Transcript
My name is Horace Six-Means. I'm a senior here at the Seminary. On behalf of the Association of Black Seminarians, of which I am the librarian, I welcome you to our Geddes Hansen Lecture on Black Culture and Christianity. We're fortunate to have this evening Professor Mercy Amba Oduyoye, who is the Visiting Makai Lecturer in World Christianity. We are doubly blessed to have her for both semesters. She will be teaching, she is teaching this semester Missiological Issues
in African Church History, Religion in African Literature. And next semester, for those of you who haven't had the pleasure of being in her class this semester, you can look forward to possibly taking African Women's Writings and African Theology. I first got acquainted with Professor Oduyoye through her writings. Of course, I took with Dr. Paris here two years ago. We looked at this book, "Hearing and Knowing: Theological Reflections on Christianity in Africa". She brings a breadth of
knowledge. She's written many articles and several books, including a two-volume study on the development of the Methodist Church in Nigeria. So I am really excited to have her here speaking to expose a wider community to the insights that she brings to theology and Christian practice in life in general. So I give to you, Professor Mercy Amba Oduyoye. It's a pleasure to be able to share with you this evening a few random thoughts on Christianity in
Africa. I originally thought I was going to have like eight African Americans and we will sit in a circle and I will say all the unmentionable things that I usually say about Christianity, and then we could discuss. I've changed that format only slightly, and I'm trying to do something which for myself also is really a challenge, because what comes first to me when I think of Christianity in Africa is how very negative it has been to
my own culture. But let me begin with some of the usual caveats that one has to put when one speaks about Africa. First, it is not a country. Africa is not a country. It is a continent. And after so many fruitless attempts on the part of Africans to say this to Christians in the Northern Hemisphere, Christians here in the U. S., now we have the collaboration and solidarity of Friendship Press that has put out a map
and given statistics and shown the evolution of the vision, the picture of Africa through the ages that the map makers have depicted. And I hope that you go to the bookshop and buy a copy. It's really informative, and I think when you are confronted with that map, you begin to reshape. That visual enables you to reshape what you think Africa, you have been thinking Africa is. The other caveat is that one doesn't really speak competently about
Africa and African culture in the singular. If one is not going to be able to illustrate with particular culture in Africa. We are a diverse people, but then to the extent that you can say this is American or European or Asian, so there are things that you can say are African. So within that diversity, one speaks then out of certain particularities. I also want to shift our perception a little beyond the arrival of Europeans along the
coasts of Africa and say that Africa was alive with people and empires and universities and political, economic, and educational structures, and was in touch with Asia and the Middle East before Europeans discovered it on their way to Mediterranean Africa. But Africa has since then existed in our minds from a Eurocentric perspective, on a Eurocentric map. And sometimes I feel that we are placed in a disadvantageous position on the globe for being so close to Europe, directly
under Europe. I would also like to say that there were churches in Africa before a greater part of Europe came to Christ. But then the Euro-centered Christianity does not want to hear this. Or when it hears this, it immediately begins to redefine Africa. And to say the Africa of St. Mark and the Coptic Church, the Africa of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, the Africa of Nubia is not Africa. The Africa of St. Augustine and Cyprian, Libya,
all the churches in the Mediterranean, they are no longer Africa because it doesn't fit the European scheme of things. The neglect of African languages, and I'm one of the culprits of this neglect. I should be speaking Fante here and not English. The paucity of the written material in our own languages has meant that we keep interpreting ourselves with the images and imagery and philosophical presuppositions of cultures that are not our own. And that makes whatever we
would like to express always seem like a little bit of gear. We speak English and French and Portuguese and Spanish. And sometimes we forget that Arabic, Swahili, Hausa, even Yoruba could be African languages because they are spoken by more people in Africa than speak maybe English or French. But the language is a political issue. If we want to communicate around the world in Swahili, we will need to be an economically strong and politically strong power with
trade and battleships behind us for other people to want to learn Swahili. We have also neglected in our African studies the materials that have come from the Arabic periods written up in Arabic of the empires of Mali and Songhe and Ghana. They are not showing up so dynamically in the histories that we read, but they were there. The written language that is African languages and there were written African languages that were only limited to the priestly
class and were written and understood only by people in the secret societies. In Eastern Nigeria now there's some research into the Equal Society that has its own written forms. The communication that has gone on in Africa in terms of picture language is beginning to be now a little more familiarized among the younger people. When you pick a cloth like I have over there, and that's a very simple one and not a very good one, a dinkra,
and you spread it out, all the different symbols have meaning and they send messages. The Morse code is a derivation from the drum signals. As Baden-Powell got the boy scout and girl guide idea from living in Ghana, he says so himself. So there was a culture that was communicating with these symbolic forms, with written forms that were secret, but which somehow got derailed. I could go on and talk about in terms of what the Caribbean
writers have called how Europe underdeveloped Africa, or rather talk about the disrupted development, the disrupted evolution, the contact that meant that the flowering of an African culture was not allowed to happen. Nipping in the bud her uniqueness in an attempt to create Africa in Europe's image is what we live now. It's much more easy for me to talk about the impact of Christianity on African culture if I want to list what I find negative. My struggle
and the reason I say it's for myself also a challenge, is that I want to try and pick out a couple of things that I find positive in this encounter. Any interaction is a two-edged sword, and the way it cuts is not simply straight, it's zigzag, it's crooked. The impact is also not one way because Africans have created and they continue to create their own versions of Christian religion. Another complicated factor in this impact is
that it is difficult to separate Westernization or Europeanization or Americanization from what is Christian in Africa. One thing which is clear is that power is a key factor in the direction of the change. There are several external changes in Africa, in the African culture that derive from Western culture, but which were introduced by Christian missionaries and were deemed necessary for salvation as defined by Christianity. Just to name a couple, the naming of people with a patriarchal
surname and the nuclear family with its atomized homesteads, the architecture that goes with that, which T. M. Aluko was inspired to use in the title of his books, "One Man, One Wife", "One Man, One House", "One Man, One Machete", this is Europeanization. You look at clothing and the significance of what one wears has now become meaningless. Whereas in the Akan culture that I came from or come from and live, in the traditional culture, you see a
person and you know that person's status, both in terms of chronological status and in terms of political status. Now, it's gone. The celebration of marriages is another area. We get white weddings with long trails and wedding cakes, Bible and ring, and these have superseded the original intention of marriage as knitting together two families. Now, tried as this may sound, they represent profound changes in the self-understanding of the African Christian. They represent the breakdown of traditional
social system, of individualism. They undermine the respect for and attachment to our own culture and they inculcate negative attitudes towards being African and they inculcate a lowering of one's self-esteem. My journey from dogmatic theology into contextual theology began with this search for the value of African religious beliefs and practices for Christian theology. The negative influences of Westernization, including Christianization, are not difficult to identify and to analyze. What then is positive about this content? Now, for
me to talk about what is positive, I'm obviously going to be biased. It's value-loaded statement and I do need a criteria for myself as what is positive. So, far be it from me to join in any priori condemnation of Africa's religious culture. That's far from what my intention is. What I want us to do is to apply our tools of critical examination to review the religious beliefs and values and concepts from the perspective of Christ.
What I'm doing is asking myself if Christ is to assume African culture, what would make Christ feel at home in Africa? When Jesus pitches his tent among the nomads, or builds a hut in the savanna, or builds a mud block in the farm, in the forest belt, or takes palm fronds and builds a hut among the fisher folk, or lives in the high rice in Lagos, Johannesburg, Cairo, what would make Christ feel at home in these
different circumstances? There are very many controversial areas in this search, but for me, primary among them is the understanding of marriage, and especially the plural marriages which the churches set themselves up to condemn and to destroy. The early Christianization seemed to have focused itself on if you got your marriage straightened up the way we have straightened it up in the West with one man, one wife, and you name your children after yourself, which for us was
an abomination, that you name a child after yourself. Who are you to claim the child that comes from generations and generations and sent by God and you name this child after yourself? That moves on to this other area of the role of one's ancestors in the spirituality by which one lives. Are the ancestors in competition with God? Why were the missionaries, why are Christians so worried about references to the ancestors? Are they in competition with Christ,
with the angels, or with Christian sins? I sat in chapel this morning and I said, I don't need to give my lecture. There goes, the ancestors are there, right there in the pulpit of PTS chapel being acknowledged. And we have to, because if you don't know where you're coming from, you don't know what you're doing here. The Western mentality of either or rather than both demands that the ancestors be excluded from the lives of Christians. With
these remarks, I come to the identification of the positive impacts that I want to bring to you. And I'll take three things. And I want you to hear me as a woman who comes from a mother-centered culture. A firstborn who is supposed to be the be-all, the biggest thing that happened in the family. Who has such a big self-ego that nothing can shake. You have to hear me as somebody from a Christian home
who was waking up 5 a.m. every morning for prayers and taught Sunday school. And you have to hear me as somebody who for good or ill had studied some religion and a bit of theology. Christianization. The challenge of Christianization to Africans is often stated in terms of, in terms that Ogbu Kalu, who is from Eastern Nigeria, is very good at picturing these He says, when the gospel comes into a community, it confronts the spiritual powers at
the gates of the individual, the gates of the family, and the gates of the community. Does it have the intensity to break these powers as God did to Sion and Og? Or do the powers overwhelm and encounter? And in this article, which he has Inculturation Theology, he's asking the question which many people have asked, but in Eastern Nigeria, because of the way the Ogbu's organize their homesteads, the gate is a very powerful symbol for them.
So they're always asking, how did Africa open her gates to Christianity? Why didn't Africa guard her gates against these incoming people? Why have we allowed ourselves to be so vulnerable to all commerce? And we continue to do so. Carlo uses the imagery of warfare in the Bible, in which Yahweh, or the Christ, defeats oppressive powers. Apart from this confrontation model of the interaction of Christianity and African culture, there is also the reinforcement model. But in both
of them, we find this two-edged sword. Anyone who surveys Africa's recent history, that is from the 18th century, will have to agree with Carlo that the Christian God remains a stranger. Christianity has flourished, but has not assimilated. It is in this context that I undertake the task of identifying these positive influences on our culture. In the time that we have, I want us also to look at the question not only of the beliefs and practices,
but also of choice and of the sacredness of human life. Christianity in Africa began with a task of unmasking the powers, because the early missionaries didn't come into a vacuum, and it didn't take long for them to realize that to get into the African soul, there was something there already that needed to be destroyed. When the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society went to Ghana, in the Fante area along the Cape Coast, the Goma area, it still had
forests. Now most of the forests are gone. There was a very powerful, we say grove, forest reserve. In that forest reserve, we buried our dead, and it's a sacred place. You don't just go walking around there when you are not fortified, because what you will meet you won't like. And that grove is also the center of the traditional worship. The drama that the Methodists undertook was to destroy this grove and to demonstrate that the fearsome noises,
the humming that emanate from the ancestral grove do not come from spirits, but from human beings. Now this is not the only place where this happened. In several areas, when missionaries asked for land to build a church or a school, they would give them grounds that you might say haunted grounds, in the hope that when they start the buildings, the spirits might break them down. And then as Ogbu Kalu says, these spirits just stood by and had
their gates opened and destroyed. But I use this because what the desecration and the destruction of the powers of oppression, the powers of death. The people were afraid of whatever was in the grove. When an announcement is made that the spirits say we should do this, that, or the other thing, you just went ahead and you did it. As the burial ground of the ancestors and the place of this powerful cult, the spirits reigned and interacted,
directed the life of the living. The destruction of Nananumpo was actually done literally unmasking the masquerades. They ripped off the masks from their faces to show that they were human beings. And for a time, people were happy. The fear of the spirits of the ancestors was broken, and the people turned to the church. Today, when people lack up courage to confront the powers that be, they edge themselves on with the saying, Nananumpo Nipa-Ye. They say, don't
worry about, don't think this is some spirit. It's human beings who are behind this. Nananumpo Nipa-Ye. Behind the masks are human beings. So in liberative theology, derived from our culture, cultural experience, we would say behind the structures of death and nation, there are real human beings. And we need to unmask. Having challenged the misuse of the belief in the existence of the ancestral spirits, people continue to fear and honor their ancestors, but they expect them to
be on the right side of justice and fair play and peace and security. Both of the individual and of the community. And if things aren't going well and you pour your libation, you say to your ancestors, you must be sleeping. Don't you see the children hunger? Don't you see the wars? You no longer care. We're going to forget you if things don't straighten up here. Because their memory and our life here are intertwined. The way has
been opened for asking not only how rituals are performed, but also why they are performed. Because once with Christianity, a little drill had been pushed into the traditional religion and what makes it tick. You begin to widen the wedge and ask more questions. Women especially have been liberated to challenge much of the traditional demands on them. The gospel is understood as a gift, for by the gospel, the powers are overcome. Of course, even here, there are
many cases where Christianity as taught reinforces the oppression of women, while traditional culture is more affirming. So as I said, I'm trying very hard to pick what's positive. And what's positive here is that we know that behind the masks, there are men who are ringing the bell to say all women should hide. So we have to deal with those men and not with the bell that is ringing for me to go and hide. He's laughing because
he knows what I'm referring to. Then the support of choice. African traditional culture tends towards the ascription of roles and does not leave room for quote, deviance. One does not choose to belong. One simply belongs. And that orders one's total life and worldview. The intercultural living occasioned by the coming of Christianity highlights the fact that culture is created by human beings and is transmitted by human beings, by human agency. If we are agents, then we can
change and modify and transform. So Christianity has supported choice of religion, choice of forms of marriage, even choice of cultural bias. Because there are Africans who have decided they don't any longer want to be African. I think they are crazy, but that's my idea. As you can imagine, this causes no amount of suffering and conflict in the African family. Because if, like in Eastern Nigeria, there is a group of people, it's a long story called the
Osun, who are not allowed to, nobody else can marry into the Osun because they come from a non-auspicious story that it takes too long to tell here. But now people marry from the Osun group. The choice of careers and professions, they have come out of the Christian context. Because in the tradition, your education comes within what your family has done. If you come from a family of drummers, you are taught how to make the drum,
how to play the drum, you become a specialist in that. But now, okay, even in this Western system, when some people are lecturers, they want their children to be lecturers, when they are doctors, they want them to be doctors. But at least the idea that you could choose and you don't have to follow exactly what your forebears have done is something that for me is positive. It has enriched, I think, our culture in several fronts. An
area of vast transformation, often entailing grave disruption, is marriage. Because it comes with property and how heritage inheritance is passed down. And you know that wherever the economics is the operating factor in any culture, you do get more complications arising. Christianity has, at least in this area, done one thing in supporting African culture in its view about the centrality of marriage for the well-being of the human community. There are several other areas where one could
say it hasn't been positive, but at least has been an affirming religion. Then the sacredness of human life. I think Christianity has reinforced the sacredness of life which is integral to African culture and has enforced it by its humanitarian stance vis-à-vis the quality of life. In Africa, we will do anything to keep somebody alive. If a person is sick, a family will take this person from one doctor to another to another to another until
they have spent their all and then they start ponying their jewelry and everything. Anything to give life, they will do to save life. So it has not only helped to keep alive the creation myths from Africa which link our human spirit with the spirit of God and which makes all of us derived from the supreme being. It has also taught very many different ways of affirming life and enabling people to live more qualitatively higher levels. The
churches have tried to prohibit, they think, different practices that they dehumanize. They have not always been successful, but at least the principle had been accepted that whatever is dehumanizing is not acceptable in the human community. Since religion permeates the whole of life in the traditional society, Christianity reinforced the African belief that life is lived in the presence of God and the whole spiritual universe. Whether the structures are familial, economic, political, or educational, they should be accountable
to God who seeks the good of all. We keep saying in my language, all human beings are the children of God, none is the child of the earth. This of course conflicts with the secularization which accompanied the westernization that came with this religion. And it is the secularization that has fractured the concept of unity and has separated what is spiritual from what is, I don't know, the opposite for spiritual because for me life is simply spiritual.
We have been taught that we need to separate religion from politics when in the tradition the political head was also the religious head. But I don't put that to Christianity because I think Christianity gives us a holistic picture. It's the Western Christianity that tries to separate because the economic and the political games do not, you don't maximize your profits if you are going to say that you are living in the presence of God. That, those things
don't go together. Westernization meant that the goals of society became unclear, so the churches helped by their presentation of the Christian idea of the reign of God and the kinship of all humanity. So it was a kind of stabilizing factor in our interaction with Western culture. Through the myths and the folk tales, one comes face to face with how the pre-contact Africa expected instant solutions to life's challenges. We had a lot of magical solutions and
divine acts. They were more the order of the day than struggling to achieve one's aspirations. Although Christianity has reinforced the sacredness of life, it has also attempted to make Africans more realistic. We still say, and this is being very Ghanaian, God will provide. Give it to God by the grace of God. But Christianity has highlighted the traditional value of hard work, which is then blessed by the folks in the spirit world. If this really were so,
it would break the cycle of poverty. But this religious precept is complicated by the global demons behind masks that we are yet to know how to exorcise. Christianity's emphasis on the dignity of human beings and the sacredness of life has become for many the hermeneutical principle for reading the past and for assessing the present and for projecting the future. If these and other factors taken up by the African instituted churches and into our contemporary legislature promotes
creativity in the pursuit of justice in Africa, then Christianity would have been a force for good. If the churches in Africa are able to challenge governments to love the people they reign over, then Christianity would have counted as a positive presence. If the church in Africa accompanies people in the strife for racial justice and a civil society in which human beings are treated not simply civilly but caringly, then Christianity would have served as a force for
good and a force for life. But I'm afraid this is not exactly a 50-50 case. And as I promised myself that I will stop on a positive note. I think I'm going to be good for myself and stop at this point. Thank you. Thank you, Professor. And now we'll have about 10 or 15 minutes for questions and answers. I think you are referring to the African instituted churches in Eastern Africa. I was making a reference
to the church up to the end of the first millennium that was in Nubia, present-day part of Sudan, and in Egypt and in Ethiopia. These were national, these were folk churches, churches that have taken into themselves the culture of the people. They went, they were not missionary churches. St. Mark came to Cairo and Athanasius sent people down to Nubia and so on. But these were not missionaries in the sense of the 18th and 19th centuries
when the Christianity came with a culture ready. Ethiopian Christianity is very unique. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church, the priestly class, almost every other person is a priest. They have thousands of them. The liturgy, the drumming, the language, their own language, the Ge'ez' language for the liturgy is their own local language. That is the Christianity I'm referring to. The Orthodox churches in Cairo with their own unique way of dealing with the Christian theology and liturgy and organization. That's
the one I was referring to. I think it's very different from the Western Christianity where the ethos was Western. If you take the blessing of the waters that you have in the Coptic Orthodox Church, if we did anything like that in the Western Christianity in West Africa or in modern day East Africa, they would say that was paganism. But then the blessing of the waters had come traditionally from the indigenous culture. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church celebrates
several festivals that are not in the Western Christianity and this comes out of their own culture. They have taken over the traditional, the temples of traditional religions and turned them into churches and that was all right. We couldn't do anything like that with the 18th and 19th century Christian impact because all that was there had to go or something had to come out. So that the grace between reality and actuality is very complicated. What happened after
that provides for the actuality of the other ethnicities and ethnicities and ethnicities. The spirit of the spirit is the power of the spirit and the power of the spirit. I think with us in Africa, it was necessary. It was almost like an imperative that if we, the Christians in Africa, were going to hold on to Christ, we had to prove that this is a universal principle and we are part of the universe. We had to prove
to the nationalists who had got so fed up with the colonial heritage and its close link with Christianity that they were saying, what is this religion doing here? We had to say that Christianity doesn't belong anywhere. That where it was born, it was thrown out and has been trying to find a home ever since. So if one is able to find stories from Ethiopia, from Nubia, from Egypt, from North Africa, to illustrate the development of Christianity,
it's always very much appreciated by the strong Christians that we have in the forest belt where the early church did not really reach. Although in the savannah belt, we do have artifacts that look like the link across the Sahara did bring Christianity even earlier than we think, but there isn't enough archaeological evidence right now to say these things one way or the other. But it's certainly for us important that we hold on to the Jesus who
took refuge in Africa and that's the way we can link up the universal religion to ourselves. Well, I think in this, we are in the same boat because the people who taught Christianity taught the Western interpretation of Christianity and the few people who know about Augustine and Cyprian and these people are in the academies and these things don't come through preaching or Bible study and we don't study that much anything beyond what is in the Bible.
So the normal rank-and-file people in the pews may never even have heard about these people, let alone think in terms of their being African. So my personal approach in dealing in Bible studies and speaking in church groups and is to go back to the Bible and to talk about the things that happened in the Bible that are really things that are on this continent so that people can feel the affinity to the religion and
be able to feel at home in it. But the scholarly discussion on these persons behind our history is not in the minds of Christians back home at all. And when it's there, then you get the division of Africa. That's when people start talking about Africa south of the Sahara, the Nilotic Africa, until you don't know what is Africa. And we buy into this. I have had young people in Egypt and in Ethiopia ask me how are
the young people in Africa when I was doing youth work. And you have to pick a map and show them that they are on this continent. I think the forum for talking about these things in common are the ecumenical organizations. But these ecumenical organizations are so western that the persons in the African instituted churches tend not to feel at home in them. They start by joining the Christian council or joining the all African conference of churches.
They find the interpretation is into French and English and no interpretation into Kikuyu or Swahili or Fante and they leave. And we build structures that they feel doesn't have sufficient spirituality into the meetings and so on. Where they have stayed in and have worked together, it's usually in the area of when they have to challenge a government. The government is taking over schools or making legislation that will make the practice of Christianity impossible. Or like in
Nigeria, they have to come together and challenge the government's particular support of Islam. Then they will come together. But on the cultural issues, it looks like each church community does what it seems right in their own eyes. How do they work it out in some of those areas of religious theology, of worship, and how do they live? There's a lot more in the area of the liturgy where the very African enthusiastic way of dealing with life
and life has to be lived with vigor. So you get to church and you have to really sing and say your amens and dance and drum and so on. In the mission churches, the Western churches, drumming itself was hiking back to paganism. So you couldn't bring drums into church. When the African independent churches started using the traditional instruments on the basis of the Psalm 150 or whatever the psalm is where you bring out all the timbrels
and everything, then the Western churches also kind of gradually have begun to do this. They have done this more and more after Vatican II when the Catholics really moved into the indigenization of literature. Then these other Western churches felt, well, the Catholics are doing it here. Maybe we can also try. So that's one area where you get the Africanization. You get a strong sense of the presence of the spirit in their churches, in everything. The healing
ministry, exorcism, and all those things that we in the Western churches would say happened only in primitive Christianity for them is still valid today. They work with those things. Then they do have the African organization where there's always a face-to-face group that you relate to so that the pastoral care is intense, it's communal, it's mutual support. I think this is what makes them unique and the Western churches are also beginning to work on those
lines. I wonder if the Africanization was more successful in breaking down the ethnic and the legal division between African and non-African churches. That's why I said I didn't want to go about the negatives in the interaction because if anything, what we have done is to add some more divisions through Christianity. You're not getting ethnic groups, you're also getting ethnic groups superimposed also by denominations. And with the 1910 committee agreement, you are beginning to get ethnic
churches. You're also by the very history of, say, the Methodist Church comes first to an area which is Fante speaking. So after a while, you find that the leadership is all Fante. So then the Ge'ez and the others and so on would say, how come it's only the Fantes who are in leadership? But it's the history of where the people started to get impressed. The same with Nigeria. I don't think that we get over the divisions
any better than up here because the unity in Christianity is rhetoric. We would very much like to leave it, but we find it easier to work on the basis of my group. And the us and them is not only here, it's also in Africa. But in any particular church, you will find a mixture of ethnic groups. There may be predominantly one group or the other, but that depends on the area you go to. And the reason
for all this use of English and French and so on is because of these mixtures. Because when they are mixed congregations, you may have a service, like if you are in Lagos, you may have a Yoruba service, where the people who feel they cannot cope in English would go. Or you may have an English service and people have their choice. And then you have the normal services where it's always multilingual. You speak a little bit of
Yoruba and a bit of English and you sing different hymns in different languages. And in that way you can transcend the divisions. But I don't think Christianity has really helped in terms of overcoming divisions. If you narrow it down to Nigeria, I think Nigeria is more of a dramatic situation that one can describe. Because this is a situation where you have as many Christians as Muslims. And our colonial government in Nigeria was Western, was British. We
had taken it for granted that whatever the Western government, which was also Christian, did was what should go. And we have Christian holidays. Everybody celebrates Easter and Christmas is a holiday and Sunday is a no-work day. And we take it for granted that everyone should buy into that system. With political independence, then the Muslims say, why is that? Friday we go to the mosque. We don't declare it a work-free day, but at least we
make space for going to the mosque. Why should we, when we have the legal year, march into the Anglican church to celebrate the opening of the legal year? So then in Nigeria, the government has a constitution that tries to say, this is not a secular state, but it doesn't have a state religion. So that the government subsidizes people going for the Hajj. And when the Christians complain, the government says, now who is asking you not to
ask for a subsidy to go to the Hajj? Now the Christians, well, since we are both Catholics, Catholics do have Hajj, the Protestants don't have Hajj. Then we also create Hajj and people band together and they go to Jerusalem and they go to Geneva. And they get a subsidy for the Hajj. And then the Christians are very nervous in Nigeria when the Nigerian government becomes an associate in the organization of Islamic states. Now I'm using the
Nigerian example because Islam in Africa is growing and it's very strong. And it's visibly growing because you can see the mosques springing up everywhere. And it makes our church leaders very nervous, especially at a time when they don't have the money and they don't receive the grants from Britain and America and so on to build churches. And they can see the petrodollar building mosques and building them in very strategic and obvious places like airports and university
compounds and so on. So they feel that they are being overwhelmed by Islam. And I think they really do need some process of getting them to see where and how to deal with this situation in the politics. We assumed as colonial people that Christianity and Christian norms will be what will influence our legislation. And the Muslims are saying no. As the traditionalists have always said no. So that we always operated on the legal system, always on
two levels. You can go to court and win a case and you come home and they tell you that's a piece of paper. And that's it. So we're having to deal with a very complex situation of trying to create a new culture out of all these different influences, Western and Arabic and our own traditions. Well, would you like to thank Professor Geddes once again. [applause] As I said, if you haven't had the opportunity to take a course
with her, we'll be teaching two courses next semester. Please take advantage of that opportunity. And I know many juniors have spoken to me and have mentioned how they regret that they won't be able to attend because some Neal history professors have given them an exam. But I told them that they didn't have to worry. We would pray for them and it's going to be all right with their exam. And some of them are here now. And
we have also said that we will have to ask Professor Oduyoye if he will give a lecture next semester. And he has consented. And really those two professors aren't really that mean. I just, I just forgot the date of their exam. And so it's my fault. And I told him I'd try to make it but we thank the professor. There are refreshments over here. So you have a chance to mill around and talk to her more
and talk to each other and find out more about how we can grow in grace and understanding of our place.