Re-Africanizing the African: Indigenization of Christianity on the Slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro

Abstract

Christianity has recently been implicated in the dissolution of the traditional African identity. These assertions potentially establish a reverse discourse that undervalues and peripheralizes the contemporaneous African identity. Furthermore, such postulation fails to appreciate other catalysts of cultural change. The discourses of Christianity and colonialism were not, as is popularly assumed, oppressing in the absence of cultural, economic and material resistance and integrative agency. Traditionality and Christianity are dialectically related, with each system effecting performative change upon the other. Christianity has been Africanized. Christianity has been made morally, environmentally and culturally intelligible. This paper will demonstrate the proactive participatory systems and actors involved in the indigenization of Christianity through case study material gathered during recent oral historic and ethnographic research conducted in Kilimanjaro, Tanzania.