Black women’s bodies as reformers from the dungeons: The Reformation and womanism

Fundiswa A Kobo

doi:10.4102/hts.v74i3.5015

Abstract

While it cannot be denied that the 16th-century Reformation, which challenged papal authority and questioned the Catholic Church’s ability to define Christian moral practice in a just manner, indeed came with deep and lasting political changes, it remained a male-dominated discourse. The Reformation was arguably patriarchal and points to a patriarchal culture of subordination and oppression of women that prevailed then and is still pertinent in the church and all spheres of society today. The absence of Elmina and the silenced yet loud voices and cries from the female dungeons below a Dutch Reformed Church in the upper levels of the castle in the retelling of the narrative of the Reformation leaves much to be desired and has a bearing on how black women perceive the Reformation 500 years later. The article thus problematises the Reformation through the heuristic eyes of Elmina Castle in Ghana as the genesis of the ‘dungeoning’ of black women justified by faith. The article argues that black women are reformers from the dungeons following the historical experience of reformation and the Reformed faith as racist and sexist, among other ills experienced by blacks in the Global South, with black women literally kept in the dungeons below a Reformed Church building as they were in Elmina with a biblical inscription, Psalm 138, on the threshold of its main door. This article thus points to irreconcilable contradictions maintained by the Reformed faith that continues to bury black women in the ‘dungeons’ even today. The enfleshment of black bodies in the dungeons of the Elmina Castle underneath a Reformed Church building is seen as the historical and heuristic starting point of engaging Reformed faith from a womanist perspective.

Highlights

This article was originally drafted for a conference of the Change Agency Project, a community engagement project of the Department of Christian Spirituality, Church History and Missiology, under the theme ‘Reformation, Transformation and Change Agency’, which marked the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation.1 Before we proceed it might be important for me to state that the use of ‘I’ or ‘we’ in my writing is an expression of a conversation that is never possible without others from a womanist perspective and a conscious statement against the Cartesian ego.The time when this article is being written has been marked by shifts and in some instances questionable hope on the possibility of transformation of the Reformed tradition and church
We proceed to look at the pervasive dungeons – dungeons both historically understood as a reality and heuristically used to connote the current condition – for South African women post 1994 and the pseudo-spirituality of a Calvinist woman from the dungeons of Elmina
The relevance of Western Christianity, reformation and the Reformed tradition remains eternally toxic to the consciousness and spirituality of a black African woman

Summary

Introduction

We proceed to pose the question of whether the Reformation was racist and sexist and whether John Calvin was aware of Elmina and the dungeoning of black women. Http://www.hts.org.za of a Dutch Reformed chapel above the female dungeon at Elmina Castle, where human beings were commodified, where human beings were starved to death when they resisted inhuman actions, where black African women were raped and humiliated, is a clear demonstration of how the church can allow itself to become the cultural and religious guardian of the symbols of domination and subjugation.

Results

Conclusion