Introduction
There have been broadly four phases in the development of Christianity in Africa. The first of these, which is not part of our main concern here, relates to North Africa where by the middle years of the second century a strong Christian community had emerged, centred on both Carthage and Alexandria.
It was presided over in turn by such influential theologians as Clement of Alexandria (c. 150-215 ce), his pupil Origen (c. 185-254); ‘the brilliant, exasperating, sarcastic, and intolerant yet intensely vigorous and incisive in argument’ Tertullian (160-220), who determined the terminology of Latin theology for the future and was to join the ecstatic religious sect, the Montan- ists; Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, who was martyred in 258; Athanasius, the long-serving Bishop of Alexandria (c. 296-373); and Augustine, Bishop of Hippo (354-430), most influential of all (see Chapter 9).Schism, persecution, failure to sink its roots among the ordinary people, and in the seventh century the advance of Islam, severely curtailed the expansion of the North African Christian Church. With the exception of Egypt and Ethiopia, where the Coptic Church with its strong monastic strain is still even today relatively large, Christianity in North Africa was reduced to a number of very small and scattered communities which, although they were allowed to practise their faith, were forbidden to evangelise.
Moreover the Sahara Desert made missionary work among the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa a virtual impossibility. The Christian evangelisation of this region of Africa was in fact only to begin in the wake of Portugal’s seaborne expansion which got under way in the middle years of the fifteenth century. This marks the second phase in the development of Christianity in Africa which was to cover the period c. 1450-c. 1800. The modem missionary movement followed and lasted until the era of independence, which began for many African states in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The fourth phase covers the period from independence to the present. The rest of this article is concerned with the second, third and fourth phases of the history of Christianity in Africa.