Want to know Prof Mbiti’s small struggles? Start with his ID card

Before Prof John Samuel Mbiti, a global icon, there weren’t towering intellectual voices in the Christian Church to defend – and explain – African religions and spirituality.

The received and accepted Eurocentric wisdom within Christendom was that Africans were a benighted and savage lot, and that it was the so-called White Man’s Burden to save and free the African from his demonic and cursed heritage.

The duty of the White or European missionary – and later his African convert – was to beat the satanic “gene” out of the Black African native.

The Christian Church treated the African as a child-like simpleton and mental defective ready for salvation. This is the “othering” narrative that Prof Mbiti tried, with limited success, to challenge.

Prof Mbiti had few equals as a Christian philosopher of African theology, spirituality and religion. He bestrode the globe like a colossus.

Quiet and unassuming, the Kitui-born man of God earned scholarly plaudits the old-fashioned way – by writing works of the intellect that have been etched in the consciousness of global knowledge.

Among Kenyans, I rank him up there with Prof Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who has imprinted his signature on the universe of high thought.

If the Nobel team hasn’t seen it fit to honour Prof Thiong’o, it’s not because he’s not better than those who’ve been chosen.

Similarly, those who may doubt Prof Mbiti’s stature are themselves, ironically, the “pagans” in the academic fountains of knowledge.

It’s not easy to be an insider-outsider, where one’s soul is tormented. Prof Mbiti was a global citizen, and yet a child of two worlds playing in the nomenclature and civilisation of the Empire.

It’s an existence that consumed and enveloped him, and, like a leviathan, didn’t let him go.

He fought and writhed in intellectual pain and torment.

He tried to educate the “master race” as a jihad of self-liberation but in reality the “master” had him intellectually sequestered.

This was the duality and nuanced complexity of Prof Mbiti’s life.

He desperately wanted to be an African, a true African, but was instead suspended in the precarious middle between a weak Africa and a dominant West.

None of this diminishes Prof Mbiti. It’s the lot of virtually all post-colonial peoples. We still live in the Age of Europe.

Even the mighty Prof Thiong’o lives in the incubator of the West as he writes in his native Gikuyu.

I suspect that when he wins the Nobel Prize in Literature – as he will when the Nobel Committee stops being scared of a dominant and original anti-colonial African mind – it will be a major vindication.

African states must end their subordinate status on the global geopolitical map for our lot to truly change.

Otherwise, we will continue to sing the tunes of others, including in the field of religion. Prof Mbiti went as far as possible within “their” Church.

RELIGION
In his best-known 1969 seminal work, "African Religions and Philosophy", Prof Mbiti openly challenged the “master race” and its deformed understanding of the African religious universe.

He drew a line in the sand and argued that African religions weren’t “demonic”.

But then he quickly pivoted and argued that African religions weren’t anti-Christian. He split the baby in two without killing it.

In other words, he contended that African religions were as human as Christianity and that the two could find common ground.

He punched the “master” in the mouth and then embraced him by sheathing himself in the “master’s” universe.

He became an Anglican priest and then a canon. He was a subtle rebel within the Church.

Along the way, Prof Mbiti taught the Empire important lessons about African humanity.

For example, he unalterably taught the Empire that individualism – the linchpin of Eurocentricity and Western civilisation – wasn’t sacred.

That the individual wasn’t the only centre of the moral universe. That individualism untethered from community is an abomination.

He taught the Empire – and us – that “I am because we are”.

He nuked the narrative that Africans are mere vessels for the ideas of other races, and that we are open-mouthed consumers and not producers of ideas.

He planted a permanent African flag in the Church. I know folks want to valorise him for translating the Bible into Kikamba. It was yeoman work, but not his zenith.

As an academic in the fields of law and philosophy, I’ve written on the clash between African religions and philosophy and how law has been used to deny African humanity.

I’ve written about how African cultures have been robbed or destroyed by the Church.

I’ve quoted Prof Mbiti often, and he’s given me the cojones to forge ahead. But I will never know, or understand, how his names could be John Samuel.

That epitomised to me the torment even of the most brilliant of African souls in the Age of the Empire. Prof Thiong’o jettisoned James.

I “killed” Robert. I don’t judge, but Prof Mbiti’s double “Christian” names will always befuddle me.

Makau Mutua is SUNY Distinguished Professor at SUNY Buffalo Law School and Chair of KHRC. @makaumutua.