‘God is not neutral in an unjust world’ — late liberation theologian Bishop Bolana

To speak of Bishop Dr John Bolana merely as a church leader is to misunderstand his historical role. He stood in the lineage of liberation theologians who understood a fundamental truth: Christianity in Africa was either a force for liberation or a tool of occupation — never neutral. uTatomkhulu, as I would call him, chose the side of the oppressed, and he chose it unapologetically.

Liberation theology, as lived by Bishop Bolana, was not an academic exercise nor a borrowed theory. It was organic African theology, forged in the lived experience of landlessness, racial capitalism, and spiritual humiliation imposed by colonial Christianity. For him, theology had only one legitimate starting point: the condition of the African masses.

“God is not neutral in an unjust world,” our beloved uTatomkhulu often quipped. Like James H Cone, the father of black liberation theology in the US, Bolana rejected the lie of a “colour-blind” or “neutral” God. Cone famously declared that God is black — not in pigment, but in political location.

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God stands with the oppressed against their oppressors. uTatomkhulu echoed this conviction in practice. His God was not found in grand cathedrals but in dusty New Brighton streets, among the hungry, the unemployed, the youth abandoned by the post-colonial state.

Where Cone wrote, Bolana built. Daily meals, youth festivals, communal discipline — these were not acts of charity but acts of theological resistance.

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