Abstract
The twenty-nine contributions to this volume share the conviction that the nineteenth-century scramble for Africa, which carved up the continent into European colonies and subjected its peoples to western imperialism, “was the scramble for Africa through the Bible” (p. 4). The Bible was used by western missionaries to encourage African obedience to conquering powers; the Bible was translated and interpreted so as to disparage African religions and cultures; Bible stories like the conquest of Canaan by an elect nation seemed to sanction the expropriation of Africa’s resources by colonizers and empire builders. The contributors to Postcolonial Perspectives in African Biblical Interpretations—mostly South African and African diaspora scholars—seek to liberate the Bible from colonial translations and interpretations that continue to oppress or marginalize Africans, by looking at the sacred text from beyond the horizon of western imperialism. While the contributors differ in regarding the Bible as an inherently liberating book (that only needs to be freed from harmful interpretations) or rather a text which can only selectively support an Afro-centric ideology, all are agreed on the urgent need for a postcolonial framework for African biblical studies.
Published under the auspices of the SBL, this book is of interest to more than just Biblical scholars. It includes several chapters on the history of the Bible’s transmission in Africa as well as the use of the Bible in African literature, which will appeal to missiologists, church historians and literary scholars. The contributions to this volume are typically articulate and consistently challenging as they illuminate the biblical text from various African perspectives. Where this volume sheds little light, however, is on how most African Christians actually read the Bible. With notable exceptions from Gerald West and Musa Dube, there is surprisingly little interaction with African Initiated Churches or other types of popular Christianity that flourish in postcolonial Africa. Rather, these essays represent the perspectives of university-based scholars. In the instances where they do engage the more mainstream African understanding of the nature and meaning of the Bible (which tends to be more “conservative”), the tone is condescending and very critical. It would be a shame if African biblical scholars, having sought to decolonize the Bible by resisting the hermeneutic of modernism, maintain the disjuncture between church and academy, Christian proclamation and critical study, that has troubled biblical studies in the west since the Enlightenment.