In the second essay in A Future for Africa Emmanuel Katongole searches for a theological perspective on the AIDS crisis in Africa that moves beyond the usual polarization of the debate between ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ positions. The problem is that both camps ‘share the same narrow view of ethics as primarily a prescriptive discipline’ and fail to consider the ‘narrative’ context that constrains the options available. Ethics must be narrative, he believes, ‘not just in the plain sense of telling stories, but in the critical sense of offering interpretive frameworks and descriptions that help us to understand and critically assess the sort of people we are becoming as we live with and try to negotiate the challenges we face’ (30). But the AIDS pandemic also highlights the acute need beyond description to ‘provide alternative symbols, images, and practices to those currently available’.

He argues that one of the most ‘distracting effects of the AIDS blanket over Africa’ is that it has turned suspicion into a way of life, both with regard to relations between Africa and the West and at the personal level: ‘the radical suspicion generated by AIDS gnaws at the very core of our self-understanding, and thus threatens the basic trust on which our individual and societal existence is based’ (31). He illustrates this rather effectively by describing how official anti-AIDS posters in Uganda shifted from ‘Love Faithfully. Avoid AIDS’ to the more pragmatic ‘Love Carefully’ and finally to the love-free slogan ‘Use a Condom to Avoid AIDS’ (40). The no-doubt unintended subtext is that you can’t trust your partner. Katongole argues that the changes

reflect an ongoing (de)evaluation of the depth of the trust and commitment necessary to sustain sexual relations. Viewed in this manner, the “protector” condom is both an expression and a way of managing the radical suspicion that has already inserted itself at the core of this most intimate of human relationships. (41)

Katongole – a Catholic priest, remember – believes that safety in sexual relations has been bought at the high cost of an increasing despair and cynicism and the reduction of intimate relationships to the status of another disposable commodity. There is a dark postmodern spirit at work here: ‘condomization seems to reflect a form of nihilistic playfulness’ (43).

We could without too much difficulty develop a similar analysis of Western sexuality as a decline into cynicism and ‘nihilistic playfulness’ – without, of course, the excuse of an AIDS pandemic. There would be some risk of overstatement, but it seems to me that entrenched suspicion and the loss of trust are evident in many types of relationship and at many levels of social interaction, not least in marriages or in marriage-like partnerships.

Katongole believes that the AIDS problem is forcing the church to revise the way in which it understands itself and its mission. ‘The church needs to change from being a moral and spiritual umpire, to engendering a practice of cultural empowerment’ (44). The rhetoric has a postcolonial ring to it (I am suspicious of the word ‘empowerment’) that I think is misleading. Katongole explains the ‘practice’ in terms of the provision of a ‘new culture through which Christians see themselves and relate to the world’.

This, I would argue, is the essence of a new creation based missiology: the corporate expression of the world in microcosm within a retold narrative and a transformed culture for the sake of others. Within this expansive framework, within a renewed worldview, the church can begin to generate the new symbols, images and practices that will constitute a genuine alternative to the ‘cycle of cynicism, despair, and playful nihilism’.

See also:

Emmanuel Katongole and A Future for Africa
Katongole: Communities of memory