Editorial

When I left Nigeria to study in Rome in 2001, my parents gave me two requests. My mother asked me to bring her holy water from St. Peter’s Square. My father asked me to “learn everything the white man knows, add it to your African wisdom from our ancestors, and use this knowledge to lift Africa higher and higher.”

I didn’t need to fulfill my mother’s request—she came to Rome the following year, when Cardinal Okojie, my spiritual father, received the Cardinal’s red hat, and brought home as much holy water as airline regulations allowed. My father joined our ancestors in 2016, but his charge remains my compass: Am I lifting Africa higher and higher? Am I gaining new knowledge through interactions with other cultures, traditions, and spiritualities? Am I deepening the African ancestral wisdom and Christian faith, and how am passing these on through my words and actions?

Every Sunday, I join my mother virtually for the rosary. She will turn 90 this year. Though she’s had two strokes in the past nine years and her memory is weak, she comes to vibrant life during the rosary—singing hymns to Mary and sometimes dancing to traditional Abia Nshi music from my maternal home of Eke. Five years ago, we began documenting her life. Now, with her memory fading, we rely heavily on her younger sister to recount what shaped her into such a tenacious, entrepreneurial woman and why her faith in God and commitment to the Catholic Church is so profound. She was so attached to Rome that she would have liked to transport the two fountains in St. Peter’s Square to Nigeria.

My mother can no longer tell her stories, and any retelling lacks her voice. My father, however, wrote his biography, Divine Purpose: My Memoir, one year before he died. He left our family—and the clan he led as monarch—with a rich chronicle of his life and of our people: from colonial times, through Nigeria’s war years, into the arduous journey of rebuilding our land.

In many ways, my family’s story mirrors the story of African Christianity today. Our faith blends ancestral spirituality with that inherited from Western missionaries. Western missionaries may have planted the seeds, but the rapid, post- Western missionary growth of the Church in Africa—under African leadership—has not been matched by African narrative ownership of this expansion or African theological influence and account of the changing context and significance of the faith as it crosses different cultural, spiritual, and ecclesial frontiers in Africa. 

During the interregnum between Popes Francis and Leo, I gave over forty interviews across 20 different media channels—five of them African (two from South Africa, one from Kenya, and two from Nigeria) and the rest from Europe, North America, and Australia. I realized the world cares about Christian growth in Africa; what happens in African Christianity is important to the World Church. Yet, the stories told about Africa are still largely filtered through Western outlets and editors who decide what’s “newsworthy” and how African stories should be framed.

African journalists, whether working for African or Western outlets, must pass their work through Western editorial norms and gatekeepers. That’s why VoiceAfrique exists. We aim to tell African Christian and societal stories for Africans, by Africans, with the option to share these stories worldwide. VoiceAfrique digs deeper than headlines, analyzing the footprints of God in our stories; uncovering how God’s presence shapes our complex history. Our narratives, informed by a hermeneutic of humility and generosity, will emphasize redemption and hope rather than default to tired, negative frames—even the ones shaped by Africans themselves because of the lingering coloniality of the imagination or false historical consciousness or even in some cases learned helplessness. Many VoiceAfrique contributors are young—journalism isn’t our qualification, but our sharp-eyed commitment to narrate our own beckons. We tell the story of youthful African churches and the youth bulge that is tantalizingly appealing and hopeful for the future of the Christian faith in Africa. As Cardinal Ravasi described it few years ago, it’s a contrast between “a tired and fatigued European Christianity” and vibrant African worship.

How we tell our stories—and who tells them—matters. I learned this from Africa’s foremost novelist and master storyteller, Chinua Achebe. In his 1998 McMillan-Stewart Lectures at Harvard, Achebe spoke of balance in African storytelling. His insights inspired Chimamanda Adichie’s TEDx talk on the danger of a single story. Achebe warned: those who can’t write their own narrative “will be condemned to live the stories and images of themselves created by others.” But he also envisioned a shared world: “It is not true that my history is only in my heart; it is indeed there…in that dusty road in my town…in my country…on my continent…and, yes, in the world.” That dusty road is our collective link. Asking us to abandon our histories and migrate to the West is, Achebe said, “just crazy.” We Africans walk that road. It is our home, our history, our faith, our church, and our destiny. It may lead us near or far—but in all that movement, my father’s wisdom endures: we should not isolate ourselves nor forsake our heritage. Rather, we are open to knowledge from any part of the world to enrich our own African wisdom but must craft stories of hope —lifting Africa higher and higher to the margins of heaven and to the center of the world—Stan Chu Ilo