African Church Leaders

African Church Leaders, homosexuality and racism

On Nov. 25, 2005 the U. K. Church Times published a letter from a certain Bob Cranmore of Lancing in the U.K. in which he drew parallels between the behaviour of the Anglican church leaders in Africa and African political leaders. It seemed to me that Mr. Cranmore’s assumptions were implicitly racist, and I wrote to the Church Times as follows:

Sir
Bob Cranmore (letters Church Times 25/11/2005) links the behaviour of “Anglican leaders in Africa” with the behaviour of African politicians, who “have had notoriously little self-discipline over their quest for and retention of personal power and wealth, and have been prepared to destroy institutions and infrastructure laboriously built up — and to hell with the people they should be looking after.”
This kind of stereotyping of African leaders is, to say the least, intemperate and ill-informed. As it happens, on the same day (25/11/2005) the Johannesburg Star published an article by a Distinguished Research Fellow of the (South African) Human Sciences Research Council which pointed out, inter alia, that while only 8 African Presidents retired voluntarily and one stood down after loosing an election between 1960 and 1989, the corresponding figures were 17 and 15 between 1990 and 2004. This is a rather different picture than that painted by Bob Cranmore.
I am not in the least sympathetic to either the views or the actions of the Archbishop of Nigeria, but it should be noted that Nigeria is one country in a large continent, and our own Archbishop of Cape Town, for example, is a very different kind of person and holds quite different views. He is not alone in this.
At a time when many of us are desperately anxious that nothing should hinder the Archbishop of Canterbury’s efforts to hold the Communion together, it is rather surprising to find the Church Times offering room to a letter which has something of a hint of racism in the opinions expressed. Such views can only serve to inflame an already difficult situation.

Of course, I am obliged to the Church Times for publishing my letter, which obviously they had no obligation to do, but I was surprised to find that the sections in bold italics in the version of the letter above were omitted by the Editor.
The effect of this is to remove from my letter the suggestion that Mr. Cranmore’s letter reflects a racial stereotyping of African leaders. Most of us, would feel that a suggestion, for example, that European church leaders cannot be trusted because their political leaders commit crimes such as the torture, imprisonment and slaughter of Jews to be a biased and terribly over-simplified account of things.
Am I wrong in thinking that the Church Times itself betrays an inadequate grasp of the issue of racism when it is prepared to publish a letter like Mr. Cranmore’s without comment, and then to delete from my reply the points I made about the racist assumptions underlying his letter?
Please email your views to me at theos@theos.co.za so that I can publish them on this site.
A reflection on the central importance of maintaining the unity of the visible church across all cultural and racial boundaries will be found at http://www.theologon.org.uk/ on the page, “a God who re-creates human community”.