Elochukwu E.Uzukwu : Memorializing the Unsung: Slaves of the Church and the Making of Kongo Catholicism . University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press , 2024; pp. ix + 234.
Year: 2025
Type: book-review
Abstract: This work of theologically interpreted history represents years of serious research and reflection on Kongolese Catholicism.Drawing upon historical accounts and numerous other studies, Uzukwu strives to "memorialise" the courageous witness of generations of believers who faced daunting challenges to their faith and resilience.Author of distinguished works in African ecclesiology and liturgical studies, and a professor of theology at Duquesne University in the US, Uzukwu here expands into African church history to recover the legacy of these heroic believers, heretofore overlooked, or "unsung."While highlighting their endurance of dehumanising treatment at the hands of European colonial forces and missionaries, he recognises their loyalty to the church and their creative embrace of the faith preached, if imperfectly, by missionaries.Though some of its arguments rest on uncertain evidence, Memorializing the Unsung builds on existing scholarship to demonstrate the historical importance and admirable witness of Catholics in Kongo, especially those who were calledand embraced -the labels "slaves of the Church" and later, "slaves of the mission" (p. 1).In studies of African Christianity, the Kingdom of Kongo represents a special case, by far the most significant Christian society in early modern sub-Saharan Africa, yet also much diminished by the time of the nineteenth-and twentieth-century's colonial takeover and renewed missionary evangelisation.With a royal conversion in the late fifteenth-century, the Catholic identity solidified in the sixteenth century and was tightly linked to the kingdom's political structure, and a diocese was established in 1596.Formal relations emerged between Kongolese monarchs and the Pope, along with uneven dealings with the Portuguese.Internal conflicts, Portuguese aggression culminating in a catastrophic defeat for the Kongolese at Ambwila in 1665, and especially the Atlantic slave trade diminished Kongo, so that by the eighteenth century it had much declined, and by the early nineteenth century, the last Catholic missionaries, mostly Italian Capuchins, had left.The discontinuity between early modern vitality and later, rather isolated Kongolese Catholics whom missionaries encountered beginning in the later nineteenth century during Europe's missionary re-engagement with Africa, has contributed to disagreements over Kongo's historical importance visà-vis contemporary African Christianity.At stake are the depth and sincerity of Kongo's earlymodern Catholic Christian faith and the ways its culture shaped the religious identity that emerged beginning in the early sixteenth century.Uzukwu emphasises the way Kongolese Catholics called "slaves of the church" kept their faith alive amidst periodic violence at the hands of Europeans, and persisted as believers despite shocking missionary enslaving and slave-trading, the reluctance to train local clergy, as well as long absences of missionary clergy.He resists assertions that their Catholic identity was shallow, believing instead that historical evidence shows them to be an emerging church over several centurieswhat he dubs "church-becoming" (p. 1).Uzukwu thus disputes accusations of syncretism or limited appreciations of Catholicism as only a veneer over a pre-contact worldview.In such demeaning assessments he detects the narrow preconceptions of scholars unable to discern faith, who often repeat the dismissals of early anti-Catholic observers who detected fetishism in abiding Catholic practices.To the contrary, in the creation of a Kongolese language catechism (which required local cooperation and internalisation of faith), prominent Kongolese teachers of the faith called maestri (whose service was legendary and longstanding), and the use of traditional Kongolese 1
Source: Journal of Religious History
Author: Paul V. Kollman
Institution: University of Notre Dame
Language: English
Subfield: Religious studies
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4411348368