Like Narcissus who died through being consumed by self-obsession, postcolonial critique is dazzled by the perverse logic of colonial value despite wanting to separate from it.
Joseph Tonda centres his study on African societies and their diasporic communities to describe a global tortured, torturing human state from which there appears to be no escape. His metanarrative establishes that we are all entangled as victims.
Colonial languages need to be brought into conversation with indigenous languages in anticolonial or decolonial praxis. It is in the process of translation that colonized subjects begin to find themselves.
For African Political Theology to be Christian, African, and praxis-oriented, its concern must be Africans; Africans in a universal and “Afropolitan” sense, that is, all of those Africans gifted with God’s image, and as such, God’s children.
Translating Senghor’s political writings shows the continued relevance of Negritude in the conceptualization of political community in the wake of the encounter between Africa and Euro-America. However, framing the translation, like engaging any of Senghor’s work, ought to pay close attention to his African critics.
“We should think of queer humanitarianism as a theological project. It suffers from a messianic complex.”
Achille Mbembe’s work excavates the legacies of colonial reason and violence shaping the powers of death in the world today.
The account of the baptism of the Eunuch can be read in several ways. Fruitful readings have focused on the gender and the nationality of the person. The political implications have often been overlooked, even though this is an early and potentially fruitful tale for the political theologian.
