Seeing the World Through African Eyes: A Tribute to Andrew Walls

Abstract

This is an autobiographical essay describing the seminal impact that eminent World Christianity scholar Andrew Walls (1928–2021) had on my intellectual life and scholarship from the time I became a student at the Center for the Study of Christianity in the Non-Western World (at Edinburgh University) up to his passing in 2021. What is presented here is not an account of Walls’s illustrious career and extraordinary legacy; but rather a chronicle of my intellectual journey over a period of more than thirty years, during which Walls shaped my scholarship and academic commitments more profoundly than any other person. The story pulls back the curtain on what was, for me, a life-transforming relationship. It reveals in close detail how Walls’s tutelage, scholarly vision, and winsome brilliance molded and fashioned both my emergence as an African scholar and my evolution into a scholar of World Christianity (including the approaches, perspectives, and core interests that have characterized my work in the last two decades). The tale is told strictly through the lens of personal experience, with all the inherent biases and blind spots that this implies; not to mention the limitations of human memory that every historian knows all too well. Inevitably, however, the narrative arc engenders some coverage of Walls’s pioneering and immense contribution to World Christianity scholarship. It has been said that Walls “may be the most important person you don’t know.” It is my fond hope that this article goes some way to filling this knowledge gap. But, ultimately, this is a story of how a young African from Sierra Leone became a Walls-ian.