Decolonising faith: a challenge to KZN Catholic bishops

Ah, the Catholic bishops of KwaZulu-Natal have spoken. And what a revelation it is! After two thousand years of Christianity thriving on cultural borrowings, they have finally found the great threat to the Gospel: Africans with coloured candles, slaughtered chickens, and wild dancing. Who knew sacraments could be this fragile?

They thunder against “syncretism” with the confidence of people who were absent from seminary the day their own church history was taught. Easter baptised spring fertility rites; Christmas colonised the solstice; saints’ festivals replaced pagan cults. Relics are kissed, Mary appears on rotis, and saints are invoked to find lost keys. But if Gogo (old woman) appears in a dream, warning her family of danger, that is idolatry of the highest order. Consistency clearly isn’t a theological virtue.

The ban list itself could have been lifted from an 1880 missionary manual. The bishops, armed with canon law, seem determined to scrub African spirituality from the faith, erasing decades of scholarship by John Mbiti, Kwame Bediako, Mercy Oduyoye, Laurenti Magesa, and others who showed that African culture is not a contaminant but a carrier of the Gospel. Meanwhile, African Initiated Churches have long embodied what inculturation looks like: a living, biblical, rooted faith. But when Rome borrows, it is orthodoxy; when Africans do the same, it is scandal.

This pastoral statement is less about safeguarding the Gospel than preserving control. It reduces African faith to something needing constant policing, rather than a gift to the global Church.

These bishops resemble the so-called Exempted Blacks - a clique from which many clergy themselves came - who helped form the ANC. Like them, they are not invested in decoloniality; they simply want a seat at the master’s table. Dare I say to Catholics: if this is the Christianity your bishops want, let them keep it. You are not an afterthought. You are equally created in the image of God. Seek communities that value your African contribution to faith and to the world. |Sifiso Khuzwayo Blairgowrie