Mercy Amba Ewudziwa Oduyoye : mother of our stories

Abstract

Mercy Amba Oduyoye (1933-) is Africa’s first and foremost woman theologian. While her life reads like a story, Oduyoye’s theology itself can best be described as a theology of stories that have changed worldviews on gender, ecumenism and restorative historiography. This article deals with these three themes in Oduyoye’s work, and how she has journeyed with them through the three main periods of her life. At the beginning of her teaching career, during the 1970s, she taught students the history of dogma as people’s stories of their struggle to understand the divine. In the 1990s and at the height of her career as Deputy General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, we find her deconstructing the mythical stories of both the African and Judaeo-Christian traditions in order to retell these stories as healing stories to African women. And now, more than a decade after she retired from institutionalised labour, Oduyoye is still contributing prolifically to re-telling the stories of Africa as stories in which women are worthy human beings, and the African church is one with, and in, its cultural history. Indeed, hers is a life committed to the theological significance of stories, and to the power of stories to heal and to unite.