Roberts A.D. The Cambridge History of Africa, Volume 7: from 1905 to 1940
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'ETHIOPIANS', ENTHUSIASTS AND PROPHETS
brought with it novel, disturbing and even revolutionary implica-
tions.
The millenarian convictions which proliferated before the
First World War were thus but one aspect
of a
much wider
conceptual development that was taking place in these decades as
a direct result of the impact of Christianity. The particular form
of these millenarian beliefs owed much to another chance contact
with North America, mediated again by Booth; but the widespread
interest they aroused illustrated the extent to which the world-view
of an increasing number of African individuals and societies was
being challenged and changed.
The most dramatic African response to a Christian millenarian
message occurred among the Tonga in northern Nyasaland.
In
1908 a young Tonga migrant worker, Elliott Kamwana, returned
to his people after an absence of some seven years, during which
he
had
first been baptised
at
Booth's mission
in
southern
Nyasaland, gone on
to
work
at a
mine near Johannesburg and
then had spent six months at Cape Town with Booth. By this time,
Booth had been converted to the millennial teaching of Charles
Taze Russell, the Pennsylvanian founder
of
the Watch Tower
Bible and Tract Society, later to be known as Jehovah's Witnesses.
It was therefore
as a
Watch Tower emissary that Kamwana
returned
to
the Tonga. Within
a
few months, before
he
was
deported, he had baptised more than 9,000 adherents. Here was
a faith which embraced not primarily an emerging elite but the
masses;
its
literature denounced
in
general terms the existing
structures of church and state and proclaimed exciting alternatives.
Such millennial hopes inspired some of Chilembwe's followers in
1915,
but Kamwana dissociated himself from political revolt and
his main impact appears
to
have been religious rather than
political. Already among the Tonga and neighbouring peoples a
general response
to the
Gospel proclaimed
by the
Scottish
missionaries
was
developing, with enthusiastic audiences
of
several thousands attending evangelistic services and impatiently
demanding baptism. Fearful that such enthusiasm might
be
superficial,
the
missionaries insisted
on an
increasingly strict
probation and greater educational qualifications, and Kamwana
himself,
when he had been a student at Livingstonia, had not been
granted baptism.
In
this situation Watch Tower offered
an
immediate alternative to the mission and one which was open to
all,
for Kamwana criticised the
'
bad effect' of college education
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CHRISTIANITY
and emphasised the importance of using ' knowledge properly for
general interest'.
14
As Watch Tower reached out to the multitudes,
it
became at
times increasingly involved
in
traditional spiritual concerns,
bringing new rites and concepts to the solution of long-standing
problems. Mass baptisms could
be
experienced
as a
cleansing
analogous
to
witchcraft eradication, and one
of
the converts
to
Watch Tower, Tomo Nyirenda, was to become not merely
a
finder
but also a killer of witches among the Lala in Northern Rhodesia
in 1925. But besides its wide and sometimes transient appeal in
remote rural areas, Watch Tower spread among migrant workers
on settlers' farms and in the urban areas
of
Central Africa, and
it also developed some relatively prosperous agricultural
settlements.
Its
links with
the
international society remained
tenuous, but its adherents became so firmly established during the
colonial period that later they were even seen by some politicians
as threats to national mobilisation.
The fiercely independent Watch Tower groups
had
thus
appropriated a specific eschatological emphasis in Christianity and
around this message
had
formed significant
and
enduring
movements
in a
crucible
of
rapid and disruptive social change.
It would
be
wrong, however,
to
overemphasise
the
peculiar
character of this experience or to see African Christian initiatives
as uniquely exemplified
by
these independents.
The
balokoh
revival, which developed among evangelical Anglicans, both
black and white, in Ruanda and East Africa in the 1930s, produced
similar close-knit fellowships.
It
provided, like Watch Tower,
a
new 'lineage',
in
which dreams were taken seriously
as in
indigenous traditions, public confession was used
to
eliminate
jealousy and mistrust, women found new roles and respect, and
ecstatic phenomena were accepted
as
normal.
In
northern
Nyasaland, only
a
year after Kamwana's preaching among the
Tonga,
a
missionary evangelist drew even larger crowds
to
his
revival services, and the thousands
at
Loudon who burst into
public confession of sin may well have experienced
a
catharsis
similar
to
that found
in
Watch Tower services. The initiatives
could also look towards the future. As early as 1904 a well-known
example of Tonga evangelistic initiative, David Kaunda's ministry
14
Quoted
in J.
McCracken,
Politics
and
Christianity
in Malawi iSjj-if^o (Cambridge,
1977),
211.
152
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ETHIOPIANS , ENTHUSIASTS AND PROPHETS
among the Bemba, had been launched from his Livingstonia base.
Labour migrants educated by him and by the Scots were to play
a major part, especially in the inter-war period, in creating unaided
the church in the Copperbelt and in founding the associations in
Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland which were to be forerunners
of national political parties. 'We were reading our Bible,' recalled
Donald Siwale,' and knew that every human being was the same.
Our idea of equality came from the Bible.'
15
Far more significant
than the specific messages relayed by Booth or the particular
emphases brought by the Scots was the fact that, in certain nuclear
areas in Africa, Christian insights had been widely accepted as
being deeply relevant to an increasing range of African
experiences.
Ethiopianism and eschatology were but two of the novel
aspects of Christianity which at the turn of the century were
gaining acceptance among Africans. Of even greater significance,
since it quickly fused with one of the most powerful elements in
African religious traditions, was the Pentecostal emphasis on
spiritual healing. Like Russell's millenarianism, this emphasis had
its origins in the revival and 'Holiness' movements which had
so deeply influenced Western Protestantism in the later nineteenth
century, and it reached Africa in many diverse ways. In 1897
Petrus Louis Le Roux, a young Afrikaner Dutch Reformed
Church missionary at Wakkerstroom in the eastern Transvaal,
began reading
Leaves
of
Healing,
a periodical published by John
Alexander Dowie, who had recently announced in Chicago his
plans for Zion City. Refusing to hide the ' glad tiding' of divine
healing from his Zulu congregation, Le Roux resigned from the
DRC,
and in May 1904 an emissary sent by Dowie held the first
Zionist baptism in South Africa, immersing Le Roux and his Zulu
followers in the river outside Wakkerstroom. Two years later' the
fire came down', marked by the charismatic speaking with
tongues, at a Negro Holiness Church belonging to Azusa Street
Mission in Los Angeles. 'Faith gives quaint sect new languages
to convert Africa,' announced the press,
16
and in May 1908 a
former member of Dowie's Zion went to South Africa, there to
15
Quoted in D. J. Cook, 'The influence of Livingstonia Mission upon the formation
of welfare associations in Zambia, 1912-31', in T. O. Ranger and J. Weller (eds.), Themes
in the Christian history of Central Africa (London, 1975), 108.
16
New York American, 3 December 1906, quoted in W. J. Hollenweger, The
Pentecostals
(London, 1972), 2j.
153
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CHRISTIANITY
be joined by Le Roux, to establish the Apostolic Faith Mission,
the first
of
several Pentecostal missions
in
South Africa. Even
before this
new
development, some
of
the Zulu Zionists
at
Wakkerstroom had split
off
from Le Roux
to
create their own
symbols and practices. Soon the Zionist churches multiplied
in
South Africa and spread north across the Limpopo. They brought
a fresh urgency
in
their challenge
to
divination and ancestor
veneration: accepting the reality of the evils which the traditional
religions confronted, they proclaimed that possession by the Holy
Spirit was made manifest in faith-healing and rain-making. They
encountered
the
message
of
God
in
dreams and visions, and
almost all of them practised the purification ritual of baptism by
immersion.
In
some cases they developed
a far
from orthodox
theology.
In
1911 Isaiah Shembe,
the
greatest
of the
Zulu
prophets, founded the Church of the Nazaretha at Ekuphakameni
near Durban, Natal.
He
seemed
to his
disciples
to
have
the
characteristics not of
a
pastor but of the Lord,
'
the mask of the
Black Christ'.
17
He
called his people
to
worship 'the God
of
Adam'
in
indigenous songs
and
dances
of
great dignity and
beauty. They responded in their thousands and continued to do
so,
led by his son after Isaiah's death in 1935. Shembe and many
Zion leaders in southern Africa owed little or nothing directly to
Pentecostal and North American leaders, but the career
of
Le
Roux and other white enthusiasts indicates that the origins and
affinities of these churches in southern and Central Africa lie not
so much with' tribal psychology' or
a
recrudescence of' paganism'
but rather with
a
world-wide, charismatic wave.
In southern Nigeria, the other principal area which witnessed
the early emergence of African churches with a healing ministry,
the initial contacts with overseas Pentecostalism were even
slighter. The first African churches in Lagos differed but little in
belief and emphasis from the mission churches out of which they
had developed. Their dispute primarily concerned questions
of
organisation, leadership and discipline: the acceptance
of
poly-
gamy by some of these African churches and its partial toleration
by others was perhaps the aspect which most clearly distinguished
their practice from that of the missions. The first major shift in
emphasis appeared with Garrick Braide and the thousands who
17
The phrase used by B. Sundkler, Zulu
Zion and some
Swa^i
Zionists
(Uppsala, 1976),
193.
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'ETHIOPIANS', ENTHUSIASTS AND PROPHETS
followed his teaching and example, first in the Niger Delta and
then throughout southern Nigeria. In one respect Braide's break
in 1915 with
the
Niger Delta pastorate, that branch
of the
Anglican Church led by Crowther's son and staffed entirely by
Yoruba and other clergy of African descent, seemed yet another
dispute over leadership, with Braide recruiting support from
people at Bonny and elsewhere who resented being ruled by an
alien clergy. But from the first, Braide's charismatic challenge had
also
a
radical spiritual dimension, which led
to an
enthusiastic
destruction of charms, mass baptisms and an acceptance of Braide
as a prophet whose prayers — and, it was alleged, his bath-water
— possessed the power of
healing.
Braide
himself,
imprisoned by
the colonial administration, died in November 1918 and after his
death his Christ Army Church divided into various sections, but
the 1921 census reported 43,000 adherents and the emphasis on
healing soon developed momentum.
During
the
influenza pandemic
of
1918,
a
prayer-group
of
Yoruba Anglicans was formed
in
Ijebu-Ode. Renouncing
all
forms of medicine, they relied solely on prayer and divine healing.
Their beliefs spread to the Ijebu in Lagos, one of whom, David
Odubanjo, found
a
similar emphasis
on
prayer and healing
in
tracts published by the Faith Tabernacle of Philadelphia. Adopting
the name of this American body, prayer-groups were established
in other Yoruba cities: one was started at Ibadan in 1925 by Isaac
B.
Akinyele, who thirty years later became the
olubadan
or ruler
of the city while
his
brother was
its
Anglican bishop. Other
separate groups were also formed, the most notable of
which,
led
by Captain Abiodun, daughter
of a
cleric, developed into
the
Cherubim and Seraphim. At first these
Aladura,
or prayer-groups,
sought to remain within the mission-connected churches, holding
that their beliefs and activities merely satisfied a need previously
neglected by the missions. Many of their leaders were drawn from
the relatively well-educated ranks of established Christian families
and their theology was exclusively Biblical. Their desire
for a
Pentecostal awakening
was
intense
and in
July 1930,
at a
conference at Ilesha, the prayers of
a
young charismatic convert,
Joseph Babalola, were followed by several dramatic healings. The
wave of enthusiasm spread to Ibadan and other Yoruba towns and
several prophetic figures emerged, including Josiah Olunowo
Oshitelu of Ogere in Ijebu, who as a young Anglican teacher had
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CHRISTIANITY
already received
visions.
Great crowds attended open-air meetings
in the markets. Many patients were cured, while others were
cleansed from witchcraft. Baptism services continued all night.
Soon the Aladura were no longer merely
a
small band of Christian
deviants who had been separated from the main churches;
suddenly with Babalola and the prophets they had become a
dynamic evangelising force, which presented for the first time a
Christian challenge to many illiterate farming communities.
The rapid expansion brought persecution: at different periods
both Babalola and Oshitelu were briefly imprisoned on charges
of making accusations of witchcraft. It also brought divisions and
fierce theological debate. At Akinyele's house in Ibadan
throughout the night of 23 January
1931,
the leaders questioned
Oshitelu and condemned on scriptural grounds some of his
practices, particularly his use of 'Holy Names'. At the close,
Oshitelu, firm in his own convictions but also in the ecumenical
belief that, as he expressed it, ' there is but one tree and there are
many branches',
18
withdrew to found the Church of the Lord
(Aladura). For a period the Faith Tabernacle leaders developed
contacts with the Apostolic Church, a British Pentecostal church,
which as a result sent missions to southern Nigeria and the Gold
Coast. The principal consequence, however, of the Aladura
revival of 1930 was that Christianity was established in many
previously unevangelised areas of Yorubaland where Muslim
influences were penetrating quickly: in the crusade against the
expansion of Islam, which had so concerned the 1910 Edinburgh
conference, Western missionaries had received, albeit if they failed
to recognise it as such, a powerful, independent reinforcement
from a most unexpected quarter.
It seems an extraordinary coincidence that the Pentecostal
emphasis on faith healing should have developed in Western
Christendom precisely at the moment when large numbers of
Africans were seeking in Christianity a solution to the problem
of suffering and evil broadly consonant with their previous
concepts of healing. The links, albeit tenuous, in Zululand and
southern Nigeria with Western Pentecostalists helped to em-
phasise the universal significance of this local African response.
Yet the careers and impact of two other prophetic figures —
William Wade Harris and Simon Kimbangu — illustrate the fact
18
Quoted by H. W. Turner, History of an African independent church (Oxford, 1967), 25.
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'ETHIOPIANS', ENTHUSIASTS AND PROPHETS
that as Christianity reached a wider circle of Africans, as the
immediate entourage of the mission station ceased to be the focal
point of evangelism, the call to purification and healing almost
inevitably emerged as a dominant emphasis of the Gospel to
Africa irrespective of the presence or absence of Pentecostalist
teaching.
A Grebo from Cape Palmas in Liberia, brought up under the
influence of Episcopalian missionaries, Harris received his
prophetic calling while in prison for having challenged the
Liberian authorities. In a trance Harris heard the Archangel
Gabriel proclaim that God was coming to anoint him and he felt
the Spirit descend upon him. When released from prison, probably
early in 1912, Harris discarded all European clothing and set out,
with Bible, cross, calabash and a bowl of water, on a preaching
mission along the coastal areas of the Ivory Coast to the western
Gold Coast. 'Possessed by a holy horror of fetishism',
19
he
proclaimed repentance and summoned his hearers to renounce the
old gods, while acknowledging the reality of traditional spiritual
anxieties. He offered them immediate baptism and healed them,
casting out evil spirits by beating his patients on the head with
his Bible. It has been estimated that about 200,000 people
responded by burning their
charms.
Fearing political disturbances,
the French expelled Harris from the Ivory Coast at the end of 1914,
but he left behind him thousands of convinced converts. Some
followed a variety of prophets and formed independent churches;
others joined one of the mission-connected churches. Ten years
later the first Methodist missionary to visit Harris's followers in
the Ivory Coast found about 150 congregations with a total of
some 30,000 members, many of whom, on the condition that they
accepted monogamy, became the nucleus there of the Eglise
Protestante Methodiste.
In July 1915, Simon Kimbangu, aged about 25, was baptised
at Ngombe Lutete, a station of the Baptist Missionary Society in
the Lower Congo. Three years later, during the influenza
pandemic, Kimbangu received his first summons to a prophetic
mission, but, restrained by a sense of inadequate training, it was
only in March 1921 that he responded by effecting a spectacular
cure.
News of the miracle spread rapidly, the mission hospitals
19
The phrase is that of a Roman Catholic eye-witness, the Rev. P. Harrington SMA,
quoted by G. M. Haliburton, The Prophet Harris (London, 1971), 38.
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CHRISTIANITY
were suddenly deserted and for the next three months the prophet
was
at
the centre of a tumultuous movement, which attracted
thousands of adherents and produced an unprecedented demand
for Bibles
and
hymn-books. Like Harris,
he
commanded
his
followers to destroy images and charms and, like Harris and the
Aladura, Kimbangu appears to have seen his message not primarily
as a challenge to the missions but as an extension of their activities,
a translation of the Gospel to African spiritual realities. In June
the Belgian administration, alarmed at the impact of his teaching,
attempted unsuccessfully to arrest him, but in September he was
arrested, condemned to death and then imprisoned for life, dying
in prison in 1951. Many of his closest disciples were also arrested
and exiled
to
other parts
of
the Congo,
but the
movement
continued clandestinely. A large number of his adherents, led by
his sons, remained faithful
to his
message, re-emerging
as a
well-organised, extensive church which in 1969 became a member
of the World Council
of
Churches. Both Harris and Kimbangu
were prophets proclaiming
the
New Testament. Both were
shunned and persecuted by missionaries and administrators, and
they had merely
a
fleeting contact with their followers during their
brief public ministries, but both left a legacy at once profoundly
indigenous, Christian and ecumenical.
CATHOLIC STRATEGY AND PRACTICE
Besides the established and the newly arrived Protestant missions,
and the wide-ranging spectrum of independent Christian radicals
and enthusiasts, Africans
at the
beginning
of
the twentieth
century were also becoming increasingly exposed
to a
massive
momentum
of
the Catholic missionary movement. The rapid
Catholic expansion into tropical Africa which marked the closing
decades of the nineteenth century was a direct consequence of the
major reorganisation achieved earlier
in the
century.
New
missionary societies, closely linked
to the
Congregation
of
Propaganda Fide
in
Rome
and
based, like their Protestant
counterparts, on
a
widespread mobilisation of recruits and finance,
had replaced
the
earlier initiatives which
had
been heavily
dependent on Catholic monarchs. The Congregation of the Holy
Ghost, or Spiritans, reorganised in 1848 and with headquarters in
Paris,
had started work on the coast
of
Senegal and Gabon and
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later expanded into Angola and the East African coast. They had
been joined in West Africa by the Society of African Missions
(SMA) from Lyons, while in the Turco-Egyptian Sudan Bishop
Comboni and priests from Verona attempted to make a reality of
the vicariate of Central Africa established in
1848.
In South Africa,
where the hierarchy had been established largely to meet the needs
of Catholic settlers, significant missionary initiatives were
gradually developed by the Reformed Cistercians (Trappists) at
Mariannhill, near Durban, by the Oblates of Mary Immaculate in
Basutoland, and by the Jesuits north of the Limpopo.
None of these missions had, however, made an appreciable
impact in the interior of tropical Africa before 1878, when Charles
Lavigerie, Archbishop of
Algiers,
persuaded Propaganda Fide to
entrust four enormous vicariates in Equatorial Africa to the
Society of Missionaries of Africa, founded by him ten years earlier
and known as the White Fathers from their adoption of the
Algerian tunic. This extraordinary coup gave his society re-
sponsibility for the immense area from the Lower Congo to the
great lakes, and the first caravans set off immediately for the
kingdom of Buganda and Lake Tanganyika. Soon Cardinal
Lavigerie's vicariates were drastically reduced, particularly in the
Congo Independent State where Leopold insisted on preference
for Belgian missionaries, especially the Belgian Jesuits and
Scheutist Fathers, but in the east the White Fathers were still left
with a vast, densely populated, undivided area which embraced
all the interlacustrine kingdoms. Elsewhere the newly established
colonial powers often preferred missionaries of their own
nationality: German Benedictines and Pallotin Fathers were sent
to German East Africa and Kamerun respectively; Mill Hill
Fathers from Britain were introduced into Uganda, and Irish
Spiritans moved into eastern Nigeria, speaking the same language
as the colonial administrators but hardly sharing all their imperial
attitudes. In French Equatorial Africa the French Spiritans, under
the local leadership of Prosper Augouard, set their active assistance
in the extension of French colonial rule as a counter against the
demands of French anti-clericals, and in Madagascar French
Jesuits were able to exploit their nationality first against British
and Malagasy Protestants and then against anti-clerical attacks. In
subsequent years many other Catholic orders and societies were
allocated missionary responsibilities in Africa, but throughout the
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CHRISTIANITY
colonial period the scene was largely to be dominated by
a
few
societies — the Spiritans, White Fathers, SMA, Verona Fathers,
Scheutists and Belgian Jesuits
—
who, unlike most
of
their
Protestant counterparts, were free to concentrate virtually all their
energy and resources upon Africa.
This rapid occupation
of
sub-Saharan Africa
by
virtually
independent, and sometimes rival, Catholic missionary societies
created problems of co-ordination and control for the Vatican,
even though
the
missionaries were among
its
most trusted
supporters. Threatened and beleaguered after the Italian capture
of Rome in 1870, the papacy found faithful and useful allies
in
the new missionary societies who owed their powers, and often
their existence, to the encouragement and support of Propaganda
Fide.
Leo XIII had been able to use Lavigerie to launch a policy
of reconciliation with the Third Republic, and missionaries were
enthusiastic supporters of Pius
X
both in his condemnation of
Modernism and in his confrontation with French anti-clericalism
in the events leading to, and following from,
the
Loi de
la
Separation,
the law by which the government of Emile Combes
separated church and state in 1905. As with the earlier case of
Lavigerie and Gambetta, missionaries were able to exploit their
positions of relative strength in the colonies. Their weapons were
various. Sometimes a delicate, diplomatic tact was employed, as
with the emissary, Princess Anne Bibesco, prioress of
a
Carmelite
convent in Algiers, who helped persuade Combes to include the
White Fathers among the orders which were
to
be reprieved.
More often the defence was far more direct, as with Augouard's
blunt assertion to Savorgnan de Brazza in May 1905 that it would
cost the state 500,000 francs per annum to laicise the schools in
the French Congo and that
if
there was to be
' a
religious war'
he would not hesitate to appeal to the powers who had signed
the Berlin Act. In this conflict with European anti-clericalism, in
which it sometimes seemed their very survival was at stake, both
papacy and missions were firmly united.
Yet the Vatican could not allow the missionary societies
to
establish themselves
as
the undisputed, virtually autonomous
rulers of enormous ecclesiastical jurisdictions. Rome's authority
over the mission fields was enshrined
in
Propaganda's right
to
appoint the prefects and vicars apostolic, but since these dignitaries
were in practice selected from the missionary society operating
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