Hannah Wangeci Kinoti

Hannah Wangeci Kinoti was a Kenyan African Feminist theologian. She was a member of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians. Kinoti is notable for her contribution to African Communitarian Ethics. She has over fifty publications under her name. Kinoti was the first female chairperson in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Nairobi, where she rose to Associate Professor. She was a founding member of Wajibu Journal, founded in 1985, focusing on religion, African values and morality, politics, and other societal aspects.

Early life
Hannah Kinoti was born on 1 August 1941 in Nyeri District (now Nyeri County). She is the lastborn of five siblings. Her parents, Ruben and Ruth Gathii, were among the first to convert to Christianity. Kinoti died on April 30, 2001, aged fifty-nine years.

Education
Hannah Kinoti went to Kahuhia Primary School, before proceeding to  Alliance Girls High School. She would later join Makerere College School in Kampala where she did the Cambridge Advanced Level School Certificate, and Makerere College which was at the time a college of the University of East Africa. Hannah Kinoti graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Religious Studies and English in 1966 from the University of Nairobi. Then she went on to do a Graduate Diploma in Teacher Education at St.George University.

Personal life
Hannah Kinoti grew up as a member of her parents' church, the Scottish Presbyterian Church, which later became the Presbyterian Church of East Africa. She became a Christian at the age of 15 years. As a youth, she participated in evangelism, and later on was accredited as a lay preacher in the Methodist Church in Kenya. For many years, she served as superintendent of the Sunday School at the Lavington United Church in Nairobi. In addition, she was called upon to speak on various spiritual, moral, or social topics in Nairobi and further afield. Hannah Kinoti married George Kinoti, a fellow academician and they had five children.

Career
After graduating as a teacher, she taught Bible knowledge, English, divinity, and literature at Kenya High School for five years. She then secured an appointment as a tutorial fellow in 1974 at the University of Nairobi where she did her doctorate in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies. She became an assistant Lecturer in 1982 and later a lecturer in 1984, after completing her doctorate studies. In the mid-1990s a post-doctoral fellowship enabled her to spend six months at the Department of Social Medicine, Harvard University Medical School in Boston, USA, learning methods for research in health and behavior.

At the University of Nairobi, Hannah Kinoti rose through the academic ranks. She was an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies until the time of her sudden death in April 2001. She had served as the department's Chairperson for a maximum term of six years. In addition to her university duties, she at different times served as (i) a member of the Board of Governors of Limuru (now Jumuia) Conference Centre, (ii) a member of the Board of Governors, St. Andrew's School, Turi, (iii) a member of the Board of Governors of  St. Pauls Theological College Limuru (now St Paul's University), (iv) a member of the Board of Directors of CORAT (Christian Organizations Research Advisory Trust), and (v) Chairman, Joint Urban Community  Improvement Program/Scholarship Committee, a department of the National Christian Council of Kenya, (vi) a member of the editorial board/consultant editor of Wajibu Journal of Social and Religious Concern.

She taught students at the University of Nairobi. She was an adjunct lecturer at the Jesuit School of Theology Hekima College and Kenyatta University. At the same time, she carried on a fruitful scholarly life, as shown by the selection of her publications below. She was a member of several professional organizations, namely Eastern Africa Ecumenical Symposium, the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians Kenyan Chapter, the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians Kenyan Chapter, the Association of Theological Institutions in Eastern Africa, and the World Conference of Associations of Theological Institutions.

Gikuyu morality, Afro-communitarian and African Communitarian feminist ethics
Hannah Kinoti was an African feminist theologian renowned for her zeal for African ethics, religion, and culture particularly in her remarkable publication African Ethics: Gikuyu Traditional Morality emphasizing the significance of African cultural value systems as essential elements for liberation from Western culture and religion. She was among the first members to join the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians in its early years. Kinoti's religio-cultural climate and personal life experiences molded her research interest in African ethics and scholarly trajectory. Kinoti's childhood among her Gikuyu people in Nyeri County provided her with a rich ambiance of Gikuyu epistemologies, sense of being, and moral codes. She was grounded in African epistemologies and ethical codes often passed from one generation to another through complex systems, gendered structures, and personnel including rites of passage, taboos, clan systems, and rituals. Her parents were early Christian converts who sought to raise their children in Christianity. Thus, Kinoti was also immersed in a Christian religious climate and conversant with its ethical dictates and norms. She attended Christian missionary schools, became a Christian, served as a lay preacher, and served as a superintendent for her church's Sunday School. As such, Kinoti's moral and ethical training was framed by both Christian and Gikuyu ethical frameworks.

Afro-Communitarian ethics
As a Gikuyu Christian woman, Kinoti perceived a disjuncture in her perceived identity which was not unique to her alone but shared by Gikuyu, Kenyan, and Africans who desired to be Christians who are true to their African heritage. Kinoti began to observe and critique the overwhelming hegemony of Christian moral and ethical codes advanced by Western missionaries which tended to submerge of African moral and ethical codes. These were external to her Gikuyu and African ways of being and were propelled by the force of colonialization. Kinoti problematizes European invasion into Africa with its imposition of religious, cultural, economic, political, and social norms as essentially disruptive and the genesis of disorganization and discrimination of African systems of being. Kinoti also drew attention to how such incursions have established structures for the propagation of neocolonialism maintaining hegemonic control and enforcing narratives of impoverishment. Such intrusions vilified African norms, ways of being, and moral codes as essentially barbaric, impoverished, and fundamentally in opposition to modernity. She critiqued popularized notions of African moral bankruptcy and the assumed absence of moral conscience in Africans. Kinoti sought to reclaim and reconstruct the agency of African ethics, epistemologies, and moral codes by decolonizing and deconstructing Western colonial and imperial hegemonies and norms.

Kinoti sought to construct an ethical system that blended Christianity and African cultural ethics and developed theoretical, conceptual, and methodological modalities toward achieving this. It was important to Kinoti to understand and clearly frame her values, code of ethics, and morality in a manner that fully embraced her identity as a Gikuyu, an African woman, and a Christian. Thus, she deployed language, proverbs, folklore, belief systems, rituals and other forms of indigenous knowledge systems to reconstruct and conceptualize her native Gikiyu morality. She identified a firm belief in the existence of a divine being Ngai/God as the source of moral authority and stipulations among the Agikuyu community, an emphasis on the role of older members of the community as the moral consciousness and link between God and the community, as well as the primary role of the physical worlds including animals, plants, and the land. These three categories, she theorized, constituted the framework that undergirded the Agikuyu code of ethics and morality. With this, Kinoti argued that the goal of the Agikuyu ethical and moral system was to maintain harmony between the categories. She emphasized communality as fundamental to the Agikuyu and advanced an understanding of Afro-communitarian ethics, which centered on wholistic social relationships based on a communal sense of responsibility rather than an individual moral obligation.

African Communitarian feminist ethics
Kinoti was especially concerned with the peculiar experiences of African women. This concern explains her active involvement in the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians and her extensive research on African feminism. Primarily, Kinoti sought to construct an African feminist ethic of liberation that extolled indigenous knowledge systems and unique African ways of being. Her work was influenced by the advancement of Liberation Theology and nurtured by her quest to see the full liberation and empowerment of African women and all humanity. With this, Kinoti engaged in conceptualizing an African communitarian feminist ethics that displayed a consciousness of women's oppression and sought to reclaim their agency and chart a course for the full realization of their rights, empowerment, and liberation.

Kinoti's theorization has three major themes essential in understanding African communal structures and critical towards the full liberation of women and humanity. First, she conceived of human values and living a virtuous life as key indicators of the well-being of an individual and African Indigenous community. Second is the fundamental role of indispensable relationships in the structuring and survival of a community's moral order, which shapes individual actions and defines the community's character. Lastly, the centrality of the immaterial world and the recognition, veneration, and reverence of the spiritual realm and ancestral beings are critical to understanding communal life and shaping the moral fabric of African communities. With this, Kinoti critiqued Western colonial and imperial epistemologies of gender and the interaction between men and women. Her methodology advanced the decolonization and indigenization of morals and suggested the possibility of generating a localized liberative epistemology that ensures the full flourishing of African women and their communities. Kinoti's African communitarian feminist ethics centered on African women's identities. It nurtured an analysis that allowed the deconstruction of oppressive cultures and liberated women to speak from and to their experiences while embracing values of sisterhood, solidarity, mutual respect, and communality.

Selected works

 * Kinoti, H.W. (2013). Growing Old in Africa: New Challenges for the Church. In Waruta, D. W. and Kinoti, H.W. (Eds). Pastoral care in African Christianity: Challenging essays in pastoral theology. Acton Publications, Nairobi, 191–218.
 * Kinoti, H. W. (2010). African ethics: Gĩkũyũ traditional morality. CUEA Press, Nairobi.
 * Kinoti, H.W. (2003). Christology in the East African Revival movement. In Mugambi, J. K., & Magesa, L. (Eds). Jesus in African Christianity: experimentation and diversity in African christology. Acton, Publishers, Nairobi, 60–79.
 * Kinoti, H. W. (2002). Caring in the Family and Community. Crises of life in African religion and Christianity, Lutheran World Federation.
 * Kinoti, H. W. (1999). "African morality: Past and present." In Moral and Ethical Issues in African Christianity: Exploratory Essays in Moral Theology, 2nd ed., edited by J. N. K. Mugambi and Anne Nasimiyu-Wasike, 73–82. Nairobi: Acton Publishers.
 * Kinoti, H. W. (1999). "Matthew 5:1-12 An African Perspective." In Priscilla Pope-Levison and John R. Levison (eds) Return to Babel: Global Perspectives on the Bible, 125–131. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.
 * Kinoti, H.W. (1998). Proverbs in African Spirituality. In Getui, M. N. (Ed). Theological method and aspects of worship in African Christianity. Acton Publishers, Nairobi, 55–78.
 * Kinoti, H.W. (1997). Well-being in African Society and the Bible. In Waliggo, J. M., & Kinoti, H. W. (Eds). The Bible in African Christianity: Essays in Biblical Theology. Acton Publishers, Nairobi, 112–143.
 * Kinoti, H.W. (1997). The Church in the Reconstruction of our Moral Self. In Mugambi, J. N. K. (Ed). The church and reconstruction of Africa: Theological considerations. All Africa Conference of Churches, 115–128.
 * Kinoti, H.W. (1996). Nguiko: A Tempering of Sexual Assault Against Women. In Wamue, G. & Getui, M. Violence Against Women: Reflections by Kenyan Women Theologians. Acton Publishers, Nairobi,
 * Kinoti, H.W. (1994). Pastoral Care in African Christianity: Challenging Essays in Pastoral Theology; Action Publishers
 * Kinoti, H. W. (1993). The Challenge of the New Age Movement and Oriental Mysticism. Mission in African Christianity, Uzima-Press.
 * Kinoti, H.W. (1992). African Morality: Past and Present. in J. N. Mugambi, & N. Wasike, Moral and Ethical issues in African Christianity.  Nairobi: Initiatives, 73–82.
 * Kinoti, H. W. (1988). "Some principles of man-woman relationships in traditional Gĩkũyũ society." Wajibu 2(3): 2–4.