Skip to main content

Researcher of the Month, November 2024: Kevin Ward

Category
Researcher of the Month
Date

Dr Kevin Ward was Associate Professor of African Religious Studies at the University of Leeds from 1995 to 2014. He is now retired, living in Leeds, and is an honorary research fellow of CRPL. 

 

Tell us about your research journey.

I’m a historian by training. My interest in Africa began when I went to Kenya in 1969 as a school teacher - and found that I was to teach the new curriculum on African (rather than British) history. It was a steep learning curve! But I became fascinated by the richness of African history and culture, and when I went to Cambridge to do a PhD, I made the decision to change from my original topic (on the Scottish Enlightenment) to studying the development of Christianity in colonial Kenya. I was able to spend a whole year back in Kenya on fieldwork, walking miles in rural areas, with my tape-recorder, to recover oral testimony. My thesis focused on two issues: first, the way in which the missionary hope of establishing a united Protestant church transcending denominational boundaries was scuttled by internal missionary disputes between liberal and fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible; and, second, the conflict between African Christians and missionaries over the value of African cultural practices, most specifically, over the issue of what was then called ‘female circumcision’ [female genital mutilation], which in 1929 led to the creation of a number of independent African churches.

After completing my PhD in 1976, I taught for 16 years in the Bishop Tucker Theological College, the main seminary of the (Anglican) Church of Uganda, teaching both Church History and Systematic Theology, always an area of interest for me since my days at Edinburgh University. I went to Uganda at the height  of the Amin dictatorship, which put great pressure on the churches, and during which a number of Catholic and Protestant leaders were murdered. For a time, my college was taken over as a barracks for Libyan troops brought in to help Amin. We recovered the college with the fall of the Amin regime, but were soon overtaken by 6 years of civil war, until Yoweri Museveni took over in 1986.

Coming to Leeds in 1995 enabled me to research and write about Uganda’s history: religious conflict between Catholics, Protestants and Muslims, the importance of the East African Revival movement in creating a vibrant African spirituality, and on-going problems of Church-State relations in Uganda’s more recent history. In recent years Uganda has often been at the centre of disputes over LGBT+ rights, and I have written  on the churches’ involvement in creating a climate of hostility to gay Ugandans.

 

What are you currently working on?

In retirement I have continued to work on issues of Christian history in East Africa, including issues of sexuality; also a study of evangelical Anglicans in Rwanda during Belgian colonial rule and the entanglements of religion and ethnicity, which led to violence in  Burundi as well as Rwanda, culminating in the 1994 genocide. I have also recently completed a chapter for a Handbook on Christianity in Africa on the pioneering work of Professor Adrian Hastings, who first established an interest in religion in Africa  at this university, a legacy for which both Adriaan van Klinken and I are indebted.

My life had been involved with Africa, in one way or another, for 40 years, and in retirement I looked for a new focus of interest. I found it in a study of the history and culture of East Asia, particularly China, Japan and Korea. I have made many friends from the growing numbers of men and women from these countries studying in Leeds, and have visited all three countries. I have tried to learn some elementary Chinese and Japanese, and have been making some effort to bring my research on Africa and Asia together. For example, I am working on a contrasting study of LGBT+ issues in Uganda, Japan and Korea, showing how Buddhism, Confucianism, traditional religions, Christianity, globalisation and modernity, have all contributed to the differing approaches of these countries to the social and ethical issues of homosexuality.

 

In what ways do you feel your research examines the role of religion in public life and the relationship between the two?

My research has largely involved studies of worldwide Christianity, in situations where secularism and the privatisation of religion are not considered the norm, and where ‘modernity’ does not simply follow the patterns of European and North American development,  even though the pressures  of western neo-liberalism and globalisation are immense. Religion in all its diversity is one of the crucial factors in resistance, whether it be an African Christianity emancipated from its colonial  heritage, or East Asian cultural and religious movements, including Christianity, which problematise both capitalist and socialist regimes.