The shift from mission to church pre-dated movements of decolonization. The first wave of African mass conversions followed the imposition of colonial rule, which provided their crucial backdrop. From the 1880s the exploitative and rapid social and economic change that accompanied mining, plantations, and white settlement created intense social, intellectual, and religious disturbance. Africans sought a measure of conceptual control over these global forces by turning to world religion, Christianity or Islam. Converts also gained access to new ideas and tools that helped them relate to the colonial economy. The first major conversion movement happened in Catholic Buganda, East Africa, in the last fifteen years of the nineteenth century. Similar movements soon traversed other parts of the continent. In the Ivory Coast they were led by the dynamic Liberian Grebo, the Prophet, William Wade Harris. Among the Bakongo of Belgian Congo a chief agent of conversion was the former Baptist catechist Simon Kimbangu. In southern Africa a host of prophetic leaders founded Christian movements informed by Pentecostalism and Methodist revivalism. But whether led by independent church prophets or mission catechists and evangelists, these movements formed a rich spectrum of popular Christianity. All of them were selfconsciously modernizing, displaying an aggressive rejection of traditional religious objects and practices and a strong desire to acquire bush schools and literacy. Hymn-singing and the public reading of the Scriptures became the most prominent feature of this new mass Christianity.
The Bible inspired both ordinary and educated minds, albeit in different ways. Richard Gray points out that the majority of African Christians consistently saw their faith as immensely relevant to ‘the sufferings associated with disease, poverty, and death and also the misfortunes inherent in human experience’, while ‘an educated few saw the Kingdom of Heaven in terms of overcoming the evils of racial discrimination and political oppression, and this particular appropriation of Christianity powerfully fostered many elements in African nationalisms’. It was among this latter group of African clerks, pastors, and schoolteachers that the Ethiopian movement emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. In South Africa a black Christian intelligentsia inspired by the biblical image of the ancient autonomous Christian kingdom of Ethiopia broke away from mission churches in frustration at missionary racism and hypocrisy. The Lutheran Bapedi Church and the Zulu Congregational Church resembled former mission churches, though they took a more liberal attitude towards polygamy. The major difference from the European missions was their shortage of resources for health and education. It was this desire for a modernizing gospel, along with misplaced notions of America as a place of black emancipation, which led some breakaways to join forces with Afro-American missionaries from the AME. Although AME leaders such as Bishop Henry Turner proved to be as intensely conservative in the treatment of their African flocks as their white missionary counterparts, the aspirations of the movement’s African leaders and laity gave it a political dimension. At one end of the spectrum it provided a seedbed from which a good number of the founder members of the African National Congress emerged. Even more significantly, AME ministers, dependent on their flocks for the subsistence, were drawn into a range of local struggles over health and housing, transport and education.
It was this broad urban populism of the AME leadership that moved James Campbell to argue that African Methodism was far more radical than early elite-driven South African nationalism.
In Nyasaland, Ethiopian ideas found fertile ground among Africans educated in the Scottish Presbyterian tradition. Here too a biblically informed idea of racial oppression as a manifestation of evil was common among the key dissenting figures. The former Presbyterian Charles Domingo, who founded his own church between 1907 and 1910, proclaimed, ‘The gainers of Money and Missionaries are very poor to try and conquer the wiles of Satan... [They] do form the same rule to look upon the native with mockery eyes.’ Some of Domingo’s insights appear in the words of John Chilembwe in conversations he had with members ofthe Blantyre mission in the lead-up to the 1915 Rising. Chilembwe accused the Blantyre missionaries of hypocrisy in preaching the Ten Commandments from the pulpit while condoning the colonial government’s action in stealing African-owned land.
Movements such as the AME were never able to compete with missionaries on the same ground. In South Africa and Zimbabwe the drive for state recognition and the perennial shortage of resources tempered their initial political fervour. While they helped train the first generation of African political elites, the ambitious African tended to remain in the better-funded mission churches. The major exception came in Northern Rhodesia, where the mission churches proved so sluggish in coming to terms with nationalism that political elites turned back to the AME, making it ‘the established church of the Congress Party’. Increasingly, though, AME members placed their hopes in economic rather political liberation, a gospel of thrift, sobriety, industry, and respectability.
The fortunes of mission Christianity changed drastically in the period 1929-45, which coincided with the crisis of Western capitalism during the Great Depression followed by the Second World War. As the pace of development slowed and agricultural production yielded diminishing returns, so colonial administrations grew increasingly conservative, blocking the advance of educated elites and consolidating alliances with traditional leaders. Given that the colonial State was in good part a religious construct, legitimized by both the ideologies of modernizing mission Christianity and customary law, it is hardly surprising that disillusionment was expressed in religious terms. Christian Africans seized the initiative, founding new independent churches and energizing those already in existence. Given their fiery critique of worldly missionaries and demon-possessed customary rulers, two key pillars of the colonial order, it is hardly surprising that such movements so unsettled imperial officials.
Mission Christianity did not die, however, but was saved by the revivalist activities of women and youth. This was often the pattern throughout East Africa, where the Revival, or Balokole, movement spread from Rwanda in 1939, touching numerous Protestant churches. Revivalists preached against the institutionalization of mission churches, emphasizing confession of personal sin and drawing heavily on the biblical language of renewal. The increasing availability of the Scriptures in the vernacular fired both independency and revival, acting as ‘a consistent force in transferring authority from the culture of the European missionary translator to that of mother tongue speakers’.
By 1949, whether by means of revival or independency, a shift in the balance of power between black and white Christians had occurred. As African Christians seized the religious initiative, formal connections between Christianity and Empire diminished. With Christianity more profoundly indigenized than ever before, there was no contradiction between a sharp increase in Christian adherence and the growth of anti-colonial sentiment. But African Christians had done more than seize the religious initiative; they had learned that religious idioms could both legitimize and condemn political systems. By 1950 ‘everyone claimed... the sanction of religion in some form’, and this profoundly shaped the decolonization process.