Missions do not feature in explanatory models of African decolonization, whether viewed as metropolitan or peripheral-nationalist forces of change. Their absence stems in part from the paucity of research on missions in this period, but it is evident that most missionaries remained aloof from formal politics, quietly grateful for the subsidies they received from the colonial State. Indeed, for post-war British governments promoting colonial economic and social development, missions were key players. Missions knew the terrain and had a modicum of the necessary personnel. As they drew ever closer to colonial governments in the provision of social services, they were less well placed to evangelize or offer a perspective on independence movements.
Many missionaries harboured suspicions about anti-colonial movements that were to some extent well founded. They had seen the effects of communist nationalism in China and narrowly defined cultural nationalism in South Asia. The varieties of African cultural nationalism were more vaguely defined than in the Indian case, as much imagined as real. But the nationalist emphasis on traditional religious values and idioms as the essence of the people appeared a grave danger to mission work. Moreover, as one African nationalist victory followed another, missionaries were unnerved by the rise of authoritarianism, whether of the one-party or of military state, even if they felt powerless to respond.
Although few missionaries connected with the rising momentum of African nationalism in the 1950s and 1960s, there were exceptional individuals. In Nyasaland missionaries attached to the Church of Central Africa Presbyterian successfully mobilized the socially conservative Church of Scotland against the federation imposed by the British government. And just as there had been a spirited group of Anglican clerics sympathetic to Indian nationalism in the last decade of the Raj, similar men appeared in Africa: Trevor Huddleston, John V. Taylor, and Michael Scott. There were other whites exemplified by Geoffrey Clayton, Archbishop of Cape Town, who represented the liberal voice of the English-speaking Church. Benign but paternalist, such men never met seriously with African leaders but rather spoke to other whites about ‘natives’. But the loudest white voices were heard trumpeting the virtues of a racist ‘Christian nationalism’. In Southern Rhodesia, Ian Smith billed his Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965 a ‘blow for the preservation of justice, civilization and Christianity’. In Zambia it seemed to the radical Methodist missionary Colin Morris that mission churches were so slow in coming to terms with African nationalism that it only happened ‘an hour after midnight’. The same was true elsewhere across the continent.
The muted missionary response to African nationalism in the 1950s and 1960s did not spring just from self-interest. Most Protestant missionaries lacked a theology of the State to help them engage with politics, apart from a simplistic recognition of the secular authority of the State grounded on Romans 13. Less theologically impoverished Catholics of non-British nationality were acutely aware of their foreign status and hesitated to express a political view. Moreover, since the 1930s an increasingly significant body of evangelical American Protestant missionaries treated politics as a distraction from the main business of preparing for the imminent return of Christ. Evangelicalism had also been steadily growing among British Protestants since the turn of the century. While some Anglicans continued to advocate Christian socialism, it was a ‘guilty socialism, driven to transform relationships rather than reform structures’.
There were, of course, black clergy, but they were few and far between in the 1950s, especially in the upper echelons of the Church. Within the Anglican Communion in Africa there was not a single black diocesan bishop in 1950. In the Catholic Church there was only one—the Ugandan Joseph Kiwanuka. In the lower ranks of the Protestant churches the clergy were at a distinct disadvantage when compared to the laity. Theological institutions lagged far behind the mission schools that trained the clerks, teachers, lawyers, and eventually the politicians of the late colonial period. The situation was compounded by the low salaries paid to ministers of religion relative to those received by schoolteachers. Catholic priests had the benefit of a long and rigorous seminary education but one intended to screen them from contact with the outside world. Moreover, the very clericalism of the Catholic Church and its strong universalism imbued black priests with loyalties that conflicted with their growing sense of nationhood. A formal African theology that addressed the material and intellectual challenges of independence was slow to develop, and often simply mirrored cultural nationalism when it did emerge.
Some exceptional African clerics deserve a mention. The Methodist Thompson Samkange was a key figure in the development of a Zimbabwean nationalism. James Calata, Anglican priest and Secretary-General of the African National Congress (1936-49), moved from a liberal to a more militant leftist mould within South African politics. Another outstanding priest from the Church of the Province of South Africa was Fr. Theophilus Hamutumpangela, whose statue stands outside Parliament in Windhoek, alongside other heroes of the Namibian independence struggle. Desmond Tutu would emerge from the same remarkable southern African Anglican tradition. John Lester Membe of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) was perhaps ‘the most distinguished Zambian of his generation’. Although never particularly interested in politics, he led protest against federation out of a general desire to improve the human well-being of his fellow Africans. When Congress called two days of national prayer in April 1953, Membe preached to a large meeting in Lusaka on the text ‘Let no man despise thee or thy youth’, a reference to European disregard of African opinion. There was also a collection of distinguished black Christian academics, Professors Z. K. Matthews and D. D. T. Jabavu in South Africa along with J. B. Danquah, K. Busia, and C. G. Baeta in the Gold Coast. Such men represented a bridge between Church and more secular politics, which the next generation of politicians chose not to traverse.
As African independence dawned, so too did the Africanization of ecclesiastical hierarchies, often only marginally in advance of the political changes. The Catholic Church led the way, making twenty African bishops between 1951 and 1958. Such appointments were possible due to a new network of seminaries in East Africa and an increase in the number of African priests studying in Rome. These developments in turn drew a good deal of impetus from the deliberations and proclamations of the Second Vatican Council, which so neatly coincided with African independence. By the 1970s a critical mass of black clerics, and a number of radical leftist missionaries open to liberation theology, were in place to engage with the second wave of nationalist movements against white settler regimes in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia. By this stage the stakes were far higher as African nationalists drew inspiration from Marxism-Leninism or Maoism in their violent struggles against intransigent white nationalism.
But the general picture for 1950 ‘at the level of high leadership the... churches looked overwhelmingly white and missionary... as dependent as ever upon earnest committees in London or New York’ for direction and resources, while ‘at the level of much of the membership, at least in the larger and older churches, the missionary and his concerns were already receding into the distance. The village with its own narrow tangled hopes and fears, its grass-roofed chapel, its poorly trained catechist, its occasional visits from a native minister on his bicycle, was the place where the church had now to stand or fall.’ As the elites became disengaged from normal church life, the African poor came to the forefront of church leadership: the catechist, evangelist, pastor, and perhaps most importantly the Bible women organized into their Anglican Mothers, Unions, Wesleyan manyano, East African Revival sororities, and a host of other fellowship groups. These were the footsoldiers of the African Church, who held it together at its rural and urban township roots.