The Church in Africa, 1450-1950

"This is one volume in a long series called the Oxford History of the Christian Church. I chose it because its author, who is sadly now dead, was not only a great historian but also a participant and observer. He was a Roman Catholic priest who went to Africa and worked particularly in Mozambique. He’s one of the few people in modern history who can claim to have brought down an empire single-handed, by reporting, in Europe, on the massacres that the Portuguese army was carrying out against the local population as they tried to win their independence. And it really destroyed the credibility of the Portuguese, the last people in Europe really to defend their colonial empire. It made him very unpopular in certain circles at the time. The expertise that Hastings brought to what he did was quite exceptional, and this history is just entrancing. It is beautifully written, it is beautifully organised, it’s full of wonderful human interest stories and a great sympathy with ordinary people, and it sets standards for the way that we all write. More than that, because the Christian Church has been in Africa, in Egypt, since the 1st century of the Christian era, and it’s been in Ethiopia since at least the 4th century of the Christian era. That’s the story he tells first – he has the most wonderful chapter on Ethiopia, which is one of the weirdest Christian stories in the world. They more or less got on with being Christian, without much contact with the outside world, for centuries, and became pretty odd in the process. And he’s got a great deal of sympathy with that. He tells the story of the European colonialists in the 15th and 16th centuries, which is a Portuguese/Spanish story, and he tells the story of the English and their missionary efforts, evangelicals for the most part, in the 19th century. Then he starts showing the reader how from that initial mission from outside, Africans took over and made this religion their own. He’s very good at portraying that world of African Christianity. It is absolutely central over the last 150 years. Africa has become half a Christian continent and half an Islamic continent. It has made both these faiths African, and the destiny of South and West and East Africa is Christian now. It’s one of the powerhouses of Christianity, and it’s emancipated itself from any colonial taint. When all the African states became independent in the 1960s, all the bien pensant liberals across the world said, ‘Oh, this is the end of Christianity – it’s associated with colonialism.’ But what happened was that all these states fell apart and the Christian churches just grew and flourished. People trusted them more than the politicians. So that is the future of Africa now. You see African church leaders getting involved in politics in ways I would normally profoundly disapprove of, and which I do think are potentially very dangerous for their moral integrity. But they represent a much more authentic leadership than some of the terrible, corrupt leaders of the 1960s and 70s."