How God Became African: African Spirituality and Western Secular Thought (review)

Gerrie ter Haar. How God Became African: African Spirituality and Western Secular Thought. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. pp. ix + 120 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $34.95. Cloth Gerrie ter Haar's How God Became African: African Spirituality and Western Secular Thought provides new insight into the processes by which Africans refashioned Christianity to conform to Africa's unique spiritual needs while remaining faithful to the message of the Bible. Drawing on a variety of disciplines, including anthropology and neurological sciences, ter Haar highlights the complexity of the relationship between the physical and the metaphysical worlds to show how Africans' acceptance of the mutual interactions between these two worlds demonstrates not only the uniqueness of African spirituality, but also the universality of beliefs often associated with magic or miracle. While modernity has driven the West, for example, to frown upon public discourses about beliefs in miracles, such beliefs persist in the private realm, further demonstrating the resilience of such beliefs in spite of modernity. Moreover, new discoveries in neurological science appear to support the validity of miraculous healing. The resilience of Africans' beliefs in the cohabitation of the human and the spiritual worlds, die author maintains, does not imply the absence of modernity, but rather die appropriation of modern material discourse to explain the realities of the human universe in ways that reinforce Christian beliefs. After all, the beliefs in miraculous healing powers, the language of charismatic African evangelists, and their liturgical practices are drawn not from indigenous beliefs (though these beliefs facilitate local receptivity to the message), but direcdy from the Bible. It is this holistic approach to Christian doctrine that facilitates the growth of Christianity in Africa at a time when Christianity is declining in the West. Yet the Western Christian world, we are reminded, yearns for a new spirituality that does not write off miracles as part of human pursuit for happiness. Africa is thus in the position to return a "pristine" Christianity to the West in subtie but dynamic ways. The book comprises seven chapters. The first three expose the reader to the African spirit world and how this cosmology relates to the larger paradigm of the Christian scriptures - belief in miracles, spirit possession, and spiritual healing. Each chapter focuses on specific themes that tie African spirituality to Africans' material existence. Chapter 2 discusses the concept of "inculturation." Referring to ideas expressed earlier by the Rev. Milingo of Zambia, whose history provides the intellectual and ethnographic background to the arguments set forth in the book, the author notes, "inculturation should be understood not as unidirectional but as a process of cross-fertilization, in which different cultures enrich one another while preserving the characteristics that make up their original identity. Genuine and fruitful inculturation will affect mutual change, or changes in both contexts: the place the idea or practice came from as well as the place to which it was taken" (32). I find this concept, which has gained currency among anthropologists, less problematic in recognizing Africans' agency and contribution to global cultural transformations than earlier concepts such as "acculturation" and "appropriation. …