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Taking a close look at the explosion of Christianity in twentieth-century Africa, we meet a remarkable group of colonial-era (roughly 1890 to World War II) apostles who were born, grew up, and ministered in sub-Saharan Africa. We have been inspired and challenged by their stories. We hope you will be, too.

While the story of Christianity's spread in Africa is nothing less than awesome, it is also nothing more than the work of God, who always uses the foolish things of a sin-scarred world as the building material for his body.

Western missions in colonial Africa proceeded by slow, painful steps. The missionaries' best efforts were often hindered by cultural misunderstandings, economic abuses, political agendas, and racist presuppositions. While missionaries were picking their tortuous way through the colonial period, indigenous African evangelists and teachers exploded onto the scene like dynamite. Yes, they worked on the same confused, conflicted landscape as the missionaries. Nonetheless, something happened when the gospel was proclaimed under African sponsorship. It revolutionized the continent.

Within a few short decades, out of the seeds first sown by the missionaries came a profusion of indigenous roots and branches, laden with a lavish variety of flowers and fruit.

To help us understand the cultural and spiritual landscape of colonial Africa, we interviewed Dr. Ogbu Kalu, Henry Winters Luce Professor of World Christianity and Mission at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago. Kalu, an elder in the Presbyterian Church of Nigeria, came to McCormick in 2001 from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where he had served as professor of Church history for 23 years.

What was the relationship between the African Christians who wanted to live a truly African faith and the colonial churches?

African Christians clearly worked from a position of reaction against colonialism. But there were several kinds of reaction, from those who largely worked within the mission churches; to those who stayed in but agitated for change, like the Ethiopianists (pp. 14 and 39); to those who struck out on their own, like the Aladura churches in the West (p. 35) and the Zionists in the South.

It is important to understand the chronology here. Colonialism was actually a very short-lived phenomenon in Africa—it lasted only the span of a single human lifetime. What we call the colonial enterprise did not gel until 1900. By 1914, when the continent was fully carved up, the European powers were on the verge of World War I, which distracted them and drained their resources. Between 1919 and 1939, you have the turbulence of the interwar years and the Great Depression. By 1945, the European countries were exhausted by World War II. That's why the French wanted to pull out of Algeria by 1957, followed by the British receding from Ghana, and so forth. Colonialism was effectively dead by 1960.

Certainly it was a very powerful phase in African history, which had physical, mental, psychological, economic, and religious import. But since the colonial governments at no point had enough European administrators to achieve effective rule in their African colonies, they left local cultures and leadership structures intact. In fact, they used a system of almost entirely indigenous rule to keep order.

The missionaries, however, operated in just the opposite way. Although most of them—especially the Roman Catholics—did train indigenous helpers, they generally dragged their feet on ordaining Africans. The story of Crowther (p. 10) was highly unusual for its time, and Kiwanuka (p. 16) came later and in a different regional situation.

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