Revisiting the Historical Presence of Inculturation Liturgies and Moving Towards Liberative Africanist Liturgies

Abstract

Ancestors play a critical role in African life and traditions. They are critical to how morality in Africa is conceptualised. Ramose and others have exposed that life in Africa is lived holistically, and ancestors play a significant role in guiding the living. Among the key aspects of becoming an ancestor is dying a natural death, having played an upstanding role in the community and having an offspring. Recognising these key parts of the criteria, this paper seeks to explore what natural death means in the face of coloniality and conquest. This paper argues that coloniality has not only killed the flesh but the living-dead. This being the case, I advance the argument that the history and presence of inculturation liturgies do not address the issue of double death. This causes a problem with the way morality is conceptualised using the African ancestral framework. Unnatural death in this paper refers to deaths that occur as a result of sickness, murder, and accidents, for instance. I argue, therefore, that ontic and epistemic death is unnatural. Addressing Christians who embrace African spirituality and Christianity, this paper advocates for the adoption of a liberative-liturgical praxis. In such a liberative-liturgical praxis, recognising the wounds and deaths of our ancestors epistemically and ontically becomes a critical part of our worship. This paper concludes by avowing that the integration of epistemic and ontic reflections of the wounds of those who have passed can play a critical liberative-reconstructive role liturgically, in the manner in which morality is framed for the African Christian society. Methodologically, this paper uses the desk research method, which is literature-based and requires no empirical research methods.