by David Lamb
John Gunther was no supporter of colonialism as an institution. But in Inside Africa, published in 1953, he shared the prevailing Western view that the European presence had been largely positive:
The Europeans may have ravaged a continent, but also they opened it up to civilization. Colonialism made today’s nationalism possible, and opened the way to democracy. The Europeans abolished slavery, and ended tribal warfare. They created communications, improved the standard of living, developed natural resources, introduced scientific agriculture, fought to control malaria and other diseases, established public health controls, gave natives only an inch away from barbarism stable administration and a regime based in theory at least on justice and law. (The white man’s law, of course.) Most important, they brought Christianity and western education …
In reading those words today one gets the impression that Gunther probably spent too much time talking to British governors and not enough to Africans. The benefits he mentioned were not lasting. They vanished almost as soon as the Europeans left. The Europeans built artificial foundations for Africa’s fledgling nations, and when the tide changed, they crumbled like sand castles. Only one aspect of colonialism was strong enough to survive the transition to independence—economic enslavement.
True, the two black African countries that were never colonized, Liberia and Ethiopia, remain among the most backward on the continent, and officials there often attribute their undeveloped condition to the fact that they missed the material benefits of colonialism. But the overall effect of colonialism on Africa was overwhelmingly negative. England, France, Portugal, Belgium, Germany and Spain divided up the continent like poker players sharing a pot. Their interests were economic: slaves, ivory, raw materials, bunkering ports such as Djibouti, new markets for European goods and, in Portugal’s case, a dumping ground for more than one million of its citizens, most of them unskilled and semiliterate. Europe had not the slightest concern for the advancement of Africa—if that advancement did not profit Europe. As long as law and order were maintained, all other considerations were secondary.
To lessen the drain on treasuries back home, the colonialists introduced cash-crop economies: cocoa was planted in Ghana, peanuts in Senegal, tobacco in Malawi, coffee and tea in Kenya, sisal in Tanzania, cotton in Angola. These were export crops, and they neither fed Africa nor reduced Africa’s dependence on Europe. Thus Africa was cast into independence with no industrial base. Each economy was based on one-crop harvests that were irrelevant to Africa and were subjected to wild price fluctuations on the world markets. Kenya, for instance, enjoyed a financial bonanza in 1977 when coffee prices soared following a frost in South America. That year Kenya earned $482 million from its coffee crop. Two years later world prices returned to normal and Kenya’s earnings shrunk to $265 million. But Kenya had overspent during the boom days as though the windfall were permanent, and it was soon back on the international dole, its ambitious development plans wrecked.
The European powers, already having established borders that ignored tribal demarcations, now further divided the Africans in each colony into haves and have-nots, the former being a small, select group, often from a particular tribe, whom the colonialists deemed worthy of assuming limited bureaucratic authority. At independence the goal of the privileged few was to grow into a dominant bourgeoisie as quickly as possible. To do this, the African elite had to accumulate wealth and influence, and this new class set about manipulating public power for personal enrichment with remarkable ingenuity. The gap between the few and the many grew.
Throughout the five hundred years of European domination in Africa, dating back to the early Portuguese settlements in Mozambique and Angola, the whites governed as though colonialism would last forever. It was not until the final years of Africa’s subjugation that Europe took any serious steps to prepare the continent for nationhood. By then it was too late. The new countries inherited economies and governmental infrastructures and sophisticated jobs that were designed by a European society to meet the needs of a European society. The untrained Africans could not cope. Twenty-five years ago they did not drive cars, let alone fly airplanes. They did not dream of becoming bank managers or corporate directors—positions that only whites filled—and the highest advancement an African could expect to make during the colonial era was to the level of senior civil servant, a job that would be closely supervised by a more senior white civil servant.
Djibouti had fewer than a hundred high school graduates at independence. The Congo had but a single senior African civil servant. Mozambique had an illiteracy rate of 90 percent. Zaire, a country as large as the United States west of the Mississippi, had only a dozen university graduates among its 25 million people. Several countries, such as Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, had not one African doctor, lawyer or accountant. No country, except perhaps Nigeria, had a middle class that had risen on its own merit.
But Africa’s preparedness for independence was no longer the question by the mid-1950s. The moral climate in the world had changed. The colonies had become expensive to run and only Portugal was willing to risk a land war to keep its empire intact. France and Britain preferred simply to pack their bags and hope that the new states would remain within the structures of international capitalism, that they would respect their inherited Western-style political systems, that they would settle easily into the rhythm of responsible national behavior. In 1957 Britain’s Gold Coast became the Republic of Ghana, black Africa’s first ex-colony.* The next year France’s Guinea became the second. In 1960 seventeen new countries with a population of 198 million were born.
Freedom Year, as 1960 was known, began with a prophetic speech by Britain’s prime minister, Harold Macmillan. Addressing both houses of South Africa’s white-only parliament in Cape Town, he said: “… The most striking of all the impressions I have formed since I left London a month ago is of the strength of this African national consciousness. In different places it takes different forms, but it is happening everywhere. The wind of change is blowing through this continent, and, whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact. We must all accept it as a fact, and our national policies must take account of it.”
What if that speech had been given a hundred years earlier and Europe had decided not to colonize Africa? What condition would Africa be in today? First, remembering that the ancient Mali Empire stretched over what is now nine countries, it is reasonable to assume that Africa would have formed viable regional entities—just as the principalities of Germany and the city-states of Italy did in the 1800s. The strong would have risen to impose their language, culture and rule on the weak. This would have reduced tribalism—though not without bloodshed—and Africa in time would have been led by legitimate presidents or monarchs. A sense of nationalism would have followed.
Second, even without colonialism, Africa would have been no more isolated from Western influence than is, say, Asia. The Dutch would still have settled South Africa and instituted their policies of white supremacy. The missionaries would have come and, later, so would businessmen from London, New York and Tokyo seeking markets and resources. Africans would still have gone off to Europe and the United States to be educated, and returned home to understand their continent’s problems. Certainly they would have been as capable of building schools and hospitals as the colonialists. Africa would not have inherited the European political systems and thus would probably have outgrown its age of instability long ago. A member of the Third World it might still be, but if Africa had had the opportunity to develop naturally at its own pace, it seems unlikely that there would ever have been such a place as Djibouti.
The colonialists left behind some schools and roads, some post offices and bureaucrats. But their cruelest legacy on the African continent was a lingering inferiority complex, a confused sense of identity. After all, when people are told for a century that they’re not as clever or capable as their masters, they eventually start to believe it.
“It is dangerous,” the Italian novelist Alberto Moravia said in 1972, writing about Africa, “to destroy a religion at a single blow, rather than allow it to die from old age and unreality, especially a primitive religion, which is at the same time both a faith and a culture.
“I believe, in fact, that there is no greater suffering for man than to feel his cultural foundations giving way beneath his feet.”
For better or worse, though, the missionaries did not fail in their assigned task: they planted the seeds of Christianity deep. And today, despite great obstacles erected by repressive presidents and Marxist governments, the Christian church is probably the most powerful institution in sub-Sahara Africa, an institution that is influenced by the West but is, at its core, indigenous.
Almost every president in Africa is the product of a missionary education, and many remain closely associated with the church. President Hasting Banda of Malawi is a minister, as was the late Liberian president William Tolbert. President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia is a lay preacher. The former prime minister of Rhodesia, Abel Muzorewa, is a United Methodist bishop. The socialist president of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, and the Marxist-oriented president of Madagascar, Dikler Ratsiraka, are devout Catholics, and Jomo Kenyatta, the late Kenyan president, as a boy gave up herding his father’s flocks in favor of life at a nearby Church of Scotland mission.
“You have to understand,” Canon Burgess Carr, the former head of the All-Africa Conference of Churches, said, “that for the generation of men now in power, my generation, the churches provided the only opportunity available. When I was growing up in Liberia, none of us could think of being engineers or chemists. The only path was the church.”
The Portuguese and Spanish brought the first seeds of Christianity to Africa in the fifteenth century. But they did not survive in the face of disease, warfare and primitive conditions. Four hundred years later came the Germans and the British. The European missionaries were instrumental in getting slavery abolished; but by preaching assimilation they also helped create the climate for colonialism and the undermining of African cultures. They were the harbingers of the white man’s economic and social domination of a black continent, and as they pushed inland, they brought to the African interior, often for the first time, forces and values that emanated from another continent.
“I beg to direct your attention to Africa,” David Livingstone, missionary and explorer, said at Cambridge, England, in 1857. “I know that in a few years I shall be cut off in that country [sic]; Do not let it be shut again. I go back to Africa to make an open path for commerce and Christianity.”
Under their religious banners, the missionaries provided schools, churches and hospitals and eventually translated the Bible into four hundred African languages. They denounced what they considered the evils of African traditions such as polygamy and female circumcision and were authoritarian and paternal in their approach to Africans. One African convert recalls an Anglican missionary in Uganda known as Bwana Botri who frequently descended from his pulpit during service to cane African latecomers.
“The Negro is a child,” Dr. Albert Schweitzer wrote in 1921 after his first years of work in Africa, “and with children nothing can be done without the use of authority … With regard to Negroes, then, I have coined the formula: I am your brother, it is true, but your elder brother.”
Schweitzer (1876–1965), a French Protestant clergyman and physician who won the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize, used to pay his African workers in bananas, seven bananas a day per man. John Gunther once asked him if the Africans would work better if they received eight bananas. “No,” Schweitzer replied, “that would disturb discipline and morale.” The bush hospital Schweitzer built from scratch—practically with his bare hands—after arriving in Africa in 1913 operates to this day in Lambarene, Gabon. It is a modern facility with two air-conditioned operating rooms, staffed by both Europeans and Africans. Schweitzer is buried in a grassy patch out back.
Although spending most of his adult life in Africa, Schweitzer never learned to speak an African language. Today the young white missionary coming to Africa certainly speaks a local language, and he is more likely to be a specialist (perhaps a linguist or a doctor) than an evangelist. He needs a work permit in most countries, just as other expatriates do, and he seldom devotes his entire career to Africa as did his predecessors. His life may be Spartan and occasionally dangerous—thirty missionaries were killed in the 1970s during the Rhodesian civil war—but the missionaries still come in great numbers, apparently motivated by the same pioneering flame that has burned for more than a century. In Zaire alone, there are more than 5,000 white missionaries, in Kenya 3,000, and in many countries the demand for missionaries is higher than the churches can meet.
Unlike the West, where the congregations of many churches have been dwindling for years, Christianity in Africa is growing so fast that by the year 2000 the continent may have the greatest concentration of Christians in the world. Their current strength is nearly 200 million or forty-four percent of the population. Another 100 million Africans are Moslems; the remainder follow animist or traditional beliefs.*
David Barrett, a Nairobi-based Anglican researcher completing a multivolume study on world religions, estimates that each year about 6 million Africans—or more than 16,000 a day—are added to the Christian rolls. About two fifths, he says, are converts; the rest are the result of population increase. (Islam grows in Africa by about 3.6 million members a year, virtually all because of population increases.)
That Christianity should be undergoing such a numerical expansion in Africa is something of a miracle in itself, for in few places in the modern world have the church and its leaders been subjected to such humiliation and perils. But although many African presidents have managed to cripple the spirit and dreams of their own people, none has ever succeeded in breaking the church.
In Uganda, Kabaka Mwanga, a Moslem king of the 1880s, murdered scores of young Christian converts and an Anglican missionary, Bishop James Hannington, for what he saw as an attempt to establish Christian hegemony. Under Idi Amin, also a Moslem, the Christian majority did not fare much better. Amin kept lists of all clergy, ordered the murder of the Anglican archbishop and often had Ugandans tortured for the simple reason that they had attended church.
“You would leave your home in the morning on God’s work and not know if you would come home that night,” Silvanus Wani, the successor of the slain Ugandan archbishop, told me. “Each morning was one of thanksgiving. The next day you went out in faith again.”
In Ethiopia, Emperor Haile Selassie forced clergymen to recite his name as part of mass. In Guinea, Archbishop Raymond Marie Tchidmbo was arrested in the 1970s on trumped-up charges of being implicated in a coup, and despite the pleas of two popes, kept in jail for nine years. Sixty-five missionaries in Burundi were given two days’ notice to leave the country in 1979 for “preaching tribalism,” and most missionaries have been expelled from the Marxist states of Ethiopia, Mozambique, Angola and Benin. Jehovah’s Witnesses have been persecuted in Kenya and jailed by the thousands in Malawi.
The president of Equatorial Guinea, Macias Nguema Biyogo, a Catholic-turned-atheist, decreed in the late 1970s that mass must end with the congregation chanting, “Forward with Macias, always with Macias, never without Macias.” He later closed all the churches in his country. When he was overthrown by the military and executed in 1979, the soldiers’ first order of business wa
s to reopen the churches.
Church services were segregated in colonial days and names such as “Native Anglican Church” were common. But most Africans do not view Christianity as a white, imported religion. Jesus is depicted as a white man on some church murals, as a black on others. The interpretation is the artist’s to make. Nevertheless, the Catholic and Protestant churches have remained largely traditional, failing to “Africanize” either their hymns or sermons, and in the past two decades there has been a move away from the Western orientation toward breakaway Christian sects of a purely indigenous nature. By 1982 the number of separate denominations operating in Africa had passed six thousand.
Some of the new sects have fewer than a hundred members. Their church may be under a mango tree or in the corner of a city parking lot, and every Sunday, cities such as Nairobi come alive with groups of singing, chanting worshipers, swaying to the beat of drums, often dressed in white robes with caps bearing the insignia of their sects. Western Christians would find little familiar in the service, the hymns or the prayer books.
Despite the growing number of converts throughout Africa, there is reason to question whether their commitment is really as deep as the numbers suggest. The church, I think, is primarily expanding because it represents a modern rather than primitive force, exerted at the very time Africa is preoccupied with the future. After all, Jean-Bédel Bokassa, the former president/emperor of the Central African Republic/Empire used to swing between Christianity and Islam, depending on his current source of foreign aid. For the average African, Christianity legitimizes a belief in miracles and a respect for mystery, and that alone is sufficient to attract a following of millions.
