Expressions and Encounters: Experiencing the Histories and Theologies of African Christianity in the Collections of Pitts Theology Library

Abstract

To begin, let me thank and praise the Pitts Theology Library staff, and especially the curator Jennifer Aycock, for a most enlightening and stimulating exhibition on the histories of African Christianity as these can be gleaned through the archives here at Pitts. I cannot begin to imagine the hours and hours of work that went into curating and then mounting this exhibition – an especially demanding exercise for Jennifer, since she is a full-time graduate student in course work. Normally a project like this is a good excuse to put off working on one’s dissertation! We all are deeply in your debt for her service. There is so much to wonder at here, so much to learn, so much to ponder. This evening I would like to offer two questions that an exhibition such as this – one that is culled from a library’s archives – raises for me. These are not questions demanding immediate answers; rather they are questions to help us begin to interpret what we see and hear in the exhibition as we tour it tonight and in the coming weeks. The first question has to do with the reading of non-western archival materials. Allow me to wander for just a few minutes from Africa to Asia, a continent with which I am much more familiar. In an essay published in 1982, William Henry Scott, late historian of the Philippines, picking up on language of an “iron curtain” and “bamboo curtain” that was prevalent in those pre-perestroika years, wrote about a “parchment curtain” that pervades Filipino archives. Scott acknowledged, but also challenged, a common historiographical assumption of his day, namely that it is impossible “to write a real history of the Filipino people under Spain because the colonial government enjoyed a monopoly on the production of source materials.” Scott showed that the curtain of Spanish perspectives and biases covering Filipino perceptions and actions in Spanish documents, contain “cracks . . ., chinks, so to speak, through which fleeting glimpses of Filipinos and their reactions to Spanish dominion may be seen. These are more often than not unintentional and merely incidental to the purpose of the documents containing them.”1 In other words, it is just as important to read archival materials for what they do not mean to tell us, as what they do mean to tell the reader. Scott gives the example from the report of a Jesuit priest in 1668, who was writing about the gold donned by a Visayan bride: “She was wearing so much gold it made her stoop,” wrote the priest, “and it seemed to me it reached 25 pounds or more, which is a great weight for a 12-year old girl.” The Jesuit was remarking on the gold; but as Scott puts it, “He incidentally let us know that upper class seventeenth-century Visayan ladies married at a rather tender age.”2 Scott’s insight is, of course, a theoretical commonplace today, but reading what is not meant to be conveyed is an art that too often evades too many of us historians.3 So it might behoove us to ask, what cracks and spaces