The following was written in June of this year during a visit to Abidjan in Côte d'Ivoire, when the story of ebola in West Africa was still a very minor story at the bottom of the international news. If you have not read David Brooks' recent op-ed in the New York Times on that subject, I strongly recommend it.
*****
My first experience of sub-Saharan Africa north of the Limpopo River was a small and incredibly stuffy pre-immigration "holding room" in the airport in Lomé, the capital of Togo in West Africa. This experience of an hour or so introduced me to many of the less pleasant aspects of travels in Africa. After the long and disorderly queues, the repeated checks of vaccination records, the stuffy environment, the mosquitoes, and the assumption that everyone speaks French well, I stood before the immigration officer who slowly and with a slightly detached air checked and rechecked my passport. After she affixed the requisite stamps, she handed me my passport. Upon making eye contact as she handed me my passport, her eyes brightened, and she said, seemingly with all sincerity, "thank you for visiting our country." I puzzled over that at the time, and to a degree continue to puzzle. I was hardly the only foreigner or the only American on that AirFrance planeload arriving from Paris. She was hardly wowed by my incredibly poor French. I hardly looked nice after a 24-hour journey across the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Sahara. It seems, after many more visits across this vast and diverse continent (some including distinctly less pleasant immigration or emigration experiences!), I would still say that that experience sums up many of my experiences in Africa.
Africa, like much of the world, is portrayed in the United States as a land of poverty, conflict, violence, and disorder. All of that is true, in part. It is also true of most other places in the world. From the recent coverage of the (undeniably awful) violence of Boko Haram in Nigeria, one would think that Nigeria barely functions as a country, when in reality most of its citizens continue to lead their economic, social, and spiritual lives productively on a daily basis. The Africa that appears in so many western newscasts is real, but is a small part of the daily life of Africa. The same could be said of many of the promotional materials of many western NGOs active in Africa. A common underlying theme seems to be that Africa is a continent without hope, a continent somehow almost outside of history, in need of interventions to save it from itself. These "interventions" have at times taken the almost society-wide form of colonialism, while more recently I have seen them more in the form of "aid" projects, including many Christian aid projects, that seek to somehow meet "Africa's needs" one drip at a time.
This "intervention" approach, in my opinion, fails to give enough credit to African people, who, despite challenging circumstances, are a phenomenally creative lot. I see this especially in the African evangelical churches, or at least in the swath of this vast and diverse movement that I engage with. For many years, these relatively young churches adopted a thinking very similar to many churches in the West that stressed personal salvation and the life of the church within the walls of the church with relatively little focus on what faith meant outside the walls of the church in daily life. Although I'm far from an expert in African culture, the history of African churches, or African theology, I have always felt that this rather limited understanding of Christianity seemed out of tune with the realities of Africa. Africa, it seems to me, is a very holistic place that seems to have an almost natural aversion to the dichotomy of the spiritual and the social that has bedeviled many Protestant movements in the west and elsewhere. Over the past ten years, I have seen this commitment to holistic mission grow. A recent meeting in Abidjan included numerous expressions of a sense that society was looking to the church for answers to persistent questions and that the church was looking to be more active in addressing these questions. This takes a number of forms, from the formation of Christian universities across the continent, to a commitment to theological education that is more responsive.
Africa's great strength is her people. Just as I was blessed by the Togolese lady's smile on my first visit, I continue to be blessed by Africans day by day.
*****
My first experience of sub-Saharan Africa north of the Limpopo River was a small and incredibly stuffy pre-immigration "holding room" in the airport in Lomé, the capital of Togo in West Africa. This experience of an hour or so introduced me to many of the less pleasant aspects of travels in Africa. After the long and disorderly queues, the repeated checks of vaccination records, the stuffy environment, the mosquitoes, and the assumption that everyone speaks French well, I stood before the immigration officer who slowly and with a slightly detached air checked and rechecked my passport. After she affixed the requisite stamps, she handed me my passport. Upon making eye contact as she handed me my passport, her eyes brightened, and she said, seemingly with all sincerity, "thank you for visiting our country." I puzzled over that at the time, and to a degree continue to puzzle. I was hardly the only foreigner or the only American on that AirFrance planeload arriving from Paris. She was hardly wowed by my incredibly poor French. I hardly looked nice after a 24-hour journey across the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Sahara. It seems, after many more visits across this vast and diverse continent (some including distinctly less pleasant immigration or emigration experiences!), I would still say that that experience sums up many of my experiences in Africa.
Africa, like much of the world, is portrayed in the United States as a land of poverty, conflict, violence, and disorder. All of that is true, in part. It is also true of most other places in the world. From the recent coverage of the (undeniably awful) violence of Boko Haram in Nigeria, one would think that Nigeria barely functions as a country, when in reality most of its citizens continue to lead their economic, social, and spiritual lives productively on a daily basis. The Africa that appears in so many western newscasts is real, but is a small part of the daily life of Africa. The same could be said of many of the promotional materials of many western NGOs active in Africa. A common underlying theme seems to be that Africa is a continent without hope, a continent somehow almost outside of history, in need of interventions to save it from itself. These "interventions" have at times taken the almost society-wide form of colonialism, while more recently I have seen them more in the form of "aid" projects, including many Christian aid projects, that seek to somehow meet "Africa's needs" one drip at a time.
This "intervention" approach, in my opinion, fails to give enough credit to African people, who, despite challenging circumstances, are a phenomenally creative lot. I see this especially in the African evangelical churches, or at least in the swath of this vast and diverse movement that I engage with. For many years, these relatively young churches adopted a thinking very similar to many churches in the West that stressed personal salvation and the life of the church within the walls of the church with relatively little focus on what faith meant outside the walls of the church in daily life. Although I'm far from an expert in African culture, the history of African churches, or African theology, I have always felt that this rather limited understanding of Christianity seemed out of tune with the realities of Africa. Africa, it seems to me, is a very holistic place that seems to have an almost natural aversion to the dichotomy of the spiritual and the social that has bedeviled many Protestant movements in the west and elsewhere. Over the past ten years, I have seen this commitment to holistic mission grow. A recent meeting in Abidjan included numerous expressions of a sense that society was looking to the church for answers to persistent questions and that the church was looking to be more active in addressing these questions. This takes a number of forms, from the formation of Christian universities across the continent, to a commitment to theological education that is more responsive.
Africa's great strength is her people. Just as I was blessed by the Togolese lady's smile on my first visit, I continue to be blessed by Africans day by day.
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