Special Forum • Curatorial Challenges 7

use. In this spirit, I was invited to curate a library exhibition in order to publicize more broadly the resources held at Pitts for the study of global south theologies and histories. The exhibition would also reintroduce a collection seemingly forgotten and little used. I oriented myself to the collection first through scouring finding aids and second through reading Jeschke’s administrative files and letters. In so doing, I determined that the exhibition needed to reflect Jeschke’s ecclesiological vision across vast but also uneven and, at times, scattered materials. Additionally, I began to see my work as designing an exhibition that served as an introduction for visitors to African Christianity post-1400 CE. I decided that the exhibition materials would need to illustrate important themes in the study of African theologies and histories, but would also invite visitors to make their own connections across time and regions. I took seriously Jeschke’s injunction that, in the end, this collection was not intended merely to be exhibited, but rather it is a collection that is to be circulated and utilized for serious research by faculty, students, and visiting scholars, in service of a global and ever-changing church.

As I sifted through the mainstays of the collection—periodicals, missionary postcards, and United Methodist missionary archives—I also began searching for particular items buried in Special Collections and amongst circulating items. Specific searches turned up early orthographies and grammars used in the translation of biblical texts, along with hymn books and pamphlets generated out of 19 th- and 20 th-century African Christian encounters, such as in Gold Coast (Ghana) and Igboland (Nigeria). The materials coalesced to support an exhibition that familiarized visitors with important themes in the study of African Christianity: cultural exchange and encounter, independence, African agency and initiative, translation, lived theology, resistance, ritual, and hymnody as historical and theological resources.

For example, encounters between Ethiopian monks and European Catholic priests beginning in the early 16 th century initiated what scholar Matteo Salvadore calls “the Ethiopianist library, the first body of European knowledge dedicated to a specific African society south of the Sahara.”11 Such texts printed and translated in Europe incorporated the new type Amharic. Pitts Cataloger Fesseha Nega identified several held in Pitts Special Collections that provided intellectual insights into early iterations of cultural and religious exchange between Africans and Europeans in this often-overlooked era. Including these texts symbolized a longer history of Christian encounters driven by Ethiopian agents on both European and African continents. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church dates to Christianity’s adoption as an imperial religion in the fourth century and enjoys an enduring history as one of the first national churches.12 Such symbolic emphases within the exhibition complicate the common assumption that Christianity’s emergence as an African religion is an imposition of the colonial period.13 Moving forward in time, African American missions and African religious movements such as Ethiopianism often drew theological and symbolic inspiration from Psalm 68:31 in the 19 th and 20 th centuries. The text “Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands to God” (Psalm 68:31, KJV) functioned as a motif to indicate divine providence and inclusion of Africa within redemptive history.14

I also highlighted African initiative and agency throughout the exhibition. An example was highlighted in the legacy and memory of Samuel Ajayi Crowther (1807-1891), born in today’s western Nigeria. Crowther led the Church Missionary Society’s Niger Mission, and became the first African Anglican bishop consecrated in 1864. Periodicals and photographic records from the Congolese Kimbanguist Movement, initiated in 1921 by Simon Kimbangu (1887-1951), illustrated the threat African religious movements posed to colonial

11 Matteo Salvadore, The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402-1555 (London: Rout-ledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2017), 4.

12 Kenneth R. Ross, J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu, and Todd M. Johnson, Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa, Edinburgh Companions to Global Christianity (Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 144-151.

13 On Christianity as an African religion see Ogbu Kalu, African Christianity: An African Story (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2007); and Kwame Bediako, Christianity in Africa: The Renewal of a Non-Western Religion (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1995).

14 Gayraud S. Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Interpretation of the Religious History of African Americans, 3 rd ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1998), 2; J. Mutero Chirenje, Ethiopianism and Afro-Americans in Southern Africa, 1883-1916 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1987).