A Future for Africa: Critical Essays in Christian Social Imagination by Emmanuel Katongole

A confession to start: I haven’t been much interested in Christianity in Africa. Attention to the church in Africa has produced in me a similar response to, say, guilt-inducing pleas in television commercials to help alleviate suffering there. God, that place is awful. No, we don’t do enough to help. Can anyone find the remote control?

I picked up this book anyway because I know Emmanuel Katongole to be a man of extraordinary kindness from personal interaction around Duke Divinity School, where he is professor of world Christianity. I had also heard his was a brilliant mind. The clencher for me was that Emmanuel is a reader of Stanley Hauerwas: he’s written a book about him, and contributed to a feschrift about him. In my experience Hauerwas’ best readers are those most closely aligned with the church in their thought and practice. Emmanuel, as a Roman Catholic priest from Uganda, is certainly that.

The book far surpassed my expectation. Not only does Emmanuel deal deftly with knotty philosophical problems (he was originally trained as a philosopher in Belgium), he also writes accessibly, even beautifully. He taught me about our common teacher, Hauerwas, in ways I hadn’t expected: “The sense of communal identity, an appreciation of virtue, a respect for tradition and authority, and, on the whole, a view of the universe as pervaded with spiritual and symbolic meaning—all notions Hauerwas was calling for—were part of the moral heritage which, as an African, I simply took for granted” (p. 233). The clarion call of the book is that the church must see itself as a distinct social imagination—one able to interrupt the culture of violence of the African nation-state which was learned from Africa’s colonial oppressors. The problem in Africa generally is not a lack of proposals to “fix” violence, or AIDS, or political corruption, or whatever—the continent has no lack of experts spinning ideas, wielding dollars. The problem is one of description. How do we understand Africa’s history, its present problems, its enormous church growth? Only when we tell Africa’s story well—which we cannot do without living into the church’s practices, especially the eucharist—will we have anything helpful to say to its myriad problems.

These are all familiar Hauerwasian themes, but they are here peppered with enormously fresh vignettes. How come wherever Katongole goes in America, people hear he is from Uganda, and want to ask him about Idi Amin? Is Uganda specifically, and Africa generally, only noteworthy for its brutal dictators? What are we to make of the extraordinary “condomization” of Africa? That is, the fact that young children can name half a dozen condom brands off the tops of their heads, and that village shops have the prophylactic even when they’re out of dietary staples? Why are African village women mistrustful of western aid and medical programs—in one recent case, refusing to bring their children in for vaccination against polio, despite promised punishment? Perhaps most pressingly for westerners, how are we to remember the Rwandan genocide, in which the country that missionaries considered Africa’s greatest evangelism success (90% professed Christian faith), and many who fled to the church from the violence were slaughtered, often betrayed by their own priests?

These are concrete, specific social problems in Africa, of the sort often overlooked by enthusiasts over the continent’s church growth. The Ghanaian theologian Kwame Bediako and the American sociologist Philip Jenkins, for example, both laud the fact that in some decades’ time the bulk of Christians worldwide will be Africans—mostly Pentecostals. This sort of observation has been politically volatile in recent years as conservative Christians in the US especially have pointed to the rising tide of conservative, evangelical faith in the southern hemisphere as a rebuke to their liberal opponents in the church. Katongole also takes African church growth, and the possibility that it might contribute something to the church catholic, as a sign of hope. But not uncritically. For the form of Pentecostalism there ascendant is, itself, a form of Protestant liberalism. It does not seek to interrupt the sorts of descriptions that have long yielded tribal violence, self-enriching politicians, mass starvation and disease. It rather seeks to bless the nation-state, and help individuals prosper financially within it. He quotes a Latin American liberationist colleague as saying, “Liberation theology opted for the poor, but the poor opted for Pentecostalism”! (p. 247).

Katongole aspires instead for the church to be, borrowing a term from Sallie McFague, “a wild space.” That is, a space in which new and previously unpredictable forms of social imagination and practice can arise. He calls for the church to leave off its role as “moral umpire,” as in Catholic debates over condom use, and busy itself instead with the project of more faithful description of memory (p. 44). A good question to ask in that debate is whether the condom’s status as a disposable product, like cans of coke or disposable razors, does not lend itself to being people of superficial attachment who limit themselves to “safe,” and so impoverished, relationships. Katongole sees this characteristic among many Ugandans and Americans (indeed, with the regnancy of global capitalism and its antipathy to the local, there is more in common in the two cultures than ever). Such aloofness is not unrelated to the fear with which Americans greeted 9/11—an act of violence that feels “familiar” to Africans. Katongole’s answer to America’s ceaseless question of “why do they hate us so?” is to offer a reading of the book of Job: America’s suffering, like Job’s, tempts it to believe (once again) that everything is about America. In fact, America and the west generally are guilty of a far worse tribalism than any that affects Africa: the belief that only western economic “interests” are those that should exercise American moral judgment and foreign involvement. Ugandan women did not take their children for polio vaccination because polio was not much of a risk to their children—malaria and measles and lack of clean water kill much more frequently. What did these westerners really want? (a good question to ask, given Africa’s history of exploitation at western hands). Elsewhere he suggests that the far greater religious “success” in Rwanda came from the Muslim community, which made up all of .7% of the country’s population. For unlike most Christians, the Muslims took one another in, at great personal cost (p. 107).

The church can likewise provide an alternate social reality by its very catholicity, expressed above all in the Eucharist. Katongole tells of visiting a church in a village in Malaysia in which everyone present greeted everyone else before worship began. He wondered if this practice did not enable the church’s extraordinary multiculturalism: Chinese, Malay, Indian, and other indigenous peoples were present. At a fellowship gathering afterwards, church members poured Coca-Cola from individual cans into one communal jug from which all drank. Katongole saw this as a sign of hope: the church’s resistance to the ultimate individualistic consumer product by choosing, without regard for sanitation or convenience, to drink from one jug. Works like Katongole’s can help us see how what we already do, who we already are, is a form of resistance to the violence that only seems to be just a step ahead of us.