Abstract
This article builds on my recent engagement with James Cone’s binary view of Africanness and Christianity which focused on his Western locus of enunciation and the criticism he received from his African American colleagues. I believe that analogical questions regarding Christian theology’s attitude towards Africanness in general and African religiosity in particular present themselves to us who live in and try to make sense of South African reality today, including white people like myself. I start by introducing a decolonial perspective as it manifests itself through the recent #MustFall student movements. In this context, I offer three theses regarding the decolonial perspective on African religiosity, each of which constitutes a more or less direct critique of Cone’s ambivalent attitude towards Africanness, and African Traditional Religions in particular. The first thesis concerns the distinction between postcoloniality and decoloniality; the second thesis concerns engaging African religiosity as a requirement for decolonising Christian theology; and the third thesis concerns problematising the relationship between the categories of blackness and Africanness.
Highlights
I had an opportunity to engage James Cone’s binary view of Africanness and Christianity, focusing on his Western locus of enunciation and the criticism he received from his African American colleagues
Where does Cone’s binary view of Christianity and Africanness leave the experiences of various African peoples around the globe, especially in Africa itself, who have fought against colonial oppression and who continue to fight against various forms of imperial injustice emblematised by whiteness? To say that these experiences transcend those of African Christians, and even what can be labelled ‘Christian’ in the case of the latter, would be stating the obvious
To paraphrase Vellem’s (2014:6–7) question: What does the relationship between Christian faith and African religiosity really signify? Does it imply the ‘inclusion’ of the black African dispensation in the central tenets of Christianity, or does it signify the liberation of African religiosity within its tenets? Not least, is African religiosity an embodiment of the Christian-faithdecolonised-and-liberated in the present-day African contexts, or not?
Summary
I had an opportunity to engage James Cone’s binary view of Africanness and Christianity, focusing on his Western locus of enunciation and the criticism he received from his African American colleagues (notably Gayraud Wilmore, Cecil Cone and Charles Long). 3.I do not refer here to the fact that Cone was geographically located in the West, but rather I argue that Cone’s location as a theologian remained in essence Western, both with regard to his cultural and religious identity (i.e. his blackness and his Christianity).
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