Contact:Paula Randall, [email protected]; 520-621-5372 in the College of Humanities
Julian Kunnie, acting director and professor of Africana studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson, has completed a DVD about South African indigenous churches. "Umoya: The Spirit in Africa" draws on interviews conducted during field research trips to South Africa that span the past fifteen years.
Indigenous churches in Africa are among the fastest growing religious communities in the world, having more than doubled in population between 1970 and 2000. Kunnie estimates that, in South Africa alone, 55 percent of Christian church members belong to these indigenous churches. The number of registered denominations also has increased from 5,980 to 7,170 in the years between 1970 and 1985.
The last video on South African Indigenous churches available for educational purposes, "Zulu Zion," was part of "The Long Search," a BBC series produced in the 1970s that focused on world religious traditions. Kunnie set out to make a contemporary video that touched on the relationships of these religious institutions to critical social, economic and political issues in the pre- and post-apartheid eras, such as land reform and the role of women in the church.
Included in the DVD are videotaped interviews with members of six denominations and an academic paper on the African indigenous churches, filling a gap in religious research, says Kunnie, "that has considered the Indigenous churches to be sects and therefore outside the perimeter of institutional churches." Kunnie interviewed clerics, church leaders and lay individuals in six cities, neighboring towns and in rural areas.
"The political and social marginalization of blacks by the colonial white minority, which persists today, was the principal cause of schisms from white mission churches such as Paris Mission in 1872 and the 1889 Berlin Bapedi Church split from the Lutheran church," says Kunnie. Blacks split from European dominated churches because those churches supported colonialization and denied black Africans the right to retain elements of their traditional spiritual practices as well as the right to hold leadership roles in the churches they attended. Members of the contemporary Amanazaretha or Nazarite Church, for example, perform mass baptisms and group dances that reflect the Zulu belief that, in Kunnie's words, "God is worshiped in ukukhonza, congregational worship, and never in private isolation."
Kunnie's interest in the African indigenous churches is based on interests in the spiritual aspects of culture, the ongoing liberation struggle of Africans, and the role the indigenous churches play in this struggle. His research and the "Umoya" DVD explore the ways in which those churches continue to provide the spiritual, emotional and social support black South Africans need to survive and thrive in a society that continues to deny them access to adequate education, jobs, land and political power.
The University of Arizona College of Humanities funded portions of Kunnie's work on the African indigenous churches out of the Humanities Research Initiative. The "Umoya" DVD is available at $75 per copy. To order a copy, call or e-mail Ruby Shelton at (520) 621-5665 or [email protected], or contact Africana studies through its Web site, http://www.coh.arizona.edu/aas/aas.htm.
Kunnie has a doctorate in systemic theology and philosophy, specializing in black theology and African religions, from the Graduate Theological Union at the University of California, Berkeley. He is author of "Is Apartheid Really Dead? Pan Africanist Working Class Cultural Critical Perspectives," (Perseus Books, 2000) and "Models of Black Theology; Issues of Class, Culture, and Gender," (Trinity Press International, 1994). He is chair of the Indigenous Religions section of the American Academy of Religion and an ordained member of the Sierra Pacific Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
Africana studies, a College of Humanities program, is committed to comprehensively educating people about the breadth and depth of the African experience in the United States, Africa and the rest of the African Diaspora.
Photos are available upon request. These include a photo of Julian Kunnie, and several photos taken by Kunnie: a mass baptism in the Indian Ocean; an assistant minister of an indigenous church whom Kunnie interviewed; and Alexandra township, Johannesburg, South Africa.
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