Gunda & Kügler, Introductionmembers of society.” (Gunda 2010:66). In such communities being a
Christian and citing from the Bible becomes “fashionable ... in order to
seek the votes of the Christian community” (Phiri 2008:111). Citing from
the Bible is particularly critical because of the undisputed position of the
Bible across denominations and the idea that “Africans hear and see a
confirmation of their own cultural, social and religious life in the life
and history of the Jewish people as portrayed and recorded in the pages
of the Bible” (Mbiti 1986:26). A lot of political statements be they at
national. Community or even family level are mostly couched in biblical
terms to give them credence and weight. To that extent, we engaged in
this journey hoping that we could also scrutinize these biblical claims,
since “the claim to be simply ‘biblical’ requires careful scrutiny. Nor-
mally it masks an attempt to construct a theory out of a few texts, which
is then fathered on ‘the Bible’. Because of a fundamentalist understand-
ing of the Bible, there is no way to control the doctrines supposedly
derived from it” (Gifford 2002:180). Religion in general and the Bible in
particular remains a political resource in many predominantly Christian
nation-states in Africa. This use of the Bible has been observed by many
scholars across Africa and a survey would show that the Bible has always
occupied this function and role from the colonial period to the post-
colonial era in Africa. The prominent prints of the Bible in African poli-
tics at all levels meant that the conference was a necessary starting point
for scholars of the Bible who are convinced they are called to serve this
world more than the biblical world. In other words, we congregated as
socially engaged scholars to deal with contemporary pressing issues.
This desire is apparent from the different contributions in this volume
and our hope as organizers of the conference as well as editors of this
volume is that these contributions will go some way in adding to the
resources that are already in circulation on the Bible in Africa.
An array of issues: A bird’s eyeview
This volume is divided into three sections: In the first section are six
contributions focusing on the Bible and broad political discourses in
Africa. In this section issues of democracy and democratization, devel-
opmental justice, Pan-Africanism and the public sphere feature promi-
nently, especially how these interface with the use and abuse of the Bible
by public figures and ordinary Bible readers. The contributions in this
section largely focus on the Bible in general without focusing on a single