Africa has haunted the Christian conscience of this country for two centuries. It haunts it today as the Kikuyu rise in revolt and are savagely repressed; as Malan preaches and practises the doctrine that black men are of an inferior race; as the Bamangwato are deprived of their tribal chief (Seretse Khama) in one area, and the Buganda of their Kabaka in another. From North to South and from East to West “trouble” of one sort or another is the news from Africa, and it impinges on a Christian conscience which has long been uneasy.

Nor is this situation new. When Livingstone lived and worked, the harsh lot of the black man, and the evil of the Arab slave trade was a well-known theme in churches and chapels from Lands End to John o’ Groats. But nor was this the beginning, for even earlier, before the days of major missionary development, Britain herself had been more directly involved in the African slave trade. And it was in those days that William Cowper, who died in 1800, and some of whose hymns are commonly sung in our churches, wrote The Negroes’ Complaint, in which the Negro speaks like this:

“Still in thoughts as free as ever,
     What are England’s rights, I ask,
Me from my delights to sever,
     Me to torture, me to task?
Fleecy locks and black complexion
     Cannot forfeit Nature’s claim,
Skins may differ, but affection
     Dwells in white and black the same.

“Is there, as ye sometimes tell us,
     Is there One, who reigns on high?
Has He bid you buy and sell us,
     Speaking from His throne, the sky?
Ask Him, if your knotted scourges,
     Matches, blood-extorting screws,
Are the means that duty urges
     Agents of His will to use?”

[2] In another set of verses, Pity for Poor Africans, he put the other side of the case and showed it in all its barbaric selfishness.

“I own I am shocked at the purchase of slaves,
And fear those who buy them and sell them are knaves.
What I hear of their hardships, their torturers and groans
Is almost enough to draw pity from stones.

“I pity them greatly, but I must be mum,
For how could we do without sugar and rum?
Especially sugar! So needful we see,
What, give up our deserts, our coffee and tea?

“Besides, if we do, the French, Dutch and Danes
Will heartily thank us, no doubt for our pains;
If we do not buy the poor creatures, they will,
And torture and groans will be multiplied still.”

This was the period in which Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect, in the name of an evangelical Christianity, were on the rampage against the slave trade. Wilberforce had written in his diary in 1787: “God Almighty has placed before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners,” and if his reformation of manners allowed him to oppose in the House of Commons a Bill to stop the use of climbing boys for sweeping chimneys, yet on his first count he achieved the success of an Act making the slave trade illegal in 1807, and the triumph was none the less for the fact that it took another campaign to secure any real enforcement of the Act, and yet another, which achieved success only in 1833, to abolish the institution of slavery itself upon British territory.

Anybody who would sum up—and it is more than time that we all did so—the British debt to Africa, might well study a passage from the speech of Wilberforce in the House of Commons on May 12, 1789, when he first moved a motion for the abolition of the trade in human beings. It was, he said, well known “that people were sold there as goods, and that considerable numbers of Africans were continually conveyed away from their country by owners of British vessels; the question then was, Which way came they by them? In answer to that question, he declared that the report of the Privy Council, which was then on the Table, [2/3] afforded evidence the most satisfactory and conclusive, his Majesty’s Ministers had instituted an enquiry of great extent, and on a studious examination of their report he had found many things in it that confirmed every proposition that he had maintained before, and which he had taken from information of the best authority, and from every history he had read; but it was unnecessary to quote either the report or history. Plain reason and common sense must point out how the poor Africans were obtained; Africa was a country divided under many kings, under many governments, under many laws; in many parts the princes were despotic, and others governed with law maintained to a certain degree, men were considered mainly as goods and property, and as such subject to plunder in the same manner as property in other despotic countries; the kings and princes of that unfortunate country were naturally fond of our commodities, and to obtain them by the captivity and sale of their countrymen they waged war on each other and ravaged their own country, when they could find no pretence for quarrelling with their neighbouring sovereigns and their subjects; in their courts of law many poor wretches who were ignorant were condemned; and to obtain a sufficient number of slaves, thousands were kidnapped, and torn from their families and their country, and sent into slavery. All this, he said, was recorded in every history of Africa, and was now verified by the Report on the Table. Look to the reign of Henry Eighth, and it would be found that the same convictions and the same penalties follow conviction. The kings in Africa did not engage in war like the kings in Europe, for glory; they engaged in war for the purpose of obtaining what we had made their necessaries. The cruelty of those engaged in the inhuman traffic of procuring slaves he painted in a strong light, and said the first thing he recollected by way of exemplifying these people being made slaves was the celebrated tragedy at Calabar, where two large African villages having been some time at war, at length made peace, which was to have been ratified by inter-marriages; this, he said, from the best authority, appeared to have been defeated by the cruel machinations of our people, who seeing the trade must stop, again sowed dissension between the villages, set one against the other, fought alternately for each, and massacred and enslaved the inhabitants of both. Tragical and shocking as this transaction might appear, there was not a single history of Africa to be read, in which such scenes were not related. The Gentlemen, he said, who defended the trade, were warped and blinded by their interests, and would not be convinced of the [3/4] miseries they were daily heaping on their fellow-creatures. By their conduct they had placed the inhabitants of Africa in a worse state than that of the most backward and savage nations; they had destroyed what ought to be the bond of union and safety, they had rendered the whole country one general scene of discord and anarchy; they had set kings against their subjects; had set subjects against each other; had rendered every private family miserable, and created one general scene of disunion and despair. When these people were separated from all they loved, he had thought that they had come to an end of the sufferings of the poor Africans. He had vainly imagined that when men, with affections and feelings like to our own, were torn from their Country, and everything dear to them, that they sufferings would have ceased, and that in their passage to their place of destination they would have had their sufferings alleviated, and been treated as human beings.  The sad reverse was the case, and it was not in his power to impress the House with what he felt; the description of their conveyance was impossible, so much misery condensed in so little room, [Italics in original.] so much affliction added to misery, that it appeared to be an attempt by bodily suffering to deprive them of the feelings of their minds. Six hundred linked together, trying to get rid of each other, and crammed in a close vessel, with every object that was nauseous and disgusting; with pestilence, disease and despair, in such a situation as to render it impossible to add any more to human misery. Yet shocking as this description must be felt to be by every man, it had been described by several witnesses from Liverpool as a comfortable conveyance. . . .”

As always those who stood to profit from the evil, however degraded it was, and who were immersed in arguments as to how many slaves per ton a merchantman could carry, were able to go to any lengths in self-deception to hide from themselves the iniquity in which they were involved, and to go to the same lengths in misrepresenting it to be general public. But pictures such as that given here by Wilberforce haunted the public conscience. They led to the legal abolition of both the traffic in slavery and the institution of slavery as well as a growing insistence that the newly-made laws should be implemented. And it is at this point that the missionaries come into the story.

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[5] It must never be forgotten that the rise of missionary work in Africa coincided with the rise of Empire in Africa and that even the demand for the ending of the slave trade not only went hand in hand with the call for Empire, but saw the very things for which white invasion stood as the answer to slavery.

The slave trade had been the curse of Africa for ten centuries. Begun by Arabs for Asia, it had been continued and developed by Europeans for America and the West Indies. Africans had co- operated with both Asian and European to sell and enslave their own kind. What was the answer to this? How was it to be overcome? Wilberforce had put the point of view of the majority of its opponents in 1789:

“Let us make reparation to Africa as far as we can by establishing a trade upon true commercial principles.”

This was the school of thought which was soon to predominate in the missionary field, and it was ably led by Buxton who, in 1840, held a meeting on “The African Slave Trade and its Remedy,” and formed a society, which secured Government patronage, for “the Extinction of the Slave Trade and the Civilisation of Africa.” Its prospectus envisaged treaties being made with native rulers and the cession of territory. If for no other reason this meeting is outstanding in missionary history in that it was attended by David Livingstone, who developed its theme in his first book in which he wrote:

“The promoting of commerce ought to be especially attended to.” Nor was Livingstone himself averse from playing his part in developing it, and when he returned to the Zambesi in 1858 he went as British Consul.

Livingstone, of course, was not the first British missionary to go to South Africa, and the tradition he inherited from his predecessors was one of an active concern for the practical affairs of the country into which they were entering. Dr. John Philip Price, to take but one example, of the London Missionary Society, was outstanding in the political life of Cape Town.

In many ways the approach of the missionaries did not differ from that of the other whites. Livingstone himself carried a gun, and was ready to use it if danger offered. He was determined to [5/6] open up the interior, as against the Boers, who wanted it left alone. In his 1852 journey he took with him Mr. Fleming, the agent of a Cape Town commercial firm, and they went jointly as agents of the Gospel, the Royal Geographical Society, and Free Trade, and in Livingstone himself these were more three aspects of one faith than three faiths. “Protection,” he said on one occasion, “is a form of heathenism,” and he advocated vigorously English colonisation and a trade in cotton. He put it himself at Cambridge in 1857:

“I go back to Africa to try to make an open path for commerce and Christianity.”

It was at this meeting that the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa was formed, the Society which stated in its first prospectus: “In Dr. Livingstone’s words, civilisation and Christianity go together.” By “civilisation” it meant exactly what Queen Victoria’s England meant by it – the English version of capitalism.

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It is recorded in the Book of the Acts that Paul saw in a vision in the night “a man of Macedonia standing, beseeching him, and saying, ‘Come over to Macedonia and help us.’” The result was that he went off to Macedonia to help. This is the real and authentic approach to the spread of Christianity, the idea of going elsewhere and helping brothers in need by preaching the good news of the Kingdom. And it was in doing this that Paul was able to say: “To the Jews I became as a Jew, to them that are under the law as under the law . . .  to them that are without the law as without the law . . . to the weak I become weak . . . I am become all things to all men, that I may by all means save some.”

“To the Africans I became as an African”? It would be an exaggeration to say that this had been the historical approach of modern Christian missions, although it was the approach of Christian missionary activity in North Africa in the Middle Ages; the [6/7] tendency of modern missions has been to Europeanise the African, and that basically because the missions have seen nothing in African life to respect.

The history of Africa has still to be written, and there are many and great obscurities in the story yet to be uncovered; it is also true that the history of Africa is the history not of a country but of a continent, and a continent which has seen throughout its history great movements of peoples, and that therefore its history is in some ways confusing.  Neither of these facts, however, can mitigate the simple truth that we do not know a great deal about the history of Africa and that while in common with the history of all countries it reveals much that is dark and regrettable, equally whether we look at some of the more fully developed civilisations of the North, or whether we look at tribal society, we find much that is fine and noteworthy.

It is, indeed, all too often forgotten that Christianity itself owes much of its history to Africa: the School of Alexandria, the Monastic movement, St. Augustine, these and much else come to us from Africa. Civilisations of Egypt, of the Sudan, of the Negro kingdom of Ghana, of Ashanti and many others have played their part. Totemistic cultures have produced their own art and music; the art of Benin was famous; the Yorubar civilisation was preeminent in terra cotta work; the gold of Ophir was mined by the Bantu; the spinning, weaving and dyeing of cotton was universally practised. E. Africa had its own iron industry, and it is even thought by some that it was the Negro who discovered iron; W. Africa and the Sudan exported cotton cloth long before  Britain; the towns of N. Africa were world famous; the Bantu were masters of irrigation. The list could go on and on, and the simple truth is that when European civilisation began to stir itself and go forward in the fifteenth century, much of African civilisation was in advance of it.

Unquestionably the rapid rise of Europe then transformed the situation and left African civilisation behind, but it was precisely the barbaric side of the rising European civilisation which created the situation described in A Brief Account of the Present State of the African Trade, which was published in London in 1713 and which said that European competition “had raised the price of Negroes,” and “the Coast of Africa was a mere common Fair.” Even so, for all the degradation and corruption that the disruption [7/8] of society caused by Arab slavery on the one hand, and the European inroads on the other, produced, the popularly accepted picture of Africa as composed wholly of tribal societies steeped in witchcraft is completely untrue. Among the Zulus, to take but one example, while ancestor worship predominated and the head of the family was a sacrificing priest, witchcraft was a crime in tribal law. The “doctor” was the protector of society and had important social functions which would have been easily recognisable to most Old Testament characters.

It is, indeed, regrettably true that no small percentage of those who made missionary policy in Africa, had they been translated by some magic carpet into the middle of Old Testament history, would not have seen a situation which was to lead to the New Testament, the Christian Gospel, and a fundamental influence on human history, but something that had to be Anglicised and put into long trousers if it were to have any hope of redemption at all. Amos and Isaiah without the benefits of western sanitation would have seemed of doubtful validity.

There is, perhaps, little to be gained by criticising history, but the fact has to recorded that the modern missionary approach to Africa has been, fundamentally, one of the condescension of a superior civilisation to a lower one, and to say this is not to condemn the missionaries, a very high percentage of whom have been devoted and faithful people, prepared to spend their lives in the service of a cause in which they believed, and the great majority of whom have loved their fellow men whether they were white or black. But for all that the fact remains. Modern missions started with a complex of a deep feeling for the sufferers from slavery and a desire to uplift to “civilised standards.”

In the early days Bishop C. F. Mackenzie, of the U.M.C.A., started off with an offensive anti-slavery war (it was, of course, only a little war), but this was not the general policy, and in pursuing it he was rejecting the advice of Livingstone, who had urged him to use arms only defensively. Livingstone himself stood “for a system combining the repressive efforts of Her Majesty’s Cruisers with lawful trade and Christian missions.” He held, with some justice, that the overcoming of native poverty needed trade, and he saw in the supply of raw materials from the west and the trade it could produce the only practical answer to the slave trade. “Neither civilisation nor Christianity,” he said, “can be promoted [8/9] alone. In fact they are inseparable.” Further than this he saw, and again with some justice, a threat of a new slavery coming from the Boers. The result was a realistic policy which would have been abundantly successful had it not been for the fact that the “civilisation” generally, took precedence over the Christianity, and that the “civilisation” contained defects of a very important kind. Some of the defects were borne in on the Africans when Bishop Maples ordered floggings at Masasi and when a missionary flogging led to a death at Blantyre. When, again, missionary policy led to the formal British annexation of Uganda, other things also became clear.

From all this it follows inevitably that Christianity and imperialism have walked hand in hand in Africa, and that the Christian missions themselves have created the situation in which it is extremely difficult for Africa to revolt against imperialism without revolting against Christianity at the same time.

The recognition of this simple and important fact sometimes leads to the extravagant notion that the missionaries have made no fundamental contribution to Africa, but such an idea is deeply mistaken. Modern Africa owes a great deal to the missions, which have sometimes played the decisive part in creating written languages and introducing a literature, which have introduced modern education to Africa, which have introduced hospitals and doctors and social services, and which have also taught the Africans something of the Bible. None of these things has been done without opposition. A pamphlet published in London in 1708 (Some Proposals Towards Promoting the Propagation of the Gospel in Our Mission Plantations), which was concerned with the question of African Negroes in America, quoted the Quakers as attacking the Church of England for providing Ministers of the Gospel for whites only, and advocated Christianity as an aid to making the slaves obedient to their masters. The truth is, of course, that there was a profound hesitance in taking Christianity to the blacks, whether in America or in Africa, and still, today, planters and white colonisers are often suspicious of “all this business of taking education and the Bible to the native.” It is important to realise that this suspicion is soundly based. History has proved that it is quite possible for well-to-do respectable people to come together in England and solemnly chant that they will pull down the mighty from their seats and will send the rich empty away, without ever stopping to think that these words have a meaning, [9/10] but it is not possible to teach these same words, and many others that go with them, to the African peoples who have not been practised enough in literacy to treat words as sounds to deny sense, without their realising that these are the words that suit their situation. And so the Nationalist movements in Africa today owe a profound debt to the missionaries.

It is not without its significance that the Kikuyu people in the first place learnt reading and writing from the missions, and that even many of their songs of revolt have a biblical background; and that there is today a gulf between them and the missions epitomises prophetically the drift of the entire world mission situation. It is, no doubt, a truism to say that Africa is in revolt and that Asia is in revolt. This is a simple fact which all who have eyes can see. It is equally clear that the attempt to dam up the tide of this revolt is as futile as the attempt of a celebrated English monarch to stem the tide in the Wash. But it is exactly this that outdated empires must try to do, and it is this they do, whether in Kenya, in Malaya, or Indo-China, with a prodigal recklessness of blood and life and liberty. And the missions? Their Christianity calls them to the side of the oppressed; every tie of old school and club and financial backing and white man’s privilege calls them to throw in their lot with those who would stem the tide.

Often enough the tide has been stemmed with a minimum of flogging and a maximum of diplomacy; today it needs a degree of bloodshed which can only barbarise and destroy those who inflict it. If, therefore, the Church stands with Empire, it joins the foreign oppressor and it makes it intolerably difficult for any honest African to have anything to do with it. In this crisis Christianity itself is determining its own future in Africa.

It is all too little helped in doing so by the Church at home, which officially obviously feels tied to Government policies, so that even in the glaring case of the Union of South Africa, whose native policies are fascist and whose master-race policy is the antithesis of Christianity, the English Christian who is constantly exhorted to condemn the East of Europe, is told that he must not embarrass the people on the spot by saying too much. His obvious duty, of course, is to embarrass everybody on the spot until the situation is changed.

The real situation in Africa can be expressed quite simply [10/11] Africa possesses 80% of the world’s industrial diamonds; 57.7% of the world’s gold; 30% of its chrome and manganese; 68.85% of its cocoa; 75% of its sisal; 80% of its cobalt; 98% of its columbite; 35.5% of its phosphates; 18% of its copper; 40.4% of its hard fibres; 69.5% of its palm oil; 15.35% of its coffee; some of its uranium, and not a little else. The West wants these things and the profit to be derived from them, it wants African labour to produce these things for it, it wants bases in Africa, and it wants all these things far, far more than it wants the well-being of the African peoples. And the African peoples? They want what is their own.

The policies of the past are defended on the grounds that those who adopted them were the children of their age. No doubt they were. Let it then be realised that our age is an age of expanding freedom or it is nothing; it is an age of successful national movements together building a genuine internationalism or it is an age of wars and world disaster. It is an age in which Christianity must stand with the African or betray everything for which it has ever stood and lose all its supporters in doing so, for the age of successful evasion of world issues is rapidly passing.

The African scene itself is, of course, as complex as all scenes are. The many movements that stir Africa are mixed as all movements are. And within this very mixed and confused scene one Christian group or another, as the Church Missionary Society over Buganda, says something that is brave and true, while others take refuge in the complexity and use it is an alibi for not facing the real issues, and more and more this policy leads to the withering away of such support as Christianity in Africa has in the past enjoyed.

It is no longer possible for Christians, and in particular Christian missions, to evade the main choice. Are they for the African peoples or against them? Will they help them find the road to their own future or stand in their way? Will they condemn the suppression of native rights in Bechuanaland, Buganda and elsewhere and denounce the barbaric ferocity of white rule in Kenya, or will they, by their silence, proclaim to Africa and all the world their complicity with a degenerate repression which takes its stand with the slavers of the past?

The authentic voice of the true Briton in the past was against slavery, and Christianity aided him in making that decision. Let it be so again today.

[12] A PRAYER OF JOHN WESLEY.

O Thou God of Love, Thou who art loving unto every man, and whose mercy is over all Thy works: Thou who art the Father of the Spirits of all flesh, and who art rich in mercy unto all: Thou who hast mingled of one blood all the nations upon earth: have compassion upon these outcasts of men, who are trodden down as dung upon the earth! Arise and help those that have no helper, whose blood is spilt upon the ground like water! Are not these also the work of Thine own hands, the purchase of Thy Son’s blood? Stir them up to cry unto Thee in the land of their captivity; and let their complaint come up before Thee; and let it enter into Thy ears! Make even those that lead them away captive to pity them, and turn their captivity as the rivers in the South. O burst Thou all their chains in sunder, more especially the chains of their sins: Thou Saviour of all, make them free, that they may be free indeed.