Providence and History in Christopher Tounsel's Chosen Peoples

CHOSEN PEOPLES: CHRISTIANITY AND POLITICAL IMAGINATION IN SOUTH SUDANBy Christopher Tounsel. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021. Pp. xiv + 205. Paper, $25.95. I am very pleased to have been invited to contribute to the ongoing discussion of this important book. I first saw it before it had a cover, on the website of Duke University Press. It was around 2019 or early 2020 when I was doing research for a similar project in another African country, my home country of Cameroon. I was working on a paper dealing with how theology is brought to the service of the separatist war in the country (Ngong 2022). I thought this was a new phenomenon because I was unaware of any other African country where Black people were drawing from liberation theology to fight for self-determination from other Black people. As far as I could tell, theology was brought to the service of anticolonial struggles in Southern and West Africa, and this was directed at colonizers who were white not Black. In Cameroon, however, the situation appeared different—Black people, dissatisfied with their coexistence with other Black people, were drawing from liberation theological discourse to fight for independence. This is the story of what is called the Cameroon Anglophone conflict. I found the use of theology in this context to be intriguing and wanted to find out if there is a precedence for this on the continent. That was how I found Chosen Peoples on the website of Duke University Press, still without a cover. I read the content summary and saw that a similar move had already been made in South Sudan. I read about how South Sudanese drew from Christian theology to buttress their struggle for independence. I could not wait for the book to be published. Since the book was released, I have read it several times already, looking at how the situation of South Sudan compares to the case of Anglophone Cameroon. What has intrigued me most about the book, however, is not the similarities and differences I have found between the two contexts but rather some of the remarkable insights and questions the book generates. I am going to focus on just two of the insights I find most remarkable and then raise one question which I think is central to the narrative of the book. The first of the insights concerns the place of translation in creating or solidifying ethnic identity. The second deals with the possibility of religion, in this case Christianity, to create a people. The question is about the relationship between providence and history in the context of empire. I should clarify that I come to this book not as a historian but as a theologian. I am aware that Chosen Peoples is not a theological text, for Tounsel clearly notes that he is interested in how the people of South Sudan “used their faith as a political technology,” (2021, 14—italics in original), that is, as a means of creating an identity that would enable them to wrest their self-determination from their erstwhile oppressor—Sudan. He is interested in what belief in spirits does, not whether the spirits are real. However, the question of the relationship between providence and history that I raise may also be of interest to historians, as the historian may ponder what a people engaged in the struggle for self-determination believed to be the relationship between providence and their history, especially between colonialism as a providential dynamic through which an African people is created. So, first, the insights. One of the profound insights in Chosen Peoples is the complicated role of translation in the missionary enterprise. Through the influence of Lamin Sanneh, who is cited in the text (Tounsel 2021, 33,34), the critical role of translation has come to be acknowledged in the spread of Christianity around the world. In his Translating the Message (2009) and many other works, Sanneh argues that the gospel took hold in many contexts around the world when it was translated into the indigenous languages and cultures of the people. Sanneh's understanding of translation is not limited to the translation of the biblical texts but includes the translation of the message of the Christian faith itself. He provides copious examples of this around the world, from South Africa to the Philippines. In these different contexts, Sanneh shows that the appropriation of indigenous languages in translating the Christian message contributed to the preservation, regeneration, and popularization of cultures. In the hands of Sanneh, therefore, translation is a positive development that has led to the propagation of the gospel. While the importance of translation in transmitting the gospel has been recognized, it has also been accused of misrepresenting indigenous notions, such as notions of the divine and the ancestors (Setiloane 1979, 60; Ntloedibe-Kuswani 2001, 78–97). However, what Sanneh and even his critics do not appear to have considered is how translation also created a strong ethnic identity that renders the process of creating a nation-state beyond the ethnic group quite contentious. Beginning the story with the British missionary creation of the Nugent School, Chosen Peoples shows how the ethnoreligious education South Sudanese men received at this school suggests that translation is a double-edged sword. Here, translation is not the uncomplicated good it has often been made to seem. The Nuer and the Dinka could hear the gospel in their own languages, but that very fact raised the barrier between them, a barrier that would seem to make the creation of a people between these two groups a daunting task. At this point, however, one may want to raise the question of whether it is the fact of ethnicity that is the problem or the way politicians use ethnicity for their own ends. Does answering this question one way or the other address the problem of ethnicity in nation-building? Would the situation have been different if the differences between the two groups had not been exacerbated through the translation of the gospel? The fact remains, however, that translation heightens the sense of ethnic identity, thus complicating the process of creating a people out of what appears to be different peoples. The second insight is connected to the first, and it deals with the possibility of appropriating religion to create a people. Can religion create one people out of people who see themselves as belonging to different ethnic groups and even races? As Chosen Peoples argues, the government of postcolonial Sudan before the separation thought so. That was why it wanted to make Sudan an Islamic country, touching off the processes that eventually led to the separation between South Sudan and Sudan. With South Sudan, however, the matter is different: it is about whether people who see themselves as belonging to different ethnic groups may see themselves as a people held together by their Christian faith. The liberation theology appropriated during the struggle for independence saw the people as a single people who could understand themselves from a Christian perspective. It portrayed the people, in the language of the Book of Exodus, as a people in literal bondage in Sudan, being led out of enslavement. In fact, the leading South Sudanese “rebel” leader, John Garang, was even described as Moses leading the people out of Egyptian bondage. Just as Joshua succeeded Moses in the process of leading the Israelites into the Promised Land, so too did Salva Kiir, who was nicknamed Joshua, succeeded John Garang (Tounsel 2021, 99, 113–116) in the process of leading the people to an independent nation-state, their promised land. However, after independence this view of the people as one gave way to ethnic identity, to the distinction between the Nuer and the Dinka. The language that identified the people as one people, as an enslaved people fighting for their freedom and marching towards the promised land of freedom in a new nation-state subsided. The argument shifted from the claim that the people were one chosen people to the claim that the people were distinct peoples who should nevertheless live as one. Thus, Christian discourses that portrayed South Sudanese as a single people dominated the struggle for independence. After independence, however, ethnic discourses returned. Christian theologians and church leaders appear to have been suggesting that Christianity can or should serve as a glue that holds different groups of people together. This is especially found in many theologies of reconciliation, such as that of the Ugandan theologian Emmanuel Katongole. Katongole has suggested that the Christian faith should shape a people who are not divided by identity, a people who are united in Christ in a common faith. He has drawn from the British historian of world Christianity, Andrew Walls, to suggest that the Christian faith should create what is called the “Ephesian Moment.” The concept of the Ephesian moment is drawn from Ephesians 2 in which the author speaks of Jews and Gentiles coming together in the church to form one new humanity. “But now in Christ Jesus,” the author writes, “you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us....(2:13,14). Katongole here presents Ephesus as a place where the bringing together of different peoples to form one people had already begun to happen in the church (Katongole 2017, 74-76; Walls 2002, 72–81). Chosen Peoples shows, however, that the situation could be quite complicated. Despite the people of South Sudan using religious language to fund their struggle for self-determination, a Christian message that portrayed them as one people, their post-independence situation challenged this discourse of unity. Their differences even led to a war that only ended about five years later, leaving hundreds of thousands of deaths, displaced, and scarred people. This post-independence fragmentation of an otherwise united people poses a challenge to the notion that the Christian faith could serve as a source of unity among a divided people. Can the Christian faith make one people out of many? If so, why does it not appear to be working anywhere in Africa and, in fact, around the world? The discourse in independent South Sudan has devolved into one in which Christian leaders are saying that the different ethnicities are “chosen peoples” (rather than “chosen people”) who should live together as one. Thus, one still hears a statement that is now familiar to anyone studying Christianity and conflict in the Great Lakes Regions of Africa, namely that “the blood of the tribe [sic] is thicker than the blood of Christ” (Tounsel, 132). Another way this is rendered is that the blood of the tribe is thicker than the water of Baptism. This claim is a way of saying that ethnicity holds greater power in uniting a people than the Christian faith. If this is true, what becomes of Christian theologies of reconciliation in Africa and, in fact, around the world? Given the persistent fragmentation that we find in the world today, does the Christian faith have the potential to bring people together? This is an important question Chosen Peoples raises. However, the overriding question of Chosen Peoples' narrative is the relationship between providence and history. Providence is a theological concept that may make historians nervous, but it is not new in the conception of history. In fact, Hegel's account of the movement of world history is a secularized version of the Christian doctrine of providence (1956). However, modern historians, it seems, do not dabble in theology. That is why Tounsel is careful to argue that his work is not theological, for he is interested in what theological thought does, not with whatever reality may be claimed behind the rhetoric. For him, the theological rhetoric is the reality. The fact that South Sudanese appropriated Christian liberation theology to fight for self-determination is what is important. However, Chosen Peoples is about the colonial process that creates a people. It is about empire and how empire creates a people. It is about a people who appropriated a central Christian language to cast themselves as having a special relationship with God, a special relationship that leads them to see themselves as a chosen people. This discourse is central to their understanding of their place in history. In the process of fighting for self-determination, the South Sudanese elite seemed to have an uncomplicated understanding of themselves concerning colonialism and empire that seems replicated in the narrative of Chosen Peoples. Tounsel simply tells their story without interrogating it. Thus, the role of British colonialism in creating the people of South Sudan appears to have been concealed using theological language. In this concealment is also the concealment of the doctrine of providence that is intrinsic to the process of creating the people of South Sudan. This doctrine of providence is one rooted in missionary and colonial history. It is quite instructive that the process that led to the creation of South Sudan began with missionaries. As Tounsel tells it, the Christian mission that set up events that would lead the South Sudanese people to see themselves as Christians came after the Mahdi forces killed the British army commander Charles Gordon in the late nineteenth century. In fact, the Church Missionary Society missionaries sent to Christianize the people of the upper Nile, including South Sudanese, was called the “Gordon Memorial Mission,” sent to “perpetuate Gordon's memory... through the direct proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ to all the races inhabiting the upper basin of the Nile” (cited in Tounsel, 24). As the historian of the British Empire, Stewart Brown has noted, for many British people of this time, “the United Kingdom and its empire were God's instruments for the great work of spreading His [sic] gospel throughout the world.... For them, world history was directed by the sovereign God, and as part of this history, the United Kingdom was called to take a leading role in sending out Christian missionaries, spreading Christian and moral civilization, and promoting righteousness in international affairs” (2008, 3). It is in this context that the missionary activity that set in motion the process that would result in South Sudan could be situated. Interestingly, South Sudanese situated themselves within this providential history and saw themselves as a chosen people, or rather, chosen peoples. Given that the history of Chosen Peoples is told within the context of imperial formation, one hardly encounters an engagement with the problem of empire and the problematic claims about being a chosen people or even chosen peoples. Should a history rooted in the narrative of empire not engage the problem of empire in the formation of a people, especially if discourses of chosenness are concerned? Is there not a sense in which South Sudan could be conceived as a thinly veiled continuation of the British Empire, given that its self-understanding is rooted in this narrative? Could Chosen Peoples have interrogated how the theological language of liberation theology appropriated in South Sudan conceals this history of empire or does the book participate in this concealment when it focuses on the South Sudanese self-understanding as chosen peoples without the requisite critique

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