Domesticating a Religious Import: The Jesuits and the Inculturation of the Catholic Church in Zimbabwe, 1879-1980

Introduction

Introduction Catholic theologians in the last fifty years have developed the term inculturation to discuss the old problem of adapting the church universal to specific local cultures. The theologians conceive of inculturation as a dialogue between Christianity (the church) and culture.1 The concept of inculturation differs from the anthropological concepts of acculturation , which is the process of adapting to a culture that is not a person’s native culture, and enculturation, the process of learning a culture as one’s native culture. Europeans needed ten centuries to inculturate Christianity from its Judaic roots. The existence of the eastern churches in communion with the Roman Catholic church points to the time in history when there was greater development of local churches and, consequently, greater inculturation of the church (that is, prior to the schism of the eleventh century).2 As such, African efforts to make the church their own are a manifestation of the same process, but in a much shorter period of time. African Christians were aware that European missionaries transmitted aspects of their cultures with the Christian message during the evangelization of Africans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This African Christian consciousness emerged in an effort neither to destroy or appropriate symbols of authority nor to reclaim appropriated cultural patrimony.3 It was a deliberate attempt to introduce and incorporate elements of vernacular African religion into the Christian symbolic system. In Southern Africa, it appears that African Catholics , above all, sought to fashion for themselves a niche, a spiritual home within the church. 2 | introduction Theories of power, such as those of Jean and John Comaroff or James C. Scott,4 that focus explicitly on contestation are of limited value in discussions of religious change, which must account for the religious ideals of unity between and communion among people. If the question had simply pitted African Christians against Western Christians in a contest for cultural patrimony, then African Christians more than likely would have left the Catholic Church in greater numbers and joined one of the many African independent/initiated Christian churches, where African Christians were free to formulate doctrines and practices with African symbols without interference from European missionaries. The articulators of African Christian consciousness, however, were deeply engaged in a ‘‘quest for belonging.’’ They chose to pursue spiritual peace within the Catholic Church, where they began to transform the church from below by incorporating African symbols, music, and ways of being Christian into the universal church. They began to place their cultures on par with Western cultures in the church. Studies of religion and religious interactions within a colonial context, such as that of Henry Bredekamp and Robert Ross, expand discourses on power relations and render them more complex by arguing that because true Christians are Christians of their own free will, missionaries cannot impose Christianity on people unwilling to accept it. To argue that Africans’ consciousness was colonized is ‘‘akin to saying that it was false. It can only be an insult . . . a demeaning of the real choice and the real dignity of those who came to accept, in part and in their own ways, the messages of the missionaries.’’5 Since the 1950s, scholars such as J. F. Ajayi and Roland Oliver have associated Christianity with the European imperial conquest and colonization of Africa.6 Other scholars, such as Greg Cuthbertson and Paul Landau, have seen Christianity from a materialist perspective and contend that Africans were motivated to become Christians for reasons of material gain.7 These are problematic views of Christianity because they see Christianity only as part of a hegemonic civil society that Europeans used to make Africans docile subjects of colonial states and do not take seriously either the possibility that Africans may have been sincere in their acceptance of Christian ideology or African Christians’ introduction | 3 ability to influence Christian beliefs and practices. Christianity is reduced to a function of European culture. Though many European and African converts and missionaries did collaborate with the imperial powers, the subtlety and variety of African responses to the Christian message make the problem more complex. In 1952, Roland Oliver posited that Christianity was a European import to Africa, and that missionaries were part of the vanguard of the colonial enterprise in The Missionary Factor in East Africa. Since then, scholars studying the history of Christianity in Africa have had to contend with Oliver’s assertion. Given the variety...