Dear Sir,
I was excited to see a review, in the March en, with the title ‘Tribal influences’, assuming the book (African Contextual Realities edited by Rodney L. Reed, Langham Global Library) would critique the divisions within British evangelicalism that undermine our witness. I was saddened to find the title coloured an outstanding collection of work pulled together by the African Society of Evangelical Theology. While the reviewer refers to ‘African Tribal Religion’ the book itself correctly uses the term African Traditional Religion to decode the acronym ATR. Even then it does so cautiously, preferring to talk about the African worldview, and questioning whether that term can apply on a continent so diverse.
The title plays into the hands of those who have little understanding of the dynamics of the continent and use the term ‘tribal’ pejoratively. The word is used within the book, which is legitimate from within the African discourse, but it is unwise to single it out in an external review of a collection that covers a rich canvas (it is indicative that the word never appears in any of the chapters’ helpful lists of ‘key words’).
