Walker-Said- Faith Power and Family-Chapter 1.pdf

Journal of African Historical Studies, 2015

European law dramatically affected the terms of wealth exchange in marriage throughout colonial Africa. In the French mandate of Cameroon, laws governing bridewealth significantly altered the asset value of a wife and her children and with it the path towards prosperity for young unmarried men, as well as fathers, elders, and communities. In the years between the start of World War I and the end of World War II, the currency fluctuations, profit valuations, and market prices that increasingly entered into marriage arrangements in the rapidly expanding economy of Cameroon shocked Christian missionary societies, disquieted the French administration, and provoked unmarried African men whose pursuit of a wife and family became not only more onerous, but also steeped in risk. In response, the French administration set strict legal limits on the use of currency in bridewealth exchange, enforced through taxation and the etat civil. However, French law could not inhibit economic forces from rendering African communities increasingly competitive, particularly in the marital domain. In response, new African leaders—including priests, pastors, catechists, nuns, and organizers of pious brotherhoods—emerged to reform and renovate marriage culture. This paper discusses the confluence of an expanding colonial capitalist economy and burgeoning Christian devotion, which transformed ideologies regarding marriage and family building—the principal path to wealth, as well as spiritual grace—in modern Africa. It will analyze how marriage became a site of contestation between economic trends and religious movements and how Christian marriage reform movements derived from a crisis of economic inequality.

Gender & History, 2017

In the French-governed territory Cameroon, religious dynamics frequently encountered the intimate sites of implementation between spousal bonds. In the years during and after World War II, African Catholic and Protestant women developed educational agendas and charitable associations that pursued specific intentions for African marriage and family life. While African family configurations had long been targets of evangelical reform since the early colonial period, African Christian women appropriated and repurposed spiritual mantras and doctrinal demands to reform longstanding non-Christian approaches to marriage such as polygamy, bridewealth, and arranged marriages and simultaneously crafted traditionalist codes that encouraged women’s submission and devotion to their spouses, homes, and families. African Christian leaders’ strands of knowledge and spiritual wisdom romanticized monogamy and companionate marriage and these ideals were powerfully and meaningfully received by women across the territory who entered women-run schools, charitable organizations, and youth centers. However, they could also prove difficult to realize completely. Marital failures or religious inconstancy appeared as evidence of an incompletely civilized African society. African Christian women teachers and leaders experienced religious conflict and moral shortcomings as rich opportunities to lead spiritual renewal and seek a rational, moral, and just future for African marriage of their own making.

International Journal of African Historical Studies, 2019

PONTICAL GREGORIAN UNIVERSITY, 2020

The characteristically boisterous and overwhelming presence and activities of Pentecostal movements in Cameroon now are no news. This compels us to ponder on a series of issues: their origin, their doctrines (which seem so appealing to Cameroonians) and why this new way of viewing Christianity is massively sweeping people off their feet and almost driving some crazy. In Chapter one, we explore some of the repercussions of these movements on the mainline Churches in Cameroon. Chapter two's focus is to grapple with the socio – political and religious impact of these movements on Cameroonians. Our case study here is the city of Douala where we set out to to examine to what extent these movements have been beneficial to the faith life of the people on the one hand, and how this has been harmful, on the other hand.

When it comes to stories (even fabrications) that reveal Africa as a dark continent, a continent of emptiness and of primitivism, one is likely to find milliards of documents proliferated by Europeans to continuously justify their overrule over the continent and its people. But when it comes to literature especially written by Europeans who have experienced Africa objectively that confesses the potential of its people and their knowledge base and how this knowledge base can inform European social existence, such hardly exists. In this paper my aim is to reveal some studies carried out by European missionaries in Cameroon which went out of the way to recommend that amidst the social crisis that plagued Europe, and the human values of traditional society in Africa, there was need for a paradigm shift from preaching the Christian gospel to Africans to preaching African social wisdom to the Europeans. I content that this position was contrary to Coloniality of power, being and knowledge which have guided Euro-African relations from the time of their early contact. That is why it has been consciously suppressed by the colonial archive.

Women and Missions: Past and Present. …

The chapter looks at the experience of the Mill Hill Missionaries (Society of St Joseph) among the Bangwa and Mbo peoples of Cameroon, West Africa, from 1930s-1960s. Like other missionaries of the period, the Mill Hill Fathers faced the dilemma of how to form Christian families based on a Western model of monogamy in a society which practices polygyny.

2020

This article sets out to present Joshua Dibundu and Lotin Same, two clergymen and contemporaries of John Chilembwe of Nyasaland and Simon Kibangu of the Congo, who stood out against European missionary pressure and colonial administrative oppression in an effort to establish and sustain the first African Independent Church (AIC) in Cameroon: the Native Baptist Church (NBC). I argue in this article that unlike the Cameroon kings and chiefs who resisted European occupation of the territory, and nationalists who fought for independence, the leaders of the Native Baptist Church represent another type of early nationalist and change-oriented agents who deserve their place in the historiography of the country. I have privileged the use of archival documents, structured interviews and some critical empirical literature to establish this account.

Journal of World Christianity, 2021

1994