On the eve of African decolonization the future of the African Church lay squarely on the shoulders of the laity. Even here its prospects did not initially appear particularly rosy. The mission-educated leadership of nationalist movements was distinctively lukewarm towards the Church. In South Africa the new men, Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, and Oliver Tambo, remained Christians, but their religion was increasingly peripheral to their public voice. This scenario was common elsewhere across the continent. Missions had been central to the creation of nationalist elites but their legacy was ambivalent. The often quoted observation of Shepperson and Price that Livingstonia was the seedbed of the Nyasaland African Congress could be generalized to missions in many other British colonies. E. A. Ayandele’s path-breaking work on the missions in Nigeria remains one of the most comprehensive explanations of the missionary contribution to African nationalism. He showed how African converts had acquired European political and economic aspirations as they had embraced modernization. Secondly he demonstrated how religious journals and newspapers had familiarized black Christians with new powerful modes of political expression and communication. Thirdly, he noted that Africans gained vital skills in leadership and organization through Christian service, which readily transferred into secular leadership of political parties. Finally, Ayandele observed that missionaries preached an intoxicating message of Christian equality and fraternity, which inspired converts to seek the privileges of whites. Because missionaries did not practise what they preached, Christian elites felt ambivalent towards their Christian heritage. Although grateful for education, many felt betrayed by churches whose missionary leaders did so little to advance equality and social justice. While schools and colleges inculcated virtues of democracy, they functioned in an authoritarian manner. Indeed, several educational institutions had become sites of mini-nationalist struggles. Although Christian missionaries propagated the revolutionary idea that all Africans were one people, regardless of tribal origin, that did not necessarily translate into nationalism, contributing just as readily to new ethnic and pan-African solidarities. Nationalist elites who moved in sophisticated secular international circles demystified their former missionary mentors and turned to voluntary associations, trade unions, and political parties to advance their interests.
Despite growing disillusionment with mission churches, most nationalist politicians retained Christian affiliations. Cultural nationalism appeared antagonistic towards Christianity, but in a number of instances it was paper-thin, its intellectual content elaborated, post hoc, after independence. In Zaire, Mobutism ignored traditional insights in favour of synthesized models of African religion elaborated by Christian theologians. In former Lusophone Africa, Marxist cadres sought to identify traditional belief in order to transcend it. Anti-colonialism did not necessarily engender opposition to the ideals and principles of Western institutions, including Christianity. Indeed a great deal of anti-colonialism was based on the acceptance of these ideals and principles, accompanied by an insistence that conformity with them indicated a level of progress that qualified the African elites the right to govern their own nation-states. Nationalism, like Christianity, was essentially modernizing.
It was hardly surprising that African nationalism drew upon evangelical language. In Northern Rhodesia in March 1953 Harry Nkumbula, an exmission teacher, now AME member, publicly burned seven pages of the White Paper outlining plans for federation in the presence of a number of chiefs and a large crowd after singing ‘O God our Help in Ages Past’. Six years later, in Nyasaland, Hastings Banda told jubilant crowds, ‘To hell with federation’ and ‘Let us fill their prisons with our thousands shouting Hallelujah.’ By using simple biblical models and parallels Bachama Christians in Nigeria’s Middle Belt were able to sanctify colonial politics and justify their activism. They were to be like ‘the Salt of the earth’ (Matthew 5:13) or Christ cleansing the Temple (Mark 11:15-17). Biblical characters became models for political action. King David was taken to be at once ‘a man of God and a man of the world’, while Moses was the prototypical political leader who took his people out of captivity. Christian hymns were used in political mobilization stressing unity in the face of a common Muslim Fulani enemy. Finally, because Nigerian cultural nationalism had deep historical roots, Bachama Christians began to identify points of congruence with their faith to build a new ethnic culture shared by Christians and traditionalists alike.
Scripture had a significant ideological input into the ‘discursive arena’ of ‘moral ethnicity’ through which Kikuyu of Kenya understood themselves. They read the Bible as ‘an allegory of their own history—a story of servitude and salvation, exile and return’. In the early stages of their struggle to forge an ethnic nationalist consciousness, on the eve of the Mau Mau emergency, they embraced the Exodus story, likening themselves to the Children of Israel and the British to Pharaoh’s Egyptians. The force of such a comparison was grounded in the publication of the Kikuyu Old Testament in 1951. While Christianity was central to the creation of tribes in Nigeria and Kenya and elsewhere, as Hastings has argued, it also provided through the Bible the original model of the nation, suggesting at the same time that it was the God- given unit of political action.
Although revisionist historiography of African nationalism stresses the divergent class interests that divided leaders from the rank and file, there were points of connection between them. Often they lived in close proximity in the segregated suburbs of colonial cities. As recycled elites, nationalist leaders rubbed shoulders with industrial workers and domestic servants in sporting and cultural associations, as well as in churches. Both retained a foothold in the rural areas. Teachers trained in mission schools and colleges mediated between town and countryside. These nationalist footsoldiers carried the message ‘from party headquarters to the villages and translating it into attractive and concrete terms’. Given that teaching rather than Christian ministry continued to attract the most able, it was hardly surprising that schools rather than churches were often the local sites for nationalist organization.
Peasants and workers who participated in rallies could be enchanted by the millennial promises of nationalism, but they were never completely captured. Some turned away from politics. Popular participation never equalled popular empowerment. While those in the large political gatherings sympathized with the humanitarian and evangelical sentiments advanced by the demagogues who addressed them, they had other concerns and drew a different sort of inspiration from the Christian faith. Some sought personal security, health, and healing through prayer. Others looked to the Church for more explicit clues on how to enter modernity through becoming respectable and economically solvent. In sociological terms their dominant concern was not politics but social reproduction. Many within this broad swath of popular Christianity remained within the historic mission churches, but there were new areas of growth, movements whose concerns ran against African nationalism as much as they ran with it.
The first growth area was Christian independency. By the 1950s the founding prophets of the independent churches had passed away and the larger churches had grown, with the help of complex bureaucracies, into sprawling transnational movements. Some, like the Apostles of Maranke and Masowe, whose networks stretched from southern to eastern Africa, were vigorously modernizing, financed by chains of village stores, bus companies, and illegal currency exchange. But for every large movement there were myriads of smaller local ones, often highly schismatic, with little knowledge of their antecedents. Next to these came a more consciously modernizing cluster of churches, Pentecostals, Evangelicals, and Charismatics, the forerunners of the contemporary born-again movement. These derived for the most part from North American missionary activity, reflecting denominational shifts in American Christianity. In the era of decolonization the movement was most visible in the crusading activities of Billy Graham and Oral Roberts but was also linked to older Pentecostal movements such as the American and British Assemblies of God. Alongside independency and the fledgling born-again movement stood Watch Tower, more usually known as the Jehovah’s Witnesses. By the 1950s the movement had shed much of its subversive millennial character. Bureaucracies in Kitwe and Salisbury oversaw many of its disparate village groupings, promoting the virtues of respectability and a puritan work ethic. Jehovah’s Witnesses stood aloof from nationalist politics in a similar manner to which they had shunned the colonial State. They also avoided voluntary organizations and welfare societies. The same was true for the great raft of independency and newer born-agains, all of which, at this stage, were highly sectarian. Their adherents cared for their own sick and buried their own dead. Self-help and not politics was the answer. For its rejection of formal politics this growing body of Christians was often rewarded with violence from the nationalist youth, who also extended their punishment to mission communities that remained aloof.
If these sectarian movements had a voice in the 1950s, it was that of the Zulu evangelist Nicholas Bhengu. A one-time member of the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union and South African Communist Party, Bhengu turned his back on formal politics when he converted. Eschewing nationalism as well as communism, he argued that the ‘new nation’ would be ‘born from above with the likeness of God’. He believed that political equality with whites invited them to define the content of African aspirations. Narrow Western definitions of liberation left him unimpressed. His message of spiritual renewal, elaborated in his Back to God campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s, had a number of strands. He emphasized autonomy, dignity, Africa’s rich Judaeo-Christian heritage, and its place in the Scriptures. While he worked in association with missionaries from the Assemblies of God, he argued that Africans should be free to define their faith in their own terms. The new believer was to be honest, respectful, and self-sufficient. Bhengu also encouraged church members to engage in handicrafts and penny capitalism, and to tithe in order that the Church become self-supporting and free from missionary control. Piles of surrendered weapons and stolen goods often accompanied his preaching. Finally, Bhengu envisioned a continent ‘Christian from Cape to Cairo’. Although he was branded a sell-out by Manilal Gandhi, the son of Mahatma Gandhi and President of the Natal Indian Congress, Bhengu’s movement and others like it evolved into some of the most vital manifestations of Christianity in post-colonial Africa.
The well-documented case of Southern Rhodesia exemplifies the complexity of missionary and African responses to decolonization. Christian responses to the hegemony of an entrenched white settler community took a long time to work themselves out. While the Anglican Church assumed a quasi-establishment character symbolized by the location of its cathedral adjacent to the parliament building, the larger Roman Catholic Church was also part of the establishment. Catholic missionaries had accompanied the ‘pioneer column’ of settlers across the Limpopo, and, along with American Methodists, they had been rewarded with large mission farms. English Jesuit priests in the Salisbury Club rubbed shoulders with tobacco barons, civil servants, and the Anglican bishop. Bishop Ashton Chichester aptly summed up the Catholic Church’s position in his consecration speech when he spoke of ‘the fine relationship between Church and civil authorities both striving for the welfare of the same people’. Chichester ‘ruled’ the Church from 1931 to the mid-1950s, sorting out difficulties with the State by means of a private and personal word with the appropriate minister or secretary. But this upper-class English Jesuit hegemony was gradually undermined as Chichester was forced to recruit Swiss Bethlehem missionaries, Irish Carmelites, and Spanish Burgos Fathers to help manage the Church’s expansion.
When Zimbabwean and white settler nationalism first clashed in 1956, neither the Anglicans nor the Catholics were well placed to mediate. To begin with, the prophetic voice came from Bishop Ralph Dodge, leader of the United Methodist Church and head of the Christian Council of Rhodesia. Dodge was deported soon after the Rhodesian Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965, of which he had been an outspoken critic. Bishop Abel Muzorewa subsequently replaced him. Between 1965 and 1970 a consensus emerged among the church leadership in Rhodesia. The rebellion of Ian Smith against Queen and country outraged Anglicans and freed non- British missionaries to speak out. Mission churches criticized individual injustices, and all roundly condemned the proposed segregationist constitution of 1969 as contrary to the teachings of the New Testament. However, as Zimbabwean nationalism, in the face ofwhite intransigence, was forced from a reformist to a revolutionary path, so church hierarchies and laity fractured. The Anglican hierarchy took an increasingly pro-white line. After the Anglican Bishop of Matabeleland, Kenneth Skelton, resigned in 1970, declaring ‘Justice is more important than Law and Order,’ Bishop Paul Burroughs and Father Arthur Lewis spoke up for white Rhodesians. Burroughs, a regular correspondent in The Times (of London) concerning the dangers of Marxism, had actively campaigned for the racist constitution of 1970. Lewis, a Rhodesia Front senator, extolled the virtues of Ian Smith as the champion of Christian civilization in a booklet entitled Rhodesia Undefeated (1976).
After initial confrontations with the Rhodesian State, the Catholic hierarchy proved unwilling to condemn the guerrillas or their cause. The bishops’ focus slowly changed from an ecclesiocentric desire to defend their primary schools from the Rhodesie Front’s Community Development policy to a broader commitment to issues of African rights and social justice, exemplified by the pastoral of 1969 A Call to Christians. Nevertheless, their pronouncements remained couched in the language of individual rights. Even the most outspoken of them, Donal Lamont, found difficulty coming to terms with nationalism and communism. Eventually his implicit support for the guerrillas in his Manicaland Diocese gained him the respect of rural people—and deportation from Rhodesia after a long trial, which captured the world’s attention. With Lamont’s demise the initiative within the Catholic Church shifted from the bishops to more radical institutions run by liberal whites and the first generation of black priests. These representatives of what Ian Linden calls ‘listening Church’ were the School of Social Work, Silveria House, the radical monthly Moto, and most importantly the Commission for Justice and Peace. There were also Catholics who lived in solidarity with the guerrillas in their camps in Mozambique. Spanish Burgos Fathers drew on their experience of working in Latin America and the Frelimo-controlled areas of Mozambique to develop a liberation theology of their own. But the most explicit Christian support for the liberation movement came from the nationalist leaders. Despite his image in the Rhodesian and British press as a gun-toting guerrilla, Muzorewa’s demands for African emancipation were always couched in biblical language. It is clear from his autobiography, Rise Up and Walk, that Scripture provided personal legitimization as well as a model of liberation, spiritual and material. For Ndabiningi Sithole, a Wesleyan preacher, the Bible was a source of liberating modernization, redeeming Africans from ‘the power of superstition, individuality-crushing tradition, witchcraft and other forces which do not make for progress’ ‘When Europeans took our country,’ he recalled, ‘we fought them with our spears, but they defeated us because they had better weapons... But lo! The missionary came in time and laid explosives under colonialism. The Bible is now doing what we could not do with our spears’. As Lonsdale points out, for Sithole the well-known aphorism ‘In the past the Europeans had the Bible and we had the land; now they have our land and we have the Bible’ was more ambiguous than it may have at first appeared.
Despite the Christian credentials of the nationalist leadership, connecting with the rural and urban poor was both a slow and a partial process. Although early nationalist meetings in urban Salisbury began with prayers and hymn-singing, when nationalist youth attacked churches and evangelistic meetings some Christians withdrew from nationalist politics. Others never made connection at all. On the eve of the era of open mass nationalism on 12 October 1955 Southern Rhodesia’s capital, Salisbury, witnessed its largest gathering to date. A crowd of 30,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses assembled to hear not an African nationalist, but a white New Yorker, Mr G. Hershel, talk about religion. In 1960 multiracial audiences of a similar size gathered in Salisbury and Bulawayo to hear the globe-trotting evangelist Billy Graham, notwithstanding his insistence that ‘only spiritual revival can improve the social, political and economic life of the Federation’. No movements of popular Christianity in eastern Zimbabwe expressed enthusiasm for mass nationalism in the late 1950s. But most of them—folk Catholicism, folk Anglicanism; even African-run Elim Pentecostalism and younger members of independency, as well as traditional religion as expressed through the spirit mediums—joined with the guerrillas during the war. This came about because the liberation war was fought in alliance with much of the peasantry and came to reflect many of their aspirations. The holy men of popular Christianity—black pastors and priests and white missionaries—provided guerrillas with symbolic and ritual power. And guerrillas in turn respected Christian ceremonials and rituals, and came to use Christian idiom and song in their attempts to mobilize the peasantry. Nevertheless, some movements such as the Assemblies of God, African, which had antecedents in Bhengu’s Back to Africa campaign in Salisbury in 1960, remained aloof from formal politics. Following a parallel but different trajectory, which focused adherents’ energies on transforming themselves and their communities through cultural reformation and economic advance, it spread from township to township and across borders into Zambia and Mozambique, carried by zealous labour migrants. After independence in 1980 this movement would be one of Zimbabwe’s fastest-growing churches.
Christian idioms and practices figured more highly in Zimbabwe’s liberation war than in Kenya’s Mau Mau movement, probably because Zimbabwe was more Christian than Kenya in the 1950s. Forty per cent of Zimbabweans in the 1970s were estimated to be Christian, while missionaries had reckoned Kikuyu Christians at only 10 per cent in 1952. In the South African liberation struggle of the 1980s and 1990s, recourse to Christianity was even more pronounced. South African politicians had long mined the Bible to enhance their calls for liberation, and the tendency to do so increased as apartheid neared its end. David Chidester notes that virtually all major parties, including the ‘secular’ African National Congress, claimed the message and authority of the gospel in their election campaigns in 1994. Moreover, while Christians in earlier nationalist struggles had read the Scriptures in a somewhat literal manner as a source of hope, action, and endurance, South African Christians elaborated more formal political theologies. The most influential was the Kairos Document, signed in 1985 by more than 150 South African theologians, black and white. Alert to issues of context and power, they offered a powerful critique of state and church theology before advocating a preferential option for the poor. The Kairos Document prompted a response from 132 concerned evangelicals the following year. Setting out to critique Kairos theology, they soon felt compelled instead to put their own house in order, repenting of their dualistic theology and their narrow concern with personal moral failings at the expense of ignoring the sinful structures of apartheid. Both of these theological statements came at the height of the State of Emergency, when townships were caught in a spiral of violence and repression. In this context, even members of independent churches issued formal theological statements. In 1994 Archbishop Ngada and other members of the African Spiritual Churches Association published Speaking for Ourselves. While the document shows Ngada and his colleagues cautiously exploring the political implications of their faith, its real significance lies its recognition of Christian independency’s constituency: ‘the members of our Churches are the poorest of the poor, the people with the lowest jobs or no jobs at all. When people become highly educated and begin to earn big salaries they usually leave our churches.’ What mattered to those who remained was healing: ‘in these churches we have been able to experience the healing and salvation of the Spirit now and not in the afterlife’ These South African documents epitomize the spectrum of African Christians’ responses to political change during decolonization. The Kairos theologians stood at the end of the Christian humanitarian tradition, including Ethiopians like Domingo, missionaries such as Cripps, and nationalist leaders such as Muzorewa. The African Spiritual Churches Association reasserted the centrality of personal security, a dominant theme of popular Christianity. Between them lay evangelicals and Pentecostals, asserting a faith at once aggressively modernizing and intensely personal. But across the entire spectrum of African Christianity prayer rather than politics remained the primary focus.