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Cowboys and Indians raced across the West in the Saturday matinees I eagerly attended many years ago. Invariably, the Indians were bad and they paid for their misdeeds by getting shot off their horses, or worse. The filmmakers simply followed the counsel of our country’s first settlers, who said, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”

Occasionally, however, these same scenarios moved from the American West to “darkest Africa.” The white explorers and hunters were “good” and the African natives were “bad.” We had to kill lots of them to bring home the gold, ivory and big game trophies.

Thus the movies shaped my early impressions of our country’s history and the history of Africa. In the African desert, we killed nasty Arab traders. Always for good causes, of course.

These images remained secure as I grew older and encountered the world of missionaries. These wonderful people did not go to Africa to plunder the continent’s resources, or to kill people who got in their way. They went to save people. Yet, somehow the Africans came across as people a notch lower than the whites.

I heard many stories about their untrustworthiness and their refusal to abandon some bad habits and erroneous beliefs. They were never quite ready to take church and institutional leadership. Rarely were they welcomed into missionaries’ homes. Did the missionaries have any real African friends? I wondered.

Eventually the worm turned and the colonial powers were expelled. In the political violence and upheavals that have continued to this day, many missionaries quit Africa, often at great personal risk to their lives.

Now the Africans we looked down upon sit in seats of political and church power. Thousands of African Christians, meanwhile, suffer horribly because of the chaos. We wonder if many countries will ever find real political stability. Every time fighting breaks out, we remember those old matinees. Are the whites still “good” and the Africans “bad”?

I’m afraid that those old story lines inhibit our prayers for our sisters and brothers in Africa. I’m afraid that we still think that what’s best for them is to live and work like we do. Our racism is so pernicious that it infects and breaks down the solidarity we should enjoy in Christ’s body.

Before rushing to judgment about Africans, we would do well to take a hard look at things that happened to them there a hundred years ago. Missionaries cried out against manifold cruelties and injustices, as did some secular writers, but they were ignored in the headlong pursuit of commercial gain. Political leaders saw no point in cutting off the source of funds for their treasuries.

Historians equate what happened in Congo, 1890-1910, with the Holocaust in Germany. The story in Congo was much the same-torture, rape, killing, mutilation and forced labor at the cost of 10 million Congolese.

These enormous atrocities never made it into any history books I read, and I was a history major. It failed to dent the consciousness of most Americans when it happened. Courageous black missionaries to Congo were outraged, but they were never given responsible leadership. On mission rolls they had a C (Colored) behind their names, and that said it all.

Rather than close our minds when the next African tragedy explodes, we should try to understand the seeds that were sown by so-called Christian Western nations a century ago. The matinees blinded us to our racism and the awful truth behind what we saw on our screens.

September 21, 2001