A reflection on Vuyani Vellem’s longing for liberation: A spirituality of life and freedom

Stephan F De Beer

doi:10.4102/hts.v76i3.6210

Abstract

Vuyani Vellem was insistent on fostering a spirituality that could ground and sustain resistance of death as expressed in multiple unfreedoms, and the quest for life and freedom in abundance. After naming a number of themes evident in the life of Vuyani – ranging from racism and pigmentocracy to the managerialist university and the shackled church – this article traces his reflections on a spirituality that embraces the cross, resurrection as rebellion and imvuselelo [revival] as the iziko [fire] that births a new political community. It considers the imvuselelo as both an exorcism and a reconstruction. In conclusion, the intersectionality of violences and oppressions, increasingly addressed in his work, is touched upon. And the charge he left us with, to connect spirituality and liberation – as moral imperative and integrative force – is considered for embrace. Contribution: This article contributes an appreciative reflection on the spirituality of Vuyani Vellem that undergirded his Black Theology of Liberation. In contemporary contestations and discourses on race and racial justice, whiteness and oppression, and decoloniality, what is often absent is a clearly articulated spirituality of black liberation. Vellem helps us with that.

Highlights

Contribution: This article contributes an appreciative reflection on the spirituality of Vuyani Vellem that undergirded his Black Theology of Liberation
Vuyani Vellem, already in his doctoral dissertation in 2007, but ever clearer and more passionately in recent times, explored a spirituality undergirding the journey of liberation
It becomes possible to speak about a spirituality without a consciousness and of a consciousness without a spirituality

Summary

Introduction

This is to participate in the rebellion from below that finds expression in peoples all over the world that daily find in themselves and how they organise, ways to resist death tenaciously (Vellem 2015b): In unmasking the universe of Empire and its mindset, there is no theory but the praxis of the peoples of the South and all those totally excluded and oppressed, living on the underside of modernity with its effects of racism and capitalism.

Objectives

Results

Conclusion