Missionary Work in Africa
African Christianity is now the most dynamic form of the religion in the world. In 1900 perhaps 9 million of the 110 million sub-Saharan Africans were Christian; in 2020 more than 600 million of the 1.1 billion were. The numbers are not a curiosity. They are the single most important fact about global Christianity in the twenty-first century, and they are the result of a long historical process in which the British missionary societies played a central — but not, as Andrew Porter argued in Religion versus Empire? (2004), the determining — role.
The standard view that missionary work was simply an instrument of empire has, as Porter showed, worn badly. Porter’s intervention in the 2000s was to read the missionary archives as a record of the missionaries’ own project, with their own theologies, their own quarrels, their own financial dependence on the nonconformist chapel at home, and their own complicated relations with the colonial state. The result was a body of work — Stanley, Hastings, Maxwell, Sanneh — that treats the missionary encounter as a three-sided affair, in which the African, the missionary, and the imperial state were three distinct agents. To read the missionary as a creature of the colonial state is, on this view, a category mistake.
The British Missionary Establishment in Africa
The British missionary establishment in Africa was overwhelmingly nonconformist and evangelical. The Church Missionary Society (CMS), founded in 1799, was the principal Anglican body. The London Missionary Society (LMS), founded in 1795, was interdenominational and largely Congregational. The Baptist Missionary Society (BMS), founded in 1792, was Particular Baptist. The Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society (WMMS), founded in 1818, was Methodist. The Scottish missionary societies — the Church of Scotland Foreign Missions Committee, the Free Church of Scotland Foreign Missions Committee, the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland — were the northern establishment. The Catholic orders — the Mill Hill Mission, the Society of African Missions, the Holy Ghost Fathers, the White Fathers — operated in the British peripheries, especially in Uganda, Nyasaland, and the East African protectorates.
The British societies were, on the whole, theologically suspicious of empire. Susan Thorne, in Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-Century England (1999), showed how thoroughly the LMS constituency was a nonconformist, provincial, anti-establishment body, and how deeply suspicious the LMS committees were of the East India Company and the colonial state. The CMS, closer to the Anglican establishment, was the more ambiguous: its East Africa and Uganda enterprises worked, on the whole, in close collaboration with the British protectorate, and its West Africa enterprises were often openly hostile to the colonial state. Brian Stanley’s The Bible and the Flag (1990) is the indispensable history of the tensions within the British missionary world on the empire question.
Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, and the West African Coast
The first substantial British missionary enterprise in sub-Saharan Africa was the Sierra Leone mission, opened by the CMS in 1804. Sierra Leone was, in a literal sense, a Christian settlement: it was established in 1787 as a freed-slave colony, and the CMS mission grew up alongside the freed-slave communities of Freetown. The first generation of African Christian leaders — the Rev. John Goba, the Rev. Samuel Adjai Crowther, the Rev. James Johnson — were products of the Sierra Leone mission. The Fourah Bay Institution, founded in 1827, was the first institution of higher education in West Africa, and the first African to take a university degree (in any discipline) was the Sierra Leonean Edward Wilmot Blyden, who graduated from the University of Glasgow in 1857.
The CMS’s most consequential West African enterprise was the Yoruba mission, established at Abeokuta in 1842 by Henry Townsend. The Yoruba mission was, by 1900, the principal Anglican mission in tropical Africa. Its most lasting institutional products were the CMS Grammar School, Lagos (1859), the CMS Training Institution, Lagos (1866), and the CMS College, Ibadan (1906); its most lasting intellectual product was the Yoruba Bible, completed by Samuel Ajayi Crowther in the 1880s. Lamin Sanneh, in West African Christianity (1983) and Translatability in Africa (2009), has shown that the translation of the Bible into Yoruba — and into Igbo, Twi, Ga, Efik, and Hausa — was, in cultural terms, the most consequential achievement of the West African missionary enterprise. The vernacular scriptures, Sanneh argued, were the foundation of an African Christianity that the missionaries had not anticipated and could not control.
The Gold Coast mission was the parallel Wesleyan Methodist enterprise, established in 1835. The Basel Mission (a Swiss-German Lutheran body) had arrived in 1828 and was, by the 1840s, the principal non-British mission in the Gold Coast. The Presbyterian Church of the Gold Coast, the successor to the Basel Mission, is, today, one of the principal Christian bodies in Ghana. The Mfantsipim School (1876), the first secondary school in the Gold Coast, was the Basel Mission’s most lasting educational achievement.
The Niger Mission and the Deposition of Crowther
The CMS Niger Mission, established in 1857 under the leadership of Samuel Ajayi Crowther, was the most ambitious British missionary enterprise in West Africa. Crowther, a Yoruba ex-slave rescued by the British in 1822, was the most distinguished African clergyman of the nineteenth century. His consecration in 1864 as Bishop of the Niger — the first African to be consecrated a bishop in the modern Church of England — was, in Andrew Porter’s reading, both a recognition of the maturity of the West African Christian community and an attempt by the CMS to limit the political damage of an African episcopate.
Crowther’s bishopric was an extraordinary achievement, and its ending was an extraordinary injustice. Crowther was deposed in 1890 on a charge of financial irregularity. Porter, in Religion versus Empire? (2004), read the depositions proceedings in the CMS archive and concluded that the charge was substantially fabricated by Crowther’s European colleagues, who were determined to break the African episcopate. The deposition was, as David Maxwell showed in African Gifts of the Spirit (2006), the high-water mark of European racial paternalism in the African Anglican church, and the foundation of a long African Christian campaign for Crowther’s rehabilitation. The Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion) has, since 2000, formally reasserted Crowther’s good name.
East Africa: Uganda, Buganda, and the CMS
The CMS Uganda mission, established in 1877, was the most rapid expansion in the history of the British missionary movement. By 1890, more than 12,000 converts had been baptised in the previous decade; the kingdom of Buganda had, in 1892, accepted a treaty that made it a British protectorate. The 1892 religious war in Buganda — in which the Protestant and Catholic parties of the kingdom, each backed by their respective British and French missionary and political agents, fought for control of the kingdom — was the first of the modern East African “religious wars.” The result was the 1893 establishment of the British East Africa Company and the 1894 establishment of the British East Africa Protectorate.
Adrian Hastings, in The Church in Africa, 1450–1950 (1994), read the Uganda episode as the founding moment of the modern East African church. The CMS’s institutional legacy in East Africa is the network of schools and churches that produced the East African clerical and political class of the twentieth century: King’s College, Budo (1906), Makerere University (1922), the Alliance High School (1926), and the translation of the Bible into Luganda, Acholi, and Swahili. The Church of the Province of Uganda is, today, the most important African Anglican body; the Churches of Kenya, Tanzania, and Burundi are the institutional descendants of the CMS’s East African work.
South Africa: The Scottish and the LMS Missions
The South African case was older and harder. The LMS had worked among the Khoisan and Xhosa of the Cape Colony from 1799; the Scottish missionary societies had worked among the Xhosa, the Sotho, the Tswana, and the Ndebele from the 1810s. The principal institutional products were the Lovedale Institution (1824, transferred to the Free Church of Scotland in 1841), the LMS mission at Kuruman (1814), the LMS mission at the Paarl (1837), and the Scottish mission at Blantyre (1875). T. O. Beidelman, in Colonial Evangelism (1982), read the South African missionary enterprise as a sustained attempt by British nonconformists to convert a society that the British state was simultaneously dispossessing, and the contradictions were visible from the 1820s onwards.
The 1857 Cattle-Killing crisis in the Cape Colony — in which the Xhosa prophetess MaNthatisi persuaded her people to slaughter their cattle and burn their crops on the promise of a millennial deliverance — was the moment at which the contradictions came to a head. The Cattle-Killing was, as Beidelman showed, the result of the cumulative pressure of European settlement, and of the Xhosa’s recent military defeat in the Eighth Cape Frontier War (1850–53). The crisis produced, in its aftermath, a substantial Xhosa Christian community; it was also the moment at which the nonconformist missionary enterprise and the British colonial state came, permanently, into tension.
The Twentieth Century: African-led Christianity
The twentieth century was the period of African Christian independence. The Edinburgh World Missionary Conference of 1910, which Brian Stanley has called “the apotheosis of the late-Victorian missionary movement,” was the high-water mark of the older tradition. By 1930, the CMS, LMS, and Wesleyan Methodist missionary societies were smaller, more cautious, and more ecumenical bodies. Their work in Africa was, increasingly, transferred to the local churches: the Church of the Province of West Africa (1859), the Church of the Province of East Africa (1927), the Church of the Province of Central Africa (1928), the Church of the Province of Southern Africa (1870), the Church of the Province of the Indian Ocean (1973), and the Church of the Province of West Africa are the institutional descendants of the British missionary enterprise.
The East African Revival (1929–), which began in the CMS Rwanda mission and spread to Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania, was the first major African-led Christian movement. David Maxwell, in African Gifts of the Spirit (2006), read the Revival as the founding moment of modern African Christianity: it was led by African pastors and laypeople, it was rooted in African patterns of worship and prayer, and it was suspicious of European missionary control. The post-1950 African Christian expansion — the African Independent Churches, the African Initiated Churches, the Aladura Churches, the Cherubim and Seraphim Churches, the Zion Christian Church, the Apostolic Faith Mission, and the Pentecostal churches of the 1980s and 1990s — was, in the largest sense, the moment at which the African Christian church was African.
The 1990s and 2000s saw the Pentecostal explosion that has produced, in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa, a self-confident African Christianity that preaches to its former preachers. The Redeemed Christian Church of God, founded in Nigeria in 1952, has, since 2000, established congregations in 197 countries. The most consequential single development in the history of Christianity since the conversion of the Roman Empire, as Lamin Sanneh has argued, is now taking place in sub-Saharan Africa — and the African Christian churches, in their substantial contemporary growth, are not waiting for the historians’ verdict.
Historiographical Note
The historiography of the British missionary enterprise in Africa has been transformed, since the 1960s, by the work of Andrew Porter (Religion versus Empire? 2004), Brian Stanley (The Bible and the Flag 1990, The World Missionary Conference, 1910 2009), Susan Thorne (Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-Century England 1999), Adrian Hastings (The Church in Africa, 1450–1950 1994), David Maxwell (African Gifts of the Spirit 2006), and Lamin Sanneh (West African Christianity 1983, Translatability in Africa 2009). The earlier celebratory accounts — the centenary histories of the CMS, the LMS, and the Free Church of Scotland — have been supplemented, and in places supplanted, by the more critical accounts of the post-colonial generation. The unresolved question is the same one Porter posed: how to weigh the genuine humanitarianism of the missionary enterprise against the destructive consequences of the missionary encounter with African societies.