Las G. Newman, author of To Die in Africa's Dust, shares his testimony of coming to Christ amidst political turmoil, identity crisis, and how he came to the book that raises marginalized voices as they tell their own stories of engagement, struggle, and liberation.
Early Life
I was born and raised in the British Caribbean colony of Jamaica. My ancestors in Jamaica were colonized by an oceanic Empire that colonized Africa, the West Indies, the Middle East and parts of South and East Asia. The middle child of three in a working-class family, I had my early childhood shaped by a mother who was an erstwhile member of a Jamaican neo-Pentecostal Church. This church had its roots in the American Midwest and its local formation by American missionaries who had come to Jamaica in 1907 and made their contribution in church planting and education. My maternal grandfather raised his family in that church tradition in rural Jamaica and, after coming to faith as a fourteen year-old at camp, I was baptized into the church at age fifteen in the urban metropolitan city of Kingston, Jamaica. That was the most significant decision I made in my life.
My father, if he had any regard for church at all, was marginally connected to the Church of England (Anglican) in Jamaica. I grew up in the colonial environment of Jamaica in the 1950s at a time when an advanced state of anti-colonial politics was at work in society. I was very conscious from a young age of the issues in the big neighbor to the north, the United States, as well as at home in our little nation of colonial Jamaica. I was eleven when Jamaica stepped out of three centuries of British colonial control and into a new dawn of political independence and national sovereignty. I have vivid memories of Independence Day, 6 August 1962, the jubilation, the parades, the flag-waving crowds, the ubiquitous independence memorabilia and the hopes of the new nation being birthed.
My father was a local politician who never ran for office but spent most of his waking life working as a constituency organizer. He worked for one of the two competing political parties then seeking to lead Jamaica out of the wilderness of British colonialism and into a promised land of postcolonial sovereignty and self-government. I remember at the age of eight my father taking me to a political mass rally to hear the constituency representative in the Chamber of the National Parliament, the House of Representatives. This was the party for whom he worked and held forth on why Jamaica should be mobilized to emancipate itself from British colonialism. As a young child I stood in the midst of the crowd and felt the energy and the longing excitement of the people.
Then came the year 1968. I was seventeen years old in what would be a pivotal year. 1968 became a watershed moment in modern postcolonial struggles. America was fully at war with half a million troops fighting in Viet Nam and a growing anti-war movement spreading everywhere. Revolutions erupted across the world, in Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. Perhaps the most dramatic was the self-described “‘French Revolution”’ of May 1968 when students and workers rioted in Paris and other cities in France and the country came to a standstill in a general strike.
Coming of age in the midst of this exciting yet
fearful politics of decolonization, was a challenge.
I entered my senior years in high school and in April Dr. King, the non-violent leader of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States was assassinated in Memphis. Two months later, Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General of the United States, was assassinated in Los Angeles. Across Africa, the Congress on Pan-Africanism had gained much influence on an emerging generation. In Latin America, the influence of revolutionary Cuba and a Caribbean community chasing constitutional de-colonization, were the driving forces in decolonization and postcolonial thinking. Coming of age in the midst of this exciting yet fearful politics of decolonization, was a challenge.
The time was rapidly approaching when I was to move on to college or University. Yet, I struggled with the question of how prepared I was to face the world with these great challenges? I was torn between, on the one hand, the strident and powerful gospel messages of the white American evangelist Billy Graham (“you must be born again”), whom we listened to on radio twice on Sundays. Graham was an effective evangelist who attracted mass audiences wherever he went. He influenced a generation of church leadership and ministry with his call to evangelization. And on the other hand, the powerful appeal of the biblically rooted social justice messages of Dr. King, (“we shall overcome”) spoke directly to our social context and need.
At the same time, the message of Malcolm X (“what we need is Black Power and Black self-determination”) was also coming through. Brother Malcolm and his followers, including Trinidad-born Stockley Carmichael, put forward a radical agenda of black empowerment and social change. Which message was the correct one? Which side should I move towards and embrace? I had a crisis of identity. It was in that context that I chose Christ and surrendered my life and future to him.
The Questions in Adulthood
After graduating from high school in Jamaica I went to Canada to take a Bible course at the Ontario Bible College in Toronto (now Tyndale University and College). Here I encountered e outstanding leaders in the Christian church and missionary movement, including Uncle John Stott who visited Toronto several times while I was a student to conduct evangelistic and Bible teaching missions. I went on to study history and political science at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. This opened my eyes further to the transformative impact of Christian mission on the ancient and modern world. I was encouraged to pursue this further, looking at my own context of growing up in the Caribbean (also known as the West Indies), and so I earned my PhD at the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies in the UK.
The Book
To Die in Africa’s Dust is the fruit of my PhD studies. In it I question historical interpretations of the African-West Indian participation in the Western missionary enterprise in Africa in the nineteenth century, seen then as that of “nostalgic exiles” in a mythic quest of an imagined homeland, or as misguided adventurers in pursuit of personal career advancements. Through comparative investigation of three of five such West Indian projects, I propose instead that the African-West Indians’ engagement in Africa was a pursuit to further the emancipation dream for themselves and their fellow Africans in the motherland. Their participation reinforced and shaped a conception of Christian mission as an agency of justice and freedom, not unlike the Christian mission exhibited by the apostolic group in the first-century early church who sought to evangelize Jews and Gentiles and legitimize Gentile Christianity as act of providential design and divine justice.
This is a story of how a marginal group of quasi-native and newly emancipated Africans in the West Indies were recruited to help to leverage the rise of Christianity in Western Africa in the mid-nineteenth century after Africa was considered the “White Man’s grave.”
It reveals how current claims for reparation for the historic damages to Africa by centuries of European enslavement of Africans began before the abolition of slavery and infused itself into the Western missionary enterprise as a means of seeking divine justice and compensation to Africa for “wrongs hitherto done to Africa.”
To Die In Africa's Dust questions historical interpretations of the Western missionary endeavour, exploring the pivotal role of native agents in cross-cultural Christian mission and allowing readers to hear from marginalized voices as they tell their own stories of engagement, struggle, and liberation.
