DURBAN, South Africa - Observers from other continents might be excused for feeling confused by the increasingly frequent references to the African Renaissance coming out of Africa over the past year. After all, renaissance implies renewal, rebirth and things positive and upbeat, while from the outside, the diet of news of Africa is little different today from the past several decades. In the global view Africa is written off as having little significance other than being a very secondary market place for goods and ideas from elsewhere. Africa is known primarily for its production of bad news. Major famines, natural disasters, genocides, coups, corruption, AIDS and conflict dominate what the world hears about Africa.

How can it be, then, that in many parts of the African continent, the term African Renaissance is increasingly a household word? Is it simply another case of double speak, of an attempt to cover up real and pressing problems by vilifying the outside world and romanticizing the African past? Or is there some real substance to the idea that there is something new happening in Africa?

Africa has at times been referred to as a sleeping giant. If this is true, it is also true that those of us "outsiders" who live here touch only small pieces of this giant, in different places and in different ways. We are all largely blinded by the size and diversity of Africa, and our ways of understanding or imagining Africa are shaped by diverse forces and influences, many of which have more to do with us than with Africa itself.

Nevertheless, it seems clear to me, an outsider who has returned to live in Africa after an absence of fifteen years, that there is something happening throughout this continent which makes sense of the term "renaissance." This something is apparent in the speeches of politicians and intellectuals, in the writings of scholars, novelists and poets, and in the various gatherings and pronouncements of religious leaders and organizations. And it is also apparent in many smaller ways among ordinary people; in the vast proliferation of local NGO (non-governmental organization) groups busy working at every imaginable issue, in the mind-boggling numbers of highly educated and well-trained Africans in every imaginable field, and in the countless common people and small community groups scattered everywhere who continue to work, despite the prevalent mood of post-development pessimism, in undramatic and everyday ways at changing their lives and the lives of their neighbors for the better.

If there is meaning in the term African Renaissance, we should be able to expect that it is something more than simply a rosy gloss on all things African. Moeletsi Mbeki, a South African businessman and former exile, has reminded us that the European Renaissance surfaced after the "centuries of Darkness" (the 'Dark Ages') which followed the collapse of the Roman Empire. It was a "rebirth," rather than simply a birth, in that it was based on a return to Roman and Greek ideals, the "sources of European civilization."

Mbeki goes on to suggest that the sense of expansion and curiosity which typified the European Renaissance led to the birth of the "New World," which in turn, through the extermination of indigenous New World peoples and the vast expansion of the slave trade in Africa to replace these peoples as workers in the New World, contributed significantly to bringing about Africa's own Dark Age. Slavery further resulted in and led to the plundering of Africa's natural resources and the decimation of African cultures and civilizations, replacing the latter with European culture and civilization. In this view Africa's Dark Ages lasted for the better part of four centuries.

Mbeki maintains that the African Renaissance is not a new thing. He sees its origins in the early part of the twentieth century, when both politically and culturally, from within Africa and from the diaspora, a sense of what it means to be African began to be articulated. This renaissance had the dual agenda of establishing political independence and reconstructing African society. Like the European Renaissance before it, the African Renaissance is not a simple return to the past, nor is it an opportunistic melange of traditional and modern. Rather it attempts to identify traditional African values and world views, and to build a future on the foundation of those values.

My own experience of the African Renaissance has been shaped significantly by my secondment over the past several years to the Mennonite World Conference Global Gifts Sharing Project. Through this project I have had the opportunity of traveling around Africa with project director Pakisa Tshimika, meeting with Mennonite and Brethren in Christ churches, and listening to church leaders and members talk about the resources and gifts which they as churches and as individuals have to share with the global church.

Wherever we have gone - from Luanda to Kinshasa to Bulawayo to Addis Ababa to Choma to Accra to Musoma - we have felt overwhelmed by the wealth of human and other resources we have encountered. This is not meant to be a simple story of "rays of hope in the darkness." Rather it is a suggestion that the darkness we have seen has often been our own, a product of our propensity to see Africa as a vast arena of need.

If indeed there is an African Renaissance, what does it mean for us, and how should or can we interface with it? Above all else I think it is important for us to purge ourselves of the lingering understanding, profoundly born of our cultural conditioning, our racism, and perhaps our guilt, of Africa as a place of darkness and need. Africa is a place - like other places - and Africans are people - like other peoples - of great resources and wealth, resources that can tell us critically important things about who we are as humans and who God is.

There is no doubt that African countries and African peoples face immense obstacles; no glib talk of renaissance will change that. Yet what I find most refreshing about the proponents of the African Renaissance is not their optimism, but rather their determined realism, and their willingness to move beyond a legacy of slavery and colonialism more profoundly devastating than we can begin to imagine. Those who speak most convincingly of African Renaissance do not gloss over the conflicts, famines, corruption and disease. Rather they insist that Africans need to come to the "realization that African problems can only be solved by African solutions."

Lionel Mtshali, Premier of the province in which we live in South Africa, suggested in a recent speech that "we will know that the African Renaissance has started when we have restored the moral fibre and character of our neighborhoods. It will have to start in our own lives and communities."

This same theme is echoed by South African Deputy President Jacob Zuma, who said, "We ought to begin by saying: What should we be doing as Africans to ensure that future generations do not have to endure the shame of poverty, ignorance and backwardness that has been the lot of many of our generation? When we are able to develop African solutions, implement and respect them, then we will know that the African Renaissance has taken root."

This focus on African solutions to African problems does not mean there is no role in Africa for people and organizations from other parts of the world; isolation is simply not an option in our interconnected world. But it does mean (a) that we need to listen more carefully than ever to African partners and their visions and dreams; (b) that we have to do a better job of leaving our agendas at home; (c) that we should do better at restraining our eagerness to respond to need; and (d) that we should reflect more carefully on our own needs and how the resources and gifts of Africa might become gifts to us.

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Tim Lind lives in Durban, South Africa, with his wife Suzanne and their youngest daughter, Rosetta, where he works with the MCC Africa Program and the MWC Global Gifts Sharing Project.