# Christianity and Colonialism in Africa ## Intro European empire and Christian mission arrived in much of Africa at the same time, and they were often tangled together. Some missionaries blessed conquest, looked down on Africans and blocked African leaders. Others risked their lives to expose colonial crimes, and it was missionaries who brought the worst of them, King Leopold's Congo, to the world's attention. The record also shows that Christianity was in Africa more than a thousand years before the colonizers, that Africans did most of the evangelizing, and that the church grew fastest after colonial rule ended. An honest answer has to hold all of that at once. ![Black-and-white 1904 photograph of a group of Congolese men and two European missionaries on a veranda, with the severed hands of two victims laid before them](/codex/assets/congo-reform-hands-1904.jpg) *Missionaries John Harris and Edgar Stannard with Congolese men holding the hands of two victims killed by rubber-company sentries, Baringa, May 1904. Photo: Alice Seeley Harris, public domain ([Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alice_Seely_Harris,_picture_of_Bompenju,_Lofiko,_a_third_person,_John_Harris_and_Edgar_Stannard_with_the_hands_of_Lingomo_and_Bolengo,_which_have_allegedly_been_killed_by_sentries_of_the_ABIR_(May_1904).png)), resized.* ## In full The charge this page answers is that Christianity in Africa is a colonial product: that it came with the gun, served the flag, and survives as the residue of empire. The historical record supports part of the charge and refutes the rest. What it supports: - Mission and empire were frequently allied, especially in the era of the Scramble (roughly 1880 to 1914), and missions often depended on colonial protection, land grants and subsidies. - Racism and paternalism were widespread in mission circles. The undoing of Bishop [Samuel Ajayi Crowther](/codex/samuel-ajayi-crowther/) in the 1880s and 1890s is the textbook case of European missionaries pushing aside a proven African leader. - Churches lent theological cover to injustice in specific places, most notoriously the Dutch Reformed defense of apartheid in South Africa. What it does not survive: - **Chronology.** Christianity was African centuries before it was colonial. Egypt, North Africa, [Aksum](/codex/kingdom-of-aksum/) and [Nubia](/codex/christian-nubia/) were Christian in the first millennium, and the [Kingdom of Kongo](/codex/kingdom-of-kongo-christianity/) adopted the faith by its own choice in 1491 (see [African Christianity Pre-Colonial](/codex/african-christianity-pre-colonial/)). - **Agency.** Historians of the period, including Adrian Hastings, Andrew Walls and Lamin Sanneh, stress that African catechists, evangelists, prophets and translators did most of the actual evangelizing. Figures such as [William Wade Harris](/codex/william-wade-harris/) and [Simon Kimbangu](/codex/simon-kimbangu/) reached more people in months than whole mission stations had in decades. - **Demography.** Pew Research Center (2011) estimated that Christians in sub-Saharan Africa grew from fewer than 9 million in 1910 (about 9 percent of the population) to more than 516 million in 2010 (about 63 percent). Sanneh, Walls and Philip Jenkins all argue that the decisive surge came after independence, when the colonial props were gone. If Christianity were only the religion of the colonizer, it should have receded with him. It did the opposite. - **Translation.** Missions put the Bible into African languages, which, as Sanneh argued, handed Africans the tools to judge both the missionary and the empire by the Scriptures themselves (see [Missionary Translation and African Languages](/codex/missionary-translation-and-african-languages/)). The fair conclusion is the one ris3n's paper [Christianity in Africa](/codex/christianity-in-africa/) draws: separate the faith from its colonial corruption, and judge the corruption by the faith's own standard. ## The Scramble and the Berlin Conference - The Berlin Conference (November 1884 to February 1885) set rules among European powers for claiming African territory. No African ruler was present. - Its General Act pledged protection for missionaries, scientists and explorers. Missions were written into the colonial order from the start, which is one root of the "missionaries came with the colonizers" memory. - By 1914 almost the entire continent was under European rule. Ethiopia, which had defeated Italy at Adwa in 1896 under [Menelik II](/codex/menelik-ii/), and Liberia were the main exceptions. Ethiopia, the one African state that kept its independence by force of arms, was also one of the oldest Christian nations on earth. - David Livingstone's call for "Christianity, commerce and civilization" (his Cambridge lecture of 1857) is often quoted as the mission-empire charter. Livingstone himself saw commerce as a way to choke off the slave trade, but the slogan was readily absorbed into imperial self-justification. ## Complicity: where the charge lands | Case | What happened | Who documented or condemned it | |---|---|---| | Mission dependence on empire | Many missions relied on colonial protection, land and school subsidies, and some preached submission to colonial authority as a Christian duty. | Adrian Hastings, *The Church in Africa 1450-1950* (1994); Elizabeth Isichei, *A History of Christianity in Africa* (1995) | | Paternalism and racism | Mission boards often treated African Christians as permanent minors, slow to ordain them and quicker to promote Europeans. | Andrew Walls; Jehu Hanciles | | The Crowther episcopate | After decades of success, the first African Anglican bishop was undercut by young European missionaries around 1890, his African clergy suspended, and no African was appointed to succeed him. | See [Samuel Ajayi Crowther](/codex/samuel-ajayi-crowther/) | | Congo Free State | Belgian Catholic missions were, broadly, closer to King Leopold's regime than the Protestant missions that led the protest. | Adam Hochschild, *King Leopold's Ghost* (1998) | | Rwanda | Catholic missionaries in the colonial period helped entrench a racialized Tutsi-Hutu division; clergy were implicated in the 1994 genocide. In 2017 Pope Francis asked forgiveness for the sins and failings of the Church and its members during the genocide. | Vatican statement, March 2017 | | Apartheid | Sections of the Dutch Reformed Church supplied a theological defense of apartheid. The World Alliance of Reformed Churches declared apartheid a heresy in 1982, and the Belhar Confession (drafted 1982, adopted 1986 by the Dutch Reformed Mission Church) condemned it. | Belhar Confession; WARC Ottawa 1982 | | Cultural contempt | Some missions condemned African music, dress, names and customs wholesale, not only practices that conflicted with the gospel. | Kwame Bediako, *Theology and Identity* (1992) | A saying often put in the mouths of Jomo Kenyatta or Desmond Tutu captures the bitterness: when the missionaries came, Africans had the land and the missionaries had the Bible; they taught us to pray with our eyes closed, and when we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land. Its origin is uncertain, and it is best treated as a proverb rather than a quotation from either man. ## Critique from inside: missionaries who opposed colonial abuse The colonial crimes that most shaped world opinion were exposed largely by Christians, using Christian moral language. ### Leopold's Congo From 1885 to 1908 the Congo Free State was the personal possession of King Leopold II of Belgium. Forced rubber collection was enforced by hostage-taking, flogging, mutilation and killing. How many died is disputed: Adam Hochschild's *King Leopold's Ghost* (1998) popularized an estimate of around ten million, which other historians regard as unprovable, but no serious historian denies the scale of the atrocities. - **William Henry Sheppard** (1865-1927), an African American Presbyterian missionary from Virginia, investigated a raid in the Kasai in 1899 and counted 81 severed hands being smoked by soldiers of a state-employed militia. His reports reached the international press. After a 1908 mission newsletter criticized the Kasai Rubber Company, Sheppard and his colleague William Morrison were sued for libel; Sheppard was tried in 1909 and acquitted. - **John and Alice Seeley Harris**, British Baptist missionaries at Baringa, documented mutilations with photographs from 1904 onward. Alice Harris's images, shown in lantern-slide lectures across Britain and America, became the visual evidence of the campaign. - **The Congo Reform Association** was founded in 1904 by E. D. Morel and Roger Casement, with Henry Grattan Guinness among its founders, after Casement's consular report confirmed the missionaries' accounts. Missionary testimony was its backbone, and it ran public meetings through churches and chapels. - **Outcome.** Under international pressure Belgium annexed the territory from Leopold in 1908, ending his personal rule, though colonial exploitation continued under the Belgian state. ### Other voices - **John Philip** of the London Missionary Society campaigned in the 1820s for the legal rights of the Khoikhoi at the Cape, earning the hatred of settlers. - **[Afonso I of Kongo](/codex/afonso-i-of-kongo/)**, an African Christian king, protested the Portuguese slave trade in letters to the Portuguese crown in the 1520s, centuries before the Scramble. - **African Christian nationalists**, from the Ethiopianist church founders of the 1890s to independence leaders schooled in mission schools, used the Bible's teaching on human equality to attack colonial rule. Albert Luthuli (Nobel Peace Prize 1960) and Desmond Tutu (Nobel Peace Prize 1984) fought apartheid as committed Christians. - **Robert Woodberry**'s 2012 study in the *American Political Science Review* found that where Protestant missionaries were present and independent of state control, later rates of literacy, civil society and stable democracy were higher. See [Robert Woodberry](/codex/robert-woodberry/). ## African agency: who actually evangelized Africa - **Catechists and evangelists.** Most mission stations were staffed by a handful of Europeans and a much larger number of African teachers, catechists and evangelists who did the village-level work. Walls and Hastings both treat this as the ordinary pattern, not the exception. - **Prophets.** [William Wade Harris](/codex/william-wade-harris/) (Ivory Coast and Gold Coast, 1913-1915), Garrick Braide in the Niger Delta, and [Simon Kimbangu](/codex/simon-kimbangu/) (Belgian Congo, 1921) triggered mass movements to Christ independent of any mission. Colonial governments jailed or deported them. - **African Initiated Churches.** From the 1890s Africans founded churches outside missionary control (see [African Initiated Churches](/codex/african-initiated-churches/)). - **Martyrs.** The [Uganda Martyrs](/codex/uganda-martyrs/) of 1885-1887 were African converts killed by an African king before British rule was established, and the faith in Buganda spread chiefly through Ganda evangelists. - **Rulers.** Christian kingship in Africa predates the Scramble by centuries: [Ezana of Axum](/codex/ezana-of-axum/) in the fourth century, [Afonso I of Kongo](/codex/afonso-i-of-kongo/) in the sixteenth, and Ethiopia's Christian monarchy down to the twentieth. ## The "white man's religion" charge, answered from the record 1. **Origins.** Christianity began among Jews in the Middle East and was established in Africa before most of northern Europe was evangelized. See [Christianity Is the White Mans Religion Objection Defeater](/codex/christianity-is-the-white-mans-religion-objection-defeater/). 2. **Priority.** Aksum was officially Christian in the fourth century; Nubia from the sixth; Kongo by choice in 1491. See [Christian Pre-Colonial African Heritage Argument](/codex/christian-pre-colonial-african-heritage-argument/). 3. **Growth after empire.** Pew (2011) records the jump from about 9 percent of sub-Saharan Africans in 1910 to about 63 percent in 2010, and the Center for the Study of Global Christianity reported in 2025 that Africa was the fastest-growing region for Christians, at 2.59 percent a year for 2020-2025 (Gina Zurlo). Jenkins, in *The Next Christendom* (2002), and Walls describe a shift of Christianity's center of gravity to the global South. See [Christianity in Africa Today](/codex/christianity-in-africa-today/). 4. **Mother-tongue Scripture.** Translation put the Bible in African hands and African languages, and, as Sanneh argued, made Africans the judges of how it should be lived. See [Missionary Translation and African Languages](/codex/missionary-translation-and-african-languages/). 5. **Misuse is not origin.** The same Bible that apartheid theologians misread was the Bible Belhar, Luthuli and Tutu used to condemn them. See [Most of the World Was Colonized by Christians Objection Defeater](/codex/most-of-the-world-was-colonized-by-christians-objection-defeater/). ## Scholars and their readings - **Lamin Sanneh** ([Lamin Sanneh](/codex/lamin-sanneh/)) argued that missionary translation unintentionally undermined colonial control by empowering vernacular cultures, so mission and empire were rivals as often as allies. - **Andrew Walls** framed African Christianity as the latest chapter in the faith's serial movement across cultures, with Africans as its main agents. - **Kwame Bediako** ([Kwame Bediako](/codex/kwame-bediako/)) argued that Christianity in Africa is best understood as the renewal of a non-Western religion rather than a Western import. - **Adrian Hastings** documented the long interaction of church and state from 1450 to 1950, giving full weight to both missionary failure and African initiative. - **Philip Jenkins** documented the demographic shift southward. - **Critics** in the decolonial and nationalist tradition (for example Okot p'Bitek, in his 1970 critique of Western scholarship on African religion) argue that missions did deep cultural damage that the translation thesis understates. Their point about cultural contempt is largely conceded by Christian historians; the dispute is over whether that contempt defines the faith or betrays it. ## Scholarship Published academic works this page draws on, each matched to a publisher, index or library catalog record. - Kwame Bediako, *Theology and identity* (1992). [Open Library](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL13756790W) - Adam Hochschild, *King Leopold's ghost* (1998). [Open Library](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1869541W) - Elizabeth Allo Isichei, *A history of Christianity in Africa* (1995). [Open Library](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL2872129W) - Philip Jenkins, *The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity* (Oxford University Press, 2002). [doi:10.1093/0195146166.001.0001](https://doi.org/10.1093/0195146166.001.0001) ## See also - [Africa and Christianity](/codex/africa-and-christianity/), the master hub for Christianity in Africa - [Christianity Is the White Mans Religion Objection Defeater](/codex/christianity-is-the-white-mans-religion-objection-defeater/), the debate-ready reply to the identity objection - [Most of the World Was Colonized by Christians Objection Defeater](/codex/most-of-the-world-was-colonized-by-christians-objection-defeater/), the broader colonial-guilt objection - [Christianity in Africa](/codex/christianity-in-africa/), ris3n's paper on roots, distortions and reclamation - [Missionary Translation and African Languages](/codex/missionary-translation-and-african-languages/), Sanneh's translation principle - [Samuel Ajayi Crowther](/codex/samuel-ajayi-crowther/), the first African Anglican bishop and the clearest case of missionary paternalism - [African Initiated Churches](/codex/african-initiated-churches/), Africans organizing outside missionary control - [Papal Bulls and Slavery](/codex/papal-bulls-and-slavery/), the fifteenth-century documents behind the "Doctrine of Discovery" charge - [African Participation in the Atlantic Slave Trade](/codex/african-participation-in-the-atlantic-slave-trade/), the wider history of the trade - [Robert Woodberry](/codex/robert-woodberry/), the quantitative case on missions and democracy
## Common questions this page answers **Q: Did missionaries help colonize Africa?** Some did. Missions often depended on colonial protection and land, some preached obedience to colonial rulers, and many treated Africans with paternalism. But other missionaries were among colonialism's sharpest critics, and it was missionary testimony that exposed King Leopold's atrocities in the Congo. **Q: Was Christianity brought to Africa by colonizers?** No. Christianity was in Egypt and North Africa by the second century, Aksum (Ethiopia) became officially Christian in the fourth century, Nubia in the sixth, and the Kingdom of Kongo chose Christianity in 1491. European colonial rule over most of Africa only came after the Berlin Conference of 1884-85. **Q: Who exposed the atrocities in King Leopold's Congo?** Missionaries were central. William Henry Sheppard, an African American Presbyterian, reported severed hands in the Kasai in 1899, and British Baptist missionaries John and Alice Seeley Harris photographed mutilated victims from 1904. Their evidence fed the Congo Reform Association founded by E. D. Morel and Roger Casement, which pressured Belgium to take the Congo from Leopold in 1908. **Q: Why did Christianity grow in Africa after colonialism ended?** Scholars such as Lamin Sanneh, Andrew Walls and Philip Jenkins argue that Christianity was already being carried mainly by Africans, in African languages, through African churches and evangelists. When the colonial powers left, the faith did not depend on them. Pew Research Center estimated Christians in sub-Saharan Africa rose from about 9 percent of the population in 1910 to about 63 percent in 2010. **Q: Is Christianity the white man's religion in Africa?** The historical record says no. The faith began in the Middle East, was African long before it was colonial, was spread mostly by African evangelists, and has grown fastest since independence. Africa now has more Christians than any other continent. **Q: What was the Berlin Conference and how did it involve missionaries?** The Berlin Conference of 1884-85 set rules for European powers claiming African territory, with no African rulers present. Its General Act promised protection to missionaries along with scientists and explorers, which built missions into the colonial order and is one reason many Africans remember missionaries and colonizers as one movement. **Q: Did churches support apartheid in South Africa?** Parts of the Dutch Reformed Church gave apartheid a theological defense. Other Christians condemned it: the World Alliance of Reformed Churches declared it a heresy in 1982, the Belhar Confession rejected it, and Christian leaders such as Albert Luthuli and Desmond Tutu led the opposition.