Spoken Voice/Written Word

The challenge of this book is to show the effects of the Media shift from a spoken to a written culture ¿ ostensibly late Capitalism¿s and modernity¿s flagship development in an African missionary context of biblical transmission, translation and appropriation in North-Eastern Zambia. The tectonic shift from an oral to a written medium led to the problem of hermeneutical disenfranchisement. On its journey from the West to the rest, especially Africa in particular, the good news of the Bible became derailed by the pernicious demise of oral culture leading to a religion, Christianity, being both Eurocentric, androcentric and phallocratic. A religion that began with the Pauline claim to the Galatians that ¿There is neither [Ioudaios] nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus¿ (Gal 3.28 NIV) ended up justifying power structures of the male, literate and dominant elite. In the process, many old people, women and people with learning disabilities who were not able to read or write, were disenfranchised. This book is therefore an example of hermeneutics of suspicion, retrieval, restoration and transformation applied to an African context.