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'Ilahle Elinothuthu'?* the Lay Reader and /or the Critical Reader- Some Remarks On Africanisation
Abstract
This article intends to link Africanisation, lay readings and critical scholarship. Its point of departure is the dialectic of colonial inferiority complexes and the realisation of a Babelesque confusion as a defining element of South Africanness. Within this socio-political context the focus falls on Semeia 73 ('Reading with': an exploration of the interface between critical and ordinary readings of the Bible), drawing some implications for a grassroots reading of Esther 9 as well as the role of critical scholarship in the Afrikaans Reformed tradition. Bearing in mind the work of Edward Said on the subject of intellectuality, the article suggests that as long as the renewed focus on the lay reader represents only a change in political grid and power relations, it does not initiate a new trend in hermeneutics. A fundamental shift will only occur when the underlying reading strategies of lay reading are revealed and critically assessed. Instead of merely reproducing the ideological mechanisms and alignments whereby description becomes prescription and the local is represented as universal, it is suggested that these mechanisms should be challenged by the critical reader, even when and while socially engaged.
This essay enquires into the problem of mimesis when dealing with the biblical text: imitating the text as well as imitating the tools with which the text is read. Using the Book of Esther as illustration material, it looks into mimesis within the story of Esther itself as well as mimetic actions based on the story. The focus then shifts to a particular Western and African feminist/womanist discourse on mimesis and the biblical text masking particularities. The discussion proceeds to highlight one particularity that needs to be discussed, namely the issue of textuality, a theme with rich potential in the Book of Esther. The author ponders the following question: If the notions of text and writing are so deeply embedded in Western thinking, is it not time to start thinking in terms of different rationalities when African hermeneutics is contrasted with Western hermeneutics? The last section of the essay looks into this possibility but only in a preliminary way in an effort to move the debate between African hermeneutics and Western hermeneutics a bit further.
In this essay the author looks at the decolonial critique on Western epistemology as presented within Western biblical hermeneutics in order to appreciate the focus on the geopolitical and the body political nature of knowledge. To this end, the author revisits an aspect of the book of Esther, namely the issue of Haman as perpetrator, not only to utilise decoloniality as a heuristic key to read the book, but to explore similarities with the current postapartheid context of race trouble. The discussion proceeds as follows: (a) an exploration of aspects of Haman's comportment in the story in terms of a colonial matrix of power and Mordecai in terms of a coloniality of being; (b) a discussion on decoloniality in terms of (i) the decolonial turn, (ii) coloniality, (iii) the three ego's, (iv) the non-ethics of war, (v) the zone of being and the zone of nonbeing and (vi) the objective of decoloniality; (c) a proposition to unthink race by taking seriously (i) race trouble as a direct consequence of the colonial matrix of power, (ii) and to take the geopolitical and body political location of knowledge production seriously.
The RCSA is in desperate need of a new way of approaching the Bible. The hermeneutical principles that gave birth to a theological legitimation of apartheid are still active in the theological legitimation of a patriarchal order in the RCSA (Gereformeerde Kerke in Suid-Afrika). It is as if the RCSA suffers from a theological schizophrenia which bars a critical approach from taking root. The article explores some hermeneutical impediments within the RCSA, illustrated by the 2000 Synod and a declaration published for the advent of Reformation Day in October 2000. Those impediments can be traced back to a seminal article of the 1980s, written by J.C. Coetzee, B.J. de Klerk and L. Floor (“Die hermeneuse van die Skrif met die oog op hedendaagse kerklik-etiese vraagstukke”), and to the influence of Afrikaner civil religion in the reading of the Bible. In the light of these three aspects, the article surveys the problem of imitating the text in terms of its values or characters, since the discussion of the role of women in the church is based on what is said about women in the Bible as a male text. The article concludes with a tentative proposal for an ethics of reading, with regard to the theoretical aspects when discussing gender issues in the Bible.
This article follows aspects of the current debate on racism as embodied in the AIDS-HIV controversy. It discusses President Thabo Mbeki's AIDS letter to world leaders in terms of the religious reality it invokes and his reaction to opposition at home regarding his stance on the link between AIDS and HIV. His handling of opposition is analysed in terms of Emmanuel Levinas's concept of the Other and J Hillis Miller's concept of the law of the text. The article concludes that the debate on racism is still stifled by essentialist thinking on both sides of the racial spectrum, making it very difficult to transcend the situation.
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