Missions, Colonialism & the African Church

Christianity is not foreign to Africa. The Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8) was among the first Gentile converts. The church in North Africa — Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria — was one of the strongest centres of early Christianity. Alexandria was a theological powerhouse. Carthage produced Tertullian and Cyprian. Hippo gave us Augustine. The Coptic Church of Egypt and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church trace their origins to the first centuries of Christianity — they have existed continuously for nearly two thousand years, without any connection to European colonialism. When we say 'Christianity came to Africa through missionaries,' we erase this ancient heritage. Christianity was African before it was European. The Nubian kingdoms of Sudan had Christian civilisations from the sixth to the fifteenth centuries. It was the Islamic conquests of the seventh to fifteenth centuries — not any failure of African Christianity — that diminished the church in North and East Africa. When European missionaries arrived in sub-Saharan Africa from the fifteenth century onward, they were not bringing Christianity to a religionless continent. They were re-introducing it — and they did so with enormous cultural arrogance, largely ignorant of Africa's existing Christian heritage.

The modern missionary movement began in the late eighteenth century, fuelled by evangelical revival in Britain and America. William Carey went to India (1793), and soon missionaries fanned out across Asia and Africa. In Southern Africa, the London Missionary Society (LMS) established stations in the Cape Colony, and from there moved northward into Bechuanaland (modern Botswana). Robert Moffat arrived at Kuruman in 1820 and began translating the Bible into Setswana — an extraordinary achievement, but also one shaped by his cultural assumptions. Moffat and his son-in-law David Livingstone genuinely believed they were bringing light to darkness, civilisation to savagery. They did not separate the gospel from European culture. Converts were expected to adopt Western dress, Western names, Western education, and Western church structures. Traditional practices — including some that were spiritually neutral or even positive — were often condemned wholesale as 'heathen.' The relationship between missionaries and colonial authorities was complex. Some missionaries advocated for African rights (the Bechuanaland chiefs Khama III, Bathoen I, and Sebele I were supported by the LMS in their 1895 journey to London to resist Cecil Rhodes' British South Africa Company). Others were complicit in colonial dispossession. The gospel and the gun arrived on the same ship — and Africans were left to sort out which was which. The legacy is ambiguous: genuine conversion and genuine harm; real education and real cultural destruction; access to the Bible and loss of indigenous identity.

By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, African believers began to resist the cultural captivity of mission Christianity. The result was the explosive growth of African Independent Churches (AICs) — also called African Initiated Churches or African Indigenous Churches. These movements took many forms: Ethiopian churches that broke from white-controlled denominations to assert African leadership (e.g., the Ethiopian Catholic Church in South Africa, 1892). Zionist and Apostolic churches that emphasised the Holy Spirit, healing, prophecy, and African expressions of worship — drums, dancing, robes, outdoor worship. Prophet-led movements like the Zion Christian Church (ZCC), the Church of the Nazarites (Shembe), and the Apostolic Faith Mission. In Botswana, Spiritual Healing churches and various Zionist movements became deeply rooted in village life, offering healing, community, and spiritual power in ways that mission churches often could not. The AICs recovered something the missionaries had suppressed: the integration of faith with African cosmology, community, and embodied worship. They took the Bible seriously — often more seriously than mission churches — and found in it a God who heals, delivers, and speaks directly to African realities. The AICs were not perfect. Some fell into syncretism, personality cults, or theological error. But their fundamental impulse was right: the gospel must be at home in African culture, not a foreign import wearing borrowed clothes.

One of the great paradoxes of African Christianity is this: the Bible was brought by colonisers, but it became the weapon of liberation. Desmond Tutu said: 'When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, "Let us pray." When we opened our eyes, we had the Bible and they had the land.' But then Tutu adds the crucial second half: 'But we got the better end of the deal.' The Bible, intended to pacify, turned out to be dynamite. African believers read Exodus and saw their own story of liberation from oppression. They read the prophets and heard God's judgment on unjust rulers. They read the Gospels and encountered a Jesus who sided with the poor, the marginalised, and the oppressed. In South Africa, black theology used Scripture to challenge apartheid. In Botswana, the biblical vision of human dignity undergirded the resistance to colonial exploitation. The lesson is powerful: God's Word cannot be domesticated. It may arrive in colonial packaging, but it carries within it the seeds of liberation. The same Bible that was used to justify slavery was the book that inspired the abolition of slavery. The same Bible used to justify apartheid was the book that dismantled it. We must always distinguish between the gospel itself and the cultural vehicle that carries it.

The history of Christianity in Africa is incomplete without acknowledging the central role of women. In mission contexts, women were often the first and most committed converts. They formed prayer groups (manyano in Southern Africa), taught children, cared for the sick, and sustained church life when men were away at mines or in towns. Yet women were systematically excluded from formal leadership in both mission and independent churches. The manyano movement in Southern Africa is a remarkable grassroots phenomenon: women's prayer and mutual-aid groups that became the backbone of congregational life. These women sang, prayed, fasted, and supported each other through poverty, domestic violence, and bereavement. They were doing theology — embodied, practical, Spirit-led theology — even when they were denied the title 'theologian.' In Botswana, women have been and remain the heart of the church. Any honest history must acknowledge this, and any future vision must include women in leadership — not as tokens but as full partners in ministry, teaching, and governance.

The challenge for African Christianity today is decolonisation without deconversion. We must strip away the layers of European cultural assumption that were confused with the gospel itself, while preserving the gospel at the centre. This means: Worshipping in African idioms — using our languages, our music, our cultural expressions. Reading Scripture with African eyes — asking what the text means in our context, not just what European commentators say it means. Developing African theology — not as a reaction against Western theology but as a constructive contribution from our own soil. Challenging structures that replicate colonial hierarchies — clericalism, patriarchy, and authoritarian leadership that mirror colonial power relations rather than the servant leadership of Jesus. But decolonisation does not mean rejecting everything Western. The Reformation's sola Scriptura, the Nicene Creed's Christology, the abolition tradition rooted in evangelical faith — these are gifts to the global church, not merely Western impositions. We receive them as part of our shared Christian heritage while also offering our own gifts: Ubuntu theology, communal hermeneutics, embodied worship, and a spirituality that refuses to separate the sacred from the everyday. The church in Botswana stands at this crossroads. We have the opportunity to build something genuinely African and genuinely Christian — rooted in Scripture, alive in the Spirit, and free from both colonial captivity and uncritical nativism.