By Ogova Ondego
Published October 13, 2019
Though John Samuel Mbiti (November 30, 1931 – October 6, 2019) was best known and revered for his African Religions and Philosophy book that has had a great impact in shaping the opinion on African ways or cultures around the world, the almost self-effacing Mbiti, who died in Geneva city in Switzerland on October 6, 2019 was more than just a theologian, philosopher, Anglican Church vicar, storyteller,preacher,anthropologist, folklorist, linguist, poet, historian, writer, teacher, scholar or Africanist. The open-minded man, who wore many hats, defied pigeonholing.
I, who never got to meet the late Mbiti in person but have made his African Religions and Philosophy my reference on African way of thinking and doing things since I first read it in Primary 3 (Class 3, Standard 3 or Grade 3!), then in secondary school, high school, university and continue to use it in my work in the field of culture, the arts, journalism and communication, do write this tribute to the man.
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I was always fascinated by the fact that the writer of African Religions and Philosophy who was born in a remote Mulango village in Ukambani district of Kitui on the eastern side of the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, not only went to school at a time when extremely few Africans attended school, any school, but that it was to the then exclusive African Alliance High School in Kikuyu on the outskirts of Nairobi, but also Makerere University College in Kampala (the only university in East Africa!) and the world-renowned University of Cambridge in Britain (the centre of academic excellence in the world?) and earned a doctorate in 1963 as Kenya was just beginning to take its first baby steps towards political independence from (Great!) Britain.
That he started teaching religion and theology at Makerere a year later and it was while here that he turned his lecture notes into what would become the African Religions and Philosophy book in 1969, thus having another feather added to his cap of firsts.
After a decade at Makerere he moved to Switzerland to become director of Ecumenical Institute of the then World Council of Christian Churches from 1974 to 1980.
Some of the works for which Mbiti shall be remembered include African Religions and Philosophy; Concepts of God in Africa; Introduction to African Religion; Love and Marriage in Africa; The Prayers of African Religion; Bible and Theology in African Christianity; New Testament Eschatology in an African Background; Poems of Nature and Faith; and Akamba Stories.
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And since I only ‘know’ Mbiti from my interaction with his writing, I shall pay my tribute to him through those who knew him.
David Maillu, Kenya’s most prolific writer, says, “I can’t claim that I have been very close to Prof John Mbiti. But he is a person I have interacted with at different levels over the years. Primarily because we had common interests in African cultural values epitomized by African Religion. In a way, we have been friends. It’s strange that both of us are writers, philosophers and theologians, from the same ethnic community and married from the same foreign ethnic community. There are people who have claimed that we have some physical resemblance.”
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Maillu says he first met Mbiti at a conference in Limuru near Nairobi in 1972.
“I invited him for dinner. We had a wonderful evening. I also wanted him to have a look at my Kikamba poetry, which I published thereafter in a book titled Ki kyambonie. We interacted later more when I headed a group of scientists in the compilation of the African Bible titled Ka:Holy Book of Neter, in which I gave him the acknowledgement of being number one of the authors whose works we used in writing the Holy Text. As soon as the book was published, I wrote to him saying, ‘You said in your books that traditionally Africans are notoriously religious and African religion is as old as anyone could think of. However, the only missing thing in that religion has been a Holy Text equivalent to the Bible or Koran. We have now finally written and published that book. What is your take on that?’ .”
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Maillu says Mbiti’s answer was, “‘How would you classify the people who wrote the book? The new Moses? Do we need a new religion?’.”
“I used absolutely nothing else but quotations from his books to answer him. He never replied the letter. However, when I met him at the beginning of the year, he said, ‘I know you wrote me a letter nearly four years ago which I never replied’. By then I had already given him a copy of the Holy Text, which he had received with excitement. I thought I should let the letter issue rest, but when I told him, ‘By the way, in your book, African Religions and Philosophy, you refer to African religion as religions.’ He was quick to defend himself, ‘Please, I stopped saying that in 1975 after realizing that it is only one religion.'”
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Describing Mbiti as a ‘soft-spoken and shy person who, if he passed somewhere where he was known, he would be dismissed as an ordinary villager’, the largely self-educated Dr Maillu says Mbiti preferred keeping a low profile at conferences: “he always chose hiding in the back seats. He had been, perhaps, my most influential academician. ”
Maillu, who has turned his rural home in Makueni into a centre of culture and the arts, says he had planned to invite Mbiti over to unveil a monument in his honour before death snatched him away.
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“Mbiti is appreciated much more by outsiders than by his own Akamba people. Not to mention that, at large, Kenyans are not openly proud of their heroes. Akamba people should have created many forums in which they used Mbiti in order to get the best out of him. He was a man of great mental health, which was under-utilized,” Maillu concludes.
Augustine Bukenya of Makerere University who worked with Mbiti writes in Daily Nation of Nairobi that he admired three things in the late Mbiti: ‘his deep but relaxed, ecumenical faith, his multidisciplinary interests and his thorough, meticulous and applied scholarship.’
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“Mbiti was not content with merely holding on to his faith. He showed his commitment by offering himself to its ministry, to actively promote, teach and preach the Christian faith. For Mbiti, church service was a vocation, a genuine calling to serve, not a job opportunity, as it is increasingly becoming these days. After all, with all his academic qualifications, he was highly employable and he did not need a church post,” Bukenya writes.
“We’ve lost a great Kenyan. A great man who went against all odds to become a successful scholar, writer and priest. He was a role model and an ambassador of the Kenyan brand abroad,” Uhuru Kenyatta, Kenya’s fourth President, says of the late Mbiti who is largely unknown among ordinary Kenyans.
Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, said, “Thanks be to God for the life, scholarship and witness of a key father of African theology, Canon Prof John S Mbiti, who has died peacefully in Switzerland. It was a joy to see him at Lambeth Palace in February 2017.”
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Following the announcement of the death of Mbiti, Willy Mutunga, former Chief Justice of Kenya, tweeted, “He was my brother, mentor, friend, and my role model since I was in primary school in 1950s when his novel in Kiikamba, Mutunga Na Ngewa Yake, was one of our set books.”
Kivutha Kibwana, Governor of Makueni County in Ukambani, said, “Prof John Mbiti was a rare human being. May he be in eternity with God’s saints and Angels.”
As Mbiti bowed and walked off the stage to take his last breathe after 87 years, not just Africa, but the world, stood. Silent. Still. Out of reverence and realisation that it had lost not just a library, but a fountain from which knowledge springs.
