The Africanization of Missionary Christianity: History and Typology

Abstract

Of the many issues confronting African Christians today, none would appear to have received more attention than the problem of defining the precise relationship between Christianity and African culture. The lively, sometimes heated, debate which has developed over this issue has produced in its wake a substantial body of literature on diverse aspects of a process variously labelled as Africanization, incarnation, contextualization, adaptation. As with any large corpus of literature, the writings on this topic vary significantly in scope, intention, and quality. Yet, without exception these works are consistent in their avoidance of any discussion of two topics: historical precedents and typological distinctions.2 Whatever the differences in the authors' stands in present-day debates, they are generally united in the limited attention they give to early attempts at Africanization and their lack of interest in defining different forms of adaption. It is with these two issues that this paper is primarily concerned. Western missionaries have frequently been condemned as cultural imperialists incapable of or unwilling to fairly evaluate and respect the cultures of the peoples with whom they came in contact. A. J. Temu's claim that almost all the Protestant missionaries to Kenya viewed all native customs and traditions with abhorrence has been voiced by students of missionary studies with regard to Christian activity in every area of the continent.3 Missionaries, it is charged, were unable to separate the Christian religion from such European trappings as monogamy, Western dress, and etiquette and accordingly sought to impose an all inclusive package upon the African population, rather than confining themselves to religious change per se. In the main this picture is an accurate one. The extreme ethnocentricity and cultural arrogance of many Western missionaries cannot be denied. However, in con