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’.

I have started reading Emmanuel Katongole’s A Future for Africa: Critical Essays in Christian Social Imagination as preparation for the Amahoro conference in Johannesburg in a couple of weeks. Katongole is a Catholic priest from Uganda who is now associate professor of theology at Duke Divinity School and co-director of its Center of Reconciliation.

His broad argument, as stated in the introduction, is that what Africa needs to overcome its various intractable social problems – ‘poverty, violence, instability, tribalism, and so forth’ – is not more good advice, not ‘abstract principles and recommendations’, but a new imagination. Christian ethics for Africa has been so preoccupied – understandably – with the ‘search for realistic and pragmatic considerations and solutions’ that it has failed to grasp the fact that the problems are ‘wired within the imaginative landscape of Africa’.