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79 5 w฀ Christ in Context The Changing Face of Christianity but what did a faith from a young, black, South African student activist’s “guts” look like? It depended. Ideas depend on identities—on who thinkers think they are and on what they think they are trying to do. In the 1970s, some argued that a less “foreign” faith required little more than replacing white leadership with black; others thought that the transformation had to be far more profound, with changed leaders portending more fundamental reassessments of faith. Some attempted this reassessment by looking to “traditional” African “religious” practices—the use of quotes implies the difficulties they encountered there—and others looked instead for a sacred road to a hopedfor political future. Secular theology might have been dismissed as foreign by some black South Africans, but its insights were keenly felt. It had made the case for the divine’s infusion across and through people’s earthly lives. In seminars, essays, and discussions, black South African Christians soon set out to determine for themselves what that meant. This chapter continues to unpack their efforts to link Jesus of Nazareth and Tiro of Dinokana, political and religious faith. The critique of Christianity did not end with the acceptance or rejection of secular theology, nor did it cease with more representative leadership within the mainstream churches. Instead, just as Western theologians adapted their faith to fit emergent postmodernity, so too did Africans interrogate Christianity’s place in postcoloniality. They probed the boundaries proscribed by mission and participated in what Lamin Sanneh has described as the further “translation ” of the faith.1 African Theology resulted from this effort—a school of theological thinking that strove to respond to the particular needs, experiences, and conditions of a certain “Africa.” 80 w฀ Emergent Gospel Yet African Theology’s Africa could not mean the continent as a whole. It was largely an interpretation of God’s word designed for postcolonies, for independent countries in search of roots from which new nations might grow. But what about the unfree Africa, where local people had no power? Africans in places such as South Africa had a different perspective compared to Africans in independent nations. They were not yet in a position to look backward; what lay ahead was far more pressing. As we shall see, this marked a critical distinction between the African Theology that arose in independent Africa and what came to be called Black Theology in South Africa. The latter was about context, which in the usage of the time meant not just where you were but where you were going. As John Parratt explained, theologians in independent Africa sought a more culturally conditioned, “indigenous theology,” whereas their still-colonized counterparts in South Africa increasingly looked to a “contextual theology,” focused not on the past but on the challenges of the now and especially “the struggle for human justice” plotted into the future.2 African Theologians such as John Mbiti were uncomfortable with the not-yet, but South African Christians—driven by necessity—charged forward.3 Yet Barney Pityana’s casual borrowing of Mbiti’s language suggests that South Africans still heard African Theology, and we must heed its insights in order better to understand South African departures. This chapter opens with debates over so-called Africanization, the indigenizing of power well under way in most of Africa but more politically problematic in its southern tip. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri asked in a different context, what does demographic change mean when fundamental power relationships remain the same?4 In the late 1960s, South African Christians’ demands for more control over their churches only corrected part of the problem. In the Bantustans, the African faces on the wall and flags flown over “independent” capitals belied actual power relationships ; in church affairs, Africanization only achieved so much. Faced with the pressing demands of context and the future, South Africans first turned elsewhere in Africa and then to the diaspora, specifically to black America. There, they found a more overtly political faith known as Black Theology, which shared their concerns with the historical contingency of blackness and the enduring necessity of liberation. As South African church people began to develop their own voice, they interwove this latter insight with secular and African Theology. As SASO had done, church people carefully picked their way through both their sources and themselves, wielding the strands of identity, political imperative , and perceived context to talk about both Christ and Tiro...

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