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Prelude to African Christian Independency: the Afro-American Factor in African Christianity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2011

Lamin Sanneh
Lamin Sanneh
Affiliation:
Harvard Divinity School
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Extract

A remarkable phenomenon in African Christianity occurred between about 1912 and 1930 when, mostly out of the ferment of indigenous reaction to Western Christian missions, local “prophets” emerged and founded African Independent Churches. “Independency” is the term employed to characterize this phenomenon which came to embrace both the charismatic prophet figures and the separatist churches they or their followers created. Over six thousand such movements were identified throughout Africa in 1968, with the situation still in considerable flux. By the end of the twentieth century it is estimated that some 350 million Africans will have converted to one form or another of the various types of Christian practice now active on the continent.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 77 , Issue 1 , January 1984 , pp. 1 - 32
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1984

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References

1 See Peel, John D. Y., Aladura: A Religious Movement among the Yoruba (London: Oxford University Press for the International African Institute, 1968).Google Scholar

2 Barrett, David B., Schism and Renewal in Africa: An Analysis of Six Thousand Contemporary Movements in Africa (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1968).Google Scholar

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7 See, e.g., his Plan for a Free Community in Sierra Leone (London, 1792).

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12 Ibid., 98.

13 The founding of Sierra Leone was an outgrowth of abolition pressures in England, with the Directors of the Sierra Leone Company also serving as the foremost promoters of the abolition cause.

14 Kirk-Greene, “David George,” 98.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid.

17 Brooks, W. H., “The Evolution of the Negro Baptist Church,” Journal of Negro History 1 (1922) 11–22.Google Scholar James Melvin Washington observes that “the story of independent black Baptist congregations begins in Georgia. … George Liele became one of the first slaves to be deeply affected by the missionary zeal of these new revivals” (“The Origins and Emergence of Black Baptist Separatism, 1863–1897” [Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1979] 6–7).Google Scholar Liele's missionary labors produced David George, then a slave in Silver Bluff, South Carolina.

18 Kirk-Greene, “David George,” 96.

19 Ibid. See also Sobel, Mechal, Trabelin' On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1979) 314.Google Scholar

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22 Ibid., 335.

23 Fyfe, History, 36–37.

24 A recognition of this fact should help elucidate a question for further research of the continuity of the revival tradition in the assimilation of Christianity in Africa.

25 Fyfe, History, 41,47–48.

26 Ibid., 56, 73, and passim.

27 Ibid., 39, 47. “Early in 1793 three European sailors from a ship chartered by the Company killed a duck belonging to a Nova Scotian. Macaulay tried them with a Nova Scotian jury who found them guilty. One was publicly flogged, the others fined and imprisoned” (53).

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33 Cited in Kirk-Greene, “David George,” 114.

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid.

36 Ibid.

37 Walls, “Nova Scotians,” 27. The reference to the settlers' “meeting-house,” with claims of autonomy for it, opens a new dimension in future relations with the authorities, including the missionaries who arrived initially at the request of the settlers. I shall develop this point later in the paper when its importance in determining secession will be examined.

38 Anderson, Efraim, Messianic Popular Movements in the Lower Congo (Studia Ethnographica Upsaliensia 14; Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958) 244.Google Scholar

39 Ibid.

40 Benedict, David, A General History of the Baptist Denomination in America and Other Parts of the World (Boston, 1813; New York, 1848) 1. 288.Google Scholar

41 Mackerrow, P. E., A Brief History of the Coloured Baptists of Nova Scotia 1832–95 Halifax, 1895)Google Scholar, cited in Kirk-Greene, “David George,” 103.

42 Ibid., 106.

43 Ibid., 118–19.

44 A passing sea captain notes in his diary that the Nova Scotians “appear very Religious attending Service by 3 o'clock in the Morning and till Eleven at night, four, or five, times per week.” Cited in A. P. Kup, “Freetown in 1794,” SLS n.s. 11 (1958) 163.Google ScholarPubMed

45 Report of the Sierra Leone Company (March 1798) 47–48; also cited in Kirk-Greene, “David George,” 117–18.

46 Ibid., 117.

47 Ibid.

48 See, e.g., Groves, C. P., The Planting of Christianity in Africa (4 vols.; London: Lutterworth, 1964) 4. 130.Google Scholar Barrett expresses it most forcefully when he states:

The root common cause to the entire movement of independency … may be seen in this one aspect of culture clash: a failure in sensitivity, the failure of missions at one small point to demonstrate consistently the fulness of the biblical concept of love as sensitive understanding towards others as equals, the failure to study or understand African society, religion and psychology in any depth, together with a dawning African perception from the vernacular scriptures of the catastrophic nature of this failure and of the urgent necessity to remedy it in order that Christianity might survive on African soil (Barrett, Schism and Renewal, 156).

49 Kirk-Greene, “David George,” 118. The story is told of the Swedenborgian scientist, Adam Afzelius, then living in Freetown:

In two years Afzelius had planted his gardens with rare specimens he was … collecting … and had assembled a small zoo and an aviary. All this the French devastated. His trees and plants were cut down or uprooted, notebooks and collections trampled underfoot, the birds and animals killed, some even eaten. In vain he explained he was a Swede, a scientist who took no part in the strife of nations. All they would let him keep was what remnants of the wreckage he could sweep from the floor (Fyfe, History, 60).

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50 Kirk-Greene, “David George,” 118.

51 Ibid., 119.

52 Ibid. Also Fyfe, Christopher, “The Baptist Churches in Sierra Leone,” SLBR 5 (1963) 57.Google Scholar

53 John Wesley, Letters (standard ed.) 7. 225, cited in Walls, “Nova Scotians,” 22.

54 Ibid., 25.

55 Ibid.

56 Fyfe, History, 32.

57 .Walls, “Nova Scotians,” 27.

58 Ibid., 26.

59 Fyfe, History, 51–52.

60 Walls, “Nova Scotians,” 26.

61 Fyfe, History, 70.

62 Walls, “Nova Scotians,” 27.

63 Ibid.

64 Walls, A. F., “A Christian Experiment: The Early Sierra Leone Colony,” in Cuming, Canon, ed., The Mission of the Church and the Propagation of the Faith (Studies in Church History 6; London: Cambridge University Press, 1970) 117 n.Google Scholar

65 Fyfe, Christopher, “The West African Methodists in the Nineteenth Century,” SLBR 3 (1961) 23.Google Scholar

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67 Walls, A. F., “The Usefulness of Schoolmasters: Notes on the Early Sierra Leone Documents of the Methodist Missionary Society,” SLBR 3 (1961) 28–29.Google Scholar

68 Walls, “Christian Experiment,” 120.

69 Ibid., 121.

70 Ibid., 123.

71 Ibid., 124.

72 Ibid., 122–23.

73 Ibid., 126.

74 Ibid.; Fyfe, History, 139.

75 Marwei, Matei, “The Rev. Daniel Coker of Sierra Leone,” SLBR 7 (1965) 41–45.Google Scholar

76 Walls, “Christian Experiment,” 119.

77 Ibid., 117.

78 Ibid., 118.

79 Ibid.

80 Fyfe, “West African Methodism,” 23.

81 Lady Selina Shirley, the Countess of Huntingdon, joined the Calvinist Methodists in 1739 under George Whitefield whom she retained as her personal chaplain. A woman of independent means, she purchased a substantial building at Spa Fields, London, intending it for a cathedral. In 1783 she openly ordained six students at Spa Fields, a move that caused her formal breach with the Church of England. John Wesley followed suit in 1784. See the following sources on her movement: Carruthers, Robert, The History of Huntingdon, from the earliest to the present times … (Huntingdon, England, 1824)Google Scholar; Taylor, Sarah [Henrietta Keddie], The Countess of Huntingdon and her circle (London: Sir 1. Pitman and Sons, 1907)Google Scholar; Knight, Helen C., Lady Huntingdon and her friends; or. The revival of the work of God in the days of Wesley, Whitefield, Romaine, Venn and others in the last century (New York: American Tract Society, 1853)Google Scholar; Whitley, W. T., “Huntingdon (Countess of) Connection,” ERE 6 (1951) 879–80.Google Scholar

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83 Ibid., 55.

84 Ibid.

85 Ibid.

86 Ibid., 60.

87 Ibid., 58.

88 Ibid., 57.

89 Ibid. I have elsewhere tried to distinguish between source and influence, viewing the first as material that is neutral of ideological force, and the second as the principle of selection and meaning. See my “Source and Influence: A Comparative Approach to Religion and Culture,” Bulletin of the Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard University (Spring 1983) 6–20.Google Scholar

90 I have come across evidence of such borrowing in the unlikely context of modern Yoruba Islam in Nigeria. The Anglican Book of Common Prayer is the source of some of the prayers contained in a popular manual for use in schools. See Kasim, Alhaji M. S., ed., Songs and Prayers for Muslim Schools (Ijebu-Ode, Nigeria, 1969).Google Scholar

91 Fyfe, History, 114.

92 Ibid., 123.

93 Ibid., 128–31.

94 See my recent book, West African Christianity: The Religious Impact (London: Hurst; New York: Orbis, 1983) 83–89.Google Scholar

95 Fyfe, History, 201–2.

96 Ibid., 293–94.

97 Walls, “Nova Scotians,” 30.

98 Walls, “Christian Experiment,” 128.

99 Fyfe, History, 212. See also 227–28.

100 Ibid., 213.

101 .Ibid., 172.

102 Journals of the Rev. James Frederick Schon and Mr. Samuel Crowther (London: Halchard, 1842).Google Scholar Crowther's personal account of the attack on his town of Oshogun by Muslim forces and his capture and sale into slavery are recounted in Appendix III of that volume. Crowther met his amazed mother and sisters in Abeokuta in 1845. The once lost child had returned “like Joseph, a ruler from the pit of slavery” (Fyfe, History, 236).

103 Fyfe, History, 327; see also Ajayi, Jacob F. A., Christian Missions in Nigeria, 1841–1891: The Making of a New Elite (London: Longman, 1969; Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969) 206–7.Google Scholar

104 .Ajayi, Christian Missions, 233–77; Webster, James B., The African Churches among the Yoruba, 1888–1922 (London: Oxford University Press, 1964).Google Scholar A third account, to be understood in the aftermath of the ethnic turbulence of the Nigeria Civil War (1967–71), takes a hostile view of the role of Crowther as a Yoruba and his Sierra Leonean Creole agents, all of whom are aspersed as non-Ibo intruders in Ibo country: Tasie, Godwin, Christian Missionary Enterprise in the Niger Delta: 1864–1918 (Leiden: Brill, 1978).Google Scholar

105 Hair, Paul E. H., “Archdeacon Crowther and the Delta Pastorate: 1892–99,” SLBR 5 (1963) 18.Google Scholar

106 Cited in Webster, African Churches, 68.

107 Crowther saw his Christian role as that of a teacher, not merely a preacher of the word. When summoned to enforce stricter discipline in the church by the Parent Committee of the CMS in London, he declared on a visit there in December 1889: “We are all weak and imperfect agents, faulty in one way or another, which need be strengthened, supported, reproved and corrected, when not beyond amendment” (Ajayi, Christian Missions, 250; see also 252).

108 Webster, African Churches, 69.

109 The attributes of Ifa have a striking similarity to those used in Isaiah 53. The names of Ifa included “the great Almighty one,” the “Child of God,” the “One who came whom we have put to death with cudgels causelessly,” the “One who is mightiest among the gods and prevailed to do on a certain occasion what they could not” (Ajayi, Christian Missions, 235 n.).

110 Fyfe, History, 236. See also Peterson, John, Province of freedom (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969)Google Scholar passim. Crowther described his meticulous interest in the Yoruba language: “In tracing out words and their various uses,” he said, “I am now and then led to search at length into some traditions or customs of the Yoruba.” As an example of such cultural investigations Crowther did research into the Engungun secret society and the cult of Ifa (Ajayi, Christian Missions, 128 n.).

111 Fyfe, History, 236.

112 His work on Nupe was published in 1864; Ajayi, Christian Missions, 128 n.

113 Crowther, Bishop, Niger Mission: Report of the Overland Journey, November 10, 1871-February 8, 1872 (London: Church Missionary House, 1872), 17–19.Google Scholar

114 Ibid., 19.

115 The subject of vernacular translation opens the enormous question of the role of European missionaries in it. The Rev. Sigismund Koelle, the German missionary linguist who arrived in Freetown in 1847, was able to document over 200 African languages by using recaptive informants in Freetown. See Koelle, , Polyglotta Africana (London: Church Missionary House, 1854; Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlangsantalt, 1963).Google Scholar

Another German missionary linguist, the Rev. J. G. Christaller, who arrived in Ghana in the 1850s, commenced in 1865 the study of the Akan language and three years later completed the translation of the entire Bible, following this work with a comprehensive grammar in 1875 and a monumental dictionary in 1881 (Smith, Noel, The Presbyterian Church of Ghana: I835–1960 [Accra: Ghana Universities Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1966] 54–55).Google Scholar Dr. J. B. Danquah, a father of modern African nationalism, wrote in 1944 that without “Christaller's foresight in recording in permanent … form the scattered elements of the beliefs and hopes and fears of the Akan people … [they] would to-day have failed to bring their indigenous contribution to the spiritual achievements of mankind” (The Akan Doctrine of God: A fragment of Gold Coast Ethics and Religion [London: Lutterworlh, 1944] 186).Google Scholar Many more examples could be added.

116 .Raboteau, Albert J., Slave Religion: The ‘Invisible Institution’ in the Antebellum South(New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).Google Scholar

117 Peel, Aladura, passim.

118 See, e.g., Long, Charles H., “The Oppressive Elements in Religion and the Religions of the Oppressed,” HTR 69 (1976) 397–412.CrossRefGoogle Scholar