European Missionaries in Africa
At the beginning of the
nineteenth century, Christianity was bounded to the coastal areas of Africa. At
this time in Western Africa, there were a total of three missionary societies
operating in western Africa. There was the Society for the Propagation of the
Gospel (SPG), the Wesleyan Missionary Society (WMS), and the Glasaw and Scottish
Missionary Society (GSMS). In the southern portion of Africa, the Morovian
Missionary and the London Missionary were dominant. There was only one society
in eastern Africa and there were none at all in northern Africa. However, by
1840 the number of missionary societies had increased to more than fifteen in
western Africa, eleven in southern Africa, five in eastern Africa in 1877 and
there were six in northern Africa in 1880. Not only were these societies active
in the coastal region of Africa, but they also started stretching inland to
lands where they haven’t reached before. Around the year 1860, these societies
in southern Africa had traveled as far north as present day Botswana, Lesotho
and Zambia. (Boahen
15) Famous names of this time include David
Livingston and Robert Moffat. (Gordon 285)
Maybe it is good to look at how
these missionaries spread and shared their ideas to all four corners of Africa.
When the Europeans landed in Africa in the beginning, they had no knowledge of
the type of people that they were dealing with. They knew nothing of their
culture, language, religion or anything of that nature. So the Europeans had to
find someone or something to tell them about the people they were dealing with.
The Europeans looked no further than the slaves…mainly in the United States. The
United States exported freed slaves back to Africa in order to help the
colonization process run smoother. After all, these people knew about African
culture and language and the people of Africa would probably listen to someone
of their own color before a white European whom they knew nothing about.
The
Christian Africans were most successful around the Guinea coast…around Sierra
Leone, Liberia and Nigeria. (Gordon 44) In fact, most African Catholics owe
their conversion to black catechists. Catechists were Africans who were mostly
untrained and unordained, but preached the gospel and set up Catholic
communities all over Africa.
These catechists were the main people
responsible for the huge increase of Christians in Africa, particularly in the
Nigerian area. (Hastings) Samuel Adjai Crowther was the most famous among these
African missionaries. Crowther was very popular amongst his people and later
became the first African Anglican bishop. ( Gordon 285) Crowther had a firm
belief that Africa could not be evangelized by Europeans, but only by Africans
themselves. He argued that the presence of Europeans endangered the “manly
independence and the courage and bravery of Africans” ( Boahen 22)
Even
though white missionaries did place pressure on some portions of Africa, take
for example southern Africa, there is little doubt that those in the heart of
Africa were facing great danger in being subjected to the Zulu, Boers, or
Ndebele people and saw the white missionaries as a “savior” and embraced them.
(Boahen 16) This could be a reason why the Africans tolerated and welcomed the
white man to begin with, when they could have fought them out of their lands.
In addition preaching the Gospel and converting the African people to
Christianity, these European Missionaries also translated the Bible into several
African languages.
The Missionary Societies also promoted agriculture as
well as teaching certain skills such as printing and tailoring. They also set up
trading posts and various points to help trade flourish, although these posts
were more than likely set up for their own benefit. But perhaps the greatest
thing that the European missionaries tried to enforce on the Africans was the
educational system. (Boahen, 16)
The Europeans saw the Africans as
“uneducated savages” who needed the white mans’ help to function as a society.
All missionary societies set up elementary schools and some even had training
colleges and secondary schools. They also had teacher training colleges,
seminars and technical schools. By 1894, the protestant missionaries claimed to
have had a total enrollment of 137,000 students attending their schools. (Boahen
16)
However things were not all peaches and cream. Very rarely did a student
stay in school a whole session and the amount of schools, particularly the
training and secondary schools, was very scarce. Even if the student managed to
get into the school, he was often sent off to work in the fields or the mines to
make money to pay taxes imposed by the Europeans. (Boahen 104) Even the Africans
who had access to school and stayed in them long enough weren’t
getting
a quality education. The books, teachers, and methods of teaching were all
second-class. New ideas that were in the big cities areas never reached the
smaller towns. There were very few schools in which science was even taught.
(Rodney 246) Whatever history of Africa that was taught in school only went back
as far as they first Europeans landed on the continent. A prime example of this
is that Europeans supposedly “discovered” Mount Kenya and the river Niger.
(Rodney 247) In the end, the spread of Western education in the African elite is
what ultimately started the overthrown of the colonial system as well as
constituting the center of the civil service in independent African states.
(Boahen 104)
The missionaries certainly had an impact on African society as
the standard of living had been changed, for the better and for the worse. Some
Africans started wearing European style clothing, and there were also some
modern style houses built in Africa. The Africans gained access to modern
medicine. They also began practicing monogamous marriages. As far as social
Africa goes, the largest impact the missionaries had was “the stratification of
African societies into a small educated elite.” (Boahen 16) Members of the elite
were given jobs such as teacher,
clergymen, doctors, civil servants, law
clerks, and journalists. In the long run, this “stratification” was not a good
thing. Members of African society were split up into two groups. There were the
“school” people, and then there were the “red” people, which mainly comprised of
the workers and the poorer citizens of Africa. The result of this was, of
course, much social tension and upheaval.
Even though the people of Africa
were given a steady diet of Christianity and Christian doctrine from the
missionaries, there were still many that had no intentions of converting. Most
Africans held true to their own traditions, there own religion, and their own
customs. It also didn’t take a while for the Africans to realize that the
missionaries and colonization went hand in hand. The missionaries help the
colonizers work up treaties that cheated Africa tribes out of their land and
their resources. Kenyan nationalist leader, Jomo Kenyatta, was quoted saying
“When the missionaries came the Africans had the land and the Christians had the
Bible. They taught us to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened our eyes we
saw that they now had the land and we had the Bible.” ( Gordon 286)
This is the sad truth. The missionaries did use Christianity as a
way to control the Africans and make the colonization process easier. These
people were doing quite well without having Christianity in their lives…believe
it or not.