“Africa is our Fatherland”: The Black Atlantic,Globalization,and Modern African Christianity

Africans and African Christianity

The notion that modern African Christianity is largely a Western creation remains widespread, even among Africans. In part, this has to do with the enduring perception that mainline churches in Africa are essentially extensions (or auxiliaries) of mother denominations in Europe and North America. Even the newer post-1970s Charismatic or neo-Pentecostal movements are deemed to reflect not the impulses and fruit of African spirituality and experience but the products of the global spread of American evangelicalism. ¹ Most importantly, Western missionary historiography is steeped in analyses that link the planting of the church on African soil to the arrival of foreign agents. ²

This entrenched view has a long history, as the reports on Africa at the historic 1910 Edinburgh World Missionary Conference demonstrate. The relevant report estimated that there were some 150 million Africans on the continent who needed to be evangelized. ³ But, after noting that the way was now open to European missionaries, in part due to expansive colonization, the assessment of the prospects of Christianity on the continent concluded that “if things continue as they are now tending, Africa may become a Mohammedan continent.” ⁴ This remarkable prognosis reflected a keen awareness that African conversion to the Muslim faith was “proceeding rapidly and continuously in practically all parts of the continent,” mainly through the movement of Muslim traders. ⁵ But it was also the product of an outlook that neither made room for African initiatives nor factored in indigenous agency, even though the previous century was marked by extraordinary African missionary efforts. The conviction that the fate of African societies and the fortunes of Christianity on the continent depended on the designs and dominating control of European powers and agents was much too engrained.

The insistence that African Christianity represents the fruit of programs and projects conceived in the minds of foreign powers is striking for at least three reasons. First, as Lamin Sanneh points out, the same verdict is seldom applied to Islam; which means that the same processes of religious change are subjected to different standards of judgment. ⁶ Whereas the African embrace of the Christian faith is often deemed an ill-informed imitation of Western forms, the spread of Islam in Africa is often seen as “proof of its intrinsic merit,” free from external imposition. The Edinburgh 1910 reports, for instance, readily acknowledged the missionary role of itinerant Muslim traders but never considered the possibility that migration movement among African Christians had the same potential effect.

Second, the judgment that African Christianity is raised on foreign stock ignores the dynamics of religious change and the enduring potency of indigenous elements. For one, the vast majority of Africans had only minimal exposure to a white missionary; ⁷ most Africans were evangelized by Africans. Stipulating the arrival of foreign agents as the starting point of the church ignores the decisive ways in which the preexisting religious heritage shaped African engagement with the Christian faith. Not to mention the fact that religious change depended on the capacity of the gospel to address African questions and concerns. Similarly, the passive receptivity attributed to African societies and peoples is incompatible with the ways in which indigenous appropriation produced new understandings and fermented initiatives that challenged foreign control. As I will demonstrate below, careful historical analysis indicates that African agency, ingenuity, and creativity were indispensable for the establishment and the growth of the church in Africa.

Third, while European projects and activities form a part of the story of African Christianity, the extensive transatlantic movements and ideological streams associated with black Christians of the diaspora represent an even greater component. That this black Christian contribution remains largely ignored reflects the extent to which Western initiatives and agency are privileged in discourses of globalization and the history of Christianity. In fact, in many places on the continent it was Africans, either repatriates or liberated slaves, who “laid the foundation stones of the present African Church.” ⁸ Thus, the ingredients for an African brand of Christianity, albeit with the incorporation of some Western forms, were present from the very beginning.

In what follows, the term “black Christian” refers to Christians of African descent outside the African continent or, as some would term it, Christians in the African diaspora. This term is hardly without its problems, but it serves to distinguish this group from indigenous Christians on the continent. This is not to deny that there were major areas of convergence. Most importantly, the representatives of the two different groups whose experiences, ideas, and actions dominate the story were all emancipated or free persons. Their contribution, as David Northrup acknowledges, was made possible by “freedom, faith, and education.” ⁹

The term “globalization” now has an established place in the popular lexicon, even if it continues to be a source of confusion and contention. Simply put, the phenomenon captures the increasing convergence or deepening interconnectedness among the world’s inhabitants and implies that the people of the world “are [being] unified into a single society.” ¹⁰ One of the earliest definitions holds that it portends “the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa.” ¹¹ The extraordinary developments and technological breakthroughs that have attended contemporary globalization often foster the false impression that the phenomenon is recent. But most analysts now agree that what is called globalization today has deep historical roots. How far back the phenomenon can be dated is much debated, but there is some recognition that processes of globalization have been unfolding for thousands of years, linked to enduring features of human civilization such as migration. ¹² In this regard, the interconnectedness and exchange generated within the black Atlantic world is quite significant.

The 1910 Edinburgh World Missionary Conference provides insights into the processes of globalization that marked the nineteenth century as well as the new global consciousness these evoked. For a start, the dynamism and international reach of the meeting reflected the realities of the new global order. As Ken Ross observes,

the steamship had revolutionized international travel so that it became possible to contemplate bringing together hundreds of people from different parts of the world for purposes of conference . . . [and] the vast correspondence which gathered information from hundreds of missionaries spread across the globe would not have been possible on anything approaching its scale at any earlier time. ¹³

Strikingly, the meeting’s conveners also noted that “the whole world has become one neighborhood” where “the nations and races are acting and reacting upon each other with increasing directness, constancy, and power.” ¹⁴

But, then as now, the paradoxical nature of globalization was overlooked. At its most basic level, globalization is unfeasible without localization (or local adaptation); which also implies that the process tends to augment the function and capacity of non-dominant actors. The work of the foreign missionary, for instance, requires local translators or agents, which in turn elevates the significance of the latter and potentially limits the authority of the former. Many foreign missionaries who set out to change lives often find that the encounter with other societies and cultures changes their own lives; meanwhile efforts at cultural domination can and did strengthen ethnic consciousness. Along a similar vein, the phenomenal dispersion of Africans to distant lands through the slave trade embedded Africans in unfolding structures of economic and cultural globalization with unpredictable outcomes. The concept of a black Atlantic is useful, nonetheless, because it points to the escalating interconnections and varieties of transnational flows that marked processes of globalization in the nineteenth century.

In any case, the principled conviction at the 1910 meeting that the evangelization of the non-Western world depended (as far as human means go) entirely on the actions and resources of the Western Church precluded sufficient appreciation of the capacity of global processes to empower local or non-European actors in the spread of Christianity. Few contemplated the fact that the spread of faith inevitably multiplies the centers of missionary outreach which in turn stimulates further expansion.

Paul Gilroy first introduced the concept of a “black Atlantic” (or black Atlantic world) in the 1990s to describe the formation of a diverse transnational cultural network of African peoples within the transatlantic system. ¹⁵ The term gained widespread usage as a symbolic reference to the movement, intellectual production, and creative innovations of black people despite conditions of exclusion and oppression. As a “unit of analysis,” the black Atlantic captures the embeddedness of Africans and people of African descent within global processes of change. It also signals their contributions to the modern world. In the context of globalization, black Atlantic points to the post-emancipation interconnections forged among diaspora communities and between them and the ancestral homeland.

From a historical perspective, the black Atlantic is a product or manifestation of migration and relocation. ¹⁶ It signifies the powerful appeal that a shared identity and common ancestry exerted on the imagination and aspirations of the vast African diaspora. It also points to the almost gravitational pull that black Africa wielded on the missionary consciousness and vision of African descendants in distant lands with momentous implications for African Christianity. As Martin Delany (1812–85), a prominent black abolitionist, put it when making the case that black emigration was critical to the development of Africa (a position he came to after previous opposition): “Africa is our fatherland and we its legitimate descendants.” ¹⁷

Rather surprisingly, Gilroy gives little attention in his work to developments on the African continent. He also disregards religious forms or movements. Yet, understanding the role of religion is indispensable for a full grasp of the historic role of the black Atlantic; in part because religious convictions were a driving force behind key aspirations and initiatives that emerged out of this black Atlantic world. “Almost without exception,” remarks Northrup, “the pioneers of the black Atlantic were sincere Christians, not simply because it was the dominant religion of the diaspora but because . . . they found strength and fulfillment in Christianity’s story of redemption and equality.” ¹⁸ Needless to say, the same deep-rooted faith marked the lives and ministries of the African Christians with whom they collaborated; the majority of whom were first-generation converts and church leaders.

Abolitionism and mission

In America, as in England, the black Atlantic movement was stimulated by the conflux of abolitionism, repatriation, colonization, and missionary purpose. Abolitionism played an especially significant role in the developments associated with the black Atlantic. By drawing together likeminded groups in Britain, the Caribbean, and North America, abolitionism fostered transatlantic alliances in which blacks participated. It also provided the main impetus for Protestant missionary engagement in Africa, based on the widespread notion that freed blacks made ideal missionaries among African peoples. In this regard, the black Atlantic was not an entirely “black” or African phenomenon. It included key European strands or impulses. The two strands, African and European, were discrete in important ways—colonization, for instance, was a wholly white initiative; missionary emigration was a wholly black affair—but in a number of instances the two strands also converged. This is powerfully illustrated by the “back to Africa” movements that emerged separately in Britain and North America and provided avenues for black missionary enterprise.

It is important to note that, as a result of emigration, blacks were the first American missionaries in many parts of Africa. Indeed, it could be argued that every black emigrant who left America for Africa in the nineteenth century was in fact a missionary, ¹⁹ due to the general belief that American blacks were representatives or purveyors of Christianity and Western civilization. The majority of these black emigrants ended up in two destinations in West Africa: Sierra Leone and Liberia. The historical significance of these two settlements for nineteenth-century African Christianity deserves brief further comment.

African agency

The Africans and the black migrants who played a pioneering role in nineteenth-century African Christianity were emancipated, usually well-educated individuals, and typically male—an elite minority. There is space here only to highlight the contributions of a notable few, all of whom mirror in their lives and legacy the extensive migrations, missionary engagement, and transnational exchange (within the black Atlantic) that helped shape African Christianity.

Samuel Crowther (c. 1806–91) is well known as the slave boy from Yorubaland who became the first African bishop of the Anglican Communion. Crucial elements of his story—his liberation by British vessels, relocation to Freetown, repatriation to his homeland, advanced training and lifetime employment by a British missionary society, and pioneering efforts at cross-cultural missions—embodied the fruitful intersection of abolition and mission that marked the black Atlantic world. Crowther also epitomized the aspirations of the African Church and exemplified its innate missionary capacity. This was most evident in two interrelated areas: vernacular translation and extensive evangelization. Crowther was acutely aware of the profound impact that access to the Christian message and Scriptures in their own tongues would have on the spiritual life and identity of nascent African congregations. He spent most of his life translating the Bible into the Yoruba language, and was the first person to deliver a sermon in Yoruba in Freetown. He also made vernacular translation a priority in his pioneering missionary work.

Crowther’s all-African Niger Mission not only broke new ground in the building of the African Church but also represented “the first sustained missionary engagement with African Islam in modern times.” ²⁶ Founded in 1857 with the help of several African schoolmasters and evangelists from Sierra Leone, the Niger Mission was a bold experiment in African enterprise. ²⁷ Shortcomings notwithstanding, it marked one of the most extensive African missionary initiatives in the nineteenth century under Crowther’s rather paternal leadership. In important ways, Bishop Crowther’s life mirrored the rise of the modern African church and the transatlantic collaboration that constantly shaped its fortunes.

Edward Blyden (1832–1912) has been described as the most learned and articulate champion of Africa and the Negro race in his own time. No other single individual of the black Atlantic had a more profound impact on African Christianity. Blyden was a West Indian of African descent (his parents were Igbo) who first moved to New York in 1847 and migrated to Liberia in 1850. Blyden had a long and distinguished career that encompassed the roles of Presbyterian clergyman, educator, diplomat, and statesman. A prolific writer and correspondent, his vigorous defense of African nationalism and unwavering endorsement of black emigration to Africa contributed immensely to the development of the church in West Africa. His influence was wide, varied, and enduring. In Sierra Leone, where he spent a few years in the employ of the CMS in the 1870s, his ideas fermented calls for an independent African church and strengthened resistance to European missionary control. ²⁸

Blyden’s personal influence on major developments within Christianity in West Africa continued into the opening years of the twentieth century. Though he was willing to serve European missionary societies like the CMS when it suited his agenda, he remained a vigorous critic of European missions throughout his life, primarily for what he deemed to be their negative impact on African culture and traditions. His vision of African Christianity was particularly influential on the second generation of African Christian leaders who emerged in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. His association with William Wadé Harris (1860–1925) of Liberia, for instance, arguably planted the seeds of a new spiritual consciousness that contributed to Harris’s remarkable evangelistic ministry on the West African coast in the early 1900s, which produced tens of thousands of converts. ²⁹

The abolition of slavery in 1834 and the strong interest among European missionary societies in using black missionaries for the evangelization of Africa also spurred the transatlantic movement of West Indian blacks. These initiatives proved relatively short-lived. The ill-fated 1841 Niger expedition, for instance, included 12 blacks from the West Indies; ³⁰ and the mission on Fernando Po (an island on the West African coast), established in 1844 by the Baptist Society with 36 blacks from Jamaica, also foundered. ³¹ The contribution of West Indian blacks to the spread of Christianity in Africa is most evident in the contribution of a few outstanding individuals. The most notable of these was Thomas Birch Freeman (1809–90), the son of a West Indian father and an English mother, who arrived in Ghana (in 1838) as a missionary of the Wesleyan Missionary Society. Freeman built the first Methodist church on the Cape Coast and emphasized the training of Africans. In his long and distinguished career as a pioneer missionary, he established missions in Ghana (among the Ashanti), Badagry and Abeokuta (southern Nigeria), and Quidah (Dahomey). Today he is revered as the “father of Ghanaian Methodism.” ³²

Also worthy of mention is William Henry Sheppard (1865–1927), who arrived in the Congo in 1890 as a missionary of the Southern Presbyterian Society. Sheppard labored among the Bakuba people for two decades. He made few converts (despite assiduous evangelism) and locals referred to him as a “black white man.” But his pioneering spirit, aptitude for learning African languages, direct engagement with African society, and vigorous campaign on behalf of the Africans against colonial atrocities earned him the sobriquet “black Livingstone.” ³³

The impact of the black Atlantic: Transfer of consciousness

Until the 1880s, almost all the black missionaries in Africa were supported by white churches or denominations. By the end of the century, however, the movement had become a predominantly black effort sustained by independent black missionary agencies such as the African Baptist Missionary Society (founded in 1845). In the long run, black denominations, including American Methodist Episcopal (AME) and American Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ), provided greater support for missionary work on the continent than any white institution.

All that said, the number of African Americans who went to Africa officially as missionaries—estimated at just over 115 by 1900—was insubstantial; and the majority served the “Europeanized areas of the continent” such as Liberia, Sierra Leone and South Africa. ³⁴ Moreover, with few exceptions, black missionaries manifested the same attitudes of condemnation and rejection of indigenous culture common among their white counterparts. But, of far greater significance than direct missionary engagement, the black Atlantic movement contributed to major transformations in the African Church through fruitful alliances and ideological exchange. More broadly, the ideologies of black nationalism and pan-Africanism that flowed across the Atlantic readily cohered with and augmented the formation of an African brand of Christianity. The process was not free from tension or missteps. And African Christians, it must be added, did not need external input to mine the extraordinary resources of the indigenous religious world or effect renewal and innovation in Christian life. But the ideas and instincts that shaped African Christian rejection of racial inequality and denunciation of European missionary structures derived considerable impetus from black American influences and ideas. The most compelling of these ideological strands was Ethiopianism.

Ethiopianism

As a representation of black Africa, the term “Ethiopian” was introduced into the vocabulary of African peoples on the continent and in the diaspora by Europeans. ³⁵ Crucially, the scriptural declaration “Ethiopia shall stretch out her hands to God” (Psalm 68:31) was commonly used as a catchphrase within the nineteenth-century European missionary movement to energize efforts for the evangelization of Africa. Throughout the nineteenth century black Christians in America read this scriptural reference as a promise of black redemption or an embodiment of the divine will for the black race. Ethiopianism emerged as an ideological expression of these assumptions and provided the rationale for black nationalism, an ideology that emphasized black solidarity, black achievement, and a distinctive cultural existence. The “Africa for Africans” slogan reflected these aspirations.

The body of ideas and aspirations subsumed under Ethiopianism spread to Africa with black Atlantic migrations. It did so primarily as a transfer of consciousness mediated by the common cause that naturally emerged between American blacks and educated Africans in their opposition to white domination and racism. The earliest manifestations of Ethiopianism occurred in Sierra Leone where European colonialism, black missionary initiatives, a well-educated African class (clergy and lay), and the gradual implementation of Henry Venn’s native pastorate experiment ³⁶ provided fertile soil. Despite the involvement of Edward Blyden, the Sierra Leone episode failed in its calls for a non-denominational African church. But it acted as a springboard for the diffusion of Ethiopianism in the West African region. The slogan “Africa for Africans,” intended to signify rejection of European domination as well as the conviction that whites should yield mission on the Africa continent to blacks, became the catchphrase of its proponents. Ethiopianism provided the inspiration for numerous African church movements that emerged in West Africa in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.

In southern Africa, Ethiopianism emerged separately and was marked by distinctive elements. In particular, black American involvement was much more extensive and instrumental. Starting with the founding of the Ethiopian Church in 1892 by Mangena Mokone (1851–1931), an African Wesleyan minister, the movement sparked a spate of independent, non-denominational (mainly tribal) churches. In 1896, the leaders of these churches collaborated to establish affiliation with the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) in America. When AME Bishop Henry M. Turner (1834–1914) visited South Africa two years later he ordained 65 African ministers, consecrated one of the leaders as assistant bishop and organized the independent African churches into regional conferences. ³⁷ Urged on by Turner’s rousing rhetoric, large numbers of black Americans also headed for South Africa; meanwhile increasing numbers of Africans left South Africa to study in the United States.

With the exception of the 1915 uprising in Malawi, led by John Chilembwe (d. 1915) against white settlers, ³⁸ these new African movements were assertive and subversive of the existing order but peaceful and nonviolent. Everywhere in Africa, however, the movements inspired by Ethiopianism elicited strong European opposition and hostility. Invariably, the demand “Africa for Africans” was rejected outright by white missionaries, and the exodus of Africans from the mission-established churches was viewed with strong resentment. In South Africa white colonial authorities, who were deeply irritated by the social activism and increasing political consciousness that marked these movements, looked for ways to suppress them. ³⁹

Yet, despite efforts to curb or quash it, Ethiopianism stimulated mass movements and produced fast-growing churches. When, for instance, Pambani Mzimba (d. 1911), the first South African-trained black Presbyterian minister, seceded from the Free Church of Scotland in 1898, the entire congregation of Lovedale Church (mainly of Mfengu origin) went with him. By 1911, Mzimba’s independent Presbyterian Church of Africa had more than 13,000 members in 35 congregations. Everywhere on the subcontinent, vigorous evangelism by African agents, widespread dissatisfaction with white domination, the upheavals of the new colonial economy, and the attraction of a brand of Christianity that emphasized engagement with the African spiritual world, caused the African Church movement to proliferate rapidly.

The process developed new momentum in the opening decades of the twentieth century with the emergence of a new spate of African renewal movements variously labeled Zionist, Apostolic, Aladura, or prophet-healing. Complex, multifarious, and endlessly analyzed, these movements are not the last word on African Christianity—which even now continues to generate fresh and innovative streams—but they undoubtedly galvanized the spread of Christianity in unprecedented fashion and established a new era of African Christianity as an African religion.

Conclusion

In the final analysis, the story of African Christianity and the growth of the modern African church has been a decidedly African production in which foreign agents have made dramatic entrances and exits. The complex processes of globalization that shaped the narrative so remarkably were marked by an intricate web of transatlantic movements and transnational interactions that often made it far too easy to confuse the dominant with the determinant. By 1910, the confluence of black Atlantic interaction and local initiatives produced a dynamic brand of African Christianity that was irrepressible. Alas, for the leading minds at the Edinburgh World Missionary Conference, however, it was the intentions and designs of the dominant powers of the day that mattered. Moreover, the entrenched belief that “world mission” was the prerogative of Western Christendom produced a vision of global Christianity in which African agency and enterprise was voided. But globalization can be a funny thing. The same global processes, in tandem with the intrinsic propagating power of the gospel, had already demonstrated that the future of the African Church and the prospects of African Christianity rested squarely in African hands. This too would have implications for the globalization of the faith.