Chilisa, Bagele, Musa W. Dube, N. Tsheko, and B. Mazile. The Voices and Identities of Botswana’s School Children: Gender, Sexuality, HIV/AIDS, and Life Skills in Education. Nairobi: UNICEF, 2005.
AbstractNoting that the ways of interpreting the Bible now practiced in the West are patriarchal and oppressive of those in other parts of the world, Dube offers an alternative interpretation that attends to and respects needs of women in the two-thirds world. In a provocative and insightful reading of the book of Matthew, she shows us how to read the Bible as decolonizing rather than imperialist literature.
Dube, Musa W. The HIV & AIDS Bible: Selected Essays. Scranton: University of Scranton Press, 2008.
Abstract"The HIV and AIDS Bible "opens a new chapter in African religious discourse by placing the pandemic at the forefront of theological discussions. In a series of incisive essays Musa W. Dube examines the HIV/AIDS crisis in light of biblical and ethical teachings and argues for a strong theological presence alongside current economic, social, and political efforts to quell this devastating disease. "The HIV and AIDS Bible "will be helpful for teachers, clergy, social workers, health care providers, and anyone else seeking creative ways to integrate their religious beliefs with their efforts to alleviate the suffering caused by the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
Dube, Musa W., and C.J. Makgala, eds. Pula Botswana Journal of African Studies 21, no. 2 (2007).
Dube, Musa W., and Johanna Stiebert, eds. The Bible, Centres and Margins: Dialogues between Postcolonial African and British Biblical Scholars. London: T & T Clark, 2018.
AbstractThere has rarely been an effort to address the missing dialogue between British and African scholars, including in regard to the role of British missionaries during the introduction ofthe Bible and Christianity to many parts of Africa. To break this silence, Musa W. Dube and Johanna Stiebert collect expressions from both emerging and established biblical scholars in the United Kingdom and (predominantly) southern African states.
Divided into three sets of papers, these contributions range from the injustices of colonialism to postcolonial critical readings of texts, suppression and appropriation; each section complete with a responding essay. Questioning how well UK students understand Africancentred and generated approaches of biblical criticism, whether African scholars consider UK-centric criticism valid, and how accurately the western canon represents current UK based scholarship, these essays illustrate the trends and challenges faced in biblical studies in the two centres of study, and discusses how these questions are better answered with dialogue, rather than in isolation.
Dube, Musa W., and K. C. Monaka, eds. Pula Botswana Journal of African Studies Special Issue: Research on Khoesan in Botswana, 20, no. 1 (2006).
Dube, Musa W., and Paul L. Leshota. Breaking the Master’s S.H.I.T. Holes: Doing Theology in the Context of Global Migration. Contact Zone. Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2021.
AbstractThe Trump neo-liberal and global warming era has intensified migration, highlighting the diasporic space and global structures as the context of theological inquiry. It is signified by the rise of overt sexism, racism, classism, anthropocentricism, Islamophobia and intensified conservatism that determine who crosses the boundaries, the terms of their crossing and the hospitality they receive. President Trump's shocking statement that characterized some Two-Thirds World countries as S.H.I.T. Holes as well as his travel ban policies that targeted countries of particular religious faith, attest to overt racism. In this volume, African theological scholars challenge euro-centric racist-global immigration policies and propose the paradigm of breaking the master's S.H.I.T. Holes.
Dube, Musa W., and R. S. Wafula. Postcoloniality, Translation, and the Bible in Africa. Oregon: Pickwick Publications, 2017.
AbstractThis book is critically important for Bible translation theorists, postcolonial scholars, church leaders, and the general public interested in the history, politics, and nature of Bible translation work in Africa. It is also useful to students of gender studies, political science, biblical studies, and history-of-colonization studies. The book catalogs the major work that has been undertaken by African scholars. This work critiques and contests colonial Bible translation narratives by privileging the importance African oral vitality in rewriting the meaning of biblical texts in the African sociopolitical, political, and cultural contexts.
Dube, Musa W., and Sidney K. Berman, eds. Pula Botswana Journal of African Studies 21, no. 1 (2007).
AbstractA special issue focusing on HIV/AIDS & Theological Discourse
Dube, Musa W., Andrew M. Mbuvi, and Dora Mbuwayesango, eds. Postcolonial Perspectives in African Biblical Interpretations. Global Perspectives on Biblical Scholarship 13. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012.
AbstractThis volume foregrounds biblical interpretation within the African history of colonial contact, from North Atlantic slavery to the current era of globalization. It reads of the prolonged struggle for justice and of hybrid identities from multifaceted contexts, where the Bible co-exists with African Indigenous Religions, Islam, and other religions. Showcasing the dynamic and creative approaches of an emerging and thriving community of biblical scholarship from the African continent and African diaspora, the volume critically examines the interaction of biblical texts with African people and their cultures within a postcolonial framework. While employing feminist/womanist, postcolonial, Afrocentric, social engagement, creative writing, reconstruction, and HIV/AIDS perspectives, the authors all engage with empire in their own ways: in specific times, forms, and geography. This volume is an important addition to postcolonial and empires studies in biblical scholarship. The contributors are David Tuesday Adamo, Lynn Darden, H. J. M. (Hans) van Deventer, Musa W. Dube, John D. K. Ekem, Ernest M. Ezeogu, Elelwani B. Farisani, Sylvester A. Johnson, Emmanuel Katongole, Malebogo Kgalemang, Temba L. J. Mafico, Madipoane Masenya (ngwan'a Mphahlele), Andrew M. Mbuvi, Sarojini Nadar, Elivered Nasambu-Mulongo, Jeremy Punt, Gerrie Snyman, Lovemore Togarasei, Sam Tshehla, Robert Wafawanaka, Robert Wafula, Gerald West, Alice Y. Yafeh-Deigh, and Gosnell L. Yorke.
Dube, Musa W., ed. HIV/AIDS and the Curriculum: Methods of Integrating HIV/AIDS InTheological Programmes. Geneva: WCC, 2003.
Dube, Musa W., ed. Other Ways of Reading: African Women and the Bible. Global Perspectives on Biblical Scholarship 2. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2001.
AbstractRooted in the rich story-telling tradition of Africa, this volume of essays, the first of its kind, highlights the unique approach African women bring to reading and interpreting the Bible in their diverse historical and cultural contexts. Early bible translation and interpretation in Africa was carried out primarily by foreign missionaries and so was deeply influenced by patriarchal and colonial ideologies. The strategies of resistance to these dominant traditions exemplified by the contributors to Other Ways of Reading include examining translations in their own languages and reading from a variety of perspectives. Featured methods include storytelling; postcolonial feminist reading; womanhood/bosadi and womanist reading; and reading from and with grassroots communities. The book provides important new ideas and tools for Bible study in Africa and beyond.
Dube, Musa W., ed. Pula Botswana Journal of African Studies 22, no. 1 (2008).
Dube, Musa W., K. C. Monaka, and K. Nthomang, eds. Pula Botswana Journal of African Studies Special Issue: Research on Khoesan in Botswana, 20, no. 2 (2006).
Dube, Musa W., Senzokuhle Setume, Tirelo Modie-Moroka, Rosinah Gabaitse, Malebogo Kgalemang, Elizabeth Motswapong, Mmapula Kebaneilwe, and Tshenolo Madigele. Ubuntu and Women: Building Community in Urban Areas, 2023.
AbstractThe book takes us to women-centred events in Gaborone, the capital city of Botswana. Data was collected from the conversations and events women hold with and for one another on the occasions of bridal, Naomi/Laban, and baby showers. Defining Ubuntu/Botho as the belief that our humanity is only measured by our capacity to welcome, respect and empower the other, this research-based book analyses how women practise Ubuntu/Botho in the urban spaces where the community easily disintegrates to individualism, isolation and poverty. It seeks to explore how Ubuntu/Botho intersects with gender and navigates its space around patriarchy, marriage, motherhood, family and community. It explores rituals and connections between women of different generations such as mothers and daughters, daughters-in-law and mothers-in-law, children and mothers, and their struggles to uphold Ubuntu/Botho in their families, communities and workspaces in the face of patriarchy, urbanisation, capitalism and neo-liberalism. The book employs and generates a multitude of methods and theories to highlight women mothering and delivering Ubuntu/Botho in the urban space communities.
Dube, Musa W., T. Armstrong, N. Sanoto, and C. Scanlon. Moral Education 2. Gaborona: Longman, 2000.
AbstractThis volume focuses on African indigenous women legends and their potential to serve as midwives for gender empowerment and for contributing towards African
Dube, Musa W., Telesia K. Musili, and Sylvia Owusu-Ansah, eds. Gender and African Indigenous Religions. London: Routledge, 2024.
AbstractFocusing on the work of contemporary African women researchers, this volume explores feminist perspectives in relation to African Indigenous Religions (AIR). It evaluates what the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians’ research has achieved and proposed since its launch in 1989, their contribution to the world of knowledge and liberation, and the potential application to nurturing a justice-oriented world. The book considers the methodologies used amongst the Circle to study African Indigenous Religions, the AIR sources of knowledge that are drawn on, and the way in which women are characterized. It reflects on how ideas drawn from African Indigenous Religions might address issues of patriarchy, colonialism, capitalism, racism, tribalism, and sexual and disability-based discrimination. The chapters examine theologies of specific figures. The book will be of interest to scholars of religion, gender studies, Indigenous studies, and African studies.
Dube, Musa W., Telesia K. Musili, and Sylvia Owusu-Ansah, eds. Gender, African Philosophies, and Concepts. London: Routledge, 2024.
AbstractThis volume sets out to explore, propose, and generate feminist theories based on African indigenous philosophies and concepts. It investigates specific
Gudhlanga, Enna Sukutai, Musa W. Dube, and Limakatso E. Pepenene. African Literature, Mother Earth and Religion. Malaga: Vernon Press, 2022.
AbstractThis book is a collection of essays that explore the intersection of Earth, Gender and Religion in African literary texts. It examines cultural, religious, theological and philosophical traditions, and their construction of perspectives and attitudes about Earth-keeping and gender. This publication is critical given the current global environmental crisis and its impact on African and global communities. The book is multidisciplinary in approach (literary, environmental, theological and sociological), exploring the intersection of African creative work, religion and the environment in their construction of Earth and gender. It presents how the gendered interconnectedness of the natural environment, with its broad spirituality and deep identification with the woman, features prominently in the myths, folklores, legends, rituals, sacred songs and incantations that are explored in this collection.Both male and female writers in the collection laud and accept woman’s enduring motif as worker, symbol and guardian of the environment. This interconnectedness mirrors the importance of the environment for the survival of both human and non-human components of Mother Earth. The ideology of women’s agency is emphasised and reinforced by ecofeminist theologians; namely those viewing African women as active agents working closely with the environment and not as subordinates. In the context of the environmental crisis the nurturing role of women should be bolstered and the rich African traditions that conserved the environment preserved. The book advocates the re-engagement of women, particularly their knowledge and conservation techniques and how these can become reservoirs of dying traditions. This volume offers recorded traditions in African literary texts, thereby connecting gender, religion and the environment and helpful perspectives in Earth-keeping.
Gudhlanga, Enna Sukutai, Musa W. Dube, and Limakatso E. Pepenene. Ecofeminist Perspectives from African Women Creative Writers: Earth, Gender, and the Sacred. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024.
AbstractThis volume explores contemporary African women's creative writing, highlighting their contributions to ecofeminist theology. Contributors address the following questions: How do contemporary African women writers depict the Earth/land/environment and its relationship to women in various contexts? How is religion featured in African women's writing? How does religious literature (scriptures) form an intertextual layer in African women's writing? The contributors proceed by analyzing the intersection of religion, gender, class, sexuality, colonialism, and ecology in selected texts written by African women. They bring these texts into conversation with broader eco-feminist theological scholarship, exploring the potential of literary writing to contribute to theological discourse of liberation and social justice in the African and global arena. Enna Sukutai Gudhlanga is Associate Professor in the Department of Languages and Literature at Zimbabwe Open University. Musa Wenkosi. Dube is Professor of New Testament at the Candler School of Theology, Emory University, USA. Limakatso Pepenene is Senior Lecturer in the French Department at the National University of Lesotho
Leshota, Paul, Ericka Dunbar, Musa W. Dube, and Malebogo Kgalemang. Mother Earth, Mother Africa and Biblical Studies : Interpretations in the Context of Climate Change. Bible in Africa Studies 29. Bamberg: University of Bamberg Press, 2021.
AbstractClimate change and its global impact on all people, especially the marginalized communities, is widely recognized as the biggest crisis of our time. It is a context that invites all subjects and disciplines to bring their resources in diagnosing the problem and seeking the healing of the Earth. The African continent, especially its women, constitute the subalterns of global climate crisis. Can they speak? If they speak, can they be heard? Both the Earth and the Africa have been identified with the adjective “Mother.” This gender identity tells tales in patriarchal and imperial worlds that use the female gender to signal legitimation of oppression and exploitation. In this volume, African women theologians and their female-identifying colleagues, struggle with reading and interpreting religious texts in the context of environmental crisis that are threatening life on Earth. The chapters interrogate how biblical texts and African cultural resources imagine the Earth and our relationship with the Earth: Do these texts offer readers windows of hope for re-imagining liberating relationship with the Earth? How do they intersect with gender, race, empire, ethnicity, sexuality among others? Beginning with Genesis, journeying through Exodus, Ruth, Ecclesiastes and the Gospel of John, the authors seek to read in solidarity with the Earth, for the healing of the whole Earth community.
Njoroge, Nyambura J., and Musa W. Dube. Talitha Cum!: Theologies of African Women. Natal: Cluster, 2001.
AbstractThis volume highlights some of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians strategies. Circle ways of doing theology seek to confront all the factors that deny African women their human rights and dignity. It offers penetrating critiques of widely accepted theological frameworks, showing how embedded they are in colonial and patriarchal discourses. Pledges contained to transforming power come through the framework of Talitha Cum, the little girl who was called back to the circle of life.
O’Brien Wicker, Kathleen, Althea Spencer Miller, and Musa W. Dube, eds. Feminist New Testament Studies: Global and Future Perspectives. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Ukpong, Justin, Musa W. Dube, Gerald O. West, M. Alpheus Masoga, K. Norman Gottwald, Jeremy Punt, Tinyiko S. Maluleke, and Vincent L. Wimbush, eds. Reading the Bible in the Global Village: Cape Town. SBL - Global Perspectives on Biblical Scholarship 3. Atlanta: SBL, 2002.
AbstractThe world is increasingly assuming the characteristics of a "global village," as transportation and information technologies make travel and communications around the globe ever quicker and easier. The world of biblical scholarship has not been immune to such changes. Increasingly, biblical scholars everywhere recognize that they are "reading the Bible in the global village," and that as they do so they must be aware of their particular contexts for reading the Bible, and of the relationships and tensions between the global and the local, the general and the particular. This volume, which derives from the 2000 SBL International Meeting in Cape Town, South Africa, presents essays by eight scholars who all either come from Africa or have strong interests in African biblical scholarship. Taken together, their work provides a good overview of and introduction to some of the key issues, themes, theories, and practices that are characteristic of the best contemporary biblical study in Africa.
West, Gerald O., and Musa W. Dube, eds. Semeia 73: "Reading With" African Overtures (1996).
AbstractThe term "reading with" (which is explained more fully in the first essay) signifies a reading process in which the respective subject positions of ordinary, untrained readers and critical, trained readers are vigilantly foregrounded and in which power relations are structurally acknowledged. Who the reading subjects are is carefully specified in each essay. And just as "who" is reading is clearly accounted, so too is "where" the readings take place. The readings are all African readings, as the subtitle indicates. A more detailed explanation of the book's intent is outlined in the Introduction. "Semeia" is an experimental journal devoted to the exploration of new and emergent areas and methods of biblical criticism.
West, Gerald O., and Musa W. Dube, eds. The Bible in Africa: Transactions, Trajectories, and Trends. Leiden: Brill, 2000.
AbstractAlthough the arrival of the Bible in Africa has often been a tale of terror, the Bible has become an African book. This volume explores the many ways in which Africans have made the Bible their own.
The essays in this book offer a glimpse of the rich resources that constitute Africa's engagement with the Bible. Among the topics are: the historical development of biblical interpretation in Africa, the relationship between African biblical scholarship and scholarship in the West, African resources for reading the Bible, the history and role of vernacular translation in particular African contexts, the ambiguity of the Bible in Africa, the power of the Bible as text and symbol, and the intersections between class, race, gender, and culture in African biblical interpretation.
The book also contains an extensive bibliography of African biblical scholarship. In fact, it is one of the most comprehensive collections of African biblical scholarship available in print.
West, Gerald O., Musa W. Dube, and Phyllis A. Bird, eds. “Reading With”: An Exploration of the Interface between Critical and Ordinary Readings of the Bible: African Overtures. Semeia 73. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1996.
Sign up here to receive the ATW Newsletter, which provides updates about the platform and showcases valuable resources, as well as special announcements related to the field of African Christian Theology.