(Photo credit - The Queen's 90th Birthday Celebration - Ghana 1961 )
'Monkey, monkey, monkey ... ' A familiar chant aimed at Black players and shouted out by drunk football hooligans at an English football match. How deeply has the theory of evolution impacted England in 2020? Why are we still feeding this 'theory' into our education system? It hurts to even write about such racist behaviour but it is a deeply rooted part of our supposedly advanced and scientific society.
'If my people who are called by My Name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face & turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from Heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.'
2 Chronicles 7:14
So we did it! In response to this verse - literally the whole worldwide church, hundreds of thousands of us, the people called by His Name - united in praying for healing of our planet from Covid19 and the effects it has wrought on the whole world. We were ultimately praying for revival, a fresh outpouring of His Spirit. 12 weeks of solid prayer & for many this included sessions of fasting.
We thought it was about Covid and the environment. We thought it was about answering the cry of the broken hearted. We thought it was for our tired planet and burnt out lives. We thought revival was on its way to rescue us. And what a shock when He answered by starting with His family, cutting to the core of some deep issues and revealing that we still needed to work through the consequences of 'the sins of the Fathers.'
Parenting on a grand scale, from Britain's role as a parent nation to the huge empire she ruled over. Broken hearts were revealed but not in the way we expected. We were happy to pray every line of the 2 Chronicles 7:14 bible verse and glossed over 'turn from our wicked ways' because we didn't think it applied to us! We knew that we were expecting 'the prodigals to return' and 'the hearts of the fathers to be turned to their children'. But never did we tie that in with the role Great Britain has played in the world.
Flipping genius and flipping painful. I love how upside down the Kingdom of God is. Never what you expect. Always out of the box. Never predicable. He is very thorough in His justice.
Here we sit 13 weeks into Covid19 and WE ARE GRIEVING. Now not just for the viral pandemic. Today we are grieving for 'the sins of the fathers.' Another ironic moment as I realise that 2 years ago I was told to 'pray for LONDON - the city that mothers the world'. Now in June 2020 we are peeling back the layers of what a bad parent Britain really was. And more specifically England. For this national sin relates to the English and not the Irish, Welsh or Scottish. This is not a new process. The whole epic Empire saga has been repented of many times. The Queen has apologised and offered many acts of restitution. As a British citizen I have travelled the world, always feeling slightly awkward when living in or passing through former colonies. It feels like I have spent my whole life apologising for being ENGLISH. When will it ever stop?
Here at Loseley I have the pleasure of being surrounded by many nesting birds. I have watched geese hatch their young as fluffy yellow goslings that gradually grew into healthy strong adults. I have observed bluetits make a nest in the lifeguard box and watched the babies take their first flight away from the safety of the nest. I have watched swallows raise young. And from my front window I have enjoyed watching a Barn owl take flight at dusk as well as observing the many feral pigeons and a few white doves that nest here.
I always associate the white doves with the Holy Spirit. I love their elegance. But I must say I also have observed how rubbish they are at parenting. Here in the courtyard I have seen many babies fall to their death on the stone floor below the precariously balanced nest.
Over the Pentecost weekend I was sitting watching the sun go down and observed that above me in the gateway arch, a dove and pigeon were arguing on a thick beam of wood. The pigeon was harassing the white dove. Submitting and cooing and flapping its wings and requesting company. The white dove kept pushing the pigeon away and when it would not cease harassing it, the dove began to peck at the pigeon's head. The pigeon persisted and would not leave the dove alone or let her rest. In frustration the the dove moved into more militant action and began to nail the pigeon's head down in submission, holding it down against the beam.
I watched wondering if it was an over amorous couple. She would push him off the beam and he would fall off, fly back and continue harassing her. Then I thought he might be a child begging for food. He had some white feathers in his colouring and maybe he was her son? I watched and wondered what was going on? I never realised that a dove could be so aggressive. She had that pigeon nailed by the head to the beam. She was dominating and powerful. I was impressed.
At the time I thought it might be a prophetic picture of the Holy Spirit nailing covid19, or dangerous dark forces. It was a season when we were expecting Pentecost to arrive and watching the wind blow had become part of my days. To capture the movement & action I took a photo of the Union Jack flag blowing in the wind over Loseley House. I posted a picture of the dove and the Union Jack together on my Instagram account. I was celebrating the blowing of the Holy Spirit across planet earth.
On Pentecost Sunday I opened my front door to feel the wind on my face. I was ready for new things. A revival sweeping around the world. I stepped out and nearly trod on the body of a dead pigeon. It had crawled towards my front door for refuge. And there it lay where it breathed its last. I was shocked. Was that the same pigeon that had been harassing the dove? Had she finally killed him? One of her own offspring!
It was around the same time that I was alerted to how George Floyd died after a white police officer held his knee on his neck, holding his head to the ground. I was shocked and shaken. Could what I had seen with my white dove actually have been a reflection of what white men have done? I removed my photo from Instagram. I realised that what I had observed was possibly a picture of a grand story that was unfolding and that the glorious Union Jack I had posted the white dove alongside was actually the root of the problem.
20 years ago I read a book by Brian Mills & Roger Mitchell titled 'Sins of the Fathers.' The book documents England's murderous past. Arrogant. Proud. Deceitful and self centred. As an intercessor we have spent decades repenting of our corporate sin. God deals with national sin just as intensely as He does personal sin. It doesn't matter that we were not there. I may not have been involved in the Boer War but my English identity will always be noted by my Afrikaner friends. The sin of mass murder and genocide is still mine through my national identity. Here we go again. Another round of national examination and we brought it on ourselves because we asked God to heal our nations!
The issue of praying for London - the city that Mothers the world has begun.
Bad parenting seems to be a major issue that we all need to work through. Whether it is mine, a white girl with a flawed white Mum and Dad or a black Southern African family that was forced to send their father away from home to work in South Africa's mines thereby splitting the family for months or years. Laying the foundation for multiple sexual partnerships that meant HIV was able to sweep through black Southern African families. Bad parenting still impacts the great grandchildren of slaves who might be lacking in strong father figures due to the fall out from economic and educational barriers. The legacy of slavery still divides the West Indian ethnic London communities from their parent Ghanaian and Nigerian communities. Former slaves and the tribes that sold them into captivity.
Going back to February - I remember getting excited as I thought through my 50th year on earth. I wrote a whole blog post explaining that biblically the 50th year is marked out as A JUBILEE YEAR.
The Jubilee tradition is to RETURN TO YOUR FAMILY ROOTS. For me that meant Devon and London. I did consider that the place I was born, Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) might play a part in that. I imagined a nice trip to the Victoria Falls. But never did I foresee what was about to unfold!! With the death of George Floyd in America sparking a ripple of racial unrest in Great Britain, the name of former oppressive white slave owners and key figures in the oppressive colonial empire, such as Cecil Rhodes are being thrown around more than usual!
Right now I am processing all that means for me, a white English woman with roots in Devon and London and a birth place in Rhodesia, named after that powerful, greedy and wealthy son of the British Empire, Cecil Rhodes. Not only was I born there. But the nation I lived in had declared Independence from the British and decided to run their own show. The Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Great Britain was a source of some pride to many white expats. Here we were, the bread basket of Africa feeding the world on our produce and educating our local population under the British education scheme. We lived under economic sanctions from the rest of the world but that just made us all the more resilient. We knew that we were good stewards of this wealthy landscape which Cecil Rhodes had cleverly & deceitfully delivered into British hands. But we were no longer submissive to Queen and country.
We were not ready to give it all back. All that fertile land. The mineral wealth. The power of being in charge.
The indigenous population was deemed not quite mature enough to handle the details of running their own country. And who exactly were the indigenous native people? As a child I was told that this land belonged originally to the bushmen before it was invaded by darker tribes from the interior. We were just a long line of invaders, a white race that was currently doing a great job of managing the land and the resources. We didn't feel that our precious country was ready for self rule yet. 'Let us ease them in gently. Give it a few more years.' Northern Rhodesia was handed back and became Zambia, but Southern Rhodesians held on.
This position inevitably led to civil war. Not a pure black on white one either. There were many who joined the Rhodesian civil war as black soldiers fighting their own, we were all forced to choose sides. White rebels of motherland England who felt a self righteous mission to deliver the local population from an enemy who we felt was funded with money from 'evil communist regimes,' such as North Korea.
I cannot do the whole miserable violent civil war justice in this piece. All I can share was that my childhood was about my father having to play his part and serve in the army. My mother trying to run a household alone for lengthy periods, wondering if Dad would return or be killed. My extended family watched those they loved black and white be slaughtered. Sanctions meant 'Homemade clothing' & 'Blackmarket trading.' ( Yes I know how loaded that label is - black market! ) Holidays were taken under strained conditions - travelling in convoys under military escort. The land was laid with landmines. There was a massive hidden tribal genocide. Captured traitors who were mainly black men in the wrong tribe had their ears slashed off, legs broken and tongues ripped out. And not by white soldiers. This was a black on black/white civil war. Britain's legacy of 'divide and conquer' playing out once again!
It is messy and too lengthy to go into all the details of Rhodesia's civil war - but in all that misery there were also tales of the miraculous. Angels showed up all over the place - Literally! I recently reread some of the testimonies which were compiled into a book to record what went on. For anyone born on African soil, the supernatural realm is not as veiled as it is in the West.
And the final outcome was the downfall of Southern Rhodesia, the country named after Cecil Rhodes, the land where he is buried - and the Independence for Zimbabwe ( House of Stone.) Ironically I recently found out that the founder of the boy scout worldwide movement, Baden Powell, was in Rhodesia close to Cecil Rhodes grave when he was inspired to start the Scout movement. So for those of you thinking that this history has nothing to do with your life, think again. If you have embraced the guide and scout movement, your roots also go all the way back to the Matobo Hills in Zimbabwe.
But just a few years earlier, in the decade before Cecil Rhodes was carving out huge portions of Africa for the Empire, another man was treading down the River Nile seeking to share the incredible message of an eternal Kingdom. A different kind of man, driven by conviction and faith. Sadly his legacy was over shadowed by Cecil Rhodes. Somewhere into that mix the concept of 'darkest Africa' was coined. And that little label went on to create havoc. It became an excuse to plunder the land and oppress the local populations who we deemed 'uneducated & unenlightened'.
Rhodes may have reaped the bounty of Africa's material wealth for the British Empire but not before David Livingstone planted the eternal gift of Jesus Christ. Meanwhile contemporaries of Livingstone were at the same time busy dismantling the slave trade. Men who saw that we are all made in God's image, equally valuable as humans. Men such as William Wilberforce laid their lives down to abolish the abominable British slave trade.
Trading in slaves was not a new idea that Britain came up with. The Arabs were familiar with slave trading. African tribes had already been trading in slaves long before we came along and joined in. The Middle East has a history of slave trading. Wasn't even Joseph sold by his brothers to Egyptian slave masters? Slavery was not invented by the British, it was just the industrial scale that the British brought to this activity that was so disgusting.
While Cecil Rhodes was rounding up Africa's wealth for the British crown, Charles Darwin was wandering the earth observing ADAPTATION. Out of these observations he wrote his book 'The Origin of Species' from which we have established the theory of EVOLUTION. It was embraced by a white intellectual society, becoming a very convenient philosophical idea from which to hang the idea that a white man is more evolved than a black man. Everybody has heard of Darwin's first book 'the Origin of Species' but not many will have heard of his second book - 'The descent of man' a deeply racist manifesto! I think we are all familiar with the concept of 'survival of the fittest' and 'The Selfish Gene' by Richard Dawkins. Maybe it's time we started questioning these theories which may have contributed to where we find ourselves in Great Britain.
Currently in June 2020 Cecil Rhodes statue is being taken down. Personally - I really think it is about time we did more than just removed statues of oppressive white men. I would like us to also question the roots of where some of this behaviour came from. How deeply has 'the theory of evolution' impacted our society? It is time we questioned the honour we have laid at the feet of Charles Darwin.
In my opinion the theory of evolution is another little white lie that is still a theory because it has never been proved. I studied science at University and I am forever grateful that it was presented to me as a flawed theory and not a fact. Now I see it as a convenient explanation of how life might have begun which is being fed into our primary and secondary education systems. It fundamentally removes our God given value as humans, equal in God's sight and formed in His image. We become animals subject to base laws of animal behaviour like 'survival of the fittest' and 'the selfish gene'.
Did you know that for a while Aborigine people were considered the 'missing link' between stone age human beings and 'fully evolved whites'!? Aboriginals were killed for display and others for science. Thousands of Aboriginal graves were raided, and bodies and bones were shipped back to England.
I am ashamed of all that Darwin's theory has led to.
It is no good hiding behind our 'darkest Africa' label or planting our head in the sand because White Europeans are educated and scientific and don't do the supernatural! 'Science has disproved God.' Has it really? Any good scientist will be humble enough to admit, we just don't know how it all began. That is truth. Science supports the evidence of intelligent design and it has never disproved God.
One day I would like to stop having to apologise for Britain & specifically England's terrible history. I can't change our past history just like I cannot change being born on African soil and would never want to. I am forever glad and grateful for my African roots and will always have a biased favour towards Africans.
We can tackle this on an intellectual level and write new constitutional laws that value Black lives and add more boxes that need ticking as far as racial equality goes, but if we never deal with the root at the heart of our racism. If we continue to feed our children on the poison that humans are just African monkeys that got lucky and walked upright, we will never erase those white football hooligan thugs who get drunk and chant 'Monkey, Monkey, Monkey' at black players during our football matches!
( Me & Nanna Fenn in Salisbury, Rhodesia. 1971)
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