Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (149 page)

There was certainly demand for the new message. People all over Africa, uprooted by local wars or the recent interference of Europeans, were as eager as industrial workers in Georgian England to find new purpose and structure for their lives. Even while missionary societies were first dispatching volunteers from Britain early in the nineteenth century, a far less formal dispersal of Christian knowledge was exuberantly travelling out of the first British Protestant coastal footholds in southern and West Africa, almost without the missionaries noticing. Through much of the continent, both trade and the need for pastoralists and arable farmers to move on from easily exhausted soils or pastures encouraged Africans to travel over long distances. Young men from inland went to find work on the coast; they returned home, having witnessed a new religion and sung its hymns. Women were the mainstay of trade in West Africa, and in Sierra Leone many Krio women highly gifted in commerce were seized by enthusiasm for Christian faith. On their far travels out of the colony, they marketed Christianity as successfully as all their other wares, like the Syrian merchants of Central Asia long before them.

As a result, it was rare in nineteenth-century Africa for a European missionary to appear in any community which had apparently never before enjoyed a visit from a white man and not find someone who recognized what he was talking about. If the personal chemistry worked between missionary and this new acquaintance, such a person could become a teacher, prepared to go on repeating and recreating the Christian message when the European moved on: speaking to Africans in African ways. It was a rediscovery of the vital role of catechists like those whom Catholic missionaries had already employed in Latin America, central Africa and China in previous centuries, and it paralleled what was going on in Christianizing the Pacific. Local voices had much more chance of conveying what the missionaries were trying to bring in an alien cultural form: joy. Dan Crawford, a missionary from the British 'Brethren' movement, came to Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century as an unusually sensitive guest. In his missionary work, he drew on the Brethren's tradition of carefully eschewing any religious hierarchy, and he watched and listened. As he observed a convert lady dancing, he grasped how great were the marvels which he himself could hardly enter:

to me, a new-comer, what a gazing-stock! The amazing, maddening mix-up of the prayer in the heart, and the prance in the feet! Asked her what it meant at all at all, and she quaintly replied, '
Oh! it is only the praise getting out at the toes
.'
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What messages made the new Christians dance? At the risk of seeming foolishly patronizing to a multitude of different peoples across a vast continent, it is worth drawing attention to a few themes, not always those which missionaries expected or wanted converts to pick up from the good news. At the heart of Christianity is a book full of signs and wonders testifying to God's power, and Africans were accustomed to looking for those. Their religions commonly spoke of spirits and provided explanations of the mysteries of world origins and creation: so did this book. It was full of genealogies: most African societies delighted in such repetitions, when they bored or baffled pious Europeans, who had often turned to Africa precisely to make their mark unhampered by the snobbery of long-pedigreed gentry back home. In fact, Africans might take the book more seriously than the missionaries who brought it, in the sense that they confidently expected concrete results from the power of God. That was a challenge to European Evangelicals, who were likewise convinced that God wrought miracles in his world, but whose rationalism (born at whatever remove from the Enlightenment) provoked them into alarm at a literalism which differed from their own.

The Bible speaks without reserve about witches and at one point it suggests that they should not be allowed to live.
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African societies knew witches well, and many allotted power to witch-finders. Europeans did not want to encourage these rivals in charisma, particularly when the witch-finders encouraged the killing of witches, but if Europeans expressed scepticism, indigenous Christians might ignore them and take matters into their own hands. In the twentieth century, the results grew increasingly fatal in certain parts of rural Africa, where witch-killings marched in step with the growth of African-initiated Churches.
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This was by no means the only matter on which African Christians might look for specific action from their God beyond missionary expectations. In arid zones, missionaries were repeatedly expected to bring rain where there was no rain. They were after all travelling men preaching biblical power, and they ought to be able to do better than traditional rain-makers, who were often also charismatic wanderers, and as much their competitors as the witch-finders. Once more, even the most uncompromising European Evangelicals were likely to doubt that in God's providence the weather worked quite like that. It was particularly testing, as the Wesleyan Methodist William Shaw discovered after staging a round of sermons and prayers for rain to outface challenges from a non-Christian rainmaker, to turn off God's bounty once the recipients had had enough.
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Rainmaking (or rather the lack of it) ended the personal missionary career of the great Scottish missionary publicist and explorer David Livingstone. His one known convert, Sechele, King of the BaKwena in what is now Botswana, was a perfect prize, intellectually gifted and a fine orator, but he was also his people's rainmaker, and his powers appeared to have ended when he accepted Christian baptism. To Livingstone it was folly to worry about this; to Sechele it was crucial. In his frustration, the King broke with Livingstone on another matter which from different standpoints mattered very much to both of them; he took back his multiple wives. There was general satisfaction among the BaKwena at this. Livingstone was furious and left, never again to effect any conversions in his restless African travels. Livingstone's departure suited Sechele rather well: the King continued eloquently preaching the Gospel among his people unhindered by Europeans, he made rain and he honoured all his wives.
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Polygamy was one of the great stumbling blocks for Western mission, just as it had been long before for the Church of Ethiopia, and with equally inconclusive results (see p. 281). Here yet again was an issue of biblical interpretation. Polygamous African Christian men were perfectly capable of reading their Bibles and finding their ancient marital customs confirmed in the private life of the patriarchs in the Old Testament; usually in vain did Europeans redirect them to a contrary message in the Pauline sections of the New Testament. John William Colenso, a polymath with an inconvenient Cornish propensity for pointing out truths to those disinclined to see them, became first Anglican Bishop of Natal in South Africa, and he had great admiration for the equal clear-sightedness which he found in his Zulu flock. He became alarmed at their puzzlement about anomalies in the Pentateuch.
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His struggles to satisfy their queries eventually won him ostracism within Anglicanism, but apart from his notorious (and it has to be said clumsy) championing of sensible critical analysis of the Bible, Colenso also became convinced that the Zulu had a good case on polygamy. He said so in a pamphlet of 1862 addressed to the Archbishop of Canterbury. His fellow bishops worldwide were not going to agree with a heretical troublemaker, and the Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops (with the agreement of Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the one African present and on the relevant committee) condemned polygamy in 1888.
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Back in Sierra Leone in the same year, Anglicans hotly debated the same issue, when one speaker bluntly said that to recognize polygamy would 'make us all honest men' - but the bookseller who had proposed the idea found himself forced to resign from the Church Finance Committee.
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Colenso articulated what was unannounced but general practice among Anglicans and Catholics, when with characteristic candour he made it clear that he did not force Christian converts to put away extra wives, considering it cruel and 'opposed to the plain teaching of Our Lord' (who, on any reading of scripture, showed a firm if not consistently reported hostility to divorce). Colenso's pragmatism was equalled by that of the great missionary archbishop of North African Catholicism, Cardinal Charles Lavigerie, when considering with dismay another aspect of African esteem for marriage: the difficulties which it caused in recruiting local Catholic priests in the face of the Church's rule of universal clerical celibacy. Lavigerie, an enthusiastic student of Church history who took the long view, recommended that the Pope should authorize a married priesthood for Africa, but the obvious parallel in the married clergy of the Greek Catholic Churches of eastern Europe did not impress the Curia.
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When Churches took a hard line on such matters of sexuality, they might well find their flocks and even their clergy voting with their feet, as when, in 1917, sixty-five Yoruba ministers were expelled from the Nigerian Methodist Church for polygamy. Yorubaland, a cultural frontier where the contest between Islam, Christianity and traditional religion led people to a questioning spirit in religious matters, was not a country to breed meekness to external authority. The expelled ministers went on to found a United African Methodist Church whose 'united' character, like that of a previous 'United' Methodist Church created back in England, consisted in a sturdily united refusal to be bossed around by Wesleyan Methodists.
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By that period, there was a vigorous movement through most of Africa to found Churches independent of European interference: Colenso, indeed, had retained a loyal Zulu following when deposed by the Metropolitan Bishop of Cape Town, and it was half a century after his death before most of the remaining Colensoites were persuaded back into mainstream Anglicanism.
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The movement to create African-initiated Churches further fragmented African Christianity, but it might be regarded as a logical end result from the thinking of the more imaginative early missionaries. Among them had been an outstanding leader back in London, Henry Venn, grandson of one of the original 'Clapham Sect' and for more than thirty years from 1841 General Secretary of the Church Missionary Society. He was one of the first to enunciate a policy easier for Protestants than Catholics to envisage: an African Church based on a 'three-self' principle - self-supporting, self-governing, self-propagating. Naturally, for the Anglican Venn, this was not meant to involve ecclesiastical separation, but it demanded that local leadership should be established as soon as possible. A disastrous missionary venture of 1841 in West Africa prompted the CMS into acting on his strategy: a hugely ambitious expedition in the River Niger basin, during which fever struck down 130 of 145 Europeans and killed forty of them.

The Niger catastrophe seemed to show that Africans were better suited to withstand local conditions. Among its survivors was an African clearly endowed with leadership qualities, and who during visits to England had become a personal friend of Venn: Samuel Ajayi Crowther (his English baptismal names commemorated the Samuel Crowther who was a leading figure in the CMS). Crowther was another Yoruba - indeed, through his writings, he was the main agent in popularizing this proud self-ascription for his people.
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The British Navy had freed him from a slave ship bound for the Americas, and he then settled like so many freed Yoruba in Sierra Leone; he was eventually consecrated bishop in Canterbury Cathedral in 1864. His career, so promising and so prophetic of eventual indigenous leadership, was crippled through no fault of his own. Crowther's restrained dignity clothed a passionate hatred of slavery and ignorance. He could be unsparing in his criticism of African people, precisely because he wanted to arouse them out of the poverty and deprivation which he saw as caused by false religion as much as by slavers.
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Although as a member of the 1888 Lambeth Conference's committee on polygamy he concurred in the committee's denunciation of the institution, his hostility anticipated modern feminist critiques of polygamy's male-centredness. He couched his critique in terms of women's rights: women had not chosen polygamy, and although they usually worked harder than men, a polygamous husband was unlikely to satisfy all their needs (in one of his memoranda to the CMS, he told a cheerfully risque tall story to illustrate his point).
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After the initial visionary decision to consecrate Crowther, he was ill-served by an episcopal appointment which in reality did not at all exemplify Venn's 'three-self' principle. Allotted the diocese of the Niger rather than his own Yorubaland because of jealousy from European missionaries working among the Yoruba, Crowther did his considerable best amid an unfamiliar culture with a language not his own, but eventually he found himself facing a peculiarly ruthless trading corporation, the Royal Niger Company. His efforts to remain independent of them attracted much ill-will and resentment that an African should stand in the way of Crown and commerce. Eventually a younger generation of missionaries appeared in Crowther's territories, endowed with all the self-confidence of English public schoolboys and the brisk austerity of late Victorian Evangelicalism, plus a dose of plain racism. They were unsympathetic to Crowther's gentle style - 'a charming old man, really guileless and humble . . . but he certainly does not seem called of God to be an overseer' was the magisterial judgement of the twenty-four-year-old Graham Wilmot Brooke on the bishop more than half a century his senior. Crowther was induced to resign in 1890, and died a couple of years later.
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He was remarkably gracious about his treatment, and some of those involved later realized how foolish they had been. But no other black African was made a diocesan bishop until 1939, and then it was the Roman Catholic Church which had taken up the challenge of African leadership.
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In 2009, as this book goes to press, the Church of England is adorned by an Archbishop of York born and raised in Uganda, John Sentamu.