Epistemological dialogue as prophetic : a black theological perspective on the land issue

Abstract

Land is life and land is our mother. The absence of the content of liberation for the dispossessed in theologies that seek to address the question of land is the ‘original’ sin of the debate about land in South Africa. The history of the church and land dispossession is a bifurcated, dichotomised discourse of annihilation and quarantine of the disposed. With the rudiments of a Contextual Theology of Land and a Black Theology of Land, the prophetic imagination of the church post-1994 must subject any epistemological views that exclude the internal logic of black Africans to a rigorous hermeneutic of suspicion. Black Africans need land to live first and not to be agents of the commodification of land, a spirit that dominates the debate today.