USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ogbu Kalu: Memorialization

As part of the effort to keep alive the memory of Nigeria's preeminent scholar of religions, his essays have been consolidated into three volumes and published by Africa World Press

http://www.africaworldpressbooks.com/servlet/Detail?no=513

volume 1

This book provides an excellent lens to view, interpret, and evaluate the Pentecostal experience in the African continent. Contrary to dominant Western perspective on African Pentecostalism which sees it as a religious vehicle for Western global cultural influences in Africa, Kalu provides an alternative trans-national discourse that is sensitive to local identities, appropriations, and contestations of global processes.

In essay after essay in this volume, he demonstrates the courage to blaze a new path, offer new, bold insights, render prevailing discourse obsolete, and set sail a new one in the treacherous academic waters by shifting the terms, accent, and drift of the old one. As this set of sixteen essays shows, he researched profusely, argued trenchantly, and thought and taught powerfully to change how African Pentecostalism is portrayed, interpreted, and situated both within Christianity and within African traditional religions. In all this, he is not simply correcting distorted scholarship, but also altering the way Africans are portrayed in Western scholarship.

 Volume 2

The narratives and analyses in this volume will enable scholars of global Christianity to discern how the shifting center of gravity in Christianity is being played out in Africa. Kalu in these essays do not simple record demographic shift, numerical growth, and vitality of African churches, but also and importantly shows how the expressions of Christianity are filtered through African cultures. 
The narratives are intellectually compelling and emotionally engaging. They primarily focus on concrete lives and efforts of people engaged in the missionary endeavor. The essays do not simply tell the story of how African Christians are engaged in the practices of sharing their faith. They also describe how African Christians are shaping the world through the power of the Christian gospel and the ethic of love expressed in the life of Jesus Christ.

Kalu makes the significant point that it is unnecessary for missiologists studying the recent blooming of Christianity in Africa to search for its founding missionaries, originative centers or influences outside the continent. Foreign connections are more useful in explaining the character of the movement than in tracing its genealogy.

 Volume III

This volume collects together Kalu's insightful essays on the intersection of religion and social issues in Africa. They constitute an engaging set of political and ethical analyses of the flow of events as Christianity penetrated Africa and sustains itself it multiple forms. It is an illuminating, informative, and provocative commentary on religion in African public spaces. It is also a constructive study of how religion affects public life, engaging the debate on how primal religions frame the outworking of the social ethics of African Christians and Muslims. In this set Kalu displays the sensitivity of a great historian coupled with an eye for ethical issues.

--  

Toyin Falola
Department of History
The University of Texas at Austin
1 University Station
Austin, TX 78712-0220
USA
512 475 7224
512 475 7222  (fax)
http://www.toyinfalola.com/
www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa
http://groups.google.com/group/yorubaaffairs
http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue