Can an African become a Christian without becoming less African?
Can an African become a Christian without becoming less African?
That is the question we should be asking.
If becoming a Christian means rejecting your history, looking down on your ancestors, dropping your own way of seeing the world, and calling your traditions “pagan,” then what exactly did we convert? The person, or the person’s identity?
And if Christianity is truly universal, why must an African wear someone else’s cultural clothes to practise it?
In this series, we will face that uncomfortable question honestly: how can an African be a Christian without destroying his or her African identity? It may mean walking a new road. We will have to question what we inherited, drop some assumptions, recover what we abandoned, and perhaps find new words that speak truthfully to the African experience.
And who should do this work? We should. Not foreigners defining Africa for us. Not people who never lived our cultures telling us what our traditions mean. Not by importing other people’s categories and calling them universal.
We must study our history, understand our cultures, look honestly at our indigenous spiritual systems.
Not Christianity against Africa. Not Africa against Christianity. Just the hard work of discovering what an authentically African Christianity can look like.
