We began 2009 already aware of unusual life-course conjunctions. I'm thinking especially of celebrations centered on February 12, the date in 1809 when the well-to-do Darwins of Shrewsbury in Shropshire and the dirt-poor Lincolns of Hardin County, Kentucky, welcomed sons who left such a mark on the world. Now a conjunction of life endings has made Thursday, January 8, of this year a day to be remembered with sadness, reflection, and gratitude. In New York City, Richard John Neuhaus succumbed to complications from a recurrence of cancer; on the same day in Chicago, Ogbu Kalu died from complications arising from pneumonia.

Neuhaus was better known, at least in North America. Love him or loathe him, this larger-than-life figure had been an unmistakable force for more than forty years—from his efforts in 1964 at founding Clergy Concerned About Vietnam, to the posthumous "Public Square" column in the February 2009 issue of his journal, First Things. Since 2001, Kalu had served as the Henry Winters Luce Professor of World Christianity and Mission at Chicago's McCormick Theological Seminary. This Nigerian scholar shared an expatriate status with Neuhaus, who had come to the United States from his native Ontario as a mid-teen. For those committed to understanding the dramatic worldwide spread of Christianity, Kalu's death is as devastating as Neuhaus' decease has been for those who joined him in seeking the right kind of Christian support for the right kind of public life.

Pope Benedict XVI will be in two African countries this March for his first trip to continental Africa as pontiff. It is surprising that this imminent visit has not generated any interest in both Africa and outside the continent. Whatever be the reason for this apparent lack of enthusiasm about this visit, like most papal trips one hopes that this visit will be significant coming more than a decade after the last one by Pope John Paul II to Africa in 2008. The highlight of this visit will be the publication of the Instrumentum Laboris for the 2nd African Synod coming up later this year in Rome, and the celebration of the 500th anniversary of the evangelization of Angola. This five days visit (17-23 March) is expected to draw attention to the state of the Catholic Church in Africa within the wider question of the African condition, and the role of the Church as an instrument of peace and justice. It will also highlight the great work that the Catholic Church is doing in Africa in the areas of health care, development initiatives, and the drive towards more prosperous and stable democracies in Africa. There is also the concern over how the Catholic Church in Africa is enhancing the agency of Africans in stimulating the needed response to change the contoured face of Africa. It is significant that the theme the Pope chose for the Second Special Assembly for Africa is, “The Church in Africa in Service to Reconciliation, Justice and Peace.” This no doubt underlies the prophetic role which the church is called to play in the very challenging contexts of faith practice in Africa.

The Church in Africa has come of age. The latest edition of church statistics published by the Vatican shows that the number of Catholics increased from 1.131 billion to 1.151 billion between 2005-2006, representing an increase of 1.4%. The statistics confirmed what many people already know that the church in Africa is witnessing a new wave or resurgence not only in the Catholic faith, but also in the Protestant churches, the evangelical and Pentecostal movements, and the blossoming African Independent Churches. Africa, for instance, has overtaken the United Kingdom as the largest Anglican community outside Europe. Within the Catholic Church, while seminaries are closing down in the West, and parishes are being closed in many dioceses in Canada and the USA, seminaries are being expanded in many African countries, while many prospective seminarians and aspirants are being turned down because of the lack of facilities to accommodate them. The seminaries and convents are bursting at the seams. Many bishops can no longer meet the ever growing demands for new parishes and new dioceses in many parts of Africa. The churches in Africa are witnessing a new harvest and a new Pentecost with an exponential rise in attendance. Churches are packed to the full every Sunday with robust and dynamic liturgies, which testify to the fact that the apprehension of Christianity in Africa is at the level of cultural identity, hence the new cultural imagination that is being created by the presence of the Christian faith in the continent.....

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)....