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Westerners are prone to silly generalizations about Africa. We forget that it is geographically huge, culturally complex, and linguistically diverse. The sheer immensity of the continent is belied by its apparent size on maps like the Gall-Peters projection. There, it assumes modest proportions, seemingly smaller than North America, its surface intersected with neatly drawn borders demarking 53 discrete nation-states. Their geographical boundaries can be traced to an 1884 Berlin Conference where—with nary an African present—European powers neatly carved up the entire continent among themselves. The simplicity of the European scheme has obscured and exacerbated more complex on-the-ground realities.

The most polyglot of all continents—home to some 2,100 "mother tongues"—is notorious for its "vampire" states, savage civil wars, overwhelming poverty and pandemics, and rickety civil, transportation, and communication infrastructures. Africa—in the words of Robert Guest, former Africa editor of The Economist—is "the Shackled Continent."

Despite decades of prodigious "development" efforts fueled by close to $600 billion in aid since the 1960s, living conditions continue to decline:

• Of the 40 countries at the bottom of the World Bank's human-development index, 33 are African.
  
  
• Africa's estimated income per person is less than 5 percent that of the United States's.
  
  

The legacies of slavery, colonialism, and globalization tell part of the story. But many of Africa's wounds—some say most of them—are self-inflicted. Exploited by Arab and European outsiders who extracted as much as they could before moving on, the continent continues to be led by home-grown political predators whose kleptocratic rule, self-indulgence, dysfunctional economic policies, pathological violence, and sheer incompetence have ensured that Africa is more impoverished today than it was 50 years ago.

Seldom noted in the depressingly predictable reports and images, however, is Africa's burgeoning and dynamic Christian counterculture—churches and denominations that serve as oases of integrity and harbingers of hope. At its best, this counterculture is the antithesis of all that is wrong with Africa.

Philip Jenkins's The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South suggests that the growing rift between the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion in Africa is both inevitable and unbridgeable. While American and African churches appear to be using the same book, they are in fact reading quite different Bibles. African Anglicans—with their strong evangelistic impulse, surging memberships, and overwhelming social challenges such as AIDS, poverty, and corruption—tend to read the Bible evangelically. They understand its teachings to be authoritative in all matters of faith and life, and its words to be the verbal plenary revelation of God. Theirs, then, cannot be a comfortable post-Enlightenment "Yea hath God said?" reading of the Bible, letting believers be swept along by the shifting winds of current cultural predisposition. To most African believers, gender roles and sexual orientation are elemental pillars of the created order. To tinker with such verities is to invite not only the derision of Muslim neighbors but the judgment of God. That American and Nigerian bishops should have achieved only impasse is little wonder.

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November 2007, Vol. 51, No. 11, Page 46