Tribute: “To Make the Church in Africa Really African”: A Perspective of a Church Historian on the Endless Quest of Laurenti Magesa, 1946-2020

Why publish a new book in honor of Laurenti Magesa if one was just written six years ago? In 2014, Acton published a collection of essays in honor of Magesa. A mere six years later, I was asked to collaborate on a similar project. The reason, I initially thought, was Catholics catching up on re-appropriating one of their most prominent African theologians. Yet, as I went through this excellent book, edited by J. N. Kanyua Mugambi and Evaristi Magoti Cornelli, I quickly realized that, with the exception of the first chapter, which is auto-biographical and from which the book’s title is borrowed, no contribution effectively and comprehensively situates Magesa and his theological quest in the long history of African Christianity, from his birth in 1946 to 2014 (when the book was published). If Magesa himself coined his theological journey and vocation as the “Endless Quest” of a theologian, the driving question behind this quest was how “to make the church in Africa really African.” And Magesa’s most succinct response to that question was fostering “genuine inculturation,” that is, “a pilgrimage of return home, back to familiar waters of God’s primordial presence in African culture.”