I.

A Brief History of the Emergence of African Theology

1.1 Introduction
Historians of contemporary agree that the centre of gravity has shifted to the global south. As early as 1976, Andrew Walls pointed out that within the previous three centuries Christianity had undergone a remarkable shift from being a sort of tribal religion of the Caucasian people to truly global religion. 1 Church membership is growing at a breath taking pace. In Ethiopia, for example, in post-Dergue era we have seen dramatic growth in membership in churches, whether in those mainline or new ones. Today Christianity has most adherents in Africa and Latin America, even Asia, where it exercises huge influence in societies. Although no matter how Christianity grew fast in the whole global south. It is only theologies done in Latin America, through theology of liberation, and Asia that caught the attention of Western scholars.2 Nonetheless, with its various historical and cultural settings, Africa plays a key role in the first advance and expansion of Christianity. Now, regarding the emergence of African theology While the origin of the rise of African theology is as yet a matter of debate among historians, historians agree with the presentation of a concept paper formulated and presented by some Congolese Catholic fathers under the title Des Prtres noirs sinterrogent (Some Black Priests Question/Wonder) in 1953.

1.2 The Impact of African Revolution

The lesson we get from history of theology shows us that theology has always arose in the midst of struggle and the location of the struggle determines which orientation theology presupposes. This location can be internal, as can be seen from history of theology, that certain theological trends emerged out of internal doctrinal and/or power struggles. On the other hand, for those coming from the underside of history, theology is attached with the struggle, in this case, external, between those in the margin of politics and economics and the forces that keep these interlocutors in the periphery. This explains the emergence of African theology and its close affinities with African revolution. As we know, the African revolution is marked by struggle for emancipation by throwing off the shackles of all enslaving and dehumanising forces brought to the continent by European colonisers. It was a revolutionary struggle to be fully

Andrew F. Walls, Toward Understanding Africas Place in Christian History, in Religion in a Pluralistic Society, vol. 2, Studies on Religion in Africa (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1976), 180. 2 John Parratt, Reinventing Christianity: African Theology Today (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), 12.

human in a world that denigrates black humanity. 3 The impact of the African revolution on the emergence and development of African theology is enormous as it prompted the African church and its leaders to relate their faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ with the African socio-cultural, political, economic and religious realities.4 The origin of this revolution can be traced back at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, when more organised black resistance to colonial oppression and racism emerged under the influence of the growing sense of pan-Africanism and later, after WWII, African nationalism. Its ultimate objective has always been to bring total liberation to the African in all areas of human existence political, social, economic, cultural and religious or, said differently, to bring full humanity.5 African Christians, through the writings of both Africans and blacks of the diaspora, have learned how colonialism drained African societies As result, these same Africans came to realise the irrelevancy of theology as developed in purely Western cultural-philosophical categories in African context and situation. Contextual provenance aside, those notable theologians in Germany like Karl Barth, although they were at the frontiers of ecclesial resistance to Nazi ideology and atrocities, had never addressed the issue colonial aggression and oppression against African people. It follows that the African revolution for liberation from oppressive and exploitative forces compelled the church to theologically accommodate the change and its demands for African identity and episteme. In other words, there was growing conviction among African Christians that the various tenets of the movement of liberation should be brought under the focus of Christian thought and theological interpretation. At this point, one might sense that African theology took two separate (yet related, in my view) avenues or, better said, orientations. In the African quest for its (post-colonial) identity, the theme of liberation was not to be found in the theological lexicon of the pioneers of African theology. This is not to be taken as taking a different route that the crosscurrents of the revolution. Instead, the theological current that evolved had a narrow focus on the cultural-religious dimension of the revolution. This also meant a refusal of dialogical engagement with the critical issues raised by political and economic factors in the continent. One may wonder as to why the African church leaders, radicalised by the revolutionary struggles, did not develop a theological stance on liberation in its political and economic dimensions. Understandably though, their focus was to adapt the gospel message to suit the African situation and ethos. The primary reason was that they saw in the western missionaries who brought it a concomitant interest in the seed of perpetual Western superiority and domination. 6
3

Emmanuel Martey, African Theology: Inculturation and Liberation (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1993), 7. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., 8. 6 Aylward Shorter, African Christian Theology: Adaptation or Incarnation? (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1977), 150.

More theologically, and less politically, the tendency to lay claim to universal validity by western theology due to its longstanding and developed heritage, resulted in a theology that was not relevant to African Weltanschauungen.7 Let me make a brief detour to remark on colonialism, western epistemology and its effects on mission theologies in the continent of Africa.

1.3 Western [Ordering] Epistemology: Examples from Hume, Kant and Hegel
Marked by the Cartesian cogito and Kantian transcendental subjectivism, the European Enlightenment championed the rise of egoistic epistemology in which the thinking (or doubting) subject (I) became the starting point of knowing. A number of thinkers and schools of philosophy subscribed to this, although at times challenged. The concept of subjectivity traces its intellectual origin back in Edmund Husserls philosophy of phenomenology. In a remedy to the shortcomings of subject-object dualisms that had long been central to the Enlightenment philosophy from Descartes (mind-body, subject-object) to Kant (noumena-phenomena), 8 Husserl develops the socalled transcendental phenomenology. The main attempt of this theory is to bridge the gap between appearance (phenomena) and reality (noumena). Instead of starting with the Cartesian dubito, he devised system of phenomenological reduction in which the observer suspends (instead of doubting) beliefs in the world external to consciousness. Only then would the observer be able to interpret the available sensory data arrive on certainty. With modification of Cartesian theorem, Husserl finds another problem which is the transcendental ego that drives the observer to know, which bestows meaning upon the objects intended in consciousness. 9 This could attract the charge of solipsism because reducing oneself to ones transcendental ego by way of phenomenological epoch. Husserl thus affirms the existence of other egos who surely are not a mere intending

Parratt, Reinventing Christianity, 2. This conviction has guided and been shared by many theological works brewed in Africa, including Bnzet Bujo, African Theology in Its Social Context, Faith and Cultures Series (Maryknoll, N.Y: Orbis Books, 1992); Martey, African Theology; Parratt, Reinventing Christianity; Laurenti Magesa, Anatomy of Inculturation: Transforming the Church in Africa (Maryknoll N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2004); Emmanuel Katongole, ed., African Theology Today, African Theology Today 1 (Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press, 2002); Bnzet Bujo and Juvnal Ilunga Muya, African Theology in the 21st Century: The Contribution of the Pioneers , vol. 1 (Nairobi: Paulines Publications Africa, 2003); Bnzet Bujo and Juvnal Ilunga Muya, African Theology in the 21st Century: The Contribution of the Pioneers , vol. 2 (Nairobi: Paulines Publications Africa, 2006). 8 The exception is perhaps Hegel who attempted to systematically bridge (Vershnung) the gap between mind and body by conceiving the world as the product of a single self-knowing subject spirit. Georg W. F. Hegel, Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit , trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). 9 Nick Crossley, Intersubjectivity: The Fabric of Social Becoming (London [England]: Sage Publications, 1996), 3 Intentionality in Husserlian phenomenology entails that consciousness is always conscious of something or that objects are always presented to consciousness.

and intended in me, merely synthetic unities of possible verification in me, but, according to their sense, precisely others.10 The French poststructuralist thinker Michel Foucault developed the notion that the structures of power are concealed in the regimes of episteme.11 Knowledge for Foucault was (as for most other structuralists and poststructuralists) was not that existed independently of language. That is, knowledge is not simply communicated through language; all knowledge is organised through the structures, interconnections and associations that are built into language. These underlining principles are collectively called, according to Foucault, discourse. Foucault understands discourse the particular kind of [organising] language which specialized knowledge has to confirm to in order to be regarded as true.12 This makes that wonder about the functions of discourse. Discourse, at face value, may seem to be equated with any intellectual or quasi-intellectual explanation of things, on the sociological and cultural levels it means, a social language created by particular cultural conditions at a particular time and space, and it expresses a particular way of understanding human experience. 13 Discourse refers to very specific patterns of language that tell us something about the person speaking the language, the culture that that is part of, the network of social institutions that the person caught up in, and even frequently the most basic assumptions that the person holds. The European discourse towards black Africa was that it was a continent of barbaric and uncivilised people. This discourse was uncritically shared by influential philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Hume/Kant/Hegel) and propounded by ethnologists all the way down he nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (e.g. Lvy-brhl/Malinowski). Especially, the views of those philosophers such as Hume, Kant and Hegel are worth quoting. David Hume, often dubbed as father of Scepticism, did not allow his Scepticism to extend to all the prejudices of his time. In the 1753 edition of his essay Of National Character, a footnote reads:
I am apt to suspect the negros and in general all other species of men to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation.

10

Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology , Kluwer Translations of Edmund Husserl (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991), 89. This point marks Husserls theory of intersubjectivity. 11 Michel Foucault, Power-Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings,1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980). 12 Robert J. C. Young, Foucault on Race and Colonialism, New Formations 25 (1995): 2. Foucault contends that the formation and function of discourse involves a sort of violence in a way it imposes its linguistic order on the world. That is, knowledge has to always confirm to its paradigms in order to be recognised as legitimate and maintain the legitimation. 13 Lois Tyson, Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide (Routledge, 1998), 281.

Immanuel Kant has been the most influential philosopher of the Enlightenment whose thoughts are haunting contemporary continental and English-speaking philosophies. Although he famously claimed that Humes Scepticism freed him from falling into dogmatism, his 1764 work Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime betrays the fact he, far from being awakened, gets trapped in the European colonial dogmatism that befell to the Scot. Says Kant of Africans:
The Negros of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling. Mr Hume challenges anyone to cite a single example in which a Negro has shown talents, and asserts that among the hundreds of thousands of blacks who are transported elsewhere from their countries, although many of them have been set free, still not a single on was every found who presented anything great in art or science or any other praiseworthy quality. So fundamental is the difference between these [black and white] races of man, and it appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in colour.

G. W. F. Hegel developed an expansive system whereby he defined [human] history is the concrete unfolding of the Spirit in the progressive realisation of its own consciousness, which is the Absolute. Unfortunately, Africa didnt belong to this kind of universal history:
At this point we leave Africa, not to mention it again. For it is no historical part of the world; it has no movement or development to exhibit. Historical movements in it that is in its northern part belong to the Asiatic or European world. Carthage displayed there an important transitionary phase of civilization; as a Phoenician colony, it belongs to Asia. Egypt will be considered in reference to the passage of the human mind from its Eastern to its Western phase, but it does not belong to the African Spirit. What we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature, and which had to be presented here only as on the threshold of the Worlds History.14

This unexpectedly nave outlook on Africa from these philosophers was part of the European colonial discourse on Africa. As Hegel himself admits, missionaries played a significant role in its formation: the copious and circumstantial accounts of Missionaries completely confirms this. 15 In other words, inasmuch as the missionaries collaborated and got endorsements from the colonial masters, they saw their missionary task to convert the savage Africans to Christianity and become civilised like the Europeans. This resulted in a cultural stalemate where the culture of the dominating Europeans has been imposed on the cultures of local people. The rise of the African revolutions for independence was a pivotal reaction towards this of cultural and the concomitant political and economical imperialism. This was the historical, political, and ecclesiological context out of which African theology emerged, as a meaningful theological quest for an African identity.

14 15

G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), 99. Ibid., 93.