/fringe/ - Fringe

In that hour when John newton 'first believ'd', he saw no incongruity between his newly awakened faith and his trade of shipping fellow human beings from West Africa to America. In fact he saw the slave trade as having helped him reshape his life after a chaotic youth, and in his autobiography, written in mid-life, he observed with no condemnation of his former career that he had been 'upon the whole, satisfied with it, as the appointment Providence had marked out for me.' The trade taught him discipline, and formed the setting for his Evangelical Calvinist conversion in 1747, after which happy experience he continued to pass on his new-found discipline to his unruly charges by applying thumbscrews to them when necessary. A stroke, not any qualm of conscience about slavery, ended his career at sea in 1754. It took three decades for him publicly to express revulsion for his old business and make common cause with those now seeking to abolish it, grown from a group of eccentrics to a national movement. 'I am bound in consciencce,' the old man said bravely in 1788, 'to take shame to myself by a public confession, which, however sincere, comes too late to prevent or repair the misery and mischief to which I have, formally been an accessory.' Newton's belated change of heart was part of a new departure in Christianity: a conviction which over two cneturies was now become well-nigh universal among christians that slavery in all circumstances is against the will of God.

There had of course long been a widespread opinion that slavery was not a deisrable condition - particularly for oneself. Frequently Christians had felt that being a Christian and being a slave were not compatible, so that it was an act of Christian charity to free slaves. But that is very different from condemning the whole institution - hardly surprisingly, since the christian Bible, both Tanakh and New Testament, unmistakably takes the condition of slavery for granted. Quite apart from its general connivance with slavery's existence, the Bible contributed a useful prop to the institution, in th story of the drunkenness of Noah. A drunken and naked Noah was humiliated when his son Ham saw him in this state, and subsequently Noah cursed Canaan, son of Ham, and all his descendants to slavery at the hands of Ham's elder brothers, Shem and Japheth. Apart from its popularity among medieval Western preachers, who saw in the story a pleasingly ingenious allegory of Christ'as Passion and human redemption (Michelangelo uses it thus on the Sistine Chapel ceiling), this story was regularly trotted out by slave traders both Christian and Muslim to justify enslaving Africans, children of Ham. It is in early Muslim sources that the bible's listing of many black races among Ham's descendants was first extended into an aspect of Noah's curse - the first Muslims were familiar with black slaves from across the Red Sea. This interpretation ignored the fact that the Bible indicated that the curse was actually pronounced on Canaan and not his voyeur father (a baffling shift which Genesis does not explain), and further that Canaanites were not actually among the black races of the ancient world.

The link between blackness and slavery reached the Christian West late, and it was ironically via Judaism. Just when the Portuguese were beginning to take their share of the African slave trade, in the late fifteenth century, a celebrated Portuguese Jewish philosopher, Isaac ben Abravanel, suggested that Caanan's descendants were black, while those of huis uncles were white, and so all black people were liable to be enslaved. Genesis 9 gives no support to this belief; nevertheless Abravanel's innovative exercise in biblical hermeneutics now proved extremely convenient for the same Iberian Christians who persecuted his own people, and later fo rchristian slavers everywhere. Other Christians followed a different line in Biblical interpretation not found in any Western Bible, but traceable right back to a reading in the Syriac Peshitta version of the story of Cain in Genesis 4.1 - 16: according to this Syriac take on the biblical text, black people actually descended from Cain because when God had punished Cain for killing his brother Abel, the 'mark' he gave the murderer was to blacken his skin. It was reasonable to suppose that this applied to all Cain's descendants. Neither biblical approach was calculated to raise the status of people defined as black.

The long struggle to abolish slavery remained throughout a curious collaboration of fervent Evangelicals, who were mostly otherwise extremely politically conservative, with radical children of the Enlightenment, many of whom had no great love of Christianity, though some were enthusiastic Unitarians (as Socinians were now more courteously known). Such radicals saw an end to slavery as part of the war on oppression of which the French revolution also formed a part. So in 1791, before that Revolution became a liability rather than a potential ally for English radicals, the adventurous Whig MP Charles james Fox - whose colourful private life certainly did not make him a natural ally for morally censorious Evangelicals - spoke forcefully in Parliament in support of one of Wilberforce's earlier unsuccessful motions against 'this shameful trade in human flesh'. 'Personal freedom,' he insisted, 'must be the first object of every human being… a right, of which he who deprives a fellow-creature is absolutely criminal'.

There has been nearly a century of argument as to whether slavery's abolition was merely a Machiavellian outcome of the West's realization that slavery was becoming an economic liability. It is understandable that descendants of enslaved Africans should tire of hearing complacent British repetition of the famous judgement by the Victorian historian of European ethical change, W.E.H. Lecky, that the 'unwearied, unostentatious and inglorious crusade of England against slavery may probably be regarded as among the three or four perfectly virtuous acts recorded in the history of nations'. Yet after all the debate, and the research it engendered, Lecky seems vindicated": abolition was an act of moral revulsion which defied the strict commercial interests of European and anglophone nations. Less frequently has it been recognized as one of the more remarkable turnarounds in Christian history: a defiance of biblical certainties, spearheaded by British Evangelicals who made it a point of principle to uphold biblical certainties. Many of their fellow Evangelicals berated them for their inconsistency and few of their allies in mainland European Protestantism showed much sympathy for their project.

It is true that other moral dimensions nuance Lecky's judgement. The ethical imperative in the circle of Sharp and Wilberforce was part of a new self-confidence and imperial assertiveness on the part of Britain, taking shape even as its North American empire was ripped in two. A direct outcome of the abolitionist movement was one of the earliest British colonies to extend the Crown's territorial ambitions beyond coastal trading forts outside America and India: Sierra Leone in West Africa. Inaugurated in 1792 after a badly conceived false start in the same area five years before, this was a cooperation between the indefatigable Evangelical abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, his ex-naval officer brother John and a West African - an Egba prince who in enslavement had taken the name Thomas Peters and then regained his freedom by fighting for the British in the American War of Independence. The venture tried to learn lessons from a second previous failed colony of 1775 on the ominously (though coincidentally) named Mosquito Coast of Central America. That had been a partnership between an English businessman and another formerly enslaved African-American, Olaudah Equiano, whose autobiography had become a transatlantic best-seller, especially among Evangelicals, and who became one of the advisers to the new Sierra Leone scheme. The Mosquito Coast venture involved using enslaved Africans to make it commercially viable, with only a vague prospect that financial success would bring them freedom: that strategy was very far from abolitionism and the slaves sought to escape, all drowning in the attempt.

There was now no question but that the Sierra Leone colonists who started arriving in 1792 should be Africans to whom freedom had been restored, either liberated on the West African coast or shipped back from the Americas complete with Protestant Christian values. Thomas Peters had his own ideas as to what those values might be, and he had the temerity to demand more political rights for his black fellow settlers than Englishmen would have enjoyed back home. Against him were ranged the English directors of the Sierra Leone Company, who as in the Mosquito Coast venture linked 'the true principles of Commerce' to 'the introduction of Christianity and Civilization', and who crushed uprisings by kindred spirits to Peters after his early death. Yet Peters's fellow colonists who shared his spirit of independence and self-reliance had the advantage that the tropical climate made even shorter work of British administrators than it did of returned African-Americans. the new venture soon developed a hierarchical pyramid of status groups: Christians from the New World at the top, then West Africans liberated locally (the two groups together became known as the Krio) and finally the indigenous population, who, like the inhabitants of Canaan three millennia before, had not been given any say in God's territorial gift to these new Children of Israel. It was an unhealthy imbalance in which the seeds of modern troubles were sown for Sierra Leone; the later American initiative in founding an entirely independent West African state of Liberia (from 1822) suffered from the same problem.

Sierra Leone did not make money for its proprietors, but it did survive, a rich source of African Christian leadership for all West Africa, from the many Protestant denominations it hosted. Its Krio language, a creative development of English, soon served as a lingua franca throughout the region. The colony was also an interesting sign to imperial strategists that European African colonial possessions might usefully extend beyond scattered coastal outposts. From 1808 Sierra Leone was a Crown Colony, base for a remarkable practical extension of the Parliamentary Act abolishing the slave trade, a British naval squadron which intercepted slave ships and freed their captives. The British government was not unaware that this was a useful part of the war effort against the commerce of the Napoleonic Empire, but the work did not stop with Napoleon's defeat. The navy now combined a moral campaign with the steady extension of British influence. Evangelicals had produced this result, and their continuing agitation sustained British commitment - which, perhaps surprisingly, extended to the British government bringing pressure to bear on Pope gregory XVI: an Apostolic Letter in 1839 echoed the recent British condemnation of the salve trade. Out of this moral crusade emerged the potent idea that the British Crown was a partner with its subjects in the worldwide enterprise of spreading Christian civilization - a theme as useful to imperial subjects as to imperial government.

to Make the World Protestant: (1700 - 1914)

Africa: An Islamic or a Protestant Century?

Nowhere else in the world was the relationship of Christianity to colonial expansion so straightforward as in the Pacific, partly because elsewhere Europeans encountered cultures based on faiths also claiming a universal message or with the potential to do so: Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism. Of these, Islam had the widest reach, and contacts were consequently the most varied. We have already noted how a far more confrontational attitude to Christianity arose in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, but for more than a century before, there had been revivals throughout the Islamic world, reactions to the humiliation of the failing empires of the Ottomans and Mughals. In the face of growing European military success in late-eighteenth-century India, Shah Wali-Allah began considering how Muslim society might adapt for the first time in its history to losing political power. He pleaded eloquently both for Islamic social reconstruction and for a reconciliation of Sunni and Shī'a within Islam, and his son 'Abd al- 'Aziz sustained and developed his movement, combining tradition with a recognition of the reality of British India. On the fringes of ottoman power in Arabia, an austere revivalism founded by Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhāb (1703 - 87) gained support from tribal leaders of the Sa'ūd family; al-Wahhāb rejected more than a millennium of development within various branches of Islam, to return to basic texts, in a move not unlike the Protestant Reformation. In 1803 the Sa'ūd temporarily conquered the holy city of Mecca, and thereafter remained a significant force in the politics of Arabia until eventually they became its rulers.

During the nineteenth century, this Wahhabite religious movement in a peninsula dominated by desert and with no great political or economic power seemed to have little wider importance. It was in North and West Africa that a new surge of life extended Muslim frontiers, and the agent was a very different form of Islam led by mystical Sūfī orders: the first significant sign of Islamic renewal that Christian missionaries encountered anywhere. If christian expansion in Africa did eventually become linked to military success, reforming Islam had already set the pattern in late-eighteenth-century West Africa, through the strength and proselytizing zeal of the pastoralist Fulani people. Their establishment of a string of emirates in place of previous kingdoms was spearheaded by movements of jihad (struggle) to establish a purer form of Islam, the greatest of which was led from 1802 by the campaigning Sūfī scholar Shehu Usman dan Fodio. In the early nineteenth century, the most plausible picture of the future was that black Africa would have become overwhelmingly Muslim, and Muslim growth there remained spectacular all through the century. In fact, Christianity came to equal Islam in outreach in Africa, and this spurt of Christian growth was in the first place a mission pushed forward by self-help. Only belatedly did it gain increasing protection from European military power; even at their apparently most powerless, Africans made their own choices within the offer of Christian faith.

There was certainly demand for the new message. People all over Africa, uprooted by local wars or the recent interference of Europeans, were as eager as industrial workers in Georgian England to find new purpose and structure for their lives. Even while missionary societies were first dispatching volunteers from Britain early in the nineteenth century, a far less formal dispersal of Christian knowledge was exuberantly travelling out of the first British Protestant coastal footholds in southern and West Africa, almost without the missionaries noticing. Through much of the continent, both trade and the need for pastoralists and arable farmers to move on from easily exhausted soils or pastures encouraged Africans to travel over long distances. Young men from inland went to find work on the coast; they returned home, having witnessed a new religion and sung its hymns. women were the mainstay of trade in West Africa, and in Sierra Leone many Krio women highly gifted in commerce were seized by enthusiasm for Christian faith. On their far travels out of the colony, they marketed Christianity as successfully as all their other waves, like the Syrian merchants of Central Asia long before them.

As a result, it was rare in nineteenth-century Africa for a European missionary to appear in any community which had apparently never before enjoyed a visit from a white man and not find someone who recognized what he was talking about. If the personal chemistry worked between missionary and this new acquaintance, such a person could become a teacher, prepared to go on repeating and recreating the Christian message when the European moved on: speaking to Africans in African ways. it was a rediscovery of the vital role of catechists like those whom Catholic missionaries had already employed in Latin America, central Africa and China in previous centuries, and it paralleled what was going on in Christianizing the Pacific. Local voices had much more chance of conveying what the missionaries were trying to bring in an alien cultural form: joy. Dan Crawford, a missionary from the British 'Brethren' movement, came to Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century as an unusually sensitive guest. In his missionary work, he drew on the Brethren's tradition of carefully eschewing any religious hierarchy, and he watched and listened. As he observed a convert lady dancing, he grasped how great were the marvels which he himself could hardly enter:

to me, a new-comer, what a gazing-stock! The amazing, maddening mix-up of the prayer in the heart, and the prance in the feet! Asked her what it meant at all at all, and she quaintly replied, 'Oh! it is only the praise getting out at the toes.'

What messages made the new Christians dance? At the risk of seeming foolishly patronizing to a multitude of different peoples across a vast continent, it is worth drawing attention to a few themes, not always those which missionaries expected or wanted converts to pick up from the good news. At the heart of Christianity is a book full of signs and wonders testifying to God's power, and Africans were accustomed to looking for those. Their religions commonly spoke of spirits and provided explanations of the mysteries of world origins and creation: so did this book. It was full of genealogies: most African societies delighted in such repetitions, when they bored or baffled pious Europeans, who had often turned to Africa precisely to make their mark unhampered by the snobbery of long-pedigreed gentry back home. In fact, Africans might take the book more seriously than the missionaries who brought it, in the sense that they confidently expected concrete results from the power of God. That was a challenge to European evangelicals, who were likewise convinced that God wrought miracles in his world, but whose rationalism (born at whatever remove from the enlightenment) provoked them into alarm at a literalism which differed from their own.

The Bible speaks without reserve about witches and at one point it suggests that they should not be allowed to live. African societies knew witches well, and many allotted power to witch-finders. Europeans did not want to encourage these rivals in charisma, particularly when the witch-finders encouraged the killing of witches, but if Europeans expressed skepticism, indigenous Christians might ignore them and take matters into their own hands. In the twentieth century, the results grew increasingly fatal in certain parts of rural Africa, where witch-killings marched in step with the growth of African-initiated Churches. This was by no means the only matter on which African Christians might look for specific action from their god beyond missionary expectations. In arid zones, missionaries were repeatedly expected to bring rain where there was no rain. They were after all travelling men preaching biblical power, and they ought to be able to do better than traditional rainmakers, who were often also charismatic wanderers, and as much their competitors as the witch-finders. Once more, even the most uncompromising European Evangelicals were likely to doubt that in God's providence the weather worked quite like that. It was particularly testing, as the Wesleyan Methodist William Shaw discovered after staging a round of sermons and prayers for rain to outface challenges from a non-Christian rainmaker, to turn off God's bounty once the recipients had had enough.

Rainmaking (or rather the lack of it) ended the personal missionary career of the great Scottish missionary publicist and explorer David Livingstone. His one known convert, Sershele, King of the BaKwêna in what is now Botswana, was a perfect prize, intellectually gifted and a fine orator, but he was also his people's rainmaker, and his powers appeared to have ended when he accepted Christian baptism. To Livingstone it was folly to worry about this; to Setshele it was crucial. In his frustration, the King broke with Livingstone on another matter which from different standpoints mattered very much to both of them; he took back his multiple wives. There was general satisfaction among the BaKwêna at this. Livingstone was furious and left, never again to effect any conversions in his restless African travels. Livingstone's departure suited Setshele rather well: the King continued eloquently preaching the Gospel among his people unhindered by Europeans, he made rain and he honoured all his wives.

John William Colenso, a polymath with an inconvenient Cornish propensity for pointing out truths to those disinclined to see them, became first Anglican Bishop of Natal in South Africa, and he had great admiration for the equal clear-sightedness which he found in his Zulu flock. He became alarmed at their puzzlement about anomalies in the Pentateuch. His struggles to satisfy their queries eventually won him ostracism within Anglicanism, but apart from his notorious (and it has to be said clumsy) championing of sensible critical analysis of the Bible, Colenso also became convinced that the Zulu had a good case on polygamy. He said so in a pamphlet of 1862 addressed to the Archbishop of Canterbury. His fellow bishops worldwide were not going to agree with a heretical troublemaker, and the Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops (with the agreement of Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the one African present and on the relevant committee) condemned polygamy in 1888. Back in Sierra Leone in the same year, Anglicans hotly debated the same issue, when one speaker bluntly said that to recognize polygamy would 'make us all honest men' - but the bookseller who had proposed the idea found himself forced to resign from the Church Finance Committee.

Colenso articulated what was unannounced but general practice among Anglicans and Catholics, when with characteristic candour he made it clear that he did not force Christian converts to put away extra wives, considering it cruel and 'opposed to the plain teaching of Our Lord' (who, on any reading of scripture, showed a firm if not consistently reported hostility to divorce). Colenso's pragmatism was equaled by that of the great missionary archbishop of North African Catholicism, Cardinal charles Lavigerie, when considering with dismay another aspect of African esteem for marriage: the difficulties which it caused in recruiting local Catholic priests in the face of the Church's rule of universal clerical celibacy. Lavigerie, an enthusiastic student of Church history who took the long view, recommended that the Pope should authorize a married priesthood for Africa, but the obvious parallel in the married clergy of the Greek Catholic Churches of eastern Europe did not impress the Curia. When Churches took a hard line on such matters of sexuality, they might well find their flocks and even their clergy voting with their feet, as when, in 1917, sixty-five Yoruba ministers were expelled from the Nigerian Methodist Church for polygamy. Yorubaland, a cultural frontier where the contest between Islam, Christianity and traditional religion led people to a questioning spirit in religious matters, was not a country to breed meekness to external authority. The expelled ministers went on to found a United African Methodist Church whose 'united' character, like that of a previous 'United' Methodist Church created back in England, consisted in a sturdily united refusal to be bossed around by Wesleyan Methodists.

By that period, there was a vigorous movement through most of Africa to found Churches independent of European interference: Colenso, indeed, had retained a loyal Zulu following when deposed by the Metropolitan Bishop of Cape Town, and it was half a century after his death before most of the remaining Colensoites were persuaded back into mainstream Anglicanism. The movement to create African-initiated Churches further fragmented African Christianity, but it might be regarded as a logical end result from the thinking of the more imaginative cearly missionaries. Among them had been an outstanding leader back in London, Henry Venn, grandsonn of one of the original 'Clapham Sect' and for more than thirty years from 1841 General Secretary of the Church Missionary Society. He was one of the first to enunciate a policy easier for Protestants than Catholics to envisage: an African Church based on a 'three-self' principle - self-supporting, self-governing, self-propagating. Naturally, for the Anglican Venn, this was not meant to involve ecclesiastical separation, but it demanded that local leadership should be established as soon as possible. A disastrous missionary venture of 1841 in West Africa prompted the CMS into acting on his strategy: a hugely ambitious expedition in the river Niger basin, during which fever struck down 130 of 145 Europeans and killed forty of them.

The Niger catastrophe seemed to show that Africans were better suited to withstand local conditions. Among its survivors was an African clearly endowed with leadership qualities, and who during visits to England had become a personal friend of Venn: Samuel Ajayi Crowther (his English baptismal names commemorated the Samuel Crowther who was a leading figure in the CMS). Crowther was another Yoruba - indeed, through his writings, he was the main agent in popularizing this proud self-ascription for his people. The British Navy had freed him from a slave ship bound for the Americas, and he then settled like so many freed Yoruba in Sierra Leone; he was eventually consecrated bishop in Canterbury Cathedral in 1864. His career, so promising and so prophetic of eventual indigenous leadership, was crippled through no fault of his own. Crowther's restrained dignity clothed a passionate hatred of slavery and ignorance. He could be unsparing in his criticism of African people, precisely because he wanted to arouse them out of the poverty and deprivation which he saw as caused by false religion as much as by slavers. Although as a member of the 1888 Lambeth Conference's committee on polygamy he concurred in the committee's denunciation of the institution, his hostility anticipated modern feminist critiques of polygamy's male-centredness. He couched his critique in terms of women's rights: women had not chosen polygamy, and although they usually worked harder than men, a polygamous husband was unlikely to satisfy all their needs (in one of his memoranda to the CMS, he told a cheerfully risqué tall story to illustrate his point).

After the intiial visionary decision to consecrate Crowther, he was ill-sered by an episcopal appointment which in reality did not at all exemplify Venn's 'three-self' principle. Allotted the diocese of the Niger rather than his own Yorubaland because of jealousy from European missionaries working among the Yoruba, Crowther did his considerable best amid an unfamiliar culture with a language not his own, but eventually he found himself facing a peculiarly ruthless trading corporation, the Royal Niger Company. His efforts to remain independent of them attracted much ill-will and resentment that an African should stand in the way of Crown and commerce. Eventually a younger generation of missionaries appeared in Crowther's territories, endowed with all the self-confidence of English public schoolboys and the brisk austerity of late Victorian Evangelicalism, plus a dose of plain racism. They were unsympathetic to Crowther's gentle style - 'a charming old man, really guileless and humble… but he certainly does not seem called of God to be an overseer' was the magisterial judgement of the twenty-four-year-old Graham Wilmot Brooke on the bishop more than half a century his senior. Crowther was induced to resign in 1890, and died a couple of years later. He was remarkably gracious about his treatment, and some of those involved later realized how foolish they had been. But no other black African was made a diocesan bishop until 1939, and then it was the Roman Catholic Church which had taken up the challenge of African leadership. In 2009, as this book goes to press, the Church of England is adorned by an Archbishop of York born and raised in Uganda, John Sentamu.

It was of course possible for indigenous rulers to make decisions about Christianity and provide leadership, just as in the Pacific. Many monarchs throughout the new British territorial empire chose Anglicanism. Perhaps the most celebrated example was the kingdom of Buganda, part of what is not the Republic of Uganda, where Anglicans fought off vigorous competition for established status from Roman Catholicism and Islam. In the process they gained a set of martyrs whose firey deaths for refusing the orders of their Kabaka (king) to commit sodomy have left the Anglican Church in Uganda particularly sensitive to recent shifts in Western sexual mores. In the end, Buganda's identification between Crown and Church was so great that when in 1953 the British Governor of Uganda exiled the Kabaka of Buganda for political for political reasons, the Mothers' Union of the Anglican Church was loud among the chorus of furious protest. They complained that the Kabaka's exile endangered all Christian marriage in the kingdom, since the Anglican Bishop of Uganda had presided over the marriage of the Kabaka to his people when he bestowed a ring on him at his coronation.

Another powerful African kingdom, on the island of Madagascar (now Malaghasy), likewise weighted up which varieties of Christianity (if any) to persecute or engourage. Eventually in 1869 Queen Ranavalona II settled not on Anglicanism but on English Congregationalism: an analogous triumph to Methodism's in Tonga and a tribute to the astuteness and persistenc eof the London Missionary Society. So Congregationalism had a new taste of state establishment after its recent American losses, albeit this time under an absolute monarch, but the end of the story was very different from Tonga's. The colonial power which overthrew the monarchy, late in the colonial process in 1895, was not Britain but France, and for decades a further paradox afflicted Madagascar, as anticlerical French republican governments allowed Catholic clergy a free hand they would not have tolerated at home, actively repressed Protestant congregations and confiscated Protestant churches and schools, all in aid of promoting francophone against anglophone culture. This was a rather curious example of colonialism and Christianization going hand in hand, although the Congregationalists survived repression and still have a substantial presence on the island.

Elsewhere, the inglorious end of Samuel Crowther's episcopate encouragd the formation of African-initiated Churches; the late nineteenth century saw the rise of leaders asserting their charisma as Old Testament prophets had once done against the Temple priesthood. One of the classic figures, whose influence is still felt all through West Africa, was William wade Harris (1865 - 1929), a product of both Methodism and American Anglicanism. As a native Liberian of the Grebo people, marginalized therefore by the African-American Liberian elite, his career began in political agitation against their misgovernment which aimed to hand Liberia over to British rule, an interesting tribute to British colonialism. Imprisoned as a subversive, Harris was granted visions of the Archangel Gabriel, who relayed god's command to begin the work of prophecy. One aspect of the command was that Harris must abandon European clothing: that resolved the tangle into which his complicated relationship with Western culture had led him. Soon he was striding barefoot through the villages of the Ivory Coast and the Gold Coast (now Ghana), dressed in a simple white robe, bearing a gourd calabash of water and a tall cross-staff (after Harris, staffs became well-nigh-indispensable kit for any African prophet). He preached the coming of Christ and the absolute necessity to destroy traditiona cult objects. With him was his team of two or three women, singing and playing calabash gourd rattls to summon the Holy Spirit. Little in Harris's message beyond his angelic vision and personal style could be considered alien to the mainstream Christianity he had learned in his years as an Episcopalian catechist, although colonial administrators of antiquarian tastes deplored the destruction of local art which followed his visits. He himself recommended his converts to join the Methodists, but given his own tolerance of polygamy, that caused problems.

A feature of Harris's often brief visits in his tireless preaching (no more than a few weeks in the Gold Coast in 1914, for instance) was his extraordinary ability to leave permanent Churches in his wake - in terms of missionary impact, he was more John Wesley than George Whitefield. In the Ivory Coast, previously a Roman Catholic French enclave, Protestant practice mushroomed. The rich variety of Churches he left behind was characterized by local leadership and a propensity for building their own emphases into a distinctive system, beyond anything that Harris recommended. The Twelve Apostles Church in modern Ghana, for instance, has developed predominantly female leadership. Prophetesses preside over 'gardens', complexes of open-air church, oratory and hostel rather like a monastery; the prophetess's most prized ministry is healing, centring on Friday services (for which market women have decreed themselves a day off), the whole congregation dressed in red robes to honour the blood of Christ. All these are developments independent of Harris. His gourd rattles nevertheless remain crucial to the liturgy, banishing spirits of illness with their clamour, while alongside them the skills of teenage drummers are given full rein. The Bible becomes a sacramental instrument, its touch calming the noisily possessed, and the prophetess bears a replica of Harris's cross-staff. The Twelve Apostles pride themselves on being the Church of last resort in affliction, even for proud folk who affect to despise such unsophisticated approaches to illness.

Harris's early effort to play off the British against the Liberian authorities followed by his sudden rejection of European styles of worship echoed wider African reactions to a political situation transformed in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. A complete partition of Africa by European powers, through the Congress of Berlin in 1884-5, resulted in the destruction of a vast number of local power structures. The only lands left governing themselves were Ethiopia and Liberia, the latter a dubious exception. In King Leopold of Belgium's new so-called Congo Free State, a vast and scandalously misgoverned personal fiefdom, there was a sad symbolism of changed times when, in the 1890s, Baptist missionaries had no compunction in quarrying the ruins of Kingo's once-splendid royal and Catholic Cathedral of São Salvador to build a new church for themselves. Christian missionary organizations largely welcomed the new situation, although colonial administrators, mindful of the disaster of the Great Indian Rebellion of 1857-8, were generally careful to respect the large areas of Africa which were now Islamic - to the annoyance of many aspiring evangelists.

Still Christians had advantages. Now that colonial governments were demanding the regular collection of taxes and the filling in of forms, Westen-style education was at a premium and only the Churches could offer it. In South Africa, the Xhosa word for Christians became 'School'. Some Churches became alarmingly identified with the new imperialism. Catholics, Anglicans, Scots Presbyterians, Methodists, Dutch Reformed, even the Salvation Army, all accepted large grants of land from colonial promoters in 'Rhodesia' (now Zimbabwe/Zambia) and Kenya, which provoked widespread resentment against their missions. Now it was possible to conceive of Christianity spanning the continent just as the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes envisaged a British-owned Cape to Cairo railway. Despite the unfortunate connotations of the image, it became common to talk about a 'chain' of missions across Africa, all belonging to some particular organization or Church. This generally European vision was to be fulfilled in a rather different fashion by African-initiated Churches.

Amid the general European ascendancy, two ancient Christian Churches stood out as not having first arrived in Africa with the slave traders. Both were Miaphysite: the Copts of Egypt and the Ethiopians. The Copts emerged from three centuries of beleaguered existence to a new prosperity, thanks to the opening up of their country to Western Christian influence in the wake of French and British clashes over Egypt in the Napoleonic period. A triangular relationship developed between the Copts, Evangelical missionaries (particularly from the Church Missionary Society) and Muhammad Ali, the Albanian Ottoman soldier of fortune turned carpet-bagging ruler of Egypt from 1805, founder of a dynasty which survived the Ottoman fall to rule Egypt into the mid-twentieth century.

All sides had something to gain. The Copts were alert to the possibility of outside help after such long isolation, the English missionaries were not only eager to save souls but excited at the prospect of contact with so venerable a Church untainted by popery, and the Muslim Muhammad Ali recognized how useful it would be to exploit a skilled indigenous people who could mediate with Western powers and provide a pool of administrative expertise. The CMS implemented a scheme to introduce European patterns of education; the Copts eagerly seized on the opportunity and were careful to take it over for themselves. The centrepiece became a Coptic Patriarchal College founded, as its name implied, by the head of the Coptic Church, Kyrillos (Cyril) IV, who initiated a wave of Church reforms, a surprising number of which survived, considering that he had only seven years in which to implement them. The CMS were disappointed in their initial hopes of mass conversions of Egyptian Muslims, but unwittingly they had aided a renaissance in an ancient Church. In the face of all the tribulations which followed for Ottoman Christians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was to prove one of the most successful in all Eastern Christianity.

Ethiopia's continuing existence was the most emphatic reminder that Christianity was an ancient African faith, and the resurgence of its Church owed little to the sort of quasi-colonial assistance which benefited the Copts. In the early nineteenth century the Ethiopian Empire might have entirely disintegrated, but it was rescued by a provincial governor, Kassa, who hacked his way to power so successfully that in 1855 he was crowned Negus under the name of Tewodros (Theodore), the hero whose providential arrival as monarchical saviour had been predicted in a sixteenth-century Ethiopian Christian prophecy. Intensely pious - 'Without Christ I am nothing,' he declared - he ended the tradition of royal polygamy and toyed with Protestant missions travelling down from Egypt, some of whom had a particular use for him in their ability to manufacture armaments. But like several of Ethiopia's most energetic monarchs before him, Tewodros descended into paranoia and murderous vindictiveness; it was not good for his sanity to think himself lineally descended from King David. His cruelty alienated his own people, and his imperial posturing led to a British expeditionary force which crushed his armies at Maqdala in 1868. In despair, he turned on eo fhis missionary-forged guns on himself.

Ethiopia survived this disaster and its Church maintained its Miaphysite character. Yöhannes IV, another provincial governor turned Negus, imitated Constantine in presiding over a Church council in 1878 to settle long-standing disputes on Christology, although his order to tear out the tongues of some of those challenging his decision rather outdid the Roman Emperor's enforcement of Nicene Orthodoxy. His less opinionated successor, Menelik II, brought the empire to an unprecedented size, and delivered the most lasting defeat suffered by a colonial power during the nineteenth century when he crushed the invading Italians at Adwa in 1896. It was an event celebrated all over Africa: a sign (like the Japanese victory over the Russian Empire nine years later) that Europeans were not all-powerful. It was also a triumph for authentically Africa Christianity, which might now turn to Ethiopia for inspiration.

Already in 1892, far away in the Transvaal, a Methodist minister of the Pedi people, Mangena Maake Mokone, infuriated at condescension from his white colleagues, had founded what he called the Ethiopian Church. Here was a name for a Church which, unlike any other title - Methodist, Anglican, even Catholic - was actually to be found in the Bible. Mokone was mindful of the psalm-verse (68.31) 'let Ethiopia hasten to stretch out her hands to God' - a scriptural fragment which, in conjunction with the story in Acts 8:26 - 40 of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch, was destined to have huge repercussions through the continent over the next century. In a remarkably deft piece of Anglican diplomacy, the nucleus of Mokone's Ethiopian Church eventually ended up as an 'Order of Ethiopia' in union with the mainstream South African Anglican Church, but the impulse to honour the victorious empire spread elsewhere through a great variety of African-initiated Churches. A paralel urge to look for a truly African historic episcopal succession led some African Christians to form congregations under the jurisdiction of the tiny Church presided over by the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Alexandria; but Ethiopia remained and remains the chief symbolic focus.

When Facist Italy sought to avenge the shame of Adwa in its invasion and destructive occupation of Ethiopia in 1935 (including the wrecking of historic church buildings), reaction across Africa was sharp in condemning this outrage. As far away as Nigeria, Christians sneered at the Italian Pope for his lack of condemnation of fellow Italians: "It should be remembered that the Pope is after all a human being like the ordinary run of mankind and therefore heir to human weaknesses, in spite of the traditional claim for him by his adherents of infallibility.' Equally Ethiopia has inspired many Afro-Caribbeans and African-Americans to express their pride in Africa through their adherence to Rastafari. This syncretistic religious movement takes its title from the pre-coronation name of the last Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie, and it meticulously grounds its beliefs in Old and New Testament, in the fashion of Christian Churches through the centuries.

Diarmaid Macculloch

Author of this book.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7f7ILenKBQ

Happy black history month!