Why Coloniality?

Colonialism, as an analytic category, is not nearly as potent in explanatory power as might be expected. For, on the one hand, it is not the case that missionaries were simply colonialist agents. On the other hand, there is evidence in the assumptions and practices of many missionaries, which could be described as proto-colonialist and colonialist.Footnote 4 In terms of both chronology and commitment to colonialism, the expansion of Anglicanism to Africa and its relation to imperialism are not straightforward. Consequently, a general theory explaining the relationship between mission and empire will not be submitted here. Rather, the analytic category of coloniality is submitted as descriptive of (mal)practices arising from the historical realities of mission and/or colonialism and significant for the ongoing post-colonial theologizing within Anglicanism. For the purpose of the present article, coloniality will be understood as a state or process subjugating culture and/or agency by incursive cultural and, in this case, theological discourses.Footnote 5 While, I argue, such a definition describes well the practice of much evangelizing in Africa, it is its theological significance that will be of particular focus here. There are at least three reasons for the theological significance of coloniality. One might refer to these reasons as relating to the histories or narratives of Western theologies, the critical awareness of such theologies and the liberative function of theologies as contended for especially by theologians from beyond the North Atlantic academies.

First, theological justification exists for colonial incursion and subjugation.Footnote 6 Max Warren’s ‘theology of imperialism’ justifies empire with reference to the theological categories of providence, vocation, order and greater good.Footnote 7 Despite being an Anglican priest and general secretary of the Church Missionary Society, taking up the role in 1942, he shies away from providing any ecclesiological justification. The editor of the first edition of The Colonial Church Chronicle in 1847, which coincides with the consecration of the first Anglican bishop to be sent to Africa, is not so bashful.Footnote 8 He sees the theological significance of colonialism in ecclesiological as well as providential terms. It is providentially significant that a Christian nation should rise to power with the capacity to universalize its values. It is ecclesiologically significant. For such expansion is an opportunity to plant the worldwide ‘Reformed Catholic Church’, thus undermining the Roman Catholic critique that the Church of England is insular.Footnote 9

Such expansionist theology, in the case of the Chronicle, explicitly functions as a response to alleged ecclesiological dysfunction. Warren’s theologizing, explicitly and implicitly, functions as a response to alleged cultural dysfunction. The rise of empire is providential because, unlike African traditions, it can act as a preparatio for the Gospel. The universal vision of the empire, in contrast to the localism of traditional practices, inspires vocation. Colonization brings, in contrast to social structures that existed before, the permanent good of legislation, political betterment and cohesion. The scope of the empire, again unlike traditional societies, can evoke in its subjects a commitment to a greater good and broader Commonwealth.Footnote 10

Second, if post-colonial theorists are guilty of excluding the religious from post-colonialism then theologians are equally guilty of excluding post-colonialism from their theologizing.Footnote 11 Theology is critical when it resists, what Johann Baptist Metz calls a ‘privatizing tendency’ in favour of addressing itself to public or political concerns.Footnote 12 However, despite the continued justifications of European or Anglo-American Christian expansionism by missiologists and mission historians, there remains much work to be done uncovering how imperialism and colonialism have often influenced Western theology.Footnote 13 The existence of this lacuna undermines the ongoing claim that such theology, practised in the traditional colonial centres, is in fact critical. The challenge to the critical nature of theology is even stronger when it is recognized that theologies emerging in colonial and post-colonial Africa explicitly critique Western theologizing. In practical terms, responding to coloniality will therefore mean, at the very least, an engagement with marginalized theology and theologians.Footnote 14

Post-colonialism seeks to critique or undermine Western hegemony.Footnote 15 This too is, in large part, the reason for the rise of African theologies in the era of independence. Consequently, it is possible to see the emergence of African theologies as a constituent part of the broad field of post-colonial literature and as part of a movement for decolonization.Footnote 16 It is the liberative engagement with coloniality and its social, cultural, political and theological effects that ultimately define the ‘post-colonial’ even if the authors of such material do not see themselves in such terms.Footnote 17 African theologies are, I argue, often both historically and critically post-colonial. They raise and direct the question to the North Atlantic academies: what form will your theology take given the violence of coloniality, violence which incursive Christian theologizing played a part in perpetrating?

Third, the main concern of Western theologies is often seen as coherence. The recognition of coloniality will result in a rejection of such a narrow view. Instead, some sort of liberative practice will be the end goal for theologies.Footnote 18 Acts 17 is the story of Paul in Thessalonica. As a result of his preaching some are convinced and are converted. Some are not convinced and start a riot. The rioters complain: ‘These people who have been turning the world upside down have come here also…They are all acting contrary to the decrees of the emperor, saying that there is another king named Jesus’ (Acts 17.6-7).

Interestingly, without reference to Acts 17, Robert Young identifies the essence of post-colonialism as a turning of the world upside down.Footnote 19 Some understood the earliest followers of Jesus to be challenging the empire as they declared the divine intent to bring down ‘the powerful from their thrones, and lift up the lowly’ (Lk. 1.52). The christological claims of these Christians were understood, at least in Acts 17, to stand opposed to the temporal claims of the emperor.Footnote 20 Expansionist theology suppresses this ‘upside down’ theologizing in favour of an ‘inside out’ theologizing. That is to say, theology is done at the centre and deductively applied to the places beyond or below. Such centres exist because of the resources they possess. The ongoing Anglo-American mission expansion in Africa does not arise from inherently superior commitment to mission. Rather, it arises from a greater store of disposable income.Footnote 21 However else one might understand liberative practice it will, therefore, not exclude the concrete issues of social justice in a world where globalization appears to be nothing less than an attempt to ‘synchronize’ the majority of the world with the ‘reigning ideology of Global Capitalism’.Footnote 22

Young observes that post-colonialism is ‘distinguished by an unmediated secularism’. It is committed to excluding religious (and theological) attempts to provide alternative value-systems to those of the West. He submits that what he refers to as a ‘spiritual’ approach to decolonization will emphasize individual self-rule, duty over rights, non-violent resistance and a critique of the Western obsession with materiality.Footnote 23 It is not clear yet, especially in light of the theological justifications for empire and the subjects addressed by African theologies, if these are the themes that will emerge in post-colonial Anglicanisms. However, given the historical and theological rationale for post-colonialism, and specifically the category of coloniality, some methodological characteristics can be identified.

Methodological Lessons from African Theologies

In the light of experiences of subjugation, the need for a rigorous practice of critical awareness, an engagement with marginalized theologizing and hope for liberative practice, at least three methodological priorities can be identified, which begin to address these issues.

First, a method that has a particularist characteristic stands in contrast to the expansionist theology already referred to. For such theologizing and its attendant missionary malpractice do not take place in the abstract. Too often mission Christianity assumes that the component parts of theology, which include tradition, theologian and context, are self-evident. A particularist approach will undermine such naivety.Footnote 24

The early work of John Mbiti, who some consider to be the father of modern African theology, can be seen as a particularist approach. His early theology, specifically his work on eschatology, arises from experience of missionary malpractice in a particular place at a particular time.Footnote 25 In effect, he challenges the way theology is practised by these missionaries and, by implication, challenges the way theology is practised in North Atlantic academies. For he unsettles the identity of theologian, tradition and context. Theologians become those who reflect on their encounter with God with or without explicit reference to the Christ of Scripture. Tradition is expanded to include the pre-missionary wisdom of indigenous theologizing. Context, therefore, is not only the physical and cultural space that missionaries move into. It is also the public, political and/or ecclesiastical space where some discourses are permitted, some are legitimized, some are suppressed and where others resist, subvert and hybridize.

Mbiti, read according to his own initial approach, is not simply involved in an exercise in comparative or contextual theology. Such African theology, even from what Josiah Young calls ‘the old guard’, loses its significance when either the theologians themselves or readers of their theology separate it from the experiences of coloniality.Footnote 26 To the extent Mbiti’s work retains a particularist approach, it is post-colonial and thus seeks some form of theological decolonization. In this context, a particularist approach will mean the recognition and search for theological significance arising from distinct groups asserting their identity and practice in the face of Western expansion.

Second, maintaining the critical nature of theology will be served by, what might be termed, the experiential interface. In a bid to take account of the agency of converts, in the face of post-colonial interpretations of mission, Brian Stanley suggests that ‘the scholar adopt’ the world of the ‘indigenous receptor’.Footnote 27 Such an assumption that, in the case of Mbiti, an Akamba perspective can simply be adopted through mental activity and ‘inhabited’ by the academic denies agency to those belonging to the context. In short, there is a form of particularism that amounts to the colonization of method. For, according to such an approach, a Western scholar can occupy the same enuciative space as African converts, speak on their behalf and at the same time justify missionary incursion. Methodologically speaking, more is needed.Footnote 28 Consequently, the primacy of the experiential interface is submitted as a second methodological characteristic.

Mbiti’s work arises from the experience of mission Christianity and the subjugation of contextualization. That is to say, his theology emerges from the experiential interface between missionaries and converts. However, that there is a move away from this experiential site to an approach that grounds the emerging theology on so-called African traditional religion has not been recognized and the implications have not been identified. No longer does the emergence of an African theology depend primarily on theologically significant engagements between converts and missionaries (what might be called an emic approach). Instead, the emerging theology becomes grounded upon a categorizing of ‘traditional practice’, which supposedly stands independent of the engagement with mission Christianity (what might be called an etic approach). Traditional practice is considered an abstraction. This betrays the fabric of Western ways of theologizing, which Mbiti is seeking to criticize, and leaves less and not more room for African agency in his thought.Footnote 29

It seems that Mbiti’s initial approach, which emphasizes the Akamba critique and response to mission theologizing, is sound. While such work might be challenged as being subjective it is, arguably, more critical than his later work. For it is theological reflection on the experience of evangelization and colonization and not the abstraction and construction of a so-called ‘traditional’ foundation upon which African theology might be built. It is emerging theology and not expansionist theology. It refuses to provide a new preparatio, which is as idealized as Warren’s imperial preparatio.

Third, a methodology that is inductive and seeks liberative practice contrasts theologies that are chiefly concerned with coherency and deductive application. Such liberative practice will inevitably move towards some sort of theological decolonization. As has been seen, such decolonizing might begin with a particularist approach and the affirmation of an experiential interface. For this undercuts the assumption that the Western scholar can inhabit (colonize) the perspective of Africans who theologize in response to the violence of coloniality. Theologically, however, more is being claimed for theological decolonizing when the method is seen as inductive.

Theological decolonization is not only incursive perspective being disrupted and problematized by counter-discourses from Africa. It is also the recognition that knowledge of God emerges from the presence and experience of those encountering coloniality. This includes, as emerging African theologies often indicate, the recognition that revelation arises from practice, pre and post the missionary movement. Theological knowledge does not primarily expand by missionary agency from Christians centres but emerges by divine agency from African experience and thought. Consequently, the fundamental theological category of revelation, along with the categories of theologian, tradition and context, is hybridized. For the binary representations of ‘tradition’ versus ‘revelation’ are erased.

Such theological erasure or blurring is not necessarily evidence of theological dysfunction nor the denial of divine agency. On the contrary, intentional hybridizing is an exercise in asserting agency, which, if seen as a means to theological decolonizing, becomes part of the divine intent for human liberation. It is doubtful then that any notion of expansionism will be theologically constructive to such an approach. The mistake that Warren makes is that he emphasizes institutional expansion, which then finds its corollary in colonial expansion. In sum, the mission of both church and state is to subdue the Other. In contrast, the best of African theologies emphasize not an expansion of an institution but a participation in the divine.