of old. Of course, it is in the past two decades that African Christianity has begun to let go off its western robes, theological and otherwise, and Asamoah-Gyadu has provided a critical commentary to the process. Indeed, he captures for us the story of the africanization of Christianity, first in Ghana in his African Charismatics but later, in his subsequent works, in the wider African context including that of the African diaspora. I argue that this africanization of Christianity reflects the momentum of African independent churches and is shaped largely by the encounter between African culture and Christianity (and not Pentecostalism).
Appropriating Asamoah-Gyadu in African Christianity
Asamoah-Gyadu’s work stands tall in a long line of important scholarly writings on African Christianity. Before him are towering figures of such scholars of renown as Andrew Walls, John Mbiti, Lamin Sanneh, Kwame Bediako, Allan Anderson, and many others. He picks up the baton in the late 1990s and emerges to make a critical commentary on subsequent developments in African Christianity in a period when it begins to reshape itself as an African religion. Asamoah-Gyadu has dedicated a great deal of his work for the past two decades to making a very important commentary—a critical one for that matter—on the ongoing africanization and charismatization of Christianity in Africa. This story of African Christianity does not begin in the second half of the twentieth century when Africa emerges to be a significant Christian heartland while Europe’s secularization continues at a shockingly rapid pace. Thus, Asamoah-Gyadu’s work serves to connect contemporary Christianity in Africa both with its past and its future. The africanization that we are seeing is in its very early stages. Africa will shape a great deal of ecclesial history for the next few centuries. This time that we live in, following the great works of Asamoah-Gyadu, will be recognized as the tipping point when African Christianity embraced its enthusiastic nature and rose up to re-energize world Christianity. This story will not be told without the mention of the eloquent words of J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu. But to appreciate his impact, we have to start at the beginning.
Why Did You Hide the Spirit from Us?
The emergence of spirit-oriented forms of Christianity in Africa precedes the birth of the Pentecostal movement by at least two decades. Early African spirit-oriented churches began to appear in West Africa in the 1870s, long before the partitioning of the continent at the Berlin Conference of 1884, the scramble for Africa that followed, and the colonizing of Africa by European powers. Indeed, they appeared long before the rise of the Pentecostal movement in California in 1906. We could actually look to the charismatic tendencies in early Christian communities of North Africa (e.g., the Montanists and Saint Anthony, 100–500 CE) and the Kongo (e.g., Kimpa Vita, 1500–1700 CE) to say that enthusiastic Christianity actually precedes the arrival of the nineteenth-century missionaries in Africa. However, that said, my argument in this essay only focuses only on those enthusiastic expressions of Christianity that emerged after the missionaries arrived in Africa in the 1800s. These spirit-oriented churches were labelled African independent churches right from the moment they emerged—and in the course of the decades that followed, they have been called African instituted churches or African initiated churches, or in some cases, African indigenous churches.
African independent churches first appeared in West Africa where many European missionaries begun to work in the early decades of the nineteenth century. They emerged largely because of two factors; access to education and the presence of African religions. Often, the missionaries started with education partly because they needed their new converts to be able to read the Bible. They established schools for the teaching of the children of their converts and used them to convince and coerce others to conversion. Along with education and evangelism came the need to translate the Bible into African vernaculars. But above all this, education was the only perceivable way to civilize the heathens out there, so they reasoned. It was largely through education that they would civilize and christianize the Africans.62 Thus, education fit well with the missionaries’ agenda to bring civilization to Africa. Practically speaking, educated Africans—and by this, in the context of nineteenth-century Africa, I have in mind primary-school-educated Africans—could be more helpful in serving the missionaries both in the church as altar boys or deacons, for instance, and at home as gardeners and cooks. All in all, educated Africans were beneficial to the missionaries. In addition, many African leaders were open to having their subjects go to school under the missionaries as they understood that “you could only defeat the white man if you had the white man’s education.”63 Before long, quite a few Africans were able to read the Bible in their own languages. Some Africans actually learned to read and write in European languages and could, therefore, read the Bible in English, French, Dutch, or German. This direct access to the Bible meant they could interpret the Bible for themselves without needing the help of the missionaries. Consequently, Africans could also confidently disagree with the missionaries on how they understood the text of the Bible.
One subject of contention between the Africans and the missionaries was that of the Spirit and the spirit-world. On the one hand, African converts were informed by traditional religion, from which they had converted, and which had a vibrant and dynamic spirit-world that shaped the entirety of their lives, from birth to death. It has been said numerous times by African scholars from John Mbiti64 to Kwame Bediako65 and Laurenti Magesa66 that for Africans, the spirit-world is not a distant reality and that spirits can break into the material world of human beings at any time. This is normal and generally expected and accepted among Africans, especially those outside Christianity and Islam. Indeed, for most cultures in sub-Saharan Africa, the gap between the material and the spiritual worlds is so thin that it is considered non-existent and whatever of it exists, it is thoroughly permeable that humans and spirit interact constantly. Indeed, for precolonial Africans, it was impossible to tell a people’s religion apart from their culture as the two are generally inseparable. Precolonial Africans understood religion to be entirely about staying connected with the spirit-world (of ancestors and other spirits, including that of god, whatever that god was called in each of their tribal languages), and they shaped their culture accordingly. Until today, almost two hundred years after the arrival of the missionaries, and even after a majority of sub-Saharan populations are Christian, the belief in a spirit-world among Africans is unaffected. If anything, as Asamoah-Gyadu shows us, this belief in an active spirit-world has made Christianity catch fire in the continent. It is spirit-centered Christianity that has exploded in Africa in the past fifty years. I cannot count how many times I heard as a young African growing up in Malawi that “the spirit-world is more real than the physical world,” and that “human beings are essentially spirits that have (and live in) human bodies.” This attention to and awareness of the spiritual world shaped—and continues to shape—the ways in which Africans engaged with the missionaries and read the Bible.
The missionaries, on the other hand, were shaped in modernity in Europe and would find it difficult to understand and acknowledge the vibrancy of African religions and their openness to the spirit-world. Of course, by 1800, the Enlightenment had been shaping European culture for almost 200 years. In this time—and this would go on for another 200 years—science and reason were the drivers of European life. Religion slowly gave way to science, losing its place on the public sphere in the process. European Christianity would have to keep adapting itself to a culture that was constantly shifting towards secular humanism. Even its theology would eventually lose its ability to understand and engage the spiritual nature of Christianity as a religion. Bultmann, a German theologian of the twentieth century, would become famous for having demythologized the miracles of the New Testament.”67 Consequently, when the missionaries came to Africa, they arrived equipped with a theology that could not fathom African spirituality, let alone its religion. Many of their converts would find this new religion, the Christianity of the missionaries, devoid of the Spirit. Without an active spirit, the Christianity of the missionaries would leave its converts unprotected from contrary spirits (both of their abandoned deities and ancestors and those sent by their enemies to harm them), and this was a real danger that cost people their lives. Victor Hayward is correct in his diagnosis:
Christianity was too Western, too rationalistic and otherworldly, to gain the confidence of its adherents at their deepest levels of experience. This showed up most plainly in those times of personal crisis, such as barrenness and sickness, when many baptized believers, thinking that Jesus Christ did not have