6. Mirror of the past and window to the future. A century of postcolonial theology in Africa Tinyiko Maluleke and Wietske de Jong-Kumru Prof. dr. Wietske de Jong-Kumru is Professor of Theology of Religion and Interreligious learning at the Seminar für Evangelische Theologie at the Europa-Universität Flensburg, Germany. Prof. dr. Tinyiko Maluleke is a Senior Research Fellow and Deputy Director of University of Pretoria Center for the Advancement of Scholarship. He specialises in religion and politics as well as black and African theologies. There is a frequently-used fable about the Bible in Africa: When the white man came to Africa he had the Bible and we [Africans] had the land. The white man said to us: ’let us pray’. After the prayer, the white man had the land and we [Africans] had the Bible. 1 This story makes clear that neither imperial Christendom nor the Bible (and the manner in which it was used and interpreted) can be exempted from critique. This provokes the question whether it is possible either to lose the Bible in order to regain the land, to regain the land without losing the Bible, or even to use the Bible in order to regain the land. These permutations summarise, in part, the various approaches in black and African theologies. Theology in Africa is a theology in its own right. In this article, we conduct a survey of African theological thought, looking backwards, sideways, and for- wards. Our subtitle, ‘A century of postcolonial theology in Africa’ is deliberately ambiguous. It resists the temptation to confne the discussion either to a diachro- nic or a synchronic perspective. The intention is to look both backwards and forwards: backwards to the past century of African theology and forwards to the next century. This multidirectional approach 2 eludes a Western, linear conception