Last month, we held the 2nd Annual CIHA Blog Conference in South Africa on religion, governance, and humanitarianism in Africa. Today, we present the first article in a series of papers from the conference. In today’s piece, Professor Gerald O. West, a Senior Professor and Director of the Ujamaa Centre in the School of Religion, Philosophy, and Classics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, discusses the notion of ‘site of struggle’ in South African Contextual Theology and South African Black Theology. West extends the notion of ‘site of struggle’ to African cultural and religion in general, stating, “African cultures and/as African religions are sites of struggle in any and every struggle for social transformation in African contexts.” We look forward to your comments and stay tuned for more posts from our conference!
by Professor Gerald O. West, University of KwaZulu-Natal
Introduction
South African Contextual Theology, a form of liberation theology with formative links to the worker movements of 1940s Europe, Latin American liberation theology, and the other theologies of resistance that emerged in response to the ‘low intensity conflict’ political regimes common to Brazil, the Philippines, and South Africa in the mid-1980s,1 used the notion of ‘site of struggle’ extensively.
For Contextual Theology, “The struggle is the opposite of the system”.2 The struggle for liberation from the system of apartheid (and its precursor settler-colonial systems)3 required the identification of particular ‘sites of struggle’. Among the sites of struggle that were identified as sites of Christian engagement were the state as a site of struggle, the church as a site of struggle, and theology as a site of struggle. The South African Kairos Document (1985), one of the clearest articulations of Contextual Theology, declared that “Christians, if they are not doing so already, must quite simply participate in the struggle for liberation and a just society”.4 In the very next paragraph The Kairos Document goes on to analyse the church as a site of struggle, though it does not for strategic reasons use this terminology.5
The Kairos Document went further, identifying Christian theology itself as a site of struggle. Indeed, the most significant contribution of The Kairos Document, as the product of an even more important process,6 was analysing South African theology as a site of struggle. What the struggle for liberation demonstrated, The Kairos Document argued, was that ‘theology’ was itself contested. There was no single ‘Theology’. The Kairos Document identified and analysed three contending theologies in the South Africa of the 1980s: State Theology, Church Theology, and Prophetic Theology. Briefly, “State Theology” was identified as the theology of the South African apartheid State which “is simply the theological justification of the status quo with its racism, capitalism and totalitarianism. It blesses injustice, canonises the will of the powerful and reduces the poor to passivity, obedience and apathy”.7 “Church Theology”, it was argued, was “[i]n a limited, guarded and cautious way … critical of apartheid. Its criticism, however, is superficial and counter-productive because instead of engaging in an in-depth analysis of the signs of our times, it relies upon a few stock ideas derived from Christian tradition and then uncritically and repeatedly applies them to our situation”.8 The Kairos Document deconstructs these two forms of theology and advocates for a “Prophetic Theology”, a theology “that is biblical, spiritual, pastoral and, above all, prophetic” and that “speaks to the particular circumstances of this crisis, a response that does not give the impression of sitting on the fence but is clearly and unambiguously taking a stand” against the apartheid system.9
However, while the state, the church, and theology were each recognised and analysed as intrinsically and inherently contested, the Bible was left untroubled as a site of struggle. Biblical interpretation was a site of struggle,10 but not the Bible itself.11 Indeed, The Kairos Document insisted that neither State Theology nor Church Theology has a “biblical foundation”,12 but that about Prophetic Theology, the Bible “has a great deal to say”.13 The Kairos Document concludes with an ‘invitation’ to “all committed Christians to take this matter further, to do more research, to develop the themes we have presented here or to criticise them and to return to the Bible, as we have tried to do, with the question raised by the crisis of our times”.14 Stated even more clearly and strongly, the Revised Second Edition (1986) of The Kairos Document asserts that, “To be truly prophetic, our response would have to be, in the first place, solidly grounded in the Bible. Our KAIROS impels us to return to the Bible and to search the Word of God for a message that is relevant to what we are experiencing in South Africa today”.15 Biblical interpretation was the problem, according to The Kairos Document, not the Bible itself.
But there was another theological trajectory, alongside South African Contextual Theology in the 1980s, and this is the trajectory of South African Black Theology. Representing the second phase of South African Black Theology,16 Itumeleng Mosala states clearly that, “the texts of the Bible are sites of struggle”.17 What he means by this is that different, contending sectoral voices are part of the very fabric of the Bible. Though Mosala acknowledges that the final literary form of the biblical text bear witness to these struggles,18 his primary focus is the sites of struggle that produced and are evident within the various redactional editions of the biblical text.19 Ancient class and a range of other sectoral struggles are significant social forces in the long history of the Bible’s formation.
But such analysis does not render the Bible unusable. We can continue to use the Bible, argues Mosala’s colleague and fellow Black theologian, Takatso Mofokeng, because “the Christian religion and the Bible will continue for an undeterminable period of time to be the haven of the Black masses par excellence”.20 The second reason has to do with what I have called “an analogy of method” and “an analogy of struggle”.21 For Mosala historical-materialist analysis of the biblical text’s contending ideological voices offers potential kindred sites of struggle for Black working-class Christians, “drawing from their history of struggle”, including their struggles against both African precapitalist and later white settler capitalist modes of production,22 to “make hermeneutical connections with similar agendas in the contemporary setting”.23 So in terms of an analogy of method, the methods of analysis that are necessary to identify the contending sectoral voices within the Bible are also useful for identifying the contending sectoral voices within African contexts. And when these methods are used through an analogy of struggle, Africans discern links between kindred struggles in the Bible and in African contexts, which may offer potential resources for contemporary African struggles.
But, Mosala is quick to add, even “[w]ith the [ideological] agenda of the [biblical] text laid bare”, “[t]he usefulness or otherwise of the agenda of the text cannot be decided a priori. It has to be tested on the basis of the demands and experience of the struggle of black working-class people”.24 African contexts must be given priority in African biblical (and theological and religious) hermeneutics.
Having outlined, by way of introduction, how South African Contextual Theology and South African Black Theology have used the notion of ‘site of struggle’, I now want to indicate how such analysis must be extended to religion in general. Indeed, I would go further and argue that such analysis must be extended to African culture and/as religion in general. In other words, African cultures and/as African religions are sites of struggle in any and every struggle for social transformation in African contexts.
Culture and/as religion as a site of struggle
The clearest account of African culture and/as religion as a site of struggle comes from the work of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians (the Circle), a broad interfaith (though primarily Christian) coalition of African women from across the African continent.25 The “cultural hermeneutics” contribution of Musimbi Kanyoro,26 for example, has become a key resource for two generations of African women theologians, each working within her own particular African context.
And it is not incidental that this essay by Kanyoro is found within a collection of essays centred on the Bible: Other ways of reading: African women and the Bible.27 For the Bible is a similar type of site of struggle as African culture and/as religion. The Bible, like African culture and/as religion, is for women deeply ambiguous, offering both ‘assets’28 for life and instruments of death. And, it is important to reiterate, the ambiguity is intrinsic to both. It is not a matter of the interpretation of the Bible or the interpretation of culture and/as religion. It is a matter of the very nature of the Bible and culture and/as religion.
African women experience both the liberatory capacity of (aspects of) the Bible and (aspects of) African culture and/as religion and the dominating hetero-patriarchal tendency of (aspects of) the Bible and (aspects of) African culture and/as religion. Hetero-patriarchy is a primary site of struggle in African contexts, seeking to control, as it does, women’s bodies, as well as the bodies of those who are ‘not-heterosexual’. Hetero-patriarchy’s power resides in its coercive systems constructed to control all of us, male and female, gay and straight, allocating each of us a place within its pervasive system that is woven into the fabric of African culture and/as religion.
But hetero-patriarchy is not the only ‘system’ that subverts social transformation of African contexts. Though pervasive and ‘internal’ to African culture and/as religion, it has formed alliances with other ‘external’ colonial and neo-colonial systems. Indeed, as the Latin American theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid has argued, “The story of colonial settlements and imperial control is a story of one basic alliance: the patriarchal one”.29 She argues that in colonial contexts, including African colonial contexts, while “colonisers stripped Africa of its culture, religious and economic systems”, they “kept patriarchal power intact, if not reinforced, by Christianity [and I think we could include Islam]”. She is clear that this alliance includes the continuation of “heterosexual power”.30 However, as Althaus-Reid implies, the colonisers (including my own ancestors) brought with them other coercive social systems, specifically extractive economic systems.
This is not the place, given the emphasis of our conference, to engage in depth with colonial and neo-colonial economies of extraction that characterise African nation states (or what is left of African nation states in the wake of neo-liberal, ‘structural adjustment’, transnational, globalised forms of capitalism).31 But suffice it to say that African culture and/as religion plays its part in coercing the cultural and religious sectors of African contexts to acknowledge, first, two separate terrains, a moral terrain and an economic-political terrain, and then, second, to insist that the religious and cultural sectors remain focussed on the moral terrain and that the economic-political terrain is the sole preserve of the African state.32 Our African kinds of religion lack capacity to engage African economies of extraction.33
Towards a contextual interfaith liberatory praxis
It should be clear by now why religion (and culture and/as religion) is a site of struggle in African contexts. As a way forward, I want to offer a quite different way of conceptualising the relationship between religion and context.
Mosala, we will remember, makes it clear that biblical scholarship is only of use if ordinary Africans, “drawing from their history of struggle”, including their struggles against both African precapitalist and later white settler capitalist modes of production,34 are able to “make hermeneutical connections with similar agendas in the contemporary setting”.35 Though somewhat unorthodox, Mosala privileges context above religion; and we should pause to consider the import of his argument.
What Mosala is arguing is that our religions are only significant if they are of use to Africans in African contexts. Religions derive their value from their capacity to offer resources for survival, liberation, and abundant life in African contexts. Matthew Palombo, working with both Islamic religion and Christian religion within African contexts, extends Mosala’s argument to interfaith relations.36 He advocates for a contextual interfaith liberatory praxis that locates context as primary. The significance of any religion, whether African Christianities, African Islams, or African Religions, or post-colonial hybrid combinations of these, lies in its capacity to offer resources for liberation as these different religions collaborate within particular African contexts.
Humanitarianism as a religious site of struggle
I want to conclude by problematising any a-religious notions of ‘humanitarianism’ in Africa. As our elder John Mbiti has said, “Africans are notoriously religious”.37 To the extent that this is true, African forms of humanitarianism must be interrogated for how religion intersects with and infects particular humanitarianisms. We cannot permit uninterrogated notions of religion to be smuggled in in the guise of ‘humanitarianism’. Religion in African contexts must be ‘outed’; it must come out of the closet and be recognised as a site of struggle. Humanitarianism in African contexts is a religious site of struggle.
Professor Gerald West is a Senior Professor and Director of the Ujamaa Centre in the School of Religion, Philosophy, and Classics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He is also the Co-ordinator of Body Theology, Earth Theology and People’s Theology programmes at Ujamaa.
1 For a series of essays on ‘Contextual Theology’ see McGlory T. Speckman and Larry T. Kaufmann, eds., Towards an Agenda for Contextual Theology: Essays in Honour of Albert Nolan (Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications, 2001). For an inter-contextual collaborative theological engagement with these realities see ICT, The Road to Damascus: Kairos and Conversion (Johannesburg: Skotaville, 1989).
2 Albert Nolan, God in South Africa: The Challenge of the Gospel (Cape Town: David Philip, 1988), 157.
3 God in South Africa: The Challenge of the Gospel, 161.
4 Kairos, Challenge to the Church: The Kairos Document: A Theological Comment on the Political Crisis in South Africa (Braamfontein: The Kairos theologians, 1985), 22 §25.22. For a full set of ‘kairos’ documents see Gary S.D. Leonard (Compiler), “The Kairos Documents,” Ujamaa Centre, http://ujamaa.ukzn.ac.za/Libraries/manuals/The_Kairos_Documents.sflb.ashx.
5 Kairos, The Kairos Document, 22 §25.21, 23 §25.23.
6 Gerald O. West, “Tracing the ‘Kairos’ Trajectory from South Africa (1985) to Palestine (2009): Discerning Continuities and Differences,” Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 143 (2012), 4-22.
7 Kairos, The Kairos Document, 3 §2.
8 The Kairos Document, 8 §3.
9 The Kairos Document, 15 §14.
10 The Kairos Document, 1, 4 §2.1.
11 West, “Tracing the ‘Kairos’ Trajectory.”
12 Kairos, The Kairos Document, 14 §13.14.
13 The Kairos Document, 16 §14.12.
14 The Kairos Document, 24.
15 The Kairos Document, 17 §14.11.
16 See Gerald O. West, The Stolen Bible: From Tool of Imperialism to African Icon (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 326-348.
17 Itumeleng J. Mosala, Biblical Hermeneutics and Black Theology in South Africa (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 185.
18 Biblical Hermeneutics and Black Theology, 40.
19 Gerald O. West, “Redaction Criticism as a Resource for the Bible as ‘a Site of Struggle’,” Old Testament Essays (Forthcoming).
20 Takatso Mofokeng, “Black Christians, the Bible and Liberation,” Journal of Black Theology 2 (1988), 34-42: 40.
21 Gerald O. West, Biblical Hermeneutics of Liberation: Modes of Reading the Bible in the South African Context, Second Edition (Maryknoll and Pietermaritzburg: Orbis Books and Cluster Publications, 1995), 74.
22 Mosala, Biblical Hermeneutics and Black Theology, 183. It is important to note that Mosala does not see the indigenous African pre-colonial past as a struggle free period. ‘Class’ struggle goes all the way back.
23 Biblical Hermeneutics and Black Theology, 185.
24 Biblical Hermeneutics and Black Theology, 185.
25 Mercy Amba Oduyoye, “Reflections from a Third World Woman’s Perspective: Women’s Experience and Liberation Theologies,” in Irruption of the Third World: Challenge to Theology, ed. Virginia Fabella and Sergio Torres, 246-255 (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1983); “Christian Feminism and African Culture: The ‘Hearth’ of the Matter,” in The Future of Liberation Theology, ed. Marc H Ellis and Otto Maduro, 441-449 (New York: Orbis, 1989); Mercy Amba Oduyoye and Musimbi Kanyoro, eds., Talitha, Qumi! Proceedings of the Convocation of African Women Theologians 1989 (Ibadan: Daystar Press, 1990); Mercy Amba Oduyoye, Daughters of Anowa: African Women and Patriarchy (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1995).
26 Musimbi R.A. Kanyoro, “Cultural Hermeneutics: An African Contribution,” in Other Ways of Reading: African Women and the Bible, ed. Musa W. Dube, 101-113 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2001).
27 Musa W. Dube, ed. Other Ways of Reading: African Women and the Bible (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2001).
28 Steve de Gruchy, “Of Agency, Assets and Appreciation: Seeking Some Commonalities between Theology and Development,” in Keeping Body and Soul Together: Reflections by Steve De Gruchyon Theology and Development, ed. Beverley G. Haddad, 66-86 (Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications, 2015).
29 Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender and Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 15.
30 Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender and Politics, 13.
31 For an in-depth analysis of the South African context see Sampie Terreblanche, A History of Inequality in South Africa, 1652-2002 (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2002); Jeremy Seekings and Nicoli Nattrass, Class, Race, and Inequality in South Africa (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2006); Gillian Hart, Rethinking the South African Crisis: Nationalism, Populism, Hegemony (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2013).
32 West, The Stolen Bible, 445-542.
33 “Unstructural Analysis of the Bible Reinforcing Unstructural Analysis of African Contexts in (South) Africa?,” Old Testament Essays 23, no. 3 (2010), 861-888.
34 Mosala, Biblical Hermeneutics and Black Theology, 183. It is important to note that Mosala does not see the indigenous African pre-colonial past as a struggle free period. ‘Class’ struggle goes all the way back.
35 Biblical Hermeneutics and Black Theology, 185.
36 Matthew C. Palombo, “Interfaith Praxis in South African Struggle for Liberation: Toward a Liberatio-Political Framework for Muslim-Christian Relations” (University of Johannesburg, 2014).
37 John S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (London: Heinemann, 1969), 1.