3. African Theologies as the Story of God’s Deeds in African History
The discourse about theology and literature in African Christian religion, as we have shown, must go beyond written sources, or formal theological writings to individual and communal experiences of faith and its enactment in churches, sites of prayer and rituals, and in daily praxis. Anene and Brown writes as follows with regard to writing history in Africa, “history may be a matter of words and shards carefully dusted in libraries and museums in Europe; in Africa it is a living environment. Indeed the shortage of written documentation which is likely to be characteristic of some areas of African history and which is a curse for the historian can be a blessing for the history teacher.’[10]
In this light then, I will argue that anyone who wants to write about God and society in Africa must not stay only in the libraries. He or she must go to the shrines, visit the healing homes, churches, hospitals; funeral homes and funeral ceremonies, marriage ceremonies, etc. He or she must pay particular attention to folktales, historical fiction, biographies of men and women of God, legends, myths, parables, poems, prayers, proverbs, sayings, and songs, and the narratives of real life stories of miracles and survival, as well as stories and events in personal and communal lives which uplift people’s lives or harm their collective or individual good.[11] The importance of oral tradition or the so called ‘memorial culture’ as source of valid theology has been challenged by the ‘hard school of history’ who argue that “proper history must be reconstructed from written documentary sources of sufficient vantage and, therefore sufficient distance, from the events it is concerned with.”[12]
The importance of orality and storytelling as media of communication in Africa has been emphasized in African scholarship especially in the development of African literature and orature. Abiola Irele commenting on the place of African literature in writing African history argues that “the dominance of orality in the cultural environment of African expression seemed to offer possibilities for validating the endeavor to state the relevance of orality not only to a general understanding of the processes involved in human communication but also, and in particular, to formulate an all-encompassing idea of imaginative expression, one that would point toward a universal concept of literature.”[13] Irele’s perspective reinforces the contention of many African theologians that oral tradition cannot be dismissed in the writing of African history of which theology is a sub-set. Oral tradition continues to flourish in Africa because of the high cultural context of Africa which furnishes what Irele calls ‘a more flexible principle of textuality’ and an impermanence of text with ‘a built-in principle of instability.’ The oral or written text is embedded in memory as multiple forms of ‘imaginative expression’ which are experienced ‘as the outline of a verbal structure and as reference points for the development of ideas and images, as suggestive signposts in the narrative or prosodic movement of discourse that is still in the future.’[14]
In order to be a good African theologian, one must be a good historian. In order to be a good African historian one must study and understand how oral traditions work in Africa. That means that African theologians must enter into and understand in depth African language of discourse especially the art of storytelling. In doing this, the African theologian pays particular attention as Emmanuel Katongole proposes to the inner logic in the story, and how to locate the agency of the people in the local processes and their actual faith especially how they all come together in creating ‘the matrix of visions, symbols, and stories’ which shape an African theological imagination.[15]
African ethnic groups, as Obiechina proposes, are narratophilic (story-telling) societies rather than a logocentric (word-centred) society. In such a world, life is a portrait cast in multiple stories, which interact between a moral and spiritual universe and everyday practices of people. It brings together connections of shared participation and mutual interaction between nature and spirit, humans and non-humans, God and humanity, the living and the dead, politics and society, life and death, animals and humans etc.[16] God is woven into the weft and woof of history in Africa. Theological narratives are therefore being hewed from the tree of life growing as a communal and collective existence. As Obiechina writes with specific reference to the Igbo of Eastern Nigeria, “The Igbo have always rememberd that they have a tree and their storytellers have always reminded them of the need to tend it. For them, stories are important because they are anchored in memory. For them, the story is eternal, it belongs in time but it has a timeless quality, its power to instruct, to remind, to renew, and to direct is not circumscribed by time. So that in their travels and through all vicissitudes of flux and change, they carry with them a memory instructed by their stories.”[17]
The persistence of stories in African culture is anchored on memory. How does the community remember? The community remembers in Africa through her communal life broadly conceived; memory gives identity and form to the community. Memory in African traditional society is the storehouse of the worldview of the people; it is the repository of the great stories and great deeds of people in their cultural and religious history reflected in their beliefs and practices, spirituality and ethics. Memory furnishes the interpretive keys for understanding time and space. It is also the key to understanding the past, the present as well as the future. Whether one is talking about cyclical time, temporal time or genealogies, the stream of consciousness embedded in history can only be understood in African ontology and in African Christian narrative through entering into this memory bank, which mediated through the lives of members of the community of faith. Theology is valid only when it locates in these stories the portrait of how God’s people through their daily narratives are bringing about God’s reign in history. African theology is, therefore, a narration which does not cease to grow because even in being set in any fixed form in textuality, it exudes fuller dimensions beyond the text, because it is born out of a living environment.
[10] Godfrey N. Brown, “The Place of African History in Education in Africa” in Joseph C. Anene and Godfrey Brown, ed. Africa in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Ibadan, Nigeria: University of Ibadan Press, 1967, 7.
[11] Joseph G. Healey, African Stories for Preachers and Teachers, 8.
[12] G. N. Uzoigwe, “A Half Century of Historical Writing in Africa, 1950-2000” in Toyin Falola and Adam Paddock, ed. Emergent Themes and Methods in African Studies: Essays in Honor of Adiele E. Afigbo. Trenton, NJ: African World Press, 2009. 112.
[13] Abiola Irele, “Orality, Literacy, and African Literature” in Tejumola Olaniyan and Ato Quayson, ed. African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory. Malden, Maryland, Blackwell Publishing, 2013, 75.
[14] Irele, 81.
[15] Emmanuel Katongole, Born From Lament: The Theology and Politics of Hope in Africa. Grand Rapids, Michigan: W. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2017, 36-37.
[16] See Emmanuel Obiechina, Nchetaka: The Story, Memory and Continuity in Igbo Culture, Ahajioku Lecture 1994. Owerri, Imo State: Ministry of Information and Social Development, 1994, 26.
[17] Obiechina, Nchetaka, 47.