Once more Congo is burning and the world is watching. After five years of civil war (1998-2003) in which over 5 million people were killed and over a million dislocated, the war-weary people of Congo are facing the prospect of another preventable war. The Congo conflict is the longest and most devastating conflict in Africa. It is also central to resolving the horrors going on in Darfur because these conflicts have led to the weaponization of this African sub-region and the surrounding countries extending to Sudan and Chad. The vast and ungoverned territories of Congo, Angola, Sudan, and Uganda provide the route for the transportation of all kinds of weapons to the African hot spots in Uganda, Somalia, Congo, and Sudan. They are also providing fertile grounds for very angry and disinherited Africans who are veritable tools for burgeoning terrorist cells and rogue groups and militias.

General Nkunda’s rise as a main player in the conflict is not without reason. He is only a front for a constellation of ethnic, national and economic interests within and outside Africa, which is playing out in the murky waters of the bloody politics of this troubled African region. This self-proclaimed general of the Tutsi ethnic nationality claims to have a Messianic mission to purge Congo of the remnants of the Hutu ethnic group that perpetrated the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. He is also claiming that he is a freedom fighter who will rid the region of dictatorial regimes who have mortgaged the future of the people of the Greater Congo basin to Western and Chinese economic interest. Since January 2008, Nkunda has made it clear that the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) was wrong to have negotiated away a third of Congo’s resources to China. In that deal worth over 5billion dollars, China will control and exploit Congo’s resources over a given period, while in return China will build 2,050 kilometres of road in Congo as well as provide other infrastructures like schools and hospitals...

Notwithstanding the debate in Quebec and some of the debate during the Ontario election campaign, I first of all think immigrants come to this country to belong to this country…I also think that the Canadian approach to this, which is a mixture of integration and accommodation, for a lack of a better term, is the right approach. -Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper speaking on Canadian immigration policy, December 23, 2007.

Many people who have followed post-apartheid South African society will not be surprised at present and ongoing uprising of South African Blacks against Black migrants in Alexandra, Johannesburg. This was a crisis in the making. There are three fault lines that have developed since the end of apartheid and the introduction of Black majority rule in South Africa: The first is the internal crisis and conflict of identity among the Black South Africans themselves. Many young Black South Africans, especially those who were born in the late 60’s and early 70’s, never had an opportunity to develop their skills or attain any level of educational or professional competence. Most of them were sired in the revolutionary anti-apartheid movement of the 70’s characterized by militancy and rebellion. With the end of apartheid, these young men were left in the broken lower rungs of social progress, stifled as persons in the choking economic dungeons of poverty and existential insouciance. The victorious elites of the ruling party, the ANC, who took the reins of power at all levels failed to address the needs of these young people and the burgeoning Black families who were waking up from the long night of depersonalization and cultural asphyxiation. Their concerns were blithely papered over as temporary social problems that will disappear as the gains of Black majority rule begin to trickle down. Unfortunately, close to two decades after the end of apartheid, the challenges of these lost generations of South Africans have not been addressed. The post-Mandela ANC has continued to lose legitimacy as South African Blacks move from the euphoria of freedom to the stark reality of Black social apartheid that is widening the economic divide between the White South Africans and the Blacks, and among the Blacks themselves and other colored but marginalized citizens of South Africa. The ruling party has not seriously addressed the needs of the lost generation as well as the Black community as a whole as poverty continues to spread like wild fire among young Blacks and their families, and the number of the unemployed and unemployable Black South Africans continues to increase exponentially; while HIV/AIDS continues to eat away the vibrant portion of a palpably restive Black community....

1.1 Introduction

My goal in this paper is to present the Christology of Charles Nyamiti as one model of ancestral Christology that has been proposed in contemporary African theological systems. I shall establish the structure of his theological system; his methodological approach and his use of ancestral veneration for doing Christian theology. I wish to demonstrate in this paper that systematic theologies on the nature and person of Christ have started to emerge in Africa. Twelve factors could be easily identified as influencing the development of different African contextual theologies (African cultural traditions, African past and present history, African socio-political contexts, the advances made in contemporary African social sciences, the influence of Vatican II in encouraging an inculturated Christianity, historico-critical study of the Christian Bible, growth and diversity in the African Independent Churches, Gender Issues, Folk theology, evangelical/chrismatic church, and the crisis of culture in the West)....

The recently released United Nations midway point assessment of Africa’s journey towards achieving the eight millennium development goals (MDGs) by 2015 shows that no single country in sub-Saharan Africa is on track to achieve any of the goals. The report is hopeful that the goals are achievable in most African nations before the year 2015. Many perceptive commentators on the African condition are far from being convinced on the necessity of these bogus plans for Africa that are long in expectations and promises but far removed from the local context. To accelerate the drive towards achieving the MDGs in Africa, the UN scribe Ban launched the MDGs Africa Steering Group on September, 14 with a clear mandate to find ways and means of helping African nations to get on track in efforts towards achieving the millennium goals.

ISSUES OF RACE IN RELATING TO AFRICA: LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL INSIGHTS THAT COULD AVOID TRAPS

The following article is a contribution from Jim Harries. Jim Harries (b. 1964) has lived and worked in Africa largely with indigenous churches in Zambia and then Kenya since 1988. He looks after local children in his Luo village home in Western Kenya in which he has lived since 1993. Fluent in German, Kiswahili and Dholuo as well as English (and at one time Kikaonde of Zambia) Jim's primary ministry is in Bible teaching and discussion at extension schools in Yala and Siaya, plus at Kima International School of Theology which goes to BA level. (He is also on the adjunct faculty of William Carey International University, California.) Jim is Chairman of the Alliance for Vulnerable Mission, that seeks to encourage mission to Africa from the West using African languages constrained to local resources. Jim's 2007 PhD from the University of Birmingham in UK can be found at http://etheses.bham.ac.uk/15/ and his web page is at http://www.jim-mission.org.uk

By Jim Harries March 2007. Copyright applies.