AMERICAN AND SOUTH AFRICAN SODIO-HISTORICAL LIBERATION THEOLOGY RECIPROCATIVE INFLUENCES

Abstract

The paper meanders through American and South African liberation theology. Underlining the thoughts and influences of charismatic leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, James Cone, and Allan Boesak are the historical sociology of two distinct religious spaces, South Africa and the United States of America. Each region had an influence on the other, sometimes both implicitly and deliberately, but most times inadvertently. Christianity was joined by Islam in both regions in establishing a praxis. But more so in America where James Cone suggests his liberation theology to have been a direct response to the Nation of Islam's Malcolm X. In the end, it was the synthesis and influences of a number of religious ideas including Mohandas Gandhi's Hinduism / Jainism, Islam, Christianity, Nation of Islam and Garveyism that were used in whatever form necessary to socialize a liberating praxis or rational study.