Contemporary

A micro-study of a vital centre in the history of Christian struggle against apartheid, this essay--part homage--identifies some key characteristics of those who influenced and trained people as they confronted the state and racism in South African society, especially those who operated out of a deep religious conviction. The history of the Cape Office of the Christian Institute, its complex interactions with an enormous variety of people from all walks of society, national and international, and the particular charisma of its director, Theo Kotze, form the substance of the essay. It is history, but it is also an attempt to point to and recover, for the future, the kind of leadership and commitment that this institution produced in large measure, to unpack on a small, local scale, exemplary historical dynamics that were present in South African society that still have a bearing for us.

I have made my opening point before (West 2003), but I will make it again because it is so important. I worry when well intentioned people who are not HIV-positive prescribe what kind of theology there ought to be or how we ought to read the Bible for people who are HIV-positive. The questions of how we read the Bible (specifically the Old Testament) in the context of HIV/Aids, the subject of my paper, must be substantially constituted by actual collaboration with people who are living with the virus. We are all affected, and we are all being partially constituted by the daily realities of HIV/Aids, but we are not all infected. Alongside the other liberation theologies that have shaped our African contexts ? and I speak here specifically of liberation theologies that have centred around race, class, gender and culture ? HIV/Aids must now take its place (see for example Maluleke 2001; Nicolson 2000). And what an HIV/Aids liberation theology demands is that we grant an epistemological privilege to the experience of those who are infected. Per Frostin is correct when he says that the distinguishing characteristic of liberation theologies is not content but methodology (Frostin 1988:11), and key to the methodology of liberation theologies is the epistemological privileging of those who experience that particular marginalisation. Those who know the lived reality of HIV/Aids, must become the primary interlocutors of theology (see Frostin 1988:6-11).

Using the concept of (multiple) identities as constructed by (shifting, porous) boundaries, the paper explores how these philosophical notions play themselves out in Africa under condition of globalization. It begins with the idea of an African Renaissance, given special currency in South Africa and more widely by our current President, Thabo Mbeki. It is his sense of Africanness that I probe, and its relation to identity under globalizing conditions. Second, I read globalization itself as a way of orienting the notion of identity within a broader field of terms—social, political and economic. Third, I treat what seems either to be truncated or seen as derivative forces of money (or economy) and power (or politics) in some theories, namely, culture—more precisely, religion, the one thing that seems most derivative to creatures of the Enlightenment. I seek to redraw boundaries, to read globalization from another place, to link it to the place of Europe and to relocate it in an African worldview, which is not an African worldview alone, and thus to decentre it.

Where migration patterns stretch the capacities of health care systems of African countries, religious beliefs, rituals and practices represent vital cultural capital. Religiously motivated or based healing and health-related activities, often with strong local impact, generate "religious health assets" that need much more analysis and understanding-for policy reasons and for development theory and practice. The essay explores some of the conceptual and theoretical frameworks necessary for carrying out a deeper analysis, using a local South African context-the historically black settlement of Imizama Yethu, Hout Bay-as an empirical example of how the key dynamics and processes associated with problems in health care promotion and delivery might impact on the role of religious health assets. This is based on a detailed study of local governance in health care in the area by a Norwegian political scientist, who concludes that the key ingredient, mostly missing, is "trust." The essay defends a religious approach to the issue and outlines the principles of a major project that seeks to explore them in the wider Sub-Saharan African context.

Some years ago Elsa Tamez, a biblical scholar and social activist from Costa Rica, made the comment that Latin American biblical scholars would have to face up to the fact that there were biblical texts that resisted being read liberatively. One of the great contributions of Latin American biblical scholarship has been its resolute commitment to reading the Bible as a liberatory text (see Vaage, 1997, Hanks, 2000). While not questioning this contribution or orientation, Tamez was worried that she and her colleagues were sidestepping significant hermeneutical issues by not taking seriously those texts that seemed to have an anti-liberation ideological agenda (or grain). Her comment arose from seeing my little book on Contextual Bible Study (West, 1993) in which I try to come to grips with the text of 1 Timothy from a gendered perspective. She herself, told me, was working on 1 Timothy for the very same reason. What do those of us who are committed to God's project of liberation for women do with texts like 1 Timothy 2:8-15 and what hermeneutical questions does this generate?