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Date Posted: 20:03:11 11/19/05 Sat
Author: Olufemi Taiwo
Subject: What is the Biblical Idea of Prophecy and Modern apostles

Introduction
Five years ago, I published a paper titled “On the Misadventures of National Consciousness: A Retrospect on Frantz Fanon’s Gift of Prophecy”, in which I explored the interface between the biblical idea of prophecy and social science predictions. I said there:

There are three attributes shared by a social scientific model and a jeremiad: description, explanation, and prediction. In ways that mirror social scientific models, there is a description, in a jeremiad, of what is wrong in the community. For example, biblical prophets gave stark descriptions of the many sins and transgression prevalent in their community, the corruption and debaucheries of the rulers, the absence of righteousness and upstandingness among their fellows. Secondly, the explanation of the misfortunes of the community was that the people had strayed from the path of righteousness laid out for them by the divine authority. Finally, in the prophecy, there was a warning that unless the divine word was heeded, dire consequences would follow. But there is at least one clear difference between biblical prophecy and good social science: in social scientific models, the “Thus saith the Lord” of a prophecy is replaced with the authority of analysis, theoretical paradigms, and empirical investigations. Nonetheless, in the same way that failure to heed the word of the Lord will mean perdition, so will failure to heed the warning in social scientific prophecy lead to social dislocation and crisis in the community.1
The template constructed there will be deployed here for reasons that will become clear presently. But before I set out those reasons, one additional commonality shared by prophecy and social science must be identified. They both arise often from dissent, from heterodoxy, and they usually come as part of a moral vision that the situation of which the prophecy speaks ought to be altered.

Why Prophecy? Why Now?
We begin from the present. The entire continent of Africa, not unlike other parts of the world, is at the present time one huge workshop of social experiments in politics, economics, religion, culture and myriad other areas of life. One frame within which scholars in almost all disciplines interpret contemporary Africa is that of a dichotomy between Africa’s much-vaunted attachment, one is tempted to say addiction, to tradition and near congenital aversion to what is generally dubbed ‘modernisation’. Those who are familiar with the social science literature in economics, political science and history would easily recall that in the sixties and seventies, African regimes were adjudged successes or failures by how far they had travelled on the road to modernization. Modernisation was understood in near-grotesque terms of increasing Gross Domestic Product, total mileage of macadamized roads, and the like. And when the bottom fell out in the eighties, we were treated to gory accounts of so-called modernisation that went too fast, African traditional institutions that were recalcitrant to the changes enjoined by modernisation efforts, and so on.

There are two major problems with any attempt to explain phenomena in Africa within the ‘traditional versus modern’ schema. The first problem is conceptual: the means, ‘modernisation’, is mistaken for the end, ‘modernity’. This is not a mere verbal point. The end-product, putatively speaking, of all modernization processes must be the transformation of the social organism concerned from a pre-modern or non-modern state to a modern one. Properly understood, this must mean that the organism concerned has had its most dominant institutions bathed in the ether of modernity, the proper name for the outcome of the process in which modernisation is a tool. If this is the case, it is possible to have modernisation, understood as the superficial painting of the social fabric with various markers of modernity without there being the infusion of the elements that constitute the soul, the identifying characteristics of modernity. Japan and South Korea are the most successful examples of this phenomenon. Taiwan and Hong Kong are not far behind. Hence, I am suggesting that whatever was going on in Africa in the sixties and seventies were at best inchoate attempts at becoming modern. So, their failure cannot be used as evidence of the inability of Africans to be modern.

The second problem is historical: contemporary scholars do not evince any awareness of the rich legacy of past attempts at the installation of modernity in some parts of the continent, most notably English-speaking West Africa. Hence, much of the discourse about Africa and modernity at the present time proceeds as if (1) this is a new problem or (2) there are no antecedent African engagements with modernity. The available historical evidence supports neither standpoint.

In the nineteenth century, specifically before the imposition of formal empire on the African continent by various European powers, some parts of Africa were in the beginnings of a transition to modernity. Originally begun under the inspiration of Christianity—taking this seriously is bound to alter our historiography of Christianity and appraisal of its career in Africa—the African apostles of modernity took the movement beyond the confines of the religious to the larger sphere of the secular. I argue that it is time to honour these prophets and adapt their wisdom to the task that is again before us to move Africa towards modernity. But we cannot celebrate them if we don’t know who they are. So one modest aim of this essay is to introduce these prophets of old Africa.

There is an even deeper reason to take them seriously now. I argue that modernity is back on the agenda in Africa, as it is in other areas of the world. It is more insightful, perhaps more correct, to interpret the current experimentation in forms of rule—liberal representative democracy and the rule of law; forms of social living—the ideology of individualism; forms of economic production—capitalism; in Africa and other parts of the world as late transitions to modernity. I am quite aware that what I say risks being appropriated by social evolutionists who would like to make it appear as if Euro-America sits at the apex of the human social ladder with the rest of the world coming up the rear. Anyone who is familiar with the expostulations of Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington will see the point clearly.2 But we may not refrain from drawing appropriate lessons from history for our own use because some might turn the same results to mischievous ends. It is worth taking the risk involved in this instance because I would like Africa, if its peoples so desire, to engage modernity in a conscious, critical way and embrace or shun it for Africa’s own reasons, not out of ignorance or elemental hostility traceable to the conflicted legacy of its history in the continent.

What Modernity?
We work with a very historicised and, therefore, narrow conception of modernity. Modernity, as it is understood here, refers to that movement of ideas, practices and institutions that originated in Europe the roots of which are generally traced to the Renaissance, moving through the voyages of Discovery, the Reformation and the Enlightenment. It gave us such milestones as the English Civil War and Act of Settlement of 1701, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, the Scientific Revolution as well as Capitalism. But it is modernity’s philosophical discourse that interests us because, ultimately, its most lasting impact has not been that it enabled us to build nuclear weapons or send humans into space. Rather, in creating and widely disseminating a new and radically different view of human nature unique to it, and creating the kinds of values, practices and institutions to enable this specific mode of being human to effloresce, modernity represents an epoch all its own in the history of human evolution.

The relevant elements of the discourse of modernity are the following: the principle of subjectivity and its social concomitant, individualism, the centrality of Reason, autonomy of action, liberal democracy, the Rule of Law, the open future, and an obsession with novelty. This is not the appropriate place to expound upon the meanings and entailments of the various aspects of modernity just iterated. In this section, we give a brief description of each of the features that will be discussed below. For our purposes here, the Rule of Law, autonomy of action, and the question of novelty shall not be considered.

Individualism:
The most important of the above elements to be discussed here is the idea of individualism. No doubt, the idea of individualism predated the modern age. My contention is that (1) the notion of the individual that is dominant in the modern age is without precedent, at least in the Euro-American tradition from which our African prophets extracted it; (2) it is under the modern regime that individualism is anointed as the principle of social ordering and almost everything else is understood in terms of how well or ill it serves the interests of the individual. Thus, although it is true that there was some recognition of the individual in premodern epochs, it is in the modern epoch that the individual is not merely supreme; whatever detracts from the rights of the individual is, precisely for that reason, to be rejected. This notion of the individual took a long time to emerge but it received one of its most dramatic consecrations in the Protestant Reformation when the subject, that is, the individual, was made the centrepiece of Christian soteriology. The subject must win eternity for himself, helped of course by grace. One’s genealogy, status and similar attributes counted for nothing, or at least theoretically ought to count for nothing in the allocation of goods, services, or even recognition. The key element is that of individual striving, what the individual makes of herself and whatever talent she is endowed with by Nature. Here is the source of the Merit Principle, the meritocracy that promises rewards to individuals according as they show themselves worthy by developing their talents. One consequence of the focus on the individual in the modern state is that no longer are individuals’ futures determined by what station they were born into in life. Humans are adjudged capable of moving across status, class, and other boundaries as long as they are willing to improve themselves enough to fit them for whatever station they aspire to occupy.

Our prophets embraced the preceding idea of individualism and made it the cornerstone of their worldview. Whatever other influences they would later derive from their African origins and general milieu, the idea that if they improved themselves sufficiently, they would be rewarded with careers open to talent was appropriated directly from their engagement with modernity. Needless to say, at the core of the individualist orientation is the idea of the person, the self, created by God, saved by grace. In the interim between its creation in sin and its salvation by grace, the self acquires stature by dint of hard work, education, and a little luck. This is the self that is accorded respect and whose well-being is the metric by which to judge forms of social ordering. I am not saying that the kind of rampant individualism that we usually associate with the modern variety would have appealed to any of them. But I definitely would argue that the self—of individuals—and the collective self—of groups—were objects of their solicitation.

The Centrality of Reason
The second tenet of modernity that is of moment to us is the centrality of Reason. Modern society fancies itself as a society of knowledge, one in which the claims of tradition and authority do not mean much and every truth claim must be authenticated by Reason. Whoever can show that she has superior knowledge commands our assent and respect. This is contrasted with the premodern situation where authority went largely unchallenged, tradition reigned supreme and reason was appointed a handmaiden to Revelation. The African prophets adopted this tenet of modernity with aplomb. In their exertions, we can see them working extremely hard to acquire knowledge of not only the new ways of life that their sojourn in the New World of Slavery and the Slave Trade had socialised them into, but also that of their own societies, cultures, and customs. They provided us with our first models of intellectuals under the new dispensation inaugurated by evangelisation and colonisation.

Governance by Consent
Finally, I refer to the central tenet of political theory in the modern age under which no one ought to acknowledge the authority of, or owe an obligation to obey, any government in the constitution of which he or she has played no part. That is, no government is legitimate to which the governed have not consented. When the American revolutionaries first used this principle as their rallying cry in 1776, it was the first culmination of a new principle of legitimacy the philosophical grounds of which had been foreshadowed in the writings of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and others. From that point on, whether it was in the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, the much less abrupt transfer of power from the monarch and the nobility to the House of Commons in Britain, the authority of every ruler by the grace of God or by reason of birth was vulnerable to the challenge posed by the new thinking concerning the issue of who ought to rule when not all can rule. It was this principle that, as we shall see, our prophets adopted in their argument that they must be rulers in their own house and that representative government was not a gift to be bestowed on them by the British, but a right that they had earned because they were citizens of Empire. Our prophets were so enthusiastic about the doctrine of governance by consent that they sought at different times to remake indigenous modes of governance in accordance with its imperatives. Such was the force of the principle that by the third decade of the twentieth century, “no taxation without representation” was a favourite slogan of leaders of the National Congress of British West Africa.3

The Historical Context
In what follows, I shall be arguing that the African apostles of modernity filled the role of prophets in the manner described in section 1. There were two dimensions to their starting point: the first was their experience of having been recaptured from slavers and slavery. As a result, their appreciation of the liberty promised for all under the modern regime was not merely theoretical. Theirs was an unalloyed disavowal of any and every regime that threatened to undermine liberty. The second was their description of the indigenous Africa to which they had returned. Given the approbation that they bestowed upon their new outlook on life, it is no surprise that they held their native counterparts to be backward, sunk in heathenism and requiring redemption through the light of Christianity and (modern) Civilisation. They attributed Africa’s backwardness to the ravages of the Slave Trade and the prevalence of ignorance and superstition. Their preferred solution provides a pointer to their moral vision. They insisted that the future prosperity of their land depended on their taking the best from modern civilisation and combining it with what was best about their indigenous heritage and fashioning a synthesis that would deliver the promise of Christianity and Civilisation to their compatriots.

Let us rewind to the nineteenth century. The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slavery had just been abolished. Many slaves—Recaptives, as they were called—were being taken from their slavers and returned to Sierra Leone and other parts of West Africa whence they’d been taken. Others were being repatriated from the United States and the West Indies or Canada—they were called freedmen. But before their return journeys many of them had undergone some fundamental reorientation, sundry life-changing experiences, the most important of which was their becoming Christians. However, to see their becoming Christians only in terms of its religious trappings will be inadequate, perhaps mistaken.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, there was a small group of missionaries and politicians as well as other men and women of affairs, especially humanitarians, who believed that the success of their missionizing activities was to be measured by how quickly they were able to render themselves superfluous to the running of the local Church they had helped establish. Many of them had been active in the humanitarian movement that had spearheaded the struggle for the abolition of the Slave Trade and Slavery. No doubt, the period witnessed its share of racist apologists who saw Africans as non-human beings or lesser human beings. Their ranks included missionaries and humanitarians. But many in the humanitarian movement saw Africans differently. They believed that the degenerate state of Africans at that time could not be separated from the centuries of degradation that they had suffered under the twin evils of the Slave Trade and Slavery. They contended that if Africans displayed lesser qualities than other humans, this was not because Africans were any less human than their fellows. Rather, the development of Africans had been stunted by historical factors. Thus, the humanitarians regarded the abolition of the Slave Trade and Slavery as the absolute prerequisite for the rehabilitation of the Africans and for their restoration to their proper place at humanity’s table. As a result, some missionaries and humanitarians believed that their task was to school Africans in preparation for that time when the latter must assume the basic prerogative of every human being: responsibility for themselves and their posterity. For those missionaries and humanitarians, their task was to create those conditions in which Africans could quickly master, once again, the art of self-government and its attendant responsibilities, and they, as teachers, would take pride in having weaned their heathen wards off any dependency.

A similar current was present among politicians, too. It was articulated for instance by Earl Grey, Colonial Secretary in Lord Russell’s administration, 1846-52, in the following terms: “The real interest of this Country is gradually to train the inhabitants of this part of Africa in the arts of civilization and government, until they shall grow into a nation capable of protecting themselves and of managing their own affairs, so that the interference and assistance of the British Authorities may by degrees be less and less required.”4 Another manifestation of it is to be found in the resolution of the Select Committee of the House of Commons in May 1865 which said, inter alia, “that the object of our policy should be to encourage in the natives the exercise of those qualities which may render it possible more and more to transfer to them the administration of all the Governments, with a view to our ultimate withdrawal…”5

The sentiment was most pronounced among missionaries. One might argue that there was a convergence of views among the key sectors of nineteenth century West Africa concerning the aim of imperial activities there: freed slaves who had become socialized into a new lifeworld structured by Christianity; government officials who felt that the most economical way to build Empire was to rely on native agency and who saw their duty as making Africans fit for self-government; and missionaries who saw Africans as blighted children of God, no thanks to slavery, but God’s children nonetheless who were capable of redemption and regeneration needing only temporary help from their missionary benefactors. Whether or not the government officials meant what they professed, and whether or not the missionaries were sincere in theirs, the Africans took the charge seriously and proceeded to make themselves worthy of self-government. The conjuncture we have described so far provided the context for the phenomena that we discuss in the rest of this essay.

The most vocal and the most profound missionary at that time was the Very Reverend Henry Venn who served as the Honorary Secretary of the spearhead organisation for the evangelisation activities of the Church of England, the Church Mission Society, from 1841 to 1872. Here is Ade Ajayi’s summary of Venn’s ideas on native Church organisation.

The Missionary Society he says in effect, is an organization with limited funds, but unlimited fields to cover. Its aim must be to create “self-governing, self-supporting, self-propagating” churches. The missionary arrives in the field, sent out and maintained by the Society. His first converts should be organized in little bands under leaders and should start as soon as possible to make contributions to a Native Church Fund separate from the funds of the Missionary Society. Soon the bands should come together and form a congregation under a native catechist whom they should endeavour to maintain. Soon the catechist or other suitable native should be ordained pastor and the missionary can then move on to fresh ground. Thenceforth, the missionary is “to exercise his influence ab extra, prompting and guiding the native pastors to lead their flocks, and making provision for the supply for the native Church of catechist, pastors or evangelists…. “Let a native Church be organized as a national institution…. As the native Church assumes a national character, it will ultimately supersede the denominational distinctions which are now introduced by Foreign Missionary Societies… Every national Church is at liberty to change its ceremonies, and adapt itself to national taste.” But that must be the work of the native pastorate. The temptation for European missionaries to assume the role of the pastor must be resisted, for, “such a scheme, even if the means were provided, would be too apt to create a feeble and dependent native Christian community.6
Notice the emphasis on the three selves—self-governing, self-supporting and self-propagating. This alone is significant. Were we to focus on its implication we would see the secular reach of what goes on within the religious sphere. Self-support means (1) that there is a self whose capacity to act and whose autonomy to do so must not merely be recognised but respected, celebrated even and (2) support cannot but include the creation of material means to ensure that neither Church nor pastor is beggared. Again notice the connections. Only a post-Reformation Christianity could articulate the kind of heterodoxy suggested by Venn. Even in our day, the Catholic Church does not allow anything similar. Venn took seriously the history of the Church of England itself and he was willing to extend the capacity for autochthony to the African Church. He insisted that perpetually feeding the native Church through aid from the coffers of the mother Church would create a dependent and feeble native Church. The mother Church must equip the native Church with the capacity for self-support and must insist on the latter acquiring such capacity in the shortest time possible. Hence, Venn, and others who shared his philosophy, wanted a total remaking of the African world, initially under their direction but quickly turned over to Africans themselves, a development that was to be anchored on the other two Cs—Commerce and Civilisation—that they deemed requisite to the achievement of their primary C, Christianity.

Many Africans took the humanitarian professions of faith in native agency seriously. They set about the task of remaking the African world after the fashion of the world that they had been inducted into, the signal values of which they had come to embrace, and the fruits of which they were earnest to make available to their brethren and sistren who, in their estimation, were still in the grip of heathenism. It is from among their ranks that the prophets that I am speaking of emerged, fully persuaded that a great future for Africa lay in a critical appropriation of what force and Providence had bestowed on them during their time in the Babylon of New World Slavery and the Slave Trade. According to Ajayi,

The most important factor in their make-up, however, was that in passing through slavery into freedom they had all been made acutely conscious of the gaps that separated them as a people from the Europeans. And in spite of having been subjected to Europeans or because of it, they wished to be like Europeans. They had all travelled far. A few of them had travelled widely and had seen something of the European world, either in Europe itself, or at secondhand, in Sierra Leone, the West Indies or Latin America. By and large, they all came back desiring to make certain changes come about… They were the first generation of Nigerian nationalists. Their nationalism consisted in their vision of a new social, economic and political order such as would make their country “rank among the civilized nations of the earth”.7
Ajayi’s description requires us to consider these Africans with greater sophistication and sympathy. In assessing the contributions of this group of African thinkers we must resist the urge to see in them glorified ‘Uncle Toms’. All too often in the apologias of colonial administrators, they are represented as persons who suffered from a dependency complex or a near pathological desire to be ‘white’ or, at least, ‘European’. I suspect that part of the reason that their reflections have not been taken seriously by African scholars in the contemporary period is not unconnected to the fact that it is this picture of them that is present to our contemporary minds every time their names come up. Furthermore, ever since the colonial period and the subsequent hostility that it kindled in nationalistic Africans, those Africans who have deigned to think that indigenising the ways of their European oppressors offered a path to serious progress for their own peoples and lands have always attracted the disapprobation of their fellows. Yet, to think of our prophets as, for the most part, desirous of becoming ‘white’ or ‘European’ is to seriously misconstrue what they were about and who they desired to be. Indeed, a close but unprejudiced analysis of their writings and pronouncements will reveal entirely contrary impulses.

The view of the prophets as bad parodies of their European benefactors can sometimes be traced to their unflattering portrayals of indigenous African practices, institutions, and values, especially when they compared the latter to their newly acquired practices, institutions and values of European provenance. They are thus spoken of as if they found nothing good in African ways of being human and thought everything good about European ways of being human. The problem with this view is that, again, on closer analysis, their standpoints had more nuance than their latter day critics are aware of or willing to acknowledge. Our task is to understand where they were coming from, explore their ideas fully rather than strands taken out of context, and see why they might have appeared as pathological self-haters. I hope that the discussion that follows offers a modest beginning on the path to appreciating their genius.

Unlike the reticence, maybe a profound lack of self-confidence, with which we their progeny now approach modernity and other things ‘Western’, the prophets of old exuded tremendous confidence in their belief that they were destined to be the leaders who would create new forms of social living in Africa be stealing the fire of the ‘West’ and combining it with what was best in their indigenous heritage, and doing all this in partnership with Europeans. Thus we need to investigate their ideas of progress, of the state of Africa during their time, and of how best to fit Africa for its proper place in the concert of nations.

THE PROPHETS
Samuel Ajayi Crowther
The first of the apostles that I wish to present for rather belated honour is the Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther (1806-1891). The contributions of Bishop Crowther have usually been processed through religious lenses. He was “the first non-European to be consecrated a Protestant Bishop since the Reformation.”8 The evangelisation of much of present-day Nigeria was prosecuted under his direction. This achievement alone would constitute enough justification for adulating him. But I concur in Ade Ajayi’s judgment:

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