The Echoes from AEFJN No. 30 - July August 2016 are now available online. 1405 - Morality and Africa's Development
The African continent has fought mighty battles championing the cause of freedom, refusing to accept a position of subservience to those who, bent on subjugating its people to the level of labourers, have wielded political power over it. So by virtue of our morally driven victories, there should be at the heart of the African agenda and all our work a moral consciousness and power that leads to justice and righteousness. Yet Africans continue to suffer even at the hands of their own kith and kin, who should be leading them to a better life. Africa’s leaders should refrain from blaming the past for our ills and accept unequivocally the responsibility of changing the social landscape of Africa. This is not meant to excuse those global forces that continue to buffet the continent, seeing it as a prey to be devoured.
Perhaps the problem of Africa is Africa’s moral capacity to do right by Africa. Future and contemporary Church leaders need to be asked if Christianity has anything to offer to resolve this moral impasse. What moral power must pervade Africa for Africa to find its life? The challenge is to give Jesus the voice and personhood that is recognisable as bringing salvation to Africa. In Him we have to see God incarnate in Africa. We have tended to make the Church more acceptable to Africa (adaptation of liturgy) without equally trying to address the question of Christ’s incarnation in Africa effectively. It is as He engages in our struggles and faces us with tough life choices that incarnation begins to take root. Can Africa echo Christ’s words “I have not come to destroy, but to fulfil”? The hungry and the poor in Africa are asking, “Did you come for us too?” Otherwise why are the powerful so exulting in the wealth of our land that they even display it in our faces with such disdain and impunity?
The crisis of Africa is the decline of moral consciousness that renders accountability moribund. At the heart of the call for the African renaissance is the conviction that the renewal of Africa is interlinked with the renewal of its people, its institutions and its self-esteem. This renewal must be effected by Africa’s own children; it cannot be imported from other nations. It is linked to the new affirming self-understanding by Africans. It calls on Christians to say whether the empowering Holy Spirit is available to Africans in a different way to other peoples of the world.
Stephen Bantu Biko maintained up to his last breath that Africa has something beautiful that the world is waiting for expectantly. And that gift is UBUNTU, a unique appreciation of what it means to be human, which also inspired Mandela and Desmond Tutu. Truthfulness to this gift demands that we reject man-made classifications of different races and ethnic groupings and embrace and assert the fact of the unity of the human race. It is from this reality that the social goal of the ‘common good’ makes sense. Africa has to assert that “true abiding happiness cannot exist while others suffer; it comes only from serving others, living in harmony with nature.” This has to be the mantra of Christian witness in Africa.
Perhaps even more challenging is the rigidity with which the continent locks itself behind the status of “sovereignty” of nations and countries, even when it knows that its people are dying within their sovereignty and are crying for help. If indeed we have a potential to find new meaning to what it means to be human together in the ideal of UBUNTU, should this not form the centre of conversation between us all, no matter what our religious affiliation, so that we can craft a moral base to which we can hold each other morally accountable for our common life? Africa and its individual nations, will not overcome its problems without nurturing a moral power that will be at the core of Africa’s being and embedded in her myriad faiths.
Read the source from ‘Morality and Africa's Development’ by Rev. Dr. Mvume Dandala