T.B. Joshua’s youtube channel had 1.8 million subscribers, and over 600 million views – the most watched Christian ministry on youtube ever*, yet many on hearing of his passing said TB who? That in itself is extremely telling of the information silos to which the present generation has been neatly apportioned.
Forbes magazine reported him to be one of the wealthiest pastors in Africa. Winnie Mandela announced him the leader of ‘Africa’s most important religious family’. Power, wealth, influence and yet the Google gods of the modern information universe in their supreme wisdom chose to capriciously delete this entire channel and its rich historical and anthropological commentary on Africa as she sees herself in the 21st century without reference to the approved versions produced by CNN and BBC etc. all now patronizingly awash with continental cultural and industrial developments; and on the frivolous, trumped-up pretext that his entire channel (or was it just one alleged video that merited the draconian cancellation?) ‘promoted hate speech’ and claims he had the cure for homosexuality. It’s not even worth discussing the merit of those allegations nor exposing the real motivation behind this foolhardy overreach.
This is the type of stuff my brother Wayne West, crusader against the ominous and infernal so-called Universal Gay Agenda, gets really agitated about and ready to rumble … with placards, town criers and seminars and the like. Nothing that would even cause the Googlian goliath to even bat an eye, to be sure. There is a new supremacy born into the world. Not one based on religion, race or capital. It’s the age of knowledge supremacy. There is a certain arrogance that comes with providing the machinery for all the basic underpinnings of modern industry and culture … Difficult to do that without acquiring the God-syndrome.
Each mammoth cable information network system with its cult-like following, like religious denominations, have all recognized that their powers of influence are all eclipsed by Google’s mighty light. Governments try and fail to curb the power of the archivist of every parliamentary proceeding, political protest, religious service, practice and doctrine, every Ted talk, every new claimant of breakthrough in every field of human endeavor. Google’s service to modern technological innovation and information is hardly calculable…. The closest thing to Thy-Kingdom-Come human hands have come up with – The manifesting a physical structure for Akasha.
So expect some arrogance. That service has often been taken for granted and undervalued, and the peculiar world of the geeks whose introverted compulsions transformed them from social pariah to now finally having the machinery to seriously recriminate against rivals in policy or praxis from any of the hostile universes which use their gifts ungratefully – religion, finance, politics whichever.
Don’t imagine this to be a protest or polemic of sorts. It is not. Googliath exists for a higher purpose than it of itself (with all its multidisciplinary lenses out to the universe) can perceive. As pompous a thing it may be to claim that Google has a blindspot, it’s a thing that should be self evident to a healthy rationale mind. But reason is stealthy. When it flees the scene, often no one notices its absence (as should now be clear to observers of the US malaise), and sadly also (as Googlites may readily identify with) its presence too is often entirely ignored.
Seeds produce harvest. Today, as the body of TB Joshua is about to be laid to rest, we salute his memory.
*the mantle now passed to T.D. Jakes
YeKengalé 