The Sacrifice of Africa – Introductions

Though I haven’t blogged about it much here, one of my great passions is the study of Africa – its histories, cultures, peoples… you get the idea. My interest was first sparked in high-school as I worked with Sudanese refugees in Lincoln and it has grown steadily ever since. In fact, I’m hoping to start work on a PhD in modern African history sometime in the next few years.

When a friend first informed me of the upcoming book The Sacrifice of Africa, my eyes nearly popped out of my head I was so excited. I immediately wrote to Eerdman’s requesting a review copy, something they graciously mailed me a couple weeks later. Now, having read the book I feel confident in saying that of all the reading I have done on Africa, this book is the most important for the future of Africa. Dr. Emmanuel Katongole – a Ugandan priest now working at Duke Divinity School – has written a book that manages to be both extremely idealistic and eminently practical, a difficult combination to pull off but one he achieves with great style.

Katongole argues the radical thesis that the nation-state in Africa has not failed. Rather, it has produced the exact results we ought to expect of it – poverty, political instability, and rampant corruption. Consequently, when westerners try to “fix” Africa by repairing the nation-state, we pursue a fool’s errand. It’s the equivalent to helping someone lose weight by having them switch from Big Macs to Whoppers. As an alternative political model for Africa, Katongole proposes a kind of localist, small-scale approach premised on what he calls “relocation.” Relocation means resituating Africa in a different story from the one modernity has given it. The modern story of Africa – beginning with colonialism and now continuing into the allegedly “post” colonial era – is premised on the idea that African history began with Europeans. In this story, the Europeans not only “discovered” landmarks like Mosi-oa-tunya (Victoria Falls as the Brits dubbed it, but the Tonga name is so much cooler) but they also provided the Africans with something that African traditions lacked – a cohesive social vision. That social vision – Europe’s “last gift to Africa” as Basil Davidson termed it – centered around the institution of the nation-state. But unlike in Europe, where the nation-state arose over a several century process built around serving the local people, in Africa the nation-state emerged out of exploitation, war, and greed. The boundaries which today define these countries were, for the most part, defined at the Berlin Conference in 1884 and 1885 by European (and American) politicians who knew nothing about the continent. Upon his return to London after the conference, Prime Minister Salisbury of Great Britain quipped that “We have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where they were.”In other words, historically speaking the modern entities of “Zambia,” “Uganda,” or “Ghana” are historical fictions fabricated by greedy Europeans 125 years ago. Therefore, unlike their European counterparts who emerged from a more-or-less logical process (albeit a bloody one) that took several centuries, the creation of the African nation-states was a charade from beginning to end whose primary purpose was the exploitation of African peoples for western economic gain. With such a foundation, Katongole explains, it isn’t hard to see how the modern African state can’t provide clean water for all her people, but can afford to wage multi-billion dollar wars (often on her own people). The entire architecture of the nation-state in Africa is designed for such tasks.

Katongole seeks to resituate Africa in a Christian story, leaning heavily on the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation. These doctrines, he argues, provide a framework for understanding Africa and paint a picture of what Africa might become. The Trinity helps us to understand how community ought to function by showing us that, as human beings made in the image of a triune God, we already exist in community on an essential level and must now incrementally pursue it on a practical level. Unlike the early revolutionaries of post-colonial Africa who wanted to accomplish everything at once, Christian revolutionaries are freed up philosophically to work incrementally. Viewed Christianly, revolution is not a switch we turn on or off all at once, but a way of being that we grow into. (This is a slow process, but Katongole is OK with that, as am I.)

The incarnation offers guidance as well in that it gives us a practical guide to revolution: To remake the world, God had to humble himself. He did not legislate change from the distant heavens, he incarnated himself as a human being and worked from the bottom up. As Katongole writes:

“If relocation names a commitment to the local, and especially the abandoned places, it names a unique type of “incarnational evangelism” characterized by the posture of self-emptying (kenosis) service out of which the church lives. This is the story and posture of God made concrete through the Incarnation. It is this self-emptying attitude that Paul speaks about in the letter to Philippians:

Your attitude must be the same as Christ’s. Though he was in the form of God, he did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself taking the form of a slave, and taking on human appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, death on a cross.

For the African church to live into this self-emptying kenosis that Paul talks about, it has to sacrifice the elegance and magisterial authority that comes from distance. It has to come down within the confused mess of everydayness and risk becoming less and less churchly, so as to nurture and gestate, to use Ela’s expression, ‘a different world right here,’ which is what the new future in Africa must be about.”

Katongole closes the book by citing three specific examples of relocation in practice amongst Christians in Sudan, Uganda, and Burundi which I will describe at greater length in the chapter-by-chapter reviews I’ll be posting over the next week or two.

To sum up, though, The Sacrifice of Africa is absolutely essential reading for anyone interested in the future of Africa and especially for any Christians interested in the subject. Katongole melds the insight of a political scientist, literary scholar, historian, and theologian into one excellent, profound, and enjoyable book. You can pre-order it on Amazon or directly from Eerdman’s.