The Size and Distribution of the Movements

Not all areas of Black Africa have produced these new religious movements to the same extent. Islamic movements seem concentrated in West Africa and especially in Senegal. Christian-related movements are a second-stage response rather than a preliminary substitute and so have first appeared and have proliferated where this faith has been longest established, in Ghana and Nigeria, in South Africa and in Zaire.

It was once widely believed that such movements arose only in Protestant mission areas and that Catholic areas were immune, partly because they did not provide the model of many denominations and did not freely translate and distribute the Scriptures. Earlier there was some truth in this but since the 1940s there have been notable movements arising within a Catholic milieu as well as many Catholic individuals who have joined these movements. The Eastern Orthodox tradition has been interact­ing with Black African peoples from about 1924, first indirectly through Marcus Garvey’s African Orthodox Church in North America, and, when its authenticity was questioned, through the Alexandrian Patriarchate of the Greek Orthodox Church. The complex of Orthodox-related independency has developed mainly in East Africa and since the 1970s has been extended through the presence of a missionary bishop of the Coptic Orthodox Church in Nairobi.

Estimates of the total number of distinct movements reach as high as 20,000; in Ghana alone some five hundred were known in the 1970s. Some, however, are very small, with perhaps no more than twenty members. Others are large, with several million members—for example the Kimbanguist Church, and the Zion Christian Church in Southern Africa which was reported to have over three million assemble at its annual Easter festival at Zion City Moriah in the northern Transvaal in 1985. A fairly firm figure for South Africa, based on the 1980 census, indicates that about thirty per cent of all Blacks, about 5.9 million members, belong to these move­ments in that one country. While specific statistics in this field should be treated with caution it is clear that taken together these movements represent a massive new religious development in Africa.