African Initiatives

The Dictionary of African Christian Biography(DACB; www.dacb.org) hosted a conference at Boston University in October 2015 to mark its twentieth anniversary. As the DACB website announces, “The mission of the DACB is to collect, preserve, and make freely accessible biographical accounts and church histories—from oral and written sources—integral to a scholarly understanding of African Christianity.” The conference gathered together scholars of African history, authors of biographies, and theologians from the United States, Europe, and Africa, who all contributed to a series of informative and provocative presentations and discussions.
Jonathan Bonk, editor of the DACB, provided some background in his welcoming remarks. The dictionary was conceived as a way to bring attention to the role of Africans in spreading Christianity in the most Christianized continent, where one in four Christians in the world are found. With a non-proprietary, open-access collection of brief biographies, the DACB hoped to contribute to a more accurate understanding of religion in Africa and to honor some of Africa’s church leaders and founders, theologians, and proselytizers. The site holds more than 2,000 entries, and over 1,500 visitors browse it each day.
The conference featured plenaries and papers on biographical methodology and on the intersection of biography and history. Participants raised questions and encouraged discussion about what makes a good biography, what makes a story worth telling, and how to understand human agency in the historical process. While some of the religious participants discussed biography as a narrative of faith, others were more concerned with determining the accuracy of a story, especially when using the sometimes-difficult sources and archives found in African communities.
While discussing the DACB’s own collection of many brief biographies, participants reflected on using such a source to develop a collective story about a particular place or event beyond one person’s life. Michele Sigg put forward her idea of “pointillism” as a way of seeing how many brief biographies could coalesce to tell a larger story. Lamin Sanneh, Paul Grant, and Roger Levine discussed the importance of “naming” as a route to retrieve lost stories and to understand how one person’s life might present a series of different identities. Though most Africans who were enslaved remain anonymous, there were individuals who rose to prominence and whose individual histories repudiate that anonymity. Tracing their changing names through archival documents is one important way to bring such stories to light. The use of oral testimony and the problems of fixing fluid narratives in a written form was another topic, discussed in Stan Chu Ilo’s paper on the strengths and weaknesses of oral sources.
There was a notable emphasis on women. Philomena Mwaura, a professor at Kenyatta University in Nairobi, provided an overview of gender and power, while others presented papers about individual women and their leadership work in a variety of churches, Protestant, Catholic, Pentecostal and other new forms of religious organization. Wendy Belcher, an associate professor of African literature at Princeton University, told the intriguing story of Krastos Samra, a fifteenth-century Ethiopian saint, while Bard Associate Professor of History Wendy Urban-Mead discussed the role of one woman who influenced the development of the Brethren in Christ Church in twentieth-century Zimbabwe. A dinner talk and slide show by Linda Heywood,  professor of African History at Boston University, looked at the complicated story of Njinga, a queen and sometime convert to Catholicism in seventeenth-century Kongo, now part of Angola.
     The conference concluded with a useful wrap-up of events, in which Andrew Barnes, an associate professor of history at Arizona State University, suggested that biography serves four human desires: memorializing individuals, shaping the historical record, illustrating historical experience, and revising erroneous accounts. At the same time, it contributes to an ever-expanding set of data by encouraging the idea of patterns of human behavior, and by providing a skeleton for historical narrative. It was clear that even when writing within the restricted topic of African Christianity, there is a multitude of human stories now being discovered and told to a wider audience.

Kathleen Sheldon is an independent historian and research affiliate at the University of California, Los Angeles Center for the Study of Women. She wrote dozens of brief biographies of African women for her Historical Dictionary of Women in Sub-Saharan Africa (2005; revised edition forthcoming in 2016) and was an area editor with responsibility for entries on women for the Dictionary of African Biography, edited by Emmanuel K. Akyeampong and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 6 vols. (Oxford University Press, 2011 and ongoing online).