Democratic sacrifice

Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa was a seminal book in the theological development of Emmanuel Katongole. As he recounts it in his recent The Sacrifice of Africa: A Political Theology for Africa (Eedmans Ekklesia) , Hochschild revealed the fact that colonialism in Africa was based on the principle of the “dispensability of African lives.” And that was a key to understanding post-colonial Africa as well: “A Mobutu or a Mugabe will never voluntarily step down from office in the national interest. Instead, he will sacrifice, waste, starve, and kill ‘his people’ for his own political ambition.”

This perspective “allowed me to see the Rwandan genocide as a metaphor of African politics – an extreme example of the politics built on the assumed disposability of African lives as part of official state policy. While previously the state depended on a few of its functionaries . . . , Rwanda reveals a radical democratization of this expectation, with the state attempting to recruit everyone (the Hutu masses) into the service of its violence” and revealed the “readiness with which the West has come to expect and allow the wastage of African lives to go on.” He viewed this as a theological claim “regarding African lives,” the claim “that these are not unique, precious, sacred lives; these are Africans, mere bodies to be used, mere masses to be exploited.”