Engelbert Mveng

Engelbert Mveng was born on the ninth of May 1930 at Enam-Ngal in southern Cameroon, to Presbyterian parents, and was baptized Catholic at five. From the minor seminary at Akono he entered the Jesuit novitiate at Djuma, in the Belgian Congo, in 1951; took philosophy in Belgium and theology at Lyon-Fourvière; and on the seventh of September 1963 was ordained the first Cameroonian priest of the Society of Jesus.

That same year Présence Africaine published his Histoire du Cameroun, the first academic history of his country. His doctorat d'État followed at the Sorbonne in 1970, on the Greek sources of Black-African history from Homer to Strabo. He professed history at the University of Yaoundé from 1965, chaired its history department in the 1980s, and directed his ministry's cultural affairs from 1966 to 1974.

He gave African theology one of its enduring terms — "anthropological poverty," the despoiling of a people not only of what they have but of what they are: identity, history, language, dignity. Beside Jean-Marc Éla he stands among the fathers of inculturation theology, and he preached as much with brush as with pen: the Uganda Martyrs altar at Collège Libermann in Douala, the chapel fresco at Hekima College in Nairobi, murals in Chicago and Nazareth. He presided over the Art Commission of the Société africaine de culture and served as Secretary-General of FESTAC '77 at Lagos.

On the night of the twenty-second to twenty-third of April 1995 he was killed in his bed at Yaoundé — nothing stolen, no killer ever named, one of several Cameroonian clergy slain unresolved in those years. Honored be Engelbert Mveng, who painted the Gospel in Africa's colors and wrote her name back into history.