Telesia Musili

Hannah Wangeci Kinoti has contributed immensely to African traditional ethics. She argued that the heart of morality is community consciousness since self-centered individuals cannot create a cohesive society. She advanced a communitarianist philosophy emphasizing the connection between the individual and the community. It is a philosophy guided by the belief that community relationships primarily mold a person’s social identity and personality. For Kinoti, morality involves the whole, both corporate and personal, political, economic, cultural, and spiritual. She uses this paradigm in almost all her scholarly works to argue about gender, sexuality, corruption, impunity, environmental degradation, women’s leadership, neo-liberal economies, colonialism, and individualistic absolutist Western morality. This chapter critically analyzes Kinoti’s approach to the individual’s social identity and personality as molded mainly by the community. It will also amplify the moral values framework proposed by Kinoti, which points to virtue ethics and its dedication to the common good of the whole person rather than simply human actions. This will create a pathway to integrate African ethics and embrace Christian ethics for a liberating and life-enhancing ethical framework for the future work of the Circle.

This volume explores the ethical and philosophical paradigms presented by most of the influential Matriarchs of the Circle of African Women Theologians. It critically evaluates the effectiveness of their ethical and philosophical theories, models, and frameworks in pursuing justice and liberation for women in Africa and globally. The authors address critical questions: How have African women theologians reimagined existing ethical paradigms? What original ethical and philosophical ideas have they generated? How have their ethical frameworks influenced the theologies and interpretations they have developed? What purposes do their ethical and philosophical paradigms serve? How do these renderings intersect with various social categories, including gender, race, class, sexuality, capitalism, and colonialism? What liberating frameworks do they propose? The volume further explores the dialogue between distinct African contexts and universal experiences and values. It explores how universal themes such as humanity, human dignity, rights, justice, motherhood, and more can coexist with communal African concepts and themes. It contemplates how embracing African approaches engages these themes more globally, bringing together particular African contexts of women and the universal ethical, philosophical, and theological theories, models, and frameworks to advance the cause of justice and liberation for African women and women worldwide into the future.

This volume focuses on African indigenous women legends and their potential to serve as midwives for gender empowerment and for contributing towards African feminist theories. It considers the intersection of gender and spirituality in subverting patriarchy, colonialism, anthropocentricism, capitalism as well elevating African women to the social space of speaking as empowered subjects with public influence. The chapters examine historical, cultural, and religious African women legends who became champions of liberation and their approach to social justice. The authors suggest that the stories of resistance featured hold great potential for building justice-loving Earth Communities. The book will be of interest to scholars of religion, gender studies, Indigenous studies, African studies, African-Indigenous Knowledges and postcolonial studies.

Human immunodeficiency viruses (HIV) and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), COVID-19 and Ebola have exposed the magnitude of care-related tasks on women. Most often, because of the gendered nature of domestic and reproductive roles, women are expected to assume unpaid care-related, nurturing and domestic work. Despite the valuable duties, women are economically poor and othered. These unpaid care duties are exacerbated by pandemics and ratified even further by religion. For instance, in Nomiya Church (NC), the first African independent church in Kenya, women’s experience narratives and biblical texts such as the story of the Proverbs 31 virtuous woman are used to glorify unpaid charitable work for women. Women’s virtuous personality, hard work and character are upheld in Christian spaces, thus obstructing sound work theologies. This article employed African Women’s theological lens in view of pointing out repressing and transformative tenets in charitable theologies of work for social and gender justice. While applying womanhood hermeneutics in the passage, the article points to valued behavioural postures of hard work in responding to God’s stewardship mandate. An affirmation of fair reward and accumulation of property is embraced as a familial complementary role, especially in pandemic contexts. The article amplifies the accumulation of property as a human right and the mandate of stewardship for all earth communities. Hence, charity work is a stewardship framework that all earth communities must engage in for replenishment and sustenance for all. Contribution: The article challenges literal biblical interpretations that glorify charity work. It advances a stewardship framework in understanding unpaid and charity work that all earth communities must engage in to replenish and sustain all creation. The framework affirms the dignity of all human persons through a transformational understanding of the theology of work as enabled by the African theological hermeneutics.

COVID-19 is a global pandemic that has unmasked the underlying and once-ignored challenges in public health, especially in Africa. The pandemic has adversely disrupted people’s lives where systemic and structural inequalities have taken root owing to the interaction among religious, political, economic, socio-cultural, environmental and other influential factors, resulting in adverse outcomes. These interactions affected not only the psychological, physical, emotional and social wellbeing of all humanity but also their ethical way of thinking. Adherence to the local government ministry of health’s stringent measures, such as voluntary self-quarantine or forced quarantine, may be unattainable. This raises several ethical issues that are not new but which become intensified in pressing situations. Ethically, legitimate public health measures and conservative environmental efforts are easier to voluntarily comply with than being enforced. In this article, a phenomenological methodology was employed to not only debunk the ethical difficulties in adhering to the pandemic’s preventive protocols, but also to reason on the entwinement between the public health and environmental concerns. The article foregrounded that the COVID-19 pandemic is both a healthcare crisis and an environmental ethics challenge. In focussing on how systemic and structural inequalities influence social life, the article argued that public health ethics informs environmental conservation towards a more holistic approach to health and wealth that flows from environmental health ethics. Contribution: The article advanced ongoing discussions on environmental health ethics. Environmental health ethics is a transdisciplinary and integrated approach that upholds sustainable balance and optimisation of the health of people, animals and ecosystems. A sensitisation and realisation of our inter-webbed relatedness to all, is a major step towards sustainable health and wealth.