This panel proposes to discuss the ways in which Christian missions and churches have contributed to the shaping of individual as well as group identities in Africa, and the role that these identities have played in the definition of citizenship in both colonial and post-colonial African states.
Concepts, meanings and experiences of citizenship raise a diverse set of issues with regard to the identity of individuals and communities in African states and societies, notably in the light of social and economic integration (vs. disintegration) as well as political unification (vs. fragmentation). Christian missions, by dint of their work in the African settings, invariably triggered processes of reforming individual and collective identities. Such trends commonly resulted from direct, extensive contact - at the grassroots - between the missionaries and their target groups. The scope of the reform processes has broadened considerably with the growth and gradual indigenisation of mission churches. Consequently, it has occasionally been suggested that mission churches have more recently evolved into (mini-)states within the (post-colonial) state. This observation is an overtly political offshoot within the wider margins of the critical assumption we shall discuss: that Christian missions and their partners/successor churches constitute a vital non-governmental alternative to forming, or influencing the formation of, and monitoring communal structures; and that the latter have in turn become enmeshed with wider notions and articulations of citizenship.
The literature on Christian missions has for many years looked at the discourse on religion and religious movements from a political angle, trying to figure out on which side the (representatives of) missions stood – on the side of the colonial state or of nationalist movements, of imperialism or of African peoples and "subjects", of democracy or of totalitarian regimes, etc. Only more recently have studies moved on to see what churches have 'objectively' done, in spite of - and beyond - their political leanings. Emphases have thus been placed on their contributions to economic and social development, to the insertion of Africa into a globalised world, to the formation of societies based on modern African individuals, and to modernisation at large.
There is no question that the Church (Protestant and Catholic) educated westernised African elites. The latter often had a role in nationalism and they came to power at independence in many countries. Thus it has been noted that Christianity had a role in shaping African nationalism ? even if it had a role in colonialism as well. The question about Christian elites and African nationalism which has been less discussed, and which this presentation wishes to address, is the diversity of ideologies (of citizenship) which Christianity fostered. For one, there was a diversity of religious thoughts and teachings on the subject (Protestant vs. Catholic, social vs. evangelical Protestantism, Jesuit vs. Franciscan theology vs. liberation theology). For another, there were different articulations between African social groups and religious organizations, between African interests and religious thoughts. Taking the case of the diocese of Beira, I shall discuss the diversity of ideologies of citizenship which developed among Christian elites and I shall present their impact on colonial and anticolonial politics.
In Angola, the anti-colonial war was as much about putting an end to Portuguese colonial rule as it was about the opposition between conflicting views over the social, cultural, racial and ethnic contours of the Angolan nation. Lack of agreement about these contours led to the emergence in the 1960s of three nationalist movements which competed for the takeover of power in the country — and it has also played an important part in the extension of the anti-colonial war into the 27-year civil war which ravaged Angola from 1975 to 2002. At the core of these conflicting visions were questions of identity and citizenship, or what it meant to be Angolan, and who were the ‘rightful Angolans’ who should be entitled to take control of the country after independence.
Christian missions, which in the particular context of Portuguese rule represented the only avenue of social mobility for the vast majority of ‘indígenas’, played an important role in these processes. They contributed to the emergence of a moral economy which, although it primarily centred on the definition of the self in an effort to create ‘new Christian subjects’, also concerned the links between individuals, their community and the nation(-state). These values, once appropriated by local elites, shaped much of the politics of the competing nationalist movements as well as that of the postcolonial state. Drawing on the example of the Angolan Central Highlands (Huambo and Bié provinces), this paper looks at the way in which Catholic and Protestant missions thus contributed to conflicts over citizenship in Angola.
By the 1940s, Ugandan Christians had transformed protestant Christianity in Buganda from a small mission-based institution to a central reality of Uganda’s political world. The Church participated in crowning kings and Church membership was a criterion for participation in the leading group of regents and ministers. The Native Anglican Church (later the Church of Uganda) continued to be headed by British Bishops, but as a state church, supported by notable Baganda, coordinating a substantive network of schools, clinics, and churches throughout the Potectorate, it provided Baganda with opportunities for service, social climbing, recognition, and even power. Nor was the institutional strength of the Native Anglican Church all that protestant Christianity offered Baganda and other Ugandans: a dissident movement of the “saved” abalokole within the church, as well as the growth of the Greek Orthodox movement and the Malakites outside the church, also testified to the power of transformational faith and charismatic leadership among Ugandan Christians. Protestant Ugandans, members of government, and members of Uganda’s elite, tend to dominate narratives of Uganda’s politics in the 1930s through the 1950s.
This, however, may be more a function of ideology and source availability than reality. The single most prominent radical Bataka activist of the 1940s, after all, was Semakula Mulumba, a man who began his career as “Brother Francis.” And beyond tracing individuals, a close examination of Catholic institutions, such as the Old Boys’ Association of St. Mary’s College Kisubi, and Catholic Action, provides hints of how elite sociability developed and worked even when markedly removed from both the Government of Buganda and the Protectorate’s administration, and where political activists acquired guides to such covert organizing methods as the “cell system” and networks of informers. In this paper, I will depart from conventional understandings of how Ugandans built ideas of citizenship, organization and democratic action through practice in protestant church politics. Instead, I will argue that significant aspects of Ugandan radical or “nationalist” politics can best be understood by examining how Catholic leaders and followers conceptualized power, lobbying and subversion from the 1920s into the 1950s. Bishop Joseph Kiwanuka’s autocratic power, Catholic Action’s subversive cells, the efforts of the Old Boys’ Association to police its members and their social lives, and individual Catholics’ bitter critiques of power and exclusion disrupt any straightforward narrative of political development toward democracy and progress. Instead, Catholics understood privilege and power as potentially stable, and worth acquiring. They bitterly resented abuses and exclusions. And they struggled with authorities for control over institutions as they sought to make the Church serve their needs. Catholics in Buganda were not simply members of an inchoate mass. This paper will draw on materials from Catholic archives in Rome and Rubaga, contextualized with materials of a larger research project on Buganda in the 1940s, to explore how their ideas, institutions and struggles provided a major basis for Ganda political mobilization.
In my paper I delineate theological reflections on citizenship and outline the role of churches in the shaping of political identities in the context of democratic transition (or more specific: consolidation) in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Recent publications by South African theologians dealing with the role of churches in democratisation processes will form the background of these explorations. In a rapidly changing political setting, theologians as well as churches were forced to re-think their involvement in the political and public sphere. In a specific way this applies to those churches that were engaged in the anti-apartheid struggle and share a history of strong political commitment. Furthermore the paper looks at potentials and limitations of church bodies as agents of civil society supporting processes of democratic consolidation and asks whether (and how) they open up possibilities of political participation for men and women. On a more individual level it attempts to describe how church membership and/or faith shape personal attitudes and values which again impact on personal and communal life and political ways of acting.
The paper will re-examine one of the historic roots of what in contemporary Ghana is perceived as the image of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana and Presbyterian Congregations vis à vis the polities, which it/they form part of.
From a historic perspective in the case of the Basel Mission / Presbyterian Church and what is nowadays Ghana ‘citizenship’ was essentially related to the concept of an exemplary community, the Christian quarter or ‘Salem’. For a long time the divide between ‘traditional’ state and society on the one hand and on the other hand the ‘Salem’, was taken as given and more often than not, (and especially in nationalist discourse), criticised for alienating ‘Ghanaian’ citizens from the polities of their origin. More recent research has re-examined that history and found that there existed not so much an absolute divide, but more a dialectic relationship. (Still it may appear ironic that contemporary Ghanaian politicians can occasionally be heard addressing the Presbyterian Church as an exemplary community and to ask its members to impart the values that inform Presbyterian life to state and society at large - not least the stereotypical Presbyterian discipline.)
The paper will contend that the dialectic relationship between the Basel / Presbyterian community and the surrounding polities can be traced to a self-perception of the German speaking Pietist community as ‘ecclesiola’ (‘small church’). It can be regarded as a template for Pietists’ critical and criticising relations to any given polity, as well as representing the Pietists’ self perception as agents for (positive) change. In the revivalist missionary discourse of the Basel Mission the concept of the small, pious, exemplary and potentially critical community was extended to overseas.
The paper will ask, how from the perspective of the political, religious and social entities on the former Gold Coast, to which this image had been related, it has appeared to be potentially disruptive and/or to be offering alternative and potentially interesting options. In doing so it will focus on the conceptualisations of gender involved.
Culture and ‘tradition’ are important resources for regional development in the Ghanaian set-up. At many places the church is part and parcel of this heritage. This is for example the case in the Manya Krobo State. Here, as has been the case elsewhere, the Evangelical Basel Mission Society had been called in on purpose by local entrepreneurs in order to facilitate structural change and to strengthen their own position.
While both church and traditional state project an image of a close and ideal partnership of mission and chieftaincy, they also have to deal with the cleavages that the radical policies of the mission created between culture and Christianity. This paper explores how the church and the chieftaincy have dealt with this ambiguity in past and present.
Much of Africa’s cultural life centers on the family and kinship networks. Christianity and Westernization led to the rejection of African traditional culture until the cultural revival of the later colonial period. The colonization of Africa changed the nature of African missions and African Christianity. Missionaries became more closely related to the various European powers and their identification with the colonizing mission often resulted in both alliance and opposition in the attempt to construct new African identities. This paper examines the ways both missionaries and colonial authorities professed both love for Africans and the inferiority of African cultures, the contested nature of this relationship, and the crisis of identity created by the contested terrains.
Considerable resistance confronted the replacement of the Rhenish Mission in Steinkopf, South Afrcia by the Nederduitse Gerefoormeerde Sendingkerk in the 1920s in Steinkopf, one of seven former “colored” reserves in Namaqualand South Africa. Yet when the Nederduitse Gerefoormeerde Sendingkerk was replaced by the Verenigende Gerefoormeerde Kerk in Steinkopf in 1994, few people noticed. My submission focuses on the changes in notions of citizenship, entitlement and local participatory politics that were brought about by these three organizations across 20th century South Africa contending that the Rhenish mission was a considerably (and perhaps ironically) more progressive religious organisation than the two that followed it.
All too often have women in Cameroon constituted the vanguard of (attempted) shifts from traditional politico-religious institutions to Christianity or fusions between the two, notably in some highly centralised societies of the Grassfields in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. Although such inclinations were repeatedly suppressed, for example through persecution, their initiators occasionally chose alternative - informal - means and venues, largely disclosed from the public eye, to pursue their aims of participating in the mediation of Christian precepts, values, and practices. Intended or unintended, the results of these individual or collective ventures eventually revealed themselves - gradually and principally from below - in a large-scale socio-religious transformation of community structures. Those most directly affected in addition to the women proper were the children they raised and who came to represent a generation on the threshold of a revolutionised status between subject and citizenship. Only later on, following concerted waves of nationalist propaganda and activism as well as their splintered offshoots, did citizenship provide a common reference for the peoples' adherence to what became the federal and later unitary state of Cameroon.
The proposed paper shall take into account several biographical traces of women, both from the Grassfields and the adjacent Forest area to the south, to explore processes of orientation towards notions of citizenship combining three broad strands: missionary encounters and discourse (focussing on the Basel Mission), local contests for authority, and a growing national consciousness. The selected women are considered both in the light of their individual lives, ideas and achievements, and in the wider contours of their origins, including family and kinship backgrounds.