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By virtue of Mercy Amba Oduyoye's birth in 1934 and childhood in Ghana under British rule, her career has coincided with the tumultuous period of modern African history: the struggle against colonial domination, political instability after independence, war and violent religious and ethnic strife, the widening economic gap between the Northern and Southern hemispheres, famine and ecological disaster, the overthrow of apartheid, and the tortuous road to democracy. As a feminist theologian and a leader in the ecumenical movement, Oduyoye has worked tirelessly to ensure that women's voices and concerns have been heard amid such momentous changes in African society.
In her several books and more than eighty published articles, Oduyoye has written on numerous subjects, such as the doctrine of God, the Bible, anthropology, the church, mission, and spirituality. One of her central concerns has been the ways African religion and culture shape and influence the experiences of African women. Culture can provide women their communal identity and sense of belonging, while at the same time it can be manipulated and used as a tool of domination. She writes, "African women's theology is developing in the context of global challenges and situations in Africa's religio-culture that call for transformation."' This article examines one issue that occupies a pivotal position in her writings over the past several decades: the relation between cultural hermeneutics and Christian theology.
Culture as a Site of Struggle
In Orientalism, Edward W. Said argues that colonialism involves political, economic, and military domination, as well as cultural hegemony in terms of the production of knowledge about the "other" and representation of the colonized in art, novels, travelogues, and missionary and government reports.2 Labeled variously as the "primitive" and "uncivilized" "dark continent," Africa has had its unfair share of racist and colonialist myths projected onto its cultures and peoples. When the Enlightenment thinkers divided people into different racial groupings, some of the leading figures, such as Kant and Hume, placed "Negroes" at the bottom level of their racial hierarchy.3 In the nineteenth century the nascent fields of anthropology, ethnology, comparative anatomy, and comparative religions described Africans as "savage," "childlike," and "barbaric" in their so-called scientific theories about the races.
To counteract such colonial misrepresentations, anticolonial struggles in Africa began with the affirmation...