African Spirituality Research Articles

A Critical Exploration of African Spirituality and Democracy in Africa

Abstract This article investigates the spiritual dimension of African politics, a significant, real, and practical variable that has received little recognition in public discourse about the practice of democracy in Africa. I focus on the role of African spiritual agency and its cosmological implications in the development of African democracy. The article argues that African spirituality is pervasive but not sufficiently strong to meet the challenges of new political realities. Through the use of critical case analysis, the study concludes that African politicians exhibit a dual loyalty, affirming Western political theories in public discourse (in most cases) while adhering to African spiritual rituals and oaths in private. The consequences of this include undermining the dividends of democracy and encouraging the dereliction of the environment.

African Culture and Melville’s Art: The Creative Process in Benito Cereno and Moby-Dick by Sterling Stuckey (review)

Reviewed by: African Culture and Melville’s Art: The Creative Process in Benito Cereno and Moby-Dick by Sterling Stuckey Christopher Freeburg Sterling Stuckey African Culture and Melville’s Art: The Creative Process in Benito Cereno and Moby-Dick New York : Oxford University Press , 2008 . ix + 154 pp. If you have ever chased the great white whale, you know of Herman Melville’s worldly aesthetic vision. Melville scholarship resembles the imaginative array of the Pequod’s motley crew from around the world, with different critics indicative of the varied archives and disciplines that inspire a range of interpretations. When it comes to understanding the relationship of Melville’s works to African culture, the historian Sterling Stuckey stands alone. From his landmark text Slave Culture (1987) to his writings in Going through the Storm (1994) to his recently published African Culture and Melville’s Art, Stuckey analyzes black culture and performance across the Atlantic. Stuckey’s passion for Moby-Dick (1851) and “Benito Cereno” (1855) reveals itself in his commitment to an anthropological and historical vision of Melville’s major fiction: a vision defined by Stuckey’s interests in black music, the thematic play of blackness, and material culture. Stuckey’s African Culture sheds light on how Melville scholars can access racial difference and Black Atlantic culture through Melville’s creative genius. Stuckey shows us how knowledge about African culture can illuminate Pip’s connection to African American street festivals in Albany (Moby-Dick), the origins of Atufal’s dress in Ashantee decoration (“Benito Cereno”), and Frederick Douglass’s depictions of slave song (Narrative of the Life). While Stuckey may not always draw one-to-one connections when establishing links between discourses on Africans and Melville’s black characters, this book demonstrates the significance of African culture for black performance in the United States and New World slaves’ reinvention of that culture. In assembling the chapters for African Culture, Stuckey draws upon essays he has published on Melville since the 1980s and adds some new material. His revisions illuminate his thinking about how different topics, texts, and sites of evidence relate to one another, and the introduction helps the reader sync the essays’ investment in African culture. Yet in recasting the essays, Stuckey limits the implications of his work by not explaining how his arguments relate to recent developments in Melville studies and in scholarship on [End Page 75] black performance. While one does not want Stuckey to rehearse his debt to scholars he undoubtedly influenced, the book would have benefited from a fuller engagement with scholars working on race and black culture. Stuckey’s depictions of African culture are not limited to insights about the politics of being enslaved. He focuses on music and spirituality and on blacks as innovators in song, dress, and myth. Stuckey’s essays demonstrate that the African cultural presence in Melville’s life served as the basis for characters such as Atufal in “Benito Cereno” and Daggoo in Moby-Dick. Across the volume, Stuckey encourages us to be better students of the African traces Melville left in his writings and invites us to consider anew how Europeans and Americans experienced West African spirituality, mysticism, rituals, dances, song, and other cultural practices. Stuckey’s greatest accomplishment in African Culture is attaining his stated goal: “my purpose is to show how he [Melville] used sources never before read by critics to fashion strikingly intricate and subtle techniques of craft, heretofore unexplored, in creating two of his greatest works, Benito Cereno and Moby-Dick” (3). Stuckey persuasively shows that while slavery is widely discussed by critics, African culture has been shortchanged in Melville studies. Stuckey also uses the writings of Melville’s contemporaries, including Frederick Douglass, Charles Dickens, Mungo Park, Frederick Augustus Ramsayer, and Johannes Kuhne, to study the relationship between Melville’s aesthetics and African culture. Stuckey claims that Melville “appropriated and transformed material from writers who were well known in his time but not previously thought to have influenced him artistically” (5), such as Dickens in American Notes (1842) and Douglass in his Narrative of the Life (1845). African influences, Stuckey argues, were central to Melville’s creative method. Stuckey’s distinctive contribution here is to...

Conquest and Theology

The Jesuits played a key role in the evangelization of the Portuguese colony of Angola and its surrounding Kimbundu-speaking neighbors when they came with the colonial mission of Paulo Dias de Novais in 1575. Their experience is an example of evangelization in a colonial setting in Africa, and contrasts with Jesuit approaches to conversion in the neighboring and independent Kingdom of Kongo. They drew heavily on previous experiences in the Kingdom of Kongo, which had itself become Christian a century earlier and pioneered a marriage between African religion and Christian spirituality. When Jesuits came to Kongo in 1548 they found an existing established church and added relatively little to it before they left following political disputes. When Dias de Novais came to found Angola, he initially was militarily dependent on Kongo’s assistance and the Jesuits, too, were dependent on the Kongolese version of Christianity, which is clear in their choice of vocabulary in the Kimbundu catechism that they sponsored and oversaw in 1628. However, the colonial situation in Angola made the Jesuits more willing to accept the idea of conversion by the sword, and they were notably less tolerant of African religious inclusions in Angola than in Kongo. The contrast in the two approaches was particularly evident when the Jesuits reopened a mission in Kongo in 1619.

The perception of Africa by African Americans in the predominantly black community of East St. Louis, Illinois, USA

The dominant image of Africa in the colonial discourses of Western explorers has been persistently negative, stereotypical, and demeaning. The unauthenticated negative images are the largest influencer of Western perception of Africa because as long as the misrepresentation lingers on in Western media and film, the dominant white attitude toward African Americans as inferior could be rationalized and sustained. Moreover the real impact of such misrepresentations on how African Americans see and relate to their ancestral homeland remains grossly under studied. Through purposive sampling, this study interviewed 55 East St. Louis African Americans on the meaning of Africa to them. The results show that they had very positive perceptions of Africa and prided themselves as Africans despite centuries of negative Western portrayal of the continent. Their most important positive images included: Africa as the ancestral home of black people, African festivals and attire, African history and traditions, and African spirituality and belief systems. Through factor analysis, seven underlying dimensions that structure how African Americans construct their perceptions of Africa emerged – including: their Black African heritage, their fantasy of going back to Africa, their inerasable African identity, Connecting Africa to the world, African heroes, keeping the Black pride alive, and the failed stereotypic portrayal of Africa over the centuries.

Literary expressions of African spirituality

Literary expressions of African spirituality

Literary Expressions of African Spirituality ed. by Carol P. Marsh-Lockett and Elizabeth J. West (review)

Literary Expressions of African Spirituality ed. by Carol P. Marsh-Lockett and Elizabeth J. West (review)

Of Spirituality and Poverty: A Zimbabwean Cultural Perspective

This article, based on a desk study, connects African spirituality to the phenomenon of poverty and argues that mundane poverty alleviation strategies that ignore the cultural perspective of a people are doomed to fail, especially in the African context. Within this context, a domain such as transcendence is as ‘real’ to the people as the material world. This article delves into the alchemy of the traditions of African people from a Zimbabwean perspective in an attempt to understand some of the causes of poverty. The authors aver that development practitioners stand to gain if they take into account such (African) worldviews. The article shows that there is a disconnect between western culture and indigenous cultural beliefs and suggests that it is necessary to use phenomenological methods to unpack this disconnect because the spiritual world can support or limit the extent to which poverty alleviation programmes are effective. This means that the notion of development rooted in western knowledge frames may require opening discourses that imagine different social ontologies to find solutions in an (African) context. Thus, the challenge for phenomenologists is to research culturally-appropriate approaches to development using phenomenology.

The value and extent of religious participation of members of the South African Police Service (SAPS)

The objective of this research was to determine the extent to which the employees of the South African Police Service participate in religion, and their opinion regarding the value it added to their lives. The range of religions and the various Christian denominations represented was determined. No sampling strategy was used, as all available employees were included in the study (N = 37 816). The survey instrument was administered by Employee Assistance Services professionals. The results of the study indicated that religion played an important role at individual, group, organisational and community level. The majority of the participants in the study (79.4%) were Christian, 15.9% followed by African spirituality, 0.9% were Hindu, and 0.4% were Muslim. An analysis was conducted of the distribution of the religions represented within the nine provinces of South Africa (and Head Office as a collective), and across the four race groups. The Christian denominations best represented in the study were the Dutch Reformed (12.7%), Methodist (6.0%), Roman Catholic (5.8%) and Anglican (5.0%).

Forged in the fiery furnace: African American spirituality

Forged in the fiery furnace: African American spirituality

New Perspectives from Old Collections

Charles Fairbanks advanced the field of plantation archaeology in 1968 in his pioneering excavation in the cabins of enslaved laborers at Kingsley Plantation, Florida, with a focus on identifying "Africanisms." Failing to recognize elements of African cultures, Fairbanks and his students moved to St. Simons Island, the Couper Plantation and Cannon's Point site, and focused instead upon socio-economic status patterns. Other archaeologists would later make the case for material evidence of African cultural retentions at sites in the United States. Using new interpretative frameworks, a reanalysis of the archaeological materials recovered in the Couper Plantation excavations in the 1970s reveals elements of possible African spirituality not originally identified.

Communicating African Spirituality through Ecology: Challenges and Prospects for the 21st Century

This review was set in the context of African spirituality and ecology. Specifically, the review addressed issues of African spirituality and the environment from a Kenyan context. Through analyses on existing literature, we examined African worldviews, determined how African spirituality was communicated through the environment, evaluated African ways of regulating the use of the environment, and explored challenges facing African spirituality and ecology today. Results show that African spirituality has been enhanced through the environment where humanity worshipped and venerated everything under the earth, on earth, between the earth and heavens and in the heavens above. Consequently, various methods to restrict the utilization of certain natural resources are employed as a way of conserving the environment. Additional findings demonstrate that African spirituality and ecology are currently facing a number of challenges, hence a major challenge of sustainability of African spirituality in regard to environment. From a spiritual point of view, it is therefore recommended that environmental diversity should be conserved through sustainable development where every person from grassroots level is involved in protecting and maintaining God’s creation. We conclude that African knowledge and belief systems on environmental sustainability could be revitalized and used in environmental conservation.

African spirituality in black women's fiction: threaded visions of memory, community, nature, and being

African spirituality in black women's fiction: threaded visions of memory, community, nature, and being

How God Became African: African spirituality and Western secular thought

How God Became African: African spirituality and Western secular thought

“With God in our lives he gives us the strength to carry on”: African Nova Scotian women, spirituality, and racism-related stress

This mixed-methods study explored the racism-related experiences of 50 mid-life African-heritage women living in Nova Scotia, Canada, along with their use of spirituality as a coping strategy for dealing with racism-related stress. Four standardised instruments, along with qualitative in-depth interviews, were used to examine women's experiences of racism, depression, stress, and spirituality. Spirituality provided a key coping mechanism for racism-related stress, providing church community, spiritual community, faith, guidance, a personal relationship with God, and a source of meaning-making. For some women, spiritual belief provided a means of cognitive reinterpretation, allowing them to make sense of racism and other life challenges, recasting these as tests and trials which they were capable of surmounting with God's blessing and protection. Implications for mental health practitioners include working with spiritual and religious venues to help lessen stigma against mental health problems.

The Plantation Household Revisited: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s Contribution to Southern History

BERTRAM WYATT-BROWN University of Florida, Emeritus The Plantation Household Revisited: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s Contribution to Southern History ELIZABETH FOX-GENOVESE’S WORK IN SOUTHERN HISTORY PLACES HER IN the highest ranks of the field. At the same time, she was a most generous scholar. Despite not having seen her in a number of years but knowing that she and her husband were equipped with a huge library in regional materials, I was bold enough to call long distance from Baltimore to have her assistance. I was writing a review of Michael O’Brien’s two-volume Conjectures of Order for Robert Silvers at the New York Review of Books.1 Sure enough, Betsey could retrieve the information but, she said, “it’s in the basement, and it takes me a while to get there and back.” Sometime later she called me with the answer I had asked for. I now realize that her illness was the cause of the delay. It was very thoughtless of me to put her through the ordeal. She had complied with my request, no matter the physical difficulty it required. I also recall a very memorable occasion at the St. George Tucker Society in Augusta, Georgia, in 2003. Before the assembly, Jeffrey Anderson, one of my most accomplished PhD students, was offering his exposition as that year’s recipient of the Melvin Bradford Prize for best Southern Studies dissertation on his topic, “Conjure in American History.” Betsey was in the audience and raised the first question. After prodigious research, Jeff had proposed in his text that traditional African spirituality evolved from its origins in the slave quarters into a thriving commercial and public realm where it still persists. She announced that she foundhisthesishighlydoubtfulbutcouchedhercritiquein objective rather than personal terms. With considerable aplomb, given the stature of his critic, Jeff in reply cited detailed archaeological evidence that demonstratedhowconjurersquicklysetupofficesfortheirmagicalwork almost immediately after emancipation. I remember her words. “Well, you have convinced me that you are right, and I am wrong.” Betsey was 1 No doubt for good reasons, Silvers rejected the drafts sent, but the essay review later appeared in Historically Speaking. 592 Bertram Wyatt-Brown not particularly noted for conceding debating points, but Jeff had held his ground. For her part, she had graciously yielded. As already suggested, in the course of a most productive career, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese published studies whose relevance continues to engage the academy. Many of them were and still are controversial and provocative, an approach she seemed to relish. Yet none of the others, in my opinion, is more engaging, authoritative, and original than her study, Within the Plantation Household. This is not to slight the monumental character of Eugene D. Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’schef-d’oeuvre,TheMindoftheMasterClass.It,together with the further volumes in the “Mind of the Master Class” series, is the academic climax to their many years devoted to exploring Southern themes. But that rich and valuable study was, after all, a mutually supportive venture. In contrast, Within the Plantation Household belonged to Betsey alone, though with undoubtedly constructive criticism from her husband. Not only was she among the first to explore with deep thoroughness the world of elite women and their female slaves and the indispensable economic work they performed, but she did so with a truly remarkable literary sensitivity. To be sure, in Fox-Genovese’s study we find less concern with proslavery theology and evangelical piety than in the couple’s subsequent investigation, The Mind of the Master Class, which carried the point into the subtitle: History and Faith. That latter-day transition is consistent with their own spiritual history away from Marxist historical materialism toward the benefits of grace. Yet despite this relative neglect of religious elements, which Southern culture has made central over the last one hundred fifty years, Within the Plantation Household must be considered one of the classics in Southern history. That field has been crowded over the years with remarkable practitioners from C. Vann Woodward and David Potter to Carl Degler, George Fredrickson, Mills Thornton, and Drew Gilpin Faust. Fox-Genovese belongs in that imposing pantheon. Her talent in re-creating a past that disappeared long ago...

“Chango ‘ta vein’/Chango has come”: Spiritual Embodiment in the Afro-Cuban Ceremony, Bembé

Over seventy years ago, Melville Herskovits ([1941] 1990, 8) argued that the African heritage of any people of the African diaspora could not be understood without reference to the others. He saw and documented cultural continuities from Dahomey to Suriname, Trinidad, Haiti, and the United States. What struck Herskovits, and many visitors and scholars since, is a remarkable similarity in what he emotional expression in the religious life of communities of African descent (210). These highly emotionalized religious and ecstatic experiences, he argued, could be attributed to a shared African heritage in which music, dance, and trance were linked. The focus of this essay is this spirituality of embodiment, where the divine being is called by percussion, singing, and dancing to become manifest in the body of an initiated medium and in the body of the congregation as whole. Our community is that of Afro-Cuban variously Lucumi, Santeria, or regla de ocha, where direct African provenance is apparent in nomenclature and the historical record. Yet, after a description of the bata drums that invoke the spirit, and the bembe ceremony that makes it manifest, we will ask whether the same isomorphism of music, body, and divine presence is the touchstone of religious experience and cultural memory throughout the African diaspora. In his magisterial work of the 1950s, Los Instrumentos de la Musica Afrocubana, the Cuban ethnographer Fernando Ortiz (1955) documented several hundred musical instruments of African derivation on the island. At least 800,000 Africans had been enslaved and taken to Cuba during its first four centuries of European colonization, and their cultural impact could be seen and heard in every corner of the country. Ortiz gave pride of place to a set of drums bata, since their rhythms played an essential role in the reconstruction of an African religious culture in Cuba. Bata performances are part of a larger ritual complex of drumming, dancing, and singing often bembe that is organized for the veneration of African divinities orishas. The ceremony profiled in this essay is known by a variety of names that represent different communities and different kinds of colloquial usage. While the word bembe has been generalized here to encompass all Lucumi drum fiestas, it is often used more restrictively. Most people that I have met in New York and in Cuba referred to the ceremony as a tambor (drum), although I've heard tambor bata and bembe, as well. The differences in terminology can sometimes refer to different kinds of drums used and rhythms played. If participants are more precise, bembe can refer to a ceremony with specific bembe drums that are conical and open at the bottom in the conga style as opposed to the hourglass-shaped, double-headed bata. Bembe-type drums may also call the orishas, though the structure of the ceremony is less formal and the technique less learned than that of the bata rite. People might refer to a ceremony with bata at this level of discourse by calling it toque de bata (bata rhythm). John Amira and Stephen Cornelius (1992, 21) recognize the lax usage among participants but prefer a distinction between bembe, which ought to be celebrated with bembe drums, and guemilere, which is performed with the bata drums. Each sets up different patterns of praise for the orishas and evokes different expectations for the unfolding of the ceremonial events. This essay examines the role of the bembe--that is, bata drumming, antiphonal singing, and expressive dancing--in embodying an African spirituality in the Americas. Bata: The Royal Drums of Shango Bata drumming has its origins among the Yoruba people of present-day southwestern Nigeria and eastern Benin. Musicologist Akin Euba (2003, 54) cites Yoruba oral historians who speculate that bata were introduced into Yorubaland from the north some five hundred years ago (see also Thieme 1969, 183-186). …

Public Faith and the Politics of Faith: A Review Essay

A symposium entitled In the Presence of Faith: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on Southern African Studies of Religion was held in Johannesburg from 24 to 26 February 2010.1 This review essay outlines our rationale for the symposium, highlights its most pressing debates, and introduces the papers included in this special edition of the journal for the Study of Religion, an edition entitled Public and the Politics of Faith.The SymposiumThere were a number of reasons to call together a symposium of this nature. As organisers and in our own work we have been struck by the very limited extent of inter-disciplinary reading, discussion or collaboration about Our first wish was to create a place where scholars from different disciplines who have an interest in religion could converse together and be exposed to a diversity of questions, methods and literatures. In doing this, we hoped to open a debate about how religion has been studied in Southern Africa, what is missing and where the field should be moving. Drawing on the experience of Wiser' s 2007 Reasons of event, the organisers made efforts to invite the participation of historians, sociologists and anthropologists as well as those working from religious studies departments.Our second wish was to invite and stimulate more empirical attention to religion, particularly by social science and humanities scholars. We also hoped to raise a discussion on topics not normally encountered under the purview of religion in the social sciences. We were interested in the relationship between religion and the state, both in how religious communities attempt to influence the state, but also how the state structures its relationship with religious communities. The relationship of African nationalism to religion, both Christianity (independent and mainstream) as well as traditional, was also something we felt would lead to productive discussion. We were also interested in topics we felt had been neglected in the regional scholarship, such as personal conceptions and appreciations of faith; the public role of Christians who attend mainstream churches in Southern Africa; and the need to engage between traditional, independent and mainstream forms of religion in our theory and research. And we sought to pay attention to some of the growing religious phenomena of the last two decades, not least of which is the increasing Pentecostal involvement in public life. There is a great deal of work yet to be done on this.As part of our planning we carefully weighed up the use of our words. In choosing our symposium title, we opted for the more polysemie word faith, instead of the more normative religion. The former, we felt, offered a point of ingress into the symposium of a wider set of views on spiritual practice; it also offered a way to move beyond more dogmatic understandings of Faith also seemed to offer a way for comparative discussions between some of the major world religions practised in the region, allowing for a symposium in which scholars of Islam, Judaism, African spirituality and Christianity could speak alongside one another.A third rationale for the symposium lay in the great need for scholars working in South Africa and other Southern African countries to engage in dialogue on One reason is that there is an increasingly dense network of religious and labour migration across our respective borders. A regional perspective on such migration and the study of transnational religious communities is increasingly imperative.The call for papers elicited an enthusiastic response. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the majority of abstracts were theological in orientation. The planning group decided to exclude them. Many reflected a narrow focus on Biblical scholarship, or were poorly-researched from a social scientific perspective. As such, they did not meet the requirements of our call for papers. The high volume of scholarly theological and Biblical publishing in South Africa does not evidence much attention to most of the issues referred to above. …

Use of Ifá as a Means of Addressing Mental Health Concerns Among African American Clients

African Americans underuse counseling services because of factors such as cultural mistrust, stigma, and culturally incongruent treatment interventions. As a result, this population relies on informal healing networks. The foundations of these networks have been outlined within the professional literature. However, limited attention has been given to the indigenous healing methods used by African Americans in lieu of counseling. This article explores the conceptual, diagnostic, and treatment strategies of the indigenous healing system, Yorùbá‐based Ifá.

Gerrie ter Haar. How God Became African: African Spirituality and Western Secular Thought. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. pp. ix + 120 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $34.95. Cloth

Gerrie ter Haar. How God Became African: African Spirituality and Western Secular Thought. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. pp. ix + 120 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $34.95. Cloth - Volume 54 Issue 1

How God Became African: African Spirituality and Western Secular Thought (review)

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...