WeeklySA_AdminRECKONING: In a letter to the Pope, the Burkina Faso leader says the global church failed to protect the oppressed and entangled itself in the machinery of subjugation…
By Monk Nkomo
Thousands of men, women and children perish almost daily in animal-infested deserts, capsiSed in makeshift boats in billowing seas and drown while others are captured and incarcerated in filthy jails abroad while fleeing starvation in their motherland – Africa.
In contrast, foreigners pillage their beautiful continent daily, enriching themselves by extracting minerals that included gold and diamonds and uranium, while Africans are left destitute and scavenging for what was theirs.
In a poignant letter penned recently to Pope Leo XIV, President Ibrahim Traore of Burkina Faso raises serious concerns about the role of the global church which – amid the painful suffering of the African masses – he says supported “the oppressor and preached forgiveness while the oppressor held the whip against the oppressed, asking them to pray while they were met with air strikes and advocating peace while fanning the flames of war and destruction in the continent.
What Africa was demanding now was nothing else but justice, says the Burkinabe leader. “Africa is not calling for vengeance but for recognition, not for division but for dignity and not for retribution but for renewal”.
Following is the edited letter from President Traore…and the summarised response from His Holiness, Pope Leo X1V about the tragic events that were unfolding in Africa.
TRAORE: The global church has for years failed to protect the oppressed in Africa where the mission of salvation became entangled in the machinery of subjugation and the teachings of Jesus Christ diluted by the ambitions of kings with the church always supporting the oppressor.
Silence is no longer holy and neutrality is no longer noble. We are not asking for charity. We are demanding justice – justice that must begin with the truth that Christianity in Africa has been both a bomb and blade.
I do not ask you to be African. I ask you – His Holiness – to be human, to be moral, to be brave because courage, real courage, is not blessing the powerful. It is defending the powerless when it costs something. Do not tell us to forgive while the whip is still in the hand of the abuser. Do not tell us to pray while our prayers are met with drone strikes.
I write this letter as a son of Africa and not from a palace, nor from the comfort of foreign embassies, but from the soil of my homeland, the land of Burkina Faso, where dust mingled with the blood of our martyrs and the echoes of revolution are louder than the hum of foreign drones overhead. You are now the spiritual father to more than a billion souls, including millions in Africa at a time when the world stands at a precipice. Africa is watching from below – climbing and bleeding. We are rising and we are daring to ask questions that echo louder than canon law.
What we need is a Pope who will name the modern- day Herods and who will thunder against economic empires just as boldly as the church once thundered against communism; who will say without apology that it is a sin for nations to profit from the destruction of Africa.
You inherit not just a church, but a legacy. Do not speak of peace without naming the profiteers of war because silence is no longer holy and neutrality is no longer noble. If you ought to be a shepherd of the global flock, then hear this cry from the dust of Ouagadougou. We are your sheep too but we do not graze quietly in the fields.
We die in the streets and in the front lines. We rise from the ashes with fire in our bones and scripture in our mouths. Africa is done asking for permission to exist or pleading for validation from the powers that exploit our minerals while preaching morality.
The church must decide where it stands with the powers that be against the people who are bleeding because Africa, the wounded and the rising, is watching your Holiness.
We Africans know the power of the cross. We know the hymns and the prayers. We have built churches with callous hands and defended our faith with our blood. But we also know another truth, one that too many preferred to bury.
The church at times walked beside colonisers. While missionaries prayed for our souls, soldiers littered our lands. While your predecessors spoke of heaven, our ancestors were chained on earth. And even now in this so-called modern age, we feel the chains not of iron, but of silence, of indifference, of geopolitical games played in holy shadows. So, I ask in the name of the mothers who pray on dirt floors and the children who wear in catechism with empty stomachs.
Will your papacy be different? Will you be the Pope who sees Africa not as a periphery but as the prophetic centre? Will you be the Pope who does not only visit slums for photo opportunities but who dares to speak with rage against the forces that make those slums permanent?
You see your Holiness, I am a man shaped by war, not wealth. I was not groomed for politics by western institutions. I lead a nation that was tossed aside by the world until we refused to be silent. We were told we were too poor to be independent, too weak to be sovereign, too unstable to resist.
But I tell you this with the thunder of ancestors in my voice. We are done asking for permission to exist. We are done pleading for validation from powers who exploit our minerals while preaching morality. And we are done. Absolutely done watching global spiritual leaders turn their eyes from Africa’s cries because the politics are inconvenient. Your Holiness, I speak now, not only for Burkina Faso, but for a continent too long patronized. Africa is not a continent of pity.
We are a continent of prophets. Prophets who were jailed, exiled and murdered for daring to challenge the empire. And now that you wear the ring of St. Peter, will you walk in the path of the prophets or will you too be a prisoner of politics? We need no more platitudes.
We do not need diplomatic neutrality while African youths drown in the Mediterranean fleeing wars they did not start with weapons they did not make. We do not need saccharine statements while African sovereignty is auctioned off behind closed doors in Brussels, Washington and the Geneva.
Will you condemn the arms deals that fuel proxy wars in our deserts and forests? Will you name the greed that dresses itself in charity? The diplomacy that cloaks imperialism and peace talks. I do not ask you to be African. I ask you to be human, to be moral, to be brave because courage, real courage is not blessing the powerful. It is defending the powerless. Your holiness the world stands at a precipice. On Africa, this battered and beautiful continent is not merely watching from below. We are climbing. We are bleeding.
Where was the church when our Presidents were overthrown by foreign -backed mercenaries? Where was the church when our youth were abducted and indoctrinated into wars funded by nations that pretend to be peacekeepers? Where was the church when our currencies collapsed? When the IMF choked our economies? When our leaders were punished for choosing sovereignty over submission? Do not tell us to forgive while the whip is still in the hand of the abuser. Do not tell us to pray while our prayers are met with drone strikes.
Do not speak of peace without naming the profiteers of war because silence your Holiness is no longer holy and neutrality is no longer noble. If you ought to be the shepherd of this global flock, then hear this cry from the dust of Ouagadougou. We are your sheep, too. But we do not graze quietly in the fields.
We are not asking for charity. We are demanding justice. And justice must begin with truth. The truth that Christianity in Africa has been both a bomb and a blade. The truth that the church has fed our spirits while failing to protect our bodies. The truth that redemption without reckoning is a half-truth and half-truth have never healed nations.
We have learned to pray and protest with the same breath. And we ask, will your papacy walk with us? Will you meet us in our pain, not just in our pews? Will you recognize the God in our hunger, the Christ in our chaos, the Holy Spirit in our struggle? Because if not now, when. And if not you, and if the church continues to preach peace while ignoring the machinery of oppression, what gospel is left to believe in? I say this not with anger but with sacred urgency.
We are a people at the crossroads of prophecy and politics. And Africa’s time is no longer coming. It is here. We are rewriting the narrative, reshaping the future, reclaiming the dignity denied to us by centuries of foreign domination and spiritual manipulation. And the church must decide where it stands.
I do not write this letter to condemn. I write it to invite you your Holiness into a deeper solidarity to a solidarity that walks barefoot with the poor.
We await your voice. Not from balconies, but from trenches and from refugee camps, from behind the bars of political prisons where truth is incarcerated because only that voice, your voice can redeem the silence.
…‘We must reject treaties binding nations in economic shackles’
INTERCHANGE: Pope Leo XIV responds to Burkina Faso President Ibrahim Traore…
I confess that the church during certain moments in history, had stood beside colonizers when it should have supported the crucified. For these sins, sins of omission and commission, I bow my head in repentance. No institution, however sacred, is above self-examination. If the church is to remain a beacon, it must not only shine the light outward, it must shine it within.
I experienced the hardships suffered by many communities including the exodus of youth from their countries and the silencing of the stories of the displaced. I have wept in Lampedusa. I have prayed in silence at Lesbos. I have looked into the eyes of children who have no more tears left to cry.
Africa’s youth deserve better than tombstones in foreign lands and unmarked graves beneath desert sands. They deserve futures, not funerals. And so long as I have breath, I will preach this truth that no human being is illegal and that no continent owns compassion.
There were chapters, some long, some shamefully brief where the mission of salvation became entangled in the machinery of subjugation where the banner of the cross was hoisted beside flags of empires and the teachings of Christ were diluted by the ambitions of kings.
Will the papacy be different?
Not only will it be different. It must be. For too long, the African voice has been heard only in whispers. Your leaders have since been praised only when they were pliable and demonised when they dared to defy unjust systems.
Your resources have been extracted while your people were left scavenging what was theirs to begin with. But Africa is not a charity case. Africa is not a patient waiting for the West to administer spiritual or political anaesthesia. Africa is the cradle of courage, the well-spring of song, the pulse of prophesy. It is not the worst burden. It is its teacher.
Blood-stained minerals and hunger
Africa is rich yet too many of her children remain poor. Why? Because the wealth beneath your soil – cobalt, gold, uranium, calan oil – has been turned into a curse, not a blessing. Those are supposed to be gifts of providence, not instruments of plunder. Let us no longer pretend that economic suffering is accidental. It was a policy. It was greed. It was engineered stagnation orchestrated by debt and predatory agreements signed in glass towers while farmers walked barefoot through dust.
And, yes, while the church itself may not have signed trade deals or drawn oil contracts, it has often been too quiet when it should have cried out, too cautious when it should have stood between the vulnerable and the vultures – too diplomatic when the gospel demanded disruption.
Cultural respect and the theft of memory
To the universal church, let us finally acknowledge that missionary work must never mean cultural amnesia. Let us teach theology with humility. Let us breach Christ without erasing identity. Let us be bold enough to say Jesus can wear African robes, speak in African proverbs, walk through African landscapes.
Cultural respect is not political correctness. It is spiritual necessity. And when we honour the memory of others, we reflect the very heart of Christ who never asked his disciples to become Romans to be redeemed. Let the church become a place where all memories are safe. Let us remind the world that to erase a culture is to offend the Creator himself for He who created all people, created all their expressions.
Will the church defend African sovereignty?
Let me be clear. Sovereignty is not a luxury. It is a right. It is not privilege to be granted by stronger nations. It is a divine dignity rooted in creation itself. Every people has the right to shape their own future. Every people has the right to protect its identity, its culture, its path forward. And the church has a moral compass for the global community. We must not merely affirm this right in writing. We must defend it in action.
We must reject policies and treaties that bind nations in economic shackles while pretending to offer freedom. We must expose covert operations, manipulation of local politics and the orchestration of coups disguised as democratic transitions.
The drones that hum with foreign command
President Traore, you mentioned the whispers in your capital and the silent hand that tries to tip the scales of justice and governance. These are not works of a free world. These are the remnants of imperial logic. The same logic that says Africa is a project to be managed, not a continent to be respected. But Africa is rising and with her rise comes the discomfort of those who once dictated her fate. That discomfort is necessary. It is the pain of awakening.
Colonial legacy
Colonialism was not simply a political conquest. It was a spiritual betrayal. It was not just the theft of land but the attempted eraser of identity. The entire civilisations with their poetry, their proverbs, their cosmologies, their sacred rhythms, were silenced under foreign flags and foreign gods. The missionaries, some sincere, came with crosses in one hand, but behind them followed gunboats, traders and governors with contracts of domination.
The church did not always stand with the oppressed. Too often it stood with the conqueror.
You spoke of chains not only of those that bound the bodies of our ancestors, but the invisible ones that still clutch at the soul of Africa. Let us speak truth not as adversaries but as men burdened with memory.
Political interference and sovereignty
It is the old song of resistance that began when the first maps were drawn. When you speak of sovereignty, your voice carries the weight of centuries during which the African will has been contested, controlled and conditioned by powers that did not emerge from the soil of Africa but planted themselves there like towering foreign trees casting long shadows across native lands.
The struggle for African self-determination is not a new cry.
It is the old song of resistance that began when the first maps were drawn without your consent and when borders were carved by the hands of colonial ambition and when leaders chosen not by your people, but by distant interests, were placed like marionets in high office.
And yet even as flags changed and independence was declared, interference did not end. It merely changed form. We must however ask: why does Africa remain a battlefield for the interests of others? Why must your internal affairs be negotiated in foreign capitals before they are respected at home? Why are African elections monitored with suspicion while fraudulent dealings elsewhere are called irregularities?
Why is it that when an African leader speaks of nationalising resources, he is accused of authoritarianism, but when a foreign CEO exploits those same resources, he is praised as an innovator?
Christ wept for Jerusalem not because it was wealthy but because it was wounded by foreign interference and internal betrayal.
Will the Vatican name the sins?
Yes. We will no longer speak of poverty without naming its architects. We will challenge institutions that pretend benevolence while negotiating for control behind closed doors. We will no longer sit at global summits in silence when African leaders are told to privatise their future in exchange for too short-term loans.
The church must not merely advocate for aid, it must fight for equity. We must speak of economic repentance for true peace cannot exist where there is structural theft and where prosperity for the few is built on the perpetual depletion of the many, where Africa must always borrow back its own wealth with interest.
Africans fleeing from their war-ton countries
Borders must be respected and nations have the right to regulate who enters and exits. But the first border we must protect is the dignity of the human person. When a man risks his life crossing the desert because staying at home means starvation, it is not freedom of movement. It is forced displacement.
Africa’s children do not migrate out of laziness. They migrate because hope has been outsourced. To the leaders of Europe, open your eyes, not just to gates. Understand why they come . Look not only to their passports but to your past. Ask not what they threaten but what they reveal.
To the leaders of Africa, we must create nations worth staying in. Nations where brilliance is not exported but embraced, where schools do not train our youths to leave but to lead. To the global church, we must protect migrants, not as a political talking point but as sacred.
To the migrants themselves, those on foot, on boat, in detention centres, in shelters and in fear – you are not forgotten. You are not invisible. You are not illegal in the eyes of God. You are the living sermon of this age. A sermon that tells us that if global justice had hands, they would be building bridges, not borders.
The church must finally acknowledge that missionary work must never mean cultural amnesia. Let us teach theology with humility. Let us be bold enough to say Jesus can wear African robs, speak in African proverbs and walk through African landscapes.
Africa’s story reminds me not of a single wound but a body bearing many wounds of land, stolen tongues, silenced faith, weaponised and dreams deferred.
And yet, in all this, you have not called for vengeance but for recognition, not for division but for dignity, not for retribution but for renewal. This is the heart of gospel. Forgiveness is not the eraser of memory. It is the sanctification of memory. It is when the flame that once burned becomes the light that now guide.
Forgiveness is not submission. It is the highest form of strength. The kind that can reach across centuries and clasp hands where once there were chains. Forgiveness without justice is an insult. And unity without truth is a lie.’’
President Traore, the world is weary. It is choked by cynicism and fatigue. But you have reminded me and reminded the church that hope is not naïve. It is revolutionary. Let this be not merely an exchange of letters but the birth of a covenant of intentions. Not between two leaders but between two souls and through us perhaps between two worlds.
I will pray for you and I ask you to pray for me, not as politicians but as pilgrims on the same difficult road. May the God of justice walk beside you. May The Christ of the poor dwell within you and may the spirit of reconciliation unite us all from Ouagadougou to Rome and from the tombs of martyrs to the altars of tomorrow in peace, hope and brotherhood.
