Post Colonial Discourse

The three key elements of African biblical interpretation are the biblical text, the African context, and the act of appropriation through which they are linked. The biblical text and African context do not on their own participate in a conversation. For dialogue to take place between text and context a real flesh and blood African reader is required! This reader moves constantly back-and-forth between the biblical and African context, bringing them together in an ongoing conversation which we call appropriation. How the reader moves between text and context is determined by a range of factors, including their ideo-theological orientation, their ecclesio-theological missionary heritage, their engagement with ordinary readers of the Bible in the church and community, and the important issues that require attention in the African context. In this essay, each of these elements in African biblical hermeneutics is explored.

In most forms of post-colonial discourse, the Bible's reception is subsumed under the reception of Christianity. This article argues that the Bible is a separable object of power in the protracted transactions between the Tlhaping people of southern Africa and the explorers and missionaries who first brought Bibles among them. The focus of the article is the visits of the explorer William Burchell and the missionary John Campbell to the Tlhaping in the early 1800s. Through a detailed analysis of their journals, diaries and letters, read "against the grain," signs of an emerging indigenous hermeneutic can be detected. While the Bible occupied a particular place in the constellation of meanings the missionaries embodied, it is argued there that the Bible as a distinct object took on a different order and fresh significations among the Tlhaping — significations that may be considered foundational for subsequent moments in their history.

What sense does it make to speak of "indigenous exegesis"? In some sense this article is an exegesis of this question and this phrase. While acknowledging the presence and importance of ordinary African "readers" of the Bible in the formation of African biblical scholarship, African biblical scholarship has said very little about the textual interpretative interests of ordinary African "readers" and the place of these interpretative interests in the academy. This article addresses and redresses this anomaly, arguing that it does make sense to speak of "indigenous exegesis" and that indigenous exegesis does have a place in the academy alongside the more familiar forms of exegesis.

The dominant interpretive paradigm in African biblical scholarship involves a socio­historical comparative analysis of the biblical text and the African context. While the analytical processes employed in each of two major constituent parts ­­ biblical text and African context are clear, the third part of the interpretive act, namely the actual comparative appropriation is less clear. Nigerian scholar Justin Ukpong and South African scholar Jonathan Draper (via the work of Cristina Grenholm and Daniel Patte) are the clearest about the interpretive elements that brings the biblical text and the African context into conversation, and yet even in these cases the ideo­theological dimensions of the appropriative act are somewhat obscured.

Since its arrival in Southern Africa, the Bible has been a site of struggle (West 2007), though often in more complex ways that most postcolonial analysis has acknowledged. This article reflects on some of that history but focuses on the present, examining the place of the Bible in public discourse in South Africa, more than a decade after liberation.

Written for a volume reflecting on the failures and challenges of the United Nations Summit on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance held in Durban, South Africa in 2001. Describing the way in which discourse about racism has evolved in a post-apartheid era, adopts a definition of racism as embedded prejudice linked to structural discrimination. Noting that neither a biological nor a cultural basis for understanding "race" has validity, I then define the ongoing "epistemic violence" of racism, rooted in European and American history. How we will overcome racism in a context where it is no longer overtly linked to any racist regime? If racism is embedded in a paradigmatic epistemé, how can it be overcome without public regulation, civil transformation and personal conversion as the necessary and simultaneous conditions of its eradication?

Reconstructed identities, redefined differences and a reconstitution of diversity mark the key tasks South Africa society has undertaken in the years of transition from an oligarchic tyranny to a plural democracy. With that as the key, this essay looks at the question of tolerance in an emerging democracy in four steps. The first comments on the transition to democracy in South Africa, particularly in respect of the establishment and work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The second unpacks the discourse about nation-building which predominates since 1994. The third, a brief excursus on the question of religious diversity and political tolerance follows, attempts to show how the politics of identity and difference plays itself out in one, significant cultural form. The final step is a turn to the theory of democracy, exploring the notion of tolerance in relation to identity and difference, and indicating my preference for a discourse ethics or deliberative theory of politics.