Missionary Bibles that Shaped African Christianity – Their Translation and Translators: Examples from Colonial West Africa

Book Review| April 13 2020 Review: Global Christianity and the Black Atlantic: Tuskegee, Colonialism, and the Shaping of African Industrial Education, by Andrew E. Barnes Global Christianity and the Black Atlantic: Tuskegee, Colonialism, and the Shaping of African Industrial Education, by Andrew E. Barnes. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2017. 219 pages. $49.95 (hardcover). ISBN: 9781481303927. James Howard Hill, Jr. James Howard Hill, Jr. Northwestern University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar National Review of Black Politics (2020) 1 (2): 330–332. https://doi.org/10.1525/nrbp.2020.1.2.330 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation James Howard Hill; Review: Global Christianity and the Black Atlantic: Tuskegee, Colonialism, and the Shaping of African Industrial Education, by Andrew E. Barnes. National Review of Black Politics 13 April 2020; 1 (2): 330–332. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/nrbp.2020.1.2.330 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentNational Review of Black Politics Search In Global Christianity and the Black Atlantic: Tuskegee, Colonialism, and the Shaping of African Industrial Education, Andrew E. Barnes provides significant insight into how African Christians challenged European domination through use of a strategy of social development via Christianization, appropriated from their understanding of African American Christian life (1). Central to Barnes’s study is how African Christians strategically built upon the establishment of schools like Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute. Contributing to the fields of History, American Studies, and Religious Studies, Barnes reveals how African-edited newspapers became primary sources through which African Christians learned about African American life as well as African American contributions to industrialism. Examining an underanalyzed range of African-edited newspaper archives, Barnes explores how, in both West Africa and South Africa, African-edited newspapers played an essential role in movements for the establishment of industrial institutes as alternatives to mission schools for African students. In contradistinction to... You do not currently have access to this content.

The Africanisation of Christianity in Africa is closely linked to the availability of the Bible in African mother tongues. However, mission-led Bible translation in Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not solely the work of European missionary linguists. Africans, such as Ludwig Adzaklo of the Bremen Mission, played essential roles in this process. Nevertheless, African translators like him were considered as mere Sprachgehilfe (language assistants) to the missionaries and not as co-translators. After a postcolonial analysis of archival data on the translation of the Old Testament into Ewe by Ludwig Adzaklo and Jakob Spieth, this study argues that Adzaklo was not just Spieth’s Sprachgehilfe but a co-translator on the project. Being referred to as Spieth’s Sprachgehilfe was a colonial-missionary label that denied Adzaklo’s agency in mission-led Bible translation in Africa. Therefore, the study suggests that Adzaklo should be viewed as an early Ewe mother-tongue Bible translator in the history of West African Christianity.

Focussing on locally-owned newspapers in colonial West Africa, this essay presents a Mstory of reading in the colonies which experiments with reading beyond, or reading outside, the anti-colonial nationalist perspective that prevails over newspaper history. The essay asks what kind of 'information' about the values, attitudes, aspirations and articulations of diverse colonial readerships can be extrapolated from the indigenous press, and about the manner in which non-readers' in West Africa interacted with printed forms, including the newspaper. Keywords West Africa, newspapers, reading public, colonialism, orality, nationalism Book historians have recently criticised the extent to which Euro-American generic hierarchies and evaluative biases have infiltrated 'the minds of commentators on literary reception in the wider world'.1 A residual bias of another sort persists in postcolonial literary scholarship, however, including in the work of book historians themselves: the tendency to use generalised categories such as 'the reader' or 'reader' to refer to the plurality of consumers of books and other printed materials at different times and in different global locations. As a consequence readers have, until recently, existed as shadowy figures in studies of colonial and postcolonial literary cultures. So great is our fascination for the contents and circulation of particular titles in colonial and postcolonial settings that - as in the intricate archival work of Robert Darnton on British surveillance of newly published books in colonial India2 - local readers are frequently left out of the frame. If one privileges the contents of a text above its consumption, or official documents above local readers' responses, an entire field of articulation is erased from the literary map. As this essay will suggest, particular print-mediated subjectivities and genres emerged in locally-owned newspapers in colonial West Africa, and significant processes of textual production can be found in the press in the form of readers' articulations. Indeed, the binary opposition between 'the reader' and 'the text', or consumer and commodity, which tends to dominate Euro-American literary criticism, is inaccurate to describe the colonial (con)texts examined in this essay. The history of reading and authorship in Britain's West African colonies is inseparable from the rise of African-owned newspapers. Newspapers provide a substantial and unique resource for research into reader reception, cultural production and political agency in the colonial period. The sheer quantity of indigenous newspapers in Britain's colonies has, however, tended to cause scholars to treat the press as an archive to be mined for information. Such a straightforward approach minimises or ignores the status of newspapers as productive literary forms with the power to generate (and to be modified by) particular types of discourse.3 Yet the structural and textual complexities of colonial newspapers are of equal importance to their contents. As cultural historians, we need to appreciate the ways in which newspapers produced political realities and generated reading publics at different moments of colonial history, and the status of newspapers as elite-owned textual commodities which had the power to articulate (with) diverse colonial readerships. Cultural theorists such as Stuart Hall and Richard Middleton have used the concept of articulation to describe the processes whereby social classes 'speak forth' from particular socioeconomic positions, connecting cultural elements together while never being wholly fixed within the parameters of class. An articulation, Hall states in interview, is: the form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions. It is a linkage which is not necessary, determined, absolute and essential for all time. You have to ask, under what circumstances can a connection be forged or made? …

Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: This article is interdisciplinary between theology and the health sciences among the mega Pentecostal churches in the context of Pentecostalism. The study makes an important contribution to both the study of theology and epidemiology in the understanding of challenges posed by pandemics such as COVID-19 and how to address such challenges through a theology of care.

The study engages Alain Badiou’s philosophical concept of ‘immanent exception’ to establish the special potential embedded in African Christianity for engendering human universal (Umuntu). It argues that African Christian experiences inform their interpretations of Jesus Christ as the answer to all human existential concerns. This approach forces them to ‘exceed’ in the locations and spaces of their imaginations of suffering by embracing ambivalent localizations (through a constant oscillation between local and un-local) in search to transcend, not escape, in thought and practice their negative realities. Thus, they transcend unitary Christian boundaries and integrates critical elements of African spiritual systems to build human universal within the paradigmatic universal humanity of Jesus. The study underlines that grasping African Christianity through immanent exception could contribute to empowering not only African Christians, but also world Christians to seek new ways of becoming human universal for global struggle against death dealing forces such as COVID-19. The study concludes by calling for the need to engage how World Christianity in its particularities is shaping life today and how local churches are participating in constructing what it means to be part of God’s mission to build a human universal in active search for global justice.

This article engages the work of two prominent but recently deceased scholars of African Christianity—the Gambian Lamin Sanneh and the Cameroonian Fabien Eboussi Boulaga. It argues that their reinterpretation of Christianity is designed to develop an imagination of resistance in the context of western domination in Africa. Sanneh approaches the matter from a historical perspective through which he narrates the emergence of a new form of Christianity, leading to his important distinction between “world Christianity” and “global Christianity.” Boulaga approaches the issue from the perspective of philosophical theology, through which he developed the “Christic model” as central to appropriating the Christian faith in Africa. The paper argues that one can hardly understand why Sanneh distinguishes between global and world Christianity and why Boulaga develops the radical Christic model, if one fails to locate their work within the framework of problematizing dynamics of western domination in Africa.

The map of world Christianity has changed dramatically in just the last century. Today, the majority of Christians live in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, making Christianity a world religion as never before in history. Given that global reality, Klaus Koschorke, Frieder Ludwig, and Mariano Delgado have created the first comparative documentary history of Christianity for these regions covering the period 1450-1990. Taking the changing ecumenical conditions into account, this volume enlarges the horizon of classical church historiography. In contrast to the prevailing Western perspectives on the history of Christianity in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, voice is given here to the multitude of local initiatives, specific experiences, and varieties of Christianity in very diverse cultural contexts - addressing such questions as the colonial conquest, slavery, and the demand for ecclesiastical independence.

Although the relationship of Catholic mission to colonialism in Africa is a controversial one, it cannot be denied that the Church was instrumental in the progress of African peoples and nations. Drawing inspiration and guidance from the corpus of Catholic Social Teaching, the Church plays a key role in continuing to inspire Africans to the higher goals of human rights and Democracy. A Catholic social imagination, through which Catholics communicate the social demands of their faith as they engage social questions and envision social possibilities in Africa’s pluralist societies, needs to be promoted. The task before the Catholic Church in Africa is to move this rich deposit of faith from being the Church’s best-kept secret to the marketplace of ideas that can constitute the moral foundation for our politics. Helping to frame the moral direction of public policy in the various young or tottering democracies in Africa is a noble vocation that makes the Church remain a critical collaborator in building sustainable and just democratic cultures on the continent.

This article describes the shifts and contradictions in British approaches to the control of print media in colonial West Africa between the 1920s and 1940s. Well before the Colonial Office's post-war interventions to create an ‘enlightened and educated’ West African citizenry through mass education, decades of independent newspaper production in the region helped to shape independent and critical readerships. For the British, however, an upsurge in African nationalist journalism in the mid-1930s coincided with a perceived Communist infiltration of ‘British West Africa’ to make censorship and surveillance more palatable than before to colonial officials in London, in spite of the new emphasis on public relations.

This chapter begins by examining the relationship between Christianity and colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa and assessing Christianity’s explosive growth in the twentieth century. Indeed, accounting for conversion to Christianity in Africa has been a much-discussed topic among historians, sociologists, anthropologists, missiologists, and theologians. The chapter then moves to consider the conversion and converting mission of William Wadé Harris, the single greatest evangelist in African history and the quintessential representative of numerous prophet-healing movements in West Africa in the first decades of the twentieth century. Crucial to the extension of the gospel and conversion of the Dida people of the southern Ivory Coast was the composition of hymns to the Christian God. As typified the Christianization process throughout a largely illiterate Africa, neither text nor catechism but song became the village people’s theology.

Senegalese Stagecraft: Decolonizing Theater-Making in Francophone Africa by Brian Valente-Quinn

Between 1930 and 1948 colonial governments in British West Africa found themselves fighting an unusual battle against ordinary Africans on two fronts: illicit distillation from 1930, which undermined colonial revenue, assailed colonial hegemony in the flagrant disrespect for law, and compromised British subscription to international conventions that forbade liquor distillation in the African colonies; and prostitution, particularly during World War II, when venereal diseases emerged as a real threat to military preparedness among British military forces. Though I have written on liquor traffic, illicit distillation, and prostitution in colonial West Africa, I underestimated the American influence on the international context that framed these issues between the 1880s and the 1920s and the energy of American moral reform organizations that drove temperance and the social purity movement. The American factor enters African historiography from decolonization, and America and the former Soviet Union typically are presented as anti-colonial forces. Elided within this historiographical tradition are America's imperial history and the formative influence of American moral reformers in shaping the very nature of colonial rule in the British Empire. The internationalized struggle against vice in the British Empire lent a depth to colonial responses and a sharpness to the colonial crackdown on illicit distillers and prostitutes in West Africa in the 1930s and 1940s that radicalized ordinary men and women and unveiled their potential for nationalism and mass politics. In the Gold Coast, for example, these ordinary men and women would be heavily represented in Kwame Nkrumah's Convention People's Party (CPP). The collapse of prohibition in America in 1933 in the face of widespread criminality and corruption took the wind out of the sails of the international moral reform movement and helped undermine the discourse of the “civilizing mission” and the “white man's burden” as rationales for colonialism. In the aftermath of economic depression in the 1930s and World War II, colonial emphasis shifted to development in partnership with African nationalists. Nkrumah in the early years of Ghana's independence commented on how the mosquito was an unsung hero, for its presence in West Africa limited white settlement and removed a bottleneck from the process of decolonization in West Africa.

Reviewed by: Writing Ghana, Imagining Africa: Nation and African Modernity Stephanie Newell Writing Ghana, Imagining Africa: Nation and African Modernity By Kwaku Larbi KorangRochester, NY: University of Rochester P, 2004. x + 352 pp. ISBN: 1-58046-146-8. In an article addressing the silence (or silencing) of Africa in contemporary postcolonial theory, Simon Gikandi offers the following explanation for the situation: "The institutions of interpretation that now operate under the orbit of poststructural [End Page 130] or postcolonial theory have proven incapable, or ill-prepared, for the conjunction between a particular politics and morality," he writes; yet this conjunction is vital to "the making and unmaking of African worlds" (Gikandi 3). With politics, morality, and "the making and unmaking of African worlds" firmly in view, Kwaku Larbi Korang sets the record straight in Writing Ghana, Imagining Africa, opening up a vital space in the cultural history of West Africa for indigenous intellectual activity and nationalist self-assertion. In the process, he engages with dominant figures in the institution of postcolonial theory, from Partha Chatterjee to Kwame Anthony Appiah and Paul Gilroy, showing how their negative assessments of nationalism fail to admit the rich history of African agency within colonial social formations. Writing Ghana, Imagining Africa is an elegantly written and meticulously researched history of intellectual self-assertion in colonial West Africa. Korang puts aside the common assumption that there were no formal political or philosophical movements in West Africa prior to négritude. He convenes a loose grouping of highly educated, anglophone African men whose writings and publications on the subject of African modernity and African nationalism formed sites of self-conscious intellectual activity between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Their links with a global pan-Africanist intellectual community are emphasized, for, as Korang shows, "Africa" emerged as the product of vital interregional exchanges of ideas about modernity and the nation (6–7). The book charts the contribution of heterogeneous West African thinkers to the ideas of Africa, modernity, and African nationalism. Focusing in particular on the Gold Coast (Ghana) in the century before independence, Korang locates a "frontline" of African intellectuals whose inspiration was drawn from race-thinkers in all parts of the colonial world. Alongside well-known pan-Africanists such as E. W. Blyden, J. E. Casely Hayford, and Kwame Nkrumah, Korang studies the work of less internationally familiar intellectuals such as Carl Christian Reindorf, John Mensah Sarbah, John Ocansey, and Kobina Sekyi. He emphasizes that the contribution of the latter group to the idea of African modernity—ranging from the accommodationist to the ultraconservative—was no less significant than that of the former group. These intellectuals are placed together for the first time as a group in Korang's comprehensive study of the intellectual currents circulating around West Africa. The intersection between their particular politics and their pan-Africanist identification is the defining space in which Korang undertakes his study. In recognition of their shared colonial culture, and also in recognition of colonial Africa's porous "national" boundaries, he shows how the idea of "Africa" remained strong among these intellectuals and political figures, informing (rather than simply complementing) their political struggles, and inspiring their literary production. Given the emphasis on African agency throughout the book, it is both ironic and historically perceptive that what emerges from Korang's study of frontline intellectuals is the portrait of an intensely tragic class of men, bound into a Faustian pact in which they were conscious of their position as mouthpieces for the very colonial epistemologies from which they attempted, in their writing, to break free. A "constitutive and untraceable contradiction" made each individual a friend and enemy to himself, Korang writes, for each man was, in spite of himself, "the agency by, and subjectively through, which Enlightenment (indirectly) fasten[ed] its grip on native realities" (13; 42). Caught between seeing modernity as alienating and desirable, this "middle class" was literally a middle class: these men were inheritors to "a deathly heritage" that they were "powerless not to pass on" (179). [End Page 131] One consequence of the tragic positionality of this group was that their nationalism and engagement with modernity exhibited an intimacy with European philosophy. On one...

In the wake of the Dictionary of African Biography (2011) and the Dictionary of African Christian Biography (DACB), the present volume, African Christian Biography, emerges as another important contribution to scholarly discourse at the intersection between “African,” “Christian,” and “Biography.” Dana Robert, the editor, argues that at the heart of the volume is the affirmation of biography as an important form of historical writing that broadens the sources and methodologies for reading Africa’s Christian history. Through biography, she claims, “people become . . . subjects of their own history” (viii). In corroboration, Emmanuel Egbunu, in one of the chapters, laments that the absence of biographical writing has fueled the pervading conception of African Christianity as “a late comer within Global Christianity” (63). Robert’s and Egbunu’s assessments provide a clear trajectory toward understanding the purpose and organization of the book as well as its invaluable contributions to the field of World Christianity. The volume consists of papers presented at a conference marking the twentieth anniversary of the Dictionary of African Christian Biography held at Boston University in 2015.The book’s seventeen chapters are divided into four parts. The first, “The Importance of African Christian Biography and the Role of the DACB,” earmarks the vision and historical trajectory connecting this volume to its parent publication, the DACB. Authors in this section respond to the question of why such a scholarly enterprise should matter in the first place as well as how the DACB sought to awaken this consciousness in view of the new phase of world Christianity as captured in World Christianity studies. According to Jonathan Bonk,Bonk’s vision is clearly expressed in the second and third parts of the volume. While the second, entitled “Biographies of Christian Leaders,” focuses on biographical histories of male and female Christian religious leaders, the third, “Retrieving Women’s Lives,” focuses specifically on the biographical renderings of herstorical characters. Christian leaders such as Krәstos Śämra of Ethiopia, King Afonso I of Kongo, Queen Njinga of Angola, Kgosi Sechele and Seth Mokitimi of South Africa, John Chilembwe of Malawi, Bernard Mizeki of South Africa and Mozambique, and the itinerant prophet William Wade Harris, who transversed across Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, and Ghana, were all engaged alongside female figures such as Nokutela Dube of South Africa, Sikhawulaphi Khumalo and Nellie Maduma Mlotshwa of Zimbabwe. Their biographies are constructed with a view toward the complexities of lived experience at the intersection of Christian and African identities and the colonial and patriarchal powers-that-be.In the last part, “Challenges in Writing African Christian Biography,” the authors return to the core question of reading African Christian history through biographical interpretations and draw out the factors militating against a more robust engagement with this form of historiography. For example, Paul Grant explicitly examines the problem of rupture in the biographical construction of people who endured dehumanization as enslaved persons, colonial subjects, victims of genocide, famine, poverty and other forms of violence. Shining a spotlight on Catherine Zimmerman, who was stolen from the streets of Angola, survived enslavement in the West Indies, and died in Ghana while serving as a missionary with Switzerland’s Basel Missionary Society, Grant examines the various levels of rupture in her lived experiences vis-à-vis his own obligations as a researcher, concluding that “the real problem is moral: it is the problem of historians’ appropriate humility towards the horrible experiences of the African past and the witness offered by the survivors to their heirs” (294). Grant’s observation poignantly underscores the underlying message of faithful interaction with historical sources and resources in the re-enactment of the humanity of biographical figures.African Christian Biography must be praised for its contribution to making scholarship on African Christianity more open to the often-neglected role of biography and oral history using a bottom-up approach. Although most of the contributions come from Southern Africa, the book’s rich collection of remarkable but little-known African Christian figures who helped create Christianity on the continent and beyond, makes it an invaluable resource for scholars of world Christianity, African religions, and African colonial history.

Reviewed by: How God Became African: African Spirituality and Western Secular Thought Hugh R. Page Jr. (bio) How God Became African: African Spirituality and Western Secular Thought. By Gerrie ter Haar. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. PP. ix + 121. $34.95 Originating in a series of lectures delivered to the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh in 2006 (121), this monograph opens a window onto the conceptual world of contemporary African Christianity. Following a Preface that summarizes the book's primary objectives and an introductory chapter that offers an overview for examining religion in Africa, the book's remaining chapters address: the process through which ideas about the divine have been contextually re-defined by African Christians (Chapter 2); the spiritual topography of the African imaginary and its theological import (Chapter 3); the role of the miraculous in African worldviews (Chapter 4); the impact of African conceptions of evil and their bearing on the struggle for human rights (Chapter 5); the mobilization of religious resources in the enhancement of the lives of individuals and institutions in Africa [End Page 135] (Chapter 6); and both the global diffusion of "African Instituted Churches" (93) and their missionary efforts in Europe. Those lacking familiarity with African Christianity and the cultural matrices within which it has taken shape will appreciate the background provided for understanding its dynamism as well as some of the more important factors contributing to its ongoing evolution. Those already conversant with such matters will, no doubt, find ter Haar's articulation of several key issues refreshing and thought provoking: e.g., the legitimacy and cachet of "spiritual knowledge" among Africans (19); the importance of engaging "African epistemologies" given the modern realities of diaspora and migration (20); the role of the "spirit world" (23), conceptions of "evil" (29, 60-61), and notions of "power" (29, 86) in African cosmologies; the ubiquitous nature of the miraculous in African Christianity (50-54) and the close relationship between such phenomena and the political arena (57-58); the "contextual reading" and deployment of the Christian Bible in critiquing "European society" (58, 98); the complex interplay of ideas about evil, personhood, and human rights (61-67); the perceived spiritual basis for health and prosperity within some African Christian theologies (82-86); and the relatively recent impetus for international missionary initiatives, particularly among members of "African Instituted Churches" (vii, 93, 96-99) in Europe. Two crucial points noted by the author in the Preface to the book should not be overlooked by readers—i.e., the antiquity of the Christian presence in Africa (vii); and the "spirit-oriented" character of African Christianity from its "early beginnings" (viii). While ter Haar does not focus on the ancient roots of the Christian movement in Africa, the aforementioned references make clear that Africanization of the Judeo-Christian deity began—in a real sense—with the arrival of the very first missionaries on the continent. Thus, treatises by theologians such as Augustine, Coptic Christian icons, and illuminated biblical manuscripts produced by Ethiopian Orthodox artists are examples of genres that can—and should—be utilized as sources illustrative of Christian enculturation in Africa. This is an area much in need of additional work and ter Haar is to be commended for subtly calling attention to this fact. In sum, ter Haar has provided a concise and lucid treatment of the theoretical underpinnings of African Christianity and the forces fueling the process of Christian enculturation in Africa since the nineteenth century (vii, 31-33). Lay and specialist audiences should find it very illuminating and helpful for purposes of teaching or research. Hugh R. Page Jr. University of Notre Dame Hugh R. Page Hugh R. Page, Jr. is Dean of the First Year of Studies at the University of Notre Dame, the Walter Associate Professor of Theology, and Associate Professor of Africana Studies. He holds a B.A. degree with a major in History from Hampton University; M.Div. and S.T.M. degrees from General Theological Seminary in New York; a D.Min. from the Graduate Theological Foundation; and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University. His published works include The...