A SCRIPTURAL RETENTION PROJECT
BY
DR SEFOKO RAMOSHABA
HOD: STUDENT LIFE AND DEVELOPMENT
NELSON MANDELA UNIVERSITY
ABSTRACT
This research paper advances a decolonised, Liberating, and Black scriptural reinterpretation of the history of the bible. It argues that the current fake and the manufactured Eurocentric biblical scholarship that exist within colonial Christian epistemologies that intentional undermines Africa and its peoples, is a white male supremacist fallacy. Black liberation theology argues that the Eureocentric interpretation of the bible is incorrect and full of racist sin. This study argues that while Europeans had used the bible incorrectly to perpetuate colonialism on non-white nations around the world. The bible was used an instrument of capital oppression, racism, land and mineral grab, state oppression. The start argues for the re-centring of Africa in biblical knowledge and memory from Africa (Ethiopia) to Eden. The papers contest the white Eurocentric theological assumptions. It argues that Black theology as a true biblical assumption that corrects the white man’s lies on the bible interpretation. Black theology is not an academic project but a political imperative and ethical authoritative standpoint in a world still shaped by Eurocentric colonialism, oppressive and cruel capitalism, and epistemological injustice.
Keywords: Black theology, Decoloniality, Biblical hermeneutics, Africa, Post-colonial, theology, Liberation theology.
1. INTRODUCTION
Correct biblical interpretation is the proper method for instilling the right theology that shapes religious power in the world. The current world power dynamics are centred on the wrong interpretation of the bible by the Europeans. The current Eurocentric biblical epistemology has been developed in conjunction with the colonial expansionist of the white Europeans against the global south. It was just destined to formalise the Western biblical narratives and colonialism as the true theological knowledge in the world, it was the power for world domination by the white folks from Europe. It was meant to dehumanise and undermine non-Europeans and Black people at large. It undermines non-European theological knowledge systems (Sugirtharajah, 2013, 2021). In conclusion, the biblical interpretation by the Europeans was meant to legalise and legitimise oppression, apartheid, genocides, imperialism, slavery, colonial conquest, and racial hierarchy.
Liberation and Black theology emanate as a central critique the white man’s theological biblical distortion. It argues and contends that theology must be central and accountable to the historical oppressive lived and learned experiences of the oppressed who are normally non-white nations. It must be interpreted based on people’s sufferings and struggles than concept (Cone, 1997, 2011). This paper contends that the correct decolonised interpretation of the bible and its history will reveals Africa as a central pillar in the bible and Christianity not a poor cousin to the Europeans in the biblical world. The study must realign the biblical interpretation as a disputed landscape between empire or the oppressors and liberation.
2. LIBERATING AND BLACK THEOLOGY AND DECOLONIALISM
Liberation and Black theology emanate from the lived and learned experiences of the real life of the oppressed, marginalised, social, and economic subjugation and exploitation, enslaved and poor non-whites. Cone (1997) argued that Christian theology that ignores the lived and learned struggles for justice is just an ideology of oppression than a witness to the true gospel. Liberation theology later encompassed the global struggles against oppression, social and economic exploitation. colonialism, male dominance, and exploitative neoliberal capitalism (West, 2020; Vellem, 2015).
The decolonial theory accompaniments Black theology by laying bare how current epistemological systems have been crafted by colonial power designs. The concept of “coloniality of knowledge” highlights how Western epistemologies claim universality while sidelining other ways of knowing (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018; Quijano, 2007). This is applicable to biblical epistemologies systems, decolonial hermeneutics questions why and how Eurocentric conventions shaped scriptural interpretation and theological authority (Dube, 2012; Segovia & Sugirtharajah, 2007).
Liberation, Black theology and decolonial must be brought to the fore and the centre of the dialogue when interpretating the history of the bible. The bible must be interpreted from the lived and learned experience of the historically oppressed people. It must also challenge the notion of the ideological objectivity of traditional biblical knowledge systems.
3. AFRICA IN THE CENTRALITY OF THE BIBLE
In terms of the Hebrew Bible put Africa in the centre of the Bible since time immemorial. Genesis 2:13 indicate that the land of Cush, known as associated with Nubia and Ethiopia, while Genesis 10:6–7 identifies Cush, Mizraim (Egypt), and put among humanity’s prehistoric ancestors. These scriptures clearly indicate that Africa was, and it is still entrenched geographical imagination of the biblical world. It is not symbolic but natural and real. Europeans had tried to put Africa in the periphery of the Bible and Christianity though the false biblical epistemologies. It is false Africa to put Europe as the normative centre of Christian history at the expense of Africa (Sugirtharajah, 2013). This downgrading indicates what Mbembe (2017) describes as the epistemic violence of modernism, whereby African histories is deemed non-existence.
Liberation and Black theological perspective are that Africa’s existence in biblical chronicles strike at the foundations of racialised interpretations of the scriptures that displays non-white and Black people as outsiders to sacred history. It places as the domain of the formative years. Africa emerges as a formative space in the biblical formative years, and its history.
4. ISRAEL EXIST WITHIN THE AFRO-ASIANTIC WORLD
Israel’s existence and its identity has been shaped its close and inherent links within the Afro-Asiatic world shaped by African and the close Asia-minor’s evolutions. No one can subvert that Israel’s sojourn Egypt, the Exodus, and the prophetic tradition are intimate from African contexts. Egypt was never a site of oppression, but it was the central to Isreal’s evolution in term of cultural and political formations (Assmann, 2020). Biblical scriptures referencing Africans within Israel’s history thwart European racialised understanding of the bible. Moses’ Cushite wife (Numbers 12:1) and the Ethiopian Ebed-Melech (Jeremiah 38–39) embed African existence within Israel’s existence. These scriptures indicate the white European lies of black people being far from the bible or God. It disputes the colonial prescripts that Israel as ethnically homogeneous and European. Black peoples’ affinity with Israel is not genetic but existential, centred on shared values, lived, and learned and shared experiences of oppression and resistance.
5. ETHIOPIA AND THE EARLY CHRISTIAN MOVEMENT:
The New Testament affirms Africa’s biblical existence through the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8:26–39, one of the earliest recorded Gentile converts to Christianity. Historically, Ethiopia developed ancient Jewish and Christian traditions independent of European domination, as evidenced by the Beta Israel community and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church (Bowersock, 2013; Kaplan, 2022).
6. CONCLUSION:
This article has argued that Africa occupies a central yet historically suppressed place in biblical history. A decolonised reading of scripture reveals that Black people were not marginal spectators but participants in the formation of Israelites and Christian traditions. Liberating Black theology is a transformative theological program. Christianity must fight against the inheritances of imperialism and expansionism. Christianity must be reimagined as the faith of the practice of fairness, self-esteem, freedom, and deliverance. The universality of the European theological interpretation is a fallacy and a product of the pigmentation of Europeans’ minds. The bible must be interpreted in relation to real struggles against racism, social and economic exploitation, oppression, and colonialism. The false interpretation of the Bible must be challenged and put into the dustbin of history.
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