Space and Human Agency in the Making of the Story of Gershom through a Senegalese Christian Lens

Abstract

As a teacher of the New Testament in the United States, I find that the Senegalese, West African context that shaped my formative years has become more probing me than ever before. Like our first Senegalese president, Leopold Sedar Senghor, who spoke of how his kingdom affected his poetics of negritude, I try engage my own poetics in conversation with biblical voices the extent possible. I share much in common with Kenneth Ngwa, especially when it comes French colonization and its lasting effects on our countries. My childhood kingdom, like that of many Africans, had and still has its share of problems, including family feuds, intergroup skirmishes, diseases, and a protracted war for independence that severely affected my family. Diola ethnographers trace the causes of this war back the colonial period.1I concur with Ngwa that a meeting held in Berlin (1884-1885) led the occupation of the African continent. Senegalese people awoke this strange dawn,2 as French colonists, proud of their constructed Celtic/Gaulic identity as a legitimate mandate for exercising civilizing mission, arrived in Senegal. Over time they created four communes, towns/cities, a France Overseas (Saint Louis, Dakar, Goree and Rufisque, 1887-1960), frenchify Senegalese people. This assimilation experiment was exercised under the aegis of France's civilizing mission ironically called the peace of France.3 cities, similar ancient Greek gymnasia, became religious, economic, political, and assimilation centers, and since 1914 the inhabitants received French citizenship and political representation in metropolitan France. Protectorate dwellers, on the other hand, had earn their citizenship by excelling in French education. In that vein, education and the granting of citizenship rights wooed the populace French ways but also generated contempt as the frenchified of the towns (originaires) believed they were more civilized than and superior their country cousins.4 Most of the originaires had European ancestry. Because they were privileged politically and economically, they understandably tended accept European culture and Christianity.5 Catholic missionaries introduced French ways Africans alongside catholic teachings secure French dominance in Senegal. As a result, christianization and civilization were practically mixed6 and the colonizers argued that to civilize is Christianize.7 This was a terrifying message that turned the biblical message into a colonizing tool.8Lacking political power, most protectorate dwellers and those leaders who refused collaborate with French colonial officials, resorted various oppositional tactics ranging from violent confrontations daring defiance.9 Many Diola, objectified as uncivilized, living in the most fertile southern region of Senegal called the Lower Casamance,10 fought the then-prevailing French system of occupation preserve their socioreligious memory, culture, and rice-farming practices.11 Colonial administrators forced Diola elders sign treaties, which were ignored as soon as colonial officials retreated their civilized spaces such as Goree and Saint Louis. This went on from the onset of the occupation until the 1920s, when Diola were considered have been somewhat pacified. This brings me Ngwa's The Making of Gershom's Story.Contested GeographiesSpace matters. Ngwa's argument, as I mentioned earlier, is an intriguing innovative take on a story often missed by readers. If the story is read at all, the violence that undergirds and directs this narrative's interregional and intergenerational identity, as well as its ethics and cultural values (p. 855) are often sanitized and its pervasive terror spiritualized or cheapened an extent that Gershom is simply reduced a son of Moses circumcised by his mother Zipporah. Exodus 2, as Ngwa sees it, is nothing short of a narrative whose multivalent meanings he purposed uncover through a Cameroonian postwar hermeneutical lens informed by trauma and inspired by a resilient and innovative drive survive in assigned spaces. …