The African Context for Theology

Abstract

There is a dichotomy between African traditional culture and Western civilization and Christianity. Westerners generally regard African traditional beliefs as superstition, symptomatic of a people’s backwardness. African people, on the whole, are influenced by their religio-traditional beliefs which include belief in and fear of witches and witchcraft practices. In an attempt to eradicate this so-called superstition, missionaries
in the past laid heavy stress on education and Christian evangelism as the answer to the problem of the so-called African superstition and backwardness. Millions of dollars were raised in the United States and European churches to solve what was assumed to be a short-term process of educating and evangelizing Africa. After a century, the enigmatic puzzle still facing the Christian church in its wrapping of Western civilization remains the same: the African elite, in spite of high achievement in the arts, theological education and technology, remains staunchly embedded in his/her religio-cultural tradition which is based on African cosmology.

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