Out of Africa Something New?

DONALD S. ARDEN 1976

CLOSING his study of the Ugandan church, John V. Taylor, now bishop of Winchester, wrote in 1958:

There are many who feel that the spiritual sickness of the West which reveals itself in the divorce of the sacred from the secular, of the cerebral from the instinctive, and in the loneliness and homelessness of individualism, may be healed through a recovery of the wisdom which Africa has not yet thrown away. The world church awaits something new out of Africa.

How far have these hopes been fulfilled? What contribution, for example, did Africa make to the papers coming out of the 1975 Assembly of the World Council of Churches (WCC) at Nairobi? Is African theology of permanent significance, or is it only a rationalization of temporary political attitudes?

Religion of the Head

This raises the problem as to whether this question itself has any real meaning. What was the theology of Francis of Assisi? Should the aim of a WCC Assembly be the production of theological statements? Is Africa’s contribution to Christianity perhaps that of liberating us from cerebral formulations of our faith?

I used to be the examiner in doctrine for a theological college in South Africa. Wanting to see how far the students could apply what they had learned to the context in which they would be working, I set this question: “You are talking to an old man who is a follower of traditional religion. Explain to him why Christians believe in God, and what they believe about him.” One answer was written by an African hand, but with the voice of the West:

“I would say to him: There are five arguments for the existence of God: the cosmological argument, the ontological argument, the teleological argument, the moral argument, and the argument ex consensu gentium.“

I would love to have seen the old man’s face. We spend time answering questions raised by Greek sophists in the fourth century A.D. that nobody ever asks in Africa. God is not someone to be argued about or proved. He is. For

Law and Love

Great Spirit!
Piler-up of the rocks into towering mountains,
when thou stampest on the stone,
the dust rises and fills the land.
Hardness of the precipice;
Waters of the pool that turn into misty rain when
stirred;
Vessel overflowing with oil!
Father of Runji, who seweth the heavens like cloth,
let him knit together that which is below.
Caller forth of the branching trees,
thou bringest forth the shoots that they stand
erect.
Thou has filled the land with mankind,
the dust rises on high, O Lord!
Wonderful One, thou livest in the midst of the
sheltering rocks,
thou givest rain to mankind.
We pray to thee, hear us, Lord!

At Nairobi, there was often the feeling that the West and the South were speaking different languages. An Indian priest would say, “My own faith in Jesus Christ is richer, deeper and stronger because of what I have learned about prayer from my Hindu brothers.” He would be answered by a Scandinavian theologian saying, “But this concept of the cosmic Christ is a misunderstanding of Pauline theology.”

The a priori and legalistic approach to religion leads to bizarre results in people’s lives. For twenty years in the Province of South Africa I accepted blindly the rule of the church that African marriage was “potentially polygamous” and that the legal prerequisite for receiving the sacrament of Holy

Matrimony must be to contract a Western statutory marriage. As this involved unacceptable consequences regarding inheritance, most Africans by-passed marriage and joined the army of the excommunicate which can eighty per cent of the adult Christian community. In Malawi I found that every one of the clergy was married in the form forbidden in South Africa.

Africans who do not have foreign thought-forms thrust on then) (Io not make such mistakes. Moral problems are settled face to face. Every marriage in Malawi has built-in marriage counsellors–two senior relatives who are the “marriage guardians.” Any problems that arise will be settled by thein in (discussion, not by the book of rules. A couple may be excommunicated to satisfy the missionary’s logic and elected by those who know them as church leaders. All life is meeting:

The core of African wisdom is that she knows the difference between existence and presence. Europeans, they say, are people who do not greet one another in the street. Not to be seen, not to be recognised, to become invisible and anonymous, is the burden that subverts the integrity of all those whom the city swallows.

Sin is any rift in the human family—quarrels, witchcraft, apartheid. It may be said that this is humanism and not religion. Africa would reply that they are the same thing—the man-to-man relationship and the man-to-God relationship are inseparable. Whatever fractures peace is of the devil—and the word for peace in any African language has deep overtones of the Hebrew shalom.

Experience in Community

Africa sees religion as experience in community. It is not the abstractions of Western theology nor the emotions of revivalism. The medium is the message; the experience is the theology. A conference built around this principle might produce no papers, statements, or resolutions. It would meet mainly in small groups of ten to sixteen members discussing subjects of their own choosing, sharing experiences, growing to a common mind. They would be under no compulsion to produce reports, but if they had an insight worth sharing with others, there would be the means to do so. Participation would carry the obligation of reproducing such experience in one’s own constituency.

“Familia 74” in Tanzania was organized on just this principle. The report contains no sociological analyses, recommendations, or consensuses—just bits of diaries, slogans:

Do not walk in front of me because I cannot follow you.

Do not walk behind me because I do not want to guide you.

Walk together with me and we will make Ujamaa.

Ujamnaa – familyhood – is defined by Aboud Jumbe, Vice-President of Tanzania, as “the way of life that ensures for every individual the security and roots that come when one belongs to a widely extended family.”

There are photographs and poems, like this one written to a woman hoeing her corn field:

Dear sister, the beads you gave me
from around your dusty neck
are filled with the aroma
of a smoky, mud hut.
Through the beads your dark skin shall rub
against mine
though our eyes may never meet again.
You have touched me,
and we are sisters forever.

The meeting of human beings in small communities—not just their minds, but all of them—is what changes people. The principle is as valid today as in the time of the Twelve, and what are the gospels but diary-jottings and fragments of poetry engraved in the heart of ordinary people? Long after the last statement of “Nairobi 1975” has been consigned to the wastepaper basket, those who were in it will carry as part of them the song we sang as we surged out into the square of the Kenyatta Centre—

Break down the walls that separate us

and unite us in a single body—

with its innumerable applications to church unity, racism, interfaith dialogue, sexism, world poverty, marriage, and the God-man relationship. We had all read it a hundred times in Ephesians: now it was part of us.

Wholeness

If the medium is meeting, then the message is its corollary—wholeness. And wholeness means healing. Western man finds himself trapped in a way of lite that separates him from the natural world and from his fellow human beings. It even fragments his own nature into an artificial separation of body, mind, and spirit that has played havoc with our theology and with ourselves.

One of the most alarming of the doom forecasts is that before the end of the century there will be eighteen cities of ten million people or more. Thirteen of them will be in the Third World, with only a fraction of the resources of New York with which to combat the forces that destroy human personality. In Africa the rifts are still only cracks. But the same blind economic forces are at work, and the underdeveloped can quickly become the overdeveloped.

One of the critical decisions the human race has to make is to apply the principle of “Small is Beautiful.” The decisions will not be made until we can experience what wholeness means. It is this living, many-faceted experience that could be the gift of African Christianity to the world.

Man and the World

Ninety-four per cent of the people of Africa still live in rural communities. Of the urbanized six per cent, the majority are not yet urban people. Their kinsmen and their spiritual roots are still in the rural areas. Relationships remain strong and are built up by visits in both directions, and by the exchange of children within the extended family. Partly this is an accident of geography. When Europe discovered America, waterways brought them into the heart of the continent. Two hundred years after the arrival of Europeans American Indian culture was dead. In Africa, apart from the limited Congo, Niger, and Zambezi basins, the outsider found a four thousand foot plateau stretching from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. At a few points slave-raiders punctured the continent on foot in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In the twentieth century the West came to take the gold, copper, and diamonds. But basically the culture remained sufficiently intact for its recent flowering under independence in music, dance, and language. A Brazilian couple at “Familia 1974” record their most vivid impression of “a certain ‘cultural purity’ in the people of Tanzania. We experienced the emotion of seeing people, African people, in their natural manner. In Latin America, despite the fact that we are an underdeveloped continent, we have lost our cultural roots. In Tanzania, the people are not prostrated before TV idols, nor lured by the new opium of the people, namely mass culture at official and national levels.

In many parts of Africa cattle have a quasi-religious significance. Traditional Swazis bury their dead under the sibaya where the cattle sleep at night. (Why did the church have to set its face against the custom?) Cattle pass from one herd to another to seal the compact when a man and woman marry. In Botswana the urbanized disappear at weekends to be with their cattle at the cattle-posts until work begins again on Monday.

“Pula!” (Rain!) is the greeting given to an important visitor in Lesotho.

John Mbiti writes:

To African peoples, rain is always a blessing and its supply is one of the most important activities of God. The Mende believe that even though God has retired far into the sky, he still sends rain to fall on his wife, the earth. For them, rain is a love-token, a sign of God’s care for the earth

The African village shares in this close touch with the soil. The local earth, burned into brick by the people it nourished. The village priest ekes out his three hundred to nine hundred dollars a year salary by growing his own food. A village church in Tanzania may raise the whole of its year’s budget at the harvest festival. In Malawi baptism in the Anglican church still sometimes takes place in a river or a lake: this will be normal in many independent churches.

The Human Family

The new-born baby rides on his mother’s back or on her hip from his earliest days. The most common symptom of leprosy in a baby is a patch of pale skin on the forehead where his head rubs against the mother’s back. As a child, he sleeps rolled up in a pile of other children. For the rest of his life this warm, intimate relation with other human beings is something without which life becomes intolerable. An adult forced by circumstances to sleep alone in a room may leave the light burning all night and rationalize it as protection against thieves.

The extended family is the child’s world, symbolized by the village in which he or she grows up. This may consist of anything up to a hundred houses, most of the inhabitants of which will be relatives. There will be several who may be addressed as “Father” besides the physical father. In Malawi, where until recently half the adult male population have been away working on mines and farms in other countries, one of the others addressed as “Father” will automatically assume the responsibilities of parenthood. Traditional Africa needs no orphanages and no geriatric institutions, for the family cares for each of its members from birth to death.

One must beware of idealizing. The extended family is under strain from urban housing conditions, economic differentiation, Christian assumptions about personal choice, education for a competitive life, labour migration, and the refugee situation. It also carries its own debits—the stifling of initiative; inability to reach urgent decisions (when a child needs hospitalizing, for example); jealousy, even accusations of witchcraft, when one member doubles the return from his land through modern farming methods.

But when the debits have been deducted, we are still left with an outlook on life in which personal relations are paramount. The web of community support sustains the individual in the disasters that are part of daily life in a continent where medical services are the thinnest in the world and in parts of which drought and starvation lurk round the corner. The indestructible sense of belonging goes far toward explaining why the poorest of the continents is also the continent that knows most of the sheer joy of living. This suggests to the Church—both in the West and Africa—that high on its agenda should be the helping of the local congregation to become the extended family of God a caring, supporting community. This function is one of the local congregation because it is precisely the person-to-person relationship in community that is needed. The church of Acts maintained no charitable institutions, but it remembered its Lord’s guidelines. Caring was the sign by which the world would recognize his disciples. The point is made splendidly by John Taylor in The Primal Vision:

The New Testament rings with this note of mutuality—”Wash one another’s Feet confess your sins one to another and pray for one another … forbearing one another and forgiving one another … teaching and admonishing one another … comfort one another and build each other up love one another as I have loved you.”

The community there described is not already perfect. The prayer of the faithful few who meet daily at dawn in the thatched church is my worship, though I am too careless to join them. The seduction of my neighbour’s daughter after the beer-drink is my sin, though I was not there that night. Every child here is my child to bring up in the fear and nurture of the Lord. Every brother may be my confessor, striving that I may enter in at the straight gate. Like soldiers scaling a wall, we climb upon one another’s shoulders and hoist each other up into the City of God.7

The Living and the Living-dead

In the West, death has replaced sex as the theme of obscenity. Because we do not know how to cope with it or what we believe, we hide it in silence or postpone it meaninglessly by ever more sophisticated techniques. So we use up the resources that could bring fullness of life to the millions who suffer from malnutrition, leprosy, measles, polio, and other preventable diseases. Of every hundred children born in rural Africa between twenty and fifty die before the age of five. Death is as common as it was in Victorian England and occupies the same place in the life of the community. Details of belief and practice vary widely, but on the main theme there is an astonishing consensus, summed up by John Mbiti thus:

Without exception every African society has ways of establishing and maintaining contact between human beings and the departed. The living-dead are still members of their human families, and people include them in activities in which they would normally have taken part if they were still physically alive. African people are extremely sensitive to the existence of the spirit world which presses hard upon that of human beings. Indeed there is practically no gap between these worlds. The spirit world is as real as the physical world

Birago Diop of Mali has given this poetic expression:

Those who are dead have never gone away.

They are at the breast of the wife.

They are in the child’s cry of dismay

and the firebrand bursting into life.

The dead are not under the ground.

They are in the fire that burns Iow.

They are in the grass with tears to shed,

in the rock where whining winds blow.

They are in the forest, they are in the house.

The dead are never dead.9

A distinction is made between natural death at full age and the accidental death of the young. In the latter case, the person-oriented mind of the African asks Who, not What. The answers given by western science—blind accident, disease-bearing organisms—are not accepted deep down. The answer may be God, and his action accepted in the spirit of the book of Job.

A Hottentot prayer of committal runs:

Dead leaves in the wind,
they wait for him who will come
for him who will come and will say:
“Come” to the one and “Go” to the other.
And God will be with his children.
And God will be with his children

Or if deaths recur in the family, then witchcraft will be suspected.

The death of the old is quite different, and the domestic theology of the living-dead draws on a wisdom that the West has lost. In Swaziland I spent a night with the medical assistant of a government clinic, who was also the leader of a little Christian congregation. Another guest was his father, a gentle, happy man in his late sixties, who lived eighty miles away. On my next monthly round I was shocked to be told by my friend that his father had just died at the family home. I expressed surprise, since he had seemed to be in excellent health, and asked of what he had died. “Nothing, it was just his time. We are four children in the family, so he came to stay with each of us for a week and talk and play with all his grandchildren, and to say good-bye. He reached home last week, and now he has gone. It is good.”

It is indeed good, and better than our complex way of prolonging life in order to launch ourselves on disputations about the rightness of shortening it again to its natural span.

This is an area where theological imperialism has been at its most destructive. As a result, Africa as yet can offer no consensus of her own insights and Christian faith. On the Roman Catholic side, fear of syncretism and indifferentism has led to suspicion of anything resembling ancestor worship.

The evidence produced by John Mbiti , Edwin Sillith, di Nola , and others, make it clear that requests addressed to the living-dead are far from the language used in the worship of God. The difference may be obscured by the fact that prayers to God are often directed through the living-dead as intermediaries (as requests to a chief, even in his presence, may be directed through an induna). The following rebuke, from Zululand, is addressed to some of the living-dead who had been making a nuisance of themselves:

When have we ever forgotten to make sacrifices to you? Why are you so miserly? If you do not improve, we will let all your honourable names fall into oblivion. What will be your fate then? You will have to go and feed on locusts. Improve, else we will forget you!14

This from Tanzania is in language that might have been used to a crotchety grandfather:

If you hinder me in any way, will you then receive anything? Never. And your companions will make fun of you. Therefore watch over me and you will receive your due.

In Protestant churches, an attitude dating back five hundred years and arising from the maladministration of the mediaeval church—chantry chapels, requiem masses, mass-priests—has led to the prayer books in use over most of Africa making no provision at all for one of the deepest needs of the people.

When linked to a hellfire eschatology that left no other destination for the unbaptized “heathen,” this situation has sometimes brought about a flat rejection of a Christianity which represented God as more petulant than the ancestors. More frequently there has been a schizophrenic continuance of the forbidden prayers and offerings at times and places that the missionary was not expected to know about.

The healing of this split is beginning, now that the missionary priest is little more than a historic memory (except in the Roman Catholic church, where there are still over nine thousand expatriate priests in independent Africa). The Festschrift to Harry Sawyer—one of the first African theologians to be heard by the outside world—concludes with a synthesis from Edward Fasholé-Luke, Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Sierra Leone University:

The veneration of the ancestors in Africa and our passionate desire to be linked with our dead in a real and genuine way can be satisfied by the development of a sound doctrine of the Communion of Saints This will raise the sights of African Christians beyond their family and clan and would help to solve the problem of tribalism, which is plaguing the continent today. By participation in the sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist Christians are linked with Christ, and so are linked with others, not only in different parts of the world, but also with the departed. This is so because Christ is the Lord of the living and the dead. Moreover, the merits of Christ’s death are immeasurable, so that even non-Christians can be embraced within the Communion of Saints.

Among the mental bric-a-brac inherited from Greek philosophy, Levantine religion, and conventional God-talk is the dualism of body and spirit, earth and heaven, secular and sacred. Sterile arguments on the nature of the soul and where it resides occupy much of mediaeval theology. In reaction, science developed a mechanistic approach that modern medicine has not fully outgrown. “The medical schools are very blind about sickness,” said a Uganda doctor to John Taylor, “They teach us only to ask how, but never why.”

The dichotomy of body and spirit, and the identification of the body with evil, led to a negative attitude to sexuality, totally out of line with its joyful acceptance in the opening chapters of Genesis and in the Song of Songs. “Lambeth 1958” was the first time that the Church produced a coherent theological statement on the part that the body has to play in marriage.

A by-product of this has been a theology of salvation obsessed with sexual guilt and the means for its release, either through sacramental confession or through the conversion experience. None of the high points of religious experience in the various Christian traditions—solitary contemplation, formal liturgy, guilt release—provide a model which bears much relation to the African religious experience, in community, in spontaneity, and in the joyful acceptance of the goodness of the body and its powers and his gift.

Is there another African way of looking at human nature and, if so, is it valid? Let us begin with the latter question. Detailed surveys in areas as widely separated as Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa indicate that the incidence of insanity is between a quarter and a tenth of that in Western Europe and North Alnerica.17 Of the depressive psychosis, Carothers writes, on the basis of twenty-one years psychiatric experience in Kenya:

In the 10 year period there have been seen only 24 cases definitely suffering from a depressive psychosis of any sort, or 1.6% of the total. Yet among European patients admitted to the hospital in admissions the 10-year period, no less than 22% were depressives.

The same author notes that sexual perversions seem to be uniformly rare. Homosexuality, except in mine compounds and in jails, is unusual. This is linked to the fact that in the extended family mother-fixation cannot exist. All this falls far short of proving that the African view of human nature is valid and does not attempt to assess the relative importance of genetic, cultural, and environmental factors. It could, however, suggest to the hag-ridden, urban West that Africa could provide a new starting point for our concept of man as Benin masks did for our art and West African music for our dance.

Guilt and Its Cleansing

Africa says to me that man is a whole. Just as there is no clear division between this life and the next, nor between sacred and secular, so body, mind, and spirit make a unity. Similarly, the layer-cake concept of the mind— superego, conscious, unconscious—is alien. What a Westerner hears as the promptings of conscience or the superego, an African may see as the wishes of his living-dead father come to him in a dream.

The first question asked about sickness is where is the anger that causes it—bottled up in ourselves, or stalking one as the malevolence of another? In both cases one will want to do something about it. If it is one’s own anger, ritual means exist for ridding oneself of it by vomiting, spitting water, speaking it out, or sacrifice. Independent churches make great use of such symbolic actions, incorporated into Christian ritual. Revival movements in churches where public or sacramental confession is not used make much of public confession.

Discussing the relative absence of depression, Carothers quotes from a study in Ghana: “One of the most characteristic elements in the depressions of European psychotics is self-reproach. Self-reproach is very rarely met with in the context of African psychotics. He comments from his own experience that depression is linked with retribution for sins. When an appropriate lite can be performed, whether to atone for sin or to assuage grief, the burden on the individual is shifted from his own shoulders to those of the community and of the gods. Here we have African tradition and a white psychiatrist saying what Christianity should be saying and has half-forgotten.

Exorcising Corporate Sin

A participant at the WCC Assembly described a visit to an independent church at which the climax of the worship was the breathing-out of sins done jointly and to one another, in preparation for the Eucharist. When he told an African delegate how deeply this had moved him and how, for the first time he had seen corporate sin experienced, the latter said to him, “In the rituals of my tribe, there is a reconciliation ceremony each year. Each member makes a gift to anyone whonl he has wronged. The gifts are collected, burned, and the ashes ritually thrown into the river. I am a pastor in my church, but there is nothing there that can give Ine the same sense of release from the corporate guilt in which I share. Each year I go back to my home village to take part in this rite.”

It was a common observation of the missionary period that “the African lacked a sense of sin” and that in this culture shame replaced guilt. A sin was not a sin until it became known. I should prefer to say that Africa anticipated

Western Christianity in sensitiveness to corporate sin. We have slowly come to realize that Vietnam or the million untreated lepers of Africa are the result not of a wrong personal choice by innumerable individuals, but of the failure of us all as a community, and that most suffering in the world is caused by this kind of sin. Yet it is only since Vatican 11 that the Roman Catholic church has developed rituals for expressing it, and evangelical thought still conceives of sin as an individual responsibility. Indeed, it is the failure to be concerned with both sorts that causes much of the misunderstanding between the WCC and the evangelicals, who read “corporate” as “political.”

Sexuality and Its Acceptance

The African attitude to sex I cannot express more delightfully than Bishop John Taylor:

The wonder of sexual maturity is the most intense expression of the life-force, and the young walk proudly. “Okyali muto, You are still a child”, you may say jokingly to a young girl. And softly but with immense confidence she may reply, “Ndi mukldu”, which may mean, “I am older than that”, or “l have reached maturity”, or even “I am no longer a virgin”. For sex is good, and the joy of it goes far beyond its physical pleasures and outshines even the shame, which may be great, of breaking the bounds.

The clash in outlook acted as a telegraphic scrambler in ensuring that Africa and the missionary misunderstood what the other was saying. My engagement to wife-to-be was announced shortly after I came to work in a diocese where for eighty years the missionaries had at great personal cost remained celibate. “We are so happy,” said a church elder, “We have always known that the missionaries must have been sleeping with one another, and it is so good that you should be open with us.”

In a discussion on polygamy, the Westerner will almost certainly be thinking about sex, lust, and self-control. I asked the advice of a liberal, white Roman Catholic bishop regarding a man whose original marriage had broken up because of war service. A second marriage had brought much happiness, six children, and the respect of the congregation. “They must stay together,” was his advice, “because they have a duty to one another and to their children under the natural law. But they should be told not to sleep together any more. “

The African may be thinking in similar terms; we share a common nature. But the odds are more than even that his polygamy has to do rather with status (a chief needs more than one wife to prepare food for visitors), or with responsibility for his brother’s widow (the levirate is practiced in of Africa), or with the absence of children (to pass on the life-force is a categorical imperative, and there are no orphans for adoption in the extended family), or with preserving the custom that forbids pregnancy before the previous baby is weaned (two-year spacing was a general rule in Africa long before family planners arrived).

Sacred and Secular

The tourist could be forgiven for thinking that, apart from imported Christianity and Islam, he had found a country without religion. Most African cultures have no temples, shrines, or priests. No Bantu language that I know has any word for “religion,” and the interpreter has to make do with words that mean “teaching” or “begging” or “offering.” Yet of all the continents, this is the one where faith in God shows most vitality. The same is even true when Africans have been torn out of their own culture and transported as slaves—or in these days as migrant workers—to other continents.

The words “sacred” and “secular” have no meaning since traditional worship is intimately bound up with home and village. The leader of prayers or the offeror of sacrifice will most often be the family head or the village chief. There is no pie-in-the-sky religion; instead, a marvellous system of mutual caring. Similarly, imported political philosophies are purged of their anti-God elements. In Zambia, Kenneth Kaunda has evolved an African humanism that owes more to Teilhard de Chardin than to the rationalists. In Tanzania, Julius Nyerere—a practicing Catholic—has selected from Marxism certain social, political, and economic elements with the object of finding a formula that will enable the mutual care of the extended family to endure and develop in the economic tangle of a modern state.

It was appropriate that the first healing word to the Nairobi WCC Assembly, polarized by the Uppsala confrontation between a Godward vertical religion, and a manward horizontal religion, should be spoken by an African, Desmond Tutu, recently appointed Dean of Johannesburg:

For us in Africa the so-called vertical has automatically and inextricably involved the horizontal. It must not only be but be seen to be the gospel of Jesus Christ which constrains us all to be the instruments of his shalom— instruments of peace, of justice, of wholeness; of the integrity, the harmony, the fellowship which are God’s intention not only for humanity but for the whole of his cosmos.

This world-view is under attack. The growing gap between the rich and the poor threatens to turn Lagos, Nairobi, and Kampala into miniature Calcuttas. The pursuit of wealth carries the hidden germs of a materialist philosophy. The connivance of the West in the colonial policies of Mozambique, South Africa, and Rhodesia (where the Smith regime would probably have collapsed long ago but for U.S. chrome purchases) has made the independence movements turn to China, Russia, and Cuba for money, arms, and training. As a result of this, and in reaction to a corrupt church where the missionary priest could collect a tithe from the harvest even of Muslim peasant farmers, Marxist sounds are beginning to be heard from the Frelimo government of Mozambique. In Zaire, the state offers itself as the supreme authority, replacing God

Despite all this, Africa remains the most deeply religious continent of the world. For what they are worth, one set of estimates of the total number of African Christians reads: 1912, 1.2 million; 1950, 20 million; 1960, 40 million; 1970, 90 million; with a forecast that by 1990 half of the world’s Christians will be in Africa. Islam, though somewhat stagnant in East Africa, is probably growing in West Africa, though not as dramatically as many people suppose. Nor is there any sign of a decline in traditional religion, in which, almost invariably, the cornerstone is belief in one supreme God. He is known by a thousand vernacular names, translatable as the Great-Great One, the Spirit of the Sky, the Creator, the Original Source, the Owner of All Things, the Supreme Father. There are many symbols of him, but never an image.

Sometimes where the missionary hold has been rigid, traditional religion has set itself up in opposition to Christianity. More often it has merged with the Old Testament as preparation for the gospel.

Idowa sees the future religion of Africa as a fusion of the two:

The main problem of the church in Africa today is the divided loyalties of most of her members. In hospital for example, practising Christians have medicine prepared in the traditional way smuggled in to them, simply because it is consecrated medicine with the touch of the divine healer, in contrast to the European’s mere coloured water or mere pills. . . . We maintain that African Traditional Religion is the religion of the ntaj01ity of Africans today. There is every indication that the processes of modernisation and of syncretism, with the religion as the senior and predominant element in the mixture, will continue.

Many would dispute the last sentence, and such a process is less in evidence in East and Southern Africa, where traditional religion was less fully (developed. John Taylor’s words are relevant, “It is at the danger-point of interchange and temptation that a true African theology will be born, not out of syncretism but out of understanding. What most no one in Africa foresees is the death of God.

Laity and Clergy

The boundary line between laity and clergy is blurred for a number of reasons. In traditional religion the professional priest was a rarity. Many churches were chary of ordaining Africans. The Roman Catholic church in Malawi, for example, began work in 1900, but did not ordain its first African priest until 1937. But the gospel was accepted readily and the teacher-catechist became effectively the pastor. Lay people took the initiative in evangelism. The Diocese of Lebombo in Mozambique exists because of returned mine workers from Johannesburg who brought the church back to their villages. The price paid is that the sacraments became rarities. The Catholic Church is beginning to meet this by appointing laymen to be in charge of parishes, distributing communion from the reserved sacrament.

In Malawi the Anglican church looks to the tent-making ministry as the solution to the problems created by growth. These are made acute by the financial difficulties parishioners who live by subsistence farming find in maintaining a priest capable of ministering to students and the professional class. Ordinands for this ministry are trained by extension methods. There are obvious advantages. It is economical in the use of skilled trainers. A student is able to support his family while training. His family learns with him. What he learns is in the context of life and not in the artificial community of a college. It makes it possible to accept mature students for the ministry. These are men with an established position in the community who have already given ten or twenty years’ voluntary service to the church as laymen.

There are deeper levels also. The tent-making ministry makes an instinctive appeal to the African sense of history; this is how the Church began. It reflects the African sense of the unity of life and evades the false split between sacred and secular. It helps a congregation to grow and to be responsible for throwing up its own leaders. It encourages true ministry—serving and not ruling.

In Swaziland I offered to present for ordination, on retirement, a Malawian medical assistant who had founded a congregation and built a church with his own hands. He refused firmly. Pressed for a reason, he said, “Work you do for God is done for love. To be paid would spoil everything.” He became the first Malawian voluntary priest and is still at work as a missionary to Swazis at age eighty. It took up sixty years to find out that the ideas of the rebel prophet-priest Roland Allen work.

One Body of Christ

In Africa a resounding silence has followed Canon Burgess Carr’s proposals for a moratorium on foreign money and staff in the African church—a mora- African cupidity, nor even to the realization that the power of the African church to serve its non-Christian fellows in health, education, and development would be hamstrung without efficient tools. The African church demands the freedom to grow and express herself, but it does not demand isolation.

I asked a Malawian Catholic bishop what hopes he had for ecumenism in Africa. ‘ ‘You have attended many funerals,” he replied. “There you saw Seventh Days, Presbyterians, Catholics, Anglicans, and Muslims praying together, singing the same hymns to the same African tunes. This is what will happen when the white man gets off our backs.”

But the issue is complex. An immense loyalty to the separate traditions has been implanted by the missionaries, and though Africans realize that their denomination is mainly a geographical accident, the tradition is inside them and part of them. In Southern Africa there is the racial tension within the church, a tension harder to harmonize than the denominational one. Dr. Manus Buthelezi expressed this poignantly at Nairobi:

Can poor people really belong to the same church with those who have made them poor? Can we truly share the body and blood of Christ if by deliberate economic planning there is injustice in the distribution of the material gifts of God? If we can not be one in sharing a cup of coffee, how can we truly be one in sharing the cup of the blood of Christ? How does one maintain church unity among members who are fighting one another on the battlefield? Does one take sides and write off one section in favour of the other? How can our ministry, even to the wretched of the earth, become an instrument of church unity?

In Zulu the word for fellowship—ukudlelana—means eating together. It was an African Catholic—Archbishop Amissah of Ghana—who pleaded for Eucharistic fellowship to be the means to unity, not just its prize. The feeling for our common humanity—ubuntu in Zululand, obuntu two thousand toiles away in Uganda—is a deep one. The archbishop was right in thinking that when Africa helps to bring about the unity of Christendom, it will not be by carefully devised schemes but by sacramental expression of our common humanity—being washed by the one Spirit, eating together at the table of the one Lord.

Nor will this longing stop at the boundaries of the Christian family. Where else but in Africa would a Christian priest be invited to the mosque at the time of prayer on Friday to read and expound the gospel, as happened recently on the shores of Elke Malawi?

Reconciliation

The quality most admired in a leader is that he should be a reconciler. When there is harmony between man and wife, in a village, in the congregation, then everyone is filled with “the fullest vital potency” (to use Fr.Tempel’s phrase). There is peace. Men like Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, Gatsha Buthelezi of Kwazulu are leaders, orators, men of fire. But the secret of their quiet strength is their gentleness and their faith in Christ.

The Western stereotype of Africa tends to derive either from stories of Shaka, the Zulu tyrant, or from colourful extracts from politicians’ speeches.

Both are atypical. A tribal court often resembles a Quaker meeting, the case being passed from mouth to mouth until a consensus is reached, which is then reported to the chief. Acceptance describes the normal attitude of the village community to the sinner, the criminal, the sufferer from leprosy, the mentally ill. In Asia, a patient hesitates to come to a leprosy hospital for fear that he will be branded as a leper and cast out. In Africa he may for the opposite reason also hesitate to seek treatment. The reason here will be that the disease does not usually cause pain and that he continues to be accepted by his village, even after his condition has become known. In Swaziland a woman at her marriage is smeared with red ochre on the forehead by the womenfolk of her husband’s family, as a sign that she is now one of them. The symbol is indelible. She may desert her husband and live in adultery with half-a-dozen men, but whenever she returns home, even after thirty years, she is accepted without question. She belongs, and appropriate rituals are at hand to wash away the shame.

It is worth noting, since it was not widely reported at the time, that when the All Africa Conference of Churches (AACC) met in Lusaka in 1974, the delegates were presented with a prepared document relating to racism in Southern Africa in which the phrase “justice and liberation” occurred several times. The delegates refused to accept it until in each case the word “reconciliation” was added. There is no shadow of doubt that the grants to guerrilla groups made under WCC’s Program to Combat Racism have brought immense hope as a symbol of solidarity. It is my belief, however, based on many debates and conversations, that the power of the symbolism would have been even greater if an equally costly and equally controversial symbol had been chosen, one which was nonviolent in the spirit of Martin Luther King whose life and death inspired the program at Uppsala.

Work in Progress

This article responds to a request for indications of ways in which the West can learn from Africa. It therefore paints a rather idealized picture. To straighten the record, let us say that the African church is very conscious of not yet having arrived. Victorian dirges are heard more often than the independent churches’ songs of Africa; mediaeval Rome and Calvinist Geneva have given models to the Anglican church of judgmentalism to obscure acceptance;

a male-dominated church belies the symbol of the twin male-female figures common in West Africa; legalism is found where the true Africa settles its problems face to face; urban elitism threatens to destroy the mutuality and equality of the village; as in other countries, the Anglican city church tends to be the middle-class at prayer; the voice of prophecy is sometimes muted.

But not always: listen to Burgess Carr’s passionate outburst at Nairobi, addressed to the Prime Minister of Jamaica:

In a region near us there are. constant upheavals, massacres, murders of hundreds of thousands of people for nothing—for nothing! AACC is responsible for the care, along with other organizations, for more than one million refugees, and if we settle the problems in Angola, then all of the refugees in Africa will come from independent nations. Mr. Prime Minister, tell us as a leader in the Third World, speaking for your colleagues who are African heads of state, what—what—what moral force can they claim?

The important thing is that the Spirit is at work and change, as in secular life, is happening faster than it can be recorded.

Themes of Africa

It would be impertinent and ridiculous for a Westerner to suggest the themes out of which Africa’s Christian symphony will be woven. Bengt Sundkler has put on paper some of those that he has heard in Southern Africa. From West Africa, H. W. Turner sketches the agenda for African 33 theologians. What are the felt needs? Can the gospel be recentred on the vital power of God rather than atonement for guilt? What is peripheral and what is essential, what is valid and what is false, in Western Christianity, in the independent churches, in traditional religion? What is polygamy—marriage or adultery? How would a Spirit-filled church function? How do churches grow?

Future leaders of the African church in daily dialogue with anthropologists and theologians from the West are producing some of the most exciting new thinking at the Catholic Pastoral Institute of Eastern Africa, formerly at Gat)a, now recently moved to Eldoret in western Kenya. This is reported in Gaba Pastoral Papers, in AFER (African Theological Review), and in major studies 34 based on field work such as Missionaries to Yourselves. The next book to appear from this stable, in a year’s time, will be a study of marriage in Africa, following up the questions raised by Adrian Hastings. Aylward Shorter’s “Tle African Contribution to the World Church came into my hands as this paper was nearing completion.

Some Of the seminal ideas in its first chapter provide me with an open-ended stopping place.

With great diffidence, since an expatriate can neither be neutral nor identified with the African mind, Fr. Shorter suggests some of the themes which Africans could develop for the benefit of the worldwide church:

Integration—reality is both sacred and secular, and this insight can help the West to see the folly of a technology without religious meaning.

Symbol—as a way in which the sacred is spoken of in secular terms, replacing arid rationalization.

Fecundity—the importance of life, its generation and sharing, as a key to the preservation of personal values in a technological world.

Human-beings-in-community—discovering their full personality in group relationships.

“Liminality “—the jester’s license of those undergoing rites de passage, as a model for prophecy and the collective witness of Christians in society.

Bond-friendship and Blood Pacts—the unbreakable relationships that nevertheless are not exclusive, obligating also the whole kin-group.

Reconciliation—the ritual expression and redress of hidden tensions.

The Living-clead—the revitalising of the doctrine of the communion of saints.

Liturgy—its renewal through traditional symbols, rites and hymns.36

Myth—the enrichment of theology and preaching through the interaction of two mythological traditions, biblical and African.37

Declericalisation and Community Building—using the experience of lay pastors.

Little of this is totally new. The emphases of Africa—the Spirit-filled community, abundance of life, the priority of persons—are part of renewal in the West as they were the core of the gospel in the beginning. Perhaps the answer to the question in our title should be—No, Africa brings nothing new.

Her gift is potency to truths gone flabby. She is the living sign that integration—in ourselves, with each other, with God, and with his creation releases the unsuspected power of the Spirit.

NOTES

1. John V. Taylor, The Growth of the Church in Buganda (London: SCM Press,1958).
2. John S. Mbiti, The Prayers of African Religion (London: SPCK, 1975), p. 148. This hymn was collected by I). Campbell in 1922 from the Baluba in Zaire.
3. John V. Taylor, The Primal Vision (London: SCM Press, 1963), p. 197.
4. Rex Davis, Ujamaa safari (WCC Risk No. 4 of 1974).
5. Comment by Orestes and Eunice Goncalves de Oliveira.
6. John S. Mbiti, Concepts of God in Africa (London: SPCK, 1970), p. 58.
7. Taylor, Primal Vision, pp. 13()-131.
8. Mbiti, Concepts of God in Africa, pp. 246-268.
9. John Reed and Clyde Wake, A Book of African Verse (Atlantic Highlands, N.J..Humanities, 1967), pp. 25-27.