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Books by Lamin Sanneh
Whose Religion Is Christianity /
Translating the Message /
The Crown and the Turban /
The Changing Face of Christianity
West African Christianity /
Encountering the West /
Disciples of All Nations /
Religion and the Variety of Culture
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Abolitionists
Abroad: American Blacks
and the Making of Modern West Africa
By Lamin Sanneh Lamin
Sanneh Speaks on African Slavery
Revolutionary Effects of Freed Slaves
American blacks who, as a
result of the American Revolution, were eventually repatriated
through Nova Scotia to West Africa. There they planted
successful colonies for freed slaves, becoming antislavery
champions.
In the medieval period,
European missionaries went to Africa with the aim of converting
the aristocracy, on the ground that if you convert the chiefs,
that would inspire the rest of society to become Christianized.
This "top-down" approach was tried in Africa for 300
years (between 1475 and 1785). It didn't have much of an impact.
These new antislavery
blacks, though, started from the bottom up, first converting
former slaves, then instructing them in the Christian life; they
showed them how to equip themselves through education, skills,
and the institution of the family. They started benevolent
societies that looked after the poor. These institutions,
created and led by former slaves, were such a powerful example
for the rest of society that Christianity spread, beginning with
the establishment of Sierra Leone in 1792. Nigerian and Ghanaian
colonies were in some ways extensions of the Sierra Leone
colony.
Entrenchment & Moral
Crisis of Slavery in Africa
The trans-Saharan Arab
slave trade was in place for at least 700 to 800 years before
Europeans started their own slave trade. Europeans realized that
the trade was going on in Africa and that they could profit from
it, and thus they introduced the transatlantic slave trade. But
prior to that, African society had already been profoundly
influenced by slavery. It was part and parcel of the African
value system. Had there been no moral crisis in that value
system, no matter who said slavery was wrong, people would still
have practiced it.
It [the moral crisis] was
actually based on a simple but profound evangelical or Puritan
idea: we are each made in the image of God. Evangelical religion
seized on that idea, of human personhood founded on divine
right, and then targeted the individual as the fundamental unit
of society--not the collection but the individual. These
individuals--emancipated slaves, ex-captives, repressed
women--formed the cornerstone of the new community. This was
without precedent.
African captives themselves took to this kind of
religion with gusto. They embraced it. You can see why: in their
own societies, once a slave always a slave. You always carried
with you this stigma. This doctrine said that the stigma is
dissolved in the blood of Christ.
Bourgeois Liberal Values
& Evangelicalism
You might say . . .
bourgeois liberal values [individual responsibility, personal
initiative, enterprise] have their roots in evangelical
Christianity, because all of them are premised on the divine
right of human personhood. All men and women are created equal
and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable
rights. When Americans tried to create a fresh political
community during the American Revolution, they fell back on a
theocentric idea of human community; not a theocratic one, and
certainly not a natural-law notion of community, but one that
assumed that God has given us the gift of life, and created us
in freedom. So liberty is our divine right. It's not something
that the king or state gives us.
Christianity &
Colonialism in Africa
I [drive] two nails through
the colonial argument, from opposite ends. I am saying that this
radical view of Christianity and of society that came to West
Africa in 1792 preceded colonialism, and that the political view
of Christianity--first secure the chief as an ally of
Christianity--was tried for 300 years and didn't work.
I drive the nail in the
other end when I point out that the greatest expansion of
Christianity in Africa occurred not during colonialism but after
colonialism. In 1960, which is the end of the colonial era,
there were between 48 and 50 million Christians in Africa. In
the year 2000, merely 40 years later, the numbers have increased
to 340 million.
Most of the early Christian
leaders in Africa were arrested by the colonial authorities.
Many of them were tried and sentenced because preaching
Christianity, especially from the Bible, was deemed a criminal
offense.
One senior colonial
administrator in Nigeria said that Christianity was giving
Africans the wrong ideas of equality and justice, and that these
ideas did not belong to Africa. Christianity taught that God had
accepted them, and so all believers could stand before God
without prejudice. But this religious idea also gave Africans
the political notion that they were equals of Europeans, and
that was not acceptable. But political repression only
strengthened the conviction of Africans that they had actually
found the truth.
Still, the colonialists
managed to disenfranchise these Christians. And they have
remained disenfranchised to this day. Today Africa's new
political leaders behave like the old chiefs. They connive in
looting the continent, traumatizing their citizens, and flouting
the rule of law. Consequently slavery has remained
in some parts of Africa. And there is no institution or
structure to challenge it.
What is crucial is not just
structures, institutions, general trends, and forces but what I
call moral agency: human beings as moral agents. It doesn't help
to throw money at problems out of a sense of Western guilt. That
only deepens the problem. The most important thing we need today
is moral character and leadership, men and women who are not in
it for their own gain. Identifying such people and equipping,
training, and supporting them is one of the most important
investments the church can make.
You find such people not
among the privileged but among what you might call the flotsam
and jetsam of society. These are people who have been to the
depths of human experience and have come to their faith in
Christ in a way that places them at the very center of God's
moral redemption of the world.
That is what happened with
the antislavery movement in Africa. It was not a movement of the
privileged but of those whom the world despised. Nevertheless,
their faith was strong, because their work was plainly "the
work of God," as they put it. In spite of human obstacles,
they were able to undertake this tremendous revolution of love,
peace, and justice.
Source: Tim Stafford
“The First Black Liberation Movement,” Christianity
Today, 07/10/2000, Vol. 44 (An
Interview of Lamin Sanneh)
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Lamin
Sanneh Speaks on World Christianity
Many
of my colleagues make the assumption, when they say "Christianity,"
that
virtually the sole instance of it is Western Christianity
and that
Western Christianity is all of Christianity.
Family Background in
Gambia?
[My family] had been empire
builders, founders of the Kingdom of Mali, members of a royal
line of the Mandinkas or the Manding nation. My father, though,
worked as civil servant for the British colonial administration.
His brothers continued the royal line, and they still are
chiefs. The family is Muslim. My father's older brother, in
fact, was an Islamic scholar, as were my grandfather and
great-grandfather.
I became a Christian as an
adolescent. I was baptized into the Methodist church, although
the English missionary who baptized me had asked me to go to the
Catholic church. However, after a year of vain attempts to catch
the eye of the Catholic priest, an Irish missionary, I went back
to the Methodist missionary, and he agreed to baptize me. He
stressed that I should remember my baptism is recognized by the
Catholic Church. Many years later, in a private audience at the
Vatican, I nearly told Paul VI that one of his priests had
turned me down, but desisted.
Culture Shock &
the 1963 USA Visit
I was . . . surprised
that there was anything called the United States. In my school,
you see, my British history master taught the history of America
only until 1776, and as far as he was concerned, there was no
American history after 1776. When I arrived in the States we had
an orientation program in Vermont, but I had never heard of the
state of Vermont.
What struck me most,
though, were differences summed up in the fact that my culture
is very deferential toward elders and authority. It is a very
coded culture. You have to know the invisible signals, the
secret codes. I was surprised by how free and open everything
was here, but especially in the civil rights movement. I was
struck by the politics of confrontation, which had never entered
my world growing up in Africa.
I was a seriously religious
person even in those early days, and so I was surprised by the
strength of secular culture in America. People felt as
enthusiastic about that as many of us in Africa felt about
religion. I see now that culture for the West is a kind of a
religion, a rival religion to the Gospel, and that Christians
are sorely tempted to express their Christianity in cultural
terms. . . .
I still remember a remark,
made in one of the first orientation lectures we were given in
Vermont, that any of us were free to go out the following day
and start a new church. Religion for us, at least in Africa, was
not something you concocted.
So what we call the
voluntary principle in American religion was a real shock.
Indeed. Another surprise was the unformalized relations between
men and women. As a boy growing up in an African household, I
was never really equipped for this. I never related at all to
women except my mother, my sisters and my aunts, so women for me
were relatives, not a potential object of pleasure. I was
impressed by the commercialization of sex in America. That was
new to me, because in Africa, and especially in a small country
like Gambia, every woman is either your relative or the relative
of someone you know. My first adolescent stirrings were
religious, concerned with the meaning and end of human life and
creation.
Returning to Africa
My conversion to
Christianity had hit my family like an earthquake. I later went
back for visits with my South African wife and children, but
initially it wasn't advisable. I worked, though, in Freetown,
Liberia, for a year and in Ghana for three. I had applied to
work as a lay missionary to help the churches in their relations
with the Muslims. I suppose my basic motivation stemmed from the
African tradition of including outsiders. I felt that we in
Africa had a legacy of religious tolerance and that we should
develop this, bringing it forward as a formal, conscious
element, in relations between Muslims and Christians.
Christianity and Islam
in Africa
That there was never much
of a violent struggle between Christians and African traditional
religionists in the conversion process on the continuum from
African traditional religion to Christianity, whereas Islam in
West Africa had a history of jihad (holy war) against
unbelievers. But also that the African ethos of tolerance and
inclusiveness somewhat pacified and neutralized this. Islam
spread through Qur'an schools and the establishment of Arabic as
the framework for religion, faith and devotion.
Christianity, by contrast,
spread through the vernacular translations of the Scriptures.
And these translations required the invention of alphabets and
vernacular literacy. Thus Christianity was accompanied by a
profound vernacular awakening of traditional cultures, whereas
the success of Islam was almost a function of the extent to
which Africans were able to leave vernacular cultures behind and
simulate the ethos of the Arabic language and orientation toward
Mecca and Medina as the center of religion. For Christians,
especially for Protestants, there was no geographical focal
point. It's really a remarkable contrast between the two
religions.
Territorial Religions:
Islam & Christendom
Islam represents the
fundamental shift from a kin-based territoriality to religious
territoriality, with faith finding expression in demarcated
boundaries. Believers were assembled under the one mandate of
the Prophet Muhammad within the city of Medina. Eventually Mecca
was incorporated into the Pax Islamica, which soon grew to
become the Islamic empire. Religious identity, political
authority and territorial allegiance were combined to define who
or what a Muslim is. Later jurists developed this by fusing
religion, politics and territoriality into one as Dar al-Islam,
the realm of faith, versus Dar al-Harb, the domain of unbelief.
We in the West have
abandoned the "Christendom" version of religious
territoriality, in part because the religious wars of the 16th
and 17th centuries made it necessary to separate church and
state, but also because Christianity was born without
territoriality and could, under the right doctrinal stimulus,
overcome its "Christendom complex" as an aberration.
Given the fact that modern
Christianity has grown and flourished as non-territoriality, and
Islam's success as territoriality, how can these two gnat
civilizations encounter each other without costly
misunderstanding? This is a crucial issue, because Muslims
imagine, for example, that America is a Christian country on the
principle of cujus regio ejus religio ["a territory's
religion will be that of its ruler"], while Christians,
nurtured in religious voluntarism, assume that Islam is a matter
of free individual choice. We press Muslims on human rights
issues, while they press us on issues of religious
territoriality. This misunderstanding destabilizes our
relations.
Benign View of Christian
Missionaries
I am writing, after a
fashion, to prove that you can tell the story of Christianity in
places like Africa without those raised hackles that Westerners
seem to have about religion. I believe that you can tell the
story of Christianity from within its own internal dynamics and
come up with a rather complex picture . . . one that is neither
wholly good and holy, nor bad and disastrous. It is a story with
ambiguities, with its own clarity, its own dullness, its own
strengths, its own weakness. Therefore, that makes Christianity
in Africa an intimate part of the story of the human enterprise.
The stereotypical way of looking at Christianity in Africa as a
result of missionary Western imperialism is a caricature.
Many Western writers are
profoundly alienated from the Christian tradition, and therefore
they are unable to "leave Christianity alone." They
must continue to combat Christianity as if it were in danger of
making a comeback and imposing compulsory religious observances.
There is a kind of Enlightenment prejudice against Christianity.
Some anthropologists, for instance, assume a prejudice against
third world Christianity and go on about their work while
ignoring it . . . except, perhaps for a few nods toward
liberation theology. Even then, they mostly select aspects that
fit a social and political agenda that they embrace for other
reasons.
In the core of theology,
however, what we've called variously "third world
Christianity" or "world Christianity" has made
almost no impact whatsoever. And I have found this to be true
even in divinity schools. Western academic theology has by and
large been able to ignore the worldwide movement of Christian
mission. Theologians who have assimilated into the Enlightenment
worldview and ethos have accepted Western culture as the
definitive source even of Christian identity.
At Yale Divinity School,
for example, I think that many of my colleagues make the
assumption, when they say "Christianity," that
virtually the sole instance of it is Western Christianity and
that Western Christianity is all of Christianity.
Western Cultural Prejudice & the Vigor
of Christian life
This is what I mean by the Enlightenment
heritage that sees culture transformed into the definitive
source of identity and understanding. And since Western culture
is regarded as the highest form of development, we think, even
if only unconsciously, that therefore it follows that
Christianity in other cultural levels and forms of expression
must be inferior. Thus African or Indian Christians are at an
earlier stage of development, which the international agency
bureaucrats, the intellectuals or the West in general have gone
through and superseded.
This has profoundly unsealing effects and
results in an unwillingness to allow third world Christians a
significant voice in theological debate and discussion. I have a
difficult time trying to speak up for non-Western Christian
people in places like faculty meetings because the assumption is
that Westerners know better what this phenomenon of Christianity
is and that it is up to non-Westerners to catch up with them.
The fact that one may, for example, view Christian theology
differently, if one looks at it from the horizon of world
Christianity, scarcely enters the consciousness of Western
academic theologians.
Western Culture of Suspicion
I think the whole intellectual tradition of
suspicion [Freud, Marx and Nietzsche] is itself based on a
position that is not open to debate. That is to say, Western
scientific methods are really believed to be superior to
religious experience, tradition, and imagination as ways of
knowing and living in reality. [It assumes] a posture of doubt
about religion because [it think it has] a firmer foundation,
one that overturns authority and tradition, for example, as
reliable.
As a result, [it has] a kind of secular
Western cultural exclusiveness and ethnocentrism that holds that
the West knows the best methods to answer moral and cultural
questions, and that the West is the best arbiter of what is
normal, rational and humane, including how one can be
emancipated from religion. This secular attitude is at least as
imperialistic as the worst examples we know of Christian
mission.
I also believe that such postmodern movements
[feminists and ecotheologians touched by Buddhism or Native
American religions] are a dramatic demonstration of the
inability of the West to accept pluralism and inclusiveness. And
that is one reason why the West is still suspicious of third
word Christianity. Persons in such movements are often
suspicious of particularity and represent neo-Enlightenment
gnostic movements that say we must work from universals. But
their universals aren't really derived from the richness of
human diversity; they're "composed" to advance an
agenda. Such movements deny the very notion of cultural
particularity, and they are thus unable to take either
Christianity or any other religion seriously. . . .
Buddhism may provide the metaphysical
framework for what I call a culture of exclusion. It is
"better" than other ways of describing the world, so
you must exclude these other ways, for instance, by becoming
anti-Christian.
As a former Muslim and now a committed
Christian, I accept the great affirmations of Christianity. But
as a non-Western Christian I see nothing that requires me to
reject Islam in its insights. The same for Buddhism or Hinduism.
My Western counterparts, however, find it impossible to accept
that Christianity has something meaningful to say. Their form of
religion is a dramatization of the incapacity of the West to
accept pluralism. We are still working with exclusive norms in
the West, whether these norms are cultural, as in the case of
the liberal secular tradition, or religious, as in terms of your
convert to Buddhism. I think it's disastrous for our society
that the West cannot transcend its own cultural
self-righteousness.
Who Is Right/Who Is Wrong?
The problem, though, is that instead of
serious conversation about differences, people in the West tend
to take on a posture of exclusivism. A theorist on family law,
for instance, tends to adopt a posture of "objective
neutrality" that excludes the possibility that the Jew, the
Christian, the Buddhist or the Muslim has anything of major
importance to be taken into account in a debate on a matter of
public policy.
My approach is somewhat different. I would
say that if there is something really right in Christianity,
then it must be the case that some of these insights must occur
and be morally valid in other religious traditions as well, as
in other streams of consciousness in the human enterprise,
however differently cast they may be. And vice versa. You don't
need to play off one against the other. I think that it is only
with such a religious faith that we can have a genuine pluralism
with real conversation about matters of importance. . . .
Identification vs Conversion
One tradition with all its inadequacies [may
bring] you to the point where you are able to see truth in
another tradition. But you still should recognize that the first
tradition is like a midwife who has safely borne you to the
point of the crossover. . . .
Christianity & Secular Culture
Christianity in the West is a cultural flag
of convenience, invoked for things one wants to do or believe
for other reasons. Another: It also serves for many as a kind of
cultural precursor that gives you a taste for what is really
important--for instance, human rights, equality, or the
emancipation of women; but for the full flowering of these
things, in this view, you must go outside Christianity to
movements such as those for civil liberties or the women's
movement or black nationalism or development projects.
Another characteristic is that it plays
second fiddle to national identity. Citizenship is primary. What
church you belong to or what it demands is secondary to what
passport you carry. I don't think that Christianity can make a
contribution to Western culture when it remains in the
subordinate realm of enforcing either national identity or a
kind of activism in the secular realm, say in black nationalism
or feminism or in gay and lesbian rights. You can articulate
these agendas equally well in secular organizations. . . .
The conservative response often merely
repeats a superficially "Christian" idiom and goes in
a different direction, basically denying the validity of all
other cultures and restricting the benefits of Christianity to
their own culture and to their own tradition. It's an extension
of what Illinois Senator Everett Dirkson used to say about
American virtue residing in rural areas and about urban centers
as sources of evil in American society.
He was saying it with tongue in cheek, but
the conservatives are generally taken up with rural virtues and
seek to elaborate them within the Christian scheme of things.
They say, "Let's go back to the Bible." But they don't
mean, "Let's go back to Hebrew and Aramaic," because
that means embracing the cultural particularity of the Jews,
which they reject.
What they really mean is, "Let's take
you to our interpretation of the Bible." It is, in fact,
the King James version of the Bible, but it is also a King James
English that has been torturously strained through Victorian
morality of which it is largely unconscious, ending up in a
position one hears caricatured in the adage, "If the King
James version of the Bible is good enough for Jesus, it's good
enough for us."
The Challenge of Christianity & the
Religious in Religion
The real challenge is that of the universal
community within the fellowship of believers, the Corpus
Christi. For the Western Christian church, that may be
concretized as realizing that someone who shares your faith has
claims on you equal to persons who share your nationality and
culture. In other words, if I may put this more concretely, the
challenge for American Christians is that they should not feel
more comfortable with their fellow Americans, who may be
non-believers, than with fellow believers of a different
nationality. In short, the evidence of world Christianity is a
challenge to the idolatry of cultural and national identity and
citizenship.
The heart or thrust of religion--as I've
encountered it in Islam, Judaism and Christianity--is that God
speaks, bears testimony to the things of God. God is God's own
testimony. The issue comes up again and again in the Gospels.
"How do we know," the followers of Jesus ask,
"that you are speaking the truth?" I would say that
religious truths are those truths that are corroborated by God.
Having been addressed, our part is to recognize God as true and
to submit to God. To bring all the talents we have--the tools of
understanding, ethical engagement and commitment, of being
faithful servants--to commitment to the God who speaks. Religion
must teach rather than just encourage me to moralize or be
self-reflective. . . .
Plurality of Religious Voices
Recall that other, non-Christian religions
are "kosher" today in the academic community in ways
Christianity is not. You dialogue with Muslims. You dialogue
with Hindus. The real problem, though, seems to occur when a
Christian knocks on the door, someone who doesn't share your
personal positions. In the West today Christians are relegated
to an inferior position. In the academic realm, it is not much
different. For both, they are considered less mature and
unsophisticated. It is a judgment not made on other religions. .
. .
In many ways, the liberal or mainline
churches and their suprachurch organizations are intolerant of
religious plurality and particularity, even if their vocabulary
is more open. The World Council, for example, often seems an
extension of the Western liberal tradition and its intolerance
of religious particularity.
There's a kind of Enlightenment heresy there
that believes that eventually all religions will converge if we
look for a common ground. That view sees concrete religions as
truculent, intransigent and mischievous. It appears to believe
that as the acid of secularity and liberalism works on religion,
it will dissolve its particularity to reveal the essence of
religion. The results will be a human, genial, liberal and
tolerant world.
The Pope & Theologians
I can imagine the terrible time he is having
with his mostly Western theologians. I doubt whether he is
getting that kind of flack from third world bishops. It's
paradoxical that, in the age when we think we are most liberal
and open-minded, we find that the West is actually more
intransigent than ever about what it believes and does not
believe. It's an interesting time to be living as a Christian. I
feel a little bit out of place in modern secular culture. I
really don't share its outlook. I don't believe that the secular
means the West is using will get us to our destination--to the
tolerance, inclusiveness, humaneness, compassion, charity and so
forth that we proclaim. The vehicle of cultural and moral
relativism that characterize Western secularity and liberal
theology just won't get us to the promised land. . . .
They've been corrupted. They've been
captured. It's something like the situation portrayed by Adrian
Hastings (in his book English Christianity: 1920-1985) as
"anti-romantic, anti-ideological, a dry-man-of-the-world
cynicism, as bored with left-wing enthusiasms as with religious
credulities . . . the safest core of a conservative
establishment." Such cultural elitism was what took over
the neo-orthodox movement of the 1960's and is quite comfortable
just sitting there and enjoying its privileged position.
Christianity & Cultural Causes
I have a question about anything that defines
religion in terms of possibilities reachable by human effort. I
put the question in the form of the story of Maximilian Kolbe,
the Polish priest who died for another man in a Nazi
concentration camp. I wonder whether Kolbe would say that
religion for him was political liberation only, and that,
instead of giving his food self-sacrificially to his fellow
inmates, he should have proclaimed liberation as what
"religion" demanded.
The Gospel, for me, has more nuance than
that. It's much more than a rational thing that is approved by
the wisdom of the age in the way sociopolitical liberation is
today. That is an inadequate way of dealing with the full range
of religious claims and the richness of religious life. But it
seems increasingly the one that both liberal and conservative
American Christians--although facing in quite different
directions--are fixed on, and it is a reductionism that is
turning away many thoughtful people from the church, as the
statistics show.
Source: William R. Burrows.
"World Christianity from an African Perspective," An
Interview With Lamin Sanneh. America, 4/9/94, Vol.
170, Issue 12. William R. Burrows was managing editor of Orbis Books, Maryknoll, N.Y., which
has published three of Professor Sanneh's books: Encountering
the West: Christianity and the Global Cultural Process
(1993), Translating the Message (1989) and West
African Christianity (1983). Reviews
Abolitionists
Abroad: American Blacks
and the Making of Modern West Africa
By Lamin Sanneh
The heart of Sanneh's book concerns the role of
Black leaders in carrying Christianity, as well as antislavery and
antistructure ideology, to Africa and in reshaping Christianity to
meld with indigenous needs and religions. Their success in Sierra
Leone and Nigeria contrasts starkly with the failure of the former
American slaves who emigrated to Liberia to implant a vibrant
Christianity in their hinterland, or even to suppress the slave
trade. Sanneh argues that this was largely due to the fact that
only a few thousand recaptives were taken to Liberia and that they
were treated as second-class citizens by the dominant Americo-Liberians
who created a racist society of their own in Liberia.
The outlines of Sanneh's story are well known, but the
book is of interest for its perceptive insights. It is at its most
readable in the thumbnail sketches of the people who tried so hard
to establish a Christian democratic society in Africa. He sets
each of them in their own time and place and assesses their
problems, achievements, and failures. The roles of some of them,
Olaudah Equiano and Samuel Ajayi Crowther, for instance, are
already familiar, but here they are discussed side by side with
lesser-known figures.—Suzanne
Miers, Professor Emerita, Ohio University Sanneh's antistructure motif pits the
abolitionists directly against "chieftancy rule,"
implying that African governance was inseparable from slavery and
that slavery's clear antithesis was freedom. Given these
oppositions, Sanneh can only call Edward Blyden mistaken for not
rejecting chiefly rule, and cannot explain why Bishop Crowther
tolerated domestic slavery. West African governance and slavery
were of course much more complex than Sanneh's rhetoric allows.
Chiefs did survive abolition; slavery was but
one mode of labor control. Sanneh's focus on ideas also leads him
to overplay the Niger Mission's role in transforming Nigeria;
surely this transformation was also wrought over time by the
dynamics of peasant production, the limits of the colonial state,
and urbanization. Sanneh, it seems, accepts too readily the Africa
imagined by his abolitionists in which slavery and antislavery
were the determining forces, at the expense of appreciating West
Africa's complex history more fully.
In the end these problems do not negate
Sanneh's accomplishment. He has composed a compassionate account
of how basic human rights ideals became embedded in the
foundations of modem West Africa. If these are to flourish in the
future, contemporary Africans would be well advised to appreciate
what Sanneh has discerned about their history.—P.
S. Zachernuk, Dalhousie University
Sanneh effectively demonstrates that black
abolitionists challenged the slave trade at its African base while
creating a distinct gospel of African Christianity that would
become a model for the continent.
The last major chapter of the book,
"American Colonization and the Founding of Liberia," is
an important supplement to the standard work on the subject by P.
J. Staudenraus, The African Colonization Movement: 1816-1865
(1961). Although settlers in Sierra Leone and Liberia (founded as
a free settlement in 1822 and as an independent republic in 1847)
experienced the ravages of malaria, attacks by African chiefs, and
lack of supplies, Sierra Leone benefited from Britain's long
experience with colonial administration, whereas Liberia was
virtually ignored by the government of the United States, with its
anti-imperial inclination and its own national dilemma over the
pursuit of racial justice.
Indeed, the free settlement of Liberia came
into existence only through an armed confrontation between agents
of the American Colonization Society and King Peter that left a
legacy of hostility between settlers and the chieftaincy. Only in
1862 did the administration of Abraham Lincoln sign a treaty of
friendship with the country. After 1847, a mulatto social class of
settlers dominated Liberia and virtually excluded indigenous
Africans from civic participation.
During its early years, Liberia was not only
unable to extirpate the slave trade, but settlers found it
economically expedient to engage in commerce with slave traders.
Nonetheless, antislavery and missionary efforts to end human
bondage eventually triumphed in transforming a slave-ridden
Africa. Sanneh includes interesting vignettes of African American
abolitionists, such as Paul Cuffee, Martin Delany, Joseph Brown
Russwurm, Alexander Crummell, and Edward Wilmot Blyden.
This sophisticated and well-researched book will appeal
mainly to scholars. Sanneh's focus on Africa, the use of
comparative history, the oppressed as active historical agents,
and the melioristic role of evangelical religion make
Abolitionists Abroad an important achievement.—Lawrence
B. Goodheart, University of Connecticut at Hartford
In this absorbing study, Sanneh, a historian and
professor of world Christianity at Yale University, argues for the
historical significance of the settlement in Freetown, West
Africa, established by nearly 1,200 freed slaves in 1792 as the
foundation for a powerful antislavery movement that influenced
social policy in both America and Europe. Using journals, letters
and other evidence gleaned from public records, he shows that
freed slaves and former captives such as Olaudah Equiano, David
George, Paul Cuffee and others believed that abolitionist
sentiment, together with Christianity, with its theme of God-given
humanity, could become an effective liberating force.
While the settlements of freed slaves in Sierra
Leone and, later, Liberia were often plagued with controversy,
political infighting and epidemics, Samuel Ajayi Crowder, an
ex-slave from Nigeria, used the models of earlier antislavery
communities to build new ones in Nigeria. Sanneh suggests the zeal
of the repatriated ex-slaves and their evangelical Christianity
not only threatened the old traditional African tribal chieftain
hierarchy, but challenged Christian practices in Europe and the
New World.—Jeff
Zaleski and Charlotte Abbott, Publishers Weekly
Sanneh, Lamin.
Abolitionists Abroad: American
Blacks and the Making of Modern Western Africa Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2000. 352 pp.,
Lamin Sanneh is professor of world
mission, Yale Divinity School, and chair of the Yale University
Council on African Studies. Professor Sanneh was born to a
Muslim family in Gambia, West Africa, where he received his
early education as a Muslim before becoming a Christian. He came
to the United States in 1963 to study at Union College in
Schenectady, N.Y., after which he worked in Nigeria at the Study
Center for Islam and Christianity. He continued Islamic studies
in Lebanon and England, obtaining his doctorate at the
University of London. He has taught at the University of
Aberdeen and Harvard, and is in demand internationally to talk
on his studies of Christian mission and Muslim-Christian
relations.
Contact:
www.yale.edu/divinity
lamin.sanneh@yale.edu
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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