Construing Newer "Window" of Ecumenism for Africa: A Catholic Perspective

Ecumenical Review, The, July, 2001 by Gosbert T. M. Byamungu

   To succeed in transforming Africa, in their education the young Africans
   must be left as genuine Africans and not be turned into black-skinned
   Europeans who become misfits in their own society and country. Be like St
   Paul who made himself Barbarian with the Barbarians just as he was Greek
   with the Greeks. St Peter and St Paul did not try to make Hebrews of the
   children of the first converts of Rome, nor did St Irenaeus try to make
   Greeks of the children of Lyons. Do not commit the unpardonable mistake of
   bringing up the African children in a French way. I forbid you to put them
   in French beds to sleep; I forbid you to give them French food to eat; I
   forbid you to teach them to read and write in French.(7)

Would the missionaries, whether Protestant, Catholic or Orthodox, succeed in implementing this wisdom as they carry out their task to evangelize? The lines are blurred. Many also were the difficulties that arose because of religious bigotry, the different nationalities and diverse cultural backgrounds of the missionaries. In addition, and unhappily for African Christianity, the European expansionism of the 19th century coincided with the growth of Christian missions, with damaging results.

Thus the Christian message, which was supposed to be liberating, never really liberated the African people. Rather they were made to evaluate their cultures as "uncivilized", and thus encouraged to absorb Western culture as an essential part of the message of salvation. The legacy of this distortion and misrepresentation of Africans and African culture is here to stay. For much of the world Africa remains a despised and exploited continent.

That colonial legacy overtly introduces a deep ambiguity into the whole missionary programme, an ambiguity that is repeatedly observed in the dichotomy between what the church would like to proclaim because of the demands of the gospel (its "holy" side), and what it lives in practice (because of its "sinful" face). There is a clear duality when the church of all times and places struggles to live the ideal of the gospel, but finds itself caught up in the concrete realities of its own time and place. Observing the gap between the socio-economically affluent churches of the North and the socio-economically poor and destitute churches of the South, one wonders if this is really the one church established by the one God. Pope Paul VI dubs this "the scandal of glaring inequalities."(8)

For this reason there is need among the churches of the "margin" to rethink their inherited fragmentation and to start working for a new, decolonized vision, working in solidarity and for the truth of the gospel. This task should be done as a contribution to the new image which the universal church should seek to attain. In this quest I am convinced that the African church has some ecumenical light and insight to bring to the universal church.

The stratified mission

The dichotomy referred to above goes back, then, to the manner in which the gospel was brought to Africa and elsewhere. The spirit of competition for territories in the political arena found its echo in the same spirit of competition for "converts" on the religious plane. Territorial hegemonies in the name of Caesar ran parallel to territorial hegemonies in the name of God. The mission and the colony worked together, and African historians do not hide the alliance: