The Church in Africa, 1450-1950
The Church in Africa, 1450-1950
THE CHRISTIAN C H U R C H
Edited by
I lenry and Owen Chadwick
The Church in Africa
1 4 5 0 - 1 9 5 0
ADRIAN HASTINGS
i 3 s 7 c) jo S 6 4 2
the last forty years, have made this book possible. It rests wholly on
their shoulders, its special contribution being the attempt to make of
so many different stories something of a single whole. Writing it has
made me see clearly what very big gaps remain. On topic after topic,
from sixteenth-century Ethiopia to the nineteenth-century mis-
sionary movement, there is not a single, wide-ranging, reliable
modern work.
1 have to thank the British Academy for a grant in 1990 to support
study at Yale, and Yale Divinity School for a research fellowship both
then and in 1988. The Overseas Ministries Study Center at Yale
provided me on both occasions with hospitality and assistance of
every sort for which 1 am particularly grateful. The librarians at the
Divinity School and the Sterling Library at Y*le were always
immensely helpful, as have been those at Rhodes House, Oxford,
and in the Brotherton here in Leeds. M y wife has throughout
supported and encouraged me in a work which has often seemed too
dauntingly vast, since I agreed to undertake it in 1980. She has also
improved its English at many points. I must also thank the
Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Leeds not only
for a generous grant towards the preparation of this book but also for
providing a community of friendship, pleasure, and shared learning of
a sort not these days so easily found in our harassed and over-
competitive university world. Last, but first in the debt I owe, Ingrid
Lawrie, whose commitment to the book has been throughout no less
determined than my own. She has typed and revised every line,
checked it for inconsistencies, struggled to meet deadlines by-
working late at night. For such professionalism, joined to affection,
there is no adequate way of saying thanks.
ADRIAN HASTINGS
Leeds
August Kj(j3
CONTENTS
A Note on Names xi
List of Abbreviations xiii
1 4 5 0 - 1 7 8 0
A MEDIEVAL ENVIRONMENT
1
THE ETHIOPIAN C H U R C H IN THE AGE OF
ZARA YA'IQOB
At the feast of Mary in the middle of August in the year 1449/ the
Emperor of Ethiopia, Zara Ya'iqob, assembled a Church council in
the monastery at Dabra Mitmaq in Shoa. It was called to resolve
matters of great moment. Here were gathered in large numbers the
Church's principal leaders, the two Egyptian metropolitans, the
Abunas Mika'el and Cabri'el, the Abbots of Dabra Hayk, Dabra
Libanos, Dabra Bizan, Dabra Maryam, Dabra Damo, and many other
monasteries, together with the chief clerics of the royal and episcopal
courts. But it was Zara Ya'iqob, w h o had significantly taken the
regnal name of Constantine, who presided and it was, most certainly,
his policies that were agreed upon. He had become emperor sixteen
years before, in 1434, to rule over an Ethiopia larger, wealthier, richer
in religion and culture than it had been in any previous age. N o r was
Dabra Mitmaq chosen accidentally foran event which he intended to
be of great significance in the enhancement of Ethiopia's ecclesiastical
polity. It was in Tigulat, a favourite haunt of his mobile court, that he
had himself founded the monastery of Dabra Mitmaq and given it the
name of Mitmaq upon hearing of the demolition of an Egyptian
monastery* of the same name bv / the Muslims. That was the defiant
action of a ruler whose sense of religious responsibility was profound,
but it represented too a confident, almost aggressive, imperial
Christianity.
Shoa, in the central highlands of Ethiopia, had only relatively
recently become a firmly Christian province, but it was now the
heart of the kingdom, the home of many of its most influential
1
An alternative dating is 14 Feb 1450 or 1 4 5 1 . For Aug. 1449 sec G. I Iaile. 'The Lotter of
Archbishops Mika'cl and Gabrc'el Concerning the Observance of Saturday', JSS zC\ {19S1).
7 3 - 8 . for A Feb. date see C . Conti Kossini. 'Il "Gadla Filpos" c il "Gadla YohanrnVdi Dabra
Biz.m\ Atti di-li 1 Rr.i/r Academic, da Um ci. i<>co <;/«S (1903). 163.
4 1450—1780: A Medieval Environment
monasteries, yet it was also strategically close to its most exposed
eastern frontier, over which there was almost continuous warfare
with the Muslim sultanate of Adal, centred upon Marar. In Shoa
the heart of the kingdom had moved far south of its original
fourth-century location at Aksum in Tigre or the later twelfth- or
thirteenth-century capital of Lalibela. These holy places had by no
means been abandoned. Aksum, only 100 miles from the R e d Sea,
remained the symbolic focus of the kingdom s identity, its single
cathedral, home of the Ark of the Covenant, Ethiopia's original N e w
Jerusalem. Mere Zara Ya'iqob's own solemn coronation had taken
place in scenes ritually reminiscent of Jesus' entry into the holy city.
In Tigre too Dabra Damo and the other monasteries of ancient times
retained a position of particular prestige as providing the link in
monastic succession of all later Ethiopian monks back to Pachomius
and Anthony, and the monastic succession in Ethiopian eyes was as
precise and significant a chain as the episcopal. One hundred and fifty
miles to the south of Aksum in the early thirteenth century the
Emperor Lalibela, greatest of the Zagwe kings, had chiselled out the
eleven subterranean churches named after him, the new capital
modelled once more upon Jerusalem. It was intended, presumably, to
outdo Aksum as the Ethiopie reincarnation of Zion. This was already
a considerable move away from the coast into the Zagwe heartland of
Lasta, but the political, military, and religious thrust of the Christian
kingdom had advanced well south of Lasta by the fifteenth century.
The kings of the revived 'Solomonic' line after 1270 continued to be
crowned in Aksum, whose primacy they did not challenge by
founding any new symbolic capital up-country. None the less they
lived, for the most part, in Shoa. Dabra Mitmaq was a good 400 miles
from Aksum, over 500 from the sea. Here in 1449 the Emperor,
surrounded by his wives, his bishops, his abbots, his generals, was
resolved to settle once and for all the problem of the Sabbath.
The status of the Jewish Sabbath had proved, religiously and
politically, an awkward and divisive issue within the Ethiopian
Church for centuries. O f late it had been the cause of schism. To
understand why, we need to look back a good deal and to consider
the way Ethiopia's self-consciousness had developed. The Church
began in the fourth century with the Christian conversion of King
Ezana of the small Semitic or Semiticized kingdom of Aksum upon
the R e d Sea coast, a kingdom already well established by that date,
and spreading inland to absorb the Cushitic peoples of the highlands
'I he Ethiopian Church and Zara Ya'iqob ii
behind them. The first bishop. Frumentius—the first Abba Salama to
the Ethiopians—was a Greek, consecrated and mandated by
Athanasius, Patriarch of Alexandria, and it was one of the enduring
peculiarities (and problems) of Ethiopian Church life that it was
never accorded a metropolitan of its own race nor even—until the
reign of Zara Ya'iqob, and then only exceptionally—more than one
single bishop. When an abuna died an embassy had each time to
make the difficult journey to Alexandria (and later to Cairo), laden
with suitable gifts, to beseech his replacement. That explains why, in
1449, two Egyptian prelates, Mika'el and Gabri'el, were present at
the Council of Dabra Mitmaq. But to understand the full significance
of their presence and what they stood for, it is necessary to turn first
to the history of the Church of Egypt itself from which they,
Frumentius, and therefore the Ethiopian Church tradition as a
whole, derived.
There was, however, also translation from Coptic to Creek. See e.g.. R Dragnet,
'Notre Édition des recensions syriaques de L' "/Vcetiion" d'Abba lsaie\ Revue d'histoire
ecclésiastique. 63 (l«>68}. S43-S7.
See, ir. particular, W. II. C . Frend. 'Athanasius as an F.gypcian Christian Leader in the
Fourth Century', in Religion Popular cwd Unpopular m (ht tùiriy Christian Centuries (1976).
'I he Ethiopian Church and Zara Ya'iqob ii
into it, one naturally expects an extension of the Egyptian Church to
do the same. Which is what happened. The Ethiopian Bible is a
remarkable achievement, but its production was clearly taken for
granted in the missionary practice of the time. Again, we do not
know just how or when or by whom the Scriptures were translated
into Ethiopie—probably it was done bit by bit and by more than one
hand—but we can be certain that the N e w Testament was translated
from Greek at a quite early stage in the history of the Church of
Aksum, certainly before the end of the fifth century. The Old
Testament was at least no later and may well have been initially
translated, at least in parts, direct from Hebrew/ The mission of
Frumentius was only a start. We know very little of its immediate
consequences but two of them seem certain enough. It established a
permanent relationship of dependence upon the Patriarchate of
Alexandria and it gave Ethiopia what was essentially the Egyptian
liturgy and the Egyptian theological tradition: an intense commit-
ment to the Council of Nicaea and to the teaching of the great
Alexandrians Athanasius and Cyril. But Ethiopian tradition also
attaches much importance to the arrival of the 'Nine Saints', nine
monks, probably from Syria, rather over a century later. They have-
often been characterized as l anti-Chalcedonians\ the source of
Ethiopia's alleged monophysitism. They have also been claimed as
Chalcedonians. Again, the fact is that we know very little about
them, but the evidence suggests that for long after this the beliefs of
the Ethiopian Church were pre-Chalcedonian rather than anti-
Chalcedonian. If Monophysite, it was only verbally so, rather firmly
following the essentially orthodox teaching of Cyril of Alexandria.
Ethiopia's Christological faith, expressed again and again with great
firmness and subtlety, was and remained substantially no different
* S
from that of R o m e or Constantinople.'
What the Nine Saints most definitely did do was to establish a
number of monasteries around Aksum in Tigre, among them Dabra
Damo, which would remain for more than a millennium the most
decisive institutions for the passing-on of the tradition and ministry of
the Church, the copying of manuscripts, the cultivation of a
minimum core of theological learning. The Rule of Pachom and the
7
See R . H Cliarlcs. 'Hthiopic Version*, m J. I lasting* (ed.). Dictionary of the Bible, i (1902),
791-3-
B. M We i sc h or, 'Historical and Philological Problems of the Axumitic Literature
(especially 111 the Qerellos)', JUS y / i (1971). 8 3
10 145°~* 7$°A Medieval Environment
Life of Anthony were now, if not earlier, translated into Ethiopie. At
much the same time a number of other books were to be translated
which would be profoundly influential in the long and lonely course
of Ethiopian Christian history. One example is the Shepherd of
Hermas, which Athanasius used as a textbook for catechumens and
Clement of Alexandria had regarded as part of the canon. Here in
fact, in Ethiopia, it did become an additional canonical book. On the
Old Testament side there were more—the Book of Enoch, 9 the
Book of Jubilees, and others. In general these additions to the canon
either reflected or easily contributed to a somewhat Judaizing form
of Christianity, something in its way not surprising in a child of
Alexandria. The Ethiopian Christian library remained a small one, at
least until the fourteenth century, but it included the decrees of the
first three councils together with its fundamental work of theology,
the Qerellos, an anthology consisting principally of the writings of
Cyril of Alexandria. Whatever survived from this early period seems
in later ages to have merged, in terms of category, into one large
canonical whole. To understand the subsequent Christianity of
Ethiopia, one needs to envisage a process of continual redigestion
across centuries of a very limited range of texts, a process carried out
with no more than the most minimal contact with the rest of the
Church.
In its early days, the Christian kingdom of Aksum had been a not
too remote or special pare of the Christian world of the eastern
Mediterranean. In the sixth century in the reign of King Caleb it had
become a power of some importance, the principal Monophysite
kingdom, a state to which Coptic Monophysites could look for
patronage and with which Justinian could need to negotiate. It is the
period in which the Kebra Nagast, the supreme myth of Ethiopia's
Solomonic origins, was probably first written. It was only with the
coming of Islam in the seventh century that regional power was
replaced by isolation. The R e d Sea soon fell under Islamic control;
the Church of Alexandria lost much of its authority and wider
significance. The kingdom of Ethiopia withdrew little by little away
9
It is certainly odd that the Jewish Book of Enoch, a work actually quoted in the N e w
Testament (lude 1 4 - 1 5 ) and written for the most part in the tst or 2nd cent, bc, should have
disappeared from the whole of the rest of the world, except in Aramaic. Greek, and Latin
fragments, while more than thirty manuscripts of it exist in Hthiopic. cf. M . A . Knibb. 'Ihc
Ethiopie Book of littoch, 2 vols. (1978); Matthew Black. Ihe Book of F.noch or I F.tioch (Leiden.
1985).
'I he Ethiopian Church and Zara Ya'iqob ii
from the R e d Sea inland into the highlands. While never wholly
shorn of wider contacts, these very nearly withered away. There were
decades in which there was no abuna sent from Egypt and the
shortage of priests could become perilous. It is noteworthy that the
kings of Aksum minted coins from the third century to the eighth,
after which there were no more. In these circumstances of quite
extraordinary religious and political isolation, while the Christian
identity of the kingdom was continuously reaffirmed, its form
developed in ways significantly distinct from those of the central
Christian traditions, Greek and Latin, from which initiallv it mav
' / <
have been little different—no more than that of other outlying areas.
So do Coptic Christians. For female circumcision in the Coptic Church, see Otto
Mcinardus, Christian Egypt, h'aith and Life (Cairo, 1970), 3 1 S 4 1 .
' ' Abu Salih, Tue Churches and the Monasteries of Egypt and Sotne SeighiMurtttg Countries, cd.
B. T. A. Eveils (Oxford. 1895), 284-1; 1.
'I he Ethiopian Church and Zara Ya'iqob ii
period, as heir co Solomon, superior in authority ta the emperors of
Byzantium and destined protector for the whole Monophysite
world. 1 2 If so, it is improbable that the tradition of Jewish descent
simply began then; in which case it is very close indeed to the
Christian conversion of King E'/ana in the fourth century.
It is, however, certain from inscriptions that Ezana himself moved
to Christianity not from Judaism but from belief in a polytheist
pantheon. Hence it remains possible to regard the Kebra Nagast
tradition as devoid of anv historical foundation whatsoever, a mere
matter of Ethiopian musings upon Acts 8: 26-39, 1 Kings 10, and
Matthew 12: 42. If Philip the Evangelist could convert to Christian
faith an Ethiopian eunuch, the treasurer of Candace, Queen of the
Ethiopians, w h o had been to Jerusalem to worship, was not the
implication of this strange story that the Ethiopians were believing
Jews already? Were not the two 'Queens of the south' to be linked
together? While we know that scholars tend to place Candace far
away from modern Ethiopia, Ethiopians did not. The myth of the
Kebra Nagast could be woven from such threads. Yet it seems at least
tenable to argue that there is rather more to it historically than this:
the story in Acts could reflect the existence at the time of'black Jews'
011 the R e d Sea coast south of Egypt, and the Kebra Nagast could be
correct in claiming that the people of Aksum had in part been Jews
before they were Christians. If the people of Aksum, to whom
Frumentius preached, retained as Christians elements of their
previous customs and beliefs, but the latter had already in part
been Judaized. then they could in terms of religious inheritance be
seen as Jewish Christians as well as African Christians. That is indeed
how they have long regarded themselves.
The second piece of evidence has been the existence of the Falasha,
a small group of people in north-west Ethiopia accepting the Old
Testament and living according to it as faithfully as they can, but who
are not Christians. The Falasha must surelv be one of the most
/
E. A . Wallis Budge (ed.). Ine Queen ofSheba and her (hily .SOM, Menyeiek, iieitig the 'Book
of the C/or)' of Kings' fKehni Sagaxt) ( 1932), ch. 2,S.
ii
'I he Ethiopian Church and Zara Ya'iqob
returned to Ethiopia, joining the rather dispirited group who had
always/ remained there, to found the community/ of Dabra Maryam.
/ It
and Dabra Bizan, founded a little later by Filpos, who became the
true leader of the 'House of Ewostatewos', were the principal centres
of the movement. By the end of the fourteenth century it would
seem to have outshone the old monasteries of Tigre in terms of
spiritual and apostolic zeal. Its monks were now advancing the
Christian frontiers of the north, preaching in Muslim and Falasha
areas, just as were those of the House of Takla Haymanot in the
south. What distinguished them as a group was the close
commitment to the memory of Ewostatewos, the explicit linking
of their houses within a wider organization, and the keeping of the
Sabbath rest. They had more of the character of a religious order than
the earlier communities, and this included a more developed convent
life for nuns. Ewostathian abbesses apparently had the right to give
absolution to their nuns for lesser faults/" The vitality of the
movement was shown too by the number of new foundations their
three principal houses were making. But it was the Sabbath which
divided them, in an almost inevitably bitter manner, from other
monks—at least southern monks—and from the metropolitan, and
made of them a movement bordering on the heretical and the
schismatic.
In ï 388 the Abuna Salama died after an Ethiopian ministry' of forty
years in which he had concentrated upon improving the biblical and
theological knowledge of the Church entrusted to him. He was not
replaced for ten years until the arrival of the Abuna Bartalomewos in
1398. We can imagine that Salama in his last years may have been
reluctant to face up to what was becoming a major problem. In the
ten-year interim the Ewostathians had grown greatly in numbers and
confidence and Bartalomewos was quickly convinced that firm
action needed to be taken. His anti-Sabbath views were shared, so far
as is known, by all the monastic leaders of the south and in particular
by those of the major monasteries of Dabra Hayq and Dabra Libanos.
N o r was the King of a different mind. Dawit had come to the throne
in 1380. As with many of the kings, his closest spiritual adviser was
the Aqabe-Sa'at of Hayq, at that time Saraqa-Birhan, and Saraqa-
Birhan was adamantly opposed to the keeping of the Sabbath. A
Council was called in 1400 by royal authority. Messengers were sent
:
Conti Rossini, 'II "Gadla Filpos"'. 162.
30 J4j>o 1 A Medieval Environment
For four years. However, lus memorial in the synaxarium of the Ewostathian
monastery of Dabra Worxj says that while he was kept for years in Amhara he was only six
months at Hayq (R. Schneider, 'Notes sur Filpos de Dabra IJi?en et ses suceesseuis*. Annales
d'P.thtopie, ri (197$). 13>-*>)•
'I he Ethiopian Church and Zara Ya'iqob ii
observance of the Sabbath as simply reflecting Ethiopian tradition,
challenged by an Egyptian abuma anxious to enforce the Cairo line.
On the other hand, it is hard to believe that the Ewostathians were
wholly innovating either. The amount of local support they seem to
have received in the north, the ease with which their cause eventually
triumphed, and the congruity between this and other Ethiopian
characteristics (such as retention of the Mosaic dietary laws, which
are, however, witnessed to in the Kebra Nagast as Sabbath observance
is not) do all suggest that the Ewostathians were reflecting or
resurrecting an ancient Ethiopian tradition, still held to some extent
among the people, but which had fallen into considerable desuetude
and was 110 longer regarded by most churchmen as a necessary part of
Christian life. Certainly hostility to it among the monks of Dabra
Libanos seems as clear as the commitment to it among those of Dabra
Bizan. One other piece of evidence, enigmatic as it is, may be
considered. 24 At Lalibela there are a number of Ethiopie texts carved
in wood which claim to be the work of King Lalibela. As such they
are about the earliest surviving religious texts we have in the
language. N o w by far the longest is a piece in praise of the Christian
Sunday, a mystical personification comparable to the Falasha
personification of the Sabbath. Should we see this as evidence that
the Zagwe dynasty in abandoning Aksum also abandoned, or played
down, the Sabbath, while stressing the holiness of the first dav of the
week? If this was royal orthodoxy in the mid-thirteenth century, it
might help to explain how Iyasus-Mo'a, founding Dabra Hayq while
the Zagwe were still ruling, never included Sabbath observance as
part of its practices, and how an absence of Sabbatarianism became so
decided a mark of the whole southern monastic movement springing
from Hayq.
The Council of 1400 proved ineffectual. The persecution of monks
as holy as Filpos was distressing, while support for them in the north
appeared to be considerable. The King of Ethiopia now lived in
Shoa, but it was crucial that he retain the loyalty of Aksum and the
north, and not too easy to do so. There were already signs of an
incipient Eritrean separatism, a political movement needing and at
times obtaining local religious support. If the Ewostathians had
revived the traditional practice of Aksum in regard to the Sabbath and
were now to be persecuted for it, the effect on the unity of the
Gigar Tcsfayc, 'Inscriptions sur bois de trois hgliscs de l.alibala'. JUS 17 (19S4), 107-26.
32 l^o-j^So: A Medieval Environment
kingdom might well be perilous. But the unity of the Church was
threatened no less, even, conceivably, the future of Christianity.
The Ewostathians had been excommunicated by the Abuna for
years and this had prevented them from being ordained. As a result,
while elsewhere monks were priests, here they were not. N o w it is
true that in this they were no different from the early monks of Egypt
and the West. Nevertheless, the custom for monks, and especially
their abbots, to be ordained priest had long been established in
Ethiopia as elsewhere, and this was really needed for their wider
pastoral responsibilities outside the monastery. It is true that the
Ewostathians were not, apparently, entirely priestless. From time to
time they received priests into their ranks who, after undergoing
penance for lapsing from Sabbath observance, were then able to
celebrate mass. Nevertheless, it seems clear that there was a danger of
an almost priestless, even mass-less religion emerging, a religion
whose most striking characteristic wras Sabbath observance. The
Ewostathians were only too clearly moving in a direction that the
Beta Israel may have taken a few centuries earlier: the giving of
precedence to Hebrew institutions over Christian ones, and the
closeness of their ideals to the religion of the 'Falasha' (probably not
yet regularly called by that name) may not have escaped notice,
particularly as some of the Ewostathian communities were actually in
Falasha territory. They had, it seems, been evangelizing there not
unsuccessfully. Cabra-Iyasus had been one of Ewostatewoss early
disciples and had accompanied him abroad. On his return he was sent
to the country around Lake Tana, and, his hagiographer tells us,
'Even the sons of the Jews believed, received baptism and entered
into his teaching.' 25 This could well be so, the very sabbatarianism of
the Ewostathians proving a bridge to the Falasha. In point of fact
King Dawit did not only have the Ewostathians on his hands. He also
had the Falasha, w h o had been involved in a major revolt during his
reign. It is not implausible to see the possibility of a Falasha-
Ewostathian entente if the monks were effectively driven out of the
Church on account of their commitment to the Sabbath. Such an
alliance might have endangered the whole royal position in the
north, if it could claim the blessing of Aksumitic tradition itself
About 1404 the old Aqabe-Sa'at, Saraqa-Birhan, died. Almost at
** C . Conti Rossini, 'Note de agiograûa etiopica: Gabra-Iyasus%, Rivista degli studi orientait,
«7 (1938), 409--52.
'I he Ethiopian Church and Zara Ya'iqob ii
once Dawit ordered Filpos to be released from Mayq. Furthermore,
the king commanded that in future the disciples of Ewostatewos
should observe both Sabbaths. The speed of this volte-face was
remarkable. In itself it was a compromise. N o one else was
commanded or advised to observe the Sabbath. A serious division
of practice was, for the time, thus admitted within the Church.
Moreover, as the Metropolitan had 110 intention of ordaining
Ewostathians, nor they of seeking ordination from a Sabbath-breaker,
the semi-priestless state of their monasteries with its inherent threat
to the whole sacramental structure of the Church remained
unhealed. But the sabbatarians felt vindicated and enthusiastic.
Their houses and their influence spread.
Even non-Ewostathians were moving towards Sabbath observance.
The most significant case is that of Giyorgis of Gascha (or Sagla),
probably the greatest Ethiopian theologian for many centuries,
author of the 'Book of the Mystery', Mashafa Mistir (completed in
1424). I lis father had been a chaplain at the royal court and sent his
son to school at Mayq, which seems to have been for the Ethiopia of
the time a cross between a monastic seminary for the élite and a
detention centre. It was during the last years of Abbot Saraqa-Birhan,
and young Giyorgis may well have met and got to know Abbot
Filpos, there under house arrest. After some years the father of
Giyorgis decided to retire to a monastery and his bright and well-
educated young son took his place as a court priest. Recognized as a
man of exceptional learning, he was entrusted with the education of
Dawit's sons. I le had, however, been fully converted, perhaps
through conversation with Filpos, to the Tightness of Sabbath
observance, which he firmly defends in the Mashafa Mistir.
The long reign of Dawit would seem to have been a time of
maturation for Ethiopian Christianity. He had continued Amda
Seyon's military successes against the Muslim sultanate to the east.
Central Ethiopia was, for a period, a moderately secure land in which
the victories of a century had brought increasing prosperity. Conflict
between monarchy and Church seemed a thing of the past. Dabra
Libanos and the monasteries derived from it had fallen in with the
line of Hayq in receiving gifts and co-operating with the king. The
years of Abuna Salama had seen many new books translated from the
Arabic. There must have been a noticeable growth in the number
and size of monastic libraries. Dawit himself was a man of piety who
particularly favoured the two devotions which were advancing in
34 1450—1780: A Medieval Environment
these years: veneration of Mary and veneration of the Cross, a piece
of the true Cross having recently been brought from Jerusalem, as
also most probably one or more of the Byzantine 'Luke' icons of the
Virgin.
N o book seems to have been more popular in fifteenth-century
Ethiopia than the Miracles of Mary. The origins of this book lie in
twelfth-century France. It was put together at Marian shrines
responding to the plagues of the time. Numerous expanded versions
are to be found in almost every medieval vernacular including
Icelandic. Sometime in the fourteenth centurv it was translated into
/
Arabic and then, probably in the reign of Dawit, from Arabic into
Ethiopie. Thus twelfth-century French devotions had reached
fifteenth-century Ethiopia, and Zara Ya'iqob imposed it as
compulsory clerical reading for the thirty-two Marian feasts
(following in this an Egyptian regulation of a little earlier). What
in the West was really only a piece of popular piety became in
Ethiopia part of orthodoxy itself.
Zara Ya'iqob was brought up in the pieties and new learning of the
court of Dawit, his father. A boy of outstanding intelligence, he was
probably taught at court by Abba Giyorgis and all his life maintained
theological positions remarkably close to those of the latter.
Subsequently, it seems, he may have been sent to a monastery.
However, on Dawit's death, when his brothers Tewodros and Yishaq
became king in turn, Zara Ya'iqob was confined (in accordance with
Ethiopian practice) in the mountain prison of Amba-Gishan reserved
for all princes of the blood. There he remained for twenty years until,
on the death of his brother, he was called to the throne in 1434.
'God made us king on this orthodox throne of the kingdom so that
we may root out all worshippers of idols,' 26 Zara Ya'iqob later wrote
in his Mashafa Milad> one of several works of political theology he was
to compose. He had clearly had plenty of time to think, and he
possessed an education and a knowledge of theology far beyond that
of his predecessors. He combined these qualifications with fierce
determination and an ability to plan in large terms. He set himself to
Da* Mashafa Milad und Mashafa .SW/<i>t* u, (texe) 9 5 - 6 , qv. T. Tamrat Church and State in
Ethiopia (1972} 2 4 2 - 3 .
'I he Ethiopian Church and Zara Ya'iqob ii
unify and reform both Church and State, applying to Cairo for two
bishops, whom he set to work in separate parts of the country. He
changed the name of Dabra Asbo to Dabra Libanos, enriched it with
possessions, and entrusted its abbot, the eccage, with wide pastoral
responsibilities for the control of other monasteries, at least in Shoa
and maybe more widely. In particular he handed over to it direct
responsibility for his new royal foundations at Dabra Mitmaq, Dabra
Berhan, and elsewhere. In receiving these duties the eccage did not,
as is often suggested, replace the aqabe-sa'at of Hayq, for their two
roles remained very different. The new function of the abbot of
Dabra Libanos was one of oversight over a multitude of monasteries.
There is no evidence that the abbot of Hayq had ever had such a role.
His was instead one of being the kings principal spiritual adviser, and
this certainly continued well beyond the death of Zara Ya'iqob.
The active presence of two bishops and the advancement of the
eccage were not, however, intended to establish any sort of
independent ecclesiastical administration but, rather, to make royal
control of the Church effective. In the previous reign even the Abuna
Bartholemewos had been accused of heresy, and a royal commission,
including Giyorgis of Sagla and the Abbot of Hayq, had been
appointed to investigate. The Abuna was acquitted, but royal control
of both doctrine and pastoral practice was now to be applied
effectively. As Zara Ya'iqob saw it, he was faced with a Church which
had grown greatly in size and learning but was failing to get to grips
with its principal problem, the paganism in its midst, or its secondary
problem, the appeal to an irremediably Hebraist Church of the full
Falasha option. There was in point of fact no other authority able
either to direct the pastoral ministry or to control the increasing
diversity of belief and teaching consequent upon the growth of
essentially unco-ordinated monasteries. In these circumstances, Zara
Ya'iqob took upon himself the duties of bishop as much as of king.
Central to his programme was the matter of the Sabbath. It had still
not been resolved. T h e House of Ewostatewos received no
ordination, while the rest of the kingdom ignored Sabbath
observance. Zara Ya'iqob seems to have been a convinced
Sabbatarian from his youth. Perhaps he learned it from Abba
Giyorgis: the 4two Sabbaths', the Jewish and the Christian, must both
be faithfully observed, and essentially as one. He claimed to be
convinced of this from the instructions of the Apostles themselves (as
in chapter 38 of the Apostolic Didascalia, a work which may have
36 1450—1780: A Medieval Environment
been translated into Ethiopie from Arabic during the fourteenth
century), but perhaps still more decisive was his meditation upon
Matthew 5: 1 7 - 1 9 . ' D o not think that I have come to abolish the
Law or the Prophets . . . not an Iota will disappear from the Law.* Was
the Law of Sabbath Observance (one of the Ten Commandments,
after all) not an iota? Was not Jesus himself the lota (the identity was
established by the numerical value of the letters of the word)? Fidelity
to Jesus required observance of the Sabbath. All this Zara Ya'iqob went
over again and again in his most influential work the Mashafa Berhan,
or 'Book of the Light', a collection of readings for the two Sabbaths.
Politically; full reconciliation with the Ewostathians was no less
important. Disagreement over the celebration of the Sabbath in
fifteenth-century Ethiopia was as damaging politically as disagree-
ment over the celebration o f Easter in s c v e n t h - c e n t u r v /
G. Haile, 'Documents on the History of A$c Dawit 1 3 8 0 - 1 4 1 3 ' . JtzS iCi (1983), 2 5 - 3 5 .
T. Tainrai. 'Sonic Notes on the Fifteenth Century Stcphanite " H e r e s y " RSt 22
(i<)6C>), 103 « 5-
5
" For a very interesting reference of Alvares to the Stefanites and their attitude to the
cross r\vo generations later M.*e Al vares, The Prester John of the Indies, i. 170.
40 1450—1780: A Medieval Environment
expounding and woe to those of his subjects who in any way
deviated from it, monks, priests, laity, but non-Christians still more.
His chronicle declares him 'the exterminator of the Jews' and if that
was in point of fact exaggerated, his hostility to the Falasha, just as to
his pagan subjects, was clearly unbounded. His compromise on the
Sabbath was not intended to open the door to further movement in
their direction, but instead to close it.
'Whoever kills pagans has committed no sin,' pronounced Zara
Ya'iqob. 3 1 Clearly his approach to a multi-religious empire was very
different from that of Amda Seyon. The Church had, of course,
advanced a great deal in the meantime, and the policy of Zara
Ya'iqob did not appear quite as unrealistic in his day as it would have
done in that of Amda Seyon, and it was probably no more ruthless
than that of his elder brother, Yeshaq. It remained, nevertheless,
deeply impractical. The syncretism and surface Christianity inevitably
characteristic of the Church of his empire could not be overcome by
such means.
An ultimately more plausible approach may have been the
liturgical. In 1521 Zara Ya'iqob's great-grandson, Lebna Dengcl,
had an interesting conversation with a Portuguese visitor to his
country, Francisco Alvares. Alvares had just been witnessing the
annual ceremony of rebaptism, performed at Temqat, the Feast of
Christ's Baptism, 6 January. After the Emperor himself had been
rebaptized by the Abuna, he sat and watched as his subjects were
immersed one by one in a tank of water before him. While the line
went on and on, the Emperor called to ask Alvares what he thought
of it. Alvares was a quiet and diplomatic person, but he replied that in
his Church there was no such rite and that, indeed, it was forbidden
to give baptism more than once. To this the Emperor replied that
their books too were against rebaptism, but what was one to do? So
many people became Muslims, Jews, or whatever and then repented.
Endless souls would be lost if there was not some convenient way of
sweeping the slate clean from time to time. Alvares' solution was to
write to the Pope and obtain additional powers of absolution, but
that, too, would have required a more informed clergy than the
Church of Ethiopia could dispose of. In practice neither that nor
Zara Ya'iqob's desperate measures could work, so the annual
Jl
His Mashafa Milad is full ol'such teaching, as aLso the Mashafa ßerhan.
'I he Ethiopian Church and Zara Ya'iqob ii
rebaptism of Temqat would continue to perform an almost essential
function of purification.
Zara Ya'iqob's preoccupations drove him, physically and mentally,
into an extraordinary isolation in his later years. The court of his
predecessors, as his own for more than twenty years, had been a
migratory one, a capital of tents. In the last fourteen years of his life
this quite changed. Instead he built at Dabra Berhan a church and a
palace, inside which he lived, almost invisibly. The two buildings
were linked by a covered passage; when he went through it to the
church, everyone else had to leave except for his personal confidant,
the Aqabe-Sa'at, Amha Seyon, and four other priests. Zara Ya'iqob
was gripped by an acute terror of bewitchment. Priests had ceaselessly
to patrol the palace, spraying holy water upon its inner walls. Every
Ethiopian court was a perilously bloody place, but the tragedies of
those years seemed exceptional as accusations of pagan practices
mounted into a sort of witch-hunt in which the King showed no
mercy. It is striking how more than one person had his name changed
to that of the devil: thus Amda Masqat was renamed on conviction
Amda Say tan. One of the King's wives and several of his sons and
daughters were flogged to death on the accusation of taking part in
pagan practices. Upon the ecclesiastical side among the victims of his
latter vears were Indirvas, the Abbot of Dabra Libanos, St Takla
/ * ' *
}A
J. I'erruchon (cd.), 'Histoire D'Eskendcr. de Amda-Scyon II et de Na'od, rois
d'F.thiopie', Journal asiatique, 9/3 (1894), 340.
60
" lb a large extent we can infer that African religion as observed in the 19th and 20th
cents, was present 111 its main lines in die 16th and 17th. but w c also have many interesting
accounts of African religion at that cime from the hands of missionaries in such works asjoào
dos Santos. Etiopia oriental (Evora, 1609), Manuel Alvares, F.tiopia menor e dcscricaogcografua da
prowttaa Serra Leoa (1615), A . Donelha, Descricào da Serra Leoa e dos Rios de Cuiné do Cabo
Vade (1652), Giovanni Cavazzi, ktorxa descrizione de tre regn i, Congo, Matamba ed Angola
(Bologna. 1687). and the Abbé Proyart. Histoire de Loango, Kakongo et autres royaumes d'Afrique
(Paris, 177 6).
I 52 1450-1780: A Medieval Environment
the power and presence of God tended to be seen above all in a range
of natural phenomena (the sun, rain, thunder) whose names might
well be 110 different from the names of God.
However, between God and the living was a vast world of spirits,
far nearer to humankind and therefore on the whole in daily life
more important to approach and propitiate. Their images, symbols,
or impersonations—the 'idols' or 'fetishes' visible almost everywhere
in western Africa especially—provided the principal expression of
religion for the eye of the outsider. These spirits were mostly of two
kinds: spirits of the village and spirits of the wild. The former were
one's ancestors, inherently friendly and supportive at least so long as
one followed the customary norms of right living, but also tiresomely
demanding; behind and above them often stood the hero figure or
proto-ancestor, who first established the people or led them to their
present home and whose miraculous power seemed little less, though
more ambiguous, than that of divinity itself. The latter were not
necessarily evil, but could be frightening, unpredictable, and
dangerous like the forest in which they dwelt. Divinity and the
original creation might be perceived and named in terms, and across
the experience, of either the one or the other. And both expressed
their will through possession. Spirit possession was an almost
universal phenomenon of African religion, an ongoing revelatory
experience. There was nothing seen as evil about it, it was simply as
such a primary way (though there were important other ways too,
mosdy manual) for communication between the visible and invisible
worlds. Yet clearly possession by a spirit of the wild was a more
dangerous experience, and some such spirits (as also those of the evil
dead) might be close to being seen as evil. As the forest was tamed
and the village expanded, the spirits of the forest tended to grow in
scale (but effectively to be reduced in number), becoming the nature
deities of a pantheon above the ancestors but below the creator.
Within a monarchical theology many of them might merge with
powerful kings of the past and might so grow in majesty and worship
as effectively, or wholly, to exclude any more ultimate power.
Religion was, however, much less a matter of theology than of ritual,
rituals intended to control the present and safeguard the future in
both the social and the physical orders: rituals of initiation and
kingship, of fertility and rain, of sickness and death. They were all
performed in the hope of securing the fullness of life by appealing to,
or even attempting to control, whatever spiritual powers there be
Africa in 1500 and its (Christian Past 53
beyond yet within the visible world. While this appeal was sometimes
to God in the most ultimate sense, it was far more often to other
spirits around whom the ritual, sacrificial, and invocatory life of
Homo religiosus African us mostly revolved.
The balance of life, physical, social, spiritual, was wrell constructed
in principle but easily disturbed in practice. It was not a golden world
in which generations passed without undue pain, crisis, or history.
The rains failed. Children died unexpectedly. Men fought over
women and murdered one another in anger. More powerful
neighbours seized one's cattle or invaded ones ancestral holding.
But most such tragedies, millions of times as they occurred, left no
trace wrhatever beyond the memory of one or two generations in the
story of humankind. They were small-scale. They were never
recorded in writing. Life went on. People forgave, moved their
dwellings, bore other children, recognized new lords and new gods.
The knowledge and technology available even to the more powerful
could have next to no effect upon the ecology (except, perhaps, in
the over-use of some limited terrain around a royal capital) and
relatively little upon the majority of their neighbours. Then as now
the human heart had more than enough to endure, but upon all sides
it was—from the viewpoint of our modern eyes—endurance within
a context of micro-concern but macro-powerlessness.
Benin we may take as something already rather different. The
'Great city of B e n y \ as Pachcco Pereira called it in his Esmeraldo de
Situ Orbis, written about 1 5 0 6 / was in 1500 ruled by the Oba
Ozulua, son of the Oba Ewuare, who about the middle of the
fifteenth century had established Benin as the most powerful state in
Africa south of the Sudanic belt. While extending the power of the
monarchy over the nobles, he had reformed the constitution, built an
inner wall and ditch around Benin City, and extended the frontiers of
the state both east and west. Benin benefited, it would seem, from
being a centre of long-distance trade as well as being a home of crafts,
in brass and bronze and terracotta, of extraordinary skill. Some of this
the Ede of Benin had learnt from their neighbours, the Yoruba to the
west, or, perhaps, the mysterious people w h o had some centuries
earlier made the artefacts recently discovered a little east of the Niger
at Igbo-Ukwu. In a smaller and less distinguished form Benin went
3
Duarte Pachcco Pereira, F-mejaido dc Situ Orbis, Eng. trans. G. H. T Kimble (1937).
125.
I 54 1450-1780: A Medieval Environment
back with its dynasty at least a couple of centuries, while the city and
kingdom of Ife, to which Benin continued to pay a ritual deference,
went back to probably the tenth century. By the end of the fifteenth,
in this exceptional area, there was a small cluster of monarchies
developing, each centred upon a city, of which Ife was the oldest and
Benin currently the most powerful. They were the sort of state the
king of Portugal could do business with.
do. It was of the nature of the trade, of the large caravan in foreign
country, to select and thereby aggrandize a limited number of
markets. Once some quite petty state had become a regular trading
centre for the whites (Berbers and Arabs) from the north, it inevitably
grew by leaps and bounds in relation to its neighbours. It did so
because it had first choice of imported goods and could levy customs
dues on all that went through. It did so, further, because of the
prestige brought by the permanent settlement of foreigners and the
skills of literacy (in Arabic) and wider knowledge which they brought
with them and were willing to put. to some extent, at the service of a
local, friendly king. Finally, it did so, very particularly, because of the
nature of much of the trade. In the earlier years of the great age of
Saharan trade when Ghana and then Mali were its principal
beneficiaries, a large part of it was gold. Gold for salt was an early
core exchange. Undoubtedly the northerners brought a f i r wider
range of goods than they took back with them, but as the principal
long-distance entrepreneurs in the exercise, it was they who called its
central tune. To gold was added slaves. B y the fifteenth century slaves
had replaced gold as the staple commodity. The supply of gold was in
itself quite limited, the supply of slaves was not. Hence the shift
eastwards, to the middle Niger, of the heart of the trade and in
consequence of the heart of Sudanic political power. Here gold was
unavailable, but slaves were nearer the Sahara crossing than they were
in Mali.
The Islamic world flourished upon slavery, female slaves very
specially. Slaves were integral to its domestic, military, naval, and even
sexual system (a Muslim was allowed only four wives, but any
number of slave concubines, over and above that, was permissible:
when a Sudanic king became a Muslim, the number of his wives
went down, but that of his concubines went up. The wives had been
'free', the concubines were slaves. Whether the women noted much
difference, one does not know). In some parts of the Middle East—
and it is important to remember that African slaves were exported
well beyond Africa—they were also important for agricultural work
011 large plantations, but in terms of the trade this was probably of
secondary, rather than primary, importance. Females were valued
more on the Saharan line, on the transatlantic they would be valued
less. For over a thousand years the large-scale need for fresh slaves was
incessant, and was met by a highly organized, and still far too litde
understood, slave trade focusing upon the Upper Nile, the coasts of
Africa in 1500 and its (Christian Past 57
eastern Africa, West Africa, and central Asia. In late medieval Europe,
the role of the slave was marginal, though in Portugal and Spain in
the fifteenth century it was increasing, but these were lands which
had for long been Arab-ruled anyway. They were in many ways still
uncharacteristic of Europe. In medieval Islam it was crucial:
concubines, eunuchs, soldiers. While in subsequent centuries the
imports of the Atlantic slave trade were settled together and allowed
to breed among themselves, thus producing in time a permanent
enslaved labour force (though here the birth-rate only caught up
with the death-rate in the late eighteenth century or after), the
imports of the Arab slave trade never were. They could not become a
distinct society. While the conditions of the long trek across the
Sahara were appalling and the wastage rate very high, once arrived
the condition of the slave greatly improved. Most became Muslims.
Many were freed when their period of utility was over, and if not
their children were likely to be free. In so far as they bred at all, their
offspring were most often mixed. They darkened the skin colour of
the whole community but did not produce a society of their own.
This system did, of course, necessitate a regular and rather rapid
replacement of slaves. They aged fast. Herein lies the incessant logic
of the Saharan trade, which was, most probably, not overtaken
quantitatively by the Atlantic trade until well into the seventeenth
century. A sub-Saharan spin-off was the retention of a great many
slaves in the more fortunate Sudanic societies. The more thev were /
into the Islamic system, the more slaves people possessed. Thus the
islamic 'capital* of Timbuktu was a great slave-owning city, and well
into the nineteenth century the principal Hausa towns seem to have
had a majority of slaves among their population.
What was the principal object offered in exchange? Undoubtedly
merchants had much to offer; however, from the fourteenth to the
sixteenth century, politically and socially, the most important object
can be singled out as the horse. Horses, of very small breeds, had
been present in most parts of West Africa north of the tropical forest
for centuries. They had relatively little political or economic
significance. The larger horse, brought by the thousand across the
desert in these centuries, had a very different role. Just as slaves could
only be sold by people with power, so horses were only bought by
such people. For a time the new breed was probably almost a royal
monopoly and it gave the king a quite new power, the ability to
terrorize larger areas than previously, and it enhanced prestige.
I 58 1450-1780: A Medieval Environment
Without the imported horse the extremely extended empires of the
medieval Sudan are not really explicable, nor arc the rapid rise and
fall of these empires explicable without this controlling factor of
foreign trade, winch, by shifting its interests and favoured centres,
could effectively strangle one empire and establish another.
Furthermore, the horses were needed to round up the slaves, just
as the slaves were needed to exchange for more horses. The going
rate seems to have been between ten and twenty-* slaves per horse (the
terms of north-south trade were quantitatively disadvantageous to
the south, then as now). It seems that there was for long little
breeding of the new type of horse south of the desert. For that they
needed to be far more of a rural than—as was the case—urban
phenomenon. Hence, just as the Mediterranean world needed to
renew its slaves each generation from outside, so did Sudanese kings
need to renew their horses from outside still more frequently. Once
you were in this game, you could not stop. Probably, however, by the
mid-sixteenth century the Sudanese breeding of horses was
expanding, initially under royal control, yet this was likely to
decrease the centralized control of horses so important for royal
power. However, with the Battle of Tondibi in 1591 and the collapse
of the Songhay empire, a loss of royal control over horses hardly
mattered, in Songhay at least. To some extent guns would anyway
replace horses as the new instrument of power which the powerful
needed to monopolize. Kings were, even in the early sixteenth
century, already very much on the look-out for guns. However, in
reality for a couple of centuries more the effectiveness of the gun
would remain verv limited. For the Saharan slave-trade, as for the
later Atlantic trade, a multiplicity of goods in exchange was always 011
offer. If the horse trade declined, it was not hard to replace it.
In North Africa Islam spread originally through military conquest.
In West Africa, prior to the nineteenth century with few and
relatively ineffectual exceptions, it did not do so. It spread through
trade. Commerce (of the sort described), civilization, and Islam went
together. Islam remained, in consequence, a very urban and royal
affair. The merchants were, indeed, followed by imams whose
original function, however, was probably more to chaplain the
merchant communities settled south of the desert than a missionary
one. But kings were encouraged to convert and already in the
eleventh century they had begun to do so. From then on we hear,
through Arabic records, of kings of an increasing number of areas
Africa in 1500 and its (Christian Past 59
who became Muslims. Some made the hajj. Some built mosques and
attended them. Some, to a very limited extent, attempted to impose
wider Islamic law and practice upon their subjects. Mansa Musa, ruler
of Mali from 1307 to 1332, was the model of the new Islamic ruler,
l ie was, declared Ibn Battuta, who visited Mali a few years later, *a
generous and virtuous king who loved whites and gave gifts to
them'. 4 He built mosques, ensured at his capital the regularity of
Friday prayer, imported Islamic lawyers, and went on the hajj with
such a large entourage and so much gold that it was long
remembered. He even attempted a jihad against the non-Muslim
inhabitants of his empire.
Askia al-Hajj Muhammad Ture, ruler of Songhay from 1493 to
1528, was of much the same vintage, a man of Islamic piety, wide
experience, and immense power. The thousands of his horsemen
were a menace to any of his neighbours unwilling to recognize his
superior authority. It is said that one of his successors even had a
cavalry regiment consisting of 4,000 eunuchs. Islam had indeed been
present within his realms for some 500 years, and to the west of his
capital there stood the principal Islamic city of West Africa,
Timbuktu, then at the height of its glory. Here was a town ruled
by its cadi, a city of mosques, schools and learned men, dynasties of
imams. But they were mostly white, though when the city was
smaller and less important they had been Sudanese. Here, as in the
lesser centre of Jenne further up the Niger, or earlier at Walata in
Mali and Awdaghust in the Ghanaian days, there was a genuinely
Muslim society. Among these immigrant religious scholars, resident
from birth to death in Timbuktu, the most distinguished in 1 $00 was
probably al-Hajj Ahmad. I lis grandson thus describes him:
When one considers that long march of Islam penetrating not only
West Africa but up the Nile too, almost encircling Ethiopia in the
horn and spreading down the east coast of the continent, one realizes
just how much the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia had become by
1500 an anomaly, a left-over from a far earlier religious movement
which had in its time, 1,000 years before, seemed little less promising
but had then slowly evaporated under the pressures of Islam.
We must therefore once more look back a little in order to
interpret aright the religious scene as it existed at the start of our
period. We will begin with the 'North Africa' of tradition, excluding
Egypt, the area which is today Algeria, Tunisia, and, to a lesser
extent, Morocco. Here was the old Latin-speaking African Church,
presided over by the Archbishop of Carthage because Carthage was
the principal city of this province of the Roman Empire, just as, in
still earlier centuries, it had been the principal city of the ancient
Punic state, Rome's greatest rival for hegemony in the western
Mediterranean. T h e special hero of African Christianit)- was
Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage in the third century, martyred in 258.
Sixty years after his death, at the beginning of the reign of
1
Constantine, his Church split disastrously between 'Donatists' and
Catholics, ostensibly over the issue of how Christians who had
succumbed during the great persecution should now be treated. The
Donatists were rigorists while the Catholics favoured a more lenient
approach to the large numbers of Church people who had
compromised their faith under persecution but now wished to
return to Christian practice. Almost everywhere in the Empire this
problem had arisen, but nowhere else was the group of the
uncompromising so large or so determined. In origin the Donatists
were not an anti-Roman movement, they were not predominantly
rural, and thev could not without anachronism be described as an
expression of African nationalism. Nevertheless, while both Catholics
and Donatists appealed at first to the emperor and to the authority of
Cyprian too, there developed an increasing polarization between
Africa in 1500 and its (Christian Past 63
' R o m a n ' and 'African'. The Catholics had the backing of the bishop
of R o m e and, mostly, of the emperor; they retained their strength 111
Carthage and in circles linked with imperial government and the
Church outside Africa, while the Donatists multiplied in rural
Numidia among the least Romanized of people. By the later fourth
century in most parts of the country the Donatists appeared to have
the upper hand and they were supported by wandering bands of
militant religious fanatics called the Circurncclliones.
The Catholics, on the other hand, appear as a rather weak and
demoralized group until the arrival back from Italy of the brilliant
young academic convert Augustine, whom the Catholic diocese of
Hippo quickly chose as its bishop. Augustine and his friends
reinvigorated Catholicism and easily out-argued the Donatists, but
they did it by an appeal to values and powers which were universalist
rather than local. Catholicism and Africanism were here falling apart.
After a debate at Carthage in 4 1 1 Donatism was proscribed by
imperial authority and, to some extent, driven underground. Its
roots, however, had sunk deep and the country people of Numidia
were unlikelv to feel verv affectionate towards either an extortionate
/ j
iv. Nubia
The Church in Nubia to its south did not survive. Yet, when we
begin this history, Nubian Christianity did still just exist. The
territory along the Upper Nile, south of the border of the Roman
Empire, had doubtless in part been evangelized in an informal way at
quite an early period—no later than the fourth century and quite
possibly earlier—as a natural extension to the Church of Upper
Egypt. Sahidic Coptic was used in the Nubian Church, as was Greek.
By the late sixth century there were several Christian kingdoms in
Nubia, a northern state called Makuria with its capital at Dongola,
and a southern state of Aiwa centred upon Soba close to the modern
Khartoum. We do not know whether the Scriptures were translated
into Nubian, though in later centuries Nubian did come to be used
for formal documents such as ecclesiastical land charters as well as for
lives of the saints. This was a period when Coptic was ceasing, or had
ceased, to be a spoken language even in Egypt. Maybe in an earlier
age a knowledge of Coptic and use of the Coptic Scriptures were
quite widespread; it is hard to believe that knowledge of Greek ever
was. Following the Arab conquest of Egypt, Nubia too was attacked,
but put up such a spirited resistance, while at the same time
appearing to have relatively little to offer in the way of economic
inducement, that the Baqt treaty was concluded in 652 whereby it
was agreed that no Muslim should enter the country, but that Nubia
should make an annual payment of slaves to Egypt (probably in
return for other goods). It would seem that the treaty was kept for
several centuries, and between the eighth and the twelfth centuries
Christian Nubia flourished. Monasteries and cathedrals like those of
Faras, Qasr Ibrim, Soba, Sai, and Dongola were built and decorated
I 68 1450-1780: A Medieval Environment
with splendid paintings. Here as in Ethiopia Christianity was a royal
religion, greatly dependent upon the king, but unlike Ethiopia
Nubia had several bishoprics and they were held by local Nubians
rather than Egyptians, though consecrated by the Patriarch of
Alexandria. The experience of increasing isolation from the rest of
Christendom was the same.
Being quite limited in its area of settlement each side of the Nile,
Nubia was far more vulnerable to invasion than Ethiopia became,
and it was from time to time raided and weakened bv Muslim armies, /
but it would seem that its slow collapse was peaceful rather than
violent. It lacked adequate internal resources to survive on its own
and the decline of the Coptic Church after the thirteenth century is
likely to have had its effect upon Nubia. After some centuries, despite
the Baqt, Muslims did inevitably encroach upon the country through
trade and the migration of less settled desert peoples, added to which
in the thirteenth century a Muslim inherited the northern throne,
apparently peacefully. At that point the majority was still Christian,
but with a Muslim king the balance slowly changed, though it looks
as if this was accompanied by a disintegration of royal power to be
replaced by a multiplicity of tiny feudal lordships. Without a strong
and supportive monarchy the Church too declined. In the far south,
in the kingdom of Aiwa, about which we know particularly little,
Christian rule remained for rather longer, but in the north too there
was for a time a Christian breakaway state called Dotawo, with its
capital at Qasr Ibrim, a strongly defensible site. We now possess the
splendid consecration and enthronement certificates of Timotheos, a
Nubian bishop of Qasr Ibrim, signed by Patriarch Gabriel IV of
Alexandria in 1372. 7 He was consecrated in Cairo and enthroned not
in his own cathedral but at Qamula in Egypt three months later. He
then brought back with him to Qasr Ibrim these scrolls, duplicate in
Bohairic and Arabic, and when he died they were placed beneath his
body in the cathedral. Even a century later, in 1484, there was still in
Dotawo a Christian king, named Joel, and a bishop of Ibrim named
Merki. Thus a Christian kingdom in Nubia lasted well beyond the
reign of Zara Ya'iqob in Ethiopia. We do not know when the line of
either ended, here or in Aiwa, but certainlv not much later than the
* /
* Francisco Alvares, 11 ic fresier John of the India. cd. P.. F. Buckingham And G. W. 13.
Hunnngtord, ii (Cambridge, iy6i). 461
3
THE KONGO, WARRI, MUTAPA, AND THE
PORTUGUESE
i. Portugal Overseas
The Portuguese state had arisen in a crusading spirit after the twelfth
century when the far west of the Iberian peninsula was reconquered
by Christians following several centuries of Muslim rule. It prospered
and wished to expand. By the fifteenth century it was natural to cany
the war across the sea to Africa just as Muslims had earlier carried it
across the sea to Spain. But as the Portuguese, who were little more
than a million in number, were unable to dent Islamic power in
northern Africa, despite the capture of a few coastal bases, it was
natural too to proceed southwards, hoping thereby to outflank Islam,
gain control of the source of the gold which came north across the
Sahara, and even establish links with 'Prester John', the Christian
priest-king fabled to exist somewhere in the east, in Asia or Africa.
An immediate economic benefit was slaves. The underpopulated
economies of Spain and Portugal were developing plantation farming
on an east Mediterranean model, alien to the past tradition of
Europe. A few black slaves had already been brought to Europe from
north Africa; from the mid-fifteenth century a rather more
considerable stream began to arrive in Portugal, brought up from
the West African coast. From the beginning there was a very
substantial degree of royal control over this enterprise, which had
been for a while masterminded by Prince Henry the Navigator.
Trade required the establishment of forts, but it was also seen as a
religious, and even missionary, activity. It was part of an anti-Islamic
crusade. It seemed then, once more, natural enough to obtain from
the papacy documents of ecclesiastical authorization. Throughout
the fifteenth century some seventy papal bulls sanctioned the
I 72 1450-1780: A Medieval Environment
imperial enterprise both bit by bit and as a whole and granted both
civil and ecclesiastical authority over the lands Portugal was about to
discover. 11 owe ver, the target of these early bulls remained the
conquest of Morocco, a further piece of local reconquista, rather than
the formation of an intercontinental empire. It was the journey of
Vasco da Gama around Africa to Asia, following on that of Columbus
to America,7 which created a new situation and led to the hastv /
establishment of the ecclesiastical 'patronage' of the kings of Spain
and Portugal over a newly discovered world. The Portuguese
Padroado Real was effectively granted by Pope Leo X in his 1 5 1 4 brief
Praecelsae Devot ion is, a control over the Church overseas almost
greater than that exercised by the king at home.
At the time of these grants there was next to no organized Catholic
missionary activity anywhere in the world and, in the atmosphere of
the Renaissance papacy and the general level of monarchical control
of the Church almost everywhere in western Europe, they may have
appeared almost uncontroversial. Even if R o m e had not given them,
the effective control of the Portuguese and Spanish monarchies over
the extension of the Church in areas reached by their fleets and armies
might have been hardly affected. However, it would not be very long
before many people involved with the missionary apostolate in R o m e
and elsewhere would come to regret deeply the granting of these
powers. R o m e is always intensely reluctant to admit a mistake or to go
back upon anything it has done. In consequence it lived with the
Padroado, of a diminished sort, far into the twentieth century;
nevertheless, from the decline of Portuguese power in the late
sixteenth century on, it tried little by little to curtail its significance.
In 1482 the Portuguese, having reached the coast of gold, built
there a fort at Elmina, their first tropical possession. A local chief
begged the Portuguese to go elsewhere; they, in their turn, begged
him to be baptized and so save his soul. Both requests were declined.
The hitherto unpopulated island of Sao Tomé was settled by the
Portuguese the next year, 1483, initially with an odd collection of
whites from Lisbon, but it soon began to import slaves in large
numbers from the mainland. Indeed for the next twenty-five years it
was the principal recipient of the Portuguese slave-trade. It also
became the advanced base for Portugal's West African empire and
hence, inevitably, an ecclesiastical base too, even if for many years the
population of the island was distinctly piratical and little amenable to
directions from Lisbon. In 1534 a diocese of Sâo Tome was
established to include the whole southern half of West Africa. While
Kongo, Warri, Mutapa, and the Portuguese. 73
its bishops were often non-resident, they came, nevertheless, to fill an
important role as ecclesiastical entrepreneurs between Portugal and
the African mainland.
/The very year that Säo Tomé was colonized an expedition reached
' the mouth of the River Zaïre under Diego Cao and took home to
: Portugal some hostages after making initial contact with its
inhabitants, who were found to belong to a kingdom named
Kongo. There were further expeditions in 1485 and 1487, more gifts,
more hostages, and the growing realization on the Portuguese part
that here was a monarchy of some size, unusually open and friendly,
seemingly an ideal place to do business and make Christians. The
fourth expedition of 1491 was the decisive one. It had been prepared
upon both sides. There had been a few Portuguese in the Kongo
(including, probably a priest in Sovo) and Kongolese in Lisbon for
some years. Priests, stonemasons, carpenters, horses, and a few-
women were all unloaded, together with plenty of cloth and other
useful objects. The Mani Soyo, the chief of the coastal province of
Sovo, was at once baptized with his son while a large symbolic
bonfire was made of the implements of traditional religion. Two
months later the Portuguese reached the capital, Mbanza Kongo,
where the king himself. Nzinga Nkuvu, the Mani Kongo, welcomed
them and was baptized, receiving the name Joao I, in honour of the
reigning king of Portugal, Joao II. Thus did the Christian history of
Kongo, and indeed of black and central Africa, begin.
It was a meeting between two societies and even two religions
rather less different from one another than we are inclined to believe.
Perhaps the Christianity and monarchy of Ethiopia can be used as
providing a bridge in understanding the relationship. Francisco
AJvarcs, the thoughtful Portuguese priest who spent six years
observing Ethiopia in the 1520s, seemed to find there little too
surprising. Beneath a surface of dissimilarity the structure and
ideology of the two monarchies, and the Church which served each,
had much in common. Certainly, he had his worries about annual
rebaptism, mass ordinations of children, and the quality of the wine
used at mass, but he recognized, correctly enough, that here was a
Christianity very like that of Portugal, a religion of rituals and monks,
of sacred images, and royal powTer. Portuguese and Ethiopians shared
I 74 1450-1780: A Medieval Environment
intense devotion to the Mother of Jesus and to the Cross, together
with a huge loathing for Muslims and Jews. They shared religious
attitudes 111 which violence and tenderness interplayed without
apparent contradiction in ways often strange and repulsive to us. The
Ethiopians recognized some degree of final authority in the Patriarch
of Alexandria, and Alvares thought they would do much better to
exchange it for that of the Pope, but in practice both the religion of
Ethiopia and that of Portugal was a royal religion in which almost
everything that happened in the Church was dependent upon the
king.
While such a comparison may be at first surprising, it is not hard to
recognize as apt. It is when one extends the parallel to the African
religion of Kongo or Benin that complaint is more likely to arise, yet,
deep down, the Catholicism of fifteenth- or sixteenth-century
Portugal or Spain had far more in common with African religion
than might be imagined. The popular Christianity of late medieval
Europe had absorbed into itself a great deal of the pre-Christian
religion of its peoples. In Europe as in Africa physical and social
happenings of a disastrous sort were to be explained by a spiritual
causality. Missionaries might come to complain that Africans
worshipped the devil because he would otherwise harm them
(though certainly they did not), but in Iberian popular religion at the
time there was indeed a continual sense both of the power of the
devil and of the anger of God. It was the latter, mostly, which
explained disasters, and it needed to be placated both by penances—
fastings and flagellations—and through the protection of lesser but
still potent and more practically benevolent spiritual forces. There
was a vast multiplicity of local saints and protective relics and holy
places to turn to, but especially and increasingly Mary, mostly a very
localized Man-, Mary of somewhere. Mary alone was always kind,
never associated with punishment. Evil too was often highly localized
in witch or diabolical possession. The physical and the spiritual were
inextricably woven together so that miracles and prodigies of all sorts
could be expected and revered. There was a profound 'sense of
divine participation in the landscape', whereby nature was invested
with a kind of innate sensitivity to the sacred T —a sort of animism, if
one dare use the word, as much Iberian as African.
1
William Christian, hwil Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain, (Princeton. NJ, 19H1), 208;
cf. George Brooks. 'The Observance of All Souls' Dav in che Guinea-Bissau Region: A
Christian Holy Day, an African ! larvest Festival, an African N e w Years Celebration or All of
the Above?', HIA 11 (1984). 1 - 3 4 .
Kongo, Warri, Mutapa, and the Portuguese. 75
The religious sensibilities, then, of sixteenth-century Iberians as
much as of pagan Africans were absolutely pre-Enlightenment, and
close cousins to one another. Africans would not be too conscious of
moving into a different intellectual world by going from one to the
other. You were, at least at first, doing no more than embracing a
new name and source of superior power, almost as a village in Spain
embraced a new saint, a new relic from R o m e . In both the sacred
object, a cross or some ju-ju figure, was not just a symbolization of
the spiritual but itself a localized protective power. It is of course true
that the European and Christian attitude to the diversity of spiritual
powers now limited the acceptable range of inclusiveness to the
specifically 'Christian' while all non-Christian powers were on the
contrary labelled demonic. The Christian spiritual world of the time
had become a highly dualistic one in which the devil was an almost
omnipresent reality which non-Christian cults were seen as
necessarily serving. Mere indeed there was a large contrast, for the
African spiritual world, more like the Hindu, set 110 such limits and
had in reality little dualism to it. Christian cults and rites could be
incorporated as welcome additions rather than alternatives. The
metaphysical and moral dualism of the late medieval mind imposed
itself, often disastrously, upon the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
missionary Despite that, the missionary and the African often
understood each other better than most of us can understand either.
They shared a conviction about the importance of the fetish, and if,
at times, missionaries risked death from angry crowds as they tried to
destroy these symbols of life, yet enthusiastic crowds could at other
times participate in the bonfires themselves.
Again, a decisive and intimate relationship between the religious
and the political was common to both. The king dominated the
Portuguese Church, just as the king dominated the religion of Benin
or Ife. T h e tombs of dead kings were of the greatest symbolic
importance in all these places. In the mind of the Portuguese and in
the mind of the people of Kongo religious conversion was dependent
upon a royal decision—as it had been, again and again, in Dark-Age
Europe—and its consequences were largely a matter to be arranged
between two monarchies—the sending and the receiving.
Nzinga Nkuvu was the king of a large and remarkable society
divided into at least six major provinces extending in all some 250
miles south along the coast from the River Zaïre and much the same
inland. Its monarchy was partially elective with very little of a military
76 145°~178o: A Medieval Environment
character to it but a very sound economic base. Among the kings
sons one, Mvemba Nzinga, was in 1491 governor of the northern
province of Nsundi. Me was baptized together with his mother, a
month after his father, on 4 June, and given the name Afonso; a
month later the first church of Mbanza Kongo was blessed. But
within three years most of this was reversed. Nzinga Nkuvu tired of
the Christian insistence upon burning fetishes and restricting oneself
to a single wife. Both insistences were socially and politically
disruptive and he returned to the ways of his fathers. The function of
the fetishes present in every village was to secure rain and health, to
protect against witchcraft; the function of the kings many wives was
to link him with different sections of his people. A few Portuguese
priests performing their rituals in an incomprehensible language and
hastily constructed building in the capital might add a novel prestige
to the court, but it in no way substituted for what was lost in the
experience of the people and the authority-* of the king. Like many
another African ruler hurriedly baptized, he returned to 'paganism' as
soon as he began to detect the implications of Christian conversion.
That is to be expected.
What is less to be expected is that young Mvemba Nzinga. away in
Nsundi, refused to do so, so that for the next twelve years the latter
provided the surviving focus of Kongolese Christianity. In 1506 the
king died. He was said to have nominated Afonso to succeed him,
but the great chiefs at Mbanza Kongo chose a different, and pagan,
son. Afonso marched on the capital, defeated his enemies-—assisted in
correct Iberian fashion, it was quickly claimed, by a heavenly vision
of St James—and became king. He certainly was assisted by the
Portuguese, w h o had been with him in Nsundi. He was,
undoubtedly, and to an extraordinary degree, a modernizer,
someone open to every aspect of life as promoted by the
Portuguese. He was not a warrior king; his reign is not a record of
war and territorial aggrandizement, but of a persistent concern for
educational, social, religious, and even medical advancement. The
Portuguese monarchy recognized this. Mvemba Nzinga was an
independent Christian king, to be assisted to Christianize his
kingdom and be trained in the behaviour suitable to Christian
kings, even—if possible—to live in a two-storeyed house, as
Christian kings should do. The very detailed instructions sent by-
King Manuel of Portugal in 1 5 1 2 together with priests and artisans of
every sort are extremely enlightening as to the model behind the
Kongo, Warri, Mutapa, and the Portuguese. 77
exercise. It was certainly not a racialist model. And with a king as
intelligent, as forceful, and co-operative as Mvemba Nzinga, Afonso
I, success for a time seemed assured.
Let us compare this with two other, much less successful, examples of
the same missionary method. Benin was a greater prize than even the
Kongo and in 1 5 1 4 its oba, Ozolua, sent an embassy to Lisbon to
indicate an interest in Christian conversion while asking for firearms,
including cannon. In reply the King of Portugal promised
missionaries but declined to provide arms prior to conversion. On
the other hand, he urged the Oba to open his country freely to trade,
that is to say the slave trade:
With a very good will wc send you the clergy that you have asked for . . .
when we see that you have embraced the teacliings of Christianity like a
good and faithful Christian, there will be nothing in our realms which we
shall not be glad to favour you, whether it be arms or cannon and all other
weapons of war. . . these things we are not sending now because the law of
God forbids it . . . we earnestly recommend that you order your markets to
be opened and trade to be carried on freely. . . 2
defeated and killed his pagan brother, at no point did the monarchy
whatever the political and religious problems facing the country,
quite go back upon that public commitment for over 300 years.
Afonso established a new sacral legitimacy which was from then on
an essential element in Kongo identity7.
Second to this, and essential to its continuance, was the parallel
commitment of a large core of the Kongolese ruling class, the
Mwissikongo. The monarchy was essentially elective and the rule of
the king, the Mani Kongo, was always balanced by that of another
and more ancient religious dignitary, the Mani Vunda, whose
authority sanctioned that of the king himself In 1506 Afonso
immediately entrusted the Mani Vunda, who had actually supported
his brother in the war, with a Christian religious role. A hundred
years later it would be another Mani Vunda, Antonio Manuel ne
3
' T h e correspondence of Afonso ! . . is of no help The lcttercarc the work of royal
secretaries, all Portuguese, save one . . . their style is conventional' (G. Balandier. Daily Life in
the Kingdom oj Kongo { N e w York, 1968), 53). It is hard to believe that ttaJandicr could have
read the great letter of 5 October 1 5 1 4 . for instance, and penned such a misleading
comment. T h e 'save one' ignores the fact that the secretary in question wrote all the more
important letters which survive.
Kongo, Warri, Mutapa, and the Portuguese. 81
Vunda, whom Alvaro 11 sent as his first black ambassador to R o m e
where he died in 1608 and where his bust can still be seen in the
church of Santa Maria Maggiore. But a basic continuing Christian
attachment of other nobles is no less clear. What may have begun as
the brief and opportunistic conversion of Nzinga Nkuvu and the
persevering but idiosyncratic Christian commitment of Afonso
became within the latter'* lifetime the common will of the ruling
class of a quite large country, a common will manifested by their
extraordinarily consistent use of baptism, Portuguese family names,
titles, chivalrous orders, and Church confraternities: together these
constituted a kind of new collective identity for the nobility.
/ The third pillar consisted in the churches of the capital, its rituals
and priests, its new symbolic identity7. Poor as the stone building of
the cathedral of Sao Salvador may seem in comparison with a
European cathedral of the period (and it was never roofed other than
with grass) it was certainly the most striking edifice in all that part of
Africa. It had a bell—so that Kongo dia Ngunga, Kongo of the Bell,
became one of the names of the capital—and its priests celebrated
the office more or less regularly. The principal Christian feasts
became part of the national and royal life cycle. Mbanza Kongo truly
became at the same time Sao Salvador, a sacred city of churches, the
heart and symbol of Kongolese Catholicism. The principal rituals of
the cathedral, at which the king would always be present, were
important to the enhancement of the monarchy and its mystique.
They were performed by Christian nganga (the Catholic priest was
called an nganga just as a pagan priest was: the function was not seen
as identical, but it was seen within a continuity verbal and
ontological, without which the role of the Christian priest could
hardly have been understood). Henceforth the monarchy and the
Church of Sao Salvador supported each other—all the more so as
throughout the sixteenth century there was often elsewhere, except
in Mbanza Soyo, hardly another priest in the country. It was, pre-
eminently, a ritual support.
T h e fourth pillar was that of the immigrant Portuguese
community. The artisans sent by the King of Portugal to build a
new Kongo were not a great success. The churches and palaces of
Mbanza Kongo made slow progress. Nevertheless, a permanent
Portuguese community was established in the capital and, to a lesser
extent, in other places up and down the country. It was almost
wholly concerned with slave-trading. By the end of Afonso s reign
I 82 1450-1780: A Medieval Environment
there were probably up to 100 Portuguese living in the country; some
with white wives, but mostly with black ones or concubines.
Twenty-five years later, when a small Portuguese army entered the
country from Sào Tomé at Alvaro Ps request, to rescue the Kongo
from the Jaga invasion of 1568, most of its members subsequently
settled there. These immigrants with their guns, their larger range of
skills, and their mestiço children, became an important class within
the country, but they did not gain entry into the traditional ruling
class or appointment to chieftaincies. Their religion was Catholicism,
their occupation slave-trading. They were not strong or numerous
enough to control the country and they were, on the whole, loyal to
the king, though they were also—at least in the first generation—an
element which the king could not wholly control, as Afonso I was
painfully aware almost from the start. As their children grew up this
group of people became increasingly Kongo-based and fluent in
Kikongo at least as much as in Portuguese. Because of their linguistic
and technical skills, they could be of great service to the king, but
they also provided an ongoing core to the Church from which in
time a number of white and mestiço priests would come (which does
not mean that they did not quickly adopt recourse also to traditional
rituals for the control of witchcraft and sickness). Thus already in
1546, only three years after Afonso s death, the Bishop of Säo Tomé
ordained at Sâo Salvador a young white (or mestiço), Diogo Gomes,
who had been born at Sào Salvador and became an excellent priest
and, later, a Jesuit. He composed the first Kikongo catechism, printed
in Lisbon, which does not, however, seem to have survived long for
use in the Kongo.
The shortage of priests was acute almost from the beginning. In
the earlier years of Afonso's rule quite a fewr were sent out from
Portugal, but the conditions of life, the high mortality, and—perhaps
most of all—the absence of an even moderately workable pastoral
model for a few, wholly unprepared, priests to cope with a huge,
profoundly pagan yet now nominally Christian society, ensured
discouragement, withdrawal, or—alternatively—transference to a
life of concubinage and slave-trading. Portugal believed from the start
in training native priests and Afonso was enthusiastic to do so. In
consequence a considerable number of young men were sent to
Lisbon to be educated and ordained. For the most part this simply did
not work—perhaps for reasons of celibacy and marriage as much as
anything else, but health, inability to learn Latin, and the attractions
Kongo, Warri, Mutapa, and the Portuguese. 83
of alternative careers were equally factors. Nevertheless, one, the
King's own son, Henry, proved different. He was sent already by 1508
when hardly twelve years old and resided with the canons of Saint
John the Evangelist in Lisbon. He apparently studied well and made
an excellent impression so that the King of Portugal proposed he be
made a bishop. This was done, with R o m a n permission, in 1 5 2 1 ,
when he was about 25. He returned to the Kongo, to the delight of
his father. A few years later he disappeared from sight. In August 1526
his father refers to his continual illnesses, and what he did as a bishop
(he was nominally an auxiliary of the diocese of Funchal) we simply
do not know. By 1530 he was dead.
Again and again King Afonso appealed for priests, as for teachers,
craftsmen, doctors, and ships. In the truly extraordinary letter of 5
October 1 5 1 4 to King Manuel he even suggests that he be given the
Isle of Sao Tomé to use as a sort of vast school to which he could send
boys and girls to study more easily than in Lisbon. There is frequently
a riveting intensity in Afonso s appeals for help, protests about the
growing slave-trade and bad behaviour of the Portuguese, a fierce
fusion of Christian faith, modernizing intentions, regal shrewdness,
and a bitterness with the reality in which neither his secular nor his
religious hopes were being realized.
We know of his death from a letter written by his brother Manuel,
then in Lisbon, to the Queen of Portugal, 15 July 1543. Afonso had
sent his brother in 1539 on a mission to the Pope, but the
Portuguese had never allowed him to proceed beyond Lisbon.
Now, the King dead, Manuel wished only to return to Kongo. By
1543 Afonso may well have been in his eighties. Maybe the account
of him written in 1 5 1 6 by the Portuguese priest R u i d'Aguiar is
much exaggerated:
His Christian life is such that he appears to me not as a man but as an angel
sent by the Lord to this kingdom to convert it, especially when he speaks
and when he prcaches . . . better than we, he knows the prophets and the
Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ and all the lives of the saints and all things
regarding our Mother the Holy Church . . . He does nothing but study and
many times he falls asleep over his books; he forgets when it is time to dine
when he is speaking of the things of God. So delighted is he with the
reading of the Scripture that he is beside himself. . . He studies the Holy
Gospel and when the priest finishes the mass he asks for benediction. When
he has received it he begins to preach to the people with great skill and
I 84 1450-1780: A Medieval Environment
great charity . . . he punishes with rigour those who worship idols and he
has them burned along with these idols.4
* M.WA i. 3 6 1 - 3 . Correspondence de Dom Afonso, roi du COM^O 1506 -1541. cd. L. Jadin and
M . Dicorato (Brussels, 1974). 1 1 6 - 1 7 . English translation from Hahndicr, Daily tjfe in the
Kingdom of Kongo, 5 2-3.
Kongo, Warri, Mutapa, and the Portuguese. 85
Lollards were not commended but rather condemned for producing
in the fourteenth century an English Bible. So it is not surprising if it
hardly occurred to only slightly post-medieval missionaries in Africa
that they needed to do quite otherwise. Nevertheless, already in the
1550s the Jesuit Fr. Comes had produced a catechism in Kikongo, of
which, however, 110 copy has survived. He was, perhaps, the only
sixteenth-century missionary to begin to understand what its Church
most needed.
What in general was brought was what Portuguese priests were
accustomed to—a Church of liturgy and sacraments, all performed in
Latin. The laity participated objectively through attending mass and
the Valid' reception of the sacraments, rather than intelligibly. O f
course that sort of model of religiosity had been changing in
northern Europe among Catholics as well as Protestants with the
growth of a more individualistic lay and vernacular piety, but this had
little affected early or mid-sixteenth-century Portugal. The model it
provided did, more than any other, presuppose the presence of
priests, not particularly well-educated priests, but many of them.
Southern Europe at the time was filled with priests. But here were
next to none, despite the arrival of various orders from time to time.
There were some Franciscans and Augustinians in the early years,
Jesuits in the 1550s, further Franciscans, a few Dominicans, and, in
the 1580s, a brief venture by Spanish Carmelites. But 110 order in the
sixteenth century maintained any long-standing commitment to the
Kongo. It is hardly surprising. The material conditions were
extremely hard, the political conditions highly unstable, the pastoral
task seemingly almost impossible, the mortality rate very high.
From the 1570s, however, there was a change. The Portuguese had
begun the conquest of Angola, the area directly south of Kongo, and
with the establishment of a European-controlled port in Loanda, the
Jesuits relocated their mission there. From here they would later
revive their Kongo enterprise. At much the same time, in 1 5 7 1 , the
Bishop of Sao Tomé opened a seminary on the island for the training
of local priests. Though closed in the 1580s, it was reopened in the
T590S by Bishop de Vilanova. The intention, at least, was a sound
one, and it may be that a few seculars from here actually did get
through to work in the Kongo. Almost invariably the kings of Kongo
quarrelled with what priests they got, yet wanted more. The
kingdom had been committed by Afonso to Christianity and
Portugalization and, in theory, his successors never went back on that
86 A Medieval Environment
commitment. In reality what the package amounted to by the later
sixteenth century was little more than a few half-ruined church
buildings, the absurd importation of titles—dukes, counts, marquises,
and whatever—a taste among the upper classes for Western finery to
wear on ceremonial occasions, and, principally, a host of unruly and
uncontrollable slave-traders. It is not surprising that the kings
believed there must be something better than this. If Portugal had
failed them, could not R o m e help?
It is clear that for much of his reign Afonso had been trying to get
a direct line to R o m e and even as late as 1539 had dispatched his
brother on a mission to R o m e which never got beyond Lisbon.
Portugal, appealing to what it was beginning to call its 'historic
rights', wanted no direct K o n g o - R o m e link. But the kings from
time to time kept on trying and with Philip II of Spain s take-over of
the Portuguese crown in 1580 the likelihood of success grew a little
greater. In 1579 a Portuguese named Duarte Lopes had arrived in
Mbanza Kongo. Four years later he left it as Alvaro I's ambassador to
the Pope, having first been created a fidalgo, a gentleman of the royal
house. Lopes carried precise instructions with him, which almost
certainly included the obtaining for the Kongo of its own bishopric
entirely freed from Portuguese control. Unfortunately Lopes had
many problems. His ship was blown across the Atlantic and wrecked
in the West Indies. Though he managed to swim to land, it was a year
before he could cross the Atlantic once more and go in due course
via Spain, to R o m e . By then Alvaro I was dead. However, in R o m e
Lopes met Filippo Pigafetta, a writer, who composed a book about
the Kongo based on Lopes' notes. The Relatione del reame di Congo,
published in Italian in 1 5 9 1 , and quickly translated into English,
Dutch, and Latin, proved for our story a work of immense
importance. Until its publication the K o n g o was essentially
unknown to Europe, even to R o m e . Only the Portuguese knew
anything about it. From now on the rest of Europe was aware that
there existed a strange Christian kingdom, commonly called Western
Ethiopia, and that it was in the greatest need of priests.
Kongo, Warri, Mutapa, and the Portuguese. 87
THE SEVENTEENTH AND EICIITEENTH CENTURIES
' P SCRMIci. Jam dv Brtfigny (15561634): Aux ongine> <iu C<innc( de France, de Belgique e: du
Congo (Louvain, 1974), 3 2 9 - 3 0 ' Ibkl. 322.
Kongo, Warri, Mutapa, and the Portuguese. 95
Lisbon had consistently prevented any non-Portuguese missionary
from reaching the Kongo. But in 1640 the Dutch conquered Angola
as they had conquered Elmina in 1637, Cochin in 1633, and Malacca
in 1641. In 1652 they settled at the Cape. For a moment a Dutch
Protestant empire appeared to be replacing the Portuguese. This
freed the Kongo from Portuguese pressure and (together with the
Spanish-Portuguese conflict going on simultaneously) made it just a
little less difficult for non-Portuguese missionaries to get there. That
very year, 1640, R o m e established an Apostolic Prefecture for the
Kongo and confided it to the Italian Capuchins. It was a new kind of
missionary structure recently devised by Propaganda Fide. The
Prefect to whom it was encharged was not a bishop but had almost
episcopal jurisdiction and he was appointed directly by R o m e . It was
a way of escaping the royal stranglehold over missions through
control of episcopal appointments.
, For several decades Capuchins, Italian, Spanish, and French, had
been trying to worm their way into the African mission despite the
stonewalling tactics of the Portuguese government. In the 1630s a
number of French Capuchins had begun to do so along the west
coast in areas where any Portuguese control had disappeared; but the
climate was almost as effective a bar to mission as the Padroado and
most quickly died. Moreover, the Dutch were as anxious to keep out
all Catholic missionaries as were the Portuguese to keep out all non-
Portuguese ones, so the general position was little improved.
Missionaries had no ships of their own. They were dependent for
getting to Africa at all upon co-operative traders and European port
authorities.
Nevertheless, in 1644 Propaganda Fide added to the Apostolic
Prefecture for the Kongo another for the Guinea Coast and Sierra
Leone, confided this time to the Spanish Capuchins of the province
of Andalusia; in 1647 it created a third—for a mission to Benin—and
gave it to the Capuchins of Aragon. In the second half of the century
the Portuguese attitude also changed to some extent. There were
very few Portuguese priests now able and willing to go abroad, and
Lisbon revised its position to allow missionaries of other nationalities,
so long as they were not Spanish, to work within the Padroado,
provided that they travelled via Lisbon. Before the end of the century-
even the island of Sào Tome had become an area of Capuchin
ministration: thev had come to see it as a convenient base from which
/
I 96 1450-1780: A Medieval Environment
to succour the Christians of Warri and Sierra Leone, areas in which
no missionary' seemed able to survive for long.
It was within this context at once of a change in the wider
European and colonial political situation, of a new missionary
structure devised by Propaganda Fide of apostolic prefectures, and of
a very considerable missionary enthusiasm within the Capuchins of
many lands, that the arrival of twelve Italian and Spanish missionaries
in Soyo in May 1645, led by their prefect Bonaventura d'Alessano,
must be seen. It was to be the start of almost 200 years of Capuchin
involvement in the Kongo. They were received in Mbanza Soyo by
its Count and people with much enthusiasm as 'priests of the great
God', nganga za Nzambi rnpungu, 9 but their mission was to the
Kongo as a whole and its king, so naturally the prefect wished to
proceed as soon as possible to the capital, Mbanza Kongo, Sào
Salvador. But there at once was a problem. Soyo and Kongo were at
war. The Count in consequence did his best to keep them in Soyo
whereupon the Prefect began to threaten to make use of the quite
special papal excommunication incurred by those impeding
missionaries from attaining their objectives. The Count weakened,
providing the porters without w h o m the missionaries were unable to
proceed, and the Prefect and three companions then set out.
The welcome they experienced from King Garcia II when they
reached Sao Salvador was no less enthusiastic. Nevertheless, the fact
of first entering the land at Soyo and establishing a base there always
marked the Capuchin mission, so that it continued to have two sides
to it—Soyo upon the one hand, the rest of the kingdom on the
other. Soyo, benefiting from a certain amount of direct overseas
trade, had been growing increasingly powerful and had in fact
defeated the Kongolese army in the recent war, but it had had no
priest for several years. Mbanza Kongo, on the other hand, had both
Jesuits and secular canons, and the Capuchins would always relate
somewhat uneasily to both. The King welcomed them as not being
Portuguese, not coming from Loanda, and as representing a direct
line to R o m e — t h e achievement, it might be felt, of fifty years of
diplomacy. Yet in Soyo the Capuchins were in undisputed
ecclesiastical control as they never could quite be in Sào Salvador.
Moreover, when, three years later, the Portuguese drove the Dutch
9
F Bontinck (cd.), tirèi? relation de la fondation de la mission des Frères Mineurs au royaume de
Congo par Jean-François de Rome (Louvaiii. 1964), 30.
Kongo, Warri, Mutapa, and the Portuguese. 97
from Loanda, the Kongo was in trouble as a Dutch ally and the very
attractions of the Capuchins became an added embarrassment: they
were a group of Italians and Spaniards without a Portuguese among
them. Their very language was wrong and they had never embarked
from Lisbon in the first place. The presence of Spaniards in particular
much increased the Portuguese case against Garcia, for Spain was
now Portugals enemy almost more than Holland. In the complex
and unstable politics of the next years the Capuchin mission was
under frequent suspicion from both Kongolese and Portuguese. The
Capuchins, who were deeply committed to an intensely religious
mission and very little interested in politics, were time and again
disillusioned by the realities of their situation.
What kept many of them going in face of almost overwhelming
difficulties was an immense commitment to a specifically missionary
calling, a great sense of Capuchin esprit de corps, but also a lasting
feeling that—in spite of everything—they really were wanted and
respected in the Kongo. They started, in Sao Salvador, by learning
the language from Manuel Roborcdo, and some of the early
missionaries learnt it well. The Spaniard Antonio de Teruel actually
composed seven books in Kikongo and in neighbouring languages,
and the first prefect requested R o m e to send out a small printing-
press, but in practice the authorities in R o m e and elsewhere now
appeared little interested in furthering such crucially important work.
Some of the later missionaries failed to learn Kikongo well and
always heard confessions through an interpreter—a practice which
Bernardo da Gallo in the early eighteenth century was by then clearly
unusual in finding both unnecessary and undesirable. But in the early
days that does not seem to have been so. Manuel Roboredo himself
soon became a Capuchin, and his ministry in Sao Salvador in the
1650s was one of exceptional influence. Antonio do Couto was by
then the only Jesuit priest left in the Kongo, and a school run by the
Capuchins became probably more important than that of the Jesuits.
Indeed there were at times more than a dozen Capuchins in the
capital, though they tended to be those who were ill.
The primary Capuchin task, as they saw it, was all the same to
evangelize the countryside and, having learned Kikongo (which was
less needed for Sao Salvador where Portuguese was widely
understood), they were distributed through the principal provinces,
especially Nsundi, Mbamba, and Mbata. While houses were also
opened elsewhere, they were seldom maintained for long. At least a
98 1450-1780: A Medieval Izttvironment
third of the friars died within a couple of years of arrival; others were
invalided home. Despite the scores of Capuchins sent to the Kongo,
there were seldom even in the early years more than about a dozen
active at any one time. Men like Jerome de Montesarchio and
Antonio de Teruel, w h o were at work for some twenty years in the
kingdom, were quite exceptional. What is more surprising is that
anyone survived at all, wearing a hair shirt, taking the discipline,
fisting in Advent and Lent—all that over and above the most difficult
conditions of lodging and food, constant travelling, very hard work,
and plenty of tropical disease.
The ministry of the seventeenth-ccntury 'apostolic missionary' was
one of the sacraments and a measure of basic teaching. Here was a
'Christian kingdom' whose people were largely unbaptizcd or, if
baptized, not married canonically. It was that which had first to be
rectified. The number of baptisms and marriages claimed is often
surprising—Jerome de Montesarchio once baptized more than 1,000
people in one day—but the figures are by no means incredible, and,
as the Others seem normally to have recorded on paper the names of
those they baptized and married, it is unlikely that the figures are
much exaggerated. Again and again they were visiting places where
there had been no priest for many years, if ever. Why should the
people in such places want to be baptized or married canonically? It
seems clear enough that they did want to be. The common
consciousness of the people of the Kongo, following their king, was
that they were Christians. It was their tribal religion. This meant
going through the recognized rites of incorporation which related
them to Nzambi mpungu, the great God, through 'taking the salt',
the way the rite was called. What baptism could possibly mean to the
rural population beyond this, it would be hard to say. Hut it was still
an occasion of communal delight. Witness an occasion in 1668, the
baptism of a young country girl who came stark naked to a travelling
Capuchin to be baptized. Before instructing her in 'the Principles of
Christianity', he arranged for her to be covered with some leaves,
and, as it was the feast of St Joachim, he baptized her Anne. Men,
women, and children then made a ring, placed her in the middle,
and danced around, playing on their instruments and crying 'Long
live Anne, long live Anne'. 1 0
Denis de Carli, A Curious and llxact Aaouni of a Voyage to Congo, in A. and J. Churchill
(cdv), A Collection of Voyages (1704), i. 627.
Kongo, Warri, Mutapa, and the Portuguese. 99
Local governors, who had mostly lived for considerable periods in
Mbanza Kongo and attended school and services there, were no less
anxious that the people should be baptized. It was the class of the
Mwissikongo, formed in Mbanza Kongo but ruling the provinces,
who really made the sacramental work of the Capuchins on a large
scale possible. What the people did not want was to give up their
existing rites. Addition was one thing, subtraction quite another. In
1697 Luca da Caltanisetta commented on this in Nsundi quite
perceptively: 'Some men and women told the interpreter that I
behaved badly in being an enemy of the fetishists and burning their
idols because they could not abandon the custom of their country
and that as Christians they did first have recourse to Ci od for the
health of the sick person but, not obtaining it, turned to the
fetishists.'11 This, he commented, is the view held universally in this
miserable kingdom. He saw the traditional rites as being a sort of
devil-worship, and that indeed was the general missionary view; yet
even so unsympathetic a missionary' as Luca could admit that fetishists
'do not make a pact with the devil and do not aim at their
neighbour's destruction but to do him g o o d ' . 1 2
This second side of the ministry- of the 'apostolic missionary*'—the
war upon nkisi, idols, l devil-w r orship', secret cults like Kimpassi and
Atombola—was a far more difficult and dangerous one. Georges de
Geel, a Flemish Capuchin, came upon one such cult in the
'Christian' village of Ulolo, broke it up, and flung the nkisi into a fire.
The infuriated villagers attacked him so fiercely that he died of the
effects ten days later. It is surprising that this did not happen more
often. It was not only the Capuchins who dealt so high-handedly
with the instruments and sacred objects of local religion. Fr. Tavares
had done quite the same around Bengo a few decades earlier, though
he did at least respect enough the great idol of Golungu to carry it off
and send it home to the university of Evora. One cannot quite
imagine the Capuchins doing anything so academic. Lonely and
exposed as they were when faced with uncomprehending crowds of
resentful people who saw their symbols of life, rain, and health being
smashed before their eyes, the Capuchins frequently triumphed in
the immediate situation, not only through an appeal to secular
authority, but by the sheer force of their own spiritual power. A man
t:
R . Rainero, II Congo agli inizi del seiwcento nella relatione di P. Ijuca da Caltamseua O F M
Cap (Horcncc. 1974). 210. Ibid. 1 2 3 .
I 100 1450-1780: A Medieval Environment
like Jerome de Montesarchio was an extraordinary thaumaturgie
figure (even the locusts fled before him!) and the missionary s sense of
divine compulsion, the evident willingness to die for G o d s cause,
must have had a lot to do with his success. The fact that these white
men were wholly unconnected with the slave-trade, refused the offer
of women, and sought nothing for themselves was recognized by the
people and set them quite apart.
The fatal weakness in the strategy was not so much the burning of
nkisi: that might be ruthless enough, but it was in its way understood.
It was the way fourteenth-century Ethiopian monks had behaved and
the way twentieth-century prophets would behave. It at least took
the nkisi seriously. It shared with them a sort of common logic. The
weakness was their non-replacement. O f course there was the cross
and the rosary: the cross standing at the centre of a village, the rosary
hanging around the necks of the faithful. The sendees wThich, here
and there, the maestri led in village churches appear to have consisted
in little but saying the rosary and singing the Salve Regina and other
canticles. The discipline was taken on Fridays in Lent. There were
processions for St Anthony or at great feasts, but such things will have
happened only where there were maestri and a tradition of devotion,
in villages for the most part rather close to Mbanza Kongo, Soyo, or
the capital of Mbamba. It is amazing that the maestri were never
authorized even to baptize. The attack on the nkisi was pointless, not
so much because of its violence and sense of stark confrontation, but
because it simply left a ritual void in local life which could only be
filled by carving new nkisi once the missionary had passed on.
For the twenty-five years following 1645 a good deal of this sort of
apostolate was carried on. but it affected some parts of the country
more than others: the east always less than the west. It was
everywhere intermittent and its scale soon declined in every province
other than Soyo. There just were not the priests available. Moreover,
within ten years the centre of the prefecture—the residence of the
prefect himself—had been moved from Sao Salvador to Loanda (just
as had happened to the diocese) and the Capuchins were beginning
to turn their attention to the spiritual needs of the white colonial
population surrounding it: the re-established colony of Angola had
decided that, in the near absence of Portuguese priests, it could well
tolerate the ministry' of zealous Italian friars.
At the same time the core of the Kongolese Church which had
seemed to be improving just a little from the 1620s to the 1640s and
Kongo, Warri, Mutapa, and the Portuguese loi
which the Capuchin offensive was intended to enlarge appeared, on
the contrary, to be disintegrating. The diocese had no bishop from
1642 to 1673 o n account of the Portuguese—Spanish conflict and
Roman support for the Spanish side. This meant that there were no
local ordinations (though one or two people were still sent by the
Capuchins for training and ordination to Lisbon or R o m e ) and also
that there was no real diocesan leadership or planning. After the
Portuguese recapture of Loanda, the few Portuguese priests who had
survived moved there. Mbanza Kongo was left with no more than
five mestiços: the one surviving Jesuit, do Couto, now acted as
Portuguese Ambassador, and the Jesuit impact on Sao Salvador had
virtually come to an end. For the rest the surviving canons lived
openly with their concubines and exercised a ministry which gives
the impression of having consisted to a large extent in closing the
churches when their dues were not paid. A hundred and fifty years
earlier Afonso I was already complaining of Portuguese priests who
lived with their concubines, and in 1534 the Nuncio in Lisbon had
sensibly suggested in a letter to the Papal Secretary' of State that the
clergy' in the Kongo should be given permission to marry 'as one has
done for the Maronites'. 13 It was not done. N o w that a local clergy
had developed, the consequence was only too clear. Their training
was quite inadequate and all the circumstances of their life militated
against the practice of celibacy. Marriage being forbidden, their lives
generated a continuous public scandal at the heart of the Church
which inevitably undermined the almost impossible struggle to
persuade the laity to adopt the basics of Catholic marital teaching—
monogamy and lifelong fidelity. Inevitably too this generated a
continual conflict between religious and seculars. In some cases the
latter were also deeply involved in slave-trading. When local
ordinations were resumed late in the century, it would be largely
of the illegitimate sons of the Angolan clergy, black, white, or
mestiço. A correct insistence upon the necessity of developing a local
clergy, but tied by a wholly inappropriate system, had generated a
pattern of clerical life profoundly disastrous for the development of
an authentic Christian community.
The only hope for the Kongolese Church probably lay in
separating it firmly from Angola and placing it in the hands of the
,J
Correspondence de Dom Afonso, S3, 97. and 195; e.f. .1U0 F. Bontinck, 'Du nouveau sur
Dom Afonso, roi de Congo', African Historical Studies. 3 (1970), 1 5 1 - 6 2 .
102 i450-!: A Medieval Environment
Capuchins. At the end of the 1640s this was probably the R o m a n
intention, but the Portuguese restoration in Angola and the apparent
impossibility of relating to the Kongo on a regular basis except
through Lisbon deterred Propaganda from carrying it out. Inevitably
from then on, as the centre of diocese and prefecture ceased to be in
Sao Salvador and became the Portuguese colonial, slave-trading, port
of Loanda, ecclesiastical concern for the Kongo steadily declined.
That decline was, however, much precipitated by political events.
Everywhere else east of the Atlantic the Portuguese Empire was
fading, but in Angola it was not. On the contrary, its grip was
extending as the colonized area expanded and around it the far larger
area of persistent slave-raiding. The expansion of Angola meant the
contraction of Kongo. In most of the sixteenth century Portugal
could affect a friendly relationship to the kingdom because it had
developed no territorial aspirations in this part of Africa, but in the
seventeenth century the requirements of Angola were inherently
destructive of a strong independent kingdom immediately to its
north. Moreover, as the Portuguese Empire declined, Angola and its
economy became more and more important to what remained of it,
and Angola's economy consisted of just one thing—the traffic in
slaves. Brazil was beginning to flourish, but Brazil's prosperity-
depended upon a ceaseless importation of African slaves to cultivate
its estates. Angola had become effectively no more than a subsidiary
to the Brazilian economy, and the Kongo, with its well-populated
provinces, was an obvious target for the trade.
vii. Ihe Battle of Ambuila, Kimpa Vita, and the. Antonian Movement
the Capuchins had fostered this devotion. One of the four pious
congregations of the faithful was named after him. But there was
more to it than that. Beatrice had heard a sermon on St Anthony
read from the Portuguese book of a friend.' 6 This sermon was most
probably that preached in T638 by Fr. Antonio Vieira, SJ, at Sào
iy
L. Jadin, 'Le C o n g o er la secte des Anconiens: Restauration du royaume sous Pedro IV
ec la "Sainte-Antoine Congolais" 1 6 6 4 - 1 7 1 8 * . LUHB 33 (K;6I), VW-
>6
See ibid. 5 1 5 and W. Randies I.'Ancient Royaume du Congo. des origines à le, fin du XIX
aède (Paris, n>6S), 1 5 7 - 9 .
ïOô 1450—1780: A Medieval iïnvirotmient
Salvador de Bahia in Brazil after the Dutch had raised the siege of the
town. Vieira had taken as his text 2 Kings 19: 34, 4I will protect this
town and I will save it on account of me and my servant David'. He
then compared Sao Salvador de Bahia with Jerusalem, and St
Anthony with David. To save Sào Salvador God has 'delegated his
power to St Anthony'. Vieira 's sermons enjoyed a widespread
popularity. For Beatrice this Brazilian Portuguese text was to be
rccontcxtualizcd at Sào Salvador of the Kongo.
After she had left Mount Kimbangu, the King and his servants
came to mass, each wearing a cross. The day was passed, they
declared, in which St Anthony had prophesied that all those upon the
mountain would be destroyed. However, having left the Kings court,
Beatrice's confidence seemed to grow. People should now pray to no
other saint than Anthony, she now claimed as she led a group of
commoners back to Sào Salvador. It was just what da Gallo had been
urged to do but had not done. After establishing her own abode
beside the cathedral on the spot where the bishop once lived, she sent
out messengers, 'little Anthonies', all round the Kongo, calling
people back to the capital. These messengers were summarily
rejected by authorities in more stable areas like Soyo and Nsundi, but
in many parts the new movement was afoot and Lorenzo da Lucca,
another Capuchin, encountered it close to the sea at Musseto in mid-
1705. Soon the capital was being rcpopulated and Beatrice hailed as
the true nganga, a restorer and ruler of the Kongo, while da Gallo
was denounced as 'little Bernardo', a cowardly nganga who had not
had the courage to lead the people back and so restore the kingdom.
The Chibenga now moved into the capital, ostensibly to protect her,
and when the Mani Vunda went there on behalf of the King to find
out what was happening, he was very nearly killed. On return he
continued to press on Pedro the importance of returning, so in
February' 1705 the King left the mountain armed with the crucifix
taken from the altar of the local church: he would return, but as an
orthodox Catholic monarch. However, the Chibenga continued to
control the capital and Pedro set up temporary' camps, first at
Mulumbi, then on Mount Evululu, a day's journey from Mbanza
Kongo. He remained anxious not to precipitate a battle, declaring
that continual wars had simply destroyed the kingdom, and for the
next three years unsuccessfully negotiated for the Chibenga's
submission.
Meanwhile, at Sào Salvador the Antonian movement was reaching
Kongo, Warri, Mutapa, and the Portuguese. 107
its climax, an extended religious doctrine and practice. Jesus Christ
had been born, declared Beatrice, at Sao Salvador, the true
Bethlehem, just as he had been baptized at Nsundi, in the River
Zaïre. 1 7 The Salve Regina had become a Salve Antoniana with quite
a theology' attached. 'You say Salve and you do not know why. God
takes the intention. Marriage matters not at all. God considers the
intention. Baptism matters nothing. God considers the intention.
Confessions serve for nothing. God considers the intention. Prayers
serve nothing. God considers the intention. . . . St Anthony is our
remedy. . .\ I S While the missionaries considered all this blasphemous
nonsense, much of it might well be regarded as a remarkably acute
judgement upon the externalism of Kongolese Christianity. O f her
final interrogation Lorenzo da Lucca remarked that she spoke with
gravity', giving the impression of weighing her words with care.
Beatrice had a male assistant or 'guardian angel' who called himself
St John. She became pregnant by him. As she had herself stressed her
own chastity—on the Capuchin model—this presented a problem. It
clearly did not fit with the St Anthony identity*. She disappeared from
the capital while awaiting childbirth, but, soon after the child was
born, she was arrested and taken for trial to Evululu. It would appear
to have been D o m Manuel, the Mani Vunda, w h o took the lead in
the trial as Kongolese custom would suggest as appropriate, but
Bernardo da Gallo and Lorenzo da Lucca, who was visiting his
colleague (after several years in which Bernardo had seen 110 other
Capuchin), interrogated both Beatrice and old Apollonia. At the
petition of the missionaries Apollonia (on account of apparent
senility) and the baby were spared. Beatrice (aged about 22) and John
were flung live upon the flames on 2 July 1706.
The Antonian movement did not at once collapse with the death
of Beatrice. The population of Sào Salvador remained committed to
it, so far as can be seen, at least until the recapture of the city by Pedro
IV in February- 1709. In the final battle, in which the Chibenga fell
and Pedro triumphed, the solders of the former cried 'Salve
Antoniana' and 'Sari, Sari' while the King went into battle carrying
St Francis, tt was asserted, had been .1 member of the Vunda clan, the source o f K o n g o
religious legitimacy. T h e male leader* of the Antonians wore crowns made from the
musenda tree, of women Beatrice alone wore one. T h e y called them ' N e Yari' (or 'Sari'),
'mercy'.
Jadin, 'I.e C o n g o et la secte des Antomens', 5 1 6 . T. FUcsi, Nationaiittno e rehgione net
Congo all'inizio del 1700: La setta degli Antoniani (Rome, 1972}, 77.
I 8 1450-1780: A Medieval Environment
a crucifix. Thus was restored the unity of monarchy, capital, cross,
and Catholic Church which was to continue—despite the ever more
prolonged absence of priests and the gradual diminution of the
kingdom—for another century and more. Appallingly heretical as
the Capuchins found Beatrice, there is perhaps less of her teaching
that orthodoxy need finally fault than one might have imagined. We
do, of course, only know it across a few outside and hostile observers.
There is no need to think that everything reported of it is fully
accurate, or that even-thing Antonians did corresponded to what
Beatrice said. Again, it is unlikely that she was always consistent.
Nevertheless, a deeply Christian, and even Catholic, character to the
movement does come across through the surviving evidence. The
very attack on the cross was probably a justifiable indictment of the
way it had been turned into just another nkisi. That the movement
also drew deeply upon traditional religion (very likely including
Kimpa Vita's own experience of the Bisimbi cult) will be no less true.
In her political intuition of the absolute need for the Kongo to
restore Sao Salvador, Beatrice was absolutely right. Her 'prophecy'
was socially accurate. While her ability to dream dreams and see
visions may well have derived from cult experiences in early life
unconnected with Christianity, her teaching and sense of mission
were expressed in decidedly Christian terms and in regard to a society
which could no longer make sense, even to itself, except in such
terms. Yet it was inevitable that the Capuchins were unable to
sympathize with what she said. They were lost in the political and
religious maelstrom around them: even a functioning Kongolese
society was largely incomprehensible to the foreigner, much more so
one as damaged as the kingdom in the long aftermath of the Battle of
Ambuila.
In the years following the death of Beatrice, Pedro IV slowly re-
established the unity and viability of the kingdom. He reoccupied
Sao Salvador and stabilized a political order balancing the capital and
the provinces which was to endure for 150 years. Undoubtedly the
power of the king and the prestige of the capital were much
diminished. Soyo had become effectively independent in the
seventeenth century, Nsundi and Mbamba followed in the eight-
eenth. B y the early nineteenth century, while a nominal sovereignty
was recognized very much more widely, the king actually controlled
nothing more than the villages around Sao Salvador. None the less,
there remained a genuine continuity of religious, cultural, and
Kongo, Warri, Mutapa, and the Portuguese. 109
institutional identity from the time of Afonso I in the early sixteenth
century to Garcia V and Henrique II in the nineteenth. The
Christian kingdom did then survive its traumatic crisis in the late
seventeenth century, but henceforth there would be no regular
priestly presence in the capital. The twelve ruined churches would
remain the burial grounds of the nobility, but they would never be
rebuilt.
Iy
J. ("livelier (ed.). Relations sur le Congo du Père I eurent de I Moques 1700-1717 (BrusscU,
1953). 101.
I 12 1450-1780: A Medieval Environment
The fathers in this period do not appear an outstandingly able
group. Their linguistic knowledge was mostly poor—very different
from that of two generations back. The Capuchin sense of mission
and collective commitment to the task given them was not easily
eroded, but their understanding of its problems was disastrously
limited. Their very fidelity to the instructions of Propaganda not to
alter culture, and their consequent overwhelming preoccupation
with 'religious' things in a rather narrow sense, meant that their
impact was in some ways far less than that of the Jesuits. One of their
brothers, Leonardo da Nando, who worked in Soyo from 1654 to his
death in 1687, did for many years run a quite influential school in
Mbanza Soyo, but such work had not the priority it had for the
Jesuits.
Most disastrous was the absence of any policy in regard to a local
clergy. In fact the Capuchins criticized and disapproved so strongly of
the behaviour of local priests elsewhere, they could hardly wish to
extend them. But what alternative was there if the Church was to
continue? Underlying failure to grapple with this question was the
absence of authority. The Capuchins in the Kongo did not constitute
a diocese of their own; they and their prefecture were now centred
upon Loanda. For both bishop and prefect Soyo had become an
outlying area of marginal importance, rather than the one possible
viable centre for the development of a genuinely African Catholic
Church. Equally Propaganda Fide, which in the time of Vives and
Ingoli had demonstrated such an outstanding concern for the Kongo
as well as a remarkable wider missionary imaginativeness, seems to
have lost heart over the Kongo, just as it lost confidence in the kind
of adaptation which Ricci pioneered in China. In 1 6 1 5 Pope Paul V
had given permission for Chinese priests to celebrate mass in
Chinese. In 1656 R o m e approved, a little vaguely, the adaptationist
Chinese 'rites' recommended by the Jesuits. In 1704 the rites were
condemned and the use of Latin was being insisted upon for all
Chinese priests. The effective Roman and missionary abandonment
of the Kongo has to be seen within this for wider shift, and decline,
in missionary commitment and vision characteristic of the
eighteenth-century Church.
While the diocese of Sao Salvador was established in 1596, no
bishop had lived there or visited it since the 1620s. Ecclesiastically, as
Loanda—essentially a colonial city g r e w — S a o Salvador was
abandoned. There were still appeals in the 1680s and later for this
jKongo, Warri, Mutapa, and the Portuguese 113
to be reversed, for Sao Salvador to be detached ecclesiascicallv from /
26 i?
ibid. 37s. Ibid 386.
jKongo, Warri, Mutapa, and the Portuguese 117
remaining within the country after Cherubino's departure, the slide
away from the consciousness of Christian identity and any sort of
surviving core community which had already taken place almost
irreparably in Nsundi was more than likely to happen increasingly in
most other parts of the country.
We happen, however, to have contemporary with the last period
of Cherubino's ministry some remarkable independent evidence of
the persistence of Soyo Christianity and its limitations. For nine years
from 1766 to 1775 there was a mission of French priests to the two
kingdoms of Loango and Kakongo north of the River Zaïre. The
Capuchins had never penetrated these societies, which had remained
entirelv non-Christian. Nevertheless,7 more than once the mission-
*
' y ' Abbe Proyart, Histoire de Loango, Kakongo et autres royaumes d'Afrique (Paris, 1776), esp.
pt. 2, ch. 17, 3 1 5 - 5 1 . also 226 and 2 5 7 .
10
J. Cuvelier, Documents sur une mission francise au Kakongo 2766-1??$ (Brussels. 1953),
126-9.
I 118 1450-1780: A Medieval Environment
were Christians, surprising as they found it. But the limitations of this
sort of Christianity, of which the Capuchins had mostly been only
too well aware, had now triumphed unchecked. In the Kongo
Christian heartlands rather more remained to this identity, if only
among an increasingly small group of people. In the almost entire
absence of missionaries it was still to some extent self-sustaining
through the maestri and a certain ritual tradition to which the ruling
class at least continued to conform.
xi. An Evaluation
In the early seventeenth century, when the full impact of the slave-
trade was still to come, and the wave of post-Tridentine missionary
enthusiasm was rising to a peak, there seemed a great and not entirely
illusory hope for the conversion of Africa. It was well, if ambiguously,
symbolized by that strangest of events 111 our history, the arrival in
R o m e of the Kongolese Ambassador to the Pope in January 1608:
D o m Manuel, the Mani Vunda, bearer of the most ancient religious
authority in his country. Sent by his king, as many kings of Kongo
previously had endeavoured to send ambassadors direct to the Pope,
he had finally arrived despite every obstacle raised by the Spanish and
Portuguese. The Pope, Paul V, was awaiting him. But when he
arrived, landing at Civita Vecchia, assisted by a few servants and a
Spanish Carmelite priest who had visited the Kongo in his youth, he
was mortally ill. O n 5 January, the eve of the Church's principal
missionary feast, the Epiphany, in which is traditionally celebrated the
coming to Christ with their gifts of the kings of the world (including,
in Western mythology, a black king) D o m Manuel reached R o m e .
Pope Paul visited him in his apartment; the Mani Vunda
recommended to the Pope the king and Church of the Kongo and
See S. Axelson, Cuf/im* Confrontation in the I.jouvt Congo (Uppsala, 1970). 240 1, 2 6 4 - 5 .
2 9 0 - 1 ; also W. Holman Bentley, Pioneering on (he Congo (1900), i. 252, for the late 1'Mi-cent,
common opinion of the people: "In the early days, when a native saw us open a tin of
preserved meat, he would wacch with curiosity until he saw the meat inside, then he would
turn away with a shudder, and an expression of disgust on his face: "Poor thing*! That is
what become* of them, is it?" Ct". also J Miller. Hfcy of Death (Wis., LYXX), 4 -5.
jKongo, Warri, Mutapa, and the Portuguese 127
then immediately passed away. Undoubtedly this extraordinary event,
depicted in the frescoes of the Vatican Library, made a very
considerable impact upon the Pope and those about him.
Move 011 ten years or so to the 1620s, that exciting time for the
missionary movement when the Sacred Congregation of Propaganda
Fide and its college were being established and men like Ingoli and
Vives were planning a deeply renewed strategy for the effective
evangelization of the non-Western world. In those same years at the
court of the Kongo, Fr. Cardoso was arriving with his catechism, at
the court of Zimbabwe the Mutapa Mavura had been baptized, and
at the court of the Emperor Susenyos of Ethiopia, Fr. Pedro Paez was
achieving the most remarkable conversion of all. In Warri, the Olu
Sebastian was doing his very best to advance Christianity, while in
Mombasa a young Christian king, D o m Jeronimo Chingulia, had just
been installed with his Portuguese queen after baptism and years of
education by the Augustinians in Goa. Here was a network of
Catholic rulers spread all across Africa and they were being assisted by
a number of remarkable priests. Behind these advance guards waited
many hundreds of Capuchins, Jesuits, and others anxious to serve in
the conversion of Africa. Such was the brief climax of the enterprise.
But look again, eighty years later, the end of the century. The
Changamire had expelled the Portuguese, missionaries included,
from the lands of Zimbabwe; the Emperor of Ethiopia had expelled
Catholic missionaries from his territories; and in 1698 Fort Jesus at
Mombasa wras captured by Oman. Even the kingdom of the Kongo
lay in ruins and the Capuchins after fifty years of intense work and
the dispatch of several hundred missionaries were near to desperation.
Only Soyo would continue, moderately hopeful, a little longer. The
likelihood of any enduring Catholic presence in black Africa of more
than minuscule size had become by 1700 extremely slight. Why had
this quite rapid reversal taken place? We have encountered various
causes. Basically it might be claimed that the sixteenth-century
pattern of mission, subjugated to the Padroado, had continued
sufficiently to strangle the seventeenth-century model; moreover, the
earlier pattern was now still further deformed by the steady
expansion of the slave-trade as well as the drying-up of whatever
element of religious idealism had formerly existed within the
Portuguese sense of their imperial destiny.
T h e continued dominance of a Tortugalization' model of
Christian advance may be shown most precisely by a look at what
128 1450-1780: A Medieval Environment
happened in Mombasa in 1 6 3 1 . The Augustinian mission here was
probably the nearest the Church came on the east coast to a very
minor breakthrough. With the establishment as King of Malindi and
Mombasa of P o m Jeronimo Chingulia, a Knight of Christ, educated
by the Augustinians in Goa and married to a Portuguese woman,
there could seem some possibility of a local Church taking root, if
not among Muslim converts, at least among many local Africans w h o
were not Muslim. There were a number of Portuguese priests based
in Mombasa, and it had even been requested that a suffragan bishop
be appointed. Beside the white Christian community were a rather
larger number of native Christians already baptized. While most of
these were women and children, they included, besides the King, his
cousin, P o m Antonio of Malindi, who had also been educated
abroad and served for some years in the Portuguese navy. When the
King apostatized and carried out a massacre of all the Christians w h o
refused to apostatize with him, D o m Antonio was one of those who
refused and was killed.
The sworn evidence collected for a possible canonization of the
martyrs certainly suggests that there were few native males among the
Christians. But what is really more profoundly significant is that the
lise of those 'crowned with martyrdom* sent to R o m e included the
/
Fr. Joao ol"Jesus», OSA, in G. S. P. Frccinan-Grenviile, Ihe Mombasa Rising against the
Portuguese 1631 (ry8o). 79.
Kongo, War ri, Mutapa, and the Portuguese 129
never have been converted if the missionary monks who undertook
it had not very quickly been supplemented by a local married clcrgy,
an indigenous ministry adapted to the economic and cultural
conditions of the country. This was as true of England as of Russia.
And in both a vernacular religious literature soon developed.
When one considers the long history of the Kongolese Church, its
very considerable geographical dimensions, the disinterested zeal of
the Capuchins, and the tenacity of Kongolese Christians themselves,
one is constrained to ask (as so often in history) if it needed to end as
it did. The answer must here, as always, be: it was not predetermined.
The climate, the distances from Europe, the inevitable problems
arising from African society, all created formidable difficulties, yet all
were sufficiently overcome for it to be clear that they were not
insuperable. The mission was not killed by them but by four other
and extrinsic things: the systematic Portuguese opposition to missions
of other nations (the Italian Capuchins only got in originally thanks
to the temporary Dutch conquest of Angola and the coinciding
Spanish-Portuguese conflict), the profound social and political
dislocation produced by the slave-trade from the early seventeenth
century onward, the general decline of missionary enthusiasm in
eighteenth-century Catholic Europe, and the rigidities of canon law
and current missionary practice. If Propaganda Fide had been able to
send missionaries more freely and to establish dioceses uncontrolled
by Lisbon (as did happen in parts of Asia), if the Portuguese had lost
Angola and the slave-trade had functioned here at least no more or
no differently/ from how it had functioned on other coasts,* if the
missionaries had printed more books in the vernacular and allowed
the maestri to baptize, if R o m e had listened to the early advice of the
Nuncio in Lisbon and agreed to a married clergy for Africa (as it had
done for the Lebanon and the Ukraine), then by the eighteenth
century a large and expanding section of central Africa might well
have been Christian. The 4antica missio', as it came later to be called,
was not a futility, only a strangled opportunity.
4
RICHES TO RAGS: ETHIOPIA 1500-1800
/ The Abuna Marqos was, in the 1520s, a very aged man, devout,
revered, one of the finer abunas. He had been many years in the
country—ever since the reign of Eskender. His authority had
combined with that of the Queen Mother, Eleni, to ensure the
selection of Lebna Dengel as emperor when still a child, but he
exercised no pastoral control whatever over the Church beyond the
conducting of thousands of ordinations. Responsibility for the
Church lay with the king, just as responsibility for everything else in
Ethiopia lay with the king, but in reality the religious life of the
Riehes to Rags: Ethiopia 1500-1800 133
country simply flowed on, with little theology and less planning, in a
river of rituals and of music.
When in 1520 the Portuguese embassy, after some considerable
delay, was admitted to the presence of the Emperor, they saw that
which in Ethiopian tradition ordinary people were rarely permitted
to gaze upon, the embodiment of the entire life, spiritual and
political, of the nation. It was a memorable experience, as they passed
through a series of enclosures and curtains, each more gorgeous than
the one before, walked through massed crowds of guards holding
arms and lighted candles, until at last they came before a large dais
covered with the richest of carpets and shielded by a final curtain.
The curtain was pulled back and there was the King, sitting at the top
of six steps, dressed in gold brocade, upon his head a crowrn of gold
and silver, a silver cross in his hand, a piece of blue cloth covering his
mouth and beard. On each side of him stood pages, the nearest
holding another silver cross, then two with drawn swords, then four
upon each side with lighted candles. Thus enthroned between cross
and sword, was Lebna Dengel, at the time a young man 23 years of
King David (Iiis regnal name), the head of his kingdoms, the beloved of
God, pillar of the faith, descendant of the lineage of Judah, son of David,
son of Solomon, son of the Column of Zion, son of the Seed of Jacob, son
of the Hand of Mary, son of Nahum in the flesh (all references to Lebna
DengcTs ancestors by their regnal names), emperor of the high Ethiopia and
of great kingdoms, lordships and lands, King of Shoa, of Cafate. of Fatiguar,
of Angotc, of Baruu, of Balinganje, of Adea and of Vangue, King of
Gojjam, of Arnara . . .
Beccari, xi. 259; see also the account in the* Iliston,) Re$i< Sarta Dcugcl (Malak Dengel),
cci. C . Conti Rossini. CSCO ?.o (1907; rcpr. 1955), 90.
Riehes to Rags: Ethiopia 1500-1800 135
extraordinarily primitive in its economic formation and technology
for a state of such size and stability. It was quite excessively dependent
upon Arab traders for the provision of much of what it needed.
There was a complete absence of indigenous urban life and of many
of the more elementary skills of craftsmanship. Doubtless almost
every cloth and ornament which gave the emperors court its
characteristic appearance had come from abroad, and Ethiopia had
little to offer in exchange—principally gold, hides, and slaves. It
needed to raid its neighbours for slaves to sell to the Arabs in
exchange for luxury goods and for this reason it could hardly afford
to convert them, as it might not enslave Christians. Failure to
evangelize the Agaw of western Gojjam over several centuries is
noticeable. The missionary advance of Ethiopian Christianity had not
entirely ceased,4 but it was, then, impeded by its primitive economy
and dependence upon supplying the insatiable demand of the Arab
world for slaves, much as in West Africa the advance of Islam was
impeded for quite the same reason.
Military prowess, bureaucratic organization, a literary cultural
tradition unique in Africa, and a highly confident religious
orthodoxy had, nevertheless, combined to establish a major state,
considerable and confident enough to be on the look-out for further
progress. Lebna Dengel continued to promote the translation of
Greek and Arabic works into Ge'ez. T h e Europeans w h o
occasionally found their way within its borders were politely
detained and put to work. Thus for forty years the Italian Nicholas
Brancaleone seems to have been ceaselessly busy painting churches
and icons. s An ingenious monk, Ezra the Stefanite, returned from
abroad, when questioned at court offered to construct a water mill or
a windmill, a hydraulic saw, an oil-press, or a hayrick worked by an
ass. In fact he made the watermill to general amazement. 6 The
Empress Eleni had brought artisans from Egypt to construct her new
church at Martula Maryam. 7 In his letter to the King of Portugal
4
Ac times of strength the monarch could still bring about the conversion of neighbouring
societies. See the account of the conversion and mass baptism of F.narya in the 1 $tfos in the
Historii: Rial's S.mii Dengel, 13 ^>-44. Sarsa Dengel stood godfather to its king. Badanco.
* Diana Spencer, 'Travels in Gojjam: St Luke, Ikom and Brancaleon Rediscovered'. J U S
12 (i9?4), 201-20.
6
It was 111 the early years of the i6th cent., in che reign of Lebna Dengel's father. Na'od.
A. Caquoi (ed.), '(.es Actes d'F.zra de Gunde Gunde', /tiiiKjJi».« d'f-thiopie, 4 (1961), 1 1 0 -13.
7
See the account of it in H. F Beckingham and G. W. B. Uuntingford (eds.). Some Records
of ISthi opta (1954), 1 0 3 - 7 .
136 1450-1780: A Medieval Environment
Lebna Dengcl appealed for craftsmen of all sorts just as did his
contemporary, Afonso King of Kongo, though he was appealing
from a far higher base than that of Afonso. His appointment of the
Arab convert Enbaqom to be abbot of Dabra Libanos, even if it was
not a success, was still remarkable. None of this suggests fear of
outside influences, so long as they could be made to tally with the
intrinsic orthodoxy of Ethiopia. We know for too little to reconstruct
a wholly reliable picture of the state of Ethiopian consciousness in the
earlier years of Lebna Dengcl, but the things we have referred to
suggest a prosperous, basically confident, and forward-looking mood.
Yet it was a deeply fragile condition. The always potentially hostile
Muslim world around it was growing more than was Ethiopia and
had of late been invigorated by the rise of Turkish power in the R e d
Sea. Innovations in firearms also benefited Muslims, who were in
easy touch with world trade, far more than Ethiopians, w h o could
obtain nothing beyond what Arab traders were willing to bring
them. The prospect of an alliance with the Christian kingdom of
Portugal might not be very realistic, but, in such circumstances, it was
bound to seem attractive.
All through the early years of the reign of Lebna Dengel war on the
eastern frontier was endemic. When Christians were weakened by
the Lenten fast Muslim armies annually raided the eastern marches.
Yet the Christian-Muslim relationship was not an entirely
straightforward one. On the surface, Muslims appear simply as the
enemy. The Emperor's letter to the King of Portugal called down
peace on King Manuel because, being strong in the faith, he was
'assisted by Our Lord Jesus Christ to kill the Moors'. But that was
largely rhetoric. In Ethiopia Muslims were a very real threat both to
Christianity and to the monarchy and, certainly the former was
highly unlikely to survive without the latter. There were no
Christians in the lands of Adel or of Sennar. Nevertheless, there were
plenty of Muslims within the Ethiopian state, and not only Arab
traders. Parts of the kingdom were largely inhabited by Muslims and,
so long as they were loyal, they were as safe as anyone else. There was
much intermarrying. Thus the Empress Eleni's own father had been
Muhammad, the Muslim governor of I Iadya.
It is hard to know quite why in 1529 a jihad of unprecedented
Riehes to Rags: Ethiopia 1500-1800 137
proportions was suddenly let loose upon the country. Perhaps the
presence of a Portuguese mission for six years in Ethiopia had alerted
its neighbours to a possible new danger. Perhaps Turkish influence
underlay a new aggressiveness. But the chief cause does appear to
have lain in the personality of one man, Ahmed Gran, leader of the
armies of Adel. At once fearless military leader and religious fanatic,
undeviating in his determination to wage a holy war for the
destruction of the Christian kingdom and the establishment of a
Muslim state, Gran was of a type which would appear several times in
the religious history of Africa as in the wider history of Islam. Me
combined professional efficiency with religious single-mindedness to
a high degree. He was, in all this, very different from generations of
his predecessors. He equipped his armies with the latest weapons and,
once begun, he continued his campaigns methodically from year to
year. He came extremely near to achieving his aim.
In March 1529 Ahmed Gran defeated the army of Ethiopia with
very great slaughter in the battle of Chembra Koure, following
which he set about the systematic
* destruction of the countrvi and in
particular the ravaging of churches and monasteries. He began with
Shoa in the east and steadily moved north and west. On 14 July 1 5 3 2
Dabra Libanos went up in flames, many of its monks throwing
themselves into the fire in their despair. The invaders pushed on
through Tigre and Gojjam until they arrived at the ancient heartlands
of the north-west. The great cathedral of St Maty of Zion at Aksum,
dating probably from the sixth century, was reduced to ruins. Early in
1540 the formidable royal fortress of Amba Geshcn was captured
with all its treasure and the archives of the State. As the chronicler
sadly noted, 'They were conquerors in all the battles to the east, to
the west, to the north and to the south.'* Everything of significance
was destroyed or carried away. Few are the manuscripts which survive
from before 1530. Tens of thousands of people adopted Islam, many
others were marched off into slavery. What was happening in those
twelve years was a systematic campaign of cultural and national
genocide.
By 1540 Gran regarded himself as the unassailable king of Ethiopia.
He was accepted as such by many of its people, w h o now obeyed his
orders and served in his armies, while his original soldiers had
took the offensive and the Portuguese, still largely unsupported by-
Ethiopians, were overwhelmed. Da Gama, wounded and captured,
was dragged before Gran to behold the heads of 160 Portuguese
displayed in front of him before he too was decapitated by Ci ran
himself.
Over-confident in the finality of his victory. Gran at once
dismissed his Turkish allies and returned to what had become his
capital near Lake Tana. Meanwhile, Sabla Wangel, who had played a
remarkably active role throughout the campaign and had personally
bound up the wounded in battle, managed to escape with the
surviving remnant of the Portuguese and to link up with her son
Galawdewos, who had been campaigning in the south of the
country. The Portuguese rearmed themselves from a store which da
Gama had wisely left at Dabra Damo. Some thousands of Ethiopians
rallied around the King and together they marched once more to
attack the unsuspecting Gran. On 21 February 1543 at the Battle of
Woguera Gran was slain by a ball fired from a Portuguese matlock
and his troops turned and fled. Without its leader the jihad and the
incipient Muslim kingdom of Ethiopia simply dissolved and
Galawdewos was left to restore a shattered state. Tens of thousands
of apostates had to be reconciled, churches and monasteries rebuilt,
books recopied. The cultural and institutional wealth of medieval
Riehes to Rags: Ethiopia 1500-1800 139
Ethiopia could never be recovered, and it is clear that even in the
seventeenth century the condition of the country had by no means
returned to that of the age before Lebna Dengel. The very cathedral
of Aksum was onlv rebuilt under Fasiladas, and then in a manner bv
/ ' j
'* Joäo Bermudez's SJiort Account, first published in 1 5 6 5 . was translated into English and
included by White way with lus edition of Cascanhoso, 'Pie Portuguese Expedition 10 Abyssinia
m ij?^/ i ^ j (1902). It is higlily unreliable. Some writers continue to accept his claim to have
been appointed by Marqos, even though they admit that his further claim to have been
confirmed by the Pope was bogus (see e.g. J.- B. Coulbeaux, DTC 5. 1. 950, and P. Caraman.
'lite Lost Umpire (1985), 8) but there is no good reason to accept either, cf. Whiteway s
introduction, pp. lxxxii-ci, M. Chaîne, i . e Patriarche Jean Bermudez d'Etliiopie 1 5 4 0 -
1570', Revue de i'Orient chrétien, 14 (1909). 3 2 1 - 9 . and S. fc. Guringcr, 'Der Pseudopatriarch
Johannes Bermudes', 'Ideologie und Glauhe, 17 {1925). 2 2 6 - 5 6 .
140 i^yo—ijso: A Medieval Environment
Lebna Dengel had sent the Pope a letter with Alvares expressing
reverent submission in terms which were taken to mean a great deal
more in Europe than they meant in Ethiopia. It now entered the
minds of the King of Portugal and the Pope that they might do well
to send out a genuine Latin Patriarch. The rejection of Bermudez did
not appear to them to indicate a going-back on Lebna Dengels
apparently unsolicited act of submission, especially as Galawdewos
expressed himself exceptionally diplomatically. Pope Paul Ills first
idea, a wise one, seems to have been to ask the Emperor of Ethiopia
himself to choose a Patriarch but the King of Portugal objected.
They then turned to the Jesuits to provide someone, and Ignatius
Loyola, though old and unwell, actually offered to go himself. That
was, of course, unthinkable, but an experienced priest was chosen,
John Nunez Barreto, and two other Jesuits—Melchior Carneiro, also
Portuguese, and Andrew Oviedo, a Spaniard—were consecrated as
bishops to accompany and, if necessary, succeed him. That was in
1555-
It is well to note that R o m e was not acting in ignorance in its
dealings with Ethiopia at this time. For quite some while, probably
since the 1480s, there had been a small community of Ethiopian
monks near the Vatican at the chapel of St Stephen. As a
consequence of their presence, the Ethiopian Psalter was printed in
R o m e in 1 5 1 3 . Then, about 1537, a most remarkable Ethiopian
monk from Dabra Libanos arrived in R o m e via Jerusalem with two
companions to join the community. His name was Tasfa Seyon, but
he was known in R o m e as Petrus Ethiops. He stayed in R o m e until
his death in T552, patronized by Paul III. He wras an outstanding
scholar and personally responsible for the printing in 1548 of the
Ge'cz N e w Testament and eucharistie: liturgy. Moreover, Alvares'
True Relation was printed in Lisbon in 1540 and soon translated into
Italian. It had certainly been read by Ignatius among others and he
knew Tasfa Seyon well.
People in R o m e could, then, be quite well informed in regard to
the character of the Church of Ethiopia. The lengthy instructions
Loyola drew up for the guidance of his men are, in consequence, of
special interest. He stressed several times that in their exceptionally
delicate mission they should proceed con dolcezza, with sweetness and
gentleness. He was almost willing to tolerate circumcision but then
thought better of it and deleted that line; he felt that the excessive
fasts which the Christians of Ethiopia were accustomed to practise
Riehes to Rags: Ethiopia 1500-1800 141
really ought to be mitigated. 10 Nevertheless, the aim he outlined to
reduce the Ethiopian Church to eventual uniformity with R o m e was
deeply unrealistic. In the substance of his advice there was very little
to suggest that its implementation could prove other than disastrous.
While waiting for the Patriarch to arrive, the Portuguese Viceroy of
India thoughtfully sent off a couple of Jesuits to Ethiopia to inform
the Emperor that he was on his way. The mission was led by Gonçalo
Rodrigues and arrived at the imperial camp in May 1555.
Galawdewos received him politely but was profoundly disturbed by
his message. Fully committed to the tradition of Ethiopia, the
Emperor had no wish to quarrel with his Western friends but equally
no wish to be saddled with a Latin patriarch. He already had his
Egyptian one. In these circumstances he went off for a month to
consult his mother, Sabla Wangel, w h o combined affectionate
experience of the Portuguese with firm adherence to Ethiopian
custom. While with her he seems to have composed his famous
Confession of Faith, dated 23 June 1555. He informed Fr. Rodrigues
and presented him with a copy to take to the Viceroy. Deeply
disappointed, the Jesuit returned to Goa. A natural diplomatist,
Galawdewos had affirmed his willingness to meet the Patriarch and
seems to have thought in terms of his remaining in charge of the
Portuguese, all 200 of them.
It was decided in Goa that, in these circumstances, it would be
unfitting for the Patriarch to proceed, and Ovicdo was sent instead.
He arrived in 1557. Like many another sovereign, Galawdewos
enjoyed theological disputation and proved well able to cope with
the ecumenical dialogue Oviedo's presence initiated in his court. The
good Jesuit then produced in Ethiopian a very combatively phrased
work entitled The Primacy of Rome and the Errors of the Ethiopians.
There was very little dolcezza about that. Tempers were rising on
both sides. The King forbade the Jesuits to preach to Ethiopians, and
Oviedo declared the King excommunicate. Shortly afterwards
Galawdewos was killed in a war with Adel and canonized in
Ethiopian tradition as St Claudius. He was succeeded by his brother
Minas, a rather less courteous ruler. Ethiopia degenerated into a
period of civil war, in which the Turks intervened against Minas
while Oviedo, backing the rebels, found himself to his embarrass-
ment on the same side as the Turks. Little by little, however, in the
10
Bcccari, i. 2 3 7 - 5 4 ; for Ignatius' hesitations over circumcision, see 7 9 - 8 0 as well as 242.
142 /450-1780: A Medieval Environment
reign of Sarsa Dengel (1563-97), nephew of Galawdewos, order was
restored once more, the Turks soundly defeated, and the Jesuits
confined to serving the small Portuguese community centred at
Fremona not far from AJksum.
Bv/ this time Barreto had died and Oviedo automaticallv/ succeeded
him as Patriarch. In practice he remained as parish priest of the
Portuguese community, its Ethiopian wives and children, until his
death in 1577. He was recognized as a holy man but was not,
intellectually, a very supple one. One of his companions, Francisco
Lopez, formerly a lay brother but ordained by Oviedo, lived on at
Fremona another twenty years, dying in ï 597. Me was replaced by an
Indian secular priest, Belchior da Silva, who had managed to get
through from Goa to minister to what had become a tiny, and only
barely surviving, Latin community of some 2,000 people formed by
forty years of Jesuit presence out of Portuguese immigrant origins.
Few could any more speak Portuguese. Da Silva found that many,
while still claiming to be Catholics, were already circumcizing their
children and observing the Sabbath. 11
Several young men of mixed blood born and educated at Fremona
later became priests and died for their faith. Consider two of them:
they tell us a little about the community. Abba Jacobo was the son of
a Spaniard, Joào d'Alessandro, who had escaped from the Turks and
joined the Portuguese settlement a generation after its beginnings.
His mother was an Ethiopian, Wela Dahna. Baptized by Francisco
Lopez in the 1580s he became a lay missionary sent by Fr. Paez
around 1 6 1 2 to the non-Christian Agaw in Gojjam where he was
said to have baptized many. He was later ordained by the Patriarch
iVlendes and murdered in 1628 in one of the earlier risings against the
Catholic policy of Susenvos. Antonio d'Andrade belonged to a
younger generation but had a similar Fremona background.
Ordained by Mendes and exiled with him, he was, years later,
made a bishop by Propaganda Fide in 1668 and sent back to Ethiopia,
only to be murdered at Massawa in 1670. The Catholic community
at Fremona which nourished these two men was a group not at all
" Ibid. 4 1 3 - 3 9 . there is a long letter from Belcluor da Silva to the Archbishop of Goa
from Ethiopia dated $ Aug. 1695. Beccari accepts the date and regard* it as evidence of the
survival of the Catholic community at Fremona at the close of the 17th cent., which is
improbable. Moreover, it means accepting that a second Cîoan priest, of identical name, was
sent to Ethiopia exactly a century after the first, which is extremely improbable. There
internal evidence, including a reference to Francisco Lopez, to make it clear that the date of
the letter must be late 16th, not 17th, cent.
Riehes to Rags: Ethiopia 1500-/800 143
unlike other small settlements of Portuguese in the Kongo, in
Mombasa, or elsewhere. In colour they were, by the seventeenth
century, little different from Ethiopians, and not much different even
in language, but they retained a strong consciousness of difference
and special skills with firearms and other things. They were half a
help to a local ruler, half a continuing threat. This enduring, rather
tough, but very small-scale presence of Catholics in the country was a
good part of the reason for the continuing Jesuit interest in Ethiopia,
but it would not really be of service to the wider cause of
reunification sought by R o m e because, by theoretically existing as a
Latin Church within the country, it encouraged the wholly foolish
and impossible endeavour of latinizing Ethiopia. On the contrary, if
there was anv chance at all of union with the Church of the West, it
could only be through a very thoroughgoing acceptance of the
Ethiopian rite and its related customs.
An important early consequence of the Jesuit mission was to
stimulate the writing of Galawdewos's Confession of Faith, one of two
remarkable works of Ethiopian religious literature produced in his
reign. 12 It is divided into two parts. In the first the King declares his
faith in the Trinitv and the Incarnation. In the second he deals with
/
the three matters over which the Jesuits were currently accusing the
Ethiopian Church of Judaizing, that is the celebration of the Sabbath,
the rite of circumcision, and the avoidance of pork. Unlike the
writings of the Jesuits, the Confession does not contain a trace of
controversialism. It is neither one-sided nor aggressive, nor in any
way bigoted in tone. Quite the contrary. Galawdewos undoubtedly
intended it to confirm his adherence to the faith of Alexandria and
his rejection of the accusations the Jesuits were making that the
Church of Ethiopia was gravely at fault and needed to be reformed in
faith and practice, but he makes no contrary accusations, no attacks
upon the faith of Chalcedon (in this being rather uncharacteristic of
Ethiopian theological writing). There is in fact nothing in what he
12
English translation in J. M . Harden, An Introduttiort to Ethiopie Christian IJterature (1926).
1 0 4 - 7 . and S. Pankhurst. Ethiopia- A Cultural History (19S5). 3 3 4 - 7 ; thé Confession was first
published by Hiob Ludolf 111 G c ' e z and Latin m i<V*>i with his Crammatica Aethiopka, foi
Ludolfs discussion of it see Im Ad suam Historian Aethiopkani Comtnentarius (Frankfurt,
1691), 2 3 7 - 4 1 , 27N-9; for a modern commentary and discussion see L. Lozza. Im <onfessione
di Claudio re d'Etwpia (Palermo, 1947). also USE 5 (1946)» 6 7 - 7 S ; for another Ethiopian
response to Jesuit teaching at exactly the same time, see the work entitled 'The History of
the Four Councils* or 'The Treasure of the Faith*. 111 F.. Ccrulli (ed.), „Slm'ffi teolegki etiopki dei
setoli xvi-xvii (Rome. i960). 11 1 - 1 0 1
144 Î45°~17^O: A Medieval Environment
wrote that the Jesuits and R o m e should not have been able to accept.
Its theological orthodoxy is incontestable.
What is particularly interesting is that he defended the customs of
Ethiopia in remarkably secular terms. There is, undoubtedly, a firm
insistence that Ethiopians possess true apostolic doctrine and 'turn
aside neither to the right hand nor to the left' but there is also a sense
of freedom and of rather restrained claims, especially in regard to the
Sabbath, altogether different from the intolerant dogmatism of Zara
Ya'iqob. As regards the Sabbath, circumcision, and the avoidance of
pork, he points out that in each case Ethiopian Christian practice is
significantly different from that of the Jews. Circumcision is
performed simply because it is a local custom, while as for the
eating of pork he blandly observes that everyone is at liberty to
refrain from eating meat if he so wishes. 'There are some w h o love to
eat fish, and there are some w h o like to eat the flesh of cocks, and
there are some w h o abstain from eating the flesh of lambs; let every
man, according as it pleases him, follow his own desire. There is no
law about the eating of flesh.' Galawdewos began his Confession as
follows: 'This is my Faith and the Faith of my fathers, the Israelitish
kings, and the faith of my flock which is in the fold of my kingdom.'
In these words he expressed simply but rather movingly the
Ethiopian conception of the kingdom at its highest and most
Christian, the sense of pastoral responsibility for this 'flock 1
committed to him and for the maintenance of its faith. It is, as so
often in Ethiopian theological documents, grounded on explicit
reference to the first three councils of Nicaea, Constantinople, and
Ephesus. It may be that Galawdewos was considerably understating
the common Ethiopian view of the customs in question and that
many an Ewostathian monk would have grounded them quite
explicitly in an interpretation of the N e w Testament of the sort he
noticeably avoided. Strange as it may seem, Galawdewos wrote far
more like a modern man than did his Jesuit opponents, gripped as
they were by the mood of intellectual intransigence characteristic of
the Counter-Reformation. He, on the contrary; was able to play
down controversial issues by an appeal to the divergence of cultures.
Everyone, even the Jesuits, agreed that he was an extraordinarily
attractive as well as able person, someone of profound moral and
intellectual qualities, yet he and his Confession remain something of
an enigma. One wonders how he obtained his very considerable
Riehes to Rags: Ethiopia 1500-1800 145
éducation during the devastating ten years in which he grew to
manhood.
One answer to that question may lie in the character of his dear
friend and mentor Enbaqom, the author of a no less remarkable
work, the Anqasa Arniti, the 'Door of the Faith'. Enbaqom was an
Arab, perhaps from Iraq, who was converted to Christianity as a
young man and had settled in Ethiopia in the reign of Eskender,
probably about 1490. He became a monk at Dabra Libanos but was
much at court and the close friend of the Abuna Marqos. He became
a friend too of Alvares, w h o helped him with his Portuguese and also
taught him a little Latin. Enbaqom was a linguist, fluent in Arabic,
Copt, and Ethiopian, and—as was inevitable in the context of
Ethiopia and monastic life—a translator. He was working in the
1520s, when Alvares met him at the court of Lebna Dengel and
visited him too at Dabra Libanos, on J o h n Chrysostom's
Commentary on the Epistles of St Paul and, most probably, a little
later, on St John's Apocalypse. About this time he was selected as the
new Eccage, abbot of Dabra Libanos, the senior ecclesiastical post in
the country after that of the abuna. The choice must certainly have
been the King's, but it is a surprising one as it meant that both the top
figures in the Church were in consequence non-Ethiopians.
Enbaqom was in fact the only foreigner ever to be eccage and the
resultant dissatisfaction—perhaps in part because his relations with
Marqos were too intimate—brought about his deposition. He was
exiled to Gunei and, though after a year the King recalled him,
Enbaqom was distressed by his treatment and remained in solitude in
Warab. Meanwhile, the country was devastated by Gran. When
Dabra Libanos went up in flames in 1532, it was being ruled by
another abbot. Enbaqom fled from place to place to avoid the
soldiers of Gran until, in 1540, he addressed Gran directly, first by
letter and then by this book.
It was a time when it must have seemed that Gran was indeed
destined to rule Ethiopia for good, and it may have been with that in
mind that Enbaqom first appealed to him to cease burning churches
and killing monks and other innocent people, and then, when Gran
apparently agreed only to kill those who resisted him, set about the
hard task of demonstrating to Gran the truth of Christianity. It was a
bold endeavour. The Anqasa Amin is an apologetic work based almost
entirely upon Enbaqoms memory of the Qur'an. He did not, he
said, have a copy with him as he wrote, which is very understandable
146 j450-17So: A Medieval Environment
in the circumstances. He may hardly have read it for many years,
having been living in Ethiopia for fifty. This easily accounts for the
slips and inaccuracies in his text. He appears to have written first in
Arabic, specifically for Gran, and then to have translated it into Ge'ez.
It remains the only book in Ethiopian Christian literature to include
considerable texts of the Qur'an. Enbaqoms arguments may not
convince a modern scholar any more than they were likely to
convince many of his Muslim contemporaries. They seem mostly
drawn from the standard Arab Christian responses to Islam, with
some personal additions. His insistence that the Qur'an affirms
things, for instance that Jesus is the Spirit of God, which really mean
more than Muslims admit them to mean, is not, to say the least, an
absurd or insignificant argument. But probably his most interesting
proofs are two of a more general nature, one linguistic, the other
moral, neither dependent upon a precise reading of the Qur'anic
text. In the linguistic argument he insists that the Qur'an is the book
of a single language, Arabic, while the 'book of the Jews' is also in a
single language, Hebrew, but the gospel is in all languages. It is not
language-bound. There are, he says, twenty written languages in the
world divided into three groups. There are Hebrew, Svriac, Arabic,
and others of the people of Shem; there are Frankish, Latin, Greek,
and others of the people of Japheth; and there arc Coptic,
Ethiopian, Nubian, and others of the people of Ham. The gospel is
written in them all. The verv vastness of difference in culture and
/
It is not unlike the rcccnt thesis of another convert from Islam to Christianity, Lamm
Sanneh, cf. Translating the Message (1989). Sanneh was not, however, familiar with the work
of Enbaqom.
Riehes to Rags: Ethiopia 1500-1800 147
once the Imam he addressed was overthrown and the Christian
monarchy restored. Yet he was a man of quite outstanding breadth of
culture for the society he lived in and it is no wonder he was admired.
Ethiopians are generous in their recognition of foreign talent. Once
Galawdewos became king, we are informed, he recalled Enbaqom to
his court and kept him there as his councillor for many years. The
monk resumed his work of translation, rendering into Ethiopian at
Galawdewoss command the ancient (originally Buddhist) romance
of Baralam and Yewusaf. It is pleasant to think of one very aged
member of the community of Dabra Libanos translating this novel
into Ge'ez at just the time that another, younger, member of the
same community was in R o m e , 'working day and night', as Tasfa
Seyon himself wrote, at printing in Ge'ez the N e w Testament. They
were both endeavouring to counter the great shortage of Ge'ez
books produced by the destruction of Gran. Enbaqom completed Iiis
in May 1553. Just two years later the first Jesuits arrived with their
seemingly ceaseless determination to refute the 'errors' of the
Ethiopians. Seyon in R o m e acknowledged papal authority without
hesitation but defended the orthodox}' of the Ethiopian Church no
less emphatically. What his writings most suggest, however, is a lively
sense of Christian unity and friendly co-operation able both to give
and to receive. The Counter-Reformation mind of Rodrigues or
Oviedo lacked the more medieval tolerance discernible in Enbaqom
and Tasfa Sevon.
4
line »c fitted far less with the logic of prc-Tridentine Catholicism. The comments of
Alvares upon Ethiopian ecclesiastical culture were remarkably unjudgemental. Note Paul
Ill's original proposal simply to authorize the Emperor to choose a Patriarch of lus own.
Rome's natural willingness to tolerate oriental diversity declined considerably in the course
of the 16th cent.
156 1450-1780: A Medieval Environment
M e n d « reports such chants (Beccan, viii. 374), as docs Almeida (ibid, vii, 176). The
quotation comes from Ludolf*s \rcu> History of Ethiopia (KS82), 3 5 7 - 8 .
Riehes to Rags: Ethiopia 1500-1800 157
Such a mission needed, above all, subtlety of mind and a maximum
of theological discretion. It had temporarily flourished at the hands of
a number of men of exceptional sensitivity. Ironically, it was sunk
irremediably by the hand of a professor. However, the sensitivity had
been one of initial method and of tone of voice. There is little sign
that it ever extended to the ecclesiological goal. One may ask
whether Paez was not fortunate in the moment of his death. In 1640,
when it was too late to matter, Propaganda Fide forbade the
Ethiopian Rite to be altered. Why was Mendes appointed as
Patriarch without, it seems, any instructions on the subject of rite?
The Ethiopian liturgy had, after all, been printed in R o m e in the
previous century. Neither the papacy nor the Society of Jesus seems
to have adverted to the problem at all. Nor, so far as one can see, had
Paez. Perhaps he had simply taken it for granted that the Ethiopian
Rite and calendar would continue, but he seems never to have said so
and he had many years in which to think about it and write to the
authorities. He and his fellow Jesuits said mass according to the Latin
Rite and the few Ethiopians he received into Communion then
worshipped in that rite too, so Mendes was not obviously
overturning the practice of Paez and was never subsequently
blamed by his fellow Jesuits for so doing. Antonio Fernandez
became Mendes' Vicar-General and never seemed to detect any great
change in strategy. He certainly never criticized the Patriarch.
Within less than fifty years the Society of Jesus had been involved
in the reconciliation of three Eastern Churches—the Maronites in
Lebanon at synods in 1580 and 1596, the Syrian Christians of St
Thomas in South India at the Synod of Diamper in 1599, and then
Ethiopia. All three were heavily latinizing, that of the Maronites the
least, that of Ethiopia the most. Yet the Ethiopian was the largest
Church of the three and the most different in its practices, but also
the most difficult effectively to coerce. It seems extraordinary that the
Society and R o m e had learnt so little from Lebanon and Malabar to
apply to Ethiopia.
Paez shines in personal terms but there seems no evidence that he
had during nearly twenty years in the country thought out a
constructive strategy to cope with the liturgy or anything else once
the process of Catholicization moved from winning over the minds
of a handful of the élite to reshaping public religion. It is fashionable
to praise Paez and damn Mendes, but it could be claimed that Paez
let Mendes down quite as much as Mendes betrayed the legacy of
i58 1450-1780: A Medieval Environment
Paez. Could Paez, any more than Mendes, once Susenyos had
publicly proclaimed his Catholicism, have put up with a court full of
divorcing and polygamous noblemen set on circumcizing their
children? And could such noblemen long have put up with a Church
which damned so many of their ancestral customs? A pre-
Reformation Catholic Church might have been reconciled with
Ethiopia a great deal more easily than could a post-Tridentine one.
Fasiladas was by no means prepared to return to the way things had
been under Sarsa Dengel. Unity of Church had become once more a
national necessity. Sela Krestos and a number of Ethiopian Catholics
who held loyally to their faith were banished or executed. The Jesuits
were ordered to leave and the Patriarch hardly improved things by
appealing to the Portuguese for military intervention to depose
Fasiladas. Portugal had, in fact, just succeeded in reconquering
Mombasa from its Muslim king. That was quite sufficient to alarm
Fasiladas. A few of the Jesuits went into hiding and survived in
Ethiopia for several years. It may well have been the foolish attempt
of two Capuchins, sent by Propaganda, to enter the country in 1638
which brought about not only their own deaths but also that of the
surviving Jesuits, the last of whom were executed in 1640. There-
were, however, a number of Ethiopian secular priests who survived,
ministering in secret, for another thirteen years. Their leader was Fr.
Nogueira, another Fremona priest and a descendant of one of
Cristovao da Gamas companions of 1 5 4 1 . If he and his colleagues
were able to continue so long, it was because they had the support of
a very loyal lay community to shelter them. Fr. Nogueira was killed
himself in 1653. It was the end of any established Catholic clerical
presence for a century and a half. Various Capuchins who continued
to try and enter the country, some in the reign of Fasiladas, others
later, were in most cases quickly murdered.
For two centuries Ethiopia cut itself off from the outside world or.
at least, from Latin Christianity. The isolation was not complete. The
tiny Ethiopian monastic community in R o m e soon ceased to exist,
but the much larger ones in Jerusalem and Egypt continued to
flourish. The learned Abba Gregorio, whom Paez converted and
Mendes ordained, had gone into exile with the latter to Goa in the
1630s. He was in R o m e by the late 1640s, helping the German
scholar Ludolf with his Ethiopian studies, and was entertained at the
court of the Duke of Saxony in the 1650s. Several of the emperors
would willingly have resumed relations with the West, but popular
Riehes to Rags: Ethiopia 1300-1800 159
hostility to any Roman priest remained for long quite overwhelming.
Greeks, Syrians, and Armenians were still welcome. To some extent,
they replaced the Portuguese and must have helped to build Gondar,
but the chief effect of the Jesuit mission was to stimulate a paranoid
sense of isolationism which lasted for 200 years and deeply damaged
Ethiopia's social and mental development.
The quantity of high-quality Jesuit writing about Ethiopia for the
first forty years of the seventeenth century (much of it unpublished
until the twentieth century) is remarkable. It includes the lengthy
accounts of five different authors together with hundreds of letters.
Inevitably, once the Jesuits are gone we know a good deal less about
what happened next. Yet their mission may have helped to stimulate
a new literary wave, principally translations from the Arabic such as a
first book of ecclesiastical law, the Fetha Nagast, or the thirty-five
chapters of the book entitled Spiritual Medicine, translated for Sabla
Wangel, the wife of Yohannes I. Then there was the writing or
revision of various rites including penance and marriage, further lives
of the Saints, but, above all, an explosion of Christology.
One piece of hagiography deserves special attention. It is the Life
of Walatta Pietros, perhaps the first biography of an African woman.
Whether the details arc wholly accurate matters little. The
hagiographical genre had to set an individual's life within a suitable
context, combining secular history and religious ideal. If written little
after the death of its subject, as this was, it would certainly be basically
faithful to the way things were and it presents a picture of very
considerable interest. An upper-class lady, extremely self-confident,
indeed both headstrong and outspoken, she has at the same time to
be shown to demonstrate the necessary qualities of humility and
deference. While able to kill people at a distance, possessing in this
the qualities more usually associated with a witch than a saint, it is
clearly seen to be for the good of their souls, or at least someone s
soul. Married to a devoted husband, she saw her three children die in
succession, in response—it is suggested—to her own prayers to
ensure their eternal salvation. That could well have been sufficient to
ensure divorce and her withdrawal to a monastery, but this decision is
put instead in the context of her husbands contamination by
Romanism. As a married lady, Walatta was a model of the virtues, a
patron of the clergy, whom she provided with dinner on Sundays.
On becoming a nun. she founded her own monasteries for both men
and women, exercised full authority (woe betide the priest who did
i6o 1450-1780: A Medieval Environment
not obey her commands), gave the lead in the building of churches,
and suffered from the Romanizing persecution of Sela Krestos. She
converted a princess, sent to her by Fasiladas, w h o had fallen into
R o m a n beliefs, she spent time in pious reading, she performed
various miracles, and in due course died, but not before a final vision
in which she was constituted by Christ 'Head of the Deacons' (even
though in Ethiopia women did not become deacons). So Walatta
Pictros may be seen as something of an ecclesiastical feminist, as well
as saint, nationalist hero, witch, and miracle-worker. The hagio-
graphie conventions do not make it easy to see through to the real
person, but a sense of the principal concerns of the rime and of the
degree of initiative possible for a devout woman of the upper class
comes across clearly enough.
We have few such glimpses into the interior of seventeenth-
century Ethiopian Christian life, but one other still more
extraordinary is that of the movement of za-Krestos and his
followers in Amhara. 1 9 He proclaimed himself the new Christ,
born again for the Gentiles in Ethiopia, about 1604. Though he was
executed by the Emperor Za Dengel, his followers multiplied,
developing a Church complete with hierarchy, rituals, and a
Communion service in which the faithful received 'the body of za
Krestos, our God, which he took from Amata Wangel, the Lady of us
all*. The movement was effectively wiped out by orders of Susenyos,
many of its members flinging themselves to death over a precipice. It
remains, in the litde we know of it, not too dissimilar to that of
Kimpa Vita in the Kongo just one century later.
The post-Jesuit age is dominated by Gondar. Fasiladas was as strong
and single-minded a ruler as his father, and he ruled for well over
thirty years. Having rejected R o m e , he set about the reconstruction
of Ethiopian orthodoxy in a new and yet traditional way. Ever since
the jihad of Gran, the cathedral at Aksum had been in a very poor
condition indeed. Fasiladas built a new one, not nearly as impressive
as that of antiquity but still as fine as he could make it. It is the
19
G. Haile, ' A Christ for the Gcmi\c<>\JRA 15 (19X5), 8 6 - 9 5 . We would have a third,
very different hut no less fascinating, glimpse into 17th-rent. Ethiopian religious life if w c
could accept the Hatata of the philosopher Zara Ya'iqob as genuine as, for instance,
Pankhurst, Ethiopia, J 5 9 - 6 5 . still does. For its full text in Ge'ez and Latin translation see
Philosopht Abessitti, ed. E. T.ittmann, C S C O 1 8 - 1 9 (1904. repr. 1955). Unfortunately it
appears to have been composed by a içth-ccnc. Italian Franciscan, see C . Conti Rossini. *Lo
Hatata Zara Ya'qob e il Padre Guisto da Urbino*. Rendùonti delta Reale Aceademia dei Ijncei,
5 / 2 9 (Rome. 1920). 2 1 3 - 2 3 .
Riehes to Rags: Ethiopia 1500-1800 161
cathedral that has been there ever since. The establishment of a
capital at Gondar may have been inspired by the building at Dancaz
by Paez of a stone palace for Susenyos, though Zara Ya'iqob had
done the same two centuries earlier at Dabra Berhan. His successors
had at once abandoned it. But perhaps Aksum itself or even Lalibela
may have been at the back of the mind of Fasiladas, or simply the
consciousness that in other countries kings lived in castles and
capitals. The great stone castle of Fasiladas still looks impressive
enough. It seemed progressive. It provided protection, a centre for
administration, an appearance of power. Almost certainly it
contributed, nevertheless, to the decay of the Ethiopian monarchy
and of Ethiopia itself. Gondar had little to offer beyond its palaces. It
neither presupposed nor generated any sort of middle class or wider
urban life other than the Arab town a mile awav, so similar to the
towns which grew up next to the transient courts of the kings of
West African medieval empires. Economically Gondar generated
nothing. It merely isolated the Emperor from his provinces. Only the
ceaseless imperial itinerations of the past could hold the country
together, while maintaining his apartness from provincial loyalties—
the power of Solomonic isolation. The more the Emperor remained
at Gondar, immersed within the mirrors and ivory of the latest palace,
the more Shoa, Tigre, Amhara, and Gojjam would go their
independent ways.
Gondar had, however, a more intrinsic significance. At least in the
original conception of Fasiladas, it was to be a religious as much as a
royal city, a revitaiization of Ethiopian Orthodoxy, a symbol to
outshine the buildings of the Jesuits. Gondar was not in purpose a
secular power-centre, but a mysterious combination of the divine
and the royal, a kremlin in which, surrounded by high walls and great
gates, a mass of churches would be as important as the palaces: St
Mary of Zion, St Mary of Sihor, St Mary of the Gondar people, St
Michael of Aira, St Simon of Tzaamdi, St George of Damot, St.
George of Ueerangueb, St John of Guara, the Church of the Apostles
of Deva, the Church of the Four Saints; a little later came the Church
of God the Father, the Church of St Anthony, and many more, over
forty in all (Poncet claimed over a hundred). In Gondar lived only
the royal family, its ministers, servants, and soldiers, the Abuna, the
Eccage, the Aqabe-Sa'at, and numerous other priests and monks. It
was a city shared between prayer and political intrigue.
162 1450-1780: A Medieval Environment
vi. 'llie Eighteenth Century
For some seventy-five years, through the reigns of Fasiladas, Iiis son
Yohannes I, and his grandson Iyasu I, the Ethiopian monarchy
retained a certain strength and seeming vitality within the new shape
that Gondar had given to it. The French doctor Charles Jacques
Poncet, visiting the country in 1699—1700, provides a description of
prosperity and good order not too unlike that of Alvares 180 years
earlier. The art of the period, both in manuscripts and in wall
paintings, was remarkable, more naturalistic than that of previous
centuries and not at all averse to European influences. Again it was a
great age for music, the period in which the Ethiopian musical
tradition developed its standard annotation. Unfortunately music, art,
even theology are only a small part of life. The kingdom was
declining in size and centralized control as waves of Galla (more
attracted to Islam than to an Amharic-dominated Christianity)
infiltrated many parts of it. From the deposition of Iyasu in 1706
Ethiopian political history degenerated into a chronicle of palace
revolutions, the rise and fall of emperors who controlled little more
than Dembea, the province immediately around Gondar. Shoa
became effectively independent, kings slaughtered their subjects and
one another or were deposed by the Ras of Tigre, Begemdir, or
Gojjam. Yet within the walls and soon half-ruined palaces, a ritual
but no longer creative semblance of the ancient Solomonic kingship
retained its high claims and continued to preside over the fanatical
rivalries of monastic orthodoxy while averting its eyes from the
reality of social and political disintegration.
Ecclesiastical history became dominated by a struggle between two
Christologies, one championed by the House of Takla Haymanot,
the other by that of Ewostatewos. It seems to have been set off by a
monastic sense of the need to respond theologically to the arguments
of the Jesuits about the two natures of Christ. Fasiladas denied to
Mendes (probably correctly) that there was any substantive doctrinal
difference between the two Churches. 2 0 Mendes, unbending
Counter-Reformation theologian that he was, could not agree.
Certainly, while kings tried regularly to play down theological
disagreement, clerics equally regularly accentuated it.
20
The decisive 1632 letter of Fasiladas to Mendes, which the latter reproduced in fxill in
his Hxpeditio Aethiopica (Beccari, ix. 2 ^ - 3 2 ) rather reminds one of the Confession of Faith of
Galawdewos in the tolerance of its theological judgement.
Riehes to Rags: Ethiopia 1500-1800 163
For the Ethiopian theologians the problem came to be focused on
the verse in Acts ro: 38 where Peter is reported as declaring that 'God
anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power'. If,
as in Western doctrine, two natures—divine and human—are
admitted to exist in Christ, then it seems easy to explain that God
anointed the human nature. But if the doctrine of the two natures is
rejected, as is required by monophysitism, then there arises the
problem: what was anointed? A German Lutheran named Hcyling,
who came to Ethiopia with the new abuna, Marqos, in 1637 may
actually have set off the form of the resultant controversy by focusing
attention upon the meaning of the word 'anointed' (which underlies,
of course, the meaning of 'Christ'). Two schools developed,
reflecting the traditional division of monastic orders. T h e
Ewostathians held that the anointing was the divinization of the
humanitv, identical with the union of the two natures into one. This
was known as the Kebat. The House of Takla Haymanot, on the
other hand, held that the anointing had nothing to do with the union
itself, which it presupposed, but instead made Jesus into the Messiah
or second Adam. This became known as the Tcwahdo. The Kebat
was more rigorously Monophysitc, the Tewahdo approximating
more to Western views. In this the Houses of Takla Haymanot and
Ewostatewos were more or less replaying their roles from earlier
Sabbath controversies. It is noticeable, nevertheless, that whereas in
the fifteen century the Ewostathians were led by coastal monasteries,
like Dabra Bizan, in the far north, by the eighteenth century these
areas had been so Islamicized as to matter a great deal less. The
kingdom had withdrawn from the sea. Just as the truly ancient
monasteries around Aksum, like Dabra Damo, were already taking
second place by the fifteenth century because the heart of the
kingdom had moved away from Aksum, so by the Gondarine period
even Dabra Bizan had effectively yielded leadership to the
Ewostathians of Gojjam.
Two synods were held in the 1650s under Fasiladas to decide
between the opposing views. The first supported the Kebat, the
second the Tewahdo. From then on the Tewahdo, the orthodoxy of
Dabra Libanos, was upheld by the emperors through a series of
synods for some fifty years. Yohannes 1 (1667-83), Iyasu the Great
(1683-1706), and Takla Haymanot (1706-8) all maintained the
doctrine of the Tcwahdo. After that, however, things changed.
Theophilus, Justus, and David III veered round to the monks of
164 /45°~l 7$°: A Medieval Environment
Gojjam and under David there was, furthermore, a considerable
massacre in 1720 of the leading monastic supporters of the Tewahdo
in the palace of the Eccage at Gondar. Other monastic strongholds of
the doctrine in Dembea were also stormed by the army. From then
on the Ewostathians were for long the dominant party. The
explanation for the shift in imperial favour may have been a
geopolitical one. Up to the early eighteenth century the emperors
were still seriously trying to maintain a real unity for Ethiopia. For
that it was absolutely required to retain the loyalty of Shoa and of its
principal religious tradition upheld by Dabra Libanos. From about
the fall ofTakla Haymanot, the son of Iyasu the Great, in 1708 this
policy fell by the wayside. Shoa could no longer be controlled and so
there was less point in placating its monks. There was much more to
be said for ensuring the loyalty' of Gojjam, a province far closer to
Gondar. Geography prevailed over theology. The palace of the
Eccage was stormed, and Shoa effectively withdrew for more than an
hundred years into autonomous existence, an existence about which
we know exceedingly little.
R o m e never gave up hope of reviving its Ethiopian mission. It was
occasionally encouraged by emperors clutching at straws, for they too
had never quite abandoned the miasmic hope that somehow R o m e
might once more provide the sort of help which, in the legend of the
past, Cristovao da Gama had brought to Galawdewos in the country's
supreme hour of need/ 1 Given popular opposition at home, the
political state of Europe, and the missionary rigidity of R o m e , it was
a singularly ill-founded hope. It produced a joint Jesuit-Franciscan
mission around 1700 and another Franciscan mission in the r750s,
but they were entirely ineffectual. However, two Bohemian
members of the 1750s mission, Remedius Prutcky and Martinus
Lang, were permitted to remain in Gondar for seven months and
acquired considerable influence over the royal family, despite
showing 110 sympathy at all for Ethiopian orthodoxy. When they
returned to R o m e , they recommended the appointment of an
Ethiopian bishop. This may have encouraged Propaganda Fide to
have another try of a different sort toward the end of the centurv.
/ /
Otic claimed imperial submission to the Pope, that of fyasu I, sent via (he Franciscan
Joseph of Jerusalem in 1702. is probably entirely fraudulent, though M . C . da Nembro
appears to regard it as genuine ('Martirio ed espulsione in Etiopia', PI'MR i/l (1971), 646
70). see Beccari. 1 4 4 1 - s . i
Riehes to Rags: Ethiopia 1500-1800 165
consecratod bishop in June 1788 and dispatched via Egypt to his
home country with another Ethiopian priest also trained at
Propaganda. They worked for some months around Adwa but were
bitterly attacked once their character became clear. The ancient and
hospitable monastery of Dabra Damo provided refuge for a time, but,
after spending many miserable years wandering from place to place,
Bishop Tobia finally arrived back in Egypt in 1797. Before
consecration, which had been appropriately performed by a bishop
of oriental rite, he had been required to take an oath to use only the
Ethiopian Rite. Mad R o m e then learnt its lesson? The Patriarch of
Alexandria was particularly bitter at this move, declaring that 'from
the time of St Mark until now there has not been a single Ethiopian
bishop'. 22 The Patriarch therefore requested the princes of Ethiopia
to imprison, torture, and execute the bishop. Tobias mission did
indeed threaten the Egyptian monopoly and Ethiopia's total
dependence upon Egypt. It is not to be condemned for that, but it
may be remarked that the very need to exact an oath about the use of
the Ethiopian Rite is revealing. It was only necessary because Tobia
had been trained, not within the Ethiopian tradition, but in the Latin
environment of Propaganda Fide and had for years shared regularly in
the Latin Rite. The Ethiopian Rite he was now required to use was
not a rounded Christian tradition but simply a certain liturgical form
to which, hitherto, he may have been too little accustomed. If R o m e
was to respect Ethiopian Christianity it would have to go a great deal
further than that.
James Bruce visited Gondar in 1770—1 and gives us a lively picture
of a much diminished kingdom, almost impotent emperors, the
dominance of Ras Mika'el of Tigre—a dominance never for long
uncontested by alternative warlords. Less than twenty years later
things had fallen completely apart and there began what came to be
known as 'Zamana Masafent', the 'age of the Judges'—a reference to
the post-Mosaic period when 'there was no king in Israel'. The last
king to rule at all effectively was Takla Giyorgis and his reign was
appropriately nicknamed 'Fasame Mangest', the end of government.
It is worth pausing a little at this point and we are fortunate in
possessing a chronicle that tells us a great deal about the uncertain
years of his reign (1779-84 plus various brief restorations as far as
O n the 10th [;V/a.fk<irawj, September) there were great rejoicings in the town
of the Negus because Azaj Gabru and Tserag Masare Fequr F.gzie (Beloved
of God) had reconcilcd, by order of the Negus, the men of the House of
Kwostatewos with the Aqabe Sa'at Kabte from their hearts and on 0.1th, as
H. Weld Bluudell (ed .). Ihr Ro'/jI Clmmklc of Abyssinia 176p-!S40 (Cambridge, 1922},
54
230. Ibid. 2.66
Ridws to Rags: Ethiopia 1500—1800 T67
the B o o k says, 'And they carnc to the place of contention, and settled it by
taking oaths'. On the 1 tth the men of Dabra Libanos stayed with the men
o f the house of Ewostatewos singing hymns of love in the Church of the
Holy Fasiladas, for previously they sang the music of discord. And they
came out of there and spent the time in festivity at the royal palace, eating
and drinking, and the next day the Negus again feasted the priests
mentioned above. And the Aqabe Sa'at Kabte also serenaded the Negus
with songs of peace-making. 2 5
1780-1890
FROM ANTI-SLAVERY TO TOTAL
SUBJUGATION
5
EQUIANO TO NTSIKANA: FROM THE 1780s
TO THE 1820s
C). Cugoano, 'Ilioughts <vid Sentiments on (he ISvik c*f Slavery (1787), 4 2 - 3 . 62, 146.
liquiano to Xtsikatia: 1780s to 1820s 175
odd that his name does not appear in most accounts of the
movement. The second is that Equiano represented at its most
articulate a new social reality: a black, Protestant, English-speaking
world which had grown up in the course of the eighteenth century
on both sides of the Atlantic in the wake of the slave trade. A dozen
of its leaders, 'Sons of Africa', including Equiano and Cugoano,
addressed a special memorial of thanks to Granville Sharp in
December 1787. They had all been given, and willingly employed,
European names, but it is noticeable that both Equiano and Cugoano
chose to stress their African names on the title-pages of their
published works, and Cugoano remarked insistently that 'Christianity
does not require that we should be deprived of our own personal
name, or the name of our ancestors.'2 They had no problem in using
both. Equiano, the Igbo, could sign himself 'Gustavus Vassa. the
Oppressed Ethiopian, N o 53 Baldwins Gardens', London. They
appear already conscious of constituting something of a cultural,
linguistic, and religious bridge. Equiano in London appears as a more
articulate equivalent to Lourenço da Silva, active in Lisbon and
R o m e a hundred years earlier.
/ There were at this time far more African Protestants west of the
Atlantic than east of it, but it was appropriate that Equiano and
Cugoano, the most vocal among them, should be based in London.
London, one may well say, was not only the capital of the empire in
which most of them lived (including, until the 1780s, the North
American colonies), it was just at this point becoming a sort of capital
of Africa itself. And so it would remain for 150 years. Just a year after
Equiano's book appeared, people in London would be avidly reading
an account of the east of the continent, James Bruce s description of
Ethiopia in his Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile. Britain was
about to take control of Cape Town and its hinterland, the decisive
entry point into the southern half of the continent. N o European
state possessed more forts along the African coast; no nation carried
in its ships more African slaves across the Atlantic; nowhere else in the
world was there such knowledge or such concern for Africa, a
concern demonstrated by the formal establishment in 1787 of the
Committee for the abolition of the slave trade. It was essentiallv a /
Ibid. 14?.
i(j 2 1780-1890: An ti-Slavery to Subjugation
but its interests would be very considerably African and 110 other
societvS would send such influential missionaries to Africa over the
next half-century. Other missionary societies too, founded at this
time, like the hardly less influential Church Missionary Society, were
based in London.
By no means the majority of Africans carried overseas into slavery
were, by the late eighteenth century, even nominal Christians. In the
West Indies very fewT were, but in North America Christianity had
been spreading fast, especially among those who had escaped from
slavery, legally or illegally. The men who joined the British Forces in
the war of American Independence to fight for their freedom against
white colonists, who had asserted the equality of all men in their
opposition to His Majesty's government in London but were not
willing to extend that equality as far as black slaves, found
Christianity a unifying and strengthening force. When the war was
over and some of them were resettled in Nova Scotia, Christian
congregations led by their own preachers were their strongest
institution. Men like David George, w h o had been a slave in
Virginia, become a Christian there, joined the British Army, and was
evacuated to Nova Scotia in 1782 to become a Baptist preacher, or
the blind Moses Wilkinson, also from Virginia, who became in Nova
Scotia a notable Methodist preacher, were the local leaders of a new
black society. Legally free, basically literate, it was a society whose
Christianity was that of a tolerant Protestant sectarianism—a religion
of much preaching, much hymn-singing, and a certain amount of
spirit-filled enthusiasm. It was a religion which, sharing in the
essentials of late eighteenth-century Evangelicalism, took the
authority of the Bible wholly for granted. Equiano's portrait on
the frontispiece of An Interesting Narrative shows him holding open
the N e w Testament at the verse in the Acts of the Apostles by which
he was vouchsafed his second conversion. The Bible had become, far
more than any deed of manumission, the charter to which one could
appeal for freedom and dignity. It constituted little less than the
foundation document of this new society as it shaped itself the other
side of slavery. The underlying sense of African unity was wholly
pervasive. The experience of the middle passage was a great unifier.
Some of its leaders, like Equiano and Cugoano, had been born in
Africa and still knew at least something of an African language. Many
others were sons of those who had been. In the late eighteenth
ccntury little distancing had been achieved from their continent of
liquiano to Xtsikatia: 1780s to 1820s 177
origin. The continued scale of the trade, the tens of thousands of
annual new arrivals, ensured that. Yet the diversity of their origins
and their languages necessitated the adoption of English as the
language of this new Africa, an Africa in diaspora, a Christian and
biblical Africa, an expanded Ethiopia.
* T. Thompson. An Account of'Iivo Missionary Voyages by the Appointment of the. Society for the
Propagation of the Faith in Foreign Parts (1758; repr. 193?), 29.
* M . Priestley, 'Philip Quaque of Cape Coast', in P. D. Curcin (cd.), Africa Remembered
(1968), 1 1 6 .
liquiano to Xtsikatia: 1780s to 1820s 179
clear that the Protestant concern for vernacular translation was
already present with these Gold Coast Fante—it was the very
spearhead of their work—but it is clear too that in missionary terms
they were all failures. They all had white wives and, in Capitein's
case, his suggestion that he might marry' a black was rejected in
Holland as dangerous. They were gifted individuals, blossoming in
Europe but tied in Africa to a tiny white slaving community and only
serving beyond it a rather nominally Christian fringe of mulattos
living in the shadow of a fort.
Even in the case of Quaque, whose ministry lasted far longer, this
hardly changed. Ordained in London in 1765, his position at Cape
Coast Castle was defined as that of 'Missionary, School Master, and
Catechist to the Negroes on the Gold Coast' as well as 'Chaplain' to
the casde. He survived for fifty years, so witnessed in old age the end
of slaving within the castle. His white wife died and he married a
black woman. She died and he married another. He died in 1816, a
highly respected figure w h o had persevered in the ideal of priesdy
ministry he had learnt in London as a young man. As a missionary he
had had little success. Nevertheless, there did come from his small
school men who a generation later would be among the leaders of a
struggling coastal Church. Two of them, John Martin and Joseph
Smith, wrote in 1834 to the Wesleyan Missionary Society to invite it
to the Gold Coast, an invitation which led to the arrival in 1838 of
Thomas Birch Freeman, the father of Ghanaian Methodism. There
is, then, a genuine black continuity between Quaque and the Church
of a century later.
From the late 1780s Protestant Christianity would impinge upon
Africa in a new and far more dynamic way. Granville Sharp, the
charming, determined, but slightly eccentric protagonist of African
freedom in London, was persuaded that it would be a real step
forward if some of the black people in London, many of whom were
penniless and in trouble, could be resettled on the coast of Africa.
The 'Black Poor' of London could be transformed into a flourishing,
free agricultural community, an example of the way things could be
without the slave trade. There was, in Sharp's vision, to be no
governor. They would rule themselves according to the ancient
Anglo-Saxon principles of the Frankpledge, as understood in
eighteenth-century England. The government agreed to ship them
out, and a first settlement was made in this 'Province of Freedom', as
Sharp liked to describe it, in 1787. The settlers wrere, for the most
i(j 2 1780-1890: An ti-Slavery to Subjugation
part, from among the dregs of London society with seventy white-
prostitutes thrown in, while the problems even a very well-managed
enterprise was bound to encounter were huge. Unsurprisingly, it was
not a success. Some of the settlers were quickly re-enslaved; some
turned slavers; many died; quarrels with the local inhabitants
mounted until in December 1789 a neighbouring ruler burnt the
settlement down. Reinforcements, indeed a new start and a
governor, were imperative if the whole exercise was not to be
dramatically counter-productive: apparent proof of the inability of
freed blacks to make good. A Sierra Leone Company was established
and new settlers sought. At that point Sharp seems to have received a
letter from Cugoano suggesting that there were plenty of suitable
blacks in Canada, formerly British servicemen, who would like to go
to Sierra Leone and might even pay their way: 4 They are consisting of
Different Macanicks such as Carpenters, Smiths, Masons and farmers,
this are the people that we have immediate use for in the Province of
freedom.' 5 C u g o a n o had been visited by Thomas Peters, a
millwright, formerly a slave in North Carolina, then a sergeant in
the Guides and Pioneers, now settled in Nova Scotia. Sharp met
Peters, the directors of the Company accepted the plan, and the
Treasury agreed to cover the expenses of shipping. Thomas Clarkson,
a leading abolitionist and a director of the Company, had a younger
brother John, a naval lieutenant, who was willing to superintend the
operation and did so very well. Fifteen ships were chartered to carry
1,100 emigrants from Halifax to Sierra Leone. In January 1792 they
sailed; six weeks later they arrived in Freetown and the real history of
Sierra Leone began.
In Halifax, awaiting embarkation, they had been divided into
companies, each with its captain, and in many cases the captains were
the preachers of the Christian congregations which had formed
themselves in Nova Scotia. David George, the Baptist, was one; Luke
Jordan, the Methodist, another; so too were William Ash and Cato
Perkins, preachers in the Countess of Huntingdon's Connection.
Doubtless not all the Nova Scotian emigrants were committed
Christians, but a large core of them were, so that Freetown became
from its start an emphatically Christian town. It was not Christian
because of its English Evangelical sponsors or on account of any
missionary' (at the early stage there was none), but because its African
A. P. Walls, ' A Christian Experiment: The Early Sierra Leone C o l o n y ' , in G . J . Cuming
(ed.), 'the Minion of the Church and the IbopagaUon of (he l:ai(h, SCH vi (1970). 108.
' A. M . Falconbridge, Xarralive of Tuv Voyages io the River Sierra ixonc (1793), 201.
H
M . Knutsford, hjc and Inter* of Zachary Alasaulay (1901), 145.
v
June 1 8 1 7 . Walls, 'A Christian Experiment', 126.
i(j 2 1780-1890: An ti-Slavery to Subjugation
separation of Church and State, the missionary desire to support and
- ^ b e supported by government 'especially in a foreign part 1 . In this case
both were Methodist expressions. In practice, however, they were
divergent tendencies rather than contradictory polities. Almost no
one could quite disconnect politics and religion for long; almost no
one sought for an established Church. The Nova Scotians for the
most part knew perfectly well that they needed and benefited from
British rule and a general British patronage for Christianity however
little estabhshmentarian was the temper of their religion. They
fought against the American Republicans under the British flag
precisely because they shared with the Republicans a concern for
freedom which now they were able to express most emphatically in
the sphere of religion. And in Sierra Leone they were constitutionally
free to do so, however much their governors might personally prefer
a more Anglican face for the Church.
Their power to build upon and develop this highly congregational
form of Christianityj was limited. Thev/ lacked resources, educational
and academic, and the deeper sense of a religious tradition to pass on,
and, as the years went by and the original leadership who had
benefited from a wide North American experience aged, they could
not but feel the need for qualified assistance. Thus in 1807 a
Methodist preacher, Joseph Brown, wrote most earnestly to his
brethren in England requesting 'a pious person who could assist in
preaching to the people, and taking the charge of our small flock . . .
as I am old, my assistant, M r Gordon, is likewise advanced in years,
and there is not any suitable person being raised up here'. 1 0 It proved,
however, too difficult to reconcile this early Freetown tradition of
African independency with the authoritativeness almost inherent in
the leadership of a white British minister sent from abroad, and the
Methodist congregation at Rawdon Street which had appealed for
help in 1807 reconstituted itself in 1821 as a Church independent of
the mission which had been provided for it.
In 1807, however, a far more important development took place,
the passing by the British Parliament of the bill for the abolition of
the slave-trade, just twenty years after the Abolition Committee was
first constituted in London and Cugoano's 'thoughts and Sentiments on
the Evil of Slavery had been published there. It was, despite the delay
(in large part due to the counter-effect of the French Revolution and
îc
X'fethodisi Magazine (1807). 203 -4.
liquiano to Xtsikatia: 1780s to 1820s 183
the war), an impressive achievement, going as it did against the
undoubted economic interests of Britain and a powerful interested
lobby of planters and merchants. It legally placed the interests of
public morality above profit and market forces. It was in 110 way at
the time a necessary achievement. It was managed by the
combination of an efficient 'moderate' leadership, at once religious
and political, with a nation-wide public opinion produced by a great
deal of campaigning. The sustained parliamentary spokesmanship of
the morally impeccable Tory Wilberforce, personal friend for so
many years of the Prime Minister, was invaluable, though the true
architects of abolition were Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson,
not Wilberforce. A cause which in the early 1780s still seemed
eccentric was rendered respectable by the underlying support of the
two greatest parliamentarians of the age—Pitt and Fox—and by its
coherence with the best in contemporary thought, philosophical and
religious. It would certainly not have been carried through without
very powerful religious convictions at work which, starting from the
Quakers, took hold of an exceptionally able group of upper-class
Anglican Evangelicals, but it was by no means an inevitable
consequence of the Evangelical Movement, and indeed its movers,
Sharp and Clarkson, were far from typical Evangelicals. In America
Evangelicalism brought no comparable conclusion. In Holland and
France religion remained little affected by such concerns. Only in
England did things take this course at the start of the nineteenth
century and it seems hard to deny that it was due to the persevering
commitment to the abolitionist cause of a quite small group of men
whose separate abilities and positions were knitted together to form a
lobby of exceptional effectiveness.
Its effects upon Sierra Leone were to be momentous. The Act of
Parliament sanctioned the stationing off the West African coast of
ships of the Royal Navy charged with the interception of slavers. It
was agreed that the cargo should be landed at Freetown, thus giving
the tiny colony a new raison d'être. It badly needed one. The Sierra
Leone Company's original aim of establishing a thriving settlement
on the shores of Africa which would demonstrate bv the success of
4
While the centre of Islam did not lie within Africa, it did not lie far
outside it either. The cult and pilgrimage centre of Mecca, the
academic centre of Cairo, were both accessible to many Africans in
the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries far more than were the
Christian centres of western Europe. You could, and did, go to them
liquiano to Xtsikatia: 1780s to 1820s 189
under your own steam. There was a worthwhile degree of continuity
in language and culture between the Arab world and the heart of
West Africa, a continuity which had been forged by many centuries
of contact. There were plenty of black Muslim scholars who could
read and write Arabic, who had made the hajj and were anxious as
recognized participants within the Islamic community both to apply
its traditional norms more firmlv and to introduce its more recent
/
M. Hiikcu. The Suwd of Iruth: 'The Life and Times of the Shehu Usuman Dan Fodio
(1973).
i(j 2 1780-1890: An ti-Slavery to Subjugation
as to replace it with some form of purer theocracy committed to the
enforcement of the shari'a.
Undoubtedly, the strength of Islam in West Africa was much
enhanced by these movements, the consequence of which was also to
extend the Muslim presence southwards towards the coast. Thus
Ilorin, south of the Niger and formerly a dependency of Ovo,
became a Fulani emirate after a jihad in T.817. Yorubaland had been
entered by force in Ilorin but already through commerce elsewhere.
O f course, the literature of each jihad affirmed its effectiveness. Such
is the nature of most religiously committed literature. Yet Africa is a
perennial witness of religious reform movements, as much as political
reform movements, which flow across a tolerant continent and
slowly die of their own inability to change human nature. Futa Toro
was converted into an Islamic state from paganism in a jihad in the
late seventeenth century. It was reconverted by another jihad in the
late eighteenth century. In 1853 Umar Tals jihad began with a hegira,
a withdrawal to Dinguiray from 'the territory of unbelief*, and that
territory was once more Futa Toro. Mixed Islam is not easily
annihilated. Nevertheless, the importance of the early nineteenth-
century jihads for the consolidation of Islam over wide areas by both
the enforcement of law and the strengthening of the Sufi orders was
very great.
The story was always written in purely religious terms and the
modern historian cannot easily, without seeming tendentious,
transform it into another idiom. Yet it is no less clear that the
effect of the jihads, especially that of Usuman dan Fodio, was to
establish the rule of a Fulani minority over the native inhabitants,
Hausa or otherwise, and to create the most powerful state in sub-
Saharan Africa. The pattern of a 'pastoralist' minority ruling over an
agricultural majority is frequently to be found in Africa in
circumstances quite unconnected with jihad or Islam, and the
religious dimension of the Fulani conquest should not be allowed to
obscure, as it often docs, the alternative side of what really happened.
It was the unity' of the Fulani people, their sense of purpose
heightened by Islamic righteousness, which enabled them to triumph
so strikingly over the many petty kings of Hausadom and establish
the hegemony of their own race. The Fulani order which resulted
proved remarkably stable. It was a society with more slaves than
freemen in its cities, a society whose chiefs were models of Islamic
polygamy, just as their predecessors had mostly been models of
liquiano to Xtsikatia: 1780s to 1820s 193
traditional polygamy: dan Fodio had thirty-seven children, his son
Bello seventy-three. While their wives were mostly Fulani, their
concubines were not. But the status of the children was not different.
The Fulani—Hausa divide was thus not accentuated, while the
remarkable development of an Islamic Fulfulde and Hausa literature,
something rather unusual in African Islam, contributed greatly to
strengthen its popular character. Those w h o could understand Arabic
would remain the leisured few, yet the presence of an ongoing local
tradition of Arabic scholarship was no less important.
There could seem little reason in 1820 to question that the religion
of Sokoto and Ilorin, Harar and Zanzibar was destined to become the
religion of almost the whole of black Africa in the course of the next
century or so. In the west it was beginning to enter Ashanti and
Dahomey as well as the Yoruba states. The roots now went very deep
south of the Sahara as well as on the east coast, while the outward
growth was gathering momentum. In the east a Swahili Muslim
literature was developing, comparable to that of the Hausa, while in
the wake of the slave-trade, managed in the east from Zanzibar and
servicing Arabia, Islam was penetrating the interior. Even in Cape
Town in 1820 there were 1,326 Muslim slaves counted, probably ten
times the number of Christian slaves. Overwhelmingly the
impression that a careful observer would have gained of the Africa
of 1820 was that Islam was substantially a missionary- religion, and an
effective one, while Christianity was not. The white Protestant
presence in Cape Town for a century and a half had led to no
significant advance beyond the ranks of the settlers. The ancient
Christianity of Ethiopia had never been communicated to anyone
well beyond its own borders and it had allowed its Christian
neighbour, Nubia, to fade away unassisted. T h e Catholic missionary
effort from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century had been
considerable in scale and often personally heroic, but it had been
remarkably ineffectual. It had now, anyway, almost entirely
disappeared. A handful of Protestant missionaries was beginning to
make its impact in south and west, but there was no large-scale
missionary élan in Africa in 1820 and, still more, no response in depth
of its inhabitants to compare with the onward march of Islam on
almost every/ side of the continent. It was a march assisted bv / the
sword but not confined to the sword, a march in education, learning,
and devotion, a march which was above all one of Africans
194 1780—i Sço: Anti-Slavery to Subjugation
themselves: it might be inspired by what was seen in Cairo or Mecca,
but it was in no way controlled from anywhere outside black Africa.
E. M . Casalis. My Ufe IM
' Basutoland (i889). 105.
Equiano to iWtsikana: 1780$ ro 1820s 201
truly charismatic individual, the prophet, is something of primary
rather than marginal weight. That should perhaps be self-cvidcntly
the case in any examination of the tradition of Jesus of Nazareth.
What made Van der Kemp so different, not from all other
missionaries, but from most of them? Four characteristics stand out.
First he was seen as a man of God, of spiritual power, of prayer, a
rainmaker. Secondly, he was a man of the most absolute poverty.
Other Europeans might be seeking for land and cattle, he wanted
nothing. He walked bareheaded and barefoot, he fed on what was
put before him, he was satisfied with the poorest of huts. Thirdly, he
was a man of high intelligence, struggling with the study of Xhosa,
anxious to explain to Ngqika the role of electricity in lightning.
Fourthly, and probably most important of all, he lived on a principle
of the most absolute human equality, behaving in a friendly, familiar
wavV in evervdav
j / matters. Colour, race,' the material level of culture
1
We held a day of public thanksgiving. We assembled all our people, old and
young, and pressed on their minds the horrid iniquity of trading in human
flesh, that our youth might remember it to their latest years . . . Being eye-
witnesses of the horrid usage of the poor slaves still in bondage in this
colony, so renouned for its mildness to them, we agreed to be urgent ac the
throne of grace, in public and private, that the Lord may be pleased wholly
to do away with this great evil.1*
Report oj the Directors of the Missionary Society, 1809. 302. in J. Sales, Mission Stations and
the Coloured Communities of the Rastern Cape 2800-:$52 (Cape Town, 1975),
Equiano to \Ttsikana: 1780s to 1820s 203
continual barrage of attack upon social injustices suffered by non-
whites. It would be continued in due course by the next L M S
superintendent, John Philip, and would make each of them for
generations the religious bogyman of white tradition: the priest
interfering in politics.
Bethelsdorp was derided by whites, and their view of it was well
reflected in the remarks of the German zoologist Martin
Lichtenstein, who visited it during his African travels in 1803,
when the settlement had scarcely begun. His book first appeared in
German in T 8 I I and in English and Dutch translation shortly
afterwards. Its account of a developed institution was thus
fundamentally unfair and was anyway based on a very short visit,
but it was no less influential for that. Van der Kemp, he wrote, 'had
never turned his thoughts seriously to instilling habits of industry' into
his disciples; but all idea of their temporary welfare appears with him
to be wholly lost in his anxiety for their eternal salvation . . . his total
neglect of husbandry and of all mechanical employments . . .V 6
Despite appearances, such criticism was unjustified and tendentious.
Bethelsdorp had poor land, unsuited for the support of such a
considerable population, but it is by no means true that its
missionaries had no interest in inculcating industry'. By [809 mat-
and basket-weaving, soap-boiling, lime-making, fishing, shoe-
making, candle-making, and wood-cutting were included among
its occupations. Mathilda Smith's school of knitting had been
continued by Mrs Read. Read himself began a blacksmiths forge,
Ulibricht (who joined them in 1805) a windmill and watermill.
Van der Kemp died in December 1 8 1 1 , aged 64. It is surprising he
lasted so long, given the way he lived. He was a man of extremes
both in behaviour and in language, an intensely other-worldly pietist
in his gospel, yet the most intensely outspoken of all missionaries in
his defence of the this-worldly rights of the downtrodden. Van der
Kemp was an outstanding product of the intellectual civilization of
his age, a linguist who began his work with the Hottentots by
composing and printing a catechism in the Khoi language, but who
could work at the same time on a Latin treatise 011 the Epistle to the
Romans and a handbook in Dutch on midwifery for use at
Bethelsdorp. He had a different species of mind from the artisans of
1 lenry Lichienscein, Travels in Southern Africa in the Yrvjx i$oj, 2804, and J$06 ( 1 8 1 2 ;
rq>r. Cape Town, 192S and 193c). i. 2 9 4 - 5 .
i(j 2 1780-1890: An ti-Slavery to Subjugation
Genadendal or the often illiterate farmers with whom he had to deal.
He was an officer and a gentleman, a scholar contemptuous of the
narrow vision of the whites around him yet endlessly sensitive to the
needs and moods of his black dependants. Traditionally the Khoikhoi
worshipped under the moon, so it is intriguing to find a visitor
commenting on 'the simple and venerable appearance of the good
man in the midst of his family, leading their devotion, on a lawn
surrounded by shrubs and enlightened by the beams of the m o o n ' . 1 '
His ability to adapt radically, to 'be a Khoikhoi with the Khoikhoi'
was extraordinary. To most of his white contemporaries and, still
more, his Victorian successors, it was almost scandalous. The thought
of his stooping to wash his own laundry in the river, and, infinitely
more, to marry a young slave, was abhorrent. Van der Kemp's
approach to mission could seem flagrantly opposed to one focused on
the details of'civilization*. In the words of the R e v d John Campbell,
a senior L M S man inspecting the South African mission field a
couple of years later, Tlad the founder of Bethelsdorp, Doctor Van
der Kemp, been more aware of the importance of civilization, there
might at least have been more external appearance of it than there
now is. He seems to have judged it necessary, rather to imitate the
savage in appearance than to induce the savage to imitate him.' 18 In
reality Van der Kemp was not unconcerned with 'civilization', but he
saw it as more a matter of political freedom and equality before the
law than in the details of the exterior neatness of a mission
compound or in clothes.
The issue of clothes expresses the contrast between the two views
pretty clearly. For most missionaries, in common with most other
Europeans, the wearing of western-type clothes was decidedly
important. For Van der Kemp and Read it was not. Jarnsens,
Governor in the brief period of Dutch Restoration after the Peace of
Amiens from 1803 to 1805, criticizing Van der Kemp's viewpoint and
particularly his concern for writing, remarked that he could not see
the point of teaching Hottentots to write when they had no 'desire
to wear clothes nor the least share of civilization*. Iy At Bethelsdorp
European clothes were not discouraged and the Khoikhoi certainly
liked to wear them when thev could, but thev were not insisted
/ /
Sales, A/k.<(0h Stations and the Coloured Commuâmes o} the litis tern Cape. 35—6
). Campbell. 7rdt-W< in South Africa (i8l>). 129.
Sales, Mission Stations and the Coloured Communities of the Iztistcrn Cape, , 1.
Uquiatw to Ntsikana: 1780s to 1820s 205
clothing, which to other missionaries could appear shocking, at least
in church. After his death, Read remained under attack over this but
argued that many people, especially old women, had simply no
money to obtain clothing of a more Western sort. Van der Kemp s
own clothes were for him, as for his critics, part of the issue. Once he
had decided to live as close as he could to his Bethelsdorp Khoikhoi
it was important that his own clothing should not differentiate him
too obviously from his congregation. With the Xhosa he went,
barefoot for eighteen months; with the Khoikhoi he wore 'leather
sandals bound upon his feet, the same as worn by the Hottentots'. 20
The issue of clothes would go on and on. Civilizers like Robert
Moffat simply could not understand how Africans could refuse 'to
adopt our plain and simple modes of dress' in place of theirs, which
were, he judged, 'disgusting', especially in regard to the red ochre
adornment. The Moffat view generally prevailed. 'Thus', he wrote,
24
M . W. WaMman, T h e Church of Scotland Mission at Blantyre. Nyasaland: Its Political
Implications', BSACH 2/4 (1968}, 299 310.
2
- J. McCrackcn, Politics and Christianity m Malawi I$75-1940 (1977), 64-5.
214 ij8o-i Sgo: An ti-Slavery to Subjugation
monogamy for che as yet unmarried might be insisted upon. In the
larger land concessions, especially further south such as that of the
White Fathers at Chilubula (in northern Zambia) or the huge Jesuit
'farms' at Empandeni and Chishawasha, even this might not be
required. It would certainly be hard to enforce with people already
living on a stretch of land now regarded as part of the mission
territory because it had been arbitrarily bestowed upon the Church
by an African king or by Cecil Rhodes.
Mission villages were thus enormously diverse in size, reasons of
origin, and degree of discipline and Christian commitment, as well as
in the social context in which they emerged. What was common was
the sense that this was a place in which the European mind rather
than African custom controlled the details of life—patterns of work
and marriage, the shape of houses, the public practice of religion.
Boundaries with the surrounding world might be harder or softer. At
Masasi, established in 1876, W. P.Johnson wrote in retrospect, 4the
local chiefs trained us very gently' to recognize their authority, but
even there for most things they were their own authority. 'It has been
said that we ruled in our own village simply by Church censure, but
this is hardly correct. We were in the position of well-to-do squires.
We had a fair amount of work to give out, and this was coveted. We
were recognised as heads of the station by the headmen around/ 26
Chauncy Maples wrote already in 1883
Upon the whole I think the presence of the returned slave community
retarded rather than assisted the work among the tribes . . . Our great
difficulty . . . at Masasi . . . was this. We had to take care of a number of
worthless people who not only were not Christians but whose conduct was
so bad that there was scarcely any hope of their ever becoming Christians:
meanwhile their misdoings, quarrels and excesses of all kinds took up an
untold amount of time as dav after day I had to listen to their disputes and
mete out satisfaction to the partners injured by them/ 7
Johnson and Maples were both U M C A men and one feels that few
missionary traditions in the late nineteenth century grew faster to
maturity. By 1890 Bishop Smythics could say firmly, 'I think that we
ought to dismiss altogether from our minds that rather fascinating
idea of a Christian village,' 28 though there were other missionary
tree Ntsikana composed the four hymns which were so soon taken
over by the mission Churches and printed already during the 1820s,
to become for ever the core of the Xhosa Christian worshipping
tradition.
54
Hodgson, 'Ntsikana, History and Symbol', i. 3 2 3 , 3 2 5 , and 327.
6
THE LION REVIVED: ETHIOPIA IN THE
NINETEENTH CENTURY
The state of Ethiopia in the 1830s was as wretched as could be. The
Zamana Masafent, 'The era of the Judges (or princes)', had been an
age of disintegration. There were still emperors in Gondar, chosen
always from the old royal line. They retained a certain mystique but
were virtually powerless and were frequently deposed by one or
another warlord. Gondar functioned more as a city of monks, the seat
of the eccage, than as a centre for even minimal political authority.
Most of the time there were three principal local rulers: one in Tigre
ruling the north, one in Shoa ruling the south-east, and one in
Bagemdir ruling the central and western provinces, including
Gojjam. But that is a simplification as the governors, mostly
hereditary, of many other provinces were themselves in frequent
rebellion against the Ras of Tigre or Bagemdir. The ruler of Shoa was
alone in daring to adopt the title of negus, 'king'. His dynasty
claimed to belong to the old Solomonic line and Shoa had effectively
for a century been a separate state, the most clearly defined, stable,
and well-governed part of Ethiopia. It was ruled from 1813 to 1847
by Sahela Sellase. Bagemdir now belonged to the Yajju, a Galla
dynasty which had, at least superficially adopted Christianity. Closest
to Gondar its ras, ruling from his provincial capital of Dabra Tabor,
effectively controlled the central rump of the country. He could
appoint or depose emperors but his Galla origins and Muslim
affinities set limits to his legitimacy. To the north Tigre stood as the
third centre of power, benefiting from being nearer to the outside
world of Egypt and Europe. In these years it was dominated first by
Sabagadis and, from 1 8 3 1 , by an Amhara subordinate of the Yajju,
Webe, who invaded the north and overthrew and killed Sabagadis. A
little earlier, Gugsa, who had been Ras of Bagemdir for many years,
died, to be succeeded first by his son and then by his 13-year-old
Ethiopia in the Nineteenth Century> 223
grandson, Ali II. Ali's mother, Menem, became in consequence, for a
time, the effective ruler, and installed her new husband, Yohannes, a
son of Takla Giyorgis, as emperor. However, once Webe had
consolidated his power over the north, he turned his mind to the
overthrow of AJi and his own establishment as controller of Gondar.
As the Yajju dynasty was suspected of being Muslims in disguise, it
was useful for Webe to project himself as defender of the Church.
Throughout the 1830s and through most of the first forty years of
the nineteenth century, there was no abuna in Ethiopia. The
authority of Qerelos, w h o arrived in 1 8 1 5 in succession to Yosab,
who had died in 1803, was largely rejected within a Church now-
riven more than ever by Christological controversy. Whichever side
an abuna countenanced, the two or three other parties were
immediately alienated. After Qerelos there was again no one to
ordain priests for more than a decade, but the collapse of any regular
ordinations merely rendered more rapid an ecclesiastical falling-apart
which had been going on for several generations. There never had
been any real jurisdictional authority over the clergy other than that
of the king, and the collapse of the monarchy, confined within the
ruined palaces of Gondar, left the Church, already rent apart by-
theological disagreement, almost entirely without direction. The
eccage might do his best but he was not a bishop and his moral
authority7 seldom went beyond the party to which he adhered. Again,
the weakness of the Patriarchate of Alexandria at this period meant
that no great help could be looked for from that direction, and,
without royal backing, an abuna—even when there was one—was
unable to cope with the ceaseless conflicts over the intricacies of
dogma.
Pagan or Muslim Galla had settled over considerable areas of what
had once been strongly Christian territory. Thus there was a thick
swathe of Galla-occupied land in Wallo, which now largely separated
Shoa from Amhara, Bagemdir, and Gojjam. While the major
monasteries survived, partly because they were mostly so inaccessible,
they often now represented mere pockets of Christianity, survivals of
a past religion, respected as sacred shrines by the new arrivals in the
land, but isolated and quite ineffective evangelically. Thus the
monastery of Lake Hayq, the first of all houses in the south, while
still served by a Christian village on the shore, was otherwise
surrounded by a predominantly Muslim population. Christianity had
crumbled even more in the outlying areas of the old kingdom,
i(j 2 1780-1890: An ti-Slavery to Subjugation
though even here Christian villages or groups of villages survived in
some places, particularly in the far south-west, in Enarya and Kafa,
often in the more defensible areas. Their religion, nevertheless, had
inevitably become increasingly syncretistic, and while the hereditary'
families of priests might continue to minister, in many cases they now
did so without ordination.
While some Galla did become Christians, especially among the
new nobility, who, in general, outwardly respected the principle that
Ethiopia was a Christian state, Christianity had little wide appeal for
them. The fasting required seemed excessive while the liturgy and
holy books imprisoned within a now almost incomprehensible
language offered neither sense nor attraction. For Christians too the
language problem had steadily grown as Amharic and other regional
forms of speech had diverged more and more from Ge'ez, leaving the
Church without Scriptures or liturgy- intelligible to anyone other
than the more learned of the monks. And learning too had
everywhere
»
declined. Hundreds of churches had been destroved / or
abandoned and, after a whole generation and more in which
ordination had been exceedingly- difficult to obtain, the very survival
of the priesthood was seriously in question. Henry Salt, whose agent
and informant, Nathaniel Pearce, was in the country for a long
period during the first two decades of the century, concluded
gloomily but not unreasonably, 'the nation, with its religion, is fast
verging on ruin; the Galla and Mussulman tribes around are daily
becoming more powerful; and there is reason to fear that, in a short
time, the very name of Christ may be lost among them'. 1
In February 1830 Samuel Gobat and Christian Kugler, two
German missionaries employed by the C M S , arrived in Ethiopia at
the court of Sabagadis at Addigrat. The modern missionary and
colonial period had begun. Both Britain and France were soon to
open consulates at Massawa, and an increasing number of Europeans
of every sort were making their way into the country. For the next
thirteen years some half-dozen C M S missionaries, all German,
worked in Tigre, Gondar, and Shoa. They established an initial
rapport with Sabagadis and, after his death, some degree of
confidence with Webe in Tigre and Sahela Sellase in Shoa. Gobat,
the most sympathetic to Ethiopian ways, managed to enter into
dialogue quite positively with the Eccage Filpos in Gondar. The
1
Henry Sale, in G. Anncslcy (cd.), Voyages and Travels (1809), iii. 256.
Ethiopia in the Nineteenth Century> 225
purpose of their mission was not to establish a Church separate from
the Ethiopian but to purify and strengthen the latter by spreading
printed copies of the Scriptures, especially in Amharic, and by
convincing Ethiopians of the errors of their ways in praying to Mary
and the saints, venerating images, kissing the cross, keeping fasts,
cherishing monasteries, and all other un-Protestant practices. They
were rather simple biblically minded Evangelicals, largely appalled by
the Ethiopian Church, about which they were frequently very rude.
It was certainly a gain to have for the first time an Amharic Bible;
nevertheless, they came to recognize how reluctant Ethiopians
could be to turn from Ce'ez to Amharic for their sacred texts, and
sensibly suggested that it might be better to print both versions in
parallel columns of a single volume. They also realized that
Amharic was hardly acceptable in Tigre where its own vernacular
needed to be used. All this was, or could have been, a help to the
Ethiopian Church, but it was their continuous criticism of
Ethiopian devotion to Mary which really brought about their
ruin. Even Cobat, appealing as he was in personality, was advocating
a religious revolution more radical and more offensive than that of
Mendes.
It was inevitable that the initial welcome was changed into
increasing hostility, even if that hostility was veiled for a while by the
desire of the rulers to obtain help from abroad. 'He does not seem to
feel the necessity of a reformation of their Church,' Charles Isenberg
wrote sadly of Sahela Scllase. 2 As ever, rulers wanted guns,
technicians, and foreign alliances, not another wave of religious
controversy. The missionaries were unable to perceive the
consequences of their own simple certainties and—like Evangelicals
on many a later occasion—blamed 011 'Romanist intrigues' or similar
causes what was rather caused by their own lack of rapport with
African reality. It was the enormous gap in religious ideal between a
Protestant and an Ethiopian Christian at his best which rendered the
C M S mission so essentially unrealistic. In failure Johann Krapf, in
some ways the ablest among them, turned to advocate British
political, and even military, intervention (from India) to ensure the
survival and success of their mission—much as the Jesuits had done in
the seventeenth century: 'Our spiritual embassy to these countries
will be according to the success of the British Mission, with them we
' Ibid. 5 1 2 .
Ethiopia in the Nineteenth Century> 227
character of de Jacobis, and the almost leaderless, near desperate state
of the Ethiopian Church were sufficient to ensure the coming into
being of a Catholic Ethiopian community which would survive all
subsequent storms, even if its larger national aspirations would never
be realized. A number of monks, especially from the monastery of
Gunde Gunde, joined de Jacobis, as did whole villages, but the
greatest single conversion was that of Ghebra-Mika'el. One of the
most learned and respected of Gondar monks, he felt the appeal of de
Jacobis for several years before becoming a Catholic in 1845 (the
same year as Newman's conversion) when he was already in his late
fifties. His attraction to Catholicism was not an aberration for circles
in Gondar, being shared by the Emperor, Yohannes III, the Eccage
Mahsantu, and other clergy, but for few did it become a full
commitment, in his case unto death. As in the past, the tendency
towards Catholicism was mostly to be found among the House of
Takla Haymanot, but Ethiopian Catholicism not only made converts
among people of distinction, it also bred them. Fr. Takla Haymanot
of Adwa, w h o was converted by de Jacobis in his teens and was the
first priest to be ordained by him, would become one of the most
remarkable religious and literary figures of nineteenth-century
Ethiopia and the biographer of de Jacobis, 'Abuna Jacob'.
The Lazarists were joined in 1846 by a group of Capuchins led by
Guglielmo Massaja, who went further south with a mission to the
Galla. Massaja ordained de Jacobis a bishop, but the approach of the
two groups was in some wrays different. In theory Massaja was a
Latiniser extending the Latin rite to non-Christians, not purifying
the Ethiopian rite among those already Christian. In practice,
however, he not only largely worked among people already at least
partly Christianized, as in Kafa, but he did also adopt the Ethiopian
calendar and other practices such as fasting. It is noticeable, too, how
tolerant Catholic missionaries could be in the mid-nineteenth
century over matters like circumcision which appeared so
unacceptable in the sixteenth or seventeenth.
Both de Jacobis and Massaja went Ethiopian in one decisive way:
they ordained Ethiopians, some who were married, and some of
quite slight education, at least of a formal Western sort. There can be
little doubt that one of the most decisive reasons for the survival of
the Ethiopian Church across the centuries, often in highly
unfavourable circumstances, was its ordination practice—particu-
larly criticized all the same by Western observers—of ordaining men
228 I?8O-Î8QO: And-Slavery to Subjugation
of the slightest education in very large numbers. De Jacobis and
Massaja did not do quite the same, but they were both committed to
the ordination of Ethiopians and both actually fulfilled their
commitment despite the criticism of colleagues. The acceptance of
a married clergy is in striking contrast to Catholic missionary practice
elsewhere in Africa. De Jacobis opposed an increase in foreign
missionaries, holding that Ethiopian priests could very well by
themselves renew Ethiopian Christianity. Massaja was accused of
ordaining 'Children, scarcely 23 years old, who know neither how to
read nor write, not even having the knowledge of our Holy Religion
which one requires in Europe of a child taking its first communion
. . . how can these indigenous priests properly dispense the treasures
of the Church?' 4 In the latter half of the century when foreign
missionaries were largely excluded, some of these Ethiopian priests in
fact saved the Church.
It is conceivable that, if there had continued to be no Egyptian
abuna in Ethiopia or at least no authority to back him, then the
moral suasion of de Jacobis surrounded by an increasingly large group
of Ethiopian Catholic clergy might have shifted the Church as a
whole from Alexandrian to Roman loyalty. De Jacobis himself even
at one moment thought it would happen. In fact things were to
develop in a quite different direction. In 1841 a new bishop was
appointed in Cairo in response to a request from Webe. The Abuna
Salama was a very young man w h o had been educated in a C M S
school and seems in all traditional ways an astonishingly inappropriate
choice. He had none of the qualities of the customary monastic
abuna chosen from the community of St Anthony. He was proud,
forceful, and cruel, determined to vindicate his own authority but
also, increasingly, the traditional ecclesiology of the Ethiopian
Church. His sympathies for Protestantism and for Britain gave him
some slight protection but hardly affected his policies. Protestantism
was no threat to the Ethiopian Church and its dependence on
Alexandria, Catholicism in the form of de Jacobis, and the group of
Ethiopians developing around him, most certainly was. It was
inevitable that an Egyptian abuna of any vigour would endeavour to
fight the influence of the Catholic mission and exclude it, for
instance, from the use of Ethiopian Churches. De Jacobis as a bishop
in Ethiopia making use of the Gc'cz Rite was, in principle, a rival
4
Des Arancher? 10 Propaganda, Mar. i860, in Cruinmey, Priests and Politicians, 4 - 5 .
Ethiopia in the Nineteenth Century> 229
abuna, but Salama's hostility was directed even more towards
Ghebra-Mika'el, w h o had actually been one of the Ethiopian
delegation to Cairo before he became a Catholic and the only one to
oppose Salama's appointment publicly. Salama seems never to have
forgiven this. With the missionaries Salama could at times be almost
friendly; to the reverend Ethiopian theologian more than twice his
age w h o had publicly rejected him, he could offer only
imprisonment and torture.
For years, however, Salama was in almost no position to do
anything. Caught between the clergy of Gondar, who suspected his
theology; the Catholicizing sympathies of Webe, and the Islamizing
reputation of Ras Ali, there was little scope for Salama either to
strengthen his own authority or to weaken that of de Jacobis, until
the arrival of a new political star, Kasa, Governor of Qwara, changed
irrevocably the context of ecclesiastical conflict by restoring that
central point of reference, royal power, which had always been so
crucial to Ethiopian polity, but which had been so wholly absent
since the late eighteenth century.
Kasa was an upstart, a poor relative, a rebel who had fought his way
up, been made Governor of Qwara (the area to the west of Lake
Tana), married the daughter of Ali, and then proceeded in a scries of
campaigns to advance his power until in 1853 he overthrew Ali to
replace him as ruler of central Ethiopia. That, however, was not
enough. The last of the judges' in the age of the Zamana Masafent,
his ambition went far beyond that. In February 1855 he overthrew
Webe, conquered Tigre, and immediately afterwards was anointed
and crowned king of kings by Abuna Salama. He took as his throne
name Tewodros. Only Shoa remained effectively independent, and
within a few months it too had been subdued. After seventv vears
j of /
official titles, but initially it was military success and ritual, not
ancestry, which vindicated his authority. Observers recognized the
sheer quality and conviction of the man. 'Without Christ I am
nothing,' he would repeat, and his personal life was remarkably
Christian, a monogamist who received communion with Iiis queen
at the coronation. He remained faithful to her even though she was
childless, something extraordinary in an Ethiopian monarch. His
concern for the poor, for destitute children especially, was well
attested. At the same time he reorganized the army, ending the old
system of indiscriminate pillage which was to be replaced by regular
pay, improved the administration of justice, encouraged the Galla to
convert to Christianity, rebuilt churches, and planned for the day
when he would march out from Ethiopia to liberate Jerusalem.
The programme was fantastic. Unfortunately its sheer scale and the
Emperor's ruthlessness in its implementation soon led to trouble:
Ethiopia in the Nineteenth Century> 231
with de Jacobis and the Catholics, with the provincial nobility who
had not really accepted that their independence was at an end, even
with the Church once he decided to tax the clergy to pay for his
army.
De Jacobis had at first been immensely impressed by Kasa: l As for
Kasa. visible instrument of Providence, I cannot prophesy his
intentions, and, if I have praised him to you, it is because virtue is
such a rare thing here that merely its appearance immediately seduces
us/6 That was in 1854. But the alliance ofTewodros and Salama could
leave little room for the sort of ecclesiastical future de Jacobis had
been working for. He was arrested and detained for five months
before being sent into exile, but the full force of Salamas anger was
now unleashed against the leading Catholic Ethiopian monks,
Ghebra-Mika'el above all. While the others were eventually released ê
6
Dc Jacobis to Sturchi, 2 Jan in Cmnimcy, PhV>f.< and Polilidtins. 96.
PiirliatnetUitry fKipers% 152.
232 ij8o-i Sgo: An ti-Slavery to Subjugation
Church which henceforth offered no threat to royal power, the unity
of the kingdom, or even the religious authority of Orthodoxy. De
Jacobis had no real successor, and the European missionaries, few of
whom had sympathized with his ideals, were soon in prolonged
conflict with the Ethiopian Catholic clergy. Yet, almost leaderless, the
Church survived. By 1885 it counted—apart from its Lazarist
missionaries—some 30,000 Catholics, mostly in Tigre, 50 Ethiopian
priests, and 15 sisters. Nowhere else in Africa was there anything
comparable. N o r would there be until, thirty years later, ordinations
began in Buganda.
In 1855, as the Catholic mission withdrew from Gondar, a
Protestant team arrived once more, consisting of Krapf and Martin
Flad and representing Gobat, now the Anglican-Lutheran Bishop in
Jerusalem, and the C M S . Tewodros and Salama welcomed its arrival,
but made clear that they wanted technicians to civilize the country,
not Protestant evangelists. In particular the Emperor wanted a gun-
maker, an architect, and a printer. Somewhat uncomfortably they
agreed to his terms, without quite intending to abide by them, and
the mission arrived in 1856 led by Flad. It was to stay in Ethiopia for
twelve years. Its initial members were by no means the artisans
Tewodros was looking for, but little by little a group of lay artisan
missionaries trained at the St Chrischona Institute near Basle were
recruited and put to work near the Emperors working capital at
Dabra Tabor. Belonging to the pietist tradition, they were as a group
not unlike the Moravian community at Genadendal, committed to
prayer and work rather than to evangelism. They had not, however,
intended the sort of work Tewodros wanted them for: road-making
was one thing, repairing thousands of broken muskets—which is
what Waldmeier and Saalmüller actually found themselves doing—
was rather another. The decision, however, had been taken to find a
way in through imperial service and there was little alternative to
complying with the requirements of Tewodros. It would end up with
casting heavy artillery. Both the Emperor and Salama were pleased
with the compliance and a considerable willingness on the part of the
missionaries to go Ethiopian—to receive Communion, to take
Ethiopian wives. A more evangelical group, led by Flad and Stern,
were permitted in recompense to preach to the Falasha so long as
converts were baptized into the Orthodox and not the Protestant
Church. Evangelicals have mostly a great need to convert someone.
So, if they were not permitted to convert Orthodox into Protestants,
Ethiopia in the Nineteenth Century> 233
the conversion of Falasha into Orthodox seemed the next best thing,
though it did not much please Flad, who thought the Falasha morally
superior to Ethiopian Christians anyway. What seemed to justify
everything was the increasing confidence of the King, who liked to
discuss theology and seemed at least half-convinced by Protestant
tenets: ' D o not believe I am an Abyssinian at heart; no, I am as one of
you,' he told Kien/Jen in a moment of confidence in 1859. 8 T he
missionaries were convinced he was 'a model prince'.
And for a time Tewodros saw them too as model missionaries,
Waldmeier especially. They were providing him with things he
wanted, and could, he hoped, obtain for him the help from Europe
of which he felt increasing need. By 1859 things were not going well
for him. Again and again he had to put down revolts in the provinces,
not only among the Galla but almost everywhere else too. As the
revolts multiplied, his violence in response to them grew; alienating
people still further. There had always been a side to him which could
not brook the slightest questioning of his authority and responded
with a merciless cruelty. He was also at odds with the Church, which
objected to assisting him financially, as with Tigre, Shawa, Gojjam,
the Muslims of Wallo. Disaffection grew deeper not only among the
nobility but amongst the common people, who had at first hailed
him as a saviour. His turning towards the Protestant missionaries has
to be seen in this context but, inevitably, they were unable to gain
him the foreign help he sought or to escape his suspiciousness
indefinitelv./
8
Nrtts fitmx the Journal of f:. M Ftoé, cd. W D. Vcitch (i#éo), 9l.
i(j 2 1780-1890: An ti-Slavery to Subjugation
around Maqdala. Mis cannon, forged by the missionaries and
transported at such cost from Dabra Tabor to Maqdala. proved
useless, and his army was mown down by British rifles in the sole
battle of the war on Good Fridav 1868. Tewodros released the
/
missionaries and all his other European prisoners and, as the British
stormed Maqdala, shot himself Salama had already died in captivity
while the missionaries left the country with the British army,
absolutely nothing achieved. Tewodros had wholly failed to establish
the era of Tewodros, the prophesied era of peace. He had, 011 the
contrary-, still further increased the devastation of Ethiopia's central
provinces.
The fourth factor producing changc in the 1840s was the revival of
Catholic mission. The old movement, which had begun in the
sixteenth century, received new direction by the establishment in
R o m e of Propaganda Fide in the early seventeenth, and continued
with little change, if declining momentum, into the late eighteenth,
largely collapsed under the impact of the French Revolution and
Napoleonic Wars. Religious houses and seminaries were closed in
most parts of Europe. Even the Roman Curia was for years
disrupted. Only after Waterloo could recovery begin. It did so almost
at once, but a great deal of leeway needed to be made up. The
Society of Jesus was officially reconstituted in 1 8 1 4 and new
congregations of a more or less missionary nature were soon being
founded, such as the Oblates of Maty Immaculate at Marseilles in
1816. In 1822 at Lyons a young laywoman, Pauline Jaricot, began a
pious lay association named the Work for the Propagation of the
Faith, a fund-gathering body which would spread throughout the
Catholic world while retaining its headquarters in Paris, and provide
the financial undergirding for the new missionary movement which
was about to develop. But the shortage of clergy was so considerable
in some parts of Europe and the demand was also so pressing in new
emigrant areas, above all the United States, that it was only in the
1840s in the pontificate of Gregory X I V that a real impetus was once
again given to the African mission.
Gregory, Pope from 1831 to 1846, had previously been Prefect of
the Congregation of Propaganda. An extreme conservative at home,
his missionary commitment was outstanding and could lead even to
seemingly radical actions such as the publication in December 1839
of the Apostolic Letter In Supremo Apostolatus condemning the slave-
trade, something which too many Catholic countries were still very
much abetting. While this was not a reversal of the previous papal
position, it was a far more public and weighty statement of
condemnation than anything that had gone before. It has to be said
that it was, in part, a response to British pressure.
A Vicariate-Apostolic of the Cape of Good Hope was erected by
Gregory in 1837, one for the 'Two Guineas' (effectively the whole
west coast north of Angola) in 1842, another for Egypt in 1844, and a
fourth for the Sudan or Central Africa in 1846. By 1850 the eastern
C'ape and Natal had become separate vicariates. Already de Jacobis
77? e Victorian Missionary 263
had landed at Massawa in 1839 while a remarkably mi xed t ^ g ™
Jesuits, led by a Pole, Maximilian Ryllo, ascended the Upp^ r 1 ^
n a e
1847. Irish secular priests were dispatched to the eastt*r P *
A ncW
French Oblates of Mary Immaculate to Natal. Already
Catholic missionary assault upon Africa was, then, well ui )C * er
but while the Protestant assault was centrally unplanned at1^
under the management of a multitude of lay boards, the C a d 1 0 c
far more centralized beneath the control of Propaganda Fi^e* ^
ie cc
Doubtless anxiety about Protestant missionary progre^ P
c 1
stimulate the Catholic revival but, basically, it was simplv th "
• \ always
renewal of an activity which the Catholic Church ha cl ^
:in
regarded as crucial and which had only been, in part, ab .
n
under pressure of extraneous circumstances. The most i „
111
single development within the revival was the foundation '
jon>
by Francis Libermann, a convert Jew, of a new Congreg3t
'Missionaries of the Holy Heart of Mary', in 1840 and its iH e r 8 i n S a
few years later with the far older, but almost defunct,
of the Holy Ghost, based in Paris. The amalgamated group c ° ° ^ ^
name and buildings of the older society but the l e ^ e r a n c
orientation of the new one. It was to be a missionary .ongregauon
explicitly directed to Africa. Libermann was an oucs c a n ? '
perceptive and charismatic figure, able to inject a new
and a more specifically missionary spirituality into his group'
died in 1852 when it was still just beginning.
Only a few years later, in 1854, another new society was ^
11 c c
for Africa in France, this time in Lyons, where the Associatif
Propagation of the Faith was already centred. The Society
1
Missions (SMA) owed its existence to Melchior de Marion-* '
%cr
who had formerly been a missionary bishop in India. It °
sectlon
from the Holy Ghost Fathers responsibility for a large centré
' FY* were
of the west coast. De Bresillac and his first missionary ^
wiped out by yellow fever in Freetown in 1859 only a
after arrival, but a second party established itself at Ouida^ 0 1 1
coast of Dahomey in 1861 led by an Italian, Francesco l 3 o r S u r o -
vir in
They had chosen Dahomey in preference to Sierra Leone £
territory', but the kingdom itself was firmly closed to
and their establishment on the coast at Ouidah proved any f ' 1 1 T 1 ^
c,lbt
virgin. It represented instead almost total continuity with
effective Catholic presence of the past. The home of a Poi" c U ^ u c s c
speaking community of mixed blood and slave-trading t r a C
250 îyiïo—iSgo: An ti-Slavery to Subjugation
Ouidah was Christian enough to want a Catholic ritual presenc:e and
to tolerate a school for its children. Language-learning took second
place.
J e a n - R e m i Bessieux. the Holy Ghost Congregation's pioneer on
the west coast and Vicar-Apostolic of the Two Guineas, had already-
had a Pongwe grammar and a Pongwe-French dictionary printed at
Amiens in 1847, indicative of the way some Catholics, no less than
Protestants, were developing a greatly increased concern for African
languages, but both at Ouidah and in South Africa the impression is
one of a primary concern for people already somehow nominally-
Catholic because of European origin or mixed blood, and of a
pattern of mission in practice rather little affected by the half-centurv
of hiatus since the close of the eighteenth century. It would take
another twenty years for new approaches to develop sufficiently to
alter the character of the movement as a whole. They would be
associated above all with the name of the French Archbishop of
Algiers, Charles Lavigerie.
> and the late nineteenth century was less a revolutionary change of
method—wonderful as that might have been, if genuinely applied—
than quinine, railways, and European administration.
Further to the west,7 however, a somewhat more revolutionary/
initiative was developing. In 1867 Charles Lavigerie was appointed
Archbishop of Algiers, hitherto a position of little importance and
one concerned with not much more than the chaplaincy of French
settlers. But Lavigerie was an exceptional person both in intelligence,
at once learned and imaginative, and in an ambitious forcefulness. Me
was to prove the most outstanding Catholic missionary strategist of
the nineteenth century, determined to turn his see of Algiers into
something of continental significance. In 1868 he founded yet
another society,/ ' the Missionaries of Our Ladv of Africa, soon to
* *
become known as the White Fathers 011 account of the Arab dress
they were given to wear. The White Sisters followed. More
consistently than any one else Lavigerie insisted on a strategy of
adaptation in clothes, language, food. It did not, however, include
theological adaptation. The White Fathers, like all the new Catholic
missionary societies of the nineteenth century, were theological
ultramontanes. In the post-revolutionary era and the age of the first
Vatican Council Catholic institutional renewal was carried out with a
sense of dependence upon R o m e and of the necessity- for theological
77? e Victorian Missionary 255
and liturgical conformity still greater than that of the Counter
Reformation period.
The White Fathers were based quite deliberately not in France but
in North Africa—in Algiers and in Carthage, outside Tunis.
Lavigerie had added to his existing position that of Archbishop of
Carthage and 'Primate of Africa', as well as Apostolic Delegate of the
Sahara. He saw himself as the reviver of the ancient Christian Church
of Africa, the Church of Cyprian of Carthage. He remained at the
same time very much a French statesman for whom the French
conquest of North Africa was a matter of high pride. Without it, of
course, his j o b would not have existed. The White Fathers had their
first mission to work with the Muslims in North Africa,7 but thev j
lay and the clerical. The societies at home sent out recruits who were
overwhelmingly lay, but many of those who stuck it out were
ordained in the field within a few years. A man as little educated as
James R e a d was hardly ordainable at home, but, once his
commitment was proven, the need for more ministers quickly
prevailed even in Church traditions which regarded themselves as
anything but clericalist. Only in the large institutions like Lovedale
and Livingstonia was there really place for a considerable number of
the unordained. Otherwise, 011 the smaller station, the layman
remained unordained only if he really was intellectually not up to it
or had some clear technical j o b to keep him fully occupied. But as
the ordained man spent much of his time gardening, building, or
274 îyiïo—iSgo: An ti-Slavery to Subjugation
printing, the need for the unordained to do such things was not so
obvious. This was, again, true of medical mission, which was not seen
as a distinct field until the end of the century. Until then the typical
medical missionarv was almost invariablv ordained as well. The
* /
enough. They lived there fifty years and brought up a large and
healthv/ familv.
j Further north it was more often disastrous,7 and the
death-rate was particularly high among children and pregnant wives.
Anna Minderer may well have survived—if at times only just—for
seventeen years at Ibadan in the 1850s and 1860$ precisely because she
was childless. The strain on missionary wives in frequent childbirth in
the most awkward of circumstances is clear enough. Emily Moffat
wrote advisedly in i860, l I am almost an advocate, in such raw
missions as this, so remote from help in times of need, for a bachelor
commencement'5 Only a year later R o g e r Price of the ill-fated
Makololo mission wrote to Emily's husband,
On the 7th (March) I found little Henry Helmore lying dead amongst the
others on the bed, and his father and mother, lying on the ground like logs
of wood, scarcely took any notice at all of it, his mother none whatever,
though passionately fond of him. On the 9th my own little babe died in its
mothers arms as she sat by my bedside, where I laid in a wet sheet . . . on
the afternoon of the nth, dear little Selma Helmore died . . . Next
morning Mrs Helmore followed.6
the south not only had 110 health problems but had their life
expectancy actually improved, yet from the 1840s there was an
increasing number of survivors in the west, and some of them,
adequately acclimatized, survived for a very long time. To that small
but powerful group—T. B. Freeman in the Gold Coast, Townsend
and the I linderers in Nigeria, Saker in Cameroon, Bessieux in
Gabon, among others—the Church of the second half of the century
would owe a great deal of its shape.
Missionaries not only turned back or died. Quite a few turned to
given a horse by the Sultan of Zanzibar. It soon died, but later he was
given a donkey by the Sultan of Sadami and it kept going all the way
to Buganda: lIt saved me many a mile on foot.' 1 5 In 1890 Bishop
Tucker took two donkeys on his first journey to Buganda, but 111
1892 011 his second he took seventy. Protestant missionaries tended to
carry far more equipment than Catholics in the big expeditions—
boats, printing-presses, and the rest—requiring many hundreds or
even thousands of porters, each with a load of 70 pounds. If they died
or defected, so much the worse for your luggage. Again and again,
equipment had to be discarded. In December 1877 Mackay,
following C M S board instructions, set off from the coast for Lake
Victoria with six large carts and eighty oxen to draw them. The oxen
soon began to die and by February he had had to abandon the lot.
The idea of water transport was naturally appealing. Though Mgr.
Knoblecher had a boat, the Stella Matutina, 011 the Nile in 1 8 5 1 , this
was once more mostly a Protestant stratagem, encouraged by
11
14 Apr. i Sy I. François Coillard, On the 'Hireshold of Central A frica (1897}. 4 1 8 - 1 9 .
R Coupland, hiingstones Last Journey (1945), 3.
Owen Chadwick, Mackenzie's Grave (1959}. 44
14
Cardinal lavigerie. Instructions aux miuionnaires (Naiiuir. 1950), 12S <j.
77ir Stor/ of Mackay of Uganda, by Iiis sisicr (1892), S9-
77? e Victorian Missionary 269
Livingstone and the 'commerce* school. Supporters at home much
liked the idea of launching boats 011 the great lakes and rivers of
Africa. In due course it made a difference on the River Congo and
Lake Nyasa. Livingstonias Ilala (from 1875), the U M C A ' s Charles
Janson (1888), and the B M S Plymouth on the Congo (from 1881) were
certainly of real use. Elsewhere the distances required for porterage
were just too much and there were plenty of large canoes on Lake
Victoria, for instance. Crossing a lake was the least of missionary
problems. Getting there remained a formidable one. Inevitably, in
consequence of all this, the missionary in the interior tended to be
sedentary. Surviving the inland j o u r n e y was already a feat.
Establishing a mission station with its house and church, reliable
water supply, and gardens was a second. The station itself then
required continuous servicing while the survival of the missionaries
depended above all upon its amenities. Where health and life were
always so much at risk, the shape of the mission was controlled
excessively by the requirement of missionary survival. In theory they
had come to serve others. In practice it had to be that life revolved
largely around their own needs. As one bright young missionary,
fresh from Cambridge, described it:
The contrast will have struck you already. The people, to whom we have
come to preach, lie on the ground or in a reed or grass hut, cat rice and a
bit of dried fish (two cupfuls of ricc and a handful of dried fish is a day s
rarion), carry a load under a burning sun for ten or twelve miles which I
should be sorry to carry a mile in England, walk barefoot 011 the scorching
ground, while we live in grand houses or tents (palaces to these people),
sleep on beds as comfortable as any at home, eat chickens (earned in a box
alive), preserved meat, green peas (preserved), tea, cocoa, biscuits, bread,
butter, jam. Necessary for health perhaps . . .,r>
'What!' he exclaimed with astonishment. 'What are these words about? the
dead, the dead arise!' 'Yes', was my reply, 'all the dead shall arise'. 'Will my
father arise?' 'Yes', I answered, 'your father will arise'. 'Will all the slain in
battle arise?' 'Yes' . . . 'Hark . . . did ever your ears hear such strange and
unheard of news?'21
This might well sound like the Xhosa king Ngqika, responding
sceptically to the predictions of Nxele; it is in fact Makaba, Chief of
the Bamangkhetsi, responding to Moffat on his first visit.
The Zulu were no less unpersuaded by millennialist teaching.
Colenso on his first visit to them in 1854 was assured that the
profession of Christianity had been much hindered by 'persons saying
that the world will be burnt up—perhaps very soon'/"'' The
millennialist assertions of many an early nineteenth-century
Protestant missionary or even the ceaseless stress upon an afterlife
seemed no less bizarre to his black hearers than they did to plenty of
'<J> Fr.nxc«'0 Mortami. Mission? ttt Africa centrale t>iario (Bologna. 1973), «93
"" R. Moffat. Missionary hilxnos and Scenes in Southern Africa (1S42), 296.
Ibid. .;o.|. 22
John Colenso. Ibi I-HTJM in Xatal (1S55). 100 1.
272 îyiïo—iSgo: An ti-Slavery to Subjugation
people in Europe at the same time. 23 But if they got beyond their
healthy scepticism and began to believe, the hermeneutical gap
between white preacher and black hearer could still not be closed.
The missionary, consciously or not, was distanced from the biblical
events and images he dwelt upon in a way that his converts, hearing
of these things for the first time, could hardly be. If angels frequently
appeared in the gospel narrative which the missionary had
thoughtfully translated into their language, then they could be
expected to go on appearing in contemporary Africa, and so forth.
People either did not believe the missionaries or they did. Either way
the latter might well feel that their message had not got through. For
most missionaries there was in reality a great gap between the biblical
dispensation and the ecclesiastical dispensation of the Victorian
Church. It was assumed but not explained. For their hearers it was
only discovered when they later challenged the latter dispensation on
grounds of their understanding of the former and found themselves
in trouble.
The effective theology of missionaries varied a great deal,
Evangelicals from Catholics, millennialists from non-millennialists,
fundamentalists from a handful of relative liberals. T h e same society
might include people with sharply divergent views as—by the late
nineteenth century—was increasingly the case in the home Church,
though Colenso proved too liberal in biblical interpretation to be
acceptable to his colleagues. Missionaries almost always represented
the more conservative end of current orthodoxy at home, but in the
nineteenth century Protestant orthodoxy at least was changing
perceptibly Some were preoccupied with the devil; with others
Satan hardly got a mention. Hell remained a much-stressed Catholic
doctrine long after it was slipping out of Protestant sermons. Yet if
missionaries grew less fundamentalist in their thoughts, they seldom
admitted this too openly, and it almost certainly had little effect on
what African Christians actually understood. The Bible message was
accepted in its most literal form.
There appears, nevertheless, to have been a significant shift from
initial concentration upon sin, salvation, and eschatology to one
focused more upon God and creation, upon a linkage even with
African traditional belief. For Catholics and High-Churchmen, this
** I I. Fast, ' "In O n e Ear 3nd Out at the Other": African Response to the Wesleyan
Message m Xhosaland 1 8 2 5 - 1 8 3 5 ' . J R A 23 (1993), 164 -6.
77? e Victorian Missionary 273
came more naturally than for Evangelicals, but it was a matter of
pedagogy as much as of theology. Bishop Mackenzie, in 1 8 6 1 , never
preached at all to the unbeliever. He did not know enough of the
language to dare to do so, and he did not trust the skills of his
interpreters. The post-Tractarian university mind realized more easily
the absurdity of the sort of brash preaching of the Christian mysteries
in an alien language which an earlier generation had thought itself
bound to engage in. John Colenso, admittedly a theological liberal,
was already in 1865 criticizing missionaries for their stress upon
salvation rather than the larger revelation of God. Callaway, writing
in 1870, records the account a very old Xhosa man named Ulangeni
gave of Van der Kemp's teaching: T i e made enquiries amongst us,
asking "What do you say about the creation of all things?" We
replied, "We call him w h o made all things Utikxo." And he
enquired, "Where is he?" We replied, "In heaven." Uyegana said,
"Very well, I bring you that very one (that is, all that relates to or
concerns him) to you of this country.' 24 Maybe that memory is
coloured by subsequent Christian teaching, but it suggests that even
in the first years of the century a highly intelligent, if idiosyncratic,
Evangelical could start with creation and God, not salvation and
Christ, and could use African beließ as a bridge. 'Tell them', said
Colenso in 1854, 'that their own names are excellent names for God;
and we shall . . . come to tell them more about Him.' 2S Lavigerie
would forbid his White Fathers even to mention anything derived
from revelation and relating to Christ in the first two years of
instruction, which were to be confined to 'fundamental truths of the
natural order'. 26 It would be a command hard to keep, but it certainly
pointed in a sane direction. When linked with the acceptance of a
traditional African name to denote G o d (general, though not
universal, among missionaries) such an approach could enable
missionaries to begin to talk intelligibly, moving on from a common
ground of belief, instead of flinging out at the start an extraordinary
mix of salvific and cschatological doctrines.
Direct evangelism would not disappear, indeed many an African
catechist or prophet would excel at it. They would, of course,
ground it much better than could the newly arrived missionary
within a context of local meaning. Sometimes, even with the
Mow little he knew about Victorian Britain! But his appeal was also
to smaller, more immediately impressive things: the concertina, the
gramophone, but especially the magic lantern, a favourite missionary
possession. Livingstone carried one with him though when using it
he was careful to make clear that there was nothing supernatural
about its effects: it was the natural, scientific power of the white man
which, he believed, pointed to the truth of Christianity, not anything
supernatural, essentially supernatural as the core of his message
undoubtedly was. His explanations meant little to his hearers: the
magic lantern was clearly magical. But such things appealed too
because they simply made life more enjoyable; they helped make it
pleasant to share the missionary's company. They were a way to
create initial interest, even a bit of excitement.
One dav I was walking with him on parochial work when he saw a child,
called Karowanga, a chronic invalid. He washed Iiis sores, but had no
bandage, so he said, 'Haven't we a purificator in church? Let us bind up this
child'. By chance we had some suitable ones and he split these and bound
the wounds of the child with them with medicine. For a rime he prayed
without uncovering them. When he uncovered them he was quite healed
and his arm which had been bent was quite straight.*6
That was an exceptional experience, but it may still express the way
in which Africans frequently understood the effectiveness of
missionary medicine.
Later on two things happened. The first was the development of a
distinct 'medical mission' with its own rationale, staffed bv doctors
* *
and nurses w h o would run hospitals and clinics, but not participate in
missionary work of other kinds. It was only in the 1890s that this
development got under way anywhere, and much later in many
F. K. Ekechi, Missionary Enterprise and Rivalry in Igboland i$57-içi4 (1972), 77- 8.
K. Msigala, 'Reminiscences Started in July 1 9 5 $ ' , trans, from Swahili by C . Blood,
quoted in T. Ranger. 'Godly Mcdicinc: The Ambiguities of Médical Mission in South-East
Tanzania 1 9 0 0 - 1 9 4 $ ' , Social Science and Mediane, 15b (1981). 2 6 1 - 7 7 .
278 1780-1890: Anti'Slavery to Subjugation
places. Albert C o o k , arriving in Uganda in 1896, is one of the first of
the new breed. It involved a rationale which in some ways stressed
the importance of medicine within missionary strategy far more than
had been usual in the nineteenth century, but it also secularized it.
T h e second development, perhaps in some reaction to the first, was
' the rise of independent Churches far more committed to Christian
healing of a spiritual kind. While this can well be seen as the
emergence within Christianity of more traditional African attitudes
to healing and as a critique of the secularity of the twentieth-century
medical missionary approach, it may also be seen as in deep
continuity with the central perceived thrust of nineteenth-century
medical mission.
I have 110 special gift for languages, but what is shared by most educated
men of fair ability. What I have done, 1 have done by hard work—by sitting
with my natives day after day, from early morn to sunset, till they, as well as
myself, were fairly exhausted—conversing with thcin as well as I could and
listening to them conversing—writing down what I could of their talk
from their own lips, and, when they were gone, still turning round again to
my desk to copy out the results of the dav. ' 8
J7
Cecil Northcott, Robert Moffat (1961), 1 3 1 .
J. Colenso. Remarks upon the Recent Proceedings and Charge of Robert, Lord Bishop of
Capetown (1864). 4.4-5.
77? e Victorian Missionary 279
Venn, in December 1862. informing him of che tragic loss of his
papers when his house was burnt down in Lagos:
] had always made it a rule that in case of a fire breaking out, not to hesitate
but to snatch out the manuscripts of my translations the first thing, for
security; and then 1 may try to save anything else if possible; but on this
occasion 1 was not at home to put rny resolution to practice. . . . Thus the
manuscripts of nearly all the remaining books of the Pentateuch which I
would have prepared for the press this quarter were destroyed. My
collections of words and proverbs in Yoruba, of eleven years' constant
observations since the publication of the last edition of my Yoruba
vocabulary, were also completely destroyed. The loss of those is greater to
me than anything else, in as much as it cannot be recovered with money
nor can I easily recall to memory all the collections 1 had made during my
travels at Rabba and through the Yoruba country, in which places 1 kept my
ears open to every word to catch what 1 had not then secured, with which I
had expected to enrich and enlarge my Yoruba vocabulary this year. Now
all are gone like a dream.3y
J. Ajayi, Christian Mission m Nigeria îSji-iàçt 'the Making of a New Élite (1969), 128.
Haiïord-Baticrsby. Pilkington of Uganda, 1 9 . S - 6 .
280 j 780-1890: An ti-Slavery to Subjugation
put all missionaries on probation for the first three years while seeing
whether they could pass the test of learning a language.
A very partial list of the corpus of nineteenth-century Protestant
linguistic work can fittingly begin with Henry Brun ton's Grammar
and Vocabulary of the Susoo language, printed in Edinburgh already in
1802 well before the missionary movement had really got under way
in Africa. It shows well enough where the new priorities lay. Van der
Kemp s pioneering language work with the Xhosa was being done at
just the same time. If we move south from the banks of the R i o
Pungas where Brunton had briefly worked, we may note Gustav
Nvländer's
» work in Sierra Leone from 1806 011 Bulom Sherbro, into *
J. Krabill, 'The Hymriody of the Harrist Church among the Dida ofSouth-Centr.il
Ivory Coast', Ph.D. thesis (Birmingham, 1989). 3 3 3 .
77? e Victorian Missionary 281
enhanced sense oflanguage difference. The fluidity of die oral across
both time and space is diminished, though not entirely lost, by the
reduction to writing and the consequent urge to standardize. Such is
and has always been the consequence of literacy. The social effects of
missionary linguistics could be considerable, but in this area at least
missionaries did not take from Africans their heritage. Rather did
they defend and enrich it, by opening it to a wider usefulness with
both analytical self-understanding and the capacity to absorb the
wisdom of other worlds.
Catholics had not shown such consistent linguistic determination,
but with them too this increased in the course of the cencurv. O n *
nothing was Lavigerie more insistent than that his missionaries should
be masters of the local language, and they were actually forbidden to
speak to each other in anything else after being six months in a
place. 42 1c is doubtful whether that command was strictly adhered to,
but it is certain that the White Fathers became, as a group,
outstanding linguists. They were instructed to produce dictionaries,
grammars, and catechisms. They were not urged to translate the
Scriptures. They became excellent teachers in the vernacular, but
they seldom produced a quantity' of literature comparable with the
Protestants, and never large translations of Scripture. Protestant
vernacular Bibles had multiplied across the continent before the close
of the century, Catholic ones were simply non-existent.
Undoubtedlv/ for a correct evaluation of nineteenth-centurv /
missionaries, their linguistic work is crucial. It constituted the
essential bridge. On the one hand it was the key work through which
to commend the Word of God, so it was primarily evangelical. On
the other hand, to understand a language intimately is also, almost
inevitably, to enter into and appreciate its cultural context, the people
who use it, have made ic,• and been made bv/ ic. It is hard to know an
African language very well and not to be fond of the relevant culture
and people. Through language we can experience an alien culture,
both in its otherness and in its ultimate intelligibility and shared
humanity. In the wrestling with construction, word, and meaning
continuously involved in the learning of a language and the
translation of texts, the claims of biblical primacy and cultural
relativity could be wonderfully combined.
42 czc
Livigcnc, inamdiotis iïh.y mtsiionnaires, 7 0 - 1 , r34—5. ' 4 5 . -
282 j 780-1890: An ti-Slavery to Subjugation
x. Christianity, Civilization, and Commerce
Evangelism and Bible translation may seem a very long way from
preoccupation with 'civilization*. How was it that a movement
concerned with the one could so often harp upon the other? The
nineteenth-century missionary fixation with civilization—and it
sometimes seems little less—requires proper explanation. And that
requires some return to eighteenth-century roots. A few quotations
may help, chosen almost at random except that an African exile and a
British Prime Minister have been chosen to lead the team.
In proportion to the Civilization, so will be rhe consumption of British
Manufactures. (Olaudah Equiano. 13 March 1788, in a letter to the
Committee of the Privy Council Examining the Question of the Slave
Trade)43
I trust w e shall n o t think ourselves t o o liberal, if, b y abolishing the slave-
trade, we give them the common chance of civilization with other parts of
the w o r l d . . . If w e listen to the v o i c c o f reason and d u t v w e m a v live to
/ /
Marsden and Watson to Jarnos Lynch in India, 29 Oct. 1 8 1 5 . Levee Kadenge, ' The
Origins and Early Development of the Weslevan Missionary Society'. M . T h . thesis
(Aberdeen. 1986). 149.
77? e Victorian Missionary 285
and, more generally che world supremacy of western Europe was that
of commerce and civilization. Commerce, it is true, could not mean
much to the ordinär)- missionary, being for the most part too far
removed from the opportunities of his station, but civilization was
different. Missionaries were much concerned with vegetable gardens
and fruit trees, clean houses and water, ploughs and forges, reading
and writing, hats and shoes: the simple things which they had known
at home but which were in no way new in Britain and hardly in the
forefront of the minds of the civilization theorists. After all, many of
them had been gardeners, hatters, or cobblers. Where the theorists
thought of high international commerce, large companies, the
development of factories in Manchester or Leeds, the missionaries
translated civilization into the simpler terms of the more homely
things they themselves had some knowledge of. They no less readily
adopted the jargon of civilization for what they were doing. In
practice they turned 'Christianity and commerce' into 'gospel and
plough'. In this sense it was almost inevitable that they should be
concerned with 'civilization', though Van der Kemp had had little
interest even in that. James Read, more practical than Van der Kemp,
was unpreoccupied with clothes but very preoccupied with ploughs
(he may, indeed, even have originated the 'gospel and plough'
formula) and with this or any other way of increasing the earning
power of the Khoikhoi, with whom he had thrown in his lot.
By the 1830s 'Civilization and Christianity' had become the catch-
phrase used by everyone from Ministers of the Crown, quite
uninterested in pushing missions but concerned to present acceptably
Britain's world-wide colonial enterprise, to the humblest missionary
explaining the tiny developments of his own corner. John Philip, the
theorist in the field, expressed a middle-of-the-road missionary
viewpoint with his customary precision in a statement of 1833:
The civilization of the people among whom we labour in Africa is not our
highest object; but that object never can be secured and rendered
permanent among them without their civilization. Civilization is to the
Christian religion what the body is to the soul . . . The blessings of
civilization are a few of the blessings which the Christian religion scatters in
her progress to immortality; but they are to be cherished for their own sake
as well as for ours . . . 5 "
JO
A. Ross, John Philip (Aberdeen. 1986). 2 1 7 .
286 j 780-1890: An ti-Slavery to Subjugation
Of course, for many a non-missionary, colonial administrator or
settler, it was very much the other way round: what mattered was
'civilization' (meaning, very often, commercial employability). The
missionary was to be welcomed only so long as he did not push
religion too much but made certain requirements of 'civilization' his
first concern.
Disagreements over winch those requirements were could be no
less sharp. For Philip, as for Van der Kemp, the primary requirement
was political justice, while for many who called for civilization that
was almost the last thing they had in mind. Bishop Colenso of Natal
began Iiis South African career as a benign imperialist exuding a
liberal confidence in the spread of civilization and even, like
Livingstone, calling for a large increase in white settlement; he ended
it battling against the British government for justice and
independence for the Zulu kingdom. Bishop Mackenzie in 1861,
fired with horror of the slave-trade, found himself engaged in
fighting the Yao to liberate Manganja slaves. Twenty years later John
Mackenzie of the L M S was so alarmed bv Boer incursions on the
/
for a time agreed that the concern to civilize was incumbent upon a
missionary, and not only Britons. French colonial officials were
complaining that French Catholic missionaries, unlike the Protes-
tants, did too little to civilize. Poor Père Lossedat, a I loly Ghost
Father in Gabon, wrote home in 1852 that 'Some F,uropeans (they
say French Officers) have broken the rosaries of our catechumens.
They object to our approach of teaching people to pray and to chant
canticles. It is not thus, says M . Bouet, Commander of the Adour, that
one civilizes people.' 51 In fact in his massive Mémoire of 1846 for
Propaganda Fide on African missions Libcrmann had already firmly
asserted the absolute need for civilization, and not just some low-
level technical skills but the inculcation of science, 'les theories des
c h o s e s ' . T u r n to another sphere. In 1855 Alexander Crummell, a
^ Alexander Cnnnmell, 77Jc Future of A frica ( N e w York, 1862), 57 (04, passage quoted
71-2. Livingstone. Missionary Correspondence, 258.
288 1780—1890: An (i-Slave ry to Subjugation
connections. The Lâkes Company's connections were particularly
close—to the Livingstonia mission—and it was exceptionally
unsuccessful. It is interesting that James Stewart, whose appeal it
had been in 1874 to the Free Church of Scotland to establish 'a great
centre of commerce, civilization and Christianity' in memory of
Livingstone, was three years later writing, '1 hope none of my friends
of the mission in Glasgow will have anything to do with big trading
schemes for Lake Nyassa at present. . . Trade must grow little by litde
and a large expenditure at first means certainly a big loss.'55 That was
the voice of the missionary realist in contrast to that of the orator, but
it was not barkened to. The Glasgow businessmen were resolved on a
trading company and, perhaps, without the illusion of quick
commerce they would not have backed missions as they did. In a
sense the whole of this history is one in which missionary enthusiasts
and their business friends deceived each other into believing in the
possibility that profit and piety could be combined.
If missionaries of the late nineteenth century were, in the main,
pretty cool about any link between their work and commerce, it was
drink more than anything else which made them so. In August 1876
the steamer Ethiopia left Liverpool bound for the Nigerian coast,
carrying one missionary, Mary Slessor, and a cargo of spirits. Six years
later the Ethiopia was wrecked on rocks just off Loango and it is said
that the Rim seized as it was breaking up caused the deaths of 200
people. T h e first Baptist missionaries to the Congo arrived in 1879
on a boat loaded with gin. Earlier missionaries had arrived on slave-
ships. N o w 'legitimate' commerce had been substituted. In place of
slaves, gin. It is hardly surprising that the late Victorian Evangelical
shied away from Livingstone's enthusiasm for the commercial model.
In missionary jargon the word 'industrial' came much to be
preferred to the word 'commerce'. 'Industrial' was a step up from the
plough. It signified a more systematic stress on technical skills in a
way that was only possible in larger centres like Livingstonia and
Lovedale, though the name would come to be adopted by many
smaller enterprises as well. The central missionary 'institute' became
increasingly the ideal of the civilizing school—less ambitious and
prone to corruption than the commercial company but rather more
sophisticated than the 'gospel and plough' formula. The Industrial
Mission is the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century favourite
5S
McCrackcn, Politics and Christianity in Malawi, 43- 4.
77? e Victorian Missionary 289
for people with this approach, aware of the dangers to which the
commerce ideal almost inevitably led—drink, bankruptcy, or a take-
over by European settlers. For white setdement is what Christianity
and Commerce seemed inevitablv to lead to if it was to succeed in
/
-f' Letter of 26 Oct. 1850, cf. C. Conu Ross«)), Reiidiconii delta Reale Acidemia det Uneei,
5/29 {1920), 21 Ci.
290 j 780-1890: An ti-Slavery to Subjugation
From the material aspect we must leave Africans as they are, that is to say
truly Africans. We must shut our eyes and hearts to a false pity . . . and
resign ourselves to see the young negroes close to us maintain the customs
of their land, their wattle huts instead of houses, their bare earth in place of
beds, sorghum and manioc instead of bread, grass waist bands in place of
shirt and trousers.57
If Protestant missionaries seem to have been rather easily carried away
by the 'civilization' model, it may be because they had so little of a
real missionary doctrine to fall back upon, over and above a great
enthusiasm for world evangelism. But so soon as they began to
develop a doctrine, they started to recognize the danger. It is
noticeable that Henry Venn had very little interest in civilizing, and
indeed increasingly recognized how opposed it could be to the early
realization of his ideal, the self-governing Church. The establishment
of a native Church required the adoption of African ways, not the
imposition of European ones. It is odd that it was Livingstone with all
his African intuition who confused the whole movement by
plunging back from a concern with native agency into one which
ceaselessly harped on the vocabulary of civilization and pursued the
goals of Western commerce and settlement. But at the very same
time that he was reinvigorating the civilization school, Venn,
Lavigerie, and others like Hudson Taylor, founder of the China
Inland Mission, were guiding the central core of the missionary
movement emphatically away from preoccupation with civilization
towards the acceptance of cultural diversity and non-European ways
as crucial to a missionary's central purpose.
By the 18 80s an extreme point was reached by some radical
Evangelicals following the Hudson Taylor line on adaptation. Two
young upper-class English enthusiasts, Graham Wilmot Brooke and
John Alfred Robinson, in proposing a new C M S mission up the
Niger to the Hausa, were particularly outspoken. Brooke, a
somewhat unbalanced extremist, had for years been trying to
escape from any part of Africa affected by, as he saw it, the
contaminating curse of Western commercialization and concern for
the this-worldly values of civilization. 'We carefully avoid praising
civilization or civilized powers to the heathen,' they wrote in 1891. 4If
they themselves are extolling civilization we tell them that they
should not set their affection on things below.' 5 * Here was the
sv
Lavigerie. Instructions aux missionnaires, 98.
C M S , Sudan Mission Leaflet, no. 18. Feb. 1 8 9 1 , A . Walls, 'Black Europeans, White
Africans: Some Missionary Motives in West Africa', in D. Baker (cd.), Religious Motivation,
SCII xv (197«), 3 4 7 - 8 .
77? e Victorian Missionary 291
resurgence of pure evangelicalism with a vengeance, but it remained
untypical of C M S men, even of that Keswick-influenced period, at
least in so extreme a form.
U M C A attitudes were not all that different, and more consistent.
'Our desire is to distinguish very clearly between Christianising and
Europeanising', wrote Bishop Smythies in 1892. 'What we want is to
Christianise them in their own civil and political conditions; to help
them to develop a Christian civilization suited to their own climate
and their own circumstances. For instance, we do not allow any of
the boys in our schools to wear any European clothing; it is not our
business to encourage the trade in boots . . .V 9 Next year the Synod
of the Diocese of Zanzibar resolved to 'strenuously discourage all
Europeanisms\ 6 ° Of course, this remained a minority position just as
heavy civilizing remained a minority position. In betwreen were the
large majority, Europeanizing in some ways (and no book-learning
could be done without a measure of Europeanizing), endeavouring
to adapt to African ways in others. Dr Laws of Livingstonia was a
distinguished but autocratic representative of the civilizing line while
Archdeacon Johnson, who enjoyed at times the hospitality of Dr
Laws when he was more than usually unwell and in need of a rest,
was a fine and unusually unautocratic representative of the
Africanizing. Both spent fifty years on Lake Nyasa and both have
had their admirers, black and white. For Johnson, the Church must
be above all 'a true native development and not a foreign intrusion.
This must be insisted on by keeping its thought, its agents, its
appointments as entirely native as possible.'61 Laws, on the other
hand, wanted to give the very best of Scotland to Africa—he even
planned a tower at his Overtoun Institute just like that of King's
College, Aberdeen! The Scots were the greatest of civilizcrs. Donald
Fraser, a younger member of the Livingstonia Mission moving mildly
in a different direction, could smile at Laws s dictum that to teach an
African to lay bricks in a straight ' line was a great step towards
civilization, but, of course, a lot of Africans were grateful for such
lessons and without them the Christian Church and its institutions
would have been far less attractive than they were. Johnson's far
w
G.W. (Gertrude Ward), 77ic IJfe of Charles Alan Smythies (1X98), 190.
<0
Diocese of Zanzibar. Aits of the Synods, 1884- 1903, iX; see also W. 1* Johnson's defence
111 the Nyasa Navs of 1894 of this position, written as 'An Answer' co one who said 'You
must accept your position as being not only messenger; of the Gospel, but representatives of
civilization', H. H. Barnes, Johnson of Nyasaland (1935), 1 0 6 - 7 .
Barnes. Johnson of Nyasaland, 140.
292 1780-1890: Anti'Slavery to Subjugation
quieter, less disruptive, approach needed more time, and in late
nineteenth-centurv* Africa time was more limited than it mayj have
seemed.
At the end of the dav, Henri Junod, a remarkable Swiss missionary
scholar, added up the pros and cons of 'civilization' in the conclusion
of his Life of a South African Tribe, published in 1 9 1 2 . He listed the
blessings of civilization, among them the disappearance of deadly
famines, improved clothing (which he thought only a 'mixed
blessing'), better seeds and agricultural implements, a broadening of
ideas. But the "curses of civilization' he judged far to exceed the
blessings, at least in South Africa, and first among them he listed 'Loss
of political interest and responsibility'. 62 For Adam Ferguson, in the
eighteenth century, it was the political which, more than anything
else, defined civilization. N o w it is noticeable how consistently
Johnson urged a scrupulous respect for African political authority,
even of a rather minuscule form. Perhaps the 'anti-civilizers' had the
deeper sense of civilization, even in terms of the Enlightenment,
while the civilizers were continually in danger of disrupting
civilization by concentrating upon the technical to the dissolution
of the socio-political.
The ideolog\r of the nineteenth-century missionary movement
began with a simple evangelical individualism grounded upon the
Bible first and last. As we have seen, it quickly joined to this a second
more worldly thread which may loosely be characterized as
'civilization', an undefined additional component, formally rejected
by rather few, but, equally, central to the thought of rather few. It
seemed at least a happy way of persuading the secular scoffer that
missionaries were a good thing earning their keep in terms of the
public good. It also served to justify a great deal of highly 'secular*
activity on the mission station which, in strictly evangelical terms,
might be hard to defend. A secular component to mission seemed a
natural enough adjunct to anyone other than the narrowest
evangelist; for a minority it became a quite central concern. It
could take an anti-slavery form with some, a struggle for political
rights with others, a general interest in benevolent improvement with
a third group, an alliance with Western commerce for the opening-
up of the world with a fourth. Van der Kemp and Philip battled with
the Cape government for Khoikhoi rights, Moffat irrigated the valley
62
Henri Junod. Ike Life of a South Afriam Tribe, ii (1912), 540.
77? e Victorian Missionary 293
of Kuruman, Livingstone encouraged grandiose schemes of
European commerce. Bishop Mackenzie reluctantly led his
missionary colleagues into various tiny wars for the freeing of
slaves: these were extremely different approaches to the business of
spreading civilization, but they concur in showing that part of the
missionary task was a secular and worldly one.
Yet he could also describe the Shona as 'a gentle, industrious and
skilful people'. Knight-Bruce rapidly wore himself out as Bishop of
Mashonaland. He had much of the self-confident arrogance of
the late Victorian imperialist, but flashes also of a more humane
discernment. At the end of his life he could write, 'I feel deeply how
constantly I misjudged both my Christian and heathen natives.'74
Few missionaries were racialists. The very universalism implicit in
their calling made it difficult for them to be so. They stressed again
and again—often against fashionable Western opinion, with its
increasingly racialist overtones—the intelligence, ability; rationality;
and even high moral qualiries of the unconverted people among
whom they worked, and still more of course the achievements of
their converts. They long expatiated on the virtues of a Khama or a
Crowther. Occasionally they could delight in the closest of
friendships, as Pilkington could write to his mother on the death
of Sembera Mackay, 'Oh, Mother, you don't know how I loved him,
C. Fripp (ed.), Cold and (he Cospcl in Mashonaland i$S8y the first part being the
Mashonaland Journal of Bishop Knighc-Bruce, (1949), 54.
74
G. W. H. Knight-Bruce. Memories of Mashonaland (1895), 161.
302 lySo—iSgo: Anti-Slavery to Subjugation
and love him still with all my soul; everyone loved him; the best, the
bravest, the noblest, the wisest. Never to see his kind face in this
world again or hear his cheery voice . . . 1 couldn't even bid him
good-bye for the last time.' 75 'Unreasonableness cannot be said to be
a more obstinate hereditary complaint in Africa than in Ireland,'
declared Livingstone provocatively. 'If one behaves as a gentleman, he
will invariably be treated as such.' 76 In their approach to Africans,
John Philip admitted in 1846, missionaries were of 'two different
classes'.'''
earlier with the Khoikhoi chief Jager Afrikaner and, later over many
years, with Mzilikazi of the Ndebcle. Livingstones friendship with
' H. Holt. Joseph Williams and the Pioneer Mission to the South-Eastern Bantu (I.ovcdalc.
1954), 80.
1
P. Rllingworth, 'Christianity and Politics in Dahomey 1 8 4 3 - 1 8 6 7 " . JAII 5 (1964), 219.
Kings, Marriage, Atices tors, and Cod 309
Sechele of the Bakwena, Casaliss with Moshoeshoe of the Sotho,
Coillard s with Lewanika of the Lozi, Thomas Birch Freeman's with
Kwaku Dua of the Ashanti or with Ghezo of Dahomey, Colenso's
/ *
with the Zulu king Cetshwayo, Lourdel's and Mackay's with Mutesa
of Brfanda may all be recalled together with many other less
well-known relationships.
Missionaries were seldom people who could have any political
importance at home, even though the diplomatic skills they
developed were in some cases considerable. They achieved in
Africa on occasion a political status they had not sought but not
unnaturally enjoyed. By influencing a king they could affect the lives
of many, and they could themselves be affected with both fondness
and admiration for an able and experienced ruler. They realized that
kings appreciated them for their personal skills but seldom fathomed
quite how politically inexpedient conversion was likely to be.
Polygamy could be a political necessity, linking the king with
powerful lineages; rain-making, either personally or through the
patronage of specialists; could be his most significant social function;
rituals of circumcision, of ancestor-intercession, or of witch-
detection, provided the intelligible structures which shaped society
and coped with its ills, and all might require his active participation.
Even military leadership, especially when of an aggressive sort—
hardly something alien to the Christian monarchical tradition of
Europe—could be vitally necessary to the survival of a state and
nevertheless seem pagan and highly unacceptable to the Evangelical
missionary. As for human sacrifice or the public executions and royal
disregard for human life which missionaries observed at the great
courts of Buganda, the Zulus, Dahomey, or Ashanti, it could all seem
simply diabolical. The social function of such bloody ruthlessness
within a specific political or ritual system was seldom grasped in
mitigation, nor was comparison made with the barbaric punishments
still regularly used in European states in the first half of the
nineteenth century. A problem with the missionary evaluation of
African political realities was that the missionary mind had mostly
been shaped in Europe in such a non-political way.
The difference between a self-interested patronage, including a
genuine measure of personal affection, and conversion was a large
one. Missionaries did recognize the gap, but hoped, usually
unrealistically, that it might be bridged. Occasionally it was
bridged, and the example of a Khama was there to prove that royal
3 io lyßo-iSgo: Ami-Slavery to Subjugation
conversion was not an impossibility. The more likely scenario
remained the one already described by Townsend writing realistically
enough to Henry Venn from Abeokuta in 1850: M do not doubt but
that the government of this country is set against the spreading of the
Gospel . . . At the same time they want us without our religion . . .
because they see that through us they are likely to . . . obtain trade
and be well supplied with guns/ 3 In point of fact missionaries proved
nearly always a commercial disappointment, particularly in the matter
of guns. They had a few for their own use, but were almost never
prepared to help with their supply or even their repair on a large
scale. 'What do I want with a Gospel which gives neither guns, nor
powder, not coffee, nor tea, nor sugar, nor workmen to work for me,
nor any of the advantages I hoped for?', asked Lewanika bitterly of
Coillard in 1893. 4
Far from being suppliers of guns, tea, and coffee, most missionaries
were in reality highly dependent economically upon their hosts.
They depended upon them for labour, for materials for building,
even for food. Again, they needed permission to talk to people, to
travel around the country, to hunt, not only to arrive but also to
leave. 'We are necessarily sadly too dependent upon him and he
would wish us to be whollvj so,'' wrote Emilyj iVloffat to her father of
Mzilikazi.* That was how any sensible king wanted it: to remain in
control of a game in which missionaries were additional pawns,
rather than to become pieces within a game controlled exteriorly. As
the nineteenth century moved to a close, we change in place after
place from one game to the other, but what we are concerned with
here are the dynamics of the first game.
If. initially, a king seemed the providential instrument for the
conversion of society, he could in consequence of much of this, as
realism prevailed in the missionary's mind, appear instead as the
greatest of obstacles, the principal incarnation of everything that
needed to be changed. T h e separation of the people from thëir tribal
chief is, humanly, the only conceivable way in which they can be laid
open to the reception of Christianity,' wrote Alexander Riddel of
' J. Ajayi, CVir;<fii7n Mission* :n i\igeria ltfji iSyt: Ihe Making of a \'etv F-hte (1965}, 100.
1
F. Coillard, On ihr 'Ihreshold of Central Africa (1.S97), 508.
s
22 Jan. i.Xfio, J. Wallis (ed.). Hie Matabele Mission : A Selection from the Correspondence of
John and bimily Mojfat, David Uiingstone and Other< iSsS-i$7$ (1945), 8<V
' J. McCrackcn, Politics and C.hristiamty in Malawi: 'Ilie Impact of (he Livingstonia Mission in
the Sorthern Province (1977), >9.
Kings, Marriage, Atices tors, and Cod 311
Livingstonia in 1880. 6 T h e Jesuit Fr. Prestage regarded the
Ernpandeni mission which he had founded among the Ndebele
with Lobengula's permission in 1887 as a failure 'due to the
overwhelming terror engaged by the system of government'. ' The
mission was closed, and Prestage soon after became a chaplain to
Rhodess pioneer column. Ic is striking how in some societies,
especially in West Africa, even when the large majority of people
have evcntuallv become Christian in the course of the twentieth
/
7
N. BLIEBE. Christianity and Traditional Religion in Western Zimbabwe 2$59-1923 (1979), 59-
312 lySo—iSgo: Anti-Slavery to Subjugation
are interrupted and contradicted without ceremony.' He contrasted
this with the 'servile habits' of the Zulu and stressed how reluctant
s
Moshoeshoe was to kill anyone.' An ethical congruity between
Victorian missionary and Tswana king appears as part of the
grounding of the conversion process.
François Coillard moved as a missionary from the Sotho to the
Lozi. Lewanika was clearly a somewhat different sort of king from
Moshoeshoe, more representative of what one may regard as the
main group of central African Bantu monarchies, of which the
Ganda provides another example. There appears here rather less
convertibility than with the Tswana but little of the rigidity of the
Zulu, despite a pervading cult of the royal ancestors linked with the
need for rain-making. Lewanikas son Litia did in fact become a
Christian in 1892 and Lewanika accepted the conversion. T h o u g h —
like Sechele—Litia subsequently, if briefly, became a polygamist, he
in due course succeeded to the throne as a Christian king. The
Ganda monarchy only became Christian after the deposition of
Mwanga and his succession by an infant son, Daudi Chwa, but here
too the Christiani'/ation which had already been carried through by
the principal chiefs of the kingdom could happen within a context
still respectful of tradition. This does not seem to have been so
possible in the more sacralized monarchies of the west coast. The
Asantehene had major ritual obligations, such as those at the monthly
Adae and annual Odwira ceremonies, all closely linked with the
ancestor cult, which may explain why he and comparable rulers were
unlikely to become Christians. Where, as in Dahomey, the cult of the
royal dead required annual human sacrifice on a large scale, the royal
culture might be quite unable to accommodate itself to missionary
Christianity without self-destruction in a way that was not the case
among the Lozi and had not been the case, in the past, for the
Kongo. For all these monarchies, the abandonment of polygamy was
a huge additional problem, involving the political loss of multiple
marriage alliances which could do much to strengthen a king's
position.
While some monarchs who were unable to convert could also not
countenance their servants doing so, for others this was not the case.
In the west, especially, where Islam had long been present, the
* F. Casalis, .V/y life in [iasutotand (1889). 224-5, G. Sctiloanc, The Image of God among the
Sotho-Tswana (Rotterdam, 1976), 25.
Kings, Marriage, Atices tors, and Cod 313
custom already existed of acquiescing in the presence of people of a
religion of the book. Islam may well have made Christian conversion
easier in many such societies. It would be naïve to expect any
institution which had been based immemorially upon one belief
system to be able to transfer easily or painlessly to another. What is
remarkable is that some African monarchies, particularly some of the
smaller ones, were capable all the same of doing so, and many more
were capable of a considerable tolerance of Christianity among their
subjects. In general the widespread missionary judgement at the close
of the nineteenth century that traditional African power had to be
broken before Christian faith could enter, a judgement accepted by
some modern historians, does not appear valid. It was often based on
quite brief experience, and experience reflecting only one of a
number of very different forms that the African state had adopted. In
the Kongo a traditional Bantu kingdom had retained for centuries a
Christian commitment. The same could happen elsewhere. Kingship
was both hindrance and helpmate to a process of Christianization,
and that is hardly surprising when one recalls how central has
kingship been to Christian experience in other ages and parts of the
world. Missionaries were delighted to hand out crowns and develop
rituals of Christian coronation. The perceptive king might foresee
that it would not be all loss. Moreover, the perceptive commoner in
stateless societies, the successful trader or teacher, might turn himself
into something of a chief or king with missionary encouragement.
Thus Bishop Shanahan's biographer writes firmly of the early Niger
Missionaries, 'In one place—Aguleri—they actually succeeded in
converting the king.' 9 The truth seems rather that Ogbuanyinya
Idigo I of Aguleri was an influential trader who gave land for a
mission, dismissed his wives, was baptized in 1891, became a
catechist, but somehow turned into a sort of king too. In the
flexibility/ characteristic of much of Africa outside the old established
states Christianity could be more creative than destructive of kingly
authority and only in a minority of African societies do kingship and
chieftainship appear almost totally negative factors in the process of
Christianization.
ii Rain
not give up his new faith. Freed of a missionary presence and able
henceforth to rule his own Church, he regularly preached on
Sundays, expounding the Scriptures to the Bakwena, but he also
resumed his old art of rain-making. Christianity and tradition were
compatible after all.
That might appear as a merely schismatic or heretical example, at
least as a withdrawal from missionary standards, but even thus to
conclude would be to over-simplify Livingstone provided in his
Missionary Travels a splendid theoretical account of a rain-makers
viewpoint, characterizing it as 'remarkably acute'. Perhaps as a
10
K. MofTac, Missionary Labours and Scenes in Sinthern Africa (1842), 305.
" Livingstone's Prii\Ue Journals tSfi-iSßj, cd. I. Schapcra (i960), 300.
Kings, Marriage, Atices tors, and Cod 315
Christian missionary he was too much of a rationalist to be
sufficiently adaptable. Anyway he would not. or did not, attempt to
take over the rain-makers role himself and step in with prayer where
they had failed with bones. If kings were seldom their own rain-
makers and missionaries were but willing to assume the ritual role of
bringing rain through the nudging of supernatural power of one sort
or another, everyone could still be happy. Back at the start of the
century in 1800 Van der Kemp had already been under pressure from
Ngqika to take on the job. He had refused at first: God would give
rain when and only when he saw fit. However, the situation grew
more desperate, the rain doctors failed, and repeated deputations had
come to Van der Kemp. So holy a man could not fail to do the one
thing which mystics were really needed for. He finally agreed to pray
to God and declared in Xhosa, 'Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is Lord
in Heaven. I will speak to him, and he will give rain. I cannot.' He
prayed fervently, rain fell for two days and Ngqika's kraal was flooded
out. 1 2 The Christian rain-maker had arrived.
Throughout the nineteenth century we find missionaries doing
much the same. Moffat as a young man had argued in 1821 with a
rain-maker that one simply could not do it—such effects could not
follow such causes. The rain-maker insisted on the contrary that his
operations had frequently been followed by 'abundance of rains'. 13
Most missionaries avoided the theoretical discussion. Pressed by
popular demand they responded like Van der Kemp as best they
could. Again and again it worked. Rain followed their prayers just as
it followed the medicines of the rain-doctor. Thus Joseph Tindall, a
Wcsleyan, offered 'incessant prayer for rain' in April 1844 and it was
followed bv an 'abundance of rain'. 14 Henrvj Richards, one of the
/
1. Enklaar. Life and Work of Dr J. 'Hi. Van der Kemp (Capo Iown, 1988), 102.
11
C. Northcotc, Robert Mojfat: Pioneer in Africa (1961), 76.
14
The Journal ofJoseph Tindall. cd, B. A. Tindall (1959), 57-
15
H. G. Guinness, 77re New World oj Central Africa (1S90). 276
3i6 îjSo-iSço: And-Slavery to Subjugation
Mbelwa of the Ngoni, produced a splendid shower to be long
remembered. Back in Scotland the missionaries might play down any
claim that the cloudburst was 'miraculous', but in Ngoni land they
were happy enough to be accepted as effective rain-makers. One
more example: among the Lozi Coillard's nickname was Mungole,
literally 'the long rain'. 'You bring us rain and sleep, peace and
abundance,' he could be greeted. Even though he had failed to bring
the guns, coffee, and tea Lewanika claimed to want, he had brought
what an African holy man was really meant to bring. Consider this
splendid memory of an old man in 1974:
There was no rain; the land was drv. The Mbunda cast their bones in vain.
/
Then Mungole called Lewanika and the people into the Church at Lwatile.
Before them all, he preached and preached and preached. As he preached a
cloud no bigger than a hand appeared on the horizon. Then Mungole began
to sing a hymn. By the time he had reached the second verse, the sky was
dark. By the time he ended, the rain fell so hard that people could not
return at once to Lealui but had to remain waiting in the Church. Alas,
there are not such men of power nowadays.16
We should not conclude from such stories (and there are plenty
more of them) that praying for rain, let alone rain-making, was an
important activity for nineteenth-century missionaries or for the
Victorian religion, mostly of an evangelical hue, which they had
learned at home. It might be truer to say that, faced with the
activities of rain-makers, they had been driven to decide, quite
pragmatically, 'If you can't beat them, join them', but of course they
did believe that, with the help of God, they could beat them. And
they were pretty sure that, time and time again, they had done so in a
nearly miraculous way. They prayed and the rain came. Victorian
Christianity had not rejected praying for rain, though it might be
embarrassed at taking it too seriously. For us here, however, the
important thing is not how the missionary interpreted these
experiences but how Africans did so. The missionary was the new
rain-maker and, if he did not always succeed, he was not dismissed on
that account. His predecessors had done no better. The point is that
rain-making needed to go on, and go on it did. Despite an initial
16
G. I'rins, The Hidden Hippopotamus (1980). 195 and 294. The incident in question
probably happened in 1892. For an Anglican example see A. G. de la Prync's rain-making
achievements m 1907 in villages of the upper Shtrc valley. A. Andereon- Morshead, The
History of the Universities Mission to (Central Africa (1897} i. 237. For further discussion see I.
Schapera, Raitt making Rites of Tsuuna Tribes (1971).
Kings, Marriage, Atices tors, and Cod 317
conflict, worked out chiefly within the missionary's mind, rain-
making provided no long-term obstacle to the spread of Christianity.
On the contrary with a little revamping it proved both a tool for its
propagation and a context for its indigenization. Great Christian
rain-makers of the twentieth centurv, like Shembe and Mutende,
were here as elsewhere not rejecting their missionary inheritance.
Rather were they the successors to the Elmslies and Coillards of the
nineteenth.
the harshest sort built up in the years of the scramble and found
expression in statements of the World Missionary Conference at
Edinburgh in 1910:
Our correspondents in Africa view with unanimous intolerance conditions
of life which are not only unchristian, but are at variance with the instinctive
feelings of natural morality. With them there can be no 'question' of
polygamy. It is simply one of the gross evils of heathen society which, like
habitual murder or slavery, must at all costs be ended . . . In Africa polygamy
is more prevalent than in other countries. . . indeed, the Christian law upon
this subject may be said to be the greatest obstacle to the acceptance of our
faith. In the face of this it is surprising to note, that it is in regard to the
evidence from Africa alone that there is an almost complete unanimity of
opinion. Every Mission within our review refuses admission to the Church
111 Africa to any man who is actually living with more than one wife. 17
This was a remarkably unqualified position for a Protestant
conference to take up, given that it is near impossible to ground
insistence on monogamy upon any biblical text (as Lutheran
17
Hi? Church in the Mission I:ithi. Report of Commission II of the World Missionary
Conference (Edinburgh, 1910), 65-6, ^9-70.
318 i y SO-i Sgo : A nti-Slavery to Subjugation
theologians in the sixteenth century; including Luther himself,
already admitted) and that some Protestant missionaries, especially in
Asia, but also in Africa, did receive polygamists to baptism through
much of the nineteenth century. Set against the moral convictions of
the missionary' world at Edinburgh we have the reality of Africa, a
continent in almost all of whose black societies polygamous marriage
w a s actually the ideal, in which all rich and powerful people had
^numerous wives, many ordinary men had two, and in which no
African saw it as a moral problem. N o one thought he was doing
wrong in entering into more than one public marriage, let alone did
he see it as 'at variance with the instinctive feelings of natural
morality'. One might conclude that the 'instinctive feelings' of
Victorian Evangelicals had simply removed them from reality if they
could denounce as equivalent to 'habitual' murder (and one wonders
how murder can be 'habitual') the social practice of an entire
continent, turning it into 'the greatest obstacle to the acceptance of
our faith'. Or had they?
The apparent simplicity of a picture of stark confrontation docs at
least require a little modification. As a matter of fact, through much
.of the nineteenth century many missionaries had not thought it right
- that converts put away all wives but one. When Bishop Colenso first
visited his diocese of Natal in 1954 he declared almost at once, '1 feel
very strongly upon this point, that the usual practice of enforcing the
separation of wives from their husbands upon their conversion to
Christianity is quite unwarrantable and opposed to the plain teaching
of Our Lord.' lS It was indeed the usual practice in South Africa just as
it had been the usual practice among Anglicans, as among Catholics,
but it was by no means the invariable practice among Protestant
missionary societies.
... Consider this charming story from the American Baptist
Missionary Union (formerly the Livingstone Inland Mission) in the
Congo in 1888. After a service taken by Henry Richards at Mbanza
Manteke a man named Nganvan Dimboini, accompanied by his five
wives and a sixth lady to whom he was betrothed, asked to become a
Christian. The missionary agreed that he might keep his five wives
but not the sixth, and Nganvan refused, walking out of the
missionary's room. An observer reported afterwards:
When he came into the garden, I watched him through a hole in the
' v S. Axelson, Culture Confrontation tn the Ijower Congo (Uppsala, 1970), 236.
20
Guinness, Ike Neu- World of Central Africa. 4.37, P. Coulon and P. Brasseur, Ubermann
I So 2-1 Su (Paris, 1988), 3 Cm n. 28; P.. Grau, in G. Baöta (ed.), Christianity in Tropical Africa
(1968). The 1876 Church Rules of the Bremen Mission are particularly explicit: 'a man w h o
has several wives must be admitted to baptism and communion*, Bacta, Christianity in Tropical
Africa, 6X.
21
Setiloane, 7 he Image of Cod among the Sotho-Tswana, 103.
M . Wright, Gentian Missions in Tanganyika 1891-1941 ( 1 9 7 1 ) , IC<5, 132.
320 îy8o-i8go: Anti-Slavery to Subjugation
alive, but after his death in 1905 their rule was changed. So too with
the Swedes in 1907. In this as in much else the years around the turn
of the century saw a hardening of missionary attitudes of an
unadaptive sort just as such attitudes were being challenged by
increasingly outspoken voices within the African Christian
community.
While Edinburgh's very hard line over polygamy does not then
reflect the whole of nineteenth-century'' experience and reflection by
any means, it cannot be denied that it does represent the normal
missionary position, and Africans knew it. Without insistence on
monogamy, Moshoeshoe had remarked, 'we should soon be
Christians'. When Mzilikazi was asked why his people did not
become Christian, he replied, 'We Matabele like many wives.' 23
More deeply instructive, however, is the case of Sechele. Here was a
king with no more than five wives who had both learned to read and
had brought his wives to study under Livingstone. He was a man of
exceptional intellect and character who had taken to Bible-reading as
a fish to water and appeared as quite the model of the convert king,
while his wives Livingstone could describe as 'decidedly the most
amiable females in the town, our best scholars too . . . Two of them
were the daughters of under-chiefs through whose influence, after his
father's murder, he had been enabled to succeed to the chieftainship.
This circumstance made his parting with them assume the
appearance of ingratitude.' 24
Sechele's renunciation was received in his town with general
consternation and when, two months later, he was baptized, many
spectators were in tears. As Livingstone remarked, 'all the friends of
the divorced wives became the opponents of our religion'. 25
Attendance at school and church diminished. Six months later
Sechele made love to one of his superfluous wives, who, because she
had a small daughter, had remained nearby. 'Never did man bid fairer
for years to enter the Kingdom of G o d than he,' affirmed
Livingstone, but now, instead, he was to be accounted 'an
apostate'. 26 Despite expressing penitence, Sechele was cut off from
2f
Ca salis. .V/y Life in fiasutoland, 225 -7; Bhcbc, Christianity and Traditional Religion in
Western Zitnbabur, 43.
i Nov. 1948, IJvingstone's Missionary Correspondence 1841-1856. cd. I. Schapcra (1961),
II?-5
" D. Livingstone, Missionar)' Travels and Researches in South Africa (1X57), 6.
26
IJvingstone's Missionary Correspondence, 20.
Kings, Marriage, Atices tors, and Cod 321
communicant membership of the Church with no apparent
likelihood of restoration, and Livingstone himself soon withdrew
from Kolobeng. While the disastrous consequences of imposing
monogamy upon already polygamous people as a condition of
baptism could seem here excessively evident, Livingstone appears
never to have questioned the Tightness of his own behaviour, yet the
contrast between the treatment of Sechele and of Dimboini, each
with five wives, is striking. Just as Richards could act as a rain-maker
but Livingstone could not, so Richards could receive a man and his
five wives, Livingstone could not. But while some missionaries did
prove capable of questioning the simplicities of Victorian Evange-
licalism, Livingstone's spirit of enquiry wras directed into other areas,
geographical and social, rather than theological or pastoral, though
whether ten years later he would really have agreed with his
judgement of 1848 one may wonder. Yet it may well be that his
authority/ and his well-advertised treatment of Sechele had a not
inconsiderable influence upon the missionary mind of the next half-
century, even if it was rejected by some, among them the Livingstone
Inland Mission.
There can be no question but that missionary' insistence upon
monogamy created a sharp initial contrast between Christian and
traditional models of domestic society and helped to deter many
powerful people from becoming Christians, but how far did its
consequences go beyond that? The general effect upon conversion
can probably be overstressed. The fact is that many people in highly
polygamous societies did become Christians. The effect was less to
deter conversion than to ensure a long-term post-baptismal problem
as polygamy re-emerged within the ranks of otherwise committed
Christians. It was, then, less an obstacle to 'the acceptance of our
faith', as Edinburgh put it, than to the subsequent development of
the sort of Christian society the missionaries wanted. Sechele
remained a Christian and a Bible-preacher, but also an embarrass-
ment to the missionary^. The African Church was thus provided with
an ongoing area of dissension which in a hundred years was not to be
resolved. Many African Christians, especially perhaps the married
clergy of the mainline churches but also members of many
independent Churches, agreed with missionaries and strongly
insisted upon the importance of upholding monogamy. African
Christianity has certainly adopted a monogamous culture both as a
precious ideal and as something often lived by faithful Church
322 i y8o-18go : Anti-Slavery to Subjugation
members, but it has also continued to practise a polygamous culture.
All in all the traditional polygamy of Africa operated less as an
obstacle upon Christianization, at least in the longer run, and far
more as an instrument of Africanization and as a focus of controversy
about what Africanization should mean: and Christianity has often
thrived upon internal argument.
It needs to be remembered that African marriage custom
contrasted with Christian tradition in many other ways too, most
obviously in the widespread giving of lobola or bride-wealth by a
bridegroom and his family to the family of the bride as constituting
the principal legal element of marriage. Again one must recall that
marriage in Christian Europe had often been dominated by property
considerations, if not so much in the class from which most
missionaries came. For many of them bride-wealth was not a
problem, especially in the earlier period. Thus Daniel Lindley, an
American Congregationalist pioneer in South Africa, thought lobola
'the foundation of the structure of native society' and 'productive of a
world of g o o d ' / 7 but by 1878 younger missionaries within his society
were promulgating a new set of rules to prohibit the custom. Much
the same happened with the Norwegian Mission in Zululand. At first
they accepted it and occasionally even helped young men to raise it
while Zulu Christians simply took it for granted. Only in and after
the 1880s did the missionaries turn against it, divisively but
ineffectually.
Attitudes towards circumcision were not dissimilar in regard to
some of the peoples who practised it, and it appears at times in
southern Africa in the later nineteenth century to constitute as large a
problem as polygamy. What African Christians might regard as an
unabandonable piece of cultural identity became for some
missionaries an offence against which they were resolved to set
their face. The Xhosa poet Mqhayi tells how when he was studying
at Lovedale about 1890, he went off as a teenager to be circumcised.
As Canon Bevan at Phokwani among the Bechuana wrote at almost
the same time, 'nearly all our young men whom we have brought up
as Christians have gone to it'. For the mission authorities it was 'a
great and unforgivable sin', 'apostasy', though none of the young
men intended to give up Christianity for traditional custom, only 'to
S. Dwanc, 'Christianity Relative to XJiosa Religion*. Ph.D. thesis {London, 1979). io>;
Historical Reeords of the Church of the Provitice of South Africa, ed. C. Lewis and G. JB. Richards
(1934). 499-500.
29
Freedom for my People: The. Autobiography of Z. K. Matthews (1981), 15-iri.
324 1780-1890: Art ti-Slavery to Subjugation
advanced die theological mind moved fairly steadily away from the
simplicities of Edinburgh and back towards a recognition that bride-
wealth, circumcision, even polygamous marriage, all had at least
something to be said in their favour.
What matters to us here is not, however, how the missionary mind
judged such customs, but how they appeared to the African mind. On
this criterion they were far less of a major obstacle to Christianization
than they may seem according to the missionary mind. They moulded
the new community more significantly than they impeded it. Take
one new example. The Nyakyusa of south-west Tanganyika lived in
age-set villages. Once Christians began to multiply, their young
people had to form generational villages of their own. These age-set
villages adapted themselves to certain Christian requirements
including the ideal of monogamy, and yet Christian living itself was
profoundly adapted to a society in which teenagers went to live, no
longer in the homes of their parents, but in a village of their own.
There were, however, some social structures which did for long
constitute major bulwarks of anti-Christianity. O f these almost
certainly the most powerful were secret societies and masquerades. In
both West and central Africa these were popularist institutions
without a hierarchical leadership, committed to the maintenance of
traditional morality and certain rites of passage. They could control
initiation and funerals. They were essentially educational societies
with a strong public presence. They covered just the sort of ground
the Church wanted to occupy. They were easily diabolized by
missionaries, who found them particularly difficult to understand.
Equally they were bound to see themselves as threatened by the
advance of Church and school. Ogbonni among the Yoruba, Poro,
Sande, and H11 moi among the Mende, Nyau among the Chewa
could be formidable powers. The stronger societies of this sort were
among a people, the more difficult did any Christian advance remain.
Christianity did not flow into and over them in the same way. They
reflect too the wider nature of the diffused authoritv characteristic of
the many stateless societies. Monarchies were in comparison easy to
target and approach. In a relatively developed state there were,
moreover, a range of classes and of interests—officials, traders, the
poor. One group or another could well prove amenable to some
message of the gospel. Converts might be found at least among the
most underprivileged. Livingstone reported the perceptive comment
of one chief that 'some profess Christianity because they like the new
Kings, Marriage, Atices tors, and Cod 325
system which gives so much more importance to the poor'. 3 0 But in
stateless societies the category o f ' t h e poor' really did not exist. There
appeared instead of royals and the poor a homogeneity far more
difficult to fathom. Almost no one stood out and no one had any
reason to be interested in missionary wares. School education
appeared particularly pointless. Only when a society was threatened
by a neighbouring state or by slave raiders might it turn rather readily
to missionary patronage. In general and in the long term the supreme
African social obstacle to missionary influence was not the kings, not
the State, not marriage, but statelessness, amorphous and mysterious,
lacking in centres political or commercial, lacking in any of the more
familiar ambitions upon which a missionary could play.
Most negative of all were pastoral, semi-nomadic societies such as
those of the Nuer, the Turkana, the Masai, or the Karamojong. The
social shaping of this sort of Africa provided an almost total bar to the
kind of religion the Western missionary had on offer. They could at
best watch each other with an amused sympathy, but, for the most
part, and for long, missionaries simply found they had plenty to do
elsewhere.
Very little is known about the religion of the Nuer. Miss Huffman mentions
some names of their gods, but we learn little as to their significance in the
lives and beliefs of the people. While I was studying the Shilluk people in
the Sudan in 1910, yet another Nuer god, viz. Kot, was mentioned to me
by a number of Nuer men . . . to Kot is attributed the creation of the
world.41
Had Miss Huffman failed through all her years in Nuerland to hear
the name which the two anthropologists heard so often? One cannot
say, but this does suggest how hard it is to be confident not only
about African religion but also about the interpretative skills of even
deeply sympathetic missionaries, and anthropologists too. Lived and
practised in a variety of ways but never written down, oral religion
Livingstone, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa, 138-9; cf. IJvingstone's
Missionary Corresjiondence, 307.
41
Ray Huffman. \'uer Customs and Folk-lj>re (1931), viii.
328 1780-1890: Art ti-Slavery to Subjugation
may escape nonce particularly from people gripped by a religion of
the book.
Yet was there necessarily so total a contrast between biblical and
African religion? When Equiano was first introduced to the Bible
by a friend in 1759 he confessed himself 'wonderfully surprised to
see the laws and rules of my country written almost exactly here, a
circumstance which I believe tended to impress our manners and
customs more deeply on my memory'. 4 2 In point of fact what
proved for some missionaries a problem was less the religionlessness
than the religiosity of Africans, because they themselves were now
as much the apostles of science as of religion. The Bible and
African religion might form more of an alliance than they really
liked. The alliance they increasingly believed in was rather one
between the Bible and science in which the more awkward parts of
the former for the modern mind were quietly passed over: T I o w
much superstition a little science overthrows . . . To reveal a law
where they expect a witch is our privilege.' So wrote an American
missionary in Sierra Leone in the 1890s. 43 The secular benefits
brought by the missionary could be clear enough. It was,
paradoxically, his religious contribution which might be less
obvious. Just as the missionary could fail to see African religiosity,
so might Africans fail to see or to be impressed by a missionary's
religiosity.
The missionary linked faith in G o d with a trust in 'secular'
medicine. For Africans too religion had a great deal to do with
health. They found it indeed impossible to separate the two, but also
hard to see a difference between the theory of efficacy of their
medicines and that of European ones. Why be compelled to reject
the one and yet encouraged to make use of the other? African
Christian religiosity tended, then, either to believe in the efficacy of
both or to reject both. Either way one might judge their attitude
more, not less, religious than that of the missionaries. Over medicine
as over so much else, however, the conflict of contrasting
understandings had to work itself out not so much in the initial
leap of conversion as in the long run of the post-conversion years.
*2 The Interesting Narrative of the Uje of Olaudah ISqmano or Guslatws Vas so, the African (1789;
rcpr. 1969, cd. 1'. Edwards), ch. 6.
43
Alfred Taylor I Ioward. cf. A. Walls, 'Ruminations on Rainmaking', in J. C . Stone (ed.),
Experts in Africa (Aberdeen, 1980), 1 4 6 - 5 1 .
Kings, Marriage, A tices tors, and Cod 329
This particular issue would prove in point of fact one of the major
factors in the spread of Christian independency.
Witchcraft is not unrelated to medicines. It provided a principal
explanation for grave and unexpected misfortune. Belief in witches
means belief in the existence of neighbours personally and secretly
responsible for death, disease, and disaster. Prevalent throughout
Africa, it was a belief activated a good deal more in some societies
than others. People were executed for witchcraft, among them
Lobengulas own sister Mngcengence, but in decentralized
communities it probably made the least impact. It was where
royal power and a machinery for finding and executing witches
were linked together, as among the Ndebele and the Azande, that it
had most fearful consequences. With the advent of Christianity
there were several possible developments. Witch-finders tended to
become a missionary's chief enemies, and early converts could easily
be denounced as witches. People otherwise accused of witchcraft
might at times seek missionary protection. Thus in general, from
the viewpoint of traditional society, the witch-detecting industry
was placed in opposition to Christianity, which was seen as a new
source or cover for witchcraft. It may well be that what made it so
hard for an Ndebele to become a Christian was the alliance
between monarchy and witchcraft finders, rather than the nature of
the former alone. However, as Christianity spread among a people,
new alliances developed. In the period of social disorientation
consequent upon the European take-over of Africa, the fear of
bewitchment appears to have grown. If witchcraft was the most evil
of things and Christianity was itself a struggle with evil and with
the devil, then Christianity and witchcraft detection should be on
the same side. Many of the waves of popular Christianity flowing
across one part or another of rural Africa in the first half of this
centurv/ shared in the characteristics of a witchcraft eradication
movement. In one extreme case Tomo Nyirenda, a self-appointed
evangelist with a slight Livingstonia background and Watch Tower
inspiration, turned in Northern Rhodesia into an exccuter of
witches on an horrific scale. Witch fears operated powerfully within
Aladura, Lumpa, and many other independent churches and mass
movements. Here again the content of traditional belief was carried
over into the Christian community, powerful but neither
unchanged nor unchallenged. Popular Christianity can in many
places not be understood without a sense of this pervading fear, and
330 iySo~ i8go: Arm-Slavery to Subjugation
yet, to cite one example to the contrary; the word 'witch' never
once makes an appearance in the huge corpus of oral Dida Harrist
hvmns. 44
/
45
Dec. 1877. G. Gox, The IJfe of John William Colenso, Bishop of Natal (1888), ii. 453.11. 1;
J. Guy, 'The Heretic: A Study of the Life of John William Colenso (Johannesburg, 1983}, 259.
4
* S Akama, ' A Religious History of the Isoko People of che Bendel State of Nigeria',
4?
Ph.D. thesis (Aberdeen, 1981), 404. J. MiddJcton, Lugbara Religion (i960). 35.
332 lySo—iSgo: Anti-Slavery to Subjugation
over to many of the prophets of the twentieth century who were
totally denunciatory of respect for ancestral spirits, this was not on the
whole in most places a side of tradition which acted as a consistent
break upon Christian conversion. Once again it was much more a
question of Christianity flowing over it and then having to live with
the consequences.
The cult of deities was very different. In the orisa of the Yoruba.
the abosum of the Akan, the lubaale of the Baganda, there was a
developed system of worship with temples, rites, myths, systems of
divination, an organized priesthood. In origin they had been royal
ancestors, heroes of the past, or nature spirits. Their cult had almost
inevitably to come into sustained organizational and ideological
conflict with a Christian Church just because the two were so
relatively similar. Such cults could not be assimilated into any
recognizable Christianity. They were most extensive in the more
established monarchies and in a number of cases, such as that of the
Yoruba Cult of Esu, the Cult of Wamala and Kibuka in Buganda, and
the royal worship in Dahomey and Ashanti, human sacrifice was an
integral part of the system. Here religious confrontation, both
between rituals and between people, was likely to be most complete,
but quite apart from the aggravating element of human sacrifice—an
element which had to disappear after the establishment of European
p o w e r — w e can identify a basic relationship of opposition between
these particular cults and Christianity which would not go away.
However, as such cults were far from universal—unlike ancestor
veneration—and thev could be, moreover, both fearful and feared,
their significance for the confrontation of the two religions should
not be overstated.
It has also to be borne in mind that while the cult of a deity could
be exclusivist for its devotees, it did not effectively alter the general
tolerance of the African religious culture of which they were part, a
tolerance of inclusiveness comparable to that of Hinduism or the
religious condition of the R o m a n Empire in the first centuries of the
Christian age. If African religion tried—seldom very forcefully—to
be intolerant of Christianity, it was less because of any confrontational
character of its own than because of Christianity's inherent
intolerance.
Only in regard to the reality of God was there a shared inclusivity.
Here missionaries themselves increasingly recognized that in
traditional belief thev actuallv had an all v. It is hard for the historian
/ / •
Kings, Marriage, Atices tors, and Cod 333
to disagree. Maybe African traditional beliefs about the nature of
God were not often as clear as some missionaries affirmed and many
modern African Christian scholars tend to suggest. Duff Macdonalds
remarks of i «S82 may be as sound as any: after affirming that in
scripture translation they always used the word 'mulungu' to translate
'God', though realizing that this is chiefly 'a general name for spirit'
and often refers to the spirit of a dead man, he continued, 'Beyond
their Polytheism the language contains a few expressions that remind
us of Pantheism, and a great many that speak to us of Monotheism.' 4 *
Traditional usages could hardly not be theologically ambiguous, open
to a development in clarity in quite different directions. Words for
spirit had an inevitable fluidity of meaning. What matters for
Christian history is that they were open to a Christian development
and refinement which could generally take place without over-
straining earlier meaning and with a sensed experience of spiritual
continuity. This applied not only to god names but to other words as
well, relating to human virtues or divine attributes. In almost every
language group Christianity carried over from tradition its name for
G o d — O l o r i n , Lesa, Nzambi, Mulungu, Katonda, Imana, or
Modimo. It is true that missionaries were by no means always clear
that it was right to do this. There was a great deal of argument,
especially in southern Africa, and some quite sustained attempts to
use an entirely European-rooted name—Jehovah, or even 'Godi'.
Thus for years the Jesuits in Rhodesia stood out against the use of
Mwari, insisting upon Jahve instead. Even as late as 1924 their
Prefect-Apostolic could threaten to close a mission they had taken
over from Mariannhill 'unless Mwari is eliminated and Jahve
substituted', 49 but they were unusual in this and had finally to
abandon it. 'Tell them', declared Colenso towards the Zulu, rejecting
missionary caution in this matter as in others, 'that their own names
are excellent names for God and we shall call Him by those names,
and shall come to tell them more about Him. There was a general
assent of "Yebo", "Yes".' 5 ° For the historian the crucial fact is simply
that this happened and in happening helped shape the spirituality of
the Christian Churches at the basic level of the orientation of divine
worship and God-talk. It is difficult to disagree in point of feet with
Henri Junod s judgement: 'It is wonderful to notice how easily the
DutT Macdonald, Afiicana; or, Tne Heart of Heathen Africa (1882}. i. 59 and 67.
49
T. O Ranger, 'Poverty and Prophecisin', unpublished paper, 13.
y
' Colenso. Jen IVeeks in \'atal, 134.
334 1780-1890: Art ti-Slavery to Subjugation
idea of die God of Christianity is accepted by the Bantu.,_Nl All the
God proverbs and theophorous names common in many African
languages could be adopted to strengthen a culture of religious
continuity. Perhaps the Christian God was taught too often in ternis
less kind and more revengeful than the God of tradition, but if
missionary doctrine might affect the traditional image of God in
more than one direction, it is probably still more true that the latter
continued to affect how Christians understood the former.
African religion, like African society generally, had then areas
which were toughly resistant to the Christianization process, yet it
had much else which could go along with that process more easily
than many a rather condemnatory missionary had at first imagined or
desired. In practice there was an oscillation between continuity and
contestation both in the initial processes of conversion and within the
subsequent development of church life and theology at almost every
level. It may, finally, be best simply to illustrate the contrasts within
that oscillation by a number of examples.
H. C. Monrad, a Danish chaplain at the fort at Christiansborg from
1805, visited an Ewe fetish mountain near the lower Volta. The priest
who had accompanied him poured a libation to the local spirit before
they descended and asked Monrad to do likewise. This he did 'with
the hearty desire to God that a happier future would dawn for this
corner of the earth which nature had so splendidly endued with
beauty'. When later he went down with fever, a fetish priest in full
dress murmured prayers over his bed and was rewarded with a glass of
brandy s 2 Such an expression of ecumenism was, undoubtedly, wTildly
uncharacteristic of the nineteenth century, but it is interesting to
know that at its start it was, all the same, possible.
'Sango cannot save. Ova cannot save, but Jesus Christ can,' declared
early converts among the Yoruba. 5 3 Conversion tends to be
confrontational. In nineteenth-century Africa it could be exceed-
ingly so. Becoming a Christian almost inevitably involved public
repudiation of the 'principalities and powers', the particular spiritual
forces hitherto believed to dominate the world. When at Bonnv in /
11
H. Junod, The LJfe of a South African Tribe (1912). ii. 410.
H . Debrunner, 'Notable Danish Chaplains on the Gold Coast', Transactions of the Gold
Coast and Togoland Historical Society. 2/1 (1956), 19.
u
J. Peel. 'Conversion and Tradition in T w o African Societies: Ijebu and Buganda', Pa>f
and Present, 77 (1977), 123.
Kings, Marriage, Atices tors, and Cod 335
honour of a deceased member of his family, three young Christians
refused to take part and one, Joshua Hart, was put to death because
he 'refused to partake of things sacrificed to the gods'. He was
repeatedly tossed in the air and left to fall on the ground. He was
then bound, hand and foot, taken in a canoe and thrown in the river.
When he did not sink, his head was smashed with a paddle. The
Bonny confirmation class used to pray, 'Give us the firmness of
Joshua.' 54
On the other side of the continent one day in 1882 the C M S
missionary O'Flaherty was physically attacked by the medium of one
of the gods, Namalere, and they fought with sticks until separated by
a local official. 55 When a German missionary forced his way into the
sacred grove of Lubaga of the Nyakyusa, it is said that there was a
crash of thunder and he fled, afraid, leaving his jacket behind. 56
Michael Tansi, the Igbo Catholic priest, faced with a masquerade,
took his stick declaring, 'The spirit has been confronted by a more
powerful spirit' or even 'I will reduce you to ashes.'2'7 Canon
Buningwire, an early Anglican priest in Ankole, would go around the
villages with two dogs dressed with fetishes and amulets, telling the
people that those who trusted in such things were like dogs who
cannot reason. 58 The mass destruction of fetishes by many a prophet
like Harris or Babalola witnessed 110 less to an inherent confrontation
which was surely in part unavoidable. These things were simply too
powerful, just as the missionary claims for 'Christ alone' as mediator
were too powerful, for there not to be plenty of immediate conflict
in which some people died and many were threatened.
Yet for many Christians there were also elements of continuity,
especially in personal terms. The Christian conversion of people with
traditional spiritual authority was not unusual. They could carry their
authority with them, and at least some early priests were able to say,
'If I had not been a priest, I would have been a diviner.' 59 The kings
of Ankole depended profoundly upon their principal diviners, a
dynasty of women chiefs at Ibanda, the religious centre of the
u
F.. ïsichei. 'Christian* and Martyrs in Bonny, Ora and l.okoja c 1 8 7 4 - 1 7 0 2 * . in E
Isiehei (ed.), K;ricfiVv of Christian Uxpencnce in Nigeria (1982). 6 2 - 8 .
55
D. Bukenva, ' T h e Development of Neo-traditional Religion: T h e Bagnnda
Experience', M.Lict. thesis (Aberdeen, 1980), 7 1 .
M . Wilson, Com;mojij/ Rifu<?k of the 1\yakyioa (1959), 29.
<?
E Isichei, Entirely for Cod: 7he Life of Michael luvte fàmt (1980), 5 5, 40.
• ' Bishop Jerome Baniunoba. oral information.
v>
J. Bamunoba, 'The Cult of Spun in Ankole', M A dissertation (Makererc, 1973). 296
336 1780-1890: Art ti-Slavery to Subjugation
kingdom. In 1902 Kiburuva succcedcd bcr sister in the position,
became a most enthusiastic Christian, and made lbanda a major
centre of Christianity. In [904 she was baptized with her whole
household, returned her instruments of divination to the palace
where they were thrown on the grave of the last pagan king, and
from then on until her death in 1951 patronized the church, made
mats for the sanctuary with her own hands, provided money for the
salary of catechists, and had a priest actually living in her household.
Mer influence was immense just because it was that of tradition/ 10
The authority of lbanda had been continued, not overturned.
Some missionaries saw the 'principalities and powers' of tradition
as simply empty, imaginary things. For others, they were diabolical,
just as they were for Tansi or Harris. But for many Christians they
were real, far from diabolical, yet now replaced by a new, greater, but
less approachable, power. A Christian Nyakyusa chief in the 1930s
could affirm that 'in the old days Kyala heard men and agreed to their
requests in this way. We went to ask for rain and food in the groves;
the chief would kill a cow and Kyala agreed, food and rain came.
N o w that the Gospel has spread . . . Kyala refuses to agree . . .\ 61 For
many Christians the old rituals were seen as having been necessary in
the past, and, even now, probably remained necessary for non-
Christians. Inevitably in times of drought or other crisis they could
still fall back on them as 'necessary even for us*. They continued,
then, to live in two worlds, between which the relationship was
largely one of uneasy coexistence. One, nevertheless, was in process
of displacing the other, sometimes by the sheer challenge of denial
and destruction, sometimes as at lbanda by a quieter transference,
sometimes even through an amicable farewell.
Our final example illustrates the scenario of parting with an old
friend and guardian, because a greater lord has arrived, rather
touchingly. It comes from the Dida Harrists in the village of
Yocoboué. The spirit Kpoto, who resided not far away in the river
Boubo, had blessed the village with more children than any other
spirit. It was necessary to sever his worship and the tie of dependence
effectively but gratefully. A Dida witness years later described
the day when Pastor Jacob 'Iowa announced in church that the worship
service on the following Sunday would take place 'chez Kpoto' on the
** J. Bamunoba, ' T h e Diviner* for die Kings (Abagabc) of Ankolc', IJJ 29 (1965) 9 5 - 7 .
rM
Wilson, Communal Rituals of the Nyakyusa, 176.
Kings, Marriage, Atices tors, and Cod 337
Boubo River. Beginning already on Tuesday of that week, the villagers
went to the spot and began cleaning up the area. From Tuesday to Saturday
they worked, felling trees, burning the underbrush, sweeping impeccably
the banks of the river, and then constructing an immense hangar of wood
posts and palm branches, large enough to contain the entire village. The
worship service on that Sunday was very long. There were songs and
prayers and a lengthy sermon by Towa. And then, finally, came the moment
which 110 one who actually witnessed it could ever forget, when Towa took
water and baptized Kpoto in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy-
Spirit, all the while bcsccching God to hear him as he prayed: 'God, we
want now to worship you, you alone, and none other. Send us the force we
need in order to give you all of our praise. Protcce us and give us the
strength to remain faithful to you.' Then, addressing himself to Kpoto, Towa
added: 'Go away now, far, far from this place. We will worship you no
more. It is God alone who will reçoive our praise. We don't need you
anymore.>62
Doubtless such events happened less frequently than those of
confrontation and destruction. Yet interiorly and psychologically this
scene may represent the larger reality better than that of Tansi waving
his stick at a masquerader or Joshua Hart dying for his refusal to share
in a sacrificial feast to his family gods. As a whole the Christian
community moved beyond the rituals upon which its fathers had
depended. Such a moving beyond was indeed a liberation from many
burdens though, if only half believed in, it could also engender
additional fears. Nevertheless, as it moved more confidently into a
Christian world of meaning and practice, it did so for the most part
without quite disbelieving in the reality and even the beneficence of
the world it had hitherto inhabited. If destruction of the past was one
inevitable dimension of the Christianization of society, it was a
destruction coupled, not officially by the Church, but quite
profoundly by many of its members, with gratitude for a religious
inheritance which continued to shape in many ways their beliefs,
their language, and their morality'.
rti
Krabill, 'The Hynmody of the Hnrrist Church Among the Dida of South-Central Ivor)-
Coast'. 3 9 2 - 3 .
9
CHRISTIAN LIFE IN THE AGE OF BISHOP
CROWTHER
i. 'Black Europeans'
1
A Crummell. 'Hie Future of Africa {1X62), 12.
1
Report of the Hislcyan Methodist Missionary Society, xii (1854).
Christian Life in the Age of Bishop Crowther 339
Irishman, sometime Colonial Secretary, commented on Samuel
Lewis, leading citizen of Sierra Leone in the second half of the
century, that he was 'more English than the English themselves'. 3
While he may have said this a little sarcastically, Lewis almost
certainly regarded it as a compliment.
Consider the great names of West African Christianity in this
period: Samuel Lewis, Samuel Crowther, Samuel Johnson, Thomas
Babingeon Macaulay, James Johnson, Nathaniel King, James
Africanus Horton. Here indeed we find English nomenclature,
English language, English manners, and clothes, come to Africa and
vigorously adopted far more than imposed: clergy, doctors, lawyers,
and soldiers all educated in and loyal to a London model. This mid-
century Christian culture whose heart was in Freetown, writh its
parallel—more settler, less Africa-linked—in Monrovia, was by the
1850s spreading vigorously along the coast, above all around Lagos.
The core experience of liberated slaves in the villages outside
Freetown ensured an ethos that was intertribal yet not too abruptly
cut off from local, pre-colonial, roots elsewhere. T h e founding
fathers in Regent, Wilberforce, and Bathurst remembered their
homes and their own languages. Some in due course returned to
them. The vigour of the so-called 'Sierra Leoneans' of the second
half of the century lay in this easy belonging to two worlds. They
took on board as much of this Western, civilizing, Christianizing
model as they wanted, the choice was essentially theirs, and some
preferred Islam instead. Freetown was their own. There was no white
settler society. Europeans died too fast and missionaries remained
rather few. An African clergy, on the contrary, soon developed in
remarkable numbers. Crowther was the first to be ordained, in 1843.
At least 100 West African 'native clergy' connected with the C M S
had followed him by 1899, apart from Methodists and Baptists. Most
had been born in Sierra Leone. Fifty-five of them had been trained at
Fourah Bay and eleven of these had received Durham University
degrees (possible only after 1879). The rest were mostly untrained.
From the late 1830s some 'Sierra Leoneans' had begun to move
back to their original lands along the coast, and by 1851 there were
already some 3,000 returned 'emigrants' in Abeokuta alone. Samuel
Crowther's reunion with his mother at Ochogu near Abeokuta in
1846 and her subsequent baptism were prophetically symbolic of the
the later nineteenth century was the way in which Yoruba from
Freetown, Christianized and in a way Anglicized yet not de-
Yorubaized, returned through Badagry and Lagos into the interior to
promote a style of Christianity which was increasingly their own and
something well able to appeal to other Yoruba who had not had the
Sierra Leone experience. Nowhere else did this happen to any
considerable extent. Even in Sierra Leone—indeed in Sierra Leone
most of all—it failed to happen. Christian Sierra Leone culture and
life remained cut off from its hinterland, which for long it almost
wholly failed to penetrate. Again on the Niger, Bishop Crowther's
own diocese, it did not really happen. Here was missionary work run
by a group of outsiders rather than confident re-entry of the returned
native into his ancestral land bearing with him a faith he wished to
share.
The Gold Coast experience was different again, although the area
of penetration—among the coastal Fante in and around the British
colony—was fairly small. T h e kingdom of Ashanti still provided a
hard wall against any advance inland. The roots of nineteenth-
centurv Christianitv/ here are to be found less in the return of
*
recaptives than among pupils of Philip Quaque and the Cape Coast
Castle school, though little less important was the arrival of the Basel
missionaries in 1828 at Christiansborg Castle. Methodism derived
from the first, under the guidance of Thomas Birch Freeman, an
enthusiastic pioneer, the son of an African father and English mother.
Presbvterianism derived from the second. The Basel and Bremen
/
4
J Ajayi, Christian Mittler» Nigeria }$.fl-i$(}i. 77t»' Making of a New F.iite (1965), 207.
344 1780-1890: Art ti-Slavery to Subjugation
consecrated him in Canterbury' Cathedral. But of what was he to be
bishop? The obvious answer was Yorubaland. He was a Yoruba.
Yoruba Christians and clergy were reasonably numerous. Nowhere
else was the 'euthanasia' of the mission remotely conceivable. But
there were problems. The white missionaries among the Yoruba,
Townsend especially, were emphatically opposed. Moreover,
Crowther himself had been working on the Niger for several years
and had been involved in all the Niger expeditions including the first
and particularly disastrous one of 1841. He had survived. The C M S
did not want to abandon the Niger Mission but feared to send white
people to a region where they so rapidly died. By appointing
Crowther Bishop of the Niger, Venn thought he could at one and
the same time promote the man he believed in, solve the awkward
problem of the Niger Mission, and avoid conflict with his
missionaries in the field. Crowther was certainly a 'native' but he
was not a native of the Niger. The degree of difference between the
Yoruba and all the peoples east of Benin almost certainly escaped
Venn's understanding. The unreasonableness of such an arrangement
was overwhelming, its consequences in due course disastrous. That
was not, however, how it looked at first. Crowther, declared the Act
of Parliament requisite for the creation of a new bishopric, was to
exercise jurisdiction over 'the countries of western Africa beyond the
limits of our dominions', 5 while the English Bishop of Sierra Leone
would retain within his diocese the various British colonies. As the
British dominions were extremely limited in 1864, this should have
given Crowther almost all Yoruba, including Abeokuta and Ibadan,
and, indeed, Venn declared that their exclusion from his diocese 'can
only be regarded as temporary'. 6 Crowther actually exercised some
jurisdiction in his early years in Yoruba areas and even in Liberia.
There was, then, a psychologically destabilizing ambiguity in the
nature and boundaries of his diocese from the start. Crowther fixed
his base at Lagos, absolutely reasonable if his jurisdiction was really as
Parliament had declared it, but rather unfortunate if it was to be—as
it came to be and by some had certainly been intended from the start
to be—over the Niger and no more.
'I know that my new position sets me up as a kind of landmark,
which both the Church and the Heathen World must needs behold.
I am aware that any false step taken by me will be injurious to all the
5 6
Ibid. 274. Ibid. 20*.
Christian Life in the Age of Bishop Crowther 345
Native Churches; yet, if God keeps me steadfast, the mouths of the
adversaries will be silenced: 7 Crow r thers departing words in Salisbury
Square to the Committee of the C M S before returning to Nigeria in
July 1864 express both the lonely eminence to which he had been
called and his profound sense of responsibility alike to the African
Church and to the C M S : 110 missionarvf societv J ever had a son more
loyal. But the facts were against him from the start. T h e Church in
Yoruba, the one place where Venn's principles could reasonably be
applied, remained under white control while Crowther and his very
mixed bag of assistants were expected instead to be themselves
missionaries in territories where they were, with few exceptions, far
from native and with no firm base from which to operate, or
adequate means to sustain their operations. It was a cheap
arrangement. Yoruba was dissatisfied, while Crowther was left
without the support needed to undertake a major missionary venture
in a vast and difficult area. By 1875 Hinderer, who like Townsend
had initially opposed Crowther's appointment to be bishop in
Yorubaland, could ask, 'Has not the time come when the native
bishop's jurisdiction should be further extended than the Niger,
especially to his own native soil?' 8 But it was not to be. T h e history of
the Church in both areas might have been very different if Venn had
more firmly implemented his own principles instead of confounding
them in an arrangement which led to ineffectiveness upon the one
side and dissatisfaction on the other.
The very shape of the Niger Mission was a problem. It consisted,
according to the plan as received from the C M S inheriting a Niger
strategy stretching back to the planners of the 1841 expedition, of a
series of stations along the River Niger. It related, not to society or
language, but to the river as providing easy communications, a way
into the continent's interior. In reality it provided a way to an Islamic
interior unpropitious to missionary work. Apart from that it did little
more than link together a number of rather insignificant places of
different culture and language. The Yoruba Mission had a unity of
language and culture. If Crowther had been instructed to evangelize
the Igbo, his mission could also have had one. Instead he had the
many peoples of the Delta in the south, the Igbo in the middle, the
Nupe and other more Islamicized peoples including the Hausa in the
7
E. Scock, The History of the Church Missionary Society (1899), ii. 457.
* Ajayi, Christian Missions in Nigeria, 230.
346 l y S o — I S g O : Anti-Slavery to Subjugation
north. Nothing could have been worse from the viewpoint of
making an impact anywhere. While the river linked the stations, it
did so only if you possessed a reliable boat. For the first fourteen years
Crowther had none. When a mission steamer did arrive, in 1878, it
actually added to the problem: it had to engage in trading to pay its
way and was handed over to a British assistant to manage, someone
w h o failed to get on with Crowther and his agents. With or without
a steamer, the mission was dangerously dependent upon trade and
traders, especially the Niger Company. The riverside inhabitants
could not conceivably be expected to make a sharp distinction
between the evangelists and the traders (in the early years, largely
traders in drink; in later years, largely imperialist bullies), w h o came
and went in the same boats.
W h o m could Crowther find to do the work of preaching and
teaching? Here lay the largest problem of all. The Church in Yoruba
was based on considerable numbers of Christian settlers home from
Freetown, people w h o had not forgotten their own language in
English-speaking Sierra Leone. There was no such group of any size
for the Niger. Furthermore, Christian Yoruba were not particularly
interested in, or suitable for, work quite outside their area. Crowther
naturally recruited Igbo and others of eastern Nigerian background
in Freetown. The general quality was far from outstanding. It is only
too clear that there was considerable difficulty in finding enough
suitable agents. Most of those selected were very poorly educated,
some were old or physically unfit, some had no linguistic
qualifications, a few were of quite dubious character. 9 The case of
William John, recruited at Fourah Bay in 1874, was certainly
untypical, but it provided ammunition for the mission's critics and
was even debated in the House of Lords. First stationed at Brass, he
was disconnected the next year on grounds of seducing the daughter
of a leading Christian, but was re-employed by Crowther in a
secretarial role. Two vears later,• now in Onitsha as assistant
j
both Yoruba urban society and Yoruba polytheism. The towns were
many, cults were many. At times, undoubtedly, the towns warred as
the towns of medieval Italy warred, but they were still bound
together by a common language and a sharing of divinities which
could always make room for one more. While Christianity remained
of its nature as absolute in its claims in nineteenth-century
Yorubaland as in first-century R o m e , it was met in each case by a
society readier to be svncretistic
/ 4
than absolutist: and Yoruba lacked
the imperial authority' and its political cult which gave R o m e its
measure of intolerance. Christians, like Muslims already present
among the Yoruba, adopted the name of Olorun, a Yoruba title for
the creator God, to speak of the G o d of the Bible. While for them
the worship of Olorun was to be sharply contrasted with that of lesser
deities like Sango or Orunrnila, for the traditionalist Yoruba it
remained quite within their system if some should wish to transfer
their worship from one of these deities, the orisa, to the high god,
Olodumare—Olorun. The aggressiveness of the Christian preacher
could appear ill-mannered and unnecessary'. Within the context of a
home Christian faith might well be persecuted and there was
persecution of a sort in Abeokuta and elsewhere around 1850, but on
the larger, public, scene this was greatly- moderated by its deep
incompatibility with both the religious pluralism of Yoruba tradition
and its confident, almost democratic, urban authority.
In a remarkable judgement of July 1849 the Sagboa, or chief
magistrate of Abeokuta, ruled on the persecution of a woman by her
husband for attending Church:
Sagboa now speaks. With a prudent and calm speech lie drew the minds of
all to his subject. Then he began to ask: 'Did the Egbas ever know of so
many country-fashions [indigenous customs] as they now do? No. Whether
Christian Life in the Age of Bishop Crowther 3 51
Sango had ever injured any of such people, who do not worship him, and
who of late have forsaken him? No. Are there not among us worshippers of
Obbatala, Ifa, Orisako and of hundreds of Gods? And have we not
many Mahoniedans in the Land? Yes. Well then, did people ever
express any illwill towards those differences? If we tollerate the one,
we must of necessity tollerate the other also. Therefore my advice is
this: that ye permit this woman to worship whom and what she pleases
without the least interference/ And with this advice all agreed. 14
In this the Yoruba attitude was not csscntiallv different from that of
/
That was his position in 1859. In fact it would be another nine years
before Akibode took 'the final start', but already in 1861 he was so
sure he would be baptized that he had chosen the name he would
take, Faul. Meanwhile, he introduced Pearse to other babalawo in his
home. Among them was Masolowo, who had been one of Akibode s
disciples and like him had accepted the basic message of Christianity
yet for long could not be induced actually to abandon his Ifa. Like
Akibode he visited Pearse, was fond of discussion and very friendly,
but to give up both his work and his wives was another matter.
The third babalawo was Philip Jose Mcffre, a different sort of person
in that he was himself a returned ex-slave from Brazil. A highly
skilled diviner with a great reputation, he came to be convinced by
Pearse that he needed 'something superior to Ifa'. Meffire was keen to
learn to read both in English and in Yoruba. As he read the Scriptures
in Yoruba his commitment rapidly grew in the course of 1862.
Encouraged by a dream in September he took his principal Esu, a
great mud idol he had brought back from Brazil, and buried it in the
ground. In November he handed over six other orisa to Pearse and
two sets of Ifa at the January N e w Year's service. 'It yet remains two
superior ones. The Lord will overcome them also.' He did so in
February. It was a reproach to Akibode, w h o no longer used his Ifa
but could not get himself actually to surrender them. Only in 1868
did he finally do so, to be followed almost at once by Masolowo.
These conversions are exceptionally interesting because they were
highly personal, the intellectual and moral decisions of able,
successful people who were losing a great deal in consequence: the
principal source of their livelihood as well as their social prestige and
their plural marriages. It says a great deal for Pearse that he was both
so convincing and so patient. He could take Iiis babalawo seriously
within their own thought-world as so many a white missionary could
not. He seemed able to argue convincingly the superiority of a
354 1780-1890: Art ti-Slavery to Subjugation
Christian theodicy, a Christian personal eschatology in regard to life
after death, and a Christian pattern of morality, each in close
comparison with Yoruba conceptions.
Mcffire too was helped at a crucial moment by a dream in which a
voice had ordered him to bury seven images, and he had actually
done so. Dreams could be an important part of the conversion
process. Many a prospective convert had one, and Sierra Leonean
agents like Pearse at Badagri, James White at Otta, and William
George at Abeokuta had no problem in taking them seriously The
mechanics of religious conversion within Yoruba society had moved
rapidly away from the model British missionaries would themselves
have inculcated. To some extent this was helped by the consequences
of the Ijaye war between Ibadan and the Egba which raged through
the early 1860s separating Ibadan Christians from Abeokuta
Christians. European missionaries were expelled from Abeokuta
and severely restricted elsewhere. As a result throughout much of
Yorubaland the Christian ministry depended entirely upon Yoruba
clergy and schoolteachers, almost all of whom were Sierra Leoneans,
though in Ibadan they were joined by the first non-emigrant, Daniel
Olubi, trained wholly in Nigeria and mosdy in David Hinderers
household.
The maturity of this Yoruba Church by the mid-1870s was
remarkable. It was not indeed in relation to the total population a
numerous Church. Politically and socially it was insignificant, at least
outside Lagos. Nothing like a mass conversion movement was to be
expected. Many of the clergy had a fairly limited training while the
lay Sierra Leoneans who had returned with them were, many of
them, Christians in little more than name. All the problems
characteristic of an African Church anywhere in relation to
marriage, funerals, and traditional rituals structuring almost every
side of social life were problems here too. What is remarkable,
nevertheless, is how an evangelical momentum, begun in Freetown,
was in many places maintained quite outside the sphere of British
rule or a Westernized town, and how committed and imaginative the
best clergy and laity were. It is interesting, for instance, to find at Otta
by the late 1850s the development of hymns, both words and tune of
local composition, encouraged by James White, who had been a
catechist there since 1854 and was ordained in 1857. Henry
Townsend described them that vear as 'the first I have heard', and
Crowther much later spoke of them as 'suitable Scriptural
Christian Life in the Age of Bishop Crowther 355
compositions of their own adapted to their native airs'. 17 This
represented already a quite courageous break with the cultural norms
of Freetown.
Nevertheless, while one kind of Africanization of Christianity was
developing quite fast in up-country Yorubaland from the 1850s to the
1870s, another kind was being proposed more theoretically in
Freetown and then in Lagos. Between 1871 and 1874 a controversy
broke out in Sierra Leone. There had been a native church pastorate
for a decade with nine pastors in charge of as many parishes, but
supervision and authority remained finally in European hands. On
the tenth anniversary of the pastorate, one of its clergy, J. H. Davies,
appealed for a fully independent native Church: l We request you to
aim at establishing at Sierra Leone a pure Native Church . . . not
only for our own and children's use, but for the use of Africa at
large.'1 x But it was the arrival of Edward Blyden in Freetown in
August 1871 which really triggered off the argument. Blyden had
come from the Caribbean to Liberia as a very young man. There he
had already held a large variety of posts including those of Professor
of Classics at Liberia College and Secretary of State in the
government. He was a man of extraordinary brilliance, a master of
written English and much else despite a very limited formal
education. He came now to Freetown, sent by Henry Venn and
the C M S , to teach Arabic at Fourah Bay College and in general to
prepare the way for a mission to the Muslim interior. It did not work
like that. There were rumours that he had left Liberia on account of
adultery with the President's wife. Bishop Chectham and the white
missionaries believed the rumours and suspended him at once. The
African clergy disbelieved them and gave dinners in his honour. He
soon began a newspaper, the Negro, through which he could
disseminate his own great schemes: to bring more West Indians to
Africa, to found a university in Freetown, to recognize the merits of
Islam, and to free the Sierra Leonean Church from its dependence
upon Britain and its missionaries.
The clergy of Sierra Leone at first responded with enthusiasm,
James Johnson the principal intellectual among them particularly.
Nevertheless, the enthusiasm was soon tempered with caution.
Blyden s strident criticism of missionaries was simply too dangerous
Nothing might seem much more different from Yorubaland than the
situation in South Africa. Yet go back to 1825 and west and south
look not dissimilar. Probably, indeed, the local Christian leadership of
men like Andries Waterboer, Andries Stoffels, and Jan Tshatshu was
superior to anything indigenous to be found in West Africa. Move
on sixty years and the position is quite other. While there was by the
i88os a remarkably confident Christian élite and numerous clergy in
Freetown, Yorubaland, and on the Niger, nothing really comparable
is to be found within the heartland of the new South Africa despite
the far greater missionary resources. The principal reason for the
difference lay, almost certainly, in the very multitude of missionaries.
Already in 1843 David Livingstone remarked that in Cape Colony
'the number of missionaries of different societies is so large compared
to the population it must strike everyone with astonishment'. 20 Yet
they continued to multiply all through the century. By 1880, for
instance, there were nine different societies at work in Natal and
Zululand. N o fewer than seventy-five mission stations were opened
in Natal, Pondoland, and Zululand between 1844 and ^ 7 7 - 2 1
Nowhere else in the world, it is claimed, with the exception of New-
Zealand, was so thickly populated with missionaries.
20
Letter to Arthur Tidman, J e j u n e 1 S 4 J . Lii'ings(om''s Missionar/ Correspondence 184 s-
i8t56. ed. I. Schapen (1961), 44
See the lise and map. N. Etheriugton, freachery. Peasants and Politics m Sou:hca<( Aft tea
1835-1880 (1978), 26-7.
Christian Life itt the Age of Bishop Crowther 359
The consequence was obvious and inevitable: the more the white
agency; the less the black. It was a shortage of white missionaries 011
the west coast and the health problems they encountered there which
stimulated so fruitfully a multiplication of black ordinations. It was
the multitude of white missionaries in southern Africa and the very
healthy conditions they there enjoyed which inhibited the growth of
an indigenous clergy.
It was not only a matter of numbers but also of a larger missionary
method. Nowhere else was Christian life so long dominated by the
'station\ the mission estate large or small, where Africans accepted a
missionary landlord and a shaping of society according to missionary
regulation. With the advancing wave of white settlement which was
taking over the subcontinent, crushing the societies that had lived
there and dispossessing them of a great part of their land, it was
inevitable that the simultaneous wave of missionaries, with their own
share of the land—even if not in all a very big share—should be seen
and resented as part and parcel of the same thing. When land was
granted by colonial authority to a mission, the people living on it
sometimes simply migrated. Nevertheless, as settler land alienation
continued, numerous Africans were bound to seek employment,
security, and a home in the relatively benign atmosphere of a mission
station. The contrast between mission Africans and those elsewhere
soon became a sharp one. N o people anywhere in Africa was more
evidently divided by Christianity into two sections than the people
who for long bore the main brunt of settler advance, the Xhosa.
There were for generations the ' R e d Xhosa' and the 'School Xhosa'.
While the African Christian community did continue to grow, it thus
did so in a fundamentally unhealthy and over-dependent way, as a
social appendage to the white missionary community, itself an
integral part of colonial society.
Missionaries conformed remarkably quickly to the dynamics and
mentality of the colonial system whatever their origins. Initially
Americans and Scandinavians, for instance, had been decidedly
anti-imperialist. But such attitudes seldom lasted for long in South
Africa. Again, Henry Callaway, an Anglican missionary of
exceptional ability and understanding, was at first deeply
concerned with the understanding of African culture and
religion. As the years passed, however, he became less adapta-
tionist, coming to believe instead in the necessity of the imposition
of European ways for the accomplishment of evangelization. It is
360 i/So-iSço: Atîti-Slavery to Subjugation
remarkable how monotonously alike in behaviour and outlook the
/
Ibid. 1 7 7 and 1 2 1 .
Christian Life itt the Age of Bishop Crowther 361
a negligible one and that in social and religious terms the missions
were having, collectively, a significant impact. At least the best of
them were. They were empowering Africans in a new way within a
colonial world. While we can most easilv describe this in economic
/
children and have followed our missionarv, now we are men and mav
think and act for ourselves".' 23 The army of missionaries had brought
about an impressively quick rise in a class of confident black believers.
Ploughs and schools and vernacular Bible texts had been both
effective and appreciated. The reply of the Mvoti people to Grout
could be paralleled again and again. It was the missionary inability to
think beyond a Western-controlled and highly paternalistic relation-
ship, in which there was really no room for Africans to be at home
constructing a culture of their own in some ways significantly
different from that of Victorian whites, however immenselv /
23
Ibid. U 7 - H .
Christian Life itt the Age of Bishop Crowther 363
in any circumstances, our second problem. The contrast between
west and south over clergy ordinations is a striking one. William Ellis,
an LMS missionary-, wrote a report in 1855 on an institution
established at Hankey a few years earlier for the training of teachers
and clergy:
I deem it right to state that it does not appear to me that the important
objects contemplated by the Directors, in commencing the Seminary, are
likely to be realized without a cost of time and money greater than they will
feel justified in appropriating to the same, especially if the uncertainty of che
issue be taken into consideration.
T h e native Churches have not hitherto and do not now contain young
men of piety and talent or attainments to render them suitable for
becoming students for the Christian ministry'. . . T h e want o f materials out
of which to train a native ministry is not confincd to the Colony, but
extends to the stations beyond it . .
the later nineteenth century. And behind Ntsikana one can still just
detect the power of Van der Kemp, an influence so profoundly
different from that of most of his successors. The tradition did not die
with Dukwana.
It is striking to note how the appeal back to Ntsikana grows if
anything stronger, and more varied, in the years after the death of the
son who most resembled him. Little more than a year later John
Knox Bokwe published an account of 'Ntsikana and his Hymn* in
five instalments in the Christian Express. Bokwe, W. W. Ggoba, John
Muir Vimbe, S. E. K . Mqhayi, Nkohla Falati, Alan Kirkland Soga
(Tiyos son), and William Kobe Ntsikana (the prophets grandson)
were all writers, poets, and teachers of the 1880s and 1890s
consciously influenced by Ntsikana. 35 They represent what may well
be called the Xhosa origins of'Ethiopianism'. While the flowering of
that movement would be after 1890. it was well rooted in the Xhosa
Christianity of previous generations. If Ntsikana had provided the
M
Hodgson, 'Soga And Dukwana', 204.
35
J. Hodgson, 'Ntsikana: History and Symbol. Studies in a Proccss of Religious Change
among Xhova-Spcaking People', Ph.l> thesis (Cape Town, 19X5), 3 7 7 - 8 8 .
Christian Life itt the Age of Bishop Crowther 385
root, Tiyo and Dukwana were the trunk earning 'Ntsikana's Vision'
(to make use of the title of a poem published in 1897 by one of Tivo s
sons and later set to music by John Knox Bokwe) across to the much
enlarged Xhosa Christian community of the late nineteenth century.
But they also themselves became part of the legacy. Ten of Tiyo s
own hymns were included in a Xhosa hymn-book published shortly
after his death. Mqhayi, when a schoolboy at Lovedale about 1888,
recited the whole of the first chapter of Tiyo s Pilgrim's Progress in an
elocution competition with such vivacity that onlookers wondered
about his sanity. They were in fact listening to someone who was to
become the greatest of Xhosa writers of both prose and poetry. For
the development of Mqhayi, Bokwe, and their generation, Lovedale
was absolutely needed to provide the books and the literary
confidence, but Ntsikana and Tiyo were needed to provide the
underlying, unitive inspiration.
From the origins of Xhosa Christianity in the early nineteenth
centurvJ to the establishment of the Ntsikana Memorial Association
in 1909 and beyond, a unifying mythology was provided by the
figure of the prophet whom the Memorial Association would
proclaim a saint. It was that symbol which empowered the culture of
Christian Xhosaness actually to enhance its identity in the face of a
ceaseless forward march of a racialist colonialism and of a missionary
paternalism which could, especially at Lovedale, provide a useful
education, but, once the education was given, could not adapt to the
consequence of its own success. The 1870s and 1880s were not, in
South Africa, an era of obvious black Christian achievement, despite
the growth in number, wealth, and education of the Kholwa. The
growth was too clearly threatened by the very forces which had
encouraged it. Nevertheless, a growth in maturity can all the same be
discerned, a growth which was at the same time, and quite especially,
an exercise in perseverance.
gerontocratic. Each county or ssaza had its own chief, but these were
appointed by the king and participated closely in the central
w
H. Ibniolo <md R . Hill (cd*.), 'flic Opening of the Nile Baun {1974). 20, itKi-203; see the
photograph of Fr. Deng with Comboni reproduced in D. M c II wan. A Catholic Sudan :
Dream, \1i<H0ti, Reality (Rome, 1987}, S7.
fc. bichei, 'An Obscure Man: PA Antonio", in F.. Isichei (ed.). K;r>efiV> of Christian
Hxperienee in Nigeria (19S2), 2 S 3 3 .
Christian Life itt the Age of Bishop Crowther 375
hierarchy of government headed by a chief minister, the katikiro. The
religion of the country was a complex polytheism, somewhat similar
to Yoruba religion, in which a number of powerful gods, the
halubaale, had their own temples and priests, some of which practised
human sacrifice. A high god, Katonda, had one or two small temples
but appears to have been little attended to in the nineteenth century,
whatever earlier mav have been the case.
/
For fifty years before the arrival of the missionaries there had been
Arabs at the court of Mengo and quite a number of Baganda had
become Muslims. They had already adopted Katonda as the name for
Allah, and in due course Christians would take this over without
question. Mutesa had toyed with Islam as later he toyed with
Christianity. I lis secretary was an Arab. A mosque had been built
within the royal enclosure. Mutesa had once observed the fast of
Ramadan and twice declared Buganda an Islamic state, but when
Muslims at the court were too forthright, he had turned on them and
executed a considerable number. Buganda in the 1870s was by no
means a Muslim country, but it was one which looked likely to
become one, little by little, much as many a West African monarchy
was slowly Islamized. It was again in this not at all unlike Yorubaland
at the same period.
It was the young men serving in and around the court of Mutesa,
some of them drawn from the best families and training for
chieftainship and war or already occupying minor offices, who had
been attracted by Islam, but few of them were fully converted.
Baganda appear as deeply averse to circumcision. It was among such
people that the missionaries, Catholic and Protestant, quickly found
hearers and readers. Standard missiology has portrayed the arrival of
two competing societies, each prepared to denounce the other when
necessary, as an evangelical disaster in a most promising field. The
evidence suggests the contrary. It was the very tension between the
two—as between both and Islam—which created a genuinely
intellectual challenge and made Christianity so intriguingly
appealing. It would not be very long before young Baganda could
be heard discussing the merits and demerits of Henry VIII or of
praying to Mary.
Cardinal Lavigerie sent instructions to his missionaries in 1879,
forbidding them to baptize any convert, except in the case of the
dying, before completion of a four-year catechurnenate. So sure,
however, were Lourdel and Livinhac of the quality of their best
376 1780-1890: Anti-Slavery to Subjugation
young men that before these precise commands arrived they had
already baptized eight in March and May of 1880, hardly a year after
their arrival. In 1882, after protests to Lavigerie and some mitigation
in severity of the rule, they baptized eight more, including Joseph
Mukasa Balikuddembe, Andrew Kaggwa, Luke Banabakintu, and
Matthias Kalemba,' four future martvrs. y Later that vear the White
*
Pathers withdrew from the country to a station south of the lake. For
some reason, not well identified, they had become discouraged and
frightened, and for two and a half years, November 1882 to July
1885, they were completely absent from Buganda. In 1882 the first
Protestant baptisms were performed and a good many more the next
year. Mackay did not leave the country, and his influence remained
considerable. Mutesa died in 1884, to be replaced by one of his
young sons, the unstable Mwanga.
It is important for any understanding of the Christianization of
Buganda to pause at that point, well before the beginning of any
persecution, because what had happened was already quite
remarkably out of line with missionary experience anywhere else.
The behaviour of Mutesa can be closely paralleled by that of many
another king. What cannot be paralleled is the speedy individual
conversion, in a wholly non-colonial situation, of a large number—
perhaps several hundred—of mostly young people who were not
slaves or outcasts, w h o were not obtaining the protection of a mission
station, but who represented many of the most intelligent among the
up-and-coming governing élite.
It is impossible quite to explain the dynamics of conversion,
whether personal or collective. In Buganda at this point when an
immense process of change was just beginning, one has upon one
side the personalities of the main missionaries, Lourdel and Mackay,
both unusually interesting, and the dialectic of interaction of the two
missions. Upon another side one can point out the quite exceptional
interest the converts showed in learning to read and in the
acquiring of new information. Different again was the appeal of a
very other-worldly gospel, the message of heaven, and of a very high
moral code embraced by many of the early converts with
extraordinary enthusiasm. Put the stress where you will, already by
1882 a collective movement of conversion was under way which
nothing would be able to hold back and over which the missionaries
themselves had remarkably little control.
It is very striking how when the White Fathers left, after just over
Christian Life itt the Age of Bishop Crowther 377
three years in the country, the little group of Catholics had already
the confidence to stand on their own and grow still more numerous,
rather than be reabsorbed in the company attached to Mackay.
Several of them had in fact at the beginning regularly visited both
missions. Thus all four of those mentioned above among the early
Catholic baptisms had earlier been reading St Matthews Gospel and
the Acts of the Apostles with Mackay. In the absence of the White
Fathers men like Mukasa and Kaggwa became both Church leaders
and evangelists, baptizing the sick, catechizing new recruits. Mukasa
in his early twenties was a trusted personal attendant to the King and
took the lead among Christians in the inner court. Fifty miles away at
Mityana, a place no missionary had ever visited, a considerable
community was growing up around Matthias Kalemba, a most
remarkable man in his forties. A Musoga who had been captured as a
child by a Ganda raiding party, he had in time become the Mulumba
or steward of the county chief of Ssingo. O f Kalemba, Lourdel
reported in his diary for 7 June 1880: 'Yesterday, a young man among
our catechumens, an overseer of the slaves of a great chief called
Mukwenda, an ex-disciple of the Protestants and owner of a large
number of women, sent them all away except one and then came to
ask us to baptize him/ 4 1 Banabakintu was also in the service of the
county chief at Mityana. The two were baptized together in 1882,
and by 1886 there were, it was claimed, some 200 believing
Christians gathered around them at Mityana.
It is clear that in each case strong early converts quickly built up a
group in their vicinity While Catholics and Protestants did not see
themselves as sharply divided at this stage, they were in fact
developing in separate areas. The presence of Mukasa Balikuddembe
among the pages of the inner court ensured that this would be a
predominantly Catholic area, and after his death leadership here was
at once taken over by other Catholics like Charles Lwanga and
Honorât Nyonyintono. In the stores, on the other hand, the
leadership of the assistant treasurer, Apolo Kagwa, ensured a
Protestant community. Outside the palace but in its close vicinity
there was the important Catholic cluster at Natete around the houses
of Kisule the gunsmith and Andrew Kaggwa, the royal bandmaster,
while at Kasengezi there was a comparable Protestant meeting-place
at the home of Nuwa Walukaga, the chief blacksmith.
n
J. Paupcl, African Hahyeaust (1962), 31.
378 1780-1890: Anti-Slavery to Subjugation
The transformation in the Catholic community which Lourdel
recognized 011 his return to Mengo in July 1885 was enormous.
Everything that happens later derives from this very early experience
of an almost self-directed and staggeringly confident Christianity.
The court of Mwanga was, if anything, even more unpredictable
than that of Mutesa. While the new Kabaka at first sympathized with
his Christian age-mates in hostility to the older pagan chiefs and
especially the Katikiro, Mukasa, whom he had inherited from his
father, their clear dependence on an authority other than his own
and their willingness even to speak in criticism of his behaviour
quickly led him to turn back to seek the support of the Katikiro, a
man increasingly worried by the Christian phenomenon and
particularly by the influence of his namesake, Joseph Mukasa
Balikuddembe.
At that point the Anglican Bishop Hannington was 011 his way to
Buganda, approaching it not from across the lake as all the
missionaries had done hitherto but overland from the east. It was
regarded by the Baganda as dangerous to allow anyone to enter the
kingdom that way while an English bishop sounded powerful and
dangerous in himself. With every year that passed the stories of
British power grew more impressive. Mwanga was frightened and
gave orders that Hannington should be arrested and murdered, which
he was at the end of October 1885. Once it was done, however,
Mwanga was alarmed that his responsibility for the deed should be
known by Europeans. Joseph Mukasa Balikuddembe he saw as to
blame. Mukasa had rebuked him over the murder and must surely
have passed on the truth to the missionaries. Mwanga worked himself
into a furv and ordered Mukasa s execution. He was taken awav. but
the executioner hesitated to cam- out the order, anticipating a
possible reprieve for the Kings close friend. The Katikiro, however,
sent a further order to ensure that the execution took place without
delay It was carried out only a little before a reprieve did in fact
arrive from Mwanga. Here, as in the large-scale persecution of six
months later, the process was sudden, arbitrary, unsystematic. If
Mwanga was responsible for part of it, the Katikiro Mukasa and other
senior chiefs were also behind it. But neither had anv desire /
ibid 177.
380 1780-1890: Anti-Slavery to Subjugation
Christian, in fact successfully protected two leading Christians,
Nikodemo Sebwato and Alikisi Ssebowa, both in his service.
There was, then, no clear pattern of who died and who lived. The
account of an incident in Apolo Kagwa's Ebika Bya Buganda shows it
well:
Zakariya Kizito and Nuwa Walukaga remained where they were and
prepared to be arrested. After a short time had passed, they saw in the
distance the chief executioner as he was approaching to seize them . . . It
was at this moment that Kizito was given to remember how it is written in
Matthew 10: 22-3, That man will be saved who endures to the lost. Only,
if they persecute you in one city, take refuge in another.' And when he had
remembered that, he stood up and said to his friend: 'Let us flee, because
God has directed us to go.' But his companion refused. Then he turned to
prayer a second time, and when he had finished praying, he stood up
quickly and entered the place of Prince Kiwcwa, where he hid himself. But
when he had just left Nuwa Walukaga, che executioners came and seized
Walukaga and took him away.43
M. Wright. Liuganda in :he Ilcroic Agt {i<;7J)> 104. Wrights discussion of the subject is
very helpful.
384 ijSo-iSgo: Anti-Slavery to Subjugation
became county chief of Kyagwe in 1905, was a model if eccentric
Christian patrician in all sorts of ways, and only died in 1956. For half
a century and more Ganda Christianity would flourish, almost self-
consciously, in the aura produced by the 1880s. It created the
consciousness of a Christian nation with a high sense of mission but
also an almost excessive pride in the superiority thus achieved.
Christianity did not replace the traditional culture of Buganda. It
merged with it, almost consecrating a commitment to tradition in
regard to all sorts of things which elsewhere Christianity' was more
likely to challenge.
1890, where we leave this story for a while, remains a hinge year
for Ganda Christianity as for so much in African history. It was the
year the capital was recaptured. It was also the year that the two
pioneer missionaries, Mackay and Lourdel, died while both still at
work in East Africa. And it was the year that saw Captain Lugard of
the British East Africa Company arrive in the capital in December.
Nine days later Bishop Tucker arrived too, the first Anglican bishop
to do so although the third to attempt it. For Lugard and Tucker
what now appeared most important was a good, strong dose of Pax
Britannica to bring all the feuding to an end. It did not work quite
like that and Lugard s own share of responsibility' for causing the next
civil war, between Catholic and Protestant, in January 1892 should
not be underestimated. Anyway, like it or not, independence was
out, colonial rule was in, though to many people in London as in
Buganda that was not immediately clear.
Probably no observer quite realized the wider significance of what
had happened in Buganda in the 1880s. It was seen more as problem
or as opportunity than as achievement—naturally enough, as so little
had been done by the missionaries themselves. Yet a movement of
religious conversion and political revolution had in no more than ten
years provided for African Christianity as a whole a major new
powerhouse, a new model of conversion, new saints to emulate.
Nowhere else did such things ever happen so fast or so effectively.
But for the effect of what took place in Buganda in the 1880s to be as
widespread as it was over the next twenty years, it probably was
necessary that Pax Britannica should intervene at that point. The
Ganda Church and its amazing early self-confidence owed nothing to
colonialism, and probably never could have existed like that if the
colonial regime had arrived first. Having done it for themselves,
however, the Baganda were able to take advantage of the arrival of
Christian Life itt the Age of Bishop Crowther 385
the British Empire to spread their new beliefs far and wide upon less
favoured peoples. M o r e than any other nation, except the
Ethiopians, they were ready to enter as partners into the wider
scramble, ecclesiastical and political, now rapidly beginning. The
1880s had taken them a long way.
The bones that had been shaking for some time past began to stand up and
show very evident signs of life. Truly the Pentecostal power came as I have
never seen before . . . the people came up in large numbers to the station.
The house became too strait, and we were obliged to hold the services in
the open air, and have continued to do so up to the present time, and we
have more than 700 converts. The glorious fact is this, that Banza Manteke
is no longer a heathen country, but more Christian than any I am
acquainted with.' 7
40
Ibid 11. 304
V;
J. 13. M VERY. 77 ic Cwtga for Cfoht ( 1 8 9 s ) . 1 5 2 .
388 1780-1890: Anti-Slavery to Subjugation
At a time when there were so many new beginnings, dependent
for the most part upon the arrival of Europeans, there is considerable
point in stressing elements of continuity, whether they go back only
to the early nineteenth century or whether, as in this case, they go
back much further still. And it is not merely a matter of a sort of
religious archaeology, for it seems likely that it was the ease with
which a Christian culture re-emerged in the Kongo in people like
Nlemvo and Miguel that provided the root for a rather rapid wider
expansion in the interior. Here as in west, south, or east, what made
the expansion possible was that it was carried from and by a group
already Christianized. The group that did this for the modern Congo
was present and available because of what had happened in the
ancient Kongo. Tenuous as the continuity might be, it remained
creative.
There is no hope of success until we have first taken down the whole of the
past work so that not one stone remains upon another. 1 mean that the
pastors . . . must be changed, the communicants must be changed, the
message preached must be changed, the time, mode and place of worship
must be changed, the schoolchildren must be changed and the course in the
schools must be changed.>0
1890-1960
THE CHRISTIANIZING
OF HALF A C O N T I N E N T
10
A VARIETY OF SCRAMBLES: 1890-1920
In the late 1870s Africa between the Sahara and the Limpopo was
still, ostensibly, a continent divided, as it ever had been, into an
almost infinite number of mini-states and stateless peoples, a network
of villages battered at times by slavers, droughts, and tribal migrations
but unrelated to anything Europe could recognize as sovereigntv.
Behind the appearance it was, nevertheless, a British continent in so
far as Britain alone by trade, coastal possessions, and recognized
interest dominated the whole. Portugal maintained a few antique
claims around the Zambezi and Angola, while France held Senegal,
but these were very limited areas. Beyond them a British hegemony,
a paramountcy of implicit claim, was unquestionable and unchal-
lenged. Occasionally, indeed, there was the suggestion of a sort of
'Monroe Doctrine' for Africa, whereby any other outside power was
in principle excluded.
Perhaps if Britain had, in the decade following the Ethiopian
expedition of 1867, set out to conquer Africa as a whole, for the sake
of ensuring its informal empire of trade by the establishment of
formal sovereignty, it could have done so. That is to say, it would have
been little opposed by other European states. Its victories over the
Ashanti in 1874 and the Zulus in 1879 were not won easily, but they
were decisive, and few other peoples could have put up such a stout
resistance as did those two. But it is, of course, unimaginable in terms
of British politics that any government would have been willing to
commit the resources required for such an enterprise or would have
seen any point in doing so. Earlier than the 1870s the resources were
not available. Later than the 1870s the European balance of power
required that the continent be partitioned and not allowed to fall, as
India had fallen, beneath the power of Britain alone.
398 iSgo-ig6o: (Christianizing Haifa (Continent
Let us further consider the contrast between the earlier and later
period. It is often suggested that up to the 1860s only 'informal
empire* was pursued simply because it was economically profitable.
There was no reason to push inland politically beyond the tiny points
of the coastal colonies. That may be true, but it is also true that
Britain had simply not the power to do so without quite
disproportionate cost and, even then, probably unsuccessfully. A
European army fighting in Africa against a Zulu, Ashanti, or
Ethiopian army had fairly limited advantages and many grave
disadvantages until well beyond T850. The problems of a permanent
internal occupation of Africa were overwhelming. From the middle
of the nineteenth century, however, the balance of power came to
change enormously in favour of Europe. Five things would bring
about this change: the steam-engine, the breach-loading gun, the
telegraph, quinine, and a coherent knowledge of the interior of
Africa put together by explorers, missionaries, and geographical
societies. Steamships would bring people and goods to and fro in a
rapid and predictable way unimaginable in the age of sail; railways
would make it possible to cross the vast interior of the continent in
days instead of months; the breach-loading gun. especially the
Maxim when it arrived, would render next to useless the thousands
of old rifles which had been sold to Africa over the years and ensure
that large armies could be mown down by a handful of properly
equipped Western soldiers; the telegraph would make it possible for
European governments to know within hours what was happening
on every side of the continent; a coherent geographical picture of the
interior would make it practicable to plan for the future as a whole;
quinine would prevent repetition of the exceedingly heavy casualties
from malaria still suffered in the 1840s. By the 1870s Africa was then,
in principle, becoming conquerable by Europe in a way it had not
been previously. Indeed the contrast between power and power-
lessness was now so huge that conquest was not only possible but
almost inevitable. In terms of the late nineteenth-century world there
was an absolute vacuum of power in most of Africa and into a
vacuum forces are inevitablv drawn.
j
It was not, in fact, that the control of Africa was likely to be very
profitable. To Britain, the country chiefly concerned, Africa never
meant much. It wanted the Cape and Suez because of the East and its
world naval role, and, once gold was discovered on the Rand in 1886,
it wanted that too. The British government was always a reluctant
A Variety of Scrambles: 1890-1920 399
taker of anything not obviously valuable. It had too many possessions
elsewhere ever to feel that prestige required an extensive African
empire. Even for other European governments sovereignty over large
tracts of Africa was seldom a high attraction, although to any country
becoming united and a 'major power' at that time, like Germany and
Italy, the acquisition of colonial possessions could seem a piece of
necessary prestige. For France too, humiliated by its defeat by
Germany in 1870, the conquest of an African empire offered some
compensation.
It was, however, far more self-propelled adventurers of every
nation w h o forced the pace. De Brazza and Stanley, (»oldie and
Peters, Harry Johnston, Cecil Rhodes, and many more, were people
who could not be held back, who could have made themselves
independent rulers of colonial states—as Rhodes, indeed, almost did
and King Leopold quite did—if European governments had not
controlled the partition by authorizing it, at first through companies,
then inevitablv,S '
when moncvJ ran out or their activities came under
attack, by direct control. It had by that time become a matter of
ensuring that rival powers were prevented from threatening ones
own interests. The 1880s saw the sudden arrival of Germany, Italy,
King Leopold, and a far more outgoing France upon the scene. They
were united in determination to prevent Britain from increasing its
world power at their expense by any total control of Africa, and their
competition ensured that Britain lost important areas it had hitherto
thought complacently to fall within its hegemony, such as most of the
Sultan of Zanzibars mainland possessions to Germany and
Madagascar to France. Continental pressure produced in its turn a
resurgence of British imperialism, even within government. It is
striking that Portugal was allowed to hold such huge areas, despite its
political and economic insignificance in terms of European power
politics, and even more striking that King Leopold was allowed to get
away with what might be regarded as the plum—a vast chunk of
equatorial Africa. But this is in fact extremely revealing. When the
partition arrived, the weakest did best. Britain, which could have had
the Congo if it had really wanted it, was only too happy that Leopold
should have it instead with all its problems, just because Leopold,
king of what was not so much more than a British client state, could
be no threat to Britain. Bismarck, for his part, had long been opposed
to the acquisition of colonies and his late enthusiasm for it did not
last. It had become important, not so much for its own sake, but
400 iSgo-ig6o: (Christianizing Haifa (Continent
because, once some sort of partition of Africa had become manifestly
inevitable, German prestige and possible future interest might suffer if
Britain and France alone shared the continent.
The plans were made in the 1880s. The actual partition took place
mostly in the 1890s. By 1900, of the African political world as it had
been for centuries only Ethiopia retained its independence. A new
political geography, imposed quite arbitrarily by European power in a
matter of fifteen years, had created in principle an extraordinarily
different context for every side of human activity, religion as much as
anything. The history of African Christianity could not possibly
escape the consequences of the colonial revolution.
It remained, for the most part, a cheap and feeble colonialism, in
which European governments invested the minimum they could get
away with. At times, it was all the more brutal for that. Fervent
colonialists had always claimed that Africa could be profitable. It
seldom proved so and most of the chartered companies had soon
fallen into financial difficulties—the investment required for inland
profitability was too considerable, the return too slow in coming.
Even Leopold, the greatest of believers in an African El Dorado, was
driven to countenancing an increasingly cruel regime in order to
make his Independent State pay its way. If, in the short run, the very
underlying feebleness and lack of sustained imperial will produced
shoddy, tyrannical governments, it also led speedily enough to the use
of subcontractors other than commercial companies: both 'chiefs'
and missions. 'Indirect R u l e ' through native authorities, traditional or
invented, to handle local government, on the one hand, and a
privileged role for the missions in education and medical services, on
the other, were both inevitable consequences of the reluctance of
European governments to give African colonies a high priority. For
France thev mattered most,7 for Britain least. Hence France could
i
were served by the new road system, largely created by forced labour
and often at the price of great suffering.
If the new communications system served government, the
economv, and verv ordinarv Africans, it served the missions too.
/ ' / / '
The slow, exhausting marches up from the coast which had been the
start of every missionary's experience until the late 1890s were
replaced by a railway journey of a couple of days. European leave
became infinitely easier. The missionary life ceased to be so much a
romantic and dangerous adventure into the unknown and rather
more a prosaic, well-organized affair. The pioneering spirit was not
gone, but scope in which to exercise it was decidedly more limited.
The organization of large states, symbolized by government houses
whose grandeur must have been quite astonishing to many who saw
them, the railways, the newspapers, the cathedrals, the sense of now
falling beneath the authority of some remote potentate of seemingly
infinite resource, the King of England or the Emperor of Germany,
the sheer enlargement of scale, power, and knowledge within a space
of twenty years, and the very numerous possibilities of participation
within this new system of things, inevitably precipitated a pursuit of
new systems of meaning, truth, philosophy, and religion. The
religions of tradition were not unchanging. They were not incapable
of incorporating new elements and experience. But they were closely
tied to relatively small-scale communities and, very often, to
authorities which had now been deeply discredited. They had
been appealed to and had failed to halt the white invasion. The new
school learning ignored or mocked them.
Despite all this, most people would for a time turn all the more
A Variety of Scrambles: 1890-1920 405
fervently to the invisible powers they were familiar with, but a more
reflective, modern-minded minority was no less bound to seek for
spiritual and moral alternatives. Ail the conquerors claimed to be
Christian, and at the end of the nineteenth centurv it seemed
overwhelmingly obvious that power, riches, and knowledge
belonged to Christian nations. It would have been very strange if
Africans did not, in the situation of conquest, seek to share in the
beliefs of their conquerors. If the process of Christianization was now
to be greatly accelerated, it was not just that there were vastly more
missionaries about, with plenty of privileged opportunities for
proselytism, it was because Africans themselves had been placed in a
situation of objective intellectual unsetdement and were thoughtful
enough to seek appropriate positive answers of a religious as well as a
technical kind to their current dilemmas.
The answers which presented themselves most obviously in the
twenty years following partition were mostly two: Christian and
Muslim. And these two had much in common. Both religions had a
great deal of continuity with the religions of Africa, above all the
continuity of belief in a finally single personal God of creation and
providence; but both too had the continuity that they were already
held by Africans. This was most obviously true of Islam, whose
African presence was already enormous, but it was also significantly
true of Christianity. It was the grip which black Africans from Sierra
Leone, or Cape Colony, or, indeed, Ethiopia, already had on
Christianity which made it a great deal easier for black Africans
elsewhere to appropriate it quite quickly and confidently in the age
of partition. Christianity, even in the worse moments of the scramble,
was seldom simply a religion of the whites.
The relationship between Islam and the new colonial order was a
different one, and it is important that it not be misunderstood. The
Islamization of much of West and East Africa had been steadily
advancing in the later nineteenth century in a quiet but noticeable
manner. Some peoples were highly resistant, like the Ashanti, who
had a large and influential body of Muslim merchants in their midst
but who were themselves almost never converted. The Yoruba were
different, and the growth of a large Muslim community' in many
parts of Yorubaland was one of the more important developments in
406 iSgo—igôo: Christianizing Haif a Continent
African religious history of this period. In East Africa, in the wake of
Arab slave-traders, Islam had for the first time established indigenous
communities far inland—as around Tabora and Ujiji or among the
Yao and the Baganda.
For the most part the European colonialist came to Africa with no
hostility whatsoever towards Islam. Quite the contrary. There were
exceptions. As a group the Portuguese and the Belgians may have
tended to see Islam as an enemy. The closer the formal links between
a body of missionaries and the colonial state, the more likely this was
to be the case. But even the links between Portugal and the Catholic
Church were historic rather than contemporary. Again, Leopolds
Congo Independent State had used the Arabs in its eastern parts as
sub-imperialists in its early days and had no reason to turn anti-
Muslim until its alliance with the Catholic Church developed in the
last years before the official Belgian annexation.
For the British, the French, and the Germans an anti-Muslim note
was even rarer. Some French administrators did see the spread of
Islam as potentially a threat to French control of West Africa; they
were, however, rather few and uninfluential. In general all three
nations recognized how powerful Islam already was in areas they
wished to control, and the last thing they wanted to do was to
provoke a Muslim-inspired anti-colonial movement. At this point
missionaries and administrators found themselves quickly at cross
purposes, and their lack of a common ideology was usefully revealed.
German rule in East Africa was first firmlv established on the
/
though once Italy had entered the game Italian missionaries naturally
again transferred their loyalties.
In very few cases could the missionary factor actually make a
difference to how partition proceeded, though as we have seen it did
in a few. The conditions for effectiveness were, first, that a mission
was already well established in a particular area, secondly, that it was
of the same nation as a possible colonial power and in a position to
influence it at home. These conditions were fulfilled in the case of
the Scottish mission in Nyasaland and the C M S in Uganda, but in
very few other cases. There was an easier natural channel between
missions of the British Established Churches and their government
than between almost any other missions and governments. Curiously,
by the late nineteenth century, Britain was the most quietly clericalist
of major European states, and British missionaries could profit from a
traditional relationship which, elsewhere and especially in France and
Italy, had been eroded by anticlericalism.
But a negative case may be instructive too. The area of the
Cameroon River had long been a British Baptist mission, and its
inhabitants had petitioned for a British protectorate. There was no
German mission in the area. While the German take-over in 1884
was thoroughly unwelcome to the missionaries, Baptists had not the
political clout in Britain of the Church of Scotland, nor was the
Cameroon of any great interest to the British government.
Furthermore, Germany could not be threatened, as could Portugal.
The Baptists were therefore quite unable to affect the process of
414 ISgO-Ig6O: (Christianizing Haifa (Continent
partition and withdrew the following year to be replaced by Germans
of the Basel Mission: an early example of the reformation of the
missionary presence in consequence of European political control.
In German East Africa too there had, previous to partition, been
no German mission. There were English U M C A missionaries in one
part of the area, C M S in another, L M S in a third. On the Catholic
side there were French Holv Ghost Fathers and White Fathers. Both
the nationalist impact of partition on the character of the missions
and an increase in scale is here apparent. The L M S withdrew across
the border to Northern Rhodesia and the C M S to Kenya and
Uganda. Only the U M C A , for w h o m it was their principal
missionarv area, stuck it out on the Protestant side. At least five
German missionary societies were, on the other hand, soon seriously
at work within the territory: the Bethel Mission (earlier named
Berlin III), the Moravians, the Berlin Missionary Society (Berlin I),
the Leipzig Society (which took over the C M S stations in the north-
east), and the Catholic Benedictines of St Ottilien. By 1893 all five
were established in one or another part of Tanganyika, producing a
predominantly German quality within the missionary force at least
upon the Protestant side.
The Rhodesian case is equally illustrative of the speed and shape of
the ecclesiastical scramble. At the beginning of T 890 there was still no
white missionary settled in Mashonaland and only the LMS stations
at Invati and Hope Fountain in Matabeleland. The Jesuits after ten
fruitless years north of the Limpopo had just withdrawn from
Bulawayo and Empandeni. They returned with Rhodes's Pioneer
Column in its march northwards to occupy Mashonaland in search of
gold and to found Fort Salisbury in 1890. There came soon
afterwards a group of Dominican nursing sisters under Mother
Patrick Cosgrave from County Meath. Knight-Bruce, Anglican
Bishop of Bloemfontein, had already visited Mashonaland in 1888
and in 1891 became its first bishop, establishing an important station
in the east of the country at Penhalonga. Three other missions
entered Mashonaland in 1 8 9 1 — t h e Salvation Army, the Wcsleyan
Methodists, and the Dutch R e f o r m e d Church of South Africa, each
occupying part of the central territory. In 1893 the American Board
established a mission in the south-east, near Mount Silinda, in 1894
the Seventh-day Adventists arrived in Matabeleland, and in 1897 the
American Methodist Episcopal Church began work in the east
around Umtali. Thus within seven years the single mission of the
A Variety of Scrambles: 1890-1920 415
L M S was joined in what had now become Rhodesia by eight other,
ecclesiastically quite distinct, mission bodies.
Take one other example. In 1900 Kavirondo (at the time the
eastern province of Uganda, later transferred to Kenya) had not a
single mission. In December 1901 the railway from Mombasa
reached Kisumu. B y 1908 there were six different missionary societies
at work in the region: the Quakers at Kaimosi from 1902, the Mill
Hill Fathers a few months later, the C M S early in 190$, the South
African Compounds and Interior Mission late 1905, the Nilotic
Independent Mission and the Seventh-day Adventists, both in 1906.
On the Protestant side, by 1908 there were five different societies
occupying eight stations, twenty-one missionaries in all.
Equally rapid growth and the effective subdivision of countries and
regions into a number of segments of missionary influence was going
011 in most parts of the continent apart from the strongest Muslim
areas. T h e British remained the most tolerant colonial power in
regard to national and denominational diversity, and as their territory
was by far the most extensive, especially in regard to population, the
element of colonial control over missionary expansion was hardly—
apart from the special case of the protection of Islamic areas—a
decisive factor on a large view, though locally it could be so. British
tolerance was a natural consequence of the size and character of the
British Empire, the diversity of Church life within Britain, and
government recognition that, while England still saw itself at the end
of the nineteenth century as a Protestant State with an established
Protestant Church, any discrimination against Catholics could only
be disastrous. Not only had Ireland—then within the United
Kingdom—a large. Catholic majority, but other important parts of
the Empire like Malta and Quebec were overwhelmingly Catholic.
Britain had learnt from long experience that imperialism required
religious tolerance, but even here there could be hiccups. The brief
civil war between Catholic and Protestant Baganda in 1892 could be
seen as a war between French and English influences. Reflecting the
nationalities of the White Fathers and C M S missionaries present in
Buganda, the one party named itself the Bafransa. the other the
Baingleza. Basically, any identification between British rule and
Protestant evangelization was antipathetic to long-standing British
policy, yet an 1890s imperialist like Rosebery could get out of line
sufficiently to suggest that French missionaries had plenty of French
colonies to work in without poaching on British territory. If that
4to 1890-1960: Christianizing Haifa Continent
remained an un-British approach, the Catholic reaction to it in
Uganda was still significant: bring in British missionaries (of the Mill
Hill Society) to supplement, though not replace, the French White
Fathers and so demonstrate to Africans that Britishness and
Catholicism could go together.
When Gabon became French territory, the well-established
American Presbyterian mission quickly withdrew and handed over
to French Protestants. French Holy Ghost Fathers in the Congo
Independent State were forced by an agreement between Leopold
and the Vatican to give way to Belgians of the newly founded Society
of Scheut and to Belgian Jesuits. Even Lavigerie had to promise
Leopold that White Father missions in the Congo would be staffed
from their Belgian province. But Leopold had not a strong enough
position to drive out British and American Baptists and Presbyterians
or Swedish Lutherans, given the almost entire absence of
Protestantism in Belgium to provide a national replacement, and
his commitment, required by the Congress of Berlin, to freedom of
religion. The odd consequence of his insistence upon Catholic
missionaries being Belgians, coupled with the undeveloped state of
missionary concern in Belgium, was that Catholic missions in the
Congo remained far less widely spread than Protestant until almost
the end of the century. Leopold had 110 particular religious
preference and was at first quite happy to co-operate with
Protestants as they were with him—until the 1890s and the growth
of missionary' criticism of his regime. Even in Portuguese Angola
considerable British and American Protestant activity dating from the
i88os, Baptist, Congregationalism and Methodist, continued freely
enough—perhaps unsurprisingly, given the increasing anticlericalism
of the Portuguese State and its deep economic dependence upon
Britain.
Hitherto missionaries, at least Protestant missionaries, throughout
Africa had tended to use English as the European vernacular, though
in places on the west coast it had never quite replaced the traditional
Portuguese. N o w the new authorities insisted upon the use of
German or French instead, but, so long as rather minimal
requirements were complied with, early relations between colonial
officials and missionaries of any nationality tended to be good: British
officials with French or Dutch missionaries, Belgian officials with
American or Swedish missionaries, German officials with British or
French missionaries. This is hardly surprising as the officials were
A Variety of Scrambles: 1890-1920 417
extremely few and hard-pressed and naturally turned for assistance to
any white person around, so long as he was not openly hostile, while
the missionaries for the most part welcomed the colonial era as
bringing them vast new opportunities for proselytization. In French
West Africa, nevertheless, an almost monolithic national pattern did
emerge, as Protestant missions hardly appeared and all the Catholics
were French, while in Belgian Africa a monolithic pattern was—as
we have seen—imposed in regard to the principal, and increasingly
privileged, missionary Church: privileged, it was claimed, not
because Catholic but because Belgian. In this case most of all an
impression of intrinsic diversity between missionary Church and
colonial State was seriously eroded. Elsewhere differences of national
origin helped render recognizable deeper differences of nature and
purpose to the observant local eye. Thus, for instance, the early
Catholic missionaries on the Niger were favoured in Igbo eyes
precisely because, unlike the C M S , they did not appear to be linked
to the oppressions of the Royal Niger Society.
All missionaries needed land. But how much? The normal way to
obtain it was through negotiation of gift or sale with a local chief.
There was plenty of empty land in Africa, but missionaries needed to
be close to the more highly inhabited areas where available land was
bound to be limited. Where the people wanted them, a grant o f t e n
to fifty acres was seldom a problem, though the terms on which it
was originally negotiated might prove later to have been differently
understood by the two sides. Basically, however, an African grant of
land could strengthen the missionary position and people might be
proud that they or their parents had given a piece of land for church
or school. That was the normal pattern in West Africa and in many
other places too. But the 'Christian village' missionary syndrome,
which had developed especially in the south, required a much larger
amount of land. The Kuruman model was the ideal for everv newlv * /
thousands of acres, but few societies were not affected by land lust.
There was a range of missionary motivation behind this. A first
lfl
Hor K w a n g o and the Paragviay comparison sec G. Ciparissc, ' I x s Origines de la
méthode des fermes-chapelles au Bas C o n g o 1 8 9 5 - 1 8 9 8 * , BIHB 4.3 ( 1 9 7 3 ) , 802; for Fr.
I.oubicre scc A . Dachs and W. H Rca» Tfte Catholic Church and 7Atnbalnve (Gwelo, 1979), 7 9 -
17
84. J. Colenso. Ten Weeks in Natal ( 1 8 5 5 ) . 70.
A Variety of Scrambles: 1890-1920 425
motive was simply the desire to implement the current dominant
southern model, which required space for a large village with plenty
of land to cultivate over which missionaries could exercise control.
The aim, however, was becoming rather the provision of boarding-
schools and 'central' institutions for people permanently residing
elsewhere than the establishment of homogeneous settlements—the
Livingstonia model, in fact, rather than the Blantyre. The boarding-
school, wrote Archdeacon Willis of Nyanza in 1909, 'secures what
the old monasteries secured in the Middle Ages and in its measure it
effects what they effected'—a place of protected Christian teaching
• *IH •
and living 'amid a sea of temptation', ' but residence within it was
essentially temporary.
A second motive was a desire to cultivate a large estate profitably in
order to make the mission self-supporting. Profitable cultivation,
such as the development of a commercial plantation, however, almost
always proved incompatible with the first aim. A third aim might in
some cases actually be to allow Africans to remain unthreatened on
their land through missionary ownership of what might otherwise fall
to settler control and expropriation. It seems likely that this was more
of a subsequent missionary justification for large landholdings than an
original motive for acquiring them. However, it does look a little as if
the Jesuits, having singularly failed to evangelize people effectively
north of the Limpopo in the pre-colonial era, then backed white
conquest, but subsequently salved their consciences by seeing huge
estates like Chishawasha and Empandeni as 'reductions' of a
Paraguayan type in which they could not only convert and educate
the natives but also protect them from injustice. They certainly did
not see it in terms of large commercial gain. Still more clearly, when
Arthur Shearly Cripps acquired over 7,000 acres outside Enkeldoorn,
it must simply have been to provide a large area of protection for
tenants w h o paid 110 rent and did as they chose. Chapepa, to give him
his African name ('He who cares for people'), lived himself in a
thatched hut beside his church.
On the Protestant side, however, concentration upon profitability,
the ownership and development of an estate in just the same way as
might a settler or commercial company, could go far in crossing the
bridge into settlerdom. Not only did missions seek estates of quite
Archdeacon Willis. Attmtal Letter, Nov. 1909, Willis Papers, CMS Archives.
Birmingham.
426 îSço-igôo: Christianizing Half a Continent
huge size, individual missionaries sometimes acquired estates in their
own name. Again, some missions after acquiring estates for a Church
purpose then sold them unabashed for profit to settlers, some settlers
claimed to be missionaries when acquiring estates even though
unsponsored by any recognized society, and some missionaries of
recognized societies still managed to acquire estates in their own
name and then gave up missionary status to become settlers. In
African eves,
/ 7 in Rhodesia or Kenva,1 the differences between the two
/
C. P Groves, 77/t* Planting of Christianity ttt Africa (1952), iii. 104: Report of the Land
Commission 1925. para. 206; G. M. Brand in M. Bourdillon (ed.), Christianity South of the
Zambezi, ii (1977), 70 1; C. Zvobgo. The Wesleyan Methodist Mission in Zimbabwe 189 t -
1945'. Ph.D. thesis (Edinburgh, 1977}, 219. For an account ofiifc at Chishawasha under the
Jesuits see Laurence Vainbe, I'rom Rhodesia to Zimbabwe (1972).
A Variety of Scrambles: 1890-1920 427
populated area in which initially, in 1898. the local chief refused to
sell more than 44 acres though pressed for TOO. A few years later D. C.
Scott, head of the Scottish mission, persuaded the government to
turn it into 3,000, while leaving the Africans 011 the land as a captive
population now to be defined as 'squatters'. In 1909 H. E. Scott,
D. C. Scotts successor, was imposing labour agreements 011 his
'squatters' whereby they were obliged to work for the mission for
three months a year, received one acre as a personal plot, but had to
sell surplus products to the mission at current market prices, if the
mission so wanted.
D. C. Scott had come to Kikuvu from the Church of Scotland
/
1891. 'We ask that the authority and influence of the native chiefs in
the country be recognized and their counsel sought in dealing with
the people.' 23 Metherwick was not an easy person, and, in many
places. British colonial authority would come to recognize the
authority of native chiefs more than some missionaries would like.
*
" For Fr. Richartz. see Dachs and Rca, The Catholic Church and Zimbabwe, 57-9; for Mgr.
Biicking. Miillcr, Histoire de l'église catholique au Togo, 65 7.
A Variety of Scrambles: 1890-1920 435
and Holinan Bentley long believed in his high philanthropic
purposes and put down maladministration (at times perfectly
correctly) simply to the inadequacies of the handful of local
officials. The missions were provided with the sites they required,
some received considerable material assistance from the administra-
tion, and they were perhaps relieved to find that Leopold's
determination to keep French Catholic missionaries out of the
Congo effectively gave Protestants a missionary monopoly in many
areas.
It is true that even in the early 1880s there were Swedish
missionaries in the Lower Congo who reported on the violence and
cruelty with which Stanley and Leopold's other pioneers were setting
up the new state, but methods were not equally bad everywhere and,
until after 1890, there was very little voiced Protestant criticism. Even
as late as 1900 Molman Bentley's Pioneering on the Congo appears
excessively laudatory of the king and his government. T h e
missionaries were conscious of how dependent they were upon
Leopold's goodwill while working in an 'absolute monarchy'. Open
criticism might have little effect while being highly disadvantageous
to their work.
B y the 1890s the C o n g o State had come to cost too much and
Leopold developed a new policy to ensure that, at last, his kingdom
would produce profits not losses: a State monopoly over ivory and
wild rubber was established in large parts of the country, and Africans
were compelled both to provide a food tax and to collect adequate
amounts of rubber under pain of fearful punishment—hands were
cut off, villages burnt down, if quotas were not met. The Congo
soon became profitable, but some missionaries in the worst-hit areas
(and, of course, with the size of the Congo, there were huge areas of
the interior with no missionary presence at all) began to protest both
to the local officials and by writing home. 'These poor people died',
wrote a Swedish missionary, Gustav Palmer in T896, 'as if they had
been sentenced to extermination and 110 more to exist as a nation.' 32
It was another Swede, E. V. Sjöblom, employed by the American
Baptist Missionary Union, who first sent home for publication a
detailed report of atrocities, also in 1896. He sent it to Britain, the
United States, and Sweden. Cautious mission authorities in the first
32
S. Axclson, Culture Confrontation m the Lower Congo (Uppsala, I$>70), 2 6 5 .
43<> 1890—1960: Christianizing Haifa Continent
two countries decided not to publish it. In Sweden, however, they
did so and Sjöblom's report was soon reverberating round Europe.
There can be no doubt that the systematic abuses in the Congo
administration were appalling, despite a number of genuine but quite
inadequate attempts at reform. They failed, however, to produce for
quite some rime any great wave of Protestant protest. Missionary
leaders for long remained convinced of Leopold s good intentions,
and they doubted whether any campaign would have other result
than to terminate or restrict their own presence in the country. In
fact, in retaliation for the protests they did make, they ceased to be
given new mission sites: the government did not wish their presence
to be spread any wider than it was already. It may be noted that while
Belgian supporters of Leopold tended to blame British missionaries
for the growing international attack on the Congo State, suggesting
that it was in order to get British rule established in the Congo
(moreover, these were the years of the Boer War and most Belgians
sympathized with the Boers), in fact the British missionaries were
slower than either Swedes or Americans in voicing any sort of public
protest.
At the beginning of 1900 one of the most senior and responsible of
the American Presbyterian missionaries in Kasai, William Morrison,
published a devastating account of recent atrocities, but what really
changed the situation wras the appearance of E. D. Morel, a young
Englishman with no Church connections but a burning concern for
justice in Africa and outstanding skills in organizing a publicity
campaign. B y 1900 there was much international dissatisfaction, and
some Belgian dissatisfaction too, with the way the Congo was run,
but it was only Morel, beginning with a series of unsigned articles on
the 'Congo Scandal', who turned this disquiet into a crusade. In 1904
he founded the Congo R e f o r m Association and published his
massive King Leopold's Rule in Africa, centred upon an analysis o f ' t h e
new African slave-trade'. He could not have mounted his campaign
without missionary evidence, but it was he, not they, who had done
the homework, putting the evidence together from many sources to
create a coherent picture, and then drawn the leadership of the
missionary societies into public support for reform. It was because of
this that the British government, also reluctantly enough, sent its
consul, R o g e r Casement, to tour the interior and write a report, fully
vindicating missionary accounts. ILS publication was dynamite.
It was the mounting indignation in Britain, America, and
A Variety of Scrambles: 1890-1920 437
Germany which forced the Belgian government to end the
'Congo Independent State' by annexing it in 1908 and reform its
administration fairly decisively. Nevertheless, the Congo R e f o r m
Association continued to function until 1 9 1 3 , endeavouring to ensure
that Belgium really did implement the necessary reforms and to
prevent Britain from recognizing Belgium's sovereignty over the
Congo until that had been done. The Baptist Missionary Society
remained a firm supporter of the Association all that time. There can
be no question but that Leopold was forced to abandon his powers
and Belgium to undertake a major programme of reform by British
and American pressure which would have been unimaginable
without missionary provision of evidence and sustained support for
the campaign. Yet the missionaries could not have done it on their
own. The campaign itself was the child of Morel and depended
greatly on a radical lobby in the House of Commons. There were
many abuses elsewhere in colonial Africa, and nothing in the Congo
was worse than the near genocide of the Herero in South West
Africa, but nowhere else was there so systematic and long-standing a
regime of oppression as in Leopold's Congo. Again, at no other point
did a large group of missionaries, including several nationalities and
societies, enter so publicly and for so long into the arena of politics.
The missionaries in question were not naturally politically minded—
far less so than many Church of Scodand or C M S men—and they
entered the campaign slowly and reluctantly, but the contribution
they made thereby to a very general improvement of life and liberty
for the mass of Congolese people was none the less considerable, and
its evaluation must remain central to any understanding of missionary
participation in the African scramble.
Throughout the whole trip my loads were carried and I and my servants
were fed with no cost to myself. I was received with joy by these simple
folk, who escorted me with hymn-singing to their well built churches,
where dav by day at dusk and dawn they meet for worship and prayer
conducted by their own illiterate leaders. They have picked up Fanti hymns
of all sorts from any clerks passing through from the Coast, and they have a
delightful tuneful form of extempore hymns as well as extempore prayer.
iS
C. T.vie, Christian Missionary Enterprise in the Niger Delta i$6.f-n)t8 (Leiden, 1978). 180.
4
* Haliburton. Vic Prophet Harris, 21Ä.
A Variety of Scrambles: 1890-1920 447
Their leaders made most earnest prayers and the congregations said Amen
like claps of thunder.47
A little later, around 1920, another still less instructed prophet named
Samson Oppong restarted S watson's crusade in another part of
Ashanti, this time to the benefit of the Methodists. His converts were
even more numerous, his anti-fetish fervour even more unbounded.
If we move once more eastwards to Nigeria, to the country of the
Isoko just west of the Niger, we are with a people w h o in 1 9 1 0 had
still been totally untouched by any missionary agency. There was, so
far as is known, no Christian of any sort present in the area before M r
Edda Otuedo was sent in 1909 to Uzere as court clerk. An Itsekiri-
man, Otuedo had attended a C M S Church for four years in Benin,
but was not baptized. In 1 9 1 0 with the aid of a portable 'organ*
which he is said to have bought at Asaba Ase he started to preach to
the Uzere people outside office hours, to organize Sunday worship,
and to run a small school for boys. A couple of years later, however,
he was transferred to a post outside Isokoland. B y then an Ijo
woman, Bcvebolo Bribrina, who had been converted to Christianity
some years before, and had later demonstrated her commitment by
refusing to allow one of her twin children to be put to death—for
which she was banished from her community—settled at Igbide with
a trader, whom she married, and began to preach the gospel to her
neighbours. Persecution forced them to leave Igbide and with
convert friends they founded a new Christian settlement, Obhodo
(the 'new town'). Obhodo soon became the centre for Christianity'
in Isokoland. At much the same time, Christianity was entering the
country from other directions. In Ozoro town a local trader named
Akwa, w h o had become a Christian while residing in Warri.
returned to his home to carry the message. I lis first convert, a
woman named Ezihobo, was soon joining in his public preaching.
These, and others, are oral traditions about very humble people,
none of w h o m had anything of the charismatic power, the genuine
knowledge, or the wide-ranging ministry of a Harris or even a
Swatson. Yet by the close of 1 9 1 4 the one missionary who had visited
the area, J. D. Aitken, could report 'Lack of men and means alone
prevent this country from being a Uganda on a small scale. Agents
without supervision! Converts without anyone to prepare them for
baptism! Churches without pastors! Schools without teachers! A
47
ibid. a } .
462 îSço-igôo: Christianizing Half a Continent
harvest unreaped! A judgement to come!' 4 8 A couple of years later an
elementary crash training for evangelists was being begun at the
nearest mission, Patani, but it is quite clear that the mass movement
among the Isoko had nothing to do with local missionary stimulation
or almost any other factor normally offered to explain such events.
The Christian life of the first converts was enthusiastically
confrontational. At first even the traditional Isoko name of God.
Oghere, was rejected, as were all deities and ancestor spirits. The new
Christians worshipped Egode or Ijohiva through Jesu Kriti and each
group was led in its worship by the first male Christian in the place,
w h o became its 4 olori', a name used equally for leaders in non-
Christian cults. At the initiation of a new Christian, the congregation
would gather at his home, outside which all his 'fetishes', previous
religious symbols and statues of any sort, were set on fire, while the
Christians danced around the flames, proclaiming the power of God
and the impotence of the spirits of the past. Here is one of their
songs. 4 9
l^oceedings of the CMS jSpy, 59-60, Groves. The Imming 0/Christianity m Africa, 111 216;
J. Peel, Ijeshas and Nigerian* (1983). 1 6 6 - 8 .
43<> 1890—1960: Christianizing Haifa Continent
prevailed. These were, of course, also the characteristics of conversion
in Buganda. Once more, however, in African eyes, the difference
between the Igbo case and the other West African ones may have
seemed little more than that the number of missionaries accorded the
Igbo ensured a far larger increase in the schools they saw opened
within a quite short space of time.
Here too 1913 is the crucial year. It was the year Father Shanahan
wrote, 4At last the era of Patrick is being realised in Igboland. As we
move from town to town, idols are toppling of their own accord and
the Cross of Christ is being erected in their place. H o w much more
astonishing would the miracle be, if we only had more priests to
increase our contact with the people/ The years 1 9 1 2 and 1913 are
looked back upon as 'the two most fruitful in the history of the
Catholic Church in Southern Nigeria'. The statistics shown in Table
i are indicative of what was happening. 51 In twelve years a Catholic
community of under 5,000 had grown into one of 74,000 arid it was
the period after 1 9 1 2 which really saw the mass movement,
Shanahan's 'miracle'. This is only part of the story as Anglican and
Methodist numbers were growing almost as fast. Shanahan himself,
we are told, after a fruitless visit to Europe to find more priests in
1913 entered upon 'his greatest span of stern and relentless trekking
from town to town'. 5 2 It would be interesting to compare a
contemporary African evaluation of Shanahan with one of Harris.
They had much more in common than might be supposed.
Shanahan's very lack of sophistication in terms of a modern
missionary apostolate added to this. He had the advantage in time
" J.Jordan. Bishop Shattahafi of Southern Nigeria (Dublin, 1949), 109 3iid 140.
Ibid 122.
A Variety of Scrambles: 1890-1920 451
span, in a minimum of government assistance, and in the army of
untrained teachers w h o followed behind him, though he certainly
could not rival Marris in ability to produce an instantaneous impact.
But the basic phenomena of charismatic, peregrinatory evangelist and
mass conversion, a 'toppling of idols of their own accord', among a
decentralized coastal people being opened up simultaneously to the
local pressures of colonial administration seem essentially the same.
Once more, however, it would be mistaken to overstate the degree
to which European missionaries, Holy Ghost Fathers, or whoever
'converted' the Igbos. All the evidence suggests that, for perhaps
mysterious reasons, the Igbos converted themselves. Shanahan's part
was not so much more than to hurry along the process, enticing
villages to opt for the Catholic rather than the Protestant fold by
offering to open up a multitude of bush schools. What brought about
the conversion was, instead, a combination of the influence of
catechists, 'warrant chiefs', and an atmosphere of expectation among
the young engendered by the appearance o f ' n e w men'—policemen,
traders, clerks. Here again it was the already existent commitment of
a very small minority which sparked off the mass movement. Igbo
chiefs were not traditionally decisive figures, but it was often their
preferences which decided which w a y — C a t h o l i c , Anglican,
Methodist—a particular village went. But it was above all the
catechists who made conversion seem both desirable and possible.
Statistics make this clear enough. In 1906 there were 31 Catholic
missionaries east of the Niger (12 priests, 9 brothers, 10 sisters). In
1918 there were 30 (19 priests, 7 brothers, 4 sisters). Moreover, it is
doubtful whether many of the latter could speak Igbo with even
partial fluency (the early French missionaries in Igboland mastered
the language, their Irish successors mostly failed to do so). What had
changed in those twelve years was the number of catechists, 33 in
1906, 552 in 1918. Their organization was described a few years later:
'Each village is a substation with its own chapel and catechist. Several
substations depend on a principal station having at its head a chief
catechist. Above the chief catechist is a visiting catechist in charge of a
district.' 53 Initial evangelization and subsequent pastoral care
depended almost as wholly upon the African agents here as in the
Ivory Coast of Harris. They all carried with them Fr. Vogler's
C. A. Obi, A Hundred Yean of the Catholic Church in Eastern Nigeria (Onitsha. 1985). »40
and 144: I. Ozigboh, Roman Catholtcism in South-Eastern Nigeria î88$-1931 (Onitsha, 1988),
226
4$2 iSgo-igöo: Christianizing Half a Continent
Katekistn ak'okwukwe Nzuko Katolik N'asasu Igbo, printed in
Strasbourg in 1903 and capable of recitation in a rhythmic singsong
manner. Before 1913 there was no catechist training centre but here,
as elsewhere, that mattered little. It may even have been an advantage.
The power of the barely literate evangelist clutching his one book
proved sufficient to convert a nation.
'See how all the villages hastened to abandon their fetishes; see all
the roads littered with fetishes of all kinds. People confessed their sins.
Drums were broken, dancing forsaken. People struggled to seek out
teachers. Churches were built overnight in all the villages.154 That is a
passage in a Kimbanguist doctrinal text of the late 1950s describing
what happened in the Lower Congo in 1 9 2 1 . It might easily be judged
a somewhat mythical account of events as imagined long after. In fact
we should judge it substantially accurate, not only for the countryside
around Nkamba in 1921, but also for the whole series of phenomena
we have been considering. When Sir Hugh Clifford, Governor-
General of Nigeria, bewailed in 1920 'the extraordinary irruption of
"hedge-schools" which has of late years occurred throughout the
southern provinces', 55 he was referring to essentially the same thing.
What the Kimbanguist text does, however, suggest is how decisive
such events were, not only at the time, but also in the memory of
those who recalled them a couple of generations later.
It is necessary, then, to beware of any conclusion which would too
sharply isolate what was happening on the West Coast in 1913 to
1 9 1 6 from conversion movements elsewrhere in Africa, then or in
other years. What happened in those years had happened very
similarly, over the two previous decades, in Ijebu and in and around
Buganda. It was happening, if just a little less dramatically, in Kasai
(central Congo) and in Manicaland, the eastern part of Rhodesia
where Anglicans, Methodists, and Catholics were all multiplying fast
by 1 9 1 0 and where the pace was very clearly being set by African
demand rather than by missionary hard work. By 1923 a Methodist
agriculturalist could comment, T h e success of our native people in
agriculture is really wonderful. Some of our best stations like
Gandanzara where the new methods of agriculture have taken a firm
grip are a wonderful demonstration. At this particular station every
u
Wyatt MacGaffey, ' T h e Beloved City: Commentary on a Kimbanguist Text', JRA 2
(1969). 138.
55
Education in Africa, the first Phelps-Stokes Report, ed. T. Jesse Jones ( N e w York, 1922).
17S-
A Variety of Scrambles: 1890-1920 453
person w h o has any cattle has a plow and there arc forty-three plows
owned by the people there.' 56 Ploughs are important, but we should
not allow them to stop us seeing how underlyingly similar was the
conversion movement in a society' where it took this particular form
and in another where, perforce, the plough or any comparable
technique was not available. The movement in Manicaland was as
basically spontaneous as that in Isoko and neither was primarily
economic. What was happening in place after place was a spiritual
revolution sparked off by native evangelists in conditions created by
the unsettlement of early colonial rule.
any gap between them did not really seem significant. Most prophets
preached modernization, most catechists had dreams.
The primal character of a Christian community in contrast with a
traditional one was not confined to hymn-singing, monogamy, or
even school-learning. It went equally with a newly shaped week.
Sabbath-keeping's most revolutionary effect derived from its
substitution of a seven-day week for a four-, five-, six-, or ten-day
A Variety of Scrambles: 1890-1920 459
week—four, arranged around market days, being very common.
This meant in principle the substitution of a liturgical w e e k — o n e
centred upon a day of worship—for an economic one. To such basic
things were quickly added a style of clothes, of houses, of recreation.
It was, in most places, a community of youth, a great deal less
gerontocratic than traditional society a world in which novelty rather
than custom was favoured. It too would have its regulations, some of
them troublesome enough, about the Sabbath, marriage, dancing.
The negativity of Protestantism might appear very strikingly in the
list of all that Christians could be required to withdraw' f r o m —
dancing, beer-drinking, the chewing of cashew nuts, the paying of
bride-wealth, every kind of customary ritual. Yet the early
experience of Christian conversion outside the restrictions of the
'mission village' was likely to feel liberating rather than restrictive, in
abandonment of fetish, taboo, and cult. Quantitatively the true
village Christian had at first little to put in place of a myriad of
customary practices. Sometimes very little indeed.
Once baptized, my father asked Harris what he should do. The Prophet
cited for him the ten commandments, riot to kill, not to steal, not to
worship idols and co reserve one day each week for praying to God. When
my father asked Harris what day that was, the Prophet said the seventh, and
counted on his fingers, one, two, three . . . up to seven so that he would
never forget. When father got back here he did his best to follow the
Prophet's orders. Taking an empty bottle, he filled it each week with seven
stones. On the first day he would remove one stone . . . when all the stones
were gone he would call the family together in his courtyard and tell us
This is the day the Prophet said to worship God. Go. wash yourselves, and
get ready for prayer.'66
The sheer simplicity of the moral and ritual requirements with which
a conversion experience began is well communicated in that Dida
reminiscence. Sunday-keeping was so important because it seemed to
be the one ritual act absolutely required within the new dispensation.
If traditional dancing was banned, an alternative was quickly
provided. In the U M C A mission diary of Magila for 17 September
1884 is the first recorded football match in Tanganyika. B y the close
of the century British missionaries were enthusiastically encouraging
football everywhere. Donald Fraser, a missionary in the east of the
M
J. Krabill. ' T h e Hymnody of the Harrist Church among the Dida of South-Central
Ivory Coast', Ph.D. thesis (Birmingham, 1989), 2 2 2 -3.
4Ö0 I8QO-ÎQ6O: Christianizing Half a Continent
continent, publishing 'Hie Future of Africa in 1 9 1 1 , could illustrate it
with the photograph of a West African football team, winners of the
'Calabar Cup', with their European minister in a dog-collar sitting
well satisfied in their midst. On the football field, it was being
suggested, lay the road to a healthy Christian Africa, whether in east
or west. Furthermore, football crossed the denominational divide;
the football match was becoming as much part of the Igbo Catholic
catechists' annual retreat as the 'group rosary' or the talk on 'customs
that should be retained or abolished'. 67 A village church might even
be less of a necessity than a playground for football, close to school
and catechists home.
Christian clothes were trousers and skirts. Beyond that, it
depended on prosperity. Catholics, Protestant Igbo believed, were
'people who wore trousers without shoes'. 68 They had the essential
Christian character but lacked the prosperity. They were also, most
likely, the less Europeanized ones. In general Catholics were, anyway,
less keen to Europeanize. Perhaps that is why in Buganda, where
their influence was strongest, the best Christians did not wear
trousers but a kanzu. In this, as much else, Buganda would offer a
new model, one least consonant with the ethos of the mission village.
Names mattered. Unlike an earlier generation the Christians of this
period did not abandon their African names, but they added to them
new ones—a quite African thing to do. Non-Christians in Ankole
could even be nicknamed Abelziina rimve (one-named or single-
named) and compared to dogs which have but one name. Christian
identity now required that one had both: a double name for a double
belonging.
Ploughs. In the south they had long been a characteristic of
Christian communities, ever since the time of James Read. They
were, as we have seen, becoming a noted feature of Methodist life in
eastern Rhodesia by the 1910s. And if not ploughs at least
agricultural improvement of some kind. Oyebode's demonstration
plot of cocoa, oranges, and plantain, behind his Iloro parsonage, was
an integral part of his apostleship of Ijeshaland. Christianity brought
prosperity if it was allowed to do so, and congregations needed to
support Church, school, and even catechist. Agricultural develop-
ment—the growing of cocoa, coffee, cotton, or whatever—
6f
V. A. Nwosu, The iMity and the (îrou i h 0/ /he Catholic Church in Nigeria: Ilie Onitsha
Story 1905-1983 (Onitsha, 1990), 3 1 . ™ Ibid. 9 1 .
A Variety of Scrambles: 1890-1920 461
remained the one economic part of the civilizing mission almost all
missionaries still believed in. Very often, too, Christians in the villages
simply imitated what went on in the central mission stations and the
old 'Christian villages' which had depended for survival upon
agricultural production of a Western sort. In many places the first
Christians in the villages had previously lived in missionary-
controlled settlements, but had moved away when colonial order
made it seem safe to do so. They naturally carried with them upon a
small scale the new pattern of cultivation but not the regimentation.
x. Logics of Conversion
Buganda is the only place in Africa where there was both large-scale
conversion to Christianity in the pre-colonial era and a mass
conversion movement within the early colonial age. The latter was
most certainly dependent upon the former, and, while the arrival of
British rule in the early 1890s facilitated it, the explanation for what
happened is to be found less in any colonial logic than in the initial
conversions and stormy events of the 1880s, leading up to the
political and military triumph of the Christian minority in a situation
when British rule was certainly not anticipated, at least upon the
African side. When Bishop Tucker reached Kampala on 27
December 1890, just nine days after Captain Lugard and nineteen
days after his Roman Catholic opposite, Mgr. Hirth, their joint
arrival can well be seen as marking the start of the colonial age, but it
was in no way the start of Christianity. Bishop Tucker on his first
Sunday was delighted by the numbers who came to Church, but
surprised that they all brought their guns with them. Understandably
he knew little of the true state of the country, still in the midst of
several years of civil war, a war in which the Christians had finally
defeated the Muslims, but were themselves about to break apart. At
the Battle of Mengo in January 1892 the Catholic forces allied with
the Kabaka Mwanga and led by Stanislas Mugwanya fled before the
fire of Lugards Maxim gun, brought into action to prevent a
Protestant defeat. Effective control of the country wTas then seen to
have passed into the hands of the representatives of Britain and its
most reliable local allies, headed by Apolo Kagwa, the new katikiro.
All the new leaders of the nation had come through the struggles
of the i88os, but they had been marked out as members of the ruling
class before their Christian conversion and before the wars began.
They were in many ways determined to maintain Ganda custom but
A Variety of Scrambles: 1890-1920 465
no less to convert the nation to Christianity, excluding both
traditionalists and their Muslim opponents so far as they could, but
ensuring too their own oligarchic ascendancy in the face of both a
debilitated monarchy and colonial power.
The armies who had fought for them were 'Christian' by
allegiance to one or another warlord. They were not only
unbaptized but almost uninstructed, yet already largely committed
to an either Protestant or Catholic identity. That large-scale, if almost
mythical, commitment had come about at a time when there were
no missionaries in Buganda, and it was manifested already in 1892
when Lugard divided the country; giving the great western county of
Buddu to a Catholic chief, Alikisi Ssebowa, but most of the rest to
Protestants. In consequence, there was a massive redistribution of
population in the course of 1892; 15,000 to 20,000 'Catholics'
migrated westwards, some in large armed parties, some singly, while
smaller numbers of Protestants marched east. Already by April
Protestants were singing jubilantly
was a reading sheet mastered than at once the learner bccamc a teacher. It
was the same with die Gospels: every fact noted, every truth mastered, was
at once repeated by groups of eager enquirers. It was a most touching sight
to see little groups scattered about here and there in the church, each of
which had in its centre a native teacher who was himself, at other times in
the day, ail eager learner.70
Exactly the same enthusiasm was found upon the Catholic side,
Yowana Ssebalijja, 'Memoirs ot" Rukiga and other places', in 1> Dcnoun (cd.), A
History of Ktgezi (Kampala, 1972). 179—99.
A. Luck. Afruon Saint: The Ijfe if Ajx>to Kwefwlaya (1963). 123
A Variety of Scrambles: 1890-1920 471
mission in 1896. He had already abandoned all his wives and declared
chat he would have no more: 'God must suffice for me.' He then
settled in Mawakota, receiving a chiefdom, but in 1901 announced
his desire to become a missionary to peoples other than his own, and
later that year, having resigned his chiefship and distributed all his
property to the poor, set off for Bunyoro. Soon afterwards he was
brought back to Lubaga to take the year course at the newly opened
school for catechetical training, after which he went back to the west,
being placed in the kingdom of Bunyaruguru beyond Ankole, which
the British were at the time endeavouring to pacify through the
imposition of some Ganda chiefs. The project was not a success. The
Banyaruguru rose in revolt, the Baganda fled, only Kitagana
remained, even continuing his work among the insurgents, despite
the manifest danger he was in.
In 1 9 1 1 Kitagana was moved to evangelize the mountainous
district of Kigezi, and for more than ten years, before the arrival of
three White Fathers in 1923, he preached and directed the work of
other resident catechists, continually trekking through its valleys and
hills, dressed only in an animal skin—apart from the white gown he
kept for Sundays—and becoming truly the apostle of Kigezi as he
was already that of Bunyaruguru, a man about w h o m many
wonderful stories came to be told. Kitagana and Kivebulaya were at
the height of their apostolic prowess at just the same time as Harris
and Swatson, and in very comparable circumstances—the early years
of colonial rule in societies hitherto almost untouched by any
European presence. Kitagana's emphatic teaching of God, his
destruction of fetishes, a simple concern with hygiene, the very
poverty of his appearance, armed only with staff and rosary, may all
remind one of Harris, though his spirit seems more gentle, without
that touch of charismatic madness which differentiates a 'prophet'.
He certainly did not have the power to effect change overnight.
Harris functioned through the immediacy of unmitigated absolutes:
destroy your fetishes now, be baptized now. It was a therapy of
instantaneous conversion. For Kitagana this was not possible. For
him. as a catechist of the White Fathers, baptism could only c o m e —
except in danger of death—after a lengthy catechumenate. Even
fetishes might be kept for a little. In one charming story, when a
sorcerer begged him to come at once and burn all his charms in front
of his brothers, Yohana replied, 'Gently, my friend. Do not harm
your protecting gods, for fear could take hold of you.' They waited a
486 îSço-igôo: Christianizing Half a Continent
week and dien Yohana burnt the objects to the chanting of 'Veni
Creator'. 7S Over the years his journevings may have been little less
decisive for Kigezi or Bunyaruguru than were those of R . S . Oyebode
for Ijeshaland or of Harris for the Ebrie or the Dida, but the main
point which needs stressing is that, rather than isolated heroes, they
are all three representative of a class of 'apostle' to be found in
these years throughout the length and breadth of sub-Saharan
Africa.
In Buganda itself the movement of conversion had inevitably
passed by this time into a more prosaic, less exciting, even
disillusioned, process of ecclesiastical construction under missionary
control. In the Church of Uganda a rather dreary argument was
going 011 between Bishop Tucker and his missionary colleagues over
the establishment of a constitution for the Church with a regular
svnod. Tucker wanted the white missionaries to be fullv in, and
therefore under, the local Church. They were mostly reluctant to
agree, arguing that it would be like 'giving school children control of
their master'. 76 B y 1908 a compromise was achieved which, if it did
not go as far as Tucker had hoped, still did give the Church of
Uganda a very much stronger position and more self-government
than almost any African Church had at the time. In practice,
nevertheless, it left the missionaries largely outside, and therefore
above, its control. This was symbolic of a missionary failure, perhaps
basically a racialist failure, to trust sufficiently a Church which had
come into existence in so remarkable a way and with so little effort
on their part.
Upon the Catholic side it would have been impossible to be
anywhere near so far advanced in selfhood as, despite its faults, the
Anglican Church s constitution proclaimed it to be. Yet, in Catholic
terms, the Ugandan achievement was still more remarkable. In 1908 a
Protestant missionary' published a book about Uganda in which he
remarked of the Catholics, T h e y have 110 native clergy connected
with their mission and arc not likely to have any unless they can
remove the obstacle of celibacy.'77 That sounds a fair judgement and
it tallies with Catholic experience elsewhere. Apart from the clergy of
Angola of earlier days, mostly of mixed race, and a few individuals
7<
J. Njcoict, 'An Apostle in che Ruwenzori: Yohana Kitagana', unpublished paper, 9.
76
H. B. Hansen, 'European Ideas, Colonial Attitudes and African Realities: The
Introduction of a Church Constitution in Uganda 189K 1909', IJA 13 (1980). 25s.
77
C . W. Hattersley, The llaganda at Home (1908: repr. 1968). 220.
A Variety of Scrambles: 1890-1920 473
trained and ordained 111 Europe, the Catholic Church in Africa had
proved wholly incapable of developing a local clergy despite the
constant Roman insistence upon the importance of doing so.
Everywhere the difficulties produced, upon the one hand, by the use
of Latin for the celebration of mass, the recitation of the breviary,
even the teaching of theology, and, upon the other, by the law of
priestly celibacy seemed simply too great to overcome in societies
where literacy was so limited and a life of celibacy derided. Yet
almost at once Mgr. Mirth began a seminary, and when Mgr.
Streicher was consecrated at Bukumbi in 1897 he declared to the
thirty-three seminarians who crossed the lake to assist at the
ceremony that it was his top priority. R o m e had insisted that 'a
mission that can produce martyrs can produce priests'/'8 Despite a
great reluctance 011 the part of many of the missionaries, Streicher
pressed on. The boys w h o entered the seminary were, for the most
part, selected by Catholic chiefs to do so, including in some cases
their own sons. To make the exercise possible, a great many books
were required, both in Luganda and in Latin, including a large Latin-
Luganda dictionary, used in manuscript form already for many years
before its printing at Bukalasa—632 pages of a Lexicon Latinum
Ugandicum—in 1 9 1 2 . In due course what seemed an unrealistic
dream became a reality when the first two Baganda priests, Victor
Mukasa and Bazilio Lumu, were ordained in 1913 in a ceremony
witnessed by 15,000 people. By 1920 there were ten (including three
from Toro and Bunyoro) and many more on the way, and the
example was being followed elsewhere.
In 1 9 1 0 a congregation of Ganda nuns, the Bannabikira, began its
existence—in response not to missionary pressure but to the
insistence of a large number of African women, including one of
Stanislas Mugwanya's daughters, Angela Nabbogo, among others.
Already in 1886 a first woman, Munaku, the sister of one of the
martyrs, N o e Mawaggali, committed herself to perpetual virginity on
the day of her baptism. She and other? who joined her became
auxiliaries in the missions and female catcchists. Out of this group,
the formal congregation began and grew by about a dozen a year. At
the time of Munaku s decision there had not been a single white nun
in the country to inspire her vocation. In this, as in so much else,
early Ganda Christianity was both radical and spontaneous.
Buganda was then the new model, and a highly influential one.
Nevertheless, it would be a great mistake to conclude that what
happened in Buganda in the 1890s was simply replicated in, for
instance, Rwanda in the 1930s, during the conversion movement the
White Fathers there described as a 'tornade'. As Buganda and
Rwanda had so much in common in size, the powTer of the
monarchy, and the rapidity of a mass conversion movement when it
came, it is worth pausing for a movement to reflect upon the deep
divergence between the two. The Ganda movement was over-
whelmingly self-started, at a time when there were few missionaries
in the country and colonial rule had hardly begun. Missionaries and
the colonial state responded to something they had certainly not
created and could barely control. In Rwanda, the 'tornade', on the
contrary, was produced by years of heavy missionary pressure and,
finally, the forcible removal of the old pagan king Musinga in 1 9 3 1 .
476 iSgo-ig6o: (Christianizing H a i f a (Continent
Conversion in Kigezi, again, had a quite other face, derived in part
from its very different social character, consisting of a number of non-
monarchical units. While its early evangelization by an outstanding
Ganda catechist links it with the conversion of Buganda, the
character of the process involved was by no means the same.
Moreover, while some of the secondary examples—particularly the
kingdoms to the west first affected by Buganda—did themselves send
out evangelist-catechists, this happened far less spontaneously and
strikingly. It is remarkable that the remembered 'apostles' of peoples
west of those kingdoms are names not from them but from Buganda.
The Ganda experience, then, while greatly influential over a far
larger area, was not as such replicated elsewhere.
What made it unique? The first answer to that question lies in the
depth of its pre-colonial Christian experience. The mass movement
of the 1890s is unimaginable without the individual conversions,
martyrdoms, and civil wars of the 1880s. One may sav that the early
colonial situation provided a highly favourable environment for the
working-out of a movement already under way. Ic certainly did not
create it. Nowhere else did a conversion movement cross the hinge of
colonialism in this way, feeding upon the opportunities and new
horizons of the new regime without being intimidated by it. If the
stimulus was not primarily colonial, nor was it primarily
missionary—less so, undoubtedly, than in Igboland twenty years
later, though more so than in the Ivory Coast of Harris or the villages
of the Isoko. Here the missionaries, still after all quite few in relation
to the scale of the movement, could to some extent channel and
teach it, but they did not produce it and could not—at least for quite
a while—control it. The balance was probably a good one. What did
control it, at least initially, were the chiefs. Nowhere else in Africa did
major chiefs, and not one or two oddities but a whole group, enter
into, indeed initiate, a mass conversion and do so, not out of a sense
of diplomatic advantage in relation to foreign powers, but from one
of personal involvement. They had not indeed been chiefs before
conversion, but they were in the class of those at court who were
marked out for chieftainship in the near future. Undoubtedly
conversion brought with it, after a lot of struggle and including not a
few deaths in battle as well as on the execution pyre, both power and
land. It was a political revolution as well as a religious one, but it was
the religious change which came first, and, in purely political terms,
these men still looked like a bunch of conservatives. If some of them
A Variety of Scrambles: 1890-1920 477
hardly lived up afterwards to the personal ideals of their new public
allegiance, others did so to a quite remarkable degree.
The Ganda experience was unique too in the speed, scale, and
sheer enthusiasm of its early missionary movement to the peoples
beyond. Nothing quite similar can be found elsewhere and if,
without question, it at times degenerated into a sordid piece of
subcolonialism, it also rose to produce some figures of exceptional
holiness. Again it was unique in its production of an ordained
clergy—more than twenty Anglicans by 1900, ten Catholics by 1920.
Both were quite remarkable. On the Catholic side especially,
Buganda showed that it was possible to produce priests against all
expectation and provided a yardstick by which every other mission
would subsequently be judged. The development of a community of
sisters was no less impressive. And both went with the quick
emergence of an ongoing leadership, lay as well as clerical, within
both Churches which can again hardly be paralleled. The production
of an early Luganda Christian literature by Ham Musaka. Apolo
Kagwa, Alifonsi Aliwaali, Fr. Yozefu Ddiba, and others was quite
exceptional. It was all part of the creation of a new rounded,
thoroughly living national culture at once traditional and Christian, a
culture which included within it all the clan differentiations of the
past, the Catholic-Protestant divide the first missionaries had brought
them, a unique and quickly mythologized religio-political history of
its own, and even characteristic clothes. In Buganda the good
Christian did not wear trousers, but a kanzu, just like Muslim or
traditionalist. In nothing perhaps is the self-confidence of Ganda
Christianity better expressed, but it was doubtless helped in this by
the not very different dress of the White Fathers. In most places from
the early nineteenth century on an African Christian, a missionary,
and a settler all dressed alike, in European style, wholly distinguish-
able from non-converts. In Buganda this was not so. Colonialist and
Protestant missionary wore trousers, but African Christians of both
Churches adhered to the clothes of tradition, and if the Catholic
missionary was judged—as he often was—an honorary 'non-
European \ it was in part at least because he almost dressed as one.
Clothes remain a crucial part of consciousness, culture, and group
identity.
When one considers the conversion of Buganda, it is essential not
to see it simply as a mass conversion movement but as one which
pushed straight on into the shaping of a diversified African Christian
478 îSço-igôo: Christianizing Half a Continent
life. It may well be true that nowhere else were there so many
exceptionally able missionaries, exceptional particularly as linguists,
both Catholic and Protestant, and their contribution to the total
process should in no way be undervalued. Nevertheless, they were,
far more than they realized or quite liked, secondary to a
phenomenon which as a whole from the 1880s to the 1920s
remains one of the most decisive, unexpected, and still inadequately
understood chapters within the Christian history of Africa.
*r' Correspondance de Dom Afonso, roi du Congo 1 506-/54$, cd. I. Jadin and M . Dicorato
(Brussels, 1974), 54-
A Variety of Scrambles: 1890-1920 479
favourite text of James Stewart of Lovedale, hardly someone
sympathetic to Ethiopianism. An equally popular missionary text
was Acts 8 on the baptism of the Ethiopian eunuch. So it is hardly
surprising if African Christians accepted an Ethiopian identity. 'Africa
is to rise once more, Ethiopia is to stretch out her hands to God; her
tears are to be wiped off her eyes; her candlestick is to be replaced,'
said James Johnson in a memorable 1867 sermon in Freetown. 81 'I
stand up for the Ethiopian,' Harris told Benoit near the end of his life
in 1926. 8 2 'Ethiopianism', then, as such, had nothing special to do
with ecclesiastical independency in the narrow sense. It referred to a
natural sense of cultural and political identity of black Christians
anywhere 011 the continent, drawing upon the Bible on the one side
and the surviving strength of a black Christian state in the horn of
Africa on the other, to inspire confidence at once religious and
political over against the pressure to conform in all things to the
white man, missionary or colonialist. But it was natural too to carry
this across to provide a name and justification for independent
African Churches: Ethiopian was, after all, a better name than those
the missionaries had brought with them: Anglican, Methodist, or
Presbyterian. Which of these was to be found in the Bible? O f which
could it be said, as it could of Ethiopia in reference to Zion, 'This
one and that one were born in her' (Psalm 87: 4-5)? Ethiopia and
Zion, be it noted, were not contrasting but overlapping points of
reference: Ethiopia had always for Ethiopians been a relocation of
Zion. N o w for black people everywhere it would symbolize a
biblical and historical pathway to Zion.
When 111 1892 Mangena Mokone, a Wesleyan minister in
Johannesburg, resigned in opposition to racial segregation within
the Wesleyan Church and established a new 'Ethiopian Church',
something quite decisive was happening for African Church history.
It was not the first secession in South Africa, but it was the first to
endure in a way which mattered and to point the road for many
others to follow in quite rapid succession. In fact similar secessions
were taking place at just the same time in Nigeria. In each case some
people within the now quickly expanding African Christian
C o m m u n i t y were finding missionary control and a certain inbuilt
racial discrimination intolerable. But many other Christians, while
There is too much failure among all Europeans in Nyasaland. The Three
Combined Bodies: Missionaries, Government—and Companies or Gainers
of money do form the same rule to look on a Native with mockery eyes. It
sometimes startle us to see that the Three Combined Bodies are from
Europe and along with them is a tide 'CHRISTENDOM'. And to compare or
make a comparison between the MASTUR of the title and His Servants it
pushes any African away from believing the Master of the title. If we had
power enough to communicate ourselves to Europe, we would have
advised them not to call themselves 'CHRISTNDOM' but 'Europeandom'. We
see that the title 'CHRISTNDOM' does not belong to Europe but to future
BRIDE. Therefore the life of the Three Combined Bodies is altogether too
cheaty, to thefty, too mockery. Instead of 'Give' they say 'Take away
from*—from 6 am to 5 or 6 pm there is too much breakage of GODS pure
law as seen in James' Epistle V:4. Therefore Goo s vengeance is upon The
Three Combined Bodies of Nyasaland.9'1
From 4 August 1914 Britain, France, and Russia were at war with
Germany and Austria. This meant that in Africa too there would be
war, in fact four different wars, in east, west, and south, relating to
Germany's four African territories. O f these the longest and most
severe was the war for Tanganyika and Rwanda-Burundi, a war
affecting all the territories around—Kenya and Uganda, Northern
Rhodesia, and Chilembwes Nyasaland. Already in September a
considerable number of Africans had been killed when the King's
African Rifles encountered the German forces for the first time at
Karonga near the northern end of Lake Nyasa. European armies in
Africa required a mass of African auxiliaries, both soldiers and tens of
thousands of porters. African society was now to be press-ganged to
provide the muscle without which white officers could not march
488 i8ço-îç6o : Christianizing Half a (Routinen!
around, to kill and be killed. Far more porters died than soldiers. The
British alone 'employed' more than half a million porters and
admitted to the death of 44,911 from disease, probably a great
underestimate. In November as recruitment was getting under way,
Chilembwe, perhaps the black man in Nyasaland with the most
standing, took it upon himself to write a letter of protest to the
Nyasaland Times, which the newspaper actually printed:
G. Shepperson and T. Price, Independent African: John Chilcmbe attd the Origins, Setting
and Signtftidtur of the Nyasaland Native Rising of tQi$ (Edinburgh, 1958), 234-5.
A Variety of Scrambles: 1890-1920 489
macabre service he is reported to have held before the head of
Livingstone could suggest it. It seems impossible to answer such
questions with any certainty. Chilembwe has proved vastly more
powerful in death than in life: the strangest of mini-risings largely
unsupported in a land not excessively ill governed has become in the
retrospect of mythological history a famous expression of proto-
nationalism and Christian resistance. What is verv difficult is to
/
" t Ay<mdcle. Ihc Missionary Impact on Modem Nigeria 1 $42-1914 (1966), 200.
1
II. King, 'Co-opcr.ition and Coiucxtualisalion: T w o Visionaries of the African
C h u r c h — M o j o l a Agbebi and William Hughe* of the African lnstiiuic. C o k v y n B a y ' . J l i A
16 (1986), 17.
* M. Agbebi, 'Inaugur.il Sermon', in J. Avo Lmglcy (cd.}, Ideologie* of Ijhe/ation in Black
Afrtüi iSy&-lO?0 (l<>79). 74.
496 iSgo—igéo: Christianizing Haifa Continent
broken up. The year of the first significant Nigerian secession, 1888,
was also the year of the Lambeth Conference which laid down
emphatically that persons living in polygamy be not admitted to
baptism. Crowther was there and had approved. While only
confirming what was normal mission policy against liberals like
John Colenso w h o had wished to modify it, the Lambeth resolution
indicated a hardening of the missionary view about the unaccept-
ability of polygamous marriage just at the moment that it was being
increasingly challenged by African Christian opinion. In reality the
mission Churches had proved a good deal more accommodating than
the Lambeth pronouncement might suggest. In Nigeria, in particular,
while polygamy was condemned in theory, a blind eye was often
turned in practice so long as not more than one wife and family was
baptized in the same Church, but to some clergy this was
unacceptable. Thus at a Methodist circuit leaders' meeting in 1 9 1 7
the ten top men of Ereko Church were named as polygamists.
Admitting their 'guilt', they were removed from membership.
Another member then stood up and asked why these ten were
singled out when so many were guilty. On being told that evidence
was available only for these, forty-five others stood up to provide
evidence against themselves. They too were removed from the roll.
The result was the emergence of the United African Methodist
Church, a small but wealthy group of Lagos polygamists. While no
other African Church in Nigeria seceded precisely upon the issue of
polygamy, the case for its more public tolerance very much formed
part of the independent agenda. Nevertheless, here too there were
disagreements—between a policy of toleration of polygamists and a
policy of full acceptance, as between allowing or not allowing
polygamous marriage to the clergy. On the whole African
churchmen in Lagos held closer to the missionary view, while in
the country, especially around Agege, the alternative 'evangelical*
school advocated the acceptance of polygamy as a key to
Christianization and resistance to Muslim advance.
For a large part caution, and mission ideals, prevailed, but it
remained one of the issues on account of which the African Church
movement was deeply fragmented. It was probably also one of the
few issues dividing Bishop James Johnson, the continuing Anglican,
from Dr Mojola Agbebi, the theorist of independency. But the
intellectual and practical line separating the two camps, Christians
who put up with missionary' control and those who repudiated it,
Independency and Prophet istn 497
was seldom a hard one. Few Christians who belonged in any way to
the Sierra Leonean tradition were in practice interested in going to
Agbebi s lengths. Johnson remained their natural leader. A man of
stature and some learning, but both angular and indecisive, he had
stood for a while on the verge of secession but never quite got there.
The advantages of not seceding, spiritual and institutional, for an
educated man and still more a cleric or a bishop, were too
considerable. In 1901 at the moment that Johnson was assuming his
new role as assistant bishop on the Niger, the core of his old parish of
St Pauls, Breadfruit, was moving into schism over the issue of the
appointment of his successor. Here as elsewhere the hard division was
between lay independents and white missionaries and it was a
division over control, not over doctrine or liturgy. Indeed the
continuing loyalty to denominational tradition in regard to the latter
subsequently inhibited attempts to bring the various groups of
independents into unity. A sense of Anglican, Baptist, or Methodist
identity remained too strong.
While the African Churches grew to some significance, including
by 1920 about a third of all Yoruba Christians, it cannot be said that
the promise in Agbebi's appeal was fulfilled. In hymnody and politics
their contributions were not negligible. Their Lagos church buildings
were impressive enough, their success in rural evangelization in places
quite considerable, but in general their continued division and
further subdivision in small units, coupled with a natural inability to
evaluate with theological maturity the legacy they had carried over
from the missionaries, inhibited effectiveness. They reflected the
circumstances, particularly the urban circumstances, of a generation
of Christians still within the Sierra Leonean tradition if disillusioned
with its ethos. From the early 1920s the role of Africanizing
challenger to missionary Christianity would increasingly be taken
over by a new, and very different, wave of prophet Churches.
In South Africa the story appears not dissimilar. Here too the end
of the 1880s was a time of increasing ecclesiastical unrest, culminating
in the establishment in Pretoria in 1892 of che Ethiopian Church of
Mangena Mokone, a Wesleyan minister. A few years later,
encouraged by Mokone's friend James Dwane, they joined the
black American African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) and in
1898 an AMF. bishop, H. M . Turner, visited South Africa. His five-
week preaching tour excited Africans and infuriated Europeans.
Turner was, declared the Christian Express, the newspaper of Stewart
498 îSgo-içôo: Christianizing Half a Continent
of Lovcdale, an 1 Arch-mischief-maker'. 5 The same year a large
secession of Presbyterians took place from Lovedale led by P. J.
M z i m b a , while, both in 1890 and 1896, there were also
Congregationalist secessions: to form the Zulu Mbiyana Church in
the former year, the Zulu Congregational Church in the latter.
Disagreements over polygamy mattered less in South Africa; here as
in Nigeria the underlying issue was one of control. It was expressed
in conflicts relating to the career prospects and life-style of black
ministers and to race relations within the Church as a reflection of
race relations within society. In both countries a basic alienation in
sympathy derived from the concern of thinking black Christians with
issues of African political and social rights at a time when the
imperialist bandwagon was moving forward most unrestrainedly and
missionaries for the most part tended to share uncritically in its
enthusiasms. There was, nevertheless, a large difference between the
ecclesiastical context of the two movements. In West Africa there
were by the 1890s numerous black clergy, not a few of some
distinction. There were also considerable areas of at least partial
autonomy—the native pastorates of Freetown and Lagos as well as
that of the Niger delta. While much of this appeared threatened by
the attack on Crowthers diocese, it was still from a position of
relative strength that the African Church movement in Nigeria
developed. Indeed, it was just because of that position that many
natural Ethiopians, like James Johnson, in fact never felt called to
secede. In South Africa almost none of this existed. Ecclesiastical
Ethiopianism here sprang from depression with a far more intensive
pattern of white control. Existing clerical resources were far more
limited, and the movement might hardly have had the strength to
emerge as it did had it not been for the Afro-American assistance it
received at the start.
It is important here to remind ourselves that secession was not an
inherently African phenomenon. The kind of issue upon which most
of these schisms actually took place was hardly at all different from
ones which had caused the British Methodist movement in the
nineteenth century to split again and again, or which had worked in
the United States to multiply denominations. They were in a sense
endemic to Anglo-Saxon Protestantism once it ceased to be a State
Church. Its missionaries had carried their seed to Africa only too
" S. Jacobi (ed.), Black Americans and (he Missionary Movement in Africa (1982), 179
Independency and Prophet istn 499
faithfully, and it would be misguided to see in this wave of so-called
Ethiopian separatism a merely African phenomenon uncharacteristic
of contemporary Protestantism.
In South Africa and in West Africa what was decisive in bringing
about this particular wave of secessions was nevertheless a loss of
interracial confidence heightened by the atmosphere of the scramble.
Yet in the south as in the west many people w h o shared that loss of
confidence remained within a mission Church. If James Dwanc
eventually established Iiis Order of Ethiopia within Anglicanism, if
J. Tengo Jabavu, outspoken editor of the Xhosa newspaper Inwo, but
critic of the Turner visit, remained a Lovedale Presbyterian, it was not
because they entirely liked the way things were in a white-ruled
Church, but because they recognized that the mission option was still
the wiser one for people who valued the kind of religious and social
life, the educational- opportunities, even the international links,
which the main Churches continued to stand for. The independent
Churches in the period up to 1 9 1 0 were sufficiently numerous to
alarm missionaries and to establish an alternative ecclesiastical option,
but it remained very much a minority option even for people who
shared interiorly almost all of their presuppositions. It remained so
precisely because, while rebelling against control by missionary
personnel, it was still so closely controlled by a missionary model of
religious life.
It was the role of the prophets to forge a new model, even though
they too began often enough under missionary inspiration. Consider,
for instance, the little network of Protestants in South Africa who
had linked together the name of Zion, a commitment to faith-
healing, the solemnity of baptism in a 'Jordan' river or sea, and, in due
course, the Pentecostalist gift of tongues. All this is to be found
especially in the enthusiastic but unstable ministry of P. L. Le R o u x ,
an Afrikaner who had come under the influence of the Scottish
revivalist Andrew Murray, who had done so much for the Dutch
Reformed Church. Le R o u x began work as a missionary to the
Zulus. It was from Murray above all that he had learnt of faith-
healing. Le R o u x s little chapel at Wakkerstroom was already a 4 Zions
Kerk' because in it they sang the hymns of Zion, the Zions Liedere, a
Dutch hymn-book of Moravian inspiration. In 1903* however, he
5i 8 I8gO—ig6o: Christianizing Half a Continent
went further, resigning from the Dutch Reformed Church to join,
instead, a group dependent upon the Christian Catholic Apostolic
Church founded a few years before by John Alexander Dowie at
Zion City near Chicago. 'I am going over to Zion. Those who wish
to follow me mav/ do so,'* Le R o u x wrote in a letter in Zulu to one of
his parishioners, Jonas Hlatshwayo, dated October k j o z . A strength
of Le R o u x lay in his close and happy relationship with Africans. It
proved to be a bridge carrying the religious ideals and nomenclature
of a tiny, not very significant group of white Christians across to a far
larger group of black Christians. He now called his congregation the
Zionist Apostolic Church.
This Zionist form of missionary Christianity, for so we may term it,
proved unusually attractive. It seemed indeed to share so many
themes with African traditional religion that once it had adopted an
African persona and broken any organizational links with its white
genitors, it was easily forgotten that it had anything but an African
origin. Yet Le R o u x and his colleagues Edgar Mahon and Daniel
Bryant provide the necessary link between the 2,000 or more black
Churches in South Africa eventually calling themselves by the name
of Zion and historic Christianity. Not that use of the name of Zion
/
could only have come by such a route. Rather its scriptural resonance
and the spiritual need of biblical religion to reinvent Jerusalem in
ones own land have time and again inspired Christians to claim a
Zionist identity.
/ This would be the case in Africa not only / in the
south where a precise missing link is identifiable but also in other
parts of the continent. And just as the missionary root of African
Zion could easily fade from view, so could that of many other
aspects—millennial, ritual, and so forth—but may again and again be
discovered in a Watch Tower pamphlet or some passing contact
between white and black enthusiasts.
One of Le R o u x s most faithful disciples was Daniel Nkonyane.
Around T908 Le R o u x had another crisis of religious identity. This
time he decided that he must join a Pentecostal Church, the
Apostolic Faith Mission (the new wave of Pentecostalism had only
just begun in Los Angeles in 1906), and leave Zion. Nkonyane
replaced him at this point as the latters principal leader in South
Africa, but the fist-growing Zionist tree quickly divided into
numerous branches, all of which were initially led by men w h o had
' * *
This was very much the case in the Lower Congo in 1 9 2 1 . We are
here once more upon the frontier of a fairly well-established
Protestant Church, that of the Baptists, whose roots in the ancient
Kongo tradition of Catholicism we have already explored (Chapter 9,
Section vi). Here too was a disorientated society, whose beliefs and
structures had crumbled under the blows of a particularly cruel
colonialism, but which still needed moving by something less
cerebral and methodical than even the best of Protestant missions.
But here too, within Kongo religion, was a tradition of the ngunza or
prophet. Simon Kimbangu, a villager from Nkamba, some ten miles
from the mission of Ngombe Lutete, had been baptized with his wife
at the mission in July 1 9 1 5 . He was about 26 years old. We know-
little of his early life except for one memorable incident. A
missionary, G. R . Cameron, journeying in the 1890s on the
Ntontani-Nkamba road, had been attacked by villagers and took
refuge in the house of a woman, Kinsembo, w h o gave him some
water. Before leaving he blessed the woman and her child, who was
Kimbangu. For Kimbangu and his followers subsequently that event
was something to appeal to, and a group of Baptist deacons in prison
in 1923 could write to him, 'You, M r Cameron, can rcjoice in these
things, and know that the things which you asked of God for this
Congoland, Me has done them, and especially in the matter of the
blessing of the woman who helped you when you were in danger.' 11
The accounts of many prophets claim supernatural events setting
them aside in childhood, or even before birth. It is remarkable that
12
Haliburton, 77.v Propkci Harris, 163.
l<
C . Irvine. 'The Birth of the Kimbanguitr Movement in the 13as-Zaire 1 9 2 1 ' . JRA 0
(1974). 74-
Independency and Prophet istn 509
Kimbangu is che recipient of special blessing already in childhood,
but remarkable too that it is not as such a supernatural event and that
it is in fact well authenticated. This does, moreover, help to locate the
Kimbanguist movement firmly inside the Baptist Church and its oral
history.
Cameron's blessing of Kinsembo did not. however, determine
Kimbangu s sense of vocation according to the tradition. It was only
after his baptism that he had a dream vision calling him to teach, and
he was in fact accepted as an evangelist or lay preacher in 1918. His
weakness in reading was an obstacle to promotion, but a recurrence
of his dreams affected him still more, and apparently in an effort to
escape them he set off to work in Kinshasa. His time there was clearly
disturbed, and after a few months fellow Bakongo persuaded him to
return home. His visions had continued, and he interpreted his
troubles in Kinshasa as consequent upon his failure to respond to
them. He then hoped to be appointed the Church's evangelist at
Nkamba, but he was rejected for this and his stepbrother appointed
inscead. It was at that moment that he had a vision of a new order no
longer calling him, as he saw it, to a given and lowly office within the
Church's hierarchy, but constituting him 'an apostle', someone
replacing the 'apostle' Cameron by right of the blessing he had
received from Cameron. He was also, by right of his visionary calling,
prophet and healer, fulfilling, as he and his disciples constantly
insisted, the miraculous expectations of Mark 16: 16.
It was in the middle of March 1921 that Kimbangu's healing
ministry began. The immediate response to it was twofold. On the
one side, large numbers of people began coming to Nkamba to be
healed, apparently as far as from Kinshasa, abandoning hospitals,
Catholic missions, whatever. It is clear, even from Kimbanguist
sources, that far from everyone was cured, but it is clear too that
many people thought they were or that other people had been. The
second immediate response was that of senior African members,
deacons and others, of the Baptist Church. They visited Nkamba,
decided thac what was going on was indeed 'the work of God', and
from then on included it within the structures of the Church. It
would seem that, strictly, the Kimbanguist movement did not begin
with Kimbangu's first 'miracle' but with the moment, some weeks
later in April, when the Church approved of it. Kimbangu himself
was its prophet but hardly its leader. He and the deacons around him
did, furthermore, emphatically separate themselves from many of the
5i 8 i8go—ig6o: Christianizing Half a Continent
other 'prophets' who were springing up around him. Nothing is
clearer in the fascinating work going under the name of Nfinangani
and written within the first three months of the movement than its
insistence upon the difference between the true prophet, Kimbangu,
and others filled with false spirits. It is in terms of biblical exegesis
that the claims for Kimbangu are already here made. He and the
community around him are wrestling both through dreams and
through discussion with specific biblical passages, but the text as a
whole is redolent with a sense that what was happening in lower
Zaïre was a renewal and fulfilment of what they had read about in the
bible and what the missionaries, they believed, had taught them to
expect.
Such a highly charged and quickly growing movement could not,
however, in white eyes be left entirely in black hands. Nevertheless,
the local missionary, R . L. Jennings, was slow to make up his mind.
Kimbangu visited him at Ngombe on 19 April and he visited
Nkamba in May and saw no miracles. The local administrator, Morel,
also visited Nkamba in May and, again, saw little to agitate him
greatly: no cadavers being brought for resuscitation, no huge crowds.
Neither witnessed any healings. Kimbangu undoubtedly preached
about the imminent return of Christ,' but so did manvy a missionarv. /
v. Aladura
Turn from Nigeria to Kenya and one finds that here too the very end
of the 1920s was a crucial time. The previous years had seen a
considerable growth in Christiariization and a concomitant desire for
schooling, but had also witnessed increasing tension between the
races basically caused by the expansion of white farming and
settlement in the highlands. There is, in consequence, a bitterness in
Kenyan history not to be found in Nigerian. Yoruba society was not
threatened in the way Kikuyu society was. Here the main movement
of independency focused upon two issues: African control of schools
and the circumcision of girls. Missionary- opposition to the latter,
especially the campaign against it organized by Arthur of the Church
of Scotland Mission, a man highly influential with government, to
secure the suppression of what nationalist Kikuyu could see as an
integral mark of their identity as a people, was the spark which
provoked secession and the establishment of the African Independent
Pentecostal Church (the AI PC, not in fact Pentecostalist). While its
origins may go back a few years before that, it was the 1929-30 crisis
over circumcision which made thousands of Church members,
Presbyterian, Methodist, and Anglican, move into the AIPC. The
educational issue, however, was 110 less fundamental so that the other
side ot the A I P C was KISA, the Kikuyu Independent Schools
Association, which was certainly established in 1929. Johana Kunyiha
would for long be its president. He had been a district councillor
since 1928, a member of the District Education Board since 1930. For
him the independent movement was intended to differ from the
mission Churches 011 the right of Christian girls to be circumcizcd
but on nothing else, and it is noticeable that in 1933 a petition was
actually sent to the Anglican Bishop of Mombasa to allow some
ministers to be trained in the diocesan theological college. The
request was refused.
At the same time, however, other movements of independency
were developing in the very same places, notably that of the Arathi,
'prophets', or the Watu wa Mungu, 'the people of God'. The culture
of the Arathi was far closer to tradition. These were people with no
interest in schools or any other aspect, other than the Bible, of the
European intrusion which was dispossessing the Kikuyu of so much
of their land. European dress was rejected, white robes (or even just
skins) and turbans adopted; the taboos of Kikuyu tradition were
49^ 1S90-1960: Christianizing Half a Continent
reshaped by Levitical law; Western medicine, Western schooling,
Western housing, all was to be avoided. Later on this spirit movement
split on whether polygamy should be accepted or not, on whether
Sunday should be replaced by Saturday, on the degree of radicalism in
rejection of the European-mission style of life, which was seen as so
alien to Kikuyu consciousness in a way that the Bible, the Old
Testament particularly, was not. While the Arathi worried the
colonial authorities, who judged them at least as 'potentially
subversive' of civil order—particularly after a clash in 1934 in
which Joseph Ng'ang'a, the original leader and two others were shot
and killed by the police—they were not proscribed and in due course
came to be recognized as a group of unusually hard-working and
puritanically moral country folk. The gap between Johana Kunyiha
and Joseph Ng'ang'a was undoubtedly a very considerable one in
religious, cultural, and educational terms, but once more it is
important not to divide different tendencies within Christian
independency too rigidly, just as it is important not to overstress
the difference between the Christianity of much of it and that of the
mission Churches. The Roman Catholic missions, and, at least in
some parts, the Anglicans continued to allow female circumcision.
The bitterness in the division in Kenva was considerable, but it was a
/
sent by God to preach. For Maranke the experience has been dated
to 17 July. For Masowe (formerly named Peter Shoniwa) the date
does not appear to be known, but a police report dated 1 November
makes it clear that it was some months before that. The former had
something of a Methodist background (with, perhaps, some Zionist
influence), the second an Anglican. Each claimed a complete
personal revelation. In Maranke s case it is to be found written down
in a book, the New Revelation, which supplements or even replaces
the Bible. T h e element of dream or vision, used elsewhere including
mission Churches simply to provide personal guidance for the
interpretation of Scripture or to add to Scripture in a fairly minor
way, has here gone far further. Indeed Masowe, at least at first,
ordered his followers to destrov their Bibles.
/
Churches almost all the practices of the mission but without the
mission s resources. In most cases they were probably not worse off
personally for their secession because most clergy and catechists wTere
paid no more than a pittance, if that, in the T 9 3 0 S and 1940s. There-
were particular issues at stake: Madida was shocked that a mission
which forbade the eating of pork should be making a profit from
farming and selling pigs. Nyabadza found his mission slack on
drunkenness. Kunyiha could not accept the banning of the
circumcision of girls. But underlying such relatively trivial issues
was the wider one of control and confidence. This was still not an age
in which the missionaries were, at all often, giving signs of bowing
out or of heeding the mature judgement of African Christians. What
had happened in Lagos and Lovedale in the 1 8 9 0 $ was happening
now in a great many other places as black frustration mounted with
the restrictions of life within what wras structurallv still a mission /
Ibid, i
Independency and Prophet istn 525
movement to arise in colonial Africa, and it is not surprising that this
should happen in Zambia, one of the last countries to be effectively
missionized. Nevertheless, it may be that the particularly Christian
character of Lumpa reflects the wider spread of Christianity in society
by the 1950s. Lumpa appears also as a feminist Church, not only led
by a woman but expressing feminine aspirations, a woman's view of
the ideal society, more than others. This was expressed in its
opposition to polygamy, but also in the symbols it made use of in its
hymns deriving from the mind of Lenshina. In the 1960s with the
advent of political independence Lumpa would take up a strongly
negative stance, linked with its opposition to the spread of schools,
and would end in a bloody confrontation with government, but in
the 1950s when our story ends this could hardly have been
anticipated. Indeed in its anti-mission stance it appeared at times as
a populist ally of the nationalists.
well established in the figure of Sir Isaac Akinyele was Aladura by the
1950s. In South Africa too Zionism had settled down in fairly stable
forms, 011 the one hand more urbanized on the Rand, on the other
so closely linked with the King of Swaziland as to be part of its
established religion. In the 1950s the presence of Bishop Nkonyane at
the annual Swazi Incwala was taken for granted. Yet at the same time
as some of the principal 'prophet' movements of a generation before
were hardening into an almost 'Ethiopian' model, there was as ever a
multitude of other tiny spiritual groups springing up around them,
each serviced by a prophet whose functions were mostly those of
ritual healing. While the great prophets of the first generation were
above all evangelists, the multitude of their successors were healers
rather than preachers. Healing, in the meantime, had become a
slightly secondary dimension of the main Kimbanguist or Harrist
traditions. Independency could not mean the same thing in 1958 as it
had meant fort)' years earlier, but equally it could not mean the same
thing for a movement that was new, like Lumpa, as for a movement
Independency ond Prophetistn 527
which had gone through a considerable history of persecution and
spiritual maturing like the Kimbanguist. The character of a
movement at its origins did not determine its character a generation
later, but, equally, there could be an intrinsic biblical or Christian
commitment which survived but might nevertheless look rather
different when translated from an almost illiterate to an urban and
partly educated society. Nevertheless, it is clear that basically similar
religious movements could spread in very different social and political
contexts. Zionism might be the characteristic religion of the South
African underclass in a racist society, but Aladura, not all that different
in religious terms, was always a religion of aspiring and literate urban
artisans and clerks under no sense of political alienation.
" J. Farram» Mashonaîand Martyr: Bernard Mizeki and the Pioneer Chunk (1966).
49^ 1S90-1960: Christianizing Half a Continent
A word should be added here about 'negative cases'. The 1 9 1 4
upsurge of the Bamalaki in Uganda was a major movement involving
for a few years tens of thousands of Anglicans, but it did not last
except in a minuscule form. One other, later, Ugandan secession
from the C M S Mission joined the Greek Orthodox Church. It was
not large, but its very shunning of independency is significant. In
Uganda by the 1950s independent Churches were so small as to be
effectively non-existent. Even more striking is the Christian history
of Tanzania. Almost every independent Church in Tanganyika in the
1950s was a cross-border extension, of no great size, of a body based
elsewhere, in Kenya or Nyasaland. Both Uganda and Tanganyika had
exceptionally large Christian communities by i960. In each case
considerable parts of the country were predominantly Christian.
They also had the Bible translated into their principal languages,
something claimed by some interpreters as almost inevitably leading
to independency. But in neither country was there any significant
locally based independent movement. If we ask why, we can find
three fairly evident possible factors. The first was that in each the
majority of Christians was Roman Catholic; the second that in most
of Uganda there was only one Protestant missionary society and
while there were several in Tanganyika they did not overlap; the third
that in neither was there any considerable white settler presence. We
can observe the same absence and the same possible causes in
Rwanda and Burundi.
By the 1950s something like a third of all black Christians in South
Africa belonged to independent Churches. Elsewhere it was seldom
nearly so large a proportion, nevertheless, there were now two kinds
of country, in one of which independency was significant, in the
other it was not. South Africa and Swaziland fell into the first
category, Basutoland and Bechuanaland (Lesotho and Botswana) into
the second; the Rhodesias (Zimbabwe and Zambia) were in the first,
Tanganyika in the second; Kenya in the first, Uganda in the second;
Nigeria (at least western Nigeria) in the first, Cameroon 111 the
second; the Belgian Congo (Zaïre) in the first, Rwanda and Burundi
in the second. N o single factor correlates well with that division, but
in general the rule holds that where Christianity began with a
multiplicity of Protestant Churches and where there was a
considerable white settler (and ostensibly Protestant) presence, there
independency grew; where Christianity was predominantly Catholic,
where Protestant missions did not overlap, and where white settlers
Independency and Prophet istn 533
were few or none, there it hardly emerged. It is at least in such terms
and not in those of the character of traditional religion that its growth
has chiefly to be explained.
Independency appealed to different classes in different circum-
stances. Its 'Ethiopian' end appealed to the new élite of clergy and
laity, literate and school-minded, but irritated by European control.
Its other, 'prophetic', end is harder to define socially. Mosdy it was
the very poor who wanted the power of Christian faith but had little
interest in schools and none in elitist self-improvement. They were
opters-out into a religious world of meaning when the secular world
was so dominated by white foreigners and a colour bar. Even in
Northern Rhodesia at the end of the 1950s it looks as if the
progressively minded were turning to nationalist politics and even a
mission Church, while the unschooled, often from the same families,
went for Lumpa. But it would be dangerous to press this too far.
Zionism may have been in South Africa the refuge of the very poor.
That is not so obvious in Swaziland, while in Yorubaland it has been
demonstrated that Aladura appealed on the contrary to up-and-
coming urban youth, both literate and skilled. Those responding in
their thousands to the preaching of a Harris or a Swatson will have
sought whatever the prophet had to offer, and it was not a package so
different from that of the missionary.
W. MacGaffcy, "lite Iteloivd City: Commentary 011 a Kimbanguist Text\ JRA 2 (1969),
l2<>-47-
Independency and Prophetism 539
thousand in the colonial Congo 'while they carried loads from
Matadi to Leopoldvil le'.
Then in 1921 God raised up a prophet, Simon Kimbangu, through
whom ' G o d our Father and his Son Jesus Christ are returned to us'.
Miracles were performed, but only in order that wickedness should
cease, hearts be converted, prayers and hymns be said, the Bible be
read. All this happened in Nkamba, clearly identified by such events
as the N e w Jerusalem spoken of in prophecy. Inevitably there was
resistance from 'the hill of Satan'—false prophets, missionaries, and
the Belgian government. Just as Jesus and his disciples were
persecuted, so were Kimbangu and his followers. For all these
reasons Nkamba is to be loved and the children of Kimbangu obeyed
as against the many others who 'have bestowed prophethood upon
themselves . . .and set themselves up as the equals of Simon
Kimbangu\ Z i They dissuade people from going to the true
Jerusalem, claiming instead their own holy cities, but God has
rejected them.
In this moving text, Kongolese and biblical history arc woven
together. One renews the other, being essentially the same thing.
Within a single sacred history- we move through soteriology to
ecclesiology. While the colonial government has crumbled, the false
prophets are still a 'hill of Satan' very much in existence. Kimbangu
himself did in fact declare other prophets to be false. His sons renew
the claim of a divine intervention, a divine love which has been
manifested within black history but is both particularized and
institutionalized. C o m e to Nkamba and experience it. Not many
Churches might have expressed their theology quite so well, but we
have in this text an integration of African experience and biblical
spirituality which is essentially common to many Churches other
than the Kimbanguist, and it may well provide the best theological
expression of the type of Christianity characteristic of the African
prophetic movement in every part of the continent. It was a view of
things by no means unfaithful to what had happened forty years
earlier, yet controlled by the needs of a very different age in which
colonialism was passing and the prophetic and millennialist mission
required reinterpretation by a Church in which the miraculous healer
was being replaced by the cooler hand of preacher and administrator.
141.
12
CHURCH, SCHOOL, AND STATE IN T H E AGE
OF BISHOP KIWANUKA
an African in central and southern Africa to see this black man eating
with whites and treated the same was quite extraordinary. It had
never happened before in their experience and would not happen
again for quite some time. Moreover, while a wide commitment to
educate was new and very important, it did not reach far at secondary
level until well into the 1930s in most countries. In Belgian Africa it
did not do so even then. Indeed the African with more than primary
education could still be seen as inherently undermining Indirect Rule
and the maintenance of 'traditional' authorities. O f course such
people were already quite numerous in the principal towns of the
west coast as in South Africa, but colonial orthodoxy tended to
condemn missionaries who pushed secondary education for 'spoiling'
Africans and turning black men into white.
Even more was the educated African seen as a threat by the white
settler. Across much of southern, central, and eastern Africa a very
different development was in progress. In more and more places
settler communities were establishing themselves, acquiring large
stretches of land which required for their cultivation a cheap black
labour force and erecting around themselves the sharpest of colour
Church, School, State, and Bishop Kiwanuka 543
bars. The one relativelv liberal tradition within white Africa, that of
Cape Colony as it had developed by the later nineteenth century, was
quickly cut back after the Union of South Africa came into existence
in 1 9 1 0 and the more racialist attitudes of the Transvaal and the
Orange Free State came to prevail. In 1923 Southern Rhodesia
became internally self-governing, a settler community whose
attitudes were fundamentally those dominant in South Africa. The
settlers in the Kenya highlands were hoping for no less, and the even
smaller groups in Nyasaland, Northern Rhodesia, and Tanganyika
had comparable aspirations for the more distant future. While total
numbers remained verv limited until after the Second World War,
the pressure of settler politics seemed considerable everywhere in the
continent south of Uganda, being quite as noticeable in the Belgian
and Portuguese possessions as the British. Undoubtedly that pressure
held back African advancement and especially African education
above primary level.
The most important change in African consciousness wrought in
these years by Western education was, however, precisely at primary
level. It is to be situated in the almost indefinable area of a popular
culture deeply affected by literacy. The expansion of bush schools run
by teachers often barely literate themselves was not much approved of
by government or by educational theorists and it may have brought
no great range of examinable skills to the general population, but it
did bring within reach of millions an awareness of what reading and
writing were about, tools both for new forms of culture and
economic advancement. As there was still so little vernacular
literature other than that which missionaries had produced, this
created a vast, diffuse conditioning of the common mind favourable
to the spread of Christianity. It also enhanced the status and spread of
a number of major African languages while contributing to their
greater internal uniformity. In some cases new languages were almost
constructed in the process, a process running parallel to the attempts
of colonial governments to establish suitable media of communica-
tion. Africans were quite used to speaking more than one language,
so the wide use of standardized forms of a relativelv small number of
/
as to which way the future lay. White settler communities had grown
considerably in numbers in the post-war years, but black nationalist
* 3 June 1954. Debate* of the Iîouse ojAssembly, Union of Souch Africa (Cape Town, 1954),
S6, 6220.
Church, School, State, and Bishop Ki want i ha 549
! organizations grounded upon far more than 90 per cent of the
population were spreading everywhere with the example of the Gold
Coast before them. The first half of the 1950s witnessed two victories
for the former and defeats for the latter. In January 1953 a conference
in London, from which every African representative had withdrawn,
recommended the establishment of a Central African Federation,
uniting the two Rhodesias and Nyasaland. Essentially this extended
local white control from Southern Rhodesia to its two northern
neighbours and constituted a major settler victor)'. The same year the
Mau Mau rebellion broke out among the Kikuyu of Kenya, reacting
tenaciously and bitterly to the settler expropriation of so much of
their land. It took three years to suppress. It is noticeable how iVlau
Mau, like other 1950s nationalist movements in Buganda and
, elsewhere, very easily assumed an anti-Christian and still more an
anti-missionary face. In the heat of the moment Christianity could be
damned as the fourth wheel of the white mans chariot.
It would be a number of years before it became clear that the
Central African Federation could not survive against the opposition
of the African population of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, and
that Kenya was after all going to emerge as a black- and not white-
ruled land, but by the end of the decade both were obvious. Give or
take a few months here and there, i960 provides the symbolic line
between past and future, north and south. In January of that year,
Harold Macmillan, Britain's Prime Minister, declared to an
unenthusiastic audience in Parliament in Cape Town that 'the
wind of change is blowing throughout the continent'. 9 The
government of South Africa remained adamant that it should not
blow there. It was a determination shared in Rhodesia and by the
government of Portugal in regard to Angola and Mozambique. A
new triple alliance of the south was about to be forged. In March
i960 sixty-nine people were shot and killed by the police in less than
one minute during a demonstration at Sharpevillc. The following
month African political parties were permanently banned in South
Africa. There would be no wind of change in a land now governed
by Verwoerd. 'Never in history', he declared in an emotional address
in September 1958, 'at least not in the history of the past two
thousand years, was the position of white society (blankdom) in danger
to such an extent as now.' His government, he continued, remained
9
Marold Macmillan, Pomfmç the Way 1959-1961 (1972), 475.
550 1890—1960: Christianizing Half a Continent
determined to defend 'everything which has been built up since the
davs of Christ . . . for the salvation of mankind'. 1 0
/
The missionaries who were coming out were for the most part
professionally trained teachers, doctors, nurses, very many of them
women. The most productive side of the new mission was,
undoubtedly, the educational. Oldham was behind the Phelps-
Stokes Reports, the British government paper on educational policy
of 1925, and the Le Zoute Conference of 1926. All of these were
intended to push both colonial commitment to African educational
progress and co-operation therein between administration and
mission. They largely succeeded, at least in regard to British Africa.
In South Africa missionaries were already spearheading African
education at Lovedale, Fort Hare, and elsewhere. The characteristic
contribution of the educational missionary in this period was the
boarding-school, teaching a Cambridge syllabus and modelling itself
on an English public school. It may not have been a very imaginative
contribution, but it remained, quite probably, what Africa needed
most and wanted most: some at least of its sons and daughters to be
provided with the educational and social confidence inherent in the
ways of their masters. For the most part these were rather happy
communities, to which in after days African politicians would look
back as providers of the cradles of the new nationalism. Headmasters
like Carey Francis of Alliance High School in Kenya could be seen
and loved as liberal mentors of a free Africa. When Francis died in
Nairobi in 1966 his old pupils Oginga Odinga, Tom Mboya, Charles
Njonjo, and Ronald Ngala, now political rivals, nevertheless united
to act as pallbearers.
The other main concern of Le Zoute was African culture. The
conferences chairman was Donald Fraser, back in Britain after thirtv
» /
order was going to last a long time and that the achievement of 'a
genuinely indigenous Church' could safely be left for a while.
Administrative efficiency, good bookkeeping, heading off schism,
getting a tiny élite through the Cambridge School Certificate was
what mattered now.
It is strange how little attention was still being paid to the
formation of an African clergy. In comparison with other schools
remarkably little effort was put into theological colleges and any
raising of their standards. It was almost as if a rise in the number of
the ordained, especially if reasonably educated, was regarded as a
threat to be held off as long as possible. The very schisms of an
'Ethiopian' sort which had taken place and were still taking place
could be seen as grounds for avoiding any more by the multiplication
of clergy. It is certainly striking that in 1950 not a single Anglican
African diocesan bishop had been appointed since the death of
Crowther. The new leadership the Churches were fostering through
the best of their schools would, in consequence, become in the 1950s
a contester for political control but only very occasionally for
ecclesiastical control. In most places it simply was not strong enough
for the latter. Nevertheless, it is also true that, while African clergy
did not grow in numbers to the extent one would have expected in
this period, they did in a way come to exercise authority simply
because a vacuum had been created. White missionaries had moved
steadily upwards into central institutions or higher administration.
Black Church numbers had multiplied. The people actually doing
pastoral work on any scale were a large number of catechists and a
small number of ordained Africans. Inadequately trained and in
H
Ranger, 'Poverty* and Prophetism'. 16.
556 1 8 g o - i ç 6 o : Christianizing Haifa Con tinetit
theoryr subject to white control, they were in practice by the 1940s
the only functioning pastors in a great many Churches. Leslie Brown
became the Anglican Bishop of Uganda in the 1950s. 'When I
arrived in my own diocese', he later wrote, 'I found one priest, with
no ordained assistant, responsible for ninety congregations, but I
suppose the average with us may be about fifteen.' 1 * T h e
consequence of a long policy of holding back on ordination was
less to maintain white control than to create an impossible strain
upon the few Africans who were ordained and to establish a state one
may describe as 'sacramental famine' across the young Churches of
the continent.
Kenya presents an interesting case for this period in that its political
fate seemed the most uncertain. It had the largest settler community
of any colony not ruled by settlers. Here, more than elsewhere,
missionaries were in a way in a balancing position. In Rhodesia they
could criticize but hardly challenge the policy of a settler
government, and after 1930 hardly any one except Cripps even
criticized it. In Uganda and Tanganyika colonial rule was fairly
clearly geared to the long-term interests of black society. In Kenya
the country stood upon a knife-edge in which, while the settlers
were extremely powerful, they were not in control and direct appeal
to London on behalf of African interests could be effective in a way it /
The 1950s were a good age for the missionary movement. Protestant
decline was not yet too evident while the Catholics were still going
from strength to strength. Missionary enthusiasm was in fact central
world-w'ide to the Catholicism of the period. For Protestantism its
vigour was surviving only in the rather marginal counter-culture of
conservative evangelicalism, though here it was expanding. But
among both Catholics and Protestants probably 110 other decade in
missionary history could lay claim to such intelligent vitality. This was
as true of Africa as anywhere. The rather ponderous, slow-thinking,
paternalistically benevolent but heavy-handed note of the inter-war
years was giving way to something altogether sharper, more self-
critical, more willing to recognize that God had always worked as
much outside the Christian Church as in it. Max Warren, General
Secretary of the C M S since 1942, was now the principal Protestant
strategist, a scholar of considerable historical and cultural sensitivity.
To sense the quality of the missionary spirit in post-war Africa one
could well put together some such collection as Geoffrey Parrinder's
West African Religion (1949), Bengt Sundkiers Bantu Prophets in South
A frica (1949), Trevor Huddlestons Naught for your Comfort (1956), and
John Taylor's Christianity and Politics in Africa (1957). Doubtless all
these books could be criticized, but they and others of the same
period collectively show a much more open and immediate
recognition of the weight and validity of African human and
religious experience as of the political rights of Africans and the
missionary responsibility to be critical of colonialism and still more of
racialism.
The new missionary mood could be sharpest and most to the point
68 iSgo-igôo: Christianizing Half a Continent
where che African identity was being most painfully repressed—in
South Africa. There was, of course, still plenty of racialism in the
missionary Church of the 1950s, both in South Africa and elsewhere.
Indeed Trevor Huddleston, Michael Scott. Ambrose Reeves, and
other vocal Church critics of racialism and especially of the policies of
the new Nationalist government were largely regarded by fellow
Church workers, from Archbishop Clayton of Cape Town down-
wards, as trouble-makers. They certainly did not represent most, or
even many, white Christians within South Africa. Nevertheless, in
terms of moral passion, gospel conviction, and even sheer political
long-sightedness, they won the debate hands down against the
moderates within the Church w h o stood for a more measured
approach or even just an inability- to recognize that the issues in
question, basically ones of human dignity and racial equality, were
more central than anything specifically ecclesiastical to the health and
credibility of the Church.
The Catholic scene was not too dissimilar, though it was still
characterized more by continued post-war growth in missionary
numbers than by any profound rethinking. The latter would have to
wait another ten years. Nevertheless, there was an increasing
liberalism in approach, brought about in part by the large number
of lay missionaries now serving in Africa, particularly in organizations
like Ad Lucem, a graduate fellowship originating in France. Fr.
Placide Tempels s profound and stimulating Bantu Philosophy (1945)
had had a considerable influence if, perhaps, not always a beneficial
one—his stress on the centrality of 'force vitale' in the African
philosophy of life could be misinterpreted by missionary colleagues
to confirm their conviction that Africans only understood force of a
very crude sort. Fr. Mosmans, the Belgian Provincial of the White
Fathers in the later 1950s, was one among a number of writers pre-
dating in the mission field the aggiornamento which would blossom
forth so rapidly after John X X I I I became Pope in 1958. Again, the
replacement in 1956 as General of the White Fathers of the rigidly
conservative Bishop Durneu by the more open-minded Dutchman
Leo Volker helped a larger shift in attitudes, while Joseph Blornjous,
another Dutchman and Bishop of Mwanza in Tanganyika from 1948,
was highly unusual among missionary bishops in being a theological
scholar who built a large library for himself on the shores of Lake
Victoria, an ecumenical liberal who held the confidence of his fellow
bishops. He was largely responsible for the commencement in 1959
Church, School, State, and Bishop Ki want i ha 569
of the A frican Ecclesiastical Review,; a quarterly published in Uganda but
intended for the whole of English-speaking Africa as a means of
decreasing the extreme intellectual isolation from which the Catholic
missionary world suffered. Its editor was a third Dutchman and
White Father, J o o p Geerdes. Volker, Blomjous, and Geerdes
represent what we may call the Dutch age of Catholic mission, a
fairly brief age, vigorous, open-minded, ecumenical, which was just
beginning as our story ends.
Such developments, however, were in i960 only starting to affect
the basic attitudes of the majority of missionary bishops, priests, and
sisters. Many continued to hold without question that every
unbaptized person must go to hell, that Protestants were
unquestionably wrong, that—beyond perhaps some minor reforms
such as a greater use of the vernacular—the Roman Catholic Church
neither could nor should change. The mental gap between ordinary
Catholic and Protestant missionaries was still quite enormous at the
end of the 1950s, though rumbles of impatience could be heard and
were tolerated rather more than in earlier decades. It was Pope John,
the Council, and the need to respond to African independence
which would change it, and nowhere, did the Council have a more
startling effect than in the African missionary field, but that again is a
story which goes beyond the frontiers of this history.
Africa and its Churches north of the Zambezi were clearly turning
to the 'left' by the end of the 1950s, but south of the Zambezi the
political direction would remain equally emphatically to the 'right 1 .
Scott, Huddleston, Reeves, and their like were all removed from
South Africa or silenced within it, and for a while in the 1960s they
had few obvious successors in that dark age of black hopes. They
were, of course, all English priests. Afrikaners had for a century been
decrying the interference of English people in South African affairs.
Clerics of this sort were seen as simply an anachronistic example of
the British imperialist spirit which had crushed the Boer republics. In
the nineteenth centurv the Dutch Reformed Churches had at times
/
put brakes upon the racialism of their members. By the 1930s it was
rather the other way round. In 1938, for example, the mission
secretary of the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk, J. G. Strydom,
could already describe apartheid as an 'issue of faith' at a mission
congress at Bloemfontein. This was at a time when the use of the
term 'apartheid' was only just beginning. The mildly liberal theology
of the English-speaking Churches had done next to nothing to hold
S70 i$go-ig6o: Christianizing Haifa Continent
back che advance of racialist legislation in the age of Smuts, but it had
been a piecemeal, untheorized advance. N o w Christianity itself, in
one of its forms, was justifying the implementation of a coherent
racial apartheid through a simplistic but heavy-handed and
fundamentalist neo-Calvinist theology-, which had only quite
recently emerged within the spiritual context of Afrikaner
nationalism.
It was obvious that after the Nationalist victory of 1948 it would
appear more than ever intolerable that a handful of rather high
church English clerics should assert the unchristian character of
racialism with an inspired clarity never before achieved. At the time
they certainly appeared to fail in their struggle. Yet, on the one side,
the struggle would quickly be taken up again, even by Afrikaner
Christians. In the late 1950s Dr Beyers Naudé, Vice-Chairman of the
Transvaal Svnod of the N G K and a member of the Broederbond,
/
many decades. It may seem unrealistic for the historian to pick out
such things from a very complex series of events, yet religious history
is constructed more than most by myths, symbols, and a tradition of
empowering memories. When myths ring true they can be very
powerful indeed. Twenty-five years later South Africa would be
teeming with radical clergymen, but not in the 1950s. Yet it was then
Church, School, State, and Bishop Ki want i ha 571
when the scar of racialism was rising, not when it was setting, that
such witness was historically significant.
North of the Zambezi, colonialism was now rapidly and
benevolently crumbling. Equally, the missionary movement was
sitting ever more loose to colonialism. At times they had seemed
horse and rider, now the missionary preferred not to stress the
acquaintance. The warning of China, with its communist take-over
and expulsion of missionaries, had to some degree at least been
imbibed. T h e 1950s were in the Western Church as a whole a fairly
conservative epoch. Its missionary groupings together with other
people particularly concerned with Africa could seem for the
moment its more radical wing. It was in Africa that the perceptive
could discern a new world about to arrive, a world of great poverty*,
underdevelopment, and exploitation, yet possibly a rather Christian
world—but onlv/ if the Churches could show that their colonialist
links might fairly be forgotten or forgiven. Could they now serve
creatively instead in the development of a new and independent
Africa? Many missionaries throughout the 1950s saw such prospects
only with foreboding, expressions of the advance of 'communism'.
And manv African nationalists were still unsure whether the
missionary Churches should be seen as friend or foe. The 1950s
were, obviously enough, a time of transition in which Churches of a
highly colonial type subsisted side by side with signs of rapid change.
By and large missionary' leadership recognized the challenge just in
time, and a new independent Africa which needed missionary
personnel and expertise only too obviously was disposed in most
places co believe in its good intentions and accept its collaboration in
the long march that had now to begin.
For twelve years after 1939 Bishop Kiwanuka was the sole African
Catholic diocesan bishop. There was equally 110 Anglican. It is in
itself highly surprising that in a matter of this sort the Catholic
Church was now actually ahead of any other, and this points both to
the loss of Africanizing momentum after the death of Bishop
Crowther and to the wav in which the Protestant-Catholic balance
/
had been altering during the first third of this century. Kiwanuka
Church, School, State, and Bishop Ki want i ha 573
represents an age in which Catholicism had moved to the centre of
African Christianity in a way that was not at all the case in the
nineteenth century. But it was the success of Masaka that ensured the
extension of what could be seen as an experiment. Kiwanuka was as
conscious as Crowther had been seventv vears before that he had
/ /
W. Omulokoli, 'The I Ii>tonc.*l I )cvolopinont oi the Angl 1011 ( .'hurch among Ab.iluyu
195s*. I'h.l) thesis (Aberdeen. i»;Si).
H. Rirhurds, Fifty YÎ-:ÏD- IM .\')\R>I:M (Masenu. rto.
Church, School, State, and Bishop Ki want i ha 575
once more. This was not simply a case of black faces replacing white
ones in a certain number of missions. The stvle was different too.
Undoubtedly White Fathers were good at living off the land;
nevertheless, the African clergy had to be still more self-reliant. The
gardens of their missions were a most necessary object of their care.
Their relationship with the people was different, linked as they were
in innumerable kinship relationships. They knew more and could
indeed be more severe 111 application of the norms they had learnt 111
the seminars7 just because it was more difficult to pull the wool over
their eyes. The clergy of Masaka with their mastery of Latin and the
theology of their textbooks were an object of incomparable
admiration in the 1930s and 1940s. Their F.nglish was less good
than their Latin. Their domestic culture was essentially vernacular,
their one normal source of external knowledge being the Church
newspaper Munno. In this they were very like many a diocesan clergy
in Italy or Spain. The diocese of Masaka was, then, in its way very
deeply Africanized, but this did not signify the slightest deviation
from missionary norms. On the contrary; its clergy- were meticulously
faithful to the 'Statutes' regulating the details of their daily life, drawn
up on missionary authority. If it had not done so, it would have
spelled undoubted disaster and been used as an argument against the
success of the 'experiment*. Fven so, missionaries could write to
R o m e that 'in all the Buddu missions entrusted to African clergy, we
have observed an evil spirit. Priests manifest nationalism. They want
to be on their own, manage their own affairs. 07 Masaka succeeded
just because, ecclesiastically and theologically; it was so unnationalist,
so persistently faithful to missionary- norms and ultramontane
theologyr. In this model of Africanization there could be no room
for anything else.
The Chewa people of Mua were not very polygamous but their
marriages were traditionally unstable. Nevertheless, the proportion of
Church members still able to receive the sacraments in Mua was in
fact relatively high. John Taylor, a few years later, found that over 80
per cent of Anglicans in Buganda were excommunicated. 33 For
Ganda Catholics it may have been about 60 per cent. This is what
'control* had come to mean: the statistical precision and sacramental
discipline of the Mua diarist represents it most accurately. Mua in
1952 remained a well-run mission—not too large in size or
numerous in its parishioners to be out of control for three energetic
White Fathers. The statistics and the communions could still be
controlled, only the 'indifference' could not. Elsewhere things could
already be a good deal worse.
When, however, we have gone so far, we are still far from through
all the degrees of Church membership because we have not
considered the many who had for years been enrolled in a
catechumenate but were never, for one reason or another, actually
baptized. Again there were many people who had not seriously
entered a catechumenate at all, but who regarded themselves as
Catholic, Anglican, or Methodist because a parent, child, aunt, or
whatever, actually was a member of such a Church, and they wanted
to be something. If an ordained Luyia priest of fairly limited
u
l. Linden. Ca(holi(.\ /Vay.-wK iitui Chrwa Resisuinw in yasahvui :i>$9~igj<) (1974.), I!><;.
33
J. Taylor, 77»«' Cwvu'/ft of ihc (Jhunh in Bugamia (1958), 24 s•
Church, School, State, and Bishop Ki want i ha 581
education had fifty congregations to serve, with only the assistance of
various untrained and mostly unpaid lay readers and evangelists, is it
surprising that the complexities of individual life histories when
placed against the requirements of Church regulations were often
beyond his time and ability to work out?
If such problems were to be worked out, it would be done by the
catechist. He was the Church's one local man, and in this regard the
age of the catechist lasts well into the 1950s. It was the catechist and
no one else who ensured that the vast numbers of Christians
multiplying across the first half of this century became, most of them,
Catholics, Anglicans, or Presbyterians and not members of an
independent Church or millenarian cult. The catechists continued to
represent in the context of innumerable villages Ecclesia Catholica,
the universal fellowship of Christians, as well as literary modernity,
the three R s in fact: Reading, Writing, and Religion. He was not
entirely local. Catechists might be moved. They might even have a
bicycle. Almost unpaid by the Church, they often supported
themselves by trade unless they were doubling as teachers paid by
the State. A few would be promoted. To us they stand for the local.
To their people, and even to themselves, they stood for and were
linked with a world of religious and secular powrer, the world of the
bishop, of a cathedral, even of the Pope. They were far-flung
outposts in a new ecclesiastical geography growing up around them.
They visited their diocesan headquarters from time to time, and the
way things were there was the way things should be in the village too.
Protestant or Catholic, biblicism or papalism, he had somehow to
represent these great things to his fellow villagers, standing for values,
ideas, and powers whose authority he could sense but whose
meaning he could hardly begin to apprehend.
Jedida Asheri describes her catechist father at Kikai in western
Cameroon in the 1930s as owning a sewing-machine and sewing his
family's clothes as well as trading. He would set off on foot hundreds
of miles to sell his kola-nuts. Greatly respected by his fellow villagers,
he was 'Massa' (Master), whose calabash had to be filled at the spring
before theirs, and he lived a little apart even from his family in 'Papa's
house', whose principal room was the parlour, the office of his
ministry, containing table, two chairs, and magazine pictures on the
three walls. Here cleanliness and tidiness had a high priority. 'Massa'
was a Catholic. His contemporary Benjamin Paul Apena was an
Anglican. Both had been born in the 1890s. Apena, an Isoko from
582 1890-1960: Christianizing Half a Continent
Ikpidiama, was in the Nigerian army in the latter years of the war. In
1921 he felt the call to become an evangelist and interpreter for the
missionaries. Over the next twenty- years he was promoted and sent
on courses for further training until in December 1939 he was
ordained a deacon and became the first native Isoko pastor. Twenty-
five years later he would be its first archdeacon. u "The Catholic
catechist could never advance beyond his parlour, the Protestant
might conceivably—but not until after i960—end his days as an
archdeacon. But in this Apena was quite abnormal. Massa, with his
tidy parlour, the respect of the village, and the struggle to make ends
meet, remained the model of the many thousands of catechists who
held the Church together but never advanced a step higher up the
ecclesiastical ladder.
Sometime in the 1930s an English woman recorded this scene from
eastern Nigeria, a Methodist Sunday service led by its catechist:
'"* In retirement the end of the 1970s Apena wrote 'The Life History ol Venerable
Benjamin Paul Apena J P as Compiled by Himself'. Cf. S Ak-inu, 'A Religious History of
the Isoko People', Ph.D. thesis (Aberdeen, 19X:}, app. i>. 4.95-6.
S. Leith-Ross. Afmatt Hotmt 1 11939). 1 2 1 - 2 .
Church, School, State, and Bishop Ki want i ha 583
Carbolic mass with its Latin loss alien than a twisted Igbo and 'to the
outsider there seemed more of God V 6 but a Catholic mass was not a
normal village service, and the Catholic service led by a catechist,
though it probably did not try to take Malachi on board, mav have
been little different from the Methodist. There was certainly an
absence of the charismatic, the exciting, or the spontaneous in most
village worship of this sort. The criticism 'dull' remains a telling one.
Missionaries had been making considerable efforts to train
catechist.s in the inter-war years. It was on this, rather than clergy
training, that they concentrated, though for Protestants 111 theory at
least the one could lead to the other. Catechist and teacher in this
period were essentially one and the same, though with White
Fathers, for instance, the stress was more on the catechist, with Holy
Ghost Fathers more on the teacher. The catechists primary task was
to care for the local church, its services, and its catechumens. The
teachers primary task was to run the local school. Little by little the
two fell apart. In 1956 Roland Oliver remarked, 'the village catechist
and teacher is still today the corner-stone of the African Church*.''
That was still true but: it was also a slightly anachronistic judgement
because by the 1950s catechist and teacher were coming to separate.
Governments were raising the educational level of the teacher by
leaps and bounds but also their control over his or her work. The
catechist remained the Churchs almost unpaid and increasingly
unvalued servant. Almost every catechist training centre had been
closed, and missionaries could write them off ungratefully as
uneducated and inadequate, 'a bunch of riff-raff', people who
'onlv destrov our w o r k V s Yet there was still no one else actuallv to
j j *
keep the village church functioning. Before the First World War
catechist.s were alreadv 'the corner-stone' of the African Church. In
/
between the wars the truth of this was recognized and much effort
was put into training them. After 1945 it was again forgotten.
Training and appreciation diminished, but the fact remained. There
was no one else and it was, in a way, to the good that the regular
minister of the local congregation was not ordained and that in
consequence its regular sen-ice was not a communion one. As most
of its members were likely to be excluded from communion, the
absence of the ordained kept the congregation together as one for
viii. Dreams
u
P. McKenzie. D r e a m s and Visions in Nineteenth-Century Yoruba Religion', in M . C .
Jedroj and R.. Shaw (cds.}, Dreaming, Religion and Society in Africa (1992), 1 2 6 - 3 4 , Sundkler,
Bara Bukoba, 9 S - 1 1 2 . W. De C n e m e r . the Jamaa and the Church; A Bantu Catholic Motftneni
iti Zaire (1977), 85, 93 7. n o , F:. Isichei, Entirely for Clod: Tue Ufe of Michael lurre Tansi
{1980). >7
B. Sundkler. Bantu Prophet ;/; South Africa, 2nd edn. ( 1 9 6 1 ) . z6<>--$. For further
discussion see S. Charslev, 'Dreams in a Ugandan Church', Africa, 57 (1987), 281—9. and
Jedrej and Shaw. Dreaming, Religion ami Society in Africa, esp. 13 s - 7 6 .
586 18go-iç6o: Christianizing Haifa Con tinetit
missionaries too could at times connect their calling to dreams. 46 If
the dream so quickly takes on prominence within African
Christianity, it must be because Africans themselves were already
prone to make use of dreams as well as finding in the Bible
encouragement to go on doing so. It is thus a quite significant
example of the early Africanization of Christianity, an example
unresisted by missionaries.
In his youth, Madziyire continues, Jeche had been the first man to
welcome missionaries. The first mass in the country had been
celebrated in his mothers hut, but it was only in his final illness that
he felt called to baptism and was given the new name of Abraham.
Suitably for such a great rain-maker, there were three davs of
torrential rain at the time of his death and a great thunderstorm
during his burial service. The point for us here is the integration of
the two religions, old and new, both in Jeche and in Madziyire. It is
the carrying-across of the religious consciousness of Jeche into that of
Madziyire which matters. In the literature it may appear exceptional.
Here the confrontatory rejection of the old by Fr. Tansi or Feter
Kalilombe is the norm. But in life it is almost certainly the other way
round and the more normal is rather that the deeply Christian
consciousness of a Madziyire yet draws more than it is generally
willing to admit upon a real validity in pre-Christian experience.
Madziyire may be exceptional in admitting to it so openly but not in
accepting it. It is at least another form of Africanization.
S. Madziyiie, 'Heathen Pracnccs m die Urban and Rural Parts of"Mar.1ndell.1s Area and
their Effects upon Christianity', in Ranker and Weller. I hemes it: the ( '.hristun H i < tor)- of
Central Africa, 77
Church, School, State, and Bishop Ki want i ha 593
which is useful but hardly for most people the business of a lifetime,
it does so by sprouting a variety of associations. To some of these we
will now turn.
Between 1 9 1 0 and 1940 one finds in many parts of eastern and
central Africa the emergence of local welfare associations, some
temporary enough. At times missionaries actually founded them or
became a president or vice-president, such as Owen and Arthur in
Kenya. Elsewhere they simply encouraged their founding. Thus Dr
Laws advised the first members of the North Nyasa Association to
hold their meetings in public, send the minutes of their proceedings
to the Resident Magistrate, and limit membership to men of good
character and education. And on the whole this is what thev did. The
North Nyasa Association became the model for many others in
Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia, so Levi Mumba, its principal
founder, was widely influential. He had been appointed the first
African teacher of commercial subjects and bookkeeper at
Livingstonia s Overtoun Institute in 1905 and was for many years
Laws s right-hand man in business matters. O f the fifty-one members
of the Mombera Association at Ekwendeni in 1924, twenty-two
were mission teachers, eight government clerks (of whom seven had
previously been mission teachers), two were ordained (but former
teachers), two were chiefs (again, both ex-mission teachers). 52
When associations grew up in towns rather than in the
countryside, their membership was more diverse, but their character
and aims changed relatively little. Intended to promote the corporate
interests of the new group of English-speaking mission-educated
people, they grew out of the more liberal Protestant missions—
particularly missions like Livingstonia which had pushed secondary
education hard—and reflected their political culture. The educators
of Livingstonia and its like were educators for freedom, democracy,
and secular progress, however cautiously its missionaries proposed
such values and however slow thev were to apply them to their own
institutions. They gave what they had and they had nothing else. For
Laws the Overtoun Institute was intended to replicate Aberdeen
University. Inevitably it passed on the political culture of a free
Scotland. At the same time the welfare associations sought a larger
measure of elbow-room than mission life itself afforded. Their aims
v
I> C o o k , T h e Influence of Lninpconia Mivs:on upon the Lormarion of Welfare
Avionatiom :n Zambia 1 9 1 2 iy.ii*. m Ranker and Weller. Hiernes in the Christian History oj
Central Africa, 103.
5Ö2 i8go-iç6o: Christianizing Half a Continent
were secular, though their tone was often mildly ecclesiastical, but
then the aims of Livingstonia were largely secular too. The welfare
associations were essentially 'a place to feel at home' for the new
Protestant-trained elite. Catholic missions contributed nothing to
such a culture.
Welfare association members, nevertheless, could grow increas-
ingly disillusioned with the missions which had nurtured them. Levi
Mumba actually helped found the African National Church in 1929,
and later still, in 1944, was the first President-General of the
Nyasaland African Congress. Some association members joined
independent Churches, some the African Methodist Episcopal
Church, but the greater part probably had their eye too firmly on
the secular city to wish to change ecclesiastical allegiance. Basically
they represented a moderately independent way for the new-
Christian elite to shape itself, a way which in every country led on
by the 1940s and 1950s to the formation of political parties. The
leadership of each new congress, whether it was that of Levi Mumba
or Dr Banda or Kenneth Kaunda, came in central Africa
preponderantly out of the Livingstonia stable, just as in South
Africa it had already come preponderantly from Lovedale and Adams
College and in West Africa from Fourah Bay Mfantsipim, and other
Protestant institutions, Presbyterian, Congregationalism Methodist, or
Anglican. The relationship between the Churches and political
parties is too complex for adequate treatment here and it would take
us too deeply into wider political and social history. But it is
absolutely true and extremely important to stress that African
political life as it developed in English-speaking Africa was not only
unimaginable without the input of the main Protestant missions but
also long continued to function as, in a very real way, part of their life.
Men like Luthuli, Z . K. Matthews, and indeed, among a younger
generation, Oliver Tambo, belonged at one and the same time to a
Church world and a political world. They did not see the two as
contradictory. On the contrary one had both prepared them for the
other and continued to provide some support for the other. It would
be quite wrong to over-secularize the South African ANC- before the
end of the 1950s, though the bonds were undoubtedly weakening.
When, however, any congress acquired a mass membership, and
entered the business of pursuing immediate power, the mission
Churches could come to look verv different: their liberal areas small
/
and tepid, their wider influence thrown firmly behind the colonial
Church, School, State, and Bishop Ki want i ha 595
status quo. Hence the sort of nationalist-church tension, even the
burning of missions, which erupted at times in the late 1950s. It was
essentially a superficial and short-lived dimension of the indepen-
dence struggle. Once the latter was over the earlier relationship was
quite easily revived. The developing associational history of African
nationalism, at least within English-speaking Africa, in the decades
up to 1950 has to a considerable extent to be seen as the way in
which Christians combined the African need for societies and the
ideals of liberal Protestant secondary schools to create for themselves
a context at once for personal advancement and political action.
They were entirely a matter for men. Neither custom nor the
Church did much to encourage women in these years. Missionaries
lamented the backwardness of female schooling, just as the Phelps-
Stokes Reports had done, but they certainly did not succeed in
greatly altering the sexual balance in education. Yet perhaps for that
reason the female associations which were beginning to proliferate
were all the more religious, as well as being in African terms
innovative. The development by the 1940s of a nctwrork of societies
of quite considerable size wholly controlled by women was a
revolution for most of Africa even if the Manvanos
y of South Africa,'
the Rukwadzanos of Rhodesia, and comparable bodies elsewhere
hardly look revolutionary to us. Deriving chiefly from Methodist
inspiration, they were uniformed societies of respectably married
women committed to the virtues and duties of Christian domesticity
and to supporting one another in the troubles of life. The
Rukwadzano member was committed to teaching her children
Christian customs, to not cooking beer, smoking tobacco, or
working in a tobacco field. She was committed to cleanliness, to
sewing on the buttons of her husband's clothes, to hospitality, and to
Church work. The founders and leaders were the wives of ministers,
but ministers in no way controlled the Manyano and indeed were
often irritated by it. Its regular meetings and collection of money
were nevertheless coming to be recognized as a principal source of
strength for Churches which had it. The very success of such an
organization, as in Rhodesian Methodism, could, however, make the
Church as a whole appear a 'women's Church 1 and be criticized
accordingly. Certainly female Church attendance could proportio-
nately be far higher for Methodism than elsewhere. Women were in
fact less likelv/ to be excommunicated for marital offences than men,
they were less likely to be away as migrant labourers, they were less
596 1890-1960: Christianizing Half a Continent
likely to be preoccupied with politics or drink. They were more
likely to retain a commitment to the Church, and Manyano
concretized that commitment. Thev were effectively excluded from
/ /
Church office, but office was coming to mean less 111 ordinary
African Christian life than association.
The same message is true if we turn to the East African Balokole
'Revival', by far the most famed of Christian associational
movements to have emerged in these years. It grew out of the
Rwanda Mission, an intensely conservative evangelical wing of C M S ,
largely staffed by Cambridge men, recruited from O C C U ,
Cambridge's Christian Union, of w h o m the most influential was
Dr Joe E. Church, w h o arrived in Rwanda in 1927, imbued not only
with Keswick Evangelicalism buc also with the Oxford Group
practice of public confession. Church became very friendly with
Simeoni Nsibambi, a wealthy Muganda landowner, and his brother
Blasio Kigozi. As a result Church at his hospital in Gahini. Rwanda,
was helped by a flow of young Ganda Christians coming to work in
Rwanda. The interaction between Church and his Ganda assistants
produced Revival, whose first convention was held in September
1931 at Gahini. Annual conventions followed in different places,
always writh the same pattern: impassioned appeals to 'Awake', sin,
repentance, 'Coming out of Egypt', separation, the Holy Spirit were
its favourite topics, leading up to public confessions of guilt. At
Kabale in September 1935 we read 'many had dreams, sometimes
receiving strong impressions to read certain verses of the Bible which
led them to put away some sin, beer-drinking for example'. 53 The
sudden death of the deacon Kigozi in 1936 made him into a sort of
patron saint of the Revival.
Church, Nsibambi, and their allies had two targets. One was the
so-called 'dead' state of the Ganda Church fifty years after its mass
conversion—a mix of establishment Anglican attitudes and Ganda
traditionalist ones. It was criticizable for its tolerance of chieflv /
in the villages that resistance was hardest, and it is clear that here it
was verv/ much a matter of the commitment of Balokole to their own
vision of life. What was required by Mau Mau was the taking of its
oaths sealed with blood, whether the blood of a goat or of the oath-
taker himself. The blood of Christ was the central symbol of Revival.
Through it, every Mulokole sang in the %Tukutendereza> hymn, he
or she was saved. I have drunk the blood of Christ, how then can I
take your blood of goats?' 55 was a frequent reply of Christian Kikuyu
x. A Modern Leadership
and even the missions too, even more than had the old ones;
moreover, the people would find that, when their governments grew
v>
R . D. Gnllo, African Ratluwymen (1973). 152. The field-work was done 1 9 6 4 - 5
Church, School, State, and Bishop Ki want i ha 609
tyrannical, the Churches might be the only institutions able to
mitigate or challenge the new bondage.
Independence also provided a further spur for Africanization. In
many ways and in most places the 1960s constituted almost a golden
age for African Christianity, an age of optimism and progressive
thinking 111 which black and white co-operated more affectionately
than they had ever done before. It was a decade in which missionaries
would still retain an undeniable importance but were all the same
inexorably passing into the wings of the stage. At the centre stood
men like Kiwanuka, Sabiiti, and younger colleagues like Zoa and
Gantin. Nearly all these men had experienced the rein of missionary
control and had at times fretted under it. What, nevertheless, is
striking about them is the continuity they represent with their white
predecessors. The new- ecclesiastical leadership had grown out of the
soil of the old. Kiwanuka and Sabiiti are two examples of men with
decades of spiritual and pastoral experience obtained within a
Church firmly contained within the colonial order. While they
wanted more black priests and black bishops, they were too loyal to
their formation to seek any sudden or startling change. If change was
to come it would be due much more to the pressures of the new
political order and of the theological revolution about to sweep across
the world Church in the wake of the Second Vatican Council.
Where in the Catholic Church there was but one black bishop in
Africa of the Latin Rite in 1950 and only about twenty when Pius
XII died in 1958, there would soon be many hundreds. At every level
and in almost every denomination the quantitative growth of African
Christianity would be formidable. A new era had begun,
ecclesiastical as much as political, an era whose closure is not in the
early 1990s yet evident.
African Church history 1960-90 undoubtedly grows out of the
experiences we have examined in the late colonial period, but the
scale, the challenges, and the context are so different that i960
remains the most appropriate point to call a halt to this particular
chronicle, a point many of us can still well remember and yet one
already quite remote from the African Church of the 1990s. Yet that
very remoteness can enable us to achieve an historical focus too
elusive in regard to happenings more recent. Here then in the late
1950s we will call a halt, contemplating Churches which had already
attained a size, a strength, and a leadership missionaries of a half-
century earlier could hardly have imagined possible. Yet the scale by
6io 1890—1960: Christianizing Half a Continent
then achieved may in its turn seem slight in comparison with that of
the 1990s when African Christianity had doubled and redoubled to
become one of the largest and most lively segments of the world
Church. Desmond Tutu, ordained a priest within a white-ruled
Church and a racialist state of the late 1950s, would be Archbishop of
Cape Town and a figure of world-wide renown by the 1990s. The
problems of the African Church might multiply, but its prayerful
character and its cheerful hopefulness would not diminish and would
continue to constitute of themselves a very African contribution to
the life of Christianity in an age of depression. Whatever else had
happened and for whatever reason, it would certainly seem true that
from the age of the scramble to that of independence Ethiopia had
held out its hands to God.
APPENDIX 1
ETHIOPIA
KONGO
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GENERAL
African history; apart from that of the Mediterranean and Ethiopian areas,
had hardly started to be taken seriously until the 1950s. Before that there
was little more than the history of white people—Arabs and Europeans—in
Africa. A fair date for the effective beginning of the new African
historiography is i960, "the year of Africa' in which so many countries
became independent, including black Africa's two giants. Nigeria and Zaïre,
but also the year in which the Journal of African History began. In
consequence, in this field, more than in most areas of history, one has
largely to limit a useful bibliography to works published within the last
thirty years.
i. General Histories
T here are two standard general histories of the continent, each in eight
volumes: J. D. Fage and Roland Oliver (eds.), Cambridge History of Africa
(Cambridge, 1977-86) and the UNESCO (General History of Africa (1981- ).
These are invaluable for reference at every point of our story but can best be
supplemented by the main regional histories. The earliest of these is the
three-volume History of East Africa (Oxford), i, ed. R . Oliver and G.
Mathew (1963), ii, ed. V. Harlow, E. M. Chilver, and Alison Smith (1965),
iii, ed. D. A. Low and Alison Smith (1976). The other major regional
histories are: J. F. Ajayi and Michael Crowder (eds.), lite History of West
Africa, 2 vols.; this was very considerably rewritten for the third edition
(1985), which must be used; Monica Wilson and Leonard Thompson (eds.),
Hie Oxford History of South Africa, 2 vols. (1969); and the youngest of the
series, David Birmingham and Phyllis M. Martin (eds.), 'The History of
Central Africa, 2 vols. (1983). J. D. Fage, A History of Africa (1978) and Basil
Davidson, Africa: History of a Continent, rev. edn. (1972), magnificently
illustrated, may be the best of the single-volume histories, though the latter
at least is somewhat dated in its perspective. J. D. Fage, A Guide to Original
6 4<S Bibliography
Sources for l'recolonial Western A frica published in European languages (1987) and
G. S. P. Freeman-Grenville, Chronology of African History (1973) are useful
tools. The annual Africa Bibliography (Manchester, 1984-90; Edinburgh,
1991- ) is indispensable.
Among an almost infinite number of other general works the following
regional collections of selected documents may be recommended: Ci. S. P.
Freeman-Grenville, The East African Coast: Select Documents from the First to
the Earlier Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1962), Thomas Hodgkin, Nigerian
Perspectives: An Historical Anthology; 2nd edn. (1975), and John Hargreaves,
Trance and West Africa: An Anthology of Historical Documents (1969). Finally,
John Iliffe. lite African Poor (Cambridge, 1987) provides a fascinating
overview of a particular theme.
3. Bibliographies
N o less necessary for Catholic missionary history are the African volumes of
Robert Streit, O M I and Johannes Dindinger, O M I (eds.), Bibliotheca
Missionum (Freiburg, 1951—4), listing all known documents and publications
by year. These volumes, entitled Afrikanische Missionsliteratur, are divided as
follows: 15, AD 1053-1599; 16, 1600-99; 17, 1700-1879; 18, 1880-1909; 19
and 20, 1 9 1 0 - 4 0 . In addition to this, publications since the early 1930s are
listed in the indispensable annual Bibliographia Missionaria (Vatican C icy), first
published in 1934 and now edited by W. Henkel and J. Metzler, O M I . For
an account of the development of both Bibliotheca and Bibliographia see Willi
Henkel, T h e Legacy of Robert Streit, Johannes Dindinger. and Johannes
Rommerskirchen', IBMR 6 (1982), 1 6 - 2 1 . For the Jesuits use may also be
made of Laszlo Polgar, SJ. Bibliographic sur l'histoire de la Compagnie de Jésus
1901-1980 (Rome, 1986), ii, Africa. 507-30. In the last twenty yean; the
Bibliographia Missionaria has become increasingly ecumenical but remains
predominantly R o m a n Catholic.
The nearest Protestant equivalents are to be found in the quarterly
review of missionary literature in the International Revieiv of Mission (Geneva)
and in the regular missiological abstracts of Missionalia (Pretoria). For South
Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland, Botswana, Namibia, and Zimbabwe there is a
6,000-entry bibliography entitled History of the Church in Sim (hern Africa: A
Select Bibliography of Published Material to 1980, ed. J. W. Hofmeycr and K. K.
Cross (Pretoria, 1986).
Guides to Archives
For archival research the following guides to manuscript material are
available. An eight-volume Guide to the Sources of the History of Africa has
been published with U N E S C O support by the International Council on
Archives (1970-83), country by country. The first volume, Quellen zur
Geschichte it) den Archiven der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, lias a useful section
on the archives of the Rheinische Missionsgesellschaft at Wuppertal-Barmen,
1 1 5 - 2 2 . But the most valuable volume for our purposes is vol. vii, Guida
delle fond per la storia dell'Africa a Sud del Sahara negli Archivi della Santa Sede e
negli Archivi Fcclesiastici (VItalia by Lajus Pasztor (1983). In this, besides an
invaluable 150-page survey of African material within the Vatican's
principal archivio segreto (including an important section on the nunciature
6 4<S
Bibliography
of Lisbon, 211-32), there are particularly useful sections on the archives of
Propaganda Fide (253-60), the Jesuits (302-13), the White Fathers (388-
413), and the Capuchins. For the last named, this includes not only their
archivio generale (337-42) but also the Italian provincial archives (463-82). To
this, for Catholics, may be added J. C. Baumont, 'Une source de l'histoire
du xix c et du debut du xx e siècle: Archives et publications de l'Oeuvre de la
Propagation de la Foi', HIA 3 (1976) (an archive in Lyons), and the two
volumes of S. Luciani and I. Taddia (eds.), Fond Comboniane per la storia
dell'Africa nord-orientale, i (Bologna, 1986), ii (Cagliari, 1988).
The five-volume series of Guides to Materials for West African History is also
invaluable: Patricia Carson on Belgium and Holland (1962), A. F. C. Ryder
011 Portuguese archives (1965), J. R . Gray and D. S. Chambers, Italian
archives (1965), Patricia Carson, French archives (1968), and Noel
Matthews, United Kingdom archives (1973). T. W. Baxter and E. E.
Burke, Guide to the Historical Manuscripts in the National Archives of Rhodesia
(Salisbury, 1970) is of help for Zimbabwe, while Noel Matthews and M.
Doreen Wainwright, A Guide to Manuscripts and Documents in the British Isles
relating to Africa (1971) is useful, particularly for the archives of the Church
Missionary Society (30-48), the London Missionary Society' (75-80), the
Methodist Missionary- Society (81-5), and the United Society for the
Propagation of the Gospel (145-50). It should, however, be noted that the
location of these missionary society' archives has altered: the CMS archives
arc now in Birmingham, the LMS and MMS at the School of Oriental and
African Studies in London, and the USPG at Rhodes House, Oxford. To
these should be added A Survey of the Archives of Selected Missionary Societies,
covering nineteen societies, published by the Historical Manuscripts
Commission (1968), M. Cason, 'A Survey of African Material in the
Libraries and Archives of Protestant Missionary Societies in England', HIA
8 (1981), 277-307, and V\e Joint IMC/CBMS Missionary Archives., Africa and
India, iQio-1945 Inventory (includes material as far as 1950) (Zug, 1979). The
latter too are now housed at the School of Oriental and African Studies.
For German-speaking missions, besides the U N E S C O volume above,
there is W. Haas and P. Jenkins, A Guide to the Basel Mission s Ghana Archives
(Basel, 1979) and D. Maier, T h e Norddeutsche Missionsgescllschaft
Archives', HIA 8 (1981), 335-7.
For the United States see Aloha South, Guide to Non-Federal Archives and
Manuscripts in the United States Relating to Africa, 2 vols. (1989) and Robert
Shuster, 'Documentary Sources in the United States for Foreign Missions
Research: A Select Bibliography and Checklist', IBMR 9 (1985), 19-29. For
Canada there is K. V. Ram, 'Survey of Canadian Protestant Missionary
Archives Relating to Africa', HIA 7 (1980), 359-65.
Bibliography 625
5. Reference Books
Among reference books the following, among others, may be helpful: J. D.
Fage, An Atlas of African History; 2nd edn. (1978), Roland Oliver and
Michael Crowder (eds.), Cambridge Encyclopedia of Africa, (Cambridge,
1981), Jocclyn Murray (ed.), The Cultural History of Africa (Oxford. 1981), E.
Livingstone (ed.), Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd edn.
(Oxford, forthcoming), S. C. Neill, Gerald Anderson, and John Goodwin
(eds.), The Concise Dictionary of the Christian World Mission (1970), M. Eliade
(ed.), Encyclopedia if Religion, 16 vols., (1987), and John Hinnells (ed.),
Penguin Dictionary of Religions (1984). For Catholic subjects one may consult
the New Catholic Encyclopedia, 15 vols. (Washington, DC, 1967), together
with its three supplementary volumes (1974-89).
For Islamic matters consult both the old Encyclopedia of Islam, 5 vols.
(1913-32), and the still-unfinished New Encyclopedia of Islam, 5 vols. (1960-
86), as also I. M. Lewis (ed.), Islam in 'Tropical Africa (1966), J. Cuoq, Les
Musulmans en Afrique (Paris, 1975), and various volumes by J. Spencer
Trimingham: Islam in Ethiopia (1952), Islam in West Africa (1959), History of
Islam in West Africa (1962), and Islam in East Africa (1964). For full
bibliographies see S. M. Zoghbv, Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Partially
Annotated Guide (Washington, DC, 1978), and the Index Islamicus (1958 with
later supplements).
6. Journals
Useful periodicals include the Journal of Religion in Africa (Leiden, 1967 - ),
the Journal of African History (Cambridge, i960- ), African Affairs (London,
1902- ), the International Journal of African Historical Studies (Boston, Mass.,
1968- ; until 1972 called African Historical Studies), Etudes d'histoire africaine
(Kinshasa and Louvain, 1970- ), the Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria
(Ibadan, 1956- ), and the Bulletin de la Société d'archéologie copte (Cairo,
1935— ). Two rather short-lived periodicals should also not be forgotten:
the Revue d'histoire des missions (Paris, 1924-40) is of considerable value for
Catholic history, just as the Bulletin of (he Society of African Church History
(Aberdeen, 1963—70) is chiefly useful for Protestant.
CHAPTER 1
THF. ETHIOPIAN CHURCH IN THF. ACE OI: ZARA YA'LQOB
1. Introductory
The most useful modern books are Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in
Ethiopia 1270-1327 (Oxford, 1972), Edward Ullendorff, Ethiopia and (he Bible
6 4<S Bibliography
(London, 1968). Jean Dorcsse, L'Empire du Prêtre-Jean, 2 vols. (Paris, 1957),
and Steven Kaplan, The Monastic Holy Man and the Christianization of Early
Solomonic Ethiopia (Wiesbaden, 1984). The first three have extensive
bibliographies, as has the article 'Ethiopie' by Bernard Velat, in Dictionnaire
de spiritualité, ix (Paris, 1961), cols. 1452—77. See also for items in Hnglish
Jon Bonk, An Annotated and Classified Bibliography of English Literature
Pertaining to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church (Metuchen, NJ, 1984). The
Rwsegna di studi etiopici (Rome, 1945- ) and the Journal of Ethiopian Studies
(Addis Ababa, 1963- ) are invaluable. See, in particular, K.-R. ZeLleke,
'Bibliography of the Ethiopie I lagiographical Traditions', JES 13 (1975),
57-102.
2. Primary Texts
The principal surviving royal chronicles are G. W. S. Huntingford (ed.), Ihe
Glorious Victories of Amda Seyon (Oxford, 1965), Jules Perruchon (ed.), Les
Chroniques de 'Aar'a Ya'eqob et de Ba'eda Maryam (Paris, 1893), and J.
Perruchon (ed.), 'Histoire d'Eskender, d'Amda-Seyon II et de Na'od, rois
d'Ethiopie', Journal asiatique, 9/3 (1894), 319-66. To these should be added
the following basic texts: Abu Salih, The Churches and Monasteries of Egypt
and Some Neighbouring Countries, ed. B. T. A. Evetts (Oxford, 1895), The
Queen of Sheba and her Only Son, Menyelek, being the *Book of the Glory of
Kings' (Kebra Nagast)% ed. E. A. Wallis Budge (London, 1932), Gigar Tesfaye,
inscriptions sur bois de trois églises de Lalibela', JES 17 (1984), 107-26.
By far the largest collection of printed primary texts is that of the more
than 70 volumes of the Scriptores Aethiopici, in the Corpus Scriptomm
Christianørum Orientaliumy printed with Ethiopie text and translation into
one or another European language. They are referred to here according to
their numbering in the CSCO, not their additional numbering for the Sc.
Ae. For the fifteenth-century Church particularly enlightening are the Actes
de Marita Kres tos, ed. Stanislas Kur, C S C O 330-1 (1972), the Actes de Samuel
de Dabra Wagag, ed. Stanislas Kur, CSCO 287-8 (1968), and the Acta Sancti
Abakerazun et Sancti Takla Hawaryat, ed. C. Conti Rossini, C S C O 56—7
(1954). All these (except Abakerazun) are of the House of Takia Haymanot.
i o them should be added the lives of the principal Ewostathian leaders, i l
"Gadla Filpos" e il "Gadla Yohannes" di Dabra Bizan', ed. C. Conti
Rossini, Atti della Reale Accademia dei Lincei, 1900 5 / 8 (1903), 61-170, and
C. Conti Rossini, 'Note di agiografia ctiopica Abiya-Egzf, 'Arkaledes e
Gabra-Iyasus', Rivista degli studi orientali, 17 (1938), 409-52 (only the third,
Gabra-Iyasus, was an Ewostathian). For the Stephanites besides Abakerazun
(above), there is André Caquot (ed.), 'Les Actes d'Ezra de Gunda Gunde',
Annales d'Ethiopie, 4 (1961), 69-121, and Aleksander Ferene (ed.), 'Les Actes
disaie de Gunda Glinde', Annales d'Ethiopie, 10 (1976), 243—94. For
Bibliography 627
Giyorgis of Sagla sec C . Conti Rossini. 'Due capitoli del libro del Mistero di
Giyorgis da Sagla\ RSE 7 (1948), 13-53, G. Haile, *Fakkare Haymanot or the
Faith of Abba Giyorgis Säglawi'. Le Muséoti, 94 (1981), 235-58, and Yaqob
Beyene, 'La dottrina délia chiesa etiopica e il "'Libro del Mistero" di
Giyorgis di Sagla', RSE 33 (1989), 35-88.
Some of the writings of Zara Ya'iqob are also to be found in the CSCO:
l yas Mashafa Milad und Mashafa Scllasc des Kaisers Zara Ya'qob, ed. K. Wendt,
is in CSCO 221-2, 235-6, the Mashafa Birhan. ed. C. Conti Rossini and L.
Ricci, CSCO 2 5 0 - 1 , 2 6 1 - 2 (1964-5). I ; or Zara Ya'iqobs writings see also
C. Conti Rossini, i l libro di re Zar'a Ya'qob sulla custodia del Mistero',
RSE 3 (1943), 148-66, E. Cerulli, 'La festa del battesimo e I'eucaristia in
Etiopica nel secolo X V ' , Analecta Bollandiana, 68 (1950), 436-52, G. Haile,
'A Preliminary Investigation of the lomara 'lasbat of Emperor Zar'a Ya'eqob
of Ethiopia', Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 43 (1980),
207-34, G. Haile, 'Power Struggle in the Medieval Court of Ethiopia: The
Case of Bätargela-Maryam', JES 15 (1982), 3 7 - 5 5 . and G. Haile, 77te
Mariology of Emperor Zar'a Ya'eqob of Ethiopia: Texts and Translations (Rome,
1992).
3. Judaic Tradition
The nature of the original Christian conversion of Ethiopia is examined by
Steven Kaplan, 'Ezanas Conversion Reconsidered', JRA 13 (1982), 1 0 1 - 9 .
For the subsequent relationship with Judaic tradition see, besides Ullendorff
above and a review of it by L. Ricci in RSE 24 (1969-70), 2 7 3 - 8 3 , E.
UllcndoriT. 'Hebraic-Jewish Elements in Abyssinian (Monophysite)
Christianity', JSS 1 (1956), 2 1 6 - 5 6 , Maxime Rodinson, 'Sur la question
des "Influences Juives" en Ethiopie', JSS 9 (1964), 1 1 - 1 9 , Ernst
Hammerschmidt, 'Jewish Elements 111 the Culnire of the Ethiopian
Church' JES 3 (1965). 1 - 1 2 , I. Shahid, 'The Kebra Nagast in the Light of
Recent Research', Ije Muséon, 89 (1976), 1 3 3 - 7 8 (a very important
reassessment), G. Haile, 'The Forty-Nine Hour Sabbath of the Ethiopian
Church', JSS 33 (1988), 2 3 3 - 5 4 . On the Falasha there has been an
avalanche of recent work. See Steven Kaplan and Shoshana B e n - D o r (eds.),
Ethiopian Jewry: An Annotated Bibliography (Jerusalem, 1988), W. Leslau,
Falasha Anthology (New Haven, Conn., 1951). K. Shelemay. Music, Ritual
and Falasha History (East Lansing, Mich., 1986), Steven Kaplan, '"Falasha"
Religion: Ancient Judaism or Evolving Ethiopian Tradition?'. Jeunsh
Quarterly Review, 79 (July 1988), 49-65, and James Quirin, 771e Evolution
of the Ethiopian Jews: A History of the Beta Israel (Falasha) to tç2o (Philadelphia,
1992). Shelemay's work is an original research contribution of major
significance for matters far wider than its title. Steven Kaplan, indigenous
Categories and the Study of World Religions in Ethiopia: T h e Case of the
6 4<S Bibliography
Beta Israel (Falasha)', J RA 22 (199 2), 2 0 8 - 2 1 . and R . Pankhurst. 'The
Falashas, or Judaic Ethiopians, in their Christian Ethiopian Setting', A frican
Affairs, 91 (1992), 567-82, provide the most recent overviews.
CHAPTER 2
AFRICA IN I5OO ANI) ITS CHRISTIAN PAST
i. Introductory
To the works referred to in the general section above, the following may be
added for the political state of Africa before and around 1500: R . S. Smith,
Kingdoms of the Yoruba (1969), R . K. Bradbury, Benin Studies (1973), P. S.
Garlake, Great Zimbabwe (1973), D. N. Beach, The Shona and Zimbabwe 900-
1850 (1980), G. S. P. Freeman-Grenville, Hie Medieval History' of the Coast of
Tanganyika (1962), and M. S. M. Kiwanuka, A History of Buganda from the
Foundation of the Kingdom to 1900 (New York, 1972).
For stateless societies Robin Mortons chapter in Ajayi and Crowder
(eds.), History of West Africa, i, 87-128, is particularly valuable. For some
modern examples of stateless sodedes see E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer
(1940), M. Fortes, 'lite Web of Kinship among the Tallensi (1949), and Mary
Douglas, The Lele of the Kasai (1963).
In regard to African religion again only a very small selection of what is
both available and helpful can be offered: Dominique Zahan, The Religion,
Spirituality and Thought of Traditional Africa (Chicago, 1979), Meyer Fortes
and Robin Horton, Oedipus and Job in West African Religion (Cambridge,
1984), Evan M. Zuesse, Ritual Cosmos: The Sanctification of Life in African
Religions (Athens, Ohio, 1979), E. W. Smith (ed.), African Ideas of God
(1950), D. Forde (ed.), African Worlds (1954), J. Omosade Awolalu, Yoruba
Beliefs and Sacrifia al Rituals (1979), Wände Abimbola, An Exposition of the Ifa
Literary Corpus (Ibadan, 1976), E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and
Magic among the Azande (1937), Jack Goody, The Myth of the Bagre
(Cambridge. 1972), Godfrey Lienhardt, Divinity and Experience (1961), and
D. 1. Nwoga, 'The Supreme God as Stranger (Ahiazu Mbaise, 1984).
2. Islam
For Islam in West Africa up to 1500 the most comprehensive and reliable
study is Joseph Cuoq. Hi s tot re de l'Islamisation de V Afrique de l'Ouest, des
origines à la fin du xvf siècle (Paris, 1984). to which may be added J. Spencer
6 4<S
Bibliography
Trimingham, A History of Islam iti West Africa (1962) and Peter Clarke, West
Africa ami Islam (1982). The available Arabic sources are to be found
translated in N. Levtzion and J. F. P. Hopkins (eds.), Corpus of Barly Arabic
Sources for West African History (Cambridge, 1981) and J. Cuoq, Receuil des
sources arabes concernant VAfrique occidentale du vuf au xvf siècle: 1 radia tion et
notes (Paris, 1975). To these the following may be added: N. Levtzion,
'Patterns of Islamization in West Africa', in N. Levtzion (ed.), Conversion to
Islam (1979), 207-16, J. O. Munwick, 'Religion and State in the Songhay
Umpire 1464-1591', in I. M. Lewis (ed.), Islam in Tropical Africa (1964). 124-
43; J. O. H un wick, Shari'a in Songhay: The Replies of al-Maghili to the
Questions of A skia al-Hajj Muhammad (1984), J. O. Hunwick, 'Notes on
a Late Fifteenth-Century Document Concerning "al-Takrur" \ in
Christopher Allen and R . W. Johnson (eds.), African Perspectives
(Cambridge. 1970), 7-33, Elias Saad, Social History of Timbuktu (1983),
Ralph A. Austen, 'The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade: A icntativc Census', in
Henry A. Gemery and Jan A. Hogendorn (eds.), The Uncommon I^îarket
(1979), 23-76, Allan G. B. Fisher and Humphrey Fisher, Slavery and Muslim
Society in Africa (New York, 1971), and Robin Law, 'The Horse in West African
Society (1980).
For Islam in eastern Africa there is J. Spencer Trimingham, Islam in East
Africa (1964) and Freeman-Grenville, The Medieval History of the Coast if
Tanganyika, as above. For Ethiopia we have J. Cuoq. UIslam en Ethiopie des
origines au xvf siècle (Paris, 1981) and J. Spencer Trimingham, Islam in
Ethiopia (1952).
4. Christianity in Egypt
There are regular bibliographies entitled 'Christian Egypt' in the Journal of
Egyptian Archaeology between vol. 1 (1914) and vol. 26 (1940) which are
invaluable. See also the Bulletin de la Société d'archéologie copte (Cairo)
beginning in 1935, together with many other publications of the society
especially its series Textes et documents, as well as the subseries Scriptores
Coptici within C-SCO.
Colin H. Roberts, Manuscript, Society and Belief in Early (christian Egypt
(1979) is a stimulating discussion of origins, while H. 1. Bell and H.
Thompson, 'A Greek—Coptic Glossary' to Hosea and Amos', Journal of
Egyptian Archaeology 11 (1925), 241-6, provides a fascinating glimpse of the
Christian crossing of the Greek—Coptic divide. See also C. W. Griggs. Early
Egyptian Christianity, front its Origins to 451 ce (Leiden, 1991), Mario
Naldim, II Cristianesimo in Egitto: Lrttere private nei papiri dei secoli n-iv
(Florence. 1968). and W. 11. C. Frend, 'Athanasius as an Egyptian Christian
Leader in the Fourth Century', in his Religion Popular and Unpopular in the
Early Christian Centuries (1976).
For Coptic Christianity monasticism became absolutely central. It also
provides the indispensable background to Ethiopian monasticism, while
comparison with movements in modern African Christianity may also be
enlightening. Derwas Chitty, The Desert a City (Oxford, 1966) provides a
vivid and wide-ranging interpretation, and C. C. Walters, Monastic
Archaeology in Egypt (Wirminster, 1974), a survey of the physical remains.
For an accessible edition of the earliest texts see Benedicta Ward, The
Sayings of the Desert Fathers (1975) or O. Chadwick (ed.), 'Sayings of the
Fathers', in IWestern Asceticism (1958), 33-181. There is an English translation
of Athanasius' Life of Anthony, ed. R . T. Meyer (1950) and Derwas Chitty
has translated The Letters of Saint Anthony the (Ireat (Oxford, 1989). For
Pachomius, the basic texts are L. T. Leibrt, Œeuvres de S. Pachome et de ses
disciples, CSCO 159—60 (1956) and L. T. Lefort, Iss Vies coptes de saint
Pachome et de ses premiers successeurs (Louvain, 1943). hi English we have
Philip Rousseaus fine study, Pachomius: The Making of a Community in
Fourth-Century Egypt (1985), as also the two volumes of Armand Veilleux,
Pachomian Koinonia (1982) and J. E. Goehring. The Letter of Ammon and
Pachomian Monasticism (1986). An account of Egyptian monasticism in the
late fourth century, the Historia Monarchorum, is translated and discussed in
B. Ward, The Lives of the Desert Fathers (1980). For the later tradition of the
White Monastery see Sinuthii Vita et Opera Omnia, ed. I. Lcipoldt and W.
Crum, CSCO 41-2 (1906-8), and David N\ Bell, The Life of Shenoute by
6 4<S
Bibliography
Besa (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1983). For the Ethiopian text see G. Colin (ed.),
La Version éthiopienne de la vie de Schenoudi, CSCO 444-5 (1982). For Besa
himself see Besa. Letters and Sermons, K. H. Kuhn (ed.) C S C O 157-8 (1956)
and K. H. Kuhn, 'A Fifth-Century Egyptian Abbot', Journal of llieological
Studies, NS 5 (1954), 36-48, 174-87, and (1955), 35-48. For the Coptic view
of Saturday, of interest for later Ethiopian controversy, see J. Muvser, 4Le
Samedi et le dimanche dans l'église et la littérature coptes', in Togo Mina,
Ijc Martyre d'Apa Epima (Cairo, 1937).
For the last period of Egyptian Church history prior to the Arab
conquest the best account is W. I I. C. Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite
Movement (Cambridge, 1972), together writh his chapter in CHA ii. 410-89.
Bibliographies and a general review of the theology and literature of the
later Coptic Church can be found in Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, x
(1929), article entitled 'Monophysite (Eglise copte)', 2251—306, in D'I'Cviii
(1925), 'Kabar, Ibn', 2293-6, and in the Dictionnaire de spiritualité, ii (1953),
'Copte (littérature spirituelle)', 2266-78, and iv (1960), 'Egypte chrétienne',
532-58. Other studies of Coptic history and life include Murad Kamil,
Aspects de l'Egypte copte (Berlin, 1965), with 120 tine photographs, Sylvestre
Chauleur, Histoire des Coptes d'Egypte (Paris, i960), Edward Hardy, Christian
Egypt: Church and People (New York, 1952), Maria Cramer, Das christlich-
koptische Aegypten einst und heute (Wiesbaden, 1959), valuable for
bibliography and for another large collection of photographs and plans,
and Otto Meinardus, Christian Egypt Ancient and Modern, 2nd edn. (Cairo,
1977).
5. Christian Nubia
Knowledge of Christian Nubia has been transformed in the last twenty-five
years through excavations undertaken in haste before the flooding of the
whole area by the Aswan High Dam, but for a sensitive treatment of what
earlier archaeological finds already suggested see J. W. Crowfoot, 'Christian
Nubia', Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 13 (1927), 141-50. P. L. Shmnie,
'Christian Nubia', CHA ii. 556-88 (plus bibliographical essay 7 1 2 - 1 5 and
bibliography, 764-6) and S. Jakobielski, 'Christian Nubia at the Height of its
Civilization', CHA iii. 194-223. provide a reliable account of present
knowledge, but U. Monnerct de Villard, Storia della Nubia cristiana (Rome,
1938) remains a foundational work. G. Troupeau, 'La "Déscription de la
Nubie" d'al Uswâni\ Arabica i (1954), 276-88. relates to a valuable tenth-
century Arabic account of Nubia, mostly lost, while Ibgo Mina, Inscriptions
coptes et grecques de Nubie (Cairo. 1942) is a basic collection of texts. Two
important recent collections are K. Michalowski (ed.), Nubia, récentes
recherches (Warsaw, 1975) and J. M. Plumley (ed.), Nubian Studies
(Warminster, 1982). K. Michalowski, Paras: Centre artistique de la Nubie
Bibliography 633
chrétienne (Leiden. 1966) describes the most spectacular of the archaeological
discoveries and J. M. Plumley, 7he Scrolls of Bishop T'imotheos (1975) another
hardly less exciting. Both relate to northern Nubia. D. A. Welsby, 'Recent
Work at Soba East in Central Sudan', Azania. 17 (1983), 165-80, describes
excavations at the southern capital of Aiwa. Stefan Jakobielski, A History of
the Bishopric of Pachoras on the Basis of Coptic Inscriptions (Warsaw, 1972), John
Vantini, The Excavations at Faros (Bologna. 1970), S. C. Munro-Hay, 'Kings
and Kingdoms of Ancient Nubia', USE 29 (1982-3), 87-137, and J. Cuoq,
Islamisation de la Nubie Chrétienne, vu'—xvï siècle (Paris, 1986), should also be
consulted. The possibility of some survival of Christianity west of Nubia
even in the eighteenth century is discussed by R . Gray. 'Christian Traces
and a Franciscan Mission in the Central Sudan 1700-171 i\JAH 8 (1967),
383-93-
CHAPTHR 3
THE KONGO, WARRI, MUTAPA, AND THF. PORTUGUESE
I. General
The principal source of published primary material for West Africa, Kongo,
and Angola is the massive twenty-volume Monumenta Missionaria AJ'ricana
(Lisbon), ed. Antonio Brasio, with fifteen volumes in series 1 (1952-88) and
five in series 2 (1958—79). Volumes i—iv of series 1 and i—iii of series 2
contain material prior to the end of the sixteenth century, vols, v—xiv of
series 1 and iv~v of series 2 cover the seventeenth century. Volume xv of
series 1 is a final supplement covering both centuries. There is nothing
comparable for the eighteenth century. For eastern Africa the main
collection of primary material remains the rather dated nine volumes of
G. M. Theal (ed.). Records of Sou ih-Eastern Africa (Cape Town, 1898-1903),
to which must be added the far better-edited Documents on the Portuguese in
Mozambique and Central Africa 1497-1840 (Lisbon, 1962—89), of which nine
volumes, containing original texts and Fjiglish translation and arriving at
1615, have so far been published.
FI. Livermore, A New IIistor)f of Portugal 2nd edn. (Cambridge, 1976)
provides an introduction to the major colonial and missionary' power of this
period. For Portugal's overseas empire and missionary policy C. R . Boxer,
The Portuguese Seaborne Empire 1415-1825 (1969) and C. R . Boxer, The
Church Militant and Iberian Expansion 1440—1770 (Baltimore, 1978) are
indispensable. See also A. de Silva Rego, Portuguese Colonisation in the
Sixteenth Century (Johannesburg, 1959). C.-M. de Witte, Les Bulles
pontifuah's et l'expansion portugaise au xv' siècle (Louvam, 1958) provides a
full account of the ecclesiastical significance of the pre-Vasco da Gama era
6 4<S Bibliography
bulls. It is also to be found, in article form, in the Revue d'histoire ecclésiastique
48 (1953), 49 («954), 51 ('956), and 53 (1958).
There is a vast modern literature on the development of the Atlantic
slave-trade in this period. See especially P. D. Curtin. 'Ilie Atlantic Slave
Trade: A Census (1969). James Rawley, 'Ihe Transatlantic Slave Trade (1981).
21-50, and Paul E. Lovejoy, Iransformations in Slaver)': A History of Slavery in
A frica (Cambridge, 1983). For slavery in Africa itself see also C . Meillassoux.
Hie Anthropology of Slavery (1991); for slavery in Portugal see A. C. de C. M.
Saunders, A Social History of Black Slaves and Freed men in Portugal 1441 -1533
(Cambridge, 1982), and for Portuguese Africa, Joseph Miller, T h e Slave
Trade in C o n g o and Angola', in Martin Kilson and Robert Rotberg (eds.).
lite African Diaspora (1976), 7 5 - 1 1 3 , and J. Miller, Way of Death (Madison,
Wis., 1988). For the papal position see J. R . Gray, T h e Papacy and the
Atlantic Slave Trade', Past and Present, 115 (May 1987), 52-68.
For Catholic missionary organization in the seventeenth century the first
of the five volumes of Sacrae Congregations de Propaganda Fide Memoria
Rerum is essential. See in particular J. Metzler, 'Foundation of the
Congregation , l de Propaganda Fide" by Gregory X V ' , 7 9 - 1 1 1 , and Willi
Henkel, 'The Polyglot Printing-Office of the Congregation', 335-50. The
documents in the appendices of the last volume, iii/2 (1976), are also
important. S. Delacroix (ed.), Histoire universelle des missions catholiques, 11
(Paris, 1957) i* helpful, especially chapters 6 and 7 by A. Perbal on
Propaganda Fide and the beginning of Vicars Apostolic.
For an overall view of Catholic missionary history in Africa in this
period, from a R o m a n viewpoint, see L. Jadin, 'L'Œuvre missionnaire en
Afrique noire', PP'MR i/2. 4 1 3 - 5 4 6 , and, for the eighteenth century, Josef
Metzler, 'Missionsbemühungen der Kongregation in Schwarzafrika',
PFMR ii. 882-932.
2. West Africa
T h e lasting impact of missionary activity in West Africa, apart from Warri,
was minimal. The principal studies 011 Warri and Benin have been made by
A. F. C . Ryder: 'Missionar)- Activity' in the Kingdom of Warri to the Early
Nineteenth Century\ JHN 1 (i960), 1 - 2 6 , 'The Benin Missions', JH:\ 2
(1961), 231-59, and Benin and the Europeans 14^5-J&97 (1969). T. Hodgkin,
Nigerian Perspectives, 2nd edn. (1975), 171-89, includes valuable Warri
documents. To these should be added Vittorio Salvadorini, Le missioni a
Benin e Warri nel xvu secolo (Pisa, 1972).
For early seventeenth-century Sierra Leone there is a great deal of
material available in English, mostly due to Professor P. E. H. Hair. See his
survey article, 'Jesuit Documents on the Guinea of Cape Verde and the
Cape Verde Islands 1 5 8 5 - 1 6 1 7 in English Translation', HIA 16 (1989),
Bibliography 635
375-81, together with the following articles, all by him: 'Alvares at
Mitombo 1 6 1 1 \ Africana Research Bulletin (Institute of African Studies,
University of Sierra Leone), II (1981), 92—140; 'Hamlet in an Afro-
Portuguese Setting: New Perspectives on Sierra Leone in 1607', HIA 5
(1978), 21-42; 'The Abortive Portuguese Settlement of Sierra Ixone 1570-
1625', in Vice-Almirante A. Teixeira da Mota in memoriam (Lisbon, 1987),
171-208. A very considerable collection of shorter documents is to be
found in Jesuit Documents on the Guinea of Cape Verde and the Cape Verde
Islands 1583 -1617, translated by P. E. H. Hair (Liverpool. 1989). For two
longer documents see André Donelha, Descriçao da Serra Leda e dos Rios de
Guine do Cabo Verde 1625 (An Account of Sierra Leone and the Rivers of
Guinea of Cape Verde 1625), ed. A. Teixeira da Mota and P. E. H. Hair
(Lisbon, 1977) and Manuel Al vares, SJ. E ti opt a Menor e descri(âo géograj ica da
Provincia da Serra Leda c. 1615 (Ethiopia Minor and a Geographical Account
of the Province of Sierra Leone c. 1615) ail interim translation by P. E. H.
Hair (Liverpool, 1990).
For the Ghana area see Ralph Wiltgen, Cold Coasi Mission Histor)f 1471—
18S0 (Techny, 111., 1956) and for part of what is now Benin, Henri Labouret
and Paul Rivet, 'Le Royaume d'Arda et son evangelisation au xvu c siècle'.
Travaux et mémoires de l'Institut d'ethnologie (Paris, 1929), and Robin Law,
'Religion, Trade and Politics on the "Slave Coast" \ JR/i 21/1 (1991),
4^-77-
For a late eighteenth-century French mission to the coast, just north of
the river Zaïre, see the Abbé Proyart, Histoire de lx>ango, Kakongo et autres
royaumes d'Afrique (Paris, 1776). Its first half is translated into English inj.
Pinkerton, A General Collection of. . . Voyages and Travels, xvi (1814), 548-
97. Unfortunately this does not include the history of the mission and
account of the discovery of the community of Manguenzo Christians. See,
too, the important collection of related documents inj. Cuvelier, Documents
sur une mission franpiise au Kakongo 1766—1775 (Brussels. 1953).
Principe Catolico: The Capuchins and the Rulers of Soyo in the Lace
Seventeenth Century', Africa, 53 (1983). 39-54 (reprinted in R . Gray, Black
Bibliography 639
Christians and White Missionaries (1990), 35-56) and John Thornton, the
whole sweep of' Kongo Catholicism in 'The Development of an African
Catholic Church in the Kingdom of Kongo 1491-1750', JAH 25 (1984),
147-67.
For the Antonia» movement there is now a considerable literature. The
fullest discussion, together with all the primary' texts in their original Italian,
is to be found in Teobaldo Filesi, Nazionalismo e religione nel Congo all'inizio
del 1700: La setta degli Antoniani (Rome, 1972). Cuveliers French edition of
Lorenzo da Lucca provided the first published account of the movement
and Jadin s 'Le Congo et la secte des Antoniens' the first publication of the
most important piece of evidence, the report of Bernardo da Gallo. Both
Thornton, The Kingdom of Kongo, 106-13, and Randies, L'Ancien Royaume,
I57""'9Î provide valuable comment, as does Wyatt MacGaffey, 'The Cultural
Roots of Kongo Prophetism', Iïistor)' of Religion, 17 (1977), 177-93- I he
wider literature includes R . Batsikamn, Ndona Béatrice: Serait-elle témoin du
Chi st et de la foi du vieux Congo? (Kinshasa, 1970), a plea for Beatrice's
canonization, Bernard Dadié, Beatrice du Congo (Paris, 1970), an opera, and
Ibrahim Baba Kake. Dona Beatrice: La Jeanne d Arc congolaise (Paris, 1976), an
imaginative retelling of the story.
CHAPH-R 4
RICHliS TO RACS: KTHIOP1A I5OO-I8OO
CHAPTER 5
I: Q i : i A N O TO NTSIKANA: I-ROM T i l H I 7 8 OS TO THI: 182OS
i. Anti-Slavery
Equianos autobiography was first published in London (1789), by himself as
The Interesting Narrative of the Life oj Olaudah Equiano, or, Gustavus Vhssn, the
African. It was reprinted in 1969, ed. Paul Edwards and an abridged edition,
also by Edwards, appeared in 1967. Ottobah Cugoanos 'thoughts and
Sentiments on the Evils of Slavery (1787), was also reprinted in 1969. P. Hoare
(ed.), Memoirs of Granville Sharp (1820), includes reference to both men.
For the anti-slavery campaign and Evangelicalism in general see E.
Howse, Saints in Politics: The Clapham Sect and the Growth of Freedom (1971),
S. Jakobsson. Am I not a Man and a Brother?: British Mission and the Abolition
of the Slave Trade and Slaver)' in IVest Africa and the West Indies 1786-1838
(Uppsala, 1972), R. Anstey, 771e Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition
1760-1810 (1975), C. Bolt and S. Drescher (ed.), Anti-Slaver)', Religion and
Reform (Folkestone, 1980), D. W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern
Britain: A History from the 1730s to the iq8os (1989), and E. Wilson, Thomas
Clarkson (1989).
3. Islam
For the jihad of Shehu Usuman dan Fodio and Islam in early nineteenth-
century West Africa, the most authoritative recent studies are Mervyn
Fliskett, The Sword of Truth: The. Life and Times of the Shehu Usuman Dan
Fodio (1973). Murray Last, The Sokoto Caliphate (1967), H, A. S.Johnston,
The Fulani Empire of Sokoto (1967), B. G. Martin, Muslim Brotherhoods in
Nineteenth-Century Africa (1967), M. Kane, The Islamic Regime of Fuuta Tooro
(East Lansing, Mich.. 1984), and David Robinson, The. Holy War of Umar
Tai: 'The Western Sudan in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (1985). There are
selections of texts in Hodgkin, Nigerian Perspectives, 244-56, and J.
Flargreaves, France, and West Africa (1969), 119-34.
4. The Kongo
For the Kongo in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries see L.
Jadin, 'Relation sur le royaume du Congo du P. Raimondo da Dicomano,
missionnaire du 1791 à 1795', Bulletin des séances de LfAcademic royale des
sciences coloniales (Brussels), NS, (1957), 307-37. T. Filcsi, 'L'epilogo délia
"Missio antiqua" dei cappucmi nel regno del Congo 1800-1835', Buntes
6 4<S
Bibliography
Doccte, 23 (1970). 377-439, L. Jadin, 'Les survivances chrétiennes au Congo
au xix c siècle', FAIA 1 (1970), 137-85, and Susan Broadhead, 'Beyond
Decline: The Kingdom of Kongo in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth
Centuries', IJA 12/4. (1979), 615-50. Garcia V's correspondence is to be
found in L. Jadin, 'Recherches dans les archives et bibliothèques d'Italie et
du Portugal', Bulletin de l'Academie royale des sciences coloniales, 2 (1956),
958-69.
5. South Africa
B. Kruger, The Pear Tree Blossoms (Genadendal, 1966) is authoritative for the
Moravians in South Africa. See also H. Bredekainp and H. Plüddemann
(ed.), 7 he Genadendal Diaries: Diaries of the Ilerrnhut Missionaries IT. Mansveld,
D. Schimm and J. C. Kühnei i. 1792-1794 (Bellville, SA, 1992). For early
London Missionary Society work the volumes of the Transactiotis of the
Missionary Society (1795- ) are valuable, as is L I I. Enklaar's Life and H'frrfc of
Dr J. Th. van der Kemp 1747-1811 (Rotterdam, 1988).
For South African mission history in general in this period see P.
Hinchliff, The Church in South Africa (1968), R. Lovett, The History of the
London Missionary Society 1795-189.5 (1899). Harry Gailey, The I .MS and the
Cape Government 1799-1828 (Los Angeles, 1957). P. Hinchliff, A Calendar of
Missionary Correspondence from the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope 1800-1850
(Pretoria, 1967), Jane Sales; The Planting of the Churches in South Africa
(1971), B. Holt. Joseph Williams and the Pioneer Mission to the South-Lastern
Bantu (Lovedale, 1954), J. Sales, Mission Stations and the Coloured Communitie<
of the Eastern Cape 1800-1852 (Cape Town, 1975), and V. C. Malherbe.
T h e Life and Times of Cupido Kakkerlak', JAIl 20 (1979), 365 78. The
thirty-six volumes of the Records of the Cape Colony 1793-1831, ed. G.
Theal (1897-1905) contain many mission-related documents.
Among contemporary accounts of the state of the mission in the two
decades following Van der Kemp's death are John Campbell. Travels in South
A frica, undertaken at the request of the Missionary Society (1815) and his
further Travels in South Africa . . . being a Sanative of a Second Journey, 1820, 2
vols. (1822), Robert Moffat's Missionary labours and Scenes m Southern Africa
(1842), and John Philip's Researches in South Africa, 2 vols. {1828). See also
Chapter 7 for a fuller missionary bibliography.
For background to early Xhosa Christianity see J. B. Peires, The House of
Phalo (Johannesburg, 1981), J. Hodgson. The God of the Xhosa (Cape 'I own,
1982), and B. Maclennan, A t}roper Degree of Terror: John Graham and the
Cape's Eastern Frontier (Johannesburg, 1986). For Tshatshu see P. J. Jonas,
Jail Tshatshu and the Hastern Cape Mission: A Contextual Analysis',
Missionalia (Pretoria), 18 (1990), 277~<;2; for Ntsikana see J. B. Peires,
'Nxele. Ntsikana and the Origins of the Xhosa Religious Reaction', JAH
Bibliography 647
20 (ï979). 51 61. J. Hodgson, Ntsikanas Great Hymn: A Xhosa Expression of
Christianity in the Early Nineteenth Century (Cape Town, 1980), and J.
Hodgson, 'Ntsikana: History and Symbol. Studies in a Process of Religious
Change among Xhosa-Speaking People', Ph.D. thesis (Cape Town, 1985).
CHAPTER 6
THE LION REVIVED: ETHIOPIA IN 1 H Ii N I N E T E E N T H C E N T U R Y
i. Primary Texts
The principal nineteenth-century Ethiopian sources available in translation
for the general history of the country' are as follows: Chronique de lliéodoros
II, roi des rois d'Ethiopie 1853-1868. ed. C. Mondon-Vidailhet (Paris, n.d.)
(the author, Alaga Walda, was close to Abuna Salama); M. Moreno (ed.),
;
La cronaca di re Teodoro attribuita al dabtara "Zarieb"', RSE 2 (1942),
143-80: L. Fusella (ed.), 'La cronaca delLimperatore Teodoro II di Etiopia
in un manoscritto amarico\ Annali dell'Istituto Universitario Orientale di
Napoli, NS 6 (1954-6), 6 1 - 1 2 1 ; C. Conti Rossini, 'Nuovi documenti per la
storia d'Abissinia nel secolo x i x \ R end icon t i della Reale Accademia dei Uncei.
S8, 2 (1947), 357-416, M. Chaine (ed.), 'Histoire du règne de lohannes IV,
roi d'Ethiopie 1868-1889', Revue sémitique, 21 (1913), and Giichre Sellasie,
Chronique du règne de Menélik II, Roi des Rois d'Ethiopie, 2 vols. (Paris,
1930-1).
The most useful non-missionary European published sources for the
period up to the fall of Theodore (after which they became far more
numerous) are as follows, in roughly chronological order: H. Salt, A Voyage
to Abyssinia . . . in the Vfarc /Sog and iSio (1814), N. Pearce, 'Ihe Life and
Adventures of Nathaniel Pearce, Written by himself, during a Residence in
Abyssinia from the Ycrtrs 1810 to 1819. W. C. Harris, The Highlands of Ethiopia
(being the Account of Eighteen Months of a British Embassy to the Christian Court
of Shoa). 3 vols. (1X44), C.Johnson, travels in Southern Ethiopia, through the
Country of Adal to (he Kingdom of Shoa, 2 vols. (1844), Antoine d'Abbadie,
Voyage en Abyssinie (Paris, 1839), and Arnauld d'Abbadie, Douze ans de séjour
dans la Haute-Ethiopie, 3 vols., ed. J.-M. Allier (Vatican. 1980 and 1983) (in
fact eleven years, 1838-48). Parliamentary Papers, t86j~$. LXXII, Accounts and
Papers. 33, Correspondence respecting Abyssinia 1846-1868 (1868).
C H A P T E R 7
IHI; V I C T O R I A N M I S S I O N A R Y
I. Introductory'
The wealth of material for the nineteenth-century missionary movement,
archival and printed, is overwhelming. For guides to the principal
missionary archives, see the General Section, Guides to Archives, above.
Most Protestant missionary societies produced annual reports or volumes of
official proceedings as well as much else ranging from the heavyweight to
the highly ephemeral. Some of it was aimed at the most committed and
6 4<S Bibliography
well-informed readership and could include lengthy accounts of individual
missions; some of it was for children or for a popular readership and was
distributed free. Thus, to give the single example of the CMS, its annual
reports date from 1801. In 1813 the monthly Missionary Reporter was begun
and continued until 1856. It was not confined to the CMS and published
much material relating to other missions but it was for long the principal
publication 111 which CMS activity was reported. A single volume (e.g. that
of 1820) might include no fewer than 540 pages. The CMS began to
publish its own Record from 1830; it had produced the Quarterly Paper
distributed free, from 1816; to these it added the Gleaner in 1838 and the
Juvenile Instructor in 1842. In 1849 it began a new, more highbrow, monthly,
the Intelligencer. While much of this was highly serious, including massive
extracts from the letters and reports of individual missionaries, it was all
intended to obtain support, emotional and financial, for mission work.
Anything likely to discredit the mission was naturally excluded. It was.
moreover, put together by people who, in most cases, themselves had no
experience of Africa and who could inject an emphasis different from that
of the missionaries themselves. Such publications, as also the missionary
sermons of numerous clerics who never worked abroad and even the
comments of biographers of missionaries, are all good evidence of the way
the missionary movement was fuelled at home, but it is not always reliable
evidence of the way missionaries were actually behaving or thinking. Such
literauire tended to idealize missionaries and to degrade Africa both in the
nineteenth and the twentieth century. Missionaries themselves at times
protested at the way their supporting magazines described their work, but
on the whole they may have liked to be depicted as invariably heroic.
5. Ilenry Venn
Henry Venn is treated at length in volumes i and ii of Stock s History of the
CMS. William Knight published The Missionary Sa ret aria t of Henry Venn in
1880 and Memoir of Henry Venn in 1882. Max Warren edited a selection of
his writings in 1971 entitled 'to Apply the Gospel. The best modern studies
are T. E. Yates, Venn and Victorian Bishops Abroad (1978), W. B. Shenk, Henry
Venn: Missionary Statesman (1983) and C. Peter Williams, The Ideal of the SelJ-
Governing Church (Leiden, 1990). The last may be the most authoritative.
Sources for the topics discussed in this chapter are included elsewhere,
especially under Chapters 2, 7, 9, 1 1 , arid 12.
CHAP I ER 9
CHRISTIAN LIFE IN IHE AGE 01- BISHOP CROWTHER
i. West Africa
The main published writings of black Christians in this period are the
following: J. F. Schön and S. A. Crowther, Journal of an Expedition up the
Siger in 1841 (1843), S. Crowther, Journal of an Expedition up the Niger and the
Tshada in 1854 S. Crowther and J. Taylor, The Gospel on the Banks of
the Niger: Journals of the Niger Expeditions of 1857 and Missionary Notices
(1859), Alexander Cru mm e LI. 'Ihe future of Africa (1862), James Africanus
Horton, West African Countries and Peoples . . . : A Vindication of the Negro
Race (1868; repr. with an introduction by George Shepperson, Edinburgh,
1969), E. W. Myden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (1887; repr. with
an introduction by C. Fyfe, Edinburgh, 1967), James Johnson, Yoruha
Heathenism (1897), and Samuel Johnson, A History of the Yorubas (1921, but
completed in 1897). FI. R . Lynch has edited Black Spokesman: Selected
Published Writings of Edward Wilmot Blyden (1971).
The principal modern studies remain a group of books published in the
1960s: C. Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone (1962), F. Bartels, Ihe Roots of Ghana
Methodism (1965), J. H. Kopytolf, A Preface to Modern Nigeria: 'Ihe 'Sierra
Lsoneans' in Yoruba 1830-181)0 (1965), J. F. Ajayi, Christian Missions in Nigeria:
Ihe Making of a New Elite (1965). E. Ayandele, 'Ihe Missionary Impact on
Modern Nigeria 1842-1914: A Political and Social Analysis (1966), and R . July,
Ihe Origins of Modern African 'thought (1968). For Liberia there is T. Shiek,
Behold the Promised hind: A History of Afro-American Settlers in Nineteenth
Century Liberia (1980).
For Crowther see the early biography of J. Page, 'Ihe Black Bishop (1908),
P. McKenzie, Inter-Religious Encounter in West Africa: Samuel Ajayi Crowther's
Attitude to African Traditional Religion and Islam (Leicester, 1976), J. F. Ajayi,
'Samuel Ajayi Crowther of Oyo\ in P. Curtin (ed.), Africa Remembered
Bibliography 659
(1967). 289 -316, and J. Loiello, 'Bishop in Two Worlds: Samuel Ajayi
Crowther (1806-1891)', 111 h. Isichei (ed.), Varieties of Christian Experience in
Nigeria (1982), 34-61.
Some other biographies: J. Hargreaves. A Life oj Sir Samuel Leuns (1958),
E. Holden, Blyden of Liberia (1966), H. R. Lynch, Edward IVilntot Blyden
(1967). L. Ayandele, Holy Johnson (1970), O. Adewoye, 'Sapora Williams:
T he Lawyer and the Public Sen-ant', JHN 6/1 (1971). 47-65. C. Fyfe,
Africanus Horton, (1972). and J. R. Oldfield, Alexander Crummell
(1819-181)8) and the (Creation of an African-American Church in Liberia (1990).
Further studies: S. G. Williamson, T h e Lyric in the Fante Methodist
Church\ Africa, 28 (195X). 126-34, C. Fyfe, 'Peter Nicholls: Old Calabar
and Freetown', JHN 1 (i960), 105-14, C. Fyfe. 'Four Sierra Leone
Receptives', JA H 2 (1961). 77 86, P. Hair, 'CMS "Native Clergy" in West
Africa to 1900', SLB 4 (1962), 71-2, P. Hair. 'Archdeacon Crowther and the
Delta Pastorate 1892 9', SLB 5 (1963), 18-27, P. Kllingworth, '"As Others
See Us": Non-Methodist Sources for Methodist History m Ouidah,
Dahomey*. BSACH 1 (1963), 13-17» and '"As They Saw Themselves":
More about the Beginnings of Methodism 111 Ouidah', BSACH 1 (1963),
35-41, II. R . Lynch, T h e Native Pastorate Controversy and Cultural
F.thnocentrism in Sierra Leone 1871-1874', JAH 5 (1964), 395-413, W. O.
Ajayi. 'The Niger Delta Pastorate Church 1892-1902', BSACH 2 (1965),
37~>4. ^ Flair. 'Niger Languages and Sierra Leonean Missionary Linguists
1840-1930'. BSACH 2 (1966). 127 -38, W. O. Ajayi, 'Christian Involvement
in the Ijaye War', BSACH 2 (1967), 224-38. P Ellingworth, 'Methodism on
the Slave Coast 1842- 1870', BSACH 2 (1967), 239-48, E. Ayandele. 'The
Missionary Factor m Brass 1875-1900: A Study in Advance and Recession',
BSACII 2 (1967), 249-58, J. Adedeji, 'The Church and the Emergence of
the Nigerian Theatre 1866 -1914', JHX 6/1 (1971), 25-45, G. Tasie,
Christian Missionary Enterprise in the Siger Delta 1864-1918 (Leiden, 1978),
A. Ci. Hopkins. 'Innovation m a Colonial Context: African Origins of the
Nigerian Cocoa-Farming Industry 1880-1920', in C. Dewey and A. Ci.
Flopkins (eds.). Imperial Impact (1978). 83-96. P. McKenzie, 'Death 111 Early
Nigerian Christianity'. Africana Marburgensia, 15/2 (1982), 3-16. K. Mann,
'The Dangers of Dependence: Christian Marriage among Elite Women in
Lagos Colony 1880-191 s \ J A H 24 (1983). 37-56, J. Iliffe. 'Persecution and
'toleration in Pre-Colonial Africa: Nineteenth Century' Yorubaland', in W.
Shiels (ed.), Persecution and Toleration. SCH xxi (1984), 357-78, L. Shyllon,
'Aspects of the Dynamics of Methodism in Sierra Leone: A Reflection', in
O. Kalu (ed.), African Church Historiography: An Ecumenical Perspective (Berne,
1988), 95 - 1 1 4 , J. Peel, T h e Pastor and the Babalawo: The Interaction of
Religions in Nineteenth Century Yorubaland', Africa, 60 (1990), 338-69.
P. F. de Moraes Farias and K. Barber (eds.), Self-Assertion and Brokerage: Early
Cultural Nationalism in Hest A frica (Birmingham, 1990). J- l^cl, 'Poverty and
6 4<S Bibliography
Sacrifice in Nineteenth Century Yorubaland: A Critique of Iliffe's Thesis',
JAH 31 (1990). 465-84, P. McKenzie, 'Dreams and Visions in Nineteenth
Century Yoruba Religion', in M. C. Jedrej and R. Shaw (eds.). Dreaming.
Religion and Society in Africa (Leiden. 1992). 126-34.
2. Southern Africa
J. A. Chalmers. Tiyo Soga: A Page of South African Mission Work (1887) is an
early biography, and D. Williams. Umfundisi: A Biography of Tiyo Soga 1 829—
1871 (Lovedale. 1978) a recent one which has been followed up by D.
Williams (ed.), 'Ihe Journal and Selected Writings of the Reverend Tiyo Soga
(Cape Town. 1983). See also D. D. T. Jabavu, Ihe Life of John Tengo Jabavu
(Lovedale. 1922), C. Saunders (ed.). Black Leaders in Southern Africa (1979)
includes D. Williams, 'Tiyo Soga'. 127-41. and L. Ngcongco, 'John Tengo
Jabavu 1859-1921', 142-56. G. M. Gugelberger (ed.), Nama/Namibia: Diary
and Letters of Nama Chief Hendrik Witbooi 1884-1894 (Boston, Mass., 1984)
shows the mind of a Christian chief. Vol. ii of J. Hodgson's Ph.D. thesis
'Ntsikana: History and Symbol. Studies in a Process of Religious ("hange
among Xhosa-Speaking People' (Cape Town, 1985) covers the develop-
ment of the Ntsikana tradition in the later nineteenth century, while her
'Soga and Dukwana'. J RA 16 (1986), 187-208, treats of Tiyo's father and
Ntsikana s son.
C. Bundy, Ihe Rise and Pall of the South African Peasantry (1979), N.
Etherington, Preachers, Peasants and Politics in Southeast Africa 1835-1880:
African Christian Communities in Natal, Pondoland and Zululand (1979). J. B.
Pieres, lite Dead Wrill Arise: Nongqatvuse and the Great Cattle-Killing
Movement of 1856-1857 (1989) are major recent contributions to the
understanding of the African predicament in the later nineteenth century.
Among shorter studies, one may begin with B. Hutchinson, 'Some Social
Consequences of Nineteenth Century Missionary Activity among the
South African Bantu', Africa, 27 (1957), 160-75 and Monica Wilson, in M.
Wilson and L. Thompson, Ihe Oxford History of South Africa, i (1969), 260-
71. It may be noted that Professor Wilson was herself one of the white
children educated at Lovedale when it was still multiracial—see her
memoir, 'Lovedale: Instrument of Peace', in E Wilson and D. Perrot (eds.),
Outlook on a Century: South Africa 1870—1970 (Lovedale, 1973), 4 12. She
continued throughout her life to represent the Lovedale tradition at its most
liberal. More recent studies include W. Mills, "The Taylor Revival of 1866
and the Roots of African Nationalism m the Cape Colony', //L4 8 (1976),
105-22, T. Keto. 'Race Relations, Land and the Changing Missionary' Role
in South Africa: A C'ase Study of the American Zulu Mission 1850-1910',
IJA 10 (1977), 600-627 N. Etherington, 'Social Theory- and the Study of
Christian Missions in Africa: A South African Case Study', Africa, 47 (1977),
Bibliography 674
31-40, J. Hodgson, '/.onnebloem College and Cape 'Ibwn 1858-1870', in
Studies in the History of Cape lowth ed. Christopher Sanders (Cape Town,
1984) 125-52. W. Mills, 'The Roots of African Nationalism in the Cape
Colony: Temperance 1866- 1898', IJA 13 (1980). 193-213, J. Hodgson,
Princess Emma (1987) and J. Hodgson, 'Kid Cloves and Cricket on the Kei\
Religion in Southern Africa, 8 (1987), 61—91.
For the Christianity of the Tswana, the Sotho, and their kings there is A.
Sillery, Sechele: 'Ihe Story of an African Chief {1954), 1. Schapera, 'Christianity
and the Tswana', Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 88 (1958), A.
Dachs, Khama of Botswana (1971), J. Chirenje, Chief Kgama and his Times
(1978), L. "Thompson, Survival in 'luv Worlds: Moshoeshoe of I wsot ho 1786-
1870 (1975), P. Saunders, Moshoeshoe, Chief of the Sotho (1975) and 0 .
Gulbrandsen, 'Missionaries and Northern Tswana Rulers: Who Used
Whom?', J RA 23 (1983), 44-83.
3. Buganda
For the history of Buganda there are available written Luganda sources,
both published and unpublished, probably richer than anything comparable
for Christian history in any other African language. See J. Rowe, 'Myth,
Memoir and Moral Admonition: Luganda Historical Writing 1893-1969',
33 O969), 17-40. 'There is important material by Apolo Kagwa, Ham
Mukasa. Yosefu Ddiba. and others. Four major general studies, all—
oddly—published in 1971 are M. Kiwanuka, A History of Buganda from the
Foundation of the Kingdom to îçoo, M. Wright. Buganda in the Heroic Age, D.
Low, Buganda in Modern History.: and D. Low, 'Ihe Mind of Buganda. Also
important are A. Oded, Islam in Uganda: Islamisation through a Centralized
State in Pre-Colonial A frica (Jerusalem, 1974) and J. Waliggo, "The Catholic
Church in the Buddu Province of Buganda 1879-1925'. Ph.D. thesis
(Cambridge, 1976).
For Lugard see his 7he Rise of our Ea<t African Empire (1893), Margery
Perham, Uigard: The Vk-jw of Adventure 1838-1898 (1956) and The Diaries of
Lord Lugard, cd. M. Perham (1959), but also J. Rowe, iMgard at Kampala
(Makerere. 1969).
R. P. Ashe. Two Kings of Uganda (1889) and Chronicles of Uganda (1894) are
early published accounts by a CMS missionary, J. Faupcl, African Holocaust
(1965) is based upon the most detailed research into the martyrdoms but
should be supplemented by J. Rowe, T h e Purge of Christians at Mwanga's
Court', JAll 5 (1964), 55-72, D. Low, 'Converts and Martyrs in Buganda',
in C. G. Baëta (ed.), Christianity in Tropical Africa (1968), 150-63, L. Pirouet,
Strong in the Faith (Kisubi, 1969), and R . Kassimir, 'Complex Martyrs:
Symbols of Catholic Church Formation and Political Differentiation in
Uganda', A A (1991). 357-82.
6 4<S Bibliography
Sir John Gray, 'The Year of" the Three Kings of Buganda, Mwanga—
Kivewa—Kalema, 1888-1889', I J (1950), 15-52, is an important early-
piece of research on a difficult period, and D. Low, Religion and Society in
Buganda 1875—1900 (Kampala, 1956) a decisive piece of interpretation. See
also C. Wrigley. 'The Christian Revolution in Buganda', Comparative
Studies in Society and History. 2 (1959). 33-48. J. Rowe, 'Mika Sematimba'.
LJ 28 (1964), 179-99, M. Kiwanuka, 'Sir Apolo Kagwa and the Pre-
Colonial History^ of Buganda', UJ 30 (1966), 137-52. M. 'Twaddle, "The
Muslim Revolution in Buganda', A A 71 (1972), 54-72, J. Peel, 'Conversion
and Tradition in i wo African Societies: Ijebu and Buganda', Bast and
Present, 77 (1977), 108-41. N. Bennett, Arab versus European: Diplomacy and
War in Nineteenth Century East Central Africa (1986), M. 'Twaddle, "The
Emergence of Politico-Religious Groupings in Late Nineteenth Century
Buganda*, JAH 29 (1988), 81-92, and J. Brierley and T. Spear, 'Mutesa. the
Missionaries and Christian Conversion in Buganda', IJA 21 (1988), 601-18.
c H A pr 1. R 10
:
A VAHIlil'Y OI SCRAMBLES: 189O-I92O
I. General
Literature on the scramble is now immense. The best recent guide may be
volume vi of the CtlsÎ and, especially, the contributions of Oliver,
Sanderson, and Lonsdale. R. Robinson, J. Gallagher, and A. Denny, Africa
and the Victorians (1963) remains foundational to the modern debate but its
conclusions have been overtaken. For a small selection of later views see
IL-U. Wehler, 'Bismarck's Imperialism 1862-1890*, Past and Present, 48
(1970), 119-55, P- Gilford and W. R . Louis (ed.), Britain and Germany in
Africa (1967) and Brttain and Prance in Africa (1971), Henri Bmnschwig, be
Partage de l'Afrique (Paris, 1971), C. C. Kldridge, England's Mission: Ihe
Imperial Idea in the Age of'Gladstone and Disraeli 1868-1880 (1973), and R.
Hyam, Britain's Imperial Century 1815-1914 (1976). J. Ellis, 'Ihe Social
History if the Machine Gun (1976), D. R. Headrick. 7he tools of Empire:
Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (1981), and L.
Brock way, Science and Colonial Expansion: Ihe Role of the British Botanic
Gardens (1979) examine some of the most decisive underlying factors
behind the scramble.
Margery Perham's two-volume life of Lugard (1956 and i960), R. Oliver,
Sir Harry Johnston and the Scramble for Africa (1957), J. Flint, Sir George Goldic
and the Making of Nigeria (i960), J. S. Galbraith, Mackinnon and Last Africa
1878-1895 (1972), J. Flint, Cecil Rhodes (1976), R . Rotberg, Ihe Pounder:
Cecil Rhodes and the Pursuit of Power (1988), and R . E. Nwoye, Ihe Public
Bibliography 663
Image of Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza and the Establishment of French Imperialism
in the Congo (Aberdeen, 1981) deal with six of the leading figures of
imperialism whose African careers had many connections with the
missionary presence.
Hor the African experience of the scramble in a few of the areas where
the colonial-missionary interaction was closest: Igboland, E. Isichei, lite Ibo
People and the Europeans (1973) a n d A History of the Igbo People (1976); the
Congo. Ruth Slade, King Leopolds Congo (1962). R . T. Anstey. Britain and
the Congo in the Nineteenth (Century (1962), S. J. S. Cookey, Britain and the
Congo Question 1913 (1968), and B. Emmerson, Leopold II of the
Belgians: King of Colonialism (1979); southern Africa, T. O. Ranger, Revolt in
Southern Rhodesia 1896-1897 (1967), J. Du fly, A Question of Slavery: Libour
Policies in Portuguese A frica and the British Protest 1850-1920 (1967), S. Trapido,
'African Divisional Politics in the Cape Colony 1884-1910', JAII 9 (1968),
79-98, Shula Marks, Reluctant Rebellion: An Assessment of the 1906-1908
Disturbances in Natal (1970), T. Karis and C. Carter (eds.). From Protest to
Challenge, four splendid volumes of South African documents 1882-1964
(1973-7), J. Guy, 'Ihe Destruction of the Zulu Kingdom (1979), H. Drechsler,
Let Us Die Fighting: lite Stmg^le of the Ilerero and Noma against German
Imperialism 1884-19iß (1980).
A brief reading-list for Islam in this period will include, besides J. S.
Trimingham's Islam in West Africa (1959) and Islam in East Africa (1964), T.
Gbadamosi, 'the Growth of Islam among the Yomba 1841-1908 (1978), N. King,
A. Kasozi, and A. Oded, Islam and the Confluence of Religions in Uganda 1840—
1966 (Tallahassee, Fl., 1973), A. Oded, Islam in Uganda (1974), A. Kazozi,
'the Spread of Islam in Uganda (1986), E. Alpers, 'Towards a History of the
Expansion of Islam in East Africa: The Matrilineal Peoples of the Southern
Interior', in T. Rangerand I. Kimambo (eds.), The Historical Study of African
Religion (1972), E. AJpers, Ivory and Slaves in E&\t Central Africa (1975),
'Islam', inj. Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika (1979), 208-16, D. Bone,
'Islam in Malawi', JRA 12 (1982), 126-38, Donal Cruise O'Brien, The
Mourides of Senegal (1971)» R Del val, D*s Musulmans au Togo (Paris, 1980),
C. Harrison, France and Islam in West Africa 1860-1960 (1988), and D.
Robinson, 'Beyond Resistance and Collaboration: Amadu Bamba and the
Murids of Senegal', JRA 21 (1991), 149-71. C. C. Stewart, 'Islam', in CHA
vii provides an overview and a fuller bibliography.
Volume iii (1955) of C. P. Groves, 'Ihe Planting of Christianity in Africa,
remains an invaluable guide to missionary activity in this period within
Africa. For Christianity's wider ecclesiastical and missionary development
see R. Aubert, Ihe Church in a Secularised Society (1978), R. Rouse and S. C.
Neill (eds.), A History of the Ecumenical Movement 1517-1948 (i954)> W. H. T.
Gairdner, 'Edinburgh 1910': An Account and Interpretation of the World
Missionary Conference (1910), T. Christensen and W. R . Hutchinson (eds.),
6 4<S
Bibliography
Missionary Ideologies in the Imperialist Era 1880-1920 (Aarhus, 1982), Ci. K. A.
Bell, Randall Davidson, Archbishop of Canterbury 2 vols. (1935), S. Koss,
'Wesleyanism and Empire'. Historical Journal 18 (1975), 105-18, A. C. Ross,
'Scottish Missionary** Concor» 1874-1914: A Golden Era?', Scottish Historical
Review, 51 (1972), 52-72, and A. Hodge, 'The Training of Missionaries for
Africa: The Church Missionary Society's Training College at Islington
1900—191 J RA 4 (1971)* 81-96.
While much listed under Chapters 7 and 9 and some under 12 include
sections on this period, the following selection of titles includes what is
most important for 1890-1920.
2. West Africa
Books: J. Casely Hayford, Ethiopia Unbound (1911; 2nd edn. 1969). J.
Jordan, Bishop Shanahan of Southern Nigeria, Dublin (1949). F L. Bartels, The
Roots of Ghana Methodism (1965), II. Wr. Debrunner, A Church between
Colonial Powers: A Study of the Church in logo (1965), D. Bouche, Les Villages
de liberté en Afrique noirefrançaise1887-1910 (Paris, 1968), K. Müller, Histoire
de l'église catholique au Togo (Lomé. 1968; the German original, Geschichte der
katholischen Kirche in logo was published at Kaldenkirchen in 1958). E. A.
Ayandele, HolyJohnson: Pioneer of A frican Nationalism 1 $37-1917 (1970), C«. M.
Haliburton, The Prophet Harris (1971), F. K. Ekechi, Missionary Enterprise and
Rivalry in Igboland 1857- 1914 (1972). J. Van Slageren, Les Origines de l'église
évangelique du Cameroun (Yaounde, 1972), D. Bouche, L'Enseignement dans les
territoiresfrançaisde l'Afrique occidentale de 1817 a 1920 (Pans, 1975), I leinrich
Berger, Mission und kolonial Politik: Die katholische Mission in Kameroun
während der deutschen KoloniaUeit (Immersee, 1978), E. S. Akama, 'A
Religious History of the Isoko People of the Bendel State of Nigeria',
Ph.D. thesis (Aberdeen, 1981), J. Ki-Zerbo, Alfred Diban: Premier chrétien de
Haute-Volta (Paris, 1983), C. Obi (ed.), A Hundred Years of the Catholic Church
in Eastern Nigeria t #85—19$.5 (Lagos, I985),J.-R. de Benoist, high se et pou voit-
colon tal au Soudan Jrançais 1885-1945 (Paris, 1987), 1. Ozigbo, Roman
Catholicism in South Eastern Nigeria 1885-1931 (Onitsha, 1988), Ci. Johnston,
Of G od and Maxim Guns: Presbyterianism in Nigeria 1846-1966 (Waterloo.
Ont., 1988), N. I. Omenka, Ihe School in the Service of Evangelization: The
Catholic Educational Impact in Eastern Nigeria 1886-1950 (Leiden, 1989).
Articles: D. Okafor-Omali and P. Hair. 'The First Christian in the
Village: A Case-History from Eastern Nigeria*, BSACH 1/2 (1963), 49 61,
W. O. Ajayi, 'The Niger Delta Pastorate Church 1892-1902', BSACH 2/1
(1965), 37-54, E. A. Ayandele, 'The Missionary' Factor in Brass 1875 -1900:
A Study in Advance and Recession', BSACH 2/3 (1967). 249-58. E. A.
Ayandele, ''The Relations between the Church Missionary Society and the
Royal Niger Company 1886-1900', JHN 4/3 (1968), 397-49, D. G. Gelzer,
Bibliography 665
'Missions and Colonialization: Education in Cameroun in the Days of the
Germans', BSACH 3 / 1 (1969-70). 1-14. A. E. Afigbo, 'The Calabar
Mission and the Aro Expedition of 1901 -1902', JRA 5 (1973), 94-106, P. B.
Clarke, "I he Methods and Ideology of the Holy Ghost Fathers in Eastern
Nigeria 1885-1906'. JR/\ 6 (1974), 81-108, J. Peel. 'Conversion and
Tradition in Two African Societies; Ijebu and Buganda', Past and Present, 77
(1977), 108-41, F. K. Ekechi, "The Missionary Career of the Venerable T. J.
Dennis in West Africa 1893-1917\ JR/\ 9 (1978), 1-26. O. Kalu, 'The
Battle of the Gods: Christianization of Cross River Igboland 1903-1950',
JHN 10/1 (1979), 1-20, O. Kalu, 'Primitive Methodists 011 the Railroad
Junctions of Igboland 1910-193 i\ JRA 16 (1986), 44-66, N. Omenka,
' I he Role of the Catholic Mission in the Development of Vernacular
Literature in Eastern Nigeria', JRA 16 (1986), 121-37.
3. (Zaïre)
Books: L. Denis (ed.), I s s Jésuites belges au Kwango 1893—1943 (Brussels,
1945), Ruth Slade, English-Speaking Missions in the Congo Independent Stale
1878-1908 (Brussels. 1959). A. Roeykens, Ui Politique religieuse de l'état
indépendant du Congo: Documents (Brussels, 1964), M. Kratz, La Mission des
Rédemptoristes belges au B^-Congo: Li période de semailles (Brussels, 1968), D.
L agergren. Mission and State in the Congo 1883-1903 (TJppsala, 1970), S.
Axelson, Culture Confrontation in the Lower Congo (Uppsala, 1970).
Articles: L. Cuypers, 'La Politique foncière de l'état indépendant du
Congo à regard des missions catholiques', Reuue d'histoire ecclésiastique, 57
(1962), 45-65, 446-69, L. Cuypers, 'La Coopération de l'état indépendant
du Congo avec les missions catholiques', Revue d'histoire ecclésiastique, 65
( ! 97o), 30—55, L. Greindl, 'Notes sur les sources des Missionnaires d'Afrique
(Pères Blancs) pour l'est du Zaïre', UHA 7 (1975), 175-202, Jean Stengers,
'King Leopolds Congo 1886-1908', in CHA vi. 315-58, D. Northrup, 'A
Church in Search of a State: Catholic Missions in Zaïre 1879-1930\ Journal
of Church and State, 30 (1988), 309-20. G. Ciparisse published an extremely
detailed study, including massive documentation, of the Jesuit Mission in
Kwango and the rise and fall, 1895-1911, of its 'fermes-chapelles' in four
parts in the BIHB: 'Les Tractations en vue de la création de la "Mission du
Kwango": Le dossier de la Compagnie de Jésus 1879-1893', 42 (1972),
453—577; 'Les Origines de la méthode des fermes-chapelles au LSas Congo
1895 1898', 43 (1973), 693 839; 'Les Structures traditionelles de la société
tnpangu face à l'introduction d'une méthode occidentale de développe-
ment: Les termes chapelles du Bas Congo 1895-1911', 46-7 (1976-7).
368-601, and 52 (1982), 153-270.
6 4<S
Bibliography
4. Eastern Africa
Books: C. Harford-Battersby, Pilkington of Uganda (1898), A. Tucker,
Eighteen Yeats in Uganda and Last Africa. 2 vols. (1908; 2nd edn. 1911), one of
die only major published works on Church history by a missionary of this
period, K. M. Crawford, By the Equator's Snowy Peak: A Record of Medical
Missionary Work and 'travel in British East Africa (1913), H. Maynard Smith,
Prank Bishop of Zanzibar (1926), R . Oliver, the Missionary Factor in East
Africa (1952), D. A. Low. Religion and Society 1 n Buganda 1875^ 1900
(Kampala, 1957), J. V. Taylor, 'Ihe Growth of the Church in Buganda (1958),
H. P. Gale, Uganda and the Mill Hill Fathers (1959), C. H. Hellberg, Missions
on a Colonial l:rontier West of Like Victoria (Lund, 1963), A. Luck. African
Saint: Ihe Life of Apolo Kivebulaya (1963), R. Fouquer, Ixy Docteur Adrien
A tinian, médecin-catéchiste au Tanganyika (1964), S. ,ron Sicard, 'the Lutheran
Church on the Coast of Tanzania 1 $87-191.1 (Uppsala, 1970), M. Wright,
German Missions in Tanganyika 1891—1941 (1971), A.J. Temu, British Protestant
Misstons (1972), 1. Linden, Church and Revolution in Rwanda (1977), R . W.
Strayer. The Making of Mission Communities in East Africa: Anglicans and
Africans in Colonial Kenya 1875-1935 (1978), L. Pirouet, Black Evangelists: The
Spread of Christianity in Uganda 1891-1914 (1978), J. lliffe, A Modern History of
Tanganyika (1979), particularly good on the impact of the first world war, R .
Heremans, L'Education dans les missions des Pères Blancs en Afrique centrale
(1879-1914) (Bmssels, 1983), H. B. Hansen, Mission, Church and State in a
Colonial Setting: Uganda 1890-1925 (1984), J. M. Waliggo, A History of African
Priests (Masaka, Uganda, 1988), M. Twaddle. Kakumgulu and the Creation of
Uganda (1993).
Some unpublished doctoral theses: J. Kiernan, 'The Holy Ghost Fathers
in East Africa, 1863 to 1911' (London, 1966), B. G. Mcintosh, 'The Scottish
Mission in Kenya 1891-1923' (Edinburgh, 1969), John Waliggo, 'The
Catholic Church in the Buddu Province of Buganda 1879-1925'
(Cambridge, 1976)—an outstandingly rich piece of research into a subject
of exceptional importance—F. Nolan, 'Christianity in Unyamwezi 1878-
1928' (Cambridge, 1976), T. H. Cope, 'The xAfrican Inland Mission in
Kenya: Aspects of its History 1895-1945' (CNAA. 1979). Renison G ithige,
T h e Mission-State Relationship m Kenya 1888-1938' (Aberdeen. 1982).
Articles: 11. B. Thomas, 'Capax Imperii: The Story ofSimei Kakunguru'.
If 6 (1939). 125-36, R . Gambier, 'L'Affaire Stokes', Revue Belge de philologie
et d'histoire, 30 (1952), 109-54, A. D. Roberts, "The Sub-Imperialism of the
Baganda', JAH 3 (1962), 435-50, J. M. Gray 'Kakunguru in Bukedf, UJ 27
(1963), 31-60, T. Price, T h e Church as Land-Holder in Eastern Africa',
BSACH i /1 (1963), 8-13, T. Williams. 'The Coming of Christianity to
Ankole', BSACH, 2/2 (1966), 155-73. A. Hastings. 'From Mission to
Church m Buganda', Zeitschrift für Missionwissenschaft und ReligtonunssenschaJt
Bibliography fây
(June 1969). reprinted m A. Hastings, Mission and Ministry (1971), 144-76,
Y. Sscbalijja, 'Memories of Rukiga and Other Places', 179-99, and J.
Nicolet. 'The Religious Impact of Yohana Kitagana', 231-40, both in 1).
Denoon (ed.), A History of Kigezi (Kampala, 1972)—there is a longer,
unpublished version of Nicolet's memoir of Kitagana entitled 'An Apostle
of the Ruwenzori' L. Pirouet, 'Hast African Christians and World War I',
JAH 19 (1978), 117-30, H. B. Hansen, 'European Ideas. Colonial Attitudes
and African Realities: The Introduction of a Church Constitution in
Uganda 1898-1909', IJA 13 (1980), 240-80, R. M. Githige, ' The Issue of
Slavery: Relations between the CMS and the State on the East African
Coast prior to 189 s', J RA 16 (1986), 209-25, Paul Rutayisire,
'L'Africamsation du Christianisme er. la pratique missionnaire en référence
à la Christianisation du Burundi (1897-1937)', in G. Ruggieri (ed.), Église et
histoire de l'église en Afrique (Paris, 1988).
l:or Kakunguru's later religious development, besides the two articles in
the Uganda Journal listed above, see F. B. Welbourn, Fast African Rebels
(1961) and À. Oded, T h e Bayudaya of Uganda', JR.-1 6 (1974), 167-86.
5. Central Africa
Books: Dan Crawford, 7hit iking Black: 'Iiventy-liw Yhir.* without a Break in
the Long Crass of Central Africa (1912) is splendidly worth a read (for its
background see R . Rotberg, 'Plymouth Brethren and the Occupation of
Katanga 1886-1907', JAII 5 (1964), 285-97). W. P. Livingstone's two
biographies. Lues of Livingstonia (1921) and A Prince of Missionaries: 'Ihe Rev.
Alexander Hethemnck of Blantyre (1931). as also Agnes Eraser's life of her
husband, Donald Fraser of Livingstonia (1934) are still worth referring to as
accounts of three Scottish missionaries with a high profile of this period.
Modern critical writing about the missions begins for Central Africa with a
more than usually critical 011e, R. 1. Rotberg, Christian Missionaries and the
Creation of Sorthern Rhodesia 1880-1924 (1965). J. Farrant, Mathonaland
Martyr: Bernard Mizeki and the Pioneer Church (1966) and J. C. Weiler, 'Ihe
Priest Jrom the Lakeside: 'Ihe Story of Ijeonard Kamungu o f Malawi and Zambia
1877-1913 (Blantvre. 1971) provide carefully researched biographies of two
African Christian pioneers. I. Linden, Catholics, Peasants and Chewa
Resistance in Syasalatid 1889-1939 (1974). J. McCracken, Politics and
Christianity in Malawi 1875 ^940: Ihe Impact of the IJvingstonia Mission in
the Sort hern Province (1977), N. Bhebe, Christianity and Traditional Religion in
Western Zimbabwe 1859 1923 (1979). G. Prins, 'Ihe Hidden Hippopotamus
(1980). C. Zvogo, 7he Wesleyan Methodist Missions in Zimbabwe 1891-1945
(Harare, 1991), B. Garvey Pembaland Church (Leiden, 1993). Some
unpublished theses: A. C. Ross, 'The Origins and Development of the
Church of Scotland Mission, Blantvre. Nyasaland. 1875-1921' (Edinburgh,
668 Bibi log rap hy
1968). T. J. Thompson. 'Fraser and the Ngoni: A Study of the Growth of
Christianity among the Ngoni of Northern Malawi 1879-1933'
(Edinburgh, 1980).
Articles: A. Ross, " The African—a Child or a Man": The Quarrel
between the Blantyre Mission of the Church of Scotland and the British
("entrai Africa Administration 1890-1905', E. Stokesand R. Brown (eds.),
Ihe Zambezian Past (1966), 332-51, M. R. Waldman, ' The Church of
Scotland Mission at Blantyre, Nyasaland: 1rs Political Implications', BSACH
2/4 (196X), 299-310, F. Soremekun, 'Religion and Politics in Angola: The
American Board Mission and the Portuguese Government 1880—1922',
Cahiers d'études africaines, 9 (1971}, 341-77, W. R. Peaden, 'Nenguwo
Training Institution and the First Shona Teachers', 111 A. J. Dachs (ed.),
Christianity South of the Zambezi, 1 (1973) 71-82, R. Peaden, 'The
Contribution of the Epworth Mission Settlement to African Develop-
ment'. in T Ranger and J. Weiler (eds.), Hiernes in the Christum History of
Central Africa (1975), 135-5 1, C. Zvogbo, 'Shona and Ndebele Responses to
Christianity in Southern Rhodesia 1897-1914'. JRs\ 8 (1976), 4 1 - 5 1 . B.
Garvey 'Bemba Chiefs and Catholic Missions 1898-1935', JAII iX (1977),
411-26, C. /.vogbo, 'Christian Missionaries and the Establishment of
Colonial Rule 111 Zimbabwe 1888-1918', Jourm;/ of Southern African Affairs, z
(1977), 217-34, R. Stuart. 'Anglican Missionaries and a Chewa Dim:
Conversion and Rejection in Central Malawi', JRA io (1979), 46-69, H.
Langworthy, 'Joseph Booth: Prophet of Radical Change in Central and
South Africa 1891-1915', JRA 16 (1986). 22-43, Yorke, 'The Spectre of
a Second Chilembwe: Government, Missions and Social Control 111
Wartime Northern Rhodesia 1914-1918', JAH 31 (1990), 373-91.
The fundamental study of John Chilembwe remains G. A. Shepperson
and T. Price, Independent African: John Chilembwe and the Origins, Setting and
Significance of the Nyasaland Native Rising of 1915 (Edinburgh, 1958) but needs
to be supplemented by George Mwase, Strike a Blow and Die, ed. R.
Rotberg (1967), I.andcg White, Magomero: Portrait of an African Village
(1987), and by Jane and Ian Linden, 'John Chilembwe and the New
Jerusalem', JAH 12 (1971), 629-51. For Charles Domingo see K. Lohrentz,
Joseph Booth, Charles Domingo and the Seventh Day Baptists in
Northern Nyasaland 1910-1912', JAII 12 (1971). 461-80, II. Lang-
worthy, 'Charles Domingo, Seventh Day Baptists and Independency', JRA
15 (1985), 96-121. the Letters of Charles Domingo, ed. H. W. Langworthy
(Zomba, Malawi, 1983), and J. Parratt, 'Y. Z. Mwasi and the Origins of the
Blackmail's Church', JRA 9 (1978), 193-206.
Bibliography 669
6. Southern Africa
Monographs include A. Sillerv, John Mackenzie of Bechuanaland: A Study in
Humanitarian Imperialism 1835-1899 (Cape Town, 1971), A. Dachs,
'Missionary Imperialism: The ("ase of Bechuanaland*, JA H 13 (1972),
647 .58, T. D. Ver ry n, A History of the Order of Ethiopia (Cleveland,
Transvaal, 1972), J. L. de Vries, Mission and Colonialism in Namibia
(Johannesburg, 1978), J. B. Brain, Catholics in Natal 1886-1925 (Durban,
1982), J. B. Brain, Christian Indians in Natal 1860-1911 (1983), J. Van
Butselaar, Africains, missionnaires et colonialistes: Les origines de l'église
presbytérienne du Mozambique (Mission Suisse) 1880—1896 (Leiden, 1984),
J. M. Chirenje, iithiopianism and Afro-Americans in Southern Africa 1883-1916
(Baton Rouge, La.. 1987), F. Hasselhorn, Bauemmtssion m Südafrika: Die
Hermansbriger Mission in Spannungsfeld der Kolonialpolitik 1890 1939
(Erlangen. 1988), and FI. H. Hewison, Hedge of Wild Almonds: South
Africa, the 'Pro-Boers' and the Quaker Conscience 1890-1910 (1989).
Articles: S. Marks, 'Flariette Colenso and the Zulus 1874-1913', JAII 4
(1963), 403-12. S. Marks, 'Christian African Participation in the 1906 Zulu
Rebellion', BSACH 2/1 (1965), 55-72, A. J. Dachs, 'Missionary
Imperialism: The Case of Bechuanaland', JAII 13 (1972), 647-58, G.
Cuthbertson, 'James Stewart and the Anglo-Boer War 1899—1902', South
African Historical Journal, 14 (1982). 68 - 84. C. Cuthbertson, 'Missionary
Imperialism and Colonial Warfare: London Missionary Society Attitudes to
the South African War 1899-1902'. South African Historical Journal, 19
(1987), 9 3 - 1 1 4 . G. Cuthbertson, '"Cave of Adullam": Missionary Reaction
to Ethiopiamsm at Lovedale 1898-1902', Missionalia, 19 (1991), 57-64.
Finally, G. Shepperson, 'Ethiopianism: Past and Present', in C. G. Baëta
(ed.), Christianity in 'tropical Africa (1968), 249-68, remains the best
introduction to an often misinterpreted phenomenon.
CHAPTER I I
IROM A C B II B I TO 1)1 A N C I E N D A : I N D E P E N D E N C Y A N D
PROPHETISM
I. General
There is no very satisfactory overall study of prophetism, independency,
or—still more vaguely—'new religious movements' in Africa. Two pioneer
attempts to provide such a study were published in 1968: D. B. Barrett,
Schism and Renewal m Africa (Nairobi), an analysis of 6,000 contemporary
religious movements, and G. C. Oosthuizen, Post-Christianity in Africa. Both
were seriously flawed but at least helped reveal the pitfalls of such an
enterprise, and R . Mitchell. 'Towards the Sociology of Religious
6 4<S Bibliography
Independency', JRA 3 (1970), 2-21, took the debate a little further. Among
more recent general books the following may be noted: N. Ndiokwere,
Prophecy and Revolution (1981), B. Jules-Rosette (ed.), Ihe New Religions of
Africa (1979), M. Daneel, Ihe Quest for Belonging (Gweru, 1987), as well as
the continent-wide survey in A. Hastings, A History of A frican Christianity
1950-1975 (1979) of independency in the 1950s, 67-85 and 175-83. H. W.
Turner's Religious Innovation in Africa: Collected Essays on New Religious
Movements (Boston, 1979), remains the most authoritative of wider studies,
and the same authors Bibliography of New Religious Movements in Primal
Societies, i. Black Africa (Boston, 1977), the basic, though now somewhat
dated, bibliography. Much of the recent literature is too sociological or
concerned with movements originating after i960 to be included here.
2. South Africa
For South Africa, B. Sundkler, Bantu Prophets in South Africa (1948. revised
1961), was a work of great influence but both detail and viewpoint are
modified in the author's later and more sympathetic Zulu Zion and some
Swazi Zionists (1976). Other major studies are E. Kamphausen, Anfänge der
kirklichen Unabhängigkeitsbewegung in Südafrika: Geschichte und Theologie der
äthiopischen Bewegung 1872—1912 (Berne, 1976), a massive account of the
Ethiopian movement, K. Schlosscr, Eingeborenen Kirchen in siid- und siidwest
Afrika (1958), M. West, Bishops and Prophets in a Black City (1975), G. FI.
Haliburton, 'Edward Lion of lM$otho\ Journal of Southern African Historical
Studies* i (1976), 64-70, and N. Etherington, 'The Historical Sociolog)' of
Independent Churches in South East Africa', JRA 10 (1979), 108-26, which
provides a useful reanalysis of the early period. J. P. Kiernan has written
numerous articles on Zionism including 'The Work of Zion: An Analysis of
a Zulu Zionist Ritual', Africa. 46 (1976), 340-56, "'Poor and Puritan": An
Attempt to View Zionism as a Collective Response to Urban Poverty',
African Studies, 36 (1977), 3 1 - 4 1 , T h e Weapons of Zion', JRA ro (i979)>
13-21, and T h e Canticles of Zion', JRA 20 (1990), 188-204.
For the Amanazaretha of Isaiah Shembe, besides the two Sundkler
volumes noted above, see G. Oosthuizen, The Theology of a South African
Messiah: An Analysis of the Hymnal of the Church of the Nazarites (Leiden,
1967), H.-J. Becken, 'On the Holy Mountain: A Visit to the New Years
Festival of the Nazaretha Church 011 Mount Nhlangakazi, January 1967',
JRs\ i (1967), 138-49, J. Fernandez, T h e Precincts of the Prophet: A Day
with Johannes Galilee Shembe', JRA 5 (1973). 32-53, and the outstanding
study of E. Gunner, 'Power House, Prison House: An Oral Genre and its
Use in Isaiah Shembe's Nazareth Baptist Church\ Journal of Southern African
Studies, 14 (1988), 204-27.
Bibliography 671
3. Central A frica
Zimbabwe is fortunate in having the largest single study of any country, the
lengthily researched and pondered three volumes of M. Daneel, Old and
New in Southern Shotia Independent Churches (The Hague. 1971, 1974, 1988).
but this vast work remains chiefly concerned with Zionism in the Masvingo
area and is stronger on description than on history-. Zionist origins in
Rhodesia are well researched m W. R. Peaden, 'Zionist Churches in
Southern Mashonaland 1924--193 3', BSACII 3 (1969-70), 53-67. For the
earliest Shona Independent Church, that of the White Bird founded by
Matthew Zwimba, see T. Ranger, The African Voice in Southern Rhodesia
(1970), 20-5, and for a small and isolated Ndcbcle Church, that of the
Overseer (Madida) near Gwanda, see L. Dube, 'The Spirit of Purity', MA
dissertation (University of Zimbabwe, 1984). For the 'apostolic/ Churches,
A. K. Weinrich, 'The People of the Spirit: An Independent Church in
Rhodesia', Africa, 37 (1967), 203-19, M. Murphree, Christianity among the
Shona (1969), B. Jules-Rosette, African Apostles: Ritual and Conversion in the
Church ofJohn Maranke (1975) and 'Marrapodi: An Independent Religious
Community in Transition', African Studies Review, 18 (1975), 1-16, C.
Dillon-Malone, The Karsten Bixhetmakers: A Study of the Masowe Apostles
(1978), and R. Werbner, 'The Argument of Images: From Zion to the
Wilderness in African Churches', in W. van Binsbergen and M. Schoffeleers
(eds.). Theoretical Explorations in African Religion (1985), 253-86. Note an
interesting early journalistic account, C. Dunn, 'Black Christians Build an
Ark', The Observer, 26 June 1955,
Other Churches: P. Chater, Caught in the Crossfire (Harare. 1985) for the
Church of St Francis, Rusape, C. J. Zvobgo, 'The Rev. E. T. J. Nemapare
and the African Methodist Church in Southern Rhodesia 1930-1950',
Rhodesian History; 6 (1975), 83—7, and C. Gandiya, 'The Guta Rajehova
Church', MA dissertation (Zimbabwe, 1984). Fl. Bucher, Spirits and Power
(1980) offers a critique of the Christianity of the spirit Churches.
For Malawi, besides the works by G. Shepperson and others listed in the
final paragraph of Chapter 10 (section on central Africa), the principal early
survey is R . W'ishlade, Sectarianism tn Southern Nyasaland (1965). These can
be supplemented by a number of smaller studies such as R . Macdonald,
'Religious Independency as a Means of Social Advance in Northern
Nyasaland in the 1930s', JRA 3 (1970), 106-29, J. Parratt, 'Y. Z. Mwasi and
the Origins of the Blackman's Church', J RA 9 (1978), 193-206, O. Kaiinga,
Jordan Msumba, Ben Ngemela and the Last Church of God and his Christ
19241935', JR/l 13 (1982), 207-18. Sources for the Study of Religion in
Malawi, published by the University- of Malawi, include Y. Z. Mwasi, My
Essential and Paramount Reasons for Independently, ed. J. Parratt (1979)
and J. C. Chakanza, An Annotated List of Independent Churches in Malawi
6 4<S
Bibliography
1900-1981 {1983). J. Chakanza's unpublished Oxford D.Phil, thesis surveys
the whole field: 'Continuity and Change: A Study of New Religious
Movements in Malawi 1900-1981' (1985).
Independency in Zambia might be said to begin with the tragic history
of T01110 Nyirenda. for which see T. Ranger, 'The Mwana Lesa Movement
of 1925', in T. Ranger and J. Weiler (eds.), 7hemes in the Christian History of
Central Africa (1975), 45-75. For Jeremiah Condwe see S. Cross, 'A Prophet
not without Honour, in C. Allen and R. Johnson (eds.), African Perspectives
(1970). 171-84. There are two early accounts of the Lumpa Church of Alice
Lenshina, valuable especially because written prior to its conflict with the
State: Dorothea Lehmann s 'Alice Lenshina and the Lumpa Church', in J.
Taylor and D. Lehmann, Christians of the Coppcrhelt (1961), 248-68, and L.
Oger, WF, Lumpa Church: 7he Lenshina Movement in Northern Rhodesia
(Serenje, i960). The best factual account of its history remains the chapter
by A. Roberts in R . Rotberg and A. Mazrui, Protest and Power in Black
Africa (1970), 513-68, but there is to date no adequate study of this
movement despite the valuable interpretative efforts of both W. van
Binsbergen, Religious Change in Zambia (1981), and II. Hinfelaar, 'Women's
Revolt: The Lumpa Church of Lenshina Mulenga in the 1950s', JR/l 21
(1991), 99-129. For the Bamutima of Emilio Mulolam see chapters in
Taylor and Lehmann, Christians of the Coppcrhelt, B. Garvey. Bembaland
Church (Leiden, 1993), and II. Hinfelaar, Religious Change among Bemba-
Speaking Women of Zambia (Leiden, 1994).
Watch Tower, Kitawala, and its various ramifications from Kamwana
onwards are explored by R . J. Flooker, 'Witnesses and Watch Tower in the
Rhodcsias and Nyasaland', JA H 6 (1965), 91-106, H.-J. Greschat, Kitawala
Ursprung: Ausbreitung und Religion der Watch Tower—Bewegund in zentral
Afrika (Marburg, 1967), J. Gérard, Les Fondements syncrétiques du Kitawala
(Brussels, 1969), Sholto Cross, The Watch Tower Movement in South
Central Africa 1908-1945', D.Phil, thesis (Oxford, 1973), J. Chakanza,
'Continuity and Change', 91-157, and K. E. Fields, Revival and Rebellion in
Colo t lial Central Africa (1985).
4. Hast Africa
The principal earlier works are F. B. Welbourn, Hast African Rebels (1961)
about Ganda and Kikuyu movements, F. B. Welbourn and B. Ogot, A Place
to Feel at Home (1966). 011 two west Kenyan bodies, the Church of Christ in
Africa, and the African Israel Church Nineveh, and Wr. Sangree, Age, Prayer
and Politics in Tiriki, Kenya (1966). C. Rösberg and J. Nottingham, lite Myth
of Mau Mau (1966) should also be consulted. More recently we have J.
Murray, 'The Kikuyu Spirit Churches', JRA 5 (1973). 198-234, J. Murray,
'The Kikuyu Female Circumcision Controversy, with Special Reference to
Bibliography 673
the Church Missionary Society's Sphere of Influence', Ph.D. thesis (Los
Angeles, 1974), A. Wipper, Rural Rebels: A Study of Iwo Protest Movements in
Kenya (1977), V. Neckebrouck, I.£ Onzième Commandement: Htiologie d'une
église indépendante au pied du mont Kenya (Immensee, 1978) on the African
Independent Pentecostal Church, and the mass of information, both
statistical and biographical, to be found in D. Barrett and others, Kenya
Churches Handbook (Kisumu, 1973). For Tanzania's mostly 'negative case'see
two discussions by T. Ranger: 'lite African Churches of lanzania, a Historical
Association of Tanzania pamphlet (Dar es Salaam, 1970) and 'Christian
Independency in Tanzania', in D. Barrett (ed.), African Initiatives in Religion
(Nairobi. 1971). 122-45.
5. West Africa
The authoritative study of the early African Church movement in Nigeria is
J. Webster, Hie African Churches among the Yomba, 1888-1922 (1964), to
which should be added J. Webster, 'The Bible and the Plough', JIIN 2/4
(1963), 418—34, and his chapter 'Attitudes and Policies of the Yoruba
African Churches towards Polygamy*, in C. Baeta (ed.), Christianity in
'I'ropical Africa (1968), 224-48. See also H. King, 'Co-operation in
Contextualisation: Two Visionaries of the African Church: Mojola Agbebi
and William Hughes of the African Institute, Colwyn B a y \ J R A 16 (1986),
2-21.
The best early account of Harris is J. Casely Hayford, William Waddy
Harris, the West African Reformer: The Man and his Message (1915). G.
Flaliburton, 77ic Prophet Harris (1971) provides the most complete published
study of Africa's most successful evangelist, but see S. Walkers review in IJA
c
$ 0975). 73~9- he mind and teaching of Harris, D. Shank, 'A Prophet
of Modern Times: The Thought of William Wade Flams', Ph.D. thesis
(Aberdeen, 1980) is invaluable and volume iii includes a complete collection
of primary sources. See too D. Shank, "The Prophet Harris: A
Historiographies! and Bibliographical Survey'. JRA 14 (1983), 130-60.
For post-Harris developments in the Ivory Coast reference may be made to
B. I lolas, Le Séparatisme religieux en Afrique noir: L'example de la Cote d'Ivoire
(Paris, 1965). R. Bureau, 'Le Prophète Harris et la religion harriste', Annales
de l'Université d'Abidjan (Serie F), 3 (1971), 31-196, S. Walker, The Religious
Revolution in the Ivory Coast: 'Phe Prophet Harris and the Harrist Church (1983),
1). Shank, "The Harrist Church in the Ivory Coast\JRA 15 (1985), 67-75, a
critique of Walker, and J. Krabill. 'Dida Harrist Hvmnody (1913-1990)',
JRA 20 (1990), 118-52.
For Ghana, C. G. Baeta, Prophetism in Ghana (1962) remains useful. G.
Haliburton devotes an appendix of The Prophet Harris to John Swatson
(217-27). Among more recent studies are P. Breidenbach, 'Maame Harris
6 4<S Bibliography
Grace Tasi and Papa Kwesi John Nackenbah', IJA 12 (1979), 581 614, K.
Opoku, 'Changes within Christianity with Special Reference to the
Musama Disco Christo Church'. 111 CIA 1 1 1 - 2 1 , J. Fernandez,
'Rededication and Prophetism in Ghana', Cahiers d'études africaines. 10
(1970), 228-305, a study of Wovenu, R. Wyllie. 'Pioneers of Ghanaian
Pentecostalism: Peter Anim and James McKeown\ JRA 6 (1974). 102 22,
and G. Flaliburton, 'Mark Christian Hayford: A Non-Success Story', JRA
12 (1981), 20-37.
For Nigeria, the earliest published accounts of Garrick Braide include
James Johnson, 'Elijah 11\ Church Missionary Review (Aug. 1916), 455 62.
and P. Talbot, 'Some Beliefs of Today and Yesterday', Journal of the African
Society 15 (1916), 305-19. Recent accounts include G. Tasic. Christian
Missionary Enterprise in the Niger Delta 1864-1918 (Leiden, 1978), 166-201.
and F. Ludwig, 'Elijah 11: Radicalisation and Consolidation of the Garrick
Braide Movement 191 5-1918', JRA 23 (1993), 296-317. The literature on
Aladura is exceptionally extensive. The principal earlier works were J. Peel,
Aladura (1968) and H. W. Turner, African Independent Church, 2 vols. (1967).
The former was a study of Cherubim and Seraphim and of the Christ
Apostolic Church, the latter of Oshitelu's Church of the Lord (Aladura).
R . C. Mitchell. 'Religious Protest and Social Change: The Origins of the
Aladura Movement in West Nigeria', in R . Rotberg and A. Mazrui (eds.).
Protest and Power m Blach Africa (1973), 458-96. was a judicious analysis from
the same period. For the Christ Apostolic Church see also the Ecumenical
Review (1976), 418- 28, and for the Celestial Church of Christ, founded in
1947 in Dahomey, the largest of the later Aladura Churches, see R. Hackett.
'Thirty Years of Growth and Change in a West African Independent
Church': A Sociological Perspective', JRA 11 (1980), 212-24. For two
outstandingly creative small Churches see S. Bennett, Ihe Rise and Pall of an
African Utopia: A Wealthy 'theocracy in Comparative Perspective (Waterloo.
Ont., 1977), a study of the Holy Apostles' Community at Aiyetoro, and M.
Abasiattai, 'The Oberi Okaime Christian Mission: Towards a History of an
Ibibio Independent Church', Africa, 59 (1989), 496-516. E. Isichei (ed.),
Varieties of Christian Experience in Nigeria (1982) includes two helpful mini-
biographies: A. Ogunranti, 'Pastor and Politician: Isaac Akinyele, Olubadan
of Ibadan (1882-1955)', 131 40, and A. Omojayowo, 'Mother in Israel:
Christianah Olatunrinle in Ondo (c. 1855 1944)'. 141-8. For the best recent
reassessments of Aladura see J. Omoyajowo, Cherubim and Seraphim: A
History of an African Independent Church (1982), R . Hackett, New Religious
Movements in Nigeria (1987), P. Probst, 'The Letterand the Spirit: Literary
and Religious Authority in the History of the Aladura Movement in
Western Nigeria', Africa. 59 (1989), 478-95, and B. Ray, 'Aladura
Christianity: A Yoruba Religion', JR/l 23 (1993), 266-1; 1.
Bibliography 675
6. Zaïre, Congo, and Angola
Two extensive and wide-ranging works for the old Belgian and French
Congo are E. Andersson, Messianic Popular Movements in the Ijoiver Congo
(Uppsala, 1958), and M. Sinda, Ije Messianisme congolaise et ses incidences
politiques (Paris, 1972). to which should be added the very rich collection of
primary texts, J. Janzen and W. MacGaffey, An Anthology oj Kongo Religion
(Kansas City, 1974). For a movement in Angola see A. Margarido, "l'he
Tokoist Church', in R . I I. Chilcote (ed.), Protest and Resistance in Angola and
Brazil (1972), 29-52.
The earliest published account in English of Simon Kimbangu is P.
Lerrigo, T h e "Prophet Movement" in the Congo', International Review of
Missions, 11 (1922), 270-7. The three principal books are M. L. Martin,
Kimbangu: An African Prophet and his Church (1975), a work which represents
the modern Kimbanguist view very closely, W. Ustorf, Afrikanische Initiative:
Das aktive lsiden des Propheten Simon Kimbangu (Bern, 1975), and S. Asch,
L'Église du prophète Simon Kimbangu de ses origines à son role actuel au Zaïre
(Paris, 1983). Among shorter scholarly studies the following are important:
J. Chômé, La Passion de Simon Kimbangu 1Ç21—1951 (Brussels, 1959), P.
Raymaekers, 'Histoire de Simon Kimbangu, prophète, d'après les écrivains
N fin a n gam et Nzungu (1921)', Archives de sociologie des religions, 16 (1971),
15-42, D. Feci, Vie cachée et vie publique de Simon Kimbangu selon la littérature
coloniale et missionaire belge (Brussels, 1972), E. Libert, Tes Missionnaires
chrétiens face au mouvement kimbanguiste: Documents contemporains
(1921)', HHA 2 (1971), 121-54, C. Irvine, T h e Birth of the Kimbanguist
Movement in the Bas-Zaïre 1921', JRA 6 (1974), 23-76, A. Geuns,
'Chronologie des mouvements religieux indépendants au Bas-Zaïre,
particulièrement du mouvement fondé par le prophète Simon
Kimbangu'» JR/\ 6 (1974), 187-222, H. Desroche and P. Raymaekers,
'Départ d'un prophète, arrivée d'une église: Textes et recherches sur la mort
de Simon Kimbangu et sur sa survivance', Archives de sciences sociales des
religions, 42 (1976), 117-62, C. Irvine. T h e Second Baptism of Simon
Kimbangu', inj. Thrower (ed.), Essays in Religious Studies for Andrew Walls
(Aberdeen, 1986), 17-36, and D. Mackay, 'Simon Kimbangu and the BMS
Tradition', JRA 17 (1987), 1 1 3 - 7 1 . J. Pemberton, 'The History of Simon
Kimbangu, Prophet, by the Writers Nfinangani and Nzungu, 1921: An
Introduction and Annotated Translation', JJR/1 2 3 (*993)> 194-231, is a
translation of P. Raymaekers (above) with a new introduction and notes,
while D. Mackay and D. Ntoni-Nzinga, 'Kimbangu's Interlocutor:
Nyuvudi's Nsamu Miangunza\ JRA 23 (1993), 232-65, supplements
Nfinangani with a second early African text, this time complete with its
Kikongo original.
The following articles relate rather to the subsequent life of
6 4<S
Bibliography
Kimbanguism. W. MacGaffcy, 'The Beloved City: A Commentary on a
Kimbanguist T e x t \ J R A 2 (1969), 129-47, M. Muntu-Monji, 'Nzambi wa
Malernba: Un mouvement d'inspiration Kimbanguiste au Kasai\ Cahiers des
religions africaines, 8 (1974), 231-55, D. Ndofunsu, 'The Role of Prayer in
the Kimbanguist Church', in CIA 577-96, A. Droogers, 'Kimbanguism at
the Grass Roots: Beliefs in a Local Kimbanguist Church', JRA 11 (1980),
188-211, W. MacGaffcy, Modern Kongo Prophets (1983), G. Molyneux, 'The
Place and Function of Hymns in the EJSCK', JRA 20 (1990), 153-87, and
M. Muntu-Monji, 'Sources imprimées et bibliographie suédoises
commentées relatives aux mouvements prophétiques du Zaïre', JRA 13
(1982), 219-22.
C H A P T E R 1 2
K I W A N U K A
Many of the titles included under Chapter 10 also refer to the post-1920
years. They are not repeated here.
i. General
Among the more general studies of Christianity- in this period C. P. Groves,
Ihe Planting of Christianity in Africa, iv (1954), remains the most detailed
survey of missionary activity throughout the continent. A. Hastings, A
History of African Christianity 1950-1975 (1979) looks at developments in the
latter part of our period with special concern for Church-State relations. B.
Sundkler, 'Ihe Christian Ministry in Africa (i960), B. A. Pauw, Religion in a
Tswana Chicfdom (i960), M. Brandel-Syrier, Black Woman in Search of God
(1962), M. Murphree. Christianity and the Shona (1969), Ft. Mobley, 'the
Ghanaian's Image if the Missionar/: An Analysis of the Published Critiques of
Christian Missionaries by Ghanaians 1897-1965 (Leiden, 1970), D. Barrett
(ed.), African Initiatives in Religion (1971), T. Ranger and J. Weiler (eds.),
1 hemes in the Christian History of Central Africa (1975), and Gerdien
Verstraelen-Gilhuis, A \rew Ijook at Christianity in Africa (Gweru, 1992), a
posthumous collection of essays, all function with a wide frame of reference
and a principal focus upon the middle third of this century.
Novels by African writers are rich in depictions of Christian life and the
tensions with tradition a Christian commitment involved in this period.
While some are more descriptive, others arc more ideologically
determined. From what is now a very considerable literature any selection
to illustrate Christian life between 1920 and 1960 is likely to include Chinua
Achebe, Arrow of God (1964), and No Longer at Case (i960), Ngugi wa
Bibliography 677
Thiong'o (formerly James Ngugi), The River Between (1965) and A Grain of
Wheat (1967), Mongo Beti, Le pauvre Christ de Botnba (1956; English
translation Ihe Poor Christ of Botnba, 1971) and Mission terminée (1957;
English translation Mission to Kala, 1958), and Peter Abrahams, Ihe View
from Coyaba (1985). For further discussion see JRA 191 (February) (1989).
Two exceptionally perceptive analyses of African Christianity written in
the finit part of this period are Norman Leys, Kenya (1924), 210-55
"Christian Missions', and Monica Hunter, 'An African Christian Morality',
Africa, 10 (1937), 265-92. See also Monica Plunter's Reaction to Conquest
(1936), a study of Pondoland, L Schapera, Christianity and the Tswana (1958),
and T. Rangers delightful Taking Hold of the Land: Holy Places and
Pilgrimages in Twentieth-Century Zimbabwe', Past and Present, 117 (1987),
158-94.
2. Protestant Missions
For Protestant missionary approaches in this period, particularly in regard to
African culture, one can best start with Edwin Smith, 7he Christian Mission
in Africa. a study based on the work of the International Conference at Le
Zoute, 1926 (1927), R . Allen. Le Zoute: A Critical Review of Ihe Christian
Mission in Africa' (1927), E. Smith, 'Ihe Golden Stool (1926), Roland Allen.
'Ihe Spontaneous Expansion of the Church (1927), E. R . Morgan (ed.), Essays
Catholic and Missionary (1928). D. Westermann, Africa and Christianity (1935),
D. Shropshire, 'the Church and Primitive Peoples (1938), G. Parrinder, West
African Religion (1949), E. Smith (ed.), African Ideas of God (1950), J. V.
Taylor, 'Ihe. Primal Vision (1963), T. Ranger, 'Missionary Adaptation of
African Religious Institutions: The Masasi Case', T. Ranger and 1.
Kimambo (eds.), The Historical Study of A frican Religion (1972), 221-47, E.
Jaeschke, Bruno Gutmann, his Life, his Thoughts, his Work: An Early Attempt at
a Theology in an African Context (Erlangen, 1985), P. Forster, 'Missionaries
and Anthropology: The Case of the Scots of Northern Malawi', JRA 16
(1986), 101-20, P. Forster, T Gullen Young: Missionary and Anthropologist
(1989), G. Parrinder, 'Dahomey Haifa Century Ago\JRA 19 (1989), 264-
73, N. King and K. Fielder, Robin Lxmburn: Prom a Missionary's Notebook:
'Ihe Yao of Tunduru and Other Essays (Saarbrücken, 1991).
There LS as yet no even partially adequate study of J. H. Oldham, but see
the memoirs by J. Dougall in International Revietv of Mission, 59 (1970), 8—22,
and Kathleen Bliss in Dictionary of National Biography (1961-70), 806-8, W.
Flogg, Ecumenical Foundations: A History of the International Missionary Council
and its Nineteenth-Century Background (1952), E. Smith, T h e Story- of the
Institute', Africa, 7 (1934). 1-27, G. Bell, Randall Davidson, Archbishop of
Canterl?ury (1935), as well as his own books Christianity and the Race Problem
(1925) and (with B. D. Gibson) The Remaking of Man in Africa (1931), J. Cell,
6 4<S Bibliography
By Kenya Possessed: The Correspondence of Norman Leys and J. H. Oldham
1918-1926 (197 6). Hugh Tinker The Ordeal of Love: C. H Andrews and India
(1979) has much about Kenya and Oldham, as has 13. S. Bennett. 'The
Archbishop of Canterbury in Politics 1919-1939: Selected Case Studies',
Ph.D. thesis (Cambridge, 1992). For someone who was, in a way, Oldham's
principal successor, at least as regards African concerns, see A. Porter,
'Margery Perham: Christian Missions and Indirect Rulc\ Journal of Imperial
and Commonwealth History, 19/3 (1991), 83-99.
Owen and Arthur have been discussed in a number of studies: J.
Lonsdale, 'European Attitudes and African Pressures: Missions and
Government in Kenya Between the Wars'. Race\ 10 (1968—9), 1 4 1 - 5 1 , J.
Lonsdale, 'Political Associations in Western Kenya', in R. Rotberg (ed.).
Protest and Power in Black Africa (1970), 589-638, L. Spencer, 'Defence and
Protection of Converts: Kenya Missions and the Inheritance of Christian
Widows 1912-1931', JRA 5 (1973), T07-27, M. Whisson andj. Lonsdale,
"The Case ofJason Gor and Fourteen Others: A Luo Succession Dispute in
Historical Perspective', Africa, 45 (1975), 50-66, D. Wylie, 'Confrontation
over Kenya: The Colonial Office and its Critics 1918-1940', JAH (1977),
427-47, N. Murray, 'Archdeacon W. £. Owen: Missionary as Propagandist',
IJA 15 (1982), 653--70, and L. Spencer, 'Christianity and Colonial Protest:
Perceptions of W. E. Owen, Archdeacon of Kavirondo', 13 (1982),
47-60. See also R . Githige. T h e Mission-State Relationship in Kenya
1888-1938', Ph.D. diesis (Aberdeen, 1982).
For Cripps see D V. Steere, God's Irregular: Arthur Shearly Cripps (1973),
M. Steele, '"With Hope Unconquercd and Unconquerable . . .": Arthur
Shearly Cripps, 1869-1952', in T. Ranger and J. Weiler (eds.). Themes in the
Christian History of Central Africa (1975), 152-74, and G. Brown, A.
Chennels, and L. Rix (eds.), Arthur Shearly Cripps: A Selection of his Prose and
Verse (Gweru, 1976). For Schweitzer, another odd man out, see G. Seaver,
Albert Schweitzer: 'the Man and his Mind (1947) and N. Griffith and L.
Person, Albert Schweitzer: An International Bibliography (Boston, Mass., 1981).
I lis own accounts of his missionary work are On the Edge of the Primeval
Eorest (1922) and More j'rom the Primeval I-orest (1931).
Studies of other missionary figures: C. F. Andrews, John White of
Mtehonaland (1935), J. Weiler, 'The Influence 011 National AfFairs of Alston
May, Bishop of Northern Rhodesia, 1914-40', in Rangerand Weller (eds.),
7 hemes in the Christian History of Central Africa, 195-211, S. Morrow, ' " O n
the Side of the Robbed": R . J . B. Moore, Missionary on the Copperbelt
i 9 3 3 - i 9 4 i \ JRA 19 (1989), 244-63. Max Warren's autobiography is
entitled Crowded Canvas (1974) and his biography by F W. Dilhstone, Into
All the World (1980).
Bibliography 679
3. Education
The two Phelps-Stokes Reports (New York. 1920 and 1924), both entitled
Education in Africa and edited by T. Jesse Jones, are foundational for
education in this period. The first deals chiefly with Sierra Leone, Liberia,
Gold ("oast, Nigeria, South Africa, the Belgian Congo, and Angola, the
second with eastern and central Africa. The best subsequent wide-ranging
surveys are to be found in the two editions of Lord Hailey s An African
Survey (1938), 1207-1308, (1956), 1132-1262. Other earlier works to be
noted are A. V. Murray's outstanding Ihe School in the Bush (1929; 2nd edn.
1938), H. Dumbrell (ed.). Letters to African 'teachers (1935), and A. Mayhew,
Education in the Colonial Empire (1938). A. Kerr, fort Hare 1915-1948 (1968)
and R . 11. Shepherd, Lovedale, South Africa, 1824 -1955 (Lovedale, 1971) give
the historv/ of two of the most influential missionarv• educational
institutions, and L. B. Greaves, Carey Francis of Kenya (1969) a biography
of one of the most famous of missionary headmasters. Among recent books
the following may be noted: I). G. Scanion (ed.), Church, School and
Education in Africa (New York, 1966), J. E. Anderson. 'Ihe Struggle for the
School: The Interaction of Missionary, Colonial Government and Nationalist
Enterprise in the Development of Formal Education in Kenya (1970), K. King,
Pan-Africanism and Education (1971). K. Elliott, An African School: A Record of
Experience. (Cambridge, 1970). E. Berman (ed.), African Reactions to
Missionary Education (New York, 1975), L. and N. Sanderson. Education,
Religion and Politics in Southern Sudan 1899-1964 (1981), and N. Omenka,
Ihe School in the Service of Evangelization: 'Ihe Catholic Educational Impact in
Eastern Nigeria 1886-1950 (Leiden, 1989), together with the following
articles: T. Ranger, 'African Attempts to Control Education in East and
Central Africa 1900-1939', Past and Present, 32 (1965), 57-85, F. Carter,
'Co-operation in Education in Uganda: Mission and Government
Relations in the inter-War Period', BSACI-I 2 (1967), 259-75, K. Ward,
'Evangelism or Education? Mission Priorities and Educational Policy in the
African Inland Mission 1900-1950', Kenya Historical Review 3 (1975), 243-
60, E. K. Mashingaidze, 'Government-Mission Cooperation in African
Education in Southern Rhodesia up to the Late 1920s', Kenya Historical
Review, 4 (1976), 265-81, A. E. Afigbo, 'The Missions, the State and
Education in South-Eastern Nigeria 1956-71', in CIA 176-92, C. Cooke,
'Church, State and Education: The Eastern Nigerian Experience 1950-67',
in CIA 193-206, S. Morrow, 1 "No Girl Leaves the School Unmarried":
Mabel Shaw and the Education of Girls at Mbereshi, Northern Rhodesia',
IJA 19 (1986), 601-36, B. Carmody, 'Conversion and Schools at Chikuni
1905-39', Africa, 58 (1988), 193-209, and G. Verstraelen-Gilhuis, 'African
Education as Seen from Le Zoute, 1926', A New lx>ok at Christianity in Africa
(Gweru, 1992), 31-61.
6 4<S Bibliography
4. I}rotestant Churches
For the history' of Protestant Churches and their developing life the
International Review of Missions (1912- , London, then Geneva) is a valuable
source throughout this period. J. V. Taylor. 'The Growth of the Church in
Buganda (1958), L Schapera, Christianity and the Tswana (1958), K.
Braekman, Histoire du Protestantisme au Congo (Brussels. 1961), J. V. Taylor
and D. Lehmann, Christians of the Copperbelt (1961), P Chater, Grass Roofs:
lite Story of St Faith's Farm (1962), N. Smith, 'Ihe Presbyterian Church of
Ghana 1835-1960 (1966), G. D.Johnston, 'Ohafia 1911-1940: A Study in
Church Developments in Rastern Nigeria', BSACH 2 (1966), 139-54, M.
Nissen, An African Church is Born: 'Ihe Story of the Adamawa and Central
Sardautia Provinces in Nigeria (Denmark, 1968), W. V. Stone, 'The
Livingstonia Mission and the Bemba', BSACH 2 (1968), 3 1 1 - 2 2 . R .
Sweeting, 'The Growth of the Church in Buwalasi (Uganda)', BSACH 2
(1968), 334-49, and 3 (1969-70). 15-27. F. P. Cotterell, 'An Indigenous
Church in Southern Ethiopia', BSACH 3 (1969-70), 68-104, R .
MacPherson, The Presbyterian Church in Kenya (1970), J. Gration, 'The
Relationship of the Africa Inland Mission and its National Church in Kenya
between 1895 and 1971', Ph.D. thesis (New York University, 1974), O.
Saeveras, On Churcft-Mission Relations in Ethiopia 1944-1969: With Special
Reference to the Evangelical Church Mekane Yesus and the Lutheran Missions
(Oslo, 1974), E. Crampton, Christianity in Northern Nigeria (Zaria, 1975), I -
Sanderson, 'The Sudan Interior Mission and the Condominium Sudan
1937—1955% JRA 8 (1976), 13-40, K. Ward, T h e Development of
Protestant Christianity in Kenya 1910-1940', Ph.D. thesis (Cambridge,
1976), W. Johnson, Worship and Freedom: A Black American Church in Zambia
(1977), R . Stravcr, 'Ihe Making of Mission Communities in East Africa:
Anglicans and Africans in Colonial Kenya 1875-1935 (1978), B. Sundkler, Bara
Bukoba: Church and Community in Tanzania (1980), W. Omulokoli, 'The
Historical Development of the Anglican Church among Abaluyia 1905-
1955', Ph.D. thesis (Aberdeen, 1981), G. Verstraelen-Gilhuis. From Dutch
Mission Church to Reformed Church in Zambia (Franeker, 1982), S.
Chimombo, 'Dreams and Ntara's Man of Africa\ JRA 19 (1989). 48-70.
For the East African revival movement see J. E. Church, Awake Uganda!
The Story of Blasio Kigosi and his Vision of Revival (Kampala, 1937), Max
Warren, Revival: An Enquiry (1954), E. Wiseman. Kikuyu Martyrs (1958), C.
Robins, Tukutendereza: A Study of Social Change and Sectarian
Withdrawal in the Balokole Revival of Uganda', Ph.D. thesis (Columbia,
1975), J- Murray, 'A Bibliography of the East African Revival Movement',
JRA 8 (1976), 144-7. J. E. Church, Quest for the Highesi (1981), R . Anker-
Petersen, 'A Study of the Spiritual Roots of the East African Revival
Movement with Special Reference to its Use of Confession of Sin in
Bibliography 681
Public', M.Th. thesis (Aberdeen, 1988), K. Ward, '"Obedient Rebels": The
Mukono Crisis of 1941 \JR/\ 19 (1989), 194-227.
5. South Africa
A. Paton, Cr)', the Beloved Country (1948), T. Huddleston, Naught for your
Comfort (1956), M. Scott, A Time to Speak (1958), D. Paton (ed.). Church and
Race in South Africa (1958), including Ambrose Reeves, "Selections from the
Charges to his Diocesan Synod 1952-1957', 9-50, and G. C. Grant, 'The
Liquidation of Adams College', 51-93; M. Benson, Tshekedi Khama (i960),
I I. Stanton, Co Well, Stay Well: South Africa 1956-1960 (1961), C. Hooper,
Brief Authority (i960), A. Luthuli, Let my People Co: An Autobiography
(1962), Joost De Blank, Out of Africa (1964), P. Walshe, lite Rise of African
Nationalism in South Africa: Ihe African National Congress 1912—1952 (1970), H
Wilson and D. Perrot, Outlook on a Century: South Africa 1870-1970
(Lovedale, 1973), J. Peart-Binns, Ambrose Reeves (1973), A. Paton, Apartheid
and the Archbishop: 'Ihe Life and Times oj Geoffrey Clayton (1973), Freedom for
my People: Ihe Autobiography of Z. K. Matthews, with a memoir by Monica
Wilson (1981), A. Wilkinson, lite Community of the Resurrection: A Centenary
History (1992).
Among more recent analytical studies the following should be noted: T.
Sundermeier (ed.), Church and Nationalism in South Africa (Johannesburg,
1975), W. A. de Klerk, Ihe Puritans in Africa (1975), T. D. Moodie, The Rise
of Afrikanerdom (1975), J- de Gruchy, 'Ihe Church Stm&qle in South Africa
(1979), E- Regehr, Perceptions of Apartheid: 'Ihe Churches and Political Change
in South Africa (1979), L Hexham, Ihe Irony of Apartheid (1980). J. Michener,
'Ihe Covenant (1980), D.J. Bosch, 'The Roots and Fruits of Afrikaner Civil
Religion', i n j . S. Hofmeyr and W. S. Vorster (eds.), New Faces of Africa
(Pretoria, 1984), 14-35, A. Du Toit, 'Puritans in South Africa? Afrikaner
"Calvinism" and Kuyperian NeoCalvinism in Late Nineteenth Century-
South Africa', Comparative Studies in Society and Histor)\ 27 (1985), 209-40,
A. Du Toit, 'No Chosen People: The Myth of the Calvinist Origins of
Afrikaner Nationalism and Racial Ideology', American Historical Review, 88
(1983), 920-52, L. T hompson, 'Ihe Political Mythology of Apartheid (1985),
J. R . Cochrane, Servants of Power: Ihe Role of Fnglish-Speaking Churches
1903-1930 (1987), F. England and T. Peterson (eds.), Bounty in Bondage: 'Ihe
Anglican Church in Southern Africa (1989), M. Worsnip, Between Tu>v Fires:
'Ihe Anglican Church and Apartheid 1948-1957 (Pietermaritzburg, 1991).
For the Catholic Church in South Africa see F. Schimlek, Against the
Stream: 'Ihe Life of Father Bernard Huss, CMM, the Social Apostle of the Bantu
(Mariannhill, 1949), W. E. Brown, The Catholic Church in South Africa from its
Origin to the Present Day (i960), A. Prior (ed.), Catholics in Apartheid Society
(1982), and G. Abraham, 'ihe Catholic Church and Apartheid: 'Ihe Response of
6 4<S Bibliography
the Catholic Church in South Africa to the First Decade of National Party Rule
1948-1957 (Johannesburg. 1989).
8. Marriage
The Survey of A frican Marriage and Family Life, ed. A. Phillips, published
jointly in 1953 by the International Missionary Council and the
International African Institute, remains a standard text. Of its three
sections that on Marriage I.mws in Africa by Phillips was republished in 1971
and that by Lucy Mair on African Marriage and Social Change in 1969. The
6 4<S
Bibliography
third section. 'Christian Marriage in African Society' by Lyndon Harries,
has not been republished but could be considered as replaced by A.
Hastings, Christian Marriage in Africa (1973). L Schapera, Married Life in an
African 'tribe (1940) remains a little classic. See also 13. Kisembo, L. Magesa,
and A. Shorter, African Christian Marriage (1977), Eugene Hillman, Polygamy
Reconsidered (New York, 1975), and M. Kirwen, African Widows (New York,
1979).
9. Ilymnody
For the development of African hymnody in the mission Churches, H.
Weman, African Music and the Church in Africa (Uppsala, i960) remains the
most considerable work together with A. M. Jones, African Hymnody in
Christian Worship (Gwelo, 1976). See also S. G. Williamson, 'The Lyric in
the Fante Methodist Church', Africa, 28 (1958), 126-34, K. Carroll, 'African
Music', APHR (1961), 301-12, S. Mbunga, 'Church Music in Tanzania',
Concilium, 2 (Feb. 1966), 57-60, and J. Lenherr, 'The Hymnody of the
Mission Churches among the Shona and Ndcbcle\ in M. Bourdillon (ed.),
Christianity South of the Zambezi, ii (Gwelo, 1977), 103-21 .JRA 20/2 (June
1990) is entirely devoted to hymnody.
Abeokuta. Nigeria 243. 2 6 2 . 2 7 4 . 283, 339. Akinyele, Sir Isaac 5 1 4 . S 1 6 - 1 8 . S20, 537.
343~4» 35«. 354
Abcrcorn, Northern Rhodesia 544, 566 Aksum, Ethiopia 4. 9. 2 1 . 36. 134, 137, 139,
Accra, Gold Coast 540 1 4 2 , 149, 160. 163. 536
Achebe, Chinua 462 Aladur.^329. 5 1 3 - 1 8 . 526-7. 53*. 533.
Achimota, Gold Coast 545 5 3 7 8, 599- to-
A d Lucent 568 Alexandria, Egypt 5—<». 17. 44» 55. 74.
Adams College, Natal 3 6 1 , $45. 548, 594- 150 1
6<i6 Patriarch 66. 6 8 - 9 , 16s. 223
Adams. N e w t o n 2 6 4 - s Algiers, Algeria 2 5 4 - $
Addis Ababa. Ethiopia 236, 547, 577- /Mi II, Ras 2 2 3 . 229
Adel, Muslim Snltanace of 4, 1 3 6 - 7 . 150 Aliwaali, Alifomi 4 7 7
Adwa, Hthiopia 165, 226, 367 All African Conference of Chinches 605
.Allen, Roland 5 5-» 555» 5 7 7 8
liarde of (1X96) 2 3 7 - 8 , 367. 478
Alliance High School, Kenya 545. 553
Aforiso 1 (Mvemba Nzmga). King of
Alvares, Francisco 40, 44, 46, 69, 73 4. 130,
Kongo 76, 79—S5, 87, 90 i, l o i , 103,
140. 1 4 5 . 162
1 0 9 , 1 3 6 . 1 9 5 - 6 . 3 6 7 . 47**
Alvares. Manuel, S . J . 1 1 9
African C o m m u n i o n of Independent
Alvaro I (Nimi Lukeni). King of Kongo 82.
Churches 494
84. 86
African Congregational Church <22
Alvaro II {Mpanzu Nimi). King of
African Independent Pentecostal
Kongo 8 1 , 87
Church s 19
Alvaro III (Nimi Mpanzu). King of
African Industrial Society 486
Kongo 8 9 - 9 1
African Inland Mission 424, 4sS
Amanazaretha 5 0 2 - 3 . 529. 538
African Israel Church Nineveh 5 } 7
Ambinla. Battle of (1665) 103. 108 10
African Lakes C o m p a n y 2 8 7 - 8
Amda Masqal 41
African Methodist Church s22
Amda Seyon, King of Ethiopia 1 8 - 2 1 , 24.
Africa» Methodist Episcopal Church 41.S,
2 6 7, 4 0
497, 544. 594 America 1 7 5 - 6 . 178, 182, 245. 248, 360.
African National Church >94 419. 4 3 6 - 7 . s52, 561
African National Congress 4 8 1 , 594, 605 6 African Methodist Episcopal 4 1 8 , 497 8
African Native Baptist Church 502 Baptists 176, 4 1 6 , 4N6, 493
African Presbyterian Church 480. 5 2 2 Congregationalism 256, 3 6 1 , 362 „
African Sabbatarian Church 483 Evangelical Movement 183
Agbebi. l)i Mojola (David Brown Methodists 4 2 6
Vincent) 4 9 3 - 7 . 5 1 8 . 537 Presbyterians 262, 4 1 6 , 4 3 6 7
Agege. Nigeria 496 Sre al.<o Liberia; Maryknoll Fathers and
Aggrey. James 542. S s . <"»04 Sisters Mendt Mission
Aguleri. Nigeria 313 American Baptist Missionary Union. >ir
Ahui, Jean 507. S35 Livingstone Inland Mission „
Anken. J. I). 447 American Board of Missions 2 4 3 , 264. 414
Aiycloio. Nigeria 522, 533 American Methodist Episcopal
Ajuoga, Matthew 523 Church 4 1 4 , 480
AJuii people 3 3 2 . 4 0 2 - 3 Amha Seyon, Aqabe-Sa'at of Hayq 41
Akinsowon, Abiodun 5 1 5 Anihara, Ethiopia 22, 2s, 160 1, 2 2 2 3. 240
Akinyele, A. B „ Bishop of Ibadan 5 1 8 , $73 Amissah, Archbishop Sam 605. 6 0 7 - 8
688 Index
Aria a Mulungu Church 522 Aupiais, Fr 560
Anderson, Rufus 293 A x i m . Ghana 444
Andrade, Antonio d' 1 4 2 Azikiwc, Nnamdi 544
Anglican A d a m s Preaching Society 600,
602
Anglican Church: Babalola.Joseph 335. 5 J 5 - J 7 . 530. 5 3 7
18th century 1 7 3 . 1 7 8 - 9 Bachmann. Traugott 3 1 9
early-mid 19th century 182-3, ^ . S - ? » Badagrv, Nigeria 3 4 1 , 352. 354
210. 242, 245-7, 293-5 Baëta, C . C . 604 -5, 607
mid -late 19th century 2 1 4 . 2 5 2 , Bagamovo, Tangenvika 211-12, 2S^, 257,
256-7, 260, 277-9, 291, 301, 319, 335, " 267'
3 3 9 - 4 0 . 343—9. 352-8, 372. 3 7 5 - 8 4 , Bagemdir, Etluopia 222-3. 235. 239
388-93, 410-12. 415. 43-2-3. 449. 455. Bagisu people 587
457» 465~8> 494 5» 4 9 6 - 8 Baida Maryarn. King of Ethiopia 42. 4 4 - 5 ,
20th century 425, 429. 433-4, 446-7. *32, 134
449. 454" 5» 457> 462, 47"» 472, 474» Baillie. John 270
477. 485-Ö. 489. 4 9 4 - 9 . SO?, 5*3—18, Bakaluba. Matayo 482
531-2, 552. 555-9. 567-70. 5^7- 591-2. Bakhada people 2 1 7
596-600 Bakongo people 492. 509
.Stft* also Church Missionary Society; Bak wen.1 people 3 1 4 , 366
Universities Mission to Central Africa Balikuddembe, Joseph Mukasa 376-8, 381
Angola 85. 89, 91 2, 95, loo 3, 109, 1 1 4 , Balokole 'Revival' 537, 596-602. 608
118. 120. 123. 125—6. 129, 194-6, 248. Bamalaki Church 489, 5 3 2
250, 3 7 2 . 397. 4^6, 433, 455. 472. 478. Bamangwato people 366
549. 563 Bamatope, J. A. 5 1 4
Ankole, Uganda 335. 3 8 1 , 383. 460. 466, Bambara people 1 9 1 . 402
469, 4 7 1 . 597 Bambata Rising 483, 540
Antioka, Mozambique 442 Bana ba Mutima 528, 6 0 1 , 604
Antonio I (Vita Nkanga), K m g of Banabakintu, Luke 376-7, 379
Kongo 102 3 Banda, Dr Hastings Kamuzu S94
Antonio Francisco das Necessidades 373 Banfield, R e v d A . W. 445
Antonio of Malind», Dom 128 Bangweolo. Northern Rhodesia 566. 578
Antonio Manuel ne Vunda 80 1, 87, 126 7 Bannabikira, Ganda nuns 473
Antonio, Pa 374 Baptist Missionary Society 197, 244. 269,
Apena. Benjamin Paul 5 8 1 - 2 279. 385, 4 3 7
Apollonia (or Mattuta), prophetess 104, 107 Baptists 176. 180, 247, 257,288. 3 1 5 . 319.
Apostolic Faith Mission Church 500-1, 339. 343» 3 8 5 - 7 , 4 1 3 , 4«6, 4 ' 8 , 433-4,
52Z. 537 462. 508-12. 526-7. 578. 585
Apostolic Sabbath Church of C o d Baqt Treaty (652) 6 7 - 8
(VaHossana) 5 2 1 - 2 Bari people 266, 304
Aqabe Sa'at, Abbot of Hayq 24, 29, 35, 4 1 , Barotseland. see BUIOZJ
161, 166 Barreto, Francisco 78 9, 87
Arab people 54, >6-7. 6 3 . 135. 146, 189, Barreto,John Nunez. S . J . 1 4 0 . 1 4 2
236, 374-5, 406. 410-11, 429. 431-2 Barroso. Fr 387, 4 2 1
Arathi 519-20. s34. 537 Bartels F. 1.. 604 5
Arthur, J. W. 490, 519, 556-9, 593 Bartoleinewos. Abuna 29-30. 35
Ashanti people 185, 1 9 3 , 309, 3 3 2 , 3 4 1 , Basel Mission 2 1 0 , 3 4 1 , 4 1 4 . 4 3 3 . 455, 490
3 9 7 - 8 , 405. 447 Basutoland (Lesotho) 200, 256. 303, 438-9,
Asheri, Jedida 581 492. 501-2. 532. 608
Askia Al-hajj Mohammad Ture, ruler of Bathurst, Sierra Leone 187, 3 3 9
Songhay 54. 59—61 Baviaanskloof, South Africa 1 9 7 - 8
Assisi, Luigi-Maria d' 195 Bazin. H . Mgr 43 >'
Association for die Propagation of the Beatrice (Kimpa Vita) 104- S, 160
Faith 248—9 Bechuana people 207. 209. 3 2 2
Athanasius, Patriarch of Alexandria 5, 8, 10 Bechuanaland (Botswana) 286, 366, 367,
Augustine of Hippo 63. 65 4C9, 532. 578
Augustimam 85. 1 1 9 . 1 2 1 . 1 2 7 - 8 Belgium 406, 416-18, 423. 4 3 4 - 7 . 455. 49'»
Index 689
5 1 2 , 5 1 6 , 5 2 5 . 540. 543—3. 547. 550. Brancaleone, Nicolas 4 3 , 135
5 6 1 , 563 4, 5 6 8 , 601 Brandone, D o m AJvaro 1 1 6
Bella Krestos 1 5 3 Brass, Nigeria 346, 348- 9» 3 8 9 - 9 0
Beltrame, G. 266 Brazil 102. 106. 1 2 4 - 5 . 194
Bemba people 4 5 6 . 492. 524. 536, 566, 603 Breadfruit, Lagos 3 5 6 - 8 , 495, 497, 514-15
Bene, Pietro da 195 Brébcuf, Jean de 88
Benedict X V , Pope 5 5 9 Bremen Mission, Gold Coast 3 1 9 , 3 4 1 , 4 5 5
Benedictines 196. 373« 4 ' 8 Brésillac, Melchior de Marion 249, 2 5 5 , 296
of St Ottilien 4 1 4 Britain 94, 1 1 9 . 2 1 2 , 258, 279, 3 5 2 , 356.
Benin 50, 5 3 - 4 . 7 4 " 5 . 77. 79. 95» 1 1 9 20, 378, 4 7 0 - 1 , 4 8 1 - 2 . 488, 490. 516, 558
402, 447 Catholics 246. 297. 4 4 2 9 , 462, 561-2
Benoit, Pierre 479. 507. 535 "Civilization and Christianity' 2 8 5 - 7
Bentley, H o l n u n 280, 3 1 9 . 3 2 5 , 386. 4 2 1 . colonialism and imperial expansion 189,
435 ?99, 2 1 3 , 2 2 4 , 2 4 5 - 6 , 3 8 4 - 5 . 392,
Berber people 54, 56, 6 3 - 4 397-4CO, 404. 4 0 8 - 1 3 , 4 ' 5 «6. 4 2 9 .
Berlin. Congress of 4 1 0 , 4 1 6 , 4 1 7 436, 468, 53S
Berlin Missionary Society 4 1 4 , 4 3 8 . 5 7 6 Dukwana and 3 7 0
Bermudez. John 13 8 - 4 0 and education 5 4 2 - 3 . 5 5 3 . 5 6 1 - 2
Bernardo I. King o f K o n g o 84 a n d Islam 406-8, 462
Bernardo of Sào Salvador 196 Methodists 181, 182, 245-6
Berthoud, Henri 4 4 2 Protestants, Protestantism 177-8, 181-5,
Berthoud, Paul 4 4 1 - 3 226. 228, 245, 4»9, 481
Bessieux, M g r J e a n - R e m i 2 5 0 . 262 Select Committee on Aborigines 217
Bethelsdorp, South Africa 2 0 1 - 9 , and slave-trade 1 8 2 - 4 , 4 3 1 - 2
216-17 and T e w o d r o s 231, 233-4
Bethlehem Fathers 560 and World War I 402. s40
Bible Church Missionary Society 5 7 7 and World War II 546 8
B i c k e r a t h . Edward 186 Zambezi expedition 2 5 2 . 274
Bichler, F.dward, S. J. 4 3 3 ~ 4 nho Anglican Church; Church
Bigirumwami. Bishop AJoysius 573 Missionary Society; London Missionar)'
Birraux, J. M . , W.F. $66 Society; Universities Mission to Central
Bismarck. Otto von 399 Africa
Blackman s Church 4X5 British Apostolic Church 5 1 4
Blackman s Church of G o d 5 2 2 British East Africa C o m p a n y 287, 384,
Blake, William 2 9 9 - 3 0 0 4 1 1 1 2
Blantyre Mission, Nyasaland, 2 1 0 . 2 1 2 - 1 3 . British and Foreign Bible Society 244, 445
2 5 7 , 2 7 6 . 4 1 0 - 1 1 . 425» 4 - 7 9» 4 3 2 , 4 5 5 , British South Africa C o m p a n y 4 1 2 , 4 2 6
4^4» 487» 5 5 7 Bmderick, Thomas 4 1 8
Bloemfontem, South Africa s69 Brooke, Graham Wilmot 290, 3X9- 9 2
Blomficld, Charles, Bishop of London 293 Brown, Leslie, Bishop o f Uganda 5 5 6
Blomjous, Joseph. Bishop of Mwanza Brownlee, John 206, 2 2 0 - 1
568-9* Bruce, A . Livingstone 487» 4 S 9
Blyden, Edward 355—6. 407. 4 ' * Bruce Estates 4H6 7
Board of Commissioners for Foreign Bruce, James 165. 1 7 5 . 2 3 0
Missions ( A B C F M ) 2 4 4 - 5 , 293 Brunton, Henry 280
Boer people 236, 2 5 1 , 267, 286, 409. 4 1 1 , Biicking, M g r Hermann 4 3 4
429, 436. 569 Buddu. Uganda 4 6 5 - 6 , 4 7 0 , 4 8 1 , 565»
Boilat. A b b é David 296, 3 7 3 571-2, 575
B o k w c , John K n o x 3 2 3 . 3 6 1 , 3 7 0 - 1 Budo, Uganda 545
Bonny, Nigeria 3 3 4 - 5 . 348» 507 Buganda 309, 3 >2. 3 3 ^ . 3 7 1 - 8 5 . 3 9 2 , 402,
Booth. Joseph 4 3 3 . 4 ^ 3 . 4^6. 504 4 4 1 . 4 5 0 , 4 5 7 -, 4 6 0 , 4 6 1 - 2 , 4 6 3 , 4 6 4 — 7 5 ,
Borghero, Francesco 249 476, 492. 549
Borumeda, Council of (1878) 2 3 4 . 2 3 8 . 2 4 0 Catholics in 2 3 2 , 2 5 5 . 298. 3 7 2 . 3 7 4 ~ 7 .
Botelho, Esravo 1 1 3 - 1 4 3 7 9 . 3 8 1 - 4 . 4 1 5 . 4 * 2 . 4 6 4 - /. 4 6 9 .
Botswana, see Bechuanaland 474 5. 5 6 5 , 5 7 2 . 5 8 0 . 6 0 3
Bowen, T. J.. missionary 280. 326 civil w a r 381-2, 415
Braide, Garrick 4 4 5 ~ 6 . 449. $05. 507. 5 ' 3 Buganda (cont.):
6i)0 Index
and evangelization of neighbouring Crape Verde Islands 1 1 8
lands 468 78 Capiiem, Jacobus 1 7 8 - 9
government structure 3 7 4 - S Capuchins 8 8 - 9 , 9 2 - 1 0 5 . 1 0 7 - 1 5 . 1 1 7 - 1 8 .
human sacrifice in 3 3 2 1 2 0 - 1 . 1 2 4 - 5 . 1 2 7 - 9 . 156. 158. 194 6.
Islam in 375, 381 3, 406, 465 227. 237- 8, 255, 267, 3 1 7 , 387, 5 6 0 - 1
martyrdom in 378—y Cardoso. Matthen*. S J . 9 1 - 2 , 94, 127
Protestants in 246. 257. 3 7 - . 374 7. 379. Carey, William 197, 244, 259
381 4, 4 1 $ , 429, 464- 9, 470, 474 5. Carmelites 85, 90, 94, 374
580. 596 Carneiro. Melchior, S J . 140
transport 268 Carthage, Tunisia 6 2 - 4 , 25s
Sec alio Kivebulaya; Kiwanuka; Mwanga, Casalis, Eugene 20c, 309, 3 1 1
King Casement. R o g e r 4 3 6
Bulla, Tanganyika 566 Castro, Miguel de 93, 104
Buhaya, Tanganyika 474 Catholicism 168
Bukalasa, Buganda 5 7 2 3 r d - ! 2 t h century 6 2 - 4
Bukedi, Uganda 469 i$ch-if»rh century 72. 74. 79. 87. 142.
Bukoba, Tanganyika >76, 585
151. 193
Bukumbi Mission. Tanganyika 3 8 1 , 473
i7rh ceiuuiy 90. 95. 1 0 1 . 108. 1 1 0 - 1 1 ,
Bulawayo, Rhodesia 256, 4 1 2 , 4 1 4 , 521
I2C. 1 2 4 - 5 . *27. 142 -4, 151 8, 160,
Bulingtigwe Island 3 8 2 - 3
«93. 275
Bulozt, Northern Rhodesia 268, 455, 560
18th century 129. 164 5, 177, 193, 194
Bumngwire, Canon 335
19th century 1 9 4 - 6 . 2 1 3 . 2 1 5 . 2 2 6 - 9 .
Bunyaruguru. Uganda 4 7 1 - 2
2 3 1 - 2 . 235. 2 3 7 9, 244. 2 4 8 - 9 . 2 5 4 - 7 .
Bunyoro. Uganda 50. 469, 473
260, 2 6 2 - 8 , 2 7 0 - 2 . 277. 2 8 1 . 2 9 5 - 8 .
Burundi 474, 487, 532, 564, 576. 578
3C0. 304. 3 3 1 • 343- 372 S. 3 7 7 9,
Bushmen 199. 2 1 7
381 5, 392, 406, 4 1 1 . 4 1 3 - 1 4 . 4 1 5 - 1 7 .
Busia. Dr Kofi 605
»30. 4 3 3 . 435- 4 6 4 - 6 . 4 8 1 - 2
Butere Mission, Kenya 574
20th century 3cx>, 392, 406—'7. 4 1 5 .
Buwalasi Mission. Uganda 587
4 1 9 - 2 0 , 4 2 2 - 3 . 429, 4 3 3 - 5 . 4 5 0 - 2 , 460,
Buxton, T. P. 287
462, 4 6 9 - 7 0 . 4 7 2 -5, 477 8, 504-5.
5 0 7 - 8 . 520. 524. 52S. 5 3 1 - 2 . 538. 5 5 3 .
Byabacwezi, Regent of Bunyoro 469 5 $ 9 - ^ 9 . 5 7 7 - 8 . 585. 587 92, 594.
603 4. 607 9
Set <il.<i> Capuchins; I loiv Ghost Fathers;
Cairo, Egypt 28, 43, 55, 6 1 , 66, 68, i8S, Jesuits White Fathers
194. 229. 254. 374 Cekwane, Timothy 502, 505
Calabar, Nigeria 260, 3 4 3 , 562, 592 Cela Krcstos 152. 1 5 5 , 158, 160
Calata, James 606 Cesar, Julio 121
Caleb. King of Ethiopia io, 12 Cetshwayo. king of Zululand 309. 3 3 1 , 4 1 2
C'alia way. Canon Henry 264, 27%. 304. U 9 . Chagga people 403
362 Chanda, Mother Bemadelta Stuart 6 0 1 ,
Caltanisetta, Luca da 99 604
Calvinism 246, 256, 560 Chectham. bishop 355
Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Chembre Kouré, Battle of (1529) 137
Union ( C I C C U ) 596 Chewa people 324, 580, 5 9 1 - 2 . 600. 603
Cameron. Donald 541 Chichester. Bishop Aston 573
Cameron. G. R . 508 9, 5 1 t Chikuni Mission, Rhodesia 590
Cameron, John 3 1 9 Chilembwe, John 4 1 8 , 4 8 5 - 7 . 4 8 8 - 9 . 491.
Cameroon 242. 257, 262. 4 1 3 . 4 1 8 . 4 3 3 , SOS
455. 5 3 2 . 581, 6 0 7 - 8 Chilonga, Northern RJiodesia 561
Campbell. R e v d j o h n 204. 2 1 6 Chilubula Mission, Northern
Canada 88, 180, 245, 5 6 1 - 2 , 56s Rhodesia 2 1 4 . 566
Cao, Caspar. Bishop 1 1 9 China S8, 1 1 2 , 148, 1 5 3 . S71. 573
Cape 95, 1 7 8 - 9 . 198 9. 206, 245, 248, 248 China Inland Mission 290
9. 292. 338, 3 4 1 - 2 . 3 58. 398. 405. 409. Chingulia, D o m Jeronimo, Kmg o f M a h n d i
543 and Mombasa 1 2 7 - 8
Cape Palmas, Liberia 338, 507 Chinula, Charles 522
Cape Ibwn. South Africa 175. 193, 197,
199. 202, 207, 2 1 6 , 2 2 1 , 247. 256. S49
Index 691
Chiradzulu, Magomero 4 8 6 - 8 280. 286. 309, 3 1 8 - 1 9 , 3 3 1 , 3 3 3 , 362.
Chishawasha Station, Rhodesia 2 1 4 . 4 2 5 . 412, 424. 496
433 Comber. Thomas 385
Christ Apostolic Church 5 1 4 . S 1 7 18. 5 3 7 C o m b o m . M g t Daniel 2 5 3 - 5 , 296, 373-4
Quakers 1 8 3 , 4 1 5 , 424, 4 2 6
Quaque, Philip 1 7 8 - 9 . 341
Sabagadis 2 2 2 , 224
Quclimane, Mozambique 2 5 0
Sabiiti. Archbishop Erica 598, 6 0 8 - 9
Quimulaza, D o m Pedro Manicongo
Sabla Wangcl, Empress of Ethiopia 138,
Ambamba de 1 1 5
141. 159
Sabra, Abba, monk 15
Rabai, Mombasa 2 5 7 Sadare, Joseph 5 1 4 , 5 1 6 - 1 7
Rattray. R . S. 5 4 1 . 55.1 Sahara desert 4 9 - 5 0 . 5 4 - 8 , 397
Ravenna. Fr Eustachio da 1 13 14 Sahela Sell ase 2 2 2 , 2 2 4 - 6 , 2 3 6
R e a d , James 2 0 1 . 2 0 3 - 7 . 2 1 6 - 1 8 . 2 5 9 . 2 8 5 . St Anthony, movement of 1 0 4 - 7
287, 460 St Faiths Mission, Rhodesia 522
Read, James, Jr 2 1 7 - 1 8 St Petei's College. Rosettenville 4 5 5 . 545.
Rebmann, Johann 2 4 2 . 2 5 7 5 4 8 , 6 0 6 -7
Redempcorists 4 1 8 St Thomas Christians 1 5 5 . 1 5 7
Reeves. Ambrose 5 6 8 - 9 Sakar. Alfred 2 4 2 . 262
Regent. Sierra Leone 185 7, 209, 2 1 1 , 3 3 9 Salama, A h u m ( 1 3 4 8 - 1 3 8 8 ) 19, 29. 33.
Rhenish Mission 207. 428 Salarna. A b u n a ( 1 8 4 1 - 1 8 6 7 ) 228-9, 229-34.
Rhodes, Alexander de 88 235
Rhodes, Cecil 3 1 1 , 3 6 6 - 7 , 399. 4 1 2 - 1 4 . Salazar, A n i o m o 4 3 1
4 2 4 . 4 2 7 -9 Salomon, Dialungana K. 538
Rhodesia 127, 268, 4 1 2 . 4 1 4 - 1 5 , 4 3 3 . 440, Salt. Hem y 224
4 5 7 . 4 8 1 . 485. 5 3 2 . 544 Salvation A r m y 4 1 4 , 4 2 4 . 5 1 3
Catholics 111 4 5 2 , 5 6 0 - 1 , 573 Sandile. Xhosa C h i e f 368. 370
and C'entrai African Federation 549 Sào Salvador de Bahia 106
Dominicans in 121 2, 4 : 4 Sâo Salvador, Kongo 7 3 . 76. H 1 - 2 . 8 6 - 7 ,
Jesuits in 3 3 3 . \ 14. 4 2 4 . 4 2 6 89-94. 96-7. 99-108. 110. 1 1 2 - 1 3 . 116.
land grants 4 2 7 1 1 9 , 194 6, 385 7, 4 2 1
Methodisrs in 4 2 6 . 4 5 2 - 3 , 460. 595 Sâo Ibmé 7 2 . 7 7 - 8 . 83, 95. 1 1 8 - 2 0
settlers 111 543. 5 5 6 bishop of 82. 85, 90
•x 703
Saraqa-Birhan, Aqabe -Sa'at of I layq 29, Shoniwa, Peter (|ohane Masowe) 520-2,
3 2-3 531, 533. 537
Sarsa Dcngcl, King of Ethiopia 142. 14S, Sidaino, Ethiopia 2 4 0 - 1 . 5 7 7 - 8
I5S Sierra Leone 95 6. 1 1 9 , 1 8 0 - 3 , 1 8 5 - 7 .
Saulmiiller. K., missionary 2 3 2 2 0 9 - 1 0 . 2 1 3 , 2 1 6 , 245, 247, 249, 262,
Savona, Fr Chcrubino da 1 1 4 - 1 7 . 194 280, 287, 326. 328. 3 3 9 - 4 3 . 3 4 6 - 7 .
Saxony, Duke of 158 3 5 0 - 2 . 354 7, 363 4. 405. 4 1 8 , 444,
Sayfa-Ar'ad, King of Ethiopia 27 454, 4 9 2 - 5 . 497
Schmidt. Georg 197 8 Sierra Leone Company 1 8 0 - 1 , 1 8 3 - 4 , 284.
Schön. J. E 242, 2S0 287
Schreuder, 1 lans 276. 280 Silva, Belcliior da 142
Schweitzer. Albert 4 1 9 Silva, Louienço da 125. 175
Scotland 174, 2 0 5 - 8 , 2 1 7 . 2 5 7 - 6 1 . 264, 287, Silveira, Gonçalo da 78—9, 88
291. 363 Sisters of the Infant Jesus 6 0 1 . 604
and London Missionary Society 246 7 Siti Kazurukumusapa (Dom
mission landholdings 4 2 6 - 7 Domingos) t2i
See also Blantvre Mission; Church of Sjoblom. e\'. 435 6
Scotland; Ehnslie; Fraser; Free Church Slessor. Mary 2 0 5 - 6 . 260, 288
of Scotland; Hctherwick; Laws; Smith, Edwin 327. 5 5 3 - 4
Livingstone; Livingstonia Mission; Smith. Joseph 179
Molïat; Oldham; Philip. John; Soga, Smith, Mathilda 2 0 2 - 3
Tiyo; Stewart; World Missionary Smith, Sydney 265
Conference Smuts, Jan 548, 560
Scott, D. Clement 427. 429, 4 3 2 , 5 5 7 Smytbies, Bishop 2 1 4 . 291
Scott, H. E. 4 2 7 Soares, Manuel Baptista. Bishop of Sào
Scott. Michael 568 -70 Salvador 90
Sebastian, King of Portugal 78, 1 1 9 Society of African Missions 240. 255, 275.
Sebastian, M wane Mutapa 1 1 9 374. 4 1 8 . 56t
Sebastian, Oiu o f W a r r i 1 1 9 - 2 0 . 127 Society for the Civilization of Africa 251
Sebwato, Nikodemo 3 8 0 - 1 , 4 6 6 8 Society for the Extinction of the Slave
Sechele, King of Bakwena 309. 3 1 1 - 1 2 . Trade 251
314,320 1,366 Society for the Propagation of the
Sechuana people 32 5 - 6 Gospel 178, 244
Sekhoma. kgosi of Bamangwato 366 Society of Saint Patrick 560
Sellin 1, Sultan of Turkey 46 Society of Scheut 4 1 6
Sena, Mozambique 7 8 - 9 , 1 2 1 , 123 Sofala. Mozambique 46, 50. 78, 1 2 2
Senegal 190. 295, 373> 397 Soga. Alan Kirkland 370
Sengwayo, Mheke 522 Soga, councillor to Ngqika 220, 368, 370
Seraphim Society 5 1 5 . 5 1 8 Soga. Festiri 368
Seventh-Day Adventists 4 1 4 15. 522. 579 Soga. T i y o 260, 3 6 1 . 3 6 3 - 4 . 3 6 8 - 7 1 . 480,
Seventh-Day Baptists 4 8 3 - 4 491
Sbaka, King of the Zulus 3 1 1 Sokoto. Nigeria 190 1. 193. 402
Shanahan. Bishop Joseph 3 1 3 , 4 1 8 , 4 2 2 - 3 . Solomon, John Ahoomah 342
4 5 0 - 1 . 463, 56c Songhay empire 54. 58. 190
Sharp, Granville 1 7 3 - 5 . 1 7 9 - 8 0 . 183, 284 Sontonga. Maiikavi Enoch 481
Sharpeville. South Africa 549, 606 Sophiatown. South Africa 570
Shembe. Isaiah 2 4 1 , 3 1 7 , 5 0 3 - 5 . 529. Sortir, Fr Darnel Deng Farim 374
534 6, 538 Soshong, Botswana 2 5 6
Shembe, Johannes Galilee 534. 538 Sotho people 207. 3 1 1 , 438 9, 454, 463
Shire, Kivei 2 5 2 3. 256. 4 1 0 - 1 1 . 428. 486 South Africa 197 209. 259. 264. 292, 3 1 8 .
Shoa, Ethiopia 3 - 4 . 20. 22, 24 5. 3 1 . 35, 358 66, 3 7 0 - 1 . 401. 409, 438. 4 4 1 . 537.
137. 1 6 1 - 2 . 164, 168 9. 2 2 2 - 4 . 226, 544. 556. 568 70, 6 0 5 - 6
229, 233 6, 2 3 9 - 4 0 . 242 Catholics in 4 1 8
Shoko, Andreas 501 colonialism 306. 398, 529, 540. 542 3
Shona people 301, 325, 4 3 8 - 9 . 4 6 1 . 482. Congregationalists in 3 2 2 . 362, 364, 498
492 education 360 1. 364. 54 5
Shoniwa, John 531 farming 289. 360. 362
704 Index
South Africa ((four.): Susu people 185—<1
female associations 5 9 5 - 6 Svane, Pedcrson 178
impact of World War 1 4 9 0 - 1 SwatsSon, John 4 4 6 - 7 , 449, 4 7 1 , 533
Methodists in 206, 3 6 3 - 4 , 455. 479, 497. Swaziland 5 0 1 . 526. 5 3 2 - 3
595. 605 Sweden 205 6, 3 1 9 20, 4 1 6 , 4 3 5 - 6
missionary landholding 3 5 9 - 6 0 Switzerland 196, 292, 438, 4 4 1 - 2, 560 1
Moravians in 1 9 7 - 9 Sylva, Dorn Miguel Castro da 1 1 5
Presbyterians in 498, 499 Sylva, Dom Pedro Constantino da, the
Protestants in 197, 207. 4 1 8 - 1 9 . 499. 528. Clubcnga 104, 1 0 6 - 7
5 5 3 . 5*8
secessions 493, 4 9 7 - 9 . 5 2 8 - 9 . 5 3 2
Tabenmsi, Ethiopia 7
transport 2 6 7 - 8
Tabora, Tanganyika 404, 406, 423
white Afrikaner nationalism 5 4 8 - 9
Takla Giyorgis, King of Ethiopia 1 6 5 - 7 ,
Zionism in 4 9 9 - 5 0 0 . 502. 5 2 6 - 7 , 533, 602
169, 223
SiT also Bethelsdorp; Colcnso;
Takla Hawaryat. Samt 41
Genadendal; Kuruman Mission;
Takla Haymanot 22, 24. 30. 164. 168
Lovedale; Ntsikana; Philip, John;
House of 28, 38, 45, 1 6 2 - 3 , 227
Zionism
Takla Haymanot of Adwa 227, 238, 241
South Africa Compounds and Interior
lakla Haymanot, Negus (Ras Adal) 235
Mission 4 1 5
Iakla Haymanot, Negus of Gojjam 240
South African Native National
Takla Iyasus 4 2
Congress 481
Talbot, P. A . 445, 541
Soveral, Francisco de, Bishop of Sào
Tambo, Oliver 594, 6 0 6 - 7
Salvador 9 2 - 3
Tanganyika 3 1 9 , 324, 4 0 1 , 403, 4 1 4 . 4 2 2 -
Soyo, Kongo 9 0 - 1 , 96, 100, 106, 1 0 8 - 1 7 .
455» 459. 469. 482, 487, 490, 5 3 2 . 54
127, 194. 2 1 7
54^-5. 560, 564. 566. 573. 576,
Spain 7 1 - 2 . 7 4 - 5 , 88-90, 94 7, 101, 124,
587. 59«
126. 129. 150. 194
Iansi. Fr Michael 3 3 5 - 7 . 585, 5 9 1 - 2
Spelonkcn, South Africa 441 -2
Tasfa Seyon 140, 147
Ssebowa, Alikisi 3 8 0 - 1 . 4 6 5 - 7 . 4 8 1 - 2
Ta va res, Fr 94, 99
Ssematimba. Daniel 466
Taylor, John 347. 567. 580
Sscmogerere, Timotco 5 7 2
Taylor, William 3 6 3 - 4
Ssese Islands, Buganda 382. 466
Tempels, Fr Placide 568, 601 z
Stanley. Sir Henry Morton 257, 371 2, 374.
Temple, Sir Charles 407
385, 399. 4 3 4 - 5 Teniqat, feast of, 40 -1
Steere, Edward. Bishop 265, 267, 280 Teruel, Antonio de 9 7 - 8
Stefamtes 39, »35. 2 2 7 Tewodros, King of Etliiopia 34. 2 2 9 - 3 4 .
Stewart, James 257, 2 6 4 - 5 . 288. 3 6 1 , 365, 235. 236. 2 3 9
439. 4 7 9 - 8 0 . 483, 498, 5 5 7 Texeira. Joao 80
Stoffels, Andries 2 1 7 - 1 8 . 358 Theopolis, South Africa 209, 2 1 6 - 1 7
Stokes. Charles 263, 382 Thévenoud,Johanny 567
Storcr, Francis 275 Third Order of St Francis 6 0 1 . 604
Streicher, Bishop Henri, W. E 4 6 6 - 7 . 4 7 3 . Thompson, Thomas 178, 326
5 6 5 - 6 , 572 Thuku, Flarry 599
Strydom, J. G. 548. 569 Tigre, Ethiopia 4, 9, 21 2, 25, 29 30. 13
Stuart. Bishop 597. 599 1 6 1 - 2 . 222, 2 2 4 - 6 . 229, 2 3 2 - 7
Student Volunteer Movement 4 1 9 Tijaniyya 189, 191
Snmrman, Bootsman 2 1 7 - 1 8 Timbuktu, Mali 57. 5 9 - 6 1
Sudan 50, 54, 5 6 - $ . 6 0 - 1 . 234. 240, 248, Timotheos, Nubian bishop 68
266, 270, 3 7 3 , 4 2 3 , 4 3 1 , 469. 577. 59« Tindall, Joseph 3 1 5
Sudan Interior Mission 552. 577 Tlhaping people 2 0 7 - 8
Sudan L'nited Mission 552 Togo 4 1 8 , 4 2 2 , 4 3 4 , 455. 607
Sufism 189, 192 Tondibi. Battle of (159O >8
Sukuma people 403, 468 Tonga people 504
Sundkler, Bengt 534. 567 T010, Uganda 469 70. 4 7 *
Susenyos, King of Ethiopia 127, 142, Townsend. Henry 2-13. 262, 309. 3 4 3 - 5 .
1 4 9 - 5 2 , 1 5 4 - 6 . 158. I 6 0 - 1 . 230 354
•x 705
Transkei 256, 4 8 1 . 600 Vienna, Peace of ( 1 8 1 5 ) 195, 206
Transvaal 2 5 1 , 267, 441 2, 4 5 $ , 501 2. 5 2 1 , Villa Maria, Buddu 466. 565
543. 570 Villanova. Francisco de. Bishop 85, 1 1 9 - 2 0
Trent. Council of ( 1 5 4 5 - 6 3 ) 87 Vives, Juan Baptist. M g r 8 7 - 8 . 94, 1 1 2 . 127
Trotha, General von 401 Volker, Leo. W.F. 5 6 8 - 9
Tsharshu,|an 2 1 7 - 1 8 . 3 5 8 . 3 6 8 - 9
Tsonga people 4 4 1 - 2 . 454
Tswana people 286, 3 1 1 1 2 . 365 7, 409, Waddilovc, Rhodesia 562
438. 492 Walatta Pietros 1 5 9 - 6 0
Tucker. Alfred. Bishop 268, 384, 392, 4 1 1 , Waldnieler. T h . missionary 2 3 2 - 3
429, 4 6 4 - 6 , 468, 472 Walker. Archdeacon 304, 383, 429
Tugwell, Bishop 3 9 2 - 3 Waliamo, Ethiopia 5 7 7 - 8
Turkana people 325 Wallo. Ethiopia 2 2 3 , 2 3 3 , 2 3 9 - 4 0
Turkey 137 8. 1 4 1 - 2 , 150. 1S9 Walukaga, N u w a 377, 3 7 9 - 8 0 , 383
Turner, H. M . 497 Warneck. Gustav 4 1 7
Tutu. Desmond. Archbishop of Cape Warren, Max 567
Town 570, 6 1 0 Warri, Nigeria 96, 1 1 9 - 2 0 . 127, 447
Wasukuma people 4 7 4 - 5
Watch Tower and Bible Tract Society 488,
Ufipa, langanvika 566, 578 504
Uganda 14. 2 6 1 . 267. 2 7 8 - 9 . 289, 304, 382,
Waterboer. Andnes 2 1 6 - 1 8 , 358
392, 403 4, 41 i - is. 422, 432, 4 5 3 . 4 5 5 .
Webe, ruler of Tigre 2 2 2 - 4 , 226, 2 2 8 - 9 .
4 57. 469. 472. 4 7 4 - 5 . 487. 489. 5 3 2 .
229, 231
537* 5 4 3 - 7 . 5$6, 560, 5 6 4 " 5 . 569, 573.
Weld. Alfred. S. J. 264
587. 599. 608 Wesleyan Methodists 245, 3 1 5 , 3 1 9 , 342,
Agreement (1900) 429. 466
4 1 4 . 446. 479. 490. 579
Ujiji, Tanganyika 2 1 3 , 404, 406
Wesleyan Missionary Society 179
Ukerewe, Tanganyika 474
Westermann, Diedrich 3 2 7
Umar Tal (al-Hajj Uinar bin Said) 1 9 1 - 3
Wcstland, Nils 280
Umtali, Rhodesia 4 1 4 , 426, 531 Weston. Frank 4 2 2
United African Methodist Church 496
White Fathers 206, 393, 4 2 3 , 456, 536,
United Gold Coast Convention 604
United Nations 547, 570 564-9. 583
Universities' Mission to Central Africa in Buganda 257, 3 7 2 , 374. 376, 3 8 1 . 4 1 5 ,
( U M C ' A ) 2 1 2 . 2 1 4 , 246. 2 5 2 - 3 , 2 5 6 - 7 . 467, 4 7 4 - 5 , 477, 565. 572. 575
260, 264. 269. 277, 291. 4to, 4 1 4 , 4 2 1 , clothing 206. 254
in the C o n g o 4 1 6
423. 434. 455- 459. 487
foundation 2 5 4 - 5 , 4 1 8
Upper Volta 334. 567, 608
111 French West Africa 4 2 3 , 4 3 0
Uslurombo. Tanganyika 2 1 2 - 1 3
in Gold Coast 577
Usuman dan Fodio. Shehu 1 9 0 - 2
linguistic knowledge 267. 281
and medicine 276
van der Kemp, Johannes 198 206, 2 1 6 -19. mission villages 2 1 2 - 1 4
2 2 1 . 2 7 3 . 280. 2 8 5 - 6 . 292. 296. 3 0 7 - 8 , in Northern Africa 255
3 1 5 , 325. 370 m Northern Rhodesia 5 6 1 , 566
van Sambeek. Jan 566, 578 in Nyasaland 422, 5 7 3 , 580
Van Wing, J.. S.J. 560 in Rwanda 573
Vapostori Church 5 2 1 , 522, 534, 5 3 7 and slavery 4 1 0
Vassa. Gustavus, ><v Equiano. Olaudah in Tanganyika 257, 4 1 4 , 4 2 3 , .566. 573
Vatican Council. Fii>t (1870) 254 in Uganda 416, 4 7 1 . 565
Vatican Council, Second (1962) f x : 7 - 9 White Fathers (rørif.)
Venn, Henry 279. 290. 2 9 3 - 5 . 298. 309, See »tiso Lavigerie
343. 345. 355. 357. 468 White, James 352. 354
Verm. John 293 Wime. John 280, 4 3 3 , 559
Verona Fathers 2 5 4 - 5 . 4 1 8 White Sisters 426
Vecwoerd, Dr Hendrik 5 4 8 - 9 Wilbertorce, William 183. 245. 287. 4 1 0
Victoria. Lake 2 6 S - 9 . 3 7 1 . 403. 468. 4/0. Wilkinson, Moses 1 7 6
474, 4 8 1 , 545 Williams, Joseph 206, 2 1 9 - 2 ]
Vieira. Fr Antonio 1 0 5 - 6 Woguera. Battle of (i 543) 138
706 Index
World Council of Churches 5 5 1 , 606 za-Krestos. Movement of 160
World Missionary Conference (Edinburgh Zaïre (formerly Congo) 510. 5 1 8 , 5 2 1 , 5 3 2
1910) 3 1 7 - 1 8 , 3 2 0 - 1 , 324. 4 1 9 - 2 0 . Zaire. River (Congo Rjver) 7 3 , 75, Ï07,
5 S»-' m , 1 1 7 , 126, 2 6 1 , 269, 385
World War I 402. 4 3 1 . 4 8 7 - 9 2 . 540. 552. Zakaryas, Sheikh (Newaya Krestos) 2 4 0 - 1
559» 5 6 1 - 2 , 583, 6 0 i Zambezi Industrial Mission 486
World War ÏI 525, 543, 546- 50, 552, 564, Zambezi, River 49, 78, 120, 1 2 3 - 4 , 2 5 1 - 3 ,
583 256, 257. 264, 267. 397. 4 0 1 , 4 1 0 , 420,
550. 569. 571
Xhosa people 1 9 9 - 2 0 1 . 2 0 5 - 6 , 2 1 6 - 2 1 , Zambia 403, 475, 4 8 1 , 524- 5, 5 3 2
280, 307, 3 1 5 . 325. 327. 359, 3 6 8 - 7 1 . See also Northern lUiodesia
4 3 8 - 9 , 463. 492, 499. 544 Zanzibar 193, 2 1 1 - 1 2 , 2 4 2 , 2 5 6 - 7 , 264,
Xintomane. Lois 4 4 1 - 2 , 446 2 9 ' . 399» 402, 407» 4 1 0 , 4 3 1 - 2
Zara Ya'iqob, King of Ethiopia 3 - 5 , 19. 24.
Yagbe'a Seyon, King of Ethiopia 4 2 28, 34. 4 3 - 4 , 68, 134, 144, 150, 1 6 1 ,
Ya'iqob. Abuna 18. 2 5 - 7 166, 168
Yao people 286, 406 policies of 3 4 - 4 2
Yikunno AjnJak, King of Ethiopia 20, 27 Zigubn, Frank 439
Yimrha-Krestos, King of Ethiopia 27 Zimbabwe 522. 5 3 2
Yohannes I, King o f Ethiopia 159, 162 -3 See also Rhodesia
Yohannes 111. King of Ethiopia 223. 2 2 7 Zion Christian Church 501
Yohannes IV, King of Ethiopia 2 3 4 - 6 , Zionism 4 9 9 - 5 0 5 , 5 2 0 - 1 , 5 2 6 - 7 , 5 3 3 ,
238-40 537-8, 602
Yohannes. eccage of Ethiopia 147 Zionist Apostolic Church 500
Yoruba people, Yorubaland 53- 4, 187, Zoa, Jean, Archbishop 608 9
1 9 2 - 3 . 279. 307, 3 - 4 . 326. 3 3 2 . 334. Zoungrana, Paul, Archbishop 608
3 4 0 - 7 , 3 5 0 - S , 360, 364, 375, 4 0 2 - 3 , Zulu Congregational Church 498
405. 440, 449» 492» 495, 497, 5 * 4 - 1 6 , Zulu Mbiyana Church 498
5 1 8 - 1 9 . 5 3 3 , 550 Zulu people 205, 2 7 1 , 2 7 4 , 286. 309,
Yosab, Abuna 167- 9, 223 3 1 1 - 1 2 , 3 3 3 , 397 8, 4 1 2 , 492, 499, 5 0 1 ,
Young, Gullen 554 503
Zuluhnd 2 4 î , 256, 276, 3 2 2 , Î58, 4 1 2 . 5 0 1 ,
Z a Dcngel, King of Ethiopia 149, 1 5 1 , 160
536