felt they had to visit the traditional healer.68
Gottfried Oosterwal would be more direct in 1973:
For it is precisely the absence or lack of the power of God as a reality people can live by that has been a precipitating factor to these movements. In the African traditional religions, power is as the center of their thinking, life, and experience. And the spirit—of God, the gods, or the ancestors—was a tangible reality. How remote, how intellectual, how powerless seems to be the God and the Spirit the missionaries preach about, or the Westerners show in their lives. As one leader once expressed it in a conversation with the missionary, “You have held back the Spirit!”69
One of my ancestors, a spirit medium and herbalist, refused for a long time to convert to the Christianity of the Western missionaries saying, “Your religion has no sense of mystery and wonder. Its spirit is too passive; one would think it does not exist at all. Therefore, your religion is no religion at all.” Towards the end of his life, after he converted, he told me, “A religion that fails to connect with the spirit is only a moral philosophy whose only good news is either moral legalism or moral liberalism.” When I asked him to explain why he converted, he said that when he discovered the Holy Spirit it reflected the spiritual world in its purest form and it was more powerful than anything he had worked with. It is to people like him that African independent churches were attractive. The Africans who initiated independent churches had converted from traditional religion to Christianity only to find that (1) Christianity—as it was presented by the missionaries—did not know how to meet to their spiritual needs and (2) being a Christian meant they had to let go of everything to do with African culture. As a result, it was generally impossible for a person to be a Christian and an African at the same time. Christianity and African culture were mutually exclusive. Naturally, many converts to Christianity sought ways to keep their newly found faith without losing their Africanness. To do this, they had to reinterpret the Bible to make space for the active spiritual world they knew from the African religion. It was a great delight when the African converts discovered the Spirit in the Bible.
As Africans came to understand the Bible more, the gap between African independent churches and the missionary-led churches would widen. Often, the missionaries did not appreciate African independent churches and incited the colonial governments to frustrate them. In the Congo, for instance, Baptist missionaries would incite the colonial government to imprison Simeon Kimbangu in 1921 for establishing an independent healing ministry that proved more popular than the mission churches.70 Even though both William Wade Harris and Garrick Sokari Braide were wildly successful in their evangelism efforts in West Africa, reaching many thousands more than the missionaries could and challenging Africans in ways that actually resonated with their cultural sensibilities (for instance, to burn their fetishes and trust the spiritual powers of Jesus Christ to protect them), they both were maltreated by the colonial government while the missionaries nodded and looked away.71
African Independent Churches in the Colonial Era
African independent churches started as a protest form of Christianity, first against the spiritually deficient Christianity of the missionaries and later against colonialism, especially where colonialism worked hand-in-hand with the missionaries (which was almost everywhere). Generally speaking, European colonialism took full advantage of the presence of the missionaries in Africa.72 To many, it actually appeared like the sending of missionaries to Africa was intended to prepare the way for colonialism, especially as Europeans needed to replace the trade of kidnapping and enslaving Africans to sell them in the Americas which had run for more than four hundred years with a new one. Edward Andrews argues that even though many modern mission historians—Kenneth Latourette and Stephen Neill inclusive—have portrayed missionaries as “visible saints, exemplars of ideal piety in a sea of persistent savagery” wider Western scholarship often labels them as the religious arm of European colonialism.73 Indeed, some missionaries actually worked for their European governments, pacifying the people before the full wrath of colonialism was unleashed and keeping them subservient to their colonial masters, forcing upon them racist ideologies of white supremacy—that everything African was evil and inferior. David Silverman adds that “by the time the colonial era drew to a close in the last half of the twentieth century, missionaries became viewed as ‘ideological shock troops for colonial invasion whose zealotry blinded them,’ colonialism’s ‘agent, scribe and moral alibi.’”74 While, of course, there existed many missionaries who sought to undermine colonialism, it is unthinkable that the colonial agenda did not aid mission in any way. The mere presence of a European colonial governor with his agents and numerous white traders made the work of the missionary somewhat easier.
Surprisingly though, Christianity began to take root in Africa during the colonial era. Even the missionaries themselves did not expect Christianity to gain traction in Africa. At the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in 1910—at the peak of both the colonial scramble in Africa and of the Western missionary movement—they believed that Africa appeared to be on the verge of converting to Islam. They were wrong. Christianity continued to grow in Africa. It grew exponentially and unexpectedly in the African independent churches, away from the gaze of the colonial governments and the mission scholars. William Wade Harris’s story of travelling to and through Cote d’Ivoire, baptizing an estimated one hundred thousand converts in an eighteen-month period and impacting the lives of an estimated two hundred thousand people over the three years75 when European missionaries could convert only one thousand people would play itself many times over in other parts of Africa. In addition, mission churches generally thrived where they allowed marginal movements of revival to exist in their midst. The Anglican Church in Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda would benefit greatly from the East African Revival that operated between the Church and charismatic independent groups in the region. Allan Anderson is right to suggest that the growth of African independent churches is akin to an African Reformation—the title of his book that explores their development in the twentieth century.76 Citing Bengt Sundkler, Anderson says that African independent churches grew from forty-two thousand members in 1900 to fifty-four million in 2000.77 Gina Zurlo and Todd Johnson project that they will be at one hundred eighty million in 2025.78 This suggests that almost 25 percent of African Christians are in independent and unaffiliated churches. While this phenomenal growth is to be celebrated, I wish to suggest that their greatest impact is that they prepared the way for the Pentecostal, Charismatic, and Neo-Pentecostal churches that emerged in postcolonial Africa.
During the colonial era, Europeans were essentially in charge of both governance and religion over millions of Africans even though they did not understand the religious sensibilities of Africans. Consequently, they sought to do away with African traditional religion and they frowned upon African independent churches, often persecuting their members. The existence of such churches allowed Africans some space out of European reach to practice a form of Christianity that the Europeans did not understand. This was a great cause for concern for Europeans as they needed to monitor the Africans at all times for fear of anticolonial uprisings. In Malawi, an insurrection in 1915 led by John Chilembwe, a Malawian evangelist, caused the British colonial government to pass laws that made it impossible for Malawians to register Christian churches unless they were led by white Westerners.79 Those laws were abolished after Malawi gained her independence from Britain in 1964.80
Second, African independent churches differed quite significantly from Europeans both in their theology and their ecclesiology. William Wade Harris’s calabash and cross, the Aladura’s white garments, Isaiah Shembe’s music and dancing, Simeon Kimbangu’s healing ministry, all these plus the prominent role of the charismatic leader (in the likeness of the oracle or the medium of traditional religion) made it difficult for Europeans to trust members of African independent churches as fellow Christians. Since most of their leaders were not advanced in the Western system of education, and that they were either illiterate or semi-literate in the eyes of the Europeans, there was always concern about syncretism—that Africans were mixing their Christianity with aspects of African religion. Of course, the operational belief was that all Christians would worship and behave just like European Christians. Many missionaries believed that there was only one way to be a Christian—the European way. Every Christian in the world would have to believe and behave like a European. Any deviation was suspect. Consequently, African