The globalization of localized African religions : the case of Kwame Bediako

Some 15 years ago, a publication edited by Robert Bates, V. Y. Mudimbe and Jean O’Barr appeared under the title ‘Africa and the Disciplines’. The volume suggests a critical issue that I want to address in this article, which, in my view, the editors have failed to exploit because they deliberately have retained a fully Westernized perspective. My argument is this: Western academic disciplines have ‘globalized’ quite localized African cultures not solely by applying the methods used in the social sciences and humanities to the study of Africa, but by literally extracting African scholars out of Africa into Western institutions. If such scholars return to Africa, they re-interpret African cultures in terms of their ‘globalized’ experiences. A scholar’s academic credibility thus does not stand or fall simply, as the editors claim, by his or her capacity to generate, analyse and assess arguments regardless of the geographic origin of the scholar. This would hold true only if Western academic disciplines are regarded as somehow privileged and unaffected by context. If African cultures are primarily localized, kinship-based systems, the globalizing effects on such cultures by Africans trained in Western institutions must be significant. The validity of scholarly arguments may not be determined by their origins, geographic or cultural, as Bates, Mudimbe and O’Barr contend, but their appropriation into geographic and cultural contexts by African scholars transforms radically the self-understanding of the ‘objects’ of study to which the arguments refer. This process can be seen particularly by African scholars of religion, who, under the influence of Western theological and religious studies methods, have applied globalized religious interpretations to localized African religions. Nowhere can this be seen better than in the writings of Kwame Bediako, who studied in Aberdeen University in the early 1980s under the noted church historian Andrew Walls, and who returned to Ghana to establish a Centre aimed at reaching deeply into the local Ghanaian culture by training the theologians and church leaders through a globalized understanding of African indigenous religions. After briefly seeking to establish that African Indigenous Religions indeed are localized, in the remainder of this essay, I intend to illustrate the globalizing process through the writings of Bediako.