Biology Reference
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(Amaslotsi) people die or get ill. Some sorcerers ride backwards on the backs of baboons, the
baboons the remains of a human like race (Amafene), that is evil, like devils (Amatagati),
doing people harm. These devil sorcerers can show up as hyenas, mambas, baboons, or puff
adders and thus these animals are not to be messed with. Thus, for the missionaries to the
Nguni, that Nkosi would send a messenger (Ujesu) to people on earth (Kamhlaba) from
Ezulweni to save them from evil and take them back to Ezulweni after they died did not seem
that strange. Thus, many Nguni believed the message of the missionaries but the problem for
the missionaries was that many of the Nguni people would hedge their bets by still going to the
Inyanga to buy skins or potions that would protect them against evil curses, including disease,
which may have been from a spell somebody had thrown on them.
There was, however, initial
setbacks among the Zulu. Jacob, a Zulu translator, returned from the Cape in the 1850s and in
vengeance against his employer Cane, he prophesized that first the Europeans will claim the
King's land and be followed by white sangomas that Dingane interpreted as the missionaries,
and finally armies will come to conquer. In 1953 the apartheid government banned the
education of Africans by missionaries because of the fear that an educated African population
would endanger their apartheid supremacy. It also fed into their propaganda that the Africans
were inferior. Despite this, many early African leaders are luminaries of mission schools. The
schools not only educated them but also gave them an understanding of morals, God, and
relationships to fellow man that was to be basis for their countries moral fiber, even though
they may not have professed to have adopted the beliefs. The new leader's aspirations may
have been for kingdoms of peace, justice, and righteousness but that will have to wait for
another day of restorancy. The transfers to of power to these new African leaders could have
been at considerably greater loss of blood if it had not been for their schooling, the innate
forgiveness of Africans for crimes, and the neo-African humanist concept of “Ubuntu”, namely
that we are all one human race that should treat each other well. Bishop Tutu puts it this way:
“Ubuntu ... speaks of the very essence of being human. We say …"Hey, so-and-so has
Ubuntu." Then you are generous, you are hospitable, you are friendly and caring and
compassionate. You share what you have. It is to say, "My humanity is caught up, is
inextricably bound up, in yours." We belong in a bundle of life. We say, "A person is a person
through other persons."
“A person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel
threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes
from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are
humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.”
Later leaders that were not educated in the same schools have tended not to treat their
populations well such as in the civil wars of Congo, Uganda, Sudan, Rwanda, etc. With
education the success for African advancement has been quite phenomenal. One only needs to
look at South Africa and how the whole country has been transformed since 1994 with African
children in white neighborhoods being exposed to the same education that was restricted to
“whites only” schools. The question is whether advanced education will result in a stable non-
racial middle class driven economy or whether corruption will favor dictatorial elite that
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