Voices from within the Church of Uganda (originally known as the Anglican Native African Church) have been heard celebrating the recent decision of the Church of England to allow its female clergy to also be eligible for appointment as bishop.

Make no mistake; being a bishop is no small matter, particularly in the Anglican Church as it operates in Britain.

Beyond being the official religion, the Anglican Church is actually part of the state. Clergy from the level of bishop get 15 seats in the upper house of parliament. 

Through this, the church retains important rights and privileges, including having its own supreme body being able to pass policies that carry the power of law.  

This all may be seen as strange when one bears in mind that the Anglican Church is nearly dead at ground level in much of the UK.

Organisationally, the church’s dilemma is simple: The bulk of its active membership is found in the former colonies. Nigeria and Uganda alone hold more active Anglicans than can proportionally be found in the United Kingdom.

The populations remain materially bound to their churches in a way not seen in England since the creation of the welfare state.

The complication now is that the church’s essential organisational head exists in Europe, while its substantive body resides in what they would see as the Third World.

This is rooted in the historical consequences of the church choosing to bind itself to the fortunes of the then expanding British Empire.

It had come into existence more as a result of a constitutional crisis a few centuries before under the then reigning King Nenry VIII, who then gathered various strands of anti-Catholicism around him in a new body.

This may explain the endless ideological horse-trading that takes place in its policy-making bodies before a new position is arrived at as can be seen even with this two-decade plus debate on the gender for priests and bishops.

There is therefore an element of both moral and cultural delinquency in this. At the moral level, it implies a belief that they are perhaps above the law in certain matters.

Culturally, it reveals an organisation that was more backward than many of the cultures it participated in trying to obliterate.

This is not “progress” because it is not a new idea across religions. It is not progress, because it is being driven more by legal considerations than theological ones.

It is not progress because it is being used to continue to promote the idea that this colonial-enabler is somehow at a forefront of human progress when, in fact, it has been the one holding people back.

With an estimated 9 million adherents, custodianship of nearly half the country’s schools, being one of the biggest single landowners as well as owner of numerous rural hospitals and clinics, the Anglican church is a mainstay of Ugandan society.

Such influence can be seen in the fact that of the nine heads of state Uganda has had, only two have not been Anglicans, and not one has been a Catholic (despite their greater numbers).

The Anglican Church in Uganda has also been standing in violation of the rules of equal employment opportunity. Much as it is nominally independent of the original mother church, it has not seen fit to take its own line and appoint a bishop who is also a woman.

Native religion was strongly targeted by the church. Many Anglican places of worship, including the church headquarters, physically sit atop what were once the sites of native places of worship that were deliberately destroyed by armed militias that had seized control of Buganda in 1899.

The idea of men running religion is one very central to the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Islam and Christianity). Native Africans did it somewhat differently.

So Christian hostility, which led to the disempowering and driving underground of native worship, was also a process of disempowering native women since they have always comprised the overwhelming majority of priests in native religion.

This places Christian Africans in a contradictory position. Their “advancement” or even “evolution” owes everything to the very institutions that have undermined their ancestral knowledge base.

It is this legacy that has led to a thinking that any and all solutions to problems we face today must come from a non-African space.

This is why any celebration of the church’s decision on women bishops would be a misreading of the situation. A more direct route to having females in positions of senior religious authority would be through re-establishing native religion.