African Christian Biography Serialized: stories my grannies never told me: memory and orality in the narrative of African Christian history

In this paper I have argued for the importance of both memory and narration in writing African Christian history by means of documenting the biographies of African Christian ancestors. I have proposed that in following the stories of these ancestors, DACB documentarists should pay attention to the larger communal context and pre-text of their lives. I also argued that these life texts or biographies are open books emerging from their communities even as they still belong to them. In the religions and morality of most African ethnic groups, ancestral veneration and ancestral reading of history is at the heart of the plausibilitystructure. The importance of this ancestral tradition has been preeminent in Christological reflections in Africa. The image of the ancestor in African Christian inculturation is widely interpreted as revealing the continuing presence of Christ in history and links the past to the present and the future in a concrete way. The biographies found in the DACB highlight the ancestral tradition as a hermeneutical key for understanding the movement of the Spirit in African Christian history.