Stumbling toward Zion by David W. Smith

Author:David W. Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783687770
Publisher: Langham Creative Projects

This has been described as “one of the great poems of all time,” not least because its repeated questioning suggests that every great wrong, all the crimes against humanity, are “committed under the eyes of frightened or uncaring people.” The finger of accusation points to us all: we “are guilty not so much because of what we do, as what we allow to happen. And without a doubt, the slave singer was including slavery of human flesh in the bill of indictment.”[34]

If lament resurfaced to play a central role in the response to the suffering of slaves, it has reappeared throughout sub-Saharan Africa itself in more recent times in a situation in which an entire continent suffers beneath the burden of the colonial legacy and the failure of independent African governments to fulfil their promises of liberation and freedom. In the early years of the present century I visited Nairobi on a number of occasions, spending time with Christian brothers and sisters in Kibera, widely regarded as Africa’s largest slum. On one occasion, coming away from Kibera with a heavy heart and a troubled conscience, I stumbled on a bookshop in which I found a copy of Jean-Marc Ela’s African Cry. The title itself speaks the language of lament, and that night as I devoured Ela’s pages I realized that I had found an African Christian theologian whose work responded to the nest of issues which burned within my soul. Ela was a Cameroonian Catholic who had completed a doctorate in theology in Paris and later returned to France to work for a second doctorate in sociology. With an educational achievement which would have opened almost any career doors for him in post-colonial Africa, this remarkable man chose to devote his life to the service of a neglected and suffering tribal people in the remote mountains of northern Cameroon. He wrote that the birthplace of his published theological reflections was “the villages of the lowlands and the mountains where we went on foot, our only baggage a sleeping mat, a Bible, our heart, and the love of the poor.”[35]

Out of this truly apostolic mission there emerged a series of reflections on Christianity in Africa which, to my knowledge, are unrivalled in their insight, passion and prophetic courage. I have written elsewhere on the significance of Ela’s work,[36] but here we note an example of his writing which has a direct bearing on the subject of this chapter. He is discussing “an African reading of the Exodus”:

The God of the Old Testament, the God of Promise, continually shows human beings a future of hope, which enables them to criticize the existing situation. God summons up from within the hoping consciousness of the human being a nonconformity with reality. In short, God carries human beings forward, toward a future characterized by a new reality. But in the official churches, God’s divinity has been posited in a changelessness, an immutability, an impassibility such that the history of human beings is effectively abandoned to its own devices, deprived of the capacity to appear as the locus of manifestation of God’s action.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.