TWO DIVERSE MAPS

A theme

Two quite different maps can be drawn for the nineteenth-century Christianization process in Africa: one explicit, manifest and official; the other – no less important – related to clan and village involved in the cataclysmic changes which overtook African societies.

The first, the official map, covered ‘mission fields’, consisting of a great

number of mission societies and mission stations, Catholic and Protestant, highly visible centres in the African landscape, with church, school, clinic, farm and printing press, together with staff houses. Such centres represented well-defined missionary programmes. From the station there were regular visits to the surrounding population by the Western missionary and/or the African catechists, by foot, on horse back, by ox cart, or by canoe.

In certain cases the mission station was seen as a point of departure for a strategic plan or dream, to reach farther afield. There were to be established so-called ‘chains’ of mission centres: six of them in a Methodist programme through Transkei designed by William Shaw; a Reformed chain along the south-west Namaqualand coast; or from Natal overland to Ethiopia; or across the continent from Mombasa to Gabon, devised by Johan Ludwig Krapf; or from Gabon to Mombasa, and planned by John Leighton Wilson.

THE CHURCH AT THE KINGS' WAY

The ‘Lacustrines’ – the ethnic communities in western Uganda, along Lake Victoria and Lake Tanganyika – are known because of certain ethnological distinctions between a royal and aristocratic upper class, a minority of some ten per cent of the population and the broad masses of the commoners, the cultivators. Further south, the Fipa and the Bemba fall into the same category. It is realized that the account could profitably have been stretched even further south to the Lozi in south-western Zambia, but there strong links of mission history with southern Africa suggest that this community be treated with the southerners.

Missiologically the entire region is characterized by an exclusive combination of, and competition between, Catholics, the White Fathers and low-church Anglicans (CMS). The exceptions to this pattern are the Congregationalist (LMS) attempt on Lake Tanganyika and further south in Bembaland with, on the Catholic side again the dominating presence of White Fathers, but where the Protestant party consists of Congregationalists and Presbyterians, the latter closely linked with Malawi's ‘Livingstonia’.

This structure – with its social tensions and missiological polarities – continued throughout the colonial period, in some places with feudal characteristics or those of a caste society, and together constituting a highly significant framework for the beginnings of a vital Christian Church.

Until about 1950 the ethnological differentiation was explained by a supposedly Hamitic population theory; according to which early invasions had come from somewhere north, Ethiopia or Egypt and the Middle East.

CATECHISTS AND CATECHUMENS

The catechist

Representative voices bear witness to the role played by catechists in the rapid advance of the Church in this period. ‘The village catechist, with his slender qualifications and very modest pay, is the real hero of the Christian situation in Africa’. A revival in southern Cameroon in 1937 resulted in the opening of four Presbyterian catechist schools, with two-year courses. The men trained there formed the backbone of the Church for a whole generation, doing all the pastoral work except the administration of the sacraments. Catechists played a role in another Presbyterian Church, the Mission Philafricaine in southern Angola. There were two kinds of catechists: those with four to six months' training ‘but not ordained’, and those with three years' training who were ‘ordained as evangelists’. In this Church all the pastors came from this latter category, having been catechists and evangelists, with one year's additional pastoral training beyond their evangelist schooling. In the local communities, catechists were still regarded as leaders.

1. Christianity is an Eastern faith, from Galilee and Judea, very soon reaching the Nile Delta and Egypt and from there speeding west along the coast and south to Nubia and Axum-Ethiopia. At the end of the fifteenth century the faith reached sub-Saharan Africa – Kongo, Mutapa and Mombasa. While Islam came by camel caravan – ‘ships of the desert’ – Christianity arrived by sailing ship: along the coastline and then, by way of canoe along the rivers and the lakes and from the south by ox-waggon, in each case mediated by groups of young African witnesses.

2. The Christian message as a power of motivation from ‘Beyond the Seas’ did not arrive alone. The proclamation of the Gospel was sabotaged by the powers of colonialism and race. The emerging Churches came to be seen as related to a political metropolis and to Western missionary societies. The identification of Western colonialism and Christian mission was even more accentuated by the concept of a ‘national mission’, representing the particular nationality of a colonial-imperial power, while other missions, from other countries and denominations were, presumably, beyond this privileged position.

Another factor was that of race, particularly in South Africa and other territories with a dominating European minority. Relationships between the races, within the Churches as well, came to be decreed by anonymous segregation and by the legal enactments of apartheid.

ZAMBIA

Zambia, or Northern Rhodesia as it was then called, was during the 1920s ‘a poverty-stricken backveld Protectorate which only few people could have identified on the map’. The population was entirely rural, many being involved in fishing on the lakes and along the Luapula and the Zambezi. Enterprising pioneers from Malawi, ‘black Scots’ from the East, became store-keepers in the bush and might sell their commodities on such markets as were springing up in connection with the emerging mines. After the years of Chartered Company rule, a ‘Protectorate’ was established in 1924, and in the 1920s copper was discovered, upon which the conditions and the outlook of the country was totally changed. Towards the end of the 1920s four large mines were being developed on the Copperbelt and at each of them a town soon emerged, with a small European and a large African population, with Ndola the main commercial centre. By the 1950s, 120,000 Africans and some 38,000 Europeans worked in the mines. Migrant labourers in their tens of thousands came from the rural communities of Zambia and Malawi, all coming for the very first time to a mine and to the city.

The Africans working in the mines were a floating population, staying for about a year or, if married, for nearly two years.

INTRODUCTION

A myriad of ethnic communities of differing sizes and complexities existed in East Africa during the nineteenth century. For Church history purposes we can distinguish four areas in the region: the Muslim-dominated island of Zanzibar and its coastal hinterland; the inland peoples, many of whom lived in small-scale societies in bush, savanna and hilly country; the nomadic pastoralists, including the Masai; and the hierarchical kingdoms further into the interior of the continent, close to the Victoria and Tanganyika Lakes – ‘the Church along the Kings’ Way'. This multipartite division facilitates our understanding of the general history of the region during the nineteenth century, and also for its developing religious and Church history map.

Within twenty-five years (1863–88) seven mission societies were established in East Africa. They were all inspired, in different degrees, by the visits and work in the region of two earlier missionaries: Johann Ludvig Krapf and David Livingstone. Krapf travelled extensively in East Africa between the years 1844–53. His vision of a chain of mission stations across Africa, another ‘Apostles Street’, from Rabai on the Indian Ocean coast to Gabon on the Atlantic, stimulated many Protestant mission boards to think in terms of transcontinental strategies. David Livingstone's entreaties for an African Church were on an entirely different scale. A supreme publicist, he caught the imagination of Europe and this popular interest for mission triggered off a missionary ‘scramble’ in Eastern and Central Africa.

SENEGAMBIA

Ma-Ba, the Grand Marabout of Senegal about 1840, was determined to ‘impose Islam on all the infidels in the kingdoms of Senegambia’. In order to achieve his goal he was prepared to use various means, even supporting the claims of Lat-Dyor, the syncretistic Damel (King) of Cayor, the most important kingdom between Dakar and St Louis, the European forts and outposts of the coasts. In comparison with the pressures of Muslim power, the Catholic presence appeared extremely limited. The French missionaries spoke of Senegal or Senegambia but, in fact, they were hardly concerned with much more than the two island towns of St Louis and Gorée, with some 6,000 inhabitants altogether, of whom three-quarters were captives and slaves.

The Catholic faith in these parts of West Africa had to a large measure been integrated with the French colonial presence. After the vicissitudes of revolution and wars, the French were at last able to repossess Gorée in 1817. Wolof and Oualo chiefs were willing to consider French trade, and Colonel Julien Schmaltz the first French governor, built a French port at Dagans. Problems associated with European colonial personnel made the French presence ineffective. In the years 1843–48, no less than eight governors succeeded one another at Gorée! The colonial chaplains, legal representatives of the European' religion, fared little better. Some of them were complacent, playing the supposedly sophisticated role of the worldly chaplain.

THE CATHOLICS AND VATICAN II

The Popes and Africa

The strength of the Roman Catholic Church had always been its solid foundations, its tradition, language, law and liturgy. Then the good Pope Johannes XXIII called the Church to an aggiornamento, and the Church was hit by the greatest spiritual change and challenge, yes, revolution, of the latter part of the twentieth century: Vatican II. To a degree which cannot be fathomed, at least not by a Protestant observer, the local dioceses of the Church in Africa, under African bishops, realized that they were now placed in a completely new situation, standing at the door to the future.

Pope Pius XII showed the way. His role cannot be referred to without mentioning his initiative in 1957, the encyclical Fidei Donum. In his Easter message of 1957 the Pope suggested that bishops in the ‘First World’ send some of their priests to Africa for a certain period. In fact these priests worked on average nine years in Africa, their average age being around fifty years old. In 1982 the following numbers were involved in the Fidei Donum programme: in North Africa thirty-seven, in Black Africa 124, and on Madagascar fourteen, devoted to the following tasks: pastoral service; Catholic Action; schools; and theological seminaries with catechetical training. Examples are known of priests who have served for over thirty years in this capacity, far beyond the retirement age.

‘A bitter pill which the majority of writers on Christianity and missionary activities in Africa should swallow is that they have not been writing African Church History.’ This statement by Professors J. F. Ade Ajayi and E. A. Ayandele must serve as an introductory remark to our Church history of Africa. The two Nigerian scholars developed their point by claiming that hitherto Church history had been written ‘as if the Christian Church were in Africa, but not of Africa’. It stressed the missionary presence while forgetting or neglecting whatever there was of an African initiative, an African dimension of African Church history. The sort of book which my Nigerian colleagues may have had in mind was not least the detailed and lengthy Mission histories, produced in the pre-Independence period and stamped by this fact. Of necessity this implied a view centred in some Western metropolis and in certain mission societies there. This view of Christianization was to treat it as a Western invasion in sub-Saharan Africa. The continent was mapped out according to mission societies and mission fields.

Confronted with the challenge of Professors Ajayi and Ayandele in the 1970s, I was asked to take on the task of writing a Church history of Africa, covering nearly 2,000 years and an entire continent. How could one attempt this? History, I realized is somehow related to the standpoint and experience of the writer.

Explorers of Seas and Souls

Throughout the Middle Ages the Mediterranean Sea – with Rome, Constantinople and Alexandria – marked the core and, to some extent, the horizon of the Christian Church. In 1453 this perspective suddenly changed. An incredulous Christian world heard that the Muslims had taken Constantinople and that the Hagia Sophia had been turned into a mosque.

No nations were more deeply shaken by this news than Portugal and Spain, themselves only recently freed from Muslim control. They therefore became all the more involved when the Pope called for a new crusade against the enemies of Christianity. The small Portuguese nation – at this time no more than 2 million – was looking for a solution and found it in Prince Henry the Navigator, son of King Joao I, who had the vision and the resolve to find a new passage over the seas.

Gone were the times of using the manpower of oarsmen. Technical advances in ship design were experimented with and worked. Sails, sternpost and compass were the answer, and ever more sophisticated shapes and sizes of sails related to longer and finer forms of ‘caravels’ and ‘galleons’. With the discovery of the potential of sailing ships, there were seemingly no limits to what could be attempted and achieved via the seas.

From the Mediterranean to the Atlantic and Indian Oceans and their peoples, the world outlook changed.

FRANCOPHONE WEST AFRICA

The Holy Ghost Fathers arrived first on the coast and established their work along the Atlantic coastline, ever conscious of their concern for the inland to the river Niger bend. But they were not alone. The White Fathers coming from Algeria claimed their rights. They had a reputation for knowing the Sahara, and acquired the preferment of the Propaganda in Rome. They were placed at certain strategic points in the immense, sparsely populated inland.

They were French and were to find that at this particular point in time they had to meet with opposition from the French colonial administration. The mission had great difficulties from the side of the French colonial administration because of the influence in West Africa of the anti-clerical campaign in France 1900–05. These bitter political struggles in France were exported to Africa. Anti-clerical laicization attitudes were carried by the French colonial administration. De Benoist in his rich and valuable book, Église et Pouvoir Colonial au Soudan Français, one of the great Church and State volumes on the colonial period, has shown that while in general the attitudes of the administration were unsympathetic and even hostile – administration and mission were involved in a sort of small war, both parties involved in ‘a dialogue of the deaf’ – there were exceptions attempting human contacts and personal understanding, which on occasion took astonishing forms.

THE COLONIAL STATE

The years 1920 to 1960 are characterized by the transition from a colonial period to that of the Independent African state. Functioning in this context the churches were conditioned, sometimes marked, by this political frame-work. A few brief paragraphs must here serve to indicate, from the point of view of the churches, this signature of the period.

The British

In the 1920s the British established a relationship between administration and population through the system of Indirect Rule, thus ensuring the continued role of the chief. This system had been conceived by Lord Lugard while working in northern Nigeria with emirs and other prominent chiefs. The British administration was to exert its influence through the chiefs, a system that was kept in force until the 1950s. A country which experienced a prominent application of this system was Tanzania. Both Catholics and Protestants had to adapt themselves to the practice of Indirect Rule while it could work out differently depending on whether the chief was Catholic or Protestant: in principle this denominational difference was not supposed to tell but in practice the priest/pastor or missionary found that a Catholic or Protestant chief would react differently to a request for a school and church site according to his denominational affiliation.

The church in nineteenth-century Africa was dominated by the catechist-teacher.

INTRODUCTION

The pre-colonial setting

Adzindzali, people of the river, was the name for the ethnic communities along the Congo waterway. They considered this a name of honour – they were fishermen and proud of it. In their dugout canoes they would move over vast waters along the main river and up and down the many Congo tributaries bringing their catch to the markets, to Likuba or Ntsei or Mushei, centres used over many generations for the exchange of commodities. For ‘the environment of these people which made them fishermen also made them traders’. The Bobangi brought their smoked fish, slaves, pottery and iron implements to a Tio market. They formed their relationship with the Tio to the extent of establishing blood-brotherhood between their chiefs or ‘great men’, thus widening the horizons of each of these two communities. ‘Sharing the waters with non-Tio made them [the Bobangi] more sophisticated and gave them a much broader outlook than that of most of the landlocked agriculturalists.’

Sometimes the Bobangi canoes would take them much further down the river to Kinshasa (soon to be referred to as ‘Stanley Pool’), or up the river towards the Falls. Together with other Congo communities they came to be regarded as ‘middlemen’. For generations they were confronted with the ideas and ambitions of foreigners: to the west, Portuguese, Dutch, French; to the east the Arabs. Portuguese was the trade language of the western coast.