Sub-Saharan Africa, c. 1800-c. 1960

The Nineteenth Century

The origins of this third phase of the Christian missionary movement in Africa owe much to the concern to remedy the evil effects of the slave trade and to replace it by what were termed ‘legitimate’ trade and commerce and by agricultural development, all of which was to be inspired by Christian virtues and values, an approach to evangelisation usually referred to as that of the Bible and the Plough.

In West Africa the modern missionary movement began with the establishment of Christian colonies in Sierra Leone in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The so-called problem of the ‘black poor’ in Britain, exacerbated by the ruling of Lord Chief Justice Mansfield in 1772 that the holding of slaves was illegal and by the arrival of black soldiers who had fought on the British side during the American War of Independence (1776-83), preoccupied humanitarians and abolitionists such as Thomas Clarkson, Granville Sharp, Samuel Hoare, Henry Thornton and Zachary Macaulay, all members of or associated with the Evangelical wing of the Church of England known as the Clapham Sect. Some were also con­nected with the Sierra Leone Company. The solution devised to deal with the problem of the ‘black poor’, which at the same time would enable the evangelisation of Africa to begin, consisted in settling these black people in Sierra Leone, an ideal entry point to the hinterland, it was believed. It was also a place where the settlers would have little difficulty in finding land and, through ‘legitimate’ enterprise grounded in Christian values, acquire wealth. In this way a prosperous and virtuous African middle class would in time emerge and lead their fellow Africans along the twin paths of Christianity and ‘civilisation’ and away from ‘darkness’ and ‘idolatry’. Europe would also benefit from having helped to raise up a new African business and trading elite, with whom it could enter into ‘legitimate’ commerce and thereby offset any economic disadvantage that might ensue from the abolition of the slave trade.

The first of these settlements, notably Granville Town, named after Sharp (also euphemistically known as the ‘Province of Freedom’), were largely unsuccessful, as also were later attempts. Similar ventures in Liberia by the American Colonization Society in the first quarter of the nineteenth century also started inauspiciously. In fact, by the end of the nineteenth century, while there were several thousand Christians in Freetown and Monrovia, capitals of Sierra Leone and Liberia respectively, Christianity had made almost no impact at all on the peoples of the hinterland in either country.

The aim of most Protestant missionary societies in the nineteenth century was the establishment of self-supporting, self­governing African churches, a policy pursued with conviction and determi­nation by Henry Venn, secretary of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) from 1841 to 1875. To this end Venn emphasised the absolute necessity of engaging Africans as equal partners with European missionaries in the work of Christian evangelisation and of establishing a practical, relevant Christian­ity, which would contribute not only to the spiritual development of the people but also to an improvement in their quality of life. As a result, an industrial school was opened by the CMS in the 1840s at Abeokuta in western Nigeria, and agricultural and other relevant schemes were introduced. Moreover, many of these societies appointed Africans to posts of responsi­bility. For example, the CMS in the 1850s placed the Nigerian Samuel Ajayi Crowther in charge of the Niger Delta Pastorate, which covered what is today a large part of Nigeria. In 1864 Crowther was consecrated a bishop at Canterbury. However, some European missionaries were not prepared to accept the authority of Africans and even questioned their competence to manage the affairs of the churches in their charge. This kind of opposition not only forced Crowther to resign his post in 1890 (in reality he was displaced) but also contributed, as we shall see, to the rise of what are known as the African independent churches.

There were, of course, other missionaries like Chris­tina and Franfois Coillard of the Paris-based Protestant Evangelical Mission­ary Society (SME) who worked both for and with the local people. The Coillards, for example, found themselves working with Mohesh and his people as they struggled to save their kingdom in the Drakensberg mountains from English and Boer domination. There were many others who followed a similar path, among them David Livingstone, Johannes Vanderkemp, Robert Moffat and John Philip of the London Missionary Society (LMS), who sought to co-operate with rather than rule over Africans. Livingstone pioneered the beginnings of Christianity and ‘legitimate’ commerce between 1842 and 1874 in parts of what are today Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique and Tanzania, while other Scottish missionaries of the LMS were to consolidate his work and that of others in these areas. Yet others were to make a notable contribution to the development of Christianity in both East and South Africa. By the middle of the nineteenth century not only the LMS but many missionary societies were expanding their activities in South Africa, among them the Wesleyan Methodists, the Moravians, the Lutherans and several Presbyterian societies. From the last emerged the entirely black Bantu Pres­byterian Church and the mainly white Presbyterian Church of Southern Africa. In 1836 the Dutch Reformed Church began its first mission to blacks,

Christianity in Africa a move that contributed much to one of several schisms within this church during the nineteenth century.

Despite the impression conveyed so far, the nineteenth-century missionary movement was not an exclusively Protestant affair. In fact Roman Catholic missionary societies had been engaged in the task of evangelisation from the first quarter of the nineteenth century when the French order of nuns, the Sisters of St Joseph of Cluny, undertook hospital and teaching work in Senegal and the Gambia. Catholic priests had returned to South Africa in 1805.

There were numerous instances of this Catholic­Protestant and Christian-Muslim rivalry, late nineteenth-century Uganda providing one of the best known examples of both. It was there in 1892 that Catholics from the mission-stations of the White Fathers and Protestants from the CMS engaged each other in open combat for power and influence among the Buganda. This followed on the Christian-Muslim war of 1889, which had not only brought the Christian leaders into political power but had also established the principle of cujus regio ejus religio.

During the nineteenth century the Catholic Church was to make most headway in what became during the last quarter of that century and the first decade of the twentieth century French, Belgian and Portuguese colonial territories, for example in the former French and Belgian Congo (Congo Brazzaville and Kinshasa respectively), the Ivory Coast, Senegal, Guinea (Conakry), the People’s Republic of Benin, Togo, Cameroon, Gabon, Angola, Rwanda-Burundi and Mozambique. The Cape Verde Islands and Sao Tome and Principe were a virtual Roman Catholic monopoly from the fifteenth century, the presence of Protestant missionaries only being tolerated in recent times.

Although the first Roman Catholic church was built in South Africa at Mossel Bay, Natal, in 1501, andjesuits had visited the Cape in 1685, followed, as we have seen, by other priests in 1805, Catholics only began regular missionary work in earnest in that country in 1820. Even then progress was slow, one of the reasons being that they were not officially granted freedom of worship until 1870.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Christian mis­sionary societies were involved in the work of Christianising and ‘civilising’ Africa, from virtually every country in Europe and from North America, from those already mentioned to the Finnish Lutherans active among the Ovambo in Namibia and their Swedish colleagues in the Congo and

Ethiopia. While, as we have seen, this renewal of missionary involvement in Africa was triggered in large measure by the anti-slavery campaign, it was also a response to the Evangelical Revival which swept through parts of Europe and North America in the eighteenth century and to the gradual opening up and greater knowledge of the continent made possible by ex­plorers, settlers and traders. As others had become in the second half of the eighteenth century the pathfinders of the missionary in Africa, the missionary himself had, in the opinion of some scholars, become one hundred years later the ‘flag-bearer of colonialism’ on that continent.

This, however, would seem to be something of an over-simplification; for while there were cases where missionaries encour­aged and even appealed to governments to intervene and establish a presence in Africa (the British bombardment and annexation of Lagos, Nigeria, in 1851 and the French conquest of the western Sudan (Mali) in the late 1880s being cases in point) missionaries tended on the whole to be somewhat sceptical of the benefits to be derived from large-scale, direct Western politi­cal and economic involvement in Africa. As it turned out, the first stages of formal colonialism from the mid-1880s to the outbreak of the First World War were, in Uganda and elsewhere, remarkably favourable in somewhat different ways not only to Christianity but also to Islam.

Finally, while during the nineteenth century much more had been achieved by European and North American missionaries, both black and white, in terms of the number of those converted to Christian­ity, the building of churches, schools and hospitals and the introduction of ‘legitimate’ commerce in among other places the Zambesi valley where the slave trade had once flourished, than during the whole of the period from c.

The Twentieth Century

During the colonial era, which in the case of most African states had come to an end, at least in a formal sense, by the mid-1960s, Christianity made rapid progress in the so-called ‘pagan’ areas, that is in those areas which had not been heavily influenced by Islam. Where Islam had taken root, for example in northern Nigeria, the northern Sudan and in large areas of former French West Africa, it made virtually no headway, despite its earlier optimism that African Muslims would flock to the Christian churches immediately on seeing what were regarded as the obvious benefits to be derived from membership when compared with allegiance to Islam, Western education and medicine in particular. However, apart from the fact that Christian missionary activity was prohibited or severely restricted by colonial governments in certain Muslim areas, such as northern Nigeria, African Muslims generally turned out to be more secure in and committed to their religion than was expected, and Islam sometimes exercised greater appeal than Christianity, even in the designated ‘pagan’ areas such as the Ivory Coast.

It was nevertheless the case that Christianity, wher­ever it opened schools and even more wherever it made full use of the catechist or lay African evangelist, made considerable gains in influence and in num­bers of converts. The upheaval and dislocation resulting from the colonial takeover of the region facilitated change, eastern Nigeria being one striking example of the phenomenal growth of mission Christianity in this period. It was a growth that had much to do with the school approach to evangelisation adopted by both Catholics and Protestants. Senegal is a striking case of the expansion achieved as a direct result of the greater use made of catechists in the teaching and preaching of the Christian faith. Moreover, during the First World War, in parts of both East and West Africa where German and French missionaries had to withdraw for chaplaincy service and other reasons, their mission-stations and churches advanced and prospered under African leader­ship. After the war when the rail and road networks were appreciably extended to reach far into the interior, and with the introduction of the motor-bicycle and the motor-car, the scope and pace of missionary work widened and quickened, producing dramatic results as far as the numerical growth of Christianity was concerned. Furthermore, an increasing number of educated Christians began to enter the professions and the modern sector of the economy, achieving thereby more status and influence in society. While this was largely unintentional on the part of the mission churches, this educated, relatively prosperous elite which they were helping to create became the leaders of the independence movements that began to take shape in the 1930s and 1940s.

Other important developments in this period include the slow but steady increase in the numbers of indigenous clergy, two of the best examples being in eastern Nigeria and Cameroon, and the change in attitude to both Islam and African ‘traditional’ religion. The former came to be regarded less and less by the Christian missionary as an inferior religion, a post-Christian heresy founded by a corrupt, immoral and psychologically disturbed, self-proclaimed prophet, and more as a genuine religion, and although fundamentally in error, one that should be treated with greater tolerance, sympathy and understanding rather than with the scorn and ridicule which had been until then characteristic of the Christian approach to Islam.

As for African ‘traditional’ religion, this had been widely attacked as little more than a bundle of primitive superstitions. Some missionaries in the very early years of this century, like the Catholic bishop Shanahan, in eastern Nigeria, had taken a more positive approach, recognis­ing that Africans did have a concept of and faith in a Supreme Being, and that this could provide a useful vehicle for introducing them to the Christian idea of God. But on the whole, as far as written sources are concerned, missionary interpretations of and approach to African ‘traditional’ religion were almost entirely negative; it was in fact an evil and harmful influence from which African converts were to be protected and shielded. This explains much about the location of the Christian churches which were sited away from the ordinary, everyday world of the African. The writings and research of missionaries like Father Schmidt, who in the 1930s argued that African religions were in ‘origin’ at least monotheistic, and of Father Tempels who in his Bantu Philosophy used the Bergsonian notion of ‘ vital force’ to interpret the unifying idea underlying all Bantu cosmology, ethics and ritual, thereby attempting a dialogue between African religious thought and Western philosophical categories, did much to change the climate of opinion and approach to ‘traditional’ religion.

However negative and hostile its view of and approach to African ‘traditional’ religion, Christianity in Africa was never able to escape from its influence and today seeks positively to integrate into its own liturgy and teaching elements of African ritual, beliefs and practices. Many of the traditional life cycle rituals in the religious and cultural life of African Christians such as birth, marriage and funeral rites, and practices such as the veneration of ancestors, once frowned upon by mission Christian­ity and which consequently were simply allowed to run parallel to (where they were not deemed actually to collide with) the so-called orthodox version of the faith, have now been incorporated in one form or another into the Church’s liturgy. It is not an exaggeration to say that in certain respects the Christianity introduced by the mission churches, for the most part very Western in organisation, content, character and style, has undergone consid­erable transformation as a result of its encounter with the ‘traditional’ religi­ous culture of Africa.

Nevertheless, as independence drew near it was still very much a mission Church and one that in several respects had not prepared itself for this new age in African history. Certainly a glance around Africa as it was in the 1950s will show that much had been achieved. There were by then some twenty-five million Christians in Africa from the Sahara to the Cape, and in the former Belgian Congo (Zaire) alone there was an estimated Catholic population of over three and a half million, while the Protestant churches, somewhat surprisingly in this ‘Catholic’ colony, had over one and a half million members. They had around three million in the Union of South Africa, the Methodist Church being the largest of the Protestant mission churches there. The Anglican Church was present wherever Britain was the colonial power, a presence that was considerable in Nigeria and Uganda in particular. Of course its character varied from ‘evangelical’ in these and other countries, where it had been introduced by the CMS, to Anglo-Catholic in Zanzibar, Malawi, Zimbabwe and South Africa, where either the Univer­sities Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) or the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) was its chief support or standard-bearer. In addition to their remarkable growth, the mission churches also enjoyed a virtual mono­poly of primary and secondary education, which in parts of Nigeria and elsewhere was to be lost shortly before or soon after independence.

But these churches were not as strong as they looked. They had become too dependent on the school approach to evangel­isation and on outside financial support and expatriate leadership. With no more than a handful of African bishops and a comparatively small number of African clergy, many of them at independence still bore the appearance of colonial churches. There were other churches, generally referred to as inde­pendent churches, that were much more African in character. To a brief consideration of these we now turn.

Independency

African independent or, as they are sometimes called, separatist churches can be counted in their thousands, the largest number being in South Africa, which perhaps has the greatest proliferation of such churches of any country in the world. Founded by African Christians, these churches first began to appear in the closing decades of the nineteenth century and today are an established and familiar part of the religious and cultural life of many African countries, and especially in those areas where Protestant Christianity prevailed.

The early independence churches that emerged in South Africa and Nigeria in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were an appeal to mission churches to adapt to the local conditions and, even more, a protest against European domination of these churches. As we saw in the case of Nigeria, Africans were being demoted rather than promoted to positions of leadership in the churches in this period, the case of Samuel Ajayi Crowther being one of the best-known instances. However, the issue of white leadership was to come to a head in Nigeria in the Baptist Church in Lagos in 1888, when most of its members joined the dissident African-led African Baptist Church founded by the Nigerian Mojola Agbebi. This was followed in 1891 by a schism within the CMS in Lagos which saw the establishment of the United Native African Church, dedicated to the evangelisation of Africa by indigenous agents and to the replacement of alien rituals and ceremonies by African ones.

While they placed considerable emphasis on African leadership and independence from the mission churches and are therefore sometimes referred to as ‘Ethiopian’ (Ethiopia being both long Christian and un colonised, and therefore symbolic of African independence) some of these churches modelled themselves where liturgy, organisation and doctrine were concerned on the mission churches from which they had seceded.

Somewhat different were the separatist churches that began to emerge not long before, during and just after the First World War. These are known by different names, such as ‘zionist’ in South Africa (in no way connected with Jewish Zionism), aladura (prayer) in Nigeria and ‘prophetic’ and ‘spirit’ churches elsewhere. It was not deliberate policy on the part of these churches to break away from the mission churches. Their principal preoccupation was with healing through prayer, and they strongly opposed the use of all forms of medicine, traditional or Western. Led by charismatic, prophetic figures they attracted both Christians and non­Christians alike and in due course became churches in their own right.

The Harrist Church in the Ivory Coast, inspired by the teaching and preaching of the Liberian ‘prophet’ William Wade Harris, is a case in point. Harris’s preaching tour of the southern region of the Ivory Coast and south-west Ghana in 1913-14 was perhaps the most remarkable conversion campaign ever undertaken in Africa, leading to the baptism of an estimated one hundred thousand people. It was not undertaken in opposition to the mission churches or with a view to founding a separatist church, which only came much later. In fact Harris advised his followers at this time to join the mission churches, either Catholic or Protestant; while later, in the 1920s, it appears that he issued instructions that they were to seek membership of the Protestant churches only. In Nigeria, it was Moses Orimolade who in the 1920s inspired the praying bands that had developed into the popular and now widespread Cherubim and Seraphim societies and churches, one of them being the Church of the Lord (Aladura), founded by the former Angli­can Josiah Oshitelu. In South Africa the best known of the quasi-messianic, prophetic leaders of the zionist churches of roughly the same period was the soft-spoken, reserved, former Baptist, Zulu healer and hymn-writer of genius, Isaiah Shembe, who founded the Church of the Ama Nazaretha. Today in South Africa some 20 per cent of the African population belong to one or other of the country’s many independent churches, while the aladura churches have millions of followers in Nigeria and have spread to other West African states and even to Europe and North America.

Although they did not unite in pursuit of political independence, these churches did contribute to that cause in its wider sense and in particular to the religious and cultural independence of Africa, preserv­ing, albeit on a selective basis, African rituals, hymns, prayers, names and beliefs, and providing through their organisations and schools a means for Africans to acquire experience in running their own affairs.

On occasion, colonial governments and mission churches reacted (and not always without some justification) as if these churches were, or were likely to become, simply ‘fronts’ for political move­ments. The prophet Harris, mentioned above, was expelled from the Ivory Coast by the French colonial administration for fear that he might incite the people to rebellion. John Chilembwe, founder of the Providence Industrial Mission in Nyasaland (Malawi), a mission with over nine hundred students in seven schools in 1912, did in fact organise and lead an uprising which resulted in the death of several European settlers in 1915. This brought about the immediate closure of his mission and schools and caused all independent churches to appear suspect to the colonial authorities and the missions. Some leaders of independent churches, although they did not necessarily regard themselves as such, were seen by sections of their followers more as national­ists and revolutionaries than as Christian prophets. Simon Kimbangu, in whose name was foundedin the 1920s, in the Belgian Congo (now Zaire), the Church of Jesus Christ on Earth Through the Prophet Simon Kimbangu, is one well-known example. Although this former catechist with the Baptist Missionary Society presented himself as a messenger or prophet of God and healed in the name of Jesus, he opposed separation from the mission churches, condemned the spirit cult associated with charms calledmenkisi and advised the people, unlike some of the Nigerian prophets of the same period, to pay their taxes to the government. Nevertheless, he was eventually arrested and sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted by the King of the Belgians and he died in solitary confinement in 1951. Kimbangu’s preach­ing with its strong millenarian strain—a new God was to come more power­ful than the state—and his large following made him a threat to the authorities, as did what was said and done by groups of his followers in his name if not necessarily with his approval (such as the non-payment of taxes).

On the other hand, certain movements that started off as political became over time religious. For an example of this we turn this time to the former French Congo and to Simon Matswa, who founded the Amicale in Paris in 1926. This was a secular protest movement at the outset and brought the Lari people into confrontation with the French colonial administration, while Matswa himself died in a colonial prison in 1942. At this point the movement turned away from direct political action to a passive millenarianism as followers awaited deliverance through the second coming of‘our sovereign Father Matswa’, as they now called him. Like the mission or historic churches as they are sometimes known, the independence churches grew at a rapid pace between 1945 and 1960, by which time many of them had become increasingly respectable and would soon receive state recognition.