Domesticating a Religious Import: The Jesuits and the Inculturation of the Catholic Church in Zimbabwe, 1879–1980 (review)

Nicholas Creary’s book on the Jesuit mission during Zimbabwe’s colonial period addresses an ecclesiastical audience as much as an audience of historians. An Africanist historian with a background of two years as a Jesuit novice, Creary writes with a strong belief in the potential of the Church to become inculturated—that is, adapted to the particularities of local cultures. The term inculturation was popularized by Pedro Arrupe, the superior general of the Jesuit Order from 1965 to 1983. Drawing upon Arrupe’s language, Creary writes with the conviction that “catholicity . . . allows for local cultures to influence the church universal by taking elements of broader Christian culture and incorporating them into their respective cultural contexts, while simultaneously offering their respective symbols to enrich the Christian context” (pp. 248–49).

While documenting the popularity of Catholicism among the VaShona people of Zimbabwe, Creary writes with disappointment about the attitudes of Jesuit leaders, who tended to be suspicious of grassroots religious innovations. Such innovations included the incorporation of marriage payments into church practices; the adaptation of ancestral veneration into Catholic ritual; and the use of Mwari, a deity with shrines throughout the region, as a legitimate name for God within Catholic liturgy. For Jesuits, problems of inculturation were crucially shaped by canon lawmaking. The book concentrates on debates among the Jesuit leadership of Chishawasha Mission, the oldest Catholic mission in Zimbabwe, about the legitimacy of religious innovations under terms of canon law. In addition, Creary incorporates perspectives of members of the lay Catholic Association as well as of Mariannhill missionaries who established convents for women during the 1920s, a time when the colonial government was making efforts to uphold local patriarchal authority.

Creary’s intent to study “the efforts of African Christians to shed the European influences of an imported Christianity and transform it into an African religious experience” (p. 17) is carried out most effectively in a chapter concerning controversies over kurova guva, rites of honoring ancestors. These rites were banned for Catholic adherents in the 1890s by Jesuit missionaries, whose collective memory had been shaped by controversies during the eighteenth century between Jesuits and Dominicans over comparable Chinese rituals. Creary documents ongoing debates among Zimbabwean Catholics over the value and significance of ancestral veneration. In the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, African Catholic priests argued that kurova guva fulfills the commandment to honor one’s father and mother, and received permission from Rome to incorporate the rite into liturgy under the term kuchenura munhu (to purify the person). Yet in 2007, the Southern African Catholics Bishops’ Conference issued statements opposing the rite on grounds that it is performed out of fear of ancestral curses. Creary disputes this latter position, arguing that it overlooks commonalities between kuchenura munhu and prayers to saints, and represents a step backward from inculturation. Local ambivalence about ancestral demands is clearly a significant component of popular Catholicism in Zimbabwe; yet the implications of this issue are obscured by the text’s emphasis on the degree to which the Church has been inculturated.

Owing to the atmosphere of fear associated with political violence in Zimbabwe since 2000, Creary was unable to conduct oral interviews that might have enriched descriptions of popular religious practices such as pilgrimages to the shrine of Bernard Mizeki, an Anglican martyr revered by Zimbabwean Christians of many denominations. In addition, the focus on inculturation glosses over Catholic responses to colonial and postcolonial violence. What this book has to offer instead is a detailed account of how the Jesuits’ own commitments to defining church law shaped their assessments of the cultural practices of their parishioners.