John S. Mbiti

It was November 30, 1931, in Mulango, in Kitui County, in eastern Kenya.

A boy was born into a Christian family of the Akamba people. His parents, Samuel Mutuvi Ngaangi and Valesi Mbandi Kiimba, farmed the land. They had six children.

He was the first to survive. They named him Mbiti. The name was a prayer: a thank-you, and a wish that he would live.

He lived. And he learned.

He studied at Alliance High School, then at Makerere, in Uganda, graduating in 1953. He then crossed the ocean to Barrington College, in Rhode Island.

But he did not forget his language. In 1954, he published a novel in Kamba. Then he put together an English-Kamba vocabulary.

He gathered some 1,500 traditional stories of his people. Part of them appeared in 1966, as Akamba Stories.

Yet there was a contradiction in his life.

As a child, he had been taught that the African religious and cultural heritage was demonic and anti-Christian.

He went to Cambridge, in England. In 1963, he earned a doctorate in theology there. That same year, he was ordained an Anglican priest. He first served in an English parish.

In 1964, he went back to Africa. At Makerere, he taught African traditional religion.

Later, he explained that his view had changed upon careful study of the religious background of his own people.

In 1969, his first book appeared: African Religions and Philosophy.

The book had grown out of his thesis. It spoke of the beliefs of some 300 peoples of Africa. It challenged an old idea: that these religions were the devil's work.

Mbiti wrote that wherever the African is, there is religion.

One of his sayings was often quoted:

The book was reprinted almost every year. It was translated into seven languages. In all, Mbiti wrote more than fifty books.

In 1974, he left Africa for the Ecumenical Institute at Bossey, near Geneva, which he directed. He then became a pastor in Burgdorf, Switzerland, and taught at the University of Bern.

In retirement, he returned to his first words. He translated the New Testament from Greek into Kamba, his mother tongue. The translation appeared in 2014.

He died on October 5, 2019, in Burgdorf. He was 87.

His sentence never stopped travelling. In the words of a son of the Akamba, it echoes what Ubuntu affirms: a person is a person through other people.

A child whose name was a prayer that he might live. An old man giving his people scripture in their own language. Between the two, a single conviction: no one ever exists alone.