Has Christianity been bad for Africa?

Mathew Otieno

July 17, 2023 4 Reactions

Christianity isn’t foreign to Africa at all. The religion has been here since its very beginning. And it wasn’t just in North Africa, which many often conveniently dismiss as “not the real Africa.” The Acts of the Apostles has Philip baptise an Ethiopian eunuch long before Paul is converted and takes Christianity to Europe. This same Ethiopia – which our enlightened Africanists often think of as the centre of African identity – has one of the oldest Christian traditions of any region in the world.

Selfless sacrifices

But even if it is true that European Christian missionaries were the most active at spreading Christianity in the rest of Africa, the colonial connection is much harder to draw, since European missionaries were rarely allied with their governments. Though there were exceptions (the main one being the Anglicans, whose leader was the monarch of the British Empire), most missionaries conducted their activities separate from, and often at odds with, colonial governments.

Where the latter dawdled about educating Africans, brave missionaries stepped into the breach and started world-class schools for them; when the government tended to the healthcare of the white man and left the African to his own devices, missionaries, once again, weren’t afraid to treat them. Missionaries lived and died with their newly-adopted African communities, and their bodies are buried alongside them.

To wit, both Jomo Kenyatta and Bishop Tutu were educated by Christian missionaries; without that education, there is absolutely no chance they would ever have had the intellectual tools to agitate for the dignity of their fellow Africans.

Not even Dedan Kimathi, leader of the Mau Mau and Kenya’s most famous freedom fighter, and a great inspiration to our sophisticated anti-Christian crusaders, despised Christianity; his last requests, before his British captors executed him, were that he receive the last sacraments from a Catholic priest, that his wife be kept close to the church and comforted by nuns, and that the missionaries should educate his son.

As if that were not enough, the quote with which I opened is just wrong. Christian missionaries rarely appropriated land by trickery or force from the communities they served. On the contrary, quite often, at least in the case of Catholic missionaries, the communities initially assigned them unwanted land. This phenomenon is alluded to in Chinua Achebe’s book Things Fall Apart, where a pesky group of missionaries is gifted land that is thought to be haunted, as a way to get rid of them.

But this is not a mere fiction. There is a school about 30 kilometres from my home. Founded in 1927 by Catholic missionaries, it was built on land that was considered cursed, since it was where all of society’s outcasts – lepers and people with terminal illnesses, for instance – used to be sent to die. But St Mary’s, as the school is known, not only ended up producing a steady stream of African intellectuals and professionals for Kenya, but also created a growing town around it.

Leftist lies

But this is not even the main reason that quote is mistaken. As it happens, neither Jomo Kenyatta nor Desmond Tutu originated it. Its real source was a leftist white man, German author and playwright Rolf Hochhuth, whose rabidly negative portrayals of Christianity have been debunked, including by institutional authorities like Encyclopaedia Britannica, which panned his portrayal of Pope Pius Pius XII – whom he accused of being indifferent to Nazi war crimes – as unhistorical.

This fact betrays a very important truth. The idea that Christianity has been negative to Africa is not original to, nor mainstream on, the continent. It seems, instead, to be primarily the preoccupation of a certain class of rich white liberal, aided by radical elements of the African diaspora, who entertain a childish nostalgia for an Africa that never existed and are ever grasping for grievances to bemoan. They babble on and on, but have never proffered a single realistic solution to Africa’s problems.

And all the while, as they sanctimoniously fulminate and spit from their pulpits, Christian schools continue to educate Africans, regardless of tribe or creed; Christian hospitals continue to treat Africans, both in the cities and in far-off places that even governments dare not reach; Christian charities tend to Africans displaced by war and other calamities; and Christian Africans continue to build up their own countries into the paradises they will eventually be.

If Africa had only one true problem, it is people who think (or fail to) like this.

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Mathew Otieno is a Kenyan writer, blogger and dilettante farmer. Until 2022, he was a research communications coordinator at a university in Nairobi, Kenya. He now lives in rural western Kenya, near the shores of Lake Victoria, from where he's pursuing a career as a full-time writer while concluding his dissertation for a master's degree. His first novel is due out this year.

Image credit: Pexels, Photo by nappy.