John S. Mbiti
In African life religion is everywhere, and the individual exists only through the community: “I am, because we are.”
Placement
Kenyan theologian and Anglican priest: African religions deserve the respect given to other world religions. His “I am, because we are” became a slogan; his claim that African time knows almost no distant future drew sustained criticism.
Key ideas
- “I am, because we are; and since we are, therefore I am”
- Sasa and Zamani (time)
- African religions as religions in their own right
Influence
Influenced 1
Ifeanyi Menkiti
influenced
Menkiti took up Mbiti’s ‘I am, because we are’ and concluded personhood is attained in community, not given at birth (‘Person and Community in African Traditional Thought’, 1984). I. A. Menkiti, “Person and Community in African Traditional Thought”, in R. A. Wright (ed.), African Philosophy: An Introduction (3rd ed., 1984); J. S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (1969)
Evidence: AI draft
Ifeanyi Menkiti › 1940–2019
Criticism
Criticized by 3
Okot p’Bitek
criticised by
Okot p’Bitek objected that Mbiti and other African theologians had “Hellenised” African deities by describing them as omnipotent, omniscient and eternal. O. p’Bitek, African Religions in Western Scholarship (1970); Masolo 1994; S. O. Imbo, Oral Traditions as Philosophy (2002)
Evidence: AI draft
Okot p’Bitek › 1931–1982
Kwame Gyekye
criticised by
Gyekye read Mbiti’s ‘I am, because we are’ as radical communitarianism without room for individual rights, and proposed a moderate version (‘Person and Community in African Thought’, 1992). K. Gyekye, “Person and Community in African Thought”, in K. Wiredu & K. Gyekye (eds.), Person and Community (1992); Tradition and Modernity (1997), ch. 2; J. S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (1969)
Evidence: AI draft
Kwame Gyekye › 1939–2019
Henry Odera Oruka
criticised by
Odera Oruka placed Mbiti’s African Religions and Philosophy (1969) under ‘ethnophilosophy’, a description of collective beliefs rather than critical reflection by individual thinkers. H. Odera Oruka, “Four Trends in Current African Philosophy” (1978; publ. 1981); Sage Philosophy (1990), introduction
Evidence: AI draft
Henry Odera Oruka › 1944–1995
Works
A survey of African religions as a whole – with the dictum “I am, because we are” and the thesis of a time oriented to the past.
Position
African Religions and Philosophy was written against the missionary view that African religions were superstition or devil worship. Mbiti presented them as a coherent whole, with a belief in one God, intermediaries such as spirits and the “living dead”, rites of passage and an ethics bound to community, and asked that they be studied with the same respect as Christianity or Islam: “Africans are notoriously religious.” Two theses from the book became widely known. The first is his summary of African views of the person: “I am, because we are; and since we are, therefore I am.” The second, drawn from the verb tenses of Kikamba and Gikuyu, holds that time in African thought has two dimensions: a lived present (sasa) that flows into a long past (zamani), with almost no distant future. Both met strong criticism. Okot p’Bitek, in African Religions in Western Scholarship (1970), accused him of dressing African gods in the attributes of the Christian God. Kwame Gyekye, D. A. Masolo and others argued from Akan and other languages that the claim about time was false, and noted that the Swahili terms themselves are loanwords from Arabic. Henry Odera Oruka placed his work under “ethnophilosophy”, a description of collective beliefs rather than critical reflection. His formula about the community, on the other hand, became a starting point for the debate on personhood with Ifeanyi Menkiti and Gyekye.
Life & context
John Samuel Mbiti was born in 1931 at Mulango in Kitui, Kenya, into a Kamba family. He studied at Makerere College in Uganda and at Barrington College in Rhode Island, and in 1963 took a doctorate in theology at Cambridge with a study of New Testament eschatology, the basis of his later book on that subject in an African setting. In the same year he was ordained an Anglican priest. From 1964 to 1974 he taught religion and philosophy at Makerere University, where he wrote African Religions and Philosophy (1969). In the 1970s he moved to the World Council of Churches’ Ecumenical Institute at Bossey near Geneva, which he directed until 1980. He then served as a parish minister in Burgdorf in Switzerland until 1996 and taught at the University of Bern. He was married to Verena Mbiti-Siegenthaler. In retirement he translated the New Testament from Greek into his mother tongue, Kikamba. He died in Switzerland in 2019.
Further main works
- Concepts of God in Africa (1970)
- New Testament Eschatology in an African Background (1971)
- Introduction to African Religion (1975)
- Bible and Theology in African Christianity (1986)
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