The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present 3031482697, 9783031482694

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The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present Edited by  Andrew Eugene Barnes · Toyin Falola

The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present

Andrew Eugene Barnes  •  Toyin Falola Editors

The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present

Editors Andrew Eugene Barnes School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies Arizona State University Tempe, AZ, USA

Toyin Falola Department of History University of Texas at Austin Austin, TX, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-48269-4    ISBN 978-3-031-48270-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48270-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Ivan Vdovin / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Andrew Eugene Barnes Part I Mentors  15 2 The  Writings and Influence of Edward W. Blyden 17 Moses Moore 3 The  Writings and Legacy of John Mbiti 37 Harvey Kwiyani 4 The  Writings and Legacy of Adrian Hastings 53 Kevin Ward 5 Elizabeth  Isichei’s Contributions to the Study of Christianity 67 Toyin Falola 6 The  Writings and Legacy of Andrew Walls 83 Jonathan Bonk 7 The  Writings and Legacy of Lamin Sanneh 97 Joel Carpenter 8 The  Writings and Legacy of John Peel107 Toyin Falola

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9 The  Legacy of Terrence Ranger for Historians of African Christianity127 David Maxwell 10 The  Writings and Legacy of J. F. Ade Ajayi143 Femi J. Kolapo 11 The  Writings and Legacy of Ogbu Kalu161 Toyin Falola Part II Trans-Atlantic Christianity in Africa 177 12 Missionaries  and African Christians179 Emma Wild-Wood 13 Catholic  Missions and African Responses I: 1450–1800193 Paul Kollman 14 African  Initiatives and Agency Within British Protestant Missions in Africa, c.1792–c.1914207 Brian Stanley 15 Abolitionism  and the Evangelization of Africa221 David Killingray 16 Continental  Protestant Missions and the Evangelization of Africa (1800–1880)239 Paul Glen Grant 17 European  Settlers and Christianity in Africa255 Norman Etherington 18 Catholic  Missions and African Responses II: 1800–1885269 Paul Kollman 19 European  Christianity and European Imperialism in Africa289 David Lindenfeld 20 New  World Ethiopianism and the Evangelization of Africa303 Kimberly Hill

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21 Catholic  Missions and Colonial States321 Elizabeth Foster 22 Protestant  Missions and Colonial States333 Andrew Eugene Barnes 23 Women  Missionaries and the Evangelization of Women in Africa349 Rebecca C. Hughes 24 Christian  Africans, Muslim Africans, and the European Colonial Project361 Shobana Shankar Part III The Rooting of Christianity in Africa I: Christian Life from Ancient Times to the Independence Era 375 25 Christian  Communities and Religious Movements in Roman Africa377 Eric Fournier and Mark Lewis Tizzoni 26 Christian  Communities and Religious Movements in Ethiopia and Nubia399 Vince Bantu 27 Mission  Station Christianity in the Nineteenth Century: A Spatial Lens413 Ingie Hovland 28 Christianity,  Witchcraft, Magic, and Healing in Africa429 Kalle Kananoja and Markku Hokkanen 29 African Women Christians445 Toyin Falola 30 Ethiopianism in Africa463 Ethan R. Sanders 31 Garveyism  and Christianity in Colonial Africa485 Ciprian Burlăcioiu

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32 The  East African Revival503 Jason Bruner 33 The  Transfer of Protestant Mission Churches to African Christians519 Musa Gaiya Part IV The Rooting of Christianity in Africa II: Christian Life in Contemporary Africa 533 34 Christian  Devotional Practice in Contemporary Africa535 Katharina Wilkens 35 Catholic  Church Growth in Independent Africa549 J. J. Carney 36 Christian  Femininity in Independent Africa565 Dorothy Tembo 37 Change  and Continuity in AIC Church Life and Their Scholarship: A Question of Maturation?579 Retief Müller 38 Significant  Trends in Contemporary African Pentecostalism593 Paul Gifford 39 African  Pentecostalism from an African Perspective607 Paul Mwangi and Kyama Mugambi 40 Missions  and Contemporary African Rulers625 Charles Prempeh 41 African Christianity Rising: Lessons from a Documentary Film Project645 James M. Ault, Jr. 42 African  Christians Outside of Africa667 Enoch Olujide Gbadegesin Index683

Notes on Contributors

James M. Ault, Jr.  is a sociologist trained in comparative historical methods by Barrington Moore at Harvard and ethnographic phenomenological ones by Egon Bittner at Brandeis. His first field of study was African societies and politics, studying at SOAS in London and doing field research in Zambia on urbanization and politics. Introduced to documentary filmmaking in its more intimate cinéma verité genre by John Marshall, one of its pioneers in the United States, his first film, Born Again, an intimate portrait of a fundamentalist Baptist church leading America’s “Culture Wars,” was broadcast as a national primetime special on PBS and around the world. His book on that project, Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church (Knop 2004), exploring the social bases of conflicts over “family-value” issues fueling America’s persistent partisan divides, was named one of the five best nonfiction books of the year. After producing, directing, and doing camera work for various documentary film projects, he returned to Africa for this extensive ethnographic film project exploring the sources and directions of Christianity’s explosive growth in Africa, for which he filmed intimately across church types in Ghana and Zimbabwe (countries chosen to demonstrate cultural difference and because both had well-established film industries to draw on for local crew members for this deeply cross-cultural work). His two-part African Christianity Rising film series was praised by Andrew Walls, founding editor of the Journal of Religion in Africa, as “striking, powerful and clarifying,” and “pack more information and present it more tellingly than would vast areas of print.” He has recently completed two follow-up films from this project, a biography of Kwame Bediako, a great thinker of the church in Africa, and one on Zimbabwe’s gospel music legend, Machanic Manyeruke, both carrying important lessons about the sources and directions of Christian growth in Africa. Vince Bantu  is the Ohene (President) of the Meachum School of Haymanot and is Assistant Professor of Church History and Black Church Studies at Fuller Theological Seminary. Vince’s assignment from the Lord is to proclaim that the Bisrat (Gospel) of Yeshua is for all nations, tribes, and tongues and to ix

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do this by teaching on the earliest history of Christianity in Africa and Asia. Vince is the author of A Multitude of All Peoples (IVP), Gospel Haymanot (UMI), and The Bisrat (Jude 3 Project). Vince is also the Ohene (President) of the Society of Gospel Haymanot (SGH), an academic society of theological Gospelism—Afro-rooted theology committed to the universal Lordship of Jesus, biblical authority, and the liberation of the oppressed. Vince also serves as the Katabi (Editor) of the publication of SGH—the Haymanot Journal. Vince is minister at Beloved Community Church in St. Louis. Andrew  Eugene  Barnes  attended Wesleyan University, Connecticut, USA, where he graduated with honors with a Degree in History in 1975. He received his Doctorate in History from Princeton University in 1983. He taught and received tenure at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He left Carnegie Mellon for his present position as Professor of History in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University in 1996. Barnes is the author of three monographs—The Social Dimension of Piety: Associative Life and Religious Change in the Penitent Confraternities of Marseille 1499–1792 (1994); Making Headway: The Introduction of Western Civilization in Colonial Northern Nigeria (2009); and Global Christianity and the Black Atlantic: Tuskegee, Colonialism and the Shaping of African Industrial Education (2017)—as well as 40 research journal articles and scholarly book chapters. Presently he is working on a monograph on the evolution of Ethiopianism among Protestant Christians of African descent across the Atlantic, 1780–1930. Jonathan Bonk  is a mission research professor at Boston University School of Theology. He is founding Director Emeritus of the Dictionary of African Christian Biography (www.dacb.org). He has served as president of IAMS, ASM, APM, and EMS. He is current president of the Global Mission Leaders Forum (GMLF). He was executive director of the Overseas Ministries Study Center in New Haven, CT, and Editor of the International Bulletin of Missionary Research from 2000 to 2013. He was a student of Andrew Walls at the University of Aberdeen from 1978 to 1982. Jason  Bruner  is Professor of Religious Studies in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. His books include Living Salvation in the East African Revival in Uganda (2017), Imagining Persecution (2021), and How to Study Global Christianity (2022). With David C. Kirkpatrick, he is co-editor of Global Visions of Violence: Agency and Persecution in World Christianity (2022). Ciprian Burlăcioiu  is Lecturer in Church History and World Christianity at the University of Munich, Germany. His previous work engaged with questions of religious transatlantic links between United States and Africa in the early twentieth century and the emergence of missionary independent churches in South and East Africa. Currently, he works on issues related to historical

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processes of migration in the history of Christianity with a focus on the history of Christianity as a world religion. J.  J.  Carney  is Professor of Theology and African Studies at Creighton University, Omaha, Nebraska, United States. His research has focused on modern Catholic history and theology in Africa. Dr. Carney’s first book, Rwanda Before the Genocide: Catholic Politics and Ethnic Discourse in the Late Colonial Era (Oxford University Press, 2014), won the African Studies Association’s Ogot prize for best book in eastern African studies. More recent works include For God and My Country: Catholic Leadership in Modern Uganda (Cascade, 2020); Contesting Catholics: Benedicto Kiwanuka and the Birth of Postcolonial Uganda (James Currey, 2021; co-authored with Jonathon Earle); The Surprise of Reconciliation in the Catholic Tradition (Paulist, 2018; coedited with Laurie Johnston); and On the Eighth Day: A Catholic Theology of Sport (Cascade, 2022; co-­authored with Max Engel and Matt Hoven). Carney has served as a US Fulbright Scholar and visiting professor at Uganda Martyrs University, and he has led study abroad courses in Tanzania and Rwanda. Joel Carpenter  is professor and provost emeritus at Calvin University, where he also founded and directed the Nagel Institute for the Study of World Christianity. He is the editor of an ongoing monograph series, Studies in World Christianity, at the Baylor University Press. Among his recent works are Christianity and Social Change in Contemporary Africa (Langaa, 2020), coedited with Francis Nyamnjoh; and Christianity Remade: The Rise of Indian Initiated Churches (Baylor, 2022), edited for its late author, Paul Joshua. Prof. Carpenter chairs the board of the Langham Partnership United States, and he serves as an adviser to the Lamin Sanneh Institute at the University of Ghana. Norman Etherington  is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Western Australia. He received his PhD from Yale University and taught at the University of Adelaide before moving to Perth in 1989. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and a past president of both the Australian Historical Association and the African Studies Association of Australasia and the Pacific. His books include Preachers, Peasants and Politics in Southeast Africa (London: Royal Historical Society, 1978); Theories of Imperialism: War, Conquest and Capital (London: Croom Helm, 1983); The Great Treks: The Transformation of Southern Africa, 1815–1854 (Longman, 2002), Missions and Empire (Oxford University Press, 2005); Mapping Colonial Conquest: Australia and Southern Africa (UWA Press, 2007); Big Game Hunter: A Biography of Frederick Courteney Selous (London: Robert Hale, 2016); and Imperium of the Soul: The Political and Aesthetic Imagination of Edwardian Imperialists (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017). In 2013 he was awarded the Order of Australia for service to history and the community.

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Toyin  Falola, PhD  is the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, USA.  A recipient of 18 honorary doctorates, an annual conference has been named after him: TOFAC (Toyin Falola Annual Conference on Africa and the African Diaspora). The Association of Third World Studies has named its annual best book after him as the Toyin Falola Prize for the best book on Africa. He has contributed to various academic associations, once serving as the President of the African Studies Association. He has a forthcoming book, A History of West Africa. Elizabeth Foster  is Professor of History at Tufts University. She is the author of African Catholic: Decolonization and the Transformation of the Church (Harvard University Press, 2019), which received the John Gilmary Shea Book Prize of the American Catholic Historical Association in 2020 and Honorable Mention for the Religion and International Relations Book Prize from the International Studies Association in 2019. Her first book, Faith in Empire: Religion, Politics, and Colonial Rule in French Senegal, 1880–1940 (Stanford University Press, 2013), won the Alf Andrew Heggoy Prize from the French Colonial Historical Society in 2014. She is also the co-editor, with Udi Greenberg, of Decolonization and the Remaking of Christianity (Penn Press, 2023). She has published in the Journal of African History, The Journal of Modern History, French Historical Studies, and French Politics, Culture & Society, and her work has been funded by Fulbright, NEH, and ACLS fellowships. Eric  Fournier  born and raised in Québec, Canada, completed his PhD in 2008 at the University of California, Santa Barbara, on the history of the late antique Mediterranean. He is Professor of History at West Chester University of Pennsylvania, where he has been teaching ancient and medieval history since 2008. His research focuses on late antique North Africa, the Vandal kingdom in particular, and he is interested in the history of Christianity, religious conflicts and persecutions, the rising role of bishops, saints, and martyrs in the early medieval Maghreb, as well as the importance of rhetoric in late antique sources. He has published widely on these topics, including Heirs of Roman Persecution: Studies on a Christian and Para-Christian Discourse in Late Antiquity, coedited with Wendy Mayer. He has recently obtained fellowships at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies and the Roman Islam Center (Universität Hamburg) to work on his current book project, Us and Them: Purity, Pollution, and the Cultural Memory of the Martyrs in North African Christianity, a booklength study of the intertextual aspects of martyrological North African texts from the second to the seventh century CE. Musa  Gaiya  is Professor of Church History, Department of Religion and Philosophy, University of Jos, Jos, Plateau State, Nigeria. He has been teaching in this University since 1990. Musa Gaiya has published several books and articles in reputable journals locally and internationally. His latest publication

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which he did with Wendy Elgersma Helleman is Early Christianity: A Textbook for African Students (2019). He is working on a similar treatment of the history of Christianity in Africa. His interest is in collecting data (oral and written) for the re-construction of histories of the impact of African appropriation of the Christian message and the life and times of African and European missionaries and church leaders in Nigeria. He is also looking into the relationship between Christians and Muslims in Nigeria and the challenge neo-Pentecostalism has brought to that interaction. Gaiya is married to Pamela and with four children (one is late). Enoch  Olujide  Gbadegesin  Associate Professor of Religion, received his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts in Religious Studies from Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria, and then proceeded to obtain his Master of Theological Studies (MTS) from Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2008 and his PhD from Rice University, Houston, Texas, in 2014. He is the author of more than 36 peer reviewed articles in journals, Encyclopedia, and books in both local and international outlets. He is a co-editor of a book titled Ethics of Individualism and Communitarianism: Multidisciplinary Essays (2016). His research interests focus on gift and reciprocity, culture and family, interreligious dialogue, religion and gender, religion and ecology, and Aladura and Pentecostal Spirituality. Since 2000, he has been in the Department of Religion, Faculty of Arts at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria, where he teaches courses in anthropology of religion, philosophy of religion, and methods and theories in the study of religion. He is a fellow of Young Scholars for Religion and the Rule of Law at Oxford University, 2022. He is currently the Department of Religious Studies’ Postgraduate Coordinator. Paul  Gifford  is emeritus professor of SOAS (the School of Oriental and African Studies) of the University of London. Over 40 years, he has done fieldwork in several African countries, the results of which are found in particular case studies: Christianity and Politics in Doe’s Liberia; then African Christianity: its Public Role (with case-studies of Ghana, Cameroon, Zambia, and Uganda), Ghana’s New Christianity: Pentecostalism in a Globalising African Economy, and Christianity, Politics and Public Life in Kenya. From these case studies, he has attempted a more synthesizing study, Christianity, Development and Modernity in Africa (2015), and a comparison with Western Christianity, The Plight of Western Religion: the Eclipse of the Otherworldly (2019). He has also written on Islam in Senegal. Since retirement he has lived in Senegal and Ethiopia. Paul  Glen  Grant  is Lecturer in History at the University of WisconsinMadison. In 2020 he published Healing and Power in Ghana: Early Indigenous Expressions of Christianity (Baylor University Press). His research focuses on missionary receptivity to African innovations in Christianity, especially in precolonial situations. Drawing on archival work in Switzerland and Belgium, he

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is currently working on African Christians’ conceptualization of Europe as a mission field. Kimberly  Hill is a historian of Black Internationalism and American Christianity. She has taught at the University of Texas at Dallas since 2014 with a previous appointment at Del Mar College. Her first book, A Higher Mission: The Careers of Alonzo and Althea Brown Edmiston in Central Africa, analyzes how HBCUs and industrial education influenced African American Presbyterians serving as missionaries in colonial Congo. Hill obtained her PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2008 and studied in South Africa through study abroad programs. She continues to research black missionaries by focusing on the efforts of YMCA and YWCA activists during the Long Civil Rights Movement. Markku  Hokkanen  is Senior Lecturer in History at the Department of History, University of Oulu. His previous publications include the monographs Medicine and Scottish Missionaries in the Northern Malawi Region 1875–1930: Quests for Health in a Colonial Society (2007); Medicine, mobility and the empire: Nyasaland networks, 1859–1960 (2017); and the co-edited collection Healers and Empires in Global History (2019). In 2019–2023 he led an Academy of Finland-funded research project on healers, politics, and development in modern African history in collaboration with an international research team. Ingie Hovland  is Assistant Professor of Religion and Women’s Studies at the University of Georgia in the United States. She is a historical and cultural anthropologist of religion who is especially interested in the many different histories, cultural practices, and social effects of Christianity in the world. She uses feminist theory and material religion studies to trace the interplay of gendered bodies, spaces, and words, in particular social situations. Her first book was Mission Station Christianity: Norwegian Missionaries in Colonial Natal and Zululand, Southern Africa 1850–1890 (Brill, 2013). Rebecca C. Hughes  is an associate professor and chair of the History department at Seattle Pacific University. She teaches courses on European and African history including history of humanitarianism. Her research focuses on the interplay of gender, race, and theology in British missions in twentieth-century Africa, and her work has been published in The Journal of Religion in Africa, Social Sciences and Missions, The Journal of Commonwealth and Imperial History, the International Bulletin of Mission Research, and more. She is currently working on an article on the use and display of photographs during Mabel Shaw’s tenure as headmistress of the Girls’ Boarding School in Mbereshi, Zambia. She is also beginning a project on Mary Stuart (1900–2000) and her work in mid-century Uganda. Kalle Kananoja, PhD  Lecturer in History of Science and Ideas at University of Oulu, is a historian with a background in African and southern Atlantic

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studies. His research focuses on social, cultural, and intellectual histories of slavery, religion, and medicine. Kananoja’s book Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2021) analyzes continuous knowledge exchanges and perceptions of health, disease, and healing in West Central and West Africa in the early modern period. He has co-­edited Healers and Empires in Global History (Springer 2019), which explores cross-­ cultural medical encounters and the intertwined and plural medical histories involving nonWestern healers from the Arctic, Asia, Africa, Americas, and the Caribbean. David  Killingray  taught African, Caribbean, and English local history at Goldsmiths, where he is Emeritus Professor of Modern History; he is a senior research fellow in the School of Advanced Study, University of London. In retirement he continues to research and write on aspects of local history and the transatlantic black diaspora. He has recently completed a study entitled ‘Black Agitator’: Dr Harold Moody and the League of Coloured Peoples and now is writing a book on the transatlantic origins of pan-Africanism before 1913. Femi  J.  Kolapo  teaches African history, history of slavery in Africa, and African diaspora history in the History department of the University of Guelph. His research interest includes the introduction of evangelical Christianity to Africa and the dynamics of the relationship between the nineteenth century Christian missions and missionaries on the one hand and African societies on the other. Paul Kollman  C.S.C., a Catholic priest of the Congregation of Holy Cross, is Associate Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. He also serves as a fellow in the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, the Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion, and the Nanovic Institute for European Studies. He has taught in the past at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago; Queen of Apostles Philosophy Centre, Jinja, Uganda; and Tangaza University College, Nairobi, Kenya, and has been a visiting scholar at the Center for World Catholicism at DePaul University and at the Church Mission Society in Oxford, UK.Kollman’s research focuses on African Christianity, mission history, and world Christianity, with special attention to Catholic experiences in eastern Africa. His most recent book is Understanding World Christianity: Eastern Africa (2018), co-­authored with Cynthia Toms Smedley. His first book, The Evangelization of Slaves and Catholic Origins in Eastern Africa, was named an outstanding book in mission studies in 2006. He is currently preparing an edited volume on comparative approaches to holiness and sanctity, as well as advancing a manuscript on the history of Catholic missionary evangelization in Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania. Harvey Kwiyani  is a Malawian theologian currently serving as CEO of Global Connections in Leamington Spa, England. He also leads a Master’s program exploring World Christianity, especially in the context of diasporas, at Church

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Mission Society in Oxford, England. He founded and continues to serve as executive director of Missio Africanus, an intercultural mission training initiative that seeks to equip and empower the global church for mission in Europe. Having served in missions in Europe and North America for a long time, he writes a great deal on issues to do with cross-cultural mission and leadership. He has authored several books including Sent Forth: African Missionary Work in the West and Multicultural Kingdom: Ethnic Diversity, Mission and the Church. He blogs at www.harveykwiyani.substack.com. David  Lindenfeld is Emeritus Professor of History at Louisiana State University. While trained as a historian of Europe, he shifted emphasis in midcareer to world history, which he taught and developed as a research field. He conceived a project in 2002 to investigate how different peoples throughout the world interacted with Christian missionaries, from their perspectives rather than that of the missionaries. These investigations led to an edited collection of essays, Beyond Conversion and Syncretism in 2011 and a single-authored work, World Christianity and Indigenous Experience. A Global History, 1500–2000 in 2021. The present article combines his interest in religious studies with his background in European history. David Maxwell  is Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Emmanuel College. He is author of Christians and Chiefs in Zimbabwe: A Social History of the Hwesa People c.1870s–1990s (1999) and African Gifts of the Spirit: Pentecostalism and the Rise of a Zimbabwean Transnational Religious Movement (2006). With Patrick Harries he co-edited The Spiritual in the Secular: Missionaries and Knowledge About Africa (2012). He was long-time editor of the Journal of Religion in Africa. His third monograph, Religious Entanglements: Central African Pentecostalism, the Creation of Cultural Knowledge, and the Making of the Luba Katanga, was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2022. Moses Moore  is an associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Arizona State University. He received a B.A. from Eckerd College and the Master of Divinity from Yale Divinity School. He completed a doctorate in American and African American Church History at Union Theological Seminary (NYC). His dissertation, focused on the life of Orishatukeh Faduma, explored the African and African American religious encounter with modernity. His current research and publications continue this focus with studies of Edward Wilmot Blyden and Henry H.  Proctor. His major published works include Orishatukeh Faduma, Liberal Theology and Evangelical Pan-­Africanism, 1857–1946, (Scarecrow Press, 1996); “‘Behold the Dreamer Cometh’: PanAfricanism and Biblical Hermeneutics” in African Americans and the Bible, ed. Vincent Wimbush, (New York: Continuum, 2000); “From Atlanta to Brooklyn: The Social Gospel Ministry and Legacy of Henry H. Proctor,” USQR Volume 62 Fall, 2011; “Edward Wilmot Blyden: From Old School Missionary to ‘Minister of Truth,’” Journal of Presbyterian History, (summer 1997);

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“Orishatukeh Faduma and the New Theology,” Church History, (March 1994); “Righteousness Exalts a Nation: Black Clergymen, Reform, and New School Presbyterianism,” American Presbyterians: Journal of Presbyterian History (winter 1992). Kyama Mugambi  specializes in historical, ecclesial, social, cultural, theological, and epistemological themes within African urban Christianity. He is Assistant Professor of World Christianity at the Yale Divinity School. His 2020 book, A Spirit of Revitalization: Urban Pentecostalism in Kenya, which traces the history of Pentecostalism in Kenya, has been hailed as a singular contribution to the fields of mission studies, world Christianity, and intercultural theology. His current research explores themes within emerging ecclesiologies on the continent. One of his projects brings together six researchers to investigate expressions of communality within African churches. Another project takes a deeper look at aspects of Pentecostalism and the way they relate to the African context. Retief Müller  is a theologian and a church historian who focuses on Southern African religious history. He wrote, among other things, two academic monographs: African Pilgrimage: Ritual Travel in South Africa’s Christianity of Zion (Ashgate, 2011) and The Scots Afrikaners: Identity Politics and Intertwined Religious Cultures (Edinburgh University Press, 2021). He teaches at VID Specialized University in Stavanger, Norway, where he also leads the RethinC research group on the intercultural history of Christianity. Formerly, he was director of the Nagel Institute for the Study of World Christianity at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and before that he taught church history at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. Paul  Mwangi his research interests are in World Christianity, African Pentecostalism, theological education, and Christian response to contemporary issues. He holds a PhD in Religious Studies from the University of Nairobi, a Master of Arts in Theological Education from London School of Theology, UK as well as an MA in Religious Studies from the University of Nairobi, in Kenya. Paul lectures at the South Eastern Kenya University, Kitui Kenya. He has authored research articles and book chapters in addition to his role as coeditor of the volume, A Century of God’s Household in the Diocese of Mount Kenya South (Uzima Press). Charles Prempeh  is a research fellow at the Centre for Cultural and African Studies, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, KumasiGhana. He holds a PhD in Theology and Religious Studies from the University of Cambridge (Wolfson College), UK, since 2021 and a certificate in Public Engagement with Research (AHRC-TORCH outline course): organized by the University of Oxford, in 2021. Prempeh undertook two years of doctoral coursework in interdisciplinary Social Studies at the Makerere Institute of

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Social Research (MISR), Makerere University (Uganda—2014–2016). He also holds a Master of Philosophy in African Studies from the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon, where he was awarded the prestigious Agyeman Award for academic excellence in 2010 before his graduation in 2011. Prempeh holds a BA African Studies (First-Class) from the University of Cape Coast in 2008. He has an interdisciplinary research interest, incorporating areas such as gender, popular culture, religion, history, politics, education, philosophy, and cultural studies. He has published in these areas in prestigious journals including African Studies Quarterly, Journal of Religion in Africa, and Religion Compass. He is also the author of three books. Ethan R. Sanders  is Associate Professor of History at Regis University and completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2013. His research focus is on global intellectual history with an emphasis on East Africa and the world. He has published on African political thinkers, the Zanzibar Revolution and the Cold War, missionaries and empire in Africa, Christian-Muslim relations in East Africa, and gender and ethnicity in Zanzibar. His first book, Building the African Nation: the African Association and Pan-­Africanism in Twentieth Century East Africa, is under contract with Cambridge University Press and looks at the formation of an African identity in East Africa and how it was used for practical and political purposes. He is currently working on a religious and intellectual biography of Julius Nyerere. Shobana  Shankar  is Professor of African and Global History at the State University of New  York-Stony Brook. Her research focuses on colonial and postcolonial West Africa and Africa-South Asia relations, especially in religion, higher education, and scientific development. Her most recent book, An Uneasy Embrace: Africa, India and the Spectre of Race (2021), is the first history of how race and racialization have brought Africans and Indians together, yet also driven them apart; it was shortlisted as a finalist for the P.  Sterling Stuckey Prize of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora and the International Studies Association’s Global Development Section Book Award. She is also author of Who Shall Enter Paradise? Christian Origins in Muslim Northern Nigeria, c.1890–1975 (Ohio U.  Press) and coeditor of two edited volumes, Transforming Africa’s Religious Landscapes: The Sudan Interior Mission (SIM), Past and Present (Tim Geysbeek, Barbara Cooper, Musa Gaiya, Gary Corwin, and Tibebe Eshete, Africa World Press, 2018) and Religions on the Move: New Dynamics of Religious Expansion in a Globalizing World (with Afe Adogame, Brill, 2012). She has received fellowships from the Council of American Overseas Research Centers, Goethe University in Frankfurt, Fulbright, Wenner-Gren Foundation, the American Historical Association, and the Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, DC. Brian Stanley  is Professor Emeritus of World Christianity at the University of Edinburgh, where he taught from 2008 to 2023. Previously he was based in

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Cambridge, where he directed the Currents in World Christianity Project and was a Fellow of St Edmund’s College. His many publications include histories of the BMS and CMS (jointly with Kevin Ward), a history of the 1910 World Missionary Conference, and Christianity in the Twentieth Century: A World History (Princeton University Press, 2018). Most recently, he has edited for posthumous publication Professor Andrew F.  Walls’s book, The Missionary Movement from the West: A Biography from Birth to Old Age (Eerdmans, 2023). Dorothy Tembo  is a senior lecturer at the University of Malawi, working in the Theology and Religious Studies Department. She holds a PhD in Religions from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her research focuses on the intersection of Christian beliefs and African cultures, traditions, and practices to create opportunities for societal progress. She employs interdisciplinary approaches to promote an inclusive and beneficial society that values and respects the rich religious and cultural heritage of African communities. Her ultimate goal is to promote the peaceful coexistence of these two aspects and encourage positive social change that benefits everyone. Mark Lewis Tizzoni  is Assistant Professor of Classical and Medieval Studies at Bates College in Maine, United States. Tizzoni’s research focuses on late antiquity in the Maghreb and Iberia with a particular emphasis on the postRoman period and the transformation of the Roman world in a global context. Employing evidence from Latin literature—poetry in particular—he is engaged in questions relating to community and identity formation. He is currently working on projects centering critical approaches to race, gender, and social cohesion in post-Roman Carthage using the Anthologia Latina in addition to continued work on Eugenius II of Toledo and the intellectual culture of Visigothic Iberia. His teaching focuses on early Africa and the Mediterranean. Kevin Ward  worked for over 20 years in East Africa. He wrote his Cambridge PhD (1976) on the formation of Protestant Christianity in Kenya, 1910–1940. From 1976 to 1991, he was a tutor in the history of Christianity at the Anglican seminary in Mukono, Uganda, Bishop Tucker Theological College (now the Uganda Christian University). He was ordained in the Church of Uganda in 1977. In 1995, he was appointed as a lecturer at Leeds University, in succession to Adrian Hastings, who, as Professor of Theology, had established African Religious Studies in the university. Kevin has published widely on Christianity in East Africa, on issues of church and politics in Uganda, and on the spirituality of the East African Revival (the Balokole). He has also published A Global History of Anglicanism (Cambridge University Press, 2012). Emma Wild-Wood  is Professor of African Religions and World Christianity at the University of Edinburgh, UK. With Dr Alexander Chow, she co-directs the Centre for the Study of World Christianity and co-edits the journal, Studies in World Christianity. She is one of the editors for the series Religion in Transforming Africa with James Currey. Her recent works include The Mission

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of Apolo Kivebulaya: Religious Encounter & Social Change in the Great Lakes c.1865–1935 (2020) and, with George Mpanga, The Archive of a Ugandan Missionary: Writings By and About Revd Apolo Kivebulaya (1800s–1950s) (2022). She has taught in DR Congo, Uganda, and Cambridge, UK. Katharina  Wilkens  studied religion, anthropology, and Islamic studies at Bayreuth and Edinburgh universities. She received her PhD from Bayreuth University in 2007. She is currently senior lecturer at the University of Tübingen, Germany. Her research interests include the history and anthropology of religions in Africa, ritual practice and ritual healing, aesthetics of religion as well as travel literature and African socialism. She has published Holy Water and Evil Spirit: Religious Healing in East Africa (Lit, 2011) and co-edited the Bloomsbury Handbook of Cultural and Cognitive Aesthetics of Religion (with Anne Koch, 2020). A special issue on Multiple Secularities in Africa is forthcoming with the Journal of Religion in Africa (co-edited with Marian Burchardt and Magnus Echtler).

CHAPTER 1

Introduction Andrew Eugene Barnes

“How I got over, How I got over. You know my soul looks back and wonders, how I got over” (from the African American gospel hymn, “How I got over”)

Introduction The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present presents an anthology of studies that collectively provide a survey of the historical development of Christianity in Africa from the time of the apostles to the present era. The aim of the volume is to supply both a comprehensive introduction to the study of the Christian faith as it has been practiced on the continent in the past and a summary understanding of the findings of the most current historical investigations of Africa’s Christian past. Recent scholarship talks about the emergence since the end of the era of European colonialism of an “African Christendom,” meaning a Christian civilization evolved from African cultural and historical roots. The studies in this volume take the evolution back to apostolic times and narrate how from various evangelical initiatives over two millennia the African Christian civilization now being celebrated came into existence. The ambition behind the volume is not to replace existing histories of Christianity in Africa. As the chapters below that are concerned with identifying the historical legacy of the great twentieth-century historians of African Christianity attest, much fine and dedicated scholarship was produced during

A. E. Barnes (*) School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. E. Barnes, T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48270-0_1

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the twentieth century. This scholarship served as the garden bed for the present floraison of historical research on the history of Christianity in Africa. The chapters in this volume aim to continue to build upon that scholarship. Rather, the ambition behind the volume is to reset the discourse about the history of Christianity in Africa. If an indictment can be made of present scholarship, it is that present scholarship is far too concerned with moot historical issues. Present scholarship is preoccupied with resolving debates no longer relevant to the construction of the narrative of African Christian history. The goal of the volume is to set scholarship on the history of Christianity on a track that will provide knowledge and understanding for future generations of Christians, scholars, and students. The twentieth century saw a proliferation of studies on how Christianity was planted in Africa from across the Atlantic Ocean. These studies took for granted that, beginning in the fifteenth century of the common era, trans-Atlantic Christian missionaries, mostly, but not only of European descent, slowly but progressively fanned out across the continent, preaching ideas of Christianity derived from the European cultural experience. These studies traced the contemporary embrace of Christianity by Africans back to the initiative, the perseverance, and the sacrifice of these missionaries. This narrative, however, has triggered much contention. From outside of Christianity has come skepticism about the benign impact of the advent of trans-Atlantic Christianity on African shores. An assumption shared by the scholars invested in the narrative is that the arrival of Christianity in Africa was a good thing for Africans. Some scholars, many of them not Christians, many of them not sympathetic to Christianity, question this assumption. There is a substantial historical literature that in various ways points to the negative costs to Africa and its peoples of the Christianity introduced to the continent from Europe beginning in the fifteenth century. Europeans landed on the shores of Africa with the Bible in one hand, and unfortunately slave manacles in the other. The simultaneity of the introduction of these two artifacts of European civilization has defeated any effort to distinguish the European evangelization of Africa from the European exploitation of the continent. And arguments that look back to the abolition of slavery movement in Europe as proof of a Christian determination to disengage from exploitative practices run aground against the reality of the subsequent collusive relationships that evolved between European Christian missions and European colonial governments. Yet, while the association of the trans-Atlantic missionary impulse with the historical reality of European oppression and racial domination still stands, what also stands is the fact that ultimately, European Christianity, European Christians, did not get in the way of the African embrace of Christianity. African peoples, African nations have outlasted all the historical forms of European exploitation inflicted upon them, including the forms linked with the trans-­ Atlantic proselytization of Christianity. From the perspective of how Christianity is now practiced on the continent, European Christian collaboration first with

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European slave traders and later with European imperialists is water under the bridge, meaning that whatever pernicious impact these types of collaboration had on the development of African Christianity continues to recede into the past. Accepting the assessment that European past actions, no matter how questionable, have had no lasting deleterious effect on African Christianity, two other related issues have drawn an unnecessary amount of attention from scholars, especially those eager to celebrate the success of the faith on the continent. One of these issues has to do with the already mentioned question of European agency in the evangelization of Africa. The other issue has to do with the question of the essential character of Christianity itself. Both of these issues go back to the African reaction to the chauvinism through which European Christians viewed what trans-Atlantic Protestant Christians came to call the “Great Commission,” that is, the Christian obligation to evangelize the non-­ Christian peoples of the world. As a form and expression of the faith, western European Christianity was a latecomer to the feast. Yet one of the greatest criticisms that can be leveled against Christian European thinkers is how across the centuries they so totally and completely promoted the idea that there was a one-to-one equation of Christianity with European consciousness. Christianity as it was preached and practiced in the centuries after the death of Jesus Christ was predominantly a religion of Asiatic and African peoples. Four hundred years after Christ, a Greek-speaking European Christian civilization emerged in eastern Mediterranean lands, but it had a progressively weaker influence on the Christian society evolving by fits and starts in the western Mediterranean and its hinterland. Only a thousand of so years after Christ did what can be called a western European Christendom arise in western Mediterranean lands, and a religious experience that could be recognized as unique to the region did not mature for another five hundred years after that. Western Mediterranean Christianity itself was then absorbed into and became the foundation for a religious experience more representative of the cultural proclivities of people in a more northern portion of the European sub-continent, the region that faced out upon the Atlantic. With due respect to the evangelical initiatives of the Portuguese monarch in Africa in the fifteenth century as a prelude to what followed, the Christian missionaries who from that time onward began to venture forth from Europe across the Atlantic in various directions proselytized this northern, Atlantic idea of Christianity. These Christian latecomers were remarkably myopic in their insistence that the Christianity they were preaching was the definitive version of the faith. By the sixteenth Atlantic European Christianity had multiple confessions, that is multiple institutional forms, and sadly, Catholic and Protestant Christians understood it to be an act of faith to kill each other as heretics. There was a conviction among all European Christians, however, that the version of the faith for which they were fighting was the same version as that proselytized by

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Christ’s apostles. Regardless of the differences between them, Western European Christians believed themselves to be the only true Christians on earth. The development of science and secularism in Europe only made matters worse. Racist arguments, built upon what was then recognized as science, appealed to a broad swarth of Europeans, including a good many European Christians. Beginning in the fifteenth century, the wealth that Europeans garnered, thanks to oceanic exploration and mercantile expansion, facilitated an economic takeoff that by the start of the twentieth century made Europe the wealthiest region on earth. Christian Europeans claimed that prosperity as the fruit of faith, as the reward of Christian Europe’s covenant with the God of Abraham. Other, more secular-minded Europeans argued, however, that scientific research and discovery revealed that Europe’s great leap forward was more an outcome of the European’s biological superiority. There is no necessary antipathy between faith and science, but one of the most effective strategies followed by those European thinkers who wanted to encourage such an antipathy was to argue that contrary to the Christian insistence on the common origin to all humankind, science revealed the innate superiority, and therefore right of dominion, of Europeans over all other peoples on the planet. Christianity was trying to hide from Europeans their destiny as a master race. Over the centuries, Christian thinkers of European descent struggled mightily with the question whether their Christian civilization could be shared. The discourse that emerged around the question shaped the Christian message European missionaries communicated outside of Europe. The apostles of Christ were first and foremost evangelists, individuals preaching the good news of Christ’s sacrifice to those who had never heard of him. Evangelism has always been for Christians the most highly regarded articulation of faith. As European Christians ventured out of Europe to evangelize, a discourse that came to preoccupy a significant number of them was whether, accepting that the God of Abraham had made a covenant with European Christians, had he made it with European Christians as Christians, or as Europeans? If the former, then the task before the missionary was to augment European communities of the faithful with non-European recruits. If the latter, then European missionaries were wasting their time seeking fellowship with non-Europeans. The best these missionaries accepted they could do was point non-Europeans in the direction of establishing their own covenants with God. Eventually, European Christians got it right, the God of Abraham’s covenant was not tied to race. Scholars and Christians of all colors should acknowledge the fact that after centuries of debate, by the second half of the twentieth century perhaps not all European Christians, but at least those committed to global evangelism came down on the side of the idea that European Christianity was a spiritual feast to be shared with the rest of the peoples of the globe. By the end of the twentieth century, these same Europeans had evolved even further and had come to appreciate that Christians of other racial descents had spiritual dishes for what needed to be reconceived as a global spiritual potluck. Acknowledgment of European enlightenment, however, does not take away

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from the fact that at the core of the debate among Europeans had been a presumption that Christianity was essentially a manifestation of European cultural consciousness; that Christianity was a possession belonging to Europeans that they could share as they would or would not according to their own predilections. The proprietary claims that Europeans placed upon Christianity could not help but alienate the African Christians that European missionaries helped recruit. It is difficult today to recreate the insult that must have accompanied the awareness on the part of African Christians that the communion being promised by missionaries was qualified in the minds of Europeans by phenotype. African Christians protested against the insult. Adding intellectual injury to the spiritual insult, European Christians dismissed such protests as an outcome of either racial mental incapacity or at best the immaturity to be expected of child races. Responding to the insult and injury of European prejudice was for many African Christians among their first conscious acts as Christians. The voices of those Africans attracted to Christianity yet lacking the ability to put words on a page have been lost to history. But it may be the case that unlettered African Christians expressed their responses in the context of voting with their feet. “Backsliding,” to use the colloquial English expression, that is, the act of Christian converts falling back into pre-Christian beliefs and practices, has been most typically treated in European Christian missionary sources as a function of the appeal or “pull” of traditional ways. While the phenomenon cannot be measured with any rigor, worth speculating is that backsliding was perhaps equally motivated by the “push” of an adverse reaction on the part of converts to the discovery of the racism in the Christian practices of Europeans. The concern of this discussion is more with the reactions of “lettered” African Christians, that is, Africans with literary skills in a European language. The goal of the Christian missions directed toward Africa up to the end of the nineteenth century was the formation of Christian kingdoms on idealized models of Christian states of Europe. From the beginning of the proselytization of Africa by Europeans, lettered Africans attempted to get European Christians to hear and understand how European racism and prejudice was getting in the way of such formation. This message is discernible in the letters sent at the start of the sixteenth century by the Mwene Kongo Mvemba a Nzinga, known in Europe as King Afonso l of the Kongo, to King Joao lll of Portugal.1 Two and a half centuries later, in the closing decades of the eighteenth century, it is still discernible in the unsuccessful pleas that Olaudah Equiano made for his appointment as a missionary to go to Sierra Leone.2 The eighteenth century was the height of the Atlantic Slave Trade, and one of the primary rationalizations of the trade put forward by Europeans was that it introduced captured Africans to the social and mental discipline needed to free their minds and souls from the “degeneration” endemic on the African continent due to its tropical climate. Also present in African Christian writings in European languages from Equiano onward is a repudiation of the

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characterization in European discourse, by then commonplace, of African lands and peoples as benighted. African Christian writing made the case that it was the goodness of the lands and peoples that made Africa so amenable to evangelization, and the European traffic in human bodies that posed the greatest obstacle to the Christianization of the continent. In the wake of the abolition and decline of the Atlantic Slave Trade and what now has to be recognized as the concurrent buildup to the partition of Africa by European nation states, European scientific racism evolved to justify European notions that Europeans had, as a race, an imperative to either subjugate or exterminate the other peoples on the planet. At the core of such arguments were equations of European civilization with the culmination of human evolution. In the context of such arguments, Europeans debated whether Christianity was the impetus or outcome of European racial evolution. Whatever the position taken, it was accepted as a given by European Christians that contemporary industrial civilization was the validation of the argument that there was something the God of Abraham has given to the European race that he had not given (or given in lesser doses) to all other human races. In response to these sorts of arguments, in the nineteenth century, lettered African Christians, most notably Edward W.  Blyden, James Africanus Horton, and John Dube, came to focus on ideas of Christianity as the impetus behind human evolution, and to rebut European arguments of European civilization as proof of racial superiority with celebrations of what the God of Abraham had already done for the African race and predictions of the future rise of a comparative, competitive African Christian civilization. The widespread appeal of such ideas to Christians of African descent is illustrated by the embrace across the Black Atlantic world of the New World versions of such arguments put forward by Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, Booker T. Washington and Marcus A. Garvey. Finally, in the twentieth century, as Africans gained sufficient command of the technology and political institutions of modernity to force European imperialists to leave their lands, African Christian thinkers began to repair the spiritual insult and intellectual injury of a centuries-long engagement with Eurocentric Christianity. In response to a half millennium of listening to European proprietary claims on Christianity, of European myopia about the right ways to worship the God of Abraham, African Christians began to conceptualize faith in ways that referred to European Christianity as at best an antecedent. The “African Reformation” at least as conceived by African Christians, in ways very much reminiscent of the ways Protestant Europeans once conceived the “European Reformation,” represents a movement to wipe away not just the corruption in an inherited form of Christian practice, but the inherited form of Christianity itself. Outside of African Christianity, the Senegalese physicist, Chiekh Anta Diop, introduced a secularized idea of the movement of civilization that repudiated the European claim that whatever civilization existed on the African continent came from outsiders either from the north across the Sahara or from the west across the Atlantic. Diop

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identified an indigenous source of civilization on the African continent, spreading west and south from the Nile Valley.3 Inside of African Christianity, the Nigerian theologian and historian, Ogbu Kalu, performed a similar intellectual feat. Rejecting the notion that European consciousness in any necessary way inspired African Christianity, Kalu identified an indigenous African Christian mentality in form and substance akin to what is now recognized as Pentecostalism. In his various writings, Kalu then narrated how, going back to the time of the Apostles, this mentality has informed and shaped the ideas of Christianity percolating to the African continent from Asia and then Europe.4 Here in the twenty-first century, lettered African Christians have made Christianity an indigenous expression of faith, triumphing over all the exclusivist claims Europeans once made. African Christian thinkers see themselves as having righted the wrongs perpetuated by European thinkers in the past. The celebration attendant to this achievement, however, is the greatest prompt behind the need for a reset to the historical narrative of Christianity on the African continent. African Christian intellectual engagement has been preoccupied with the demonstration of what was wrong with the older European narrative to the detriment of the conceptualization of the new narrative that should replace it. Going forward, what is needed is not further discussion of what Europeans did wrong, but a far more developed understanding of what Africans did right. Taking a didactic perspective, there are several problems that any new narrative of the history of Christianity in Africa must address. Most obvious is a lack of consensus among scholars about what changed for the good. The broader the audience for an argument for a historical sea change, the greater the demand for clarity in the dichotomy being postulated as existing between what is being identified as having been wrong and what is being identified as now right. And what is being identified as right needs to be substantive, needs to be something positive, as distinct from just that which remains once the wrong has been discarded. For example, more should be said than just that the European equation between Christianity and European consciousness was wrong. Was it wrong because an equal case might be made for an equation between Christianity and African consciousness? Or, as would be defended here, “my father’s mansion has many rooms,” meaning that it was wrong because there is no one-to-one equation between Christianity and any national or racial consciousness? The question of Christianity and collective consciousness as applied to the history of Christianity in Africa is of course a question in need of a great deal of further investigation. It has been placed on the table here to illustrate the necessary next steps prompted by the success of Christian discourse in moving past the challenges once posed by European chauvinism. To build upon this point, for a new way of thinking about a historical phenomenon to be grasped, the previous ways of thinking it seeks to replace require some rehearsal. It does not help matters, however, if the rehearsal of the older ways of thinking explains more about the phenomenon than the presentation of the newer ways of thinking. In the sciences it is argued that “bad

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science” simply disappears into oblivion. Not so, bad history. In the absence of newer, better treatments, bad history continues to be read. Historians are preoccupied with change over time; so flawed, previously recited historical narratives must be recapitulated in some form as the prelude to any presentation of how things have changed. In the absence of superior alternatives, such recapitulations keep the old ways of thinking alive in collective memory. At best, for people with some recollection of the psychic costs of the limitations of the old ways of thinking, rehearsing them one more time can be a cathartic process. More typical, because collective memory is so short-to-non-existent these days, teaching bad history mostly provides occasions for collective rediscovery of contentions mostly forgotten, with, as the contemporary debate in the United States over Critical Race Theory illustrates, the messenger often being condemned for the message. As applied to the study of the history of Christianity on the African continent, the ongoing focus on what was wrong with mission Christianity continues to reinforce Eurocentric narratives as paradigmatic. Ironically, to the extent to which new research on the history of African Christianity is a retort to the way the history of African Christianity used to be taught, it is a retort to an argument no longer being advanced. Scholars of mission history have moved on, concentrating more and more on the attributes of what the late historian Lamin Sanneh called the “translation of the message,” that is, the process through which African Christians have indigenized the Christian message originally communicated by older generations of missionaries. No doubt there is more to discover about the bad things that European Christians did in the past. It is not clear what these discoveries would add to present understanding. It is clear that the research that would supply these discoveries would continue to service a narrative in which few people are now invested. Further research on the wrong turns of the past is not needed. What is needed is new research on the right turns that lead to the present. What is needed is a new perspective. The African American spiritual “How I got over,” is most regularly associated with the great African American gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, in particular with her performance of the hymn at the civil rights “March on Washington” in 1963. The March on Washington is best remembered as the occasion of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. For African American Christians, however, the occasion had an even greater resonance. Many of them at the time read the March on Washington, 30 years in the making, as a sign of election, as a testament from the God of Abraham that they were truly among his people, blessed with a covenant to keep moving forward along the path that had led to the March, a path that would culminate for many of these believers in the election of Barack Hussein Obama as President of the United States. As Mahalia Jackson sung the song on that day in August, it represented both a recognition that a great battle over past domination had been won, but also that a new battle, a new battle symbolized by King’s “I Have a Dream,” speech had been mandated by the Christian God.

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The case being made in this chapter, and in this volume, is that the perspective taken in that hymn, on that occasion, is the perspective new scholarship on the history of Christianity in Africa should take. “My soul looks back and wonders” Jackson sung, “at how I got over.” To take nothing from the sense of miracle communicated in that sentence, the task before historians is to explain, in terms of the depiction of events and developments in time and space, how the Christian message in Africa survived whatever carrying costs Europeans intentionally or unintentionally attached to it to become a message Africa now rebroadcasts to the rest of the world. Equally, if not more important, here on the other side of Eurocentric constructions of African history, the task before scholars is to demonstrate how the peoples on the African continent have been hearing and spreading the Christian message since the time of Christ. For good or for bad, the European moment in African Christian history has come and gone and with it the need to start the chronicle of Christianity in Africa with the arrival of Portuguese explorers at the court of the Mwene Kongo. For the better this volume seeks to affirm, there is now the possibility of writing the history of Christianity according to an African timeline. The imperative implicit in this victory is to recast the narrative of the history of Christianity on the African continent in new ways. Not to presume upon the right of future generations of Christians and scholars to ask their own questions and seek their own answers, but the volume promotes three new directions future research and writing should pursue. Accepting that the discourse on African Christianity no longer has to recognize the racial distinctions Europeans once imposed among African peoples, and that, as such, the discourse no longer requires any focus on “interventions” in African history by bearers of civilization from places remote to the continent, the volume aspires to demonstrate the utility of recasting the narrative of the history of Christianity in Africa along the line that perhaps it should have been casted from the start, that is, as following similar patterns of cultivation, growth, and dissemination as Christianity followed in Eurasia. Some parts of Asia became Christian in the centuries immediately following the death of Christ. So did some parts of Africa. The proportion of the continental population of Eurasia that became Christian in ancient times was no greater than the proportion of the continental population of Africa that became Christian. Across the past two millennia Christian civilizations have risen and declined on both the Eurasian and the African continent. Here in the twenty-first century, there are Eurasian peoples just learning about Christ, just as there are African peoples doing the same thing. This exercise in comparison could be extended further, but hopefully its point is clear. Building upon the work of the pioneering world historian, Marshall Hodgson, worth positing is that, just as Hodgson suggests there was an old-world pattern of socioeconomic diffusion and interaction, with ideas and innovations self-­ regenerating as they bounced from one old-world locale to another, so there was also an old-world pattern of cultural and religious diffusion and interaction, with religious and spiritual movements reseeding each other as they moved from one location to another.5 The mid-twentieth-century Protestant

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missionary discourse about “older churches” and “younger churches” would seem to have had some idea of this dynamic in mind.6 The most essential point being advocated here is that the history of Christianity as a faith embraced and practiced by African peoples needs to be understood as a cultural phenomenon similar, if not the same, to the cultural phenomenon of Christianity as a faith embraced and practiced by Eurasian peoples. Both processes involved a spread outward across space and time from the places where Christ and his apostles preached. Both processes were sped up and held back by historical vicissitudes. Missionaries, trading peoples and settlers were vectors in both instances, but local holy people in both places made meaningful for indigenes the faith communicated by the outsiders. Like Thomas in South Asia and the Eunuch in Ethiopia, the trans-Atlantic missionaries who began to arrive along Asia’s and Africa’s coastlines in the fifteenth century are important to the story as sowers, but only of some, not all the varieties of the seed that took root. How central to the story of Christianity on both continents the trans-Atlantic missionary movement will prove is of course something that future generations will debate. What can be said of value about Africa at the present is that the story of Christianity on the continent reads much more clearly when begun in ancient Egypt rather than late medieval Portugal. Yet, having spent a good deal of the chapter making the case against the centrality of trans-Atlantic missions to the history of Christianity on the African continent, it is important to not throw out the baby with the bathwater, that is, to dismiss the historical legacies of trans-Atlantic missions for Christianity as now practiced in Africa. Hundreds of millions of African Christians continue to worship in churches first founded by Europeans. For these Christians, the historical narratives they want to read highlight the continuities, not the discontinuities in the story of Christianity in Africa that begins with the arrival of trans-Atlantic missionaries. The second direction in which the volume hopes to guide future research is toward a new conceptualization of the Christianity introduced into Africa from along its Atlantic coastline. The study of mission Christianity does not capture the whole story of Christianity in Africa, but it does capture a crucial part of the story. And perhaps more important than the story of mission Christianity itself is the story of how mission Christianity shaped Christianity as a religious experience on the continent. Confessional, denominational, and specific faith community histories are best left to historians in those church traditions. A volume such as this can show the way forward in fitting the histories of mission church traditions into a broader narrative of Christian history on two fronts. First is in the synchronization of the ecclesiastical histories of these church traditions with the larger metanarrative of the history of Christianity in Africa. Trans-Atlantic Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical and Pentecostal churches have matured in Africa according to their own internal histories, but these developments have occurred within the contexts of the wider spread of Christianity and of the rise and decline of the European presence on the African continent. The volume seeks to demonstrate how

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comprehension of these internal histories is enhanced by fitting them within larger historical constructs. The second front upon which the volume can help further the discussion of the legacies of trans-Atlantic missions is in offering some general answers to the question of how the European Christian civilization that trans-Atlantic missions brought to Africa imprinted the practice of faith on the continent. Most concretely this question can be answered through discussions of how European Christian notions of ecclesiastical polity and social welfare have continued to shape African Christian understandings of how a church operates and how a church services its community. Trans-Atlantic missions introduced into Africa congregational, episcopal, synodal and presbyterian forms of ecclesiology. Faith communities first founded by trans-Atlantic missions have retained these forms of church organization. The forms have been widely adopted as well by Christian faith communities established by Africans. A “new wine in old bottles” versus “old wine in new bottles” debate is in fact quite alive and well in the discourse about the connections between mission-founded versus African-­ initiated churches. Perhaps the most enduring legacy of the Christian civilization introduced to Africa from across the Atlantic is the notion of Christian social welfare that first matured in Europe. The saying, “Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime,” may be Daoist in origins, but it reflects a Christian moral sensibility traceable back to the European Middle Ages. From that time forward “caritas,” or the ethos of caring for other Christians, came to be signaled through a commitment to the latter’s social amelioration. Across the early modern and modern centuries, the ethos informed the approach that European Christians took both to servicing the social welfare needs of existing Christian communities and to providing the evangelical outreach needed to grow new Christian communities. The ethos was institutionalized in the form of hospitals, orphanages, and most importantly schools, all dedicated to the Christian idea of self-improvement as the measure of Christian identity. Trans-Atlantic missions introduced the ethos, communicated through the establishment of the same sorts of social welfare institutions in Africa. Significantly, while “dechristianization,” that is, the secularization of social welfare institutions was taking place in Europe itself, Christian missions in Africa negotiated with European imperial powers to supply the social welfare needs of colonial states, meaning that Western ideas of social welfare retained their association with Christianity through the colonial into the independence era. In twenty-first-century Africa, both mission-­ founded churches and African-initiated churches have continued to service their communities through the provision of Western-style social welfare institutions. The volume aspires to highlight the ways in which notions of social welfare derived from European Christian practices inform the way Christianity has evolved on the continent. The third direction in which the volume seeks to guide new research is toward a more empirical understanding of the spread of Christianity in Africa

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as a historical process. This is a greater challenge that it might first appear. As already explained, Eurocentric narratives have served as a major obstacle to the reconstruction of the story of Christianity in Africa. Even in the narratives most concerned with identifying African agency, there has been too much focus on missions and missionaries, and not enough on the churches and Christian devotional movements taking root in African soil. And of course, it has been only recently that the scholarship on Christianity in Africa has gotten past the debate whether Christianity is a form of cultural imperialism imposed on Africans. To get around such deficiencies, to tell the story of how Christianity came to be in Africa, in the past thinkers have turned to various other intellectual approaches, such as theology, anthropology, biblical studies, and literary theory. These are all viable, valuable ways of understanding phenomena, but when used as the basis for historical reconstruction, they cannot avoid essentializing their subject matter. And approaching the topic from any of these perspectives begs the issue of historical verification. If there is no history available to validate your argument, how do you know that your argument actually identified and explained something that happened? The volume takes for granted the idea that getting the narrative as forensically accurate as possible is an end in itself. It also hopes to show that more rigorously researched and detailed historical treatments of the various storylines in the history of African Christianity can aid scholars who study the topic of African Christianity from other intellectual perspectives. There is no expectation that the chapters in this volume will get everything right. There is the hope that the historical narratives the chapters do offer will stand the test of future investigations. The chapters below have been divided into four sections. As mentioned at the start, the volume honors the legacies and ongoing influence of the nineteenth and twentieth-century thinkers who shaped much of the present discourse on the historical development of Christianity in Africa. Under the heading “Mentors,” the chapters in section one offer chapter-length studies of the teachings of many of the most influential thinkers, not all of whom were historians, who published studies in the twentieth century. The question posed to the authors of the chapters in the section is what are the most important ideas and concepts twenty-first-century students can find in the thinker’s corpus of writings? Collectively, the chapters in the section provide a primer of how the history of Christianity was first conceived and written about by the greatest teachers of the subject. Christianity in Africa goes back to the first centuries after Christ’s and the apostles’ ministries. Forms of Christianity that trace their ancestry back to Christian communities that formed during these times continue to be practiced in Africa. Still, the antecedents of most of the forms of Christianity now practiced in Africa were churches and missions that came to Africa from across the Atlantic Ocean. The second section collects chapters that, under the heading “Trans-Atlantic Christianity in Africa,” talk about attributes of these antecedents. The chapters in this section deal with the complexity associated with, to return to an expression used above, not throwing the baby out with the bath

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water. Trans-Atlantic Christianity, even in the forms appropriated by Christians of African descent, is derivative of European Christianity, with all the latter’s issues with racism and oppression. What these chapters show is how the varieties of Christian missions that arrived in Africa from across the Atlantic transcended the obstacle of their origins in the European world to offer to African peoples avenues into fellowship with Christ. The chapters follow a loose narrative format. Beginning with the missions that arrived on Africa shores during the early modern centuries, the chapters take the story through the colonial era. Considerations of the story after Independence will be offered in the last section. Charles P. Grove’s four-volume work, The Planting of Christianity in Africa, which, appropriately enough was first published in 1955, the year before the Gold Coast became Ghana, entrenched in the historical mind the idea of Christianity as a sower’s creed. The sowers Grove had in mind were fairly exclusively Europeans. The work fits very easily into the genre of writings that appeared at the end of the colonial era on what Africans should be thankful that Europeans did for them. But other Christian writers, African as well as European have appropriated the idea and applied it to their narratives. It is worth suggesting that a good deal of the contention between scholars over agency in African Christianity is traceable back to framing the history of Christianity on the continent from this perspective. This volume seeks to reverse the narrative and move past the notion of the sowing to what has been identified here as the more important question of the rooting of the faith in Africa. The last two sections of the volume look at the history of Christianity in Africa from this point of view. The chapters in the third section, under the heading “The Rooting of Christianity in Africa I: Christian Life from Ancient Times to the Independence Era,” consider churches and movements that attracted Christian adherents going back to Roman Africa and ancient Nilotic Africa and going forward to the Independence era. The concern of the chapters will be how Africans in the past transformed Christianity into “lived” religious experience. The chapters in the fourth section, under the heading “The Rooting of Christianity in Africa II: Christian Life in Contemporary Africa,” take the discussion to the present and reflect upon contemporary developments that are shaping the Christian experience on the continent.

Notes 1. See “Excerpt of letter from Nzinga Mbemba to Portuguese King João III,” in World History Commons, https://worldhistorycommons.org/excerpt-­letter-­ nzinga-­mbemba-­portuguese-­king-­joao-­iii [accessed June 6, 2023]. 2. Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African Written By Himself. Project Gutenberg, n.d. Chapter 12.

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3. See Cheikh Anta Diop and Mercer Cook. The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality. San Antonio: Chicago Review Press, 1989. 4. Kalu, Ogbu. African Christianity: An African Story. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2007. 5. Marshall G. S. Hudgson, “The Interrelations of Societies in History,” Comparative Studies in History and Society, vol. 5. no. 2 (1963), 227–250. 6. See William Richey Hogg, Ecumenical Foundations; A History of the International Missionary Foundation, Portland OR: Wipf and Stock Publisher.

PART I

Mentors

CHAPTER 2

The Writings and Influence of Edward W. Blyden Moses Moore

From our standpoint, we do not believe that Africa needed the theological interference of Europe, for the Theology of Europe is derived from the conceptions of Roman, Celt, and Teuton, which have modified the Semitic ideas promulgated in the Bible….European Christianity is Western Christianity—that is to say, Christianity as taught at Nazareth, in Jerusalem, and on the Mound of Beatitudes, modified to suit the European mind or idiosyncrasies. (Edward Blyden, African Life and Customs (London: C. M. Phillips, 1908), 63–64).

During his extended 1881–1882 tour of the United States, Edward Blyden, the West African-based minister, educator, statesman, and scholar, delivered an extraordinary address before an audience in Boston’s famed Park Street Church. His astounding lecture, focused on the famed encounter between “Philip and the Eunuch” described in Acts 8:26–40, disabused his listeners of much that they had come to believe and consider sacrosanct about the origins and development of Christianity.1 Rather than reiterate conventional nineteenth-­century expositions of the narrative that invariably emphasized and

M. Moore (*) School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA School of Historical, Philosophy, and Religious Studies, Department of Religious Studies, Tempe, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. E. Barnes, T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48270-0_2

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affirmed the centrality, primacy, and agency of “Philip” and by extension that of Europe and Europeans, Blyden focused instead on the significance and contributions of the unnamed “Ethiopian” Eunuch. Employing hermeneutical, theological, and historical skills enhanced by the era’s new academic and religious disciplines, Blyden emphatically identified the Eunuch with Africa and expounded upon the traditionally ignored role that Africa and her descendants played in the origins, formation, and dissemination of Christianity. His bold and iconic reinterpretation of the biblical narrative and its significance before an audience that he knew would be skeptical, if not hostile, illuminates much that is to be valued about Blyden’s life and legacy as a pioneering nineteenth-­ century scholar of not only African Christianity but also the continent’s more diverse religious history and heritage. Blyden’s explication of “Philip and the Eunuch” embodied a thesis that he had been developing over the course of his maturation as a West African-based scholar simultaneously engaged with the validation and defense of Africa and her descendants while responding to the myriad challenges posed by the advent and extension of late Victorian modernity and its new religious, scientific, intellectual, and academic corollaries. Especially important among the latter was the emergence of the “science of religion” and its nurture of purportedly more “scientific” and critical approaches to ethnography, hermeneutics, theology, and ecclesiastical history.2 Blyden was increasingly aware of these developments which induced unsettling questions about the veracity of the era’s prevailing metanarrative and its claims about not only the normative role that Europe and Europeans played in the origins, historical development, and diffusion of Christianity but also their continued hegemonic agency in Christianity’s dissemination. As he cautiously engaged and appropriated the new “science of religion” and its disciplinary corollaries, Blyden formulated and presented a countervailing narrative that unequivocally emphasized the role played by Africa and Africans in the origins, and formation of Christianity and the importance of their continued agency in Christianity’s African and global diffusion. Blyden’s scholarly maturation and his pioneering ethnographic, comparative, hermeneutical, and historical studies were chronicled in an extensive and impressive corpus of publications with provocative titles such as Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race; A Vindication of the African Race: Being a Brief Examination of the Arguments in Favor of African Inferiority; The African Problem and the Method of its Solution; “Mohammedanism and the Negro Race,” “Islam and Race Distinctions,” “The Koran in Africa,” “From West Africa to Palestine,” “West Africa Before Europe,” and African Life and Customs.3 Although often deemed controversial, his publications and scholarship were valued and acknowledged by many of his African, European, and American contemporaries. His importance as a scholar of note was also attested by his membership in prominent learned societies such as the American Philological Association, the American Society of Comparative Religions, the Royal African Society, and the American Negro Academy.4 In further acknowledgment of his erudition, Blyden was the recipient of several honorary degrees, including a doctorate, and he was

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invited to share his scholarship in numerous academic and religious venues on both sides of the Atlantic.5 Especially notable was an invitation to deliver a paper on “Comparative Religion” at the 1893 Columbian Exposition which hosted what was arguably the most prominent religious gathering of the nineteenth century—the World’s Parliament of Religions.6 The importance and scope of Blyden’s pioneering religious scholarship were additionally attested by West African Muslims who honored him with the conveyance of Islamic names and by a representative of the Sultan of Turkey who presented him with an award “for the labor expended in pointing out to the better consideration of the world the virtue or true import of their religion [Islam].”7 No less significant was the tribute paid to him and his scholarship by appreciative parents of his Muslim students in Sierra Leone who gifted him with a pen engraved with words that had special resonance for Blyden: “the Pen is mightier than the sword.”8 Given the acknowledgment of Blyden’s importance as a scholar of religion by his contemporaries, it is ironic and unfortunate that his contributions are so little known by current religious studies scholars and students. The myriad factors that contribute to this inattention include a tradition of cultural and racial chauvinism embedded in the discipline of religious studies from its inception. Moreover, as was the case with his scholarly contemporaries, Blyden’s contributions, while significant, were constrained by the limitations of the intellectual, academic, and scientific insights and presuppositions of his era. The gaze of history and hindsight also reveals that Blyden was not always intellectually cogent or ideologically consistent. Consequently, several of his foundational presuppositions and theories have proved to be outmoded and variously problematic. Notable in this regard were his often romanticized and idealized views of Islam and its adherents, and his beliefs about the determinants and fixed nature of racial characteristics. However, not all of Blyden’s views have proved outmoded or inaccurate. No few of his concerns and insights anticipated and attempted to address issues and discourses that remain central to the discipline of religious studies and particularly to studies of the formative history and dissemination of Christianity.9 Nevertheless, it is tragically ironic that notwithstanding Blyden’s pioneering scholarship, contemporary popular and even academic accounts of the developmental history and diffusion of Christianity remain embedded in and supportive of a predominately Western and Eurocentric metanarrative which still obscures, misconstrues, and even ignores the contributions of Africa and Africans.10 The continued influence of this metanarrative suggests that contemporary scholars engaged in studies of the development and dissemination of Christianity would benefit from an examination of not only the scholarly legacy of Blyden but also the epoch and related factors that molded him and his pioneering religious scholarship. Foremost among the factors that shaped Blyden’s contributions and legacy as a path-breaking African scholar of religion was his birth in the Atlantic diaspora in 1832 to African parents; his early embrace of Christianity; his sensitivity

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to the inferior status that traditional nineteenth-century interpretations of Christianity consigned to him and other peoples of African descent; and his increasing awareness that currents of modernity were inexorably recontouring traditional notions of religious, intellectual, academic, and racial orthodoxy. Although introduced to Christianity by his parents who were members of the Dutch Reform Church on St. Thomas, Blyden’s early studies of biblical and ecclesiastical history, theology, and hermeneutics were under the direction of John Knox, an American Presbyterian minister who was recovering his health on the island.11 Encouraged by Knox to depart St. Thomas at eighteen to pursue ministerial education in the United States, Blyden was dismayed to discover that his race precluded his admission to several purportedly Christian institutions.12 He was further distressed and shocked by the viciousness and cruelty of America’s wider racial climate, which seemed to have reached its nadir with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Especially troubling for Blyden was the scriptural and theological support provided by the controversial legislation by American “divines.” Long afterward he recorded his still palpable dismay and disgust at hearing a New York pastor, “a D.D. of eminent learning and ability,” cite from the pulpit the so-called Curse of Noah in justification of slavery and the new law: “The decree, … has gone forth, and we cannot reverse it. ‘Cursed be Canaan, a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.’” Blyden confessed: “This was the first of our hearing such weight given to that interpretation and application of Noah’s malediction; and though not over eighteen years old, we experienced, as it were, an intuitive revulsion of mind never to be forgotten.”13 It was a seminal experience that inspired Blyden’s desire to “read passages in the Bible purporting to the Negro without racist redaction.”14 Subsequently, hermeneutics, and exegesis aided by disciplined study of “biblical languages,” as well as theology and history became parts of the scholarly arsenal that Blyden developed as he embarked on a lifelong effort to challenge and correct interpretations of Scripture and other literary, historical, and scientific canons that alleged the inferiority and legitimated the oppression of people of African descent. Desperate to escape the racial animus of the United States, Blyden soon immigrated to Liberia. Upon his arrival in January 1851, the tiny republic, like its neighbor Sierra Leone, was still struggling with crippling handicaps associated with its establishment as a quixotic prescription to the intersection of modernity, Atlantic slavery, evangelical outreach, and Africa’s development.15 Seeking to continue his aborted education in Liberia, Blyden began instruction in the local high school under Princeton Seminary graduate Rev. John Wilson for whom the Bible was the literal and authoritative “Word of God” as well as the school’s primary textbook.16 Blyden also revived his dream of becoming a Presbyterian minister and his desire for formal theological education at one of the denomination’s American seminaries. However, the Presbyterian Board of Missions inexplicably rejected his petition for support and its racially based decision would prove to have unforeseen consequences for Blyden’s religious and intellectual development

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and orientation.17 Inadvertently, their decision helped to nurture the intellectual and religious eclecticism that Blyden exhibited as his research and scholarship increasingly distanced him from theological, doctrinal, and eventually ecclesiastical allegiance to Presbyterian orthodoxy and traditional Christian evangelicalism. Upon successful completion of his ordination studies under Wilson and satisfactory evidence of his knowledge of and subscription to the tenets and doctrines of Old School Presbyterianism Blyden was ordained in 1858 and became an active member of a Presbytery of West Africa. However, the presbytery was characterized by an allegiance to Reformed orthodoxy that eventually put many of its members at odds with the trajectory of Blyden’s intellectual and religious maturation. Even as a newly ordained minister, Blyden envisioned an expansive role of the ministry and in an ordination sermon subsequently published as “The Pastor’s Work,” he insisted that it was essential that black ministers be “intellectually” and “spiritually” enlightened and engaged, and scholars of both science and scripture.18 The text was essentially a public and personal manifesto which signaled that Blyden’s intellectual and vocational path would not be that of a traditional minister or missionary. Presaged were his expansive and intersecting roles as a scholar, statesman, and public intellectual. The text also signaled his increasing susceptibility to the more progressive academic, intellectual, scientific, and religious currents of the era. As he assumed the ambitious model of the ministry delineated in “The Pastor’s Work,” Blyden embarked on an intensive program of expansive and disciplined self-education initially focused on the study of Scripture, “Biblical languages,” and the “Classics.”19 His early mentors, Knox and Wilson, were well schooled in the prevailing methodology and perspectives of nineteenth-­ century biblical scholarship and Blyden also initially embraced a traditional and “orthodox” approach to the study and exposition of Scripture that earned him praise for possessing an exceptional competence in “Biblical Knowledge.”20 Subsequently, “Biblical Knowledge,” combined with his classical studies and linguistic skills, proved to be indispensable aids as Blyden engaged in an unrelenting mission to challenge and correct interpretations of Scripture and other literary, historical, and scientific canons that alleged African inferiority. It was an ambitious agenda boldly proclaimed by Blyden in his first major publication titled “A Vindication of the African Race: Being a Brief Examination of the Arguments in Favor of African Inferiority.” In its thirty-seven pages, the twenty-five-year-old budding scholar vigorously refuted a mélange of theories purportedly “founded upon facts of Theology, Science, or Philosophy [and History]” that allegedly justified black inferiority and oppression.21 Of particular concern were prevailing interpretations of Genesis 9:18–27 which was often referred to as the “curse of Ham” and quoted ad nauseam to provide scriptural and theological justification and legitimation for the subordination, brutalization, and exploitation of blacks.22 Blyden’s exegesis of this text, although reflecting the limitations of his still traditional theological and hermeneutical skills and orientation, was ambitious in its challenge of the Hamitic Myth and

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its contention that “the malediction of Noah” was directed at the black race. Notably, his agenda foreshadowed a lifelong hermeneutical, theological, and historical effort that anticipated the work of later generations of black biblical scholars, theologians, and historians.23 Biblical narratives, themes, motifs, and language creatively reinterpreted became staples of Blyden’s academic and religious arguments in “vindication” of not only the African race but also Liberia and Liberian colonization. His synthesis of ideology, theology, history, and biblical hermeneutics in support of this agenda was premiered in A Voice from Bleeding Africa on Behalf of her Bleeding Children and subsequently repeated on both sides of the Atlantic in sermons and lectures such as Liberia’s Offerings; “Hope for Africa” and “The Call of Providence to the Descendants of Africa in America.”24 His efforts would make him one of the era’s most articulate and prolific “colonization theologians” and proclaimers of the dream that black emigration from the Americas would make Liberia the nucleus of a modern West African state and proof of the capabilities of the Negro race.25 Blyden’s preoccupation with what he pronounced as his life’s work— “vindication” of the Negro race—inspired his publication in 1869 of “The Negro in Ancient History.”26 Both title and content illuminate the application of his classical, literary, philological, historical, and biblical research in a systematic and comprehensive effort to correct misinformed judgments concerning the past, present, and future of the African race. With no apologies, it forthrightly challenged prevailing truisms of scripture, literature, and history which insisted that Africa and Africans had made no contribution worthy of note to either sacred or secular history. Consequently, the testimony of scripture buttressed by literary, historical scholarship as well as archeological research garnered on his 1866 trip to Palestine and Egypt were felt to provide incontrovertible proof that Africans had been a significant presence in antiquity.27 The resulting text was heralded as “the most serious attempt made by a member of the Negro race to reconstruct aspects of early Negro history,” and Blyden’s aggressive scholarship again anticipated the work of later generations of scholars who would follow his lead in exploring the role and contribution of blacks in antiquity.28 Blyden’s appropriation of the methodology and scholarship associated with what was initially called the historical/critical method facilitated his gradual embrace of the still nascent discipline of biblical criticism.29 Its critical appropriation was an extension of his earliest hermeneutical efforts intended to enable him to “read passages in the Bible purporting to the Negro without racist redaction”30 By the early ’70s, Blyden was cautiously embracing the methodological orientation and findings of biblical criticism en route to becoming one of its foremost black advocates. Central to his advocacy was what he described as its potential as a corrective of persistent hermeneutical and exegetical racism and particularly “eliminating from Christian teaching the mischievous doctrine that the African lies under a curse through the anger and mortification of Noah.”31 Notably, by the end of the century, Blyden was

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emphatically insisting that black appropriation of the findings of higher criticism had become even more imperative because the “sinister influence” of the Hamitic Myth was being magnified as a result of the pernicious and increasing impact which it was exerting “upon the consciousness of [increasing numbers of] Christian Negro youth in theological schools and colleges.”32 Characteristically assured of his scholarship, Blyden was not reticent in expressing confidence in his critical appropriation and mastery of the methodologies and insights associated with both biblical and historical criticism. This propensity was evidenced by his public incursion in heated discourse among “learned” religious scholars Professor [William] Robertson Smith, Dr. George F. Moore, Dr. Davidson, Karl Marti, and Joseph Jacobs as they grappled with parts of the Exodus narrative.33 Their dilemma, as described by Professor Smith, the accomplished but controversial Scottish biblical scholar, was that, “The perplexities of Exodus xix-xxxiv have made these chapters the locus desperatus of criticism.”34 However, Blyden confessed to being “perplexed at the perplexities of the learned critics” as he offered the “solution of the difficulties” posed by the text: “All the misunderstanding, it seems to me, has arisen partly from the mistake of translating instead of transliterating proper names, and probably partially from the repellent idea of appearing to recognize polytheism in the Bible.”35 Astutely discerning the implicit racial, ethnic, and cultural chauvinism embedded in their discourse, Blyden added that “The Bible is constantly pointing out that the dispensations of Jehovah are not restricted to the Hebrew course of History—Jehovah makes no distinction. …[and] we are also taught that in all parts of the earth Jehovah is worshiped though under different names.” He also saw fit to interject even more novel insights into the discourse as he affirmed soteriological options for Africa, apart from any normative religious claims of either East or West: “Islam or Christianity for Africa is not the only alternative. Christ told the woman of Samaria that the worship of Jehovah should be confined neither to Mount Gerizim nor to Jerusalem. [Consequently, t] he ultimate fate of Africa does not depend exclusively upon Jerusalem, Rome or Mecca.”36 Blyden’s interrogation and selective appropriation of the methodologies and perspectives associated with modernity and its intellectual and academic corollaries were discernable to varying degrees in most of his publications and addresses dating from the early 1870s. Arguably, however, the aforementioned “Philip and the Eunuch—or The Instruments and Methods of African Evangelization,” and an earlier sermon titled “Ethiopia Stretching Forth Her Hands Unto God; or Africa’s Service to the World” best illuminate Blyden’s contributions and legacy as a pioneering biblical exegete and ecclesiastical historian.37 Significantly, both addresses were originally delivered to audiences within an American religious milieu that was experiencing heightening acrimony resulting from the era’s emergent hermeneutical, theological, and historical disciplines and the challenges which they posed to the “authenticity” of traditional interpretations of Christianity, its Scriptures, and history.

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“Ethiopia Stretching Forth Her Hands Unto God; or Africa’s Service to the World,” presented before the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States in 1880, was the latest exposition of one of Blyden’s favorite texts—Psalm 68:31: “Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God.” Often evoked by Blyden to rally support for African missions and Liberian colonization, it was now employed to provide scriptural and historical context for a far-ranging exposition that illuminated the historical and contemporary contributions that Africa and her offspring had rendered in “Service to the World.”38 Evidenced throughout the published version of the sermon were Blyden’s enhanced hermeneutical, theological, and historical skills as he offered definitive clarification of the Scriptural reference to “Ethiopia” and “Ethiopians” as meaning, “the continent of Africa” and “the great race who inhabit that continent.” He also affirmed Africa’s ancient and contemporary linkage with important developments taking place in other portions of the globe, since the continent was “no vast island” but rather “lies at the gateway of all the noblest and lofty traditions of the human race….and is connected, in one way or another, with some of the most famous names and events in the annals of time.” Sacred history, he also insisted, testified that “Abram, Jacob, and the ancient Hebrews were connected with Africa” and that “In Africa, Moses, the greatest lawgiver the world has ever seen was born and raised.”39 Similarly, the “ancient Philosophers” of Greek and Rome “resorted to Africa “to gaze upon its wonders and gather inspiration from its arts and sciences.”40 Blyden’s appropriation of the findings of the discipline of comparative religion was also evident as he challenged the stereotypes and ignorance of many of his fellow ministers regarding African religion and religiosity: There is not a tribe on the continent of Africa, in spite of the almost universal opinion to the contrary, in spite of the fetishes and gree grees which many of them are supposed to worship … which does not stretch out its hands to the Great Creator. There is not one who does not recognize the Supreme Being.41

Two years later, in his exposition on “Philip and the Eunuch,” Blyden elaborated on these themes and their broader implications. In contrast to usual expositions of the text which began and ended with affirmations of European agency and hegemony and African subjugation, Blyden engaged in a radically nontraditional exegesis that boldly rejected dismissive images, stereotypes, and truisms that traditionally framed historical and biblical allusions to Africa and its inhabitants. Sacred and secular history was deftly linked as Blyden, again anticipating the scholarship of later generations of black biblical scholars and historians, reiterated that “Ethiopians” referenced in scripture were in fact Africans and that there is “no people, except the Hebrews and other ancient inhabitants of Palestine, more frequently mentioned in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament than the Ethiopians; and there is no country more frequently referred to then Ethiopia.” Furthermore, “the record of no people… in sacred history or in ancient secular history, has less of the discreditable

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then the record of the Ethiopians.”42 Refutation of the era’s popular “Orientalism” and “Egyptology” that denied Africa and its inhabitants association with Egypt was also central to Blyden’s presentation. Thus, he summarily denounced arguments rooted in “superficial criticism” and “prejudices” being advanced by contemporary writers and scholars which “attempted to deny the intimate relations of the Negro with the great historic races of Egypt and Ethiopia.”43 Alluding to his travels to North Africa and Egypt, Blyden pointed out that “No one who had traveled in North-eastern Africa, or among the ruins of the banks of the Nile, will for a moment doubt that there was the connection, not of accident or of adventitious circumstances, but of consanguinity between the race of inner Africa of the present day, and the ancient Egyptians and Ethiopians.”44 Notably, after confirming an honorable and indispensable African presence in the Old Testament narrative and its historical milieu, Blyden similarly affirmed the central role of Africa and her inhabitants in events at the core of the New Testament narrative. He offered a reinterpretation of sacred history that boldly affirmed and celebrated the role and agency of Africa and Africans at and in the origins of Christianity: When the Savior of mankind, born in lowly circumstances, was the persecuted babe of Bethlehem, Africa furnished the refuge of his threatened and helpless infancy. African hands ministered to the comfort of Mary and Joseph while they sojourned as homeless and hunted strangers in that land. In the final hours of the Man of Sorrows, when his disciples had forsaken Him and fled. …; when Asia, in the person of the Jew, clamored for His blood, and Europe, when the Roman soldier, was dragging Him to execution, and afterwards nailed those sinless hands to the cross, and pierced that sacred side… [Africa] furnished the man to share the burden of the cross with the suffering Redeemer.45

In addition to highlighting Blyden’s enhanced hermeneutical, exegetical, and theological skills, “Philip and the Eunuch” also showcased his complementary appropriation of the era’s new ecclesiastical historiography. In doing so, Blyden acknowledged the progressive studies of his longtime friend Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Dean of Westminster and author of an impressive corpus of critical ecclesiastical studies.46 He also acknowledged his debt to the scholarship of Henry Milman, who was heralded as one of “the first” British churchmen and scholars to “break loose from the narrow methods of biblical study” and pioneer application of the historical-critical method to both Scripture and ecclesiastical history.47 Milman was explicitly cited as Blyden proclaimed that it was the African continent that had nurtured the “two most wonderful and productive of all the primitive Christian Churches … namely, the Greek-­ speaking Church in North-Eastern Africa, and the Latin-speaking Church in North-Western Africa.”48 Contending that “Africa, not Rome … gave birth to Latin Christianity,” Blyden also linked Christianity’s most famous and influential Church Fathers to Africa. It was, he proclaimed, the Latin-speaking Church

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in North-Western Africa that produced “those three great Latin-Africans— Tertullian, Cyprian, and Augustine” who profoundly influenced the subsequent history, theology, and doctrine of Christianity. “The African Tertullian,” he decreed, “Latinized the theological and ecclesiastical language of the West”; while “in all controversies on the constitution of the Church, the appeal has been by Western Christians to the African Cyprian”; and finally “no one has contributed so much to Western theology as the African Augustine.” Consequently, “Through them” he insisted, the “African Church had permanently affected all Western Christendom-Protestant as well as Roman Catholic, [in] the New World as well as the Old World.”49 Also momentous was Blyden’s admittedly more speculative account of the origins, history, and significance of the “third African Church—the Abyssinian or Ethiopian.” Returning to his text, he pointed out that it “is believed” that it was “the nameless Ethiopian eunuch” who, after his encounter with Phillip, “returned to his country… and became the founder…, of the Abyssinian Church.”50 Moreover, important contemporary historical and missiological insights, he opined, were to be gleaned from the long ignored and obscured history of this church which was “[f]ounded by a native,” and unlike its predecessors did not “wither away” but rather “struck its roots deep into the soil.”51 With pointed reference to his own ecclesiastical and missiological advocacy of indigenization and Africanization, Blyden deduced and pronounced that it was the Abyssinian Church’s openness to “taking root among the people of the country” which allowed it to remain, “the only African Church which had held fast its Christian faith, century after century” and which “through various trying vicissitudes, [it] continues to this day. … [as] the only real African Church yet founded whose priests and people are all of the African race.”52 Despite the often misconstrued narrative of the Ethiopian Eunuch and the neglected history of the Abyssinian Church, both, Blyden insisted, held profound and unmistakable contemporary spiritual, missiological, and racial lessons for those seeking to extend Christianity in Africa. Decreed as foremost among the contemporary lessons to be gleaned from the narrative was that “Ethiopia and Ethiopians have ever been connected with the Divine administration and manifestations, and that that great country and its people are not left out of the beneficent purposes of the Almighty.” The second lesson had even more direct implications and meaning for ongoing efforts at missionizing and Christianizing Africa: “That the gospel, to be successfully carried into Africa must be carried by Africans.”53 While Blyden’s hermeneutical, theological, historical, and missiological studies focused on the continent of Africa, it is significant that another important but similarly overlooked aspect of his legacy as a historian of African-­ influenced Christianity extended into the Atlantic Diaspora. A remarkable essay, originally published in 1876 and titled “Christianity and the Negro Race,” illuminated his pioneering contributions as a pathbreaking scholar of both American and African American religious history.54 Starting from the “mistaken Philanthropy” of Bishop de las Casas, Blyden provided a history and

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analysis of the intersection of Atlantic slavery and Christianity. Continuing into the colonial era, he pointed out that most of America’s “most eminent divines” and “distinguished figures” were Christian slaveholders who forged a self-­ serving biblical and theological justification for slavery.55 Equally insidious, he noted, were the efforts by “Christian divines of all shades of opinion,” who preached sermons and wrote “books prepared specially for the instruction of the slaves” and their conversion to a bastardized version of Christianity that was accommodated to the institution of slavery.56 Although acknowledging that “such were the circumstances, under which the Negro throughout the United States received Christianity,” Blyden provided an insightful analysis of the origin and subsequent development of an African American version of Christianity that anticipated the insights of later generations of American and African American religious historians.57 Notwithstanding the introduction of enslaved Africans to a “Gospel of Christ … travestied and diluted … to suit the ‘peculiar institution,’” Blyden noted that this insidious effort and process had not proved definitive for the subsequent development of the African American Church and its particular interpretation and practice of Christianity.58 Far in advance of the late twentieth-century historiographical debate regarding the impact of African religious and cultural “survivals,” he emphasized the influence of African religious and cultural retentions in the shaping of a distinctive version of African American Christianity.59 Africans, he argued, had “carried away” and retained as best they could “the traditions of their country” and “in the midst of their sorrows in a strange country, they constructed out of their dim recollections of what they had seen at home, a system of religion and government for themselves, which they curiously combined with what they received from their new masters.”60 The result, he opined, was a unique expression of not only African American Christianity but also other forms of African-­ influenced religious traditions and expressions throughout the Americas.61 Also of related historiographical significance was Blyden’s bold proclamation issued in 1880 that “Africa may yet prove to the spiritual conservatory of [the] world.”62 His words and analysis proved prophetic of the global expansion of African-influenced expressions of Christianity and have special relevance for contemporary scholars engaged in the emergent discipline of World Christianity.63 As the twentieth century dawned, the continued metamorphosis of Blyden and his scholarship was illuminated in his last major text titled African Life and Customs.64 Published just four years before his death, it presented Blyden’s most detailed assessment of African history, religion, and culture as viewed from the gaze of his decades-long analysis of the intersection of race, religion, and modernity. Many of the themes and arguments presented in African Life and Customs had been long in fermentation and even presented piece-meal by Blyden in other forums and venues, thus the text illuminated the long trajectory and culmination of Blyden’s intellectual, academic, religious, missiological, and ideological journey as he stood at the twilight of his life and career.

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African Life and Customs was unambiguous in its illumination of Blyden’s continued appropriation of the late Victorian era’s new intellectual insights and academic methodologies. The corrective synthesis of his “eye-witness” research in West Africa with the selective appropriation of the insights, perspectives, and methodologies associated with the “scientific study of religion” remained obvious as Blyden critiqued and denounced “Divines and politicians, physiologists and scientists” who “exhausted the resources of their intellect in the endeavor to prove the Negro only quasi-human … [and] born to serve a superior race.”65 In contrast, Blyden linked himself and his text to what he described as an emerging “new school of thinkers on African and racial questions” who as “conscientious investigators on the spot, have broken through the sinister traditions of hundreds of years, and are teaching their countrymen to judge the Man of Africa by the impartial light of truth, and not from the standpoint of prejudice and preconceived ideas.”66 He optimistically proclaimed that their agenda and task was to foster a new school of scholarship that would displace “the theories of the noisy and blustering anthropologists [of] forty or fifty years ago. …who invented all sorts of arguments based upon estimates of physical phenomena as conceived by phrenology or physiognomy,……to prove the mental and moral inferiority of the Negro.”67 The theological, hermeneutical, historical, and missiological implications of Blyden’s broader application of the “scientific study of religion” and its corollary disciplines were also explicitly noted as he reiterated that their findings supported his thesis that Africa had no real need for the theological or ecclesiastical intervention of Europe.68 The historiographical insights and perspectives earlier displayed in “Phillip and the Eunuch” were again appropriated as Blyden pointed out that “European Christianity is Western Christianity—that is to say, Christianity as taught at Nazareth, in Jerusalem, and on the Mound of Beatitudes, modified to suit the European mind or idiosyncrasies.”69 Moreover, he opined that it was this often ignored reality, that was largely responsible for decades of unsuccessful efforts to root a European version of Christianity in African soil.70 Blyden also concluded with a dire warning that reflected his growing appreciation of African religion as a vital and integral part of a holistic social system and “When this system is recklessly and indiscriminately interfered with, the result is what we are witnessing everywhere in West Africa. … dislocations, degeneracy, death.”71 On the morning of February 7, 1912, Blyden died in Sierra Leone. He had spent most of his almost eighty allotted years in West Africa engaged in never ceasing applied scholarship and attendant controversy en route to becoming the era’s most important black interrogator, adjudicator, and mediator of modernity and its intellectual, academic, scientific, religious, and racial corollaries. By way of his pathbreaking, controversial, and often subversive sociological, comparative, theological, hermeneutical, and historical studies, publications, and addresses, Blyden had challenged and upended prevailing intellectual, academic, and popular narratives that dismissed Africa and Africans from theories and discussions pertaining to the origins, role, and function of

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religion in general and the Abrahamic traditions in particular. As a path-­ breaking and courageous scholar and a proud scion of Africa, Blyden bequeathed a still potent scholarly and activist template, and legacy to contemporary scholars of religion and especially historians of African Christianity and its global dissemination.

Notes 1. Edward Blyden, “Phillip and the Eunuch” in Edward Blyden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, (2nd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1967. Originally published London: W.  B. Whittingham & Co., 1887), 174–198. 2. Marjorie Wheeler-Barclay, The Science of Religion in Britain, 1860–1915 (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2010). 3. Edward Blyden, A Vindication of the African Race: Being a Brief Examination of the Arguments in Favor of African Inferiority (Monrovia: G. Killian, 1857); Edward Blyden, The African Problem and the Method of its Solution (Washington, DC: Gibson Bros, 1890); Edward Blyden, “Mohammedanism and the Negro Race” (Fraser’s Magazine, November 1875); Edward Blyden, ”Islam and Race Distinctions” (Fraser’s Magazine, November 1876); Edward Blyden, “The Koran in Africa”, The Journal of the African Society, January 1905, 157–171; Edward Blyden, From West Africa to Palestine (Freetown: T. J. Sawyerr, 1873; Edward Blyden, “West Africa before Europe,” Journal of the African Society (July 1903), 359–374 and Edward Blyden, African Life and Customs (London: C. M. Phillips, 1908). 4. Thomas W.  Livingston, Education and Race: A Biography of Edward Wilmot Blyden (San Francisco: The Glendessary Press, Inc. 1975), 54–55. 5. Ibid. 107, 190; Hollis Lynch, Edward W. Blyden, Pan- Negro Patriot, 1832–1912 (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 81. 6. Edith Holden, Blyden of Liberia (New York: Vantage Press, 1966), 646. 7. Blyden to Henry Venn, Sept 6, 1871, Holden, Blyden of Liberia, 189, 808–809, 839. See also Henry N.  K. Odamtten, Edward W.  Blyden’s Intellectual Transformations, Afropublicanism Pan-Africanism, Islam and the Indigenous West Africa Church (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2019), 129–130, 133–134. 8. Holden, Blyden of Liberia, 808–809, 839. 9. David Chidester, Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative Religion (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline of Reasons and Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1993); Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 20015); and Curtis J.  Evans, The Burden of Black Religion (London: Oxford University Press, 2008). 10. Thomas C.  Oden, How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind: Rediscovering the African Seedbed of Western Christianity (Downer’s Grove, Il: Intervarsity Press, 2007). 11. Livingston, Education and Race, 17–20; Edward Blyden, Liberia’s Offering (New York: John A. Gray, 1962) iii.

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12. Livingston, Education and Race, 20. 13. Holden, Blyden of Liberia, 21–22. Lynch, Patriot, 4. 14. Blyden, Liberia’s Offering, iii. Edward Blyden, The Jewish Question (Liverpool: Lionel Hart, 1898), 6–7. 15. Livingston, Education and Race, 22–27. See David Borman, “Literature of Return: Back to Africa, Belonging and Modernity” (PhD diss., University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida, 2014), accessed June 7, 2016, http://scholarlyrepository. miami.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2237&context=oa_dissertations 16. Livingston, Education and Race, 32. 17. See Wilson to Blyden, June 1859, P.B.F, M. Outgoing Letters to Africa, vol. 2, no. 351; Livingston, Education and Race, 43. 18. Edward W. Blyden The Pastor’s Work: A Sermon Preached On the Occasion of the Installation of Rev. Thomas H. Amos as Pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Monrovia, May 6 1866 (London: Dalton & Lucy, n.d., 9, 15–16). Lynch, Pan-­ Negro Patriot, 45–47. African Repository 41 (1865): 123–24. David Wilson to Walter Lowrie, 1 October 1851. Holden, Blyden, 50, 53, 129–30, 138–39; Livingston, Education and Race, 41. 19. Livingston, Education and Race, 30–33. 20. Blyden, Liberia’s Offering, iii. Edward Blyden, The Jewish Question (Liverpool, 1898), 6–7. 21. Edward Blyden, A Vindication of the African Race: Being a Brief Examination of the Arguments in Favor of African Inferiority; Blyden, Liberia’s Offering, iii, 29–64. 22. Cain Hope Felder, ed., Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), 130–32. 23. Cain Hope Felder, “Race, Racism, and The Biblical Narratives” and Charles B.  Copher, “The Black Presence in the Old Testament,” in Felder, Stony the Road We Trod, 127–84 and Sylvester, A.  Johnson, The Myth of Ham In Nineteenth-­Century American Christianity: Race, Heathens, and the People of God (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 24. Edward W. Blyden, A Voice from Bleeding Africa on Behalf of Her Exiled Children (Monrovia: G.  Killian Printer, 1856); Edward W.  Blyden, Liberia’s Offerings (New York: John A.  Gray, 1862); Edward W.  Blyden, “Hope for Africa, A Discourse Delivered in the Presbyterian Church, 7th Avenue, NY.  July 21, 1861” (Washington, 1861). Original version published in the African Repository 47 (1861): 258–71. Edward Blyden, “The Call of Providence to the Descendants of Africa in America” (New York, 1862). 25. Hollis Lynch, Black Spokesman: Selected Published Writings of Edward Wilmot Blyden (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1971), 25–33. 26. Edward Blyden, “The Negro in Ancient History,” Methodist Quarterly Review 51 (January 1869): 71–93; Lynch, Patriot, 56. 27. Blyden, From West Africa To Palestine, 112; Lynch, Patriot, 56. 28. See Frank Snowden, Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983). See also Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afro-Asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University, 1987); Cheikh Anta Diop, “Origin of the Ancient Egyptians,” Ancient Cultures of Africa, vol. 2 of General History of Africa (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1981); and Maghan

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Keita, Race and the Writing of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). See also Lynch, Patriot, 14, 26, 63. 29. Holden, Blyden of Liberia, 21–22. Lynch, Patriot, 4. See also Blyden to Coppinger 13 September 1884, ACS Papers, vol. 21. 30. Livingston, Education and Race, 31. 31. Edward Blyden, “The Koran in Africa,” Journal of the Royal African Society 4, no. 14 (January 1905), 161. 32. Blyden to Professor Camphor (of the College of West Africa), 22 September 1899 and Edward Blyden, “The Koran in Africa,” Journal of the African Society 14 (January 1905): 157–71. 33. Edward Blyden, The Arabic Bible in the Sudan: A Plea for Transliteration (London: C. M. Phillips, 1910). See also E. G. Brown, “Obituary Notice: Prof. Will Robertson Smith,” Journal of Royal Asiatic Society (July 1894); John Sutherland Black, The Life of William Robertson Smith (1912); and John William Rogerson, The Bible and Criticism in Victorian Britain: Profiles of F. D. Maurice and William Robertson Smith (Sheffield Academic Press, 1997). 34. Blyden, Arabic Bible, 7. 35. Ibid. 36. Blyden, Arabic Bible, 8. 37. Edward Wilmot Blyden, Philip and the Eunuch; Or, the Instruments and Methods of Africa’s Evangelization. A Discourse Delivered in the Park Street Church, Boston, U.S.A., Sunday, October 22, 1882 (Cambridge, MA: John Wilson & Son, 1883); Edward Blyden, “Philip and the Eunuch—or The Instruments and Methods of African Evangelization,” in Blyden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, 174–98. Edward Blyden, “Stretching out her hands unto God; or Africa’s Service to the World” in Blyden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, 174–98, 130–32. 38. Blyden, “Africa’s Service to the World” in Blyden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, 174–98, 130–32. 39. Ibid., 135 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., 132 42. Blyden, “Philip and the Eunuch”. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., 177–178. 46. Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Lectures on the History of the Eastern Church with an Introduction on the Study of Ecclesiastical History (1861). 47. Henry Milman, History of Latin Christianity (London: John Murray, 1855). See also “Dean Milman, His Career at St. Paul’s and the Works He Wrote,” New York Times, March 31, 1900. 48. Blyden, “Phillip and the Eunuch,” 189. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid., 188. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid., 190–192, 195. 54. Edward W. Blyden, “Christianity and the Negro Race, in Blyden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, 30–53.

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55. Ibid., 32–34. 56. Ibid., 36–37. 57. Blyden, “Christianity and the Negro Race,” 37. 58. Ibid., 38, 52. 59. Ibid., 39, 51. See Charles Long, “Perspectives for the Study of African-­American Religion in The United States” in Timothy E. Fulop and Albert J. Raboteau, eds. African American Religion: Interpretive Essays in History and Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1997): 21–35; Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Melville J.  Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958). 60. Blyden, “Christianity and the Negro Race,” 37–38. 61. See Blyden, “Christianity and the Negro Race,” 39–40. 62. Blyden, Edward, “Ethiopia Stretching out her hands unto God; or Africa’s Service to the World” in Blyden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, 131–149. 63. Sanneh, Lamin “World Christianity and the Study of History: Framing the issues, Exploring the Heritage” Reflections, Winter-Spring, 1995: 1–10 and Adogame, Afe, ed. The African Christian Diaspora: New Currents and Emerging Trends in World Christianity (Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). 64. Edward Blyden, African Life and Customs (London, C. M. Phillips, 1908). 65. Ibid., 7. 66. Ibid., 7–8. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid., 63–64. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid., 31, 33.

Bibliography Adogame, Afe, ed. The African Christian Diaspora: New Currents and Emerging Trends in World Christianity (Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). Beckerlegge, G. “Professor Friedrich Max Muller and the Missionary Cause,” in John Wolffe, Religion in Victorian Britain: Culture and Empire, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997) 177–219. Bernal, Martin, Black Athena: The Afro-Asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University, 1987). Black, John Sutherland, The Life of William Robertson Smith (London: A. & C. Black, 1912). Blyden, Edward “The Koran in Africa,” Journal of the African Society 14 (January 1905a):157–71. Blyden, Edward, The Arabic Bible in the Sudan: A Plea for Transliteration (London: C. M. Phillips, 1910). Blyden, Edward, “Stretching out her hands unto God; or Africa’s Service to the World” in Blyden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, 174–98, 1967a.

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Blyden, Edward, Philip and the Eunuch; Or, the Instruments and Methods of Africa’s Evangelization. A Discourse Delivered in the Park Street Church, Boston, U.S.A., Sunday, October 22, 1882 (Cambridge, MA: John Wilson & Son, 1883). Blyden, Edward, “Philip and the Eunuch—or The Instruments and Methods of African Evangelization,” in Blyden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, 174–98. Blyden, Edward, “Africa before Europe,” Journal of the African Society (October 1902). Blyden, Edward, The Three Needs of Liberia: A Lecture Delivered at Lower Buchanan, Grand Bassa County, Liberia, January 26, 1908 (London: Phillips, 1908a). Blyden, Edward, The Problems before Liberia: A Lecture Delivered in the State Chamber at Monrovia, January 18, 1909 (London: Phillips, 1909). Blyden, Edward, “Islam and Race Distinctions,” Fraser’s Magazine November 1876a. Blyden, Edward, “The Koran in Africa,” Journal of the Royal African Society 4, no. 14 (January 1905b): 157–171. Blyden, Edward, African Life and Customs (London: C. M. Phillips, 1908b). Blyden, Edward, A Vindication of the African Race: Being a Brief Examination of the Arguments in Favor of African Inferiority (Monrovia: G. Killian, 1857) Blyden, Edward, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, (2nd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1967b. Originally published London: W. B. Whittingham & Co., 1887). Blyden, Edward, From West Africa to Palestine, (Freetown: T. J. Sawyerr, 1873) Blyden, Edward, “Islam and Race Distinctions,” (Fraser’s Magazine, November 1876b) Blyden, Edward, The Jewish Question, (Liverpool: Lionel Hart, 1898). Blyden, Edward, “Sierra Leone and Liberia” in Blyden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race. Blyden, Edward, Aims and Methods of a Liberal Education for Africans (Cambridge, Mass.: J. Wilson & Sons, 1882). Blyden, Edward, Liberia’s Offering, (New York: John A. Gray, 1962). Blyden, Edward, “Mohammedanism and the Negro Race,” (Fraser’s Magazine, November 1875). Blyden, Edward, “Mohammedanism in Western Africa,” Methodist Quarterly Review (January 1871): 133–148. Blyden, Edward, The Pastor’s Work: A Sermon Preached On the Occasion of the Installation of Rev. Thomas H. Amos as Pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Monrovia, May 6 1866 (London: Dalton & Lucy, n.d.-c). Blyden to Booker T.  Washington, 28 November 1894, published in New  York Age, January 24, 1895. Blyden, Edward, A Voice from Bleeding Africa on Behalf of Her Exiled Children (Monrovia: G. Killian Printer, 1856). Blyden, Edward, Liberia’s Offerings (New York: John A. Gray, 1862). Blyden, Edward, “Hope for Africa, A Discourse Delivered in the Presbyterian Church, 7th Avenue, N. Y. July 21, 1861,” (Washington, 1861). Original version published in the African Repository 47 (1861): 258–71. Blyden, Edward, “Christian Missions in West Africa,” in Blyden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, 1876c, 46–70. Blyden, Edward, “Phillip and the Eunuch” in Edward Blyden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, (2nd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1967. Originally published London: W. B. Whittingham & Co., 1887). Blyden, Edward, “The Negro in Ancient History,” Methodist Quarterly Review 51 (January 1869).

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Blyden, Edward, “West Africa before Europe,” Journal of the African Society (July 1903): 359–374. Borman, David, “Literature of Return: Back to Africa, Belonging and Modernity” (PhD diss., University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida, 2014a), accessed June 7, 2016, http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2237& context=oa_dissertations. Borman, David, “Literature of Return: Back to Africa, Belonging and Modernity” (PhD diss., University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida, 2014b), accessed June 7, 2016, http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2237& context=oa_dissertations. Brown, E. G. “Obituary Notice: Prof. Will Robertson Smith,” Journal of Royal Asiatic Society (July 1894). Capps, Walter, H. ed., Religious Studies, The Making of a Discipline (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995). Chadwick, Owen, The Victorian Church, vol. 2, 2nd ed. (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1972). Chidester, David, Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative Religion (Chicago and London: University of Chicago press, 2014). Chidester, David, Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996). Copher, Charles B., “The Black Presence in the Old Testament,” in Felder, Stony the Road We Trod, 1991. Curtis, Edward E., IV. Islam in Black America: Identity, Liberation, and Difference in African-American Islamic Thought (Albany: State University of New  York Press, 2002), 22-23398-418. Curtis, Edward E., IV. “African American Islam Reconsidered: Black History Narratives and Muslim Identity,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 7, no. 3 (September 2005): 659–84. Darwin, Charles, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (London: John Murray, Albemarle, 1859). Diop, Cheikh Anta “Origin of the Ancient Egyptians,” Ancient Cultures of Africa, vol. 2 of General History of Africa (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1981). Doi, A.  R. I. “Influence of Islam and the Spread of Islam Learning in West Africa: Contributions of E. W. Blyden to Islamic Studies,” The Islamic Review 54, no. 11 (November 1966): 31–34. Dorman, Jacob, “‘Lifted Out of the Commonplace Grandeur of Modern Times:’ Reappraising Edward Wilmot Blyden’s Views of Islam and Afrocentrism in Light of His Scholarly Black Christian Orientalism,” Souls, A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 12, no. 4 (October 2010): 398–418. Eliade, Mircea and Kitagawa, Joseph, The History of Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959). Evans, Curtis J., The Burden of Black Religion (London: Oxford University Press, 2008). Felder, Cain Hope, ed., Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991). Fulop, Timothy and Raboteau, Albert eds. African American Religion: Interpretive Essays in History and Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1997).

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Givens, Willie, Selected Works Of Dr. Edward Wilmot Blyden: Statesman, Politician, Linguist, Educator and Great Pan-Africanist (1832–1912) (unpublished collection, Robertsport, Grand Cape Mount Country Liberia: The Tubman Center of African Culture, 1976). Herskovits, Melville, J. The Myth of the Negro Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958). Holden, Edith, Blyden of Liberia (New York: Vantage Press, 1966). Johnson, Sylvester A., The Myth of Ham In Nineteenth-Century American Christianity: Race, Heathens, and the People of God (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Jordan, Louis H., Comparative Religion: Its Genesis and Growth (Edinburgh: T. & T, Clark, 1905). Keita, Maghan, Race and the Writing of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Livingston, Thomas, Education and Race: A Biography of Edward Wilmot Blyden (San Francisco: The Glendessary Press, Inc. 1975). Long, Charles, “Perspectives for the Study of African-American Religion in The United States” in Timothy E. Fulop and Albert J. Raboteau, eds. African American Religion: Interpretive Essays in History and Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1997): 21–35. Lynch, Hollis, Black Spokesman: Selected Published Writings of Edward Wilmot Blyden (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1971). Lynch, Hollis, Edward W. Blyden, Pan- Negro Patriot, 1832–1912 (London: Oxford University Press, 1967). Ludwig, Frieder and Adogame, Afe, European Traditions in the Study of Religion in Africa (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2004). Masuzawa, Tomoko, The Invention of World Religions (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015). Milman, Henry, History of Latin Christianity (London: John Murray, 1855). “Dean Milman, His Career at St. Paul’s and the Works He Wrote,” New York Times, March 31, 1900. Muller, Max Introduction to the Science of Religion (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1873). Muller, Georgina A. ed., The Life and Letters of the Right Honorable Friedrich Max Muller Edited by his Wife, vol. 2 (New York, London: Longman Green, 1902). Oden, Thomas C. How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind: Rediscovering the African Seedbed of Western Christianity (Downer’s Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2007). Odamtten, Henry N.  K. Edward W.  Blyden’s Intellectual Transformations, Afropublicanism Pan-Africanism, Islam and the Indigenous West Africa Church, (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2019). Rice, Gene “The Curse That Never Was (Genesis 9:18–27),” Journal of Religious Thought 29 (1972). Rogerson, John William, The Bible and Criticism in Victorian Britain: Profiles of F. D. Maurice and William Robertson Smith (Sheffield Academic Press, 1997). Sanneh, Lamin, Whose Religion Is Christianity? The Gospel beyond the West (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004). Sanneh, Lamin, West African Christianity: The Religious Impact,(Maryknoll: Orbis Press, 1983). Sanneh, Lamin “World Christianity and the Study of History: Framing the issues, Exploring the Heritage” Reflections, Winter-Spring, 1995: 1–10.

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Sharpe, Eric J., Comparative Religion: A History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975). Shaw, Mark and Gita Wanjiru, The Kingdom of God in Africa: A History of African Christianity (Carlisle: Langham, 2020). Sillah, Mohammed Bassiru “Edward Blyden and Islam in Sierra Leone: A Study of African Intellectual Response to British Colonialism,” Hamdard Islamicus 14 (1991): 23–42. Snowden, Frank, Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983). Stanley, Arthur, Lectures on the History of the Eastern Church with an Introduction on the Study of Ecclesiastical History, 1861. Talal, Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline of Reasons and Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1993). Weisenburger, Francis P., Ordeal of Faith: The Crisis of Church-Going America, 1865–1900 (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959). Wheeler-Barclay, Marjorie, The Science of Religion in Britain, 1860–1915 (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2010. Wiebe, Donald, “Religion and the Scientific Impulse in the Nineteenth Century: Friedrich Max Muller and the Birth of the Science of Religion,” International Journal of Comparative Religion and Philosophy, vol. 1: 76–97, 1998. Wills, David W. “Aspects of Social Thought in the African American Methodist Episcopal Church 1884–1910’ (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1975). Wimbush, Vincent M. ed., African Americans and The Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Textures (New York, London: Continuum, 2000). Wolffe, John, Religion in Victorian Britain: Culture and Em, 1997.

CHAPTER 3

The Writings and Legacy of John Mbiti Harvey Kwiyani

Remembering John Mbiti This chapter discusses the enduring legacy of John Mbiti—one of Africa’s leading theologians in the decades between 1960 and 2020. It does so in three parts. The first one (which is also the shortest of all) offers a biographical sketch of Mbiti’s life to situate his work properly in the continent of Africa that was, in the 1960s, seeking its own identity and trying to tell its own stories to correct the colonial narratives that had, for decades and centuries, been told about African cultures and religion. The second part discusses Mbiti’s writing, paying attention to some general key themes that shape his work. In this part, the chapter appreciates Mbiti’s overly productive decade at Makerere University. The third part explores what we consider the pillars that together make up Mbiti’s legacy, and these will include his commitment to Africanising Christianity, his work in dignifying African religion and his connecting of African religion and African theology to African philosophy (as a way of Africanising Christianity). In the end, it finishes by appreciating Mbiti’s impact on the field of African theology, making clear that his voice and wisdom are needed in the study of African Christianity even though some of his significant works are more than half a century old. The prolific writer that Mbiti was, with more than 500 published works to his name spanning 6 decades of academic work, cannot be effectively explored in one chapter. As such, this discussion is not exhaustive—it is not meant to be.

H. Kwiyani (*) Centre for Global Witness and Human Migration, Church Mission Soceity, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. E. Barnes, T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48270-0_3

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John Mbiti: A Biographical Sketch John Samuel Mbiti was born on 30 November 1931. His father was Samuel Mutuvi Ngaangi while his mother was Valesi Mbandi Kiimba. He was born in Mulango town in Kitui district in the Kamba region of East Central Kenya. He was named Mbiti—which means “a child vowed unto God”—in keeping with Kamba tradition giving children individual names for unique and personal identity.1 As a young boy, he went to Mulango Elementary School and the Government Primary School in Kitui. He did his secondary school at Alliance High School, close to Nairobi. The British colonial education that he received at Alliance, grounded in the Christian beliefs of his teachers, had an impact on his life and influenced his career choices immensely. In 1950, he earned admission to the University College of Makerere in Uganda where he studied English, Sociology and Geography, leading him to a general Bachelor of Arts degree. By the time he graduated, Mbiti was clear that his career path was to the priesthood (though he could not study theology or religion at Makerere because they were not offered). Looking at the corpus of his work 70 years later, it seems very plausible that the courses he did at Makerere helped his research immensely. He went to Barrington College in Rhode Island, USA, in 1954 on a Fulbright Scholarship. He returned to Kenya after his studies at Barrington and taught briefly at Kagunda Teachers College. In 1959, he was appointed William Paton Lecturer at the Selly Oak Colleges, Birmingham, UK, where he taught courses on Christianity in East Africa. In the following year, he joined Cambridge University for his doctoral studies focusing on New Testament eschatology. He graduated in 1963, and his dissertation, New Testament Eschatology in an African Background was revised and published in 1971. At Cambridge, he met Verena whom he married in Switzerland in 1965. They had four children, Kyeni, Maria, Esther and Kavata. After graduation, he served as a priest at St Alban’s parish in London for one year before returning to Makerere where he would teach for ten years. He joined the World Council of Churches in 1974, serving as Director at the Ecumenical Institute, Bossey, in Switzerland. He worked at the institute for six years, leaving it in 1980 to serve as a parish minister in the Reformed Church in Burgdorf, in the Canton of Bern in Switzerland while also teaching at the University of Bern. He passed on to join the ancestors on 6 October 2019, aged 87, 50 years after the publishing of African Religions and Philosophy. He remained active both in academic and pastoral work right until the end of his time with us. He travelled and lectured in many cities and institutions around the world. His prolific scholarly writing continued from the 1960s to 2019. All in all, he published well over 400 academic works (books, journal articles and book reviews) on varied subjects including theology, religion, philosophy, poetry, literature and Kamba culture. It is no wonder that Jesse Mugambi lists more than 25 titles for Mbiti:

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Academic, adviser, anthropologist, artist, author, counsellor, diplomat, ecumenist, exegete, interpreter, linguist, mediator, mentor, missiologist, parent, pastor, pathfinder, planner, poet, preacher, priest, professor, promoter, teacher, theologian, translator.2

Mbiti’s Writing in Context To understand and appreciate Mbiti’s writing, it is necessary to listen to him speaking to the world of the 1960s when he laid the foundation for the theological work that would later earn him the title, “Father of Contemporary African Theology.” When he came to teach in Makerere in 1964, Mbiti was asked to develop and teach a course in African religion—a field of study that was just emerging and was offered at only a few institutions. The study of African traditional religions as an academic course started in Nigeria in the late 1940s when a British Methodist missionary, Geoffrey Parrinder (1910–2005),3 offered courses in the subject at the University of Ibadan.4 Parrinder established and led the programme in African traditional religion at Ibadan from 1949 to 1958. Bolaji Idowu (1913–1993)—a Nigerian Methodist minister whose doctoral thesis Parrinder had supervised at the University of London in 1955—took over in 1958 and led the programme until 1976. Both Parrinder and Idowu focused most of their work on the religious heritage of the Yoruba people of southwest Nigeria. Parrinder’s outstanding works, among many, include West African Religion5 and African Traditional Religions6 published in 1949 and 1954, respectively. Idowu is a legendary figure in Nigerian scholarship on African religion. His published works include Olodumare: God in Yoruba Belief (1962)7 and African Traditional Religion (1973).8 As an African Anglican priest and a scholar of the New Testament, Mbiti approached African religion with dignity—something that Europeans had not done for long. In the missionary era of the nineteenth century, the very existence of African religion was denied, and African religious heritage was demonised as animism, defined by Edward B.  Tylor (1832–1917) who coined the term in his book, Primitive Culture, of 1871, as “the ascribing of personal agency to inanimate objects and using spirits, souls, or gods to explain phenomena within the world.” Tylor synthesised this definition after he carried out what he called a “systematic study of the religions of the lower races” (by which he meant black Africans and many other peoples outside Europe, including Arabs and Jews).9 Tylor added, “under the name of animism, [we mean] to investigate the deep-lying doctrine of spiritual beings, which embodies the very essence of spiritualistic as opposed to materialistic philosophy.”10 Animists, in Tylor’s language, are those who hold to “extreme spiritualistic views” or “the general belief in spiritual beings” which can intervene in the lives of human beings and in the natural world.11 Later, he adds, “Animism characterizes tribes very low in the scale of humanity, and thence ascends, deeply modified in its transmission, but from first to last preserving an unbroken continuity, into the midst of high modern culture.”12 Essentially, animism was the religion of the

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“savages” that continued to evolve up until the age of “civilized men.”13 Among his informers were Charles Darwin and one Samuel Baker, who from 1869 to 1873 served as the Governor-General of the Equatorial Nile Basin (Southern Sudan and Northern Uganda today), and had written in 1867 about the people of Sudan that “[w]ithout any exception, they are without a belief in a Supreme-Being, neither have they any form of worship or idolatry, nor is the darkness of their minds enlightened by even a ray of superstition.”14 Mbiti led the charge to have the term “animism” banished from our vocabulary—it is too pejorative and colonial to be of use in our world today.15 Africa itself was, until the mid-1900s, labelled the Dark Continent whose peoples did not have a religion and an understanding of God. Indeed, as Idowu asserts, most Europeans believed that “the devil, in all his abysmal, grotesque, and forbidden features armed to the teeth and with horns complete, held sway” in Africa.16 Africans were thought to be too primitive to understand religion and, therefore, whatever they had was not considered religion at all. Right up to the 1960s when African countries gained their independence, African religions were of interest largely because they were still too exotic—they were, in the language of the Europeans, pagan religions of the heathens. Books about African religious systems—and these started to appear in the 1920s and 1930s—sought to inform the Europeans about the curious religious practices of the exotic people groups far away.17 For example, Edward E. Evans-Pritchard, who spent many years working in Sudan, published Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande18 in 1937, adding to a series of many articles and books following his research among the people of Sudan. Like many Europeans of the day, Evans-Pritchard’s attitudes towards his research subjects were that they were primitive. His 1956 publication, Nuer Religion, is a perfect example of European writing about an African community as if they were simply subjects in a laboratory.19 Later, in 1965, Evans-Pritchard published Theories of Primitive Religion, admitting that ‘“primitive” is not necessarily a good word, but since it has been in use for so long, there is no point dropping it.’20 Colonial governments and missionaries would join hands in their efforts to erase African religion from the continent, often employing forceful strategies to convert Africans to Christianity. Mbiti set out to correct this misrepresentation of African culture and religion.

The Crucible of Makerere When Mbiti came to Makerere in 1964, European colonial attitudes towards African religion persisted. His course would be the first of its kind in East Africa. This afforded him a chance to start with a blank slate. To teach the course, he had to carry out first-hand empirical research to understand how Africans spoke about and appropriated their religious heritage. His first book, African Religions and Philosophy, emerged out of his lectures at Makerere (starting in 1964) and at Hamburg University (in 1967),21 informed by the research that Mbiti carried out largely in his own ethnic community, the

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Kambas of Kenya. As he broadened his research focus to include other ethnic communities in the wider eastern and southern Africa, and eventually all of Sub-Saharan Africa, he would publish other deeply informative books like Concepts of God in Africa,22 The Prayers of African Religion,23 and Introduction to African Religion,24 in addition to several hundred academic articles on subjects relating to Christianity in Africa. Developing the programme from scratch allowed him to engage African religion as a true son of the continent, confident in his identity as an African (of the Kamba community) and a Christian (an Anglican priest, born and raised in a Christian family) at the same time. The question of the African Christian identity was central to his work. The main theme underlying all his writing sought to answer the question, “Can an African convert to Christianity without having to become a European?” He is quoted in 1971 in a New York article stating, “The days are over when we will be carbon copies of European Christians. Europe and America westernized Christianity. The Orthodox easternized it. Now it’s our turn to Africanize it.”25 This Africanising had to do with African religion which, for him, was not some exotic religion that needed to be unmasked and analysed by foreign powers. It was the religion that shaped his own community, from which, even for him, there was no escape. Christianity had to be understood in connection with African religion. In Africa, the Christian gospel was not engaging a people who had no religion—there was no tabula rasa. Eventually, he would argue that African religion prepared the way for Christian evangelism—that it was prepaeration evangelica.26 Such an argument proved controversial and Mbiti suffered great criticism for it. In the 1960s and the 1970s, Makerere University set the standards in higher education in East and Southern Africa, shaping the minds of a generation of young Africans who would lead the continent as Africa shaped its identity in the decades that followed. Makerere had, throughout the 1960s, a vibrant literary culture that produced some of the most celebrated postcolonial African writers of the twentieth century.27 As the European political colonisation of Africa came to an end, Makerere University was the literary powerhouse where a young academic faculty gathered around an even younger student body to wrestle with the issues that would dismantle colonialism’s cultural legacy and shape the continent’s liberated minds as its countries became independent.28 It was the Mecca where young Africans learned to claim their identity and dignity and to unmask the many lies of the Europeans who sought to keep the continent colonised, at least, intellectually. Makerere was, for some time, an educational home to many of Africa’s prominent writers of the 1960s, including Okot p’Bitek, Ali Mazrui, David Rubadiri, Okello Oculi, Ngũgı ̃ wa Thiong’o, John Ruganda, Paul Theroux, V. S. Naipaul and Peter Nazareth. In a nutshell, Makerere was central to the growing sense of nationalism that provided ideological foundations for the struggle for independence and decolonisation of African thought. Okot p’Bitek published a book, African Religions in Western Scholarship, in which he defended African religion and accused Mbiti, Idowu and others of Hellenising African deities.29

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African Religion and Beyond By the time Mbiti left Makerere, he had written and published some of his most important books; African Religions and Philosophy30 (1969), Concepts of God in Africa31 (1970), Introduction to African Religion32 (1975) and The Prayers of African Religion33 (1975). His time at Makerere was extremely fruitful. The publishing of African Religions and Philosophy in 1969 opened a new world for him that he could not foresee when he studied at Cambridge. Even though African Religions and Philosophy was published many years after Evans-­ Pritchard, Parrinder and Bolaji had published theirs, it would eventually have more impact on the study of religion in Africa. The breathtaking research that informed it, the clarity of the language with which Mbiti wrote, and the issues that it discussed—some of them still hotly debated years after his death—made the book the most important on the subject. Right from its opening statement, “Africans are notoriously religious,” the book’s agenda was clear. The Europeans were wrong; Africans have a religion that covers all aspects of life and the African world is impossible without it. The world listened as Mbiti shone a new light on African religion and, before long, his name was among the great theologians of his generation. African Religions and Philosophy has gone on to be translated into more than ten languages around the world. This success was unexpected. When he wrote the preface to the second edition of African Religions and Philosophy, Mbiti revealed that it was rather difficult finding a publisher for the book: I also thank the publishers (Heinemann Press) very heartily, for promoting the book, for facilitating its translation into other languages and for asking to have a new edition of it published. It is amazing to think that the original manuscript was rejected by several other publishers before being accepted by the current publisher!34

While Mbiti is known for his work on African religion, this subject formed only a small (though very important) portion of his work. He did a lot more writing on other subjects both before and after African Religions and Philosophy. In 1959, he published an English-Kamba Vocabulary.35 He would follow this one with a collection of folk stories from the Kamba community in a book entitled, Akamba Stories36 in 1966. In the following year, 1967, he published a novel, Mūtūnga na Ngewa Yake37—he was a storyteller right from the start. In 1969, when African Religions and Philosophy was published, Mbiti also published Poems of Nature and Faith.38 In 1971, The Crisis of Mission in Africa39 was published while The Voice of Nine Bible Trees40 came out in 1972. In 1973, Mbiti would publish Love and Marriage in Africa.41 After Makerere, Mbiti continued to write and publish, at first mostly articles focused on issues of interest to the World Council of Churches and later, matters of general theological inquiry in African Christianity. His later books include Bible and Theology in African Christianity42 (1986) and African Proverbs43 (1997). His final major

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publication is the widely acclaimed Kikamba Bible which came out in 2014.44 With it, he became the first African scholar to translate the New Testament from Greek to an African language.

Mbiti’s Theological Legacy The expansive legacy of John Mbiti’s life and work cannot be faithfully explored in one chapter. He remained active in research and writing for more than 60 years, during which time he published more than 500 works, reaching a word count that exceeds 3 million. In addition, he is one of the most researched and written-about African academicians—his academic impact goes well beyond theology. Consequently, there are numerous books and dissertations dedicated to his work.45 Readers wanting longer explorations of Mbiti’s theological works are encouraged to consult one of these many books and dissertations. The remainder of this chapter will focus on Mbiti’s identity as a quintessential African theologian who sought to Africanise Christianity in everything he did. If there is a motif that colours every one of his works and informs every argument he made, it is his conviction that Christianity could actually be understood as an African religion. It is this conviction that Christianity can be Africanised that sets him apart among many African theologians that have existed in the past 70 years. Throughout Mbiti’s theological corpus, his own identity as an African Christian stands out. Whatever he did, he did it as an African. Of course, he lived in Switzerland since 1974. Spending so many years in the diaspora gave him the critical distance that would allow him to engage African religious realities as an Insider-Outsider, something that he makes good use of in his research. His theological work seems to have been built upon several pillars. It will take a longer essay to explore all of them. As such, here, we will explore only three of them in this chapter.

Africanising Christianity First, Mbiti believed that Christianity in Africa needed to be African and not European. His 1971 argument (quoted in the New York Times above) that it is the Africans’ turn now to Africanise Christianity reflects a deep-seated conviction that Christianity needed to look, speak and sound African in Africa. In a sense, he believed that Christianity has to be contextual in Africa. As a matter of fact, he believed that Christianity is always contextual and, therefore, the Western missionaries’ imposition of its expression of Christianity (with its theology and ecclesiology) in Africa was a grave error that needed urgent correction. That Africanising of Christianity could only happen if the theological thought in African Christianity were freed from the Western shackles that had been imposed by the missionaries. He wrote in 1968, “It [The African Church] is a church that depends entirely on an imported theology from Europe and America.”46 Later, he added, “Africa is becoming Christian [so] rapidly that

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Christianity has hardly had time to become ‘naturalized,’ psychologically indigenized and emotionally assimilated into the natural points of reference.”47 To naturalise Christianity in Africa, there was a need to develop an indigenous African Christian theology. Emerging African theologians needed to radically reinterpret the Christian faith to make sense of African cultural realities and answer African questions about the faith. Of the development of African theology, Mbiti said: Freedom from theological inhibitions also means the freedom to make mistakes. The theologians of the new Christendom (sic) must be free to hatch their own heresies and theological errors, often it is only in response to heresies and errors that sound theological orthodoxy is generated. Too much protectiveness from our mother churches and theologians will only retard our theological output.48

Later, concerned about continuing Western theological paternalism in Africa, he argued for theological mutuality between African theologians and those of the West. We have eaten theology with you; we have drunk theology with you; we have dreamed theology with you. But it has all been one-sided, it has all been, in a sense, your theology. We know you theologically. The question is, do you know us theologically? Would you like to know us theologically? Can you know us theologically? … It is utterly scandalous for so many Christian scholars in older Christendom to know so much about heretical movements in the second and third centuries when so few of them know anything about Christian movements in areas of the younger churches.49

Mbiti’s defence of African theology, made largely in the 1970s, continues to shape African Christian thought until today. He continues to be the foremost African theologian whose theology was shaped primarily by African cultural sensibilities and sought to shine the gospel to their concerns. In theology and related fields, Mbiti remains one of the most cited African scholars. He travelled and lectured around the world even until his death. His theological thought still informs and shapes a great deal of African theology with some scholars refuting his argument even after he passed away.50 When he made his assertions back in the 1960s and 1970s, he was often criticised for heresy. His argument for the Africanising of Christianity irked some Western scholars who sought to protect the orthodoxy of Christianity from African corruption.51 Fellow Africans like Okot p’Bitek would accuse him of Hellenising African religion while some African Christians condemned him for bringing African religion into Christianity. Byang Kato, a Nigerian evangelical scholar, shaped as he was in the crucible of United States evangelicalism, led the charge against Mbiti, accusing Mbiti, Bolaji Idowu and others of committing the sin of syncretism.52 Mbiti also had mutually critiquing conversations with some scholars of Black Liberation theology, both in the United States and in South Africa.53 Of course, he weathered those storms and continued to publish his vision of an

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Africanised Christianity. Today, more than 50 years after the publication of African Religions and Philosophy, Mbiti’s theology underpins the works of many African scholars, especially those who focus their research and writing on the contextualisation and indigenisation of Christianity in Africa.54

Dignifying African Religion Second, Mbiti worked hard to restore the dignity of African religion. Of course, back in the 1960s, he talked about African religions in the plural. By the 1990s, he had shifted to understanding it in the singular. As such, he spoke of African religion in agreement with other scholars like Laurenti Magesa.55 In the preface to the 1989 edition of African Religions and Philosophy, Mbiti found it necessary to explain a change in his terminology: In the first edition, I spoke of “African religions” in the plural to keep alive the diversity of African religiosity. Since then, I have felt the need to emphasise also the commonalities and potential unity (not uniformity) within this diversity. Consequently, in lectures and other publications, I now use the singular, “African religion,” more than the plural expression.56

His argument that Africans have a religion, that this African religion was not devilish as had been said before by many Europeans, and that it is a precursor to Christianity in Africa was, in the world of the twentieth century, earth-­ shattering. Throughout that discourse, Mbiti did not only describe African religion like other scholars did.57 As he had already been a priest in England in 1963, he was able to connect African religion to Christianity in Africa. His commitment to the Christian belief allowed him to argue that God was present in Africa before the missionaries came—and this is possible because, of course, the African is notoriously religious,58 and not religiously illiterate.59 He wrote in 1970, “My own suspicion, if not conviction, is that Christianity and traditional religions are to a great extent compatible.”60 In talking about African religion in this manner, Mbiti was also able to dignify African culture. If God was present in African religion, then God was present in African culture and, therefore, African culture was also not evil as it has been portrayed by some missionaries and colonisers. Contrary to popular twentieth-century scholarship, Mbiti argued that African religion was the connecting point between Christianity and African life. He disagreed quite vehemently with the scholars who sought to continue discrediting and marginalising African religion. He believed that, as praeparation evangelica, African religion prepared the way for the Christian gospel. Eventually, he argued that African religion is actually the Old Testament of African Christianity.61 Mbiti was right. This connection between African religion and Christianity has been foundational to the explosion of enthusiastic forms of Christianity in the continent. A majority of Christians in Africa, regardless of their

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denominational affiliations, have been influenced in one way or another by Pentecostal and charismatic expressions of the faith. It seems quite plausible that African Pentecostalism is simply a Christian version of African religion, having replaced its old rituals with Christian ones. The old medium has been replaced by the popular healing and money-multiplying Christian prophets who continue to influence African culture today. Of course, Africans have found it easier to convert to Christianity because of their religious outlook that covers all of life. It is in this sense that African religion can be really understood as a precursor to Christianity in Africa.

Promoting African Philosophy The greatest controversy around Mbiti’s work has been about what he proposes about the African understanding of time. He discusses time in African Religions and Philosophy62 and even though he does not dwell on it extensively in his later writings, it is evidently the most discussed aspect of his work. He argued how the African understanding of time shapes the rest of African life, its religious foundations, its cultures and its cosmologies. His bold assertions that Africans have a sense of time even though it is different from how Westerners view time sparked a debate that, to a great extent, raised the awareness of African philosophy to a wide audience. Of course, Mbiti identified more as a theologian than a philosopher and in writing about the concept of time in African perspectives, Mbiti shifted from the subjects that would become the hallmarks of his work—Christian theology and religious studies—to philosophy. However, his argument is clear—“the African concept of time [is] the key to our understanding of the basic religious and philosophical concepts. … [It] may help to explain beliefs, attitudes, practices and general way of life of African peoples.”63 He observes, “In western or technological society, time is a commodity which must be utilized, sold, and bought; but in traditional African life, time has to be created or produced. Man (sic) is not a slave of time; instead, he (sic) ‘makes’ as much time as he (sic) wants.”64 It is in this context that he introduces deep theological questions that, I believe, are yet to be fully explored in African theology. The first of these has to do with the spirit-world, including that of the ancestors. An African pneumatology that seeks to make sense of the cultural sensibilities around spirits and the spirit-world is yet to be accepted, even in African theology. It is for this reason that African Pentecostal theology does not respond positively to African religion. This is a curious case of miscontextualisation. African culture has all the ingredients that a good pneumatologically robust theology needs as a foundation for Pentecostal theology. Instead, it continues to borrow from Western theology even though such a theology struggles to make sense of the spirit-world. In addition, an African theology that makes good sense of the ancestors is yet to emerge. African Pentecostals, again, do not know what to do with them apart from demonising and exorcising them.

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Second is Mbiti’s theology of community which is built on the principle of belonging. He argues that Africans live in solidarity with each other because, “I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am.”65 He adds, “The individual is united with the rest of his community, both the living and the dead, and humanly speaking nothing can separate him from this corporate society.”66 This is what would become popular as the philosophy of ubuntu in the last decades of the twentieth century, largely from post-apartheid South Africa when Archbishop Desmond Tutu used it to help rebuild the country. The implications of this philosophy on the African Christian life are yet to be fully understood—and, again, this is partly due to the continuing dominance of Western theology in Africa. To a considerable extent, Mbiti is right to state that African theology is built on a foreign philosophy and because of this, it is unable to indigenise as Mbiti would have hoped.

Conclusion Mbiti joined the ancestors in October 2019 but, from the grave, he speaks on. The expansive volume of published words he has left for us will continue to shape our theological discourse and challenge the African nature of our Christianity. He will always continue to tower over the subject of African theology. The comparisons between him and early African theologians, for instance, in Hans Engdahl’s African Church Fathers, are well deserved. He models for us a commitment to Africanising Christianity that is greatly needed in the twenty-first century when the colonisation of the African Church’s mind continues. As we wrestle to reclaim an African identity in our theology, it is to people like John Mbiti that we must turn. May he, from the ancestral community of African theologians that includes people like Lamin Sanneh, Ogbu Kalu, Kwame Bediako, Bolaji Idowu, Kwesi Dickson, Origen, Augustine, Cyprian and Tertullian, continue to guide the cause.

Notes 1. “Mbiti” was a name usually given to children whose families had suffered several infant deaths. 2. Joseph G. Healey, “Tribute to John S. Mbiti,” Proverbium 37 (2020): 406. 3. In 1949, he was appointed to the highly innovative department of religious studies at University College Ibadan, in Nigeria, first as lecturer (1949–1950), then as senior lecturer (1950–1958), teaching many African students and making lasting friendships. 4. The University of Ibadan was founded in 1948 as a college of the University of London. 5. Geoffrey E. Parrinder, West African Religion (London: Epworth Press, 1949). 6. Geoffrey E.  Parrinder, African Traditional Religion (London: Sheldon Press, 1954). 7. E. Bolaji Idowu, Olodumare: God in Yoruba Belief (London: Longman, 1962).

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8. E.  Bọlaji Idowu, African Traditional Religion: A Definition (London: SCM Press, 1973). 9. Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom, 4th ed., 2 vols. (London: J.  Murray, 1993). Chapter 11 of the first volume is entitled “Animism” and discusses to a great detail his cultural evolutionary theory. A summary version of his argument written by Tylor himself appears as an excerpt in Michael Lambek’s A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion. I am informed to a great extent by this excerpt. See Michael Lambek, A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion, 2nd ed., Blackwell Anthologies in Social and Cultural Anthropology (Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2008). 10. Lambek, A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion, 25. 11. Lambek, A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion, 26. 12. Lambek, A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion, 26. 13. Lambek, A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion, 26. 14. Samuel Baker, “The Races of the Nile Basin,” in Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London (London: John Murray, 1867), 231. 15. Agbon Orobator, a Jesuit theologian, chooses to proudly own the term, and argue that Christianity that is contextualised for the African peoples must be animist. See Agbon E. Orobator, Religion and Faith in Africa: Confessions of an Animist (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2018). I find the term pejorative, but I also understand Orobator’s argument. 16. Idowu, African Traditional Religion, 87. 17. Missionary and explorer journals were generally popular for this reason. Whether it was David Livingstone’s Missionary Travels, Henry M. Stanley’s Into the Dark Continent, or Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, stories of the exotic “primitive, animistic savages in Africa” produced instant bestsellers. 18. E.  E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1937). 19. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956). 20. E.  E. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion, Sir D.  Owen Evans Lectures, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965). While there were, indeed, some Europeans who were sympathetic to African religion and culture, some of whom joined and participated in African religious services, the general understanding remained that either Africans did not have a religion or that whatever religion the Africans had was evil and demonic and must therefore be abandoned. 21. John S.  Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1970), xiii. 22. John S. Mbiti, Concepts of God in Africa (London: SPCK, 1970). Subsequent editions of the book included data from many more ethnic communities that the 400 that were represented in the 1970 edition. 23. John S. Mbiti, The Prayers of African Religion (London: SPCK, 1975). 24. John S. Mbiti, Introduction to African Religion (New York: Praeger, 1975). 25. Edward B.  Fiske, “African Christians Are Developing Their Own Distinctive Theologies,” Archive, The New  York Times (New York) 1971, https://www. nytimes.com/1971/03/12/archives/african-­christians-­are-­developing-­their-­ own-­distinctive-­theologies.html.

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26. For an extensive discussion on this, see Blake Wiley Burleson, “John Mbiti: The Dialogue of an African Theologian with African Traditional Religion ” (Ph.D. diss. Baylor University, 1986), 77–88. 27. It hosted the first African Writers’ Conference in 1962, and in attendance were such renowned writers as Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Obi Wali, Gabriel Okara, Bernard Fonlon, Frances Ademola, Cameron Duodu, Kofi Awoonor; Ezekiel Mphahlele, Bloke Modisane, Lewis Nkosi, Arthur Maimane, Ngũgı ̃ wa Thiong’o, Robert Serumaga, Rajat Neogy, Okot p’Bitek, Pio Zirimu, Grace Ogot, Rebecca Njau, David Rubadiri, Jonathan Kariara and Langston Hughes. Each one of these names is a celebrated writer—between them, readers have access to the early discourse of postcolonial theory in East Africa. The 1960s were a very important decade in African literature and higher education, not only for Makerere University itself but also for the entire continent. 28. Seventeen African countries had gained independence in 1960 alone (including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Madagascar, and Cote d’Ivoire). Four more countries (Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Nigeria and Cameroon) became independent in 1961. Another four (Burundi, Rwanda, Algeria and Uganda) gained their independence in 1962. Kenya gained its independence in 1963. Malawi and Zambia gained theirs in 1964. Seventeen more countries would gain independence between 1965 and 1980. 29. Okot p’Bitek, African Religions in Western scholarship (Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau, 1970). 30. John S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (London: Heinnemann, 1969). 31. Mbiti, Concepts of God in Africa. 32. Mbiti, Introduction to African Religion. 33. Mbiti, The Prayers of African Religion. 34. John S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy, 2nd rev. and enl. ed. (Oxford: Heinemann, 1989), xiii. 35. John S.  Mbiti, English-Kamba Vocabulary, Eagle Language Study Series, (Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, 1959). 36. John S. Mbiti, Akamba Stories, Oxford Library of African Literature, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966). 37. John S.  Mbiti, Mũtũnga na Ngewa Yake (Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, 1967). Mbiti wrote this novel while he was still in school, most likely, when he studied at Makerere. The original edition of the book was published in 1954, the year when Mbiti went to Rhode Island. 38. John S.  Mbiti, Poems of Nature and Faith (Nairobi: East African Pub. House, 1969). 39. John S.  Mbiti, The Crisis of Mission in Africa (Mukono: Uganda Church Press, 1971). 40. John S.  Mbiti, The Voice of Nine Bible Trees (Mukono: Uganda Church Press, 1972). 41. John S. Mbiti, Love and Marriage in Africa (London: Longman, 1973). 42. John S.  Mbiti, Bible and Theology in African Christianity (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1986). 43. John S. Mbiti, African Proverbs (Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 1997). 44. John S.  Mbiti, The Kikamba Bible: Utianiyo Mweu Wa Mwiyai Yesu Kilisto (Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau, 2014).

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45. A simple Google Scholar search of materials discussing the theological work of John Mbiti will reveal more than a handful resources. For instance, see Jacob K.  Olupona and Sulayman S.  Nyang, Religious Plurality in Africa: Essays in Honour of John Mbiti (New York: Mouton De Gruyter, 1993). Also see Chammah J.  Kaunda and Julius Gathogo, African Theology, Philosophy, and Religions: Celebrating John Samuel Mbiti’s Contribution (London: Lexington, 2020). There is also Hans S. A. Engdahl, African Church Fathers-Ancient and Modern: A Reading of Origen and John S.  Mbiti (Cape Town: UWC Press, 2021). Two outstanding dissertations on Mbiti include Burleson, “John Mbiti.” And Jan Hendrik Nieder-Heitmann, “An Analysis and Evaluation of John S. Mbiti’s Theological Evaluation of African Traditional Religions” (Ph.D. diss. Stellenbosch University, 1981). Also, Donatues Nnabueze Ngolade, “John Samuel Mbiti and the Study of African Traditional Religion” (MA diss. University of Nigeria, 1990). 46. John Mbiti, “The Ways and Means of Communicating the Gospel,” in Christianity in Tropical Africa, ed. C.  G. Baeta (London: Oxford University Press for International African Institute, 1968), p. 332. 47. John Mbiti, “The Growing Respectability of African Traditional Religion,” Lutheran World 19 (1972): 56. 48. John S. Mbiti, “Theological Impotence and the Universality of the Church,” Lutheran World 21, no. 3 (1974): 16. 49. Mbiti, “Theological Impotence and the Universality of the Church,” 16–17. 50. For instance, see Adeolu Oluwaseyi Oyekan, “John Mbiti on the Monotheistic Attribution of African Traditional Religions: A Refutation,” Filosofia Theoretica: Journal of African Philosophy, Culture and Religions 10, no. 1 (2021). 51. There was a heated debate in 1976 between John Mbiti and Benjamin Ray, for example, about their understanding of African religion. For more on this, see Benjamin C. Ray, “African Religions,” Worldview 19, no. 11 (1976). 52. Byang Kyato’s critique of Mbiti foundational to the argument he made in his book, Theological Pitfalls in Africa. Of course, the critique finds its way to several other Kato’s works, including his essay entitled “The Gospel, Cultural Context, and Religious Syncretism” in which Kato is concerned that Mbiti is inviting the [Kenyan] government to have oversight on religion. Mbiti writes of his conversation with Byang Kato in which Kato was led to understand Mbiti’s argument and agree to make a public apology and retract his disparaging remarks on Mbiti’s work. Sadly, Kato died nine days after that conversation with Mbiti having started to make the edits necessary. Unfortunately, the evangelicalisation of African Christianity that has occurred in the 50 years since the early 1970s means that a great deal of African theology is informed by Western theological thought, especially that of the United States. In this postcolonial world, 60 years after the collapse of European colonialism in Africa, John Mbiti’s voice needs to be heard again. 53. For more on the fiery exchange between Mbiti and James Cone, see Emmanuel Martey, African Theology: Inculturation and Liberation (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2009). 54. These include Kwame Bediako, Laurenti Magesa, Mercy Amba Oduyoye, Ogbu Kalu, Jesse Mugambi, Agbon Orobator and many others. 55. Laurenti Magesa, African Religion: The Moral Traditions of Abundant Life (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1997).

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56. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy, xiii. 57. For example, Bolaji Idowu’s work, Olodumare: God in Yoruba Religion. 58. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy, 1. 59. Mbiti, Concepts of God in Africa, xiii. 60. John S. Mbiti, “Christianity and Traditional Religions in Africa,” International Review of Mission 59, no. 236 (1970): 435. 61. Burleson, “John Mbiti,” 83. 62. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy, 19–36. 63. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy, 21. 64. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy, 24–25. 65. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy, 152. 66. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy, 152.

Bibliography Burleson, Blake Wiley. “John Mbiti: The Dialogue of an African Theologian with African Traditional Religion” Ph.D. diss., Baylor University, 1986. Engdahl, Hans S. A. African Church Fathers-Ancient and Modern: A Reading of Origen and John S. Mbiti. Cape Town: UWC Press, 2021. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. Nuer Religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956. Evans-Pritchard, E.  E. Theories of Primitive Religion. Sir D.  Owen Evans Lectures. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1937. Fiske, Edward B. “African Christians Are Developing Their Own Distinctive Theologies.” Archive, The New  York Times (New York), 1971. https://www. nytimes.com/1971/03/12/archives/african-­christians-­are-­developing-­their-­own-­ distinctive-­theologies.html. Healey, Joseph G. “Tribute to John S. Mbiti.” Proverbium 37 (2020): 404–24. Idowu, E. Bolaji. Olodumare: God in Yoruba Belief. London: Longman, 1962. Idowu, E. Bọlaji. African Traditional Religion: A Definition. London: SCM Press, 1973. Kaunda, Chammah J., and Julius Gathogo. African Theology, Philosophy, and Religions: Celebrating John Samuel Mbiti’s Contribution. London: Lexington, 2020. Lambek, Michael. A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion. Blackwell Anthologies in Social and Cultural Anthropology. 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2008. Magesa, Laurenti. African Religion: The Moral Traditions of Abundant Life. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1997. Martey, Emmanuel. African Theology: Inculturation and Liberation. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2009. Mbiti, John S. African Proverbs. Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 1997. Mbiti, John S. African Religions and Philosophy. London: Heinemann, 1969a. Mbiti, John S. African Religions and Philosophy. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1970a. Mbiti, John S. African Religions and Philosophy. 2nd rev. and enl. ed. Oxford: Heinemann, 1989. Mbiti, John S. Akamba Stories. Oxford Library of African Literature. Oxford: Clarendon, 1966. Mbiti, John S. Bible and Theology in African Christianity. Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1986.

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Mbiti, John S. “Christianity and Traditional Religions in Africa.” International Review of Mission 59, no. 236 (1970b): 430–40. Mbiti, John S. Concepts of God in Africa. London: SPCK, 1970c. Mbiti, John S. The Crisis of Mission in Africa. Mukono: Uganda Church Press, 1971. Mbiti, John S. English-Kamba Vocabulary. Eagle Language Study Series. Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, 1959. Mbiti, John S. Introduction to African Religion. New York: Praeger, 1975a. Mbiti, John S. The Kikamba Bible: Utianiyo Mweu Wa Mwiyai Yesu Kilisto. Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau, 2014. Mbiti, John S. Love and Marriage in Africa. London: Longman, 1973. Mbiti, John S. Mũtũnga Na Ngewa Yake. Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, 1967. Mbiti, John S. Poems of Nature and Faith. Nairobi: East African Pub. House, 1969b. Mbiti, John S. The Prayers of African Religion. London: SPCK, 1975b. Mbiti, John S. “Theological Impotence and the Universality of the Church.” Lutheran World 21, no. 3 (1974): 251–60. Mbiti, John S. The Voice of Nine Bible Trees. Mukono: Uganda Church Press, 1972. Ngolade, Donatues Nnabueze. “John Samuel Mbiti and the Study of African Traditional Religion.” MA diss., University of Nigeria, 1990. Nieder-Heitmann, Jan Hendrik. “An Analysis and Evaluation of John S.  Mbiti’s Theological Evaluation of African Traditional Religions.” Ph.D. diss., Stellenbosch University, 1981. Okot p’Bitek. African Religions in Western Scholarship. Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau, 1970. Olupona, Jacob K., and Sulayman S.  Nyang. Religious Plurality in Africa: Essays in Honour of John Mbiti. New York: Mouton De Gruyter, 1993. Orobator, Agbon E. Religion and Faith in Africa: Confessions of an Animist. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2018. Oyekan, Adeolu Oluwaseyi. “John Mbiti on the Monotheistic Attribution of African Traditional Religions: A Refutation.” Filosofia Theoretica: Journal of African Philosophy, Culture and Religions 10, no. 1 (2021): 19–34. Parrinder, Geoffrey E. African Traditional Religion. London: Sheldon Press, 1954. Parrinder, Geoffrey E. West African Religion. London: Epworth Press, 1949. Ray, Benjamin C. “African Religions.” Worldview 19, no. 11 (1976). Tylor, Edward B. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom. 4th ed. 2 vols. London: J. Murray, 1993.

CHAPTER 4

The Writings and Legacy of Adrian Hastings Kevin Ward

Adrian Hastings (1929–2001) was a Catholic priest, theologian, human rights campaigner, and historian, whose prolific writings on African Christianity, and work as editor of The Journal of Religion in Africa from 1984–1999, exercised a profound influence on the study of Christianity throughout colonial and post-colonial sub-Saharan Africa. His work is characterised by a search for an ecumenical rather than a sectarian perspective, the wide-ranging scope and humanity of his vision, and his ability to integrate religious history with wider political, social, and cultural concerns.1 Hastings was born in Malaya in 1929. His father was a lawyer in the British colonial service. It was a strongly Catholic family—Hastings’ maternal grandmother was the abbess of a Benedictine convent. His own father was a convert to Catholicism—the Hastings forbears included a long line of Anglican clergy, five generations in succession holding the benefice of Matley in Worcestershire. Adrian attended the (Catholic) Douai Abbey School in Berkshire. He studied history at Worcester College, Oxford, where he developed a strong interest in medieval church history. From an early age he felt a vocation to the priesthood,

Adrian Hastings’ personal papers are kept in the Special Collections of the University of Leeds. They are not yet fully sorted and catalogued. But the boxes which I was able to use were invaluable in writing this chapter. I cite material from the collection as ‘Hastings Paper: University of Leeds Special Collections MS 1710’ [hereafter HP.ULSC].

K. Ward (*) African Religious Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. E. Barnes, T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48270-0_4

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strengthened at Oxford by a circle of progressive Catholic friends. His natural instincts drew him towards intellectually enquiring and lively religious orders such as the Benedictines or Dominicans. But, equally, he felt called to a disciplined life of service as a missionary, and after graduating from Oxford, he entered the English province of the White Fathers (WF.  Peres Blancs), the French missionary order founded by Cardinal Lavigerie for service in Africa. Hastings recalled that this decision went against his natural instincts: “I was a little Englander, wholly uninterested in the Empire or in non-European cultures. To banish myself to Africa was a singularly disagreeable thought”.2 He also found the education provided by the White Fathers at Broome Hall in England, and S’Heerenberg in the Netherlands, singularly narrow and rigid, with a strict censorship of books and newspapers. This did not prevent him from developing a strong social sense and a conviction of the urgent need for Catholic renewal if the church was to escape the dangers of racial superiority, clericalism, and reactionary dogmatism. While still at Broome Hall, Hastings had encountered Bishop Joseph Kiwanuka, the Bishop of Masaka in Uganda, the first African Catholic bishop since the sixteenth century. Hastings made the suggestion that he might complete his priestly training at the Uganda major seminary of Katigondo, but the bishop felt that this would be problematic in terms of diet and, as Fr Smit, a teacher at Katigondo, put it, ‘a daily martyrdom’. Such a warning was hardly likely to deter Adrian from further pursuing the possibility that he might be ordained, alongside Ugandans, as a regular priest in the diocese. He explained this to his English provincial, Fr Howell. “I do not think that these ideas are pure sentiment. There seems to be a strong objective basis for such a vocation. The growing colour conflict in Africa threatens even the interior life of the Church there at present. … I feel that the act of a European submitting himself to work with and under Africans cannot but be of value at the moment”.3 Hastings felt that his own intellectual approach to faith made it appropriate for him to work in a relatively advanced Catholic Church like Masaka. While seeking for permission to follow this vocation, Hastings learnt about the existence of an order in Belgian, the Societe des Auxiliaires des Mission (SAM), founded by the great missionary to China, Vincent Lebbe, a strong proponent of indigenous leadership in the Chinese Church. SAM was exactly the kind of organisation which Hastings was looking for: to provide “secular priests, who will reinforce the national secular clergy, incorporating themselves in it as completely as possible in a spirit of service and on a basis of absolute equality”.4 Unfortunately the society mainly worked in Asia, though it had recently sent a priest to help out in a seminary in Burundi. Hastings was convinced that it was to Uganda that he was called. Eventually, the White Fathers, despite their strong reservations, agreed to release Hastings, and the way was clear in 1954 for him to go as a secular priest to Uganda. Bishop Kiwanuka agreed to send him to the Roman College (an organ of Propaganda Fidei), where he studied theology, alongside seminarians from Asia and Africa.5 Here he became acquainted with some of the future leaders of the Catholic Church

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in Africa, such as Victor Lubaga (the Congolese theologian), and the West African priests of ‘Les pretres noirs s’interrogent’, a clarion call for a progressive Catholicism. The Principal of the Roman college, Fr Cenci, was a sympathetic leader, and Hastings felt immediately at home when he saw a portrait of Vincent Lebbe in Cenci’s office. Alas, the teaching was not so inspiring. Adrian spent much of his time in independent learning from la Nouvelle Theologie— the writings of radical French priests such as Yves Congar and de Lubac. After ordination in Rome, Kiwanuka asked Hastings to take a Certificate of Education at Cambridge, while he also completed his doctoral thesis on Anglican ecclesiology.6 It was during the defence of this thesis that Pope Pius XI died. Hastings departed for Uganda while the conclave to elect his successor was still in session. The election of Cardinal Roncalli as John XXIII was something of a disappointment to Hastings. He had been hoped that a less ‘traditional’ and more clearly progressive bishop would emerge. On his arrival in Uganda in December 1959, Bishop Kiwanuka first assigned Fr Hastings as a curate to a Muganda parish priest at Villa Maria. This mission had been founded by Bishop Streicher as the central station for the Catholic Church in Buddu, a county in Buganda which was becoming overwhelmingly Catholic. At Villa Maria, he began to learn Luganda, the local language, and learnt to preach in what he later described as “my bad but fairly flowing Luganda”.7 The experience of local parish life gave Hastings a lasting appreciation for the strengths of Catholicism at the local level, lovingly and perceptively described in his essay ‘Ganda Catholic Spirituality’ (Hastings 1989, pp. 69–81). But he also quickly became aware of the rigidities of a very traditional form of Catholicism: “a constant failure of communication within a very old fashioned world ruled by clerics whom I tried hard to serve but whose presuppositions came over the years to irritate me more and more”.8 After 15 months, Bishop Kiwanuka sent him to the junior seminary of Bukalasa, which was beginning to operate an English language syllabus for Ugandan high schools. Hastings resented being “an apostle of the British examination system” but enjoyed the stimulus of teaching English and History (largely British history) and putting on productions of Shakespeare plays. Like most minor seminaries, only a very small minority of students went on to major seminary and the priesthood. But some of the future leaders of the Catholic Church in Uganda were students at that time, not least, Fr John Mary Waliggo (1942–2008), who became a great historian and theologian of Ugandan Catholicism, and a leading human rights activist in Museveni’s Uganda. Unfortunately the staff at Bukalasa became suspicious of Hastings’ radical ideas and opposed the liberal spirit of free enquiry which he represented.9 By the time of his first home leave in December 1964, it had become clear that he would not return to Bukalasa. The new bishop of Masaka, Adrian Ddungu, was faced with a dilemma about where to place his turbulent English priest. Katigondo, the senior seminary, would have been the obvious destination. Although it was next door to Bukalasa and in the diocese of Masaka, it was under the control of the Ugandan episcopal conference as a whole, and Hastings had effectively alienated himself

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from the bishops—his strictures about ‘ecclesiastical baronies’ in the English Catholic journal The Tablet had not gone down well.10 Ddungu placed Hastings in a parish in the meantime, where he became even more convinced of the clerical alienation from the actual life of the local church: The church in Uganda still has great possibilities: not only an extraordinary numerical growth, but a truly indigenous Christian life deeply rooted in some areas. … But there is no country in Africa today where reluctance to face up to the inadequacies of the established system and the need for reorientation is beginning to have more disastrous effect upon the whole quality of the church’s life. (Hastings 1971, p. 122)

Bishop Ddungu was relieved when an invitation came from the Association of the Members of Episcopal Conferences in Eastern Africa (AMECEA) to produce a bi-monthly newsletter, in which the documents of Vatican II were summarised for clergy study. Hastings was placed in charge of the project. The newsletters were produced at Kipalapala Major Seminary in Tanzania over a period between July 1966 and May 1968. They were subsequently published (with some modifications) in two volumes as A Concise Guide to the Documents of the Second Vatican Council (Hastings 1968, 1969). The articles, a model of clear thinking and lucid presentation, steered clear of direct comments on African Catholicism—they were, after all, meant to stimulate discussion rather than to prescribe how the church should respond, but Hastings may well have felt cautious about being too provocative given the suspicion about his own views. His own understanding of the state of the church came in his subsequent articles for the Ggaba Pastoral Institute, in which he made clear his critique of rigid clericalism, advocating the end to clerical celibacy in Africa, the promotion of even married catechists to the priesthood, and the urgent need to address the decline in Christian marriage—largely in Hastings’ view because of the remoteness and irrelevance of this sacrament for most Catholics. He even entertained the possibility of women priests, based on his appreciation of the dedication of female catechists and women religious for the life of the church in Uganda. Otherwise, as he put it, “The Roman Catholic Church in Africa [is] today a dinosaur, kept on its legs with the annual blood transfusion of men and money from Europe and North America” (Hastings 1971. p. 214). Returning to Uganda as a priest seemed remote. Possibilities of university jobs in newly established departments of religion at Makerere University, Kampala, and in Nairobi remained elusive. (In Nairobi, the Anglican Bishop Stephen Neill became professor, though he had minimum African experience). Hastings took a temporary research position at the Mindolo Ecumenical Institute in Zambia, and, in 1970, he accepted the invitation of Anglican bishops in Eastern and Central Africa to enquire into the state of African marriage customs and the problems which this presented for full membership of the Church. Pastoral issues relating to marriage with the Catholic Church in Uganda had already exercised Hastings during his ministry in Uganda. This

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new project gave him the freedom to develop his ideas more fully and systematically, in the context of another ecclesial community, and without appearing directly to criticise the practices of his own church. The book takes an ecumenical approach: issues of polygamy, conflict with traditional culture, the impact of modernity on the erosion of both traditional and Christian discipline are ones which concern all Christian churches. As Hastings observed in the book: It is likely that in many areas two groups of Christians are emerging; a relatively small committed core who share in many ways in the active life of the Church and take a church wedding fairly for granted, and another group—probably growing far more quickly—that does not hesitate to call itself Christian but in which individual commitment is far more slight. (Hastings 1973, p. 104)

In particular, he challenges the common practice of excluding from holy communion those who have not married in church: [D]iscipline of this kind largely weighs upon the weaker members of the community; the poor rather than the rich and influential; women rather than men. Far more girls than boys tend to come under discipline, yet the seriousness of fault may well lie quite the other way round. Pregnant unmarried girls are frequently a chief object of church discipline; they already have much to suffer and the imposition of further public and humiliating punishment is unkind and unhelpful.

This is a “misuse of the central sacrament of the Church, a sacrament above all expressive of love and forgiveness” (Hastings 1973, pp. 105–106). In his analysis Hastings refers to the pioneering work of the Anglican theologian and historian John Taylor. He also refers to him in the important work published in 1971, Mission and Ministry, largely written during his time at Mindolo. Ugandan Christianity is central to this study. It is a pioneering ecumenical study of the formation of two opposed Christian communities, Catholic and Protestant (Anglican). Hastings notes A joint study of the two communities in Uganda, whose history is in many ways so similar is not made easier by the quite extraordinary hostly each felt for the other through many years. Missionary literature on each side abounds with the most sweeping condemnation of the other. Happily this is now passing. (Hastings 1971, p. 144)

The last remark may have been rather too optimistic, but Hasting’s account certainly ranks as one of the most penetrating and incisive attempts to redress this scandal. He praises Anglicanism for its ability to foster an indigenous clergy, integrated in the social life of the local community. He notes that the survival and growth of early Catholicism in the 1880s had been at a time when the missionaries had left Uganda, when leadership devolved on the first remarkable converts. Hastings also notes the remarkable missionary work of the Catholic catechists, Yohana Kitagana, and the Anglican priest, Apolo Kivebulaya, both

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previously married men who voluntarily chose the celibate life. Hastings saw the institutional life of the churches as hampering the vigour and ingenuity of local evangelism. For Anglicanism, the overly close links with the state (both colonial and independent) were problematic; for the Catholics, the ‘heavily unadapted clerical structures of the Latin church’ was a huge impediment. In independent Uganda, Hastings notes that “the real life of the Anglican Church has anyway for long been carried forward by the Revival Movement rather than the establishment. Nevertheless it must be admitted that the Anglican Church in Buganda is today somehow paying for its privileged position obtained 70 years back… so often the very strength of one generation proves a source of weakness for the next” (Hastings 1971, p. 167). Despite his strictures, Hastings’ commitment to the Catholic Church in Uganda shines forth in his account of Fr Lourdel, the first Catholic missionary, and of Bishop Lavigerie, who had even proposed the possibility of a married priesthood for Africa. He also commends the work of Bishop Streicher (nicknamed Stensera by the Baganda), and the solid work of the early missionaries in producing a Luganda-Latin dictionary (1912) and Le Veux’s Premier essai de vocabularies Luganda-francais of 1917. Hasting also notes Fr Joseph Ddiba’s recent history (1967, p.  67), Eddini mu Uganda’ [Religion in Uganda]. Later, in his essay ‘Ganda Catholic Spirituality’ (1989, pp. 69–81), Hastings wrote a loving reminiscence of his experience of the Catholicism in Villa Maria. Hastings had returned to England in 1971 and his future career in Africa remained uncertain. He himself wondered whether he should look for other areas of service. His future was further complicated by his decision in 1974 to marry. His wife, Ann Spence, was brought up in Southern Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, and was a tutor at the Anglican College of the Ascension, part of the mission complex at Selly Oak in Birmingham. Hastings reflected on this decision, and on the wider issues of compulsory clerical celibacy within the Catholic Church, in a little book entitled In Filial Disobedience, published in 1978. Here he stated that he had no intention of leaving the priesthood, which he considered to be a lifelong commitment. Hastings saw no reason to negotiate his decision to marry with the Catholic hierarchy in England. His decision, in effect, excluded him from recognised priestly ministry in the Catholic Church. Nevertheless, his growing reputation as a theologian and historian meant that he was still widely regarded, both inside the Church and in the academic world, as a Catholic intellectual. Marriage meant that his career as a priest in Africa was over. But it did not mean that his engagement with Africa was at an end. In 1979, Hastings published the first of his great works of historical scholarship: A History of African Christianity 1950–1975. This seminal work covered a crucial period of transformation: from colonial missionary dominance to independent African political, cultural and ecclesial autonomy. Hastings adopted a chronological framework, “in fact a fairly straight history” as he put it (Hastings 1978, p. 2). Dividing the book into three periods of approximately eight years, he explored

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the apparently impregnable colonial ascendency of the immediate post-war period, the rapid erosion of that hegemony as independent movements gathered momentum, and the initial period of independence, which had been achieved by 1975  in most of Africa outside the white bastions of southern Africa. In each period he gave detailed attention to church-state relations, to developments within ‘the historic churches’, Protestant and Catholic, and to the role of African independent churches and movements. His commitment to an ecumenical approach was groundbreaking. His comments were astringent, with criticisms of the institutional history of all the traditions, but with a deep sympathy for the complexity of human decision-making in times of upheaval. One of the most important aspects of the book was that it showed that African Christianity could not be dismissed as a colonial hangover, that it was, in fact, deeply ingrained in the political and social life of independent African countries. He was realistic, however, about the lack of fulfilment in the initial optimism of independence, and the increased rather than diminished role of churches: Having lost many of their institutions, the churches remain a good deal less vulnerable. What power they have is now more locally based and they have in many cases grown in popular credibility as much as governments have declined in that commodity. The main churches in the meantime have continued to provide the one recognisable alternative structure; they may offer a more objective network of information and assessment. … If the churches are bashed from time to time by African governments in the 1970s, it is really because they are politically strong—not in immediate action, but in resilience, in the confidence of many people, in their potentiality to carry through significant social programmes of medium size. (Hastings 1979, p. 263)

Many of the political leaders now in power had been educated in mission schools. All these factors, in Hastings’ view, had contributed to the revival of the ‘historic’ churches at the expense of the less organised and cohesive ‘independent’ forms of Christianity, which many had predicted would be the main beneficiaries of independence. In the light of subsequent developments, this may seem an overly sanguine assessment. In the concluding chapter, ‘Between politics and prayer’, Hastings stresses that Christianity’s fundamental role is in its life of prayer and spirituality. He notes the faith which inspired the martyrdoms of the Rwandan Tutsi Anglican, Yona Kanamuzeyi and the Burundian Hutu Catholic theologian, Fr Michel Kayoya; and in Uganda the Anglican Archbishop Janani Luwum and Fr Clement Kiggundu (editor of the Catholic newspaper Munno) in Amin’s Uganda. Above all he emphasises the importance of lay communities such as the (Anglican) Balokole in Uganda and the (Catholic) Jamaa in Congo/Zaire. It is the spirituality of the communities at large, Catholic, Protestant, and Independent, rather than the clericalism of the institutions, which encapsulate the meaning of African Christianity.

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The publication of this volume in 1979 marked a transition in Hastings’ writing. Previously his focus had been essentially pastoral and ecclesial, springing from his participation as an African diocesan priest in the contemporary life of the church and arguing for reform of parish life and theological education of priests. In particular, wrestling with the issues of reconciling African and Catholic culture on marriage, and arguing for much greater flexibility in understanding the tensions between monogamy and polygamy, the status of women, family life and the rearing of children, and clerical celibacy. In articulating these concerns he was always interested in the historical developments which had resulted in what he saw as the precarious state of the church in contemporary African society. With the writing of A History of African Christianity 1950–1975, his focus was more clearly as an historian, concerned with the wider issues of the historical place of Christianity (Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox and Independent) as a whole in African political and social history. In his move to more purely academic work, he was no longer the ‘insider’ (a position with which he was never comfortable). He was freed from the role of representing, even as a critical friend, his Church as an institution, while never abandoning his Catholic sensibilities. Yet he never abandoned his activism and concern for political justice. Hastings was particularly concerned with those areas of southern Africa which were still under white control. He was from the beginning distrustful of the racial policies of apartheid: in his private papers, he preserved a statement by Bishop Hennemann of South Africa in the immediate aftermath of the National Party’s victory in 1948: “a beginning has already been made to put into practice this noxious, unchristian and destructive policy”.11 Even as a student in Rome, Hastings had voiced criticism of Portuguese policy in Goa. In 1972 there was a massacre by the Portuguese government in Wiriyamu in Mozambique. Hastings helped the Burgos Fathers to publicise the scale of the massacre. They had been frustrated by the attempts of the Catholic hierarchy in Mozambique to suppress their report. Hastings’ newspaper articles highlighting this atrocity, and his subsequent book Wiriyamu in 1974, gave international publicity to the event, and (in Hastings’ own words) “undoubtedly contributed to the crumbling of the Salazar regime. Both in Portugal and in Africa”. Hastings compared Wiriyamu to the news of the Hola massacre during the Mau Man period in Kenya, and the international storm raised by the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. Each had contributed to the undermining of imperialism (Hastings 1979, pp. 212–3). The publication of A History of African Christianity 1950–1975 established Hastings’ reputation as a fine historian, who persuasively advocated that religion was a central force in the understanding of African society, rather than a marginal, partisan concern of missionaries. Already his growing recognition as an outstanding interpreter of African Christianity was consolidated by his involvement in an ambitious project springing out of a conference in Jos, Nigeria, to describe and evaluate the state of Christianity in the continent. The result was a cornucopia of articles, published in 1978 as Christianity in

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Independent Africa edited by Hastings, Fashole-Luke, Richard Gray, and Godwin Tasie. By this time Hastings’ years of wandering came to an end when, in 1976, he was appointed as a lecturer in Aberdeen University, in the Centre for the Study of Non-Western Christianity founded by Andrew Walls. Here he engaged with some remarkable fellow academics and students, both African and from the West, many of whom would transform the study of African religion in seminaries and universities in Africa itself. Then in 1983 came the chance to return to Africa as head of the religious department at the University in Harare, in newly independent Zimbabwe. In his inaugural lecture, entitled ‘Mediums, Martyrs and Morals’, he noted that neither of his predecessors had stressed traditional religions. “[The department] was not located mentally in any significant way within the continent wherein it was placed physically… The real experience of Africa is not to be so easily dismissed”.12 He advocated that religion, in all its variety, and not least African religious traditions, was vital for “the understanding and enhancement of human experience”. The time in Zimbabwe, running a university department, proved an important factor in his appointment as Professor of Theology in the Department of Theology and Religion in the University of Leeds in 1985. One of his lasting achievements at Leeds was to establish an important centre for the study of religion in Africa, a legacy which continued after his retirement and death, partly through my appointment as Lecturer in African Christianity in 1995. In 2022 another ‘Adrian’, Adriaan van Klinken, was appointed and he has developed the study of religion in Africa in new and important ways, ones which Hastings would hardly have envisaged in the 1980s, not least in the study of gender and sexuality. Yet, the study of the experience of gay and lesbian African Christians is surely in accordance with Hastings’ concern to highlight the creative experience of African men and women in creating communities rather than ecclesial institutions. Ingrid Laurie’s fine biographical chapter in Christianity and the African Imagination notes the important African scholars who came to Leeds because of Adrian’s presence. After his retirement, an outstanding PhD student was the Nigerian Jesuit, Fr Orabator, who went on to become the Director of the Eastern African province of the Jesuit order. Orabator’s enlightened, progressive African Catholicism would be a fulfilment of Hastings’ vision for the future of the Catholic Church in Africa. During Hastings’ time at Leeds, he published A History of English Christianity 1929–1985, one of many historical contributions to British Christian life, evidencing so many of the traits which have made his studies of Africa so important—ecumenical non-partisanship, a deep sympathy for the actors, whatever their limitations or failures. At Leeds he also published what was to be his magnum opus on African History, The Church in Africa 1450–1950, a monumental survey, which combined a magnificent overview of the importance of Christianity for Africa, while delighting in vignettes of individuals and movements and emphasising once again the creative ingenuity of African agency. He spent much effort in researching deeply the early chapters on the

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Ethiopian Orthodox Church, not least because this definitively countered the idea that Christianity was predominantly a European missionary movement. But, equally, in his study of Kongolese Christianity in the sixteenth century, he was fully alert to the complexities, the triumphs, and tragedies of the missionary endeavour. He devotes a chapter to ‘Church, School and State in the Age of Bishop Kiwanuka’, the man who convinced him that he should go to Africa in the first place. Humanity, sympathy, ecumenical enjoyment in the variety of the Christian endeavour, acute critical judgements, delivered in clear, straightforward prose, characterise this great work. The other great achievement of the Leeds years was his editorship of the Journal of African Religions (JRA). He took it over in 1984 when it was at a low ebb as a result of the illness of its founder, Andrew Walls. Adrian’s drive to improve standards resulted in an increase in the page numbers and regularity of its production, so that when he stepped down from editorship in 1999 it had become one of the foremost journals on African religion. Adrian was insistent that it should not be primarily a theological journal—scholarly study of religion, whether historical, anthropological, sociological, or cultural, should be the standard, in the study of traditional religion, Islam and Christianity. Dogmatic or partisan views, or issues of primarily denominational concern, were not acceptable. Hastings’ one big regret was the lack of articles by Africans working in Africa which achieved the scholarly standards he required. He would not compromise on this. While he himself was fully alert to intellectual arguments, he was sceptical of the artificial introduction of methodological or theoretical material which was not fully integrated into the subject of an article. His own historical work is largely free of such material, which he viewed as often productive of sterile debate, obscure terminology, and abstruse argument. Yet, he was well able to engage in historical debate on issues which divide historians. For example, in his The Construction of Nationhood (1997), he fully entered into the fierce debates about nationalism as developed by Eric Hobsbawm and Benedict Anderson. He argued that nationalism was not simply a modern, largely European phenomenon. The interest for Africanists lies in his use of historical examples of ‘national’ sentiment in places like Ethiopia, Buganda, and among the Yoruba, dating back to pre-colonial times. Thus, he drew Africa fully into discussions about national identity, whereas before they had often seemed either marginal to such discussions, or simply reacting to Western colonial modernity. While not engaging extensively with the more theoretical issues of gender and sexuality, Hastings’ own struggles with clerical celibacy gave him a keen awareness of the dangers of a male-only professional clergy and of the marginalisation of women within the life of all the churches. He writes perceptively of women missionaries—noting that Catholic women’s orders, like that directed by the French nun Mother Anne-Marie Javouhey, working in Senegal from the 1820s, were often in advance of Protestants in allowing an autonomous role for women missionaries. For Protestants, married missionaries were the ideal, but Hastings points out the problems of male missionaries leaving wife and

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children back in the home country for long periods and of the particular dangers of child birth for Europeans. Only in the 1890s did Protestant women single missionaries become a regular feature of missionary life, with their own agency. Against the odds, African women did make their mark in the history of African Christianity. From his early days as a diocesan priest in Uganda, Hastings had realised the vital importance of women as informal evangelists, catechists, and pastoral workers, though often ignored and undervalued by church authorities. It was this recognition which led to his suggestion that women could and should be ordained. In The Church in Africa, Hastings gives vivid portraits of Donna Beatrice (Kimpa Vita) in sixteenth-century Kongo, and Alice Lenshina in 1950s Northern Rhodesia. Notably both these charismatic leaders were at odds with the churches in which they were nurtured. Of Lenshina’s Lumpa Church Hastings writes: Lumpa appears … as a feminist Church, not only led by a woman but expressing feminine aspirations, a woman’s view of the ideal society … This was expressed in its opposition to polygamy, but also the symbols it made use of in its hymns. (Hastings 1994, p. 525)

Issues of African masculinity and homosexuality were only beginning to surface in the last decade of Adrian’s life. President Mugabe’s denunciations came in the 1990s, and African Anglican bishops were crucial in the condemnation of the Anglican Lambeth Conference of 1998. Both have had dire consequences for African Christian militancy against same sex relations. Adrian did not address these issues in his writings, though one would expect that his liberal views on sexual issues generally would have extended into these areas also. Adrian died after a short illness in 2001. According to John Peel, who wrote an obituary in Journal of Religion in Africa, his death deprived us of a history of the Catholic Church in Uganda, for which he had been preparing material. Undoubtedly, that would have been a brilliant account, the absence of which is to be lamented (the more so as John Waliggo, his former student, also died suddenly, in 2008, without having published a similar comprehensive history). Earlier Terry Ranger had regretted that his time in Zimbabwe had not produced a monograph about aspects of local Zimbabwean Christianity. One might, however, argue that Hastings’ strength was in presenting ‘the big picture’, the panoramic overview. His historical works rely largely on published monographs and scholarly material, rather than research in archives or through extensive oral interviews. But, as Peel wrote, “There is little to equal it [Adrian Hastings’ oeuvre] for the scope of its erudition, the rectitude of its judgements or the fluency of its expression” (Journal of Religion in Africa, XXXI–4, 2001. Obituary, pp. 493). Of A History of African Christianity, Peel judged that “Its most basic achievement was perhaps less its compelling narrative, rich with detail and analysis, than its triumphant demonstration that developments in Christianity were a central strand of Africa’s contemporary history”. Peel felt that his “touch was always less sure with independent churches and those that

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stood furthest from the historical traditions and institutions of Christendom— he did not appreciate the rise of charismatic [churches] and neo-­Pentecostalism”. One could argue, particularly in the History of African Christianity, which ends in 1950, that these phenomena were not yet of central significance, however much they were already becoming so by the late twentieth century, gathering momentum since his death. Yet, the fact that such developments have become so central to an understanding of the nature of African Christianity inevitably means that Hastings’ writing is firmly of its time. If anyone has the temerity to write a history of the half century after 1975, it will demonstrate fundamental differences from the period about which Adrian Hastings wrote. Historians are not, and should not aspire to be, prophets, though as a human rights advocate, Hastings certainly was a prophet. As a historian of African Christianity, he is as yet unequalled.

Notes 1. A good biographical account of Hastings’ life can be found in Ingrid Lawrie, ‘The Shaping of a Prophet: The African Career and Writings of Adrian Hastings’ Chapter 11 of Maxwell, David (editor), Christianity & the African Imagination: Essays in Honour of Adrian Hastings, Leiden: Brill, 2002, 333–366. 2. Hastings (1978, p. 34). 3. HP:ULSC Fr Howell to the Father Provincial 14/5/53, quoting from a letter written by Hastings. 4. HP:ULSC. Revd Herman Unden to AH, 9/7/53. 5. HP-ULSC Spiritual Diary. Chapter 1, pp. 26–30. 6. In 1961 a revised version of this Roman doctoral dissertation was published as One and Apostolic. 7. HP:ULSC. A handwritten Spiritual Diary 1950–1980, Chapter 1, p. 20. 8. HP:ULSC. Spiritual Diary, Chapter 1, p. 7. 9. HP:ULSC. Spiritual Diary, Chapter 1, p. 17. 10. HP:ULSC. Spiritual Diary, Chapter 2, p. 3. 11. HP:ULSC. Box 23, Pastoral Letter of Bishop Hennemann 5/9/48. 12. HP:ULSC, Inaugural lecture, delivered before the University of Zimbabwe, 16 June 1963.

Bibliography For a complete bibliography of all that Adrian Hastings wrote see Ingrid Lawrie’s ‘Adrian Hastings Bibliography 1950–2002’, in Maxwell, David (editor), with Ingrid Lawrie. 2002. Christianity and the African Imagination: Essays in Honour of Adrian Hastings. Leiden: Brill. pp. 367–406. Hastings, A. 1967. Church and Mission in Modern Africa. London: Burns & Oates. Hastings, A. 1968. A Concise Guide to the Documents of the Second Vatican Council. Darton, Longman & Todd. Volume 1. Hastings, A. 1969. A Concise Guide to the Documents of the Second Vatican Council. Darton, Longman & Todd. Volume 2. Hastings, A. 1971. Mission and Ministry. London: Sheed and Ward.

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Hastings, A. 1973. Christian Marriage in Africa. London: SPCK Press. Hastings, A. 1974. Wiriyamu. London: Search Press. Hastings, A. 1978. In Filial Disobedience. Great Wakering: Mayhew-McCrimmon. Hastings, A. 1979. A History of African Christianity 1950–1975. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hastings, A. 1989. African Catholicism. London: SCM Press. Hastings, A. 1994. The Church in Africa 1450–1950. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hastings, A. 1997. The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hastings, A and E.  Fashole-Luke, Richard Gray and Godwin Tasie (editors). 1978. Christianity In Independent Africa. London: Rex Collings. Peel, J.D.Y. 2001. ‘Adrian Hastings: An Appreciation’, in Journal of Religion in Africa. XXX1–4.

CHAPTER 5

Elizabeth Isichei’s Contributions to the Study of Christianity Toyin Falola

Introduction Professor Elisabeth Isichei remains an outstanding pioneer with a consuming passion for interrogating religious history, especially the Christian religion as it infiltrated Africa. She got her fire for such ambition sparked by the awareness that scanty, if any, materials are available about religion in Africa. That paucity led to the proliferation of convoluted information that mischaracterizes the religion of the people, particularly their adoption of external religions. Examining her research interests reveals an interesting position she holds about religious beliefs. She has repeatedly argued that the foundation of each religion might be different. Still, they all achieve the same purpose: connecting with the Supreme Being.1 This mindset assisted in strengthening her resolve to pursue knowledge about them (all the dominant religions domiciled in Africa) in ways that gave credit to her intellectual rigor. Sparked by that interest, she has produced sparkling results that are genuinely influential in understanding otherwise inconspicuous information about human religions in Africa, especially. We cannot deny that the absence of thorough research around the topic of religion, especially in relation to Africa, breeds numerous fabrications that often generate avoidable contentions when involved parties try to understand the coloration of their religion or the roles it has played in their lives. Concerning religion, the condition of Africa is remarkably enthusing, for at different epochs

T. Falola (*) Department of History, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. E. Barnes, T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48270-0_5

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of their history, they have been inundated with exogenous religions that define the trajectory of their world. Christianity is one, and Isichei provides very illuminating views. Through her engaging research, we understand first that religious groups and their eschatological teachings have survived every human civilization depending on the existing perception and understanding of spirituality.2 In Europe, which consists of all states (by states, I mean cultural identities and groups), the survival of religions in the past was determined exclusively by the religion of their leaders. I use the word leaders very metonymically to represent all forms of individuals who are the occupants of their seats of power. In other words, those who were monarchs were automatically considered the leaders of a people, and for their roles, they determined the religious inclinations and engagements of their people. However, this tradition is not exclusive to Europe, as, at the time when it was commonplace among them, similar things happened in many places in the world, especially in Africa. Africans used to operate on collective religious practices as long as their leaders approved them. Isichei insists that the survival of Christianity in African states (not countries) is linked particularly to the amount of royal support that it attracts. Therefore, the Republic of Congo and Warri (a regional group in modern-day Nigeria) have displayed generational loyalty to Christianity because the religion enjoyed royal approval and support upon introduction. Attempts to penetrate the continent’s interior met brick walls as long as royal support was not forthcoming. Apparently, there had been the practice of activating very aggressive campaigns against indigenous African religion by Christians, especially those who wanted to dislocate the existing spiritual systems of Africans to achieve provincial intentions. However, the shield of royal intervention in the form of spirituality that governs the people was very strong and uncompromising. Isichei paints a picture of the nineteenth-century African states that either were under the grip of Islamic religion or were inseparably tied to their indigenous spiritual beliefs, and it was one of wonderment and bewilderment. Christianity appeared to them as strange and inoperable, as they could not reconcile the Union of Divinity—the trinity described in the Christian religion—which they believe contradicts the arrangement of metaphysical provenance they were indeed familiar with. As long as they were unconvinced about the sanctity of these teachings, that is, the teachings of the religions brought to them, the promulgation of such religious beliefs does not only stand condemned, but the perpetrators are also liable to face trials among them for spreading them. In essence, the inhospitable condition of the existing religious atmosphere made it impossible to penetrate a number of African states aggressively, and that continued for a very long time until some changes were recorded, especially by the efforts of crusaders who adopted different strategies for the enhancement of their agenda. This therefore places Christianity as a religious identity that faced critical challenges in the course of its spread in Africa.3 Isichei emphasizes that the wide acceptance of Christianity as a religious practice in Africa today comes into play because there was a deepened contest

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between Christianity and Islam to get the people’s attention. Both religious orientations understood that the dislocation of indigenous religion was necessary, and in fact, the only reasonable way by which the people would embrace exogenous beliefs. To that extent, virtually all the Christians available in Africa, even till the present moment, Isichei proclaims, are individuals with backgrounds in indigenous religious practices.4 On a very rare occasion, one would find African Christians with Islamic backgrounds. Although this is not impossible, a thorough examination of the individuals would likely reveal their indigenous religious foundation. In essence, what is natural and consistent with Africans and their religious understanding is their African spirituality. Their Christian tag or Islamic orientation, however, has a layer of history that is to be examined for proper understanding. And it was commonplace that each of them was loyal to their professed faith. It should be emphasized that the spread of Christianity in Africa, particularly among the demographic already immersed in different religions, was relatively possible based on the identical structural system that governed the religious beliefs. Mystics in these religions have recognized their points of convergence and exploited that to drive their patronage community into deepening their loyalty to the religions. Ethiopia, for example, has had a longstanding relationship with Christianity, and it looks predictable that they maintained that position for a long time. However, their religious commitment was ruptured when an aggressive Islamic crusade became the order of the day. Christians became flummoxed by the development, but they barely had the power to prevent the attitudinal decline that became evident in the unfolding events. In quick succession, transformations happened. However, it became very clear in the twentieth century that the drivers of Ethiopian Christianity were already determined to introduce the new system of gathering more people. It would be very disastrous to their resuscitated or rekindled interest on the occasion that they do not employ sustainable approaches to bring back their glory days when they were recognized as the predominant religious identity. To that extent, individuals who were understood as instrumental to the activities of Christianity, whether to spread it or enhance it, were drawn from several areas just to ensure that the fire of their religion was not extinguished. According to their very commitment, the increment of people doing the work gave Christianity the numerical advantage that was the foundation of its spread in the country after centuries of critical challenges. Priests whose work is to spread the religion to the people outnumbered those who existed in some European countries. This exploration is self-revealing of otherwise blanketed information about the extent to which Christians invested in spreading the religion. But more importantly, it illuminated some practices of that time, which were not deliberately obstructed or mistakenly undermined. For instance, priests could tie nuptial knots during that time. The matter of their familial interest or connection was not important for critics of religion in the period. They wanted religious leaders who would progressively ensure that their popularity was not extinguished by whatever reason, and priests having their own wives had little to do

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in this regard. Curiously, the proliferation of religion during this time invites us to ask some important and helpful questions, the answers to which are immediately necessary here. Why do Christian crusaders have an impressive record of converts in Ethiopia, especially recently, and to what extent did they maintain their ground? For one, the proliferation of the religion is hinged on the exploration of available loopholes, or maybe opportunities, in the existing religious identity of the people. Ethiopians, like many of their colleagues in other places on the continent, believe that evil persists in the human world and that the metaphysical universe deserves continued spiritual understanding before one can make positive choices that do not have outrageous consequences.5 The fact that Christianity dedicated a large number of people to that assignment indicates that they wanted to cash in on the people’s vulnerability. Despite the geographical difference, Ethiopia adopted traditional Christian culture in an attempt to exude the character of the traditional adherents of the religion as known to the Israelites. Quite a number of their activities were drawn from Biblical documents, tilting their religious identity and engagement from what occurs in its natural environment. To this extent, Ethiopian Christians saw themselves as the African version of the chosen people whose covenant with God was to be taken absolute care of.6 Traditional or orthodox Christians are continually dismissive of values that do not have their religion’s backing and approval, Ethiopian Christians behaved similarly. In essence, the status of the chosen people was jealously guarded. The traditional Christians, for example, kept Saturday as their Sabbath day when they observe all religious rituals associated with the Christian religion; their Ethiopian counterparts, however, added Sunday to this day, and for that, it was common knowledge that their status as original Christians was maintained for a very long time. Their commitment is indicated by their resolution to adopt certain behaviors as recognized by some people in the Bible. For example, they adopted the culinary culture of the Levites as described in the Bible by avoiding pork and its related food. This dietary practice was exemplary of orthodox Christians and became an integral part of Ethiopian Christianity. The circumcision of their male child occurs on the eighth day of their birth, in sync with the activities of the Jews. Isichei educates us that the cultural baptism of Ethiopians into their adopted religious identity was dangerous politics aimed at extinguishing their indigenous history in a desperate search for approval or adoption, especially by the Israelis. They had taken for a fundamental truth the fact that they were spiritually connected to traditional Christians. This socio-spiritual affirmation was intended to win them metaphysical legitimacy and originality, as it did for the Jews, the Israelites. Prominent Ethiopians once believed, and some still do till today, that they are descendants of Jews, convinced through the Solomonic monarchy legend that there had been some relationships between them through the supposed marriage between King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. They understood that this relationship produced a son named Menelik, who took the Ark of the Covenant to Aksum, and they understood that this

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son was eventually to become an ancestor in their story, with a high chance of being the progenitor of lineages of kings from the state. Meanwhile, this belief is not rooted in verifiable history, as Isichei would eventually reveal.7 It seems that the structural and ideological similarities between the experiences of Israelites and Ethiopians were the reason for drawing that connection, in an attempt to create for themselves an image of people with extraordinary power and those with the possibility of surviving their challenges. But more than this, something revealing is constant in the history of Ethiopian Christianity and its believers. A number of them understand that continuity is the crux of existence, and for that reason, they cannot be divorced from the series of historical happenings that are linked with Jews. They hold this position tenaciously and beautifully in their hearts because Jesus made remarks that egg them on in this belief. The declaration that his coming was for the affirmation of the Old and the New laws, that is, the Old Testament and the New one, creates that moral ground for them to underscore their history as the continuation of the older tradition. There seems to be a historical linkage between Sabaea and Saudi Arabia. Sabecans migrated to Aksum before the Christian era, and their contiguity to Saudi Arabia makes it inevitable to worship the God of the Arabs. That cultural absorption became extraordinarily necessary for the people at the time in their desperate attempt for survival. They tried to integrate their history with that of the Israelites as they adopted their cultural values and political systems. At some point, their ruler, who declared himself as the king of Ethiopia, was not coronated until he surrendered and declared himself the king of Zion. This indicates a deepened relationship, especially for some ulterior motives. Although the history that there is absolutely nothing familial about the connection between Ethiopians and Jews remains public knowledge, it will not be discarded because they had expectations to meet. The spread of Christianity in Ethiopia, therefore, follows the trajectory of conquest at some point. A particular warrior king named Amda-Siyon (Pillar of Zion; 1314–1344) considerably influenced how the state radically became a site of Christianity where members declared their interests and commitment to the religion, as concluded by Isichei. Many Ethiopians who were yet to embrace the religion believed it was against their existence, and the happenings of the time assuaged their claims and affirmed their fears. There is no consideration for individuals who declare a different faith than Christianity. If any assault or onslaught was directed at others who believed differently from Christianity, the state did not recognize the breach of their rights as they were considered infidels, pagans, or unbelievers for daring to follow a different religion. During the critical onslaught of the Southern Ethiopians in the seventeenth century, the people became terrified and, in some ways, consumed by the fear of terrible things happening to them, thereby seeking desperate ways to survive. It was, therefore, instinctive that they immediately declared their commitment and loyalty to the Christian religion imposed by the warrior king. It should not be forgotten so quickly that royal support was essential at the time. If a religious

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identity would survive at all, it would demand the affirmation of kings so that people would place themselves under it. Meanwhile, as the kings gained much legitimacy in governance and power, they became more superior to the extent that they conceived themselves as the on-earth representatives of supernatural powers, who, in a way, deserve as much honor and recognition as given to the traditional Christians in their natural habitat.8 At some point, the overbearing posture of the king became a potential threat to the survival of Christianity there. Anyone who refused to accept the near-despotic rules and regulations of the king was considered a potential threat which they must neutralize. Isichei paints this condition as flagrantly abusive to the people who feel the heat of these egoistic whims. She buttresses this by citing the situation of a certain Estifanos,9 who was flogged and scolded for what they considered an affront against the king. The latter had refused to prostrate for the king with the excuse that such a gesture was reserved for God and that no human is expected to benefit from such privilege for whatever reason. This ideological and philosophical quandary is characteristic of resistant behavior toward the king, and in order to avert similar things in the proximal and distant future, they decided to make an example of the man by exiling him and punishing him for his action. Unlike others, Estifanos believe that the excessive and extreme devotion to the Cross and Mary was not Christian-like, and he would not sheepishly compromise his position in deference to the king. He was banished. However, the spread of Christianity in Ethiopia was dotted by some events that changed the course of engagement and history. As already established, the connection between Muslims and Christians was deeper than imagined. They had begun their interrelationships even before the ascendancy of Mohammed into Islam, but it was extremely strengthened when he came into play. When Mohammed, the Prophet of Islam, was pursued by his Arabic relatives in Mecca, many of his followers found their way to Ethiopia, where they were well received. But their relationship was going to be fractured anyway. After spending several years in their allocated geography in Ethiopia, the instinct to spread their religious beliefs took over their minds, and they began to scheme important ways through which they could actualize that particular objective. Then came a courageous young man named Imam Ahmad, who came from Adal, determined to perform jihad, the holy war of Muslims, meant to spread the religion of Allah across the human world. Ethiopians were not unaware of his capacity, especially when it comes to warring engagements. He was powerful and strategic, and people around him never doubted his ability to make notable changes as long as he was ready to make them. He advanced his army, and, in that case, he already questioned the legitimacy of the Christians, who had hitherto enjoyed unruffled peace and stability to lead their religious lives. Prefaced by a series of intermittent aggressions, Ahmed recorded substantial success against the Christians on their occasion of wars and conquest. His forces overran Ethiopia as they seized the atmosphere, forcing themselves on the people. They burned down monasteries, killed priests and sacrificed

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strong-willed Christians who did not waver in their commitment to the religion. The aftermath of their victory momentarily changed the landscape of religion in Ethiopia. In the meantime, he enjoyed the people’s popularity and goodwill, which brought about the massive conversion of people into Islam. Upon conquering the people, he offered the king the opportunity to convert to his Islamic religion, but the king declined for obvious reasons. For one, the lineage of Christianity in Ethiopia had crossed many centuries. As a courageous leader, the king would not kowtow to the pressure of a dissident to save his life. Martyrdom presents more dignity to him than that. It was more honorable to die for a just cause than die as a weakling. Also, the devout young man who challenged him was an immigrant who was granted the latitude to do business in Ethiopia out of their compassion and respect for others. He, therefore, would not allow such an individual to overrun his affairs. Momentary loss did not prevent the king from making underground efforts to reclaim his glory. The king sought reinforcement from Portugal to face Ahmad’s army. After the initial setback, they came back to defeat him, and that eventually restored Christianity to its frontal position in Ethiopia. Whereas Ethiopians have considered themselves an integral part of Christianity, or more accurately, uniquely significant participants in the religious spread, missionaries held a contrary view. An interesting history nonetheless precedes their understanding of Ethiopian Christianity. Western Europe, which became an important body in the spread of the religion, believed that they were superior in moral and ideological perception, thereby condemning alternative ideas in the process. They often sought alliance with anyone who made it available, to the extent that they extended hands of friendship to the Islamic Arabs, especially when they had pressing issues they needed to fight over. When this assistance is, however, not forthcoming, they often seek alternatives elsewhere as long as it facilitates their transformations in every respect. To this extent, they conceived Ethiopian religious fortitude as something necessary and important to actualize certain agendas. As such, while they see Ethiopians as potential allies for this hidden objective, the latter basked in the euphoria that they are already substantiated as fundamental pillars in the identity of Christianity. Whether this matched the intentions of the European Christians or not was not their immediate concern. However, it is important to notice that they paraded injunctions and denominational specifics that many European Christians did not support. Isichei recalls the history of a certain Ethiopian king, who ascended the throne at an early stage in life, exactly at 18 years. Hair Gelawdewos (Claudius) became a rallying point for the Christian religion in the period. It was a time of war and continued inter-regional hostilities, and kings took particular roles in ensuring the safety of their people. According to her, Gelawdewos wrote a piece titled The Confession of Faith before his demise. The book x-rays the notable things that are congenitally adopted by Ethiopians, which sometimes contradict the teachings of the European Catholic Church. He inscribed into the monograph that they share compelling characteristics with these European

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Christians but differ in some areas. By that condition, he believed that the legitimacy of their belief was not whitewashed for whatever reason. European Catholics, for example, did not subscribe to the Sabbath-day seclusion. They contested the rationality behind not eating pork and also challenged the commonsense of circumcision, all behaviors that are entrenched in the cultural engagements of Ethiopian Christians. Then, Gelawdewos challenged that position and argued that most of these things are deeply inscribed in the annals of their culture and cannot be jettisoned because they do not sit well with the European version of Christianity.10 All these are ways that Isichei used to tell her audience about the redecoration of the Christian religion to accommodate indigenous ideas so that they would not become extinguished by pressures from within. The character of Christianity in Ethiopia, however, differs slightly from what history documents with the Egyptians. By the fourth century AD, the influence of Christianity had spiraled across Egyptian geography so much that one would hardly find an Egyptian that was not a Christian. But the said fourth century was very significant in the history of Arabic Islam, as that was around the time when the Islamic religion was created. With the determination to spread the religion across different countries and cultures, Egypt became one of the most targeted places to influence because of its geographical and political contiguity to Islam. They needed to make this development to establish their root in what would be described as a virgin ground in the world (Africa), where external religions had not gained substantial ground. Whereas we should mention that the conquest of Egypt, which led to the overrunning of their religious activities by Alexandria, happened as the latter successfully dismantled their epistemic base, and that, in a way, gave a meteoric rise to the religion in Egypt. Before Christianity, there had been indigenous religions in the place and that itself made it more imperceptibly dangerous to think that a people who developed an enduring civilization and culture guided by various ideological underpinnings and promoted through their commitment do not have enough historical legacies they can depend on, as contemporary history has maintained. Egypt used to be called Copts at this level, not because the term describes Egyptians themselves, but because a large number of Egyptians are Christians, except for a few of them. However, linguistic mutations and changes are sometimes important tools that reveal the patterns of the history of a people to us. By the end of the said millennium, Egyptians were already inundated with Islamic values so much that the geometric increase in the numbers of non-­ Christians, that is, the Muslims, contributed to the effacement of the name. Christianity in Egypt had undergone a brutal attack that necessitated aggressive reprogramming of their values. The Arab invasion changed many things about them, the most apparent of which is the radical de-territorialization of the country for Christians. Placing them at the periphery made it obvious that the people would have no significant political power to promote anything about the Christian identity. Napoleon’s account, as evaluated by Isichei, gives the impression of the reason for the effacement of Christianity in the country.

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According to him, harsh political relationship was shown to the Egyptians, which means that they have continually been pushed to the margin through the usage of power by the Muslims. Despite this development, numerous factors enhanced the sterilization of Christianity in the place. Still, Muslims and Copts (Christians) continued in some of their traditional practices, which means that they are not entirely departing from their religious source. Isichei reiterates the fact that rapid political attacks on them considerably caused the sharp decline of Egyptian Copts. With the succession of Muslims at the political base of Egypt, the survival of the Christians became more unpredictable. This is underscored by the fact that each Muslim ascent to power pushed an agenda that indicates their unpreparedness for multiplicity and diversity. Under the reign of al-Hakim, numerous Copts (Egyptian Christians) and Jews faced dreadful persecution that led to the elimination of their religious popularity. The prosecution of these Christians dreaded others, and they became fearful of the government so much that their religious beliefs were subsumed considerably. The decline in the number of their religious leaders indicates that their capacity to spread the religion became weak and could not be compared to that of the Muslims. Of course, sometimes, if not all the time, having political power helps in the sustenance of a certain level so that the people do not get intimidated for declaring their  preference for a particular belief system. Those who are, however, unruffled by these developments are devoted to the Christian creed. While they may have been intimidated by several actions of the Muslims against them, they demonstrate their faith in different ways and continue to show solidarity with doctrinal values that are exclusively orthodox, such as loyalty to the Cross and Mary. Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa took on an essentially different character in its spread. European explorers became very instrumental in the spread of the religion in the region.11 These explorers sought to expand their economic networks by assessing what happens among other people of the world and, in the process, taking advantage of it. It appears very impressive that such a journey was undertaken by several Europeans whose intentions may have been identical, but their means were different. Christopher Columbus was in this category because he was an adventurous man looking for places where massive success could be attained. His circumnavigation of the American world, for example, brought about the redefining of international relationships. Apart from Columbus, Portuguese adventurers equally made impressive efforts to extend their economic base, and they penetrated some places in the world, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Because the religion of their places was Christianity, adventurers from these European states carried with them the values and virtues of Christianity and spread the religion unconsciously. To be honest, their initial intention was purely to amass enough wealth to transform their economic conditions, but situations in the various states they came into contact with necessitated that they weaponize their religion as an instrument of deepened solidarity, which they believed was necessary for their intentions. Some interesting things made their journey successful.

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First, for the Portuguese adventurers, there existed some measurable structural similarities between their religious values and that of the host. For Africans, there was no contention about the supremacy of God as a nodal force responsible for the earth’s creation and sustenance. It, therefore, appeared like an expected opportunity that was ready to be exploited. Sub-Saharan Africans recognized ancestors and their power of metaphysical interventions on issues that have physical legitimacy.12 They understand that some things happen in the world that are beyond the comprehension of the ordinary human, and the fact that they have ancestral power that is showcased anytime they call for it solidifies their beliefs in the existence of an immaterial world. For the Portuguese, however, ancestors are called saints, and some are given other descriptions. What is constantly affirmed by their religion is that there are principalities that are involved in the management of the world as created by the Supreme Being, God. The Portuguese called them angels, but sub-Saharan Africans recognized them by different nomenclature. What remains apparent is that they operate within a similar philosophical paradigm. Both have sacred places, and they have things that are given special attention, especially as spiritual matters, among others. It was, therefore, incumbent on these adventurers to take advantage of the situation if they wanted to achieve their ambitions. We learn through the teachings of Isichei that the intentions of Europeans were different from ecumenical initially, as it was evident that they wanted to amass maximum financial resources to advance their cause. As has already been implied, it was apparent that they could not achieve their aspirations if they did not devise an excellent means by which they could penetrate the people. One way to understand Europeans’ intentions is to evaluate the names they imposed on some sub-Saharan states with which they came into contact. There is, for example, the underlying implication that these names suggest their ambitions. Slave Coast, Gold Coast, and Ivory Coast, among others, are the names conferred on some of these sub-Saharan countries, but one would see that Europeans named them based on what they wanted to get from them. They needed slaves to advance their economic base in North and South America; they wanted many people who would advance their economic possibilities there. Where they tagged the Gold Coast, it was evident that the large deposits of gold there attracted the West, and they needed to attain their desires first. But then, they must create a shared blueprint that can facilitate their success, hence why they said they wanted to convert Africans to accept their (Christian) religion so that the latter would “be saved.” Several times, they banked on the fact that their approach to spirituality was identical, which made it easy for many Europeans to gain the loyalty of the unassuming sub-Saharan Africans. To understand the diversity of Christian denominations in Africa today, one needs to get familiar with the politics of colonial imperialists that necessitated it. Versions of the religion came to the fore through the various activities of European states and how they domesticated the religion in their home countries.13 As one can understand colonialism from the pattern of imperialism employed by the Europeans, it is also possible to understand different

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dimensions of Christianity in Africa based on the preferences of the Europeans who came to Africa using religious ideologies. The Portuguese are largely Catholic and that affected the strand of Christianity they brought to the continent. In every place where the Portuguese settled or conquered, Catholicism was introduced, and that substantially influenced how the loyalty of countries on the continent is fortified even till the present moment. A papal concession of 1514 concentrated power in the hands of the Portuguese, which conferred the right to have control over the overseas churches on them. However, such control could not be guaranteed remotely; they needed individuals available in their colonies to advance the campaigns of the Portuguese adventurers. They lacked the population figure to effectively manage their overseas possessions, thereby creating some loopholes in their engagements in the long run. It affected the number of priests to be allocated, and that therefore became a weakness to be exploited by intended oppositions. Isichei maintains that there is an important twist to this event that must be carefully examined. The spread of Christianity, especially the Catholic strand, was significantly associated with the cooperation accorded to the religion by some locals, called laity, who did not have significant offices in their faith. These people are not ordained clergy or clerics, but given that they had a consuming passion for the religion, that set Christianity on the path of generational relevance in Africa. Priests, as already argued, are produced in very low quantities. That means that without consistent preaching or engagement in other religious activities, the people are faith-wise vulnerable and susceptible to all forms of manipulation if the situation presents itself. The combination of the laity, royals, and aristocrats helped fortify the religion because they learned the language of their European friends who brought the religion. In what would be known as the Republic of Congo today, the Catholic Church helped translate not the Bible but Catholic catechism into Kikongo. Notably, the Bible was never translated into Kikongo but Catholic catechism was. This is because the locals were not encouraged to read the Bible for reasons known best to them. What they learned helped spread the religion but they did not understand it enough to ask very fundamental questions. In all other African countries where Catholicism got to, you either read the Christian sacred texts in Latin or do not read them. Sao Tome was one of the African states overridden and taken by the Portuguese. They also converted the people to the Catholic version of Christianity, and before long, they extended their outreach to places around them. They got to Warri in Nigeria by the last quarter of the sixteenth century. Understanding that the religion of the royals was tantamount to the religion of the followers, in the 1570s, they converted the heir of the Olu of Warri to Christianity, with the baptismal name Sebastian. Apparently, the fact that he would be the face of power after the transition of the father essentially influenced why they considered him an important figure. In the end, he remained very loyal to the religion for many of his years on earth. In fact, he died a strong Christian and left an impressive legacy for Christendom. The affection of King

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Sebastian for Christianity cannot be quantified as he dedicated his human and material resources to advance that particular course of action. In a show of solidarity with the Christian cause, he sent his son to Portugal to be a priest. However, his son had a different purpose for himself there as he departed from that line of action to something he considered more fitting and generally purposeful. Outside the palace, the spread of the religion was not deep. Christianity generally suffered greatly because the Portuguese priests could not stay in Warri because of the complaint that their weather was not friendly, and they were prone to sicknesses there. As already implied, it is apparent that Catholic Christianity chiefly overtook the continent because a large number of earlier Europeans who came to the continent were Portuguese. They made considerable progress in getting people to accept their faith. One wonders, therefore, how efforts made by the Portuguese would later be overshadowed by what other Europeans did on the continent, especially in the area of colonial undertakings. From Warri to Congo, Ethiopia to Sao Tome, it was unmistakable that the Portuguese strand of Christianity was already seen as an important bride whom it was morally questionable to abandon to posterity.14 Despite the impressive achievements associated with Portuguese, there were areas where another strand of the religion was enjoying significant recognition. One of such cases was the Gold Coast, where, rather than Catholic Christianity, the Protestant church was the ringleader of religious affairs in the place. Apart from the indigenous religious practices and spirituality, the people were visited by Christian values that clearly depart from their Catholic counterparts. Before the breakup of the continent as done by Europeans at the Berlin Conference in 1884–1885, a similar act of dividing the world antedated that development. Historically, towards the end of the fifteenth century, the pope divided Africa, Asia, and the New World between Spain and Portugal. This division had the character of colonialism, but it did not function in that capacity, as it would be revealed. The Gold Coast was one of the places where other than the Portuguese, Europeans substantially spread, meaning their religious beliefs were also brought along. France, England, Holland, Denmark, and Brandenburg are some  European nations that established forts in the area and bringing their version of Christianity was commonplace. Incidentally, quite a number of them were Protestants, and they introduced this to the country to the extent that it led to the cultural integration of the people into their specific religion. In these forts, many Protestants clergy worked as chaplains and not missionaries, which explains why they had mixed with some Africans who also benefitted from the opportunity to advance their understanding of the European culture by learning their languages. They would eventually become very resourceful for the religion, and they became instrumental to the cause in spreading it. The acquisition of Western knowledge through that opportunity opened ways for them as they became forerunners of African intellectualism, professionals in their chosen fields and achieved very greatly in their chosen careers. More than being the face of informed Africans at the time, they would eventually function as the

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compass of that religious belief in that they were directly or indirectly involved in bringing their people into it. But what is constant is that they are different from the Catholic Church, and their dedication also helped advance the religion considerably. Meanwhile, being the agents of spreading Protestant doctrine came with considerable challenges that were difficult to undergo at some point. One is that not many Africans understood these European languages, perhaps because the numbers that wanted to use their intellectual resources were limited. This is somewhat understandable. Their primary intention was to exploit Africans and not, in reality, be of any help to them concerning their spiritual existence. For all intent and purposes, similarities are found between the existing African religions and the foreign ones. For that reason, attention given to teaching people in European languages was minimal. The overwhelming consequences this had for the people contributed significantly to the decline of Christianity in the place. The Africans who went abroad to advance the cause of Europeans became disconnected from their languages and cultures, which became one of the fundamental reasons for their actual damnation. By losing touch with their languages, they became exilic in their states when they returned. Upon returning home, they could not speak their languages nor perform some engagements by observing their cultures. They were, therefore, isolated for being conscripted into the European workforce intended to help spread the gospel of Christianity, especially the Protestant strand. That affected religion. Understanding the black Christians in the New World would require us to familiarize ourselves with some important epochs of their history. As Isichei notes, Nova Scotians were originally a black community that assisted the British in fighting their wars of independence over the promise that they would be granted freedom upon their victory with the English. The War of Independence was important for the British to escape their oppressors and have their freedom retrieved. Still, apart from their numerical vulnerability, they did not possess substantial technological power to challenge their opponents to victory. Hence, they needed the black people, whom they dominated in Nova Scotia, to be available for that activity. But the British did not honor their side of the contract, as they reclaimed some black people and sold them back into slavery. They ruffled the black community, and a good number of them returned to Nova Scotia and resettled. Having waited without success to see the British fulfill their agreement with them, some took their grievances to London to ask for what was rightfully theirs. Instead of allocating the blacks their land in Nova Scotia, they offered some of them the opportunity to return to Sierra Leone to start their lives and become an important factor in their political and economic development there. Some of them chose to return to Canada, and some of them returned to Sierra Leone. Accepting this challenge, however, shows them as courageous and focused. In Sierra Leone, they would have to contest the existing powers and make themselves relevant. Those settled in Nova Scotia faced their own challenge of confronting the people of the area, and among the things they faced were the

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fierce religious dissimilarities that separated them from one another. A large number of Africans had been immersed in various doctrinal ideals before they were drawn away from their African countries. Some of them were Methodists, and others were Baptists; it was apparent that they would necessarily be forced to change their religious orientation if they triumphed in their new environment. Gradually but steadily, they were beginning to inject their strand of African Christianity by departing creatively from the tropes of the religion introduced by the Europeans. They, therefore, created a safety net for the proliferation of the religion as they became foot soldiers who spread the religion themselves. Europeans did not have the biological fortitude to withstand the pressure in Africa, as the climate reality was against their constitution. African converts became strongly influential in spreading the religion themselves. But this comes with the opportunity to color their religion in ways that suit the African people. That was the genesis of the entrenchment of  Christianity in many African countries.

Notes 1. Elizabeth Isichei, The Religious Traditions of Africa: A History (London: Praeger Publishers, 2004). 2. Isichei, The Religious Traditions of Africa: A History. 3. John Thornton, “The Development of an African Catholic Church in the Kingdom of Kongo, 1491–1750,” Journal of African History 25 (1984): 147–167. 4. Elizabeth Isichei, A History of Christianity in Africa: From Antiquity to the Present, (United States of America: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1995). 5. Humphrey Fisher, “Conversion Reconsidered: Some Historical Aspects of Religious Conversion in Black Africa,” Africa 43 (1973): 27–40. 6. Elizabeth Isichei, “Christianity in Africa,” Journal of African History 42 (2) (2001):314. 7. Isichei, “Christianity in Africa.” 8. Steve Kaplan, “Ezana’s Conversion Reconsidered,” Journal of Religion in Africa 12 (1982): 166–186. 9. Kaplan, “Ezana’s Conversion Reconsidered,” 10. Richard Gray, Black Christians and White Missionaries (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), 11–58. 11. Elizabeth Isichei, Christianity, “Historiography in Africa,” Encyclopaedia of African Religions and Philosophy (2022): 117–117. 12. Richard Elphick and Rodney Davenport, Christianity in South Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), part 2, 124–241. 13. Elizabeth Gunner, The Man of Heaven and the Beautiful Ones of God (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2002). 14. Adrian Hastings, “African Christian Studies, 1967–1999: Reflections of an Editor,” Journal of Religion in Africa 30 (1) (2000): 30–44.

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Bibliography Elphick Richard and Davenport, Rodney. Christianity in South Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Fisher, Humphrey. “Conversion Reconsidered: Some Historical Aspects of Religious Conversion in Black Africa,” Africa 43 (1973): 27–40. Gray, Richard. Black Christians and White Missionaries. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992. Gunner, Elizabeth. The Man of Heaven and the Beautiful Ones of God. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2002. Hastings, Adrian. “African Christian Studies, 1967–1999: Reflections of an Editor,” Journal of Religion in Africa 30 (1) (2000): 30–44. Isichei, Elizabeth. “Christianity, Historiography in Africa,” Encyclopaedia of African Religions and Philosophy (2022): 117–117. ——— “Christianity in Africa,” Journal of African History 42 (2) (2001): 314. ——— The Religious Traditions of Africa: A History. London: Praeger Publishers, 2004. ——— A History of Christianity in Africa: From Antiquity to the Present. United States of America: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1995. Kaplan, Steve. “Ezana’s Conversion Reconsidered,” Journal of Religion in Africa 12 (1982): 166–186. Thornton, John. “The Development of an African Catholic Church in the Kingdom of Kongo, 1491–1750,” Journal of African History 25 (1984): 147–167.

CHAPTER 6

The Writings and Legacy of Andrew Walls Jonathan Bonk

Life Andrew Finlay Walls (OBE) (April 21, 1928–August 12, 2021). Walls was born in New Milton, Hampshire, England on April 21, 1928. His mother was a devout church goer, but his father had little use for formal religion. Living with the family when Walls was a child was his rough and ready seafaring grandfather who had run away at the age of twelve and sailed all over the world, living a hard life before the mast. He had ended up sheep farming in Patagonia. While his grandfather had absolutely no use for the Christian faith, Walls’ early

Angela Dwamena-Aboagbye, Akrofi-Christaller Institute of Theology, Mission, and Culture. One Year Commemoration of Prof. Andrew Finlay Walls, Friday, August 12, 2022, at the ACI Quadrangle, Akropong-Akuapem (Akropong-Akuapem, Ghana: Akrofi-Christaller Institute of Theology, Mission, and Culture, 2022): p. 26. This article relies heavily at times on a chapter that I contributed to the book edited by William R. Burrows, Mark R. Gornik, and Janice A. McLean, Understanding World Christianity: The Vision and Work of Andrew F. Walls. A festschrift (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011). My chapter was titled “Changing the Course of Mission and World Christian Studies: Andrew Walls and the Streetlight Effect” (Pp. 61–77) and is here used by permission of the publisher. A later adaptation of this chapter later appeared as “Andrew Walls: Mentor, Friend, Exemplar” in Journal of African Christian Biography. Vol. 6, No. 4 (October 2021), Pp. 3–21.

J. Bonk (*) Center for Global Christianity and Mission, Boston University School of Theology, Boston, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. E. Barnes, T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48270-0_6

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memories include tales of his grandfather’s adventures in many parts of the world, which, he says opened up his young mind to a wider universe.1 He graduated from Exeter College, Oxford, with a BA in Theology First Class Honors in 1948, an MA in 1952, and a B.Litt. in 1954 under patristics scholar Frank Leslie Cross for his thesis on “The Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus.” While serving in the RAF Reserve (1948–1952) he met fellow officer Doreen Mary Harden (August 13, 1919–October 11, 2009). They married on April 4, 1953, at Hamstreet United Methodist Church, the South Kent Circuit. This was also the year that Walls became a Methodist preacher, remaining active on the Methodist circuit in the North Scotland for the rest of his life. They had two children: Christine [McKuen] and Andrew Walls Jr. He taught at Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone from 1957 to 1962 before becoming head of the religious studies department at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka where he taught and researched from 1962 to 1965. The looming Nigerian civil war (1967–1970) dictated his return to Scotland where he was appointed to a post in ecclesiastical history at the University of Aberdeen and became Riddoch Lecturer in Comparative Religion. In 1970 he established the first department of religious studies in a Scottish university. This evolved into the Centre for the Study of Christianity in the non-Western World, with Walls as its Director. While that department was destined to be in Aberdeen for only a few years before relocating to Edinburgh, it featured an outstanding faculty including Adrian Hastings, Harold Turner, James Thrower, and Lamin Sanneh with African history specialists—Roy Bridges, John Hargrave, and Jocelyn Murray—in the wings, attracting promising young scholars from around the world whose productivity would amplify Walls’ influence in the field into the twenty-first century: Wilbert Shenk, John Roxborogh, Kwame Bediako, Rosalind Hackett, Jehu Hanciles, Timothy Tennent, Siga Arles, and Mark Gornik. Further extending and deepening both the shape and influence of his ideas was the Yale-Edinburgh Group on World Christianity and the History of Mission, co-founded by Walls and Sanneh in 1992.2 This annual forum, hosted alternative years by the Centre for the Study of World Christianity at the University of Edinburgh and Yale Divinity School and managed by Margaret Acton in Edinburgh and Martha Smalley at Yale, attracted and influenced scores of academics from all over the world. While decidedly historical in its orientation, its “members” represented a range of disciplines. It was for many the best kind of academic conference possible, providing a forum in which emerging scholars could freely share their ideas and discoveries without fear of censure or embarrassing critiques by better informed veterans in the field. Although the original founders of this extraordinary forum are both gone, it continues to fulfill its unique role in an academic field usually neglected in standard academic taxonomies. While Walls is best known universally for his contribution to our understanding of world Christian history, he was active in his local community of Aberdeen. In 1976 he was elected to Aberdeen City Council as the member for

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Cairngorm ward. He was also Master of Kirks and Bridgeworks and, later, convener of museums, parks, and recreation, campaigning for better access for disabled people and helping to establish a maritime museum. He was also an active member of Unison, the union of the manual laborers in Scottish universities. In 1978 he received an OBE in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace for his contribution to the Arts. His plays and dramatic readings written and performed under the nom de plume “Finlay Anderson” reveal another side of Walls.3 As a Methodist “local Preacher” active in congregations along the northeast coast of Scotland, he also wrote hymns featuring, in the words of fellow-­ Methodist I. Howard Marshall, “a certain amount of local color not always easily adaptable for use outside their local Aberdeen setting.”4

Publications Although most of Walls’ considerable volume of publications first appeared as essays prepared for publication in journals or for delivery as lectures, many of these were collected and organized as books. This is due largely to the perseverance of Bill Burrows, then Managing Editor of Orbis Books, a small but influential religious publisher founded in 1970 by Nicaraguan Maryknoll priest Miguel D’Escoto with Philip J. Scharpe. It is to Bill Burrows and Orbis Books that students and scholars of world Christianity everywhere now owe an immense debt of gratitude. Three volumes of Walls’ essays—each a treasure-trove of his remarkable intellectual erudition and literary creativity—were published by Orbis Books: The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith featuring 19 of his essays appeared in 1996 and was awarded the Christianity Today Book Award. The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith (2002) was the second in the series, making available 15 more of his compositions. A third and final 16-chapter volume appeared in 2017 as Crossing Cultural Frontiers: Studies in the History of World Christianity. A fourth book as of this writing awaits publication by Wm. B.  Eerdmans Publishing House. Provisionally titled The Missionary Movement from the West: A Biography from Birth to Old Age, this volume is his magnum opus on the serial spread, expansion, and contraction of world Christianity, with special emphasis on its European Protestant forms. The book is the edited result of a series of lectures given at the Overseas Ministries Study Center in New Haven, CT in 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2012 on the social history of the European missionary movement. These lectures were transcribed by Lois Baker, with an understanding that Eerdmans would eventually publish them. Posthumously, the resulting manuscript was relayed by Mark Gornik (to whom Andrew had committed the essays for editing) to Brian Stanley, who completed his editorial work in 2022. This book is an elaboration and exposition of a theme that Walls touched upon frequently and found in distilled form

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in his “Afterword: Christian Mission in a Five-hundred-year Context” in Mission in the 21st Century.5

Documentation6 Walls understood that “A people is defined and unified not by blood but by shared memory. … Deciding to remember, and what to remember, is how we decide who we are.”7 For decades he acted practically, resourcefully, and without fanfare on that conviction. He became widely known for his work as editor of the long-running “Bibliography on Mission Studies” series that was a regular feature of the International Review of Mission since 1982.8 He played a key role in stimulating the collection and preservation of often overlooked materials that retrospectively turn out to be indispensable to the collective memory known as “Church History.” At the inaugural meeting of the International Association for Mission Studies (IAMS) in 1972, Walls initiated The Documentation, Archives, and Bibliography Mission Study Group (DAB), which later expanded to include oral history (DABOH).9 Walls was an animating influence in meetings and projects undertaken by the DAB/DABOH. He played a leading role, for example, in the DAB consultation on “Mission Studies and Information Management” held in Rome in 1980, and in a subsequent DABOH consultation convened in Rome in 2002 on the theme “Rescuing the Memory of Our Peoples.” Among the tangible fruits of the 2002 consultation was a 60-page “how to” archives manual compiled by Martha Smalley (Yale) and Rosemary Seton (SOAS). This widely used resource was made freely available online in seven languages as a PDF.10 Less conspicuous but perhaps of greater ultimate significance were his efforts to stimulate local documentation and collections. Where others saw junk mail, he saw the treasures of social history. His eye for the important but generally overlooked category sometimes known as “gray literature” was evident in the voluminous but quirky collection of pamphlets, booklets, letters, flyers, tracts, printed memorabilia, and miscellanea that he accumulated over the years, and to which he would refer his students at Aberdeen and Edinburgh universities and at the Akrofi-Christaller Centre in Ghana. He instilled in his students and inspired in his peers an appreciation for non-scholarly printed materials. He understood that with the passage of time such materials come to be appreciated as a clear window—unobscured by scholarly processing—into the world as seen, experienced, and articulated by those who lived and moved in earlier times.

Impact A comprehensive interim assessment of the global impact of Walls’ thinking may be found in the book Understanding World Christianity: The Vision and Work of Andrew F.  Walls, published in 2011.11 The essays in this book are arranged under five headings, each of which intimates a dimension of Walls’

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impact on the academy’s understanding of world Christianity and mission: “A Man With a Large Map,” “Breaking Boundaries, Building New Ways of Scholarship,” “Themes in the Transmission of Faith,” “Transformations in Understanding Christian History,” and “Africa’s Place in Christian History.” Each section elaborates on recurring themes in his writing and lecturing. Philip Jenkins concludes his posthumous tribute to Andrew Walls by naming him as “the most significant founder of the scholarly study of Global of World Christianity. And arguably, the Onlie Begetter.”12 Not only was he “a man with a large map,” but a man whose mapmaking transformed scholarly understanding of Christian topography across time. Most serious scholars of world Christianity and mission would concur. His ideas have come to permeate the thinking, curricula, and publications of universities, seminaries, and mission academies around the world and across the Protestant, Orthodox, and Catholic spectra. Concepts that didn’t exist 50 years ago and were introduced by Walls in essays and lectures collected and published by relatively little known Orbis Books might have been expected to disappear. There is something refreshingly ironic that this man—like the astonishingly parochial young man in Galilee whose followers “turned the world upside down”—should with his perspicacious but modestly promoted ideas have transformed our understanding of Christian history and our place in it. The titles and substance of his essays have become the parlance of the entire discipling of contemporary church history and mission. Rare indeed is the student of world Christianity who does not now appropriate concepts such as “The Gospel as Prisoner and Liberator of Culture”; “The ‘indigenizing’ principle”; “The ‘pilgrim’ principle”; “The translation principle in Christian history”; “The human auditorium”; “Turning that which is already there toward Christ”; Christianity’s shifting “center of gravity”; “The Ephesian moment”; “From Christendom to world Christianity”; “The serial nature of Christian expansion”; “Structural problems in mission studies”; Each of these phrases, and many more like them, is fraught with meaning that registers a foundational shift in the way academics see world Christian history and themselves in it. One would be hard pressed to write a credible history of world Christianity today without using ideas, themes, and orientations traceable to Walls. His ability to see connections, analogies, and hitherto overlooked links across the spectra of time, ideas, practices, and places seemingly re-energized and even re-directed serious historians. Reflecting on the shift of the Christian “center of gravity” from Europe and its migrants in the west to Africa and Asia, Walls often observed that “Modern African Christianity is not only the result of movements among Africans, but it has been principally sustained by Africans and is to a surprising extent the result of African initiatives.”13 He argued convincingly that the first church in tropical Africa was not a product of foreign missionary initiative, but that “It arrived readymade, a body of [eleven hundred] people of African birth or descent who had come to faith in Christ as plantation slaves or as soldiers in the British army during the American War of Independence, or as farmers or squatters in Nova Scotia after it.”14

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It is appropriate to allow his peers in the field to voice their views on Walls’ impact on them personally, as found in my chapter alluded to above (note 6). Scottish historian David Bebbington referred to Walls as “the leading pioneer of his generation in writing the academic history of Christian missions. His writing,” he went on to say, “depicts the modern missionary movement as a phase in the grand sweep of global Christian history and he has illuminated with particular clarity the relationship between the Christian faith and its host culture.”15 “Andrew turned my life around,” recalled Frederick Norris. “When I met Andrew at OMSC,” he wrote, “I had been a history of theology major for eleven years and four degrees, including the Yale Ph.D. I had taught historical theology, theology, and ethics in all eras for five years in a provincial seminary. He made everything I had studied new: some things turned upside down, others related to events, persons, and writings I had not considered. Never had I seen such insight into the nature and history of the Gospel, culture, and the church. I stopped the project I was working on and turned to the history of World Christianity.”16 “Andrew Walls,” observed Philip Jenkins, “is a much-­ maligned man. Everyone accuses him of just being a brilliant scholar on African Christianities in the modern world. … I still think the ideas expressed very briefly in his essay ‘Eusebius tries again’ should be enough to keep any decent history department on their toes for several years.”17 “[N]o one has written with greater wisdom about what it means for the Western Christian religion to become the global Christian religion,” wrote evangelical historian Mark Noll. “By tracing the current movement of Christianity from the post-­Enlightenment North to the animistic South, Walls [showed] how much the twentieth century has resembled the second century, when Christianity moved out from its Judaic origins into the Hellenistic Mediterranean, and also its seventh-and-eighth century of northward migration from the Greco-Roman world into the Germanic regions of Europe.”18 In an interview about his book The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith (InterVarsity 2009), Noll acknowledged the transformative role played by Andrew Walls in his own thinking: “Walls has written profoundly about the huge impact of voluntary societies on world Christianity” he said; “My book is, in a sense, only an extended footnote on Walls’ very important insights (italics mine).” Noll then went on to urge readers of his book to familiarize themselves with Walls’ The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith (Orbis 1996).19 Daniel Bays, a leading academic interpreter of Christianity in China, recalled being “struck by the freshness of his approach and the cogency of his case for the need to re-conceptualize both Western and non-Western Christianity” the first time he heard Walls lecture more than 25 years ago. “In the years since then,” he wrote, “my own approach to issues in the history of Christianity in China has been heavily influenced by his insights. … For years now, I have been employing concepts coined by him as tools to enhance my own understanding of the historical dynamics of Christianity in the global East and South, and as examples of creative historical thinking. Andrew has almost single-handedly

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transformed the moribund field of ‘mission studies’ or ‘missiology’ into a lively arena of Christianity’s interface with culture and cross-cultural transmission of faith.”20 Robert Frykenberg, pre-eminent Indian historian and professor emeritus of Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin, frankly acknowledged the influence of Walls on his thinking since their first encounter at a conference in 1986. “The sheer breadth and depth and mind-expanding sweep of [his] ideas … [obliging] me to reformulate my own perspectives on Christian Missions and World Christianity, have been breathtaking,” he wrote, “Indeed, his ideas enabled perspectives on the growth of Christianity in India, from its earliest beginnings to the present, that would not have been otherwise possible. For this alone I owe him a huge debt of gratitude.”21 Similar stories of academic conversions following engagement with Walls’ ideas have been recounted with such frequency on all five continents that it was not only appropriate but inevitable that the American Society of Church History should have honored him with its Distinguished Career Award in January 2007, in recognition of his impact on the field.22

Africa Commenting on David Barrett’s prescient conjecture in 1970 that the growth surge in African Christianity portended that “African Christians might well tip the balance and transform Christianity permanently into a primarily non-­ Western religion,” the late Kwame Bediako pointed out that it was Andrew Walls who realized that “what happens within the African Churches in the next generation will determine the whole shape of church history for centuries to come; what sort of theology is most characteristic of the Christianity of the twenty-first century may well depend on what has happened in the minds of African Christians in the interim.”23 Africa figures prominently in Walls’ thinking and writing. It was in Africa that his own understanding of church history was transformed. As he explained in a recorded interview in July 2001: “I went to West Africa in the 1950s. I was in my 30th year. I had a reasonably solid theological education. I had been trained particularly in patristics. Had done it at Oxford under one of the outstanding scholars of the early church at that time. … In those days we still talked about younger churches … you were called on to teach wisdom of the older churches. I recognized from the start this was not clear sailing … wasn’t particularly making any impression. … The only way I could describe what happened was a dawning realization one day that I was living in a second [century] church. Here was I who worked on the second century and now always talking about it. My own great teacher had told me we know hardly anything about the church before the council of Nicaea in 325—the sources are so fragmentary, and so on—and suddenly it came! You’re living in a second century church! All that fragmentary literature is talking about is going around before your very eyes.24

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In the conversation with James Ault alluded to above, Walls said: “I don’t think anyone brought up in the thin-blooded north can go to Africa and attend African churches without something happening to give them new insights in Christian worship—that expression of joy, that enormous vitality that comes through Africans sitting with all the poverty, all the distress people have. Just go to the market, go to the bus station.”25 Africa now being demographically central within world Christianity, Walls believed that it would of necessity transform Christian theological discourse in the decades and centuries ahead. He believed that while western expressions of Christianity showed that they could survive and adapt to European Enlightenment thinking, these had for the most part been “strangled” by its concomitant scientific and rational worldview. “It was possible to convert the Enlightenment worldview,” he noted, “but most of us, whether we know it or not, are still shaped by what is in fact a very small universe. The Enlightenment worldview boxed off a large part of what people of an earlier time had thought of as reality … the world of spirit. … Christianity became concerned with a rather small version of the universe with recognized crossing points to the spirit world, [and] a lot of theology [was reduced to] policing the frontier between the two worlds.”26 Walls noted that African Christians—especially those in the so-called African instituted churches (AICs)—are living in a much larger universe inhabited by all sorts of entities, spirit entities, beyond the capacity of Enlightenment Christians to notice let alone acknowledge. Much of the universe described in the New Testament is familiar to Africans but has no room in Enlightenment theologies. As Walls explained, In the New Testament you had prophecy, you had healing, you had casting out of demons. The Lord did it. The disciples did it. The Lord said you will do greater works that I will, and [African instituted churches] put two and two together and began to read the Gospel in a different frame.27 I think the sense of the larger universe, and the greater reality of the spirit world, and perhaps a stronger sense of what we might call systemic evil, of the actual presence of evil in the universe, but a universe which … has been redeemed by Christ … will be one of the new developments in Christian thinking, from which perhaps we may in the West want to derive something if … our Enlightenment universe crumbles further.”28

It would be premature to attempt any assessment of Andrew Walls’ impact on Christian theology in Africa. Such an essay might well be attempted a century from now. He undoubtedly played an influential role in mentoring and encouraging key African Christian intellectuals such as Kwame Bediako,29 whose own contributions to Christian theology are from a distinctively African perspective, a perspective fostered and dynamically disseminated through the scholarly research and publications of the intellectually and spiritually dynamic

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center that he founded and led until his departure on June 10, 2008, the Akrofi-Christaller Institute. This was Walls’ second home for the last several decades of his life. This is where he met and married (in 2012) his wife Dr. Ingrid Reneau, a Presbyterian missionary to South Sudan.30 His legacy will be determined by future generations. For those of us living now, his memory is too fresh, his contributions still gestating, his impact as yet unknowable. But what is certain is that Africa transformed him, and through his transformation an entire generation of Western church historians. As Angela Dwamena-Aboagbye, of the Akrofi-Christaller Institute, observed on the occasion of the one-year celebration of Andrew’s passing, “Who was Andrew Finlay Walls? A giant who never dwarfed anyone. A towering figure who never overshadowed anyone.”31

Sources VHS Tapes Among Walls’ most constructively attentive chronicler is documentary film maker James Ault. His filmed interviews of Andrew Walls and Kwame Bediako took place in 1998, 2001, 2006, and 2009. As of this writing (Oct. 2022), most of the material is comprised of ten hours of raw footage video files and 80 pages of transcript. Ault’s “African Christianity Rising” series (“Stories from Ghana: Part 1” and “Stories from Zimbabwe: Part 2”) is indispensable viewing for anyone interested in Andrew Walls and his most distinguished understudy and colleague, Kwame Bediako. Books, Pamphlets, and Articles Andrew F. Walls published extensively in learned journals and even more extensively in publications well off the beaten path. The most comprehensive, though dated, register of his many publications was compiled by Mark R. Gornik, cited below. Akrofi-Christaller Institute of Theology, Mission, and Culture. One Year Commemoration of Prof. Andrew Finlay Walls, Friday, August 12, 2022, at the ACI Quadrangle, Akropong-Akuapem. Akropong-Akuapem, Ghana: Akrofi-­Christaller Institute of Theology, Mission, and Culture, 2022. Kwame Bediako. “Andrew F.  Walls as Mentor.” Understanding World Christianity: The Vision and Work of Andrew F.  Walls. Edited by William R. Burrows, Mark. R. Gornik, and Janice A. McLean. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011. Pp. 7–10. [Andrew’s role in Kwame’s faith journey five years after his Damascus Road experience in 1970 in Bordeaux when AFW gave the 1975 graduation address as London Bible College where he and Gillian were students.]

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Jonathan J.  Bonk. “Changing the Course of Mission and World Christian Studies.” Understanding World Christianity: The Vision and Work of Andrew F.  Walls. Edited by William R.  Burrows, Mark. R.  Gornik, and Janice A. McLean. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011. Pp. 61–77. Jonathan J.  Bonk. “Andrew Walls: Mentor, Friend, Exemplar.” Journal of African Christian Biography. Vol. 6, No. 4 (October 2021), Pp. 3–21. Mark. R.  Gornik. “Bibliography of the Writings of Andrew F.  Walls.” Understanding World Christianity: The Vision and Work of Andrew F. Walls. Edited by William R.  Burrows, Mark. R.  Gornik, and Janice A.  McLean. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011. Pp. 257–277. This is the most extensive in-print bibliography available. Walls published several articles and book chapters after this, and his book on the history of the missionary movement from the West (below) awaits publication as of this writing. Allison Howell and Maureen Iheanacho, “Andrew F.  Walls as Teacher in Africa.” Understanding World Christianity: The Vision and Work of Andrew F.  Walls. Edited by William R.  Burrows, Mark. R.  Gornik, and Janice A. McLean. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011. Pp. 17–31. John Roxborogh, “Rescuing the Memory of Mission: The Story of ‘Documentation, Archives, and Bibliography’” in Witness to World Christianity: The International Association for Mission Studies, 1972–2012, edited by Gerald H. Anderson with John Roxborogh, John M. Prior, S.V.D., and Christoffer H.  Grundmann. New Haven, CT: OMSC Publications, 2012. Pp. 133–156. Wilbert R.  Shenk. “Challenging the Academy, Breaking Barriers.” Understanding World Christianity: The Vision and Work of Andrew F. Walls. Edited by William R.  Burrows, Mark. R.  Gornik, and Janice A.  McLean. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011. Pp. 35–50. [Shenk recounts Walls’ transformation from a Patristics scholar to a student of World Christianity.] Brian Stanley. “Founding the Centre for the Study of Christianity in the Non-­ Western World.” Understanding World Christianity: The Vision and Work of Andrew F.  Walls. Edited by William R.  Burrows, Mark. R.  Gornik, and Janice A. McLean. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011. Pp. 51–59. Andrew Walls and Cathy Ross, editors. Mission in the 21st Century: Exploring the Five Marks of Global Mission. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2008. Andrew F.  Walls. “Afterword: Christian Mission in a Five-Hundred-year Context.” Andrew Walls and Cathy Ross, editors. Mission in the 21st Century: Exploring the Five Marks of Global Mission. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2008. Pp. 195–204. Andrew F. Walls. The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission and Appropriation of Faith. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books/ Edinburgh, Scotland: T & T Clark, 2002. Andrew F.  Walls. Crossing Cultural Frontiers: Studies in World Christianity. Edited by Mark R. Gornik. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2017.

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Andrew F. Walls. The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books / Edinburgh, Scotland: T & T Clark, 1996. Andrew F.  Walls. The Missionary Movement from the West: A Biography from Birth to Old Age. Edited by Brian Stanley. Unpublished manuscript to be published by Wm. B. Eerdmans, based on a series of annual lectures (transcribed by Lois Baker) given at OMSC in 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2012. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2022. Andrew F.  Walls. “Politics, Economics and The Great Commission. In Ini Dorcas Dah, Evenezer Yaw Blasu and Rudolf K. Gaisie, eds., Understanding the Gospel Culture and Environment: Essays in Honour of Allison Mary Howell. Legon, Accra, Ghana: University of Ghana Printing Press, 2022. Pp. 147–156. Andrew F.  Walls. Understanding World Christianity: The Vision and Work of Andrew F.  Walls. Edited by William R.  Burrows, Mark. R.  Gornik, and Janice A. McLean. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011.

Notes 1. James Ault, Andrew Walls recorded interview, Yale Divinity School, July 2001 (VHS tape 1:5:06). The transcription of this interview is not strictly word-for-word. 2. Yale-Edinburgh Group on World Christianity and the History of Mission | Yale Divinity School. 3. See I. Howard Marshall, “Andrew Walls, Methodist Local Preacher and Hymn Writer” in William R. Burrows, Mark R. Gornik, and Janice A. McLean, eds., Understanding World Christianity: The Vision and Work of Andrew F.  Walls (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011), Pp. 11–15. As of this writing, a repository of this material is being prepared for location at the AFW Centre at Liverpool Hope University. 4. Ibid. p. 12. 5. Andrew Walls and Cathy Ross, editors. Mission in the Twenty-first Century: Exploring the Five Marks of Global Mission. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2008. (Pp. 193–204). 6. Michael Poon, “Andrew F.  Walls and  Documenting World Christianity in the Twenty-First Century,” in Understanding World Christianity: The Vision and Work of Andrew F. Walls, edited by William R. Burrows, Mark R. Gornik, and  Janice A.  McLean (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011): pp.  169–192. The material in this section relies heavily on Bonk’s chapter in the same book, “Changing the Course of Mission and World Christian Studies” (pp. 65–69). 7. Robert Pinsky, “Poetry and American Memory,” The Atlantic Online (October 1999), URL: http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/99oct/9910pinsky.htm Accessed October 21, 2010. 8. The title of this long-running series has evolved over time, beginning in January of 1982 as “Bibliography on World Mission and Evangelism,” continuing until October 1987 as “Bibliography on World Mission,” until finally settling on

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“Bibliography on Mission Studies” in January 1988. Margaret M. Acton has served as co-editor of the bibliography since April 1996. 9. “DABOH,” according to its official website, “exists to help rescue the memory of our people by: promoting the documentation (with due emphasis on ­recording personal memoirs through oral history and other means) of the mission of the Christian church around the world, especially in regions where infrastructures do not exist for such endeavors; (2) encouraging the support, development, and use of archives for mission; (3) stimulating the preparation and distribution of material to enable mission studies and other researchers to identify, locate, and access primary material on the mission of the church in their own country and worldwide; and (4) networking with individuals and groups with related concerns, and facilitating multilateral, ecumenical, inter-cultural, and international conversation to further our understanding of worldwide Christianity. [http://missionstudies.org/index.php/study-­groups/daboh/ (accessed October 15, 2010)]. See John Roxborogh, “Rescuing the Memory of Mission: The Story of ‘Documentation, Archives, and Bibliography’” in Witness to World Christianity: The International Association for Mission Studies, 1972–2012, edited by Gerald H.  Anderson with John Roxborogh, John M.  Prior, S.V.D., and Christoffer H.  Grundmann (New Haven, CT: OMSC Publications, 2012), pp. 133–156. 10. Rescuing the Memory of our Peoples: Archive Manual (IAMS and OMSC, 2003) is available in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, Swahili, and Chinese. It can be downloaded at http://www.omsc.org/Links.htm (the OMSC Website) or at http://www.library.yale.edu/div/RTMmanuallinks. html (the Yale Divinity School Website). 11. William R.  Burrows, Mark R.  Gornik, and Janice A McLean, editors. Understanding World Christianity: The Vision and Work of Andrew F.  Walls (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011). In this article I utilize some of the material in my chapter, “Changing the Course of Mission and World Christian Studies” (pp. 61–77). 12. “Andrew Walls: The Most Important Scholar You Didn’t Know”. August 16, 2021. https://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/author/philipjenkins/. 13. Andrew F. Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996): pp. 86ff, 102–110. 14. Ibid. 15. David W. Bebbington to Jonathan Bonk, in a personal email dated September 4, 2008. 16. Frederick W. Norris in a personal email to Jonathan Bonk, dated September 11, 2008. Norris attributes his own Christianity: A Short Global History (Oneworld Publications, 2002) to the influence of Andrew Walls. 17. Philip Jenkins to Jonathan Bonk, in a personal email September 5, 2008, referring to Andrew F.  Walls, “Eusebius Tries Again: Reconceiving the Study of Christian History,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol. 24, No. 3 (July 2000), pp. 105–111. 18. Mark. A.  Noll, “Andrew F.  Walls: The Missionary Movement in Christian History (1996)” in First Things (March 2000), pp. 55–56. 19. Justin Taylor, “An Interview with Mark Noll about The New Shape of World Christianity” first appearing in Faith, Books and Culture (June 8, 2009) http://

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thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justintaylor/2009/06/08/interview-­w ith-­ mark-­noll-­about-­new/ Accessed August 30, 2010. 20. Daniel H. Bays in a personal email to Jonathan Bonk dated September 26, 2008. Bays’ best-known book is Christianity in China: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Stanford 1996). Bays is Professor and History Director in the Asian Studies Program at Calvin College. His latest book, co-edited with Ellen Widmer, is China’s Christian Colleges: Cross-Cultural Connections, 1900–1950 (Stanford 2009). 21. Robert Eric Frykenberg in a personal email to Jonathan Bonk, September 24, 2008. Frykenberg’ s most recent book is his highly acclaimed Christianity in India: From Beginnings to the Present (Oxford 2010). 22. URL: http://www.churchhistory.org/researchgrants.html Accessed October 20, 2010. 23. Kwame Bediako, Christianity in Africa: The Renewal of a Non-Western Religion (Edinburgh University Press and Orbis Books, 1995), p. viii, citing David B. Barrett, “AD 2000: 350 million Christians in Africa”, International Review of Mission, Vol. 59, No 233 (January 1970), pp.  39–54, and A.  F. Walls, “Toward An Understanding of Africa’s Place in Christian History”, in J. S. Pobee (ed.), Religion in a Pluralistic Society (E. J. Brill, 1976), pp. 180–189. 24. James Ault, Andrew Walls interview, Yale Divinity School, July 2001 (VHS tape 1:47:33). The transcription of this interview is not strictly word-for-word. 25. James Ault. Andrew Walls interview, Yale Divinity School, July 2001. (VHS tape 1:44:38). 26. Ibid, VHS tape 1:14:06, 35, 15:31. 27. Ibid, VHS tape 1:17:28, 37. 18:08, 30. 28. Ibid, VHS tape 1:20:13. 29. Kwame Bediako, “Andrew F.  Walls as Mentor,” in Understanding World Christianity: The Vision and Work of Andrew F.  Walls, edited by William R.  Burrows, Mark R.  Gornik, and Janice A.  McLean (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011): pp. 7–10. 30. Doreen passed away in 2009. In 2012 he married Ingrid Reneau, a Presbyterian missionary to South Sudan whom he had met at in Ghana at the AkfrofiChristaller Institute. She accompanied Andrew for the rest of his busy life. 31. Angela Dwamena-Aboagbye, Akrofi-Christaller Institute of Theology, Mission, and Culture. One Year Commemoration of Prof. Andrew Finlay Walls, Friday, August 12, 2022, at the ACI Quadrangle, Akropong-Akuapem (Akropong-­ Akuapem, Ghana: Akrofi-Christaller Institute of Theology, Mission, and Culture, 2022): p. 26.

CHAPTER 7

The Writings and Legacy of Lamin Sanneh Joel Carpenter

Lamin Sanneh (1942–2019) exerted a profound influence on the study of Christianity in Africa, and beyond that, on the study of Christianity worldwide, past and present. Sanneh introduced some striking new lines of conversation into the history of African Christianity, and for the emerging field of world Christian studies he became, as Andrew Walls put it, an “architect of the discourse” (Walls 2019). Indeed, the influence of Sanneh, Walls, and other Africanists was so strong on world Christian studies that at least one recent attempt to reframe it began with critiques of its being skewed toward Africa (Cabrita et al. 2017, pp. 2–3). Sanneh’s interests and inquiries became world-­ ranging, but Africa was at the center of his attention. Sanneh’s personal story is quite amazing. He made his way from a remote, up-river town in the Gambia to become a distinguished member of one of the world’s greatest universities. He converted from Islam to Christianity as a teenager, after years of interrogating his schoolmates and teachers about the nature of God and of God’s ways and will in the world. When he decided for Christianity, he recalled, it was because of the Incarnation, of God’s coming down to be with us in our suffering and to deliver us (Sanneh 2012, pp. 90–91). Yet unlike most converts, Sanneh never pushed away hard against his legacy faith. Indeed, he found much to admire in Islam, and he was widely admired by Muslim leaders. The abiding questions of Sanneh’s long career as a historian of African religions came out of these formative experiences and the questions they raised.

J. Carpenter (*) Nagel Institute for the Study of World Christianity, Calvin University, Grand Rapids, MI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. E. Barnes, T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48270-0_7

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What is distinctive about West African Islam? How are we to understand the massive movement in Africa toward faith in Jesus Christ? And what does that movement reveal about how Christianity has made its way as a movement, both in Africa and across the globe? Sanneh began university-level studies in the 1960s, just as independent African states (and their universities) were emerging, and “African studies” began to take off as a field of inquiry in the West. He completed his bachelor’s degree in history at Union College in New  York State in 1967, then obtained a master’s degree in Islamics at the University of Birmingham (England) in 1968 and then studied Islamics for a year at the Near East School of Theology in Beirut. He followed that with a Ph.D. in Islamic History at the University of London in 1974. Sanneh’s dissertation was on the Jakhanke Muslim clerics, in which he revealed a 600-year tradition of Muslim piety and mission that was not, he insisted, founded upon jihad (militant struggle). In his reading and travels, Sanneh had been taught the centrality of jihad for Islam, but this understanding did not resonate with the Islam that he learned and practiced in the Gambia (Sanneh 2012, pp. 197–205). He was thus able to look across the grain of this field of inquiry and come to fresh and surprising conclusions. This contrarian approach became a main feature of Sanneh’s work, and it fueled his originality. Sanneh’s first five years or so of publications give no hint that he would re-­ set the discourse of African Christian history or that he would have much to say about that field at all. As he traversed through brief teaching assignments at Fourah Bay College of the University of Sierra Leone and the University of Ghana, his publications were almost entirely about West African Islam. Sanneh was hired in 1978 to teach as an Islamist in the religious studies department at the University of Aberdeen, but not long after starting there, he fielded a surprising request. His department’s specialist in African Christianity would not be on hand to conduct a course on Christianity in West Africa, and Sanneh was asked to teach it. In his struggle to organize the course, Sanneh discovered a striking fact: Christianity spread across West Africa primarily by African initiative. Conventional wisdom, both in African history and in African religious studies, was that European missionaries brought Christianity to the continent and urged it on the people, and that as such it was a form of false consciousness, reinforcing and in turn propped up by colonial power. Sanneh recalled a conference held on Christianity in Africa at the University of Ghana in the mid-­1970s, where the main thrust was that the faith would die out in post-­ colonial Africa. But those predictions did not match what he was seeing on the streets while he taught in West Africa. Christianity was growing rapidly and taking on an ever more African character in the absence of the Europeans (Sanneh 2012, pp. 216–17). Sanneh’s idea of “African agency” was not a novel one among the historians of African Christianity at the time that his first book, West African Christianity (1983), appeared. Indeed, it came at the high tide of interest in the “African independent churches,” whose rise and rapid growth throughout much of the twentieth century attracted major scholarly attention (Hastings  2000,

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pp. 32–34). Sanneh, however, was showing his peers that even the old, mission-­ founded churches had been built upon the efforts of African catechists and evangelists and that the most important work that the foreign missionaries did was translating the Bible into African languages. As time went on, and with vernacular Scriptures in hand, African Christians read themselves into the great biblical drama and made Christianity their own faith. They accepted it on their own terms as they found answers to their own religious questions. As colonial influence waned, even the old mission churches were becoming more African (Sanneh 1983, pp. xii–xiv, 242–246). So, in Sanneh’s first book-length publication, we see two main themes of his life work emerging: African agency in the spread of Christianity and the “translating” of Christianity into African cultures. Sanneh had been encouraged to develop these ideas by his colleagues at Aberdeen, especially the historians Adrian Hastings and Andrew Walls. Walls was teaching about Christianity’s “translatability” in his seminars (Walls 1996, pp. 26–42; Bediako 1995, pp. 61, 157), and Sanneh readily picked up on the idea, which as an Islamist he found particularly striking. Certainly, he saw the ways in which West African cultures had assimilated Islam, but the Christian idea that translation was at the heart of the Gospel made Christianity much more amenable to cultural appropriation than was Islam. Sanneh continued to work on this theme after he moved to Harvard Divinity School in 1981, and he brought out a major tour de force on the topic eight years later, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (Sanneh 1989a, rev. ed. 2009). Sanneh swept through all the centuries of Christianity’s existence to show that the faith was translated into the deep cultural terms of one people after another, and indeed that translatability has been the driver of Christianity’s worldwide spread and lasting impact. This book had a stunning effect on the study of Christianity’s history. It laid out a new paradigm for understanding the faith’s universality, one that immediately seemed more satisfying than focusing on the history of missionary efforts or the rise of national churches. Alongside Andrew Walls’ The Missionary Movement in Christian History (1996), Sanneh’s Translating the Message had an immensely formative effect on the rise of world Christianity as a concept and as a field of inquiry. Sanneh stayed in close contact with his colleague and mentor, Andrew Walls, and in 1992 they formed a network to encourage the historical study of Christian missions and of world Christianity. The Yale-Edinburgh Group was essentially an e-mail list and directory of scholars who were actively engaging in this field. Members participated in annual themed conferences, held in alternate years at Yale Divinity School, where Sanneh had moved in 1989, and at the New College of Edinburgh University, where Walls had moved in 1986. This informal network has continued to grow, and it now has more than 900 registrants in its directory. The annual meetings continue, and now in hybrid form they attract participants from around the world. The theme of the first Yale-Edinburgh meeting in 1992 was “From Missions to World Christianity,” and in effect it was announcing a paradigm shift in a field of inquiry. Just as African history had long been preoccupied more with

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the colonizers than the Africans themselves and now was making vigorous moves to correct that astigmatism, the study of the spread of Christianity, in Africa and worldwide, was also shifting from a preoccupation with European and North American missionaries to a focus on new indigenous movements and ancient traditions in the rest of the world. Andrew Walls had been teaching such things since the mid-1970s, and his arguments for the salience of non-­ Western Christianity were bolstered by the pioneering work of David Barrett, whose World Christian Encyclopedia documented the fact that most Christians lived outside of Europe and North America (Barrett 1982). Yet Walls’ influence at the time was hampered by the scattered nature of his publications. It was not until the mid-1990s that some of his most important essays and articles appeared in book form (Walls 1996). But with Walls as networker and organizer, and Sanneh’s Translating the Message providing a fresh approach to the historic rise of world Christianity, this field of inquiry took off (Robert 2020). During his first decade at Yale, Sanneh co-led the Yale-Edinburgh group and advised grants officers at the Pew Charitable Trusts, which were providing major support for new research and scholarship on world Christianity. Sanneh also became an important adviser for the Overseas Ministries Study Center (OMSC), which had moved to New Haven in 1987 and became the convening center for two Pew-funded programs to support research on world Christianity. Sanneh also published two follow-on books to Translating the Message that explain and defend his approach to religion and culture: Encountering the West: Christianity and the Global Cultural Process (1993), and a brief recap and expansion of some of its arguments, Religion and the Variety of Culture: A Study in Origin and Practice (1996a). Focusing on African examples in these books, Sanneh explained at more length what he meant by the “translatability” of the Christian message and the cultural effects that followed on the translation of the Bible into African mother tongues. Scholars had focused much attention on the intentions of Western missionaries and paid too little attention, he thought, to the actual outcome of their efforts, particularly in the indigenous reception and appropriation of Christianity. He put forward some dramatic examples in Ghana and in South Africa of people finding in Christianity the means to resist the negative effects of colonialism and to develop a richer and deeper cultural awareness (Sanneh 1993, pp. 73ff). But Sanneh did not stop there. He was concerned that African scholars of religion and culture like himself were being handicapped in their attempts to evoke the full meaning of religion’s cultural role. European post-­Enlightenment assumptions separated religion and culture and in effect rendered religion as irrelevant, a false consciousness, and a dependent variable with little or no formative or motive power in culture. Sanneh would have none of it. This was a view of reality that was much too thin for African consciousness, and he was not about to engage in methodological atheism to meet the expectations of the North Atlantic scholarly realm. He defended theological analysis of culture because a philosophy of culture devoid of moral commitments and the

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acknowledgment of spiritual forces was effectively useless to engage African life and indeed life more universally. Sanneh was not alone in this quest. African scholars were beginning to recover from the horrific declension of African university life in the 1980s and early 1990s and were busily carving out approaches to their disciplines over against the norms and expectations of the Western academy. Perhaps most famously, V. Y. Mudimbe, the Congolese poet and philosopher, wrote in The Invention of Africa that Western Africanists still controlled the idea of Africa and made it part of the Western neocolonial imagination (Mudimbe  1988). Mudimbe’s work helped to spark a post-colonial interpretive frame for studying the African past and present (Zeleza 2009, pp. 128–132, Mkandawire 1997, pp. 28–34). African Christian scholars were wading into the fray as well. Ezra Chitando, for example, recounted the tense debates between European and African religion scholars. The Europeans insisted that one must study religion “non-confessionally,” leaving one’s beliefs and commitments to the side, while Africans said that this was an artificial and stultifying way to study religion (Chitando 2000, pp. 392–396). Within Christian theology per se, African scholars were arguing that post-­ Enlightenment materialism had put Western theologians back on their heels and made them less likely to acknowledge the work of spiritual forces in the world. Kwame Bediako thought that Western Christian theology had become weak and thin and was lacking the “power of God unto salvation” (Rom. 1:16) that Africans were seeking (Bediako 2009, p. 53). Sanneh was sounding off, then, on a theme that a growing chorus of African Christian scholars were taking up. They insisted on the unity of religion and culture, the presence of spiritual forces within human affairs, and the necessity of making moral and spiritual judgments as scholars (Kalu 2003, pp. 29–39). On another front, Sanneh was circling back to look at West African Islam. He published his dissertation on the Jakhanke Muslim clerics in Senegambia (Sanneh 1989b), and then three books on Islam engaging the state and other religious believers (mostly Christians), both in West Africa and in Great Britain (Sanneh 1996b, 1997, 1998). At a time of rising concern because of the growth of radical Islamist movements, Sanneh held up the example of pluralistic and tolerant West Africa. Christians and Muslims commonly lived together there, often within extended families; they did not see each other as engaged in a winner-take-all contest. The main sources of concern among both Muslims and many Christians, Sanneh argued, were the attempts to impose a secular state that would rule without regard to religion. That posture was simply unacceptable for Muslims, and it struck Christians, too, as stilted and artificial. The better choice, he counseled, was a more positive pluralism in which each faith brought their values to public affairs while seeking common ground and guarding others’ right to practice faith freely. The state, moreover, should affirm religions’ contributions to the public good and support plural religious public engagement rather than trying to expel religion from the public square. Sanneh saw his

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work in interfaith relations as a divine calling, something that the Almighty had uniquely situated him to do. He found ways to be helpful on the ground as well as in the study, such as participating in the Programme for Christian-­ Muslim Relations in Africa (PROCMURA, f. 1959) and accepting appointment to the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations with Muslims. As if all these matters were not enough to engage, Sanneh also wrote a remarkable piece of transatlantic history, Abolitionists Abroad: American Blacks and the Making of Modern West Africa (Sanneh 1999). He had thought for years about the North American freed slaves that settled on the coasts of Liberia and Sierra Leone, having written a senior undergraduate thesis on the subject and then having encountered Andrew Walls’ avid interest in it too. In a dramatic and compelling narrative, Sanneh showed that the freed American slaves who came to West Africa were not just the castoff victims of North American prejudice. They were evangelical abolitionists who publicized the antislavery cause internationally at the same time they were establishing Christian republics on African shores and suppressing the slave trade at its source: in the hands of African chiefs. Thus, Sanneh joined the movement among black historians to turn the history of antislavery on its head. It was not just a predominantly white movement, mounted largely by elite spokesmen. It was also a story of black initiative and agency, based on an anti-structural social argument fueled by evangelical revivalism. The black abolitionists challenged the privilege and power of those who felt justified in making their fortunes by exploiting black people. If that weren’t enough to convey in one book, Sanneh also showed that these transatlantic black revivalists and reformers laid the groundwork for African Christian nationalism, based on universal human rights and hope for a better future. After 2000, Sanneh’s attention increasingly focused on the broader realm of world Christianity. While throughout the 1990s, the Yale-Edinburgh group was busy making the shift from studying foreign missions to studying world Christianity and producing dozens of path-breaking works in this field, the idea of Christianity’s rise as a world religion had not captured much public attention. Then the topic gained extraordinary publicity because of historian Philip Jenkins’ arresting best-seller: The Next Christendom (2002). Sanneh and others had produced the great wave of evidence that Jenkins cited in his work, and they took some satisfaction from the growing publicity for their field. They were not overjoyed, however, by the approach that Jenkins took in presenting their work. Jenkins suggested that non-Western Christianity was tending to come out as conservative, even reactionary, and it might well present a threat to the liberal world order. Sanneh was encountering similar concerns in conversations with students and colleagues in New Haven and out on the lecture circuit, so he decided to address the questions he was fielding in Whose Religion is Christianity? The Gospel beyond the West (Sanneh 2003). In a delightfully informal, Q&A format, Sanneh imagined an interlocutor who is a liberal-minded, thoughtful Northerner who was a bit disturbed at the way Christianity was turning out in

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the rest of the world. While emphasizing that most Christians live in a world where miracles do happen and transcendence is an everyday way of life, Sanneh also stressed that these Christians live constantly with religious pluralism and have a love of freedom. Some critics thought that Sanneh was a bit too sanguine about world Christianity’s prospects regarding such matters, but Sanneh presented a compelling case for a Christianity that was not bowing down to modern secularism and had a hard-won right to be heard. Sanneh’s next book-length work, Disciples of All Nations: Pillars of World Christianity (Sanneh 2008) was his entry into a growing industry of attempts to capture the story of world Christianity. Sanneh’s treatment covered Christianity since early times by anchoring the narrative to eight “pillars,” or definitive themes and episodes in the faith’s development and spread. One such theme was empire, and it examined the ways that Christianity both engaged the Roman Empire and was shaped by it. So too with other themes, such as Islam; the transport of the faith via European empires to the New World; the rise of the successive pietist, revivalist, Pentecostal, and charismatic neo-­ Pentecostal movements; and a striking finale: China. Throughout, Sanneh showed Christianity to be a profoundly embedded religion, engaging traditions and cultures at deep levels wherever it went. Disciples of All Nations was heralded as the first of a series that Sanneh would organize for Oxford University Press: Oxford Studies in World Christianity. Two other works have appeared in the series, Todd Hartch, The Rebirth of Latin American Christianity (2013); and Alan Anderson, To the Ends of the Earth: Pentecostalism and the Transformation of World Christianity (2014). One more, Chandra Mallampalli, South Asia’s Christians: Between Hindu and Muslim, is due out in early 2023. Sanneh took special delight in meeting with his series’ advisory board, hosted by OMSC, and brainstorming new authors and titles. The series made a very fruitful start but does not appear to be continuing in Sanneh’s absence. Throughout the final decade of Sanneh’s life, he spent increasing amounts of time and energy engaging African affairs, especially where church, academy, and public life intersected. With the help of an energetic and entrepreneurial project partner, Michael Glerup, director of the Center for Early African Christianity, Sanneh hosted several consultations for African Christian leaders regarding religious freedom and religions’ contributions to the health of African society. These meetings followed the themes that Sanneh had laid out in his books on Islam, public affairs, and Christian-Muslim relations back in the 1990s. They were pleas for constructive pluralism and for the Christian churches and their thought leaders to develop a more robust public theology. Sanneh argued that religious leaders, according to Afro-barometer surveys, were the most trusted class of leaders on the continent, and it fell to them to work more concertedly for the public good. These meetings resulted in a public statement, the “Accra Charter of Religious Freedom and Citizenship,” published in 2011 in the International Bulletin of Missionary Research. As a result of these meetings, Glerup assisted Sanneh in setting up a “Program on Religious

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Freedom and Society in Africa” housed in the Macmillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University. What promises to be a more enduring legacy of Sanneh’s concern for constructive religious pluralism is the Lamin Sanneh Institute, opened in 2020 at the University of Ghana. The institute exists to equip and resource “religious leaders, scholars, academic institutions and wider African society through advanced inquiry.” It will foster both scholarly research projects and more popular conferences and workshops on inter-religious relationships and religions’ public role and responsibilities. The institute has an initial focus on West Africa but hopes eventually to range more widely across the continent and to foster inter-continental exchanges as well. Sanneh was on hand for a major planning conference in late 2018, shortly before his passing. The Sanneh Institute, directed by the Ghanaian theologian John Azumah, is off to an ambitious start with major research funding for a study of the pacifist tradition of Islam in West Africa. This project was inspired to a great extent by Sanneh’s final book, Beyond Jihad: The Pacifist Tradition in West African Islam (Sanneh 2015), in which he revisited the Sufi-inspired West African Muslim tradition and showed how it spread by persuasion, patient witness, and cultural accommodation. While teaching a summer faculty seminar at Calvin College in 2008, Sanneh told me that he was writing his memoirs, something that his children had urged him to do. The result, four years later, was Summoned from the Margin: Homecoming of an African (Sanneh 2012). This eloquent, touching book operates on a variety of levels; it is at once a personal memoir; a conversion and pilgrimage story; a journal of travels, projects, people and places; and an intellectual excursion. It shows how Sanneh’s lineage as a Muslim from up-river Gambia and his life encounters since then have fed into his highly original and often gently contrarian scholarship. The story portrays a boy and young man with an insatiable intellectual appetite who repeatedly impressed people who had the power to advance his education. They granted him opportunities to learn from a generation of brilliant Western scholars who built the contemporary study of Islam, Christian-Muslim relations, comparative religions, and Christianity in Africa. His intellectual biography since those early years has been one long narrative of his putting the perspective gained from his life to work as he looked across the grain of conventional wisdom and reached new conclusions. Sanneh was gifted with a relentless critical curiosity, a genial confidence in his own ability to discover new things, and a vastly different cultural vantage point from most Western scholars. These traits enabled him to see things that others did not see. So, when a generation of venerable scholars of Islam, both secular Westerners and Islamic intellectuals, posited jihad as the fundamental driver of Muslim spirituality and mission, Sanneh pointed to a compelling alternative in West African Islam. When it was common knowledge that Christianity was a foreign imposition in Africa and a handmaiden to European imperialism, Sanneh showed that whatever the motives and prejudices of the missionaries, their translation of the Bible into African mother tongues empowered Africans to

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accept Christianity on their own terms and to make it their own faith. Christianity then became a foundation for their critique of colonialism and their vision for a more just society. And when the common historical memory of abolitionism was as a white person’s movement, led by social elites, Sanneh showed the outsized influence of Black former slaves, transported to West Africa from North America. They established Christian republics on the coasts of Liberia and Sierra Leone, publicized their antislavery arguments, and made their case on evangelical Christian grounds. By these means they attacked the structures of privilege and power that made white people assume that slavery was acceptable and that enabled African rulers to exploit the vulnerable. Not only that, but these African Americans also laid foundations for African nationalism. Abolitionists Abroad was one of Sanneh’s most powerful contributions to a historiography of African agency and creativity, not just of African victimhood. Sanneh was of course more the scholar than the activist, but he volunteered his energy and expertise to the fields of Christian-Muslim relations and Christian democratic public theology for Africa. The Sanneh Institute at the University of Ghana promises to sustain this legacy and extend it far beyond Sanneh’s personal reach. And finally, Sanneh helped to shape world Christianity as a concept and a field of study. Christianity has become a predominantly non-­ Western religion, regarding where most of its members reside, where its patterns of growth are most dynamic, and where its on-the-ground vitality exists. Lamin Sanneh showed, with great originality, how a new narrative of Christian history should read—in Africa first but far beyond as well.

Bibliography “Accra Charter of Religious Freedom and Citizenship.” 2011. International Bulletin of Missionary Research, vol. 35, no. 4, pp. 198–201. Barrett, David B. 1982. World Christian Encyclopedia: A Comparative Survey of Churches and Religions in the Modern World, A.D. 1900–2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bediako, Kwame. 1995. Christianity in Africa: The Renewal of a Non-Western Religion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books. Bediako, Kwame. 2009. “The Emergence of World Christianity and the Remaking of Theology.” Journal of African Christian Thought, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 50–55. Cabrita, Joel; David Maxwell, and Emma Wild-Wood. 2017. Relocating World Christianity Interdisciplinary Studies in Universal and Local Expressions of the Christian Faith. Leiden: Brill. Chitando, Ezra. 2000. “African Christian Scholars and the Study of Traditional Religions: A Re-evaluation.” Religion vol. 30, pp. 391–397. Hastings, Adrian. 2000. “African Christian Studies, 1967–1999: Reflections of an Editor.” Journal of Religion in Africa, vol. 30, fasc. 1, pp. 30–44. Jenkins, Philip. 2002. The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. New York: Oxford University Press. Kalu, Ogbu U. 2003. “Clio in A Sacred Garb: Telling the Story of Gospel-People Encounters in Our Time.” Fides et Historia, vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 27–39.

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Mkandawire, Thandika. 1997. “The Social Sciences in Africa: Breaking Local Barriers and Negotiating International Presence.” African Studies Review, vol. 40 no. 2, pp. 15–36. Mudimbe, V.  Y. 1988. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Robert, Dana. 2020. “Naming ‘World Christianity’: Historical and Personal Perspectives on the Yale-Edinburgh Conference in World Christianity and Mission History.” International Bulletin of Mission Research, vol. 44, no. 2, pp. 111–128. Sanneh, Lamin. 1983. West African Christianity: The Religious Impact. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books. Sanneh, Lamin. 1989a, rev. ed. 2009. Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books. Sanneh, Lamin. 1989b. The Jakhanke Muslim Clerics: A Religious and Historical Study of Islam in Senegambia (c. 1250–1905). Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Sanneh, Lamin. 1993. Encountering the West: Christianity and the Global Cultural Process. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books. Sanneh, Lamin. 1996a. Religion and the Variety of Culture: A Study in Origin and Practice. Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International. Sanneh, Lamin. 1996b. Piety and Power: Muslims and Christians in West Africa. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books. Sanneh, Lamin. 1997. The Crown and the Turban: Muslims and West African Pluralism. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Sanneh, Lamin. 1998. Faith and Power: Christianity and Islam in ‘Secular’ Britain. London: SPCK. Sanneh, Lamin. 1999. Abolitionists Abroad: American Blacks and the Making of Modern West Africa. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press. Sanneh, Lamin. 2003. Whose Religion Is Christianity? The Gospel Beyond the West. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Sanneh, Lamin. 2008. Disciples of All Nations: Pillars of World Christianity. New York: Oxford University Press. Sanneh, Lamin. 2012. Summoned from the Margins: Homecoming of an African. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Sanneh, Lamin. 2015. Beyond Jihad: The Pacifist Tradition in West African Islam. New York: Oxford University Press. Walls, Andrew. 1996. The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books. Walls, Andrew. 2019. “Tribute of a Colleague and Co-founder.” Journal of African Christian Biography, Vol. 4, No. 2, p. 10. Zeleza, Paul Tiyambe. 2009. “African Universities and African Studies.” Transition, vol. 101, pp. 117–135.

CHAPTER 8

The Writings and Legacy of John Peel Toyin Falola

Introduction African societies are built on communal principles and regulated interpersonal relationships that are in many ways attributed to the operations of some supernatural beings. Many Africans are religious, largely influenced by the cultural conviction and historical trend of their beliefs. Hence, religion in African societies has always been a social construct that goes to the root of the behavior of every member of society, as well as the manuals for the operations of social institutions.1 Commitment to religions that were fundamental to the pre-­ existence, existence, and post-existence of their people and place portrayed Africans as deeply religious.2 This fundamental characteristic was explored by the formal introduction of foreign religions, such as Christianity, which came to change the people’s beliefs and redefined the sense of their worship or gave them something else to worship. Hence, this work does not intend to criticize or examine the polarization of African pre-colonial religions and Christianity but to state that the religiosity of the African societies had a great effect on the spread, practice, and transformation of Christianity in Africa. African Christianity had two effects: first, it created a new paradigm for African religions and religious history, and secondly, it created a new trend for Christianity in general.3 In the same way that early Christianity of the Apostles had a bit of the old Hebrew religion in a new manner, those Christian faiths were also made to create a new trend when they got to the minds of Africans. Thus, the Christianity historical timeline changed when the Apostles started

T. Falola (*) Department of History, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. E. Barnes, T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48270-0_8

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teaching doctrines, and Christianity in Africa changed when Africans began to practice the religion.4 Notably, the growth of the religion in ideology and number of believers have been unimaginable. In the early twentieth century, especially back to the 1910 World Missionary Conference, Africa was considered one of the least Christianized territories, with Europe, New Zealand, North America, and Australia as fully missionized regions.5 At that early stage, Asia was projected to fulfill missionary germinations. While Europe was referred to as the heartbeat of Christianity at that time, Africa, close to the end of the twentieth century, was already establishing itself as the new heartbeat of the religion.6 The concept of African Christianity gradually became a phenomenon, and one of the people who saw the importance of studying African Christianity and its history was J. D. Y. Peel. The growth of African Christianity over time has drawn scholarly attention from across the world in order to provide an adequate understanding of the concept. One of the earliest academic evaluations of African Christianity is Roland Oliver’s How Christian is Africa? (1956),7 which inquired into the level of Christianity among Africans. Oliver’s work set further evaluation for conferences hosted by the International African Institute and writers like David Barrett, who predicted there would be 350 million Christians in Africa by the end of the twentieth century.8 The growth of African Christianity continued gradually but progressively and attracted more evaluations from local and foreign scholars like Peel. Unarguably, African Christianity has grown stronger over the years, with a higher number of believers across the continent.9 However, as stated earlier, one thing that cannot be dissociated from this development is the peculiarity of African society, their history and belief systems, which have aided the spread of Christianity. Society’s role is quite obvious because conversion could not radiate only from the missionaries. This interaction between African societies resulted in mutual changes, and as a result of the development of Christianity, African social changes became quite striking and also attracted anthropologists, who at that time wanted to examine this relationship and make it one of the explanations for African social change.10 Social change, African Christianity, and syncretization of Christianity in Africa have brought about continued debates and expansion of scholarship. Therefore, Peel is involved in this endeavor as one of the leading anthropologists who deliberately examined African religion, cultures, and Christianity.

J. D. Y. Peel: The Scholar of Christianity in Africa Peel’s contribution to understanding Africa, African religion, and African Christianity has left an indelible mark in the historical and anthropological examination of African religion and culture.11 The almost 74 years that Peel lived were worthwhile, and his mind has been immortalized in refined and carefully thought-out scholarly works. As Professor of Anthropology and Sociology with an interest in the continent, alongside his desire for African

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knowledge, Peel’s understanding of African society and religion might be related to his deep research and engagements with African societies. Peel was deliberate about the Nigerian religious society, and his PhD thesis was written on Nigerian religious evolution and independent churches.12 Peel believed that religion belonged to everyone and could turn to whatever it could depending on the society in which it finds itself, and that religion was not the exclusive property of some people.13 Riding on these implied convictions, Peel was able to create understanding from the conjuring of social anthropology, history, and sociology to create another door into African society, religion, and Christianity. In line with this, he engaged people’s minds on different areas of African social and cultural changes, religion, and gender, as well as conversion to Christianity and new religions, especially in Nigeria. In what could be termed a trilogy, Peel conducted extensive research on African religion and Christianity. He provided insight into African religious movements, erupting new religious norms that gradually became predominant due to environmental factors. The first part of the trilogy that speaks to this phenomenon is his Aladura: A Religious Movement Among the Yoruba, which he published in 1968. Another part of the trilogy was published in 2000 and was titled Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba.14 In this second part of the trilogy, Peel enhanced the trajectory of religious academic discussion in Africa and examined Yoruba social change in line with the introduction of Christianity.15 The research work situated his evaluation in the religious period of 1845 to 1912  in Africa and got him international recognitions, including the Herskovits Award and the Amaury Talbot Prize. The last part of the trilogy was his comparative and comprehensive study of the operation and co-practices of Christianity, Islam, and African traditional religion in Nigeria in his work, Christianity, Islam and the Orisa: Comparative Studies of Three Religions in Interaction and Transformation.16 As a lover of African historical, sociological, and social anthropological scholarship, Peel set emulative standards for the exploration of many African scholars and practiced inclusiveness in his research. The only way to describe Peel’s scholarship was that he was deliberate, detailed, and intelligent in his research into African society and communities. His interaction with his subjects, making friends among the Yoruba, editing and reviewing various scholarly works about Africa, and serving in the leadership of various African scholarship associations emphasize his attachment to the culture and the studies. It could not be ascertained whether it was Peel’s brilliance that helped his academic journey or if his academic journey enhanced his brilliance because he enjoyed a smooth drive in both and rode through the echelons of the academic world. He started his academic career in sociology, where he lectured at the University of Nottingham and the London School of Economics, giving him more insight into the paraphernalia of society at large. He also became a visiting lecturer at the then University of Ife, now Obafemi Awolowo University, as a Reader of Sociology and Anthropology in 1973 before moving to the

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University of Liverpool in 1975.17 At the University of Liverpool, Peel became Dean of the Faculty of Social and Environmental Studies from 1985 to 1988. Later, in 1989, he moved to another level of his career as he joined the School of Oriental and African Studies, where he spent 18 career years, explored different academic positions, and added more noteworthy achievements.18 At every point and place in his academic career and research, he always set the pace for others and has been responsible for clearing the reasoning and research pathway for many. In many cases, when a non-African researches and writes about African history or society, it is often an unconscious habit to examine the vantage point from which such a writer evaluates Africa.19 In other instances, the ethnocentric and limited views often foil research by foreigners, but Peel’s case was different as he set an example of understanding one’s areas of interest and subject matter and encouraged engagement with it. His anthropology, sociology, and historical research could not be faulted, at least not from an ethnocentric standpoint, since there is often no difference between his scholarship and Nigerians’ when his commitment level is considered. Peel taught in Nigeria and made friends with the likes of Jacob Ade-Ajayi, Segun Oke, and Sir Olaniwun Ajayi, enrooting his fondness for African societies and history. His dexterity in research was so striking that he was considered incapable of making unintelligible statements.20 The foundation of Peel’s interest in the religious evolution of Africa and Nigeria in specific consideration could also be traced to his combination of social theory, western reasoning, and examination of seminal scholarship. At an early stage, Peel studied the research and argument of scholars like John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, as well as seminal thinkers from Britain, Germany, and America, to understand the meeting points of the sociological and historical backgrounds of those countries.21 He was eager to engage in arguments and scholarly discussions on social theories with a readiness to point out lacunas.

Peel’s Expansion of Understanding of Christianity in Africa As Peel believed, religion cannot be correctly viewed in isolation but would require holistic examination and inquiry into the root of the society receiving it.22 The knowledge of Nigerian and Yoruba history through sociological and anthropological lenses gave Peel scholarly strength.23 He made different publications and researches into the history and belief systems of the Yoruba people of Nigeria and established a clearer vision of the social construct of the societies, an endeavor capable of influencing the spread of and conversion to Christianity in Africa.24 According to Peel, the ethnogenesis of a particular society influences whatever they believe in. However, in explaining the narratives of the ethnicity of society, he refused to follow Abner Cohen’s assertive position, which states that understanding the ethnic construction of the people

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does not need cultural or historical observation.25 This position was expressed by Maryon McDonald when he posited that the people’s identity is well expressed in the structural context of contemporary society, leaving culture and the past out of the question.26 However, Peel rejected these structuralist positions entirely, claiming that there is always a need for cultural and historical analysis of the people to understand their ethnicity and belief system. The cultural identities of African societies have been largely related to the spread of Christianity, especially among the Yoruba. Although the Yoruba society holds its culture in high esteem, its ethnic identity and values have been more political than cultural.27 Peel later agreed with Cohen’s position, as the present Yoruba societies did not identify as Yoruba before the end of the eighteenth century—only the Oyo people identified themselves as such. However, factors like migration, trading, and conversion allowed the adoption of the Yoruba ethnic identity.28 As a result of striking similarities in culture, history, and mythology, it was easy for the people to adapt to the cultural identification. Similar historical and cultural values must also have explained the conversion to Christianity across Yorubaland.29 In tracing this historical background, Peel noted that Samuel Johnson related the early history of Yoruba to Christianity, such that Christianity was just a reintroduction to the region.30 Inevitably, the remnant of Christian values and principles, no matter how faint they might be through history, might have made adopting Christianity quite easier for the Yoruba. Although Johnson’s historical narration might be faulty in many ways, the projection of adaptability to Christianity might not be too far-fetched. In understanding African Christianity, Peel was one of those who emphasized the importance of viewing religion, the sociological state of the society, and its institution from the perspective of the past rather than only the present. Peel believed that the past should be viewed in context and that this context must be used to evaluate the disengaged theoretical conventions between the past and the present,31 describing this contextualization as “history as it really happened.”32 His position is not that the present should be totally separated from the past. However, he posits that the present should not define the past, that there is no necessarily compulsory need to view the future in a continuous line from the past to the present, that regard should be given to the possibility of discontinuity, and that the past itself should be viewed in its contexts.33 Hence, if one would view religion in Africa, one cannot just construct its historiography from a continuous line of events from the present to the past but must understand the past in context in order to have a clear view of the effect of the past on the current practice of such religion. Also, Peel reminded all scholars during his time and in contemporary periods of the importance of carefully considering narratives of African Christianity and religion in general.34 He stated that there are different versions of the narratives of Christianity in Africa and especially in Nigeria. One must be careful of the “grand narratives” that aim to place African history and conversion to Christianity in the order of world history, with its colonialism, globalization, and modernization, which do not rightly address the development of

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African history and Christianity. Hence, the source materials for these narratives are quite very important.35 In addition, understanding religious change and development in Africa must be drawn from three major narratives, including missionaries’ activities, colonialism, and the internal development of African society in general. Considering all these narratives without prejudice would give a clearer understanding of African historical and religious development and provide ample information on the process of conversion in the continent.36 Peel noted that the interrelationship between Christian missionary activities and colonization explains the maintenance of mainstream Christianity in Africa. Christianity was instrumental in the stability of colonial rule with its role in educational institutionalization and preparation of the people’s minds toward the colonial government.37 More so, the colonialists were more disposed to missionary activities and the observance of Christian principles. As Peel noted, the absence of colonial connection to Christianity practices due to decolonization would logically mean that there would be a new wave of Christianity in contemporary African society.38 This position is valid as post-colonial Nigeria has witnessed more diverse African churches and beliefs that have not been totally consistent with mainstream Christianity. Therefore, the post-colonial research inquiries set out to establish Christianity’s development from the present and the pre-colonial periods in the nineteenth century. This narration, by the likes of Ade-Ajayi and Ayandele, was targeted at recreating different narratives from the missionary narratives, with more emphasis on the elite and people’s conceptualization and conversion to Christianity.39 During this period of inquiry, more researchers and scholars got fascinated by the emerging African churches regarded as independent, rather than the orthodox and missionary-founded churches. Hence, Peel, along with African religion researchers, believed that the establishment of African religion historiography should be seen as quite independent of missionary accounts but established along with the context of pre-colonial African religion and history.40 For a better understanding of Christianity in Africa, Peel tried to juxtapose and contrast missionary narrative and anthropological narration of African history and religious development.41 At one point, the missionaries served as the major source of religious history in the continent, with less regard for historical and traditional narration of religious emergence. Many writers have posited the painting of the enlightenment period starting majorly from the Christian and colonial contacts, seeing that western education was primarily the duty of the missions.42 The missionaries wrote many works on their activities and became early sources. However, a more favored narration is the historical anthropology narratives of African religious and social change. Peel noted that historical anthropology could be constructed from three interactions: the relationship between the ethnohistory of the people and their sequence of change, the relationship between the past and the resulting social forms emanating from them, and the relationship that exists between the existing social forms and ethnohistory in context.43 For Peel, to understand the

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spread of Christianity and African development, it is important to distinguish between narratives and reconcile them when necessary with more care on mitigating factors like individual peculiarities, among others.44 Aside from the narratives of change in African history, especially in areas of religion, the understanding of conversion in Africa has also been at the core of Peels’ discussions and legacies. Peel offered more explanation of the process by which the primary and original religion, their domestication, and the creation of local beliefs and traditions are in line with both Christianity and Islam in Africa. He justified the need for the examination of conversion based on the fact that many theories of Christianity conversion might be quick conclusions. For instance, he stated that ascribing the reason for the wide conversion of Christianity to missionary teaching and colonialism might not be justifiable, considering that other foreign religions like Buddhism and Islam that had been in contact before then did not have the general manner of conversion as Christianity.45 To put his discussion into perspective, Peel examined the conversion in the Ijebu community of the Yoruba and Buganda. By 1910, Ijebu had become one of the largest Christian cities in Africa, having about one-third of the total Christians in all of Yorubaland. While Christianity conversion might be linked to colonialism, it is, however, wrong to assert that colonial imposition is responsible for such conversion. Peel cited Asante, Dahomey, and Benin to illustrate this assertion and posit that the conversion has been more voluntary than imposed.46 Zulu and Xhosa’s conquest also did not guarantee the conversion of the Reds until after 50 years of such conquest. This means that the desire for Africans to be Christians must have been from conviction rather than coercion. To put Ijebu in the spotlight of this discussion, Peel posited that Christianity was not the only massively increasing religion during colonialism, as Islam was also spreading during the same period, which means that the compulsory adoption of the colonizer’s religion was never the case in Ijebu and most parts of African communities. Yes, there was no direct compulsory adoption of the colonizer’s religion but an indirect adoption of the colonizer’s religion by default through the missionary schools and the colonial administrative and commercial bureaucracies that required some level of certification in western (Christianized) education. Since they did not happen due to conquest or imposition, the conversion of African societies has been described as necessary for a befitting situation. Peel subscribed rightly to the theory that adopting a particular religion or system is often because such religion befits that society’s current conditions and situations. And where there is a change of beliefs and religion, the newly available religions are more befitting to the contemporary situations. Hence, this could partially explain the change of African societies from traditional beliefs and other religions to Christianity at the time Christianity was offered to them. It is a partial explanation because one could not have access to Western education without conversion to Christianity; thus, Muslims had to set up their faith-­ based schools to prevent their children from being converted to Christianity.

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However, one must also not forget about the domestication of religion to fit into required situations, as well as the colonizer’s Christian conditions that conflicted with African polygamous and secular government, belief systems, and traditions. This would explain many of the religious movements that happened in Africa within the Christian faith, such as the Aladura Church movement, born out of contemporary needs and conditions tied to urbanization, colonization, and movements from the villages to the cities. Understanding the presence of these factors and conditions has opened the minds of researchers to keep pondering the questions of “why.” The above principle is close to that of elective affinity, as popularly expanded by Max Weber, who stated that two ideas, religions, or situations can attract each other based on influence, reinforcements, and convergence that satisfy those conditions.47 Aside from the fitness of the new religion to situations that encourage conversion, Peel also noted some other factors that needed to be examined to get a good grasp of the causes of the spread of Christianity in Africa. The spread of Christianity has also been attributed to the availability, accessibility, and capability of the carriers of the religion on the continent.48 Although colonial policies and disposition might have favored the spread of Christianity in Africa, there is a place for the strength of the missionaries. At a point, some of these missionaries did not have access to many areas in Africa. For instance, Lord Lugard’s colonial administration initially restricted the spread of Christianity in the Northern Protectorate of Nigeria as he had promised the Sultan not to let anything tamper with their Islamic beliefs and Islam.49 These policies reduced the missionaries to health and educational work in those areas, and they only had access to the Northern people on rare occasions. Consequently, the capacity, ability, availability, and accessibility of the Christian missionaries had a significant impact on the rate of conversion of the African people to Christianity.50 Furthermore, Peel stated that the position, interest, and conviction of society leaders and stakeholders to assist the missionaries to convert Africa is an important factor in examining the conversion of Africans. The reception of the leaders in Abeokuta and even the Ifá priest and traditional worshippers toward missionaries is a ready example.51 It has been posited that the Abeokuta people had carried out rituals for the expectation of the missionaries, and when the missionaries arrived in Abeokuta, there were huge celebrations to make them feel comfortable with the environment. The leaders and stakeholders in Abeokuta societies also supported the religion, which helped in the spread of Christianity in Abeokuta and its further spread to other parts of Yoruba societies. However, the northern part of Nigerian communities was largely Muslim, especially due to the religious revolution and Jihad by Usman Dan Fodio in the early nineteenth century.52 This made the Hausa and Fulani communities reject Christianity and could still explain a wide rejection of the religion in many parts of northern Nigeria up till today. More so, the people’s freedom of action before and after conversion also goes a long way. In many customs, people are subjected to their leaders’ positions and cultures, and taking up other beliefs might be outlawed and

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punishable. In addition, females and children in many African societies did not have full rights of their own and would only follow the decision of the man of the house. Hence, where the father or family head refused to convert, there might not be hope of conversion for other members of the family. The freedom that Christianity offers in the sense of grace has also attracted possible believers. In general, Peel was of the position that these factors might not be the cause of the initial conversion of Africans but are important in subsequent conversion and sustenance. He created a set of literatures that expanded into different African societies with an adequate depiction, history, and analysis of how religion reacted to social behaviors and vice versa.53 Also, he explained the religious behaviors of early Christians, the effect of colonialism on the religion, new movements, the independent African churches, and the attitudes of the churches in post-colonial African societies. Christianity in Africa has developed into what could be called family religion, and there is a wide subscription to it. There is almost an equal proportion of Christians and Muslims on the continent. These “world religions,” as often described by Peel, have transcended from mere foreign religions and have established themselves as primary religions. As Peel also examined, the two religions have developed issues that have created conflicts, especially among the overzealous faithfuls. In addition, societies have worked politics into religion and used it as an instrument of political interests. Although this might not be easily conquered in a very religious society like Nigeria, Peel examined the possible causes of these conflicts and advised against the use of religion for political gains.54

Peel on Religious Syncretism African societies have a diverse cultural heritage with different belief systems, worldviews, and religions that have survived time and history.55 These beliefs were one of the conditions that Christianity and colonialism had to battle with to achieve an adequate spread of the religion. It is quite difficult for Africans or anyone to embrace new systems and beliefs without an interplay or conflict with old beliefs because Africans’ beliefs have been widely adopted that they influence the people’s thinking process and identity. In another instance, these primary beliefs and identities tend to influence new beliefs. This is a similar situation in the spread of Christianity in Africa as the reception of the religion has been met by cultural rationalization, and the continuous practice of Christianity has shown a high level of syncretism that portrays portions of the traditional belief systems and other existing belief systems in the continent. Religious syncretism is the adoption and adaptation of the beliefs of different religions to form new and comprehensive beliefs in order to fit into a domestication process or make them comfortable for people to practice. This process is often created as a result of needs and convenience, and Africa is a valid testing ground and research object. Religious syncretism cannot be disregarded because of the conditions and the contributing factors attributable to

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Africa, which has proven notorious enough to be noticed in all African religions. Peel, along with other scholars, gave the concept of religious syncretism remarkable thought and research, and Peel seems to have provided remarkable observations and positions on African religious syncretism.56 Peel viewed religious syncretism from different narratives and views. Ordinarily, the introduction of new “world religions” has been operating with the people’s traditional beliefs that existed before their introduction. In this light, the common position of people and early scholars was to view the operation of those beliefs within the newly accepted religions from the angle of paganism rather than acculturation. Due to the difficulty in totally discarding their original beliefs, Peel observed that it is not surprising to see African Catholicism as mixed with paganism, or references to African Christians as not being Christians as such.57 While the wonders of religious syncretism might be the basis of these assertions, Peel believed they might not be totally wrong though not totally right. He favored the description of such instances from an anthropological vantage point of acculturation and cultural contacts rather than summing them up under paganism or inadequate practice. This is because the Christianity received and developed in one cannot be said to be the original practice received from Jerusalem; thus, it might not be easy to see a pure practice of a received belief by the receiving society. Religious syncretism has never been a strange process in African societies, especially before the introduction of Christianity. Although these periods could be characterized by multiple practices of religions and polytheism, the practice included the interconnectedness of many religions, especially among the African traditional religions. There are gods called Òrìṣà in the Yoruba society with their own specific manner of worship, beliefs, and appeasement. The spread of Sango to all parts of Yoruba society has been ascribed to the activities of the old Oyo Empire among those now known as the Yoruba.58 No matter the primary religion to which they are ultimately subscribed, the Yoruba gave regard to other religions and adjusted their belief systems to incorporate those beliefs. Peel also noted that other practices imported from neighboring Yoruba societies have also been domesticated within existing Yoruba religious systems. For instance, Peel made reference to the adoption of the Igunnu cult from the Nupe, the Ṣọ̀npọ̀nná from Dahomey, and the Olókun from Benin, among others that existed and were practiced in the Yoruba religious space. This acculturation, as Peel tries to prove, might have made it easy for the Yoruba to adopt Christianity while also being responsible for the infusion of traditional beliefs with the existing beliefs of Christianity practice.59 In more specific terms, Peel has taught us not to make a big deal of religious acceptance and syncretism in Africa, as it is in no way different from what has been acceptable in other parts of the world. When the Christian missionaries came to Abeokuta, the people were happy, especially because of the corn mill that was brought to them. They were happy about this development, and in their spirit of tolerance and secularity, as seen in the issue of adoption of the Ìgunnu cult, they accepted Christianity, and the practice started spreading.

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Peel related this to the scenarios of Rome under the rulership of Emperor Alexander Severus, who accepted Christianity and had a chapel where statues of Apollonius, Orpheus, Jesus Christ, and Abraham were built.60 Aside from Christianity, religious syncretism was also seen in the case of the adoption of Islam among the Hausa/Fulani people. When Islam was introduced through the Trans-Sahara trade, it lasted for a long period, and at a point, there was a mixture of traditional practices with Islam among the Hausas until the Jihad of Usman Dan Fodio in the early nineteenth century to purify Islamic practices in Northern Nigeria. Peel attempted to trace the reception and reaction of the Yoruba societies to the introduction of Christianity. He noted that new believers were initially separated from the Yoruba communities. The early African Christians were more relatable to missionaries, their ways of life, and civilization. However, when the number of converts increased, there was more acceptance and involvement of the Christians in society, but they could not involve themselves in other social functions like that of the Ògbóni cults. Although many of the traditional customs and beliefs were rejected, some of them were submerged with the new beliefs at that early stage. Olódùmarè, the Supreme God or Being of the Yoruba people, was understood as the Christian God, and his Oríkì was adopted in the praises of the Christian God by the new African Christians.61 Olódùmarè, regarded as the Almighty God in Christian parlance, had similar features as that of the Christian God and, as such, made it quite easy for the people to believe. However, other gods could not be acculturated into the Christian faith because of the idolatry approach to their worship. It was easy to adopt Olódùmarè as the Yoruba interpretation of the Christian God because of how easy it was to separate it from idol worship. The other Òrìṣàs were seen as unreal and delusional because they were hard to prove or believe. However, the person of Èṣù in Yoruba mythology was linked to the Biblical devil because of their similarities and features.62 Although the missionaries and especially the Christian Missionary Society (CMS) dismissed the importance of the Òrìṣà, Peel noted that the Yoruba, despite their conversions, believed in their existence and possibilities. This was mostly because of their societal importance and influence on the social structure. Hence, although a large number of early Christians did not worship the Òrìṣàs, they believed they existed and trusted in the power of Almighty God to protect them from their attacks and activities.63 In some other lengths of conceptualizing Yoruba theology and conceptions, there was a comparison between the Christian approach to worship and that of the African traditional religions. Some Christians believed in the concept of witches, known as Ajẹ in Yoruba societies and other related names. One other early discernment was the understanding of the Yoruba concept of ògùn, which means both juju/voodoo and traditional medicines. The understanding and practice of ògùn as traditional medicines was accepted by early Christians, especially because of their potency. They have been related to Western medicine as they serve their medicinal purposes. In fact, Peel noted

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that many Anglican Christian leaders were able to administer them and write about them. In addition, the concept of Ifá was seen as Yoruba philosophy, and the body of knowledge has been given wide respect and understanding, especially in scientific observations. To comfortably allow the easy adaptation of Africans to Christianity, there was an early analysis of Ẹbọ to be synonymous with the sacrifice of Jesus Christ and show how Jesus had made all needed sacrifices. Christian prayers were seen as similar to how the people approached their gods.64 The resemblance of these religions allowed easy adaptation and conversion, and, in the long run, these backgrounds formed the adjustment of the Christian faith to comfortably fit in with the people’s beliefs. Furthermore, Peel explained the acculturation processes that occurred during the spread of Christianity in Africa at the beginning, which opened the understanding of many other researchers. The existence of this rationalization and domestication at the beginning of the introduction of the new religion might be admirable and helped people understand what they believed, but Peel pointed out that this rationalization would not end at this moderate level, and some other radical acculturation in the practice of African Christianity could occur. This necessary continuous syncretism brought about the creation of African churches, especially during the end of the nineteenth century, which was a break away from the original missionary churches like the Anglicans and Baptists, among others.65 The motive of the founder of the early African churches was not to establish theirs because they wanted to be rebels but because they were convinced that the new churches were too foreign to address all the concerns of the African people. They believed that before the churches could wear the cloaks of African societies and relate to all their problems, there was a need for them to be led by Africans. When the first African churches started, they did not do much to change the theological teachings of the original churches, and many of them were retained. However, Peel noted that few changes made them different from the original churches. The African churches made radical changes to the organizational and systemic arrangement and set-up of the churches. The church introduced new forms of evangelism and church leadership that were different from what they were originally taught. More so, the new African churches embraced many social practices, such as polygamy. Also, the Yoruba people tried to incorporate their traditional social groupings called society into the Christian religion and adjust it to blend with Christianity. Introducing these systems and manners of doing things would quickly make the growth of religious syncretism convincing. While an assertion of syncretism might be right, Peel made an argument that opened the eyes of researchers to see that it might be wrong to quickly believe that these were religious syncretism. As stated earlier, he posited that the changes were not really changes in religious beliefs but changes in colonial cultures that were attached to the religion of African cultures.66 For instance, changing songs and dances to African alternatives does not mean any change in religious convictions. To buttress this, he claimed that if all that changed could

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amount to syncretism, then the factors that made them so should have allowed the Yoruba to synthesize traditional religion, Islam, and Christianity into one religious system. However, based on this claim, he opened the possibilities of pluralism to the minds of researchers. No matter how the argument goes, certain facts are known about Peel’s conviction on African syncretism. One of the things that enabled and encouraged the adoption of Christianity across the continent was Christianity’s compatibility with their primary traditions and religious beliefs. He showed this with the explanations given toward conversion in different African societies, including Buganda, Bantu, Ijebu, Yoruba, and other notable societies. Another thing is that Africans largely conceptualized the understanding of world religions in the purview of their traditional beliefs and conviction. Moreover, the African independent churches have worn more of the African features they received at the initial stage. Also, different religious movements have developed largely as a result of religious syncretism. Although Peel would not want to totally categorize the development of the Aladura churches to be the result of syncretism, he was able to examine its possibilities. The Aladura churches have been regarded as a distinct or a different breed of Christianity largely similar to the one accepted at the initial stage and has a large imprint on Yoruba cultures and beliefs. The differences and the level of acculturation have not made the categorization of its difference mere foreign classification, but local authors have also alluded to the fact that the system and structure of this type of Christianity were different from the world religion. Peel’s reluctance in naming the Aladura church a syncretic version of Christianity is understandable in that he did not want to imply that the religion was an “imperfect” form of Christianity or a hybrid at its best. This position has also been associated with many scholars who have refused to view the change from a theological perspective but rather from an anthropological evaluation.67 In line with Peel’s ideas, Ray proposed that Aladura churches should be viewed from a larger perspective that would not limit the understanding of the religion. Hence, an approach that sees it as the combination of Yoruba religious beliefs, biblical beliefs, Christian liturgy, and convictions without subjecting it to theological justification would allow individuals the free mind to imagine and see the true nature of the religion.68 Peel and other scholars believe that to classify Aladura churches as products of syncretism is to nullify the beliefs of the Aladura devotees. The believers do not see themselves and their beliefs as products of religious syncretism because they tend to condemn traditional religion and practices more than the orthodox Christians would. Any relationship or link to the traditional religion would mean they were as pagans as the traditional worshippers. As a result, one cannot afford to run to this erroneous conclusion. I have stated earlier that at the point where Christianity was initially introduced, paganism and contrary religious beliefs were rejected in their entirety. However, the Aladura churches retained some of those beliefs, but with quite different significance. Firstly, the Aladura Christians were still convinced that

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spirits and demons were in the mythology of African traditional religion, but they were labeled as malevolent and diabolical spirits.69 Secondly, they believed there is still a place for rituals, and the potencies of these rituals were held to be strong; as such, they felt a need to find a solution in Christ Jesus through fervent prayers. The received Christianity had a limited view of the existence of spiritual elements and personalities aside from that of the Holy Spirit and God. To a large extent, the openness to science and logic had cleared out possible belief in such spiritual forces. This conviction is obviously difficult for African and Yoruba societies to believe, seeing that the whole social process is built on operations in spiritual spaces.70 When an event happens in Yoruba and African societies, the questions that would most likely arise were to trace the causal lines of the occurrence, which are either traced to human or spiritual forces. Nothing happened by chance in Africa; something must have triggered the other. This was a belief that the Aladura churches held and tried to understand within the wisdom of Christian teachings and Biblical explanations. More so, African societies have long been conditioned to ritual processes and sacrifices to predict or control an event. To do this, dedicated activities and performances are done to allay the evil, and when the evil does not reveal the sign of its origin, they resort to divinations to give more understanding of what should be done. The Yoruba communities consult Ifá priests and visit the shrines of their respective gods to offer their prayers and sacrifices.71 Hence, to the Aladura churches, these practices and beliefs were too real to be insignificant, and if such pagans could be that fervent in their worship and inquiry, they would have to be so with the Christian God. This could explain the strong beliefs of the Aladura churches in miracles and prayers, at least as they were done in the Bible. The Aladura Churches are disposed to spiritual inquiry and solutions to societal and personal problems of the people with the same or more intensity as among the pagans. Prayers for success, healing, financial breakthrough, childbearing, and combating evil spirits and suspected attacks are among the requests of the Aladura Christians.72 With the understanding that the Christian God can do much more than what is gotten through sacrifices to traditional gods, it was easy to convince people, and as a result, the Aladura churches began to grow and more faithfuls were won. Yoruba culture and traditional religions have a specific metaphysical conviction of the world centered around spirituality. They believe in the interconnectedness of heaven (Ọ ̀run) to the world (Ayé) and the predestination of Orí. The world is often seen as a marketplace, where different people come, transact, and return to Ọ ̀run. However, the operation of humans has been linked with spiritual forces both on earth and in heaven. Hence, they believe in the susceptibility of the interference of Orí or Kádàrá by some of the forces. They created a link between individuals with a spiritual personality similar to that of the Igbos (Chi). The Aladuras believed these conceptions were valid, but their allies were found in God, the Holy Spirit, and the Angels who reside in their heavenly places.73 These beliefs, coupled with the conviction that Christianity

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is more potent than what they were exposed to, that prayers could change things and do a lot more, and that Christianity was the only hope for redemption and future, inspired the organization and establishment of the first sets of Aladura churches. In this line, Precious Stone Church, also known as Faith Tabernacle, was established in 1918.74 Faith Tabernacle later metamorphosed into Christ Apostolic Church, and the Cherubim and Seraphim church was established in 1925. As noted by Peel, understanding the situations of society around the time the religion was created would also explain the rationale behind the several beliefs held by the Aladura believers. The world faced an influenza epidemic that claimed millions of lives in the world, along with economic breakdown and wars. To make explanations and provide solutions to the people, the Aladura church had to make the people believe in the potency of prayers, and revivals were carried out by prophets like Joseph Ayo Babalola, which resulted in massive conversion. These were done without compromise to biblical tenets but with greater exposure to the powers of God. At a later point, the Aladura churches adopted material representations. The Faith Tabernacle, in their revival sessions, adopted the use of “healing water” (Omi Ìyè) that was prayed into.75 The Cherubim and Seraphim churches and other churches that emerged also adopted the use of candles and other materials for prayers. These practices were not far from the potions and juju that were given to people who patronized shrines of traditional gods. Although the use of these materials was not in any way seen as pagan practices, they were evidence of the similarities between the new breeds of African Christianity and African traditional religions. Also, as Peel has taught, no matter how these resemble religious syncretism, it would be wrong to tag them as such, as they were not the formation of a new religion or hybrid Christianity.

Conclusion Undoubtedly, African society is unique in its belief systems, especially because of its diversity and system of worship. It is quite difficult to receive a religion without expecting a touch of society on them. Through several of his works, J. D. Y. Peel has been able to distinguish and show how African Christianity can be, highlighting its possibilities and developments. Peel did not stand aloof like other non-African writers to question the level of the African Christian faiths. Instead, he got involved in the process of seeking answers in a way that almost portrayed him as an African himself. When the question of “How Christian is Africa?” arose, Peel, seeing and understanding the development of the African society and Christianity, knew that the level of germination of the Christian seed could not be underestimated and thus believed that Africans were not less Christians than the rest of the world. Peel also established to African scholars that viewing the growth of African Christianity from the missionary perspective with its own standards might be an early misleading conclusion, but he subscribed to sociological and

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anthropological inquiry into African Christianity. He believed this would allow the researchers to understand Christianity without prejudice. Hence, African Christianity researchers have been advised to seek answers not only within the missionary accounts but also from sociological and historical perspectives that would create a holistic explanation of what is now known as African Christianity. Peel’s contribution to understanding Christian conversion in Nigeria has also given some level of understanding to researchers. While there is no denying that colonialism and Christianity are largely linked, he, however, stated that to say that Christianity was able to spread as a result of colonialism or colonial conquest would be fatally wrong. He provided different explanations that would not make such narratives stand and pointed to other factors within African societies. In conclusion, Peel was very careful not to attribute the creation of African Christianity, independent churches, and the Aladura churches to religious syncretism. This is because he believed that those early endeavors were not mainly theological changes and that taking them as such would mean that African Christianity is an abridged form of Christianity or Christianity in a lesser form. In other words, J. D. Y. Peel’s insistence on separating the modes of operation of the new faith from the orthodox notion of syncretism is one of his outstanding contributions to the study of the Christian religion in Africa.

Notes 1. Gavin Flood, Beyond Phenomenology: Rethinking the Study of Religion (London and New York: Cassell, 1999). 2. David Chidester, Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 3. Adrian Hastings, A History of African Christianity, 1950–1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 4. Andrew F. Walls, “African Christianity in the History of Religions,” Studies in World Christianity 2, no. 2 (1996): 183–203. 5. Brian Stanley, The World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh 1910 (Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2009). 6. Walls, “African Christianity in the History of Religions.” 7. Roland Anthony Oliver, How Christian is Africa? (Knoxfield: Highway Press, 1956). 8. David B. Barrett, “AD 2000: 350 Million Christians in Africa,” International Review of Mission 59, no. 233 (1970): 39–54. 9. Walls, “African Christianity in the History of Religions.” 10. John David Yeadon Peel, “For Who hath Despised the Day of Small Things? Missionary Narratives and Historical Anthropology,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, no. 3 (1995): 581–607. 11. Wale Adebanwi, “Peel and the ‘Intellectualist’ Account of Social Change,” Religion and Society 8 (2017): 5–10. 12. Paul Gifford, “Professor JDY Peel,” SOAS University of London, November 10, 2015, https://www.soas.ac.uk/news/newsitem107075.html.

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13. John David Yeadon Peel, Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2003). 14. Gifford, “Professor JDY Peel.” 15. Gary Lynn Comstock, “The Yoruba and Religious Change,” Journal of Religion in Africa 10, no. 1 (1979): 1–12. 16. Gifford, “Professor JDY Peel.” 17. Gifford, “Professor JDY Peel.” 18. Gifford, “Professor JDY Peel.” 19. James Morris Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History Vol. 1 (New York: Guilford Press, 1993). 20. Trevor H. J. Marchand, “JDY Peel (1941–2015), Obituary,” RAI Archives & Manuscripts, January 12, 2016, https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/21810/. 21. Marchand, “JDY Peel (1941–2015).” 22. Peter Beyer, Contemporary Social Theory as it Applies to the Understanding of Religion in Cross-cultural Perspective (Malden: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2001). 23. Ruth Marshall, “Days of Small and Great Things: In Homage to JDY Peel,” Religion and Society 8 (2017): 15–20. 24. J.  D. Y.  Peel, “The Cultural Work of Yoruba Ethnogenesis,” in History and Ethnicity, eds., Elizabeth Tonkin, Maryon McDonald, and Malcom Chapman (London: Routledge, 1989), 198–215. 25. Peel, “The Cultural Work of Yoruba Ethnogenesis.” 26. Peel, “The Cultural Work of Yoruba Ethnogenesis.” 27. Peel, “The Cultural Work of Yoruba Ethnogenesis.” 28. Peel, “The Cultural Work of Yoruba Ethnogenesis.” 29. Peel, “The Cultural Work of Yoruba Ethnogenesis.” 30. Samuel Johnson, The History of the Yorubas: From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the British Protectorate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 31. Steven Seidman, “The Historicist Controversy: A Critical Review with a Defense of a Revised Presentism,” Sociological Theory 3, no. 1 (1985): 13–16. 32. John David Yeadon Peel, Herbert Spencer: The Evolution of a Sociologist (New York: Basic Books, 1971), 263. 33. Robert Alun Jones, “The New History of Sociology,” Annual Review of Sociology 9 (1983): 447–469. 34. J. D. Y. Peel, Church History and a Christian Life The History of Christianity in West Africa (London: Longman, 1980); Elizabeth Isichei, Entirely for God: the Life of Michael Iwene Tansi (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Cistercian Publications, 2005); The Journal of African History 23, no. 2 (1982): 275–276. 35. Peel, Religious Encounter. 36. Peel, Religious Encounter. 37. Robin Horton and J. D. Y. Peel, “Conversion and Confusion: A Rejoinder on Christianity in Eastern Nigeria,” Canadian Journal of African Studies/La Revue canadienne des études africaines 10, no. 3 (1976): 481–498. 38. Peel, Religious Encounter. 39. Peel, Religious Encounter. 40. Peel, Religious Encounter. 41. Peel, “For Who hath Despised the Day of Small Things?”

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42. John D.  Y. Peel, “The Christianization of African Society: Some Possible Models,” in Christianity in Independent Africa, eds., E. Fashole-Luke, R. Gray, A. Hastings, and G. Tasie (London: Rex Collins, 1978), 443–454. 43. Peel, “For who hath Despised the Day of Small Things?” 44. Peel, “For who hath Despised the Day of Small Things?” 45. John David Yeadon Peel, “Conversion and Tradition in Two African Societies: Ijebu and Buganda,” Past & Present 77 (1977): 108–141. 46. Peel, “Conversion and Tradition.” 47. Michael Löwy, “The Concept of Elective Affinity According to Max Weber,” Archives de Sciences Sociales Des Religions 127, no. 3 (2004): 6–6. 48. Peel, “Conversion and Tradition.” 49. Christopher N.  Ubah, “Problems of Christian Missionaries in the Muslim Emirates of Nigeria, 1900–1928,” Journal of African Studies 3, no. 3 (1976): 351. 50. Ubah, “Problems of Christian Missionaries,” 351. 51. Agneta Pallinder-Law, “Aborted Modernization in West Africa? the Case of Abeokuta 1,” The Journal of African History 15, no. 1 (1974): 65–82. 52. S. A. Albasu, “The Jihad in Hausaland and the Kano Fulani,” Nigeria Magazine 53, no. 1 (1985): 52–54. 53. John D.  Y. Peel, “Post-socialism, Post-colonialism, Pentecostalism,” in Conversion after Socialism: Disruptions, Modernisms and Technologies of Faith in the Former Soviet Union, ed., Mathijs Pelkmans (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 183–199. 54. J. D. Y. Peel, “The Politicisation of Religion in Nigeria: Three Studies,” Africa 66, no. 4 (1996): 607–611. 55. Susan Osireditse Keitumetse, African Cultural Heritage Conservation and Management Theory and Practice from Southern Africa (Cham: Springer, 2016), 1–21. 56. John D. Y. Peel, “Syncretism and Religious Change,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 10, no. 2 (1968): 121–141. 57. Peel, “Syncretism and Religious Change.” 58. Peel, “Syncretism and Religious Change.” 59. Peel, “Syncretism and Religious Change.” 60. Peel, “Syncretism and Religious Change.” See also, William Hugh Clifford Frend, “Open Questions Concerning the Christians and the Roman Empire in the Age of the Severi,” The Journal of Theological Studies 25, no. 2 (1974): 333–351. 61. E. Bolaji Idowu, Olódùmarè: God in Yoruba Belief (London: Longman, 1970). 62. Idowu, Olódùmarè. 63. Temimola Alanamu, “‘The Way of Our Fathers’: CMS Missionaries and Yorùbá Health in the Nineteenth Century,” Lagos Historical Review 10 (2010): 1–27. 64. Benjamin C. Ray, “Aladura Christianity: a Yoruba Religion,” Journal of Religion in Africa 23, no. 1–4 (1993): 266–291. 65. Peel, “Syncretism and Religious Change.” 66. Peel, “Syncretism and Religious Change.” 67. Ray, “Aladura Christianity.” 68. Ray, “Aladura Christianity.” 69. Afe Adogame, “Engaging the Rhetoric of Spiritual Warfare: The Public Face of Aladura in Diaspora,” Journal of Religion in Africa 34, no. 4 (2004): 493–522.

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70. Peter Probst, “The Letter and the Spirit: Literacy and Religious Authority in the History of the Aladura Movement in Western Nigeria,” Africa 59, no. 4 (1989): 478–495. 71. John D. Y. Peel, “The Pastor and the Babalawo: The Interaction of Religions in Nineteenth-Century Yorubaland,” Africa 60, no. 3 (1990): 338–369. 72. David Olu Ogungbile, “Meeting Point of Culture and Health: The Case of the Aladura Churches in Nigeria,” Nordic Journal of African Studies 6, no. 1 (1997): 14–14. 73. Peel, “Syncretism and Religious Change.” 74. S. A. Fatokun, ‘“I Will Pour Out My Spirit upon All Flesh”: The Origin, Growth and Development of the Precious Stone Church: The Pioneering African Indigenous Pentecostal Denomination in Southwest Nigeria,’ Cyberjournal for Pentecostal-Charismatic Research, accessed July 27, 2022, http://www.pctii. org/cyberj/cyberj19/fatokun.html. 75. Deji Isaac Ayegboyin, “‘Heal the Sick and Cast out Demons’: The Response of the Aladura,” Studies in World Christianity 10, no. 2 (2004): 233–249.

CHAPTER 9

The Legacy of Terrence Ranger for Historians of African Christianity David Maxwell

Terence Ranger was a pioneer of the discipline of African History. He was most well-known as a historian of nationalism who specialised in the Zimbabwean past. He also wrote on the history of disease, death, and the environment. His most prominent publication was his co-edited volume with Eric Hobsbawm, The Invention of Tradition (1983), which explored issues of legitimacy, hegemony, and identity in relation to mass politics in the context of empire. Nevertheless, his work on religion was also enormously significant. He was interested in how religious ideas and practices are related to the wider social and political field, and he was fascinated by internal questions of liminality and religious experience. Following his studies in Oxford, Ranger had an extensive and distinguished academic career which commenced at the University College of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia in 1957. Quickly becoming involved in campaigns against the Rhodesian Colour Bar and subsequently in the early African nationalist movement, Ranger and his wife Shelagh fell afoul of the white settler state and were deported in January 1963. Already in demand, he was immediately appointed as Professor of History at the University of Dar es Salaam in recently independent Tanzania. Tasked with building a new History Department he convened a remarkable group of scholars including John Iliffe, John Lonsdale, John McCracken, and the radical Guyanese

D. Maxwell (*) Emmanuel College, Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. E. Barnes, T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48270-0_9

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academic, Walter Rodney, who would together help define the emergent discipline of African History. From Dar es Salaam, Ranger went on to hold high profile Professorships at UCLA (1969–1974) and the Universities of Manchester (1974–1987) and Oxford (1987–1997). He returned to what is now the University of Zimbabwe in Harare on his retirement in 1997. In all these institutions he built up cohorts of Africanist postgraduates and convened seminars, conferences, and international collaborations in African History. In addition, he played an important role as an intermediary. He brought African History into European academic settings through his role in the leading social history journal, Past and Present, and by publishing widely in non-Africanist journals and collections. And because he kept abreast of historiographical developments across the discipline, he ensured that scholarship on the African past remained a comparative enterprise (McCraken 1997). Ranger’s scholarship on African religions, particularly Christianity, developed a good deal over his long career, shaped by the institutional settings in which he worked, his immense erudition, and his great facility of self-criticism. This essay will take a broadly chronological approach to reconstruct its evolution. In his entertaining autobiography, Writing Revolt (2013) Ranger confessed that he arrived in Southern Rhodesia in 1957 knowing almost nothing about the African past. Employed to teach early Modern and Late Medieval British and European History, he was immediately captivated by Zimbabwean nationalism and began to research its antecedents. His autobiography also reveals little initial interest in religion. There was no indication of the Anglican faith that animated his later years in Oxford, where he was a regular attender at Christchurch Cathedral. His Oxford doctoral dissertation had been about Richard Boyle, First Earl of Cork. Although Boyle was a self-righteous Protestant, Ranger ignored issues of religious hypocrisy to examine instead how this English aristocrat managed to accumulate so much land that he became the richest man in the UK (Jeater 2011). Ranger’s interest in African religion came via other means: his political activism, his friendships, and his students. Always the more radical and activist of the two, Shelagh Ranger drew Terry into campaigns against racist discrimination in Salisbury, where they would rub shoulders with radical liberal missionaries and clergy such as the Methodist, Whitfield Foy, or the Anglicans, such as John Collins who worked with African political prisoners, and Michael Scott who created the Africa Bureau in London. Later in Tanzania, Bishop Trevor Huddleston would arrive at one of his parties, beginning a friendship which allowed Ranger access to remarkable sources on Tanzanian Anglicanism. Once involved in Zimbabwean nationalism Ranger was initiated into his first memorable encounters with African Christianity. In Seke Reserve, where he accompanied journalists to see the effects of Native Land Husbandry Act (1951), he met white-robe-wearing Apostles who shunned ‘worldly things’ but were successful farmers, seeking liberation via self-reliance (2013: 33). He encountered another type of Christian independency at nationalist meetings at the mission of St Francis, Makoni District, where he befriended the Nyabadza

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family who had founded a breakaway Anglican church animated by a community of African nuns and special sites of prayer in the landscape. He later observed: ‘Its combination of prophetic Christianity, African peasant life, and sensitivity to the landscape was reflected in my writing for decades to come’ (Ranger 2013: 86–87). In Makoni, he also became acquainted with Guy and Molly Clutton-Brock, founders of the radical Christian collective farm at St Faiths, and through them met nationalist leaders such as James Chikerema, George Nyandoro, and Maurice Nyagumbo, coming to grasp the centrality of a vast network of Anglican, Catholic, and American Methodist missions to nationalist formation and mobilisation. In the 1980s, Makoni District would become his laboratory for reflection on popular Christianity. Finally, Ranger’s religious horizons were extended by his students. For instance, Mutumba Mainga, who would go on to have a successful career as both a Zambian politician and historian, took him to the graves of the Lozi kings, introducing him to oral accounts of the past kept by priests who remembered them through elaborate traditions of music and dance (2013: 126). It was the High God cult of Mwari in Western Zimbabwe and Mhondoro cults associated with dynastic ancestors in the East that first attracted Ranger’s attention as an historian of religion. It is important to understand the principles behind his scholarship on so-called African Traditional Religion because they shaped his approach to Christianity. In what is now considered to be a classic of nationalist historiography, Revolt in Southern Rhodesia (1967), he argued that the religious system innovated in response to an ecological crisis, caused by drought, disease, and locusts, and to compensate for the loss of political leaders vanquished by colonial occupation. Shrine priests and spirit mediums stepped up to co-ordinate confederated resistance against the British South Africa Company in 1896–1897. Ranger dubbed the Revolt ‘primary resistance’, the first manifestation of a widespread, emotional response to colonialism. In the absence of formal mass based political organisation until the 1950s, he saw such movements as important moments in the trajectory of popular responses that eventually led to nationalism. Significantly, it was within this Whiggish or teleological model of the past that he would also locate the African independent churches that appeared in colonial Zimbabwe in the 1920s and 1930s as expressions of ‘proto-nationalism’. Zimbabwean nationalism had multiple sources of religious legitimation and organisation and Christian independency represented the next stage after traditional religious mobilisation. This idea found expression in the conclusion of his African Voice in Southern Rhodesia (1970): ‘Watch Tower in Lomagundi’ was partly an expression of resentment at what was seen as a conspiracy between the missionaries and other whites, partly an expression of the desire to overthrow white control, partly an expression of the desire to enter into and enjoy white wealth, partly an acceptance of the need to adopt new customs … [The Shona people] were turning to new millenarianism and adopting new customs and new way of life. In this there was a remote promise for

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the emergence of a mass nationalist movement, secular in intent, but with millenarian implications. (1972: 206 & 214)

On other types of Christian independency, he wrote: The Zionist and Vapostori movements [pneumatic types of independency] obviously expressed many of the same emotions that were present in the Watch Tower flare up. They were the same articulation of the feelings of thousands of rural Shona. Their achievement was to institutionalise themselves, to make their more subdued millenarian message a source of long-term hope; to combine millenarianism with attempts at improvement. They represented one step further along the road that Watch Tower to the emergence of modern mass nationalism. (1972: 222)

Beyond Ranger’s concern to create a ‘useable past’ to inspire Zimbabwean nationalists, there were other intellectual underpinnings in his early model of African religions, traditional and Christian, that are worthy of note (1976: 17–30). His initial work on African traditional religion critiqued functionalist anthropology established in the interwar period, well before the emergence of professional African history, and which had an enormous effect on urban sociology, religious studies, and theology. Although, of course, the work of leading anthropologists such as Edward Evans Pritchard and Meyer Fortes was immensely important in highlighting the sophistication of African institutions, it was ahistorical, asserting the function of traditional religion in maintaining the stability of African societies. In one of his self-critical, auto-biographical essays, Ranger argued that this notion of integration of African religion with society created an invidious distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ religion: ‘good religion, healthy religion founds identity in community. African “traditional” religion or the Coptic church in Ethiopia did this, we are told, by being co-existent with and inseparable from society. Destructive religion—mission Christianity as a dimension of … cultural change on a hitherto unknown scale—threatens identities. Such religion breaks down the ideological solidarity of African societies’ (1987b: 147). Ranger had in his sights John V. Taylor’s The Primal Vision (1963), which romanticised collective African experience in contrast to an inferior individual European mode of being, and Colin Turnbull’s The Lonely African (1962), which depicted Zairean traditionalists, youth, and urban migrants as alienated by colonialism and mission Christianity, lacking in identity, and socially isolated. He critiqued the work of the influential African theologian, John Mbiti, in a similar manner, arguing that his assertion of the boundedness of African religion, its strong equation with so-called tribal identity, rendered it incapable of responding to the increasing scale of interaction that colonialism engendered (1988). Ranger’s mantra that ‘African [traditional] religions were complex, multi-layered, dynamic, with a history of contradiction, contestation, innovation’ was important because it meant that Africans were already

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responding to new religious ideas prior to the arrival of Christianity (1987b: 151) and that mission Christianity could be received in places as part of that ongoing process of reinterpretation. As we shall see below, his work on urban history, particularly urban Christianity, revealed that although Africans were coerced and subjugated by colonial law, they were nevertheless resilient, gregarious, and adaptable. Ranger’s thinking about the locus and scale of religious agency would come to fruition in a provocative essay entitled: ‘The Local and the Global in Southern African Religious History’. The piece was a riposte to the widespread idea that African traditional religions were microcosmic, their horizons limited to local ecological and ancestor cults. This notion sprang from a simplistic reading of Robin Horton’s influential essay on conversion, which asserted that Africans turned to the universal religions, Christianity and Islam, because their pre-existing religions no longer articulated to a worldview vastly expanded by labour migration and urbanisation (1971). In response, Ranger observed that until they were constrained by colonial borders and the administrative assertion of a traditional localism, regional cults in Central Africans drew pilgrims from locations hundreds of miles in search of fecundity and healing.1 Meanwhile the assertion of indirect rule and the creativity of missionaries and African Christians created intensely local Christianities—a theme discussed in detail below (1993c). Although Ranger’s model of unified Shona and Ndebele religious resistance in Revolt was overturned by David Beach (1979) and Julian Cobbing (1977), he did not, as they did, have the benefit of being able to conduct fieldwork due to his house arrest by the Rhodesian authorities. Instead, he was reliant upon the reports of paranoid colonial administrators who were fixated on rumours of witchcraft and superstition, and which confirmed his theory concerning the religious organisation of the 1896 Revolt. Nevertheless, much of his early thinking about the dynamic, open, and plural nature of African traditional religion was subsequently confirmed by work on the oral traditions underpinning regional cults in Central and Eastern Africa and by research on pre-colonial African identities. His co-edited collection with Isaria Kimambo, The Historical Study of African Religion (1972), was an early example of this kind of approach. African Voice was another a landmark in Africanist historiography, its chapters on early trade unionism and the politics of elite association inspiring research projects for the next generation of Africanist historians. The pioneering sections on independency doubtless also shaped scholarly trajectories that Ranger came to disapprove of and critique with great effect. The first was the fashionable scholarly emphasis on African Independent Churches (‘AICs’) because they were believed to be somehow more authentic than mission churches. This tendency was criticised by another pioneer of work on independency, Bengt Sundkler, who sagely observed that it was to mission churches that most Africans continued to adhere (Sundkler 1987).2 The second related trajectory on independency reinforced the distinction between good African religion and bad missionary Christianity whereby AICs represented

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‘belonging’: spaces where Africans could feel at home, tightly linked to family and ethnicity, in opposition to a supposedly deracinating mission Christianity.3 A more capacious reading of Christianity is evident just a few years after the publication of African Voice in Ranger’s ‘Introduction’ to Themes in the Christian History of Central Africa (1975) co-edited with John Weller, where he argued for a concerted examination of the relation between religion and social and political change by turning ‘inward’ to the ‘religious or ideational aspects of Central African history’. Asserting that ‘social change is accompanied, articulated, and perhaps even made possible, by symbolic change in the realm of myth and ritual’, he argued that ‘It is the developing dogma of [religious] movements which makes certain protest responses—or certain adaptive responses—possible’ (1975: 4). His call for research on the existential theology and ritual formulated by missionaries and African catechists stimulated a significant body of scholarship on the hitherto neglected field of missionary encounters, making it one of the supreme subjects of anthropological research in the 1990s and 2000s. Even more prescient was his observation about the scholarly neglect of subjects such as Pentecostalism and evangelical revivalism which came almost two decades before the enormous volume of research on the Born-again movement across the Africanist social sciences: ‘We have no adequate treatment of the dogmatic and symbolic content of Revival movements inside missionary Protestantism. Little is available about the ideas and ceremonies of various American and South African fundamentalist missions. Above all, perhaps the whole topic of Pentecostalism in its widest sense has hardly been treated. How important for the implantation of Christianity in Central Africa been for what one missionary called “a new Pentecost”, accompanied by healings and exorcisms? What is the significance of the dominance of the idea of the Holy Spirit in so many African independent churches?’ (1975: 4). Ranger’s increasing determination to differentiate between different dynamic Christian traditions and changing expressions of African traditional religion was intended as a counter to what he perceived to be another worrying tendency in Religious Studies, namely the inclination to contrast a single essential Christianity with a single essential African worldview that followed Placide Tempels’ enormously influential Bantu Philosophy (1959).4 For Ranger it was crucial that scholars grasped the significance of the variety of African responses to myth, sin, God, millenarianism, and prophetic tradition across the religious spectrum (1975a: 4–5). In some respects, this new agenda for research was put on hold during Ranger’s period in Tanzania (1963–1969), where his major scholarly endeavour was the history of Beni ngoma team dances that were performed in Dar es Salaam and across the Region, Dance and Society in Eastern Africa 1890–1970 (1975b). Interpreting the dances as an aspect of popular culture, he used them as ‘a source of commentary and as an articulation of the varying levels of popular concern during the colonial period’, events that ranged from the First World War and Great Depression to struggles around Independence (1975b: 165–65). Once again, this research took aim at an earlier synchronic,

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functionalist account of the dances in Central Africa (1975b: 3–4). Another unpublished, but much cited, piece of research was on the history of witchcraft eradication movements, such as Mchape, that traversed Central Africa during the colonial era (Ranger 1982a). Both these projects drew upon Ranger’s research in archives throughout Central and East Africa and from the fieldwork of African students funded by the University of Dar es Salaam (2013: 174). Although they were not about Christianity, they deepened his insight into the transnational dimensions of African social and religious movements. The research on witchcraft also alerted him to the existential reality of phenomenon and highlighted the appeal of Christian movements that engaged in its eradication or cleansing. During his period in Dar es Salaam, Ranger did however conduct research that would lead to the publication of two pioneering articles on the interaction of the Anglican Universities Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) with local culture and religion at Masasi, Tanzania. While visiting the mission in 1967 to deliver a lecture to the Tanzanian Historical Association, Bishop Trevor Huddleston gave him dozens of daily logbooks that missionaries and clergy had been obliged to keep recording their mundane, and sometimes extraordinary, endeavours to build new Christian communities (2013: 174). The first article picked up on Ranger’s growing interest in pneumatic dimensions of Christianity, comparing bio-medical and Pentecostal approaches to disease and healing (1982b). The second piece explored UMCA Bishop to Tanzania, Vincent Lucas’ endeavours to Christianise the traditional rite of passage (Ranger 1972). The major lesson Ranger elicited in this much cited piece was the sheer complexity of traditional ideas, chiefly authority, and ethnic identity in the face of missionaries’ misplaced sense of the superiority of their own religion. Ranger never made full use of the Masasi logbooks to write a monograph-­ length study of religious entanglements between missionaries and Africans. The task would fall to J.D.Y. Peel who, using similar sources generated by the Church Missionary Society, wrote a remarkable study of the encounter between Anglican missionaries and the Yoruba (Peel 2000). However, through an innovative series of articles on the social history of Christianity in Eastern Zimbabwe written in the 1980s, Ranger would bring significant new dimensions to the history of African Christianity. The African regime that came to power in independent Zimbabwe in 1980s quickly abolished Ranger’s prohibited status, allowing him to return to Makoni District where old friendships, nationalist connections, and a rich complex of Anglican, Catholic, and American Methodist missions gave him unrivalled oral and archival data on religious change. A series of reflective essays and commentaries outlined his developing approach to be called the history of popular Christianity (1986, 1987a, b, c, d, 1993a). The most important of these was his wide-ranging piece for African Studies Review, ‘Religious Movements and Politics in Sub-Saharan Africa’ (1986). His approach was to focus on ‘traditional’ and Christian religious movements by which he meant: ‘widespread and grass roots adherence to religious ideas, symbol and

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rituals, sometimes brief in duration, sometimes long-lasting; sometimes lacking, sometimes acquiring formal organisational structures’. And his object was to reconstruct ‘popular consciousness’, rather than ‘formal theology’, by culture-­specific symbolic analysis which eschewed western explanatory concepts and paid attention to the grounded idioms and images of the movements themselves (1986: 1, 5–12). This new paradigm of religious history reflected a shift away from nationalist historiography, in which he had reductively located religious movements in a proto/nationalist sequence, to a broader history of nationalism which did not privilege it over other kinds of political aspiration (51).5 Ranger’s growing interest in the symbolic and imaginative nature of religions themselves prompted a revised reading of independent churches. He now situated them alongside mission Christianity in a spectrum of popular Christianities (1986 appendix).6 Critiquing ahistorical and non-sociological notions of authenticity prominent in African theology and religious studies, he argued that Independent Churches such as the Apostles of Johanna Maranke and Johanna Masowe were ‘less African’ than supposed (1987a: 31; see also 1993a: 182). Such churches had their roots in Western derived movements of counter-establishment Christianity such as John Alexander Dowie’s healing movement in the US Mid-West, John G. Lake’s Pentecostal activities emanating from Azusa Street, Los Angeles, or from Protestant missionary revivalism. They had missionary antecedents, simply not the type that historians had hitherto considered.7 Highlighting the global appeal of these pneumatic movements, he argued that they expressed the consciousness of those who felt impotent and peripheral in the crisis of world capitalism that took hold during the 1930s. They attracted Zimbabwe women, youth, and small-scale peasants in a similar manner to the way that they empowered alienated industrial workers in the West. Rather than stress their supposed, ethnic, or national nature, Ranger instead emphasised their transnational character. The Apostles constituted networks of traders who crossed boundaries between nations. Fundamentally they were movements seeking power not for protest but for personal and practical purposes such as exorcism, healing, and security. If they did have political implications, they were most effective as a riposte to colonial legitimating ideology via their vicarious attack on the two pillars of indirect rule—mission Christianity and chieftaincy (1986: 51).8 Indeed, in their iconoclasm, their repudiation of traditional medicines and magic, and the totalising demands for separation that they made on adherents, they posed far more of a threat to traditional society than the historic mission churches (1993a: 182). Nevertheless, despite the vigour with which they caught hold of the rural imagination, Independent Churches did not sweep mission Christianity away. Charismatic revival led by women and youth held mission communities together. All these fascinating insights into independent Churches, along with animated cameos of their prophetic leaders, were included in a memorable chapter entitled ‘Taking in the Missionaries’ Task’. Ranger’s choice of title was

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intended to illustrate how AIC founders usually saw movements as supplemented mission Christianity rather than abolishing it (2002). The other major assertion of Ranger’s work on mission Christianity in Eastern Zimbabwe was that by the 1930s it had become Africanised: ‘not in the sense of being absorbed into some metaphysical “traditional” culture, but in the manner of being taken up by Africans and used by them to survive and prosper in modern African society’ (1987a: 42). He sought to show that mission Christianity was just as creative and interesting as Christian independency and that it lent itself to analysis of symbolic innovation just as readily. And by arguing that pioneering missions had the character of a movement in the 1910s–1920s, he was able to characterise some missionaries as wonderworking prophetic figures hardly distinguishable from African prophets with whom they vied for influence. It was possible, he asserted, to reconstruct ‘collective African experience, initiative and effervescence’ by ‘reading between the lines of missionary documentation; by balancing such documentation with records of African sermons and other discourses; by collecting and collating multiple oral reminiscences; by making deductions from observed and recorded behaviour’ (1993a: 183). Deploying this method, Ranger advanced a model of popular Christianity that hinged upon three factors (1987a). The first was that despite their cultural arrogance missionaries were symbolically sensitive enough to collaborate with Africans to seize hold of the local landscape and create new centres of spiritual power. Developing this idea in a Past and Present article which drew upon European cultural history, he argued the African landscape was full of religious significance (1987c). Trees, rocks, pools, and streams were often places of invocation to the ancestors, whilst caves could have particular significance as burial places of great dead chiefs and kings. He showed how in different ways it was re-sacralised in Christian fashion. Catholics took hold of the land though the constructions of shrines and grottos in which statues of the saints and the Virgin Mary were placed. On certain religious days of the year possessions of devout Catholics, usually women, would perambulate up the mountainsides for special prayers. The American Methodists developed holy ground out of the sites where their annual camp meetings were held at which the Holy Spirit came down. And the Anglicans created Christian cemeteries as the focal point of their religion. The second factor was missionaries’ dependence on African agents. Both the Anglicans and Methodists in Eastern Zimbabwe extended their influence, thereby recognising local men who set up as preachers and teachers on their own accord. These men were often labour migrants who returned home with the Christian faith they had encountered in the mines and cities of southern Africa. They had both status and financial independence in their Christian villages over which they presided with great zeal. Other agents were semi-trained teachers-cum-evangelists who worked in the mission stations or taught in outlying schools. Others still were Catholic catechists. These were lay Catholics who lived in African villages, teaching the rudiments of literacy and the catechism, often by rote. Later came Bible women, and members of

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female confraternities, who prayed, raised funds, asserted notions of Christian respectability, and instituted revival. The final factor Ranger identified in the creation of popular Christianity was that Africans seized upon Christian symbols and powers because these had a practical utility in relating to the colonial economy. The ideology and ritual of Makoni District American Methodism, Anglicanism, and Catholicism contributed to the creation of different types of peasantries. In its  combination of strong discipline, intense emotional experience, and ‘the gospel of the plough’, American Methodism provided an ideal mix for entrepreneurial pioneers who farmed extensively. Anglicanism provided an explicit ideology of village communalism via its creation of cemeteries. Whereas Catholicism sustained a subsistence agriculture in remote parts of the district. Its sacralisation of the landscape through the establishment of holy grottos  brought home labour migrants on pilgrimages, while its paternal discipline ensured that hard pressed female cultivators remained in line (1985, 1987a: 43). Once again, Ranger never wrote an extended monograph on the entanglement of missionaries and Africans in Makoni District, although the sum-total of his essays in terms of content and impact had the same effect. The closest he got was an extensive essay on American Methodism, combining white missionary records with a subsequently collected African archive of oral reminiscence (1994). Relating his Makoni work back to his abiding interest in the history of nationalism, Ranger argued that all these local Christianities, save American Methodism, interacted with the politics of Makoni district in a manner that facilitated wartime mobilisation  (1885). Zones of popular Christianity had been created by missionaries and Africans to match those founded by the mediums of mhondoro cults, the religion of traditional ancestors. It was in guerrillas’ interests to negotiate with, priests, pastors, and spirit mediums to gain popular legitimacy and material support (1985, 1986: 58). Ranger would use the idea of deeply rooted zones of popular religion in his subsequent work on nationalism and politics in rural Matabeleland, including Violence and Memory, cowritten with Jocelyn Alexander and JoAnn McGregor, to explain patterns of rural mobilisation and the fate of local communities in colonial and post-colonial violence in Western Zimbabwe (2000). In an essay penned with Jocelyn Alexander, the authors showed how the Nevana Shrine in the north-west continued to be as resilient and adaptable, as it had been throughout the previous century in its service to the region, complementing the activities of the churches  (1998). The shrine priesthood was involved in healing individuals following the end of the liberation war in the 1970s and developed an explanation of the droughts of the 1980s which was a commentary on the history and legitimacy of the Mugabe Regime (Ranger 1999). Literacy was a ‘power’ central to the making of popular Christianity. A key feature of Ranger’s work was the exploration of how missionaries and Africans collaborated to create vernaculars that became the basis of ethnic identity. The origins of this strand of his scholarship lay in his essay ‘The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa’ in his co-edited volume with Eric Hobsbawn

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(1983; Ranger 1983), though his model of an open, differentiated, adaptable pre-colonial social world paralleled his understanding of the variegated, flexible nature of pre-colonial religion. He reiterated that in nineteenth-century pre-­ colonial Africa, far from there being a single ‘tribal identity’, most Africans moved in and out of multiple identities, defining themselves at one moment as subjects of a chief, at another moment as members of a cult, and at yet another moment as members of a professional guild. The boundaries of the ‘tribal’ polity and the hierarchies of authority within them did not define the conceptual horizons of African peoples. All this changed with colonial rule when pacification came to mean ‘the immobilization of populations, reinforcement of ethnicity and greater rigidity in social definition’. Colonial administrators needed comprehensible and manageable units and so invented tribes; urban employers needed, or at the very least inevitably developed, ethnic hierarchies of hypothesised labour skills (Ranger 1983: 249–250). Ranger’s initial scholarship on ethnic formation focussed upon European motivations and agency. His subsequent research shifted attention to African ideological work in the imagination of ethnicity, a process that continued to be defined and contested  (1993b). In a brilliant case-study developed from his work on Eastern Zimbabwe, he explored the making of the Manyika identity. This ethnic category did have a pre-colonial currency deriving from the territory and the people of Chief Mutasa. But it was expanded and given a ‘degree of reality’, ‘due to the agency both of “unofficial” Europeans and “unofficial” Africans—of missionaries and their converts—and of African labour migrants’ (1989: 121–122). Focusing on the use of language in the creation of ethnicity, Ranger described how, through the activities of missionary linguists, the gradual lexical and idiomatic change in the Shona language countrywide was turned into ‘discrete dialect zones by developing written languages centred upon a number of widely scattered bases’ (1989: 127). Responding to the grassroots demand for education in Manicaland, native pastors, teachers, and evangelists took the new dialect out to the people in the form of tracts, catechisms, Bibles, and educational literature. Mission converts, who were often the first Africans in Central Africa to become literate, took up the immensely important task of writing ethnic history which provided new ethnicity with a primordialism, a rootedness more profound than its historical reality. These histories were authorised and disseminated through schooling. Ranger also considered ethnicity in relation to labour, illustrating how labour migrants from the eastern province, who were by no means all mission Christians, would ‘attach themselves to the growing “myth of the Manyika” … with their irresistible “high sounding English”’ to maximise their chances in the labour market. The Manyika came to be thought of as natural domestic servants (1989: 139–140). Ranger’s work on popular religion in Eastern Zimbabwe was almost entirely rural focussed, concerned with the construction of peasantries and their relation to politics. However, he expanded his conceptual horizons once again in the 2000s when he began to research the social and cultural history of the Zimbabwean city of Bulawayo. His article ‘Dignifying Death: The Politics of

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Burial in Bulawayo’ (2004) was a retort to historians who asserted a hegemonic model of colonialism which constrained indigenous creativity in African townships. In response, he demonstrated the symbolic and practical autonomy of the religious sphere. Inspired by his reading on West African urban life where city dwellers had complex cemetery and mausoleum politics, he wondered how urban Zimbabweans gave dignity to the departed (Jeater 2011: 44). He explored how different social categories took cultural and symbolic initiatives in the realms of death, burial, and commemoration, and how these shifted over time. The initiatives ranged from: the performance of rites to ‘bring back the spirit’ a year after death, in the face of missionary and municipal prohibitions; the role of burial societies in financing the funeral and wake of a deceased labour migrant; to efforts of educated young men to erect memorials for African kings and chiefs (2004, 2011). Another lacuna in Ranger’s work on religion in Makoni was the absence of a proper consideration of issues of gender. He put this right in a remarkable departure from his abiding concern with large scale popular movements with a study of a Wesleyan Methodist dynasty, Are We Not Also Men? The Samkange Family and African Politics in Zimbabwe 1920–1964 (1995). In retrospect, Ranger also viewed the book as a corrective to his doctoral thesis in which he had ignored the Earl of Cork’s remarkable family, and his religion, to focus on a man whose ‘humanity [had] drained away’ (2013: 34–35). Seizing the opportunity to pen a proper family history, he examined the role of Christianity in redefining gender and making class in a manner that underpinned the ideal of Christian civilisation (1995: vii). He explored the new notions of womanhood Grace Samkange achieved through enhancing her status and influence as a co-evangelist with her husband Thompson. He observed the new type of female authority she was accorded via her leadership of the Methodist sorority, the Ruwadzano. And he noted her role as a wife who sustained Christian monogamy as the basis of the elite family. Thus, Wesleyan Methodism remade gender relations in a manner that created the progressive African family as a feature of a new respectable class. Returning to his concern with African nationalism in the later chapters of the book, Ranger9 observed that Thompson—had no ‘sympathy with a “totalitarian” view of nationalism—in which a single movement would organise and orchestrate the “branches of the people’s life”… He stood for a representative view, one in which recognised (and Christian) leaders were entrusted by the branches of civil society with the right and duty of representing them. Still, he did constantly call for unity, he did want many branches and a large membership of Congress’ (1995: 120). Here Ranger was doubtless ventriloquising through his protagonist, for Thompson’s commitment to nationalist unity with a belief in the autonomy of civil institutions represented his own response to the far-reaching crisis that so damaged Zimbabwe from the turn of the twenty-first century onward when nationalism grew ever more authoritarian, the economy collapsed, and political violence became widespread (McCraken 1997: 182–183).

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We see Ranger’s aspiration for a united civil society holding a de facto one-­ party state at bay in his last project on Christianity, namely a set of papers and publications on Zimbabwean church state relations since the 2000s. It was particularly manifest in a Pew funded project, ‘Evangelicals and Democracy’, in which he convened the African research. He celebrated the growing radicalisation of Zimbabwean evangelical churches in their political declarations in favour of peace and social justice. He embraced ‘the extraordinary unanimity’ of 59 denominations in their pronouncements on ‘equality and democracy’ (2008: 239–240). And he remained ever vigilant for signs of ‘vibrant and life changing worship in  local churches’ that suggested a people’s church struggling to free itself from the compromised theologies of their national leaders (2007). Terence Ranger’s scholarship on Christianity demonstrated the significance of a spectrum of Christian expressions in the making of African history. Situating Christianity in a religious field alongside an historicised African traditional religion, he showed how they articulated to politics, economics, and society. This dynamic model of religious change challenged the ahistorical, essentialising tendency in Religious Studies which had its roots in a functionalist social anthropology. Because he took a bottom-up approach to African history, Ranger was never fixated with the debate about Christianity’s relation to commerce and empire which so dominated the historiography of African Christianity in the 1990s and 2000s (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, 1997; Elbourne 2003). He was more concerned with exposing the naivety of the conviction held by some missionaries that African society could simplistically be changed from one set of beliefs to another. Missionaries could be imaginative and adaptive, but their successes mostly came when they collaborated with local Christian agents in accord with the direction of social change. His fascination lay more with the creativity of the African church, the agency and creativity of its faithful, and their agency and resilience in the face of constraints and crises.

Notes 1. Ranger was responding to an essay by Ifkenga-Metuh (1987). 2. Adrian Hastings also critiqued this scholarly overemphasis on AICs (2000). 3. See, for instance, Daneel (1987). 4. For a discussion of Bantu Philosophy see Maxwell (2022). 5. Interestingly, Ranger’s interpretation of religious movements prefigured Fred Cooper’s influential argument that Africans in the 1950s were open to a variety of models of liberation, religious and political, before nationalism became the preeminent trajectory (Cooper 2002). 6. The same intention to close the gap between independent and mission churches by viewing them all as expressions of popular Christianity is apparent in Hastings (1994).

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7. These transnational connections were examined more fully by Maxwell (2006) and Cabrita (2018). 8. Here Ranger was influenced by the important book by Karen Fields (1985). 9. Thompson Samkange to B. Mnyanda, 13 June, 1947, Documents in Black case, Samkange Archives.

Bibliography Alexander, J., J. McGregor, and T. Ranger 2000. Violence and Memory. One Hundred Years in the ‘Dark Forests’ of Matabeleland. Oxford: James Curry; Harare: Weaver. Alexander, J., and T.  Ranger 1998. ‘Competition and Integration in the Religious History of North-Western Zimbabwe’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 28, 1: 3–31. Beach, D. 1979. ‘Chimurenga: The Shona Risings of 1896–97.’ Journal of African History, 20, 3: 395–420. Cabrita, J. 2018. The People’s Zion. Southern Africa, the United States, and a Transatlantic Faith-Healing Movement. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Cobbing, J. 1977. ‘The Absent Priesthood: another look at the Rhodesian risings of 1896–97.’ Journal of African History, 18, 1: 61–84. Comaroff, Jean and John Comaroff. 1991. Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa. Of Revelation and Revolution: Volume 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Comaroff, Jean and John Comaroff. 1997. The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier. Of Revelation and Revolution: Volume 2. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cooper, F. 2002. Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Daneel, M. 1987. Quest for Belonging. Introduction to the Study of African Independent Churches. Gweru: Mambo Press. Elbourne, E. 2003. ‘The Word Made Flesh: Christianity, Modernity and Cultural Colonialism in the Work of Jean and John Comaroff’. American Historical Review 58 (April): 435–59. Fields, K. 1985. Revival and Rebellion in Colonial Central Africa. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Jeater, D. 2011. ‘Terence Ranger: Life as Historiography’. [An Interview transcribed and edited by Marybeth Hamilton]. History Workshop (July) https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/terence-­ranger-­life-­as-­historiography/ [consulted 29 August 2022]. Hastings, A. 1994. The Church in Africa, 1450–1950. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hastings, A. 2000. ‘African Christian Studies, 1967–1999: Reflections of an Editor.’ Journal of Religion in Africa, 30, 1: 30–44. Horton, Robin. 1971. ‘African Conversion’, Africa. 41, 20: 85–108. Ifkenga-Metuh, Emefie. 1987. ‘The Shattered Microcosm. A Critical Survey of Explanations of Conversion in Africa’ in Kirsten Holst-Peterson (ed.), Religion, Development and African Identity. Uppsala, Scandinavian Institute of African Studies: 11–27. Maxwell, D. 2006. African Gifts of the Spirit. Pentecostalism and the Rise of a Zimbabwean Transnational Religious Movement. Oxford, James Currey. Maxwell, D. 2022. Religious Entanglements. Central African Pentecostalism, the creation of cultural knowledge, and the making of the Luba Katanga. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press.

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McCraken, J. 1997. ‘Terry Ranger: A Personal Appreciation.’ Journal of Southern African Studies, 23, 2: 175–185. Peel, J.D.Y. 2000. Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ranger, T. 1967. Revolt in Southern Rhodesia, 1896–7: A Study in African Resistance. London: Heinemann. Ranger, T. 1970. The African Voice in Southern Rhodesia, 1898–1930. London: Heinemann; Illinois: Northwestern University Press; New  York: International Publications Service; Nairobi: East Africa Publishing House. Ranger, T., and I.  Kimambo (eds). 1972. The Historical Study of African Religion. London: Heinemann. Ranger T. 1972. ‘Missionary Adaptation of African Religious Institutions: The Masasi Case’ in T. Ranger and I. Kimambo (eds). The Historical Study of African Religion. London: Heinemann: 221–251. Ranger, T., and J. Weller (eds). 1975. Themes in the Christian History of Central Africa. London: Heinemann. Ranger, T. 1975a. ‘Introduction. Christianity and Central African Religions’ in T.  Ranger and J.  Weller (eds.), Themes in the Christian History of Central Africa. London: Heinemann: 3–13. Ranger, T. 1975b. Dance and Society in Eastern Africa, 1890–1970. London: Heinemann. Ranger, T. 1976. “Towards a Useable African Past,” in: Christopher Fyfe (ed.), African Studies Since 1945: Essays in Honour of Basil Davidson’s Sixtieth Birthday. London: Longman: 17–30. Ranger, T. 1982a. ‘Medical Science and Pentecost: The Dilemma of Anglicanism in Africa’, in T.  Ranger and W.  Shiels (eds.), The Church and Healing. Oxford: Blackwell: 333–65. Ranger, T. 1982b. ‘Mchape: a study in diffusion and interpretation’, ms. Ranger, T., and E.  Hobsbawm (eds). 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ranger, T 1983. ‘The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa’ in Ranger, T., and E. Hobsbawm (eds.), The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 211–262. Ranger, T. 1985. Peasant Consciousness and Guerrilla War in Zimbabwe. London: James Currey. Ranger, T. 1986. ‘Religious Movements and Politics in Sub-Saharan Africa’, African Studies Review, Vol. 29, No. 2, 1–69. Ranger, T. 1987a. ‘Religion, Development and African Christian Identity’ in K. Holst-­ Petersen (ed.), Religion, Development and African Identity (Uppsala, Scandinavian Institute of African Studies: 29–57. Ranger, T. 1987b. ‘Concluding Summary’, in K.  Holst-Petersen (ed.), Religion, Development and African Identity (Uppsala, Scandinavian Institute of African Studies: 145–163. Ranger, T. 1987c. ‘Pilgrimages and Holy Places in Twentieth Century Zimbabwe’, Past and Present, No. 117, November: 158–194. Ranger, T. 1987d. ‘An Africanist Comment’, American Ethnologist, Vol. 14, No. 1: 182–185. Ranger, T. 1988. ‘African Traditional Religion’, in S. Sutherland and P. Clarke (eds), The Study of Religion, Traditional and New Religion. London: Routledge: 106–114.

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Ranger, T. 1989. ‘Missionaries, Migrants and the Manyika: The Invention of Ethnicity in Zimbabwe’, in L. Vail (ed.), The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa. London, James Currey: 118–150. Ranger, T. 1993a. ‘New approaches to the history of mission Christianity’, in T. Falola (ed), African Historiography. Essays in honour of Jacob Ade Ajayi. London: Longman: 180–194. Ranger, T. 1993b. ‘The Invention of Tradition Revisited: The Case of Colonial Africa’, in T. Ranger and O. Vaughan (eds), Legitimacy and the State in Twentieth Century Africa. London: Macmillan: 62–111. Ranger, T. 1993c. ‘The Local and the Global in Southern African Religious History’, in R.W.  Hefner (ed.), Conversion to Christianity. Berkeley: University of California Press: 180–194. Ranger, T. 1994. ‘Protestant Missions in Africa: The Dialectic of Conversion’, in T.D.  Blakely, W.E.A.  Van Beek and D.L.  Thomson (eds), Religion in Africa: Experience and Expression. London: James Currey: 275–313. Ranger, T. 1995. Are We Not Also Men? The Samkange Family & African Politics in Zimbabwe, 1920–64. London: James Currey; Cape Town: David Philip; Portsmouth NH: Heinemann; Harare: Baobab Books). Ranger, T. 1999. Voices From the Rocks: Nature, Culture & History in the Matopos Hills of Zimbabwe. Oxford: James Currey; Bloomington: Indiana University Press; Harare: Baobab Books. Ranger, T. 2002. ‘Taking on the Missionary’s Task: African Spirituality and the Mission Churches of Manicaland in the 1930s’ in David Maxwell (ed.), Christianity and the African Imagination. Leiden: Brill, 93–126. Ranger, T. 2004. ‘Dignifying Death: The Politics of Burial in Bulawayo, 1893 to 1960’, The Journal of Religion in Africa, Vol. 34, No. 1, 110–144. Ranger, T. 2007. ‘The Church in Zimbabwe’. Christchurch Cathedral Talks, 15 August 2007. Ranger, T. 2008. ‘Afterword’ in Terence Ranger (ed.) Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Africa. New York: Oxford University Press. Ranger, T. 2011. Bulawayo Burning: A Social History of a Southern African City. Woodbridge: James Currey; Harare: Weaver Press. Ranger, T. 2013. Writing Revolt: An Engagement with African Nationalism, 1957–67. Woodbridge: James Currey; Harare: Weaver Press. Sundkler, B. 1987. ‘African Church History in a New Key’, in Kirsten Holst-Peterson, (ed.), Religion Development and African Identity. Uppsala, Scandinavian Institute of African Studies: 73–83. Taylor, J. 1963. The Primal Vision. London: SCM Press. Tempels, P. 1959 [1945]. Bantu Philosophy. Paris: Présence Africaine. Turnbull, C. 1962. The Lonely African, Simon and Schuster, New York.

CHAPTER 10

The Writings and Legacy of J. F. Ade Ajayi Femi J. Kolapo

The current chapter is a reflection on some of Professor J. F. Ade Ajayi’s most important writings on the role of Mission/Church in the emergence of modern Africa and synthesis of them. While Mission/Church was but only one of the major themes that Professor Ajayi wrote about, it nevertheless was at the heart of his scholarship and is also my focus in this chapter. A significant collection of Professor Ajayi’s essays was published in 1999 titled Tradition and Change in Africa: The Essays of J.F. Ade Ajayi. It consisted of twenty-nine select papers organized by themes into six sections. The editor described these works, written over the span of several decades, as some of Professor Ajayi’s leading essays. A section in the book consisting of five essays is organized under the heading of “Mission Studies.”1 These essays and a couple of significant others serve as the source for my analysis.2 Some of the editor’s prefacing comments on the essays are germane to an appreciation of these writings and of other works of Ajayi on Christianity in Nigeria and Africa and on the legacy that they represent. The editor of the collection stated that back in the late 1950s and 1960s Ajayi: joined the few other pioneers to advocate a nationalist historiography that, among others, demonstrated that Africa had a long-established history (not the so-­called history of Europe in Africa), that colonialism and European contact did not completely destroy African institutions, and that colonial rule was an episode with limited impact. He joined others in developing new curricula along these per-

F. J. Kolapo (*) Department of History, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. E. Barnes, T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48270-0_10

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spectives and write essays and books on different aspects of the continuity and changes in African history.3

The editor further disclosed that “Ajayi’s starting contribution to African history is in the area of missionary studies” and the essays on missions in the said collection made significant arguments that will receive critical mention in my analysis, viz.: “That Christianity is important in Africa; “a new elite created by the missionaries has been at the forefront of change and contributed to the rise of African nationalism. “there are Christian pioneers whose visions of change were broad and impressive; “clashes between an African elite and Europeans enabled the former to reinterpret the relationship between races and to theorize the alternatives that they and their people could pursue.”4

Historiographical Context Ajayi wrote many other essays that are not directly about the church, Christian mission and missionary activities that are nonetheless important to mention in the current study. Some of them provide us with Ajayi’s conceptualization of the nature of history on the ground and the dynamic relationship between change and continuity in the unfolding of human history as he applied it to Nigeria and Africa. They provide a conceptual lens on which were based his analyses of mission, missionary and African interaction, and Church history in Africa. For example, Ajayi’s chapter titled “the Continuity of African institutions under colonialism” describes the historiographical context within which he explored the nature of European Christian missions in Africa; viz., that of the relationship between internal and external dynamics in the unfolding of African history.5 He was perturbed by the “colonialist” historiographical trend in British scholarship on Africa that essentialized European intervention. These studies positioned colonialism to have overturned and disrupted the normal flow of African peoples’ history. While emphasizing that change is the nature of history, he thought the question to ask was how African societies—institutions, agents, and culture—adapted to external stimulus; how Africans continued to make history on their own terms within the given context of external intrusion and its social-political strictures.6 A. E. Afigbo classified this historiographical stance of Ajayi as belonging to the genre that revolted against the Eurocentric, negative, and denigrating methodological position, especially in European representation of the history of Africa:

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a revolt against three closely related attitudes which characterised the writing of African history in the colonial period … firstly, that the “lack of written sources in some areas meant also the absence of history”, secondly that for the most part African history consists mainly in the activities of invaders from outside; and thirdly that the history of the relationship between the invaders and Africans is more or less the story of “a race of gods and heroes communing with mortals; Prospero communing with Caliban”, a story in which the African hardly played any noteworthy part or in which if he attempted to invariably did so on the reprehensible side.

Felix Ekechi echoed this view asserting that Ajayi’s first book belonged among “‘serious historical studies’ of missions” that developed in tandem with the rise of nationalism and independence in Africa. It was produced when “the Eurocentric perspective in mission studies was replaced with the Africanist interpretation, at times identified as ‘nationalist’ historiography.”7 This nationalist context was the ground for Ajayi’s use of historical source evidence, beyond those relied upon by British writers, including especially oral sources, and for his consequent analysis of African history.8 The outcome was his conceptualization of the European imperialist intrusion of late nineteenth– early twentieth-century Africa as only an interruption, an “episode in the continuous flow of African history.” He clarified that this does not minimize “the fundamental, and often quite ruthless nature of the changes brought to Africa and African institutions” by the factor of European colonial rule.9 In Ajayi’s assessment of what made up the historical experience and evolution of Africa, he tipped the scale towards what became known in Africanist and nationalist historiography as “African initiatives.”10 Such initiatives were primarily progressive and productive of structures, institutions, and cultures that proactively and profitably adapted Africans to the conditions that confronted them, in counter position to European intervention that were especially disruptive and retrograde. Another historiographical emphasis of Ajayi in this early writing was that the particularly dramatic and traumatic changes caused by the much over-stressed element of Western colonial intervention was due to its abrogation of local political autonomy and sovereignty. Hence, one of the most significant elements to the adaptive strategy of Africans and African agents of European missions was to assert, rebuild, or re/constitute spaces of autonomy within which to act in ways that met their own short and long-term interests. The colonialist historiographical emphasis that Ajayi and others revolted against represented African history in terms largely of Europeans acting in and on Africa and Africans. Africans did not feature as active historical agents. But Ajayi’s analyses show that Africans established niches of autonomy and were able to delimit how deeply or widely external forces, including of colonialism, impacted.11 Ajayi applied this conception of history to his analysis of nineteenth and twentieth-century European Christian missions’ engagement with Africans. Missionaries, missionary teachings, and the institutions, the church and the

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school, within this purview could not deprive Africans of this regenerative and adaptive human capacity. Rather Africans adapted these new external forces and factors in ways demonstrative and facilitative of their historical agency. In the first place, there was the strategic logistical weaknesses of the foreign agency in West Africa, like staff shortages, language and cultural barriers, and poor European adaptability to the local disease environment. Consequently, missionaries and even colonial agents found it necessary to rely on Africans and to partner with them if they were going to make any headway in their evangelistic (for missionary) or colonialist (for imperial agents’) objectives. However the European agents of mission, commerce, or colonialism thought of Africans, they found it necessary, to varying degrees, to give assent to, support, and even promote a class of Africans, extant African social structures, or some preexisting local cultural capital, to enable the intruding Europeans achieve many of their own objectives. Second, because all categories of Africans that the European colonial factor spawned or encountered and engaged were active agents in every aspect of their interrelationship with the Europeans, Africans acted on European explorers, missionaries, traders, and colonizing forces and objectives to serve their own interests and purposes. To put this in as close to Ajayi’s phrasing as possible, it is that Africans, individually and collectively, made choices with respect to adopting, adapting, or coopting structures and cultures from outside to enhance, readjust, and determine their lives. States and peoples likewise. Emergent new social classes of African peoples (as Western educated elite, migrant workers, peasant producers, proto-capitalists, and small-scale traders etc.) actively engaged with foreign forces based on their specific historical experiences. They managed their interactions based on the particular socio-economic and political configurations within which they developed in various autonomous ways and in conformity with their perceived socio-economic and political interests.12 Thus, despite the strictures associated with European intrusion and political domination, Ajayi questioned viewpoints that would deny that Africans still “exercised any control over their own fate.”13 If anything, Africans, he averred, valiantly and successfully struggled “to master the new forces that … descended on them…”14

Christian Missionaries in Nigeria 1841–1891 This methodological stance suffused themes that Ajayi explored in his oeuvre, Christian Missionaries in Nigeria 1841–1891, a classic in the field. Accolades for this classic are many. Richard Gray in 1966 declared that it “carri[ed] the study not only of mission, but also of African history a long step forward.”15A. E. Afigbo also in 1966 predicted that the “book will remain a classic for a long, long time.”16 Ekechi considered that “with the possible exception of [Roland] Oliver’s work, few historical studies on missions in Africa have been as widely and frequently cited.”17 T. O. Ranger in 1993 remarked that though “the book, [was] now a quarter of a century old,” it remained “one of the few true classics of African historiography.”18

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Most reviews and analyses of the book agree that it effectively lays out the origins of West African, and especially Yoruba, educated elite and pioneer or proto-nationalists role in the emergence of modern Nigeria.19 It demonstrated their critical role in the development of Christianity and the Church and in the emergence of the modern nation of Nigeria. Ajayi described this class of social and political actors as “a new elite,” spawned by nineteenth-century European and indigenous Christian missionary and educational activities. These new elite were a product of missionary education, but they also became avid promoters of Western education and modernization. Thus, there was this dynamic intersection of external and internal forces of modernization that in Ajayi’s analysis ultimately linked to the development of modern Nigeria. His analysis of the “initiatives” of this group was productive of the rise at first, in the nineteenth century, of a general nationalism that was premised on the idea and identity of the “African race.” Eventually in Nigeria by the late nineteenth century and early decades of colonial period, this new elite became the originator of a potent cultural nationalism that became the source of an efflorescence of Yoruba self-consciousness and ethno-cultural renaissance. The latter was the foundation of the nationalism that saw out colonial rule from the country.

Christianity and Nationalism The social-historical context of the recaptives’ (Africans returned to Africa by the British Naval Squadron after the latter has intercepted slave ships on the trip to the New World) experience of enslavement, displacement, exile, and liberation in Sierra Leone and their re-immigration to Yorubaland as Saros was extremely conducive to social and political re-engineering. No wonder the European Anglican, Methodist, and Presbyterian missions took advantage of Saro social and cultural capital—their Western education, skills and professional and local connections—to further their evangelistic goals in Nigeria. Ajayi demonstrated that the entire returnee movement (of Saro from Sierra Leone to Nigeria) itself became a socio-cultural and political exercise in self-­ reconstruction and social reconstitution of community.20 The social imaginary of the returnees became infused with the idea of modernization, development, and nation-building in the context of “Christianity, Commerce, and Civilization” credo of the time. At Abeokuta and eventually in Ibadan and other places in the interior of southern Nigeria where war and displacement had traumatized societies, newly rising political leadership as well as returnees from Sierra Leone (Saro) were equally open to the concept of modernization, development, reconstruction, and nation-building. The international humanitarian and abolitionist ethos and commercial efflorescence and the stress on “legitimate trade” of the period grounded and amplified these momentous changes for the recaptives. The Saro thus adopted Christianity, absorbed Western education, and adapted Western ideas of “development” and the nation, to reconstitute themselves and their home communities. The missionaries and their schools were

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welcomed as instruments for these purposes even by the local African hosts of the recaptives. These activities were the precursors of the modern nation-­ building that developed after World War II. Thus, we have the experiment with the creation of a modern state of Abeokuta in the late nineteenth century by some Western educated Egba recaptives. These elite returnees to the city united with some of the traditional political elite and began to implement a program that combined development with political restructuring along modernist lines. They borrowed ideas of what constituted a modern nation from their British education and socialization, including a government structure that was parallel to and that moderated the traditional political arrangement. A postal service and customs department and schools were all established, and traditional political elite were placed on a payroll, among other reforms they instituted.21 All this was not without difficulties. The process of social transformation and particularly of cultural nationalism had its positive origins. This was in the deliberate actions of the recaptives and the newly emerging educated and professional class in Sierra Leone and across West Africa who actively worked on adapting Western ideas of self and nation to suit them. But it also arose from a negative basis of being partly the result of responses to European racism and increasing rise and spread of colonialist imperialism. The sentiments and actions emanating from this was discriminatory against these educated Africans, denigrating of things African, and clearly seeking to impose direct political dominion on African. The cream of the new elite, mostly products of the missionary education and in Lagos and in Yorubaland largely members of the Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS), with some Methodists, developed potent cultural nationalist sentiments. They developed strong cultural resistance to European discrimination and denunciation of African culture. They began to contest European monopolization of leadership and to challenge British and European propagation of their cultural superiority and exceptionalism in the church and without. They advocated for a Christianity infused with African cultural way of dancing, singing, of being. Then came the promotion of African-led churches to give full rein to cultural adaptation and enculturation of Christianity within their indigenous culture. In Nigeria, they began to promote Yoruba culture, language, and literature. They began documenting it, circulating literature on it, popularizing its folklore, and establishing a foundation for writing and dissemination of pan/Yoruba history. All this generated an increasing awareness of indigenous culture and tradition. African names replaced European names, new hymns infused with local airs were developed for church use, and a pride in being African and Christian arose among the people. These were the authentic contexts for nationalist development and the basis for African modes of doing Christianity.22 We should note that Ajayi’s analysis of these elite’s role in laying the foundation for the modern Nigerian nation is thus made up of several strands. There was the elite’s role in the Christian missions, particularly in spreading

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Christianity and Western education. Another is their pioneering role in opposing and resisting foreign European political domination and racism in and beyond the Church in Nigeria but also across West Africa. Then as referenced earlier on, these elites became enthused with and proud to promote their local culture, documenting it, circulating literature on it, popularizing its folklore, and establishing a foundation for writing and disseminating its history. Finally, Ajayi’s notion of modern nationalism connects with the introduction of the Church itself and African’s use of it. As he put it, “the Church became an association creating a new kind of communal feeling which transcended sub-ethnic frontiers.”23 These all constituted a movement along the line that produced modern nationalism, with its nationalist parties, anti-colonialism, and of the modern independent nation of Nigeria.

Henry Venn and a “Development Agenda” In studying the origin of the Church in Nigeria and particularly making visible the role of Crowther and other African agents in the spread of Christianity, Western education, and modernization, Ajayi engaged with the significant role of the nineteenth-century abolitionist, humanitarian, evangelical, and missionary groups from Britain. The chief representative of this initiating factor from Europe in Ajayi’s many writings was Henry Venn, the longtime pioneer secretary of the CMS.24 The CMS was the organization mostly responsible for taking the recaptives in Sierra Leone under its progressive, paternal, wings; helping to convert them to Christianity and introduce them to Western education and Euro-Christian ideals. Venn was the CMS point man who devised a program of action from Fowell Buxton’s abolitionist and humanitarian philosophy of “Christianity, Commerce, and Civilization” and the accompanying missionary credo of the “Bible and the Plough.” Samuel Ajayi Crowther was its executor on the ground, taking it to the field in West Africa, particularly, in his Upper Niger Mission episcopal field. The plan was all encompassing: Christianization, education, the building of a national church led by indigenous clerics in a modernizing nation of new Western educated elites, as well as a program of commercial and agricultural (economic) development. This was designed to permanently extirpate slavery and the slave trade, provide the people with alternative profitable modern economic endeavors premised on modern agriculture. Its goal included in general the development of a middle class, a new class of modern farmers, educated merchants, and professionals, whose economic activities and interests would link with the commerce and industry of Europe in a profitable manner. By this plan the old slave trading elite of West Africa would be sidelined and replaced by a new Western educated elite imbued with ideas, ideals, and influences from Europe. A paragraph in Ajayi’s A Patriot to the Core instances one of such development actions:

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Manchester Evangelicals and other ‘Friends of Africa’, under the leadership of Thomas Clegg, were encouraged to promote the cultivation of cotton, as an alternative to the US slave grown cotton. They were also to encourage the growth of a civilised Native Agency. Their agents were to be mission educated young men, not chiefs such as controlled the Liverpool-based palm oil trade in the Delta, under the same ‘Trust’ or credit system that prevailed in the slave trade era. Young men from the Mission, including Crowther’s children, were recruited and trained in Britain to supervise the cultivation, harvesting, cleaning and preparation of cotton for export in bales. The banks of the River Ogun were cleared; the river landing place at Aro was built, and a road constructed to Abeokuta to take carts for carrying heavy goods like cotton gins … The Mission [added] brick-­ making, carpentry, sawing of logs into planks, printing and other industrial arts.25

In Venn conceiving of this idea of development and instituting policies, sourcing its funding, deploying missionary agents and teachers to carry out the policy on the ground in West Africa, we have in Ajayi’s elegant conception, the first “policy of development” planned for Africa. It was progressive. It was revolutionary. In many respects, it was effective and momentous in its impact. Churches were founded, schools were built, and a critical mass of people were converted and trained in modern skills and professions. Modern agriculture developed and production of industrial crops like cotton and cocoa for export overseas spread beyond the church, and beyond the confines of the elite and coastal regions into the interior. All of this, Ajayi anchored on the assiduity, patriotism, and nationalism of African auxiliaries who implemented the policy on the ground. And all these outcomes for African agents and African peoples were produced in the contexts in which they contested the blueprint as well as positively contributed to every aspect of the development program.26 The thesis of a “development program” implemented for Africa that originated from ideas, thoughts, and convictions of a section of British humanitarians and evangelicals was thus a major theme in Ajayi’s writings on missions in nineteenth-century Africa. But Ajayi discriminated between purposes and forms of the foreign engagement and encroachment on Nigeria and Africa. The early nineteenth-century set of foreign humanitarian, evangelical, and missionary groups were moved by an ideology that compelled a duty upon them to extend British-type civilization to Africa to compensate for their enslavement by Europeans. They possessed a vision of social and economic change in Africa conformable to “progress.” Here, Ajayi clearly associated an initiating significance with the anti-slavery, abolitionist, humanitarian, and progressive elements in European missionary intervention. This is demonstrated by Ajayi applauding Henry Venn’s original CMS plan for Crowther and Nigeria. He applauds, especially, Venn’s objectives of developing a self-sustaining, self-­ supporting, and self-propagating church in Africa where foreign missionary tutelage would be quietly and quickly withdrawn so that local and indigenous leadership and an adapted Christianity could become rooted.27

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This links to Ajayi’ explanation of missionary and local church efforts in the provision of education, medicine, and civilization. Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone, established by the CMS, as the pioneer skills and trade school, and eventually as a higher institution, was the leading force in this regard. It was quickly followed by the rise of church-led primary-, secondary-, and tertiary-­ level education spreading across all West Africa where the CMS (and other rival missions) implemented their evangelistic and education plans. While Ajayi both promoted and celebrated cultural and national self-assertion of Africans, i.e., “African initiatives,” he also clearly associated these initiatives with global or universal forces of modernization and development, affirming that the new elite drew part of their inspiration and obtained useful support from those who were “friends” of Africa. Regarding the critical role of African agents—catechists, interpreters, schoolmasters, lay persons, and clerics—in the establishment of Christianity and the Church in Africa, Ajayi, with E.  A. Ayandele, extended his argument beyond Nigeria to other parts of sub-Sahara Africa, stressing that “these auxiliaries bore the brunt of evangelization, discharging a number of functions which were necessarily beyond the reach of their alien white masters.”28

Samuel Ajayi Crowther Ajayi’s A Patriot to the Core makes available to the reading public as a volume much of Ajayi’s reflections found in his other writings on the person, career, and significance of Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther in the history of West Africa and Nigeria. In it, Ajayi showcases Crowther’s central role in the planting and spreading of Christianity in Nigeria. Crowther was the brightest and best of the new elites that were spawned by nineteenth-century British humanitarian and evangelical mission. He represented the best of the product of abolitionism and Christian spread during the period. He also represented the influence, goals, and the potential of the class of Western educated elite produced by the activities of the missions, their churches, and their schools that spread across West Africa. Ajayi positions Crowther’s many pioneering activities as the more germane to the founding of modern Nigeria than those of European agents. Consequently, he pits Crowther against Goldie in a rebuke of the writings by British colonialist historians that acclaimed George Goldie or Frederick Lugard, two British imperialist agents, as founders of modern Nigeria.29 Ajayi highlighted how it was mostly Crowther who developed the orthography of the Yoruba language, translating most of the books of the bible into Yoruba. He developed Yoruba primers and book of songs and prayers, printed and put into circulation. Through his mission agents, Crowther introduced the same principle of the reduction of local languages into writing among the Nupe and the Ibo, thus establishing a firm basis for the rise of the local intelligentsia and the efflorescence of their culture and literature. By his translation activities, he opened wide the door to literacy and popular education among

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the people, ultimately facilitating the social development that they experienced.30 Ajayi noted: the Yoruba Bible has won universal approval by the Yoruba themselves for communicating the Message of the Gospel, starting a literary tradition and, in effect, initiating a renaissance of the language.31

Ajayi portrayed Crowther to be in every respect equal to the best of the European missionaries and surpassing many who were jealous of and opposed to his assumption of leadership over the CMS mission in Nigeria. Compared to his white missionary colleagues, Henry Townsend or G. F. Buhler, in Abeokuta or David Hinderer in Ibadan, Crowther operated under a more complicated socio-political context. This included an unrelenting white missionary opposition, his operating in a field of activities outside of the direct mediating influence or reach of the British empire, in mission stations spreading into territories of fully independent Muslim jihadist states far away from the coast. He was also encumbered by a persistent scarcity of local agents to oversee his stations which led him to recruit relatively poorly qualified agents from Sierra Leone, and throughout his service time was under a tighter financial economy in his episcopacy. In scholarly narrative of the rise of the Church and of Christianity in the continent, Lamin Sanneh’s classic work, Translating the Message, highlighted the significance of the work and the social-cultural implications of local missionaries translating the Bible into the vernacular.32 This resulted in the vernacularization of concepts, ideas, and practices that came to define Christianity in Africa which otherwise would have been culturally foreign. In this regard, Crowther and his other African helpers who pioneered the reduction of Yoruba into writing and translated the Bible and other liturgical texts of the churches were pioneering heroes who helped to indigenize Christianity in Africa, helping forward the growth of the church universal within the specific context of its African cultural locales. Ajayi lauded him as a promoter of “movements of indigenization and cultural liberation.”33

The Church and Education in West Africa Ajayi gave praise to the missions and missionary organizations as initiators of Western education in Sierra Leone and West Africa in general. Mission education was a lever the missionaries hoped to use to reconstruct Africa according to their purposes. This was to make Africans literate enough to read the Bible and be converted to Christianity and to produce catechists and other lower-­ level auxiliaries able to continue the religious work of propagating Christianity. To continue benefiting from government subventions during the colonial period, the missions had to follow a guideline that included secular subjects in

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their curricula to produce lower-level functionaries to support colonial administration.34 Thus, as critical to the start of Western education as missionary agency was, especially in the nineteenth century, the objectives that missionaries conceived for their education of Africans were limited, narrow, and constricting. True, in the twentieth century, colonial need for junior auxiliaries to support administration expanded the need for more school. However, government unwillingness to incur expenses and, together with the missions, their goal of using education to maintain their control on the pace of social change meant that their program of educational advancement did not meet African demands and standards. Ajayi thus noted for the colonial period that it was African people themselves who pressurized the missions and the colonial governments to increase the pace of establishing school and to up the quality of instruction. Proteges of mission schools and mission education, many of them took matters into their own hands and began to promote and eventually establish private secondary schools to meet evolving and expanding community demands. They began to establish independent mission and secular schools for liberal education in their communities. As Ajayi puts it, the most important group stimulating the demand for Western education were the Africans who had benefited from, or had witnessed the benefits of, Western education from the activities of missionaries in the 19th century. The educated elite created by the mission schools and their offspring, especially in West and South Africa were anxious to sustain and, if possible, to increase the momentum in the expansion of Western education. They had come to realize that the acquisition of Western education was the necessary condition for obtaining jobs in the different modernizing sectors of the economy, and, thus, to join the influential modern elite. … Sometimes it became a matter of community rivalry to secure the services of some evangelist or missionary body to establish schools. In this way, once introduced, the expansion of a network of elementary schools could be sustained by the community itself exerting pressure on the missionary society concerned, so as to remain competitive in the race for development. …the critical sector was at the post-primary level and here the pressure for expansion was exerted by the educated elite who were themselves largely the product of a specific policy of missionary societies in the middle of the 19th century to create an African elite who could work side by side, and not merely under, Europeans for the development of Africa.35

All this echoes Ajayi’s “African initiative” perspective that dominated his edited version of the UNESCO General History of Africa Vol. VII. He was consistent in proving that Africans were no mere objects of European thought and willful actions. Rather, Africans adapted to the changing economic, social, and political contexts in the lead up to and during the colonial period in accordance with their evolving interests and purposes. They were strategic in their choices and determinative in their decisions regarding what served their needs at particular moments during the periods in question.36

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Mission and Empire, Church and State Ajayi in his telling of the Crowther story, a major theme in his writing on mission and Christian missionary activities in Nigeria, affords us a scholarly opportunity to investigate structures and ideas that could unite a nation of diverse peoples and religions. Nor am I talking about a fictional imposition of Crowther’s ideas on a non-existing reality. Ajayi analyzed the significant, varied, contentious, and changing relationship between forces and agents of religion and that of the state in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century historical development of West Africa. He made the claim, especially for Nigeria, that “the empire created the plural society; the mission created the Church and helped to shape the multi religious context of the state, particularly the confrontation between Christians and Muslims.”37 Ajayi outlined the changing nature of the relationship between mission and empire. He delineated an initial early period that saw British citizens and evangelical activists take for granted that the state was an instrument that could be deployed profitably on behalf of Christian expansion overseas.38 An example would be the Church directly influencing public policy in parliament to promote the establishment of Sierra Leone.39 Then came another era when mission administrators and citizens had to examine the church-empire relationship more critically rather than take it for granted. At this period, for instance, Henry Venn had to lobby and make use of all his state contacts to promote his liberal development purposes and objectives for the West African converts, their emerging churches, and their “nation.” But then by the end of the nineteenth century, the relationship was no longer mutually beneficent and British evangelicals felt that collaboration with the state was hurting Christianity. These phases of evolving church-state relationship transferred to West Africa on the ground. It was seen in the tried relationship between the missions/churches and the indigenous governments and during the colonial period between the church/missions and the colonial authority. More specifically, in Ajayi’s writing, the Crowther event and moments were part of this changing relationship of the empire and the mission. First was the establishment of Sierra Leone as a result of Church-State partnership, complemented by the role of the missionaries in socially and politically establishing and consolidating Sierra Leone as a British colony on behalf of the imperial government. Then followed the rise of the local Churches and the interests of its converts and school graduates (educated elites, professionals, merchants, produce exporters, etc.). By the turn of the century, the state of course eventually divested the mission of most direct economic and political duties in regard to the freed slave population in Sierra Leone or in the management of diplomatic and political relations in Nigeria. Direct colonial intervention became the order of the day, and the mission became a clear junior partner co-opted as needed, especially in the sphere of the provision of education.

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Conclusion Ajayi and Ayandele back in 1969 recommended that the study of the history of the Church in Africa “must necessarily be concerned with the totality of the African past.”40 They emphasized that the most useful analysis of relations between the Church and African culture must adopt “the scientific approach of the social anthropologist, with data going back to the origins of the Church on the continent.”41 They condemned the negative references to Africanization of the Church demonstrated in the use of special nomenclatures (“African,” “Separatist,” “Spiritualist,” and “Prophetic”). Such labels made these churches into deviant sub-species of the supposedly original version espoused in Britain or in the mainstream mission churches.42 Ajayi and Ayandele called for: an investigation of the African Churches, in their own right, in their internal growth. In matters of organisation, liturgy, theology, forms and formularies, thought-forms and style of life.43

Too many studies of the Church and Christianity in Africa that can be mentioned have since followed this advice and it is likely that were such an advice given today, most scholar of African church history likely would consider it passé. The writing of African history has evolved significantly since the days that Africanist and nationalist historiography attacked and debunked Eurocentric and racist tenets of colonialist historiography. Nonetheless, Ajayi’s stress on the role of internal African forces, agency, and dynamics and its consequent implication for paying attention to “continuity” in social, cultural, and political trends predating colonial intrusion remains important in the historical scholarship of contemporary Africa. All countries of West Africa continue to face acute crises based on ethno-religious divergence and questions continue to be raised whether these countries have succeeded in completing the nationalist project begun by the early nineteenth-century Western educated “nationalist” elites and whether we need to revisit and readopt the program of these early leaders. The nature and quality of indigenous agency, local leadership, and the capability of leaders to chart a progressive course within a constricted and competitive global environment, foci of Ajayi’s writing, remain topical and continue to call for action.

Notes 1. Toyin Falola, ed., Tradition and Change in Africa: The Essays of J.F. Ade Ajayi (Africa World Press, 1999), p. xi. 2. These essays are as follows in the order in which they appear in the collection: “Henry Venn and the Policy of Development,” “Nineteenth Century Origins of Nigerian Nationalism,” “Bishop Crowther: A Patriot to the Core,” “Native Agency in Nineteenth Century West Africa,” and “A New Christian Politics?” 3. Falola, ed., Tradition and Change in Africa, p. xi.

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4. Ibid. 5. This was a contribution to T. O Ranger’s edited collection, Emerging themes of African History. Similarly, while his contributions in UNESCO volume on the history of Africa that he edited have only a couple of paragraphs on Christian mission and Christianity, they nonetheless established a strong methodological precedent for taking internal forces and dynamics within Africa serious as the basis of change during the period he examined. “Africa at the beginning of the nineteenth century: issues and prospects,” pp. 1–22 and “Conclusion: Africa on the eve of the European conquest,” pp.  773–791  in J.  F. Ade Ajayi, ed., UNESCO General History of Africa-VI Africa in the Nineteenth Century until the 1880s (Heinemann, 1989), and his “Colonialism: An Episode in African History” in Falola, ed., Tradition and Change in Africa. 6. J.  F. Ade Ajayi “National History in the Context of Decolonisation. The Nigerian Example,” Conceptions of National History: Proceedings of Nobel Symposium 78, Nobel Symposium (Stockholm, Sweden Walter de Gruyter, 1994), p.  71; J.  F. Ade Ajayi, “The Continuity of African Institutions under Colonialism,” in Emerging Themes of African History, ed. T. O. Ranger (Dar es Salaam: East African Publishing House, 1968), pp. 194–95. 7. Felix K. Ekechi, “Studies on Missions in Africa,” in Toyin Falola, ed., African Historiography: Essays in Honour of Jacob Ade Ajayi (Longman, 1993), p. 150. 8. Ajayi “National History,” pp. 69–70. 9. Ajayi, “The Continuity of African Institutions,” p. 194. 10. This is exemplified by several of the chapters that make up UNESCO General History Of Africa VII.  Africa under Colonial Domination 1880–1935, ed., A. ADU BOAHEN 11. Ajayi “National History,” pp. 71–72. 12. J. F. A. Ajayi and J. B. Webster, “The Emergence of a New Elite in Africa,” in Joseph C.  Anene, Godfrey N.  Brown (eds) Africa in The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Ibadan University Press. 1966), pp. 150–162. 13. Ajayi, “The Continuity of African Institutions,” p. 197. 14. Ibid., 200. 15. Richard Gray, “Christianity and a New Order.” Review of Christian Missions in Nigeria, 1841–1891. The Making of a New Elite. By Prof. J. F. Ade Ajayi, Journal of African History, vol. 7, no. 2 (1966), p. 347. 16. A.  E. Afigbo, “Review of Christian Missions in Nigeria,” 1841–1891. The Making of a New Elite. By Prof. J. F. Ade Ajayi, Journal of The Historical Society of Nigeria, Vol. 3 No.3 (1966), p. 579. 17. Ekechi, “Studies on Missions in Africa,” p. 15. 18. Terence Ranger, “New approaches to the history mission,” in Toyin Falola, ed., African Historiography: Essays in Honour of Jacob Ade Ajayi (Longman, 1993), p. 180. 19. Gray, “Review: Christianity and a New Order” Review of Christian Missions in Nigeria 1841–1891, pp. 348–349 20. See especially Chaps. 2 and 6 of Christian Missions in Nigeria 1841–1891; Robert O. Collins, Review of “Christian Missions in Nigeria, 1841–1891: The Making of a New Élite by J. F. A. Ajayi”; Christian Missionaries and the Creation of Northern Rhodesia, 1880–1924 by Robert I. Rotberg Victorian Studies, Vol. 9, No. 4 (1966), pp. 413–415; Franklin Parker, Review of “Christian Missions in Nigeria, 1841–1891; The Making of a New Elite by J. F. Ade Ajayi,” Books

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Abroad, Vol. 41, No. 1 (1967), pp. 113–114; John D. Hargreaves, Review of Christian Missions in Nigeria 1841–1891: The Making of a New Elite by K.  O. Dike and J.  F. Ade Ajayi, The English Historical Review (1967), pp.  192–193; and Peter Beyerhaus, Review of Christian Missions in Nigeria 1841–1891: The Making of a New Élite by J. F. Ade Ajayi, Journal of Religion in Africa, 1968, Vol. 1, Fasc. 2 (1968), pp. 157–160. 21. The early epitome of a program to build a modern state is Abeokuta’s Egba United Board of Management, led by the indefatigable returnee, George William Johnson. See Ajayi, Christian Mission in Nigeria, pp. 196–200. 22. Ibid., p. 225. 23. J. F. Ade Ajayi and E. A. Ayandele, “Writing African Church History” in Peter Beyerhaus, Carl F.  Hallencreutz, The Church Crossing frontiers: essays on the nature of mission in honour of Bengt Sundkler (Gleerup, 1969) p. 99. 24. Ajayi, Christian Mission in Nigeria, Chap. 6; “From Mission to Church: The Heritage of the Church Mission Society,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research April 1999 pp.  50–55; Ajayi, “Henry Venn and the Policy of Development,” in Falola, ed. Essays of J.F. Ade Ajayi, pp. 331–341. 25. J. F. Ade Ajayi, A Patriot to the Core: Bishop Ajayi Crowther (Spectrum Books, 2001), p. 88. 26. Ajayi, “From Mission to Church”; and “Henry Venn and the Policy of Development.” 27. Ajayi, “Henry Venn and the Policy of Development.” 28. Ajayi and Ayandele, “Writing African Church History,” p. 92. 29. J.  F. Ade Ajayi, “Bishop Crowther and Taubman Goldie in the Sokoto Caliphate,” in Falola, ed., Tradition and Change in Africa, pp. 311–336. 30. Ajayi, A Patriot to the Core, p. 8. 31. Ibid., 92. 32. Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture. Revised and expanded (New York. Orbis 2009). 33. Ajayi “National History,” p. 71; Lamin Sanneh “Bible Translation, Culture, and Religion,” in Lamin Sanneh and Michael McClymond, The Wiley Blackwell Companion to World Christianity (John Wiley & Sons, 2016), p. 267. 34. J. F. Ade Ajayi, L. K. H. Goma, and Ampah G. Johnson, The African experience with higher education-(Association of African Universities 1996), pp. 30–31. 35. Ibid., pp. 29–30. 36. J. F. Ade Ajayi, “The Development of Secondary Grammar School Education in Nigeria,” Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria Vol. 2, No. 4(1963), pp. 517–535. 37. Ajayi, A Patriot to the Core, p. 58. 38. Ibid., Chap. 3. 39. Ibid., 67–8. 40. Ajayi and Ayandele, “Writing African Church History,” p. 100. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., pp. 102–103. 43. Ibid.

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Bibliography Ade Ajayi, J. F. 1989. “Africa at the beginning of the nineteenth century: issues and prospects.” pp.  1–22 and “Conclusion: Africa on the eve of the European conquest”. pp. 773–791. In J. F. Ade Ajayi, ed., UNESCO General History of Africa-VI Africa in the Nineteenth Century until the 1880s. Heinemann. ———. 1994. “National History in the Context of Decolonisation. The Nigerian Example.” In Conceptions of National History: Proceedings of Nobel Symposium 78, Nobel Symposium. Stockholm, Sweden Walter de Gruyter. ———. 1968. “The Continuity of African Institutions under Colonialism.” In Emerging Themes of African History, ed. T. O. Ranger. Dar es Salaam: East African Publishing House. pp. 194–95. ———. 1999a. “Nineteenth Century Origins of Nigerian Nationalism.” In Toyin Falola, ed., Tradition and Change in Africa: The Essays of J.F.  Ade Ajayi. Africa World Press. pp. 69–84. ———. 1999b. “Henry Venn and the Policy of Development”. In Toyin Falola, ed., Tradition and Change in Africa: The Essays of J.F.  Ade Ajayi. Africa World Press. pp. 57–68. ———. 1999c. “A New Christian Politics?”. In Toyin Falola, ed., Tradition and Change in Africa: The Essays of J.F. Ade Ajayi. Africa World Press. pp. 129–150. ———. 1999d. “Bishop Crowther: A Patriot to the Core”. In Toyin Falola, ed., Tradition and Change in Africa: The Essays of J.F.  Ade Ajayi Africa World Press. pp. 85–100. ———. 1999e. “Colonialism: An Episode in African History” in Falola, ed., Tradition and Change in Africa. ———. 1999f. “Native Agency in Nineteenth Century West Africa”. In Toyin Falola, ed., Tradition and Change in Africa: The Essays of J.F. Ade Ajayi. Africa World Press. pp. 101–128. ———. n.d. “Bishop Crowther and Taubman Goldie in the Sokoto Caliphate.” In Falola, ed., Tradition and Change in Africa. pp. 311–336. Ade Ajayi, J. F. and E. A. Ayandele. 1999. “Writing African Church History.” In Peter Beyerhaus, Carl F. Hallencreutz. The Church Crossing frontiers: essays on the nature of mission in honour of Bengt Sundkler. Gleerup. ———. 1963. “The Development of Secondary Grammar School Education in Nigeria.” Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria. Vol. 2, No. 4. pp. 517–535. Ade Ajayi, J. F., L. K. H. Goma, and Ampah G. Johnson. 1996. The African experience with higher education. Association of African Universities. pp. 30–31. ———. 1966. “Review of Christian Missions in Nigeria, 1841–1891. The Making of a New Elite. By Prof. J. F. Ade Ajayi. Journal of The Historical Society of Nigeria, Vol. 3 No. 3. p. 579. Ade Ajayi, J. F.. and J. B. Webster. 1966. “The Emergence of a New Elite in Africa.” In Joseph C. Anene, Godfrey N. Brown, (eds) Africa in The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Ibadan University Press. pp. 150–162. ———. 2001. A Patriot to the Core: Bishop Ajayi Crowther. Spectrum Books. Beyerhaus, Peter. 1968. “Review of Christian Missions in Nigeria 1841–1891: The Making of a New Élite by J. F. Ade Ajayi.” Journal of Religion in Africa. Vol. 1, Fasc. 2. pp. 157–160. Collins, Robert O. 1966. “Review of ‘Christian Missions in Nigeria, 1841–1891’: The Making of a New Élite by J. F. A. Ajayi; Christian Missionaries and the Creation of

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Northern Rhodesia, 1880–1924 by Robert I. Rotberg”. Victorian Studies, Vol. 9, No. 4. pp. 413–415. Ekechi, Felix K. 1993. “Studies on Missions in Africa.” In Toyin Falola, ed., African Historiography: Essays in Honour of Jacob Ade Ajayi. Longman. Falola, Toyin, ed. 1999. Tradition and Change in Africa: The Essays of J.F. Ade Ajayi. Africa World Press. Gray, Richard. 1966. “Christianity and a New Order. Review of Christian Missions in Nigeria, 1841–1891: The Making of a New Elite By Prof. J. F. Ade Ajayi,” Journal of African History vol. 7, no. 2. p. 347–49. Hargreaves, John D. 1967. “Review of Christian Missions in Nigeria 1841–1891: The Making of a New Elite by K. O. Dike and J. F. Ade Ajayi.” The English Historical Review. pp. 192–193. Parker, Franklin. 1967. “Review of Christian Missions in Nigeria, 1841–1891; The Making of a New Elite by J. F. Ade Ajayi”. Books Abroad, Vol. 41, No. 1. pp. 113–114. Ranger, Terence. 1993. “New approaches to the history mission”. In Toyin Falola, ed., African Historiography: Essays in Honour of Jacob Ade Ajayi. Longman. Sanneh, Lamin. 2009. Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture. Revised and expanded. New York. Orbis. ———. 2016. “Bible Translation, Culture, and Religion.” In Lamin Sanneh and Michael McClymond. The Wiley Blackwell Companion to World Christianity. John Wiley & Sons.

CHAPTER 11

The Writings and Legacy of Ogbu Kalu Toyin Falola

Introduction Notwithstanding his transition in 2009, Ogbu Kalu’s contributions to scholarship on Christianity remain important. Kalu had ministerial training in Canada and attended the University of Toronto, Canada, to study Church History for his Bachelor of Arts (B.A.). He earned his Master’s Degree in History at the University of McMaster in Hamilton, Ontario, and emerged with a “Summa cum laude” result. He had his doctorate in Church History from the University of Toronto. When he became qualified, he went to the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, United Kingdom, for a post-doctoral research program. Following this program and the request of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, Kalu enrolled in the M.Div. program at the Princeton Theological Seminary. The training and education created a solid foundation for him to exude his brilliance in academic scholarship about Pentecostalism, Church historiography, and Christianity. Kalu, during his time, published more than 18 books and more than 160 articles, both in edited volumes and in journals.1

Ogbu Kalu’s Contributions There is no doubt that Kalu’s exposure to evangelicalism at a young age and the torrents of experience and training he got in history and theology informed his ability to give a sound analysis of Christianity in Africa. Also, his education in Canada, the United States of America, and the United Kingdom gave him

T. Falola (*) Department of History, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. E. Barnes, T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48270-0_11

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the needed exposure on the international stage. This international exposure, his strong African roots, and his torrents of training enabled the constant flow of in-depth scholastic work from Ogbu Kalu. He was also committed to Christian practices. Professor E. M. Uka has rightly described Ogbu Kalu as a hyphen of great tension. In his words, he stated: Ogbu, it must be said, was a hyphen of great tension between “town and gown,” between the privileged and the underprivileged, between the teacher and the taught, between the educated and the uneducated, between the young and the old, between Nigeria PCN and Canada PCC, and between black Africa on the one hand and Asia/Europe on the other hand. It was by these means that he found outlets for his inventive genius and creative abilities which in turn gave expression to his potential for moral goodness, academic excellence and poetic flair.2

Throughout his career, Ogbu Kalu proved he was a world-class scholar and a man who gave himself to an in-depth understanding of the Christian faith. He was an outstanding scholar who covered the length and breadth of the subjects he focused on. Chima Korieh once described Ogbu Kalu as a “towering figure in the fields of Global Mission, African Christianity and Global Pentecostalism.”3 This points out that he was not just an academic genius but also a committed servant who took his service to his Lord and savior with all seriousness. When it came to the service of the Lord, Ogbu was never found wanting. He was an ordained elder in the Presbyterian Church in Nigeria, a member of the Progressive Community Center in Chicago, and the Henry Winters Luce Professor of World Christianity at the McCormick Theological Seminary, Chicago. He even held different leadership positions within the church whenever he believed his service was needed.4 Undoubtedly, Kalu has left us with incredible scholarship that continues to be of use worldwide. Up to the time of his departure, Kalu remained the most accomplished African Christian scholar in North America.5 Christianity in the twentieth century experienced remarkable growth and expansion across the global south.6 This period was phenomenal for Africans and African countries because it was a time when the understanding and practice of Christianity began to come to the limelight. It was also when African Christianity became most susceptible to Western interpretations. The growth of Christianity at this time was so massive that observers called it “the fourth great age of Christian expansion” because of how rapidly it was moving and how its practice was being accepted or subjected to societal norms and customs. Fortunately, this time coincided with Kalu’s scholarship and provision of insight into the practice, spread, and interpretation of Christianity in Africa and across the globe. Kalu’s work tackled the origin and evolution of African Christianity. It offered insight that shed light on the idiosyncrasies of African Christianity and diverted it from the preying Western misinterpretation. Coincidentally, the scholarship of Kalu aligned with some major developments

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in Christian history. For one, the growth of African Pentecostalism in Africa happened at a time when there was also a dimensional shift in World Christianity. This dimensional shift constituted a focal point for scholars like Lamin Sanneh, Andrew Walls, and Philip Jenkins to take on critical analyses of World Christianity and the church on the global stage. At the same time, the shift in World Christianity and the growth of African Pentecostalism gave Kalu the opportunity to not just observe, but also weigh in on its operations. This firsthand experience may have informed Kalu’s persistent research in not just African churches but also African Pentecostal churches in the diaspora.7 When Kalu started his scholarship insight into Christianity, his work focused first on Protestant religious practices in Jacobean England. It’s easy to see why Kalu started with this, especially in the light of his affiliation and opportunities which he had been offered by the Protestant church—the chance that changed his life. After sharing his insights and discoveries on the Protestant religious practices in Jacobean England, Kalu shifted his attention homeward. With this, he focused on Christianity practices and interpretations in Africa and, of course, in Nigeria. Kalu’s focus on this area covered African Pentecostalism, where he conducted research and published his findings, which would later come to cement his recognition as an admirable and rigorous world-class scholar. With Kalu’s contributions to this area, one cannot but set aside time to look closely at his perspectives on African religion and his evergreen contributions on Pentecostalism. As a church historian, Kalu adopted a theological and confessional approach to telling the history of Christianity and, particularly, African Pentecostalism. Kalu believed that the peculiarity of the church and its nature set it aside and made it important for church history to be connected with theology. When Kalu deliberated on the providential outflow of the spirit, he linked its operation first to African Indigenous Churches and traced its movement into the modern Pentecostal movement.8 Kalu was concerned that the influx of social scientists into the study of African Indigenous Churches was undermining the true identification of its origin and growth, as many of them offered nothing but a functionalist explanation. Kalu submitted that it is important to recover the substance of the power of the gospel and the religious experience of African Christians, as well as believing that getting the historical discourse of the African church right creates an opportunity for the recovery of the African religious dimensions in their purest forms.9 The growth of Pentecostalism in Africa was also of concern to Kalu. He particularly disagreed with the methods adopted in telling the history of the provenance and growth of the church in Africa. Kalu was concerned that the theories being adopted tilted majorly to one side: external influences contributed largely to Pentecostalism in Africa while undermining the contributions of Africans and their religious creativity. In Pentecostal and Charismatic Reshaping of the African Religious Landscape in the 1990s, Kalu identified the deliberate attempt to subsume the growth of African Pentecostalism under the discourse and influence of globalization and modernity.10 While drawing on the insights

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of some eminent scholars,11 Kalu brought to fore the force, the tenacity of the African churches, and how their lived experiences and spirituality have formed African Pentecostals into prioritizing their intimacy with God rather than worrying about the trends of modernity and globalization. An ecumenical approach to African church historiography is another way Kalu contributed to Christianity and Pentecostalism in Africa. Kalu believed that in reading African history, the whole inhabited earth should be taken into perspective because it triggers a broadened understanding of the church in Africa. He believed that church history should be centered more on the magnanimity of God and the story of His presence among humans and “their response to divine love in time perspective,”12 instead of merely revolving around the presence and activities of missionaries or the story of church institutions. Kalu rejected the institutional approach adopted to mirror the churches in Africa, which presents the image of God as distant from the African world.13 According to him, church history is inadequate if it begins with the arrival of missionaries and describes the growth of institutions and the encounters with local traditions. Kalu believed that church history must transcend this and include a biblical model of the church, which illuminates a non-institutional approach. Kalu’s focus with the ecumenical approach was so that African church history could be leveraged to assist modern churches in dealing with contemporary social and political problems in Africa.14 According to Kalu, he expected the ecumenical approach to: reconstruct from the grassroots the experience of men and women in a community and the meaning of Christ in their midst. It assumes that as the Spirit of God broods over the whole inhabited earth, human beings would increasingly recognize the divine presence and their lives would be changed in the encounter.15

Kalu also paid attention to nationalism as it concerns African church historiography, especially regarding the adopted approach. He praised the efforts of Nigerians like Emmanuel Ayandele16 and Ade Ajayi,17 who adopted a nationalist approach as a reinforcement against efforts by missionary historians to ridicule traditional cultures and the role of African agents.18 He, however, criticized this nationalist approach for its failure to take cognizance of foreign missionaries’ contributions and the value of missionary historiography.19

Africanity While Kalu tackled a subject like religion with an international application, one thing that maintained constancy in his scholarly works was his tenacity to ensure that he mirrored Africa. He did this by telling the story of Christianity, not in ways that reflected Western interpretations or conceptions or in a way that sought to place Western missionaries at the center of gravity, but rather in a way that the true African voice resonated in his writings about Christianity. Kalu’s expertise in doing this ensured that Africans’ contributions,

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understanding, interpretation, and representation of Christianity were brought to the limelight. It must have been that Kalu’s main focus was to highlight the submerged contributions of African agents, instead of the then-existing narrative that overstated the role of non-African agents.20 Richard Burgess, in “Ogbu Kalu and African Pentecostalism,” further explained what he suspects influenced Kalu’s focus and interest in mirroring Africa. He stated that this might have flowed from “his conception of church history as an empowerment project.” I agree with Burgees’ stance here, especially considering Kalu’s work. One could sense the deliberate attempt to broach Christianity not only from an African perspective but also from the responses of Africa to Christian historiography and identities.21 Kalu was more concerned about how Christianity was appropriated rather than how it was transmitted. This explains why many of Kalu’s works were Africa-focused. A consideration of his edited volume titled African Christianity: An African Story showed how much Kalu was concerned with telling the African story through the lens and contributions of African agencies.22 The contributors to the book further demonstrated intentionality in being African and representing Africa in the work. Contributors to the book include scholars like Tinyiko Malukeke, Akintunde Akinade, Afe Adogame, J.N.K. Mugambi, and many others. In this deliberate effort to represent Africa and tell the African story of Christianity, Kalu’s work on Experiencing Evangelicalism in Africa: An Africanist Perspective is of particular relevance here.23 In this work, Kalu himself concurred that the goal is driven toward highlighting African perspectives through the efforts and actions that Africans deployed in challenging what the missionaries called their own mode of evangelicalism.24 Africans, despite being under a deliberate burden to have their understanding and efforts toward evangelism, the gospel, and the holy book modified into an acceptable frame of missionary and Western styles, rejected this and instead pursued their own form of African evangelicalism stimulated by different African initiatives.25 These efforts toward rejection of foreign perspectives contributed to the existence of some of the strongest African-instituted churches today, like the African variety of Pentecostalism and the Aladura church. Kalu’s work on Experiencing Evangelicalism in Africa: An Africanist Perspective mirrored the experience of Africans with evangelicalism and Christianity in general. From the start, it was clear that what Kalu set out to achieve was simple. He wanted to showcase the efforts of Africans in the success and spread of evangelicalism. Doing this, Kalu must have believed, would tilt the scale and balance the narrative on the roles of Africans and their missionary counterparts in evangelicalism.26 Explaining the results of the Africans’ resistance to the Western missionaries’ imposition of their Christian perspectives, Burgees showed how Kalu portrayed the African-inspired evangelical movements. Burgees stated: Ethiopianism emerged from 1860 as a cultural protest against white dominance in colonial Christianity. The Zionist or Aladura tradition, which arose between

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the two world wars, was a charismatic religious response to western missionary theology. The Pentecostal movement that flourished in two phases, under colonialism and in the midst of the politics of independence, represented a third response to western cultural dominance over the church in Africa. These are the movement which spanned the twentieth century, were portrayed by Kalu as a “trail of ferment” running through the entire continent caused by Africans when they encountered the gospel. What emerged as a form of Christianity under indigenous leadership at once conservative evangelical and Biblicist, yet with a charismatic favor characterized by an emphasis on vibrant worship, prophecy, healing, and evangelical fervor.27

Kalu was convinced that in writing about Christianity and Christianity’s history in Africa, the focus should be on African agencies and their contributions to or perspectives on Christianity rather than the influences of foreign agencies or missions. His convictions that local agencies and actors were critical players in the early Christianity movement in Africa and have since made great contributions to African Christianity informed his analysis and presentation of African Pentecostalism and the historiography of Pentecostals. Kalu challenged the already sweeping account of the West that subsumed and tied African Pentecostalism to globalization; instead, he showcased the contributions of African players and agencies to the existence and spread of African Pentecostalism. Kalu particularly believed, as reflected in his works, that this African Pentecostalism, which was a variant of the missionary Pentecostalism style was a protest and a “quest for power and identity.”28 For Kalu, accounts and stories of Pentecostalism should reflect contextual idiosyncrasies, especially as they touch on indigenous cultures and responses.29 This is one of the understandings that led Kalu to challenge the widespread account that tied the historical existence of global Pentecostalism to the Asuza Street revival in Los Angeles. Kalu pointed out not just the distinctions between the Asuza Street revival movement and the movement in Africa but also the experiences that made the difference. Kalu’s concern was that contextual identities must be taken into consideration when accounting for Pentecostalism—an action that many Western perspectives have failed to consider.30 He believed that it is impossible to give an encompassing perspective if contextual meaning and idiosyncrasies are divorced. As such, contextual integrity must be maintained even when approaching from a global perspective. This way, Kalu believed, is necessary if the indigenous people’s and culture’s responses to Christianity are to be understood and brought to the fore.31 All of these showed that Kalu was not satisfied with the Western narrative of African Pentecostalism and Christianity, which did not consider the contributions and distinctions of African players and African Pentecostalism, respectively. More importantly, they show Kalu’s readiness to correct the obvious misconceptions and deliberate subjugation of African Christian identities and stories.

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Kalu also looked at the connection between the nationalist movements in Africa and the struggle for decolonization concerning their effects on Christianity, its acceptance, and its spread across the continent. Kalu had earlier submitted that the world wars and the destruction they caused had increased the chances of leadership by Africans and had shifted attention to cultural nationalism, which gave rise to political consciousness and an unrelenting urge for independence. As an African, Kalu recognized the role traditional religion played in the minds of the people and in their willingness to embrace another religion. Kalu was particular about the responses that Christianity got in its early years among Africans. He, for one, believed that accepting a perspective or religion is hinged largely on the elasticity of people’s prevailing cultures and worldviews. This explains why Kalu consistently pointed out how existing religious structures shaped or influenced Christianity, its acceptance, and its growth in different African countries. In Kalu’s African Pentecostalism, he argued that people generally evaluate the gospel within the context of their cultural norms and determine whether it can provide clarity to some of the fogs that exist in their culture or offer a more exhilarating perspective.32 The answers they get to this often determine their level of acceptance of that gospel. In Kalu’s work on The Embattled Gods, where he considered Igbo traditional religion against the acceptance of the gospel, he argued that one substantial reason why Christianity was accepted among the Igbos was that the people were able to draw some sense of semblance between the traditional Igbo religion and Christianity.33 This position, which Kalu stretched to other African societies, was used to understand why people would, in the first instance, accept a foreign religion when they already had their own religious practices.34 The answer was always that the new or foreign religion resonated with their local religion, and thus they expected, as they found solace and answers in their own religion, to also find them in the foreign religion, in this case, Christianity.35 Kalu also used this understanding to explain the practice of the popular Aladura churches in Africa. To Kalu, the Aladura churches are a direct challenge to exotic Western Christian practices. The Aladura Church appeared to be one of the Christian practices closest to African traditional religion. This is easily noted in their practices. The Aladura churches, unlike contemporary churches, have not completely divorced African traditional religion and cultural beliefs from the Christian belief system. In fact, one of the reasons they have gone so far and stood out is because of the way they have fused both religions and their worship ingredients into one.36 In his writings about African Christianity, Kalu believed and defended the notion that Pentecostalism in Africa is often an offshoot of the pre-existing cultural practices in Africa. In many of his works that treated African Pentecostalism as a subject matter, he used this connection between pre-existing cultural practices and contemporary Pentecostalism to explain different African Pentecostal charismatic expressions and evangelical revivalism.37 Kalu’s strong forte is that to understand African Pentecostalism or Christianity as a whole, one has to pay considerable attention to the link it shares with existing cultural practices.38

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Kalu ascribed the growth of Pentecostalism in Africa to its easy fit into existing cultural worldviews, and the propensity to provide answers to some of the questions raised within these cultural worldviews.39 In drawing the attention of his readers to the link and shared perspective of existence, Kalu pointed out the shared belief in and the continued tolerance of realism in cosmology, spirituality, and reverence to a supernatural being, and the interrelationship between earth and heaven that exist in both Christian doctrine and African religion.40 Kalu also did not fail to point out some of the factors that are responsible for Pentecostal growth in Africa. He, for one, disagreed with the narratives that only mirrored the external factors and the contributions of external forces to Pentecostal expansions, which tied the expansion to globalization or modernity discourses. Rather, Kalu emphasized Africa’s religious creativity and highlighted the resilience of the African churches in renewing their intimacy with their creator so they can be partakers in the gift of the holy spirit and be able to surmount their difficulties in life.41 Another focus area of Kalu’s writing on African Pentecostalism is the subject of prosperity teaching and prioritization in contemporary African churches.42 Before Kalu, African prosperity theology had often been treated as a strategy for religious penetration.43 Essentially, it has been debated that, owing to Africa’s existing economic distress and the struggle to break through into convenient living on the continent on the one hand, and the need for the spread of Christianity on the other hand, it was necessary for Christian teachers and missionaries to tie the acceptance of the gospel to the possibility and propensity for riches.44 Scholars like Paul Gifford45 and Matthews Ojo,46 while addressing this subject, were able to trace the origin of prosperity teaching in Africa to foreign perspectives and sources. Matthews Ojo particularly pointed out that since it was a norm for Africans to link their gods to wealth, indigenous agents saw it as an opportunity to localize prosperity teaching as a means of giving hope to their followers.47 For Kalu, he identified two factors regarding the origin of prosperity teaching in Africa. He first concurred that prosperity teaching was not original to African countries, as it had flowed into the continent from the United Kingdom, Asia, the West Indies, and North America through the influence of the media and the frequent visits of missionaries.48 He, however, pointed out that this only explains the introduction of prosperity teaching in Africa and not the reason it has spread across the continent and taken center stage in almost all denominations. Offering an explanation for this, Kalu pointed out his earlier assertion that the acceptance of a religion or doctrine rested on its connection with the perspective or cultural worldview of the people to the religion or gospel being offered. According to Kalu, prosperity teaching in Africa flourished because it resonated with some beliefs in traditional African culture and religion. Within the African traditional beliefs are well-developed concepts like wealth, salvation, worship, the role of the gods to bless or reward those facing life challenges like poverty, and many more beliefs that resonate with the Christian gospel and doctrine.49 Kalu believed that

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prosperity teaching in Africa, though received through foreign influence, was an indigenously developed theology that was used as a strategy for poverty alleviation. Kalu’s concern was not only the influence and spread of Christianity in Africa; he was also focused on understanding the context within which Christianity existed in Africa. In doing this, he considered social influences and responses that gave Christianity fertile ground in Africa. Kalu’s analysis covered influences from colonialism to contemporary political and economic conditions. He considered how colonialism and World War I facilitated the growth of the church in Africa. According to Kalu, the World War created a lacuna for leaders in Africa to develop themselves and step up to the position of power in churches. He pointed out that World War I was a factor in creating fertile conditions that triggered the development and spread of Christianity in Africa. It also led to church revivalism that was essentially not in consonance with the existing church status quo. In considering how far colonialism influenced the existence and acceptance of Christianity in Africa, Kalu studied the early history of Christianity in Africa and how it was affected by colonialism when European countries ruled and controlled Africa and World War I. He believed that the war and its aftermath created conditions that helped African church leaders to emerge and encouraged the growth of charismatic churches. This happened because the war disrupted the work of missionaries and left more space for African leaders to take on important roles. Additionally, Kalu observed that the return of African soldiers after the war helped to spread an influenza epidemic to sub-Saharan Africa. This epidemic, combined with other problems such as racist policies and lack of political rights, contributed to the growth of certain African churches, like the Aladura churches in Nigeria and the Zionist churches in South Africa. These churches became centers where people gathered to pray for the healing of those who were sick from the epidemic.50 After linking colonialism and World War I with the spread of Christianity in Africa, Kalu also considered the post-colonial factors that influenced the churches in Africa. In doing this, he considered how the church was politically engaged. He linked the nationalist movement and the decolonization of churches in Africa to some of the phenomenal changes that occurred in African churches.51 Another thing that becomes prominent upon analysis of some of Kalu’s work is his efforts toward clarification, representation, and delineation. Kalu was concerned with shedding light on some of the gray areas of Christian practice that were frequently misrepresented or misunderstood, one of which was the demonization of African-founded Churches such as the Aladura church in Nigeria. He explained that to understand these African-instituted Churches, attention needs to be paid to typology, Christology, their relationship to the Bible, and their affirmation of Jesus Christ as their savior. Though some of these African-instituted Churches, like the Aladura church in Nigeria, are not entirely disconnected from the traditional African religious system and items, as some of their modes of worship and practices incorporate traditional ritual

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symbols and occult practices, they still share great similarities, like baptism, prayers, belief in the gift of the holy spirit, speaking in tongues, and many others, with Pentecostal movements. Kalu submitted that for a broadened understanding of these churches, their biblical and theological analyses are necessary. Aside from this, Kalu was also concerned about how church history was being told. Although he had earlier set out to correct some of the Eurocentric notions and perspectives of the church in Africa, his concern here was to separate the methods of telling church history from the methods of telling secular history. He was particularly concerned that church history was being interpreted in a social scientific way rather than through its own distinct theological expressions and religious beliefs. He argued that for church history to be told in the most acceptable and encompassing way, the focus must be “adopting a theological perspective and a Christocentric understanding of the church and its history.”52 Kalu believed that the perspective through which Christian history is told must be delineated from the everyday perspective of telling history in other fields53 because Christianity automatically imposes on its historian a requirement that compels the consideration of the “past to the ultimate reason for creation as well as the future of creation.”54 Kalu believed the history of Christianity (or the “church”) is not just about the beliefs and experiences of individual believers, but also about how those beliefs and experiences have been shaped by the cultural and social contexts in which they have lived. In other words, the history of the church is the story of how people have experienced God’s grace (or love and mercy) in different cultural and social environments. Ogbu Kalu believed that it was important to study both the internal, personal aspects of religion such as people’s beliefs and experiences and the external, social aspects of religion such as how religion is expressed and how it interacts with other aspects of culture and society. He believed that religion is a part of culture and is shaped by the cultural context in which it is practiced. This means that it is important to study the ways in which religion has been expressed and practiced in different cultures in order to understand it fully.55 Kalu also tackled Western historians for being held hostage by their modern perspectives and secular worldview when it came to the history of Christianity and the way it was told. He accused them of stifling the true expression of Christian history to sound respectable within the academic space. Kalu believed this had unprecedented implications for the mode of church representation, ideology, and definition. He believed that whoever puts themselves out there as a Christian historian must be comfortable writing about kingdom experiences and the religious, ideological commitment that contextually distinguishes each church. He submitted that to fully comprehend the complexities of the African church, a church historian must go to the grassroots, where they can adequately tap from the sources and use their findings to supplement their archival or library resources.56 For Kalu, church history represents more than the narration of different occurrences about the church in Africa. Rather,

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church history should be an avenue for gaining insight into life and the world’s works; it should be a retelling of the memories of the people of God.57 Kalu’s works, like other writers’, however, also suffered criticism. Jane Soothill particularly distanced herself from some of Kalu’s perspectives on Christianity. In her review of Kalu’s African Pentecostalism, she refused to accept Kalu’s position on the perspective that Western Christian historians employed and Kalu’s attempt to make a distinction between the mode of telling church history and other secular histories. Soothill accused Kalu of creating a “false dichotomy” between these blocs and that, by doing this, he had pushed a confessional approach of his own liking upon others. It was Soothill’s position that an approach to church history does not necessarily contradict approaches in anthropology or sociology, and that church history might, in fact, be read with works in these fields. Paul Kollman also weighed in on the criticism by describing Kalu as a writer with an overt theological agenda that seeks to push the narrative that the Holy Spirit’s invocation is the cause of church vitality in Africa.58 Kollman also disagrees with some of Kalu’s methods and assertions. He posited that acknowledging Christians’ experiences does not necessarily equal an acceptance of the assertions of Christian truth. On his ecumenical approach, Kalu has also been criticized for projecting a unifying thread, addressing differences, and promoting cooperation among churches.59 On a more careful look, this criticism might have been based on a misunderstanding of the depth of Kalu’s ecumenical approach. For Kalu, his ecumenical approach is beyond the conception as just a unifying thread. Rather, it encompasses a holistic understanding and approach to church history. Kalu’s concern was that factors like elitism, denominationalism, institutionalism, and nationalism, on their own, confine the wholistic conception and understanding of the African church.60 According to Kalu, an ecumenical church history would focus on Christianity and African responses, while also highlighting factors such as denomination and missionaries’ ideologies that are responsible for some of the worthwhile strategies employed on the field. Burgees, summarizing Kalu’s ecumenical approach, stated: First, it focuses on African responses to Christianity but also pays heed to denominations and the influence of missionary ideology which informed their policies and strategies in the mission field. Second, it sets the story within local cultural contexts and shows the impact of socio-economic, political and ecological factors on the patterns of Christian presence. Third, ecumenical church history is a perspective ‘from below’, which requires historians to be sensitive to the voices of the marginalized and the poor. Fourth, it calls for a dialogical and irenic approach towards non-Christian religions and traditions of non-European societies, and recognizes the resilience of the African traditional worldview among Christians. Finally, an ecumenical approach should make the writing of history a ‘process of liberating, self-discovery for the individual as well as the community’, a means of reflection, renewal and redirection to a better future.61

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While considering the maintenance and sustenance of missionary legacies and hegemony in Africa, Kalu tied the strategy employed to the same one as that of decolonization. To Kalu, nationalist movements and the decolonization of African churches had more than face-value effects; they were parts of missionary efforts to consolidate the denominationalism of African churches.62 Conceiving it as a means of passive revolution, Kalu drew on the similarities between the decolonization goal and the efforts of missionaries to indirectly maintain control and influence in African churches. According to Kalu, decolonization seeks to transfer limited power while ensuring that control over economic resources is not lost in order to retain power over possible and subsequent developments. This line of approach, Kalu stated, was adopted by missionaries toward African churches in the sense that the missionaries merely shed limited power but retained control and influence in the church through their access to indigenous resources and their use of indigenous personnel. To back this up, Kalu referred to the missionary policy of indigenization, which was concerned with enabling local participation while preserving missionary structures.63 Nonetheless, in his paper on “Passive Revolution and its Saboteurs: African Christian Initiative in the Era of Decolonization,” delivered at the “Missions, Nationalism, and the End of Empire” conference, Currents in World Christianity Project in 2000, Kalu pointed out that the efforts of the missionaries to maintain this kind of setting and structural control of African churches were sabotaged by the emergence of youthful charismatic preachers who challenged and called for the withdrawal of Western missionaries and subsequently developed new Pentecostal churches in parts of Africa.64 Kalu also considered the relationship that the church shares with political engagement in Africa, especially after the demise of the colonial masters. To Kalu, religion and politics in Africa are separated into two parts, following the inherited model of the church’s political engagement from North America and Europe. Kalu, however, traced a more active political engagement of the church to the challenge of military rule and the one-party state in Africa, which was the preoccupation of the Second Liberation struggle. He explained that the struggle widened existing space and created new room for religious leaders and organizations to get politically engaged.65 Kalu disagreed with scholars like Amos Yong,66 Gifford,67 and Ruth Marshall,68 who raised the argument of Pentecostal culture and the immediate effect of political abstinence or dormancy. Gifford and Marshall particularly argued that the preoccupations of Pentecostalism in Africa are salvation, deliverance, and prosperity teaching, submitting that this focus of Pentecostal churches in Africa drives attention away from happenings in the political sphere.69 Kalu, however, disagreed with their submission as he dwelled on the relationship between African Pentecostalism and political engagements, and broached some of the strategies used to influence politics by Pentecostal churches in post-colonial times. From his findings, Kalu concluded that the political engagement of Pentecostal churches is a function of the society’s existing political culture. In all, Kalu

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maintained a robust mind and scholarship toward analyzing African Christianity, contributing to world knowledge.

Conclusion As he has made important and lasting contributions to the field, Kalu remains a prominent scholar in African Pentecostalism and Christianity. Kalu’s contribution to our knowledge of the place of religion in African culture and society through his research and writing remains relevant. His distinctive viewpoint on the emergence and expansion of Pentecostalism in Africa, and the need to understand the manner in which religion and culture interact in Africa are fundamental ideas that we cannot shove aside. In addition to his contributions to the study of Pentecostalism and African Christianity, Kalu provided insightful observations on how these traditions relate to modern African culture. The perspectives of Kalu on African Christianity and Pentecostalism are still useful and applicable for modern academics and practitioners. His writings continue to offer a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the role of religion in African culture and society as well as significant new perspectives on the continuing importance of Pentecostalism and Christianity in Africa. Leveraging on Kalu’s perspectives, we must resolve to view the growth and development of Pentecostalism in Africa as a component of a larger process of cultural and social change, and understand Christianity in Africa in the context of the specific cultural, social, and historical circumstances of the continent. In a world that is changing quickly, his work emphasizes how Pentecostalism and Christianity can bring purpose and hope to people and communities, as well as be a source of empowerment. No doubt, Kalu’s contribution will continue to shape the field of African Christianity and Pentecostalism and have a lasting impact on the way these traditions are understood and studied.

Notes 1. For his full-length career, see Toyin Falola, Understanding Ogbu Kalu: Christianity and Culture in Africa, Ibadan: Pan-African University Press, 2019. 2. E. M. Uka, The Man Behind the Mask: An Overview of Professor Ogbu Uke Kalu’s Professional Career. Bassey Andah Journal, Vol.1. 2008, 202. 3. Chima Korieh, “Kalu, Ogbu Uke.” Dictionary of African Christian Biography. Accessed December 22, 2022. https://dacb.org/stories/nigeria/ kalu-­ogbu-­oke/. 4. Richard Burgees, “A Tribute to Ogbu U.  Kalu (1942–2009),” Equinox Publishing Ltd, London, 2010. 5. Burgees, “A Tribute to Ogbu U. Kalu (1942–2009).” 6. Falola, Understanding Ogbu Kalu: Christianity and Culture in Africa. 7. Richard Burgess, “Ogbu Kalu and African Pentecostalism.” In Making Evangelical History, pp. 213–234. Routledge, 2019.

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8. Ogbu Kalu, African Pentecostalism: an introduction, Oxford University Press, 2008. Pg. 73. 9. Kalu, African Pentecostalism: an introduction, pg. 26. 10. Ogbu Kalu, “Pentecostal and charismatic reshaping of the African religious landscape in the 1990s,” Mission Studies 20, no. 1 (2003): Pg. 84–109. 11. Philip Berg, “A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural” (1970): 564–565. Harvey Cox, Fire from heaven: The rise of Pentecostal spirituality and the reshaping of religion in the 21st century, Da Capo Press, 2009. Waldo Cesar, “Daily Life and Transcendence in Pentecostalism,” Pentecostals and the future of Christian churches, Promises limitations challenges, 2000; pg. 3–111. 12. Ogbu Kalu, “Introduction: The Shape and Flow of African Historiography.” African Christianity: An African Story (2005): 1–23. 13. Ogbu Uke Kalu, ed. African church historiography: An ecumenical perspective. Evangelische Arbeitsstelle Oekumene Schweiz, 1988, 72. 14. Ogbu Kalu, “Introduction: The Shape and Flow of African Christian Historiography.” 15. Ogbu Kalu, “Introduction: The Shape and Flow of African Christian Historiography,” Pg. 22. 16. Emmanuel Ayandele, The missionary impact on modern Nigeria 1842–1914: A political and social analysis, London: Longman, 1965. 17. Ade Ajayi, Christian missions in Nigeria, 1841–1891. The making of a new elite, London: Longman, 1965. 18. Kalu, “African church historiography: An ecumenical perspective.” 19. Ogbu Kalu, The Embattled Gods: Christianization of Igboland, 1841–1991, Africa World Press, 2003. 20. Burgess, Ogbu Kalu and African Pentecostalism, 9. 21. Ogbu Kalu, African Christianity: An African Story. Dept. of Church History, University of Pretoria, 2013. 22. Kalu, African Christianity: An African Story. 23. Ogbu Kalu, “Experiencing Evangelicalism in Africa: An Africanist Perspective.” The Collected Essays of Ogbu Uke Kalu. Volume 2: Christian Missions in Africa: Success, Ferment and Trauma (2003): 191–2. 24. Ogbu Kalu, “Experiencing Evangelicalism in Africa: An Africanist Perspective,” 192. 25. Ogbu Kalu, “Experiencing Evangelicalism in Africa: An Africanist Perspective,” 194. 26. Burgess, Ogbu Kalu and African Pentecostalism, 10. 27. Burgess, Ogbu Kalu and African Pentecostalism. Pg. 10. 28. Ogbu Kalu, African Pentecostalism: an introduction. Oxford University Press, 2008. Pg 4. 29. Kalu, African Pentecostalism: an introduction. 30. Kalu, African Pentecostalism: an introduction. 31. Burgess, Ogbu Kalu and African Pentecostalism. Pg. 11. 32. Kalu, African Pentecostalism: an introduction. 33. Ogbu Kalu, The embattled gods: Christianization of Igboland, 1841–1991, Africa World Press, 2003. 34. Kalu, The embattled gods: Christianization of Igboland, 1841–1991.

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35. Ogbu Kalu, “Preserving a worldview: Pentecostalism in the African maps of the universe,” Pneuma 24, no. 2 (2002): Pg. 110–137. 36. Ogbu Kalu, “A trail of ferment in African Christianity: Ethiopianism, Prophetism, Pentecostalism,” African identities and world Christianity in the twentieth century (2005): Pg. 19–48. 37. Kalu, “Preserving a worldview: Pentecostalism in the African maps of the universe.” 38. Kalu, “A trail of ferment in African Christianity: Ethiopianism, Prophetism, Pentecostalism.” 39. Kalu, African Pentecostalism: an introduction. 40. Kalu, African Pentecostalism: an introduction. 41. Kalu, “Preserving a worldview: Pentecostalism in the African maps of the universe.” 42. Kalu, African Pentecostalism, Pg. 255–63. 43. Paul Gifford, “Ghana’s new Christianity: Pentecostalism in a globalizing African economy” (2006): 139–141. 44. Paul Gifford, African Christianity: its public role, Indiana University Press, 1998. 45. Paul Gifford, “Prosperity: A new and foreign element in African Christianity.” Religion 20, no. 4 (1990): Pg. 373–388. 46. Matthews Ojo, The end-time army: Charismatic movements in modern Nigeria, Africa World Press, 2006. 47. Ojo, The end-time army: Charismatic movements in modern Nigeria. 48. Kalu, African Pentecostalism, Pg. 194. 49. Kalu, African Pentecostalism, Pg. 259. 50. Burgess, Ogbu Kalu and African Pentecostalism. Pg. 13. 51. Ogbu Kalu, African Christianity: An African Story, Dept. of Church History, University of Pretoria, 2013. 52. Burgess, Ogbu Kalu and African Pentecostalism. Pg. 4. 53. Ogbu Uke, Kalu, ed. African church historiography: An ecumenical perspective. Evangelische Arbeitsstelle Oekumene Schweiz, 1988. 54. Burgess, Ogbu Kalu and African Pentecostalism. Pg. 4. 55. Burgess, Ogbu Kalu and African Pentecostalism. Pg. 4. 56. Kalu, “African church historiography: an ecumenical perspective.” 57. Kalu, “African church historiography: an ecumenical perspective.” 58. Paul Kollman, “Classifying African Christianities: past, present, and future: part one,” Journal of Religion in Africa 40, no. 1 (2010): 3–32. 59. Clifton Clarke, “Ogbu Kalu and Africa’s Christianity: A Tribute,” Pneuma 32, no. 1 (2010): 107–120. 60. Kalu, “African Church Historiography,” 75. 61. Burgess, Ogbu Kalu and African Pentecostalism. Pg. 9. 62. Ogbu Kalu, “African Christianity: An Overview.” African Christianity: An African Story (2007): 24–43. 63. Ogbu Kalu, “African Christianity from the world wars to decolonization,” WORLD CHRISTIANITIES c. 1914–c. 2000 (2006): 197, 212–3, 215. 64. Ogbu Kalu, “Pentecostalism and Mission in Africa, 1970–2000 Le pentecôtisme et la mission en Afrique, 1970–2000 Pentekostalismus und Mission in Afrika, 1970–2000 Pentecostalismo y misión en África, 1970–2000.” Mission Studies 24, no. 1 (2007): 9–45.

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65. Ogbu Kalu, “Tools of Hope: Stagnation and Political Theology in Africa, 1960–95.” A Global Faith: Essays on Evangelicalism & Globalization 8 (1998): 181. 66. Amos Yong, In the days of Caesar: Pentecostalism and political theology. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2010. 67. Gifford, Ghana’s new Christianity: Pentecostalism in a globalizing African economy. 68. Ruth Marshall, “‘Power in the name of Jesus’: social transformation and Pentecostalism in western Nigeria ‘revisited,’” in Legitimacy and the state in twentieth-­century Africa, pp. 213–246. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 1993. 69. Gifford, “Ghana’s new Christianity: Pentecostalism in a globalizing African economy.”

PART II

Trans-Atlantic Christianity in Africa

CHAPTER 12

Missionaries and African Christians Emma Wild-Wood

Introduction Over centuries, encounters between missionaries and Africans took place in diverse social, political and economic situations, and produced a range of understanding of the spiritual and its practices (Kalu 2010, 5–6, 14). This chapter attempts what one historian of Africa claimed was impossible: ‘one cannot really talk just about “missionaries” and “Africans”, nor about a dialogue between them … Cultural agents and brokers were multiple’ (Ranger 2006, 70). Yet the word of caution provides a way of addressing a vast topic: missionaries and African Christians were agents of social change and cultural exchange. The chapter focuses upon the nature and debates surrounding change and exchange, illustrated by examples, during a period of significant foreign missionary involvement on the continent. It starts from the 1790s when abolitionist activity prompted African-Americans to resettle in West Africa and renewed European missionary interest in the continent. It includes the colonial period from the 1880s. It closes in the 1960s when many African countries and churches became independent of European control. This period is placed in a wider historical purview from 1490s to 2020. Three points are significant in understanding the subject. First, many Africans spread Christianity. It is erroneous to infer from the chapter’s title that ‘missionary’ is not applicable to African Christians. African Christians who were employed by a European mission agency were called missionaries, like Revd Tiyo Soga (1829–1871) of the Glasgow Missionary Society of the Free

E. Wild-Wood (*) Centre for the Study of World Christianity, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. E. Barnes, T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48270-0_12

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Church of Scotland, a missionary to his people, the Xhosa, in southern Africa. Africans who introduced Christianity to ethnic groups other than their own were recognised as missionaries. From the 1860s, 40 recaptives from East Africa and educated in Bombay, including sisters Pricilla and Polly Christian, volunteered to work with the Church Missionary Society around Mombasa. Independent prophets, like William Wade Harris (c.1860–1929) travelled large distances encouraging baptism and the burning of protective charms. Charismatic preachers and healers, like Garrick Sokari Braide (c. 1882–1918) challenged mission churches and colonial administrations (Ekebuisi 2015). Second, it should not be assumed that all non-African missionaries are white Europeans or those of European heritage: African-American and Caribbean missionaries have been active on the continent since the first people of African heritage settled in Freetown, Sierra Leone in 1792. In the twenty-first century, missionaries came from countries like Korea and Brazil. Racialised definitions of ‘missionary’ have caused some scholars to overlook the agency of black people and misinterpret interactions between missionaries and African Christians. Nevertheless, the encounter between foreign missionaries and African Christians is important because it occurred as European countries gained greater control of trade, resources, land and governance in Africa. The third point concerns the context of colonialism. To understand the appeal of Christianity in Africa from the 1790s a distinction is required between the colonial reduction in African autonomy and governance and the introduction of new technologies and ideologies through the encounter between foreign missionaries and Africans. To quote Olufemi Taiwo (2010, 6), ‘in their interactions with Africans, the missionaries were the revolutionaries and the administrators were the reactionaries’. Early missionary encounters predated colonialism and can be distinguished from imperial interests. Colonisers were mostly ambivalent about providing services or encouraging African ‘civil’ rights and independent economic production. Colonisers allow missionaries to continue this work, during the decades of colonial rule. Where the missionary movement served colonial interests, it held a kernel Christian humanism that undermined the imperial project. To be a missionary was to believe in the need for personal commitment to Jesus Christ, to be against slavery and for the social ‘up-lift’ of humanity. Propounding improvements was paternalistic. Up-lifting oneself was the lived reality for missionaries like David Livingstone (1813–1873) and Mary Slessor (1848–1925) who worked in mills as children, and Samuel Ajay Crowther (c.1812–1891) and Bernard Mizeki (c.1861–1896) who were enslaved or migrants in their youth. They had improved their own lives through conversion and education. They believed that others might benefit from the same improvements. Their obedience to the ‘Great Commission to, … go and make disciples of all nations’ (Matt 28: 18–20) was rooted in an evangelical vision of common humanity and a civilisation it could share. The outworking of this vision in multiple contexts provides a complex history during which missionary ideals were often compromised.

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A Brief History of Missions from 1490 The period 1790s–1960s falls between other missionary movements that provide background for the encounters of missionaries and African Christians. From the 1490s, European mission was renewed through a rise in mercantile technology, transnational trade and Renaissance thought. Roman Catholic orders already involved in missionary work, like the Franciscans and Dominicans and new religious orders like the Society of Jesus (Jesuits, 1540) travelled to Asia and Latin America. African ports were often little more than staging posts. However, in the Kingdom of Kongo ruling elites readily adopted Christianity and popular movements, like that led by Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita (c.1684–1703), appealed to saints to give victory in battle. The fragmentation of Kongo and its entanglement with the Portuguese slave trade heralded the demise of the church and missionary activity. From the eighteenth century, Dutch, Danish and British mercantile companies developed. They supported their traders with Protestant chaplains. On the West African coast the chaplains included Africans. Jacobus Capitein (c.1717–1747), Christian Protten (1715–1769), Frederik Svane (1710–1789) and Philip Quaque (1766–1816) attempted to interest associates in Christianity. They had little impact beyond the port towns since the companies they represented had become dependent on slaving. The modern missionary movement was influenced by the Moravians, Methodists and German Pietists active in the Americas and South Africa from the eighteenth century. The Great Awakenings spread evangelical enthusiasm and social concern among freed Christians of African heritage. From 1792 some moved to Freetown which was to become a missionary sending centre throughout West Africa. Freed men like Oludah Equiano (1745–1797) and Ottobah Cugoano (1957–c.1799) influenced British evangelical social reformers like William Wilberforce (1759–1833), Hannah More (1745–1833) and Thomas Clarkson (1760–1848) to protest against the evils of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and plantation slavery and to encourage foreign missions. Protestant missionary voluntary societies developed: the Baptist (BMS, 1892), London (LMS, 1795) and Church (CMS, 1799), Missionary Societies; the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM, 1810) and the Basel (1815) and Paris Evangelical (1822) Missions. Institutional churches established internal missionary boards. Roman Catholics renewed their missionary work from the mid-nineteenth century, developing new religious orders like the Holy Ghost Fathers (1845), The Society of African Missions (1858) and the Order of Missionaries of Our Lady in Africa or White Fathers (1868). Missionary societies were inherently abolitionist: evangelism was one way of repaying the debt owed to Africa for the trade and forced labour of fellow humans. The jostling of European powers for influence on the African continent culminated in the General Act of the Berlin Conference in 1885. It divided Africa into different spheres of European imperial interest, with little concern

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for existing polities and regional networks. Colonial rule was condoned by many missionary organisations that assumed it would bring greater stability to their work. The 1890s saw a new wave of missionary activity in Faith missions like Sudan Interior Mission (1893), the Africa Inland Mission (1895) and Sudan United Mission (1904). A strong ‘end-times’ theology and commitment to holiness made them wary of engaging in ‘worldly’ concerns like education or health-care. The Pentecostal movement also started sending missionaries from its earliest years. In 1908, the Apostolic Faith Mission arrived in Cape Town and spread across southern Africa in the following decade. Many others followed. Pentecostals were distinctive in their propagation of faith-healing, prophecy and speaking in tongues. In the early years the missions were multi-­ racial too: soon they formed institutional churches along racial lines, including the largely black Zionist churches. The First World War’s devastation (1914–1918) profoundly shocked European society, eroding confidence in Empire, Christianity and the superiority of Western civilisation. The war was also fought by Africans on colonial territory. Foreign missionaries in Africa reduced in number, and African Christians stepped into their positions. Nevertheless, Europeans still exerted considerable power, even as the Second World War (1939–1945) further eroded imperial ideology. From the 1920s the number of independent churches increased. Zionists and the Aladura churches of West Africa developed forms of worship that connected with indigenous spirituality in their prayerful pursuit of healing and well-being, while rejecting ancestor and spirit veneration. In 1957 Ghana’s political independence marked the decline of governance from Europe. Within 20 years most African nations gained self-determination, even while the Cold War (1947–1991) threw a long shadow of Western interference. Mission-­ initiated churches gained their independence but often maintained close partnerships with their Western counterparts. Mission agencies continued to function even as some developed into faith-based international development organisations. At the end of the twentieth century, a new era of globalisation began and Christianity remained its agent. Novel technologies developed to accelerate the speed and ease of travel, communication and international trade, complimented or superseded the technologies that had made the modern missionary movement possible. Mission took place from ‘everywhere-to-everywhere’, even though the Western agencies still maintained considerable financial influence. The era witnessed a rise in Pentecostalism and a commitment from Africans to ‘reverse mission’, that is, to take Christianity back to an increasingly secular Europe and North America (Falola 2005, 13–14). The current public, transnational and missionary nature of African Christianity has its roots in the earlier encounters between foreign missionaries and African Christians.

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Christian Societies As Africans became Christians they wanted to know how to live as Christian people. There was an anticipation, from the first encounter with missionaries, that this would involve a change in behaviour. Exactly what changes were necessary to be a follower of Christ and church member and how they impacted upon society were questions that provoked much debate. Missionary structures often provided the basis for debate. A number of Catholic societies created a communitarian response to the slave trade by constructing villages of freed-slaves as model of Christian society. The Holy Ghost Fathers turned their attention to the slave market of Zanzibar which had an annual turn-over of 60,000 slaves at its height. They built Bagamoyo in 1863 as a home to 200 children who were given academic, industrial and agricultural training, and 40 couples who prayed and worked together. The residents established other Catholic villages, especially among the Chagga near Mount Kilimanjaro. The White Fathers in the Great Lakes region also encouraged communal living, expecting adherents to live at the mission station for at least six months before baptism and confirmation. The break with village life was intended to form a new church community. Enthusiastic catechists, like Daudi Lyenga (c.1880–1963), prepared the way for the next mission station (Ajika 2008, 87–106). Communal models supported a Catholic focus on creating an indigenous church, but they required a large staff of priests and sisters. In Cameroon between 1914 and 1939 when foreign missionaries were absent because of war about 400,000 Africans converted to Christianity. Dedicated African catechists intent on conducting Christian worship, teaching doctrines and promoting the societal benefits of a new morality influenced their conversions (Walker-Said 2018, 24–27). The BaselBasel Mission Mission on the GoldGold Coast Coast also instituted a ‘Salem’ policy of withdrawing their congregations into a separate Christian community on mission land in order to protect them from the ‘heathen’ world around them. One of the first ordained ministers, Theophilus Opoku (1842–1913) worked in several villages (Iheanacho 2020). However, many Protestant missions were wary of this kind of segregation. They wanted to convert individuals and nations rather than form new ecclesial social and political structures. In South Africa the LMS, ABCFM and Paris Mission wanted to challenge state on moral issues without establishing a parallel form of government. However, they started to establish mission stations to give autonomy from the colonial state (Elphick 2012, 25). In Uganda, the CMS mission was focused on the establishment of churches in villages. Two African teachers, with permission of the local ruler, were expected to induct the curious into literacy, bible reading and Sunday worship and to establish schools. Village churches were seen as mini-mission stations where African Christians persuaded others to reorder the pattern of their lives and their consumption. White cotton cloth, book bags and a taste for tea, instead of beer, became markers of Christian identity. The change was both adopted and rejected at village level (Wild-Wood 2020, 171–172).

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Protestant notions of individual conversion challenged social expectations around communal well-being, engagement with the natural world and gendered behaviour. Belief in salvation through Christ’s death made libation to ancestors and nature spirits seem redundant. African Christians, refashioning their societies along modern lines, often adopted a suspicion of local art, music and stories that maintained connections with their pre-Christian life. Polyandry was almost universally condemned by missionaries, although some, like John Colenso, Bishop of Natal (1814–1883), defended a limited continuation of its practice. Likewise, ‘female circumcision’ was condemned. African Christians who understood the social importance of these practices resisted these challenges and formed their own churches to permit them. However, some Christian women joined mission churches because they rejected practices women considered harmful (Mombo 2012). The United Presbyterian Mission (UMP) in the Calabar region challenged some Efik customs. Killing twins at birth, killing slaves and wives at funerals of rich and influential men, and retributive killings were considered contrary to Christian teaching that all humanity was equally made in the image of God. Mary Slessor who arrived in 1876 was particularly vehement in her criticism and her direct action. The babies Slessor rescued she brought up as her own children. Slessor continued to promote the nurturing and domestic roles expected of British women but she also worked beyond conventional social boundaries of both British and Efik societies (Obinna and Adesina 2014, 214–215). Her activity was resisted by some Africans. It was welcomed by others, for whom the old ways were dangerous and oppressive. They called Slessor, Akamba Ma, ‘great mother’. Christianity expanded the ethnonational consciousness of some ethnic groups. A Yoruba grammar and Bible translation coupled with Old Testament notions of nationhood supported a discourse of ethnic unity and self-­governance (Vaughan 2016, 36–38). Crowther had led the translation work. He had grown up in Freetown and supported a mission among the Yoruba in Abeokuta in 1843. The ethnonationalist cause was prompted by the belief that diverse languages and cultures could co-exist by holding to a common sacred text. Revd James ‘Holy’ Johnson (c.1836–1917), another Krio from Freetown, was a member of the Legislative Council in Nigeria, where he was an open critic of imperialism. He engaged in pan-African discussions to develop a nation and a Church with African philosophies and African theology. He dialogued with traditional diviners and incorporated Yoruba religious names into Christian baptismal rituals, recognising the spiritual value in vernacular wisdom and customs. In 1908, at the Lambeth conference in London, he gave a paper on African Christianity and proposed the acceptance of polygamists into full membership of the church. Johnson’s scholarly approach contrasted to popular forms of Christianity. He initially endorsed the prophetic ministry of Garrick Braide (c.1882–1918) that brought crowds to give up charms and drinking, but he ultimately condemned Braide’s resistance to Anglican church authority (Ekebuisi 117–142).

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Where Africans were weighing up the merits of two monotheistic systems the more advanced technology introduced by missionaries indicated the greater spiritual power of Christianity over Islam. King Mutesa of Buganda (1856–1884) was intent on widening the borders of his kingdom, establishing international relations and gaining new knowledge. Many at court had become Muslim through contact with traders. However, in 1879 Alexander Mackay, an engineer of the CMS, introduced watches and bicycles to Buganda. He constructed a loom so the Ganda could make their own cotton rather than buying it from the Zanzibari traders. He eagerly shared his knowledge of physics alongside his biblical knowledge. The court was divided, and war ensued. Yet Christian conversion and the dissemination of modern knowledge spread rapidly. It was no longer the preserve of coastal ports or among Muslim elites. Ham Mukasa (c.1870–1956), a senior Muganda chief, was a biblical commentator, historian and moderniser. He was proud of the past whilst wanting change for the future. He put new engineering technologies in practice for the benefit of his chieftaincy.

Cultural Exchange Missionaries’ views were changed by spending long periods of time learning from Africans. Mission stations operated as sites of encounter and learning, permitting African contributions to global repositories of knowledge in the biological, geographical and medical disciplines as well as to ethnography and linguistics (Brock et al. 2015, 157–204). Mission presses produced Christian literature and also collections of proverbs, histories, newspapers and journals on current affairs. Missionaries became conduits to Europe for African knowledge of humanity and the natural environment (Harris and Maxwell 2012: 4). Likewise, African Christians travelled to Europe for education or as diplomats and addressed audiences of missionary supporters (Gikandi 1998). Among Slessor’s pupils was an early ‘reverse missionary’: Daniels Ekarte emigrated to Britain and started the African Churches Mission in Liverpool in 1931. In West Africa, men like James Africanus Horton (1835–1883) and Obadiah Johnson (1849–1920) went to Britain to train as doctors. On their return to Africa, they introduced a scientific worldview with new comprehensions of healing and the human body with the medicine they administered. Johnson was the only brother of four not to become a prominent clergyman: an indication of the close connection between new forms of knowledge and Christianity. Yet medical science in Europe was still in its infancy, while medical practices in Africa had developed through familiarity with herbs and surgery. Dr David Livingstone is a famous example of a missionary who knew the limitations of his knowledge and was grateful for his companions’ understanding of the healing qualities of African plants when he was sick. Likewise, in the early twentieth century the Christian Missions in Many Lands (Plymouth Brethren) hospital in Zambia adapted its therapeutic system so it became a locally meaningful form of healing. The missionary medical staff followed Lunda advice, including

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eating scorpion as a cure and prophylaxis for scorpion stings. The Lunda saw the hospital’s work as an alternative way of confronting witchcraft and ancestral displeasure (Kalusa 2012: 249). In Western Uganda, the first Runyoro-Rutoro Gospel translation was begun in 1895 by Apolo Kivebulaya, a Buganda missionary to the Kingdom of Toro. Kivebulaya handed the translation work over to CMS missionary H.E. Maddox and three Batoro, Aberi Balya, Yosiya Kamuhiigi and Zac Musana. New Christians in the area spent evenings translating alongside CMS missionaries to produce the entire Bible. Through the process knowledge of language, linguistics and culture were shared. Bible translation helped fashion a vision of a single but internally diverse worldwide Christian culture. Banyoro and Batoro rulers, supported by CMS missionaries, use the translation to argue for greater influence in the colonial state. Ruth Fisher, who wrote the earliest anthropological work of the Banyoro and Batoro people, Twilight Tales of the Black Buganda, collaborated closely with the kings and courts to gain her information (Wild-­ Wood 2020: 189–193, 199). Apolo Kaggwa (1865–1926), the Protestant Prime Minister of Uganda, was an anthropologist and historian who collaborated closely in research with the Revd John Roscoe (1861–1932) of the CMS. Kaggwa published three titles in Luganda on the kings, traditions and clans of the Baganda1 before Roscoe published The Baganda: An Account of Their Native Customs and Beliefs (1911). Roscoe appreciated the great legends of the Ganda, and the proverbs as repositories of wisdom. Through this exchange some missionaries experienced an epistemic conversion to new thought forms. David Clement Scott continued to challenge racial assumptions into the twentieth century. His encounter with the Mang’anja people from 1881, their language and civilisation prompted a respect for ways of human interaction that were new to him. He credited his African friends with teaching him the arts of diplomacy required to negotiate with local rulers and Arab traders intent on preserving the slave trade. Theologically, he considered that the figure of the risen Christ offered a vision of the unity of humanity in interracial worship that recognised differences and learning from strangers. This vision produced ‘theological reversals’ in which received European knowledge was upturned (Englund 2022). Many daily encounters—including those that resisted Christianisation— show the cultural exchange between missionaries and Africans. International friendships were formed (Robert 2011) which appeared to herald an integrated society. Yet some mission activities alienated indigenous populations and increased the inequitable distribution of resources and power. It is to these we turn now to understand the context in which they took place.

Asymmetries of Authority Inequalities in social and political power influenced the encounter between foreign missionaries and African Christians. A significant imbalance occurred from 1885 when European states imposed colonial administrations across most

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of the continent. Prior to this change, missionary work had relied on maintaining good relations with local rulers and early converts. In places that were relatively stable, missionaries were reluctant to see colonial authorities take control. In areas that were politically unstable, foreign missionaries petitioned their home governments to ‘protect’ the populations. European missionaries controlled the church before political colonialism took effect. This was based on an attitude of superiority not on political power. Most European missionaries in the early nineteenth century were convinced that Christianity and Western culture represented the pinnacle of civilisation. They assumed that proper African Christian leadership would replicate ‘civilised’ ways of thinking, organising and dressing; conversely, these ‘civilised’ traits were signs of Christian conduct. The CMS Secretary, Henry Venn (1796–1873) and Rufus Anderson (1796–1880) of the ABCFM challenged European missionary leadership: they insisted that missions should work towards their ‘euthanasia’ through creating self-governing, self-supporting and self-propagating churches. This ideal was much vaunted, but foreign missionaries were unwilling to relinquish control. Venn was inspired by his friendship with Crowther and the missionary interest of the church in Sierra Leone, where, for example, the Igbo recaptives formed an association to lobby for a mission to Igbo (Kalu 2010, 50). Crowther was erudite and well-educated, in many ways the epitome of a civilised gentleman. He became Bishop of the Niger Delta in 1864. Crowther’s leadership was criticised by a new generation of foreign CMS missionaries. They no longer supported the older ‘civilising’ mission approach, and its predilection for European habits were interpreted as ‘worldly’ and ostentatious. They propounded a strict ethic of personal morality inspired by the ‘holiness’ movement. They expected Africans to be more ‘spiritual’ and less ‘modern’. Bishop Crowther’s public humiliation was a turning point in calls for autonomous church governance. Prominent West African church leaders wanted to exercise self-actualisation guided by Christianity. They re-examined African traditions and claimed to see God’s work in them, while European missionaries with a strong theology of the fall preached a radical rejection of the past. The first independent church was established as early as 1821, when the West African Methodist Church (WAMC) declared its independence from the American Methodist Episcopal Church (AMEC), a church established as a protest against slavery and oppression in the US. Daniel Coker (c.1780–1846) AMEC missionary in Sierra Leone became leader of the WAMC. In the 1840s Methodists and Baptists formed churches that were similar in structure and worship to their predecessors but, crucially, were independent of missionary control. They were supported by the prominent Pan-Africanist, statesman, Presbyterian minister and, briefly, employee of the CMS, Edward W. Blyden (1832–1912). Born in the Caribbean, Blyden went to the newly independent Liberia in 1850. He was an advocate of political and religious independence known as Ethiopianism. Inspired by biblical references to Ethiopia (e.g. Ps 68: 31) and the ancient Christian kingdom, Ethiopianism reclaimed Christianity for Africa with African

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leadership whilst espousing modern education and technology. Blyden urged Anglicans in Lagos, which had been a British colony since 1861, to separate from the Church of England. By 1891 the region was under British colonial rule and Crowther was a broken man. Some Anglicans formed the United Native Anglican Church. Others, sympathetic to the Ethiopian cause, took different routes to ecclesial autonomy. James Johnson was a close ally of Blyden but he preferred to attempt change within the Anglican Church. Brought up the WAMC in Sierra Leone, he became an Anglican priest and assistant bishop (1900–1917) of the Niger Mission and Benin territories. He criticised CMS missionaries for neither following the CMS ideal by treating Africans as their equals nor adhering to true Anglican principles. He was ardent in his articulation of African Christianity and the evangelisation of Africa by Africans. For him, Christianity instigated nationhood and required national independence from foreign rule. Few missionaries were convinced imperialists, yet some actively encouraged colonial rule. The Church of Scotland missionaries were concerned about the Portuguese and Arab slave-traders who raided the local populations near Lake Nyasa (now Malawi). The CMS missionaries in Buganda worried about the effects of civil war in the kingdom. Both petitioned the British government to establish a protectorate as a buffer against slaving interests and conflict. In Uganda’s case the move was supported by Apolo Kaggwa’s faction in the war who sought international allies. Missionary proponents of British rule were soon its critics. David Clement Scott critiqued the destructive, violent techniques of colonial entrepreneurs and administrators. Other missionaries took a pragmatic approach to colonial rule. Slessor was asked to act as Vice-Consul, after the British army annexed the Calabar area, establishing the Niger Coast Protectorate in 1891. Despite reservations about British rule, she accepted the role because, she believed, it helped her act as a local mediator and seek justice for women and children. In 1905 she became Vice-President of the Native Court, the first woman magistrate in the British Empire (Obinna and Adesina 2014, 212). Using her fluent Efik to administer justice, she called for the recognition of traditional ‘friend’ marriages that were temporary and often polygamous, for women whose husbands had long prison sentences. Such relationships, she said, should not be considered adulterous. Slessor attempted to change the expectations of British justice and morality, to do so she worked within colonial rule. Missionaries tried to put imperialism ‘in its place’ (Porter 2004, 330). They worked with colonial authorities, assuming they could benefit local populations. Missionaries criticised colonies that did not listen to their advice. They were less forthright on self-governance of Africans. Conversely, colonial administrations, who had little direct interest in improving the rights or economic situation of Africans, supported missionary educational and medical institutions. Missionary organisations ameliorated colonialism by investing in services the colonial authorities did not want to fund. Ultimately, African Christians

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used those missionary services and arguments to work for their self-­ determination (Falola 2005, 9).

Racial Inequalities Missionaries believed that Christianity could overcome human differences while often failing to identify the harm caused by social constructions of difference. In 1828 John Philip of the LMS wrote an extensive report into the abuses meted upon the Khoi-San of the Cape Colony. His denunciation of racial discrimination drew upon Christian doctrine and eighteenth-century notions of human and natural rights, including right to life, liberty, family, property, fair wages, mobility and freedom from cruelty and oppression (Elphick 2012, 321). Over time, however, missionaries’ assertions of equal rights were matched with an acceptance of inequalities. Equality became spiritualised. Few foreign missionaries doubted that Africans were their equals as sinners and children of God in need of Christ’s salvation. They first judged Africans by the standards of Western civilisation and, later, by an interior piety and a belief that African cultures were inferior. Notions of African immaturity abounded as the title of CMS missionary A. L. Kitching’s book exemplifies, On the Backwaters of the Nile: Studies of Some Child Races of Central Africa (1912). Deterioration in racial attitudes affected recruitment. Missionary societies originally thought that African people would make better missionaries. African-­ Americans were expected to adapt more quickly to African climates and cultures whilst displaying the best of Western civilisation. Once the UMP negotiated with Efik rulers to start a mission to Calabar in 1846, they recruited Jamaican missionaries. They encouraged evangelism by local Efik Christians, and the first clergyman, Revd Esien Ukpabio, was ordained in 1872. By the end of the nineteenth century, optimism for societal equality through Christian conversion had diminished among foreign missionaries. African-American missionaries were no longer considered an asset. Alonzo and Althea Brown Edmiston, who worked for the American Presbyterian Congo Mission (APCM) between 1902 and 1941 to provide education and services for Congolese people, had to contend with the racialised policies and assumptions in the Belgian colony and among mission supporters and the APCM itself (Hill 2020). Social theories of race influenced Christian theologies, missiology and action (Stanley 2010). Racist attitudes among missionaries prompted the rise of independent churches. In 1892 Wesleyan Methodist Missionary church minister Mangena Maake Mokone wrote a resignation letter listing reasons for his decision. They include racist practices of white missionaries, including scrutiny and suspicion of their black counterparts, the gulf between black and white people, and a lack of material support for African ministers. Mokone formed the first Ethiopian Church in South Africa. It wanted to maintain international ties and joined the AMEC. The connection with the USA initially brought a new narrative of freedom and links with black people who advanced an African cause.

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Unfortunately, the AMEC also adopted rhetoric about the ‘dark continent’ and ‘barbariansim’ and sought to control the South African church in ways that angered African leaders (Campbell 1995, 116–120). The East African Revival (1930s–1970s) tackled racism directly within mission-­ initiated churches. Revivalists were outspoken in their belief that Christian gospel brought humanity together, as ‘brothers and sisters in Christ’ regardless of race and ethnicity. Customs and social groups that perpetuated racial and ethnic difference were considered sinful. African revivalists confronted white missionaries with the need to confess their superior attitude. Some white missionaries considered the Revivalists impudent. Some confessed and pressed others to do the same. The partnerships between prominent European and African preachers, the friendship between their families and the boldness with which Africans challenged European missionaries played a role in dissociating Christianity with colonialism. The Revival inspired Revd John Gatu (1925–2017), of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa. He rejected the approach of the Mau-Mau uprising against the British (1952–1960), but firmly supported Kenyan independence from colonial and missionary control. From 1974 at the All Africa Council of Churches, and the Lausanne International Congress on World Evangelization he urged a temporary moratorium on Western missionary work, to achieve equitable interdependence between foreign missions and African churches (Wild-Wood 2021), a call many missionaries failed to understand.

Conclusion Despite the scale of the modern missionary movement most African Christians did not encounter foreign missionaries directly during 1790–1960. They were more likely to encounter an African missionary or teacher. The movement had a profound effect on the continent because of the collaboration between Western and African missionaries to spread Christianity, literacy, schools, biomedicine, modern technology and through it all a vision in common humanity with shared values. Foreign missionaries have been considered the vanguard of colonialism. Missionary work increased during the colonial era. So, some commentators expected the influence of Christianity to fade in the independence era. Yet African Christians were attracted to the Christian church as a universal community and maintained transnational connections. They argued for local differences in Christian practice and they resisted over-weaning attempts at foreign control. The spread of Christianity was entangled in colonialism, but it was not synonymous with it. Judged by numbers of Christians, the religion took hold in Africa in its many forms only after the colonial era had passed: in 1900 only 8.9% of the population of Africa was Christian, this percentage rose to 38.2% in 1970 and 49.3% in 2020. Jehu Hanciles (2021), in arguing the role of migration in the spread of Christianity, has recently challenged the primacy of imperial explanations that lend too much agency to elites, institutions and doctrine, while failing to observe the social change and exchange that takes

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place in social and cultural movements. The encounter between foreign missionaries and Africans was limited but profound: friendships and enmities were formed that influenced the course of church leadership and nationalist discourse. The encounter between African missionaries and Africans—in ordinary, everyday ways—pervaded all aspects of life and produced lasting social change. Most significantly, it has inspired many Africans with similar missionary commitments to effect change in the name of Christ. Today, African Christians are missionaries to Europe and America.

Note 1. Kagawa, Ekitabo kya Basekabaka Bebuganda (The Book of the Kings of Buganda, 1901), Ekitabo Kye Empisa Za Baganda (The Book of the Traditions and Customs of the Baganda) 1905, Ekitabo Ky’Ebika bya Abaganda (the Book of the Clans of the Baganda) 1908.

Bibliography Ajika, Michel Djalbonyo. 2008. Daudi Lyenga: Premier Catéchiste de l’Ituri. Mahagi: Eveche. Brock, Peggy, Norman Etherington, Gareth Griffiths, Jacqueline Van Gent. 2015. Indigenous Evangelists and Questions of Authority in the British Empire, 1750–1940: First Fruits. Leiden: Brill. Campbell, James T. 1995. Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Ekebuisi, Chinonyerem C. 2015. The Life and Ministry of Prophet Garrick Sokari Braide; Elijah the Second of Niger Delta, Nigeria, c.1882–1918. Bern, Peter Lang. Elphick, Richard. 2012. The Equality of Believers: Protestant Missionaries and the Racial Politics of South Africa. Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press. Englund, Harri. 2022. Visions for Racial Equality: David Clement Scott and the Struggle for Justice in Nineteenth-Century Malawi. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Falola, Toyin. 2005. ‘Introduction’, In Christianity and Social Change in Africa: Essays in Honor of J.D.Y. Peel. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press: 3–25. Gikandi, Simon (ed). 1998. In Uganda’s Katikiro in England by Ham Mukasa. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hanciles, Jehu J. 2021. Migration and the Making of Global Christianity. Grand Rapids, MI; Eerdmans. Harris, Patrick and David Maxwell. 2012. ‘Introduction,’ In Patrick Harris and David Maxwell (eds) The Spiritual in the Secular: Missionaries and Knowledge about Africa. Grand Rapids, MI; Eerdmans: 1–29. Hill, Kimberly D. 2020. A Higher Mission. The Careers of Alonzo and Althea Brown Edmiston in Central Africa. Lexington, The University Press of Kentucky. Iheanacho, Maureen O. 2020. ‘Following Jesus in Nineteenth-Century Gold Coast: The Unassuming Leadership Style of Theophilus Opoku’ Journal of African Christian Thought 23, 1: 20–27.

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Kalu, Ogbu. 2010. ‘Changing Tides; Some Currents in World Christianity at the end of the 20th century’ and ‘Gathering Figs from Thistles?’ In Wilhelmina J. Kalu, Nimi Wariboko, Toyin Falola (eds). The Collected Essays of Ogbu Kalu, Christian Missions in Africa: Success Ferment and Trauma. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, Inc. Kalusa, Walima T. 2012. ‘Christian Medical Discourse and praxis on the Imperial Frontier: Explaining the Popularity of Missionary Medicine in Mwinilunga District, Zambia, 1906–1935’. In Patrick Harris and David Maxwell (eds) The Spiritual in the Secular: Missionaries and Knowledge about Africa. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. 245–266. Mombo, Esther. 2012. ‘The Revival Testimony of Second Wives’. In The East African Revival: History and Legacies, edited by Kevin Ward and Emma Wild-Wood, 153–62. Farnham: Ashgate. Obinna, Elijah and Oluwakemi A. Adesina. 2014. ‘Invoking Gender: The Thoughts, Mission and Theology of Mary Slessor in Southern Nigeria.’ In Africa in Scotland, Scotland in Africa. A. Adogame and A. Lawrence. Leiden: Brill. 205–229. Porter, Andrew. 2004. Religion Verse Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ranger, Terrance. 2006. ‘Christianity, Capitalism and Empire: the state of the debate’, Transformation, 23, 2: 67–70. Robert, Dana. 2011. Cross-Cultural Friendship in the Creation of Twentieth-Century World Christianity’. International Bulletin of Missionary Research 35, 2: 100–107. Stanley, Brian. 2010. ‘From “the poor heathen” to “the glory and honour of all nations”: vocabularies of race and custom in Protestant missions, 1844–1928,’ International Bulletin of Missionary Research 34, 1: 3–10. Taiwo, Olufemi 2010. How Colonialism Preempted Modernity in Africa. Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press. Vaughan, Olufemi. 2016. Religion and the Making of Nigeria. Durham, NC; Duke University of Press. Walker-Said, Charlotte. 2018. Faith Power and Family: Christianity and Social Change in French Cameroon. Woodbridge: James Currey. Wild-Wood, Emma. 2020. The Mission of Apolo Kivebulaya: Religious Encounter and Social Change in the Great Lakes c.1865–1935. Woodbridge: James Currey. Wild-Wood, Emma. 2021. “The East African Revival.” In The Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of African History. Oxford University Press. https://doi. org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.ORE_AFH-­00646.R1.

CHAPTER 13

Catholic Missions and African Responses I: 1450–1800 Paul Kollman

Introduction The three centuries covered here—from the arrival of Iberian Catholic missionaries in sub-Saharan Africa to 1800—saw the Catholic Church’s presence in Africa remain meager. Historical understanding of African responses to the Catholic message throughout this period remains elusive since European perspectives dominate most written sources. Nonetheless, discernible evidence of differentiated responses to missionary initiatives exists quite early, some of which prefigured important aspects of African Catholicism to come, with ongoing implications for the present.

Catholicism in Africa Before the Nineteenth Century Long blunted in northern Africa by overwhelming Muslim control, the Catholic Church began to engage sub-Saharan Africa via Portuguese explorations around the continent in the latter fifteenth century. Such explorations drew intermittent motivation from rumors of a stranded and desperate Christian king, sometimes called “Prester John,” needing European intervention from Muslims or other threatening outsiders—a mythic conception once linked to India, yet versatile enough to be attached to the longstanding Christians of Ethiopia and other potential allies. Prince Henry the Navigator

P. Kollman (*) Department of Theology, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. E. Barnes, T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48270-0_13

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(1394–1460), who spearheaded Portuguese explorations south toward Africa, sought to spread Christianity and counter Islam, and priests accompanied many voyages. In 1421, recently conquered Ceuta, in northern Africa, became a diocese and in 1472 Pope Sixtus IV named Alfonso de Bolaños, a Franciscan who had served in the Canary Islands, as papal nuncio and commissioner for both the islands and “Guinea,” or the coast of western Africa. Small coastal missionary outposts established over the next centuries appeared alongside trading posts and military fortifications as linked chaplaincies and churches, with Portugal taking official Catholic control over the evangelization of Africa due to the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas. This agreement split control of the world being explored between Spain and Portugal, lending political reinforcement to earlier papal conferrals of missionary and ecclesial responsibility on the Iberian kingdoms, known as the patronato real in Spanish and padraodo real in Portuguese. A few places saw significant Catholic vitality in the early modern period, notably the Kingdom of Kongo, with promising moments also in Ethiopia, Angola, and southeast Africa. Some have even linked the 1622 founding of the Vatican’s mission office, Propaganda Fide, to hopes of evangelization in Kongo and Ethiopia.1 Regardless, at the end of the eighteenth century the Catholic presence in all but Kongo remained small, and mostly diminishing. From a Catholic perspective, these first three centuries have been deemed a “strangled opportunity,” undermined by Portuguese indifference and even hostility, missionary unwillingness to adapt the faith to local cultures, occasional fierce resistance to the European presence (at times linked to Muslim faith), and the trans-Atlantic slave trade.2 Ethiopia Europeans had long known of Ethiopian Christianity, which had representatives at the 1443 Council of Florence. The 1453 fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans encouraged new attention to this isolated potential Christian ally, whose monks had a monastery in Rome from 1480. Pressed by Muslims, the Ethiopian crown asked for help from the Vatican in 1513 and in 1520 a Portuguese delegation arrived, remaining until 1526. Its chaplain, Francisco de Alvarez, prepared a famous and influential 1540 account of the kingdom that described the impressive institutional church and called the emperor “Prester John.”3 Suffering renewed and devastating Muslim attacks beginning in 1531, the Ethiopians called for more help from European Christians. The Portuguese defeated Muslims threatening the kingdom in 1542, and a large group of Jesuits arrived in 1557. With their successive leaders named a “patriarch” by the Vatican, the Jesuits alternately appreciated and sought to change the form of Christianity they encountered, which was deeply linked to national identity. The new European form of Christianity led to civil conflicts and few Ethiopians converted, though a Catholic community, largely Portuguese, developed in the north at Fremona.

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The third such Catholic patriarch for Ethiopia, the Jesuit Pedro Paez, arrived in 1603 after a harrowing journey that included time as a galley slave. An outstanding missionary with unusual linguistic ability and cultural sensitivity, Paez achieved promising, if short-lived, results. He found the ear of the emperor he met, whose welcome and subsequent religious changes led to his execution by those loyal to the national faith. A later emperor named Susenyos, however, continued the welcome and, despite Paez’s warnings, converted in 1622. He also sought to make Catholicism the official religion of Ethiopia, motivated by faith as well as fear of Turks to the north and unrest among a group with traditional African beliefs to the south, the Galla (today called the Oromo). Dynastic rivals, however, including his son Fasilidas, resisted Catholicism. The sudden death of Paez only a few weeks after Susenyos’s conversion led to a much less skilled Jesuit successor, Alphonsus Mendes. Mendes’s stridency only inflamed nationalist loyalties to their venerable form of Christianity, and Susenyos relented, allowing freedom of worship in 1632 and turning over power to his son. Fasilidas expelled the Jesuits in 1637 and some of those hiding in order to remain were found and killed, the last one in 1653. Rome later attempted a joint Franciscan-Jesuit mission in 1700 and sponsored another Franciscan effort in 1750, neither of which lasted long. In 1788 the Vatican appointed an Ethiopian convert, Tobias Gabra Egzi’abeher, as bishop, but he was poorly received when he arrived.4 Eastern and Southeastern Africa At the coast of eastern Africa, today Kenya and Tanzania, the famous Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier had stopped on his way to India in 1542. Over the next centuries, Catholic missionaries staffed mostly modest mission stations linked to Portuguese fortified ports. Yet Augustinian friars, the most prominent group, recorded hundreds of converts in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. One, Yusuf bin Ali, who became Jeronimo Chingulia after baptism, succeeded his Muslim father as sultan of Mombasa in 1625. Some combination of Portuguese mistreatment and his own personal ambition compelled his return to Islam and an uprising in 1631. Several hundred converts and Europeans died to become the so-called Mombasa Martyrs. Revealingly, the Portuguese initiated processes of canonization yet ignored the many Africans who died, recognizing only missionaries and other Europeans. Ongoing Muslim resistance led to a Portuguese withdrawal and the end of formal European and Catholic presence in eastern Africa by the early 1730s.5 The Portuguese presence to the south, in today’s Mozambique, was more substantial.6 At the coast, a sizeable Portuguese Christian population arose on the island of Mozambique, which served as colonial capital until the late nineteenth century, and a chapel was built in the fort. The first missionary work came after mainland Tonga people asked for missionaries, and three Jesuits from Goa arrived in 1560, led by Father Gonsalo da Silveira. Arriving at the court of Gamba, a local king, they baptized several hundred, discovering the

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nature of local religion and how it resisted Christianity. Leaving a colleague, Father Fernandes, in charge, Gonsalo went off to evangelize a more renowned king, the Mwene Mutapa, the regional hegemon rumored to hold much gold. Back at Gamba’s court, Fernandes ran into trouble, facing local resistance including an effort to starve him and soon withdrew. Meanwhile Gonsalo arrived in late 1560 at his destination and impressed the famous court with his ascetical life. Soon the Mwene Mutapa and other royal figures were baptized. Yet according to missionary records, local Muslims felt threatened and warned the king, whose personal name was Negomo Mupunzagutu, against Gonsalo as a harbinger of Portuguese domination, and the missionary was condemned to death. Hearing his sentence, Gonsalo allegedly forgave the Mwene Mutapa, baptized 50 people, and was strangled the same night. A Portuguese punitive expedition, with Jesuit missionaries joining as military chaplains, never reached the Mwene Mutapa, though on the way they massacred Muslims accused of complicity in the missionary’s death. A new Dominican mission arrived in 1577, and Father João dos Santos claimed to have baptized 20,000 by 1591, despite finding polygamy and other pagan customs deeply entrenched.7 The Dominicans also attracted local vocations to the priesthood, whom they educated in Goa. In 1607, a new mission of Jesuits arrived to a welcoming Mwene Mutapa named Gatsi Rusere, but the Dominicans restricted the newcomers’ work to the Zambezi river, where they opened missions near existing Portuguese posts at Sena and Tete. By 1612, Mozambique was detached from the Catholic jurisdiction in Goa, and, by 1620, 42 priests served there. The next Mwene Mutapa, Kapararidze, cracked down on Catholics and was overthrown in 1628 by the Portuguese, who were inspired by a Dominican priest-chaplain, Father Luis do Espirito Santo. Kapararidze’s successor, Mavhura, seen as a puppet, was soon overthrown, and the Dominican chaplain was killed, prompting Portuguese retaliation once more. Soon the once-dominant kingdom was under Portuguese control, as were nearby polities, and the slave trade expanded. The Mwene Mutapa became a baptized figurehead8 until a rebellion in 1693 overthrew Portuguese control, with a second one in 1712 removing existing coastal missions. Mission centers continued only along the Zambezi, led by the Jesuits and a few Dominicans. In the Zambezi valley, a few missionaries oversaw large prazos, or plantations, that usually included slave-holding. Though the Jesuits set up a college for educating local and Portuguese elites in 1697 at Sena, almost no evangelization of local peoples occurred. Ignoring official Catholic prohibitions against engagement in commercial activities, some missionaries became local powerbrokers with extensive holdings in land, gold, and slaves. One wealthy Dominican missionary priest, Pedro de Trinidade, served for 44 years, owned 1600 slaves, and continued in  local cults as a rain-making divinity after his 1751 death at Zumbo.9 The Portuguese colonial regime, prompted by the anticlericalism of the powerful Marquis of Pombal at home, expelled many missionaries in 1759, by which time neither the Jesuits nor Dominicans were baptizing converts.

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Portuguese clergy operated in colonial centers, yet in the mid-nineteenth century, David Livingstone saw only ruins of Catholic missions along the Zambezi River.10 Western Africa Due to its comparative proximity to Portugal, western Africa saw earlier, more extensive, and more diverse Catholic attempts at evangelization than elsewhere in Africa. Cape Verde, a series of islands off so-called upper Guinea (the northern part of coastal western Africa), due west of Senegal, and São Tomé, an island off the mainland in lower Guinea, near Gabon, became centers for projecting Catholic activity to the continent, and by the 1530s, both were dioceses of their own (Bane 1956, 12). Most efforts remained small, confined to the areas near the original Portuguese forts and trading posts from which sporadic missionary outreach occasionally emanated. The exceptions were the Catholic Kingdom of Kongo and the Portuguese colony of Angola to its south. Kongo especially had impressive Catholic vitality from the early 1500s until the latter eighteenth century. Already in 1458, a chief in what is now Gambia underwent instruction in Catholicism by a Portuguese ship captain, and small Catholic communities arose, with Cape Verde-based priests offering Mass in small chapels. Beginning in the early 1470s, the Portuguese built forts with chapels at the Gold Coast, today Ghana, the most prominent at Elmina, dedicated to Saint George and staffed by the Portuguese military religious order called the Order of Christ. A 1494 German visitor to Portugal spoke of many Africans being trained to be priests in Lisbon, and there were occasional signs of life in Africa, too, though nearly always short-lived. When in 1503 a statue of Saint Francis at Elmina changed color due to the climate, the governor proclaimed the revelation of a new patron saint for Africa, and soon a mass movement of conversion occurred, including the chief of the Efutu and 1000 others. Little catechesis followed, however, and one woman, Grace, who fell away from the faith, found herself prosecuted by the Inquisition and was jailed in Lisbon.11 Four Portuguese Augustinian missionaries came to Gold Coast in 1572, establishing schools and tentatively evangelizing the surrounding countryside, and two followed the next year. After some initial success, local people attacked and killed the missionaries, who were not soon replaced. After its founding in 1622, Propaganda Fide took over, assigning Capuchins to Elmina and its environs in the 1630s. French Capuchins came first, establishing a mission at Assinie in the far west—in what is now Ivory Coast—in 1635, and Spanish Capuchins replaced them in 1651. Some decades later, two Africans from Assinie were brought to Paris to be converted by a famous French priest-­ theologian, Bossuet, at the command of Louis XIV. One returned in 1695, the other in 1701. Soon after the Dominicans, who had succeeded the Capuchins in 1687, left Assinie.12

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Catholic missionaries reached the regionally famous kingdom of Benin in 1515 after a request to the Portuguese king for weapons, which were promised based on conversion. For their part, the Portuguese were most interested in slaves, and the next year the king, or Oba, had his son baptized. One convert already present, Gregorio Lourenço, served as interpreter and continued as intermediary with the Portuguese into the 1530s. A few converts emerged in the sixteenth century, but the local religion retained a formidable presence and residents resisted any new creed. Later in 1665, audacious Spanish Capuchins were about to witness hitherto secret rituals including human sacrifice, yet when they were detected they were ejected. An Italian Capuchin mission operated in Benin’s capital from 1710 to 1713, with little effects before closing.13 A Catholic presence in Warri, home of the Itsekeri people whose capital was Whydah (or Ouidah) in what is now southern Nigeria, arose in 1570, when Augustinian missionaries from São Tomé were invited by the local Olu, or traditional ruler, in an effort to gain Portuguese allies. The first Olu baptized, Sebastião, sent his son Domingo to Portugal to be educated as a priest, but he returned with a European wife in the early seventeenth century. Other successors were also educated in Portugal yet local evangelization did not accompany royal support. Future Olus requested missionaries, but the kingdom’s poverty dissuaded religious orders, who often opted instead for nearby Benin. The Capuchins opened a mission at Whydah in 1644, soon leaving due to the resistance of European traders, and returned to Ardra, a nearby kingdom, in 1660 at the request of the king. The Capuchins tried again at Whydah in 1667, yet their chapel was burned by European traders, and later attempts to found missions by the Dominicans in 1670 and 1674 were all thwarted. A few Capuchins evangelized into the early eighteenth century but enthusiasm dissipated. Catholicism’s appeal waned over time due to scandalous missionary behavior, European traders’ resistance, local political unrest, and, beginning mid-­century, Portuguese anti-Catholicism.14 When in 1797 the King of Dahomey, which had conquered Whydah 70 years before, told visiting missionaries that he desired baptism, he was assassinated before that happened. Though European visitors recognized traces of Catholicism in local religious practices into the nineteenth century, no Catholic missionaries returned until the 1840s.15 Jesuits based in Cape Verde arrived in Sierra Leone in the early seventeenth century, led by Balthasar Barreira, SJ, who nearly converted a local king but was thwarted by Muslims. Capuchin missionaries arriving over a half-century after Barreira’s death in 1669 found that local people remembered him. Meanwhile, a Castilian Capuchin named Seraphim arrived in 1647 and remained for ten years, earning a reputation for compassion, but other missionaries were absent until the 1714 return of a lay African Catholic, Signor Joseph, who had been converted in Europe. Signor Joseph founded Catholic villages and was renowned for his holiness.16 In Senegal, the French eventually established missions in two small coastal settlements, Saint Louis, established in 1659, and Goree, in 1678. Both became

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Catholic enclaves surrounded by Muslims, serving French traders and mixed-­ race offspring. An apostolic prefecture was established there in 1763.17 Kongo and Angola The Kingdom of Kongo, which straddled the current countries of Congo-­ Brazzaville (formerly French Congo), the Democratic Republic of Congo (previously Belgian Congo, then Zaire), and Angola, became the most important Catholic presence in Africa until at least the late nineteenth century.18 Late fifteenth-century contacts with the Portuguese had led to the conversion and baptism of some coastal Kongolese elites, and eventually the king, who became João I, in 1491. Unsurprisingly, despite having dreams allegedly urging him to embrace his faith, he renounced Christianity once he realized the implications, not least the need to become monogamous. His son, Mvemba Nzinga, however, who was baptized Afonso (c.1456–1542/43), succeeded his father after a civil war in which the intervention of Saint James had allegedly been decisive in his triumph over his non-Catholic brother. Ruling for over three decades, Afonso I became a monumental figure in African Christian history, the “apostle of the Kongo,” presiding over his kingdom and stamping it with a Catholic identity that persisted for over two centuries. He pledged loyalty to the Pope in 1513, and in the 1960s Pope Paul VI called Kongo “the eldest son of the Church in Black Africa.” Afonso, deemed an “angel” by a Portuguese missionary in 1516—ironically, due to his willingness to burn idolaters in order to protect the faith19—is also the first person in history from south of the Sahara to leave us with a significant correspondence. At his death, perhaps one half of the kingdom’s population of four million was baptized. Adrian Hastings (1994, 80–82) has identified four pillars that organized Kongolese Catholic identity: first, the royal monarchy; second, a Catholic noble ruling class, including religious figures with ritual authority; third, the developing religious role of the capital city, Mbanza Kongo, which became São Salvador, and its large church, with Saint James’s feast the premier national holiday; and fourth, immigrant Portuguese who, though focused on slave-­ trading, also furnished the kingdom with skilled labor and European advice as Kongo’s leaders negotiated with their European interlocutors, political and ecclesiastical. Their offspring, often intermarrying, also provided African Catholics speaking both Portuguese and Kikongo fluently. These pillars buttressed a palpable Catholic identity that could withstand the few missionary priests, many of them providing egregious moral examples, which prevented thorough evangelization of the larger population. Afonso himself sought to advance evangelization and sent his son, Henry, to be trained as a priest in Lisbon. Henry became a bishop in 1521, returning with four assistant priests to Kongo. Received reluctantly by Portuguese priests on the ground, he only lived a short time before dying in 1530. Afonso repeatedly asked the Portuguese and the Vatican for more missionaries—seeking 50 in 1526, for example—and meanwhile sought to serve as a model of faith

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himself while establishing structures for expanding Catholicism. The Portuguese proved unreliable allies and Afonso complained of their slave-­trading, though occasionally they did assist the Kongolese monarch with supplies and personnel.20 After Afonso I’s death, his successors showed little of his religious zeal or capacity to unify the kingdom, and missionaries also remained few amidst the political turmoil. These kings intermittently pursued deepening direct ties with Rome and tried to avoid or placate the Portuguese, which was difficult. The Jesuits arrived mid-century and found their message resisted due to calls for an end to the king’s concubinage. Still, in the 1550s, one Jesuit missionary produced a catechism in the local language, Kikongo—and a later version from 1624 featured an innovative method of learning the faith by singing (Sundkler and Steed 2000, 54). Yet few missionaries meant little adequate organized instruction. The Jesuits also engaged in slave-trading which, coupled with their calls for reform, led to their expulsion in 1555 (Bane 1956, 39–41). The later sixteenth century saw sporadic and uneven efforts, with missionaries often sent along with Portuguese military assistance to the kingdom when it faced attacks from outside invaders call the Jaga or Imbangala. The foundation of a seminary in São Tomé in 1571 raised the possibility of more substantial evangelization, and papal correspondence suggests that Kongolese kings interacted with the Vatican not unlike contemporaneous European monarchs. A Franciscan bishop from São Tomé sought to re-engage the kingdom in 1577, and Carmelites came in 1582. In 1587, King Alvaro II allowed the Jesuits to return.21 The 1591 publication in Europe of an account of the kingdom and its Catholicism brought it to broader European attention, likely prompting the establishment of the diocese of São Salvador in 1596. This was a welcome sign of independence from the diocese of São Tomé, dominated by the Portuguese, yet the rules of the padraodo still operated, so bishops had to be Portuguese. Unfortunately, the first few bishops died quickly. So, too, did a Kongolese envoy sent to Rome from the court, the Mani Vunda, in 1608—though his portrait came to be painted and adorns the Vatican library to this day.22 Meanwhile, the Portuguese political presence also expanded to the south, in Angola, which became a Portuguese colony, a political change that weakened Kongolese kings. This led to devastating conflicts between the Europeans and Kongolese in the seventeenth century. Letters from desperate Kongolese kings to popes in the 1600s sought relief from Portuguese attacks as well as more missionaries.23 Portuguese expansion in Angola brought missionaries to Kongo in the short run, however, and Jesuits arrived in 1560 in Angola, with other groups coming in subsequent years, despite facing occasional persecution from some local chiefs. One Spanish priest, Bras Correa, knew the Kongolese language very well, having come as a layman. He was ordained at São Salvador in 1601 and helped stabilize the regime. Thwarted as bishop because he was not Portuguese, he later joined the Jesuits, who numbered 24 by 1619 between Angola and Kongo. They opened a college in São Salvador in 1624, wrote

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historical accounts of the kingdom, and used their catechism to train local lay catechists named maestri to teach the faith (Bane 1956, 41–42, 53). Beginning in the seventeenth century, Dutch attacks on Portuguese possessions led to repercussions in the Kongo, intensifying the slave trade, increasing the number of weapons in the region, and creating political turmoil as alliances shifted in response to need for allies. Complex political intrigues poisoned relations between the Portuguese and Kongolese, so that São Salvador had no bishop between 1642 and 1673. The unrest and mutual antagonisms culminated in a devastating 1665 military defeat of the Kongolese by the Portuguese and their allies at Ambuila in Angola. Decades of political infighting and uncertainty ensued, increasing the seizure and sending across the Atlantic of enslaved Kongolese. Yet Catholic evangelization persisted. Italian Capuchins, in discussion about coming to Kongo since the 1620s and active since the 1640s after receiving responsibility over Soyo, one part of the Kingdom often in rebellion, continued to operate.24 They served less as missionaries converting the unchurched and more as pastoral agents in an established Catholic setting: catechizing in rural areas, chastening elites, addressing complex marriage cases. They also acted as representatives of the Kongolese as the Dutch and Portuguese fought each other on land and sea trying to control Angola. Though the Capuchins struggled in the face of stubborn aspects of Kongolese traditional religion and linked secret societies, Richard Gray (2012, 27) calls the Capuchin mission to Soyo “by far the most important mission sent to Africa by Rome before the middle of the nineteenth century.” The civil unrest after the 1665 defeat at Ambuila situated the most important eighteenth-century episode of African Catholic activity occurring in Kongo, the appearance of the so-called Kongolese Saint Anthony. Beatriz Kimpa Vita, a local Kongolese Catholic woman with family ties to traditional healing and prophetic practices, became possessed by Saint Anthony, a favorite Portuguese intercessor, in 1704. She proclaimed a message of unity among the Kongolese, urging an end to the fighting along with the rebuilding of the old cathedral in São Salvador—sacked in 1678—on the banks of the Congo River. Eventually burned at the stake in 1706 after being convicted of heresy, Kimpa Vita has drawn increasing historical attention since the late twentieth century due to her impact, as well as fascinating and extensive Capuchin missionary accounts. She represents a forerunner of African independent Christianity, provocative local theologizing, and women’s Christian leadership. The so-called Antonian movement persisted, eventually undone by military defeats and enslavement, though some have seen evidence of it among slaves in South Carolina who revolted in 1730.25 The Kongolese Kingdom, though diminished, maintained its Catholic identity into the nineteenth century. In Soyo and elsewhere, Capuchins and other missionaries worked with the local Catholic lay interpreter-catechists called maestri to keep the faith alive. The papacy corresponded with Kongolese royalty, responding to queries about complex marriage cases into the eighteenth

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century, and missionaries at times pursued evangelization with zeal, though rarely with cultural awareness or appreciation. Eventually, tensions between the missionaries and local leaders, coupled with the ongoing depredations of the slave trade and the absence of local clergy, undermined Catholic vitality. An unheeded Capuchin’s 1711 plea to Rome to send a bishop and establish a seminary dramatized the problems, which were exacerbated by Portuguese clerical misbehavior. Formal ecclesiastical control remained in the hands of the bishop of São Salvador, stationed in Luanda in Portuguese-controlled Angola, and often little inclined to accommodate Kongolese interests in advancing Catholicism in the neighboring kingdom, which was regularly in tension with the Portuguese.26 Nonetheless, missionaries in the eighteenth century recorded remarkable evangelization in Kongo, showing evidence of ongoing Catholic vitality. One notable example is the single Capuchin present from 1750 to 1777, Cherubino da Savona, who claimed to have baptized 700,000 Kongolese. His reports from the 1770s detail the varied circumstances of Catholic life in the Kingdom’s districts, where missionary absences were sometimes mitigated by dynamic local maestri-led evangelization, though seldom for long. When the occasional missionary priest came in the later eighteenth century, he encountered people hungry for baptism, and Franciscans allegedly baptized 380,000 between 1781 and 1788. Still, the combination of repression of the Jesuits by Iberian monarchs—they were expelled from Luanda in 1760—and then the entire Society’s suppression by the papacy in 1773, coupled with the French Revolution, all but stopped the already-feeble flow of missionaries to the Kongo.27 The remarkable development of Catholic Christianity in the Kongo was intertwined with Catholic engagement with the Portuguese colony to the south, Angola. The largest kingdom inland, Ndongo, was about one-third the size of the Kongolese kingdom and requested missionaries from the Portuguese beginning in 1518. Four Jesuits finally arrived in 1560, soon establishing a mission at Kabasa with a school for noble children (Bane 1956, 41–42). An expulsion of the Jesuits led to Portuguese reprisals, eventuating in conquest in 1587, with Jesuits serving as chaplains for the conquerors. Ongoing fighting over the next decades as the Portuguese sought complete control ended briefly after a 1622 treaty. In its aftermath, Jesuits established Catholic settlements and prepared a catechism in the local Mbundu language. Meanwhile, as tensions grew between the Portuguese and Kongolese, Luanda, an island port that Jesuits had helped to found in the late sixteenth century, grew beyond its role as a Portuguese colonial center and became the residence of the bishop of São Salvador in 1620. Its ecclesial role grew so that by 1700 it housed four Catholic male orders: Jesuits, Franciscans, Capuchins, and Carmelites. The largely slave African Catholic community participated in devotional groups, or confraternities, like Catholics in Iberia. Luanda was also the center of the slave trade to Brazil. An interesting Catholic development occurred linked to the African negotiator of the 1622 treaty between the Portuguese and Ndongo, Njinga

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(1583–1663), a remarkable seventeenth-century African who was sister of the king, or Ngola (source of the name of the colony and eventual nation). Njinga’s acceptance of baptism played a role in the 1622 treaty’s outcome, and over the next several decades she exasperated and intrigued both Portuguese colonizers and Catholic missionaries. She took over Matamba, one part of the kingdom of Ndongo where she developed her own monarchy, skillfully alternating between alliance and betrayal among the slave-raiding Portuguese and Dutch, as well as nearby African peoples. Two missionary biographers, Italian Capuchins who befriended her late in her life after a second conversion and return to Catholic practice in 1656, famously recounted her career in lurid narratives published in 1669 and 1687 that thrilled readers in early modern Europe. They highlighted her unpredictability, gender-bending clothing, and marital practices, as well as her oscillating savagery and inspiring Catholic faithfulness, as she protected her realm’s independence from 1622 to 1663. By the late 1650s, aided by missionaries, Njinga sought to be a loyal Catholic monarch in direct relationship with the Vatican, bypassing the Portuguese authorities in Luanda. She built churches and established catechetical training for her people with missionary help, and late in her life adopted a simple lifestyle, assuming the name Anna and renouncing the trappings of monarchy. Her successors undid many of her efforts to create a Catholic kingdom, yet like Kimpa Vita in Kongo, Njinga was a remarkable African Catholic woman in the early modern period.28 Luanda’s Catholic identity persisted even after the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1760, but little happened outside the coastal island port by way of evangelization on the mainland.29

Notes 1. For this argument, see the following: Sanneh (2012, 4–6) and Gray (2012, 35–36, 45, 73–93). 2. On the assessment of the entire period as a “strangled opportunity,” see Hastings (1994, 129), as well as Baur (2009, 91–97). For summaries of the Portuguese explorations and ensuing Catholic developments, including changing papal designations, see Bane (1956, 18–27; 1968, xi, 5–9), as well as the following: Hastings (1994, 71–73), Isichei (1995, 53), Sundkler and Steed (2000, 42–45, 71); Kpobi (2007, 124–125); Baur (2009, 43–50). 3. For an excerpt from Alvarez, see Collins (2001, 27–28). 4. For summaries, see Hastings (1994, 130–164), Isichei (1995, 51–52), Sundkler and Steed (2000, 73–77), Baur (2009, 51–54), Gray (2012, 28–31). For a description by a Jesuit who arrived in 1620 from Goa and tells of attacks on Jesuits, see Collins (2001, 93–96). 5. For summaries, see Isichei (1995, 70–71), Sundkler and Steed (2000, 71–72), Baur (2009, 87–91), Kollman and Toms Smedley (2018, 27–28, 216–217). 6. For summaries, see Hastings (1994, 78–79, 120–123), Isichei (1995, 68–70), Sundkler and Steed (2000, 68–71), Baur (2009, 78–85) and Sanneh (2012, 14, 20–21).

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7. For an account of a 1590 Portuguese attack on a local people in what is today Mozambique, during which a Dominican chaplain was captured, tortured, and killed, see Collins (2001, 55–63). 8. For an account of the 1652 conversion of one of the rulers, see Collins (2001, 113–115). 9. See the following: Isichei (1995, 70), Denis (2003, 40, 42–43). 10. See the following: Hastings (1994, 122–123), Baur (2009, 84–85), Sanneh (2012, 17). 11. On early Catholic evangelization in Elmina, see the following: Wiltgen (1956, xiii, 1–14), Vogt (1979, 52–56), Isichei (1995, 55), Kpobi (2007, 127), Baur (2009, 46). 12. For summaries, see the following: Bane (1956, 79–82), Wiltgen (1956, 20–25, 55–70), Vogt (1979, 183–184). 13. On Benin, see the following: Bane (1956, 85–87), Ryder (1969, 99–123), Hastings (1994, 77–78), Isichei (1995, 62–63), Sundkler and Steed (2000, 48–49), Kpobi (2007, 128). 14. For summaries, see: Bane (1956, 93–95, 105–106), Law (1991), Hastings (1994, 119–120), Isichei (1995, 61–62), Soglo (2003), Baur (2009, 75–77). 15. See the following: Ryder (1982, 25), Law (1991, 74, n. 20), Isichei (1995, 157). 16. See the following: Bane (1956, 103–104), Isichei (1995, 58–59). 17. On Senegal’s early Catholic presence, see the following: Jones (1980, 323–324), Isichei (1995, 57), Baur (2009, 131). 18. For summaries, see the following: Bane (1956, 28–32), Hastings (1994, 73–76, 79–127), Isichei (1995: 63–67), Sundkler and Steed (2000, 49–62), Baur (2009, 55–63), Heywood (2017, 4–7). For a more suspicious view of the vitality of Kongolese Catholicism, focusing on alleged decrease in Christian religious identity after enslavement and transfer to Brazil, see Sweet (2003, 109–113, 191–197). 19. See Collins (2001, 25–26). 20. See the following: Bane (1956, 34), Bane (1968, 10), Isichei (1995, 66). 21. See the following: Bane (1956, 43), Bane (1968, 14–15). 22. See the following: Bane (1956, 46–50), Bane (1968, 15–19). 23. For two such letters, from 1613 and 1617, see Collins (2001, 84–88). 24. On the Capuchins in Kongo, see the following: Bane (1956, 56–62), Bane (1968, 19–28), Hastings (1994, 94–102), Sundkler and Steed (2000, 53–59), Baur (2009, 63–72), Gray (2012, 62, 94–95). Despite decreasing vitality after 1700, only in Kongo “did Christianity in this period escape being a mere appendage of colonial presence” (Hastings 1994, 118). 25. For the most thorough account, see Thornton (1998), and for the evidence from South Carolina, see 212–214. 26. See the following: Bane (1956, 96–102), Bane (1968, 34–39), Hastings (1994, 92, 113–118), Baur (2009, 66–74). 27. See the following: Hastings (1994, 194, 114–118) and Sundkler and Steed (2000, 63). 28. For the fullest account, see Heywood (2017), also Sundkler and Steed (2000, 62–64), and Baur (2009, 73–75). There have been several film versions of her life. 29. On those later years, see Bane (1956, 67–73).

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Bibliography Bane, Martin J. 1956. Catholic Pioneers in West Africa. Dublin: Clonmore and Reynolds. Bane, Martin J. 1968. The Popes and West Africa: An Outline of Mission History, 1460s–1960s. New York: Alba House. Baur, John. 2009. 2000 Years of Christianity in Africa: An African Church History. 2nd ed.. Nairobi: Paulines Publications Africa. Collins, Robert O., ed. 2001. Documents from the African Past. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers. Denis, Philippe. 2003. South East Africa. From Dominicans in Africa: A History of the Dominican Friars in Sub-Sahara Africa, ed. Philippe Denis. Trans Robert deViana. Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications, 31–45. Gray, Richard. 2012. Christianity, the Papacy, and Mission in Africa. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Hastings, Adrian. 1994. The Church in Africa, 1450–1950. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heywood, Linda. 2017. Njinga of Angola: Africa’s Warrior Queen. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Isichei, Elizabeth. 1995. A History of Christianity in Africa: From Antiquity to the Present. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Jones, D. H. 1980. The Catholic Mission and Some Aspects of Assimilation in Senegal, 1817–1852. Journal of African History 21:3, 323–340. Kollman, Paul and Cynthia Toms Smedley. 2018. Understanding World Christianity: Eastern Africa. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Kpobi, David N.A. 2007. African Chaplains in Seventeenth-Century West Africa. From African Christianity: An African Story (Ed.), Ogbu Kalu. Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 123–149. Law, Robin. 1991. Religion, Trade and Politics on the “Slave Coast”: Roman Catholic Missions in Allada and Whydah in the Seventeenth Century. Journal of Religion in Africa 21:1, 42–77. Ryder, A.F.C. 1969. Benin and the Europeans: 1485–1897. New York: Humanities Press. Ryder, Alan. 1982. Precursors. From Varieties of Christian Experience in Nigeria, ed. Elizabeth Isichei. Hong Kong: Macmillan, 10–27. Sanneh, Lamin. 2012. Introduction: Foresight in Hindsight. In From Christianity, the Papacy, and Mission in Africa by Richard Gray. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Soglo, Gilles. 2003. The Guinea Coast. From Dominicans in Africa: A History of the Dominican Friars in Sub-Sahara Africa, ed. Philippe Denis. Trans Robert deViana. Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications, 46–54. Sundkler, Bengt and Christopher Steed. 2000. A History of the Church in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sweet, James H. 2003. Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the Afro-­ Portuguese World, 1441–1770. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Thornton, John K. 1998. The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684–1706. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vogt, John. 1979. Portuguese Rule on the Gold Coast. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Wiltgen, Ralph M. 1956. Gold Coast Mission History, 1471–1880. Techny, IL: Divine Word Publications.

CHAPTER 14

African Initiatives and Agency Within British Protestant Missions in Africa, c.1792–c.1914 Brian Stanley

It has rightly become common to assert that the extraordinary growth of Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa over the last 200 years owes more to multiple initiatives by Africans than it does to European missionary actors. Nevertheless, the African Christians who took these initiatives often remain hidden figures, concealed from our gaze by the predominantly European provenance of the archival sources. This is especially the case in relation to the pre-­ colonial or early colonial periods, up to about 1914. Throughout this period, the tendency of the missionary societies was to reserve the label of “missionary” to those of European racial identity who traveled across the seas to communicate the gospel. In some cases this categorization was extended to include the African Americans or Afro-Caribbeans whom most of the societies recruited for their Africa missions. The major American black denominations had their own foreign mission agencies, which sent quite large numbers of African American missionaries to West and South Africa (Williams 1982), but no such denominations existed in Britain. Nevertheless, British mission agencies working in Africa did rely heavily on African agency, most often of an indigenous, local, and lay character, but also including some African Americans or Afro-­ Caribbeans. Some of these were paid from society funds and classified as full missionaries alongside their white colleagues. More numerous in the early years of British Protestant missions to Africa were Christian settlers on the African

B. Stanley (*) Centre for the Study of World Christianity, School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. E. Barnes, T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48270-0_14

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continent, either former slaves or their offspring, animated by their own missionary vision of bringing the gospel to the land of their ancestors. In this period of gradual and uneven Christian penetration of the African interior, European or North American missionaries were in apparent control of the process, yet even from an early date their dependence on African personnel was greater than they admitted. The dynamics of language learning, compilation of grammars and dictionaries, and Bible translation cast European missionaries in the role of pupils, and Africans—even those not yet Christian—in the role of teachers. Furthermore, the high levels of white missionary mortality, above all in West Africa, led missionary strategists to believe that black Christian agents would prove to exhibit at least a measure of immunity against malaria and other tropical diseases. The supposition was erroneous, but not entirely so, for indigenous populations typically possessed a rather higher degree of resistance to locally prevalent diseases than did outsiders, whether these were white or black. This half-truth encouraged the conclusion that the numerous Christian members of the African diaspora in the Caribbean or North America were the most promising candidates for the task of spreading the gospel in the regions of West Africa from which their forebears had been forcibly removed by the transatlantic slave trade. As the young Samuel Adjai Crowther concluded in 1841 following his participation in the first Niger Expedition, “very little can be done by European Missionaries, except by such as have, before ascending the river, become inured to the climate of Africa. … I am reluctantly led to adopt the opinion, that Africa can chiefly be benefitted by her own Children” (Crowther 1970, p. 349). Afro-Caribbeans and African Americans in this period remained Africans by self-designation and were categorized as such by whites as late as 1910 (Stanley 2009, pp. 99–100). Although Africa’s “own Children” who made the reverse Atlantic passage in the hope of evangelizing the continent proved as susceptible to tropical disease as their British missionary counterparts, it is appropriate that, alongside discussion of initiatives by indigenous African Christians, this chapter will also illustrate their substantial part in the African missionary enterprise. It will draw on the history of several British mission agencies, but make most extensive reference to two of the larger ones, the Church Missionary Society (CMS) and Baptist Missionary Society (BMS). It should be read alongside David Killingray’s Chap. 15 on the close links between abolitionism and the evangelization of Africa.

Beginnings The earliest example of African Christian initiative in bringing the gospel to Africa was the party of 1100 former black slaves who arrived in Sierra Leone in 1792 from Nova Scotia, encouraged by British evangelical philanthropists and funded by the British government in return for their loyalty in military service during the American War of Independence (Walls 1996, p.  86). They were subsequently joined by Maroon (escaped slave) settlers from Jamaica. Neither

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group was ever treated as missionaries by the various British missionary agencies that were establishing a foothold in the settlement at the time. However, being deeply influenced by the evangelical revival movements that had swept through the former American colonies, Nova Scotia and Jamaica, many of the settlers planted chapels of Methodist or Baptist church order, or adhering to the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion, and were fired by missionary enthusiasm. The Nova Scotian loyalists in particular saw themselves as pilgrims in a divinely effected exodus from past slavery, now called to enter the promised land, a land of freedom but also of spiritual darkness which it was their commission to illuminate with the light of Christ. Although the reality of life in Sierra Leone (a British colony from 1800) fell short of this expansive vision, the hope that the colony might prove the base for missionary endeavors in West Africa began to be realized in the wake of the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807 (see Chap. 15). African re-captives such as Samuel Adjai Crowther, liberated by the British navy from the slave trading ships of other nations, and converted to Christianity in Sierra Leone, would become the mainstay of Protestant efforts to evangelize the West African interior in the first half of the nineteenth century. At a time when British Protestant missions were still in their infancy, Sierra Leone became a hub of black missionary enterprise in Africa.

Scale and Status How numerous were persons of African extraction working in association with British missions in Africa during this period, and what status did they possess? Precise quantification is impossible, for various reasons, not least the problems arising from the uncertainty in the minds of missionary society administrators about whether black propagators of the gospel should be counted as missionaries, or simply as evangelists or teachers. Any attempt to arrive at an accurate estimation of the scale of the African contribution soon confronts the ambiguities surrounding the definition and status of African Christian agency. Any estimate that can be made is necessarily limited to those who had some kind of formal employment by a mission agency or its associated churches: the much larger number of ordinary African Christians who shared their faith with their neighbors have left little trace in surviving records. In preparation for the World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh in 1910, a Statistical Atlas of Christian Missions was compiled, which included a table that attempted to convey the scale of the global Protestant mission movement. The table gave figures for both foreign missionaries and “native workers,” a category that was sub-divided into “ordained natives” and “unordained natives, teachers, Bible-women, and other workers.” These figures may reflect a degree of guesswork by the societies who furnished the data and did not differentiate British missions from those of other nations. Table 14.1 is based on the table in the Statistical Atlas and clearly reveals that by the end of our period the societies were heavily reliant on African

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Table 14.1  Foreign and African personnel in Protestant missions to Africa, 1910 Regiona

NE Africa NW Africa W Africa SW Africa S Africa S Central Africa E Africa Madagascar and Mauritius Africa total

Foreign missionaries

Ordained natives

Un-ordained natives, teachers, Bible-women, and other workers

Total of ordained and un-ordained native workers

296 151 518 645 1585 403

54 0 261 68 395 16

764 27 2277 2149 8270 3077

818 27 2538 2217 8665 3093

630 269

62 688

2900 5450

2962 6138

4497

1544

24,914

26,458

Source: World Missionary Conference (1910), Commission I. (1910). Statistical Atlas of Christian Missions, p. 63 The Statistical Atlas of Christian Missions defined the regions of Africa as follows: North-east Africa: Egypt to Somaliland North-west Africa: Tripoli to Morocco Western Africa: Senegal to Nigeria South-west Africa: Kamerun to German South-west Africa South Africa: British Union with Basutoland and Swaziland Southern Central Africa: Five British Protectorates East Africa: Portuguese, German, British Madagascar and Mauritius On pp. 71–74 of the Atlas these regional totals for Africa are broken down according to mission agency

agency, at least in sub-Saharan Africa. It also indicates the relatively slow progress made in training Africans for the ordained pastoral ministry. Nevertheless, these figures suggest that lay Africans employed in church and mission work, including an unspecified number of Bible-women, were in aggregate over five times as numerous as expatriate missionaries. In South Africa and Madagascar the ratio was even higher. It is debatable whether modern historical scholarship on the growth of Christianity in Africa has yet given sufficient weight to the fact that, even in this early period, the Christian message was most frequently spread by those with black faces and articulated in indigenous vocabularies. One of the missions whose high numbers of African agents is reflected in this table was the London Missionary Society (LMS), which had extensive work in southern Africa and Madagascar, but none in West Africa, apart from an early abortive excursion to Sierra Leone in 1797–1798. Yet the LMS failed to append any list of African or Malagasy agents to its published register of missionaries, though the register did include one black Jamaican on the LMS payroll, James Hemans, who, with his wife, Cecilia, worked in the Central Africa (Tanganyika) mission from 1888 to 1906 (Sibree 1923, p. 118). Its indigenous agents were most numerous in Madagascar. The Isan-Enim Bolana, a union

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formed in 1868, comprising Congregational churches and some churches planted by the Friends’ Foreign Mission Association, had, by 1911, 467 Malagasy pastors, 2727 un-ordained “native workers,” and 24 indigenous male missionaries plus their wives, employed by a native missionary society (established in 1875) to bring the gospel to unreached areas of the island (Lovett 1899, I, pp. 751, 754; Goodall, 1954, p. 335).

The Ambiguities of West African Agency in the Church Missionary Society: Samuel Adjai Crowther The British mission agencies were at best inconsistent in including African agents in their published statistics, which generally focused on those who received a missionary stipend from the society and hence were funded by British donors and subscribers. The largest British missionary society, the CMS, included a separate register of “native clergy” in its privately circulated volume, Register of Missionaries and Native Clergy from 1804 to 1904 (Church Missionary Society n.d. [1904]), but the CMS was reluctant to award even its ordained African agents the status of missionaries, even though by most definitions many of them must be regarded as such. Henry Venn, the notable secretary of the CMS from 1841 to 1872, insisted on a rigid and ultimately untenable distinction between missionaries, as those “sent from home,” and “native pastors” (Hanciles 2002, p.  69). In West Africa, the CMS invested heavily in education, founding grammar schools in Freetown and Lagos, and an advanced institution at Fourah Bay in Sierra Leone, which as early as 1875 was offering degree-level theological education through affiliation to Durham University. According to the CMS Register of Missionaries and Native Clergy, by 1890, 76 West Africans, mostly re-captives or sons of re-captives, had been ordained to the Anglican ministry for service, not simply in Sierra Leone, but also as African missionaries to what is now Nigeria (Pirouet 1978, p. 19). The most celebrated of these missionaries from Sierra Leone was Samuel Adjai Crowther (c. 1809–1891), Yoruba re-captive, an early student of the Fourah Bay Institution, and the first African bishop in the Anglican communion. Crowther was paid by the CMS and answerable to its London committee, but he appears in the Register in its list of native clergy rather than its list of clerical and lay missionaries (Church Missionary Society n.d. [1904], pp. 298–99). His name should surely have appeared in both lists. In the CMS mission to the Yoruba, established in 1845, Crowther received a salary of £100 per annum; his two European missionary colleagues were paid £250 each. In 1864, on being appointed by the British Crown as bishop “of the countries of Western Africa beyond the limits of our dominions,” his salary was raised to £300 per annum (Ajayi 1965, pp. 187, 206, 219), but his European subordinates never fully respected his episcopal authority. Crowther was not simply a missionary and a bishop—he was also an architect of the Yoruba language in its written form, and hence also an architect of

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Yoruba national identity. He was appointed to the infamous 1841 Niger Expedition on the basis of his command of his mother tongue, Yoruba. In 1844 he caused a sensation in Freetown by preaching and reading the Anglican liturgy in Yoruba, the first time this had been done (Sanneh 2000, p. 184). His Vocabulary of the Yoruba Language was published in 1843, and the Book of Common Prayer in Yoruba followed in 1850. John D.  Y. Peel argued that Crowther’s use of the term Yoruba in the title of his vocabulary was crucial in enabling the varied groups who spoke the language to think of themselves as one people. It is also significant that Crowther chose terms already employed by Yoruba Muslims to express key Christian concepts, such as priest, prophet, prayer, and preaching: he was prepared to use Islam as a semantic bridgehead for the transmission of Christian ideas (Peel, 2000, pp. 194–55, 284).

African Agency in the CMS Uganda Mission In the CMS Uganda mission, begun in 1877, non-ordained Africans, whom the CMS designated as catechists or teachers, were more numerous than in West Africa, though for some appointment as a catechist was a first step toward ordination as an Anglican deacon and then priest. The first six catechists were commissioned in January 1891, of whom three were ordained as deacons two years later, along with three other Baganda teachers (Pirouet 1978, pp. 20–21; (Church Missionary Society n.d. [1904], p. 353). At this early stage of the mission, terminology was fluid, but there seems to have been a much larger body of those who were categorized as “native teachers.” They received a very elementary training at their nearest mission station and were employed by the church at minimal rates of pay to teach the rudiments of reading and writing as a first step toward learning the Christian faith. In August 1894 it was reported that nearly 100 such teachers, supported by the infant Bugandan church, were at work throughout the kingdom of Buganda (Pirouet 1978, p. 26). By 1906 the number of such teachers had grown to 1713 (Tuma and Mutibwa 1978, p. 28). Almost from the beginning, Bugandan Christians extended their evangelistic work beyond the kingdom of Buganda. In July 1891 three men offered to go south of Lake Victoria to the Sukuma people of what is now Tanzania, and others followed. In November 1898 Bishop Alfred Tucker bestowed his blessing on this African initiative by confirming 24 male and 2 female Baganda for “missionary enterprise” among the Sukuma. Tucker observed that “Baganda as evangelists have done what no European missionary has ever had it in his power to do—they have shown the Wasukuma that the gospel is for the black man as well as for the white” (Pirouet 1978, p. 13). The most celebrated of the Baganda missionary catechists was Apolo Kivebulaya (c.1865–1933), who labored in the kingdom of Toro from 1895, initially as a catechist and from 1903 as an ordained Anglican priest. Latterly, from 1915, Kivebulaya extended his mission activities to the Ituri district of the Belgian Congo, evangelizing the “pygmy” peoples of the forest. He was to

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achieve heroic, even saintly status within CMS circles, becoming a canon of Namirembe cathedral, Kampala, in 1922 and an honorary vice-president of the CMS in 1927 (Wild-Wood 2020). Despite being revered by European and African Christians alike as a latter-day “apostle,” Kivebulaya’s name does not appear in the list of CMS missionaries; he was supported financially by the Anglican church in Buganda and appears in the CMS Register simply as a native clergyman (Church Missionary Society n.d. [1904], p. 487).

African Agency in the BMS Cameroons and Congo Missions In the Baptist churches of Jamaica, as more widely in the Caribbean and southern states of the United States (see Chap. 15), many of the liberated slaves manifested a keen desire to take the gospel to their native continent. In June 1840 the BMS Committee agreed in principle to commence a mission in West Africa, and the resulting Baptist mission was established in Fernando Po and the Cameroons from 1843. In 1892, to mark the centenary of its foundation, the BMS published a centenary volume that contained a list of its missionaries from 1792 to 1892 (Myers 1892, pp. 313–25). This included several of the Jamaican missionaries who played a crucial part in the establishment of the Cameroons Baptist mission, such as Joseph Merrick, Francis Pinnock, Alexander Fuller, and his son Joseph Jackson Fuller. However, the list failed to include not merely the wives of Pinnock and Alexander Fuller, but also at least one of these Jamaican missionaries, Angus Duckett, who worked alongside Merrick from 1844 to 1847, before ill health compelled him to return to Jamaica (Clarke 1869, pp. 212, 217). The contribution of its Jamaican personnel to the BMS Cameroons and Congo missions was downplayed in the society’s publications. The most striking example of this was the account of the Cameroons mission in the centenary volume, which gave the impression that the establishment of a printing press, the construction of the Duala language in written form, and the publication of the entire Bible in Duala in 1872 were largely the achievement of the British missionary Alfred Saker (Myers 1892, pp. 159, 307–8). In reality, Saker had no experience in printing and relied heavily on Merrick to teach him Duala. Merrick (1818–1849) was the son of a Jamaican Baptist minister and grandson of a free colored slave-owning woman, had run his own printing shop at Spanish Town as early as 1836, and published a short-lived newspaper, The Telegraph, which championed the cause of the apprentices. Furthermore, while still in Jamaica he had devoted himself to the study of African languages that remained half-remembered in former slave communities. During Merrick’s brief missionary career in Cameroon, he produced Part 1 of an Isubu-English Dictionary, a comparative dictionary of terms in the Isubu [or Ísuwu], Baquiri, Mongqo, Balunu, Duala, and Bahimba languages, in addition to Isubu translations of Genesis, Exodus, and the Gospels of Matthew and John (Clarke 1869,

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p. 208). After his early death, his Jamaican apprentice in the Cameroon printing press, Joseph Jackson Fuller, took over its management. In 1895 Alexander Innes, a former BMS missionary who had fallen out with the society, published a purportedly “true” biography of Saker in 1895, which made damaging allegations of Saker’s brutality toward his African agents, and attacked E. B. Underhill, BMS secretary and biographer of Saker, for giving all the credit in the centenary volume for the printing and linguistic work in Cameroon to Saker, and ignoring the work of Merrick and Fuller (Innes 1895). Innes was an intemperate polemicist, but some of his charges were justified. The BMS mission in Cameroon owed its origins to Jamaican vision and initiative, and its achievements depended in large part on Afro-Caribbean Christian leadership. The Congo mission was initiated in 1878 as an offshoot of the Cameroon mission. The BMS established a flourishing church among the Bakongo people of the lower river, where its most famous convert, Simon Kimbangu, was baptized in 1915. In 1921 he would assume the role of a prophet and healer, founding a movement that would eventually give rise to the largest independent church in modern Africa. The early Congo mission also featured two Afro-Caribbean personnel of note: John Pinnock, grandson of the Jamaican missionary to Cameroon, Francis Pinnock, and Rose Grenfell, the second wife of George Grenfell. Pinnock’s father, John Pinnock senior, served the BMS in Cameroon; John Pinnock junior served in both Cameroon and Congo as an ordained missionary from 1887 to 1909 (Johnston 1908, II, pp. 224–5; Myers 1892, p. 322). The English missionary who achieved greatest renown as pioneer of the Protestant advance up the Congo river, George Grenfell, spent his early mission career in Cameroon, where in 1878, soon after the death of his first wife, he made his black housekeeper, Rosanna Patience Edgerley, pregnant. She was born in Fernando Po, of Jamaican freed slave ancestry. Grenfell was compelled to resign from the society, but 17 months later was re-admitted, to superintend the first BMS station at the mouth of the Congo. Eventually the existence of a black Mrs. Grenfell began to be acknowledged in the society’s publications, though, like most other missionary wives, she was never given the status of a missionary of the society (Stanley 1992, pp. 119–21). She was indispensable to Grenfell’s work in the upper Congo, and outlived her husband, dying in Jamaica in 1928. The Congolese converts of the Baptist mission played notable roles in language, translation, and church work. They included possibly the first Congolese Protestant convert, Ndonzoao Nlemvo (1867–1938), who professed Christian faith in his early teenage years, though he was not baptized until 1886 (Ndoadidiki 1978, pp. 26–8). While still a teenager, Nlemvo collaborated with William Holman Bentley in preparing the first grammar and dictionary of the Kikongo language, published in 1887, and later worked alongside him in translating the Kikongo New Testament (1893) and then the whole Bible (1905), despite his deteriorating eyesight. Another prominent Congolese agent of the society was Disasi Makulo, a Turumbu freed slave, purchased from the Arab slave trader Tippu Tip by Henry Morton Stanley. Makulo had been taken to

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London by the English agent of a Dutch commercial company. After returning to Congo, he became a Christian through the influence of George Grenfell and another BMS missionary, Robert Glennie. At Yalemba on the upper Congo, Makulo and his wife Longene set about planting a congregation, three years before Grenfell obtained permission from the Free State authorities to reside there; Makulo subsequently became an elder of the Yalemba Baptist church, and captain of the BMS mission steamer, the Grenfell (Akambu 1983; Fullerton n.d. [1928], pp. 165–70). Neither Nlemvo nor Makulo receives any mention in the BMS centenary volume (Myers 1892). Along with most other mission agencies, the BMS was prepared to designate as “missionaries” those who had at the society’s expense crossed the Atlantic to West Africa in the name of Christ, but not indigenous Africans who were prominent leaders of mission work within the African continent.

The Agency of Xhosa Christians in the Early Scottish Missions to Malawi In 1876, 13 Xhosa Christians educated at the Free Church of Scotland’s mission station at Lovedale in the Cape Colony volunteered to serve as evangelists—in reality as missionaries—in the new “Livingstonia” mission in what is now Malawi (Thompson 2000). In the event, only four of the thirteen were sent. Of the other nine, two, Mpambani Mzimba and Elijah Makiwane, were already ordained and were needed in the local church. They were the first black Africans to be trained within South Africa for the Free Church’s ministry. Mzimba would in 1898 secede from the Free Church to form his own Presbyterian Church of Africa (Thompson 2000, pp. 97, 180). A third member of the nine, John Knox Bokwe, though not ordained until 1906, was already earmarked as too gifted to be spared from Lovedale. Bokwe would later become a prominent figure in church life, politics, and African hymnology in the Cape, being notable especially for his transcriptions and publication between 1878 and 1914 of four hymns of the Xhosa Christian prophet, Ntsikana (Dargie 1997, p. 323). The four who were selected for the mission party—William Koyi, Shadrach Mngunana, Isaac Williams Wauchope, and Mapassa Ntintili—were chosen as those who showed enough promise to be lay evangelists, but not enough to make them indispensable to the Free Church’s work in the Eastern Cape. In this Presbyterian denominational context, as in others, evangelists ranked below ordained ministers in the hierarchy of status. In the event, first Ntintili and later Koyi were temporarily loaned by the Livingstonia Mission to the separate Church of Scotland mission at Blantyre, while Wauchope fell victim to depression and was sent back to South Africa in December 1876, and Mngunana died of blackwater fever in May 1877. Ntintili and Koyi served in Malawi until 1880. Ntintili never returned, working as a teacher and then evangelist in the Transkei. Only Koyi returned to Malawi in late 1881, where he exercised a remarkable ministry among the Ngoni people

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until his death in June 1886. In December 1883 he was joined by a further Xhosa evangelist, George Williams, who served in Malawi until October 1888. The African contribution to the early Scottish missions to Malawi was, therefore, modest in numerical terms. It was also hampered by similar tensions arising from racial and status hierarchies to those apparent in the BMS and CMS missions. As graduates of the Lovedale institution, the Xhosa missionaries were better educated than the artisan Scottish missionaries who were recruited for Livingstonia, a mission with a strong industrial emphasis. Yet they were initially paid only £45 per annum, about half the salary paid to the Scots artisans, while ordained and medical missionaries could earn up to £300 a year (Thompson 2000, pp. 38–9). Nonetheless, the contribution of William Koyi to the birth of the Ngoni Presbyterian church cannot be underestimated. The Scots missionary William Elmslie wrote in hyperbolic terms that “William Koyi took possession of Ngoniland for Christ” (Elmslie 1899, p. 103). As a gifted linguist and translator between the congruent Xhosa and Ngoni languages, Koyi was the only missionary in this early period of the Livingstonia Mission who could communicate directly and fluently with the Ngoni. They gave Koyi the affectionate nickname of “Mtusane” (the go-between) and also described him as their umteteleli—meaning “advocate” or “intercessor”; in the Xhosa Bible, published in 1879, the same word was used to translate the Greek parakletos, the word used in John’s Gospel for the Holy Spirit (Thompson 2000, pp. 118–19). Throughout the continent, even in this era of growing European colonial penetration, it was Africans like William Koyi who were the most effective conduits of transmission and interpretation of Christian concepts to indigenous audiences. They were also, at least to an extent, conduits in the reverse direction, on whom European missionaries relied for their understanding of African social and cultural mores.

Self-Understanding and Cultural Identity The final brief section of this chapter will devote attention to the self-­ understanding of these African agents of evangelization, and how they located their identity in relation to both African and European cultures. It should be admitted at once that to recover this self-understanding is extremely difficult. Nevertheless, from time to time their voice can be heard, for example in the case of the Yoruba-speaking evangelists of the CMS mission, who were required to submit to the CMS headquarters in London written journals reporting their work. These journals, 47 of which survive in the CMS archives in Birmingham, UK, were extensively analyzed by John Peel in a book that illuminates how these evangelists defined the Christian message in relation to both indigenous beliefs and Islam, but also the reception they received from their hearers, and the way in which they began to construct their identity as belonging, not simply to a common language group, but increasingly also to an emergent Yoruba nation. Possibly the most far-reaching of Peel’s conclusions is that, while the Yoruba evangelists followed their British evangelical mentors in presenting

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Christianity as the religion of the book, this was not merely a matter of conveying the benefits of literacy, but rather an insistence that the Bible was a unique repository of spiritual power, above all for healing (Peel 2000, pp. 216–25). Long before the emergence of Pentecostalism in any formal sense, African evangelists were imparting their own interpretation of Christianity as a repository of spiritual power. After 1914, such interpretations would become more generally visible as prophet movements and independent churches multiplied. This perception should be held in mind when we turn our attention to the apparently European cultural self-definition of those African agents who were profoundly shaped by higher-level education in theological institutions in Sierra Leone, the Cape Colony, or Britain. These African Christian elites have often been styled as “Black Europeans” (Walls 1996, pp. 102–110). They generally adopted European dress as a badge of status, took pride in their spoken and written English, and spoke in approving terms of Britain, its history, and its ostensibly “civilizing” mission in Africa. Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss them as cultural mimics who attempted to divest themselves of all trace of African identities. In 1856 Tiyo Soga (1829–1871) became the first Xhosa to be ordained to the Presbyterian ministry, and in the following year he was commissioned in Edinburgh as a missionary of the United Presbyterian Church to work among his own people. Educated in both Glasgow and Edinburgh, he had married a Scottish wife, Janet Burnside, and was an admirer of Queen Victoria. Yet this apparently Anglicized Xhosa has been hailed as “the progenitor of Black nationalism in South Africa” (Williams 1978, p. 126). This is an overstatement. However, Soga had been impressed by lectures he had received at Edinburgh which employed chapter 9 of Paul’s letter to the Romans to teach that there was solid New Testament authority for the compatibility of the universal gospel of Christ with particular national or ethnic allegiances. Once back in the Eastern Cape, Soga deployed this biblical principle to contest published statements by a white missionary colleague that the supposedly indolent and degenerate “Kaffir race” was destined for ultimate racial extinction before the onward march of white civilization. Soga argued that, on the contrary, God had given Africa to the children of Ham, and had promised, in the words of Psalm 68:31—a verse increasingly cited by African Christian intellectuals—that “Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands to God.” Soga also welcomed the appearance in 1862 of Indaba, the first Xhosa newspaper, which he saw as a crucial vehicle for the expression of Xhosa nationhood (Stanley 2011, pp. 75–6).

Conclusion Throughout the long nineteenth century, African Christians from the Caribbean and Africa itself played important roles in the British missionary enterprise, especially in West Africa. Their contributions were often downplayed or ignored in missionary society publications. Their initiatives went far beyond evangelization as narrowly understood: they also compiled grammars and dictionaries,

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were central to the process of biblical translation, and through these activities defined the vocabularies of vernacular Christian discourse. They functioned as conduits of mutual influence and interpretation between dissonant African and European worlds. In the process, they shaped African Christian identities, and even, in some cases, the identities of emerging African nations. Although their cultural appearance often exhibited many European features in this period, they typically combined that outward style with an inner conviction that Africa and Africans occupied a cherished place, both in the historic pages of Christian scripture and in the future salvific purposes of God for the world.

Bibliography Ajayi, J. F. A. 1965. Christian Missions in Nigeria 1841–1891: The Making of a New Élite. London: Longman. Akambu, Makulo. 1983. La vie de Disasi Makulo: Ancien ésclave de Tippo Tip et catéchiste de Grenfell. Kinshasa: Éditions Saint Paul Afrique. Church Missionary Society, n.d. [1904]. Register of Missionaries (Clerical, Lay, and Female), and Native Clergy, from 1804 to 1904. London: Church Missionary Society. Printed for private circulation. Clarke, John. 1869. Memorials of Baptist Missionaries in Jamaica, Including a Sketch of the Labours of Early Religious Instructors in Jamaica. London: Yates & Alexander. Crowther, Samuel Adjai. 1970. Journals of the Rev. James Frederick Schön and Mr Samuel Crowther who, With the Sanction of Her Majesty’s Government, Accompanied the Expedition up the Niger in 1841 on Behalf of the Church Missionary Society, 2nd ed., with a new introduction by Professor J. F. Ade Ajayi. London: Frank Cass. Elmslie, W. A. 1899. Among the Wild Ngoni. Edinburgh: Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier. Dargie, B. 1997. “Christian Music among Africans.” In Christianity in South Africa: A Political Social and Cultural History, edited by Richard Elphick and Rodney Davenport. Oxford: James Currey, pp. 319–26. Fullerton, W. Y. n.d. [1928]. The Christ of the Congo River. London: The Carey Press. Goodall, Norman. 1954. A History of the London Missionary Society 1895–1945. London: Oxford University Press. Hanciles, Jehu. 2002. Euthanasia of a Mission: African Church Autonomy in a Colonial Context. Westport, CT: Praeger. Innes, Alexander. 1895. More Light: The Cameroons and the Baptist Mission, in Four Parts, with Introduction and Appendix: The Only True Biography of Alfred Saker and his Cruelties, by Eye-Witnesses. New ed. Birkenhead: no publisher. Johnston, Harry. 1908. George Grenfell and the Congo: A History and Description of the Congo Independent State and Adjoining Districts of Congoland ... and Similar Notes on the Cameroons and the Island of Fernando Po ... 2 vols. London: Hutchinson. Lovett, Richard. 1899. The History of the London Missionary Society 1795–1895. 2 vols. Henry Frowde. Myers, John Brown, ed. 1892. The Centenary Volume of the Baptist Missionary Society 1792–1892. 2nd ed.. London: Baptist Missionary Society. Ndoadidiki, Nlemvo Way na Ngombe. 1978. Ndonzoao Nlemvo, premier chrétien protestant du Zaire (1867–1938). Kinshasa: Centre Protestant d’Éditions et de Diffusion.

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Peel, J. D. Y. 2000. Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Pirouet, M.  Louise. 1978. Black Evangelists: The Spread of Christianity in Uganda 1891–1914. London: Rex Collings. Sanneh, Lamin. 2000. “The CMS and the African Transformation: Samuel Ajayi Crowther and the Opening of Nigeria.” In The Church Missionary Society and World Christianity, 1799–1899, edited by Kevin Ward and Brian Stanley. Grand Rapids, MI, and Richmond, Surrey: Wm. B. Eerdmans and Curzon Press, pp. 173–97. Sibree, James, comp. 1923. A Register of Missionaries, Deputations, etc., from 1796 to 1923. 4th ed.. London: London Missionary Society. Stanley, Brian. 1992. The History of the Baptist Missionary Society 1792–1992. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. Stanley, Brian. 2009. The World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh 1910. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans. Stanley, Brian. 2011. “Edinburgh and World Christianity.” Studies in World Christianity 17, no. 1: 72–91, https://doi.org/10.3366/swc.2011.0006. Thompson, T. Jack. 2000. Touching the Heart: Xhosa Missionaries to Malawi, 1876–1888. Pretoria: Unisa Press. Tuma, Tom, and Phares Mutibwa, eds. 1978. A Century of Christianity in Uganda 1877–1977. Nairobi: Uzima Press. Walls, Andrew F. 1996. The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books. Wild-Wood, Emma. 2020. Mission of Apolo Kivebulaya: Religious Encounters and Social Change in the Great Lakes c.1865–1935. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer. Williams, Donovan. 1978. Umfundisi: A Biography of Tiyo Soga. Lovedale: Lovedale Press. Williams, Walter. 1982. Black Americans and the Evangelization of Africa, 1877–1900. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press. World Missionary Conference (1910) Commission I. 1910. Statistical Atlas of Christian Missions: Containing a Directory of Missionary Societies, a Classified Summary of Statistics, an Index of Mission Stations, and a Series of Specially Prepared Maps of Mission Fields. Edinburgh: The Conference.

CHAPTER 15

Abolitionism and the Evangelization of Africa David Killingray

The eighteenth-century Enlightenment helped begat the evangelical revival on both sides of the Atlantic and laid the foundations for the American and French revolutions (Stanley 2001; Bebbington 1989). In the process new ideas were generated about freedom, personal salvation, humanitarianism, and individual dignity which gave rise to demands to end the slave trade and slavery (Davis 1973; Brown 2006; Sanneh 1999). Abolitionism was inspired and largely driven from the 1770s by evangelical Christians on both sides of the Atlantic. The evangelical revival, rooted in the Bible and a counter to nominal Christianity, had expansive aims indicated by the formation of new missionary organizations to spread the Christian gospel across the world. In Africa this began on the west coast, directed, and conducted by black and white Christians. The evangelization of Africa from the late eighteenth century was primarily an African initiative (Killingray 2003). This chapter looks first at the struggles by abolitionists, primarily Christians, to end the transatlantic slave trade and to emancipate slaves in the Americas and Africa. Secondly it examines the efforts of black and white Christians to evangelize, to spread the Christian gospel, throughout sub-Saharan Africa. White missionary movements might be enthusiastic to win the world for Christ, but this did not absolve many of its proponents from the sin of racial discrimination repeatedly demonstrated in mission methods and practices.

D. Killingray (*) Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, London, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. E. Barnes, T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48270-0_15

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The Slave Trade, Slavery, and Resistance For more than two millennia Africa had been a source of slaves, exploited within the continent and carried out of it. The longest enduring trade involved captives taken to areas of what increasingly became the Islamic world in North Africa, south-east Europe, and western and southern Asia (Eltis and Engerman 2011). From the late fifteenth century a Euro-African slave trade developed with people becoming a major item of transatlantic commerce. A recent census suggests a total of 12–13 million Africans were shipped to the mines, plantations, and factories of the Americas in the period 1500–1865 (Eltis and Richardson 2010, p.  23, Table  2). After the 1760s this brutal business was dominated by British ships. A crucial aspect of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americas was the deracination of Africans: they were stolen from their homes, carried across the ocean to distant captivity by whites who regarded them as base inferiors. White perceptions of their own racial superiority became deeply ingrained, surviving long after the abolition of slavery, and given additional heft by European colonialism in Africa after the 1870s. White evangelicals might believe in a common humanity created in God’s image, but this did not absolve them from ideas of their own racial and cultural superiority (Coffey and Tuck 2019). The most persistent and vigorous abolitionists were captive Africans. Their opposition to slavery was persistent: against their African captors, by attempts to seize control of slave ships, and throughout the Americas in daily acts of passive resistance, flight from ‘owners’, and violent revolt. Black slaves were indeed ‘troublesome property’. Slave revolts brought harsh punishment, but that in the French sugar-rich colony of Saint-Domingue in the 1790s successfully overthrew European rule, ended local slavery, and created Haiti, the first internationally recognized black sovereign state in America (Dubois 2004). Throughout the Caribbean, and in the United States, slave owners, often greatly outnumbered by their servile black populations, feared similar revolts. Serious risings occurred in the United States (1831), and in the British Caribbean colonies of Barbados (1816), Jamaica (1831), and Demerara (1832), the latter two challenging British public opinion as to the wisdom of continuing to uphold the institution of slavery (Scanlan 2020, ch. 6; Zoellner 2020; Schipper 2022).

Abolitionist Origins In the late seventeenth century, on both sides of the Protestant Atlantic, a few Christians questioned the morality, indeed the sinfulness, of the commerce in humanity (Newman 2018). This is not to ignore the role of Roman Catholic sentiment and subsequent mission endeavour in Africa, both less prominent than that of Protestants (Gray 1990; Isichei 1982). Abolitionist ideas grew in the 1770s in Britain and in the newly independent American republic prominent activists being the Quaker Anthony Benezet in Philadelphia and John Wesley,

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Granville Sharp, and African allies in London (Sharp 1769;  Benezet 1772; Jackson 2009; Wesley 1774; Cuguano 1787; Equiano 1789). In the American colonies slave codes severely maintained the legal status of black captives. By 1790 in the United States there were 900,000 slaves and 59,000 free black people who had some legal rights although restricted (Sinha 2015; Baptist 2014). In England, the legal status of the 10,000 or so black people was ambiguous. White slave owners attempted to keep their chattels from learning to read and access the Bible which held doctrines that might lead them to question their status. Nevertheless, the number of literate Christian slaves and free blacks increased in the Caribbean and the United States (Raboteau 2001). In 1794 the first black-led congregation was formed in Philadelphia, paving the way for the foundation of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), followed in 1821 in New York by the African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ) church which espoused Arminian theology (Newman 2007). By then active black mission work had begun among slave and free communities in both the United States and the islands of the Caribbean (Frey and Wood 1998). Abolitionists in England used the courts to gain the Mansfield decision of 1772 which stated that black people could not be forcibly removed to the colonies (Wise 2005). The mass murder of African captives on a Liverpool slaver, the Zong, in mid-Atlantic in late 1781, and the subsequent trial, further emphasized the cruel and wicked nature of the slave trade. It stirred British public opinion and resonated across the Atlantic to a receptive humanitarian-­ minded North American audience (Baucom 2005; Walvin 2011; Scanlan 2020). During the American war of independence, the British enlisted escaped slaves into their armed forces with a promise of freedom. Following their defeat, the British withdrew taking some of their black soldiers and their families, many to settle in Nova Scotia, others to England increasing the number of impoverished Africans in the metropole. A solution to this perceived problem, championed by Granville Sharp, was the resettlement of these poor blacks on the west coast of Africa at Freetown in 1787, to which later were added Nova Scotian blacks and Maroons from Jamaica (Walker 1992; Braidwood 1994). This planted a ready-made black Christian community on Africa’s west coast (Walls 1996, p.  86). Among the first leaders, arriving in 1792, was Thomas Peters and the Baptist preacher David George, both ex-slaves. The first abolitionist body in colonial North America was established by Philadelphia Quakers in 1775. The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, formed in London in 1787, lobbied parliament for a legal ban on the transatlantic slave trade. A major obstacle facing the abolitionist lobbies in both the United States and Britain was the widespread belief that the economic well-being of the country relied on the slave trade and colonial slavery. Nevertheless, after lengthy debates over economics and politics, a war that altered global trade and international relations, and following nearly 30 years of campaigning, the transatlantic slave trade was made illegal by both Britain and the United States in 1807 (Brown 2006; Rydén 2009, ch. 1). However,

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the domestic sale and movement of slaves continued in the jurisdiction of the colonial empires and within the United States.

Abolition to Emancipation With the end of the Napoleonic wars, abolitionists in Britain campaigned to end the transatlantic slave trade conducted by other European countries, particularly Spain and Portugal. Both Britain and the United States provided an inadequately small number of naval vessels to patrol West African waters in the attempt to suppress slaving. Africans liberated from slave ships (often referred to as ‘recaptives’) were landed at coastal towns, the most prominent being the new British settlement of Freetown (Everill 2012). Official policies, and recaptive responses to their treatment, varied greatly across the transatlantic world (Richards 2020). Naval patrols also took military action against African slaving polities on the riverain and coastal areas of West Africa. After the 1860s similar operations were extended to the Indian Ocean region against Arab-Islamic slave traders (Campbell 2019). Black slavery continued for much of the nineteenth century, with Cuba and Brazil regularly importing slaves from Africa. Slaves were emancipated in the British Empire in 1838, and in the French colonies in 1848, but the ‘peculiar institution’ was maintained in the United States until 1865, in Cuba to 1886, and in Brazil until 1888. For much of the nineteenth century slavery remained as an institution in the British and French empires, and in the southern United States, which included the internal sale and movement of slaves (Scanlan 2020, ch. 4). The largest slave state in Africa was Sokoto, north of the Niger. Throughout the Atlantic world black enslaved labour was regarded as essential to imperial and national economies. In the United States natural increase among African Americans resulted in a rapid growth in the black population. Slaveholders in the Americas, particularly in the United States and the Caribbean colonies, viewed with deep anxiety the growing number of free and enslaved Africans as a threat to the body politic. Reliant on black enslaved labour to sustain the United States growing global economy, whites feared their presence and hardened the coercive rules that regulated the institution. They sought biblical passages to endorse the social and economic order and, in the nineteenth century, welcomed white scientific craniometric ideas that viewed black people as childlike with restricted intellects, a divine order of separate and unequal human races (Curtin 1963; Lorimer 2013). Many abolitionists decried slavery but feared that immediate emancipation would result in political and economic unrest. When the British ended slavery in their global empire in 1833 the conditions tied the slaves to a period of servile ‘apprenticeship’, prematurely ended until in 1838 by continued abolitionist protests, including that by women (Murray 2020; Oldfield 2020). Allied to naval and diplomatic measures to disrupt and end the continuing Atlantic slave trade, abolitionists proposed developing ‘legitimate’ trade with

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Africa to exploit locally produced agricultural goods, timber, and mineral resources in place of the sale of captives. Disease and nature defeated the British Niger expedition of 1841 to plant an agricultural and philanthropic colony at the confluence of the Niger and Benue rivers. ‘Legitimate’ trade resulted in the development of several African-owned plantation economies across West Africa using slave labour to produce palm oil, cotton, and ground nuts for European markets. Military interventions led to a slow extension of European colonial territory and increased commercial activity to exploit African resources. Abolitionists in the United States were similarly divided between those who demanded immediate emancipation, for example William Lloyd Garrison and the former slave Frederick Douglass (McDaniel 2013; Blight 2018), compared to those who advocated steady and measured change. A solution advanced by the African Colonization Society (ACS), founded by white people in 1816, was to encourage the emigration of freed blacks to Africa or Haiti. Black opinion was sharply divided between those who regarded North America as home to African Americans whose labour had helped build the country and those who believed that blacks would only be free by ‘returning to Africa’ to form a separate country of their own, such as the settlements that eventually became Liberia in 1847. The idea of ‘Exodus’, leaving a slave state for the promised land in Africa, resonated long in many African American minds (Maffly-Kipp 2010, ch. 4; Coffey 2014, Part II). Slavery had been made illegal in many northern American states. Not so in the ‘south’ where the plantations, notably growing cotton, rice, and tobacco, the factories, and many households, relied on enslaved labour. Southern slaveholders looked to continued expansion of slavery westward into Texas and territories seized from Mexico, and south into the Caribbean. As the number of black churches increased in the United States, the major white denominations, Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists, split in the late 1830s to 1850 over the question of slavery, a division which shaped mission policy in Africa. The ABCFM divided in 1846, firm opponents of slavery succeeding to form the American Missionary Association, which body later created the Freedmen’s Aid Society. There were also international repercussions. British evangelicals in 1846 refused to have fellowship with US slaveholders in a proposed international Evangelical Alliance (Wolffe 2006). With the United States divided between the slave-holding ‘south’ and northern ‘free’ states, militant abolitionists, black and white, aided runaway slaves to flee north (Blackett 2018). Southern pressure secured the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 thus enlisting federal authority to aid the recovery of stolen or runaway human ‘property’. Well before mid-century many fleeing slaves found an uneasy refuge in Canada. A handful, for example, Moses Roper, Frederick Douglass, the Crafts, and the Allen’s, found greater safety in Britain where on public platforms and through their best-selling books they provided an authentic voice of United States slavery (Blackett 1983, 1986). Within the United States the scene was being gradually set for a violent confrontation between slave-holding and non-slave states, which occurred

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under the guise of ‘states-rights’ in the disastrous civil war of 1861–1865 (McPherson 1998). Slavery was finally ended at the end of the war by the 13th Amendment of 1865. The brief period of ‘Reconstruction’ in the ‘south’ failed to be upheld by federal authority, and the subsequent white political backlash disenfranchised African Americans, entrenched segregation, and imposed legal structures often silent in the face of racially motivated lynchings.

The Evangelization of Africa The earliest attempts at evangelizing in the black Atlantic world were by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), founded in 1701. Using white clergy its remit extended to white settlers, native Americans, and black slaves. An African, Philip Quaque was ordained in London in 1765 and returned home to the Gold Coast where his ministry was largely to white merchants (Glasson 2012). In the 1770s, the Rev. Samuel Hopkins, a Congregational minister in Rhode Island, argued for the immediate abolition of slavery, and that African Americans might serve as Christian civilizing agents in Africa. Nothing came of this scheme interrupted by the outbreak of war in 1776 (Hopkins 1776). A few years later Olaudah Equiano’s request to the Bishop of London for ordination as a missionary to Africa was rebuffed (Carretta 2005). In 1792 the Scottish evangelical Dr John Erskine, supportive of African mission, enquired about the possibility of black missionaries being sent to Sierra Leone (Dickson 1792, quoted in Whyte 2006, pp. 71–72). By the mid-nineteenth century the population of the Sierra Leone colony had grown to c.50,000, largely due to the landing of ‘liberated’ slaves. Some 20,000 people, mostly in Freetown and its settlements, were Christians, a literate, politically aware middle class tutored by British institutions, who had growing commercial and religious interests that extended eastwards along the west coast of Africa. The town was seen by many, particularly members of the CMS, as the vital place for the future evangelization of West Africa. For some black people in America, hope of redemption from slavery and oppressive white dominance lay in the idea of exodus, of freedom and leaving America for a promised land in Africa. The idea of evangelizing Africa subsequently developed into a belief among some black Christians that divine providence had brought them to the Americas to learn of Christianity, thus equipping them to share that faith with their own countrymen in Africa, what Bishop Henry Turner later called ‘black manifest dynasty’ (Redkey 1969; Williams 1982; Jacobs 1982). Psalm 68, 31, ‘Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God’, served as a repeated divine call for people of the diaspora to take the gospel to Africa, a verse quoted as early as 1774 by Phillis Wheatley in a letter to the Rev. Samuel Hopkins (Wheatley 1774, in Carretta 2011, pp. 151–152; Kay 2011). The recently formed missionary societies in London and North America, most important being the Baptist Missionary Society, 1792 (BMS), Church Missionary Society, 1799 (CMS), Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society,

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1811 (WMMS), and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Mission, 1810 (ABCFM), all saw Africa as a potential mission field. Commerce and Christianity would prepare the ground for the advance of ‘civilization’. Thomas Fowell Buxton talked of the ‘Bible and the plough’, although many thought that commerce in legitimate trade, rather than agriculture production, would effect that desired change. The agents for this purpose were primarily Africans, often aspiring ‘recaptives’ who had absorbed aspects of European culture and become literate Christians. Although many pursued commercial activities, a number sought dedicated Christian service. This accorded with white mission notions of ‘native agency’ formulated by Henry Venn of the CMS in London and Rufus Anderson of the ABCFM in North America. Venn looked ahead to a ‘native pastorate’, an African church that would be self-propagating, self-supporting, and self-sustaining. African evangelization was best left in the hands of people of African origin and descent: they were questionably believed to be acclimated to the tropics, had the advantage of cultural affinity with Africans, sometimes a knowledge of their languages, and certainly were cheaper to employ than white missionaries. For many home mission councils, and their few white agents in the field, African autonomy seemed precipitate; they counter-argued for missions to remain firmly under European direction and control. The ruling hierarchies in African polities, for example, among the Yoruba and Egba, had different responses to a mission presence. Some welcomed new commercial opportunities, modernity, and military allies; others feared alien intrusion that threatened indigenous authority and culture, and foreign commerce that involved slaving. Mission and colonial ambitions coalesced in the bombardment of Lagos in 1851 and its annexation by the British ten years later. The first African clergy from Freetown sent by the Church Missionary Society (CMS) helped found the Yoruba Mission in southern Nigeria in the late 1840s. A leading figure was Samuel Ajayi Crowther (1806–1891). Stolen from his Yoruba-speaking home as a six-year-old, rescued from a slave ship, educated at Freetown’s Fourah Bay College and in London, he was ordained as an Anglican minister (Ajayi 1965; Ayendele 1966; Loielle, in Isichei 1982, pp. 34–61; Peel 2000). By 1864, and in pursuit of Venn’s idea of an African church, Crowther was consecrated in Canterbury Cathedral as a Bishop of an indeterminate area of Equatorial Africa, a diocese that he ran with ‘meekness of wisdom’ until shortly before his death. During the next half-century nearly 100 African clergy served in this mission enterprise, 60 per cent drawn from the Krio community in Freetown (Walls 1978, in Baker, pp.  339–348). Although the British colonial authorities discouraged formal Christian mission work in Islamic northern Nigeria, African Christian migrants from the south were often active agents of the gospel. Mission agencies, notably the African Colonization Society, in the United States sent African American missionaries to Liberia. A few were single-­ mindedly devoted to evangelism among the indigenous peoples, but many were suborned by the institutions of black colonial settler society intent on

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subjecting African peoples to alien black colonial rule. Alexander Crummell, who had gone to Monrovia to serve the episcopalian cause, saw the presence of African American settlers as key to indigenous evangelism. At the same time, he demeaned Liberia’s indigenous peoples as in need of ‘regeneration’, if necessary, by settler coercion (Barnes 2023). Both Crummell and E.W. Blyden, influential in the Christian story of West Africa, decried a white missionary presence, but remained under the orbit of foreign agencies (Lynch 1967; Oldfield 1990). Despite Liberia’s growing African American and ‘recaptive’ population, it failed to be a successful base for the evangelization of West Africa. In the British Caribbean before emancipation, former slaves and free blacks had ambitions to work as missionaries in West Africa (Buxton 1840). The Baptist Calabar College was founded in Jamaica in 1843 with the purpose of training men for ministry and mission. Jamaican Baptists were among the earliest Christian pioneers in the Gold Coast, Fernando Po, and Cameroon, a hardy vanguard suffering high mortality in what was described as the ‘white man’s grave’ (Vassidy 1872; Martin 1989; Russell 2000; Newman 2007). Barbados also provided Anglican missionaries for West Africa, graduates from the Codrington College in Bridgetown, who established the Rio Pongas mission north of Sierra Leone. Like their Caribbean colleagues, they established churches and schools, translated the scriptures into local languages, and built small communities of African Christians (Gibba 2011).

Evangelization, Means, and Methods Across sub-Saharan Africa Protestant mission endeavours to ‘civilize’, whether in black or white hands, was largely Bible-based and thus promoted schools and literacy, including for girls, using imported printing presses to produce translations of scripture, catechisms, hymns books, and newspapers. Knowledge of the Bible message, to those who heard it and for those who were able to read it, could be transformative. But it was heard and received in different ways and adapted and expressed in African cultural contexts and sensitivities across the continent. Translations of the scriptures, an arduous and scholarly task, often undertaken by Africans, could provide an essential but sometimes contentious text (Sanneh 1989; Landau 1995). And translation of the scriptures into an African language rendered the text open to individual interpretation, which in turn enabled African readers and hearers to emphasize those aspects of the message which resonated with their individual and communal experience, be it political power and authority, family relationships, health and healing, materialism, and, in a missionary and colonial context, matters of land, race, and identity. African societies were dynamic, not static, and resilient, and it is doubtful if their communal consciousness was ‘colonized’ by Western missionary influence to the extent conceived by the Comaroffs in their fascinating and provocative studies of the Tswana peoples of the northern Cape (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, 1997; Landau 2000). Faced with new ‘alien’ ideas of

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Christianity, Africans were buffeted by the countervailing weighty presence of indigenous belief systems and, across a lengthy part of northern sub-Saharan Africa, the appeal of monotheistic Islam. African reception of religious beliefs was nearly always veiled in complexity. Non-literacy did not mean lack of intellectual thought about belief. The new Christian message, whether promulgated by white or black missionaries, was initially brought by those who thought in terms of regeneration of Africans and their societies. But regeneration was implicit in much Protestant, and especially evangelical Christianity, whether directed to African peasants or London slum dwellers. If, as this paper argues, the Christian gospel was primarily spread by African converts, their essential message probably focused more on personal change than on cultural reordering, although the one cannot be divorced from the other. Modern means of communication included literacy, text, and printing and were accompanied steadily by other cultural scientific advantages, most importantly medicine, and ideas of hygiene. Western Christian cultural norms and Biblical interpretations, by the late 1880s more rigorously advanced by younger white missionaries, operated in the shadow of growing imperial penetration. This further challenged mission responses to African cultural practices of domestic slavery and polygynous marriage (Miller 2003, pp. 148–149). At a time of growing cultural patriotism, with some members of educated elites adopting African names and clothing, a crucial question was about authority and church leadership. The arrogant ‘purge’ of the Niger Mission by younger white CMS missionary clerics angered many Africans and severely challenged their loyalties, illustrated in the life of the Anglican Bishop James ‘Holy’ Johnson and the Niger Delta Pastorate (Ayendele 1970, pp. 221–238). For the avowed African patriot Mojola Agbebi, the weak ecclesiastical structure of Baptists enabled him to establish the Native Baptist Church in southern Nigeria in 1888 (King 1986; Abobunde 2022). After the US Civil War, the number of African American men and women volunteering for African mission service increased. Many were trained in new black colleges such as Hampton, Stillman, Wilberforce, Fisk, and Livingstone (an AMEZ college), which also trained several Africans including James Emma Kwegyir Aggrey (1875–1929), the most influential African Christian of the early twentieth century (Smith 1929; Sanders 2023, (forthcoming)). In Britain, the CMS, from the outset, trained a handful of African students, a policy copied on a small scale by most protestant denominations. St. Augustine’s College, Canterbury, a High Church college founded in 1848, to train men for overseas missionary service, taught a few African and black students. The single institution to train solely black students for the African mission field was the African Institute, founded by a former Welsh Baptist missionary, in Colwyn Bay, North Wales (Burroughs 2023). Britain geographically played a pivotal role in the evangelization of Africa. African Americans intent on working in Africa invariably travelled on regular transatlantic shipping lines via British ports. Their stop-over in Britain helped cement connexions with British Christians and gave them recourse to the many

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services of a growing industrial state (Killingray 2022). The premier Wesleyan missionary in West Africa was Thomas Birch Freeman, a black Briton born in Hampshire, who from 1838 spent the next 50 years in and out of mission work on the Gold Coast. One of the first black medical missionaries to serve in Africa, Archibald Hewan from Jamaica, was trained in Scotland, and sent by the Scottish Presbyterians to Calabar in 1855. In the 1860s, James White and W.S. Allen, African pastors of the CMS in Nigeria, practised medicine as part of their evangelism (Peel 2000, p.  221). White pietists of the Basel Mission worked on the Gold Coast training African Christians, some of whom were sent to Germany for further education, several serving as a vanguard of new mission work in the interior of that expanding British colony. Both the AME and the AMEZ churches planted churches and mission stations in Sierra Leone and Liberia, also in South Africa, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For some Africans there was an attraction in a church ‘composed of Africans and entirely governed and worked by Africans’ (Geiss 1974, pp. 15–48; K.C. Barnes 2004, pp. 108–122). Southern Africa The British seized the Cape Colony in South Africa from the Dutch in 1806. A white religious revival had occurred in the 1780s, although it did not generate strong anti-slavery sentiment. Indeed, few African slaves became Christians until after emancipation in 1838. For many coloured people in the Cape, descendants brought as slaves or servants by the Dutch from the East Indies, their traditional beliefs in Islam offered an entrenched alternative to alien Christianity. In the 1840s–1850s church and mission work slowly developed against a backcloth of white farmers’ demands for African farm labour and conflict for land in a series of frontier wars. While white-directed mission agencies sought to promote ‘civilization’ and Christianity rooted in settled agricultural communities, the troubled frontier nurtured African intellectual turmoil and early forms of religious independency. For many Africans, mission stations offered a place of security, especially for women, with schools, literacy, and opportunities to acquire and use new skills. The missions also produced a steady stream of African Christian agents and school teachers who gradually spread the gospel (Elphick and Davenport 1997, ch. 2–7). One significant product of the Presbyterian mission among the Xhosa-­ speaking peoples was the Rev. Tiyo Soga. After his second period of education in Scotland he returned home in 1857 an ordained minister with a white wife on his arm. He helped further the work of Bible translation, and through the nascent black press helped stimulate a sense of Xhosa identity allied to a wider consciousness of what it meant to be African (Davis 2018). Adherents of Christian churches in southern Africa grew with great rapidity in the last 40 years of the nineteenth century, so that by 1911, 26 per cent of Africans claimed to be Christians.

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A few African ‘recaptives’, mainly rescued from ‘Arab’ slave ships in the Indian Ocean, were landed in South African ports. These included Oromo child slaves whose care was undertaken by the Scottish mission school at Lovedale (Shell 2018). Mission work in South Africa was heavily influenced by racial discrimination: churches were segregated, African clergy paid lower salaries than their white counterparts (as was generally the case across Africa) and generally subjected to condescension as inferiors. Not surprisingly this led to the creation of independent African churches from the 1880s, often labelled pejoratively by whites as ‘Ethiopian’. Whites in state and church condemned these expressions of African independency as a political threat to the segregationist racial order of the southern continent (Pretorius & Jafta, in Elphick and Davenport 1997, pp. 211–219; Kalu 2006, in Gilley and Stanley, pp. 576–592; Chirenje 1987). The influence of the AME church in South Africa encouraged Ethiopianism, while the subsequent Bambatha rising among the Zulu in 1906 confirmed white fears of the subversive influence of African American missionaries in the country (Campbell 1995; Page 1978). East and Central Africa The spur to the evangelization of east and central Africa owed much to the influence of David Livingstone on British public opinion. In Britain it was hoped and believed that an extension of Christian mission activity would help combat what was widely termed the ‘Arab slave trade’. British naval ships patrolled Indian Ocean waters apprehending dhows carrying slaves and landing their ‘recaptive’ cargoes at nearby ports in Africa and Asia. A spiritual arm would complement the naval and military one. The high church Universities Mission to Central Africa, formed in 1858, focused on Zanzibar and the east African mainland, establishing stations, schools, and churches. Settlements of runaway slaves existed on the coast, largely autonomous and organized by African Christians. The CMS gathered ‘recaptives’, some educated in Bombay, who in 1875 became the core of settlements for freed slaves on the East African coast near Mombasa. The progressive and modernizing intent of these settlements of African catechists, students, converts, and freed slaves was largely undone by white ‘missionary insensitivity, insecurity and cultural arrogance’ (Strayer 1975, p.  27). Similar patterns of white racially structured mission activity litter the landscape of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sub-­ Saharan Africa. For example, the Jamaican couple, James and Cecelia Hemans, served with the LMS in now northern Zambia from 1888 to 1906, enduring the racial slights and critical attitudes of their fellow missionaries until they decided to leave ‘for the good of the mission’ (Rotberg 1965, pp. 159–160). It says much for the gracious tolerance of African Christians that many remained within the church and mission denominational structures of authority (see Stanley’s chapter, Table 0.1, for figures of African personnel 1910). Secession occurred, but few resorted to violent revolt as did John Chilembwe in Nyasaland in 1915 (Shepperson and Price 1958).

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Among the so-called native clergy were black Britons, African children rescued from slave ships and educated in Britain. Two are worth mentioning. Salim Wilson, a Dinka rescued from slavery in the Sudan, was brought to Britain where he was educated. In 1887, employed by the CMS, he went to Congo in an unsuccessful effort to reach his home country. Later he worked as an evangelist in northern England (Johnson 1991). James Challa Salfey, an Oromo child, was rescued from a slave ship in the Indian Ocean and adopted by a naval officer. Educated in Bombay and England he was ordained as a missionary priest, serving first with the Universities Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) in east Africa and finally in a new Anglican diocese in south-east Africa.

The Enduring Racial Equation The evangelization of Africa continued during the years of colonial advance after 1880. Much of this was in the hands of Africans and often out of sight of European missions. In that growth many in the African church had within them the seeds of African independency, restless indigenous leaders looking forward to autonomy and a time when that might be realized. European missions were ambiguous about colonial control: it was welcomed where it protected Christian work, opposed when it tried to exclude missions for political reasons, as in northern Nigeria. However, such barriers offered opportunities for individual indigenous mission activity, the African church often pushing ahead of both formal mission and colonial control. Over much of the sub-­ Saharan continent after 1920, racial colonialism imbued by white mission agencies demeaned the role of African American missionaries who declined in number. Abolitionism and the legal emancipation of slaves in the British Empire, the United States, and by 1888 in Cuba, and Brazil, was an important step towards the recognition of universal human rights. However, post emancipation race-­ bound slave institutions cast a long and enduring shadow of racial discrimination, intolerance, and violence. Within Africa, white colonialism was rooted and directed by ideas of race, of African subjects governed by European masters. Racial ideas figured prominently in mission policies, both at home and overseas, at a time when Asian and African converts played an active and often dominant role in spreading the Christian gospel. Despite the claims by many white Christians to recognize in Christ a common humanity, this was countered in word and deed by policies that discriminated and patronized non-­ Europeans. Black and white Christians were active in their opposition to continued racial violence in the United States, Ida B. Wells carrying her campaign against lynching to Britain in 1893–1894 (McMurry 1998, pp. 188–222). Black missionaries protested at murderous imperial commerce in the Congo Free State, an insistent voice being that of the African American Presbyterian William Sheppard (Kennedy 2002; Phipps 2002). Service on the African mission field provided first-hand evidence of imperial excesses, as earlier Africans had experienced the brutalities of the slave trade

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and slavery. The missionary Thomas L. Johnson wrote movingly of his 28 years as a slave, and in Britain he was not alone among African Americans in displaying shackles and whips at evangelistic services well into the twentieth century (Johnson 1909). Johnson, along with fellow former black Baptist missionaries, in Britain promoted public awareness of the racial disadvantages endured by fellow Africans through the African Association, formed in 1897, and the Pan-­ African Conference that met in London in 1900 (Killingray 2020). In three days of discussion the Conference speakers, mainly active Christians, condemned racial discrimination and the exploitation of labour on south African mines and farms. The Jamaican medical missionary, Theophilus Scholes, retired to London, turned to writing polemical anti-imperial books, primarily intended for white readers, in the process inspiring future African and black activists to challenge colonial rule (Scholes 1905, 1908).

Conclusion African decolonization north of Limpopo in the late 1950s–1960s marked a decisive tilt in the racial equation, although new political dispensations in Africa then had to begin the long struggle to secure economic equity in an unbalanced global capitalist system. The post-decolonization years also gave stimulus to new varieties and expressions of independent church structures and leaders. Remarkably, that period was marked by a rapid growth of Christian faith and mission by Africans within the continent and without. Instances of ‘reverse mission’, Africans coming to Europe to evangelize white people, had occurred in the nineteenth century. By the late twentieth century that process was well underway, perhaps fulfilling E.W. Blyden’s idea that ‘it may yet come to pass that when, in Europe, “God has gone out of date” … then earnest enquirers after truth leaving the seats of science and the “highest civilization”, will take themselves to Africa to learn lessons of faith and piety’ (Blyden 1880, p. 16).

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Comaroff, Jean and John L.  Comaroff 1997. The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier, vol. 2. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cuguano, Quobna Otobah. 1787. Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery. London: 1787, edited with an Introduction by Vincent Carretta. London, Penguin Books, 1999. Curtin, Philip D. 1963. The Image of Africa, British Ideas and Actions, 1780–1850. London: Macmillan, ch. 5, ‘The racists and their opponents’. Davis, David Brion. 1973. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution: 1770–1823. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Davis, Joanne Ruth. 2018. Tiyo Soga. A Literary History. Pretoria: UNISA. Dickson, William. 1792. ‘Diary of visit to Scotland 5 Jan–19 March 1792’, Friends House Library, London, Temporary box 1014, quoted by Ian Whyte, Scotland and the Abolition of Black Slavery. Edinburgh: 2006), pp. 71–72. Dubois, Laurent. 2004. Avengers of the New World. The Story of the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Eltis, David and Stanley L.  Engerman. 2011 and 2017. eds, The Cambridge World History of Slavery, vol. 3 and vol. 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eltis, David and David Richardson. 2010. Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 23 Table 2. Elphick, Richard and Rodney Davenport, eds. 1997. Christianity in South Africa. A Political, Social & Cultural History. Oxford: James Currey, chs 2–7. Equiano, Olaudah. 1789. The Interesting Narrative of The Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African. London: edited with an introduction by Vincent Carretta. London: Penguin Books, 1995. Everill, Bronwen. 2012. Abolition and Empire in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Frey, Sylvia R. & Betty Wood. 1998. Come Shouting to Zion: African American Missionary Protestantism in the American South and the British Caribbean to 1830. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Geiss, Imanuel. 1974. The Pan-African Movement. 1968; English trans., London: Allen & Unwin, pp. 145–148. Glasson, Travis, 2012. Mastering Christianity. Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gibba, Bakary. 2011. ‘The West Indian Mission to West Africa: the Rio Pongas Mission 1850–1963’, PhD diss. University of Toronto. Gray, Richard. 1990. Black Christians and White Missionaries. New Haven, CT: pp. 5–10. Hopkins, Samuel. 1776. Dialogue Concerning the Slavery of the Africans. New York. Isichei, Elizabeth. 1982. ‘An obscure man: Pa Antonio in Lagos (c.1800–c.1880)’, in Isichei, ed., Varieties of Christian Experience in Nigeria. London: Macmillan, pp. 28–33. Jackson, Maurice. 2009. Let This Voice Be Heard. Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Jacobs, Sylvia M, ed. 1982. Black Americans and the Missionary Movement in Africa. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982. Johnson, Douglas H. 1991. ‘Salim Wilson: the black evangelist of the north’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 21, 1, pp. 26–41. Johnson, Thomas L. 1909. Twenty-Eight Years a Slave. Bournemouth. Kalu, Ogbu. 2006. ‘Ethiopianism and the roots of modern African Christianity’, in Sheridan Gilley and Brian Stanley, ed., The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol 8.

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World Christianities, c.1815–c.1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 576–592. Kay, Roy. 2011. The Ethiopian Prophecy in Black American Letters: The History of African American Religions. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. Kennedy, Pagan. 2002. Black Livingstone: New York: Viking. Killingray, David. 2003. ‘The black Atlantic missionary movement and Africa, 1780s–1920s’. Journal of Religion in Africa, 33, 1, pp. 1–31. Killingray, David. 2020. ‘Black Baptists and the Pan-African Conference 1900’, Immigrants & Minorities, 38, 1–2, pp. 105–130. Killingray, David. 2022. ‘Black diaspora Christian activity in Britain from the late 18th century to 1950’, Studies in World Christianity, 28, 3, pp. 361–393. King, Hazel. 1986. ‘Cooperation in Contextualization: Two Visionaries of the African Church: Mojola Agbebi and William Hughes of the African Institute, Colwyn Bay’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 16, 1, pp. 2–21. Landau, Paul Stuart. 1995. The Realm of the Word. Language, Gender, and Christianity in a Southern African Kingdom. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Landau, Paul S. 2000. Review of the Comaroff’s two vols, ‘Hegemony and History’, Africa, 70, 3, pp. 501–519. Loiello, John. 1982. ‘Bishop in two worlds: Samuel Ajayi Crowther (c.1806–1891)’, in Isichei, Varieties of Christian Experience, pp. 34–61. Lorimer, Douglas A. 2013. Science, Race Relations and Resistance. Britain, 1870–1914. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lynch, Hollis R. 1967. Edward Wilmot Blyden. Pan-Negro Patriot 1832–1912. London, Oxford University Press. Maffly-Kipp, Laurie F. 2010. Setting Down the Sacred Past. African-American Race Histories. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ch. 4. McPherson, James M. 1998. Battle Cry of Freedom. The Civil War Era. New  York: Oxford University Press, 1988. McDaniel, W. Caleb 2013. The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery. Garrisonism Abolitionists & Transatlantic Reform. Baton Rouge: Louisiana University State Press. McMurry, Linda O. 1998. To Keep The Waters Troubled. The Life of Ida B.  Wells. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 188–222. Martin, Sandy D. 1989. Black Baptists and African Missions: the Origins of a Movement 1880–1915. Macon. GA: Mercer University Press. Miller, Jon. 2003. Missionary Zeal and Institutional Control. Organisational Contradictions in the Basel Mission on the Gold Coast, 1828–1917. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, pp. 148–149. Murray, Hannah-Rose. 2020. Advocates of Freedom. African American Transatlantic Abolitionism in the British Isles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Newman, Lascelles. 2007. ‘Mission from the Margin: a critical analysis of the participation of West Indians as agents of the Western missionary enterprise in Africa in the 19th century’, PhD thesis, University of Wales. Newman, Richard S. 2018. Abolitionism. A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 16–19. Oldfield, J.R. 1990. Alexander Crummell (1819–1898) and the Creation of an Afro-­ American Church in Liberia. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. Oldfield, J.R. 2020. The Ties That Bind. Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Reform, c.1820–1865. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

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Page, Carol A. 1978. ‘Black Americans in white South Africa: Church and state reaction to the A.M.E.  Church in Cape Town and Transvaal, 1896–1910’, 2 vols, PhD, University of Edinburgh. Peel, J.D.Y. 2000. Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, p. 221. Phipps, William E. 2002. William Sheppard. Congo’s African American Livingstone. Louisville, KY: Geneva. Pretorius, Hennie and Lizo Jafta. 1997. ‘“A branch springs out”: African initiated churches’, in Elphick and Davenport, Christianity, pp. 211–219. Raboteau, Albert. 2001. Canaan Land: A Religious History of African Americans. New York: Oxford University Press. Redkey, Edwin S.1969. Black Exodus: Black Nationalist and Back-to-Africa Movements, 1890–1910. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Richards, Jake Subryan. 2020. ‘Liberated Africans and Law in the South Atlantic, c.1839–1871’, PhD thesis, University of Cambridge. Rotberg, Robert L. 1965. Christian Missionaries and the Creation of Northern Rhodesia 1880–1924. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 159–160. Russell, Horace O. 2000. The Missionary Outreach of the West Indian Church. Jamaican Baptist Missions to West Africa in the Nineteenth Century. New York Peter Lang. Ryden, David Beck. 2009. West Indian Slavery and British Abolition, 1783–1807. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ch.1. Sanders, Ethan R. 2023. ‘James Emman Kwegyir Aggrey: Educator, minister, and global black intellectual’, in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History, (forthcoming). Sanneh, Lamin. 1989. Translating the Message. The Missionary Impact on Culture. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. Sanneh, Lamin. 1999. Abolitionists Abroad. American Blacks and the Making of Modern West Africa. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Scanlan, Padraic X. 2020. Slave Empire. How Slavery Built Modern Britain. London, Robinson, ch. 6. Schipper, Jeremy. 2022. Denmark Vesey’s Bible. The Thwarted Revolt that put Slavery and Scripture on Trial. Princeton, CT: Princeton University Press. Scholes, T.E.S. 1905 and 1908. Glimpses of the Ages, or the ‘Superior’ and the ’Inferior’ Races, so-called, Discussed in the Light of Science and History. 2 vols. London: John Long. Sharp, Granville. 1769. A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery. London. Shepperson, George and Thomas Price 1958. John Chilembwe and the Nyasaland Rising of 1915. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press. Shell, Sandra Rowoldt. 2018. Children of Hope: The Odyssey of the Oromo Slaves from Ethiopia to South Africa. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Sinha, Manisha. 2015. The Slave’s Cause. A History of Abolition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Smith, Edwin W. 1929. Aggrey of Africa. A Study in Black and White. London: Student Christian Movement. Stanley, Brian. 2001. ‘Christian missions and the enlightenment: A revaluation’, in Stanley, ed., Christian Missions and the Enlightenment. Grand Rapids, MI. pp. 1–21. Strayer, Robert W. 1975. The Making of Mission Communities in East Africa. London: Heinemann, p. 27.

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Vassidy, Bela. 1872. ‘The role of the West Indian missionary in West Africa, 1840–1890’, PhD, Temple University. Walker, James W. St. G. 1992. The Black Loyalists. The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone 1783–1870. 1976, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Walls, Andrew F. 1978. ‘Black Europeans—White Africans. Some missionary motives in West Africa’, in D.  Baker, 1978. ed., Religious Motivation: Biographical and Sociological Problems for the Church Historian. Studies in Church History, 14. Oxford, Blackwood, pp. 339–348. Walls, Andrew F. 1996. The Missionary Movement in Christian History. Studies in the Transmission of Faith. Maryknoll, NY, p. 86. Walvin, James. 2011. The Zong: A Massacre, the Law and the End of Slavery. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Wesley, John. 1774. Thoughts Upon Slavery. London: R. Hawes. Wheatley, Phillis. 1774. Complete Writings. Edited and with an introduction by Vincent Caretta. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2001, pp. 151–152, letter dd. Boston, 9 February 1774. Whyte, Ian. 2006. Scotland and the Abolition of Black slavery. Edinburgh. Williams, Walter L. 1982. Black Americans and the Evangelization of Africa, 1877–1900. Madison, WI., University of Wisconsin Press. Wise, Stephen M. 2005. Though the Heavens May Fall. The Landmark Trial that Led to the End of Human Slaver. Cambridge MA: Da Capo Press. Wolffe, John. 2006. The Expansion of Evangelicalism. The Age of Wilberforce, More, Chalmers and Finney. Nottingham: Inter-Varsity Press, pp. 231–234. Zoellner, Tom. 2020. Island on Fire. The Revolt that Ended Slavery in the British Empire. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

CHAPTER 16

Continental Protestant Missions and the Evangelization of Africa (1800–1880) Paul Glen Grant

Introduction The early and middle parts of the nineteenth century were times of jarring social transformations, not only in Africa, but also in Europe. The slave trade was abolished in Atlantic-facing Africa at the same time that industrial capitalism was emerging in northwestern Europe. Abrupt changes to the nature of wealth and power triggered wars, revolutions, and turmoil on both continents. In Protestant Europe, spiritual revivals broke out, as young people sought spiritual answers that spoke to the times. These revivals quickly branched into missionary projects all over the world, including Africa. Eventually, European national rivalries would see Africa partitioned in a scramble of conquest. This chapter is concerned with religious encounters between Africans and continental European Protestants in the eighty years between these concussions—the Atlantic slave trade and high colonialism. Especially in comparison with the colonial period that followed, the decades to 1880 were uniquely open for African leadership and innovation. In conversation with this volume’s overall approach, to focus less on what Europeans got wrong and more on what Africans got right, this chapter conceives of the early and midcentury encounter as African intellectual history, asking what Africans made of the Christian message presenting itself to them in the form of continental European Protestants. This chapter is structured as follows: a brief

P. G. Grant (*) Department of History, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. E. Barnes, T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48270-0_16

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chronological overview is followed by a section on the distinctives of the continental European Protestant missionary movements. These movements were also characterized by several internal tensions—perhaps contradictions—that could not be sustained in the long run. A third section examines these tensions, asking how they were reconciled, and how they were not. I conclude with some suggestions for further research.

Chronology Someone born near the West African coast around 1800, like a certain Mohenu of the Accra region of today’s Ghana, would likely have thought of Christianity as a European religion. Despite 150 years of Protestant presence on the coast, there were nearly no indigenous Christians who were not intimately connected to European men at the forts. This was certainly the case with Mohenu, who grew up fewer than ten miles from the Danish fort, but who seems never to have encountered Christianity outside of that town.1 In the middle decades of their life, this same observer would have encountered a very different kind of foreigner entering indigenous societies. Some were Europeans, and others were Africans from elsewhere in the continent or the Atlantic diaspora, who dressed, spoke, and worshiped like Europeans— people like Catherine Thompson of Jamaica, born Geveh in Angola, whom the Basel Mission recruited as a missionary schoolteacher for Accra.2 These newcomers, including Thompson, her German husband Johannes Zimmermann, and scores of others throughout Africa, learned local languages and generally entered local social life, but nevertheless abstained from the most important local customs. By the end of this observer’s life, Christian communities, typically led by locals in some kind of hierarchical relationship to those foreigners, would be scattered throughout the countryside. This number included Mohenu himself, who, after his own conversion in the home of the Zimmermann family, took the name Paolo Mohenu and spent nearly thirty years as a traveling evangelist, preaching in his native language and from the perspective of an insider.3 In other words, the nature of Europe-originated Christianity in Africa changed so quickly during the first three quarters of the nineteenth century, that an observer might well have wondered whether this was the same religion as that of the coastal forts they had seen in their childhood. If the Portuguese of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries may justifiably be charged with wedding slave-trading and evangelism, early Protestants in Africa resolved that problem by doing away with the evangelism parts. Arriving in appreciable numbers only after the end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648, most early Protestants in Africa were employees of trading companies headquartered in Europe. Few had any interest in engaging with their hosts in any other way than at the level of trade and carnal pleasures. It would be several decades—in some locations, over a century—before any meaningful missionary enterprise emanated from these outposts. This simple fact, that continental Protestants

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did not necessarily conceive of their activities in Africa as evangelistically meaningful, is a striking aberration in Christian history. If, as Hanciles has argued, much of Christianity’s spread in its first fifteen centuries was driven by migrants—including merchants—and that therefore “every Christian migrant is a potential missionary,” the near total absence of missionary activity among the first generations of Protestant Europeans to travel to Africa demands historical explanation.4 A full investigation belongs elsewhere, but the answer must ultimately include theology: something exceptional in Christian history that did not envision the cross-cultural transmission of the faith. Aside from the Moravian Brethren, whose scattered eighteenth-century missionary projects in South and West Africa seem to have borne little fruit, it was not until after the end of the slave trade that Protestants systematically began engaging in missions in Africa.5 Things changed soon after the year 1800. A series of localized but interconnected revivals (both on the continent and throughout the English-speaking world) generated tremendous spiritual energies, mainly among the youth, which missionary-minded elders were in position to direct into concern for the lost around the world—be they the impoverished at home, or emigrants to the Americas or the frontiers of the Russian empire, or non-Christians (Jews, Muslims, and “heathens”) in Asia, America, or Africa. Operating without much strategy or structure, these people—initially concentrated in southwestern Germany and the Netherlands—began pastoral and educational work (mainly teaching literacy and the Bible) in South Africa and among formerly enslaved settlers in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Some operated on their own and others in the service of the Church Missionary Society. The hubs of activity soon shifted to the Gold Coast and Nigeria, and German missionary societies hired numerous Africans and West Indians for the work.6 Unlike Catholic missionaries of this same period, who could build directly on centuries of experience, nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries were inventing things as they went along. Few of these revivalist missionary activists were explicitly motivated by what would later be called “civilizing missions.” To the contrary: they often insisted that indeterminate numbers of nominal Christians in Europe were as lost as African non-Christians.7 At the first commissioning service for Basel Missionaries, the young men departing for Sierra Leone were told that they would be opposed by “the gruesome tyranny of the negro kings, who sell their subjects as human commodities, … and the base greed of the European slave traders.”8 This comment is fascinating for its open-­ endedness. On the one hand, the language of “gruesome tyranny” clearly anticipates the shrill outrage, which a few decades later would develop into moral justifications for colonialism. On the other hand, the preacher clearly conceives of Europe as a curse, rather than a blessing. These missionaries were not being deputed in the name of European civilization. Over time, growing institutional maturity saw the emergence of an indigenous ordained clergy and congregations organized into districts and synods. Some of the most creative minds in nineteenth-century African Christian

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history were active during these years—a development unfolding in both continental and British missionary communities. From midcentury on, however, the nationalism playing an increasingly prominent role in state churches inflected more of the mission work. Mutual English-French-German antagonisms, which would culminate in the First World War, easily slid into a syncretism of mission with cultural propaganda that entailed African subordination to missionary paternalism.9 Especially from the 1870s (after the Franco-Prussian War), a colonial fever swept through German Lutheran churches, and German missionary societies, whatever their private thoughts about empires, found themselves increasingly pressured to show donors how the benefits of mission work flowed both ways—that is, to Germany. Influenced by transnational networks developed over the eighteenth century, continental Protestant missions thought and acted in a decidedly ecumenical and transnational fashion, but as the century wore on were unable to maintain these positions against the tide of imperialism. In comparison with Nordic and Alpine Protestants, Germans were especially susceptible to a British level of colonial enthusiasm. The Berlin Mission saw its donor base swept up in imperial fantasies, and despite public misgivings, entered German East Africa with substantial government support, as did the Rhenish mission in Southwest Africa, and the Basel Mission in Togo and Cameroon. The underlying reason for this failure to resist the “colonial fever” was a taste of social prestige. Mercantile and industrial interests suddenly aligned with those of German missionaries: the “heathen mission” could be an important instrument of the “spread of culture” in the new colonies.10

Distinctives The half dozen decades of continental European Protestant mission ending with Africa’s partition were so tumultuous on both continents that it is difficult to identify commonalities amongst the missionaries. Not all participants within the movement, for example, hailed from socially disadvantaged families, and not all were ecumenically minded. However, there were a few traits shared by most missionaries, among which three are most relevant for the movement’s eventual transferal to and appropriation by African leaders. The first was that the early stages of this movement were largely driven by enthusiastic youth from socially or economically marginal backgrounds: they were young, gifted, and poor. Accordingly, the movement tended to attract bright misfits for whom the pathway to a local pastorate in the state church was barred (often for social, rather than character, reasons). Of the 102 missionaries the Norwegian Mission sent to Africa in the nineteenth century, for example, only 21 had attended university; these young men were overwhelmingly farmers’ sons.11 Walls argued that most missionary movements in Christian history originated as youth awakenings, and specifically as religious protest movements, a formula that certainly describes the continental protestant missionary movement of the early nineteenth century.12 A focus on early

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nineteenth-century missions as a youth movement helps explain its calcification late in the century: by the time of colonial scramble, the early century missionary organizations were aging, and given to rehearsing the glory days of their early successes. Simultaneously, with growing maturity and financial stability came a corresponding concern for respect within academic and state church circles at home. This late-century jealousy for bourgeois respectability typically required missionaries to adapt attitudes of heightened paternalism (often inflected with scientific racism), and liberal, disenchanted theology. Many early missionaries had little administrative training. Operating without budgets, offices, boards, or bylaws, undertaking risky (and sometimes poorly considered) projects with the seal of a handshake, the generation who initiated mission in Africa compensated for wanting skills and lack of financial means with boundless enthusiasm.13 Johannes Christaller’s calling is paradigmatic. The future master of the Akuapem Twi language grew up poor and fatherless in rural Germany, ineligible for public assistance with school fees (for reasons having to do with his widowed mother’s irregular citizenship). A supremely gifted intellect, however, Christaller displayed all the “advantages and deficits of an autodidact” to the Basel Mission, who eventually agreed to give the young man a chance.14 Early African converts shared in this youthful enthusiasm, if not always in their European colleagues’ low social origins. As men and women equipped with tremendous spiritual vitality, these pioneers paid a steep cost for their commitments. Susanna Anyama, for example, of a royal family in Akuapem (Ghana), was expected to be married into a position of high rank—perhaps eventually to become a queen mother. Instead, she became a missionary to the poor in rapidly industrializing Switzerland in the 1860s, where she eventually died of tuberculosis.15 Second, while only loosely coordinated, the European Protestant missionary movement was broadly ecumenical but intensely devout. Having emerged from transnational evangelical awakenings that had begun a few decades earlier, many of these missionaries were convinced that spiritual vitality could be found not only in other Protestant communities, but also in eastern branches of Christianity. Although they rarely extended ecumenical understanding to Roman Catholics,16 German and Swiss missionaries traveled to Ethiopia in the 1820s, hoping to promote “revival.” Their work included Bible Study, fellowship and prayer with indigenous orthodox Christians, and education—both teaching and learning.17 Leaders within these movements read each other’s newsletters, corresponded with one another, and often traveled around the continent to participate in each other’s events.18 The Rhenish mission traces its roots to enthusiastic youth, gathering to discuss missionary newsletters and pray.19 Many continental Protestants, however, also distinguished between people whose faith they deemed genuine and those who seemed false. According to this logic, correct belief in its granular doctrinal detail was irrelevant next to spiritual vigor. This zeal distinguished them from their orthodox co-religionists

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even as it bound them to fellow enthusiasts of other (Protestant) sects. In 1799, for example, the Netherlands Missionary Society (abbreviated NZG) opened its ranks beyond the Reformed Church, to all who called themselves Christians.20 The NZG was established in the 1790s by young people connected with the Amsterdam chapter of the Switzerland-based Deutsche Christentumsgesellschaft, an evangelical network committed to renewal within existing churches.21 In the 1860s, to take a few other examples, the Finnish mission found its way to Ovamboland in northern Namibia when a visiting Rhenish missionary (Hugo Hahn) spoke of the need there,22 the Swiss-trained and English-commissioned German Ludwig Krapf helped the Swedish Mission establish itself in Ethiopia,23 while the Paris Mission hired the Anglican Walter Taylor, a Sierra Leonian of slave-recaptive origins, at the mission’s leader in northern Senegal.24 The cumulative impression is one of effortless transnationalism—a striking difference from what would follow in the early twentieth century. Some of the most important missionaries serving in the British Church Missionary Society (CMS) were Germans, including Jakob Sessing in Sierra Leone, Johannes Schön in the lower Niger, and Johannes Rebmann and Ludwig Krapf in East Africa, among several others.25 Likewise, Gottlob Schreiner (father of South African novelist Olive Schreiner) served with the London Missionary Society in the Eastern Cape. Highly competent at navigating political and ethnic barriers and indefatigable as travelers, these Germans seconded to British missions collectively laid significant linguistic groundwork for the translation of the Bible in various African languages. Indeed, the CMS had such success recruiting Germans for African service that some British chauvinists took offense. In the same 1857 speech in which he articulated his famous call for missionaries to bring “civilization, commerce, and Christianity” David Livingstone said that it was “deplorable to think that one of the noblest of our missionary societies, the Church Missionary Society, is compelled to send to Germany for missionaries, whilst other societies are amply supplied. Let this stain be wiped off.” Third—the outstanding mark of continental European evangelical Christianity in Africa—was a sustained conviction of the value of vernacular language in the life of African Christians. Drawing on global Protestant cultures of reading (primarily the Bible, but also Christian literature of all forms), nineteenth-century missionaries dedicated great energies to learning African languages. This was done mainly in the interest of Bible translation, the assumption being that the Christian faith is only genuine when it is comprehended in a holistic cultural context. Along the way, these missionaries produced scholarship on African languages of inestimable value. A fourth distinctive of these missionaries, albeit more characteristic of the Germans, was their paternalistic organizational culture, which often crushed spirits and stifled innovation. Most meaningful decisions were taken from the various home offices, leaving field workers often frozen for months while waiting for instructions. This “trained incapacity” inculcated at the seminary was

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reproduced on the field, as African catechists were subject to discipline for independent thinking, and indigenous congregations subject to suffocating regulations.26 As the century went on, this paternalism grew increasingly racialized. While most German missions never embraced scientific racism and tolerated (sometimes grudgingly) interracial marriage on the field, their deeply engrained authoritarian habits fell far more heavily on African than on European clergy. A focus on language and culture as fundamental to human authenticity often implied that African clergy must not speak or write in European languages—but since field leadership meetings were held in German, African clergy were thus excluded from leadership nearly as effectively as under explicitly racial regimes. Finally, music and song. The mid-nineteenth-century European missionary presence in Africa was inescapably musical. Many of the missionaries had experienced their calling in song, and they sang constantly on the field—not only in liturgy—with songs specific to morning, noon, and nightfall, songs for work and songs for rest, songs of joy and songs of grief. Indeed, the Netherlands Missionary Society published hymnals specifically for usage on the South African missionary field, as did the Basel Mission.27 It is here that some of the earliest articulations of African protestant Christianity are to be found. From an early date, indigenous Christian leaders were able to intervene in the missionary message at the level of music—that is, in song.

Internal Tensions The continental European Protestant missionary movement of the nineteenth century was riddled with internal tensions. What began as a youth movement was held together by dogged determination and revivalist enthusiasm. The project was unstable and fell apart under the pressure of colonialism. This section identifies three fields in which the movement’s contradictions were especially acute. First, a tension between mission and migration obtained throughout the continent. Indigenous African Christians and colonial settlers tended to have divergent spiritual interests. At times uncritically socializing with settlers, and at times attempting to mediate, missionaries were often caught in the middle. Leaders of colonial communities often asked churches to foster social cohesion and moral authority among far-flung settlements. If Africans wanted to join the church, that was fine, as long as conflict with indigenous authorities did not ensue. During the period of this chapter, many Dutch settlers in South Africa, almost exclusively members of the Dutch Reformed Church, felt that their faith was the central or only source of their community’s continued existence.28 African Christians in settler societies were thus exposed to profound contradictions at the heart of European Christianity, which could be reconciled either by resistance or by abandoning the faith. Sol Plaatje—one of the intellectual godfathers to the South African resistance movement later called the African National Congress—took the former approach; born in 1876 to indigenous

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staff with the Berlin Mission and raised on various mission stations, Plaatje had a clear-eyed understanding that the gospel message stood in judgment of land policies promulgated by an ostensibly Christian government.29 In one of the most explosive passages in his 1916 book Native Life in South Africa, Plaatje explicitly connected African refugees of the 1913 Land Act with Christian persecution, marshaling Jesus’ own words in Matthew 24: “Pray that your flight not be in winter.”30 A second tension was between the missionaries’ fantastic daydreams and practical realities. The evangelical revivals that lay behind the early nineteenth-­ century mission movement were casually, almost effortlessly, transnational while also being socially anchored in the lower classes.31 These two qualities—a global imagination and a marginal existence—did not contradict one another. Rather, poverty and oppression drove the revived out into the world. For example, in the case of the Finnish Missionary society, established during Russian imperial rule, missionaries went to Africa because the Russians did not allow Lutherans to evangelize within the empire.32 This dual reality had important consequences on the field with respect to the emergence of indigenous Christianity. First, it meant that the continental missionaries, especially in the earlier decades of the century, had a much easier time identifying with Africans in the rural countryside: they were usually villagers back home, more than competent to handle livestock and clear brush—and content to spend days talking with locals about the same. Conversely, the missionaries’ low social origins forced them to enter indigenous society from a position of relative weakness—subject to indigenous authorities’ own political or economic agendas and also often at odds with the prevailing colonial authorities.33 This social dynamic meant that some of their early successes, especially in attracting converts through schooling and education, were among Africans of much higher social standing than the missionaries themselves—children of royalty and privilege. From early on in the encounter, some of these African Christians understood that the missionaries were not representative Europeans—and that the gospel judged the missionaries as much as the unbelievers. On the other hand, few missionaries seem to have comprehended how much these high-born African Christians were sacrificing by abstaining from traditional ways. Third, German and Nordic missionaries of the nineteenth century had no consistent theology of race, an absence that left them unable to see the racial implications of colonial conquest. Coming from linguistic contexts in Europe which were racially monochrome but intensely sensitive to minute variations in dialect that signified origin and class (or, in the case of Finland, in which language was becoming coterminous with national belonging), incoherency on culture and race made the missionaries impotent to resist coarsening racial dynamics in colonial societies in which they were active.34 The same cannot be said of African Christians associated with the missions. These did not have the luxury of splitting hairs over the difference between language and ethnicity:

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what to some missionaries was an academic distinction with implications for biblical hermeneutics was a matter of life and death—or of faith and apostasy— to many Africans of the late nineteenth century. As Barnes reminds us, African Christian protest against European Christian racism dates at least to the early sixteenth century. That is, African Christians have seen errors in European Christianity from before the European missionary movement had even matured—and long before European Protestants had even moved beyond their own adolescence. In the late eighteenth century, Olaudah Equiano observed British racism gaining in intensity even as the abolitionist cause progressed. No such racial consensus shaped early nineteenth-­ century continental Protestants, especially the lower-class evangelicals who constituted the backbone of the missionary movement. There is a direct line between missionary linguistics and rapacious colonial policies, such as the mid-­ twentieth-­century South African Bantu Education Act, which extensively drew on German missionary linguistics, but very few nineteenth-century missionaries seem to have connected the dots.35

For Further Research The nineteenth-century continental European missionary movement was internally coherent if often chaotic. It played out with its own life cycle, displaying youthful enthusiasm (including youthful mistakes), eventually maturing into institutions that long outlived the missionary societies themselves. It was replete with internal tensions and contradictions, but left a cumulative legacy of world historical import, such that many African Christian leaders are justifiably proud of their traditions. There is little need for new histories of the missionaries themselves. However, the vitality and numeric strength of African churches which identify the European Protestant Reformation as at least part of their intellectual and spiritual ancestry demands much more research into the cross-cultural process, by which a religious tradition highly contextualized to European history was successfully translated into African societies. By way of a conclusion, then, I suggest five promising areas for future research. First, a history of reciprocity: what patterns are there in European missionary reception of African Christianity? Throughout the decades of encounter and across the length and width of the continent, African Christians consistently sought to incorporate the foreign messengers into their own emergent indigenous churches. They were not always successful, but investigations into missionary receptivity to African Christian innovations seem promising. After all, instances of successful feedback—which are not always easy to find in the archival record—would amount to the earliest intellectual history of African Protestantism. Before African Christians had access to the pulpit or to their own printing presses, they had foreigners in their presence, upon whom they could cultivate the implications of their new faith.

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A second promising direction for research is in the history of biblical hermeneutics. Too few North American and European scholars, oblivious to the potential energy unleashed in Bible translation, bother to look at sermon texts or biblical references as records of original thought. As Kwame Bediako insisted, however, the Bible, which for many African languages was the first vernacular book in existence, gave African Christians “an independent yardstick by which to test, and sometimes to reject, what … missionaries taught and practiced.”36 Third, music and songs. The cross-cultural process functioned both at the level of oral and print culture, with missionary subjectivity to African moral imagination operating at the realm of the former. For that reason, scholars examining the interplay between oral and print cultures must foreground emotion as mediating factor, especially in song. Moreover, since some of the earliest African theological commentary was expressed in converts’ hymns, these deserve the same attention from theologians that scholarship on African history has long shown to the oral tradition. Fourth, the history of race and nation. Continental European Protestant missionaries brought historically contingent ways of thinking about human differences. Some of these ideas were incoherent, and some were very different than those of British and American missions. Scholars working on African Christian history cannot assume that German (and Dutch) words with English cognates, such as heathen, negro, and civilization, meant the same thing to nineteenth-century continental Europeans as they do to (for example) twentieth- or twenty-first-century Americans. Scholars working on African Protestant intellectual history must work out the degree to which missionary ideas on belonging shaped African Christian thought and praxis. Finally, there is a pressing need for research in African and continental European languages. Too many histories of nineteenth-century African Protestantism rely on sources in English or French, with research skewed toward scholarly foci in those communities, respectively. For example, English language research on Ghanaian Christianity tends to ask questions of African resistance to colonialism, with Christianity understood as part and parcel of colonialism. But to the extent that many sources on early African evangelical intellectual history were written in German, Dutch, and Nordic languages, they remain inaccessible to all but a few African scholars. Translation and publication of these sources is not merely a matter of intellectual enrichment but of the repatriation of heritage. Likewise, many African Christian sources, written in their own vernacular, contain brilliant insights into cultural and religious problems inherent to  Christianity, which missionaries never comprehended.

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Table  Continental European Protestant Missionary Societies before 1880 Society

Established

Home office Year Denomination(s) Fields of work language(s) first until 1880 entered (contemp. Africa names)

Moravian Mission

Saxony German (Germany), 1732 Netherlands Missionary Netherlands, Dutch Society (Nederlandsch 1797 Zendeling Genootschap)

1737

Anabaptist

South Africa, Ghana

1798

Reformed (but Ecumenical)

South Africa (in partnership with London Missionary Society) Guinea, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Tanzania, Egypt Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ghana, Togo, Cameroon Ghana (in partnership with Basel Mission) South Africa, Namibia

Church Missionary Society (many German staff)

England, 1799

English

1802

Anglican (but Ecumenical)

Basel Mission (Evangelische Missionsgesellschaft in Basel)

Switzerland, 1815

German

1823

Reformed, Lutheran

Danish Missionary Society (Danske Missionsselskab)

Denmark, 1821

Danish

1828

Lutheran

Rhenish Mission (Rheinische Missionsgesellschaft) Paris Evangelical Missionary Society (Société des missions évangéliques de Paris) Berlin Mission (Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Evangelischen Missionen unter den Heiden) Norwegian Mission (Norske Misjonsselskap) North German Mission (Norddeutsche Mission) aka Bremen Mission

Germany, 1828

German

1829

Lutheran

France, 1822 French

1833

Reformed

Lesetho, Senegal, Gabon

Germany, 1824

German

1834

Union

South Africa, Eswatini

Norway, 1842

Norwegian

1843

Lutheran

Germany, 1819

German

1847

Reformed, Lutheran

South Africa (Zululand), Madagascar Togo, Ghana

(continued)

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Table (continued) Society

Established

Home office Year Denomination(s) Fields of work language(s) first until 1880 entered (contemp. Africa names)

Hermannsburg Missionary Society (Hermannsburger Mission) Swedish Mission (Evangeliska Fosterlands-Stiftelsen) Finnish Missionary Society (Suomen Lähetysseura) Mission Romande

Germany, 1849

German

1858

Lutheran

South Africa

Sweden, 1856

Swedish

1865

Lutheran

Finland, 1859

Finnish, Swedish

1868

Lutheran

Ethiopia (Oromo), Eritrea Angola, Namibia

Switzerland, 1874

French

1875

Reformed

South Africa, Mozambique

Data collated from Dwight et al. (1910)

Notes 1. E. M. Lartey Odjidja, Paolo Mohenu, the Converted Fetish Priest, 5. 2. Paul Glen Grant, “Biography as Counter-Narrative to Rupture,” 276. 3. E. M. Lartey Odjidja, Paolo Mohenu, the Converted Fetish Priest, 25–30. 4. Jehu Hanciles, Migration and the Making of Global Christianity (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2021), 1. 5. On Moravians on the Gold Coast, see Jon F. Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival; in South Africa: Richard Elphick, The Equality of Believers, 1. 6. Abraham Nana Opare Kwakye, “Returning African Christians in Mission to the Gold Coast.” 7. Whether this vision drew on Equiano—whose Curious Narrative had been translated into Dutch, German, and Russian—would be a potentially valuable topic for further research. Either way, more than a few African Christians conceived of Europe as a mission field. 8. Wilhelm Schlatter, Geschichte der Basler Mission, vol. 3, 1. 9. Anne Wind, “The Protestant Missionary Movement from 1789 to 1963,” esp. 239–240. 10. Hellmut Lehmann, 150 Jahre Berliner Mission, 91. 11. Jarle Simensen, Norwegian Missions in African History, 26. 12. Andrew F. Walls, “The Eighteenth-Century Protestant Missionary Awakening in its European Context.” 13. Lehmann, 150 Jahre Berliner Mission, 16. 14. Paul Glen Grant, Healing and Power in Ghana, 140. 15. Hans Werner Debrunner, “Eine Afrikanerin in Riehen.” 16. Mutual Protestant-Catholic antagonism was especially pronounced in French contexts such as Senegal, where nineteenth-century Protestants operated in settings where the settler population was overwhelmingly Catholic and as hostile to Protestantism as to Islam. See Blanc et al., Histoire des missions protestantes françaises, 126.

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17. Tibebe Eshete, The Evangelical Movement in Ethiopia, 66. 18. Andrew F. Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History, 160–170. 19. Alfred Bonn, Ein Jahrhundert Rheinische Mission, 4. 20. Jan Boneschansker, Het Nederlandsch Zendeling Genootschap, 57. 21. Jan Boneschansker, Het Nederlandsch Zendeling Genootschap, 27. 22. Finnish Mission: Pellervo Kokkonen, “Religious and Colonial Realities,” 157. 23. Tibebe Eshete, The Evangelical Movement in Ethiopia, 70. 24. René Blanc, Histoire des missions protestantes françaises, 129–130. 25. “Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East” in Otis Henry Dwight, H. Allen Tupper, and Edwin Munsell Bliss, eds., The Encyclopedia of Missions, 164. 26. Birgit Herppich, Pitfalls of Trained Incapacity. 27. Boneschansker, Het Nederlandsch Zendeling Genootschap, 91. 28. This sentiment did not preclude missionary work. See Karel Schoeman, The Early Mission in South Africa. 29. Janet Remington, Brian Willan, and Bhekizizwe Peterson, eds. Sol Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa, xix. 30. Sol T. Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, 58. 31. Jon Miller, Missionary Zeal and Institutional Control, 53–56. 32. Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Mission, “160 Years of Mission.” 33. C.f. Daniel Eshun, “Speaking for Ourselves,” 381–383. 34. Raita Merivirta, Leila Koivunen, and Timo Särkkä, Finnish Colonial Encounters, 13. 35. Sara Pugach, Africa in Translation, 16: “These missionary societies embodied the paternalistic attitude toward Africans that was so prevalent in linguistic discourse, since they believed in eventual equality for the races but did not think it existed in the present.” 36. Quoted in Eric Anum, “Collaborative and Interactive Hermeneutics,” 148–149.

Bibliography Anum, Eric. “Collaborative and Interactive Hermeneutics,” in African and European Readers of the Bible in Dialogue: In Quest of a Shared Meaning, edited by Hans de Wit and Gerald O. West. Leiden: Brill, 2008. Blanc, René, Jacques Blocher, and Étienne Kruger. Histoire des missions protestantes françaises. Flavion, Belgium: Editions «Le Phare», 1970. Blumhardt, Christian Gottlieb. Versuch einer allgemeinen Missionsgeschichte der Kirche Christi, volume 3. Basel, Switzerland: J.G. Neukirch, 1832. Boneschansker, Jan. Het Nederlandsch Zendeling Genootschap in zijn eerste periode. Een studie over opwekking in de Batafse en Franse tijd. Leeuwarden: Uitgeverij Gerben Dykstra BV, 1987. Bonn, Alfred. Ein Jahrhundert Rheinische Mission. Barmen, Germany: Verlag des Missionhauses, 1928. Debrunner, Hans Werner. “Eine Afrikanerin in Riehen. Susanna Luise Anjama (1846–1882).” Jahrbuch z’Rieche 1982, n.p. Dwight, Henry Otis, H. Allen Tupper, and Edwin Munsell Bliss, eds. The Encyclopedia of Missions, second edition New York and London: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1910. Elphick, Richard. The Equality of Believers: Protestant Missionaries and the Racial Politics of South Africa. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012.

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Eshete, Tibebe. The Evangelical Movement in Ethiopia: Resistance and Resilience. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2017. Eshun, Daniel Justice. “Speaking for Ourselves: The Ghanaian Encounter with European Missionaries—Sixteenth—Twenty-first Centuries.” Mission Studies 31:3 (December 2021), 372–397. Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Mission, “160 Years of Mission,” https://felm.org/ what-­is-­felm/history/ Grant, Paul Glen. “Biography as Counter-Narrative to Rupture: Intact Lives as Moral Problem.” In African Christian Biography, edited by Dana Robert, 275–294. Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: Cluster Publications, 2018. ———. Healing and Power in Ghana: Early Indigenous Expressions of Christianity. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2020. Hanciles, Jehu. Migration and the Making of Global Christianity. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2021. Herppich, Birgit. Pitfalls of Trained Incapacity: The Unintended Effects of Integral Missionary Training in the Basel Mission on Its Early Work in Ghana (1828–1840). Cambridge: The Lutterworth Press, 2016. Kokkonen, Pellervo. “Religious and Colonial Realities: Cartography of the Finnish Mission in Ovamboland, Namibia.” History in Africa 20 (1993): 155–71. Kwakye, Abraham Nana Opare. “Returning African Christians in Mission to the Gold Coast.” Studies in World Christianity, 24:1 (April 2018), 25–45. Lehmann, Hellmut. 150 Jahre Berliner Mission. Erlangen, Germany: Verlag der Ev.Luth. Mission, 1974. Liebst, Michelle. Labour and Christianity in the Mission: African Workers in Tanganyika and Zanzibar, 1864–1926. Suffolk, UK: James Currey, 2021. Merivirta, Raita, Leila Koivunen, and Timo Särkkä, Finnish Colonial Encounters: From Anti-Imperialism to Cultural Colonialism and Complicity. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021 Miller, Jon. Missionary Zeal and Institutional Control: Organizational Contradictions in the Basel Mission on the Gold Coast, 1828–1917. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2003. Nederlandsche Zendelinggenootschap (ed.), Gedenkboek uigegeven ter Gelegenheid van het Honderdjarig Bestaan van het Nederlandsche Zendelinggenootschap. Rotterdam: M. Wyt & Zonen, 1897. Plaatje, Sol T. (Solomon Tshekisho). Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since the European War and the Boer Rebellion: New  York: Negro Universities Press, 1969 [1916]. Pugach, Sara. Africa in Translation: A History of Colonial Linguistics in Germany and Beyond, 1814–1945. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2012. Remington, Janet, Brian Willan, and Bhekizizwe Peterson, eds. Sol Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa: Past and Present. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2016. Schlatter, Wilhelm. Geschichte der Basler Mission 1815–1915, vol. 3: Geschichte der Basler Mission in Afrika. Basel: Verlag der Basler Missionsbuchhandlung, 1916. Schoeman, Karel. The early mission in South Africa: 1799–1819/Die vroeë sending in Suid-Afrika. Pretoria: Protea Book House, 2005. Sensbach, Jon F. Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. Simensen, Jarle. Norwegian Missions in Africa, vol. 1: South Africa, 1845–1906. Oslo: Norwegian University Press, 1986.

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Verstraelen, F. J., A. Camps, L. A. Hoedemaker, and M. R. Spindler, eds. Missiology: an Ecumenical Introduction. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1995. Waldburger, Andreas. Missionare und Moslems. Die Basler Mission in Persien, 1833–1837. Basel, Switzerland, 1984. Walls, Andrew F. “The Eighteenth-Century Protestant Missionary Awakening in its European Context.” In Christian Missions and the Enlightenment, edited by Brian Stanley. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2001, 22–44. ———. The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis, 1996. Wind, Anne. “The Protestant Missionary Movement from 1789 to 1963.” In Missiology: An Ecumenical Introduction, edited by F. J. Verstraelen, A. Camps, L. A. Hoedemaker, and M. R. Spindler. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1995, 237–252. Zorn, Jean-François. Le grand siècle d’une mission protestante. La Mission de Paris de 1822 à 1914. Paris: Karthala, 1993.

CHAPTER 17

European Settlers and Christianity in Africa Norman Etherington

Introduction European settlers obstructed African Christianity wherever they established themselves in significant numbers. They cared little for missionaries and gave almost no financial support to their operations. When missions spoke up for African rights at work, in the marketplace, and on the land, prominent settler voices condemned them for political interference. Settlers blamed some mission schools for “over-educating” Africans in literary subjects, and others for producing artisans who competed unfairly with white workers. As Africans emerged as priests, prophets, and missionaries, settlers suspected they were sowing seeds of anti-colonial sedition. Settler regimes singled out New Christian movements and independent churches for persecution. There is evidence suggesting that these attempts at suppression stimulated the growth of Christianity by associating it with resistance to authority. African church leaders played conflicted roles in the death throes of settler rule in the late twentieth century. It is convenient to speak of European settlers here, even though some of their ancestors arrived in Africa in the seventeenth century and the last contingents, after the Second World War. To racialize them by using the terms white and black does violence to the historical record in all sorts of ways. As a privileged caste the settlers made and were made by the colonial experience. When

N. Etherington (*) University of Western Australia, Perth, WA, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. E. Barnes, T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48270-0_17

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the Azanian People’s Liberation Army chanted “One Settler, One Bullet” in the 1980s, they meant all those of European descent who actively or passively benefitted from the apartheid regime in South Africa.

Foundations Throughout the colonial epoch human and animal diseases made much of the continent unsuitable for permanent European settlement. In West and Central Africa the European presence was mainly confined to government, military, missionary and commercial agents, few of whom chose to make family homes there. The French government encouraged settlement in their northwest African territories, but the entrenched strength of Islam inhibited Christian evangelization. Hence the primary arena for early encounters between settlers and African Christianity was the cooler and higher country stretching from the southwestern Atlantic coasts up through the highveld and the Zimbabwe plateau, to the interlacustrine regions of central and east Africa. Control of malaria in the twentieth century facilitated further European settlement in parts of Angola and Mozambique, spurred on by the ambitions of reinvigorated Portuguese colonialism. The story of European settlers and African Christianity begins with a baptism and a wedding. Jan van Riebeeck, commandant of the newly planted Dutch East India Company stronghold at the Cape of Good Hope, took an African child, Krotoa, into his household in 1652. Baptized at nineteen with the biblical name Eva, she served the commander as maid, translator, and intermediary in relations with her people. In town she wore Dutch clothes but put on animal skins when she visited relatives. In 1664 she married Pieter van Meerhoff, a Dutch surgeon with whom she had three children. The family moved to Robben Island when he was appointed superintendent. After Meerhoff’s death on an overseas assignment, Eva fell on hard times, marked by hard drinking and reputed promiscuity. Convicted of immorality, she returned as a prisoner to Robben Island where she died and was given a Christian burial at the age of thirty-two.1 The short, ultimately tragic life of Krotoa/Eva announces themes that characterize the development of African Christianity in colonies of European settlement. Though commonly associated with foreign missionaries, Christianity did not require them for its propagation. Jan van Riebeeck’s wife instructed Krotoa in its basic precepts. As peaceful interaction gave way to conflict over land and resources, she came under suspicion as a Dutch spy. It was difficult for Africans to dissociate the settlers’ religion from their aggressive action. Conversely, the Dutch drew from Krotoa’s sad end the lesson that African Christianity was a superficial pretense, that beneath her European clothing she was a “savage” still. In years to come most European settlers treated any independent African expression of Christianity as bogus, heretical, or dangerous. Even as they insisted on essential racial differences, they initiated sexual encounters, both consensual and forced, that gave birth to children of mixed descent.

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More than sixty years after Krotoa’s death the first designated missionary stepped ashore at the Cape. Georg Schmidt was sent to Africa in 1737 by the newly established Moravian Missionary Society. He received a cold welcome from authorities and ministers of the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC), partly because he was a Lutheran representing a society with novel views on theology and evangelization. An added problem was his focus on the indigenous Khoi people, known to the settlers as Hottentots. When he baptized five of his little mission community, the Dutch ministers did not cheer. They summoned them for examination, pronounced them deficient in Christian knowledge, and declared them “unbaptized.” They further pronounced Schmidt, “the Hottentot-convertor,” to be unqualified for the ministry and therefore incapable of administering the sacraments, including baptism. Not that the DRC took any particular interest in conversion of Africans. This reflected a more general attitude among the growing settler population, who feared that Christian teaching would undermine their mastery. A white farmer warned Schmidt’s converts that they would be enslaved if they became literate.2 In 1744, discouraged by relentless opposition and the weak African response to his evangelism, Schmidt closed the mission and returned to Europe. Another forty-eight years passed before the Moravian society returned to the Cape. In the meantime, through means and persons largely unknown, Christian knowledge spread among the African population of the Cape. At Schmidt’s former mission, a small community retained their bibles and elements of the faith he taught. Elsewhere people learned from the example of the Dutch farmers among whom they lived and for whom they labored. About 1760 a woman working on a settler farm gave birth to a boy, Jan Paerl, whose father did not acknowledge paternity, presumably because he was Dutch. By this time as much as 20% of the whole population of the Western Cape region is estimated to have been of mixed descent. Jan grew up speaking Dutch but regarded himself as Khoi. Like Eva/Krotoa in the previous century, he dressed as the Dutch, but threw an animal skin kaross over his shoulder when he went among the Khoi. In 1788 he assumed the persona of a prophet. Speaking in the name of “Our Dear Lord,” he preached that on 25 October, the world they knew would come to an end. The Dutch would die gruesome deaths, and a golden age of peace and plenty would dawn. To prepare for the fateful day, people should kill their cattle, burn their Dutch clothing, build huts of grass, and gather on the eve of the apocalypse.3 Paerl’s message was not directed to any specific group, but naturally resonated most powerfully with slaves, servants, and those aggrieved by seizures of ancestral land. Modern scholarship labels such movements millenarian, grounded in pre-existing cultural beliefs and ignited by perceived oppression. But there are obvious links to Christian teaching, such as Jesus’ injunction (Matthew 19:21) “go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven.” As Paerl prophesied in a district not far from Georg Schmidt’s short-lived mission, there could be linkages. It is equally likely that a subterranean African Christianity took shape through daily contact with Dutch settlers. Some of them allowed servants and

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slaves to join them in prayer. More significantly, others did not, and punished anyone caught praying.4 Whether this was because they perceived the subversive possibilities or because they wished to preserve a spiritual monopoly, the dispossessed and downtrodden could not have missed the implication: Christianity was a source of power. One hundred and forty years after the first European settlement missionaries began to arrive in force. The Moravians reoccupied Schmidt’s station at Baviaanskloof and established a new one called Genadendal. Many others followed, modeled on Genadendal, which was not so much a station as a fenced-­ off village that aimed for self-sufficiency through agricultural and artisanal production. The model worked by attracting Africans desperate to escape the harsh labor practices of the settler farmers who had driven them from their former pastures.5 People accepted the rules and iron discipline of the Moravians because they were refugees in their own land.6 Following Britain’s occupation of the Cape in 1795 the London Missionary Society (LMS) launched its first African operation, trusting that theological affinities with the Calvinist European settlers would avoid the problems that had beset poor Georg Schmidt. The most remarkable of the LMS missionaries who arrived in 1799 was Johannes Van der Kemp. He initially aimed to bypass settlers and preach directly to the Xhosa people beyond the eastern boundary of the Cape Colony. A frontier war, the third of its kind since the 1760s, blasted his hopes and drove him back among the Khoi. He founded his mission, Bethelsdorp, on principles he thought would best promote conversions to Christianity. He lived and dressed with the simplicity of his community. He married a teenager of Malay slave parentage, with whom he fathered four children. An accomplished, highly educated missionary—formerly a soldier and doctor—choosing to dwell in humble equality with a congregation of black refugees might in another time and place have been hailed as a saint. But so much had changed since the marriage of Eva and Pieter. The Dutch East India Company closed for good in 1800, and its agents in Cape Town had long since been outnumbered by the Boers of the rural hinterland. The Company policy of assimilation gave way to a new order of racial separation in things sacred and secular. The LMS outraged the old settlers by admitting people of all colors to their services. Van der Kemp and his English colleague James Read scandalized them by their marriages. Concubinage might have been overlooked, as attested by the rapidly growing mix-raced population of the Cape, but not inter-racial marriage. A racial order had emerged that effectively restricted land ownership to those born legitimately to women designated white. The mixed-race offspring born to male settlers “were pared off into the mass of ‘non-white’ underlings” who performed servile, generally unpaid farm labor. This was “the settler farm as it later came to be found throughout British colonial Africa, from the Cape to the White Highlands of Kenya.”7 An even greater wrong in the eyes of the settlers were the measures taken by Read and Van der Kemp to shield their communities from abusive labor

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practices.8 Eventually, government removed them temporarily from Bethelsdorp and put them into detention in Cape Town. British rule, made permanent in 1806, proved no more friendly to mission communities. Even the Moravians, who avoided public criticism of the powers that be, were blamed for depriving white farmers of their labor by keeping them at work in the mission villages.9 Detention did not still the critical voices of Van der Kemp and Read. If anything, they grew louder, especially after the appointment of Dr. John Philip as superintendent of the LMS South African missions in 1817. He attempted to conciliate government and settlers by putting missions under stricter supervision and disavowing the Van der Kemp strategy. He soon learned that no concession short of preaching cheerful subservience to white employers would satisfy the European settlers. The “1820 Settlers,” British migrants encouraged to move to the Eastern Cape, proved no less hostile to missions than the Boers and burghers who came before. Government paid scant attention to Philip’s suggestions for better treatment of slaves and indigenous people. Rather than giving up, he shifted his lobbying from the Cape to England. Publication of his two-volume Researches in South Africa in 1828 created a sensation and helped speed promulgation of Ordinance 50, which alleviated some of the worst discriminatory labor practices.10

Mission Christianity Under the Moravian and London Missionary Societies Dispossession, forced labor, and other abuses perpetrated by European settlers help explain why people sought refuge on missions like Genadendal and Bethelsdorp. They do not in themselves account for the character of the Christianity they came to espouse. Ample evidence testifies to the sincerity of their religious experience: a woman lying on the floor weeping and lamenting her many sins; a man trying to pray, though his “sins like a large nail seemed to fasten me to the earth”; another giving thanks for the Bible that “charmed us out of the caves, and from the tops of mountains … where the Bible is not, there is nothing but darkness.”11 As in most other parts of the world, knowledge of Christianity spread by word of mouth among the common people, rather than by designated missionaries and pastors.12 In 1816 a missionary examining candidates for baptism at Bethelsdorp found “not one of them attributed the beginning of the work of grace in their hearts to the preaching of the Missionaries but to their own people (Hottentots) speaking to them.”13 What then was the source of the knowledge communicated by these informal evangelists? Was it picked up from the prayer services of Dutch settlers or did it include elements of pre-existing cultural beliefs? It has been argued, based on ethnographic studies dating from the 1870s, that the Khoi of the Cape had pre-existing concepts of a high god, creator of all things, along with other beliefs congruent with mission-taught Christianity.14 Based on the sparse available evidence for the 150 years of European colonial rule no certain

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conclusions are possible. It seems likely that fusion of indigenous and introduced ideas was an ongoing process. The best-documented theme in Cape mission religious expression is hostility to the European settlers. In 1795 a woman named Martha publicly proclaimed that baptism made her the equal of Europeans, thereby setting off a storm among Cape-Dutch society.15 The extreme measures taken by farmers to prevent preaching on their properties only served to reinforce the people’s conviction that Christianity was their avenue to liberation and equal citizenship.16 Andries Stoeffels summed up what he derived from Bethelsdorp: My nation is poor and degraded, but the word of God is their stay and their hope. The word of God has brought my nation so far, that if a Hottentot young lady and an English young lady were walking with their faces from me, I would take them both to be English ladies … The Bible makes all nations one … The Hottentot nation was almost exterminated, but the Bible has brought the nations together.17

A separate variety of African Christianity took root north of the Orange River beyond the boundary of the Cape Colony. People of very mixed origins based themselves at the scattered springs of an arid land. The so-called Bastards or Griqua were both refugees and conquerors. When asked why they had seized land from the indigenous hunters, one of their leaders, Hendrik Hendricks concisely summed up their history. The [Boer] Farmers say the Griquas now occupy the Bushmen’s land, who was it that drove us there? Let the names Kaapstad, Stellenbosch, Tulbagh [towns of the western Cape Colony] give the answer; it was the Dutch people who sent us forward.18

The Griqua invited the LMS to send them missionaries and later founded their own self-supporting churches. Orthodox in practice, Christianity gave them the respectability denied at the Cape. The missionaries served as their intermediaries in dealing with British authorities.

African Christian Beginnings Among the Xhosa As the tide of European conquest and settlement surged eastward it ran up against the more populous territories held by Bantu-speaking peoples. On the frontline of the settler advance, the Xhosa fought five designated “frontier wars” between 1779 and 1820 in defense of their lands. As elsewhere in Africa, bits and pieces of Christian knowledge penetrated the region before the arrival of missionaries. Cultural interaction with Khoi, which had begun centuries earlier, accelerated with the development of the Western Cape. Many individual Xhosa had worked on settler farms and missions. Two who stand out as religious innovators are Ntsikana and Nxele.19 Born to an influential councilor

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to Chief Ngqika, Ntsikana may have heard Van der Kemp preach and is known to visited Joseph Williams’ LMS station. After a vision around 1815 he gathered a band of disciples and began to preach sermons that mingled Biblical and Xhosan concepts. He composed sacred songs, including the so-called Great Hymn, that are still sung. Among his prophecies was the coming of End Times when a Messiah would inaugurate lasting peace. Nxele was born on a Boer farm in recently conquered territory. At an early age he showed signs of having been called as a Xhosa diviner. Following a vision of Christ rescuing him from a pit of fire, he too began to preach and prophecy, but in a very different vein from Ntsikana. Nxele’s Manichean doctrine pitted a black God against a white one. A day of reckoning was coming in which, following a ritual sacrifice of cattle, the Xhosa dead would be raised. Meantime his people must resist the settler advance. As a war doctor he helped lead the Xhosa forces in the fifth frontier war at the battle of Grahamstown. Captured and exiled to Robben Island, Nxele died trying to escape.20

A Decade of Reckoning Hot on the heels of the 50th Ordinance came the news that slavery would be abolished throughout the British Empire in 1833. Late the following year a sixth war convulsed the eastern frontier districts. Marked by the usual military atrocities, it culminated in Cape Governor Benjamin D’Urban’s annexation of a huge tract of Xhosa land, which he proposed to open to European settlement. Outraged at the conduct and consequences of the war, Britain’s colonial secretary, a veteran of anti-slavery campaigning, reversed the annexation. A parliamentary enquiry ensued in 1837 that heard testimony on the treatment of indigenous people in all British colonies.21 Reaction to these events strengthened settler convictions that the meddling of so-called philanthropists and missionaries threatened their lives and livelihoods. John Philip came in for particular criticism for giving settlers a bad name. This sounded a theme that would echo down the years among all the settler regimes to the tail end of the twentieth century: the holier-than-thou, hypocritical, misguided, interfering missionary. It crops up incessantly in newspapers, novels, histories, and movies. Conversely, the inquest on settlement afforded South African missionaries and African Christians to tell their side of the story, not just to the parliamentary Aborigines Committee, but to mass meetings of sympathetic Britons. At one such meeting, Christian Xhosa chief and evangelist Jan Tzatzoe expressed surprise at seeing: So many people assembled in the house of God. I am happy to have the opportunity of seeing those Christian friends who sent out Dr. Vanderkemp [sic], Dr. Philip, Mr. Read, and all the other missionaries … who came to South Africa, when we were shot with bullets and when there was nothing but blood-shed in

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that ill-fated country. You must not be wearied in well-doing; the work is still great, and the work must be spread in the world.22

A typical reaction came from the editor of the Grahamstown Journal, who said Tzatzoe was made “a convenient tool by our colonial agitators.” For him and settler spokesmen to come, African Christianity was never authentic, always the product of missionary puppet masters. For Tzatzoe and the other Africans who testified, Britain, its monarch, and its Christian people were the friends and protectors to whom they must look for the justice denied them at home. This too became a template for future strategies of resistance, persisting despite a multitude of disappointments. Spurred on by a climate of settler opinion that blamed humanitarian interventions for the loss of property in slaves, Ordinance 50, and the revocation of Governor D’Urban’s annexations, thousands of families—mostly of Dutch descent—left the Cape Colony in search of new farms to conquer north of the Orange River and in the grasslands of Natal region. The so-called Voortrekkers (pioneers) greatly expanded the realm of European settlement. Significantly, one of their first enactments was to ban all English missionaries.

Natal, 1845–1910: From Toleration to War on African Christianity Fearing that the invading Boers would put further pressure on the Cape frontier, the British annexed Natal. With a functioning government by 1845, the colony tried to avoid the worst aspects of the Cape Colony’s land policy. Under Theophilus Shepstone (son of a Methodist missionary) as secretary for native affairs, Natal aimed to reserve enough land—known as Native Locations—to provide for the African population, while allowing for European settlement on the most accessible agricultural districts. A decade later designated Mission Reserves were laid out, based on the idea that missionaries would be a “civilizing” influence. From the moment that settlers grew numerous enough to influence policy—particularly after an elected legislative council was established—they set their hearts on diminishing the size of the Reserves in the hope that land shortages would force Africans to work for them at low wages. At the same time missionaries from many countries and denominations established stations on the Reserves. They had little initial success in evangelization but through their translations and grammars built the foundations of a specifically Zulu Christianity. They lobbied against colonial legislation that threatened to diminish the rights of their adherents. Missions had a friend in Shepstone but faced hostility from settlers. One facetiously remarked that he would give to missions if the money were used for “blowing Kafirs’ brains out.” Colonists in the town of Ladysmith refused to let their children be baptized by the local German missionary. A frequent complaint was that missionaries made Africans useless

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workers who demanded higher wages and time off to attend services. A plantation owner charged that “by teaching the Kaffirs to read and write, and wishing them to dress” missionaries “made them proud and idle, and put them in possession of a power by which they became rogues and thieves.” More puzzling to the missions was the common saying that all African conversions to Christianity were bogus. A Methodist remarked that it was most painful “that those who say such things seem as if they wish them to be true.”23 Mission schools provided virtually all African education in colonial Natal. Students learned to read the newspapers in which they were denigrated by settlers. As they took up leadership positions in the churches their Christianity was heavily inflected by resistance. This was reinforced by the example of missionaries like Anglican Bishop J. W. Colenso, who campaigned tirelessly against injustice, whether directed at Christian or non-Christian Africans. Conversions rose sharply in the 1890s right across South Africa, largely as the result of formal and informal African evangelization. Well-educated African ministers occupied an increasing number of pulpits. Some left the missions and formed their own churches. Less educated evangelists arose from the grassroots, preaching to farmers on distant hillsides and to urban workers on street corners. This caused a colonial panic about “Ethiopianism,” the term applied indiscriminately to churches led by Africans. The settlers fear that they were preaching sedition under the cover of religion led to an extraordinary episode in which the government of Natal declared war on African Christianity in 1902. Missions would be barred from the Locations and Reserves unless under the supervision of white ministers. The government took control of all the Mission Reserves. African pastors would no longer be licensed to conduct marriages. Future educational grants would be restricted to training in basic literacy and manual labor. In 1904 the government began burning churches found to be without white missionaries in charge. Congregational minister John Dube perceived the real object of the persecution to be “to deter the civilization of our race.”24 The government attributed a widespread uprising in 1906, sparked by a new tax regime, to the subversive influence of Ethiopianism. Among African Christians the persecutions stimulated the formation of new forms of protest even as settler supremacy culminated in the proclamation of the independent Union of South Africa in 1910. While the new regime formulated its Native Land Act, forbidding African ownership across broad stretches of the country, an African National Congress (ANC) arose. A direct line can be drawn between the attack on African Christianity in Natal and the ANC choice of Natal’s John Dube as first president.25

The Later Colonies of Settlement In the 1890s a flurry of annexations opened new fields for European settlement. The British South Africa Company (BSA) under the leadership of Cecil Rhodes recruited a militarized column of “pioneers” to seize and hold the Zimbabwean plateau as Southern Rhodesia. A less successful Imperial East

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African Company claimed a large territory later divided into Uganda and Kenya when the company ceded its land to Britain. Both Southern Rhodesia and Kenya actively recruited European settlers, using the incentive of land seized from Africans. Many of them came originally from South Africa, bringing with them the anti-missionary bias forged during the previous century. Both colonies employed the Natal system of designated Native locations and reserves. Settlers never constituted more than a small fraction of the population in either colony but acquired an outsized voice in its elected assemblies and government agencies. The same advantages of climate and arable land that attracted settlers drew missions of various denominational and national origins. Elsewhere the old Boer trekking tradition led to Afrikaner settlement in Southwest Africa (Namibia), Botswana, Southern Rhodesia, and Kenya. Nyasaland (Malawi) and Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) were special cases. A strong missionary presence, first Scottish Presbyterian and later Catholic, prevented Nyasaland from falling into the hands of Rhodes’ company and prevented a small number of settler plantation owners from dominating the colony’s affairs. Settlers in Northern Rhodesia, which passed from the BSA to government as a British Protectorate in 1924, were concentrated in the mining regions. The growth of African Christianity displayed some of the features that developed in South Africa but ran a different course because of the independent churches and movements that had grown up in the south over the last quarter of the nineteenth century. For example, the African variant of Jehovah’s Witnesses, known as kitiwala, unaided by overseas missionaries, spread northward along the main roads and rivers as far as the Congo. Mission churches were increasingly dominated by Africans who brought their own evangelical agenda, as well as their knowledge of settler ideologies and politics. An isolated but highly symbolic revolt flared up in Nyasaland in 1915, led by American-­ educated Baptist John Chilembwe. There are suggestions that he and his followers regarded the outbreak of World War as the Armageddon prophesied in the Bible. They attacked and murdered European planters before the revolt was put down. In the aftermath settlers blamed missionaries in general and independent churches in particular for their subversive influence.26 Portuguese colonies, though the oldest on the continent, did not become significant territories of European settlement until well into the twentieth century when immigration to Angola and Mozambique was pushed by government in Lisbon. Between 1928 and 1960, the settler population in those two colonies rose from around 70,000 to 160,000. During that time the Salazar dictatorship used state resources to bolster the Catholic Church while discouraging foreign missions. As a result, the impact of Portuguese settlement on African Christianity—a little studied topic—bears no resemblance to the experience of South Africa and the other British settler-colonial regimes.

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Decolonization, Liberation, Democracy It may seem surprising that African Christianity had so little to do with the epochal events that very rapidly brought settler colonial regimes to an end after 1960. The leaders of independence movements, armed resistance, and political parties had practically all been raised as Christians and educated in mission schools. They were well acquainted with settler attitudes and policies—policies they were sworn to destroy. Yet, apart from the occasional cry of “one settler, one bullet,” the settler as such was nowhere the target of liberation movements. Jomo Kenyatta, who had been jailed during the “Mau-Mau” emergency in Kenya, took office in a peaceful transition. Following his election as president he invited local white farmers to join him for refreshments on his farmhouse veranda. Missions and African church leaders were key actors in the breakup of the short-lived Central African Federation (1953–1963), which, because of Southern Rhodesia’s large settler population, threatened to retard progress toward majority rule in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. However, when those colonies became Zambia and Malawi, there was no victimization of settlers. Southern Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965 under the settler politician Ian Smith was not recognized by Britain. During the prolonged war for liberation that ensued, Christianity was not employed as a weapon by either side. On the contrary, in a last-ditch effort to save itself, the Smith regime installed an African bishop, Abel Muzorewa, as titular prime minister. When Catholic Robert Mugabe became president of independent Zimbabwe, his land and financial policies aimed at conciliating rather than eliminating the defeated settlers. Decolonization arrived in Mozambique and Angola like a clap of thunder in 1975, following the overthrow of the long-running Portuguese dictatorship. In the aftermath, the settler population built over the previous fifty years departed even more quickly than they had come. Most went to Portugal, where they were known as retornados (the returned). Christianity mattered as little to their departure as to their arrival. South Africa, effectively independent since 1910, cut all ties with Britain in 1961, which meant that the fight to end the white supremacist apartheid regime, did not use the language of decolonization. Christianity figured more as a sign than a weapon in the struggle. References to the settler past from Van Riebeeck to the Voortrekkers energized the ruling National Party base in a 100% white electorate. Old battles were cast in new terms. The role previously played by the interfering British was assigned to the interfering United Nations. The misguided missionaries were recast as the muddle-headed World Council of Churches. The frontier savages of yesteryear became the godless communists of today. This last bit of casting stretched credulity, due to the prominence of Christians on the other side, from Trevor Huddlestone and Albert Luthuli to Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela. Their links to Christians around the world proved as valuable in the late twentieth century as they had for John Philip and Bishop Colenso in the nineteenth. Democracy, against all

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expectations, arrived peacefully in 1994, cloaked in rainbow colors and flying a banner of truth and reconciliation that belied the still-evident scars of the previous three centuries. And what, it may be asked, were the independent churches, local evangelists, and prophets doing during the death throes of settler power? Mostly, they pursued their core business of comforting the afflicted, healing the sick, and preparing for the kingdom that is to come. From the earliest days settlers had suspected African Christianity as bogus, seditious, and dangerous. And it is true that settler aggression contributed a great deal to its form and content. But open acts of defiance were practically unknown. Precisely because the independent churches inducted their followers into a parallel spiritual realm where the earthly powers held no sway, they felt no need to rush to the barricades.27 Realizing this, in the end settler governments that had declared war on independent African Christianity at the beginning of the twentieth century embraced it in 1985 when South African President P.  W. Botha traveled to Zion City, headquarters of the Zion Christian Church to congratulate them on the seventy-fifth anniversary of their founding.28

Notes 1. Christina Landman, “The Religious Krotoa (c. 1642±1674),” Kronos: Journal of Cape History, (Nov. 1996), 12: 22–35; V. C. Malherbe, Krotoa, called Eva: A Woman Between (University of Cape Town: Centre for African Studies, Communication no. 19, 1990). 2. Bernhard Krüger, The Pear Tree Blossoms: A History of the Moravian Mission Stations in South Africa 1737–1869 (Genadendal: Moravian Church in South Africa, 1966), p. 37. 3. Russel Viljoen, Jan Paerl: A Khoikhoi in Cape Colonial Society, 1761–1851 (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 13–90. 4. Ibid., 145. Elizabeth Elbourne, “Early Khoisan Uses of Mission Christianity,” in H. Bredekamp and R Ross, eds., Missions and Christianity in South African History (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1995), p. 69. 5. Richard Elphick, The Equality of Believers: Protestant Missionaries and the Racial Politics of South Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012), pp. 27–28. 6. Kruger, Pear Tree Blossoms, pp. 86–87. 7. Robert Ross, Beyond the Pale, Essays on the History of Colonial South Africa (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1994), pp. 47–48, 137. 8. Andrew Porter, Religion Versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), p. 52. 9. Russel Viljoen, “Moravian Missionaries, Khoisan Labour and the Overberg Colonists at the End of the VOC Era, 1792–5,” in Bredekamp and Ross, Missions and Christianity in South African History, pp. 49–61. 10. Porter, Religion Versus Empire, p. 82. 11. Elphick, Equality of Believers, p.28; Robert Ross, These Oppressions Won’t Cease: An Anthology of the Political Thought of the Cape Khoesan, 1777–1879 (Cincinnati: Cincinnati University Press, 2018), p. 69.

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12. Norman Etherington, “Introduction,” in Missions and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 7–8. 13. Elphick, Equality of Believers, p. 28. 14. Elbourne, “Early Khoisan Uses of Mission Christianity,” pp.  74–80; Viljoen, Jan Paerl, pp. 34–35. 15. Viljoen, “Moravian Missionaries, Khoisan Labour and the Overberg Colonists,” pp. 53–54; Elphick, Equality of Believers, p. 27. 16. Elbourne, “Early Khoisan Uses of Mission Christianity,” pp. 84–85. 17. Quoted in Ross, These Oppressions Won’t Cease, p. 71. 18. Etherington, Norman. The Great Treks: The Transformation of Southern Africa, 1815–1854 (London: Longman, 2001). 19. Richard Elphick and Rodney Davenport, eds., Christianity in South Africa: A Political, Social and Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 71–73. 20. Etherington, Great Treks, pp. 64–66; Janet Hodgson, “A Battle for Sacred Power,” in Elphick and Davenport, Christianity in South Africa, pp. 68–75. 21. Alan Lester, “Humanitarians and White Settlers in the Nineteenth Century.” in Etherington, ed., Missions and Empire, pp. 65–71. 22. Roger S.  Levine, A Living Man from Africa: Jan Tzatzoe, Xhosa Chief and Missionary, and the Making of Nineteenth-Century South Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), p. 133. 23. All quotations in this paragraph come from N. Etherington, “Christianity and African Society in Nineteenth-century Natal,” in A.  Duminy and B.  Guest, eds., Natal and Zululand from Earliest Times to 1910: A New History (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1989), pp. 285–86. 24. P. Brock, N. Etherington, G. Griffiths, and J. Van Gent, Indigenous Evangelists Questions of Authority in the British Empire 1750–1940 (Leiden: Brill, 2015), p. 264. 25. N. Etherington, “Religion and Resistance in Natal, 1900–1910,” in A. Lissoni, J. Soske, N. Erlank, N. Nieftagodien and O. Badsha, eds., One Hundred Years of the ANC (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2012), pp. 55–76. 26. John McCracken, A History of Malawi, 1859–1966 (London: James Currey, 2012), pp. 127–46. 27. Hennie Pretorius and Lizo Jafta, “‘A Branch Springs Out’: African Initiated Churches,” in Elphick and Davenport, eds. Christianity in South Africa, pp. 221–26. 28. Matthew Schoffeleers, “The Zion Christian Church and The Apartheid Regime,” Leiden University Scholarly Publications (1988) 4: 42–57.

Bibliography Bredekamp, Henry and Robert Ross, eds., Missions and Christianity in South African History (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1995) Brock, Peggy, N.  Etherington, G.  Griffiths, and J.  Van Gent. Indigenous Evangelists Questions of Authority in the British Empire 1750–1940 (Leiden: Brill, 2015). De Gruchy, John W. The Church Struggle in South Africa (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986).

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Elbourne, Elizabeth. “Early Khoisan Uses of Mission Christianity,” in H. Bredekamp and R Ross, eds., Missions and Christianity in South African History (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1995). Elphick, Richard. The Equality of Believers: Protestant Missionaries and the Racial Politics of South Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012). Elphick, Richard and Rodney Davenport, eds. Christianity in South Africa: A Political, Social and Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Etherington, Norman. “Religion and Resistance in Natal, 1900–1910,” in A. Lissoni, J. Soske, N. Erlank, N. Nieftagodien and O. Badsha, eds., One Hundred Years of the ANC (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2012), pp. 55–76. Etherington, Norman ed., Missions and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) Etherington, Norman. The Great Treks: The Transformation of Southern Africa, 1815–1854 (London: Longman, 2001). Etherington, Norman. “Christianity and African Society in Nineteenth-century Natal,” in A. Duminy and B. Guest, eds., Natal and Zululand from Earliest Times to 1910: A New History (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1989), pp. 275–301. Hodgson, Janet. “A Battle for Sacred Power,” in Elphick and Davenport, Christianity in South Africa, pp. 68–75. Krüger, Bernhard. The Pear Tree Blossoms: A History of the Moravian Mission Stations in South Africa 1737–1869 (Genadendal: Moravian Church in South Africa, 1966). Landman, Christina. “The Religious Krotoa (c. 1642±1674),” Kronos: Journal of Cape History, (1996), 12: 22–35. Lester, Alan. “Humanitarians and White Settlers in the Nineteenth Century” in Etherington, ed., Missions and Empire, pp. 64–85. Levine, Roger S. A Living Man from Africa: Jan Tzatzoe, Xhosa Chief and Missionary, and the Making of Nineteenth-Century South Africa, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). Malherbe, V.  C. Krotoa, called Eva: A Woman Between (University of Cape Town: Centre for African Studies, Communication no. 19, 1990). McCracken, John. A History of Malawi, 1859–1966 (London: James Currey, 2012). Porter, Andrew. Religion Versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). Pretorius, Hennie and Lizo Jafta. “‘A Branch Springs Out’: African Initiated Churches,” in Elphick and Davenport, eds. Christianity in South Africa, pp. 211–26. Ross, Robert. These Oppressions Won’t Cease: An Anthology of the Political Thought of the Cape Khoesan, 1777–1879 (Cincinnati: Cincinnati University Press, 2018). Ross, Robert. Beyond the Pale, Essays on the History of Colonial South Africa (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1994). Schoffeleers, Matthew. “The Zion Christian Church and The Apartheid Regime,” Leiden University Scholarly Publications (1988) 4: 42–57. Stuart, John. British Missionaries and the End of Empire: East, Central, and Southern Africa, 1939–64 (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1986). Viljoen, Russel. Jan Paerl: A Khoikhoi in Cape Colonial Society, 1761–1851 (Leiden: Brill, 2006). Viljoen, Russel. “Moravian Missionaries, Khoisan Labour and the Overberg Colonists at the End of the VOC Era, 1792–5,” in Bredekamp and Ross, Missions and Christianity in South African History, pp. 49–61.

CHAPTER 18

Catholic Missions and African Responses II: 1800–1885 Paul Kollman

Introduction Four historical trends helped intensify the Catholic Church’s engagement with Africa in the nineteenth century.1 First, renewed Catholic vitality succeeded the curtailing of the church during the era of the French Revolution and ensuing Napoleonic wars. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, some older religious communities like the Jesuits and Dominicans underwent revitalization while new communities emerged, including of religious women. New groups included the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Cluny, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the Missionaries of Africa, the Missionary Sisters of Our Lady of Africa, the Society of African Missions (or Lyon Fathers), and the Comboni missionaries (also known as the Verona Fathers). In addition, an older group of “missionaries of the Holy Spirit,” or Holy Ghost missionaries, secular priests who served in French colonies from the early eighteenth century, received new energy from papally encouraged amalgamation in 1848 with missionaries of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, another society started by a French priest, Jacob Libermann. Libermann’s group focused on evangelizing Africans, and after the merger the Spiritans were practically reborn as a combined formal religious congregation. All these groups and others focused missionary energies in sub-­ Saharan Africa. Meanwhile lay European Catholics followed Protestant examples and supported missionaries with financial resources, exemplified by the

P. Kollman (*) Department of Theology, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. E. Barnes, T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48270-0_18

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1822 founding of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith by Pauline Jaricot in Lyon, which funneled large funds to many Catholic missionary groups working in Africa. A second factor stimulating nineteenth-century Catholic evangelization in Africa was the papacy of Gregory XVI (1831–1846), who encouraged missionary engagement, underscored the need for local clergy in newly evangelized areas, and also advanced Catholic efforts against the slave trade. His successors continued these missionary emphases. Closely related was a third factor, the increased capacity of the Vatican’s mission office, Propaganda Fide, to overcome limitations of Portuguese dominion over church affairs in Africa under the centuries-old Vatican treaty arrangements known as the padraodo real. Control by Propaganda Fide, founded in 1622 and reestablished in 1816 after suspension during the Napoleonic wars, directed resources to encourage the coordination and effective support of Catholic missionary efforts in Africa, as elsewhere. Propaganda Fide had procedures to set up new jurisdictions to which missionary bodies were assigned authority to oversee evangelization: first assigning a missionary body to a geographically defined territory, then establishing an apostolic prefecture led by a priest-missionary as apostolic prefect, then establishing an apostolic vicariate led by an apostolic vicar, who had the power of a bishop. Sub-Saharan Africa witnessed a proliferation of these jurisdictional changes, especially after the mid-nineteenth century.2 Fourth, deeper European engagement with sub-Saharan Africa in general, besides undoing Portuguese pretensions to control except in what are now Angola and Mozambique, also brought many new missionaries to Africa. Most Catholic missionaries came from France, where, as elsewhere, national sentiments rose to address perceived moral issues like abolition of the slave trade and the responsibility of “civilizing” in places like sub-Saharan Africa, while also seeking commercial exploitation, scientific advancement, and advantages in rivalries among European powers. Even when European governments were anti-clerical at home, they relied upon their nation’s missionaries to support colonialism, both Catholic and Protestant. Catholic circumstances varied widely, depending on the region. Northern Africa Northern Africa had long interested the Vatican, with pockets of Christians persisting amid Muslim domination. In 1700, reports from Tripoli of Christians living in what is now northern Nigeria led the Vatican to send Franciscans to make contact, though historical details are scant and contradictory (Gray 2012, 116–130). Official Catholic offices existed in some cities, akin to European diplomatic outposts. As with small Catholic populations amid Orthodox Christian majorities in eastern Europe, in Egypt the Catholic Church developed a new ecclesial body, in the past called a Uniate church, which retained many of the cultural practices

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long part of historic national Christian identities, but in union with Rome. Today this body is called the Coptic Catholic Church and in 1788, one such Catholic Copt, Matta Righet, became Apostolic Vicar in Egypt, serving until 1821 with the support of the Sultan Muhammad Ali (Sundkler and Steed 2000, 13). In Algeria, a Catholic presence emerged after the French conquest of 1830, which led to extensive European settlement and the establishment of the diocese of Algiers in 1838. Missionaries of the newly founded Congregation of Holy Cross from Le Mans, France, arrived in 1840, serving briefly before withdrawing in 1842, then serving sporadically through the nineteenth century (Connelly 2020, 30). Like most other efforts by Catholic missionary bodies who served in northern Africa, they mostly worked with Europeans or taught orphans in their care rather than evangelizing among the largely Muslim population. Though its effects were eventually felt much more in sub-Saharan Africa, a more concerted effort in northern Africa emerged with the appointment of Charles Lavigerie (1825–1892) as Archbishop of Algiers in 1867.3 Lavigerie, a patriotic French cleric who also founded the Missionaries of Africa and the Missionary Sisters of Our Lady of Africa (popularly known as the White Fathers and White Sisters due to their customary attire), dreamed of Christian kingdoms in equatorial Africa and saw his episcopal see as a door to the continent. To that end, Lavigerie gathered and educated orphans in Algiers, eventually training missionaries there also for work in the Sahara and beyond. He scattered missionaries among Algerian populations deemed to harbor traces of ancient Christianity in the 1870s, but his first two missions sent across the western Sahara led to the murder of three missionaries in 1876 and three more in 1881. For his missionaries bound for non-Islamic situations, Lavigerie formulated influential Catholic missionary strategies that urged acquisition of linguistic and cultural expertise, zealous community life, a rigorous catechumenate modeled after that of the early church, efforts at establishing indigenous clergy, and medical training for former slaves. This last effort among onetime African slaves led to the foundation of an institute in Malta dedicated to forming them, with 12 eventual graduates, one of whom, Adrian Atiman, began a remarkable decades-long career in western Tanzania in the 1880s (Kollman and Toms Smedley 2018, 251). Lavigerie’s views could be controversial. In 1879, he envisioned retired papal soldiers or zouaves supporting missionary-led efforts to fight the slave trade in east-central Africa. One of them, Leopold Joubert (1842–1927) served in what is now eastern Congo, settling and marrying a Congolese woman.4 In the name of preserving local cultures, Lavigerie also was wary of advancing the material well-being of Africans absent religious formation, foreseeing risks to their faithfulness in the inevitable social changes to come. Eventually becoming Archbishop of the ancient see of Carthage and thus “Primate of Africa” in 1881 and a Cardinal in 1882, Lavigerie sent his “White Fathers” and “White Sisters” to sub-Saharan Africa beginning in the 1870s

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after receiving responsibility for a large part of central Africa, taking over territory that other Catholic missionary bodies had considered their own. They achieved remarkable results in Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, the Congo, and elsewhere. Beginning in the late 1880s, Lavigerie also led arguably the first truly global anti-slavery campaign (Mulligan 2013). Around mid-century, another effort began from northern Africa with repercussions for Catholicism south of the Sahara, this one linked to another outstanding nineteenth-century Catholic missionary leader, the Verona priest Daniel Comboni (1831–1881). By the 1840s, a few European Catholic priests envisioned the Nile River as a way from Egypt into the Sudan and onto central Africa, and sought to spread the faith southward.5 Some were members of religious congregations and many were citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, of which Verona was then part, including both native Italian and German speakers. They relied upon both Muslim acquiescence—Turkish and Arab— and the intermittent support of the Europeans who also asserted mitigated authority in the region. Propaganda Fide set up the Apostolic Vicariate of Central Africa in 1846 and, when its first Jesuit apostolic vicar soon died, his companion, the Slovenian priest Ignatius Knoblecher, succeeded him, serving from 1848 until his death in 1858. Knoblecher’s strenuous efforts, helped by a boat on the Nile and funded in part by the Austro-Hungarian emperor, eventually drew support from priest-graduates of the Mazza College in Verona, which sent Comboni and others to Khartoum. They arrived in 1858, horrified by slavery and ravaged by disease. Among many short-lived mission foundations, those at Gondokoro and then later El Obeid became central. Missionaries who reached Khartoum told stories of brutal slave markets and oppressed women, sometimes bringing back ransomed slaves, among whom some became priests and sisters. European missionaries often died quickly of disease and efforts to train Africans in Europe also struggled due to expense and racist assumptions. In 1864, Comboni, while praying at Saint Peter’s tomb and meditating on the devastating mortality suffered by European missionaries in Africa, developed a vision to “save Africa by Africa.”6 He envisioned training sub-Saharan Africans under European tutelage not in Europe but in northern Africa from where they would return to serve as missionaries among their peoples. An 1865 meeting with Lavigerie in France, before the latter became a missionary, shaped Lavigerie’s subsequent ideas, and Comboni’s plan was presented at the first Vatican Council, 1869–1870. In later trips south on the Nile, Comboni traveled with African men and women bound to evangelize in Sudan, facing the horrors of the ongoing slave trade and violent conflicts arising from European incursions and local disagreements. An indefatigable fund-raiser in Europe, Comboni founded missionary institutes for men in 1867 and for women in 1872, established a training institute in Cairo, and in 1877 was named Vicar Apostolic of Central Africa. Traveling to Africa for the eighth and final time in 1880, he founded “agricultural colonies,” Christian villages of converts to isolate them from Muslims. Comboni died in Khartoum in 1881,

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shortly after receiving devastating news in 1878 that much of his dreamed-of equatorial mission territory had been conferred on Lavigerie and his Missionaries of Africa. He later commented with hardly veiled disapproval on the vast expenditures of the 1878–1879 Uganda mission of the Missionaries of Africa and expressed frustration at his own comparatively slight support. He died heartbroken at the lack of appreciation and encouragement for his and his confreres’ efforts. Soon after, most of the Catholic missionary infrastructure established in the previous decades in the region was swept away by the Mahdist revolution.7 European Catholic missionaries, priests and nuns, were taken hostage, with Father Joseph Ohrwalder, an Austrian, held in captivity from 1882 to 1891 before his escape. Yet the mission down the Nile had important effects for the Catholic Church. In 1885, the male followers of Comboni became a formal religious congregation. Moreover, there were remarkable Sudanese Catholic converts who served at Catholic missions beginning in the 1850s, some trained at the Cairo Institute. Notable Sudanese Catholics included Pius Hadrianus, a onetime slave and then Benedictine Sudanese priest who accompanied Comboni to Sudan in 1873 before dying soon after, and Comboni’s protégé, Father Daniel Deng Farim Sorur, a native Dinka (d. 1899). Prominent Catholic Sudanese women included Caterina Zenab (d. 1921), a catechist and translator among the Dinka, and Bakhita Quasce, who became the first Sudanese Catholic nun in 1881.8 Southern Africa Though Christian missionaries had long been in southern Africa, nearly all were Protestant. The area lay under the official Catholic jurisdiction of Mauritius and faced the anti-Catholic views of the dominant Dutch, as well as French Huguenots and the British. Until the nineteenth century, the Catholic Church had almost no presence, with three priests allowed to serve as chaplains at Dutch military posts between 1804 and 1806. Propaganda Fide appointed an apostolic vicar in 1818, but he was forbidden to take his post by the British and returned to Mauritius (Baur 2009, 189). The first in-person South African prelate arrived after the Irish Dominican Patrick Griffith became Apostolic Vicar of the Cape of Good Hope in 1837 (Denis 2003). Griffith assumed a vast territory with few clergy and petitioned to split the vicariate in 1846. His vicar, Aidan Devereaux, took over in the east in 1847, which became its own vicariate, and he then petitioned another split in 1850. Devereaux vigorously approached religious orders to come and assist, and difficulties faced in Algeria by the recently founded Oblates of Mary Immaculate led to their arrival in 1852 (Sundkler and Steed 2000, 372–73). Soon the Oblates oversaw a third vicariate, that of Natal, and an 1880 expulsion of their community from France led many members to transfer to South Africa, where from Durban they moved inland to Pietermaritzburg. Their missionary efforts struggled among the nearby Zulus, and the Catholics whom they served were often onetime slaves

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imported from Mozambique known as “Zanzibaris,” who gathered for Mass in Durban and then helped spread the faith (Oosthuizen 1990). The Oblates had more success among the neighboring Basotho, to whom they turned with much energy in 1862. French Protestant missionaries had already been at work there, and before long intra-Christian rivalries drove conversions to various Christian bodies, dividing even the royal family; contending were evangelicals from France, soon arriving Anglicans, and Catholics. Father Joseph Gérard, OMI (1831–1914), who was beatified in 1988, led the Catholics, whose colorful worship, along with Gérard’s personal sanctity, attracted many, establishing a formidable Catholic presence centered at Roma that persists to this day. Bishop Charles Jolivet, OMI (1826–1903) became Apostolic Vicar in 1874 and traveled extensively into the 1880s, expanding the Catholic presence especially among the Basotho and, to a lesser extent, the Zulu. He invited many other religious congregations, and several groups of Catholic sisters arrived in those years. In 1886 the Vicariate split, one part among the Zulus, the other for the Basotho.9 Bishop Jolivet opened the way for the most famous Catholic mission in South Africa, Marianhill, founded in Natal, near Durban, in 1882 by Austrian Trappist missionary monks. Thirty missionary monks were led there by Abbot Francis Pfanner (1825–1909), and 80 came the next year (Sundkler and Steed 2000, 422–423). Pfanner’s ideal of physical work appealed to the Zulu and he soon had a large central monastery with a dozen outstations for Mass and catechesis, as well as agricultural training. Pfanner also founded multi-racial schools, in contravention of then and later colonial strictures. He established as well the Missionary Sisters of the Precious Blood, who visited homes in the 1880s, extending the reach of the Catholic faith, which would expand especially in the 1890s and afterward (Baur 2009, 190–191). Further northeast, in what is today Zimbabwe, Jesuits arrived to work among the Ndebele in 1879. They struggled to gain a foothold, gathering few converts until well into the 1880s, but laying a basis for a stronger presence afterward.10 To the northwest, the Spiritan priest Charles Duparquet, who had already served in eastern and western Africa, extended a mission in Angola into Amboland in what is today Namibia beginning in 1884, with Namaqualand becoming a Catholic prefecture in 1888 (Sundkler and Steed 2000, 443–444). A modest Portuguese-founded Catholic presence in Madagascar had ceased in the mid-seventeenth century, yet Catholic efforts in the 1830s began anew. These were stymied by local anti-European activity and Protestant resistance until a number of Jesuit and Holy Spirit missionaries established small sites on islands near Madagascar. French Catholic missionaries had arrived in nearby Mauritius in the early eighteenth century and built a cathedral in Port-Louis in the 1750s. Réunion, which eventually became the source of the Catholic presence in eastern Africa, also had a modest Catholic missionary presence by the eighteenth century (Sundkler and Steed 2000, 493–494). These served as staging areas and in Madagascar itself, a Jesuit, Marc Finaz, arrived incognito at the capital Antananarivo in 1855 and befriended the queen, though she

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quickly turned on all Europeans (Sundkler and Steed 2000, 501). Only with her son Radama II’s accession were a few Jesuits and some sisters of Saint Joseph of Cluny able to settle openly in 1861. Over the next decades the Catholic presence grew: parishes, schools, clinics, and a cathedral in the capital. An uprising against the French in the early 1880s prompted the missionaries to flee the capital, but they returned afterward, and converts had maintained the church’s vitality. Ethiopia After decades of thwarted missionary efforts, the Catholic presence in Ethiopia started anew when missionaries from the Congregation of the Mission, or Vincentians (also known as Lazarists), and Capuchins began working there in the early nineteenth century, following an era of political and religious unrest in the ancient Christian stronghold (Baur 2009, 151–152). Each was led by a distinguished Italian missionary leader. The Vincentian Justin de Jacobis, canonized in 1975, arrived in Tigre in 1839 after an earlier colleague’s initial contact. De Jacobis broke decisively with longstanding Catholic suspicion of Ethiopian Christian practices, instead appreciating the traditional piety and seeking to create Christian unity. De Jacobis impressed Ethiopian Christians with his holiness and humility, becoming known as “Abuna Jacob” following the title for an Ethiopian bishop. A number of Ethiopian monks became Catholic, including Ghebra-Mika’el of Gondar, a learned and respected leader, creating the basis of a permanent Catholic Ethiopian community. One of de Jacobis’s converts became Father Takla Haymanot, who wrote de Jacobis’s biography in 1915, which extolled his humility and zeal for unity between Catholic and Ethiopian Christians.11 In 1846, a second notable Italian, the Capuchin Guglielmo Massaja, arrived in southern Ethiopia and began to work among the “Galla,” now called the Oromo, becoming the first Apostolic Vicar in the south and Italy’s most celebrated mid-nineteenth-century missionary (Baur 2009, 163, 166–167). Like de Jacobis, whom he ordained as a bishop in 1849, Massaja ordained Ethiopians as priests, reinforcing the basis for an ongoing Catholic presence. Both also expressed openness to married priests, highly unusual at the time among Catholics. Since Massaja worked among mostly pagans, his goal was less Christian unity than their conversion to Catholic Christianity. Thus, unlike de Jacobis, who sought to accommodate traditional Ethiopian liturgical practices in moving toward unity, Massaja imposed the Latin rite on his converts. He was also skilled at medicine, which helped him convert the Oromo, and prepared catechisms in local languages. Though both de Jacobis and Massaja enjoyed significant success, Catholic hopes faced challenges. Eventually the new official Abuna Salama, head of the Ethiopian church, linked to a popular nationalist leader who took the traditional name Tewodoros beginning in the 1850s, saw the growing Catholic presence as a threat. Urged on by his Abuna, the ambitious and pious monarch

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imprisoned de Jacobis and Ethiopian Catholic clergy, then tortured the onetime Gondar monk-turned Catholic priest Ghebra-Mika’el, who died of his treatment in 1855. De Jacobis supported a rival to the throne who promised to allow Catholics to operate, but the rival was defeated and de Jacobis died in 1860, his cause in peril. Massaja, too, had to flee, and eventually underwent exile seven times before returning to Europe in 1880, where he was named a cardinal in his retirement. Under the Ethiopian emperor John IV (1872–1889), many Catholic churches were destroyed, yet the small Catholic Church in Ethiopia survived, having in 1885 perhaps 30,000 members, most in Tigre, including 50 Ethiopian priests and 15 sisters (Hastings 1994, 231–232). Still, the different approaches of Massaja and de Jacobis with regard to the advisability of imposing the Latin rite versus maintaining Ethiopian customary practices persisted, creating challenges to unity at times even among the few Ethiopian Catholics. Beginning in the 1840s, Massaja and other Catholic missionaries active in Ethiopia had visited Zanzibar, seeking to ascertain missionary possibilities in eastern Africa. No doubt motivated by the appearance of Protestants in what is today Kenya from 1842, these efforts came to nothing at first, even though the Vatican showed interest. Eastern Africa The initiative for return of the Catholic Church to eastern Africa after the expulsion of the Portuguese and their missionaries in the early eighteenth century came not from Ethiopia but from Saint Denis, capital of Réunion in the Indian Ocean, one of the so-called sugar islands in the Indian Ocean. Both Réunion and Mauritius had seen French missionaries at work from the eighteenth century. In the 1830s, new missionaries arrived, some linked to Jacob Libermann, who would revitalize the Spiritans, others belonging to the English Benedictines, one of whom served as the first bishop of Mauritius in the 1840s. Two of Libermann’s earliest disciples, Frédéric Le Vavasseur in Réunion and Jacques Laval, who was named bishop in Mauritius, became renowned for their work with former slaves, educating and training them in schools and workshops.12 Beginning in the 1850s, Saint Denis’s bishop, Armand Maupoint, sought to reestablish a Catholic mission in Zanzibar, an island trading center at the Indian Ocean coast famous as a market for slaves, and under the firm control of a Sultan linked to Oman. It became a new apostolic prefecture in 1860, to which Maupoint sent his vicar, Father Fava, to purchase property, and he soon opened a chapel. Six sisters of the Daughters of Mary from Réunion accompanied Fava, several of them of mixed race and former slaves (Sundkler and Steed 2000, 522–523), schooling and a clinic began, and in 1863 the mission passed into the hands of the Holy Ghost (or Spiritan) missionaries, who also worked in Réunion. Under the leadership of Father Antoine Horner, the Spiritans continued the work begun, ransoming and gathering slaves, mainly children, whom

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they schooled, evangelized, and trained to work. Forbidden to preach in public, the Spiritans foresaw substantial Catholic possibilities only on the mainland where Islam was not omnipresent. In 1868 they moved their center to the mainland coast at Bagamoyo, which became a famous Catholic mission, housing hundreds by the late 1870s. Explorers and other international visitors reaching Bagamoyo extolled the plantations and “industrious” Africans being evangelized. Like Comboni’s later Christian villages in Sudan, Bagamoyo was called an “agricultural colony,” a term originally used for juvenile reform institutions in nineteenth-century France. Subsequent Catholic missionary bodies to enter eastern Africa usually did so via Zanzibar or Bagamoyo into the twentieth century. Early Spiritan efforts to train seminarians began in the 1860s yet encountered difficulties of personnel, internal disagreements about policy, as well as resistance among the former slaves.13 Spiritans sought to establish missions further inland but were delayed by a devastating 1870 hurricane, tightening of funds from Europe after the Franco-Prussian War, and mortality of missionaries. Eventually, many missions were founded by Spiritan priests and brothers, and peopled by married once-slave Christians trained and evangelized at Bagamoyo, beginning as Christian villages established with hopes to attract surrounding peoples. The first appeared at Mhonda in 1877, others following in 1881 at Mandera, in 1882 at Morogoro, and in 1884  in Tununguo. Mandera’s chief famously had a dream of white strangers shortly before the Spiritans arrived, and later saw the Catholic presence as bringing the advancement of the coast, with its wealth and prestige, to his village.14 Nearly all the early African Catholics linked to Spiritan efforts before the 1890s were former slaves ransomed or received at the Catholic missions of Zanzibar and Bagamoyo. The Catholic missionary situation in Uganda showed a new way forward. Its roots lay in the 1870s, when King Leopold of Belgium publicly pursued European engagement in Africa, ostensibly to fight the slave trade and advance civilization, though in retrospect allowing him to exploit the resources of the Congo. Leopold’s efforts led to the International African Association in 1876. Before and after, explorers and missionaries like David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley wrote about the needs of people in the region, laying the grounds for expanding missionary and colonial activity. In 1878, Lavigerie’s Missionaries of Africa received permission to enter sub-­ Saharan Africa to assume control over territory assigned to them by Propaganda Fide. Frustrating both the Spiritans and the missionaries linked to Comboni, both of whom thought the territory was theirs to evangelize, Lavigerie sponsored several well-funded and large “White Father” groups of priests and brothers who leapfrogged the inhospitable regions in eastern Tanganyika, traveling from Bagamoyo to what is now western Tanzania and Uganda, before long entering the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi. Following their trek from Bagamoyo, the first group of the Missionaries of Africa split into two groups. One remained in Tanganyika while the other

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headed to the south shore of Lake Victoria to cross over to the Kingdom of Buganda, the largest in the region and which Henry Morton Stanley had portrayed as promising missionary territory in European newspapers in 1876. There they met in 1879 the Kingdom and its kabaka, Mutesa. They also encountered recently arrived Anglicans of the Church Mission Society, as well as Muslim traders. Mutesa’s court became the site of ongoing conversations about religious matters, some of them heated. The Catholics were usually represented by the White Father Simon Lourdel, with royal pages—young men in training for leadership—attracted by both forms of Christianity. As has often been the case in African Christian history, rivalry between Christian groups promoted conversions. Already in the early 1880s some became “readers” for both groups, showing interest in baptism. Soon small groups of catechumens lived close to the Catholic missionaries. Mutesa oscillated between warmth and suspicion toward the missionaries, and both groups went into periodic exile in the early 1880s, staying in touch with the converted or interested pages. The kabaka preferred to keep the missionaries close to the court, restricting their hearers to the pages themselves. These continued to meet even when missionaries were exiled, to read the Scriptures and letters from their missionary mentors, and argue about the merits of different forms of Christianity, Islam, and the local religion. They also developed what Adrian Hastings (1994, 378) called “an almost self-directed and staggeringly confident Christianity.” When Mutesa’s son Mwanga followed as kabaka after his father’s death in 1884, the Catholics initially rejoiced, returning to the capital and court with hope since he seemed to favor them. Yet his suspicion of the loyalties of his pages, perhaps intensified by their refusal of his sexual advances, as well as an encroaching European presence and his paranoia, led him eventually to order the execution of several in 1885 and more in 1886.15 These so-called Uganda martyrs, Anglican and Catholic, only inspired further interest in Christianity, which grew remarkably over the next decades, during periods of civil war with factions linked to Islam, Anglicanism, and Catholicism clashing, ending up with eventual British control by the early 1890s. Uganda is one of the only places to undergo large-scale conversion to Christianity in Africa prior to colonial overrule16 and, by the early twentieth century, Catholics were the largest group. Royal pages who survived persecution became leaders among the Catholics and Anglicans, while those martyred—especially the 22 beatified by the Catholic Church in 1920 and canonized in 1964—have inspired believers ever after. Lavigerie’s missionary instructions to his Missionaries of Africa insisted on a lengthy catechumenate to create stalwart converts, and the steadfastness of the Uganda martyrs validated that strategy. Notable Catholic Ugandan converts included the first such martyr, Joseph Mukasa Balikuddembe, the leader among the pages who was baptized in 1882 and served as Mwanga’s majordomo in the royal household when he was killed in 1885, and Charles Lwanga, seen as the Catholic standard-bearer among the largest group of martyrs who died in June 1886.17

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Nothing so dramatic happened by the 1880s linked to the other group of White Fathers who stayed in Tanganyika. Yet their mission on the south shore of Lake Victoria, Bukumbi, also founded with the help of former slaves, became a refuge for their confreres from Uganda in the 1880s and early 1890s. In early 1879, the missionaries reached Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika, which would serve as a base to move into eastern Congo. Their armed auxiliaries like the onetime papal zouave Leonard Joubert helped fight against Arabs and local peoples involved in the slave trade, all the while training once-slave children in schools and farms at their missions (Hastings 1994, 410). Beginning in the early 1880s, they established Catholic enclaves in central Tanganyika as well as in other parts of the Great Lakes region, including a large mission at Karema in 1885, where the former slave turned medical-catechist Adrian Atiman would later serve. Other White Fathers founded missions by 1885 to the north in Burundi— where two White Fathers were killed in 1881 at Rumonge—and in eastern Congo. Both the pioneering Spiritans and the White Fathers relied on schooling and training former slaves, often children, to serve as model Catholics to attract local peoples. These included a woman whose story the first Spiritan superior Horner publicized widely, Suema, who allegedly survived enslavement and the murder of her mother to become a sister.18 Another was Hilarion Maruammakoma, who was trained to be the first Catholic catechist in eastern Africa and served at the inaugural inland Catholic mission at Mhonda at its foundation. Over time his education and connection to the missionaries allowed him to become a local patron, creating tensions with the Spiritans, and he later became Muslim, working closely with German colonizers.19 Catholic couples from Bagamoyo later founded the formidable Catholic presence near Mount Kilimanjaro in the early 1890s, as well as the earliest Catholic parishes in Kenya. Yet already by the early 1880s, once-slave Catholics chafed at missionary control, fleeing missions and, like the onetime catechist Hilarion, resisted accepting missionary expectations. By the early 1880s, the Spiritans pursued reforms to their system, yet they continued to favor Christian villages composed of freed slaves into the twentieth century, and other Catholic missionaries often did the same (Sundkler and Steed 2000, 543). Missionaries taking in slaves, Catholic and Protestant, sometimes faced armed attacks from local people who saw missionary encroachment as a threat to their well-being, which at times included the freedom to pursue the slave trade. Already in the 1880s, Spiritans and White Fathers sought to attend to cultural challenges arising in evangelizing settled peoples. The White Fathers challenged Baganda customs, some deemed incompatible with Catholic faith, and other peoples practiced infanticide when children’s teeth appeared in an inauspicious order (Kollman 2005, 200–201). This missionary recognition of cultural differences would grow and the evangelization of slaves would recede over time as the center of missionary strategy.

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Western Africa If Uganda and Ethiopia arguably saw the largest nineteenth-century Catholic gains in African converts by 1885—and these remained quite modest, though that soon changed in Uganda—nonetheless, as had been the case earlier, western Africa saw the most varied Catholic presence. Large-scale growth came later, yet processes unfolded that laid the basis for future expansion, especially the dynamism in energetic Catholic missionary bodies linked to three French Catholic missionary leaders: Anne Marie Javouhey, founder of the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Cluny, from the 1820s; Jacob Libermann in the 1840s, who helped revive the Holy Ghost or Spiritan missionaries; and Melchior de Marion Brésillac, who founded the Society of African Missions, or Lyon Fathers, in the 1850s. The old Catholic centers founded by the Portuguese—Cape Verde and São Tome—continued sending priests periodically to the coast into the early nineteenth century, with little impact (Bane 1956, 110–112). Meanwhile a smaller yet also longstanding Catholic presence persisted from the seventeenth century in Senegal, where a few Catholic priests remained into the nineteenth century, mostly serving the local French populace at island-colonies of Saint Louis and Gorée. Senegal had been erected as an apostolic prefecture in 1758 and received priest-leaders assigned by the Vatican and approved by the local French authorities (Baur 2009, 131). The apostolic prefect from 1825 to 1833, Abbe Girardon, complained of the challenges, including the scandalous behavior of certain priests and local lay Catholics (Jones 1980, 327–328). The missionary push for abolition of the slave trade caused further tensions between the Church and local European Catholics. New dynamics were already underway, however, because in 1819, at the start of the broader global Catholic missionary recovery, Senegal had received Sisters of Saint Joseph of Cluny, a community founded by Anne Marie Javouhey, a remarkable French nun beatified in 1950 who pioneered the renewed Catholic evangelization of western Africa.20 Javouhey’s sisters first served in the Indian Ocean at Réunion, then came to Senegal to take over the Catholic hospital. There they found the local Catholic Church in a crisis, unable to get priests, which led Javouhey to think about forming African Catholic clergy. After early cooperation with the overly strict local apostolic prefect, she founded her own Catholic outpost, where agricultural and academic training of Africans, some former slaves, went together. In the mid-1820s she sent some of her African students to the Holy Spirit Seminary in Paris, the traditional source of the so-called Spiritan missionary priests who served in French colonies. Javouhey foresaw a congregation of French and African priests and brothers working together, something resisted by earlier products of Holy Spirit Seminary. Three of the Africans eventually became priests and returned to Senegal in 1842, shortly after the 1841 arrival of the Ploermel Brothers of Christian Instruction, a French teaching order that founded schools to train indigenous teachers. The local church was unprepared for Fathers David Boilat,

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Arsene Fridoil, and Pierre Moussa. They faced racial condescension and other challenges to their ministry and vocations, with only one remaining to serve for any length of time.21 Two other efforts came together in the early 1840s to shape the emerging Catholic presence in western Africa.22 First, priests of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, a community founded by an Alsatian convert from Judaism who became a priest, Jacob Libermann, took as their goal the evangelization of “black peoples,” initially sending missionaries to Réunion and Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. Second, Propaganda Fide, after failing to secure Jesuits for western Africa, sought US priests to go to Liberia, a US-founded colony in western Africa. The new mission was comprised of two US priests, the apostolic prefect Edward Barron and John Kelly, along with a brother, Dennis Pindar. They arrived at Cape Palmas, finding 18 Catholics and another 200 in Monrovia.23 Soon after, in 1842, Propaganda Fide created the new Vicariate of the Two Guineas with Barron as apostolic vicar (Bane 1968, 46–47). In 1843, seven of Libermann’s disciples joined the Americans. Most quickly died of disease, and Kelly, too, soon left very ill and returned to the US. In 1845, Barron returned to Rome and resigned. He named the challenges he faced: shifting oversight of his role, the difficult political situation shaped by French-British conflict, the loosely evangelized local community, and the poor reputation of the clergy (Bane 1968, 49–50). Yet one of Libermann’s disciples who had joined Barron and Kelly, Jean-­ Rémy Bessieux, had gone on to Gabon and, though presumed dead after loss of contact, was still evangelizing. After resuming his contact with Libermann, Bessieux established a mission in 1844 at Libreville, destined to be the first permanent Catholic mission station in sub-Saharan Africa.24 A few other of Libermann’s group then proceeded to Senegal, and eventually to Dakar (Baur 2009, 135). Senegal’s strong Muslim culture meant that evangelization of local peoples was difficult, and the Spiritan first apostolic vicar and bishop of Dakar, Benoît Truffet, wrote in 1847 that they faced a theocracy and were prohibited from baptizing and educating children. Yet Truffet befriended some of the Muslim leaders, who appreciatively  noted his reluctance to wholeheartedly embrace French colonial overrule. When two of his Spiritan confreres were kidnapped by a local king, the bishop did not immediately call in the French navy, instead allowing his Muslim friends to secure the missionaries’ release.25 Unusual as Truffet’s largesse was, his early death, and that of many others, made Catholic mission in the region difficult. Yet the 1848 union of Libermann’s new and vital group with the older and staid Holy Ghost missionaries created new energy. The numbers of missionaries, all now called Spiritans after the older body, grew. Bessieux became the new apostolic vicar in Gabon in 1848, with fellow Spiritan Father Aloysius Kobès as his co-adjutor—assistant and presumed successor—in Dakar in Senegal. Soon Kobès founded a large mission at Ngazobil with other Spiritans, including a seminary of sorts, training small groups of young men and women seen as future African sisters and brothers.

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Bessieux, who already in the 1840s had begun work on Pongwe, the local language, founded similar institutions at the freed-slave town of Libreville before his death in 1876, and after his 34  years in Africa there were perhaps 3000 Catholics in Gabon.26 Libermann’s ideas were ahead of his time, for he invited his missionaries to accommodate themselves to those whom they came to evangelize. He urged them to release themselves from other loyalties in order to—as he famously put it—“be black with the blacks,”27 all the while creating Catholic Church structures. Following his friend Anne Marie Javouhey, he also urged the rapid formation of indigenous clergy and religious, something that was hard to put into practice, as well as strong education for converts. Miles of coastline still remained untouched by Catholic evangelization between Senegal and Gabon in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1854, Melchior de Marion Brésillac, a former missionary in India, decided to found a group of priest-missionaries for Africa—the Society of African Missions (SMA) based in Lyon (thus sometimes known as “Lyon fathers”).28 Brésillac and a small group of confreres arrived in Sierra Leone in 1859, nearly all dying in a few weeks in the new apostolic vicariate, Brésillac included. Yet the remainder of the small community, now led by Augustin Planque back in France, did not let Brésillac’s dream die. A second group of SMAs arrived in 1861 in Dahomey, at the old Catholic site of Whydah, under the direction of Francesco Borghero. In the face of conflict-raising local religious beliefs—not only occasional human sacrifices, but Borghero also faced arrest and a fine when he was blamed after lightning struck nearby—most energy went toward the existing local Catholics, many of them Europeans with some Brazilian ex-slaves. The SMAs celebrated sacraments, offered modest medical care, and developed a Catholic school that soon had 100 students.29 Borghero soon made contact in Lagos with Pa Antonio, a remarkable lay Catholic leader in nineteenth-century western Africa. Pa Antonio had returned to his native eastern Nigeria after years of enslavement in Brazil, where he also had embraced the Catholic faith. In Lagos he led the so-called Amaro, onetime Brazilians like himself now returned to their origins in western Africa, numbering perhaps 4000 in 1868. Leading them from sometime in mid-century until his 1880 death, Pa Antonio worked closely with missionaries who arrived and built upon his earlier efforts. Elizabeth Isichei has called him the “John the Baptist” of Nigerian Catholicism, mindful of later growth of the church there. He expressed his confident leadership when he interrogated Borghero’s orthodoxy upon the missionary’s arrival in what was called “Portuguese town”: he asked him to recite the rosary!30 Borghero estimated that Catholics between Whydah and Lagos totaled 3000, a diverse group of onetime Brazilian returnees, other former slaves who converted, children in training, and Europeans. Leaving due to illness and discouragement in 1865, Borghero was succeeded by other SMAs who led Catholics in the region (Bane 1956, 149–151). In 1868, the SMAs began to build in Lagos and established Holy Cross mission among the Yoruba in 1870. It became a cathedral in 1878 and soon SMAs

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pursued evangelization elsewhere in the region, where the Anglican Church Mission Society had long been active. Propaganda Fide divided the Dahomey mission into two apostolic prefectures in 1883, that of Dahomey and the other, centered in Lagos, of the Bight of Benin. In 1884, SMA missionaries began a mission near Benin City at Lokoja, part of the new Apostolic Prefecture of the Niger.31 Illness continued to take the lives of many of the early missionaries. Today’s large presence of Catholics among the Igbos of southeastern Nigeria was just getting started in 1885, though two SMAs had visited Onitsha from Lagos in 1883.32 The eventual foundation emerged not from Lagos, however, but from Gabon, and the Spiritan Father Lutz arrived in November 1885, receiving land from the ground-breaking Anglican leader Samuel Crowther, who had been ordained bishop in 1864. The huge growth of Catholics among the Igbo, overseen by the Spiritans, would only happen decades later. The 1880s also saw Catholic missionaries return to what are now Ghana and Liberia. After a visiting Spiritan reported on an 1879 stop at the old mission site of Elmina, Propaganda Fide set up a new apostolic prefecture of Gold Coast, assigning it to the SMAs. The first missionaries who arrived, Father Moreau and Father Murat, visited Lagos and brought to their new territory an African Catholic to serve as a teacher, James Gordon. In 1881 they opened a Catholic school, and in 1882 they wrote a vivid account of their visit to the king of the Ashanti at Kumasi that was published in London. Soon the increasingly typical missionary tasks—language acquisition, forming a catechumenate process, baptizing small numbers—were underway (Bane 1956, 174–182). In Liberia, where the three American missionaries had sought to establish the Church in the 1840s, the local African government asked the Vatican for missionaries in 1880. Spiritans arrived in 1884 in Monrovia, led by Father Lorber, but illness and Protestant opposition led to its closure in 1886, and a permanent Catholic presence only arrived in 1906 (Fisher 1929, 286–293). The advent of German colonialism in Africa also meant that the colonial government sought German Catholic missionaries. In 1875, missionaries of the newly founded Society of the Divine Word came to Togo (Sundkler and Steed 2000, 221), and German Benedictines arrived in German East Africa, today Tanzania, in the late 1880s. Kongo had long been the most important Catholic place in Africa even as it diminished from previous vitality through the eighteenth century. Its decline continued in the nineteenth century as a Catholic presence appeared elsewhere on the continent. Garcia V, king of Sâo Salvador from 1803 to 1830, wrote to the king of Portugal asking for priests, and one eventually came in 1814, baptizing 25,700 in a seven-month visit (Sundkler and Steed 2000, 61), yet his successors were discouraged by the absence of genuine faith. The last Capuchin left in 1835—at least 440 of them had served in Kongo since 1645—and a formal Catholic presence did not return until the end of the nineteenth century, despite Kongolese kings’ many requests for missionaries.33 The prefecture apostolic of Congo was entrusted to the Spiritans in 1865, and though Catholicism lingered in  local memory, the prior arrival of other Christian

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missionaries meant that the Catholic Spiritans who came in 1879 had to remind the then-king, Pedro V, of the venerable Catholic identity of the realm. The monarch avoided public appearances on Sunday as a consequence of ecumenical disagreements (Isichei 1995, 186). Meanwhile beginning in the 1870s, Spiritan missionaries Hippolyte Carrie and then later Prosper Augouard explored the north shore of the Congo River looking for mission sites in what would become the French Congo, now Congo-­ Brazzaville. In 1873, Carrie founded Landana mission, in 1880 another at Boma in what would become Belgian Congo, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, then later one at Linzolo, at each site working with fugitive and ransomed slave children. After an exploratory journey where he met Henry Morton Stanley and the French explorer Brazza, by 1883 Augouard was building Linzolo into the chief Catholic mission, and he later became bishop of Brazzaville, founding missions along the Congo River.34 As with other Catholic missions in this period, many of the first converts were former slaves or refugees. Though a few priests continued to operate there, nearby Angola also suffered Portuguese neglect, the last Capuchin departing in 1835, and no bishop came to Luanda until 1849.35 Then in 1866, Holy Ghost missionaries, notably Charles Duparquet, who later worked in eastern Africa and also Namibia, began to work there, overcoming Portuguese suspicions by convincing the Spiritans to found a seminary in Portugal. Duparquet had arrived in Dakar in 1855, then worked in Gabon, returning ill to France in 1857, where he discovered the history of Kongolese Catholicism. After a stint in eastern Africa, he returned to the lands of the venerable Catholic kingdom in 1866, visiting old missions into the 1870s and writing accounts in mission journals about meeting Kongolese who called themselves “slaves of the Church” and claimed to be descendants of the maestri of old (Sundkler and Steed 2000, 288–289). Dubbed “the Catholic Livingstone” due to his prodigious travels and widely circulated writings, Duparquet was eventually appointed apostolic prefect of Cimbebasia in 1879. He worked also on the other side of the Congo River, in Landana, following Carrie by focusing on children’s education and starting a modest seminary, soon left under Carrie’s direction. The Sisters of Saint Joseph of Cluny came to Angola in 1881, and Duparquet opened the flagship mission of Angola at Huila in 1882.36 In the 1880s, the presence of a Portuguese priest at Sâo Salvador in Kongo interfered briefly with Baptist goals to Christianize the Kongolese beyond the remnants of Catholic practices (Hastings 1994, 386–387). By 1885, the Belgian king Leopold II had convinced Europe of the need to organize efforts to stop the slave trade in Africa and develop the continent— infamously revealed later as a mask for his desire to exploit its resources that would afflict the Congo so severely. Eventually he crossed both Lavigerie and the Spiritans, insisting on Belgian missionaries in his territory, with intermittent Vatican support, yet some of the Catholic missionaries of the 1870s— Carrie and Duparquet further west, Augouard into the Kasai region—continued their work as the Belgian grip on its part of the Congo region tightened

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(Sundkler and Steed 2000, 291, 294–295). In 1885 they did not foresee the profound suffering that lay ahead for the people of Congo.

Conclusion Though substantial growth in the number of Catholics in Africa did not occur until well after 1885—a somewhat arbitrary date for much of Catholic history in Africa—a number of realities were in place that led to that future growth. First, many of the missionary societies that would carry out primary evangelization in Africa—for example, Capuchins, Spiritans, Missionaries of Africa, Lyon Fathers, Comboni missionaries, Jesuits, Dominicans, various groups of sisters—were already in place. Their numbers grew substantially in nearly all cases into the 1960s, and they were already at work in some places that today have formidable Catholic populations: Uganda, southwestern Nigeria, Burundi, parts of Tanzania and Congo. In addition, Vatican-defined Catholic jurisdictional realities had been established that, though undergoing important modifications later, set the stage for growth as Africans responded to the Catholic message. Proto-diocesan structures like the apostolic prefecture and apostolic vicariate that generally followed it were operative in nearly all of the continent, even if their reach in many places was rather restricted. Along with formal permissions and territorial definitions, guidelines for missionary practice from Propaganda Fide and missionary leaders were also widely accepted, even if followed unevenly. These included the acquisition of linguistic and cultural expertise, the avoidance of unnecessary political ties to Europeans, the training of catechists to assist in evangelization, and the forging of native clergy and members of religious congregations. Thus, habits of forming African Catholic believers, evangelists, catechists, clergy, and religious were developing, if slowly, in many places. Yet certain changes to come would have important consequences not yet evident. Formal colonial overrule, all but finalized by 1914 but not obvious in 1885, hastened missionary expansion into other regions that have become predominantly Catholic, like Rwanda, the region around Mount Kilimanjaro, and central Kenya. It also facilitated new Catholic missionary bodies in Africa linked to Catholic missionary zeal in Italy, the Netherlands, Ireland, Poland, and elsewhere. Catholic missionaries, like Protestants, would increasingly tend to avoid establishing missions where large European presences developed, and they would focus on settled peoples instead of more nomadic groups. For the future of African Catholicism, these missionary efforts, though essential for what followed, are less important than how Africans responded. And already by 1885, distinguished African Catholics had for nearly four centuries made their mark on the slowly emerging Church—on its prayer and other practices, on its policies and procedures, and on its self-understanding and leadership.

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Notes 1. For background, see Hastings (1994, 248–250, 253–255); Isichei (1995, 84–88); Sundkler and Steed (2000, 100–109); Baur (2009, 104–07). 2. For a description, see Hastings (1994, 248–49). For the fullest portrayal of these changes, see Koren (1992). 3. On Lavigerie, see the following: Hastings (1994, 290); Cisternino (2004, 118–119); Baur (2009, 177, 221–23). 4. See https://www.peresblancs.org/capitaine_joubertgb.htm. Accessed August 16, 2022. 5. On this Catholic effort, see the following; Sundkler and Steed (2000, 138); Cisternino (2004, 3–8). 6. On Comboni’s impact and experiences, see the following: Cisternino (2004, 61–69, 109–112, 127–129, 132–144); Baur (2009, 171–174). 7. For the impact of the Mahdist uprising, see Cisternino (2004, 198–238). 8. On early Sudanese Catholics, see the following: Cisternino (2004, 21, 53, 105); Sundkler and Steed (2000, 144–145); Baur (2009, 174–175). The Catholic saint Josephine Bakhita, a onetime slave in Sudan who later went to Italy, became prominent in the later nineteenth century. 9. On these events, see the following: Sundkler and Steed (2000, 174–79, 380–383); Denis (2003, 87–88); Baur (2009, 189). 10. On early Jesuit efforts, see the following: Hastings (1994, 264); Baur (2009, 203). 11. On de Jacobis, see the following: Hastings (1994, 226–227); Sundkler and Steed (2000, 158); Baur (2009, 157–159, 165–66). 12. On these two, see the following: Sundkler and Steed (2000, 493–495); Uzukwu (2013, 179–182). 13. On the early Spiritan efforts in eastern Africa, see Kollman (2005), and for evolving strategy and African responses, see especially 106–121, 145–148, 162–166, 185–188, 241–251. 14. On this episode and Spiritan expansion see: Baur (2009, 218); Sundkler and Steed (2000, 541–42). 15. For one summary of that complex set of events, see Kollman and Toms Smedley (2018, 37–39). 16. As Elizabeth Isichei puts it, “There is no more extraordinary chapter in the history of African Christianity than its growth in Buganda” (Isichei 1995, 145). 17. On the martyrs, see the following: Isichei (1995, 148); Sundkler and Steed (2000, 571); Kollman and Toms Smedley (2018, 243–246). 18. For a discussion of Suema, including the dubious historicity of some of Horner’s account, see Kollman (2005, 128–132). 19. On Hilarion, see the following: Kollman (2005, 195–197, 256–260); Kollman and Toms Smedley (2018, 239). 20. On Javouhey, see the following: Bane (1956, 112–114); Bane (1968, 46); Sundkler and Steed (2000, 171–72); Baur (2009, 131–33). 21. See the following: Jones (1980, 333–338); Sundkler and Steed (2000, 172). 22. See the following: Hastings (1994, 249); Sundkler and Steed (2000, 173–175). 23. See the following: Bane (1956, 119–125); Bane (1959, 65–67); Bane (1968, 47–48); Baur (2009, 133).

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24. On Bessieux, see the following: Bane (1956, 125–127); Bane (1968, 50–52); Sundkler and Steed (2000, 276–77); Baur (2009, 134). 25. See the following: Sundkler and Steed (2000, 175–77); Uzukwu (2013, 176, 185–188). 26. See the following: Hastings (1994, 250, 262); Sundkler and Steed (2000, 178, 277). 27. On Libermann, see the following: Sundker and Steed (2000, 171–74); Hastings (1994, 286, 295–96); Baur (2009, 136–38). 28. For a pious biography of Brésillac and his legacy, see Bane (1959). 29. See the following: Bane (1956, 127–133, 136–144); Bane (1959, 10–13, 19–28); Hastings (1994, 249, 275); Sundkler and Steed (2000, 221–222); Baur (2009, 138–40). 30. On Pa Antonio, see the following: Bane (1956, 146–149); Bane (1959, 29–32); Isichei (1982); Hastings (1994, 374); Baur (2009, 141); Sundkler and Steed, 223, 236. 31. See the following: Bane (1956, 159–160, 165–66); Bane (1959, 33–34). 32. On the origins of mission among the Igbo, see the following: Bane (1956, 165–66); Ekechi (1972, 72–76); Sundkler and Steed (2000, 248). 33. See the following: Sundkler and Steed (2000, 53); Baur (2009, 205). 34. See the following: Quesnel (1983); Sundkler and Steed (2000, 287); Baur (2009, 206–07, 210). 35. See the following: Hastings (1994, 372–73); Sundkler and Steed (2000, 318). 36. For general remarks, see the following: Sundkler and Steed (2000, 290, 540); Baur (2009, 209). Duparquet’s correspondence has been edited and published (Vieira 2012, 2013, 2014, 2017).

Bibliography Bane, Martin J. 1956. Catholic Pioneers in West Africa. Dublin: Clonmore and Reynolds. Bane, Martin J. 1959. Heroes of the Hinterland: The Bresillac Story. New  York: Shamrock Guild. Bane, Martin J. 1968. The Popes and West Africa: An Outline of Mission History, 1460s-1960s. New York: Alba House. Baur, John. 2009. 2000 Years of Christianity in Africa: An African Church History. 2nd edition. Nairobi: Paulines Publications Africa. Cisternino, Mario. 2004. Passion for Africa: Missionary and Imperial Papers on the Evangelisation of Uganda and Sudan, 1848–1923. Kampala: Fountain Publishers. Connelly, James T. 2020. The History of the Congregation of Holy Cross. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Denis, Philippe. 2003. Southern Africa. From Dominicans in Africa: A History of the Dominican Friars in Sub-Sahara Africa, ed. Philippe Denis. Trans Robert deViana. Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications, 85–107. Ekechi, F. K. 1972. Missionary Enterprise and Rivalry in Igboland, 1857–1914. London: Frank Cass. Fisher, Henry P. 1929. The Catholic Church in Liberia. Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia 40:3, 249–310. Gray, Richard. 2012. Christianity, the Papacy, and Mission in Africa. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.

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Hastings, Adrian. 1994. The Church in Africa, 1450–1950. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Isichei, Elizabeth. 1982. An Obscure Man: Pa Antonio in Lagos (c. 1800–c. 1880). From Varieties of Christian Experience in Nigeria, ed. Elizabeth Isichei. Hong Kong: Macmillan, 28–33. Isichei, Elizabeth. 1995. A History of Christianity in Africa: From Antiquity to the Present. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Jones, D. H. 1980. The Catholic Mission and Some Aspects of Assimilation in Senegal, 1817–1852. Journal of African History 21:3, 323–340. Kollman, Paul. 2005. The Evangelization of Slaves and Catholic Origins in Eastern Africa. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Kollman, Paul and Cynthia Toms Smedley. 2018. Understanding World Christianity: Eastern Africa. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Koren, Henry J. 1992. The Evolution of the Church in Africa Since the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century. Unpublished manuscript. Bethel Park, PA. Mulligan, William. 2013. The Anti-slave Trade Campaign in Europe, 1888–1890. From A Global History of Anti-Slavery Politics in the Nineteenth Century eds. William Mulligan and Maurice Bric. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 149–170. Oosthuizen, Gerhardus C. 1990. The Zanzibari Catholics and Their Contribution to the Introduction of Catholicism to the Zulu People of Natal. Neue Zeitschrift für Missionswissenschaft 46, 188–99. Quesnel, Roland. 1983. Centenary of the Church in the Congo. Spiritan News 49, 1–3. Sundkler, Bengt and Christopher Steed. 2000. A History of the Church in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Uzukwu, Elochukwu E. 2013. The Spiritan Congregation’s Mission to Africa: Clues to an Appropriate Relationship of Christians with Muslims. From Can Muslims and Christians Resolve Their Religious and Social Conflicts? Cases from Africa and the United States, eds. Marinus C.  Iwuchukwu and Brian Stiltner. Lewiston, Maine: Edwin Mellon Press, 173–196. Vieira, Gérard, ed. 2012, 2013, 2014, 2017. Le Pére Duparquet. Collected writings, 4 volumes. Paris: Karthala. Vieira, Gérard. 2012, 2013, 2014, 2017. Le Pére Duparquet. 4 volumes. Correspondence and commentary. Paris: Karthala.

CHAPTER 19

European Christianity and European Imperialism in Africa David Lindenfeld

The most striking feature of Christianity’s role in the European partition of Africa between 1884 and 1902 is its relative absence. This may seem a surprising assertion in view of the undoubted popular enthusiasm for missionary proselytization in this period, particularly in Britain, as epitomized by the burial of missionary David Livingstone in Westminster Abbey in 1874 as a national hero, not to mention the tremendous increase in the scale of missionization during the years of partition itself—some 10,000 men and women by 1910 (Hastings, 1994, p. 419). But if one looks for evidence of Christian influence in the actual planning and execution of the colonization of Africa, the results— with some notable exceptions—are considerably less than one would expect. Colonization was done in part by individual adventurers and entrepreneurs who signed treaties with African leaders in advance of their home countries, and by government ministers who made the policy decisions, and who were only occasionally swayed by popular sentiment or missionary pressure. According to the study by Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher (1961): Ministers usually listened to their pleas only when it suited their purpose; but commercial or philanthropic agitation seldom decided which territories should be claimed or occupied or when this should be done, although their slogans were frequently used by government in its public justifications. (463)

D. Lindenfeld (*) Emeritus, Department of History, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. E. Barnes, T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48270-0_19

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Add to this the multiple players in the colonization game—France, Germany, Portugal, Belgium—whose identification of their national purpose with Christianity only rarely matched that of Britain. None of this is to deny that the same improvements in communication and transport that made colonization feasible also facilitated the increase in missionary penetration, or that, once in place, colonization facilitated the work of the missionaries and vice-versa. It is only to suggest that the two processes took place largely independently—as witnessed by the fact that the nationalities of the missionaries in a given location only rarely matched those of the colonizing powers (Etherington 2005, p.3). The surge of colonization, known as the “great scramble,” differed in important respects from instances of European imperialism earlier in the nineteenth century. To focus again on Britain, the dominant economic power, influence had been informally exercised by independent entrepreneurs working in scattered locations throughout the world, backed up when needed by the British navy. Colonies were regarded as a burdensome expense, and direct government intervention, though necessary at times to settle disputes among indigenous groups (as with the Ashanti and Fante in the Gold Coast), was in general a last resort. At the same time, missionaries, who were similarly scattered, became exposed to conditions abroad that aroused their sense of injustice, such as the practice of Sati in India and the horrors of the slave trade and the treatment of slaves in the Americas. This spurred them to become increasingly active in politics and to agitate for reforms, with considerable success, as with the abolition of the trade in 1807 and the abolition of slavery itself in 1833. This moral impulse could in some instances lead to the case for government intervention in the colonies, as when Dr. John Philip from the London Missionary Society in South Africa argued that the British needed to protect the African indigenes in the Cape Colony from the abuses of the Dutch-­ descended Boers (Porter 2004, pp.  80–83). Missionaries also played a great role in the shaping of Sierra Leone, a colony created as a haven for ex-slaves from across the Atlantic, and which became a center for the spread of African Christians across western Africa. From such instances there emerged among missionaries a mindset that neatly fit the British sense of their own chosen-ness, encapsulated in the three “C’s”: Christianity, commerce, and civilization. The moral victory over slavery, it was thought, would open the door to legitimate commerce based on free exchange of goods and labor, exemplified by British business and voluntarily embraced by Africans. Civilization meant the superiority of Western, especially British, standards and culture to those of others. Although missionaries argued over which of these three should come first, it was generally agreed that the Christian message was indispensable in conveying such standards to peoples who had not attained them. This was Livingstone’s message, although it was not original with him (Stanley 1990, p. 73). Although some of these attitudes held fast during the partition, some important changes took shape in the third quarter of the nineteenth century.

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The bonds among the three C’s were beginning to fray (Porter 2004, chap. 7). Evangelizing efforts were not yielding desired results in terms of converts, nor were Africans generally taking up the habits of hard-working Englishmen. While the slave trade had been largely stamped out in West Africa, it continued to flourish in East and Central, fed for example by Western demand for ivory (for billiard balls and piano keys) that required large numbers of porters carrying elephant tusks long distances. A number of missionaries became disillusioned with the worldliness of Western civilization and turned to a conscious embrace of the cultures they were trying to proselytize, such as the China Inland Mission. Most missionaries remained committed, however, to Western humanitarian ends. The challenge of the East African slave trade only called forth new and stronger efforts to eradicate it (McCaskie 1999, p. 673). And if the link between Christianity and commerce remained questionable, that with civilization seemed to become stronger. Indeed, that word, symbolizing the “advanced” culture of the West, became repeated in document after document as the main raison d’être of conquest. It was a formula on which Christians, merchants, and statesmen could agree. Yet over time, a specifically Christian meaning seemed to diminish as references to it became fewer and far between, though not completely absent. For example, in the General Act of the Berlin Conference on West Africa (1885), where the European powers gave themselves permission to establish protectorates without consulting Africans, the signatories agreed, “without distinction of creed or nation, [to] protect and favour all religious, scientific or charitable institutions … which aim at instructing the natives and bringing home to them the blessings of civilization,” although Christian missionaries were singled out for protection (https://loveman.sdsu.edu/docs/1885GeneralActBerlinConference.pdf, accessed 7/13/2022). In addition, ideas of civilization became increasingly colored by notions of race that were prevalent at the time. Kipling’s popular poem “The White Man’s Burden” does not mention Christianity. While most missionaries held to the belief that all souls were ultimately redeemable by accepting Jesus, regardless of their genetic makeup, many were persuaded that this would take longer for Africans than previously thought. The changes that enabled both missionary and colonial penetration into Africa can be summed up as the impact of the Industrial Revolution that drastically widened the gap in wealth between Western Europe and Africa (Burbank and Cooper 2010, p. 287). Technological changes impacted Africa and its relationship to Europe directly as well. Steamship travel accelerated communication, as did the opening of the Suez Canal. Railroads opened up the interior of the continent in many places, and advances in medicine, such as treatment for malaria, enabled Europeans to survive there as they had not been able to do before. Changes in firearm design, such as the breech-loading rifle and later the Maxim automatic gun, gave Europeans a virtually unbeatable advantage in war. Whereas previously European traders with Africa had been mostly confined to

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the coast, where they had to negotiate with African merchants, now they were in a position to impose their will by force. The psychological result of these changes was to instill in the Europeans a tremendous feeling of overconfidence, a sense of limitlessness in what they could achieve. This became evident in a number of ways, perhaps foremost in fantasies of economic development. True, Africa could generate great wealth in certain cases, such as gold and diamonds in South Africa or ivory and rubber in the Congo. But these were outnumbered by the “totally mythical El Dorados in tropical Africa” (Sanderson 1985, p.  101), schemes that bore little or no relation to actual economic activity.1 There were grand schemes of transcontinental railroads, the British Cape to Cairo and the French Trans-Saharan, or the artificial creation of an inland sea in the Sahara south of Algeria and Tunisia (Murphy 1968, p. 70). Another expression of the same impulse was the drive for territorial aggrandizement, “not driven by a specific appetite for a specific country but conceived as an endless process in which every country would serve as stepping-stone for further expansion” (Arendt 1958, p. 215). The exemplars of this drive were the restless explorer/adventurers after Livingstone who actually accomplished the initial colonizations in advance of the states that eventually claimed them. The cases of Cecil Rhodes in Britain (1853–1902) and Carl Peters in Germany (1856–1918) might serve as examples. Although both were sons of clergymen, one searches in their biographies in vain for signs of religious motivation, although both were willing to support missionaries when it suited their expansionist purposes. The young Rhodes wrote a “Confession of Faith” in which he outlined a vision for the re-unification of England and America under a secret society with the object of “furtherance of the British Empire and the bringing of the whole uncivilized world under British rule.” Moreover, “since we are the finest race in the world … the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race” (Rotberg 1988, p. 100). Both Rhodes and Peters envisaged vast colonial empires, stretching from the Cape to Cairo in one case and from the Zambesi River to the Nile in the other. Both willingly resorted to armed force to achieve their ends, although Peters gloried in it to a greater extent than Rhodes. One of Peters’s favorite sayings was, “Haven’t you shot a negro yet!?” (Perras 2004, p. 118). Peters’s personal behavior turned into a sexual scandal in the mid-1890s that ended his career as an official. The category of boundless adventurer also applies to King Leopold II of Belgium, although he never set foot in African territory. In his twenties he had already developed an appetite for colonies and searched the world for suitable opportunities, at one point even trying to buy the Philippines from Spain (Hochschild 1998, pp. 41–42). His early memos and letters reveal an overriding interest in profit. But as he realized that Belgium would not automatically be accepted as a colonial power, and also that Belgian politicians had little interest in colonies, he soon learned to mask his motives in the language of humanitarianism and philanthropy, a skill that he developed to exquisite perfection. “To open to civilization the only part of our globe which it has not yet

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penetrated, to pierce the darkness which hangs over entire peoples is, I dare say, a crusade worthy of this century of progress,” he wrote (Hochschild 1998, p. 44). His vehicles for successfully persuading the powers to accept this new player were international conferences and diplomacy—and cultivation of missionaries, both Catholic and Protestant. He was also skilled in ensuring that his new colony in the Congo would be under his personal control rather than the Belgian state, eventually with the name “Congo Free State.” While claiming to support free trade, denouncing the slave trade, and supporting Christian missionaries, his practices did just the opposite. His mercenary army, the Force Publique, growing to 19,000 in the course of his reign, was often recruited by force. Whippings were common practice, and when the demand for rubber for bicycle tires arose in the 1890s, the Force initiated a “rubber terror,” setting quotas for rubber delivery and cutting off the right hands of those who failed to meet them. The individual who is commonly thought to have acquired the territory of the Congo for Leopold by signing treaties with local chiefs was Henry Morton Stanley, undoubtedly the most famous adventurer-explorer after Livingstone. However, a 2007 biography by Tim Jeal, based on Stanley’s previously unavailable correspondence, has largely rehabilitated his reputation, including a genuine respect for Africans. Indeed, Stanley constituted an exception to the pattern of indifference to Christianity. Although as a young man he poked fun at the organized church, his attitude changed as he came to know and respect men who were devout Christians, not least Livingstone himself. A similar sense of mission led him to want to open up the Congo River to trade as a way of beating back slavery, and in 1878 he accepted Leopold’s offer to do this. Like so many others, Stanley was persuaded by Leopold’s smooth talk. But he refused to go as far as Leopold wanted, namely to have the local rulers cede authority to the Congo Free State. As a result, Stanley found himself bypassed by others who were willing to do Leopold’s bidding (Jeal 2007, pp.  280–88). While revered as a fearless explorer, Stanley’s reputation was further sullied by a subsequent expedition through central Africa. The route was extremely hazardous, and Stanley’s men had to battle disease, starvation, desertion, rebellion, and hostile warriors, which led some of them to commit atrocities. The stories that circulated from this expedition prevented him from being buried in Westminster Abbey next to Livingstone, as was his wish. In any event, the mentality of boundless confidence soon emboldened the European powers to challenge the paramount position of the one country that dominated imperialism at the time, namely Great Britain. This gave rise to the multiple national rivalries for colonies in Africa which, combined with Leopold’s jockeying for recognition of his Congo Free State, precipitated the great scramble. The tipping point came in 1882, when Britain occupied Egypt out of concern for control of the Suez Canal.2 This aroused the opposition not only of the French, who had been England’s traditional imperial rival, but also of the Germans. At the same time, the explorer Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza was making claims and signing a treaty for France on the north bank of the Congo

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River, impinging on Leopold’s plans. This further aroused the attention of Portugal, who had claims on the mouth of the river. The British signed an agreement recognizing Portugal’s claims, which the Germans refused to acknowledge. This tangle led to the international Berlin Congo Conference of 1884–1885. Bismarck’s attitude toward Africa may be gauged by a conversation he had with an explorer in 1888, “Your map of Africa is very nice, but my map of Africa is in Europe. Here is Russia, here is France, and we are in the centre; that’s my map of Africa” (quoted in Baumgart 1982, p. 152). The Berlin Conference did not actually partition sub-Saharan Africa, but opened the door for numerous bilateral agreements that did so. One document collection lists 93 separate agreements among Britain, France, Germany, and Portugal between 1869 and 1908 (Baumgart 1982, p. 36). Such agreements had the result of drawing lines on a map. The actual control of these regions that followed—one historian calls it a second partition—was much uglier, involving resistance, military force, forced labor, taxes, and deadly epidemics (Lonsdale 1985, p. 682). What role did European Christianity play in this process? One needs to look at each colonial power to answer. Britain remained the most widespread colonial power despite the challenges, and one sees its different policies and emphases in West, South, and East Africa, respectively. On the west coast, the aforementioned spread of African Christianity had produced a generation of acculturated Christian Africans (“black Englishmen”). The change that occurred in British attitudes may be seen in the following contrast, “A traveller to the British settlements on the West Coast of Africa in about 1870 might have transacted his business with the Government almost entirely with African senior officials … [who] could all have been black. Thirty years later all would probably have been white” (Symonds 1966, p. 119). The most visible symbol of this shift was the humiliation of Anglican Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther, a Yoruba who had been enslaved and then liberated by the British, educated in Sierra Leone, who became a missionary in what is today Nigeria, but increasingly targeted for poor administration by a new generation of missionaries who had likewise been infected with the mentality of boundless expectations. Thus in the words of one of them, “[T]he pastors … must be changed, the message preached must be changed, the time, mode and place of worship must be changed, the school children must be changed, and the course in the school must be changed” (Lindenfeld 2021, p. 120). Crowther resigned his post in 1890. Around the turn of the century, friction between French and British forces along the Niger River led the British to penetrate further north into Muslim territory, today northern Nigeria. The commander in charge, Capt. Frederick Lugard, found allies among the Muslim elites who were fighting their own rebels. On this basis Lugard became identified with the principle of “indirect rule” that came to characterize British imperial policy in general. In a memoir on colonial rule published in 1921, Lugard, although willing to work with

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missionaries, found Islam to be better suited to the African mentality than Christianity. In his words (Lugard 1965): Islam as a militant creed which teaches contempt for those who are not its votaries, panders to the weakness of the African character—self-conceit and vanity. … Christianity, on the other hand, has not proved so powerful an influence. … Its more abstruse tenets, its stricter code of sexual morality, its exaltation of peace and humility, its recognition of brotherhood with the slave, the captive, and the criminal, do not altogether appeal to the temperament of the negro. (pp. 77–78)

Politically, South Africa before the scramble was a mosaic of British colonies, Boer republics, and independent kingdoms. Its temperate climate that favored herding and agriculture also offered attractive opportunities for Christian missions: an 1884 account lists no less than 385 mission stations (Elphick 2012, p. 17). But the British and the Boers had radically different notions of what it meant to be a Christian. The former generally embraced a liberal, inclusive view, while the latter believed that God had developed specific covenants with specific nations according to their rank. For the most part, colonization and missionization proceeded independently, with missionaries successfully exerting political influence on only a few occasions.3 The driving force of colonization was clearly the discovery of diamonds in 1867 and then gold in 1886, which turned South Africa from a predominately agricultural economy to an industrial one, based on mining. British trade from South Africa soon dwarfed that coming from West Africa. The pressures generated by this shift—to move laborers from the farms to the mining centers—led the British to try to unify the territory, unsuccessfully in 1877, successfully between 1899 and 1902 via an extended and ugly war. The Union of South Africa that followed in 1910 brought reconciliation between the British and the Boers, but at the expense of the blacks, that eventually culminated in apartheid. The period between these two attempts witnessed the scramble, to the northeast with Rhodes being the principal actor, and to the west, where the British now faced a German colony. Regardless of who was in charge, the means were often the same. Shula Marks notes, “[A]ttempts to raise tax were frequently accompanied by hut-burning, flogging and the confiscation of crops and cattle for non-compliance” (Marks 1985, p. 426). She also notes that missionaries did serve a mediating function, “encouraging individualism, wage labour and commodity production and fostering the growth of a class of educated Christian Africans, who were to become the most effective critics of colonialism” (Marks 1985, p. 423). Yet over time this ability to mediate was eroded by the increasing divisions that led to apartheid. East Africa, in particular Buganda, a prosperous kingdom on the shores of Lake Victoria, presented yet another scenario, one where missionary interests did significantly affect the colonial situation, an exception to the general rule. British interest in this region was awakened by the Suez Canal that gave shipping access to the area. There they found the Muslim Swahili merchants who

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engaged in slave trading, but managed to exert their influence on the Sultan of Zanzibar to ban it. A shipping magnate and devout Christian, Edward McKinnon, developed a scheme to penetrate the interior. Stanley played a role as well, persuading the ruler of Buganda to accept Christian missionaries alongside his Muslim advisers. Stanley then wrote a letter to the London Daily Telegraph urging public support and raised £24,000 within a few weeks. It was not long before other missionaries arrived, namely Catholics, which opened up a rivalry. Each became aligned with a different faction in a decade of civil warfare in the 1890s, a situation eventually resolved by Lugard (before he was posted to Nigeria), who was ruthless in his attacks on the Catholics but eventually provided a province where they could practice. Each was able to take root during the period and set the stage for mass conversions in the 1890s, while missionaries from each side exerted pressure on the British government urging a protectorate, which was proclaimed in 1894.4 In France, colonial policy vis-à-vis Christianity was conditioned by two basic factors. First, a strong anti-clerical tradition dating back to the French Revolution. This ebbed and flowed during the course of subsequent French history but was especially strong during the Third Republic, the government at the time of the scramble. For them, the secular ideals of 1789 represented the apex of civilization. Thus Jules Ferry, the politician who promoted colonization more than anyone else, also expelled the Jesuits from France and removed religious workers from public schools (Daughton 2006, p.  9). At the same time, however, many French Catholics became all the more dedicated in their faith, and this found expression in the missionary movement. Of the approximately 14,000 priests working outside Europe, some two-thirds were French. Add to that the many more laypersons who worked abroad for the church (Daughton 2006, p. 11). In fact, the colonialists found themselves depending on the missionaries for services such as education: “anti-clericalism is not an item for export” was the common phrase. The relationship could not be taken for granted, however: the Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s inflamed opinion on either side, and in 1905 a law of “separation” of church and state was passed, followed by a confiscation of much church property in 1908. Missionaries in the colonies were deprived of state assistance. The second factor was that France was still smarting from her defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871. This led to intense but contradictory swings in public opinion. On the one hand there was a desire for revanche, to win back the territories she had lost to Germany. On the other was the desire to regain greatness through colonization, which Bismarck was only too happy to promote. Thus the French followed with avidity the exploits of de Brazza and his rivalry with Stanley, which led to the government ratifying an ill-­ considered treaty with an African king in 1882, resulting in the colony of French Congo. Three years later, however, the anti-colonialists were denouncing Ferry as a traitor for having suffered a defeat in Indochina. Given these swings, colonial initiatives gravitated to the military. This consisted of a series of expeditions up the Senegal River to connect with the Niger and which

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eventually succeeded in linking to the Congo colony. These involved fighting several powerful Muslim states, but once achieved, the French took the position of not trying to foment rebellion by attacking Islam. French Congo included a vast tropical forest, rich in rubber, and the conditions of its extraction generated abuses similar to those in Leopold’s Congo—to the chagrin of Brazza himself. The most complicated set of confrontations between colonizers and missionaries occurred on the island of Madagascar. This was inhabited by a variety of ethnic groups which had come under the control of the Merina people who occupied the high tablelands at the center. The London Missionary Society had been active there and managed to convert the ruling family by 1864. The French, jealous of the British, started a campaign which turned into a full-scale invasion in 1895. While they subdued the Merina at great cost, they were unable to control the multiple ethnic groups, until an experienced colonial soldier and administrator, Joseph Gallieni, stepped in. He was able to institute a policy giving the different groups their own rulers, not unlike Lugard’s principle of indirect rule. But his difficulties remained with the British Protestants. The French distrusted them because they were British. Gallieni’s successor imposed a number of restrictions on the missionaries, who complained to London. The affair was eventually resolved by the French foreign office and had the effect of clarifying the status of missionary organizations, both Protestant and Catholic, in the colony. National rivalries were also paramount in Germany’s decision to acquire African colonies. Although Bismarck had originally been opposed to them, he changed his mind in response to pressure from merchant interests and acquired four within the space of a year: Southwest Africa, East Africa (Tanganyika), Togo, and Cameroon. Missionary interests played a secondary role in the acquisition of the first two, but were important in the last two (Smith 1978, pp. 27, 70, 82). German missions had been in the southwest since the 1840s and unsuccessfully petitioned for German protection in the 1870s; but only when the Bremen merchant Lüderitz made the same request in 1884 did Bismarck respond. Another important factor in the German case was the perception of overpopulation in Germany that increased the pressure for settler colonies. Southwest Africa was the leading recipient, and the more settlers arrived, the more the missionary influence declined. The depletion of native land led to a revolt of the Herero in 1904–1905, and the German response amounted to a genocide. German policies in East Africa also provoked two rebellions, one in 1888 and one in 1905, also put down with great brutality. Missionaries were active there as well, as was Protestant-Catholic rivalry. Moreover, missionaries had to contend with the government’s willingness to work with Muslim leaders. Christians succeeded in baptizing 80,598 Africans, compared to between 300 and 500,000 Muslims (Iliffe 1979, pp. 215, 230). Christianity did enter into German politics, however, in the form of the Catholic Center Party. This had been formed as a result of Bismarck’s campaign against the Vatican—the so-called Kulturkampf—in the 1870s. The

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party proved to be a defender of Catholic missionaries in the colonies and took up the anti-slavery crusade in the Reichstag. Since their votes were needed for Bismarck’s parliamentary majority, they got their way (Spellmeyer 1931, pp. 28–41). Although Portugal had a long history of church-state cooperation, neglect of her African colonies for over 200 years meant a minimal missionary presence there. She was re-awakened from this slumber by several trends in the nineteenth century: (1) the persistence of slavery and the international (mainly British) condemnation thereof. The Portuguese were not immune to this criticism and banned it on paper in 1858, but enforcement proved difficult, especially in East Africa, as exemplified by Livingstone’s thundering critique of Mozambique society in 1865 that stimulated an influx of Protestant missionaries from abroad. The Portuguese quickly learned to retain servitude under other names, such as forced “contract” labor, as in this 1899 statement, “the state … should have no scruples in … forcing these rude Negros in Africa … to acquire through work the happiest means of existence, to civilize themselves through work (italics in original)” (Duffy 1959, p.  155). (2) Portugal was forced out of her isolation by the great scramble itself. Her claims on the mouth of the Congo River and in South Africa were challenged; in the latter case, her ambitions to link her colonies of Angola and Mozambique ran head-on into Rhodes’s north-south designs, leading to an armed clash in what is today Malawi. The British issued an ultimatum, and Portugal backed down. In 1910 Portugal became a republic and enacted legislation separating church and state, following the French example. This did not last long, however, and when Antonio Salazar took power in 1931 he re-instituted the connection, proclaiming “one State, one Race, one Faith, and one Civilization,”  that applied both to the colonies and to Portugal itself (Duffy, 1959, p. 272). The Portuguese did hold out the possibility of cultural assimilation for the Africans, although limited to the very few. To qualify,the African had to amass sufficient wealth, master the Portuguese language and convert to Christianity (Albertini, 1976, p. 336). In Belgium, Leopold turned over his personal colony to the Belgian government in 1908. The reason was the increasing tide of humanitarian outrage at his policies that had been growing since 1903. The lead instigator was Edward Morel, a clerk-turned-whistleblower of the steamship company that handled Leopold’s business. Morel turned to journalism and publicized Leopold’s atrocities far and wide, enlisting the aid of missionary societies that had heretofore been largely quiet. The Protestant missions took the lead, which led Leopold to favor the Catholics, who were largely Belgian. The Catholics were reluctant to criticize the king, and in 1906 a concordat was signed between the Congo and the Vatican. But the reports on abuse could not be stopped, and when Leopold’s own investigating commission confirmed Morel’s reports, the king had little choice. But the Protestant-Catholic rivalry that he had sown continued to plague Belgian colonial policy in the years following (Markowitz 1973, p. 10). * * *

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The decade that led up to the First World War was rather different from the years that had preceded it as far as colonized Africa was concerned. After 1902, the partition of Africa into colonies was complete, except for Ethiopia and Liberia, and most of the resistance had been put down following the crushing of the Herero and Maji Maji revolts in 1904–1905. The emphasis thus shifted to administering the territories previously acquired, and this led in many cases to a greater degree of cooperation between colonial offices and missionary organizations. The British relied on missionaries to provide education and medical services, in no small part because their taxpayers did not want to shoulder the financial burdens of administration. In Germany, following the criticisms of the Peters scandal and the atrocities perpetrated on the Herero, the colonial office shifted to promoting economic growth and reform that likewise coopted missionary organizations. Moreover, Morel’s journalistic exposé of Leopold’s atrocities helped launch a movement toward international humanitarian organizations. In this way, missionary and colonial interests may be said to have drawn closer together in the years preceding the First World War. The impact of these changes was to nudge the missionary organizations to emphasize “secular” activities such as medicine and, most importantly, education. This did not always happen easily, as missionaries often continued to view such activities as a means to the end of evangelization. But colonization had its own imperatives. According to Hastings, Africans were suddenly precipitated into a new kind of economy, in which they were forced to earn in order to pay tax and, thereby forced too to seek employment in plantation, mine, or government service…. Everything profitable or powerful seemed now to require literacy…[and] the only people to offer a way to literacy were missionaries…. The need to read and write in the colonial order quickly transformed the whole relationship between mission and society. (Hastings 1994, p. 403)

In German East Africa, education was made compulsory where it was available in 1910 (Beidelman 1982, p. 78). The compulsive aspect of such changes should not, however, lead one to underestimate the genuine thirst for literacy on the part of Africans. The prestige of literacy transferred to Christianity itself, and missionaries found that the number of their converts increased, despite the secularizing trend. This new modus vivendi was not, however, free of problems. Prominent among them was the denominational pluralism of Christianity itself. True, Protestant missions were learning to cooperate with one another, as evident in the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in 1910. In Africa, Protestants were developing “comity” arrangements not to impinge on each other’s territory. Nevertheless, the administrative problems stemming from diverse missions in a given region were clearly a source of frustration for officials. And such tensions were mild compared to the antipathy, even hatred, between Protestants and Catholics, which continued undiminished until the First World War. Competition in setting up schools was intense, in one case leading Protestants to dismantle Catholic structures (Shorter 2006, p. 206).

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Such competition, however, also had its advantages, in forcing each side to explain its position and giving Africans a choice. The organizational unity of the Catholics gave them a numerical advantage: Hastings estimates there were some 4000 Protestant and 6000 Catholic missionaries in Africa in 1910 (Hastings 1994, p. 419). Another source of tension was the widespread presence of Islam. Lugard was not alone in his favorable estimate of its suitability for the African people. In areas such as northern Nigeria and French West Africa, where Islam was firmly established, colonizers did not want to risk unrest by bringing Christian missionaries in. And in German East Africa, they preferred to work with the coastal Muslims who spoke Swahili rather than the inland tribes with their multiple languages. By 1911 the government was operating 83 Swahili schools, making it the lingua franca, much to the displeasure of the Christians who preferred the vernacular. By 1913, Christians succeeded in baptizing 80,598 Africans, compared to 300–500,000 Muslims. (Iliffe 1979, pp. 209, 215, 230). The French trajectory in the years before 1914 was in many ways the inverse of the British and the German. Public opinion was turning against the colonial project, seeing it as too hasty, ambitious, and expensive. The colonizers had begun by holding to the ideals of 1789 as the proper model for all peoples, regardless of culture. The naivete of this notion had become evident by 1905, and the result was indifference and lethargy in administration (Roberts 1963, pp. 25–31). Add to this the law of separation of church and state of 1905 that deprived many missionaries of their resources. In West Africa, educational development was set back 20 years (Shorter 2006, p. 209). French missionaries continued their work independent of the state. Meanwhile, however, the European rivalries that had given rise to the partition of Africa did not die down once that partition was complete; rather they found outlets closer to Europe itself, as in the Mediterranean. The result was the First World War.

Notes 1. The economic theory of imperialism, that it was caused by pressure of finance capital seeking new investments—the so-called Hobson-Lenin thesis—has been decisively refuted by empirical research. See, for example, Baumgart (1982, chap. iv). 2. A more complete explanation, involving management of Egyptian indebtedness, is given by Cain and Hopkins (1993, pp. 362–69). 3. For a detailed discussion of two of these, namely Bechuanaland among the Tswana people and Nyasaland (Malawi) among the Yao and the Tonga, see Stanley (1990, pp. 116–127), and the mixed results in both. 4. For treatment of pressure from the Protestant side, see Stanley (1990, pp. 127–132); from the Catholic side, Shorter (2006, pp. 8–14). For missionary activity in Kenya, see Strayer (1978).

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Bibliography Albertini, Rudolf v. 1976. Europäische Kolonialherrschaft 1880–1940. Zürich: Atlantis. Arendt, Hannah, 1958. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Cleveland: World Publishing Company. Baumgart, Winfried. 1982. Imperialism. The Idea and Reality of British and French Colonial Expansion, 1880–1914. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Beidelman, T. O. 1982. Colonial Evangelism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Burbank, Jane and Frederick Cooper. 2010. Empires in World History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cain, P.J. and A.G.  Hopkins. 1993. British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion 1688–1914. London: Longman. Daughton, J.P. 2006. Empire Divided: Religion, Republicanism, and the Making of French Colonialism 1880–1914. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Duffy, James. 1959. Portuguese Africa. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Elphick, Richard. 2012. The Equality of Believers. Protestant Missionaries and Racial Politics of South Africa. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Hastings, Adrian. 1994. The Church in Africa 1450–1950. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hochschild, Adam. 1998. King Leopold’s Ghost. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Iliffe, John. 1979. A Modern History of Tanganyika. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jeal, Tim. 2007. Stanley. The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer. New Haven: Yale University Press. Lindenfeld, David. 2021. World Christianity and Indigenous Experience. A Global History, 1500–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lonsdale, John. 1985. “The European Scramble and Conquest in African History.” In The Cambridge History of Africa, Volume 6, edited by J.D. Fage and Roland Oliver, 680-766. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lugard, Lord [Frederick]. 1965 [1922]. The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa. Hamden, Conn: Archon Books. Markowitz, Marvin D. 1973. Cross and Sword. The Political Role of Christian Missions in the Belgian Congo, 1908–1960. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press. Marks, Shula. 1985. “Southern and Central Africa, 1886–1910.” In The Cambridge History of Africa, Volume 6, edited by J.D.  Fage and Roland Oliver, 422-492. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCaskie, T.C. 1999. “Cultural Encounters: Britain and Africa in the Nineteenth Century.” In The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume III, The Nineteenth Century. Edited by Andrew Porter, 644-689. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Murphy, Agnes. 1968 [1948]. The Ideology of French Imperialism 1871–1881. New York: Howard Fertig. Perras, Arne. 2004. Carl Peters and German Imperialism 1856–1918. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Porter, Andrew. 2004. Religion versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Roberts, Stephen H. 1963 [1929]. The History of French Colonial Policy 1870–1925. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books. Robinson, Ronald and John Gallagher. 1961. Africa and the Victorians. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

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Rotberg, Robert I. 1988. The Founder. Cecil Rhodes and the Pursuit of Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sanderson, G.N. 1985. “The European Partition of Africa: Origins and Dynamics.” In The Cambridge History of Africa, Volume 6, edited by J.D. Fage and Roland Oliver, 96-158. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shorter, Aylward. 2006. Cross & Flag in Africa. The “White Fathers” during the Colonial Scramble (1892–1914). Maryknoll: Orbis Books. Smith, Woodruff D. 1978. The German Colonial Empire. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Spellmeyer, Hans. 1931. Deutsche Kolonialpolitik im Reichstag. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer. Stanley, Brian. 1990. The Bible and the Flag. Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Leicester: Apollos. Strayer, Robert W. 1978. The Making of Mission Communities in East Africa. Anglicans and Africans in Colonial Kenya, 1975–1935. London: Heinemann. Symonds, Richard. 1966. The British and Their Successors. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

CHAPTER 20

New World Ethiopianism and the Evangelization of Africa Kimberly Hill

Introduction The concept of “Ethiopianism” started with attempts to describe group identity. It developed in the Americas as an ideology endorsing transnational solidarity and transformation. The historian Andrew Barnes defines Ethiopianism as “a line of thinking that featured peoples of African descent taking the lead in the Christian evangelization of Africa.”1 These Ethiopianist leaders found strength in their ancestry while uniting around a shared identity with western roots. They expected to inspire beneficial changes on the African continent through religious, political, economic, literary, academic, and religious pursuits that continued into the early twentieth century. But these pursuits did not have to take place abroad, nor did they require Ethiopianists to adopt African lifestyles. Ethiopianism incorporated many of the ideals of the broader nineteenth-­ century “civilizing impulse.”2 Yet Ethiopianism specifically invited leaders to draw skills and inspiration from modern developments in the United States or Europe before recreating or adapting those developments in Africa. Roots of American Ethiopianism can be traced through the expansion of the African Methodist Episcopal and AME Zion denominations in the early 1800s. These denominations endorsed organizational separatism by appointing

K. Hill (*) History and Philosophy Program, Bass School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. E. Barnes, T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48270-0_20

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pastors and bishops of African descent who founded additional churches in the United States, the Caribbean, and West Africa. The growth of the AME denomination sparked the popularity of Ethiopianism in South Africa. The theologian Bengt Sundkler introduced the term to describe church-centered movements that chose independence from western missions in colonial South Africa during the early twentieth century.3 In that context, a church could embrace the movement without any specific connection to the nation of Ethiopia. Rather, an Ethiopian church enhanced the identity of its African members by setting them apart from non-African authority. People of different tribes could find a unifying identity in the contrast between their group and those established by missionary sending agencies. American Ethiopianism also included activities that were not based within one specific group or activity. The concept implied group solidarity in the form of widespread public empathy with freedom struggles in Haiti and Ethiopia. In other cases, it inspired divisiveness through discourse about the relative civility of various groups of African descent. And American Ethiopianism sometimes promoted economic policy shifts that combined vocational skills-building with European colonialist agendas. This range of pursuits hints at the diversity of interests and professions among historic leaders who became associated with Ethiopianism. Various expressions of Ethiopianism shared an emphasis on “evangelization” in the sense of expecting wide-scale transformation among Africans on the continent. It often meant endorsing and pursuing trans-Atlantic connections bridging the African diaspora. Some of these connections were religious exclusively, while others focused on business and political implications. Even before the term became prominent, eighteenth-century African American leaders endorsed migration to the continent as a missionary objective. Late nineteenth-­century Protestant civilizing missions provided a means for a relatively small number of Americans of African descent to travel to the continent as ministers and missionaries. Ethiopianism strategies could include visions of African redemption based on individual conversions and eventual territorial autonomy or institution building. The term became associated closely with nationalist rhetoric by the 1920s as the expansion of European imperialism raised questions about the long-term extent of western influence on the continent. Leading voices in American Ethiopianism claimed to recognize and value their African heritage, yet fissures in the movement became evident through varying attitudes about the lifestyles and beliefs of Africans living during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ethiopianism prompted enthusiasm for African ancestry without inspiring widespread agreement about the roles of contemporary Africans in evangelism and other reform efforts. The lack of clarity regarding Africans’ roles in the movement complicated the legacies of American Ethiopianism, particularly since the rise of World Christianity and African Initiated Churches during the late twentieth century.

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Historical Context This essay concentrates on developments in American Ethiopianism from the 1880s through the 1920s. This time span marked the height of the Protestant foreign missions’ movement in the United States. Larger numbers of Americans traveled abroad as missionaries, and major African American denominations established their first mission stations and local congregations on the African continent. Four of the most widely known black missionaries started working overseas during this period. Amanda Berry Smith, a Methodist evangelist from Pennsylvania, served as a preacher and teacher in Liberia during the 1880s. Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, a former Georgia state legislator, traveled to Africa four times by 1899 with the goal of expanding the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME). William Henry Sheppard of Virginia co-founded and managed two stations for the American Presbyterian Congo Mission between 1891 and 1909. And James E.K. Aggrey of Anomabo, Ghana (formerly the Gold Coast) partnered with an educational philanthropy foundation called Phelps Stokes and lectured in ten African countries between 1920 and 1921.4 Each minister’s style represented an aspect of American Ethiopianism that is elaborated in the following pages. This time span from 1880 through the 1920s also fostered a notable shift in political and intellectual discourse about foreign affairs and the African continent. Both Sierra Leone and Liberia had expanded from their origins as British and American sanctuaries for formerly enslaved people. The international commercial interests fostered by these emigrants and their descendants helped to spark European competition for raw materials exports. The deadly consequences of maintaining the rubber trade from the Congo Free State sparked the most notorious trade scandal of the era. Some of the most notable proponents of Ethiopianism during this era anticipated western intervention in the development of the African continent and proposed strategies for Africans to adjust to these interventions. In particular, Edward Wilmot Blyden and Alexander Crummell intended for people of African descent to participate in political and social development as influential leaders rather than being relegated to servitude. Prospects for black leadership were complicated by the expansion of the American Jim Crow system around the turn of the twentieth century. The rise of the Ku Klux Klan and the proliferation of lynching endangered historically black colleges, segregated public schools, and the educators who served them. Bishop Turner and other African American politicians lost their positions without due process when states refused to allow nonwhite officials to serve their full terms. Black missionaries serving within segregated white denominations faced racial discrimination in the appointment process as well as among their missions colleagues. Ministers working for the African Methodist Episcopal Church and other black denominations also faced hindrances in the form of race-based travel restrictions and surveillance by European colonial authorities. Other signs of Jim Crow life (such as state transportation segregation laws,

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medical and educational underfunding, and residential segregation) complicated black missionaries’ efforts to maintain a healthy quality of life when they visited the United States during furloughs. According to the historian Sylvia M. Jacobs, only about 600 African Americans traveled abroad as missionaries before 1980.5 Despite their relatively small numbers, these leaders were celebrated during the Jim Crow era for representing a professional career option that could place them in a less restrictive political environment. The expansion of European empires coincided with a dramatic increase in American immigration rates, adding further ethnic diversity to the nation’s black population. Before the passage of the restrictive Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, hundreds of thousands of people from the Caribbean and Latin America entered the United States. Many of them settled in New York or other major port cities where they proved instrumental to the labor movement, to cultural innovation, and to socialist activism. The emerging study of the African Diaspora benefitted from the personal library collection of Puerto Rican immigrant Arturo Schomburg. Latin American musicians helped to popularize Afro-Cuban jazz in American clubs. Meanwhile, industrial workers from the Caribbean led chapters of factory unions like the Industrial Workers of the World with explicit criticisms of capitalism. These immigrants brought recent awareness of British, French, and Spanish colonial control that fed into globalized interpretations of anti-black prejudice and white supremacy. The most famous Jamaican immigrants of the era were Marcus Garvey and Amy Ashwood Garvey. Their Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) encouraged trans-Atlantic travel, economic nationalism, and cultural solidarity for people of African descent. UNIA members drew international attention after 1919 when the Garveys moved to New York City. Copies of the UNIA newsletter circulated on the African continent, and reports of its Black Star Line steamship inspired conjecture about potential mass uprisings led by African American travelers to western or central Africa.6 The UNIA influenced African evangelization efforts through its success popularizing African identity in the United States, and the colonial backlash against anyone suspected of UNIA affiliation also imposed consequences for those who embraced Ethiopianism during the early twentieth century. By 1920, the first two meetings of the Pan-African Congress ushered in a new phase of Ethiopianism. The 1900 and 1919 sessions took place in Europe with attendees who represented African nations, the West Indies, and the United States. Though the publications from these sessions did not exert immediate influence on western colonial policies, the delegates’ statements signaled goals that dominated Pan-Africanist activism until World War II. The early Pan-African Congresses encouraged education, human rights reform, and recognition of independent nations with African or African American leadership. They reinforced a contemporary tendency to criticize certain aspects of European imperialism without endorsing full self-determination for colonized parts of the African continent.7 Later Congress meetings would feature more explicit declarations of African nationalism.

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Ethiopianism and Identity Formation By the late nineteenth century, proponents of Ethiopianism had interpreted its scriptural basis with broad racial and ethnic implications. The term referenced the verse “Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God” and implied its application beyond that specific nation.8 The limitations on African and African American autonomy that accompanied the expansion of colonialism and Jim Crow helped to cement the ideological appeal of Ethiopianism. For black professionals navigating official and unofficial race-based discrimination, travel outside of Jim Crow America provided liberatory potential. The goals of achieving self-determination, professionalism, and belonging fed into the concept of Ethiopianism. Some African Americans advanced those goals by promoting a symbolic type of community formation designed to embody unfulfilled aspirations. The anthropologist Elliott P.  Skinner described the community formation process as “a physical or spiritual return to their ancestral lands” motivated by “the desire to achieve true human dignity.”9 This process entailed adopting and proselytizing an African collective identity that did not require literal residence on the continent. The promotion of Ethiopianism as a unique identity was an influential concept that motivated initiatives on the African continent while also extending beyond it. The intellectual ramifications of Ethiopianism were explored by Edward Wilmot Blyden and Alexander Crummell through their approaches to promoting African identity formation. Both ministers migrated to Liberia during the mid-nineteenth century and analyzed the concept of evangelization in African contexts. They served as Liberia College faculty together during the 1860s after segregated United States-based academic institutions denied them admittance. Statements and publications by Blyden and Crummell revealed diverging opinions about which cultural and religious traits people of African descent should express. Yet they shared mutual interests in shaping environments where academia and political leadership could remain free of racial restrictions. Edward Wilmot Blyden’s reputation as “the father of Pan-Africanism” grew through decades of public service in Liberia and comparative study of religions.10 Blyden argued that Liberia and other nations on the African continent had regional distinctions that shaped the interests and needs of their residents. As a classics professor and eventual President of Liberia College, he envisioned higher education as a means to fulfill and amplify those regional distinctions.11 He encouraged people of African descent from the United States and the Caribbean to bring skills and lessons that would befit ongoing developments within West Africa.12 The efforts of these migrants to address regional conditions through their international expertise would help them accomplish Ethiopianism. By the 1880s, Blyden stressed one key to that cultural exchange process: that Ethiopianism should require more than the one-sided delivery of Western principles and skills. He anticipated that Liberia and Sierra Leone would be

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influenced by European colonization and by the settlement of African American emigrants, but Blyden argued that the primary responsibility for the region should be granted to local Africans.13 Likewise, Blyden expected that the educational achievements at Liberia College would incorporate skills and cultural traits that were not yet prominent in the western hemisphere. The combination of West African, Caribbean, and US academic influences would give the college a unique institutional mandate; it could preserve and represent bodies of knowledge created by people of African descent.14 As noted by Shea William Bigsby in his literary analysis of Blyden’s speeches, the progression of European colonization complicated his vision of Ethiopianism through academia.15 By 1920, colonial governments on the African continent placed limitations on the leadership roles that people of African descent could pursue and monitored the communications of black travelers. Yet Blyden’s emphasis on African intellectualism distinct from western traditions meshed well with the goals of Alexander Crummell and inspired future Pan-Africanist leaders including W.E.B. Du Bois.16 Crummell interpreted some of the western interest in the African continent as a useful step toward the success of Ethiopianism. He emphasized the spiritual connotations of the concept by encouraging white Americans to support African Americans’ participation in African missions’ efforts.17 Any efforts that could help advance this goal fit within Crummell’s Ethiopianism ideal, even when those efforts did not take place within the African continent. Twenty-six years after leaving his Liberia College faculty position, Crummell co-founded the American Negro Academy to promote literary and academic excellence among the African American elite.18 This organization spurred creativity and collaboration while highlighting the leadership skills of its target population. While Alexander Crummell valued Ethiopianism for the Christian promise of “the regeneration of Africa,” he also argued that the pursuit of evangelization would necessitate recognition of African Americans’ capabilities. Crummell highlighted “Talented Tenth” intellectuals and hopeful emigrants to Liberia because he found their characteristics admirable for reasons beyond their effects on the African continent.19

Ethiopianism in Response to Imperialism Examples from the first decade of independent black church formation illustrate the range of how African Americans interpreted the political implications of Ethiopianism in the midst of European imperialism. The Ethiopian churches of South Africa began in 1892 when a Wesleyan preacher named Mangena Mokone objected to the mission church’s racial inequalities in pay and authority. Those inequalities reflected the structure of British control over the country and were reinforced by the colonial government’s reluctance concerning black leadership.20 The apostolic efforts of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner helped the Ethiopian church movement to flourish.21 After serving as the first African American chaplain for the US Army and being elected to the Georgia

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legislature, Turner had grown frustrated that professional leadership positions like his were so often thwarted during the Jim Crow era. Turner encouraged African Americans to emigrate as an alternative; he anticipated that they would establish and lead organizations in West Africa without interference from white authorities.22 In the 1890s, Turner traveled to South Africa with similar ambitions for a network of AME churches in the colony supervised by local African pastors. According to the historian J. Mutero Chirenje, Turner also endorsed Ethiopian churches because they symbolized rejection of racial stereotypes. Turner seemed to “well understand the courses of Ethiopianism” when he rebuked an American Christian magazine for accusing black church leaders and missionaries of “being devoid of Christian virtues.”23 His choice to ordain about 50 South African ministers indicated that Turner wanted to counteract assumptions of their inadequacy. The additional ministers also sustained the Ethiopian movement by serving the growing numbers of congregants seeking alternatives to white-led mission churches. Turner did not object to the independent organizing efforts of native South Africans.24 The British colonial government responded to the South African Ethiopian church movement by trying to isolate it. Officials monitored the congregations and introduced travel restrictions to reduce the number of African Americans who entered the country after 1905.25 These reactions acknowledged the political implications of Henry McNeal Turner’s ministry style. In an 1898 article for Voice of Missions (an AME magazine that he edited), Turner declared famously that “God is a Negro.” He wanted the declaration to promote “the study of such things as will dignify and make our race great.” And he argued that associations of whiteness with divinity were wrong because they legitimated racial hierarchies based on black laborers trying indefinitely “to please the whites.”26 By 1921, Britain and France passed measures to limit African American missionaries’ international travel out of concern that their evangelism would also question the legitimacy of colonial work requirements.27 The political backlash against black travelers assumed more uniformity of thought among them than was warranted. Henry McNeal Turner’s support for the commissioning of African pastors set him apart from the missionaries who prioritized western leadership and western norms in their African outreach. These priorities guided the founding of Sierra Leone in 1787 and the founding of Liberia in 1821. The British government and the American Colonization Society (ACS) recruited formerly enslaved people and impoverished free people of color to settle in these regions of West Africa. Their version of Ethiopianism included plans for preaching and education outreach to Africans in the region, but the plans would be conducted with western control and financial support. Goals for personal survival rather than evangelism dominated their interests for the first years of the settlement. Intermittent conflicts with surrounding African villages and with coastal slave traders reduced opportunities for consistent ministry. Nevertheless, the suffering of the settlers promoted early Ethiopianism by symbolizing a common cause against the slave trading

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economy as well as a potential model of a growing, ethnically diverse black community. Between 1880 and 1920, the two settlements became primary hubs for Protestant missions from black congregations in the United States. The goals of these early missions to West Africa set a model that informed later theories of racial uplift. Emigration plans that were once interpreted as efforts to control and reduce the free black population in the United States became strategies for expressing and sharing black freedom.28 As African American denominations commissioned ministers for service in Liberia, they supported arguments that Americans of African descent shared special skills and responsibilities that led them to work on the continent. An article written by Ida B. Wells represents this type of argument well. Published in the July 1892 edition of the AME Church Review, the article claims that the great need of Liberia is a strong, intelligent citizenship, to develop her resources and evolve a government which shall command the attention and respect of the civilized world. For any fraction of over eight millions of Afro-­ Americans to devote its talents to the work with measurable success would be an example and inspiration for [Afro-Americans] the world over.29

Wells focused on the international exchange of talents as part of American tradition dating back to the early Puritan settlers. Her perspective celebrated the economic and political influences that often accompanied African Americans’ evangelistic efforts on the African continent. Ethiopianism could contribute to the annals of human accomplishment if black travelers engaged in suitable preparation and investment strategies. The fame of Ida B. Wells as an anti-lynching activist and as a co-founder of the NAACP suggests the underlying connections between supporters of back-­ to-­Africa movements and critics of American racism. Such connections are also apparent in the biographies of certain prominent African American missionaries. The efforts of these missionaries to sustain overseas ministries proved significant for forging connections with Africans while also defying race-based limitations. A Methodist minister named Amanda Berry Smith earned recognition as a camp meetings preacher during the 1870s before relocating to Liberia for eight years. The title of Adrienne M. Israel’s study of Smith summarizes her surprising career trajectory; despite being born into slavery and mired in poverty for decades, she transformed “from washerwoman to evangelist” with national fame and international travel opportunities.30 Smith’s work in Liberia revolved around teaching children and leading evangelistic outreach to nearby African villagers. These missions’ activities supported Smith’s significance as a rare woman preacher who earned recognition and upward social mobility during the late nineteenth century. Part of Amanda Berry Smith’s public reputation was based on her popularity among white attendees of Methodist camp meetings. She preached about

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salvation through faith in Christ while incorporating subtle criticisms of racial discrimination. For her donors and supporters in the United States, Smith’s African outreach enhanced her image as a reliable commentator on American race relations. The autobiography that she published for her American donors included illustrations of her Liberian ministries that highlighted her status and leadership abilities. The illustrations sent these messages by highlighting the contrasts between Smith and her African audiences. Smith was depicted in a full-length, western-style dress and seated above the shirtless men and boys who attended her outdoor Sunday School. Other illustrations showed two local children under her care in elaborate western attire and posing for portraits.31 The historian Elisabeth Engel argues that AME missionary photography during the early 1900s “[drew] on colonial otherness and the refined look by which African Americans expressed their racial uplift since emancipation.”32 She attributed strategic messages to the setting and positioning of these photographs, some of which were intended to communicate “the need for Africans’ Christianization.”33 Similar messaging is evident in the illustrations for Amanda Berry Smith’s autobiography. African American missionaries invested in cameras and portraits to circulate depictions of themselves as authority figures who could be distinguished from local Africans, while staged photographs also suggested their ability to transform African Christians’ appearance.34 The outward change was meant to indicate permanent inward change. Perhaps because of similar reasoning, Amanda Berry Smith included a portrait of her adopted Liberian son Bob in an American-style sailor uniform before a passage about how God led her to take him in. Smith claims she heard the following response to her prayer that she didn’t have the means to support Bob: “Is not Ethiopia stretching out her hands to God? … Cannot you help a little?”35 The passage continues with Smith referring to Bob as a “naked heathen” before she makes his first pair of pants.36 Like most American missionaries during the late nineteenth century, Smith echoes terminology of cultural imperialism while promoting her African outreach efforts.37 The lingering question in the history of Ethiopianism was whether cultural imperialism would ever help secure a future for self-sufficient African societies.

Ethiopianism and Community Building During the 1910s and 1920s, Ethiopianism became more politically controversial through its association with African nationalism. As the historian Andrew Barnes argues, the concept of Ethiopianism implied the rejection of an overemphasis on white European authority. That implication of “a call for race conscious ministry and missionary endeavor” bolstered Alexander Crummell’s calls for African Americans to direct economic outreach on the African Continent, yet it was tempered by his collaboration with the American Colonization Society.38 That type of nationalist messaging grew more forthright when the principles of Crummell, Henry McNeal Turner, and other

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leaders were adapted by the Universal Negro Improvement Association.39 But the details of how Ethiopianism altered African diasporic communities can be traced more clearly through the experiences of the few African American missionaries who continued serving abroad past 1920. For examples, this section focuses on the American Congo Mission co-founded by the Reverend William Henry Sheppard. William Henry Sheppard devoted 19 years to ministry among African villagers in the central part of the former Congo Free State. He became well known in 1909 as one of the faces of a successful human rights campaign against King Leopold II’s governance of the colony. But more of Sheppard’s work overseas focused on founding and maintaining a Presbyterian mission station under African American supervision. The staff and residents of this Ibanc station coordinated to make a culturally diverse community that did not replicate fully either African or African American lifestyles.40 The biographer William E. Phipps traces the ancestry of William H. Sheppard to one of the first 20 people kidnapped from the Kingdom of Kongo and transported to Virginia in 1619. Born in 1865 to a free woman of color, Sheppard did not experience enslavement. He took advantage of consistent educational opportunities through his young adulthood and observed church ministry on a regular basis through his father’s service as a Presbyterian sexton. After graduating from Hampton Institute and Tuscaloosa Theological Institute (now Stillman College), Sheppard applied in 1888 to travel to the African continent as a missionary for the Southern Presbyterian denomination, and he received an official appointment in 1891. The denomination’s prior interest in the newly founded Congo Free State made that location appealing.41 But Sheppard’s approach to life in central Africa was informed by his lifelong familiarity with African American institutions and his appreciation for historic traditions. He envisioned evangelization as a combination of Gospel messages and world-building. About a year after he and his associate Samuel Lapsley founded the first American Presbyterian Congo Mission station, Sheppard decided to start an alliance with the largest African kingdom in the central part of the Congo Free State. Entering the capital city of the Kuba kingdom in 1892 made him the first westerner to view and document this reclusive society.42 Sheppard built on this pioneering achievement by recruiting other African American ministers to help manage a mission station near Kuba territory. The station closed by 1919 and was not remembered by missions’ historians as a success in terms of conversions.43 Yet Sheppard and his colleagues celebrated the Ibanc mission station for the educational, entrepreneurial, and diplomatic innovations that it fostered. Between 1898 and 1904, Ibanc represented a unique civic opportunity for local Africans seeking alternatives to oppressive authority. It attracted migrants from beyond the Kuba kingdom who sought stability, trade markets, and wage-­ paying employment.44 It provided temporary sanctuary for a Kuba prince who was estranged from the royal household.45 And the mission station staff served as mediators documenting the consequences of the colonial rubber industry

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and its reliance on forced labor. At a time when the region’s largest African society faced unprecedented threats to its autonomy, the Presbyterians at Ibanc represented useful alliances. The intentionality these missionaries expressed through their interest in alliances with regional chiefs and kings did not guarantee stable relations, but it did set the Congo Mission apart from an older trend of Ethiopianists who built communities with only other American Christians in mind.46 The local perception of these African American missionaries as employers, civic leaders, and negotiators also gave Sheppard’s mission station symbolic value for them. As the historian Walter L.  Williams wrote in reference to Sheppard, “[s]ince mission work was highly regarded by both white and black Americans, a missionary held a relatively prestigious position, and was able to work without much of the interference commonly caused by racial prejudice.”47 Ministries at Ibanc enabled missionaries to expand the professional skillsets that most of them acquired through historically black colleges and universities. Lucy Gantt Sheppard continued the musical training she excelled in before marrying William Henry; as a former Jubilee Singer, she specialized in translating English hymns and Negro spirituals into the Bushoong language of the Kuba people. Her mentee, Althea Brown Edmiston, used her Fisk classics degree to publish ministry resources for Kuba outreach before completing her dream project in 1932: the first Bushoong language dictionary and grammar book.48 Her husband, Alonzo Edmiston, earned a seminary degree with additional training at Tuskegee Institute. His connections with George Washington Carver and his agricultural experiments helped Edmiston earn awards from the Belgian Congo government. And his status as a mission station manager empowered him to mediate between local chiefs and colonial officers.49 The black staff of the American Presbyterian Congo Mission did not always identify with local Africans; like Amanda Berry Smith, some of them criticized and sought to change aspects of African societies.50 Neither did the Presbyterian ministries create constant peace or prosperity. The fate of the Ibanc mission station proved this fact; the Kuba king ordered an attack on foreigners that led to its destruction in late 1904. William H. Sheppard continued to argue that the rubber industry sparked violence in the region, which led to the Belgian government accusing him of libel. He and Lucy Gantt Sheppard remained part of the mission staff until 1910, and they eventually revitalized a domestic mission to African Americans in a segregated Louisville, Kentucky neighborhood from 1912 to 1926.51 Alonzo and Althea Brown Edmiston led many of the efforts to restore relations between the Congo Mission and the Kuba kingdom from 1905 through the 1932 publication of Althea’s Bushoong dictionary. In the process, the couple tried to maintain literal and figurative communities that were shaped by the perspectives of their African neighbors. New local communities based on shared academic, spiritual, and financial interests seemed to supplement the

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Edmistons’ dwindling connections with African American life across the Atlantic Ocean. As mentioned earlier, the tenor of Ethiopianism shifted by the early 1900s toward emphasis on black nationalism. One reason for this shift was that prior statements advocating for European and white American intervention abroad seemed redundant as colonialism became the new norm on the African continent. Efforts to preserve colonialism also tended to discredit and displace African American leaders who tried to endorse Ethiopianism. Andrew Barnes argued that European imperialism defied early Ethiopianists’ rhetorical dichotomies between themselves as “civilized” leaders and the “frontier” people expected to serve their African settlements.52 As two of the relatively small population of African American missionaries who continued to serve overseas after 1920, Alonzo and Althea Brown Edmiston modeled the transition of Ethiopianism. The Edmistons combined their long-term commitment to a local kingdom with the increasing demands of the Belgian Congo government. Similar to the ways Alexander Crummell criticized exploitative labor systems maintained by white missionaries, Alonzo Edmiston complained about the tax and work policies enforced by Belgian officials. Edmiston’s roles as a boys’ school teacher and farm supervisor led him to emphasize discipleship through strict chore schedules, yet he objected when government work requirements led to corporal punishment and forced relocation.53 Edmiston seemed to embrace the principle that Andrew Barnes identified in Crummell’s career: a desire to see Africans “acquire the discipline” to gain spiritual strength without being trapped in perpetual physical bondage.54 The notorious and deadly forced labor system maintained in Congo under Belgian control made the potential for indefinite enslavement seem likely.55 Yet both Edmistons also benefitted from affiliation with Belgian authorities later in their careers. The colonial government issued them service awards and sent representatives to visit them at the mission stations. Hosting official visitors helped to boost the African American missionaries’ status by drawing recognition and funding opportunities. Receiving an appointment to the native court also gave Alonzo Edmiston another professional leadership post at a time when segregation made his status seem tenuous compared to his white Southern Presbyterian colleagues. As the court chairman, he gained the authority to vote against government measures that seemed abusive but remained responsible for enforcing those measures.56 The forms of Ethiopianism expressed through the ministries of Alonzo and Althea Brown Edmiston revealed heightened awareness of political affairs paired with empathy for Africans’ responses to colonialism. Before 1909, such civic engagement was not unusual at the American Congo Mission since their colleagues, William H. Sheppard and William Morrison, became prominent voices in the human rights campaign against King Leopold II of Belgium. But the Edmistons continued to express concerns about abuse and forced labor decades after the king ceded control and the Belgian Congo entered a less controversial colonial era. Many of their professional options were limited due

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to Belgian travel restrictions and due to segregation within the mission station. The Edmistons responded to reductions in their authority by drawing more attention to the priorities of local Africans. Alonzo did so by allowing worship time for church members to express grievances, by recognizing the leadership of family elders, and by accepting homegrown produce instead of Belgian francs as donations.57 Althea emphasized African perspectives through her linguistics work and through educational plans designed to incorporate regular feedback from local chiefs.58 Through these strategies, the Presbyterian missionaries extended Edward Wilmot Blyden’s late nineteenth-century goals for Ethiopianist organizations that embraced African cultural distinctions.

Ethiopianism and Labor The examples thus far focused on Ethiopianism from African American perspectives and through Christian activities on the African continent. But one of the most influential forms of New World Ethiopianism relied on secular rhetoric to symbolize unity among people of African descent. Between 1917 and 1925, the Phelps Stokes Fund sponsored three education reports about schools, colleges, and universities serving black students in the United States and on the African continent. The author of these reports, Thomas Jesse Jones, endorsed a standardized form of industrial education as a race-specific training model. This training would emphasize “adaptation and community consciousness,” based on the premise that coursework needed to address directly the lived circumstances of a typical black community.59 Affiliation with major philanthropists and prominent speakers helped Jones popularize arguments that manual labor training and domestic work offered the most practical benefits for all students of African descent. For economic and political purposes, an oversimplified concept of shared African and African American identity was imposed by powerful education experts. Though the name of Thomas Jesse Jones did not become as memorable as that of Booker T. Washington or W.E.B. Du Bois, the influence of Jones was evident in the dichotomy often drawn between Washington’s support for industrial education and Du Bois’ advocacy of classical studies. This notorious pedagogical feud obscures the two leaders’ more complicated disagreements about definitions of “racial uplift” and the appropriate role for the white Phelps Stokes spokesman who Du Bois dubbed the “evil genius of the Negro race.”60 Coordinating with Jones (as Washington did until his death in 1915) entailed coordinating with the colonial officials who supported and applied his research. These officials expected that political aid to African students attending US-based industrial education programs would yield financial benefits through rising generations of African laborers prepared to staff mining, manufacturing, and agricultural ventures in the colonies.61 James E.K. Aggrey represented the New World Ethiopianism embedded in the goals of Thomas Jesse Jones while also communicating those goals in an evangelistic style. The historian Thomas C. Howard described Aggrey as “an

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embodiment of African accomplishment for millions,” a status which was achieved through decades of work within African American institutions and years of touring various regions of the African continent.62 Aggrey left the Gold Coast to enroll at a historically black college in 1898 with goals of becoming a minister and educator. He continued his ties with the African Methodist Episcopal Zion denomination after graduation by working for his alma mater (Livingstone College) and pastoring two AMEZ churches in North Carolina. He combined his personal experience with liberal arts studies with professional observation of vocational training.63 Aggrey recalled his pastoral service as an outlet for combining religious education with the “gospel” of commercial self-­ help. He was quoted offering the following advice about race relations to a congregation: I set myself in season and out of season, even in my sermons, to advise the raising of chickens, and soon all the Blacks had them to sell, and eggs, and the attitude of the Whites changed toward them, and they grew, some of them, wealthy. You must make yourselves indispensable—that is how you can improve your condition.64

With similar reasoning, Aggrey encouraged coursework in “agriculture, hygiene, and handicraft” for African students. He endorsed the industrial education focus of Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute and during the early 1920s used his role in the Phelps Stokes Commission to recommend it for primary and secondary schools on the African continent.65 After he joined the administration of Prince of Wales College at Achimota (in Ghana), some agricultural and industrial courses were added to its curriculum.66 Aggrey excelled in crafting messages of race pride and achievement that remained acclimated to European colonial contexts. His rhetoric and delivery were memorable enough to inspire nationalist sentiment in Kwame Nkrumah, the future first president of independent Ghana.67 Meanwhile, his emphasis on “patience and humility” appealed to British colonial officials. According to the historian Kenneth King, he urged “that no controversy or protest must endanger the chance of racial cooperation.”68 Aggrey’s theories of Africanized education and peaceful race relations suggested a vision of collective cultural redemption for people of African descent. As a minister educated in mission schools, he did not hesitate to attribute salvation to faith in Jesus Christ. But he combined his conversion messages with criticisms of academic aspects (like education in Greek or Latin) that seemed impractical for most African colonial subjects during the early twentieth century.69 Aggrey expected that universities like the one he helped run in Achimota would in time become sites where African scholars would make the most of more diversified academic options.70 His lack of demands for the immediate accomplishment of this goal helped Thomas Jesse Jones and other race-specific education experts perceive Aggrey as an antidote to what D.D.T.  Jabavu called “their dread of Ethiopian doctrines.”71 Aggrey helped to craft an alternate vision of Ethiopianism compatible with imperial racial hierarchies.

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Conclusion Ethiopianism remains one of the most influential cultural and religious theories for its potential to inspire pride, protest, fear, and transformation in various parts of the world. The concept motivated many of the early African American missionaries to associate western acculturation and professionalization with evangelization. Other interpretations of Ethiopianism focused on finding group alternatives to racial oppression or forging new cooperative communities among people of African descent. We can analyze a range of American and European attitudes toward African people in the ministry strategies inspired by Ethiopianism. The rising trend in studies of this topic also encourages additional emphasis on Africans’ initiatives during and after the colonial era. More attention to how African Christians influenced missionaries and colonial leaders helps to explain current demographic patterns in religious participation. Efforts to promote black leadership that began during the colonial era blended into what became known as the World Christianity movement. The African continent played a major role in World Christianity as it became home to some of the fastest-­ growing Christian populations on earth.72 By the early 2000s, American and European standards for Christendom proved insufficient to describe the popularity of African Initiated Churches within the continent and in western nations. Roots of these recent developments can be traced to earlier Ethiopianism and its tendencies to claim some common interests between missionaries and potential converts of African descent. The recent World Christianity movement redefines religious identities by highlighting the evangelistic prowess of congregations that originated beyond the western world. African Initiated Churches make it possible for members to embrace and practice markers of “African” identity even when those members are not living on the continent. Ethiopianism worked in a similar way for African Americans by providing rhetorical options to embrace and analyze shared African ancestry. The term did not always imply a sense of unity, but it did connote perceptions of capability and responsibility.

Notes 1. Andrew E.  Barnes, “Emigration and Diaspora Formation Across the Black Atlantic,” in Migration and Diaspora Formation: New Perspectives on a Global History of Christianity, edited by Ciprian Burlăcioiu (Boston: De Gruyter, 2022), 224. 2. Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Creative Conflict in African American Political Thought: Frederick Douglass, Alexander Crummell, Booker T.  Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Marcus Garvey (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 101–102. 3. Andrew F.  Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History  (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996), 111.

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4. J.  Gordon, James Emmanuel Kwegyir Aggrey (1875–1927), BlackPast.org, online, https://www.blackpast.org/african-­american-­history/people-­african-­ american-­history/james-­emmanuel-­kwegyir-­aggrey-­1875-­1927/. Accessed 29 August 2022. 5. Sylvia M.  Jacobs, “African Missions and the African-American Christian Churches,” in Vaughn J.  Walston and Robert J.  Stevens, African-American Experience in World Mission: A Call Beyond Community (Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 2009), 44. 6. M.  W. Kodi, “The 1921 Pan-African Congress at Brussels: A Background to Belgian Pressures,” Transafrican Journal of History 13 (1984): 48–49. 7. Adejumobi, S. (2008, July 30). The Pan-African Congresses, 1900–1945. BlackPast.org. Accessed 31 August 2022. https://www.blackpast.org/global-­ african-­history/pan-­african-­congresses-­1900-­1945/ 8. Laurie Maffly-Kipp, Setting Down the Sacred Past: African-American Race Histories (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 35; Psalm 68:31, The Bible, King James Version. 9. Elliott P. Skinner, “The Dialectic between Diasporas and Homelands,” Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1982), 15. 10. Cheryl Sterling, “Race Matters: Cosmopolitanism, Afropolitanism, and Pan-­ Africanism via Edward Wilmot Blyden,” The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol.8, no.1 (June 2015): 121. 11. Shea William Bigsby, “Diasporic Reasoning: The Idea of Africa and the Production of Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America,” dissertation (Duke University, 2012), 166–168. 12. George Frederickson, Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 68–69. 13. Frederickson, Black Liberation, 69–71. 14. Bigsby, “Diasporic Reasoning,” 152, 154–155. 15. Bigsby, “Diasporic Reasoning,” 157. 16. Bigsby, “Diasporic Reasoning,” 192–193. 17. Alexander Crummell, “The Regeneration of Africa,” in Afro-American Religious History, edited by Milton C. Sernett (Durham: Duke University Press, 1985), 253–259. 18. Frederickson, Black Liberation, 68, 73. 19. Moses, Creative Conflict in African American Political Thought, 128, 131–132. 20. Richard Elphick, The Equality of Believers: Protestant Missionaries and the Racial Politics of South Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 116–119. 21. Stephen Ward Angell, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and African-American Religion in the South (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 225, 230. 22. Gregory Mixon, “Henry McNeal Turner Versus the Tuskegee Machine: Black Leadership in the Nineteenth Century,” The Journal of Negro History, Vol. 79, No. 4 (Autumn, 1994): 371–372. 23. J.  Mutero Chirenje, Ethiopianism and Afro-Americans in Southern Africa, 1883–1916 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 69. 24. Angell, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and African-American Religion in the South, 230–234.

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25. David Killingray, “The Black Atlantic Missionary Movement and Africa, 1780s–1920s,” Journal of Religion in Africa 33, no. 1 (2003): 21. 26. Henry McNeal Turner, “God is a Negro,” Voice of Missions, 1 February 1898, in Black Nationalism in America, ed. by John H. Bracey, Jr., August Meier, and Elliott Rudwick (New York: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1970), 155. 27. Killingray, “The Black Atlantic Missionary Movement and Africa,” 21. 28. William Allen Poe, “Georgia Influence in The Development of Liberia,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly, Vol. 57, No. 1 (Spring, 1973): 2; Roland P.  Falkner, “The United States and Liberia,” The American Journal of International Law, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Jul., 1910): 529. 29. Stephen W. Angell and Anthony B. Pinn, Social Protest Thought in the African Methodist Episcopal Church (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2000), 257. 30. Adrienne M.  Israel, Amanda Berry Smith: From Washerwoman to Evangelist (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1998). 31. Amanda Berry Smith, An Autobiography: The Story of the Lord’s Dealings with Mrs. Amanda Smith, the Colored Evangelist (Chicago: Meyer & Brother Publishers, 1893), 348, 380, 390. Online, Documenting the American South, accessed 2 August 2023. https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/smitham/ smith.html. 32. Elisabeth Engel, “Southern Looks? A History of African American Missionary Photography of Africa, 1890s–1930s,” Journal of American Studies, vol. 52 (2018): 393–394. 33. Engel, “Southern Looks? A History of African American Missionary Photography of Africa,” 404. 34. Engel, “Southern Looks? A History of African American Missionary Photography of Africa,” 395. 35. Smith, An Autobiography, 396–397. 36. Smith, An Autobiography, 398. 37. Walter L. Williams, “The Missionary: Introduction,” in Black Americans and the Missionary Movement in Africa, ed. by Sylvia M. Jacobs (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982), 132–133. 38. Barnes, “Emigration and Diaspora Formation Across the Black Atlantic,” 240–243. 39. Barnes, “Emigration and Diaspora Formation Across the Black Atlantic,” 257. 40. The spelling of this Presbyterian mission station name varies between Ibanc, Ibaanj, and Ibanche. Hereafter I use the spelling adopted by anthropologist Jan Vansina in his study of the Kuba kingdom. 41. William E.  Phipps, William Sheppard: Congo’s African American Livingstone (Louisville: Geneva Press, 2002), 2–9. 42. Phipps, William Sheppard, 68–71. 43. Walter L. Williams, Black Americans and the Evangelization of Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 29; Robert Benedetto, Presbyterian Reformers in Central Africa (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 37. 44. Jan Vansina, Being Colonized: The Kuba Experience in Rural Congo, 1880–1960 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010), 28, 63–66. 45. Phipps, William Sheppard, 111–112. 46. Barnes, “Emigration and Diaspora Formation Across the Black Atlantic,” 230.

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47. Williams, Black Americans and the Evangelization of Africa, 94. 48. Robert Benedetto, “The Presbyterian Mission Press in Central Africa, 1890–1922,” American Presbyterians, Vol. 68, No. 1 (Spring 1990): 58, 61. 49. Kimberly D. Hill, A Higher Mission: The Careers of Alonzo and Althea Brown Edmiston in Central Africa (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2020), 112–113, 159. 50. For examples, see Althea Brown Edmiston, “Missions in Congo Free State, Africa,” American Missionary 62, no. 10 (1908): 308–310; Williams, Black Americans and the Evangelization of Africa, 110–113. 51. Phipps, William Sheppard, 182–187. 52. Barnes, “Emigration and Diaspora Formation Across the Black Atlantic,” 231. 53. Hill, A Higher Mission, 133–134. 54. Barnes, “Emigration and Diaspora Formation Across the Black Atlantic,” 250. 55. For more details about the use of forced labor to harvest rubber and cotton in Congo, see Osumaka Likaka, Rural Society and Cotton in Colonial Zaire (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997); Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999). 56. Hill, A Higher Mission, 65–66, 71, 143–144, 159–160. 57. Hill, A Higher Mission, 71–73, 121–122, 145. 58. Hill, A Higher Mission, 88–94, 120–121. 59. Kenneth J. King, Pan-Africanism and Education (New York: Diasporic Africa Press, 2016), 97. 60. Herbert M.  Kliebard, “‘That Evil Genius of the Negro Race’: Thomas Jesse Jones and Educational Reform,” Journal of Curriculum and Supervision 10:1 (Fall 1994): 5–20. 61. Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, The German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 181–182, 188. 62. Thomas C.  Howard, “West Africa and the American South: Notes on James E. K. Aggrey and the Idea of a University for West Africa,” Journal of African Studies 2, no. 4 (1975): 448. 63. Howard, “West Africa and the American South,” 447. 64. Dorothy Cowser Yancey, “Professor James Emman Kwegyir Aggrey’s Personality,” Negro History Bulletin 40: 4 (July/August, 1977): 723. 65. Yancey, “Professor James Emman Kwegyir Aggrey’s Personality,” 723–724. 66. Thomas C.  Howard, “West Africa and the American South: Notes on James E. K. Aggrey and the Idea of a University for West Africa,” Journal of African Studies 2, no. 4 (1975): 447, 459. 67. Yancey, “Professor James Emman Kwegyir Aggrey’s Personality,” 724. 68. King, Pan-Africanism and Education, 102. 69. Yancey, “Professor James Emman Kwegyir Aggrey’s Personality,” 724. 70. Howard, “West Africa and the American South,” 458. 71. King, Pan-Africanism and Education, 98. 72. Lamin Sanneh, Whose Religion is Christianity? The Gospel beyond the West (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2003), 3–4, 14–18.

CHAPTER 21

Catholic Missions and Colonial States Elizabeth Foster

Most of the European missionary activity that laid the basis for Catholicism in contemporary Africa took place during the height of the colonial period between the “scramble” for colonies in the 1880s and the wave of independence across the British and French territories in the late 1950s and early 1960s. During this era, relationships between Catholic missions and colonial states in Africa were complex, often uneasy, and evolved over time, depending on the interaction of multiple factors. These included whether the missions in a particular territory had arrived substantially before the secular power or vice versa, whether they were staffed by nationals of the reigning colonial power, and that power’s attitude toward the church. There were meaningful differences in how various European powers conceived of church and state relations in their colonial territories. British authorities were more likely to favor Protestant missionaries over Catholics, though it depended on the context. Under Bismarck, Germany was skeptical of Catholic missionaries: for example, German authorities initially only agreed to allow missionaries who were German nationals into Cameroon and insisted that they not take orders directly from Rome (Orosz, p. 36). France, though it launched more Catholic missionaries than any other European power at the turn of the twentieth century, had the most fraught approach to church and state relations (Daughton 2006, pp. 11–17). The French Republic passed three sweeping anti-clerical laws in 1901, 1904, and 1905, hampering Catholic congregations and formally separating the Catholic Church and the republican state in the metropole. Though

E. Foster (*) Department of History, Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. E. Barnes, T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48270-0_21

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the most important missionary congregations were exempted, and the laws were not formally applied in most of Africa, they disrupted Catholic schooling in some colonies and contributed to tensions between missionaries and state officials (Foster 2013, pp. 69–94). Meanwhile, Portugal displayed a measure of ambivalence toward the church in its African territories until it signed a formal agreement with the Vatican in 1940, which committed the state to backing Catholic missionary activity in its colonies to the hilt (Morier-­Genoud, p. 6). At ground level, however, local circumstances were usually most important in determining the relationships between missionaries and state authorities, and Africans thus played a key role in shaping them. Personal rapports between missionaries and colonial administrators, who were frequently the only Europeans in more remote locales, mattered greatly. An administrator who was sympathetic to missionary work could do much to help clergy in their endeavors, while an anti-clerical one could easily hinder evangelism. Often Africans’ reactions to the missionary presence determined officials’ stances. While some administrators applauded Catholic missionaries’ “civilizing mission” among their African subjects, others became alarmed if conversions to Catholicism caused violence or intractable generational rifts within African communities. Political calculation was decisive: for example, in French territories where Islam was the dominant faith, many officials were wary of antagonizing Muslim powerbrokers and disapproved of overzealous missionary activity. Africans frequently perceived and exploited rifts between missionaries and administrators, leading to persistent low-level conflict, even if relationships between bishops and colonial governors appeared to be warm. This meant that even within a particular colonial power’s territory, relations between missions and the colonial state could vary greatly depending on local conditions.

Missionary Resurgence in the Nineteenth Century Catholic missionary entanglement with colonial rule in Africa did not occur by design, but rather developed organically as both the church and the European powers sought to expand their reach on the continent in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Of course, both the church and European states had a much older presence on the edges of the African continent. For example, the Portuguese had first brought Catholicism to Africa in the fifteenth century, and it became the official religion of the Kingdom of Kongo for almost 300 years. The African Kings of Kongo became Catholics, and Afonso I (1509–1540s) sent his son Henry to Lisbon to train as a clergyman (Hastings 1994, pp. 79–83). Between the mid-1400s and the mid-1600s, Catholic clergy also made inroads in West Africa, as well as in what are now Mozambique and Zimbabwe (Sundkler and Steed 2000, pp.  42–64; Morier-Genoud 2019, pp.  17–18). Indeed, the rapid gains of evangelism in Africa, Asia, and the Americas in the early modern period, together with a desire to assert Vatican control over missions in the face of Portuguese and Spanish power, led Pope

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Gregory XV to found the Sacred Congregation of the Propaganda Fide in 1622 to promote and oversee the expansion of the faith (Hastings 1994, pp. 86–89).1 By the start of the second-third of the nineteenth century, however, the Catholic presence on the African continent had declined sharply from its earlier gains. Few European clergy remained, and most were ministering to Europeans, not African Catholics. This period ended up being a turning point, however, in Catholic endeavors in Africa and marked the beginning of a Catholic dream of evangelizing the whole continent, though that would not be the case in practice for many years after. Beginning in the 1840s, zealous missionaries from America and Europe began focusing their efforts on Africa in a more concentrated way, and over the following two decades the Propaganda Fide separated it into gigantic new mission territories, such as the Apostolic Vicariate of the Two Guineas, created in 1842, which encompassed a huge swath of coastal Western and Southern Africa (Koren 1958, p. 79 and charts pp. 597ff). New missionary groups focused specifically on evangelizing Africa developed to staff these vast regions. These included the Frenchmen François Libermann’s “refounding” of the Spiritan congregation in 1848 and his countryman Melchior Marion de Bresillac’s launching of the Society of African Missions in 1856; Herbert Vaughan’s establishment of the Saint Joseph’s Foreign Missionary Society (known as the Mill Hill Fathers) in Britain in 1866; Daniele Comboni’s creation of the Comboni Fathers of the Sacred Heart (or Verona Fathers) in Italy in 1867; and French Archbishop of Algiers Charles Lavigerie’s founding of the Society of the Missionaries of Africa (or White Fathers) in 1868 (Hastings 1979, pp. 39–40; Koren 1983, pp. 200–201; 265–274).2 The small numbers of missionaries that began working in these enormous jurisdictions at mid-century only occupied the tiniest fragments of them, however. In many regions, the expansion of their missions and their advances further into the interior of Africa occurred just prior to or concurrently with that of European conquest, so their Catholic projects were frequently bound up in the establishment of colonial rule. Even where the Catholic missionary presence had preceded formal colonial rule, it usually became imbricated in the colonial order, and over time ecclesiastical boundaries began to mirror political ones as the major European powers conquered and divided the continent. Leaders of these new missionary congregations usually counseled their members to steer clear of politics and to maintain good relations with secular officials in order to smooth the way for evangelism. Libermann, for example, urged his clergy to avoid conflict with temporal authorities, and not to do anything that would make themselves “appear as political agents” (Koren 1983, p. 263). Lavigerie echoed this advice. He told his priests to attempt to “‘gain the esteem’” of local leaders, whether European or indigenous, while “‘preserving the dignity and liberty of the ministry.’” He also warned that, “‘there is no prudence nor profit in censuring the acts of the civil authorities’” (de Benoist 1987, pp. 40–41). It would be best, most missionary leaders believed,

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to cultivate the approbation and support of secular authorities wherever and whenever possible. Some missionary leaders, like French Spiritan Monsignor Prosper Augouard, Apostolic Vicar of Oubangui, were unabashedly patriotic and celebrated the colonial enterprise (Goyau 1926). Most were more guarded than Augouard, but still sought warm relations with colonial authorities. Missionary prelates wanted to protect church interests, and more often than not, they believed that maintaining good rapports with colonial officials were the best way to do so, though this could prove difficult in practice.

Cooperation and Conflict in the Colonial Era The case of Senegal provides an excellent example of how the expansion of colonial states could engender clashes with existing Catholic missions, and how Africans exploited the rifts between them. In the 1880s and early 1890s, the French colonial administration expanded its purview down the coast south and east of Dakar. One of its governing strategies was to appoint Muslim Wolofs as “chiefs” over restive animist Sereer populations, who had long resisted Wolof domination and conversion to Islam. Many Sereer mobilized to resist this new order and enlisted the help of French Spiritan priests, who were already living and working among them, to undermine the administration’s Wolof brokers. French missionaries, aghast at policies which they saw as favoring Islam over Christianity, did their utmost to help the Sereer thwart their Wolof overlords (which also helped them win Sereer converts). Matters came to a head in 1892 when a Sereer who had killed a Wolof representative of the administration was acquitted on the grounds of self-defense in a French court in Saint-Louis. The key witness in the case was French priest Father Albert Sébire, who testified that Wolof abuse of the Sereer had created a climate of violence in the region. Administrative officials were outraged by what they viewed as unwarranted missionary interference in politics, which they continually deplored in their reports and correspondence. Not long after the case, the colonial government “dis-annexed” the entire region from so-called direct administration, which meant that French law no longer applied there and French courts, such as the one that had acquitted Sene, had no jurisdiction. This heightened administrative control over the Sereer and repudiated any notion that colonial authorities were remotely interested in the kind of assimilative civilizing mission that Catholic missionaries claimed to espouse. Nonetheless, though they had reaped conversions from conflict with the administration, the Spiritans in the region kept doggedly lobbying officials to see them as allies and appoint their African converts, or themselves, to be chiefs over the Sereer (Foster 2013, pp. 43–67). Catholic missionaries also arrived prior to formal colonial rule in the Great Lakes region of East-Central Africa, though circumstances were quite different than in Senegal. In this case, their fierce competition with Protestant missions shaped both their relations with the British, who established colonial rule in the 1890s, and the fate of their converts thereafter. Both Catholic and Protestant missionaries arrived at the court of the monarch or kabaka of

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Buganda in what is now Uganda in the late 1870s. (Islam was also present in Buganda, though not as dominant as it was in the Western Sahel or along the East African coast). Then-kabaka Muteesa kept European missionaries under close surveillance, though he alternately showed himself amenable to Christianity and Islam before his death in 1884. Between 1885 and 1887, his son Mwanga, who had received some Christian education, ordered the deaths of over 100 Catholic and Protestant converts, including the well-known execution of many court pages at Namugongo in 1886.3 A series of civil wars between rival groups in the realm ensued at the end of the decade, in which Protestants ultimately triumphed with the help of the Imperial British East Africa Company, which regarded the White Fathers Catholic missionaries on the ground as possible instruments of France. By 1894, Buganda was a British protectorate and the colonial authorities presided over the consolidation of resources in Protestant hands. Despite an effort to bring in British Mill Hill Catholic missionaries to defuse tensions with the regime, authorities continued to favor the latter (Shorter 2006, pp.  8–14). Moreover, Catholic converts were shortchanged in the new social and political order, which divided along confessional lines. Just after 1900, though Catholics were the largest confessional group in Buganda, they received a much smaller proportion of the land grants distributed by Protestant chiefs and the British government than Protestants did. African Anglicans, though not in the majority, held the largest number of seats in the Buganda “parliament” or Lukiiko. This imbalance continued for decades, to the frustration of the Catholics: in 1934 there were 14% more Catholics in Buganda than Protestants, but the latter had 22% more chieftaincies and their earnings were 35% higher. The colonial regime’s consistent favoring of Protestants laid the basis for resentments which stoked political violence at independence in the 1960s (Earle and Carney 2021, pp. 3–6). The case of Rwanda, one of Catholic missionaries’ great success stories in colonial Africa, also illustrates the complexities that arose in the triangular relationships between colonial authorities, Catholic missionaries, and African power brokers. Rwanda remained a centralized and independent monarchy until the late 1890s, and, in contrast to Buganda, Catholic missionaries (White Fathers) arrived only after German authorities established a protectorate in 1897. Although skeptical of the French and Alsatian Catholic missionaries at first, Lutheran German officials ultimately decided that they could be allies in “educating and pacifying” the local population, especially given the administration’s own lack of human and material resources. Moreover, they saw francophone Catholics as less threatening than British Protestants, as France had no colonial claims nearby, whereas Britain was their primary regional rival. Trouble quickly arose, however, when, in defiance of Bishop Jean-Joseph Hirth, some White Fathers became entangled in local politics by organizing military action against groups hostile to their missions in 1904 and arguing with the Rwandan royal court over property claims. In these instances, the German colonial regime sided with the Rwandans against the missionaries. On the other hand, German officials praised the White Fathers for “‘contributing in large part to

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the pacification’” of the northwest region of the kingdom and reacted with “scorched earth” tactics when Father Paulin Loupias was shot and killed in 1910 while mediating a dispute between a local rebel and the royal court (Carney 2014, pp. 24–30). After this up and down relationship with the German colonial state, Catholic missionaries were delighted when Belgium took over Rwanda during the First World War. The Belgian authorities thoroughly endorsed a Catholic “civilizing mission” in Rwanda, and “offered unflagging financial and infrastructural support for Catholic missions until independence.” This support began right away: even before the war was over, the Belgian military authorities forced the Rwandan monarch Musinga to declare Christian missions to be legal. Missionaries and the colonial regime did not always see eye to eye in the interwar years, however: Apostolic Vicar Léon Classe backed the idea of an all-Tutsi ruling class (particularly those young elites who had been educated in Catholic schools) against official skepticism in the late 1920s. Nonetheless, they remained very closely aligned overall, going so far as to conspire together to overthrow and exile Musinga in 1931, replacing him with Rudahigwa, a monarch who favored Catholicism, which helped to turn Rwanda into “the first daughter of the African church” (Carney 2014, pp. 30–36). One pernicious legacy of this period, however, was that both missionaries and Belgian officials contributed to the hardening and racializing of the categories of Hutu and Tutsi, a development which would contribute to devastating violence in the decades to follow (Carney 2014, pp. 32–35). Like Rwanda, Cameroon also changed hands during the colonial period, passing from German to French and British control during and after the First World War. The portion ruled first by Germany and then by France illustrates how education was a key site of both cooperation and conflict between Catholic missions and colonial states. Overall, the degree of harmony or discord between missionaries and officials regarding education varied greatly by time and place. In general, missions hoped for state support for their schools, which they touted as sites of “civilization” of Africans. Some colonial officials wholeheartedly agreed and were happy to fund missions to work in a domain that their shorthanded administrations could not staff adequately. Others, however, saw mission schools as sites of religious propaganda and instruction that did the colonial order little good. For their part, missionaries differed on whether schools should focus on assimilation and teach Africans European languages and culture, or if they should instruct Africans in their own languages and transmit religious ideas in terms more familiar to their pupils. In Cameroon, the German Pallottine Catholic missionaries who arrived in 1891 were eager to avoid any conflict reminiscent of the bitter kulturkampf that had poisoned Church and State relations in their home country. They therefore went out of their way to please the colonial authorities, particularly in the realm of education. At their mission stations, they founded schools in which missionaries personally taught African children in the German language. This delighted colonial officials, who were eager for a supply of “civilized”

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African clerks and bureaucrats to work in the administration and colonial business. Protestant missionaries, on the other hand, tended to prefer entrusting schools to African catechists, who instructed children in local languages, a practice that colonial officials saw as both neglecting the work of “civilization” and useless from the point of view of creating African partners for the administration (Orosz 2008, p. 112). When the French took over much of Cameroon during the First World War (as of 1922 their rule was affirmed as a mandate under the League of Nations), their officials tried immediately to enact a campaign of “Gallicization” by instructing missions to teach in French. At first, newly arrived French Spiritan missionaries embraced this policy, but they soon reneged, sparking a bitter conflict with colonial officials that lasted the duration of the interwar period (Orosz 2008, pp. 259, 317). Led by Alsatian Apostolic Vicar François-Xavier Vogt after 1922, French Spiritans in Cameroon shifted their focus to evangelization and focused more on employing local languages to reach more converts. Vogt, whose case amply demonstrates how the personalities of individual prelates or colonial officials could shape church and state relations in colonial Africa, disliked the fact that “too many of his priests still thought of themselves as soldiers serving the state, rather than as missionaries.” He believed that schools were essential, but that education should be conducted in the vernacular so that the Catholic message could reach more students (Orosz 2008, pp.  278–279). This repudiation of gallicization led to bitter conflict with French Commissioner Théodore Paul Marchand, which culminated in state efforts to curtail Catholic missionary influence in the territory, and missionary threats to denounce Marchand to the League of Nations and the French legislature (Orosz 2008, p. 317). Thus, Spiritan attitudes to colonial authorities in 1920s Cameroon bore little relation to those of their Spiritan brethren in 1890s Senegal, demonstrating that depending on time and local factors, variety prevailed even within individual congregations and colonial powers.

Toward Decolonization: Missions and Colonial States After the Second World War The Second World War marked a turning point in the relationship between the Catholic Church and most colonial states in Africa, though a spectacular break never occurred. Ever cautious and eager to protect Church interests, Pope Pius XII (1939–1958) shied away from taking a definitive public stance on the question of colonialism, even in the context of bitter conflicts like the war in Algeria.4 Yet, after killings and expulsions of European missionaries in Asia before and during the war, the Vatican began to reckon with the possibility that political decolonization might also be imminent in Africa. The hierarchy wanted to distance itself from the colonial order and sought to create the impression that an African Catholic Church led by Africans was well on its way to realization. While it did not instruct missionaries to reject funding from

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colonial governments for schools or health care initiatives, the Vatican issued emphatic directives urging them to redouble their efforts to provide Africa with robust numbers of clergy before any “nationalist crises” occurred and forced European clergy to depart (Foster 2019, pp. 154–155). This stance was not entirely new: the Papacy had long urged missionaries not to conflate imperialism and evangelism in Africa. In 1919, after the upheavals of the First World War, Benedict XV had issued the apostolic letter Maximum Illud on the “Propagation of the Faith Throughout the World.” Speaking to European missionaries, he exhorted them to prioritize the training of indigenous clergy so that the church would not remain dependent on “foreign” priests, in the event of “persecution” (Benedict XV 1919). He also sternly reminded them that they were to pursue their spiritual aims and not the temporal goals of their countries of origin. He warned that potential converts would be able to perceive ambiguities, which could have disastrous consequences for evangelism if they concluded that, “the Christian religion is the national religion of some foreign people and that anyone converting to it is abandoning his loyalty to his own people and submitting to the pretentions and domination of a foreign power” (Benedict XV 1919). In 1926, Benedict’s successor Pius XI amplified this message in Rerum ecclesiae, an encyclical on missions. He evoked the possibility that missionaries of a given country could be forced to leave a territory if it changed hands (as had happened in the case of German colonies at the end of the First World War) or that colonized peoples might evict their rulers and the clergy of the colonial power to boot. To guard against such eventualities, he urged European missionaries to train as many indigenous clergy as quickly and as thoroughly as possible (Pius XI 1926). He thus indicated that missionaries should not be working to perpetuate colonial domination, but in fact to hedge against its possible instability. Nonetheless, despite this messaging, much ambiguity remained regarding the relationship between the church and temporal colonial states in the interwar period. The training of African clergy proceeded slowly in many areas, and few Africans rose to positions of authority within the Church before the 1940s and 1950s (Foster 2012, pp. 260–261). In the colonial context, the church frequently reflected the hierarchical and racist colonial order of things: white Europeans dominated positions of leadership, their culture and heritage informed the faith they imparted, and most Africans were relegated to positions of tutelage and subordination. This all changed after the war as the Vatican implemented a sweeping new strategy to promote African leadership of the church across the continent. In the 1950s, Pius XII elevated African bishops across Belgian-, British-, and French-controlled territory in Tanganyika (1950), Rwanda (1952), Basutoland (1952), South Africa (1954), Sudan (1955), Cameroon (1955), Upper Volta (1956), Belgian Congo (1956), Kenya (1956), Nigeria (1957), and Ghana (1957). Moreover, the Vatican established the Catholic hierarchy, replacing apostolic prefectures and vicariates with dioceses and archdioceses, in most of British West Africa in 1950, South Africa and Basutoland in 1951, Kenya,

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Tanganyika, and Uganda in 1953; and French colonial Africa and Madagascar in 1955 (Adriányi et al. 1981, pp. 778–781). In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Pope John XXIII publicly celebrated the independence of new African states and strategically promoted African clergymen to key positions in former colonial capitals.5 For example, in response to Guinean leader Sekou Touré’s explicit attacks on the church as a colonial institution in 1962, the Vatican responded with the nominations of a wave of young African Archbishops: Father Hyacinthe Thiandoum, age 41, in Dakar, Senegal; Father Luc Sangaré, age 36, in Bamako, Mali; Father Robert Dosseh, age 36, in Lomé, Togo; and Father Raymond-­ Marie Tchidimbo, age 41, in Conakry, Guinea (Foster 2019, pp. 178–180). John XXIII hoped to cement the argument that the Church was now an African enterprise, and no longer a colonial one, even though legions of European clergy remained on the ground for years to come. In this new era, only Portuguese-controlled Africa remained a major outlier. Church and State relations in Portugal’s colonies were governed by a 1940 Concordat and a 1941 Missionary Statute between the Holy See and António de Oliveira Salazar’s regime that instituted separation between Church and State in Portugal, but a tight alliance in its colonies. In keeping with these accords, the colonial state invested “massively in missionary activities, by subsidizing the dioceses, paying the salaries of missionary personnel, allocating land and granting tax exemption to the church, and paying for Catholic health and educational facilities.” For its part, the church guaranteed that clergy in Portuguese colonies had to have Portuguese nationality (this did not rule out Portugal’s African subjects) and “agreed not only to evangelize but to civilize and Portugalize Africans” (Morier-Genoud 2019, pp. 20–21 emphasis in original). Even with the Vatican’s shift in priorities after the Second World War, change was slower to come in Portuguese colonies, partially because they lacked indigenous clergy. In the diocese of Beira in Mozambique, a lasting seminary for Africans was not in place until 1949 (an earlier one had closed) and most of its early students failed to finish. Only seven African clergy were ordained in Beira before Mozambique’s independence in 1975, all in the 1960s (Morier-Genoud 2019, pp.  82–87). It is notable, however, that conversion rates climbed steadily in Beira under colonial rule in the 1960s, suggesting that its alliance with the colonial state was not necessarily impeding church goals there.6 Church willingness to take funding from colonial states while simultaneously trying to distance itself from the colonial order did not escape the notice of some embittered observers, such as François Méjan, a French lawyer and civil servant who penned a scathing critique entitled Le Vatican contre la France d’Outre-Mer? in 1957. Widely reviewed in French and international media in the late 1950s, the book accused the church of repudiating Western Civilization and rejecting its longtime missionary policies for a new focus on “de-­ occidentalization” (Méjan 1957, pp. 73, 75). Yet at the same time, the Church came under increasing fire from prominent African Catholic intellectuals and clergy who faulted it for failing to live up to its catholic vocation. The Church

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in Africa was still too tied to European culture and personnel, they argued, and need to do much more to become truly welcoming to all peoples and cultures.7 Catholicism needed African saints, African clergy, and African prelates to show it was not in fact the religion of the colonizers, but a universal creed. Over 60  years after much of Africa obtained political independence, it appears that the African voices prevailed in the foregoing debate. It is revealing that much of the exponential growth of Catholicism in Africa did not occur until after the demise of the formal colonial regimes. It took Vatican insistence on training African clergy, strenuous campaigning by African Catholic intellectuals and clergy at mid-century, and innovations by African believers on the ground to divorce the church from colonialism and lay the groundwork for Catholicism to explode in independent Africa. The Church did ultimately succeed in firmly anchoring itself in Africa and the faith is growing faster there than on any other continent, while Catholic observance has plummeted precipitously in Europe in the intervening decades. Indeed, Africa now exports clergy to serve dwindling congregations in Europe and to staff the missionary congregations that evangelized Africa in the first place.

Notes 1. The Sacred Congregation of the Propaganda Fide remained the Vatican body overseeing the missions until 2022, though in the wake of decolonization, it was renamed the “Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples” in 1967. 2. Libermann had previously founded a separate congregation, the Fathers of the Holy Heart of Mary, which then merged with the pre-existing Fathers of the Holy Spirit or Spiritans. See Koren (1983, pp. 200–225). The Spiritans did not focus exclusively on Africa, but it became a chief area of their operations, both within and beyond French territory. 3. The Catholic Namugongo “martyrs,” beatified in 1920 and canonized amid decolonization in 1964, became the first modern African saints in the church. In the first visit to Africa by a modern Pope, Paul VI went to Namugongo in 1969, and today it is a major site of Catholic pilgrimage. 4. On the Church and the Algerian War see Fontaine (2016). 5. For a collection of John XXIII’s speeches and letters on various colonies’ transitions to independence (see Société africaine de culture 1965). 6. For the rates of conversion in Beira see the charts and maps in Morier-Genoud (2019, pp. 66, 68, 69, 71, 76–77). 7. See, for example, the work of Alioune Diop, featured in Foster (2019, pp. 58–94).

Bibliography Adriányi, Gabriel et  al. 1981. The Church in the Modern Age. Trans. Anselm Biggs. New York: Crossroad. Carney, J. J. 2014. Rwanda Before the Genocide: Catholic Politics and Ethnic Discourse in the Late Colonial Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Daughton, J. P. 2006. An Empire Divided: Religion, Republicanism, and the Making of French Colonialism, 1880–1914. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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de Benoist, Joseph-Roger. 1987. Église et pouvoir colonial au Soudan français: administrateurs et missionnaires dans la Boucle du Niger (1885–1945). Paris: Karthala. Earle, Jonathon L. and J. J. Carney. 2021. Contesting Catholics: Benedicto Kiwanuka and the Birth of Postcolonial Uganda. Rochester, NY: James Currey. Fontaine, Darcie. 2016. Decolonizing Christianity: Religion and the End of Empire in France and Algeria, 1940–1965 Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Foster, Elizabeth A. 2012. “A Mission in Transition: Monsignor Joseph Faye and the Decolonization of the Catholic Church in Senegal” in Owen White and J. P. Daughton, eds., In God’s Empire: French Missionaries and the Modern World. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2013. Faith in Empire: Religion, Politics, and Colonial Rule in French Senegal, 1880–1940. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2019. African Catholic: Decolonization and the Transformation of the Church. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Goyau, Georges. 1926. Monseigneur Augouard. Paris: Plon. Hastings, Adrian. 1979. A History of African Christianity 1950–1975 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1994. The Church in Africa, 1450–1950. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sundkler, Bengt and Christopher Steed. 2000. A History of the Church in Africa. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Koren, Henry J. 1958. The Spiritans: A History of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1983. To the Ends of the Earth: A General History of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Méjan, François. 1957. Le Vatican contre la France d’Outre-Mer? Paris: Librairie Fischbacher. Morier-Genoud, Eric. 2019. Catholicism and the Making of Politics in Central Mozambique, 1940–1986. Rochester, NY: Rochester University Press. Orosz, Kenneth J. 2008. Religious Conflict and the Evolution of Language Policy in German and French Cameroon, 1885–1939. New York: Peter Lang. Pope Benedict XV Maximum Illud, Nov. 30, 1919 https://www.vatican.va/content/ benedict-­xv/en/apost_letters/documents/hf_ben-­xv_apl_19191130_maximum-­ illud.html. Pope Pius XI, Rerum ecclesiae, Feb. 28, 1926 https://www.vatican.va/content/pius­xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-­xi_enc_28021926_rerum-­ecclesiae.html. Shorter, Aylward. 2006. Cross & Flag in Africa: The “White Fathers” during the Colonial Scramble (1892–1914). Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Société africaine de culture. 1965. Un hommage africain à Jean XXIII. Paris: Présence africaine.

CHAPTER 22

Protestant Missions and Colonial States Andrew Eugene Barnes

Introduction This chapter provides a brief narrative overview of the evolution in the relationship between Protestant Christian missions and colonial administrations in Africa between 1880 and 1960, the period when Protestant missions most ardently pursued what they called the “Great Commission,” the task of evangelizing the entire world in one generation, while simultaneously European nation-states, in the aftermath of the “Scramble for Africa,” sought to impose administrative control over colonies across most of Africa. The chapter will focus on providing a historical explanation of one series of developments in this multidimensional and multifaceted story. During the 1920s, Protestant Christian missions and colonial governments worked out arrangements whereby governments would subsidize Western-style social services provided by missions, that is, schools, hospitals, orphanages, etc., in exchange for a commitment by missions that the latter would not use the venues where the services were being provided to proselytize. This strange and counter-intuitive bargain remained in place for the rest of the colonial era and was the modus vivendi behind a massive expansion in Western-style social services in Africa beginning in the 1920s. One of the legacies of this development are the service sectors in modern African states. Another is the niche Christian churches and missions retain in the provision of social services in Africa. The chapter will offer first a background understanding of the historical factors shaping the bargain, second a consideration of how the deal came to be made, and then A. E. Barnes (*) School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. E. Barnes, T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48270-0_22

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third an outline of how the deal played out over the last decades of the colonial era. The subject of church-state relations during the colonial era in Africa has a vast historiography, both from the perspective of Christian missions and from the perspective of colonial governments (Stanley 1990; Adu Boahen 1999; Cox 2010). Most of this scholarship has been the result of archival research, with the result that most of the existing scholarship on the mission side has been focused on specific missions and denominational churches, while most of the existing scholarship on the government side has been focused on specific colonies (Cf. McLeod 2006; Gilley and Stanley 2006; Spear 2023). Given the episodic character of the materials collected in archives, there is a tendency in this research to treat the secular trend of the relationship between missions and government as progressing as an outcome of exigency. Both groups of Europeans made decisions and took initiatives based upon developments on the ground (African and/or European responses to some situation) or as a consequence of historical events that were beyond the control of local actors (the two world wars, the global depression of 1929, etc.). Respecting the saliency of this approach for explaining much of what happened on the ground, the argument advanced below will be that there was a bigger picture and that in that picture there were broader, adversarial, cultural agendas guiding the actions and policies of both missions and colonial governments across the colonial era. These agendas reflected collective mentalities about how the world, as shaped by Europeans, should look in the future. The collective mentality shared by Christians, Christian churches, and Christian missions, on one side, and the collective mentality shared by ruling elites, imperialists, and colonial governments, on the other, took for granted the superiority of modern European culture, the obviousness of that superiority to African peoples, and the eagerness of African peoples to share in that culture. In the European mind there was such a seller’s market for European civilization that Europeans could exercise some discrimination in choosing to whom they sold. Europeans could not afford to let that market become free, however. To whom European civilization was sold was important for the future of European civilization itself. Both mentalities recognized both some set of core values as having inspired Europe’s rise to world dominance, and some set of values within modern European culture as working to destroy it. The challenge was identifying a set of African buyers who would cherish and build upon their acquisition in ways that would benefit European sellers (Barnes 2003; Hodge 2007). To change metaphors for a moment, both the missionaries and the colonial administrators who went to Africa saw themselves as on a mission to find a cure to the disease destroying modern European civilization. Africa was for them a “living laboratory” where they could demonstrate the values that had made Europe great through the inculcation of these values in Africans whose behavior gave evidence of the desired predispositions, while simultaneously showing how to quash the values that were destroying Europe through the suppression

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of the ambitions of Africans whose behavior gave evidence of the undesired values (Tilley 2011). To return to the original metaphor, the best set of African buyers would be those with a displayed affinity with the European sellers. Europeans continued to act out of these mentalities until the collapse of empires in the wake of World War II made it no longer possible to do so. Of pertinence here is how the mentalities shaped interactions between the missionaries and colonial administrators during the colonial era. What has been labeled the European Colonial Project was much bigger than the contest over the future of European civilization between the two groups (Rash and Horan 2020). Still, in all negotiations between missions and colonial administrations concerning the future of African peoples, negotiators for the two groups engaged in zero-sum thinking with any concession to the other side understood as potentially detrimental to the outcome of the Colonial Project.

Missionaries Versus Colonial Administrators To briefly characterize the opposing ambitions of missionaries and colonial administrators, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, European nation-­ states, empowered by the Industrial Revolution, and falsely deceived by scientific racism, aspired to become, as it was once described, “lords of human kind,” establishing political control over as much of the territory of the globe as they could (Kiernan 1988). Nationalism inside European nation-states inspired both elites and common folk to see as an index of national greatness the collection of far-flung colonies where they, as citizens of the nation-state, could rule as members of a master race. This was the European Colonial Project, but only as popularly imagined in Europe (Thorne 1997; Rash and Horan 2020). In government circles in Europe and on the ground in Africa among European expatriates there was an awareness of the need for local collaborators to make any European initiative work. There was recognition in both these groups that the bounty of imperial conquest needed to be shared with some set of local intermediaries. These local intermediaries were the buyers to which Europeans engaged in the above-described culture war wanted to sell. As Europeans conceived the European Colonial Project it offered potential collaborators such benefits in terms of access to European civilization as to outweigh whatever costs these potential collaborators associated with European conquest (Barnes 2003; Lawrence et al. 2006). Missionaries could be as enthusiastic about the European Colonial Project as colonial administrators. It was over the issue of which groups of Africans should be considered the best potential collaborators that the two groups spared. Missionaries and colonial officials shared racial and national, though rarely cultural and social identities (Kuklick 1979; Comaroff and Comaroff 2008). Cultural distinctions in particular set members of the two groups in opposition to each other. In dreaming about the advent of new empires, missionaries dreamed of Christian empires. Colonial officials maintained more secular fantasies. If, as has been suggested, European colonial conquest was

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about establishing new hierarchies of intermediaries between the conquerors and the conquered, then missionaries wanted to establish colonial societies where Christian Africans were given preferential treatment as intermediaries. Missionaries saw the European Colonial Project as making available to Christian Africans the material prosperity and social space to create idealized notions of “yeoman” Christian communities, “younger churches,” as missions came to call them, that would look up with filial pride to the “older churches” of Europe and their diasporas. As secularism gradually destroyed Europe, these younger churches would accept the torch of Christian faith while simultaneously showing that Christianity had in fact been the impetus behind Europe’s rise to global prominence. Crucially, missionaries hoped to arrange things in such a fashion that African Christians would occupy all the intermediary space between the colonizers and the colonized, offering Africans a voice only through Christianity (Barnes 2003, 2009). The hierarchies that colonial officials envisioned were much more complicated, with a priority given to race, and then social class in the search for collaborators. Race is a tricky item here. European racism in this context was primarily concerned to show the absence of any civilizing instincts among Negro peoples. To account for the presence of indigenous civilizations in Africa, Europeans at this time preferred to think that they were not the first set of outside invaders who had conquered Africa, just the most recent (and of course the best). There was a remarkable amount of intellectual speculation among Europeans about whether those ancient conquerors were Semites or Aryans. The one point of consensus in these speculative arguments was that these ancient invaders did not have black African blood inside them when they arrived; hence, they needed to be considered white, though with their white blood much corrupted by way of miscegenation (Barnes 2003). Colonial administrators were recruited from among those groups of Europeans who viewed with regret the decline of rule in Europe by hereditary elites. Colonial officials understood the European Colonial Project as providing refuge for Europeans with gentle if not aristocratic ancestry. The colonies would demonstrate the ongoing capacity of these individuals to rule while simultaneously demonstrating the capacity of indigenous elites to learn how to rule in a similar fashion. Since many of these indigenous elites were themselves the descendants of previous white conquerors, then ideally both European notions of race and class would be confirmed by the proposed collaboration. In their search for Africans with which to share their version of European culture, colonial administrators made a determined effort to validate the idea that ruling classes were a reality that liberal bourgeois European societies were denying at Europe’s cost. They made this effort first by shoring up the political authority of those African traditional elites who were accommodating to European overrule, and then second through endeavoring to train these elites to rule their domains using modern European methods (Barnes 2009).

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The Northern Nigerian Example The contest between the ambitions of missionaries and colonial administrators can be illustrated by examples drawn from across Africa, but here the clash will only be talked about using one example, that of the covert war between missions and government in the northern province of colonial Nigeria. In that region the battle between the two groups was more in the public eye than perhaps anywhere else in Africa, with missionaries complaining to the Colonial Office in London about their mistreatment by the local colonial administration, and administrators defending themselves by pointing to missionary excesses. At the heart of the missionaries’ complaint was the indictment that out of an anti-Christian animus, the colonial government was covertly promoting the spread of Islam. At the heart of the administrators’ rejoinder was the charge that the missionaries were trying to empower the worse sorts of Africans (Barnes 2003). To speak first about the objectives of Christian missions, Christian evangelists from various points across the Atlantic had been coming to Africa for centuries before the evolution of the European Colonial Project. Already by 1880 there were practicing African Christian communities in areas connected with trade across the Atlantic. Many of the missionaries who arrived in Africa after 1880 did not see these African Christians as potentially good collaborators. The missionaries who in particular headed for territories north of the Niger-Benue, that is, territories under the control of Muslims, thought that earlier efforts at Christianizing Africans had failed, in part because of the overall inferior caliber of the Africans who had converted (Barnes 2019a). The 1880s were the moment when in theory European Christians were proudest of the Christian success represented by the Reverend Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the slave who had risen to become a bishop. Already though, Europeans were chafing at the independence Africans sought from European ecclesiastical control, an independence expressed in African-edited and African-published newspapers, an independence already seeking common cause across the Atlantic with other Christians of African descent. Missionaries understood this independence as a reflection of an improper assimilation of the tenets of Christianity, traceable perhaps to the social background of many African Christians as either liberated slaves or the offspring of liberated slaves. Missionaries perceived the Muslim peoples of the north as hailing from a different stock, that of warriors and traders. Muslims were fellow enslavers, not the enslaved. So, missionaries were determined to proselytize the Muslim populations to create the desired types of Christian communities. The few Christian efforts at evangelizing the region before the turn of the twentieth century had few positive results. Missionaries were not deterred, however, because they looked at those efforts as having been hindered by the machinations of Muslim elites. If they could get past the elites, the missionaries declared, they could win converts. The British conquest of the emirates, culminating in Frederick Lugard’s hoisting the Union Jack in Sokoto in 1900, excited Christian missionaries with the possibilities of winning

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what they saw as the battle between the Cross and Crescent in the region, with the region’s Muslim population as the spoils of conquest. Missionaries were enraged when Lugard and his successors prohibited Christian proselytization in territories under Muslim rule. They were further incensed by rules promulgated by administrators that restricted the establishment of European mission stations, but not of Islamic schools, understood by missionaries to be equivalent loci for proselytization. Perhaps the last straw was the administrative move to put villages filled with non-Muslim peoples under the jurisdiction of local Muslim elites and then require Christian missions to petition local Muslim elites for permission to proselytize in said villages. Missionaries stewed as they watched one group of village leaders after another come under Muslim sway and convert to Islam in hopes of political preferment. Missionaries placed themselves at the borders of the emirates—or were escorted there by colonial officials—and looked on as their chances of converting prized groups of Africans whittled away. They ascribed this defeat to British administrative fiat. Out of a hatred of Christianity and Christians, British colonial officials were promoting the spread of Islam (Barnes 2009, 2010). There were in colonial Nigeria’s northern province some colonial officials with an animus against Christianity, though it would probably be more accurate to say that these men were motivated by notions of racial superiority that did not coalesce with the missionaries’ notions of Christian brotherhood. In seeking collaboration with Muslim elites, however, colonial officials were not being anti-Christian. They were acting out of the above-stated agenda that prioritized the transformation of traditional elites into colonial intermediaries. Thanks to literacy and long centuries of life at what Europeans considered a medieval level of social development, to the administrative mind Nigeria’s Muslim emirs were the ideal type of traditional elites, and thus deserved whatever assistance government could provide against the efforts of Christian missionaries to poach away their subjects (Barnes 2003). This thinking drew on more than just class-based altruism. One of the arguments made in favor of Muslim elites was that, just like Europeans, they had come to Africa as conquerors, and as conquerors they had the political acumen to appreciate that they in turn had been conquered and that the best option for survival before them was to serve as lieutenants for their new masters. As lieutenants they had to accept doing the dirty work of ruling, of coercing non-­ elites into compliance with the new colonial regime. Perhaps the most tangible application of this presumption could be seen, as least in the early decades of the colonial era, in the European expectation that Muslim elites supply forced labor for government projects. A Muslim elite who would not or could not display his capacity to rule through uprooting the indigenous male population from their fields to supply labor on demand, rarely retained political office, no matter how aristocratic a lineage they might claim. For almost thirty years (1900–1930) missionaries and colonial administrators fought an undeclared war over the right to develop the region’s Muslim population into a living illustration of the type of society to which Europe

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should return. The level of cloak and dagger was extraordinary, with missionaries and colonial officials surveilling each other through the back roads of the Northern Province, missionaries posting anti-government propaganda in the dark of night, and administrators seeking to expel missionaries from the territory altogether (Barnes 2003, 2004). On neither side was there any real regard for the fact that the region’s Muslim population wanted nothing to do with either of them. Still, the contest shaped the exigencies that developed in the region toward the outcomes desired by the opposing agendas. The missions gained a local Christian population almost inadvertently as the region’s traditionalist population toward whom the colonial administration shunted the missions’ evangelical efforts evolved into one of the staunchest Christian populations in Africa. Meanwhile the Muslim elite that emerged in the region toward the end of the colonial era were broadly recognized as validation of the government’s social and cultural engineering strategies (Barnes 2009, 2010).

Ethiopianism and the Phelps-Stokes Education Commissions Some version of the contest that took place in Nigeria’s northern province occurred in some fashion almost everywhere in Africa during the colonial era, though perhaps nowhere with the same level of acrimony. The European civilization toward which Protestant evangelization pointed African converts was different from the European civilization to which colonial government policies mandated African societies’ progress. And neither group of Europeans ever relented in its effort to corral more Africans inside its’ vision. The stalemate that developed, however, did not last. Even before the contest between Europeans existed, that is, before the European Colonial Project evolved, there were African Christian and African diasporic Christian visions for the future of Africa. All these visions can be loosely labeled Ethiopianism because they all took their start from a reading of Psalms 68:31–2, “Princes and envoys shall come from Egypt and Ethiopia will quickly stretch out her hands to God,” which taught peoples of African descent that the civilizing and evangelizing of the African continent would come through African initiative. Ethiopianism developed its classic formulations across the nineteenth century culminating in Africa in the Ethiopianist movement that emerged in South Africa during the 1890s, which significantly presented to Europeans the phenomenon of African Christians turning to African American Christians for support and guidance (Redkey 1969; St. Clair Drake 1970; King 1971; Shepperson  1968; Lahouel 1986; Chirenje 1987; Moses 1996, 1998). (Please also see Chaps. 20, 30 and 31 in this volume). Europeans opted to ignore the historical import of Ethiopianism, however, choosing to dismiss it as an example of African peoples failing to grasp the tenets of Christianity. One problem for Europeans though was that Ethiopianism would not go away and through newspapers and lectures continued to grow in

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intellectual maturity. Another problem for Europeans was that missions did not stop teaching African Christian converts to read and write, and that once literate, these individuals became the audience for Ethiopianist discourse. Ethiopianists were antagonistic toward every version of the European Colonial Project. And to the chagrin of Christian missions, as the number of African Christians increased, the number of Christians with Ethiopianist sympathies grew (Langley 1973; Lahouel 1986; Chirenje 1987; Campbell 1998; Duncan 2015; Barnes 2017, 2019b). Missions had maintained schools attached to their mission stations since before the Scramble for Africa, and colonial governments once they were established did not think too hard about challenging the monopoly over the provision of education that missions claimed, especially since those schools supplied the only Africans with the clerical skills needed to staff new government offices. The monopoly came under progressively greater government scrutiny, however, as the number of African Christian critics of European domination grew, and African Christians displayed the temerity to argue about colonial liberation, in print and in European as well as indigenous languages. Both groups of Europeans found that the covert war between them was being supplanted by the covert war between the two of them on one side and Africans who challenged European rule on the other. Two developments finally brought home to missions and colonial governments the fact that despite their opposing visions, they had a need for each other. One was World War I and the European discovery that European nation-states required their African subjects’ support to keep their empires afloat. The second was the emergence of the Marcus Garvey movement across the Black Atlantic world in the years following World War I. The Garvey movement made obvious to both groups of Europeans a truth they both would rather ignore, that the European Colonial Project was not the only vision of Africa’s future on the table. (See Chap. 31 in this volume). So, both groups of Europeans opened themselves up to the possibility of some sort of common vision (Whitehead 2005; Windel 2009). The two Phelps-­ Stokes Education Commission Tours of Africa, the first in 1920 and the second in 1923, have earned a fair amount of historical investigation, though worth suggesting here is that they have not earned enough (Berman 1970, 1971; King 1971; Barnes 2017, 2020b). Not much can be said about them here except to sketch the ways in which they facilitated the bargain between missions and colonial governments talked about above. The tours were organized by the International Missionary Council (IMC), a Protestant mission lobby organization that evolved out of the World Missionary Conference that took place in 1910. J. H. Oldham, the general secretary of the IMC, the individual most involved in settling disputes between missions and governments in Africa, brokered an invitation from the British Colonial Office to Thomas Jesse Jones, education director for the American philanthropy, the Phelps-Stokes Fund, and self-proclaimed “greatest living expert on Negro education,” to build a team of other experts and then tour mission schools in Africa to offer an assessment of how the schools could be improved. The only improvements about which the

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Colonial Office wanted to hear were those that went toward the missions recognizing the need to cease producing African Christians prone to Ethiopianism. Jones claimed that industrial education schools in the United States, of which Hampton Institute in Virginia and Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee Alabama were the shining examples, had demonstrated how Christians of African descent could be trained to seek to serve, not challenge white authority. The charge of the first Phelps-Stokes Education was to determine how Jones’ idea of the education being given at Hampton and Tuskegee could be applied in schools in Africa (King 1971; Correia 1993; Barnes 2020b). It is quite difficult today to go back and read what Jones had to say a century ago and figure out exactly what made it so persuasive to contemporaries. But it must be acknowledged that the first tour, which traveled from Sierra Leone to Cape Town, and the report that Jones published about the tour were sufficiently successful that funding was found for a second tour and report, the second tour traveling from Durban to Addis Abba (Education in Africa 1922; Education in East Africa 1925; Berman 1970, 1971; King 1971). Triggering the receptivity of both missions and governments to the tours was a shared fear of Garvey and Ethiopianism. That Ethiopianism could be the inspiration for political sedition was proven to the European mind by John Chilembwe’s rebellion in Malawi in 1914 (Shepperson and Price 1969; Mwase 1975). And Garvey’s movement explicitly proposed to replace European empires in Africa with one empire ruled by Garvey and other people of African descent (Moses 1996; Vinson 2006). One cause for the success accredited to the Phelps-Stokes tours was the activities of James Aggrey, the one African member of the commission. Aggrey spent time on both tours consciously attacking Garvey and the Garvey movement. More important than these attacks though was the Ethiopianist vision that Aggrey promoted as an alternative to the one Africans read about in Garvey’s journal, The Negro World. In Aggrey’s vision, African and Europeans worked together harmoniously—like the black and white keys of a piano. Implicit in this vision was the Christian notion that in God’s plan there was enough space in Africa for both African and European schemes for future greatness. Aggrey worked somewhat independently of the other members of the commission, traveling to towns and villages where there were few whites, always preaching to enthusiastic crowds of black people who identified him as one of their own (Smith 1929; Jacobs 1996; Sanders 2019). African Christians found Aggrey’s vision of the future appealing. Europeans, especially European Christians, found Jones’ vision similarly attractive. Jones considered himself a statistician, though there was not much to his method beyond correlational analysis. Still, in his reports and other writings Jones presented numbers that purported to show that Britain and its commonwealth of former settler colonies were, statistically speaking, the best places on earth to live. This achievement was the result of design, Jones argued, Britain and its offspring having perfected a Christian lifestyle that, more than any other Christian lifestyle, generated the highest amount of social amelioration. Jones

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made the case specifically to missions that if they backed off on preaching salvation, and concentrated more on social uplift, the healthy happy Africans who would be the products of the missions’ metanoia would in a few generations fill mission churches to the balconies (Jones 1925, 1926; Barnes 2020b). Colonial governments lined up behind Jones’ proposals, promising to build schools, if the missions supplied schoolteachers; hospitals if the missions supplied doctors and surgeons. In a series of IMC conferences across the 1920s, missions and government worked out the final details of the bargain. Neither side saw the deal as demanding the abandonment of their visions for Africa’s future. Both understood the bargain as simply dictating their public behavior toward each other. Both also believed that what Jones promoted as the American approach to “Negro education” had the potential for suppressing Ethiopianism. African American missionaries had been coming to Africa since before the Scramble for Africa. They did provide inspiration and guidance to African Ethiopianists. As a final suggestion to missions and colonial governments, Jones made the case that restricting the capacity of African American missionaries to proselytize in Africa would stymie the flow of Ethiopianist ideas into Africa. In the last of the IMC conferences on the proposals put forward in the two Phelps-Stokes Education Commission reports, held in La Joute, Belgium in 1927, such restrictions were implemented (King 1971; Barnes 2017, 2020b).

The Revolutionary Consequences of the Phelps-Stokes Commission Reports The two Phelps-Stokes Education Commission reports were so suffused with imperialistic and white racial fantasy that it seems counter-intuitive to see them as having led to positive historical developments (Education in Africa 1922; Education in East Africa 1925; Berman 1970, 1971). Yet they must be recognized as a crucial antecedent to a social revolution that took place in Africa from the 1920s to the end of the colonial era, during which a new social class of African providers of Western-style social services for other Africans came into existence. Two attributes of this social revolution should be spotlighted. The first is that, for the first time, beyond manual labor, a significant set of Africans were performing jobs for which there was a one-to-one equivalency in Western societies (Sivonen 1995; Kallaway 2009; Barnes 2020a). The two Phelps-Stokes reports reiterated the European racist conviction that Africans lacked the mental capacity to perform any type of endeavor requiring intellectual training, though Jones’ liberal instincts prompted him to affirm that after several generations of the right sort of nurturing, the needed mental capacity might become a racial trait of at least Christian Africans. But in the meantime, Europeans needed to hold on to all the social service jobs that demanded any degree of professional training. Likewise, the management of institutions where social services were performed needed to stay in the hands of whites. In effect Jones reserved these jobs for European missionaries as both their charge

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and racial privilege. Putting professional and management jobs to one side, however, still left open to Africans all the other jobs associated with the provision of social services. So, Africans found open to them opportunities to train to be teachers, nurses, agricultural demonstrators, pharmaceutical dispensers, etc., jobs for which there was also a need in European and American societies. Likewise, the training Africans received was the equivalent to the training that Europeans and Americans would have received. In fact, the instructors in African training institutes who were not missionaries typically were instructors hired out of European and American institutes. Looking at the bigger picture, if all these jobs could be classified as technical in the sense that they went toward the implementation of the “tool kit” of European civilization, then it can be said that the Phelps-Stokes Education Commissions created a space for a type of African intermediary, a technically trained African intermediary, not envisioned in either of the original notions of the European Colonial Project. Both the French and the British made efforts to develop training programs for such jobs geared specifically to Muslims, but most of the schools where technical skills were taught were under missionary supervision (Küster 2007; Barnes 2018, 2020b). The second attribute of the social revolution that merits notice is that for the first time a significant set of Western-trained Africans were providing services for African clienteles. Previously, the jobs available for Africans with Western education were jobs servicing the expatriate sector. Educated Christian Africans worked for Europeans. Social welfare jobs were community-facing and applied European knowledge to the needs of African peoples. The new set of jobs opened a world of opportunities for African Christians to embed themselves in African communities. This was especially important for African women, who for the first time claimed social and cultural authority as dispensers of Western knowledge as teachers, nurses, and welfare workers (Hughes 2013; Prevost 2017; Barnes 2015, 2020a).

Some Outcomes of the European Colonial Project As a start to a conclusion, it is helpful to look back at what happened in Nigeria’s Northern Province as results of the recommendations in the Phelps-Stokes reports. A key moment there took place in 1927, when in the wake of a particularly embarrassing assessment of the government schools that had been established in the Muslim emirates, the lieutenant governor announced that henceforth missionaries would be allowed to travel through and set up mission stations in the emirates. Missionaries thought that they had won a great victory, but then the lieutenant governor made clear the fine print. Missionaries were allowed to enter into the emirates, but only with the permission of the emir and only to provide some recognized social service. Proselytizing remained prohibited. And missionaries were enjoined not to evangelize their students and patients (Barnes 1998). Medical missions were the door-opener into the emirates. Missions in the region took on the challenge of eradicating leprosy

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with some success (Shankar 2014). The crowning achievement though was the Kano Eye Hospital which opened in 1952. In one of the great Muslim cities in the world, Christian missions operated a cutting-edge hospital dedicated to the treatment of eye diseases. The protocols colonial officials demanded missionaries follow when dealing with the emirs and their families were revealing. No informality was allowed, and administrators insisted that missionaries approach Muslim elites with all the pomp and circumstance then being denied to hereditary elites in Britain itself (Shankar 2014). In other words, British colonial administrators continued their pursuit of a world run by hereditary elites, arranging for the knighting of several of the Muslim leaders who emerged in the region at the end of the colonial era. Most of those elites had been educated at Katsina College, a school for Muslim elites staffed by missionaries and former missionaries (Barnes 2009). As for the missionaries, as doctors and nurses, they displayed the expected discipline in the leprosy camps and in the Kano hospital and did not proselytize their patients. These strictures were not necessarily followed by the Christian African staff at these facilities, however. And when they felt secure from government surveillance, in the camps where they visited leprosy patients, and in the examination rooms and wards of the hospital and other medical treatment centers, to the extent to which they knew local languages, they did preach to their patients about Jesus (Barnes 2009; Shankar 2014). Accepting that teaching, medical care and other social services can be recognized as good things, and that the training of Africans to provide these things improved life in Africa both for the providers and the receivers of social services, then it can be suggested that the contest between missionaries and colonial administrators resulted in some positive benefit, perhaps the only positive benefit for Africans from the “European moment” in African history. One takeaway from the chapter should be that all Europeans did not come to Africa with a common purpose. Other groups of Europeans besides missionaries and colonial administrators came to Africa, and each of these groups had their own agendas for what they wanted to achieve. What distinguished missions and colonial administrations were their visions of how Africa and Africans would serve Europe and Europeans in the future. As shown above, both groups hoped, through various strategies of social and cultural engineering, to use African collaborators to demonstrate the ongoing vitality of a version of Europe each group felt was dying. This fear that time was running out for Europe, and that Africa, once transformed into a protean version of Europe when Europe was good, could show Europe the way back to health prompted a competition between the two groups of Europeans that never ceased during the colonial era. A second takeaway however, should be that Ethiopianism, which posited an Afro-centric vision of Africa’s future, became a threat to both sets of dreams, and prompted missions and governments to seek common cause. It would be wrong to say that the buildup of social services during the latter decades of the colonial era was an unintended consequence of the effort at suppressing Ethiopianism. It was a desired outcome. What was unintended, or perhaps to

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use a better word, unanticipated, was the opportunity the buildup of social services granted Africans to begin to shape their own version of modernity. One last takeaway, and this has to do with the importance of these developments for African Christianity, the profile of mission Christianity during the colonial era taken for granted in current scholarly discourse needs to be recognized as having evolved only after the bargain put into place during the 1920s. There is no space to develop the point here, but what can be said is that nineteenth-­ century Evangelical missionaries were as unsympathetic to Enlightenment rationality as modern Pentecostals. European Christians at the end of the nineteenth century saw the European Colonial Project as an opportunity to show how a Christianity shorn of its compromises with capitalist modernity could thrive. It was this enthusiasm that Thomas Jesse Jones demanded European missionaries give up.

Bibliography Adu Boahen, A. ed. 1999 (UNESCO) General History of Africa: Volume VII, Africa under Foreign Domination 1880–1935, Berkeley: University of California Press. Barnes Andrew E. 1998 “Some smoke behind the fire’: The Fraser Report and its aftermath in colonial Northern Nigeria,” Canadian Journal of African Studies XXI, 2 (1998), 197–228. Barnes Andrew E. 2003 “Aryanizing Projects: African Collaborators and Colonial Transcripts,” in Vasant Kaiwar (ed) Antimonies of Modernity, Duke University Press (2003), 62–97. Barnes, Andrew E. 2004. ‘Religious Insults’: Christian Critiques of Islam and the Government in Colonial Northern Nigeria. The Journal of Religion in Africa, XXXIV, 1–2, 62–81 Barnes Andrew E. 2009. Making Headway: The Introduction of Western Civilization in Colonial Northern Nigeria. Rochester: University of Rochester Press. Barnes Andrew E. 2010 “The Great Prohibition: The Expansion of Christianity in Colonial Northern Nigeria,” History Compass (online journal) June 2010. Barnes Andrew E. 2015 “‘Making Good Wives and Mothers’: The African Education Group and Missionary Reactions to the Phelps Stokes Reports” Studies in World Christianity, vol. 21. 1, 66–85. Barnes Andrew E. 2017. Global Christianity and the Black Atlantic: Tuskegee, Colonialism and the Shaping of African Industrial Education Baylor University Press, 2017. Barnes Andrew E. 2018. Christian Social Welfare and its legacy in Colonial Africa” in Martin S. Shanguhyia and Toyin Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of African Colonial and Postcolonial History, Palgrave Macmillan Press. Barnes Andrew E. 2019a. “The Cross versus the Crescent: The Missiology of Karl Kumm,” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations (2019) 30(4):1–21. Barnes Andrew E. 2019b. “The Black Atlantic: African Americans, Ethiopianism and Christian Newspapers in Africa,” in Klaus Korschorke (ed), “Giving publicity to our thoughts” Journale asiatischer und afrikanischer Christen um 1900 und die Entstehung einer transregionalen indigen- christlichen ‚Public Sphere’/ Journals of Asian and

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African Christians around 1900 and the making of a transregional indigenous-­ Christian ‘Public Sphere’ (2019). Barnes Andrew E. 2020a. “Christianity and Vocational Education,” in Toyin Falola and Jamaine Abidogun (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook on African Education and Indigenous Knowledge, Palgrave Macmillan Press, 2020. Barnes Andrew E. 2020b. “Thomas Jesse Jones, the Phelps Stokes Education Commissions and Education for Social Welfare in Colonial Africa,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History (2020). Berman, Edward H. 1970. “Education in Africa and America: A History of the Phelps Stokes Fund 42 1911–1945.” Ed.D. diss., Columbia University, 1970. Berman, Edward H. 1971. “American Influences on African Education: The Case of the Two Phelps Stokes Fund’s Education Commissions,” Comparative Education Review, 15:2, 132–145. Campbell, James T. 1998. Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Chirenje, J.  Mutero. 1987. Ethiopianism and Afro-Americans in Southern Africa, 1883–1916. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press. Comaroff, Jean., and John L. Comaroff. 2008. Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume 1 Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Correia, Stephen Taylor. 1993. ‘“For their own good”: An Historical Analysis of the Educational Thought of Thomas Jesse Jones’ Ph.D. diss., Pennsylvania State University. Cox, Jeffrey. 2010. The British Missionary Enterprise since 1700, New York: Routledge. Drake, St. Clair. 1970. The Redemption of Africa and Black Religion. Chicago: Third World Press. Duncan, Graham A. 2015. “Ethiopianism in Pan-African Perspective, 1880–1920.” Studia Historiae Ecclesiasticae 41 (2): 198–218. Education in Africa 1922. Education in Africa; a study of West, South, and equatorial Africa by the African education commission, under the auspices of the Phelps-Stokes fund and foreign mission societies of North America and Europe; report prepared by Thomas Jesse Jones, chairman of the Commission. New  York: Phelps Stokes Fund; London: Edinburgh House, 1922. Education in East Africa 1925. Education in East Africa; a study of East, Central and South Africa by the second African Education Commission under the auspices of the Phelps-Stokes Fund, in cooperation with the International Education Board. Report prepared by Thomas Jesse Jones (New York: Phelps Stokes Fund; London: Edinburgh House, 1925 45). Gilley, Sheridan, and Brian Stanley. 2006. World Christianities, c. 1815–c. 1914. Cambridge, UK; Cambridge University Press. Hughes, Rebecca C. 2013, “‘Science in the Hands of Love’: British Evangelical Missionaries and Colonial Development in Africa, c. 1940–60,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Vol. 41, No. 5, 823–842. Hodge, Joseph M. 2007. Triumph of the Experts: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism. Athens: Ohio University Press. Jacobs, Sylvia. 1996. “James Emman Kwegyir Aggrey: An African Intellectual in the United States,” The Journal of Negro History, 81: 47–61. Jones, Thomas Jesse. 1925. “The White Man’s Burden in Africa,” Current History, November 1925, 213–221.

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Jones, Thomas Jesse. 1926. “A Good Word for Missionaries,” Current History, July 1, 1926, 539–44. Kallaway, Peter. 2009. “Education, health and social welfare in the late colonial context: The International Missionary Council and educational transition in the interwar years with special reference to colonial Africa,” History of Education, vol. 38, no. 2, 217–46. Kiernan, Victor. 1988/2015. The Lords of Human Kind: European Attitudes to Other Cultures in the Imperial Age. Zed Books, London. King, Kenneth J. 1971. Pan-Africanism and Education: A Study of Race Philanthropy and Education in the Southern United States and East Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kuklick, Henrika, 1979 The Imperial Bureaucrat: The Colonial Administrative Service in the Gold Coast, 1920–1939. Stanford, Calif: Hoover Institution Press. Küster, Sybille. 2007. “‘Book Learning’ versus ‘Adapted Education’: the Impact of Phelps-Stokesism on Colonial Education Systems in Central Africa in the Interwar Period,” Paedagogica Historica, 43:1, 79–97. Lawrence, Benjamin N and Emily Lynn Osborn and Richard L.  Roberts eds. 2006 Intermediaries, interpreters, and clerks: African employees in the making of colonial Africa Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Lahouel, Badra. 1986. “Ethiopianism and African Nationalism in South Africa before 1937.” Cahiers d’Edudes Africaines 26 (104): 681–88. Langley, J.  Ayondele. Pan Africanism and Nationalism in West Africa, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973. McLeod, Hugh. 2006, World Christianities c. 1914–c. 2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moses, Wilson Jeremiah. 1996. Classical Black Nationalism: from the American Revolution to Marcus Garvey, New York: New York University Press. Moses, Wilson Jeremiah. 1998. Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History. Cambridge [England]: Cambridge University Press. Mwase, George Simeon. 1975. Strike a blow and die; the classic story of the Chilembwe Rising. London: Heinemann. Spear, Thomas ed. 2023 Oxford Research Encyclopedias: African History (oxfordre. com/africanhistory). Prevost, Elizabeth E. 2017. “Troubled Traditions: Female Adaptive Education in British Colonial Africa,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 45, no. 3, 475–505. Rash, Felicity and Geraldine Horan (eds). 2020. The Discourse of British and German Colonialism: Convergence and Competition. Milton: Taylor and Francis. Redkey, Edwin S. 1969. Black Exodus; Black Nationalist and Back-to-Africa Movements, 1890–1910. New Haven: Yale University Press. Sanders, Ethan R. 2019. “James Aggrey and the African Nation: Pan-Africanism, Public Memory, and Political Imagination in Colonial East Africa.” International Journal of African Historical Studies 52 (3): 399–424. Shankar, Shobana. 2014. Who Shall Enter Paradise? Christian Origins in Muslim Northern Nigeria, c.1890–1975. Ohio University Press. Shepperson, George, and Thomas Price. 1969. Independent African: John Chilembwe and the Origins, Setting and Significance of the Nyasaland Native Rising of 1914. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Shepperson, George. 1968, “Ethiopianism: Past and Present,” in C.  G. Baeta, ed. Christianity in Tropical Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968, 250–60. Sivonen, Seppe. 1995. White-Collar or Hoe Handle: African Education under British Colonial Policy 1920–1945. Helsinki: Soumen Historiallinen Seura. Smith, Edwin W. 1929. Aggrey of Africa: A Study in Black and White. London: Student Christian Movement Press. Stanley, Brian. 1990. The Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century, Leicester, England: Apollos. Tilley, Helen. 2011. Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870–1950. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Thorne, Susan. 1997. “The Conversion of Englishmen and the Conversion of the World Inseparable”: Missionary Imperialism and the Language of Class in Early Industrial Britain, in Frederick Cooper, and Ann Laura Stoler eds, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, University of California Press. Vinson, Robert T. 2006. ‘Sea Kaffirs’: ‘American Negroes’ and the Gospel of Garveyism in Early Twentieth-Century Cape Town, in Journal of African History, 47 (2006), 281–303. Whitehead, Clive. 2005. “The historiography of British Imperial education policy, Part II: Africa and the rest of the colonial empire,” History of Education, vol. 34, no. 4, 441–454. Windel, Aaron. 2009. British Colonial Education in Africa: Policy and Practice in the Era of Trusteeship, History Compass, vol. 7. No. 1, 1–21.

CHAPTER 23

Women Missionaries and the Evangelization of Women in Africa Rebecca C. Hughes

The iconic image of a foreign missionary traveling to Africa may conjure images of a white man with a pith helmet or the explorer-missionary David Livingstone (1813–1873), but it would be more accurate to picture a white woman with a slate and pen, sewing needle, or medical bag. More women than men served as foreign missionaries, and most were working within institutions such as schools, hospitals, and clinics (Cox 2008, p. 17). Yet this picture would be incomplete; African American women and Black settler women also worked as missionaries. These Western women differed from each other by race, class, nationality, and theology, but they all wielded power and status from their varying affiliations with imperial entities. That said, they operated in a liminal/contested space that required their attentiveness to the demands and priorities of African women, male missionary authorities, and missionary supporters at home. This chapter provides historical context on the work of foreign missionary women in Christianizing African women, and it highlights that this process, despite power differentials, required collaboration between the two as Christianity became indigenized across cultures.

R. C. Hughes (*) Department of History, Seattle Pacific University, Seattle, WA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. E. Barnes, T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48270-0_23

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Women Missionaries in the Early Nineteenth Century The spread of Western Christianity into Africa emerged out of empire and new conceptions of human rights in Europe and the US colonies in the eighteenth century. These movements flourished in tension with each other as industrializing countries granted greater rights to citizens while expanding their empires, seeking raw materials and markets. In response to these changes, a number of mission organizations were created to support colonizers as they lived outside Christian regions. By the early nineteenth century as the Great Awakening religious revival flowered, Christians established a flurry of new voluntary mission societies centered on evangelizing non-Christians across the globe. One key impetus, particularly for British missionaries, was to combat the evils of slavery, abolishing the system and uplifting those who had been dehumanized by it. Religious enthusiasm, imperialism, and new conceptions of human rights all manifested in the antislavery movement and it steered attention on Africa. The early years of missions work in Africa were not only driven by, but also complicated by the Atlantic slave trade. The Church Missionary Society (CMS) started a mission in Sierra Leone in 1804 as an extension of abolitionist efforts to evangelize Liberated Africans, but ironically, it was enmeshed with the slave trade. Despite championing antislavery, missionaries depended on slave ships for travel, supplies, and correspondence. Missionary leaders shielded the general public from this knowledge; for one, sailing on a slave ship was a highly indelicate enterprise for a respectable white Christian woman. Proximity to slave factories created difficulty for missionaries since they were accused of “spying” for the British government. For example, the mission school at Bashia, Sierra Leone was burned down, despite the fact that many of the slave traders sent their children there. Protestant women worked alongside their husbands in Sierra Leone and other early mission stations as the couples focused on evangelizing, biblical translation, and literary education. Yet the women were regarded not as professionals, but as “helpmeets.” As one of the first CMS male recruits declared, he desired a wife “‘to cheer the one and make others comfortable’” (Leach 2019, p. 157). Many of the women did exactly that, but also far more. They filled in wherever they were needed as teachers, bookkeepers, and official mission correspondents, all the while managing their households and caring for children. Generally speaking, only snippets about these women’s lives and the relationships they made with African women can be gleaned from the records of mission societies and their husbands’ writing; the bulk of these women were not even distinguished with an obituary notice in mission publications (Kirkwood 1993, p. 315). We know even less about the African women with whom missionary women interacted. Unsatisfied with their lack of professional standing, missionary women championed “women’s work for women” and claimed their relevance by evangelizing women who were out of reach of male missionaries (Semple, 2003). By the mid-nineteenth century, women were successfully creating independent

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organizations which afforded them greater autonomy despite remaining subordinate to ordained male leaders. The opening up of medical training to women in the late nineteenth century provided another avenue for women to qualify as professional missionaries. However, as historian Deborah Gaitskell stresses, women were “both liberated and constrained by their Christian faith” since they were expected to live out “womanly” compassion and comfort (Gaitskell 2003a, p. 146). Even so, this shift presented single women new opportunities to live out their faith commitment outside of Catholic orders. They served as headmistresses of schools, teachers, doctors, and nurses. One advantage that unmarried women exercised was greater flexibility in their living arrangements. In South Africa, single women who worked for the Anglican high church Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) could live in Black African neighborhoods. However, the scope of their efforts was limited to working with children because African women regarded them as lacking the authority and experience of married women (Gaitskell 2000, pp. 79–81).

Women Missionaries and the Scramble for Africa (c. 1880–1914) It was not until the Scramble for Africa was well underway that women ventured to Africa in larger numbers. The climate was deemed too unhealthy for them, but by 1895, a contingent embarked for Uganda. David Livingstone’s romantic adventures demonstrated that a white person could survive interior Africa, and his plea to help “heal this open sore of the world,” inspired women to move to Africa. Mission proponents celebrated the heroic missionary model for women as well as for men as they were recruiting volunteers and seeking financial and spiritual support. The most iconic myth became that of the “heroic” “mill girl” Mary Slessor (1848–1915); she was heralded not only for evangelizing in Nigeria, but also for rescuing twins from ritual killing (Breitenbach 2017, p. 178). The “great game” of building empire in Africa coincided with the height of the influence of scientific racism. Missionaries contributed to these ideas as they sought to understand the social and religious thought of African peoples in the service of evangelizing them. A key facet of this anthropological work focused on the origins of a people, emphasizing biological rather than cultural differences. In applying this notion, missionaries abandoned their commitment to spiritual equality and embraced racial hierarchies (Hughes, 2020). Previously they had ranked people by cultures, but belief in biological fixity now took precedence and thwarted mission theorist Henry Venn’s call for the euthanasia of the mission once self-governing, self-financing, and self-propagating churches were established. Instead, missionaries claimed Africans were incapable of overseeing their own churches. Moreover, as survival rates for Western missionaries improved, the drive to cede control of missions to Africans diminished (Walls 2015).

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Studying the lives of missionary women reveals that white missionary men began implementing these racial prejudices before the mid- to late nineteenth century. During a round of financial cuts in the early 1820s in Sierra Leone, the CMS favored white women and reduced the status, and consequently the pay, for two Black missionary wives. These women were recategorized as “native” schoolmistresses, and then they were further demoted to “native assistants,” suffering the double discrimination of racism and sexism (Leach 2019, pp.  288–90).1 Similarly, the London Missionary Society (LMS) resolved to send only married couples after 1820, ensuring that white male missionaries would not be marrying Black women. Missionary women remained deeply committed to cultural hierarchies in this era as they justified their work through civilizing missions. The ascendant feminist movement stimulated a new missional impetus as Western women regarded themselves as the most advanced in the world and thus poised to assist other women in gaining status and rights. At the heart of this conviction was a belief in the superiority of Western culture and its place as the universal standard by which all cultures should be measured. Western women were slow to claim sisterhood with African women because they ranked African cultures below others. In addition, missionary women blurred the distinctions between racial and cultural differences. The Catholic White Sisters in western Tanzania enforced a racial hierarchy by compelling African women to perform more physical labor (Smythe 2007, p. 59).2 The Keswick holiness movement also contributed to more racialized conceptions of Africans. This revivalist crusade encouraged emotion as a means to deeper spirituality, and adherents prioritized evangelism over other forms of mission work. New faith organizations, such as the Africa Inland Mission, characterized Africa as full of “‘sin, darkness, ignorance, barbarism,’” and emphasized spiritual fervor over education (Robert 1997, p. 209). In the early days of these more Wesleyan faith missions, women benefited as they could now serve as evangelists with access to men as well as women. However, the divide between faith missions and the women’s mission movement widened since the women’s movement was rooted in middle-class norms of educational and institutional work. By the twentieth century, women in the faith missions were shunted toward traditional women’s work resulting in further diminishment of their roles since faith missions devalued the social work of nursing and teaching (Robert 1997, pp. 204–09).

Education and the Christian Home In much of sub-Saharan Africa, literary education for African women was a contested goal into the early twentieth century. However, as Christianity spread and as acquiring a Western education enhanced one’s social standing, this sensibility changed, and girls’ education was integrated into the bridewealth system (Daggers 2011, pp.  92, 98). Moreover, girls across sub-Saharan Africa sought Christian education, and many aspired to a religious vocation and served as catechists and evangelists. For example, in western Tanzania, Catholic

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girls at Karema accompanied the White Sisters in evangelizing nearby communities (Smythe 2007, pp. 70–72). These young African women practiced their faith and exercised their newfound knowledge to teach Christianity to children and adult members of their society. Missionary women insisted that educated, Christian women were the key to creating a Christian Africa. Not only would they encourage their husbands in their faith, but they would also raise Christian children who would build the future. This premise developed into the doctrine of the Christian home, and it prevailed from the early nineteenth century through the 1950s. Historian Dana Robert argues that this doctrine “combined the social and evangelistic functions of missions” as it justified the work of women (Robert 2008, p. 136). The onus to teach this construct fell to married missionary women as they were to model this ideal to African women through companionate monogamous marriages, mothercraft, and housekeeping. Yet single Western missionaries also supported the construct as they served as surrogate mothers at schools and incorporated mothercraft and housekeeping into school curricula. Thus, motherhood came to signal Christian womanhood more universally than an emphasis on companionate monogamous marriage.3 Rather than build on local cultural norms, missionary women expected African women to adopt the ideas and practices of Western middle-class domesticity with its particular forms of dress, housekeeping, and respectability. Up to the interwar period, Western missionaries routinely condemned African cultures, and the sentiment of transforming “the heathen kraal into a Christian home” was applied across cultures (Labode 1993). One primary goal of missionary education was to equip African women to teach the Christian home within their communities. Perhaps the most outstanding example of this instruction was implemented in 1940s Mukono, Uganda, with the CMS erecting special housing for ordinands and their wives so that the women could gain on-the-job training for their future parishioners to emulate. Despite the attempts to convert African women into Western gender norms, Christian womanhood was negotiated and “metropolitan norms of femininity and religion were overturned as much as they were reproduced” as historian Elizabeth Prevost emphasizes (Prevost 2008, p.  155) African women interpreted the meaning of Christian womanhood into their own cultures, and missionary women accommodated these practices. Since missionaries did not think it was necessary to teach African girls and women English, this policy afforded African women more power to translate and apply biblical standards within their own culture (Daggers 2011, p. 98).4

The Building of Cross-Cultural Relationships in the Twentieth Century Religion served as a bridge between missionary women and colonized women, subverting the racial and cultural boundaries that had been erected in the high imperial Victorian era. Elizabeth Prevost argues that one can see the building of

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cross-cultural solidarity through the bonds of shared Christianity between African and British women in the Mothers’ Union during the early twentieth century (Prevost, 2008). She maintains that Anglican missionaries shifted their focus from one on imperial missions to a globalized sisterhood based on mutual relationships, albeit ones not entirely free from hierarchy. This shift coincided with the rise of “World Friendship,” which historian Dana Robert asserts supplanted “women’s work for women” as their guiding ethos (Robert 1997, pp. 272–92). Yet as Prevost cautions, emphasis on the mutual relationships that were built both illuminates and obscures the complexity of missions work in the context of colonialism and racial hierarchy (Prevost 2010). Notably, these Christian relationships deviated from the uniformly unfavorable opinions that many settlers and colonial officials maintained about African women, viewing them “not as people, but as dangers” (Summers 1996, p. 450). Missionary schools contributed to the forging of intimate relationships between African and Western women. The British boarding school model particularly fostered familial relationships that splintered strict racial hierarchies. Although these relationships were characterized by paternalism, genuine bonds were formed. In many cases, former students considered the headmistress and teachers as surrogate parents and preferred to live near them after they married. Orphaned children could seek even closer ties (Smythe 69). It also should be stressed that African women and girls actively sought education, and many chose to work at the mission in a variety of capacities from cooks to teachers. With the graduation of women from the schools, missionary women celebrated these women’s accomplishments and encouraged them to pursue Christian vocations. Undoubtedly, missionary women found their relationships with African women satisfying as Christian fellowship, but these bonds were essential to the work of women missionaries, and more overarchingly, the success of Christianity. African women had cultural knowledge and social capital upon which missionary women had to rely. In many ways, African women converts acted as “culture brokers,” a term that historian Lyn Schumaker coined to describe the work that African research assistants did as they were employed by anthropologists (Schumaker 2001, p. 13). Similarly, African women were subordinate to the missionaries at mission institutions and within the colonial system, but they bridged cultural gaps by negotiating the degree to which Western cultural standards would be embraced or modified. Nancy Rose Hunt’s innovative work on British Baptists in the Belgian Congo illustrates the way that these women interpreted birth practices to Western Christians in part to defend them while also enabling local women to find reasons to accept Western medicine at mission clinics and hospitals (Hunt 1999, pp. 201–11). African women converts performed as diplomats: they smoothed over misunderstandings between missionaries and the communities in which they were working and fostered trust between the two. These collaborations occurred within the hierarchical structure of missions and the backdrop of colonial rule, yet they demonstrate African women’s initiative and the missionaries’ need for converts to make Christianity relevant within local culture.

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Female Adaptive Education in the Interwar Period By the end of World War I as colonial governments were established across most of Africa, the concept of trusteeship came to dominate the rationale behind the rule. Under the mantle of trusteeship, colonizers justified their power by claiming they were uplifting African peoples by providing civilization and preparing colonies for independence. The most common form of governance became indirect rule, in which indigenous leaders or artificially created “chiefs” served as intermediaries between the colonial government and the general populace. This form of government was designed to provide legitimacy to colonial governments and uphold traditional values. However, colonizers’ main objective was to turn a profit, and to pursue this end, colonial officials sought outside technocratic experts in agriculture, education, and medicine, who could help develop colonies into lucrative ventures. While money-making was not a priority for missionaries, these Christians heartily endorsed what they deemed to be the more humane aspects of trusteeship. Mission advocates proceeded to ensure that government officials appreciated missionaries as experts who could contribute to the colonial project (Stanley 2018, p. 16). As colonial governments were seeking technocratic specialists to “civilize” Africans, the Phelps-Stokes Education Commission completed two investigative reports on education in Africa in 1921 and 1925. This nonprofit advisory body was comprised primarily of missionaries and humanitarians from the U.S. and Britain, but it also included a small coterie of Africans. Based on the assumption that life in the American South was not distinctly different from sub-Saharan Africa, these experts promoted industrial education over literary schooling, confident that it would raise the economic status of Africans. Lord Lugard, the British colonial theorist who devised indirect rule, successfully recruited missionary leaders to support the work, which resulted in a collaborative effort that facilitated the objectives of each party. Missionaries supplied education on the relative cheap, and colonial governments financially subsidized mission schools.5 Thus, the Phelps-Stokes Commission ushered in a new era for Christian missions. Ironically, both colonizers and missionaries believed that the adoption of Western culture would “civilize” Africans while simultaneously maintaining that contact with Western culture was eroding African families and fostering detribalization. These concerns surfaced as African men were moving to mining centers and towns so that they could earn wages to pay taxes. Women were restricted from moving to cities in many colonies since colonizers did not want a new urban class to emerge that could challenge colonial rule. Missionaries had their own reasons for their anti-urban bias; they feared women had few options in cities and would turn to sex work. However, as agricultural producers, African women preferred to cultivate the family’s landholdings rather than move to urban centers. The proposed solution to destabilization and the erosion of the African family centered on female education because women were seen to be both the

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keepers of the past and the drivers of the future. Female adaptive education was designed to preserve the African family, thwart the ills of modernization, and usher in the benefits of indirect rule through reconstructing and improving traditions. The “conservative emphasis on tradition is now commonly taken for granted as ‘neo-traditionalism’” rather than “any inherent respect for cultural integrity” as Elizabeth Prevost makes clear in an outstanding comparative analysis of four schools (Prevost 2017, p. 477). The ideology also gained traction as functional anthropologists bolstered its claims as they, too, strove to protect African societies from perceived deterioration. Missionary education signaled a shift toward greater respect for African cultures, but much was still criticized. For one, African women were deemed to deliver deficient maternal care, and they were expected to adopt Western practices (Musisi 1992). Schools devoted their curriculum to industrial education, and although some Africans preferred literary education, other Africans appreciated a scientific approach to agriculture and the promise of self-sufficiency (Barnes 2017, pp.  97, 110–11). Similarly, the African American missionary, Althea Brown Edmiston who worked with her husband in the Congo Free State, stressed industrial education as a way to promote Christianity and to support an oppressed community (Hill 2020). While there was rhetoric around preserving African culture, few missionaries accommodated African religious practices. Rather than ascertaining what tenets might accord with Christianity, missionaries preferred to move African festivals into the Church. However, one influential missionary, Mabel Shaw, was convinced that Christianity in Africa should build on the foundations of African religion as espoused in fulfillment theology. This doctrine was developed in the nineteenth century out of missions work to Hindus in India, and it was premised on the notion that God revealed fragments of divine truth to all people, with the expectation that missionaries would instruct non-Christians on how to gradually absorb the Christian message (Stanley 2009, pp.  215–19). Christianity itself would be enhanced by recovering Christ’s revelations that could have been lost in former times. Although fulfillment theology affirmed traditional culture, it presumed evolutionary progress with Christianity supplanting all other religions. Shaw was among the first to apply this concept to African religions, and in adopting it, she challenged Western definitions of what it meant to be a Christian (Hughes 2022). In concert with the women at the mission in Zambia, Shaw incorporated ancestor veneration into Christian worship at the school. One graduate, Betty Chungu, was instrumental in mediating Christian and Bemba funeral customs. Chungu also composed hymns for all occasions; notably, African hymns and songs were not welcome in “orthodox” churches until twenty years later in the 1950s (Hinfelaar 2004, p. 177). As a staunch neotraditionalist, Shaw was among the first to challenge Western condemnations of polygamy. Most women missionaries disparaged African marriages as reducing women to labor, and Western churches consistently barred membership to polygamists. Zambian women shared their perspectives with Shaw, and she eventually adopted a gradualist position, in

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accordance with fulfillment theology, which allowed her to view women in polygamous unions as Christian equals (Hughes 2022). By the late 1930s, a group of British missionaries and anthropologists raised questions about marriage as a cultural institution since they, too, were concerned that African family structures were breaking down. Debates about whether Christian marriage could be “African” continued up to the 1938 IMC meeting at Tambaram, but African voices were silenced in the final account from the conference, with polygamists banned from full church membership (Erlank 2012). The interwar period proved to be the high water mark for women’s missionary work. By the 1940s, colonial governments stressed “mass education” which was believed to be more efficiently delivered through co-education. This resulted in girls’ schools being subsumed into boys’ schools. Similarly, women’s organizations ceased to exist as they were folded into the overarching denominational missions (Robert 1997, pp. 302–07).

The Postwar Period and the Afterlife of Missions During the immediate postwar era, missionary work was characterized by deeper commitment to “development” as colonial governments expanded these efforts. Missionaries insisted that their work was being conducted out of Christian love, and servanthood was emphasized over leadership, at least in rhetoric (Hughes 2013). As missionary Hannah Stanton discovered in 1950s South Africa, she had to jettison her attitude of superiority, and later in Uganda in the 1960s, she confronted her ignorance about African intellectualism (Gaitskell 2003b, pp. 240, 245). African nationalism contributed to this shift, and women missionaries recognized the need for it. Historian Aili Mari Tripp argues that by the 1950s missionary women in Uganda saw themselves as “participants in a transition to African rule” rather than as colonialists (Tripp 2001, p. 548). By the 1950s, mission organizations experimented with new models of missions work to reduce imperial affiliations and to amplify indigenous voices. In particular, British missions entertained partnerships with African churches and encouraged British Christians to adopt a spirit of volunteerism. Christian Aid, the Voluntary Service Overseas, and Inter-Church Aid were but some of the new iterations of missions. In Kenya, there was a new emphasis on urban missions as young men flocked to the city in the wake of the reprisals against Mau Mau. By the 1960s, women were joining them, and the CMS partnered with the Kenyan government, the Nairobi City Council, and the Anglican Church of Kenya to support Christian industrial centers that provided vocational training and spiritual care. Western missionary women were especially concerned about African women working in the sex trade, and they offered courses on secretarial skills and assistance for the craftwork industry. Since independence, Christianity has burgeoned in sub-Saharan Africa. Faith-based NGOs dominate the landscape, and these focus less on conversion and more on humanitarian relief and the alleviation of poverty. Asymmetries of

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power linger in the work although there is a growing acceptance of postcolonial studies even within conservative Christian circles. Many of the foreign organizations strive to build relationships with local congregations, attempting to prioritize indigenous perspectives and goals. In many ways, foreign missionary women initiated this model. Since missionary women were marginalized in ecclesiastical and mission organizations, they invested more than men did in the “‘politics of the personal,’” building “webs of personal relationships” with African women (Gaitskell 2003b, p. 249). These ties of mutuality, while not divorced from power differentials, contributed to the building of a world Church in which African women now outnumber Western women.

Notes 1. This happened even though Elizabeth Renner oversaw a school of 140 girls in 1825. 2. Many of the White Sisters were from rural working-class France, but they also came from Holland, Belgium, Germany, and Canada (Smythe 2007, p. 61). 3. Issues over polygamy are addressed later in this chapter. 4. Daggers claims that linguistic gaps between British and Igbo women afforded the Igbo women greater authority as models of Igbo Christian womanhood. Daggers appears to draw from Lamin Sanneh’s theory that translating the Bible into local vernacular allowed converts more flexibility to shape Christianity to their own purposes. 5. American philanthropic organizations, including the Carnegie Corporation and the Ford Foundation, also invested in this education.

Bibliography Barnes, Andrew. Global Christianity and the Black Atlantic: Tuskegee, Colonialism, and the Shaping of African Industrial Education. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2017. Breitenbach, Esther. “The Making of a Missionary Icon: Mary Slessor as ‘Heroine of Empire,’” Journal of Scottish Historical Studies 37.2 (2017): 177–197. Cox, Jeffrey. The British Missionary Enterprise since 1700. New  York and London: Routledge, 2008. Daggers, Jenny. “Transforming Christian Womanhood: Female Sexuality and Church Missionary Society Encounters in the Niger Mission, Onitsha,” Victorian Review 37.2 (2011): 89–106. Erlank, Natasha. “Strange Bedfellows: The International Missionary Council, the International African Institute, and Research into African Marriage and Family.” In The Spiritual in the Secular: Missionaries and Knowledge about Africa edited by Patrick Harries and David Maxwell. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2012. Gaitskell, Deborah. “Rethinking Gender Roles: The Field Experience of Women Missionaries in South Africa.” In The Imperial Horizon of British Protestant Missions, 1880–1914, edited by Andrew Porter. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2003a.

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Gaitskell, Deborah. “Apartheid, Mission, and Independent Africa: From Pretoria to Kampala with Hannah Stanton.” In Missions, Nationalism, and the End of Empire edited by Brian Stanley, 237–49. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2003b. Gaitskell, Deborah. “Female Faith and the Politics of the Personal: Five Mission Encounters in Twentieth Century South Africa,” Feminist Review 65 (2000): 68–91. Hill, Kimberly. A Higher Mission: The Careers of Alonzo and Althea Brown Edmiston in Central Africa. University of Kentucky Press, 2020. Hinfelaar, Hugo. History of the Catholic Church in Zambia. Lusaka: Bookworld Publishers, 2004. Hughes, Rebecca C. “Expanding the Bounds of Christianity and Feminism: Mabel Shaw and the Women of Mbereshi, Northern Rhodesia, 1915–1940,” The Journal of Religion in Africa 52 (2022): 22–51. Hughes, Rebecca C.  “‘Grandfather in the Bones’: Scientific Racism and Anglican Missionaries in Uganda, c. 1900–1930,” Social Sciences and Missions 33.3–4 (2020): 347–378. Hughes, Rebecca C. “‘Science in the Hands of Love’: British Evangelical Missionaries and Colonial Development in Africa, c. 1940–60,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 41.5 (2013): 823–42. Hunt, Nancy Rose. A Colonial Lexicon of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). Kirkwood, Deborah. “Wives of Missionaries Working with the Society.” In Women and Missions: Past and Present: Anthropological and Historical Perceptions. Edited by Fiona Bowie, Deborah Kirkwood, and Shirley Ardene, Providence: Berg, 1993. Labode, Modupe. “From Heathen Kraal to Christian Home: Anglican Mission Education and African Christian Girls, 1850–1900,” in Women and Missions: Past and Present: Anthropological and Historical Perceptions (Providence: Berg, 1993), 126–44. Leach, Fiona. Reclaiming the Women of Britain’s First Mission to West Africa: Three Lives Lost and Found (Leiden: Brill, 2019). Musisi, Nakanyike B. “Colonial and Missionary Education: Women and Domesticity in Uganda, 1900–1945,” in African Encounters of Domesticity (1992), 172–94. Prevost, Elizabeth E. “Troubled Traditions; Female Adaptive Education in British Colonial Africa,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 45.3 (2017): 475–505. Prevost, Elizabeth E. The Communion of Women: Missions and Gender in Colonial Africa and the British Metropole. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Prevost, Elizabeth E. “From African Missions to Global Sisterhood: The Mothers’ Union and Colonial Christianity, 1900–1930.” In Empires of Religion, edited by Hilary M. Carey, 243–64. Houndsmills, Basingstroke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Robert, Dana L. “The ‘Christian Home’ as a Cornerstone of Anglo-American Missionary Thought and Practice.” In Converting Colonialism: Visions and Realities in Mission History, 1706–1914, edited by Dana L. Robert, 134–165. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2008. Robert, Dana L. American Women in Mission: A Social History of their Thought and Practice. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997. Schumaker, Lyn. Africanizing Anthropology: Fieldwork, Networks, and the Making of Cultural Knowledge in Central Africa. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. Semple, Rhonda Anne. Missionary Women: Gender, Professionalism and the Victorian Idea of Christian Mission. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2003.

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Smythe, Kathleen R. “African Women and White Sisters at the Karema Mission Station, 1894–1920,” Journal of Women’s History 19.2 (2007): 59–84. Summers, Carole. “‘If You Can Educate the Native Woman …’: Debates over the Schooling and Education of Girls and Women in Southern Rhodesia,” 1900–1934.” History of Education Quarterly 36.4 (1996): 449–471. Tripp, Aili Mari. “Women’s Mobilization in Uganda: Nonracial Ideologies in European-­ African-­Asian Encounters, 1945–1962,” in The International Journal of African Historical Studies 34.3 (2001): 543–564. Stanley, Brian. Christianity in the Twentieth Century: A World History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. Stanley, Brian. The World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh 1910. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009. Walls, Andrew F. “An Anthropology of Hope: Africa, Slavery, and Civilization in Nineteenth-Century Mission Thinking,” International Bulletin of Mission Research 39.4 (2015): 225–30.

CHAPTER 24

Christian Africans, Muslim Africans, and the European Colonial Project Shobana Shankar

Introduction Christian-Muslim interactions predated the arrival of Europeans by many centuries in some parts of the African continent, but European imperialism radically altered interreligious relationships, in some cases by direct intervention (Shankar 2022) and in others through unintended consequences (Sharkey 2013). For Africans, both Christianity and Islam, as religions of the book, had special characteristics that made them appear more similar to one another and starkly different to indigenous religious traditions—the Abrahamic religions were monotheistic, shared prophetic traditions, and gave rise to literate communities, centralized political-legal systems, and distinct ritual cultures and religious authorities. Europeans added a new and significant change by treating these religions as civilizing influences that were superior to indigenous African religions. European hierarchies clearly had the effect of dividing peoples by religious and other identities and accelerated their competition. Somewhat surprisingly, these hierarchies were not always predictably favorable to Christianity, the religion of the European powers. A mixture of fear of resistance and admiration for Muslim power and statecraft led the French and British, with the largest African empires, and even the Portuguese, Germans, and Italians, to privilege Muslim Africans over Christian Africans in certain situations. For their part, some African Christians and African Muslims increasingly took intensified

S. Shankar (*) Department of History, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. E. Barnes, T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48270-0_24

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efforts to convert new believers to their religions, transform religious practices, and build institutions such as houses of worship and schools in the twentieth century, doubtless due to conscious competition with the other (Shankar 2014a). With Muslim-Christian encounters holding such vital importance in politics, social welfare, education, evangelicalism and reform, and other spheres, no single actor—state or religious authorities or laypeople—could foresee or control the consequences that religious interactions and religious differences have had in modern Africa, a continent where religious affiliation is important as a public identification (Pew 2010). This essay examines the intricate and varied relationships between Christians and Muslims in colonized African societies that can no longer be characterized simplistically as sitting along a spectrum of peaceful or conflicted (Soares 2016; Soares 2006). Since the 2000s, Muslim-Christian interactions in Africa have become a topic of growing interest to scholars, who have overturned a great many assumptions. Whereas once it was assumed that European and American Christian missions during the colonial era had little impact in converting Muslims, research from various parts of the continent—West Africa, the Horn, and East Africa—shows that Christian missionary activities among Muslim peoples were more extensive than previously thought in spheres such as translation, printing, education, and medicine and had effects quite apart from and in the absence of conversion to Christianity. Moreover, missions were not the only institutions shaping interreligious relations—colonial administrations and indigenous rulers also interfered in the religious lives of Africans in many realms—domestic relations, education, and healing, to name a few— beyond rituals and beliefs. We now know much more about how African Muslims and African Christians engaged with one another before, during, and after the era of foreign rule and can better understand the longue durée of Christian-Muslim relations in Africa. It is impossible to deny that European colonial manipulation of religion and religious difference played a major hand in fomenting tensions between Christians and Muslims.

Fluid Relations Before the Twentieth Century The history of Christian-Muslim relations in one of the oldest European colonies in Africa—the Cape Colony in what is today South Africa—demonstrates the dynamic construction of religious coexistence and difference over centuries. When the Dutch first established a station at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652, the colonial authorities were invested in the growth of the Dutch Reformed Church on African soil, but they also maintained a rather relaxed attitude toward Islam, which was the religion of most slaves who were brought from the East Indies. On the one hand, slave masters were encouraged to provide Christian education to Muslim and non-Muslim slaves and allow them to be baptized and in some cases baptized slaves to be manumitted. On the other, the practice of Islam was allowed, as long as it was done away from Christians and so-called heathens. Religious separation was encouraged to the extent that

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when the Javanese Muslim exile and charismatic leader Sheikh Yusuf of Macassar was sent to the Cape in 1694, the Dutch authorities welcomed his entourage and settled them in Faure, some thirty-six miles from Cape Town. This settlement is recognized as the first Muslim community in South Africa. Religious coexistence meant separate spheres (Davids 1992). Legal restrictions became more targeted as the numbers of slaves in the Colony increased and the Muslim population as well. The administration attempted in the 1770s to impose prohibitions on practices such as circumcision, hoping to promote importation of non-Muslim slaves over Muslim slaves. Yet in an unexpected turn, Dutch slave masters encouraged their slaves to identify as Muslims and practice Islam faithfully, on the rationale that Muslim piety discouraged alcohol consumption and other “undesirable” behaviors. This encouragement toward Islam contributed to the continued separation of religious communities, as free Muslims established their own schools while Christian missions created their own. Frictions arose and abated, but some Muslims and Christians intermingled in secular subject classes in mission-­ founded schools. The most intense conflicts emerged in specific instances over public religious insults of Muslims in Christian publications and non-Muslims’ adoption of Muslim children. This relatively peaceful coexistence, combined with official allowance for separate development of Muslim and Christian institutions in South Africa stands in stark contrast to the increasing hostility of British Christians toward Muslims in western and eastern Africa. The anti-slavery movement gaining ground in England in the 1770s had some of its strongest supporters in Christian missionary circles, which included liberated slaves such as Quabna Ottobah Cuguano, who implicated Muslims as major traders of slaves (Shankar 2022). The Christian abolitionism of Cuguano, who drew from his own experience of enslavement in coastal West Africa, was echoed by white crusaders such as Scottish missionary David Livingstone, who in the mid-nineteenth century drew attention to Arab slave trading in eastern and central Africa. The British authorities increasingly blamed Muslims as participants in practices they deemed inhumane and necessitating their military intervention after abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and slavery in 1833. At the same time, the British also recognized from as early as the 1780s, with the founding of Sierra Leone colony for freed slaves, that the abolition of slavery in Africa conflicted with their economic desire for partnerships with powerful Muslim leaders. Negotiations with Muslims—on slavery and trade as conjoined issues—were undertaken from West Africa to East Africa. From The Gambia and the Bights of Benin and Biafra to the Swahili coast, British colonial officials negotiated with local leaders to allow churches to establish homes for freed slaves. Such homes located in riverine trading and transport zones essentially rendered slaves into nominally free laborers who worked for Europeans and elite Africans (Shankar 2014a; Liebst 2014). In the Senegambian region, where French trade was established from the seventeenth century, a mixed-race (métis) community born of African women

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and European traders became a wealthy and influential bloc in coastal communities such as Saint Louis and Rufisque. Yet after the 1830s, when the French sought to extend their power into the hinterland, they adapted strategies used in the Maghreb to work with established Senegalese Sufi orders to oppose and eventually conquer traditional chiefs (Robinson 2000; Motadel 2012). Significantly, this favorable posture toward Muslim Sufi leaders also sidelined the métis to some degree, who began to adapt to their position between Christianity and Islam to use their western education and skills in alliances with Muslim Africans to press for greater indigenous political representation in the French empire (Jones 2013). Métis syncretism, like the educational convergences between Muslims and Christians in Cape Town, shows similarities with West African Christian clergy in the Nigerian hinterland who mediated between Islam, Christianity, and indigenous religions, especially Yoruba ifa beliefs. Reverend Samuel Crowther, who was born in Yoruba country in the southwest of modern Nigeria in about 1807, was enslaved around the age 13 before being rescued while aboard a Portuguese ship in 1822 and taken to Sierra Leone. He attended Anglican schools and became a schoolmaster before eventually leading the establishment of the Church Missionary Society Yoruba mission in Nigeria in the 1840s. His outreach to Muslim leaders in the Sokoto Caliphate was not precisely preaching or evangelism to convert Muslims but rather religious debates about the divinity of Christ and other elements of the Christian faith that Muslims rejected. Crowther’s approach was attractive especially to young people for its unique educational culture and the modes of narrative that underpinned the growth and sensibility of the Yoruba ethnic communities that fused Islam, Christianity, and indigenous religion in Nigeria and throughout West Africa and the Atlantic world (Barnes 2018; Peel 2003). It is quite striking that Christian-Muslim interactions up until the nineteenth century, where Europeans were present but not entirely disruptive or destructive, took a range of forms. Indeed, some of the greatest hostility between Muslims and Christians existed in the Ethiopian Christian empire, independent from any European control, in the 1870s, when Muslim leaders were forcibly converted and an official ban on Islam led to the destruction of mosques and Muslims’ property (Ahmed 2001). European missionaries and colonial administrators, by contrast, saw themselves in need of alliances with Muslims, even if these Muslims were blamed for slavery and other offenses. While African Christians like Cuguano and Crowther recognized the importance of equality between African Christians and African Muslims, white Christian missionaries used the discourse of victimization of non-Muslims at the hands of Muslims to gain converts from among freed slaves and others who had resisted or stayed away from Islamic influences. Even as European and American Christians tried to wrest power from African Christians and impose certain ideas of religious difference in the era of the European scramble for Africa, Edward Wilmot Blyden, the leading Americo-Liberian Christian minister, scholar, and educator whose writings

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were read throughout Anglophone West Africa and the Black Atlantic, maintained an African tradition of pluralistic thought about Islam, Christianity, and African religious traditions into the early twentieth century. He acknowledged the historical importance and value of Islam for Africans and developed critiques of the possible effects that certain kinds of Christianity might have on African gender relations and systems of learning in indigenous traditions. Although he showed little desire to maintain the latter, he saw Islam and Christianity both as modernizing systems that Africans themselves should develop. Blyden’s infusion of race—notably the idea of an African personality—into religious politics, while employing some of the tropes of inherent biological difference of the day, fostered a sense of West African Christian independency that laid seeds for autonomous church activities and the African Christian impetus to contend with Islam on African, not foreign, terms (Blyden 1887; Hulmes 1990; Odamtten 2019). West Africa was somewhat unique for the efforts of Crowther, Blyden, and others. In the era of the European scramble for Africa and in the aftermath of conquest, religious division and difference became a strategy of rule. Perhaps most importantly, ongoing efforts to abolish slavery from the Swahili coast in the east to Sierra Leone in the west, many Christian African populations in regions with sizeable Muslim populations became known as or associated with descendants of freed slaves, creating a social hierarchy that had lasting consequences well into the twentieth century.

Regulating Religious Interactions in the Twentieth Century The European scramble for control over Africans from the 1880s unleashed resistance all over the continent, a good deal of it inspired by Islamic beliefs in the End Times. In the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, in 1881, the Sufi mystic and general Muḥammad Aḥmad ʿAbd Allāh attracted followers who believed he was the Mahdı ̄, the redeemer sent to lead the faithful and wage jihad against the Turco-Egyptian colonial government. Many years of war between the Mahdi’s forces and the British led Europeans, especially the British and the French who sought to conquer North and Saharan Africa, to greatly fear Mahdist-inspired resistance in the Sub-Saharan territories across the Sudanic belt, east to west. After 1900, when colonial powers were able to subjugate sizeable parts of their territorial claims, they initiated systems such as indirect rule in British colonies or “accommodation” in French West Africa wherein alliances with indigenous Muslim rulers were forged. In Muslim Northern Nigeria, Frederick Lugard, the first High Commissioner of the Protectorate before its amalgamation with the Southern Nigerian Protectorate in 1914, implemented the paradigmatic system of indirect rule through Muslim rulers. While promoting Christianity’s superiority, Lugard conceded that Islam had fostered some level

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of civilizational advancement that benefitted Africans; he cited the prohibition of intoxicants, a clearly delineated justice system, and a basis for unity. At the same time, he argued, Muslims had congenital tendencies toward fanaticism, evidenced by Mahdism in Sudan and its latent but potentially explosive presence in Nigeria and elsewhere. He argued that Britain as a civilizing power was bound to contain and defuse such tendencies. Thus, British officers had to rule “wisely” with Muslim emirs and their bureaucracies in the hope of their eventual reform. Added to British measures to support Islam by expanding formal qur’anic schools, Arabic language instruction and training in sharı ̄ʿa, the colonialists attempted to restrict Christian missionary work in non-Muslim areas. In French territories such as Senegal, meanwhile, the “heterogeneity” of French colonial practices and postures toward the very small Christian minority and Muslims in urban and rural communities shaped the negotiation of local privileges as a critical tool for Africans to seek agency and autonomy on the basis of a diverse set of conditions, not only religious identity (Foster 2013). While membership in Sufi orders or Catholic métis networks was helpful, religious identity was less crucial than proximity to urban centers, access to French-­ language schools and other colonial institutions, and mobility in the communes where the French allowed Africans to have more autonomy. The French saw African Muslims as fundamentally distinct from “white” Arab Muslims (Soares 2000); meanwhile, the British saw Christian Africans in similar terms as “lesser than” white Christians and African Muslims (Barnes 2009). Therefore, whatever differences existed between political practices in British and French territories, the European racialization of Africans was inextricably linked to religion as a means of studying, differentiating, and ranking culture groups (Chidester 2014). The tendency to ascribe racial differences or cultural difference amounting to a deep-seated immutable division between Muslim Africans and Christian Africans was shared and found across colonial Africa. Both the French and the British assumed that Muslim Africans were to be treated as superior to non-Muslim Africans. The fixation on African Muslims’ traits as being akin to those of Europeans—whether in languages, physical features, or intellectual or political abilities—led to the use of terms (taken from linguistics) such as Hamitic and Semitic in Muslim African contexts, akin to Aryan in India, to designate African “foreigners” such as the Fulani ethnic group, known as bringers of Islam in many places, from “indigenous” Africans such as Hausa or Wolof (Barnes 2003; Shankar 2021). Smaller imperial powers, such as Germany, followed the lead of the British and French, for they were seen as having much more knowledge about Islam and experience dealing with Muslims (Weiss 2000). German colonialists in Togo and Kamerun at first thought Muslim Africans were more civilized and less prone to violent resistance than non-Muslims, but missionaries began to worry that Muslims would convert and enslave non-Muslims. In German Tanganyika, disagreements broke out between missionaries who wanted tighter control over Muslims and planters and colonialists who sought menial laborers and wanted to work with Muslim elites (Haustein 2017).

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It is clear that a European colonial policy toward Islam and Muslims was deemed necessary in many African colonies and, in this policy, Christian missionaries were seen as potential threats to stabilizing relations with powerful Muslim Africans. At the same time, Christian tutelage was seen as critical to the project of rendering former slaves into docile laborers in the service of the colonial economy. For this reason, Christian converts from Islam or those who entered Muslim spheres in more prominent roles than the colonial administrations liked were treated as dangerous, perhaps as dangerous as Muslim resistors. The story of Inusa Samuila, a Muslim who learned to read in  Roman characters from Christian missionaries and undertook a trip from British Northern Nigeria to sell religious tracts along the way to his home village in French West Africa (Niger) in 1916, illustrates the intense reaction of the colonial authorities toward those who transgressed religious boundaries (Shankar 2006). When Inusa was found selling Christian tracts to Muslim buyers, he was imprisoned by British and French authorities and tested on his ability to read. It was not simply the content of Christian messages but also the religious authority African Christians might gain that was considered threatening to the social and political order. The slippage of religious boundaries in education was especially disliked, in part because colonial governments sought to retain the prerogative to dole out access to Western-style schools or other resources as signs of their power. Thus, Christian mission freed slave homes produced menial laborers and wives for such laborers (Shankar 2014a), while a few select mission and colonial secular schools were reserved for wealthy elites, both Muslim and Christian. Qur’anic schools were established at the behest of the French or British authorities though they offered little oversight beyond approval, as this signaled “religious non-interference.” The exercise of British and French colonial sponsorship of Muslim Africans to undertake pilgrimage to Mecca, which began to become more regular after the first World War, allowed the arguably most intrusive kinds of regulation—dictating means and routes of travel, subjecting pilgrims to sanitation measures, and ascertaining available resources for the trip (Shankar 2023). Through various means, colonial authorities politicized religion and religious difference by separating Muslims and Christians and regulating their interactions. While this separation had occurred in earlier centuries, in the twentieth century, colonial powers treated Christian and Muslim activities as subjects of state concern related to social stability and physical security and used religious resources for political gain and designated particular allowable spaces of religious interaction. Educated Muslim and Christian elites had the most opportunity to interact with one another, in schools reserved for the children of the most prominent families, within African colonies and in London, Paris, or other places outside Africa where African students went for further studies. While Christian African elites had little access to Muslim institutions, Muslim elites could send their children to Christian schools or use Christian mission medical facilities either for personal services or to foster certain forms

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of modernization, for example in medical institutions (Shankar 2007). Muslim emirs in Northern Nigeria used Christian leprosy facilities to enhance their popularity in the 1930s, while around the same time, Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia allowed Protestant missionaries to establish health clinics and schools among Muslims, before and after the Italian occupation (Balisky 2020; Shankar 2007). Thus the management of interreligious interaction was not only a European colonial strategy but also one that African rulers used.

Gender, Christianity, Islam, and the Colonial State The changes of the colonial period were not only felt in formal politics but penetrated into the everyday lives of African Christians and Muslims, women and men. For women, norms concerning their personal behaviors, roles in domestic and public realms, and expressions of piety were increasingly negotiated through Christianity and Islam, and sometimes religious encounters. The roles of women in religious communities gained new attention in the nineteenth century with the jihads that swept Western Africa. Women’s mobility became a priority of Islamic reformers, a measure of a society’s success in achieving greater morality. Charity and other efforts to instruct women or even convert them were permissible activities for pious Muslim African women to undertake toward non-Muslim women outside the domestic realm in societies such Fulani-controlled Hausa states in the 1800s. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women’s seclusion became increasingly popular among Muslim women, including non-elite women who in the past had been less likely to practice purdah, as a marker of respectability and social improvement (Smith and Baba 1964). The transition of many women from slavery to freedom—hastened by British and French abolition of slavery—appears to be a major reason for increasing emphasis on female seclusion as an attainable form of respectability. The prevalence of purdah among African Muslims was connected to the mobility of non-Muslim women as slaves. Many of these non-­ Muslim slave women were freed by European proclamations and some, in territories such as British Northern Nigeria and coastal Kenya, became Christians when they became wards of missionary-run freed slave homes. The Christian involvement with abolitionist efforts in Muslim African territories thus created intersecting identities of religion and former slave status, a lower class status than that of free Muslims. Christianity’s growth fostered social changes that had many impacts on women—with the dividing line between religious communities becoming clearer and marked by adherence to practices such as seclusion and marriage. In Northern Nigeria, white missionaries and colonial authorities viewed former slave women with suspicion, fearing the formation of an “undesirable class of unattached females” (Lovejoy 1988). The attraction of becoming wives of Muslim men—including a second, third, or fourth—increased, while Christian African marriages were often less acceptable because of missionaries’ enforcement of monogamy and the consequent social ostracism and economic

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burdens African men and women suffered (Shankar 2014a). In addition, European and American Christian missionaries, seeking to keep their roles as providers for former slaves, took great pains to arrange marriages and promote the interests of men over women in the church, reflecting their own patriarchal norms and those of colonial officials and Muslim authorities (Shankar 2014a). Polygamy, a major “crisis” for Christian missionaries and colonial authorities, was often entwined with slavery. Even where Muslims were a minority, as in the Belgian Congo, slavery and polygamy were intertwined issues, appearing at moments of “moral crises” that colonial officials saw through the lens of taxes and white missionaries through sin, mostly through “fallen women” (Hunt 1991). The Catholic authorities of the colony attempted to eradicate polygamy by refusal to recognize more than one wife and tax single women and deem them prostitutes, enraging Muslim women who revolted against the taxes in the Swahili Muslim quarter of Buyenzi in the 1950s. European colonial legal and economic intrusions in many cases shrank the bargaining power of women in relation to men in religious spheres, broadly defined. British reforms to kadhi (Islamic) courts in Zanzibar after 1875 forced a movement away from orality to scripture, leading to standardization of norms that were not historically locally relevant and brought about the circumscription of access of non-elite women and men (Stockreiter 2015). Within the vast French West African territories, women married to men who worked for the colonial regime accessed pensions and other state resources, leading couples to register marriages with the French authorities in higher numbers (Cooper 1998). As with the changing kadhi courts in British East Africa, West African Muslim authorities working for the French state began to formalize marriage and thereby remove some of the flexible negotiations that had occurred within the institution. As Lucy Creevey argues, “French values distorted [African] society,” even when interventions were indirect and untargeted (Creevey 1991). Colonization created the conditions for the rapid expansion of Islam among practitioners of traditional religions. In Mali, for example, French military recruitment produced dramatic generational tensions, leading to the rebellion of young men in Bandia, Southern Mali, where conversion to Islam happened rapidly in the twentieth century (Searing 2003). These young unmarried converts were some of the most ardent proponents of radical “reform” to older institutional norms like matrilineality to hasten patrilineal inheritance of Islam. Such research puts into relief the sociological factors of religious activism of Africans in the shadow of European colonialism. African Christians too undertook intensive efforts to reshape and “reform” gender relations according to newly defined norms of respectability, especially where Islam was seen as the religion of precolonial conquerors. For instance, in Northern Cameroon, Christian converts argued that Islam, as the religion of the jihadist Fulani, was foreign and imperialist (Gausset 1999), and they adopted the teachings of white missionaries as liberators. These teachings included strict monogamy in contradistinction to polygamy as allowed by

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Islam. In a similar context, in Northern Nigeria, when African Christians formed their own church body, The Evangelical Churches of West Africa, out of the Sudan Interior Mission, they compiled notes from the colonial-era mission documents to highlight that responsibility for the problem of their husbands’ adultery: 1. A woman who wishes to stay with an adulterous husband should be rebuked (on the orders of the church elders). (Dec. 28, 1942) 2. More attention should be paid to adultery. Cases were cited where Christian women were indifferent to the unfaithfulness of their Christian husbands and had offered no objection to their loose living. In two cases the women had later become harlots themselves. (Oct. 20, 1943)1 In response to pressing questions from Nigerian church elders about women’s rights to leave or remarry in cases of adulterous husband, American missionary Guy Playfair clarified that only “innocent” women had such rights. Male church leaders were the ultimate arbiters of marital innocence or guilt (Shankar Forthcoming-a). The prioritization of control over females in both Islam and Christianity in colonial Africa contributed to major changes in gendered norms of respectability, for women and men. Moreover, the study of religions in Africa has largely been a male enterprise, a tendency that African women scholars have challenged by recognizing historical gender dynamics as well as the question of gender in Africa’s multiple but often unequal religions (Adogame et al. 2016). There can be little doubt that European colonialists, missionaries, African religious leaders, and faith communities have contributed in different ways to the hierarchies in which Islam and Christianity to varying degrees have been accorded prominence overindigenous religions and the resulting impacts on gender relations.

Unintended Consequences: The Colonial in the Postcolonial There can be little doubt that the wide-ranging effects of colonial-era negotiations of Christianity and Islam by Europeans and Africans leading to increased scrutiny and reform of personal and gender relations and behavior were unintended. Yet their implications last today, as we see over the many decades it has taken for scholars to recognize the gendered legacies of colonial and missionary interventions that still shape knowledge-production about religion in Africa. While the European colonial project might have aimed to “civilize” Africans using religion as but one factor, the consequent divisions and othering of Africans in new ways using the rationalization of religions went far beyond Muslim-Christian difference.

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For one, Islam and Christianity both spread rapidly as modern religions in Africa in ways that Europeans never intended, predicted, or could control. Christian efforts to convert Muslims during the colonial period galvanized mistrust and efforts to promote Islamic conversion from West Africa to Eastern Africa (Shankar 2014a; Sharkey 2006). Indeed, Muslim African reformers emphasized the value of Islamic education and norms as a counterpoint to European colonialism and Christianity. Sometimes, Christianity wasn’t even visible or highly present, but the experience of colonization and anticolonial resistance led to African investments in Qur’anic schools, Sufi brotherhoods, and other institutions that expanded well into the postcolonial era, sometimes in conjunction with state welfare but other times apart from it (Babou 2021; Mwakimako 2021). Such infrastructures attracted new members, while Muslim preachers—both African and foreign like the Indian-origin Ahmadiyya in Gold Coast and Nigeria—sought to convert people anew to Islam and modeled their efforts on Christian missionaries (Hanson 2017; Shankar 2021). Such efforts were consciously competitive with Muslims and Christians seeking to increase their fold, and they were also about collective identification during the era of nationalist politics and beyond. The conversion race—initiated by white Christian missionaries and carried on by African proselytizers—laid the seeds for the major full-scale assault on local religious traditions. It cannot be said that indigenous African religions have been entirely erased but nor can they be easily taken today as evidence of pre-Islamic or pre-Christian practices. Local religious traditions have been reformed and refashioned in the shadow of “world religions.” Examinations of African religious traditions have been more an exercise of deconstruction than of  reconstruction (Olupona 2014). However, in some way, Islam and Christianity in Africa have had the effect of privileging African religious traditions as part of a history, even though they are no longer practiced in the same ways they used to be (Shankar Forthcoming-b). Just as Africans have sought to understand better indigenous traditions as part of their modern knowledge-production and autonomy from the West, African Christians and African Muslims have created postcolonial partnerships that can be considered part of the longer history of interreligious dialogue that stretches back many centuries. Interfaith development to tackle problems such as epidemics and peace-building institutions have grown in Nigeria, Kenya, and other African nations, precisely because religious conflicts have periodically broken out (Frederiks 2010). It is within moments of conflict and the aftermath that Africans have vowed to revisit the history of European divide and rule that dramatically changed the religious landscape of the African continent and not fall prey to any sense of fatalism or inevitability. They recognize that Christian-Muslim entanglements are shaped by complex factors including demography, expanding popular new movements that challenge older authorities, media, and changing gender relations in and outside the home. The ability to control religious life and interreligious relations never fully rested with European missionaries and colonial authorities. Likewise, African states do not

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exercise such power (Shankar 2014b). Africans, who are no strangers to religious divisions and differences, contend with complex histories of European colonization but also create paths for coexistence as a necessity of everyday life in their multireligious societies.

Note 1. Letter to Rev. Wenger from Guy Playfair, February 12, 1943, File SIM-ECWA Polygamy Peel, J.D.Y., 2003. Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba. Indiana University Press. 1943-5 EM-1 (1A), SIM International Archives, Fort Mill.

Bibliography Ahmed, Hussein. 2001. Islam in Nineteenth Century Wallo, Ethiopia: Revival, Reform and Reaction. Leiden: Brill. Adogame, Afe, Ezra Chitando, and Bolaji Bateye, eds. 2016. Religion and Masculinities in Africa: An Opportunity for Africanization. New York: Routledge series on African Traditions in the Study of Religion, Diaspora and Gendered Societies, 133. Babou, Cheikh. 2021. Muridiyya on the Move: Islam, Migration, and Place-Making. Athens: Ohio University Press. Balisky, Paul. 2020. “Dr. Thomas A.  Lambie: Missionary-Entrepreneur in Anglo-­ Egyptian Sudan, Abyssinia, and Palestine.” International Bulletin of Mission Research, 44(4), pp. 362–371. Barnes, Andrew. 2003. “Aryanizing Scripts, “African Collaborators,” and Colonial Transcripts.” In Antinomies of Modernity: Essays on Race, Orient, Nation, edited by Vasant Kaiwar and Sucheta Mazumdar. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2009. Making headway: The introduction of western civilization in colonial Northern Nigeria. Rochester: University Rochester Press. ———. 2018. “Samuel Ajayi Crowther: African and Yoruba Missionary Bishop.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History. Blyden, Edward W. 1887. Christianity. Islam and the Negro Race. London: WB Whittingham. Chidester, David. 2014. Empire of Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago. Cooper, Barbara. 1998. “Gender and religion in Hausaland: variations in Islamic practice in Niger and Nigeria.” In Women in Muslim Societies: Diversity within Unity, edited by Herbert Bodman and Nayereh Tohidi. Boulder: Lynne Reiner, 21–37. Creevey, Lucy E. 1991. “The impact of Islam on women in Senegal.” The Journal of Developing Areas 25, no. 3: 347–368. Davids, Achmat. 1992. “Muslim-Christian relations in nineteenth century Cape Town (1825–1925).” Kronos: Journal of Cape History 19, no. 1: 80–101. Frederiks, M.T., 2010. “Let us understand our differences: Current trends in Christian-­ Muslim relations in Sub-Saharan Africa.” Transformation, 27(4), pp. 261–274. Gausset, Quentin. 1999. “Islam or Christianity? The choices of the Wawa and the Kwanja of Cameroon. Africa, 69(2), pp. 257–278.” Jones, Hilary. 2013. The Metis of Senegal: urban life and politics in French West Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Hanson, John. 2017. The Ahmadiyya in the Gold Coast: Muslim Cosmopolitanisms in the British Empire. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Haustein, Jörg. 2017. “Strategic Tangles: Slavery, Colonial Policy, and Religion in German East Africa, 1885–1918.” Atlantic Studies 14, no. 4 497–518. Hulmes, E., 1990. Edward Wilmot Blyden’s understanding of Christianity and Islam as instruments of black emancipation in West Africa. Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 1(1): pp. 44–65. Hunt, Nancy Rose. “Noise Over Camouflaged Polygamy, Colonial Morality Taxation, and a Woman-Naming Crisis in Belgian Africa.” The journal of African history” 32, no. 3 (1991): 471–494. Liebst, Michelle. 2014. “African workers and the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa in Zanzibar, 1864–1900.” Journal of Eastern African Studies 8, no. 3: 366–381. Lovejoy, Paul. 1988. “Concubinage and the Status of Women Slaves in Early Colonial Northern Nigeria.” Journal of African History 29, no. 2: 245–266, 249. Mwakimako, Hassan. 2021. Mosques in Kenya. Klaus Schwarz Verlag. Motadel, David. 2012. Islam and the European empires.” The Historical Journal 55, no. 3 (2012): 831–856. Odamtten, H.N., 2019. Edward W.  Blyden’s Intellectual Transformations: Afropublicanism, Pan-Africanism, Islam, and the Indigenous West African Church. MSU Press. Olupona, J.K., 2014. African religions: A very short introduction (Vol. 377). Oxford University Press. Peel, J.D.Y. 2003. Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. 2010. Tolerance and Tension: Islam and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa (2010). Robinson, David. 2000. Paths of Accommodation: Muslim Societies and French Colonial Authorities in Senegal and Mauritania, 1880–1920. Athens: Ohio Univ. Press. Searing, James F. 2003. “Conversion to Islam: Military recruitment and generational conflict in a Sereer-Safèn village (Bandia), 1920–38.” The Journal of African History 44, no. 1: 73–94. Shankar, Shobana. 2006. “A Fifty-Year Muslim Conversion to Christianity: Religious Ambiguities and Colonial Boundaries in Northern Nigeria, c. 1910–1963,” in Muslim/Christian Encounters in Africa, Islam in Africa Series, ed. Benjamin Soares. Leiden: E.J. Brill. ———. 2014a. Who Shall Enter Paradise? Christian Origins in Muslim Northern Nigeria, c.1890–1975. Ohio University Press. ———. 2014b. “Civil Society and Religion.” In The Handbook of Civil Society in Africa, edited by Ebenezer Obadare. New York: Springer. ———. 2021. An Uneasy Embrace: Africa, India and the Spectre of Race. Hurst/Oxford. ———. 2022. “Christian-Muslim Relations,” in Handbook on Islam in Africa, edited by Terje Ostebo. New York: Routledge. ———. 2023. “Hajj Humanitarianism: Nigerian Power in Global Politics since Decolonization.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 43, no. 3 (Dec. 2023): 309–321. ———. Forthcoming-a. “Women’s Evangelical Revolutions in Northern Nigeria,” in Evangelical Christianity and the Transformation of Africa, edited by Jacob Olupona. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

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———. Forthcoming-b. “Between the Crescent and Cross: Politicized Remains of Local Religious Traditions in the North of Africa.” In Coexistence, Conviviality, and Conflict in Plural Religious Fields in Africa, edited by Marloes Janson, Kai Kresse, Hassan Mwakimako, and Benedikt Pontzen. Oxford: James Currey. Sharkey, Heather. ed. 2013. Cultural Conversions: Unexpected Consequences of Christian Missionary Encounters in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia. Edited by Heather J. Sharkey. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. ———. 2006. “Missionary Legacies: Muslim-Christian Encounters in Egypt and Sudan during the Colonial and Postcolonial Periods.” In Muslim-Christian Encounters in Africa, edited by Benjamin F. Soares, pp. 57–88. Leiden: Brill. Smith, Mary and Baba of Karo. 1964. Baba of Karo: A Woman of the Moslem Hausa. New York: Praeger. Soares, Benjamin F. 2000. “Notes on the anthropological study of Islam and Muslim societies in Africa.” Culture and Religion 1, no. 2 (2000): 277–285. Soares, Benjamin. 2016. “Reflections on Muslim–Christian encounters in West Africa.” Africa 86, no. 4 (2016): 673–697. Soares, Benjamin. ed. 2006. Muslim-Christian Encounters in Africa. Leiden, Brill. Stockreiter, Elke. 2015. Islamic Law, Gender, and Social Change in Post-Abolition Zanzibar. New York: Cambridge University Press. Weiss, Holger. 2000. “German Images of Islam in West Africa.” Sudanic Africa 11: 53–93.

PART III

The Rooting of Christianity in Africa I: Christian Life from Ancient Times to the Independence Era

CHAPTER 25

Christian Communities and Religious Movements in Roman Africa Eric Fournier and Mark Lewis Tizzoni

Introduction The Christian communities of Roman Africa held a central role in the development of early Christianity, wielding profound influence both in their own day and beyond. Augustine of Hippo, among the most prolific early Christian authors in Latin, consciously placed himself within an African community, even while embracing the trans-regionalism of the empire to which he belonged.1 Augustine, however, is only one of many: numerous writers and theologians from North Africa, such as Tertullian, Cyprian, Lactantius, Fulgentius of Ruspe, and a host of early popes hailed from the Maghreb. The prominence of Augustine and Tertullian in the Latin tradition has often led to something of a separation between them and their African contexts—reuniting them with their African communities reminds us of the importance of Roman Africa in the history of Christianity. Over the past several decades, scholarship has significantly enhanced and altered our understanding of the history of Christianity in late antique North Africa. The work of Éric Rebillard has demonstrated the diversity and fluidity

E. Fournier (*) Department of History, West Chester University of Pennsylvania, West Chester, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] M. L. Tizzoni Department of Classical and Medieval Studies, Bates College, Lewiston, ME, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. E. Barnes, T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48270-0_25

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of identities in late Roman North Africa, particularly in terms of Christian communities.2 David Mattingly’s comparative post-colonial analysis of Roman imperialism in the Maghreb, rooted in the work of Abdullah Laroui and Marcel Benabou, has reinforced the need to approach Roman Africa with a nuanced sensitivity to the dynamics of imperialism, colonialism, and Indigeneity.3 The work of the late Yves Modéran on Indigenous North Africans in late antiquity, ably expanded and debated in recent years, further underscores this approach, which demonstrates the need to consider the diverse communities of Roman Africa together, whether traditionally defined as inside or outside the Roman world.4 Brent Shaw’s voluminous scholarship has reframed the role of violence in late Roman North Africa, particularly as a means of building and delineating community.5 Likewise, scholarship on the late antique Maghreb has long recognized the region as frontier and borderlands, and modern borderlands studies can tell us much about the period.6 This work has led to the rejection of the old colonialist paradigm of “Romanization” (Mattingly 2011, pp. 38–42). In its place, we find a more nuanced, post-colonial picture of a colonized landscape, both human and environmental, that maintained Indigenous systems and structures while it adopted and adapted Roman imperial ones. This advancement in our understanding of the diverse communities that made up the fabric of late Roman society in North Africa allows us to better situate and understand the Christian communities that developed within and from this context. The present study seeks to outline the history of Christianity in Roman Africa through the lenses of community and religious movements. Central to this, then, are attempts at building community, identity, and consensus, and the responses and reactions to those attempts. By examining the period of “long late antiquity,” roughly 180–700 CE, several key threads come to the fore. At the center of this history we find the martyrs and the narrative legacies of their martyrdom. Elite and non-elite discourses sought to leverage and control both these narratives and the communities that valued them. As communities competed, and political conditions shifted, the maintenance and definition of community became ever more critical and those who sought to build consensus employed both inclusive and exclusive methods.

The Community of the Martyrs: Roman Persecutions and Early Christians Christians seemingly appear out of nowhere in Roman North Africa, around 150/160  CE, and our first textual records focus on the hostility that these Christian communities faced from their non-Christian neighbors. The earliest texts describing these persecutions, the Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs and the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas (relating events that occurred, respectively, around 180 and in 203), reveal both the cause of this hostility and the strong bond and sense of community that united these Christians, ready to die for

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their beliefs. Roman authorities expected to see routine gestures of loyalty and respect to the gods and imperial symbols, such as the figure of the emperor, without clearly distinguishing between what we call “religion” and “politics.” For Romans, because peace, prosperity, and all worldly benefits flowed from the gods, it was of paramount importance to worship the communal deities in public fashion. This demonstrated loyalty to the state and the community. Christian beliefs, however, prevented Christians from worshiping any deity but their own. Their refusal to participate in such communal rituals of worship and loyalty to the Roman state opened them up to nefarious accusations and hostility, particularly in times of crisis.7 Since the imperial Roman government was extremely decentralized, local authorities held vast powers over their fellow citizens: collecting taxes, maintaining the peace, and enforcing religious persecution when the community believed that the peace was threatened by a group perceived to be disloyal and suspicious, such as Christians. At the time of the first persecutions in North Africa, provincial rule was largely in the hands of local African elites, recently promoted by the African emperor Septimius Severus. Eager to demonstrate their loyalty to the central power of Rome, they were particularly sensitive to what they perceived as the disloyalty of the Christian community.8 The various passions and acts of martyrs commemorating the early persecutions include valuable evidence documenting the influence of local, African elements on the Christian community and their beliefs. Scholars have long traced Punic elements in various sources of this period, such as personal names. For instance, the popularity of the prefix “Satur-” among the names of the first martyrs, such as Saturninus in the Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs, would originate from a Latinized version of the Punic deity Baal worshiped by the Roman provincials of Africa as Saturn (Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs 2017).9 While evidence drawn from naming practices can be overemphasized, it nonetheless demonstrates both the fluidity of Roman identity in the Maghreb and the continued relevance of local, African naming traditions for the Christian community. The longer text of the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas further reveals, in addition to the appearance of a clerical structure (bishop, priest, deacon, catechumen, and teacher), specific rituals and beliefs pertaining to the Christian community: the kiss of peace (despite differences in social classes), the communal Agape meal, the acceptance of visions and prophecies (especially from martyrs), and most importantly the notion that martyrdom constitutes a “second baptism” in blood (Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas 2017, 21.2). The prevalence of baptism and martyrdom in subsequent persecutions and in the following centuries makes them fundamental themes in the story of African Christianity. Other sources, particularly the works of Tertullian, highlight a range of other activities framed as pertaining to the Christian community: the prevalence of charity (both providing for the poor and for imprisoned Christians), churchgoing (in addition to the Agape meal), and making the sign of the cross.10 While these actions all marked membership in the Christian community, the exact boundaries of that community, and the way in which its

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members understood them, remain elusive. As Rebillard (2012) has argued, Romans, Christians included, negotiated their identities and memberships situationally and Christian membership might not always have been the most salient. It is therefore nearly impossible to map the demographics of the community, although we do know that it included the poor and the marginalized alongside the wealthy, such as Cyprian. It would be difficult to exaggerate Cyprian’s importance for, and subsequent influence on, African Christianity. The fact that he became the subject of the first Latin hagiographical account by Pontius, which was to become a model for subsequent Lives of the saints, illustrates Cyprian’s significance (Pontius 2017). His career as the first prominent bishop of elite background, as well as his participation in the crises that the persecution caused among Christians, which became the roots of subsequent conflicts that were to last until the sixth century CE, further illustrates his importance for African Christianity. Even though Tertullian (fl. 190–220) was the first African theologian, his reputed association with the Montanist heresy severely skewed scholarly appreciations of his work until recent years. Yet, he was a fundamental influence on later Christian writers, African ones in particular. To Cyprian (c. 210–258), bishop of Carthage, Tertullian was “the master.” Cyprian’s writings, which became highly influential due to his eventual status as saint and martyr, follow many of Tertullian’s ideas.11 The life and career of Cyprian signals important changes, however, particularly in the way that the church grew as an institution in the course of the third century. For Cyprian, all decisions pertaining to the life of the Christian community belonged to bishops meeting in councils. This marked the increasing centralization of authority on the figure of the bishop in each Christian community, although in Africa, bishops had much more independence than in other regions of the empire. Further persecutions challenged this development. In 250, in the midst of a military crisis with profound economic and political repercussions, Emperor Decius (r. 249–251) initiated a new Empire-wide measure requiring all citizens to sacrifice publicly in order to regain the divine protection that had afforded Rome (according to the colonizing view of the court) centuries of peace and prosperity. Since Christians could not acquiesce to this order, they suffered tortures and public executions, confessing their faith in further rounds of martyrdom. But Cyprian fled, thus opening a wider debate about the proper behavior expected of Christian leaders in times of persecution. Following Decius’ death, however, Valerian (r. 253–260) renewed Decius’ religious agenda and targeted Christian clergy, resulting in the arrest and execution of Cyprian, the prominent bishop of Carthage, on September 14, 257 (Passion of Cyprian 2017). During the persecutions, several Christians had succumbed to the pressure exercised by Roman officials and sacrificed. A conflict arose about the appropriate penitence that such lapsed members of the community (lapsi) should undergo. As martyrs were believed to be immediately admitted to heaven, confessors, who had suffered torture but awaited death, held a special place as

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soon-to-be martyrs. Numerous confessors began issuing letters in support of readmitting the lapsed to the community sooner than Cyprian, who initially advocated against readmission, arguing instead that only Christ could judge them, after death. This was a serious test to the authority of the nascent position of bishop at the head of Christian communities. Furthermore, as Cyprian’s position on the readmittance of lapsi softened (to formal penance followed by a conciliar decision) he found episcopal opposition both from laxists (following Novatus) and from rigorists (following Novatian) leading to schism. When the conflict subsided, however, the question of whether to accept the baptism that such Christians had received at the hand of schismatic bishops led to a wider, more profound crisis on the nature of baptism. Given the central nature of baptism as a ritual of purity (to wash away all previous pollutions caused by sins) and as the ritual of admission to the community of the faithful, symbolized by participation in the communion, this conflict had profound implications and repercussions. Cyprian, following Tertullian, advocated rebaptism for those baptized by schismatics arguing there was only one true Church and those separated from it were not true Christians, rendering their baptism invalid. Yet the Bishop of Rome, Stephen (254–257), simultaneously defended the opposite viewpoint, that all baptisms were valid, and attempted to impose his view over Christians throughout the Roman world by virtue of his position as heir to the see of Peter. The death of both men temporarily silenced this conflict, but Cyprian’s repetition of baptism for schismatics and heretics remained the official doctrine of the African church for several decades, until the early fourth century, when renewed crisis led a powerful faction of African clerics, supported by the imperial government under Constantine, to align themselves with the tradition of the Roman church (see below). The last persecution, initiated by Emperor Diocletian (r. 284–305), is known as the “Great Persecution” (303–312) as it was the longest and most systematic. It also failed, because by this time Christians were apparently too numerous to simply be eradicated. In North Africa, it reignited the same tensions as the earlier persecutions, reviving the controversies of Cyprian’s career. What was the proper way to readmit Christians who had lapsed (lapsi) or who had handed over Christian scriptures or church property (traditores)? Reflecting back during the reign of Constantine (r. 306–337), the North African Christian rhetorician Lactantius would argue that all persecutors died a horrible death in punishment of their deeds, which would have a long historiographical posterity among Christian writers (Lactantius 1984). In the immediate aftermath, however, the “Great Persecution” had a profound impact on North African Christianity in furthering existing trends, practices, and tensions. When Constantine sent funds to the bishop of Carthage, in 312, to reverse the effects of the persecution in North Africa (Eusebius 2019, 10.6), he was surprised to learn that two separate factions (Caecilianists and Donatists, on which see further, section “The Community of the Martyrs: Roman Persecutions and Early Christians”) claimed the title of “orthodox

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Christians.” The schism that arose during Cyprian’s career had found new life. The systematic and brutal nature of Diocletian’s persecution had also accelerated other processes already visible with Cyprian’s death: the collection of relics from the martyrs, the memorialization of geographical locations where they were executed and considered holy by their fellow Christians, and the allocation of growing prestige and power to the martyrs and saints that the persecution produced.12 Two famous examples illustrate this process. First, when discussing the outbreak of the Donatist conflict, Optatus wrote (Against the Donatists 1.16) that a woman named Lucila was at the center of the coalition that had opposed the bishop of Carthage, Caecilian, because he had rebuked her during church service for kissing a relic. Second, and similarly, while Augustine lived in Milan with his mother Monica, the local bishop Ambrose admonished her for bringing food and wine to the tombs of the dead. This represented a North African custom designed to commemorate the saints, rather than to worship them, as Italians saw it.13 Beyond the gendered power dynamics involved in these two stories, they show the long-term impact of persecution on local communities who created various ways of commemorating its victims and attributing to them supernatural powers. It also highlights another continual theme of episcopal attempts to control popular forms of religiosity, in this case with the added complication of a provincial custom that clashed with the traditions observed at an imperial center such as Milan in the fourth century. Another important, long-term consequence of the persecutions for African Christianity is that the resistance of the martyrs, their willingness to sacrifice themselves for their faith, and their valuing the afterlife over the material world coalesced to become models to follow in subsequent centuries. Thus, both sides of the Donatist conflict claimed to imitate the martyrs, and ascetic life, seen as a second best if one could not become a martyr, became a dominant paradigm of late antique Christianity in North Africa. The demographics of the early Christian movement in North Africa are very difficult to establish.14 While the surviving documentation allows only for rough estimation, the few numbers we do know provide a relative sense of magnitude. The most specific numbers we know of relate to church councils. Such councils assembled 70 bishops under Agrippinus of Carthage in the 220s or 230s, 90 bishops under Donatus in the 240s, and 87 attended the council in 256 that supported Cyprian’s position on baptism.15 This seems to imply that about 100 urban centers had bishops in the third century, but the size of these communities eludes us. We do know from Cyprian’s council document, however, that the bulk of these bishoprics were in Numidia and Proconsularis (especially around Carthage). It is important to note, however, that council attendance was not universal, reflecting only those dioceses willing and able to send delegations, and so does not reflect the full reality of the Christian community on the ground. The most detailed information about a Christian community we have for this period comes from a juridical document, the Gesta apud Zenophilum

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(Optatus 1997, appendix 1). Issued during the Donatist controversy, it depicts events related to the Great Persecution in Cirta, the foremost urban agglomeration of Numidia, at the beginning of the fourth century. The document reveals that, on 19 May 303, Cirta had 22 clergy members, among which were 3 priests, 2 deacons, 4 subdeacons, 6 sextons, 6 readers, and the bishop. They met in a private house equipped with a dining-room, and the list of objects seized during the persecution is insightful regarding charity practices already in place as well as the size of the Christian community: 82 women’s tunics, 38 veils, 16 men’s tunics, 13 pairs of men’s shoes, 47 pairs of women’s shoes, and 19 rustic coats. The community owned a large codex of scripture, 30 other codices, 2 smaller books, and 4 “pamphlets” (quiniones).16 This list of objects seems to confirm Tertullian’s remarks on charity mentioned above, but especially his connection between charity and Christian womanhood (Tertullian 1954, 2.4.2).17 The clerical structure of the community, witnessed in the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitias, is likewise evident here, indicating that these structures likely existed across the Christian communities of Numidia as well as Proconsularis.

Contesting the Community: The Donatist Controversy In their aftermath, the persecutions shook the North African church to its core, bringing forth a controversy dividing the Christian communities of the Maghreb. In their attempts to define their own communities as the true, orthodox church, both sides poured forth vitriol and polemic. At the core of this controversy, known as the Donatist controversy, sat a question, posed at a moment of trauma, self-reckoning, and sweeping change: who belonged to the community of the martyrs? All of those involved in the controversy at its opening had survived the persecution—had they betrayed it to do so? If so, what should be done? These questions continued Cyprian’s discourse on persecution and forgiveness. The end of official persecution, however, opened new space for argument: space energetically filled by an elite church leadership seeking to define and delineate their communities and the powers they held over them. Our sources, the very same that constructed and maintained this controversy, would have us think of it in clear lines. Optatus of Milevis and Augustine of Hippo provide the most comprehensive sources, but present only one side: the victors.18 We must, therefore, seek to understand this contestation of community in the African church through a lens darkly—discerning underlying arguments in surviving counterarguments, piecing together what dissenting voices have survived, and reading the accounts of the victors critically. Little is clear. Despite this difficulty, grappling with the question of the Donatists is important. At its heart lies the operation of power in a colonial landscape and how that operation exists at the intersection of the sacred and the secular. As such, it has been the center of considerable scholarly debate.19

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On a basic level, the Donatist controversy dealt with the practicalities of reintegrating Christians who had failed in the persecutions. The Donatists, so named by their opponents after their longtime leader Donatus of Carthage, required rebaptism for traditores, taking a harder stance on fallen clergy. The other party, Caecilianists after Donatus’ rival episcopal claimant Caecilian of Carthage, took a more conciliatory stance toward traditores, opposing rebaptism. The Donatists referred to the Caecilianist party simply as the traditores, but because of the membership of prominent figures such as Augustine of Hippo and their success in enrolling imperial support, they have long been framed as Catholic. At the time, however, each side laid claim to catholicity, representing themselves as the sole, rightful community of the martyrs. Following so soon after the persecution, it was only too natural for the Donatists, Christians who would lose their appeal to Roman authorities, to label them and their Caecilianist rivals as persecutors, as if nothing had changed after Constantine’s support of Christianity. For them, the age of the martyrs, and the persecutions, remained very much alive. The dispute began with the election of Caecilian as bishop of Carthage in 312 or 307. The bishops of Numidia, having been excluded, arrived and, claiming to see the hand of traditores, demanded a new election. Receiving no satisfaction, they elected their own candidate, whose death shortly after led to the elevation of Donatus. Donatus’ party appealed to Constantine for imperial intervention, resulting in the Council of Arles in 314, which ruled against them, and condemned rebaptism as unorthodox. The Caecilianist bishops accepted this decision, thereby departing from Cyprian’s legacy. Because of this alignment of Caecilianists with the transmarine Christian practices supported by a majority of bishops, Donatists would eventually claim to be the true heirs of Cyprian in Africa. For some scholars, this coincidence of imperial support and adoption of the Roman position on rebaptism by the Caecilianists made the Donatist position an anti-imperial reaction of sorts. Undeterred, the struggle ebbed and flowed. Competition for episcopal legitimacy and physical space marked the discourse throughout. An attempt under Constans in 347 to bring unity through the dispatch of imperial legates to distribute imperial funds in support of North African Christians ended in armed soldiers seizing churches and new Donatist martyrs—a disaster that drove home the Donatist claim to be the true community of martyrs in a period of persecution that had not, in fact, ended. In response, violence increased— including the activities of the so-called circumcellions, discussed below. Emperor Julian’s support of the Donatists led to the triumphant reclamation of church properties and more martyrs, this time Caecilianists. At the end of the fourth century, powerful leadership—especially by Augustine of Hippo and Aurelius of Carthage—rebuilt the Caecilianist cause, leading to the condemnation of Donatism at the Council of Carthage in 411. The arrival of the Vandals and the collapse of imperial pressure in 429, however, shifted the religious landscape. Donatism becomes difficult to track after this point, although it appears to have survived as long as the Roman African Christian community itself did.20

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The trauma of the persecutions and the ways in which it was memorialized and manufactured for subsequent generations informed this conflict. The persecutions had eroded episcopal authority: in a community centered on martyrs, what was the place of leaders who had avoided martyrdom? Who had the right to be the arbiter of theology? In an effort to answer these questions we witness, from both sides, an elite, episcopal attempt to rebuild authority and community through the construction of alterity—in this case framing the “other” as traitor (the Donatist approach) or heretic (the Caecilianist one). This complex issue involved a series of discourses, not all of which fit comfortably within the Donatist-Caecilianist binary they informed. Was the church or the emperor responsible for defining orthodoxy? The Donatists would reject imperial authority, but only after it rejected them. Should local, African practice give way to that of Rome and the empire? The Caecilianists looked to the empire, but largely because they lacked support in Africa itself—and because their greatest champion, Augustine of Hippo, converted to an imperially oriented Christianity outside of Africa.21 Who held the power in the church—the ad hoc “community” of martyrs and confessors or the bishops? On this question the polemicists agreed—the circumcellions provided counterclaim. Our sources tell this story of theological struggle because they were engaged in one. The schism, however, was profoundly shaped by its non-theological African context, taking on and papering over the contours of the secular world around it. This world was a colonial space in which the pressures of an increasingly centralized empire forced the inhabitants to negotiate an existence caught between structures of exploitation and opportunity, cooperation and resistance (Mattingly 2011, pp. 43–72 and 146–166). The question of how Donatism fit within related questions of identity, status, and anti-colonial resistance represents a key debate. While scholars have argued against any simple narrative of Donatism as anti-colonial resistance, it also cannot be fully divorced from it.22 Each community viewed itself as both catholic and African. Augustine of Hippo, the imperially connected stalwart of the Caecilianists, saw himself as African, associated with the African community when abroad, and was seen by others as African (Wilhite 2017, pp. 250–258; Augustine of Hippo 2018).23 On the other hand, Augustine attempted to connect Donatism with the rebellions of Firmus and Gildo, Indigenous Mauri leaders who held senior positions in the Roman military; meanwhile Gildo’s daughter Salvina corresponded with Jerome and supported John Chrysostom in Constantinople (Blackhurst 2004). Augustine also associated Donatists with the speaking of Punic, the dominant language in much of the countryside—yet Augustine himself defended Punic and it is clear there were Punic-speaking Caecilianists, if in the minority (Wilhite 2017, pp. 218–220). Thus, while Donatists perhaps held the stronger claim, both sides were keen to embrace and express their African identities. In terms of resistance, the Donatists may well have developed a theological position separating church and state (arrived at following the ruling against them at Arles in 314) yet it was quickly forgotten when Julian gave them his support.

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The circumcellions present the most hotly contested aspect of this history.24 Augustine and Optatus sought to link them with the mainstream Donatist cause, yet one of our few Donatist sources, Tychonius, denounced them (Pottier 2018, pp. 142–143). Long discussed in terms of anti-colonial resistance, more recently Shaw (2011) has argued for viewing them primarily in religious terms as an ascetic peasant movement constituted mostly of migrant seasonal agricultural workers. They operated in the borderlands of southern Numidia, a militarized area where the Caecilianist party was weak, the Donatist strong, and where large-scale agricultural work did rely on itinerant peasant laborers, increasingly bound tenant farmers, and Indigenous trans-border migrants.25 We first see the circumcellions during the turmoil of 347: a roving group of the disaffected, based in the Numidian countryside, accessible in the market towns, and led by two duces sanctorum, “leaders of the saints,” named Axilo and Fasir (Optatus 1997, 3.4). Clearly, this movement laid claim to the ad hoc religious authority of the sort that Cyprian resisted a century before. What they did with this religious authority, however, was target creditors and slave-­holders: enemies of the tenant farmer, the day laborer, the Indigenous migrant worker. Not ecclesiastical reform, but social. Yet, they called themselves circumcelliones agonistici, roughly “fighting martyr-confessors,” and frequented martyrs’ shrines where, following traditional North African religious practices, they held communal meals (Pottier 2018, pp. 142–143). Consistently associated with voluntary martyrdom, they were accused of seeking it through armed provocation. Augustine painted them as a violent, fanatical, Donatist suicide cult, yet we must remember that Augustine sought to define community through alterity, painting Donatists as dangerous heretics. The circumcellions eventually seem to have been coopted by local, Donatist, church leadership, emphasizing the central role of religion in the movement (Pottier 2018, pp. 158–159). It is perhaps best to see them as a popular, at times militant, ascetic movement, drawn from the most exploited communities of the Roman African borderland and thus orientated to their needs, desires, outlook, and traditions. The circumcellions, therefore, sit at the place where Indigenous, mobile, and peasant communities mapped onto the Christian community. They intersected with but were separate from Donatism, until coopted by it. They represent, therefore, an articulation of Christian community, different yet intrinsically tied to the others, particularly in its answer to the question of who are the arbiters of theology. It is difficult to tell how deeply this controversy was felt outside of the main group of stakeholders. It seems that many members of the Christian community simply attended services, with no real awareness or concern for sect.26 This is consistent with the situationally activated Christianity outlined by Rebillard (2012). Often enough, only one church (usually Donatist) was available. What drove the Donatist-Caecilianist discourse was largely an elite, episcopal power-­ struggle, tying in broader non-elite communities as it strove to delineate and define. This visible, elite discourse intersected with less-visible, popular discourses involving the growth of ascetism, increasing pressure on tenant farmers

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and agricultural laborers, and the dynamics of Roman colonialism. While these discourses both clashed and intersected, they all represent attempts to rebuild the Christian community of Africa in the wake of the persecutions. The question of Donatism is thus one of blurred lines and attempts to impose clarity upon them—making categories where categories did not necessarily exist, or at least not as sharply distinguished as made out to be. The Council of Carthage in 411, which condemned the Donatists, provides us with another glimpse into the demographics of the Christian community of North Africa. Keeping in mind the difficulties mentioned before about using conciliar records to estimate the size of the Christian community, the records from 411 nonetheless provide us with important information.27 At the council, across both factions, 604 bishops represented 429 dioceses. Mauretania and Tripolitania were poorly represented, and Shaw (2011, p.  808) reckons an additional 70–80 bishops, with a total range of 675–700 for the full number of bishops, both Donatist and Caecilianist. Of the 429 dioceses, 198 had bishops of both factions. While it is likely that numbers of clergy were higher than witnessed in the Gesta apud Zenophilum, many of these bishoprics were centered on small settlements and numbers of clergy may well have been low.28 Actual community demographics are very difficult to extrapolate, but what evidence the council does provide shows the Christian community thoroughly established across the urban landscape of the Maghreb.

Arianism and the Vandal Century The arrival of the Vandals in 429 fundamentally shifted the contexts within which the Christian communities of Africa had sought to define themselves. The Vandals, one of the groups of gentes, “peoples” that coalesced in and around the borders of the empire in late antiquity, belonged to a different Christian community: Arianism. While Caecilianist polemics sought to paint Donatism as a heresy, it was never fully regarded as such and both groups belonged to the broad category of orthodox, Nicene Christians. The same was not true of Arianism, which rejected the definition of orthodoxy laid down at the Council of Nicaea in 325. The theological division between Arian and Nicene Christianity was far deeper and fundamental than those which existed within the African community. Disagreement centered on the nature of Christ. For Arian Christians, Christ was part of creation, thus subordinate to and not co-eternal with God the Father.29 The Nicene, or Catholic, position held Christ as co-equal and co-eternal with God the Father and the Holy Spirit—the Holy Trinity. The difference in these positions carried great theological stakes, including the nature of salvation and humanity’s relationship with God. The arrival of the Vandals, therefore, signaled both a key political shift, the end of Roman imperial rule, and a religious one. Imperial support had long propped up Caecilianists (while holding out a potential path to Donatists)—now, the state supported and sponsored a rival to both communities.

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The Vandals were deeply tied to Arianism, so much that it was seen as an ethnic identifier for the group. Yet, we must approach our sources with caution: once more we encounter blurred lines and attempts to impose clarity upon them. The Vandal community formed the heart of the new polity based around Carthage, but state structures require community consensus and support and the Vandals sought to incorporate the existing population through, among other means, conversion to Arianism. Increasingly, the lines blurred as Romano-Africans sought opportunity and advancement through association and cooperation with the Vandals.30 Categories became fluid and individuals moved between these communities-that-would-be-defined. Because the religious and the political were not distinct in the ancient world, political cooperation could be read as religious acquiescence. This fluidity of movement and blurring of community lines created a society in which group membership and allegiance were no longer clearly delineated. Yet, elites—be they Vandal or Nicene Romano-Africans—were invested in delineation, and so this provoked a response. The Vandal coalition quickly conquered most of Roman North Africa, eventually taking control of Carthage, around which they settled (in the province known as Proconsularis). In order to provide for his men, the Vandal King Geiseric (c. 428–477) expropriated and exiled Nicene bishops and Roman landowners, whose properties he transferred to Vandal soldiers and Arian bishops. Thus Quodvultdeus, bishop of Carthage from 423 to his exile shortly after the conquest of Carthage in 439, lived the remainder of his life around Naples. Before his exile to Campania, however, he had delivered sermons against the Vandals (Quodvultdeus 1963, De Tempore Barbarico) in which he exhorted the Nicene community to resist the invaders, who he saw as dangerous, evil enemies controlled by the Devil. Following a century of ecclesiastical infighting between Caecilianists and Donatists during which each group staunchly built their community boundaries, the party of Augustine was not able to savor their triumph very long in the early fifth century. For them, the Vandals represented yet another trial they faced against the forces of evil, and they set out to maintain their community boundaries against a new “other”: the Arian Vandals. Following the example of Valerian’s persecution of Christians, Vandals targeted clerics and especially bishops as leaders of their Christian communities. But contrary to Valerian, who quickly escalated his measures to the death penalty, Vandals for the most part limited themselves to exiling churchmen outside the confines of their kingdom. This could be to other areas of the empire, as in Quodvultdeus’ case, but also to the Mauri, “Moors,” as Victor of Vita (our main source on these events) describes it (Victor of Vita 1992, 1.35, 2.4, 2.28–37, 3.68; with Modéran 2003). This term designates Indigenous populations apparently living south and west of the Vandal kingdom, on the northern edge of the Sahara, who allied themselves with the Vandals in various ways. Because Victor of Vita was a Nicene cleric strongly opposed to the Vandals and their version of the Christian faith, his depiction of events is couched in

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polarizing hues in which the heroes are Roman, catholic, and civilized, whereas the Vandals are the villains, heretical and savage barbarians. As part of this rhetoric, Victor also depicts the Mauri, as allies of the Vandals, in negative tones, as pagans that the exiled Catholics successfully converted. Victor understood these measures of exile against the catholic clergy as a persecution in continuity with those of earlier, pre-Christian Roman rulers. Interestingly, however, Nicene clerics seem to have been unable to accept geographical limits imposed on their own community. For most of the episodes of conflict between Vandals and Nicene clerics in Victor’s narrative center around Nicene clerics disregarding Vandal interdictions to proselytize in their territory (the Proconsular province around Carthage). This would imply that Vandals did not have an issue with Nicene clerics and their faith per se, but were eager to maintain their own community by keeping members of each faith geographically separate. One of the most dramatic moments of Victor’s narrative occurs in 484, during an ecclesiastical council held in Carthage aimed at solving the Nicene-Arian divide (and modeled on the council of 411 between Caecilianists and Donatists). Victor has the king’s notary present the Arian bishop Cyrila as “patriarch,” a title to which the Nicene bishops objected, only to hear Cyrila tell them that he did not know Latin (2.54–55). While Cyrila’s claim is possible, it is more likely that this is an example of the polarizing view of all clerics involved in the dispute who considered Latin, the language of the Romans, as a marker of Nicene Christian identity. By contrast, and here implicitly, Victor conveys the notion that Cyrila’s ignorance of Latin is an example of his general ignorance, of the barbarity and heresy that, in his mind, characterized Vandal identity. But what is most interesting when considering African influence on Christianity, in Victor’s narrative, is his description of the ritual that Vandals used to forcibly convert catholic Christians to their own confession and community: rebaptism (1.33, 2.29, 3.45–52). This is especially fascinating because of the local, African context in which these events transpired. As seen earlier, the repetition of baptism was at the crux of several conflicts centering on issues of community formation going back to Cyprian. It had become the official position of the African church against that of the Bishop of Rome, and represented a central issue dividing African Christian communities during the Donatist controversy. Given this context, it would seem that Vandals consciously adopted a local ritual of integration in their own community that had the potential to be perceived as a traditional North African Christian belief (Fournier 2012). The fact that Vandals took control of the basilicas where Perpetua, Felicitas, and Cyprian were reputedly buried, as well as their celebration of the Cypriana to honor the martyr’s death at the time of the East Roman invasion illustrates how much they valued and maintained local traditions (Victor of Vita 1992, 1.3 and 1.9; and Prokopios 2014, 3.21.17–25). Such appeal to the North African martyrs as the local heroes of early Christianity transcended boundaries of the African communities, however, as they became some of the most popular saints of Latin Christianity during the medieval

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period (Conant 2010). African Nicene writers, whose texts dominate extant sources for this period, however, appealed to the model and literary archetypes provided by the passions and lives of saints in order to depict their current struggles as a repetition and continuity of past persecutions of Christians by Roman rulers. In this way, they conjured a native literary tradition about local Christian heroes who stood up to the colonial power of Rome and that provided a model to follow in their own contest with a new power. Ironically, North African Christian writers of the fifth and sixth centuries do not seem to have realized or minded that they were now allied with the colonial powers they once resisted. Instead, they invoked this tradition against a new secular power seemingly genuinely attempting to root itself in  local traditions and religious rituals such as rebaptism. The Vandals continued this policy of exiling catholic clerics into the early sixth century, when Bishop Fulgentius of Ruspe (462/7–527/32) was, around 508, exiled to Sardinia along with several other clerics. From there, Fulgentius remained a respected leader in the catholic community which regularly sought his opinion and advice in writing, showing that despite the disruptions caused by the clerical elite’s dislocation the catholic community remained united under the leadership of its bishops and theologians. This reputation attracted King Thrasamund’s attention, who recalled him around 516 in order to engage in a public theological debate, only to return him to his Sardinian exile afterwards. Following the king’s death, in 523, he returned permanently. This was because Thrasamund’s successor, Hilderic (r. 523–530), favored the Nicene version of the faith (under the influence of his mother, the Roman princess Eudocia). A faction of the Vandal community perceived such reversal of the traditional Vandal religious policies too great a break with his ancestors and founders of the Vandal kingdom, Geiseric and Huneric. This backlash eventually led to the coup of Hilderic’s cousin Gelimer, whose takeover provided the East Roman ruler Justinian (r. 527–565) with a pretext to attack the Vandal kingdom in the guise of supporting Hilderic. The specific religious pressures of Vandal rule mean that most ecclesiastical councils held during their tenure present an even more occluded lens through which to view the Christian community of the Maghreb. Because of its purpose and scope, however, the Council of Carthage in 484, mentioned above, may well provide the most accurate glimpse of all. Discussed by Victor of Vita and recorded in the Notitia provinciarum et civitatum Africae, the council was attended by 459 Nicene bishops from the Maghreb and the Mediterranean islands ruled by the Vandals.31 Of these, 260 held their posts in Proconsularis, Byzacena, Numidia, and Tripolitania, the central provinces of the Vandal polity. Many of these bishops, between 334 and 338, were expelled from their dioceses by Huneric (Merrills and Miles 2014, p. 65). It is clear that Huneric’s persecution damaged the Nicene episcopate, though the exact impact on the Christian community that they served is less clear. When the restored Nicene bishop of Carthage, Bonifatius, called a general council in Carthage in 525 under the Nicene-friendly King Hilderic, only 52 bishops (or episcopal

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representatives) came. Of these, 37 were from Proconsularis, which had been represented by 164 at the Council of Carthage in 439. While many sees likely remained vacant, such poor attendance demonstrates the weakening of the bishop of Carthage’s religious authority. During the years of exile and Arian political domination, members of the African Christian community who remained Nicene saw authority as residing more in the individual than in their ecclesiastical position. It was Fulgentius of Ruspe, a major figure from a minor see, who led the restored church back to Africa, not the bishop of Carthage (Tizzoni, 2020, pp. 355–59).

Post-Vandal Era—African Christianity as Community of Resistance The East Roman conquest of the North African kingdom of the Vandals, led by Justinian’s general Belisarius in summer 533, was swift and efficient. This officially ended a century of Vandal rule in North Africa, which had brought Arian Christianity to the fore in the region. East Roman overlords quickly attempted to erase the Vandal presence from North Africa and to return orthodox Christians to positions of power. The Vandal century had somewhat isolated Christian communities from wider Mediterranean developments and relations, however, and their return to the Roman orbit did not go as smoothly as both sides anticipated. In the Eastern territories of the Empire, theological controversies had continued unabated since the fourth century. Despite various attempts by different rulers to unite Christian communities, conflicts had persisted. As a result, Eastern Roman territories included various Christian communities under the leadership of their bishops that found themselves hostile to the political leadership of the Roman state because they disagreed with the theological leanings of the court. In a clumsy attempt to remedy the situation and bring unity to the various Christian communities of his realm, Justinian claimed the power of interpreting Scripture for himself (theologians, as experts, believed this to be their exclusive privilege) and unilaterally decided to declare three dead theologians heretical in order to satisfy one faction. This backfired, causing more rift, and the stiff resistance of Western theologians, North African ones in particular. Taking its name from the three theologians that Justinian condemned (more accurately their writings), this conflict is known as the Three Chapters controversy (Chazelle and Cubitt 2007; Dossey 2016). In Africa, resistance to the emperor’s policy started in 544, with Justinian presumably sending his edict to all provinces to obtain metropolitan bishops’ approval. This imperialist move led the Roman church to consult Ferrandus, the most celebrated African theologian of the time, who wrote his Letter 6 in response, arguing that this constituted an attack against the orthodoxy declared at the council of Chalcedon, that it troubled the peace by condemning the dead who could not defend themselves, and most importantly that the laity (including the emperor) should learn theological interpretations from bishops

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and not try usurping their position (Ferrandus 2009). This response stemmed from a century of resistance to the Vandals and their religious policy, which had caused the African episcopate to develop a strong communal identity grounded in resistance to outside interference and had increased the holy status of orthodox councils of the church. By attacking both of these elements at once, Justinian had touched a nerve, quickly souring the initial excitement that North Africans felt toward their Eastern Roman “liberators.” In the end, Justinian resorted to persecutory measures to crush the North African resistance. His reputation in North Africa suffered because of these events, coupled with increasing dissatisfaction and disillusionment with the East Roman government for its tepid response to military threats from Mauri in the South. Indigenous Mauri leaders operating in the African borderlands had long recognized the power and usefulness of Christianity and its position within the Roman state apparatus. In the fourth century, both Firmus and Gildo allied themselves to local bishops during their rebellions, seeking the support of the wider Christian community on the frontier as they negotiated their place in imperial politics.32 The name of their father, Nubel, is associated with the founding of a church with a relic of the True Cross in 359 (Blackhurst 2004, p.  65). Following the revolts of the fourth century, these borderlands witnessed an expansion of Indigenous state-building.33 During the Vandal period, these borderlands witnessed both an intensification of this state-building and the increased spread of Christianity among the Mauri, as mentioned by Victor of Vita (1.36). While our sources do not always provide clarity, when we see the religion of Indigenous leaders in Mauretania, Numidia, and Byzacena they are frequently, although not always, Christian.34 This is especially the case when looking at epigraphy, the one source that preserves the voices of these Indigenous Mauri elites—most famously the inscription of Masties imperator (“emperor”) in the Aurès Mountains and Masuna rex gentium Maurorum et Romanorum (“king of the peoples of the Mauri and Romans”) at Altava in western Mauretania.35 These epigraphic expressions of power articulated both the Christianity of those who made them and their Latinity and compatibility with the Roman style of governance. Within a fluid religious context that continued to include traditional religious expressions and practices, Indigenous Mauri leaders sought to build community and consensus with the settled Christian populations. This is not only witnessed in the Roman-oriented Latin epigraphy but in the Indigenous-oriented monumental structures known as the Djedars. These structures, built in Indigenous Mauretanian and Saharan traditions, carried substantial Christian symbolism within their non-Christian forms (Merrills 2018, pp. 379–387). Christianity was central to the communities they sought to bring together under their rule, and so it became central to Indigenous Mauri state-building. This ability of Indigenous rulers to build community and consensus proved extremely durable. When East Roman state structures collapsed following the incursions of the Arab-Islamic army, Mauri leaders such as Kusayla and Kahina filled the power vacuum, uniting Indigenous,

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Romano-African, and East Roman forces in resistance and, ultimately, in accommodation. The precise contours of the Christian community of the Maghreb at the time of the arrival of Islam proved difficult to map. It is certain, however, that it was a diverse community bringing together rich and poor, colonized and colonizer, Romano-African and Mauri, and centered on the memory of the martyrs and a long history of resistance and local self-confidence. It is also certain that it survived the arrival of the Arab-Islamic army by many centuries (Savage 1997, pp. 89–105 and Handley 2004, pp. 302–310). Arabic sources continue to speak of Christians throughout the early centuries of Islam in the Maghreb, indicating the survival of the religion among both Mauri (now constructed as Berbers) and Romano-Africans (referred to as ajām or afāriqa) and its position within new power structures, such as those of the Ibāḍı ̄ (Savage 1997, pp. 101–104 and Handley 2004, p. 303). Yet, the new Islamic government appears to have interpreted the membership of Mauri in the Christian community as different from that of the urban Romano-Africans: the latter were given protective status under the payment of the jizya, the former were obliged to submit to Islam (Savage 1997, p. 97). This distinction, however, may well have more to do with retrospective justification for the treatment of the Mauri than an actual testament to their membership within the Christian community. We should, therefore, see the Christian community at the eve of Islam’s arrival as robust, diverse, and confidently African.

Notes 1. For Augustine’s African identity, see Wilhite (2017, pp. 250–258). 2. Particularly Rebillard (2012). 3. See especially Mattingly (2011). Also Laroui (1977) and Benabou (1976). 4. See, in particular Modéran (2003). For recent additions to the debate Merrills (2018) and von Rummel (2010). 5. The most comprehensive is Shaw (2011). 6. See, for example, Cherry (1998) and Whittaker (1994). 7. For a fuller discussion, see Rebillard (2012, pp. 34–60). 8. Wilhite (2017, p. 62, 93–96, 159–60). 9. Wilhite (2017, p. 53–54, 59–61, and 89). 10. Rebillard (2012, pp. 11–20). 11. See Brent 2010, for the latest critical overview of his life and career. 12. See the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas 21.5; Pontius, Life of Cyprian 16.6; and Passion of Cyprian 4.1–2 for examples of collecting the blood and sweat of martyrs for commemorative purposes. 13. Augustine, Confessions 6.2.2; with Clark (2015, p. 128). 14. For thorough discussion of the complexities involved in demographic calculations, see Rebillard (2012). 15. Agrippinus: Cyprian, Letters 71.4.1; Augustine, On Baptism 13.22; and Against Cresconius 3.3.3. Donatus: Cyprian, Letters 59.10.1. Cyprian: Sententiae Episcoporum numero LXXXVII De Haereticis Baptizandis.

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16. English translation in Optatus (1997, pp.  150–169). See Duval (2000), for analysis. 17. Rebillard (2012, pp. 11, 32). 18. Optatus wrote a dedicated treatise, Against the Donatists. For Augustine’s lengthy engagement, Rebillard (2018) is very useful. 19. The landmark study of Frend (1952) established the modern discourse on the Donatist schism. Much of the scholarship that followed has been in dialogue and debate with Frend. The equally landmark Shaw (2011) subsequently reframed the discourse. For a convenient historiography of Donatism, see Whitehouse (2018b). See also Wilhite (2017, pp. 195–239). 20. For a convenient survey of the schism’s history, see Whitehouse (2018a). For its later history, Conant (2018). The primary source narrative can be found in Optatus’ Against the Donatists. 21. Numbers are nearly impossible to track with precision, but Caecilianist bishops were outnumbered in every African province save Proconsularis/Zeugitana, see Whitehouse (2018a, pp.  16–18) based on Shaw (2011, pp.  807–11). That Augustine’s conversion marked a break with African practice can be witnessed in his treatment of his mother Monica’s chastisement by Ambrose for following African custom in Milan at Confessions 6.2.2. This adherence to non-African custom sat in tension with Augustine’s own African identity. 22. Most notably Shaw (2011), which frames the discourse as principally a religious one, in opposition to Frend (1952), who argued for an interpretation centered on anti-colonial resistance. 23. Augustine was more than once likened to Hannibal (including by Jerome) and accused of Punicitas—being Punic (Wilhite (2017, p. 252). In his Confessions, Augustine makes clear his association with fellow Africans in Italy, for example, Ponticianus at 8.6.14, whose agency is crucial in Augustine’s final push to conversion. 24. A useful survey with reference to the scholarly debates can be found in Pottier (2018). 25. See Wilson (2012, p. 415) and Merrills (2018). 26. This is particularly clear in the fifth century, when African refugees turn up in Gaul and Italy. Conant (2018, pp. 348–50). 27. For a detailed breakdown, see Shaw (2011, pp. 807–11) and also Whitehouse (2018a, pp. 16–18). 28. For a recent and detailed discussion of clerical demographics in late antiquity, with reference to the Maghreb, see Wood (2022, pp. 41–45). 29. For a recent and comprehensive consideration of Arianism, see Berndt and Steinacher (2014). 30. On identity in the Vandal polity, Merrills and Miles (2014, pp.  83–108 and 177–203). 31. For a text of the Notitia provinciarum, Lancel (2002, pp. 251–72). 32. On the rebellions, see Shaw (2011, pp. 38–50), Whitehouse (2018a, pp. 27–28) with its historiographical discussion, and Merrills (2018). 33. The nature of these polities is debated. The framework of Indigeneity, however, allows us to consider both the similarity and diversity of these communities which existed in a colonial framework of alterity. Despite facing centuries of Roman colonization and its profound impact, these communities maintained lifeways which the Roman colonial system consistently framed as barbarity—

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specifically pastoral nomadism. The debate is a wide one: Merrills (2018), Blackhurst (2004), Rushworth (2004), von Rummel (2010), and Wilson (2012), all present different models. 34. Traditional religious practices appear to have remained dominant in Tripolitania/ Libya, where our sources emphasize their continuation. Of particular focus is the shrine of Gurzul at Ghirza. See Conant (2012, p. 267) and Handley (2004, pp. 297–298). 35. See von Rummel (2010, pp.  586–7) and Modéran (2003, pp.  398–412 (for Masties) and pp. 374–76 (for Masuna)).

Bibliography Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs. 2017. Translated by Éric Rebillard. In Greek and Latin Narratives about the Ancient Martyrs, edited by Éric Rebillard, 357–359. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Augustine of Hippo. 2018. Confessions. Translated by Sarah Ruden. New  York: The Modern Library. Eusebius. 2019. The History of the Church. A New Translation. Translated by Jeremy M. Schott. Oakland: University of California Press. Ferrandus. 2009. Letter 6. Translated by Richard Price. The Acts of the Council of Constantinople of 553 with Related Texts on the Three Chapters Controversy. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Lactantius. 1984. On the Death of the Persecutors. Translated by J.L.  Creed. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Optatus of Milevis. 1997. Optatus: Against the Donatists. Edited and translated by Mark Edwards. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997. Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas. 2017. Translated by Éric Rebillard. In Greek and Latin Narratives about the Ancient Martyrs, edited by Éric Rebillard, 303–329. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Passion of Cyprian. 2017. Translated by Éric Rebillard. In Greek and Latin Narratives about the Ancient Martyrs, edited by Éric Rebillard, 239–245. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pontius. 2017. Life of Cyprian. Translated by Éric Rebillard. In Greek and Latin Narratives about the Ancient Martyrs, edited by Éric Rebillard, 203–235. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Prokopios. 2014. The Wars of Justinian. Translated by H.B.  Dewing. Revised and Modernized by Anthony Kaldellis. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Quodvultdeus. 1963. De Tempore Barbarico. Translated by Richard Kalkman. Two Sermons: De Tempore Barbarico Attributed to St. Quodvultdeus, Bishop of Carthage—A Study of Text and Attribution with Translation and Commentary. PhD diss., The Catholic University of America. Tertullian. 1954. Ad Uxorem. In Opera I: Opera catholica, edited by E. Dekkers et al. Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, 1. Turnhout: Brepols. Victor of Vita. 1992. History of the Persecution. Translated by John Moorhead. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Benabou, Marcel. 1976. La résistance africaine à la romanization. Paris: F. Maspero. Berndt, Guido and Roland Steinacher, editors. 2014. Arianism: Roman Heresy and Barbarian Creed. New York: Routledge.

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Blackhurst, Andy. 2004. “The House of Nubel: Rebels or Players?” In Vandals, Romans and Berbers: New Perspectives on Late Antique North Africa, edited by Andy H. Merrills, 59–75. New York: Routledge. Brent, Allen. 2010. Cyprian and Roman Carthage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chazelle, Celia, and Catherine Cubitt, ed. 2007. The Crisis of the Oikoumene: The Three Chapters and the Failed Quest for Unity in the Sixth-Century Mediterranean. Turnhout: Brepols. Cherry, David. 1998. Frontier and Society in Roman North Africa. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Clark, Gillian. 2015. Monica. An Ordinary Saint. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Conant, Jonathan. 2018. “Donatism in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries.” In The Donatist Schism: Controversy and Contexts, edited by Richard Miles, 345–361. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Conant, Jonathan. 2010. “Europe and the African Cult of Saints, circa 350-900: An Essay in Mediterranean Communications.” Speculum 85: 1–46. Conant, Jonathan. 2012. Staying Roman: Conquest and Identity in Africa and the Mediterranean, 439-700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dossey, Leslie. 2016. “Exegesis and Dissent in Byzantine North Africa.” In North Africa under Byzantium and Early Islam, edited by Susan Stevens and Jonathan Conant 251–267. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Duval, Yvette. 2000. Chrétiens d’Afrique à l’aube de la paix constantinienne. Les premiers échos de la grande persécution. Paris: Institut d’Études augustiniennes. Fournier, Éric. 2012. “Rebaptism as a Ritual of Cultural Integration in Vandal Africa.” In Shifting Cultural Frontiers in Late Antiquity, edited by David Brakke, Deborah Deliyannis and Edward Watts, 243–254. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Frend, W.H.C. 1952. The Donatist Church: A Movement of Protest in Roman North Africa. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Handley, Mark A. 2004. “Disputing the End of African Christianity.” In Vandals, Romans and Berbers: New Perspectives on Late Antique North Africa, edited by Andy H. Merrills, 291–310. New York: Routledge. Lancel, Serge. 2002. Victor de Vita Histoire de la persécution vandale en Afrique. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Laroui, Abdallah. 1977. The History of the Maghreb: An Interpretive Essay. Translated by Ralph Manheim. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mattingly, David J. 2011. Imperialism, Power, and Identity: Experiencing the Roman Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Merrills, Andy. 2018. “Invisible men: mobility and political change on the frontier of late Roman Africa.” Early Medieval Europe, 26 (3): 355–390. Merrills, Andy, and Richard Miles. 2014. The Vandals. Malden: Wiley Blackwell. Modéran, Yves. 2003. Les Maures et l’Afrique romaine (IVe–VIIe siècle). Rome: École française de Rome. Pottier, Bruno. 2018. “Circumcelliones, Rural Society and Communal Violence in Late Antique North Africa.” In The Donatist Schism: Controversy and Contexts, edited by Richard Miles, 142–165. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Rebillard, Éric. 2012. Christians and Their Many Identities in Late Antiquity, North Africa, 200-450 CE. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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Rebillard, Éric. 2018. “Augustine in Controversy with the Donatists before 411.” In The Donatist Schism: Controversy and Contexts, edited by Richard Miles, 297–316. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Rushworth, Alan. 2004. “From Arzuges to Rustamids: State Formation and Regional Identity in the Pre-Saharan Zone.” In Vandals, Romans and Berbers: New Perspectives on Late Antique North Africa, edited by Andy H.  Merrills, 77–98. New  York: Routledge. Savage, Elizabeth. 1997. A Gateway to Hell, A Gateway to Paradise: The North African Response to the Arab Conquest. Princeton: The Darwin Press. Shaw, Brent D. 2011. Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tizzoni, Mark. 2020. “Locating Carthage in the Vandal Era.” In Urban Interactions: Communication and Competition in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, edited by Michael Burrows and Michael J.  Kelly, 343–372. Binghamton: Gracchi Books. von Rummel, Philipp. 2010. “The Frexes: Late Roman Barbarians in the Shadow of the Vandal Kingdom.” In Neglected Barbarians, edited by Florin Curta, 571–603. Turnhout: Brepols. Whitehouse, John. 2018a. “The Course of the Schism.” In The Donatist Schism: Controversy and Contexts, edited by Richard Miles, 13–33. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Whitehouse, John. 2018b. “The Scholarship of the Donatist Controversy.” In The Donatist Schism: Controversy and Contexts, edited by Richard Miles, 34–53. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Whittaker, C.R. 1994. Frontiers of the Roman Empire. A Social and Economic Study. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Wilhite, David E. 2017. Ancient African Christianity: An Introduction to a Unique Context and Tradition. New York: Routledge. Wilson, Andrew. 2012. “Saharan trade in the Roman period: short-, medium- and long-distance trade networks,” Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa, 47 (4): 409–449. Wood, Ian. 2022. The Christian Economy in the Early Medieval West: Towards a Temple Society. Binghamton: Gracchi.

CHAPTER 26

Christian Communities and Religious Movements in Ethiopia and Nubia Vince Bantu

The continent of Africa has been an integral part of the Christian story since the Holy Family took refuge there just after Jesus was born.1 Since the times of the Apostles, civilizations from various parts of the continent we now call Africa witnessed the development of Christian communities.2 After the New Testament period, some of the earliest and most prominent Christian theologians emerged from the African Mediterranean coast. Egyptians such as Origen, Antony the Great, and Athanasius as well as North Africans such as Tertullian, Perpetua and Felicity, Cyprian, and Augustine provided some of the most foundational theological contributions for what would become Western Christianity. However, during the earliest centuries of Christianity, there were two other urbanized kingdoms on the continent of Africa that also became a major part of the Christian story: Nubia and Ethiopia. Part of the reason these regions and the Christian theologians that emerged from them are less known than those from the African Mediterranean coast is because, unlike the aforementioned figures, Nubian and Ethiopian Christianity did not develop in a similar theological trajectory as Western Christianity. Indeed, the majority of Christians from these regions wrote in Indigenous languages, as opposed to the Greek and Latin literature from North Africa that has been of greater interest throughout the centuries to Western Christians. Furthermore, the form of Christianity that developed in Nubia and Ethiopia was distinct and even at

V. Bantu (*) Department of Church History and Black Church History, Fuller Theological Seminary-Houston, Houston, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. E. Barnes, T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48270-0_26

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odds with the Christianity that emerged in the continent we now call Europe. This played no small role in the lack of familiarity with Nubian and Ethiopian Christianity in the modern world. This chapter will address this lacuna in Church history by providing an overview of Christian history in Nubia and Ethiopia.

Nubia Ironically, the beginnings of the Nubian Church actually begin with a eunuch who is commonly known to us as “Ethiopian.” The Greek word “Ethiopian” literally means “one whose face is burned by the sun,” or, to use a modern term, “black.” Therefore, it would actually be a better translation of the eunuch in Acts 8 to simply refer to him as the “black eunuch.” Because the term “Ethiopian” (aithiopios) was a broad term referring to people with dark skin.3 In late antique texts, this term referred to people from India, Arabia, actual Ethiopia (or Axum), and Nubia. In the case of the eunuch in Acts 8, he was clearly Nubian as he was referred to as a eunuch of Candace (or Kandake), the title of the queens of the Kushite kingdom centered in Meroe. This eunuch was likely Jewish, as he was reading the scroll of Isaiah, likely in Hebrew. This is not surprising as Christianity initially spread among Jewish communities, and there was a significant Jewish community in the Egyptian border town of Elephantine, close to Kushite territory.4 The Kushite eunuch believed upon hearing the Gospel preached by the Apostle Philip, was baptized, and went his way rejoicing all the way to the capital city of Meroe in Kush or Nubia. There is no further evidence of Christians in Nubia during the first three centuries of the Church. However, it is likely that the presence of a Christian in one of the highest imperial offices would have resulted in more Christians in Kush. During the fourth century, another Kushite Christian emerged named Moses the Black (or “Ethiopian”). Moses was a Kushite slave in Egypt who became a thief and then became a Christian monk. Moses lived in the famous Wadi al-Natrun in Egypt and remains today one of the most celebrated desert fathers in Egyptian Christianity. Moses was constantly singled out because of his blackness, as opposed to the surrounding Egyptians. Additionally, Moses was praised for his humility. Moses’ own sinful background led to a strong emphasis on non-­ judgmentalism and humility in his teachings: “If the monk does not think in his heart that he is a sinner, God will not hear him. The brother said, ‘What does that mean, to think in his heart that he is a sinner?’ Then the old man said, ‘When someone is occupied with his own faults, he does not see those of his neighbor.’”5 Moses the Black is one of the most prominent monks in Egypt during the fourth century, a time of heightened emphasis on Christian desert ascetics in this region. During the fifth century, further evidence emerged of Nubian Christians who also came into contact with Egyptian Christians. In the Upper Egyptian desert during the mid-fifth century, a monastic leader named Shenoute of Atripe led a monastic federation called the White Monastery that included thousands of monks. Shenoute is renowned as the greatest writer in the history

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of the Coptic (Egyptian) language. In addition to his extensive writing career, Shenoute also led a monastic community that provided housing, health care, employment, Christian discipleship, education, and social advocacy for the Upper Egyptian community. During Shenoute’s leadership of the White Monastery, his Egyptian Christian community came into contact with a massive number of Nubians. The ancient kingdom of Kush, centered at Meroe, was rapidly declining during Shenoute’s time because Meroe had been destroyed by the Axumite kingdom which was in what is now known as Ethiopia. During the fifth century, the Kushite kingdom of Meroe was declining as a new Nubian power was ascending: Nobadia. The kingdom of Nobadia was centered in Faras and resided further north of Meroe, along the Egyptian border. At this time, the Nobadians were at constant war with another Sudanic group called the Blemmyes. The Blemmyes lived nomadically between the Nile River Valley and the Red Sea. At one point, refugees from both the Nobadian and Blemmyian communities fled the warfare across the border into Egypt. As the White Monastery was a source of social and economic empowerment, Shenoute provided shelter for a large number of Nubian and Blemmyian people. During their time in the White Monastery, many Nubian and Blemmyian people became Christian: If the entire flock is blessed and all the flocks of Christ are blessed because they follow him—for they have come to know that he is the true God—would that these friends sitting here who belong to the Blemmyes and Nubia would unite with us and follow him, that is, know that he is God! For we have allowed them to mingle with us, and they have entered into God’s house, so that they might become sober and understand what the Psalmist said, which they now hear: ‘The idols of the nations are silver and gold’—and also wood and stone, and also the sun and moon and stars, the things that their Creator made so that they might give light.6

Shenoute’s report provides the earliest mention of a large number of Nubian people coming to faith in Christ. As the case with Moses the Black, it seems that much of the earliest Christians of Nubia occurred as a result with contact with Egyptian Christians, their neighbors down the Nile. As Shenoute reported, tensions between the Nobadians and Blemmyes were significant during the fifth century. Indeed, this warfare marked not only one of the most significant instances of Nobadian history, but of the beginnings of Nubian Christianity. One of the earliest imperial inscriptions from the Nobadian kingdom was made by a king named Silko. The inscription commissioned by this Nubian king indicates that his rise to prominence in the Sudan was due to his victory over the Blemmyes. However, this inscription has also been commonly understood to indicate Nubian contact with Christianity: I, Silko King of the Noubades and all the Aithiopians, came to Talmis (Kalabsha) and Taphis (Tafa). On two occasions I fought with the Blemmyes and God (theos) gave me the victory. On the third occasion I was again victorious and took

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control of their cities. I occupied them with my troops. On the first occasion I conquered them, and they sued for terms. I made peace with them, and they swore to me by their images (eidola) and I trusted their oath in the belief that they were honest people. I withdrew to my upper regions.7

The fact that Silko’s inscription refers to a monotheistic God (theos) is uncommon to the polytheistic Kushite religious landscape that dominated the region for millennia. By contrast, referring to the gods of the Blemmyes as “idols” (eidola) is a label common to Christians of this period and uncommon to pre-­ Christian Nubian religion. For this reason, it is likely that Silko may have had contact and even embraced monotheism. While there is no mention of Jesus Christ or the Trinity, the most likely candidate for monotheistic influence in Silko’s court would have been Christians from Egypt and other parts of the Red Sea world. No later than the fifth century, the Nubian kingdoms embraced Christianity as the imperial religion. Like earlier instances of Nubian Christianity, the Christianization of Nubia occurred due in large part to Egyptian Christian influences. Indeed, the adoption of Christianity into Nubia occurred on the heels of intense divisions in the Roman Christian world. The Council of Chalcedon (451 CE) put forth the doctrine that the humanity and divinity of Jesus Christ are to be understood as two “natures” (physis), which are distinct yet united in one “person” (hypostasis). This doctrinal formula, synthesized in the Tome of Bishop Leo of Rome, was unacceptable by the Egyptian Patriarch and the majority of the Egyptian Church. Because Egypt was still a part of the Roman Empire, the fifth and sixth centuries witnessed continued attempts by the Roman Emperor to enforce Chalcedonian theology in Egypt. Such efforts were enacted especially during the reign of Emperor Justinian (527–565 CE) in Egypt and in the Near East. Part of Justinian’s efforts at expanding Roman territory and power was unifying the empire with one Christian doctrine. The Chalcedonian controversy had caused significant turmoil for the century prior to his reign. According to the anti-Chalcedonian (or Miaphysite “one nature”) historian John of Ephesus, Egypt sent a missionary named Julianus into Nubia to evangelize the Nubian king. Emperor Justinian was interested in the Nubians embracing Christianity in order to build an alliance. However, his desire was that Nubians embrace the Chalcedonian expression of Christianity; to embrace Miaphysitism would only encourage their Egyptian neighbors in their rejection of the Roman imperial faith. So Justinian sent rival missionaries into Nubia, who were stalled by Egyptian Miaphysites at the Egyptian-Nubian border. Meanwhile, the Egyptian Miaphysite missionary Julianus was able to reach the Nubian king and successfully convert him to the Miaphysite faith. Despite the Roman emperor’s attempt to bribe the Nubian king with gifts, the Nubians aligned themselves with the Egyptian Miaphysites: The gift which the king of the Romans has sent us we accept, and we will also send him a gift. But his faith we will not accept: for if we agree to become

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Christians, we will follow pope Theodosius who, because he was not willing to accept the evil faith of the king, he (Justinian) excommunicated and cast him (Theodosius) from his church. If, therefore, we abandon our heathenism and straying, we will not agree to fall into the evil faith.8

Beginning in the sixth century, the Nubian kingdoms of Nobadia, Makouria, and Alodia/Alwa adopted Christianity as the imperial religion. Not long after this time, these kingdoms united into one, called Dotawo. During the seventh century, the followers of Muhammad conquered the Arabian Peninsula, the Persian Empire, and the Near Eastern and North African regions of the Roman Empire. The invading Rashidun forces attempted to take Nubia and failed. As such, Christian Nubia is unique in being the only empire to successfully thwart the Islamic conquests of the seventh century. Later Islamic historians credit the Nubians’ skill in archery for their ability to fight off the invading Islamic army: I saw one of them [i.e. Nubians] saying to a Muslim, ‘Where would you like me to place my arrow in you,’ and when the Muslim replied, ‘In such a place,’ he would not miss. … One day they came out against us and formed a line; we wanted to use swords, but we were not able to, and they shot us and put out eyes to the number of one hundred and fifty.9

The Islamic government that ruled Egypt made a treaty with the Christian Nubian kingdoms that later was referred to as the baqt (from the Greek pacton). The baqt stipulated that the Nubians were required to delivery slaves to Egypt and the Muslims were required. Nubians were required to protect Muslim travelers in Nubia and the Islamic rulers of Egypt were required to protect Christians in Egypt. The terms of the baqt were contested throughout Nubia during the medieval period. On one instance, a Nubian prince named George traveled to Persia in 836 CE to re-negotiate the terms of the baqt with the Abbasid government. Prince George visited the Egyptian Patriarch on his way to Persia, demonstrating the continued link between the Nubian Christian kingdoms and the Coptic Church living under Islamic rule. During the seventh century, in the early years of Islamic rule in Egypt, the Patriarch Isaac actually brokered a peace treaty between the Nobadian and Makourian kingdoms. Isaac was able to appeal to the Nubian kingdoms on the basis that they were both Christian kingdoms, incurring the ire of his Islamic governor in Egypt. In this way, the political and ecclesiastical dynamics in the medieval Nile Valley were nuanced. During this Nubian Christian “golden era,” multiple monasteries and churches were constructed in cities and desert communities. Nubian Christian theology and liturgy drew heavily upon Byzantine, most notably, Egyptian, sources while also contextualizing Christianity to the Nubian context. One of the few examples of Christian literary texts written in the Old Nubian language was a text titled the Nicene Canons. Extant in a tenth-­century manuscript, this text presents itself as “Nicene” while it includes material quite

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distinct from the fourth-century Roman council. This text gives a window into the lived theology of Nubian Christians, as it discusses protocol for the Eucharist in detail: And if you take the sacrament, strengthen your heart and feelings, and come and take the sacrament. But truly, if you do not, do not be ruined. Truly, if you do not come as is appropriate for a teacher, do not take the sacrament. And truly, if you wish to take the sacrament, first proceed and come as it is appropriate to come. Truly, if you are not worthy, remain outside the church. Are you greater than God? Or how will you transgress the laws of God?10

This text included various regulations on various aspects of Nubian liturgy. From the eighth to the thirteenth centuries, Christian Nubia flourished and even made contacts with other African civilizations to the west.11 However, this period also witnessed increasing amounts of Arab migrants across the Red Sea and from Egypt settling in and around Nubia. This process of immigration led to a gradual increase of intermarriage and the Arabization of many Nubian people. As Arabization took place, Islamicization began to increase as well. As Nubia’s Islamic population grew, Islamic powers centered in Egypt began to exercise greater degrees of control in Nubia in the thirteenth century. By the end of the fourteenth century, Nubia’s government had become completely Islamic. And by the fifteenth century, Christianity has almost completely disappeared in Nubia. However, there was another African Kingdom that adopted Christianity earlier than Nubia and is still a predominately Christian nation to this day.

Ethiopia The nation now known as Ethiopia was known as the region of Agʿaze in the late antique period, with the city of Axum as its capital. Local traditions hold that Jewish monotheism was introduced through connections with King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, who many local Ethiopians believe was a queen in ancient Ethiopia. Furthermore, local tradition affirms that the eunuch mentioned in Acts 8 was from the Agʿaze region and introduced Christianity into Ethiopia in the first century.12 During the fourth century, Ethiopia received a missionary who would become the first Abuna (patriarch) of Ethiopia and facilitate the adoption of Christianity as the imperial religion of Ethiopia. A merchant from Tyre traveled to Ethiopia with his nephews, Frumentius and Aedesius. The merchant was killed and the two boys were raised as slaves in the imperial court of Ethiopia. When the king passed away, the queen freed the two men but asked that they remain in Ethiopia to aid the new young king, Ezana. After many years, King Ezana allowed the two men to leave Ethiopia after he embraced Christianity as the imperial religion. Aedesius returned to his native Tyre, but Frumentius desired to stay in Ethiopia to help grow the Church. Frumentius traveled to

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Egypt and sought ordination as the bishop of Ethiopia from Athanasius, Patriarch of Alexandria. Athanasius was embroiled in the Arian controversy during the reign of Roman Emperor Constantius. The Roman emperor supported the Arian doctrine that Jesus was a created being while Athanasius suffered exile for his defense of the Nicene doctrine of Jesus being of the same essence (homoousias) as God the Father. Despite Constantius ire toward Athanasius and his attempt at introducing Arian Christianity into Ethiopia, King Ezana embraced the Nicene Christianity of Athanasius and Frumentius. Frumentius was allowed to return and introduce Christian practices across Ethiopia: Freminatos fervently inquired about faith, and having searched for Christians in the marketplace, he found them. Then he reported to them everything that happened and he asked them to go to a quiet place so that they might sing (qine) songs. And every opportunity they had to learn, they spent the days doing so. And they built a house of prayer as they taught and trained many of us and they gathered to themselves many of the Ethiopian (‘Agazi) people.13

Because of the link established by Athanasius and Frumentius, the Ethiopian Church was under the patriarchate of Alexandria. While the Ethiopian imperial leadership embraced Christianity, the populace was very Christian as well due especially to the introduction of monasticism. Ethiopian tradition states that a group of nine saints from Syria came to Ethiopia and introduced monasticism. One of these Nine Saints, Abba Garima, is credited with translating the Bible into Geʿez and, as such, was the earliest known book written in this language. During the sixth century, the Ethiopian King Kaleb went to war with the Southern Arabian Jewish kingdom of the Himyarites. The Christians of the Himyarite kingdom were being persecuted and massacred, especially in the Arabian city of Najran. King Kaleb came to their aid while defeating and ending the Himyarite kingdom. Around the same period, the prominent figure Yared emerged. Yared was an ascetic who was musically talented. He ascended into heaven and received a vision of three birds, which represented the three modes of Ethiopian liturgical music. The unique Ethiopian worship music— called degwa—is still used today and is credited to Yared. Following the Islamic Conquest, the Ethiopian empire centered at Axum began to decline in its power over the Red Sea trade. The kingdom began to decline and a Queen named Judith conquered the city of Axum during the tenth century. Following the decline of the Axumite empire, Ethiopia entered into a dark age during the tenth and eleventh centuries. However, in the twelfth century, a new empire developed in the city of Lalibela. Ethiopian tradition affirms that King Gebre Meskel Lalibela was chosen by God to be king, as communicated by a miraculous appearance of bees around the young king. Lalibela built a majestic city that bears his name, characterized by a collection of fantastic rock-hewn churches. While the Zagwe Dynasty in which Lalibela ruled returned Ethiopia to much of its former glory, this dynasty did not last very long. During the

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thirteenth century, a rival to the throne named Yekuno Amlak rose to power and overthrew the Zagwe Dynasty. The establishment of Yekuno Amlak’s kingdom in Ethiopia initiated a new dynasty that would remain until the twentieth century. The conquests of Yekuno Amlak provided political dominance in the Horn of Africa, which many Christian missionaries utilized in order to spread Christianity. One such missionary was Takla Haymanot, perhaps the most famous Ethiopian saint. Takla Haymanot was a disciple of a monastic leader named Iyasus Moʾa at the famous Lake Tana—a center for Ethiopian asceticism. Takla Haymanot was a missionary to the neighboring kingdom of Damot, with whom Yekuno Amlak was engaged in warfare. Damot practiced Indigenous religion and the gädl (“struggle” or “spiritual biography”) of Takla Haymanot claims that the saint’s missionary success greatly angered the king of Damot. King Matalomey of Damot ordered that Takla Haymanot be tied to a tree and burned alive. Trees feature prominently in the gädl of Takla Haymanot, as they were spiritually significant objects for the inhabitants of Damot. Before being killed, Takla Haymanot prayed for protection and the “witch doctors” (marit) were struck dead by God: And having seen (the miraculous death of the sorcerers), Matälomey believed along with his soldiers, and he decreed that they should dance, as he said: “The fire-starters are defeated; the witch doctors (marit) are conquered.” And Matälomey said to our father (Täklä Haymanot): “Baptize me with your God (ʾÄmlak).” And he baptized him in the name of our God (ʾEgziʾ), Jesus Christ. And he built many churches, and he led all of the people of Damot into faith (ʾäʾemänomu) by means of the sweet aroma of his doctrine.14

Takla Haymanot went on to become the ichege (a high rank of monk) of the famous Debre Libanos monastery, which retained close ties to the Ethiopian emperor until modern times. Ethiopian tradition identifies Yekuno Amlak as the king who restored the Solomonic line of rule to Ethiopia. The empire established by Yekuno Amlak during the thirteenth century ushered in a Golden Age of Ethiopian literature, theology, art, political expansion, and architecture. Indeed, during this time, some of the earliest original Geez texts appeared. The earliest known original Geez text—the Kebra Nagast (“Glory of the Kings”)—represented the spirit of the Solomonic Dynasty. Yekuno Amlak claimed to be re-establishing the rule of Ethiopian kings who descended from the biblical King Solomon. The Kebra Nagast is the first extant text to elucidate the events where Ethiopian royalty mingled with the Solomonic line. The text claims that the biblical Queen of Sheba was from Axum, traveled to Israel, and was pressured into sex with King Solomon. The Queen gave birth to a son named Menelik who was raised in Ethiopia. Menelik traveled to Israel to meet his father and was sent back to Ethiopia with some Hebrew servants. These servants smuggled the Ark of the Covenant out of Israel, unbeknownst to Menelik, and brought it to Axum. The following excerpt describes Menelik’s entourage in their journey through Egypt back to Ethiopia:

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And among the sound of their singing, the motion of the sea was a marvel. The motion of the sea was exceedingly amazing and wonderful; the motion of the sea was tremendously strong and powerful. And the creatures that were in it—those that are visible and those that are invisible—they came forth and they worshipped Her. The birds that were on Her clapped with their beaks and overshadowed Her. And there was joy to the Sea of Eritrea and to the people of Ethiopia; they went out and they rejoiced tremendously, more than Israel did when they went out of Egypt.15

As the text makes clear, Ethiopian memory has seen the presence of the Ark in Ethiopia as the divine will of God, as Ethiopia is the new chosen people to be His representatives on earth. The Solomonic Dynasty that rose to power in the thirteenth century inspired advances in Ethiopian conquest, art, and theological cultivation. Many of the Ethiopian kings of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries expanded the Ethiopian empires through warfare with Islamic empires in the Horn of Africa. Some of the notable examples of these kings were Yekuno Amlak (1270–1285 CE), Amda Seyon (1314–1344 CE), Dawit I (1382–1413 CE), and Zarʿa Yaʿqob (1399–1468 CE). Emperor Zarʿa Yaʿqob was actually one of the first kings to also write theological texts. Zarʿa Yaʿqob was highly learned and he wrote various liturgical texts focusing on the role of Mary in ecclesiastical life. Indeed, during Zarʿa Yaʿqob’s reign, he supported the work of one of the first Ethiopian artist whose name is attested—Fre Seyon. Fre Seyon adapted Roman iconographic styles into the Ethiopian context, with a heavy emphasis on Mary. Zarʿa Yaʿqob also engaged in extensive theological debate, as the fifteenth century witnessed a rise of various Ethiopian theological movements. One of the most significant debates of the fifteenth century concerned Sabbath observance. A group of Ethiopian Christians known as Ewostathians rigorously defended the Jewish-influenced Ethiopian Christian practice of Saturday Sabbath. However, as Ethiopia was under the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Alexandria—who practiced Sunday Sabbath—this was the expectation of Ethiopia from the perspective of Egypt. In Zarʿa Yaʿqob’s central text—the Mashafa Berhan (“Book of Light”)—the emperor argued for the embracing of both days in Sabbath observance: When our fathers, the Bishops Abba Mikaʾeyl and Abba Gäbriʾeyl, heard this, they were feeling us that both Sabbaths should be honored. And they wrote with their hands that they should be honored. In this way, the Lord of the Land abolished the division that was between us and between the Bishops and between the disciples of Maʿeqäbä ʾEgziʾ; and we all were feeling the honoring of both Sabbaths.16

The issue of Sabbath observance is not the only theological issue that occupied the attention of Ethiopia during this period. Emperor Zarʿa Yaʿqob also entered into debate with a reform movement that was gaining significant momentum during the fifteenth century. A monk named Estifanos started a monastic community that bore his name, the Stephanites. The Stephanites

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contested the teaching of the dominant Orthodox Church and the policies of the Emperor. Estifanos was born and raised in a Christian family in the Zeqalay region. After being educated and mentored in monastic communities as a youth, Estifanos was ordained a priest and began to attract many followers. The community that gathered around Estifanos began to emphasize the spiritual authority of the Scriptures alone and they refused to prostrate themselves before icons or the king Zarʿa Yaʿqob. The emphasis on Scripture as the primary authority is evident in Estifanos’ exchange with Zarʿa Yaʿqob: Then the king said to the saint, “Who is your teacher?” The blessed one said, “The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.” The king said to him, further, “And after (God)?” The blessed one said to him, “The Prophets and the Apostles.” The king said to him, “After them?” The saint said to him, “Any one who abides by the ordinance of the Prophets and Apostles, whether great or small, I do not discriminate; all are my teachers.” Again the king said to him “And after this?” The blessed one replied, saying to him,” I do not have any other after this, for all are an army of Satan, a community of demons.” The king said to him, “Is the Holy Spirit for you alone?” The blessed one said to him, “It is not for me alone. The Holy Spirit abides also in all who walk according to his law.” (The king) kept silent when he heard this.17

Estifanos was brutally tortured and ultimately martyred by Zarʿa Yaʿqob. The Stephanites, in turn, were persecuted to the point of their extinction in Ethiopia soon after. The Stephanites would not be the last Christians to challenge the Ethiopian Emperor. During the seventeenth century, a woman named Walatta Petros (“daughter of Peter”) defied the Ethiopian Emperor in a similar resistance movement. While Ethiopia experienced dominance over the Islamic powers of the Horn of Africa during the fifteenth century, this situation reversed during the sixteenth century. At the same time, Portuguese colonists sought to expand their colonial enterprise into the Horn of Africa. King Susenyos built an alliance with the Portuguese in exchange for support in fighting neighboring Muslims. Susenyos also imposed Portuguese Catholicism as the imperial religion of Ethiopia. Most Ethiopians were not pleased with this, as they had an Indigenous tradition that was over a thousand years old. Additionally, the Catholic doctrine of Europe was seen as heretical to many Ethiopians due to its distinct Christology. Walatta Petros was a monastic leader who rejected the “filthy faith of the Europeans” and led a community of monks who were persecuted by the Emperor: At that time, the king was in his castle. He ordered that her relatives bring her to him, so they took her in. She went hoping to die for the true faith. … Nobody whosoever can persuade my heart that I should renounce my faith, whether they frighten me with banishment to remote places, put me into the fire, throw me into the lions, drown me in the great lake, cut up my body and my limbs, or punish me with each and every sort of torture. Still, I will never renounce my faith.18

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Walatta Petros endured exile and persecution for her rejection of European Christianity. However, Susenyos’ son, Fasilides, reversed his father’s policy and restored Ethiopian Christianity as the imperial religion. To this day, Walatta Petros is remembered as one of the few Ethiopian women saints. Moreover, the Indigenous faith of Ethiopia has remained at the center of Ethiopian identity and society to this very day.

Conclusion The majority of the most well-known African Christians from pre-modern Church history were from Egypt and North Africa. While figures such as Tertullian, Augustine, and Athanasius deserve significant attention, there is a rich history of Christian faith on the African continent south of the Sahel. Nubia and Ethiopia represent the beginnings of a vibrant Christian tradition in regions of the African continent. Furthermore, the Christian faith that developed in Nubia and Ethiopia occurred in African empires that were politically independent. The Christians of North Africa and Egypt lived under Roman colonial control that resulted in persecution in the first three centuries of the Church. At the end of Late Antiquity, the Egyptian Church had been ostracized by the Roman Empire as heretical while the Church of North Africa largely diminished after the Arab Muslim Conquest. However, the golden eras of Nubian and Ethiopian Christianity were yet to come during the Middle Ages. Like Coptic literature, Ethiopian and Nubian Christianity produced theological texts in Indigenous African languages. The few Christian texts and inscriptions and the massive amount of Geʿez literature during the early centuries of the Solomonic Dynasty represent some of the earliest books in African civilizations, especially south of the First Cataract. The Nubian and Ethiopian churches followed the Egyptian church’s rejection of the Council of Chalcedon and therefore, represent distinct forms of Christianity that are largely unknown. Nubia and Ethiopia were also instrumental in the development of urbanized civilizations which multiplied significantly after the rise of Islam. For these reasons and many more, the history of Nubian and Ethiopian Christianity are significant for world history and certainly the history of Christianity.

Notes 1. Mt. 2:13–23. 2. Acts 2:10; 8:26–30; 13:1. 3. Stefan Goodwin, Africa in Europe, Vol. One: Antiquity into the Age of Global Exploration (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009), 16. 4. Margaretha Folmer, Elephantine Revisited: New Insights into the Judean Community and Its Neighbors (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022). 5. Mary Gerhart and Fabian E. Udoh, The Christianity Reader (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 252.

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6. David Brakke and Andrew Crislip, Selected Discourses of Shenoute the Great: Community, Theology, and Social Conflict in Late Antique Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 191. 7. “Greek Triumphal Inscription of King Silko at Kalabsha,” in Fontes Historiae Nubiorum: Textual Sources for the History of the Middle Nile Region Between the Eighth Century BC and the Sixth Century AD, vol. 3: From the First to the Sixth Century AD, ed. Tormod Eide et  al. (Bergen: University of Bergen Press, 1998), 1150. 8. John of Ephesus, Ecclesiastical History, ed. Robert Payne Smith, The Third Part of the Ecclesiastical History of John Bishop of Ephesus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1860), 224. 9. William Y.  Adams, Nubia: Corridor to Africa (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 445. 10. Gerald M. Browne, “Griffith’s Nicene Canons,” in The Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 20, 97–112 (1983): 101. 11. See my forthcoming article in the third volume of the Haymanot Journal, to be released in 2023. 12. For the full account, see the fourteenth-century text: Kebra Nagast, 3rd edition, ed. E. A. Wallis Budge (New York, NY: Routledge, 2010). 13. Getatchew Haile, “The Homily in Honour of St. Frumentius, Bishop of Axum (EMML1 1763 ff. 84v-86r).” in Analecta Bollandiana 97, 309–318 (1979): 315. 14. Carlo Conti Rossini, Gadla Takla Haymanot, ed. (Rome: Academia dei Lincei, 1896), 106–7. 15. Bezold, Carl. Kebra Nagast: Die herrlichkeit der könige (Munich: Verlag der Königlichen Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1909), 62. 16. Conti Rossini, Karolus. Il libro della luce del negus Zar‘a Yā‘qob (Maṣḥafa Berhān) II CSCO 261/262, Scriptores Aethiopici 51/52 (Louvain: Secrétariat du SCO, 1965), 154. 17. The Geʿez Acts of Abba Ǝt ̣sifanos of Gʷəndagʷənde, Getatchew Haile, CSCO 620, Scriptores Aethiopici 111 (Louvain: Secrétariat du SCO, 2006), 48. 18. Galawdewos, The Life and Struggles of Our Mother Walatta Petros, ed. Wendy Laura Belcher & Michael Kleiner (Princeton, NY: Princeton University Press, 2015), 123–4.

Bibliography Adams, William Y. Nubia: Corridor to Africa. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977. Bantu, Vince. “Daughters of the Kisse: The Presence of Foreigners in Christian Nubia.” Haymanot Journal 3 (forthcoming). Bezold, Carl. Kebra Nagast: Die herrlichkeit der könige. Munich: Verlag der Königlichen Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1909. Brakke, David and Andrew Crislip. Selected Discourses of Shenoute the Great: Community, Theology, and Social Conflict in Late Antique Egypt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Browne, Gerald M. “Griffith’s Nicene Canons” in The Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 20, 97–112 (1983). Conti Rossini, Carlo, ed. Gadla Takla Haymanot. Rome: Academia dei Lincei, 1896.

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Conti Rossini, Karolus. Il libro della luce del negus Zar‘a Yā‘qob (Maṣḥafa Berhān) II CSCO 261/262, Scriptores Aethiopici 51/52. Louvain: Secrétariat du SCO, 1965. Galawdewos, The Life and Struggles of Our Mother Walatta Petros. Edited by Wendy Laura Belcher and Michael Kleiner. Princeton, NY: Princeton University Press, 2015. Gergart, Mary and Fabian E.  Udoh. The Christianity Reader. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2007. Goodwin, Stefan. Africa in Europe, Vol. One: Antiquity into the Age of Global Exploration. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009. “Greek Triumphal Inscription of King Silko at Kalabsha.” in Fontes Historiae Nubiorum: Textual Sources for the History of the Middle Nile Region Between the Eighth Century BC and the Sixth Century AD, vol. 3: From the First to the Sixth Century AD. Edited by Tormod Eide et al. Bergen: University of Bergen Press, 1998. Folmer, Margaretha. Elephantine Revisited: New Insights into the Judean Community and Its Neighbors (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022). Haile, Getatchew, trans. “The Homily in Honour of St. Frumentius, Bishop of Axum (EMML1 1763 ff. 84v–86r).” in Analecta Bollandiana 97, 309–318, 1979. John of Ephesus, The Third Part of the Ecclesiastical History of John Bishop of Ephesus. Translated by Robert Payne Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1860. Kebra Nagast, 3rd edition. Edited by E. A. Wallis Budge. New York: Routledge, 2010.

CHAPTER 27

Mission Station Christianity in the Nineteenth Century: A Spatial Lens Ingie Hovland

The height of what we might call “the mission station era” in Africa occurred during the nineteenth century. At this time, the majority of missionaries who arrived on sailing ships from Europe and North America did not choose to live as the local populations lived. Instead, they decided to establish a type of distinct residential-religious site that they referred to as “mission stations.” The site typically encompassed a number of buildings constructed in a European style, including houses for missionaries and for converts, a school, a church, dormitories for residential students and servants, sometimes a clinic, as well as gardens, fields for crops, workshops, stables, and enclosures for farm animals.1 In this chapter I wish to show that one way to gain an understanding of the complex dynamics surrounding the mission stations is to view them through a spatial lens. I argue that the mission station space was not fully controlled by any single group and did not advance a single project, such as Christianity or colonialism. Rather, the stations intersected with the projects and desires of several historical actors. I will explore this argument by offering glimpses from one mission station in southeastern Africa, the Norwegian Lutheran station Umphumulo in the British Colony of Natal. Of course, this station cannot stand as a representative of all the stations. There were many differences across stations, prompted not only by the differences among Christian traditions and between the mission societies, but also between the political and social contexts around them. Nevertheless, I think that seeing some of the details of everyday

I. Hovland (*) Department of Religion, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. E. Barnes, T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48270-0_27

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interactions on one station can help to illuminate larger patterns that were repeated, in different forms, on stations across Africa. The chapter is divided into four sections. In each section I will consider the space of the mission station using a different spatial framework: a moral geography, a heterotopia, a third space, and an imagined center. Through this, I hope to demonstrate my argument that the stations did not just embody one meaning. As we turn from one spatial framework to the next, new aspects of the place are revealed.

Setting Up a Station: A Moral Geography The British formally colonized Natal, on the coast of southeastern Africa, in 1843. They wrested rule of the land from Boer settlers, who had trekked there from the Cape and taken land from the Zulu monarchs Dingane and then Mpande, half-brothers of the late Shaka Zulu. King Mpande held on to an independent Zulu Kingdom north of the Thukela river. The small, new British colonial administration in Natal, south of the Thukela, began granting plots of land to Christian mission societies who wished to work in the area. The resident British agent Theophilus Shepstone (who was later given the formal title Secretary of Native Affairs) appreciated how missionaries could help the administration introduce European ways of life into parts of the colony that the officials otherwise had little control over (Keto 1976; McClendon 2004). Both Dutch and English settlers in the area protested against this practice, as they were afraid that the reading classes that missionaries offered to local African children might threaten the idea of an unskilled and subordinate African labor force. We see here some of the many desires that pushed for or against mission stations in this phase of early colonization, whether those desires were to “civilize,” to convert, to educate, or to employ. Hans Schreuder, the first missionary sent out by the Norwegian Mission Society, waited impatiently for his turn to be favored by the Natal administration. In 1850 he was finally granted 500 acres in the hinterland of northern Natal, not far from the border to the Zulu Kingdom, and Schreuder set to work to establish a mission station. He named it Umphumulo, “place of rest.” The ambitious Schreuder was not restful, however, as he wished to set up a station inside Zululand as well, and his chance came soon afterward when he was summoned to the Zulu king to treat the king’s pain using medicinal cream. Schreuder was then granted the right to use a plot of land within Zululand as a station in 1851. Here we see some further desires that facilitated the establishment of stations: local African authorities may have discerned the usefulness of keeping select Europeans close to their courts so as to have access, for example, to specific medicines, particular knowledge, or a line of communication with other whites. What did these new spaces look like? Let us consider Schreuder’s first station, Umphumulo. He arrived in the area together with a young Zulu man, Mbiyana Ngidi, who had been baptized on an American mission station in Natal and had sought employment with Schreuder as a wagon driver. A local

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woman later recalled that when she first saw Ngidi she had been surprised by his European clothing: trousers, a shirt, a handkerchief tied around his head, and a hat.2 The sight of a Black man dressed as a white man was still puzzling in this area, but soon became more commonplace. Ngidi stayed to help set up the station. Schreuder soon moved on to his new station in Zululand, but left three Norwegian missionaries at Umphumulo, including Lars Larsen and his wife Martha. At Umphumulo, the men cut down trees from the forest and built a rectangular, one-room wooden house, with a thatched roof, for the Norwegians’ living quarters.3 This was markedly different from the Zulu homesteads that were dotted across the hillsides around the station, each of which was set up as a circle of rounded beehive dwellings. The missionaries then erected a schoolhouse and a stable for their horses. They invited children in the neighboring homesteads to come to reading lessons, and sometimes some children came.4 The children learned to decipher printed letters that made up Zulu words, as the wholly oral Zulu language had been turned into a written one by the missionaries (Schreuder 1848, 1850). The inhabitants at Umphumulo also kept cattle, sheep, and chickens, and grew sweet potatoes and corn. While the surrounding Zulus usually considered it women’s work to maintain the fields, the missionaries thought of it as male labor, and they paid young boys from nearby homesteads to work their fields in the European manner, with an ox-drawn plow. They built a “boys’ house” for the young boys to stay in and encouraged them to wear European-style shirts and trousers. The missionaries invited everyone on the station to a daily morning devotion, in which they read aloud from the Bible and knelt in prayer. During the mid-1850s, Ngidi was given responsibility for leading the daily evening prayer.5 In the late 1850s, they rejoiced when they were finally able to build a small station church in which to hold their Sunday services. They also began making bricks from mud for further building work. And they laid out gardens.6 Over time, the missionaries noted with approval that they had managed to change the place. As one of the Norwegians at Umphumulo wrote in 1858: “The station is expanding and even the natives remark, not infrequently, on how this place has changed in a few years. Where before there were neither homes, trees nor fields, are now both brick houses and other houses, trees and fields (or gardens, if you wish).”7 These concrete changes bolstered the many other types of changes that the missionaries desired. For example, the missionaries decided to use the Zulu term uNkulunkulu to refer to the Christian God and sought to convince the Zulus that this God was not like the ancestors whom the Zulus associated with certain spaces in their homesteads.8 The missionaries encouraged new language practices, such as reading, and new gender relations. And in general, as Paul Landau (2010, 435) has observed, the missionaries gravitated toward the structuring principle of rectilinearity, emphasizing straight and “upright” buildings, straight rows of corn, straight hemlines, and straight lines of print, not to mention the straightness of bearing and gaze.

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As we use a spatial lens to consider the mission stations, it is instructive to move across the landscape and notice the stations as one type of space among many. The Zulu homestead, for example, was a domestic microcosm with local authority, shot through with larger political concerns (Kuper 1993). The manor house of the British settlers sustained social distance between manor-­ dwellers and “others” (Crais 1992, 136–138). The mission station too began to form its own domestic world with impacts that extended beyond the place itself. A station, such as Umphumulo, tied Christianity to a physical site. This site sought to stand out as visibly different from its surroundings. It sought to craft a particular connection between materiality and morality. This is what John MacKenzie (2003, 112, 121) has called a new “education of the landscape,” a “moral geography” laid out for all to see. The mission station spaces, as they became “normal,” contributed to the normalization of a broader process of seeing and organizing the African land (and world)  in certain ways (Harries 2007, 97).

Engaging with the Station: A Heterotopia One of the events that shaped the mission stations was the second-wave Protestant evangelical revivals or the Second Great Awakening that occurred in Europe and North America in the first half of the nineteenth century. The evangelicals were concerned with conversion—their own experience of it, as well as others’ need for it. They believed that those who remained unconverted to Christianity would be damned to hell for eternity, rather than enter heaven. In their view, the stakes were high, and the need to send missionaries to Africa became urgent. They established numerous new Protestant mission societies in the nineteenth century, and the number of mission stations in Africa grew fast. In the Colony of Natal there were already 28 Protestant mission stations by 1860—run by Lutherans from Norway, Germany, and Sweden; Anglicans from England; Presbyterians from Scotland; and Congregationalists from the United States—as well as one French Catholic station (Etherington 1978). The Zulu king had given permission for five further stations to be established within his kingdom after granting the first to Schreuder. While a range of Protestant denominations were involved, as well as the Catholics, mission station Christianity in nineteenth-century Africa largely exhibited the characteristics prized by the evangelical revivals. This form of outgoing Christianity was intensely focused on “spreading” the gospel by sharing the Bible (including through translations), by preaching that Jesus died for everyone’s sins so that everyone could be “saved,” and by encouraging personal conversions (Bebbington 1989). However, despite their evangelical efforts, the mission stations of the mid-­ nineteenth century did not have notable success in converting Africans to Christianity. Instead, the stations were busy places for other reasons. At Umphumulo, for example, local people came to the station to attend reading classes, to have wounds treated, or to have teeth pulled out. Many stopped by

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to trade or to see if they could sell straw mats and furs in exchange for British pound sterling. The missionaries at Umphumulo repeatedly reported their frustration that some Zulus attended their Sunday services because they believed this would bring rain. The missionaries expressed greater approval when they were instead asked to pray for rain, a request to which they consented on their own biblical grounds, even though it also threatened to enmesh them in local understandings of the political and sacred power associated with rainmaking. At this point, we can see that the stations and their various layers of meanings were not completely under the control of the missionaries and their project of conversion. Instead, the stations were shaped by the ongoing social engagement on and around them, as the missionaries were drawn into roles such as teachers, traders, healers, and rainmakers. We could think of this space as a “heterotopia.” This term, suggested by Michel Foucault (1986) and later picked up by Edward Soja (1995), refers to places in which several incompatible spaces may coexist. Some of the examples mentioned by Foucault, such as Puritan settlements in North America and Jesuit missions in South America, are reminiscent of the nineteenth-century mission stations in Africa insofar as they are all types of “counter-sites” that seek to enact “utopia” (Foucault 1986, 24), yet do so ambiguously and in the midst of knotty relations with other sites. As J.D.Y. Peel (2000) has argued in his study of the encounter between missionaries and the Yoruba in West Africa, we might think of these sites as pulling both with and against each other at the same time: If a metaphor is needed, [this] history in concrete terms is less like a chain or a ladder, whose links or steps represent phases of economic, cultural, and political change which all correspond, than a multi-colored woolen cord, with component fibers of different lengths—Yoruba, colonial, Christian, and other—that give it structure by pulling both together and against one another. (9)

But Peel’s metaphor can be nuanced further, since “Yoruba culture” or “Zulu culture” was not one thing. For example, some Zulus used the stations to question existing relations in their society. At Umphumulo, as at many other stations, several young African women moved to the station to gain greater control of their own marriage prospects. The missionaries advocated individually chosen monogamous marriages, and it soon became apparent that this threatened the power base of the Zulu homesteads, which were arranged under a male homestead head who had the authority to make marriage arrangements (Gaitskell 2003). As Amanda Porterfield (1997, 73) puts it, both the missionaries and the Zulus “respected patriarchal authority and invested it with religious meaning,” but those meanings sometimes ran at cross-purposes. Young women could threaten to destabilize either of these patriarchal systems as they moved between the homestead and the station. The mission sources have to be read carefully to capture these types of dynamics, which signal the presence of a heterotopia. For example, close

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reading of the Norwegian sources reveals that one young woman, Mathenjwaze, likely moved to Umphumulo because she and the wagon driver, Mbiyana Ngidi, wished to get married.9 She worked for Martha Larsen for several years before being baptized as Umphumulo’s first convert in 1858. The next day, she and Mbiyana were married on the station.10 They built “an upright house” for themselves on the station land.11 The Norwegian sources, written by the male missionaries, reported joyfully on Mathenjwaze’s conversion. But they did not mention that her baptism was brought about through Mathenjwaze’s interactions with a Black man, Mbiyana, and a white woman, Martha Larsen, as well as the long-term commitment and perhaps even careful planning of Mathenjwaze herself. Therefore, sources about life on the mission stations have to be read “against the grain” to recapture some of the experiences of Africans who engaged with the stations in various ways (Brock 2005; Griffiths 2005), as well as the experiences of those European missionaries who did not send letters back to Europe, such as most of the female missionaries (Bowie et al. 1993; Grimshaw and Sherlock 2005). We might also note—although we cannot know for certain—that there were perhaps several layers of meaning that played a role in Mathenjwaze’s conversion. The mission sources usually imply that African conversions on the stations were replications of the ideal-type evangelical conversion: an intensely emotional, interior event that had to do with changes in personal belief. However, African conversions may have incorporated a range of meanings, desires, and effects. At Umphumulo, conversions may have expressed emotional and spiritual discovery, intellectual curiosity or entrepreneurialism, or a change in political allegiance—or several of these at once.12 Incompatible aims may have coexisted in the heterotopic mission station space.

Changing Meanings on the Station: A Third Space Mathenjwaze chose to retain her Zulu name when she was baptized. But in the decades following her baptism, a small group of converts was baptized by the Norwegian mission each year and many of them decided to take on European or biblical names in baptism. For example, a Norwegian missionary reported in 1871 that eight converts had been baptized and that they had all chosen a “foreign” baptismal name: Andrea Tomine, Christian, Abrahamu Salomone, Martin Luther, Umatande Arone, Upaulu, Umarta, and Uberta. The missionary added an excuse in his report, explaining that he and his missionary colleagues had encouraged the converts to choose names “that have their origin in their own language,” but that if the converts insisted on “foreign ones” they were allowed to proceed.13 Here we see another form of complex agency that was unfolding on the stations. From the viewpoint of the converts, perhaps the new names marked their own wish to assert the importance of this event in their lives. At the same time, it may also have been an expression of a longer process of coming to identify

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with certain aspects of Europeanness on the colonial frontier or with its perceived power. The Norwegian missionaries, on the other hand, wanted the converts to retain Zulu names, perhaps because they wanted the Zulus to display a certain patriotism that could eventually lead, in the missionaries’ view, to a Christian Zulu nation. Or perhaps they favored Zulu names because these more clearly denoted certain categories of authority. At this time, only white male missionaries were formally in charge of the Norwegian stations. Therefore, having a Zulu male convert take a name such as Martin Luther, for example, might subtly raise questions about what type of authority the convert was aspiring to. Thus when the Norwegian missionaries communicated to the converts that they should take on European Christianity and European forms of life (such as clothes and houses), but should not aspire to take on European identity in their names, this may have seemed somewhat disingenuous to the converts. As Anne Folke Henningsen sums it up in relation to the Moravian mission in the Cape: “the entire Moravian mission endeavour can be seen as one long double bind communication of saying: become like us, but stay as you are/were” (2011, 153–154). Homi Bhabha has described this dynamic as a “flawed colonial mimesis, in which to be Anglicized is emphatically not to be English” (1994, 125, orig. emph.). When the converts chose their new baptismal names at Umphumulo, they may have insisted on a more complex form of aspiration and identification with Europeanness, which disturbed the missionaries. This is another example of how the missionaries were not able to fully steer the unfolding social relations on the stations. This also raises a broader question: Were the stations colonial spaces? Some scholars have argued that they were, such as Nosipho Majeke (1952), the pen-­ name of Dora Taylor, who saw the missionaries and their network of stations as agents of imperial conquest. In a differently angled interpretation, Jean and John Comaroff (1991) have observed that colonialism was a multifaceted process, and they have suggested that the mission stations became sites that facilitated the “colonization of consciousness,” that is, a “long conversation” in which African cognitive categories were gradually drawn into and subsumed by the categories used by the Europeans. Other scholars place more emphasis on Africans’ creative appropriations of what the missionaries brought. For example, Dana Robert (2009) has highlighted that several missionaries spoke out against racial determinism, and she has proposed that the mission process can be seen as a process of social change that involved cross-cultural transfer of new knowledge and technologies. And Lamin Sanneh (1989, 53) has argued that the local context had the final say, so that when the missionaries translated the Bible this was akin to releasing a “hurtling bullet” that could not be recalled once the translation had been picked up by new hands.14 While I have learned much from this conversation, I am wary of conflating the many different projects that were carried out by the actors involved with the mission stations under one rubric, whether that is a malignly shaded colonization or a benevolently shaded transfer of knowledge. I think a spatial lens

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better allows us to see some of the unresolved contradictions of the stations. Having already explored the framework of “heterotopia,” which considers how contradictory sites coexisted in the station space, I turn now to “third space,” which considers how some of these contradictions led to unexpected outcomes. Bhabha (1994) uses the term “third space” to describe a space that has emerged out of the dissonance of two or more currents and that has gone beyond them in important ways. The nineteenth-century mission stations were formed in the historical encounter between Christianity, local African populations, and a European colonial context. But these currents shifted as they merged. The Christianity that the missionaries brought with them changed as it was transported from, for example, the windy western coast of Norway to the subtropical hinterland of the Colony of Natal. Africans brought their own desires and types of agencies to their conversions. Both the missionaries’ and the converts’ Christian understandings and practices adjusted to—and in turn continued to create—a hybrid third space on the stations. Or, as James Pritchett (2011, 32) puts it, the mission stations produced “not simply a synthesis […] but an expanded repertoire of meanings and actions.” In this context, the African station residents developed a new role that was not just positioned “in-between,” but that rather held multiple identities (Neylan 2003, 130). It is against this background that Etherington (1976) has argued that the mission stations acted as “melting pots,” providing a platform for new African viewpoints to emerge. In southeastern Africa, the converts on the stations were known as amakholwa (believers), and in due course many of the members of this new category stepped into influential intellectual and political roles that shaped, for example, Black nationalism (Etherington 1996, 209–210)—an outcome of the station’s “third space” that the missionaries would not have expected.

The View from the Station: Forming a “Center” Although this chapter is about the mission stations, I should note now that a focus on the stations provides us with a particular, partial vantage point that omits other aspects of the picture. On the whole, the European and American mission stations of the mid-nineteenth century were managed by white, male missionaries, and the sources we have from the stations are almost all written by these white men. If a male African convert was considered suitable to manage a station, which was rare, he might be placed in charge of an “outstation,” that is, a smaller satellite station that reported to the main station. As the missionaries reported on events in letters to their home boards, they naturally placed themselves in the center, amplifying their own importance. If they were able to report on conversions, they might frame these narratives in a way that highlighted their own influence. If they were not able to report on conversions, they might frame their story as one of sacrifice. For example, Lars Larsen, in moments of frustration at the lack of Christian interest around him after he had moved from Umphumulo to set up the new station Inhlazatshe, imagined that

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“we are working in a spiritually dry land where there is no water of life,” and that the Zulus around him were “ensconced in an infinitely pitch dark night.”15 Events that took place beyond the missionary’s purview, off the stations, were relegated to the “dark” periphery. This means that much of the communication and transformation related to African adoptions of Christianity, especially toward the end of the nineteenth century, took place “far away from missionary eyes” (Etherington 1996, 217). We can see one example of this “center/periphery” framework if we follow the story of the wagon driver at Umphumulo, Mbiyana Ngidi. In 1860 he stepped into a new position as a Zulu missionary for the Native Home Missionary Society, founded by the American Zulu Mission. A little later he became responsible for his own outstation, Noodsberg, not far from Umphumulo. His first church members were baptized in 1865, and two years later the congregation had already grown to 25 members. A decade later, his congregation was flourishing (Etherington 1978, 144, 159). His success did not go unnoticed by the American missionaries, and one of them observed that “if all were like him our converts would count thousands.” But, the letter continued, some missionaries were also grumbling about what Ngidi wanted as he was “racing all over the country.”16 His apparent success was not unequivocally welcomed by the white missionaries. And they hesitated to give him any greater authority, delaying his ordination until 1878.17 As far as I know, the Norwegian mission sources do not report on his success at all. This is one instance of how indigenous evangelists were largely relegated to the “hidden history of mission and Empire” (Brock 2005, 150). This leads us to the question: What were the effects of the nineteenth-­ century stations? Did they drive the subsequent adoption of Christianity in Africa south of the Sahara? Mission sources might answer this question in the affirmative, placing the stations in the center of the story. But, surveying the scale of new African Christian affiliations in the twentieth century, Etherington notes that “there were never enough mission stations to account for the vast scale of twentieth century conversions” (1996, 217; see also Elbourne 2002; Landau 1995). However, this does not mean that the stations had no effects. It seems to me that one of their important effects was their shaping of the missionaries’ Christianity through the missionary experience of ruling over a residential community. The vast majority of stations had residential communities, with employees and converts living on the station land, in addition to short-term residents. Umphumulo and the other Norwegian stations were relatively modest in size, usually not growing beyond 50 people (Jørgensen 1990, 343), but some stations were much larger, such as the British Methodist station Edendale in Natal, which counted between 800 and 1000 residents (Meintjes 1990, 128). Who joined these communities? Etherington has suggested that the earliest resident converts on the stations were “the unstable, the rebellious, or the rejected” (1978, 67). Indeed, the Norwegian missionaries sometimes reported that they had to employ people on the stations who were otherwise considered

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socially marginal, such as those who were disabled, poor, or children. Others came to stay on the stations for shorter periods of time, such as patients or refugees. The majority of those who were baptized were young women and men. They were not, relatively speaking, socially powerful. Around Umphumulo, for example, some of the most influential local actors were the male homestead heads who had several wives. During the first decades of the Umphumulo mission station, not a single polygynous homestead head converted to Christianity (Jørgensen 1990, 155). All of these observations would support the argument that the station communities consisted of people with less social power. But this argument needs to be nuanced, because we can also observe that the visitors, employees, and converts on the stations were not considered unimportant in local Zulu society. The missionaries often reported examples of potential young converts being persuaded to stay home instead, or young girls being fetched from the stations so that they could enter into a customary marriage at home. In this sense, the mission stations were seen as a rival homestead that could entice away dependents. As Elizabeth Elbourne notes of British missions in the Cape, “to accumulate people was to accumulate power and wealth, whether of the spiritual or material variety” (2002, 161). Similarly, Justin Willis (1993) has suggested that British stations in Bonde, East Africa, were perceived to be building up alternative client bases that threatened existing systems of patronage. Therefore, the white male missionaries who were in charge of the stations also ruled over sizeable residential communities. Even though they could not retain full control of station dynamics, they exercised considerable power through their missionary paternalism, a core feature of “missionary masculinity” (Tjelle 2014). In some ways this paternalism was an extension of the elevated position of the village pastor in Europe. But this paternal power took on different dimensions in Africa, where the missionary governed not just a spiritual flock but a bounded community marked by racial difference (Harries 2007, 81). The missionaries on the stations thus inhabited a racial, gendered, religious hierarchy, day in and day out. The stations became a stage on which increasingly formalized differentiation was enacted. As anthropologists Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (1997, 43) have observed, there is a close link between the examination of how spaces are produced and the examination of how differences emerge. It seems to me that this station experience was an important contributor to a gradual shift in the missionaries’ Christianity. This became starkly evident among the Norwegian missionaries when Britain invaded the independent Zulu kingdom in 1879. During the Anglo-Zulu War, as well as the ensuing aftermath of a Zulu civil war and eventual formal British colonization of Zululand, the majority of the Norwegian missionaries turned into theological cheerleaders for Empire. While they initially felt skeptical of British colonization when they first arrived in the 1850s, some decades of living on the stations, in the “center,” had helped to shift their Christianity toward an imperial mode.18

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Beyond the Stations Between 1870 and 1891, the number of colonial government employees in the Colony of Natal grew from 99 to 695 (Keto 1976, 615). By 1890, Umphumulo formed the center of a large “mission reserve” with 12,000 acres of land which the Norwegian missionaries supervised on behalf of the British colonial government and where the government “gave the natives permission to live” (Myklebust 1949, 30). In 1887, when Zululand was formally annexed as a British protectorate, all Africans were prohibited from purchasing land in certain areas of the Zulu territory (Keto 1976, 616). However, the British allowed a Boer settlement in northwestern Zululand, the Nieuwe Republiek, to remain autonomous. This area included the Norwegian mission station Inhlazatshe, and the Boers granted the station 3000 acres of land (Stavem 1915, 300). Lars and Martha Larsen both died in their old age at Inhlazatshe in 1890, with their funerals attended by nearby Boers and Zulus.19 And, also around 1890, Mbiyana Ngidi broke with the American Zulu Mission and declared himself leader of the independent Zulu Mbiyana Congregational Church, not far from Umphumulo. It is the first African Initiated Church that we know of in Natal (Hovland  2023). These brief indications of further political and religious developments hint that while mission stations continued to exist in twentiethcentury Africa, the stories of Christianity and of colonialism moved far beyond them.

Notes 1. For a geographical overview of the distribution of mission stations in Africa south of the Sahara in the nineteenth century, see Johnson (1967). 2. Norsk Missions-Tidende 1855/56, 93–94. Norsk Missions-Tidende is the mission periodical of the Norwegian Mission Society. It can be found in the Mission and Diakonia Archives, Stavanger. 3. NMS Archive, HA, Box 130/4, Larsen to the NMS Board, 8 May 1854. The Norwegian Mission Society (NMS) Archive is housed in the Mission and Diakonia Archives, Stavanger. 4. Norsk Missions-Tidende 1852/53, 108–113. 5. Norsk Missions-Tidende 1856/57, 1. 6. This process is explored in greater detail in Hovland (2013). 7. Norsk Missions-Tidende 1858, 95. All translations from Norwegian are my own. 8. On the many intended and unintended meanings that accompanied the missionaries’ choice of a Zulu term for God, see Weir (2005) and Worger (2001). This issue was repeated elsewhere, for example, among the Tswana (Landau 2005, 208–212). 9. I have written about the intriguing story of Mbiyana Ngidi and Mathenjwaze Shange in Hovland (2023).

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10. Norsk Missions-Tidende 1858, 222. 11. Norsk Missions-Tidende 1858, 202. 12. For contributions to the question of how to think about African conversions, see, for example, Hovland (2013), Kollman (2010), and Landau (1999). 13. Norsk Missions-Tidende 1871, 483–484. 14. For other contributions to the vexed question of the relation between Christianity and colonization in Africa, see, for example, the edited volumes by Christensen and Hutchinson (1982), Etherington (2005), Porter (2003), and Robert (2008). 15. NMS Archive, HA, Box 131/1, Larsen to the NMS Board, 6 April 1864; Norsk Missions-Tidende 1866, 154. For discussion of the common mission metaphor of “light/dark” as it was applied to Africa and Africans, see, for example, Skeie (2001). 16. Archives of the American Board of Commissioners, 15.4, VII, Lloyd to Clark, marked “private,” June 1869 (housed in the Houghton Library, Harvard); cited in Etherington (1978, 158–159). 17. The white missionaries often delayed indigenous ordinations; for an overview of this phenomenon in South Africa, see Elphick (2008). 18. This argument is explored further in Hovland (2013). And, as always, it is impossible to generalize about the stations, because a few missionaries were shaped in other ways. Schreuder, who had by this point broken with the Norwegian mission to form his own organization (the Schreuder Mission), acted as a diplomatic link and sought to bring the war to a speedy end (Hernæs 1986). Lars Larsen, who had moved to the more remote station Inhlazatshe, sent critical letters back to the Norwegian Mission’s board in Norway, arguing that because of the war, the Zulus now resented white people, including the missionaries. Larsen’s criticism of the colonization effort was considered so divergent, however, that it was not printed in the Norwegian Mission Society’s magazine, but instead simply and silently tucked away in the organization’s archive (NMS Archive, HA, Box 135A/6, Larsen to the NMS Board, 3 July 1880; Box 135A/13, Larsen to the NMS Board, 6 January 1881; Box 135A/13, Larsen to the NMS Board, 5 July 1881). 19. Norsk Missions-Tidende 1890, 186.

Bibliography Bebbington, David W. 1989. Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History From the 1730s to the 1980s. London: Unwin Hyman. Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Bowie, Fiona, Deborah Kirkwood and Shirley Ardener, eds. 1993. Women and Missions: Past and Present: Anthropological and Historical Perceptions. Oxford: Berg.

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Brock, Peggy. 2005. “New Christians as Evangelists.” In Missions and Empire, ed. Norman Etherington, 132–152. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Christensen, Torben, and William R. Hutchinson, eds. 1982. Missionary Ideologies in the Imperialist Era: 1880–1920. Aros: Århus. Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff. 1991. Of Revelation and Revolution, Vol. 1: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Crais, Clifton. 1992. White Supremacy and Black Resistance in Pre-industrial South Africa: The Making of the Colonial Order in the Eastern Cape, 1770–1865. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Elbourne, Elizabeth. 2002. Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions, and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1852. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Elphick, Richard. 2008. “Evangelical Missions and Racial ‘Equalization.’” In Converting Colonialism: Visions and Realities in Mission History, 1706–1914, ed. Dana Robert, 112–133. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Etherington, Norman. 1976. “Mission Station Melting Pots as a Factor in the Rise of South African Black Nationalism.” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 9 (4): 592–605. Etherington, Norman. 1978. Preachers, Peasants and Politics in Southeast Africa, 1835–1880. London: Royal Historical Society. Etherington, Norman. 1996. “Recent Trends in the Historiography of Christianity in Southern Africa.” Journal of Southern African Studies 22 (2): 201–219. Etherington, Norman, ed. 2005. Missions and Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1986. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16 (1): 22–27. Gaitskell, Deborah. 2003. “Rethinking Gender Roles: The Field Experience of Women Missionaries in South Africa.” In The Imperial Horizons of British Protestant Missions, 1880–1914, ed. Andrew Porter, 131–157. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Griffiths, Gareth. 2005. “‘Trained to Tell the Truth’: Missionaries, Converts, and Narration.” In Missions and Empire, ed. Norman Etherington, 153–172. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grimshaw, Patricia, and Peter Sherlock. 2005. “Women and Cultural Exchanges.” In Missions and Empire, ed. Norman Etherington, 173–193. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson. 1997. “Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference.” In Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology, eds. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, 33–51. Durham: Duke University Press. Harries, Patrick. 2007. Butterflies and Barbarians: Swiss Missionaries and Systems of Knowledge in South-east Africa. Athens: Ohio University Press. Henningsen, Anne Folke. 2011. “On Difference, Sameness and Double Binds: Ambiguous Discourses, Failed Aspirations.” In Protestant Missions and Local Encounters in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Unto the Ends of the World, eds. Hilde Nielssen, Inger Marie Okkenhaug, and Karina Hestad Skeie, 131–155. Leiden: Brill. Hernæs, Per. 1986. “The Zulu Kingdom, Norwegian Missionaries, and British Imperialism, 1845–1879.” In Norwegian Missions in African History, Vol. 1: South Africa 1845–906, ed. Jarle Simensen, 103–186. Oslo: Norwegian University Press. Hovland, Ingie. 2013. Mission Station Christianity: Norwegian Missionaries in Colonial Natal and Zululand, Southern Africa 1850–1890. Leiden: Brill.

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Hovland, Ingie. 2023. “Protestant Replications: The Conversion, Ordination, and Schism of a Zulu Bishop in Colonial Natal.” Journal of Religion in Africa 53 (2): 138–171. Johnson, Hildegard B. 1967. “The Location of Christian Missions in Africa.” Geographical Review 57 (2): 168–202. Jørgensen, Torstein. 1990. Contact and Conflict: Norwegian Missionaries, the Zulu Kingdom, and the Gospel, 1850–1873. Oslo: Solum. Keto, C. Tsheloane. 1976. “Race Relations, Land and the Changing Missionary Role in South Africa: A Case Study of the American Zulu Mission, 1850–1910.” International Journal of African Historical Studies 10 (4): 600–627. Kollman, Paul. 2010. “Classifying African Christianities, Part Two: The Anthropology of Christianity and Generations of African Christians.” Journal of Religion in Africa 40 (2): 118–148. Kuper, Adam. 1993. “The ‘House’ and Zulu Political Structure in the Nineteenth Century.” Journal of African History 34: 469–487. Landau, Paul. 1995. The Realm of the Word: Language, Gender, and Christianity in a Southern African Kingdom. Portsmouth: Heinemann. Landau, Paul. 1999. “‘Religion’ and Christian Conversion in African History: A New Model.” Journal of Religious History 23 (1): 8–30. Landau, Paul. 2005. “Language.” In Missions and Empire, ed. Norman Etherington, 194–215. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Landau, Paul. 2010. “Transformations in Consciousness.” In The Cambridge History of South Africa. Vol. 1: From Early Times to 1885, eds. Carolyn Hamilton, Bernard K. Mbenga, and Robert Ross, 392–448. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacKenzie, John M. 2003. “Missionaries, Science, and the Environment in Nineteenth-­ century Africa.” In The Imperial Horizons of British Protestant Missions, 1880–1914, ed. Andrew Porter, 106–130. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Majeke, Nosipho. 1952. The Role of the Missionaries in Conquest. Johannesburg: Society of Young Africa. McClendon, Thomas. 2004. “The Man who would be Inkosi: Civilizing Missions in Shepstone’s Early Career.” Journal of Southern African Studies 30 (2): 339–358. Meintjes, Sheila. 1990. “Family and Gender in the Christian Community at Edendale, Natal, in Colonial Times.” In Women and Gender in Southern Africa to 1945, ed. Cherryl Walker, 125–145. Cape Town: David Philip. Myklebust, Olav Guttorm. 1949. “Sør-Afrika.” In Det Norske Misjonsselskaps Historie i Hundre År, Vol. 3, ed. John Nome, 5–187. Stavanger: Dreyer. Neylan, Susan. 2003. The Heavens are Changing: Nineteenth-century Protestant Missions and Tsimshian Christianity. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press. Peel, J.D.Y. 2000. Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Porter, Andrew, ed. 2003. The Imperial Horizons of British Protestant Missions, 1880–1914. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Porterfield, Amanda. 1997. “The Impact of Early New England Missionaries on Women’s Roles in Zulu Culture.” Church History 66 (1): 67–80. Pritchett, James. 2011. “Christian Mission Stations in South-Central Africa: Eddies in the Flow of Global Culture.” In Christianity and Public Culture in Africa, ed. Harri Englund, 27–49. Athens: Ohio University Press. Robert, Dana, ed. 2008. Converting Colonialism: Visions and Realities in Mission History, 1706–1914. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

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Robert, Dana. 2009. Christian Mission: How Christianity Became a World Religion. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Sanneh, Lamin. 1989. Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture. New York: Orbis. Schreuder, H.P.S. 1848. Læsebog i Zulu-sproget. Christiania. Schreuder, H.P.S. 1850. Grammatik for Zulu-sproget. Christiania. Skeie, Karina Hestad. 2001. “Beyond Black and White: Reinterpreting ‘the Norwegian Missionary Image of the Malagasy.’” In Encounter Images in the Meetings between Europe and Africa, ed. Mai Palmberg, 162–182. Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute. Soja, Edward W. 1995. “Heterotopologies.” In Postmodern Cities and Spaces, eds. Sophie Watson and Katherine Gibson, 13–34. Oxford: Blackwell. Stavem, Ole. 1915. Et Bantufolk og Kristendommen: Det Norske Missionsselskaps Syttiaarige Zulumission. Stavanger: Det Norske Missionsselskaps Forlag. Tjelle, Kristin Fjelde. 2014. Missionary Masculinity, 1870–1930: The Norwegian Missionaries in South-East Africa. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Weir, Jennifer. 2005. “Whose uNkulunkulu?” Africa 75 (2): 203–219. Willis, Justin. 1993. “The Nature of a Mission Community: The Universities’ Mission to Central Africa in Bonde.” Past and Present 140: 127–154. Worger, William. 2001. “Parsing God: Conversations about the Meaning of Words and Metaphors in Nineteenth-century Southern Africa.” Journal of African History 42 (3): 417–447.

CHAPTER 28

Christianity, Witchcraft, Magic, and Healing in Africa Kalle Kananoja and Markku Hokkanen

Introduction Christianity and healing have been closely connected in African history, but their relations have also vexed scholars. Considering relations between healing and Christian conversion, Bengt Sundkler (1961) held that the search for healing and wholeness underpinned many Southern Africans’ interest in Christianity and was an important factor motivating the embrace of the new faith. On the other hand, Terence Ranger (1982) emphasized that in the case of Anglicans in East Africa, missionary medicine as such largely failed to respond to peoples’ needs for healing and protection against witchcraft. For his part, Robin Horton (1993) argued that the success of independent African Christian and healing movements stemmed partly from the failure of missions to address local needs for healing. Generally, scholars have agreed that the perceived potential for Christianity as a resource for holistic health has been one of its major attractions, but it has been more challenging to estimate its relative importance to other motives (Hokkanen 2006, 461–462). The relations of witchcraft beliefs and practices to Christianity and healing further complicate the research field. Healing and harming have often been studied as separate categories, although they—and the occult powers linked to them—are closely related (Hunt 2013). Healing, magic, and witchcraft in

K. Kananoja (*) • M. Hokkanen Department of History, Culture and Communications, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. E. Barnes, T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48270-0_28

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Africa are tied to notions of communal well-being and social harmony as well as economic and political success (Feierman 1985). The success (or failure) of Christian religious movements often depended on their ability to respond to African demand for healing. This chapter traces African perceptions of magic in relation to Christianity over a timespan stretching from the late fifteenth to the twenty-first century, covering precolonial and colonial periods as well independent Africa. While witchcraft and healing were contested issues between Africans and early modern Catholic missionaries, a major change can be detected from the early nineteenth century onward, when African societies were increasingly permeated by a large number of Protestant missionaries. While early modern Europeans and Africans still largely shared a worldview, in which magic and witchcraft were central beliefs, the Enlightenment led to major changes in European thought and to the “decline of magic” (Thomas 1971). While it is possible to detect a major change in European attitudes toward unseen powers, we argue that such a change is more difficult to detect on the African continent despite colonial missionaries’ widespread trust in the power of Christianity and modern education to eradicate magical beliefs. Material inequalities and a failure of colonial as well modern African states to deliver effective public health care services are reflected in a continuously high demand for healing and protection from witchcraft offered by contemporary Christian ministers.

Christianity and Magic in Precolonial Atlantic Africa Religion was a lifeline for all Atlantic Africans. It was a way of explaining, predicting, and controlling events in the world around them. Communion with and the worship of one God was not important, but rituals and beliefs were designed to deal directly with the dangers of everyday life—diseases, drought, hunger, sterility, and so on. Healers and diviners were highly respected religious specialists in African societies, whose professional status was acquired through individual initiation conducted by older members of the profession. Male and female diviners, who operated by spirit possession, used trance to directly relay the wishes and observations of the spirits who entered into them. Divination by spirit possession gave them an unchallengeable authority in society (Vansina 2004, 167–168). In West Central Africa, secular structures were intimately bound to religious ideas. Especially important was the division of the universe between the world of the living and the world of the dead, which was maintained in all local religious traditions. Souls of the dead moved on to the realm of the dead to join the souls of deceased ancestors, but they never completely abandoned the world of the living. Ancestral spirits remained engaged in the everyday lives of the surviving kinsmen and were believed to be among the most powerful influences in shaping the destinies of their surviving kin. As Sweet (2003, 104) has characterized it, the living and the dead formed a single community and were

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socially and morally obliged to each other—ancestors protected the living, but in turn they expected to be loved and remembered. People relied on the spirits of the dead to maintain the well-being of the living, appealing to them at grave sites or in other ritual settings where the living made offerings to the dead in exchange for power and protection. Sickness was interpreted as a symbol of failure—spirits invoked illness as punishment for those who failed in their obligations to their deceased kin. Besides the wrath of ancestors, the activities of witches were seen as another major cause of misfortune and illness. Thornton (2002, 81) has argued that “Central African theology focused on a struggle between good and evil that created an ethical system.” People did not usually envision evil as the provenance of a specific supernatural being, such as Devil in Christian theology. Evil was rather thought to result from the actions of people with wicked intentions who resorted to supernatural forces to do harm (Sweet 2003, 104–105). Religious practices pervaded the daily life of Central Africans. A cosmology that divided the universe into the worlds of the living and the dead helped people to interpret temporal phenomena. The help of religious specialists was enlisted to combat all ills that arose from the spirit world. The potency of these specialists became increasingly under fire as Catholic missionaries began their encroachment in West Central Africa, first in the kingdom of Kongo, where they had their greatest success, and then in the colony of Angola, as it was carved out by the Portuguese. The development of Atlantic Creole culture in Central Africa commenced in the late fifteenth century in the kingdom of Kongo. Kongo’s ruler Nzinga a Nkuwu became interested in Portuguese culture after 1484, when the Portuguese navigator Diogo Cão and his crew landed in Soyo, Kongo’s province on the coast. After talks with the Portuguese explorers Nzinga a Nkuwu requested priests, carpenters, and stonemasons to build a “house of prayer” in Portuguese style, farmers to teach them to till the soil with ploughs, and women to teach the baking of bread. Some Kongolese children were sent to Europe to learn to read and write and become Christian. On their return, this bilingual and bicultural group began to spread new ideas throughout the kingdom (Heywood and Thornton 2007, 60–67). In the Mbundu region of Angola, Atlantic Creole culture emerged through contact with Kongo, and as a result of Jesuit missions that came to Ndongo with Paulo Dias de Novais’ entourage in 1560 and 1575. This cultural influence thereafter emanated gradually inland from Luanda. Jesuits extended Christianity in the region but remained hostile to the Atlantic Creole form of Christianity, which involved a great deal of religious mixture. Besides Jesuits, numerous Luso-African secular priests were present in Angola. Secular clergy generally tolerated a wider range of religious practices and influenced a Mbundu version of Atlantic Creole Christianity that was taking shape (Heywood and Thornton 2007, 98–105). The Catholic Church in Central Africa developed to its apex in the kingdom of Kongo, partly because the local people affected the structure of the church

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and its doctrines as much as Europeans from early on. Christianity was accepted as a syncretic cult, which facilitated its spread in Kongo. In practice, Kongolese retained many of their older beliefs despite their formal conversion to Catholicism through baptism. For example, polygamy was favored in contrast to the Christian sacrament of marriage. Local deities continued to be revered in their traditional locations by most people, but these were increasingly identified as Catholic saints. Traditional religious specialists continued to produce protective charms and their healing practices were still accepted as valid throughout the area, although missionaries, and sometimes the Kongolese educated elite, condemned this as “fetishism” and sought to end it. (Heywood and Thornton 2007, 66–67). The relationship between the old and the new religion was not always harmonious, and there were conflicts between the representatives of the two. During their proselytizing campaigns, missionaries burned traditional religious images as they attempted to remove all traces of the devil from Kongo. According to Young (2007, 51–52), the burning of “idols” was also important for the Kongo court, because it sought to remove the potential for spiritual and religious competition from outlying areas. Villagers often rebelled against the intrusions of missionaries because they regarded them as ritual experts, sanctioned by the king and the ruling elite, which represented a real threat against rural religious leaders. A reaction against the power of the missionaries was seen in the later 1650s and early 1660s, when Kimpasi societies proliferated in Kongo. Kimpasi was a kind of social remedy, a secret society that sought to help a community or a group of communities suffering from calamities and problems. The initiates experienced a ritual death, from which they emerged with a new identity. The indigenous religious revival consciously opposed Christianity, and the Kongo elite had to take drastic measures to prevent the Kimpasi from spreading. The seizure of power objects inhabited by spirits (nkisi) and severe penalties were ordered for Kimpasi initiates, and the Capuchins burnt innumerable nkisi and Kimpasi enclosures. After the persecution, many former Kimpasi initiates affirmed the Christian faith (Hilton 1985, 26–28, 196). Indigenous interpretations of Christian doctrine in Kongo were not marginal events, but even gained millenarian features. One of these challengers to Catholic priests was the twenty-year-old Kongolese woman Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita, who in August 1704 claimed that she had been permanently possessed by Saint Anthony. She sought to unite the Kongos by waging a war against all forms of greed and jealousy and its most obvious manifestation, misuse of kindoki or harmful witchcraft. Dona Beatriz traveled extensively as Saint Anthony and claimed that she could heal the sick, a miracle that only strengthened her fame. She announced that she could heal the infertile and found an immediate following among Kongolese women. Although she found numerous followers among the common people, she could not convince the nobility of Kongo with her vision of uniting the country. Captured in 1706,

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Kimpa Vita was delivered to the hands of King Pedro IV, whose council condemned her to death by burning (Thornton 1998, 132–149). In West Central Africa, sickness was attributed to spiritual forces. Most common explanation for sickness was that it was caused by unsatisfied ancestors, who had not been revered properly. In Kimbundu, these were called by the name zumbi. Sick people commonly expressed their malady by saying that a zumbi had entered them or infected them. People were often very cautious of all signs referring to zumbi, for example to the appearance of their ancestors or any other dead people in their dreams. If the dead appeared in dreams, it was taken as a sign that they had come to fetch the person into the Other World. To avert it, a sacrificial offering was made at the grave of the ancestor. Several inquisition cases from the 1710s and 1720s concerned people who the healers had “diagnosed” with zumbi. (Kananoja 2021). As mediums to the Other World, African medical specialists determined which spirits were plaguing the body of an individual, and then prescribed a remedy or a variety of remedies. The ngangas or spiritual healers typically helped people with problems that could have their origins in the Other World, sometimes suggesting that the client had offended the ancestors or broken some taboo established by nkita, a guardian deity of the land. However, they could also name another person or people who were working bad kindoki, in the form of lokas, or curses on them because of jealousy or anger. This could be done either intentionally or unintentionally by people who harbored negative feelings. If it was intentional, it was done by sorcerers—ndoki in Kikongo and muloji in Kimbundu—regarded as selfish and greedy people who enlisted Otherworldly power and caused disease or induced misfortune. The power to carry out a loka was kindoki as well—in these cases, it was used negatively for selfish purposes. Thus, in West Central Africa, people did not believe that evil arose from some external source, such as a devil or evil spirits, but rather from the intentions and actions of people (Thornton 1998, 42). Although Roman Catholicism made inroads in West Central Africa and around Portuguese settlements on the Upper Guinea Coast, elsewhere in Atlantic Africa Christianity remained a marginal religion during the centuries of the Atlantic slave trade and began to spread more widely only in the nineteenth century by accommodating to local religious practices (Grant 2020). For example, the Pietist Basel missionaries, who became established in southern Ghana in 1828, for a long time tolerated local medical practices and gave accounts of “healing miracles.” Although the arrival of missionary doctors complicated the situation and put an emphasis on biomedicine and hygienic teaching from the 1880s, therapeutic choices among Akan Christians still included a reliance on local and traditional health knowledge (Mohr 2009).

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Healing and Anti-Witchcraft Movements in Colonial Africa In many regions, Christianity in different forms became a majority religion during the colonial period, which especially in its initial phase (c. 1880–1920) marked major political, economic, social, and religious upheaval. Colonial conquest overthrew or marginalized many traditional rulers and institutions. At the same time, colonial era witnessed the proliferation of new healers, practices, and movements, many drawing from traditional, Christian, Islamic, and modern influences. As J.D.Y. Peel (2000, 223) argued in the case of Yorubaland, no religion seemed to offer decisive proof of its healing power; healing rather became grounds for realizing the consolations of religious belonging than a tool to win people over to any of the competing faiths. New diseases, growth of money economy, labor migration, and urbanization, as well as gradual availability of Western medicine, changed the landscape of healing, which became more individualized. Therapies became more commodified, commercialized, and pluralistic in a process that continued into the postcolonial period (Feierman 1985; Digby 2006; Hokkanen 2017). Witchcraft fears and countermeasures proliferated at times of upheaval and uncertainty, while colonial rule clamped down on some of the most established anti-­ witchcraft practitioners. In this context, Christian churches were increasingly important sites of negotiation of acceptable and unacceptable healing and places for seeking communal and individual health and safety. It is a long-held misconception that Christian missionaries were categorically hostile to African cultural expressions and social organizations. Although imperialist discourses prevailed in missionary publications, which used Africa as a negative trope in the delineation of the colonial “other” (Vaughan 1991), many missionaries in the field developed new understandings of African ways of ordering knowledge through their collaboration with native informants and assistants. In the process, African environmental and traditional medical knowledge was documented and archived. Almost invariably, missions also had to negotiate their policy toward local phytotherapies, home remedies, and healers. While spiritual healers and “witchdoctors” were condemned and demonized, plant-based medicines were often tolerated because of their commonality but also for the lack of effective biomedical substitutes (with the exception of quinine) (Flint 2008; Hokkanen 2017). Walima Kalusa (2007) has argued that, rather than seeing them as agents of European imperialism who undermined African medical beliefs and practices, African medical auxiliaries should be seen as translators and interpreters of Western medicine, who appropriated concepts from pre-existing secular and ritual vocabulary and molded biomedicine in ways that it came to be expressed and internalized as a variation of indigenous medicine in Zambia. Thus, medical intermediaries confounded their employers’ goal of undermining local medical beliefs and demonstrated their agency as self-motivating actors, who recreated their own medical conceptions and reconfigured their social

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relations, identity, and power. Indigenous medical workers became the principal dispensers of Western medicine and enjoyed greater contact with patients than European physicians. A few missionaries also began to resort to local therapeutics to treat their ailments. Major crises, such as Spanish influenza pandemic, could shake all established forms of religion and healing (Ranger 1992). However, such events could also provoke a joint response, a pooling of spiritual forces against disease. Malawian churchman Levi Mumba recalled how he worked together with his father, a traditional ritual leader, in countermeasures against influenza in their village, stating that in the end the community was spared. His account, “The religion of my forefathers” is an example of respectful, reflective Christian approach to traditional spiritual beliefs.1 Others, however, took the view that only God was a legitimate healer and prayer was the only appropriate response against illness and witchcraft. These anti-medicine movements condemned both traditional healers and Western medicine. The idea of prayer as only medicine has surfaced in many forms in different movements at least since the early colonial period (Ranger 1992; Hokkanen 2017, 23–24). It is hard to assess, however, whether the demand for shunning all other medicines has been more rhetoric than actual practice amongst the followers of such movements. Quite possibly pragmatic medical pluralism has been more the norm among most communities. More generally, healers often subscribed to the idea that God (Christian or otherwise) ultimately decides the success or failure of treatment. Without God’s will, blessing, or answered prayer, best medicines are impotent in this view. A proverb from Northern Malawi, “Dig for your medicine and mix it with God,” expresses the combination of herbal with the divine (Hokkanen 2017, 97–98). In practical terms, such approach can be seen as “insurance policy” for healers who tacitly give God both glory and responsibility for the result of treatment. The risk of healers being accused of causing patients’ deaths, or being witches themselves, has been real for many practitioners in colonial and postcolonial Africa. It is possible that increasing skepticism, suspicion, and secrecy surrounding healing, as Murray Last has argued took place in colonial northern Nigeria (1992), has more generally contributed to growth of such risks for practitioners in a more individualized and commercialized landscape of healing. While Christianity became Africanized as it spread, some African ideas of spirits, healing, and harming were Christianized. Regardless of missionary intentions, ideas of Satan and demons as causes of illness and misfortune, and notions of expelling them following the example of Christ and the Apostles, resonated strongly with many African communities. Protestant missionaries, with their emphasis on translating the Word and printing it, struggled perhaps more with the tension between modernity and tradition in Christian healing than Catholics, for whom exorcism and mystical power of religious objects were less problematic in principle. Certainly, the idea of Bible as a powerful

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medicinal object could be problematic to missionaries (Ranger 1982; Gray 1990; Fields 1985). While mission churches found healing practices against witchcraft and spirit possession healing problematic, many practices were acceptable or at least tolerated. African Christians were pivotal in negotiating the line between acceptable and unacceptable in practice during the colonial period, and missionaries could only engage in cases that came under their notice. For example, Ngoma-­ type spirit possession practices involving dancing and drumming were generally condemned in mission churches, but many other practices were considered “superstitious” but did not qualify for suspension from church (Hokkanen 2007). However, missions and churches played their part in support of anti-­ witchcraft legislation and measures at least in British and German African empires. When healers were perceived as a threat to colonial conquest or order, they were forcefully attacked in East and Southern Africa (Feierman 1995; Flint 2008; Luongo 2011). In particular, diviners, charismatic healers, and movements with political potential were targeted. However, as colonial states were unable to offer medical provision to the vast majority of people, most healers had to be tacitly accepted by governments as well as churches. Independent African churches, which proliferated from the interwar period, could be more tolerant toward traditional healing, but they could also aspire for monopolization of spiritual healing under charismatic leadership and the power of prayer. Baptism could be interpreted as protection and cleansing against evil, including witchcraft, and this interpretation could be acceptable also to missionaries. However, the long delaying of baptism in mission churches gave room for independent African movements, including Watch Tower, that spread quickly across Southern and Eastern Africa in early twentieth century and at times practiced mass baptism. Many of the new movements had also significant transatlantic elements (Fields 1985; Cabrita 2018). Water has been considered a powerful spiritual and medicinal substance in many African medico-religious traditions, and Christian idea of holy water sat easily with such traditions. In South-Central Africa, the Mwana Leza movement headed by Watchtower preacher Tomo Nyirenda became briefly a popular anti-witchcraft movement in the 1920s. Nyirenda claimed his powers to detect and kill witches came from “the book” (apparently an issue of the Rhodesia Methodist Magazine). He explicitly drew from Biblical texts on Christ exercising demons. Mission-­ educated and charismatic Nyirenda, who was hanged by the British, considered himself above all a Christian evangelist. Before his violent anti-witchcraft campaign, Nyirenda had sought to build a Christian community, emphasized looking after the sick, upholding hygiene rules, as well as calling for witches to repent (Fields 1985, 164–172; Ranger 1975, 45–33). The appeal of modernized anti-witchcraft movements at the turbulent time of decolonization is highlighted by the case of Malawian healer and diviner Chikanga, who started his popular practice in mid-1950s. In the early 1960s, large crowds from Tanzania traveled to meet Chikanga by foot, bus, and ferry,

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seeking help, protection, and cleansing. Charismatic and literate Chikanga had a multi-lingual organization in place to receive and host patients and help-­ seekers from Malawi and neighboring countries. Colonial administration seems to have handled the movement, which was generally supported by the traditional authorities, carefully in the aftermath of 1959 Emergency in Nyasaland. There were tensions and clashes with the Presbyterian church, however, as some of Chikanga’s supporters forced sent some Christians to Chikanga, who marked many with a razor. Chikanga’s Presbyterian critics referred to him as “magician” (using Biblical references to compare him to misleading magi). His movement drew from anti-witchcraft traditions, Christianity, rising nationalistic sentiments, and benefited from improved transport and communication of the late colonial period. Chikanga claimed his power to detect witches came from God, but also seems to have suggested that political freedom and peace would follow the cleansing. As Malawian theologian S.K. Msiska (2018, 20–21) has pointed out, this movement can be placed in the continuum of popular witchcraft cleansing movements such as Mchape in South-Central Africa. Chikanga had Christian prayers and hymns strongly incorporated in his practice. Alison Redmayne (2013) has argued that the fact that Chikanga did not charge for his services augmented his appeal in Tanzania. The commercial side of modern witchcraft eradication was apparent, however, in the extremely popular Mchape movement in South-Central Africa in the early 1930s. Mchape was both a cure-all and a preventive: the repentant witches consuming it would die if they resumed their activities. Mchape was sold by a network of vendors, with distributors providing the medical bark to local agents, who reportedly paid a “commission” from the profits (Nyasaland. Annual Report on the Administration of the Police Department for 1932, 16–17). Nevertheless, mchape shared the cleansing movement character with early twentieth-century Christian movements, in which the public renunciation or burning of traditional religious (and medical) objects was common (McCracken 2012; Maxwell 2013, 270). Western missionaries in the colonial era varied in their views as to the future of African traditional healing, magic, and witchcraft beliefs and practices. Some believed they should be aggressively combated and outlawed, others held that they would gradually fade with education and advance of both Christianity and biomedicine. Writing in 1930, a veteran missionary Alexander Hetherwick saw on the one hand continuation of strong influence of witchcraft beliefs in Africa, but on the other portrayed the superiority of Western education and medical science. In his image of an African medical student peering into a microscope and seeing disease-causing agents, Hetherwick (1932, 95) saw little room for “belief in the power of witchcraft.” Medical science, Christian education, and witchcraft beliefs could easily co-­ exist through late colonial to independent Africa, however. In his analysis of contemporary Western Equatorial Africa, John Janzen has argued that “moral envelope integrates alternative kinds of [healing] knowledge.” Scientific or

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technical expertise does not, it seems, in itself provide a moral framework for practitioners in the same way as a spiritual worldview provided by religion. Christian identity and Biblical references remain significant for many Congolese scientists and pharmacists and scientific research can be fruitfully set in a spiritual framework (Janzen 2017).

Prophetic Movements and Occult Powers New African Christian religious movements emphasizing healing were established in the colonial era. Many of them have remained influential with significant following to the present day. In the Lower Congo, Simon Kimbangu’s prophetic movement began in April 1921, when Kimbangu prayed in the name of Jesus and healed a sick woman. Kimbangu’s public role as a healer and prophet was short-lived. He was arrested in September 1921, and eventually the Belgian colonial state, alarmed by the proliferation of Kongolese prophets, stamped down on all religious leaders associated with the kingunza (prophetic) movements and began to send them to penal labor camps. Kimbangu died in 1951 after thirty-year imprisonment, but prophetic movements continued and took new forms under different leaders. Despite state repression, several other kingunza movements were established in the Lower Congo region between 1921 and 1960. According to Yolanda Covington-Ward (2014), women played a prominent and diverse role in the kingunza movements. Some of them prophesied and remained close to male prophets while others used their spiritual gifts and engaged in healing activities without male oversight. Healing took the form of laying hands on the sick or using blessed water. Like Kimbangu and male prophets, women could be possessed by the Holy spirits, which was displayed through the embodied practice of zakama (ecstatic trembling). Women prophets were particularly gifted in prophesying about future events and blessing members of the community. Wyatt MacGaffey (1983), who studied prophets in postcolonial Congo, focused especially on the group of churches known as Dipundu dia Mpeve a Nlongo mu Afelika (DMNA, or Church of the Holy Spirit in Africa, founded in 1961). Not all of these churches offered healing, but some were clearly medical institutions competing with both European-trained doctors and traditional healers and diviners. The prophetic churches, although rejecting magic, displayed a debt to indigenous religion. Despite the use of holy water and Bible recitation in the services, their rituals sometimes very closely resembled traditional divinatory practices. Future-oriented optimism and belief in the modern state as a guarantor of development at independence was overrun by economic downturn and World Bank-sponsored structural adjustment programs (SAPs) in the 1980s. SAPs led to a widespread crisis in health care throughout the African continent and eroded the chances that science would replace magic and that biomedicine would bring health security. Since the 1990s, contemporary witchcraft

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discourse has been seen in anthropological literature as an outgrowth of new inequalities in wealth, or social and economic transformations produced by neoliberalism (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993; Geschiere 1997; Moore and Sanders 2001). In many African cosmologies of witchcraft, evildoers gain power by literally “eating,” consuming the lives of others. Witchcraft and sorcery are understood as ambivalent forces with the potential for both good and evil. Therefore, the ability to battle or heal witchcraft and to detect witches partake of the same force as witchcraft itself (Newell 2007, 465). In postcolonial Africa, Pentecostalism has been the fastest growing and most visible religious movement. Through its gospel of prosperity, Pentecostalism directly addresses economic disparities and offers one of the few avenues through which to find success and survival. Pentecostalism’s penchant for miracles, signs, and wonders promotes a magical worldview, and consequently Pentecostal churches have also come to represent themselves as a dominant mode of combating witchcraft. In this, they share the typically ambivalent outlook usually reserved for those with the power of witchcraft: churches are accused of being sites of greed and even sorcery, while at the same time they are respected for their ability to heal witchcraft. Pentecostalism itself, according to Newell (2007), has become an alternative form of witchcraft discourse, because it recognizes witchcraft as a real and powerful force. In contrast to colonial and missionary rhetoric claiming that the spread of Christianity would eradicate belief in magic in Africa, talk about witchcraft has all but decreased. As Douglas Falen (2018, 6) has argued, African Christianity can barely be understood without acknowledging the fear of witchcraft that “is the principal force driving people toward the varied proliferating churches in Benin.” Denominations compete in combatting witchcraft, and some churches have stronger reputations for spiritual protection. In Benin, people suffering from unexplained illnesses, who have found no relief from traditional healers or hospitals, often turn to the Celestial Church to be treated through intensive prayer and rituals to expel evil forces (Henry 2008). While Christianity is believed to protect believers from evil, some see churches as dangerous spaces occupied by witches. In Benin, it is often said that witches join congregations to attack the unsuspecting members, and that witchcraft can never be truly removed. Because occult power is the strongest supernatural power, it can only be combatted with occult power. Competition and quarreling between denominations over who practices more “authentic” Christianity give rise to accusations of hypocrisy. For example, the Very Holy Church of Jesus Christ of Banamè, founded by a former Catholic woman named Parfaite, has attracted an enormous following after she was successfully delivered from witchcraft attacks and herself began to perform miraculous cures. Parfaite has denounced Catholic priests as witches and risen to national prominence for waging a spiritual war against Catholicism, Vodun, and all other religions (Falen 2018, 128–129).

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Conclusion Healing in Africa has for centuries been affected by world religions. Early Islam in West and East Africa as well as Catholic Christianity in Central Africa planted new ideas related to health and offered new “medicines” to combat illness and misfortune. The influence of Christian missions in the colonial period spread these tools even further as Africans adopted and experimented with both spiritual and biomedical medicines, and in the process, adapted these foreign influences to better correspond with traditional religious ritual practices. If anything, the globalization of African healing has intensified in the postcolonial period as African-initiated churches have spread beyond the continent. At the same time, spiritual healing and measures to counter sorcery remain popular among Christians in Africa. Healers of various kinds operate in religiously and medically plural societies to counter the effects of modern threats that are still often experienced and spoken of as witchcraft. While African societies have in many ways modernized materially, unequally distributed wealth has not brought comprehensive changes that would have led to the erosion of traditional world views. A 2022 “Afrobarometer” survey, for example, reported that most Malawians strongly believe in the existence of witchcraft and that educated citizens are more likely to believe in it.2 In contemporary Africa, witchcraft beliefs are strongly associated with the erosion of social capital and trust in many regions (Gershman 2016). Indeed, witchcraft, healing, and magic have modernized by incorporating elements of material advances into theory and practice. Therefore, witches travel in airplanes, “traditional” healers take advantage of X-rays and microscopes but activate herbal remedies by resorting to spiritual forces, and Pentecostal leaders engage in extensive ministries of healing and exorcism (Piot 2010; Schoepf 2017; Anderson and Pillay 1997). Tensions between acceptable and unacceptable healing, and sometimes blurred lines between healing and harming (Hunt 2013; Vaughan 1994), continue to run through therapeutic discourses and practices in modern African churches and communities. At the same time, African Christians and communities are today ever more connected to transnational and global religious, intellectual, and cultural networks, with complex implications for the future.

Notes 1. Levi Mumba, “The Religion of my forefathers”, typsecript, c. 1930. Malawi National Archives, Livingstonia Mission and church records. 2. https://www.afrobarometer.org/articles/most-­m alawians-­b elieve-­i n-­t he-­ existence-­of-­witchcraft-­and-­support-­criminalising-­it/ [accessed 10 February 2023].

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CHAPTER 29

African Women Christians Toyin Falola

Introduction As much as the promotion of patriarchal values was inadvertently entrenched in the colonial efforts, African women Christians nonetheless played significant roles in the consolidation of religious affairs of the missionaries, way into colonial Africa (Phiri 1997; Marty 2007; Oduyoye and Kanyoro 2005; Nyengele 2004). Notable scholars, such as Elizabeth Prevost, have produced incredible materials affirming women’s position in the transformation of Christianity in Africa. Partly underlined by the same racial philosophy that prompted colonialism, the European women that rejuvenated the fire of religious participation in Africa came with the intention not to liberate the African women per se. They wanted to offer ineluctable ideas to the proliferation of the ecumenical works already started by their male counterparts (Prevost 2010). 1 Nonetheless, these African women would eventually take advantage of the situation to also inscribe their names in the books of history, especially concerning the spread of Christianity in Africa and the preservation of the values it brandished. In essence, looking at the various roles played by African women, the claim that they have not been contributing significantly to issues of development within the continent is questionable. That conclusion reeks of hegemonic arrogance, leading to the invention of narratives to delegitimize the outstanding contributions made by African women in remote and proximal history. What they have done, their efforts, and their challenges are x-rayed here for a better perspective on what they did to advance the religion during the highlighted timeline.

T. Falola (*) Department of History, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. E. Barnes, T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48270-0_29

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Before delving into the contributions of these women to Christianity during colonialism, there is a need to understand the pretext of their involvement. An analytical quandary domiciles in the process of evangelical crusading, especially by European women. On the surface, one would believe that their getting involved in missionary works was a clarion call answered by the women to contribute to the aggressive installation of foreign spirituality in Africa, but underneath such ambition lies the desire to achieve provincial objectives. Elizabeth Prevost maintains that European women suffered excessively from the patriarchal systems installed in Europe, where they are ineluctably placed within the periphery of events and engagement in every ramification. They are culturally disallowed from participating in public activities, as that would undermine the power relations between them and their male counterparts. It was, therefore, a hostile environment that contained them and restricted them by denying them the opportunity to introduce ideas that may or may not positively influence the transformation of their society. But then, the underlying justification for this behavior toward them was that women are naturally inferior and even incapable of independent thinking that can facilitate the advancement of a people. To upturn this negative image, they needed to take bold steps. When opportunities presented themselves to prove their worth, they engaged in ecumenical works in Africa, focusing primarily on converting females and expanding the religion through them.2 Having to face such experiences means they had been conditioned to accept discriminatory and defamatory relations within their own European cultural environment. This means that when any opportunity for freedom from such treatment came, they were the most certain to grab it and expect whatever consequences it would come with. Patriarchy was so entrenched in the European political, cultural, sociological, and ideological compass that women were also not allowed to take important roles in consolidating their religious beliefs. It means that they were driven away from the internal system of governance within the church politics of which they are active members. In essence, many of these women dreamed of the opportunity to make it away from such a system, and protests against the actions would have been inadequate given that they were not within the political caucus that would enforce regulations that would bring change. Given this circumstance, it was immediately easy for European women to volunteer for ecumenical services in Africa so that they would achieve double results. While they made themselves available for these assignments offshore of Europe, it came with challenges that they never envisaged. However, their determination to break away from that slavish treatment at home overshadowed the disastrous challenges they encountered, and they became a significant player in the advancement of Christianity in Africa. That became the prelude to the idea of having African women Christians during colonialism.

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Conflict of Colonialism and Gender Whereas the male missionaries were not unaware that the allowance of European Christian women into the fold of the crusaders in Africa betrays the in-house ideological position against gender politics; they are troubled by the twin factors of inadequate numbers and the need for emotional balance in a virgin area: Africa (McCleary and Robert 2006).3 The fact that they would have their women by their sides in the course of their ecumenical assignment gave them the necessary motivation that they needed in a lonely new area. Firstly, they have infinitely desecrated the people there in Africa in very ridiculous terms. Additionally, apart from the moral burden they would have about sharing intimacy with the African women, they cannot also risk the health challenges that could come from it. It is important to clarify that the health concerns do not stem from African women being more prone to illness, but rather from their perception that the environment they would be forced to mix with is hostile toward them.4 Therefore, when women volunteered to come and join their ecumenical groups, they opened their arms to them, under the impression that issues would be properly handled. By the 1900s, British women, in particular, had begun to incorporate themselves into the clerical fold and became active players in the spread of Christianity in Africa. It was, therefore, an opportunity for them to enjoy freedom, which they did not enjoy at home on many grounds. For one, being in Africa mathematically exempted them from the territory of oppression to which they had been confined in their homeland. However, a very interesting unfolding became inevitable with the emergence of women clerics in Africa, as it was already evident that the available systems and political realities were insouciant to the said European women who came for ecumenical assignment. In nearly all African nation-states, missionaries had already planted themselves deeply in spreading the crusade of the religion. In what would eventually be countries like Nigeria, Ghana, and Madagascar, among others, a handful of missionaries had become an important part of the people. They engraved their activities into the hearts of these places through the combined efforts of missionaries and their local allies. This suggests that the environment was already unsupportive of the protests of European women clerics who came to the continent. We should understand that the knowledge of European women missionaries is very helpful in understanding the infiltration of African women into the fold of Christianity. This is underscored by the sheer distance, social and emotional, that is already engendered by the European male missionaries, who, for example, preferred men in their activities to women. It was, therefore, obvious that their erection of such social systems was to refract what was happening in their various cultural environments in different European countries. As already implied, volunteer European women missionaries, therefore, found an environment that was competitively against their success. This sent a strong message to the ecumenical European females that unless they made very courageous efforts, they would not dislodge their male

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counterparts from comfortably installing the systems they gained nothing from while they were in Britain. Meanwhile, there was a very slim opportunity that they believed they could exploit, and that was the fact that they had a better chance to navigate the African women’s world in ways that the males could not. This means that they needed to create a separate world within the church in which it would be safe and possible to achieve their ambitions. This was the genesis of having African women in the folds of clerics. They immediately swung into action, and their penetration of the women’s fold became a source of worry and happiness for their male missionary counterparts. Nonetheless, they had to make do with such an oxymoronic reality. It constituted some worry for them because the power they (females) now had was becoming unbearable and could challenge the basis for their social security, which they did not get at home (in Europe). It was also a source of happiness because having more African women accept the ecumenical teachings meant that they had foot soldiers who would themselves lay the strong foundation for the enhancement of spreading Christianity in different households. Colonialism did not support a gender-balanced environment, and the missionaries shared that moral sentiment deeply, indicating that they wanted to preserve that lopsided tradition. But then, they found ways to achieve their aims in the first instance.

African Women and Ecumenical Culture Shock Given that colonial engagements have flushed out the remains of the moral and cultural leanings in these African countries, the possibility of manifesting the form of gender equality and democracy that predated European ascension in Africa was inevitably limited. By installing the European system of governance, the consolidation of European systems in these countries was relatively easier. Meanwhile, some practices were undeserving of being eroded or eliminated as they would contribute to the dramatic decline of their values, potentially exposing them to avoidable risks or challenges. One such moral was the way social relationships were molded. Apparently, sociological behavior among Africans reflected their political, social, economic, and moral principles, constituting a collective philosophy that the people collapse in their behavior. As such, one can accurately predict the social orientation of Africans by merely looking at how they handled relations between or among other people. Interestingly, the relations between males and females across all strata of human endeavor were complementary and even supportive, and the understanding that women occupy as many institutions and positions as their male counterparts indicates a communal philosophy that recognizes everyone, regardless of their biological or anatomical composition.5 To that extent, the precolonial African women did not understand the idea of toxic masculinity, which was the foundation of the extreme patriarchy they maintained in Europe. Curiously, they never experienced such a divisive society that took away their power and subjected them to backside positions on issues that directly concerned and then affected them. With the ascendancy of

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Europeans, however, the recalibration of their political system is the first signal of the irreconcilable differences between African sociological systems and European ones. It is to be discovered eventually that although the underlying European division was the foundation of divisions along gender lines in Africa, it was nonetheless the most potent method to actualize their very imperial objectives. As much as the political power was handed to the males, it was impossible that the females would enjoy substantial opportunities like their counterparts in the unfolding events.6 For the African women who now sought to embrace Christianity and also participate as equals, the atmosphere was already rigged against them. They were compelled to function under two irreconcilable conditions. First, they were expected to perform ecumenical responsibilities under a religious system that is fundamentally hostile to their inclusion, and second, they were meant to do so under an equally patriarchal system that is unconcerned about the problems they face because of their biological conditions. In essence, it was generally difficult for the early African women who were Christians to understand the reasons for the hostility against them in the colonial system. Being a people who were domineering in the issues of social and political undertakings before the ascendancy of Europeans, they became empowered by that cultural influence on the one hand. They were ironically sterilized by the fact of ecumenical exclusions of women that missionary Christians morally supported, on the other. Despite their lack of understanding of the situation, they became pivots for the spread of the religion after interrogating the superstructure of the then-environment. The misrepresentation of their position in the spread of religion in Africa may as well be considered as the enduring legacy of patriarchy, which does not want women to occupy very important positions in the issues that affect them. In Africa, women take precedence in their indigenous spirituality model of religion so much that they do not undergo the series of abusive treatments that colonial imperialism introduced. It was, however, unbearable that a system that had claimed to come with numerous benefits for them was the fervent antagonist to their identity freedom. They would, however, challenge this stigma by creating a healthy atmosphere for themselves where they become active individuals in the transformation of the religion through crusades and taking up some ecumenical works that helped them in ways that are seen in the contemporary world.

African Women and Ecumenical Works During Colonialism Two historical events underpin the beginning of women’s efforts in the spread of Christianity in Africa, for they remain an essentially useful background for understanding the context of development associated with the religion in modern history. In 1874, the Society for Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) was established as an Anglican Mission Department saddled with the responsibility

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of getting Christianity into people’s lives (Prevost 2010).7 As already stated, it is constituted by male European missionaries who brought the ecumenical works to the people in the first instance. As their name implies, they were concerned about spreading the religion among people and converting them to Christianity. It was expected that with their actions planned very well, they would penetrate the interior of the continent as much as possible by creating an atmosphere for the successful implantation of the religion through individuals who have seen themselves as figures working for God. That would eventually be saturated by the European women missionaries too, who have come to experience freedom and simultaneously proliferate the religion on the continent. The SPG created a group department called “The Ladies’ Association.” However, they were given the responsibility to drive more participation from the female demographic. It was impossible to penetrate African women, given their excessive patriarchy and moral principles. The Ladies Association, as it would later become known, occupied an unusually important position and played essential roles in penetrating the African world by swinging into action, campaigning to people, and making them understand the very importance of the new religion.8 Apparently, this meant facing some serious issues in the process. For one, it was morally questionable for Christians to promote spiritual dividends while simultaneously making racist comments and subjecting others to subjugation based on their race. In the same vein, how will it be possible to convince the woman demographic, who had hitherto enjoyed unalloyed freedom and access to reasonable political power, to accept a spiritual system where they would not have the opportunity to take leadership positions? In fact, such a character of exclusion endures even in contemporary times, in which female leaders in ecumenical teachings are viewed with disdain. Julius Gathogo stresses how badly excluded women were in Christianity in the postcolonial era, and the politics they had to play to facilitate their torrential development (Gathogo 2010).9 Having earmarked the various assignments expected of the group for them in 1874, they became deliberate with their actions and began to undertake a series of actions as long as they would dramatically improve the conditions of religion in various African societies. Seeking to dislocate the people from their indigenous religious activities required plans, and they came prepared. Consequently, a team led by Emily Lawrence was sent to Madagascar in 1874 just to propagate the religion, and it was by this time that the redefinition of Christianity became paramount during colonialism. It thus became an important threshold for the enhancement of the religion. African women participated positively in the whole process, using their feminine power. Left to the men alone, some experiences would have challenged the spread of the religion. For one, men are superficially interested in becoming instruments of ecumenical spread. More importantly, the fact that they were facing serious economic problems prompted them to work tirelessly in European industries, which served as a significant distraction, making ecumenical contributions unnecessary and uncelebrated. This meant that for the church to survive,

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women had to play crucial roles that would transform the religion and put it on the right trajectory, as against the Islamic religion which was already gaining maximum attention. The European women sent on the errand did their due diligence and became very circumspect in their assignments. No doubt, they understood the magnitude of the assignment for which they had been allocated, and they swung into action in ways to increase the patronage community in Africa. A number of African females will only join the work if there is evidence of success. In fact, they needed to create projects that would convince them before they could gain their attention and invest their emotions into spreading Christianity too. The intervention of the Ladies Association, especially as front-lined by Emily Lawrence, created an equally amazing threshold in colonial engagements. It is safe to say, for example, that having installed the system of colonialism in different African countries, the character of European patriarchy was also baptized into the new reality. In the meantime, the politics of seclusion that European women have earlier faced within their homeland environments have been smuggled into the continent through imperialism. Therefore, this reveals the urgency with which a recalibration of the new religious systems was needed. In essence, Emily Lawrence, who was posted to Madagascar, was expected to stir up some actions that aligned with the yearnings of the people. In other words, Christianity became an instrument of social mobilization for Europeans in Africa and simultaneously became the material with which the extreme patriarchy that colonialism installed would be dislodged. But how does one fight a system that has already infiltrated people’s bloodstreams? This is where the undertaking of progressive programs became necessary and exigent. It was after they evaluated the outstanding contributions that she made that the African women became convinced and joined in their ecumenical crusades. This means Lawrence and other leading European females could drive support from Africa by first addressing issues confronting the women as a collective. Without a blueprint for how they would radically experience change, it was impossible to guarantee their freedom. African women in Madagascar began to take part when they saw the developmental project introduced to their space by the crusaders of the religion. By creating schools and establishing some social programs, some Malagasy women, for example, became incorporated into the Anglican community, where they began to scheme ways to contribute to the rapid spread of the religion.10 They also  became the compass of the religion within their space. These women began to operate as active participants, using the new platform to promote the feminist principles of their African environment. More than can be imagined, they began using their domestic responsibilities as a launchpad to promote the Christian religion, which helped them in many ways. First, they nurtured a new generation of Africans who, from their formative periods, were disposed to the Christian religion and inadvertently embraced it as their primary choice. They are the shoulders upon which the ecumenical pillars of the period after colonialism rested. By the time they entered the 1900s, they had made considerable

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progress in spreading the religion across different places. Not before long, a number of African societies began to see how connected religion was to their emancipation from the otherwise impenetrable colonial patriarchy. More than they imagined, it became a platform they used to advance their ambitions while simultaneously promoting the religion. Gradually but very consistently, African women began to take crucial measures to advance their religious beliefs. It is imperative to mention that some African societies were facing damning social problems, including sexual harassment, domestic violence, and character assassination. These issues were not unconnected to the excessive patriarchal system that manifested in some African societies. This moral deficit in some countries allowed European female Christians to advertise their religion by exploiting that moral vulnerability. This means that as much as they could provide the necessary assistance to the affected demographic by creating an atmosphere where they were respected and well-treated, the acceptance of the religion was an inevitable reality. Therefore, as the missionaries created schools and hospitals in many African societies, it was a question of survival for women to embrace the religion.11 For the most important reasons, it already enhanced the inclusion of females; it also condemned the extreme behavior against women while challenging the foundation of inequity in their communities. African women became convinced, and in the end, they rose to the occasion to become active crusaders of the Christian religion. The female child was rescued from the molestations she had encountered before then, and their mothers were attracted to it, so they became indispensable members of the religion. They joined and helped fortify it, as they canvassed people to embrace it where necessary and also encouraged some form of inclusion that guaranteed their safety. The Church Missionary Society (CMS) equally played a key role in enabling women’s activities in church services. The rapid advancement of women’s participation in church work during colonialism was influenced by the unwavering advocacy of inclusion directly and indirectly preached by those involved in denominational activities. A team of women from this denomination was sent to Uganda with similar assignments as the earlier Christians who were sent to Madagascar to promote the religion there.12 The intention was actually to turn Africa into a place where Christians increase in numbers and have much influence in their social and economic engagements. It was apparent that African women were seen as instruments of turning religion into a generally acceptable creed. Since they had the power to control their domestic involvement, conversion of otherwise hardhearted people would be easier, which would enhance the coverage of more space than usual. It was generally understood that the women involved had a sense of belonging and freedom, as that was necessary to stand strongly within the religious community and their sociopolitical environment. The team of women sent to Uganda helped change the orientation of women there and sent them the right signal to ensure that they contained the wild deeds that had been directed toward them for so long. More than one

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would have imagined, they were very active and immediately penetrated the Ugandan women’s community. These women used religion as a platform to negotiate their ways in the extreme patriarchy of their environment, as that was important for their recognition and inclusion. If the colonizers had marginalized them politically by gradually and steadily removing them from important offices, despite their significant contributions, they needed a respite and something capable of claiming that space for them back. It was generally apparent that Christianity seemed to be the only possible option at this time. They, therefore, began to use the medium as an agency to fight back. On the occasion that they were not appropriately recognized or incorporated into the politics of their country, it was evident that they would fight back using other means. But while this was their ambition, they did not address the challenge in a hostile manner, as they wanted to use their feminine power to change things and challenge the authority. They catered to children and opened their arms to other women suffering any form of social discrimination or economic problems. They provided them with the necessary environment of safety, and that ignited the interest of a number of them. They began to participate actively and joined the expedition to expand the frontiers of Christianity in Africa. Their feminine spirit is captured by the conclusion of Heather Sharkey that they reinforced identity politics using religion (Sharkey 2011).13 Meanwhile, the actions and engagements of CMS were a consolidation of what had already occurred in the Ugandan religious atmosphere. Before them, the Protestant church had already made waves and enjoyed some level of patronage. However, the character of the Protestant church is quite different because it accommodated European sentiment and therefore functioned in that specific direction. However, with CMS, it was really a better choice for Africans because it spoke to their sentiment and addressed sociocultural problems that they faced. In every way possible, what cannot be overemphasized is that it worked alongside others for the reenactment of feminist agitations and recorded an aggressive extension of their inclusion beyond their religious views. Apparently, religion became an important instrument for the renegotiation of their space in the unfolding political system that alienated them from all forms of power to decide and affect their world positively. Although the aggressiveness of women in Christianity then cannot be compared with what would eventually happen in the postcolonial time, nonetheless, they began to be involved and set the tone for the practice of the new religion in their space. Since they held strong voices in the new religion, it became more than a spiritual platform for them. They began to use Christianity as a haven for cultural renaissance. Naturally, it is not unexpected that they would embrace the religion without having to inject their indigenous ideas into it. They used this very effectively, and that speaks to the ways that religion was employed during the period. We should never underestimate the power of freedom in determining what people want and how they seek it in their attempt to actualize their ambitions. The constant expansion of African women Christians in the colonial era was

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substantially triggered by the infiltration of European women crusaders into Africa, who were using the opportunity to run away from the pangs of oppression that patriarchy was showing them. From the 1900s onward, more of these females trooped en masse into Africa, having acknowledged the possibility of their freedom to do ecumenical work overseas. This leads to the introduction of Christian groups on the continent with similar assignments. In the early period of the twentieth century, particularly after 1900, the British women missionaries imported another strand of feminist religious believers into the continent called the “Mother’s Union.”14 From the name of the group, it can be inferred that they are a group with specific interests and assignments. The carving of their name was meant to achieve dual purposes. For one, they wanted to appease their male missionary counterparts, who were growing very uneasy about the dramatic deviation of their women overseas against their creed at home. Two, they are genuinely interested in changing the African world from a women’s perspective. As long as men cannot do the roles of women, especially get emotionally close to them, it is relatively easy to incorporate them into the existing religious crusaders to spread the gospel in Africa. Their popularity grew very rapidly, apparently for reasons that are not unconnected to their demonstration of seriousness and commitment to the freedom of women. Especially in Uganda, Madagascar, Nigeria, and other African countries, the realization that these women would accelerate the growth of the religion contributed to their immediate absorption into the society. Initially, they primarily operated within the domestic sphere, where they utilized their matrilineal power to control the narratives of Christianity within the household. While they primarily had their children under control, they also influenced the decisions of their husbands, especially as related to the religion itself. Not long after, they began to gather some authority within the church in the manner that their male counterparts did, and while this ruffled a number of people, they eventually grew into it. Prior to the ascendancy of the Mother Union, different countries in Africa treated their women with disdain, with their hostilities against the women reflected in such acts of violence meant to discourage them from participating in actual sociopolitical activities that may win them legitimacy to power and encourage them to stand toe to toe with their male colleagues. However, the establishment of such Christian groups as have already been identified means that issues such as those are swiftly responded to in the interest of women. To the extent that the African women Christians challenged the inequity that encouraged such imbalance, the new century therefore came with glistering hope for them. Bridging the gap between their African culture and European politics of exclusion, the African women who were Christians in the period began to operate in a clerical capacity, as against the popular restrictions that European Christian women had faced for a long time. Apparently, the fact that the religion triumphed even under that environment encouraged the two parties, that is, the European Christian women and their African types, for that formed a formidable unit in the popularization of the religion. However, there were

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some ideological differences that almost brought notable changes to their engagements. For the British Christian women, they were used to a professional life in Britain, and that affected the way they understood the world of others. In fact, they judged others by that standard, and that created a considerable rupture in the process of religious expansion. The African women Christians, however, have a different orientation. They remain the nurturers of homes and the harbingers of domestic politics. They take issues of empowerment differently, as they conceived the idea in a different manner from their European counterparts. African women saw themselves as complementing their male counterparts and not antagonizing them. This did not sit well with Europeans, and that almost caused an ideological quandary. But eventually, they succeeded in turning religion into a generally useful instrument and became more involved in issues affecting their existence through religion.

Ideological Conflict in Ecumenical Works As much as the religious atmosphere on the continent was considered a virgin area to explore and dominate, it was obvious that misconceptions of what constituted spirituality and culture among Africans would become another reason for ideological conflict. It was bad enough that European missionaries altogether saw the blacks as individuals with a horrible sense of metaphysical understanding, for whom the need for enlightenment was immediately necessary. More perplexing was that they would not generally assimilate them into the fold of Christianity, especially trusting them with leadership roles, because of the assumption that they are inherently inferior in thinking. That was the foundation upon which the ecumenical crusades were founded, and that extended to the initial treatment given to the women when they joined the religion. Without having something with which they could identify, the project of assimilating the religion was dead on arrival, and it was this belief that superficially changed the perception of Europeans toward Africans when the crusades began. Although the souls of Africans were the target of these European missionaries, it was evident that they would only achieve that when they set rolling practices that would align with their sentiments. Given that it was possible that they could use the institutional advantage in their favor, the consequences would be too harsh on their assignments generally. As such, they created grounds for ideological conflict in the process, and that would be examined here. Contrasts in their ideological views began with the irreconcilable cultural perceptions that Europeans and Africans have, especially on some universal issues. On the issue of marriage, for example, Europeans have a preference for monogamy, and based on their claim of intellectual superiority, they judge any civilization or culture that does not follow that orientation. In other words, they already have the mindset to undermine any group of people who do not perceive the marital system in this way. For one, such a mindset sets a very dangerous precedent for their eschatological intentions, and people who have

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opposing views would be suspicious of their objectives. Meanwhile, unless the people see reasons for what you bring to them, they do not have any moral obligation to accept and embrace the ideas that are introduced to them. Whereas it is an ironic contradiction that European women Christians, who practiced a monogamous culture and endured extensive oppression in the hands of their privileged patriarchs, were ruffled by the idea that Africans, for example, upheld a polygamous culture yet enjoyed more equitable dynamics between their males and females in their spiritual works. But then, the intention to turn the situation into maximum gains for themselves overrides their ability to accept that cultural values are unique only when they are different. Contrary to their monogamy culture, Africans had no contempt for polygamy, even when a handful of them practiced it too. More than likely, a large number of Africans of the period preferred polygamy in ways that nonmembers of that cultural identity would find unpleasant. But then, that was their orientation, and they maintained a consistent standard in their domestic welfare by bestowing the women their deserved respect and honor as members of their cultural environment. Polygamy was a symbol of strength for men and an emblem of economic capacity. For the women, however, it became an institution of sisterhood, a system of unity, and a practice that harmonized their differences.15 With the ways that Africans managed their polygamy marital institution, it was apparent that they consolidated their ideological philosophy with the system by allowing a matriarchal hierarchy that allocates power and responsibilities to the extent that some cultures believe that marriage is an institution for learning, especially for young women who, in many cases, were not exposed to adequate sociocultural ideas. Under a polygamous setting, they would be tutored by elder wives, and more interestingly, they could enjoy maximum care and support from them. To that extent, polygamy offers a support system that helped transform their society. This arrangement was alien to Europeans, and they wanted to intervene in the organization because it conflicted with their ideological projections and orientations. That became a very big problem for African women Christians in colonial times. In a religion in which they would actively participate in its dissemination, it was apparent that European dissatisfaction with polygamy profoundly impacted African Christian women beyond recognition. Their husbands, who would be allowed into the fold of Christianity, were castigated based on their perception of marriage, and that affected the female demographic a lot. Men who had more than one wife would be compelled to leave all but one as a precondition for baptizing them. This came as an onslaught and a direct attack on their females, who, in most cases, would have to undergo the emotional torture that came with that development. It is noteworthy to mention that they did not have problems with their husbands having more than one wife, as that was a tradition they were closely familiar with. To now abandon that system under the impression that they wanted to embrace Christianity was something they could not fathom. Even if the husbands were enthusiastic about their newfound religion to the extent of allowing that compromise, it became strangely

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difficult for the women to navigate their ways both in the religious worldview and in their traditional dealings. This ideological quandary ultimately affected the African women Christians of the time, as those who were victims of the development had to perform extraordinary tasks in raising their children. Apparently, fathers abandoned them in attempts to please their newfound religion, and that came with grave consequences for the promotion of Christianity in the period. Female circumcision was another cultural behavior and engagement that singled out Africans from their European counterparts. For the former, circumcision is a cultural act that signals maturity and readiness to take on the challenges of other phases of human existence. Missionaries generally did not receive that aspect of their culture with any sense of diplomacy, notably because they already believed, albeit erroneously, that African ideas and ideals were not demonstrative of logical thinking or progressive orientation. Therefore, their response to some of these cultural practices was hostile rather than diplomatic. They never believed that such cultural practices could be seen as a way of managing their sociocultural interrelationships in a way that would bring maximum gains and advantages to the people. Meanwhile, their awareness of the African circumcision practice was immediate, but their policies against it were deliberately delayed for very obvious reasons. First, they wanted to gain maximum patronage from the people before they began to introduce doctrinal behavior that would sanitize the system and give purity to their religion. That suggests that a large number of African converts were technically hoodwinked by the timeline of European disaffection with the practice. Nonetheless, they were determined to pursue the plans of their religion, even if it meant that they would suffer emotional and personal consequences in the process. Many Protestant fathers faced stiff opposition from the ecumenical committees. In some cases, they were forced to sign an agreement that they would not circumcise their daughters as a precondition for maintaining their position within the church. The backlash of this development is that the African women Christians in the church faced conflicts that overstretched their beliefs. In the church, it was emotionally difficult for the daughters of these Protestant fathers and the non-Protestant ones, for they were ridiculed for supporting or wanting to get circumcised in satisfaction of their cultural ideas. On the other hand, they faced critical abuse in society for holding the Christian ideal above their indigenous values. This suggests that they potentially stood in a helpless position, for they would not find the right man to marry in the cultural environment. The consequences of this are numerous and dreadful. At the surface level, they are confronted with the double tragedy of in-house criticism and psychological trauma as a result of their faith; at the deeper level, however, they feel betrayed by the church with which they identified and sought succor in all ramifications. In fact, some of the Protestant ladies felt so connected to their cultural values that they went out of their ecumenical injunctions to perform cultural rites to satisfy their conscience. By making themselves available for

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circumcision, they proved that religious values can actually be consolidated with cultural ideas, as both of them are not mutually exclusive.

Conclusion The participation of women in the extension of Christianity in Africa deserves special mention. They used their feminine power to influence as much as affect the spread of the religion, especially from the beginning of the 1900s to the point of independence. Most of them became actively involved in missionary work over time and faced critical challenges in the course of their involvement. Despite the overwhelming nature of their experiences, they remained steadfast, upholding both their African philosophy and Christian values. This indicates that their embrace of the new religion itself is a ground for several contradictions, which they made maximum use of to produce anticipated results. The character of their Christian religion was inevitably changed to accommodate the existing indigenous values so that they would not risk identity or gender inequality. For their European female colleagues, they saw the prospect in Africa and realized that it was useful for the enhancement of their freedom. Since they had limited freedom in Europe, they sought the opportunity to enjoy freedom even if it meant volunteering for offshore ecumenical works. For their African counterparts, however, they were faced with initial challenges ranging from the difference between what they held sacred and what they were now forced to accommodate. No matter what, they would not allow the new religion to deprive them of the cultural privileges they enjoyed before the ascension of Europeans, and neither would they allow themselves to be stuck in the process of evangelization. Initially, there was a considerable degree of collaboration between them as they became the go-to individuals for European women Christians too. It was practically impossible for European Christians to get the attention of males, as that would expose their undertakings to some critical challenges, including but not limited to a rapid backlash by their male missionaries and also their racist instinct. It was, therefore, necessary for a form of connection between the European female Christians and their potential African female converts, as that was necessary for a deeper understanding of the religion and the determination to work for similar purposes. Meanwhile, the European female missionaries already face some ideological challenges within the religion itself. Left to their male counterparts, the works of evangelization were expected to be consolidated by them and not unilaterally taken to the extent of challenging their power. They have reasons to hold this position. One, the Bible is unpretentious about the back-benching roles expected for the women to take in their environment. Anything done in contravention of these injunctions was seen as an outright violation of the sanctity of the religion and should be adequately discouraged. But the European women missionaries did not see issues from their perspective, as they believed that male actions reinforced patriarchal sentiment.

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But since they made inroads into African religious space, African women got attracted to the religion but were conflicted by a number of doctrinal differences between it and their indigenous religious practices. It was, nonetheless, not seen as a reason for abandoning the religion. Many saw the connection between European Christianity and colonialism, and since the latter took away their economic and political power through their preference for male inclusion in everything, the church became a credible alternative where it was possible to launch their agenda against patriarchy. They manifested their ambitions in churches in many different ways. Some became useful in the circulation of the religion by volunteering as individuals to do outreach to people who had yet to embrace the religion. In some other cases, they created groups that had the prerogative to attend to the desires of the females. Although they faced very critical challenges, they continued with determination until they helped create a unique identity for themselves within their religion. Before the termination of colonialism, they had contributed massively to the spread of Christianity and were also involved in the enablement of female unions and societies within the church, and all these affirm the underlying justification for the allowance of European women Christians into the engagement in the first instance. Much as their male counterparts made a significant difference in spreading the religion in Africa, they also actively participated in sustaining it and making it speak to their issues in different ways.

Notes 1. Elizabeth, Prevost, The Communion of Women: Missions and Gender in Colonial Africa and the British Metropole (London: Oxford University Press, 2010). 2. Olav SñveraÊs, On Church-Mission Relations in Ethiopia 1944–1969 With Special Reference to the Evangelical Church Mekane Yesus and the Lutheran Missions (Norway: Oslo, 1974). 3. Rachel McCleary and Barro Robert, “Religion and Economy,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 20 (2) (2006): 49–72. 4. Francisco Gallego and Woodberry Robert, “Christian Missionaries and Education in Former Colonies: How Competition Mattered,” Journal of African Economies, 19 (3) (2010): 294–329. 5. Edward Berman, “African Responses to Christian Mission Education,” Africa Studies Review, 17 (3) (1974): 527–540. 6. Judith Shapiro, “Ideologies of Catholic Missionary Practice in a Postcolonial Era,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 23 (1981): 130–149. 7. Shapiro, “Ideologies of Catholic Missionary Practice in a Postcolonial Era.” 8. Jean Comaroff, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985). 9. Julius Gathogo, “Mercy Oduyoye as the Mother of African Women’s Theology,” Journal of Theology and Religion in Africa, 34 (1), (2010): 1–18. 10. Musimbi Kanyoro, “African Women’s Quest for Justice: A Review of African Women’s Theology,” Pacific Journal of Theology 2 (1996): 8–22.

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11. Mercy Oduyoye and Musimbi Kanyoro, The Will to Arise: Women, Tradition, and the Church in Africa (Oregon: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2005). 12. Thomas Beidelman, Colonial Evangelism: A Socio-historical Study of an East African Mission at the Grassroots (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). 13. Heather Sharkey, “The Communion of Women: Missions and Gender in Colonial Africa and the British Metropole,” The American Historical Review, 16 (3) (2011): 769–770. 14. Sharkey, “The Communion of Women: Missions and Gender in Colonial Africa and the British Metropole.” 15. Toyin Falola and Nana Amponsah, Women’s role in sub-Saharan Africa (USA: ABC–CCLO, Greenwood Press, CA, 2012).

Bibliography Berman, Edward. “African Responses to Christian Mission Education,” Africa Studies Review, 17 (3) (1974): 527–540. Beidelman, Thomas. Colonial Evangelism: A Socio-historical Study of an East African Mission at the Grassroots. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. Falola, Toyin and Amponsah Nana. Women’s role in sub-Saharan Africa, USA: ABC– CCLO, Greenwood Press, CA, 2012. Gallego, Francisco and Robert, Woodberry. “Christian Missionaries and Education in Former Colonies: How Competition Mattered,” Journal of African Economies, 19 (3) (2010): 294–329. Gathogo, Julius. “Mercy Oduyoye as the Mother of African Women’s Theology,” Journal of Theology and Religion in Africa, 34 (1), (2010): 1–18. Jean, Comaroff. Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985). Kanyoro, Musimbi. “African Women’s Quest for Justice: A Review of African Women’s Theology,” Pacific Journal of Theology 2 (1996): 8–22. Marty, P.F. 2007. The changing nature of information work in museums. J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci., 58: 97–107. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.20443. McCleary, Rachel and Robert, Barro. “Religion and Economy,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 20 (2) (2006): 49–72. Nyengele, M.F. 2004. African women’s theology, gender relations, and family systems theory: Pastoral theological Anowa. African women considerations and guidelines for care and counselling, Peter Lang, Oxford. Oduyoye, Mercy and Kanyoro, Musimbi. The Will to Arise: Women, Tradition, and the Church in Africa, Oregon: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2005. Phiri, I.A. 1997. Women, Presbyterianism and Patriarchy: Religious Experiences of Chewa Women in Central Malawi. Blantyre, Malawi: CLAIM. Prevost, Elizabeth. The Communion of Women: Missions and Gender in Colonial Africa and the British Metropole (London: Oxford University Press, 2010). Shapiro, Judith. “Ideologies of Catholic Missionary Practice in a Postcolonial Era.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 23 (1981): 130–149.

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Sharkey, Heather. “The Communion of Women: Missions and Gender in Colonial Africa and the British Metropole,” The American Historical Review, 16 (3) (2011): 769–770. SñveraÊs, Olav. On Church-Mission Relations in Ethiopia 1944–1969 With Special Reference to the Evangelical Church Mekane Yesus and the Lutheran Missions. Norway: Oslo, 1974.

CHAPTER 30

Ethiopianism in Africa Ethan R. Sanders

Introduction Ethiopianism is best understood as a group of ideas or as a “thought style” according to St. Clair Drake, one of the most important scholars who has studied its effects in Africa (Drake 1970, pp.  50–54). As a collection of ideas, Ethiopianism has influenced many movements, ideologies, and religious and cultural traditions in the Americas as well as throughout the continent of Africa. Therefore, a full understanding of Ethiopianism in Africa needs to view the phenomenon through the lenses of intellectual, social, cultural, religious, and political history. The genesis of Ethiopianism began in the late 1700s by Anglophone diasporic Africans in North America and Britain,1 and centered on biblical verses like Psalms 68:31 which in the King James translation read, “Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God.” Verses like this and others that spoke positively about the people of Cush and Ethiopia were soon being interpreted by Afro-Christians to mean that not only did Ethiopia—which they equated with all Africa—have a glorious past, but according to biblical prophecy they would also have a glorious future as a people once they turned to God. This “empowering exegesis,” as Ogbu Kalu called it, developed multiple themes and ideas as it simultaneously spread deeper and more broadly throughout black Christian circles, so that by the late 1800s there was a fairly clear set of ideas and a “language of Ethiopianism” spoken by many Afro-Christians throughout the world (Kalu 2007, p. 264; Barnes 2017, p. 3).

E. R. Sanders (*) Department of History, Regis University, Denver, CO, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. E. Barnes, T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48270-0_30

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One of the main outgrowths of this form of thinking was the embrace and prioritization of an “African” identity and the sense of belonging to an African family or nation of people. No matter where in the world they lived, those whose ancestral home could be traced to the continent were members of the African family, had a homeland in the continent, and belonged to the African nation of people with distinct characteristics. Against racist notions of the day, Ethiopianist thinkers argued that Africans were not inferior and that after unifying and turning to God they would establish a unique continental civilization and make a contribution on the world stage among the sisterhood of nations. This was clearly bound up with Western notions of progress and modernity (Moses 1990, p. 143; Sidbury 2007, p. 7). Most early Ethiopianists accepted that Africa was behind other nations when it came to civilization, and therefore believed they needed to borrow what was best from other cultures, and particularly elements of Western education, as they set out to build their own unique civilization which had received unique God-given gifts to be cultivated and shared with humanity. For all early Ethiopianists this “redemption” of Africa, or the “regeneration” of the continent, included the embrace of Christianity. For many, the initiative for spreading the faith, and stretching out their hands to God, was to come primarily from “Africans” themselves. This in turn spurred many blacks in the West who identified as Africans to take up the call to return to their homeland and help spread the gospel. Later in the twentieth century, some who held these views of Africa’s redemption began to drop the exclusively Christian features of the Ethiopianist vision. Two of the most important trans-regional African thinkers to help spread Ethiopianist ideas across the Atlantic in the nineteenth century were Alexander Crummell (1819–1898) and Edward Wilmot Blyden (1832–1912). Born in the Western Hemisphere, these two self-described sons of Africa spent much of their lives crisscrossing the Atlantic, and their academic works on Ethiopianist themes helped to establish it as an intellectually respectable mode of thought. Both men were ordained ministers—Crummell with the Episcopal Church and Blyden with the Presbyterian—and both men were also respected intellectuals—Crummell being the first black graduate of the University of Cambridge— and both spent time as academics at Liberia College and elsewhere. Many of Crummell and Blyden’s speeches and addresses were published and their ideas were widely shared and reprinted in newspapers and journals throughout Western and Southern Africa during their lifetimes and after (Drake 1970, p. 54; Blyden to Cook, 7 March 1910; Moses 1989, pp. 23, 78–80, 108–110, 215–216, 285–293; Barnes 2017, pp.  20–21, 25–26; Mbembe 2017, pp.  25–26; Bates 2011; Odamtten 2019, pp. vii–xv, 19, 27; Barnes 2016, pp.  130–132). Crummell’s The Future of Africa (1862) and Africa and America (1891), and Blyden’s Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (1887/1888), explored, examined, and explained the themes of Ethiopianism laid out above. These writings included commentaries on the prophecy of Psalms 68:31, and thoughts on the roadmap to Africa’s redemption.

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The impact of the Ethiopianist ideas of Crummell, Blyden, and others reached their height in sub-Saharan Africa during the two-and-a-half decades on either side of the turn of the nineteenth–twentieth centuries (c.1872–1928), but as Africans in the continent wrestled with these ideas it spurred action and new ideas that would have long-lasting effects for generations to come. I argue that Ethiopianism helped to lay much of the groundwork for many African movements such as the spread of an “African” identity, the growth of African-­ focused history, the promotion of African-run educational institutions, the exploration and popularization of “African” cultural customs, the rise of African nationalisms and anti-colonialism, the creation of the Pan-African Movement, and the beginning of a separatist church movement. While the broader separatist church movement at this time had several strands, some of which like the Zionist and Messianic did not grow directly out of strictly Ethiopianist ideas, together they created palpable momentum which ultimately blossomed into the explosion of African-Initiated Churches (or AICs) that by the turn of the twenty-first century were home to nearly a quarter of all Christians in the continent.2 Thus, Ethiopianism has played an undeniably important role in the growth of African Christianity. This chapter will examine the three main regions of Sub-Saharan Africa to briefly explore some of the outcomes of Ethiopianism during its most influential period by looking at its impact on education, politics, and religious and cultural movements through examining the ideas and movements of some of its key intellectual, religious, and political figures.

Ethiopianism in West Africa [T]herefore, let us always remember that we are Africans, and that we ought to sing African songs, and that in African style and fashion. The innumerable multitude in Heaven, which the Seer of Patmos saw, were of “all nations and kindreds and peoples and tongues,” African, Briton, French, Icelander, and consequently were making their ascriptions each in his own tongue, only the theme of their ascriptions was one. —Mojala Agbebi (1902)

In the middle of the nineteenth century, at a time when missionary interest in Africa was really beginning to take off, the most influential Protestant missionary strategist was Henry Venn (1796–1873) of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in Great Britain. He and like-minded missionaries talked of building an “indigenous church” in Africa, one which would become self-­ supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating (Shenk 1977, p.  16; Shenk 1983). Blyden later praised Venn for his “clarity and judgement” in recognizing the importance of national distinctions and the unique contribution of the African race to Christianity (Barnes 2016, p. 142). To this end, the first African Bishop of the Anglican Church, Samuel Ajayi Crowther (c.1809–1891), was enthroned in 1864 as the bishop over all of “the countries of Western Africa beyond the limits of the Queen’s dominions” (Walls 1992, p. 19). By the end of the twentieth century, however, feelings of racial superiority had grown in

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many missionary-run churches, opportunities for African advancement had dried up, and Africans found it nearly impossible to avoid the paternalism and control of white missionaries whose demands for greater uniformity to European church practices became ever more cumbersome. At the same time, Ethiopian ideas and racial pride were on the rise in West Africa, spreading through both the writings of continental and diasporic African thinkers, but also through encounters with new black missionaries of the diaspora who began arriving on West African shores. West African newspapers such as The Gold Coast Aborigines, The Gold Coast Methodist Times, The Negro, the Weekly News, and the Lagos Weekly Record often ran stories at the end of the century which highlighted great figures of Africa’s past—sacred and secular— and promoted a positive view of Africa’s future as well as pride in belonging to a larger African nation of people. Many of the black missionaries who came belonged to churches like the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (AMEZ) which had been founded in the Western hemisphere due to similar issues of paternalism in white-controlled denominations.3 Even though West African Ethiopianists largely promoted various forms of cooperation with Europeans, this did not mean that they were above criticizing white leaders—ecclesiastical or political. In particular, a number of West Africans began demanding more leadership roles in missionary-run churches. In many instances they remained within mission-­run churches, pushing for reforms from within. In others, they joined black-led diasporic denominations. And, finally, some broke away altogether and started completely new and independent West African churches. Ethiopianist connections can be traced to the earliest black Protestant churches in West Africa which were established with the arrival of North American black settlers in Sierra Leone in the 1790s. These “creoles” founded Methodist and Baptist churches that for decades were largely free from white missionary oversight (Sidbury 2007, pp. 9, 91–98; Fyfe 1961). From an early period, North American Ethiopianists like Daniel Coker of the AME served as missionaries to West Africa to help prop up these congregations and spread the gospel. Coker was less interested in the political identity of the territories, but as “a descendant of Africa” his charge was to help “the rising generation of Africa.” He felt surely the fulfillment of the prophecy of Psalms 68 was starting to unfold in the continent. He encouraged “all my dear African Brethren in America” that Africa “only wants industrious, informed, and Christian people, to make it one of the greatest nations in the world.” Coker was trying to call an African people and nation into being (Sidbury 2007, pp. 142, 165, 176; Campbell 1998, pp. 12–13, 69–70; Coker 1820, pp. 17, 23, 42–44, 47). The first church to be controlled by continental Africans was the West African Methodist Society founded in Sierra Leone in 1844. This church, led by recaptive Africans, had broken away from the creole-led Methodists because they were treated like second-class parishioners and they had no chance for advancement in church leadership. None of these independent congregations lasted long as by 1861 both groups had amalgamated with the United Methodist

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Free Church in England (Fyfe 1961). However, by the end of the century a second wave of black North American missionary activity would coincide with the rising tide of Ethiopianist sentiment in the continent. The AME restarted their work in Sierra Leone and Liberia in the early 1870s and 1880s and the AMEZ established a church in the Gold Coast (later Ghana) by the end of the 1890s. A number of West Africans joined these denominations started by the diasporic Africans and helped to establish new churches. These churches remained doctrinally Methodist, but as one Gold Coast African bragged at the time, “The Church is composed of Africans and entirely governed and worked by Africans” (Campbell 1998, pp.  88–90; Kimble 1963, pp.  162–163; Ayegboyin and Ishola 1997, pp. 47–48; Jacobs 1995, pp. 8–9). While numerically small, the leaders of these churches had a disproportional influence among the educated elites in a place like the Gold Coast, where many leading ecclesiastical and social figures such as Attoh Ahuma (formerly Rev. Samuel Solomon), Atta Osam Pinanko, and James Aggrey left the Methodist church to join the AMEZ (Geiss 1968, pp. 145–148). The most respected and high profile of the West African Ethiopianists to work from within a missionary church was James “Holy” Johnson (c.1836–1917), a son of recaptive slaves who was born in Sierra Leone. Johnson served as an Anglican priest in Sierra Leone from 1863 to 1874. At this time his thought developed along African and racial lines in part because he served in one of the most ethnically diverse territories of Africa. During this period his Ethiopianist ideas began to flourish and his sermons and writings were central to the spread and popularization of Ethiopianist ideas (Ayandele 1963, pp. 490–499; Boahen 2011, p. 22). He wrote about the “national greatness” of Africans and believed that once they reached out their hands to God and embraced Christianity that Africa would “take her place with the most Christian, civilized and intelligent nations of the Earth” (Ayandele 1970, pp.  35, 45; Esedebe 1994, pp. 23). For Johnson, his Christianizing Ethiopianist program would help the people achieve eternal salvation as well as technological and civilizational advance. Johnson firmly believed Africans to be equal to whites, but that their “backwardness” only stemmed from historical and environmental accidents, and could be fixed with faith and education. Regardless of their current place in human progress, Africans had unique attributes and should take pride in their culture, their past, and their future (Ayandele 1970, pp. 44–47, 291–302; Geiss 1968, pp. 184–185). The Anglican Church Missionary Society transferred Johnson to the Lagos Colony in 1874 and he would continue the promotion of his Ethiopianist agenda throughout the rest of his career working in various parts of what is now southern Nigeria. Johnson was an admirer of Venn’s vision and firmly believed that African clergy should be given more and more responsibility and authority in the Church. He was also a defender of the Anglican Native Pastorate system which allowed African clergy to run various churches in Sierra Leone and parts of Yorubaland independently of the CMS. To Johnson’s mind, there were sound theological reasons for European missionaries eventually

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handing the reigns over to African clergy and bishops, and the Native Pastorate system would serve as the cornerstone for building the African Church in the continent. As the years passed, however, it became clearer that the CMS was moving in the opposite direction (Ayandele 1970, pp. 41, 46–47, 301–302; Ayandele 1963, pp. 492–494, 497–498; Ayandele 1964, pp. 87–90). This was brought to a head most poignantly when a group of racist white missionaries successfully removed the only African bishop, and Ethiopianists’ symbol of hope, Samuel Ajayi Crowther in 1890. Johnson responded to this crisis and public humiliation of Crowther by complaining bitterly, and he openly considered breaking from the Anglican Communion and creating an all-African protestant church in the region. Even though some of his admirers followed through and removed their churches from the Anglican Communion, Johnson remained in the Anglican Church for the rest of his life (Ayandele 1970, pp. 226–237; Sanneh 1983, pp. 168–176). At the turn of the century he took up the position of Assistant Bishop of the Niger Delta Pastorate, which he essentially ran independently from the CMS, but the churches under his care remained loyal to the Archbishop of Canterbury and largely retained the Anglican liturgy and form of worship. By the First World War the Pastorate had achieved great success in terms of growth, and was uniquely successful in establishing secondary schools for both boys and girls. For the rest of his life Johnson pursued in vain the creation of new African-run bishoprics, though he remained optimistic about Africa’s future and took solace that work done in the Niger Delta region was at least a partial fulfillment of the Ethiopianist promise of Psalms 68 (Ayandele 1970, pp. 240–251, 264–265, 282, 291; Ayandele 1964, pp. 91–92). One of the most prominent West African Ethiopianists who decided to leave the European-controlled mission churches to form independent African congregations was Johnson’s contemporary, Mojola Agbebi (1860–1917). Largely based in Lagos, Agbebi traveled to other West African countries, Britain, and America and had extensive ties to black trans-Atlantic networks which included Blyden, John E. Bruce of New York, and others. This undoubtedly shaped his cosmopolitan, continental, and pan-ethnic disposition as his writings, both secular and sacred, were all African in outlook, perspective, and aim (Ayandele 1971, pp. 4–7, 13, 30; Okonkwo 1980, pp. 144, 154–155; King 1986, p. 4). In his early years he wrote poetry on Africa’s rise through odes to the leading figures of Africa and the diaspora, praising them for “lead[ing] the race along” (Okonkwo 1980, pp. 145–146). Agbebi’s sense of African unity clearly transferred to the church as well, as he was ecumenically minded and constantly sought to bring African Christians together regardless of denomination. Indeed, by the time of establishing the Native Baptist Church in 1888—the first independent church in Lagos—he had previously done church work for Anglicans, Methodists, and Baptists. After that time, he was involved with the founding of several other African churches and ecumenical associations. He served as the president of the trans-territorial African Baptist Union of West Africa in the early 1900s and also formed the African Communion in 1913 to

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bring all of the independent African Churches in southern Nigeria to work together on common goals, share pulpits, and settle disputes among African Christians (Ayandele 1971, pp. 10–11, 23–25). Even though Agbebi formally broke from the foreign mission bodies in the 1880s, he continued to have respect for the European and American missionary pioneers to Africa and he never developed an anti-white spirit.4 In fact, he led the reconciliation of African and American Baptists in Yorubaland in 1914, so long as Africans played a central role in leadership (King 1986, p.  6; Okonkwo 1980, p. 156). However, as he told the United African Church in 1892 (a congregation established in the wake of the Crowther debacle), he thought local churches should be “governed by Africans, worked by Africans, [and] supported by Africans” (Okonkwo 1980, p. 153). A central thrust of his ministry was based on his reading of scripture and the Apostle Paul’s distinction between the essentials and non-essentials of the Christian faith. This was most famously fleshed out in his widely published “Inaugural Sermon” at the African Church, Bethel in 1902. According to Agbebi, the “preaching of Christ, the triumph of the gospel, the success of practical righteousness” were essential, but everything else in the faith was a matter of preference, and different nations had choices when it came to several elements of their faith. He singled out prayer books and hymn books as “non-essentials” to Christianity and argued that West African Christianity had reached a point “when religious developments demand original songs and original tunes from the African Christians.” In a rebuke of churches in West Africa run by missionaries he claimed that “no one race or nation can fix the particular kind of tunes which will be universally conducive to worship” (Agbebi 1902). In light of this Biblically-based ecclesiology, Agbebi and others like him promoted culturally authentic forms of worship and prayer life. He promoted African ecclesiastical architecture and local forms of dress. In this vein he did away with both his European vestments and his European name, discarding his baptismal name David Vincent Brown for the more authentically African, Mojola Agbebi (King 1986, pp. 9, 13–14). His guiding principle throughout his later ministry was to build the foundation for the Christian Church in Africa which would express an African character, but remain true to the eternal principles of the Christian faith (Ayandele 1971, pp. 9, 12–13; Okonkwo 1980, p. 152). Two of the most important books published by West African Ethiopianists were A Defence of the Ethiopian Movement (1908) by Bandele Omoniyi and J. E. Casely Hayford’s Ethiopia Unbound (1911). Both Africans were educated in Britain and published their works in the UK so as to reach audiences wider than just their fellow Africans. Neither book was interested in local or ethnic issues, but was focused instead on Africans as a whole and the future of the African nation of people. They promoted unity among Africans around the globe, but also endorsed cooperation with whites. Omoniyi (1884–1913) was born in Lagos and became a member of the Ethiopian Progressive Association at the University of Liverpool which published the Ethiopian Review, a magazine created “to create a bond of union between all others of the Ethiopian

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race at home and abroad … and to try and strengthen the friendly relations of the said race and the other races of mankind” (Adi 1998, pp. 11–12). In his defense of Ethiopianism he rebutted the European critics of the movement who thought that its adherents were anti-white anti-imperialists by pointing out that none of the Ethiopianists in Southern or Western Africa wanted “a Blackman’s Republic” but that regardless of location, “we Africans” were merely demanding reforms. He blamed white missionaries for not treating Africans with dignity as well as individual British administrators for not living up to the ideals of British governance. But he called for the “political unity of the white and black people” so that they could work together to advance African civilization. He had high expectations that if Africans were imbued with hope, faith, love, intellect, and a sense of justice, that a “renovated Africa [would] take her proper rank amongst the nations of the world” (Omoniyi 1908, pp. 2, 119, 122–124; Adi 1991). Omoniyi urged his African readers that “unity is strength” and reminded them that they had agency and a role to play in shaping their future (Adi 1991, p. 588). For Casely Hayford (1866–1930), a Gold Coast lawyer and journalist, not only did he inspire his readers that their future was bright, but he argued that the African nation would make a unique and significant contribution to the peoples of the world. In Ethiopia Unbound, considered the first pan-African novel (Adi 2018, pp. 25–26), Casely Hayford was calling on all the sons of Ethiopia—which he clearly equated with all Africans both on the continent and in the diaspora—to join together “in the common cause of uplifting Ethiopia and placing her upon her feet among the nations.” While they could take lessons from the West when it came to education, he thought the African nation of people would one day lead the world morally through their peculiar spiritual strength and altruism. Ethiopia Unbound also promoted the works of Edward Blyden, who was put forward as the key figure in raising African national consciousness. Casely Hayford deemed Blyden even more important than W. E. B. Du Bois or Booker T. Washington because Blyden’s more encompassing outreach “revel[ed] everywhere the African unto himself … to lead him back unto self-respect” (Casely Hayford 2011, pp. 2, 9, 160, 163, 171, 174). Inculcating respect and dignity and building a sense of African identity were at the heart of these early twentieth-century Ethiopianist works.

Ethiopianism in Southern Africa The regeneration of Africa means that a new and unique civilization is soon to be added to the world. … The most essential departure of this new civilization is that it shall be thoroughly spiritual and humanistic—indeed a regeneration moral and eternal! —Pixley ka Isaka Seme (1906)5

In the late 1800s some of the most fertile soil that Ethiopianist thought landed on was in Southern Africa, particularly in the territories that would later

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come together to form the Union of South Africa. Ideas about African identity and Africa’s destiny shaped pursuits for education, influenced local and national politics, and spurred the largest separatist church movement in the continent in the 1880s and 1890s. While there were other tribal-based breakaway Christian churches in the 1870s and early 1880s, Bengt Sundkler has argued that what set apart the Ethiopianist churches was their racial and continental outlook (Sundkler 1961, pp. 38–39, 53–55). Many of these black African church leaders were inspired by the idea of Africa’s redemption, but had also grown disillusioned with many of the more recently arrived white missionary leaders. After years of growing the ranks of African ministers among all Protestant denominations in the 1870s and early 1880s, their numbers began to dwindle as ministers began to face new obstacles and restrictions. African ministers saw their pathways to education cut off by white missionaries who thought they were too valuable as evangelists. Official Church meetings and conferences became segregated, literally leaving black ministers on the outside looking in. This of course compounded feelings of resentment caused by the fact that denominations paid black ministers a fraction of what they paid white ministers for doing the same work. In the words of James Campbell, Ethiopianists could see the contradiction of white missionaries “who preached progress and incorporation while practicing restriction and exclusion” (Campbell 1998, pp.  108–111, 115). Separation for these Ethiopianists then was largely a mix of wanting to remain true to their beliefs and faith practices while doing it in a way that enabled more self-respect and inspired them about the possibilities of the future (Campbell 1998, pp. 207–211; Scott 2004, p. 47). All Protestant mission churches in Southern African territories saw their former ministers and mission-school graduates break off and start their own churches in the 1890s and 1900s—Anglicans, Wesleyan Methodists, German Lutherans, American Congregationalists, Scottish Presbyterians, French Protestants, and the Dutch Reformed Church (Campbell 1998, pp. 114–115, 190–193, 208; Lahouel 1986, pp. 682–683). Of the roughly two dozen new denominations started at this time, two of the most important were the Ethiopian Church founded by Rev. Mangena Mokone (1851–1936) and the Presbyterian Church of Africa established by Rev. P. J. Mzimba (1850–1911). Leaving the Wesleyans in 1892, Mokone wrote a letter to his religious supervisors, which was seen as a type of manifesto of the Ethiopian separatist movement. In it he measured the new missionaries against the yardstick of their own faith and found them not living up to the standards of Christianity.6 Among other grievances, he lamented that white clergy did not minister to sick Africans or even know the names of their congregants. They did not respect their African colleagues, and he wondered, “Where is brotherly love? Where is Christian sympathy?” Despite the hurt, Mokone continued to correspond with his former colleagues, but set out to create a new church that was much more racially conscious. At their opening service in Marabastad outside of Pretoria they hung a banner bedecked with the Ethiopian prophecy of Psalm 68, a prophecy Mokone and the other leaders clearly believed referred to Africa as a

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whole (Campbell 1998, pp. 116–119; Sundkler 1961, pp. 56–57). When Rev. Jacobus Xaba, an articulate early leader in the Church, defended it in the Lovedale magazine in 1897, he claimed that “[t]he aim of the Ethiopian Church is to promote Christianity and unity in the whole continent of Africa” (Xaba 1973, pp. 155–156). At this time the Lovedale Institute, the oldest and most prestigious school in the region run by the Free Church of Scotland, was having its own crisis with African leadership. The Presbyterians had already lost one congregation in Johannesburg in 1896, but in 1898, Rev. P. J. Mzimba, pastor of the Lovedale church, decided to leave with three-fourths of the congregation and a majority of the elders to form the Presbyterian Church of Africa. In their constitution, they portrayed this secession from the Presbytery in positive terms stating that missionaries had completed their mission of helping the native Christians stand on their own. The loss of the most prominent African clergyman at the church connected to their prized Lovedale mission was a huge blow to missionary leaders, more distressing even than the Anglo-­ Boer War 1899–1902. In the coming years this distress was felt by white missionaries of denominations throughout the region who fretted over what to do about the “Ethiopian scare” (Duncan 2012, 2015; Cuthbertson 1991; Sundkler and Steed 2000, p. 835). One of the most unique features of Ethiopianism in South Africa was the connections with Africans of the diaspora. For instance, Mangena Mokone of the Ethiopian Church had been in contact with two South Africans studying at Wilberforce College in the United States, the main institution of higher learning of the AME Church. This eventually led to trans-Atlantic discussions between the two churches and after deliberations the 20 ministers of the Ethiopian Church decided to merge with the larger American-run Ethiopianist denomination in 1897 and become the fifteenth episcopal district of the AME. The move according to Xaba was providential as “The prophecy predicted by the Psalmist, 68, approaches perfection.” The church saw expansive growth under the new AME banner, though in the early years there was little oversight from America and most Africans continued to call the church iTiyopia. But by 1910 they had 40,000 members (Campbell 1998, pp. 131–139). Desires for financial aid and education spurred much of the interest in partnering with the perceived wealthy Africans of America, but scholars have also suggested that economic, political, and social upheaval in Southern Africa in the 1890s and 1900s also increased interest in the Ethiopian movement more broadly (Campbell 1998, pp. 194–197, 207–211; Lahouel 1986, pp. 682–683). After the turn of the century, the Ethiopianist-inspired church movement continued beyond the four territories that would soon become the Union of South Africa. The AME Church made inroads into British Bechuanaland (now Botswana) and the Lozi Kingdom in Barotseland (now part of Zambia), but failed promises of schools and financial mismanagement only enabled these Ethiopianist outposts to last for a few years (Campbell 1998, pp.  190–193; Ranger 2007, pp. 66–67). In Nyasaland at around the same time a young John Chilembwe (1871–1915) was involved in a movement to create African unity

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among Africans in the continent and the United States in order to build schools and “to work towards and pray for the day when the African people shall become an African Christian nation” (Booth and Chilembwe 2008, p.  75). Later in the first half of the twentieth century, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) saw a proliferation of the Ethiopianist churches leaving their mission denominations as well (Ranger 2007, p. 68). As Andrew Barnes has shown, Ethiopianist ideas sparked interest in education and Ethiopianism was the language through which Africans on either side of the Christian Black Atlantic spoke to each other. It was clear that desires to bring about the Christian regeneration of Africa and civilizational uplift necessitated absorbing the most desirable elements of Western education. These ideas were backed by Edward Blyden who believed that education was an even higher and nobler work than politics, and he promoted the complementarity of both liberal and industrial education. Just as in West Africa, several Ethiopianist churches, as well as Ethiopianist-minded individuals endeavored to start new schools. Again, Africans of the continent conversed with African-American educators and debated the best educational models for Africans, such as Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and the missionary models currently in use in the African continent (Barnes 2017, pp. 1–4, 62–63, 89–90, 107–111). Both the AME and the Presbyterian Church of Africa had serious interests in opening schools as well as sending South African students to study in America (Barnes 2017, pp. 112–113; Campbell 1998). Not all Ethiopianist educationalists were from separatist churches, however. Rev. John L.  Dube (1871–1946), who founded what would become the Ohlange Industrial Institute in Natal in 1901, was clearly driven by Ethiopianist ideas though he never broke with the Congregationalists. He wrote about his desires to see the “dawning of a brighter day for the people of Africa. Christianity will usher in a new civilization. … Then shall Africa take her place as a nation among the nations” (Duncan 2015, p. 198). Dube was connected with American thinkers like Bruce and Washington and instituted “practical” education as the foundation of his institute. Interestingly, the lack of specific Christian theological training at Ohlange and the more general promotion of the “uplift and protection of the Black Races of the Fatherland” was attractive to non-Christians as well, and foreshadowed how the more secular elements of the Ethiopianist mode of thought would become more widespread among general African populations later in the twentieth century (Barnes 2017, pp.  62, 125–131; Shepperson 1960, p. 309; Crowder 2004, p. 36). Ethiopianist ideas also shaped political thinking and political action in southern Africa. In fact, many of the educated leaders of the Ethiopianist separatist church movement as well as Ethiopianist educational leaders like John Dube were some of the most prominent political leaders of South Africa during the first decades of the twentieth century (Campbell 1998, p. 151; Barnes 2017, p. 128). While it is tempting to draw direct causal links between Ethiopianists and later anti-colonial territorial nationalist movements, a closer look reveals that much of their political thought and action surrounded either local issues

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or trans-tribal or African concerns, and was marked by cooperation with whites. Clearly these emphases were shaped by their Christian and Ethiopianist thinking. In South Africa the AME publicly eschewed adversarial political protest, and the political interests of its ministers were most often influenced by notions of God’s justice and the belief that all were equal in the eyes of their creator, and therefore their forays into local politics were often to attend to the physical needs of congregants on the basis of self-dignity and equality (Campbell 1998, pp. 152, 211, 231–232). It is of note that Ethiopianist-influenced individuals in Western, Southern, and Eastern Africa were also key in starting trans-­ tribal African organizations that held little regard for colonial boundaries and were more focused on both local and continental or regional issues affecting all Africans regardless of ethnicity.7 Some of these Ethiopianist themes and trends in politics can be seen clearly in the work of Pixley ka Isaka Seme (1881–1951), one of the most prominent trans-Atlantic South Africans of the early twentieth century and a founder of the South African Native National Congress (SANNC), the forerunner of the African National Congress. Educated at both Columbia University and the University of Oxford, Seme gave an award-winning oration at Columbia in 1906 on “The Regeneration of Africa” (Dunton 2003) which highlighted the redemptive element of Ethiopianism and reinforced a trans-ethnic African identity. He opened with a proclamation and a defense of his people, “I am an African, and I set my pride in my race over against a public opinion.” He went on to illustrate the great achievements of the African race and the distinct characteristics of its peoples. He highlighted the principle of equality of the races even while pointing out the differences. Although Africans came from greatness and had a bright future, he put forward that they were behind in certain areas and thus the need to reawaken to achieve their true potential (Seme  1906). As he made clear in an article published in Imvo Zabantsundu explaining the establishment of the SANNC in 1911, he thought that Africans of all tribes were actually “one people” and therefore needed to come together to work on their problems. But Seme also felt that cooperation with non-Africans was a “priceless jewel” and would help lead to civilizational success (Seme 1972, pp.  71–73). The notion that Africans should work with whites was a sentiment shared by many early leaders of the SANNC. In fact, several early leaders of the Congress were Ethiopianist church leaders such as Rev. Henry Reed Ncgayiya, E.  J. Mqoboli, and Abner S.  Mtimkulu, President of the Independent Bantu Methodist Church, or who were clearly men of Ethiopianist thinking like John Dube, the first president of the SANNC, and Seme, who opened the first session by announcing that Ethiopia was stretching forth its hands to God (Lahouel 1986, p. 686). Cooperationist sentiments earned these early political figures the ire of later anti-colonial leaders and they were largely banished from the historical record for years.8

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Ethiopianism in East Africa [A]nd now the way is opened I pray that Africa, my Africa, may be helped to realize herself, in order that she may soon take her place in the sisterhood of nations, and under wise guidance stretch forth her hand to God by serving her day and her generation. —James Aggrey (c.1924)9

Ethiopianism in Eastern Africa became influential at a much later date than in Western or Southern Africa in large part due to fewer connections to the network of trans-Atlantic thinkers and writers. However, even here these ideas influenced Christian religious movements, social and political movements, and fostered a sense of African identity and unity. One of the most unique Christian movements shaped in part by Ethiopianist ideas was the foundation of the African Orthodox Church (AOC) in Uganda by Reuben Mukasa Spartas (1898–1982). The AOC was originally established in America by George McGuire who was closely connected with the Garveyite movement, itself heavily influenced by Ethiopianist ideas. Leading a group of black Episcopalians who sought more ecclesiastical control, McGuire received consecration by a controversial Syriac Orthodox bishop in 1921, giving him and the new church a claim to apostolic succession, although a contested one. McGuire, as the new Patriarch of the African Orthodox Church of the entire world in turn consecrated Daniel William Alexander, a native South African, to become the Archbishop of the Church in South Africa. Spartas had grown up in an Anglican home and had intentions to become an ordained Anglican priest, but after reading about Garvey in The Negro World, had contacted McGuire as early as 1925 asking for more information about the AOC and promising his willingness to “die for the redemption of Africa.” By early 1929 Alexander appointed Spartas to be a lay-reader and the Ugandan officially broke with the Anglican Church and started recruiting all “right-thinking Africans” for the African Orthodox Church. Spartas was eventually ordained as a priest in 1932 by which time the Church had seven congregations, over 1500 adherents throughout Uganda and had established a dispensary, schools, and a printing press. But within two years Spartas became disenchanted with the bona fides of McGuire and Alexander and came under the sway of the Greek Orthodox Church as he felt the Patriarch of Alexandria had a greater claim to apostolic succession and that this communion was the truest and most authentic form of Christianity. His congregations that year came to be known as the African Greek Orthodox Church and over a decade later it finally received recognition from Alexandria in 1946 with Spartas becoming a “patriarchal vicar,” and later, in 1972, he became bishop. Although there is some irony that this once African independent church came under the authority of a Greek Patriarch, Spartas’ contemporaries observed that he helped retain an authentically African flavor within the Orthodox tradition (Welbourn 1961, pp. 77–102; Ward 2011).

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The most important Ethiopianist figure in East Africa actually grew up in the milieu of West African Ethiopianism. James Aggrey (1875–1927) was born in the Gold Coast, educated in the United States where he became a minister in the AMEZ Church, and was connected to almost all the major trans-Atlantic black thinkers of the early twentieth century. Aggrey, however, went on to have a wider and more direct influence on the Anglophone African world than any of the others in the 1920s. Aggrey became the first continental-wide African celebrity through two extensive educational tours sponsored by colonial governments to eighteen African territories where he made hundreds of appearances and spoke to thousands of Africans through both public speeches and private audiences. Deemed by one contemporary Lagosian newspaper editor as the intellectual successor of Blyden (Zachernuk 2000, p. 122), Aggrey’s most important achievement was to get Africans to think more globally, to see themselves as belonging to an African nation of people, and to embrace an African identity. Inspired by this global African intellectual, several groups across East Africa were established in the wake of his trip to Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda, and Zanzibar in early 1924. These organizations embraced his messages of unity, equality, and cooperation. For instance, the founders of the Young People’s Organization in the Uganda Protectorate were empowered by Aggrey’s message of Africa’s potential and believed in his Ethiopianist message that God had created the African race to make a unique contribution to all humanity. Aggrey was also the intellectual luminary of the African Association which had chapters throughout both Tanganyika and Zanzibar in the 20s, 30s, and 40s. Many of the founders of this organization had met Aggrey and were taken by his idea that all Africans throughout the world belonged to a single African nation of people which had a glorious future. This civilizational dream shaped their policies which aimed to mentally and physically build the African nation—and not an ethnic or territorial one—by inviting all the sons and daughters of mother Africa to join regardless of education, wealth, religion, gender, ethnicity, or territory. Interestingly, many Muslims joined this organization who were inspired by its Ethiopianist vision of the future. This highlights how the message had morphed slightly as the more secular elements were given far more emphasis than the earlier notions about how Christianity was to serve as the sole vehicle to drive the advance of the African people. For these proud Aggreyites, African identity was to be prized above all others, and African unity was to be valued above religious differences (Sanders 2019).10

Conclusion The history of Ethiopianism in Africa has been much quieter since the end of the 1920s as new movements in politics and Christianity became more salient. In ecclesiastical affairs, Ethiopianists lost much of their momentum at this time, undoubtedly due in part to the ever-increasing number of schisms, even within Ethiopianist denominations. For instance, within only a few years of joining with the AME in South Africa, one wing of the Ethiopian church led by James

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Mata Dwane (1848–1916) left the AME to form “the Order of Ethiopia,” and sought communion with the Anglican church instead. Their frustrations with the AME included failure to provide money for educational endeavors, concerns over apostolic succession, and irritation over the paternalism of black American church leaders who did not understand many of their South African congregants or their cultures. Thus, the reasons were remarkably similar to those for leaving white mission-controlled churches in the first place (Campbell 1998, pp.  215–218, 234–246; Hayes 2008, pp.  347–352). Many of the Ethiopianist churches that remained more traditional and formal in their forms of worship lost out to more charismatic and Pentecostal-style African churches in the twentieth century. Although here again, Begnt Sundkler posited that in both ideas and practice there was more cross-over between Ethiopianists and messianic or Zionist churches than scholars might have assumed (Sundkler 1961, pp. 45–60). By the beginning of the twenty-first century, there were two to three million Africans in the continent worshiping in specifically Ethiopianist denominations.11 While their numbers are not statistically significant, Ethiopianist ideas continue to inspire the establishment of new churches such as the creation of the Reformed Ethiopian Catholic Church of Southern Africa in 2017. This denomination has several churches in South Africa and sees the Ethiopianist movement of the late 1800s as the “bedrock from which [they were] hewn,” and every August they commemorate “the Ethiopian founding fathers” with all other members of the Ethiopianist movement regardless of sect. Liturgically they follow Anglo-Catholic rights but are “reformed” insofar as they see themselves as reforming the Ethiopianist clergy and groups who have moved away from the original traditions of the Ethiopianist movement (The Reformed Ethiopian Catholic Church of South Africa 2017a, b). Despite the formation of new Ethiopianist churches, the current influence of Ethiopianists in the continent is probably not as important as their historical impact and the legacy of Ethiopianism. But here too, several historiographical questions remain and require further inquiry. For instance, if one approaches Ethiopianism through the lens of intellectual history and see it as a thought-­ style, how widespread, cohesive, and standardized was it? Even though some of these thinkers proudly wore the Ethiopianist identity as a badge of honor, there was no overarching organization, nor an explicit cannon of writings, and many of these ideas circulated without recognition of where they originated. For this reason, and for reasons of sources, most of the literature (including this chapter) has focused on church leaders and key intellectual figures and more research needs to be done on how these ideas shaped the identities and realities of everyday Africans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Specifically, more work needs to be done on the gender dynamics of this history and how these ideas shaped the women who worshiped in Ethiopianist churches, were educated in Ethiopianist schools, or were affiliated with Ethiopianist-inspired organizations. The obvious exception is the relatively extensive coverage of Charlotte Maxeke (née Mannya), the president of the AME Women’s Mission

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Society and a prominent South African social and political activist.12 However, more research is needed. As alluded to above, questions surrounding Ethiopianists uncomfortable relationship to imperialism and anti-territorial nationalist movements of the mid-twentieth century remain. Scholars have demonstrated parallelism between the ideas of turn-of-the-century Ethiopianists who questioned the ecclesiastical paternalism of white missionaries, and later anti-colonialists who questioned the paternalism of white colonial rulers, but cause and effect relationships have not been clearly drawn.13 It is certain that Ethiopianists such as James Johnson and Edward Wilmot Blyden had deep concerns about certain elements of European colonialism, but they also praised other facets of imperialism and promoted particular colonial policies they found advantageous to their agendas. Some of these ideas stemmed in part from their Ethiopianist convictions surrounding the importance of learning from and cooperating with other races in Africa’s attempt to advance their civilization (Ayandele 1970, pp.  46–47; Ayandele 1963, p. 514; Drake 1970, pp. 68–70; Moses 1989, p. 251; Mudimbe 1988, pp. 100–103; Tibebu 2012, pp. 19–20). Moreover, while many of them talked about nationalism, it was most often not an anti-colonial territorial nationalism, but what I refer to as an Ethiopianist African nationalism, which was interested in the advance of Africa as a civilizational nation, and not the political nationalism of small territorial units. It was a continental imagination that often inspired them, and visions of solidarity between an African family spread throughout the continent and the diaspora were far more animating to Ethiopianists than ethnic or territorial loyalty. As a particularly Christian phenomenon in Africa, more work needs to be done to understand the processes which led to the secularization of some of the ideas in the first half of the twentieth century and how those ideas continued to shape and invigorate African thinkers—sacred and secular—into the twenty-­ first century. We need to know more about the individual reasons for joining or leaving Ethiopianist churches and how they shaped mainline Protestant churches. We know that many European missionaries worried about the “poison” of Ethiopianism (Campbell 1998, p. 140), but did it inspire changes in the mission-led churches either overtly or covertly? Were these changes initiated by African clergy or congregants? Did the Ethiopian critique of white paternalism in mission churches cause any changes of heart or thinking among European and American churchgoers and leaders? In the end, the Christian tradition of Ethiopianism had a significant impact on shaping African identity, spurring the growth of African independent churches and schools, and promoting a positive outlook of Africa’s future in a time of political and social turmoil.

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Notes 1. Harry Odamtten has also shown how some Africans from Danishspeaking areas, including William Amo and James Protten, also engaged in similar ideas at this time (Odamtten 2019, chapter 3). 2. This is my calculation based on (Barrett et al. 2001). 3. For the AME see Dickerson (2020), Campbell (1998); For the AMEZ see Bradley (1956) and Martin (1999). 4.  He also made distinctions between missionaries and colonial officials—the latter which grew more odious in his mind as the years drew on (Ayandele 1971, pp. 5, 7–8, 25; Okonkwo 1980, pp. 151, 155). 5. “The Regeneration of Africa” by Pixley ka Isaka Seme was first given as an address at Columbia University in 1906 and later published in the Journal of the Royal African Society and elsewhere. 6. Like many Ethiopianists, Mokone made a distinction among the missionary pioneers, those whose ultimate aim was to establish Africanrun churches, and the newer more racist missionaries (Campbell 1998, pp. 110–111, 115–118). 7. Ethiopianists were involved in the creation of the National Congress of British West Africa (1917). Dube and Seme (see below) were key in founding the South African Native National Congress in 1912, which aimed to bring all-African natives together from the four recently unified territories of the Union of South. Finally, James Aggrey influenced the formation of the African Association of East Africa (see below). 8. Not only were such figures ignored by historians of Africa, but even in America, the Black Studies movement of the 1960s and 1970s shunned Ethiopianists like Crummell (Moses 1989, p. 5). 9. Quoted in Smith (1929, p. 116). 10. Aggrey himself seemed to promote inter-religious cooperation while in East Africa, but even though he “had profound respect” for Islam, he still felt that only Christianity was “good enough for Africa” (Sanders 2023). 11. By my conservative estimate, which attempted to identify known independent Ethiopianist denominations, there were 2,649,120 Africans that belonged to Ethiopianist Churches throughout the continent at the turn of the century, nearly half of which were located in the Republic of South Africa. This was based on data found in Barrett et al. (2001). 12. Maxeke has her own recent biography but also appears in numerous anthologies and volumes on a variety of topics. See Jaffer (2016). 13. From the beginning, the themes of resistance and rebellion and the connection to the growth of anti-colonialism in Africa have dominated much of the scholarship on Ethiopianism. This is seen in the earliest work of George Shepperson, one of the first scholars of Ethiopianism, who saw it as a type of proto-nationalist movement Shepperson 1953.

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Shenk, Wilbert R. 1983. Henry Venn, Missionary Statesman. Maryknoll: Orbis Books. Shepperson, George. 1953. “Ethiopianism and African Nationalism.” Phylon 14 (1): 9–18. Shepperson, George. 1960. “Notes on Negro American Influences on the Emergence of African Nationalism.” The Journal of African History 1 (2): 299–312. Sidbury, James. 2007. Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic. New York: Oxford University Press. Smith, Edwin W. 1929. Aggrey of Africa: A Study in Black and White. London: Student Christian Movement Press. Sundkler, Bengt G.  M. 1961. Bantu Prophets in South Africa. Second edition, First 1948. London: Oxford University Press. Sundkler, Bengt, and Christopher Steed. 2000. A History of the Church in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. The Reformed Ethiopian Catholic Church of Southern Africa. 2017a. “A History of the Ethiopian Movement in South Africa in the later part of the 1800s, the breeding ground and the bedrock from which the Reformed Ethiopian catholic church (RECCSA) is hewn: an extract from the 26th August 2017 church memorial lecture.” Accessed 25 August 2022. https://reccsa.org.za/History.pdf. The Reformed Ethiopian Catholic Church of Southern Africa. 2017b. “Who We Are.” Accessed 25 August 2022. https://reccsa.org.za/about-­us/who-­we-­are. Tibebu, Teshale. 2012. Edward Wilmot Blyden and the Racial Nationalist Imagination. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Ward, Kevin. 2011. “Reuben Ssedimbu Sebanjja Mukasa.” In Dictionary of African Biography, edited by Emmanuel K. Akyeampong and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Vol. 5. New York: Oxford University Press. Walls, Andrew F. 1992. “The Legacy of Samuel Ajayi Crowther.” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 16 (1): 15–21. Welbourn, F.  B. 1961. East African Rebels: A Study of Some Independent Churches. London: SCM Press Ltd. Zachernuk, Philip S. 2000. Colonial Subjects: An African Intelligentsia and Atlantic Ideas. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.

CHAPTER 31

Garveyism and Christianity in Colonial Africa Ciprian Burlăcioiu

Introduction The Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) of Marcus Garvey was between the World Wars the largest organization fighting for the rights of Africans and people with African ancestry worldwide—“Negro people of the world” in the language of the UNIA’s “Declaration of Rights of the Negro People of the World” from 1920. Out of this reality also comes the difficulty of cataloging the pluriform and multileveled activities of the UNIA and its leader. Even if Garvey staunchly declared his work as aiming at the material improvement of the lives of black people1—and in consequence as being secular—his ideas achieved an almost religious quality among his followers, as one supporter from Panama made clear in 1921.2 Participation in the Garvey movement was thus comparable in its effect to “religious conversion.”3 Since religion, here meaning Christianity, was an important issue for people with African ancestry, religion should not be excluded from the catalog of issues debated in connection with the history of Garveyism. Beyond the narrow level of beliefs and religious identities, the UNIA and its supporters used a religion-inspired language as well in their social and political discourses, so that the impression of UNIA as a quasi-religious organization had its justification. As Robert Hill remarked, a number of outstanding black ministers played an important role in shaping and spreading Garvey’s “success gospel.”4 Although Garvey was portrayed (or even styled himself) as “Moses,” apostle, “John the

C. Burlăcioiu (*) Faculty of Protestant Theology, Chair of Church History and World Christianity, University of Munich, LMU, Munich, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. E. Barnes, T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48270-0_31

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Forerunner,” missionary, etc. and even as “Messiah,” this should be understood only as a metaphor, and not as signaling an intention on his part to describe himself as a real stakeholder in the realm of faith. Garvey and his supporters, however, did not refrain from using religion and religious organizations to achieve their different ambitions. This prolific intermingling between secular and religious objectives in the UNIA and by Garvey himself was described by Hill “as the religion of Garveyism and the Garveyism of religion,”5 reflecting the fact that Garvey’s message found its largest audience in African American, Caribbean, and African churches. Bearing this point in mind, what has been coined as “Garveyism”—a “[racial] social consciousness and drive for self-government,” aimed at Africans and people with African ancestry worldwide6—should be conceptualized in the terms of current religious studies as a “civil religion.”7 In its historical American context, Garveyism was characterized as “the religion of success” or the “gospel of black success.”8 In Africa this transferred more specifically to a “religion” of political and social anticolonial struggles, including religious emancipation. How far Garveyism came to occupy a space in the religious landscape of Africa will be discussed over the following pages. The chapter is not claiming to be comprehensive in describing the entire texture of networks and influences between Garveyism and Christianity in Africa. It only hopes to offer some helpful examples.9 Since the time Paul Gilroy introduced the concept of a “black Atlantic,” local expressions of racial consciousness on any shore of that ocean have come to be contextualized from a trans-Atlantic perspective. This applies to Garveyism as well, especially since Garvey made a case that resonated with black people not only in different regions of the western hemisphere, but in Africa as well. Nevertheless, long before Garvey, Africa was a point of reference both for secular and religious black activists in the Americas. To a certain extent, African Christianity reflected in the early twentieth century the experience of the African American Christianity and both these branches were linked together not only personally and institutionally, but particularly through ideas merged in the concept of “Ethiopianism.”10 The discussion of the influence the Garvey movement had in Africa should not be excepted from this remark, so that Garveyism should be placed in the broader context of the African American influence on Africa. On the African Continent Before considering the different examples, three remarks will help provide a better understanding of the UNIA in the African context. First is that church institutions and parishes played an important role in spreading Garvey’s ideas in Africa and organizing support for his Association. The point reflects the fact that, especially after the UNIA was banned11 by colonial authorities along with other political organizations considered as “subversive,” African churches were the only organized bodies and meeting places to provide venues for social

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exchange among Africans outside of white-controlled society. Even if some churches were monitored by authorities as subversive organizations, they still could provide the necessary social space for public or informal debates, including those on political issues. Thus, UNIA former members or sympathizers found themselves working for their ideals in different African churches and “the spread of Garveyism in Africa followed the path already hewed out by religious prophets.”12 Due to the fact that Garvey’s ideas promoted notions of liberation and self-determination, they continued to remain influential even after the downfall of Garveyism’s initial promotors and the suppression of Garveyite movements by colonial authorities. The second observation regards the leading actors involved in UNIA branches in Africa and the supporters of Garvey’s ideas. Except for African American and Caribbean activists, the overwhelming majority of those holding positions or assuming an active role in the UNIA were natives educated in mission schools. These members of the educated African elite were usually active simultaneously in a number of anticolonial or emancipatory groups and organizations. This led to an intersection and overlapping among different African anticolonial circles. African pastors, lawyers, physicians, teachers, publishers, small clerks, entrepreneurs, etc. could all meet at the same time in different political organizations, parishes, or debating groups on the base of their ideals. For this reason, the presence of pastors or free-lance religious leaders in the UNIA should not surprise. The final observation has to do with the ways Garvey’s ideas were spread in Africa. On the one side there were personal and collective connections between the US and different parts of Africa. In West Africa, for example, Liberia already had a long history of such links. Major harbors in Africa were connection nodes for intercontinental maritime traffic and portals for the entry of Garvey’s ideas. Places such as Freetown, Cape Town, and Lourenço Marques, among others, were frequented by black sailors from the Americas and Britain and harbored stable black diasporic populations as well. Beyond the ideas channeled through personal contacts and occasional interactions between sailors and diasporic peoples, there was an important transfer of intellectual artifacts, most particularly periodical publications, and literature.13 In the case of the UNIA, the weekly Negro World, the UNIA’s own press organ, was the real drum and channel of information which bridged the Atlantic and made Garvey’s ideas popular in Africa. Letters to the editor in the Negro World testifies to its continuous circulation in Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Liberia, the Gold Coast, in francophone West Africa, and in South Africa and Namibia. Further reliable sources provide information about its occasional or permanent spread to many other regions of Africa. For this reason, the traces left by the circulation of the Negro World are highly relevant for the influence of UNIA in Africa. West Africa In West Africa, Liberia had come into the focus of Garvey already by 1919. Serious talks between UNIA representatives and the Liberian Government

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began in 1920 with the declared aim of the former to prepare the settlement of the first UNIA-migrants in Liberia that year. Talks continued without results into 1921, however, and it became clear that the intentions of the Liberian Government were not to allow the migration of a large number of African Americans and UNIA-sympathizers to the country.14 One Sierra Leonian observer of these developments aired his frustration with the Liberian ruling class along with an unshaken trust in the advance of the Garvey’s plans in an article published in the Negro World on 3 September 1921.15 The article called the policy of the Liberian elite “suicidal and short-­ sighted.” Their obfuscation stood in the way of the political desideratum of “Garveyism,” which the article described as the return of the African diaspora to Africa. In his desire to clearly describe the moral frontier between the two sides, the author compared this act of return with the Exodus of Israel from Egypt. On the one side, the Liberian elite is accused as being tributaries to “the flesh pots of Egypt, the smell of the leeks and onions, the gods of their task masters.” On the other side, “those coming out to the motherland to undertake the work of development and consolidation should be carefully instructed … on the history of the exodus of the Jews and adapt or comport themselves accordingly, with little variation.”16 The discussion in the article reveals that from the beginning Garveyism formulated its political ambitions according to a biblical paradigm. Despite this setback, several UNIA branches continued to operate in Liberia. Noteworthy here is the opening ceremony of the Brewerville division, just outside Monrovia. The inaugural act took place on 21 August 1921, in the church building of the Methodist Episcopal Church on a Sunday afternoon. The ceremonial program is described in detail in the Negro World from 15 October 1921, by Rev. Joseph. H. Davis.17 The list of speeches on political, social, and practical issues made by local and invited UNIA activists was complemented by a list of prayers, Bible readings, and church songs. The ceremony was opened with the song “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains” and a prayer by Rev. E. L. Parker. These were followed by a reading from the second chapter of Joel and Psalm 121. Only after this liturgical introduction came the political introduction to the event by Cyril Henri, a high-rank US-UNIA official. During the event thematic presentations were framed by church songs like “Onward Christian Soldiers,” “Must Jesus Bear the Cross Alone?,” “Stand up, stand up for Jesus!” The festivities concluded with the doxology “Praise God, from Whom all Blessings Flow” and benediction, again by Rev. Parker. On the base of this description, we can observe the clear overlap of the religious and political discourses in the content of ideas at the personal level, and in the way it was performed. Even if this event represented a special occasion, it should be accepted as reflective of normative practice. Church buildings served as meeting places, and political meetings were embedded within religious and liturgical frameworks. In the French Cameroon, to turn to a second example, in 1923 there was an encounter involving a young American UNIA activist and a local African

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church leader worth noting. The sources providing details on the encounter was a report by Charles Maître, a Baptist missionary, supplemented by native testimony. Maître was informed, and then passed on to colonial authorities information from church elders that an American UNIA activist had held several meetings with church members presided over by Adolf Lotin-Same, the church leader in question. Later, the UNIA activist left apparently for Victoria in the British Cameroon. The testimony of an eyewitness native church member, Mpondo Akwa, provided further information. Akwa said that the meetings were not anti-missionary but concerned with establishing a trading company. The American visitor was described as the representative of the Black Star Line, the UNIA’s shipping company, who proposed to church members a commercial scheme “to fight against the white’s commerce but not against the Administration nor against the Mission.”18 In the following months the encounter became a source of concern for the French colonial administration and Théodore-Paul Marchand, the acting Cameroon governor, wrote an official letter about it to the French Minister of Colonies. The African American visitor, named—perhaps with an alias—John Smith, is identified as the representative of the Black Star Line and distributor of the Negro World. In Marchand’s opinion, this might be a part of the strategy to “struggle against European commerce and to facilitate the purchase of all native products by the company in question.”19 After living Doula, Smith visited Victoria, British Cameroon, where he apparently spent some months in prison. Other sources talk about Smith taking trips to Nigeria, Togo, and Dahomey before being deported to Senegal and placed in the custody of the American consul in Dakar. An interesting question about this episode, worthy of brief consideration, is raised by the figure of Adolf Lotin-Same, the pioneer pastor of the native Baptist Church, a many-sided religious personality. He is presented as the head of the Native Church in Doula and a key person in said meetings. Among the alarms these meetings triggered among colonial officials, the French governor report mentioned “the pan-African movement in America and in Africa” and “letters” (petitions) to the French Parliament, American Government, Paris Mission Society, and Baptist Mission Society in London, “asking for the freedom to practice of the Native Church, for the replacement of European missionaries by black missionaries, and for the removal of [colonial] civil servants.”20 Presumably, Lotin-Same, not Smith, put these topics before the meeting. If so, then it is clear that in the eyes of Lotin-Same, the project involved—beyond the promise of African—African American political and commercial partnership— religious emancipation. The examples above reveal the colonial perspective on Garveyism. The study of Garveyism in Africa would not be complete without some discussion of the image of the movement in the minds of European powerholders. Though the Belgian Congo was not a place where UNIA’s representatives were very active, already by 1921 colonial authorities and the colonial public there conflated the Garvey movement with the growing religious movement of Simon Kimbangu.

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Interesting is how religious ideas—Kimbangu preached among other ideas a notion of a God of black people and the belief that Congolese are God’s chosen people—were immediately associated in the colonial mind with the political claims of Garvey. Kimbangu was also made responsible for political anticolonial propaganda: “Didn’t he say that whites … should be expelled from the Congo, thrown into the sea because they subjugate and oppress blacks?”21 Whether Simon Kimbangu was really influenced by Garvey’s ideas—probably at this stage not substantially—is here less relevant. Important is that many significant emancipatory efforts in Africa of these years—including the ones of religious nature—were traced back by Europeans to Garvey’s ideas. In a similar way, the Roman-Catholic missionary bishop Prosper-Philippe Augouard stated in an interview reproduced in 1921 in different colonial journals in France and Belgium22 that “the black peril” was active in French-speaking West African colonial territories, where a “so-called prophet” had gathered a following of five to six thousand natives. This referred to Kimbangu and the propaganda was presented as “coming from Monrovia,” in the jargon of the time the keyword for UNIA. Further, he raised the rhetorical question: “Is their goal purely religious?”23 Sharing the opinion of the French colonial governor, Augouard “declared that this so-called religious propaganda appears to be a real colonial political organization, aiming to establish itself in our possessions in Equatorial Africa.”24 French authorities in the Côte d’Ivoire invited in 1923 Methodist missionaries from neighboring Togo and Dahomey—in spite of the fact that Protestants were generally regarded as prone to British influence and interests—to work among the adepts of “Prophet Harris,” that is, the evangelist William Wadé Harris who preached across West Africa. Among these adepts were to be found allegedly “fervent followers of the Marcus Garvey doctrine”25 and authorities feared a greater spread of Garveyite ideas. It is arguable whether and to what extent either Kimbangu or Harris were actively aware of Garvey’s ideas. However, the fears of the colonizers and the colonial instinct toward conflating different emancipatory ideas contributed to the construction of a certain picture on the threat posed by Garvey’s ideas. South-West Africa Similar fears about the outbreak of extensive “disturbances” related with the so-called “Monrovia movement”26 were shared by missionaries in South-West Africa as well. The German missionary Gustav Becker expressed such fears in his annual report for 1922 to the Reinisch Mission Society.27 His statements are related to the Nama parish in Windhoek. He described the aim of the movement as “Africa for the Africans.” In his perception, “agents from the Ethiopian movement”28 coming from South Africa were instruments of Garveyism, responsible for spreading such ideas among the Nama-speaking parishioners in Windhoek. Word about an imminent “redemption” by the hands of Marcus Garvey—“Rejoice over Garvey! He is your savior!”—spread rapidly over the countryside and the date of this expectation was firstly set for December 1923

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and lately for April 1924. According to the report, meanwhile a majority of parishioners had become followers of this movement and showed up even to church services “wearing their pins” with the red, black, and green colors of the UNIA flag. Even some native elders and evangelists did not escape the lure of the propaganda. And according to Becker, after church burials, graves were secretly consecrated “in the name of Marcus Garvey,” probably as a sign of belonging and faithfulness even on behalf of reposed people. Similar tones are to be found in the report of Friedrich Meier, another German missionary, working among the Herero in Windhoek. He describes a certain state of agitation among natives—“The young ones dream and the old ones have visions, dream of coming tribunals”29—being inspired from South Africa and related to the “Monrovia matter.” This propaganda “tr[ies] to cause confusion at large meetings and direct inflammatory speeches against the government and, not least, the mission, apparently with great success.”30 In one of his next reports, Meier described more specifically the ideas of the “Monrovia movement”: “Blacks even from America have turned up and predicted to our people the beginning of a new era, saying that now they, too, are human, [and] promise [them] a new church led by natives, [and] preach [to them about] another God, [telling them] that the God of the whites isn’t the God of blacks[.] [They] hold large meetings, call for segregation from us, and at night consecrate the graves of the deceased in the name of Garvey.”31 Since “a God of blacks” was preached, this confirmed practice probably should be interpreted as a consecration in the name of the new God’s prophet: Marcus Garvey. Certainly, in many situations, missionary reports proved to be exaggerated.32 And it is always a useful precaution to read missionary sources against the grain. Still, the assessments of missionaries of the religious impact of Garvey’s ideas on the African continent have to be considered as valid given the extent to which they were in agreement with opinions expressed by Africans themselves. S outh Africa and Beyond Beside Liberia, which had prior historical ties to the US, South Africa proved to be the state in Africa where Garvey’s ideas had their most positive reception. A contributing factor was the increasing contact between African and African American activists and churches already discernible in the last decade of the nineteenth century. A first fruit of this increasing contact was the union of the Ethiopian Church of M.M. Mokone in South Africa with the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church from the US in 1896. In this way two of the Ethiopianist movements of the late nineteenth century, the one from South Africa and the one from the US came to coalesce together, with the broader religious, social, and political implications of the merger having an import far beyond South Africa. The influence of Garvey in South Africa should be contextualized in the context of this development. One example of research on Garveyism in South Africa is provided in the study by Robert T. Vinson33 on the presence of UNIA in Cape Town. Already a global hub in the nineteenth century, Cape Town was already a global hub in

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the nineteenth century and, as such, a place where actors operated as well outside of regional and transcontinental state and church (mission) networks. In this metropolis, important African political and social organizations such as the African National Congress (ANC) and the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU) thrived. At the same time, the city harbored a strong community of diasporic Africans (basically people from the West Indies and the US). It was a way station for many black sailors on transoceanic journeys. It became the place with the highest density of UNIA branches—five—on the African continent. Cape Town was the entry portal for Garvey’s ideas in South Africa. These ideas spread over the well-established communication highways to the inland hubs of Kimberly and Johannesburg, where hundreds of thousands of migrant workers from the entirety of southern Africa came to work in the mines on annual contracts that saw them return to their home not only with commodities but with new ideas as well. The so-called Cape boys, meaning not only Africans originating in the colony but by extension ones who spent a while in the Cape or in South Africa, were considered by Europeans as agents of the “unrest” in many regions far beyond—for example, as far as Windhoek, Southern Rhodesia, or Nyasaland. Garveyism provided to political and social organizations like ANC and ICU an important set of ideas, ideals, and political toolkits, but its influence did not stop here. The religious landscape in South Africa was in the 1920s and beyond full of direct or indirect references to Garvey’s ideals. Bearing this in mind, the following examples only give a glimpse of the history of Garveyism in the region. One example of a Garvey-connected American religious movement that took root in South Africa was the House of Athlyi movement. In the US, Robert Athlyi Rogers founded the House of Athlyi movement and authored the Holy Piby (well known as the “Black Man’s Bible”). Rogers also established a church known as the Afro-Athlican Constructive Gaathly. In the early 1920s Rogers announced his support for Garvey. He publicly recognized Garvey as being God’s apostle for the redemption of African peoples on both sides of the Atlantic. The head of the House of Athlyi movement in South Africa was Joseph Masogha. He became familiar with Garvey’s ideas in Cape Town probably in 1920 or even earlier. Shortly afterwards he moved to the Kimberley area, where he worked as a postman and later as a constable for the municipal sanitary department. Privately Masogha became the leader of the Afro-Athlican Constructive Gaathly and spread information and materials—including issues of the Negro World and other African American propaganda—around the Kimberly region. A police report described him as being a “notorious agitator.”34 The House of Athlyi was regarded by local authorities as being the religious face of the UNIA.35 It was reported to authorities that the House of Athlyi was selling “pictures depicting angels as black men and the devil as a European.”36 Another Garvey-connected movement that found adherents in South Africa was the African Orthodox Church (AOC). George Alexander McGuire, the founder of the AOC, was at times a prominent UNIA activist in the US. This

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church developed branches in South Africa and other African territories. The already mentioned Joseph Masogha was the person who provided to Daniel William Alexander, a local Christian leader, in early September 1924 an issue of the Negro World with materials from the UNIA general conference from August of that year. The issue gave the impression that McGuire and the AOC represented Garvey’s ideals in the religious sphere. After deliberations, Alexander and his followers declared themselves as a branch of the AOC and directed an application for affiliation to the headquarters of the AOC in New York. The application was enthusiastically approved. This chain of events was described by Alexander himself in the following words: “Having read in the Negro World in 1924 of the African Orthodox Church, I was at once inspired to write to His Grace the Archbishop.”37 Over the next years the relation between New  York and Kimberley developed harmoniously and culminated with the visit of Alexander to the US in 1927–1928, where he was ordained as bishop and invested as the representative of the AOC on the African continent. During the following years, Alexander founded AOC branches in Uganda, Kenya, and Southern Rhodesia. AOC leaders in Africa understood themselves as religious and political critics of the racial discrimination and oppressive structures of the colonial period. To the question about the relationship between AOC and UNIA, McGuire gave in Fall 1924 the following answer to an African audience: “We are not officially connected with the UNIA but are all of us individual members of the organization as we are one in sentiment, political and religious.”38 Worth suggesting is that this statement represented the mindset of the majority of AOC members. In a certain way the statement represents perhaps the spirit of the involvement of most African Christians with Garveyism: only a tiny minority become formal members of UNIA, but all African Christians who voiced criticisms of colonialism and missionary paternalism were “one in sentiment” with “Africa for the Africans,” the simplest and most comprehensive description of Garvey’s ideals. To continue with the story of the AOC, news of the church spread to colonial Southern Rhodesia as well.39 The news came to Bulawayo via the ICU. The two initiators of the AOC in Southern Rhodesia, John Mansell Mphamba and Dick Dube, were members of the ICU branch in Bulawayo and “ardent Garveyites.”40 Mphamba was a native from Nyasaland (Malawi) and had previously spent time in Cape Town as had many of his fellow county people. Judging from the letter addressed by Dube in 1929 to the “Editor of the African Orthodox Churchman” and head of the AOC in Kimberley, Daniel William Alexander, it was Garveyism which attracted the attention of the two activists in Bulawayo to this church.41 The connection of the AOC with Garvey’s ideas and the information to be found about it in the pages of the Negro World made the church popular in Southern Rhodesia. A parallel development took place in Uganda. This is even more interesting since Garveyism had less of an audience in East Africa compared to other regions of the continent.42 The Negro World was once again the channel through which information flowed. Reuben Sebanja Mukasa Spartas, a Baganda

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reader of the Negro World, was a mission-educated Anglican, struggling to organize schools for native children. After spending time as an employee of the colonial post office and then as a small clerk in the colonial army in East Africa, he dedicated himself to educational goals. However, he was hindered in this ambition by missionaries. During his time in the army, he came across the Negro World in 1923/24 and learned of the existence of the AOC in the US: “It was in 1923 when I came across a newspaper called Negro World published by a famous man called Marcus Garvey who was in America. In that paper there was an article about the African Orthodox Church in America. Alleluia! Amen!”43 Spartas wrote this entry in his autobiography years later so that the year mentioned here should have been rather 1924. In 1925 he wrote to the headquarters of the AOC in New York with a request for association, but an answer to his request came only in 1928. At this point Daniel William Alexander had already been consecrated bishop and invested with powers to supervise the spread of the church in Africa. The correspondence from Uganda was directed to him and he contacted Spartas in Uganda. As a result, Alexander traveled to Uganda and spent almost one year there, from 1931 to 1932, organizing a local AOC branch. In a contribution to the Negro Churchman, the press organ of the AOC in the US, Spartas proposed in 1928 that the seat of the AOC patriarchate should be moved from New York to Uganda as an illustration of the known ideals of repatriation and possession of Africa.44 Even though Spartas left the AOC for the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria in the early 1930s, this episode demonstrates how UNIA propaganda contributed to networking religious actors from the US, South and East Africa, who would have otherwise probably remained unknown to each other. This led not only to the spread of the AOC in Africa but proved to be creative, since some groups developed new religious identities on the base of these new networks as the case in Kenya reveals. Information about the mission of Daniel William Alexander in Uganda reached activists in Kenya probably during his stay in the former country or shortly afterwards. A first encounter could have taken place during his return journey to South Africa through Nairobi and Mombasa. During a female circumcision controversy in Kenya between mission churches and natives, Alexander was invited by the Kikuyu Independent School Association (KISA) to return to East Africa and establish an AOC branch in this country. Alexander traveled to Kenya and spent parts of 1936 and 1937, almost one year there, organizing a kind of seminary course for candidates to church office both in KISA and in the Kikuyu Karing’a Education Association (KKEA). Before leaving Kenya, Alexander ordained in June 1937 Daudi Maina and Harrison Gachokia from the KISA as deacons and Philip Kiandi and Arthur Gathuna from KKEA as priests. Later on, due to differences between KISA and Alexander, the group around the two deacons became the African Independent Pentecostal Church. KKEA and its two priests remained for a while in contact with Alexander as a branch of the AOC and in the early 1940s sought—similar to the group around Spartas in Uganda—to become part of the Patriarchate of

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Alexandria, the process of admission being finalized only after the war. Thus, through the AOC, the political message of Garvey was imprinted on the religious landscape. In a similar way, the social, political, and educational grievances of natives in Kenya in the late 1920s and 1930s were aired not only through political organizations, but through African-directed churches as well. Beyond people, groups, and movements maintaining contact with Garvey himself, the UNIA, and circles close to them, there were a myriad of other persons and groups that pointed to the UNIA as their inspiration. Troubling events for the colonial order were related—often without any reason—to influences from America. The so-called Bulhoek incident from 1921 which involved the “Israelites” of prophet Enoch Mgijima was thought as having being influenced—at least to a certain degree—by “Black Fleet propaganda.”45 A police report from 1929 associated the Amafelandawonye46 (meaning “we will die fighting in one place”), a popular protest woman movement in the Herschel District, in South Africa, with the UNIA. The report offers a rather “big synthesis” of events, bodies, and persons with allegedly anticolonial profiles. Still it remains important that in South Africa, as in other parts of Africa, white officials saw Garvey’s ideas at work behind threatening developments. One person who saw opportunity in the confusion caused by both the fear and excitement generated by Garveyism was Wellington Butelezi. Butelezi had no formal association with Garvey and the UNIA. This did not stop him from claiming them though. He came into contact with Garvey’s ideas in the early 1920s in Cape Town while presenting himself as “Dr.” W. Butelezi, an African American. He pretended at times to be a representative of the UNIA, a pretense which moved the Negro World to publish a disclaimer, calling him an “impostor.”47 For a while after the massacre in 1921 of the “Israelites” of prophet Enoch Mgijima, he managed to exert some influence on the remaining adepts. He was successful as well exerting some say over the adepts of the prophetess Nonteta, some of whom developed expectations about an imminent liberation through African Americans. He became involved with the Amafelandawonye48 as well. Butelezi greatest moment came in Basutoland and Transkei after 1925. There he founded mission-independent schools that rivaled for a time mission schools in the number of students they attracted. Continuing to promote the idea that African Americans were on their way to liberate the African peoples of South Africa, Butelezi advised his followers and others as well to join the UNIA and paint their houses black, so that they could be identified by the liberators.49 His message had a deep religious dimension: “When are you going to have churches, schools, Ministers and teachers of your own, why are you calling your churches Wesleyan, Church of England, Church of Scotland[?] [T]hey believe in Jesus Christ painted white and made to look like an European. I can also paint my Jesus Christ black to suit all natives of Africa.”50 Another example of an individual not associated with the UNIA who nevertheless sought to spread Garvey’s message was Isa Macdonald Lawrence.51 Lawrence was born in Nyasaland and received his education in the Zambesi

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Industrial Mission and the Seventh-Day Adventist Mission. During the 1910s he was influenced by the Providence Industrial Mission of John Chilembwe. During WWI he was employed as a clerk and in 1921 he left home to serve as a migrant worker in Chinade in Mozambique. In May 1923, in one of his return trips to Nyasaland he was found at the border to be carrying copies of the Negro World, which was prohibited in the colony. The following year he took another labor contract in Mozambique and once again during a return trip to Nyasaland he was found possessing issues of the Negro World and the Workers Herald, another prohibited journal. Consequently, he was sentenced to three years hard labor. Lawrence followed a template for people prone to Garveyism. These, even if not directly involved with churches, were former students at mission schools. They networked people and groups beyond a particular religious identity and contributed to the spread of Garvey’s ideals.

Conclusion Global Garveyism52 must be described as a wide pluriform movement and the reception of Garvey’s ideals in Africa went in multiple directions, contingent on local audiences and local issues. Garveyism’s historical significance in Africa derived from the ideological tools it provided Africans for both their religious and political grievances against colonialism. The Garveyism of Africa was derived from the Garveyism of America but was still mostly a home-grown product. Although the UNIA was a secular organization, its members were deeply religious and the message they sought to transmit used a religious language53 or had even a church institutional component. It is hard to discern whether in Africa ideals inspired by Garvey spread more among secular or religious groups, but the fact cannot be challenged that African pastors and non-missionary churches served as integral parts of the African networks through which Garvey’s ideas spread. Religious communities proved to be docking stations for Garvey agents. African churches offered at times and in many places the only organized forums where Garveyism could be discussed. Pastors in African Independent Churches were the natural receivers and transmitters of the message of political and economic liberation for Africans. Very often, earlier dissident religious groups—like the adepts of William Wadé Harris—proved receptive to Garvey’s ideals because of their familiarity with notions of liberation. New actors—like Wellington Butelezi, for example—were an eclectic combination between Garveyism and individual self-promotion. However, Garveyism contributed substantially to what can be called African “prophetic Christianity.”54 On the other side, mission Christianity in Africa provided a negative template that inspired a prolific spread of Garvey’s ideals in the religious sphere. Africans increasingly regarded mission Christianity as an argument for white colonialism and mission churches as loci of discrimination. This perception was conducive to African Garveyism evolving a different focus than that of New

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World Garveyism. “Africa for the Africans” was translated in Africa into ideas of non-cooperation with Europeans and justified demands that natives secede from mission Churches and found their own. However, one question worth posing from the perspective of the history of independent churches in Africa is how Garveyism, during its greatest moment in the 1920s, compared to earlier and later African Christian efforts helped to push back against missionary spiritual paternalism? Early efforts date to the late nineteenth century. If we take South Africa as an example, the Ethiopian Church of Mokone became popular only after its amalgamation with the AME from the US, the American church providing the African church with a means toward an end. In a similar way, the post-WWI period gave impetus to the struggle for political and religious emancipation by various groups of Africans across the continent. During this moment Garvey’s movement offered these groups a much-appreciated international platform.55 From this point of view, even if churches such as the AOC never became mass movements, many local religious initiatives drew direction from them. If during the earlier period, churches bridged the continents (to use as example the case of the Ethiopian Church and the AME) and political ideas were carried along these roadways; in the post-WWI period the UNIA, an explicitly political organization, provided a bridge even for religious ideas. In the post-WWII period and during the decolonization era African movements focused mainly on local issues in the context of fostering national identities and soon the earlier overarching feeling of transcontinental and transregional communion so evident in the late nineteenth century moved to the background. The point here, however, is that most religious groups that emerged during the 1920s and 1930s lacked this sense of communion as well. The sense that they were part of something bigger could be traced back to their embrace of Garveyism.

Notes 1. Cf. Robert Hill, ed., The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers vol. I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), xlv. 2. “We people down this way regard your movement as a religion,” in Hill, The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, vol. I, xliv. 3. Hill, The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, vol. I, xliv. 4. Hill, The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, vol. I, l. Hill quotes William H. Ferries addressing the crowds in the Liberty Hall: “this UNIA has preached a new gospel to [the Negro race] and has in it the potency of a new religion” (Negro Word, Saturday, 26 June 1920), vol. I, l. However, I do not entirely follow the conclusion of Robert T. Vinson—in spite of his valuable analysis— about the “deeply religious character of the UNIA”; cf. Robert T. Vinson, ‘Sea Kaffirs’: ‘American Negroes’ and the Gospel of Garveyism in Early TwentiethCentury Cape Town, in Journal of African History, 47 (2006), 281–303, 294. 5. Hill, The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, vol. X, xcvi. 6. See for an extended discussion the “Introduction” by Robert Hill, The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, vol. I, xxxv–xc, here xxxvi.

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7. See for criteria of the “civil religion” Omar M. McRoberts, “Civil Religion and Black Church Political Mobilization,” in Religion is Raced. Understanding American Religion in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Grace Yukich and Penny Edgell (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2020), 40–57, here 40. 8. Hill, The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, vol. I, xli. 9. R. Hill concluded that we will never be able to index all influences of Garveyism in Africa, since these happened not only in main stream organizations or on the public sphere but at multiple levels far beyond any possibility to trace them along historical records. This conclusion applies to South Africa in particular; cf. Hill, The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, vol. X, xcvi. 10. See in this volume the chapters on “Ethiopianism” by Kimberly Hill and Ethan Sanders. Cf. as well  Andrew E.  Barnes, Global Christianity and the Black Atlantic. Tuskegee, Colonialism, and the Shaping of African Industrial Education (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2017), 18–26. 11. The suppression of the UNIA in Africa came together with its stronger involvement on the continent and after the US authorities become alert on Garvey’s propaganda in the country 1920/1921 and took steps against him. 1920, the first UNIA general conference declared Garvey as the “Provisional President of Africa” and head of a government in exile of the continent, things which alarmed colonial powers. First signs of this suppression by colonial authorities in Africa came with the refuse to approve the erecting of meeting halls (as for ex. in Windhoek, February 1922), the banning of “seditious press,” that is, Negro World (January 1922  in French West Africa and in the following months in Nyasaland [March], Nigeria [June], Gambia [September], Gold Coast [December], etc.), and the entry in the colonies and free movement of persons considered agents of Garveyism (since March 1922 in Congo, Senegal [June], former German South-West Africa [August], etc.). Such measures were enforced occasionally or systematically by order forces. 12. Hill, The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, vol. x, xcvi. 13. Cf. Ciprian Burlăcioiu, The Role of the Religious and Secular Black Press in the Forging of the Transatlantic Black Community at the Turn of the 20th Century, in idem and Adrian Hermann (eds.), Veränderte Landkarten. Auf dem Weg zu einer polyzentrischen Geschichtes des Weltchristentums (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2013), 169–188. 14. Cf. Tony Martin, Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, (Westport/ Conn., London: Greenwood Press, 1976), 122–128. 15. Cf. Hill, The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, vol. IX, 170–175. 16. Cf. Hill, The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, vol. IX, 173f. 17. Cf. Hill, The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, vol. IX, 151f. 18. Hill, The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, vol. X, 48. 19. Hill, The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, vol. X, 94. 20. Hill, The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, vol. X, 94. 21. Hill, The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, vol. IX, 98. 22. Text reproduced in Hill, The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, vol. IX, 229f. 23. Hill, The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, vol. IX, 229. 24. Hill, The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, vol. IX, 229. 25. Hill, The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, vol. X, 729. 26. Garveyism was here falsely labeled after Monrovia, the capital of Liberia.

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27. Hill, The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, vol. X, 8f. 28. Hill, The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, vol. X, 8. 29. Hill, The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, vol. X, 720. 30. Hill, The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, vol. X, 720f. 31. Hill, The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, vol. X, 725. 32. This was suggested in a memorandum of the Native Affairs Officer in Windhoek from September 1923: “[I]t is evident that these Missionaries have not got enough to do … have a predilection for writing copious reports on native matters, especially unrest, they have so frequently and persistently predicted a native rising … [and] in order to justify their opinion they magnify the smallest incident” in Hill, The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, vol. X, 122. 33. Robert T. Vinson, ‘Sea Kaffirs’: ‘American Negroes’ and the Gospel of Garveyism in Early Twentieth-Century Cape Town, in Journal of African History 47 (2006), 281–303. 34. Hill, The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, vol. X, 427. 35. Hill, The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, vol. X, 433. 36. Hill, The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, vol. X, 433. 37. The Negro Churchman V, 9 (1927), 4. 38. Daniel William Alexander Papers (DWA-Papers)—African Orthodox Church Records, RG 005, Archives and Manuscripts Dept., Pitts Theology Library, Emory University, 10/14: letter from McGuire to Alexander, 24 October 1924. 39. Cf. Michael O West, “Ethiopianism and Colonialism: African Orthodox Church in Zimbabwe, 1924–1934,” in: H. B. Hansen and M. Twaddle (eds.), Christian Missionaries and the State in the Third World, Oxford, 2002, 237–254; and idem, “The Seeds are Sown: the Impact of Garveyism in Zimbabwe in the Interwar Years,” in International Journal of African Historical Studies 35, 2–3 (2002), 335–362. 40. West, The Seeds are Sown, 355. 41. “I would like to enquire or have the information from you as I want to be a scholar or student […]. Not for teaching or theologically school. But studying for problem of the race …, so as to [be] able to organise my people under the name African Communities League [UNIA]. Now is long time since I wrote to 142. W. 130th at New York City, USA [one of the UNIA offices in Harlem]. I received answer from them, but it was very hard that time for C[riminal] I[nvestigation] D[epartment] was troubling us because did not [want] ICU in this country,” in DWA-Papers 10/9, letter from Dick Dube to the “The Editor of the A[frican] O[rthodox] Churchman,” 22 April 1929. 42. Cf. D.  E. Apter, The Political Kingdom in Uganda. A Study of Bureaucratic Nationalism (London: Cass, 1997), 253. See as well the older research on this issue: Imanuel Geiss, Panafrikanismus: zur Geschichte der Dekolonisation, (Frankfurt/M. 1968), 17 and Joseph. S. Nye, Pan-Africanism and East African Integration, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), 31. Robert Hill (The Markus Garvey and UNIA Papers, vol. X, xlviii, 406f) shows isolated contacts to East Africa as well already 1922 but not more, in comparison with West and South Africa. Only with the trip of Jomo Kenyattas to London in 1929–1930 stable contacts with the broader pan-African scene are coming into being. George Shepperton (“Pan-Africanism and ‘Pan-Africanism’: some historical Notes,” in Phylon 23, 4 [1962], 357) is mentioning Reuben Spartas and his church as the only early link to this scene.

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43. The Autobiography of Father Spartas, 11, typewritten manuscript; cf. J.R. Kigongo-Dam Tabajjwa, The Life and Work of Fr. Rev. Spartas Ssebanja Mukasa. Graduating research paper 1969/70, Makerere University Library, Kampala, Uganda, 7. 44. The Negro Churchman VI, 11 (1928), 3. 45. The Christian Express (Lovedale), 1 July 1921 and reprinted in Hill, The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, vol. IX, 54 (and 106, 108); cf. as well the Christian Express from 1 June 1921 on the issue. 46. Hill, The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, vol. X, 510ff. 47. The Negro World, 30 July 1927, cf. Hill, The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, vol. X, 414. Cf. as well the membership certificate emitted by Butelezi in the name of UNIA, ibidem, 739. 48. Hill, The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, vol. X, 414f. 49. Cf. Robert Edgar, Garveyism in Africa: Dr. Wellington and the American movement in the Transkei, in Ufahamu, 6 (1976), 31–57. 50. Hill, The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, vol. X, 489. 51. For information about him cf. a police report of the Nyasaland authorities from 1927, in Hill, The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, vol. X, 387–390. 52. See for a discussion on “global Garveyism” the recent book by Ronald J.  Stephens and Adam Ewing, eds., Global Garveyism (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2019), especially the Introduction, 7f. 53. Exemplary is the comparison of Garvey and his fate with the suffering of Christ and the early persecutions against Christians made by James Thaele in the African Voice (Cape Town), 22 September 1923; cf. Hill, The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, vol. X, 120f. 54. Vinson, ‘Sea Kaffirs’: ‘American Negroes’ and the Gospel of Garveyism, 287, 290. 55. For the dynamic of Garveyism in this transcontinental perspective cf. Ronald J. Stephens, Introduction to Global Garveyism, 7.

Bibliography Unpublished Sources Daniel William Alexander Papers (DWA-Papers)—African Orthodox Church Records: Archives and Manuscripts Dept., Pitts Theology Library, Emory University, different items. The Autobiography of Father Spartas, typewritten manuscript. J.R. Kigongo-Dam Tabajjwa, The Life and Work of Fr. Rev. Spartas Ssebanja Mukasa. Graduating research paper 1969/70, Makerere University Library, Kampala, Uganda.

Newspapers

and

Periodicals

African Voice (Cape Town), September 22, 1923. The Christian Express (Lovedale), July 1, 1921. Negro World (New York) (different issues from 1920, 1922, and 1927). The Negro Churchman (New York) (different issues from 1927 and 1928).

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Secondary Literature Apter, David E., The Political Kingdom in Uganda. A Study of Bureaucratic Nationalism (London: Cass, 1997). Barnes, Andrew E., Global Christianity and the Black Atlantic. Tuskegee, Colonialism, and the Shaping of African Industrial Education (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2017). Burlăcioiu, Ciprian, The Role of the Religious and Secular Black Press in the Forging of the Transatlantic Black Community at the Turn of the 20th Century, in Veränderte Landkarten. Auf dem Weg zu einer polyzentrischen Geschichtes des Weltchristentums, ed. idem and Adrian Hermann (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2013), 169–188. Edgar, Robert, Garveyism in Africa: Dr. Wellington and the American Movement in the Transkei, in Ufahamu 6 (1976), 31–57. Geiss, Imanuel, Panafrikanismus: zur Geschichte der Dekolonisation (Frankfurt am Main: Europ. Verl.-Anst., 1968). Hill, Robert, ed., The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers vol. I, IX, X (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983, 1995, 2006). Martin, Tony, Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Westport/Conn., London: Greenwood Press, 1976). McRoberts, Omar M., “Civil Religion and Black Church Political Mobilization”, in Religion is Raced. Understanding American Religion in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Grace Yukich and Penny Edgell (New York: New  York University Press, 2020), 40–57. Nye, Joseph S., Pan-Africanism and East African Integration (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965). Shepperton, George, Pan-Africanism and ‘Pan-Africanism’: some historical Notes, in Phylon 23, 4 (1962), 357. Stephens, Ronald J. and Ewing, Adam, eds., Global Garveyism (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2019). Vinson, Robert T., ‘Sea Kaffirs’: ‘American Negroes’ and the Gospel of Garveyism in Early Twentieth-Century Cape Town, in Journal of African History, 47 (2006a), 281–303. West, Michael O., Ethiopianism and Colonialism: African Orthodox Church in Zimbabwe, 1924–1934, in Christian Missionaries and the State in the Third World, ed. Holger B. Hansen and M. Twaddle (Oxford: Currey, 2002a), 237–254. West, Michael O., The Seeds are Sown: the Impact of Garveyism in Zimbabwe in the Interwar Years, in International Journal of African Historical Studies 35, 2–3 (2002b), 335–362.

CHAPTER 32

The East African Revival Jason Bruner

The East African Revival was a populist religious movement that sought to reform the mission churches of East Africa in the late colonial era. The revival’s historical significance and legacy, however, extend well beyond the institutional parameters of Christian churches in both the colonial and the independent eras. The revival movement did cultural, economic, and political work that continues to shape private devotion and public life in the region and beyond. Since the 1990s, scholarship on the revival has moved beyond its earlier focus upon considerations of its spiritual veracity (i.e., whether or not it was truly a movement of the Holy Spirit) or a preoccupation with the ways that it led people to convert to Christianity. Scholars have increasingly developed projects that contextualize the movement with respect to East Africa’s cultural history and complex political life.

History and Historiography This section will introduce some historical figures and information, but historical overviews of the movement have been written by Kevin Ward, Emma Wild-­ Wood, Donald R.  Jacobs and Richard K.  MacMaster, and Derek Peterson. Instead of giving a direct history of the revival’s historical developments, this section will mostly focus upon historiographical questions and how scholars have addressed them when writing about the revival. What accounts for why the revival emerged in the 1930s, where it did? Is it helpful to think of the

J. Bruner (*) School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. E. Barnes, T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48270-0_32

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revival as a movement and, if so, is it a single movement? How should its cultural and political impacts be understood in relation to revivalists’ own claims about the spiritual nature of the revival? To what extent might one think of the East African Revival as being “European” and/or “African” in its origins and ethos?1 Most accounts of the origins of the East African Revival trace its emergence to an evangelical Anglican mission station in Gahini, Rwanda, in the early 1930s.2 By the mid-1940s, the revival had spread well beyond this station and its immediate neighbors, moving south to Burundi, east into northern Tanganyika, west through the eastern Congo, north to Sudan, and around the shores of Lake Victoria toward the Kenyan coast. The movement was propelled by the energy of African preachers and evangelical missionaries, but more so by the enduring efforts of ordinary revivalist Christians who testified to the changes they experienced as a result of the revival’s call to reform their material and spiritual lives. Revivalists imagined the movement as a means of arresting the spiritual decay in mission churches, as well as the moral and cultural degradation that they believed accompanied the cultural and economic changes associated with colonialism. The intensity of the common life revivalists developed within their tightly knit fellowship groups provided a means by which they shared resources and networked with fellow revivalists across East Africa. Revivalists referred to the combination of clear ethical boundaries, personal devotion, and communal fellowship as “walking in the light.”3 By the early 1940s, the movement was causing serious disruption in many mission churches—especially the Anglican churches of Uganda, Kenya, and Tanganyika. Schisms would later develop among revival sects in northern Uganda, and factions within the Anglican Church led to violent confrontations in western Kenya.4 Amid these developments, and the larger challenges of late colonial social, economic, cultural, and political life in eastern Africa, revivalists held that such conflicts and disruptions did not define the core of the movement. Letters among missionaries in East Africa written between the 1930s through the 1950s frequently address their concerns about how the “true revival” might endure and how they might protect it from “excesses” and “dangers.”5 The descriptions of the revival that are present in this chapter largely derive from the ways in which revivalists sought to parse the differences between “true revival” and its many possible derivations. Since most of the histories of the revival have privileged missionary and revivalists’ own accounts of its development, it is important to note that those who left the movement or were part of the so-called excesses or a movement that was perceived as “breaking off” from the revival have often been omitted from its history.6 The earliest missionary histories of the revival are largely concerned with discerning whether the movement was a genuine work of God. As British missionaries typically told it, the East African Revival began in Gahini, or at least with Joe Church, a young evangelical Anglican missionary doctor. Church’s own telling traces the seeds—in his view, of the initial working of the Holy Spirit—to not only a prior set of meetings he held with a senior Ugandan

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churchman named Simeon Nsimbambi in 1929, but ultimately to Church’s own experience of encountering holiness spirituality at the Keswick Conference in northern England as a young man. (Some distinctive features of Keswick spirituality are covered in the following section.) The narrative found in Church’s telling is important because a number of scholars and chroniclers of the revival based their analyses off of Church’s writings. In his account, first published in update letters in his mission’s periodical, Ruanda Notes, and solidified in a later autobiography, Quest for the Highest, Church tells of a spiritual malaise that he sensed in the Church of Uganda, which he viewed as lackadaisical and cold, and believed that the time was right for revival to come to the church.7 When African workers at the Gahini mission station began meeting for daily prayer and Bible study, and then began confessing their sins and settling the wrongs their past actions had caused, Church and others believed that a movement of spiritual renewal was emerging. Dr. Church described it in 1936 as “a deep movement […] of individual conviction and repentance, […that] has become in places a mass movement.”8 These practices and teachings were spread into Uganda in 1935 during a mission to Kabale, and then further, through the invitation of Bishop Stuart of Uganda, to coordinate a series of Jubilee missions in Uganda in 1937 to commemorate the arrival of Anglican missionaries to the region in 1877.9 In addition to these formal evangelistic efforts, bands of revivalists also dispersed informally, as word of the movement spread throughout the region. The early spread of the revival worked in several different ways. One was through personal networks—that is, through people migrating from one mission station to another, or from one region to another (e.g., a city or town). This seems to be how a fellowship of staff at Mulago Hospital in Kampala formed.10 In this sense, the patterns of colonial migration, from village, to mission station, to town or city, and back, worked well with revivalist’s sensibilities of spreading the message of the revival as widely as possible and embracing colonial cosmopolitanism rather than shunning it.11 Another way the movement spread was through the intentional evangelistic efforts led by ordinary revivalists. One man remembered preaching campaigns with fellow revivalists in the early 1940s: [W]e travelled all the way by cycling from Kampala to [Mbarara] and others went on as far as Rwanda, yes. We used to do that. We did that, joyfully, at weekends. I was a teacher here with my friends. We knew we wanted to come back in time for preparing our lessons for next week. Went out—bicycling forty miles, fifty miles and then on Sunday afternoon, come back, on Sunday evening come back, praising the Lord on the way.12

A third was through organized preaching missions, usually at the invitation of other church leaders in the region. This latter method contributed to the development of large revival conventions becoming a feature of the movement that continues into the present time. These conventions increasingly welcomed

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revivalists from across the region, who spoke multiple languages, and mixed preaching, testimony, Bible study, prayer, and singing—especially the noted revival chorus, “Tukutendereza Yesu,” which is a Luganda chorus that became closely identified with the movement. While missionaries gave a lot of attention to the organization of conventions in their accounts of the revival—and they were no doubt important in creating a sense of shared identity across the region—these large-scale events were not in themselves constitutive of what it meant to be part of the movement. Rather, the revival was more commonly manifested through the attendance of local fellowship meetings, giving testimony, and tending to personal spiritual growth with nearby revivalists. It was through these kinds of efforts, in conjunction with regular conferences of revivalists from across East Africa, that revivalists helped to develop a sense that they were part of a shared movement—in their words, a common movement of God’s spirit. In their view, the life of salvation (as defined within the revival fellowships) was a common life that one could participate in regardless of ethnicity, language, race, or class. Daewon Moon highlighted this dimension in his work that primes friendship and affiliation within the East African Revival.13 Nevertheless, one can see ethnic divisions and distinctions impacting how the revival developed in various regions. For example, in Rwanda, revivalists were often dismissed by those in positions of power as being the “religion of the Hutu” or “that of the Batwa,” referring to ethnic groups that were at that time not associated with political power.14 In the late 1930s and early 1940s, tensions emerged between revivalist and non-revivalist Christians, leaders of mission churches, and traditional rulers. The tensions had different origins based upon their location and context. With respect to churches, revivalists issued harsh critiques of an older generation of church leaders who, in their opinion, had allowed the churches to slip into spiritual decay. When among Christians who had not joined the revival movement, revivalists could be unruly and disruptive, including interrupting sermons or worship services of priests who had not confessed their sins to the revivalists’ liking. Some revivalists were even arrested for singing derogatory songs outside of Roman Catholic churches. Within their own churches, however, revivalists had a reputation for being inflexible and uncompromising. Their presumption that Christians had hidden sin they needed to confess publicly meant that they could exert intense pressure on others to confess their sins. When over two dozen revivalist students were essentially dismissed from Bishop Tucker School of Theology, it seemed that the Church of Uganda could be heading for a split of revivalist and non-revivalist Christians.15 That the revival did not break away provided an important piece of historical memory for revivalists, that they were not like independent churches, or, later, like the Pentecostal churches that would flourish across much of East Africa.16 By the 1950s, revivalist Christians were beginning to assume positions of authority within mission churches. This was most apparent in Anglican churches, but the revival also impacted Lutheran and Mennonite churches in Kenya and Tanganyika.17 While the early revivalists of the 1930s had often

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taken a judgmental stance against ecclesiastical authorities because they felt the senior priests and bishops had permitted a lax spirituality within their churches, revivalists eventually ascended the ecclesiastical ranks to fill those positions. This process was not without controversy. For example, in Kampala, tensions over the appointment of Erica Sabiti were met with opposition and hostility due not only to his revivalist spirituality but also due to ethnic tensions arising from within the Baganda that opposed his serving as a bishop, though he was ethnically not Ganda.18 Revivalists maintained vast networks of fellowship and sociability. These networks contributed to the perception that they were seeking to diminish those features of tribal life that they believed were of their sinful pasts. As a result, they often got along better with distant revivalists—even those of a different tribe, nationality, and/or language—than they did their immediate family members or neighbors. They often cited verses like Galatians 3:28, that the revival was a way for them to become “all one in Christ Jesus,” eliminating markers of ethnic particularity. It was this dimension of the revival that those who joined it used to claim that it was as a singular movement. It would, therefore, put outside of the movement those who stopped meeting with their fellowship groups, returned to their “sins,” or became involved in “politics.” As revivalists tended to describe it, they sought to focus on key practices and basic beliefs, not getting bogged down in doctrinal specificity or confessional particularity. For these reasons, revivalists who began insisting upon ideas such as are found in many Pentecostal churches—that there are charismatic signs that confirm one’s salvation—were targeted for correction by revival elders.19 For groups such as the “Trumpeters,” the assumption was that if one left the mission churches, then one essentially left the revival movement.20 Revivalists tended to insist upon the fact that there were no single “leaders” of the revival, which often served to confirm their claim that this was a movement of God, rather than human-made. Most early chroniclers of the revival saw the movement, in some sense, as a divine movement of God’s spirit to renew mission churches.21 Relatedly, historians often indicated that the revival’s origins lay in its connection to British evangelical modes of religiosity.22 Still, it was apparent that the movement could not be understood primarily through its ties to British evangelicalism. With the very notable exception of Catherine Robins’ dissertation in 1975, and a handful of articles in the 1980s, critical historical scholarship on the revival did not meaningfully come until Kevin Ward’s work in the 1990s.23 Ward’s scholarship grounded the revival within a thorough historical accounting of the history of Christianity in the region and the processes of cultural and religious change in the twentieth century. Work that followed, including Jacobs and MacMaster’s A Gentle Wind of God, as well as chapters by Mark Noll and Mark Shaw tended to emphasize those elements of the revival that meshed most easily with trans-Atlantic evangelicalism.24 The movement appeared as an insular, distinctive African Christian movement, but one that seemed to be understood almost exclusively with reference to distinctively Christian ideas, practices, and

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histories. Derek Peterson’s work directly and convincingly challenges these presuppositions by placing the revival within the cultural politics of late colonial East Africa. If earlier histories emphasized the essential uniformity of the movement, Peterson illuminates how the revival movement, though connected across the region, nevertheless was animated by distinctly local concerns, styles, debates, and political relations.

Spirituality and Theology in the East African Revival For revivalists, what distinguished their movement from other cultural and religious movements of the colonial or independent eras could be described as the way that revivalists thought of their relation to God and put that into practice in their everyday lives. These beliefs were manifested through their confessions, testimonies, and practices of fellowship. Revivalist Christians believed that those who were part of mission churches remained in spiritual darkness. Even if someone had been baptized or had been a church member for a long time, or even a member of the clergy, revivalists believed that those people could not be sure of their salvation on the basis of those things alone because they did not make clear that the person had truly repented. While confession in some form has been part of Christian worship since the first century, revivalists insisted upon a particular practice of confession that was public and specific. Revivalists believed that a general assertion of one’s sinfulness, as one might find in a liturgy, was insufficient for rooting out the sin that plagued the spiritual life of colonial mission churches. Instead, they insisted upon the public confession of specific sins, especially those sins that people had kept hidden, or might be shameful. Revivalists in the early decades of the movement insisted that Christians had hidden sins that needed to be “brought to the light” through public confession. The revival, therefore, quickly became understood as a movement of this kind of dramatic confession and repentance, with some revivalists meeting through the night to burn publicly the fetishes and amulets those who wished to convert brought to them.25 For revivalists, the moment of conversion was often directly associated with the moment they confessed their sins publicly for the first time.26 For those sins which impacted others, such as theft, typically some form of restitution was expected from other revivalists, who would encourage and monitor these behaviors. Revivalists referred to these actions as “making things right”—making their repentance and salvation manifest in the world through practical actions that restored relationships. This could mean making the misdeed known to an impacted person or compensating loses. In cases of theft, it meant returning the stolen items, however large or small, from basic school supplies taken from a mission station office to furniture or livestock.27 In the early days of the revival, particularly when revivalists were concentrated in a school or mission station, revivalists might meet in daily fellowship groups, though most revivalists tended to meet together on a weekly basis, in addition to Sunday worship services. These fellowship meetings were places to

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share testimony, confess sins, pray together, extend mutual help, and generally ensure that people were continuing to “walk in the light” of salvation. Revivalists testified to intimate relationships with Jesus and God, whereby personal, daily devotional reading and prayer were expected, and at fellowship meetings, those who were saved were expected to give a testimony that was current, meaning how they perceived God to be at work in their life up that moment. God’s immanence, therefore, was a defining piece of revival spirituality, as God was believed to work consistently in and through daily life. Walking in the light became a phrase that revivalists used to describe the whole of the way of life that the revival movement fostered. While they understood this to mean Christian devotional practices like prayer, Bible reading, giving one’s testimony, meeting for fellowship, and attending church services, revivalists used the phrase to refer to a host of other practices as well. The spiritual imagination of the revival was formed early on in the stark language of light and darkness, with the Christian idea that a true convert would move from spiritual darkness into the spiritual light of salvation. For these reasons, revivalists sought to distance themselves from their life before converting to the revival, which they believed was defined by either paganism or hypocrisy. In many cases, revivalists believed that the moral framework that missionaries had preached, or at least the practical moral leeway they permitted or tolerated within the mission churches, was too lax. Revivalists, by contrast, sought a more rigid line of moral and spiritual demarcation.28 There were tensions within the movement from the beginning: how to maintain purity while not abandoning those who remained within mission churches. The general spirit of the revival was to remain within mission churches, but revivalists did  not always live out those ideals, and schismatic groups formed in both northern Uganda and western Kenya. Revivalists struggled with the idea of spiritual superiority of being saved and the need to have fellowship to properly live out the Christian life. The moral strictures that revivalists preached—sexual abstinence outside of monogamous marriage, revoking all alcohol, a scrupulous sense of personal honesty and responsibility for wrongdoing, and shunning of nearly any cultural practice that might be thought of as “traditional”—meant that many revivalists struggled to keep the ideal standards.29 Revivalists believed that the Christian life was to be lived with others. In the revival’s early years, or in places where many in a hospital, mission station, or kraal were revivalists, there might be daily fellowship, which could consist of the giving of testimonies, prayer, Bible reading, and singing. Many revivalists testified to extraordinarily powerful experiences of conversion and confession, and these experiences often shaped their spiritual lives for years to come. For example, early revivalists frequently mentioned hearing a voice ask or demand that they throw away their amulets. In some locations, as happened in a mission station in northwestern Tanganyika, young students wept or laughed until they lost consciousness, others acted like various animals. These experiences were understood by revivalists as manifesting the power of the Holy Spirit, though unlike charismatic and Pentecostal churches, revivalists

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have tended not to seek out such distinctive, powerful experiences, instead cultivating a spiritual life that is characterized more by a direct and sincere way of speaking, a sense of warmth of communal spirit, and a shared sense of discernment on matters of theology, morality, and ethics. The revival created an ethos within much of the Anglican churches. It is not the predominant one, but its influence can still be felt through its devotional intensity, a desire to have a personal relationship with Christ, a moral conservatism, and a willingness to call attention to moral failings. These characteristics have been fostered by revivalists’ connections with global evangelical networks in the latter part of the twentieth century.30 The sense of spiritual affiliation between East African revivalists and evangelicals and other Christians in Europe and North America was facilitated not only through the latter’s enduring commitments to missionary work, but also through their commitment to large conventions, which could feature guest preachers from the United States and Western Europe alongside African revivalists and church leaders.31

Politics The relationship between revival and church has varied across the twentieth century and within countries impacted by the movement. Revivalists imagined themselves as spiritual leaven within mission churches, and most sought to remain within them. Early in the revival’s history, missionaries who were sympathetic to the revival movement took pains to argue to ecclesiastical leaders and colonial politicians that the revival was a movement of the spirit of God and not “political.” In Uganda, this distinction took on real importance in the 1940s, when a series of labor, political, and cultural disturbances in southern Uganda, and especially in and around Kampala, had colonial authorities on edge. The distinction between “religion” and “politics” had a different resonance for Kenyan revivalists amid the Emergency of the 1950s, in which revivalists tended to oppose the politics of  the Mau Mau  movement.32 But even before the challenges of the early to mid-1940s, to those outside of the revival movement, it appeared disruptive, unruly, difficult, and, in a word, rude. For revivalists in the late colonial era, defining their movement as “religious” as opposed to “political” could make the difference between its being allowed to spread and its suppression by force, as happened with populist movement like the Kimbanguists in Congo and Central Africa, or the Nyabingi cult in the 1920s in Uganda.33 This distinction could also be seen as a means to hold on to strategic cultural advantages, as many independent churches could whither without some direct or indirect support from the colonial state or connection to Western missionaries. Most revivalists wished to maintain the cultural advantages of being associated with established institutions, like colonial churches, schools, and hospitals. Furthermore, a number of prominent revivalists paired this sentiment with an overt disavowal of party politics, as political parties emerged in the late colonial period. One Ugandan revivalist expressed a

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sentiment that seemed to be common among early revivalists: “We shall do something for salvation, but we can’t manage politics.”34 While revivalists were interested in challenging the power of church, colonial, and traditional leaders and elders, revivalists generally did not seek to make the church more “African” in the style of many African indigenous churches in the colonial era. In terms of ethics, revivalists tended to argue that mission churches had not been strict enough in making a clear break with a “heathen” or “pagan” past. The revival could be thought of as a more intensely modernizing movement that facilitated the development of democratic politics, a capitalistic economy, and the breakdown of “traditional” or “tribal” life. Revivalists and their missionary apologists tended to argue that they were about transforming lives, improving the spiritual life of mission churches, and that those who joined the movement were honest, reliable citizens. Revivalists, therefore, often adopted the cultural style of the British in terms of their sexual morality, house construction, Western schooling, and use of allopathic medicine.35 These choices, of course, were not politically neutral, and they were made within a cacophonous context in which culture, lifestyle, economics, and ethnic identity were deeply contested political ideas.36 What these conceptual moves did, historiographically, was to give the impression that the revival somehow existed both outside of politics and the political imagination altogether. For historians of populist movements writing in the 1970s and 1980s, the revival did not appear to be analytically interesting in part because it did not result in widespread anti-colonial political animus. As a result, a number of historical works on the revival give the impression that revivalists were politically quiescent, if not capitulating to the colonial state. It is on this point that the most revolutionary historical work on the revival has taken place over the past decade, driven by Derek Peterson’s monumental study, Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival: A History of Dissent. Peterson shows how revivalists deliberately flouted cultural norms and taboos. They talked back, publicly airing private matters, grating against dispositions that associated moral strength with social restraint.37 Instead of pointing to the ways that revivalists understood these things to be manifestations of their personal salvation, Peterson places revivalists’ choices within the tumultuous cultural politics of the late colonial period, convincingly arguing that revivalists were far from being politically neutral. Revivalists grated especially against the sensibilities of what Peterson terms “ethnic patriots”—cultural and political activists who were attempting to codify particular ethnic (or “tribal”) identities amidst fears of their dilution within a cosmopolitan colonial world. Revivalists, by contrast, generally sought to break down ethnic particularity, dispensing with “traditional” modes of dress and food taboos, which could be used to differentiate cultural boundaries. Those who were attracted to the revival movement also tended to be people who had moved within colonial spaces, like mission stations, schools, cities, and towns, people who worked in the new professions that such opportunities brought, like nurses, teachers, and clerks. The revival movement, in Peterson’s analysis, becomes a series of complex local

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contestations about ethics, speech, and identity in a rapidly changing world that was being shaped by local, regional, and global cultural and economic forces. Peterson utilizes the concept of cosmopolitanism to differentiate both these forces as well as the ethical and political sensibilities that people developed in relation to them.38 Following Peterson’s work, revivalists’ phrases, like “All one in Christ Jesus” have clear political implications, conveying their attempts to not be confined to the ethnically or nationalistically particular polities that other activists, intellectuals, and leaders sought to leverage. Peterson’s painstaking efforts to ground the revival movement within local debates and concerns are clearly grounded in an effort to demonstrate the ways in which African revivalists understood, interacted with, and shaped their world; the revival movement, therefore, is undeniably an East African movement. His analysis also makes clear that African revivalists worked to develop their own way of being Christian, one that was often at odds with colonists’ ideas for proper religiosity, as well as non-revivalist African Christians and those who did not convert to Christianity at all. In these senses, Peterson carefully shows how fully integrated the revival was within the local contexts where it took hold, why it was appealing to those who joined, and why it was so unfavorable to those who did not.

Legacies of the Revival As revivalists look back on the nearly 90-year history of the movement, there are several points that frequently arise. Revivalists might not necessarily emphasize the “political” dimension of the revival, but they are more likely to suggest that the revival movement instilled clear moral values and, in their view, created a strong core to mission churches across the region, which then allowed them to blossom in the post-colonial era. Again, their emphasis is often upon the fact that the revival allowed them to be honest, morally upright, and reliable citizens. For some, there is a political valence to these claims. For example, Ugandan revivalists proudly remember Archbishop Janani Luwum, a revivalist, who courageously denounced the abuses of Idi Amin and was killed for it. Bishop Festo Kivengere likewise resisted Amin’s regime and was exiled as a result.39 These leaders were the most public victims of political abuses against revivalists in the late colonial and early independent eras, when revivalists (along with other groups) could become targets of anti-colonial movements and nascent state power. For example, the Mau Mau movement in Kenya often targeted revivalists, many of whom refused to join the movement because they believed it to be pagan and a means by which their spiritual lives would be compromised. As a result, revivalists were often mistreated, harassed, and killed by those associated with the Mau Mau movement.40 For similar reasons, revivalists in the eastern Congo set themselves at odds with the authenticité program of Mobutu.41 Revivalists generally continue to see themselves as moral anchors within their societies, even as the movement is more diffuse today than it was in the late colonial period.

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The spirituality of the revival, as well as its associations with evangelical missionaries who had been deeply influenced by Keswick spirituality, meant that the revival movement was poised to connect to a growing global evangelical movement of the mid- to late twentieth century. The movement did this not only because its devotional sensibilities (confession, testimony, sin, and a continuing, personal relationship with Jesus) were shared with evangelical Christians generally, but also because these connections were actively sought out and nurtured in both directions. For example, African revivalists would occasionally travel to Europe, including the Keswick Conference, and eventually to North America. William Nagenda and, later, Festo Kivengere, mediated East African revivalism to Western audiences, alongside Europeans and Americans such as Roy Hession.42 Since the mid-1990s, revivalist Christians and church leaders in East Africa have engaged in debates about sexuality and gender that have become global in scope. For example, bishops from East Africa (but also West Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia) were vociferous in their denunciations of the Episcopal Church and many Anglican bishops in the UK for their support for ordaining openly gay members of the clergy and for the possibility of blessing same-sex unions (gay marriage was not nationally legalized in the United States at the time). The reasons for their taking this position should not be understood as arising exclusively from revivalist sensibilities, but it seems to not be a coincidence that many of the bishops who did become vocal had connections to the revival movement.43 Similarly, though more complexly, was the support for bills—with Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009 being the best known—of legislation that sought to severely curtail the civil rights of sexual minorities. Such legislation often had the support not only of conservative Anglicans, but also of Pentecostal and Catholic Christians. In writing in support of the bill, then Archbishop Henry Luke Orombi cited the revival movement as a means of articulating a deep-seated conservative morality that he believed was inherent in Ugandan Christianity.44 There were other church leaders, such as John Rucyahana of Rwanda, who used ideas that emerged from the revival movement as a basis for attempting to heal after the horrors of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide.45 In this sense, revivalists’ earlier claims about the lack of importance of clan relations and ethnic identities, and the need for a larger pan-ethnic/tribal Christian identity that transcended those earlier identities, meshed well with the Rwandan government’s campaign, which centered around the promotion of “One Rwanda,” and made speaking of ethnic identities largely illegal.46 East African Revivalists have come to have varied connections with Charismatic and Pentecostal Christians in East Africa. When the revival emerged in the 1930s, there were essentially no Pentecostal churches that were established in Uganda, the eastern  Congo, or Rwanda, though Kenya had some early Pentecostal missionaries at the time. Some missionaries wondered whether the revival was not a kind of Pentecostal or charismatic movement, though missionaries who supported the movement generally regarded it as distinct from

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Pentecostal denominations. Still, some phenomena were similar. Revivalists would often testify to intense spiritual experiences surrounding their conversion. One such instance in northwestern Tanganyika entailed months of students weeping through the night, laughing hysterically, and even seemingly imitating animals in worship services, according to missionary observers.47 The spread of Pentecostal and Charismatic churches since the 1990s has brought some challenges with it, not least because they might use the same names to refer to themselves (“Balokole” in many parts of Uganda or “Born-Agains” in English). Revivalists, who trace their history to the 1930s and continue to follow the practices of confession, daily prayer, regular fellowship meetings, and so on, see the newer churches as subverting their movement—claiming a relation to it in name only, while not putting its values into practice. While some revivalists today might resent what they perceive as a drifting away from the central practices of the revival, it is nevertheless the case that many of its spiritual and moral sensibilities have shaped Christian churches and public life throughout the region in profound ways.

Notes 1. Kevin Ward, “Tukutendereza Yesu: The Balokole Revival in Uganda,” Database of African Christian Biography; Kevin Ward and Emma Wild-Wood, eds., The East African Revival: History and Legacies (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 2010); Richard K. MacMaster and Donald R. Jacobs, A Gentle Wind of God: The Influence of the East Africa Revival (Scottdale: Herald Press, 2006); Derek R.  Peterson, Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival: A History of Dissent, c. 1935–1972 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 2. Max Warren, Revival: An Enquiry (London: SCM Press, 1954); A.C. Stanley Smith, Road to Revival: The Story of the Ruanda Mission (London: CMS, 1946). See also Daewon Moon, “The Conversion of Yosiya Kinuka and the Beginning of the East African Revival,” International Bulletin of Mission Research 41:3 (2017): 204–214. 3. Emma Wild, “'Walking in the Light’: The Liturgy of Fellowship in the Early Years of the East Africa Revival,” in R.  N. Swanson (ed.), pp.  419–431, Continuity and Change in Christian Worship (Rochester, NY: The Boydell Press, 1999). 4. B.A.  Ogot and F.B.  Welbourn, A Place to Feel at Home: A Study of Two Independent Churches in Western Kenya (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1966); David Barrett, Schism and Renewal in Africa: An Analysis of Six Thousand Contemporary Religious Movements (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1968). 5. Charles Maling to Joe Church, June 12, 1941, JEC 1/3/58; Joe Church to Godfrey, April 15, 1940, JEC 3/4/25; Andrew MacBeath, “A Pentecost in Congo,” World Dominion 14:4 (1936), JEC 9/2/3; Jason Bruner, “Religion and Politics in the East African Revival,” International Bulletin of Mission Research 43:4 (2019): 311–319.

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6. Catherine Robins, “Tukutendereza: A Study of Social Change and Sectarian Withdrawal in the Balokole Revival of Uganda,” PhD diss., Columbia University, 1975. 7. Joe Church, Quest for the Highest: An Autobiographical Account of the East African Revival (Exeter: Paternoster Press, 1981); Terry Barringer, (2010). “'Recordings of the Work of the Holy Spirit': The Joe Church Archives,” in K. Ward, E. Wild-Wood, eds., The East African Revival: History and Legacies (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 2010), 271–285. 8. Joe Church, “A Call to Prayer,” April 20, 1936, p. 9, JEC 3/1/26; Joe Church, “News of Gahini Hospital from Dr. J.E. Church. November 23, 1933,” Ruanda Notes 47 (1933), 17. 9. Ward, “Tukutendereza.” 10. “Mary” interview with author February 22, 2012, Mbale, Uganda. 11. Peterson, Ethnic Patriots, ch. 2. 12.  Elieza Mugimba, June 8, 1971, East African Revival Interviews, folder 3, UCU, p. 7. 13. Daewon Moon, “Testimony and Fellowship for a Continuous Conversion in the East African Revival,” Studies in World Christianity 24:2 (2019): 157–173. 14. Zefania Mikekemo, East African Revival Interviews, folder 2, September 18, 1971, UCU. 15. Kevin Ward, “‘Obedient Rebels’: The Relationship between the Early ‘Balokole’ and the Church of Uganda: Mukono Crisis of 1941,” Journal of Religion in Africa 19 (1989): 194–227. 16. Alessandro Gusman, “Being a Mulokole: Physical and Spiritual Salvation from the East African Revival to Contemporary Pentecostalism,” in Cecilia Pennacini and Hermann Wittenberg, eds., Rwenzori: Histories and Cultures of an African Mountain (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 2008), 318–340. 17. MacMaster and Jacobs, A Gentle Wind of God. 18. Kevin Ward, “Revival, Mission and Church in Kigezi, Rwanda and Burundi: a Complex Relationship,” in K.  Ward, E.  Wild-­Wood, eds., The East African Revival: History and Legacies (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 2010), 12–44; Kevin Ward, “The Church of Uganda and the Exile of Kabaka Muteesa II, 1953–1955,” Journal of Religion in Africa 28:4 (1998): 411–449. 19. Peterson, Ethnic Patriots, 152–177. 20. Robins, “Tukutendereza.” 21. Stanley Smith, Road to Revival; Warren, Revival. 22. Brian Stanley, “The East African Revival: African Initiative within a European Tradition,” Churchman 92:1 (1978): 6–22. 23. Mark Winter, “The Balokole and the Protestant Ethic-a Critique,” Journal of Religion in Africa 14:1 (1983): 58–73; Robins, “Tukutendereza.” 24. Mark Noll, The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2009); Mark Shaw, Global Awakening: How Twentieth-Century Revivals Triggered a Christian Revolution (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2010). 25. Yeremiah Betsimbire, July 19, 1971, East African Revival Interviews, folder 2, UCU, p. 3; Jason Bruner, “Public Confession and the Moral Universe of the East African Revival,” Studies in World Christianity.

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26. David W. Kling, A History of Christian Conversion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), ch. 23; see also the forthcoming monograph from Daewon Moon, African Initiative and Inspiration in the East African Revival (Leiden: Brill, 2022). 27. Wild, “‘Walking in the Light’.” 28. Jason Bruner, “Public Confession and the Moral Universe of the East African Revival,” Studies in World Christianity 18:3 (2012): 254–268. 29. Jason Bruner, “Conversion and the Problem of Discontinuity in the East African Revival,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 70:2 (2019): 304–321. 30. Emmanuel Hooper, “The Theology of Trans-­Atlantic Evangelicalism and Its Impact on the East African Revival,” Evangelical Review of Theology 31:1 (2007): 71–89. 31. Brian Stanley, The Global Diffusion of Evangelicalism: The Age of Billy Graham and John Stott (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2013), 81–85. 32. Derek Peterson, “The Rhetoric of the Word: Bible Translation and Ethnic Debate in Colonial Central Kenya,” in B. Stanley (ed.), Missions, Nationalism, and the End of Empire (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 165–179. 33. J.  Freedman, Nyabingi: The Social History of an African Divinity (Tervuren: Musée royal de l'Afrique centrale, 1984). 34. “Unnamed man” from Kamuganguzi, September 21, 1971, East African Revival Interviews, folder 2, Uganda Christian University, Bishop Tucker School of Theology Library Archives (UCU). 35. Jason Bruner, “‘The testimony must begin in the home’: The Life of Salvation and the Remaking of Homes in the East African Revival in Southern Uganda, c. 1930–1955,” Journal of Religion in Africa 44 (2014): 309–332. 36. P. Englebert, “Born-again Buganda or the Limits of Traditional Resurgence in Africa,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 40:3 (2002): 345–368. 37. Derek R. Peterson, “Wordy Women: Gender Trouble and the Oral Politics of the East African Revival in Northern Gikuyuland,” The Journal of African History 42:3 (2001): 469–489. 38. Peterson, Ethnic Patriotism, ch. 2. 39. Insert interview with Charity. 40. Dorothy Smoker, Ambushed by Love: God’s Triumph in Kenya’s Terror (Fort Washington, PA: Christian Literature Crusade, 1993). 41. Emma Wild-Wood, Migration and Christian Identity in Congo (Leiden: Brill, 2008). 42. Stanley, The Global Diffusion of Evangelicalism, 81–85. 43.  L ydia Boyd, Preaching Prevention: Born-Again Christianity and the Moral Politics of AIDS in Uganda (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013). Peterson, Ethnic Patriotism, 286–289. 44. Henry Orombi, “What is Anglicanism?” First Things (August 2007), https:// www.firstthings.com/article/2007/08/001-­what-­is-­anglicanism. 45. John Rucyahana, The Bishop of Rwanda (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2007); Tharcisse Gatwa, The Churches and Ethnic Ideology in the Rwandan Crises, 1900–1994 (London: Regnum Books International, 2005). 46. Timothy Longman, Memory and Justice in Post-­Genocide Rwanda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 47. Peterson, Ethnic Patriotism, ch. 7.

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Bibliography “JEC” denotes the Joe E. Church Papers, held at the Centre for the Study of Christianity Worldwide. “UCU” denotes the archives of the Bishop Tucker School of Theology at Uganda Christian University. The interviews were conducted by Catherine Robins in the early 1970s as part of her dissertation research and were preserved in bound transcriptions in the archives. Barrett, David. Schism and Renewal in Africa: An Analysis of Six Thousand Contemporary Religious Movements. Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1968. Barringer, Terry. “‘Recordings of the Work of the Holy Spirit’: The Joe Church Archives.” In The East African Revival: History and Legacies, 271–285. Edited by K. Ward, E. Wild-Wood. Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 2010. Boyd, Lydia. Preaching Prevention: Born-Again Christianity and the Moral Politics of AIDS in Uganda. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. Bruner, Jason. “Conversion and the Problem of Discontinuity in the East African Revival.” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 70:2 (2019a): 304–321. Bruner, Jason. “Public Confession and the Moral Universe of the East African Revival.” Studies in World Christianity 18:3 (2012): 254–268. Bruner, Jason. “Religion and Politics in the East African Revival,” International Bulletin of Mission Research 43:4 (2019b): 311–319. Bruner, Jason. “‘The testimony must begin in the home’: The Life of Salvation and the Remaking of Homes in the East African Revival in Southern Uganda, c. 1930–1955.” Journal of Religion in Africa 44 (2014): 309–332. Church, J.E. Quest for the Highest: An Autobiographical Account of the East African Revival. Exeter: Paternoster Press, 1981. Englebert, P. “Born-again Buganda or the Limits of Traditional Resurgence in Africa.” The Journal of Modern African Studies 40:3 (2002): 345–368. Freedman, Jim. Nyabingi: The Social History of an African Divinity. Tervuren: Musée royal de l’Afrique centrale, 1984. Gatwa, Tharcisse. The Churches and Ethnic Ideology in the Rwandan Crises, 1900–1994. London: Regnum Books International, 2005. Gusman, Alessandro. “Being a Mulokole: Physical and Spiritual Salvation from the East African Revival to Contemporary Pentecostalism.” In Rwenzori: Histories and Cultures of an African Mountain, pp.  318–340. Edited by Cecilia Pennacini and Hermann Wittenberg. Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 2008. Hooper, Emmanuel. “The Theology of Trans-Atlantic Evangelicalism and Its Impact on the East African Revival.” Evangelical Review of Theology 31:1 (2007): 71–89. Kling, David W. A History of Christian Conversion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Longman, Timothy. Memory and Justice in Post-Genocide Rwanda. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. MacMaster, Richard K., and Donald R. Jacobs. A Gentle Wind of God: The Influence of the East Africa Revival. Scottdale: Herald Press, 2006. Moon, Daewon. “The Conversion of Yosiya Kinuka and the Beginning of the East African Revival.” International Bulletin of Mission Research 41:3 (2017): 204–214. Moon, Daewon. “Testimony and Fellowship for a Continuous Conversion in the East African Revival.” Studies in World Christianity 24:2 (2019): 157–173.

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Moon, Daewon. African Initiative and Inspiration in the East African Revival. Leiden: Brill, 2022. Noll, Mark. The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2009. Ogot, B.A., and F.B. Welbourn. A Place to Feel at Home: A Study of Two Independent Churches in Western Kenya. Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1966. Orombi, Henry. “What is Anglicanism?” First Things (August 2007), https://www. firstthings.com/article/2007/08/001-­what-­is-­anglicanism. Peterson, Derek R. Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival: A History of Dissent, c. 1935–1972. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Peterson, Derek R. “The Rhetoric of the Word: Bible Translation and Ethnic Debate in Colonial Central Kenya.” In Missions, Nationalism, and the End of Empire, pp. 165–179. Edited by B. Stanley. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004. Peterson, Derek R. “Wordy Women: Gender Trouble and the Oral Politics of the East African Revival in Northern Gikuyuland.” The Journal of African History 42:3 (2001): 469–489. Robins, Catherine. “Tukutendereza: A Study of Social Change and Sectarian Withdrawal in the Balokole Revival of Uganda.” PhD dissertation. Columbia University, 1975. Rucyahana, John. The Bishop of Rwanda. Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2007. Shaw, Mark. Global Awakening: How Twentieth-Century Revivals Triggered a Christian Revolution. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2010. Smoker, Dorothy. Ambushed by Love: God’s Triumph in Kenya’s Terror. Fort Washington, PA: Christian Literature Crusade, 1993. Stanley, Brian. The Global Diffusion of Evangelicalism: The Age of Billy Graham and John Stott. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2013. Stanley, Brian. “The East African Revival: African Initiative within a European Tradition.” Churchman 92:1 (1978): 6–22. Stanley Smith, A.C. Road to Revival: The Story of the Ruanda Mission. London: CMS, 1946. Ward, Kevin. “‘Obedient Rebels’: The Relationship between the Early ‘Balokole’ and the Church of Uganda: Mukono Crisis of 1941.” Journal of Religion in Africa 19 (1989): 194–227. Ward, Kevin. “Tukutendereza Yesu: The Balokole Revival in Uganda.” Database of African Christian Biography. Accessed May 31, 2023. https://dacb.org/histories/ uganda-­tukutendereza-­yesu/. Ward, Kevin. “Revival, Mission and Church in Kigezi, Rwanda and Burundi: a Complex Relationship.” In The East African Revival: History and Legacies, pp. 12–44. Edited by K. Ward and E. Wild-Wood. Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 2010. Ward, Kevin. “The Church of Uganda and the Exile of Kabaka Muteesa II, 1953–1955.” Journal of Religion in Africa 28:4 (1998): 411–449. Ward, Kevin, and Emma Wild-Wood, eds. The East African Revival: History and Legacies. Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 2010. Warren, Max. Revival: An Enquiry. London: SCM Press, 1954. Wild, Emma. “‘Walking in the Light’: The Liturgy of Fellowship in the Early Years of the East Africa Revival.” In Continuity and Change in Christian Worship. Edited by R. N. Swanson, pp. 419–431. Rochester, NY: The Boydell Press, 1999. Wild-Wood, Emma. Migration and Christian Identity in Congo. Leiden: Brill, 2008. Winter, Mark. “The Balokole and the Protestant Ethic-a Critique.” Journal of Religion in Africa 14:1 (1983): 58–73.

CHAPTER 33

The Transfer of Protestant Mission Churches to African Christians Musa Gaiya

Introduction Protestants have been understood as “the churches and denominations that have received their inspiration from the Reformation” (McGrath and Marks 2004, p. 1). Traditional Protestantism has mutated and splintered into different forms in its traditional heartland of Europe and America and its foreign climes in Africa, Asia and South America. Its broad branches being Orthodox or Traditional/Mainline, Evangelical and Pentecostal. Protestantism, beyond its religious nature, is a social-cultural movement. McGrath and Marks tell us that Protestantism in Europe was not just a church- or faith-based/religious movement but was also a “cultural phenomenon” that was shaped and equally shaped by its context (McGrath and Marks 2004, p. xiv). This is why the study of Protestant Christianity in Africa should be the examination of the adjustments Western Protestantism has made to accommodate local socio-cultural needs so as to make it relevant in Africa. Any treatment of the history of Protestant Christianity in Africa that does not look at its reception and appropriation by the ordinary Africans is not in tune with current state of the Church in the continent. Contemporary examination of this subject is, as Terence Ranger (1993, p. 181) tells, move “away from ‘institutions’ and all towards movements at the grassroots”, this position has been re-echoed by Felix K. Ekechi (1993) and Ogbu U. Kalu (1993). It was Albert Nolan (in Ranger 1993, p. 181) who clearly showed what this grassroot response to Christianity

M. Gaiya (*) Department of History and Philosophy, University of Jos, Jos, Nigeria © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. E. Barnes, T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48270-0_33

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is, as he related the South African experience, a creation of Western missionary Christianity: It was out of the missionary Church that a prophetic gospel began to emerge. At one level it was embodied in certain prophetic figures: missionaries like Van der Kemp, John Philip, Bishop Colenso and Trevor Huddleston, and Church leaders like Beyers Naude, Allan Boesak and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. At another level the voice of prophecy has been associated with bodies like the South African Catholic Bishops’ Conference, the Christian Institute. … However, at the most important and most basic level, the level that is sometimes called the grassroots, a simple, people’s gospel has been preached, lived, celebrated and developed over a period of nearly a hundred years by the suffering people of South Africa.

The above has happened because, as Paul Rutayisire has submitted, “missionary Christianity … has been unable to expunge the indigenous cultural heritage from the popular memory” (in Ranger 1993, p. 181). The result is the proliferation of independent churches throughout Africa, which continues to dominate its religious landscape. Ranger is, however, right by stating that mission Christianity is still the popular Christianity in Africa going by the share number of Africans who attend mission churches (p. 182), but as I will argue below, adherents of mission churches resort to attending African Church groups at critical periods, thereby blurring the divide line between the two groups. Further, most mission churches in Africa would tend to go with their Indigenous African Church counterparts on contentious cultural matters that divide the West and Africa. In this chapter, we try to see African Christianity as a direct product of mission Christianity or African Christianity as Africanization of mission Christianity. African Christianity did not fall down from heaven; it was the outcome of Western missionary labour, so argues Ranger (pp.  190, 191) eloquently: We are beginning to realise that during the missionary period the foundations of a vigorous African Christianity were laid. We are also beginning to realise that those foundations were laid in a concealed and mysterious manner. Little developed as the missionaries planned or hoped or feared. Hence historians of the Christian Movement in Africa have to read between the lines of missionary records, passing by apparent but illusory triumphs in order to locate real but unperceived success. … The emergence of an African Christianity was a dialectical process, a dialogue between missionary and African consciousness.

A similar submission has been made by Jean and John Comaroff (1991) where they asserted that Western missionaries created a Western oriented consciousness in their converts. Paul Stuart Landau (1995) agrees but added that Twana were more active in domesticating Christianity beyond the Comaroff’s conclusions. Kama III, the Twana Christian king, like Afenso in Kongo and Antonio III of Sonyo, created a Christian political party and with the palace as the centre for “the cult of the Word” (21).

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Western Protestant missionaries had planted many churches in Nigeria. We pick three traditions, Anglican, Evangelical and Pentecostal, to discuss their mutation and transfer to Africans. The thrust of this chapter is to see how these brands of churches were Africanized to make them culturally relevant. It is important to note that when finally Africans embraced Christianity it was because they saw it as a means of liberation and social progress. The first of the three selected Western churches planted in Nigeria is the Anglican Church; this is due to its early entry into Nigeria, its great influence in many facets of Nigerians’ life and society and its unique developmental initiative in Africa. The initiative to introduce Anglicanism in Nigeria in the early 1800s was not entirely a European one; it began with ex-slaves in Sierra Leone who expressed their desire to bring Western civilization (Christianity, commerce and colonialism) to their kith and kin as a means of attaining freedom from the degradation of the black race caused by slave trade and slavery. To do this, they needed the British Government’s assistance. The ex-slaves petitioned Government “to let them start a Colony at Badagry under British jurisdiction … they proposed not only to trade but to bring their countrymen their new religion, to proclaim in a center of the slave trade over 1,000 miles off a Gospel they trusted would sweep it away. They asked for a missionary to help them” (Modupe Oduyoye 1969, p. 19). They hoped that the opening of the interior of Africa to the Gospel would enable their people “to see the light” as James Ferguson, a convert of the Wesleyan Mission in Badagry cried out in his effort to raise awareness of the need for Christianization of in Nigeria (Oduyoye, p. 21). In this respect, the early Western churches in Nigeria had been planted by Nigerians who had returned from Sierra Leone before the arrival of the western missionaries; so, the church was planted before the arrival the missions. To facilitate the arrival of missionaries, the first white missionary of the Church Missionary Society (CMS), Henry Townsend, was given a ride in the ship owned by ex-slaves from Sierra Leone. For these Sierra Leoneans, the southwest of Nigeria was their second home. Thus, the first Anglican Church in Abeokuta (southwest Nigeria) was composed of mostly returnee ex-slaves from Sierra Leone. The first CMS missionary, Henry Townsend, became the pastor of the Abeokuta Church and leader of the mission. From Abeokuta the Anglicanism spread to Lagos, a rising commercial city of what would eventually become Nigeria then later its capital, then it spread to Ibadan, Ijaye etc. Needless to say the Anglican Church in Nigeria was the product of Evangelical Christian movement within the Church of England. The non-Evangelical wing of the Church of England was the Anglo-Catholic, it had two missionary groups, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), which introduced Anglicanism in Ghana and South Africa and the Universities Mission to Central Africa (UMCA), formed on the initiative of Dr David Livingstone and brought in the Anglican Church in East and Central Africa (Rowland Oliver 1956).

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The Nigerian Anglican Church was, therefore, the “daughter church” of the “mother church”, the Church of England, the Established Church of the British Isles.

The Transformation of the Anglican Church in Nigeria When the CMS planted the Anglican Church in Nigeria, it adopted the structure of the Church of England. At this time the Mission believed it could transfer whole gamut of Anglicanism globally, as such, there was no need to think and discuss the nature of an African or a Nigerian Anglican church. That is, the idea of the transformation the English church into a Nigerian one, a “native church” as it would be called for later. Wilbert R. Shenk asserts, “[t]he doctrine that they [Western missionaries] avoided discussing was ecclesiology” (Wilbert Shenk 1983, p. 25). Such a subject would be considered irrelevant and a waste of the time that should be committed to evangelism. The idea of a universal Anglicanism was further strengthened with Nigeria becoming part of the UK through the imposition of colonialism. At the helm of the affairs of the CMS was Henry Venn, the newly appointed honorary secretary of the CMS from 13 April 1846. Venn had been the interim honorary secretary of the mission since 1841, the year the British Government sponsored an expedition into the interior of Nigeria. He set out to fashion the nature of the missionary church. The ultimate goal of the mission, he believed, was the emergence of an indigenous church. This was a pioneering thought, only put to test in Nigeria. In Venn thinking, an indigenous church was a church that was self-governing, self-supporting and self-extending. He enumerated the principles for attaining such native churches. These principles included the mastering of the vernacular language of the converts, the reduction of that language into writing and the translating the Bible into it. Others were the recruitment of converts as evangelists or as “native agents” who would eventually be ordained as local church pastors, the gradual promotion of giving of offering and tithes by members of congregations to support the church and evangelism and so to discouraged emergence of Western paternalism and African dependency syndrome. But at the top of the Venn agenda for the evolution of natives’ churches was use of the local tongue in teaching and preaching. With the provision of education to the locals, converts could learn to read and write and eventually become missionary agents themselves, preaching the gospel in his/her mother tongue. The agents, with time, could replace the missionaries in pastoring churches, as well as, galvanizing the church to reach areas with the gospel not visited by Western missionaries. Venn also instructed that the native churches should be raised to be self-reliant so as to attain self-respect; the local churches, he writes, “should [d]raw out their native resources. Let them feel their own powers and responsibilities” (Shenk, p. 31). Venn resisted the practice of having Western missionaries as pastors as was happening in Sierra Leone and “everything was done [there in Sierra Leone] to conform to the English pattern” (J. F. A. Ajayi 1980, p. 66). He added that if such a development was encouraged with the financial

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support of the Mission, it “would be too apt to create a feeble and dependent native Christian community” (Ajayi, p. 66); he believes that an attainment of some self-reliance would be a sure way to raise an African middle class—“a keynote of Venn’s policy of development”, Ajayi (1980, p. 67) argues. Western missionaries rejected Venn’s idea of transforming missionaries’ churches into native churches, an idea that sounded as asking the missionaries to toil and give birth to babies and then to handover these babies to surrogate mothers (i.e., African leaders), who might not be equipped to bring up the babies to Christian maturity. In spite of resistance from Western missionaries, Venn went on to establish an African mission, the Niger Mission, headed by Sierra Leone returnee, the Rev Samuel Ajayi Crowther. But this African mission would work in non-European territories. He hoped the Niger Mission would found churches that would be governed by Africans, churches that would create other natives’ churches and eventually be financially independent from the Mission. However, neither the Niger Mission nor the churches founded by it were self-funding up to Venn’s retirement and death in 1873. After Venn, new administrators were appointed to the CMS headquarters in London. These new leaders found Crowther (who was now practically the bishop of the Lower, Upper and West Niger) and his missionary assistants unqualified spiritually to do mission work; most were relieved of their missionary work, including Crowther himself. Venn’s native church policy was turned into shreds. The humiliation of Crowther especially, therefore, became a watershed in the history of the CMS work in Nigeria. The treatment of the aged bishop by young English mission administrator stuck a strong African traditional cord. According to S. A. Adewale, “In traditional African setting, only the elders with tested experience of life and high integrity ruled while the young and middle-age ones watched and learned” (1994, p. 195). This treatment of the aged bishop had infuriated educated Africans, most of them immigrants from Sierra Leone, called Saro, who saw this development as not only a humiliation of the most important African leader but the humiliation of all Africans and the turning of the clock of progress of the African race. They saw this development as a setback on African aspirations to achieve progress through the church. This ignited racial consciousness and galvanized Africans of all denominations in Lagos to embraced an ideology that fostered African independence and desire to realize the prophetic words of Psalm 68: 31, when Ethiopia “shall soon stretched out her hands unto God”. This ideology was called Ethiopianism, a term Andrew Barnes says is “difficult … to explain” (2017, p. 18). But the term was used by black people globally as an ideology that promotes the upliftment of peoples of African descent in all aspects of life. In Nigeria, Ethiopianism was, as Ayandele writes, “African nationalism expressed through the medium of the Church” (1966, p.  177). The Ethiopianists did not see themselves reprobates or rebels but the disciples and advocates of Venn “native church” policy. Thus, these Anglican Ethiopianists believed churches they established in Lagos (in 1891 and in 1901) and its environs were true African Anglican churches envisioned by Henry Venn. The only

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exception, they were not branches of the Church of England, they were Africanized Anglican churches; they were doctrinally and structurally Anglican, “but against high handedness of the white missionaries in administration of the Church” (Adewale 1994, p.  196). They were not just what Bishop Tugwell declared as “African churches” [and not] “Anglican churches”. He said this when speaking specifically of one of the CMS churches in Lagos Africans had seceded from, “This is an Anglican Church [meaning the vacated St. Paul’s, Breadfruit Street, Lagos] and not an African Church (meaning the newly established African Church Bethel). Is it African Church? Let them go, they are Africans, are they not, they cannot do anything, they will come back” (Adewale 1994, p. 198). As Emmanuel Ayandele notes insightfully, this also marked the beginning anti-colonial movement in Nigeria (p.  175). The downside of Ethiopianism in Africa was its inability to foster social improvement, especially the provision of industrial education due to lack of funds. Unlike in the United States, where Ethiopianists established schools such as Hampton Institute in Hampton, Virginia and Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama, founded by General Samuel C. Armstrong and Booker T. Washington, respectively. Few attempts, however, were made in Africa, like Agbowa Industrial Mission in Lagos, West Africa, (Barnes 2017, p.  72) Providence Industrial Mission in Malawi, Central Africa and Ohlange Industrial Institute (formerly Zulu Christian Industrial School), in Natal, South Africa (Barnes 2018, p. 261), but these did not have far reaching impact as the African American ones. Ethiopianists’ success was, therefore, in the area of evangelism, seen especially in the activities of Native Baptist in Nigeria under the visionary leadership of Mojola Agbebi (formerly, David Brown Vincent). By 1914, Ayandele tells us the Native Baptist Church had “adherents and churches more than doubled those of the American Baptist Mission” (p. 200). Further transformation of the Anglican Church in Nigeria was made in the early years of the twentieth century by another group in Nigeria who, Barnes writes “began experimenting with indigenous conceptualization of Christian worship untethered from the contemporary European religious experience” (2017, p. 57). The major causation of this transformation was the venularization of Christianity. Western missionaries, in pursuit of Henry Venn’s instruction, adopted the local languages of Africa as medium of communication of the gospel and begun the translation of the Bible into local languages as an important means of evangelization. The first vernacular Bible in Africa was the Yoruba Bible translated mainly by Bishop Samuel Adjayi Crowther and published in 1884 (few years before the Bishop’s demise in 1891), a work that spanned the period of about 44 years (i.e., from around 1841)! However, vernacular Bible had its first impact on Western Christianity in Nigeria in the Niger Delta, a region Bishop Samuel Adjayi Crowther exclusively helped to open to the gospel in 1864, and which was nurtured by his first son, Dandeson Coates. Pioneering evangelists in this area, like the Saro in Yoruba land, were Igbo returnees from Sierra Leone. Back then in Sierra Leone, the Igbos had agitated for a Christian mission specifically to their kith and kin in southeastern Nigeria.

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Amongst the Igbo pioneering evangelists was an outstanding missionary of good training, John Christopher Taylor and his assistant, Simon Jonas. He spearheaded the translation of the Bible into Igbo language. Taylor was, therefore, the Ajayi Crowther of Igbo land. He was conversant with the Isuama (Owerri) dialect out of the many Igbo dialects and he did most of his translation into it in 1866. It would appear Taylor followed the method used by Crowther who had adopted the Oyo Yoruba dialect for his translation of the Yoruba Bible. For a while this dialect was the language spoken in the Anglican churches in most of the southeastern region of what became Nigeria up till 1905. In the Anglican Church in the Niger Delta, better known as the Niger Delta Pastorate Church, the Isuama Igbo was the only Igbo dialect spoken. Thus, Garick Sokari Braide, the pioneer evangelist of vernacular Christianity in Nigeria, read the Isuama Bible but preached in Kalabari. It is from his reading of the Bible that he saw the close relationship between biblical and African worldviews. Thus extempore prayers, visions, healings and the performance of miracles characterized the revival outbursts that sparked off in St Stephen Anglican Church, Bakana, in the Niger Delta led by Braide and spread throughout the southeastern Nigeria. His priest, Rev. Moses Amamnoyo Adolphus Kemmer, held him in high esteem, especially after Braide had healed his son. Many converts from traditional religion to Christianity through Braide’s preaching were admitted into the Anglican churches in the Niger Delta, but most constituted themselves into an independent church called Christ Army Church, after the death of Braide in 1918. The Yoruba Bible had a similar effect among Anglicans in Yoruba land. The Yoruba religious explosion began as a revival in St. Savior’s Anglican Church, Ijebu-Ode. What began as revival prayer meetings led to a revolutionary outbreak of religious outburst that spread throughout southwestern Nigeria. The immediate cause of the revolution was the offer of a religious cure to flu epidemic, a plague that had resisted orthodox and traditional treatment. Out of the Anglican churches here, three strong African Initiated churches emerged, Precious Stone Society or Diamond Society in 1918 and by extension Christ Apostolic Church, founded in the 1940s, Cherubim and Seraphim Society in 1925 and the Church of the Lord Aladura in 1929. These churches went beyond the indigenization of the Anglican structures that the Ethiopianists did. The leadership in these new groups was by prophets and evangelists. Like Braide’s movement in the Niger Delta, healing, vision, dreams, the casting of evil spirits and performance of miracles were major areas of concentration. Even water became an instrument conveying God’s power, it was considered a powerful means of combating evil spiritual forces, especially those of wizards and witches dreaded by Africans. All these had biblical warranty. Critics of these innovative religious ferments accused these groups of compromising with Paganism. However, Webster (1969, p.  56) reminds us Christianity, in its encounter with cultures of its converts, had adopted pagan practices as well:

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One of the real strengths of Christianity has been its ability to fuse with the pagan religion of the people it converts. Once Christianity conquered the Pagan tribes of Europe it adopted, or adapted to, many of the customs, ceremonies and rituals of the natives law and custom. The original Jewish Sabbath was abandoned as the Christian holy day in favour of the day when the Pagan performed their rituals to the Sun god. Christmas and Easter were both originally Pagan ceremonies and for many Europeans continue to be so. Father Christmas, the hanging of the stocking, the decorated trees, the mistletoe normally dwarf the creche, the star and the shepherds. Easter was originally devoted to the celebration of fertility rites, eggs and baby chickens and rabbits being much more prominent even today than the cross and open sepulchre. The European wedding in white with veil and ring are merely the old Roman custom to which the Christian clergyman was introduced. The mourning and weeping of European funerals are Pagan habits. They cannot be Christian, for Christians believe that death is a transference to a better life. If so, death particularly for the elderly Christian, should cause rejoicing as it does in Traditional Yoruba custom. … Thus it is probably true to say that pure Christianity does not exist in any institutional form in modern times.

Thus, the domestication of Anglicanism in Africa was in the adoption and adaption of African traditional religious practices with its superstitions and supernaturalism, which Christianity in its journey across cultures was not exempted. This phenomenal revolution in the indigenization of the Christian faith in Africa was remarkable not only in rooting of Christianity in Africa but the growth of the Christian faith as well. By 1918, Lamin Sanneh tells us Christ Army had over 1,000,000 members! (Lamin Sanneh 1983, p.  183). This growth would have shocked social scientists, pessimists of the authenticity of African Christianity, who in fact had predicted the extinction of Christianity in Africa through the forces of secularization and Islam following the dismantling of Western colonialism, which had sustained it (Ayandele, p.  345). More importantly, this religious revolution during the early part of the last century was, as Barnes argues, brings us to “main thrust of the indigenization of Christianity in Africa … efforts at making forms of worship first preached by missionaries work for Africans” (2017, p. 59). The mutation of African Christianity keeps on going. Contemporary charismatic and Pentecostal religiosity is based on the spirituality of the African Initiated Churches coated in sophisticated Western lifestyles. This is because founders of major charismatic and Pentecostal groups were once members of the African Initiated Churches. I have argued elsewhere that “David Oyedepo (of Living Faith Church), Enoch Adeboye1 (of Redeemed Christian church), Mike Okwonwo (of True Redeemed Evangelical Mission) and others had sprung up out of African initiated churches to become leaders of their neo-­ Pentecostal churches” (Musa Gaiya 2012, https://doi.org/10.1558/ ptcs.35765). This new religious ferment penetrated mainline churches, like the Church of Nigeria (Anglican communion) through its Nigerian Evangelical Fellowship in the Anglican Communion (EFAC), which at several times was headed by Anglican bishops, like the Right Revd Emmanuel B. Gbonigi and

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the Right Revd Josiah Idowu Fearon (Cyril Imo 2008, pp.  51, 53). Before showing how Pentecostalism affected beliefs and practices in mainline Western churches Africa, especially Anglicanism, let me briefly discuss the process of handing over the CMS Churches to Nigerians just before Nigeria’s independence.

Formal Transfer of Western Mission Founded Anglican Church to Nationals The CMS and churches it established in Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa were part and parcel of the Church of England politically and liturgically. It was agreed much earlier in the relationship between the Mission and the Church, “that all questions relating to matters of Ecclesiastical Order and Discipline respecting which a difference shall arise between any Colonial Bishop and any Committee of the CM. Society [sic] shall be referred to the Archbishops and Bishops of the United Church of England and Ireland, whose decision therein shall be final” (J. F. Ade Ajayi 1994, p. xxx). Thus all CMS churches in the mission fields were, therefore, “in full communion with the See of Canterbury” (T.  O. Olufosoye 1994, p. xxiii) and, thus, “an extension of the English Church” (Ajayi 1994, p. xxxiii). One major meeting platform of this worldwide Anglican family was at Lambeth under headship of the Archbishop of Canterbury. It was this perspective of the role of Canterbury in global Anglican affairs that made the Mission to strengthen European control of the Nigerian church following the Niger Mission crisis caused by the discredit of Bishop Crowther’s leadership credentials and his exit from the Mission. Subsequent bishops of the Church were European, except for a couple of African half-­ bishops appointed for the Yoruba Mission, the Niger Delta, on the Niger (Akin Omoyajawo 1994, p.  109) and much later (in 1951) of Lagos (Olufosoye 1994, p. xix). However, fifty years after the appointment of the last half bishop, from 1951, perhaps due to the decolonization campaigns by Nigerian nationalists, since the English Church was an established church which would make it a colonial one, there were concrete steps taken to handover the Church to Nigerian leaders. Thus, between 1951 and 1977, 14 dioceses were created, all but two, were led by Nigerian bishops. Those under the leadership of Western missionaries were the Dioceses of Northern Nigeria and Owerri. Later in 1968, a Nigerian, Benjamin C.  Nwankiti took over the leadership of the Owerri Diocese as bishop (Archive of All Saints Cathedral, Egbu, Owerri). Northern Nigerian Diocese was divided into ten dioceses between 1973 and 1991 with Nigerians as bishops (Olufosoye 1994, pp. xxiv, xxv). Finally the Church of Nigerian (Anglican Communion) was born on the Feast of Saint Mathias, 24 February 1979, and the Most Revd Dr Timothy Omotayo Olufosoye was appointed its first Archbishop. He retired in 1988 (Olufosoye, pp. xx, xxii). It seems the nationalization of the Anglican Church in Nigeria was complete, but

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was still a part of an International Anglican Communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury as the head. The first sign of trouble, however, happen during the 1988 Lambeth Conference “attended by Five [sic] hundred Bishops all over the world” when it adopted a resolution for the ordination of women. The resolution was endorsed by 423 of these bishops (The diocesan Board [1994], p.  48). To implement this decision, the bishop of the newly created Diocese of Kwarra, the Rt Revd Herbert Haruna, ordained three women. This act created a big controversy in the Nigerian Anglican Church Communion. The strongest opponent of this action by Bishop Haruna was the Primate of the Province, the Most Revd J.  A. Adetiloye. The opposition was intense that the Rt Revd Haruna was forced to disrobe the women (Diocesan Board, p.  50). The Rt Revd Haruna knew who was in charge of the Anglican Church in Nigeria; it was certainly not the Archbishop of Canterbury! This would not be the only time the Nigerian Province would disregard Lambeth’s decision. The second major disagreement between the Nigerian Province of the Anglican Church and Lambeth was on the issue of acceptance of members and priests with unusual sexual orientation. The African leader of the movement that opposed homosexuality was the Archbishop and Primate of the Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion), the Most Revd Peter Akinola. The anti-homosexual movement spread beyond Nigeria and even beyond Africa, it was embraced by the whole of the Global South. The Global South leaders had formed a body called Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) in Jerusalem in 2008; it had the support of 50 million Anglicans worldwide. GAFCON opposition to Lambeth’s stance on homosexuality was theological; it had reasserted the belief in, “God’s creation of humankind as male and female and the unchangeable standard of Christian marriage between one man and one woman as the proper place for sexual intimacy and the basis of the family” (Gbenga Gbesan 2020, p. 340). This stance had the potentials of not only breaking the global Anglican communion into North and South but also breaking the Northern Anglican communion as well (Gbesan, p. 343). Then came the bombshell, “nearly 260 dioceses boycotted the [Lambeth 2008] Conference—36 percent of the constituent parts of the Communion” with Africa and Asia “the most populous bloc of its global membership” (Gbesan, p. 341). Nigeria led the number of absentees; its 137 bishops boycott Lambeth—Ethiopianism had turned full circle! Jesse Zink laments and submitted that Nigeria’s reaction was due to its growing Pentecostal leaning, what he calls “Anglocostalism” or “Anglican Pentecostalism” (Jesse Zink 2012, p. 241). He concluded by asserting that “I believe that the context of neo-Pentecostalism in Nigeria has been a major contributing factor to the position of the Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion) in conversations about the future of global Anglicanism”. Certainly, Zink thinks the Anglican Church in the Global South or Nigeria in particular was still part of the Established English Church.

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Other Models of Change of Guard from Mission to Church in Africa The Evangelical Church Winning All (ECWA, which used to be Evangelical Church of West Africa) was established by the Sudan Interior Mission (SIM, now Serving in Missions) in 1954. SIM was one of the faith missions that worked in Africa. Others were African Inland Mission, Livingstone Inland Mission, Sudan United Mission (British Branch), Qua Iboe Mission (now Mission Africa), Christian and Missionary Alliance, etc. SIM, like the others, did not plan to transplant a Western church in Africa. In Nigeria, its biggest mission fields, SIM handed its churches to the locals with no clear political orientation. SIM believed the nationals would create one for themselves. So ECWA had no ecclesiastical identity. With limited training, the leaders of ECWA were in no position to create any identity.2 As a result, the local church changed from one Western ecclesiastical model to the other seen in the various church constitutions it created.3 ECWA has, however, remained one, due mainly to its fluidity in theology, liturgy and organizational structures. What has strengthened this unity is its insistence on the centrality of the Bible in its teaching and conduct. The Assemblies of God, on the other hand, entered Nigeria in the 1930s as a Western classical Pentecostal church tradition. The Assemblies of God mission was invited by a Nigerian Pentecostal, Augustus Ehuriewe Wagu, who before the arrival of the Assemblies of God missionary from Ghana, the Rev. William Shirer (Ayodeji Abodunde 2009, p. 379), had Pentecostal experience and had established a church, which he called The Church of Jesus Christ “inaugurated on 22nd August 1934—a date now celebrated as ‘Day of Decision’” (Ogbu Kalu 1996, p.  170). Wagu’s spiritual transformation has been described by Kalu as, “intense spiritual experience” (1996, p. 170) while he was a member of Faith Tabernacle Congregation in Port-Harcourt. Before changing its name to Assemblies of God, The Church of Jesus Christ had spread from Port-Harcourt into the interior of southern Igbo land, to Old Umuahia, Aba and had travelled northward to Enugu. Therefore, by adopting The Church of Jesus Christ, the Assemblies of God mission had absorbed the African Pentecostal spirituality, while sharing with Africans the leadership of what became the Nigerian Assemblies of God Church. This was significant, because, as Richard Burgess tells us, the spiritual ministration of the Assemblies of God helped the Igbo deal with the trauma and the economic degradation caused by the Nigerian civil war from 1967 to 1970 and beyond (2008, pp. 97, 115).

Conclusion The argument in this chapter is that generally Africans were never obsessed by Western denominational boundaries in their search for spiritual nourishment. A transfer of a Western controlled Protestant church to Africans was not a

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transfer of a tightly sealed denomination but a transfer of the faith. The main concern was how the Christian faith expression helps to solve Africans’ spiritual and material needs. As I argued, the Ethiopianists, who seceded from the Anglican Church, for instance, never saw themselves as creating watertight denominations different from the denomination they came out of; they were creating “Africanized Western churches”, so too the African Initiated churches (aladura) that followed after. So migration from one church tradition was easy and uneventful. Wagu was Anglican, Faith Tabernacle, the Church of Jesus Christ then finally Assemblies of God—all in search for spiritual and material fulfilment. This might explain why a Nigerian might belong to more than one denomination at the same time because what he does not get from one, he gets from the other. As a Protestant Christian, his/her the main attraction to a certain congregation might be the centrality of the Bible in its teaching and how such teaching impact existential matters. This might explain why Westerners say African Christianity is only a skin deep; but what they really mean African absorption of Western Christianity hook, line and sinker (the idea of proselytization) is half-hearted. But the goal of proper Christianization or what Walls calls the domestication of the gospel in peoples’ life and culture (2002, pp. 67, 68) is conversion not proselytization. Today, due to the varieties of Christianities, studies of Christian is called World or Global Christianity not Christendom (Walls 2002, pp. 46–71).

Notes 1. Adeboye was a member of the Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion), then he joined the Redeemed Church of God [a breakaway from the Cherubim and Seraphim], which at that time was like the African initiated churches and transformed it into a modern Pentecostal church. 2. Rev. Dr Simon Ibrahim said he was the appointed deputy secretary of ECWA in the 1960 after he finished his teacher training school in Igbaja in Kwara State. At that time, he was the most educated from northern Nigeria. 3. The Constitution of the Association of Evangelical Churches of west Africa, [1956]; The Constitution of the Evangelical Churches of West Africa, [1966]; The Constitution and Bye-Laws of the Evangelical Church of West Africa (ECWA), 1989; The Constitution and Bye-Laws of the Evangelical Church Winning all (ECWA), 2010.

Bibliography Abodunde, Ayodeji (2009), A Heritage of Faith: A History of Christianity in Nigeria, Ibadan: Pierce Watered. Adewale, S. A. (1994), “The African and Independent Churches”, in J. Akin Omoyajowo (ed.), The Anglican Church in Nigeria, 1842–1992, Lagos: Macmillan. Ajayi, J. F. A. (1980), “Henry Venn and the Policy of Development”, in O. U Kalu (ed.), The History of Christianity in West Africa, London: Longman.

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Ajayi, J.  F. Ade (1994), “From Mission to Church: The Heritage of the Church Missionary Society”, in J. Akin Omoyajowo (ed.), The Anglican Church in Nigeria, 1842–1992, Lagos: Macmillan. Akin, Omoyajawo. (1994), The Anglican Church in Nigeria, 1842–1992, Macmillan. Ayandele, E.  A. (1966), The Missionary Impact on Modern Nigeria, 1842–1914: A Political and Social Analysis, London: Longman. Barnes, Andrew E (2017), Global Christianity and The Black Atlantic: Tuskegee, Colonialism, and the Shaping of African Industrial Education, Waco: Baylor University Press. Barnes, Andrew E (2018), “Christian Evangelization and Its Legacy”, in M. S. Shanguhyia and T.  Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of African Colonial and Postcolonial History, https://doi.org/10.1057/978.1.137.59426.6_9 (retrieved 3rd October 2020). Burgess, Richard (2008), Times of Refreshing: Revival and the History of Christianity in Africa, Bukuru (Nigeria): African Christian Textbooks. Comaroff, Jan and John Comaroff (1991), Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Ekechi, Felix K (1993), “Studies on Missions in Africa”, in Toyin Falola, African Historiography: Essays in Honour of Jacob Ade Ajayi, London: Longman. Gaiya, Musa A.  B. (2012), ABODUNDE, Ayodeji, Messenger: Sydney Elton and the Making of Pentecostalism in Nigeria. Lagos: Pierce Watershed. 2016. Pp. 479. ISBN 9789789497652. (Book Review). Gbesan, Gbenga (2020), Peter Akinola: who Blinks First? Eugene (Oregon): Resource Publications. Imo, Cyril (2008), “Evangelicals, Muslims, and Democracy: With Particular Reference to the Declaration of Sharia in Northern Nigeria”, in Terence O. Ranger, Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Africa, Oxford: University Press. Kalu, Ogbu U (1993), “African Church Historiography”, in Toyin Falola, African Historiography: Essays in Honour of Jacob Ade Ajayi, London: Longman. Kalu, Ogbu U. (1996), The Embattled Gods: Christianization of Igboland, 1841–1991, Lagos: Mimaj Publishers. Lamin, Sanneh. (1983), West African Christianity: The Religious Impact. Orbis Books. Landau, Stuart Landau (1995), The Realm of the Word: Language, Gender and Christianity in a Southern African Kingdom, Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. McGrath, Alister E, and Darren C. Marks (2004), “Introduction: Protestantism- the Problem of Identity”, in Alister E.  McGrath and Darren C.  Marks (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Protestantism, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Oduyoye, Modupe (1969), The Planting of Christianity in Yorubaland, Ibadan: Daystar Press. Oliver, Rowland (1956), Missionary Factor in East and Central Africa, London: Lonman. Olufosoye, T. O. (1994), “Preface”, in J. Akin Omoyajowo (ed.), The Anglican Church in Nigeria, 1842–1992, Lagos: Macmillan Ranger, Terence (1993), “New approaches to the History of Mission Christianity”, in Toyin Falola, African Historiography: Essays in Honour of Jacob Ade Ajayi, London: Longman. The diocesan Board (1994?), History of the Anglican Diocese of Kwara, 1974–1994, Ilorin: np.

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Walls, Andrew Finley (2002), The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History, New York: Orbis Books Webster, J. B. (1969), “Independent Christians in Africa”, Tarikh, Vol. 3, No. 1 Zink, Jesse (2012) “‘Anglocostalism’ in Nigeria: NeoPentecostalism and Obstacles to Anglican Unity”, http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1740355312000125 (retrieved, November 2022).

PART IV

The Rooting of Christianity in Africa II: Christian Life in Contemporary Africa

CHAPTER 34

Christian Devotional Practice in Contemporary Africa Katharina Wilkens

Introduction Devotional practices are regular ritual actions performed by believers both privately and during church services. They are acquired, situated, and repetitive actions and as such they are affective by touching the experiential side of religion. While addressing subjective experiences, they are nonetheless institutionally and culturally shaped. The most common Christian devotional practices include prayers (both scripted and unscripted); the creation of sacred space through icons, posters, crosses, and music; Bible reading; and a variety of different gestures, such as making the sign of the cross or kneeling. The term “devotional practice” is not one that has been theorized explicitly in religious studies (Kinsley and Narayanan 2005). Religious devotion, as an abstract concept, is commonly used to characterize a set of practices and attitudes directed toward an object of devotion (usually some deity or spirit) within the ritual-theological framework of a religious tradition. The etymological root of the term in Latin refers to a vow given to a lord or a deity. The medieval meaning points toward a sense of profound religious awe and reverence, while its popular usage today refers to total loving submission to another person. In Catholic usage, devotions are well-defined paraliturgical practices and litanies performed by individual believers and communities and directed to the trinity, Mary and other saints. Devotional practices in this article, while

K. Wilkens (*) Institute for the Study of Religions, Tübingen University, Tübingen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. E. Barnes, T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48270-0_34

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including all the above meanings, are examined using a subject-oriented approach to rituals as practices (Bender 2012).1 There has been much unhelpful academic debate whether there exists any kind of essentialist “African Christianity”. Historical contingencies, habitualized body techniques, and theological innovations have indeed contributed to changing these practices over decades of appropriation throughout the continent. However, it is important to note that this is a historical argument premised on social, cultural, and religious dynamics. It is not an argument based on cultural essentialism. It must also be kept in mind that variations within Africa correspond in scale to variations in devotional practices in any other Christian region of the world—Europe, for example, is home to enormous variations, ranging from Scandinavian Lutheranism to southern Italian Catholicism and Russian Orthodoxy. Lastly, Christian identity is usually attached to denominational adherence. Apart from the African Independent Churches, all these denominations are part of global networks so that most practices are patterned within a global denominational community that runs counter to any continental or regional formation (Bongmba 2016a, p. 555). This situation of double attachment, to local and denominational forms of devotional practices, produces a field of tension between claims of “Africanicity” and “true Christianity”. Through devotional practices believers establish a space of communication with the divine. The embodied rituals establish and mediate divine presence in the here-and-now of the everyday (Meyer 2020). Depending on denomination, people address God, Jesus, Mary, or a number of different saints. Drawing from religious studies, praxeology, and aesthetics of religion, this article first explores the embodied and affective aspects of devotional practices in conjunction with the variety of beliefs inscribed in the various Christian denominations present across the African continent. Specific examples from these denominations follow in the next section. While this article sketches out some major practices, it must be kept in mind that the sheer richness of detail must by necessity be missing. The article concludes by situating Christian devotional practices in an analytical framework of modernity and post-secular subjectivity.

The Aesthetics of Devotion: A Methodological Approach In studying devotional practices, it is particularly helpful to look at the link between theological teachings, embodied emotions, and the habitualized skill required for specific postures and gestures (Berliner and Sarró 2007). When they learn devotional practices which are specific to each community, believers are attuned toward an object, an emotion, a thought, or a noise, for instance, that marks the moment of communication with the divine. While some practices are loud, lively, and colorful, others engender silence, quietude, or

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emptiness. Communion with the divine is thus achieved in different ways without detracting from the experiential dimension which is central to them all. The aesthetics of religion approach to devotional practices highlights the connection between religious narratives and practices of bodily and cognitive attention, while emphasizing their processual character and their historicity (Grieser and Johnston 2017; Koch and Wilkens 2020b).2 Preferences for certain devotional practices change over time and are continuously adapted to new circumstances. Christianity in Africa showcases both the stability of devotional practices, as in Ethiopia and Egypt, as well as their tremendous flexibility, shown in the rapid progression it has undergone over the last two centuries with the development of new devotional forms, for example, in the (globally unique) African Independent Churches. In an example taken from a study of a Catholic prayer group in Tanzania, the Marian Faith Healing Ministry, a man pointed to his heavily calloused knees resulting from long hours spent kneeling on a hard floor (Wilkens 2011, p. 180). He saw them as a point of pride, because they demonstrated his devotional intensity. Kneeling in prayer is a common Catholic practice (known also in other Christian denominations) that signifies humility toward God. This posture is the same as that adapted by dependents toward a worldly king or lord (as was customary in Europe). While calloused knees as a physical change directly attributable to prayer might be unusually severe, it highlights the nexus between body, affect, liturgy, and theological narrative. Leaders and members of the same prayer group, the Marian Faith Healing Ministry, generally emphasized their devotional practice of praying long litanies in a quiet but rhythmical voice while kneeling down as a distinctive feature between them and the Catholic charismatic movement, or Pentecostals more generally (Wilkens 2011, p.  194). Unscripted loud praying with upturned hands and glossolalia, in particular, were heavily criticized. Thus, devotional practices are not only linked to subjective well-being, but also to the formation of a collective identity. Daily devotional practice fulfills spiritual needs, while simultaneously enacting an embodied boundary between religious groups, specifically those in direct competition with one another (Kollman 2012, p. 426). Devotional practices are embedded in the creation of religious aestheticscapes (Koch and Wilkens 2020, p.  8). Times and places when and where prayers, meditation, or other rituals are thought to be appropriate shape the environment of believers. This might be the soundscape created by church bells, or devotional singing, or the chronoscape of a day, a week, or a year structured through specific prayer times. A church, a private house, or a workspace is integrated into a Christian aestheticscape through the placing of devotional images or a Bible, the lighting of candles, the sprinkling of holy water, or the fumigation of incense. The growing presence of Pentecostal and charismatic gospel music, both in the public sphere and in practices of private consumption, directs attention to the importance of auditory, and partly visual, aspects of religious expression and devotion. In Catholic and Orthodox churches, images and icons of dozens of different saints, as well as Mary and

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Jesus, frame public and private spaces as places of devotion. Images of Jesus and the Holy Spirit predominate in Pentecostal and charismatic settings (Meyer 2010). Other material objects that are part of devotional practices include crosses (as wall hangings, pendants, or in other forms), rosaries, medals, small Bibles that can be carried everywhere, prayer books, candles, and other items. Devotional practices may involve various forms of ritualized food consumption. The central Christian ritual of shared food and wine, the Eucharist, can only be dispensed by an ordained priest and thus is not part of devotional practices outside of church services. Reflections of the Eucharist, however, appear in prayers and iconography bringing together images of Christ, his Apostles and the Christian community. The most common prayer connected to eating across all Christian denominations is that at the beginning of meal expressing gratitude for the food and asking for the blessing of the people gathered together at the table. Other forms of ritualized food consumption include both feasting and fasting. While the former is an act of celebration that takes place in communal settings, the latter is generally thought to be an act of mental and physical preparation for a particular feast day, an act of contrition or some other marked event. As with the calloused knees, the explicitly embodied actions of sumptuous eating and abstemious fasting affect the actors in their subjective attentionality, while also demarcating collective identities. One of the most fraught topics in all Christian denominations in Africa is the believers’ relationship to their ancestors or more specifically to the ancestor spirits. While the churches encourage people to commemorate the dead through various devotional practices, such as prayers, having masses read, or attending to the gravesites, the intervention of ancestral spirits in the daily life of Christians is generally regarded with suspicion. Nonetheless, many people across all denominations continue to communicate with ancestor spirits through dreams, sacrifices, or healing rituals. The perceptual connection to ancestor spirits is aesthetically framed in a cultural context that emphasizes community and lineage belonging. While African Independent Churches acknowledge the affective and embodied experience of ancestor spirits, the (former) mission churches lack the theological grounding to do so. Some liturgical adaptations are discussed below. In Africa, Christian devotional practices, or more generally ritual practices and worship, have been discussed in a field of tension between theologians, anthropologists, historians, and various practitioners. Allegations of syncretism which claim that new devotional practices in Africa are too “heathen” stand side-by-side with claims that prophecy, dreaming, and glossolalia are more Biblical forms of worship than the prayer forms offered by the Euro-American missions (Kollman 2010). On the one hand, inculturation is a process closely monitored by church leaders and constantly evaluated theologically (Magesa 2004). On the other hand, it is a process based on cultural fluidity that is linked more to socio-cultural and economic developments which lie outside the church leaders’ purview. Historians and anthropologists often detect structural or functional similarities between indigenous healers and pastors, while most

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practitioners underscore the essential differences in identity, liturgy, and salvific outcome between pre-Christian and Christian religion. Given these important and sometimes acerbic debates it is necessary to point out that the aesthetics of religion approach does not endorse a specific Christian denominational standpoint. Instead, the relationship between inculturation theology, laypeople’s practices, and formal liturgy is discussed in a theoretical framework attuned to the study of subjectivity, historical change, and socio-economic dynamics.

Varieties of Christian Devotional Practices in Africa This section provides an overview of some devotional practices in various denominations across the continent. Some of these are specific to one community, while others are performed more widely within Christianity. As discussed above, devotional practices train the bodily and cognitive attention of a performer toward a theologically defined goal. This may be the attainment of postures that reflect virtues such as humility or receptiveness, the perception of certain voices or the ability to speak in tongues. Orthodoxy The Coptic Church in Egypt and the Tewahedo Church in Ethiopia distinguish (like all other orthodox churches, as well as the Roman Catholic church) between secular priests, the laity, and the monastic orders whose members live in celibacy, some as hermits, some in communities fully involved in the life of the laity. While some devotional practices are common to all, the time spent in prayer, meditation, and liturgical rites is much greater among priests, monks, and nuns than among lay believers. But the basic attitude is the same and includes veneration of the trinity, saints and angels, and the search for redemption. As in Catholicism and many African Churches, holy oil and holy water play an essential role as means of blessing and healing. Also, the Coptic Church and the Tewahedo Church have rich traditions of iconography which may help to direct the gaze of believers toward the depicted saints. Orthodox prayer is embedded in a rich material culture of devotional objects. Devotionals are specific objects that are accepted by the church leadership to promote an attitude of piousness toward God by mediating his divine blessing in the material space of the believers. They include icons, amulets, herbs, and other medicines, and they are involved in ritual actions such as daily prayer; the blessing of houses, vehicles, or animals; and their protection from evil forces. Holy water, in particular, which is sourced from sacred wells scattered throughout every neighborhood, is very popular as a means of healing sickness and exorcising demons. The Holy Cross as an image or as a three-dimensional object is perhaps the most important devotional object in Ethiopian Orthodoxy. As Jon Abbink states, the “tradition of artistic cross production in Ethiopia is unique and indeed impressive in its scope and variety. […] This remarkable cultural

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elaboration of the cross motif testifies to the deep-rooted attachment to the symbol itself, as a means of faith, of identification” (Abbink 2016, p.  128). Indeed, the cross is part of daily life. It is worn around the neck, placed in houses and vehicles, and carried through the streets during processions. It is the sign toward which one directs ritual greetings, both when passing a church and when addressing priests who carry a cross in their hand. Roman Catholicism As a global institution with a universalist and inclusivist theology, the Roman Catholic Church subsumes many different devotional styles in its ritual practice. In monasteries, devotional practice is formalized and regularized throughout the day, whereas lay Catholics can vary in their daily observances. Attitudes toward liturgical, social, and theological reform, including, for example, questions of inculturation, encompass liberal, conservative, and charismatic movements. Furthermore, some Catholic movements are highly involved in political issues; some actively fight against scientism and secularism; and some specialize in lay mysticism. Catholics around the world, however, share the sacramental liturgy, the most important rite of which is the Eucharist. A special feature of Catholicism in the Democratic Republic of Congo is the Zairean Use (Roman Missal for the Dioceses of Zaire). This is a variation of the Roman Rite which is the basis for celebrating Sunday services and specifically the Eucharist. Initiated by Archbishop Malula after the Second Vatican council and following the policy of “authenticity” enforced by Mobutu Sese Seko, the liturgy was officially adapted by the Vatican in 1988. Two features were adapted specifically to accommodate African devotional aesthetics: a prayer to the “righteous ancestors” was added to the established prayer calling on the saints; and a simple dance of the congregation circling the altar was permitted. In both aspects, the move marks a clear shift away from Euro-American attitudes toward the spiritual and embodied world. The most common ritual gesture performed by Catholics and Orthodox Christians throughout the world is the sign of the cross. This hand gesture, with which one marks the four points of the cross on one’s own body (forehead, solar plexus and both shoulders) is combined in prayers with the Trinitarian blessing (in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, Amen). The person performing the sign of the cross calls the blessing of God upon his or her soul and body during church services, at mealtimes, before sleeping, before any kind of risky undertaking and as a sign of thanksgiving. Crossing oneself is also used as a gesture of defense and protection against any kind of calamitous or highly emotional event and especially against demonic attacks. From an analytical standpoint, the aesthetic form of the sign of the cross connects official liturgy to everyday practice while expressing a theological anthropology that encompasses the person body and soul. The highly routinized physical action of the gesture contributes to placing everyday events within a religious framework. On the level of group identity, making the sign

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of the cross is distinctly Catholic and Orthodox, while most Protestants do not perform this gesture, and might even find it difficult to emulate because it is regarded as an important point of ritual separation between the denominations. The rosary prayer is a type of meditative practice known also in Islam, Buddhism, and other religions. While the prayer beads on a chain slip through the fingers, the devotee intones the requisite prayer text. In its sheer repetitiveness the rosary conveys an affective attitude of quiet, calmness, and security, but also functions as a ritual of safeguarding against evil forces and as a plea for healing and blessing. The rosary recalls the life of the Virgin Mary in relation to Jesus Christ. It can be prayed individually, at any time and in any place, at home, in a crowded bus or in a church. If prayed in a group setting, a leader-­ response division of voices is generally followed by the devotees. The month of May is dedicated specifically to the Virgin Mary and the rosary prayer. Pilgrimages to holy places, usually dedicated to the Virgin Mary or other saints, are common throughout the continent. Perhaps the most popular pilgrimage takes place every June at Namugongo, Uganda. At the court of Buganda, twenty-two Catholic and twenty-three Anglican converts were killed between 1885 and 1887 in defense of their faith. These martyrs are venerated by both the Catholic and the Anglican Church. Separate church buildings and pilgrimage rituals, however, demarcate the denominational boundaries. The Uganda Martyrs have become a symbol of Africanized Christianity, especially Catholicism, retelling central stories of early Christianity in the new missionary context. In the neighboring Rwanda, the Marian apparition of Kibeho is now also attracting thousands of pilgrims each year. In the 1980s, the Virgin Mary appeared regularly to three young school children and quickly attracted a larger following. Pilgrimages center around various aspects of devotion: giving thanks for healing and protection, asking the blessing of the saint for particular undertakings, and receiving the blessing of the saint at a particularly hallowed site. Such pilgrimage sites are highly affective in creating communities of pilgrims, but also as places of identity politics within the Catholic Church. Thus, these African pilgrimage places are very important in creating a feeling of African Catholic identity. Protestantism (General) Protestantism encompasses an enormous range of devotional styles across its numerous denominations. Anglicans, Lutherans, and Methodists are large churches with a comparatively low degree of commitment and thus their members often embody a habitus of low-scale devotional practice. While an attitude of piety may certainly prevail among believers, actual ritual practices, gestures, or speech patterns of devotion in daily life may be more or less absent. Other Protestant denominations, including Baptists, Evangelicals, and various smaller (and often millenarist) churches (Apostolic churches, Jehovah’s Witnesses,

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Mormons, etc.), expect a higher degree of commitment among believers with a concomitant habitus of daily devotional practices. A particular feature of Protestant devotional practice is the emphasis laid on Bible reading. Everybody is expected to own a Bible and to read it at home. Bible reading is thought to be educational as well as a devotional practice. The stories of Jesus and other figures in the Old and New Testament may serve as inspirations for everyday life. But reading is also regarded as a form of contemplation focused on the Word of God. In addition to the Bible, devotional literature which brings together prayers, a selection of Bible verses, sermons, and religious poetry is popular among believers. The emphasis on Bible reading in Protestantism generates an attitude that favors book learning and scripturality, while embedding this cultural technique in an embodied mode of focused contemplation. Protestantism knows both scripted (“set”) and unscripted prayers, though the latter are preferred in private, devotional communion with God. Evangelical mission societies and the holiness movement brought their own distinct devotional style to different parts of Africa. The early dominance of evangelical and pietist missionary societies in the nineteenth century led to a fairly conservative attitude in African Protestantism with regard to family values, gender roles, and abstinence from alcoholic beverages. Inspiration by the Holy Spirit is a central feature of their devotional style, expressed, for example, through fainting fits, fire preaching (a particular rhetorical style of highly emotional preaching featuring expressive body language and a huge range of voice modulation), and an emphasis on healing and purification rituals (laying on of hands, anointment). Baptists, Evangelicals, and other Protestant denominations have adopted the practice of baptizing adults rather than children. Baptism is thus the embodied sign of a personal choice to join the church as a rational adult. An important feature of worship services is the act of giving testimony. Believers testify in front of the congregation to the power of God which they had witnessed in their own lives in the form of healing miracles or inspirations in everyday life. Though giving testimony is a congregational act performed in front of witnesses, it has consequences for devotional practices as well. Believers chronicle their lives in order to document moments of divine intervention and inspiration. This type of attentionality in which people subsume their entire life (workday, hobbies, holidays, family life, travels, etc.) to prayer and pneumatic inspiration is theologically described as sanctification. It is a devotional attitude which is particularly emphasized in the Pentecostal churches and charismatic movements which are discussed below. African Independent Churches (AICs) The independent churches initiated in Africa are a group of churches that are uniquely distinct in Christendom. No such movement has arisen in Latin America, Asia, or the Pacific Islands. Since their beginning in the 1910s and 1920s, these independent movements triggered debates among African and

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Western Christians on the relationship between inculturation, the civilizing mission, and the place of various (African and Western) traditions in Christian devotional practices. The African independent churches re-invented and adapted many features of more radical Christianity, especially those of the holiness movement and non-denominational universalism, while adding specific features of African devotional practice. The latter include rituals addressed to ancestor spirits, healing rituals, a rich cosmology of angels and demons, inspirational dreaming, and prophesying. Liturgical objects such as candles, oils, and holy water were re-interpreted and became important features of congregational and private rituals (Adogame 2000). Regional differences are thus more strongly visible in these independent churches than in any other Christian denomination, creating distinct devotional aestheticscapes. Nigerian independent churches are often based on Yoruba spirituality, authority structures, and materiality, while those in Southern Africa are closely linked to Zulu and Sotho culture. The latter are particularly numerous and dominate the Christian field in the region. Particular messianic figures may feature largely in these regional churches and the prophets may themselves be the focus of devotional practices. The most notable figures, who attract pilgrimages to their burial sites and who are celebrated on special feast days, include Simon Kimbangu in Kongo, and Isaiah Shembe of the Nazareth Baptist Church. Healing practices and fasting, but also singing, instrumental music, dancing, prophesying, and the performance of pilgrimages shape the foundation of devotion at home and at church. Though often critiqued as syncretism by mainstream missionaries, the ritual creativity of the AICs provides much insight into the power of specific aesthetic formations to shape cultures and religions. These have demonstrated the speed with which simultaneous change can take place across large regions. White garments, to take just one example, were certainly known in Western Christianity (not least in the alb of Catholic priests), but the way they have developed into a sign of recognition among the independent churches throughout the African continent is unique to this movement. The combination of Biblical descriptions, especially from the Old Testament and the Revelation of John, with culturally coded color schemes, dress habits, and food taboos gave rise to popular social symbols that outwardly signaled both commitment to Christian devotional practice and independence from the mission churches. The Europeanization of Oriental and Greek Christianity is thus superseded by Africanization. Pentecostalism and the Charismatic Movement Pentecostal churches and the charismatic movement that has spread (in various degrees) through all denominations discussed above are particularly marked by a devotional habitus of “being born again”. This is an outward, public show of faith expressed through the frequent mentioning of the name of Jesus, spoken prayers at various points in daily (work-)life, and the public profession of being

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saved. Glossed as prayerfulness, devotion is something performed by individuals both privately and publicly. Pentecostalism in Africa, as elsewhere, thus resists the Western trend toward privatization of religion. Instead, prayers are practices through which public allegiance to charismatic Christianity is proclaimed, and through which public spaces are reclaimed as sacred spaces. Buses, workplaces, homes, and government offices are incorporated into a ritual space-time not because churches lay official claim to them, but because individual believers perform their devotional prayers there. The high degree of commitment expected in Pentecostal and charismatic communities corresponds to a change in attitude toward prayer practices: while they may initially experience them as silly and empty, believers gradually perceive the effectiveness of prayers by acquiring discipline in their devotional routines, learning the necessary gestures and postures (including glossolalia), and emplacing their everyday life in ritual space-time (Reinhardt 2017). Much has been written on self-formation, absorption, changes in attitude and habitus, and similar mechanisms at work in Pentecostal prayer (Luhrmann 2020). However, this does not mean that Pentecostals are more pious or devoted than other Christians. Rather, the theoretical analyses point toward a certain affinity between socio-psychological models of attention and theological models of prayerfulness. In the Pentecostal worldview, challenges to human prosperity and safety are often perceived as being caused by Satanic forces. Talk of war, weapons, and soldiers is typical for rituals of deliverance which are directed toward individual people, as well as spaces or objects believed to be possessed by demons.3 Though deliverance prayers are a central feature of Sunday worship, individuals may pray for deliverance on any occasion. The emphasis on deliverance is also reflected in mass media, especially movies of the charismatic type which feature dramatic deliverance rituals as a basic plotline. These films are watched not only as entertainment (certainly a very important sales aspect), but also as a devotional practice. Films aesthetically render visible the unseen forces of good and evil, they contribute to the spread of the idea of devotional efficacy, and they serve as models for real life, including social and gender roles, fashion, manner of speech, and habits of prayer (Meyer 2015). Pentecostal and charismatic music productions are even more widely popularized. Songs broadcast on radio and available in social media shape the soundscape of contemporary Christianity in Africa. Bible verses; reflections on moments of deliverance; the sanctification of everyday life; and prayers for peace, prosperity, love, and healing circulate widely as memes in social media thus expanding the possible spheres of devotional practice. Such memes always include images with the texts, and often also music, and these can make reference to local settings (village, city, national, and regional topics and people) or they can be international (American, Korean, etc.). In this way, local (African) identity and adherence to an international non-denominational, charismatic movement are expressed aesthetically through the imagery and messages of the devotional memes.

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Conclusion Christian subjectivity is shaped by the aesthetics of devotional practices. Gestures, rituals, music, sacred objects, films, and habitualized speech patterns all contribute to the formation of denominational identities, as well as the dynamic adaptability of Christianity in Africa vis-à-vis the challenges of urbanization, market liberalization, and secular education. Prayer, the calendrical feasts of Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost, as well as the lifecycle rituals of baptism, marriage, and burial are ritual practices that create a common Christian identity. Liturgical differences during these rituals, however, mark denominational distinctions that impact believers affectively through the embodied routines of ritual action. Some practices, such as the wearing of white garments, are indeed unique to specific African churches (and unknown in the West). Christianity in all its denominational variations is a popular religion in the countries of Africa. Everyday devotional practices, including prayers, hymn singing, or making the sign of the cross, are ubiquitous. Modernity and nationalist secularism have not led to a privatization of religion, as attested to by the visibility of devotional practices. Continuous processes of differentiation and (re-)entanglement between the spheres of medicine and religion may serve as an example. Prayers and various rituals for healing are a common devotional practice in all Christian denominations in Africa. How the spheres of religion and medicine can be combined, or how far they must be separated, is a matter of great controversy, both in the hospitals across the continent and in the churches. Despite much debate, however, the rise of modern medicine has nowhere led to the demise of Christian devotion—as some theorists of modernization would have it. Discourses on decoloniality throw a new light on institutional developments within the Christian denominations in Africa. The ongoing debate on the essential qualities of Africanicity versus true Christianity, locality versus globality, and tradition versus innovation highlights the necessity for further reflection on the aesthetic, cultural, and theological aspects of devotional practices. In the daily routines of practitioners, all layers of identity are embodied dynamically, shifting subtly between various aspects relevant to establishing one’s place in the world.

Notes 1. The official liturgies of Sunday services, baptism, the Eucharist, feast days, or burial rites in the various Christian churches are not a topic of this article. 2. The aesthetics of religion approach shares the epistemological interest in materiality and embodiment underpinning the field of material religion, as represented foremost by the work of Birgit Meyer. Her analytical concepts of sensational forms and aesthetic formations underlie much of the aesthetics of religion approach. However, the aesthetics approach goes a step further and includes a self-reflexive turn toward the religious, secular, and academic production of aesthetic theories, that is, theories, philosophies, and theologies concerned with per-

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ception, cognition, embodiment, sensation, emotion, materiality, and their link to epistemology. 3. In order to emphasize the importance of beliefs in demonic action, deliverance, and exorcism in the Global South, they must be contrasted with their near-­ absence in Europe. They are almost completely disregarded in the most secular regions of Protestant Northern and Central Europe and only practiced somewhat more openly in Catholic Poland and Italy.

Bibliography Abbink, Jon. 2016. “The Cross in Ethiopian Christianity: Ecclesial Symbolism and Religious Experience.” In Bongmba 2016, 122–40. Adogame, Afe. 2000. “Aiye Loja, Orun Nile: The Appropriation of Ritual Space-Time in the Cosmology of the Celestial Church of Christ.” Journal of Religion in Africa 30 (1): 3–29. Bender, Courtney. 2012. “Practicing Religions.” In The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies, edited by Robert A.  Orsi, 273–95. Cambridge Companions to Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Berliner, David, and Ramon Sarró, eds. 2007. Learning Religion: Anthropological Approaches. New York: Berghahn Books. Bongmba, Elias K. 2016a. “Studying African Christianity: Future Trajectories.” In Bongmba 2016, 555–63. ———., ed. 2016b. The Routledge Companion to Christianity in Africa. Routledge Religion Companions. New York: Routledge-Taylor & Francis. Grieser, Alexandra, and Jay Johnston, eds. 2017. Aesthetics of Religion: A Connective Concept. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. Kinsley, David, and Vasudha Narayanan. 2005. “Devotion.” In Encyclopedia of Religion, edited by Lindsay Jones. 2nd ed., 2316–22. Gale eBooks. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA. Koch, Anne, and Katharina Wilkens. 2020a. “Introduction.” In Koch and Wilkens 2020b, 1–9. ———, eds. 2020b. The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Cultural and Cognitive Aesthetics of Religion. London, New York, Oxford, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic. Kollman, Paul. 2010. “Classifying African Christianities: Past, Present, and Future: Part One.” Journal of Religion in Africa 40 (1): 3–32. https://doi.org/10.116 3/157006610X493107. ———. 2012. “Generations of Catholics in Eastern Africa: A Practice-Centered Analysis of Religious Change.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 51 (3): 412–28. Luhrmann, T. M. 2020. “Absorption.” In Koch and Wilkens 2020b, 85–95. Magesa, Laurenti. 2004. Anatomy of Inculturation. Transforming the Church in Africa. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. Meyer, Birgit. 2010. ““There Is a Spirit in That Image”: Mass-Produced Jesus Pictures and Protestant-Pentecostal Animation in Ghana.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 52 (1): 100–130. https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041750999034X. ———. 2015. Sensational Movies: Video, Vision, and Christianity in Ghana. Anthropology of Christianity 17. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2020. “Religion as Mediation.” Entangled Religions 11 (3). https://doi. org/10.13154/er.11.2020.8444.

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Reinhardt, Bruno. 2017. “Praying Until Jesus Returns: Commitment and Prayerfulness Among Charismatic Christians in Ghana.” Religion 47 (1): 51–72. https://doi. org/10.1080/0048721X.2016.1225907. Wilkens, Katharina. 2011. Holy Water and Evil Spirits: Religious Healing in East Africa. Berlin: Lit.

CHAPTER 35

Catholic Church Growth in Independent Africa J. J. Carney

The scene in Léopoldville did not look promising for the future of the Catholic Church in Africa. It was the first week of January 1959, and a sudden uprising was unfolding across Belgian Congo’s capital city (Van Reybrouck 2014, pp. 247–50). Catholic churches, convents, and schools were among the first targets, sparking a mass exodus of Belgian Catholic settlers and sending shudders across the Belgian missionary community. This anti-clerical violence, reacting to Belgian Congo’s “colonial trinity” of state, church, and commerce (Nzongola-Ntalaja 2002, p. 3), continued through the early 1960s. The worst spasm occurred in the environs of Stanleyville (Kisangani) in October 1964 when Simba guerrillas killed nearly 200 European missionaries and many more Congolese Catholic catechists (Vanysacker 2016). The worst fears of late colonial missionaries—that African nationalism and Marxist communism would link arms to destroy Africa’s embryonic Christian civilizations—appeared to be coming true in the heart of Catholic Africa. And then the unexpected happened. Far from collapsing, Catholic churches in Africa experienced an unprecedented surge in popularity in the 1960s and 1970s. Even in Congo-Zaire, the Church recovered and became perhaps the single greatest obstacle to Joseph Mobutu’s authoritarian ambitions.1 And beyond its marked quantitative growth, the Catholic Church offered a remarkable qualitative contribution to public life in postcolonial African societies, whether in healthcare, education, development, or democratization. In turn, Catholics embarked on an unprecedented quest to further “Africanize” and indigenize its leadership, worship, and theology, sparked by both the Second

J. J. Carney (*) Department of Theology, Creighton University, Omaha, NE, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. E. Barnes, T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48270-0_35

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Vatican Council (1962–1965) and Pope Paul VI’s 1969 exhortation in Kampala that “you can, and you must, have an African Christianity” (Orobator 2008, p. 131). This chapter will tackle each of these developments in turn, noting also where the Church fell short or even betrayed its post-conciliar and postcolonial goals and ideals. It concludes with several key challenges facing African Catholics as the continent’s largest Christian denomination moves deeper into the twenty-first century.2

A Story of Quantitative Growth: The Catholic Church in Independent Africa Even as Catholicism has receded in other parts of the world, the faith has grown markedly in postcolonial Africa. Adrian Hastings has described the 1960s as the “Catholic decade” in Africa as baptisms, religious vocations, and institutions blossomed. Missionary numbers remained robust with over 12,000 foreign priests and 20,000 sisters serving across the continent in 1966 (Hastings 1979, p. 171). After a slow start, the numbers of African seminarians, priests, and bishops were also rising by the late 1960s and 1970s. Between 1960 and 1975, the number of African seminarians doubled; nearly 4000 African priests were serving local churches; and African episcopal majorities could be found in such Catholic mainstays as Cameroon, Uganda, Congo-Zaire, Tanzania, and Nigeria (Hastings 1979, p.  237). Although missionary numbers declined markedly in the 1970s and 1980s, the number of African priests continued to grow, reaching 7000  in 1987 and approaching 20,000 by the year 2000. Meanwhile, the number of women religious in Africa surpassed 50,000 by the turn of the century, more than doubling the number of priests on the continent (Isichei 1995, p. 329; Froehle and Gautier 2003, pp. 49–50). Even greater growth was happening among laity. In 1970, the Catholic Church counted 45 million members (Gifford 2016, p. 85). By the turn of the century, African Catholic numbers had surpassed 100 million with particular regional strengths in central and eastern Africa (Jenkins 2011, p.  195; Baur 1994, p. 524). By the 2010s, African Catholic numbers had nearly doubled again to 176 million. At that point roughly one in six Africans was a Catholic, and one in six global Catholics was an African (Gifford 2016, p.  85). Significantly, the African Catholic growth rate in the late twentieth century nearly doubled the population growth rate, and there were more Catholics than Pentecostals in early twenty-first-century Africa (Carney 2022, p.  27; Zurlo and Johnson 2020, p. 9). So clearly Catholicism deserves a central place in the broader narratives of Christian growth in twentieth-century Africa and the overall modern shift of Christianity from the Global North to the Global South. But of course, reducing the story of modern African Catholicism to one of statistics and numbers does serious injustice to the complexity of the narrative.

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As Jesuit theologian Agbonkhianmeghe E.  Orobator (2018) has observed, commentators should take salutary caution against relying too heavily and uncritically on statistics and demography to gauge the salience, relevance, and vitality of Christianity in Africa. … In addition to church attendance and devotion, it is important to probe the extent to which Christianity in Africa promotes human flourishing, social transformation, economic development, and a transformative political imagination. (pp. 45, 47)

With Orobator’s challenge in mind, we will now turn to a more qualitative analysis and evaluation of two major areas of growth in Catholic church life in postcolonial Africa: inculturation and Africanization, on one hand, and social development and public engagement, on the other.

From Christianity in Africa to African Christianity: Inculturation and Africanization in Independent Catholic Africa If colonial Catholic missionaries were generally skeptical of traditional religion and patronizing toward the indigenous cultures of the “Dark Continent” (Hastings 1994, pp. 299–300), the Church underwent a significant transformation in attitudes in the 1960s. Corresponding with the decade of African independence, the epochal Second Vatican Council shifted the Church toward a much more positive attitude toward non-Western cultures and non-Christian religions alike. Vatican II’s constitution on the liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, opened the possibility of utilizing the vernacular language and indigenizing the Catholic Mass. The documents Nostra Aetate and Unitatis Redintegratio called for dialogue and collaboration with non-Christians and non-Catholic Christians, respectively. Dignitatis Humanae embraced religious freedom for all religious believers, and not just Catholics. Led by Tanzania’s Laurean Cardinal Rutagambwa, the sixty-one bishops representing Africa had a small but sizeable impact on the Council, especially in the areas of liturgical adaptation and missiology (Foster 2019, pp. 265–66). The “wind of change” blowing through African politics was also at work in the Catholic Church.3 The first notable area of change, which had already begun prior to independence, came in the Africanization of church leadership. As decolonization and nationalist movements accelerated in the postwar period, Roman officials saw the handwriting on the wall and moved to ordain growing numbers of African men to both the priesthood and the episcopacy. Consecrated in 1939, Bishop Joseph Kiwanuka led the way in Uganda’s Catholic bastion of Masaka (Waliggo 1992). He was followed in the 1950s by younger prelates like Rutagambwa, Aloys Bigirumwami of Rwanda, and Joseph Malula in Belgian Congo. By the mid-1970s, a large majority of African dioceses were led by Africans, with missionaries adopting an increasingly behind-the-scenes role. A good example

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comes from eastern Africa, where American Holy Cross missionary Vincent McCauley assumed leadership of Uganda’s new diocese of Fort Portal in the early 1960s before voluntarily resigning his bishopric and becoming secretary of the Association of Member Conferences of East Africa (AMECEA) (Gribble 2009). Ecclesiological adaptations also aimed to further inculturate and Africanize the church. In central and eastern Africa, Catholic bishops and missionaries implemented the new movement of “small Christian communities” (or in French, “communautés ecclésiales vivantes de base” (CEVB)). Humorously described by Cardinal Malula as an effort to “bomb the existing parishes to make them explode into small communities” (Éla 1982, p. 161), SCCs exemplified what Maryknoll missionary Joseph Healey liked to call the “the church on the move” (Healey 2012). Led by both lay women and men and comprising ten to twenty extended families or neighborhood friends, SCCs became the rural and often urban face of the Catholic Church in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Congo-Zaire, and Cameroon (Carney 2014b). Their grassroots strength helped the Church survive Mobutu’s anti-clerical authenticité turn in the 1970s (Moerschbacher 2012, pp. 53–54), while also strengthening Catholic identity in the face of the Pentecostal wave of the 1970s–1990s. Likewise, encouraged by Vatican II’s reforms, liturgical adaptations transformed the face of African Catholic liturgy. The vernacular turn enabled African Catholics to worship God in their own languages and by traditional names, whether Katonda in Buganda or Imana in Rwanda. This built bridges between Catholic and indigenous religious practice and enabled Catholicism to enter more deeply into the African religious imagination. In turn, prelates like Ghana’s Peter Sarpong took a leading role in incorporating indigenous musical, symbolic, and artistic expressions into the Catholic Mass (Ault 2012, 16:30–22:30). Associated in the colonial mind with witchcraft and paganism, the drum became the symbol of this indigenous musical revival, even ringing out in St. Peter’s Church in Rome during the canonization of the Uganda Martyrs in 1964 (“Ugandans are Canonized,” 1964). Perhaps the most extensive of these liturgical adaptations came with the “Zairean Rite,” approved by Rome in 1988 as an alternative Catholic liturgy, akin to the longstanding Eastern Rite church liturgies of eastern Europe and the Middle East (Sundkler and Steed 2000, p. 1022). The rise of African theology in the post-conciliar period also reflected this broad trend toward indigenization and inculturation. Although important works in African theology originated even before the dawn of independence (Kagame 1956; Tempels 1959; Abble 1957), the golden age came in the decades following Vatican II, led by scholars from Cameroon, Congo-Zaire, and Tanzania (Éla 1986; Mveng 1996; Eboussi-Boulaga 1984; Bujo 1990; Magesa 1997, 2004; Nyamiti 1984). These theologians demanded the rehabilitation of African traditional religion and a thorough Africanization of Catholic theology and practice, shedding the Western imperial husk that had occluded the seed of the gospel since the dawn of the missionary era.4 This call

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to indigenize African theology often overlapped with institutional demands for “ecclesiastical Africanisation” in the face of lingering missionary paternalism and resistance to African leadership (Enyegue 2022, p. 3). To be fair, the indigenous turn in postcolonial African practice and theology was by no means the final story. Catholicism remained very much a transnational and centralized religion, whether in the uniformity of the Mass or in hierarchical episcopal structures that reported directly to the Vatican.5 Like their coreligionists around the world, African Catholics continued to be deeply shaped by Marian devotions, and popular piety often veered toward traditional, pre-Vatican II emphases on fasting, exorcism, and the wearing of religious medals (Katongole 2007, p.  133). The postcolonial African hierarchy was notable for its perceived fealty to Rome with papal nuncios often exercising significant influence on the ground, such as the human rights advocacy of Giuseppe Bertello in pre-genocide Rwanda (Denis 2022, pp.  187–88). At times, the Vatican proved singularly resistant to popular local spiritual movements, such as Zambian Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo’s charismatic healing practices or Tanzanian priest Felicien Nkwera’s Marian Faith Healing Ministry (Gifford 1998, pp.  227–28; Baur 1994, pp.  333–35; Comoro and Sivalon 1999). Significant theological voices also resisted the turn to inculturation for failing to take seriously the concrete social, material, and political conditions of modern African life (Katongole 2005, pp.  153–79). And even more sympathetic theologians argued that the cultural turn always had to be distilled through a lens of liberation, especially when it came to the social expectations and treatment of women (Oduyoye 2004; Waliggo 2002). This shift to liberation discourse reflected the oft-oppressive nature of postcolonial African politics, while also displaying the Catholic Church’s central role in movements for social development and political democratization. It is to the Church’s public role in postcolonial Africa that we now turn.

Handmaiden to Democracy and Development: Catholicism’s Growing Public Impact in Postcolonial Africa Catholic missionary leaders in late colonial Africa were far from enthusiastic cheerleaders for independence. Most feared the potential anti-clericalism of African nationalism and the lurking shadows of Marxist communism. But after the first wave of independence washed over the continent between 1957 and 1964, most churches found themselves retaining the privileges they had enjoyed during the colonial era. Many of Africa’s Christian majority nation-­ states were led by mission-educated or seminary-trained leaders, including Gregoire Kayibanda in Rwanda, Abbé Fulbert Youlou in Congo-Brazzaville, or the Presbyterian Kenneth Kaunda in Zambia (Hastings 1979, p. 151). Some Catholic political leaders such as Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere or majority-Muslim Senegal’s Léopold Senghor were among the leading intellectual lights of their

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generation. Senghor’s contributions to the négritude movement are well-­ known, and Nyerere became the leading progenitor of ujamaa, an “African socialism” with distinctive underpinnings in Catholic social thought (Rabaka 2015; Senghor 1970; Nyerere 1981; Duggan and Civille 1976). So far from representing a China-style repudiation of foreign missions, 1960s Africa was a markedly congenial place for the Catholic Church and most mainline denominations. Continuing their colonial legacy, Catholic churches were leaders in the provision of education in postcolonial Africa. To be sure, mission schools lost some of the independence they had previously held, with countries from Egypt and Rwanda to South Africa and Mozambique nationalizing schools in the 1960s and 1970s (Sundkler and Steed 2000, pp.  919–22; Carney 2015, pp. 185–86; Brain 1997, p. 205; Morier-Genoud 2019, p. 154). But nationalization had its limits, especially when the state still relied on churches to staff publicly funded schools. For the most part, the Catholic Church retained curricular control, with broad latitude to run schools according to their own religious ideals. Fifty years after independence, the Catholic school system remained by far the largest in independent Africa with 33,000 primary schools, nearly 10,000 secondary schools, and 20 universities (Gifford 2016, p. 86). The story was similar in the world of medicine. The Catholic Church had become a central player in the provision of healthcare services from the dawn of the colonial era. For some religious communities like Sr. Teresa Kearney’s (Mother Kevin’s) Little Sisters of St. Francis, medicine was a primary apostolate; her pride and joy, Kampala’s Nsambya Hospital, grew to become one of Uganda’s finest (D’Arbela 2015). Such influence only expanded after independence as the African Catholic Church developed over 16,000 health centers, including hospitals, outpatient clinics, rural dispensaries, rehabilitation centers, leper colonies, and homes for the elderly and special needs patients (Gifford 2016, p. 90). But Catholic medical influence was felt far from Africa’s urban centers, especially through the Church’s extensive network of rural dispensaries. Perhaps the most significant and controversial dimension of late twentieth-­ century Catholic healthcare in Africa was its engagement with the HIV-AIDS crisis. By the year 2000, over thirty million or 70% of global AIDS cases were located in Africa, with 30% of the world’s cases in southern Africa alone (Iliffe 2006, p. 33; Orobator 2005, p. 88). The Catholic Church was the largest provider of anti-retroviral drugs, therapy, and palliative care on the continent. And yet the Church’s hardline stance against condom usage left it open to blistering critiques that it was playing a Good Samaritan role in caring for battered AIDS patients, yet seriously failing to tackle the root causes of the crisis.6 The postcolonial Church also grew into a major player in economic development, especially at the grassroots level. A new trend in independent Africa concerned microfinance. Here financial institutions like the Catholic Centenary Bank grew into the largest loan provider in rural Uganda, providing accounts to poorer residents who often struggled to access international or national banks. Following the logic of what Jean-François Bayart called “extraversion”

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(Bayart 2009, p. xii), the Catholic Church also facilitated a remarkable amount of foreign investment in postcolonial Africa. This happened through transnational groups such as the U.S.-based Catholic Relief Services and the European-­ based Caritas, but also through bilateral relationships between Western and African dioceses and episcopal conferences. Nor should one overlook the remarkable entrepreneurial prowess of individual African priests, raising money in American, Italian, German, and British dioceses to send back home for the construction of schools and clinics and the provision of countless school fees. In this sense, the Catholic Church has been a major economic player in Africa’s postcolonial development, although one could question whether this has facilitated genuine independence or only reinforced neocolonial, patrimonial tendencies with an ecclesial hue. It is on the explicitly political front that the Catholic Church has played its most controversial role in postcolonial Africa. On one hand, the Church’s ingrained conservatism and tendency to protect its institutional interests has led it to adopt a posture of quietist quiescence in the face of authoritarian governments. In countries like Macías Nguema’s Equatorial Guinea, Sekou Touré’s Guinea, or Amin’s Uganda, this silence developed as a survival strategy in the face of brutal and capricious persecution (Hastings 1979, pp. 193–94; Sundkler and Steed 2000, pp. 935–36). In countries like Rwanda, the failure to challenge authoritarian politics was less defensible, as the church was largely coopted by Hutu nationalist politics following the social revolution of 1959–1962 (Longman 2010). Conflicting ethnic loyalties could also rend public Catholic unity, as happened in Kenya (Kollman and Toms Smedley 2018, p.  140). At times such quiescence reflected financial greed, as church leaders cozied up to state elites in hopes of gaining material favors. A notorious example came in Mobutu’s Zaire, where the “president for life” enjoyed lavishing newly consecrated bishops with Mercedes-Benzes (Oyatambwe 1997, p. 63). And yet Congo-Zaire was also the place where the Church emerged as a handmaiden to democracy. Chaired by Archbishop Laurent Monsengwo, the 1992 Sovereign National Conference brought together over 2000 delegates from across Congolese civil society and represented the largest democratic exercise of power in the thirty years since independence (Van Reybrouck 2014, pp.  397–401). Across the border in the Republic of Congo, both religious sisters and lay mamans catholiques publicly protested for peace and political change (Martin 2009, pp. 172–79). Similar church-led democratization movements unfolded in Benin and Togo, while in Kenya and Malawi Catholic bishops overcame their previous caution and spoke out against the Moi and Banda governments between 1990 and 1992 (Linden 2012, pp.  231–32; Mpekansambo 2014). In Sudan, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference protested against the imposition of Islamic law on Christians during the 1980s and 1990s (Tounsel 2020). Not surprisingly, Catholic leaders and activists paid a severe price for their democratic and human rights advocacy. Among many examples, Congo-Brazzaville Cardinal Émile Biayenda was assassinated in 1977 after

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speaking out against government repression (Hastings 1979, p. 223), and the Jesuit theologian and social actvist Engelbert Mveng was murdered in 1995 in suspicious circumstances (Gifford 1998, p. 271; Enyegue 2022, p. 262). The Church also faced real discernment in how to handle rebel or resistance movements. In the late 1960s, Irish Spiritans and Holy Rosary sisters robustly supported Biafra’s failed secession effort in Nigeria and worked ecumenically to coordinate massive “Joint Church Aid” humanitarian air support (Sundkler and Steed 2000, pp.  952–53). In Congo-Kinshasa, prelates like the Jesuit Archbishop Christophe Munzihirwa and his successor Emmanuel Kataliko strongly opposed Rwandan-backed militias wreaking havoc in their eastern diocese of Bukavu; both ultimately paid for this advocacy with their lives (Kiess 2011, pp.  147–97; Katongole 2017, pp.  164–78). But in places like white-­ ruled Rhodesia, the missionary bishop Donal Lamont took a more nuanced tack, opposing armed violence yet also calling out the white-settler state for its racist, draconian security laws. Yet on the ground, Black Catholic priests served as chaplains to the Zimbabwean resistance movements, the most prominent of which, the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), was co-led by the former Catholic schoolteacher, Robert Mugabe (Linden 2012, pp. 212–24). Neighboring Mozambique also saw the Church take an increasingly pro-­ resistance stance in the 1970s as both missionaries and indigenous church leaders mobilized against the human rights abuses of the Portuguese settler state (Morier-Genoud 2019, pp. 126–54). South Africa provides one of the more famous cases of shifting Catholic attitudes toward resistance movements. Already in the 1950s the British missionary bishop Denis Hurley adopted a prophetic stance against the Nationalist Party’s brutal apartheid policies, working especially to maintain the independence of Catholic schools (Anderson 2020). And yet the postcolonial Catholic Church reflected the divisions of the nation, deeply divided between a white minority largely sympathetic to the ruling Nationalists, and a growing black majority restless for a change in the racist status quo. It was not until the 1980s that Catholics became true players in the anti-apartheid resistance movement, making ecumenical common cause with Methodists, Anglicans, and other mainline Protestant churches. Priest-scholars like Frank Chikane and Albert Nolan spoke and wrote publicly against the system, while also spending time in detention. And although they officially adopted a nonviolent stance in opposition to both state repression and the African National Congress (ANC) insurgency, the Catholic bishops’ rhetorical sympathy for the anti-apartheid movement drew the ire of the state, which then bombed the SABC headquarters in Pretoria in 1988 (Brain 1997, p. 206; Linden 2012, pp. 186–98). The “second wave of democratization” that swept over Africa in the early 1990s was also accompanied by a wave of unprecedented violence, civil war, and even genocide. The Great Lakes Region of Rwanda, Burundi, and Congo-­ Zaire were hardest hit, with the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi costing the lives of nearly one million (Denis 2022; Longman 2010). Hundreds of thousands died in Burundi during the 1993–2005 civil war, and upwards of four

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million Congolese perished in the multinational “Africa’s World War” that followed the Rwanda genocide (Prunier 2009). But vicious civil wars also unfolded in the 1990s in Sudan, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Côte d’Ivoire, Algeria, and Liberia. In the aftermath of these internecine conflicts, and alongside other Christian churches, the Catholic Church played a central role in reconciliation and reconstruction efforts. In Rwanda, Catholic activists and parishes engaged in prison ministries with former génocidaires while also instituting new penitential practices to help heal rural parishes (Carney 2015). In Uganda, lay activists and clergy joined forces to advocate for their long-suffering Acholi people during the brutal Lord’s Resistance Army insurgency of 1986–2008 (Hoekema 2019; Carney 2020, pp. 112–28). In DRC, the Catholic Church was the single most functional social institution coming out of the war with the Congolese Episcopal Conference (CENCO) serving as a conscience for the nation, and Church mediators facilitating multiple presidential elections (Okitafumba Lokola 2020; Carney 2014a). Across the continent, diocesan justice and peace commissions did yeoman’s work to protect land rights and mediate legal cases. In many ways, then, the Church’s public role in postcolonial Africa was a salutary one, marked by national advocacy for human rights and good government, grassroots reconciliation ministries, and unmatched provision of education, healthcare, and other social services. In this sense, Africa exemplified the political scientist Samuel Huntington’s claim that the Catholic Church’s Vatican II shift “from defenders of the status quo to opponents of authoritarianism” was one of the most important factors in the world’s “third wave” of democratization (Huntington 1991, p. 13). But as the Church moves further into the twenty-first century, it faces deep internal and external challenges, as we will now explore in the conclusion to this chapter.

Conclusion: Four Rising Challenges for the African Catholic Church in the Twenty-First Century Only six decades have elapsed since most African nations gained independence from European colonizers. In the long durée, then, the Catholic Church of the 2020s is still very much in the “independence era.” To be sure, Catholic growth in Africa remains robust with a recent estimate of 236 million; Catholics comprise the largest church in a continent that will count two of every five global Christians by 2050 (Zurlo and Johnson 2020, p. 9). In light of stagnating or declining populations in other parts of the world, Africa is both the spiritual heart and demographic center of the global Catholic communion. This is not to say that all is smooth sailing, however. First, tensions around gender and sexuality as well as the worldwide clergy sex abuse scandal reverberate in Africa. As the West has become increasingly accepting of homosexuality and LGBTQ rights, Africa has become something of a last bastion in conservative resistance to this legal and social revolution.

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Although Anglican and Pentecostal churches have garnered more headlines, African Catholic Churches share conservative attitudes on these questions, even as the Catholic Church has been rhetorically more accepting of the human dignity of LGBTQ persons (Van Klinken 2016, p. 495). In turn, for decades the African church largely turned a blind eye to the widespread problem of clerical sexual abuse of children, young women, and women religious. In this regard, Pope Francis’s 2019 “Meeting on the Protection of Minors in the Church” and subsequent motu proprio requiring mandatory reporting of sexual abuse and cover-ups represented an important step toward further accountability, awareness, and breaking of the code of silence (Francis 2019). Moving beyond a previous posture that dismissed the clerical abuse crisis as a “Western problem,” many African dioceses now have in place codes for sexual conduct and the protection of children. But in social contexts where the Church and its clergy exercise dominant structural power, independent reporting and accountability remain elusive. The abuse crisis also reveals other tensions within the church, such as cultural patriarchy reinforced by an all-male priesthood that often leaves lay and religious women alike in vulnerable positions. This raises the challenge of how to further empower women at all levels of the Catholic Church, whether in lay or ordained leadership (Akossi-Mvongo 2016). Second, the global ecological and climate crisis is emerging as a “matter of urgency” for African Catholicism (Knox 2016, p.  241). The environmental movement was largely peripheral to the African Church’s active sociopolitical engagement in the late twentieth century. Over the past quarter-century, this has begun to change. The lay Catholic Wangari Maathai led one of Africa’s most important grassroots ecological crusades through Kenya’s Green Belt movement, which combatted environmental exploitation while planting over thirty million trees between the 1970s and the 2000s (Munene 2014, p. 184; Maathai 2007). Smaller “demonstration plots” in integral ecology are popping up around the continent, from the Dominican priest Godfrey Nzamujo’s Songhai Center in Benin to Emmanuel Katongole’s Bethany Land Institute in Uganda (Katongole 2022). The intertwining crises of global warming, pollution, deforestation, drought, soil depletion, and species loss pose an existential threat to Africa and its peoples that demand a more robust church response. Third, African Catholics face a continuing challenge in how to engage their religious brethren. Reinforced by Vatican II, ecumenism and inter-religious dialogue advanced markedly in the independence era; symbolic here was Paul VI’s 1973 meeting with Egyptian Patriarch Shenouda III after 1500 years of Chalcedonian divisions (Sundkler and Steed 2000, p.  1019). In turn, religiously pluralistic areas became some of the most successful incubators of liberal democracy (Dowd 2015, p. 2). In the face of resurgent Islamic extremism in Nigeria, the Horn of Africa, and much of the Sahelian region, this interreligious tolerance is being tested. In 2021 alone, 6000 Christians were killed for their faith in Nigeria, including multiple Catholic priests and sisters (Karombo 2022). And although the Pentecostal wave has not sparked intra-­ Christian violence, many Catholics continue to disaffiliate to join their more

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vibrant, dynamic neighbors (often still derisively dismissed as “sects” in official African Catholic discourse). In response, the Church since the 1970s has encouraged the Catholic Charismatic Movement, which in some parts of the continent now comprises half or more of practicing Catholics. In Uganda, the Indian Vincentian missionary Joseph “Fr. Bill” Kuruppamparambil was especially influential in spreading the Charismatic Renewal (Kabagambe 2008). Charismatic practices of faith healing, speaking in tongues, and exorcisms have congealed with what Gifford has called the “enchanted” worldview of most African Catholics, while also empowering women to be more engaged in civic affairs and social action (Gifford 2016, pp. 107–24; Dowd and Sarkissian 2017, pp. 552–55). A fourth challenge concerns the growing African Catholic diaspora. Increasingly, Western dioceses in the USA, Canada, and Europe are importing African priests to serve parishes withering in the face of a precipitous clergy shortage that shows few signs of abating. As mentioned previously, these African priests have served a valuable function as “missionaries in reverse,” not to mention agents of international development and transnational short-term missions. But concerns linger over whether it makes sense to export so many African priests when rural parishes on the continent may only celebrate Eucharist a few times a year. The sacramental nature of Catholicism means that this “Eucharistic famine” is a serious pastoral crisis of the highest order (Healey and Sybertz 1996, p. 277). In turn, rising tides of refugees and migrants often take Africa’s best and brightest to foreign shores, reflecting both the cultural allure of Western culture and technology and increasing despair at the social, political, and economic situation on the continent. If Vatican II was designed to revitalize the Catholic Church in a spirit of aggiornamento (“updating”), then this church renewal has had no greater impact than in Africa. In the subsequent sixty years since the Council and independence, the Catholic Church has grown rapidly while becoming a more distinctively African community in terms of leadership, worship practices, and structures. In line with the Togolese church motto “the whole gospel for the whole man” (Sundkler and Steed 2000, p.  939), the Catholic Church also addressed the holistic needs of Africans in their social, medical, educational, economic, and political lives. Much of the Church’s success has rested on Africa’s deeply religious social imagination that has largely resisted the advent of the “secular age” that dominates so much of Western culture (Taylor 2007). But deep challenges hover in the twenty-first century, a period that will surely be marked by similar tides of political conflict, social dynamism, and spiritual energy that undergirded the post-independence era.

Notes 1. Reflecting common Catholic parlance, I will at times use language of “the Church” as interchangeable with “the Catholic Church.”

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2. After independence, Belgian Congo became the Republic of the Congo-­ Léopoldville and then the Democratic Republic of the Congo. As part of his authenticité campaign, President Mobutu renamed the country “Zaire” in 1971. After Mobutu’s toppling in 1997, the country’s name reverted to “the Democratic Republic of the Congo” or DRC (not to be confused with the Republic of the Congo or “Congo-Brazzaville,” the neighboring nation to the west). Given the historical fluidity, I will at times use the language of “Congo-Zaire” in this chapter. 3. The phrase “wind of change” comes from a February 1960 speech of British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in South Africa. Not all Catholic missionaries were on board with the “wind of change,” of course. The most famous critic was the former leader of the Spiritans in West Africa, Marcel Lefebvre. Lefebvre led a traditionalist schism in the years following Vatican II grounded on resistance to the Council’s openings on religious freedom and inter-religious dialogue, which he saw as undermining the Church’s missionary mandate and age-old tradition (Foster 2019, pp. 225–26, 263–65). On Lefebvre’s important influence within the conservative French missionary milieu of West Africa, see Enyegue 2022, pp. 34–36. 4. For a comprehensive overview of postcolonial African theology in both Francophone and Anglophone circles, see Bujo and Muya 2003 and 2006. 5. In this regard, an important institutional development in the independence era was the development of regional bishops’ conferences and transnational religious structures such as the East African Jesuit Province or Jesuit Vice-­ Province of West Africa (Mkenda 2019; Enyegue 2022). 6. To be sure, the root causes of the HIV-AIDS pandemic in Africa went far beyond condom usage to include poverty, gender relations, epidemiological history, public health access, and sexual and marital customs and mores (see Bujo and Czerny 2007 and Azetsop 2016).

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CHAPTER 36

Christian Femininity in Independent Africa Dorothy Tembo

Introduction That Christian missions conducted themselves as cultural imperialists in Africa when planting Christianity is not so much of a debate. Christian missions propagated the gospel in Africa throughout the nineteenth century, except in Ethiopia and a few other countries that had already converted to Christianity before the expansion of missionary work from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Despite the good intentions of those who attempted to convert Africans to Christianity, many Africans were compelled to abandon their cultural practices to demonstrate their sincerity to the newfound faith (Masondo 2018; Nkomazana and Setume 2016). As a result, many Africans lost important aspects of their identity (Chidester 1996; Porter 1997; Thompson 2013). Africans struggled to reconcile their Christian faith and culture throughout the colonial era. Those who converted to Christianity were expected to comply with the missionary standards of a Christian home, which required the reinterpretation and restructuring of roles inside the homes and, as a result, the reconstitution of feminine and masculine duties and responsibilities (Tembo 2022). Church and society in postcolonial Africa still display the effects of such practices and interventions through the persistence of traditionally feminine and masculine gender roles and obligations. However, the situation is different in the post-colonial era, where women can now occupy prominent positions in the church and society. This has been accomplished in part as a result of improvements in the education and literacy levels of women, which have been made possible by the fact that educational institutions and providers now

D. Tembo (*) Department of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Malawi, Zomba, Malawi © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. E. Barnes, T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48270-0_36

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accept both boys and girls as students, as well as by other factors such as modernity and globalisation (Coleman 2017; Stambach 2013). Consequently, women have been able to challenge the institutions that confine them to domesticity and have created roles for themselves in the public realm, which is a domain that was traditionally reserved for men. This has allowed women to break free from the confines of traditional gender roles. The purpose of this chapter is to compare and contrast cultural demands and expectations placed on women with an analysis of women’s religious experiences in Africa. The discussion concentrates on evaluating women’s religious experiences against the patriarchal culture that influences women’s position in society and how, in turn, women have led a social transformation of their communities and the Church using the same Christian teachings, practices, and beliefs. There are many studies on the intersection of gender, culture, and religion in Africa. Still, more research is needed to understand how women adapt to changing social norms and build productive partnerships with influential community members, authorities, and societal structures. This chapter examines Christian femininity in independent Africa by analysing literature from the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians (hereafter referred to as The Circle) to identify themes and topics that are predominant in the literature produced by The Circle. The chapter starts from the assumption that these topics represent the most pressing problems women face in everyday life. As the Circle operates on a continental scale, this is a critical starting point for exploring the intersections between the lives of African women and Christianity. We gain perspective on the issues and challenges that African women face on a daily basis from the literature produced by The Circle (NyaGondwe 2017, p. 11). It, therefore, makes it much easier to generalise the findings of their studies. The chapter considers femininity as qualities and characteristics that are associated with women. By employing the phrase “Christian femininity,” I am trying to reconcile these features with the teachings and practices of Christianity. The overall structure of the chapter consists of four sections, including this introduction. The chapter begins with a literature review of concepts of femininity and masculinity within gender studies in Africa. Then it proceeds to discuss The Circle’s literature to provide an understanding of contemporary views of Christian femininity in independent Africa. This section has four parts: the first part describes the impact of The Circle on gender roles in the homes and community, the second part explains the gendered nature of rituals and rites of passage in Africa, the third part explains women’s ordination and leadership in the Church, and the fourth part examines the intersection of gender and health. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the significance of the findings for ongoing research in this field.

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Femininity and Masculinity in Africa Femininity is a contentious topic in African studies, where it is frequently contrasted with masculinity. Traditionally, the term “femininity” has been understood to connote “domesticity,” “piety,” “purity,” and “submissiveness,” whereas the term “masculinity” is understood to refer to the aggressive nature of men and their tendency towards patriarchal behaviours (Hofstede et  al. 2005; McMinn 2000). The connotations that are normally associated with these terms are generally unfavourable and toxic. In most cultures and traditions, men “are supposed to be assertive, competitive, and tough. Women are supposed to be more concerned with taking care of the home, of the children, and of people in general—to take the tender roles” (Hofstede et  al. 2005, 2:138). Therefore, it is expected of men to take on leadership roles and responsibilities in both the public sphere and homes, while it is expected of women to provide for the psychological and physiological needs of their families. Our conceptions of what constitutes femininity and masculinity have, throughout the course of human history, determined the gender roles that men and women were expected to play in society and the home. Most examples of gender roles are neatly contained within the traditional two-sex framework. In traditional societies, the feminine traits and all attributes associated with women are devalued in favour of masculinity (McMinn 2000, p. 40). The community devalues feminine roles due to stereotypes of women’s behaviours, such as irrationality, that prevent them from holding leadership positions (Brescoll 2016; Pullen and Vachhani 2021). This is mainly motivated by the fact that violent and toxic forms of masculinity are used as a contrast and framework for understanding femininity (Gqola 2007, p.  121). One of the unintended consequences of this is an increase in incidents of violence against women. Studies show that gender-based violence has its roots in the devaluation of feminine characters (Gqola 2007, p. 121; Mombo and Joziasse 2022). Besides, it has been proved that the emphasis on domesticity, submissiveness, and silence in the face of male authority leads to a rejection of femininity, even among women (Gqola 2007, p. 121; Pullen and Vachhani 2021). As a result, it would appear that women are being coerced into denying their femininity. A growing number of women are rejecting traditional feminine roles to break free from oppressive social norms and institutional constraints (Pullen and Vachhani 2021; Phiri 1997a; Phiri and Werner 2013). McMinn argues that by devaluing femininity, we inadvertently devalue the feminine characteristics of God in humanity (McMinn 2000, p.  43). In any event, women’s agency and their capacity to choose are hindered when traditional ideas and stereotypes about women and femininity are upheld in the absence of a critical examination of whether or not these ideas and stereotypes are compatible with women’s rights. Therefore, a balance must be struck between the promotion of femininity and the promotion of favourable/acceptable masculine ideals to ensure that the restructuring of femininity does not result in its rejection in favour of desirable masculine traits and safeguard

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women’s freedom of choice (Brescoll 2016; See Pullen and Vachhani 2021). In this way, we ensure that femininity expressed in its various forms is not impacted by social values that prefer masculinity and that women are free to express their feminine traits without judgement. As we explore the concept of “Christian femininity” in Africa, we are on the lookout for the historical development and contemporary manifestations of gender roles for women in the Church and the broader African society. It must be acknowledged that conversations on Christian femininity in Africa present challenges because the phrase “Christian femininity” is predicated on the assumption that there is a homogenous and monolithic view of female characters when there is so much diversity that all forms of generalisations are impossible. Behaviors that are “considered feminine or masculine differ not only among traditional societies but also among modern societies” (Hofstede et  al. 2005, p.  137). That feminine and masculine attributes and characteristics are contextual and hence places culture at the forefront of our discussion when assessing women’s religious experiences in Independent Africa. This cultural diversity entails varieties of religious experiences and must be acknowledged to avoid perpetuating and generalising stereotypical female behaviour. Therefore, the purpose of this chapter is to investigate the faith–culture–femininity nexus in Africa to gain an understanding of the influence that African cultural norms and Christianity have had on the religious experiences of African women and, in turn, how African women are utilising Christian principles to influence social change in their homes and the community. I turn to The Circle to understand Christian femininity in Africa. A detailed analysis is given in the next section.

The Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians and Women Studies in Africa This section summarises key contributions made by women theologians on the continent through the regional grouping called The Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians. The Circle was established in 1989 under the influence of Mercy Amba Odiyoye (NyaGondwe 2017, p. 10). The Circle was established to investigate culture and the Church in order to combat discrimination against women (NyaGondwe 2017; Phiri 1997a). It is devoted to the study of women issues pertaining to sexuality, gender-based violence, health and development. While the circle does share certain parallels with other gender groups operating on the world stage, it does offer distinct theologies that are informed by African contexts and are driven by the mission to improve the lives of African women in their concrete environments. As a result, there is a wide range of theologies developed, each with its own particular focus and method, but all with the common goal of responding to the most serious issues facing women on the African continent. This section analyses the Circle’s

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literature for a sense of Christian femininity in postcolonial Africa, focusing on the common threads that run throughout the works. The Circle promotes feminist theologies to liberate women from patriarchal structures that are common and pervasive in many African countries. It is argued that these patriarchal structures limit women’s agency and access to leadership roles in the church and the wider community (Phiri 2004). This is accomplished by promoting the inclusion of women in theological education so that they are well-equipped to serve their communities and the Church. Overall, the Circle investigates the intersection of faith and culture. It demonstrates the ways in which women deal with issues pertaining to religion and culture in their local communities, as well as the efforts they make to find solutions to societal problems (Phiri 1997a). Since The Circle operates across the African continent, we can assume, with some confidence, that the topics addressed in their writings are relevant and responsive to women’s experiences in Africa. They have collected literature written by women theologians on the continent and have facilitated discussions, seminars, and conferences on themes that feature prominently in the writings of women theologians on the continent. According to Isabel Apawo-Phiri, “The Circle has concentrated its research in three main areas: the roles and images of women in relation to men in African culture, with special emphasis on rituals in rites of passage; an analysis of the interaction between African culture and Christianity and its impact on African women; and reading the Bible through the eyes of African women” (Phiri 1997a, p. 71). The literature from The Circle promotes liberation theologies designed to free women from cultural and institutional constraints that prevent their social mobility and leadership roles in the Church and society. They provide a foundation for critical inquiry about Christian femininity in Independent Africa. The literature from the Circle demonstrates that the construction of femininity in Africa, both within the Church and within homes, is not entirely the work of missionaries. Phiri observes that African society privileges men at the expense of women (Phiri 1997a, 2000, 2009). Of course, missionaries restructured the gender roles in matrilineal communities where women had considerable political and religious roles and emphasised the Christian values which placed women in subservient positions to men (Phiri 1997b). However, the matrilineal culture of pre-colonial Africa did not result in a matriarchy, and uncles were sources of authority in the matrilineal society (Phiri 1997b). Such being the case, it may be argued that the missionaries did not overhaul the African social system; they emphasised the male leadership already present through different societal institutions and structures. Gender Roles in the Home and Society in African Communities Restructuring gender roles within the family and society has been one of the most significant impacts of the Circle (Phiri 2009). Most African cultures

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uphold the view that men’s qualities are more suited to leadership roles in the public sphere, while women’s qualities are more suited to roles within the home (Gipson et  al. 2010; Fingleton-Smith 2018). In traditional societies, men are the primary decision-makers and women are often called upon to submit to the views of men. This is because men meet the households’ financial and economic needs, solidifying their dominant position as decision-makers in the home (Fingleton-Smith 2018). Ultimately, the household decisions tend to favour men and represent their interests. In some cases, the health and well-­ being of women is compromised to maintain order in the household and secure the position of men as breadwinners (Fingleton-Smith 2018; Tarimo et  al. 2009; Gipson et al. 2010). The writings of The Circle challenge the sex-based gender roles that have been placed on women (Siwila 2022). However, The Circle has not made significant contributions to the current debates around gender fluidity and constructivism, which in the West has influenced the understanding of the construction of many gender identities beyond male/masculine and female/feminine. Be that as it may, they challenge cultural practices and traditions that give men an advantage over women in the home and society. Gender, Women, and Rites of Passages in Africa Researchers have often cited rites of passage, common across Africa, as one of the cultural practices that cement men’s authority over women through ritual (Chibambo 2022; NyaGondwe 2017). According to Casey Golomski, “rites of passage are coordinated ritual events marking significant junctures and transitions across the social lives of individuals and groups” (Golomski 2012, p. 3). The rites of passage are rituals that mark the transition from one social stage to the next and are performed so that the community can prosper and avoid harm. These rites of passage pertain to initiation rites that indicate growth from childhood to adulthood (Werbner 2014), widow cleansing ceremonies, and fertility rites. It has been shown that men benefit more and are protected from community rites of passage than women do in the home. In the traditional societies, women are valued for their ability to bear and raise children. These beliefs are held for many different reasons, including maintaining the social group, maintaining the family name, and honouring the husband and wife as ancestors after their death (Chibambo 2022). Nevertheless, it has been demonstrated that the emphasis on procreation and reproduction has led to the marginalisation of women in that they have to pay for the consequences of the family failing to produce a child. Women writers from The Circle argue that these norms endanger women’s health and well-being. A recent study on families and the cultural expectations of having children revealed that women are stigmatised for failing to have children (Chibambo 2022). Suppose the family fails to have children due to a man’s infertility. In that case, the woman is assigned a fisi, a man selected by family members, and the identity remains hidden, to sleep with the woman with the hope of helping the family to have a child. If a woman cannot conceive a child or have children

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of her own, another member of the woman’s family may be asked to have sexual relations with the woman’s husband and produce children on the woman’s behalf. Lucy Chibambo (2022) argues that this is an instance of gender injustice and recommends changing traditional practices that dehumanise women to cover a perceived shame due to the lack of children in the home. The key argument has always been that women should be accepted as humans first and foremost before fulfilling any social obligation. Thus, the nurturing of domestic spaces and “tender roles” within them, stereotypically female qualities that confine women to the home, are here reframed as a driving force for breaking free of discriminatory cultural norms. In the past, cultural perspectives on the role of women, which stipulated that they needed to bear children for the family, could not be challenged and were accepted and implemented to maintain social harmony (Siwila 2022). However, things began to change with the introduction of Christian missions. The missionaries spoke against these practices, and subsequently, women challenged these practices on the basis of their Christian faith. More recently, the issue of human rights violations has been brought into the discussion, with some suggesting that the continuation of these fertility rites constitutes a violation of people’s human rights. Christianity, in its limited roles, may be said to contribute to a different version of femininity that is unafraid to question cultural practices that are not beneficial for families. Connected to this are further debates on the issue of polygamy. The women theologians have consistently argued that polygamy does not benefit African women despite its cultural acceptability (Phiri 1997a, p. 71). There have also been a significant number of studies on widow cleansing, the practice of requiring that a woman have sex with another man after her husband passes in order to allow the spirit of her husband to rest in peace (Chibambo 2022; Phiri 1997a; Phiri and Nadar 2012). Scholarship and local traditions reveal that these traditions predate the European encounter and colonialism. During the colonial era, missionaries condemned such traditions as they were seen to be inconsistent with the Christian life and principles. Nevertheless, the traditions survived such condemnations. There are numerous accounts of women who endured such traditions and used their experiences to end them. Alice Lenshina Mulenga, a prominent pastor from Zambia, then Northern Rhodesia, was one of those widows subjected to widow cleansing (Hudson 1999). She later emerged as a preacher against infidelity, which was seen as a direct attack on the tradition of widow cleansing (Kaunda and Nadar 2012). In the 1950s, Mulenga started an independent movement after a near-death experience and a mystical encounter with Jesus, where she was asked to start preaching to communities. Her teaching emphasised familial obligation and fidelity in the matrimonial home (Gordon 2012, p. 107; Kaunda and Nadar 2012, p. 351). Mulenga presents a picture of Christian femininity that goes beyond the cultural demands for women to be quiet and submissive. Through her life, we encounter a representation of Christian femininity that

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challenges norms of gender inequality by speaking out against patriarchal structures. Decades later, the practice remains, and African women in some traditional and conservative communities are forced to undergo widow cleansing ceremonies. Chibambo (2022) considers this ritual an instance of human rights violation and gender injustice, and The Circle members continue to write to condemn the practice. The Circle has taken this as one of its responsibilities to “bring to the attention of the world their spiritual, emotional, and physical suffering” (Gathogo 2008; Phiri 1997a, p. 72). This, on the surface, seems like a fight between African women and ancient traditions influenced by Christian principles and tenets. However, putting the revolutionists’ ideas from women in practice and changing the traditions destabilises the community power structures that marginalises women at the communal and household levels. It challenges male leadership and their power to implement traditions that affect women’s lives, thereby removing barriers that limited women’s agency in the home and community in the hope of attaining equality between men and women in the Church and society. When we take out the traditions that confine women to domestic life and the power of men over women, it creates opportunities for women to be involved in socio-political and economic activities of their respective communities. Christian femininity, its understanding, and what it entails are located within this struggle to strike a balance between men and women in Church and society. Women and the Church in Africa In the Church, the question of whether or not women should be able to be ordained and become priests has been a source of contention for many years. This issue has affected both Protestant and Catholic churches. Women’s ordination was prohibited in mainline Protestant churches. The practice of ordaining women was met with opposition from within the Church due to the belief that it is not supported by the Bible. In independent Africa, women have challenged the issue of ordination as reflecting patriarchal traditions, which must be changed to create an inclusive church. In addition, research has demonstrated that missionaries were responsible for founding a church that did not permit the ordination of women and that their arguments were readily accepted because they were in line with the patriarchal customs of African societies (Phiri 1997b). Such prohibitions persisted even in post-colonial Africa. It has been demonstrated that disputes within the Church over ordination and the subsequent lack of women in positions of authority are also rooted in African culture, which promotes the subordination of women (Phiri 2009). Consequently, biblical interpretations of the texts are used to support enduring traditions that limit women’s power and leadership (Dube 2014). Reviewing The Circle’s writings and other writings about women in the Church, it is clear that women are troubled by Christian and cultural practices embedded in the Church that

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prevent the ordination of women as ministers. Over the past three decades, the church has responded to calls from women to open up leadership roles for women in the church, and churches have now ordained women as church ministers (Pillay 2017). Prior to the formalisation of women’s ordination, women often relied on oral traditions to defend their right to hold positions of authority within the Church (Dube 2014). These women claimed to have had visions of Jesus or other mystical encounters with him in which he commanded them to begin preaching and healing ministries after they returned from the dead. They started churches and ministries based on the said religious experiences. This became a widespread practice, especially in charismatic and Pentecostal churches, which emphasise the Holy Spirit’s manifestations in the lives of their congregation members. Their testimonies were accepted and attracted a large following, and they became leaders of the churches and the ministries they established. This is because mystical experiences are based on people’s religious experiences, so they can be accepted based on faith alone, without needing a written text. In the past, however, women were relegated to the private sphere dominated by folk roles, children’s stories and gossip (Gathogo 2008; Shetler 2015, pp.  3–16), here the orality is being used to the women’s advantage to craft leadership roles within the church on the basis of them. Women are reclaiming the ideas of femininity that once kept them on the margins of society to establish healing ministries for their communities. By doing so, they are able to maintain their “tender roles” and the care that they provide for their families and communities. Alice Lenshina Mulenga, who was just mentioned earlier, is one of the prominent women leaders in this field. Other notable preachers include Mayi Chipondeni and Bishop Yami from Malawi (Phiri 2000). Mayi Chipondeni claims that she was struck ill and that she had a vision of Jesus following a period of time during which she fasted and prayed. She also describes how, during the time spent in prayer and fasting, she went completely blind. Through this interaction, she was given a call to the ministry, and she later established a ministry that focuses on healing (Phiri 2000, p.  272). Christian femininity, in this sense, incorporates leadership roles for women in the Church and challenges the patriarchal view of what women should be (submissive and learn from their husbands) and positions the women as leaders and teachers in the Church, home, and society. More significantly, power and authority are not defined as exclusive male traits but also characteristics that women possess. The history of women priestesses and traditional leaders dating from the pre-colonial era are invoked as powerful examples of female leadership that should be promoted in the Church and society (Phiri 1997b, p. 23). Overall, this tells us that moves to restructure homes have far-reaching implications, affecting the distribution of power even at the communal level. Therefore, Christian femininity in independent Africa does not restrict women’s social mobility through social norms that enforce submission but allows for possibilities to critique cultural practices and their overall effect on women,

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homes, and community. Previously, women were confined to the domestic life because of beliefs about femininity which included male leadership and submission to men on the premise that women lack the strength and stability to be leaders and provide guidance in their homes and communities. Women and Health According to a number of studies, the patriarchal culture that is so prevalent in African societies has an effect on women’s health (Fingleton-Smith 2018; Gipson et  al. 2010; Phiri and Nadar 2012). Women often do not have the power to make decisions concerning their bodies, including access to contraceptives and HIV/AIDS counselling and health care (Gipson et  al. 2010). HIV/AIDS is a leading contributor to the overall mortality rate in Sub-Saharan Africa (Gathogo 2008; Phiri n.d.; Kalipeni et al. 2009). Several studies have measured the impact of HIV/AIDS on communal and national development. It cannot be overstated how negatively HIV/AIDS impacts the health and well-being of those infected and their family members. Several factors contribute to the high prevalence rates of HIV/AIDS in Africa. Some studies suggest that traditional practices such as widow cleansing and the fisi are said to contribute to the high numbers of HIV/AIDS cases in African communities (Chibambo 2022). There is evidence that these practices contribute to the spread of HIV/ AIDS, but comprehensive studies comparing the impact of these practices with other ways in which people are exposed to HIV infection are lacking (Biruk 2020). This, notwithstanding, the widow cleansing and fisi have been challenged for what they represent: a society that promotes harmful practices that endanger women’s emotional and physical well-being. The Circle has proposed a shift in our thinking and outlook towards health and well-being, especially towards the HIV/AIDS pandemic. They challenge Christian perspectives that view pandemics as punishments and curses from God to consider God as compassionate and concerned with people’s well-being (Fiedler 2021, p.  18; Gathogo 2008; Phiri 2009). What we find here is the development of theologies that reflect the feminine values of compassion and love. However, the characters are here being used to challenge the practices and interpretations that injure the lives of women in the communities. Therefore, femininity is not about weakness and being marginalised, but is here being used to achieve societal change. In this way, women are agents of social change and have been influential in tackling some of the problems that communities face such as the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Conclusion This chapter demonstrates that Christian women in modern, independent Africa do not follow the normative standards of femininity found in more traditional societies. The study has shown that African women are engaged in a

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never-ending battle against the cultural and religious taboos that restrict the agency they can exercise in the home and in society. These findings enhance our understanding of the role that women continually play in redefining their roles in the home and society. It has been observed that women have been a driving force for social change in the church and the wider society despite the existence of these structural and institutional limitations. It has been demonstrated that African women have gained the self-assurance necessary to critique the traditions held within the church and society that impede their ability to advance socially as a result of their association with Christianity. Collectively, this chapter shows the contradictory nature of the relationship between women and Christianity, including how the church both oppresses women by imposing patriarchal culture on them and frees them from such cultures. This study highlights the importance of critically engaging with cultures and traditions to ensure that they maintain their relevance in the contemporary and ever-­ changing world. In African Christian communities, femininity is not a symbol of passivity but rather of an active commitment to removing obstacles to the social advancement, health, and well-being of women. Inspired by liberation theologies, previous research has so far focused on women’s ordination and leadership, rituals and rites of passage, and health. In future investigations, it might be important to include transdisciplinary perspectives to disseminate the study result to a broad audience beyond theological and religious bodies and institutions. Research topics that might be considered include studies on race and colourism, migration and human trafficking, religion and social policy, food security, and religion and fundamentalism. This would open new avenues for comprehensive studies that combine views from multiple fields of study while expanding our understanding of the issues African women face and their position in relation to, and responses to, socio-political events on a global scale.

Bibliography Biruk, C. (Crystal). (2020). The Invention of ‘Harmful Cultural Practices’ in the Era of AIDS in Malawi. Journal of Southern African Studies, 46(2), 339–356. https://doi. org/10.1080/03057070.2020.1723341. Brescoll, V. L. (2016). Leading with their hearts? How gender stereotypes of emotion lead to biased evaluations of female leaders. The Leadership Quarterly, 27(3), 415–428. Chibambo, L. T. (2022). “Kufa kwa jongololo nkhusiya mphete”: A critique of gender injustice procreation cultural practices of the Sena of Malawi. HTS Theological Studies, 78(2), 1–8. https://doi.org/10.4102/hts.v78i2.6885 Chidester, D. (1996). Savage systems: Colonialism and comparative religion in southern Africa. University Press of Virginia,. Coleman, R. (2017). Gender and education in Guinea: Increasing accessibility and maintaining girls in school. Journal of International Women’s Studies, 18(4), 266–277. Dube, M. W. (2014). ‘God Never Opened the Bible to Me’: Women Church Leaders in Botswana. In Trajectories of Religion in Africa (pp. 315–340). Brill.

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Fiedler, R. (2021). The Transferability of Selected Theologies of Isabel Apawo Phiri on HIV and AIDS Prevention and Care to Christian Women in Southern Malawi. In C. J. Kaunda (Ed.), Religion, Gender, and Wellbeing in Africa (pp. 17–30). Rowman & Littlefield. Fingleton-Smith, E. (2018). The lights are on but no (men) are home. The effect of traditional gender roles on perceptions of energy in Kenya. Energy Research & Social Science, 40, 211–219. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2018.01.006 Gathogo, J. (2008). “Christology in Africans women’s theology,” in African Theological Journal, Vol. 31, No. 2. 75–83. Retrieved October 15, 2022, from https://www.academia.edu/7486062/CHRISTOLOGY_IN_AFRICAN_ WOMENS_THEOLOGY Gipson, J.  D., Muntifering, C.  J., Chauwa, F.  K., Taulo, F., Tsui, A.  O., & Hindin, M.  J. (2010). Assessing the importance of gender roles in couples’ home-based sexual health services in Malawi. African Journal of Reproductive Health, 14(4). Golomski, C. (2012). Rites of Passage: 1900 to the Present: Africa. Cultural Sociology of the Middle East, Asia and Africa, vol. 3, Andrea Stanton, et  al., eds., 365–367. Thousand Oaks: SAGE. (pp. 365–367). Gordon, D.  M. (2012). Invisible agents: Spirits in a Central African history. Ohio University Press. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/abdn/detail. action?docID=1743718. Gqola, P.  D. (2007). How the ‘cult of femininity’ and violent masculinities support endemic gender based violence in contemporary South Africa. African Identities, 5(1), 111–124. https://doi.org/10.1080/14725840701253894 Hofstede, G., Hofstede, G.  J., & Minkov, M. (2005). Cultures and organizations: Software of the mind (Vol. 2). Mcgraw-hill New York. Hudson, J. (1999). A time to mourn: A personal account of the 1964 Lumpa Church revolt in Zambia. Bookworld Publishers. Kalipeni, E., Flynn, K. C., & Pope, C. (2009). Strong Women, Dangerous Times: Gender and HIV/AIDS in Africa. Nova Science Publishers. Kaunda, M. M., & Nadar, S. (2012). Remembering and resistance: Lenshina Mulenga’s search for justice and peace. The Ecumenical Review, 64(3), 346–357. Masondo, S. (2018). Ironies of Christian Presence in Southern Africa. Journal for the Study of Religion, 31(2), 209–231. https://doi.org/10.17159/2413-­3027/2018/ v31n2a10 McMinn, L. (2000). Masculinity and Femininity: Origins and Implications (Chapter Two of Growing Strong Daughters). Faculty Publications—Department of World Languages, Sociology & Cultural Studies. https://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/ lang_fac/43. Mombo, E., & Joziasse, H. (2022). Deconstructing Gendered vumilia (perseverance) Theology in times of the Gender-based Violence Pandemic. Journal of International Women’s Studies, 24(4), 14. Nkomazana, F., & Setume, S. D. (2016). Missionary colonial mentality and the expansion of Christianity in Bechuanaland Protectorate, 1800 to 1900. Journal for the Study of Religion, 29(2), 29–55. NyaGondwe, F. Rachel. (2017). A History of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians 1989–2007. Mzuni Press. Phiri, I.  A. (n.d.). HIV and AIDS: An African Theological Response in Mission. In Hope Abundant: Third World and Indigenous Women’s Theology.

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Phiri, I. A. (1997a). Doing theology in community: The case of African women theologians in the 1990s. Journal of Theology for Southern Africa, 99, 68. Phiri, I.  A. (1997b). Women, Presbyterianism and patriarchy: Religious experience of Chewa women in Central Malawi. CLAIM [sc. Christian Literature Association In Malawi]. Phiri, I.  A. (2000). African Women in Mission: Two case studies from Malawi. Missionalia: Southern African Journal of Mission Studies, 28(2–3), 267–293. Phiri, I.  A. (2004). African Women’s Theologies in the New Millennium. Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender Equity, 61, 16–24. Phiri, I. A. (2009). Major Challenges for African Women Theologians in Theological Education (1989–2008). International Review of Mission, 98(1), 105–119. Phiri, I. A. (2013). Theological Education in Presbyterian Churches in Afric. In Phiri, I. A., & Werner, D. (Eds.), Handbook of Theological Education in Africa, Oxford: Regnum Books International, 345–353. Phiri, I. A., & Nadar, S. (2012). African Women, Religion, and Health: Essays in Honor of Mercy Amba Ewudziwa Oduyoye. Wipf and Stock Publishers. Pillay, M.  N. (2017). Women, priests and the Anglican Church in Southern Africa: Reformation of holy hierarchies. Porter, A. (1997). ‘Cultural imperialism’ and protestant missionary enterprise, 1780–1914. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 25(3), 367–391. Pullen, A., & Vachhani, S.  J. (2021). Feminist Ethics and Women Leaders: From Difference to Intercorporeality. Journal of Business Ethics, 173(2), 233–243. https:// doi.org/10.1007/s10551-­020-­04526-­0 Shetler, J.  B. (Ed.). (2015). Women’s Alternative Practices of Ethnicity in Africa Gendering Ethnicity in African Women’s Lives. In Gendering Ethnicity in African Women’s Lives (pp. 3–30). University of Wisconsin Press. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/soas-­ebooks/detail.action?docID=3445448. Siwila, L. (2022). Chikamoneka!: Gender and Empire in Religion and Public Life. Mzuni Press. https://muse.jhu.edu/book/100636. Stambach, A. (2013). Lessons from Mount Kilimanjaro: Schooling, community, and gender in East Africa. Routledge. Tarimo, E.  A. M., et al. (2009). Gender Roles and Informal Care for Patients With AIDS. Journal of Transcultural Nursing, 20(1), 61–68. https://doi. org/10.1177/1043659608325843 Tembo, D. (2022). Missionaries and the Construction of Christian Homes: Examining the Formation of African Social Identities in Colonial Malawi. International Bulletin of Mission Research, 46(1), 105–114. https://doi. org/10.1177/2396939320987554 Thompson, J. (2013). From ABC to B.Sc.- A century of educational achievement at Livingstonia. Werbner, P. (2014). Between Ontological Transformation and the Imagination of Tradition: Girls’ Puberty Rituals in Twenty-first Century Botswana. Journal of Religion in Africa, 44(3–4), 355–385.

CHAPTER 37

Change and Continuity in AIC Church Life and Their Scholarship: A Question of Maturation? Retief Müller

Introduction—AIC as a Precarious Construct When the editors of this volume asked me to write about the themes of maturation and the church life of AIC, I was immediately intrigued, because these are interesting themes but also ones that are filled with potential interpretive pitfalls. Although my dissertation and first monograph focused on the Zion Christian Church (Müller 2011), which at the time I considered to be the largest and among the most representative of the so-called AIC movement in southern Africa, more recent scholarship has muddied the waters as far as the very category of AIC is concerned. Joel Cabrita, for example, has insisted and mostly persuasively illustrated how Zionists are not necessarily “African” indigenous movements in the first instance, but that they rather belong to a wider stream with deeper historical roots on at least three continents (2018). As such a claim is made, and if not directly made then at least implied, that what had previously been indicated as AIC should perhaps be better understood as a continuation within Protestantism more generally (see Cabrita 2017; Cabrita and Erlank 2018). Convincingly presented though this argument is in critique of essentialized constructions of “Africanness” and the consequent scholarly

R. Müller (*) Faculty of Theology and Social Sciences, VID Specialized University, Stavanger, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. E. Barnes, T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48270-0_37

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overreliance on related concepts, like AIC, one must wonder what the implications of this would be for not only what had been known as AIC scholarship but even more pressingly churches that have tended to define themselves in opposition to mainstream and evangelical European forms. What follows is in part an attempt to engage with this tension. To be sure not many churches that were typecast by a prior generation of AIC categorizers likely understood themselves as anything other than whatever their own individual church names were. AIC has in many cases been an imposed and uncomfortable construct as seen, for example, in the various and somewhat conflicting ways scholars ended up filling out the acronym, for example as African Independent, African Instituted, African Initiated, and even African Indigenous Churches. Critics of this terminology and the ways in which scholarship tended to subsequently approach the subject point among other things to the fact that the entire category came into being thanks to the thought experiments of a Swedish missionary ethnographer, Bengt Sundkler, who subdivided what he saw as independent churches into the further subdivisions of Ethiopian churches and Zionist churches (1948). More research followed suit in this vein and even added additional categories, the most elaborate of which is possibly to be found in Allan Anderson’s African Reformation: African Initiated Christianity in the Twentieth Century (2001). In this work and also in much of the recent scholarship by other authors a further complicating feature is that in some ways the category of AIC had become subsumed within broader Pentecostalism. Arguing whether any given church is an example of AIC or Pentecostalism has increasingly become something of a moot point. These categories are blurred and imprecise constructs that are changeable and, in many cases, to be taken with a grain of salt. The approaches of historians like Cabrita et al. are therefore helpful for emphasizing the rootedness of these newer church forms within broader Protestantism, evangelicalism, and so on. However, whenever something is gained it often occurs alongside something else being lost. Take for example the argument that the so-called African aspect had been overemphasized by past scholarship. Moreover, that such scholarship has often worked with reified notions of African culture and blithely assumed that this construct was what adherents of these churches were striving for. No doubt there is much truth to such suggestions which are useful in critique of narrow scholarly proclivities. But incisive though such critique is of certain scholarly approaches it does not account for the full picture of what might be going on at ground level. When asked what drew them to their churches, especially within the context of the ZCC, typical responses I received during my field research might include assertions in support of the notion that the church provides healing, or the belief that belonging there might result in some kind of blessing. Additionally, a not uncommon perspective one could hear went along the lines of, I like this church because it is truly African. This type of grassroots response must of course be taken seriously whether it affirms or challenges any given scholarly frame of reference. In addition to the challenges associated with AIC typologies, a related scholarly concern has for a long time centered around the perception that the large amount of focus that had gone the way of these newer movements in African Christianity had effectively and detrimentally drawn

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attention away from the so-called mission churches. Andrew Walls already mentioned this as a concern in a 1979 article, entitled the “Anabaptists of Africa?” And Cabrita and Maxwell recently suggested in an illuminating piece on the emergence of World Christianity as a field of study that this scholarly predisposition was perhaps caused by a kind of postcolonial guilt complex mainly on the part of theological and missiological scholarship (2017). This might particularly have been so for missiological writers from the West who were themselves indelibly bound by ties to missionary enterprises that helped to establish so-called mission churches in Africa. For such researchers it might have been a preferable option to focus their scholarly attention instead on African initiatives in Christianity. And it is not hard to imagine why and how such attention might have overemphasized what the authors considered the “African” aspect of their subjects’ religious positioning vis-à-vis the Western colonial (read white) influence. At the same time “Africa” perhaps became steadily more constructed in this academic discourse in a West/non-West type of binary as that which is quintessentially non-West. The essential “black” in polar contrast to the missionary “white” in other words. With AICs having already been identified as exemplifying this contrasting case more than any other type of church it became something of a self-fulfilling prophecy for missiological writers to focus their studies exactly in that area, and at the expense of the so-called mission churches. It is certainly true that church life within the former mission churches in Africa is no less African than in any other type of church, including those who were defined as AIC. Africa is of course not only one thing but many, urban and rural, traditional and modern, young and old, to name just a few binary themes. Furthermore, the either implicit or explicit critique from the side of historians against missiological essentialism of “Africa” particularly in respect to the very construction of and ongoing preoccupation with AIC is also not out of place and there is much to be learned from this. On the other hand, much of what are these days being said and written about AIC and their church life are not said or written by “white” missiologists but by African authors, whether they are living and working on the continent or somewhere in the African diaspora, whether they are guild missiologists or not. This Africanization of AIC-related research is indeed a striking feature, which could perhaps be shown as indicative of a growing maturation in the scholarship in this subject area at large. Let me now proceed to mention some of these writings for the most part in connection with publications dating to the last couple of decades, and with a specific focus on what they have to say implicitly or explicitly about church life in these churches.

Scriptures and Their Interpretation Any discussion of this topic would be found wanting without reference to that doyen of late twentieth-century African theology, John Mbiti from Kenya. Mbiti, of course, wrote on a diversity of subjects related to African philosophy and theology and I refer to only one article specifically in reference to AIC and

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their church life (2004). Published in 2004, Mbiti’s article focuses on one of the signature generalizations that is often made, which concerns the high regard given to the Jewish Bible or Christian Old Testament, which might be contrasted with the situation among more European or Western-aligned forms of Protestantism where the focus typically tends to fall on the New Testament, specifically the gospels and the letters of Paul. Although Mbiti was not a missiologist per se, he too could be criticized for his essentialist portrayals of “African culture” and “African religion” at times. And to be sure in the article under consideration here he did not shy away from making generalizing statements about AIC. On the positive side, he also gave voice to some grassroots practitioners of African Christianity. In reference to two “AIC” officials, “Archbishop N.H. Ngada (male) and Bishop K.E. Mofokeng (female),” Mbiti quotes their biblical views, which he identifies as representative of AIC, as follows: “When Africans learnt to read the Word of God as it was written in the Bible, they began to question the preaching and practices of the missionaries, and to recognize that there was no contradiction between their traditional religious beliefs and the written Word of God in the Bible. What African Christians discovered was a book about the wonderful works of the same Creator God in whom they had always believed. … Although there was no written Bible in Africa in those days, the Word of God was known to our ancestors—at least partially. It was written in their hearts. King Moshoeshoe of Lesotho [1786–1870] once told the missionaries: ‘Your laws [the Ten Commandments] are exactly like ours, except that yours are written on paper while ours are written in our hearts’” (Mbiti 2004, p. 222). This perspective plays in on another common if controversial theme in relation to the topic of AIC, which concerns the issue of the connectivity between Christian and pre-­ Christian traditions. Do African Christians expect a clean break from their background traditions/belief systems, or do they see points of contact between the old and the new, if Christianity could still be called a “new” tradition in much of Africa? The answer may depend on who is asked, and it may have more to do with questions of a person’s generation and gender than with the specific kind of church a person belongs to. In the above quote it is clear that these “AIC” leaders favored a more accommodationist view of course. By contrast Mbiti argued that “Christians in mission churches have made little adjustment to African traditions” (Mbiti 2004, p. 225). Mbiti gives some interesting commentary regarding the ways in which Bible texts are sometimes read as incantations of power. This is reminiscent of Matthew Engelke’s descriptions of the Friday Masowe church in Zimbabwe, where the status of the Bible is elevated to such a high level of sacrality that there are even various prohibitions against it being read (2007). In Mbiti’s examples, biblical texts are channeled for their efficacy rather than placed under taboo, and specifically so for the purposes of healing. Referring to “AICs in Nigeria,” Mbiti writes: “The texts for this use come exclusively from the Jewish Bible, except, in one case, for the use of three texts from Mark. For example, for stomach ailments special Psalms are 1, 2 and 3; if the stomach is swollen, then Psalms 20 and 40; for cleansing

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a woman’s stomach one should ‘get a little kerosene, with shear butter, ground nut oil, and white alum, mix them. Then read Psalm 50 six times into it, with the holy name Eli-Ala, God, for 26 times’” (Mbiti 2004, p. 231).

Sacred Space and Pilgrimage Healing is in general a very important theme in African Christianity, perhaps particularly so among churches that have sometimes been labeled as AIC. Mbiti argued that this emphasis extends beyond bodily or spiritual healing but even encompasses the land itself. In this connection, he mentioned the high esteem of mountains, hills, and other sacred places as held within “African Independent Churches,” which is a theme that resonates with my own research among members of the Zion Christian Church in South Africa which similarly received strong testimonies regarding the sacral importance of certain natural features of the land, often, but not always, connected to their church headquarters at Zion City Moria. Mbiti relates this interest particularly to themes within the Jewish Bible where the idea of promised land, for example, stands central within the theology. There are also numerous references to specific mountains, rivers, and sacred sites where instances of revelation occur in the narrative. Let me quote part of what Mbiti had to say on this important topic: Mountains have a mystique. They symbolize the presence of the invisible world, especially as places where the presence of God (and some spirits) may be revealed, or experienced in an intensive way. They mark concrete meeting points between the visible and the invisible, … The Bible has many such mountains and hills. But somehow Christian tradition has lost sight of the sacred mountains and hills of biblical faith. However, African Independent Churches not only incorporate these natural objects into their religious life and spirituality but also designate new or additional ones that they then treat as sacred … People retreat or make pilgrimage to these sacred places. (Mbiti 2004, p. 235)

Indeed, I have argued that pilgrimage and the discourses, minor rituals, and other activities surrounding these journeys all contribute centrally to the popular appeal of the religious culture of one of the largest churches in southern Africa, the Zion Christian Church (Müller 2011). Mbiti mentioned several other examples of sacred landscape drawing pilgrimage within “African Independent Churches” in all regions of sub-Saharan Africa, including Madagascar. Hence, if these churches that were often described along the lines of AIC should in fact more appropriately be seen as a continuation within worldwide Protestantism, then they may also be seen as contributing something to Protestantism that had been largely absent from that movement in its mainly European and North American formations in the centuries since the dawn of the Reformation era. Sixteenth-century Reformers like Luther and Calvin had theological reasons for opposing pilgrimage as it was practiced within the Roman Catholic Church during that period. Arguably, these more

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recent examples of pilgrimage as practiced by African Christians who may or may not see themselves as belonging to AIC and/or global Protestantism represent something quite different. In this newer situation pilgrimage does not feature as a form of penance, which was a characteristic motivation in medieval pilgrimages. As Mbiti also observed, contemporary African pilgrimage may have more to do with a recognition of the sacrality of land and nature. As such it allows these newer Protestants a deeper interpretation of these themes in the Jewish Bible/Christian Old Testament, which would be an appropriate development in a protestant tradition that has always avowed to prioritize the authority of the whole scripture, but where the canon within the canon, if you will, tended to more definitively reside within the New Testament for much of its history. In an essay that broadly fleshed out a continent-wide perspective on “AIC” church life, Adogame and Jafta focused on three general groupings, Aladura, Roho, and Zionists (Adogame and Jafta 2005). They described a wide variety of distinct features to support the underlying thesis of at least some commonality among these groups. Let me only highlight a few of those which are easily recognizable within many related studies on this subject. First, in correspondence with the above commentary on sacred places and pilgrimage, the following: “Sacred space among the AICs transcends the traditional church building of the mission churches. Mountains, rivers, and groves have been set aside and transformed into holy grounds where rituals are re-enacted. The phenomenon of a sacred city is a common feature of several AICs” (Adogame and Jafta 2005, p. 325). One such sacred city in South Africa mentioned above is Zion City Moria, and there are several others often identified with biblical names in some ways connected with mountains featuring in biblical literature such as in this case Moriah, and usually also with the city of Jerusalem itself. Indeed, Zion City Moria is sometimes colloquially referred to as Jerusalem by Zion Christian Church members. Another element mentioned by Adogame and Jafta, which would seem to support Mbiti’s point about the strong emphasis on the Jewish Bible among these churches, concerns the question of dietary proscriptions, especially against the eating of pork. Other typical prohibitions such as those against alcohol, drugs, and tobacco (Adogame and Jafta 2005, p. 322) have no direct biblical basis. These might perhaps rather be taken as resonating with the mores of the holiness movement in worldwide Protestantism, which has recently received renewed emphasis as a highly influential factor in the development of these churches (see Cabrita 2018).

Health and Healing The place of health and healing in Christianity worldwide and in Africa particularly is well documented. The broad movement identified by the term Zion has, for example, most recently been characterized as a “faith-healing movement” (Cabrita 2018). While this type of healing is certainly biblical at root with many direct references to the ministry of Jesus and the apostles as portrayed in the gospels and in the New Testament book of Acts, there have

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perhaps been additional spiritual resources to boost the practice’s popularity in wide swathes of African Christianity. Regarding AIC, Adogame and Jafta mention the following: “Members accept the traditional explanation for diseases, illnesses, and misfortunes but jettison the modus operandi of traditional healing. Through effectual prayers and elaborate ritual action, members attract the attention, power and action of the benevolent forces (God, Jesus Christ, Holy Spirit and the angelic forces) against the malicious, evil forces that parade the cosmos” (2005, p. 322). The COVID-19 pandemic has had an impact on all of African Christianity and there have emerged a variety of responses from the side of churches. As elsewhere in the world of evangelical Christianity there have also been some cases of covid-denialism and/or vaccine skepticism. On the other hand, there have been some notable instances of compliance with governmental covid regulations, in South Africa for example. There the large Zion Christian Church had even gone as far as to call off their regular Easter pilgrimages to Zion City Moria for three consecutive years during the pandemic (Seleme 2022). This is remarkable since pilgrimage, as I have indicated above, constitutes a very central aspect of the religious life in this church. Also, a recent research article focusing on Aladura churches in Nigeria and their responses to COVID found that there was widespread compliance with governmental regulations, as well as the following: “In an attempt to ameliorate the economic and social challenges of the impact of COVID-19, AICs provided food supplies, face masks and alcohol-based hand sanitizers to members of the public, and provided water and soap at designated places in their churches as outlined by the NCDC” (Adedibu et al. 2022, p. 6).

Charismatic Leadership The prophet-like leader, who sometimes even has the title of prophet, is another very familiar feature of someone who is imbued with spiritual power and, usually, among other things has the ability to heal, or perhaps in the theologically more orthodox settings, the ability to channel divine healing. As Adogame and Jafta put it: “Virtually all the AICs trace their emergence to a charismatic, prophetic figure usually with claims of a traumatic religious experience … The centrality of the founding story is a feature that pervades the AICs’ spiritual and moral orientation” (2005, p. 319). Charismatic leadership is part and parcel of all religious and quasi-religious formations, and so it should not be that surprising that this factor also plays a significant role in “AIC.” It may be argued of course that the Protestant ideal has traditionally been to deemphasize the persona of the leader in favor of a routinization of charisma with a structural and theoretical focus on the universal Logos as conveyed through scripture, which means that mainstream mission churches tended to eschew and suppress expressions of spontaneous charisma as seen in the emergence of African prophets, for example. This prophetic suppression is an important part in the story of the move toward independency in African Christian history. Prophecy continues to play a major role in the churches that grew out of this

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movement and church leaders remain revered. In the case of the Zion Christian Church this is particularly obvious in the way in which the church leader had become a locus of person-centered pilgrimage, which might occur in conjunction with but also in addition to the more familiar place-centered pilgrimage to their holy city at Moria (Müller 2011).

AIC as African Initiatives in Christianity One way, then, of dealing with the problematic terminology inherent to AIC is to start over in a sense, discard AIC so-called types and categories as invented constructs by missiologists who had ideological motivations for what they presented as real classifications in African Christianity. For historians it may make better sense to emphasize the transregional, transatlantic connections over time which then presents what occurred in Africa as an unbroken development within global Protestantism. Although there is much value to this approach, it may also run the risk of deemphasizing important elements of the story to the members themselves. Arguably the very aspect of African initiatives in Christianity remains an important and affirming theme for both member and non-member Africans who may nonetheless be partial admirers of the movement. This is particularly so under the intellectual climate of decolonization that has become a notable factor in African academia. Another approach to the problematic terminology of AIC is not to discard it as unhelpful but instead to expand it. This means a farewell to hard definitions and narrow classifications, which perhaps just as well serves to flatten the term and make it more elastic. For example, if AIC is basically understood as African initiatives in Christianity, then locally grown neo-Pentecostal churches are included but so too are African initiatives within older churches that may or may not have overseas roots. Approximations to this kind of approach are already found in the earlier work of Allan Anderson who broadly included African Pentecostalism under AIC (2001). Another example in this vein is seen in the writing of the East African scholar, Philomena Njeri Mwaura, who mentions similar categories as those seen in the abovementioned essay by Adogame and Jafta, i.e. Aladura, Roho, and Zion/Apostolic. Mwaura then expands the circle to also include neo-Pentecostals (Mwaura 2004, p. 164ff). Among the best-known exponents of scholarship in African Christianity who, until recently at least, has continued to use AIC terminology but with an inclusive and apparently open-ended definition is the Ghanaian theologian, Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu. With an unabashedly Christian insider’s perspective that claims the operative combining factor to be “the experience of the Holy Spirit,” Asamoah-Gyadu writes regarding “AIC”: “The groups concerned did not all end up as independent churches. Some forms of religious innovation have remained as renewal movements within the historic mission churches … Within the last century many have fizzled out for various social and religious reasons, but Christian religious innovation in Africa has continued through the work of many other Pentecostal/ charismatic churches and movements” (Asamoah-Gyadu 2017, pp. 337–338).

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Asamoah-Gyadu does not argue against the use of AIC terminology as such but instead takes issue with hard definitions of Pentecostalism. He writes that historical and theological scholarship had done the church a disservice by narrowly defining Pentecostalism within denominational terms. A better way to see Pentecostalism in his view is “as a form of Christian spirituality that exists to renew the whole church of Jesus Christ” (Asamoah-Gyadu 2017, p. 340). This, according to his analysis, is also what drives movements that have been described as AIC, i.e. churches which sought to “relive the biblical Pentecost within indigenous settings” (Asamoah-Gyadu 2017, p. 340).

African Initiatives in Christianity and the Global Migrant Experience This brings us, not so much to the last word on AIC, but at least to one more aspect that an overview of recent literature demands to be highlighted within the scope of this chapter. Apart from any aspersions the upholders of Christian “orthodoxy” might have cast on churches and movements identified as AIC over the decades, one aspect where these movements exemplified what had become accepted in both Protestant and Catholic circles as proper missional ecclesiology has been in their missionary, evangelistically outward focus. The missiological sine qua non about church life, that it should be “missionary by its very nature” has been par for the course for many of these churches identified as AIC since their beginnings. While much of their missionary activity had been unofficial, ad-hoc, and spontaneous occurring at local and regional levels, more recent realities show the growing presence of an overseas campaign. As demonstrated by several academic studies in recent years, this is particularly connected to the migrant experience of many African in Europe, the United Kingdom, and North America. As Babatunde Adedibu puts it, “African Indigenous Churches are no longer encountered only in Africa but are also part of the Christian landscape in Germany, Sweden, England, Scotland and North America with their religious idiosyncrasies” (2018, p. 3). Israel Oluwole Olofinjana’s recent article, “Pentecostal Dynamics of African Initiated Churches: Transnationalization of the Cherubim and Seraphim Church in London” is of interest here. As had happened in a prior era when historical mission churches exhibited newfound ecumenism when faced with challenges in the contexts into which they had been transplanted, one classic example being the founding of the Church of South India, Olofinjana writes about an interesting phenomenon whereby two London-based Aladura churches, Cherubim & Seraphim, and Celestial Church of Christ, decided to hold a joint revival conference. According to this author this was anomalous given that in their country of origin, Nigeria, the two churches are almost always in competition with one another and unable to work together (Olofinjana 2019, pp. 386–387). Almost equally interesting within the context of this chapter is the commentary that Olofinjana makes regarding the terminology of AIC and

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Pentecostalism. Writing from the perspective of an “insider/outsider,” in this case someone who was born and raised in the Cherubim and Seraphim Church in Nigeria but subsequently became Baptist and ordained as minister, Olofinjana appears to accept AIC terminology on the face of it with respect to Aladura, at least. His commentary is based on interviews with insiders within this “AIC” diaspora context in the United Kingdom. The critical question for him, and apparently for his interviewees, is not whether they are AIC but whether they are Pentecostal. On this point he writes, for example, “While AIC scholarship appears to have shifted in categorizing AICs as Pentecostals, the 21 African pastors interviewed for this research think otherwise” (Olofinjana 2019, p. 376). Olofinjana’s research reveals a diversity of perspective with some of these pastors accepting the Pentecostal label and others rejecting it, but apparently showing no ambiguity regarding AIC which is evidently taken as an identity marker as the following would illustrate: “What they mean is that AICs are already a unique African church movement, and so do not need to be defined as Pentecostals to make them special …. One significant point is that AICs are a church movement that still has some theological distinctions from Pentecostals. One of these is their appeal and use of African rituals and symbols that many African Pentecostals still deem unbiblical” (Olofinjana 2019, p.  381). All of this would confirm the suggestion that the term AIC has acquired a currency among churchgoers and especially office bearers that goes far beyond scholarly categorizations whether missiological or otherwise. Perhaps this type of self-­ identification regarding AIC matters even more in the African diaspora setting such as revealed by Olofinjana’s research than on the continent itself, and if so, that would be for understandable reasons. Whatever the case, if one chooses to go along with a low-bar description of AIC as African initiatives in Christianity, then there is at least one more interesting diaspora case to mention before concluding. Most research on African Diaspora Christianity tended to focus on Western Europe, the UK, and North America, which is not surprising given the fact that these contexts have been among the top destinations for migrant Africans for the past several decades. While I have suggested above that the presence of African churches in the global north may be considered as part of the outwardly missionary focus within this kind of Christianity, it must be noted that thus far much of the outreach in far-flung cities occurs among fellow migrants to the extent that these tend to be “African” migrant churches within migrant communities. However, there are also instances, currently still fewer in number, of classical cross-cultural mission as conducted by migrant Africans in northerly “indigenous” communities. Such is or at least was the case with the somewhat unusual and remarkable example of Pastor Sunday Adelaja, founding leader of the megachurch, The Embassy of the Blessed Kingdom of God for All Nations (see Hanciles 2004, pp. 104–105), that ran a highly successful ministry among Ukrainians in Kyiv for nearly three decades. Writing about this case in 2006, Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu stated that in a church of 20,000 adult members, more than 90% were “indigenous Europeans” (2006, p. 73). Adelaja, originally from Nigeria, received a scholarship to study journalism at Belarus

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State University in Minsk in the latter half of the 1980s. There he led an African Christian Students’ Fellowship and after subsequently moving on to Ukraine he recounted receiving “specific word” from God in 1993 to essentially become a missionary to the people of the former Soviet Union (Asamoah-Gyadu 2006, p. 73). His church in Kyiv eventually became something of a phenomenon and Pastor Adelaja himself, “a religious icon in the country” (Asamoah-Gyadu 2006, p. 73). However, in the wake of Russia’s more recent invasion of Ukraine in 2022 which early on included missile strikes on Kyiv, I was curious to find out what had happened to this person who might be said to have modeled African initiatives in Christianity in a foreign setting to such a remarkable degree. Given the recent nature of these events, i.e. Russia’s war on Ukraine, it is understandable that there may not be  many stories publically  available on what had happened to churches and their leaders, but I was able to find one news article featuring a long interview with Adelaja in the Nigerian based Premium Times (Bamidele 2022). It turns out that the war severely disrupted Adelaja’s ministry. In fact, Adelaja and his wife, and one would assume many of his congregants became refugees. The interview reveals the story of a man whose ministry focused on social engagement, initially especially through a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center, among other things. Adelaja describes how he had something akin to a conversion experience when he, after having felt himself called to be a pastor in Ukraine, at first struggled to attract people interested in listening to his preaching. He then came to the divinely inspired revelation that ministry was actually not about preaching but instead about feeding the hungry, clothing the poor, etc. Upon this realization he put aside his Bible, took off his suit, and went out into the streets to seek out the needy, which apparently turned out in that context to be in many cases drug addicts and alcoholics. He also organized soup kitchens and numerous other services as time went by. Eventually, he attracted quite a following, became pastor of an influential megachurch in Kyiv, which reportedly included the mayor of the city among its membership, and with numerous church plants in Ukraine and in Russia. The Premium Times interview describes Adelaja as an “influencer” who managed to draw negative attention from both the authorities in the Kremlin and figures in the Ukrainian government over a long period of time. His church planting activities in Russia allegedly placed him on a list as persona non grata there and in Kyiv he apparently also became involved in unspecified lawsuits involving the Ukrainian government, but with the root cause, according to Adelaja, the fact that his church had too much political influence which became a bone of contention for those in power. Whatever the case, when Russia attacked, he was advised to leave because the Kremlin had him down as a “marked man.” This he did, early in the war, together with his wife, and his Ukrainian ministry subsequently landed in limbo. Despite the uncertain future of Adelaja’s ministry in Ukraine, this is a story with many apparent parallels with other older narratives of cross-cultural missionaries who ran afoul of local and colonial authorities in the midst of their work, and/or who had their ministries disrupted by the outbreaks of war. For this reason, it is a fitting case with

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which to conclude this section on African initiatives in Christianity beyond the African continent.

Conclusion Identity formation is a complex phenomenon, and this also pertains to religious identity. While a label such as AIC is riddled with contradictions and historically increasingly irrelevant as an explanatory typology in African Christianity the label itself may end up having durability and even longevity among some African Christians. In the above I mentioned an example of what appears to be a basic assumption among Aladura church leaders in the United Kingdom regarding their belonging within AIC.  This corresponds to a personal research experience I have had in South Africa. During my initial inquiries into Zionist Christianity in the early 2000s I established contact with the son of an archbishop in one of the numerous smaller Zion/Apostolic churches in the northern part of South Africa. This man who was an administrative employee at the University of Pretoria (UP) graciously invited me to tag along during several of their church events. However, prior to this and in response to my request for any information regarding his church and its history, I was quite surprised when he provided me with a reading list based on sources to be found in the UP library. The prescribed list included the likes of Bengt Sundkler and other familiar names among the generic South African “AIC” corpus, but also a couple of apartheid-era Afrikaans language sources by former researchers at that institution. This was not quite what I was looking for at the time and the exchange left me somewhat baffled, but in retrospect it serves as a useful example of how the AIC label might have become owned over time by insiders in what had been so designated by outside “experts” from a prior era. Indeed, if one now speaks or writes using a low-bar description such as African initiatives in Christianity the older definitions of AIC no longer apply. Nowadays almost everything that happens in Christianity in Africa may fall under such a description, and indeed some of the more recent initiatives of note have been African Christian involvement in overseas mission enterprises such as illustrated above in the case of Pastor Adelaja’s Ukraine mission. Therefore, in reference to my task for this chapter which asks about maturation and church life in the AICs, perhaps the best thing to say is that AIC have matured into all African church life. Put differently African church life has become AIC.  Hopefully “AIC” scholarship has also matured somewhat by becoming more reflexive of our ideological constructs and prior assumptions with respect to the subject matter at hand.

Bibliography Adedibu, B. A. 2018. ‘The changing faces of African Independent Churches as development actors across borders’, HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 74(1), 4740. https://doi.org/10.4102/hts.v74i1.4740.

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Adedibu, Babatunde A; Akindolie, Akinwumi A and Olujobi, Adeleke A. 2022. “The ‘Invisible Enemy’ Covid-19 and the Responses of Churches in South West Nigeria.” Theologia Viatorum. 46(1), a138. https://doi.org/10.4102/tv.v46i1.138. Adogame, Afe & Jafta, Lizo. 2005. ‘Chapter Twelve: Zionists, Aladura and Roho: African Instituted Churches.’ In Kalu, Ogbu. 2005. African Christianity: An African Story. Pretoria: Dept. of Church History University of Pretoria. Anderson Allan. 2001. African Reformation: African Initiated Christianity in the 20th Century. Trenton NJ: Africa World Press. Asamoah-Gyadu, J Kwabena. 2006. “African Initiated Christianity in Eastern Europe: Church of the ‘Embassy of God’ in Ukraine.” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 30(2): 73–75 Asamoah-Gyadu, J Kwabena. 2017. “‘Go near and Join Thyself to This Chariot...”: African Pneumatic Movements and Transformational Discipleship.” International Review of Mission 106(2): 336–55. https://doi.org/10.1111/irom.12190. Bamidele, Ololade. 2022. ‘The war in Ukraine has been most devastating!—Pastor Sunday Adelaja’, Premium Times, July 9. https://www.premiumtimesng.com/ news/top-­news/541760-­the-­war-­in-­ukraine-­has-­been-­most-­devastating-­pastor-­ sunday-­adelaja.html accessed on 09.29.2022. Cabrita, Joel. 2018. The People’s Zion: Southern Africa the United States and a Transatlantic Faith-Healing Movement. Cambridge Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. https://www.degruyter.com/doi/book/10.4159/ 9780674985780. Cabrita, Joel. 2017. “Revisiting ‘Translatability’ and African Christianity: The Case of the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church in Zion.” Studies in Church History (53): 448–75. https://doi.org/10.1017/stc.2016.27. Cabrita, Joel and Erlank, Natasha. 2018. “New Histories of Christianity in South Africa: Review and Introduction.” South African Historical Journal 70(2): 307–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/02582473.2018.1495753. Cabrita, Joel and Maxwell, David. ‘Introduction’, in Cabrita, Joel; Maxwell, David and WildWood, Emma. 2017. Relocating World Christianity: Interdisciplinary Studies in Universal and Local Expressions of the Christian Faith. Leiden: Brill. Engelke, Matthew. 2007. A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church. Berkeley: University of California Press. https://www.degruyter.com/ isbn/9780520940048. Hanciles, Jehu J. 2004. “Beyond Christendom: African Migration and Transformations in Global Christianity.” Studies in World Christianity 10(1): 93–113. https://doi. org/10.3366/swc.2004.10.1.93. Mbiti John S. 2004. “The Role of the Jewish Bible in African Independent Churches.” International Review of Mission 93/369: 219–37. Müller Retief. 2011. African Pilgrimage: Ritual Travel in South Africa’s Christianity of Zion. Farnham Surrey England: Ashgate Pub. http://site.ebrary.com/id/10495686. Mwaura, Philomena Njeri. 2004. “African Instituted Churches in East Africa,” Studies in World Christianity 10(2): 160–184. Olofinjana, I.O. 2019. “Pentecostal Dynamics of African Initiated Churches: Transnationalization of the Cherubim and Seraphim Church in London.” International Review of Mission 108(2) 375–388. https://doi.org/10.1111/ irom.12291.386-­387. Seleme, Ray. 2022. ‘ZCC remains closed for the third time this Easter weekend’, in The South African, 13-04-2022. https://www.thesouthafrican.com/lifestyle/breaking-­

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the-­zcc-­zionchristian-­church-­remains-­closed-­for-­the-­third-­year-­easter-­april-­2022/ accessed Sept. 30, 2022. Sundkler, Bengt Gustaf Malcolm. 1948. Bantu Prophets in South Africa. London: Lutterworth Press. Walls, Andrew F. 1979. “The Anabaptists of Africa? The Challenge of the African Independent Churches.” Occasional Bulletin of Missionary Research 3(1): 48–52. https://doi.org/10.1177/239693937900300202.

CHAPTER 38

Significant Trends in Contemporary African Pentecostalism Paul Gifford

There has been an explosion of new churches in Africa in recent years. In Kenya where it is required that churches be registered before operating, the Attorney General in 2007 announced that the country had 8520 registered churches, had 6740 applications pending, and that 60 new applications were filed every month. The procedure for vetting new bodies was overwhelmed and systems had totally broken down. Other African countries have seen similar proliferation (Standard, 4 Sept. 2007, 6). These newcomers are not the older African Independent Churches, which are still evident in many countries but probably peaked around the 1960s. Categorizing these newer churches is not easy. Fundamentalist, charismatic, Pentecostal, Evangelical are all labels that have been used, but they are all labels taken from Western sectors of Christianity; it is not evident that the dynamics that gave rise to the labels in their original contexts are the same in Africa. Also, one cannot ignore the variety among these churches. They range from wealthy mega-churches with thousands of members and hundreds of branches to small family concerns. They range from sophisticated organizational structures to struggling storefront groups. Some have lasted years; others seem fairly transient. There are obvious differences in clientele: some cater for the educated and affluent and middle class, others for the uneducated and poor; some incorporate both. Urban churches are obviously different from rural ones. Nor can

P. Gifford (*) Department of Religion, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. E. Barnes, T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48270-0_38

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one presume that the phenomenon is uniform across the whole continent. One may well wonder whether any one label can do justice to their diversity. Nevertheless, I will argue here that there is sufficient consistency to discuss them as one category, and since we must use labels, I will here call them all Pentecostal while admitting the term’s inadequacy and certainly not foreclosing the issue of their similarities and dissimilarities in regard to classical Western Pentecostalism. Overwhelmingly, the adherents of these new churches are not converts from traditional practice or Islam; they come from other churches. Many of course were purely nominal Christians in the first place; many however weren’t. Sometimes this phenomenon is misunderstood; sometimes it is implied that this movement is the result of underhand pressure and promises. But nobody is forcing people to move. They join these new churches for various reasons, but their appeal is in my opinion related to their this-worldly focus, and the promise of success here. I will discuss this success motif in relation to two closely related aspects: their emphasis on spirit agency and the prosperity gospel. These two aspects deserve far more attention than they normally receive. In fact, in discussing Africa’s new churches, both aspects are often ignored altogether, but it will be claimed here that together they provide the most adequate explanation of Africa’s Pentecostal explosion. This chapter will attempt to indicate how these characteristics are both thoroughly African, but also attempt to find links to the global Christian scene. As will become clear, there are no undisputed research findings in this area. It must be stressed that this chapter is my personal understanding, in some ways going against received wisdom. The received wisdom is often based on the authority of two eminent sociologists of religion, David Martin and Peter Berger. Martin’s views on new churches were expounded in a wide-ranging study: Tongues of Fire: the Explosion of Pentecostalism in Latin America (1990). Berger took his lead from Martin (Martin’s study was done for Berger’s institute at Boston University). Both were very positive about this recent Pentecostal explosion. Berger argued that these churches were a contemporary illustration of Weber’s claim that Protestantism (more specifically Calvinism) had been an important factor in the rise of capitalism and Western modernity generally— graphically expressed in Berger’s article: “Max Weber is Alive and Well and living in Guatemala”  (2010). This was Martin’s view, too, although Martin also emphasized an insight of Elie Halévy; Halévy had suggested that it was the influence of the Methodist Revival (with its discipline, peaceability, and voluntarism) in England in the nineteenth century that had protected Britain from revolution and underpinned the economic advance that led to Britain’s global dominance. This chapter will suggest that the socio-political role of Pentecostal churches is much more complex. It will argue not from celebrated theorists of religion, but from fieldwork conducted in Africa over the last 40 years. The results of this fieldwork are found in particular case studies: first my Christianity and Politics in Doe’s Liberia  (1993); secondly, Ghana’s New Christianity: Pentecostalism in a Globalising African Economy  (2004), and thirdly in

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Christianity, Politics and Public Life in Kenya (2009). The argument is stated more generally in my Christianity, Development and Modernity in Africa, on which this chapter largely builds. I will begin from traditional African religion. This concerned this-worldly success: flocks, crops, fertility, wives, children, longevity. This here-and-now focus has become the defining characteristic of contemporary African Pentecostalism. A Christian is a success; if she is not, there is something very wrong. The success emphasis is seen in the names of churches (“Victory Bible Church,” “Winners’ Chapel,” “Triumphant Christian Assembly”), and for these churches themselves size and numbers and expansion are tangible signs of success; hence the word “International” in the title of so many. Success is evident in members’ bumper stickers like “Unstoppable Achievers,” “I am a Stranger to Failure,” “The Struggle is Over,” the labels given to years (“2001, my year of Double Blessing,” “2000, my year of Enlargement,” “2000, my Year of Fulfilment”), the themes of conventions (“Winning Ways,” “Highway to Success,” “Taking your Possessions”), their hymns (“Jesus is a Winner Man,” “Abraham’s Blessings are Mine”). Keywords are progress, prosperity, breakthrough, success, achievement, destiny, favor, dominion, blessing, excellence, plenty, open doors, elevation, promotion, increase, fullness, expansion, triumph, finances, overflow, abundance, newness, fulfillment, victory, power, possession, comfort, movement, exports, exams, visas, travel. Conversely, the negative things to leave behind are closed doors, poverty, sickness, set-back, hunger, joblessness, disadvantage, misfortune, stagnation, negativities, sadness, limitation, suffering, inadequacy, non-achievement, darkness, blockages, lack, want, slavery, sweat, and shame. These realities are understood in a fairly common-­sense way. Thus success is to be experienced in every area of life. In nearly all these churches, services provide time for testimonies (statements of God’s recent action in one’s life) from members. Some have three or four testimonies; others up to 30 or 40 much briefer ones. Many churches regard these testimonies not as optional extras, but as necessary: if you don’t testify, you won’t keep your blessing. These testimonies are an important aid in our task of establishing what this newer Christianity is about. It is sometimes said that these testimonies center round deliverance from sin and vice. That is not my experience. The testimonies almost invariably focus on the material realm, on finances, marriage, children, visas, jobs, promotion, travel, and so on. Only a small fraction, perhaps ten percent, refer to moral reform or deliverance from laziness or drink. Testimonies on the incessant Christian media programs support my contention that these churches are about success in the way just described. There are at least six distinct and separable ways in which African Pentecostalism is linked to success. The first is “motivation;” a church can inculcate drive and determination through a positive message—almost of “success through a positive mental attitude.” Secondly, entrepreneurship may be overtly encouraged. At Winners’ Chapel (to be discussed below) at least once every service you will have to turn to your neighbor and ask: “Have you started

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your own business yet?” Thirdly, success may be attained through practical life skills such as hard work, budgeting, saving, investing, organizing time, avoiding alcohol. Fourthly, the “Faith Gospel” of “sowing” or “planting a seed” encourages people to donate funds to a ministry, insisting God will reward their donation through miraculously bestowing wealth upon them. The fifth avenue to success is associating oneself with “the man of God,” one who is favored by God and therefore possesses “the anointing” of God; pastors increasingly claim this ability to prosper their followers, often effectively making themselves indispensable. Sixthly, and related to the last point, the pastor can deliver followers from the evil spirits that impede the progress that is one’s due as a Christian. These different ways this newer Christianity is understood to bring about success and wealth are obviously not incompatible, and some churches combine them all, seamlessly mixed together. Others put their stress on predominantly one or more and may downplay others. Nevertheless, virtually all preach that Christianity means achievement: it is the route to victory that differentiates them.

Spiritual Forces My fieldwork has convinced me that two of these six ways have come to predominate: the fourth (the faith gospel) and the sixth, deliverance from malevolent spiritual forces. Let us begin with the sixth, or on success understood as arising from the control of spiritual forces. To talk about this requires discrimination. There is considerable variety in grasping the spirit world. Yet despite the variety there is a recognizable uniformity, both well-illustrated in a study like Westerlund’s African Indigenous Religions and Disease Causation (2006). Westerlund considers the hunter-gatherer San, the pastoralist Maasai, the settled and mainly agricultural Sukuma, Kongo, and Yoruba. The San have a high god and one another lesser deity; the Maasai are very theocentric, with a high god but few other spiritual beings; the Sukuma focus on ancestral spirits, virtually neglecting other spiritual beings. The Kongo add fetishes or enspirited objects to other forces; the Yoruba have an entire pantheon of divinities, their orisha, gods of iron, thunder, even a god of smallpox. All these myriad spiritual entities have powers which can affect humans. In this world of traditional religion, the physical realm and the realm of the spirit are not separate from each other. Nothing is purely matter. This world is one of action and counteraction of potent forces. A stronger or higher being can easily destroy or impair the weaker or lower, so a stronger or higher spirit acting negatively upon the spirit of man may affect the whole family, clan, or state. It therefore becomes a central concern to avoid this or, where it is suspected to be imminent, ward it off quickly. The absence of such negative forces constitutes the good life. Religion is very largely the manipulating of these forces to ensure favor. Spirit-mediums are consulted to ward off negative influence in important matters, but also for lesser evils like failure to find a husband, infertility, giving birth to unhealthy

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offspring, and failure in business and education. Consulting also serves to discover why individual persons or communities are suffering particular afflictions. Causes are usually divined in specific terms, and causality is to be discerned primarily in the spiritual realm, although natural causality is not entirely disregarded. Of course, spirits may be manipulated by others, particularly to inflict evil. Also, in all the cases Westerlund considers, the worldviews have not remained static. In all of them, Westerlund argues, there has been in recent years a significant shift from spiritual forces as directly causative of misfortune to supra-normal living humans or witches—an unsatisfactory word, but for reasons of space, let it stand, and it is the word most frequently used in Africa. This religious imagination some call “primal” but I will call “enchanted,” with a nod to Max Weber who characterized the advent of modernity as a process of “disenchantment” or a shift from a focus on such spiritual forces to an empirical or functional rationality. The enchanted imagination has not, as many missionaries predicted, died out. While the mission-founded mainline churches largely ignore these spiritual forces widely considered to control our fate, these newer churches by contrast allow this enchanted religious imagination full play. The “dual allegiance” of worshiping at a mainline church on Sundays and then secretly resorting to a “healer diviner” on a weeknight is unnecessary. Now, identifying and countering the spiritual forces causing one’s misfortune can be done on a Sunday during Pentecostal service. Consider a paradigmatic case—it would be hard to be more paradigmatic— the Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministry (MFM), founded by Daniel Olukoya in Lagos, in 1989 (see Gifford 2015, esp. pp. 13–28). The church claims that its regular Sunday attendance at headquarters makes it the largest single Christian congregation in Africa. It has spread widely, even outside Africa; its founder has promoted his Christianity in over 200 books. Olukoya’s principal theological category is destiny. His claim is that we are destined for glory, abundance, marital happiness, and success of every kind here in this world. However, the greatness destined for us in this life is continually threatened by various spiritual forces. It is Olykoya’s special anointing to identify and defeat all these harmful evil forces. The spiritual force most frequently mentioned is witchcraft, the exercise of supernatural powers by people who are in league with the devil. The signs of being bewitched are any denial of your divine destiny. He lists the signs, conceding that the list is almost endless. Another category of destructive spirits is marine spirits, which are particularly destructive satanic agents, found widely in Africa. They control riverine areas, and thus are particularly to be found among riverine peoples. Marine spirits are more powerful than witchcraft spirits, and nothing is outside their sphere of influence. They are closely associated with sex and are particularly associated with female beauty. A woman attractive to men is almost certainly a marine spirit. The sources of marine bondage, including polygamy and ancestors, are almost infinite, but again, the signs are failing to reach one’s glorious destiny.

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Yet another category of spiritual forces is a spirit spouse, which traps one in a spiritual marriage. Some know they are involved in such a marriage, but over 90 percent who are spiritually married are unconscious of the fact. One becomes married spiritually in many different ways, but mainly through immorality. Sex with a prostitute automatically gives entrance to the demons of the last seven men who had sex with her, and to all the spirit husbands of the prostitute. Children of a prostitute or concubine are automatically affected. Again, the sure signs of spiritual marriage are falling short of one’s destiny. Another source of spiritual bondage is a curse made against a person or group of people. They include curses of divorce, poverty, stagnancy, backwardness, defeat, oppression, and general failure. Olukoya claims that ancestral curses are ubiquitous, especially in Africa where 95 percent of problems stem from ancestors. For this reason, nine out of ten Africans would need to go through deliverance to enjoy their lives. Olukoya talks about these major categories (witches, marine spirits, spiritual spouses, curses) at length and in considerable detail. It may appear that he has a sharply defined cosmology with identifiable causes responsible for particular effects, but this is not so. What he ascribes to a spirit spouse he can on other occasions equally ascribe to a witch or a marine spirit. In fact, almost any misfortune can be ascribed to a specific source, but on other occasions those same things can be attributed to another source, just as specified. This enchanted attitude is less a full-blown, carefully elaborated intellectual position with every anomaly eliminated, every inconsistency ironed out; it is far more what in French is called an imaginaire (often translated into English as imaginary) which is the complex of attitudes, values, images, paradigms, symbols, institutions that one unconsciously brings to experiencing and understanding reality. In this enchanted imaginaire, boundaries are not hard and fast, the spiritual and the physical world interpenetrate one another. Physical laws do not consistently apply. The primary cause of anything is a spiritual force.

Prosperity Many churches focus less on success through conquering malevolent spirits and emphasize more that victory comes through faith, the fourth of the six factors listed above. According to the faith (or prosperity) gospel, Christianity entails success, for God has met all our needs in the suffering and death of Christ, and every Christian should now share in Christ’s victory over sin, sickness, and poverty. A believer has the right to blessings of health and wealth won by Christ, and he or she can obtain these blessings simply by faith. This attitude has come to be almost invariably associated with the seed faith idea of giving money in order to receive. (We will return to this.) In discussing the prosperity gospel, one must make an important distinction between hard prosperity and soft prosperity; hard prosperity promises wealth and possessions, often quite crassly understood; soft prosperity has less focus on material prosperity and more on achievement or accomplishment or

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fulfillment. Many churches which would positively reject the charge that they preach wealth in any crass way, nevertheless, are essentially schools of “can-do” self-fulfillment incorporating aspects of the first three of the six elements mentioned above: motivation, entrepreneurship, or developing practical life skills. Often this is evident from their bookstores. Harare’s Celebration Centre in mid-2017 carried titles like Winning My Race—Start Your New Life Today; Anointed for Business; Act Like a Success—Think Like a Success; Jump-start Your Growth; Overcoming Crisis—the Secrets of Thriving in Challenging Times; 40 Days of Power; Change Your Words—Change Your Life; Coming Up Trumps— Building Vision and Thinking Strategically; The Prosperous Soul—Your Journey to a Richer Life: Power Thoughts; Your Best Life Now; Limitless—God’s Covenant with You for Life and Favor; 25 Ways to a Happier Marriage. This strand overwhelmingly predominated. The bookshop carried a few titles veering toward the spirit-emphasis of Olukoya which we have just discussed, and a few tended toward the hard prosperity we will immediately consider, but this 15,000-­member Celebration Centre is firmly anchored in this soft prosperity. Of course the ratio of specifically Christian content in self-improvement literature varies enormously in these churches, and the recognizably Christian element is not necessarily increased by copious biblical references—to the feats of Abraham, the achievements of Moses, the victories of Joshua, the triumphs of David, the riches of Solomon. If Harare’s Celebration Centre is characterized by soft prosperity, there are innumerable African Pentecostal churches marked by hard prosperity. One of the most prominent (again it would be hard to be more conspicuous) is the Nigerian multi-national Living Faith Church Worldwide Inc, better known as Winners’ Chapel, begun in Lagos in 1983 and now found all over Africa and beyond (see Gifford 2015, esp. pp. 29–46). Winners’ boasts in Lagos the biggest church auditorium in the world, seating 50,400, and in Nairobi in 2008 they opened the biggest church in East and Central Africa. The chief pastors tend to be Nigerians, well-schooled in founder David Oyedepo’s teaching and fiercely loyal; they promote his books (he usually recommends two or more “books of the month”) and promote the pilgrimage to the annual conference (“Shiloh”) at headquarters (“Canaan Land,” outside Lagos)—for members a pilgrimage rivaling the importance for Muslims of the Haj to Mecca. At Winners’, it is obvious that although the success promised embraces all areas of life, it is material success that is paramount. The testimonies are almost all to material success (often, jobs, cars, promotion, salaries paid in dollars). Oyedepo’s preaching promotes material prosperity and his services are understood to bring it about. His 649-page 2006 book, Signs and Wonders Today, well illustrates Oyedepo’s understanding, and since it consists mainly of testimonies, it also provides insight into how his followers understand and experience it. Even if the testimonies have been doctored for publication, that strengthens the point that this is how Oyedepo wishes to be experienced and understood. Quotations below are from that book.

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Christians should be “gloriously distinguished in all spheres of life.” A Christian should “enjoy victory unlimited and on all sides” because faith “overcomes all forces of darkness, economic problems, sickness, disease, family disintegration, untimely death, and every obstacle you can possibly imagine on earth.” His preoccupation with material success in particular is evident from the account which Oyedepo gives of his calling by God. His experience is obviously modeled on the call of Moses, but whereas Moses in Midian was commanded: “Go and set my people free,” Oyedepo in the United States was simply told: “Get down home quick and make my people rich” (2006, p. 79). Oyedepo’s refrain of “sweatless success” indicates that success is not primarily a product of human effort. Success or victory arises from a totally different dynamic. Oyedepo is a prime exponent of the variant of the faith gospel which stresses giving in order to receive or “sowing to reap.” Giving makes someone a “covenant practitioner,” for “prosperity is a covenant.” Oyedepo is quite clear: “Riches is God’s will for you… the covenant is your access to it … What is the guiding law of the covenant, and how do we access it? … There is a law that connects you to the source of covenant wealth … It is the law of seedtime and harvest” (2006, p. 166). Oyedepo has told of the moment when it was revealed to him that the origins of wealth lie not in any capitalist dynamic, but in a “biblical” dynamic. Thus a man testifies that he increased his tithes, and “to cut the story short, I am now a General Manager of a company, with over 200 staff under me … This was a job I didn’t apply for!” (2006, p. 440). This is the logic of the overwhelming majority of testimonies at Winners’. “I joined this commission [a term frequently used by members to refer to Winners’] in 1996, and in that same year the Bishop called for a sacrifice offering for 20-years covenant rest … I brought my color TV, video and sound system. Those were the only things I had then … Two weeks after I gave the sacrifice, the Lord gave me another shop” (2006, p. 173). Another: “I paid my tithe, redeemed my pledge, and paid my foreign missions and Canaan Land [headquarters] subscriptions, and the heavens opened again” (2006, p. 191). Another records that the Bishop “told us to give the most precious thing we had.” He and his wife took their 21-inch color TV to the front during the service: “Between January and now, I’ve not only replaced that TV set with another beautiful one, I’ve paid a six figure amount as tithe! I used to pay a four-figure amount last year … but this year I increased it to a five-figure amount, and have paid till April. I’ve also acquired a vehicle worth half a million naira’ [at the end of 2000 $US1 = 120 naira; in 2006 $US1 = 150 naira]” (2006, p. 187). Another: “In July … the Bishop taught on sacrificial giving … I sowed all my dollars and naira into the building projects. It may not be very much but I gave all! I even had to borrow some money to feed my family that month. Thereafter it started raining, and harvest time began! Within two and a half months, I made about one million naira net!” (2006, p. 200). Another had read Oyedepo’s 1995 book Breaking Financial Hardship (which argues that the principal way to financial success is to give generously to

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God). As a result, “(I gave) all that I earned that month to God despite all the enormous bills I had to pay. Immediately after I dropped that money I got an invitation to be interviewed for a Chief Executive job” (2006, p. 212). Similarly, “When the Bishop made a call for the aircraft seed [to buy the Bishop’s private jet; in 2011 he increased the number of his private jets to four], I looked around for what to give as a sacrificial offering, as almost everything in the house had packed up; the radio and television had to be knocked on the head before they started working. I decided to give the video player that was at least in a fair condition. It was after that offering that things started to change …” (2006, p. 329). Another was demoted and suffered severe financial problems, such that “my children were out of school for almost a session.” However, he “responded to calls for some sacrificial offerings in the church, and God brought some miraculous favors my way.” He continued to apply the Bishop’s preaching. “Then things started happening … two promotions came within a space of three weeks. I had barely recovered from the reverie of that favor when another one landed less than three months later: a two weeks trip to the USA, with all the perquisites attached!” (2006, p. 212). This sowing-for-wealth is relentless. Another reports that after calling for a sacrifice for Winners’ Covenant University, “the Bishop said, ‘if you want to see God in an unusual way, then sow an unusual seed.’ Therefore I decided to sow my annual housing allowance for the year 2004 instead. That same year, God brought me from obscurity into limelight” (2006, p. 347). Another heeded the preaching and gave a 200,000 naira photocopy machine: “I brought it to the church as a seed, and from then on, there was a turn-around! First I got a four million naira contract in June 1998. Then in November of the same year, I got another contract worth 18 million naira” (2006, p. 350). But success does not follow only from giving. Oyedepo illustrates a notable development in African Pentecostalism (the fifth of the six ways to prosperity mentioned above). Early in his ministry he presented himself as a faith teacher (and stressing that victory comes through “seed faith”), but by 2000 he was repackaging himself as a prophet and making this designation retroactive to 1981. God has not only revealed his will to Oyedepo, but he has the “anointing” actually to bring this about. One’s “instrument of release” is now Oyedepo’s “prophetic unction.” Indeed, it seems indispensable. These are weighty claims, with enormous consequences. “Prophetic verdicts are divine verdicts; they are heavenly verdicts. They are God’s commands given expression to through mortal lips … Every time the prophet says, ‘Thus saith the Lord,’ it is actually the Lord Himself speaking … Prophetic verdicts will cause your daystar to rise” (2006, p. 153).  Because of this prophetic status, he is totally unchallengeable. And his status includes wealth: it is right that he is the richest in his church. This prophetic anointing gives Oyedepo “creative breath.” “The Father has creative life in His breath, so does the Son. And because the Son says He has sent us as the Father sent Him, therefore, I have creative life in my breath also.

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And because the Son quickens whomsoever He wills (Jn 5,21), I too can quicken whomsoever I will by that same breath of life” (2006, p. 161).  He claims to have healed many of HIV/AIDS this way. Testimonies tell of this miraculous breath, too. This is the essence of Oyedepo’s Christianity: if you pay the tithes and offerings demanded of you, Oyedepo has the “anointing” to make you a winner, and winner in a fairly crass material sense.

Wider Connections Kate Bowler has studied the prosperity gospel in the United States, and her study helps relate this African prosperity gospel to the American phenomenon. I have attributed the rise of this gospel in Africa in large measure to its resonance with the traditional imaginaire of Africa. However, its American origins must be taken into account too. I attended Reinhard Bonnke’s pan-African “Fire Congress” in Harare in 1986, which is often cited as significant here, with American Kenneth Copeland (one of the hardest of the hard prosperity advocates) a conference star. This congress did not introduce prosperity thinking to Africa, but it certainly shaped it and as it were legitimized it.1 The American faith gospel is most often traced back to Kenneth Hagin Jr of Tulsa Oklahoma in the 1950s. He could be incredibly crass in his expression; he has even claimed that if you drive a mere Chevrolet and not a luxury car, you have not understood the gospel (cited in Hunt 1987, p. 65). The seed-faith element can receive equally crass expression; Gloria Copeland (wife of Kenneth), expounding “receive a hundredfold” of Mark 10:30, has said: “You give $1 for the Gospel’s sake, and $100 belongs to you. You give $10 and receive $1000. Give $1000 and receive $100,000. I know that you can multiply, but I want you to see it in black and white. Give one airplane and receive one hundred times the value of the airplane. Give one car and the return would furnish you a lifetime of cars. In short, Mark 10:30 is very good deal” (cited in Hunt 1987, p. 66). Virtually all the motifs associated with Oyedepo can also be found in Hagin, the Copelands, and the other stars of the American prosperity movement, both soft and hard, like Joyce Meyer, Jerry Savelle, Jesse Duplantis, Miles Munroe, John Maxwell, TD Jakes, Joel Osteen, Joe Avanzini, Fred Price. Yet Bowler well shows that the rise of the prosperity gospel in America owes a lot to the American context. Such thinking resonated profoundly with the “American social imaginary.” It affirmed the American myth of triumph through honesty, hard work, self-reliance, and perseverance over adversity, and of course it also affirmed the basic economic structures on which individual enterprise stood. The rise of the prosperity gospel in North America owes much to the postwar economic boom. “All revivalists,” she writes, “were preaching upward mobility to people already on the way up. These were the boom years in which many families considered the possibility of home ownership for the first time or were able to enjoy hitherto unobtainable luxuries such

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as indoor plumbing, a private telephone, and electrical appliances such as stoves and refrigerators … Pentecostals enjoyed the postwar economic boom as contented middle-class citizens and proved as keen as any American to believe God might have something to do with it … Modern capitalism engendered new admiration as a seemingly perfect system of decent wages, high employment rates, and cheaply manufactured goods. The mass marketing and assembly lines churning out cars, ovens, washing machines, lawn mowers, and sectional sofas brought the logic of modernity to believers’ homes and driveways.” Bowler concludes with a perceptive comment: “This was a theology-in-motion that read spiritual insight backward from circumstance” (2013, p. 51). It is precisely because the circumstances seem so different in Africa that many find it puzzling that the gospel of prosperity flourishes there. Yet as outlined above, Africa’s traditional religion was about well-being; it is not surprising that those with this imaginaire react positively to a prosperity preacher. And Bowler suggests something even more pertinent: “On one level, the appeal of prosperity theology is obvious. The (prosperity gospel of health and wealth) sells a compelling bill of goods: God, wealth, and a healthy body to enjoy it. But it is … the feelings that lift believers’ chins and square their shoulders, that is its fundamental achievement. The first step in accessing this good news is the belief that things can get better. The prosperity gospel’s chief allure is simple optimism … Throughout services in every prosperity church, the message of cultivated cheerfulness is proclaimed. Don’t complain. Everybody’s got a sad story. Speak only positively and believe for the best. (This positivity) was perhaps the movement’s greatest gift and heaviest burden” (2013, p. 232). Gift because it is so appealing; burden because eventually an assessment of the efficacy of the prosperity gospel will probably become insistent, although that can be deferred a long time. I have argued here that approaching through these two elements of the Pentecostal explosion helps explain the phenomenon. The churches we have discussed are “ideal types;” Olukoya’s Mountains of Fire and Miracles almost exclusively stresses victory through conquering spiritual forces, the Celebration Centre self-advancement, Oyedepo material wealth. These emphases are becoming ever more salient because of the massive media output of their leading champions, and the increasingly paradigmatic status of such high-profile exponents. Of course, most of Africa’s proliferating churches are not so mono-­ stranded, combining the different emphases in differing permutations and combinations. And the permutations can change; another huge Nigerian multi-national, the Redeemed Christian Church of God, was founded in 1952 by Josaiah Akindayome as a rather puritanical, abstemious movement; under his successor Enoch Adeboye it has come to be identified with prosperity. As remarked in discussing Harare’s Celebration Centre above, the element of recognizably Christian content in all these churches varies, but that topic is beyond our remit here.

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Conclusion Why are spirit causality and the prominence of prosperity so seldom given the prominence they deserve? I would suggest two reasons. First, so much writing on Pentecostalism is done by committed adherents who either don’t feel the need to do the necessary fieldwork or are determined to be as positive as they can. Second, and related to this, to the extent that these movements are enchanted they are hard to discuss without seeming to disparage adherents as superstitious, backward, or deluded. Moreover, the Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has insisted that Western scholars are ill-equipped to handle African religion, because religion in the West over recent centuries “has turned more and more towards the contemplative, conceived of as spiritual intercourse with God” and increasingly ceded to science the explanation-­ prediction-­ control function that religion performs in Africa, not least for Pentecostals. This development, says Appiah, “has driven a great wedge between the religion of the industrial world and the religion of traditional cultures … For the modern Westerner … to call something ‘religious’ is to connote a great deal that is lacking in traditional religion and not to connote much that is present” (1992, pp. 115–21). In this way, most Western academics are unprepared to take at face value the explanatory function of spiritual forces crucial to understanding Africa’s new churches. Appiah continues: “Most Africans, now, whether converted to Islam or Christianity or not, still share the beliefs of their ancestors in an ontology of invisible beings. (This is of course, true of many Europeans and Americans as well.) … I do not believe, despite what many appear to think, that this is a reason for shame or embarrassment. But it is something to think about. If modernization is conceived of, in part, as the acceptance of science, we have to decide whether we think the evidence obliges us to give up the invisible ontology. (The industrial world has experienced) a considerable limitation of the domains in which it is permissible for intellectuals to invoke spiritual agency. The question how much of the world of the spirits we intellectuals must give up (or transform into something ceremonial without the old literal ontology) is one we must face: and I do not think the answer is obvious” (1992, p. 135). Openly admitting the reality is not an answer, but it does enable the proper issues to be addressed. As is obvious, I do not consider these churches in the progressive light often accorded them. David Martin has baldly stated: “African Pentecostalism is a raft firmly pointed in the direction of modernity” (2002, p. 152). By contrast, in early 2018 the admittedly hyper-authoritarian President Kagame of Rwanda simply closed 6000 (yes, six thousand) churches in the country, 700 in Kigali alone, because if he is to make Rwanda the Singapore of Africa, there are certain kinds of religion that do not help.2 My fieldwork shows that these new churches play a much more ambiguous role in contemporary Africa than any

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inference drawn from illustrious theorists would warrant. More fieldwork on the precise mechanics of these churches is needed before the debate can be conclusively settled.

Notes 1. The congress shaped it, by laying out all the biblical texts that could be employed to back up the prosperity message (among the most important, Deut 28–30; Mal 3,10; Mk 4, 23–29; Mk 10, 29–30; Phil 4,19; 3 John 2). Interestingly, because most prosperity preachers pay no attention to Christian tradition, just moving back and forth between the present and what they imagine to have been biblical Christianity, Copeland pinpointed the time when Christianity “took the wrong turn.” This occurred with Francis of Assisi who (though “a man of God”) “threw out the baby with the bathwater,” spreading the idea that there was something wrong with wealth and that Jesus was poor. “Well, Jesus wasn’t poor,” insisted Copeland. For more on this congress, see Gifford (1990). 2. https://www.news24.com/Africa/News/r wanda-­c loses-­t housands-­o f-­ churches-­in-­bid-­for-­more-­control-­20180404; accessed 14 Feb 2019.

Bibliography Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 1992, In my Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture, New York: OUP. Berger, Peter, 2010, ‘Max Weber is Alive and Well, and Living in Guatemala: the Protestant Ethic Today’, The Review of Faith and International Affairs, 8, 4, 3–9. Bowler, Kate, 2013, Blessed: a History of the American Prosperity Gospel, NY: OUP. Gifford, Paul, 1990, “Prosperity: a New and Foreign Element in African Christianity, Religion, 20, 373–388. Gifford, Paul, 1993, Christianity and Politics in Does Liberia, Cambridge: CUP. Gifford, Paul, 2004, Ghana’s New Christianity: Pentecostalism in a Globalizing African Economy, London: Hurst and Co; Bloomington: University of Indiana. Gifford, Paul, 2009, Christianity, Politics and Public Life in Kenya, London: Hurst and Co; Bloomington: University of Indiana. Gifford, Paul, 2015, Christianity, Development and Modernity in Africa, London: Hurst and Co. Hunt, D, 1987, Beyond Seduction: A Return to Biblical Christianity, Eugene OR, Harvest House. Martin, David, 1990, Tongues of Fire: the Explosion of Pentecostalism in Latin America, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Martin, David, 2002, Pentecostalism: the World their Parish, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Oyedepo, David, 2006, Signs and Wonders Today: a Catalogue of the Amazing Acts of God among Men, Lagos: Dominion.

CHAPTER 39

African Pentecostalism from an African Perspective Paul Mwangi and Kyama Mugambi

Introduction African Pentecostals are at the center of Christian growth in the twenty-first century. One in three Pentecostal-charismatic Christians in the world are from Africa.1 This is a substantial number given that in 2020, a quarter of the world’s 2.5 billion Christians were Pentecostal-Charismatic, and that Africa leads in the growth rate of Pentecostals around the world. Four of the top ten countries with the highest populations of Pentecostal-charismatics are in the continent.2 Beyond demographic strength, Pentecostals in Africa have moved from the periphery to the center of discourse in the public sphere. Their influence in sub-Saharan Africa is evident in politics, the media, and the arts. Their missiological impact in the twenty-first century extends beyond anything envisaged among missionaries one hundred years before.3 Missionaries at the World Missionary Conference held in Edinburgh in 1910 did not envisage the possibility of Christian expansion in Africa in the scale that is now evident. They paid even less attention to the possibility of Christian expressions.4 The proliferation of the Bible in indigenous languages just before the end of the missionary era catalyzed the birth of many twentieth-century African initiatives in Christianity.5 These churches presented themselves as movements of

P. Mwangi Department of Religious Studies, South Eastern Kenya University, Kitui, Kenya K. Mugambi (*) World Christianity, Yale Divinity School, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. E. Barnes, T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48270-0_39

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the Spirit whose expressions were preludes to twenty-first century Pentecostal forms that are the focus of this chapter.6 Pentecostals are a diverse group of Christians sharing a “family resemblance” but are found in a range of denominations. They prioritize the person and work of the Holy Spirit in their worship and leadership. This work manifests through healing phenomena, miraculous provision, and deliverance from demonic powers.7 In the African context, the terms Pentecostal and Charismatic, when used together, bring in one place independent denominations and expressions with similar priorities found in historic mission churches. In one sense, Charismatics might be understood as the “Pentecostals” in historic mission churches. African Pentecostalism is as diverse as the African realities it engages. The development of its churches draws from the context created by mission and colonial histories. The churches are also the product of Christian engagement with contemporary African urban settings.8 Given their diversity and dynamism, a precise all-inclusive taxonomy is difficult to outline. In part, these churches are the early spirit-empowered movements which arose either independently or from the historic mission initiatives. The name given to these initiatives was African Initiated Churches (AICs).9 The other group includes Pentecostal churches that came out of Classical Western Pentecostal denominations. These include the Assemblies of God, Four Square Gospel Church, and the Apostolic Church. Another set is known as the neo-­ Pentecostal or charismatic churches (NPCCs).10 NPCC are a remarkably diverse category which includes several groupings within it. Among them are churches which focus on media and entrepreneurship, while others emerged from itinerant evangelistic initiatives.11 Progressive Pentecostal churches espouse Pentecostal priorities while broadening their contextual engagement to include intellectual, theological engagement with socio-political issues within the continent.12 Despite their denominational diversity, Pentecostals are quick to acknowledge their connection with others locally and around the world who share their spirituality. Theirs is an ecumenism representative of emerging non-Western Christianity which crosses denominational, national, and regional boundaries.13 This remarkable ecumenism spreads across a broad range of theological and ecclesial differences within movements and is evident in their lived theology. It manifests in prayer gatherings and revival meetings where members freely intermingle. In the cities where these churches thrive, shared languages, culture, and context supplies common experiences upon which their ecumenicity thrives. African Pentecostalism is thus a dynamic expression and practice of Christianity that embraces the tension of being and becoming within cosmopolitan settings. The ontological dimension comes from multiple shared identities brought together under their common submission to the gospel. Their shared “becoming” is enshrined in the changing African realities which they strive to make sense of within their faith experience. Each Pentecostal

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community references its sense of identity and significance based on their contextual reading of the gospel. In their origin and growth, Pentecostal communities are glocal; local in provenance, but global in outlook. Pentecostal movements in Africa arose from revitalization impulses emerging locally as well as from around the world. Their development fits the increasingly accepted polygenesis theory of provenance.14 These movements arose spontaneously from various places on the continent under the leadership of illustrious preachers and evangelists from different eras of African history. Pentecostals vary in form and size. Some are small communities of a couple dozen meeting in makeshift roadside buildings. Others are large urban megachurches with thousands of attendees. Some have simple leadership structures under a founding leader while others have elaborate episcopal hierarchies of leaders. Many run small budgets with few financial controls, while others have large denominational incomes with financial records that are publicly available. Some subscribe to classical Pentecostal doctrine while others deviate from this theology. This diversity makes it challenging to describe the phenomenon in Africa.

Historical Antecedents Pentecostalism in Africa is the product of indigenous agency charting a new path away from historic mission Christianity. The story of their provenance begins in earnest during the era of nineteenth-century Protestant missions. The influence of Enlightenment humanism on the Protestant theology of mission linked the triumphalism of progress to the Christian missionary enterprise. Nineteenth-century missionaries from Europe and America saw missions, and to some extent colonialism, as the cure for the ills of the world.15 Their zeal, invigorated by the Great Revivals, gave impetus for Protestant missionizing in Africa south of the Sahara.16 Denominational mission agencies planted denominational churches in Africa.17 These mission initiatives measured the “advance of the gospel” in the number of baptisms, confessions, communion participants, and the opening of new mission stations.18 The missionaries’ limited knowledge of the indigenous cultures rendered them comparatively ineffective relative to the indigenous Christian movements that came thereafter. Though extraordinarily successful in orthographic and Bible translation efforts, the missionaries were less effective in communicating the Christian message among Africans. These limitations contributed to the founding of the AICs which ushered in the development of Pentecostalism. Though some AICs faltered, many emerged, especially in the early twentieth century.19 They threw off what seemed like a straitjacket of European literary spirituality that did not auger well with their orality. They invented new forms of worship to accommodate their holistic, pragmatic approach to the divine. In AICs African converts found

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a place where they could “feel at home” and where African rhythms and convictions could be expressed authentically.20 Beyond their cultural blindness, the failure of the Western missionary enterprise to identify its activities with anti-colonial struggles led many committed African Christians to break away from missionary Christianity and establish movements compatible with the aspirations toward total liberation.21 AICs fostered the participation of African Christians in the liberating mission of Jesus; anticipating a future that seemed improbable during colonial times. They preached the good news of God’s love, incarnated in the witness of a community in a world of uncertainty.22 AICs came in two forms. Some were churches that seceded from their historic mission roots and opted to govern themselves. They were known as Ethiopian churches. Ethiopianist churches drew their inspiration from Psalm 68:31b. They interpreted, the phrase “Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God” to imply Africans on the continent converting to Christianity. Other AICs were purely indigenous movements led by African founders who presented Christianity in their local languages to their fellow Africans. Missionaries and colonial governments focused on the movement’s separation from the official church. The rise of AICs is, in one sense, a logical consequence of the failure of the modern missionary enterprise to support the aspirations of the African people. They emerged as part of the protest movements for political freedom from colonial rule. They sought self-determination and freedom from the missionaries while embracing the tenets of Christianity. The impulse for liberation endeared the AICs to freedom fighters. Jomo Kenyatta, a prominent pre-­ independence pan-Africanist, devoted a chapter of his anthropological work to the Akurinu a central Kenyan AIC movement.23 Though their goal was primarily spiritual, their efforts aligned with the African clamor for political freedom to end the colonial era. Their rejection of religious domination also came across as a political statement against colonialists. In Belgian Congo, the activities of Simon Kibangu (1889–1951) were interpreted as pan-Africanist in intent and hence a threat to the colonial state.24 A warrant of arrest was issued in 1921 and the movement was brutally suppressed by the Belgian colonial government.25 More significant perhaps was the AIC’s success in showing the potency of African agency in the growth of Christianity.26 The primacy of African agency in the development of Christian expressions is one of the most visible links between twentieth-century AICs and twenty-first century African Pentecostal churches. AIC spirituality tapped into the primal cosmology, piety, and orality embedded in African culture.27 Pentecostal communities that came after them reinterpreted the AICs expression of the connection between African primal spirituality and the church in the book of Acts.28 African Pentecostalism envisions a God who is present, available, and active in the lives of the believer, the congregation, and the community of faith. During Pentecostal gatherings, it’s not unusual to hear the moderator of the

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service invite people “to sit or stand in the presence of God.” From the onset, African Pentecostalism placed the expansion of Christianity in the hands of passionate Africans with a cultural advantage that European missionaries lacked. These communities translated the gospel into local idioms and worldviews with remarkable success. Like the Pentecostals who came after them, AICs championed the dignity and freedom of Africans to engage in Christian religious expressions. Missionaries acknowledged the efficacy of these movements to reach Africans. The evangelistic efforts of Prophet Wade Harris in West Africa, Walter Matita in Southern Africa, and the Revivalists in East Africa received initial enthusiastic approval from European missionaries.29 AICs communicated the Christian message using local languages and metaphors in settings that were largely monocultural and monolingual. Pentecostals expanded Christian linguistic reach in their African urban context. One special case of Pentecostal expansionism were the interdenominational revival movements. One of the earliest and most prominent of these were the Revivalists, who came out of the East African Revival. This revival originated in Gahini, Rwanda among African Anglicans. They saw themselves as renewing the spirituality of Christians who were falling into nominalism. They committed themselves to gathering in fellowships after their worship services. In these meetings, they publicly narrated candid confessions of their personal sin. Their evangelistic fervor was unparalleled among historic mission church converts. The East Africa Revival worked within historic mission denominations to democratized theology and liturgy among the laity.30 Indigenes confronted nominalism and translated the Christian message in ways beyond the command of European missionaries.31 They emphasized personal conversion, along with confession and surrender, in the context of communal narration of stories of faith. Believers were variously known as those who were “born again” or “saved” or those “who had a testimony.” St Paul’s Divinity School became a training center for revivalists with a call to join the clergy. The trainees relished the Five Pillars spiritual emphasis theme in the ordination course introduced by the principal Martin Capon. The five pillars of repentance, faith, new birth, growth in grace, and the work of the Holy Spirit, aligned with the aspirations of the Revivalists. The East Africa Revival reconfigured Christian spirituality giving prominence to traditional values of communality and mutual transparency. Their strong commitment to fellowship and confession provided a means of spiritual expression for a people affected by the collapse of the old social order during colonial rule.32 The East African Revival Movement provided a new means of familial expression outside blood relations.33 Like the AICs, revivalists had a strong sense of self-determination seeing themselves as masters of their own spiritual destiny. Their emphasis on a personal experience of God’s power by his Spirit was more intuitive for Africans,

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enabling them to relate more meaningfully with church worship as experienced in historic mission churches.34 Their evangelistic conventions which attracted thousands of participants were organized and funded by Africans. The Revival movement spread all over East Africa. In Kenya, the first convention was held at Kahuhia in 1947. It was attended by 3000 people. The second, held at Kangaru (1948), was attended by 5000, while the conventions held at Kabete (1949) and Thogoto (1950) each drew 15,000 attendees.35 These conventions were precursors to evangelistic campaigns and spiritual emphasis conferences that came to be associated with the many charismatic megachurches that now dot the Christian landscape of urban Africa. The legacy of these interdenominational revival movements continues in parts of Africa through student movements.36 Through these evangelistic initiatives, the gospel message reaches the people of Africa in dynamic urban contexts that are rapidly changing.37 As such, African Pentecostalism can be seen as a mass movement that is at the frontlines of social change. Though movements of the spirit originated in monocultural rural areas, more recent Pentecostal movements have aimed to help Africans find a spiritual identity in emerging urban contexts. Pentecostals strongly reject primal religion and will not tolerate traditional rituals. Their Christian worship gatherings incorporate a holistic cosmology and a communality which affirms their personhood, significance, and security in a rapidly changing world.38 Pentecostals provided new paradigms to offer a Christian meaning to natural phenomena. Their preachers’ rhetoric enables people to relate such things as illness, pain, and natural disasters to their spirituality in the uncertainty of modern African urban settings. The earthquake in 1978, for instance, led many to accept the message of salvation at Nairobi Pentecostal Church Valley Road.39 Most feared that the second coming was about to take place, igniting the need to be part of those that Christ would take home. They also sought to provide hope amidst the challenges brought about by the failure of economic and political systems.

The Practice and Expression of African Pentecostalism The concept of spiritual warfare is one which illustrates the holistic cosmology that is foundational to Pentecostalism. In Pentecostal parlance, spiritual warfare intersects with the African worldview, which connects the physical and spiritual world. The goal of spiritual warfare is deliverance from the power of evil.40 Warfare prayer rituals incorporate intense sessions among participants with occurrences that resemble hysteria or trances. Tanzanian televangelist Josephat Gwajima, the “archbishop” of Ufunuo na Uzima (Revelation and Life Ministries), held a crusade in Arusha where deliverance prayers were performed. He called people possessed by ancestral spirits to the front of the meeting for deliverance.41 Some attendees of the crusade ran forward frenziedly while shouting, and others fell to the dusty ground, rolling over. The leaders

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and audience consider these moments as evidence that deliverance has actively taken place. The doctrine of speaking in tongues (glossolalia) as initial evidence of Baptism of the spirit is commonplace among churches descended from classical Pentecostal missions. However, the doctrine is only found in some denominations. Regardless of their doctrinal position, Pentecostal prayer gatherings incorporate glossolalia, along with prayer in multiple indigenous languages. They consider these sessions as moments when the Holy Spirit is immanent. The sessions are infused with messages of hope for a people in need of God’s intervention. Many Pentecostals in Africa take a cue from the first chapter of Genesis—to exercise dominion over the material world. They encourage a proactive approach to the problems their members face, suggesting that these problems are opportunities for them to take active control and work toward positive outcomes. This sense of hope is palpable among Pentecostals of all socio-­ economic backgrounds. They all aspire to a society where they experience a sense of God-given wellbeing. Pentecostals articulate their faith within their primal worldview often revisiting the connection between their physical lives and the spiritual world. In so doing they constantly translate the message in terms that broaden the acceptance of Pentecostalism on the continent. The “power encounters” in the New Testament narratives find resonance with the holistic worldviews found in African communities. Pentecostals emphasize the continuity between these biblical narratives and their lived Christian experiences. This emphasis provides more points of contact between Christianity and the African experience than what historic mission churches provided. Pentecostals encourage vigorous participation in acts of worship. This is also clear in their prayer and fasting practices. The ritual around prayer includes repetition, vocal intensity, and confession. They also seek to apply scriptural formulae to, in their opinion, incapacitate malevolent spirits in spiritual warfare.42 As such, prayer acts as an essential ritual with which Pentecostals reinforce their Christian identity and voice their eschatological aspirations.43 Such prayer is intense, highly engaging with participants expending a tremendous amount of energy. The Pentecostal aesthetic of prayer prioritizes an eruption of sensibilities, sensory-motor skills, practical wisdom, and deeply felt emotions. Prayer here becomes a communal moment where Pentecostals articulate, with their voices and movements, their everyday needs to God. The prayer moment acts as a bridge between the visible and invisible realms. The Pentecostals rehearse their oral theology through copious quotations of biblical texts, prayer rituals, and their narrative approaches to preaching. They complement the spontaneity of their worship practices with corporate bodily movement. Their physical movement during prayer and music reinforce the message of hope amid their concerns in a rapidly changing world.44

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The energy in prayer is also evident in the preaching. Their rhetorical performance plays a role in Pentecostal churches with the preacher’s narrative as the centerpiece. The oral performance among Pentecostals allows them to express their spirituality within their complex identities through iterative citation processes.45 The sanctuary is the sacred space where this socio-cultural practice takes place. As such, these churches pay attention to the symbolism and aesthetics in their sanctuaries.46 As a pilgrim people situated in a particular context, African Pentecostals learn not only from the scripture but also draw from cultural and spiritual content from their cultures. They also look outward to resources from the universal body of Christ throughout history.47 They articulate themselves in vibrant worship gatherings conducted in  local languages, and express themselves through their spontaneous liturgies, which make use of oral modes of communication. Though focused on the work of the Holy Spirit in their personal lives, their communities strive to be relevant to their lived realities. Through their stories, Pentecostal leaders show sensitivity to their attendees’ plight in their sermons and prayers. The dysfunctional democracies, failing economies, struggling political regimes produce uncertain times, especially in the urban contexts within which these churches operate. Pentecostal leaders direct their sermons and prayers to these situations urging their members to imagine a positive future beyond them. Pentecostals in Africa are pragmatic in their methods. They invest heavily in film, photography, television, information technology, music, and performance arts. Many own radio and TV stations. Christ is the Answer Ministries (CITAM), for example, was already media savvy before the COVID-19 pandemic. They easily adapted to the online services when there was total lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic. In a context where entertainment is expensive, efficiency in performativity attracts and keeps huge followings in urban areas. Highly polished appearances and performance are commonplace in urban Pentecostal community worship gatherings.48 Urban African Pentecostals’ embrace of media and technology ensures that their content is more readily found on radio, television, and the internet, than is the case with the content offered by historic mission churches. Their contextual messages, enacted in their vibrant gatherings, and communicated through the media, ensure that Pentecostals remain vitally connected to the youth on the continent.49 Though they have been known to be otherworldly in their approach to systemic causes of societal ills, Pentecostals maintain energetic commitments to practical social justice initiatives. Their leaders run children’s homes and food programs for the poor. They also supply humanitarian aid for various causes. Their focus on pragmatic solutions, coupled with their focus on spiritual causality, is poorly matched by their political and social engagement with systemic injustices. Their historic inattention to these issues continues to earn them fair criticism.50

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Features of African Pentecostalism African Pentecostals’ orality predisposes them to catchy, memorable phrases that encapsulate for their audiences their hopeful ethos. These phrases are evident in the names of their churches, the religious language in their meetings, and the titles of their gatherings.51 Their narrative filled rhetoric employs poetics that draw from their local context to depict the sacred.52 Their speakers are creative and sensitive to the audience’s plight as they compose their religious events. This creativity comes across in their vivacious worship music. The music incorporates local languages and rhythms to communicate their message of hope. Their locally composed hymnody employs iterative forms commonly found among the communities they serve. Dance and movement are an important part of this embodied spirituality. As a feature of orality, music goes with African Pentecostal worship experiences, permeating the sermons, prayers, and testimonies. The music is said to mediate the presence of the Holy Spirit in the gathered community. One of the criticisms against African Pentecostals is their overemphasis on the experience of the Holy Spirit versus reason. The criticism finds its strength in their activities that have little to do with piety or missions.53 These include the promotion of sacred oils, fasting rituals, and prayer formulas. These activities have been the occasion for extortion, fraud, and extractive practices by some leaders at the expense of vulnerable congregations.54 While these might be the case with some communities, there has been a gradual shift toward education and the academy among the more established Pentecostal churches. Large Pentecostal institutions have financed the education sector, running institutions from basic schools to universities.55 This emphasis on education began in the 1990s and has led to increased investment in theological education among some Pentecostals. The result is a growing pool of highly educated leaders within the movements. In Kenya, Pan Africa Christian (PAC) University and the Africa International University (AIU) are among a few Christian-based universities that train Pentecostal Church clergy to the doctoral level. Theological training and leadership formation has also catalyzed the growth of structures that are self-regulating.56 Through their history, Pentecostals in Africa have developed different structures to facilitate their ecclesial functions. Some new urban-centered NPCCs have a fluid organizational structure shaped by the founding leader or leaders (if they are a married couple). Many larger church movements have developed elaborate episcopal structures complete with succession plans to sustain themselves. Charisma remains a critical element in Pentecostal leadership. So important is the role of the Holy Spirit in the calling of leaders that Pentecostal African women leaders featured more prominently than women leaders do in historic mission denominations. Women’s roles range from the powerful roles of spouses of founding leaders, to influential prophets, to founding women

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leaders.57 While more could be done to improve women’s participation in leadership, Pentecostal churches have fared comparatively better in giving women leaders space to develop their ministry. One leadership trend developing in these churches is the use of kinship terms to refer to leaders. The members refer to their leaders as either Dad or Mum. The communities develop a spiritual kinship community which functions like a family, with the apex leaders functioning as the patriarch and matriarch. Within these structures, the members draw their inspiration from the leaders who function as spiritual models for their lives. The community sermons, teachings, seminars propagated in print and digital media reinforce their leaders’ spiritual ideals. The material aims to inspire hope and resilience in the face of urban despondency. Some churches that use family language (Dad and Mum) combined with motivational rhetoric have come under criticism for excesses which harm the members. This paradigm is open to abuse in many African contexts which forbid their members to question “parental” authority. One example is the New Life Prayer Center and Church founded in Mombasa, Kenya’s Coastal area. The self-proclaimed Prophet, Ezekiel Odero leads the movement. Odero came to the limelight in February 2022 after a meeting in the capital city’s Kenya International Sports Center stadium which filled to capacity, with over 60,000 attendees. The wife of a prominent politician attended this worship and deliverance service.58 Government authorities arrested Odero for his links with a fringe movement allegedly responsible for deaths on the Kenyan coast.59 The movement’s considerable wealth and influence demonstrates the ability of such movements to capture the imagination of many while their leaders exploit their positions.60 Though the media is replete with highly visible examples, many Pentecostal church leaders strive to maintain a level of theological orthodoxy despite their limited training. The dynamic Pentecostalism of twenty-first century Africa is an example of a successful Christian translation process in a rapidly changing continent full of youth.61 African Pentecostalism acts as an agent of change with both a local and global outlook in the rapidly changing urban context. The global outlook embraces the African diaspora. CITAM, for instance, has an Assembly in Washington D.C., East Timor, and Romania.62 Pentecostals are developing an ever-expanding global vision for their ministry. Immigrant communities are characterized by networks, activities, and life-patterns that bring together strands from their “old home” and “new home” societies, as well as with other host contexts.63 The diaspora communities are strategic in African Pentecostalism; connecting it with the global context while keeping an African identity and expression. Pentecostals as Holy Spirit-empowered communities aim to re-enact the early church life as recorded in the book of Acts. The early church experiences are the template by which Pentecostals model their activities.64 They emphasize the manifestations of the Holy Spirit of God in the lives of the believer within their community of faith. Works of the Holy Spirit in their lives authenticate

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their relationship with God.65 These encounters and their relevance to African realities connect this Christian expression to the continent and to Africans in the diaspora. A substantial segment of African Pentecostal communities can be found outside the continent. Some belong to historic communities which resulted from forced migration to the Caribbean, the Americas, and Europe.66 These communities carried with them their African spirituality with its holistic cosmology. Their integrated worldview has found expression in various religious forms including Pentecostalism. African American Pentecostals made significant historical contributions to the Los Angeles and Topeka events in the early 1900s. More recently global migratory patterns have produced twenty-first-century Christian immigrant communities. These have at the forefront in providing Christian responses to social, political, and economic issues faced by people of people of color in the global north. Some of the largest churches in Europe are the product of African Pentecostal missions. In 2020, African diaspora pastors were the founders of the largest churches in the UK. Pentecostals in Africa keep loose relations with their counterparts in other parts of the world. Their relationships differ from the formal denominational ties found in historic mission churches. Regional Assemblies of God groups around the world meet in conferences, though the relationships are less formal. Through their phenomenal organic growth in one hundred years, African Pentecostal movements have moved from relative obscurity to prominence on the public sphere. The twenty-first century has seen increased instances of political mobilization involving Pentecostals. In ways that are reminiscent of historical church-­ state relations, politicians have begun to make effort to find their way into Pentecostal gatherings. Influential Pentecostal leaders with huge followings attract politicians who were seeking votes from the electorate. In one congregation in Kenya, a 2022 presidential candidate’s manifesto and campaign slogans were played in a huge screen found in front of the Pentecostal sanctuary as they awaited his arrival at the church. Upon his arrival, the candidate received a boisterous welcome and opportunity to address the faithful. This kind of political alignment could be found in other African countries and even Europe.67 Political affiliation with Pentecostal churches to access the voters contained therein is testament to the growing prominence of African Pentecostalism.

Conclusion Through the years, the intersection between Christianity and African culture has produced Pentecostalism in its different forms. The expression continues to grow rapidly, extending its reach and influence into various spheres, on and off the continent. Movements like the Redeemed Christian Church of God with its presence in 189 countries bear testimony to the growing prominence

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of Pentecostalism in the global Christian story.68 Pentecostals’ emphasis on the gifts of the Holy Spirit such as prophecy, tongues, and deliverance engenders a vivid imagination of the immanence of God in a dynamic world. Its diversity shows Christianity’s infinite translatability within the cultures of the world. The Pentecostal story illustrates African agency in the translation process of global Christian expansion. Through African Pentecostalism Christianity makes it home in Africa, while Africa finds its home in the Global Christian story.

Notes 1. Gina A. Zurlo and Todd M. Johnson, World Christian Encyclopedia, 3rd edition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 8. 2. Gina A. Zurlo, Global Christianity: A Guide to the World’s Largest Religion from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2022). 3. For more on this see Brian Stanley, The World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh 1910 (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2009); Brian Stanley, ‘Twentieth-Century World Christianity: A Perspective from the History of Missions.’, ed. Donald M. Lewis, Currents in World Christianity, 2004, 13. 4. Stanley, ‘Twentieth-Century World Christianity: A Perspective from the History of Missions.’, 13. 5. Lamin Sanneh discusses this extensively pointing out that the translation of the Bible into indigenous languages was just the beginning of a deeper translation of the gospel message into African cultures where “the God of the ancestors was accordingly assimilated into the Yahweh of ancient Israel to become ‘the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.’” Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture, 42 (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2015), 193. 6. There were African movements of the Spirit before the twentieth century. These include Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita founder of the Antonian movement of the Kongo of the early eighteenth century and Makhanda (Nxele) a South African Xhosa itinerant preacher from the early nineteenth century. While the term Pentecostal might not be readily used on them, their contribution as African Christian movements of the Spirit is not in doubt. 7. Zurlo and Johnson, World Christian Encyclopedia, 5. 8. See Nimi Wariboko, ‘Pentecostalism in Africa’, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History, October 2017, 1. 9. The term used for these from the 1970s to the 1990s was African independent churches. This term focuses on the separation of the churches from historic mission denominations. In doing so it fails to give due regard for the autochthonous African agency. For a further discussion on these terms see Kyama M. Mugambi, A Spirit of Revitalization: Urban Pentecostalism in Kenya (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2020), 14, 41–44. 10. Wariboko, ‘Pentecostalism in Africa’, 1. 11. See a treatment of this in Mugambi, A Spirit of Revitalization, 121–26. 12. Mugambi, 131; Wanjiru M.  Gitau, Megachurch Christianity Reconsidered: Millennials and Social Change in African Perspective (Downers Grove: Inter-­ Varsity Press, 2018).

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13. Dale T. Irvin, ‘The Church, the Urban, and the Global: Mission in an Age of Global Cities’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research 33, no. 4 (October 2009): 177–82. 14. See Ogbu Kalu, African Pentecostalism: An Introduction (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 15. D. J Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Orbis Books Maryknoll, NY, 1991), 343. 16. D. J Bosch, Transforming Mission (Orbis Books, 1992), 343. 17. These include Anglicans, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists and Moravians. 18. Bosch, Transforming Mission, 1992, 323. 19. Sundkler, Zulu Zion and Some Swazi Zionists, 1st ed. (Oxford University Press, 1976), 6. 20. Frederick Burkewood Welbourn and Bethwell A. Ogot, A Place to Feel at Home: A Study of Two Independent Churches in Western Kenya (Oxford UP, 1966). 21. J.  N. K.  Mugambi, The Biblical Basis for Evangelization (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1989), 56. 22. Bosch, Transforming Mission, 1992, 519. 23. See for example J. Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya—The Tribal Life of the Gikuyu, 1st Edition (Secker & Warburg, 1938), 270–79. 24. Wariboko, ‘Pentecostalism in Africa’, 3. 25. Wariboko, 4. 26. For a fuller discussion of this see Allan H.  Anderson, Spirit-Filled World: Religious Dis/Continuity in African Pentecostalism (Switzerland: Springer, 2018). 27. Agrippa G.  Khathide, ‘Mission in Pentecostalism’, Missionalia 30, no. 3 (November 2002): 343. 28. Khathide, 347. 29. Wariboko, ‘Pentecostalism in Africa’, 2. 30. Khathide, ‘Mission in Pentecostalism’, 348. 31. J. Karanja, Founding an African Faith: Kikuyu Anglican Christianity 1900–1945 (Nairobi: Uzima, 1999), 216. 32. Karanja, 251. 33. Karanja, 250. 34. Khathide, ‘Mission in Pentecostalism’, 350. 35. Karanja, Founding an African Faith: Kikuyu Anglican Christianity 1900–1945, 250. 36. The link between interdenominational revival movements, student movements, and Pentecostalism is explored more thoroughly in Mugambi, A Spirit of Revitalization, 55–88; Kyama M. Mugambi, ‘Student Movements and Spiritual Identity in the Growth of Pentecostalism in Kenya’, in The Pentecostal World, ed. Michael Wilkinson and Jörg Haustein (London: Routledge, 2023). 37. Gitau, Megachurch Christianity Reconsidered: Millennials and Social Change in African Perspective, 167. 38. The writers are involved in a research project “Engaging African Realities” with a specific focus on African Urban Pentecostalism and Alternative Kinship Patterns. The research is funded by the Nagel Institute of Calvin University. 39. This is the former name for the church now known as Christ is the Answer Ministries (CITAM). This is a Pentecostal church in Nairobi which traces its

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origin to classical Pentecostals, the Pentecostal assemblies of Canada. Though the church membership was African, it fully indigenized its leadership in the 1990s. Justus Mugambi, Five Decades of God’s Faithfulness: The Amazing Story of Christ Is the Answer Ministries (Nairobi: Evangel, 2009), 72. 40. Wonsuk Ma, Veli-Matti Karkkainen, and J Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu, eds., Pentecostal Mission and Global Christianity, vol. 20, Regnum Edinburgh Centenary Series (Oxford: Regnum Books International, 2014), 151. 41. Pastor Josephat Gwajima Mega Crusade in Arusha, Tanzania (Powerful Prayers), YouTube (Arusha, 2013). 42. Ma, Karkkainen, and Asamoah-Gyadu, Pentecostal Mission and Global Christianity, 20:153. 43. Wariboko, ‘Pentecostalism in Africa’, 6. 44. Wariboko, 6. 45. Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, eds., Performativity and Performance (New York: Routledge, 1995), 2. 46. Wariboko, ‘Pentecostalism in Africa’, 6. 47. Gitau, Megachurch Christianity Reconsidered: Millennials and Social Change in African Perspective, 167. 48. The authors have been involved in researching in urban Pentecostalism in Kenya. The altars of both CITAM Valley Road and Jubilee Celebration Center Parklands, Nairobi, were observed to be set for performativity and excellence performance during worship service and other Christian festivals and celebrations like Christmas. 49. We have not the time to explore this here, but by virtue of the young age of the continent, Pentecostalism is a youth movement. Africa’s median age in 2020 is 19 which in turn demonstrates that Christianity is a phenomenon which engages with the young. The youth are active participants in the growth of Pentecostalism. See Mugambi, ‘Student Movements and Spiritual Identity in the Growth of Pentecostalism in Kenya’. 50. Paul Gifford, Christianity, Development and Modernity in Africa (London: Hurst, 2015), http://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/christianity­development-­modernity-­africa/ 51. Jensine Andresen, ed., Religion in Mind: Cognitive Perspectives on Religious Belief, Ritual, and Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 144. 52. Thomas J. Csordas, ‘Genre, Motive, and Metaphor: Conditions for Creativity in Ritual Language’, Cultural Anthropology 2, no. 4 (1987): 445. 53. Khathide, ‘Mission in Pentecostalism’, 353. 54. See for example Ezra Chitando, Innovation and Competition in Zimbabwean Pentecostalism: Megachurches and the Marketization of Religion (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021). 55. CITAM and Pentecostal Assemblies of God own and run Pan Africa Christian University. Kenya Assemblies of God have their own university. Redeemed Christian church of God in Nigeria own and run Redeemer’s university. Church of God Mission International in Nigeria are the proprietors of the Benson Idahosa University.

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56. In researching on African Realities funded by the Nagel Institute of Calvin University, I noted a thoroughness in leadership structure and how leaders are appointed, trained, commissioned for service and how they retire after service in Christ is the Answer Ministries on of the classical Pentecostal Churches in Kenya and diaspora 57. Kathy Kiuna and her husband founded Jubilee christian centre in Nairobi, Kenya. Teresia Wairimu is a highly respected founder of Faith Evangelistic ministries in Kenya. Esther Obasi-ike is a prominent Nigerian Pastor. See Kathy Kiuna, Transformed Woman (Nairobi, Kenya: Jubilee Publishers, 2016); Anne Jackson and Teresia Wairimu Kinyanjui, A Cactus in the Desert: An Autobiography of Reverend Teresa Wairimu Kinyanjui, 1st edition (Nairobi, Kenya: Revival Springs Media, 2011); Prince Obasi-Ike and Esther Obasi-Ike, Purpose and Promise-­Driven Life (Nairobi: Mustard Seed Publications, 2012). 58. This prominent politician eventually became the deputy president after the election later that year. 59. Joackim Bwana, ‘A City within a City: Inside Pastor Ezekiel’s New Life Prayer Center and Church’, Standard Media, 10 May 2023, The Nairobian edition. 60. Bwana. 61. Gitau, while comparing African Pentecostalism with South Korean megachurches observes that, while the Korean church may need to turn another corner to reach its millennial generation. Gitau, Megachurch Christianity Reconsidered: Millennials and Social Change in African Perspective, 174. 62. CITAM Membership Class 101: Understanding My Church (Nairobi: Christ is the Answer Ministries, 2022), 18. 63. Afe Adogame, ‘Transnational Migration and Pentecostalism in Europe’, PentecoStudies 9, no. 1 (2010): 56. 64. David Zac Niringiye, The Church: God’s Pilgrim People (Langham Global Library, 2014), 154. 65. Niringiye, 156. 66. Migration is an important part of Christian history. For a book length treatment of this theme see Jehu J Hanciles, Migration and the Making of Global Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2021). 67. Afe Adogame writes about a similar instance when the UK Prime Minister visited a Redeemed Christian Church of God congregation on the eve of a Parliamentary elections. See Afe Adogame, ‘“Who You Are Does Not Matter in Europe!” African Diaspora Christianities and the Ethical Politics of Wasting Bodies and Unwanted Immigration in Fortress Europe’, in World Christianity as Public Religion, ed. Raimundo C Barreto Jr. and Ronaldo Cavalcante (Baltimore: Fortress Press, 2017); Chitando, Innovation and Competition in Zimbabwean Pentecostalism: Megachurches and the Marketization of Religion; Chammah J Kaunda, ‘“From Fools for Christ to Fools for Politicians”: A Critique of Zambian Pentecostal Theopolitical Imagination’, International Bulletin of Mission Research 41, no. 4 (2017): 296–311; Jorg Haustein, ‘The New Prime Minister’s Faith: A Look at Oneness Pentecostalism in Ethiopia’, PentecoStudies 12, no. 2 (n.d.): 183–204. 68. Zurlo and Johnson, World Christian Encyclopedia, 591.

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Bibliography Adogame, Afe. ‘Transnational Migration and Pentecostalism in Europe’. PentecoStudies 9, no. 1 (2010): 56–73. ———. ‘“Who You Are Does Not Matter in Europe!” African Diaspora Christianities and the Ethical Politics of Wasting Bodies and Unwanted Immigration in Fortress Europe’. In World Christianity as Public Religion, edited by Raimundo C Barreto Jr and Ronaldo Cavalcante. Baltimore: Fortress Press, 2017. Anderson, Allan H. Spirit-Filled World: Religious Dis/Continuity in African Pentecostalism. Switzerland: Springer, 2018. Andresen, Jensine, ed. Religion in Mind: Cognitive Perspectives on Religious Belief, Ritual, and Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Bosch, D. J. Transforming Mission. Orbis Books, 1992. ———. Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission. Orbis Books Maryknoll, NY, 1991. Bwana, Joackim. ‘A City within a City: Inside Pastor Ezekiel’s New Life Prayer Centre and Church’. Standard Media, 10 May 2023, The Nairobian edition. Chitando, Ezra. Innovation and Competition in Zimbabwean Pentecostalism: Megachurches and the Marketization of Religion. New  York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021. CITAM Membership Class 101: Understanding My Church. Nairobi: Christ is the Answer Ministries, 2022. Csordas, Thomas J. ‘Genre, Motive, and Metaphor: Conditions for Creativity in Ritual Language’. Cultural Anthropology 2, no. 4 (1987): 445–69. Gifford, Paul. Christianity, Development and Modernity in Africa. London: Hurst, 2015. http://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/christianity-­d evelopment-­m odernity-­ africa/. Gitau, Wanjiru M. Megachurch Christianity Reconsidered: Millennials and Social Change in African Perspective. Downers Grove: Inter-Varsity Press, 2018. Hanciles, Jehu J. Migration and the Making of Global Christianity. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2021. Haustein, Jorg. ‘The New Prime Minister’s Faith: A Look at Oneness Pentecostalism in Ethiopia’. PentecoStudies 12, no. 2 (n.d.): 183–204. Irvin, Dale T. ‘The Church, the Urban, and the Global: Mission in an Age of Global Cities’. International Bulletin of Missionary Research 33, no. 4 (October 2009): 177–82. Jackson, Anne, and Teresia Wairimu Kinyanjui. A Cactus in the Desert: An Autobiography of Reverend Teresa Wairimu Kinyanjui. 1st edition. Nairobi, Kenya: Revival Springs Media, 2011. Kalu, Ogbu. African Pentecostalism: An Introduction. Oxford; New  York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Karanja, J. Founding an African Faith: Kikuyu Anglican Christianity 1900-1945. Nairobi: Uzima, 1999. Kaunda, Chammah J. ‘“From Fools for Christ to Fools for Politicians”: A Critique of Zambian Pentecostal Theopolitical Imagination’. International Bulletin of Mission Research 41, no. 4 (2017): 296–311. Kenyatta, J. Facing Mount Kenya—The Tribal Life of the Gikuyu. 1st Edition. Secker & Warburg, 1938.

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Khathide, Agrippa G. ‘Mission in Pentecostalism’. Missionalia 30, no. 3 (November 2002): 339–59. Kiuna, Kathy. Transformed Woman. Nairobi, Kenya: Jubilee Publishers, 2016. Ma, Wonsuk, Veli-Matti Karkkainen, and J Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu, eds. Pentecostal Mission and Global Christianity. Vol. 20. Regnum Edinburgh Centenary Series. Oxford: Regnum Books International, 2014. Mugambi, J.  N. K. The Biblical Basis for Evangelization. Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1989. Mugambi, Justus. Five Decades of God’s Faithfulness: The Amazing Story of Christ Is the Answer Ministries. Nairobi: Evangel, 2009. Mugambi, Kyama M. A Spirit of Revitalization: Urban Pentecostalism in Kenya. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2020. ———. ‘Student Movements and Spiritual Identity in the Growth of Pentecostalism in Kenya’. In The Pentecostal World, edited by Michael Wilkinson and Jörg Haustein. London: Routledge, 2023. Niringiye, David Zac. The Church: God’s Pilgrim People. Langham Global Library, 2014. Obasi-Ike, Prince, and Esther Obasi-Ike. Purpose and Promise-Driven Life. Nairobi: Mustard Seed Publications, 2012. Parker, Andrew, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, eds. Performativity and Performance. New York: Routledge, 1995. Pastor Josephat Gwajima Mega Crusade in Arusha, Tanzania (Powerful Prayers). YouTube. Arusha, 2013. Sanneh, Lamin. Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture. 42. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2015. Stanley, Brian. The World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh 1910. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2009. ———. ‘Twentieth-Century World Christianity: A Perspective from the History of Missions.’ Edited by Donald M. Lewis. Currents in World Christianity, 2004, 52–86. Sundkler. Zulu Zion and Some Swazi Zionists. 1st ed. Oxford University Press, 1976. Wariboko, Nimi. ‘Pentecostalism in Africa’. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History, October 2017. Welbourn, Frederick Burkewood, and Bethwell A. Ogot. A Place to Feel at Home: A Study of Two Independent Churches in Western Kenya. Oxford UP, 1966. Zurlo, Gina A. Global Christianity: A Guide to the World’s Largest Religion from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2022. Zurlo, Gina A., and Todd M.  Johnson. World Christian Encyclopedia. 3rd edition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019.

CHAPTER 40

Missions and Contemporary African Rulers Charles Prempeh

And the nations of them who are saved shall walk in the light of it: and the kings of the earth bring their glory and honor into it. (25) And the gates of it shall not be shut by day: for there shall be no night there. (26) And they shall bring the glory and honor of the nations into it. —Rev 21:24–26 Web

Introduction Apostle Prof. Opoku Onyinah (former chairman of the Church of Pentecost [CoP]—2008–2018), in the opening ceremony of “Royals in Worship Conference” held at Pentecost Convention Centre, Gomoah-Fefeh, June 10–13, 2014, cited the above Bible text. It was part of his efforts at reforming the CoP, Ghana’s largest protestant denomination (Markins 2019), to support and align with chieftaincy. My chapter, therefore, discusses the missiological role of African rulers, focusing on the cultural creativity and social services that CoP chiefs are investing in the Christian mission. As a classical Pentecostal church, the CoP until 2014 had complex relations with chieftaincy; similar to the colonial rhetoric, the church renounced the institution as pagan (Prempeh 2021a). The CoP’s initiative marks a seismic shift in the encounters between Pentecostalism and indigenous cultures from negative to a relatively positive light. This is because, historically, Pentecostals had been hostile to indigenous traditions such that in the 1940s, some of the African rulers in countries, such

C. Prempeh (*) Centre for Cultural and African Studies, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. E. Barnes, T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48270-0_40

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as Botswana disallowed Pentecostals from operating in their areas of authority (Nkomazana 2018). Consequently, the CoP’s reassessment of chieftaincy in a favorable light is an important entry point to discuss the role African rulers are playing in contemporary Christian missions. I maintain that, through the reinvention of tradition and provision of social services, the CoP chiefs are staking themselves as missionaries for Jesus Christ in their respective Traditional Areas. Similarly, I posit that the foray CoP is making into the domain of chieftaincy is precisely because of the fluidity of the institution to change. The amenability of chieftaincy is also because of the nature of indigenous religions as more oriented to problem-­solving on earth—making it open to religious innovations. The strength of indigenous religion and its persistence in constituting the foundation of chieftaincy in postcolonial Africa attests to the endurance of African heritage that was dismissed by the early European missionaries (Falola 2022). My arguments are rendered possible because of the symmetries between Pentecostalism and an indigenous worldview. This has been aptly reflected by Toyin Falola as follows: Modern day Pentecostals in Africa not only recognize the spiritual temper of the continent, but they also embrace its aura; their notion of and belief in spiritual warfare is connected to their perception of the African view of the world. (Falola 2022, p. 196)

All this implies that both in precolonial and colonial Ghana (then the Gold Coast) chiefs played a critical mediatory role in religious and mundane issues of life. Concurrently, since the missiological role of CoP chiefs has a historical antecedent, I dedicate the following section—providing a historical context of the encounters between African rulers and mission Christianity since the fifteenth century. This section will involve the innovativeness of indigenous religions in rendering the conciliation between Pentecostalism and indigenous chieftaincy possible. The last major section of this chapter is devoted to discussing the cultural creativity CoP chiefs are investing to recast chieftaincy as a key institution in Christian mission through a form of social gospel—provision of social service.

African Rulers and Mission Christianity: A Survey The evolution of chieftaincy is seamlessly entangled with a human quest for an organized society where real and imagined social and cosmic order could be attained. Africans, therefore, share a common human history of evolving different forms of political structures for governance. In the case of several societies in Africa, political power was either vested in an individual, usually considered the ruler/chief or in a group of individuals. The former is typical of centralized societies, which included Asante and Mole-Dagbani, Yoruba and Hausa in the case of West Africa and Baganda in the case of East Africa and the Zulu Kingdoms in the case of South Africa. The areas that had power distributed

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among heads of families and clans are usually known as acephalous societies or non-centralized societies. Examples of such political societies included the Tallensi of Northern Ghana, the Nuer of Sudan, and the Igbo of Nigeria (see Fortes and Evans-Pritchard, 1970). Whether centralized or non-centralized, the goal of a political organization toward peace and order was to be achieved. Given the intertwined interaction between the temporary and the spiritual, governance involved a leader/s capacity to merge the two worlds (Busia, 1951). This entanglement was largely because people believed the forces in the spirit world, including the ancestors, exerted influence in the material world. For this reason, mundane things such as rainfall, drought, fertility, and health were all considered to be intimately associated with the spirit world (Busia, 1962). A leader/s in both centralized and acephalous societies was therefore responsible for ensuring a cordial relationship between these two worlds to support human flourishing. Considering that indigenous religions were largely this-worldly in focus, people depended largely on the earthly forces, including the ancestors, to broker convivial relationships between the spiritual and the material worlds. The mediatory role of indigenous political leaders did not seamlessly imply the absence of conflict and instability. There were occasional altercations and skirmishes in the precolonial world of Africa (McCaskie, 1995). The altercations were largely caused by the historical factor of territorial aggrandizement, struggle for political office, and human self-centeredness and hubris (Aidoo, 1972). For this reason, the political elites had to prove their mettle as leaders, both in the establishment of indigenous states, consolidation of power, and promotion of material prosperity. Leaders who supplied all these to their people significantly succeeded in quelling political agitations and also routinizing their authority. Thus, in an African spiritual map where the material and the spiritual interpenetrated fluid boundaries, the political elites deployed religious rituals to merge the two worlds (Akrong, 2006). The pervasiveness of religious rituals in the governance of precolonial societies in Africa and life, in general, has resulted in complex arguments about the nexus between Africans and religion. Geoffrey Parrinder and John Mbiti were among the earliest to have argued that Africans are religious in everything (Parrinder 1969; Mbiti, 1969). Contrary, Okot p’Bitek and Kwasi Wiredu (Bitek, 1971; Wiredu, 1998) argued that Africans were/are rather pragmatic in their deployment of religion. These two scholars argued that Africans do not perform cultic attention unconditionally. p’Bitek, for example, argued that Africans could add and discard deities based on the performance of such deities. Wiredu also argued that rituals were not necessarily religious as they were communicative devices for people to engage the spirit world. More recently, Jan Platvoet and Henk van Rinsum (2003) have extended p’Bitek and Wiredu to the point of concluding that, “Africa was, is, and will basically be no more or less a religious, and religiously indifferent, continent than Europe” (p. 171). Whether Africans are religious or not, the point is that religion was important in helping precolonial political leaders to consolidate and legitimize their

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rule (Falola, 2003; Busia, 1951; Akrong, 2006). But also the debate over whether or not Africans are notoriously religious is, in my estimation, based on a narrow implicit conceptualization of religion by these eminent scholars. The argument was obviously based on the ritual aspect of religion—which morphs into the belief in deities and other spiritual forces. But religion is more than just belief in the metaphysical and its elements. This is because not every religion that has been termed so prioritizes the deities in the attainment of salvation. This is precisely the case with Buddhism which does not emphasize the necessity of God in human attainment of salvation (moksha; enlightenment) from the problem of reincarnation and pain. Consequently, for the sake of this chapter, I deploy religion as a worldview that helps people to make sense of the world, especially in terms of crisis. It is in this light that I understand both the confessional and pragmatic use to which African rulers put Christianity during the European missionary era. So, returning to the role of religion and cementing the bond between African rulers and their people, the Europeans did not fail to see the chiefs as a critical entry point to African societies. In the Gold Coast, for instance, chiefs and their people were so intimately related socio-politically that the British often said, “The chiefs and the people of the Gold Coast” (Boateng, 1996, p. 141). The position of African rulers as the agents around whom the orbit of politics revolved was exemplified in their position as the first port of call for religious missionaries who visited Africa. So, whether Christianity or Islam, African rulers were the earliest to interact with historic religious missionaries and they were similarly responsible for mediating between religious proselytizers and those these African rulers exercised authority (Sanneh, 1983). Nevertheless, because state formation in Africa in the fifteenth century and more so eighteenth century was not always peaceful, African rulers deployed “foreign” religions both pragmatically and confessionally. Alan Strathern has expressed these motives as “immanentist” and “transcendentalist” (2018, p. 151). By “immanentist” Strathern discussed the extent to which African rulers deployed Christianity to advance their political interests, especially the consolidation of their power. In the case of the “transcendentalist,” the focus of African rulers was to achieve post-mortem salvation. I find Strathern’s work insightful for my chapter. He provided a trajectory in the encounters between African rulers and the European missionaries that betrays overly simplistic assumptions of African religiosity or otherwise. Beginning with the Portuguese West and Central Africa, Strathern established the various instances in sub-­ Saharan Africa where African rulers deployed Christianity for mutually reinforcing both “immanentist” and “transcendentalist” purposes. Providing the historical accounts of African rulers such as Afonso in the Kongo, Njinga of Angola and several other African rulers in the region, he demonstrated both the “immanentist” and “transcendentalist” reasons for African rulers’ engagement with Christianity. African rulers served as agents of the Christian mission to both strengthen their administration, advance their fame, and also overcome the drudges of life, focusing on the other-worldly

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whenever the pre-existing religions proved ineffective. Strathern’s observation that African rulers deployed Christianity for their personal and societal transformation has similarly been observed by Toyin Falola (2008), and Ornulf Gulbrandsen who analyzed the critical ways African rulers sponsored Christian mission and expansion as part of cultural advancement and a way of associating with power centers (Gulbrandson, 1992). More importantly, Gulbrandsen discussed how African rulers often straddled the worlds of Christianity and indigenous faith as they sought to reinforce their indigenous religious-based legitimacy and their loyalty to Christianity. He reported the intriguing case of Sechele I, the ruler of Bakwena (c. 1829–1892) in the Twana of South Africa. Sechele became a Christian in the late nineteenth century and made efforts at renouncing his indigenous traditional heritage, including resorting to the Christian imposition of monogamy as a mark of conversion. While he made a public claim of such breakup with his multiple wives to David Livingstone, the British missionary who mediated his conversion, Sechele impregnated one of his abandoned wives. This incurred the wrath of Livingstone who “excommunicated” Sechele. While the chief was dismissed, he still nurtured a desire to practice Christianity. So, when Livingstone left his jurisdiction, Sechele had the liberty to creatively incorporate Christianity into the indigenous worldview. As described by Gulbrandsen, “He was able to vigorously as a spiritual leader, not only drawing upon his vast biblical knowledge and Christian ritual skills, but also upon Kwena ritual tradition. He resumed the art of rainmaking at the same time as he was most exact in the observance of private and family prayers and stood up regularly every Sunday to preach to the Bakwena” (1992, p. 52). The reported case of Sechele is similar to several other African rulers, including Prempeh I of the Asante Kingdom who lived in the nineteenth century. Emmanuel Akyeampong’s work on Prempeh provides a source of vital information for my discussion on Prempeh I. Prempeh I, for complex reasons including the political strategy of not collapsing the Asante Empire that had already shown signs of decline, did not resist British imperialism. Yet, the British arrested Prempeh and deported him to exile—a common colonial strategy in 1897. While in exile on Seychelles Island, Prempeh converted to Anglican Christianity and abandoned his multiple wives to chime with his Christian monogamy ethics. He started literacy class and also encouraged his people back home in Asanteman to accept Christianity and also western education. Later in 1924, through several constitutive factors, including diplomatic engagements between Asante royals and the Gold Coast elites such as J.E.A. Casely Hayford, Prempeh returned to the Gold Coast (Darkwah, 2013). Upon his return, he was reinstated as Kumasehene in 1926, instead of Asantehene. But he nevertheless retained his Christianity and also reverted to ancestral chiefly practices—which included taking up multiple wives for political and social reasons (Akyeampong, 1999). For this reason, Prempeh went for several of his abandoned wives, resumed ancestral rituals, but also established

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Anglican Christianity as the state religion of Asanteman—which has been an enduring legacy. Aside from Prempeh I, several chiefs who converted to Christianity had to be creative in merging indigenous beliefs and Christ, since indigenous spirituality, as I have said, was/is an important source of power to chiefs (Debrunner, 1967). The form of religious dissonance was widely shared among several African rulers, including Nana Ofori I (1912–1943), who upon becoming a chief of Akyem Abuakwa, renounced his Christian faith and yet retained “a private Christian conscience” (Rathbone, 1996:8, cited in Akyeampong, 1999, p. 303). In all this, it is also important to state that the relationship between the nineteenth century missionaries and African rulers involved instances of conflict (Barnes, 1995). This was also because the missionaries did not always separate proselytization from the intricacies of colonialism. They were either part of broaching diplomatic relationships with African rulers to make them open and receptive to colonialism or provided ideologies to support the settler form of colonialism (Falola 2003). In the case of the Gold Coast, the missionaries’ involvement in internal local chieftaincy politics resulted in several conflicts. This was for example the case with the Basel missionaries’ creation of Salems (or locally referred to “Buronikrom”—Whiteman’s town) in the nineteenth century as a special enclave for their African Christian converts. This was also compounded by other African converts refusing to participate in and observe traditional rituals (Busia, 1951, p. 134). The African rulers interpreted these issues as dividing their authority, which orchestrated tension between the African rulers and the missionaries and the African converts (Boahen, 1975). In some of the French colonies, African rulers protested against the confrontational activities of Muslim religious proselytizers (Falola 2022). The polarization effect of missionary religions informed the reluctance of chiefs to accept missionaries who represented denominational interest to operate in their jurisdiction (Nkomazana 2018). In other instances, too, the missionaries defected with the colonial rulers and supported the indigenous rulers. This was particularly the case of Andreas Riis, the pioneer Basel missionary to the Gold Coast in the nineteenth century. He refused to heed the suggestion of the Danish governor, F.S.  Morck to hoist the Danish flag as an expression of Danish nationalism and control over his mission field in Akuropong (Ababio, 1991, p. 100). What I find very insightful about the encounters between African rulers and nineteenth-century missionary Christianity is that it complexifies the idea of conversion as a breakaway from one’s ancestorial past. This complexity in rupture is precisely because people did not just relate with their past as an inanimate fossilized piece of history, but functionally. The indigenous spiritual realm held the promise of influencing the mundane world for human good. Similarly, chiefs as ritual experts tap into the spirit world to enforce their authority, deepen their role as ultimate patrons and also act as the guardians of ancestral morality. These were all part of ensuring an imagined socio-political order. So, Christianity also emphasized the existential reality of the spirit world and

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provided leverage for chiefs to both rationalize their role as mediators and incorporate new sources of power centers in advancing their status. For this reason, Christianity was presented, not as a counternarrative to the reality of the spiritual map of the indigenous people, but as a more formidable and enabling power. This situation created complex outcomes where, as I have said, African rulers could straddle two religions, including creative syncretization— including reproducing indigenous rituals like rainmaking from the Christian ritual or cultic version.

Methodology Methodologically, this chapter comes from my doctoral thesis which I submitted to the Faculty of Divinity, the University of Cambridge in 2020. It makes a substantial contribution to scholarship on religion and politics in West Africa. In particular, my study examines how Akan chiefs have responded to the phenomenon of Pentecostal Christianity, focusing on those chiefly figures who are installed as traditional chiefs in certain Akan areas of contemporary Ghana as well as active members of the Church of Pentecost. Currently, there are around several hundred church members who are also installed as Akan chiefs. The phenomenon of individual CoP members both acting as “traditional” chiefs and receiving approval from the church for doing so is a recent development dating to 2014 when the church first organized a conference for chiefs, queen mothers, and other “traditional” political actors. The church’s decision to ally with its chiefs members reflects the growing popular interest in indigenous culture in present-day Ghana, a dynamic that has been discernible in the country since the period of independence. My research was primarily ethnographic. I undertook participant-­observation fieldwork as well as extensive interviews with 28 key persons, including Akan chiefs, indigenous Akan historians, and CoP key members (and those who simultaneously inhabit all of these identities). I also relied upon my own immersion with the CoP, as a member since the 1990s, to collect data. As a church insider, but also as an Akan, I have a thorough knowledge of the cultural idiosyncrasies of Akan chieftaincy as two of my uncles are chiefs. I, therefore, intuitively knew the type of questions that were appropriate and inappropriate to ask a chief. Equally important is the fact that, as an insider, I did not draw unnecessary attention to myself or generate any suspicion. I, therefore, approached this study with the perspective of an insider to the church, while at the same time striving to be critical and objective. Drawing on the works of Pentecostal scholars (Lauterbach 2017; Premawardhana, 2018; Wariboko 2012; Asamoah-Gyadu 2018), my ethnographic focus on chieftaincy—the heart of Akan indigenous cultures—allowed me to critically interrogate the assertion of most scholars of Pentecostalism in Africa that this strand of Christianity is largely antagonistic to indigenous cultures. Through immersive attention to the everyday life of chiefs and church members, I offer an alternative perspective on how CoP chiefs negotiate the

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complex terrain of Pentecostal Christianity and the Akan indigenous religion. My work repudiates an overly simplistic designation of Pentecostalism as hostile to indigenous African religions, but instead points out the nuanced interactions that take place between multiple faith traditions daily in contemporary Ghana. My dissertation shows the flexibility of the Church of Pentecost in responding to new social pressures. But it also demonstrates in fine-grained detail how Akan chiefs both seek to transform and “Christianize” chieftaincy as they selectively abolish some chiefly rituals and re-invest others with new meaning. The rest of the chapter is structured as follows: the next section discusses the 1980s economic crisis as the re-entry point of CoP and chieftaincy in Ghana; this is followed by a discussion on the roles of Nana Munumkum I, a deaconess of the CoP and, Onyinah, the former chairman of the church played in entwining CoP and chieftaincy. Finally, this chapter discusses the mission strategies of CoP chiefs and conclusions.

Revivalism of Chieftaincy Since the 1980s Extensive work has been done on African rulers and chieftaincy, including how Prempeh II who became an architect in making Anglican Christianity the state religion of Asante; and how chiefs are leveraging their conversion narratives for legitimacy (Adubofuor 1994; Akyeampong 1999; Cabrita 2014). But the focus of my chapter is on CoP chiefs and missions since the 1980s. My deployment of the 1980s as the entry point of my discussion is because the era marked the collapse of Africa’s economy—making the continent more susceptible to exploitation from a more-assured, better-resourced, and historically privileged global capitalist economic system (Oloruntoba and Falola 2020, p. 13; Tandon 2015; Boafo-Arthur 2003, p. 127; Nugent 1996). The economic challenges and the weakening of the states in Africa coincided with a religious resurgence on the continent—that morphed into a robust evangelical Christian mission on the continent (Prempeh 2021b). This brought religion into the public sphere as provider of social services—blurring the demarcation between religion and politics in governance. The 1980s also witnessed Asantehene, Otumfuor Opoku Ware II introducing the concept of development chief (Nkosuohene) which involved the creation of non-royal stools for eminent persons to contribute to human flourishing (Bob-Milliar 2009). As part of rerouting Africa’s economic growth strategies on culture, by the 1990s, the United Nations promoted indigenous cultures as the alternative to the globalization of development as westernization (Oomen 2005). This development resulted in the promotion of chieftaincy as custodians of cultures on the continent—leading to Thabo Mbeki of South Africa promoting the idea of the African Renaissance that supported chieftaincy (Oomen 2005). Nevertheless, because the public sphere in Africa had become enchanted with evangelical Christianity and reformist Islam, African rulers identified with these religions as missionaries. In the next section, I use the case study of Pentecostal chiefs in Ghana to discuss the role of African rulers in Christian missions.

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The CoP and Chieftaincy Since the 1960s, the CoP had had a difficult time with African rulers, including an altercation between an Apostle of the church, S.W. Duffour, who was summoned (but later exonerated) before Prempeh II in the 1950s, because the Apostle baptized one of the wives of the sub-chiefs of Asantehene (Asare-Duah 2014, p. 45; Prempeh 2021a). So, since the 1990s, CoP and other Pentecostal churches have often clashed with African rulers over indigenous rituals (Dijk 2001). The refusal of the CoP in the Western Region of Ghana resulted in a confrontation between the church and the African traditional authorities— leading to the destruction of church properties (Sintim-Koree 2013). Nevertheless, since the turn of the millennium, African rulers have gained more prominence with the Ghanaian state producing a cultural policy that favored chieftaincy. Concomitantly, as a mission-oriented church, the CoP has redefined its relationship with African rulers. The church in 2014 re-­theologized to incorporate chieftaincy into its evangelism drive. The reasons for the church’s alignment with African rulers are many, but the key is missiological. Consequently, African rulers of the CoP initiated the process for the church to align with chieftaincy. One such CoP member was a church deaconess, Nana Amponsah Munumkum II (known in her private life as Margaret Amponsah). Nana Munumkum II was also the queen mother of Nkyeraa Traditional Area in the Wenchi Municipality in the Brong Ahafo Region of Ghana and a deaconess of the CoP at the Dansoman Estate Assembly of the CoP in Accra. In the early 2000s, she began a project of incorporating Pentecostalism into chieftaincy. In 2006, Nana Munumkum began holding gatherings for groups of chiefs and queen mothers in her house. It was at the meeting that she and a few others who shared her vision started the Christian Kings and Queens Association (the “Association”) which was formed to incorporate Christianity into chieftaincy. The initial members of the Association included chiefs from the CoP and other Pentecostal churches, like the Assemblies of God Church, Ghana, and the Christ Apostolic Church International. Some of the chiefs also came from historic churches, like Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Anglican.1 The association was made up of all Christian chiefs and queen mothers in Ghana. Their main goal is to “Christianize” chieftaincy, which implies divesting chieftaincy of its indigenous rituals. They, therefore, wanted the group to serve as the foundation for using chieftaincy to glorify God instead of the ancestors.2 It was against this background that the Association approached Apostle Opoku Onyinah to use the demographic and financial capacity of the CoP to lead the gathering for the Royal Conference, an annual gathering of traditional authorities in Ghana, of the CoP in 2014. The first conference for royals was held at the Pentecost Convention Centre, Gomoa-Feteh, Central Region of Ghana, from June 10–13, 2014. The intersection between the Christian Kings and Queens Association and the CoP’s organization of the Royal Conference was based on Nana Kwasi Asante’s (the Executive Secretary of the Association)

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assertion that it was Nana Munumkum who inspired and impressed Apostle Opoku Onyinah to organize the Royal Conference for traditional authorities in 2014.3 In an interview, Onyinah indicated to me that he had had plans of integrating chiefs into the CoP since 1985. Apostle Onyinah narrated to me that while he was on a prayer retreat away from Accra, he reflected on the Bible’s assertion that Christians are the light and salt of the earth. Based on this reflection, Apostle Onyinah concluded that if Christians are the light and salt of the earth, Christians should “Christianize” the institution of chieftaincy—although many Pentecostals believed it was full of darkness (referring to the indigenous ritual foundation of the institution). Based on this reflection, Onyinah prepared a sermon based on one of the Gospel accounts recorded in Luke Chapter 17. The sermon was titled, “Increase my faith.” He chose the topic because he thought the idea of reconciling chieftaincy and the CoP would be misunderstood as a mark of lack of faith. While he prepared the sermon in 1985, it was in 1997 that he preached it for the first time at one of the branches of the CoP in Tema, an industrial community in Ghana.4 Given the pioneering work of Nana Amponsah Munumkum II and its influence on Onyinah, the CoP, in 2014, began revising its stance on chiefs. In 2014, the leaders of the CoP issued a formal apology for their earlier demonization of chiefs.5 In an implicit acknowledgment that Akan chiefs in contemporary Ghana are increasingly influential, Onyinah said in 2014, “we [the Church] view with regret the great gulf that has developed between the palace and the church.”6 As a result of the first conference for royals in 2014, several members of the CoP who in the past would not have considered becoming chiefs and queens are now serving in their capacities with their Christian beliefs and conduct at the forefront (Donkor, 2018, p. 20). The church currently has over 300 of its members as chiefs, some of whom hold leadership positions in the church. The 2014 conference was therefore a highly significant watershed moment in the CoP’s policy on chiefs. The conference was attended by the then minister of Chieftaincy and Traditional Affairs, Dr. Henry Seidu Daanaa. There were also representatives of the National House of Chiefs and over four hundred traditional rulers—chiefs, queen mothers, and spokespersons of chiefs from across Ghana.7 While the majority of the chiefs were members of the CoP, there was a smattering of chiefs from other churches, including historic mission and classical Pentecostal churches. These included the Methodist, Anglican, Presbyterian, and Catholic churches. There were also chiefs from the charismatic churches, the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and a chief from one of the earliest African Independent Churches, the Twelve Apostles Church, was also represented.

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Akan Religions and Chiefly Amenability to Mission African rulers are generally the gatekeepers of ancestral traditions. In the case of the Akan of Ghana, the focus of this section of my chapter, chiefs are called Nana, precisely because they occupy the stool of ancestors (Busia 1951). As Nana, they are responsible for ensuring that the ethical and ontological boundaries that their respective primordial ancestors left behind are kept. The idea of ancestors in Africa is often taken for granted as an existential reality. This implies that there has hardly been any debate among Akan rulers that they occupy ancestral stools. Busia, one of the earliest Akan scholars whose work on Asante chieftaincy remains key in discussions on the subject, observed that the source of chiefly legitimacy is ancestral religion (Busia 1951). Since Busia’s observation, recent scholars, including Awuah-Nyamekye have argued that one cannot be an Akan chief without one either offering cultic attention to the ancestors or going through the ancestral laid down rituals of installation (Awuah-­ Nyamekye 2009). Nevertheless, the argument over the ancestral religious base of Akan chieftaincy is sometimes overstretched to the point of missing out on the nature of Akan religion—as it fossilizes Akan religions. The attempt to fossilize Akan religion as unchanging is problematic in the sense that Akan religion, unlike Christianity and Islam, is not a revelation qua revelation religion (Gyekye 1996). Akan religion is part and parcel of the cultural constitution of the Akan. This is to the extent that among the Akan, like many indigenous cultures, there is hardly any word for “religion.” The Akan religion is also not scriptural-based religion. There is also no founder for the religion. The above characteristics of Akan religion make the cultic world of the Akan highly amenable to socio-political and cultural changes. This observation is central to understanding Akan religion as part of the cumulative wisdom of Akan ancestors in finding answers to the existential challenges of life. Without reducing Akan religion to the simplicity of materialism and denying the existential reality of the Akan spiritual map, the Akan religion is more about helping human beings to deal with the imperfections of life through the keeping of ethical and ontological boundaries. The keeping of ethical and ontological boundaries within Akan cosmogony is such that much emphasis is placed on the here and now as opposed to the hereafter. Whereas other religions are heavenly focused, Akan religion is this-­ worldly focused. In effect, Akan religions do not make a fuss about revelation and future life in heaven, giving, chiefs, the vanguards of Akan religions, reasonable liberty to be innovative and creatively incorporate other traditions in choreographing their practice to support human flourishing. It is within this framework that I discuss the role of Akan rulers as missionaries in Akan and beyond.

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CoP Chiefs and Mission Strategies As I have mentioned above, since 2014, the CoP has revised its engagement with African rulers. The church has openly declared its regret for its earlier hostility against African rulers. As part of its restitution, the CoP has incorporated chiefs into its retinue, including establishing chaplains in some of the paramountcies in Ghana. In response, Akan chiefs have deployed creative ways of engaging chiefly rituals as part of fulfilling the evangelism drive of the church. Akan chiefs have redeployed rituals such as libation and indigenous festivals as part of their mission strategies. Beyond that, these chiefs have also redefined chieftaincy more as the provision of social services, as opposed to just performing rituals. As stated above, chiefs could improvise the foundation of chieftaincy because the Akan religion is more oriented toward addressing existential challenges than merely seeking to go to heaven. This helps me to discuss how the Akan chiefs are redefining the frontiers of chieftaincy, focusing on libation, festivals and social services, as part of their call to Christian mission. Libation is one of the important communicative rituals among the Akan. Pouring of libation is an indigenous method of prayer, which involves the cultic practice of pouring an alcoholic beverage on the ground to call on departed ancestors and deities to help the living. Libation is therefore a necessary condition for the success of every single ceremony, not just ones linked to chieftaincy (Akyeampong 1995; Addae 1970, p.  177). It marks the transition between private and public spheres, and it is considered necessary for bridging the gaps between humans and the deities and ancestors (Kilson 1969). In many Akan cultures, alcohol is used for the performance of the ritual. Libation, as a ritual communicative device, helps the Akan to bridge the world of the ancestors and the mundane world. Libation also creates an assurance among the Akan that the ancestors are capable of transgressing ontological boundaries to participate in the world of the “living.” Similarly, libation helps the “living” to enter the world the spirit. In all this, libation enables the conjoining of the two worlds in making sense of the world of existential imperfection. It is for this reason that virtually all sociogenic and agricultural activities are preceded and ended with a libation. As to whether libation performs what it is acclaimed to do, in terms of rearticulating the imagined unbreakable link between the ancestors and the “living” is often taken for granted. It is taken for granted possibly because it gives assurance that existential imperfection could be mediated with a non-binary worldview. For this reason, the means and object of libation have transmuted over the centuries. For example, in several Akan societies, trapped rainwater (known as “nyankunsu”) was used for libation. Over time, alcoholic beverages were used for the ritual. More recently, western imported alcoholic beverages have been appropriated into the practice of libation. All these transmutations in the use of libation point to the pragmatic purpose, as opposed to the merely ritual purpose of libation.

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Given the functional purpose of libation, Akan chiefs who are members of a conservative Pentecostal denomination have found creative ways of engaging libation. They hark back to the past when water was used for libation to reject the use of alcoholic beverages for the ritual. This is precisely because Pentecostals denounce the use of alcohol as an entry point for spiritual misfortune; similar to how some Protestant missionaries saw it as a manifestation of Satanic devices mediated through Muhammed of Islam (Clarke 2014, p. 129, Barnes 1998). As part of the denomination’s holiness theology, informed by the church’s historic covenant with God (Tsekpoe 2022), the CoP does not allow the consumption of alcohol and its associated uses. But since libation is also very central to indigenous chiefly practices, Akan chiefs who are members of the CoP employ some form of culturalization, which involves turning a “traditional” ritual into harmless culture (Peel 1994, p. 163), in their performance of libation. For CoP chiefs, therefore, instead of alcoholic beverages for libation, they have reinvented the use of harvested rainwater for the ritual. This is precisely the case with Odeneho Dr. Affram Brempong III, the paramount chief of Suma Traditional Area, who said to me in an interview that: As a Pentecostal chief, I cannot simply and hurriedly discard the tradition of libation that I inherited from my predecessors. But at the same time, with a single purpose of using chieftaincy to promote Christ, I have found an important way of circumventing the use of alcohol in libation. Because as a Pentecostal, I do not consume alcohol or allow its use during state functions, I am also aware that I cannot just dismiss my people’s quest for spiritual nourishment from the ritual use of alcohol in the performance of libation. So, what I have done to disassociate my chieftaincy from alcoholism and also bring Christ to the centre is to reinvent the use of harvested water for libation. To do this, I had to read and ask my elders about what our ancestors used to perform libation. When they themselves told me that our ancestors used harvested water for libation, I arrived at a consensus with them that we should revert to the use of water, as alcoholism could destroy my people.8

Some of the CoP chiefs, including Nana Kofi Abuna, the woman chief of Essipun, and the Paramount Chief of Yeji Traditional Area, Pimampim Yaw Kagbrese V, who is the president of the Brong Ahafo Regional House of Chiefs, do not allow libation at all state functions.9 As the CoP chiefs renounce and repudiate the use of alcoholic beverages for all ritual purposes, they reinvent the culture of temperance that the nineteenth-century European missionaries imposed on the people of the Gold Coast, as part of their Christian mission (Akyeampong 1996). In addition to libation, festivals are treated with lots of regard in several African societies. It is one of the socio-cultural institutions that reinforce the human quest for gregariousness and fulfilling sociogenic activities (Clarke-­ Ekong 1997). Beyond the mundane relevance of the institution, festivals recuperate the non-binary worldview of Africans, which ensures the incorporation of the ancestors in the mundane world. This implies that all the different shades of festivals—agricultural, migration histories, and political—are primarily

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geared toward achieving the social and cosmic order of a non-binary cosmos. Given the above, festivals have since political independence become part of civil governance, such that at virtually every festival in Ghana, the political elites visit chiefs to support development (ibid). At the apex of all festivals is the cultic aspect that integrates the ancestors into the mundane world (Skrtic 1977). It is, however, an ancestral cultic aspect of chieftaincy that usually serves as a source of conflict between Pentecostal Christians and African rulers. Since Ghana’s re-democratization in the 1990s, the country has seen a surge in indigenous practices, including festivals. Such a surge has often resulted in tension in cosmopolitan cities in Ghana. In Accra, Pentecostal Christians have often conflicted with the Ga ethnic traditional authorities, who are the custodians of the land of Accra (Dijk 2001). Since the colonial governor transferred the capital of the Gold Coast colony to Accra in 1877, the city has retained its image as the economic and political epicenter of the country (Grant 2009). The city continues to draw migrants from across the country. Consequently, nearly all the major religious communities have their headquarters in the city of Accra. Accra is, therefore, an enchanted space, as Pentecostals and other religious groups compete with indigenous authorities over the spiritual space of the city. Often, the Ga traditional authorities enforce a month-long ban over noise, prior to their Homowo (agricultural festival), as part of signaling that the Ga are in control of the spiritual map of the city. Pentecostals have often read the ban as part of the Ga people seeking to impose and violate the religious freedom guaranteed by Ghana’s 1992 Constitution. Not only that, the idea of sound is important for Pentecostals whose din during service is part of rearticulating the sound of victory that the Hebrew people used to shred the city of Jericho. The theology of sound in Pentecostalism that indicates victory or otherwise has become a major issue for Pentecostals as they comply with the Ga imposition of silence. This situation has often resulted in Pentecostals running roughshod against Ga traditional authorities. The 1990s, therefore, witnessed several conflicts that destroyed the property of several Pentecostal churches. The CoP, in particular, had its brush with the chief over indigenous festivals when the leadership of the church in Nzemaland in the West Region of Ghana refused to support in material and financial terms the festival of the indigenous Nzema people in the 1990s. The consequence of the church’s refusal was bloodshed and the destruction of church property. Nevertheless, since the turn of the millennium, the CoP chiefs have sought to re-engage with indigenous festivals. One of the creative ways these chiefs have engaged the “troubling” issue of rituals and festivals is to introduce their own festivals. For example, the paramount chief of Suma Traditional Area invented the Akwantu Kese festival in 2014.10 The etymologies of “Akwantu” means journey; while “Kese” means “Great.” Put together, the Akwantu Kese festival means “the great journey.” It is celebrated to re-enact the historic migration of the Gyaman-Aduana, a group of the Akan, from their original home in Akwamu to their present locations in the Bono Region of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire.

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Carving this as a historic festival, the Paramount Chief of Suma Traditional Area has largely succeeded in circumventing the rituals that are often identifiable with chieftaincy. This implies that instead of ancestral rituals, during Akwantu Kese, Odeneho Dr. Affram Brempong III organizes all his chiefs for open-air evangelism.11 He also invites all the churches in his province to embark on robust evangelism. As a church officer (an Elder) of the CoP, the chief provides material and financial support for the various Christian denominations in his Traditional Area to invite people into Christianity. As he said, My goal as a chief is to bring the Kingdom of Christ closer and closer to my people. I have to also ensure that Christ is known in all things and at all times. So, with this festival that I have invented, I can witness the power of Christ to save my people.12

Elsewhere in the Yeji Traditional Area, Pimampim Yaw Kagbrese V, the Paramount Chief of Traditional Area, said to me that, “During festivals, I engage in evangelism, bringing my pastors and church elders to preach to my people. I want to possess my Kingdom for Christ, since my church is also possessing the nations.”13 Finally, Pentecostal chiefs have invested in social services as redefining their chieftaincy and missions. I have already mentioned that as Ghana’s economy suffered major morasses in the 1980s, the political elites who had hitherto been hostile to chieftaincy, invited chiefs to become stakeholders in development. Since the 2000s, the CoP chiefs have leveraged the state’s decentralization of development to refocus chieftaincy from rituals to the provision of social services. Instead of the idea that religion constitutes the base of legitimizing chieftaincy, Pentecostal chiefs have integrated social services as the basis of their legitimacy. Indeed, by the time Prempeh II returned to Kumasi from Seychelles, the idea of development among the Asante had been broadened to incorporate social service (Kutin 2012), and CoP chiefs have emphasized social services as the base of development. That Pentecostal chiefs are investing in social service is also part of the pragmatic nature of indigenous religions—which is to help human beings to address life’s existential challenges. As part of their nomination and selection as chiefs, all the Pentecostal chiefs I interviewed told their kingmakers that they would substitute the performance of chiefly rituals with the provision of social services. In all these instances, there was hardly any resistance from their kingmakers, as most of the Traditional Areas need such social services. With such an agreement, Pentecostal chiefs have choreographed themselves from the performance of rituals and instead invested in social services. Through these social services, Pentecostal chiefs have staged their presence as missionaries of the Christian faith. Historically, the nineteenth century invested in social services, which included building schools. These Pentecostal chiefs are similarly using social services to ward off criticism for their non-­ performance of chiefly rituals and also demonstrate that Christ brings material

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blessings. For example, since Odeneho Dr. Affram Brempong III invented the Akwantu festival in 2014, he has attracted several prominent Ghanaians who are involved in providing social services for his people. The festival has also attracted the presence of Ghanaian politicians including the current president, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufu-Addo, who has promised to help in the development of the Suma Traditional Area.14 In all this, the CoP chiefs are identifying with the goal of their church to possess the nations through, inter alia, social services. For example, since the 1980s, the CoP has curated its image away from a church with a reticent for social services to a church that has built prison facilities, roads, hospitals and clinics, and boreholes for the country (Prempeh 2021c). The church has also significantly reformed on gender, hair, and sartorial issues—including allowing persons with dreadlocks, women to worship without headscarves, and men and women sitting together during church service in 2010.

Conclusion The Christian mandate to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ has taken different shades since the fifteenth century when the Europeans made their incursion into Africa. But since the nineteenth century, the Christian mission took a different turn with the missionaries staging a relatively favorable attitude toward indigenous cultures. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the missionaries had largely positively re-evaluated indigenous cultures—paving the way for missional policies such as Vatican II in the 1960s. Nevertheless, Pentecostals remained largely hostile toward chieftaincy until the 1980s and more significantly the turn of the millennium. With the CoP, in particular, showing a favorable disposition toward chieftaincy, Pentecostal chiefs have become key stakeholders in the Christian mission. As part of reconciling chieftaincy and Pentecostal Christianity, CoP chiefs have reinvented traditions to curate their chieftaincy toward a Christian mission. These chiefs have also invested in social services as part of the Christian mission to their people. All these have been possible because of the nature of indigenous religion as a this-worldly focus, aimed at helping human beings to deal with life’s existential issues. For this reason, CoP chiefs have rearticulated chieftaincy both as practice and mission-­ oriented to support human flourishing in their Traditional Areas.

Notes 1. Nana Akwasi Asante on August 3, 2020 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Interview with Apostle Prof. Opoku Onyinah on January 2, 2019. 5. Pastor Isaac Obeng-Akese, ‘Animal Sacrifices, Festivals and the Christian Royals,’ paper presented at the Church of Pentecost Royal Conference held on

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June 18, 2017, at Pentecost Convention Centre, Gomoah-Feteh, Central Region of Ghana. 6. Apostle Prof. Opoku Onyinah, ‘Opening address was delivered at the opening ceremony of the royals in worship conference held at the Pentecost Convention Centre, Gomoah-Feteh, Central Region of Ghana, on June 10–13, 2014. 7. The National House of Chiefs was established as a result of the request of the late Otumfuor Sir Osei Agyeman Prempeh II, Asantehene, through the Act of Parliament in 1971. The aim was to provide a united front for chiefs. See: Kusi Ankra, ‘The National House of chiefs—Ghana’, in Donald I. Ray, Tim Quinlan, Keshav Sharma & Tacita Clarke (eds.), Reinventing African chieftaincy, 499–516. 8. Interview with Odeneho Dr. Affram Brempong III on April 2, 2019. 9. Interview with Pimampim Yaw Kagbrese V on April 10, 2019; Interview with Nana Kofi Abuna on May 15, 2019. 10. Interview with Odeneho Dr. Affram Brempong III on February 9, 2022. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Interview with Pimampim Yaw Kagbrese V on April 10, 2019. 14. Interview with Odeneho Dr. Affram Brempong III on February 9, 2022.

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Barnes, A. E. (1998). Catholic evangelizing in one colonial mission: The institutional evolution of Jos prefecture, Nigeria, 1907–1954. The Catholic Historical Review, 84(2): 240–262. Barnes, A. E. (1995). ‘Evangelization where it is not wanted’: Colonial administrators and missionaries in Northern Nigerian during the first third of the twentieth century. Journal of Religion in Africa, 25(4): 412–441. Bitek, O. (1971). African religions in western scholarship. Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau. Boafo-Arthur, K. (2003). Chieftaincy in Ghana: Challenges and prospects in the 21st century. African and Asian Studies, 2(3):125–153. Boahen, A. (1975). Ghana: Evolution and change in the nineteenth and twentieth Centuries London: Longman Group Limited. Boateng, E.A. (1996). Government and the people: Outlook for democracy in Ghana. Accra: Institute of Economic Affairs. Bob-Milliar, M. G. (2009). Chieftaincy, diaspora and development: The Institution of Nkosuohene in Ghana. African Affairs, 108(433): 541–588. Busia, K.A. (1962). The challenge of Africa. New York: Frederick A. Praeger. Busia, K.A. (1951). The position of the chief in the modern political system of Ashanti: A study of the influence of contemporary social changes on Ashanti political institutions. London: Oxford University Press. Cabrita, J. (2014). Text and authority in the South African Nazaretha Church. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clarke, C.R. (2014). Pentecostal theology in Africa. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications. Clarke-Ekong, S. (1997). Traditional festivals in the political economy: The case of contemporary Ghana. Journal of Social Development in Africa, 12(2): 49–60. Darkwah, K. (2013). Nationalism and independence. Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana, NS(15): 71–89. Debrunner, W.  H. (1967). A history of Christianity in Ghana. Accra: Waterville Publishing House. Dijk V.R. (2001). Contesting silence: The ban on drumming and the musical politics of Pentecostalism in Ghana. Ghana Studies, 4: 31–64. Donkor, L.E. (2018). Introduction. In L.E. Donkor and C.R. Clarke (Eds.), African Pentecostal missions maturing: Essays in honor of Apostle Opoku Onyinah 1–27. La Vergne: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2018. Falola, T. (2022). African spirituality, politics and knowledge systems: Sacred words and holy realms. London et al.: Bloomsbury). Falola, T. (2008). A history of Nigeria. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Falola, T. (2003). The power of African cultures. New  York: The University of Rochester. Fortes, M. & Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (eds.) (1970). African political systems (Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grant, R. (2009). Globalizing city: The urban and economic transformation of Accra, Ghana. New York: Syracuse University Press. Gulbrandsen, O. (1992). Missionaries and Northern Tswana rulers: Who used whom? Journal of Religion in Africa, XXIII(1): 44–83. Gyekye, K. (1996). African cultural values: An introduction. Accra: Sankofa Publishing. Kilson, M. (1969). Libation in Ga ritual. Journal of Religion in Africa, 2(2): 161–178. Kutin, J.K. (2012). Constructing the royal version of development in Asanteman. MPhil Dissertation submitted to the Institute of African Studies, University Ghana.

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Lauterbach, K. (2017). Christianity, wealth, and spiritual power in Ghana. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Markin, J.A. (2019). Transmitting the Spirit in missions: The history and growth of the Church of Pentecost. Oregon: Wipf & Stock Publishers. McCaskie, T.C. (1995). State and society in pre-colonial Asante. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mbiti, J.S. (1969). African religions and philosophy. New York: Anchor Books. Nkomazana, F. (2018). The role of women, theology, and ecumenical organizations in the rise of Pentecostal Churches in Bostwana. In A. Afolayan, O. Yacob-Haliso, and T. Falola, Pentecostalism and politics in Africa, 181–202. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Nugent, P. (1996). An abandoned project: The nuances of chieftaincy, development and history in Ghana’s Volta Region. Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial L. 203: 203–225. Oloruntoba, S.O. and Falola, T. (2020). The political economy of Africa: Connecting the past to the present and future of development in Africa. In S.O. Oloruntoba and T. Falola (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of African political economy, 1–28. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Oomen, B. (2005). Chiefs in South Africa: Law, power & culture in the post-apartheid era. Oxford: Oxford: James Curry. Parrinder, G. (1969). Religion in Africa. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Peel, J.D.Y. (1994). Review: historicity and pluralism in recent studies of Yoruba religion. Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 64(1): 150–166. Platvoet, J., & Rinsum, H.V. (2003). Is Africa incurably religious? Confessing and contesting an invention. Exchange, 32(2): 123–153. Premawardhana, D. (2018). Faith in flux: Pentecostalism and mobility in rural Mozambique. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. Prempeh, C. (2021a). Christianity, culture, and Pentecostalism in Ghana: An ethnographic study of Pentecostal traditional authorities in contemporary Akan society (1990s–present). PhD thesis submitted to the University of Cambridge. Prempeh, C. (2021b). African agency, human rights and issues of homosexuality: Biden and Africa. In B.  Wekesa (ed.) Africa’s policy towards the US: The Biden Era (137–157). Johannesburg: African Centre for the Study of the United States (University of the Witwatersrand. Prempeh, C. (2021c). Religion, social media and the discourse on prisons: An analysis of the responses to the Church of Pentecost (CoP) prison project in Ghana. Prison Service Journal, 256: 38–43. Sanneh, L.O. (1983). West African Christianity: The religious impact. London: C. Hurst. Sintim-Koree, S. (2013). The God who answers by thunder: An account of Christian persecution in Nzemaland during the ban on drumming (1993–1996). Accra: SonLife Printing Press. Skrtic, P.A. (1977). A historical and descriptive analysis of the communicative role of ritual festivals in Ghana. PhD thesis submitted to the University of Central Florida. Study of the influence of contemporary social changes on Ashanti political institutions. Strathen, A. (2018). Catholic Missions and local rulers in Sub-Saharan Africa. In R.P.  Hsia, A companion to the early modern Catholic global missions, 151–178. Leiden: Brill. Tandon, Y. (2015). Development is resistance. African Development, XL(3): 139–159. Tsekpoe, C. (2022). Intergenerational missiology: An African Pentecostal-charismatic perspective. Oxford: Regnum Books International.

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Wariboko, N. (2012). Pentecostal paradigms of national economic prosperity in Africa. In ed. A. Young and K. Attanasi (Eds.), Pentecostalism and prosperity: Socioeconomics of the global charismatic movement (pp. 35–59). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wiredu, K. (1998). Toward decolonizing African philosophy and religion. African Studies Quarterly, 1(4):17–46.

CHAPTER 41

African Christianity Rising: Lessons from a Documentary Film Project James M. Ault, Jr.

The sound of singing, drumming, and tambourines rises from the tightly packed neighborhood of wood, cement, and traditional mud and wattle homes behind the historic Presbyterian church in Ghana’s provincial town of Akropong, only a two-hour drive into the hills from Ghana’s coastal capital of Accra. Calvary Hill Christian Ministries, a young and rapidly growing charismatic church, is holding its weekly Friday evening prayer meeting. Founded several years earlier, Calvary Hill is the kind of independent charismatic church leading Christianity’s meteoric growth in Africa—here in Ghana, for instance, where the number of churches has been doubling every 12 years. Such growth was totally unexpected at the dawn of independence from colonial rule and put Africa at the forefront of Christianity’s world-historic shift to the non-western world where now two-thirds of all Christians live. Forty-some members of Calvary Hill have gathered for Friday evening prayers and worship at the home of “Auntie Lydia” Hansen, where the church has been meeting since its founding. “Sister Rose,” the wife of Calvary’s pastor, Fred Kwayisi-Darkwah, leads them in singing interspersed with prayer, all in the local language, Twi. “The lamb deserves praise, the lamb deserves thanks!” they sing briskly, clapping rhythmically. With drums and tambourines, their clapping provides a rhythmic bed carrying them seamlessly into the next song Rose launches: “Let’s go see him! His name is Jesus! He’s the general!”

J. M. Ault, Jr. (*) James Ault Productions, Northampton, MA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. E. Barnes, T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48270-0_41

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Knowing the songs by heart, they close their eyes, embracing the music all the more intensely and personally, as they sing out loud altogether. With no song book, or even lyrics projected onto a screen, their hands and bodies are free to move, to clap, to sway or step this way or that, to dance, to shake their fists emphatically, raise a telling finger, or, with a slower praise song, move their hands slowly through the air as if touching and feeling the spiritual power present. They embody their songs: “The works of your hands are wonderful!” they sing, “They are wonderful!” “Music makes a church progress,” Rose observes simply, a powerful truth about churches in general, but especially churches here in Ghana like Calvary Hill. “Sometimes the way prayer goes,” she reflects, “you’ll realize you’re standing there but your spirit has entered the presence of God. Suddenly a song comes to you that picks up on everything going on. As soon as you raise it, the whole congregation responds. So it’s not something that comes to your mind randomly,” she observes, “but God’s Holy Spirit puts it there at that moment so it’s able to work in the congregation” (Ault 2012, Part 1 Ghana, 4:26–12:35). Such a spontaneous approach to worship would surprise many churchgoers in the West often used to following a printed program. Pastor Fred recounts how troubled he was during his first visit to North America, to an African-­ American church center in Florida, by even having to read lyrics to songs projected onto a screen. Even that was too distracting for him. A song should just come up from inside you, he said, so you can just sing it out—a profound reality in oral cultures. And so it was at Calvary Hill, and in most worship services we filmed across diverse church types in both Ghana and Zimbabwe for a documentary film series exploring the sources and directions of Christianity’s explosive growth in Africa (Ault 2012). This Friday night gathering at Calvary Hill remains vivid to me because it is one of the early scenes we filmed from over 350 hours of footage we eventually shot for this project, filmed intimately across church types in Ghana and Zimbabwe. That included mission-founded mainline churches, African independent or prophet-founded churches, and new independent charismatic churches like Fred and Rose’s Calvary Hill. We filmed intimately to bring viewers into the feet of diverse believers through personal stories where one sees them facing problems anyone can identify with and then sees them wrestling with them in terms of their faith, and with their families and church communities with the particular worldviews, theologies, and cultures they share. We chose to film in Ghana and Zimbabwe, first, to demonstrate Africa’s often overlooked cultural diversity—a continent of fifty-four nations and over two thousand languages—but also because both had established film industries to draw on for skilled crew, important team members for filming intimately in cultures whose languages and customs I myself did not know. Learning how to interview subjects through a production assistant/interpreter in languages I did not understand, in order to draw out personal stories from them, brought my collaborative teamwork skills to a new level.1

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I am originally a sociologist trained by leading thinkers of the age at Harvard and Brandeis.2 My first field of study was African societies and politics focusing on Zambia where I did two stints of field research. After shifting fields to American politics and entering documentary filmmaking in its more intimate cinéma vérité mode, I was launched on this extensive project spanning more than 15 years of my working life by Joel Carpenter, then heading Religion at Pew Charitable Trusts, who was ahead of others back then, in 1996, in recognizing the shift of Christianity’s center of gravity to the Global South. Joel connected me with leading scholars on the subject to guide this work, including, most importantly, Andrew Walls, Lamin Sanneh, Marthinus Daneel, and Kwame Bediako. After studying their scholarly work, along with that of others, and consulting with them personally, I embarked on the lengthy ethnographic filmmaking process. It involved initial fieldwork and exploratory filming across a diverse range of Christian churches and institutions in both countries and then returning for major filming in select ones. That was followed by the surprisingly daunting task of translating events in our footage in local languages into English—work carrying many significant ethnographic lessons3—before editing initial roughcut portraits of each community we filmed. After lapses in funding caused by financial downturns in the United States and political crises in Zimbabwe, we returned to both countries to do follow-up filming, completing our two-part African Christianity Rising series with 23 Educational Extras in 2012. I then went on to produce, with additional filming, two follow-up films: first, a biography of the late Kwame Bediako and his legacy at his Akrofi-­ Christaller Institute in Ghana and, second, the story of Zimbabwe’s gospel music legend, Machanic Manyeruke, both carrying important lessons about Christian growth in Africa I had come to understand during the original project.4 My two most important consultant/teachers for this work were Andrew Walls, considered by many the world’s leading student of Christianity’s spread across cultures, and his brilliant student, Kwame Bediako, who hosted me at his newly founded Akrofi-Christaller Institute of Theology, Mission and Culture in Akropong, a provincial capital in the Akuapem hills outside Ghana’s capital city of Accra. Kwame, who served as a key point person and on-camera commentator for our filming in Ghana, had originally studied phenomenological approaches to literature in France, where after having drifted into atheism, he experienced a revelatory transformation leading to, as he put it, “recovering my sense of the nearness of the living God” and “my African sense of the wholeness of life… In becoming Christian,” he observed, “I’m being more African than I think I was. I am more who I am!” (Ault 2018, 12:14–14:45). He and his wife and partner in ministry, Gillian (Mary) Bediako, an English woman he met in France, ended up studying with Andrew Walls at his newly founded Centre for the Study of Christianity in the Non-Western World at the University of Aberdeen (which since moved to the University of Edinburgh) before returning to Ghana and eventually launching their pioneering Akrofi-­ Christaller Institute there.

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The most important lesson I learned from this work was that Christianity’s explosive growth in Africa resulted mainly from its becoming more authentically rooted in local African cultures, that is, its becoming indigenized. Besides embracing local music styles and other elements of local cultures, this required shedding the Post-Enlightenment outlook in which Christianity had largely been delivered to Sub-Saharan Africa by missionaries from the West. “The Enlightenment worldview,” as Andrew Walls succinctly put it in a conversation filmed with him, “in practice boxed off the whole world of spirit, because the part you deal with is the empirical world—what you can see, feel and touch… Africans respond to the gospel,” he explained, “but they are living in a bigger universe, a universe with all sorts of spirit entities, that aren’t on that Enlightenment block… Now, if you’ve got a lot of the universe that your theology doesn’t touch… or that Christ doesn’t deal with,” he concluded, “you’re in a difficult position as a Christian” (Walls 2001). This dilemma was manifest, at one level, in African Christian converts’ common practice of turning to traditional religious figures on the side for such things, like Kwame Bediako’s father, a second-generation Presbyterian, taking Kwame to a traditional shrine priest for ritual cuts and salves for spiritual protection before sending him off to study in France. “My father thought… that Presbyterian thing was not enough!” Kwame’s sister Bea explained to us on camera, “He has to find protection!” When Kwame returned from Europe and his father wanted to take him back to that shrine priest to renew that spiritual protection, Kwame declined, explaining that Jesus was even more concerned for his protection. His father responded that he never knew Jesus did such things, and that, if that were so, “We don’t need that shrine priest, do we?” Looking back on their exchange, Kwame realized that it “alerted me to the African world,” and set him on the path of thinking more deeply about how Jesus fits into that world and functions in it (Ault 2018, 14:40–17:02). Since such issues were not being addressed in mission-founded churches, they were losing members to new Pentecostal or charismatic churches, like Fred and Rose’s Calvary Hill or mega-churches like Mensah Otabil’s International Central Gospel Church in Accra, which we also filmed, all of which lifted up spiritual healing and combatting spiritual forces afflicting people as important parts of their ministry. Auntie Lydia, for example, co-founder of Fred and Rose’s Calvary Hill, who was hosting their meetings and worship services in her compound home, had been a lifelong Presbyterian, Ghana’s historic mainline church founded by Basel Mission Pietists from southwest Germany in the 1830s (before being taken over by the Presbyterian Church of Scotland after World War I). “There was faith,” in her Presbyterian church, Auntie Lydia admitted, “But I’ve received some little things here [at Calvary Hill],” she recalled, “like visions. They’re not so little!” she added emphatically. “When I sleep, I dream and see things. When I wake up, what amazes me is that some come true!” And when she had a stroke and was “down flat,” she remembered deep-heartedly, “Pastor Fred, his wife and his helpers came to

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heal me, and I became strong. So, I have faith that this praying church heals… and will grow.” When she was a Presbyterian, Lydia admitted, she did not “accept” such spiritual gifts. If she had, she said, looking back on it, “I wouldn’t have come here” (Ault 2012, Part 1 Ghana, 8:14–9:40). Eight years later, when I returned to do follow-up filming, Calvary Hill had grown to have 22 branches, largely in surrounding towns in the Akuapem hills, and was worshiping in its new building, with schoolrooms in its basement floor. Auntie Lydia expressed joy to see their church grow. Over the same period, Mensah Otabil’s mega-church in Accra kept building additions to its sanctuary to seat thousands more, while spawning over a thousand branches worldwide. In addition, the new college it had founded was in the process of growing to become Ghana’s largest private university (Ault 2012, Part 1, Ghana, 1:07:42–1:09:06). Meanwhile, in response to such challenges facing Ghana’s historic mission-­ founded churches, grassroots movements for charismatic renewal were gaining strength within them. Significantly enough, such movements in mission-­ founded churches in both Ghana and Zimbabwe were generally led by laypersons, not clergy. Among United Methodists in Zimbabwe, for example, the mission-founded church we focused on there planted by American missionaries at the end of the nineteenth century, such movements of charismatic renewal were largely led by its Prayer Groups led by lay people, who were adopting the traditional practice of all-night prayer to confront spiritual powers afflicting members. And, in the Presbyterian Church of Ghana such movements were carried by its largely lay-led Bible Study and Prayer Groups, with a long and revealing history extending back to the late 1930s (Omenyo 2006). Its local branch in the historic Christ Presbyterian Church in Akropong, made up mainly of secondary school teachers, ended up leaving their home church, given persistent tensions with its leaders, to found a new satellite church, Grace Presbyterian, which began growing rapidly mainly through its deliverance ministry. This process of shedding the Post-Enlightenment worldview to plant Christianity more effectively in African cultures, then, was manifest in powerful ways on the ground in both Ghana and Zimbabwe during our filming there beginning at the turn of the twenty-first century. In both countries it was manifest in the growth of new charismatic churches, and the continued growth of African independent or prophet-founded churches, as well as other churches that had grown up freer of that Post-Enlightenment worldview. And it was manifest in movements of charismatic renewal in mission-founded churches: in Zimbabwe, for example, in the popular embrace across all mainline churches of traditional all-night prayer vigil, or pungwe in Shona, where spiritual warfare and healing took place (Presler 1999). And in Ghana charismatic renewal was evident in the enthusiastic embrace in all mainline, mission-founded churches of deliverance ministry, which through prayer, prophetic powers, and personal care, people are delivered from all sorts of spiritual powers afflicting them.

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“Methodists, Catholics, Presbyterians—you name it,” Kwame Bediako observed at the time, “they’re all into deliverance!” And for that reason Kwame suggested we do some filming at Grace Presbyterian Church, that young start­up spun off from that denomination’s historic Christ Presbyterian Church right next to Kwame’s Institute in the provincial capital of Akropong. Because of Grace Presbyterian’s pioneering work in deliverance ministry, Kwame felt it represented, “one fruit of the ferment going on in mainline, mainstream Christianity” in Ghana at the time (Ault 2012, Part 1 Ghana, 24:50–28:00). His suggestion proved prophetic. Over the next decade, Grace Presbyterian— again, founded by laypersons and located in a small provincial town—grew to become that historic denomination’s largest congregation in Ghana, now worshiping in their new ten-thousand-seat “cathedral.” When we filmed them in 1998, Grace’s deliverance team, about 15 mainly high school teachers, were then holding 2 large and lengthy prayer meetings each week, as well as Sunday worship, in what one of their leaders, Abboa-­ Offei, affectionately called their “ramshackle” church, made from wood resurrected from demolished chicken coops he had used in his teaching agricultural science. At their Wednesday afternoon prayer meeting lasting several hours, after opening worship, testimonies, and prayer, they would break off into personal counseling sessions for those who came for deliverance from whatever was troubling them—from marriage problems and economic struggles to those causing intense psychological distress. To begin their counseling sessions with individuals and keep track of and follow the many cases coming before them, Grace’s deliverance team used with a questionnaire designed to identify a person’s problems and explore possible spiritual sources of them—for example, an association with a traditional shrine, a curse placed on them, etc. Then there would be time for prayer for those persons and against any spiritual powers potentially involved in their afflictions, prayers which often erupted in bodily struggles with spiritual powers felt at work in them… and on them. Then on Saturdays, in addition to opening the prayer meeting with praise and worship, there would be testimonies and prayers for individuals coming forward for that—again, often leading to bodily struggles against the spiritual forces at work. And in these lengthy prayer meetings there was always the opportunity for more personal, private counseling and prayer sessions (Ault 2009b). It was interesting to learn that for this work, Grace’s deliverance team began with a questionnaire they borrowed from the Anglican Church of Singapore and then “adapted it to our African context,” as team-leader Abboa-Offei put it. This pointed to similar developments pressing beyond the Post-­ Enlightenment worldview of western mission Christianity in other parts of the non-western world (Ault 2009b). It was also interesting to see how much Grace Presbyterian’s Deliverance Team’s practices involved borrowings from Pentecostal or charismatic prayer camps operating at the time, wildly popular gatherings held during the weekdays with thousands gathering for praise and worship, prayer and counseling, and spiritual warfare battling spiritual powers felt to be afflicting them. Many prayer camps were independent ministries, but

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some had ties to particular churches, like the Macedonia Prayer Camp, where we did some exploratory filming, which was then associated with the Church of Pentecost Ghana, Ghana’s largest denomination with its own revealing history.5 One thing that impressed me about both Macedonia’s Prayer Camp’s work and the work of Grace Presbyterian’s deliverance team was how comprehensive, personal, and time-consuming they were. They often involved visits to the homes of persons who came to them for personal counseling and prayer, and sometimes even taking them into their own homes for weeks, even months, for more comprehensive care and ongoing prayer. At Grace Presbyterian, for example, chemistry teacher Agnes Appiah-Asare, a longstanding member of its deliverance team, was hosting her niece and newborn baby while her niece was struggling with problems in her marriage. Reflecting on some of her niece’s bad behaviors toward her husband—like slapping and spitting on him—Auntie Aggie observed, “Satan is always at the back door waiting… As soon as he gets a doorway,” she reflected, “he comes… with more demons! So, if you are not able to retain your faith in Christ, you become a worse sinner” (Ault 2009b). In another story we followed, her close colleague and leader of the deliverance team, Abboah-Offei, the agricultural science teacher who became a renowned prophet, and his wife, Faustina, a leader of Grace’s worship team, hosted a troubled teenage girl in their home for many months. She was going through some powerful deliverance experiences and, we learned, had been deeply affected by traumas she had experienced in childhood (Ault 2010b). This kind of palliative, spiritual care in one’s home practiced by Grace Presbyterian’s deliverance team was also present in the independent prophet-­ founded church we filmed in the countryside outside Akropong, Mt. Zion Revival Ministries, founded by Prophet Fianko Bekoe, with twenty-some branches in the surrounding countryside. People came to Mt. Zion for healing from various afflictions, including a mentally disturbed young woman with baby, whose mother had brought her there. They had been staying there for months, receiving loving care and repeated prayers, often overnight, to combat the spiritual forces presumed to be involved in the young woman’s afflictions (Ault 2012, Part 1 Ghana, 43:17–45:36). Meanwhile, since Mt. Zion was competing for its spiritual healing work with a traditional obosum priestess nearby, our sound recordist, Frances Kwakye, an important contributor to our cross-cultural production decisions, suggested we film her daily work as well. Madame Akotowaa’s healing work, it turned out, offering residential holistic care to women going through childbirth, as well as those experiencing various afflictions, bore some resemblances to those practiced at Mt. Zion (Ault 2012, Part 1 Ghana, 45:40–46:10). This was understandable, since Mt. Zion’s founder, Prophet Bekoe, was himself the son of a traditional obosum priest. And we discovered similar commonalities with traditional healing practices in the independent prophet-founded church we filmed in rural Zimbabwe, a branch of the Zion Apostolic Church, which also provided residential care for mothers giving birth and others suffering from

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diverse afflictions. Their healing work was led by the midwife-healer Vashandira who told us that she herself was descended from three generations of traditional Shona n’angas (spirit medium healers). But “Instead of going that way,” Vashandira explained, “I chose to worship God” (Ault 2012, Part 2 Zimbabwe, 27:50–32:00). Noticing this common pattern of holistic and residential healing work in both Ghana and Zimbabwe, ranging from that of their independent prophet-­ founded churches, drawing on traditional practices, to the ministry of Grace Presbyterian’s deliverance team, similar to practices we filmed among United Methodists in Zimbabwe, I came to see such phenomena as an expression of what Andrew Walls describes as “the long-established African understanding of the nature and purpose of healing.” While western medicine addresses a disease, Walls points out, “healing in Africa in a more complex business,… addressed to the person as the center of a complex of influences”—for example, he explains, “as the target of outside attacks, as sufferer of unwanted legacies, as carrier of the sense of failure and unfulfilled duty” (Walls 2002, p.  132). Healing the whole person of such complex afflictions would invariably involve wide-ranging and often subliminal processes, which I came to notice filming and observing cases of such healing work by Grace Presbyterian’s deliverance team. But, bringing such holistic spiritual healing practices into Christian ministry, drawing from traditional ones of Ghana’s Akan people, as well as from those of Zimbabwe’s Shona people, raises dilemmas often resulting in troubling controversies. Does bringing such practices into the Christian ministry of Zion Apostolics in Zimbabwe, like Prophetess Vashandira, or that of Grace Presbyterian’s deliverance ministry, or Zimbabwean United Methodists’ all-­ night worship, make these believers any less Christian? Is this an expression of syncretism—a combination of different religions—as some might assume, and, therefore, not truly Christian? This question points to an important dimension of the process of Christianity’s movement across cultures and the place of conversion within it. Conversion, Andrew Walls points out, does not involve erasing and replacing all that people are—their ways of life, their culture, their mother tongues with their names for God, etc.—but, instead, turning them, or converting them, to Christ, and in the process of converting them, creating a people’s own distinct forms of Christian life which continue to enrich the increasingly diverse body of Christ (Walls 2002, pp.  67–68). This issue came up among new Greek churches in the first and second centuries, having to decide whether they had to adopt Jewish ways, including circumcision, in order to become truly Christian. In the end, they believed they did not have to. Instead, they should just bring everything they are to Christ, converting them to following their Lord. That ended up with their applying elements of their Greek philosophical thinking to their newfound faith in Christ, for example in their creation of concept of the trinity. Centuries later, converts among the “barbarians” of Northern Europe took their celebration of the winter solstice, that moment in

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the midst of winter darkness when the sun finally begins its slow climb in the sky each day, promising the coming of spring and new life, and applied it to celebrate the birth of Jesus. Though some doctrinally strict Calvinists and others suppressed such Christmas celebrations as pagan, they survived and spread great joy among Christians around the world, welcoming the newborn Christ into their homes and into their hearts…nurtured by the prospect they felt of new growth made possible by their Creator God’s coming spring. But, would the pre-Christian sources of such elements of faith be reason to judge such Christians, or those in the church of Corinth or Ephesus, as not truly Christian? No, Andrew Walls taught. This was another important lesson I learned from this project. Furthermore, Andrew Walls’ framing of such African healing practices, focused on the whole person “as the center of a complex influences,” points to broader and more subtle ways to think about the spiritual dimensions of such healing practices, which Kwame Bediako’s reflections helped illuminate. “Our cultures here are founded on relationships,” Kwame explained on camera. “People relate to each other, or have to … There are relations and dis-­relations!” he stated emphatically. “Deliverance ministries,” he observed, “often tend to probe a little bit into what relationships are, in the past, with family—and by family they didn’t just mean father, mother and children here!” he stressed. “It’s distant relations and extended-family relations… We have a proverb here in our country, ‘If you feel an ant stinging you, that ant is in your own cloth,’ you know. It’s not the ant there!” he exclaimed pointing his finger away from him, with a laugh. “It’s the ant in your cloth that’s stinging you!” (Ault 2018, 39:53–40:35). “And, usually that’s been a stock diagnostic test of peoples problems,” Kwame went on to observe. “Incidents of mishap in life—sometimes business failure—people might tend to attribute to disharmony in relationships” (Ault 2012, Part 1 Ghana, 56:03–56:37). Such a case arose at a weekly Tuesday evening meeting of Calvary Hill’s “Business” or “Workers Club” the first night we filmed their meeting. Janet, a young mother with her young child with her, rose to give her testimony. She said she lived with her in-laws in their compound home, and they had some retail space “they should have given to me,” she said, “but they didn’t care to. Because I stay at home,” Janet explained sadly, “I’m not getting any work or help from anyone. I’ve been thinking about it,” she paused, breaking into tears, “and I don’t what to do.” As she bowed her head and cried, Pastor Fred launched the group into a comforting chorus, singing “He knows what’s good for you” (Ault 2012, Part 1 Ghana, 54:53–56:04). For months and years to come Fred and Rose kept following up with Janet’s problems, giving her support and counseling. Kwame also offered reflections on the power of witchcraft in Ghana. “What is witchcraft, but ill will let loose in the community!” he pointed out. “It’s not fireballs or so on; those things belong to science fiction!” he said with a laugh, “But ill-will let loose in the community—hatred, resentment, bottled up and released!” (Ault 2018, 39:57–40:35). His reflections made me think back to

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our ancestors here where I have come to live, in Northampton, Massachusetts, in the Connecticut River Valley, where in the first century of its English Puritan settlement beginning in 1654, twenty-some families lived together trying to sustain and protect each other, always in the face of possible native American attack. In such contexts how much the effects of “ill-will let loose in the community” might affect people seemed telling—say, being talked about as not worthy of protection or help. As a result, witchcraft accusations and trials were common among these ancestors of ours. In Ghana and Zimbabwe, as well as most of Sub-Saharan Africa, such dependencies on kinship ties persist, and honoring them, even in the midst of trying circumstances, remains important. Yet, with the growth of market economies and urbanization, those extended-family reciprocities were breaking down here and there, giving rise to problems Christian ministries we filmed were often addressing. Janet’s case at Calvary Hill was one example, with her husband’s family not supporting her seamstress business and Calvary Hill stepping in to help. In another story we followed, Grace Presbyterian’s deliverance team stepped in to help a seamstress who had left her rural village to live near her brother in the provincial town of Akropong, but when he lost his job, she had no one to turn to for help. Besides counseling and encouragement, Grace’s deliverance team would often step in with small loans to help move someone’s business forward (Ault 2012, Part 1 Ghana, 34:50–39:21). And more generally, members of the Bible Study and Prayer Group fellowships in the Presbyterian Church of Ghana often found themselves stepping in to help their fellow members, say, with a wedding or other needs, things they would have otherwise, traditionally, relied on kin for. The life of Zimbabwe’s gospel music legend, Machanic Manyeruke, points to similar circumstances. After his father died when he was just 13, his grown brothers sold off the cows their father had left to pay his modest school fees. Feeling betrayed like the Old Testament character Joseph sold into slavery by his brothers, Machanic had to leave school, where he was doing very well, and eventually left his village home to walk for days to the nearest city to find work. There, though lost at times, he eventually found supportive fellowship in a Salvation Army congregation meeting under a tree near where he was working as a garden boy. And in that church community he found opportunities to develop his extraordinary musical gifts, many inherited from his father, an award-winning performer of traditional mhande song and dance. He eventually came to serve youth in his church and beyond as “Baba (Father) Manyeruke,” a helping mentor and counselor—a father figure—to many youth facing challenges similar to those he had faced. Such service, as well as his popular songs like “Josefa,” about Joseph resisting the advances of the Egyptian Pharoah’s wife, or “A Child Who Doesn’t Respect Her Elders,” a song that helped his granddaughter find a better moral orientation in life, point to his commitment to helping others facing the challenges of adapting substantively and morally to the anonymity of city life (Ault 2020).

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Finally, in another representative story we followed, the Prayer Group at St. James United Methodist church in Dangamvura township on the outskirts of the City of Mutare in Zimbabwe, stepped in to help a teenage girl, Hazel, whose family, after her father’s death, was thrown out of their home and cut off from resources by the father’s family, who traditionally would have been expected to assume responsibility for them. (I learned that this was not an uncommon occurrence in Zimbabwe at the time.) Now living in poverty with her mother and two younger siblings, Hazel was deeply troubled and felt a curse had been placed on her life. Her congregation’s Prayer Group and pastor addressed her fears and stepped in to help her through secondary school, helping pay school fees and meeting other needs (Ault 2012, Part 2 Zimbabwe, 3250–37:45). When we returned a decade later to do follow-up filming, we found Hazel living in the capital city of Harare, now a teacher happily married with her first child. “I’ve learned that the people you may call your relatives,” Hazel said, reflecting on her past, “if I have a problem, they won’t even acknowledge you as one of their own… The only relatives that you have is someone like the church people, your friends, because whenever you have a problem they are there to help you out” (Ault 2012, Part 2 Zimbabwe 1:5:40–7:05). Such stories, like Hazel’s, Machanic Manyeruke’s, or Janet’s and those cases Grace Presbyterian’s deliverance team were ministering to, point to another important lesson from this ethnographic documentary film work: namely, the basic tendency for urbanization to fuel church growth, by providing communities to step in to help meet needs lost by leaving village life and the consequent weakening of extended-family supports. For instance, when I returned to Zimbabwe to do follow-up filming, we found that St. James United Methodist Church had since given birth to “two new babies,” as Mrs. Bwawa, our school teacher/widow character put it, two new churches now “all filled to the brim.” In seeking to explain this robust growth of churches in their township, Mrs. Bwawa pointed out that “The church must take a very big step in trying to mold the character of youngsters. The mothers and father are in towns. The grandmothers and aunts are in another town or in the rural area—no one to mold the character. But, if you go to church, there you will find an aunt who is capable of molding your character” (Ault 2012, Part 2 Zimbabwe 1:09:04–1:10:18). Such help, I saw, was readily available not only through St. James’ Prayer Group, but also in its small neighborhood sections meeting during the week. That urbanization fuels church growth was also evident in nineteenth century-industrializing America and England, in the lives of evangelists like Dwight L. Moody, or in the work of the YMCA. It was also reflected in the fact, to some peoples’ surprise, that fundamentalist Christianity in the United States did not arise originally in the America’s South, but, instead, in cities like Boston, New York, and Chicago at the end of the nineteenth century. It grew strongly in the South only with the emergence of “New South Cities” after World War II (Ault 2004, pp. 107–109).

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The importance of putting aside the Post-Enlightenment outlook of the West to enable such strong growth in the expanding cities of post-colonial Zimbabwe and Ghana became clear in some revealing parallels in the otherwise different histories of these two countries. At Calvary Hill, Rose explained that, though raised Methodist, it was visiting her rural relatives on weekends as a child, and worshiping in their “apostolic church,” where she picked up the music that shaped her own engaging music at Calvary Hill. “The way they moved and shook the tambourine,” she recalled, “made me happy” (Ault 2012, Part 1 Ghana 10:10–12:40). It turned out that such “apostolic churches” had grown from church plants that had also given rise to what was now Ghana’s largest church, the Church of Pentecost Ghana, and that they all grew out of seeds planted without the visit of a single missionary. Instead, they grew from the circulation of a newsletter sent out to West Africa by steamship in the early twentieth century from a faith-healing church in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (Mohr 2013). Faith Tabernacle in Philadelphia had split off from a faith-healing community outside Chicago, Zion City, founded during the Pentecostal ferment of the 1890s. Faith Tabernacle’s newsletter, Sword of the Spirit, was devoted to discussions of divine healing featuring personal testimonies of faith-healing experiences illuminated by passages from Scripture. It so interested Ghanaian and Nigerian converts to mainline, mission-founded churches that they formed study groups around it. Soon their testimonies began appearing in its pages. One Ghanaian wrote in 1920, “I don’t know why our missionaries here did not teach us the full gospel. Many people shall believe in your gospel than those churches who were teaching us here,” he rightly predicted, “because they never done miracle [sic]; they never heal the sick.” At the time Faith Tabernacle in Philadelphia was receiving up to 200 letters a day from Ghana and Nigeria (Mohr 2011). As the deadly influenza pandemic ravaged both American and West African shores in 1918, branches of Faith Tabernacle founded by local enthusiasts in Ghana and Nigeria took off, giving rise in eight short years to over 170 congregations in Ghana alone. Then, in 1925, the Philadelphia church’s firing its pastor for charges of adultery sent its West African branches in various directions. One in southeastern Ghana under the leadership of Peter Newman Anim, who later came to be called the “father of Ghanaian Pentecostalism,” turned for inspiration to a newsletter sent out from the Apostolic Faith mission in Portland, Oregon, an offshoot from the original Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles. Subsequent splits in these “apostolic” churches in Ghana gave rise to different branches, including the Church of Pentecost Ghana, now Ghana’s largest denomination with over three million members in Ghana and branches in 136 nations around the world (Mohr 2013, pp. 72–79).6 Furthermore, since from their very beginnings such Faith Tabernacle and Apostolic congregations were not worshiping with missionaries from the West, they were free to develop their own styles of worship, including music, for which they drew on powerful indigenous ones. They became pioneers in

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creating more indigenous styles of worship music which then spread across denominations, like their influence on Rose’s music at Calvary Hill. Pastor Fred’s own ministry at Calvary Hill was also strongly shaped by the Faith Tabernacle legacy. He studied for the ministry at All Nations for Christ Bible Institute in Nigeria, founded by Benson Idahosa, considered by some the world’s most prolific evangelist, who had been brought to Christ in a congregation of the Assemblies of God Nigeria descended from Faith Tabernacle ones (Mohr 2020, p. 233). Spiritual healing was important in their theology and ministry, as was their longstanding embrace and development of local, indigenous music styles. The fruitfulness of this planting of a faith-healing Christianity in Ghana simply from a newsletter, and without the visit of a single missionary from the West, turned out to be parallel to what I discovered in Zimbabwe. There the largest church today, ZAOGA, the Zimbabwe Assemblies of God Africa, traces its roots back to a relatively short visit to South Africa of missionaries from the same American faith-healing network. In 1908 the families of John Lake and Thomas Hezmalhalch, both shaped by Zion City’s faith-healing ministry and the Azusa Street revival, arrived for a three-year stay in South Africa where they ended up launching the Apostolic Faith Mission churches with a strong faith-­ healing identity. These Apostolic Faith congregations were originally multi-­ racial, but the segregationist impulses at work in South Africa led to numerous splits into black and white branches of the movement. Some black branches came to form some of the large independent Zionist churches in South Africa, which migrant laborers from Zimbabwe and elsewhere brought back to their homelands (including the Zion Apostolic Church we filmed in Zimbabwe). And one black Apostolic Faith branch in Zimbabwe oversaw the conversion and shaped the ministry of Ezekiel Guti, a worship music leader, who then founded what became Zimbabwe’s largest church, ZAOGA (Maxwell 2006). Spiritual healing and limited involvement of missionaries from the West turned out to be foundational in all these robustly growing movements leading to the largest churches today in both Ghana and Zimbabwe. But, also, as with the Apostolic churches in Ghana, black branches of these Zionist or Apostolic churches in South Africa and Zimbabwe tended to pioneer in incorporating local music styles into their worship. Music itself tends to be the rich carrier of multiple layers of meaning, including deeply and collectively felt ones, as well as important theological ones. In work for our film on Zimbabwe’s gospel music legend, Machanic Manyeruke, I came to see some ways in which popular gospel music like his helped fuel Christian growth in Zimbabwe, even contributing to overcoming the Post-Enlightenment outlook in its mission-founded churches. It turned out that several of Machanic’s most popular songs, remixed again and again over the course of his career from the 1970s to the present, lift up themes of spiritual healing. One, Rudo Serwa Peter (“A Love Like Peter’s”), tells the story of Peter and John’s healing the cripple at the temple gates. “Give me a love like Peter’s!” the song’s chorus repeatedly implores, encouraging followers of Christ to heal. It was this song, in fact, that

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moved the rising leader in Zimbabwe’s United Methodist Church at the time, Bishop Abel Muzorewa, to ask Machanic to perform it alongside his preaching in his prestigious church in the capital city of Harare, providing a critical breakthrough in Manyeruke’s musical career onto the national public stage. This also points to the importance Bishop Muzorewa saw in the message of spiritual healing that particular song conveys, a practice often ignored by American missionary leaders of their church but much needed by Zimbabwean Christians (Ault 2020, 23:32–25:27). But perhaps Manyeruke’s most popular song, Madhimoni (“Demons”) tells the story of Jesus’ encounter with Legion, the man possessed by many demons in the graveyard, and then casting them out of him into a herd of pigs. In its initial hit recording, Machanic strived to tell that biblical story in such clear, matter-of-fact ways, that he breaks into the spoken word toward the song’s end to express basic elements of that story. Madhimoni has been wildly popular across denominations in Zimbabwe for generations now, a song he is regularly asked to perform even at events like weddings and birthdays. When I asked Machanic what prompted him to write it, he mentioned that early in his musical career it was often hearing inspiring messages at churches where he was performing, generally solo at the time, that led him to write a song about a subject. And, he clearly remembered that it was at an Apostolic Faith Mission revival in eastern Zimbabwe in the mid-1970s, when he heard someone preach movingly about the story of Jesus exorcizing those demons from Legion, that prompted him to write Madhimoni.7 Hence, his most popular gospel song, inspired by passionate preaching at an Apostolic Faith Mission revival, a church historically embracing spiritual healing and spiritual warfare, ended up spreading the message of that biblical story across denominations in Zimbabwe for generations, continually reminding them of Jesus’ day-to-day work exorcizing demons. The fact that this one song was so strikingly popular among Zimbabwean Christians across denominations suggests it met a felt need, reminding believers—again, across all mainline denominations—that Jesus does these things, despite what western leaders of their churches taught or accepted. The persistent tensions between the Post-Enlightenment outlook of churches in the West and the worldviews in which the Christian faith was growing robustly in Africa became evident in other revealing experiences I had in the course of this project. A striking one came up when I showed early roughcuts of our Zimbabwe film to leaders of the United Methodists General Board of Global Ministries in their offices in New York City. They had provided some funding for the film and were closely connected to the United Methodists we filmed in Zimbabwe. The roughcuts included scenes of Mrs. Bwawa and other members of St. James attending an annual revival held by their church’s women’s fellowship, a camp meeting over several days in the countryside with all-­ night worship and prayer involving spiritual warfare—again, a traditional practice which by then had been embraced by virtually all mainline, mission-­ founded churches in Zimbabwe (Ault 2010a, 16:21–22:36; or Ault 2012, Part

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2 Zimbabwe, 20:57–26:34). When the video ended the puzzled look on the faces of some sitting around the conference table became understandable when one burst out in exasperation, “I’ve been to Zimbabwe many times,” she said, shaking her head, “but I’ve never seen anything like this!” Others concurred. I learned that this was because their Zimbabwean hosts were accustomed to not taking their western visitors to such routine events in the life of their church involving spiritual warfare, because experience taught them that it might disturb them, and their discomfort, in turn, might disturb the tone of worship at such events. I learned this from Tite Tiénou, the then French West African head of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School outside Chicago, America’s largest theological school, who said that this was normal practice among African church leaders hosting visitors from the West. One finds it even among French Pentecostal Assemblies of God leaders, Tite pointed out, visiting their brothers and sisters in West Africa.8 This was all the more troubling when I learned that such all-night worship involving spiritual warfare was a key factor in effectively rooting that United Methodist church in Zimbabwean soil. It originally appeared among them during a revival sparked by a miraculous healing in 1918  in a Congregational church near them in eastern Zimbabwe. News of it spread with all-night worship erupting across the countryside, and, according to John Kurewa, that denomination’s leading Zimbabwean historian, this came to be seen by many Zimbabwean United Methodists as the real beginnings of their church. They did not generally see their church coming to life, Kurewa notes, during the preceding generation, from the 1890s, when American missionaries began winning converts and building churches, schools, and hospitals across their land (Kurewa 1997). Yet, sadly, and ironically, this foundational piece of their very identity as United Methodists, as Zimbabwean Christians, could not be shared with their brothers and sisters visiting from the West. This was stark evidence of how this division between the Post-Enlightenment worldview in the West and the prevailing worldviews in the rapidly growing churches of Africa was at work. I also encountered similar divisions between Ghanaian Presbyterians and their counterparts in the United States. I was speaking to the pastor of a large Presbyterian church in southern California, for example, who proudly shared with me his church’s contributions to planting a new church in Ghana, in part by paying for the theological education of its founding pastors at Trinity Theological School outside Accra. When I asked him how he felt about deliverance ministry then wildly popular in Ghana, he said that he did not approve of it and was assured by his Ghanaian partners that Trinity Theological School did not teach it. When I then shared with him the fact that I had recently filmed a class on deliverance ministry from Trinity on one of their regular visits to Grace Presbyterian’s deliverance meetings, he fell silent, realizing, I imagine, that he had been lied to. The fact that his American colleague heading their denomination’s relations with their churches in West Africa at the time told me that, in his view, deliverance ministry creates fears, rather than helps people deal with

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them, indicates how such conflicting worldviews can create a climate of distrust, even dishonesty, perhaps weakening mutual respect and open collaboration.9 The breadth of such conflicting worldviews came up even more sharply in my dealings with public broadcasters in the West about my documentary work on Christian growth in Africa. Along with many western journalists, they tended to focus on negative portraits of African Christianity, fixing, for example, on those mega-church leaders preaching a “Prosperity Gospel” structured to enrich them by persuading members to give to their ministry in order to be blessed by God, which such leaders demonstrated by growing their own personal wealth. While I did come across such self-aggrandizing ministries in the course of my research, more representative examples, it seemed, were churches like Mensah Otabil’s mega-church or Fred and Rose’s Calvary Hill. In launching Calvary Hill Fred and Rose decided to rely on Rose’s small secretarial salary to sustain their growing family and even a decade later Fred was still not receiving any income from their church. “It’s tough,” Rose admitted, yet expressed her gratitude since “Every day God helps us to eat” (Ault 2012, Part 1 Ghana, 58:00–58:37). At Business or Workers Club that Tuesday evening, before turning to hear what challenges members were having in their own work, Fred passionately preached about diligence, about showing up, and being reliable in your business. He recommended members act like the early church, coming together to share what they had, for example by giving small loans to each other to help take critical steps forward in their small businesses, which included hair-dressing, sewing, construction, and audio tech work. Nothing Fred preached promoted contributions to his own ministry. And the diligence he preached was amply demonstrated in his daily work as pastor, or “shepherd,” as he described it, as someone “who has to know his sheep.” This he did by daily visits to church members’ families, getting to know them and the sometimes daunting challenges they faced, and helping support and care for them (Ault 2012, Part 1 Ghana, 53:23–1:02:36). For his part, Mensah Otabil, the founding pastor of the International Central Gospel Church, also routinely preached hard work, as well as God’s faithfulness in caring for believers and in helping the faithful prosper, an understandably felt need among people in a country with extremely limited economic opportunities and trying poverty. As a homeless teenager himself, “roaming the streets,” as Otabil recalled, after both his parents suddenly died, he found caring support in young church fellowship groups (Ault 2009a). He took up leadership in one of those and grew his mega-church from that. Yet, rather than turning his church’s success to building his own personal wealth, Otabil turned its resources to founding a college to educate new generations, which went on to become Ghana’s largest private university, much like American churches pioneered in founding so many of America’s major colleges and universities. In these ways, Otabil’s and Fred and Rose’s ministries seemed representative of baseline prosperity gospel practices, including quite practical ones

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representing their holistic approach to ministry that was drawing Ghanaians in ever-­greater numbers to the faith. Nevertheless, the western media tended to focus its attention on the self-aggrandizing ministries of some, disregarding an important lesson from Christian history that Kwame Bediako shared with me: namely, that any period of exponential Christian growth, like the one Africa was now experiencing, creates opportunities for false prophets to exploit it for their own gain—from the second century’s notorious Peregrinus, Kwame cited, who traveled widely demanding a fee before sharing “some wisdom,” to some of America’s tele-evangelists emerging in New South cities in the 1970s and 1980s. So, Kwame asked pointedly, why focus exclusively on such negative figures in the African case, no doubt pointing to the distortedly negative images of Africa prevalent in the western media (Bediako 2006). The western media’s bias toward negative portrayals of African Christianity became more strikingly evident to me when I encountered their dismissive attitude toward our two-part African Christianity Rising films, with their matter-­of-fact portrayals of African Christians’ spiritualities (even though our Ghana film was shot by one of the world’s best handheld camera persons at the time). At the same time, I watched them praise and lift up negative, even wildly distorted portraits of African Christians, like the BBC’s head of religion’s much-lauded documentary, Saving Africa’s Witch Children, a film focused on some patently false prophets in the Niger River delta, a region then besieged by ecological and economic disaster. Seeing opportunities at hand, these prophets persuaded families with children abandoned during family conflicts over scarce resources at the time that their problems arose from some of these children being witches. They needed to be exorcized… for a fee. The film’s hero is a young white British man who comes to rescue these children from such abuse (Gavan and Van der Valk 2008). In addition to its distorted portrait of what African Christianity is all about, the film leaves distorted impressions of African family culture including their care for children. Yet these portrayals were praised by broadcasters in the West sparking some follow-up documentaries on such self-aggrandizing prophets in African diaspora churches. These differences in worldview, between the Post-Enlightenment one dominant in the western intelligentsia and African ones at work in Christianity’s explosive growth on the continent, certainly contribute to a climate of misunderstanding and distrust, making it difficult to deal with other issues or problems we together face in the world today. How deep such differences are is reflected in the revealing fact shared with me by Kwame Bediako that the Ghanaian Academy of Arts and Sciences, the most prestigious body of scholars in a nation known throughout the world for its accomplished academics and intellectuals, opens their regular meetings with charismatic Christian prayer. Certainly, if such differences in worldview and culture between African churches and their sisters and brothers in the West were more openly shared between them, contributing to better cross-cultural understandings and mutual tolerance and acceptance—instead of avoidance and deceit—this would help them help our world better deal with problems we face (especially since

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churches, along with Muslim masjid, are now by far the largest civic organizations in the nations of Sub-Saharan Africa). One issue continuing to raise conflicts between Africa and the West is homosexual rights, which has led to bitter splits in world church denominations like the Anglican church and United Methodists. And it is a conflict that cries out for better understanding based on recognizing socio-cultural differences in family, kinship, marriage, and gender relationships underlying such opposing responses to the issue. The very fact that in filming worship services in both Ghana and Zimbabwe, even in independent charismatic churches with their more urban middle-class congregations, we typically saw husbands and wives not sitting together, but, instead, in gender-segregated groups of women and men, points to fundamental differences in family, marriage, gender, and sexuality fostering such different responses to homosexuality. Such differences arise not only between the West and Africa, but between the West and other parts of the non-western world, as well, and within the West itself, for instance between different sides in America’s Culture War divides (Cf. Ault 2009c). Furthermore, on a positive note, Kwame Bediako went so far as to suggest that the West’s better understandings of the socio-cultural forces at work in Christianity’s explosive growth in Africa might even “help the West come to terms with its own past… We tend to think Europe wasn’t destroyed,” Kwame observed in a conversation we filmed, but “European memory was destroyed! When we think,” he pondered, “that Europeans still name the days of the week after their old gods—of Tiu and Woden, of Thor and Freya… Yet Europeans have literally been forced to become culturally uprooted!” (Bediako 1998). While church-goers in the West still sing classic hymns like Martin Luther’s A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, with its telling verse, “And though this world with devils filled should threaten to undo us,” or the Doxology urging them to praise God above “ye heavenly hosts,” they generally have little sense or recognition of what those spiritual entities are and what their activities or powers may be. And when African Christians address their ancestral spirits among those “heavenly hosts,” their western brothers and sisters often mistakenly think they are addressing God. But, “An ancestor is not deified! He’s not my God!” declared Archbishop Peter Sarpong to us on camera, almost laughing at the absurdity of the idea often assumed by fellow Christians in the West. “He remains my grandfather, he remains my mother, he remains whatever!” (Ault 2012, Part 1 Ghana 1:11:29–1:11:53). Standing above all such spiritual entities in both Ghana and Zimbabwe, was one God, the creator of all—Nyame in Ghanaian Twi, for example, and Mwari in Zimbabwean Shona—the local terms into which “God” and “God Almighty” were easily translated. Given such realities of historical-cultural amnesia in the West, Kwame wondered whether “The African experience of a positive engagement with a pre-­ Christian tradition may help Europe also” (Bediako 1998). Perhaps it will. Exploring the sources and directions of Christian growth in Africa through this documentary film project certainly helped me and my understandings of our world.

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Notes 1. In this regard, I am grateful to Joe Banson in Ghana, given me by Kwame Bediako, who served as driver, translator, and production assistant in this project. Our first-rate sound recordist there, Francis Kwakye, introduced to me by veteran Ghanaian producer, Ernest Abbeyquaye, also helped with production decisions. In Zimbabwe, Africa University, an independent university founded by United Methodists in Mutare, connected me with the Rev. Tafadzwa Mabambe, a student there, who served as a very knowledgeable translator/guide and production assistant. Other crew members contributed in important ways to our filming in both countries. For more about the two teams involved in our filming, view the films’ credits online here: https://vimeopro.com/jamesault/african-­christianity­rising-­a-­two-­part-­documentary-­film-­series 2. I studied comparative historical approaches to politics with Barrington Moore, Jr., during my undergraduate and graduate years, and phenomenological approaches to studying society and culture with Egon Bittner, my dissertation advisor at Brandeis where I received my Ph.D. in Sociology in 1981. 3. It took me some time to figure out the challenges of the translation process while wrestling with them, first, with our Ghana footage. I am grateful for my cross-­ cultural consultations with Richmond Ampiah-Bonney, Professor of Chemistry at Amherst College, who helped resolve many thorny issues arising in that translation work. Other cultural consultants/translators contributing to this work with both the Ghanaian and Zimbabwean footage are listed in the films’ credits. 4. All these documentary films and film materials—our two-part African Christianity Rising series, along with most of the 23 Educational Extras from the project, as well as our two follow-up films, Kwame Bediako: His Life and Legacy and Machanic Manyeruke: The Life of Zimbabwe’s Gospel Music Legend—are available to view online here: https://vimeopro.com/jamesault/african-­christianity-­ rising-­a-­two-­part-­documentary-­film-­series. Licensing for institutional educational uses is available from Documentary Educational Resources, https://www. der.org/ 5. I was originally introduced and brought to the Macedonia Prayer Camp by Emmanuel Kingsley Larbi, a scholar of Ghanaian Pentecostalism (Larbi 2001). When I returned to Ghana two years later, in 1998, to do our major filming, the leadership of the Macedonia Prayer Camp was embroiled in a conflict within their family, which made our more intimate filming impossible. For more about the Church of Pentecost Ghana’s history, see below. 6. More about the size and extent of the Church of Pentecost Ghana on its website: https://thecophq.org/brief-­history/and//thecophq.org/statistics/ 7. From a personal conversation with Machanic Manyeruke in 2022. 8. Comments by Tite Tiénou in discussion after a screening of early roughcuts of our African Christianity Rising films at the Overseas Ministries Study Center in New Haven, Connecticut, followed by the author’s personal conversation with him. This was about 2013, a decade ago, and I do not know if since then relations have become any more transparent between African Christians and representatives of their respective denominations in the West. 9. Personal conversations with colleagues.

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Bibliography Ault, James M., Jr., Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church (NY: Alfred Knopf) 2004. Ault, James, Mensah Otabil: Pioneering Church Builder in Modern, Urban Africa, 2009a. Original documentary video roughcut. https://vimeopro.com/jamesault/ african-­christianity/page/2 Ault, James, Grace Presbyterian Church—Akropong, Ghana, 2009b. Original documentary video roughcut. https://vimeopro.com/jamesault/african-­christianity/page/2 Ault, James M., “What Liberal Delusions About Conservatism Teach,” Society, 46/6 2009c. Ault, James, Zimbabwe United Methodists (original roughcut), 2010a Video. https:// vimeopro.com/jamesault/african-­christianity/page/4 Ault, James, “Deliverance Session with Nana Yaa and Her Mother,” 2010b Documentary video roughcut. https://vimeopro.com/jamesault/african-­christianity/page/6 Ault, James, African Christianity Rising, Part 1: Stories from Ghana and Part 2: Stories from Zimbabwe, 2012. Documentary film series. https://vimeopro.com/jamesault/african-­christianity-­rising-­a-­two-­part-­documentary-­film-­series Ault, James, Kwame Bediako: His Life and Legacy, 2018. Documentary film https:// vimeopro.com/jamesault/african-­christianity/page/1 Ault, James, Machanic Manyeruke: The Life of Zimbabwe’s Gospel Music Legend, 2020, documentary film. https://vimeopro.com/jamesault/african-­christianity/page/1 Bediako, Kwame, “African Christianity Might Help the West,” 1998, Excerpt from his interview by James Ault. Video. https://vimeopro.com/jamesault/african-­ christianity/page/2 Bediako, Kwame, “Lessons from Christian History for the African Context,” 2006, Excerpt from his interview by James Ault. Video https://vimeopro.com/ jamesault/african-­christianity/page/2 Gavan, Mags and Van der Valk, Joost, Saving Africa’s Witch Children, (Britain: Coproduction of C4) 2008 Documentary film online here: https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=ooXBMU_06vg Kurewa, John Wesley Z., The Church in Mission: A Short History of the United Methodist Church in Zimbabwe, 1897–1997 (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press) 1997. Larbi, Emmanuel Kingsley, Pentecostalism: The Eddies of Ghanaian Christianity (Accra: Pentecostal and Charismatic Studies) 2001. Maxwell, David, African Gifts of the Spirit: Pentecostalism and the Rise of a Zimbabwean Transnational Religious Movement (Oxford: James Currey) 2006. Mohr, Adam, “Capitalism, Chaos, and Christian Healing: Faith Tabernacle Congregation in Southern Colonial Ghana, 1918–26,” Journal of African History, 52(1) 2011. Mohr, Adam, Enchanted Calvinism: Labor Migration, Afflicting Spirits, and Christian Therapy in the Presbyterian Church of Ghana (Rochester, NY: Univ. of Rochester Press) 2013. Mohr, Adam, “Faith Tabernacle Congregation, the 1918–19 Influenza Pandemic and Classical Pentecostalism in Colonial West Africa,” Studies in World Christianity, 26(3) 2020. Omenyo, Cephas N., Pentecost Outside Pentecostalism (The Netherlands: Boekencentrum Publishing House) 2006.

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Presler, Titus, Transfigured Night: Mission and Culture in Zimbabwe’s Vigil Movement (University of South Africa Press) 1999. Walls, Andrew F., “Effects of the Enlightenment on Christianity,” Excerpt from his interview by James Ault, 2001 https://vimeopro.com/jamesault/african-­ christianity/page/3 Walls, Andrew F., “From Christendom to World Christianity” and “African Christianity in the History of Religions” in Walls, The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books) 2002.

CHAPTER 42

African Christians Outside of Africa Enoch Olujide Gbadegesin

Introduction In recent decades, African Christianity has become a force to reckon with in terms of its phenomenal growth and influence on the global map. Walls (2002: 85) affirms, “Often touted as the fastest-growing center of Christianity in the world, Africa is inarguably a major representative of the faith in the twenty-first century.” Van Klinken (2015: 13) argues that “Africa has made a major contribution to the shift of the centre of gravity of Christianity to the global South taking place in the twentieth and early twenty-first century.” While this observation is very correct, there is, however, the need to look further than this narrow confine of assigning the influence of African Christianity to the global south alone. Since the middle of the twentieth century, African Christians, especially those that tagged themselves born again, have had the ambition of re-Christianizing “backsliding” North American and European countries. The ambition to re-Christianize the west stemmed from the fact of apparent subjection of “raw faith that was once delivered” by the Euro-American west to undesirable and untamed watering down of the gospel through secularization. Secularization takes religion from the center to the periphery of social life (Wilson 1966; Luckmann 1967; Chaves 1994). This re-Christianizing endeavor is what some scholars have termed reversed mission (Ojo 2007; Olupona 2011; Adogame 2004; Ola 2019; Morier-Genoud 2018). The idea of Christian mission moving from one geographical space to another has been part and parcel of the early Christians’ missionary endeavors, and which had already begun with Jesus Christ and this continued with the

E. O. Gbadegesin (*) Department of Religious Studies, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. E. Barnes, T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48270-0_42

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disciples who went about with the mandate given by their Lord in Matthew 28:1–20. In those verses, disciples of Jesus were to go to different parts of the world preaching or proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ and making disciples of men and women like themselves. Evangelically minded Christians all over the world take this message not only literally but seriously. The early western missionaries went to the third world, especially sub-Saharan Africa beginning in the fifteenth century with the ambition to evangelize and convert the whole of Africa into Christianity and engage them with a civilizing mission. This civilizing mission was intended to suppress African philosophies, cultures, and indigenous religions by giving a new meaning to African life and culture (Mudimbe 1991: 38). This is a practice that Webb Keane calls Christian Moderns in another cultural context, which aims at purification (Keane 2007). Keane shows in his book how missionaries to Sumbanese drove a purification agenda but also shows how Christianity has often become inseparable from ideas and practices linking the concept of modernity to that of human emancipation. Through a review of literature, in four sections this chapter shall be concerned with looking first at the migration of people to the west, especially, of the African missionizing churches made possible by Euro-American Immigration Policy. Second, this chapter will consider the situation of the churches planted or transposed by migrant Christians from African nations. Third, this chapter will investigate the political relevance of African Christians in the western nations where they are located. Lastly, this chapter will talk about the demographical make-up of the African Christian communities in the west. The approaches taken are sociological and historical but there is also some personal reflection by the author, who has had the opportunity to worship in African Christian Churches in Nigeria, United States, and London, especially among Pentecostal Christians in these three nations. This chapter will primarily focus on the United Kingdom and North America, but some reference will be made to other western nations where African Christians are located.

From Africa to the Western World It is good to begin by providing some background to the events that led to Africans moving to the western world. In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, the movement of Africans was more of two-way kind of traffic in the sense that many of the African people that traveled to the western world were either going for study or learning one skill or the other or for businesses, with the intention of returning to their respective African nations. This does not mean that they all in fact did return. However, due to the Structural Adjustment Policy (SAP) that was introduced by the Nigerian Government in 1986 and later some other African countries like Ghana in response to continuously declining per capita income and comparatively unfavorable social indicators, the economy of Nigeria, in particular began to decline, making Nigeria one of

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the poorest countries in the world.1 As a consequence of these developments, many young Africans who fled to the western world in search of greener pasture carried their religion with them. On getting there, some of them who were Christians wanted to worship in white churches, but were met with negative reactions. They were not welcome in those churches, and thus had to resort to either starting a home church or beginning a new ministry entirely. For example, Peter Brierley (2008) notes with respect to the United Kingdom that: The black people (which include those from Africa, the Caribbean, and mixed) have been present in substantial numbers for the last fifty years, and started their own churches when they failed to receive a warm or enthusiastic welcome from some of the white churches. In addition, there was the pull of being able to worship in ways appropriate to their culture, with other members of their own culture and in the language of their own culture. Now, black church attendance is swelling not only through further immigration, but naturally through the inclusion of British-born children and grandchildren.

Perhaps another factor is that they wanted to be able to worship appropriately in their own cultures (Ogungbile 2010: 311–332). The situation was the same with respect to North America. African immigrants engaged with their cultures not only to redefine themselves but to manifest distinct cultural identities. For example, Olupona and Gemignani note that, “While in the United States, African immigrants have been struggling to redefine themselves, create a distinct identity, maintain contact with kin in Africa, and express their cultural values. One of the ways they are doing this is through their religious affiliations” (Olupona and Gemignani 2007: 1).

African Christians’ Migration to the West African Christians outside of Africa were able to migrate in two most important ways namely: the immigration policy of, in particular, the United States of America in 1965 (Adogame 2004: 25; Foley and Hoge 2007: 57), which allows people from the third world to migrate into the North America. The same United States of American Immigration Act of 1990 established the Diversity Visa (DV) program, where 55,000 immigrant visas were made possible in an annual lottery, starting in fiscal year 1995. Other western nations such as Germany, Demark, Canada, and a host of others have followed this process. That does not mean African people did not migrate before this period, but that it seems to have been the case that more migrations were made possible through the Diversity Visa program. Through this medium, many African Christians who won lottery visas and who say themselves as having a mission mandate began to extend the frontiers of home churches by planting those churches in various European and American cities where they came to reside. We can safely make a claim that members who belong to churches such as

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Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), Deeper Life Bible Church (DLBC), Winners’ Chapel, Christ Embassy, Christ Apostolic Church (CAC), Celestial Church of Christ (CCC), Cherubim and Seraphim Church (C&S), and a host of others came to register their presence in the western nations where they migrated. We may add to the first reason that some students from African countries such as, Nigeria, Ghana, Gambia, Kenya, Cameroun, and Uganda migrated as a result of gaining admissions to schools in the UK and North America. These students were given mandates by their church leaders to start new branches of their homeland churches wherever they went to study.2 With respect to European countries, Olofinjana shows how there were a lot of Ghanaian as well as Zimbabwean, Gambian, and Kenyan missionaries and Christians across Europe. He says that some were intentionally sent from their home countries while others came as refugees, students, asylum seekers, or economic migrants. Nevertheless they all come to engage in God’s mission in European space.3 Contrariwise, there is the example of Nigeria-born Pastor Sunday Adelaja, whose primary purpose of going to Russia in the 1980s was to study, but later got involved in an evangelizing mission after gaining his degree in journalism in Belarus. As a result, the largest Christian church in Europe was started by him in 1994.4 More shall be said on Adelaja’s missionary exploits in Ukraine in particular, and other European countries in general, later. Quite a number of Nigerians and Ghanaians seem to have had similar experiences. It has been observed that the largest Pentecostal churches in the UK are pastored by Africans. This church planting process has continued till today in many western nations. Olofinjana mentions that the Netherlands, Germany, and Sweden have a lot of African churches, as do Spain and Italy.5 There is even an ongoing new move to fully penetrate the Middle East with the gospel of Jesus Christ by African Christians, especially by members of the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG). So far, RCCG has been able to plant its churches in Afghanistan, Bahrain, Israel, Kuwait, Lebanon, Pakistan, Qatar, Turkey, and UAE.6 Another factor that has contributed to the presence of African Christians in the western world is the deliberate sending of missionaries from African countries to the Euro-American nations, not only to extend the frontiers of home churches, but also, most importantly, in the African fundamentalist imagination of the sending churches, to redress the damage that has been done to the gospel in the secularized western world. For example, Matthew Ashimolowo, the founder of KIIC was originally sent as a missionary to London in 1984 by the Foursquare Gospel Church in Nigeria (Burgess 2020: 243–268). He, however, eventually began his own ministry. Currently, Ashimolowo has one of the largest churches in the United Kingdom (Burgess 2020). In the thinking of many African Christians, the western world has moved away from the fundamental truth of the gospel by tolerating the intolerable acts, behaviors, and practices such as loose living of moral compromise, accommodation of LGBTQ, abortion, and so on that could bring about the wrath of God. There is need to

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remind ourselves of the controversies that greeted the gay and lesbian phenomenon that led to the separation of the Nigerian Anglicanism from American Anglicanism under Archbishop Peter J. Akinola in 2006 (Jerkins 2008: 1–2).7 Under this rationale and rubric also can be located, as rightly observed by Ruth Marshall-Fratani (2011: 81) “the indigenous Nigerian Pentecostal ‘missions’ or ‘ministries’ (as their transnationally ambitious leaders now call them, invariably adding ‘International’ to the name, even if the mission comprises only a handful of members)” who “open branches not only in the heart of Nigeria’s Muslim north and just next door in Benin, Liberia or Ghana, but as far afield as London, Manchester, New York and Toronto.”

A Brief Appraisal of Reverse Mission This last reason might account for what has already been briefly mentioned earlier as reverse mission. For example, reverse mission is described by Matthews A.  Ojo (2007: 380) as “The sending of missionaries to Europe and North America by churches and Christians from the non-Western world, particularly Africa, Asia, Latin America, which were at the receiving end of Catholic and Protestant missions as mission fields from the sixteenth century to the late twentieth century.” This description by Ojo seems to agree with another scholarly observation that shows that mission in the reverse has been ongoing for more than 100 years. According to Lily Kuo (2017): The idea of the reverse mission has been around for a while. In 1880, a West African preacher named Edward Blyden predicted that one day Africa would be the “the spiritual conservatory of the world.” In the early 1900s, Daniel Ekarte, a sailor from Nigeria, started a church in the slums of Liverpool for both Africans and white British. Around the same time, a Ghanaian businessman, Kwame Brem-Wilson, also founded a Pentecostal Sumner Road Chapel in Peckham, London and helped spread Pentecostalism in the UK.

The definition of Ojo has been found to be problematic in the sense that not all Christians that emigrate and eventually founded churches in the west were sent by their home churches in reverse mission. In support of this point it can be mentioned that Sunday Adelaja was not sent by his leaders in Nigeria to go and plant his homeland church in Ukraine. Hence, Afe Adogame’s definition of reverse mission has been pinpointed as more robust by Joseph Ola (2019). According to Adogame’s definition, “[RM is the] (un-) conscious missionary strategy and zeal by churches in Africa, Asia and Latin America of (re-) evangelising the West [and] re-Christianising Europe and North America.” Adogame’s definition does not also say much about whether missionaries were deliberately sent or people that migrated actually on their own volitions took up the task of re-evangelizing the west by establishing their own churches or extending home churches wherever they are located. What is more important to us, though, is

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the thought that Third World Christians are bringing back to the West the gospel that the West once sent to them. The new zeal with which reverse mission is being carried out by the African Christians in contemporary times seems unparalleled in the history of the spread of Christianity to other places. The story of Pastor Sunday Adelaja needs be reiterated here. His style of planting and growing a church in the twenty-­ first century differs radically from other African Christian immigrants’ ways of growing churches in the West. He said that when he got to Russia in 1980s no church gathering was allowed openly. Not only that, but the few immigrant Christians who were there were only able to pray underground. With determination and constant prayer however, he was able to have a breakthrough in starting a church that has given rise to many other churches. Adelaja claims that at his headquarters church, “The Embassy of the Blessed Kingdom of God for All Nations Church” in Kyiv, Ukraine, the worshippers are up to twenty thousands and that there are satellites churches in fifty countries of the world. It is even claimed that at the headquarters church in Kyiv, Ukraine, Adelaja was able to attract a congregation more than 80% European, an achievement none of the other African Christian churches in Europe have replicated. Sunday Adelaja gained this congregation through reaching out to the dregs of the society such as the outcasts, homeless, drug addicts, sex workers, and so on, instead of looking out for the elites either among Africa immigrants or the Europeans. He was able to provide food for the homeless and drug addicts thereby turning their lives around for Jesus Christ. In his biography on his blog Adelaja states, “The congregation includes members from all spheres of society, from former drug and alcohol addicts to politicians and millionaires. Its high percentage of white Europeans (99%) also indicates that boundaries of racial prejudice have been surpassed.”8

The State and Influence of the African Christians in the Western World If there was any gain that African Christians has claim in the western world, especially in Europe, it is in putting religion back in the public sphere. Enlightenment thinking had successfully confined religion to the private sphere and there was a sharp divide between religion and public policy for many centuries. Enlightenment thinkers such as David Hume (Melaney 2008) and Immanuel Kant (1784) radically changed the way Euro-American societies looked at and apprehended reality. Even though in America, religion has not left the public domain, arguably, religion has not been allowed to interfere with public debate; whether that still applies, though, may be a very important topic to look at. For example, Jeffrey Stout (2005: 11) pointed out with respect to American democracy that, “modern democratic reasoning is secularized, but not in a sense that rules out the expression of religious assumptions.”

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Despite the conditions of life in which African Christians find themselves, either in a secularized or Christianized society, the religious fervor and enchanted worldview they acquired before coming to the western world continues to condition the way they think, behave, and live in the world. For those Christians who have had the opportunity to start Christian church organizations, their intentions have remained the same; making sure that Christianity and Christian values pervade every aspect of their lives while injecting the same spiritual values into host societies who believe that they have put God behind them. Biney shows this clearly with respect to Presbyterian Church of Ghana, New York (PCGNY) upon which he wrote a monograph. According to Biney (2011: 151), the Bible takes center stage in all the things the members of PCGNY do, because for the members of PCGNY, the Bible (a) offers motifs and themes with which members can define and make sense of their lives and sojourn in the United States and (b) provides an authoritative guide that helps members of the church sort through the many perverse sociocultural influences that confront them and their children in the United States. A last thing the Bible does is provide the PCGNY with the basis for maintaining and even enforcing certain cultural and moral values. One could even add that the literalist reading and understanding of the Bible by not only the PCGNY but virtually all African Christian immigrants allow these Christians to maintain their uniquely African theological practices even in foreign lands (cf. Gerrie Ter Haar 2001: 78). African churches and denominations are on the increase in the United Kingdom, perhaps to be expected given the ties that the United Kingdom had with many African countries in the past. Olofinjana, through an interview he granted to Forster in June 9, 2022, claims that African denominational churches in the United Kingdom are the fastest-growing churches, offering to potential members modes of worship that differ radically from European denominations.9 One of the reasons responsible for the steady growth of African denominations founded by African people is that their mode of worship challenges the rationalistic and secularist style of apprehending reality. As said earlier, the worldview of Africa combines both the natural and the supernatural, the physical and the spiritual. In some African churches, especially among the Pentecostal/Charismatic groups and African Initiated Churches in the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, North America, and elsewhere, their eclectic modes of worship challenge Euro-American cold and formal worship style and hence make their churches different and strange to Euro-American Christians and non-­Christians. As a result of the Pentecostal/charismatic orientation, they manifest phenomena such as speaking in tongues, prophetism, visions, healings, and miracles and other forms of signs and wonders as they always claim could be experienced by anyone who is born again. Worship mode is often expressed in loud prayer, praise, drumming, clapping, and extempore teaching and preaching. Harvey Cox (1995: 99–100) put it succinctly like this:

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The signs and wonders that appeared at Azusa Street and in the global movement it loosed included far more than speaking in tongues. People danced, leaped, and laughed in the Spirit, received healings, fell into trances and felt themselves caught up into a transcendental sphere…It marked the breaking of the barrier that western civilization had so carefully erected between the cognitive and the emotional side of life, between rationality and symbol, between the conscious and unconscious strata of mind.

Cox’s observation is very germane to our understanding of the working and moving of the Holy Spirit in the lives of Pentecostal Christians worldwide. The successes recorded in the spread of the gospel (Good news) by many evangelical and Pentecostal/Charismatic groups all over the world are often ascribed to the working of the Holy Spirit. The manifestation of the Holy Spirit is not restricted to men folks alone but it is extended to women folks as well. Hence, Pentecostal/Charismatic Christians give pride of place to women’s visibility and the manifestation of their gifts in the public space. As a result of this, women have contributed in no small measure to the spread of Christianity both in Africa and beyond Africa. Cox shows that women have played an extraordinary part in the spread of Pentecostal movement and then concludes that Pentecostalism is unthinkable without women (p. 121). Biney (2011) has shown how the PCGNY members of the church were able to adapt and cope with economic and social reality in the United States of America through bonding and communal cooperation. This is not peculiar to PCGNY, in some of the RCCG’s parishes in North America that this author is familiar with; new immigrants were able to cope socially, economically, and spiritually through church members’ support in terms of cash or kinds and moral support until they (the new immigrants) were also able to find their footings. Tarus (2016: 16–23) shows how African Christian immigrants take hospitality and charity seriously. Alex Sackey-Ansah (2020) says, “To create a community for themselves and to influence their environs, immigrants, especially Christian immigrants use their religion as a source of comfort, encouragement, gathering, and outreach.” Olupona (2011: 187), while making reference to research that was carried out by some scholars, showed how African Christians’ communities are providing social services and social activities to their congregations. Such activities include food and clothing drives, youth seminars, substance abuse counseling, and material and spiritual outreach to various groups, such as the homeless, migrant laborers, and the incarcerated. If there is another important index by which African Christians have continued to grow and wield influence in the Euro-American world, it is through the use of both social and mass media. Mass media has helped in manifesting and transforming the African churches in every area they are located in the western world. Their electronic bulletins and pamphlets have given them visibility and in particular their websites have served as media of disseminating their churches’ information, thereby enlisting in their church denominations, in most cases,

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the majority of people who have just arrived in Europe and America. Olupona (2011: 183) puts it like this: The impressive and ever-expanding variety of these congregations indicates a growing and formidable trend in the Euro-American religious field. Already we have seen major cities such as Washington, D.C., Atlanta, New York, London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Hamburg begins to undergo a fundamental religious transformation. Unlike those who arrived during the earlier waves of immigration, the new immigrants retain an ability to utilize modern technologies of communication and travel, which are used to expand and strengthen their communities.

Western scholars such as Mark Silk (1995), Doug Underwood (2002), and others have shown the power of mass media and how religious people all over the world have used them to their own advantages. McKinney (2014) shows that they publicize, encourage, and promote events all on social media. African Christian immigrants could be said to have taken advantage of media not only to make themselves religiously relevant but also to make them socially and politically visible as well. Crumbley (2008: 131) after careful study of three African Initiated Churches such as Christ Apostolic Church (CAC), Church of the Lord Aladura (CLA), and Celestial Church of Christ (CCC) says, “The gospel was propagated country by country in the past, but, in this digital age, it takes only a nanosecond to access CAC, CLA, or CCC websites to learn about Aladura doctrine, ritual and gender practices.” What Crumbley observes in respect to the three churches she has studied is applicable to all churches. For example, RCCG has made its religious organization visible by taking an extra step of broadcasting and projecting its various programs on the Dove Television, a media organ owned by RCCG that can be viewed in virtually all over the world. The Deeper Life Christian Church has been broadcasting Pastor William Folorunsho Kumuyi’s messages through Cable Networks for many years to Nigerian members and in the Diasporas. Through media, branding of leaders’ personalities and their churches is made possible as a marketing strategy to attract people into their folds. Einstein (2008: 35; cf. Sircar, A., & Rowley, J. 2020; Ayeni, O. B. 2021) righty observes that “over the years, religion has transformed from being perceived merely as faith that is taught in Churches, mosques, temples and other religious places of worship—it is now also largely seen as a product that needs to be sold to consumers in the ‘religious marketplace’.” Media has become, beyond anything else, an important instrument for evangelization or proselytization. One could argue that this idea of using media is borrowed from the American televangelists such as Billy Graham, Kenneth Hagin, Jimmy Swaggart, John Hagee, Kenneth and Gloria Copeland, T.D.  Jakes, Joel Osteen, Creflo Dollars, late Myles Munroe, and a host of them. Casteline (2014) argues, “One reason African Pentecostals are at the leading edge of this proselytizing is the example set by televangelists, mainly Pentecostal, who came to West Africa in the 1970s. African pastors adopted

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this Western model, turning to television, printed brochures, and eventually other types of media.” One could write on and on about the positive impact of the media on religion, especially Christianity, in the twenty-first century.

African Christians and Their Political Relevance in the West Few African Christian immigrants have demonstrated their political relevance in the west where they are located. For example, Sunday Adelaja’s spiritual influence has also been extended to the realm of politics. One important event that is politically associated with Adelaja’s church is the role it played in the Orange revolution in Ukraine in 2004 and 2005. Members came together with prayer and fasting during the 12-day standoff before the results of a presidential runoff marred by corruption were annulled.10 He also claims that “I know that I am on the list because I was already a persona non grata in Russia since 2005. I have been a personal enemy of Vladimir Putin for close to 20 years now. He banned me from going to Russia, so I know I would be on the list (Nigerian Punch, 26 February, 2022).” The recent event of the death of Queen Elizabeth II has also revealed the political relevance of African Christian immigrants in Europe. The online Nigerian Punch News (September 19, 2022) carried a catchy news item entitled: “Nigerian-born cleric, others to officiate at Queen’s funeral.” The story goes on to say that “A Nigerian-born cleric, Pastor Agu Irukwu, has been listed among officiating ministers at the funeral of Britain’s longest-serving monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, set to hold on Monday. A copy of the funeral order of events obtained by The PUNCH on Monday showed that Irukwu, the senior pastor of Jesus House, United Kingdom, was among the representatives of the churches in England at the funeral.” A few years back, Prince Charles was said to have attended Jesus House of RCCG in London. The caption of Christian Today online of November 13, 2007 reads: “Prince Charles to celebrate influence of black church in Britain.” The story continues, “This week, Jesus House, a church and Christian charity at Brent Cross will play host to the Prince of Wales on his 59th birthday. A special thanksgiving service will be held to honor and celebrate Prince Charles, who will be accompanied on the visit by the Duchess of Cornwall. The Prince’s visit is also to acknowledge and appreciate the work done at Jesus House, one of London’s largest black majority churches, within the local community and beyond. Jesus House was founded in April 1994 as a parish of the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG). The RCCG was founded in 1952 and is led by Pastor E.A Adeboye, the General Overseer. The movement has a growing membership of over a million people worldwide. Jesus House moved premises to Barnet borough in 2001 and has been actively involved in community efforts targeted at youth, elderly and disadvantaged group” (Christian Today online, https://www.christiantoday.com).

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In the United States of America, many African Christian immigrants have been influencing immigration policy and have been working behind the scenes so as to see a change in American immigration policy through actively participating in voting during election time. For example, in September, 2009, the Church Arise magazine published that Pastor Enoch Adejare Adeboye, the General Overseer of RCCG was invited to come and lead prayer in the United Nations Organization’s pre-Summit prayers organized by 68 leading ambassadors and representatives from 68 nations (http://churcharise.blogspot. com/2009/10/). It has been shown as well that two of the African churches in Germany have been trying to influence German immigration policy and they do this by rejecting the notion of the nation-state as a frame of reference; a challenge to the legitimacy of political decisions by Germany regarding immigrants and African identity in Oststadt (Karagiannis and Schiller 2008: 265–278).

Demography of African Christians in the West David Ogungbile was able to show with concrete examples the Nigerian churches that were exerting influences on the immigrants and host communities by building multicultural communities in Boston, Massachusetts in the United States of America (Ogungbile 2010). What Ogungbile’s analysis failed to let his readers know was the demography of the people that worship in those churches in the Boston Area. What was certain though is that there were insignificant numbers of white members and members from South America. African immigrants were in the majority in the multicultural churches that Ogungbile examined. It has been estimated that a majority of the immigrants who come to the United States identify with the Christian faith. According to recent data, Christians constitute nearly half (49%) of all international immigrants to Europe and America (Connor and Tucker 2011: 994). African Christians are said to make up the lion share of this demographic data (Tarus 2016; Olofinjana 2020). Knowing the accurate number of African Christians in Europe, North America, and other nations of the world will prove a little bit difficult. The number of African Christians in Europe and North America, however, has continued to rise with the passage of time. As already pointed out at the beginning of this chapter, one of the reasons for this is traceable to continuous movement of people especially young folks from Africa to the western world. A Pew research report from 2016, authored by Philip Jerkins, shows how African churches have firmly established themselves in America and Europe. Sackey-­ Ansah (2020) says, “Currently, RCCG is estimated to have over five million members worldwide. It is located in 147 countries.” According to Wagner and Thompson (2004), RCCG is one of numerous African churches currently sending missionaries to America. For example, Mountain of Fire and Miracles (MFM) founded by Pastor Daniel Olukoya has 131 branches in Europe, 111 in the United States, and Asia (Adogame 2004). Winners’ Chapel has over 6000 branches in Nigeria and

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congregations in 147 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the United States (Gifford 2015; Ojo 2007). Kenya, Ghana, Ethiopia, Cameroun, Gambia, Uganda, and a host of other African nations’ Christians already have their churches planted in Europe, America, the Middle East, and Australia. According to Jerkins in the Pew Research news of July 5, 2016, “African churches are now firmly established in the United States in such urban centers as Houston and Atlanta. Houston in some ways is the Nigerian capital of America, with at least 25 African churches, some on a very impressive scale. African churches are also thriving throughout Europe, including in some unlikely settings (https:// www.pewtrusts.org/en/trend/archive/summer-­2016).”

Conclusion In this chapter, I have shown through a review of literature and personal field experience that African Christians are changing the religious landscape of the West. While it is not certain if reverse mission is indeed taking place in the west as arguments have been advanced forth and back by scholars, there is the clear evidence of the huge presence of African Christians in Europe and America and some other nations of the world such as Australia, Canada, and the Middle East. African Christians in the West have continued, not only to change the religious landscape of the Euro-American societies but also to influence the political and public policies of the western countries they are located. Their literalist reading and interpreting the scripture or the bible and most times, dependence on oral discourse rather than on reasoned discourse that characterized western theology, make their Christianity unique. As Olofinjana (2020) has shown, African Christianity in Europe is not homogenous. There are African indigenous churches (AICs), African Pentecostals, and African churches within the mainline European denominations. Irrespective of their differences, however, African Christians in the western world take the Bible seriously, they take morality seriously, they take their cultural values seriously and they take social actions seriously. All these are important to them because they have refused to come to terms with secularized modernity that characterizes the western values. African Christians, as McGrath (2002: 32–35) has also shown, refuses “the stereotype of western-led churches following western-style worship, as if Christianity was just some aspect of European Colonialism. African Christianity is led by Africans, preached by Africans, and shows little interest in mimicking western ways of thinking.” With this in place it seems, the future of African Christianity both at homelands and overseas have great prospect of not only exploding but also carrying on the re-evangelization of the world and perhaps cause the Christian revival all over the world. As shown in the body of this essay, their emotional rather than rational way of worship shows exuberance through the power of the Holy Spirit that they often claim is available for doing God’s work in an acceptable and meaningful way.

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Notes 1. See Revised Technical Report submitted by the National Center for Economic Management and Administration (NCEMA) to Global Development Network uploaded in April 2013 to https://nairametrics.com/wp-­content/uploads/ 2013/04/Nigeria_proposal.pdf 2. Personal interviews with some Redeemed Christian Church of God Pastors in the United States have shown that some of them went primarily to study in the United States before they took up the challenge of starting the RCCG branches in the United States. The same experience was shared by many leaders of the Christ Apostolic Church (CAC), Cherubim and Seraphim (C&S) Churches, Living Faith Church (Winners’ Chapel), and a host of others. I know of few people who left Nigeria for their postgraduate studies in Canada and the United Kingdom but who have become pastors of churches in these two countries. The author stayed briefly in the United States for about seven years and four months before moving back to Nigeria after his postgraduate studies in 2014. 3. See interview of Evangelical Focus Europe with Israel Olofinjana by Joel Forster, “The presence of African missionaries and churches recognises the fact that Europe is a mission field” https://evangelicalfocus.com/europe/17207/ the-­presence-­of-­african-­missionaries-­and-­churches-­r ecognises-­the-­fact-­that-­ europe-­is-­a-­mission-­field 4. https://thecitypulsenews.com/how-­i-­built-­largest-­evangelical-­church-­in-­europe-­ pastor-­sunday-­adelaja/ 5. See interview of Evangelical Focus Europe with Israel Olofinjana by Joel Forster. 6. See RCCG Facebook webpage, https://web.facebook.com/rccgmiddleeast/? 7. See also At Axis of Episcopal Split, an Anti-Gay Nigerian, https://www.nytimes. com/2006/12/25/world/africa/25episcopal.html for the detailed story. 8. See Biography of Sunday Adelaja on http://sundayadelajablog.com/about/ biography/ 9. Forster, “The Presence of African Missionaries.” 10. See May Olusola, who writes about Sunday Adelaja’s story of exploits, titled: Pastor Sunday Adelaja—From nothing to founder of one of the largest churches in Europe on The Embassy of Blessed Kingdom of God for all Nations’ websites on September 13, 2011. http://godembassy.com/central-­church/media-­ about-­u s/pastor-­s unday-­a delaja-­f rom-­n othing-­t o-­f ounder-­o f-­o ne-­o f-­t he-­ largest-­churches-­in-­europe/

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Brierley, Peter, 2008. “The Ethnicity of English Church Goers” https://lausanneworldpulse.com/research-­php/997/08-­2008 Burgess, Richard. 2020. Mega Churches and ‘Reverse Mission’ in Stephen Hunt (ed.), Handbook of Mega Churches. Brill Handbook on Contemporary Religion, 19, 243–268. Casteline, Kimberley 2014. “In African Churches’ Mass Media Use, a Glimpse of a Changing Global Christianity”. https://news.fordham.edu/living-­the-­mission/ in-­african-­churches-­mass-­media-­use-­a-­glimpse-­of-­a-­changing-­global-­christianity/ Chaves, M. 1994 “Secularization as Declining Religious Authority”, Social Forces 72: 749–774. Christian Today online, https://www.christiantoday.com Connor P. and C. Tucker, 2011. “Religion and migration around the globe: introducing the global religion and migration database.” International Migration Review 45(4): 985–1000. Cox, Harvey. 1995. Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the twenty-first Century. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press. Crumbley, Deidre Helen. 2008. “From Holy Ground to Virtual Reality: Aladura Gender Practices in Cyberspace—An African Diaspora Perspective, in Afe Adogame, Roswith Gerloff & Klaus Hock (eds.), Christianity in Africa and the African Diaspora: The Appropriation of a Scattered Heritage. London &New York: Continuum, 126–139. Einstein, M. 2008. Brands of faith: Marketing religion in a commercial age. London: Routledge. Foley M.W. and Hoge D.R. 2007. Religion and the New Immigrants: How Faith Communities Form Our Newest Citizens. New York: Oxford University Press, Inc. Gerrie Ter Haar. 2001. African Christians in Europe. Action Publishers. Gifford, Paul, 2015. Christianity, Development, and Modernity London: C.  Hurst & Company. Jerkins, P. 2008. The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South. (New York: Oxford University Press. Kant, Immanuel, 1784. What is Enlightenment? http://www.columbia.edu/acis/ets/ CCREAD/etscc/kant.html Karagiannis, Evangelos and Nina Glick Schiller 2008., “‘… the land which the LORD your God giveth you’: Two Churches Founded by African Migrants in Oststadt, Germany”, in Afe Adogame, Roswith Gerloff and Klaus Hock, Christianity in Africa and African Diaspora: The Appropriation of a Scattered Heritage. London & New York: Continuum, 165–178. Keane, Webb. 2007. Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in Mission Encounters (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kuo, Lily. 2017“Africa’s “reverse missionaries” are bringing Christianity back to the United Kingdom” in Quartz Africa. https://qz.com/africa/1088489/africas-­ reverse-­missionaries-­are-­trying-­to-­bring-­christianity-­back-­to-­the-­united-­kingdom/ Published October 11. Luckmann, T. 1967. The Invisible Religion: The Problem of Religion in Modern Society. New York: Macmillan. McKinney, D.R. 2014. Social Media in the Church. Unpublished Master of Arts Thesis, Department of Journalism, University of Arkansas, USA. Marshall-Fratani, Ruth, 2011. “Mediating the Global and Local in Nigerian Pentecostalism” in Andre Corten and Ruth Marshall-Fratani (eds.) Between Babel

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Axis of Episcopal Split, an Anti-Gay Nigerian, https://www.nytimes. com/2006/12/25/world/africa/25episcopal.html for the detailed story. Biography of Sunday Adelaja on http://sundayadelajablog.com/about/biography/ Evangelical Focus Europe with Israel Olofinjana by Joel Forster, “The presence of African missionaries and churches recognises the fact that Europe is a mission field” https://evangelicalfocus.com/europe/17207/the-­presence-­of-­african-­missionaries-­ and-­churches-­recognises-­the-­fact-­that-­europe-­is-­a-­mission-­field https://thecitypulsenews.com/how-­i-­built-­largest-­evangelical-­church-­in-­europe-­pastor-­ sunday-­adelaja/ https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/trend/archive/summer-­2016 http://churcharise.blogspot.com/2009/10 RCCG Facebook webpage, https://web.facebook.com/rccgmiddleeast/? Revised Technical Report submitted by the National Center for Economic Management and Administration (NCEMA) to Global Development Network uploaded in April 2013 to https://nairametrics.com/wp-­content/uploads/2013/04/Nigeria_ proposal.pdf

Index1

A Abbink, Jon, 539, 540 Abeokuta, 114, 116, 147, 148, 150, 152, 184, 521 Abolitionism, 105, 151, 208, 221–233, 363 Abraham, 117, 599 Abrahamic religions, 361 Abuna, Nana Kofi, 637 Abyssinian Church, 26 Accra, 240, 633, 634, 638, 645, 647–649, 659 Acton, Margaret, 84, 94n8 Ade-Ajayi, Jacob, 110, 112 Adelaja, Sunday, 588, 589, 670–672, 676 Adogame, Afe, 165, 370, 543, 584–586, 621n67, 667, 669, 671, 677 Afghanistan, 670 Afigbo, A. E., 144, 146 Afonso I, 5, 199, 200, 322 Africa International University (AIU), 615 African American Christians, 8, 339 African American Church, 27, 646 African Americans, 8, 26, 27, 105, 179, 180, 189, 207, 208, 224–229, 231–233, 304–317, 342, 349, 356, 473, 486–489, 491, 492, 495, 524

African Christian civilization, 1, 6 African Christianity, 1, 3, 6–9, 12, 13, 18, 29, 37, 42, 43, 45, 50n52, 53, 59–61, 63, 64, 80, 88, 89, 97, 98, 107, 108, 111, 118, 121, 122, 127–139, 162, 166, 167, 173, 182, 184, 188, 247, 255–257, 260, 262–266, 294, 345, 379–382, 391–393, 439, 465, 486, 520, 526, 530, 536, 550–553, 580, 582, 583, 585, 586, 590, 660, 661, 667, 678 African Christians, 2, 5–11, 41, 43, 44, 47, 61, 63, 69, 89, 90, 98, 99, 101–103, 116, 117, 121, 131, 162, 163, 166, 187, 199, 207–209, 213, 217, 218, 227–231, 241, 244–248, 260–261, 263, 278, 290, 311, 317, 336, 337, 339–341, 343, 361, 362, 364, 365, 367–371, 389, 391, 409, 421, 429, 436, 440, 456, 468, 469, 472, 493, 497, 507, 512, 519–530, 575, 582, 584, 585, 590, 610, 618n6, 630, 648, 661, 662, 663n8, 667–678 African Colonization Society (ACS), 225, 309 African Diaspora Christianity, 588

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. E. Barnes, T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48270-0

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INDEX

African Indigenous Churches (AICs), 90, 131, 135, 163, 465, 511, 543, 579–590, 609–611, 678 African Initiated Churches (AICs), 608 Africanization, 26, 155, 520, 543, 551–553, 581 African nationalism, 105, 138, 144, 306, 311, 357, 465, 549, 553 African Pentecostalism, 46, 163, 166–168, 172, 173, 586, 593–605, 607–618 African pre-colonial religions, 107 African protestant Christianity, 245 African Renaissance, 632 African syncretism, 119 Afro-Caribbean Christian leadership, 214 Afro-Caribbeans, 207, 208, 214 Afro-Cuban jazz, 306 Agbebi, Mojala, 229, 465, 468, 469, 524 Aggrey, James Emma Kwegyir, 229, 305, 315, 316, 341, 467, 475, 476, 479 Ahmad, Ima, 72, 73 Ajayi, J. F. Ade, 143–155, 522, 523, 525 Ajayi, Sir Olaniwun, 110 Akan religion, 635, 636 Akinade, Akintunde, 165 Akinola, Peter, 528, 671 Akrofi-Christaller Centre, 86 Akrofi-Christaller Institute, 91, 647 Akuapem Twi language, 243 Akufu-Addo, Nana Addo Dankwa, 640 Akyeampong, Emmanuel, 629, 630, 632, 636, 637 Aladura Church, 114, 119–122, 165, 167, 169, 182, 585, 587, 590 Alexander, Daniel William, 475, 493–495 Alexander, Jocelyn, 136 Algeria, 49n28, 271, 273, 292, 327, 557 Algiers, 271 Ali, Sultan Muhammad, 271 Ali, Yusuf bin, 195 Allen, W.S., 230 Amaury Talbot Prize, 109 African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), 223, 230, 231, 303–305, 309, 311, 466, 467, 472–474, 476, 477, 491, 497 African National Congress (ANC), 263, 492, 556

African Orthodox Church (AOC), 475, 492–495, 497 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Mission (ABCFM), 181, 183, 187, 225, 227 American Congregationalists, 471 American Ethiopianism, 303–305 American Methodist Episcopal Church (AMEC), 187, 189, 190 American Missionary Association, 225 American Negro Academy, 18, 308 American Philological Association, 18 American Presbyterian Congo Mission (APCM), 189, 305, 312, 313 American Society of Comparative Religions, 18 AMEZ Church, 223, 230, 316, 476 Amin, Idi, 512 Amlak, Yekuno, 406, 407 Anglican Christianity, 629, 630, 632 Anglo-Boer War, 472 Anglo-Zulu War, 422 Angola, 194, 197, 199–202, 240, 256, 264, 265, 270, 274, 284, 298, 431, 628 Anim, Peter Newman, 656 Anti-Homosexuality Bill, 513 Apawo-Phiri, Isabel, 569 Apollonius, 117 Apostolic Faith Mission, 182, 656–658 Appiah-Asare, Agnes, 651 Arab-Islamic slave traders, 224 Arianism, 387–391 Ark of the Covenant, 70, 406 Arles, Siga, 84 Arminian theology, 223 Armstrong, General Samuel C., 524 Asamoah-Gyadu, Kwabena, 586–589, 631 Asante Empire, 629 Ashanti, 283, 290 Ashimolowo, Matthew, 670 Association of the Members of Episcopal Conferences in Eastern Africa (AMECEA), 56, 552 Athanasius, 399, 405, 409 Atiman, Adrian, 271, 279 Atlantic European Christianity, 3

 INDEX 

Atlantic Slave Trade, 5, 6, 221–224, 239, 350, 433 Augouard, Prosper-Philippe, 284, 324, 490 Augustine, 26, 47, 377, 382–386, 388, 399, 409 Ault, James, 90, 91, 552, 646–656, 658, 660, 662 Aurelius of Carthage, 384 Australia, 108, 678 Austro-Hungarian Empire, 272 Avanzini, Joe, 602 Azanian People’s Liberation Army, 256 Azumah, John, 104 B Baal, 379 Bagamoyo, 183, 277, 279 Baganda, 58, 186, 191n1, 212, 279, 493, 626 Bahrain, 670 Baker, Lois, 85 Baker, Samuel, 40 Balikuddembe, Joseph Mukasa, 278 Bantu, 119 Baptism, 70, 170, 180, 183, 195, 198, 199, 202, 203, 256, 257, 259, 260, 278, 379, 381, 382, 389, 418, 432, 436, 542, 545, 545n1, 550, 609, 613 Baptist Missionary Society (BMS), 181, 208, 213–216, 226 Barreira, Balthasar, 198 Barrett, David, 89, 100, 108, 479 Barron, Edward, 281 Basel Mission, 230, 240, 243 Basutoland, 328, 495 Bays, Daniel, 88, 95n20 Beach, David, 131 Beatrice, Donna, 63 Bebbington, David, 88, 94n15, 221, 416 Becker, Gustav, 490, 491 Bediako, Kwame, 47, 50n54, 84, 89–91, 99, 101, 248, 647, 648, 650, 653, 661, 662, 663n1 Beirut, 98 Belgium, 277, 290, 292, 298–300, 314, 326, 342, 358n2, 490

685

Benabou, Marcel, 378 Benedict XV, 328 Benezet, Anthony, 222, 223 Benin, 113, 116, 188, 198, 283, 363, 439, 555, 558, 671 Berlin Conference, 78, 181, 291, 294 Berlin Mission, 242, 246 Bessieux, Jean-Rémy, 281, 282 Bethany Land Institute, 558 Bible, the, 2, 20, 22, 23, 70, 77, 99, 100, 104, 120, 135, 137, 151, 152, 169, 183, 184, 186, 208, 213, 214, 217, 221, 223, 228, 230, 241, 244, 248, 257, 259, 260, 264, 358n4, 405, 415, 416, 419, 435, 438, 458, 488, 505, 506, 509, 522, 524, 525, 529, 530, 535, 537, 538, 542, 544, 569, 572, 582, 583, 589, 607, 609, 618n5, 625, 634, 673, 678 Bigirumwami, Aloys, 551 Blyden, Edward W., 6, 187, 188, 228, 233, 305, 307, 308, 315, 364, 365, 464, 465, 468, 470, 473, 476, 478, 671 Boers, 258–262, 264, 290, 295, 414, 423 Boesak, Allan, 520 Boilat, David, 280 Bonifatius, 390 Borghero, Francesco, 282 Botha, P. W., 266 Botswana, 264, 472, 626 Boyle, Richard, 128 Braide, Garrick, 184, 525 Brandenburg, 78 Brazza, 284, 297 Brempong III, Affram, 637, 639, 640, 641n8, 641n10, 641n14 Bridges, Roy, 84 Brierley, Peter, 669 British Empire, 152, 188, 224, 232, 261, 292 British South Africa Company (BSA), 129, 263, 264 Brown, David Vincent, 469, 524 Buganda, 55, 58, 62, 113, 119, 185, 186, 188, 191n1, 212, 213, 278, 286n16, 295, 296, 325, 541, 552 Bugandan church, 212

686 

INDEX

Bukalasa, 55 Burgess, Richard, 165, 529, 670 Burnside, Janet, 217 Burrows, Bill, 85 Burundi, 49n28, 54, 272, 277, 279, 285, 504, 552, 556 Bushoong language, 313 Butelezi, Wellington, 495, 496 Buxton, Thomas Fowell, 149, 227, 228 C Caecilian of Carthage, 384 Calvary Hill Christian Ministries, 645 Cameroon, 49n28, 183, 213–215, 228, 242, 297, 321, 326–328, 489, 550, 552 Campbell, James, 190, 231, 340, 466, 467, 471–474, 477–479 Canada, 79, 161, 162, 225, 358n2, 559, 620n39, 669, 673, 678, 679n2 Canal, 291 Cão, Diogo, 431 Cape Colony, 189, 215, 217, 230, 258, 260, 262, 290, 362 Cape of Good Hope, 256, 273, 362 Cape Town, 182, 258, 259, 341, 363, 364, 487, 491–493, 495, 500n53 Cape Verde, 197, 198, 280 Capitein, Jacobus, 181 Capon, Martin, 611 Capuchins, 197, 198, 201–203, 275, 285, 432 Cardinal Roncalli, 55 Carver, George Washington, 313 Catholic, 3, 26, 53–60, 62, 74, 77, 78, 87, 129, 133, 135, 181, 183, 193–203, 203n2, 222, 241, 243, 264, 269–285, 293, 296–298, 321–330, 330n3, 351, 352, 366, 369, 384, 385, 387, 389, 390, 408, 416, 430–432, 435, 439, 490, 506, 535, 537, 539–541, 543, 549–560, 587, 633, 671 Catholic Christianity, 78, 202, 275, 440 Catholicism, 53, 55–58, 61, 77, 116, 136, 193–203, 272, 278, 283–285, 321, 322, 326, 330, 408, 432, 433, 439, 536, 539–541, 549–559

Cecelia Hemans, 231 Celestial Church of Christ (CCC), 587, 670, 675 Central Africa, 56, 132, 133, 137, 210, 231–232, 256, 272, 293, 306, 312, 363, 431, 440, 510, 521, 524, 599, 628 Charles, Prince, 676 Cherubim Church, 121, 587, 588, 670, 679n2 Chibambo, Lucy, 570–572, 574 Chikane, Frank, 556 Chikerema, James, 129 Chilembwe, John, 231, 264, 341, 472, 473, 496 China, 54, 88, 103, 554 Chingulia, Jeronimo, 195 Chipondeni, Mayi, 573 Chirenje, J. Mutero, 231, 309, 339, 340 Chitando, Ezra, 101 Christ, Jesus, 3, 4, 9, 10, 13, 23, 27, 71, 87, 90, 98, 117, 118, 120, 164, 169, 180, 181, 183, 186, 190, 191, 209, 215–217, 221, 232, 246, 257, 261, 291, 311, 316, 344, 364, 381, 387, 399, 401, 402, 405, 406, 416, 435, 436, 438, 439, 469, 495, 500n53, 507, 509, 510, 512, 513, 529, 530, 536, 538, 541–543, 571, 573, 584, 585, 587, 598, 605n1, 610, 612, 614, 626, 630, 637, 639, 640, 648, 651–653, 657, 658, 667, 668, 670, 672 Christ Apostolic Church (CAC), 121, 525, 633, 670, 675, 679n2 Christ is the Answer Ministries (CITAM), 614, 616, 619n39, 620n48, 620n55, 621n56 Christaller, Johannes, 243 Christendom, 3, 44, 64, 77, 87, 317, 530, 542 Christianity in Africa, 1, 2, 7, 9–13, 26, 41, 43–46, 69, 77, 97, 98, 100, 104, 107–115, 118, 152, 155, 161, 162, 169, 173, 180, 210, 240, 244, 255–266, 278, 356, 371, 421, 445–447, 449, 453, 458, 486, 496, 519, 520, 526, 537, 544, 545, 551–553, 590

 INDEX 

Christianization, 6, 149, 311, 402, 521, 530 Christian missionaries, 3, 5, 112, 114, 146–147, 154, 273, 283–284, 291, 293, 296, 337, 338, 362–364, 366, 367, 369, 371, 406, 434, 609 Christian-Muslim relations, 102–105, 362 Christian slaves, 223 Christocentric, 170 Chrysostom, John, 385 Chungu, Betty, 356 Church Missionary Society (CMS), 117, 133, 148–152, 180, 181, 183, 185–189, 208, 211–213, 216, 226, 227, 229–232, 241, 244, 350, 352, 353, 357, 364, 452, 453, 465, 467, 468, 521–524, 527–528 Church of the Lord Aladura (CLA), 525, 675 Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians, 566, 568–574 Clarkson, Thomas, 181 Classe, Vicar Léon, 326 Clutton-Brock, Guy, 129 Clutton-Brock, Molly, 129 Cobbing, Julian, 131 Cohen, Abner, 110, 111 Coker, Daniel, 187, 466 Colenso, Bishop, 265, 520 Colenso, John, 184, 263 Collins, John, 128 Colonialism, 1, 41, 50n52, 76, 78, 100, 105, 111–113, 115, 122, 129, 130, 138, 143–146, 166, 169, 180, 187, 188, 190, 222, 232, 239, 241, 245, 248, 256, 270, 283, 295, 307, 314, 327, 330, 354, 369, 371, 378, 387, 413, 419, 423, 445–455, 459, 478, 493, 496, 504, 521, 522, 526, 571, 609, 630 Columbus, Christopher, 75 Comboni, Daniele, 272, 273, 277, 323 Comboni missionaries/Verona Fathers, 269, 285, 323 Congar, Yves, 55 Congo-Brazzaville, 199, 284, 553 Congolese Episcopal Conference (CENCO), 557

687

Congo Mission, 213–215, 312–314 Congo-Zaire, 549, 550, 552, 555, 556, 560 Constantine, 381, 384 Copeland, Gloria, 602, 605n1, 675 Copeland, Kenneth, 602 Coptic church, 130, 403, 539 Correa, Bras, 200 Côte d’Ivoire, 49n28, 490, 557, 638 Council of Carthage, 384, 387, 390, 391 Council of Florence, 194 Council of Nicaea, 89, 387 COVID-19, 585, 614 Creevey, Lucy, 369 Crow, Jim, 305–307, 309 Crowther, Samuel Adjai (Ajay), 149–152, 154, 180, 184, 187, 188, 208, 209, 211–212, 227, 283, 294, 337, 364, 365, 465, 468, 469, 523–525, 527 Crummell, Alexander, 228, 305, 307, 308, 311, 314, 464, 465, 478, 479 Cuba, 224, 232 Cugoano, Ottobah, 181 Cyprian, 26, 47, 377, 380–384, 386, 389, 399 D da Silveira, Gonsalo, 195 Dahomey, 113, 116, 198, 282, 283, 489, 490 Dakar, 281, 284, 324, 329, 489 Daneel, Marthinus, 647 Daoist, 11 Dark Continent, 40, 190, 551 Darwin, Charles, 40 Davidson, Dr., Basil, 23 Davis, Joseph. H., 221, 230, 488 Ddiba, Fr Joseph, 58 Ddungu, Adrian, 55, 56 de Alvarez, Francisco, 194 de Bolaños, Alfonso, 194 de Jacobis, Justin, 275, 276 D’Escoto, Miguel, 85 de Trinidade, Pedro, 196 Debre Libanos monastery, 406 Decius, 380

688 

INDEX

Decolonization, 112, 167, 169, 172, 233, 265–266, 327–330, 330n1, 330n3, 436, 497, 527, 551, 586 Denmark, 78 Diaspora, 19, 26, 43, 163, 208, 226, 240, 304, 336, 466, 468, 470, 472, 478, 488, 559, 581, 588, 616, 617, 621n56, 661, 675 Dickson, Kwesi, 47 Dingane, 414 Diocletian, Emperor, 381, 382 Diop, Chiekh Anta, 6 Diversity Visa (DV) program, 669 DMNA (Dipundu dia Mpeve a Nlongo mu Afelika), 438 Documentation, Archives, and Bibliography Mission Study Group (DABOH), 86, 94n9 Dollars, Creflo, 675 Donatist controversy, 383–387, 389 Donatists, 381–389 Donatus of Carthage, 384 dos Santos, Father João, 196 Dosseh, Robert, 329 Douglass, Frederick, 225 Dreyfus Affair, 296 Du Bois, W.E.B., 308, 315, 470 Dube, Dick, 493, 499n41 Dube, John L., 6, 263, 473, 474, 479 Duckett, Angus, 213 Duffour, S.W., 633 Duparquet, Charles, 274, 284 Duplantis, Jesse, 602 D’Urban, Benjamin, 261, 262 Dutch Reformed Church (DRC), 20, 245, 257, 362, 471, 557, 560 Dutch settlers, 245, 257, 259 Dwamena-Aboagbye, Angela, 91 E East Africa, 38, 40, 49n27, 133, 180, 190, 232, 244, 256, 294, 295, 297, 298, 362, 363, 422, 429, 440, 476, 479, 493, 494, 499n42, 503, 504, 506, 508, 513, 611, 612, 626 East African Revival, 190, 503–514, 611

Eastern Africa, 131, 195, 274, 276–279, 284, 363, 371, 436, 474, 475, 504, 550, 552 East Indies, 230, 362 Edgerley, Rosanna Patience, 214 Edmiston, Alonzo, 313, 314 Edmiston, Althea Brown, 189, 313–315, 356 Egypt, 10, 22, 25, 74, 75, 270–272, 293, 339, 400–407, 409, 463, 488, 537, 539, 554 Egyptology, 25 1893 Columbian Exposition, 19 Ekarte, Daniel, 185, 671 Ekechi, Felix, 145, 146, 519 Elbourne, Elizabeth, 139, 421, 422 Elmslie, William, 216 Emperor John IV, 276 Engelke, Matthew, 582 England, 45, 54, 58, 78, 83, 98, 188, 223, 232, 259, 292, 293, 363, 416, 467, 495, 505, 521, 522, 524, 527, 587, 594, 655, 676 Equatorial Africa, 227, 271, 490 Equiano, Olaudah, 5, 181, 223, 226, 247, 250n7 Erskine, John, 226 Ethiopia, 10, 24–26, 62, 69–74, 78, 130, 187, 193–195, 217, 226, 243, 244, 275–276, 280, 304, 307, 311, 339, 368, 399–409, 463, 470, 474–476, 523, 537, 539, 565, 610, 678 Ethiopian Christianity, 69–71, 73, 194, 399, 400, 409 Ethiopianism, 165, 187, 231, 263, 303–317, 339–342, 344, 463–478, 486, 523, 524, 528 Eurocentric Christianity, 6 European Christianity, 2, 3, 6, 13, 28, 245, 247, 289–300, 409, 419, 459 European civilization, 2, 6, 241, 334, 335, 339, 343 European Colonial Project, 335–337, 339, 340, 343–345, 361–372 European colonialism, 1, 50n52, 222, 369, 371, 478, 678

 INDEX 

European Protestants, 85, 239, 240, 242, 243, 245, 247 Evangelical Christianity, 229, 244, 585, 632 Evangelical Church Winning All (ECWA), 529, 530 Evangelism, 4, 41, 58, 118, 165, 181, 189, 227, 228, 230, 240, 257, 304, 309, 322, 323, 328, 352, 364, 522, 524, 633, 636, 639 Evangelization, 2, 3, 6, 151, 188, 194, 196–203, 208, 216, 217, 221–233, 239–248, 256, 257, 262, 263, 270, 279–283, 285, 303–317, 327, 339, 349–358, 458, 524, 675 Evans-Pritchard, Edward E., 40, 42, 130, 627 F Falen, Douglas, 439 Falola, Toyin, 179–191, 626, 628–630, 632 Fante, 290 Ferry, Jules, 296 Finaz, Marc, 274 Finnish Missionary society, 246 Fodio, Usman Dan, 114, 117 Fortes, Meyer, 130, 627 Foucault, Michel, 417 Fourah Bay College, 84, 98, 151, 227 Foy, Whitfield, 128 France, 78, 270–274, 277, 282, 284, 290, 293, 294, 296, 309, 321, 325, 326, 647, 648 Franco-Prussian War, 242, 277, 296 Freedmen’s Aid Society, 225 Freetown, 180, 181, 184, 211, 212, 223, 224, 226, 227, 487 French Protestants, 274, 471 French Revolution, 202, 221, 269, 296 Fridoil, Arsene, 281 Frumentius, 404, 405 Fulani, 114, 117, 366, 368, 369 Fulgentius of Ruspe, 377, 391 Fuller, Alexander, 213 Fuller, Joseph Jackson, 213, 214 Fundamentalist Christianity, 655

689

G Gäbriʾeyl, Abba, 407 Gaitskell, Deborah, 351, 357, 358, 417 Gallagher, John, 289 Gallieni, Joseph, 297 Gambia, 97, 98, 104, 197, 363, 498n11, 670, 678 Garima, Abba, 405 Garrison, William Lloyd, 225 Garvey, Marcus A., 6, 306, 340, 341, 475, 485–497 Garveyism, 485–497, 498n9, 498n11 Gathogo, Julius, 450, 572–574 Gatu, John, 190 Gebre Meskel Lalibela, King, 405 Geiseric, 388 Gelawdewos, 73, 74 Genadendal, 258 George, David, 223 German Lutherans, 471 Germany, 110, 230, 241–244, 290, 292, 294, 296–298, 321, 326, 358n2, 366, 416, 587, 648, 669, 670, 673, 677 Ggaba Pastoral Institute, 56 Ghana, 13, 86, 91, 100, 182, 197, 240, 243, 305, 316, 328, 433, 447, 467, 521, 529, 552, 625–640, 645–654, 656, 657, 659–662, 663n1, 663n3, 663n5, 668, 670, 671, 673 Ghebra-Mika’el of Gondar, 275 Gifford, Paul, 168, 172, 550, 553, 554, 559, 597, 599, 678 Gilroy, Paul, 486 Girardon, Abbe, 280 Glennie, Robert, 215 Glerup, Michael, 103 Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON), 528 Global North, 550, 588, 617 Global South, 162, 528, 546n3, 550, 647, 667 Gold Coast, 13, 76, 78, 197, 226, 228, 230, 241, 283, 290, 305, 316, 371, 467, 470, 476, 487, 498n11, 626, 628–630, 637, 638 Golomski, Casey, 570 Gordon, James, 283

690 

INDEX

Gornik, Mark, 84, 85, 91 Graham, Billy, 675 Gray, Richard, 61, 146, 201, 222, 270, 436 Greek Orthodox Church, 475 Grenfell, George, 214, 215 Griffith, Patrick, 273, 418 Grove, Charles P., 13 Gulbrandsen, Ornulf, 629 Guti, Ezekiel, 657 Gwajima, Josephat, 612 H Hackett, Rosalind, 84 Hadrianus, Pius, 273 Hagee, John, 675 Hagin, Kenneth, 602, 675 Hahn, Hugo, 244 Haiti, 222, 225, 304 Al-Hakim, 75 Halévy, Elie, 594 Hamitic Myth, 21, 23 Hanciles, Jehu, 84, 190, 211, 241, 588 Hansen, “Auntie Lydia,” 645 Harden, Doreen Mary, 84 Harris, William Wadé, 180, 185, 490, 496 Harvard Divinity School, 99 Hastings, Adrian, 53–64, 84, 98, 99, 199, 276, 278, 279, 284, 289, 322, 323, 550, 551, 553, 555, 556 Hausa, 114, 117, 366, 368, 626 Haymanot, Takla, 275, 406 Hellenistic Mediterranean, 88 Hemans, James, 210 Henningsen, Anne Folke, 419 Henry, William, 313 Herskovits Award, 109 Hetherwick, Alexander, 437 Hezmalhalch, Thomas, 657 Hilderic, 390 Himyarites, 405 Hirth, Bishop Jean-Joseph, 325 HIV/AIDS, 554, 560, 574, 602 Hobbes, Thomas, 110 Hobsbawn, Eric, 137 Hodgson, Marshall, 9

Holland, 78, 358n2 Homosexuality, 63, 528, 557, 662 Hopkins, Samuel, 226 Horn of Africa, 406–408, 558 Horner, Antoine, 276, 279, 286n18 Horton, James Africanus, 6, 185 Horton, Robin, 131, 429 Howard, Thomas C., 315 Huddleston, Trevor, 128, 133, 265, 520 Hume, David, 672 Huneric, 390 Hunt, Nancy Rose, 354, 369, 429, 440, 602 Huntington, Samuel, 557 I Iconoclasm, 134 Idahosa, Benson, 657 Idowu, Bolaji, 39–41, 44, 47 Ifá, 114, 118, 120, 364 Igbo religion, 167 Igunnu, 116 Ijebu, 113, 119 Iliffe, John, 127, 297, 554 Immaculate Heart of Mary, 269, 281 India, 89, 193, 195, 282, 290, 356, 366, 400 International African Association, 277 International Association for Mission Studies (IAMS), 86 International Missionary Council (IMC), 340, 342, 357 Ireland, 285, 527 Isan-Enim Bolana, 210 Isichei, Elisabeth, 67–80, 222, 227, 282, 284, 550 Islam, 19, 23, 62, 69, 72–74, 97–99, 101, 103, 104, 109, 113, 114, 117, 119, 131, 185, 194, 195, 212, 216, 229, 230, 256, 277, 278, 295, 297, 322, 324, 325, 337, 338, 361–371, 393, 409, 440, 479, 526, 541, 594, 604, 628, 632, 635 Israel, 406, 407, 488, 618n5, 670 Israel, Adrienne M., 310 Israelites, 70, 71, 495 Italy, 275, 285, 286n8, 323, 546n3, 670 Ivory Coast, 76, 197

 INDEX 

J Jabavu, D.D.T., 316 Jackson, Mahalia, 8, 9, 223 Jacobean England, 163 Jacobs, Donald R., 507 Jacobs, Joseph, 23 Jacobs, Sylvia M., 226, 306, 341, 467 Jakes, T.D., 602, 675 Jakhanke Muslim clerics, 98, 101 Jamaica, 208, 209, 213, 214, 222, 223, 228, 230, 240 Janzen, John, 437, 438 Jaricot, Pauline, 270 Javouhey, Anne Marie, 62, 280, 282 Jeal, Tim, 293 Jenkins, Philip, 87, 88, 102, 163, 550 Jerusalem, 23, 28, 116, 528, 584 Jesuits, 48n15, 61, 181, 194–196, 198, 200, 202, 203, 269, 272, 274, 275, 281, 285, 296, 417, 431, 551, 556 Jihad, 72, 98, 104, 114, 117, 365, 368 Johnson, James ‘Holy, 184, 188, 229, 467, 468, 478 Johnson, Obadiah, 185 Johnson, Samuel, 111 Jolivet, Bishop Charles, 274 Jonas, Simon, 525 Jones, Thomas Jesse, 315, 316, 340–342, 345 Jos, 60 Joseph, Signor, 198 Joubert, Leonard, 279 Joubert, Leopold, 271 K Kagbrese V, Pimampim Yaw, 637, 639 Kaggwa, Apolo, 186, 188 Kaleb, King, 405 Kalu, Ogbu, 7, 47, 101, 161–173, 179, 187, 231, 463, 519, 529 Kalusa, Walima, 186, 434 Kamba culture, 38 Kambas, 38, 41, 42 Kampala, 56, 213, 505, 507, 510, 550 Kanamuzeyi, Yona, 59 Kano Eye Hospital, 344 Kant, Immanuel, 672 Kataliko, Emmanuel, 556

691

Kato, Byang, 44, 50n52 Katongole, Emmanuel, 553, 556, 558 Keane, Webb, 668 Kelly, John, 281 Kemmer, Moses Amamnoyo Adolphus, 525 Kenya, 38, 41, 49n28, 60, 195, 258, 264, 265, 276, 279, 285, 328, 357, 368, 371, 476, 493–495, 504, 506, 512, 513, 552, 555, 581, 593, 612, 615–617, 620n48, 621n56, 621n57, 670 Keswick Conference, 505, 513 Khoi, 257–260 Kiimba, Valesi Mbandi, 38 Kikuyu Independent School Association (KISA), 494 Kikuyu Karing’a Education Association (KKEA), 494 Kimambo, Isaria, 131 Kimbangu, Simon, 214, 438, 489, 490, 543 Kimpasi, 432 King, Kenneth, 316, 339–342 King, Martin Luther, 8, 418, 419, 662 King Afonso l, 5 King Alvaro II, 200 Kingdom of Kongo, 181, 194, 199, 312, 322, 431 King Joao lll, 5 King Leopold, 277 King Mutesa, 185 King Solomon, 70, 404, 406 Kipalapala Major Seminary, 56 Kitagana, Yohana, 57 Kitching, A. L., 189 Kivebulaya, Apolo, 57, 186, 212, 213 Kivengere, Festo, 512, 513 Kiwanuka, Joseph, 54, 55, 62, 551 Knoblecher, Ignatius, 272 Knox, John, 20, 21, 215 Kobès, Aloysius, 281 Kollman, Paul, 171, 271, 279, 537, 538, 555 Kongo, 5, 63, 181, 194, 197, 199–203, 283, 284, 322, 431, 432, 520, 543, 596, 618n6, 628 Korieh, Chima, 162 Koyi, William, 215, 216

692 

INDEX

Krapf, Ludwig, 244 Krotoa/Eva, 256 Kuba, 312, 313, 319n40 Kumuyi, Pastor William Folorunsho, 675 Kushite kingdom, 400, 401 Kushite territory, 400 Kuwait, 670 Kwakye, Frances, 651, 663n1 Kwayisi-Darkwah, Fred, 645 L Lactantius, 377, 381 Lake, John G., 134, 657 Lake Nyassa/Lake Malawi, 188 Lake Victoria, 212, 278, 279, 295, 504 Lamont, Donal, 556 Landau, Paul, 228, 415, 421, 423, 520 Lapsley, Samuel, 312 Laroui, Abdullah, 378 Larsen, Lars, 415, 420, 423, 424 Larsen, Martha, 418, 423 Latin America, 181, 306, 513, 542, 671 Latin Christianity, 25, 389 Lausanne International Congress on World Evangelization, 190 Laval, Jacques, 276 Lavigerie, Charles, 271–273, 277, 278, 284, 323 Lawrence, Emily, 450, 451 Le Vavasseur, Frédéric, 276 Lebanon, 670 Lebbe, Vincent, 54, 55 Lenshina, Alice, 63, 571, 573 LGBTQ, 557, 558 Liberated Africans, 350 Liberia, 20, 22, 102, 105, 187, 225, 227, 228, 230, 241, 281, 283, 305, 307–310, 467, 487, 488, 491, 498n26, 557, 671 Libermann, François, 323, 330n2 Libermann, Jacob, 269, 276, 280–282 Lisbon, 197, 199, 264, 322 Livingstone, David, 48n17, 180, 185, 197, 229, 231, 244, 277, 289, 290, 292, 293, 298, 349, 351, 363, 521, 629 Locke, John, 110

London Missionary Society (LMS), 181, 183, 189, 210, 231, 244, 258–261, 290, 297, 352 Lonsdale, John, 127, 294 Lorber, Father, 283 Lotin-Same, Adolf, 489 Louis XIV, 197 Loupias, Paulin, 326 Lourdel, Simon, 278 Lourenço, Gregorio, 198 Lozi Kingdom, 472 Lucas, Vincent, 133 Luganda, 55, 186, 506 Lugard, Frederick, 151, 294–297, 337, 338, 365 Lugard, Lord, 114, 355 Lumpa Church, 63 Luther, Martin, 8, 418, 419, 583 Luthuli, Albert, 265 Luwum, Janani, 59, 512 Lwanga, Charles, 278 Lyenga, Daudi, 183 M MacKenzie, John, 416 MacMaster, Ricard K., 507 Madagascar, 49n28, 210, 274, 297, 329, 447, 450–452, 454, 583 Maghreb, the, 364, 377–379, 383, 387, 390, 393 Maître, Charles, 489 Majeke, Nosipho, 419 Makerere University, 37–42, 49n27, 49n37, 56, 500n43 Makiwane, Elijah, 215 Makoni American Methodism, 136 Makoni District, 128, 129, 133, 136 Makouria, 403 Malawi, 49n28, 188, 215–216, 264, 265, 298, 341, 437, 493, 524, 573 Malaya, 53 Mali, 329, 369 Malukeke, Tinyiko, 165 Malula, Joseph, 551 Mandela, Nelson, 265 Mang’anja people, 186 Mani Vunda, 200

 INDEX 

Manicaland, 137 Manyeruke, Machanic, 647, 654, 655, 657, 658, 663n7 Maranke, Johanna, 134 Marchand, Théodore Paul, 327, 489 Marshall, Howard, 85 Marti, Karl, 23 Martin, David, 594, 604 Martyrdom, 54, 59, 73, 378–380, 385, 386 Maruammakoma, Hilarion, 279 Marxist communism, 549, 553 Masowe, Johanna, 134 Massaja, Capuchin Guglielmo, 275, 276 Matabeleland, 136 Matalomey, King, 406 Mathenjwaze, 418 Mattingly, David, 378, 385 Mau Man, 60 Mau Mau, 190, 265, 357, 510, 512 Maupoint, Armand, 276 Maxwell, John, 602 Mazrui, Ali, 41 Mbeki, Thabo, 632 Mbiti, John, 37–47, 130, 581–584, 627 McCauley, Vincent, 552 McCracken, John, 127, 128, 138, 437 McDonald, Maryon, 111 McGregor, JoAnn, 136 McGuire, George, 475, 492, 493 McKinnon, Edward, 296 Mecca, 23, 41, 72, 367, 599 Méjan, François, 329 Mendes, Alphonsus, 195 Merrick, Joseph, 213, 214 Mexico, 225 Meyer, Joyce, 602 Miaphysite, 402 Mikaʾeyl, Abba, 407 Milingo, Emmanuel, 553 Milman, Henry, 25 Missionaries of Africa, 269, 271, 273, 277, 278, 285, 323 Missionary Sisters of Our Lady of Africa, 269, 271 Mizeki, Bernard, 180 Mngunana, Shadrach, 215 Moʾa, Iyasus, 406 Modéran, Yves, 378, 388

693

Mohammed, Prophet of Islam, 72 Mohenu, Paolo, 240 Mokone, M.M., 189, 308, 471, 472, 479, 491, 497 Monsengwo, Laurent, 555 Moody, Dwight L., 655 Moon, Daewon, 506 Moore, George F., 23, 439 Moravian Brethren, 241 Moravian Missionary Society, 257 More, Hannah, 181 Moreau, Father, 283 Moses the Black, 400, 401 Moshoeshoe, King, 582 Mound of Beatitudes, 28 Mount Kilimanjaro, 183, 279, 285 Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministry (MFM), 597, 677 Moussa, Pierre, 281 Mozambique, 60, 195, 196, 204n7, 256, 264, 265, 270, 274, 298, 322, 329, 496, 554, 556 Mpande, 414 Mphamba, John Mansell, 493 Mqoboli, E. J., 474 Mtimkulu, Abner S., 474 Mudimbe, V. Y., 101, 478, 668 Mugabe, Robert, 63, 265, 556 Mugambi, Jesse, 38, 165 Mukasa, Ham, 185 Mumba, Levi, 435 Munroe, Miles, 602 Munumkum II, Nana, 633, 634 Munzihirwa, Christophe, 556 Mupunzagutu, Negomo, 196 Murat, Father, 283 Muzorewa, Abel, 265, 658 Mwana Leza movement, 436 Mwaura, Philomena Njeri, 586 Mwene Kongo Mvemba a Nzinga, 5 Mwene Mutapa, 196 Mzimba, Mpambani, 215 Mzimba, P. J., 471, 472 N Naipaul, V. S., 41 Nairobi, 38, 56, 494, 599, 619n39, 621n57

694 

INDEX

Nationalism, 41, 62, 102, 105, 127–130, 134, 136, 138, 139n5, 144, 145, 147–150, 164, 167, 171, 217, 242, 306, 311, 314, 335, 357, 420, 465, 478, 523, 549, 553, 630 Naude, Beyers, 520 Nazareth, Peter, 41 Nazareth Baptist Church, 543 Ncgayiya, Henry Reed, 474 Negro history, 22 Negro World, 341, 475, 487–489, 492–496, 498n11 Neill, Stephen, 56 Netherlands, 54, 241, 285, 670 Netherlands Missionary Society (NZG), 244, 245 New Testament, 24, 25, 38, 39, 43, 90, 217, 399, 542, 582, 584, 613 New Zealand, 108 Ngaangi, Samuel Mutuvi, 38 Ngidi, Mbiyana, 414, 415, 418, 421, 423 Ngqika, Chief, 261 Nguema, Macías, 555 Nicene Canons, 403 Niger Coast Protectorate, 188 Niger Delta, 187, 468, 524, 525, 527 Niger Delta Pastorate, 229, 468 Nigeria, 39, 47n3, 49n28, 60, 68, 77, 109–112, 114, 115, 122, 143, 144, 146–152, 154, 162, 163, 169, 184, 211, 230, 241, 294, 296, 328, 337–339, 351, 364, 366, 371, 447, 454, 487, 489, 498n11, 521–530, 550, 556, 558, 585, 587, 588, 620n55, 627, 656, 657, 668, 670, 671, 677, 679n2 Nigerian civil war, 84, 529 Nkrumah, Kwame, 316 Nkuwu, Nzinga a, 431 Nkwera, Felicien, 553 Nobadia, 401, 403 Nolan, Albert, 519, 556 Noll, Mark, 88, 507 Norris, Frederick, 88, 94n16 North Africa, 25, 222, 377–379, 381, 382, 387, 391, 392, 399, 409 North America, 56, 100, 105, 108, 162, 168, 172, 182, 208, 223, 225–227,

413, 416, 417, 463, 510, 513, 587, 588, 602, 646, 668–671, 673, 674, 677 North American missionaries, 100, 208, 467 Norwegian Mission Society (NMS), 414, 423, 424 Nova Scotia, 79, 87, 208, 209, 223 Nsimbambi, Simeon, 505 Ntintili, Mapassa, 215 Ntsikana, 215, 260, 261 Nubia, 399–409 Nupe, 116, 151 Nxele, 260, 261, 618n6 Nyabadza family, 128 Nyagumbo, Maurice, 129 Nyandoro, George, 129 Nyasaland, 127, 231, 264, 265, 437, 472, 492, 493, 495, 496, 498n11, 500n51 Nyirenda, Tomo, 436 Nzamujo, Godfrey, 558 Nzemaland, 638 Nzinga, Mvemba, 5, 199, 431 O Obafemi Awolowo University, 109 Obama, Barack Hussein, 8 Oblates of Mary Immaculate, 269, 273 Oculi, Okello, 41 Odero, Ezekiel, 616 Odiyoye, Mercy Amba, 568 Ogungbile, David, 669, 677 Ohrwalder, Joseph, 273 Ojo, Matthews, 168, 667, 671, 678 Oke, Segun, 110 Old Testament, 24, 25, 45, 71, 184, 543, 654 Oliver, Roland, 108, 146 Olókun, 116 Olukoya, Daniel, 597–599, 603, 677 Optatus, 382, 383, 386 Orabator, Fr., 61 Orientalism, 25 Orobator, Agbonkhianmeghe E., 48n15, 550, 551, 554 Orombi, Henry Luke, 513 Orpheus, 117

 INDEX 

Orthodox, 21, 41, 60, 62, 75, 87, 112, 122, 243, 260, 356, 383, 387, 392, 475, 519, 525, 537, 539, 541, 585 Orthodox Christians, 70, 119, 243, 270, 381–382, 391, 540 Osteen, Joel, 602, 675 Otabil, Mensah, 648, 649, 660 Overseas Ministries Study Center (OMSC), 85, 88, 100, 103, 663n8 P Paerl, Jan, 257 Paez, Pedro, 195 Pakistan, 670 Palestine, 22, 24 Pan Africa Christian (PAC) University, 615, 620n55 Pan-African, 184, 499n42, 602 Pan-Africanism, 499n42 Pan-African Movement, 465, 489 Paris Mission, 183, 244 Parrinder, Geoffrey, 39, 42, 627 p’Bitek, Okot, 41, 44, 627 Peel, J.D.Y., 107–122, 133, 212, 217, 227, 230, 364, 417, 434, 637 Peel, John, 63, 216 Pentecostal Christianity, 631, 632, 640 Pentecostalism, 7, 46, 132, 161–168, 172, 173, 182, 217, 439, 527, 543–544, 580, 587, 588, 604, 609, 612, 613, 616–618, 619n36, 620n48, 620n49, 625, 626, 631–633, 638, 671, 674 Persian Empire, 403 Peters, Carl, 292, 299 Peters, Thomas, 223 Peterson, Derek, 503, 508, 511, 512 Petros, Walatta, 408, 409 Pew Charitable Trusts, 100, 647 Phelps Stokes Fund, 305, 315, 339–343 Philip, John, 189, 259, 261, 265, 290, 520 Phipps, William E., 232, 312 Pindar, Dennis, 281 Pinnock, Francis, 213, 214 Pinnock, John, 214 Plaatje, Sol, 245, 246 Platvoet, Jan, 627

695

Ploermel Brothers, 280 Po, Fernando, 213, 214, 228 Poland, 285 Polygamy, 57, 60, 63, 118, 196, 356, 358n3, 369, 432, 456, 571, 597 Pope Gregory XV, 270, 322–323 Pope Pius XI, 55, 328 Pope Pius XII, 327, 328 Portugal, 5, 10, 60, 73, 78, 194, 197, 198, 224, 265, 283, 284, 290, 294, 298, 322, 329 Prempeh I, 629, 630 Presbyterian, 264 Presbyterian Board of Missions, 20 Presbyterian orthodoxy, 21 Presbytery of West Africa, 21 Prevost, Elizabeth, 343, 353, 354, 356, 445, 446, 450 Price, Fred, 602 Prince George, 403 Prince of Wales College, 316 Princeton Theological Seminary, 161 Propaganda Fide, 54, 194, 197, 270, 272, 273, 277, 281, 283, 285, 323, 330n1 Proselytization, 2, 5, 289, 338, 530, 630, 675 Protestant Christians, 3, 333, 530 Protten, Christian, 181 Putin, Vladimir, 676 Q Qatar, 670 Quaker, 222, 223 Quaque, Philip, 181, 226 Quasce, Bakhita, 273 Queen of Sheba, 404, 406 Queen Victoria, 217 Quodvultdeus, 388 R Ranger, Terence, 127–139, 179, 429, 435, 436, 472, 473, 519, 520 Read, James, 258, 259, 261 Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), 603, 617, 620n55, 621n67, 670, 674–677, 679n2

696 

INDEX

Red Sea, 401, 402, 404, 405 Reneau, Ingrid, 91, 95n30 Republic of Congo, 49n28, 68, 77, 199, 277, 284, 540, 555 Rhenish missionary, 244 Rhodes, Cecil, 263, 264, 292, 295, 298 Righet, Matta, 271 Rio Pongas mission, 228 Robben Island, 256, 261 Robert, Dana, 100, 186, 352–354, 357, 419 Robins, Catherine, 507 Robinson, Ronald, 289 Roman Empire, 103, 402, 403, 409 Roman imperialism, 378 Roper, Moses, 225 Roscoe, John, 186 Roxborogh, John, 84 Royal African Society, 18 Rubadiri, David, 41 Rucyahana, John, 513 Rudahigwa, 326 Ruganda, John, 41 Rusere, Gatsi, 196 Russia, 589, 670, 672, 676 Russian Orthodoxy, 536 Rutagambwa, Laurean Cardinal, 551 Rwanda, 49n28, 272, 277, 285, 325, 326, 328, 504–506, 513, 541, 551–555, 557, 604, 611 Rwanda genocide, 557 S St. James United Methodist church, 655 St. Thomas, 20 Salama, Abuna, 275 Salazar, António de Oliveira, 60, 264, 298 Salazar dictatorship, 264 Salfey, James Challa, 232 Salvation Army, 654 Samkange, Grace, 138 Samuila, Inusa, 367 Sangaré, Luc, 329 Sanneh, Lamin, 8, 47, 84, 97–105, 152, 163, 212, 221, 228, 358n4, 419, 468, 526, 618n5, 628, 647

Santo, Luis do Espirito, 196 São Tomé, 77, 78, 197, 198, 200, 280 Sarpong, Peter, 552, 662 Saturninus, 379 Savelle, Jerry, 602 Scharpe, Philip J., 85 Schmidt, Georg, 257, 258 Schomburg, Arturo, 306 Schön, Johannes, 244 Schreiner, Gottlob, 244 Schumaker, Lyn, 354 Scotland, 84, 85, 230, 416 Scott, David Clement, 186, 188 Scottish Presbyterians, 230, 471 Sébire, Albert, 324 Secularization, 11, 478, 526, 667 Seidu Daanaa, Henry, 634 Seke Reserve, 128 Senegal, 62, 197, 198, 244, 250n16, 280–282, 324, 327, 329, 366, 489, 498n11 Seraphim Church, 121, 587, 588 Sereer, 324 Sessing, Jakob, 244 Seton, Rosemary, 86 Seventh-Day Adventist Mission, 496 Severus, Emperor Alexander, 117 Severus, Septimius, 379 Seyon, Fre, 407 Shaka Zulu, 414 Shakespeare, William, 55 Sharkey, Heather, 361, 371, 453 Sharp, Granville, 223 Shaw, Mabel, 356 Shembe, Isaiah, 543 Shenk, Wilbert, 84, 465, 522 Shenouda III, Patriarch, 558 Sheppard, Lucy Gantt, 313 Sheppard, William Henry, 305, 312–314 Shepstone, Theophilus, 262, 414 Shona people, 129, 652 Sierra Leone, 5, 19, 20, 28, 49n28, 79, 84, 98, 102, 105, 147–149, 151, 152, 154, 180, 187, 188, 198, 208–211, 217, 226, 228, 230, 241, 244, 282, 290, 294, 305, 307, 309, 341, 350, 352, 363–365, 466, 467, 487, 521–524, 557 Silk, Mark, 675

 INDEX 

Sisters of Saint Joseph of Cluny, 269, 275, 280, 284 Sixtus IV, Pope, 194 Skinner, Elliott P., 307 Slave Coast, 76 Slavery, 2, 20, 27, 79, 105, 149, 180, 181, 187, 209, 221–226, 229, 232, 233, 261, 272, 290, 293, 298, 310, 350, 363–365, 368, 369, 521, 595, 654 Slessor, Mary, 180, 184, 185, 188, 351 Smalley, Martha, 84, 86 SMA missionaries, 283 Smith, Amanda Berry, 305, 310, 311, 313 Smith, John, 489 Smith, Professor [William] Robertson, 23 Societe des Auxiliaires des Mission (SAM), 54 Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 223 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), 226, 449, 450, 521 Society of African Missions (SMA), 181, 269, 280, 282, 283, 323 Society of Jesus, 181 Soga, Tiyo, 179, 217, 230 Sokoto, 224, 337 Solomonic Dynasty, 406, 407, 409 Ṣọ̀npọ̀nná, 116 Soothill, Jane, 171 Sorur, Daniel Deng Farim, 273 South Africa, 44, 47, 60, 100, 153, 169, 181, 183, 189, 207, 210, 215, 217, 230, 231, 241, 245, 256, 261, 263–265, 273, 274, 290, 292, 295, 298, 304, 308, 309, 328, 339, 351, 357, 362, 363, 424, 471–477, 479, 487, 490–497, 498n9, 499n42, 520, 521, 524, 554, 556, 560, 583–585, 590, 626, 629, 632, 657 South African Native National Congress (SANNC), 474, 479 Southern Africa, 41, 59, 60, 135, 136, 182, 210, 230–231, 273–275, 323, 436, 464, 470–475, 477, 492, 543, 554, 579, 583, 611 Southern Rhodesia, 58, 127, 128, 263–265, 473, 492, 493

697

Soviet Union, 589 Spain, 78, 194, 224, 292, 670 Spartas, Reuben Mukasa, 475, 499n42 Spartas, Reuben Sebanja Mukasa, 493, 494 Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn, 25 Stanley, Henry Morton, 214, 277, 278, 284, 293, 296 Stanton, Hannah, 357 Stokes, Phelps, 315, 343 Strathern, Alan, 628, 629 Streicher, Bishop, 55, 58 Structural Adjustment Policy (SAP), 438, 668 Sub-Saharan Africa, 41, 53, 75, 169, 193, 207, 210, 221, 228, 229, 231, 269–271, 277, 281, 294, 352, 355, 357, 465, 574, 583, 607, 628, 648, 654, 662, 668 Sudan, 40, 232, 272, 273, 277, 286n8, 328, 365, 366, 401, 504, 555, 557, 627 Suez Canal, 293, 295 Sufism, 364 Sukuma, 212, 596 Sundkler, Bengt, 131, 200, 271, 273–276, 279, 283, 284, 304, 322, 429, 471, 472, 477, 552, 554–556, 558, 559, 580, 590 Supreme Being, 24, 40, 67, 76 Susenyos, King, 195, 408, 409 Svane, Frederik, 181 Swaggart, Jimmy, 675 Swahili, 363, 365 Switzerland, 38, 43, 243 T Tabernacle, Faith, 121, 529, 530, 656, 657 Taiwo, Olufemi, 180 Tanganyika, 210, 277, 279, 297, 328, 329, 366, 476, 504, 506, 509, 514 Tanzania, 49n28, 56, 127, 128, 132, 133, 195, 212, 271, 272, 277, 283, 285, 352, 436, 437, 537, 550, 552 Tanzanian Anglicanism, 128 Tasie, Godwin, 61 Taylor, Dora, 419

698 

INDEX

Taylor, John Christopher, 525 Taylor, Walter, 244 Tchidimbo, Raymond-Marie, 329 Tempels, Placide, 132, 552 Tennent, Timothy, 84 Tertullian, 26, 47, 377, 379–381, 383, 399, 409 Tewahedo Church, 539 Theroux, Paul, 41 Thiandoum, Father Hyacinthe, 329 Thiong’o, Ngũgı ̃ wa, 41, 49n27 Thompson, Catherine, 240 Thrasamund, King, 390 Tiénou, Tite, 659, 663n8 Tip, Tippu, 214 Touré, Sekou, 329, 555 Trans-Atlantic Protestant Christians, 3 Trans-Sahara trade, 117 Trinity Theological School, 659 Truffet, Benoît, 281 Tucker, Alfred, 212 Turkey, 19, 670 Turner, Bishop Henry McNeal, 6, 226, 305, 308, 309, 311 Tutsi Anglican, 59 Tutu, Desmond, 47, 265, 520 Tychonius, 386 Tzatzoe, Jan, 261, 262 U UAE, 670 Uganda, 38, 49n28, 54–59, 63, 183, 186, 188, 264, 272, 273, 277–280, 285, 325, 329, 351, 353, 357, 452, 454, 475, 476, 493, 494, 499n42, 504–506, 510, 513, 514, 541, 550, 552, 554, 555, 557–559, 670, 678 Ugandan Christianity, 57, 513 Uka, E. M., 162 Ukpabio, Esien, 189 Ukraine, 589, 590, 670–672, 676 Umphumulo, 413–419, 421–423 Underwood, Doug, 675 UNESCO, 156n5 United Kingdom (UK), 38, 128, 161, 168, 216, 469, 513, 522, 587, 588, 590, 617, 621n67, 668–671, 673, 676, 679n2 United Methodist Free Church, 466–467

United Presbyterian Mission (UMP), 184, 189 United States of America, 161, 524, 669, 674, 677 Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), 306, 312, 485–497, 497n4, 498n11, 499n41 University of Aberdeen, 84, 98, 647 University of Ife, 109 University of Nigeria, 84 U.S. Civil War, 229 V Van der Kemp, Johannes, 258, 259, 261, 520 van Meerhoff, Pieter, 256 van Riebeeck, Jan, 256, 265 van Rinsum, Henk, 627 Vandals, 384, 387–392 Vapostori, 130 Vatican, 194, 195, 199, 200, 203, 270, 276, 280, 283, 284, 297, 298, 322, 327–330, 330n1, 540, 553 Venn, Henry, 149–151, 154, 187, 211, 227, 351, 465, 467, 522–524 Victor of Vita, 388–390, 392 Villa Maria, 55, 58 Vita, Donna Beatriz Kimpa, 63, 181, 201, 203, 432, 618n6 Vita, Kimpa, 433 Vogt, Vicar François-Xavier, 327 Voortrekkers, 262, 265 W Wadi al-Natrun, 400 Waliggo, John Mary, 55, 63, 551, 553 Walls, Andrew Finlay, 61, 62, 83–91, 97, 99, 100, 102, 163, 208, 217, 223, 227, 242, 351, 465, 530, 581, 647, 648, 652, 653, 667 Ward, Kevin, 475, 503, 507 Ware II, Otumfuor Opoku, 632 War of Independence, 79, 87, 208, 223 Warri, 68, 77, 78 Washington, Booker T., 6, 315, 316, 470, 473, 524 Wauchope, Isaac Williams, 215 Weber, Max, 114, 594, 597

 INDEX 

Wesley, John, 222, 223 Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society (WMMS), 226 Wesleyan Methodists, 138, 471 West Africa, 28, 89, 98, 101, 102, 104, 105, 146, 148–155, 179, 181, 182, 185, 208–213, 215, 217, 224–226, 228, 230, 241, 291, 295, 304, 307, 309, 310, 322, 362–365, 370, 371, 417, 465–470, 473, 487–490, 513, 524, 560, 611, 626, 631, 656, 659, 675 West African Methodist Church (WAMC), 187, 188 West Central Africa, 430, 431, 433 Western Christianity, 28, 350, 399, 524, 530, 543 Western Civilization, 291, 329, 521, 674 Western Mediterranean Christianity, 3 Western Sahel, 325 West Indies, 168, 306, 492 Westminster Abbey, 289, 293 White, James, 230 Wilberforce, William, 181, 229 Wild-Wood, Emma, 97, 183, 186, 190, 213, 503 Williams, George, 207, 216, 261 Williams, Walter L., 226, 313 Willis, Justin, 422 Wilson, John, 20, 21 Wiredu, Kwasi, 627 Wolof, 324, 366 World Christianity, 27, 84, 85, 87–90, 99, 100, 102, 103, 105, 163, 172, 304, 317, 581 World Missionary Conference, 108, 209, 340 World’s Parliament of Religions, 19 World War I, 132, 169, 182, 242, 299, 300, 326–328, 340, 355, 367, 468, 648 World War II, 148, 182, 255, 306, 327–330, 335, 655 X Xavier, Francis, 195 Xhosa, 113, 180, 215–217, 230, 258, 260–261, 618n6

699

Y Yale Divinity School, 84, 99 Yaʿqob, Zarʿa, 407, 408 Yared, 405 YMCA, 655 Yoruba, 39, 62, 109–111, 113, 114, 116–120, 133, 147, 148, 151, 152, 184, 211, 212, 216, 227, 282, 294, 364, 417, 524–527, 543, 596, 626 Yorubaland, 111, 113, 147, 148, 434, 467, 469 Yoruba Muslims, 212 Yusuf of Macassar, Sheikh, 363 Z Zagwe Dynasty, 405, 406 Zambesi Industrial Mission, 495–496 Zambia, 49n28, 56, 185, 231, 264, 265, 356, 434, 472, 553, 571, 647 Zanzibar, 183, 231, 276, 277, 296, 369, 476 Zanzibari traders, 185 Zimbabwe, 58, 61, 63, 91, 128, 129, 133, 134, 138, 256, 265, 274, 322, 473, 499n39, 556, 582, 646, 647, 649, 651, 652, 654–659, 662, 663n1 Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), 556 Zimbabwean nationalism, 128, 129 Zimmermann, Johannes, 240 Zink, Jesse, 528 Zion, 71, 266, 303, 316, 584, 590, 656 Zion Apostolic Church, 651, 657 Zion City Moria, 583–585 Zionist, 130, 165, 169, 182, 465, 477, 579, 580, 584, 590, 657 Zong, 223 Zulu, 113, 231, 262, 273, 274, 414–419, 421–424, 543, 626 Zulu Mbiyana Congregational Church, 423 Zululand, 414, 415, 422, 423