The Impact in Africa

The enormous growth of the Christian Church in Africa south of the Sahara in the last decades, seemingly outpacing the growth of Islam and still expand­ing even within what are primarily Islamic areas, has tended to obscure the real nature of the movement.

Western commerce and government shook these smaller-scale cultures. The more fixed parts of the pattern were weakened. In the new towns and centres of power a more secularised, Westernised mood prevailed, publicly at least. Western-style education and administration became dominant. Christianity itself became a central religion of the estab­lishment, expressed in Westernised Catholic or Protestant forms.

Meanwhile, for those on the fringes of the new centre, the free-ranging spirit movements mediated by women and younger men took on a variety of creative forms, as new cults, ‘churches’, prayer movements, or religious societies like the Jehovah’s Witnesses or the Rosi­crucians came on the scene. From time to time some of these have sought to move into the relative spiritual vacuum at the centre, claiming to recreate community and, in an apocalyptic spirit, to shape ‘a new heaven and a new earth’.

If the whole concept of the divine has been modified, so also has the concept of evil and of evil powers. The causes of sickness and misfortune have come to be diagnosed less as an offence against social rules and relationships and more as a generalised tension and disruption, matching the intuitive sense of a breakdown of the social and political order. Evil becomes attributable to the activity not only of a variety of newly perceived demonic forces, but also of a more generalised power of witchcraft, pervad­ing society, symbolising new forms of ambiguity and mistrust in the society. All these require some kind of exorcising and cleansing away by the new religious movements, with their ‘witchcraft-eradicating’ potential, as they present the possibility of new forms of community and of wholeness. Chris­tianity provides a new mine of symbolic resources for this constant quest for power that can mediate between modernity and the fragments of tradition, between individual or group and the new social order, between centre and periphery. And there is in fact a wide spectrum of experiment, innovation and acceptance or rejection of various aspects of Christianity in various African settings.

In the dreams, visions, messages and liturgical forms of the churches of a Simon Kimbangu in Zaire or an Isaiah Shembe in South Africa there are to be found new perceptions of Christ and of the Christian message, often relating to the ills of society. ‘Black theology’ in South Africa has sought to make the identification of God with struggling and suffering Africans both explicit and socially and politically effective. But in doing so it has only drawn out the unconscious implications of many inchoate spirit movements, striving to offer an alternative social and spiritual form that could move in and possess the Westernised centre.

For the most part there remains a gulf between the more Westernised, institutionalised centres of power and the local and popu­lar struggle to find wholeness and new community. This struggle has been expressed in Christian forms newly emergent among the last Africans to face modernity, the nomadic cattle peoples, the Fulani and Maasai, in a conscious attempt to re-express and universalise their traditional values ‘in Christ’.

The attempts to recreate community and spirituality are numberless. They range from cults in which Christ figures as the wounded healer, the divine Nganga standing between his people and the evils oppressing them, to one of the most substantial and longest lasting of all such efforts at restoration, the East African Revival, which has spanned several countries for over half a century. This movement for rediscovering mutual trust and cleansing through placing secret evil thoughts and past wrongs ‘under the blood’ of Christ has always tended to fall short of becoming a public, open reality, dropping rather into a private world of inner, individual­ised piety. But at its most full and vital it has been able to generate the integrity, courage and moral power which characterised some of the finest leaders of the Church anywhere in Africa, men like the martyr Archbishop Jnani Luwum in Uganda. At the moment of his confrontation with President Amin, the gap between centre and periphery, public and private, inner and outer worlds was bridged and an authentic African wholeness and holiness emerged.