The Metha Versus Vodun: Don’t Invite The Metha To Your Temples!

It has become even obvious among the Mis-Educated Than His Ancestors (the Metha) in Ghana, that the Ewes, in particular, bear the brunt of their stereotypical diatribes against Traditional African Religions, specifically against Vodun, which stereotypes African peoples around the world have become very familiar with. These diatribes range from calling Vodun a kind of spirituality, denying its status as a “real” religion to the more sinister insults—that Vodun is “Satanic.”

Never mind that Satan is, in actuality, a product not of Vodun, but of Christianity, proper. Yet, Vodun peoples, and in particular Ewes, who know nothing about Satan, nor produced this Christian Plague, are nonetheless thought of as Satan-worshippers. Never the very Christians that produced him? Of course, all of this, and all that lays in-between this hatred of Vodun among the Metha, remains a pile of horseshit. The Metha’s tongue-lashings and fulminations against Vodun are simply falsehoods. More, their tirades are meant to whip up the reminder in their Churches that Satan—that age-old Christian angel—is still relevant and still undesirable in their Christian kingdom.

This “Satanic” myth about Vodun and Vodun people prevail in a mystifying sense. They prevail in much the same manner as racist notions of Africans prevail in the rest of the world for absolutely no human reasons. Of course, it is also no coincidence that these racist notions of Black people around the world were furthered by none other than the very western Europeans who brought to Africa this Anti-Black, Anti-African version of Christianity. This myth about Vodun prevails because, some adherents of western Christianity in West Africa have come to accept that western European Christianity remains the mother of all religions.

For a reason: To the extent that if Ewes claim to have a certain religion, and that religion isn’t the western Christianity that the Metha are aware of, then it must imply categorically that Vodun must have been founded by one of the undesirable Christian angels, and not by the Ewes/Yoruba. The western European idea here is that no one else outside of Christiandom, outside of western Europe, is capable of religion, but for Christians and their arch angels. To be exact, the claim is that even the fallen angels of Christiandom are more capable of religion than anyone else. For that matter, among this coterie of Christians, the Ewes—or the Yoruba, or the Haitians who defeated every single European Force forged against it—cannot possibly have imagined and experienced their own religion. Whatever that these Africans have can only be imagined, according to these Christians, as a machination of Lucifer, who the Christians now cunningly refer to as Satan.

In the twenty-first century, we fully understand what colonialist, imperialist, western European attitudes animates this particular view: first about Africans, and about everything else that Africans do. This view is straightforward: western Europe is the center of the Universe and western Christianity is the butter of civilization. All else is pagan: The world begun with one religion called Christianity and the world must end with it. In this sense, all things begin and end with western European thought. By calling Vodun Satanic, what these Christians imply is that Vodun is a kind of Christianity, just not the correct one—but a perversion of Christianity itself. For after all, a religion cannot be truly Satanic unless it had been built upon the head of one of Christianity’s finest angels—Satan, who Christians affectionately refer to as “the light” (Lucifer).

Thus, Christianity’s perpetual war between God and Lucifer, between good and bad, between western Europe and Africa, between “white” and “black,” and simply put, between western Christianity and Vodun, remain the touchstone of Christian worship. This psychopathic, unending war between the good Church (God’s church) and the bad Church (Satan’s church) plagues the Christian mind. With this psychopathy, the Christian of this kind views the world in two halves, good and bad, “white” versus “black,” and ultimately, God versus Satan, Europe versus Africa. Nothing more, nothing less! It is simply a matter of fact that the result of this psychopathy is that the African Christian, of the western European persuasion, sees not himself in The Christ. He sees a “white” man in The Christ. Consequently, the African Christian Metha sees not himself in God, but sees his colonial master, he sees his abuser in his God.

This psychopathological abuse remains the tour de force that energizes the Metha’s anguish about Vodun. If the Ewes, the Yoruba, the Haitians, the Brazilians, the Gullah Geechee and the Africans of New Orleans see themselves in their Gods, the Metha is angered. Seeing an African in a God, seeing Africans in angels, and seeing a Black Man in The Christ is an affront to the Metha’s imagination. Never mind that the Metha lives in a world in which more than 60 million people are subscribed as Vodun people. That there are several millions more who participate in Vodun rituals, that is, they are Shrine or Custom-Ritual Attendees, or that they may not claim that Vodun is their religion, yet they do not deny it either. Further, several more millions of people in the world would claim to be Vodun people today, but for the stereotypical diatribes against a religion that is at the least, not as fraudulent or as violent as we have come to learn about western Christianity–the kind that some Metha practice in Ghana today.

The Mis-Educated Than His Ancestors, the Metha, hates Vodun. There’s no doubt about this in my mind. He partly hates and partly despises Vodun people. Sprinkle a little tribalism on the matter and the Metha froths at the mouth, like a serpent, at the mere mention of Vodun. It is not that the Metha is even aware of what Vodun entails, and what it is not. Not at all. The Metha’s colonial, missionary mis-education, from the fraudulent and violent western Europeans, has conditioned him to exact any kind of punishment on Vodun people. There is also the other kind of Metha in Ghana who hides his hatred of Ewes to claim his dislike for Vodun. It is not Vodun he hates, but Ewes!

The result of this is that the Metha no longer wants to be African. He no longer wants to be Black, since his mind is now an admixture of gray pulp that is only capable of two things: fraud and violence. The Metha’s psychopathy admonishes his sudden flight from himself. The Metha wishes to fly, for he has come close to accepting his indoctrination that he’s no longer even Human, but a “white” angel, with wings capable of transporting him beyond the clouds to high Heaven.

If Vodun people could appreciate the Metha’s psychopathy, they would never want the Metha’s representation in their Vodun Shrines and Temples. Why invite a gang of self-hating sycophants to a Vodun Temple? To accomplish what exactly? Why not leave the western European-Christianized Metha alone? Why engage the Metha, who needs the “devil” to make any sense of the complex world that he is incapable of understanding—a complex reality that his very psychopathy forbids his own comprehension? Why invite to Vodun Shrines and Temples, people who ultimately and without their being aware of it, view themselves as little devils? No, they might infest the shrines and temples with their self-hating, self-deprecating energies. There’s no need for it.