The Age of the Prophets (1900–1930)

Abstract

Abstract This chapter begins by examining the relationship between Christianity and colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa and assessing Christianity’s explosive growth in the twentieth century. Indeed, accounting for conversion to Christianity in Africa has been a much-discussed topic among historians, sociologists, anthropologists, missiologists, and theologians. The chapter then moves to consider the conversion and converting mission of William Wadé Harris, the single greatest evangelist in African history and the quintessential representative of numerous prophet-healing movements in West Africa in the first decades of the twentieth century. Crucial to the extension of the gospel and conversion of the Dida people of the southern Ivory Coast was the composition of hymns to the Christian God. As typified the Christianization process throughout a largely illiterate Africa, neither text nor catechism but song became the village people’s theology.