Collected Essays Of Ogbu Uke Kalu

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Book Reviews / Pneuma 34 (2012) 95-159

Wilhelmina J. Kalu, Nimi Wariboko, and Toyin Falola, eds., The Collected Essays of Ogbu Uke Kalu, 3 vols. (Trenton, NJ, and Asmara, Eritrea: Africa World Press, 2010). lxvi + 439 pp., lxxxi + 611 pp., and lxiii + 428 pp.

Ogbu Kalu (1942-2009) was, at the time of his unexpected death in January of 2009, one of the most prominent African scholars working in the fields of the history of African Christi- anity, missiology, and Pentecostal Theology. This three volume collection gathers in one place articles, essays, and other previously unpublished pieces that will serve as a springboard into Kalu’s corpus and the topics he prolifically addressed. Each volume is thematically organized — vol. 1: African Pentecostalism: Global Discourses, Migrations, Exchanges and Connections; vol. 2: Religions in Africa: Conflicts, Politics, & Social Ethics; and vol. 3: Christian Missions in Africa: Success, Ferment, and Trauma — although scholars of Pentecostalism will find much of interest in all three volumes. For the SPS readership of this journal, I focus primarily on the pentecostal material.

The first volume includes sixteen chapters on Pentecostalism as an emerging global phe- nomenon and discourse, which touches on, among other topics, pentecostal music, mission, and development, as well as engages with contested interpretations of Pentecostalism. The middle section, titled “Eating the Crocodile: African Immigrant Pentecostalism,” consists of five chapters of a book that Kalu was working on when he passed away; the untimely loss of his life is felt even here as only one of the chapters directly addresses Pentecostalism, although undoubtedly this would have been greatly filled in if Kalu had lived to complete this project. As with all of his work, one of the dominant threads in this volume is on African pentecostal agency, both as opposed to but also as complementing, western missionary and other related enterprises.

There is also a good deal of discussion of Pentecostalism in the other two volumes. Besides four chapters (of the 21) that focus specifically on Pentecostalism — it’s cosmology, media, missionary engagement with popular culture, and relationship to other renewal movements on the continent — the second volume is replete with discussions of the charismatic move- ment in the African Christian landscape. In particular, the gradual “charismatization” of African Christianity in the last generation is situated by Kalu in the context of the much longer history of African independent and indigenous Christianity. The final volume, con- sisting of sixteen chapters, then also provides another four chapters that interface specifi- cally with pentecostal or charismatic topics — e.g., a comparative study of Pentecostalism and Islam in Nigeria, pentecostal healing, and American linkages to Africa — but again, the latter motif, especially, permeates the volume. In effect, almost all of these two volumes provide windows into the history of charismatic Christianity in the African continent.

In terms of organization, two chapters in the second volume on theological education could easily have been moved to the section devoted to this topic in the final volume to bal- ance out what is otherwise a much more bulky volume II. Otherwise, each volume includes as part of the frontmatter an identical preface and a three-page biography by Wilhelmina Kalu (the surviving spouse, herself a PhD in educational psychology), tributes to Kalu (vol. 1’s from a number of distinguished colleagues; vol. 2’s from Kalu’s children and other especially African colleagues; and vol. 3 from many of his colleagues from or related to McCormick Theological Seminary, where Kalu taught for the last nine years of his life as the first Henry

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Winters Luce Professor of World Christianity and Mission — all of which combine to pres- ent a rich portrait of Kalu the person and scholar), a different set of black and white photos of Kalu, family, friends, and colleagues, and an editors’ introduction. Back matter includes a thirty-page curriculum vitae that itemizes Kalu’s legacy of eighteen authored or edited books and over 200 articles and book reviews, and extensive indexes (forty, fifty, and thirty pages, respectively, for each volume) to facilitate cross-referencing of the subjects covered in these almost 1700 pages.

Particularly when writing as an Africanist, some of Kalu’s previously published articles and essays are less accessible than others for North American scholars. Thus the clear ben- efit of collecting these papers in this way is to make them available to a wider audience. A added value, however, would have been proper acknowledgment of the publication data of the chapters that have been reproduced in these pages from other sources — this should have been a standard procedural requirement for a publisher such as Africa World Press — as well as identification of the venues of original presentations of the unpublished materials that is appearing here for the first time. Without such credits, readers either have to patiently try to identify original credits from the CV (which may not also be possible as it appears some of the titles of the chapters have been revised from their initial publication versions) or they otherwise lose any sense of the original context within which these ideas were presented.

Even with this inconvenience, scholars of Pentecostalism will be grateful to the editors for this collection of Kalu essays and other works. These volumes provide springboards not only into the topic of African Pentecostalism, although they certainly do that, but also to the phenomenon of Pentecostalism as a global renewal movement. Kalu’s expertise in tracing developments in African pentecostal and charismatic Christianity in response to the Chris- tian missionary movement on the one hand, and then his deft handling of the myriad of issues related to the African diaspora and “reverse flow” mission movements from African Christianity back to the Euro-American West on the other hand, provide a dynamic frame- work for understanding African Pentecostalism in both its more local and more global guises. Along the way, what is repeatedly registered by Kalu is African pentecostal contribu- tions in the forging of a viable economic, political, social, and religious future as its members make transitions in the globalizing world of the twenty-first century.

Reviewed by Amos Yong

J. Rodman Williams Professor of Theology Regent University, Virginia Beach, Virginia ayong@regent.edu

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