Ethnic and Religious Conflict in Africa: An Analysis of Bias, Decline, and Conversion Based on the Work of Bernard Lonergan (review)

In Ethnic and Religious Conflict in Africa Cyril Orji is successful in his goal “to find ways of tapping into the rich resource of Lonergan’s work with a view to appropriating him into the overall project of peace and conflict resolution that is currently taking place in the African continent, sub-Saharan Africa especially” (220). Orji demonstrates that philosopher-theologian Bernard Lonergan’s thought addresses many in the lacunae of contemporary analyses of ethnic and religious conflict in Africa, primarily in his development of Lonergan’s notions of bias and conversion.

Orji begins with a historical study of the more “remote” causes of conflict in Africa: European colonialism, cultural imperialism, and the arbitrary establishment of borders by Western powers. Since the end of official colonization in the 1960s, the more “immediate” causes of upheavals are due to the exploitation of religious and ethnic differences, whether these are actual and real or strategically constructed, by political and military rulers for their own benefit (43, 53).

Orji assesses official Roman Catholic teaching that comments on and responds to the African situation. He critiques some ecclesial statements as either unfamiliar with the African context (e.g., Pontifical Council on Justice and Peace) or lacking in attention to important factors such as African tribal religions (e.g., the Symposium of the Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar). Although the African bishops’ statements on ethnic and religious conflict are significant, they are inadequate on three fronts: they provide insufficient treatment for ethnicism/tribalism; there is no exploration of the root causes of social conflict; and they are unable to name the constitutive ingredients for healing and community building (11). Orji seeks to address these inadequacies.

While Orji appreciates and develops Lonergan’s thought, he does note that “Lonergan was astonishingly silent” on bias and its relation to the issue of race, in spite of the fact that Lonergan lived though Nazism, segregation in the United States, and apartheid in South Africa (76). Orji contributes to the extension of Lonergan’s thought on this issue.

Orji is concerned with the “unwarranted and irrational despising of others based on blind spots that condition or determine our view of them” (95). He argues throughout the book that at “the root of these political, economic, and social upheavals that plague Africa can be found in individual, group, dramatic, and general bias of common sense” (94). Orji furthers the Lonerganian enterprise in engaging the work of R. Doran and M. Rende and his correlation of conversion with bias and cycles of decline.

Orji explores Lonergan’s notion of bias, cycles of decline, progress, and conversion, and their relationship to cosmopolis and the good of order. A key dimension of achieving the good of order in Africa is dialogue as the “instrument in advancing the common good” (182). Through dialogue “one discovers values that have not yet been discovered or uncovers values that have been uncritically accepted” (93). Without personal growth through dialogue, social, economic, political, and cultural transformations, conflict resolution, and ultimately peace are impossible.

Orji engages a wide breadth of literature, including African and Western theology, philosophy, and theory, in addition to local Church documents, and papal and curial pronouncements. He selects suitable interlocutors to expand Lonergan’s thought, such as H-G. Gadamer, T. Hobbes, and K. Marx, as well as significant interpreters of Lonergan, such as W. Conn, M.S. Copeland, R. Doran, and K. Melchin. A clearer and more careful treatment of religious/affective conversion would have been beneficial, as would a deeper engagement with Doran’s work, which Orji cites as important to his own project. A small but pervasive distraction was the large number of typographical errors (21, 58, 92, 128, 132, etc.).

Ethnic and Religious Conflict in Africa makes a significant advancement in Lonergan studies...