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During the Colonial era, the Roman Catholic missionaries found themselves, not the servants of the colonial power, as all too many Protestant missionaries were, but at odds with their colonial governments. The result was a surprising sense of freedom of movement and work, and an easier transition into an indigenous clergy and church, though that transition was still slow and painful and did not arrive until after Vatican Council II and the end of colonialism, events which occurred at about the same time and jointly revolutionized the Catholic community in Africa from the 1960s on.
Most of the Catholic colonizing countries discouraged missionary presence. King Leopold of Belgium deliberately prohibited Catholic missionaries from entering the Congo, though he permitted several Protestant missionaries to work there. The number of Belgian Catholic missionaries did increase steadily after Belgium took over administration of the Congo in 1908, and their relationship with the Belgian administration was as close and supportive as that of any protestant mission, to the detriment of their work. The Portuguese colonies, Angola and Mozambique, had relatively little Christian presence, either Catholic or Protestant.
France was the one exeption, with extensive colonial holdings and many missionaries. In French West Africa the colonial administrators arrived in the interior before the missionaries, virtually all of whom were French Catholic. Most of these were White Fathers supported by the French government in order to ensure their compliance in the work of colonial pacification. By and large the missionaries complied, even though they saw their first loyalty to the pope who stood at the head of a determinedly international church, not to a secular French government.
All that changed at the turn of the century when the French government turned anti-clerical, ended diplomatic relations with the Vatican, expelled the religious orders from France and ended subsidies to the missionaries in the colonies. The missionaries were nevertheless permitted to remain and found their new relationship to the colonial administration surprisingly freeing helpful. In 1906 Mgr Bazin wrote "The blacks are far from ignoring that the colonial authorities are hostile to us and that our religion is not that of the whites who live in the [French] Sudan." [quoted in Hastings, The Church in Africa, p. 431]
The official policy of the Catholic church was to form a native clergy and self-sufficient local churches directly tied to the Roman hierarchy. However, the missionaries controlled the African Catholic community until the century was more than half over. Catholic missionaries in Africa remained old school Catholics, loyal to the cult of Mary and more interested in obedience to the ChurchÕs teachings and authority than in literacy or access to the Bible, which they believed could easily be misunderstood its without proper filtering and interpretation by the church (and the missionaries). While Catholic missionaries remained careful students of African culture, they rarely addressed political or social issues out of that understanding. They were self-confident and self-sacrificing. Although they maintained their control over the African Catholic community which they had planted, they were not responsible for its remarkable growth and development.
Most African Catholics owed their conversion to black African catechists, persons who were largely untrained and certainly unordained, but who were deputised to preach the gospel and develop Catholic communities throughout Africa. The catechists were responsible for a huge increase in the numbers of Christians particularly in Igboland, southern Nigeria, where the Catholic community grew from 5,000 in 1900 to 74,000 in 1912. All of this happened with a total of 30 Catholic missionaries, only half of them priests, and most them unable to speak Igbo.
As the Catholic communities grew and matured, they began to found schools. Catholic education became increasingly important to maintaining and developing the community. Along with the catechists, Catholic teachers brought many Africans into the Catholic community, which came to the 1960s remarkably well prepared for the momentous changes in Africa and in the Roman Catholic Church.
This page was based on the following sources, which you can consult for more detailed information:
Adrian Hastings, The Church in Africa: 1450-1950. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994 __________, African Catholicism: Essays in Discovery. London: SCM Press, 1989. Elizabeth Isichei, A History of Christianity in Africa from Antiquity to the Present. London: SPCK, 1995.
John Bauer, 2000 Years of Christianity in Africa: An African History 62-1992 (Nairobi: Paulines Publications Africa, 1994