Is soccer part of African culture? This is a question I often pose to my students, and I found myself thinking about it again upon reading John Matshikiza’s silly piece about David Livingstone (”Shoot the messenger”, April 21). My question may itself seem rather silly, except for the fact that soccer was brought to Africa by the same colonial ”bastards” who brought Christianity. In fact, soccer came 100 years later, and was allied to a much more naked form of the industrial expropriation of black labour.
But, and this is the point, Africans (and others in the colonised world) took this European game and made it our own. We developed our own teams, leagues, styles, energies, passions and heroes. So, within 100 years, something completely unknown in Africa has become an integral part of African culture. The issue in this sporting illustration is the agency of African people. A recognition of the ability to take from elsewhere, negotiate significance, reconfigure meaning and redefine the paradigm.
Now it is precisely this creative agency of African subjects of history, rather than the religious institutions of the north, that Matshikiza has denigrated in his myopic take on ”an illogical, imported religion called Christianity”. He is not alone, for it would seem to me that this fundamental theme is the one that was surprisingly ignored in the focus on religion in the Easter issue of the M&G. Matshikiza and the others proceed as if there is this definable ”thing” called Christianity, rather than an entire range of contested Christianities, and that Africans themselves are active agents in the contest. If soccer is part of African culture, then Christianity is an African religion. But reading the M&G you would never notice that!
On almost all other themes the paper is able to deal with ambiguity, contested meaning and shifting power dynamics. Your reporters and columnists are clever. But when it comes to religion you seem to become silly, and make use of simplistic models of the universe. In doing so you seem to have capitulated to the terms of debate that religious fundamentalism has established. Yes, those are the categories in which religious people themselves often articulate their concerns, but since when did the M&G allow others to set the terms of the debate?
African Christianity is alive and well and totally immune to anything written in the M&G, because your over-reliance on writers grounded in the fast disappearing world of European secularism seem not to be able to engage with the complexity, the creativity and the contestation that characterises Christianity on this continent. In the school of religion and theology at the University of KwaZulu-Natal we work on this interface, and our academic record in the context of a secular university speaks to the fact that there is more to religion in Africa than your writers would have us believe. There are millions of African people who have taken the Gospel promoted by people like Livingstone and seen in it something other than colonial legitimation. And in so doing perhaps we African Christians have rescued the tradition from its own colonial captivity.
So in the context of thinking a little more studiously, let me offer a few words of caution to Matshikiza about Livingstone. I do so on the basis that I was, for six years, the director of the Moffat Mission in Kuruman, where Livingstone began his work in Africa. The Livingstone legacy, and likewise the entire missionary legacy, is far more contested than the one book you may have read would suggest. Livingstone was a Scot, the grandson of a man who lost his land to the English during the Highland clearances, and was forced into the industrial squalor of the city. He carried within him the same sense of injustice that the grandchildren of those who lost their land in the 1913 Land Act in this country carry.
It was this that drove his hatred of the slave trade, and it was in this context that he spoke of Africa being opened up to free trade. Free as opposed to slavery, not free in the sense of the neo-liberalism of the World Trade Organisation. His Scottish working class roots made him intensely suspicious of the English upper class. The issue here is not to defend Livingstone, because seen from one perspective much of the criticism can be made to stick, but to point out that these things are not as simple as the fundamentalists would have us believe.
Every time the M&G misses the ambiguity and contestation it furthers the cause of fundamentalism.
This is surely something the M&G should understand. Intriguing, is it not, that the missionaries not only brought religion to Africa but they also brought the printing press. How interesting that the oldest working press in Africa is at the Kuruman mission, where Livingstone lived. How interesting that Matshikiza, his writing in English and his ability to be published, is rooted in the legacy of the LMS and Livingstone (and others like him). But how interesting that Matshikiza has taken that legacy and used it powerfully to his own advantage. Judging from his other writing he would be the first to be able to engage with this ambiguity and contested meaning.
Would it be too much to ask him and his colleagues at the M&G to extend this intellectual courtesy to the 500-million African Christians who are daily engaged in the same task?
Steve de Gruchy is professor of theology and development at the school of religion and theology at the University of KwaZulu-Natal