BiAS 7 – The Bible and Politics in Africa
to the integrity of the Bible as divinely originated Scripture. While these
developments in Europe made the Bible appear to be of no consequence
politics and public discourse, we are aware that the rise of Islamic fun-
damentalist groups domiciled in Europe and across the world has
brought back the subject of sacred texts and politics (though focusing
especially on the Koran). The general understanding among many Euro-
pean biblical scholars is that the Bible has no relevant and valid function
in contemporary political discourse.
While there may be ways in which it could be argued that western poli-
tics have been de-biblified since the advent of the separation of church-
state in western discourse, the same cannot even be considered as a
subject of discussion across Africa because the Bible “is the book. It is
read in times of joy and in times of sorrow” (Togarasei 2008:73). It is not
debated in many African communities that the Bible was brought in by
the white man, that at some point local people felt the white man and
his Bible had to be resisted, especially because of the connection both
had to colonization. However, “it is becoming increasingly clear that if
previously the Bible was regarded as a ‘white man’s book’ or a ‘foreign
oracle’, it has gradually become an ‘African text’” (Chitando in this vol-
ume). This development has put paid to the “anti-religion” predictions
that religion, especially Christianity would go into extinction. “Whereas
throughout the 1950s and 1960s leading scholars and other observers,
such as Indian historian and diplomat K. M. Panikkar, predicted with
breathtaking confidence and uniformity that Christianity in Asia and
Africa would collapse once the coercive pressures of Western colonial-
ism were removed, Christianity and especially Protestantism saw con-
tinuing expansion, not contraction, in the last decades of the twentieth
century” (Shah 2008:x). These predictions were developed in an envi-
ronment where it had become clear to oppressed masses that religion
and sacred texts, like the Bible, were being manipulated to prolong their
suffering and exploitation by appropriating divine agency for the exploit-
ers and perpetrators of injustices. It was apparent that some readers and
leaders read the Bible to make their judgments look unquestioned and
ancient, even timeless, and certainly as descended from divine authority
(Gunda 2010:83). What these predictions did not see was the reality that
once the status quo had been overturned, the needs of the elites could
remain similar hence the contention that “there is a consistent interpre-
tation and appropriation of the Bible by those who are privileged within
the status quo to the detriment of the underprivileged and marginalized