This brief introduction to the African number of Blackfriars can only suggest some lines of thought in regard to the progress and future of Catholicism among the African peoples. The following notes relate to the territories under British administration which lie between the Sahara and the Zambesi. The first and in some respects the happiest impact of the Catholic Faith on the African mind belongs to the period of the pioneer missionaries, largely French in their personnel and to an even greater extent French in their direction, working in a series of wholly tribalised societies. In those areas where there existed a powerful and hereditary chiefship it was often not difficult for the missionary to persuade the chief and his councillors that his coming offered no threat to established African authority. Speaking generally, the chief did not himself become a Catholic, but he was the missionary’s equal and friend and the recipient of much wise advice. It was within this framework that there was built up the system of catechists and the practice of giving such teaching to the children as was necessary to enable them to lead a Catholic life. It may be said that the survival of tribalism and its modern counterpart, the sense of African nationhood, are conditions favourable to the development of the Catholic Church in Africa. Detribalism on the other hand is inevitably unfavourable and no group is more in need and less accessible than the detribalised urban proletariat.

No religion will appeal to the African who is still working on the land unless it respects ancient traditions and is not inimical to his pride of nationhood, whether that be Ibo or Yoruba, Baganda, Bahaya, Kikuyu or Chagga. This national consciousness should never be impeded either in the African priest or in the African layman.

In spite of a steady tradition in the official documents of the Church, there has long existed, and still persists, much vagueness about the aims of the Missions. This has its ill-effects on the methods and on the missionaries themselves, and on the support given to the Missions by the Church at large. A clear view of the matter is therefore of the first importance.

The encyclical, Evangelii praecones, of Pius XII, issued on June 2nd, 1951, and that of his predecessor, Rerum Ecclesiae (of which the first commemorates the twenty-fifth anniversary), have given powerful directives in regard to Missions, and their prescriptions should remove many misconceptions. A more precise theology of the Missions is in the course of development, namely a branch of theology dealing with the expansion of the visible Church.

The fact which dominates the whole subject of Missions must be the purpose for which they are undertaken. Missionary activity is not synonymous with deep religious conviction as such, for there are many religions which have the character of a closed national or caste group, not easily permitting expansion beyond its limits. Such are most primitive religions, and some others such as Hinduism. Catholic Missions have a definite aim, and this has been stated clearly in the recent encyclical: ‘As everyone knows, these sacred expeditions have as their principal aim to bring the light of Christian truth more clearly to new peoples, to gain new Christians. The ultimate goal which they must strive to reach, and which must always be kept before the mind, is that of establishing the Church solidly among other peoples, and of giving it a hierarchy chosen from among the indigenous population.’ The establishment of the visible Church is the aim of the Missions.

If there is a ‘problem’ of adapting or accommodating African rites and beliefs to Christianity, it is one to which missionaries best know the answers. Students of primitive people are better employed in saying what does happen, rather than in speculating as to what might or should happen. The problem posed in theory, in which abstract African rites and beliefs encounter an abstract Christian teaching, can scarcely be the problem which has to be answered daily in practice. This impersonal encounter between two abstractions then becomes a very personal encounter between two people, one Christian, one pagan. Each is held to his religion by something more than the arguments he could produce for it; while the Christian may sometimes find himself nearer to the pagan than his arguments against him suggest. The difference between them makes for uneasiness, if only because it will not remain constant. Christianity and paganism, in the abstract, have a clear line of division, beyond which they are not required to meet on equal terms. A Christian and a pagan, two individuals, cannot so easily remain each on his own side of a formal division. They are bound to feel the strain of sometimes seeming to belong to different worlds, while at other times belonging so palpably to the same. I think that to try to find common ‘human’ ground between them is to misconceive the difference. This common human ground, in so far as the expression means anything, is given, in the first place. Christian and pagan are not like two slices of bread, one spread with butter and the other with margarine. To start to look for common human ground—human which is neither human-Christian nor human-pagan—is to reject what is immediately there. It is at once to make the relationship between Christian and pagan into a problem, not a relationship.

The object of this article is to present a picture of educational work among the African population, particularly that undertaken by the Church in British East Africa, with special reference to Tanganyika Territory, since the school organisation and the various problems connected with it in Tanganyika can be taken as typical of educational work in the neighbouring countries of Uganda and Kenya.

These three territories, which are as large as Spain, Portugal, France, Italy and the British Isles put together, meet about the shores of Lake Victoria. The total population is 17,600,000, of whom 7,500,000 are in Tanganyika and roughly 5,000,000 in each of the other two territories. The European population is very small in proportion, and is made up mostly of Government officers, save in Kenya where there is a white settlement of nearly 20,000. There are 11,000 Goans and an Indian community of nearly 170,000, small in numbers but economically very influential, since most of the trading, in Tanganyika in particular, is in Indian hands. The natural African unit is a tribal one, each with its own taboos, customs, laws, languages and chiefs; and where the administrative boundaries cut across tribal areas or group them into districts or reserves, the tribal organisation, with the chiefs’ barazas, is respected as far as possible.

The three territories which constitute British East Africa and the island of Zanzibar come within different political categories. Uganda and Zanzibar are Protectorates, Kenya is mainly a Colony with a narrow coastal strip formerly belonging to the Sultan of Zanzibar and now a protectorate area, and Tanganyika is a British Mandate. The territorial boundaries are entirely the result of the European occupation of East and Central Africa at the end of the last century.

Recently I was standing on a bridge crossing the main approach to the new railway station in Johannesburg: below, the last touches were being given to the fifteen new platforms, while gangs of natives were busy with pneumatic drills, cranes and trucks, already demolishing the old station, and singing shanties as they worked. In the skyscraper flats all round thousands more natives were busy cooking their masters’ dinners on electric stoves: others were handling goods in the warehouses, working as pump-boys at filling stations, setting up linotype for tomorrow’s edition of The Bantu World, or, several thousand feet underground, were manning mechanical plant, and lashing the reef rock from a gold mine.

In all outward appearances, South Africa is as modem, progressive, and industrialised as any country in Europe or America. But it is also a country of contrasts and seeming contradictions, of bright lights, hard outlines, cruelty, and laughter. As soon as the observer says Chicago has nothing on Johannesburg, he must immediately ask himself, is this not in truth darkest Africa? To ignore that question would be almost as foolish as to ignore the question, whether Paris could have a culture which was independent of neon fighting.

For the thousands of Africans who are riding bicycles, delivering refrigerators and patent medicines, who, in a word, are caught up in the techniques and efficiency of our mass-producing age, have roots in an older culture whose coherence and whose hold on them are only just crumbling. The good old days of law and order and of values they could understand are still there in the reserves, even if clouds presage the approach of night.

It is a charge commonly levelled by administrators against anthropologists—and by the more materialistic and revolutionary anthropologists against their more conservative colleagues (among whom I count myself)—that they advocate the preservation of primitive peoples as ‘museum pieces’, sheltered from the harmful influences of civilisation. There is a grain of truth in the taunt—for many an anthropologist must have wondered at times whether this tribe or that was not better off and happier before the introduction of corrugated iron and political ‘aspirations’— but it is really a gross over-simplification; it is, in truth, not change so much as revolution that is deplored. For the anthropologist has been trained to observe more clearly than most men how a tribal culture may be not merely disrupted but even completely destroyed by the opening of a mine or a plantation or the prohibition of initiation or polygamy; how, for example, the advent of the metal roof may lead not merely to the decay of the thatcher’s skill, but perhaps also to the collapse of a co-operative labour system. Far from being absolutely opposed to change, he understands that there are ways—if we are willing to look for them—of making changes rather as a graft upon the tree of tribal culture than by ruthlessly extirpating it, or inadvertently ringing the bark. So it is that he will sometimes be found seeking, however hopelessly, to retard changes threatened from outside until their promoters are ready, both in their own and in the tribal interest, to take account of research in human nature and institutions; he would be more than human in these days if he did not point to the East African Groundnuts Scheme as a classical and grandiose example of revolution unnecessarily applied to tribal cultures with an utter disregard of the very existence of human problems.