John Mbiti

John Samuel Mbiti was born on 30 November 1931 in the village of Mulango, in Kitui County of eastern Kenya, into a Kamba (Akamba) Anglican family. Raised in the late-colonial highlands, he was schooled at Alliance High School before continuing his studies at the University College of Makerere in Kampala, where he graduated in 1953.

His path then carried him across three continents. He earned degrees at Barrington College in Rhode Island (B.A. 1956, B.Theology 1957) and completed a doctorate in theology at the University of Cambridge in 1963. Ordained an Anglican priest, he served parishes in England before returning to teach at Makerere University from 1964, where he became a defining voice in a new generation of African scholarship.

In 1969 he published African Religions and Philosophy, a landmark work that challenged the long-standing assumption that traditional African religious ideas were primitive or anti-Christian, and instead presented them as coherent systems worthy of serious study. His companion works — Concepts of God in Africa, Introduction to African Religion, and others — helped open the study of African religion in universities across Africa, Europe, and North America.

Later he directed the World Council of Churches' Ecumenical Institute at Bossey and taught at the University of Bern in Switzerland, while also ministering to a parish in Burgdorf. He died on 5 October 2019. Widely honored as a patriarch of African theology and philosophy, Mbiti gave his people's inherited wisdom a place of dignity in the world's great conversations, and his memory endures wherever that wisdom is honored.