New research spotlights what the continent’s believers (and those worldwide) are missing.
Want to learn from an African Christian leader? There’s Augustine, Cyprian, and many other African theologians from the church’s first centuries. But you’re unlikely to find a living author in your library or bookstore.
Now, a new study, polling more than 8,000 Christians in four languages across three countries, has found that African Christians aren’t reading African Christians, either.
In the Africa Leadership Study, a quarter of Central Africans, a third of Angolans, and half of Kenyans named a preacher or pastor as their favorite author. Majorities in Angola and Kenya named authors whose writings were explicitly Christian. High percentages also named African writers.
However, “overlap between the two was low, with relatively few respondents identifying favorite authors [who] were both African and Christian,” said Robert Priest, a professor of international studies at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, who presented the findings to the American Society of Missiology.
The lack of prominent indigenous authors was also evidenced by the library holdings of five major Christian higher education institutions in Kenya, where only one African Christian (John Mbiti) ranked among the top 15 authors with the largest presence on the shelves. Kenyan Christian bookstores had a significantly different top 15, but only one African author (Dag Heward-Mills) cracked their lists. Other commercial booksellers and street vendors didn’t have any African Christian authors among their top 15.
Demand is one major reason for the paucity. While 38 percent of the world’s evangelicals are in sub-Saharan Africa, many “see products, including books, from the West as superior and are willing to buy them,” said Francis Bukachi, executive director of Hope Alive Initiatives in Ghana.
Pieter Kwant, program director of literature for Langham Partnership International, agrees. “We’ve had a theological stream running ‘from the West to the rest,’ including all our books,” he said. But, he added, “the questions that are being asked in the majority world are not being answered by the West.”
For instance, says Bukachi, issues like female genital mutilation, wife inheritance, polygamy, honoring ancestors, and nepotism are rarely covered by Western Christian authors.
Priest’s study found that Africans read about as much as Americans do: One-third read six or more books last year. But writing is not a priority for many African Christian leaders, who “prefer to communicate orally,” said Bukachi.
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SOURCE: Christianity Today
Kevin P. Emmert
