Introduction

Summary

The importance of the religious dimension within modern history should be clear enough to anyone concerned theoretically or practically with the life of contemporary Africa. This is by no means something unique to Africa but the vitality of contemporary religion and its intricate relationships with many other sides of life is there particularly manifest. African religion includes three main strands – the traditional, the Christian, and the Islamic – and a full religious history must do justice to all three and to their inter-involvement at many levels. Most Christian Africans share significantly at least in the traditional strand, and some in that of Islam too. These are by no means watertight compartments. Nevertheless the Christian churches have for the most part a quite clearly recognisable character, distinguishable if not wholly separable from that of other religious traditions; their role has been crucial to the political and social history of most countries of black Africa and it is certainly justifiable to look at them on their own. They have indeed been studied to a far greater extent than the other traditions, perhaps because they are a great deal more accessible to the western minded people who carry out ‘studies’ of this sort. Yet these studies are themselves patchy and seldom attempt to paint any overall picture, at least in other than very simple terms.

It has been my conviction that the immense importance of modern African Christianity both for the wider life of the continent and for that of the world Christian community, of which it has become a very significant segment, more than justifies the attempt to assess historically what has been going on as a whole in the last quarter of a century: that is to say, how the Christian churches have come through the era of decolonisation from an ecclesiasticism of dependence centred, at least publicly, upon the missionary to an age of independence.