How God Became African: African Spirituality and Western Secular Thought (review)
- How God Became African: African Spirituality and Western Secular Thought
Gerrie ter Haar's How God Became African: African Spirituality and Western Secular Thought provides new insight into the processes by which Africans refashioned Christianity to conform to Africa's unique spiritual needs while remaining faithful to the message of the Bible. Drawing on a variety of disciplines, including anthropology and neurological sciences, ter Haar highlights the complexity of the relationship between the physical and the metaphysical worlds to show how Africans' acceptance of the mutual interactions between these two worlds demonstrates not only the uniqueness of African spirituality, but also the universality of beliefs often associated with magic or miracle. While modernity has driven the West, for example, to frown upon public discourses about beliefs in miracles, such beliefs persist in the private realm, further demonstrating the resilience of such beliefs in spite of modernity. Moreover, new discoveries in neurological science appear to support the validity of miraculous healing. The resilience of Africans' beliefs in the cohabitation of the human and the spiritual worlds, the author maintains, does not imply the absence of modernity, but rather the appropriation of modern material discourse to explain the realities of the human universe in ways that reinforce Christian beliefs. After all, the beliefs in miraculous healing powers, the language of charismatic African evangelists, and their liturgical practices are drawn not from indigenous beliefs (though these beliefs facilitate local receptivity to the message), but directly from the Bible. It is this holistic approach to Christian doctrine that facilitates the growth of Christianity in Africa at a time when Christianity is declining in the West. Yet the Western Christian world, we are reminded, yearns for a new spirituality that does not write off miracles as part of human pursuit for happiness. Africa is thus in the position to return a "pristine" Christianity to the West in subtle but dynamic ways.
The book comprises seven chapters. The first three expose the reader to the African spirit world and how this cosmology relates to the larger paradigm of the Christian scriptures—belief in miracles, spirit possession, and spiritual healing. Each chapter focuses on specific themes that tie African spirituality to Africans' material existence. Chapter 2 discusses the concept of "inculturation." Referring to ideas expressed earlier by the [End Page 208] Rev. Milingo of Zambia, whose history provides the intellectual and ethnographic background to the arguments set forth in the book, the author notes, "inculturation should be understood not as unidirectional but as a process of cross-fertilization, in which different cultures enrich one another while preserving the characteristics that make up their original identity. Genuine and fruitful inculturation will affect mutual change, or changes in both contexts: the place the idea or practice came from as well as the place to which it was taken" (32). I find this concept, which has gained currency among anthropologists, less problematic in recognizing Africans' agency and contribution to global cultural transformations than earlier concepts such as "acculturation" and "appropriation."
Chapter 3 discusses how Africans have "traditionally managed their relations with the spirit world" and how this was affected by the advent of Christianity. Drawing on ethnographic studies and new research in neurobiology, the author demonstrates that science may in the end validate the African belief system. Chapter 4, which lucidly contextualizes African beliefs in both African cosmology and the Bible, concludes that Africans' attempts to recreate Christianity in an African image are "part of a general 'decolonization' of the mind that is taking place in Africa … whereby the intellectual hegemony of former colonial powers is losing its original weight and significance, both politically and religiously" (59).
Chapter 5 addresses the relationship between religion and human rights, while chapter 6 discusses the relationship between religion and development. The two chapters emphasize that human rights laws and development policies can be effective only if indigenous beliefs are taken into consideration when such laws and policies are formed. The author also suggests that the evidence on moral-spiritual context...
