John Mbiti 1931 – 2019

John Samuel Mbiti was a Kenyan-born Christian theologian and philosopher and the founding scholar of the modern academic study of African religions and philosophy. After studies in Uganda, the United States, and Cambridge, he held chairs in Africa, Europe, and America, and served as director of the Ecumenical Institute at Bossey in Switzerland. His African Religions and Philosophy and Concepts of God in Africa argued that African traditional religions contain a rich philosophical reflection that must be taken seriously alongside the Western and Asian philosophical traditions. He shaped a generation of African philosophical scholarship.

John Samuel Mbiti was born in 1931 at Mulango in the Kitui district of eastern Kenya, the son of a Kamba subsistence farmer who became a lay preacher. After Alliance High School and Makerere University in Uganda he took degrees at Barrington College in Rhode Island and a doctorate at Cambridge in 1963 with a dissertation on the New Testament eschatology and the African concept of time. He was ordained an Anglican priest in 1960.

He held the chair of religious studies at Makerere from 1964, was director of the World Council of Churches' ecumenical institute at Bossey from 1972 to 1980, and from 1983 served as a parish minister in Switzerland and as professor at Bern. His major works are New Testament Eschatology in an African Background (1971), African Religions and Philosophy (1969), Concepts of God in Africa (1970), the Prayers of African Religion, Bible and Theology in African Christianity, and the editions of African oral and devotional literatures.

Mbiti's slogan 'I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am' captured his African philosophical anthropology of the person as constituted by community and ancestry, and his treatment of African traditional religions as a serious intellectual partner for Christian theology shaped a generation of African Christian thought. He died at Bern in October 2019.