Interpretation of the Video, "Out of Africa"
by Jane Adams

Religion, in an age of globalization, flows almost unchecked around the world. In this film, African missionaries bring a renewed Christianity to predominantly white churches in the Mississippi Delta. Father Theophilus Okpara, an Igbo from Nigeria, is associate pastor of Our Lady of the Lake Catholic Church in Lake Village, Arkansas -- a church built by immigrants from Italy who worked as sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta. Brother John Danquah, from Ghana, and Brother Charles Obimbo, from Kenya, helped dedicate a new church of Bible Believers outside of Yazoo City, Mississippi. They are followers of Brother William Branham, an American who traveled into Africa and throughout the world as an evangelist.

These African Christians speak of being a "missionary in America," of their experience with relations between black and white, of leaving their homelands for strange and different lands, and of their religious faith. They also reflect on the paths that their faith has traveled -- carried by white missionaries to Africa, and now brought back to America by African missionaries.

These are the themes: globalization, and the global flow of Christianity; the complicated role of missionaries in Africa; the role of religion in the development of wealth and prosperity; racism and its sometimes surprising legacies; the often conflictual relationships between Christian denominations; and the personal experience of traveling to a strange and distant land.

This section explores these themes.