This double issue of the Journal honors two giants of African Christianity who have died in the past year, Marthinus “Inus” Daneel (1937-June 29, 2024) and Allison Mary Howell (1951-2023). Zimbabwean by birth, Daneel was a pioneering eco-theologian and expert in the early study of African Independent Churches and movements, as well as an ecumenist and an activist on behalf of the Shona people. Howell was Australian and lived as a missionary before becoming a scholar, making her home among the Kasena, in northern Ghana, where she ultimately was buried. Daneel and Howell were both children of missionaries. One powerful aspect of their two separate legacies was their willingness to intimately embrace the people among whom they chose to live and whose religious lives they documented. As a result, the scholarship they left behind for the African and the global church is not the teaching of “armchair theologians,” but instead that of researchers who were first trusted friends and even adopted family members. Their enduring legacies emerge from the richness of intentional relationships in their immediate cultural contexts, in educational institutions with their students, and within the global church and scholarly community at large.
Michèle Miller Sigg (Mon,) studied this question.