OPINION: African spirituality in the 4IR era: has it become a competitive edge or a comparative advantage for traditional healers and African religious groups? asks Nonkululeko Charmaine Nhlapo.
Spirituality is a journey that is brought about through personal change bringing to the fore changes of old perspectives, behaviours and characters, metamorphosed to new beings with a higher peaceable being but with great humility.
Thus, how one perceived life in general previously, now leads to seeing life through new lenses and seeing a divine purpose that is different in stature – one that will help to find the fulfilment so much sought – that inner peace and divine spiritual connectivity.
This makes spirituality a personal experience indeed.
What African spirituality means in this article is a physical human and a spiritual human speaking to one another – it does so through connectivity of the physical human and a spiritual human – speaking to one another – but does not include artificial intelligence such as robotics or a robot connectivity.
Similarly, societies assessing artificial intelligence in law and justice – for example do not have a robot judge passing a sentence to a gruesome murder case.
Or a robot as a priest marrying a couple? Or a robot forgiving our sins in a church service? These issues are all part of the new ethics of emerging technologies that is coming more and more to the fore.
This article therefore concentrates on African spiritual identity within the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) and how this identity relates to the 4IR spiritual contexts, as most of the spiritual services and current teaching and guidance is increasingly being pursued on visual media platforms.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution is indeed indicative of new frontiers in technology advancement that is incorporating physical, digital and biological worlds, impacting all disciplines, economies and industries, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human – as Klaus Schwab outlines in his 2017 book, The Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Schwab critically notes that artificial intelligence, biology and science, information systems and technology, and among others will exponentially grow at astronomical speeds, as humans try to match machines.
Since 2000, the world has seen major shifts in technology, specifically centred on mobile technology such as apps, IBM, Apple and more Microsoft computer conglomerates emerging with advanced analytics.
However, artificial intelligence has also seen the downside, for example of cybercrime syndicates mushrooming across the world, election polls being disadvantaged or mismanaged, resource exploitation and corruption, while others have used socio-economic realities of Africa’s disadvantaged communities to their advantage.
As technological advancements during a 4IR era, is emphasising that human and machines are becoming more integrated, and machines are leaving humans behind, have raised several ethical concerns, as well as emerging psychological, and socio-economic challenges that are now facing humans during this 4IR era.
For example, with machines doing a greater amount of work than humans, greater unemployment has become a norm. Therefore, as unemployment rates increase, the adverse effects of more leisure within societies are raising the bar of crime and lawlessness much high.
Particularly evident in South Africa is the gross plight of women and gender-based violence in South Africa which resulted in South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa bringing the country’s military on board to tackle the problem.
Also, the increasingly unstoppable poverty and hunger with close to 40% of South Africa’s 59 million population living on R350 social grants – are forcing many people in search of divine divinity, but only to meet closed doors of several church buildings brought about by the 2019 Covid-19 virus, which soon evolved into a pandemic and wiping out millions of people across the world, with several countries globally calling in for prolonged periods of lockdowns that ensued.
With the 4IR evolving rapidly in technological advancements, so have opportunistic religious organisations embraced this era by increasing and influencing their space(s) of activity in society.
What this meant is a greater number of television and cable-network channels, social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook being provided digital and augmented reality spaces for virtual reality church services and connections – just for people to connect with God.
We are aware that Africa is the origin of all life forms and the cradle of humanity. In essence, this unifies us at our core on a global scale. We are similarly aware that it was our uniqueness which was brought about by our spirituality that manage us to navigate an oppressive apartheid past.
It was our togetherness – that gripping embrace – that took us through a demonic apartheid past and force. It was our African spirituality that did all this.
Those who wanted one supreme race to rule over all the lands, with all its resources, rivers seas and oceans and keep coffers to themselves in South Africa and beyond including control over Windhoek, Maputo, Luanda and among other key regional states including the Bantustans (fake province creations) with military might and force and the masses left fallen below and left behind or either killed or demonised and to dehumanised identity through savagery and clinging on by the tips of fingernails to what it is to be African.
It is this past realisation and horrors that are spiking movements now and sounds of: black lives matter; #Rhodes must Fall; #M2, and #fees must fall movements, and among others – which are sounding a call to say that we are still here, African lives do matter, and similar ones, which are a call for us to return to our roots, but sometimes it is difficult to go back to who we are when we are all not united – and have become greatly divided.
It is this 4IR era that is giving us time to ponder and an opportunity to discuss our history, where we come from and where are we heading to: where we can articulate with pride some of the historical injustices that we had overcome – the painful experiences of injustice that made other humans less human and other humans more human because of demonic systems and evil-doers that prevailed over what was moral and good – such were put in place to oppress one human but favour the other one. In this instance issues such as patriarchy, white supremacy, xenophobia and homophobia – those isms and schisms are things we need to address now because if we don’t it will leave these issues like a noose hanging around our necks and surely keep us away from truly reaching our human potential and thus farther, leaving us hanging and unable to benefit from our interconnectedness and collective identity as spiritual beings within human spaces.
It is this African spirituality that we talk about. When you resonate to African spirituality – it goes viral, it is universal because the core of African spirituality is teaching us that as human beings, we want to live and lead a moral not a right life, because in the spirit realm there is no right or wrong. But with morality it says that our existence even though it ceased to exist after our bodiess depart from humanness, out spiritual beings continue to live and be one divinity with God.
And that is what African spirituality teaches us.
We want to live well while we are still in the flesh. So that our existence can continue, and our loved ones in the spiritual worlds can call upon us and count on us to continue with the works of life, even though they are no longer in their physical body.
Our ancestors thus have access to connect to and with us in various ways and through several varying path enhances – and there is not one route or one particular route to connect the spiritual with the living – which is to s(to communicate with your ancestors) and give definite decision to things to come because spirituality is very complex. Within this traditional African spirituality – we have not encountered our ancestors connecting with robots yet. Who knows? If we have lost our sanity and have become useless and brainless the possibility might exist.
Indeed, technology’s rise has and will continue to have an impact on the planet, entering a new era of civilisation. Human enhancement technology can improve hormone therapy to delay ageing, address drug addiction and doping issues, embryo screening, and brain medicine for better focus, and among other things. The issue is that technology for human enhancement raises fresh debates about what it is to be truly human and whether it is static or dynamic.
Human enhancement technologies have indeed placed African traditional religions in a new competitive position as they try to redefine and explain what it means to be a human. We frequently assume when discussing technology that it has to do with things like artificial intelligence and automated electrical machinery. But what was then perceived as technological progress pushed each stage of the development of human society onward. Have the 4IR developments influenced our relationship with God in addition to culture and are we now understanding ourselves differently?
Yes, we are currently at yet another technological crossroads, with the internet and mobile devices playing a major role. We are trying to figure out how to use these tools to better understand our spirituality and navigate our beliefs more fervently, now that we are aware of the risks they pose to our mental health – where social bullying and herding behaviour – and group dynamics and social groups her/him against them and they, have become common language and the befriending culture equally on the rise – creating greater psychological exclusion – painfully felt amid a tight lockdown of several countries with almost the entire world locked in and adding to the injury is technology’s social exclusion happening on social media platforms.
Most recently, there has been discussion of the connection between African spirituality and social media by Faimau and Behrens (2016:66) examining how certain language techniques and spiritualist discourses deployed on Facebook posts, reviews, and comments on a religion-based Facebook page, constructed and moulded narratives of religious authority, religious identity, and religious community.
The apartheid emergence showing its head in a new version of AI hegemony of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat – taking the lion’s share and leaving the working class and oppressed picking the bones as Lazarus did from the rich man’s plate in the parable in the Bible. The requirement of engaging with religious information on Facebook was similarly examined by Brubaker and Haigh (2017:1) along with reasons provided as to why Christians use Facebook for religious objectives. According to Coman and Coman (2017:129), religious imagery is not only an inherited and maintained “canopy” in post-secular societies but also a cultural frame of the important public sphere.
Thus it can be said that social media platforms do not always provide good outcomes as mentioned early, with great cause that such platforms can also create great harm. There are benefits and drawbacks to social media use in religion. Involvement in social networks and social behaviours are influenced by both holy and secular factors. Indeed as we seek that inner connectivity with real people – is it then suffice to say that this interconnectivity is the gripping embrace that reminds us: love your neighbour as you love yourself?
* Nonkululeko Charmaine Nhlapo is the Fund-raising Officer, Development Office, Doornfontein Campus, University of Johannesburg, and is writing in her personal capacity and these are her views.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of IOL or Independent Media.
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