FROM PREACHING THE CHRISTIAN GOSPEL TO AFRICANS, TO PREACHING AFRICAN SOCIAL WISDOM TO EUROPE: REVEALING SURPRESSED TRUTHS IN THE COLONIAL ARCHIVE IN CAMEROON
Abstract
When it comes to stories (even fabrications) that reveal Africa as a dark continent, a continent of emptiness and of primitivism, one is likely to find milliards of documents proliferated by Europeans to continuously justify their overrule over the continent and its people. But when it comes to literature especially written by Europeans who have experienced Africa objectively that confesses the potential of its people and their knowledge base and how this knowledge base can inform European social existence, such hardly exists. In this paper my aim is to reveal some studies carried out by European missionaries in Cameroon which went out of the way to recommend that amidst the social crisis that plagued Europe, and the human values of traditional society in Africa, there was need for a paradigm shift from preaching the Christian gospel to Africans to preaching African social wisdom to the Europeans. I content that this position was contrary to Coloniality of power, being and knowledge which have guided Euro-African relations from the time of their early contact. That is why it has been consciously suppressed by the colonial archive.
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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.46827/ejsss.v0i0.115
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