Musuto Chirangi of Tanzania has felt the burden of colonialism personally.

“When I was born, I was given a traditional name, which has meaning,” said Chirangi, a hospital administrator in Tanzania Mennonite Church. “Before I was baptized, I was told to choose a Christian name. But they are not Christian names. They are Latin or English or Greek names. . . .

“When we preach how we like, we are told we are making too much noise. All of these rules and judgments are unnecessary burdens put on Christianity.”

Chirangi spoke at a gathering in Kigali, Rwanda, in February, organized by Mennonite Central Committee, of 56 people of African descent who are leaders of MCC partner organizations, including churches, or MCC staff.

They came from 20 countries in ­Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa to discuss how MCC can strip away burdens on development and peacebuilding — and on Christianity itself — imposed by centuries of colonialism.

In the colonial era, mighty kingdoms were erased. African lakes and waterfalls were named after British or Belgian monarchs. Incan and Aztec temples were toppled and Catholic churches built on top.

“We were told to hate our own culture,” said Ruth Joseph, who works with Solidarity of Haitian Women.

Silvia Regina Lima da Silva, an Afro- Brazilian theologian in the Evangelical Mennonite Conference of Costa Rica, said: “The hardest for us has been to have our identity defined from the outside. The colonizers decided who we are. . . . We have assimilated values, systems, structures that were not ours.”

African diaspora participants, including Talibah Aquil, an MCC East Coast staff member, mourned the loss of identity and separation from family because of the transatlantic slave trade. Divisions remain today.

“They created borders between us, even dividing families,” said Joao Damiao, general secretary of the Christian Council of Mozambique. “Now I need to apply for a visa to visit my brothers and sisters in a neighboring country. I need to use a European language to talk to them.”

Richard Makuza, former program officer with MCC Rwanda, said: “We don’t believe in ourselves as a group, and so we don’t work together. . . . The rest of the world comes to solve our problems and continues to divide us.”

As colonizers looted African, Latin American and Asian lands of their natural resources, colonial economic systems altered traditional values.

Moses Monday, director of the MCC partner Organization for Nonviolence and Development in South Sudan, said: “When our first parents [ancestors] got their first harvest, they wouldn’t eat it alone. They would take a basket or two of their crops to their neighbors. Nowadays, the spirit of competing over resources is prevalent. This is why people fight.”

MCC partners work to decolonize, focusing on local production for local needs and preferences, recuperating ancestral seeds, replanting trees where colonial powers and mining companies have deforested, even processing locally grown cacao into chocolate and packaging it for market. Not everything has to be shipped to European- or U.S.-based companies to come back beautiful.

Community organizing, which includes local leaders training young people, helps restore traditional values and identity while introducing ways to protect the environment. Every community process seeks to increase social cohesion, peacebuilding and the dignity of each person.

Partner organizations and community leaders work toward transformation and healing, knowing that the foundation of peace includes painful truth-telling.

They commit to naming racism, rather than normalizing it, as they restore ancestral values. They commit to building their faith in harmony with their local context and culture, so that faith unites rather than divides. They take responsibility to decolonize minds, cultures and actions.

They are committed to pray and seek God’s hand in the necessary transformations. Philip Okeyo of Kenya Mennonite Church said: “When we seek the face of God, we will find solutions.”