This past week, at an Ecclesial Project gathering, someone asked me where Africans find hope amid all the troubles there. I reminded her: there is no such things as African hope or American hope. We all need hope today, just as our ancestors needed to live in hope amidst the challenges they faced in their own day. Each generation faces…
“When the ancestors dreamed of the continent, they dreamed of us—not as shadows of their past, but as the living fire of their hopes, and the witnesses of all the past heroes.” Across Africa, we walk on lands watered by tears, cultivated with prayers, and guarded by the spirits of those who came before us—men and women who stood tall…
Frantz Fanon once wrote, “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.” For many African Catholics today, there is a growing sense that God has entrusted our continent with a vital mission—to lead the Church and Christianity into a new era. It’s true that the Pope is not African, and Africans do not…
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…