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Book Review: Reading the Bible in African and British Contexts

As the subtitle says, this book is a conversation between scholars. They discuss how they read the Bible in the light of their African or European contexts, assuming the significance of power politics and ‘the perspectives of the formerly colonised and the effects on them of colonial domination’ (p. 87). Readers are allowed to eavesdrop as scholars introduce themselves, their motivations and positions, and explain why post-colonial readings of the Bible that address inequalities of power and influence are important in today’s society. Like most good conversations there are some fascinating subjects to explore: readings of Proverbs 31 (Mmapula D. Kebaneilwe, Nancy N. H. Tan), Esther 2:10 (Tsaurayi K. Mapfeka) and Job 29 (Mark S. Aidoo) in African contexts; a discussion of colonialisation and patriarchy (Elizabeth Vengeyi); racism and Christian imagery in popular western culture (Katie Edwards); western readers and African readings (Hugh S. Pyper). For a reader wishing to gain an overview, Gerald West’s chapter ‘Locating African Biblical Scholarship as Another Generation of African Biblical Scholars takes up the work’, is a helpful guide of a decade of change since he co-edited, African and European Readers of the Bible in Dialogue: in Quest of Shared Meaning (2008). That volume was published in the same year as R. S. Sugirtharajah’s Still at the Margins: Biblical Scholarship Fifteen Years after the Voices from the Margin. Like most good conversations, there is an openness towards the other: Each of the three parts and the introduction has three chapters, each written by three scholars who are listening and responding to one another. And like most good conversations, the subjects meander, they emerge, intersect and diverge. It is this last characteristic that make these set of conversations into a winsome, but uneven book. If you like your biblical hermeneutics to be suggestive, provoking and questing, to be personal and political, to have feminist and post-colonial edge then you will find much to stimulate and inspire. If you prefer a tightly organised structure, with a clear thematic development, or are unconvinced by postcolonial sketches of historical processes then you might find the range and breadth unsatisfactory. However, there are important questions here about how we study the Bible, who is included, what kind of conversations are permitted, and what scholarly norms are followed. Musa Dube in chapter two writes of her sense of alienation when she studied in the UK and USA in the 1980s. Decades later some scholars still feel pushed to the margins by centres that maintain their epistemological privilege. The white European scholars who contribute (Stiebert, Pyper and Adriaan van Klinken) scrutinise themselves and their scholarly tradition through engagement with African scholars and readers of the Bible. In a society concerned with equality and diversity, and in an academy reflecting upon the decolonisation of the curriculum a book which presents approaches to the Bible from the African continent can inform and illuminate.