A HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY IN AFRICA: From Antiquity to the Present

Elizabeth Isichei

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Other titles by Elizabeth Isichei:

Political Thinking and Social Experience. Some Christian Interpretations of the Roman Empire, (University of Canterbury Publications, 1964).

Victoria Quakers, (Oxford University Press, 1970).

The Ibo People and the Europeans, (Faber/St Martins Press), 1973.

. A History of the Igbo People, (Macmillan/St Martins Press), 1977.

A History of West Africa since 1800, (Macmillan/Africana), 1977.

Igbo Worlds. An Anthology of Oral History and Historical Descriptions, (Macmillan/Institute for the Study of Human Issues, Philadelphia), 1977.

Entirely for God. A Life of Michael Iwene Tansi, (Macmillan/Cistercian Publications), 1980. Studies in the History of Plateau State, Nigeria, (editor), (Macmillan/Humanities Press), 1981. Varieties of Christian Experience in Nigeria, (editor), (Macmillan), 1981. Editor and author of four chapters. A History of Nigeria, (Longman, 1983).

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First published in Great Britain 199S Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge Holv Trinity Church Marylebone Road London NW1 4DU

© Elizabeth Isichei 1995

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0-281-04764-2

Typeset by Wilmaset Ltd, Birkenhead, Wirral Printed in Great Britain by the Cromwell Press, Melksham, Wilts.

If you will listen, I shall tell you a mystery of simplicity.

Speratus (one of the Scilli martyrs, in ad 180, at his

trial at Carthage).

CONTENTS ^

Acknowledgements viii A Note on Terminology and Chapter Arrangement ix

Prelude 1

1 North African Christianity in Antiquity 13 2 The Churches of the Middle Years c. 1500 to c. 1800 45 3 Mission Renewed 74 4 Southern Africa to c. 1900 98 5 East and East Central Africa to c. 1900 128 6 West Africa to c. 1900 153 7 West Central Africa 183 8 Northern Africa 209 9 East and East Central Africa C. 1900 to C. 1960 228 10 West Africa c. 1900 to c. 1960 264 11 South Africa and Its Neighbours since 1900 299 12 Independent Black Africa since 1960: Church, State, and Society 323

Notes 354 References 41 3 Index 414

This is my first book since taking up a foundation Chair in Religious Studies at the University of Otago, and will appear in the year when it celebrates the 125th anniversary of its foundation. Many of the books and articles cited here were not available in Dunedin. A research grant from the University not only paid for international interloans but enabled me to employ a succession of helpers who, by tracking down the books I needed, gave me more time to read them. My thanks to Juliet Robinson, Marinus La Rooij, and C'hrystal Jaye, and to Judith Brown who compiled the index. The patience and helpfulness of the staff of the University Library's reference department are beyond all praise. My indebtedness to the University goes far beyond this, and the vote of confidence which my appointment represented has lent wings to my work.

My colleagues Malcolm McLean and John Omer-Cooper generously found time to read part of it, as did my son Uche Isichei, an architect now engaged in his own research on Africa. Jenny Murray, one of my oldest friends, read it all. Scholars too numerous to list individually corresponded with me on points of detail.

If the department did not have, in Sandra Lindsay, a wonderfully helpful and efficient secretary, I would not even try to write books while running a university department, and carrying a demanding teaching load.

My father and stepmother, Albert and Jeanne Alio, now well into their eighties, read the manuscript sentence by sentence, and eliminated both infelicities of style and my typing errors. Shirley and A1 Bain continue to be endlessly supportive and hospitable.

My five children, Uche, Katherine, Ben, Caroline, and Frank have been the sunshine of my New Zealand years. The oldest four have grown up and left home. This book is, accordingly, dedicated to my youngest, Frank, who put up with me while I wrote it.

A Note on Terminology and Chapter Arrangement

In earlv drafts of this study, I punctiliously used Bantu prefixes (luGanda, buGanda, baGanda, muGanda). Some who read it felt that it added an unnecessary dimension of complexity for those unfamiliar with the subject matter. I have accordingly adopted the practice of using the root only (Ganda), though occasionally I have retained a prefix. I have, on the whole, used the geographic terminology appropriate for the era I am writing about (German Kamerun, French Cameroun, modern Cameroon). Sometimes I use the more familiar modern place name to refer to an earlier period—Malawi, rather than Nyasaland, for example. Cameroon is part of West Central Africa, but I have also cited some Cameroon material in the chapter on twentieth-centurv West Africa. There is a note on Kongo/Congo/Zaire in chapter 7, n. 2. Because of the length and complexity of the book and its predominantly regional organisation, I have chosen to repeat a few facts and themes, rather than assume they are remembered from several hundred pages earlier!

While every day in the West, roughly 7500 people in effect stop being Christians every day in Africa roughly double that number become Christians . .

The expansion of Christianity in twentieth-century Africa has been so dramatic that it has been called 'the fourth great age of Christian expansion.'² According to much-quoted, if somewhat unreliable, statistics, there were 10 million African Christians in 1900, 143 million in 1970, and there will be 393 million in the year 2000, which would mean that 1 in S of all Christians would be an African.³ There are other estimates and the range of variation reflects the ambiguity and incompleteness of the raw data on which they are based. Much depends on how one defines a Christian, and Africa is full of small, independent churches that have never filed a statistical return.⁴ Kenya has the largest Yearly Meeting of Quakers in the world, outside the United States,⁵ and more Anglicans attend church in Uganda than in England. It is clear that, in the words of one thoughtful scholar,

perhaps one of the two or three most important events in the whole of Church history has occurred … a complete change in the centre of gravity of Christianity, so that the heartlands of the Church are no longer in Europe, decreasingly in North America, but in Latin America, in certain parts of Asia, and … in Africa.⁶

Ahafo, in Ghana, has been called 'a much more predominantly and vigorously Christian area than, for example, the United Kingdom', and the site of a 'Christian ideological triumph'.⁷ There is nothing, in the African context, peculiarly religious about Ahafo. Christianity in Africa is of global significance, and the directions it takes are of importance to Christians everywhere. At the 1974 Roman Synod, Cardinal Joseph-Albert Malula of Zaire said, 'In the past, foreign missionaries Christianized Africa. Today the Christians of Africa are invited to Africanize Christianity'.⁸

In the first Christian centuries, northern Africa provided some of the keenest intellects and most influential apologists in Christendom. Origen was an Egyptian from Alexandria, and Tertullian and Augustine came from the

Maghrib. Egypt's gnostics and North Africa's Donatists grappled with fundamental problems that still perplex the Christian. How do we explain evil and suffering? Is the Church a gathered remnant of the Just, or are the wheats and tares separable only in eternity? At the end of the third century ad, the eastern Maghrib was one of perhaps three places in the world where Christians were in a majority; the others were Armenia and modern Turkey.

The African Christianity of antiquity was largely, but not wholly, lost. The flourishing churches of North Africa and Nubia, at different points in time, gave way to Islam. Christianity in Egypt survived, though as the faith of a minority. Ethiopia preserved its national adherence to Christianity, in a highly distinctive form, through many centuries of peril and threat, though the Christian kingdom was much smaller than the modern state of the same name. To twentieth-century African Christians, its history seemed a fulfilment of the promise of the psalmist, 'Princes shall come out of Egypt, Ethiopia shall stretch forth her hands to God'.⁹

The next phase of encounter with Christianity—if we exclude the fruitless attempts to convert the Muslims of northern Africa—extends from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. A few African societies were introduced to Christianity, usually in a Catholic and Portuguese form. Christian court civilizations were established in the Kongo Kingdom, and in Warri in the western Niger Delta. The former survived, in a deeply laicized and indigenized form. The latter endured for two centuries and ultimately died out.

There were other enclaves of Christian influence at various points on the West African coast and in the Zambezi valley. It transformed individual lives, but remained marginal to mainstream African cultures. In the atypical context of originally uninhabited islands, the Cape Verdes and Sao Thome, Christianity was part of a new Luso-African culture.

The Reformation churches showed curiously little interest in the missionary enterprise. All this changed in the late eighteenth century, as a result of the Evangelical revival. There was a great proliferation of Protestant missionary societies; the Catholics followed later, and on a smaller scale.

The majority of African Christians have remained in the older churches, gradually creating their own maps of reality, interpreting their religion in terms of their own Old Testament of inherited culture. It has been said that the true encounter between Christianity and traditional religion takes place in the heart of African Christians. For many years, it has been common for movements of vigorous autonomy to develop within mission churches. The Revival in East Africa and Zaire, from the 1930s on, is a well-known example of this, as are the powerful women's movements called Rukwadzano in Zimbabwe, and Manyano in South Africa. Since independence, there has been a rapid Africanization of leadership, and of many dimensions of Church praxis. The Zaire Rite, submitted for the approval of Rome in 1983, is a well-known example of a much more extensive process.¹⁰ Once, missionaries insisted on biblical or saints' names for converts; it is now common for African Christians to give their children traditional names, chosen for their congruity with their beliefs, such as Uchechukwuka, God's Wisdom is supreme, Olisaemeka, the Lord has done well, Chinye, God gives, or Chukwubuike, God is my strength.¹¹

The so-called African or Ethiopian churches, founded between 1880 and 1920, established new religious organizations that were run by Africans, but differed only in detail from the mission churches from which they had separated themselves. In several instances, they sought and obtained affiliation either to black American churches, or to Greek Orthodoxy. Generally, they are in a state of relative, and sometimes absolute, decline, overtaken by an immense proliferation of 'prophetic' or Zionist churches. It is not easy to explain the geographic distribution of the prophetic churches. They proliferate in Kenya, but are of minor importance in Tanzania.¹² They abound in South Africa, where their appeal especially is to the poor and dispossessed, and in Nigeria, where their members include lawyers, doctors, and university teachers. Some of their founding prophets, such as Harris and Kimbangu, have had a success in winning converts that no mission church in Africa has ever equalled. The Apostles of John Maranke have branches in seven countries, but many prophetic churches are limited to a single congregation. Small churches, like small ethnic groups, tend to slip through the cracks of academic analysis.

With a few exceptions, such as Buganda and the Creole community in Sierra Leone, only a handful of people became Christians in the nineteenth century. Their numbers expanded vastly in the twentieth, largely through the impact of mission schools and the economic benefits of education in the colonial situation. In many areas, such as central Nigeria, Christianity has expanded still more vigorously since independence.

Contemporary Christian intellectuals in Africa are much preoccupied with inculturation and the search for identity. This, in part, is a reaction against white racism in the past, but it is likely that inculturation from above is less effective than the prophetic churches' inculturation from below.

The quest for autonomy has many practical implications. Often, the older churches are torn between the exigencies of their members' poverty and their desire for real independence. In theory, but not in practice, they supported a call for a moratorium on external aid. The prophetic churches are self-supporting, and always have been. To some, the quest for inculturation has become a form of false consciousness. It is always easier to fight yesterday's battles, and the most urgent and acute challenge to the Christian conscience lies in poverty. In South Africa, being poor is largely, though not entirely, synonymous with being black. The division between rich and poor Christians though is, on the one hand, global, and, on the other, mirrored in the microcosm of many independent African states. A radicalized liberation or 'contextual' theology is strongly developed in South Africa, but conspicuous by its absence elsewhere. Critics have expressed anxiety about the spread of a very different response to poverty, that of a cult of prosperity, associated with American tele-evangelism,¹³ which seems very far removed from the Sermon on the Mount.

Wherever Christianity is professed, there is a constant dialectic arising from its relationship with the cultural presuppositions and practices of the cultures where it is located. Christianity came to sub-Saharan Africa in European cultural packaging, and contextualization, as we have seen, has been a major concern of Africa's theologians. However, clearly there is a point where contextualization becomes syncretism, and Christian content is eroded, losing 'the conforming of a Church's life to standards outside itself, standards which may cut across everyone's culture pattern. . . ,'¹⁴ In 1961, the World Council of Churches defined a criterion for Christian churches seeking membership: if they accept 'Our Lord Jesus Christ as God and Saviour' and are ready 'to fulfil together their common calling to the glory of one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit'.¹⁵ It is a definition that would exclude the incumbents of many pulpits in the Western world.

When Jesus or Mary join the pantheon of spirits in Cwezi possession cults, or peasants turn Mulele into a saviour/magician, we have clearly moved a long way from mainstream Christianity. One obvious line of demarcation is to exclude cults where the African prophet becomes a saviour, similar to Jesus. However, if Christianity centres on belief in a resurrected Lord, Kimbangu was much more orthodox than Schweitzer.

A number of distinguished Africanists have reflected on the nature of syncretism, and its meaning in the African situation. Shorter suggests that it is radically different from dialogue. 'Syncretism is the absence of dialogue, or perhaps, the failure of dialogue; to avoid it there must be a continuous and consistent exchange of meanings.'¹⁶ Peel points out the ambiguity of the word itself:

if it means 'a mixing of ideas and practices from different sources' it is by no means peculiarly African. For no adherent of the world religions anywhere derives all the furniture of his mind from his religion. Man's [sic] beliefs are nearly always syncretistic, in that their content shifts in response to new experiences, and that some attempt is made to harmonize old and new . . ,¹⁷

'Syncretism occurs', writes the Cameroonian Eboussi Boulaga, 'where collections of objects, rites or institutions are transmitted—where the future is rejected in the name of a settled acquisition, which one has no desire to modify or lose.'¹⁸

Many of the prophetic churches have a profoundly biblical religion, differing from the older churches in that they reclaim many aspects of Christianity that have become eroded or forgotten in much western praxis, such as guidance through dreams and visions, miraculous healings, prayer that expects immediate and concrete answers, and often, Old Testament taboos.

Even the most fundamentalist Christians, in the West and elsewhere, are selective in the biblical texts they regard as important. A Zambian Anglican, who became a Seventh Day Adventist, said:

When I asked them about the Bible they would not give me true answers. I was very much puzzled about Daniel and Revelation. But they said, 'These are only dreams. You need not read those books. They are very hard and nobody can understand those books. It is better to read the Gospel'. But there was a great demand in my mind to understand these.¹⁹

Most observers, including Christians as orthodox as Harold Turner, applaud the Zionist and Aladura churches as deeply inculturated authentic forms of African Christianity. Not all African Christians agree. There has been a tendency to glorify the Independent Churches', writes Ogbu Kalu. 'Most of them are neo-pagan, engaged in non-Christian rituals.'²⁰ All this can best be understood in terms of a wider debate, which seeks to reconcile the historically exclusivist claims of Christianity with the desire to show equal deference to other faith traditions. 'There seems no consistent theological way to relativise and yet to assert our own symbols.'²¹ To its critics, religious pluralism erodes the basic content of faith traditions, for it is the essence of the Religions of the Book, though not of 'traditional' religions, that they make exclusive truth claims.²²

Religious meanings are changed, nuanced, eroded by journeys through time as well as by journeys through cultures. Here, again, there is a division, between those who believe that there is an essential core of Christian beliefs, unchanged by historical circumstance, and those who hold that,' „the world“ is constructed by human perceptions, concerns and interests. „Reality“ therefore, differs from society to society and from age to age. This applies to Christianity too.'²³ This division is made wider by the fact that a great deal which is apparently extraneous tends to be added to the essential core of religious meaning. Religious systems are conservative, creating a fossilized ideal of a time that never was, but is often located in an imaginary early church. Twentieth-centurv Anglicans using the 1662 Prayer Book continued to pray for the Queen, and her Privy Council, rather than the real institutions of later government, Cabinet, Parliament, and Prime Minister. The Vatican is notorious for policies justified and motivated by the desire for consistency with a recent and/or largely invented past.

Sykes, in a thoughtful reflection on these issues writes, 'the contestants are held together by the conviction that the contest has a single origin in a single albeit internally complex performance . . . the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ'.²⁴

'Where world religions become social frameworks, two things must have happened to the old ethnic religion. Firstly it must be eliminated . . . Secondly elements of the old religion are incorporated … A third possibility is that the ethnic religion may survive, attenuated . . ,'²⁵ African Christians have often chosen the first option, burning the images of traditional gods and tearing the masks from cult dancers. However, there is an underlying problem, which greatly complicated relationships between foreign missionaries and African Christians, and it lies in the question - are traditional divinities an illusion, or are they real, but evil? To nineteenth-century missionaries, the spirits of traditional religion were very often real demons. To modern Africanists, this is a good example of white racism, but they did take the spiritual world of the Other seriously, even while condemning it. Modern clerical enthusiasts for spirit possession take it for granted that the spirits have no objective existence and that, therefore, their cults are a form of gestalt therapy.

The great strength of the modern prophetic churches is that they offer deliverance from evil, perceived as witchcraft, and specific spiritual remedies for the multiple afflictions to which we are all heir, but poor Africans more than most.. Emmanuel Milingo, Catholic Archbishop of Lusaka from 1969 to 1982, fully accepted the world of witches and mashave spirits and offered a ministry of healing and exorcism to those so afflicted. He was critical of foreign Christian experts on Africa who did not accept the reality of this spirit world. But, while clearly meeting the needs of many Zambians, he was unacceptable to the authorities in his own church, which removed him from his see.

Milingo attempted to integrate elements of traditional belief with mainstream Catholicism. It is much more common for these beliefs to lead a parallel existence in the same individual. The Nigerian radical, Tai Solarin, makes this point, citing his mother, who, in an electrical storm, would call on the spirit of her grandfather more often than Jesus.²⁶ 'Where world religions become social frameworks, two things must have happened to the old ethnic religion. Firstly it must be eliminated . . . Secondly elements of the old religion are incorporated … A third possibility is that the ethnic religion may survive, attentuated. . . .'²⁷ This kind of inconsistency is not peculiar to Africa. The banking system of the western world would collapse if we all followed the precepts of Jesus about laying up treasure on Earth.

A history of the growth of Christianity easily slides into a form of triumphalism, where local cultures are passive and static. This tendency was for long reinforced by the tendency of anthropologists to seek out cultures as little westernized as possible, and to focus on the 'traditional', even where it was in the process of disappearing. Some twenty-five years ago, there was an energetic reaction against all this, in which the innovation in 'traditional' religions were emphasized, and anthropologists have become much more aware of their assumptions about time.²⁸ In a sense, the changing forms of traditional religion lie outside the scope of this book. However, the increasing importance of the High God in 'traditional' religion, the tendency to identify Chukwu (in Igboland), or Mwari (among the Shona and their neighbours) with the Christian God is apparent. Among the Nyakusa, a Supreme God was introduced into 'traditional' religion between the 1930s and 1950s.²⁹ To

Horton, this is one aspect of the transition from the village world, where local nature or ancestral spirits flourish, to a larger community, where 'universal' religions seem more appropriate. However, it is clear that just as Christianity has been influenced by insights from African cultures, African religions have absorbed intimations from Christianity. This is seen not only in concepts of God, but in the rise of 'regional cults' that transcend ethnic boundaries and are organized on congregational lines.³⁰ The process of translation, where 'God' becomes 'Mwari' or 'Chukwu' has contributed to this, but, in Yorubaland, the worship of the Supreme God, Oludumare, is in decline, while that of divinities such as Ogun, god of iron, flourishes. To modern African Christians, it is self-evident that the God they now worship is the same as that of the past. The Fipa say, 'Where the elders pray, there is the God of the Door and the God of the Door is the Christian God also'.³¹

The idea of western scholars sitting in judgement on African churches and deciding on their orthodoxy or otherwise is not an appealing one. Such judgements are unavoidable, if one is writing on Christianity in Africa, because one has to decide what falls within one's study's scope. Thus, Gray specifically excludes the Bwiti cult from his valuable collection of essays on the subject.³² The present study includes it, but, as several anthropologists have pointed out, whether a given church is 'orthodox' or 'syncretistic' is not a usual academic question, unless, perhaps, in theology. 'The invidiousness often presented in such discriminations could not interest anthropologists'.³³ They 'could only', writes MacGaffey, 'acquire interest and validity if we were to apply them to churches everywhere'. His alternative is to employ Kongo categories of thought, such as kingunza, which are clearly not appropriate to 'churches everywhere'.³⁴

The underlying critique is that all western analysis, however sympathetically intentioned, is, in Mudimbe's words, an 'invention' of Africa. It utilizes categories of thought, including 'religion' that African cultures do not recognize. Far from encountering traditional religions with mutuality, it describes them from outside, in works to which most Africans have no access. One of the most eloquent statements of this viewpoint was made in a document which grew out of discussions and interviews in Zulu and Sotho among a group of South African Independent Church leaders in 1984. 'Anthropologists, sociologists and theologians from foreign Churches have been studying us for many years . . . We have become a fertile field for the kind of research that will enable a person to write an „interesting“ thesis and obtain an academic degree. … It is therefore not surprising that we do not recognise ourselves in their writings.'³⁵ This makes sober reading for the western scholar. It sheds a precious and invaluable light on the limitations of our scholarship, and reminds us that the sympathetic Africanist creates the Other, whether working from oral sources or archives, just as the Victorian missionary or colonial administrator did. Every book must be read, as it were, in inverted commas, and historians and anthropologists write 'true fictions'.

The problem, though, is much more fundamental than the question of the limitations of the western scholar writing on African cultures. Where African academics write on the history of sociology of their own cultures, or, indeed, on faith traditions to which they themselves belong, their work is not obviously different from that of their western counterparts. There is a real sense in which Peel has grown so close to the Yoruba, or MacGaffey to the baKongo that their work has become a voice 'from within'. I was encouraged by many to think of myself in this way when I lived and wrote in Igboland.

In a book published in 1982,1 pointed out 'that what religious people see as centrally important—that dimension of inner experience and search . . . should also be of central importance to a historian of religion'.³⁶ I was concerned at a tendency to subsume the study of Christianity in Africa under other categories, to focus on the role of missionaries in spreading imperialism, or interpret the independent churches as forms of proto-nationalism.³⁷ The questions we ask of a body of historical material reflect our own priorities and values. There was a profound, if unconscious, secularity in the way in which the history of Christianity was made a subordinate ingredient in the rise and decline of empire.

My critique was based on the assumption that the history of religion should focus on what is central to religion: belief, ritual, the religious community. Much the same point was made in Speaking for Ourselves, the document issued by black South African leaders of independent churches.

. . . there is one enormous omission throughout the whole history that has been written by outsiders. The work of the Holy Spirit throughout our history has simply been left out. The events of our history have been recorded as if everything could be accounted for simply by sociology and anthropology . . . We would like to write our own history from the point of view of the Holy Spirit.ⁱ⁸

They were not primarily concerned with an imperfect knowledge of African languages, or an incomplete understanding of African cultures, though such issues are indeed discussed. They are complaining about the failure to make God the core of church history. However, faith cannot be a prerequisite for writing on church history or the anthropology of religion. Agnostics have done so with notable sensitivity and insight, and those who share the same general beliefs often disagree in their application to specific instances (this is as true of neo-Marxists, as it is of Presbyterians). The solution is not for prophetic church members to embark on academic exegesis, and those who have done so³⁹ find themselves using the techniques and approaches of the work Ngada condemns.

No one now studies prophetic churches primarily as a form of proto-nationalism. In a sense, this approach has been disproved by events, the battles between the Lumpa church and newly independent Zambia, the hostility of a Mobutu or a Banda to sectarianism, but it is clear that they often embodied and enhanced forms of political consciousness, and empowered protests of various kinds against colonial or post-colonial oppression. There are many variations on this theme in the pages that follow.

To some Marxist scholars writing on Africa, religion is an illusion. The prophetic churches concentrate on healing, and the composition and performance of hymns and liturgies rather than on the understanding of the society in which they live, and ways in which to effect its transformation. However, it is self-evident that religion is of central importance to contemporary world history, whether it takes the form of Islamic fundamentalism or the New American Right, whether it foments civil conflict in Northern Ireland, former Yugoslavia or the Lebanon. Scholars, including those on the Left, have come to give ever-increasing emphasis to the ways in which people understand the world in which they find themselves. An important collection of essays on South African history is subtitled, 'African class formation, culture and consciousness'.⁴⁰ It is evident that an analysis which excludes religion leaves out an important dimension of what those who are the subject of such a study regard as being of central importance. 'If a people's behaviour is in part shaped by their own images and concepts, to the degree that these images and concepts are ignored and alien ones imposed or applied, that behaviour will be misunderstood and faultily explained.'⁴¹ There is a deepening understanding that religious sensibility is often expressed in non-analytical ways, such as hvrnns and liturgies, and in non-verbal ways, the elaborate uniforms, the chosen Holy Place. Evans-Pritchard epitomized it all long ago when, speaking of the Azande, he said, 'their ideas are imprisoned in action . . . The web [of belief] is not an external structure in which he is enclosed. It is the texture of his thought and he cannot think that his thought is wrong'.⁴² African religion is embodied in ritual and symbol. Fernandez contrasts its 'embeddedness' with the 'imageless thought' of academic analysis.⁴³ The incorporation of African words into an academic text, which, taken to a logical conclusion, would limit it to an ethnically specific audience, is a cosmetic change that does nothing to bridge this gap.

Christianity is a religion of the Book, and the transition to literacy was an important part of the transformations it engendered. Much has been written on its implications for religious understanding:

. . . religions of the Book . . . emphasize the 'true interpretation' of things and the condemnation of heresies . . . They are exclusive religions to which one is 'converted' . . . Literate religions are less tolerant of change, once their fixed point of reference has been determined to be a sacred text . . . literate religions are individualizing and salvationistic . . ,⁴⁴

The fascination of literacy runs through the chapters that follow. Some African prophets, such as Simon Mpadi, in Zaire, wrote voluminously. Some, such as Josiah Ositelu, or the founders of the Oberi Okaine church, both in Nigeria, WTote in a new revealed script. Often frustrations at the injustices of the colonial era found symbolic expression in the myth of the true Bible, the secret of their power, that the whites had withheld from Africans.

Elaborate typologies of African Christian movements have been invented and found wanting, or irrelevant.⁴⁵ Are new religious movements vehicles of protest, or are they alternative communities offering, in symbolic and ritual terms, an alternative explanation of reality? Scholars have conducted impassioned debates about these issues—some of them, oddly enough, focused on a tiny Kenyan religious movement⁴⁶—but the points of difference are more apparent than real. The creation of an alternative community and framework of discourse is a form of protest. Both old and new churches have many dimensions of meaning: they create new communities, they challenge the hegemony of colonialism and of its successors, they offer healing and protection against evil. A Zionist prophet once said that his church was a hospital. The prophetic churches have always known what the West is painfully rediscovering—that healing must be a holistic process, involving mind and spirit, as well as the body.

In a much-cited book published in 1963, Lanternari listed the Zionist churches among Religions of the Oppressed. Some twenty years later, he had moved on from the specifics of his interpretation (based on the land question in South Africa). He still understands the prophetic churches as communities of affliction, but affliction is understood in more complex ways. They may include poverty, but they also include other forms of suffering and deprivation.⁴⁷ Comaroff, in a justly acclaimed study, suggests that the Zionist churches do offer an appropriate ideology for the oppressed and marginal: 'Zionism is part of a second global culture, a culture lying in the shadow of the first, whose distinct but similar symbolic orders are the imaginative constructions of the resistant periphery of the world system'.⁴⁸ This and other recent studies, are more nuanced than their predecessors and, accordingly, expressed in more complicated language, but the passage I have just cited is essentially Religions of the Oppressed writ large.

To an ever-increasing extent, African intellectuals are reconstructing the text of Christianity's encounters with African cultures. While black South African Christians such as Boesak or Tutu have often welcomed Liberation Theology, Francophone scholars such as Eboussi Boulaga regard it as just another form of triumphant secularity. Boulaga tries western Christianity in the balance and finds it wanting. He finds dominance intrinsic in all missionary situations ('. . . the language of derision, the language of refutation . . .) and critiques a 'middle-class Christianity' where faith has become divorced from love.⁴⁹

The account that follows uses expressions such as 'the Yoruba'. These are useful, but not particularly true fictions. More precisely, if they bear some relationship to external reality, it is a recent one. These monolithic ethnic entities were inventions of the colonial period. The ethonym 'Luhyia' was invented in 1939 by Bantu speakers in North Nyanza, to distinguish themselves from the Nilotic Luo. These ethnic labels are used for convenience, but they are a shorthand for a complicated and changing reality.

I lived for sixteen years in Africa, and have been a part of certain African worlds. The study of Christianity in Africa has been a central concern for much longer. My understanding of Africa and of Christianity, and, indeed, of the whole academic enterprise has changed very considerably in recent years. What seemed so clear to me in the 1970s and early 1980s is now riddled with complexities and contradictions that probably come closer to the obdurate and ever-changing nature of reality. The pages that follow distil it all, as I have now come to understand it.

ONE

North African Christianity in Antiquity

There cannot be only one path to such a great secret.

Symmachus, a supporter of the old gods, in the late Roman empire¹

Christians in a landscape

North Africa is part of the Mediterranean world, and it is, in a sense, artificial to analyse the growth of Christianity there in isolation from developments elsewhere. The man whom history remembers as Clement of Alexandria (to distinguish him from Clement of Rome) was born in Greece, reached Alexandria in 180, and left it forever twenty-two years later. The Alexandrian Gnostic, Valentine, spent many years in Rome and ended his days in Cyprus.

Greeks have lived in Egypt from the seventh century bc, and their history there had a great influence on the development of Christianity. In 331 bc, Alexander the Great founded the city that bears his name, and when, after his death, his three generals divided his empire, Egypt fell to Ptolemy, who turned Alexandria into one of the great cities of the ancient world. Its lighthouse was regarded as one of the seven wonders of the world, but the title was perhaps more appropriate for the scholars of the Museum, one of whom accurately calculated the circumference of the world.

Egypt became part of the Roman Empire in 30 bc when Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemies, and the only one to speak Egyptian, committed suicide by embracing a cobra, the symbol of the ancient Pharaohs. Greek remained the language of scholarship and of the great cities, 'Egyptian' (or Coptic) the language of the countryside. It is generally agreed that Roman rule brought increasing impoverishment and desperation. Egypt provided a third of the corn consumed by the Roman populace, and the weight of taxation, in time, became so great that peasants fled their land to escape it and many even settled in Palestine. Tax collection was not a sinecure but an appalling burden as the tax collector had to make up any shortfall from his own resources. A poll tax from which Greeks and Romans were exempt, but which Jews and Egyptians had to pay, left these latter peoples with a strong sense of relative

deprivation. It is against this background of suffering that most historians interpret the appeal of mystery religions in general, and of Christianity and gnosticism in particular. But perhaps this is to oversimplify. Most ages have seemed epochs of crisis and threat to those who lived in them and a golden age appears only in restrospect, the perspective of a Gibbon reflecting on the Antonines.

Nubia, South of Egypt, has been called a country 200 miles long and 5 yards wide. Lower Nubia is virtually desert, for the Nile cuts deep into soft sandstone and the flood plain is narrow or non-existent. The Nile moves in a great sweep so that for a time it flows away from, rather than towards, the sea, and is joined by a series of great tributaries. To the South, there is sufficient winter rainfall for farming. This was the setting for the civilization of Meroe, which flourished from about 300 bc to about ad 300. Christianity came late

to Nubia, introduced in the sixth century by missionaries not, as one might have expected from Egypt, but from Byzantium.

Cyrenaica lies West of Egypt, in what is now eastern Libya. The Arabs were to call it 'the Green Mountain', for its hills attracted sufficient rain for pastoral farming. Greek colonists settled among the Berbers; tradition dates this to 639 bc when the Delphic oracle directed a youth who sought help for a stammer to go to Cyrenaica.

O Battos for a voice you come But the lord Apollo Sends you to Libya nurse of flocks To build cities.²

Its exports included sylphion, valued both as a food and as a medicine, but sadly, it was over-exploited and became extinct. Ethiopia and south-east Arabia, the Yemen, have much in common, geographically and historically. Their altitude means that they are relatively well-watered, though surrounded by desert. Settlers from south-east Arabia, Sabaea, the biblical Sheba, settled in northern Ethiopia in about 600 bc, bringing with them their Semitic language and their script, ancestral to Ge'ez, and modern Ethio-semitic languages such as Amharic. In medieval Ethiopia, the legend of the marriage of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba and of their princely child, Menelik, became a founding charter of Ethiopian national identity. Like most myths, it contains a grain of truth, an ancient memory of immigrants from Sabaea.

Roman North Africa

West of Cyrenaica the sea bites deep into the land, forming the Gulf of Sidra. Here, where the desert comes close to the sea, the Greeks and Carthaginians built pillars to mark their respective spheres of influence. Carthage began as a Phoenician colony, founded, tradition tells us, by a Phoenician princess in about 800 bc. The Carthaginians fought a series of bitter wars, first with the Greeks and then with the Romans, until Carthage was finally razed to the ground in 146 bc. Cyprian's and Augustine's Carthage was a later, Roman city. In due course, North Africa became part of the Roman empire. The Maghrib exported vast quantities of wine, olive oil, and wheat to Rome, and aqueducts, the ruins of which can still be seen, carried water to many areas that are now desert. Great cities were built on Roman lines, and an urban, Latin-speaking elite developed that became part of the cosmopolitan Roman world. The great playwright, Terence, first came to Rome as a Berber slave. Victor, in the late second century, the first Pope, whose native speech was Latin, was a North African, and so was the Emperor Septimius Severus (reigned 193—211) and Apuleius, whose novel The Golden /lis is one of the few masterpieces of the ancient world that the ordinary reader can still peruse vvith pleasure.

A History of Christianity in Africa The Jewish Diaspora

In Asia Minor, and the Mediterranean world, Diaspora Jews often provided Christianity with its first converts and with its most bitter opponents. Isaiah, in the eighth century bc, lists Upper and Lower Egypt and Kush among Diaspora communities: 'Beyond the rivers of Kush there is a land where the sound of wings is heard. From that land ambassadors come down the Nile in boats made of reeds.' Jeremiah, who lived in the late seventh and early sixth centuries, castigated the Jews of Egypt for their syncretism.⁵ Judaism, like Christianity, was a missionary faith that found many converts in the ancient world. Many Greeks were attracted to its pure monotheism, though alienated bv the requirement of circumcision. Such people often became sympathetic supporters, though not full members, of the Jewish community. It was for such that the Alexandrian Jew, Philo (20 bc-ad 50), wrote his monumental attempt to svnthesize the tradition of the Hebrew Bible with Greek philosophy, a synthesis that profoundly influenced the Christian intellectuals of Alexandria. Many Jews settled in Egypt under the Ptolemies. According to one estimate, they formed 10-15 per cent of the population of Egypt in the first century ad. Like other Jewish Diaspora communities, in time they lost the knowledge of Hebrew. In 280 bc, the Old Testament was translated into Greek, the Septuagint—the first translation of any part of the Bible into a foreign language. It was later used by Christians who, in response to Jewish taunts that they had no access to the Hebrew original, developed a myth that the Septuagint was divinely inspired, the work of seventy translators in seventy days, working independently and producing miraculously identical texts. It was the Septuagint that was read by the black eunuch in a chariot, whom Philip met on the road from Jerusalem to Gaza, in one of the most famous encounters of the ancient world.

The Jews dominated two of the five quarters of Alexandria, and had their own treasury and court of justice. Tragically, they were repeatedly involved in ethnic violence. There was a pogrom in ad 58, and a Jewish rising in 73. In 115, they were involved in a very widespread Jewish revolt that began in Cyrenaica and ended in tragic loss of life. It may have been these disasters, as well as the two successive destructions of Jerusalem, that created a state of angst and anomie, conducive to conversion.⁴

These cosmopolitan, Greek-speaking Jews of Egypt and Cyrene were present at Pentecost. Simon of Cyrene carried Jesus' cross, and the fact that his sons, Rufus and Alexander, are mentioned by name suggests that they became Christians. Apollos was an Alexandrian Jew, a religious enthusiast who 'knew only the baptism of John' and was brought to a more complete knowledge of Christianity by the missionary^- couple Priscilla and Aquila. Jewish Christians from Cyrene preached to Gentiles in Antioch: 'the Lord's power was with them and a great number of people believed and turned to the Lord'. The teachers at Antioch included Lucius from Cyrene and 'Simeon called the black'.⁵ It is a good example of the essential unity of the Mediterranean world.

Many Arabs were converted to either Judaism or Christianity. From the fourth to the sixth century, the Himyar kingdom in the Yemen was ruled by converts to Judaism. Himyarite persecution of Christians led an Ethiopian emperor to invade the Yemen and briefly transform it into an Ethiopian colony. The last Jewish king of Himyar, in despair, rode his horse into the sea in 525. Christianity vanished in the Yemen, but Judaism survived. In modern times, there were still 150 thousand Jews in the Yemen, who migrated to Israel between 1948 and 1962.⁶

The Falashas are a community of black Jews who are clearly Ethiopians, and call themselves the House of Israel. They know only the Pentateuch, not the Talmud, and do not speak Hebrew. Their liturgy is in Agaw, an ancient Cushitic tongue; their daily speech, Amharic; their history, in the centuries following their conquest by the Christian kingdom, a tragic one of persecution. It seems likely that they are descended from Agaw, who absorbed Jewish teachings via South Arabian influences.⁷ In the 1970s, when Ethiopia was ravaged by famine, the Jews of Israel had to decide whether Falashas were acceptable to them as Jews, or not. They decided that they were, and many migrated to Israel.⁸

The dawn of Egyptian Christianity

The story of the Flight into Egypt has never ceased to glow in the Coptic imagination. In the words of the Coptic liturgy, 'Be glad and rejoice, O Egypt, and her sons and all her borders, for there hath come to Thee the Lord of Man. . . Modern African Christians cherish the same tradition: 'When Jesus was persecuted by the European Herod, God sent him into Africa; by this we know that Africans have naturally a true spirit of Christianity'.¹⁰ The Copts have never ceased to believe an ancient tradition that St Mark was the first apostle of Egypt and was martyred in Alexandria. Eusebius, in his Church History (written in 324), mentions this,„ and a much earlier fragment from Clement refers to Mark's presence in Alexandria. The Acts of Mark were written in Greek in the late fourth or early fifth century, claiming that Mark first preached in Cyrene, and was a Cyrenian Jew. Whether Mark was, indeed, the apostle of Alexandria we cannot know.

There are similar difficulties in interpreting the tradition of St Thomas' apostolate in India. The name of the king at whose court he preached has been found on inscriptions, and the Christians of south India believe that his tomb survives eight miles from Madras. But scholarly consensus is that the Acts of Thomas were written in the early third century in Edessa. Like the tradition of Mark in Alexandria, the story of Thomas in India is unprovable, and, perhaps, improbable, but not necessarily untrue.

Alexandria was one of the three great sees of the ancient world—the others were Rome and Antioch¹²—but we know curiously little about its early history, or, indeed, about the early history of Christianity in Egypt in general.

The churches of Egypt, Nubia, and Ethiopia had close links with the rest of eastern Christendom. There is a great unity of spirit between Egyptian and Syriac Christianity. The Syrian churches rejoice in the fact that their language is the closest to the Aramaic spoken by Jesus. Syrian Christians converted Aksum, and later strengthened its faith by their missionary- presence. A beautiful legend is told of the dawn of Syrian Christianity, how King Abgar of Edessa wrote to Jesus, seeking to be cured of his leprosy, and with an invitation: 'I have a verv little city, but comely, which is sufficient for us both'. After Chalcedon, the spiritual unity of Ethiopian, Nubian, Egyptian and Jacobite Syrian Christians was cemented by their adoption of a Monophysite Christology (see pages 29-30).

The Egyptian gnostics

In 1945, an Egyptian peasant made a remarkable discovery at a place called Nag Hammadi. He discovered a library of forty-eight books that had been translated from Greek into Coptic. The texts were gnostic, and they had been concealed because, by the time the manuscripts were written, in the late fourth century, gnosticism had become a heresy.

The existence of this large library is one indication among many of the importance of Egypt in the history of gnosticism. Alexandria was probably the world's leading gnostic centre in the second century ad, and it is the names of gnostic teachers that emerge from what are otherwise almost hidden Christian years before 180. Although, ultimately, gnosticism was condemned as a heresy, many gnostics lived, taught, and died peacefully within the Catholic Church. 'Gnosis' means intuitive knowledge, the knowledge of the heart. The gnostics' emphasis on individual religious experience and quest, and the importance of the feminine in both theology and praxis, make them immensely attractive today. They never formed a unified school of thought; each gnostic teacher had her or his own teachings. The orthodox, such as Irenaeus, mocked them for this diversity. Simon Magus of Samaria was often seen as a gnostic.¹³ They believed that they had inherited a secret tradition within the Church, quoting texts such as Mark 4.11.

The gnostics believed that the different religious traditions of mankind were distant echoes of the same ultimate truth. Alexandria and Asia Minor were closely linked by trade to India, and there is an eastern ring in the often-quoted words of the gnostic Theodotus, concerning one 'who seeks to know who we were, and what we have become; where we were and whither we are hastening; from what we are being released; what birth is, and what is rebirth'.¹⁴

Basilides (flor. 125—155) was the earliest Alexandrian gnostic known to us.

He was a prolific writer, as was his son and disciple, Isidore, but his works, as with so many gnostics, survive only in fragments in the hostile polemic of his enemies. Basilides believed that he was the heir to a secret tradition that went back to either Peter or Matthias. His starting point was the utter transcendence of God. He thought that God is so utterly other that we cannot, even by analogy, say anything about him at all. In this, he anticipates some contemporary theologians, such as Tillich. God created a series of powers, beginning with Thought (Nous) and Word (Logos), which created the 'principalities and angels', which created the first heaven. Further powers created the second heaven, and our world was the work of the powers of the lowest, 365th world. Irenaeus states that, 'These men practise magic, and use images, incantations, invocations. . . ,'¹⁵ The gnostics believed that magic charms would enable them to pass through the intervening levels to God.

Valentine was the shining star of Alexandrian gnosticism. Jerome, who was savage in his condemnation of those he considered heterodox, said, 'No one can bring heresy into being unless he is possessed by nature of an outstanding intellect and has gifts provided by God. Such a person was Valentinus'.¹⁶ He claimed that he inherited a secret tradition, received from Theudas, a disciple of Paul, and endorsed by mystical experience.¹⁷ 'He saw a newborn infant and when he asked who he might be, the child answered „I am the Logos“ and then went on to expound the secrets of the gnostic way.'¹⁸

Valentine's fundamental insight was a sense of the utter otherness of God, the inadequacy of all our analyses and descriptions. He begins with the Father who is the Deep (Bythos).¹⁹ The Deep produces Silence (Sige), who becomes his bride, and, together, they give birth to Thought (Nous). Silence produces knowledge from the depths of the subconscious.

In this way, twenty-eight spiritual beings, called Aeons, ('everlasting ones') were produced. The youngest of these was Sophia; the Fall was hers. She tried to attain a direct knowledge of the Deep, which was forbidden to her, and then transgressed the natural order by giving birth alone, but produced only a formless monster, the origin of material being. The Aeons pleaded with the Father on Sophia's behalf, and he expelled the monster, sending Huros the Boundary, and then Christ and the Holy Spirit, to complete the number of Aeons. Sophia's spiritual being lived among the Aeons, but her fallen being was excluded. The material world, all living souls and the Demiurge, grew from her fear, grief, and desire. The Demiurge, in his ignorance, knows nothing of the worlds of spiritual beings and thinks he created the visible world alone.

A female Aeon is at the centre of Valentine's cosmic vision. This sensitivity to the feminine element in spirituality was typical of the gnostics, and is perhaps linked with the emphasis on individual experience, rather than authority. One of the manuscripts discovered in Upper Egypt, at Nag Hammadi, is a poem called Thunder Perfect Mind, in which a female divinity speaks:

I am the barren one and many are her sons. I am the silence that is incomprehensible I am the utterance of my name.²⁰

Women were prominent in the daily life of gnostic churches. One of Valentine's disciples, Marcus, settled in Lyons. His congregations included manv women, one of w hom celebrated the Eucharist²¹ and divinity appeared to him as a woman.²² Tertullian raged against gnostic women who led congregations in North Africa: 'The very women of these heretics . . . bold enough to teach, to dispute, to enact exorcisms, to undertake cures, may be, even to baptize'.²³

Gnosticism developed out of two traditions: philosophic Platonism and Ptolemaic astronomy. To Plato, the spiritual world is separate from and infinitely superior to the material, and the eternal soul is imprisoned in the body. The history of Christian thought has been profoundly influenced by this tradition, but many neo-Platonists could not accept the Incarnation. Neo-Platonism was the preferred ideology of the educated opponents of Christianity, as the latter gradually became a majority creed. Its seminal intellect, Plotinus, was an Egyptian.

The catechetical school of Alexandria

The catechetical school of Alexandria was probably founded as a reaction against gnosticism. Its first teacher was a converted Stoic called Pantaenus, who was probably a Sicilian,²⁴ and who left Alexandria after a time to work as a missionary in India.²⁵ His place was taken by another convert, Clement, an Athenian whose avid search for truth led him on a restless quest from one spiritual teacher to the next: 'When I came upon the last (he was the first in power), having traced him out concealed in Egypt, I found rest'. The Samarian Greek, Justin Martvr, after a similar search, was brought to Christianity by a conversation on the beach at Ephesus.

Clement came to Alexandria to learn, and remained to teach. He was immensely learned, and one of his works cites 360 classical texts, many of which do not survive in any other form. Influenced by Philo, he attempted to make Christianity acceptable to those educated in Greek philosophy: 'For God is the cause of all good things. . . . The way of truth is therefore one. But into it, as in a perennial river, streams flow from all sides'.²⁶ Clement compared Christians who were afraid to study Greek philosophy with children frightened by actors' masks.²⁷

He tempered the rigours of the Gospel imperative for his prosperous clientele. Thus, in his sermon, 'Who is the rich man that shall be saved?', which, significantly, has been read and cited more than any of his other works, he says: 'We must not fling away riches that benefit our neighbours as well as ourselves'.²⁸ In 202, there was a savage persecution in Alexandria, and Clement fled, never to return.

His successor as head of the catechetical school was a teenage genius, Origen (185-253). Born of mixed Egyptian and Alexandrian Greek parentage, he grew up in a fervently devout Christian family. As his name means born of Horus, it has sometimes been suggested that his parents were converted after his birth. He was immensely learned, both in Scripture and in the classics; a hostile critic, centuries after his death, suggested that he took a memory drug! One of the most prolific writers of the ancient world, he worked for some forty years with collaborators on the Hexapla, a remarkable pioneering attempt to establish an accurate text of the Bible, consisting of six (in some cases eight) parallel columns of different Greek translations. His wealthy patron, the Alexandrian, Ambrose, employed a whole team of shorthand writers and scribes to take down texts as he dictated them and make copies of the results. He attempted to learn Hebrew as a young man, but never mastered it. He wrote a refutation of pagan polemic, Against Celsus, which was to be read for many centuries, and a large number of voluminous scriptural commentaries, many of which have been lost. Like Philo and Clement before him, he interpreted Scripture in an allegorical way. Unlike Clement, he was a theologian of genius.²⁹

Origen was the first major thinker of the early Church seriously to tackle the intractable problems of Christology. Sabellius the Libyan, another thinker from the African continent, attempted to define the Trinity as three modes, or aspects, of one God, so that God has one substance, and three energies. This led to problems—the posing of questions like 'Did God the Father die on the cross?'—but other attempts to define the Trinity sometimes led to tritheism. Origen, like other thinkers of his time, gave little thought to the Holy Spirit's role in the Trinity. (The Nicene Creed states simply, '. . . and we believe in the Holy Ghost', without stating the Paraclete's divinity or defining a role within the Trinity.) He was mainly concerned with the relationship between the Father and the Son. He speaks of the eternal generation of the Son, that the Father is truly God and the Son only so by participation in the Father. This subordinationism was not criticized by his contemporaries, most of whom shared it, but it was to be of critical importance in bringing his theology into later disrepute.

Origen had a bold, cosmic vision. He believed that as revealed religion tells us nothing about the universe before this world existed, or what will happen when it ceases to exist, these are legitimate spheres for speculation. Before all ages, God created spiritual beings, souls, angels, spheres and what later became the powers of darkness. The Fall was not that of Eve and Adam, but of these spiritual beings who wearied of the adoration of God. They fell from God in varying degrees, the angels least, the powers of darkness most. Human bodies were given to souls, both as a punishment and as a remedy for their fall. Souls exist before the moment of conception and go, not through one, but many lives. This is how he interprets, 'Jacob I have loved and Esau I have hated', not as a harsh predestinarianism, but in terms of the quality of their previous lives. Just as souls go through many incarnations, so there have been and will be many worlds. Origen was a universalist. He believed that even the beings furthest from God still have a capacity for repentance and a return to God. One of the elements in his thought that caused most scandal was his insistence that even Satan could, and one day would, be saved. However, his insistence on the freedom of will meant that even the blessed in heaven still had the capacity to reject God.

His interpretation of the spheres (perspex-like layers, thought to surround each planet) as spiritual beings was rooted in classical astrology. He believed that the planets' orderly paths reflected their rationality, and even found biblical texts to describe both their spiritual life and their fall in the infinitely remote past!

Origen's adult life was lived largely between Alexandria and Palestine. In 215, Egyptians were ordered out of Alexandria and Origen left with them. He later returned to Alexandria for ten years, and then spent some twenty years in Caesarea, the Roman capital of Palestine. He became an international celebrity, on one occasion summoned to meet the Emperor's mother at Antioch, and brought there with a military escort. On another, he was invited to discuss theology with the wife of the then Emperor, Philip the Arabian. He influenced history not only through his writings, but through his work as a teacher, most spectactularly through his pupil Gregory the Wonderworker, who came from Cappadocia (in what is now central Turkey) to Caesarea intending to study law. He fell under Origen's spell, and returned to Cappadocia as a missionary. Legend tells us that there were seventeen Christians in Cappadocia when he was young and seventeen pagans there when he died.

Among Origen's pupils were a number of women, among them the martyr, Herais. Another student was a former soldier who was converted by the heroism of a woman martyr, Potamiaena, who was slowly covered with boiling pitch.³⁰

Origen, like many Christians of his time, longed for martyrdom. He was an enthusiast. As a young man, he castrated himself for the Kingdom of Heaven's sake, in a literal following of Matthew 19.12, an act that was less bizarre then than it appears now.³¹ In 249, he was imprisoned during the Decian persecution. He was tortured on the rack and threatened with death, but did not recant. He died four years later in Tyre, at the age of sixty-nine.

Origen is the tragic star of the early Church. After successive Councils defined trinitarian orthodoxy, he became regarded as a heretic. The impassioned enmity of two Wise Men from the West, Rufinus and Jerome, both of whom settled in Palestine, centred on Origen. In the Middle Ages, he was esteemed, but suspect. A classic of mystic spirituality, St Bernard of Clairvaux's commentary on the Song of Songs owes much to Origen, and he influenced the brilliant and subtle thought of John Scotus Erigena and William of St Thierry, but, generally speaking, he was regarded as heterodox and a popular subject of scholastic debate was whether Origen (or Trajan, or Solomon) could be saved. Reformation thinkers, with their emphasis on faith rather than works, abhorred him. Luther said, with typical exaggeration, that the name of Christ was not mentioned in any of his works. But Erasmus, who wrote a treatise on the freedom of the will, sought inspiration from Origen. His affirmation of human freedom rings down the centuries: 'Let us take up eternal life. Let us take up that which depends on our decision. God does not give it to us. He sets it before us. „Behold, I have set life before thy face“'.³²

The achievements of the Alexandrian catechetical school did not end with Origen. In the fourth century, it was headed by the extraordinarily interesting figure of Didymus the Blind (313-98). An Alexandrian, Didymus was blind from infancy. Credited with the invention of a script for the blind, he was the teacher of Jerome and Gregory of Nazianzus and wrote many books.

Arius and Athanasius

From about 320 to about 450, the Christian churches of the East were deeply divided by what now appeared to be rather obscure theological controversies, first about the Trinity and later about the nature of Christ. These controversies did not begin with Arius, nor did they end with Chalcedon. So complicated is their history that one sometimes remembers the words of Gibbon, that it is interesting to study a particular plant: 'but the tedious detail of leaves without flowers, and of branches without fruit, would soon exhaust the patience and disappoint the curiosity'.³³ However, as the subtle intellects of the East fully realized, these basic questions were at the heart of the Christian faith. They said that Christians of the West numbered the Trinity without understanding it. The questions they asked are of lasting importance. How can one define the Trinity without falling into tritheism on the one hand or unitarianism on the other? Did Jesus pray, and why, and who did he pray to? There is a limit as to how largely these controversies can figure in what is, after all, a history of Christianity in Africa, yet, throughout these stormy years, Alexandria dominated the thought of eastern Christendom.

Arius lived from 250 to 336, so he was already old when his theological views first became subject to scrutiny. The Meletians were Egyptian rigorists, who believed that those who lapsed during persecution should be excluded from the Church. Arius began as a Meletian sympathizer and changed sides. I he Meletians never forgave him and scrutinized his later theology mercilessly. In 318, he was charged with heresy and a local synod condemned and excommunicated him. Arius was an accomplished musician and poet, and put bis theological views into a series of folk songs called the 'Thalia' or 'Banquet', in order to popularize his views. They were sung in bars, and a modern scholar has expressed mild surprise at their popularity!³⁴

Anus' thought was rooted in a sense of the utter transcendence of God. Influenced by neo-Platonism, he believed that the Word is subordinate to the Father, and, as it was begotten, it must have had a beginning, even if that beginning was inconceivably remote. He did not accept his condemnation and rallied support abroad.

In 324, the Emperor Constantine won a final victory over his rival. The empire was now officially Christian and Constantine did not want Christendom divided by obscure theological disputes. He summoned a Council to solve all the problems of the Church at once, including the date of Easter. It was held at Nicaea, near the imperial capital of Nicomedia, in what is now northern Turkey. In 325, 230 bishops, nearly all from the East, met together. It seems that Constantine was personally responsible for the formula homoousios (that the Father and the Son are consubstantial). The familiar Nicene Creed was followed by a series of anathemas that condemn those who say, 'there was when He was not and before He was begotten He was not . . .'.

Few supported the full Arian position, but many eastern thinkers in the tradition of Origen were deeply troubled by the implications of the Nicene Creed. In particular, they were concerned by homoousios, which seemed to them to be close to the Monarchian heresy that saw the three persons of the Trinity as three aspects or activities of the one God. They thought that if the Father is known by the Son, the Son must, in some sense, be distinct from him. Arius died in Constantinople in 336, a broken, and largely forgotten man.

Athanasius was only a deacon at the Council of Nicaea, but played a dominating role there. He became the Patriarch of Alexandria in 328, and, from then to his death in 373, led a life of turbulent controversy, immutable in his steely adherence to the truth as he saw it. He was exiled from his See no less than five times, beginning with a sojourn in Trier in distant Gaul. One of the most significant aspects of his life was his close relationship with the Desert People. He was deeply attached to St Antony and wrote his life. When the old hermit died, he left his few possessions-—his cloak and his sheepskin— to his dear friend, Athanasius. Nicaea did not put an end to trinitarian and christological speculation, but, despite the accession of two emperors with Arian sympathies, the Nicene party was ultimately victorious. The Second Ecumenical Council, held at Constantinople in 381, reaffirmed the identical essence of the Father and the Son, and also declared that the Bishop of Constantinople ranked second after Rome, a direct challenge to the ancient Sees of Alexandria and Antioch. This was, except in one respect, the effectual end of Arianism. The Goths had been converted by an Arian missionary, Ulfila, himself of Visigothic descent, the translator of the Gothic Bible. The Vandals, who invaded North Africa in 430, had been converted to Christianity in its Arian form and looked on Catholics as their enemies.

One cannot readily separate events in Egypt from the rest of Eastern Christendom. A classic case of this can be found in the tragic last years of John

Chrysostom ('the golden tongued'). The chain of events that led to his fall began with a conflict among Egyptian monks. A small, educated minority of these were Origenists, and attacked anthropomorphic concepts of God. This deeply distressed their less learned counterparts who were accustomed to think of God as an old man in the sky. The Origenists, the Tall Brothers, fled to Constantinople and sought the support of John Chrysostom. The Patriarch of Alexandria, angry at being thus bypassed, began the chain of events that led to John's death in lonely exile, in Armenia.

As time went by, western and eastern Christendom drifted apart, partly because of the language barrier (Latin, or Greek), and partly because of more profound differences in intellectual emphasis. The immensely learned Augustine disliked the study of Greek.³⁵

A later Patriarch of Alexandria was destined to play a dominant role in theological controversy. Cyril the Great succeeded his uncle as Patriarch of Alexandria from 412 until his death in 444. He shared the anti-semitic tendencies that disfigured the spirituality of John Chrysostom, and, in his time, both Jews and a few remaining pagan neo-Platonists were persecuted in Alexandria. His major controversy was with Nestorius, a monk from Antioch who became the Patriarch of Constantinople. Nestorius rejected the description of Mary as Mother of God, and emphasized that the human and divine natures of Christ were entirely distinct. He thought it blasphemous to say, for instance, that the Eternal Word was once a little child. The Third Ecumenical Council, held at Ephesus in 441, convened by the Emperor Theodosius and his wife, Eudokia, condemned Nestorius. Eudokia is an interesting figure. A highly educated Greek convert to Christianity, she is one of four women writers in the early Church whose works survive.³⁶

Nestorius died in Africa, on the eve of the Council of Chalcedon. He was exiled to the Libyan oases and spent his last years in Cyrenaica. There he wrote a defence of his tragic life under a nom de plume, as if he had written it under his own name it would have been condemned, unread. After his death, those who accepted his theology formed a separate church, based in Persia, with branches in Arabia and throughout Asia. The Nestorians were to provide one of the most remarkable phases of the history of Christian missionary endeavour. They taught in India and in China, and Nestorian churches survived in China and Central Asia until extinguished in the fourteenth century by the persecutions of the Ming Dynasty and of Timur the Great. A minuscule Nestorian ('Assyrian') Church still survives.

I he Council of Chalcedon was held, with momentous consequences for Christendom, in 451. In 450, Theodosius died of a fall from his horse. He was succeeded by his sister Pulcheria, who took as her consort the soldier, Marcian. They summoned a council, hoping, as Constantine had done, that divisive theological disputes would finally be ended. At Chalcedon, 520 bishops met, across the Bosphorus from Constantinople. No gathering of Christians has had more momentous consequences.

According to the definition agreed on at Chalcedon, Christ has two natures: human and divine, distinct and indivisible. It was profoundly unacceptable to Coptic Christians who felt that this was to divide Christ, and diminish the glory of his divinity. The word Monophysite was not used at the time, but, in due course, the definition of Chalcedon was to lead to the foundation of five Monophysite churches, three of them in Africa, the Coptic Church in Egypt, the Nubian, Ethiopian, and Armenian Churches and the Jacobite Church of Syria.³⁷ It is difficult now to enter into these ancient controversies that were fought then with such passion. From the point of view of Christian life and devotion, there was little difference between the warring parties. There were, however, important implications in the rival formulations. Chalcedon gave a more positive value to humanity and to the created world and laid a greater emphasis on human freedom.

The Coptic dimension

The word Coptic can refer to a people, a language, or a Church. Both 'Copt' and 'Egypt' come from a Greek word, Aigyptos, which, in turn, comes from the ancient Egyptian name for Memphis, 'the house of Ptah'. The history of ancient Egyptian literacy falls into three phases, each progressively less formal: the hieroglyphs used on inscriptions, hieratic used in official documents, and the more popular cursive script, demotic. One consequence of the Greek presence was that it became increasingly the custom to write the Egyptian language in the Greek alphabet, with seven letters added. The earliest surviving exemplar dates from 150 bc. Coptic was used in writing much Christian literature, demotic gradually dying out entirely. In its turn, Coptic was supplanted by Arabic. It survived until the thirteenth century, but, after that, even Christian Copts spoke Arabic and Coptic survived only in liturgy, as Latin did in the Catholic Church until recent times.

Coptic Christianity was forged in persecution and its most distinctive expression was in the lives of the Desert People. In Egypt, as in North Africa, a mass turning away from the old religion towards Christianity seems to have begun in the middle of the third century and to have been virtually complete by 400, with the exception of a few neo-pagan aristocrats. It is not easy to know why the Egyptian people accepted Christianity with such enthusiasm. The move has been associated with the sufferings of the Egyptian peasantry and with the relative deprivation of Jewish and Egyptian élites. It has been pointed out that temples were associated with tax collection and that people were alienated from synthetic Graeco-Roman cults, such as that of Serapis, but, even if the hardships of Egyptian life did attract them towards salvation religions, why did they turn to Christ rather than Osiris?

To many Christian apologists, the spread of Christianity, the inability of traditional gods to halt its spread, were the most convincing proof of its truth. Many individuals were converted by the courage of the martyrs, and women often played a key role in converting households to Christianity. Christianity empowered the disinherited, though some women came to feel alienated from Christianity and identified with 'heretical' cults.

In an enormously influential hypothesis, Horton has suggested that peoples are attracted to world religions when they come into contact with a wider world, that the traditional religions are profoundly rooted in a particular locality and when individuals find themselves in a cosmopolitan environment, these local divinities seem less appropriate.³⁸ This model has been used internationally, and, within Africa, it suggests a convincing reason for many conversions, both to Christianity and to Islam. At the same time, we should realize that other salvation religions were also truly international. There was for instance, a temple of Isis in London.

Persecution became most severe towards its close, in the last years of Diocletian and under Maximin in late 311 and early 312. Eusebius describes the atrocious sufferings of the martyrs of the Thebais, in upper Egypt, torn to pieces by sharp shards, or dismembered, or burned alive, executions so numerous that the executioners were exhausted and the axes worn out.³⁹

Sadly, the experience of persecution divided those who suffered from it. The point of division was the policy to be adopted towards backsliders. Were Christians who recanted during persecution to be readmitted after penance, or should they be permanently excluded from the Church? Peter, the Patriarch of Alexandria, who himself died a martyr's death, took the more generous line; Meletius and his followers the harsher one. The Christians in prisons in Alexandria in 304 hung a curtain between the factions, so sharp were their divisions. The followers of Meletius came to form a schismatic church. It was strongly rooted in some areas, but did not enjoy the almost national support that Donatus was to have in Numidia. So deeply ingrained were these events in Coptic sensibility that the Church calendar is dated from the Era of the Martyrs, beginning with the accession of Diocletian in 284.

The story has a sad sequel. In time, Christians became the persecutors. The Patriarch Theophilus, in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, led riots against the Temple of Serapis, during which much of the Museum and its priceless library were destroyed. In 415, Christian mobs put to death Hypatia, a woman neo-Platonist philosopher and mathematician returning from a lecture. Charles Kingsley wrote a novel about this almost forgotten martyr to intellectual integrity. She was thirty years old.

The Desert People

Perhaps the most distinctive contribution of the Coptic Church to world Christianity lay in its virtual invention of both the eremitical and the monastic ^way. Scholars write conventionally of the Desert Fathers. It is a sad case of unconscious sexism in language that Helen Waddell called her study of the ^women and men of the Egyptian desert, The Desert Fathers, though many of the passages in the book refer to women saints, such as Sarah or Syncletica.⁴⁰ The Desert People invented a way of life in which the world was totally given up in pursuit of God. Paul of Thebes left his native city at a time of persecution. Having moved into the desert, he came to discover the treasures within its silence and never returned. When he was a very old man, he met St Antony, a more celebrated pioneer of the desert way.

Antony inherited a substantial smallholding from his parents. When he was twenty, he heard a text in church that changed his life: 'If thou wouldst be perfect, sell all that thou hast, give to the poor and follow me'. He sold his land, gave the proceeds to the poor, making provision for his sister, and went to live on the desert's edge. Many followed his example. It was as if literal obedience to the Gospel had just been invented. The contrast with Clement's wise words on the spiritual value of prosperity is dramatic.

The beginning of western monasticism, as well as of eremiticism, is written in Coptic. Pakhom (290-346), was an Egyptian, born of pagan parents in upper Egypt. He spent some years as a soldier, and, it is said, was converted by his experiences of Christian charity. After his discharge, he lived for a time as a solitary, and then established a large monastery in the Thebaid. When he died, he ruled over nine monasteries for men and two for women. His rule survives in Latin translation and influenced Basil the Great, John Cassian and Benedict. His great innovation was the recognition that a life of moderate austerity, lived in community, suited most would-be saints much better than solitude and ferocious asceticism.

It was said at a later date, with pardonable exaggeration, that there were more Egyptians in the desert than in the cities. The Desert People emphasized work and self-sufficiency, weaving palm fronds into mats and baskets, and working as harvesters. It is said that with their earnings, they fed not only the local poor, but sent shiploads of grain to the prisons and poor of Alexandria.⁴¹ Most, but not all, came from a poor background, which doubtless made the privations of the desert easier to endure.⁴² On one occasion, a monk returned to his cell to find robbers carrying his possessions away. He helped them load his own goods on to a donkey and said, 'Look, here is a little bag which you have forgotten'. On another, a hippopotamus was causing havoc in the Nile delta and one of the Desert Fathers reproved her; she went away at his word.

Beyond the savage austerities, and the extravagant fear of the opposite sex, there is sometimes a limpid wisdom that speaks to us still:

Certain men once asked the abbot Silvanus, saying, 'Under what discipline of life hast thou laboured to have come at this wisdom of thine?' And he answering, said, 'Never have I suffered to remain in my heart a thought that angered me'.⁴³

Some tried the life and found that they could not endure it. Jerome spent some time in the Syrian desert, learned Hebrew to rid his imagination of dancing girls and discovered, in the end, that his calling lay elsewhere. St John

Chrysostom ruined his digestion when a desert ascetic and, as a result, he later gained a reputation for being inhospitable.

Athanasius' Life of Antony was translated into Latin and had a great influence in western Europe. John Cassian was a monk at Bethlehem. He visited the Egyptian monks, and spent some time in Constantinople, and in Rome before settling in southern Gaul, where he founded monasteries and wrote the Institutes for their guidance, closely modelled on the work of Pakhom, but tempering Egyptian austerity for a different environment. In 286, Augustine was living in Milan. He was visited by a North African imperial official, Pontician, who told him he had gone walking one afternoon in Treves with friends, and they had come to a little Christian community practising the common life. One of them picked up from a table the Life of Antony. He and a companion were so deeply moved that they joined the community on the spot. This conversation led Augustine directly to the great moment of conflict and decision in the garden that changed his life.⁴⁴

Not everyone admired the Desert People. Rutilius in the early fifth century, wrote of:

a credulous exile skulking in the dark, Thinking, poor fool, that heaven feeds on filth, Himself to himself more harsh than the outraged gods.⁴⁵

Gibbon condemned ascetics 'inspired by the savage enthusiasm which represents man as a criminal and God as a tyrant',⁴⁶ but, in our own times, when western Christians have rediscovered the spirituality of the Eastern churches, when the Jesus prayer is popular, and Americans build poustinias,⁴⁷ the Desert People speak to many hearts. Thomas Merton devoted a book to them.

The growth of Monophysite churches

The growth of the independent Monophysite churches was the ultimate consequence of Chalcedon, but it was a consequence that was long delayed. Egyptian views on Christology were so passionately held that the Egyptian bishops present at Chalcedon said that if they agreed to its statement of faith, they were signing their own death warrants. Six years later, the Chalcedonian Patriarch of Alexandria was actually lynched. The Western Church and the Papacy were unalterably committed to Chalcedon and the doctrine of Christ's two natures. In the late fifth century, an attempt was made to effect a compromise, but without success.⁴⁸

Justinian was emperor of Byzantium from 527 until his death in 565. He was incomparably the greatest emperor of late antiquity, remembered especially for his bold and temporarily successful attempt to regain the lost western provinces. He was also a gifted theologian, deeply involved in the controversies of his time and concerned, above all, to win the theological unity that was seen as a necessary support of empire. Justinian supported Chalcedon, but his wife, Theodora, whose fearless spirit saved his throne at a time of crisis, was a convinced Monophysite.

Ironically, it was under a Chalcedonian emperor that the foundations of a separate Monophysite church organization were laid. The leading role was played by Severus, who was Patriarch of Antioch until 518, and died in exile in Egypt twenty years later. He was a devout Monophysite, and began to ordain Monophysite clergy because he feared for the souls of the faithful if their sacraments were mediated to them through clergy who lacked the true faith. He was deluged by huge numbers of candidates for ordination. It was, in the words of a contemporary, '. . . like a river that had burst its banks'. The creation of a Monophysite church organization was completed by a remarkable Syrian, Jacob Baradaeus, who was appointed Bishop of Edessa in 542 as a result of Theodora's influence.

Egyptian Christianity was divided between a vast majority of fervent Monophysites and a small group of Melkites, king's men, headed by a Chalcedonian Patriarch of Alexandria, who owed his position to Byzantine support. The divisions of Egyptian Christians paved the way for Arab conquest, which, later, Coptic historians interpreted as a just punishment for the transgression of Chalcedon.

Nubia⁴⁹

Christianity came curiously late to Nubia, when one considers the fervour of its Egyptian neighbours.

Despite much detailed research, the history of Nubia still has many question marks. The kingdom of Meroe flourished from about 300 bc to about ad 300. Its people invented their own alphabetic script, and some were also literate in Greek. The sounds of Meroitic words are known, but little is understood of their meaning; the same is true of ancient Etruscan. The eunuch whom Philip encountered and converted was a high official from Meroe, in the employ of the Candace, the Queen Mother.

In the fourth century ad, the growing kingdom of Aksum conquered Meroe, which was already in decline. The next phase is called the Ballana culture. There was virtually no evidence of literacy, nor of the palaces and monumental architecture of a former day. This change was not the result of poverty as Ballana princes were buried with rich grave goods, including elaborate crowns of silver. It was a culture where Christianity was known, though not adopted. In one grave, for instance, a cross was found next to charms of gold and of lead. Three separate states developed in Nubia: from North to South, Nobatia, Makouria, and Aiwa, or Alodia.

In 543, Theodora sent the Monophysite monk, Julian, to Nubia, instructing the Governor of the Thebaid to stop any other mission. Julian converted Nobatia to Christianity, beginning with the court. So rapid and complete was the process, that it suggests either that the King wielded great power, or that a considerable degree of prior Christian influence existed.

Makouria was converted by Chalcedonian emissaries in about 569, and Aiwa to Monophysite Christianity in 580 by Longinus, the Bishop of Philae, who made a great detour through the desert to avoid Makouria. Nubian Christianity developed in great isolation. Between 639 and 641, the Arabs conquered Egypt, and, from then on, Coptic Christians were a diminishing minority in a country under Muslim rule. Despite this isolation, Nubian Christianity was to survive and, indeed, flourish for centuries.

The Arabs did not conquer Nubia. They were repelled by Nubia's brilliant archers in two battles at Dongola, a setback they doubtless accepted the more readily because of the poverty of the country. They recognized the independence of Nubia in a baqt, the only treaty in which the Arabs recognized the independence of a non-Muslim state; Aswan was their only officially accepted frontier.

Nubia was one of the few countries in the ancient world that was converted to Christianity without a prior experience of Roman rule; Ethiopia was another. Culturally, its Christianity was greatly influenced by Byzantium. The Nubians used the liturgy of St Mark, and decorated the walls of their churches with murals that showed their royals dressed in Byzantine style. In 1961, Polish archaeologists excavated what appeared to be a mound of sand, and, within it, found Faras Cathedral, its walls decorated with 169 magnificent paintings of dark-skinned Nubian kings, queens and bishops, and biblical figures, and saints. To Frend, Nubia was a tiny Byzantine court, far away from Constantinople.⁵⁰ Adams, a Nubian specialist, saw the Byzantine dimension as a superficial veneer.⁵¹

Literacy revived and took many forms: Greek, old Nubian, written in Greek characters, and Arabic. Christian Nubia at its height was a land of great cultural vitality. This was reflected not only in its churches and paintings, but also in a new tradition of brightly decorated pottery, characterized by realistic designs from the natural world, an idiom that owes nothing to outside influences, and which has been described as the most distinguished pottery tradition in Africa.

Pre-Christian religious buildings were often situated far from centres of population, but there were up to six Christian churches in each village. The practice of burying the dead with grave goods died out at once. Every pre-Christian Nubian king is known by his grave, but not a single Christian one. In time, Nobatia was absorbed by Makouria. The enlarged state adhered to the Monophysite faith, probably because of the overwhelming influence of Coptic Egypt.

Written records from Christian Nubia include inscriptions, and fragments of religious texts, usually Gospels, lives of the saints, or liturgical documents. Ibn Selim was an Egyptian visitor to Nubia in 969, and he speaks with sympathy of 'lovely islands and at a distance of less than two days' journey about thirty villages with beautiful buildings, churches, monasteries and many palm trees, vines, gardens, fields and large pastures . . ,'.⁵² Near Faras, archaeologists found a cave that was inhabited by an eighth-century hermit: 'Theophilus this least of monks who wrote these writings on my dwelling', in 739. The texts he chose to write on his whitewashed walls over a period of years shed a vivid light on the religious sensibility of an eighth-century Nubian. They include the Nicene Creed, stories from the lives of the saints, and various amuletic texts, including the beginnings of the four Gospels, written in circular form; also the apocryphal letter to Jesus from King Abgar of Edessa, mentioned above, and the famous palindrome,

SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS.⁵³

Thus did Theophilus protect and inspire his chosen solitude.

Changing styles of church architecture reflect an increasing distance from the people. The churches became smaller so that the congregation stayed outside, a pattern familiar from village Greece. However, the decline of Christianity in Nubia seems to have been mainly caused by a gradual process of Arab Muslim immigration. As time went on, the Nubian population became increasingly dominated by Arabs or Arabized Nubians. In 1315, the Muslim government of Egypt imposed a Nubian Muslim as the King of Makouria, and, in 1317, Dongola Cathedral officially became a mosque. However, the tiny Christian splinter kingdom of Dotawo survived in lower Nubia until the late fifteenth century. Further South, the Christian kingdom of Aiwa seems to have survived to about 1500. In 1523, a gallant Jewish traveller, David Reubeni, visited its capital, Soba, and found it in ruins. As recently as 1930, local Arabs still swore an oath in the name of, 'Soba the home of my grandfathers and grandmothers, which can make the stone float and the cotton boll sink'.⁵⁴

Aksum

There were undoubtedly Christian and Jewish merchants in the cosmopolitan cities of Adulis and Aksum, but the Christianization of king and people came with dramatic suddenness in the early fourth century, as a result of a romantically unlikely chain of events. A Christian philosopher from Tyre called Meropius travelled to India⁵⁵ with his wards, Frumentius and Aedesius. In the Red Sea, they fell prey to pirates and were shipwrecked. Meropius lost his life, but the people of Aksum found the two boys sitting under a tree, studying. They were welcomed at the court of the king, Ella Amida; Aedesius became his cupbearer, and Frumentius his treasurer and secretary. When the

King died, leaving an infant son, the future King, Ezana, Frumentius acted as regent. When Ezana grew up and took over his inheritance, Aedesius returned to Tyre. Frumentius went to Alexandria, met the great Athanasius and informed him of the needs of the Christians of Aksum. Athanasius sent him back to Aksum as its first Bishop. Ethiopian traditions written down much later call Frumentius 'Abba Salama', Father of Light; the Christian kings are remembered as two brothers, with the symbolic names of 'Abreha', he who has made light, and 'Asbeha', he who has brought the dawn. The story has independent corroboration for we have a letter from the Arian Emperor, Constantius, to the King of Aksum urging him to obtain his Bishop from Arian sources rather than from Athanasius, 'who is guilty of ten thousand crimes'.⁵⁶

Ezana's monuments and coins provide a fascinating mirror of his gradual adoption of Christianity. His earliest inscriptions are dedicated to the South Arabian gods, Astar, Baher and Meder; later, they invoke 'The Lord of Heaven', and, finally, the Trinity. Ezana's conversion has been explained in different ways, most cynically by suggestions that he knew of Constantine and had come to consider Christianity an appropriate ideology for great kings. A recent thoughtful reconsideration of the question interprets it in terms of the theories of Robin Horton, referred to earlier in this chapter,⁵⁷ suggesting that when one breaks free from the microcosm, as Ezana did in his conquests of Meroe, a universal religion comes to seem appropriate.

Ethiopia was converted by Syrians, and the connection was to be of enduring importance. The Syrian missionaries whom Ethiopia remembers as the Nine Saints arrived in the fifth century. They founded monasteries, and translated the Bible into Ge'ez from a version of the Septuagint in use in the Patriarchate of Antioch. It is possible, but not certain, that they were Monophysites, fleeing from the aftermath of Chalcedon. Certainly, from that day to this, the Ethiopian Church has espoused the Monophysite cause with passionate conviction. The sixth-century King of Ethiopia, Kaleb, invaded the Himyarite kingdom when Dhu Nawas was persecuting Christians. For a short time, Ethiopia ruled the Yemen, but it was displaced, first by the Persian conquest of Arabia, and later by the advent of Islam.

I he churches of the Maghrib, like their counterparts in Nubia, are long since dead. In their heyday, they produced some of the most brilliant intellects of Christendom, and their memory endures, not only in the writings of the famous, and the ruins of Roman cities, but also in the remains of innumerable village churches, both Catholic and Donatist.

The growth of North African Christianity can only be understood against the background of Roman rule, which began with the sack of Carthage in 146 bc, and was completed with the conquest of Mauretania (northern Morocco) in ad 40. The Maghrib underwent a process of Romanization that had no parallel in Egypt. Roman cities were founded, most notably Carthage, on the site of its predecessor, razed to the ground. New provinces were founded, Mauretania, Numidia (northern Algeria) and Africa, in Tunisia, which, taking its name from the local Afri, gave its name to a continent. Many former Roman soldiers were given land grants and became colonists; local notables and whole townships, were given Roman citizenship (which was granted to all the freeborn in the empire in ad 212). Many North Africans took the path of social mobility in the Roman world, most notably the emperor Septimius Severus, who, throughout his life, spoke Latin with an accent,⁵⁸ married a Syrian princess, and died at York, a symbol of an empire that had ceased to be Roman. Augustine grew up 200 miles from the sea and was of Berber descent, but spoke no language other than Latin.

According to Josephus, Africa supplied Rome with corn for eight months a year, the rest coming from Egypt.⁵⁹ Great groves of olive trees were planted, often in areas that are now virtually desert. 'Here lies Dion … he lived 80 years and planted 4000 trees'.⁶⁰ It is an enviable memorial. This productivity was largely due to Roman canals and viaducts.

The known Christian history of the Maghrib begins dramatically in 180, with the martyrdom of five women and seven men from the little village of Scilli, near Carthage. One of them carried in his bag, 'books and letters of Paul, a just man'. The kindly Roman proconsul who presided at their trial did not desire their deaths. He pointed out that he, too, was a religious man, and suggested they take 30 days to think things over, but the Scilli martyrs needed no time for reflection: 'Today we are martyrs in heaven. Thanks be to God*. The words resound through a North African Christian history dominated by a passion for martyrdom.

The Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity is one of the most moving documents left us from the first centuries of the Church. Perpetua is one of four early woman Christians in the ancient world whose writings have survived. Most of the text in her prison journal was, '. . . written in her own hand and according to her own perceptions'. She was a member of a prosperous family, aged twenty-two, married, with a baby boy. Her father was a pagan; the journal describes his despairing attempts to save his beloved child from the death she embraced. She was martyred with others, among them Saturus, and her friend, the slave, Felicity, also the mother of a new baby.⁶¹

Perpetua had a number of visions. In the first, she ascends a bronze ladder to heaven, treading on the head of a dragon to do so. The edges of the ladder are instruments of war. She avoids them, and is unharmed. At the top of the ladder she finds a nurturing father figure, who gives her cheese to eat. In another vision, she becomes a male gladiator, and, after a successful fight, is rewarded with apples from another nurturing father (we cannot here explore the psychological and other implications of these visions).⁶² Saturus had a vision in which he saw a priest and bishop excluded from heaven, '. . . severed and sad. And they cast themselves at our feet, and said, „Make peace between us …“ The rival claims of bishops and confessors was to be a major theme of North African Christian history.

Perpetua, Felicity, and their companions were martyred in the arena at Carthage, in March 203. Perpetua guided the executioner's sword to her own throat. 'Perhaps so great a woman . . . could not otherwise be slain except she willed it … '

Tertullian (c. 160-240) was a convert to Christianity. Like Perpetua, he was part of the Latin-speaking élite of Carthage, and probably a lawyer. Jerome states that his father was a centurion.⁶³ His voluminous writings, like his life, are full of contradictions. He praised martyrdom, but died a natural death at an advanced age. Widely read himself, he denounced classical learning: 'What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?* Happily married, he praised virginity. Ad Uxorem, addressed to 'my best beloved fellow-servant in the Lord', gives her detailed instructions about her way of life if she is widowed. It concludes with the warmest description of Christian married life in the ancient world.⁶⁴ A denouncer of heretical sects, he joined the Montanists, a sect founded in Phrygia (central Turkey), given to fasting and ecstatic experiences. Augustine tells us that in his old age he founded a little group, Tertullianistae, a sect whose existence is well attested in the late fourth century.

Tertullian was a Puritan. He believed that Christians should be a gathered remnant, avoiding all the corruption of a tainted world.⁶⁵ Women should avoid cosmetics, elaborate hairstyles, and fine clothing: 'That which He Himself has not produced is not pleasing to God, unless he was unable to order sheep to be born with purple and sky-blue fleeces'.⁶⁶ In his writings we see, although through a flawed glass, the growth of North African Christianity in his time. His denunciations of heretical sects, with their women leaders, reflect the strength of gnosticism. He describes, perhaps with exaggeration, the contemporary growth of Christianity: 'We are but of yesterday, and we have filled every place among you—cities, islands, fortresses, towns, market-places, the very camp, tribes, companies, palace, senate, forum . . ,'.⁶⁷

The Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity has many Montanist overtones, and it is possible that Tertullian was the editor.

After decades of obscurity, the Carthaginian Church emerges into the light of day again in the writings of St Cyprian. In 246, when in his mid forties, Cyprian went through a dramatic conversion experience, finding in Christian baptism a miraculous release from the vices that enchained him. He was a wealthy man, a lawyer, skilled in magical arts.

I myself was held in bonds by the innumerable errors of my previous life. … I was disposed to acquiesce in my clinging vices, and because I despaired of better things, I used to indulge my sins as if they were actually parts of me. . . . But after that, by the help of the water of new birth … a second birth had restored me to a new man.⁶⁸

In 248, he was chosen as Bishop of Carthage. He died a martyr's death ten years later, greeting his death with the words of the Scilli martyrs, 'Thanks be to God'. In the approaching divisions of the North African Church, both Catholics and Donatists believed that they stood in his tradition.

Cyprian affirmed the authority of the Church vis-à-vis the schismatic rigorist movement that followed the Roman presbyter, Novatian. He successfully established the authority of bishops, rather than confessors, in determining policy to be followed towards those who lapsed and repented, but, like the Donatists after him, he believed in the rebaptism of heretics and schismatics, defying the current Pope (Stephen) to do so. Accordingly to Jerome, he read Tertullian daily, and he had similar views on purple sheep.⁶⁹

The poor were often the most enthusiastic martyrs. Tertullian realized this. 'I fear the neck, beset with pearl and emerald nooses, will give no room to the broadsword'.⁷⁰ Cyprian, an exception, like Perpetua, gave his wealth to the poor on his conversion, 'dispensing the purchase money of entire estates'.⁷¹ He described the worldliness of some at least of his co-religionists: 'Very many bishops . . . became agents in secular business, forsook their throne . . . hunted the markets for gainful merchandise, while brethren were starving in the church'.⁷² However, the Christian community was still capable of idealism and self-sacrifice. When plague struck Carthage, and many died, the Christians, led by Cyprian, devoted themselves to the afflicted.

Traditional religion declined in the third century, a change that is easier to document than to explain. North Africa had many traditional divinities, but none more feared than Saturn, who was closer to the Punic Baal than to the Italian Saturnus. He communicated with believers in dreams, and they honoured him with human sacrifice, only later substituting offerings of lambs. Even Christians found him so alarming that they referred to him indirectly as Senex, old man. Tertullian wrote, '. . . children were openly sacrificed in Africa to Saturn as lately as the proconsulship of Tiberius . . ,'.⁷ⁱ The last dated inscription to Saturn in Numidia and Mauretania is ad 272, the last in Tunisia, 323. As the appeal of Christianity became more popular, paganism became the preserve of an aristocratic and/or highly educated minority: 'There may be a direct connection, in the Late Roman period, between the narrowing of Latin culture in its pagan form—its „aristocratisation“—and its widening—its „démocratisation“—in its Christian form'.⁷⁴ Augustine's teachers at Madaura were pagans, and there were riots in 399 when traditional shrines were suppressed at Carthage.⁷⁵

The Donatist Church

There is a profound irony in the fact that just when Christianity became official and respectable, North African Christians were torn apart by what was to prove a permanent division. The Novatian schism grew out of the Decian

persecution, the Donatist out of Diocletian's, from 303 to 313. This broke out suddenly after some 40 years of peace that had undoubtedly undermined the enthusiasm for martyrdom. Christians were ordered to hand over copies of the scriptures and their churches were burned. It was a situation that lent itself to evasion, and some handed over heretical texts or books on secular subjects. As before, the problem arose, what policy should the Church follow towards the traditores.

In 304, the conflict between confessor and Church authority broke out once more. Forty-seven Christians from the village of Abitina were tried and imprisoned in Carthage. They declared that no one who associated with the traditores would enjoy paradise. They were challenged by the Archdeacon of Carthage, Caecilian, who cut them off from visitors and supplies, a classic clash between the authority of the confessor and the organizational structure of the Church. There was an element of class hostility in this as the poor had been more prominent among the martyrs, partly because, perhaps, they had less to lose. In 311, Caecilian was chosen as Bishop of Carthage. The election was hurried through before the arrival of the Bishop of Numidia, who traditionally played a prominent role in his consecration. He then appointed an alternative Bishop of Carthage, Majorinus, an obscure figure who soon fades from the scene and is replaced by the much more formidable Donatus. He gave his name to a major North African church that was to endure until Christianity in the Maghrib came to an end.

Donatus came from southern Numidia near the desert's edge. He was a charismatic figure; 'Men swore by his „white hairs“ . . . Like some Jewish High Priest, he celebrated the mysteries alone'.⁷⁶ By a sad irony, persecution divided Christians just when persecution was coming to an end.

Constantine became the Emperor of Rome after the battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312. This sincere, but far from exemplary, convert, baptized on his deathbed, saw Christian unity as a concomitant of a united empire, and, as we have seen, summoned the Council of Nicaea. He threw the full weight of imperial authority on the Catholic side in North Africa. In Donatist eyes, imperial persecution was not a disadvantage: 'You come with edicts of emperors, we hold nothing in our hands but volumes of scriptures'.⁷⁷ Constantine built a new capital on the Bosphorus, which long bore his name. The gradual separation of an eastern and western empire, formalized in 395, j/ had profound effects on Christendom. In the end, the original Roman empire disappeared, swallowed up by barbarian invasions. Byzantium survived, despite the attacks of Muslims and of (western) Christian crusaders, until /j 1453.

The great church historian, Frend, interpreted Donatism as a vehicle for Berber patriotism and for socio-economic protest, the protest of the urban poor and the rural peasants against a Church increasingly closely identified with the landowning classes and imperial authority.⁷⁸ That it embodied such elements is beyond doubt. The Donatists claimed Simon of Cyrene as an Afer

(African) like themselves, and Augustine had to use an interpreter in the countryside around Hippo, where local people spoke lingua punka, probably Berber rather than Punic.

The Circumcellions were an extremist wing of the Donatists, who seem to have first appeared in about 340 (the name was invented by their enemies; they called themselves Champions, agonistici). This was clearly a Peasants' Revolt; they lived in community near the tombs of rural martyrs, carrying clubs called Israel, attacking their propertied opponents with the war cry Deo Laudes. They had women associates whom Augustine called nuns: (sanctimo-niales):

… no man could rest secure in his possessions … At that time, no creditor was free to press his claim, and all were terrified by the letters of these fellows who boasted that they were „Captains of the Saints“. . . . Even journeys could not be made with perfect safety, for masters were often thrown out of their own chariots and forced to run, in servile fashion, in front of their own slaves. . . .⁷⁹

Augustine described their defence of 'any debtor whatever that sought their assistance or protection'.⁸⁰ At the bottom of cliffs in Numidia are boulders marked with a name, a date, and nat(alis) (anniversary) or r (redditio), where Circumcellions plunged to their deaths in pursuit of a kind of martyrdom.

Frend's critics have pointed out that Augustine differed little from the Donatist bishops in his education and economic circumstances, that Donatist apologists apparently wrote only in Latin, that Donatism was as much an urban as a rural phenomenon (the great basilica at Timgad covered five acres), and that not only Donatist literature, but even their war cry was in Latin.

Many Donatists were converts from paganism, their church affiliation determined by geographical accident. What distinguished the Donatists above all was an ideology, a concept of the Church as a small body of the chosen. Augustine, on the other hand, believed that tares and wheat could be distinguished only in eternity. Donatists described the Church in texts beloved of Cyprian:'. . . a garden locked, a fountain sealed',⁸¹ or as an Ark, caulked to prevent leakage in or out. The journal of a modern New Zealand conservative Catholic group is called Hortus Conclusus.

Donatism was not confined to Africa. Donatus' gifted successor was a Spaniard or Gaul, and there was, for a time, a Donatist Pope in Rome, but they cherished texts that could be construed to mean God's special predilection for Africa, such as a version of the Song of Solomon 1:6 ('My beloved is from the South'). To the much travelled Augustine, it was bizarre to suggest that God's Church was primarily located in Numidia. He compared the Donatists with frogs in a pond, who thought they were the universal Church: Securus adindicat orbis terrarum. The whole world is secure in its judgement. The words troubled Newman, in his Anglican days.

'Heretics, Jews and pagans—they have come to form a unity over against our Unity', said Augustine, in words that anticipate much that was sinister in the future. Augustine's views on Donatists were used to justify the persecution of the Huguenots,⁸² and no biblical text has been used more oppressively than Compelle intrare. Laws imposed fines and legal disabilities on Donatists, but were often not strictly enforced.⁸' However, it is a sombre thought that, in the empire as a whole, more Christians were persecuted by Christian emperors than by pagan ones.

Donatists and African Catholics had much in common. They shared a fundamental austerity, a separateness from 'the world', to which Christians elsewhere were increasingly accommodated. It was, perhaps, their essential orthodoxy that exasperated Augustine, their creation of a separate church on the basis of an obscure ecclesiastical quarrel.

Augustine (354-430)**

No Christian in the world of late antiquity is as well known to us as Augustine. Thanks largely to his Confessions, we know him better than many people we meet every day. We know about his dislike of travel, especially by sea, his childhood theft of pears, which he remembered as an instance of human depravity. His literary output was prodigious, an inscription in a Spanish library says that anyone who claims to have read it all is a liar! His Confessions was written in what he believed to be his old age—he was 43! Many commentators have dwelt on his attachment to his mother, Monica, and his alienation from his father. Like Perpetua's narrative, it has its own silences. He does not mention the name of the mother of his son, with whom he lived for many years, sending her away disconsolate when he planned to marry an heiress (Perpetua similarly, says nothing of her husband).

Until his final conversion, Augustine was a restless seeker after truth. It is interesting that he never seems to have considered Donatism or paganism to be viable alternatives.

For nine years, he was a Manichee. In North Africa, as in Egypt, Manicheism largely replaced gnosticism. Mani was a Persian who died in 260; he attempted to synthesize the various faiths known to him. The religion he founded lasted a thousand years, won converts from Rome to China, and has left a great literary inheritance in a variety of languages, including Coptic.

Be like a jar of wine Firmly set on its stand, Outside, it is pottery and pitch But inside it is fragrant wine.⁸⁵

Its world view was dualist, its great attraction, which it shared with other dualist systems, is that by making evil an independent principle, it avoids the problem of the compatibility of sin and suffering with a good and omnipotent God.

Manicheism was one of many religious alternatives confronting North Africans. Another was the well-established and long-continued tradition of Judaism.⁸⁶ We have noted the Tertullianistae, and Augustine tells us of another splinter group, a village that emulated the continence of Abel, despite the problems this posed for sectarian survival!

For a time, Augustine was attracted by neo-Platonism. In August 386, after his famous conversion experience in a garden in Milan, he turned from ambition and the prospect of an advantageous marriage. He reverted to the orthodox Catholicism of his mother and returned to Africa, soon to become Bishop of Hippo and the implacable opponent of Donatism. He attacked the Donatists in public debates and learned treatises, placed posters on the walls of their basilicas and wrote popular songs, like The ABC against Donatists'.

There is a sense in which Augustine never left the Manichees. Their influence is clear in his ideas on sin and salvation, that only a few are predestined for salvation, most of humanity ending up in Hell. No ideological encounter has had more momentous consequences than his long debate with Pelagius. Pelagius, who may have come from Britain (the only heresiarch from the British Isles in the early Church), had a long and distinguished career as a teacher in Rome. When one of his disciples sought ordination in Carthage, he incurred the unrelenting hostility of Augustine. Pelagius, like the Reformation leaders after him, attacked the idea of a two-tier spirituality, where sanctity was only to be expected of monks and nuns. It was obligatory for all—God had commanded it ('Be ye therefore perfect'), and he would not demand the impossible. It was not only possible, but mandatory to create a just society.); The idea that all humanity would suffer for Adam's sin was intolerable. In the words of Julian of Eclanum, one of the most gifted Pelagian controversialists, the idea of Original Sin 'is improbable, it is untrue; it is unjust and impious'.⁸⁷ Most modern Christians would agree with Pelagius, but his humane and optimistic theology was condemned by successive Popes in 417 and 418, with incalculable consequences for medieval and later history.

It is difficult for us to enter into the passion that underlay these long-dead debates on doctrine. A famous description of Constantinople during the Arian controversy reflects how they touched the lives of everyone: 'If you ask for your change, the shopkeeper philosophizes to you about the Begotten and the Unbegotten'. In northern Africa, as elsewhere, religious differences sometimes led to bloodshed. A Greek historian of the fifth century, reflected disapprovingly, 'surely nothing can be further from the spirit of Christianity than massacres, fights and transactions of that sort'.⁸⁸

Christianity and political events

North Africans lived on the edge of the empire, and of Romanitas, yet, as we have seen, they often identified closely with both. They brooded over the relationship between religious change and temporal fortunes; the issue was far from academic. Tertullian complained that if the Tiber flooded, or the Nile failed to flood, there was a cry of 'Christians to the lion!'⁸⁹ Arnobius Afer (flor. 290-303) was a pagan polemicist in the Roman province of Africa who became a Christian, and wrote Against Pagans during Diocletian's persecution to attack this kind of thinking. Another African, Lactantius, (flor. 290-320), Arnobius' pupil, and also a convert, wrote a pamphlet on The Death of Persecutors, claiming that they were punished for their cruelty to Christians.⁹⁰ His life's work was to make Christianity acceptable to cultured pagans, but he denounces the injustices by which empires are created. Rome's boundaries spread '. . . by inflicting injustices according to legal forms', and he asks a question that has not lost its relevance, 'What are the interests of our country, but the inconveniences of another state or nation?'⁹¹

When Constantine became Roman emperor, most Christians had no difficulty in seeing his success as evidence of divine approval. The most famous example is Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History. Like many Greek Christians after him, he saw the Christian empire as the mirror image of the heavenly kingdom. However, in 410, Rome fell to the barbarians. Rome had already ceased to be the capital of the empire by then, but the symbolic and psychological impact of the fall of the 'Eternal City' was tremendous. Pagans blamed it on the spread of Christianity (Gibbon agreed with them, and perhaps, he was not wholly wrong). Augustine's response to this was his City of God, which took him fifteen years to write. His two cities cannot be identified with any earthly polity; their inhabitants are divided by the ultimate direction of their will and the membership of each can be known only in eternity: 'Two loves therefore have given origin to these two cities, self-love in contempt of God unto the earthly, love of God in contempt of one's self to the heavenly'. Rome, and other earthly states are not, and cannot be, the counterpart of the heavenly city 'and yet have those a kind of allowable peace . . . during our admixture with Babylon we ourselves make use of her peace . . ,'.⁹²

Commodian was a Latin poet, widely, but not universally, believed to be a fifth -century African. He welcomed the barbarians as agents of God's wrath against the pride of Rome, and the avarice of the rich, who, in the millenium, w ill be the slaves of the saints.

The fall of Roman Africa

One of the mysteries of church history lies in the way in which some Christian communities but not others feel a strong commitment to evangelization. Despite a gloomy view of the eternal fate of the unbaptized, Augustine and his compatriots seem to have felt no duty to preach Christianity beyond the Roman boundaries, unlike the Nestorians, Byzantines, and Syrian Monophy-sites who did so much to spread Christianity further east. The inward focus of the North African Church is reflected in the striking density of ecclesiastical administration in 411: no less than 286 Catholic bishops, and 284 Donatist ones held a debate.

In 426, 'barbarians' living outside the charmed circle of African Romanitas invaded and plundered it: Augustine wrote of 'hordes of African barbarians, plundering and destroying without resistance'. The Church was weakened both by sectarian and class divisions: 'The clergy were hated because of their possessions'.⁹³ Augustine described the dissatisfaction of the poor: 'They alone [the rich] really live'.

In 429, the Vandal king, Gaiseric, in one of the great gambles of history, brought his entire people, some 80 thousand of them, to North Africa. They settled in Tunisia, the old Carthaginian heartland, after 'the fourth Punic war'. The Vandals were Gothic in language, and Arian in religion, and persecuted Catholics and Donatists impartially. The only extant Donatist document from the period identifies the Vandal King with the Beast of Revelations. Gradually, the Vandals mellowed. Thrasamund, a later king, enjoyed theological debate; his successor was a Catholic. There was even a resurgence of Latin poetry, associated with the now obscure names of Luxorius and Dracontius.

The Vandals were too few to modify local society, or speech patterns. Their regime was overthrown by the forces of the Byzantine Emperor, Justinian, in 533; not a single Gothic word survived. The most enduring consequence of their regime was a still more profound weakening of Romanitas. In western Numidia and Mauretania, independent Berber kingdoms re-emerged, Christian in faith, and Latin in their official language (much earlier Berber kingdoms had been swallowed up by Roman imperialism). The peoples of the desert's edge, to the South, the Lawata, worshipped Hammon-Baal, the ancient god of the Libyans and Carthaginians. Byzantine Africa was larger than the Vandal kingdom, smaller than Roman Africa, which had included western Algeria and northern Morocco; the Romans' monuments were plundered to fortify its frontiers. By the seventh century, however, Christianity in Byzantine Africa seems to have been in decline, the small size and inferior construction of its churches reflect this.⁹⁴

Where most Egyptians were passionately Monophysite, North African Christianity was vehemently Chalcedonian. Indeed, in 550, the Council of Carthage excommunicated the Pope for his hesitations in this area! There was a resurgence of Donatism; the correspondence of Pope Gregory (590-604) is full of references to their 'execrable wickedness'.⁹⁵

The Arab invasions

The prophet Muhammad died in 632. Seven years later, an Arab force invaded Egypt. Its success was greatly aided by the collaboration of several highly placed men, notably Cyrus, the 'Melkite' Patriarch of Alexandria, and the Byzantine Governor, who surrendered both the fortress of Babylon and

Alexandria, and the Coptic 'Duke' Sanutius, who handed over the Egyptian fleet. All this shows the bitterness of the divisions between the Christian parties. It was not clear at the time that Islam was a new religion; the 'Ishmaelites' were initially widely regarded as a Christian sect. The Arab victors recognized the Monophysite church and the Copts received the religious toleration accorded 'Peoples of the Book' in return for poll tax. The Bvzantines withdrew, and with them the hated Chalcedonian church.

The Arabs valued the Copts as taxpayers and as civil servants. They were even, initially, prohibited from conversion, and the army was replenished by clients, mawali, initially from Libya. Coptic Christians could not bear arms or serve as soldiers until the nineteenth century. The survival of the Coptic church is sometimes explained by economic factors, such as the church's rich endowments and the Copts' dominance in the civil service. Christians formed a majority in Egypt until the tenth century. They declined to their present minority position as a result of successive waves of Arab immigration, and persecution under the Mamluks, from the mid thirteenth to the early sixteenth centuries. The worsening of the Copts' position was, in part, due to the aggression of the Crusaders, who, at various times, proposed blockading the Red Sea, or diverting the Nile. Historians cite the marriages of Arabs to Coptic women whose children became Muslims. However, the influence of Christian wives is one of the main causes adduced as originally spreading Christianity. Copt, originally meaning 'Egyptian', now meant 'Christian'.

Religious adherence and language choice were quite distinct. At the end of the tenth century, most Egyptian Christians spoke Coptic; by the end of the twelfth, most spoke Arabic, and Christian literature was translated into it. The thirteenth century was the golden age of Coptic literature in Arabic.⁹⁶ Coptic remained the language of liturgy, like Latin in the West. The Coptic church supplied the head of the Ethiopian church, the Abuna, until 1951, 'which must * iqSZ? surely constitute an ecclesiastical record for dilatory indigenization'.⁹⁷ Today, there are roughly 4 million Copts in a population of 48 million.

The Arabs conquered Bvzantine Africa between 670 and 705, with the aid pouooju- tu of the mawali, one of whom was later to give his name to Gibraltar, the Rock of A<a6- p\uJLi Iariq. They called north-west Africa 'the Maghrib', which means 'the West'; Africa became Ifriqiva, and Carthage, Tunis. The opposition they encountered came mainly from the independent Berbers, rather than from Byzantine Africa. The names of two Berber leaders are preserved, Kasila, who founded a short-lived state at Kairouan, and died in 686, and al-Kahina, the Prophetess. I radition depicts her as a Jewish queen, who waged a long struggle against the Arabs, but urged her sons to go over to their side. She was killed in c. 698 at a place called Kahina's well. An eleventh-century source calls her a Christian, and the whole story may be a legend based on a corruption of the male name, Kahva.⁹⁸

The extinction of Christianity in the Maghrib is one of the great mysteries of African history. It was a gradual process. Though the evidence is

fragmentary, it is clear that the Arab invaders encountered a Christian culture largely confined to the towns and weakened both by sectarian divisions and by the invasions of, first, Arian Vandals, and then of Berber nomads, Lawata, 'ignorant of the Christian god'.⁹⁹

Gradually, the Berbers of the north-west became, first mawali, then Muslims. There were economic inducements to conversion: the chance of joining the armies that conquered Spain, and freedom from poll tax. The Maghrib lacked the monastic tradition that did so much to preserve Christianity in Egypt and Ethiopia. There was a process of desertification, the causes of which are debated, and the vast olive groves of inland Numidia gradually gave way to steppe, the natural habitat of Arab and Berber pastoralists.

By the ninth century, the Cyrene Cathedral had been converted to residential use.¹⁰⁰ Until the twelfth century, Arab writers refer to the Afariqa, whom they distinguish from the Rarbar, and seem to have been Christians. Latin was used in inscriptions until the eleventh century and al-Bakri found a Christian community at Tlemcen in 1068, as well as numerous ruined and empty churches in Algeria and Tunisia. Jewish communities survived, and were reinforced by those expelled from Spain. Rabbis in Algiers guided the Jews of Tuat on issues such as how to keep the sabbath when crossing the Sahara.¹⁰¹ As in Egvpt, Arabization was distinct from Christianization, and manv Maghribi Muslims speak Berber to this day. Some have discerned continuities between the Puritanism and separatism of- the Donatists, and North Africa's Kharijites, the cult of local saints and the shrines of dead sufis. Herodotus, in c. 430 bc, related how the Libyans would sleep on their ancestors' graves, and Augustine, writing in ad 397-8, observed, 'it had been my mother's custom in Africa to take meal-cakes and bread and wine to the shrines of saints'. Plus qa change.

Muslim and Christian saints in the Maghrib shared the same passion for truth, the same combativeness. Carthage was a centre of Christian scholarship. Its Muslim counterpart was Kairouan, the 'caravan', or resting place, founded in 670. A traveller asked what the people of Kairouan were discussing, and was told, 'the names and attributes of God'. Dhu'l Nun al Misri ('the Egyptian'), of Nubian parentage, died in 860. He was one of the founders of Sufism. A pleasant legend states that when he died, words appeared on his forehead, 'This is the friend of God, he died in love of God, slain by God'. Much the same could have been said of the Desert People. Muslims succeeded, where Christians failed, in spreading their faith far to the South, across the Saharan trade routes, and into the western Sudan. In the Roman ruins of Hippo, Arab visitors looked for the cathedral of 'Augodjin, a great doctor of the Christian religion'.¹⁰²

«•5 TWO ^

The Churches of the Middle Years, c. 1500 to c. 1800

They are possess'd with a strange notion, that they are the only true Christians in the world.

Jeronimo Lobo on seventeenth-centurv Ethiopia'

Introduction

The Christianity of the Maghrib had virtually disappeared by the eleventh centurv, and, in 1317, Dongola Cathedral, in Nubia, became a mosque. The modern phase of missionary activity in Africa, and elsewhere, began with the foundation of the Baptist Missionary Society in 1792. Christianity in Africa, in the centuries between the Church of Clement and Augustine, and that of the nineteenth century, has three main themes: the continuing life of the Coptic and Ethiopian churches, some strikingly unsuccessful attempts to 'convert' Muslim North Africa, and the history of the Catholic churches founded in black Africa, initially by the Portuguese.

The first Portuguese ships anchored off the coast of the west-central African kingdom of Kongo in 1483. Catholicism survived, in an indigenized form, until the late nineteenth century, when a new wave of missionary activity began. It was introduced into the Niger Delta kingdom of Warri in the 1570s; despite long periods without missionaries, it endured until the mid eighteenth centurv. In Benin, it proved ephemeral. On the once-uninhabited Atlantic islands of Sâo Thomé and the Cape Verdes, Christianity became part of the dominant Luso-African culture. There were comparable enclaves in the Senegambia, in Guinea-Bissau, and elsewhere in West Africa. Not all African converts were Catholics, some joined the various Protestant churches represented in the fort cultures on the Gold Coast, where several protégés of European merchants acquired a university education abroad. However, when they returned home they were, almost without exception, unhappy and Marginalized. Sometimes, they could no longer speak an African language. In southern Africa, several Mutapa princes became friars, and when Livingstone

e

I §

g i

Christianity in Africa, a chronological perspective

travelled on the Zambezi, he encountered a Catholicism that had never entirely died out.

The history of all Christian missions is a theme in counterpoint, the intricate and ever-changing relationship between Christianity, the cultural packaging in which it is presented, and the culture of the host community. To the missionaries, Christianity was inseparable from their own cultural inheritance, and their converts acquired many cultural traits that had nothing to do with religion, so that the nobility of the Kongo became counts or marquises, with family names such as da Silva. Despite this, African Christians inevitably understood Christianity in terms of their own culture, and incorporated many of its insights. As we have seen, scholarly opinion is sharply divided as to when this becomes inculturation, and when syncretism.

Ethiopia

The spread of Islam in Arabia, Egypt, Nubia, and throughout the near East, meant that Christian Ethiopia became increasingly isolated. The early relationships between Muslims and Christians were amiable, not least because a king of Aksum gave sanctuary to some of the first Muslims, fleeing from the then hostile city of Mecca. Gradually, Muslim merchants settled on the coastal plains.

In the tenth century, the Aksumite kingdom went through a crisis, created by Muslim pressure from the North and attacks from a traditionalist from the

South, an Agaw queen, who is remembered for her passionate hostility to Christianity.

Aksum declined, and the centre of political gravity moved further South, from 1150 to 1270, the kingdom was ruled by the Zagwe dynasty, based in Lasta (see Map 5), its name reflecting its Agaw origin. It was a classic case of the vanquished taking the victor captive. Lalibela (reg. c. 1205—25) is remembered as one of the greatest of the Zagwe kings. It was in his time that the miraculous rock-hewn churches were created, in an attempt to recreate the Holy Places in his own land. Perhaps he was seeking to sacralize the new dynasty, but, if so, the attempt was ultimately a failure for the Zagwe dynasty was overthrown by an Amharic one that could lay claim to Solomonic descent.

under Christian rule V//A under Muslim rule

Kilometres

i–1-1

0 250 500

Map 5. Ethiopia and its neighbours c. 1400

Ethiopia's new rulers no longer built in stone. The Solomonic tradition became the core symbol of Christian Ethiopia, the cornerstone of its sense of national identity. It was first recorded in the Kebra Negast, The Glory of Kings, written early in the fourteenth century, but it had lived in Ethiopian hearts long before. The Coptic chronicle of the life of the Alexandrian Patriarch, Cosmas, (b. 920) refers to, 'Abyssinia which is a vast country, namely the kingdom of Saba from which the Queen of the South came to Solomon'.² The Solomonic legend, as related in the Kebra Negast, tells how the Queen of Sheba visited Solomon, and, after her return home, bore his child, who grew up to become Menelik I of Aksum. When he grew up, he went to Jerusalem and took the Ark of the Covenant back to his own people. From then on, the Ethiopians considered themselves, rather than the Jews, to be the chosen people of God. The Ethiopians called their homeland Siyon (Zion) which is still the promised land of black spirituals and of reggae music.

The Ethiopian Church's strong Hebraic elements give it a unique role in Christian/Jewish dialogue. It has grown directly from Christianity's Jewish roots, without the admixture of Hellenism.

The Hebraic practices in Ethiopian Christianity are generally thought to have been adopted gradually, rather than being ancient survivals—an identification with Israel seemed especially appropriate for an isolated people with a sense of peril and encirclement. In the same way, nineteenth-century Maori prophets in New Zealand repeatedly described their people as Jews. The world of the Hebrew Bible clearly has much in common with African cultures, in the importance placed on dreams and visions, and the felt need to establish boundaries with ritual prohibitions. Many modern African prophetic churches keep the sabbath holy, and adopt dietary and other prohibitions similar to those laid down in Leviticus, as the Ethiopians do.

Only the head of the Church, the Abuna, could ordain clergy or consecrate the tabot (Ark), which is essential in every Ethiopian church. The need to obtain every Abuna from Muslim-ruled Egypt often created difficulties, and sometimes the post was vacant for years after the death of an incumbent.

The sabbath was kept holy as well as Sunday, a situation achieved after conflict: two great monastic orders disputed the issue to the brink of schism, until it was resolved in the mid fifteenth century. Jewish dietary taboos were strictly observed, as were the laws regulating ritual cleanness, and baby boys were circumcized on the eighth day after their birth. The Church's year was full of festivals and fast days. No Christian church has fasted with the resolution of the Ethiopians: there are 180 fast days in the year for the laity, and 250 for the clergy, with every Wednesday and Friday being fast days. On a fast day, one meal is eaten, after noon, and there is total abstention from meat, fat, eggs, and all dairy products. In the nineteenth century, Ethiopians exported coffee, but the Church forbade them to drink it.

I here are large numbers of priests, who support themselves, and may marry before, but not after, their ordination. They have often been of limited education. On one occasion, for example, a group of priests were confounded when Lalibela told them to read the ritual of baptism.³ Each church, even the smallest, is divided into three sections. These include a Holy of Holies, where the Ark is kept, and where only priests and the king might enter. The Ethiopian liturgy, with its drumming, dancing, scriptural readings, and antiphonal singing is a powerful amalgam of Jewish and African elements.

The monks were the cutting edge of Ethiopian spirituality. They were celibates and ascetics, a foreign missionary describing one who lived (like some modern diet gurus) on raw vegetables and beansprouts, saying, with a shudder, that it was 'the most dismal food in the world'.⁴ The monks were healers and missionaries; they did battle with the forces of Satan, whom Kaplan calls 'the forgotten „man“ of Ethiopian history'.⁵ The saints of Ethiopian Christianity are almost unknown in the West. They include Gebre Christos, a king's son who prayed for leprosy in order to share the sufferings of Christ. His prayer was answered.⁶

The Church, especially the monastic element, was often riven by controversies, the intensity of which reflects the Ethiopians' passionate absorption with religion. We have mentioned the fifteenth-century conflict over the Saturday Sabbath, between the followers of Teka Haymanot, based in Shoa, and those of Ewostatewos, based in Tigre, but there were many others. Monks denounced the royal practice of polygamy, and some representatives of both monastic groups, including Ewostatewos himself, died in exile. A late fifteenth-centurv monastic movement, the Stephanites, refused to prostate themselves before images of Mary or the Cross. In the early seventeenth century, a monk called za-Krestos departed much further from orthodoxy; he claimed to be the Christ of the Gentiles, and was executed. Until they were eliminated by persecution, his followers believed he rose from the dead: 'On the basis of this faith of theirs they founded a false church. . . . They ordained priests and deacons. The priests even gave them communion, saying, „The body of za-Krestos, our God, which he took from Amata Wangel, the lady of us all“ '.⁷ The movement took the inculturation of the faith in Ethiopia, and the reconstruction of its Holy Places, to an extreme conclusion.

Recent scholarship reminds us that we should not idealize the Ethiopian Church and some have condemned its endowments. A more fundamental criticism is that it underpinned a monarchy and nobility that were often rapacious and oppressive, and which were closely identified with an Amharic culture that despised both Oromo and 'Shankilla', 'blacks who lived in the lowland wildernesses . . .'.⁸ It also strengthened the dominance of the husband/father in the family. The word for fasting, so central to Ethiopian Christianity, is the same as the word for a field worked for a lord's benefit by compulsory labour.⁹

The Ealasha were feared and despised as the Other, in a situation similar to that of European Jewry. From the fifteenth century on, they were forbidden to own land, and, by the nineteenth century, they were shunned and despised _as buda ('evil eye'), 'wizards and cannibals eating men by some secret process of sorcery'.¹⁰ Christianity was spread largely by force of arms. The warrior king, Amda-Siyon (1314—44), was the architect of the Ethiopian State, and its cultural hegemony was extended and consolidated by missionary monks. In the late seventeenth century, Yohannes devastated the Agaw countryside: 'Then every Agaw who lives in the middle of Sikut . . . was terrified, took refuge at a church . . . and said … 'I shall become Christian and submit to the king and pay tribute and I shall do whatever the king orders me to do“'.¹¹ Ironically, the Agaw now venerate the memory of Yohannes the Saint. All this is not, of course, peculiar to Ethiopia; it is exactly paralleled in medieval Europe.

Christian Ethiopia, like the Coptic community, was not a mission field at all; it was an ancient and thoroughly Africanized church that would have provided most valuable precedents for other African Christians, had they come into contact with it. To Catholics, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church was heretical (because Monophysite), and schismatic, although they were not blind to its strengths: '. . . notwithstanding their separation from the Roman Church, and the corruptions which have crept into their faith, yet [they] retain in a great measure the devout fervour of the primitive Christians'.

Peaceful coexistence gave way to war, as Muslims created powerful new states, such as Ifat and Adal, to the East of the Christian kingdom. Ethiopia extended much further South than Aksum had done, but was still confined, in the main, to Ethio-semitic-speaking peoples of the highlands.

In the early sixteenth century, a dynamic Muslim leader arose in Adal, the Imam Ahmad, who came close to overthrowing the Christian kingdom. It was just at this time that Ethiopia came into direct contact with emissaries from Europe. Pero de Covilha reached Ethiopia in 1494, but was not allowed to leave, and died there thirty years later. Later delegations fared better, and a Portuguese contingent assisted in the defeat of Ahmad's forces in 1543. Ethiopia's kings were torn by the desire for European assistance on the one hand, and fear of the threat to their religion and independence on the other.

Pedro Paez was a Jesuit who was sent to Ethiopia in 1589. Captured by pirates, he served in the galleys for seven years, finally reaching his destination in 1603. A remarkable linguist who soon learned to read and write Ge'ez and Amharic, he converted the king, Susenyos, and some of his kinsmen and courtiers. Susenyos openly declared himself a Catholic in 1622. Paez died in the same year, and his successors, lacking his tact and wisdom, opposed cultural practices that were, from a religious viewpoint, neutral, such as the P°rk tabu and circumcision, while insisting on the Latin calendar and liturgy. The popular opposition was enormous, and Susenyos abdicated in 1632:

• • even the ignorant peasants of Lasta have died fighting against it. Now therefore we restore to you the Faith of your ancestors . . .'. His heir, Fasilidas, expelled the Jesuits two years later. The episode left a heritage of M'strust of the western churches and of western culture, which long endured.

Missionary attacks on Monophysitism led to impassioned christological controversies within the Ethiopian Church, which profoundly weakened and divided it.

In the 1790s, an Ethiopian convert to Catholicism, Tobias Gabra Egzi'abeher, titular bishop of Adulis, worked as a missionary, but he had no more success than his West African contemporaries, such as Quaque and Amo.

The Jesuits paid tribute to the quality of Ethiopian religious life, although they tried to change it:

No country in the world is so full of churches, monastries, and ecclesiasticks as Abyssinia; it is not possible to sing in one church or monastry without being heard by another, and perhaps by several. . . . The instruments of musick made use of in their rites of worship, are little drums, which they hang about their necks and beat with both their hands . . . They have sticks likewise with which they strike the ground . . . when they have heated themselves by degrees, they leave off druming and fall to leaping, dancing and clapping their hands . . . They are possess'd with a strange notion, that they are the only true Christians in the world. . . .

It was the accretion of custom that separated the churches, rather than the obscure mystery of the Nature of Christ (the editor of a Hakluvt text notes, with unconscious condescension: '. . . it need hardly be said that Ethiopic is not a satisfactory language in which to discuss a problem of this kind'¹⁴).

The next major visitor to Ethiopia was James Bruce, an eighteenth-century Scottish laird equally hostile to Jesuits and Monophysites. He wrote, 'The two natures in Christ, the two persons, their unity . . . are all wrapped up in tenfold darkness'. Precisely, but not only for Ethiopians!

In comparison with the Ethiopian and Coptic churches, the Christian communities established through western, and especially Portuguese, influence during the Middle Years were fragile, exotic plants, which did not always survive in African soil.

Christianity did not always flourish in Portuguese soil either: Isabella's church reforms, in the late fifteenth century, led 400 friars to go to Africa and become Muslims!¹⁵ The factors that shaped Portuguese national and religious sensibilities are to be found in the history of the Iberian peninsula, which was, for centuries, largely under Muslim rule. The process of Christian Reconquista was complete by 1492. Portugal gained its independence in 1143, and retained it in part through the accidents of dynastic marriage.¹⁶

Granada Muslims were promised toleration, but, ten years later, they were offered a choice between conversion and exile, the choice that had been given to Spanish Jews not long before. In 1609, some half a million Moriscos, who accepted Christianity but retained Arabic speech and Moorish dress, were also expelled. Cruelty and ethnic chauvinism in Christianity's name were not peculiar to the Iberian peninsula, as the history of the Crusades reminds us. They were not only directed against peoples of different faiths either. When a Spanish interloper challenged Portugal's commercial monopoly in Guinea, he was burned alive.¹⁷

Much mission history is explicable only against this background, the identification of national identity with Catholicism, and the hostility to Islam. Portugal was a small country with a population of perhaps a million and a half. It created an empire that spanned the world, but which it lacked the resources to sustain.

Spain and Portugal carried the Reconquista to North Africa. In 1415, Portugal obtained a foothold in Morocco, at Ceuta, which still retains a separate political identity. Spain established a chain of coastal garrisons in the Maghrib, the last of which was relinquished in 1791. Their main impact, perhaps, was to enrage Muslim sensibilities.

Prince Henry, whom history knows as the Navigator, took part in the expedition to Ceuta. On his return, he established a school of navigation in southern Portugal, sending annual expeditions down the Atlantic coast of Africa, 'being desirous to learn new things, particularly of the peoples dwelling in those lands, and to cause injury to the Moors'.¹⁸

When Vasco da Gama reached Calicut, in May 1498, he said that he came in search of Christians and spices. A sea route to India would enable the Portuguese to bypass the Muslim middlemen who controlled the routes through the near East, and, perhaps, to find a new ally in Prester John. The legend of this mysterious Christian potentate may have had its origins in medieval encounters with Ethiopian pilgrims and monks in Jerusalem. It has been suggested that it was deliberately elaborated as propaganda, to encourage the Crusaders.¹⁹ The quest for Prester John survived long after contacts were established with Ethiopia. In the 1620s, a Jesuit working on the Zambezi hoped that he would be found north-east of Lake Malawi.²⁰ In 1469, the trade of Guinea was leased for five years to Fernando Gomes, a condition that his ships explored a hundred leagues further each year; his vessels reached the Gold Coast, often referred to simply as Elmina, the Mine.

Portuguese claims to exclusive control of the Guinea trade did not go unchallenged. Spanish ships, in particular, challenged this monopoly until the Treaty of Tordessillas (1494), which divided the newly discovered world between the two, at a point 370 leagues west of the Canaries, Africa and Brazil going to Portugal, and the rest of the New World to Spain. (See Map 4) However, this did not preserve Portugal's hegemony in Africa. From 1530, French, English, and, later, Dutch merchants, for the most part with little interest in religion, became involved in its trade.

The world views prevalent in western Europe and in black Africa in about 1500 had a great deal in common: 'No difference can be perceived between the practices of the Christians and those of the heathen', said a Jesuit in Sierra Leone at the beginning of the seventeenth century.²¹ Religion was part of the continuum of life, not compartmentalized on its margins, and it was supernatural interventions that made rain fall, and determined the outcome of battle. The belief in witchcraft and magic was as characteristic of Europe as of Africa, and a study of seventeenth-century Brittany suggests 'that the majority of the inhabitants of medieval Europe were sunk in animist worship of trees, stones and springs and that Christianity was the thinnest of veneers on top of this'.²² In Portugal, the dead were thought to return on All Souls' Day and the statues of saints were mutilated if they failed to provide expected benefits.²³ In modern times, among the Kalahari of the Niger Delta, the same fate befel sculptures of dangerous spirits.

Missionaries were professionally concerned with religion; European traders had other priorities. In the words of a visitor to the Gold Coast in the late seventeenth century, 'The great concern of the Dutch on this coast, as well as of all other Europeans settled or trading there, is the gold, and not the welfare of those souls: for by their leud loose lives, many who live among these poor wretches rather harden them in their wickedness than turn them from it'.²⁴ A Jesuit described the Portuguese in Guinea at the beginning of the seventeenth century as 'men turned wild whose way of life is more heathen than Christian'.²⁵

Portuguese missions were organized within a structure called the padroado, created in a series of papal bulls and briefs between 1452 and 1514, which gave the Portuguese crown power of appointment to all benefices in its overseas possessions, in return for financial support. The Kongo kings fought against this close association of church and state, and the introduction of (Italian) Capuchins from 1645 on was a result. As Portugal became weaker, and its colonial possessions shrank, it lacked the resources to sustain the padroado. The Catholic missionary enterprise was linked to a small and declining imperial power, and this was a continuing source of weakness.

Northern Africa

Christian mission activity in North Africa and Egypt was sporadic, and had no lasting impact, which is not surprising as it took place against a background of endemic hostility. Various forays by the early Franciscans were essentially symbolic gestures, seeking martyrdom and Paradise, rather than conversions. In 1219, the year in which he himself went to Egypt and Palestine, St Francis sent five friars to convert the Moors. After adventures in Seville, they went to Marrakesh and preached in the streets, though only one of them, Berard, knew Arabic. They coveted death, and obtained the martyrdom they desired, as did another group of Italian Franciscans, Daniel and his companions, seven years later. Much later, in 1710-11, two Franciscans crossed the Sahara, dying of sickness in the city of Katsina, in what is now Northern Nigeria.²⁶

The Majorcan, Ramon Llull²⁷ (1232 —1316), was an extraordinary genius, comparable in some ways with Augustine. His output, in Arabic, Latin and Catalan was prolific: 256 works survive, ranging from pamphlets to tomes of 150 thousand words. He wrote novels, and treatises on theology, philosophv and science, and was one of the architects of Catalan as a literary language. He was married with two children, 'reasonably well off, licentious and worldly' when, in 1263, his life was transformed by a series of visions of Christ. He decided he was to serve Him 'by carrying out the task of converting to his worship and service the Saracens who in such numbers surrounded the Christians on all sides'.²⁸ He felt called 'to write a book, the best in the world against the errors of unbelievers'; he learned Arabic from a Muslim slave, so effectively that he wrote books in it, and worked for the creation of centres of learning where it could be studied by prospective missionaries. He had some success, as the ruler of Majorca endowed a monastery for this purpose, but successive Popes were less responsive: '. . . this petition was of little interest to the Pope and to the cardinals'.²⁹ He made several missionary journeys to North Africa: to Tunis in 1293, when he was over 60, and to Bougie, when he was about 75. His last works were written at the age of 83, in 1315, during a final trip to Tunis. It is uncertain whether or not he died there or in Majorca soon after his return.

There is a touching humanity about the converted Llull. He abandoned his first projected journey to North Africa when still in Genoa, 'fearing for his skin . . . held back by a kind of paralysing fear', and afterwards, for a time, doubted his own salvation,³⁰ but, for all his exertions and learning, he made, as far as we know, no impact on North Africa. He did not even convert his Muslim slave, who remained hostile to Christianity, and finally hanged himself.

African clergy

West Africa produced a number of indigenous priests and brothers, often from the Cape Verde islands or Sâo Tomé. A Portuguese expedition of 1444 brought back 235 captives. With the myopia of the time, some were given to a church, as revenue, 'and another little Moor, who afterwards became a friar of St Francis, they sent to St Vincent do Cabo, where he lived ever after as a Catholic Christian'.³¹ In 1494, a German visitor to Portugal saw many black young men being educated in Latin and theology as a prelude to returning to Africa, and reflected, 'It seems likely that in the course of time, the greater part of Ethiopia will be converted to Christianity'.³²

African and Eur-African clergy, like their Portuguese counterparts, produced examples of holiness and devotion, but black and white alike were often reluctant to exchange the relative comfort and security of Sâo Thomé <sup>an«/sup>l the Cape Verdes for life on the African mainland. Some deserved the harsh strictures of a French abbé in Kongo in 1776, who urged Christian rulers not 'to destroy with one hand what he builds with the other by sending on the track of missionaries a set of men who have nothing of the Christian but the name they dishonour; whose worse than pagan conduct makes the idolaters doubt whether the gods whom they worship are not preferable to that of the Christian'.³³

Eur-Africans were disproportionately prominent in Africa's Christian communities and among the clergy. Atkins described a family on the Gold Coast, where a British trader was a 'kind husband and father', who educated his four children in England, and shared in his wife's traditional religion: 'He cannot persuade this Woman to leave the Country'.³⁴

Often, however, Europeans were savagely hostile to those of mixed descent, anticipating the attitude so often shown by colonial officials to the educated and westernized. There are only too manv parallels to the words of a French visitor to the Gold Coast in the late seventeenth century: 'They are generally profligate villains, a bastard race . . . and tho' they assume the name of Christians, are as superstitious idolators as any of the Blacks can be'.³⁵ Often they clung tenaciously to Christianity to establish the perimeters of an otherwise ambiguous identity.

A chronicler of the Dominican missions in Zambezia and on the Zimbabwe plateau noted that women and children were the easiest to convert,³⁶ but all the missionaries were men, until a group of Cluny sisters settled on Goree island in 1819. The records of those years are overwhelmingly preoccupied with their relationships with men and, especially, the ruling class. However, the first of African Christianity's prophetic churches, the Antonine movement in Kongo, was founded by a young mother, Vita Kimpa.

The Atlantic islands

The Atlantic islands, Sao Thome and the Cape Verdes, played a role disproportionate to their small size. Originally uninhabited, their very isolation made them more accessible to external influences. The population of the Cape Verdes came to be overwhelmingly Luso-African, its identity symbolized by its language, Crioulo, which combined Portuguese and African elements, („Affinal: Africa? Europa? Cabo \'erde\ⁱ⁷). A black priest from Cape Verde, Joao Pinto, was a devoted missionary in the region of 'the rivers of Guinea' in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.³⁸ In 1652, a Jesuit visitor gave a glowing picture of the indigenous priests, though some later observers were more critical.

Here there are clerics and canons as black as coal, but so grave, so respectable, so learned, such great musicians, so discreet and so temperate that they could arouse the envy of those we see there in our own cathedrals.³⁹

Sáo Thomé was an important centre of sugar production, until repeated revolts by enslaved Angolans, the Angolares, undermined the viability of its plantations. For a time, it was an entrepot in Atlantic trade, but it soon became an economic backwater. Both Sáo Thomé and the Cape Verdes became independent dioceses in the 1530s, and for centuries they provided priests, albeit irregularly, for Lower and Upper Guinea, respectively. On the small island of Annobon, an unsympathetic Protestant described religious practice as he perceived it in the late seventeenth century.

The Inhabitants of the Island are black, and but a sort of half Christian . . . for if they can but read a Pater Noster and Ave Maria, confess to the Priest, and bring some Offerings with them, they pass for good Christians. … I found here also two White Priests, who were endowed with no other Qualities than the profound ignorance and Stupidity of the meanest of their neighbours.. . . They invited us to come and see their Churches, which we did, and found them very handsome, and large enough for four times the Number of inhabitants on the island.⁴⁰

The Senegambia

As they struck ever further down the Atlantic coastline of Africa, the Portuguese were impressed by the contrast between the arid sands of the Sahara (Cape Blanco), and the green vegetation that lay South of the Senegal

(Cape Verde).

The Wolof people, who lived between the Senegal and Gambia, formed a loose confederation, under the overlordship of the Burba Jolof. Here, as elsewhere in Africa, the Portuguese supported one of the protagonists in a civil war, in return for his baptism. This prince, Jelen, visited Lisbon, returning home with a substantial Portuguese force, only to meet his death at Portuguese hands in c. I486.⁴¹

In general, Islamic influence was much stronger than Christianity in the Senegambia, and remained so. There was a community of 'Black Portuguese' at a few coastal settlements, including Rufisque, Joal, and Portudal, and on the Gambia. Essentially indistinguishable from their Wolof and Serer neighbours, they clung to vestiges of Christianity as symbols of a distinct identity, the concomitant of their broker role in Atlantic trade.

I He French coastal settlements at St Louis and Gorée dated from 1659 and '678 respectively. A similar social pattern developed, where a small Eur-Atrican class cherished a French and Catholic social identity, while speaking Wolof. European residents were sometimes converted to African religions, father than vice versa: it was noted in the seventeenth century that they 'have begun to believe in witchcraft and are convinced that African sorcerers can prevent their firearms from working or kill them by placing charms in their drinking water¹.⁴² The Luso-Africans of Guinea-Bissau, further south, were described in much the same way.⁴³

Sierra Leone

The Jesuit mission in the Cape Verdes was founded in 1604, in part at the urging of a Luso-African layman. Balthasar Barreira was a Jesuit who had worked for thirteen years in Angola. He left Portugal again, at the age of sixty for the Cape Verdes but concentrated especially on the Sierra Leone peninsula. A Bullom ruler was baptized as Philip Leonis, with other family members. He was converted by one of his wives, 'who was already a Christian, having been reared by the Portuguese',⁴⁴ an interesting testimony to the enduring faith of the Luso-African enclaves. Barreira came close to converting a Susu king, in the Bena country to the North, but was foiled by a rival missionary, a Muslim.⁴⁵ A Capuchin mission that arrived in 1669 found that the Susu still remembered Barreira, who died in 1612, and the image of the Infant Jesus he carried, but its members soon left or died. They baptized thousands, like their counterparts in Kongo, but the continuity was lacking to create enduring Christian communities. Seraphim was a Capuchin from Castile, who arrived in Port Loko in 1647, and stayed there, enduring poverty and illness, until his death some ten years later:

Seraph in name, looks and works . . . The poor life he led brought about his death. … He made the Church his home and was so careless of human comforts that if any devout persons . . . sent him any he kept them only to share with the sick.⁴⁶

After the Capuchins left, there were no more resident missionaries until the arrival in about 1714 of an extraordinary black Christian, Signor Joseph. He seems to have been an indigene of the Sierra Leone peninsula, and various visitors to the area paid him warm tribute:

He has been in England and Portugal-, at the last place he was baptized, and took in that Christian Erudition that he endeavours to propagate. He has built a little Oratory for his People's Devotions; erected a Cross; taught several of his Kindred Letters, dispersing among them little Romish Prayer-Books, and many of them are known by Christian Names.⁴⁷

Joseph founded a model town, first on the future site of Granville, then at what became Kissy.

Their Huts are mostly orbicular, forming a spacious square Area in the middle, and in this, the doors paved with Cockle-Shells; two or three Crosses erected, and round about, Lime-trees, Papais, Plantanes, Pineapples, and a few bee-hives. . . . This Christian Negro, by the Advantage of

Trade, has in some measure removed the Wants of his own Family (his Town). .'. .⁴⁸

The Gold Coast

Sao Jorge da Mina was built in 1482, on the boundary of two African states, Komenda and Efutu, in disregard of the wishes of the local ruler, who asked the Portuguese to leave, with the words, 'Friends who met occasionally remained better friends than if they were neighbours'.⁴⁹ Such was the lure of the gold, and, later, the slaves, to be obtained on the Gold Coast that other European nations set up land establishments: English, Dutch, Danes and for a time, Swedes and Brandenburgers. By the mid eighteenth century, there were thirty forts along 300 miles of coast, each of which made appropriate payments to the local African ruler. This settled European presence contrasted with the state of affairs in the Niger Delta and elsewhere where foreign merchants traded from their ships, and had no permanent land establishment. Sao Jorge da Mina was captured by the Dutch in 1637.

The chaplains at the forts were primarily concerned, not with the conversion of African peoples, but with the spiritual welfare of the European and Eur-African enclaves. In the late seventeenth century, the Portuguese fort included, 'a chappel in the fort, where mass is said by a black priest, ordained by the bishop of St Thome'.⁵⁰

There was little impact on surrounding peoples. Thus, in Elmina:

… if there are any among them that shew some sense of Christianity; they are only the Mulattos of Portuguese descent whereof there are near two hundred families in the town; . . . their religion being mixed with much pagan superstition.⁵'

I here were two Protestant missionary initiatives there in the eighteenth century. The Moravians sent nine missionaries between 1737 and 1770; they died almost at once, except for Christian Protten: 'The Lord had so clearly closed up the road to the country with thorns. . .

In 1752, Reverend Thomas Thompson, Africa's first Anglican missionary, went to the Gold Coast. He was in the employ of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), founded in 1701 for the benefit of Britons abroad, whose spiritual welfare was endangered by 'atheism, infidelity, popish superstition and idolatry'. He had worked among the enslaved in America, and Went to West Africa at his own request. He concentrated on the local people, rather than the expatriate enclaves. When he left after four years because of ill health, he was accompanied by three Fante boys to be educated by the SPG. 1 wo died; Europe, it has been said, often proved the Black Man's Grave. The survivor was Philip Quaque, the son of Birempon Kojo of Cape Coast. He was ^ordained an Anglican clergyman, returned to Cape Coast in 1766, and worked mere until his death in 1816. When he returned, he had forgotten much of his native Fante, and, later in life, he was criticized for his involvement in trade— the chronic ambiguity of one who stood between two worlds—but he worked in Cape Coast for fifty years, and the school he ran laid the foundation for later educational initiatives.⁵²

Ambiguity and marginality characterised other eighteenth-century Gold Coast men who acquired an education abroad. Frederick Svane, the son of a Danish father and a Ga mother, studied at the University of Copenhagen and, in 1735, returned briefly to the Gold Coast with a Danish wife, before returning to Denmark.

Jacobus Elia Johannes Capitein (1717—47) was taken to Holland as a child by a Dutch trader and received an excellent education, studying at the University of Leiden. With profound irony, he published a defence of the slave trade, in Latin, as being consistent with Christianity (Thompson, despite his genuine concern for Africa, also published a defence of the slave trade). He was ordained as a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, and worked in Elmina from 1742 until his death, five years later, translating some texts, such as the Lord's Prayer, into Fante. His life in Africa seems to have been isolated and unhappy—not least, perhaps, because the Church prevented him from marrying the African wife of his choice.

William Amo of Axim was also taken to Europe as a child and obtained a doctorate at Wittenberg. He was a protege of the Princess of Brunswick, and, when she died, he returned to Axim, after thirty years in Europe, living as a recluse.

Christian Protten's father was a Danish soldier, and his mother a cousin of the King of Popo.⁵³ He was educated in Denmark, returning to Accra as one of the first two Moravian missionaries in sub-Saharan Africa, in 1737. His work there was interspersed with two long sojourns in Europe, but he died on the Gold Coast in 1769.

These lonely, brilliant men were the precursors of later distinguished 'been tos'. Their achievements involved a degree of alienation from the society that had produced them, symbolized, in some cases, by their loss of fluency in their mother tongue, and they lacked the organizational support and infrastructure that might have enabled them to effect major, enduring change. Like the chaplains before them, they tended to concentrate on the European and Eur-African enclaves.

The Slave Coast

East of modern Ghana lie Togo and Benin, the region known, sadly, in the eighteenth century, as the Slave Coast. Whydah, in particular, became a great slave exporting centre from the 1670s on. French Capuchins founded a mission there in 1644. They were expelled by a populace incited by English and Dutch traders, 'for they feared that the conversion of the people and their chiefs would spoil their trade'.⁵⁴ There was an abortive Castilian Capuchin mission in 1660, significant chiefly for a translation of the catechism into Ewe, 'the earliest publication in any Guinea coast language'.⁵⁵ There were other short-lived missions, their impact limited by lack of personnel and high mortality rates. A few individuals, such as the interpreter Matteo Lopez or a Whydah chief called Assou or a king of Allada had Catholic sympathies.⁵⁶

Warri

The Itsekiri kingdom of Warri was a tiny state (there were fewer than 33 thousand Itsekiri in the 1950s) in the mangrove swamps of the western Niger Delta. There is some evidence that it was founded shortly before the Portuguese advent, and this may have made it easier for its rulers to embrace new ideas.

At the time with which we are concerned, it consisted of the capital, Ode Itsekiri, and a few small outlying settlements. Livelihood depended on fishing, salt making, and trade. Tradition speaks of a founder from Benin, but Itsekiri is a dialect of Yoruba, and the legend may simply reflect the symbolic importance of a powerful neighbour.⁵⁷

The history of Christianity in Warri began in the 1570s, when Augustinian monks were sent there from Sao Thome. They converted, not the king (the Olu), but his heir, who became Sebastian, an ardent supporter of Catholicism for the rest of his long life. The major difficulty he faced was the lack of clergy. In the words of the Bishop of Sao Thome, 'this kingdom is very poor and clergy would be unable to live there in reasonable comfort; moreover their health and their lives would be in very grave danger from the great unhealthiness of the climate'.⁵⁸ In the early eighteenth century, two Capuchins in Warri supported themselves by trading in locally made pots! Sebastian attempted to solve the problem by sending his own eldest son, Domingos, to Portugal, with the hope that he would be ordained. In the event, he returned with a noble Portuguese bride, the mother of the next king, Antonio Domingos. She died in the next few years; life must have been extraordinarily difficult for her in an area too poor and unhealthy for missionary priests. Meanwhile, Sebastian, 'worn out with extreme old age', instructed his people in Christian doctrine, and organized processions. There were to be some Itsekiri clergy, but they seem to have lacked the fervour of the King, and some preferred benefices in Sao Thome. In 1620, Catholicism in Warri was described as a court religion:

Outside the small town of Santo Agostinho there are no other Christians; and even in the town only a minority are of the Catholic faith. Although very many of them are nominally Christian, true Christianity is almost wholly confined to the King and the Prince; the rest only call themselves Christians in order to please the King. . . .⁵⁹

'n 1644, when Antonio Domingos was on the throne, quite a different picture Was given of the Warri Church: 'And the Negroes enter this church with Paternosters in their hands all the while, like true Portuguese people, and they read these, as well as other Popish prayers. They appear to be most godly, and can also read and write, and are eager for Portuguese books, pens, ink and paper'. Christianity also modified traditional religion: the offerings of human and animal sacrifices were abhorred, and no feticeros (traditional religious specialists) were permitted.⁶⁰

The strong attachment of the crown to Catholicism continued, despite long periods without priests, until the middle of the eighteenth century. The Olu who came to power in 1733 seems to have reverted to traditional religion. A statue of Christ was smashed because it failed to end a drought, for example. There were parallels in Europe at much the same time: 'The people of Castelo Branco were so enraged at S. Antonio for allowing the Spaniards to plunder their town, contrary, as they affirmed, to his express agreement with them, that they broke many of his statues to pieces . . .'⁶¹ An English sailor visited Warri at the end of the eighteenth century; he states that the Olu of the day had sixty wives, and described in the palace the decaying ritual apparatus of a faith in deep decline:

. . . we were much surprised to see, placed on a rude kind of tablet, several emblems of the Catholic religion, consisting of crucifixes, mutilated saints, and other trumpery … A large wooden cross, which had withstood the tooth of time, was remaining in a very perfect state, in one of the angles formed by two roads intersecting each other . . . King Otoo's subjects appeared to trouble themselves very little about religion of any kind.⁶²

In 1840, another Englishman recorded the sequel: 'I observed the Church or Catholic Chapel had disappeared and the streets were covered with grass'.⁶³ That Christianity survived so long was due to the devotion of its kings. Its ultimate extinction was caused by the lack of priests, compounded, on occasion, by the shortcomings of those who actually reached Warri.

Benin

Warri's great neighbour, the kingdom of Benin, grew out of a number of small principalities, probably in the thirteenth century. When the first Christian missionaries reached the capital, in 1515, they found a walled city and a splendid court with highly developed artistic traditions of working in bronze and ivory. They learned of a distant, sacred monarch to the East, called the Ogane—'held in as great veneration as is the Supreme Pontiff with us'—who sent a newly crowned king a cross to wear,⁶⁴ crosses which are depicted on some Benin statuary. Not surprisingly, they believed they had found Prester John.

The King's, [Oiws], initial response was sympathetic. In 1516, he sent his son to be baptized, and learn to read, but he died soon afterwards. Nearly forty years later, it was said 'the king could speak the Portugall tongue, which he had learned as a child'.⁶⁵ It is possible that human sacrifice was introduced into Benin by this baptized Oba.⁶⁶

There was a tiny handful of Bini converts in the earlv sixteenth century, the first Nigerian Christians. Like their counterparts in Whydah and Allada, they seem to have acted as interpreters and brokers for the Portuguese. One of them, Afonso Ames, ran the school where a prince became literate in Portuguese. They stood between two worlds and had a freedom of choice denied to ordinary Benin people, of whom it was said, 'They consider themselves slaves of their King and would not dare to become Christians until the King himself is converted'.⁶⁷ However, the King himself often had little freedom of choice. In the seventeenth century, when a succession of weak Obas were kept virtual prisoners by their great officials, it was said of one of them, 'he showed himself well disposed to hear the arguments for our Holy Faith, but he lacks the liberty to follow his laudable inclinations because he is hemmed in on all sides by certain ministers . . ,'⁶⁸ In 1710, a later Benin King was sympathetic to Christianity, provided land for a church, and avoided human sacrifice, but was exiled after a brief and troubled reign.

Formal Christianity had no lasting impact in Benin, partly because, as in Warri, the missionary enterprise was sporadic, and partly because traditional religion was deeply entwined with the sacred monarchy. There was no attempt to understand Benin religion and society: 'The way of life of these people is full of abuses and witchcraft and idolatry, which for brevity's sake I omit'.⁶⁹

Elements of Portuguese Christianity were incorporated into Aruosa, a royal cult to which outsiders have had little access. A British colonial administrator caught a glimpse of it.

Following the Oba I went through a heavy Iroko door, which opened into a long, narrow corridor-like room, with a tall window at the other end. He showed me a brass crucifix which was attached to a cord round his neck, and said that every morning at dawn he entered this place alone and waited for the first rays of day to illumine the window, when he pressed the crucifix to his forehead and prayed for the Oni of Ife, the Alafin of Oyo and the Oba of Benin (that is himself); after which he prayed for all the other Yoruba kings. This had for long been the custom, he said, whether the Oba was a Christian or not. . . .⁷⁰

The kingdom of Kongo

today, the Kongo people number 3 million and are to be found in Angola, (including Cabinda), Zaire, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

' he first Portuguese vessel anchored off the Zaire river in 1483. As in West Africa, it was a tragedy that the Europeans brought not only Christianity but 'he slave trade. In time, the European presence was to destroy the Kongo kingdom, inaugurating a brutal era of warlordism,⁷¹ but all that lay in the future.

There is a rich literature on Kongo history, and a corresponding variety of interpretations, though the differences are sometimes more apparent than real. To some, Christianity was a superficial façade, maintained for political reasons: 'The Christian commitment of Kongo kings was in all probability less a matter of personal belief than one of diplomatic status'.⁷² Gray has cast much light on the fervour and devotion of the late seventeenth century Soyo court, (advocates of economic determinism would do well to note that much of its external trade was with the Dutch, but its people evinced no attraction to Calvinism). To Axelson, Christianity was strong at the beginning, followed by a period of decline; there was a resurgence when the Capuchins arrived in 1645, followed by its gradual extinction. Both Hilton and Thornton emphasize the way in which the Kongo understood Christianity in terms of earlier religious concepts.

Thornton questions the widely accepted pattern of decline, and makes the interesting suggestion that the change was in the eye of the beholder. Foreign visitors in the sixteenth and seventeenth century always regarded Kongo as a Christian state—'They might denounce Kongo customs as sinful, even superstitious, but not pagan —as they were using a more inclusive definition of Christianity, which required, essentially, self-identification, but this was replaced, in the nineteenth century, by a Eurocentric attitude that condemned Kongo Christianity as syncretism.

The Kongo court welcomed Christianity. Perhaps this was linked with the fact that, in traditional cosmology, white was the colour of the spirit world, and the supernatural origins of the strangers were confirmed by their exotic speech, rich gifts, and links with the sea. However, the association of whiteness and the sea with the spirit world was true of other African peoples, including the Bini, who did not turn to Christianity in this way.

The history of Christianity in the Kongo will always be linked with the name of Mbemba Nzinga, baptized as Afonso. He became king after a civil war, after the death of Joâo I in 1506, and ruled until his death in 1543. In a 1516 description, he is a saintly apostle, preaching and teaching, falling asleep over his books late at night.¹⁴ His extant correspondence, much of it dictated to a Kongo secretary, is full of pleas for what we would now call development aid: stone masons, 'two physicians and two apothecaries and one surgeon'. At first, he was prepared to pay for imports with slaves. In time, he came to realize that the price was too high: '. . . our country is being completely depopulated, and Your Highness should not agree with this nor accept it as in your service. And to avoid it we need from these [your] Kingdoms no more than some priests and a few people to teach in schools, and no other goods except wine and flour for the holy sacrament'.'⁵

There has, perhaps, in the past been a tendency to idealize Afonso. A recent study, reacting against this, points out that he had no traditional right to the throne at all, and that this may well explain his enthusiasm for a new dispensation.⁷⁶ Afonso followed the traditional Kongo pattern of forming marriage alliances with different parts of the kingdom, and his opposition to the slave trade has a hollow ring in the light of his own willingness to export slaves. What he most objected to was that, 'they kidnap even noblemen and the sons of noblemen and our relatives'. None of this, though, impugns Afonso's sincerity in his new faith, and his desire for technological development, or his gradual recognition that the Atlantic slave trade was a source of depopulation and disorder, and that the price paid for exotic imports was too high. A group of Portuguese, at the instigation of a friar, attempted to assassinate him at the Easter service in 1540. However, he remained a Christian despite his many experiences of Portuguese violence, rapacity, and duplicity.

In these early encounters, two symbolic universes meet. In a sense, the world views of the Portuguese and the Kongo had much in common. Both took the irruption of the supernatural world into daily life for granted, in visions, significant dreams, the ending of drought. Naturally enough, both interpreted events in terms of their own cultural history. In a Portuguese narrative, Afonso wins a battle when a bright light appears, which echoes the vision claimed for Constantine.⁷⁷ In an account of events in the Mutapa kingdom, this precedent is explicit: 'As the army was setting out, raising his eyes to heaven, he saw there a resplendent light, and beautiful cross, in the same form (but without letters) in which it before appeared to the Emperor Constantine the Great'.⁷⁸

The Kongo people, inevitably, located the new teaching within their own world view—a process made easier by the fact that the missionaries translated 'priest' as nganga (a traditional religious specialist), and used the word nkisi (traditional religious object) to refer to crucifixes or rosaries, the Bible becoming mukanda nkisi, and the church, nzo a nkisi. Converts reluctant to embrace monogamy defined one spouse as a wife, and the rest as concubines.

The ruler had traditionally maintained his power by his control of tribute from different ecological zones. The rich goods brought by the strangers greatly increased the amount of patronage at his disposal. Luxuries, though, become necessities, so, when trade shifted North, to the Loango coast, or South, to the new Portuguese settlement of Angola, the monarchy was weakened. So great was the disorder of the years that followed, that fathers would brand their own sons to protect them from enslavement (the 'triplication being that they were someone's slave already). In 1568, the kingdom was invaded by a mysterious and ferocious people called the Jaga; it may well have been a jacquerie, a desperate uprising of potential victims of enslavement or actual victims of a society apparently in dissolution. They destroyed the capital, now called San Salvador, and burned its churches, and the king regained his capital only with Portuguese aid.

To some, the Kongo nobility formed a comprador class, collaborating with the foreign exploiter to prey on the masses. Their foreign titles—dukes and marquises—seem exotic and inappropriate imports. Others are profoundly moved by these pioneers of Christianity and Western education, who corresponded on banana leaves because of paper shortages, and whose records were preserved in local archives into the late nineteenth century.

The progress of Christianity was impeded by the unworthiness of many clergy, who were often involved in trade, including the slave trade, and often at odds with each other. Afonso's son, Henrique, after thirteen years of study in Portugal, returned to the Kongo as a bishop (not of Kongo, but as titular Bishop of a Muslim province in North Africa). He was marginalized by the Portuguese clergy, and the situation made him depressed and ill. Henrique went to Europe in 1529, and died on a return voyage in the 1530s. The next black bishop in West Central Africa was appointed in 1970. When Kongo became a see in 1596, the King of Portugal appointed a Portuguese bishop, and ever-fewer Kongo were ordained. What became the Portuguese colony, Angola, began as a private proprietary colony, similar to Virginia, created in 1571 under the grandson of Bartholemeu Dias. Many Kongo clergy ended their careers in Luanda, where a distinctive Luso-African culture evolved.

In 1645, the first Capuchins arrived in West Central Africa. They were more fervent than most of their predecessors, and were destined to have a transforming effect, especially on the coastal province of Soyo. Their social role varied at different times and places. They were often closely identified with the court, but their conflict with Garcia II (1641-61) reflects something of a 'preferential option for the poor'.⁷⁹

At the battle of Ambuila, in 1665, the king and many of his courtiers were killed by invading Angolan forces, led by a Luso-African general. Among the dead was another Luso-African, Manuel Roboredo, co-author of several language manuals. He was a Capuchin of royal blood, who, having opposed the war, died at the king's side.

The Kongo kingdom never recovered from Ambuila, and, for a long period, the capital was deserted. It is difficult to better the words of the soldier historian, Cadornega, in 1681: 'we will say how our lord punished this kingdom which was so Catholic. [It] is a pity and heartache to see how this new Christianity of the Kongo was retarded'.⁸⁰

In this situation of crisis, several women prophets emerged: Appolonia Mafuta and Vita Kimpa, baptized as Beatrice, who claimed to be the medium of St Antony. A member of the nobility, she had been an nganga, and absorbed the idea of spirit possession from traditional religion. She destroyed both crucifixes and traditional nkisi as powerless to save, and taught that Jesus was black, born in the Kongo capital. Both nobles and poor responded to her teaching, and Mbanza Kongo was reoccupied. She was burnt at the stake for heresy in 1706, at the age of twenty, her baby son narrowly escaping the same fate.⁸¹

The king's wife, Hipolita, left him to join the movement. The king himself, on one occasion, refused to make war on a rebel.

in no way would he make war, as it was the continual warfare which had already destroyed the kingdom, and also the Faith. Nor did the Kongolese want any more troubles. They were already tired of being like beasts in the fields and wastelands: outraged, murdered, robbed and sold.⁸²

The conventional view is that Christianity declined in West Central Africa during the eighteenth century. Nineteenth-century visitors were unanimous in painting a picture of syncretism. An English ship anchored at Soyo in 1816; its personnel met a local priest with a wife and five concubines, who could write his name and that of St Antony, and read the Roman liturgy in Latin.⁸³ In 1857, a German geographer visited the ruins of San Salvador, and recorded a stereotype, common in West and Central Africa, that the slaves sold abroad were eaten by cannibals, and their bodies processed into oil. He found crosses everywhere, and was told 'that the Portuguese Desu was a far too powerful fetiche for the common man and could be assigned only to the king'.⁸⁴

However, Catholicism in some sense endured, even in the absence of priests, sustained largely by the efforts of the noble laity, who often held additional titles such as 'Master of the Church'. An account from the 1780s described well-kept chapels and schools, run by laity literate in Portuguese.⁸⁵

Matamba's Queens⁸⁶

Vita Kimpa was a late seventeenth-century woman who responded to the needs of an age of traumatic change and violence with prophecy. Nzinga, who died in 1663, responded to crisis in a different way. She was the sister of the last effective ruler of the west-central African state of Ndongo, whose kings, the ngola a kiluanje, gave their title to Angola. She seized power by murdering her nephew and ward, but was forced to leave a state in dissolution and founded a new kingdom further inland at Matamba. In 1623, she was baptized as Dona Ana da Souza, but, for many years, had little to do with Christianity, allying herself instead with the ferocious Imbangala.⁸⁷ Her return to hristianity from the 1640s onwards was, like her initial baptism in Luanda, clearly politically motivated; it enabled her to repudiate the Imbangala and ally with the Portuguese of Angola. She had a Kongo confessor, Calisto Zelotes dos Reis Magros.⁸ She was succeeded by her sister, Barbara, and there were further regnant queens in the eighteenth century, whose names, Veronica or Ana, reflect a continuing identification, in some sense, with Christianity. Nzinga's life can most plausibly be understood as the struggle of a woman ruler, lacking precedents in a male-dominated world, to obtain political support and legitimation wherever possible.

A History of Christianity in Africa The Zambezi, and the Zimbabwe Plateau

No monument in sub-Saharan Africa is more famous than the ruins of Great Zimbabwe, which was abandoned by 1500, perhaps because of ecological changes, perhaps because of the exhaustion of local gold, which was the chief commodity foreign visitors were to seek.⁸⁹ The Mutapa state, sometimes called Monomutapa after its ruler's title, Mwene Mutapa,⁹⁰ grew up on the northern plateau in the fifteenth century or earlier.

The first Portuguese settlements on the coast, Mozambique Island and Sofala, were founded in 1505 and 1508, respectively. The former developed as a halting place on the long journey to Goa, and its Dominican community was long supported by a rich Javanese woman, Violante.

The Zambezi was the gateway to the interior, and the Portuguese established trading posts at Sena and Tete, 160 and 320 miles upstream, respectively. Missions in Zambezia suffered from a chronic lack of personnel and resources. They counted their baptisms in hundreds, but were not able to instruct such numbers adequately: 'And he affirms that by the numbers entered in the books, up to the year 1591 more than twenty thousand souls were baptised by them in that district of the rivers of Cuama [Zambezi]'.⁹¹ They suffered, too, from the inextricable intermingling of their role with Portuguese military, political, and economic goals. Friar Nicolas do Rosario lost his life in 1592 during a Portuguese expedition against the 'Zimba'. To a pious chronicler, he was a composite of St Sebastian and St Ignatius of Antioch,⁹² but he was essentially a military chaplain.

In 1561, there was a Jesuit mission to the Mutapa court. The Mwene agreed to accept baptism, but the missionary was put to death soon afterwards, at the instigation of Muslim traders anxious about their economic future. In 1569— 72, the Portuguese attempted to conquer Mutapa by force of arms and two Jesuits accompanied the expedition, which failed, both because of disease and the strength of opposition it encountered. The Jesuits returned to Mozambique in 1610, and remained there until expelled by the Portuguese crown in 1759. The Dominicans worked in the area from 1577 on.⁹³

We cannot here explore the tortuous role the Portuguese played in the Mutapa kingdom's fortunes in the decades that followed, but suffice to say that they exploited internal divisions and permanently weakened it, but never acquired real and lasting control. A Mwene Mutapa complained of the Dominicans that they spent nine months a year trading: 'I have never come across one who called my children or my vassals and asked them whether they would like to become Christians'.⁹⁴ Like the comparable involvement of many Angola and Kongo clergy, this reflects less the iniquity of those concerned than problems of sustenance, compounded by the difficulty of retaining religious values in an environment that does not share them, a perennial problem for missionaries and other Christians who live in the midst of alien religious traditions.

In 1607, a Mwene, Gatsi Rusere, weakened by internal opposition and other factors,⁹⁵ ceded the Portuguese all his mines (a concession that existed largely on paper), and entrusted them with his four sons to be educated as Catholics. When he died in 1624, civil war followed. Mavura won the contest with Portuguese help, and at a great cost—a treaty accepting vassalage to the Portuguese state. He was baptized as Philip. When he died in 1652, he was succeeded by his son, who was baptized as Domingos with his sons and other palace officials, but was soon overthrown and killed in a rising of the Portuguese prazeiros.

As we have seen, women and children were more readily converted than men.⁹⁶ In 1560, André Fernandes noted: 'The women are very devout and frequently visit the church to see the pictures, which they are very fond of, especially that of our Lady'.⁹⁷ Some Shona men entered religious life. Like their Kongo counterparts, they were drawn from the ruling class, a fact that reflects the focus of missionary energies. Friar Luiz do Espirito Santo, put to death by Mavura's rival, was 'a native of Mozambique', and probably a scion of the royal house. Father Damiâo do Espirito Santo was another Shona Dominican, involved in the same tumults. Domingos' eldest son, baptized as Miguel, became a Dominican and Master of Theology, and died in Goa in 1670 as the Vicar of Santa Barbara. An Italian Theatine said of him: 'Although he is a model priest, leading a very exemplary life, saying Mass daily, yet not even the habit which he wears secures him any consideration there, just because he has a black face. If I had not seen it, I would not have believed it'.⁹⁸

Two other Mutapa princes (the sons of Pedro Mhande, who reigned briefly in the 1690s) also became friars, ending their days in Goa.⁹⁹ That they preferred a marginalized life in a foreign land to a return home sheds much light on the violence and disorder that had come to prevail there.

Portuguese names conceal the ethnic variety of the clergy. Many of those who worked in Zambezia, then and later, were Goans. Criticized by European visitors, but struggling equally with the stresses imposed by an alien environment, they merit more attention from scholars than they have hitherto received.

The prazos were great estates in the Zambezi valley, granted by the Portuguese crown in return for tribute and the support of the prazeiros'' slave armies. The system began in the late sixteenth century, and expanded greatly ^,r> the seventeenth. The prazeiros' insatiable demand for slaves, cattle and gold, their attacks on the Shona kingdoms and each other, caused immense ^Sl'ffering: 'It was the insolences of our people [the Portuguese] that caused these wars, because those who possess many Kaffirs and have power are guilty ^of such excesses'.¹⁰⁰

In 1692, a southern Shona state, under the Rozvi, succeeded in driving the Portuguese from the plateau. A Jesuit reflected:

Thus came to an end all the fairs of gold in consequence of the injuries and injustices, which from our side were committed against the Emperors of Mwene Mutapa, who always received and treated us as if we were their

sons. . . ,¹⁰¹

The prazeiros survived. Like the Creoles of Angola or Cape Verde, they saw themselves as 'white', Christian and Portuguese. They became, in fact, African warlords, hostile to all external authority, including that of Portugal. In a 'group of twenty prazeiros each one has nineteen enemies, but all are the enemy of the Governor'.¹⁰² They had large harems, and it was found necessary to pass an edict in Goa in 1771 prohibiting ritual intercourse after Catholic funerals.¹⁰³

Some of the largest prazos were controlled by Jesuits. A Dominican friar at Zumbo, who died in 1751, was, in the nineteenth century, the subject of a spirit possession cult. He left an estate worth 100 thousand cruzados in gold, copper, and slaves.¹⁰⁴ Livingstone visited Tete and Sena in 1856:

None of the natives here can read, and though the Jesuits are said to have translated some of the prayers into the language of the country, I was unable to obtain a copy. The only religious teachers now in this part of the countrv are two . . . natives of Goa . . . During the period of my stay a kind of theatrical representation of our Saviour's passion and resurrection was performed.¹⁰⁵

One of the most interesting aspects of religious changes in the Zambezi valley was the absorption of Christian practices by neighbouring African peoples. In many cases, these were first described in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and it is not always easy to ascertain their antiquity. A rowing song was recorded among the Tonga of Lake Malawi and the Shire river that they said they had learned long ago from the Jesuits:

I have no Mother.

I have no Father.

Who will take care of me but our Mother, Maria?¹⁰⁶

The Swahili Coast

The Portuguese undermined the trade on which the prosperity of the Swahili citv states relied, and repeatedly attacked them. The much-travelled ibn Battuta had called Kilwa 'one of the most beautiful and well-constructed towns in the world'.

These societies had been Muslim for centuries, and the Portuguese tactic of enforcing Christianity on a contender in a succession dispute led only to disorder. A claimant to the sultanate of Pemba reluctantly accepted baptism as the price of the Portuguese backing, but lost his throne and his life.¹⁰⁷

Yusuf was the son of Sultan Husain of Mombasa. He spent some time in Goa, becoming a Christian and taking the name of Don Jeronimo Chingulia.

He served as a soldier in the Portuguese fleet, returning to Mombasa in 1623. Despised by his people, and marginalized by the Portuguese, he reverted to Islam, and led a revolt in 1631. He held Mombasa against the attack of a Portuguese fleet, then withdrew to Arabia in search of reinforcements. He was killed by Arab pirates in the Red Sea in 1638.¹⁰⁸

Christianity and the Atlantic slave trade

The great weakness of the Christian enterprise in black Africa in the Middle Years was its close association with the slave trade. There was a basic contradiction between converting Africans and purchasing them as slaves. Captain William Snelgrave, in 1719, told a Dahomey official of the Golden Rule, 'And that our God had enjoined this to us on pain of very severe Punishments', and yet he was there to buy slaves.¹⁰⁹

Some priests traded in slaves. The Church in Angola derived much of its income by instructing and baptizing the enslaved, and the end of the slave trade caused a financial crisis for the Luanda see. Exported slaves were branded as proofs of ownership and of baptism. It was a peculiar irony that only Christians could be sold, and that they could be sold only to Christians. Catholic debates about the slave trade tended to focus not on its intrinsic evils, but on matters such as whether or not slaves should be sold to heretics. Protestants shared this myopia. John Newton made three slaving voyages after his conversion: 'I never knew sweeter or more frequent hours of divine communion than in my last two voyages to Guinea'.¹¹⁰

For the most part, the enslaved move beyond African history. Some were, and remained, devout Muslims, while those from a traditional religion often became Christians. One of the most notable was Olaudah Equiano (1745—97). Kidnapped as a boy in Igboland, he went to sea for some years, learning English, acquiring an education, and saving up enough to buy his freedom. He went on expeditions to the Arctic and to central America, became involved in the abolitionist movement and in the proposed Sierra Leone settlement, and wrote an autobiography which went through many editions. He married an Englishwoman, and died in England. He was a devout Christian, concluding his narrative with the question, 'what makes any event important, unless by its observation we become better and wiser, and learn „to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly before God?'“¹¹¹

In the late seventeenth century, a black Catholic layman launched an attack °n slavery, which was considered by the Vatican and led to an important policy statement, albeit one honoured more in the breach than in the observance. The source of the petition was a Luso-African from Luanda, Louren^o da Silva, who claimed to be of 'the royal blood of the kings of Congo ^and Angola', and was 'the competent procurator of all the Mulattos throughout this kingdom, as in Castile and Brazil, so that he might obtain a papal brief concerning a certain matter for which they are petitioning'.¹¹² Da

Silva petitioned against perpetual slavery, and against the cruelty that often accompanied it. In 1686, the Holy Office accepted a series of propositions that would have made the slave trade unworkable, but this was not enforced in practice because, in the words of an anonymous Vatican official, of 'America's great need for Negroes'. Like his kinsmen, the Angolares of Sao Thome, da Silva struck a blow for freedom. He appealed, on the basis of Christianity, 'in the name of all the oppressed'—a distant forerunner of black and liberation theology.

Conclusion

African Christians, including the Luso-African communities, developed various forms of synthesis between Christianity and local religions. In a sense, this was syncretism, which sometimes, as among the prazeiros, clearly eroded much of the content of the new Evangel, but their stubborn attachment to Christianity as they understood it was manifested in many ways, such as their hunger for baptism. They encountered a Christianity in Western packaging. Each generation of African Christians has tackled the task of disentangling the message from foreign contexts, and inculturating it in African worlds. Their attempts to do so form a central theme of this book.

Many of the themes of later mission history are first adumbrated in the Middle Years, such as the obstacle placed to evangelization by the Church's insistence on monogamy: 'the Confinement to one Wife is an insuperable Difficulty'.¹¹³

There was also the profound attachment to the traditions of the past. Bosman recorded a dialogue at Whydah between an Augustinian from Sao Thome and 'one of the King's Grandees':

This Priest . . . said in a menacing manner, That if the Fidafians continu'd their old Course of Life, without Repentance, they would unavoidably go to Hell, in order to burn with the Devil: to which the sharp Fidafian reply'd, Our fathers, Grandfathers, to an endless Number, liv'd as we do, and Worship'd the same Gods as we do; and if they must burn therefore, Patience, we are not better than our Ancestors, and shall comfort our selves with them.“⁴

Missionaries tended to concentrate on kings, and some royal conversions were politically motivated and superficial. Even where they were sincere, the lack of missionary personnel tended to mean that the masses had no real instruction in Christian belief, even if they welcomed baptism.

The shortage of missionaries was an endemic problem, intensified by the high mortality rates caused by a new disease environment. Europeans' ethnocentricity sometimes led them to believe that the most inadequate white clergy were preferable to the local product. In 1644, Joao IV of Portugal 'circulated the prelates in Portugal that they should dispatch thither their unwanted, unruly, or even convicted criminal clergy'.¹¹⁵ Not all were unsatisfactory, though, Seraphim, the Castilian Capuchin who died in Sierra Leone in 1657, was devoted to the point of self-immolation, and so were others, but they were exceptions.

Christianity's impact was limited by the vitality of traditional culture, by the shortage of clergy, and by a long-continued experience of European 'injuries and injustices'.

The new religion was brought by men with a relative abundance of novel material goods. In traditional religious systems that emphasized this-worldly blessings, this gave a prima-facie indication of its probable truth. However, a Wolof ruler in close contact with Islam had a different perspective: . . he considered it reasonable that they would be better able to gain salvation than we Christians, for God was a just lord, who had granted us in this world many benefits of various kinds, but to the negroes, in comparison with us, almost nothing. Since he had not given them paradise here, he would give it to them hereafter'.¹¹⁶

THREE $•>

Mission Renewed

Selection is either random or invidious. But if the Epistle to the Romans is not in fact complete without an addendum of . . . names, otherwise unknown, this chapter is improperly without one.

K. Cragg¹

Much writing on Christianity in Africa—my own included—has been shaped by a reaction against a tradition of missionary biography, where the foreign Christian is the heroic actor, and African communities merely the backdrop for her or his good deeds. Often, Africans are depicted as savage and degenerate to highlight the beneficial impact of Christianity.

The response to this, pioneered by the Nigerian historians Ajayi and Ayandele,² was to emphasize the African role in the spread of Christianity, and indigenous responses and initiative. Where attention has focused on the expatriate missionary, the evaluation has tended to be critical.³ The stress on African Christian initiatives was part of a wider historiography that emphasized the positive aspects of the African past, in a salutary reaction against the racism that deforms so many older accounts.⁴ However, clearly one cannot do justice to African encounters with Christianity without some understanding of those who brought it. Christianity has never existed in an abstract form; it is always incarnated in a particular milieu. The age, nationality, gender, church affiliation, and theological bent of the missionary had a decisive impact on the message transmitted. Flemish Franciscans, Anglo-Catholics from Oxbridge, Dutch Reformed Church missionaries from South Africa, black Presybyterians from the southern United States, Mill Hill Fathers from the Tyrol, and the Wurttenbergers, who comprised 80 per cent of the personnel of the Basel Mission were among them. This chapter analyses these agents of change.

At the beginning of this book, we touched on the much-debated question of Christianity's relationship with historical and cultural relativism. A nineteenth-century European traveller in what is now the southern Republic of Sudan said of its people, 'Without any exception they are without a belief in a

Supreme Being, neither have they any form of worship. . . .'⁵ Such passages are now cited only to condemn them, and they are contrasted with classics of modern anthropology by Evans-Pritchard, and Lienhardt. However, these studies have also been criticized for their silences.⁶ Both the actors in historical events and scholars see Africa through particular 'I-glasses'.⁷ There is no other way it can be seen. This is the problem of relativism in a different form. In a sense, missionaries understood African societies most imperfectly, but, as a body, they probably came closer to Africa, especially a knowledge of its languages, than most other foreigners have done. Some of them, such as Henri Junod, wrote ethnographic studies of enduring value.

Evangelicals and mission

Christians have not always looked on missionary work as a self-evident duty and, for centuries, it was not a priority of Protestant churches, as Cotton Mather lamented.⁸ The Catholic mission enterprise in Africa was overly closely linked with the Portuguese crown, and shrank as Portugal's power dwindled. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), founded in 1701, provided clergy for the colonies,⁹ and was financed by Parliament. In the 1830s, it was transformed into a missionary society, under the impetus of the Oxford Movement. The Universities' Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) (1859) was, likewise, founded by High Churchmen. With these two exceptions, the new Protestant mission societies formed from 1792 on were overwhelmingly Evangelical.

As so often seems to happen, there was, in the late eighteenth centurv, a climate of opinion that found expression in a number of independent publications and initiatives. In 1784, Melvill Home, a chaplain in Freetown, published a Letter on Missions, appealing for an interdenominational missionary society, supported by 'liberal Churchmen and conscientious Dissenters, pious Calvinists and pious Arminians'.¹⁰ The London Missionary Society was founded on these lines in 1795, though in practice it was less ecumenical than Congregational.

It was often the achievements of explorers that attracted potential missionaries to Africa, the Pacific or Asia. 'Shall the Christian missionary be surpassed by a Park or Lander?', asked the Honourable Baptist Noel, who was, and remained, minister of St John's Chapel in Bedford Row.

I he Baptist Missionary Society was founded in 1792 as a result of the initiative of a shoemaker, Thomas Carey, who later became a missionary in 'ndia. He first thought of foreign missions when he read of Cook's journeys in the Pacific (soon, missionary work was to seem a self-evident duty to Evangelicals; that it was not so then is seen in the famous reproof Carey received: 'Sit down young man, when it pleases God to convert the Heathen, he'll do it without your help, or mine'. ) The London Missionary Society *LMS), as we have seen, dates from 1795; the Church Missionary Society (CMS) was established by Evangelical Anglicans four years later. The process continued with the foundation of the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1804, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (dominated by Boston Congregationalists) in 1810, and many more. The Leeds Methodist Missionary Society was founded in 1813, and the national Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society several years later.

They differed considerably in their forms of organization. The CMS was a voluntary association, while the WMMS was an official part of the Methodist Church. The divisions of Christendom were writ large on missionary maps. Established, Free and United Presbyterians, ard Wesleyan and Primitive Methodists maintained separate missions, though the latter united, in 1932, as the Methodist Missionary Society.

The Basel Mission was founded in 1815. At first, it supplied recruits for the Church Missionary Society; from 1828, it also had its own mission field on the Gold Coast. A French auxiliary led to the creation, in 1822, of the Société des Missions Evangélicjues, under whose auspices Coillard worked, first among the Sotho, and later, the Lozi. A Berlin auxiliary became a separate mission in 1824, a Bremen one did likewise in 1836, and worked in Togo until the First World War. The Saxony branch became a confessional mission—the Lutherische Leipzig Mission—but in both the Basel and Bremen Missions,¹² Lutherans and Reformed churches worked together, believing that 'the standpoint of missions as a work of faith and love, is neither in Wittenberg nor in Geneva . . . but in Jerusalem on the Mount of Olives'.¹³

The concerns of these bodies were world-wide. Africa was only one of their mission fields, and they combined fundraising with actual mission work. Each developed a particular regional focus: the LMS in Southern Africa and Madagascar (and the Pacific), the CMS in West and East Africa, the Universities' Mission to Central Africa, as its name states, in Central Africa, the Baptists in the Congo basin, the Basel Mission in what is now southern Ghana.

There were also smaller missionary societies, one of the most interesting being the Hermannsburg Missionary Society, founded by Louis Harms. He believed that the Church in Europe was doomed, and wanted to create new Christian communities in Africa, untainted by Modernism. He drew on the resources of a single village, his missionaries were to be celibate, and his model was the conversion of the Saxons. His goal was the conversion of the Oromo, but circumstances made the Hermannsburg mission field Natal.¹⁴

Who became missionaries?

Missionaries have always been self-selected. Two twentieth-centurv comments—one from a sympathetic outsider in Kenya, the other from a woman who worked for the Worldwide Evangelisation Crusade in Zaire—are instructive:

. . missionaries are chosen, not by the Church . . . but by themselves. Such men and women go out to Africa in intense enthusiasm, regarded by their friends and sometimes by themselves, as heroes . . .^ls

Someone, possibly deeply stirred at a missionary meeting . . . feels constrained to offer for overseas service. Almost inevitably this 'offering' comes to be regarded as a 'holy call' to a sacrificial vocation. The whole idea becomes wrapped in a veil of romantic splendour . . . many may know that, mentally, physically or spiritually, the candidate is unsuitable for missionary service.¹⁶

There was, at first, a considerable social dividing line between the prosperous advocates and patrons of foreign missions, and those who actually reached Africa: it has been the custom to think of missionaries as an inferior set of men, sent out, paid and governed by a superior set of men formed into a committee in London'.¹⁷ The first English CMS missionaries included a joiner, a blanket maker, and two shoemakers.¹⁸ Until 1830, 34 percent of the LMS's missionaries, and 31 per cent of the CMS's were artisans or retailers. Most missionaries, wrote an East African big game hunter, were 'manufactured out of traders, clerks and mechanics'.¹

The wealthy and eminent dominated meetings and committees, but much mission funding came from the many small donations of the poor: 'You will find enclosed half a sovereign; it is all we have in the world, and it is for the [Baptist] Congo mission. I am a crippled widow, and have been in bed with a bad spinal complaint for five years'.²⁰

British-based missionary societies, in their early years, recruited a third of their missionaries abroad, mainly in Germany, because of the shortage of English recruits.²¹ In most cases, lack of education reflected a lack of opportunity, and some artisan missionaries, including Carey, were remarkable autodidacts. In a sense, the mission field gave them careers that England would have denied them. Both Robert Moffat and Thomas Birch Freeman for instance, were gardener's sons, and started life as gardeners. By becoming missionaries they became community leaders, authors, and figures of international eminence: 'The missionary movement was an expression of a far wider development—the social emancipation of the underprivileged classes'. ² The facile identification of Christianity with material progress, which they so often saw as a panacea for Africans, was an extrapolation from the realities of their own lives.

Not all missionaries were of humble origins, however. The Universities' Mission to Central Africa, as its name implies, recruited its missionaries from Oxbridge graduates. Bishop Mackenzie had been a Cambridge don in Mathematics; other missionary societies, in the later nineteenth century, had an increasing proportion of graduates among their candidates. One of the two 'eaders of the CMS's Sudan Party in 1890, G. W. Brooke, was a former public ^Sc„oolboy of independent means, and the other, J. A. Robinson, had a First in

Theology from Cambridge. Recruitment in the CMS rose steadily between the 1870s and 1900, less because more candidates offered than because more were graduates, and, hence, were readily accepted.²³

Some missionaries felt a call to mission work in general, and otheis to a particular work and field. They accepted a degree of control over their lives, especially over their marriages, which seems bizarre to a later age, although the members of the home committees had not been missionaries, nor even, in most cases, visited the mission field.²⁴ A missionary in southern Tanganyika complained in 1903:

The one thing the fathers lack is practical knowledge. Men who are born in Germany, live there and never do continuous practical work as real missionaries, can have no clear insight into the requirements of this work. … In my conception, we missionaries stand to the Committee neither as mercenaries to their employers nor as German soldiers to their com-mander-in-chief. . . Rather, we stand … as individual shareholders in a corporation to one another.²⁵

Like their Italian and Portuguese predecessors, nineteenth-century missionaries inevitably tended to identify Christianity with the world from which they came. They often experienced a profound isolation, and cultural dislocation when they reached Africa. In 1796, a party of Methodists reached Freetown, bound for the inland centre of Timbo.

This morning there was nothing to be heard among the Missionary ladies but doleful lamentations or bitter complaints. To their astonishment Freetown resembled neither London nor Portsmouth; they could find no pastry cooks' shop, or any gingerbread to buy for their children. Dr Coke had deceived them; if this was Africa they would go no further.²⁶

These people were not members of a missionary society, and most who came to Africa were not so naive or ill-prepared, but complaints of depression and loneliness thread their way through missionary letters and journals. In 1886, a Catholic missionary from Alsace wrote:

One can hardly understand the trouble one experiences, arriving in a savage land, unknown and inhospitable, and being there without what one could call a home—one can't understand what I'm saying, unless one has been there. A thousand worries and a thousand anxieties pursue one daily. No bread, no wine, no eggs. . . ,²⁷

Christina Coillard's marriage was childless and her husband, François, was often away. She had spent twenty-six years in Africa when she wrote, in Bulozi, in 1886, that there was 'a wall of brass between me and the people . . • I don't live here, I languish'.²⁸ She died there, five years later.

All missionaries experienced deprivation and illness, and, for many, the call

to Africa was a death sentence. Minnie Comber reached San Salvador in 1879. Newly wed to a Baptist missionary, 'she had regarded the journey up country as one long picnic'.²⁹ Within a few weeks, she was dead. Her husband, Thomas Comber, was also to die in the Congo, as did Percy Comber and his wife Annie and a third brother, Harold; a sister, Mrs Wright Hay, died in Cameroun.³⁰

It was understandable, in the light of mortality rates, that male missionaries, especially those with families, devoted much of their energy to matters such as housebuilding and vegetable growing, their wives to baking, jam-making or sewing, or, more precisely, to training Africans to perform these tasks for them. Much of their time and strength was devoted to the maintenance of a quasi-western lifestyle. This is very evident in, for instance, the household of the Moffats, at Kuruman.

Some missionaries did adopt African lifestyles, the preferential option for the poor that is more often advocated than practised. An example is the lifestyle of the first Plvmouth Brethren in Shaba. Paradoxically, they were often not particularly successful. One of the Brethren pioneers lamented the later process of embourgoisement: 'Missionaries get too proverbially snug in all their stations. As long as we keep to the jungle and the rough life of itinerating, only the good old things can befall us'.³¹ Yet, it was in the later period that the Brethren attracted converts.

Women

The first Protestant missionaries were male, like their Catholic predecessors, and wives were onlv grudgingly allowed. The word 'missionary', like 'actor', referred to males. When the door was opened to single, women missionaries, women were soon in a majority, though their preponderance is partly masked by the fact that wives were not listed separately: 'Their work in the mission has always been gratefullv recognised. But they are, of course, not separately accepted; their entry on the roll is automatic along with their husbands'.³²

Some who wished to marrv were unable to do so, because of the isolation of their lives and the imbalance of women and men, or because a suitor was unable, or unwilling to be a missionary. Mary Slessor's engagement ended when her fiancé was invalided home. Many years later, when she died, two hooks he had given her were among her few possessions.³³ A twentieth-century autobiography, with unusual candour, described the unfulfilled desire to marry, and also a bonding to another woman candidate so close that the missionary society concerned sent the two to different continents.³⁴

Some women married men they scarcely knew, but of a desire for a Missionary life. Rosine Dietrich was engaged to a missionary who died. She travelled to Ethiopia to marry Johann Ludwig Krapf, the pioneer of Protestant Missions in East Africa, who wrote in his memoirs, 'In leaving Europe I had not arboured the slightest idea of marriage, but my experiences in Abessinia convinced me that an unmarried missionary could not prosper'.³⁵ She buried a new baby in Shoa, and died soon after bearing a second; both lie in a grave near Mombasa. Krapf did not remarry until his return to Europe.

Other women felt differently. Mary Livingstone was the daughter and the wife of famous missionaries. She brought up her children alone in poverty in England, and died on the banks of the Zambezi. It is not surprising that she came to loathe the missionary enterprise, and was accused of a fondness for drink. Livingstone grieved deeply when she died, but he said of MacKenzie, who brought his middle-aged, invalid sister to the Zambezi: '. . . he is a muff to lean on a wife or a sister. I would as soon lean on a policeman'.³⁶

Charles and Priscilla Studd worked together as missionaries in China and India. When he was fifty-two, Charles left his wife, who was in poor health, in England, and went to Africa. He stayed there continuously for the last thirteen years of his life, Priscilla visiting him once. Before he left, she wrote, 'I sat down by the fire, and as I thought of all that was going to happen to me, I began to weep. I do not often weep . . .'.³⁷

All this was not peculiar to Africa. Dorothy Carey followed her husband to India with great reluctance; her mind failed when her five-year-old son died. She was not the last missionary wife to come home insane from India.

Between 1804 and 1880, 87 women and 902 men were separately accepted by the CMS. In 1915, of a total of 1354 CMS missionaries in the field, 444 were single women and 378 were wives.³⁸ The change was due partly to the example of the China Inland Mission, which accepted single women enthusiastically, and partly to the gradual widening of vocational opportunities for women in the metropolitan countries.

Unrepresented on the local decision-making body, women in the field met in a separate conference, the recommendations of which were often disregarded: 'Our position is intolerable', wrote a woman missionary in Kenya in 1920.³⁹ The ablest and most highly educated women tended not to become missionaries, perhaps because the mainstream missionary societies were so male-dominated.⁴⁰

The central organization was also originally a male preserve. In the CMS, 'Men only attended and the presence of ladies was not expected'. When some women did attend a provincial SPG meeting, they were concealed behind the organ!⁴¹ Women first sat on the LMS Central Board in 1891, and on the CMS General Committee in 1917. R. Cust resigned from his post in the CMS in 1892, in protest when they were not allowed to do this: 'Concede in time what is inevitable . . . they will have equal rights because they are fit for them: what fools some men, old and young, are'.⁴

There were other forms of inequality: ordained clergymen, whose work was 'spiritual', were more highly esteemed than laymen, a fact which often led the latter to seek ordination. It was, to some extent, the social insecurity of upwardly mobile individuals that made them hostile to the aspirations of educated Africans, and insistent on retaining their own leadership roles.

Evangelicalism and perceptions of Africa

The Earl of Shaftesbury observed in later life, 'I know what constituted an Evangelical in former times. I have no clear notion what constitutes one now.⁴³ Evangelicals, whether Anglicans or Dissenters, were distinguished less bv their doctrines than by characteristic emphases, such as the necessity of conversion, the Atonement, and 'the vital operation of Christian Doctrines upon the heart and conduct'.⁴⁴ The Evangelical stress on action contributed to the Anti-slavery movement, to a myriad philanthropies, and to missions at home and abroad (the Wesleyans maintained a Worn-Out Ministers Fund). 'Action is the life of virtue and the world is the theatre of action', wrote Hannah More.⁴⁵

There were divisions among Evangelicals, notably the split between Wesleyans and others regarding whether or not Christ died for all, or only for the elect. This was the issue that divided General and Particular Baptists, and, when the two bodies reunited in 1891, their action reflected a world in which the debate had become less important.

Catholics and Protestants tended to regard each other as little better than 'heathen', and we saw earlier how the founders of the SPG regarded 'atheism, popish superstition and idolatry' as equivalent evils! However, they had more in common than either would have been willing to admit. Were all non-Christians, including those who had never heard the Gospel, really destined for Hell? Catholics and Evangelicals often wrote as if they believed so.⁴⁶ Moffat spoke of:

. . . the teeming millions that are . . . moving every day like some vast funeral procession; onward and downward, sadlv and slowly, but certainly to the regions of woe. 'Oh, you are a hard man', some might say; 'do you think they will go to hell?' Where do they go to? Do they go to heaven? All idolators, we are told, have their portion in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone.⁴⁷

Io many, this was unacceptable: '. . . the wisest and safest course … is to leave the question of his manner of dealing with those who never hear the Gospel message, as one among his „secret things“'.⁴⁸ Actual first-hand contact with non-Christians led some to agonize over their eternal fate. Livingstone admired Sebitwane, who led his people on a great migration and founded the Kololo state on the Zambezi. He grieved when he died of a lung ■nfection in his mid forties:

He was decidedly the best specimen of native chief I ever met … it was impossible not to follow him in thought into the other world. . . . The dark question of what is to become of such as he, must, however, be left where ^we find it. The 'Judge of all the earth will do right'.⁴⁹

The belief that the heathen were eternally lost declined, among missionaries as among others, towards the end of the nineteenth century. It was noted in 1882 that: 'The ghastly argument drawn from the appalling picture of the future misery of the heathen, which once roused missionary assemblies, has been abandoned'.⁵⁰ However, as late as 1957, the White Fathers prayed daily for the Muslims 'and other infidels of Africa', 'Have mercy on these unfortunate creatures who are continually falling into Hell in spite of the merits of your Son Jesus Christ'.⁵¹

But it was, in a sense, this polarized view of the world that strengthened missionary resolution. It is no coincidence that expatriate missionary commitment declines where liberal theology flourishes, and flourishes among fundamentalists, but it fostered a hostile, even racist, view of other cultures:

In vain with lavish kindness The gifts of God are shown, The heathen in his blindness Bows down to wood and stone.

In 1884, a CMS missionary in East Africa, Charles Stokes, a widower, married an African woman and was expelled.⁵² He became an arms dealer.

There was a natural tendency for those writing in missionary periodicals to stress the darker side of African society, such as human sacrifice, though the evils that they described were often recent developments, directly attributable to the Atlantic slave trade. Sometimes thev misinterpreted what they saw. For example, the Igbo left the corpses of those who died 'bad deaths' in a grove called ajo afia (evil forest), and some central Nigerian peoples exhumed the skulls of their loved ones and preserved them in ossuaries. European observers tended to assume, wrongly, that these various visible remains were human sacrifices.

Some, both Catholic and Protestant, described African society as demonic. For example, the first CMS missionary to the Igbo, the Sierra Leonian son of Igbo parents, wrote, 'May manv come willingly to labour in pulling down the strongholds of Satan's kingdom, for the whole of the Ibo district is his citadel'.⁵³ Similarly, the founder of the Spiritan mission to Igboland wrote to his nephew, 'All those who go to Africa as missionaries must be thoroughly penetrated with the thought that the Dark Continent is a cursed land, almost entirely in the power of the devil'.⁵⁴

Modern scholars have often condemned expatriate missionaries for their Eurocentricity, their condemnation of indigenous culture. In a sense, though, this was inevitable. The newly-arrived missionary could not be an instant expert on African languages and cultures, and the incarnation of Christianity in different African cultures involved a great multiplicity of choices that, ultimately, could be made only by Africans themselves. However, in their identification of Christianity with western culture, missionaries often opposed practices that were morally neutral. The long list of missionary prohibitions among the Kaguru of Tanganyika in 1911 included wearing discs in the ears or numerous chains on the neck, removing the incisors and braiding men's hair with fibre.⁵⁵ In 1902, a CMS representative condemned Ganda domestic architecture:

There was no home life among them and their houses were an outward symbol of that sad fact. They were round, very dark inside, having only one opening; there were no partitions beyond those made by hanging bark-cloths. … It could not be a wholesome life. . . ,⁵⁶

Persistently, missionaries condemned circular houses, and advocated rectangular ones! Such stereotypes were ethnocentric, but they were correct in perceiving that house design mirrored social values: 'The African house did not cut off nuclear families from one another … it did not manifest the owner's industriousness'.⁵⁷ Africans reflected on the symbolic meanings of house design: 'A chief argued with me for a week that by making a square house I had at once created four points of near or remote breakage'.⁵⁸

Robert Moffat's daughter even tried to impose on a Tswana woman aristocrat the tvranny of Victorian stereotypes of the ideal female form: 'Bantsan … is very stout. … I told her that in civilized and especially Christian countries, it was a great dishonor to be thought to eat, drink or sleep too much, and consequently to grow fat'.⁵⁹

Christianity and commerce

Humanitarians were sometimes accused of a 'Telescopic Philanthropy',⁶⁰ more sensitive to the plight of Africans than to that of the English poor. On one occasion, O'Connell said, 'If the Irish people were but black, we should have the honourable member for Weymouth coming down as large as life . . . to advocate their cause'.⁶¹ John Campbell White (Lord Overtoun), who died in 1908, gave £50,000 to Livingstonia, but 'did nothing to rectify the appalling conditions of work in his own factory at Rutherglen until Keir Hardie publicly exposed them in 1899'.⁶²

In the middle years of the nineteenth century, British Evangelicals tended to believe that Christianity and Commerce went hand in hand. They envisaged an Africa producing raw materials, such as cotton, for British industry, and purchasing the products that resulted. They believed that the development of alternative forms of commerce was the surest way to eliminate the slave trade: The mills of Manchester . . . will yet shout for joy through the cotton wealth the Niger districts'.⁶³ Krapf recorded a conversation with the Queen Mother of Shoa:

She asked me . . . how my countrymen had come to be able to invent and manufacture such wonderful things? I replied, that God had promised in His Word not only spiritual but temporal rewards to those who obeyed his commandments; that the English, Germans, and Europeans in general, had once been as rude and ignorant as the Gallas, but after their acceptance of the Gospel, God had given them with science and arts wondrous blessings of an earthly kind.⁶⁴

Missionaries and traders in Africa often co-operated, with the former relying heavily on commercial transport and other resources. However, they were often at odds, especially over the liquor trade. A Xhosa aristocrat pointed out that material prosperity and spiritual wisdom were not necessarily found together: 'Why should you English set down the Kaffirs as fools?', he asked, 'You certainly have great skill in arts and manufactures but may not we surpass you in our knowledge of other things?'⁶⁵

A Catholic missionary resurgence

Contemporary Catholic religious orders are, internationally, in a state of crisis and decline. Their members sometimes take comfort from the fact that religious orders experienced a still more traumatic crisis in the late eighteenth century, which was followed by a period of revival, when new orders were founded on an unprecedented scale.

The Jesuits were expelled from Portugal in 1759, an event which reflected the continuing power of the padroado. France and Spain followed suit, and, in 1773, the Pope suppressed the order in Europe. During the French Revolution, religious orders were suppressed en masse. There were 15 000 Benedictines in 1775, and 2500 in 1850; the figures for the Dominicans were 20 000, and 4560 respectively, while many other orders entirely ceased to exist.⁶⁶

Propaganda Fide was re-established in 1816, and successive popes succeeded in asserting their control of foreign missions. This was achieved by the control of funds, and by the creation of some seventy new dioceses, filled with members of the new orders, and answerable to Rome.⁶⁷ An important source of revenue was the Association for the Propagation of the Faith, founded in 1819 by a working-class woman from Lyons. It collected small weekly sums from large numbers of subscribers, and was destined to become, 'the one chief source of support for the whole of our foreign missions'.⁶⁸ The days when African sees were in the gift of the King of Portugal had gone for ever.

The growth and work of the new congregations can be understood only in terms of the changing relations of Church and State on the Continent.⁶⁹ Anticlerical politicians in France were less hostile to Catholic missionary congregations than might have been expected, because they recognized their contribution to the spread and maintenance of French power abroad. Lavigerie, for example, worked for France's acquisition of Tunisia, as did the

Spiritans, under Augouard, in French Equatorial Africa. When the French Government separated Church and State in 1905, the aristocratic prioress of the Algiers Carmel pleaded successfully for the exemption of the White Fathers' and Sisters' schools. In the Belgian Congo, the Concordat of 1906 provided subsidies for Catholic schools in return for a measure of state control. The Protestants were not included until forty years later. In the coalitions that were the norm in twentieth-century Belgian politics, the Catholics tended to win control of the Ministry for Colonies, in return for trade-offs elsewhere.⁷⁰

Italy seized the Papal States in 1870, and successive Popes felt that the Church was endangered both by the loss of this territorial principality, and by modernism. They looked for allies in the missionary congregations, and in their converts. To Pio Nono, as to Louis Harms, Africa promised new Christians, free from the taint of theological liberalism.

Many missionary congregations were created in the middle years of the nineteenth century, and some, like the White Fathers or the Society of African Missions, were specifically for Africa. The Holy Ghost Fathers, founded in 1703, were reduced to a single man during the French Revolution. The order survived, but in an enfeebled state, providing clergy for the colonies, much like the SPG. In 1848, it acquired a new lease of life by amalgamation with a newly founded missionary order, the Society of the Sacred Heart of Mary. The latter was founded by a fervent convert from Judaism, a Rabbi's son who became a priest, Francis Mary Paul Libermann. Many Spiritans died in West Africa, but the order survived; those who joined in the early years, did so in the spirit of morituri te sal и tan t,⁷¹ In 1904, there were 696 Spiritan priests and 667 brothers in missions in Senegal, Nigeria, Gabon, Angola, and East Africa.⁷²

The Society of St Joseph (usually called the Mill Hill Fathers, after their base in North London) was founded by Cardinal Herbert Vaughan in 1866. Members of this society reached Uganda in 1895, and later founded missions in Kenya, the Congo, Cameroun, and the Sudan. They recruited members from Britain, the Netherlands, and the Tyrol.⁷³

The Society of African Missions (SMA) was founded in 1856 by a former missionary bishop in India, Melchior de Marion Bresillac. Although he and his fellow missionaries died soon after their arrival in Sierra Leone, the Society survived. It was estimated that, in Dahomey, a male missionary survived for three years, a missionary nun for four. In 1905, the SMA had 330 members, and there were 150 sisters in an associated order. Its administrative centre was in Lyons, and all but one of its missions were in West Africa.⁷⁴ It was noted that, 'The Society of African Missions has lost two hundred and eighty three of its members, almost all cut down in the flower of their age by a deadly climate'.⁷⁵ Many of these missionaries were recruited from peasant families⁷⁶ in Brittany or Alsace.⁷⁷ In time, French missionary orders made a conscious attempt to recruit Irishmen to work in English-speaking areas.

One of the most important African missions was the Society of Missionaries of Africa, founded in 1868 by Charles Lavigerie, and generally known as the White Fathers. Lavigerie began his work in Algiers but like many before and after him, he found it impossible to convert Muslims. Later, the White Fathers were entrusted with vast expanses of East Africa, including the interlacustrine kingdoms.

The Oblates of Mary Immaculate, yet another nineteenth-century French society, founded by Eugene de Mazenod, worked in Natal and Lesotho. They 'were drawn mainly from small villages in Provence and the Jura: they brought with them … an emphasis on hell-fire beside which all but the most extreme Protestant sermons seemed mild'.⁷⁸

Many other orders, old and new, came to work in Africa. The first Catholic missionaries reached Khartoum in 1846. They saw the Nile as the gateway to Africa, and pushed South. However, the mission was decimated by disease, forty-four out of ninety-five dying between 1846 and 1863; many of the rest were forced to leave as a result of sickness. A survivor, Daniele Comboni, founded the predominantly Italian Verona Fathers.⁷⁹ German Benedictines worked in Tanganyika, and German Pallotins in Kamerun.

A community of Cistercians came to Mariannhill in Natal in 1882 (it is pleasant to note that the name was chosen as a tribute to the Abbot's generous and supportive stepmother!) They were, of course, contemplatives, bound to a life of silence and solitude in the community. The Bishop who originally invited them had hoped, it seems, less for their prayers than for the dissemination of their agricultural techniques! Mariannhill was soon the largest Cistercian monastery in the world. However, the monks did not take long to turn to educational and missionary work, which was incompatible with their contemplative calling, so, in 1909, the Mariannhill missions of Natal, Cape Province, and Rhodesia became a new Missionary Institute.⁸⁰

Among the prosperous, missionary vocations were 'd'une singulière, d'une affligeante rareté'.^Si In 1919, an Irish study noted that, 'In the popular estimate, the „foreign mission“ usually implies only a very modest grade in the scale of ecclesiastical respectability',⁸² but there were exceptions, such as Father Henry Kerr, Superior of the Jesuit Zambezi mission in the late nineteenth century, who was the second son of the sixth Marquis of Lothian.⁸³

Commitment to foreign missions often became a family tradition, among both Protestants and Catholics. Joseph Lutz (1853-95) was an Alsatian Spiritan who worked in Sierra Leone and on the Niger. One of his brothers was also a Spiritan, and two sisters were religious of Saint Joseph of Cluny. A number of nieces, nephews, and cousins followed in their footsteps, making a total of eight priests (five of them Spiritans), and eleven nuns (seven of them Josephites).⁸⁴

Often, these missionaries were attracted by a romantic dream of martyrdom. A French missionary, who died aged 26 on the Ivory Coast, said '. . . from afar, to die in Africa is the most beautiful dream, but once here, the instinct for life asserts itself and one would wish to live as long as in France'.⁸⁵

Religious orders were often reluctant to admit African members. African seminarians were encouraged to become diocesan priests rather than join a missionary congregation, and expatriate nuns tended to form separate orders for African sisters. In modern Africa, many prefer to join local congregations, which have offered fewer obstacles to indigenization in leadership and praxis, but their foundation often reflected a reluctance to admit Africans into the close-knit family of religious life. A Sotho, Benjamin Makhaba, worked as a catechist in the early days of Mariannhill. He wanted to join the community, but 'it was considered that the Natives of South Africa, at their stage of development at the time, were unsuitable candidates for this kind of rigorous life'. He attempted to enter a contemplative monastery in England, but was turned down. In 1923, Mariannhill founded a separate (Franciscan) congregation for African priests and brothers.⁸⁶

In 1949, an Irish bishop wrote to the Cistercian monastery at Roscrea, seeking admission for an exemplary Nigerian priest, but in vain: 'The „admiratio“ that would be caused by coloured men in our Community and the strong objection of the members to same was a big factor in deciding the issue'.⁸⁷

Hundreds of missionary nuns worked in Africa, but, as yet, their history has been little studied, and their records little used, so that the literature emphasizes men's congregations. 'For the sake of completeness, some mention must be made of the many female religious congregations', notes a study published in 1969, but adds 'Since lack of space makes it impossible to describe them in as much detail as the male congregations, only their names will be given'.⁸⁸ In addition to their own work—often teaching—they were expected to perform various services for missionary priests: 'The sisters at Kisantu [in Zaire, in 1906] do at the Mission all the wash, ironing, mending and sewing for the priests and brothers of all the mission posts of the region.'⁸⁹

Often, they were not members of a specifically missionary congregation. The sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, who went to the Lower Zaire in 1894 at the invitation of the Jesuits, were founded after the French Revolution for the education of poor girls. Most of their early members in the Congo were the daughters of Belgian farmers; some were Dutch, German or Irish. From the 1920s, Kongo women tried unsuccessfully to join them, but it was not until the late 1930s that the Jesuit bishop agreed.⁹⁰

A Franciscan convent at Mill Hill in London supplied sisters to work among North American blacks. In 1903, it agreed to supply them for Uganda. In time, the Uganda province became larger than the parent body, and, in 1952, the Franciscan Missionary Sisters for Africa became an independent congregation. ' heir first Superior-General was seventy-seven-year-old Mother Kevin, who h<“^st reached Uganda in 1903, and founded 15 convents there. In 1923, she J^d established a society of African nuns, the Little Sisters of St Francis, which, ,^by 1948, had over 200 members. Both congregations worked in education, in ''Prosariums, and in hospitals (although, until the 1930s, canon law prevented nuns from practising midwifery!) In her old age she said, 'Everything is darkness and dryness, and sometimes I am tempted to despair'.⁹¹

There was, and still is, a vast number of African women's congregations, many of which exist only at the diocesan level. The oldest of these, which still flourishes, is the Congregation of the Daughters of the Sacred Heart of Mary, founded in Senegal in 18 5 8.⁹² The majority were founded during the colonial period. Thus, in Zaire, one was founded before 1930, thirteen between 1930 and 1945, three between 1945 and 1960, and seven between 1960 and 1975.⁹³ As we have seen, they experienced fewer obstacles in inculturation than their international counterparts, but, instead of control by expatriate nuns, they often suffered from domination by a local expatriate or African bishop. They were, and still are, isolated—some congregations speak only an African language—with less access to international funding and education abroad.

There were many Christianities, as there were many African host societies. The rural Catholicism of peasant Europe had a good deal in common with the religions of rural Africa. In the 1930s, the records of Triashill in Rhodesia included the following entry: 'A big swarm of locusts (8 miles long) is quite near. All the church bells are sounded and Fr. Schmitz applies the exorcism. Soon after, the beasts disappear'.⁹⁴ Pilgrimages to Lourdes grottos or other local shrines fitted in well with a traditional emphasis on the sacred place. The feast days of peasant Catholicism, such as St Patrick's Day, corresponded with the annual festivals of traditional eco-religion.

Not all missionaries claimed power over drought, locusts, or disease, though. More typically, they endorsed a rationalist, scientific explanation of sickness, and had more confidence in hospitals than in healing by prayer. Even Pentecostals saw healings and miracles as a special gift, rather than an essential ingredient in daily life.⁹⁵ Many missionaries hovered uneasily between two worlds, like the White Fathers in Rwanda who offered both holy water and black coffee to a woman in labour!⁹⁶

Nineteenth-century missionaries, both Protestant and Catholic, were very often closer to African communities than their successors. Although they were often sweeping and extreme in their condemnation of African cultures, they were much more successful than most of their successors in learning African languages. The early French missionaries on the lower Niger seldom if ever went on leave, and acquired real fluency in Igbo, while assiduously cultivating coffee beans! Their Irish successors preached through interpreters.

Keswick and the Faith Missions

The belief that perfection is attainable in this life was an important part of early Methodism, but it was a teaching that easily exposed the devout to ridicule, and it was, to some extent, forgotten in the decades that followed. From 1870 onwards, there was a new Holiness movement in Evangelical spirituality, due largely to the teaching of Robert and Hannah Pearsall Smith. They taught that, beyond the gift of conversion, was a second gift, that of sanctification, though, in its practical application, this was often understood in terms of very selective criteria, such as teetotalism rather than kindness. From 1875 onwards, a series of conventions was held at Keswick, which became the focal point of the new spirituality. Keswick was middle-class—'a Convention for the rich alone'.⁹⁷ It produced recruits for the mission field well into the twentieth century, and contributed to the increasing proportion of middle-class and graduate missionary recruits, which we have noted in the older missionary movements described earlier.

The China Inland Mission was founded by J. Hudson Taylor in 1865. He emphasized complete dependence on God, and insisted on the wearing of Chinese dress. Missionaries did not receive a salary, and depended on offerings for their needs. His work was the model for a large number of Faith Missions in Africa, interdenominational, but strictly fundamentalist. They included the Sudan United Mission, the Sudan Interior Mission, the Africa Inland Mission, the Heart of Africa Mission, the Gospel Missionary Union, and the Christian and Missionary Alliance. Like Taylor, they accepted single women with enthusiasm.

The Faith Missions were romantic and anti-clerical; they emphasized the religion of the heart, and combat with the Devil.

Christ's call is . . . not to build and furnish comfortable chapels, churches and cathedrals at home in which to rock Christian professors to sleep by means of clever essays, stereotyped prayers and artistic musical performances, but … to capture men from the Devil's clutches. . . . But this can only be accomplished by a red-hot, unconventional, unfettered Holy Ghost religion, where neither church nor State . . . are worshipped. Not to confess Christ by fancy collars, clothes, silver croziers or gold watch-chain crosses, church steeples or richly embroidered altar cloths . . ,⁹⁸

I he history of most of these missions remains unwritten. There is a considerable body of pious biographies, but little academic research.

The Sudan United Mission was founded in 1904 by Karl Kumm with the aim of creating a chain of mission stations across Africa, at places of encounter between Islam and traditional religion. There were a number of national branches, each with a mission field—the South Africans, for instance, worked arrjong the Tiv. Kumm made an exploratory journey from the Niger to the Nile, but never worked for any length of time in Africa. His views of Africans Were paternalist, indeed, racist. The Aryan race 'is today in the full strength of •ts manhood, while in Africa and in the South Sea Islands we have the infants °f our human family'.⁹⁹ He wrote of the Sudan, 'There is a land in this Wonderful world, called „The Land of Darkness“; dark are the bodies of the People who live there, darker are their minds, and darker still their souls'.¹⁰⁰ C. T. Studd captained the Cambridge cricket team; he was one of the

Cambridge Seven who joined the China Inland Mission, and inherited a fortune, which he gave to charity. In 1908, when he was 52 years old and a severe asthmatic, he was drawn to Africa by 'a strangely worded notice', emanating from Kumm: 'Cannibals want missionaries'.^{1 1} After a visit to the southern Sudan, he travelled with a twenty-year-old companion to the Belgian Congo in an epic journey that began on the Kenya coast. He left for the Congo again in 1916, remaining until his death in 1931. This was the origin of the Heart of Africa Mission, which grew into the Worldwide Evangelism Crusade. When he lay dying, he said nothing but 'Hallelujah'.

Studd was a man of single-minded devotion, and some of his fellow workers found him difficult to live with. It is impossible not to admire the courage and tenacity that led him to work in China, India, and Africa, and not to feel for his wife, who spent her last years alone.

The Plymouth Brethren developed a separate corporate life from the 1830s on; they were very much like the Faith Missions, stressing the imminence of the Second Coming, and rejecting the rituals and organizations of the established churches. Frederick Arnot, drawn to Africa as a child, when he played with Livingstone's children, was a lonely pioneer in Bulozi and Shaba. Like the Faith Missions, they relied on offerings, and enjoyed even more individual freedom: 'Brethren of all kinds and persuasions were free to embark upon missionary adventures, to occupy new areas, or to join existing teams. There was no selection process'.¹⁰² Brethren and Faith Mission personnel recognized that they spoke the same language, and Hudson Taylor bade the Brethren leaving for Shaba an affectionate farewell.¹⁰³

The Africa Inland Mission was founded by Peter Cameron Scott ( 1867— 1896).¹⁰⁴ He, too, had a dream of a chain of mission stations across Africa, but died within a few months of reaching Kenya. Charles Hurburt took over when Scott died, and worked in Kenya until 1926. By 1960, the AIM had over 600 missionaries in six African countries, but a study at the grassroots level in Kenya shows failures that are not always apparent in the hagiographies. Candidates were expected to be able to document conversion and a Call, but the emphasis on individual spirituality led to several schisms within the movement. More seriously, they failed to provide the efficient schooling for which their Christians hungered; they tended to regard education with impatience, preferring direct evangelization. Their schoolgirls worked as domestic servants for the missionaries, while schoolboys spent half of every day grow ing vegetables that the mission sold in Nairobi. There were separate church services for black and white, and the missionaries, whose views on the unimportance of education never extended to their own children, ran an élite school for their own progeny in Nairobi.¹⁰⁵ None of this was peculiar to the AIM or, indeed, to Kenya, but it reminds us that Holiness is not easy to acquire, or even understand.

A Holiness spirituality, whether in the older missions or in Faith Missions, often led to the condemnation of the Other, and an intolerant autocracy.

Missionaries habitually demanded higher standards from their African converts than were expected in English congregations: '. . . are we to settle down content with the miserable parody of Christianity which all too commonly passes muster in „Christian England“?',¹⁰⁶ asked a CMS missionary in Buganda. Perfectionism tended to lead to the destruction, rather than the furthering, of African aspirations. European missionaries rejected Tucker's suggested Church constitution in 1898 because it gave more authority to Africans: To me the greatest objection seems to be the proposed equality of European and native workers, thereby in some cases placing Europeans under native control'.¹⁰⁷

The advocates of Christianity and Commerce had tended to believe in 'progress', by which they understood the gradual spread of Christianity, and Western civilization throughout the world. Wilmot Brooke of the Sudan Party

said:

. . . very much confusion is caused & very much nonsense talked by Evangelicals and Broadchurchmen both confusing the work of saving men from the power of Satan, and that of building up political, commercial and social civilisation. I believe these two to be very frequently opposed, & I know they are invariably distinct.¹⁰⁸

Much mission work was justified by the Great Commission (Matt. 28. 19-20). An eschatology, propounded in different forms by the Irvingites and the Brethren, looked for the dramatic irruption of Christ in history, in the Second Coming. It was believed that this could not take place until the Gospel had been preached to all nations, and, for some, this became the dominant motive for mission work. In the words of Brooke, '. . . to hasten that time is, I believe, the function of foreign missions … I therefore should be inclined to frame any missionary plans with a view to giving the simple gospel message to the greatest number of ignorant heathen in the shortest possible time'.

Robert Arthington was a wealthy, eccentric recluse, who gave large sums to missions, and often used his largesse to influence their strategies. He was a pre-millenarian, in favour of entering new fields, if necessary abandoning old ones . . that all his elect may be gathered speedily'. On one occasion, he offered a missionary ship, provided that the BMS withdrew from most of the Indian sub-continent!¹¹⁰

These differences in theory, the strategy of the Bible and the Plough, or Keswick's more 'spiritual' emphasis on individual conversion, had important practical implications.

I am entirely in favour of the Lay Evangelist, the Female Evangelist, the Medical Evangelist, whenever Gospel-preaching is the substantive work; but when it is proposed to have a pious Industrial Superintendent, or an Evangelical tile-manufacturer, or a Low Church breeder of cattle or raiser °f turnips, I draw my line.¹¹¹

The author of this passage was a member of the CMS's General Committee in the 1890s. The cherished CMS projects of the 1840s had included a model farm at Lokoja.

Missionaries and the extension of empire

The number of missionaries at work in Africa expanded dramatically between 1880 and 1920, the heyday of imperialism. Missionaries in the field often supported the imperial ambitions of their compatriots: the Ganda called Catholic missionaries baFranza (French), and Protestants, balngereeza (English), as did many other African peoples. It has been suggested that both mission and imperialism rest on the same postulate: the superiority of one's own culture to that of the other. An Asian theologian has said that not only the missionary enterprise, but western theology has been 'a handmaid of western expansion . . .', and that the linkage of mission with western political, economic, and cultural dominance has been 'disastrous for Christianity itself',„² Ludwig Krapf, the CMS pioneer in East Africa, warned his coreligionists to 'Expect nothing, or very little, from political changes in Eastern Africa . . . Whether Europeans take possession of Eastern Africa, or not, I care very little, if at all'.“³ In some instances (Kumm is an obvious example), the missionary enthusiasm for empire was based on the conviction that white cultures were superior, and that it was the duty of Europeans to be 'trustees' or 'guardians' of the supposedly less civilized. There was often an ingredient of national chauvinism—'. . . Deutsche Christen mussen wir in Kamerun erzie-hen'¹¹⁴—and missionaries were more critical of colonial administrations when they were, from their own perspective, foreign. In many cases, the extension of empire was welcomed because it was hoped it would lead to the end of abuses such as human sacrifice. Often, when they had been unsuccessful, they recognized that a change of government would break the cake of custom, and make other changes easier. After Mpande destroyed his mission in 1842, Aldin Grout always prayed for the overthrow of the Zulu state.¹¹⁵

No one became a missionary with the conscious intention of furthering imperialism, and often there were serious sources of friction between missionaries and colonial officials. Sometimes missionaries denounced various forms of oppression and injustice, and their representatives in the metropolis lobbied on humanitarian issues. An endemic source of friction between fundamentalist missionaries and white admininistrators, settlers and merchants lay in the former's Sabbatarianism, and hostility to drink, gambling, and racing—very often the major sources of solace for colonial Europeans in tropical Africa. A Faith Mission did, however, succeed in converting one of the most prominent administrators in northern Nigeria.

Missionary conflict and co-operation

]n their early days, the Evangelical missions showed a high level of mutual cooperation.¹¹⁶ The LMS and the British and Foreign Bible Society were consciously ecumenical, the Anglican CMS obtained its first recruits from Germany, and Anglicans willingly played an active role at the annual meeting of the Methodist Missionary Society. In the field, however, there was often an element of rivalry, even between Faith Missions, or different Catholic congregations:

. . . the departure of newly won converts to rival missions was invariably viewed with the same sense of loss and failure as that occasioned by the 'backsliding of local Christians into paganism'; and the possibility of rival missions establishing a presence in their field caused as much concern as the possible introduction of a new pagan shrine.¹¹⁷

Occasionally, a gleam of ecumenical charity shines through the records, as when Bishop Samuel Crowther gave the newly arrived Holy Ghost fathers in Onitsha a plot of CMS land: i acquired this land for God's cause, take it'.¹¹⁸ However, the denominational hostility that deformed religious dialogue at the court of the Kabaka of Buganda was much more typical:

M. Lourdel was spokesman. He became all at once very excited, and said, 'We do not join in that religion, because it is not true;. . . we do not know that book, because it is a book of lies. If we joined in that, it would mean that we were not Catholics, but Protestants, who have rejected the truth. For hundreds of years they were with us, but now they believe and teach only lies'.¹¹⁹

On a personal level, though, the rivals helped each other, and sometimes

became close friends.

Christianity and culture

At the heart of the missionary enterprise lay a dilemma: to what extent should converts adopt western 'civilization'? Faith Missions, fearful that converts wquld be motivated by material factors, claimed that African culture should remain unchanged, but the social implications of conversion were far-reaching. One could not introduce Christianity without changing the host society. The crucial question was, by how much? To some missionaries, for example, western dress was anathema, and to others it was the sine qua non of being a Christian. Fundamentalists expected converts to read the Bible, but lot to use their newly acquired literacy to earn a living.

In England, the established Church and Methodism tended to be socially

conservative, accepting the social relations of master and servant. In Africa, missionaries were committed to a transformation of society, but often had little understanding of the long-term implications of their actions. They took it for granted that the plough was beneficial, and so, in a sense, it was, but its adoption also led to a growing social gap between richer and poorer farmers, and changed the relationship between work and gender.

The missionaries who embarked on these social transformations were often, paradoxically, hostile to westernization and education, believing that these fostered worldliness. The bizarre contradictions that these ideas could lead to were seen in an extreme form in the history of the CMS Sudan Party in the late nineteenth century. Its members, such as Brooke, had a romantic attachment to the language, dress, and culture of Hausaland, but attacked African missionaries with vitriolic prejudice and injustice.¹²⁰

Not all Victorian missionaries were oblivious to these problems. In 1887, a missionary in Uganda wrote:

I believe we shall gain a great point when Christianity ceases to be called the white man's religion. The foolish phrase, 'Kusoma Kizungu' (to read the English thing) creates needless suspicion. I am ever battling with it among our own people and trying to get them to use 'Soma Luganda' instead. When will they learn that Christianity is cosmopolitan and not Anglican?¹²¹

None had a more sophisticated awareness of these dilemmas than John Colenso, the embattled Bishop of Natal. He opposed the belief that non-Christians are doomed to Hell, defended polygamists, and respected the positive qualities in Nguni life, but he won no more converts than others. He reached Natal in 1853, and, by 1880, had a congregation of 86.¹²² The most enduring consequence of his work was a divided South African Anglicanism.¹²³

Where central mission boards advocated black pastors and catechists, it was largely because they were paid less. An occasional expatriate missionary, invariably criticized by his fellows, attempted to share the lifestyle of the poor. Van der Kemp married a Khoi wife, and lived on the edge of destitution in the Eastern Cape until his death in 1811. The Norwegian, Lutheran Hans Schreuder, worked among the Zulu from the 1840s on: 'His personal appearance is bad. . . . His food was chiefly pumpkins, eggs and milk'.¹²⁴ Few chose to share the sufferings of the poor, and none could do much to relieve it:

I asked a man, 'Do you know that you have an undying soul?'.

'Yes, my soul tells me that I am hungry, and I want you to give me food.'

'You have heard that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners?'

'Yes; I go naked and I wish you would give me a blanket.'

'You have heard that the Bible says, God is angry with the wicked

everyday?'

'Just see (pointing downwards) what a great sore I have on my foot?'¹²⁵ \ romantic ideal of rural life meant that missionaries tended to be suspicious of the new cities and to do too little to minister to the welfare of their inhabitants. In the words of a study of Zaire:

Their own anti-intellectualism and anti-cosmopolitanism also led many many missionaries to become exponents and supporters of African provincialism. They idealized African village life and rejected such aspects of modernity as urbanization and industrialization. To them rural life was the epitome of virtue while the city was filled with evil and atheism.¹²⁶

In the long run, the pattern of African Christian life, and its relationship with western education and technology were not for white missionaries to determine. African individuals explored a variety of options. Some sought western education and technology without Christianity, while others reacted against white hegemony by founding independent churches. In doing so, they not only enriched the African expression of Christianity and its global development, but also contributed to an ongoing process of emancipating Christian thought and praxis from the domination of European concepts and values.

As the nineteenth century neared its end, there was a growing hostility to educated Africans in their role as actual or potential church leaders. The destruction of the Niger mission is the most famous case of this. Where there was a white community, settler congregations held aloof from African ones. In 1846, the first Methodist Sunday school in Pietermaritzburg, taught black, white, and brown children. By 1880, black, and white Methodists worshipped apart.¹²⁷

In the twentieth century, fundamentalism became less characteristic of the home churches, and foreign missions were very much a minority concern. In Britain, in the 1920s, 'contributions to missions amount to one eight-hundredth part of the national income, and probably less than a tenth of the population take any interest in them . . . most missionaries are adherents of the older theological ideas, now becoming less common in Europe'.¹²⁸ The missionary in Africa was marginal to other Europeans, unless he became their chaplain. Even then, he was divided from them by his lower income, and hostility to many of their most cherished recreations. In the home country, missions were more marginal still.

The host societies

Encounters with Christianity were, of course, as complicated and various as African cultures themselves. They varied with the political structure of the ^state, and the position of the individual within it. Missionary teaching encountered a world of cultural values and practices, of which 'religion' was a Part. Traditional religious values were implicit in myth and ritual, rather than

explicit.

The essential dilemma for the historian is to discern patterns of meaning in unique events. One is tempted to delineate the 'African religion' that missionaries encountered; but one of the central insights of scholarship in recent years has been that 'African traditional religion', as it has sometimes been described, did not exist.¹²⁹ There are clearly some recurring, though not universal, patterns: the invocation of ancestral shades, the cults of nature divinities, and of divinized heroes and kings, the prevalence of secret societies (sometimes, but not always male preserves, sometimes appearing in public as masked figures). There is a strong emphasis on temporal benefits, such as health, long life, prosperity, children. Many African peoples believed in witchcraft, and tended to attribute misfortunes, such as untimely death, to its malice. They invented various social mechanisms for discerning witches, and obtaining protection against them. Foreign missionaries who regarded witchcraft as a dangerous delusion could do little to meet these deep-seated needs.

Missionaries in general expected Christians to be monogamous, while aware of the cruelty and injustice involved in disrupting polygamous unions. Plural marriage was deeply rooted in the social fabric. Kings cemented good relations with subject provinces in this way, and the great value placed on children, and the contributions made by wives in farming¹³⁰ meant that the more prosperous had overwhelmingly strong motives to acquire more wives. Sometimes, pioneer Christians, such as the early Yoruba cocoa farmers, obtained the economic resources that made plural marriage possible to them for the first time. Missionaries familiar with the story of Jacob and Rachel were, for the most part, blind to the way in which love could flourish in a plural marriage:

'How many wives have you, Zatshuke?'

'Seven.'

'Have you ever put any away?'

'No.'

'How old is the eldest?'

i married her when Dingane came into power. She is an old woman now.'

'Don't you think of putting her away, now that she is old and useless?'

i would rather say, „Let us be killed together“.'¹³¹

Postscript

Many things brought Europeans to Africa. The vision of the mystic, Emmanuel Swedenborg, attracted several of his followers to Sierra Leone. He believed that somewhere between the Nile and Lake Chad was a pure African church, the recipient of a special revelation. A Swedenborgian in Sierra Leone, the botanist Afzelius, 'met three persons of great spiritual beauty' in the interior. A later member of the sect wrote, 'Any exterior communication with the

African church I think very improbable in the present state of the Christian world, and until the life of heaven is more internally found, I do not see what use it would be'.¹³²

In an age that has learned to appreciate the spiritual insights of traditional religion in Africa and elsewhere, Swedenborg's vision of an African revelation, and Afzelius' glimpses of spiritual beauty do not seem bizarre.

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