Eze

Transformation: An International Journal of Holistic Mission Studies
http://trn.sagepub.com Sources of Social and Political Theology: Interrogating the African experience
E. Chukwudi Eze Transformation: An International Journal of Holistic Mission Studies 2008; 25; 169 DOI: 10.1177/026537880802500401 The online version of this article can be found at: http://trn.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/25/4/169
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Sources of Social and Political Theology: Interrogating the African experience

E. Chukwudi Eze
Dr E. Chukwudi Eze teaches in the Department of Philosophy, DePaul University, Chicago, USA
Abstract
This paper analyses selected recent African theological works on the conceptual relationships between church and society. The author highlights what can be universally learned from the African writings with reference to debates about faith and its relationship to ideals of social and political justice. Some recent books by African theologians have taken up the challenge of directly confronting questions that arise from the relationships between Africas religions and their wider social and political environment. The paper shows how according to these theologians the church in Africa must be judged by what it does and by what it does not do vis--vis the larger societies of which it is a part.
Introduction
With few exceptions, todays Africa is remarkable for the number and diversity of religions that peacefully coexist on the continent.1 Traditional African Religion, Judaism, Islam, Christianity and many more each with tens to hundreds of competing denominations cohabit in Africa. It is therefore justifiable to ask to what extent the sources of religious violence, within or across religions, might be produced by extra-religious factors. The extra-religious pressures could come, for example, from uncertainties created by failures in aspects of wider social, economic and political institutions. Similarly, factors like ethnocentrism, poverty, and ignorance, where they exist, provide as much fuel to religious discord as any differences in theological or doctrinal observances among the religions. The possibility is worth noting that it is the larger contexts of social life which constitute the sources of threats to religious stability in Africa and not religious doctrines. This is especially true in the current climate of world opinion about causes of religious fundamentalism. In the same light, it is refreshing to see that some recent books by several African theologians have taken up the challenge of directly confronting questions that arise from the relationships between Africas religions in this case twenty-first century African Christianity and their wider social and political environment. What roles have the Christian churches played, or must play, in dealing with African issues regarding poverty, use and misuse of secular political power, and ethnic conflicts? What negative roles must the churches avoid, and what positive ones must be embraced, to develop in Africa greater social prosperity, trust and stability of public governance institutions, democratic citizenship, and more global forms of national identities? Past decades saw extensive debates among African theologians, of all religions,
Sources of Social and Political Theology
Transformation 25.4 October 2008 169
about what roles religious faith could play in transforming for the better the larger African society.2 The origins and contexts of these debates are multiple and vary from one part of Africa to another, and from one religion or denomination to the other. The main trends, however, seem to be animated by three major needs: promotion of dialogue across religions, interdenominational dialogue or ecumenism, and enculturation (i.e., the greater indigenization of those religions whose missionary roots derive, recently or in the far past, from countries and cultures other than African). Included in the theological conversations about enculturation are questions about sources of not only theological and cultural authority for the churches in Africa, but also issues regarding the basis of potentially religion-inspired legitimation of secular political power. These questions arise, in part, because of the obvious need for greater theological and institutional autonomy for those churches working in Africa which may yet be dependent, in more ways than one, on parent or sister organisations in countries, or institutions, in other parts of the world. The theological questions are therefore also informed by nationalist and secular sentiments arising from the reality of Africas postcolonial experiences in the contexts of international relations, and in the contexts of increased pace of globalization of economic and social life on the continent. So beyond controversies in some African churches over topical issues like ordination of women or gays, there are other equally controversial themes which preoccupy African Christianity during the second half of the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Although the books I have isolated for a closer reading are by Christian theologians, and the principal authors are priests of the Roman Catholic Church, it is obvious that the issues they discuss, and certainly the social ramifications, transcend this one denomination and are probably relevant to the African experiences of other religions as well.3 In fact, the questions which the Catholic works articulate are beyond the exclusive concerns of African Christianity. One of them explicitly argues that African theologians are united by issues rather than divided by doctrines. Thus, African theologians and religious scholars do not write against one another, based on doctrinal differences, but in concert with one another, based on shared contextual frameworks.4 But what are these contextual frameworks? They are, of course, the same contexts we earlier suspected as the sources of conflict both within Africas religions, between these religions and the larger African societies, and between postcolonial Africa and its external relations. As parts of the dynamic social, economic and political contexts of contemporary African societies, a church must have, our authors believe, not only a mission to redeem the soul of this or that individual sinner but also a social mission. While the first aspect of the mission is focused on the interior quest for personal salvation, the second focuses on the communally objective and on the structural institutions of social relations. In rich and complex tapestries, our authors argue that any African church or religious requires a robust social conscience. Indeed, a prophetic optimism undergirds The Church as Family, whereas a more somber picture predictably emerges from the questions asked in Rwanda. Taken together, however, the books heighten for the reader an awareness of the significance of religions in society and the difficulties of finding the right answer to a question like: What has been, or what should become, the social mission of religion in this example Roman Catholicism in Africa? The optimistic versus somber tones of these books are hardly surprising. While one was written by a young theologian at the end of the decades of the Cold War and the beginnings of the democratic stirrings that swept across Africa, the other
170 Transformation 25.4 October 2008
is a multifaceted historical review of the roles of the Catholic church, in particular the churchs hierarchy, in the tragic events of the books full title. Common to both works however are the pictures of active knowledge of Africa and a sense of the peoples hopes and dreams; vivid descriptions of the challenges impeding realizations of these hopes and dreams; and a consensus that Christian churches are, and must remain, active agents in the processes of social formation, and transformation, of the institutions of African cultures, societies, and states. The church in Africa, the authors seem to argue, must be judged by what it does and by what it does not do vis--vis the larger societies of which the church is a part. The key question is therefore how to determine, on theologically acceptable grounds, what the churchs roles in the larger societies should be. Such determinations would not only be useful to the churchs clarifications of its own intramural self-understanding; they would also help the church in explaining its mission outside the church precincts. The determinations would also be useful as guiding posts for Africas religious voices in the debates about Africas place in a rapidly integrated and globalizing world, where multiple forms of faith are bound to compete for international attention and influence. And they would be useful for the necessary dialogues which must occur between those who have religious faiths and those who doubt.
Church in Society: Conflict and convergence

It seems that if African theologians were forced to choose between embracing ahistorical (i.e. socially disengaged) forms of faith or a socially transforming secularism, a good deal of them cannot but find the proposition unintelligible. Why choose? Where is the contradiction? During the colonial period and up to the earlier decades of independence, these questions were usually posed in regard to matters almost exclusively about African cultural identity. In those times African Christians wanted to make clear to themselves and to the world that they were, without contradiction, Africans and Christians. No one, who understood the colonial history of Christianity in particularly the sub-Saharan parts of Africa, found this African insistence on inclusive identity surprising. On the one hand, it is true that African peoples, Ethiopians, were, literally, at the birth of the story of Christianity. For example, the African presence in the earliest drawings of the story of the Adoration of the Magi the visit of three kings to the baby that would become the Christ is ubiquitous throughout the history of Christianity.5 In fact, Africa was part of the history of the peoples and cultures of Jesus way before Jesus became the deified Christ of Christianity. The notably conflicted history and cultures of Judaism in Pharaonic Egypt make the record of Jewish experience in that northern part of Africa as old as, if not older than, similar Jewish experience in other parts of the world, including the rest of the Middle East.6 Similarly, some East Africans, many of them Ethiopians trace their history and religious traditions back to an ancient kingdom in Jerusalem. Ethiopia is believed to have transformed its monarchy by a visit of Queen Makeda, also known as Sheba, to King Solomon. According to the Geez language edition of the thirteenth century treatise Kebra Negast, The Glory of Kings, the Queen, while on a visit to the King, conceived with him a son who would become King Menelik I.7 It is recorded that the Queen, additionally, brought back with her to Ethiopia Jewish settlers and the Ark of the Covenant.8 Menelik and his successors are, today, referred to as The Lion of Judah, as in Mo`a Anbessa Zeimnegede Yihuda.9 Modern African and African Diaspora religious movements (e.g., Rastafarianism), as well as secular cultural
and political formations in Ethiopia, make extensive uses of the icon of the Tribe of Judah because, they believe, the founders of their religion or nation were, by David and Solomon, descendants of the Jewish tribe.10 Moreover, just as Africans were represented in the story of the Magi, Africans were also recorded to have been present both at the Crucifixion of Jesus (one was forced to help Jesus carry his Cross11) and at the time of the Resurrection of the Christ (another was given the commission to go spread the Goodnews to his own peoples in Ethiope12). Right up to the medieval times, after Christianity has been institutionally consolidated in Rome, Africans, it seems, didnt feel that there was a contradiction between being a Christian and being an African.13 As St. Paul wrote, Christianity was for men and women everywhere: Jew, Gentile, or other.14 But clearly, the above was not the story certainly not the whole story brought to Africa by the colonizing mission of the modern European states. Starting in the fifteenth century, when demands at the international markets shifted from trade in gold, silk, and iron to African slaves, new kinds of narratives arose to exclude Africans from the universalist rhetoric of one humanity, the older discourse which had served Christian evangelization in Africa during the earlier centuries.15 At this time, the Enlightenment scientific rhetoric of race became important narrative mechanisms for inclusion and exclusion. 16 The colonizing European has become white and member of a master race, while the Africa was deemed black and of the servant race. These, surely, were characterizations based on the outcomes of what were violent encounters at the colonial frontiers. The terms of this modern meeting of peoples and cultures were predetermined by the demands of labour at the sugar, cotton, and tobacco plantations of the New World: from Brazil, Cuba, and Dominica through the southern parts of the United States, Mexico, and Colombia, to Panama, Haiti, Jamaica, Martinique, and the Dutch Caribbean. But the talk of master and servant races did not only justify as it seems to have done throughout history; this we know from Greek sources like Aristotle but also fuel the terms of the eventual resolutions of the imperial and colonial conflicts.17 Many African scholars have eloquently written about the evolution and critical transformations of the racist and self-serving discursive practices of the Enlightenment, in which Africa and Africans were said to belong to a Dark Continent.18 Like their more secular Africanist counterparts, African theologians have had to deal with the legacy of colonial discourses on Africa and Africans. Thus, at the times when Africans seemed forced to argue that they were not the primitive or the savage portrayed in modern European literatures and scholarship, or in light of the past of such images of the African in the archives of European imagination, it is not at all surprising if postcolonial African theologians thought it was important to insist that they were both Christians and Africans. In an oft-repeated story about a conversation between a European missionary and a Yoruba convert to Christianity, when asked if he considered himself a member of an African Church rather than a member of the Church tout court, the convert is said to have explained that one becomes Christian but an African Christian. When asked why, he is reported to have answered: Because we are Africans.19 It may be jarring for some non-Africans to read that, in the 1990s, African theologians are still interested to retrace the critic would say, rehash the intellectual histories of the colonial disciplines in order to highlight the anti-African racist past of these disciplines. But most Africans are sympathetic to such a strategy of thinking and writing. After all, it is said that one who lacks knowledge of history
is bound to, less insightfully, suffer historys mistakes. It can be argued that part of being an educated African, today, must include knowing not just ones identity within Africa but also Africas identity in the context of the wider world. It could be considered mis-education if one abstracted for discussion post-colonial Christian African identities from their global including the historical contexts. Even in a post-European missionary era, the African Christian seeks social relevance, and the theologian believes that Africa ought to be explained, not merely from the perspectives of competing, narrowly conceived, cultural identities and faith; todays African Christians presently seek greater global historical relevance as well.20 In fact, within and across Africa, Christian churches appear to wish to think of themselves as belonging not just to a global world but also to a global South. Moreover, these issues transcend their own development as reflections of a narrowly doctrinal disagreement within and across European and African churches. The disagreements are over wider topics, including renewed concerns that, as one of the works under consideration put it, the socioeconomic and political problems, which soil the humanity and identity of Africans, do not spare either their faith or their church.21 The new African churchs awakened social and international consciousness does not seem to be driven only by the intellectual curiosities of radical theologians. The impetus for engagement often comes rather from the highest, conservative, authority of the African Churches. In the case of twenty-first century African Catholicism, the African Synod of Bishops appears to be as progressive as similar bodies could be in any other part of the world. We know this from the focus of The Church as Family. During the 1994 African Synod, in the official proclamations from the conference, the bishops explicitly asked African theologians to guide them on how to think the African church under a model of family. Rwanda, similarly, constitutes itself as an in-depth analysis of episcopal declarations of Rwandan bishops, individually and in conferences, from 1990 to 1999. In the former, the task was prospective: in light of Africas history and the postcolonial conditions of its societies, what kinds of socio-theological thought ought to guide the church in its engagement with the churchs wider historical and social environment? In the latter case, the goal was to show how the official Catholic church, represented by its bishops, may or may not have influenced and in what directions the influence the course of events leading up to, during, and after the genocide of the early to mid-1990s. Because of these two books, an observer would want to know: What factors explain the African Catholic bishops efforts to think the future and the past of their church in a potentially new light? In one case, why choose the metaphor church-as-family for this endeavour? The answer, we learn, is entirely historical. It involves what is described as the perilous course that Africa had embarked on in the 1990s. During the 1980s the so-called years of Afro-pessimism, but also the decade leading up to the 1994 Catholic Synod the continent experienced remarkable transformations in its economic institutions. On the political front, equally deep and structural changes had been set in motion in South Africa changes as deep as, though unfolding in the opposite directions from, what would become the genocidal Rwanda from 1990 to 1994. The one example represented Africas hope, the other its despair. The theologians think one can write a history of the public, transforming, exercises of faith by the African churches during these times. They see in the authoritative mandates of the bishops some clues to experiences that need to be examined in order to determine the theological bases of the churches social engagements and disengageSources of Social and Political Theology
ments. For example, by believing that the African church is a family of peoples under God, a God who in turn is not incurious about the peoples historical fates, the bishops ask the theologians to reconcile theological thought and ecclesiastical imperatives. Such theological reflection would guide practice just as practice would bring theological understanding closer to realisation of the ideal. Obviously, questions like when it is proper to its mission that the church be socially involved, and how the church should be involved, where and when it is proper to do so, are central to this task of thought. Between the appropriation of the bishops mandate and the theological attempts at the justification, we can learn the following. First, though the Catholic Church is not just any other political or social organisation, it cannot afford to think of itself as entirely apolitical or asocial. Second, if the church is already implicitly social or political in its theological and historical missions, the real intellectual task seems to be to study and learn from how the church in Africa has engaged in, or abstained from, uses of its theological mandate for fulfilling the historical aspects of the mission. Throughout, these questions are raised in the contexts of so-called post-Euro-driven missionary African churches, and in search of ways to transform the African churches sense of purpose. An easy way to capture what is at stake here might be to remember a story I heard from Bishop Desmond Tutu. When I became Archbishop in 1986, Tutu recounted, it was a criminal offence for me to live in the Archbishops official residence in Bishopscourt because of the Group Areas Act. I told the government I was Archbishop and would live in my official residence and they could do what they liked and I wasnt asking for their permission. The Group Areas Act was, of course, the notorious law in South Africas racial Apartheid by which, as the bishop also reminisced, in one instance, nearly three million people were forcibly removed from Sophiatown. Sophiatown was then repopulated by whites and renamed, with no hint of irony, Triomf. According to Tutu, now speaking decades after the removal, How wonderful that the iniquity has been reversed Triomf is Sophiatown again.22 African theologians wish to understand, from the points of view of the activities of the churches, how events could have turned out so hopefully in South Africa but so tragically in places like Rwanda. What were the qualitative differences in the Christian religious and social activism for and against intolerance in the two African countries? A partial subtext of Rwanda is the complaint about the probable complicity of the church in not just colonial-era racial thought and practices but also in post-colonial inter-ethnic and genocidal wars.23 From a sociological perspective, the evidence and arguments of Rwanda appear to confirm the case that uses were made of the concept of race in ways now familiar to us from the political science literature. In line with what is known from Mahmood Mamdanis Citizen and Subject and When Victims Become Killers, or from Phillip Guarevitchs We Want to Tell You that Tomorrow We Will be Killed, the authors of Rwanda argue that the official organs of the Catholic church might have participated in providing, or at least fuelling, the racial hatred of one ethnic group against the other. Such social involvement, where true, is yet more baffling given the fact that the accusation is made against peoples with whom one shares a Church: the Roman Catholic Church. In essence, against the racialism and the racialist, the argument of the African theologians, in this case, is that there has occurred fratricide twice. There was the fratricidal genocide of one ethnic group against another of the same motherland or fatherland. And there was, from the Christian point of view, a religious fratricide: people who share historical patri174 Transformation 25.4 October 2008
mony or matrimony of one church visited murder on each other. The two forms of fratricide, unsurprisingly, were carried out in the name of a colonial inheritance: the myth of race. As the theologians strongly argue: Dans les analyse des lettres des vques entre 1990 et 1999, on dcouvre une glise qui dploie le concept de race et aide a tablir les discriminations entre diffrentes communauts de telle manire que cette rfrence constante a la race est source de tous les malheurs des Rwandais et le sera encore longtemps.24 In addition to what has been attributed to the Bishops written pronouncements by the theologians, it has been argued that, at the level of popular expressions of Catholic religious sentiments, it cannot be denied that pro-genocide media wanted to convince their public that the Virgin [Mary] from Kibeho was on their side. Apparently, concurrent with the genocide of 1994, it was claimed that the apparition of the Virgin at Kibeho the last of the appearances reported to have occurred was on 15 May 1994 were exploited by pro-genocide media.25 To the historian Jean-Pierre Chrtien has been attributed the opinion that the notorious Radio-television libre des Mille Collines used the apparitions from Kibeho to justify the genocide. Some of the officers of the Radio-television libre des Mille Collines have been either accused, or both accused and convicted, of responsibility for genocidal acts.26 Very explicitly, Philip Gourevitch believes that the May 15 apparition offered a theological resolution to the question of genocide. He remarks that [t]he exact words attributed to the Holy Mother by the visionary Valentine Nyiramukiza might have been lost, but the message was broadcast on Radio Rwanda at the time, and a number of Rwandan priests and journalists [] told me that the Virgin was reported to have said that President Habyarimana was with her in heaven, and that her words were widely interpreted as an expression of divine support for the genocide.27 According the sociologist Joanna Tegnerowicz, there is other evidence to back up the suggestion that, in Jean-Paul Gouteuxs words, this particular Marian apparition in Kibeho was anything other than progenocidal unbridled propaganda.28 One may argue that it was and perhaps still is not clear if the official Catholic church in Rwanda held any opinion on the validity of the Kibeho apparition. But it seems that uses were made of the words of the self-proclaimed votary.
The Social Gospel in Africa: Problems and prospects

According to both The Church as Family and Rwanda, social and theological analyses need to be made to determine both the strengths and the pathologies of the African Churchs self-insertion in its African contexts. They think that an understanding of the internal and external dynamics of the processes of formation of twenty-first century social identities in Africa should be part of that analyses. Both works seem to suggest that, due to many factors, Africas postcolonial social identities have been, in too many places, internally and externally twisted and truncated. The works also attribute some of the sources of the negative factors to racist colonial legacies, and the continuing practices of inequality in global relations. Without denying agency to post-colonial Africans themselves, there are convincing arguments in both books that, quite recently, Africas historical development has been mechanically constrained by political manipulations of racial and tribal allegiances due to, among other factors, Cold War-inspired politics and economics. Other sources of the manipulations are antagonistic global relations for example, the current amorphous War on Terror whose economic and political origins are external or, at best, marginal to the interests of Africa and Africans.
Between the racist colonial and post-colonial geopolitical factors which dictate favorable or unfavorable military and economic relationships within and across nations, African countries and with them the African churches find themselves under immense pressure in the 1990s and in the early 2000s. Together, the theological books we are discussing provide exemplary insights into the dialectical relations of the internal and the external factors operating in African countries, as these factors both enable and constrain social horizons for masses of the peoples not just in Africa but in many other parts of the world. But these constraints, the theologians show, are not merely institutional and practical: they are also intellectual. For that reason, one must consider the limits and probably the political and moral ambiguities as well which may be inherent in some of the conceptual frameworks advanced as sources for constructing theological insights into the twenty-first century African experience. One such conceptual device is, obviously, the idea of church-as-family. In natural terms, we usually think of family as held together by bonds of blood, experience and history. Most of us associate these bonds with thoughts and feelings of actual or possible experiences of unconditional love, where one feels a sense of unconditional belonging. But depending on which aspect of the family bonds one chooses to scrutinise, it can easily be noticed that there are social limits to the concept. We cannot ignore these limits if the image or metaphor is to serve well the social aspirations intended of it by a church. First, they are the same or similar feelings of mutual belonging by blood that, for example, sometimes translate into tribal and racial consciousness, with the intrinsic dangers. How does one translate the idea of family or kin into a wider, universal, register? The African theologians are aware of this problem and recognise that despite attempts to affirm the universality of the African values of community as a place of unconditioned sociality, there are also certain disturbing practices which seem to indicate that these values do not extend beyond the confines of immediate and local identities or loyalties. Furthermore, [t]hese loyalties, variously called ethnocentrism, tribalism or restricted love, pose serious problems to the metaphor of church-as-family.29 Indeed restricted or even misunderstood and corrupted ideas of self-love could lead, in a spiral, to genocidal hatreds. How do the theologians propose to overcome these however stretched from the intended or real meaning unwelcome aspects of familial identities? One recommendation which, we must admit, strikes as a less-than-clear solution was to foster an understanding of church which takes seriously the localized nature of church affiliations. How would a church become a family without closing its borders to others, or thinking about them as non-family members? The next suggestion was about a need to develop models of church in Africa which facilitate a dynamic relationship between the competing localized loyalties in order to free the idea and experience of church from the narrow bond of ethnic or tribal affiliation and alliances.30 Again, there are positive and negative dynamics to ethnicity or other kinds of group loyalty, and the challenge must remain how to decrease the negative aspects and increase the positive benefits of cooperation across local churches and similar allegiances. Rwanda shows precisely what happens when these efforts fail. Christians killed Christians in their own churches, allegedly sometimes under the indication or guidance of the pastor. Where was the transcendent ethical vision sufficient to universalise, as it is supposed to be, Jesuss gospel?
Second, natural family relations just as ethnic localities are also places full of internal tensions. Some of these tensions are considered taboo to even mention, let alone discuss, in the open. For example, we know from feminist scholarship during the past decades that in highly patriarchal societies, gender relations within a natural family are usually skewed in ways that may or may not favour the ideals of love and mutual respect. Tellingly, women theologians in Africa have been the most vocal in articulating the moral limitations of what is usually called consensual thinking, a model believed to be the grounding of authentic African familial and other social relations.31 In Daughters of Anowa, for example, Oduyoye wonders whether the burden on men and women of a particular conception of family does not generate a corporatistic personality, a personality type the burden of which might stifle individual initiative and personal development. When promoted to the level of ideology, one wonders to what extent consensus politics or Afro-communalism may become an impediment to exploring other, perhaps more open, more universal, and therefore more accommodating, models of family and, equally Christian, models of social relations. We could, of course, readily avoid some of these issues by emphasising the fact that the word family, as used in the bishops document, is merely analogous, symbolic, and equivocal. We could thus think about church-as-family with some emphasis on the idea of family as also a historical construct rather than a brute natural kind. But even with this alternative emphasis, we notice factors limiting the capacities of individuals in African societies to realise the social formation of identities in families. Today, for example, we understand how certain economic relations do not encourage social life in the family. In Philosophy of Right, Hegel insightfully correlated this phenomenon with the emergence of capitalistic civil societies where individuals now atomistically conceived as economic agents are valued in so far as they play a role, and thus acquire identity, within chains of relations governed not by family or community relations but rather by the demands of market forces.32 Freed from patrimonial relations previously familiar in feudal or tribal social and economic systems, the modern individual is conceived as a self-subsistent unit of value. Descartes formulation of the basis of this kind of identity was symptomatic as well as prescient: I think, therefore I am. This would be the voice of an individual loosened from certain kinds of social and historical bonds. How this newer idea of man and the underlying economic imperatives have and will be played out in Africa, and what impact these could have on what Africans understand as self, family, community and so on, cannot be taken for granted. An anecdote could illustrate this last remark. In his September 2002 Steve Biko Lecture at the University of Cape Town, Chinua Achebe reports an interesting observation: Earlier this year, he said, I saw on American television an interview of Mr. Mandela in the Oprah Winfrey Show. Oprah was suitably deferential, but there was something she refused to accept. Mr. Mandela was at pains to explain to her that the victory [over the Apartheid regime] was not his alone but the work of a group and of the whole country. He kept stressing the collegiate, the co-operative; she kept insisting on the self, the individual. It all seemed to me like a little war game between the Western and African psychologies, between I think, therefore I am and A human is human because of other humans. Achebes Cape Town audience, presumably intuitively, understood what this war was about. After all, this is the country of ubuntu, a concept to which many theologians have attributed the success of every major event in recent South
Africa history from the democratic end to Apartheid, through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to the countrys most progressive Constitution. What some theologians in other parts of Africa have done is to radicalise the ubuntu cultural ideology by grounding this ideology in some kind of mystical African essence. Although the languages used in the justifications are claimed to be philosophical, there is no question that the force of this language does not derive from the philosophical arguments but rather from the religious and mystical poetry. Thus, in rapid succession, one can cite from one African language after another, proverbs such as Mtu ni watu (Swahili), Motho ke motho ka botho (Zulu), Madu ka Ego (Igbo) and so on, and then represent these and similar sayings in theological refinements, against an African version of Descartes: Cognatus, ergo sum (I am related, therefore I am). When the depths of this modern African theological anti-Cartesianism are plumbed, the predictable immediate authorities are Senghor and Mveng with, of course, the Tempelsian Negritudist ontology. This ontology, as it is well known, conceives of existence as a chain of Being, with vitality of life, Life itself, as the First Principle. In this metaphysics, claimed to be authentically mystical and African, any factor perceived as an obstacle to an individuals or a communitys realisation of Vitality of Life is considered anti-human, and conceptually characterised in equally ahistorical vocabulary: Nothingness, Evil, or Death. In this metaphysics, everyday life in Africa, it is implied, plays itself out in-between the moral extremities, for life on earth is mere drama, on a historical scale, of the cosmic opposition and struggle between Life and Death. An average family, in the framework of this mytho-metaphysics, is nothing but a unit of preservation of Life, so that every living thing in the cosmos ought to be united in favour of its maintenance. In what Mveng called the triadic mode of existence father, mother, child in family, it is nothing short of Being-in-Itself that is given a historical Trinitarian significance. That is why the African theologian could say: life becomes meaningful only when the people [begin] to have their own children and fulfill their task of contributing to the quantitative and qualitative increase of the communitys life-force.33 It is not only in the positive proposals about what to do how one should live that the mytho-theological worldview is self-evident. The worldview also colours the theological analyses of the roots of the social and political problems faced by the citizens of certain countries in Africa. In Rwanda, for example, we read: Le gnocide est un mal qui exprime loubli et/ou le dclin de Dieu. Lthique se situe dans la dynamique des convictions philosophiques et religieuses sur le sens du bien. On peut parler dclatement de lordre thique lorsquun Mal comme le gnocide nous laisse de marbre ou sinscrit pour certain dans le processus dun Bien.34 In this example, how one understands Good and Evil, clearly, bears on the answer to the question: Why genocide? Or, at the minimum, the conceptions of the ideas of good and evil should be made part of the exploratory conversations regarding the roots of mutual hatred and the spiraling of such hatred to its genocidal outskirts. It is impossible to make sense human sense, in any case of such tragedy without these moral and ethical, and yes, even the transcendental, dimensions. From another perspective, however, there are structures of everyday life around which questions of Good and Evil, with capitals G and E, play less significant roles in the origins of mutual mistrust and hatred, or open violence and war. These mundane areas of inquiry include matters of scarcity of essential resources, such as land (e.g. Rwandas population per square mile is one of the largest in the
world by any measurement; in the 2005 United Nations estimate, it was ranked 27th right behind Lebanon out of 230 countries and dependencies35), energy, water, work, knowledge, and so forth. This is why I would say that if our theologians are correct to ask sil nexiste pas une ethique du genocide qui defie la foi et la moral a travers la souffrance de linnocent, I would also argue that they are yet more correct to pursue the hypothesis about if, in the situation of threat of, or actual, deprivation, hatred, and ignorance, there might be more down-to-earth, more ordinary, and less transcendental, sources of conflit des normes morales. In political contexts of need and unremitting poverty, and the resulting lack of social hope, can one not see how the brother or sister or the fellow citizen could easily be conceptually turned into not just a competitor but also a categorical lnnemi? This enemy, with a capital E, could no longer be just a fellow citizen with whom one can embark upon projects of mutual self- and social construction; the shared history and social bonds may still be there, of course; but the relation has soured: the very social intimacy has become fuel for a destructive dance, a dance in which the annihilation of the other appears as natural and as inexorable as the mythical war of Good against Evil. Are we surprised that within even a hint of the fantastic universe of such mythical explanations of the everyday, something which, ordinarily, is un concept politiquecould easily offer itself to the mind comme structure daccueil de la drive gnocidaire?36 Would anyone still be at loss, given such context, to explain the meaning of Kibeho? Could any theologian be surprised, in the context of Rwanda of 1994, to read about the uses and abuses of the Holy Mother? There surely are relationships between worldviews particularly when philosophical worldviews turn themselves into forms of ideological dispositions and genocide.37 In a fascinating study called Purify and Destory: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide, Jacques Semelin conducted an extensive, comparative, analysis of genocide and ethnic cleansing (the Holocaust, Rwanda, and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina), and concluded that, while respecting the specificities of each, there are known general processes in the works of mass destruction of humans, processes both rational and irrational. He characterized the genocidal process as borne of delusional rationality, a form of rationality and its accompanying psychological conditions which are responses to fear and resentment as well as to utopic visions. Each of these motives, depending on the degree, can serve as justification for claims by those who feel themselves in need to remodel the social body by eliminating the enemy.38 Similarly, Norman Cohen argues that, based on historical research, perpetrators of genocide, however narrow, materialistic or downright criminal their own motives may be, could not accomplish their genocidal programs without an ideology behind them.39 Both authors arguments are based on the premise that, unlike an individual involved in an idiosyncratic act of crime, the organized, dedicated, and political nature of acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing require collective justification. Genocide, for example, requires from its perpetrators production of public reasons in fact, exculpatory explanations, hence the delusional nature of the rationality for their programmatic intent to physically eliminate or otherwise genocidally harm the target-population. That a form of rationality is delusional implies only that the public reasons for genocide and ethnic cleansing as produced by the perpetrators need not correctly explain the external causes usually assumed by the same perpetrators as incitement to their acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing. In fact, the perpetrators are known to go as far as to flatly deny that genocide or ethnic
cleansing was intended or has occurred.40 By most accounts, however, it is sufficient for an ideology of genocide to accomplish its goals if it enables the perpetrators or their sympathizers to believe that their own justifications for their genocidal acts, or their reasons for their own states of denial, are true. Reasons produced to explain or deny genocide, from the point of view of the perpetrator, thus function as ideological warrants: they legitimate and therefore enable or facilitate genocidal behaviors. Empirical research evidence shows that without such warrant, the perpetrators would have no choice but to see themselves as nothing else but what they really are: dedicated mass murderers.41 That is why we should explore if the anthropology of the so-called African communalism is rooted in a mythological notion of Being, and what the social implications of such a metaphysics and cultural ontology might be. In the contexts of strong mythic explanations of experience and of the world, in cases where, for example, a man or a woman has been unable to, or chooses not to, bear children, the childless individual without the cover of being a Catholic priest, monk, or nun could easily be thought about by neighbours as less of a person and, accordingly, less than a full member of the community. The childless individual is not considered to have made a choice about how to live but, it is perceived, and as Mveng implies, has deprived the entire community, in fact, the Cosmos itself, of a chance to increase qualitatively and quantitatively the communal Life Force. By framing explanations in the mythical proportion, it may not be thought that here is an individual who is either exercising rational personal agency; or enduring an individual suffering or ill-luck. Instead it seems easier to believe that, because of this person, it is the vitality of Community and, indeed, Being itself which suffers. Even in cases where childlessness results from biological causes, the childless is usually held directly or indirectly responsible by intricate chains of hypothetical reasoning that invariably involves postulation of occult causalities. One wonders, then, to what extent the idea of church-as-family may be able to escape from some of these less attractive consequences of its theological justifications on grounds of occultist or mystical anthropology and poetry? It is also interesting for us to point out that contrary to what some thinkers frequently imply rather than explicitly defend neither the mythical understanding of life nor the social issues are peculiar to African cultures. In November 2004 at the United Nations headquarters in Geneva, at the high point of a period considered the Decade of Indigenous Peoples, debates on a draft universal declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples abruptly came to an impasse. The draft document came from years of extensive consultations among representatives of indigenous peoples in countries all over the world. The debates on the draft were meant to lead to a final Declaration which would stand beside the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. If the final document were realised, it would mark a seminal achievement in the progress of the worlds indigenous peoples in their struggles to protect themselves against threats to their collective rights to lands and to cultural legacies. But the final rounds of the talks came to an untimely end, and the documents most vocal opponents were, surprising to some, the governments of the United Kingdom and of the United States. Puzzled by the facts of two powerful democracies working against what they considered a matter of freedom and human rights, the representatives of the indigenous peoples took the debates out of the United Nations conference halls to the limelight of the international press. The Inuit of Alaska, represented by Dalee Sambo Dorough, asked: Is British foreign policy simply safeguarding
the profits of the multinationals but not human rights? Is this Tony Blairs idea of spreading what he calls the values of freedom, democracy, the rule of law, and justice for the oppressed? Similarly, Armand MacKenzie, the spokesman for the Innu of Quebec, argued: Our society depends on sharing and on collective land ownership. The hunter must share his food today because tomorrow he may rely on someone else. The notion of the competitive individual winning out at the expense of all else is very foreign to us.42 Clearly, the opposing governments are not, arguably, fighting against human, cultural or property rights: they simply believe that these rights attach to individuals, corporate businesses entities, or modern states, not to groups such as tribes. Indigenous peoples all around the world, however, believe that collective rights are essential to their survival as peoples and as cultures. One could say that we have a clash of competing conceptions of subjects of liberty and subjects of rights, and I wonder to what extent similar differences might emerge if some Christian churches in Africa tried to promote the model of church-as-family beyond the confines of the religious freedom they currently enjoy from the African states. To the extent that a church in Africa believes it constitutes, across ethnicities and languages and across nations and histories, and at some macro-level of theological analysis, a people or a family, how does such theological perspective speak to the forces within Africa even within the African churches that may be inspired by a different theological point of view? To the extent that the bishops, and the African ecclesiologists deriving a theological mandate from the bishops, believe their church-as-family model to be inspired by African cultures, how might the African societies respond to forces within and without Africa that may challenge the Synodal view with different core assumptions about individual or collective natures of democratic freedoms and rights? The Afro-theological emphasis on family or ubuntu or consensus as a mode of political and social expression may conflict with other, less cooperative, modes of political and economic behaviour. Understanding these alternatives, prior to any questions about whether to adopt or oppose them, is a project that cannot be overlooked. Such an intellectual task can be ignored only at pain of misunderstanding the peoples own capacity to flourish in a global environment. Whether or not a choice is made in favour of one worldview or the other (and the subsequent comprehension of rights), or entirely other conceptual options are proposed, the question about what choices to makes is just as important as how to justify a choice made, in the face of competing claims. So, it not just the principle of freedom of thought, or of democratic citizenship within African societies, which requires that different voices to be heard. The realities of an increasingly interconnected global environment also require that one must give non-cursory attention to points of views which may, from ones own cultural standpoint, be considered Other and foreign.
Social and Political Pluralism: Theological implications

Africa has not just one but rather many intellectual traditions to draw upon in fashioning a theological outlook on societies. The literature in contemporary political philosophy gives a good picture of the available intellectual horizons. There are potential resources in what is sometimes called orature, a reference to the pre-colonial traditions of thought which may not be currently housed in modern forms of libraries. In fact, modern scholars have not neglected these previously unwritten sources of knowledge. For example, the image of the African, in terms
of individual or group identities, responsibilities, or rights which emerge from, say, Ogotemeli, is different from what one would find in the reconstructions inspired by the Egyptian heritage carried out by Diop, Obenga, and Amadiume. These, too, are different from modern or postmodern notions of the self or of group identity which one encounters in, for example, Wiredu, Hountondji, or Mbembe. The Tempelsian and Mvengian models which, unsurprisingly, are easily appealed to by African Catholic theologians are, we should admit, one strand among many and overlapping sources of authority and tradition for African social Christian thought. As noted above, there are also deep African engagements with Judaism and with Jewish social and political messianic thought in Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, and in Eastern parts of Nigeria, all places where substantial populations claim altogether, and with little or no traces of irony African, Jewish, and Christian identities. Moreover, as works by Bachir Diagne, John Hunwick, Ali Mazrui, and Louis Brenner reveal, the depths of Islamic theological scholarship in West, East and North Africa, in light of the saturation of parts of Africa with Islamic or Islamic-inspired cultures and traditions, could give African Christian theologians insights into models of social relevance in both secular and multi-religious African and global contexts. Though doctrines are hardly the main distinguishing markers, it is also plausible that, within Christianity, there are less than trivial differences in the theological traditions. Anglican, Lutheran, or Methodist theologians, for example, might have divergent ecclesiastical starting or reference points from which to develop related but different theologies of the self or of community. This plausibility of difference need not be foreclosed ahead of the enquiry: it requires closer analysis in the details than are currently allowed in assertion of contextual (i.e. African) consensus. Finally, in the international framework, the black churches of America and the Caribbean had, over the centuries, direct missionary impacts in Africa.43 Is it possible that the Afro-diaspora churches left markers of their American and Caribbean influences on the social thought of Africans and their own religions from southern Africa through the Congo to Algeria? Comparatively, in our own century, figures like Crummell, Du Bois, Fanon, Laming or Outlaw continue to challenge African intellectuals, Christian and non-Christian alike, in their selfconceptions. Among the many hopeful strands in the current Catholic theological efforts is the fact that the bishops themselves are at the forefront of the demands for new ways of looking at old problems. In comparison with the Latin American theologies of the church in the 1970s and 1980s, a Boff or a Gutierez for example, one remembers that although the imperative for social commitments was derived from the vision of Vatican IIs fundamental option for the poor, there also developed conflicts of interpretations within the regional churches, and between the regional churches and various layers of the Roman hierarchy. Whereas the theological arguments concerned if, or how, to understand the mission of Jesus through the eyes of the social sciences notably Hegel, Weber, and Marx; and whereas the debates revealed the limits of the official churchs social activist interests; there nevertheless seemed to have been immense grassroots support for the social works inspired by the newer, transformative, theologies. The grassroots support was there largely because, rather than merely palliative, the theologyinspired social interventions were in the forms of practical solutions conceived against institutional causes of poverty and the political corruptions of social life. It remains to be seen whether the effects of social analysis, as critical tools in
Catholic African theology, could achieve similar conceptual lucidity, and social impacts, on the beliefs and practices of the African churches, and beyond internationally recognized former hotspots like South Africa or, presently, the situation in Zimbabwe.44 It is also possible that, in most cases, the African Catholic experience in the social sphere will become more easily compared to the recent histories of the same church in the Philippines. For example, churches in Africa are engaged in running schools, hospitals and social welfare programmes, and many of todays African intellectuals are products of these church-sponsored educational or social programmes. It was understood that when the officers of these educational ministries were missionaries of foreign origin, they would be reluctant to antagonise pre-colonial and colonial governments who granted the licenses to minister. It is also known that many of the missionaries were directly recruited to Africa and to other parts of the world by imperial and colonial powers, as handmaids to the imperial and colonial interests. Perhaps now, in the postcolonial periods, when African churches have matured and have deep and stable local African leaderships, they can afford to challenge African political authorities beyond the precolonial definitions of mission as only the giving of help and care to church members only, within the narrow confines of what national and international secular or agnostic commercial interests may allow. Social transformation in this regard would be indeed the name of the work of a church that sees itself as irrevocably part of its own larger society, and part of the social and political interests of the peoples it ministers to. These interests would be conceptualized in ways that may or may not coincide with the class-interest of one group against the other; and certainly not in the interest of the rich against the interest of the poor. At least this was the case in the notable examples one could find, for several decades during second half of the last century, in the teachings of the Catholic church leaderships in post-colonial Philippines, Brazil, and Cuba, and in post-imperial countries of Central America, such as Nicaragua and El Salvador. But as these examples show, the patterns of a new self-understanding of the church as socially engaged also creates for the church, as we see from the events in Rwanda, deeper responsibilities about choice of positions vis--vis social and political issues about which the official church could have, in previous eras, pleaded genuine or merely professed neutrality. Yet one can imagine situations where, even with this new consciousness of deepened social and political responsibilities, the church might still ask itself where best to deploy its limited resources. Is it better to spend scarce material and symbolic resources on building and running schools, hospitals, and on the moral edification of the people versus other kinds of, perhaps, direct action in the public sphere? Ultimately, the books I have discussed here are too complex and nuanced to fit their interests into any one of these boxes. They advocate many hats for the church in Africa, and highlight, here and there, one or the other hat which the authors believe the Catholic church needs to wear, or has already won but did or did not tilt in one or the other particular direction. There is no doubt that certain kinds of social policies constantly challenge the Christian realities of the African believer, whether in the rural communities, where most Africans live, or in the huge and perennially overpopulated poor neighborhoods in the major urban centers. The creativity of the individual worker, for example, is often confronted by, and unleashed against, forces that seek to deny the Christian child, woman, or man the experience of life in family.
So the Christian thinker cannot but reflect upon the incessant dynamics of social life in Africas modern, even increasingly, postmodern, economies. In an example of how this economy could generate clashes of primal worldviews, consider Gilles Deleuzes and Felix Guattaris thesis, based on observation from the 1990s. Deleuze and Guattari do not believe in a political philosophy which would not be centred on the analysis of capitalism and its history of trans-nationalist developments. For them the central philosophic and historical idea in studies of capitalism is the analysis of its macro and micro systems, and these are systems which immanently and constantly push back its proper limits, and its own ends, because the real end is nothing else but capital gain. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, drawing from the benefit of insights already present in Marxs analysis of the fetishistic character of commodity, capitalism always finds its limits again and again on a larger scale, because the limit is Capital itself. Between African cultures famous fixation on community, and capitalisms obsession with commodity, is there a third way by which Catholic theological thinking could more complexly engage the social and political economies of contemporary Africa? Perhaps. After all, in many countries the world over, the Church and its leadership itself usually develops into wings: the progressive versus the conservative, the fundamentalist versus the liberal, or the imperial and the triumphal versus the prophetic and the Socratic. There is nothing to make one think that the church in Africa has not already followed these patterns, with serious consequences. Very frequently, within a country, one usually hears that this or that diocese is progressive or conservative; or that this Bishop is fundamentalist whereas another is liberal. Even within one city one parish might have a reputation for social or political conservationism, whereas the next one is associated with a different set of descriptors. These characterizations are often produced by parishioners themselves: the people of God who, themselves, play their crucial parts in their own uplift or, in the unfortunate cases, repression. No social theorist or political theologian could ever forget that they are the same people of God, who constitute each parish, who are also the primary and primal roots of their own agency. This is the case not only in the intramural matters of the church but also concerning the churchs experience in the wider society. After all, a narrow church hierarchy may promote or delay the social fulfillment of Gods own elected people, but always within limits. This is so because agency, ultimately, lies in a peoples own sense of individual and collective self-efficacy.45 From another point of view, then, it is not a question of the African versus the Western (or Africa versus one region of the world); or of one African culture against another. It is certainly true as one learns from the history of thought and in the works of historical and political economists such as Joseph Inikori, Stanley Engerman, and Peter Ekeh that, among other things, an understanding of Africas contemporary social situation cannot be complete without assessing the impact of Africas key economic relations with Europe, the Americas, and Asia over the modern period.46 According to these authors, empirical research in the past ten years qualifies, but does not contradict the standing insights about the exploitative and dependency relations that existed, and still exists, between Africa and Europe, as previously described and critiqued in works by Eric Williams, Walter Rodney, and Kenneth Dike.47 The arguments of todays scholars are thus informed by evaluations of the historical forces that stimulated the births and developments of key economic institutions which are still active in todays African economies. These institutions include the colonial trading companies and their
banking outfits; the postcolonial divisions in the labor markets, including the class formations; and of course the regulatory and coercive powers of the post-colonial state, this state itself being only partially free from the structural burden determined in the imperial and colonial experience. Add to these the postmodern competition for tertiary knowledge and information technology: these have become some of the main tools necessary for generation of new wealth. But how do these modern and postmodern institutions institutions that today both empower and challenge sections of populations across the globe configure themselves, in the present and thus for the near future, across Africas own landscapes? In todays world economy (e.g. agricultural production, the energy market, mineral mining and export; arms trade and warfare; primary and higher education; or health and human services) how does Africa insert herself to compete in the global circulations of the economic politics and profit? This question is not anymore Afrocentric, Eurocentric, Sinocentric, Americocentric, or Arabocentric than it is international: it merely has African, European, Chinese, American, or Arab versions. For example, when Africans complain about the inhumane legacies of transatlantic racial slavery and demand reparation as remedy for the adverse legacies, part of what the complaint is about include the destruction of individual lives, families, and communities: in short, the thingification of the person. Similarly, what was colonialism if not denial of the basic rights of self-determination to a people, who thus were pejoratively called the natives? In the first case, a human being becomes not a person with a name, a family, a village, a tribe, or national identity. Instead, she is treated as an object: literally branded with a number and shipped to the market to be sold and bought as mere, and only, a laborer. In the second case, as historians have shown, Africa, like parts of the Americas, Asia and the Arab world, witnessed a remarkable level of colonial expansion an expansion driven, as Hegel correctly noted, by the economic and social needs of Europeans to settle elsewhere in the hope of recreating for themselves, tellingly, life in the family.48 In most cases, the colonist the one who left home and country to start a new life in another far away country was as much as the native, in the international context, contending not only in some cases with religious persecution but also, and more fundamentally, with the economic systems already immanently characterize by Deleuze and Guattari as inherently without boundaries. Clearly, capitalism multiplies and magnifies, on worldly scales, both wealth and misery.49 If we returned for a moment to the case of the United Nations debates about a universal declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples to rightly own their lands and cultural heritage, fairer conceptions of the rights of the individual and of cultural groups may not be, in the end and as often made to seem incompatible. After all, tribes and groups are made up of individuals, and no individual exists as an island unto itself. As in the debates about multiculturalism within advanced capitalist societies (e.g. veils in French public schools, Burqah on the streets of London and Amsterdam, or what to teach about Darwin in American public schools), the also contentious arguments about the best ways to respect rights of groups not just to collective religious beliefs but also to other forms of self-possession and expression are becoming more visible.50 Similarly, it is clear that, traditionally, labour movements in politics have had almost always one aim above all others: to provide forms of social i.e., collective security for workers. Whether in the ambiguous legacies of British New Labour, the Hartz IV in Germany, or in the efforts to reform how political campaigns are financed in the United States, there is globally a level of social anxiety indicating that, without
doubt, and in confirmation of many of Hegels and Marxs traditionally political economic insights, the successes and failures of foreign and domestic social policies in one part of the world have an impact on other parts. For example, in Cindi Katzs Growing Up Global: Economic Restructuring and Childrens Everyday Lives, we learn how the economic and cultural structures of globalisation are remade and internalised in the everyday lives of children in two places that seemingly could not be more disparate: New York City and the Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. In recent studies of health service systems in 190 countries, the country that alone spent nearly half of the worlds total 2006 expenditure on arms was also ranked number thirty-seven in the health report, right behind Costa Rica, a country that has no army.51 And as the rest of the world learned from the August 2006 television images of the hurricane Katrina, one country could have, among its citizens, living side by side, both 868 of the 946 counted billionaires of the world and a people most wretchedly poor as could be anywhere else in the world.52 The Senegalese Murads, who are famous for their efficient but often informal global trading networks, are said to joke that Paris, to them, is a suburb of Dakar. The joke is instructive in another manner of speaking: who could see or think about Paris, or the rest of France, in the same way before and after the civil unrests of October 2005? These examples show that, though there certainly are systemic and profound differences between advanced and developing world in terms of economic and political conditions, the difference does not have a single source. There could be, for example, the perception that whereas Western values are associated largely with the individuals civil, political, and economic rights, the rest of mankind in the Arab, Asian, and African societies are said to believe in the same rights but also think about these rights in strongly communal contexts. Yet, many so-called individualistic societies have some of the best social security programs than anywhere else in the world from unemployment and disability benefits to opulent farm subsidies. How many countries in the world can afford to pay millions of dollars per year to a farmer, in order that the farmer should not grow anything on his or her farm? Or, when one is not paid not to farm, then, to compensate for loss where what is grown does not fetch as much as expected at the open market? The largest advocates of free market are often shown to be the largest protectors of closed markets within the borders of their own national communities.53 If these policies are not examples of official, state-sponsored, command communalism, then what is? Thus, it could be plausibly argued that the conceptual difference between the individualistic and communal society wherever this difference can be said to be worth more than the scholastic debates it fuels in university philosophy and anthropology seminars may not be all that rooted in immutable traditional cultures as in historically expressive and socially regulated lifestyles. After all, is there really the matter at which to be surprised when the wealthier and the poorer, within and across nations, live and die differently? When the historically, economically, advantaged and the economically under- or de-developed think and behave differently: what the perplexing is there? If the highly educated and wealthier and the less educated and poorer live in different camps, it shouldnt astonish if the camps also have different, competing, conceptions of the individual and therefore variable conceptions of duties and rights.
Conclusion
Studies of how different cultures think about duties and rights are abundant, but
most of the literature often ignores differences within each culture. The situation is understandable because within each culture, it is often harder to distinguish between what difference is properly ethno-cultural and which difference results from social-class stratification. The truth, of course, is that cultures are always already differentiated in terms of political economy. Social and political classes, too, are culturally constructed. Unfortunately, social class differences within cultures often replicate, in formal outlines, the differences thought to exist only across cultures, and vice versa. In any case, because of the internal differences which are obscured (or reduced to the effect of foreign interference) in intra-social analyses, these analyses often become incapable of adequately illuminating the cultural problems they are conceived to explain. The omissions easily become methodological repressions, resulting in cultural reductionism of various kinds. When this happens, and if the analyst cares more about the system of analysis or anticipated results than about the objectivity of the process of inquiry, those who object or propose alternative explanations of cultural facts are rarely refuted in any competitively enlightening manner. The opponent may be thought to hold a different view not just because of a different methodology, and the resulting point of view on fact, but rather because that person is culturally alienated. Or one is said to be culturally inauthentic, suffering from self-hatred, and acting deceptively as a fifth column for foreign interests. Internal and healthy intellectual and moral dissent can thus be easily silenced with name calling: rootless, sell-out, or unpatriotic. Under whatever name or justification, the effect is usually that dissent within the culture a culture which is or only imagines itself homogenous is not welcomed as the holding of a different and plausible position on the issues debated; the interlocutor is said to have betrayed community or country, so that national interest demands the persons silencing or exile. If, as I think, postcolonialism is the immediate historical context of the African theologians invocation of cultural and inter-national rights (i.e., their claims, like many others elsewhere, around the world, which tend to occur when a specific group feels deprived of political, social, or economic rights54), then, the African Catholic theologians render important intellectual service not just to their Catholic bishops but to all peoples of goodwill, inside and outside of Africa. The theologians raise questions about blueprints for their churchs social credibility and relevance. But the exercise, itself, also comes with assumptions which no one could take for granted: must the church, represented by its bishops, have a social vision? Are the priests in the churches, and ultimately the masses of African Christians themselves, who believe that they, together, constitute the holy body of the Lords Church, prepared to carry out such a theologically-informed social vision? It seems rather obvious that if any church wants to transform Africa and Africans in the areas where the transformation matters the most, then, informed intellectual debates, within and outside the church hierarchies, are works that will help the formulation of useful questions about, as well as credible explanations of, existing models of practical church-culture-society relations. Fortunately, as a matter of historical record, the modern theologians conception of Africa is already large and their idea of mission very broad. The broad approach is necessary for the development of the discourse of inclusion, i.e., the development of shared vocabulary where Christians of various denominations and theological persuasions, but also Christian and non-Christians, even believers and non-believers, may developed shared experiences and shared concerns for themselves and for their own countries and cultures. A broad perspective is also
necessary for the dialogue of Africans with peoples from other parts of the world. In person-to-person interactions and at the fora of global institutions such as the United Nations and World Trade Organizations, Africa has a track record of frequently acting as a collection of voices of reason, unity, and progress. This is done not just in matters directly affecting Africans but also on issues important for the well-being of mankind. Similarly, if African theologians are correct, Africa might have some lessons to bring to the rest world on matters of religious tolerance.55 Instead of what the United Nations has recently described as Islamophobia, Christianophobia, or anti-Semitism, Africa shows an example of a continent on which these three and many other religions, today, appear to have found not just enough grounds for each to take root and prosper but also common grounds in terms of objectives of missionary solidarity. These religions, each in its way, are involved in schools, training of businesses professionals, and provision of healthcare. Is it possible to think that, as long as the religions find and maintain a common front on these social issues, they increase the chances that they will continue to get along with one another, and with the rest of the world? The theological idea of the church-as-family, with a social mission in Africa, a mission summed up as a community of solidarity at the service of life, if this idea is non-mythically conceived, in open rather than closed fashion, seems to be a fine setting of the moral compass. Success in the matters, one can presume, shall be held in the highest esteem not just in the eyes of African Christians but also in the eyes of members of other faiths, and in the eyes of nonbelievers, within and outside of Africa. Such idea of a socially-conscious church, indeed, would be attentive, sensitive and responsive to the predicament of Africans and contributes concretely to the transformation and renewal of the African society. 56 But just as we know that the churches in Africa need not choose between intramural success (measured in the number of baptisms, conversions, exorcisms, etc.) and social work (schools, hospitals, prophetic social criticism, etc.), the churches also need not choose between attention to intra-African versus trans-African historical and theological relations. Throughout much of Christianitys recorded history, in matters of higher education and scholarship, the African churches seem to have held their own at the global circles of thought and action.57 In the final analysis, there is the need to remark that what requires deeper thinking in the African Christian experience must include the universal phenomena universal because they can be instantiated anywhere in the world of allegiance to class, tribe, race, or unconstrained nationalism. None of these kinds of allegiance are natural, if natural means that they are immutable forms of identities. Each of them can be studied, for example, from the point of view that they are, at rather deep and significant levels, units of constantly shifting political interests. The forms of loyalty are, therefore, social processes influenced by choices peoples make at locatable moments in their histories. For example, the significance of tribalism, racism and nationalism as opposed, for example, to universal, ethically grounded solidarity with members of ones moral communities as well as with others outside of ones defined communities of interests have been accurately characterised, as Michelle Ishay does in Internationalism and Its Betrayal, as inseparable from other products of repeated historical failures to vigorously and impartially promote universal rights in practice. To say that the failures are repeated, or that the consequences of the failures are predictable, in no way indicates that the worldly courses of the histories of human rights have not improved for good.58 Nor does it mean that the good, in this case, must be considered good
enough. To make the good better for example in regard to Africas postcolonial achievements in the areas of economic and social development could mean that social corporate capitalist classism, tribalism, racism, sexism, or nationalism is not, and could not possibly become, from the perspective of defense of human rights either in the local or international contexts, an acceptable alternative to universal and cross-cultural conceptions of justice.
Notes
1 Jacob K. Olupona and Sulayman S. Nyang, eds., Religious Plurality in Africa: Essays in Honour of John S. Mbiti, Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter, 1995; Austin Ahanotu, Religion, State, and Society in Contemporary Africa: Nigeria, Sudan, South Africa, Zaire, and Mozambique, New York: Peter Lang, 1992 and Wyatt MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa: The Bakongo of Lower Zaire, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986; Robert Dowd, Religious Pluralism and Peace: Lessons from SubSaharan Africa in Comparative Perspective, Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Hilton Chicago and the Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, IL, Sep 02, 2004 Online at http://www.allacademic.com/ meta/p60647_index.html; and Rashied Omar, Muslims and Religious Pluralism in Post-Apartheid South Africa Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, vol. 22, no. 1 (2002) and Asma Afsaruddin, Tolerance and Diversity in Islam, University of Notre Dame, The Kroc Institute for International Peace, http://kroc.nd.edu/colloquy/issue2/feature_afsaruddin.shtml. Accessed 1 August 2007. 2 Prime examples are J. Lukas De Vries, The concept of the church in the South African setting in view of African theology: The political perspective, ELCN: Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Republic of Namibia, 1975; C. R. D Halisi, Black Political Thought in the Making of South African Democracy, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999; Lamin Sanneh, Whose Religion Is Christianity?: The Gospel beyond the West, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2003; Ka Mana, Christians And Churches of Africa: Salvation In Christ and Building a New African Society, New York: Orbis, 2004; Laurenti Mangesa, Anatomy of Inculturation: Transforming the Church in Africa, New York: Orbis, 2004; Kwame Bediako, Christianity in Africa: The Renewal of Non-Western Religion, New York: Orbis, 1996; Diane B. Stinton, Jesus of Africa: Voices of Contemporary African Christology, New York: Orbis, 2004; Mercy Amba Oduyoye, Beads and Strands: Reflections Of An African Woman On Christianity in Africa, New York: Orbis, 2004; Raphael Chijioke Njoku, African Cultural Values: Igbo Political Leadership in Colonial Nigeria, 1900-1966, New York: Routledge, 2006; Joseph Healey and Donald Sybertz, Towards an African Narrative Theology, New York: 1996. 3 Because these remarks are intended to be brief, I will anchor my comments around these books: A. E. Orobator, The Church as Family: African Ecclesiology in its Social Context, Nairobi: Paulines Publications Africa, 2000 and F. Rutembesa, J-P. Karegeye, P. Rutayisire, eds. Rwanda: Lglise Catholique a lpreuve du Gnocide, Montral, Canada: Les ditions Africana, 2000. I am grateful to Caleb Oladipo, the Duke K. McCall Professor of Mission and World Christianity at the Baptist Theological Seminary, Richmond, Virginia, for comments on an earlier version of these remarks. 4 Orobator, The Church as Family, p. 16. 5 See, for example, Eliza Marian Butler, The Myth of the Magus, New York: Cambridge University, 1993; Alfred Becker, Franks Casket. Zu den Bildern und Inschriften des Runenkstchens von Auzon, Regensburg, 1973, pp. 125-142; J. Duncan and M. Derrett, Further light on the narratives of the Nativity, Novum Testamentum Vol. 17, No.2 (1975), pp. 81-108; Raymond Brown, The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in Matthew and Luke. London: G. Chapman, 1977; and R.T. France, The Gospel According to Matthew: an Introduction and Commentary, Westport, CT: Intervarsity Press, 1985.
6 See, for example, James E. Atwell, An Egyptian Source for Genesis 1, Journal of Theological Studies, Vol. 51, No. 2 (2000), pp. 441-477; Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism, Cambrdige, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997; Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism. New York: Vintage, 1967; Thomas E. Levy and Mohammed Sajjar, Edom and Copper, Biblical Archaeological Review, July/August, 2006: 24-35; Frerichs, Lesko and Dever, eds., Exodus: The Egyptian Evidence, edited by Indianapolis: Eisenbrauns, 1997; and John J. Bimson, Redating the Exodus. Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1981. Also of interest: Neil Silberman and Israel Finkelstein, The Bible Unearthed, New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001; William G. Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites? Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2003; Carol Redmount, Bitter Lives: Israel in and out of Egypt, The Oxford History of the Biblical World, ed. Michael D. Coogan, Oxford University Press: 1999; and Johannes C. de Moor, Egypt, Ugarit and Exodus, N. Wyatt and W. G. E. Watson, ed., Ugarit, Religion and Culture, Proceedings of the International Colloquium on Ugarit, Religion and Culture, Mnster, Germany: Ugarit-Verlag, 1996. 7 The Kebra Negast, trans. Wallis Burge, New York: Cosimo Classics, 2004 [also available here: http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/kn/index.htm]; Gerald Hausman, ed., The Kebra Negast: The Lost Bible of Rastafarian Wisdom and Faith from Ethiopia and Jamaica, New York: St. Martins Press, 1997. 8 See Vicke Byrd, ed., Queen of Sheba: Legend and Reality, Santa Ana, CA: The Bowers Museum of Cultural Art, 2004; Bernard Leeman, Queen of Sheba and Biblical Scholarship, Queensland: Academic Press 2005. For studies of other African monarchs most of them women, such as the Queen Amanishakheto (or Kandake) of Nubia who prominently figure in the Old Testament, see Laszlo Trk, Fontes Historiae Nubiorum Vol. II, Bergen, 1996, especially pp. 723-725; Trk, The Royal Crowns of Kush, Cambridge University: Cambridge Monographs in African Archaeology, 1987; and Desiree H. Necia, Nubian Pharaohs and Meroitic Kings: The Kingdom Of Kush, New York: Author House, 2006. 9 See Rodolfo Fattovich, Aksum and the Habashat: State and ethnicity in ancient northern Ethiopia and Eritrea, Boston University: Working papers in African studies, 2000 and Flattovich, The Pre-Aksumite State in Northern Ethiopia and Eritrea Reconsidered, in Paul Lunde and Alexandra Porter ed., Trade and Travel in the Red Sea Region, Society for Arabian Studies Monographs No. 2, British Archaeological Reports International Series 1269, Oxford: Archaeopress, 2004. 10 David Allen Hubbard, The Literary Sources of the Kebra Nagast, St. Andrews, Scotland: The University of St. Andrews, 1954. 11 Edwin M. Yamauchi, Africa and the Bible, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic Press, 2006. See also Africa and the History of Christianity, available on http://www. allaboutreligion.org/history-of-christianity-in-africa-faq.htm, accessed 12 July 2007. 12 J. W. Packer, The Acts of the Apostles: Cambridge Bible Commentaries on the New Testament, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1966, especially p. 51 and Mal Couch, A Bible Handbook to the Acts of the Apostles, New York: Kregel Books, 2004, p. 267. 13 Judging by his Autobiography, St. Augustine, certainly, didnt seem to have been particularly concerned about the compatibility of his North African roots and his Christian identity. In light of his City of God, the conflict seemed to have been between his prior secular (pagan) advanced learning and the demands of, on the surface, a simple faith in a religion which preaches that there is a world-transcendent purpose in human history. 14 Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier, Paolo Alto Stanford University Press, 2003; Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, Paolo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2005; and Slavoj Zizek, Eric Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard, The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 15 See, for example, Basil Davidson, West Africa before the Colonial Era: A History to
1850, London Longman, 1998 and Chinua Achebe and Robert Lyons, Another Africa, Burlington, VT: Lund Humphries, 1998. 16 E. C. Eze, Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, 1997; Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812, New York: W. W. Norton, 1977; George M. Fredrickson, Racism: A Short History, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. 17 See John Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996; and Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, The University of North Carolina Press, 1994 edition; and Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, New York: Routledge, 1995; and Carter Wilson, Racism: From Slavery to Advanced Capitalism, Chicago: Sage, 1996. 18 Chinua Achebe, An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrads Heart of Darkness, in Heart of Darkness, An Authoritative Text, Background and Sources, Criticism. 3rd ed. Ed. Robert Kimbrough, London: W. W Norton and Co., 1988, pp. 251-261; V. Y. Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa (African Systems of Thought, Indiana University Press, 1994); E. C. Eze, Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. 19 Elizabeth Isichei, A History of Christianity in Africa, quoted in Orobator, The Church as Family, p. 11. 20 See, for example, E. Elochukwu Uzukwu, A Listening Church: Autonomy and Communion in African Churches, New York Orbis, 1996; Ruth Gledhill, Anglican Schism looms over gay consecrations, London: The Times, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/global/, visited 12 July 2007; and Elie Smith In praise of Bishop Peter Akintola, http://eliesmith.blogspot.com/2007/01/in-praise-of-bishoppeter-akintola.html, visited 12 July 2007. 21 Orobator, The Church as Family, p. 9. 22 Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Look to the Rock from Which You Were Hewn, Nelson Mandela Foundation Lecture, 23 November 2004. 23 F. Rutembesa, J-P. Karegeye, P. Rutayisire, eds., Rwanda, p. 2. 24 F. Rutembesa, J-P. Karegeye, P. Rutayisire, eds., Rwanda, p. 12. 25 Reporters Sans Frontieres, Rwanda: limpasse. La liberte de la presse apres le genocide, 4 VII 1994-28 VIII 1995, p. 14. Accessed on August 13 at http://129.194.252.80/catfiles/0009.pdf 26 Kingsley Moghalu, Rwandas Genocide: The Politics of Global Justice , New York: Palgrave, 2005. See particularly Chapter Four, Judging Genocide. 27 Philip Gourevitch, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, New York: Picador, 1999, p. 137. For corroborative interpretation of the same facts, see also M. Mas, Paris-Kigali, 1990-1994, Paris: LHarmattan, 1999, p. 517. 28 J.-P. Gouteux, Le role de lEglise au Rwanda, Nuit rwandaise, No 7, April 2007. More elaborate views on Kibeho, as suggested by Joanna Tegnerowicz, can be found on H-West Africa, at http://www.h-net.org/~wafrica/. Visited August 10, 2007. 29 Orobator, The Church as Family, p. 37. 30 Ibid. 31 Ifi Amadiume, Re-Inventing Africa: Matriarchy, Religion and Culture, London: Zed, 1998 and Daughters of the Goddess, Daughters of Imperialism: African Women Struggle for Culture, Power and Democracy, London: Zed, 2000; Mercy Amba Oduyoye, Daughters of Anowa: African Women and Patriarchy, New York: Orbis, 1995; Kwok Pui-Lan, Postcolonial Imagination And Feminist Theology, Louisville, KY: Westminster, 2005; Ramthate T. H. Dolamo, Ana Maria Tepedino, and Dwight N. Hopkins, eds., Global Voices for Gender Justice, Pilgrim Press, 2001; Julie A. Gibson, Daughters of the Diaspora Get Ready: A Prophetic Word for Black Women, Tampa, FL: Sanctuary Books, 2006; and Harvey Sindima, Religious and Political Ethics in Africa: A Moral Inquiry, Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1998. See also Kwasi Wiredu, Democracy and
Consensus in African Traditional Politics: A Plea for a Non-party Polity, Polylog: Forum for Intercultural Philosophy 2, 2000, http://them.polylog.org/2/fwk-en.htm. 32 G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel: Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. 33 Orobator, The Church as Family, p. 155. 34 F. Rutembesa, J-P. Karegeye, P. Rutayisire, eds., Rwanda, pp. 12-13; added emphasis. 35 The United Nations Population Information Network, World Populations Prospects Report (2004 revision), http://www.un.org/popin/, visited 1 August 2007. 36 F. Rutembesa, J-P. Karegeye, P. Rutayisire, eds., Rwanda, p. 13. 37 The 1948 United nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as: any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious groups, as such: a) killing members of the group; b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. For other definitions, see, for example, Colin Tatz, With Intent to Destroy: Reflecting on Genocide, London: Verso, 2003. 38 Jacques Semelin, Purify and Destory: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide, London: Hurst & Co., 2007. 39 Norman Cohen, Warrant for Genocide, New York: 1967, p. 263. 40 See for example, Alexander Laban Hinton, ed., Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002; especially the chapters Essentializing Difference and Justifying Genocide; Karla Poewe, The Namibian Herero: A History of their Psychological Disintegration and Survival, Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1985; Eric D. Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005; Clarence Lusane, Hitlers Black Victims: The Historical Experiences of Afro-Germans, European Blacks, Africans, and African Americans in the Nazi Era, New York: Routledge, 2002; and Samuel Totten, William S. Parsons, and Israel W. Charney, eds., Genocide in the Twentieth Century: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts, New York: Garland, 1995. 41 Cohen, Warrant for Genocide, p. 264. 42 M. Ross, UK Backs USA Against Tribal Peoples, Survival International, London, 9 December 2004. 43 Sylvia Jacobs, Black Americans and the Missionary Movement in Africa , Wesport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982; William Seralie, Black American Missionaries in Africa: 1821-1925, Social Studies, Vol. 63, No. 5 (1972), pp. 198-202; William E. Phipps, William Sheppard: Congos African-American Livingstone, Geneva Press, 2002; Howard Culbertson, African American Missionaries in Africa, http://home.snu. edu/~HCULBERT/black.htm, visited 12 July 2007; etc. 44 Zimbabwe highlights the ambiguities of any projects of prophetic critiques of state and society in Africa. As the moral philosopher Polycap Ikhuebe remarked, in addition to anxieties about corrupt and corrupting mature of political leaderships in Africas, there are also often crises of religious leadership, in some cases because the religious leaders do not do enough to highlight or criticize the moral decadence in the political realm. In other cases, however, these religious leaders, themselves, may be involved or implicated in various forms of scandals and corruption that strip them of the moral authority to criticize political leaders. See Angus Shaw, Zimbabwe Bishop Accused of Adultery, The Associated Press, July 17, 2007, http://www.cbn.com/CBNnews/196649.aspx, accessed 12 July 2007. 45 For an extensive development of this theme, see Christian C. Ukaegbu, Leadership Fatalism and Underdevelopment in Nigeria: Imaginative Policymaking for Human Development, Philosophia Africana, Vol. 10, No. 2 (August 2007): pp. 160-182.
46 Joseph Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade and Economic Development, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002; Inikori and Stanley L. Engerman, The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies, and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe, Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press,1992; or Peter Eke and Garba Ashiwaju, eds., Nigeria Since Independence, Ibadan: Heinemann, 1989. 47 Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, Berkshire, UK: Williams Press, 2007; Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Washington D.C.: Howard University Press edition, 1981; and Kenneth Dike, Trade and Politics in the Niger delta, 18301885, Oxford: Clarendon, 1956. 48 In addition to Hegels Philosophy of Right (already cited) see S. D. Smith, Slavery, Family, and Gentry Capitalism in the British Atlantic, 1648-1834, Cambridge Studies in Economic History, New York: Cambrige University Press, 2006. 49 R. Lis and H. Soly, Poverty and Capitalism in Pre-Industrial Europe: 1350-1850, The Humanities Press, 1979 and Sheri Berman, Capitalism and poverty, World Policy Journal, Vol. 23, No. 1 (March 2006), pp. 63-70. 50 John and Jean Comaroff, Ethnicity, Inc.: On the Commodification and Consumption of Cultural Identity in the Brave Neo World, (public lecture, The African Studies Workshop, University of Chicago, October 3, 2006). See also Jean Comaroff, ed., Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism, Duke University Press, 2001 and Comaroff and Comaroff, Policing Culture, Cultural Policing: Law and Social Order in Postcolonial South Africa, Law and Social Inquiry, Vol. 29 (2004), pp. 513-545. 51 The United Nations, The world health report 2006 working together for health, Geneva, Switzerland: World Health Organization, www.who.int/whr, and Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI Year Book 2006: Armaments, Disarmaments, and International Security , Chapter Eight, Military Expenditure, http://yearbook2006.sipri.org/chap8. See also World Wide Military Spending, in Global Security, http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/spending.htm. All sources accessed on 13 July 2007. 52 The Worlds Billionaires, Forbes, 03.08.07, http://www.forbes.com/lists/2007/ 10/07billionaires_The-Worlds-Billionaires-North-America_6Rank.html, accessed 1 August 2007. 53 Evan Davis, EU spat with WTO over farm subsidies, The British Broadcasting Corporation online, 1 April 2004, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3591107. stm; Alan Friedman, Clash Over Farm Subsidies Clouds WTO Agenda, The Herald Tribune, OCTOBER 27, 1999, http://www.iht.com/articles/1999/10/27/ wto.2.t_5.php; and Dennis Avery, U.S. and EU Farm Subsidies Scuttle WTO Trade Talks, Charlottesville, Virginia: The Hudson Institute online, http://www.cgfi. org/materials/articles/2003/sept_18_03.htm. All sites accessed 1 August 2007. 54 M. Ishay, Internationalism and Its Betrayal, University of Minnesota Press, 1995, p. 10. 55 John Hunwick, Religion and National Integration in Africa , Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1992; Nehemia Levtzion, Islam in West Africa: Religion, Society and Politics to 1800 , London: Ashgate, 1994; Stephen Ellis and Gerrie ter Haar, Worlds of Power: Religious Thought and Political Practice in Africa , New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. See also footnote # 1, above. 56 Orobator, The Church as Family, p.13. 57 Lamin Sanneh and Joel A. Carpenter, The Changing Face of Christianity: Africa, the West, and the World, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005; David Novak, The Jewish Social Contract: An Essay in Political Theology, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005; Joseph Harris, ed., Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora, Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1999; George E. Tinker, Spirit and Resistance: Political Theology and American Indian Liberation, Augsburg Fortress Press, 2004; Pedrito U. Maynard-Reid, Diverse Worship: African-American, Caribbean and Hispanic Perspectives, Downers Grove, IL: Interversity Press, 2000; James W.
Perkinson, White Theology: Outing Supremacy in Modernity, New York: Palgrave, 2004; Michael C. Dawson, Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies , Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003; Cornel West and Eddie S. Glaude Jr., eds., African American Religious Thought: An Anthology, Louisville, KY: Westminster Press, 2003; James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, New York: Orbis, 1990; Dwight N. Hopkins, Introducing Black Theology of Liberation, New York: Orbis, 1999 and James Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, New York: Orbis, 1997. Reportedly, there have been at least six African popes. In Rome: Victor I (189-199 CE), St Miltiades (July 2, 310 [311], to January 10, 314), and St Gelasius I (March 1, 492-November 19, 196) and in Alexandria: Abraham (975978), Cyril (October 18, 412 ? 444), Cyril the VI (May 10, 1959- March 9, 1971); and probably Matthew I (1378-1408). See Joseph Brusher, Popes through the Ages, Neff-Kane edition, 1980 and The New Catholic Encyclopedia, Vols. VI, IX, and XIV, Thomson-Gale, 2003. 58 Consider, for example, the international and practical consequences of the following documents: The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America of July 4, 1776; The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, 26 August 1789; The Haitian Slave Revolution of August 22, 1791; The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 10 December 1948; the South African Constitution of 8 May 1996; etc.
NEW FROM PATERnOSTER Calvin, Barth, and Reformed Theology

Edited by Neil B. MacDonald and Carl R. Trueman
Karl Barth and John Calvin belong to the first rank of great theologians of the Church. Both, of course, were also Reformed theologians. Historically, Calvins influence on Reformed doctrine has been much greater than that of Barths, and continues to be so in the present day. In contrast, Barths Reformed credentials have been questioned not least in his understanding of election and atonement. The question is: who should be of greater importance for the Reformed church in the twenty-first century? Who has the better arguments on the Bible? Barth or Calvin? Doctrinal areas of focus are the nature of the atonement, Scripture, and the sacraments.
Neil B. MacDonald is Senior Lecturer in Theology, University of Surrey Roehampton, London, UK. Carl R. Trueman is Professor of Church History, Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, USA.
978-1-84227-567-2 / 229 x 152mm / 200pp (est.) / 19.99
Barth and Dostoevsky

A Study of the Influence of Fyodor Dostoevsky on the Development of Karl Barth (19151922)
Paul H. Brazier
A work of historic and systematic theology Barth and Dostoevsky examines the influence of Dostoevksy on Barth. Braziers study explicates: first, the reading of Dostoevsky by Barth 191516, and the influence on his understanding of sin and grace; second, a study of Barths friend and colleague Eduard Thurneysen who influenced Barths appropriation of Dostoyevsky; third, Barths illustrative use of Dostoevsky, around 191821, the period of the rewriting of his seminal commentary on Romans.
Paul H. Brazier originally trained in the fine arts. He holds degrees from Kings College, London, where he completed his PhD on which this book is based.
978-1-84227-563-4 / 229 x 152mm / 270pp / 19.99 Paternoster, 9 Holdom Avenue, Bletchley, Milton Keynes MK1 1QR, UK

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Transformation: An International Journal of Holistic Mission Studies

The Oxford Centre for Mission Studies

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Transformation 25.4 October 2008 189

190 Transformation 25.4 October 2008

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Sources of Social and Political Theology

Sources of Social and Political Theology

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Transformation 25.4 October 2008 191

192 Transformation 25.4 October 2008

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Sources of Social and Political Theology

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Transformation 25.4 October 2008 193

NEW FROM PATERnOSTER Calvin, Barth, and Reformed Theology

978-1-84227-567-2 / 229 x 152mm / 200pp (est.) / 19.99

Barth and Dostoevsky

194 Transformation 25.4 October 2008

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Sources of Social and Political Theology

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