CHRISTIANITY IN AFRICA Christianity in Africa: The Renewal of a Non-Western Religion. By KWAME BEDIAKO. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press and Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1995. Pp. xii + 276. £16.95 (ISBN 0-7486-0625-4).

Abstract

Kwame Bediako is one of a new generation of West African Christian scholars, who confidently assert the essential ‘Africanness’ of African Christianity against all inclined to emphasize its foreignness. While deeply indebted to the first generation of African theologians of the 1960s, Bediako feels that they accepted too readily that Christianity was a foreign religion which needed to be ‘Africanized’ by incorporating elements from the traditional African religious heritage. It was the posing of this stark dichotomy – Christian or African? – which in Bediako's view led the Ghanaian Catholic priest Osofo Damuah to renounce Christianity and to found his own neo-traditional African, explicitly non-Christian, religious movement, ‘Afrikania’.