A study of the traditional outlook of the native community in the Cameroons province of Nigeria, and its impact upon thought and practice of the Christian Church in that province

Abstract

The problem of the impact which the African Cultural Heritage has on the Christian Church in Africa is not a new one and names such as B. Gutmann, E. Smith and D. Westermann will always remain associated with its discussion. Today we live in a time where nationalism and the growing number of independent States and Churches in Africa makes the problem more urgent than it ever was before. There can scarcely be a single missionary who has not been preoccupied by misconceptions of faith and practice in the Church by African Christians. Unfortunately missionaries have too often attempted to explain them in terms of their own Western background and have not subjected them to a proper analysis. The failure to do this has time and again proved costly, and still to-day is one of the greatest obstacles to the real understanding of the Gospel in the African Churches.

The principal thesis of this dissertation is that in so far as the natives of the Cameroons lack the Christian understanding of history they are in continual danger of misconceiving the fundamentals of the Christian faith.

Recent anthropological writings have fully demonstrated that the behaviour of peoples with a tribal heritage cannot be explained in terms of the Western outlook. Such people have their own culture and their own outlook. To appreciate the character of the culture of the Cameroonian tribes it is necessary first of all to know something of their environment and circumstance. Accordingly we have opened this dissertation by presenting a minimum of relevant information about the economic and social context of the life of the peoples in question, together with a sketch of recent political and mission history.

Anthropologists have shown that one of the chief determinants of native community is the mode of social organisation, and, in particular, the system of reckoning kinship. We have found in the Cameroons that an understanding of the grouping of kinsmen into lineages, and the emphasis placed on the lineage as a unit, is absolutely vital to any understanding of traditional ritual and philosophy, and, moreover, equally vital to the understanding of the outlook of the apparently westernised African. In the light of this fact we have then examined a number of these misconceptions referred to and shown how they arise.

The first part of this dissertation contains a general survey of the area under study and an outline of the traditional structure of Hative Society and Religion and Ritual. The second part discusses the impact of this traditional background and of culture contact upon the thought and practice in the Presbyterian Church in the Cameroons. We have shown among other things, how the identification of sign and object is carried over into the understanding of the Lord's Supper. We have also shown how the central importance attached in traditional society to lineage organisation, and the association between the lineage and the ancestral spirits, is carried over into the sphere of the Church and therefore leads many to understand the Church as a new social entity, conceived analogous to their tribe. Furthermore we have demonstrated how the understanding of self and of community is bound up with the understanding of history. In discussing Baptism, Ethics and Church Discipline we have indicated how the impact of the traditional outlook is bound to lead to misconceptions if it is not replaced by the biblical understanding of history and of self which is the basis of the Kew Testament Kerygma.

There are two points for which the author must apologise: The first one is that in reporting on such a vast area covering so many tribes the danger of generalisation could not be avoided. But for the purpose of our subject, in which we are concerned with dominant attitudes and not with peculiarities of one particular tribe or clan, the area covered can, as far as we can judge, be taken as one cultural entity. She second point concerns the language. We have used Duala as an ethnographic language and have by doing this done something an anthropologist would not be allowed to do. Duala is the language used in the Presbyterian Church of this District and even if it is only understood by a minority of the total population, we still thought it suitable for our purpose to use it. We also know that the proverbs quoted are widely understood in our area.