How do missiologists describe the cosmologies of those that Christianity encounters around the world? Our descriptions often end up filtered through our own Western religious categories. Furthermore, indigenous Christians adopt these Western religious categories. This presents the problem of local Christianities, described by Kwame Bediako as those that “have not known how to relate to their traditional culture in terms other than those of denunciation or of separateness.” Kevin Lines’s phenomenological study of local religious specialists in Turkana, Kenya, not only challenges our Western categories by revealing a more authentic complexity of the issues for local Christians and Western missionaries, but also provides a model for continued use of phenomenology as a valued research method in larger missiological studies. Additionally, this study points to the ways that local Christians and traditional religious practitioners interpret Western missionaries through local religious categories. Clearly, missionaries, missiologists, anthropologists, and religious studies scholars need to do a much more careful job of studying and describing the contextually specific phenomena of traditional religious specialists before relying on meta-categories that come out of our Western theology or older overly simplified ethnographies. The research from this current study of Turkana religious specialists begins that process in the Turkana context and offers a model for future studies in contexts where traditional religion and Christianity intersect.

This volume comprises case studies of five centuries of European encounters with and imaginations of Africa encompassing her triple religious heritage: African Traditional Religions, Christianity and Islam. The introductory chapters outline the challenges and present overviews; some of them also analyze the early accounts of European travelers and missionaries. The following contributions examine the lasting legacy of the European Enlightenment in employing an ambivalent language of human equality and universalism, while in actual fact consigning Africa to an inferior position. It has been difficult for western scholars to divorce themselves wholly from the perceptions thus established. However, there have been quite different approaches. This is indicated in the papers discussing the role and impact of influential European academics (scholars of religion, theologians, historians and social scientists) during the colonial and postcolonial period. Other contributions examine specific institutional centers of African religious studies in Europe. The concluding chapters critically assess European approaches and their use for the study of religion in Africa from an African perspective.

This book explores the idea of religious and theological interculturation from a Christian perspective as an approach to evangelisation. It explores aspects of culture and pluralism as these have been interpreted in post-Vatican II approaches to mission and evaluates interculturation from a number of perspectives, including language, symbol and metaphor. It draws insight from two New Testament encounters of Jesus with women, in Samaria (John) and in Tyre (Matthew and Mark), and goes on to explore some historical sources of interculturation in the missionary endeavours of the Jesuit Matteo Ricci. A particular case study is made of the contemporary experience of an African people (the Turkana of Kenya).

How long can a traditional religion survive the impact of world religions, state hegemony, and globalization? The ’Karamoja problem’ is one that has perplexed colonial and independent governments alike. Now Karamojong notoriety for armed cattle raiding has attracted the attention of the UN and USAID since the proliferation of small arms in the pastoralist belt across Africa from Sudan to stateless Somalia is deemed a threat to world security. The consequences are ethnocidal, but what makes African peoples stand out against state and global governance? The traditional African religion of the Karamojong, despite the multiple external influences of the twentieth century and earlier, has remained at the heart of their culture as it has changed through time. Drawing on oral accounts and the language itself, as well as his extensive experience of living and working in the region, Knighton avoids Western perspectivism to highlight the successful reassertion of African beliefs and values over repeated attempts by interventionists to replace or subvert them. Knighton argues that the religious aspect of Karamojong culture, with its persistent faith dimension, is one of the key factors that have enabled them to maintain their amazing degree of religious, political, and military autonomy in the postmodern world. Using historical and anthropological approaches, the real continuities within the culture and the reasons for mysterious vitality of Karamojong religion are explored.

Beads of Life is a fascinating exploration of traditional beadwork from eastern and southern Africa, as well as the socio-religious principles upon which many aesthetic choices were based. The author concludes with an examination of contemporary beadwork as seen, in particular, through the eyes of Canadians from these regions.

This is the fascinating and important story of how God’s Word came to East Africa. Beginning with the pioneering efforts of Krapf and Rebmann, Aloo Osotsi Mojola traces the history of Bible translation in the region from 1844 to the present. He incorporates four decades of personal conversations and interviews, along with extensive research, to provide the first comprehensive account of the translations undertaken in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, and eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. The maps and tables included assist the reader, as does a history of the Swahili language – its standardization, role as lingua franca, and impact on the work of translation. Mojola’s writing is a tribute to those who sacrificed much in their quest to see the word of God accessible to all people, in all places – and the many who continue to sacrifice for the peoples of East Africa. This book is a key contribution to the important and ongoing narrative of how God has met us, and continues to meet us, in our own contexts and our own languages.

In The Leopard’s Spots, Gerrit J. Dimmendaal discusses the interaction between language, cognition, and culture in an African context with special focus on the cultural construction of meaning through language. Such constructions are constrained by our cognitive system, but leave lots of space for culture-specific interpretations and thereby for tremendous typological diversity between languages. This variation reflects the adaptive nature of human language in the same way that the spots of the leopard reflect selective advantages for its natural habitat. But whereas science has essentially one explanation for the rosettes of the leopard, the non-scientific mind may attach meaning to his or her cultural environment by way of language through a plethora of strategies.