When we were youngsters with restless minds, we got in touch, almost inevitably, with the philosophy of such people as Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, VI Lenin and other great thinkers of their epochs.

One of the oft quoted phrases from that time was Marx’s statement that “religion is the opium of the people.” It was a popular quote with the so-called “progressive” students and teachers, even if not too many people had read the full text.

This full text was as follows (from a much longer work on Hegel): “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

One of the direct effects of this thinking, fortified by so many other, and bulkier, treatises on the matter by Marx and his friend Engels, among many others, was the atheism associated with Marxists of many generations who took it as an article of faith that one could not be a “scientific socialist” and believe in divinity at the same time.

This created a mortal hatred between the Communists and the Christian churches, and the latter used this animus to frighten people in the Third World by preaching that to accept Marxism was a sure way of going to hell. This world view gained widespread currency in the decades of the Cold War, after World War Two, and the most efficient engine for its propagation was the colonial regime and its churches that never tired of repeating the mantra of damnation for all those who got too close to Moscow and/or Beijing.

Of course there were millions of people who embraced Marxism and still held their beliefs, and they were Christian, Muslim, Hindu and Jewish. It soon became clear that atheism was not an integral part of Marxism or Communism or Socialism, not as much at any rate as the inevitable class struggle.

But, looking at some of the manifestations of faith in our day and age, one may be forgiven for thinking that Marx and his colleagues may have had a point. There is no doubt that in Marx’s time, what was at issue, and had been at issue since medieval times, were the now so-called traditional churches. Which had their problems, no doubt, and still do to this time.

The idiot in Dar

But that is a far cry from what we are looking at now, with these so-called evangelical, or charismatic, groups, which seem to have gone completely bananas. We have a preacher in Dar es Salaam claiming he has the ability to resurrect the dead; there is another in South Africa who gets his congregation to go down on all fours to eat lawn grass; then others, everywhere, make young women sleep with them for the girls to be “saved.” And so on.

We now have preachers who cannot have read Jesus’s teaching that it is harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to go to heaven; they want to create millions of rich men and women; they promise them cars, villas, fat bank accounts, thereby effectively banning them from heaven. But, (surprise!) they don’t seem to mind.

These charlatans need to be arrested and charged with false pretences. To the idiot in Dar who claims the power to raise the dead we should give a proper stiff and watch him bring it back to life; the brute who makes people eat meadow should be confined to a week of grazing to see how his health does.

But out of Nigeria comes a new phenomenon, in which people who have the duty and responsibility to protect society are blaming the victims of acts of violence for their misfortunes. The reason? They must be sinners, and that is why God is punishing them.

This is not from the usual Nigerian religious charlatans, but rather from the government. The Governor of the state of Zamfara, Abdul Abubakar Yari, thinks that “all you need to do is repent” and everything will be alright. This allows him to deny any responsibility for doing nothing to protect the people under his protection.

Luckily the Emir of Kano, Sanusi L Sanusi, has contradicted Yari, stating that 90 per cent of what befalls people is in their hands to stop.

Maybe not everyone is smoking the opium.

Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: [email protected]