Transcript
Jane Dempsey Douglas will introduce our speaker. Thank you, Joyce. We heard during the last lines of the hymn as we left this morning from the chapel that we will not find our wholeness until we find our unity with the people of the church throughout the world. And so I thought that was a very appropriate way for us to begin the next session of our conference, hearing from a very distinguished women's leader from another part of the
world. Professor Mercy Oduyoye is this year the Mackay Professor of World Christianity here at Princeton Theological Seminary. And I think it's interesting that she is the first woman to sit in this chair. Mercy comes to us from her post as Deputy General Secretary of the World Council of Churches for several years. But prior to her experience in Geneva in that capacity, she was a senior lecturer in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Ibadan
in Nigeria. And she has also served as a guest professor in this country at Harvard University and Union in New York and various other places. Mercy was born in Ghana and is a Methodist and indeed a Methodist lay preacher, I understand. She has had a long engagement in the ecumenical movement. At one point, she was the president of the World Student Christian Federation. She has also been the moderator of the Unit on Faith and Witness of
the World Council of Churches and served in various capacities in the Faith and Order Movement of the World Council of Churches. This is just a very small sampling of a very long career in ecumenical service. But she has also been educating us with her writing. I'm sure many of you know some of her writing about Christianity and theology in Africa. She has been assisting through editing as well as through her own writing the publication of other
women's writing coming out of the South. So it is our very great pleasure to have Mercy Oduyoye with us to bring us a perspective which will enrich our experience together. Thank you very much and my deepest thanks to the continuing education program for organizing this. I have myself in these last years been more of a continuing education person than an academic. I have spent my working life kind of floating between formal education and continuing education in
one form or the other. And what I have to say this morning comes actually out of the experience that I have had in the area of continuing education. I have given the title, "Survival in a Hostile World: African Women's Spirituality of Resistance and Reconstruction" to the input that I need to make this morning. Between 1967 and 1974, an intensive involvement in ecumenical youth work brought me face to face with an African reality that shocked and
irritated me. Youth Without Work, Flight from the Farms. These were two cartoon booklets that I produced because I needed to get young people talking about their lives and it was only later that I realized that I too needed to give a visible expression to my own frustration with regard to the so-called school dropouts and unemployed young people produced by the structures of education that we operate on that continent. I'm no artist, but the need to
externalize the experience could not be met with words. Too many words had already been spoken on these issues. I was already spending hours upon hours talking with young people, so I co-opted an artist who was also concerned to communicate this situation in a medium other than writing. We got our two booklets published and we accompanied them with a poster, which was meant to be the first episode in a cartoon series with the title, Struggle for
Survival. With this last instrument, I joined unemployed, out of school, disadvantaged young people, victims of an economic disaster to say no to despondency, devastation, and dehumanization. In Ghana, people like to write slogans on their trucks and their cars, sometimes even on their taxis. And Life is War is a very popular slogan. Life is war. And not to fight it is to succumb to defeat and death. Survival, the young people knew, was not only a matter of
food, water, and shelter, but it helps to have them. Survival is not only the absence of life-threatening diseases and the insecurity of war, but it helps to be rid of these. Survival is not living fully, but one needs to survive in order to be fully human to face the challenge of living as God intended us to do. It is from this young people's perspective, from this refusal of young people to stay on the margins of
power that I view African women's lives. Life, living, becoming fully human, is a challenge. It's not a given. Doing so in a hostile world has been the lot of Africans for generations. Placed in a continent whose rivers refuse to be tamed, whose deserts creep in on one, whose forests are awesome to behold and frightening to traverse, a people has evolved who respect nature. They respect the nature around them and the people who seek to live in
harmony with their surroundings. If the hostility had been restricted to the ecological challenge, Africans, like all other peoples on the surface of the earth, would have creatively responded to the divine genesis, take care of the rest of creation and the rest of creation will take care of you. The fact is that we live another story. History has made Africa the continent from which all is taken and nothing is put back. In Africa, we live in a
hostile world of meager returns for enormous input, a world of giving good in return for receiving evil, a world that debases one's very humanity by the invention of race and racism, a world that places the onus of human survival on women but slights them. The exploits of all who discovered us have not been empowering. We live in a world that exploits the weak to enrich the strong, a world that seems to know nothing of what it
means to share community with God the beginner. This hostile world produces communities that do violence to the humanity of women, the very people expected to take care of community and its cohesion. In Africa, one of the most persistent challenges to women is how not to allow violence to poison their thinking and their doing. The young people of Africa responded to the challenge of living in a hostile world by creating cartoons expressing their anger and their hopes.
This generated a spirituality of resistance that enabled them to hold on to their humanity. This was a spirituality of resistance born out of a refusal to be marginalized and discarded. Bernadette Mbui Beya, a Catholic sister from Zaire, writing on charismatic and feminist trends in Zaire, cites women whose resistance to the crisis of survival in Africa led them to create spiritual homes where the power of Jesus and the gospel could be experienced in a more vivid and
dynamic way than the official churches provide. The charismatic movement and the rise of African instituted churches called anything African independent, African indigenous, African spiritual, all kinds of other names to choose from. These African instituted churches are the most organized forms of spirituality for resistance, resistance to anonymity and a sense of having been abandoned by God. Bernadette defines spirituality as what permits us to make sense of life. My thesis this morning in this presentation is that in
the struggle to build and maintain a life-giving and life-enhancing community, African men, African women live by a spirituality of resistance that enables them to transform death into life and to open the way to the reconstruction of a compassionate and compassionate world. African women live by a resurrection motif, or rather by the assertion of what the Akan spiritual fountain says, Nyame no awu a, me neku awu. Should God die, I would die. But since God never dies, I won't die.
With this affirmation, African women confront, survive and overcome violence. The violence against women. From the above description of the violence experienced by Africa, some Africans would say that isolating violence against women is like complaining that one is stepping on hot embers when one's house is on fire. True, we have on our hands in Africa violence that brutalizes the humanity of all who are African. But the experience of the liberation struggles indicate that we cannot have the
whole free if the parts are still in shackles. We also know that whatever the situation of the socio-cultural norms, the demands made on women is to be submissive, to subordinate their own behavior to the good of the community in a way that expose them and predispose them to violence and to acceptance of the violence done to them. Yesterday when we looked, we read from the curriculum that a boy who kept hitting that girl. My immediate
response is this has nothing to do with forgiveness. The girl isn't complaining. She's not saying stop. She accepts it. This is how it should be. The boy doesn't know that what he is doing shouldn't be done. He continues to do it, and doesn't see what the first is, the only child and therefore for me the only human in that situation was the one who hate. It is this violence against women that generates a spirituality of resistance
to dehumanization. Women's spirituality is developed, of course, in the larger framework of the violence in Africa and the violence against Africa. The African scene calls for a total reconstruction. The marginalization of women's pain is part of the patriarchal construct of reality which African women need to resist even more vigorously. While doing this, of course, we always keep in mind the Hausa proverb that says, the silk cotton tree in the middle of the compound. On the day
it is cut, the people in the house grieve. The outsiders rejoice. Patriarchy is the silk cotton tree in the middle of our compound and the majority of women are outside this compound and we're waiting to see patriarchy cut and we will rejoice but be sure that the people who benefit from patriarchy are not going to sit there and have you cut that silk cotton tree. The violence that Africa suffers because of racism and exploitation that is
built into her relation with the Euro-American world moves African women to cultivate and to feed on a spirituality of resistance that avoids the smooth talk which hides the violence among women. In any global dialogue of justice-loving women, the violence arising out of class, education and race cannot be overlooked. African women draw empowerment from a spirituality that urges them to think through what it means to be partners with women struggling for a world free of
violence and for human communities that honor humanity and the environment that sustains us. They draw on a liberation analysis that unveils the wide range of violent situations, not the least being that against themselves, against children, and in some communities that done against the girl child and against nature. For decades, African women have had to resist the image of the most oppressed and downtrodden of all women that has been imposed upon her by anthropologists and sociologists whose
research field is Africa. The strength it takes to survive and to keep one's humanity as a woman intact is ignored by these academics. African women are imaged often only as voiceless victims who do not even know that their humanity is being violated. This of course is contrary to reality. African women know the rule of those who have power over others by virtue of skin color, nationality, the wealth of knowledge. African women who are Christians know that
lording it over is not part of Christ's teaching. So they ask, why should we obey God rather than men? And people say, you're here to serve the men. We cannot but make our own images of God. We cannot but challenge the African man with the fact that if God is he, he doesn't make the he God. So we would rather obey God than men. Those who are theologians know that they should examine all the liturgical expressions
that predispose women to accept violence. They do not accept men's operations as lords of the manor and of the church. They don't accept this as the will of God. It is not the will of God for humanity. Did not the bullet say to the cockerel, do stop swaggering around, we are all children of eggs. So it's not as if African women are just sitting there and accepting that the men are more human than themselves. You don't
have to confront, you just have to tell them this proverb and they'll know what you're saying. To illustrate this spirituality of resistance, we need to have before us some images of women's life in this hostile Africa. So I turn to a couple of women's realities. The most prevalent image of the African woman is a composition of mother and child. So I begin with this reality, the woman as a biological entity. As in other parts of the
world, there's a cultural expectation as to what her body should look like. This leads to modifications of the body like fattening and I think around here slimming that society imposes on women. For Africa, it cannot be slimming because it is believed that a narrow hip cannot bear children. For the same reason, some would even impose on women genital modifications without which they cannot marry. The biological factor of reproduction in the context of Africa is not only
a socio-cultural but also a religious duty. This means that women's bodily discipline takes on a theological dimension. Beauty becomes a key factor in women's lives as a prerequisite for catching and holding a man. ornaments in the nostrils, in the lips, in the earlobes, elongated necks, anklets that can only be called manacles and which can only be fitted by metal smiths are symbolic of what pleasing men demands. Religion is a very potent factor in the lives
of Africans. God is very present in Africa. The African God is the one who walks with them and whom they consult any time need arises. We are also deeply aware of a spiritual world in which we participate and with whose inhabitants we are in constant communication. This spirit world, named the world in between by Archbishop Milingo, is intensely interested in the continuation of the human race and its wellbeing. This religious base permeates all that the traditional
African does, from conception to afterlife. This is an aspect of survival with its locus in mysticism that is also present in African religion and it is also in Christianity, which I think has led to the discovery, rediscovery, re-reading of the European foremothers of Christianity. In the field of economic life, the contemporary African faces the violence of the so-called structural adjustment programs imposed by the New World Economic Order. A lot of us say New World
Economic Disorder, but our voices don't get anywhere. In Africa, some people say that this Nigeria, we just say SAP, Structural Adjustment Programs. SAP has made women of men, jeopardizing men's self-esteem, which society has built upon their being providers. Domestic violence brews in this atmosphere of the economic impotence of men, compounding the traditional demonization of women evidenced in the daily language of myths and proverbs. Marriage is in itself a critical factor in the lives of African
women. The concept does not evoke partnership. It is not even a friendship. In many parts of Africa, it presents a profile of an institution that captures in full measure the inequality of power that operates in the master-servant relations as found in the European feudal culture of lords and tenants. Controversies and unclarities surrounding the marriage contract and the patriarchal economics of most African marriages, I think, are well known to most of you. Available to us are
the marks of sexism in marriage, which in some societies mean that the boy child has the right to confer inheritance, while the female spouse has no rights over the property of her husband. It is especially in these cases that her movement out of an abusive marriage is severely controlled and in which she may be unable to divorce the husband's family even after the demise of the man. I have, in this presentation of the African women's realities,
focused on her disabilities. I've done this because it is when human strength fails us that we seek intensely spiritual resources and we do so with an intensity that only the divine can respond to. When things go well, we recognize the beneficence of God and the spirit world. We celebrate, we enjoy rites of thanksgiving. This too is fundamental to the spirituality of African women. Indeed, it is what keeps us struggling and resisting and what impels us towards
transformation. In Africa, we have no problem with celebrating life and even death when it is deemed timely. What Africa is confronted with is how to forestall untimely death. Here is where the critical spiritual challenge lies. Let me refer once more to Milingo, who writes in the context of racism. If God made a mistake by creating me an African, it is not yet evident. And I think African women's spirituality is grounded in the following. If God made
a mistake by creating me, it is not yet evident. We claim our space in God's world and so are empowered to resist and to transform, to break down and to reconstruct if that is what it takes to live out our God-given humanity. So how do women survive all this? How do they survive to be able to challenge this hostile world, to break the culture of violence and to build up a life-enhancing community? What constitutes
a spirituality of resistance and reconstruction? Indeed, what is spirituality? Here is what a working group on theological reflection on a liberating feminist cultural hermeneutic at a conference of feminist theologians, international conference of feminist theologians, which took place in Costa Rica over the Christmas period had to say on spirituality. Spirituality, they say, is a holistic and continuous process of becoming. It enables me to look at others with mutual respect. Spirituality is always coupled with justice. The more
I grow spiritually, the more I'm concerned with justice and taking action for justice. My spirituality sustains and empowers me to relate in a hostile and patriarchal church and society. Women's spirituality, this group went on, must be holistic, it must be cosmic, and must embrace our own being as women. Spirituality is both passionate and compassionate. This passionate and compassionate has become an adage of the Women's Commission of the Association of Third World Theologians ever since we met
in Westerpec and we produced the book with Passion and Compassion with Virginia Fabella and myself edited. What indications do we get from this use of the word and how it functions in African women's world view? What is spirituality for the African woman? For me, spirituality has become a notorious willow, the wisp, that I need many handles to hold it down in order to attempt a description of it. And one of the handles I have found useful
is that it is a theological concept. More accurately, it is a Trinitarian one. It is God moving in and through us to accomplish a mission of peace with justice, which will result in a beautiful world, a new creation, no longer hostile. From the irritation at the wasting of young people's lives, I have come to understand as externalizing the anger and the hurt so that one might look them in the face and say no. Say no to
them and thereby be filled with the power to struggle for transformation. It is what makes one to break the silence that makes continued dehumanization possible. Spirituality, as far as I'm concerned, has nothing to do with the perpetration nor with the acceptance of death and evil. There are many words in the language I'm speaking now, English, I think it is, which I can't find in Fanti, the language in which I pray. So I have been searching high
and low for something in the African religion, the African world view that will approximate what one expresses when one talks about spirituality. And it hasn't been easy. What I have come up with is that the names and the attributes of God is what sustains life in Africa. So I'm so grateful for this morning's sermon. I just sat there and I said there is the speech, I don't need to give it again. The evidence that religion propels
people's particular attitudes and their actions is in Africa overwhelming. Professor Paris, the Christian ethicist of this institution, writes as follows on spirituality. He says, the spirituality of a people refers to the animating and integrative power that constitutes the principal frame of meaning for the individual and collective experiences. Now both Paris, an African American, and Archbishop Milingo, a Zambian, recognize the pivotal role that African religion culture plays in the shaping of this spirituality. The emphasis on the
survival of the people, the need to maintain unity in diversity, again last night, the primal need for a cohesive community and the practice of hospitality and integrity are but a few of the marks of African spirituality. And as I said, usually the onus is put on the women to make these things happen. Professor Osula King, who at the conference in Costa Rica spoke on spirituality as a struggle for life, describes the contemporary references to spirituality as
pointing to some kind of universal code word to indicate the human search for direction and meaning, especially in times of crisis, in times of widespread uprootedness, in times of confusion. It's as if people were asking, or are asking us, as they asked Jesus, by what authority do you do these things? And then we have to express our spirituality. By what authority do we challenge all the things we challenge? By what authority do we refuse to conform?
In this hostile world, we have become conscious that some people cope better than others. And of course, better here means they are able to transform and reshape adversity into advantage, using it to anchor and to secure their humanity, or even as a launching pad for the journey towards full humanity. Better, because as King says, there are different kinds of spirituality, good ones and bad ones. Here, I don't quite agree with her, but I think there's a
definition of spirituality that can take in this way of looking at it. There are good ones and bad ones. And we have to discern the spirits. In this presentation, we're dealing with a spirituality of resistance, not one of acquiescence, a spirituality of empowerment, not one that disempowers self and others, a spirituality that negates humanity's call to be the image of God, cannot derive from God and has to be resisted. Indeed, as I have said, for me,
it does not deserve the label that it bears. In Africa, spirituality was never lost, so we do not need to organize a I see the current vogue as resulting from a realization that we need to clarify the sources of our actions and attitudes. For the traditional African, the world is spiritual and human existence is part of this spiritual world. King reminds us that in European cultural history, a form of spirituality derived from Christianity has been at
work diminishing women and legitimating the exploitative use of power and violence, of pain and suffering. Such, too, is the African traditional spirituality that explained all with a harmony created by disharmony, created by nonconformity with tradition, a spirituality that resists change and subordinates our presence, present to our past. This, Osula King would describe as debilitating and distorting, a debilitating and distorting spirituality. This spirituality exists in Christianity, giving the African Christian woman a double dose of an energy
-sapping consciousness. Nevertheless, in Christianity, as in African religion, spirituality can and is understood as what propels us to resist death and foster and create life. Spirituality, says Evelyn Underhill, is the heart of all real religion. With King, too, I agree that today's spirituality is being used as an interpretive, existential tool. In this context, she says spirituality is the attitude and interpretation we adopt towards our experiences to give them meaning, make sense of them. Now, in that
presentation that she made, I just felt that she was speaking like an African woman when she describes spirituality as quite literally the immense effort, labor, and pain to produce and bring life into this world, as women always do, but also to attend to all its details of growth, to nurture it with love and care and struggle to make it grow into fuller, abundant life. Yet, it is this very spirituality that can be employed for the disempowerment
of women, as shown in the examples of marriage and childbearing cited above. For African women, this breath and blessing of life, childbearing, this very bread of life, nurturing, is also the shackles they wear as they try to walk away from debilitating traditions. A spirituality of resistance and reconstruction not only removes the shackles, they wear as ornaments, but enables them to reject being treated as ornaments and to refuse further shackling. A life-enhancing spirituality is that which
frees us from mobility. To some, it gives wings. To others, it puts roller skates on their shoes. For some, moving and changing space is slow, but the freedom to change towards living fully impels and inspires. It beckons to life-giving creativity. It clothes them, it encompasses them with power to promote life, and cradles them in the divine love that gives one the confidence to carry on in the compound and in the company of God, the God
of life, and thereby to part company with living as if one were dead. So, resisting death. I think it is possible for an African woman to work with King's statement that spirituality rightly understood and practiced is a force for survival and transformation. Africa's triple heritage is a complicated scenario for transformation, and when I talk about triple heritage, I'm talking about the African tradition, Islam, Christianity. But one could, if one dared to use the Jeremehic imagery of
pulling down and building up, could live it. Like apartheid, much of Africa's need demands dismantling of the current constructs to make way for reconstruction. A creative approach to transforming Africa from a space into a nurturing womb and cradle provided by God. That creative approach demands dismantling. Nothing short of the resurrection spirituality can cope with the demands of Africa. Meanwhile, the daily experience is one of resisting death. African women know that to resist death, one must be
ready to risk death. And so, the ester types take their lives into their hands as they declare, if I perish, let me perish. I'm going to see the king. You have to take your life into your hands to have change. Such is the stance of one impelled by a spirituality for life, one who seeks to transform relationships. But meanwhile, the spirituality of resistance directs our response to this hostile world. We need to observe that not all
resistance is active and frontal. Africa has its share of the Vashtis, the other queen, the Vashti types, who simply refuse to comply with the dictates of those who would dehumanize them. Remember this ester story? First, Vashti asked to come and dance and she says, no way. And you know so you do have both types in Africa. They face the cross in the hope that the humanity of women will rise from the silence and peace of their
graveyard. Both queens and many African queens and spiritual leaders of the colonial era demonstrated the spirit of resistance to dehumanization of various types. And there are many of those. Many more types of spirituality that edges resistance will be found among contemporary African women. The spirituality of resistance at this Costa Rica meeting was demonstrated by Hing King-Chun's paper, which she entitled with the uncompromising title, Your Comfort Means My Death. It dramatizes women's reality. Wherever a socialization
against shame make women accept and perpetuate injustice against themselves as a way of life. True spirituality anchored in God, in the God of life, is that which moves one to generate a spirituality of resistance and reconstruction. It is in this respect that attention develops in the lives of African women when giving life and nurturing means dying to one's self. In fact, on the non-metaphorical level, it is a taboo in culture to die while giving birth.
So I do this to say I have not heard this dangerous thing. To give birth to a spirituality of resistance for the sake of life, you are also risking death. There are women taking the risk to live in the eschatum, and the consequences of that stance are not mean. Professor Dolphyne, the University of Ghana, narrates the traumatic experience of a Kenyan woman whose mother had refused to have her, quote, circumcised. When asked if she would have
her daughter circumcised, she said she was not sure. Her better judgment told her she should not. But when she remembered what she had gone through, she sometimes wondered whether it would be wise and fair for her to put her daughter through the same misery. Her parents had taken a step which another woman, a Nigerian, states clearly she was not ready to take. Her parents had complied, and so does she. She says, for as long as the
community remains unsympathetic to changing the custom, the most she would do is to seek the services of improved technology. To live today as if God's reign is fully manifested demands absolute confidence in the God of life. It is the commitment to this ultimate goal that sustains one in the penultimate task of disclosing, challenging, and questioning tradition and its provisions. The resources for resisting. One needs a spirit of truth to resist. And it is neither easy to
tell the truth about a culture is brought up to love and respect, nor is it easy to do so with a culture you are taught to despise as primitive and inferior. Truth telling about African women and especially about cultural violence is costly. From the insider, it is often misunderstood by other insiders as disloyalty, if it is negative. Critique by the outsider smacks of ethnocentrism and imperialism. On the other hand, there is often some misgivings on the
part both of insiders and outsiders when one presents empowering aspects of traditional culture. So it is not easy for us to accept that we did not invent these problems and that others have been before us and that they had produced their own spirituality to nourish their lives when faced with the agents of death. So some people have walked this path before us. We find empowering myths in African tradition as we find in the biblical prophetic texts.
Given the complexity of the scenario, one does well to place more weight on, I think, the internal critical discourse. What women do in Africa is a critique of their own culture so that we may identify and utilize the values and voices that empower us and give us a sense of and wealth. This way, a life-giving hermeneutic is derived from this mixed bag that we call our culture. From the same bag, we can find resources against
the demonization and scapegoating of women. There are myths and stories and sayings in this bag that are liberating for women, or may be re-read from a liberative perspective. Resistance to sickness, to diseases, to natural disasters is found in women's prayers, in women's sacrifices that strengthen them and move them to pick up their lives. There is no time or space in the African woman's life for despair. When invading peoples with strange religions struck at the Akan,
at their original home, it is the legends of women leaders of the migration that have come down to us. When white people from overseas made uncouth demands that insulted the ancestors and the spirit of their sanctity nation, it was women who urged and led the rebellion against the ungrateful strangers. Of African women's resistance to death and disgrace from the resources of their religion, history, and culture, not half has been told. They are there to be selected
for our empowerment. To date, however, resistance has taken the form of law reforms, and a lot has been achieved in terms of legislation. But the question we are raising is, are these provisions justiciable, and can they be adequately monitored? African culture demands that the whole community complies if these changes are to be effective. So the UN Decade for Women, which empowered African women to seek direct involvement in legislation, has been effective in producing the legislation. But
the enactment of provisions without a real discussion of the traditional, religious, cultural disabilities that inform them doesn't help anybody. National Councils for Women's Developments were created by African governments. In Ghana, the Ghanaian members of the International Federation of Women Lawyers have been instrumental in new legislations, legal provisions on the areas of inheritance, legitimacy of children, the definition of wife, the abolition of widowhood rights. All these are now, in theory, no more existing. The challenge that remains
here asks in the much publicized sexual mutilation issue. Is spirituality powerful enough to resist the tradition of the people and the religious culture that informs it? This is a theological issue, but the advocates of equity rarely function with religion. We are faced with the task of pulling down the traditional religious construct for a critical review and with a view to rebuilding an empowering one. From within the culture, there are resources for transforming it. The oversized sense
of worth given women for being I think can be exposed. There's a Hausa proverb that I think many African women, and maybe some of you, need to hear. It goes like this. They pat the cow before they milk her. So beware of adulation. For Christian women, it is the theology of the cross that they have to suspect. A spirituality of the cross without resurrection is promoted among women. But we all know that projecting the cross is
not true to its Christian origins unless it means a commitment to Easter, the Easter of new life and life-bearing beginnings, an Easter of dignity and strength, an affirmation of life, and a heritage of bonding and community. Pastoral counseling, and I have heard many of this. I haven't had one. I don't think I will have one. But pastoral counseling on marriage for African women, it's so unashamedly patriarchal, it's unbelievable. It makes it risky even to resist
the traditional marriage because it supports the same ideology. When one is cutting at the roots of a people's culture, the question always is, what do you replace it with? The vision of mutual respect, of loving and bonding in marriage, and of a lifelong companionship in a world that begins to know more and more leisure is simply greeted with benign dismissal because it is not an African reality. This leisure that means people can sit around is not
our reality. Christian women have made Bible study and prayer their resource for strength. They compose and sing songs from their Christian faith. They expect God to enter into our human experience to know how it feels in order to make the appropriate response. Prayer becomes a real telling it to God, and usually begins with the strong names of God, some of which come from the traditional religion. When women know that depends on God, they cry to God.
Jesus, when we touch anything, it breaks. When we pull, it snaps. You whose tails they see, control the elements, aid our efforts, direct our ways. The women sing. They walk daily with the compassionate God who caused thousands to cross the rivers. And this is after somebody has been crying out like Jonah in the belly of the wheel. And then afterwards they are able to say, we are walking with the compassionate God, and they pick themselves up
and they go. From the African instituted churches, where many African women have found their spiritual home, many songs expressing confidence in Jesus in spite of all the harsh realities may be heard. Here the power of Jesus, they say, is the real superpower. And you can almost tell the period when this song was being sung. When we had two superpowers and we were crushed between as third world peoples, the women would say, Jesus' power is the only
superpower. We weave songs from traditional idioms and proverbs to express our faith. In the midst of poverty, women will still sing lustily. The spoon of my house is not on vacation. There is still fish in the market and I don't owe the woman any money. She has nothing, but her spoon is still working. She's tearing the pot. She's able to eat. The goodness of Christ to me are many. I will praise and thank Jesus. They are
able to sing the harvest song that the first president of Methodist Church Ghana wrote. And it says, nothing is too great for God to do. And then the proverbs and things that we normally would say attend into song. And he says, I don't know how to translate this. Weeds will not grow from our mouth. And our clothing will not be so old that it's being torn. It's easy to tear. When somebody sits, we say when somebody
is sitting there with nothing to eat, then weeds grow from your mouth. It will never happen to us that we cannot find something to eat. We cannot find something to clothe our bodies because nothing is too great for God to do. Now when all is truly bleak, that's when we cry to the God from the belly of the whale. When God hears our prayers from the deep, the African Christian woman's God can be sure of her
praise. Come join me to lift up my sorrow. God has done a lot for me. My legs dance. My heart rejoices. My mouth would sing the glory of God. And the Yoruba women, you'll never go to a Bible study with the Yoruba women without hearing them. You saw that on the tape yesterday, right? That's what we do down there. Okay. So the heavy, hostile world does not make us sit in despair because the resources are infinite
in the God of our ancestors who is the God that Christ revealed and continues to reveal to us. This is the spirituality of traditional Christian faith that encourages and inspires us to expect life from death and should enable African women to seek a transformation of the ambiguities of our triple heritage. The task is that of distilling the empowering aspects to serve as a resource for reconstruction. Total discontinuity is an illusion, though there is an ambiguity in
the exercise of continuity. Having one's heritage violated by Euro-imperialism, one feels like a traitor when one questions one's own traditional culture and lifestyle. The strength for discerning can only come out of a search for justice. Justice that is motivated by a sense that one is within the design of God. One is within the design of the God of compassion who moves us to have a passion for truth and to live by justice. It is with
this that we attempt a reconstruction of community. It is not enough to survive violence by coping devices or by resistance. There is need to take the initiative to transform the relationship that breeds violence. Reconstructing African communities on liberative empowering lines demands that we approach life in a holistic manner. There are no issues that are exclusively women's issues and there should not be any areas in life that demand that men alone meet to resolve the present and
to map out the future. Reconstruction demands a community of women and men making a concerted effort towards building up an empowering society that upholds and promotes the full humanity of every individual. Reconstruction will call for a healing process. Reconstruction calls for a healing process because the hurt of the people are many and the powers that operate in their lives are sick. They are sick with the In seeking reconstruction, I'm conscious that the we African women language
does not hold. The cleavage that has been observed between women of the north and the south is a real one. And I wish to say this, that it applies in all communities and in all nations. We do not agree on what constitutes women's issues and especially on the method of seeking reconstruction. Above all, it is really very, very exasperating to have impatient liberators on one's back. Professor King states in her paper, I am attracted by the
dignity and strength and affirmations of life found in so many African women and their traditional heritage of bonding and community building. The rich and diverse resources of tradition, history, and culture of their great continent. At different levels, African women are learning together about their religious cultural context and are seeking to discover how to make it empowering for women. The solidarity we seek from the global sisterhood is that we get our rightful space to say our own
It is no small task to undertake a critical examination of the religious culture, especially if one hopes to move from knowing to living as one empowered to participate in reconstruction. Seeking to function in this way is like the biblical imagery of disarming the strong man who is guarding the gates of his stronghold. Professor King reminds us that in seeking and talking about our new vision for human interaction, we should not use the militaristic language like struggle
and all those kinds of things. That we should leave that kind of language behind and rather talk about spirituality that feeds acts of transformation. She suggests that we put our emphasis on praying and studying and working for justice. On a theoretical level, I'm entirely in agreement with her, only we should not forget that often the language of struggle and resistance is the only language that penetrates the barricades of the powers of domination. I agree entirely that
we should do no more violence and that we should say to all, no more violence. But this I think of many African women for whom every confrontation is violence can sometimes mean that you are immobilized. It can mean that you wear these golden shackles on your ankles. The but with them on your ankles you do not move. You cannot move. This stance that many African women take is also a type, they would say, of resistance. And
it is the resistance against the saviors who think by the stroke of the pen they can change the African woman's reality. And yet when occasion demands, African women resort to traditional, what in my part of the world we call shaming devices, by saying enough. In other words, we can affirm that it's possible to attain a violent free world by an alternative discourse. One that anchors on renewing the face and promotes walking together as men and women
towards the community that we envision, towards community of life, justice-loving women. Such a transformation project calls for, at least in Africa we say it calls for working with men, which in some places is a moot point in the discourse. But surely we cannot say that there are no men who seek life and justice and truth. In the search for liberating hermeneutics, many women have claimed the biblical affirmation of our being created in the image of
God, both for the promotion of women's self-worth and self-esteem, and to protest their dehumanization by others. Granted, this imagery I think is a wearing thing. You keep saying we are in the image of God, in the image of God, and then people say what does that mean to be in the image of God. But I think without it, the whole edifice of human relations seem to crumble and fall. If one is in the image
of God, then one is expected to practice the hospitality, the compassion, and the justice that characterizes God. The accounts say all human beings are the children of God. What this calls for is mutuality in our relationships, seeking one as community and one household of the God of life. This is the spirituality that makes one survive, the spirituality that makes one resist, the spirituality for reconstruction. Thank you. (applause) Thank you very much, Mercy for that
powerful statement. We have just a few minutes. Would you be willing to respond to questions or make comments? Are there questions or comments? Yes. (inaudible) I've struggled as a white woman from North America, how to be in solidarity with women in Africa (inaudible)
I think the global women's movement, the global sisterhood, has unearthed a lot that a lot in women's lives that are common. And my sense is that if right here some of the things that you have
discovered are negative for women, you work on them here, and become a role model as to how you work on yours, maybe that will encourage us to see how we work on ours. The controversy that the women in Nairobi in the UN decade had, and I'm sure, I hope it doesn't happen in China, but it may, is that there are far too many saviors of the African women who don't even know Africa, and worse, those who
assume they know. So I think, first of all, a few more friendships, getting closer to the continent, and learning. It's very difficult to learn from an African, because we understand why it's difficult for you to learn from us. But if you want to be in solidarity with us, then you have to find out where we are. I'm always into these proverbs. We it is the person who is sitting by the fire who knows where it's heating.
So you have to get to us so we can talk this. And then maybe in the sharing of information and methods and strategies, we may discover something that is useful and usable for us. (inaudible)
This particular international conference was organized by the Ittaward Women's Commission as a dialogue with theological women from the North, basically from North America and Europe. And I know that the papers will be published. But the one that you have in your hands now
are the passion and compassion, which is from women from Asia, Latin America, and Africa. And there is an African women's writings that are now available all over the place. And the circle for concerned African women theologians, we have a book out, The Will to Arise, which describes some of what African women theologians are trying to do. (inaudible)
Well, I don't know what the organizers are thinking, but we'll talk with them and see what there is to that. (inaudible)
Well, I think the women whose literature are on the market are actually more the Islamic women, the French speaking, like Northern Africa. I sometimes wonder how that happened. But the Western world supports what it is afraid of. You get people, you give them research grants to research into Islam and Islamic situations so that you will know how to deal with the Muslim world. That's my suspicion. But what I'm saying is that they have been very vocal,
especially the feminists, and they've written a lot. And it may be for them in their literature to give you some indication how to be in solidarity with them. Because again, as I said, there's nothing like the Islamic women. They will differ among themselves. So you need to find out whose perspective you agree with and then work with them. But I know that they collaborate with people who share their dreams. (inaudible) Yeah, not on the religious level. The
women in literature group, for instance, is mixed. The women against genital mutilation is mixed. Women in development is mixed. But in religion, the only place where I've seen that mixture is the little group of African, concerned African women theologians that we created just a couple of years ago. We have three or four Muslim women in that group. Because Islam in collaboration on the level of dialogue between Muslims and Christians in Africa is itself a huge area
of uncertainty and challenge that people are working on now. (inaudible)
Well, if I judge by the two places in Africa where I've lived the longest, Ghana and Nigeria, I would say that if the young men are not willing to come along into the space where women claim equity, they will find it very hard to find companions. There are a couple of films to that effect and surveys that have reached that. So they have to move. (inaudible) Well, actually,
this conference I'm talking about, which happened in Costa Rica, was delayed something like three years because the African-American women were saying, we have not had a dialogue here in the U.S. with the white women. Why should we have a dialogue with them on the international level? So until they are willing to have a dialogue here with us, we're not coming together. Because the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians has not only the southern people,
Asia, Africa, Latin America. It has a group called the minorities, the cultural minorities. So within that movement, we have African-Americans. So they were there. And they said, no way are we going to have this dialogue until there's a dialogue up here. And of course, we know that there were areas where the class issue hadn't been dealt with and the race issue wasn't up almost in the feminist movement. And that the womanist movement had come up
with the women's histories and what happens in domestic violence between the black and the white and so on. And all that area hadn't been dealt with here in the country. And they were not going to deal with it on the international level until it's done here. So all I can say is that I do know that there is an area, a whole area of work that needs to be done here. And how you face it, I
don't know because I don't know the country. Thank you.