African Earthkeepers Volume 2: Environmental mission and liberation in Christian perspective

Author M L (Inus) Daneel was a Professor in Missiology at the University of South Africa (Unisa) and published extensively.  Daneel was a noted eco-theologian, ecumenist, author of fourteen published scholarly volumes on African Christianity and traditional religion, and founder of ecumenical movements in Masvingo Province, Zimbabwe.

Inus was born of missionary parents in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He grew up fluent in Afrikaans and in Karanga, a dialect of Shona, the majority language of Zimbabwe. In 1960, he graduated from the University of Stellenbosch with a B.A. Hons. in Philosophy. He received the prestigious Abe Bailey Bursary, which sent a dozen outstanding South African graduates to the United Kingdom. Cashing in his travel award, he headed to the Netherlands and in 1971 earned the D. Theol. (cum laude), from the Free University of Amsterdam with a dissertation on “The background and rise of Southern Shona Independent Churches.” He was Senior Lecturer and Researcher in Africa sponsored by the Free University of Amsterdam and the African Study Centre of Leiden University from 1965 to 1971. He founded and directed both the African Independent Church Conference (Fambidzano) (1972-1989), and the Zimbabwean Institute of Religious Research and Ecological Conservation (ZIRRCON) (1984-2000). In addition to his activism, he was Professor of Missiology at the University of South Africa (1981-1995), and Professor of Missiology Part-Time at the Boston University School of Theology from 1997 until his retirement in 2012. In 2004, his war novel Guerilla Snuff was named by the Zimbabwe International Book Fair as one of the best 75 books of twentieth-century fiction in Zimbabwe (one of 25 in English), the only one by a white Zimbabwean.

In 1965, Daneel moved into the Matopo Hills in apartheid-era Rhodesia to conduct research on indigenous Christian movements. Befriending the priests of the traditional high god Mwari, Daneel was the only white person admitted to the oracular cave of the deity. The deity sent him to warn Rhodesian government officials of the impending civil war, if white settlers did not return land to the Africans. His warnings went unheeded. For his refusal to bear arms against the Shona people, he was summoned before a Rhodesian military tribunal and threatened with imprisonment. With leaders of African Initiated Churches, he founded the ecumenical movement Fambidzano that conducted theological education by extension throughout central Zimbabwe. As the adopted son of the Rev. Samuel Mutendi, founder of the Zion Christian Church in Zimbabwe, Daneel sat in the docket with the Mutendi family and bailed them out when they were convicted of resisting government seizure of ancestral land. After the war, although he was a Dutch Reformed church elder, Daneel was made a Bishop by Ndaza Zionist Churches in recognition of his ecological leadership. Called “Bishop Moses,” he raised funds for church development projects, planted trees, and wrote the most extensive detailed studies of African indigenous churches in a single cultural group.

He passed away in 2024 at the age of 87.