AUTHOR: BENEZET BUJO

PUBLISHER: Paulines Publications Africa, P. O. Box 49026, Nairobi, Kenya. 2001

PAGES: 128

PRICE: US$6.00

REVIEWER: KOFI AKOSAH-SARPONG

The Arab slave trade, the trans-Atlantic slave, and colonialism, suppressed Africa’s culture for so long, long time that it created a weak cultural photosynthesis. The weak cultural photosynthesis occurred because African culture wasn’t allowed fuller ‘sunlight’ for growth. The result has been the so-called educated Africans looking down upon their culture, which is one of the best in the world, but aspects of the negative values stifling the good aspects. More troubling, still, is the so-called educated Africans aping the West, attempting to catch-up with the West, and seeing Africa’s ‘progress’ in the West’s development paradigm and image, which lacks Africa’s experiences, cultural values, and histories.

As the train of the African Renaissance process gradually gathers steam, opening up Africa’s cultural values and core history here and there, as it meanders through the forests of Africa’s values scattered in the Berber world of the Magreb zone to the Hausa dry lands in the Sahelian stretch to the Twa (pygmy) tropical rain forest, Africans increasingly rediscovering how their good culture had for long been suppressed, are now trying to de-freeze and exploit it for the progress of a continent, which has, since its independence from colonial rule, tried almost every kind of foreign ideology under the sun without any success, and discarded its own core native indigenous values.

It is under such thinking that African Theology in its Social Context is written, enjoining African Christians to rediscover some hardcore elements, which were buried under the shadows of combined weight of the slave trade, colonialism, missionary proselytism and modern technical culture. Still, much of this ‘combined weight’ that has discarded Africa’s values is most painfully seen in Africa’s education system and which in turn is producing confused Africans who demean their own culture and ‘see’ Africa from foreign values. The result is confusion all around a continent, which shouldn’t in the first place go through all this shit. The apparent ‘darkness’ in Africa is, therefore, the ‘darkness’ of its elites, chunked out periodically from Africa’s educated system.

The author of this interesting book, and part of the growing works by Africans to open up their culture for fresh breath and business, Father Benezet Bujo, a Congolese Roman Catholic priest, seeks to reincarnate Christianity from the African perspective. He does this by presenting African Theology in its Social Context in three parts—"The Preliminaries of African Theology, "Outline of an African Theology," and "African Christology and Ecclesiology." He says the reincarnation takes into consideration both the whiteman’s Christianity and that of the blackman, one in the reality of modern setting (Some people think Christianity is not all that foreign to Africa but rather it originated from Africa, taken by the Europeans, re-juggled, chiseled, refined, re-packaged, and returned back to Africa with a new face as if it is a new, unAfrican theological dogma).

Challenging African theologians to help restore the Africans dignity battered by the slave trades, colonialism and an education system that is foreign to the African’s soul, Father Bujo painfully regrets the long-running beaten African dignity and self-esteem, and stresses that the African’s dignity and self-esteem must be restored "not only at the economic level, but also at the cultural level." Father Bujo acknowledges the anthropologist’s demeaning of African culture and religion, which were further brutally ignored by the colonizing powers, seeing them as an object of no value, which can be replaced by any culture. Bujo, therefore shames the so-called African intellectuals who have continued with such damaging colonialist practices, worsened by Africa’s economic situation, and thunders that whether African liberation or the African Renaissance process or the booming various Vision development philosophies being touted by African governments will be possible only rediscovering the deeply rooted African traditional cultural values for business.