Laurenti Magesa, a Tanzanian Catholic parish priest and theologian, spent several days at Eastern Mennonite University (EMU) in Virginia last fall as part of a teaching stint in the United States. About 60 years earlier, Mennonite missionaries from the eastern U.S. began mission work in Tanzania. When he returned to Africa in December, Magesa spoke about his experience with Ron Rempel Canadian Mennonite editor, and Harold Miller, long-time mission worker in Africa.

Rempel: In your book, African Religion: The Moral Traditions of Abundant Life, you state that because missionary religions ridiculed and attempted to suppress African religion, they helped to develop a dual religious system. You suggest that the African religious heritage must be "helped to emerge from centuries of ridicule so that it can interact with other religious orientations for its own benefit and theirs as well." Tell me about this dual identity.

Magesa: African Christians are living two lives running parallel to each other. On the one hand, they are living their own traditional spirituality, with which they were raised. On the other is the Christian teaching transplanted directly by missionary groups.
     And so the African Christian is switching from one way of living to another, without these two having any serious contact. Missionaries tried to wipe away African religiosity, saying that Africans had no culture, no concept of God. But that doesn't work with human beings, because they have a kind of map that guides them. If you take that away, you take away their whole personality, their whole definition of who they are. The missionaries succeeded enough to make Africans unsure of themselves.
     Now the issue is how to unite the two ways. One of the conditions is active dialogue. Missionary religions should acknowledge that African culture has a way of speaking about the divine. Africans have to accept that their culture is not perfect, that there is something good that comes with Christianity. If we don't engage in this dialogue, Christianity in Africa will be very superficial.

Rempel: Give an example of this dual identity.

Magesa: From the age of six, when I entered a missionary school, they emphasized that witchcraft is a figment of the imagination, primitive ... and that to be a Christian and to be educated you had to forgo the idea. Now I'm 52, and I still get shivers up my back when I hear nocturnal creatures such as hyenas, often associated with the evil side of the spirit world. The idea hasn't gone away.
     Witchcraft in Africa is a reality ... a negative one. But it's there. Christians should have worked to transform this negative reality, rather than saying it doesn't exist.
     Another examply is polygamy, which missionary Christianity tried to outlaw. I don't approve of polygamy; but the approach was inappropriate, because they did not see the deeper values which this institution practised and protected.

Miller: What kind of questions did students and professors at Eastern Mennonite University bring forward?

Magesa: I sensed no resistance to peer dialogue between African and Christian understandings. Only when we got into details was there hesitation--and also a value judgement--about the values of African culture compared to their own.
     When people experience the difference, then dialogue becomes serious. The challenge is to respect the other's point of view if it is not destructive of life or of the message of Jesus Christ ... I tell my story, and you tell your story, even with points of agreement, or perhaps disagreement, but the fact that we engage in this serious peer telling of stories without preconditions will affect each one of us, if we are respectful of each other.

Rempel: Harold, you suggested that Laurenti's visit to EMU marked the end of one era and the beginning of another when people from Africa's religious tradition speak as peers with heirs to the mission tradition which viewed Africa as "pagan." I've also heard you express sadness over the lack of closure to the missionary era.

Miller: My impression is that in the Mennonite, and perhaps other African mission experiences, decisions about closure were characterized by two dynamics: first, but the "nationalist" push to replace missionary with African church leadership, and second, by the inclination of the mission community to take leave of the African scene with statistics in hand: "There are now so many Mennonites in Africa" or "There are now more Mennonites outside of North American than in North America."
     Rarely, if ever, have I heard comments to that effect from Africans. Instead, I hear their concerns in relation to alienations and difficulties. Why doesn't the economy work? Why do our children forget who they are? How do we maintain our culture?
     By what means does the mission-sending constituency now listen to the conversations in Africa amongst the new churches? This conversation is intense, sometimes tortuous, but always interesting and instructive. It could be argued that peer level dialogue now holds greater promise than ever before simply because it has become more articulate.
     The "second half" of the mission story is only now beginning in earnest. Unfortunately, as this second phase unfolds, the sending mission community seems less inclined to serious listening. After all, why listen when the church has been planted, when the missionaries have gone home and the statistics are safely in hand?

Rempel: What do you see as the next step in the mission story?

Miller: First, to acknowledge that an important conversation is underway in Africa. Second, to be informed by it. To be fair, western missiologists have listened much and written of what they have heard, even if some African friends say that such reflections are captive to western categories.
     But at the broader constituency level, the value of an ongoing conversation must be stressed. Given the plethora of apologies for past shortcomings now being witnessed around the world, this may be the time for a more intentional closure of the first half of the mission story. Such closure could include ritual, ceremony, even confession. And then together it can be decided what the next portion of the journey might look like.

Magesa: Who would initiate that movement of closure? African Christians are very sensitive on who does what. If this closure were initiated by missionaries, it would cause suspicion. Ideally it should be the so-called mission churches that should be initiating the question, "How about us talking together with you about these issues?"

Laurenti Magesa in conversation with Harold Miller. A student of African perspectives, Miller recently took a course taught by Magesa, based on his recent book, African Religion: The Moral Traditions of Abundant Life (Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY, 1997).