Articles
Posted on Tue 30 July 2024
Should the churches apologise for Christian mission in Africa?
Since the controversial killing by police in the United States of several people of Afro- American heritage, there have been increasing demands for penitence and reparative justice for the wrongs inflicted on slaves and their descendants
The churches too have been found to have benefited from the trusts and charities established by those engaged in the slave trade of those profiting from chattel slavery. There have been calls for the churches to express repentance for such involvement and to set up funds to compensate descendants of slaves for the wrong done to the ancestors.
The Church of England’s Oversight Group has gone further than that and has issued a call for the Church to apologise for mission by its agencies to Africa, for denying that Africans to have been made in God’s image and for destroying African traditional belief systems (see, https:/www.churchofengland.org/media/press-release/church-commissioners-England-warmly-welcomes-oversight groups-report). We need to ask, at once, whether these allegations are true and, if so, what should be done about them?
We need to note, first of all, that chattel slavery has been universal and can be found in the histories of every people, continent and nation. Philosophers and Aristotle argued that the state of slavery was ‘natural’ for certain kinds of people. All the empires of antiquity had slavery of prisoners of war and of commercial acquisition embedded in them. Many of these slaves were routinely sold in markets of the Roman Empire. Some Ottoman rulers and the notorious Barbary ‘pirates’ enslaved large numbers of Western Europeans for slavery in north Africa until the 18th century.
Historians and social scientists have shown how slavery was, at first, ameliorated and then disappeared with the advance of Christianity in Western Europe. From the time of Constantine, it cannot be denied that Christianity was a major influence in the fading away of slavery.
It is true that the Bible was sometimes used, especially in the ‘Deep South’ of the United States, to justify slavery but is equally the case that the Bible was increasingly used by Evangelicals, from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, to oppose the slave trade and slavery itself on the grounds that all human beings had been created in God’s image. The ending of the slave trade and then of slavery itself was largely due to the unflagging zeal of Evangelical campaigns that gripped the imagination of the population at large. The Oversight group seems not to have known that after the abolition of the trade, the Royal Navy was assiduous in intercepting slave ships off the coast of West Africa and setting slaves free. Church agencies, like the Church Missionary Society, were engaged in the resettling of these freed slaves.
In East Africa, similarly, after David Livingstone’s call for ‘Christianity and commerce’ ‘rather than the slave trade, missionaries attempted to penetrate the interior by following the routes of the Arab slave and commodity traders. I wonder whether the Oversight Group canvassed the views of the large Anglican churches in countries like Kenya, Uganda and Nigeria for their views about apologising for the mission which brought them their faith and which brought education and modern medicine to their people, whilst also challenging many of the social evils of their societies. Many paid a high price for their witness against tyranny and corruption.
Mistakes were made, of course, regarding culture, custom and family life but the effects of those mistakes are being addressed by the African churches themselves. Eminent European and African scholars like John V Taylor, John Mbiti and Kwame Bediako have been engaging with the best of African spiritualities and have noted both continuities and discontinuities with it in the Christian churches. The credibility of the Oversight Group would have been immeasurably enhanced if the leadership of the African churches had been represented in its membership.
The question of ‘reparations’ is a knotty one: How should they be paid? To whom? What counts as the reparation? There are so many claimants. Not only the descendants of the chattel slaves but also the families and communities disrupted in in Africa and elsewhere by chattel slavery. People in other parts of what was the British Empire may have their own grievances of denudation of their land by colonists, the exploitation of the poor and of commodities like spices, cotton, minerals etc. Should they also be paid reparations? What about the working classes in the U.K. who were also exploited in the cause of the Industrial Revolution and where men, women and children faced the most atrocious working conditions, denied basic hygiene, leisure and education? Should there be reparations for them also?
Is there a better way? Should resources be targeted, for example, at strengthening family life, where the disrupting effects of chattel slavery may still be observed? Not all of those affected by chattel slavery are poor today. There must be, therefore, a focusing on the poorest who may have basic needs of clean water, a balanced diet, reasonable housing, schools for their children and basic health facilities. I do hope that the proposed fund being set up by the Church will focus in these areas rather than catering to the metropolitan elite’s sense of victimhood which may, in fact, lead to privilege for them but do little to help those still caught in the trap of poverty, ignorance and ill health.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors(s)