8 Theological librarianship • Vol. 12, No. 1 april 2019

regimes and missionary control. Kimbangu’s healing and preaching ministry drew the ire of Catholic and Baptist missionaries who prodded Belgian colonial officers to intervene, prompting Kimbangu’s arrest and imprisonment until his death in 1951. Nevertheless, his wife Mama Mwilu Kiawanga Nzitani Marie (d. 1959) persisted as the spiritual leader of the movement until her death in 1959. The church known today as L’Église de Jesus Christ sur la Terre par la prophète Simon Kimbangu (EJCSK) spans the globe from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Angola, Congo-Brazzaville, France, Germany, Portugal, and Atlanta, Georgia. Highlighting African initiatives counters widely held assumptions that Christianity only grew on the continent due to forced baptisms within the transatlantic slave trade and at the hands of Western missionary intervention. Forced baptisms did occur, and the Western missionary movement is indeed an important episode within world Christianity writ large. However, centering external agents within African histories does the unfortunate disservice of denying Africans their agency and ingenuity in Africanizing Christianity. Thus, the cultural work of fashioning Christianity in African garments relevant to shared communal concerns oriented my framework for selecting material in general.

In addition, historian and director of the Marcus Garvey Papers Project at University of California Los Angeles Robert A. Hill described Jeschke’s acquisition of the African Orthodox Church of Africa’s archive in 1981 as “[what] will probably prove the single most important collection of original manuscripts in the annals of African church independency.”15 To provide some context in grasping the import of the archive, consider that in 1924, South African Daniel William Alexander (1882-1970) read about Antiguan George McGuire’s African Orthodox Church, U.S.A., in a sermon circulated through Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association’s Negro World. Alexander then convened councils in South Africa to discuss affiliating with the U.S.A.-based church, and the decision was eventually approved. Through an exchange of letters, Alexander and McGuire, along with additional Ugandan and Kenyan clergy, forged a transnational expression of black church doctrine, order, liturgy, and leadership succession independent of white oversight in an era of increasing apartheid and Jim Crow terror. The exhibition offered a fraction of the archive for viewing so visitors could engage themes of independence, exchange, and encounter in histories of black Atlantic Christianity.

Lastly, liturgies, hymns, prayers, and songs provide some of the most incisive and vibrant sources of embodied, sung, and lived theological insights into religious communities across the African continent. However, such sources cannot be accessed apart from the local vernacular and cultural categories that give them resonance within specific communities. I included Pitts’ circulating item Jesus of the Deep Forest: Prayers and Praises of Akua Kuma, Akan-Twi prayers composed by female Afua Kuma (1900-1987) of Obo-Kwahu, Ghana.16 This work introduced visitors to the local cosmologies that inflect the contextual nature of theologizing. One of the only known theological works recorded by an African woman in a local language, Afua’s prayers personify Christ in such Twi motifs as the chief of farmers, lightning, mother, deep forest, moon, the hard-working farmer, and incomparable Diviner. The work of women especially draws attention to the holistic, communal, and vernacular impulses that ground processes in which Christian concepts are translated and made meaningful at local levels.17

Attention to thematic elements in the study of African Christianity, however, did not necessitate synthesizing a grand or coherent narrative out of disparate materials. We would not expect this in an exhibition entitled “European Christianity!” Rather, the exhibition suggested that library collections function similarly to archives

15 Robert A. Hill, September 23, 1981, African Orthodox Church Correspondence and Notes, 1979-1983 (Sub-Saha-ran African Collection, Pitts Special Collections).

16 Afua Kuma, Jesus of the Deep Forest (Accra: Asempa Publisher, 1981).

17 See Lamin O. Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture, 2 nd ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2009) on the “translation principle.”