African Christianity Homepage
Christianity in Africa South of the Sahara
Roman Catholic Christianity
Pre-Colonial Roman Catholic Missions (1450-1890)
Christianity in Africa South of the Sahara Homepage
Roman Catholic Missions 1450-1890
Kongo Christianity
Roman Catholic Missions 1890-1960
Roman Catholicism since Vatican II
Protestant Missions 1700-1890
Sierra Leone
Southern Africa
Xhosa
Interior Missions
Buganda
Mary Slessor
Protestant Missions 1890 - 1960
African Independent Churches
African/Ethiopian Churches
Aladura
Zionists
William Wade Harris & Harrists
Simon Kimbangu & Kimbanguists
The Portuguese were the first Europeans to venture south of the Sahara desert in significant numbers. They took the sea route, exploring further and further down the west coast. These exploring ships often held missionaries as well as explorers. Their work bore good fruit in the Kongo, which became a Christian kingdom in the 1490s, though their efforts were less successful in Benin and Mutapa. Portuguese priests and missionaries joined in the protests of the Catholic Christian king of Kongo in appealing to the pope and the king of Portugual for support against the slave trade, but to no avail.
Roman Catholic missions experienced a great revival in the 1840s with the founding of two new missionary orders. The Congregation of the Holy Ghost became an African mission society in the 1840s, while Charles Lavigerie, who was appointed Archbishop of Algiers in 1867, used that position as a stepping stone to found the Missionaries of our Lady of Africa, known as the White Fathers, since they dressed in flowing white Arab robes. Both orders stressed a high degree of linguistic preparation and cultural flexibility, though their Catholicism was also highly clerical and centralized, submitting readily to the direction of the Propaganda de Fide (The Office for Spreading the Faith) in Rome. Nineteenth century Catholic missionaries differed from their Protestant counterparts in being far less interested in the "civilizing" aspect of missions and more interested in language and cultural identification.
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. pp. 71-126, 248-396
Elizabeth Isichei, A History of Christianity in Africa from Antiquity to the Present. London: SPCK, 1995. pp. 52-73, 84-88, 145-50, 160-62, 221-227.