Out of Africa

Ten African Cardinals
by Sally Ninham
Connor Court, 2013, 367 pages, $29.95

It is a common oversight in the Western world that a massive shift has taken place in the centre of gravity of Christianity—from the Northern to the Southern Hemisphere. The historical dominance of Europe has given way to other continents, in particular Africa. By the year 2050, the historian Philip Jenkins has estimated in The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, only one Christian in five will be a non-Latino white person.

A key sign of this change is the rise of a new generation of church leaders, and this is especially striking in the recent history of African Catholicism. Ten African Cardinals consists of a series of interviews which the Australian author Sally Ninham conducted with prelates from various African nations, some of which are largely Christian—such as South Africa, Uganda, Ghana and Mozambique—while others have substantial, even majority, Muslim populations—for example, Nigeria, Guinea and the Ivory Coast. The challenges facing these Catholic leaders range from the conditions of their individual countries in a post-colonial era to the tensions between Christianity and Islam that are increasingly confronting the wider world.

In many ways, Sally Ninham may seem an unlikely author of a work on cardinals in Africa. She admits that she was very much a child of her times—a non-Catholic, “born and raised in a godless world, a 1960s hangover that arrived aching and miserable in Australia after a decade of parties in the States”. Her upbringing had conditioned her to see religion as “a non-science, a fiction, a band-aid for mortality and for fear”. In her thirties, she had her children baptised “to give them the advantages of belonging to her husband’s tribe while still clinging tightly to a world of non-believers”—but she then found herself “wandering, cast adrift by the non-believers she thought were her people”.

Conducting the interviews had a marked impact on her outlook. The cardinals challenged many of her Western preconceptions—such as the focus on individualism, critical thinking and social democracy, which can block any sympathetic recognition of religious leaders as part of the future of Africa, and not merely of its past.

In the main, the cardinals interviewed would not be widely known, with the exception of those who have served in Vatican posts, such as Nigeria’s Francis Arinze and Ghana’s Peter Turkson (who was highlighted as a possible “African Pope” at the time of the 2013 conclave which elected Pope Francis). But the chapters on each prelate make clear their crucial importance in advancing the welfare of their people, not only spiritually but also culturally and politically. For example, the Ugandan cardinal, Emmanuel Wamala, stresses the value which the Church increasingly attached to education as the nations of Africa attained independence. He recalls the pioneering example of the first African bishop of modern times, Joseph Kiwanuka (1899–1966), in opening a girls’ secondary school. Such an initiative built on the work of European missionaries who had commonly been entrusted by colonial authorities with providing access to the techniques of Western education, which in turn fed into the continent’s emerging desire for modernity and political self-determination. (Nor has this effort been confined to ecclesiastical figures, as the phenomenal success of the School of St Jude in Tanzania shows: created in 2002 by an Australian laywoman, Gemma Sisia, it is now educating almost 2000 students.)

The emphasis on education, Ninham suggests, had a religious as well as a secular side, in that there was a clear affinity between the religions of Africa and Christianity, which centred on the shared belief in a single personal God as creator and caring provider. The result has been the forging of vital connections between traditional cultures and Christian practices, as shown by the incorporation of African symbols and customs into Christian liturgical celebrations.

Ninham notes that the number of Catholics in Africa has trebled in the last thirty years, and against this background of the growing communities of Catholics, she identifies two other contributions by the cardinals. One relates to enhancing the freedom of women, the other to deepening the spirit of harmony between Christians and Muslims.

In the interview on Nigeria, Cardinal Arinze argues that Christianity has been a liberating force for women, affording them a status and an opportunity for community leadership that traditional religions and cultures, as well as Islam, have denied them. Arinze singles out the Christian teaching on marriage, which regards the man and the woman as equal partners, and he notes the resultant impact on the ownership of family property that had previously favoured sons and not daughters.

In another interview, Cardinal Sarah of Guinea, a West African state that is largely Muslim, expresses hope in the potential for shared understanding between Christianity and Islam. He draws strength from some aspects of the religious life of Muslims, in particular their fidelity to prayer time, which has encouraged him not to abandon it in his own life in the midst of great pressures and distractions.

A special value of Ten African Cardinals is the wider questions that it raises, one of which is the relationship between nationalism and Catholicism. In various societies, such as Ireland and Poland, a sense of national feeling has historically merged with—and been spurred by—the traditions of religious faith, so that the two identities have become intertwined. The visit of Pope John Paul II to Poland in 1979, which gave momentum to the movements of protest that finally dismantled the Soviet empire, was marked by a display of Christian symbols and Polish flags. They reflected an irresistible combination as the patriotic overthrowing of communist oppression merged with a reassertion of the Polish Catholic heritage.

Sally Ninham’s biographies of the African cardinals offer a possible parallel. The interviews reveal insights into the distinctive ways in which the Christian Gospel is being adapted to the needs of a different continent and set of nations, and finding new modes of expression and forms of influence in the cultures of Africa.

The French historian and cardinal Jean Daniélou once suggested that the freedom of Christianity from identification with any specific civilisation, including its historical expression in European culture, conveys the very essence of its catholicity. In Daniélou’s view, the ultimate fulfilment of the Gospel would suggest that, before the end of time, it would find embodiment in every culture, and reveal the various countenances of the humanity that bears, according to Christian belief, the image of the divine.

At the same time, as Benedict XVI argued in a lecture delivered in 2006 at the University of Regensburg—remembered chiefly for its remarks on Islam that aroused controversy—the Christian tradition has been irreversibly shaped by its past, notably its Greek heritage. This intellectual inheritance has provided an enduring basis for discerning the relationship between natural reason and supernatural faith, both of which are necessary for understanding the fullness of reality—on the one hand, the rational grasp of material existence and, on the other, the spiritual appreciation of realities that transcend the material, such as love and beauty.

Thus the new incarnation of Christianity in Africa, of which this engaging book offers a fascinating glimpse, may enhance rather than supplant the earlier manifestations; so that, in time, some of the African cardinals interviewed by Sally Ninham, and some of their successors, could be seen as Church Fathers of the Third Millennium, as Ambrose of Milan and Augustine of Hippo were of the First Millennium.