Jesse Mugambi's pedigree : formative factors

Abstract

The article sets out to retrieve Jesse Mugambi’s life history as it surveys the key concepts of liberation and reconstruction in his works. In so doing, the study acknowledges that he became a household name in the African theological fraternity after his presentation to the General Committee of All Africa Conference of Churches when the erstwhile President of the All Africa Conference of Churches, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and the General Secretary at the time, the Rev Jose B Chipenda invited him to reflect on the “Future of the Church and the Church of the Future in Africa”i in the Nairobi Meeting of 30 March 1990. This was a month after Nelson Mandela had been released on 2 February 1990 and Namibia had attained her independence on March 21 of the same year. And it is in this meeting that Mugambi suggested that the post-apartheid or the post-cold war African Christianity must shift her theological gear from the paradigm of liberation to that of reconstruction. To do this, the study will first attempt to trace his pedigree and then move on to survey his main theological thought. The material in this article is drawn from both the library research and the fieldwork research where certain individuals were consulted.