13 FEBRUARY 1959, Page 9

Christianity ' s Lost Continent By CECIL NORTHCOTT C INCE Livingstone split

open the 'continent a a hundred years ago it has been comfortably assumed in Britain that Africa was destined to be a Christian continent. Intensive mission propa- ganda with its abounding 'success stories' has drawn a veil of glamour and romanticism over Africa which still cloaks many nineteenth-cen- tury attitudes to Africa. The truth is that the immense Christian effort of the last hundred years in Africa, so costly in people and treasure, is on the wane and is without the sense of direction it once had. Africa still calls out some noble, self-sacrificing service from this generation of younger Britons and Americans who rally to the old calls of the once dark continent. But it is also this generation who put up the ques- tioning signals about the future of Christianity in Africa.

There was a time—perhaps up to twenty-five years ago—when Christianity, plus much aid from government, was the universal provider of the good things in Africa. Schools, books, examina- tions, 'standard five education' and all the rest of the White man's mental inventions went along with the Christian religion. So did the clinics, the dispensaries, the maternity services, the leprosy homes and the hospitals. In British African terri- tories the Christian-mission machinery was the acknowledged, and used, medium for injecting the minimum of the good life, and this minimum was often equated with Christian education and evangelism. I well remember the pathetic bleat of an old Christian pastor in Ghana when he realised that the new State would take over his village school. 'It's worse than losing my church,' he said. For him the school's 'three Rs' had been 'Christian' education, all that his village needed from the church now neatly marooned by the departure of the school.

Somehow the Protestant brands of Chris- tianity—and it is those traditions I know best— have failed to identify themselves with African life at its deepest for all sorts of reasons. Out- wardly there has been, and is, a vast amount of 'carbon copy' Christianity in Africa, imitations of Western styles in worship, conduct and atti- tudes accompanied by an intensive application to ecclesiastical administration which imposes the patterns of church life so beloved of the Western churchman. How thin is the veneer of the Chris- tian faith was shown in the Mau-Mau troubles amongst :he Kikuyu in Kenya, where for many the faith was essentially the White man's faith and therefore fit only to be discarded.

In a sense Christianity is still, a foreign im- portation in Africa, a part of the suspected White man's domination, a subtle cement which helps to hold the tottering White fabric together. This sort of attitude accounts for the growing indiffer- ence to Christianity on the part of the educated Young, intellectuals of West, East and Central Africa, most of whom. have some tradition of Christian belief in their families and themselves owe much to it. I also noticed this tendency creeping into the still feudalistic areas of the Bechuanaland Protectorate, where 'Sunday-go-to- meeting' is the elaborate parade, fashions and all, of Victorian times. The old people were there, but I was warned in loud whispers that the young people didn't come, and not even their grandfathers or the chief himself could make them.

The creep of secularism is growing to a gallop in Africa, and within the echelons of higher edu- cation in the resplendent university colleges the Christian faith has for many been left behind. It is just here that some see the most potent sign that Christianity may lose Africa. The Church is failing to appeal to the rising generation of young intellectuals—the ones who are staffing the administrations, the governmental young men who see the omnicompetent State as the univer- sal provider of the good life, and are learning the tricks of files, committees, commissions and reports. Amongst urban Africans some valiant Christian efforts are being made, in the rambling townships outside such cities as Nairobi, Salis- bury and Bulawayo, to suggest that Christianity is pavement- and bungalow-minded as well as indigenous to the bush and the thatched but of the older Africa. But the swift march of money economy, and the even swifter manipulation of jobs, break up the pattern of the old Africa with which Christianity had, in some ways, come to terms. Now a new urban leadership is' needed amongst Africans themselves and the observer sees few signs of its emergence.

All this is particularly noticeable at a vulner- able point for organised Christianity—the kind of men entering the Christian ministry. Most African clergy start life as village catechists and by dint of faithful service are eventually ordained after periods of theological training which have to be laid on the miserably weak foundations of a totally inadequate general education. Higher education in Africa has, so far, provided no new stream of recruits for the ministry, which is re- garded as a calling for the third- and the fourth- rate. Unless a change happens here within the next ten years there will be no African leadership within the Church able to claim the respect of the growing numbers of educated Africans. This is where the new Theological Education Fund set up by Mr. Rockefeller and the mission boards of the United States is expected to play an im- portant part in helping African Christianity (amongst others) to reshape some of its training and so attract to the ministry men of the finest calibre.

If Christianity, in spite of its pockets of strength, looks like losing Africa, Islam looks like winning it. All along the West Coast of Africa Islam progresses ten times more rapidly than Christianity. Islam gains because it appears to be a genuinely African religion, without race-con- sciousness, secure in the bonds of brotherhood which link Muslims solidly together. Islam is now an alternative religion to Christianity in Africa, and its success in the great cities of West Africa, its appeal to the secularised intellectual as well as the bush African, and its identification with African social life (which the austere mono- gamous Christianity has never managed) are signs of its mighty forward movement. Anyone who spends a few days in Madan in Western Nigeria (where one count gives over 600 mosques) will quickly sense the inner power of Islam, and I can never forget the experience of looking through the huge glass window-walls of the Accra Community Centre (while attending a Christian Council meeting) and seeing on a Friday the building ringed by the faithful at prayer. It was symbolic of what is happening to the old strongholds of the Christian faith along the West Coast and inland through the Sudan belt of sub- Sahara Africa.