Missionaries from my church are, once again, embarking on a mission trip to Haiti. They often go to Haiti and other parts of South and Central America, the Caribbean, Africa, and India. This seems to be the typical itinerary for missionary groups in many churches in the United States. In fact, two of my students went to Southern Africa last year with their respective church groups. American churches – whether denominational or non-denominational – regularly send eager Christians to these destinations as long or short-term missionaries.

I know that these “new millennium missionaries” usually take food, clothing, and other valuable supplies with them on their mission trips, and this is a blessing to the poor people they meet on the mission fields.

Yet, whenever I hear that groups are going on a mission trip to these parts of the world, I grow pensive. I keep thinking about the primary goal of a missionary – to share the Christian gospel. If this is so, why don’t American missionaries go to Western Europe with the same amount of dedication and consistency? I’ve heard that there are huge, beautiful churches and cathedrals in Europe that are quite empty. A friend went to Germany and told me about how attendance is rather low there – and that most of the congregants are immigrants. But I never hear of a group of missionaries heading to Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, or any of the other developed Western European countries.

Conversely, the people of Africa and the Americas have been spiritual and religious and faithful – whatever you want to call it – for centuries. Missionaries brought the gospel to Africans before colonization (See Things Fall Apart). Today the largest Catholic and Non-Denominational churches can be found in Africa and South America.

So what is it that pulls all these American churches to the so-called “Third World” if the goal is to spread the good news? Is it because these Western Christians feel they would have done their “Christian duty” by going to the perpetually poor world? Why not go to the developed world where the good news seems to have been discarded? Perhaps it is too much of a challenge to change the Western paternalistic mindset from a focus on the third world to a focus on the developed world. This might give the impression that “the first world” is in some way vulnerable and not so powerful after all. God forbid!

This morning I pulled out my dusty Commodores CD and downloaded it to my ipod. I had not touched that CD for years and felt like listening to some old-school jams as I hopped on the treadmill. As I listened to “Nightshift” this morning, my mind reached back to my early college days in Nigeria. I remember this song playing at Friday-night parties on and off campus in 1985. As soon as the first distinct sounds blasted from the loudspeakers, guys would rush over to the girls and lead us to the dance floor to “rock out” to “Nightshift.” What a song!

This morning as I listened, I smiled, thought of old friends, old fashion, old attitudes, and the dance moves of 80s. I was having such a good time with these memories that I played the track again. This time, I listened closer to the lyrics. What? The entire song is an ode to Marvin Gaye and Jackie Wilson! I never knew that. I never really listened closely. I guess I knew there was something in the song about a “Marvin” or a “Jackie” but who cares when you are trying to execute your best dance steps in the middle of a steamy dance party?

Besides, I was so far away from and uninformed about African-American musical history that although I was very familiar with Marvin Gaye (from “Sexual Healing”) I would not have known who Jackie Wilson was, that he was the fabulous Rhythm and Blues singer who, like Gaye, died in 1984. If I’d been here in the US, knowledgeable about Black music history, I’d have been a better listener of “Nightshift.” I’m intrigued and a little disturbed about the ability of pop culture and the mass media to widely disseminate cultural expressions like music around the globe to mostly uninformed consumers who look for the beat and ignore the message. They can only appreciate the very surface elements of the art.

I asked my husband – also Nigerian – if he remembered “Nightshift.” “Of course,” he enthused, humming the first few chords. I asked him what it was about and he looked thoughtful for a while. “I don’t know,” he said. “It must have been about having a good time with a girl at night, or something.” When I broke it down to him, about how it was a tribute to the contributions of Marvin and Jackie, he was amazed.

The fact that the song did so well as a dance track and yet is so meaningful got me thinking about today’s upbeat dance music that generally seems to be loaded with openly sexual messages. I know there are some that offer a socially conscious message but they get buried under the bulk of explicitly commercial music.

So two questions occur to me: Why are Africans so uneducated about the cultural history of African Americans while we consume African American music voraciously? And why can’t we have more pop songs on our radio that provide a good beat and a good message? The Commodores’ “Nightshift” reminds me that it is possible.

I’ve been watching, with a mixture of fear and horror, the fight for power between Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga in the wake of the last Kenyan presidential elections. People went to the polls in Kenya, hoping for a smooth political process. The Kikuyu, the Luo, and other ethnic groups worked to keep Kenya as the beacon of stability in a region that has struggled with drought and war. But things did not go smoothly in Kenya this time. Hundreds are dead and many more are displaced in a struggle that stems from old ethnic tensions.

It is a sad story but it is one that Africans are only too familiar with. For years, since independence, many African countries have been reaching for the dream of democracy, while navigating through a treacherous obstacle course filled with coups, military dictatorships, corruption, and overnight army-turned-civilian presidents.

African nations (as well as many South American and new European nations) have grappled with attaining and retaining democracy. A lot of qualified and unqualified pundits have said that Western-style democracy simply will not work in many parts of the world, including Africa.

Neither Kibaki nor Odinga seem willing to compromise in Kenya today. A Yoruba proverb states that when two elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers. It is the ordinary people that have died in Kenya, Nigeria, Liberia, Cote d’Ivoire, Congo and many other countries, in their quest to exercise their democratic rights.

Maybe democracy does not work in some environments where ethnic tensions are old and entrenched, and where poverty is palpable. But if democracy leads to quick death for some, the alternative of military rule leads to a slow process of suffocation and oppression for all.

The other day I stumbled upon the Tyra show on television. Her topic for the day was age and appearance. She paraded a number of women of varying ethnicities before the screen and asked her audience to guess how old they were from their appearance. To everyone’s delight and horror, the “specimens” were remarkably younger or older than they appeared. Of course, as is usual fare in any of these types of shows, there were super make-overs to make the women look older, younger, or more their age.

Towards the end of the show, Tyra announced triumphantly that she was 33 and she was thrilled to be black because “black don’t crack.” This elicited the usual laughs and nods of agreement from the black women in the audience. Then I began to wonder.

How do women who are not black feel when they hear this well-used adage? If “black don’t crack” (meaning darker skin stays unwrinkled for a very long time) the assumption is that other races do crack, right? As good as this adage sounds to the ears of a black woman, it probably does not sound good to others. So, in my sensitive way, I was wondering – is it not unfair to brag about this lovely attribute of black skin? Maybe we should not say this out loud so proudly, especially not on a nationally syndicated television show. Then I thought, how would I feel if, for instance, white women always said something like: “we are the fairest of them all.” I wouldn’t feel too good about that.

But then I realized that history, the media, and pop culture have systematically sent out the message that the fairer, the better. It seems like in most societies, the subliminal message has been that the fairest-complexioned of them all is indeed the fairest (loveliest) of them all. From glossy magazines to beauty pageants to subjective media lists like “Most Beautiful Women in the World” to deodorant that is “invisible” only for the fairest folks, the world has bought into and promoted this idea that generally, black is not the top of the beauty chain. James Brown’s anthem, “Say it loud, I’m Black and proud,” went against the grain, but was tightly embraced by black folks because it was a wonderful new empowering message in the world of pop culture.

So, I’m fine with Tyra saying “Black don’t crack” on her show, even though others may feel uncomfortable. It is a drop in the bucket that is overwhelmingly filled with global messages that laud other ethnicities as aesthetically superior to African ethnicity. Full disclosure: I am a dark-skinned woman.