“Beyond Ecclesial Confines: The Bible in the African Novels of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (Kenya) and Bessie Head (Bostwana/SA),” in Postcolonial Perspectives in African Biblical Interpretations (eds. Musa W. Dube, Andrew Mbuvi, and Dora Mbuwayesango; Atlanta: SBL Publishers, 2012) (original) (raw)

African biblical studies: Illusions, realities and challenges

In die Skriflig / In Luce Verbi, 2016

African Biblical Studies is a biblical interpretation for the purpose of transformation in Africa. It is the biblical interpretation that makes the ‘African social cultural context a subject of interpretation’. It is also the rereading of the Christian Scripture in a premeditatedly Africentric perspective. It means that biblical interpretation is done from the perspective of the African worldview. The purpose of this article is to discuss some illusions or misunderstandings, realities and challenges facing African biblical studies. Some of these illusions are that African Biblical Studies is fetish, syncretistic and primitive, local and not popular or universal. The basic distinctive realities and challenges facing African Biblical Studies are also critically discussed for the purpose of understanding what African Biblical Studies is and to make African Christianity more authentic in Africa.

The Agikuyu, the bible and colonial constructs: towards an ordinary African readers’ hermeneutics

2010

Recognising the paradigm shift in African biblical studies where the image of a “decontextualized and non-ideological” scientific Bible reader is slowly being replaced with one of a “contextualized and ideological” reader, this research seeks to explore and understand the role of the “ordinary readers” in the development of biblical interpretation in colonial Kenya. It seeks to understand whether the semi-illiterate and illiterate can engage the Bible as capable hermeneuts. The study uses postcolonial criticism to recover and reconstruct the historical encounters of the Agĩkũyũ with the Bible. It reveals that ordinary African readers actively and creatively engaged biblical texts in the moment of colonial transformation using several reading strategies and reading resources. Despite the colonial hegemonic positioning, these Africans hybridised readings from the Bible through retrieval and incorporation of the defunct pre-colonial past; creating interstices that became sites for assi...

African Biblical Studies: An Introduction to an Emerging Discipline

Currents in Biblical Research, 2017

African Biblical Studies (ABS) can be characterized both as innovative and reactionary: Innovative, because it refuses to be confined by the methodologies, ancient concerns, and principles that govern biblical studies in the 'west' (used throughout this article to refer to the majority Euro-American scholars while recognizing the presence of other groups), and instead charts a course that is more interested in making biblical interpretation relevant to present realities. Reactionary, because its driving force is partly a critique of the inadequacy of western biblical studies in providing meaningful responses to concerns that are pertinent to African communities. A genuine ABS is therefore an amalgamation of multiple interpretive methods, approaches and foci that reflect a creative engagement of the African cosmological reality and the Bible.