Seminar: Writing World Christianity: Bengt Sundkler, Titus Mthembu and the Politics of Knowledge Production in Apartheid-era South Africa (København)

Bantu Prophets in South Africa (1948), written by Swedish Lutheran missionary scholar Bengt Sundkler, is widely acclaimed as a classic of African Studies, and as a foundational text for the study of Christianity in Africa.

This talk revisits the history of the writing and circulation of Bantu Prophets and its second edition (1961), revealing for the first time the significance of Sundkler’s main assistant, the Lutheran priest Titus Mthembu, to the making of this famous text.

Living amidst the strictures of a racist and repressive state, Mthembu’s proximity to this book became his means to argue for African autonomy from white rule and the integrity of a realm of Bantu ‘religiosity’.

The talk thus probes the production of religious knowledge in twentieth-century Africa, the fraught power dynamics between professional scholars and their ‘assistants’, and the reliance of the new scholarly field of ‘World Christianity’ on a realm of hitherto obscured indigenous intellectual labour.

Associate Joel Cabrita (Stanford University) will be presenting at this seminar.

Organizer: Centre of African Studies