Friends, comrades, theologians; Kairos was never a polite theological statement nor a document. It was a dangerous exercise, written in blood, prison cells, betrayal and sacrifice. It was a disruptive cry: “The time has come. The moment of truth has arrived.”
But here is the danger: if we domesticate Kairos into a museum piece, if we treat it as a trumpet blast for one era only, we betray its essence. Kairos is not past. It is a drumbeat meant to keep the church awake.
The Kairos Document’s Triple Critique
The 1985 Kairos Document was razor-sharp precisely because it named names. It cut through theological fog with a triple critique:
- State Theology: the blasphemous wedding of cross and crown. Apartheid’s “Romans 13 theology” blessed injustice, sacralised white power, and declared God to be on the side of the oppressor.
- Church Theology: the comfortable neutrality of the privileged. Reconciliation without justice, pious prayers without praxis, an abstract gospel that avoided real suffering. This was cowardice.
- Prophetic Theology: the alternative. Naming apartheid as sin, standing with the oppressed, insisting that God is always, without exception, on the side of the crucified of history.
Kairos insisted that neutrality in the face of injustice is betrayal.
Why Kairos Must Remain in Black Theological Soil
But here is the crisis today: too many have attempted to uproot Kairos movement from its liberative soil. White academia declared Black Theology of Liberation “dead.” That declaration is not just wrong; it is an act of epistemicide: an attempt to silence a Black intellectual tradition that dared to say: “we will define ourselves, we will theologise from our own wounds”. “We will read our bodies as sacred texts…”
Kairos without BTL is easily co-opted into safe “public theology” a theology that theorises about the poor but refuses to march with them. That is what Allan Boesak warned against: theology that “speaks about revolutions” but will never dare to be in their heart/ at the picket lines.
Black Theology of Liberation insisted on both structural and spiritual liberation. It named apartheid not just as prejudice, but as an evil colonial systemic rooted in land theft, commodification, racism, dehumanisation and power. Steve Biko was right: “The most powerful weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” Kairos movement* that does not take seriously Black identity, dignity, gender & sexuality, and the quest for true humanity will collapse into liberal platitudes.
A Brief Case of Ekasi Theologies
Ekasi Theologies are proof. Born in funeral processions, in the wails of mothers, in the survival of black youth, in pit latrines and pota-potas of the DA; they are a living rebuke to ivory tower oppressive theologies.
- They declare that the black body is a sacred text.
- They lament the township life
- The confront the continued dehumanisation of black people
- They reject white supervision and their posture of being deputy gods.
- They declare: “uThixo omnyama uphakama nini?” when will the Black God rise?
Ekasi Theologies are not begging for validation from any academy. They are a theologies from below, disrupting hierarchies, insisting that the voices of women, youth, queer, and poor black people are not marginal footnotes but the very heartbeat of theology. They have no emphasis on saving souls only but on reading bodies as sites of struggle.
Indigenous Knowledges and Anticolonialism: Sharpening the Spear for Today
But here is where the spear must be sharpened further: Kairos must now be paired with Indigenous Knowledges and anticolonial critique. To move away from western vocabularies and canons of knowledge…
Why? Because apartheid may have fallen politically, but coloniality endures. Our universities still treat Western knowledge as universal, while African cosmologies are side-lined as “primitive.” This is nothing less than epistemic violence.
- Indigenous Knowledges remind us that knowledge is local, relational, collective, and dynamic. They refuse the delocalised arrogance of Western universalism.
- They are not dead relics. They are living, adaptive, holistic; spanning health, ecology, spirituality.
- To reclaim them is to resist assimilation, to decolonise the mind, to restore dignity and agency.
Anticolonialism reminds us that decolonisation is not a metaphor. It is about dismantling structures of power and reclaiming land, language, and identity. It is about epistemic justice: refusing the monoculture of Western scientism and creating a pluriverse of knowledges and theologies.
If Kairos was the prophetic spear against apartheid, then Liberation Praxis, Indigenous Knowledges and Anticolonial praxis are what sharpen it against today’s coloniality of power, economy, and epistemology.
The Challenge
So let me be blunt: a Kairos movement that refuses Indigenous Knowledges is incomplete. A Kairos theology that ignores blackness is toothless. A Kairos theology that does not centre Liberation Praxis is co-opted.
The task before us is not to nostalgically reread 1985, but to embody a continuous Kairos Black Consciousness; one that keeps the church awake in the face of corruption, greed, xenophobia, epistemic violence, femicide, homophobia and new forms of oppression.
Ekasi Theologies are already showing us the way: as youthful theologies rooted in land, in language, in lament, in survival. Indigenous Knowledges expand this horizon further, refusing the arrogance of one knowledge system, insisting on epistemic pluralism and justice.
Closing
Kairos was never meant to be safe. It was always meant to pierce colonial violence.
So I end with this: The Kairos spear must remain sharpened by liberation praxis, by Intersectionality, by Indigenous Knowledges and by anticolonial struggle.
The drumbeat has not stopped. The only question is whether we, the church, will stay awake, keep marching, and dare to follow the God who is always found on the side of the crucified of history.