Black Nuns in Africa

Extract

I was teaching in a secondary school in ex-British Africa for fifteen months. The following article is written from notes I made while in Africa. The situation may have changed in the two years which have elapsed since I left. I would imagine that if anything, relations between white and black nuns will have deteriorated still further with the growing African sensitivity to racial undertones in white endeavour among black people.

When I arrived at the Mission, on the first evening, one of the teachers said as he showed me around, ‘There is the convent for the white sisters and that other building is for the black sisters’. My immediate reaction was to be shocked that there should be two separate establishments, one white, one black. But there were several reasons for this separation. The African sisters formed a diocesan community under the local bishop. The Missionary sisters were directed from Europe, and theoretically were working for their own replacement by converting the Africans. Also there was the argument that the African sisters would never develop responsibility and independence if they joined an established European community. And it would be detrimental to the growth of the African church to have Africans in missionary orders, ready to move on to new fields, instead of staying after the Missionaries had left to consolidate the Church among their own people. I was also told that Africans were bashful and inhibited in front of Europeans. So the ‘separate development’ made good theoretical sense.