Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (150 page)

It was of course possible for indigenous rulers to make decisions about Christianity and provide leadership, just as in the Pacific. Many monarchs throughout the new British territorial empire chose Anglicanism. Perhaps the most celebrated example was the kingdom of Buganda, part of what is now the Republic of Uganda, where Anglicans fought off vigorous competition for established status from Roman Catholicism and Islam. In the process they gained a set of martyrs whose fiery deaths for refusing the orders of their Kabaka (king) to commit sodomy have left the Anglican Church in Uganda particularly sensitive to recent shifts in Western sexual mores.
⁵⁷
In the end, Buganda's identification between Crown and Church was so great that when in 1953 the British Governor of Uganda exiled the Kabaka of Buganda for political reasons, the Mothers' Union of the Anglican Church was loud among the chorus of furious protest. They complained that the Kabaka's exile endangered all Christian marriage in the kingdom, since the Anglican Bishop of Uganda had presided over the marriage of the Kabaka to his people when he bestowed a ring on him at his coronation.
⁵⁸

Another powerful African kingdom, on the island of Madagascar (now Malaghasy), likewise weighed up which varieties of Christianity (if any) to persecute or encourage. Eventually in 1869 Queen Ranavalona II settled not on Anglicanism but on English Congregationalism: an analogous triumph to Methodism's in Tonga and a tribute to the astuteness and persistence of the London Missionary Society.
⁵⁹
So Congregationalism had a new taste of state establishment after its recent American losses, albeit this time under an absolute monarch, but the end of the story was very different from Tonga's. The colonial power which overthrew the monarchy, late in the colonial process in 1895, was not Britain but France, and for decades a further paradox afflicted Madagascar, as anticlerical French republican governments allowed Catholic clergy a free hand they would not have tolerated at home, actively repressed Protestant congregations and confiscated Protestant churches and schools, all in aid of promoting francophone against anglophone culture.
⁶⁰
This was a rather curious example of colonialism and Christianization going hand in hand, although the Congregationalists survived repression and still have a substantial presence on the island.

Elsewhere, the inglorious end of Samuel Crowther's episcopate encouraged the formation of African-initiated Churches; the late nineteenth century saw the rise of leaders asserting their charisma as Old Testament prophets had once done against the Temple priesthood. One of the classic figures, whose influence is still felt all through West Africa, was William Wade Harris (1865-1929), a product of both Methodism and American Anglicanism. As a native Liberian of the Grebo people, marginalized therefore by the African-American Liberian elite, his career began in political agitation against their misgovernment which aimed to hand Liberia over to British rule, an interesting tribute to British colonialism. Imprisoned as a subversive, Harris was granted visions of the Archangel Gabriel, who relayed God's command to begin the work of prophecy. One aspect of the command was that Harris must abandon European clothing: that resolved the tangle into which his complicated relationship with Western culture had led him. Soon he was striding barefoot through the villages of the Ivory Coast and the Gold Coast (now Ghana), dressed in a simple white robe, bearing a gourd calabash of water and a tall cross-staff (after Harris, staffs became well-nigh-indispensable kit for any African prophet). He preached the coming of Christ and the absolute necessity to destroy traditional cult objects. With him was his team of two or three women, singing and playing calabash gourd rattles to summon the Holy Spirit.
⁶¹
Little in Harris's message beyond his angelic vision and personal style could be considered alien to the mainstream Christianity he had learned in his years as an Episcopalian catechist, although colonial administrators of antiquarian tastes deplored the destruction of local art which followed his visits. He himself recommended his converts to join the Methodists, but given his own tolerance of polygamy, that caused problems.

A feature of Harris's often brief visits in his tireless preaching (no more than a few weeks in the Gold Coast in 1914, for instance) was his extraordinary ability to leave permanent Churches in his wake - in terms of missionary impact, he was more John Wesley than George Whitefield. In the Ivory Coast, previously a Roman Catholic French enclave, Protestant practice mushroomed. The rich variety of Churches he left behind was characterized by local leadership and a propensity for building their own emphases into a distinctive system, beyond anything that Harris recommended. The Twelve Apostles Church in modern Ghana, for instance, has developed predominantly female leadership. Prophetesses preside over 'gardens', complexes of open-air church, oratory and hostel rather like a monastery; the prophetess's most prized ministry is healing, centring on Friday services (for which market women have decreed themselves a day off), the whole congregation dressed in red robes to honour the blood of Christ (see Plate 66). All these are developments independent of Harris. His gourd rattles nevertheless remain crucial to the liturgy, banishing spirits of illness with their clamour, while alongside them the skills of teenage drummers are given full rein. The Bible becomes a sacramental instrument, its touch calming the noisily possessed, and the prophetess bears a replica of Harris's cross-staff. The Twelve Apostles pride themselves on being the Church of last resort in affliction, even for proud folk who affect to despise such unsophisticated approaches to illness.
⁶²

Harris's early effort to play off the British against the Liberian authorities followed by his sudden rejection of European styles of worship echoed wider African reactions to a political situation transformed in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. A complete partition of Africa by European powers, through the Congress of Berlin in 1884-5, resulted in the destruction of a vast number of local power structures. The only lands left governing themselves were Ethiopia and Liberia, the latter a dubious exception. In King Leopold of Belgium's new so-called Congo Free State, a vast and scandalously misgoverned personal fiefdom, there was a sad symbolism of changed times when, in the 1890s, Baptist missionaries had no compunction in quarrying the ruins of Kongo's once-splendid royal and Catholic Cathedral of Sao Salvador to build a new church for themselves.
⁶³
Christian missionary organizations largely welcomed the new situation, although colonial administrators, mindful of the disaster of the Great Indian Rebellion of 1857-8 (see pp. 893-4), were generally careful to respect the large areas of Africa which were now Islamic - to the annoyance of many aspiring evangelists.

Still Christians had advantages. Now that colonial governments were demanding the regular collection of taxes and the filling in of forms, Western-style education was at a premium and only the Churches could offer it. In South Africa, the Xhosa word for Christians became 'School'.
⁶⁴
Some Churches became alarmingly identified with the new imperialism. Catholics, Anglicans, Scots Presbyterians, Methodists, Dutch Reformed, even the Salvation Army, all accepted large grants of land from colonial promoters in 'Rhodesia' (now Zimbabwe/Zambia) and Kenya, which provoked widespread resentment against their missions.
⁶⁵
Now it was possible to conceive of Christianity spanning the continent just as the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes envisaged a British-owned Cape to Cairo railway. Despite the unfortunate connotations of the image, it became common to talk about a 'chain' of missions across Africa, all belonging to some particular organization or Church. This generally European vision was to be fulfilled in a rather different fashion by African-initiated Churches.

22. Africa at the End of the Nineteenth Century

Amid the general European ascendancy, two ancient Christian Churches stood out as not having first arrived in Africa with the slave traders. Both were Miaphysite: the Copts of Egypt and the Ethiopians. The Copts emerged from three centuries of beleaguered existence to a new prosperity, thanks to the opening up of their country to Western Christian influence in the wake of French and British clashes over Egypt in the Napoleonic period. A triangular relationship developed between the Copts, Evangelical missionaries (particularly from the Church Missionary Society) and Muhammad Ali, the Albanian Ottoman soldier of fortune turned carpet-bagging ruler of Egypt from 1805, founder of a dynasty which survived the Ottoman fall to rule Egypt into the mid-twentieth century.

All sides had something to gain. The Copts were alert to the possibility of outside help after such long isolation, the English missionaries were not only eager to save souls but excited at the prospect of contact with so venerable a Church untainted by popery, and the Muslim Muhammad Ali recognized how useful it would be to exploit a skilled indigenous people who could mediate with Western powers and provide a pool of administrative expertise. The CMS implemented a scheme to introduce European patterns of education; the Copts eagerly seized on the opportunity and were careful to take it over for themselves. The centrepiece became a Coptic Patriarchal College founded, as its name implied, by the head of the Coptic Church, Kyrillos (Cyril) IV, who initiated a wave of Church reforms, a surprising number of which survived, considering that he had only seven years in which to implement them. The CMS were disappointed in their initial hopes of mass conversions of Egyptian Muslims, but unwittingly they had aided a renaissance in an ancient Church. In the face of all the tribulations which followed for Ottoman Christians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was to prove one of the most successful in all Eastern Christianity.
⁶⁶

Ethiopia's continuing existence was the most emphatic reminder that Christianity was an ancient African faith, and the resurgence of its Church owed little to the sort of quasi-colonial assistance which benefited the Copts. In the early nineteenth century the Ethiopian Empire might have entirely disintegrated, but it was rescued by a provincial governor, Kassa, who hacked his way to power so successfully that in 1855 he was crowned Negus under the name of Tewodros (Theodore), the hero whose providential arrival as monarchical saviour had been predicted in a sixteenth-century Ethiopian Christian prophecy. Intensely pious - 'Without Christ I am nothing,' he declared - he ended the tradition of royal polygamy and toyed with Protestant missions travelling down from Egypt, some of whom had a particular use for him in their ability to manufacture armaments. But like several of Ethiopia's most energetic monarchs before him, Tewodros descended into paranoia and murderous vindictiveness; it was not good for his sanity to think himself lineally descended from King David. His cruelty alienated his own people, and his imperial posturing led to a British expeditionary force which crushed his armies at Maqdala in 1868. In despair, he turned one of his missionary-forged guns on himself.
⁶⁷

Ethiopia survived this disaster and its Church maintained its Miaphysite character. Yohannes IV, another provincial governor turned Negus, imitated Constantine in presiding over a Church council in 1878 to settle long-standing disputes on Christology, although his order to tear out the tongues of some of those challenging his decision rather outdid the Roman Emperor's enforcement of Nicene Orthodoxy.
⁶⁸
His less opinionated successor, Menelik II, brought the empire to an unprecedented size, and delivered the most lasting defeat suffered by a colonial power during the nineteenth century when he crushed the invading Italians at Adwa in 1896. It was an event celebrated all over Africa: a sign (like the Japanese victory over the Russian Empire nine years later) that Europeans were not all-powerful. It was also a triumph for authentically African Christianity, which might now turn to Ethiopia for inspiration.

Already in 1892, far away in the Transvaal, a Methodist minister of the Pedi people, Mangena Maake Mokone, infuriated at condescension from his white colleagues, had founded what he called the Ethiopian Church.
⁶⁹
Here was a name for a Church which, unlike any other title - Methodist, Anglican, even Catholic - was actually to be found in the Bible. Mokone was mindful of the psalm-verse (68.31) 'let Ethiopia hasten to stretch out her hands to God' - a scriptural fragment which, in conjunction with the story in Acts 8.26-40 of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch, was destined to have huge repercussions through the continent over the next century. In a remarkably deft piece of Anglican diplomacy, the nucleus of Mokone's Ethiopian Church eventually ended up as an 'Order of Ethiopia' in union with the mainstream South African Anglican Church, but the impulse to honour the victorious empire spread elsewhere through a great variety of African-initiated Churches. A parallel urge to look for a truly African historic episcopal succession led some African Christians to form congregations under the jurisdiction of the tiny Church presided over by the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Alexandria; but Ethiopia remained and remains the chief symbolic focus.
⁷⁰