Abu Dis Checkpoint, East Jerusalem, 2006. Image via Flickr user Kashfi Halford. CC BY-NC 2.0.
In this post, I share some of my personal experiences with Archbishop Desmond Tutu during his life and his impact on Israel/Palestine. The core of my reflections connects Tutu’s calling to pursue justice and the resonance of that calling with the Palestinian quest for liberation. In his practice, he embodied both the ideals of justice and liberation in ways that called on us to recognize our common humanity.
I grew up under Israeli military occupation in the city of Ramallah. I am the daughter of an Anglican pastor, a Nakba survivor from Al-Lidd (Lydda), who was a deputy mayor prior to becoming the mayor of Ramallah.
Having grown up in a household that was not only focused on activism but was also religious, my understanding of what it meant to be both Palestinian and Christian was intertwined with the pursuit of justice. My Christianity placed justice at its core, and it was a justice that guaranteed that each human being had equal worth. Likewise, my Palestinian-ness was very much built around a strong sense of justice, and this included seeing the Palestinian struggle in partnership with other struggles for liberation in the world, which included South Africa.
As a little girl, I remember skipping around our home singing along to a familiar refrain I heard daily on the news hour of radio Monte Carlo: Free, Free Nelson Mandela!
Another memory I have is of a visit to our home by a bishop from Namibia, who taught us to sing their song of freedom. I don’t remember the words of the song he taught us, but I remember it ending with Namibia and us lifting our fists in a gesture of solidarity and acknowledgment of their struggle for freedom. I remember this visit vividly as it inspired me to know more about other people’s struggles for liberation; it made me feel that I was part of a larger collective, which in turn gave me hope that we might all overcome oppression.
My teenage years started with the onset of the first intifada in 1987. This shaped me in ways that continue to guide me in my life to this day. It was during these years that we cultivated what we refer to as the “culture for liberation,” and that I developed a heightened awareness of the struggle to end Apartheid in South Africa. Like many Palestinians, I recognized that our struggle for freedom in Palestine was the same as that in which opponents of Apartheid were engaged with in South Africa. It was during this time that Archbishop Desmond Tutu became a household name for us.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu was loved by all Palestinians, Christians and Muslims. His message was simple: God created us for freedom. This is a freedom that does not belong to one group of people more than another. Here was a courageous church leader who centered justice within his Christianity and whose South African-ness was likewise concerned with justice for a greater humanity. I strongly resonated with the connection between one’s identity as a Christian and the struggle to end injustice wherever one faces it.
His message was simple: God created us for freedom. This is a freedom that does not belong to one group of people more than another.
Archbishop Tutu visited Palestine in 1989 during our first intifada, before Apartheid had ended in South Africa. Unfortunately, his visit took place while I was away at college and I missed meeting him. Nonetheless, many of my family members and friends remember his visit and I still recall how his arrival captivated all of us. The pressures on him were immense, and his visit with us was not welcomed by the Israelis. In fact, some hateful graffiti welcomed him to Jerusalem. Outside the walls of the St. George’s Cathedral in Jerusalem, some Israelis had scrawled: Go Home Black Nazi Pig. In the church service he led that day he began his sermon by making a joke about the graffiti. Later, I learned much more about the nature of this joyous remarkable man, but here was an early example from my memory.
Jerusalem viewed from the Mount of Olives, 2014. Image via Flickr user Michael-Ann Cerniglia. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
My friends can still recall the church service in the shepherd’s fields in the Bethlehem area on Christmas Eve. The fields were overflowing with people coming to hear the archbishop and the area was also surrounded by Israeli soldiers. The atmosphere was tense as those in attendance did not know how the soldiers would react to the crowds or to what the archbishop had to say. In his sermon, many recall Tutu describing situations that were familiar to them— humiliations at checkpoints, home demolitions, mass imprisonment, deportations, etc.—and at the end of his descriptions he would say that “of course” he was talking about apartheid in South Africa. The crowd would erupt in laughter. They heard him speak to the situation that they faced, and in doing so he further solidified the idea that our struggles were integrally linked. During this same visit, he met with the burgeoning Palestinian liberation theology movement that was just evolving. He later became the international patron of that same movement—now called Sabeel.
It wasn’t until 2007 in Boston that I had the honor and privilege of meeting Archbishop Tutu in person for the first time. I was one of the main organizers of a Friends of Sabeel conference, which aimed to highlight the apartheid situation in Israel/Palestine. Archbishop Tutu agreed to be our keynote speaker.
Experiencing Archbishop Tutu in person was not only a personal highlight that I will always cherish, but one that endeared a hero of mine to me even further. Being able to spend time with him commuting from one place to another I was able to witness his boundless joy, his humor, and his cheeky way of getting his messages across. There were several instances where we got lost on our way to somewhere and he was always ready with a witty remark followed by his adorable chuckling.
At the conference itself we were met by hecklers across the street from Old South Church, where the conference was taking place. At a moment when we weren’t paying attention, we found the archbishop across the street speaking with the pro-Israel protesters, who seemed stunned and were all of a sudden in silence. At the conclusion of the conference, we held a rally in Copley square, and we witnessed the archbishop dance through the crowd of hecklers on the way to the Square. That day we were all fortunate to have experienced this joyous, fearless, dancing archbishop who could not remain silent about the world’s injustices.
As I reflect today on the legacy of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, I recognize how privileged I was to have experienced him in person. I also recognize the tremendous impact that he has made in the world because of his character and commitment to justice, both of which I was able to see him embody during that conference. I feel strongly that his message that “God created us for freedom” was what led him in his path to speak for those seeking liberation, to use his platform to speak truth to power, and never to waver in his message. For Palestinians, whether Christian or Muslim, we saw him as our voice precisely for this reason.
Hilary Rantisi is the Associate Director of the Religion, Conflict and Peace Initiative (RCPI) and co-instructor of an annual course Learning in Context: Narratives of Displacement and Belonging in Israel/Palestine at Harvard Divinity School. She has over two decades of experience in institution building at Harvard and has been involved in developing and pioneering collaborations across campus. Humanizing issues that affect the daily lives of people throughout the Middle East has been an overriding principle that guides her work in prioritizing research, policy discussion, and institutional growth. Previously, she was Director of the Middle East Initiative (MEI) at Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Prior to joining Harvard, she worked with civil society organizations in Israel-Palestine, which focused on religion, politics, and grassroots mobilization efforts in Jerusalem. She co-edited a photo essay book Our Story: The Palestinians and is active on several boards including the board of trustees of Aurora University in Illinois.
Candlelit vigil for racial justice, 2020. Image via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
For some, racial distinction is a virtue, but to others, it is a sin. In either case, one can be strongly tempted to live into the realism (if not pessimism) that racism will never go away. One may have very limited optimism that human beings will ever celebrate human physiognomical differences due to the horrors of current and historical systematic racism. In my spiritual and theological work on Desmond Tutu, however, I argue that Tutu’s legacy is precisely in this hope that human beings will celebrate the image of God whose unity is known through diverse persons. Historically, and for some currently, it is argued that racial difference is the most pertinent criterion by which to judge human worth (racial classification was explicitly embedded in South Africa’s legal and legislature structure). The fallacy of this assumption is that the descriptive determination of “race” simultaneously carries with it a fixed classification, i.e., race is not just the color of skin, but also a marker of the character of the person. And the one who claims to determine a person’s race usually becomes that person’s oppressor. In other words, many people around the world had to accept the identities which Europeans gave them. Asians had to accept being Asian, Africans had to accept being a Negro or African. Indians had to accept being Indian. Rowan Williams helpfully describes this dynamic when he states, “White domination has been built on the assumption that whites may say what they are, independently of the needs and reality of other groups, who are built into white self-definition” (141). Desmond Tutu illustrates this tendency of the dominant group to define identity when he recounts the following story and commentary in a British context:
Once upon a time at a grand dinner party a gracious lady sat next to a Chinese gentleman. She was being solicitous [concerned] and helpful so she would say “Like a banana?” And he would reply, “Yes se pleasie.” “Like a Drink?” And he would say, “Yes se pleasie.” And then the Chinese gentleman got up to make a speech in impeccable and faultless English. At the end of it, he turned to his neighbor “Like a speechie?” Most of us in this land make the cardinal mistake of judging people by their external appearance. We use quite irrelevant biological features over which they have no control to determine their worth as human persons.[1]
Instead of dominant groups of people determining human worth, Desmond Tutu’s legacy invites us into a different narrative—one in which restoration of God’s image is the key determination of human worth. African saints like Athanasius inspired Tutu to take seriously that Jesus Christ became human so that we could become gods (54.3). As in Athanasius’s speculative theology, Tutu invites increased Christian imagination as to what is human identity defined in the concept of the image of God. God creates human beings to be a penultimate paradox, i.e., finite creatures made for the infinite, so that nothing less than God could ever hope to satisfy the deep longings of human bodies and souls, “not military strength not unbridled ambition, not material possessions, not reckless and unaccountable political power” all of which treat God’s children as if they were not infinite. Secular prosperity seduces persons into understanding others on account of productivity, as if people are only consumers whose value is dependent upon the production of goods. It is from such diminutive understandings of human identity that a society becomes possessed by racism and can only determine racial difference as a threat. Esther Mombo also explains this diminutive process as she discusses what continues to haunt Christianity today.
What appears to haunt Christianity today is the disconnect between the things of the spirit and what is seen as material or secular. The question that one perhaps faces is, how does one do mission in a context that is already pervasively religious? What seems to be happening is that many are using the “spiritual” to enrich themselves in material terms. So the spiritual dimension has not been omitted, but it is used to increase prosperity in the world. What appears to be lacking in this kind of mission is active and transformative engagement with injustices in society (378).
The very need of the oppressor to define human beings racially once presupposed a natural science to understand physiognomical differences. However, for economic and ideological reasons, racial taxonomy provided European Whites, and later South African Whites a hierarchical account of how their claimed superior racial identity related to lesser ones. Because people of different “races” are “different,” declared many White people like Hendrik Verwoerd, former Prime Minister of South Africa, human beings should develop separately (26). (Verwoerd is a major political figure in establishing “Bantustans” or independent homelands on which such separate development could take place.) But Tutu facilitated a restorative movement in the brokenness of the church to disagree with Verwoerd’s conclusions—even calling such conclusions heresy and sin. The particularity of race as legally defined in apartheid and used as conceptual identities for human beings, continues a dialectic with seemingly little hope of synthesis. For example, Alan Dershowitz branded Tutu as “evil” and “the most influential antisemite of our time” because of how Tutu described Israel’s rule over the Palestinians as apartheid. On Tutu’s visits to Israel and Palestine, Tutu recognized the existential crisis of his own homeland in “the forced removals, the house demolitions, the humiliations of checkpoints and systems of control on movement, the confiscation of land for Jewish settlements, and the confining of Palestinians to blobs of territory, reminiscent of the Bantustan Black homelands. Above all he saw one people controlling another who, like Black South Africans until 1994, had little say in their governance.” Any legal separation of human identity on the basis of race is a zero-sum outcome. Tutu’s legacy of restorative justice and Ubuntu theology seek a nonzero sum outcome.
Of course, such a legacy is difficult to maintain when being Black entails falling outside of dominant standards of intelligence, beauty, and worth, while at the same time, being White assumes the proper control and manifestation of these standards in a protected normality. For example, a White South African farmer, Schalk Vorster, remarks, “You must be committed to the concept of race. It’s an ugly word as used by some people. But what is the opposite of racism? Communism? Or is it the [White] man who marries a black maid? It’s important to me that people stand by their racial identity, otherwise you get bastardization.”[2] Consequently, in light of a third identity, “bastardization,” being Black also assumes the human predicament of having to accept an imposed identity in which you have the following choices: you can either redefine your alienation of being Black into heroic identity or you can surrender to the demonic forces in the world which will use God-created differences to further confuse, divide, and conquer. Instead of being chained to each other as a vicious dialectic of races, Tutu’s legacy sought both to redefine new models of being human and visualize new theological identities of reconciliation in which the church could facilitate a positive humanistic impact rather than a zero sum outcome of either being damned or being saved. In Tutu’s restorative and interdependent worldview, God’s love is so relentless that even Satan will one day reciprocate such love.
[1] Tutu, “General Secretary’s Report to National Conference of SACC,” June 25–29, 1984.
[2]Farmer Schalk Vorster interviewed in The Cape Argus, March 24, 1994.
Michael Battle is Herbert Thompson Professor of Church and Society and Director of the Desmond Tutu Center at General Theological Seminary in New York. The Very Rev. Michael Battle, Ph.D. has an undergraduate degree from Duke University, received his master’s of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary, a master’s of Sacred Theology from Yale University, and a PhD in theology and ethics, also from Duke University. He was ordained a priest by Archbishop Desmond Tutu in 1993. Battle’s clergy experience, in addition to his current church work, includes serving as vicar at St. Titus Episcopal Church in Durham, NC, rector at Church of Our Saviour, in San Gabriel, California; rector at St. Ambrose Episcopal Church, Raleigh, N.C.; and interim rector or associate priest with other churches in North Carolina and in Cape Town, South Africa.
Battle’s academic experience includes service as interim dean of Students and Community Life at Episcopal Divinity School, dean for academic affairs, vice president and associate professor of theology at Virginia Theology Seminary; as associate professor of spirituality and black church studies at Duke University’s Divinity School; and as assistant professor of spiritual and moral theology in the School of Theology at the University of the South. Battle has published eleven books, including his latest: Desmond Tutu: A Spiritual Biography of South Africa’s Confessor.
This God did not just talk. He showed Himself to be a doing God. Perhaps we might add another point about God. He takes sides. He is not a neutral God. He took the sides of the enslaved, the oppressed, and the victims. He is still the same, even today. He sides with the poor, the oppressed and the victims of injustice.
We must resist the temptation to impose our own “sweetness”—often a camouflage for our lack of courage—on to Desmond Tutu. Before the formal end of apartheid, Tutu was primarily the voice that demanded justice for the oppressed on the one hand and the boycott of, divestment from, and sanctions against the apartheid regime on the other. Only after the end of apartheid, when the regime was forced by our collective resistance to relent, free our leaders from prison, and get their boots off our necks, did Tutu, the reconciler, emerge.
Since the late seventies, I have had the enormous privilege of encountering and working with many of the giants of South Africa’s liberation struggle, including Desmond Tutu. I’m moved that Tutu, on more than one occasion, described me as a “trusted advisor.” I spoke at his enthronement as Archbishop of Cape Town in 1986. I worked with him on many initiatives in the liberation struggle, including the promotion of inter-religious solidarity against apartheid. After the formal struggle against apartheid ended, we collaborated very closely on the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns against the Israeli government—often drafting statements and/or cross-checking them with one other.
Desmond Tutu: A Much-Loved, Deeply Disturbed, and Offensive Prophet
Tutu was a Christian, a mensch, and a prophet. I use the word prophet in the sense given to it by liberation theology as someone desperate to challenge power and injustice. All of these dimensions were seamlessly interwoven in his identity and his vocation. His identity as a Christian was something that everyone either joyfully embraced or with which they had to put up. His identity as a mensch, most people loved. His third identity, that of a prophet, was celebrated by people on the margins of society and either met with silence or disdain by the powerful. Many embraced all the different dimensions of his being and witness. In this essay, I will reflect on all three of these aspects of his identity and then deal with the tension between the last two, his being a mensch and a prophet. More particularly, I will discuss Tutu’s prophetic voice as one that spoke the truth to the powerful and oppressive Pharaoh as well as to his own people—even the state of their relative powerlessness. In these seemingly different voices he recognized the urgency to seek freedom from the external Pharaoh, on the one hand and sleeping Pharaoh within us, on the other.
Tutu, the Christian
I have a telling anecdote about Tutu’s identity as a Christian in the context of his work on promoting inter-religious solidarity against injustice. Knowing and observing how close he was to his Muslim comrades on the battlefield, one Muslim activist came to me and Imam Hassan Solomon (d. 2009), another leading liberation struggle icon and asked, nearly pleading: “Have you guys ever tried speaking to the Archbishop about Islam (! لعل أن يصبح مسلما )? Perchance, he will embrace Islam!” In a gentle rebuke, Imam Hassan responded: “Look, The archbishop is upright; leave him exactly as he is. If he is going to lean into a direction other than where he is at the moment, he will be skewed from the path of righteousness!”
In his response, Solomon demonstrates the primacy of orthopraxis above orthodoxy, something defining about liberation theology in general, but, more specifically, about Tutu’s theology, as is evident in his work, God Is Not a Christian. In an interview from June 15, 2010 with Allister Sparks on this topic he responded,
I am a Christian, but the books that we hold to provide for how we should be thinking about God. […] I mean, right at the beginning, the gospel of John tells about ‘the light that lightens everyone’; it does not say ‘the light that lightens those who become Christians’; it says ‘everyone who comes into the world.’ (113)
His embrace of the religiosity and spiritual paths of others went well beyond the, however well-intended, condescending view first clearly articulated by Karl Rahner (1904–1984) that people who have never heard the Christian Gospel might be saved through Christ. On this view, as Gavin D’Costa writes, the non-Christians could have “in [their] basic orientation and fundamental decision accepted the salvific grace of God, through Christ, although [they] may never have heard of the Christian revelation” (132).
John Allen, his personal assistant of many years, recalls in an interview with Sparks on June 16, 2010 Tutu saying during a conference of interfaith leaders: “Don’t insult people of other faiths by saying, ‘Oh, actually our God is your God, too; You are a Christian too without knowing it.’ Don’t insult people by reducing their faith to that” (313).
While the God that Tutu worshipped was decidedly not a Christian, Tutu certainly was one, as demonstrated in his love for and agonized relationship with the Anglican Church. He was concerned with all its Anglo ceremonial and hierarchical trappings and doctrine, and sustained a relentless critique of its positions on the ordination of women and the recognition of gay rights, among others. While he celebrated religious diversity in public, in private, Christ was his only avenue to God. Tutu commenced every meeting with him—regardless of the religious composition of those present—with a prayer. Careful to avoid doctrinal expressions that may not sit well with any non-Christians present, he never ceded his role as the assumed leader and always offered what could only have been a Christian prayer in mode and content. Tutu spent four hours every day on his knees in silent contemplation.
Jesus Christ as Lord, saviour, and liberator permeated his speeches, prayers, and interventions—in short, his entire being. His faith in Jesus Christ was always endearing and often disarming to those who detested what Tutu otherwise stood for or what Christ represented to him. His profound belief in a personal God who hears and responds to him occasionally infuriated his comrades who did not share in his cherished relationship with a personal God. Sometimes we would spend many hours debating the wisdom of marching to Parliament, starting from St. Georges Cathedral in the Cape Town city centre, literally a stone’s throw away from Parliament. We were fully aware that we would be confronting the police and end up being arrested if we did. On a few occasions just before the march, Tutu, who was never a signed-up comrade of any of our political formations, would go into his sanctuary to pray for guidance, only to emerge from there saying something to the effect that this is not what he was moved to do by the spirit!
Tutu as a Mensch
Tutu was fully human and fully alive. He carried his power and fragility on his sleeves. He was a compelling character who was aware of his power but was never manipulative. While he was an irredeemable patriarch and an uncomfortable fit with progressive views on all the implications of gender equality, he was never a poster boy for machoism or patriarchy. In a moment of slumber, he advised the then-divorced President Nelson Mandela to get married to his partner, Graca Machel, because at his (Mandela’s) age, “He needs someone to bring his slippers to him when he gets up in the morning.” (While Machel needs no qualifications to avoid this kind of sexism, she was our neighboring country’s Minister of Education for several years.).
Tutu was fully aware of his stature in the world but never arrogant. He was always visibly and utterly dependent on the grace of the Transcendent. The one moment he could not perform was when he appeared as a humble petitioner trembling in front of God.
He loved all deeply, including his enemies, and was unashamedly desperate to be loved. He was a humble person, but was never so in the face of oppressive power. Easily moved to tears, he had a will of steel.
In what we call “struggle circles,” we found him infuriating for the simplicity of his kindness and love. He unfailingly referred to Prime Minister PW Botha, then the major enforcer of Apartheid, as “‘his brother-in-Christ.’ ‘Whether I like it or not; whether he likes it or not; PW both is my brother, and I must desire and pray for the best in him.’” Only much later did we see the value of our own humanity in never denying the humanity of our oppressors.
The world may know Tutu as a speaker, but he was also a listener. He was usually in a state of wakefulness when it came to justice and injustice, but he also fell asleep on occasion. When he awakened, he always grateful and happy to listen.
Sometime in August 2012, we learnt—and were alarmed—that Tutu was scheduled to speak alongside Tony Blair at a conference on leadership in Johannesburg. At a meeting among activists, many felt that we should publicly condemn him. I and others in Africa4Palestine said: “No, this is not how we treat comrades; the Arch is one of us in the trenches against injustice, and our first obligation is to speak to him.” Representing BDS-South Africa (now Africa4Palestine), I called Tutu and had a long conversation with him about the wrongfulness of sharing a platform with a war criminal. As was his habit, he replied that he needed to pray over the matter. Early the following day, he called to thank me (it was really “us”) for tugging at him and waking him up at a moment when he fell into an unethical slumber. Within hours the news was all over the media that Tutu had withdrawn from the conference because he refused to share a platform with a war criminal who should be in the Hague facing the International Criminal Court instead of pontificating about leadership in Africa. Remarking on his decision, he said,
The then leaders of the United States and Great Britain […] fabricated the grounds to behave like playground bullies and drive us further apart. They have driven us to the edge of a precipice where we now stand – with the spectre of Syria and Iran before us. [… ] On these grounds, alone, in a consistent world, those responsible for this suffering and loss of life should be treading the same path as some of their African and Asian peers who have been made to answer for their actions in The Hague.
Tutu as Prophet
Tutu as Prophetic Witness
Archbishop Desmond Tutu had a profound moral compass that was attuned to identifying and then confronting injustice. He was impulsive in his quest for a more just world. Inexorably driven to pursue a more just world like a moth drawn to a candle, he had no option but to go towards the light, even as he was a candle in his own right. The light, for him, was a more humane and just world. His impulses were at odds with the world and trappings of worldly power. As Sparks and Mpho Tutu write,
[…] He acted impulsively, driven by a passion for compassion. That compassion itself is the product of his ever-deepening spirituality, his belief that humanity is sacred and that every individual is a God-carrier to be cherished. Not for a second did any political strategy or agenda play a role in what Tutu did […]. (83)
Tutu remained consistent in his prophetic approach, which he clearly articulated in New York in 1973 at Union Theological Seminary. When referring to Black theology, he said:
[… It ] is an engaged, not an academic, detached theology. It is a gut-level theology, relating to the black man’s real concerns, life, and death issues. My paper [he could have said “my life”] is not an attempt to demonstrate the academic respectability of black theology but rather to make a straightforward, perhaps shrill, statement about an existent. Black theology is. No permission is requested for it to come into being […]. Frankly, the time has passed when we will wait for the white man to give us permission to do our thing. Whether or not he accepts the intellectual respectability of our activity is largely irrelevant. We will proceed regardless. (138–39)
Prophetic witness is often regarded solely in the paradigm or narrative of Moses confronting and speaking the truth to Pharoah. However, there is another calling, Moses speaking the truth to his people. As Tutu once said, “White oppression is not the only bondage from which Black people had to be liberated. When the white oppressor is removed, far too often he is succeeded by his Black counterpart.” (75). Tutu is, for example, and not without good cause, revered as an icon of non-violence and a voice of moderation; this is Moses addressing his own people who stray from what the prophet believes is true of their higher selves. Other examples of this include Tutu’s intervention in cases of mob lynching or, on rare occasions, when he negatively commented on the liberation movement’s final resort to armed struggle against the apartheid regime after years of knocking and banging on the Pharaoh’s doors. He retained this fundamental prophetic calling until he transitioned into the afterlife through his consistent and often scathing criticism of the African National Congress government on a range of issues ranging from corruption to the government’s denial in 2011 of a visa to the Dalai Lama. Tutu reminds us that we have to resist becoming the evil that we abhor.
This prophetic Tutu was embraced by all, albeit for different reasons. For a significant number, he was going to be the barrier that saves the civilized White people from the potential and ever-latent barbarism of Black people that may be unleashed when their liberation comes. Their disquiet was about Black people utilizing armed struggle for their liberation. Of course, for them there was never a concern with challenging White power that resorts to arms to invade, occupy, oppress, and sustain their own economies built on the military-industrial complex. For them, it was only the “cuddly” Tutu to be embraced; his revolutionary energy was to be squeezed out amid that embrace. Cornel West, in relation to Martin Luther King Jr. describes this as “SantaClausification,” a deliberate attempt to first colonize the revoultionary heritage of the prophet and then marshal this in the service of ongoing subjugation.
Tutu As Prophetic Offender
The other Tutu is the prophet who privileges the responsibility to confront the Pharaoh and demand, “Let my people go!” above that of confronting his own people and their inadequacies. His people, their liberation movement, utterings, and practices were often profoundly problematic, but they were not the problem. Pharaoh, in this case, the apartheid regime—was the problem.
This explains why Tutu, when he was in the public arena, hardly paid any attention to the troubling questions of disunity among the Palestinian liberation movements, the decimation of the Palestinian Christian community, the disconcerting Islamization of some parts of the resistance movement, the Palestinian resort to armed struggle, and even suicide operations. The responses of the occupied to their occupation, however deeply flawed and problematic, are not the problem. The Occupation is.
More than just part of his charisma, underneath his cuddly and bubbly performance was a mad and troubled man, permanently in a state of unease with an unjust world and stubbornly resisting the idea that, in Margaret Thatcher’s words, “There is no alternative.” He was constantly in search of “the least,” as in the words of Christ: “What you have done to the least of my companions, you have done to me” (Matthew 25:37–40). He was also willing to rethink, in various contexts, what constitutes “the least.” Initially, for him, the people on the margins were Black people. He then moved on to consider all the impoverished and marginalized, and then to include those living under the boots, bullets, and bombs of Zionism, and then those who were rejected based on their sexual orientation and identity, and then those who were in excruciating physical and mental pain who were desperate to die, and then our home, the ravaged earth. The list goes on from there.
Tutu had no desire to offend but knew that he would. He embraced this offensiveness and often mischievously responded to it as if he had no clue that he would offend. From this disturbance and refusal to adjust to a fundamentally unjust world, Tutu remained a maladjusted human being all of his life. Archbishop Desmond Tutu embraced being offensive and calculatingly infuriating as the logical outcome of his unease with the world. Something is wrong with you if Pharaoh is not troubled by your tirades—if you are equally welcome in his court as you are on the streets of the oppressed, where people are barely able to survive under the boots of oppressors and/or are dying from the bullets of the soldiers of occupation.
Unlike just about every other cause in the world, that of the Palestinians can earn one nearly immediate opprobrium in the world of power. Go beyond the “peace and security for both sides” refrain and name the problem—“Israel is an apartheid state”—and you are stuck with the brand “antisemite.” He was aware of the profound offense that would cause, and he went ahead—repeatedly—with his persistent description of Israel as an apartheid state that has to be boycotted and sanctioned. Inside South Africa, where, mercifully, the Zionist lobby carries preciously little weight, they lamented his ignorance of the what they argued was the “real” situation. “He ventures where angels fear to tread, not because he is brave, but because he is ignorant.”
Abroad he was denounced as an antisemite—an accusation that alternatively caused him pain and some measure of bemusement. On several occasions he misspoke, inadvertently or not, of “Zionists” and “Jews” as if equivalent. Yet, he conveyed what would become even more oppressive in subsequent years, the inability to say anything critical of Israeli state violence that will not prompt accusations of antisemitism. Speaking in New York In late April 2002, he said: “People are scared in [America] to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful, very powerful. Well, so what? Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin were all-powerful, but, in the end, they bit the dust.” The construct—“the Jewish lobby is powerful”—does traffic in antisemitic tropes. But for Tutu, this misspoken moment unfolded because of his prophetic support of Palestinians. His misspeaking here conveys the convergence of his prophetic and all too human dimensions. That his speech verged into unfortunate antisemitic tropes does not change the fact that he could have accepted most certainly the learning such a moment could afford (in the same way that he stood corrected around sharing a stage with Blair). Likewise, this moment of a divergence from what is right does not change the depth of prophetic solidarity his support of the Palestinian struggle against the boot of the Israeli occupation and apartheid regime inhabited.
Tutu’s theology was simple: embrace the logic and the dreams of the margins.
During the days of apartheid, we never had a specific word for “Whites” who were oppressing us. We just said “The Whites” because that was the face of oppression. We used the term “Whites” synonymously as “oppressors” even as we consistently affirmed the non-racial ideal for our country’s post-apartheid future and embraced numerous Whites as our comrades. A White Jew, Joe Slovo (d. 1995), headed the revered South African Communist Party. Another, Ronnie Kasrills, led our underground army (Umkhonto we Sizwe). White Jews and numerous young Afrikaners were at the forefront of the End Conscription Campaign (ECC, est. 1983) that sought to persuade young White males to resist conscription into the apartheid army. Neither in public nor inside the circles of the liberation movement was it ever considered an issue, let alone improper, that when we spoke about “White oppression” or the “Afrikaner Reich,” that we included them or diminished the suffering of Jews at the hands of the Nazi Holocaust.
Parenthetically, for me, conscious of the larger historical demonization of Jews, I will never use “Jews” as a synonym for Zionists, Occupiers, and Oppressors—even as all Zionists insist that Jewish identity is synonymous with Zionism. Tutu’s deployment of an antisemitic trope detracted from his prophetic outcry against the actual experiences of Palestinian oppression by a regime that calls itself “Jewish.” This, notwithstanding, I do not hold the Palestinians, who daily experience the only face of their oppressor as a Jewish one, accountable to the same universalist and humanitarian logic.
In 1984 Tutu, on a visit to the US, described Ronald Reagan’s administration as “an unmitigated disaster for us blacks” (95) and Reagan himself as “a racist pure and simple.” In 1988 he condemned a speech by Ronald Reagan in which the US president defended the continued involvement of US companies in the South African economy as “nauseating” and “the pits.” For his part, said Tutu, “America and the west can go to hell.”
Upon careful reflection, these two prophetic modes of engagement—as a witness and as an offender—are not two utterly different callings. On the one hand, there is the calling to be fully human, to embrace all of humanity and our home and to hold your own, the oppressed, accountable. For there is always the element, capacity, or lesser manifestation of the Pharaonic present in all of us in our personal, public, religious, and political lives. On the other hand, there is the urgency of God’s preferential option for the marginalized to resist Pharaoh with all the might and anger at our disposal. The major challenge for us lies in embracing this dual calling along with a ruthless discernment about which aspects to the foreground in our public witness and at what particular time to bring them to the public. Which Tutu do we embrace, and at what moment?
Farid Esack is a leading Muslim liberation theologian who cut his teeth in the South African struggle for liberation. He is a Senior Research Fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advance Studies. In 2018 he was presented with the Order of Luthuli, South Africa’s highest national award, for “his brilliant contribution to academic research and the fight against race, gender, class, and religious oppression”. He serves on the board of Africa4Palestine.
Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu in prayer, 2011. Image via Wikimedia Commons. CC-BY 2.0.
Desmond Tutu was a contemporary biblical prophet who used his prophetic voice to challenge Israel about its horrific treatment of the Palestinian people. Because he spoke in his own Christian and traditional African theological language, I will translate his message into mine: a Jewish version of our shared moral and religious commitments to peace and justice.
Tutu sometimes compared himself to Jeremiah because he could not keep silent in the face of injustice, and colleagues in South Africa believed he had the prophetic style of a man who acted intuitively, but not always consultatively (312). Like the prophets of old, however, he mixed his message of chastisement (you have woefully mistreated the Palestinian people) with a message of comfort (you too deserve safety and security in this land that you share with them). But Tutu was not always careful with his words, calling out the “powerful American Jewish lobby” for example, or failing to appreciate their adamant views about the uniqueness of the Holocaust, and that gave American and Israeli Jewish leaders an excuse to fear and dismiss him. It also gave the right wing the excuse to label him, inaccurately, as an antisemite, to which he replied:
Are you anti-Jewish? Not anti-Semitic. And then, you would have to say the same thing to the biblical prophets—because they were some of the most scathing critics of the Jewish leadership of their day. We don’t criticize Jewish people. We criticize, we will criticize, when they need to be criticized the government of Israel.
And he did so for forty years, from the early 1980s until his death in 2021. Tutu exemplified the patience of a prophet willing to repeat his message as often as necessary, until the government of Israel and its American Jewish supporters listened and changed their ways.
When our people groaned by virtue of the burden of racist oppression, we invoked the God who addressed Moses in the burning bush, we told our people that our God had heard their cry, had seen their anguish, and knew their suffering, and would come down, this great God of exodus, this liberator God as in the past to deliver us as God had delivered Israel from bondage. We told them that God was notoriously biased in favor of those without clout; the poor, the weak, the hungry, the voiceless.
It is that God that, Tutu knew, favored the enslaved over their oppressors, and was therefore also on the side of the Palestinians. Tutu’s theology had no place for the God of the conquest who oversaw the expulsion and destruction of the Indigenous peoples of the land that the Biblical authors claimed they then inhabited and named Israel and Judah, a vision of God that is also rejected by contemporary Jewish liberation theology. It is, unfortunately, the dominant theology of Israel today. This is the starting point of Tutu’s challenge: Israel must recognize the God that is being worshipped in the land today is the God of conquest and not the God of liberation, and that they are not one in the same.
Tutu delivered his message about Palestinian oppression to the Jewish supporters of Israel at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York after winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 when he said: “I am myself sad that Israel, with the kind of history and traditions her people have experienced, should make refugees of others. It is totally inconsistent with who she is as a people.” In that speech he critiqued not only the Nakba, but also the Sabra and Shatila massacre (when in 1982 in Beirut Christian phalangists murdered Palestinian inhabitants under the watchful eye of Israel’s Defense Forces who did nothing to stop the atrocities) and the barriers Israel set up between the holy places of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Jerusalem. What Tutu pointed to here foreshadowed the separation wall and the barriers that exist today in Gaza.
In the gentlest of ways, Tutu critiques Jewish American and Israeli leaders for forgetting their own history of suffering, especially during the Holocaust. He contends that these memories should serve as a reminder to not make others suffer in similar ways: making them refugees, being responsible for their murders, creating barriers to their freedom of movement and worship. Translating the message into the language of Jewish ethical tradition, I would rely here on Hillel’s retort to the person who challenged him to explain the Torah while standing on one foot: “What is hateful to you, do not do to another—all the rest is commentary” (Shabbat 31a). From a Jewish ethical standpoint, I would add a longer list of hateful things that Tutu did not mention in detail:
The seizing and destruction of Palestinian property (whole villages in 1948, houses and olive trees consistently since then), as was done to the Jews most dramatically on Kristallnacht and consistently thereafter.
Intimidation expressed via epithets: “death to the Arabs” / “no dogs or Jews allowed.”
Random acts of cruelty and humiliation perpetrated by soldiers, Israeli and Nazi.
Bureaucratic harassment (identity documents and permits, border crossings delayed or not allowed, passports destroyed).
Encouraging traitors (Palestinian informers and Jewish Capos).
Separation walls and prison-like conditions in Gaza not unlike German work camps.
Golda Meir blaming Arabs for making young Jewish men into killers; Nazis blaming Jews for all of Germany’s problems.
What was hateful to the Jewish people, Israel has done to the Palestinians.
When Tutu made a Christmas pilgrimage to the Holy Land sites in the occupied West Bank in 1989 he also visited Yad Vashem (the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem), which, according to Roni Arieli is required by Israeli protocol for all diplomats coming to Israel for the first time. He described his response in his book, No Future Without Forgiveness:
I visited the Holy Land over Christmas 1989 and had the privilege during that visit of going to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. When the media asked me for my impressions, I told them it was a shattering experience. I added that the Lord whom I served, who was himself a Jew, would have asked, ‘But what about forgiveness?’ That remark set the cat among the pigeons. I was roundly condemned. (267)
Tutu’s prophetic and Christian vision required the next step: forgiveness. This was the key to the Truth and Reconciliation process he oversaw in South Africa and was deeply embedded in the teachings of Jesus (the Lord whom he served) and in the African traditional concept of ubuntu (compassion, humanness rather than victimization or turning the tables). Tutu was willing to allow that Jews were not able to forgive the Nazis, but as a prophet he needed to raise that possibility. And, it appears, except for the likes of Simon Wiesenthal and his followers, Jews (and particularly the Israeli government) have certainly forgiven the Germans.
I understand this through the lens of the Jewish ethical principle of teshuvah, the concept of return and repentance. Teshuvah is the central act performed on Yom Kippur. Jews are instructed to go over the ways they have missed the mark (often mistranslated as sin) and make restitution. If the error was against God, prayer and fasting will clear the record. If the error was against another human, one must ask forgiveness, and, according to tradition, make restitution. For Jews and Germans this has been well accomplished. Germany has apologized, made reparations where possible, financially supported Israel, made antisemitism a crime, and created memorials to the Holocaust in almost every city. It is clear that this history will be remembered. What Germany has not done is pay attention to the fact that they exist in a moral triangle, as Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor point out in their book of that title. For while Germany has modeled teshuvah for Israel, they have not acknowledged the harm that the Holocaust set in motion that was the Nakba. This is a clear limitation on their expression of teshuvah, which in traditional Judaism is only complete when, given the opportunity, one don’t repeat one’s error.
Germany’s teshuvah, despite its limitations, could at least be a starting point for truth and reconciliation in Israel/Palestine. It must begin with Israel ending the occupation so they can begin the act of doing teshuvah: acknowledging the harms they have done to the Palestinian people, making reparations that allow for the literal “teshuvah,” or return of the Palestinians to their land, providing real financial restitution, ending acts and words of hate, correcting the historical record so that it won’t be forgotten, and being open to a different iteration of a one state solution which exists today, as Judith Butler pointed out many years ago, in abject form.
Can Tutu’s prophetic dream of peace and justice for Israelis and Palestinians come to be? Can Palestinians forgive if Israel does teshuvah? If violent and non-violent solutions have failed, perhaps what is needed is leadership, on both sides, of men and women with the religious values, moral clarity, and courage of Desmond Tutu to lead the way.
Cathedral of Notre Dame, Bangui, Central African Republic, March 2018. Image courtesy of the author.
I owe a special debt of gratitude to Marie-Claire Klassen, Emmanuel Ojeifo, William Orbih, Jason Springs, Cecilia Lynch, and Todd Whitmore for taking the time to read and respond to my Who Are My People?: Love, Violence, and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa in this book symposium. I am deeply touched and encouraged not only by their responses, but by the many wonderful things they each have said about Who Are My People? They each have made a number of interesting observations about the uniqueness, strengths, and accomplishments of the book. I treasure these very much. The discussants also raise some important critical issues and observations. I treasure these too and take them very seriously. I would have loved to respond to all the issues raised by each of the discussants. However, given the limitations of this forum and space, all I can say is that I will continue to think and reflect on these issues, and hopefully attend to them in some of my future work. Here, however, I can briefly highlight and respond to five key issues—theological portraiture, genre, justice, gender, and the overall structure of the book—that seem to cut across the submissions of the symposium.
Theological Portraiture
The first issue regards the methodology of theological portraiture that I employ in Who Are My People, which has been commented on by all the theologians in the discussion: Klassen, Ojeifo, Orbih, and Whitmore. While noting my debts to Sara Lawrence Lightfoot and Jessica Hoffmann Davis in developing this methodology, the discussants note the uniqueness, freshness, and effectiveness of this methodology for doing theology. Indeed, Klassen rightly points out that one unique way that I employ this methodology in Who Are My People? is to include a theological portrait of myself. That I do so is not simply the outworking of the “narrative” approach, which Whitmore rightly traces to the important influence of Stanley Hauerwas on my thinking, but also reflects a fundamental theological conviction. In my previous work, Born from Lament: The Theology and Politics of Hope in Africa, I noted the task of theology is to “give an account of hope” (1 Peter 3:15) and that responding to this invitation requires taking seriously autobiography as an essential aspect of the theological task. Others (e.g. Mclendon, Dickinkson ) have made a similar point coming from a different angle.
Whitmore raises serious critical issues regarding my use of portraiture, which revolves around the dangers of crossing disciplinary boundaries. Is it possible, he asks, “to be at the same time a theologian and a cultural anthropologist?” Whitmore points out that from the point of view of a cultural anthropology and qualitative sociology, the kind of research in Who Are My People cannot be recognized as valid ethnographic research (my claims notwithstanding) because it suffers from inherent “confirmation bias.” For Whitmore that is of course the fundamental aim and primary achievement of the book, namely to turn what cultural anthropologists and sociologists may view as a vice (confirmation bias) into a virtue, and thus offer empirical grounds for hope. My takeaway from Whitmore’s important discussion is that while the theologian should not shy away from employing ethnographical methods and research tools, she should never seek to be, and in any case will never be fully recognized as, a cultural anthropologist. On the other hand, the theologian should never feel that she has to give sociology or cultural anthropology a privileged position. She is a theologian, and theology is itself a form of sociology. Her goal in remaining unapologetically theological even as she learns from and employs social scientific tools and methods, is to develop and articulate a unique, Christian anthropology or sociology. As a unique form of Christian sociology, theology’s goal is, as John Milbank reminds us, to “tell again the Christian mythos, pronounce again the Christian logos, and call again for Christian praxis in a manner that restores their freshness and originality” (381). This is what I try to do in Who Are My People?
The Question of Genre
A second, but closely related issue of methodology is the question of genre. Klassen highlights the significance of closing the book with a sermon. This genre is not one that is typically deployed in academic work. It may of course be that ending the book with a sermon simply confirms my own idiosyncratic identity as a scholar and as a priest (preaching is what priests do, after all). However, as Klassen rightly notes, ending the book in this way is an invitation to consider the issue of identity not only in terms of its sociological dimensions, but also its spiritual and practical dimensions. She also notes how the sermon points to the significance of “friendship” across divides, which is the goal of the journey of identity, i.e. to embrace and expand a new sense of “we” in the world. Beyond this, however, concluding the book with a sermon is in line with the tonality of the entire book, which is homiletic. One reason behind this is that I have come to increasingly understand theology as a form of preaching. This is consistent with the view of the early Fathers of the Church, for whom the sermon was the primary genre of theological exploration. This is because early Fathers of the Church rightly understood theology as an exercise in the imatatio Christi: an invitation to “re-enact and instigate others to re-enact Jesus the Nazarene the Christ.” In this connection, Orbih rightly notes the deep affinity between my work and Whitmore’s Imitating Christ at Magwi). But this is also the reason why “missiology” (as Ojeifo rightly notes) is at the forefront of Who Are My People? as it should be for every theological enterprise.
Emmanuel Katogole with Bernard Kinvi, whose story and work is featured in Chapter 4 of Who Are My People? Image courtesy of the author.
The Issue of Justice
A third critical issue has to do with the question of justice. Springs notes that while the portraits I provide in Who are My People expose the logic of love and suffering, they do not explicitly engage the question of justice. Klassen asks” “How does a theology of justice intersect with an excess of love?” Both wanted to see a more explicit engagement with the question of justice. True, an explicit engagement with the notion of justice could have offered a more robust display of the transforming power of love. Love not only redefines the meaning of justice, but it also heals and restores (in its form as restorative justice) the wounds of violence. That is why the dichotomy between love and justice, or between love and power, or between justice and mercy (forgiveness) is a false dichotomy. Like Martin Luther King Jr. (as cited by Springs), I work with the assumption that the logic of the cross transforms both power and justice, both justice and mercy, into the reconciling love of God. While I did not explicitly state this, I offered portraits that serve as both the argument and evidence of this truth. Take the case of Maggy, whose story is about the power of love to make her both a “rebel” and an “inventor.” It is the “excess of love” that shaped in her the character of what Springs might, following Villa-Vincencio, recognize as Parrhesia, i.e., frank and fearless speech. What the story of Maggy helps to confirm, however, is that more than a form of speech, Parrhesia is a virtuous form of engagement, an ongoing praxis and struggle with and on behalf of wounded humanity. That is what the search for justice looks like.
The Role of Gender
The observation is related to the question of gender. Ojeifo rightly notes that because women are so often the target and victims of violence in Africa, an analysis of gender is necessary for understanding the reality of violence in Africa. Klassen also rightly notes that feminist and womanist theologians (Delores Williams, Shawn Copeland, Dorothee Sölle, and others) would serve as enriching dialogue partners. Not only have they been attentive to the question of suffering, but they have also consistently upheld the image of God as justice (see earlier). Moreover, in their resistance to the structures of injustice in their communities, African women activists confirm that another world, a different Africa, is possible. Lynch raises another important point in relation to African women theologians (Musa Dube, Isabel Phiri, and others), namely their attentiveness to the spirit world, and their willingness to explore other, non-Christian spiritualities, especially the healing and reconciling possibilities within African native spiritualities. All these observations suggest that a gendered perspective and engagement with women scholars would greatly enrich my work. I take this recommendation seriously and will engage more explicitly with some women’s voices from the Circle for Concerned African Women Theologians in my current research project on land and ecology.
The Book’s Structure
A final issue relates to the structure of the book. Whereas many note the compelling structure of the book, Lynch wonders whether the book could not have been better served if the ecological crisis had been foregrounded in it. In this reorganization, the book would begin with the ecological crisis and then move to a discussion of “religion” and “ethnicity,” not the other way around. Doing so, Lynch suggests, would resolve an apparent tension (ambivalence) in the book’s discussion of indigeneity. Whereas Lynch’s point may seem to have some validity, given the autobiographical dimension of the book, it is only more recently (I must confess) that I have started paying attention to issues of land and ecology. Moreover, it is only by doing so that I am rediscovering the deep roots of my own identity in the “soil,” and with this, the rich resources of African native spiritualities in attending to the ecological crisis. As I reflect on these through my work and engagement with Bethany Land Institute, I see more clearly the relation between the ecological crisis and other forms of violence. I am therefore hoping that my current research project, entitled Sowing Hope: Ecology, Integral Human Development and Theological Peacebuilding, will be an opportunity to work out the practical, spiritual, and peacebuilding dimensions of identity that take the issues of land, soil, and community seriously.
I conclude by thanking the co-directors and staff of the Contending Modernities Project at Notre Dame, who sponsored the research of Who are My People (as part of the Authority, Community & Identity in Africa research focus). A special word of thanks to Dania Straughan, the program manager, who organized the book launch, and to Joshua Lupo, the editor of the CM blog, for hosting this symposium.
Katongole, a Catholic priest ordained by the Archdiocese of Kampala, is a core faculty member of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. Previously, he has served as associate professor of theology and world Christianity at Duke University, where he was the founding co-director of the Duke Divinity School’s Center for Reconciliation. He is the author of books on political theology, the Christian social imagination, and Christian approaches to justice, peace, and reconciliation. His most recent book is Who Are My People: Love, Violence and Christianity in Subsaharan Africa (2022).
Father Toussaint Kafahire in audience with Pope Francis in the DRC. He presents a painting to the pope in this image. Courtesy of the author.
This piece is co-published with the Critical Investigations into Humanitarianism in Africa blog
Pope Francis’s long-awaited trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan finally occurred from January 31 to February 3, 2023. It had been long in the making. On November 23, 2017, the pope had offered a prayer mass for peace in South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The opening words of his homily were: “In prayer, we want to sow seeds of peace in the lands of South Sudan and the DRC, and in all lands devastated by war.” On November 1, 2022, almost five years after that prayer for peace and reconciliation, Pope Francis gathered African youth from different Catholic universities online for an hour and a half synodal encounter. During that conversation, addressing a question by a Congolese student from Goma, Pope Francis laughed at the rumor that he had gotten scared by the war that broke out near Goma, in the eastern province of North Kivu, where he was supposed to stop during his visit. But he confirmed his resolve to visit both the Congo and the South Sudan in late January and February 2023. Visiting these two countries had obviously been on his mind for a long time. So, finally realizing his desire, Pope Francis brought to the Congolese, as well as to the Southern Sudanese, a powerful message of love, peace, and reconciliation.
The Joy of Welcome
Tens of thousands of people cheered as Pope Francis crossed the city of Kinshasa, a distance that Congolese might take three to four hours to cover on normal days, due to heavy traffic jams. It was a unique moment in the history of the DRC. The last time a pope had traveled to the DRC was in 1985. I was 12 years old. Close to forty years later, Pope Francis had made it happen again. Hence, the emotion of the Congolese nation was expressed along the more than 27 kilometers that his papamobile traveled from Ndjili international airport to the Palais de la Nation where President Felix Tshisekedi was waiting for him. Crowds of faithful Catholics came with flags, drums, whistles, banners, and other instruments to express their joy of welcoming Pope Francis to the DRC. The pope had surely heard of the controversial ban issued by the municipality to prohibit ordinary people from displaying their items for sale along the road on the day of his arrival. The majority of the Congolese people sell small, cheap items, anything really to get by on a daily basis. Contrasting the everyday palpable poverty with this circumstantial euphoria, the pope must have been moved, remembering that crowd that moved Jesus for they were like sheep without a shepherd (Mt 9:36). Except that the ambiance was a celebration of something indefinable.
General audience with Pope Francis. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
In Goma, however, security conditions had worsened as M23 rebels were fighting for God knows for what. Initially, people believed that this revival of violence in eastern Congo was designed to dissuade the pope from coming. There could be some truth to that. Wars in the DRC are indeed fought at several levels, and the control for the image, the information, and the framing of the issue is something that those with high stakes in the destabilization of the Congo do not intend to lose. Given that the pope’s visit would highlight hard truths about these “fabricated” wars, the resumption of the war in June 2022 was interpreted as a calculated move to bar the pope from traveling to the DRC and by the same token from getting the world to focus on the Congo.
Instead, despite the conflict, the entire Congolese nation was overjoyed when the pope arrived, transcending at least momentarily any differences. He is one of the first global leaders, if not the first, to brave the stereotypes and the danger—imagined or real—of visiting the DRC. The pope’s presence in the Congo was sending the message to the Congolese people that we matter, at least to someone of that importance. Our joy was also an expression of gratitude that someone finally respected us as human beings, treated us as such, and came to visit despite the isolation, bans, and other forms of discrimination that the international community has put on the DRC.
The core message of Pope Francis in the DRC can be summarized in his introductory words in response to Felix Tshisekedi’s welcoming remarks. His audience was composed of members of the government, leaders of the civil society, other religious faiths, as well as diplomatic authorities. He told president Tshisekedi, and through him the Congolese nation, that he had “come to you, in the name of Jesus, as a pilgrim for reconciliation and peace.” Indeed, the motto of his entire trip reads, “All reconciled in Jesus Christ,” which for him, was intended as an expression of love towards all, albeit expressed in Christian terminology, and an indication that his purpose was spiritual and pastoral (rather than political), “I have greatly desired to be here, and now at last I have come to bring you the closeness, the affection and the consolation of the entire Church.” Obviously, Pope Francis understands the role of the “Vicar of Christ” and the mission of the Church as a continuation of Christ’s mission to bring God closer to humanity; that is, to reconcile a sinful and estranged humanity with the Creator. Pope Francis had set out from the Vatican to deliver this message of reconciliation and peace to the Congolese and the South Sudanese whose recent histories have been characterized by wars, violence, and death.
Indeed, since the end of the previous world order characterized by the Cold War and subsequent Cold peace, the Congo has become a theater of neoliberal plunder, where global and regional powers are vying for the control of its vast natural resources. To do so, the sovereignty of the country and its people must be weakened through a ghost army incapable of defending territorial integrity and protecting its own citizens. This state of permanent violence has left many local communities destroyed, millions of women raped, and a nation dazed and confused. Addressing these conditions on a symbolic spiritual level, especially when proposed political solutions have proved ineffective, is also necessary as much scholarship shows.
The Church has to embody the expression of the nearness of God, especially to those who suffer the most, those who are exploited, marginalized, and whose fundamental human dignity is violated and denied. Drawing from the Jesuit outlook since the Second Vatican Council, and the new awareness that ensued in the 1970s about the mission to promote faith that does justice, Pope Francis proclaimed the gospel where it is most needed. The Church in the world ought to take seriously its role of being the “salt of the earth and the light of the world” (Mt 5: 13-16), the yeast that ferments (Mt 13:31-33) the dough of social transformation.
Speaking Historical Truth
Pope Francis had strong words on his arrival, lambasting western powers that continue the colonial regime of plunder and exploitation of natural resources of the Congo at the expense of the Congolese population. In the history of the Congo, the people have been oppressed at different moments by different masters. The Portuguese slave trade in the beginning. Then the late nineteenth century western colonization. And now, a neocolonial system of predation that still operates behind a smokescreen, using proxy Africans who understand very little about how they are not serving the cause of Africa’s emancipation. The Church itself was part, if not the instrument, of this colonial violence. As V. Y. Mudimbe has noted, however, the presence of missionaries also at times helped soften “the harshness of European impact on the indigenous peoples whose lands were invaded and exploited” (45–46). The colonial Church was more socially paternalistic and less politically critical of the colonial brutalities in the Congo. In the 1950s and 1960s, however, as an indigenous clergy was coming of age, and as the theology of inculturation sought to articulate the best way of being authentically African and Christian, the African Catholic Church started addressing the lacunae of the missionary theology by denouncing the deviations of power. Where Belgian missionaries failed to denounce colonial brutalities, for the sake of patriotism, Cardinal Malula became vocal against the abusive power by President Mobutu in the 1970s. In line with a powerful and vocal local Catholic clergy, Pope Francis could echo the struggle of the Conference of Catholic Bishops (CENCO), telling the west:
… this country [the DRC] and this continent [Africa] deserve to be respected and listened to; they deserve to find space and receive attention: Hands off the Democratic Republic of the Congo! Hands off Africa! Stop choking Africa: it is not a mine to be exploited nor a terrain to be plundered. May Africa be the protagonist of its destiny! May the world acknowledge the catastrophic things that were done over the centuries to the detriment of local peoples, and not forget this country and this continent. May Africa, the smile and hope of the world, count for more. May it be spoken of more frequently, and have greater weight and representation among nations!
Pope Francis reminded the Congolese people that our lives are more precious than all the diamonds that can be extracted from our land. He then met with survivors from the war-torn eastern part of the country, and he condemned the massacres, the rapes, and the destruction of villages. Indeed, these first words of Pope Francis on Congolese soil were very moving, very refreshing, and very significant. I do not recall any leader of such stature addressing the Congolese people with such kindness, respect, love, and compassion. Never before had a leader of the world shown that much empathy and consideration toward the Congolese. And more important, no one has acknowledged the efforts of the Congolese people like Pope Francis to pull the nation together, and to dream of a future that is more humane and more dignifying.
A Personal Audience
On the second day of the pope’s visit, after meeting with the youth and catechists at the stadium, he gave a private audience to some 40 young people from the Catholic Universities in the country. He had already met with some of them online on November 1, 2022. During that meeting, the young people handed a memo to the pope in which they requested that he amplify their voice in the international community by asking for a special penal tribunal for the crimes committed in the Congo. They also requested that Pope Francis speak to Congolese authorities to release prisoners whose cases have not received justice.
The author in a personal audience with Pope Francis. Image courtesy of the author.
In turn, the pope told the students some profound truths about what it means to live a meaningful life. “Your life must be rooted in love,” he told them. “Without love, life is meaningless.” He went on to explain the three kinds of love that are absolute and non-negotiable. The first type concerns the love of God, the second the love of one’s own mother, and the third is the love of one’s homeland. Strange! Isn’t it? Pope Francis elevated the love of one’s motherland on a par with the love of God and the love of one’s mother. Obviously, this is a subversive understanding of the Torah, which states the love of God to be first and of the neighbor to be second (see also, Mt 22:37-39). Equally important, adds the pope, is the civic love for one’s motherland, which includes protection of the environment and improvement of social arrangements towards greater justice. Extrapolating the religious and biblical importance of the love of God and of one’s parents (as progeny and identity come through the mother’s role as the one who gives birth and the one who looks after the education of the children), Pope Francis introduces this third element which consists of the love of the motherland. This is extremely symbolic, especially in the context of the Congo, a land that is violated and betrayed even by its own sons and daughters. It was unheard of before that patriotism could match spiritual love.[1]
Now we have a tryptic of love entailing the religious love of God, the cultural love of one’s mother, and the civic love that nurtures the responsibility to fulfill the common good in politics. Indeed, Pope Francis was simply reaffirming what he already said in several places, that though often denigrated, “politics remains a lofty vocation and one of the highest forms of charity, inasmuch as it seeks the common good. We need to be convinced that charity “is the principle not only of micro-relationships (with friends, with family members or within small groups) but also of macro-relationships (social, economic and political ones). I beg the Lord to grant us more politicians who are genuinely disturbed by the state of society, the people, the lives of the poor!” (Evangelii Gaudium, para. 205, the emphasis is mine). That tryptic of love is the secret to living a meaningful life with God and the ancestors within one’s homeland. Of course, this love for the homeland cannot be reduced to nationalistic chauvinism that excludes others, especially foreigners.
The author in a personal audience with Pope Francis. Image courtesy of the author.
Pope Francis had, indeed, understood the drama of the Congolese people as the result of a system of plunder, violence, and subjugation that was set in place since the early encounter with the west. But he also reminded the young Catholics in this private and intimate conversation that the Congolese too bear responsibility for what is happening to the country. In fact, letting others get involved either as saviors of your situation (i.e., the East African Community) or the crux of the problem (Rwanda and Uganda) is the first indicator of that national irresponsibility. In other words, the degree of blame for what is happening is shared between the Congolese elite and those foreign predators who have a stranglehold on the Congo’s resources. Selling out and prostituting one’s motherland is as sinful as betraying the “absolute love” of God and of the mother. In other words, genuine love for one’s country can open young people up to political careers, which, if done with love, becomes the highest form of charity.
Congolese Beauty; Congolese Hospitality
Pope Francis had set the tone for his message to the world from Congolese land on the very day of his arrival in Kinshasa. At the Palais de la Nation, he defined the framework within which he sought to relate to the Congolese situation on the ground. Neither a confrontation nor a denunciation, but rather a proclamation. About the beauty of the country. Its ecosystem. It’s natural wealth. Despite being a jewel of the earth, a diamond for the world, the diaphragm of Africa, the history of the Congo has been and still is harsh on its people. As a prophet, the pope reminded the Congolese people to embody the spirit of the national anthem: “to build through hard work . . . a country more beautiful than ever before, and in peace.” The pope reminded these authorities of what he saw. “In the case of this people, one has the impression that the international community has practically resigned itself to the violence devouring it.”
Pope Francis’s effect is an important revival of our way of being Christians in the 21st century. Pope Francis has amazed the world because he has helped us, in the last 10 years of his papacy, to think of religion differently. It’s not a set of moral rules and principles to be observed. Religion—like every form of education for that matter—is about training and reforming consciences. It’s about being present to one’s time and getting involved to change the world. He is aware of the wounds inflicted by the Church on humanity, both during colonization and today. His campaign, therefore, is also to reconcile the Church with its own past, which necessarily calls for humility. Pope Francis, for instance, also surprised the world by stating that the Vatican was willing to return stolen indigenous artifacts to their rightful communities.
As far as his trip and message to the DRC are concerned, I believe he spoke in front of the world to amplify the hushed voices of the marginalized. He noted, “We cannot grow accustomed to the bloodshed that has marked this country for decades, causing millions of deaths that remain mostly unknown elsewhere. What is happening here needs to be known. The current peace processes, which I greatly encourage, need to be sustained by concrete deeds, and commitments should be maintained.” In public opinion and social media, the Congolese people showed that they felt vindicated that someone of that stature, an important international leader, finally spoke the truth about their predicament. They experienced the closeness of a powerful leader who not only denounced the western political hypocrisy but also acknowledged the African human worth and authentic spiritual wisdom.
[1] For many years, indeed, if not millennia, the Pauline theology that our citizenship is in heaven (Philippians 3:20) and that we should yearn for and worry about heavenly things is also slowly changing in interpreting social realities. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that Pope Francis’s invitation to patriotic love has a closeness in tone with the Weberian argument that the Protestant ethic potentially bolstered Christians to attend to this-worldly business. Nevertheless, Pope Francis’s background in Latin America and liberation theology might explain his attitude towards politics, society, and the love of one’s motherland as a spiritual commitment.
Toussaint Kafarhire Murhula, S.J., PhD, is a Jesuit priest, poet, theologian, social scientist, and certified Executive Coach. A native from the Democratic Republic of Congo, he studied international relations at Loyola University Chicago; ethics and social theories at the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University, in Berkeley, California; African Theology at Hekima University College in Nairobi (Kenya); and philosophy at the Facultés Saint Pierre Canisius, in Kinshasa (DRC). He is a member of several international associations and serves in leadership position as the Africa Region coordinator of the Catholic Theologians and Ethicists in World Church (CTEWC), Vice President of the African Studies Association of Africa (ASAA), member of the CIHA blog (Critical Investigations into Humanitarianism in Africa), and the Pan-African Theology and Pastoral network. He currently lives and teaches political science at the Université Loyola du Congo (ULC) in Kinshasa.
Wax print commemorating Pope John Paul II’s second visit to Nigeria in 1998. Image via Flickr user Tommy Miles. CC BY-SA 2.0.
Emmanuel Katongole’s recent work, Who Are My People? Love, Violence, and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa (2022) focuses on an important question about which little has so far been written, namely the question of African Christian identity. What does it mean to be an “African” and a “Christian” at the same time? Apart from the Ghanian Christian scholar Kwame Bediako’s book, Theology and Identity: The Impact of Culture Upon Christian Thought in the Second Century and in Modern Africa (1992), an offshoot of his doctoral dissertation presented at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1983, which sees African Christian identity as purely a spiritual and theological construct, there has been no other substantial exploration of this topic. Interestingly, the freshness that Katongole’s work brings to the conversation is that he is not exploring the question as a merely theoretical or speculative one, but as an existential question that shapes in very decisive ways the day-to-day realities, perceptions, and outcomes of African social, political, and Church life.
The Problem of Ethnicity in the Church in Africa
Let me begin with an example from a West African country—Nigeria—a bit far-away from the countries in eastern and central Africa which Katongole focuses on in his book. In 2015, two well-known Nigerian Catholic leaders—one an apostolic nuncio in the West Indies and the other a diocesan bishop in northern Nigeria—organized a seminar to discuss the problem of ethnic and sectional prejudices in the Church. The seminar came on the heels of an issue that was threatening the unity of the Catholic Church in Nigeria. In December 2012, Pope Benedict XVI had appointed a bishop for a vacant diocese in south-eastern Nigeria. The new bishop came from another diocese. He was from the same ethnic group as that of the diocese to which he was appointed, but spoke a different dialect. Many priests of the diocese mobilized the laity and together with them rejected the papal appointment, stating that they wanted a “son of the soil,” i.e., an Indigenous priest of their diocese, to be their bishop and not an “outsider.” This came as a shock to many people who always looked upon the south-eastern people of Nigeria as belonging to a homogenous ethnic group. The clergy and laity of the diocese in question accused a senior Nigerian Church official at the Vatican of masterminding the appointment of someone from his home as their bishop, decrying what they called “ethnic colonization.”
Despite the intervention of Pope Francis, the priests refused to back down. The “rejected” bishop resigned and was re-appointed to a newly created diocese in his own homeland. In 2022, Pope Francis surprised everyone by making this bishop a cardinal. As I write, the embattled diocese still does not have a bishop after more than a decade since its first bishop passed on. A similar event occurred in the diocese of Makeni, in the West African country of Sierra Leone, where a bishop appointed in 2012 to head the northern diocese was rejected by the Indigenous priests and lay people of the diocese, saying “they consider it an insult for the church hierarchy to bring in an outsider to lead them.” The new bishop hailed from a different ethnic group in the eastern Kenema district of the country.
I cite these sad stories to illustrate the fact that ethnic prejudices are a real issue in African societies and churches. However worrisome the Nigerian and Sierra Leonean cases are, they are nothing compared to the Rwandan genocide in 1994 wherein Christians who had been baptized with the same water of baptism, attended the same church, and participated in the same Eucharist, woke up one day to hack one another to death after using derogatory slurs such as “cockroaches” to describe their brothers and sisters. Thus, when Katongole in Who Are My People? asks the question which had been asked by French Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, then president of the Vatican’s pontifical council for justice and peace and John Paul II’s envoy to Rwanda in the aftermath of the genocide, “Is the blood of tribalism deeper than the waters of baptism?” (1), he is asking the crucial question about what constitutes the identity of the African Christian: Which marker of identity should establish a bond among Christ’s followers who are African—baptism or the tribe? If baptism, why has it not made more of a difference when it comes to tribal conflict? If tribe, why?
What happened in the Rwandan genocide has concerned Katongole for nearly thirty years. In his first major work on African political theology, The Sacrifice of Africa, he recalls: “This tragic event not only made me angry at the callousness with which the lives of so many people could easily be wasted; it shattered any naïveté I had about the church and Christianity in Africa” (8). How could this happen in a majority Christian nation at the same time that African Catholic leaders were meeting in Rome for the first Synod on Africa to set forth the identity of the church in Africa as “Family of God”?
Which marker of identity should establish a bond among Christ’s followers who are African—baptism or the tribe? If baptism, why has it not made more of a difference when it comes to tribal conflict? If tribe, why?
Tragic events such as the Rwandan genocide have shaped negative perceptions of sub-Saharan Africa in the western imagination, as that “God-forsaken wilderness” (15)—to borrow the expression of Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness—from which nothing good can come. Kurian, Katongole’s doctoral colleague at KU Leven, was perhaps acting on such perceptions when after watching the breaking news of the genocide, turned to Katongole as they were leaving the common room and asked, “Why do you Africans always kill your own people?” Katongole writes: “I was deeply troubled by the question” (12). Who Are My People? is his response to that troubling question. The first part of the book is a philosophical and theological reflection on Africa Christian identity, and draws significantly on the works of African and non-African, Christian and non-Christian, scholars. In the second part, Katongole focuses on ethnic, religious, and ecological violence in Rwanda, the Central African Republic, and Rwanda respectively. He sees these three forms of violence as symptoms of an “ongoing crisis of belonging” plaguing many sub-Saharan African countries, a crisis which has its origin in the invention of Africa at the dawn of colonial modernity. When he calls for a reinvention of Africa, therefore, Katongole is advocating for a critical engagement with modernity—a task he envisages for Christianity, Christian theology, and the Church in Africa.
Katongole’s diagnosis is compelling, but limited in its account of the history of this crisis. He does not seem to take account of the ubiquitous reality of sin. Sin is a wound, a rupture in the relationship between God and human beings, and it is the symptom of this wound that plays out in human societies whether we are looking at violence, poverty, war, or tribalism. Without addressing this theological issue, which is at the root of what the Catholic social tradition calls “social sins,” the possibility of redemption will be elusive. In this regard, Who Are My People? needs to be enriched by resources from Christian anthropology and soteriology, especially when it comes to what the tradition says about sin and about redemption.
Bringing Missiology to the Forefront of Africa’s Ecclesiological Identity
Notwithstanding, Katongole’s question remains valid.What does it mean to be an African Christian in the midst of harsh and sometimes tragic realities of African social life? To ask this question is to ask what difference Christianity can make in the task of reinventing Africa. I will highlight a few key areas where Katongole’s book makes a significant impact on how we answer this question. First, it elevates the question of the Church’s self-identity in Africa in a way that previous works have not done. In this way, it brings missiology—the theological understanding of the church’s mission—to the forefront of African ecclesial discourse. For instance, in the remarkable Christian individuals and activists from Uganda, Rwanda, the Central African Republic, and the Benin Republic, who are putting their lives on the line and interrupting the ethnic, religious, or ecological violence in their communities and nations, we see what it is to be a Church that is both attentive and responsive to the realities of its own social environment.
When Pope John Paul II wrote the post-synodal exhortation to Africa, Ecclesia in Africa(1995),he compared contemporary Africa to the man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, who fell into the hands of brigands, was beaten and left lying half dead by the roadside (cf. Luke 10:25-37). “Africa is a continent,” John Paul II said, “where countless human beings—men and women, children and young people—are lying, as it were, on the edge of the road, sick, injured, disabled, marginalized and abandoned” (para. 41). He expressed his hope that “the Church will continue patiently and tirelessly its work as a Good Samaritan” (para. 41). This is the ecclesiological identity and vocation of the Church in Africa that rings through Benedict XVI’s post-synodal exhortation Africae Munusas well—a church that is an instrument of reconciliation, justice, and peace on the continent of Africa.
Katongole’s book elevates the question of the Church’s self-identity in Africa in a way that previous works have not done.
Similarly, this is a concern that has been at the heart of the pastoral agenda of Pope Francis. Since the start of his pontificate in 2013, he has dreamt of a church that is a “field hospital.” By this, he means a church that is out on the battlefield attending to the wounded in dire need of healing, rather than a church that is timid, closed in, and afraid of stepping out of the securities of its own institutional existence. When he spoke to the Church’s pastoral leaders during his apostolic journey to war-torn South Sudan at St. Therese Cathedral in Juba, on February 4, 2023, Pope Francis reminded them that they are not called to be “tribal chieftains, but compassionate and merciful shepherds; not overlords, but servants who stoop to wash the feet of [their] brothers and sisters.”
Francis’s invitation to church leaders in sub-Saharan Africa to stand above tribal politics is a strategic call to embrace a different identity that is rooted in compassionate shepherding which should be the hallmark of the church. “Our first duty,” Francis notes, “is not to be a Church that is perfectly organized—any company can do this—but to be a Church that, in the name of Christ, stands in the midst of people’s troubled lives, a Church that is willing to dirty its hands for people.” This identity is in sync with what Katongole advocates in his book. Through the waters of baptism, the Christian acquires a new identity and starts off on “a journey of incorporation into a people—God’s new people—whose identity does not simply build on the so-called natural identities of ethnicity, tribe, race, or nation but reconfigures them in a distinct way, even as it heals and reconciles them” (44). This new identity is not merely spiritual. It has deep political resonance. Its power lies in the capacity to shape new visions and processes of politics in Africa that are grounded in an understanding of Christian life and identity as a journey. This is a journey, in which the African Christian is invited into new forms of community that cut across divides and heal different forms of brokenness and identities that often divide people.
The Importance of History and Social Experience in the Practice of Theology in Africa
A second area where Katongole’s book is impactful is in its attention to history and social experience in the practice of African Christian theology. The works of most modern African Christian theologians have largely been shaped by scripture and tradition as veritable sources of theology, without giving much attention to the concrete historical subjects of African theology, namely African Christians, in their day-to-day lived experiences. In 1992, the noted Congolese theologian Bénézet Bujo wrote in his book African Theology in Its Social Context: “The crisis of contemporary Africa can be solved only by those who have understood its historical roots and can see them in the light of the actual situation. Only thus can a new society arise which is both truly African and truly modern” (64).
The remarkable Christian individuals in the book who are disrupting these forms of violence in their communities and nation are given significant attention, not just for their faith-inspired activism, but more importantly because of their theological vitality and social agency.
The call that Bujo makes is for the renewal of African society through a fruitful engagement between theology, history, and social experience. Who Are My People? demonstrates a clear appreciation of Bujo’s call. In the African Christian theological landscape where the attention to history and experience in the practice of theology has been rather poor, Katongole’s book stands out for its conscious effort to pay attention to these neglected sources of theology. It critically interrogates the historical trajectory of Africa since the dawn of colonial modernity and brings that history into dialogue with the actual social experiences of the African peoples bearing the brunt of ethnic, religious, and ecological violence. The remarkable Christian individuals in the book who are disrupting these forms of violence in their communities and nation are given significant attention, not just for their faith-inspired activism, but more importantly because of their theological vitality and social agency. They understand the Incarnation not as a theological truth that stands outside human history, but as something that is deeply embedded in their own concrete social lives. Just as God in Jesus Christ takes on human flesh in order to condescend to meet suffering humanity, so these African Christian individuals are incarnating that love of God in Jesus Christ in their own suffering communities. They see their deepest identity in the story of God’s love made manifest in Jesus who sacrificed himself and died on the cross. This story, as Katongole notes, is the answer to the crisis of belonging in sub-Saharan African societies. “The power of this story,” he argues, “lies not only in resisting violence and healing its wounds but in shaping a new sense of self, a new sense of community (“my people”), and a new social order infused with love” (4). This is what makes Who Are My People? quite refreshing.
Conclusion: The Question of Gender
Considering how vexed the discussion on identity and violence is in sub-Saharan Africa today, it would be interesting to inquire what difference such a book would have made if it had included an investigation into how violence is produced in African societies from a gendered perspective. Gender remains an important site of violence, oppression, and resistance, and authors have argued for the need to include gender in the arsenal of analytical tools for rethinking African identity. While speaking to the victims of the armed violence, massacres, rapes, and exploitation going on in the eastern part of the Congo at Kinshasa on February 1, 2023, Pope Francis would not end his address without drawing attention to the plight of women, noting, “Violence against women and mothers is violence against God himself, who from a woman, from a mother, took on our human condition.” In this context, what does it mean to be an African Christian on a continent where mostly women are the victims of ethnic, religious, and ecological violence? Can Katongole’s work converse with the works of postcolonial African and non-African women scholars writing on the plight of women in Africa, such as Mercy Amba Oduyoye, Musa Dube, and Dorothy Louise Hodgson? This is a question we hope he can take up in more detail in later works.
Emmanuel Ojeifo is a second-year doctoral student in theology at the University of Notre Dame. He researches issues related to political theology in sub-Saharan Africa.
In this episode of the Kroc Cast, Contending Modernities editor and writer Josh Lupo and Co-Director Atalia Omer interview three contributors to their edited volume, Religion and Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism. The volume explores distinct moments in time across various geopolitical settings when solidarity failed to be realized between marginalized communities because of differences of race, nationalism, religion, and/or ethnicity. These contributions are intended to open up paths for imagining new forms of solidarity now and in the future.
In conversation with Ruth Carmi, the editors discuss the reasons why alliances between Mizrahi Jews and Palestinians have been so difficult to achieve, in spite of both groups’ marginalization by the Israeli government. With Brenna Moore, they reflect upon Black Catholic attempts to create transnational partnerships that challenged the White Protestant status quo in early twentieth-century geopolitics. Finally, with Melani McAlister, they consider the role of the literary imagination in helping us contemplate paths beyond the trappings of our current political order. In each of these exchanges, the authors also reflect on their findings in light of the current political moment, rather it be in the recent challenges to the authority of the supreme court in Israel, the Black Lives Matter protests of summer 2020 following the murder of George Floyd, or in the growing calls to substantively address the threat of climate change. What is revealed in these conversations is that challenging the structures that marginalize the most vulnerable in our society requires an intersectional analysis that refuses to treat any marker of identity or belonging as siloed off from others. Below are some key quotes from the conversation.
On the Resonances Between Movements
Ruth Carmi: “It is a collective project of critique or meaning-making with a liberatory potential…The critique this book offers shows the possibility of reimaging identity in a way that transcends national boundaries and can create new solidarities and alliances.”
“Re-imaging is not one size fits all…As you read the essays you can see that the authors are pushing beyond reductive ways of describing how solidarities are formed or are prevented from forming.”
Brenna Moore: “McKay and Terry wrote about the importance of not just writing about Black trauma or violence. This is what White audiences wanted…When we write about these people, we bring those stories of Black joy into our classrooms. These writers want to complicate the one-dimensional narrative of the media about Black life.”
On Writing and Political Action
Brenna Moore: “There is so much we can learn from these Black Catholic writers. They were very smart writers of non-fiction … and they did a lot of thinking about the power of writing…Writing operates in the realm of the power of the imagination and how important the imagination is for combatting structures of dehumanization that animate racist violence.”
Melani McAlister: “I use literature to challenge the empirical reality we know…It might be possible to imagine these connections [of solidarity] more fully and more richly, and to imagine that the reason we don’t do that has to do with the way we are trained.”
“I think literature can be really important to spark our political imaginations if we let it…and it requires us to let go of some of the assumptions we carry.”
On the Potential for New Forms of Solidarity
On the potential for the protests against the reform to the Supreme Court in Israel to spark new forms of solidarity movements, Ruth Carmi says: “The supreme court is one of the pillars that upholds and maintains the occupation in the legal apartheid in occupied territories and deprives Palestinians of group rights…This doesn’t mean welcoming the overhaul of the supreme court…, but Palestinians as well as Ethiopian and Mizrahi Jews cannot partake in a discourse that portrays the Supreme Court as a site of justice or as an oracle of human rights.”
Melani McAlister: “In environmentalism, it is clear to most people that we are completely in this together. There is no chance of the world saving itself unless both rich and poor countries, people of all different means, find their way into the struggle and work together.”
“When we think about solidarity as a political question it requires (1) emotional commitments, (2) humility, and (3) discipline. We have to keep in the struggle even when it is not fun.”
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
Mass for the Installation of the Archbishop of Kigali, Rwanda, 2019. Image via Flickr user Paul Kagame. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
Emmanuel Katongole’s interest in Who are My People?: Love, Violence, and Christianity and Sub-Saharan Africa is in the relationship between identity, Christianity, and violence in Africa. He asks: What does it mean to belong to a group of people called Africans? What does it mean to be an African Christian? How central is the question of identity to the Christian theological enterprise?
According to Katongole, Christian identity is not a static essence, spiritual or otherwise. Rather, it is an invitation to a journey with a definite direction and telos. The goal of this journey is the creation of an alternative African modernity from the one that has made Africa almost synonymous with violence, poverty, and underdevelopment. The stories that Katongole tells are of individuals and communities who were able to resist violence and thus testify to a different nonviolent way of living within modern Africa.
In the last two decades, Katongole has cemented his status as an African theologian. More recently, he has cemented his status as an unusual African theologian— “the storytelling theologian.” Many have praised Katongole for pioneering a new methodology for doing theology in Africa. This new methodology, which he calls theological portraiture, is an adaptation of the portraiture methodology of Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot and Jessica Hoffman Davis. In a comment on the back cover of Who Are My People, Stan Chu Ilo praises Katongole for “quietly but beautifully introducing a new methodology for doing theology in Africa.” Ilo is right. Katongole has taught us the importance of being attentive to the dynamics between foundational stories that have shaped contemporary sub-Saharan Africa and the ongoing performance of these stories.
Katongole’s storytelling methodology is not an aberration from the “real” theologizing that is required of a theologian. On the contrary, I will argue that, as far as theology in Africa is concerned, it makes him a “master of discursivity.” This special title is drawn from Michel Foucault’s 1969 article “What is an Author?” By “master of discursivity,” Foucault means authors who, through their works, have made possible not only a certain number of analogies but also a certain number of differences. In other words, they create the possibility for something other than their discourse that nonetheless belongs to the discourse out of which what they were formed. They raise important questions, introduce new methodologies, and point us to new frontiers.
While acknowledging that the question of identity lies at the heart of the African theological enterprise, Katongole invites us to a new way of understanding African Christian identity. According to him, “Christian identity is not a “static” essence, spiritual or otherwise, but an invitation to a journey, with a definite direction and telos” (63). The Christian activists whose stories Katongole carefully narrates are on this journey. It is important to observe that all of Katongole’s characters are alive—or at least were alive at the time that Katongole first published stories about them. Most of them are not just still alive but still actively doing the work that brought Katongole’s attention to them in the first place.
Christian identity is not a static essence, spiritual or otherwise. Rather, it is an invitation to a journey with a definite direction and telos.
Across his published books and articles, we often see Katongole updating stories he has already told, bringing fresh facts or perspectives to the life and work of these Christian activists. For instance, Katongole first told the story of Maggy Barankitse in his 2011 book, The Sacrifice of Africa: A Political Theology for Africa. Maggy lived in Burundi then. In Who Are My People? there is a significant update in the life of Maggy. Forced into exile for criticizing the then president of Burundi, Pierre Nkurunziza, Maggy, Katongole informs us, now lives in Rwanda “on a hilltop overlooking the city of Kigali” (88). Nkurunziza died in 2020, but Maggy continues to live in Rwanda. The Oasis of Peace Community she founded in 2018 takes care of Burundian refugees and vulnerable children. She now loves to refer to herself as “a citizen of the world.”
Katongole is aware of Samuel Wells’ distinction between heroes and saints in his 2004 book, Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics(42–44). Yet, Katongole’s characters are neither saints nor heroes. Instead, they are ministers and witnesses. They embody the African Christian identity as witnesses to God’s reconciling love. Fr. Jean Baptiste and Fr. Anthony minister to God’s mercy. Maggy ministers to God’s sacrificial/redemptive love. The Church in the Central Africa Republic and Father Bernard Kinvi minister to hope. Katongole also calls them inventors. This is how he notes Maggy prefers to describe herself and her work: “Love has made me an inventor” (90). In Maggy’s Oasis of Peace, Katongole invites us to see the invention of “a “new we” that transcends the boundaries of race, nation, and ethnicity” (97).
Thus, in their respective stories, Katongole is “listening for” the story of God’s new creation and work of reconciliation. Their stories give shape to his theological image of Africa. Because they patterned their lives after the logic of the Christian message, these activists are, in essence, helping Katongole tell the one foundational Christian story, the story of God’s active involvement in human history. Christian faith, theology, mission, and identity must be at the service of this foundational story. In Imitating Christ in Magwi: An Anthropological Theology, Todd Whitmore says that theology must always “seek to reenact and instigate others to reenact Jesus the Nazarene the Christ” (2). Katongole’s Who Are My People does this masterfully. Apart from raising new questions and contributing to broadening the horizon of African theology, he has announced both the possibility and the ongoing reality of a differing kind of modernity in Africa—one embodied in the life of numerous Christian activists.
William I. Orbih is a Ph.D. fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies and a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Theology (World Religion, World Church). In 2021, he completed a minor in peace studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. Prior to coming for Notre Dame for doctoral studies, William earned a master’s in theology from the St. John School of Theology, Collegeville MN, a postgraduate diploma in Peace Studies from the Nile University of Nigeria, and bachelor’s degrees in Philosophy, Theology, and Religious Studies from Universities in Nigeria and Italy. His scholarly interest lies at the intersection between theology, African Literature (especially protest literatures) and politics, and deconstruction and decolonial hermeneutics. He also has a lively interest in comparative theology, interreligious dialogue, patristics (Augustine), and the concept of divine transcendence. He is presently working on a dissertation titled “African Literature as Political Theology of Hope.”
Interconnectedness. Mixed media art by Ghanian artist El Anatsui. Seattle Art Museum. Image via Flickr user sswj. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Colonialism, Missionizing, and Multiple Identities
In Who Are My People?: Love, Violence, and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa, Emmanuel Katongole shows us how “doing theology” is an intensely personal, communal, and spiritual endeavor; that it is a journey; that it weaves our own story into something greater and enables us to listen to the stories of others. His methodology, which he calls “theological portraiture,” is both narrative and introspective.
Framing the entire book, however, is a question whose premise I reject. Posed in Belgium by an Indian colleague, the question is: Why are you Africans always killing each other? The idea that Africans are always killing each other, more so than humans of any other continental or national identity/identities, is both troubling and false, demonstrating the ongoing resonance of colonial tropes about the continent. I will come back to this point later in this essay, but suffice it to say that this trope is part of a meta-narrative that could, in the writing of another thinker, cloud Katongole’s own story as well as the stories of others. In what follows, I discuss elements of Katongole’s story, contrast them with aspects of my own, and then reflect on some of the ongoing contradictions arising from the story of Christian missionizing in Africa (as well as elsewhere). I then return to the trope of a surplus of African violence and argue that rejecting the premise of this trope while also engaging with additional African cosmologies actually broadens the audience for Katongole’s wisdom.
Katongole notes that there are three driving lenses through which violence in Africa tends to be understood: ethnicity (or “tribe”—a term he does not like and neither do I), religion, and land. The book’s chapters address these three in that order in ways that are sensitive to the identity struggles of Africans, especially African Christians, from decolonization to the present. These struggles produce debates about issues like the following:
What comes first and what should come first, Christianity or “Africanness”?
What is each of these, anyway?
What was the European colonial role in “creating” (using V.Y. Mudimbe’s language) and/or transforming African identity? What was its role in forging African “modernity”?
These questions are all crucial to Katongole’s exploration because of the dismemberment and dehumanizing legacies left by British, French, Belgian, and Portuguese colonialism, as well as by post-colonial neoliberal abuses perpetuated by former colonial powers with the assistance of many contemporary African governments. They are also crucial in that they stem from definitions of “African modernity” that take as their condition of possibility (drawing on Mudimbe and Ali Mazrui) the continent’s unhappy relationship with European violence.
The Problem of Identities
Regarding the question of what identity comes first, Katongole’s own story privileges his Christianity and Catholicism, although it does so in ways that are beautifully inter-religious and transnational. His story connects to the soil of his village; his parents’ farm, which becomes significant in the chapter on ecological wholeness; and the land, demarcated by the colonial borders of his region. He is the beneficiary of multi-religious generosity—his Catholic parents shaped and fed his deep faith—but the mentor who encouraged him to become a priest was Muslim. Moreover, Katongole’s African identity is extremely plural – both Ugandan and Rwandan, Tutsi and Hutu, and also Bugandan. Being an African Christian in such a rich context means, first and foremost, a journey, and a “mestizo” one at that (in Virgilio Elizondo’s words). To be a Christian is to be formed from many identities, ultimately always living as a “resident alien” as Stanley Hauerwas describes the Christian path. Recognizing and accepting such a mestizo identity, in turn, allows a multi-perspectival view of ethnicity/religion/land, which permits the possibility of a new “invention of love” (“God’s self-sacrificing love”) to emerge over and against violence.
Katongole’s own story privileges his Christianity and Catholicism, although it does so in ways that are beautifully inter-religious and transnational.
Katongole’s story prompts me to reflect on my own. Whereas Katongole shows us how his extremely plural African identity nourishes but does not supercede his overarching Christian identity, and how his and others’ (whose stories he crafts) ties to the land offer hope for inventing the “new ‘we’” he articulates as critical for overcoming violence (especially ecological violence), I (as an American whose ancestors came from different parts of Europe generations ago), feel somewhat cheated of my own more “rooted” identities in territories and pre-Christian spiritualities that long ago were put in the service of a westernized, Christian one. This sentiment has grown while forging relationships as a western white person with colleagues in East, West, Central and Southern Africa. It has also grown while navigating the recovery of “Indigeneity” in the U.S. as well as elsewhere in the world (for example all over Latin America, or in the Nordic region where I conducted research in 2019). The challenge of recovery is therefore, different, for me. It is a recovery of knowledges, cosmologies, and onto-epistemologies that have remained submerged under colonial and missionary strictures, rather than a navigating among identities that are openly acknowledged and even hyphenated.
Postcolonial Emergencies and Indigenous Ecologies
Logging trucks in Gabon. Image via Flickr user jbdodane. CC BY-NC 2.0
One of the reasons that it is urgent to recover Indigenous knowledges today is the ecological crises, a crisis which also is the subject of the third part of Katongole’s book. Reading this section, I wondered how the book might be read if it began with the ecological crisis experienced in Africa today and after that moved on to a discussion of the categories of “religion” and “ethnicity,” instead of the other way around. Of course, ecological crises are happening all over the world, not just in Africa, including in my home state of California. Everyone “knows” about these emergencies, but we might ask who really understands them, in terms not only of how to act on them now, but also what the result of acting on them for generations will be? At a minimum, Indigenous knowledges are increasingly recognized as useful in the management and stewardship of forests, fisheries, minerals and waterways.
Beginning with the ecological crisis might also compel a resolution of what I think is a tension in the book’s discussion of Indigeneity. In the chapter on the Central African Republic (CAR), Katonogole argues that a “spiritual insecurity” prompts the resort to “magical” thinking—i.e., the use of fetishes, etc.—in an attempt to gain the upper hand in a conflict. But in the next chapter, African spirituality is reconnected to the significance of land and the concept of ecological wholeness. Do these two instances speak to related or distinct aspects of African religions?
One lesson I take from Chapter 5 is that Christianity should rethink its relationship to Indigenous religions all over the world. For example, fetishes might concern objects created for their beauty but are also evocative of spirituality and a connection to nature. Is there a “bright line” between what is acceptable to African Christians and what is not? Katongole might say “no.” Still, Christian legacies have, as he points out in the first two chapters of the book, devalued (and often condemned) African religious practices. And in the end, what is the spiritual difference between the significance attached to these fetishes and the prayers and miracles of the Christians in the book’s stories who received what they needed in times of crisis? After all, Africans have prayed to fetishes and Christians have prayed to Jesus Christ for both violent and non-violent ends.
Today, an increasing number of objects of African “cultural heritage” that were stolen over the generations to occupy places of curiosity in private collections and western museums are being reclaimed. These objects are often infused with spirituality, begging the question of what happens when they are violently wrenched from their connection to people, land, and traditions? What kinds of spiritual forces are disturbed, and is it possible to repair the spiritual damage through return?
Remembering and Repairing
Kalahari Desert Star Trails of the Southern Celestial Pole. Image via Flickr user Martin Heigan. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
To return to the conceptual apparatus that Katongole lays out in the first chapters, one of the exemplary qualities of the book is that Katongole does not ignore the problematic legacies of the missionary enterprise. Indeed, he takes on the challenges posed by Madimbe, Mazrui, and Mahmood Mamdani in this regard. We cannot ignore the role of Christianity in the justification and perpetuation of expropriation of African lands, in the enslavement of African peoples, and in the denigration of African spiritualities.As Ngugi wa Thiong’o puts it, colonialists “dis-membered” African stories, traditions, and ways of being, and Africans need to recover their memories, their ways of being, their languages, and their spiritualities.
Reading Katongole makes me ask whether we also need more of a recognition of these wounds on the part of Christians as well as Europeans, in order to “move forward” to a “new ‘we’”? I think we do. Christianity has left many memories across Africa, not all of them as beautiful as Katongole’s own. Many Christian denominations are now beginning to take on this task of recognition, for example through renouncing the “Doctrine of Discovery” that justified the wholesale taking of land to establish settler colonies. We need more of this kind of recognition because the new “African ‘we’” that Katongole wants to realize is (as Mazrui and others imply) impossible to extract from a more global “we.” This means that not only Africans, but Europeans and Americans, must also do our part to further recognition, and engage in both reclamation and indeed, reparations.
Cosmologies of Interconnectedness
Moreover, does the “new creation,” the “new ‘we’” that Katongole discusses rely primarily on recognizing our multiplicity of identities? Or, might it also be profitable to see it as a “re-rooting” in the soil, not in a romantic sense, but in the sense of (once again) learning from Indigenous onto-epistemologies and cosmologies—i.e., the ways of knowing and being together that help identify our purpose in creation. The cosmology of inter-connectedness includes interconnections not only among humans, but among humans and non-humans, animals and plants, rocks and the soil, and the earth itself. This is a cosmology that Katongole instantiates, drawing on Pope Francis and other Christian interlocutors, for guidance to the Christian on their journey to the new “we.”
As Katongole acknowledges, there is a connection to God that has long been important across Africa. This is a connection that pre-dates the missionaries (and, I note, the expansion of Islam across the continent). It is a connection that is true in all postcolonial societies, as a quote from Korean theologian Hyun Young-hak, repeated by Indian theologian Christopher Duraisingh, suggests: “I do not believe in an invalid God who was carried piggy-back to Korea by some missionary. God was already active in history long before the missionaries came” (16–17).
The cosmology of inter-connectedness includes interconnections not only among humans, but among humans and non-human, animals and plants, rocks and the soil, and the earth itself.
This understanding of God prioritizes “Spirit” as a way of connecting between Christianity and Indigeneity. Christian purpose and “mission” here becomes “a way of being in the Spirit.” African feminist scholars and theologians—e.g., Isabel Phiri, Musa Dube, and many others—also note this kind of rootedness in African spirituality/religion, noting that many women are healers. Phiri, for example, discusses how the knowledge of Sangomas in South Africa has been devalued.
Katongole helps us see how Christian spirituality, through languages of Dominicanism and other orders, can link us to a more holistic sense of our identity. But can uncovering other spiritualities, especially Indigenous spiritualities, do so as well? Not simply as part and parcel of multiple identities, but as something very much intentionally alienated from us (from Africans, to be sure, but perhaps from all of us), that needs to be more foregrounded in the “new ‘WE’”?
Who Kills Whose People?
To return to the trope that “Africans are always killing each other” (either because of “ethnicity” or because of “religion”), it is of course important to note that it is not only Africans, but also Europeans (e.g., two world wars), Americans (e.g., the US civil war and the ongoing killing of black bodies through covert and overt violence; the heightened threat of authoritarian violence today), Latin Americans (civil wars), Asians (the Korean and Vietnam wars; the Cambodian genocide), and so forth and so on. The trope of Africans (or others) always killing each other also does not account for the proxy wars fought by the U.S., European powers, and the former Soviet Union on African, Asian, and Latin American soil, or the ongoing proxy wars and slow violence wrought by the continuing scourge of multinational extraction (enabled by a number of African as well as European, U.S., and Canadadian governments) and neoliberal developmentalism (advanced by many NGOs as well as donors).
Rejecting the premise of “Africans” always killing each other does not render Katongole’s wisdom less powerful. In my view, it makes it more powerful in that it requires us all to take seriously the question, “Who are my people?” When we do so we find that identities are deeply imbricated and that our “journeys” to the discovery and rediscovery of them take effort and sacrifice, but are the only way to renewal.
The journey towards change, however, cannot forget the past—acknowledging its horrors and actively opposing its ongoing manifestations and mechanisms of division (like the legal codes Katongole discusses that encourage the codification of private property)—as well as recovering its cosmologies and “onto-epistemologies” of wholeness, and longstanding indigenous forms of knowledge of the earth and our connection to it. These, I think, are also necessary to help us heal the wounds of the earth as well as of our bodies.
Cecelia Lynch is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. She is an expert on international relations, religion and ethics, humanitarianism, and civil society, and has researched and published extensively on topics related to peace, security, international organization, globalization, humanitarianism, and religion. She co-edits the Critical Investigations into Humanitarianism in Africa (CIHA) Blog, at www.cihablog.com.
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In this episode of the Kroc Cast, Contending Modernities editor and writer Josh Lupo and Co-Director Atalia Omer interview three contributors to their edited volume, 
