Sub-Saharan Africa, c. 1450-c. 1800
Prince Henry the Navigator (d. 1460) was the architect of Portugal’s geographical and navigational explorations which occasioned the involvement of Christian missionaries in sub-Saharan Africa during the second half of the fifteenth century.
He not only mapped out the plans but also launched the expeditions for the charting of the African coastline, and was given authorisation in a papal Bull in 1455 to go forth and conquer far-off lands and take possession of their wealth. The explorations that followed had a strong religious as well as economic, scientific and political purpose, though in practice it was not always possible to distinguish the religious from these other interests. The Portuguese were not only anxious to establish Christian kingdoms in Africa with a view to spreading Catholicism but also saw these kingdoms as potential trading partners, African gold and slaves being two of the commodities that were of increasing interest to them at the time, and as allies in their struggle against Islam.The year 1482 saw the arrival of a Portuguese ship at La Mina (Elmina) in present-day Ghana (formerly the Gold Coast) and the beginnings of Catholicism on the West African mainland. Mass, according to tradition, was celebrated under a tree and prayers said for the ‘conversion of the natives from idolatry and the perpetual prosperity of the Church’. But it was further south in Benin, in modern-day mid-western Nigeria, that the first serious attempts were made in 1485 to establish those Christian kingdoms envisaged by the Portuguese. Little was accomplished either here or in the nearby kingdom of Warri over the following three hundred years. Some of the more important reasons for this were the shortage of missionary personnel, the deep involvement of some of them in trade, including the slave trade, rather than evangelisation, the dislocation and insecurity caused by the traffic in slaves, the economic and political rivalry between the European powers with interests in the region, the failure to train an indigenous clergy and the reluctance of many African rulers to convert to Christianity and thereby undermine the authority and support they derived from their position as both priest and king in the traditional African politico-religious system.
Somewhat greater success was achieved in the kingdom of the Kongo in present-day Angola, where by the 1550s the ruler and some five hundred of his subjects had converted to Christianity. This success, however, was relatively short-lived for by the opening of the nineteenth century there was little trace of a Christian presence in the region. The early history of Christianity in East and South Africa followed a similar pattern to that in West and Central Africa. Although Bartholomew Dias had rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, followed by Vasco da Gama who arrived at Mombasa in present-day Kenya in 1498, Christian missionary work did not get under way in East Africa until the 1590s with the building of a church at Fort Jesus at the entrance to the mouth of the Mombasa harbour. During the next half century several hundred people in the immediate vicinity and in nearby Malindi and Zanzibar (now part of Tanzania) were converted to Christianity. But soon after, the struggle between the Portuguese and the Arabs for hegemony in the region began, and most of the Christians died in the ensuing conflicts. These ended with the Portuguese leaving the area in the middle of the eighteenth century.
Missionary activity in the hinterland was spearheaded by the Jesuits who reached Sofala (to the south of Mombasa in present-day Mozambique) in 1560. From there they advanced further inland to the Monopatapa (Mutapa) kingdom, in Zimbabwe, where they succeeded in converting the ruler in 1652, the same year that the Dutch entered the Cape and laid the foundations of what was to become the foremost Christian Church in South Africa, the Dutch Reformed Church (Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk, NGK).
At the outset the Dutch, more widely known today as the Boers, did nothing to convert the indigenous population, concentrating instead on obtaining clergy to minister in their own churches. Missionary work in the Cape only began after the British had taken it over from the Dutch in 1795.
While the Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches were at the outset to adopt much the same attitude towards the indigenous people of the Cape as the Dutch, other missionary societies, among them the London Missionary Society (LMS), the Methodists and the Rhenish Mission, became the leading pioneers of missionary endeavour here and elsewhere in Southern Africa. As for the Dutch, they began their historic trek northwards from the Cape which between 1835 and 1848 took them to the Orange Free State, Natal and the Transvaal.The vast majority of the missionaries during this second phase were Roman Catholics, and with a few exceptions it was not until the last quarter of the eighteenth century that the Protestant churches directed their attention to the African continent. By that time the Christian Church in Africa had almost nothing to show for its efforts during the previous three hundred years. Some of the reasons for this have already been mentioned. To these we can add other serious drawbacks, such as the missionaries’ dependence on the secular arm for financial support, transport to and from Africa, and even for permission to carry out their duties outside certain specified areas. During the third phase, this dependence on the state lessened somewhat as missionary societies became more self-supporting and more international in character. The growing opposition to and the eventual abolition of the transatlantic slave trade also facilitated missionary activity in this third period.