Disputation - a viable seminar form in Africa 2008

Disputation – a viable seminar form in Africa 2008

My students in the post-graduate class this semester on ecclesiology (the church) in Africa are rising well beyond my expectations. It started with my finding this class being quite open, ready for a good word in discussion. Otherwise we are still suffering from a good amount of spoon feeding, reminding us of times past of authoritarianism and apartheid, things which unfortunately are not only something of the past.

I am exceedingly happy with these students, a few from other parts of Africa, the rest from the country. It is a matter of pure joy to go there for the 1½ hours on Wednesday afternoons. I thought, it is about time that I test the classic form of having a seminar in this class. We will do it in the form of a disputation, just as we do it in Uppsala. We all have read a text. One student prepares a short paper on this text (maximum four pages) and becomes the respondent. Another student is appointed as opponent and is expected to read this short four-page paper critically. I would be in the chair, but would let them talk, and after the initial exchanges the other students would be welcomed into the discussion.

Last Wednesday we also had a class test so there was no one willing to do the opponent thing and I gave in and said, I will do it myself.

Well, there we were; Neusa, a young female student from Angola, had prepared a paper on Dr Idowu’s theology, a Nigerian, whom we had read about through another African theologian, Dr Bediako. I quickly had to appoint one of the other students as chair and then we got started.

I was amazed. Neusa was well prepared and she more or less accepted Idowu’s view that the Traditional African Religion should play a (central) role in any Christian Theology in Africa. At the same time she felt that he had spent too much energy on criticising the European missionaries for their indifference towards African things religious. She agreed with the criticism but meant that now the time had come for African theologians to prove themselves and come up with a viable authentic theology that made sense. In fact Idowu had given far too little attention to the classic theological questions around the person of Christ and God as the triune God.

The discussion moved on effortlessly after my comments on the fact that there is an ambiguity in Idowu’s theology regarding his strong emphasis at the same time, on the Gospel and the Bible on the one hand and on African religion, especially the belief in the Yoruba High God, on the other. And even so the question remained: was this God, Olúdòmarè, of the Yoruba people, in fact the one and only God, was it an expression of monotheism?

It was a moment of bliss. It was time for me to sit back. Virtually all the students in my class took part and agreed on the need for African theology to emerge and challenge all other paradigms. But not only that; there was also a very healthy discussion on the need for a balance between a local, or inculturated theology on the one hand and the very clear necessity of a catholic theology in the original sense as notions of God and God’s dealing with us humans and the creation that are general and for all. I could just sit back and dream of the day when the church in Africa (especially sub-Saharan Africa) which is by far the most vibrant part of world Christianity today, will come into its own also in terms of academic theology. It was certainly symbolic – the fact that I had had to abdicate my position as the teacher and authority in the class, an authority that is never (almost) gain said, when these things were discussed. At best, as an extra ordinary professor (I used to say that this title could only mean two things, either that the person holding it must be extraordinarily good, or just extraordinary in an odd way, choose what you like) at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, I could only serve these students to the best of my knowledge, experience and ability, in order to empower them. Is it a dream come true? How many of them will I be able to supervise or guide to a masters or a doctorate? I wonder, but in any case, it was a great Wednesday afternoon, and for a moment I thought that my dream was and would be coming true.