Toyin Falola's Understanding Ogbu Kalu: Christianity and Culture in Africa [Very Brief Review]

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

                                                                    Toyin Falola's

                                           Understanding Ogbu Kalu : Christianity and Culture in Africa

Toyin Falola's Understanding Ogbu Kalu: Christianity and Culture in Africa is a broad ranging exploration of the history and significance of Christianity in Africa in relation to other parts of the World, an examination inspired by the work of Ogbu Kalu.

I was fortunate to get a copy of this handsomely bound book in its superb cover jacket from Falola. I have looked through preliminary to detailed reading.

The work is an almost encyclopedic survey of the development of Christianity in Africa, its implications and resonance with Christianities in other regions.The central thesis, tracing what is described as Kalu's primary vision, is the complex processes  within which Africans have domesticated Christianity, making it a local religion, though based on the foundations imported from its Hebrew origins through the decisive imprint provided by the European mediation.

Reading the book helps me better appreciate African creativity in shaping Christianity. Though Falola mentions the North African achievement of the early post-Biblical church, enunciating names of its luminaries as demonstrating that Christianity's entry into Africa predates the later entry of European missionaries, I wish he had given dome depth of attention to such figures as Augustine of Hippo and Antony of Egypt because, as pillars of the history and theology of the Western church in theology, philosophy of history, autobiographical writing  and monasticism, they not only exemplify Kalu's thesis of the indigenous creativity of Africans in reshaping Christianity, but they dramatise, par excellence, a further thesis developed by Falola,  of the African reworking of Christianity migrating to the European centres from which it traveled to Africa.

Understanding Ogbu Kalu is rich in illustrations of churches,  Christian monuments and Christian ritual from different parts of Africa, dramatising  the lived experience of those people whose collective lives are analysed in the book.