A few friends, privy to our cover stars before our announcements, were baffled at first: why is a religious figure on the cover of a literary and film magazine? Open Country Mag had profiled and interviewed industry leaders outside literature and film before, but should our tenth cover not have an artist from either vocation? It’s Cardinal Arinze, I told one. Think about it. And then they got it.
The reason is our ultimate vision as a site of foundational culture storytelling — the first of its kind in African media. Our nearly 16,000 email subscribers understand that an Open Country Mag Profile is like nothing else on the Internet: no matter how many times an artist had been written about, our Profiles remain revelatory by putting them in not only biographical and industrial contexts but also in an emotional one, locating them in the mesh of history. In form, quality, and depth, they set a new bar in African and Black media.
Our readers also expect something new, a reframing of what they believed they already knew, and the fact that Cardinal Arinze — in seven decades of unparalleled service in the Catholic Church, some of which he spent in the upper echelon of the Roman Curia — had never been the subject of a major Profile puts in focus how much of our contemporary history remains uncontextualized. People know that people like him — members of the first generation of post-Independence Africans — are icons. Most people don’t know why and how.
I was fortunate to know because I grew up attending Block Rosary Crusade in Aba, southeastern Nigeria, the region covered by the old Onitsha Metropolitan See, where he began his work. It seemed, in my five-year-old mind, that the hierarchy of holiness was God, the pope, and Cardinal Arinze, and then our bishop. At some point, ensconced in Catholic trivia, I learned that he was once the youngest bishop in the world. By the time I met his secretary, Rev. Fr. Anthony Ezeugo, I knew that his story needed to be told. Fr. Ezeugo arranged it and we did the interview in February.
The history of Blackness is one of constant erasure and reinstatement, and when it comes to the papacy, what we are left with is that there have been three African popes: St. Victor I, St. Miltiades, and St. Gelasius I, all of them Berbers, the second of them widely considered to have been Black. Today, the Chair of St. Peter is a spectacle for the media and the public, and if popes were selected by those metrics, Cardinal Arinze, respected by peers and popular among the laity, might be one now. He was touted as papabile, a top contender, in both 2005 and 2013, the conclaves that elected Benedict XVI and Francis I. But, as he has said over the years and as he said again in our conversation, that is not something he concerns himself with.
He believes that life proceeds with Providence, that everything he has done is only because God laid them out for him to do. He only followed that script and it led him where it led him: being baptized by the Blessed Iwene Tansi and later advocating for his beatification, surviving the Biafran War and preserving the independence of the Catholic Church in Eastern Nigeria, and being called to Rome, where he rose as the highest-ranking African and Black official of the Church.
Two thousand years of tradition etch the Roman Catholic Church in longevity, but, in Nigeria, It has grown unbroken for only less than two hundred years. An estimated 15% of Nigerians are Catholic, around 31.6 million people, making it the second largest Catholic population in Africa, after the Democratic Republic of Congo’s 49.3 million, which is 53% of the total Congolese population. Worldwide, Nigerian Catholics attend weekly Mass the most, a whooping 94% of them. Among the 1.3 billion Catholics globally, 256 million are Africans, 18% of the population, and the continent is on pace to outnumber the European majority. Yet Catholicism is a faith in dilemma, under pressure from scandals, modernity, and even the trappings of schism. Among those holding the door, pushing back, is Cardinal Arinze, a believer in the traditionalist Church.
To the thousands on TV and the millions over a lifetime of apostolic work, and certainly to the barrage of Western journalists who look to him for answers, Cardinal Arinze is something of an informal patriarch of the African Church, a guiding light of explanations. It is an inevitable role, thrust upon him, that he has also embraced with gusto. Our cover story captures these and much more. It may be the first of its kind of an African religious figure. ♦
Read: “The Creed of Cardinal Arinze”
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Previous Cover Announcements
— Leila Aboulela Is on the December 2023 Cover of Open Country Mag
— Rita Dominic Is on the March 2023 Cover of Open Country Mag
— Chinelo Okparanta Is on the December 2022 Cover of Open Country Mag
— The Next Generation of African Literature Is on the April 2022 Cover of Open Country Mag
— Damon Galgut Is on the February 2022 Cover of Open Country Mag
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Is on the September 2021 Cover of Open Country Mag
— Teju Cole Is on the July 2021 Cover of Open Country Mag
— Maaza Mengiste Is on the January 2021 Cover of Open Country Mag
— Tsitsi Dangarembga Is on the December 2020 Cover of Open Country Mag
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