Simon Maimela as public theologian of the 1980s and 1990s

Abstract

This article traces the public career of Simon Maimela (1944–) during the 15 years between 1980, when he was appointed as the first black lecturer in the Faculty of Theology at the University of South Africa, and 1996, when he handed over the position as international coordinator of EATWOT, the Ecumenical Association for Third World Theologians, to Mercy Amba Oduyoye. Although “Public Theology” was not a current designation during the 1980s and 1990s, this article presents Maimela as a forerunner of Public Theology through his contribution to Black Theology and his influence on public opinion formation. The sources consulted include newspaper reports on his public lectures and involvement in public statements on political situations. His articles on Liberation Theology in academic and semi-academic journals and his inaugural lecture are acknowledged as the source of views that contributed to the political transition to democracy in South Africa; all of Maimela’s academic articles are derived from papers delivered at conferences to which the public had primary or secondary access. Study material on Liberation Theology prepared by Maimela while teaching Systematic Theology at the University of South Africa is cited to reveal his then novel view on feminist theology in particular. The publications of the Institute for Contextual Theology (ICT) and EATWOT are investigated to show Maimela’s role in the application of Liberation Theology to the public sphere. The article concludes by summarising Maimela’s role as teacher, public speaker and public opinion former within his own vision of Black Theology as prophetic theology. The part he played places him among the most influential Black Theologians of the last two decades of the twentieth century, and possibly of the first decade of the twenty-first.