Over 734 million people in Africa are associated with Christianity in some way. It is inaccurate to call it a white man’s religion. Christianity is a religion that started in the Near East and travelled to both Africa and Europe at the same time.
Christianity has been active in Africa since the 1st century. For Christianity was present in Africa 1000 years before the first European Colonialists arrived on African shores.
The History of Christianity in Africa
Sadly missing from many people’s understanding of Christianity is that a significant number of the Church Fathers were African.
Christianity is embraced by the majority of the population in most Southern African, Southeast African, and Central African states and in large parts of the Horn of Africa and West Africa, while Coptic Christians make up a significant minority in Egypt. Christianity reached Africa first in Egypt around the year 50 AD.
Mark the Evangelist became the first bishop of the Alexandrian Patriarchate in about the year 43. At first the church in Alexandria was mainly Greek-speaking. By the end of the 2nd century the scriptures and liturgy had been translated into three local languages. At the beginning of the 3rd century the church in Alexandria expanded rapidly, with five new suffragan bishoprics. At this time, the Bishop of Alexandria began to be called Pope, as the senior bishop in Egypt.
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In the middle of the 3rd century the church in Egypt suffered severely in the persecution under the Emperor Decius. Many Christians fled from the towns into the desert. When the persecution died down, however, some remained in the desert as hermits to pray.
The early 4th century in Egypt began with renewed persecution under the Emperor Diocletian.
I am not just talking about the Northern African countries that were part of the Roman Empire and so were Christianised in the first few centuries of Christianity’s spread. You may be familiar with the strong base for Christianity established in Alexandria, Egypt, in the 1st century. Eusebius even wrote that the Gospel writer, Mark, came to Alexandria as early as 43 AD.
To become the nation’s official religion, it’s likely that Christianity was already established in the country a long time before. For comparison, it took two and a half centuries for Christianity to become the official religion of the Roman Empire.
Going further back, we have Irenaeus of Lyons, writing in 180 AD. He wrote that a ‘Simon Backos’ preached ‘the coming in the flesh of God’ in his homeland of Ethiopia (Adversus Haereses, 3.12.8). And going back further still, Luke writes of the 1st century conversion of an Ethiopian high official (Acts 8:26-40). Could this official have started the first church in Ethiopia? We have some clues to how Ethiopia was reached.
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In the Ethiopian/Eritrean Kingdom of Aksum, King Ezana declared Christianity the official religion after having been converted by Frumentius, resulting in the promotion of Christianity in Ethiopia (eventually leading to the foundation of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church).
While some Ethiopian monks did make it to the Council of Florence in the 15th century, when the Portuguese landed in Ethiopia in 1493, they found-to their shock-that it was already full of churches! Many of the Colonists were not aware of this heritage.
I used to assume that these Church Fathers were Roman or Greek Christians living in Africa as part of the Roman Empire. Only they weren’t. Origen was Coptic. Augustine and Cyprian were Berbers. Both Coptics and Berbers are indigenous people groups native to Northern Africa. Tertullian was slightly different. He was Punic. Punics were a Semitic people who had come from Canaan and settled in Northern Africa in the Early Iron Age.
Along with other theologians who lived in Africa-such as Athanasius, Clement, Ambrose, Pachomius, Cyprian, etc.-these giants of Church history fought off heresies such as Gnosticism, Arianism, Montanism, Marcionism, Pelagianism, and Manichaeism. They also helped elucidate our view of the Trinity and taught us how to exegete correctly.
Amongst these mighty men, Augustine stands head and shoulders above the rest. He was a prolific writer, leaving behind 113 books, 218 letters, and over 500 sermons. Two of his books, Confessions and City of God are considered classics and shaped theological thinking for many centuries to come.
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After the Muslim conquests, most of the early Muslim caliphs showed little interest in converting the local people to Islam. Christianity continued to exist after the Muslim conquests. Initially, Muslims remained a ruling minority within the conquered territories in the Middle East and North Africa.
Historians have considered many theories to explain the decline of Christianity in North Africa, proposing diverse factors such as the recurring internal wars and external invasions in the region during late antiquity, Christian fears of persecution by the invaders, schisms and a lack of leadership within the Christian church in Africa, political pragmatism among the inhabitants under the new regime, and a possible lack of differentiation between early Islamic and local Christian theologies that may have made it easier for laymen to accept the new religion.
Some Christians, especially those with financial means, also left for Europe. In the lands west of Egypt, the Church at that time lacked the backbone of a monastic tradition and was still suffering from the aftermath of heresies including the so-called Donatist heresy, and one theory proposes this as a factor that contributed to the early obliteration of the Church in the present day Maghreb.
From the Muslim conquest of Egypt onwards, the Coptic Christians were persecuted by different Muslim regimes. Islamization was likely slower in Egypt than in other Muslim-controlled regions. Up until the Fatimid period (10th to 12th centuries), Christians likely still constituted a majority of the population, although scholarly estimates on this issue are tentative and vary between authors.
Under the reign of the Fatimid Caliph al-Hakim (r. Local Christians came under pressure when the Muslim regimes of the Almohads and Almoravids came into power, and the record shows demands made that the local Christians of Tunis convert to Islam.
There are reports of Christian inhabitants and a bishop in the city of Kairouan around 1150 AD - a significant event, since this city was founded by Arab Muslims around 680 AD as their administrative center after their conquest. A letter in Catholic Church archives from the 14th century shows that there were still four bishoprics left in North Africa, admittedly a sharp decline from the over four hundred bishoprics in existence at the time of the Arab conquest.
The Almohad Abd al-Mu'min forced the Christians and Jews of Tunis to convert in 1159. Ibn Khaldun hinted at a native Christian community in 14th century in the villages of Nefzaoua, south-west of Tozeur. These paid the jizyah and had some people of Frankish descent among them.
Berber Christians continued to live in Tunis and Nefzaoua in the south of Tunisia up until the early 15th century, and in the first quarter of the 15th century texts state that the native Christians of Tunis, though much assimilated, extended their church, perhaps because the last Christians from all over the Maghreb had gathered there. Another group of Christians who came to North Africa after being deported from Islamic Spain were called the Mozarabs.
The medieval Moroccan historian Ibn Abi Zar stated that the Almohad caliph Abu al-Ala Idris al-Ma'mun had built a church in Marrakech for the Christians to freely practice their faith at Fernando III's insistence.
Innocent IV asked emirs of Tunis, Ceuta and Bugia to permit Lope and Franciscian friars to look after the Christians in those regions.
Missionary expeditions undertaken by the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) began as early as 1548 in various regions of Africa. In 1561, Gonçalo da Silveira, a Portuguese missionary, managed to baptize Monomotapa, king of the Shona people in the territory of Zimbabwe.
A modest sized group of Jesuits began to establish their presence in the area of Abyssinia, or Ethiopia Superior, around the same time of Silveira's presence in Southern Africa. Although Jesuits regularly confronted persecution and harassment, their mission withstood the test of time for nearly a century. Despite this confrontation, they found success in instituting Catholic doctrine in a region that, prior to the existence of their vocation, maintained strictly established orthodoxies.
During the sixteenth century, Jesuits extended their mission into the old Kongo Kingdom, developing upon a preexisting Catholic mission which had culminated in the construction of a local church. The Jesuits went largely unchallenged by rival denominational missions in Africa.
Other religious congregations did exist who sought to evangelize regions of the continent under Portuguese dominion, however, their influence was far less significant than that of the Christians. The Jesuit's ascendency to prominence began with the padroado in the fifteenth century and continued until other European countries initiated missions of their own, threatening Portugal's status as sole patron of the continent.
The favor of the Jesuits took a negative turn in the mid eighteenth century when Portugal no longer held the same dominion in Africa as it had in the fifteenth century.
The bishopric of Marrakesh continued to exist until the late 16th century and was borne by the suffragans of Seville. Juan de Prado who had attempted to re-establish the mission was killed in 1631.
A Franciscan monastery built in 1637 was destroyed in 1659 after the downfall of the Saadi dynasty.
The growth of Catholicism in the region after the French conquest was built on European colonizers and settlers, and these immigrants and their descendants mostly left when the countries of the region became independent.
In 2009, the UNO counted 45,000 Roman Catholics and 50,000 to 100,000 Protestants in Algeria. Conversions to Christianity have been most common in Kabylie, especially in the wilaya of Tizi Ouzou. In that wilaya, the proportion of Christians has been estimated to be between 1% and 5%.
State Department estimates the number of Moroccan Christians as more than 40,000. Pew-Templeton estimates the number of Moroccan Christians at 20,000. Most Christians reside in the Casablanca, Tangier and Rabat urban areas.
The majority of Christians in Morocco are foreigners, although some reports states that there is a growing number of native Moroccans (45,000) converting to Christianity, especially in the rural areas.
Before the independence in 1956; Tunisia was home to 255,000 Europeans, mostly Christians. The Christian community in Tunisia, composed of indigenous residents, Tunisians of Italian and French descent, and a large group of native-born citizens of Berber and Arab descent, numbers 50,000 and is dispersed throughout the country.
According to Thomas C. Oden, "Christians of northern Africa-of Coptic, Berber, Ethiopian, Arabic, and Moorish descent-are treasured as part of the whole multicultural matrix of African Christianity".
Within different geographical areas, Africans searched for aspects of Christianity that could more closely resemble their religious and personal practices. Adaptations of Protestantism, such as the Kimbanguist church emerged.
Within the Kimbanguist church, Simon Kimbangu questioned the order of religious deliverance- would God send a white man to preach? The Kimbanguist church believed Jesus was black and regarded symbols with different weight than the Catholic and Protestant Europeans. The common practice of placing crosses and crucifixes in churches was viewed as a graven image in their eyes or a form of idolatry.
Also, according to Mazrui, Kimbanguists respected the roles of women in church more than orthodox churches; they gave women the roles of priests and preachers.
Members within these churches looked for practices in the Bible that were not overtly condemned, such as polygamy. They also incorporated in their own practices relationships with objects and actions like dancing and chanting.
When Africans were able to read in the vernacular, they were able to interpret the Bible in their own light.
Polygamy was a topic of debate- many literate Africans interpreted it as acceptable because of information contained in the Old Testament- while it was condemned by European Christianity. Dona Beatriz was a woman from Central Africa known for her controversial views on the acceptance of polygamy - she argued that Jesus never condemned it - and she was burnt at the stake.
European missionaries were faced with what they considered an issue in maintaining Victorian values, while still promoting the vernacular and literacy. Missionaries largely condemned the controversial African views and worked against leaders branching out.
Within African communities, there were clashes brought on by Christianization. As a religion meant to "colonize the conscience and consciousness of the colonized" Christianity caused disputes even amongst hereditary leaders, such as between Khama III and his father Sekgoma in nineteenth-century Botswana. Young leaders formed ideas based on Christianity and challenged elders.
Dona Beatriz, an African prophet, made Christianity political and eventually went on to become an African Nationalist, planning to overthrow the Ugandan state with the help of other prophets.
David Adamo, a Nigerian within the Aladura church chose portions of the Bible that closely resembled what his church found important. They read portions of Psalms because of the idea that missionaries were not sharing the power of their faith.
In addition to Africanizing Christianity, there were movements to Africanize Islam. In Nigeria, movements were created to arouse Muslims to de-Arabize Islam. There were clashes between people who accepted the de-Arabization and those who did not.
These movements took place around 1980, resulting in violent behavior and clashes with police. Mirza Ghulam Ahmed, the founder of the Ahmadiyya sect, believed that Muhammed was the most important prophet, but not the last- departing from typical Muslim views.
Sunni Africans were largely against the Ahmadiyyas; the Ahmadiyyas were the first to translate the Quran into Swahili, and the Sunnis opposed that as well.
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