Africa needs a culture of higher learning

BY FATHER STUART BATE OMI

In his apostolic exhortation after the second African Synod, Pope Benedict XVI linked development in Africa with a culture of higher learning.

“Given the great ferment of peoples, cultures and religions which marks our age, Catholic universities and academic institutions play an essential role in the patient, rigorous and humble search for the light which comes from Truth,” he wrote in Africae Munus.

“Dear brothers and sisters in Catholic universities and academic institutions, it falls to you… to help African societies better to understand the challenges confronting them today by providing Africa, through your research and analyses, with the light she needs.”

Catholic universities and higher institutes in Africa must do research.

The concern of the Synod Fathers in both the first African Synod (1994) and the second (2009) was the need to create indigenous African theological knowledge systems. This is because one of the ongoing manifestations of neo-colonialism is the fact that knowledge continues to be exported into the country from the intellectual and commercial centres of Europe and North America in all fields, including theology. So African Christians are reduced to being consumers of knowledge but not producers.

As Pope John Paul II put it in Ecclesia in Africa in 1995: “The Catholic universities and higher institutes in Africa…serve the Church by providing trained personnel, by studying important theological and social questions for the benefit of the Church, by developing an African theology, by promoting the work of inculturation, by publishing books and publicising Catholic truth, by undertaking assignments given by the bishops and by contributing to the scientific study of cultures.”

In 2012 St Joseph’s Theological Institute in Cedara, KwaZulu-Natal, decided to respond to this challenge by setting up a collaborative research group amongst its academic staff to study important questions affecting our context.

During that year we examined questions around HIV and Aids in Southern Africa and in collaboration with the Aids Office of the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference, we held a very successful conference at Cedara in January 2013.

Papers from this conference were recently published as a book, Catholic Responses to AIDS in Southern Africa, which is available from Catholic bookshops and from the SACBC Aids Office.

Last year we chose a second theme: “The Response of the Church to Globalisation in Africa”. And during 2013 we worked on this theme to produce a number of papers. We also invited three speakers from different backgrounds to present keynote addresses.

All of this was presented in our second academic conference at the end of April. Conference papers will be published in the November issue of Grace and Truth. SJTI is looking for local sponsors to help fund this new initiative as we intend to continue with a new theme this year. Please contact me at "> or on 082 712 1047.

Fr Stuart Bate OMI is research and development officer at St Joseph’s Theological Institute.