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Reframing the Story of Christianity in Africa

Harvey C. Kwiyani

Exploring Africa’s Enthusiastic Christianity

My intention in this essay is to discuss the significance of Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu’s expansive work on African Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity in the context of Africa’s widespread enthusiastic Christianity.61 To do this, I will attempt to situate Asamoah-Gyadu’s work in the wider story of the development of African Christianity. I will draw connections between the early African encounters with the missionaries in the nineteenth century and the currently ongoing charismatization of African Christianity. I will also attempt to locate it in the wider subject of world Christianity as Africa will shape Christianity in the world for this century. I make use of a historical phenomenology to make sense of the twentieth-century narrative of Africa’s spirit-centered Christianity and to make two suggestions. First, a properly contextualized Christianity will be enthusiastic in its outlook. Thus, I argue that only a Christianity that can engage the spirit world just like the old African traditional religions did would be viable both in colonial and post-colonial sub-Saharan Africa. The emergence of African independent churches suggests that on the one hand, attempts to limit expressions of Christianity in Africa to non-charismatic denominations are often a form of miscontextualization (or undercontextualization, or even non-contextualization) and can only result in a religious and theological identity crisis for Africans.

On the other hand, the labels that we use for African Christianity do not sufficiently describe what is happening on the ground. Many African independent churches precede Pentecostalism and most of them do not subscribe to Pentecostal theology even though they are often lumped together as Pentecostals. Second, I argue that Asamoah-Gyadu’s work is of greater and broader significance as it (inadvertently, I believe) announces the full arrival—or the mainstreaming—of spirit-centered expressions of Christianity in the form of Pentecostal, Charismatic, and Neo-Pentecostal movements in the continent in Africa. Looking back at the body of his literature, it becomes rather clear that he presents to us African Christianity at a tipping point where it confidently assumes its identity as African Christianity both in the continent and in the diaspora, and in the process, it begins to influence world Christianity. He catches the story at a moment when Africa Christianity is able to actually become African. I attempt to connect this current development to the African independent churches 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 any interest, or worse, the power to improve their state of affairs, 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 independent churches were politically suspicious and religiously unwelcome. Therefore, by their very existence, African independent churches critiqued this belief and showed that Christianity without European culture is possible. Whatever the Europeans thought of as syncretism, the Africans believed to be contextualization. Thus, the Africans risked syncretism in order to be—a charge that we still hear today even though it is true that every expression of Christianity has some syncretism in it. Yet, by the time colonialism came to an end, they had grown at a significantly faster rate than missionary-led denominational churches.

Pentecostal, Charismatic, Neo-Charismatic, and Beyond

At the center of the argument of this chapter is the proposition that African independent churches have made African Christianity as we know it today possible. What Harris and Kimbangu did earlier on in the twentieth century, at the height of the colonial era became the template for the multiplication that we see in African Christianity in postcolonial Africa. Their spirit-empowered prophetic and healing ministries that critiqued and protested against the missionaries and the colonists foreshadow the many charismatic ministries that have emerged in Africa since the end of colonialism. They were both extremely successful in their evangelizing efforts. They understood how to engage their audiences from within their own cultures—the missionaries could never do this. They not only spoke local languages, they also understood the spiritual needs of Africans. Through prophetic and healing gifts, they presented to Africans a God who was both touched by their needs and was close enough to help. The Jesus of Harris and Kimbangu was not only concerned with saving souls from hellfire. Yes, people had to be saved, but they also had to trust Jesus’ Spirit for protection and healing. They had to burn their fetishes and be healed of their diseases through prayer. It should be no surprise that beginning in the 1960s and 1970s when European colonization of Africa started to unravel, and the colonial representatives and agents returned to Europe, it is the Harris or Kimbangu type of Christianity that emerged across sub-Saharan Africa. The process of decolonizing Christianity took much longer (and is said to have been a lot harder) than that of the political states but when it happened, a spirit-oriented Christianity emerged. Many Western missionaries tried to stay on, arguing that the “younger churches” of Africa were not mature enough yet to stand on their own. A majority of them had to be pushed to move on.81 But once the leadership of African churches was handed over to Africans, many churches began to allow some aspects of African culture shape their theology and ecclesiology and just like in the African independent churches of old, the Spirit came rushing in. Overall, it became clear that a decolonized African Christianity had to liberate itself from European thought systems.

Since the 1970s, the Christianity of African independent churches has come to shape a great deal of African Christianity. Without the widespread misunderstandings and persecutions from the missionaries and colonial governments, African independent churches have themselves thrived and multiplied. They are home to millions upon millions of Christians in sub-Saharan Africa. For instance, both the Harrist and Kimbanguist churches have continued to grow. In southern Africa, Apostolic and Zionist churches have also continued to spread across many countries. Altogether, these classical African independent churches have millions of members both in Africa and in the African diaspora.82 Many other African independent churches have modernized and rebranded as Pentecostal denominations. Several large West African Pentecostal denominations started out as Aladura groups of praying people. Both the Redeemed Christian Church of God and the Apostolic Church of Nigeria—with more than ten million members between them—have their roots in the Aladura movements of the 1920s. In addition, of course, the Pentecostal movement made it possible for many who wanted a spirit-oriented Christianity to find a home outside the mission-established and -controlled churches. Classical Pentecostal denominations like the Assemblies of God and Foursquare have also benefitted, but in the context of Africa, they are far outnumbered by other enthusiastic expressions of Christianity. Neo-Pentecostal churches are generally modernized African independent churches. They have emerged in Africa after colonialism.

Consequently, they have a different set of concerns from those of the early AICs. In addition, most of them have Western connections and are largely informed by American popular Christianity. In addition, data coming out of America research organization puts African Pentecostal, Charismatic and Neo-Pentecostal Christians at 25 percent of the entire African Christian population. However, anecdotal reports coming from the continent are saying otherwise. Spirit-oriented Christianity influences almost all of African Christianity. Even those denominations that have come out of strict Reformed and cessationist movements have had to pentecostalize. Anglicans, Baptists, Catholics, Presbyterians, and all other mission-established churches have gone through a process of pentecostalizing. They have had no choice but to follow the crowd and transform themselves to allow African culture and worldview influence their theology and ecclesiology. We joke of Bapticostals and Prescostals as a way of I have heard from many friends, Lutherans from Nigeria, Anglicans from Kenya, and Presbyterians from Malawi saying, “If we cannot beat the Pentecostals, we better join them, otherwise we will lose all our members.” One would be hard pressed to find a denomination that has not been affected, some kicking and screaming. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, it was common for mission-founded churches to demand that their members should not fellowship with the tongue-speaking Charismatics. Some denominations excommunicated their members for behaving like Pentecostals. Today, we have generations of African Christians who have never belonged in a non-charismatic church, many who cannot imagine being church without the charismatic gifts of the Spirit being manifest.

We Need New Terms

In African Christianity, the lines between the Pentecostals, Charismatics, and Neo-Pentecostals are blurred and very permeable. Most people are not even clear whether they are Pentecostal or Charismatic and why they belong to those camps. Many do not even know what differentiates them from other traditions. A typical “Pentecostal” pastor in rural Africa has never heard of Azusa Street, Amos Yong, or Wayne Grudem. More important though, Pentecostals, Charismatics, and Neo-Pentecostals form only a small section of the many spirit-oriented Christians in the continent. Just like those Christians who formed AICs before the birth of Pentecostalism, African Christians do not need to be Pentecostals, Charismatics, or Neo-Pentecostals to believe in the active power of the Spirit. In addition, the lines between these spiritist denominations and mission-founded churches have also become thinner in Africa by the year. African Christians can be in a Catholic or a Presbyterian church and yet be filled with the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in tongues and find it normal. Generally speaking, Africans do not even need to be Christians to believe in the power of the spiritual world. The power of the spirits is part of their worldview. Such Africans find a Christianity without an active spirit-world impotent and strange. A religion whose spirit cannot perform miracles does not make sense to most Africans. A god that cannot help its people in times of need is not a god at all.

For this reason, when we use these generalized labels to describe African Christianity, we risk being vague and out-of-context. Of course, labels are important; they help us categorize whatever it is that we are working with, based on similarities, differences or any other criteria. Labels help us box similar things together and, at the same time, keep those things that are dissimilar, and do not belong, out of the box. However, labels always make sense in the perspective of the people doing the labelling. They hardly reflect the self-understanding of those being labelled. This explains why people reject labels given to them by others. In this conversation, all the labels that we use—Pentecostal, Charismatic, Neo-Pentecostal and/or Neo-Charismatic—are imported from the West. They work well when used to describe some sects of Western (and usually American) Christianity. However, it appears to me that, more often than not, when we import them to Africa, we often fail to recognize that what we identify as African Pentecostalism is in many ways different from American Pentecostalism. Even when we are talking about one and the same Pentecostal denomination operating in the United States and in Africa at the same time, (for instance, the Assemblies of God—a classical Pentecostal denomination in the United States that has found its way to many African countries), its American and African members do not always believe the same things. Their theologies are not congruent on all issues pertaining the Spirit. Even their belief in the gifts of the Spirit does not lead to the same behaviours and manifestations. Here in Britain where this writer resides, the Ghanaian-originated Pentecostal denomination, the Church of Pentecost, looks and behaves nothing like its British sister-denomination, the ELIM Pentecostal Church. I am even more intrigued when I see that the Ghanaian members of the Church of Pentecost in Britain are happier to belong to their Ghanaian denomination and not the British ELIM even when it takes more effort to do so.

In Europe, where there exists today a significant presence of African Christians, it is well-accepted that the type of Christianity that has come from Africa is Pentecostal in nature.83 The term “African Pentecostalism” has almost become synonymous to African Christianity. The largest African denominations in the diaspora are Pentecostal, and they have become representative of African Christianity outside Africa. Be it the Redeemed Christian Church of God with their one thousand congregations in the UK alone, or the Church of Pentecost that has almost two hundred assemblies in the UK, or even Sunday Adelaja’s Blessed Embassy of the Kingdom of God in Kiev, Ukraine, when researchers write about African Christianity in Europe, it is usually these Pentecostal churches that are in focus. However, both the ethnocentric label, “African,” and the theological one, “Pentecostal,” are problematic, especially in the diaspora. “African Pentecostals” forms a double fronted missional barrier to Westerners who, while finding “African” exotic and interesting, are suspicious of Pentecostalism—it is foreign to the Western Enlightenment-shaped worldview. I believe that if African Christianity is taken for what it is, and understood to be necessarily enthusiastic because of the culture that shapes it, it has a great deal to offer to the world.

Conclusion

Africa’s enthusiastic Christianity makes a unique contribution to the world. The circumstances around its emergence are unique. The historical realities of Africa’s encounter with Europe—the four hundred years of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and the ensuing attempts to evangelize and colonize Africa—plus the spiritual realities of African cultures make a distinct flavour of Christianity inevitable. Several decades after the Scramble for Africa, we see Christianity gain traction in the continent, even when the Africans were beginning to agitate for independence. Most of those Africans who found Christianity attractive needed a type of Christianity that was strong enough to meet all their spiritual needs. An enthusiastic Christianity emerged that continues until today. It is this Christianity that has reshaped the religious landscape of Africa. It is larger than any of our current labels can contain. It arises out of Africa with the potential to reach the world in the power of the Spirit. One of its major scribes is Asamoah-Gyadu. As the next generation will write about it, they will owe a great deal of that history to him.

61. “Africa” in this essay is used to describe what would be rightly called “sub-Saharan Africa.”

62. It is also because of education—the access given to Africans to learn the white man’s book—that Europe’s colonization of Africa only lasted eighty years.

63. Both Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong’o are clear about this in their novels Things Fall Apart and The River Between respectively.

64. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy.

65. Bediako, Christianity in Africa.

66. Magesa, What Is Not Sacred?

67. Bultmann, Jesus Christ and Mythology. John Mbiti tells a fictitious yet tragic story of a young African PhD graduate majoring in theology who returns home after many years of study abroad and cannot exorcize his sister (as expected by his family and community) because Bultmann had demythologized demon possession. See Mbiti, “Theological Impotence.”

68. Hayward, African Independent Church Movements, 50.

69. Oosterwal, Modern Messianic Movements, 36 (my italics).

70. For the fascinating story of the Prophet Kimbangu, see Mokoko Gampiot and Coquet-Mokoko, Kimbanguism.

71. Harris was deported from Ivory Coast for disturbing peace through his evangelism. Braide was jailed because his ministry threatened lowering tax on alcohol as people were convicted to stop drinking beer. See Isichei, “Soul of Fire”; Tasie, Christian Missionary Enterprise.

72. Mongo Beti’s classic novel, The Poor Christ of Bomba, narrates an excellent story that reflects the complex relationship between mission and colonialism. However, this is a theme that has been explored to a great depth by many scholars in the past century. See Beti, Poor Christ of Bomba. I would also refer the reader to Robert, Converting Colonialism. Another good resource is Carey, God’s Empire.

73. Andrews, “Christian Missions and Colonial Empires Reconsidered,” 663.

74. Silverman, “Indians, Missionaries, and Religious Translation,” 144.

75. Isichei, “Soul of Fire,” 24.

76. Anderson, African Reformation.

77. Anderson, African Reformation, 7. He adds that the World Christian Encyclopedia put the figure at eighty three million, and this only highlights the problematic nature of these statistics, especially when they have to do with Christianity in Africa.

78. 151 million for Independents plus 29 million for Unaffiliateds. Zurlo and Johnson, “Religious Demographies of Africa,” 155. Both Pentecostals and African independent churches are included in this figure, and that makes the figure seem rather conservative. This is part of the challenge of depending on Western categories to explore African Christianity.

79. Shepperson and Price, Independent African.

80. Strohbehn, Pentecostalism in Malawi.

81. John Gatu’s request for a moratorium on Western missionaries in Africa in 1971 was inspired by the process of political decolonization that swept through sub-Saharan Africa in the 1960s. See Reese, “John Gatu and the Moratorium on Missionaries.”

82. For example, the Kimbanguist Church has a significant presence in Belgium. The Apostolic Church of Zimbabwe has several congregations in England.

83. Kwiyani, Sent Forth, 110.