education in africa before the coming of christian missionaries

Mission education left an uneven legacy: an analysis of 26 African countries

Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Bremen, Research Center on Inequality and Social Policy (SOCIUM), Universität Bremen

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Christian missionaries were the first to introduce European-style education in sub-Saharan Africa. Mission societies often expanded into territories before colonial powers did, and providing education only cost them a little more.

Missionaries continued to be the main providers of education even after colonial powers established control during the so-called Scramble for Africa which occurred between 1884-1914. Initially, their activities focused on coastal areas. But with colonial conquest and antimalarial drugs, they moved further into the continent. Schools were deemed important. They provided missionaries a way to spread Eurocentric norms and attract new converts.

A large body of studies show that missionaries had a lasting impact beyond their early years. Today, local communities and ethnic groups that were more exposed to mission schools, still achieve higher levels of education, when compared to communities where there were no schools.

Some of the positive development outcomes of former British colonies are arguably the result of a permissive attitude towards mission schools.

Pushing the research frontier

Yet, the relationship between European missionaries and African populations had some contradictions. These contradictions are surprisingly absent from contemporary research. And that’s why I decided to look deeply into this issue.

In my study , I explored how colonial era conflicts – and disagreements over marriage norms – lastingly affected educational development. By focusing on the African demand for education, I showed that Africans were not just passive recipients of mission schooling. Their personal and family choices influenced the expansion speed of missionary education.

I compared data on the historical locations of mission stations since 1924, in 26 sub-Saharan countries with recent education data between 2008 and 2018. I found that while educational outcomes are generally better in places that were exposed to Christian missions in the colonial era, traditionally polygamous societies benefited less.

This finding was supported by two types of analysis. First, I looked at how educational outcomes depended on the distance to historical missions. Unsurprisingly, the level of education increased as one moved closer to the missionaries. But that increase was greater in monogamous societies.

I also matched up locations that differed in proximity to the mission stations, but otherwise had similar preconditions for educational development. This allowed me to estimate the impact of mission schooling directly. In traditionally monogamous societies, primary school completion increased by about eight percent, but only four percent in polygamous societies.

Making sense of the colonial struggle over polygamy

Mission schools were popular because of the new skills and opportunities they offered. Being able to speak and write in the coloniser’s language was considered a privilege. It offered the most direct path towards prestigious jobs in colonial administrations and European enterprises.

However, attending mission schools also meant exposure to colonial indoctrination. This conditioning was focused on norms that missionaries deemed incompatible with a Christian way of life. While they frowned upon bridewealth, female genital cutting, or matrilineality, they held a special grudge against polygamy.

In 1910, a prominent report of the World Missionary Conference concluded:

[T]here can be no ‘question’ of polygamy. It is simply one of the gross evils of heathen society which, like habitual murder or slavery, must at all costs be ended.

In addition to promoting a monogamous lifestyle in their schools, missionaries often insisted on divorces before polygamists or their children could even enrol.

The common response among traditionally polygamous people is well illustrated by a passage in Jomo Kenyatta’s famous book on the Gikuyu in colonial Kenya:

This [the insistence on monogamy] caused a great confusion, for the African could not understand how he could drive away his wives and children, especially in a community where motherhood is looked upon as a religious duty; the children are regarded as part and parcel, not only of the father, but of the whole clan (mbari), and without them the mbari is lost. It was also terribly hard for a woman to be driven away, and to lose her status in the society where she is respected as a wife and a mother.

In an ironic twist, the more Africans became versed in the Bible, the more they began to challenge missionaries. They discovered that the holy book did not clearly prescribe monogamy, and contained several examples of renowned Christian polygamists. However, accustomed to monogamy, few European missionaries were open to such arguments.

Despite the skills and opportunities mission schooling afforded, many Africans were not willing to pay the price. They preferred to hold onto polygamy, even at the cost of illiteracy.

What would have happened if missionaries had not insisted on monogamy? The statistical evidence suggests that education would have spread more evenly. And traditionally polygamous societies would have higher educational outcomes today.

The struggle over polygamy is well-known to historians and anthropologists. This study simply offers systematic, long-term evidence of it. Although there were many disagreements between European missionaries and African populations, antagonising polygamy is probably the best-documented norm conflict.

In addition to studying the impact of these struggles on education, we also need to understand how they influenced gender inequality. In fact, most of the norms opposed by missionaries concerned gender relationships. Efforts to change these norms were often aimed at women.

Finally, education affects many other aspects of people’s lives, including economic opportunities and political attitudes. The consequences of norm conflicts are likely to manifest beyond educational pursuit. There’s still so much to be learned from the history of education in Africa and its long-term consequences.

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The history of christian missions to africa.

• Norman Etherington Norman Etherington Faculty of Arts, Business, Law and Education, School of Humanities, University of Western Australia
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.56
• Published online: 30 October 2019

Christianity came very early to Africa, as attested by the Gospels. The agencies by which it spread across North Africa and into the Kingdom of Aksum remain largely unknown. Even after the rise of Islam cut communications between sub-Saharan Africa and the churches of Rome and Constantinople, it survived in the eastern Sudan kingdom of Nubia until the 15th century and never died in Ethiopia. The documentary history of organized missions begins with the Roman Catholic monastic orders founded in the 13th century. Their evangelical work in Africa was closely bound up with Portuguese colonialism, which both helped and hindered their operations. Organized European Protestant missions date from the 18th-century evangelical awakening and were much less creatures of states. Africa was a particular object of attention for Evangelicals opposed to slavery and the slave trade. Paradoxically this gave an impetus to colonizing ventures aimed at undercutting the moral and economic foundations of slavery in Africa. Disease proved to be a deadly obstacle to European- and American-born missionaries in tropical Africa, thus spurring projects for enrolling local agents who had acquired childhood immunity. Southern Africa below the Zambezi River attracted missionaries from many parts of Europe and North America because of the absence of the most fearsome diseases. However the turbulent politics of the region complicated their work by restricting their access to organized African kingdoms and chieftaincies. The prevalent mission model until the late 19th century was a station under the direction of a single European family whose religious and educational endeavors were directed at a small number of African residents.

Catholic missions acquired new energy following the French Revolution, the old Portuguese system of partnership with the state was displaced by enthusiasm for independent operations under the authority of the Pope in Rome. Several new missionary orders were founded with a particular focus on Africa.

Mission publications of the 19th and 20th centuries can convey a misleading impression that the key agents in the spread of African Christianity were foreign-born white males. Not only does this neglect the work of women as wives and teachers, but it diverts attention from the Africans who were everywhere the dominant force in the spread of modern Christianity. By the turn of the 20th century, evangelism had escaped the bounds of mission stations driven by African initiative and the appearance of so-called “faith missions” based on a model of itinerant preaching. African prophets and independent evangelists developed new forms of Christianity. Once dismissed as heretical or syncretic, they gradually came to be recognized as legitimate variants of the sort that have always accompanied the acculturation of religion in new environments.

Decolonization caught most foreign mission operations unawares and required major changes, most notably in the recruitment of African clergy to the upper echelons of church hierarchies. By the late 20th century Africans emerged as an independent force in Christian missions, sending agents to other continents.

• Christianity
• missionaries
• religious change
• colonialism
• decolonization

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Christian missionaries and education in former African colonies: How competition mattered

2010, Journal of African Economies

Using regional data for about 180 African provinces, we find that measures of Protestant missionary activity in the past are more correlated with schooling variables today than similar measures of Catholic missionary activity, as previous papers have suggested. However, we find that this effect is mainly driven by differences in Catholic areas (i.e., areas in which Catholic missionaries were protected from competition from Protestant missionaries in the past). This is not surprising because most former Catholic colonies had a number of restrictions to the operation of Protestant missionaries that benefited Catholic missionaries. Therefore, our results are consistent with an economic rationale in which different rules created differences in competitive pressures faced by Catholic and Protestant missionaries.

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Christianity and Vocational Education in Africa

• First Online: 03 June 2020

Cite this chapter

• Andrew E. Barnes 3  

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If vocational education is defined as any education aimed at the importing of manual and technical skills and the intellectual knowledge associated with those skills, then it can be said that starting with the European missions that began to arrive on the western coast of Africa at the end of the eighteenth century, Christianity was propagated on the African continent through the use of vocational education. Imparting vocational knowledge was never the primary or exclusive focus of Christian evangelism, which was always the communication of the basic tenets of Christian belief, but vocation training was always seen as complementary form of cultural transfer that had the potential to give Africans who converted to Christianity a way to make a living. The history of vocational education, as taught by European missionaries, can be argued to have developed from church practices in Europe that went back to the European Middle Ages. In Africa, after its initial introduction by missionaries at the start of the nineteenth century, vocational education went through three different periods of evolution. The first period, 1800–1880, was characterized by missions operating in situations where European states had no formal political, but some real economic presence. Missions in these situations offered training in skills that fit the needs of seaport economies that connected to the global markets. The second period, from 1880 to 1920, involved competing groups of Christians, European and African, attempting to utilize industrial education to advance their evangelical agendas. This competition took place against a backdrop of European conquest and colonization. The last period, from 1920 to 1960, featured European missions working in tandem with colonial governments to provide skills that fit colonial government development ambitions. The success of the two European groups in the latter effort had the unintended consequence of creating new African corps of social welfare workers who took the fore in introducing other Africans to European civilization.

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Barnes, A.E. (2020). Christianity and Vocational Education in Africa. In: Abidogun, J., Falola, T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of African Education and Indigenous Knowledge. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38277-3_7

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The History of Christianity in Africa // Africa Study Bible

More by africa study bible.

Africa is one of the most dynamic centres of Christianity in the world. Africa has a significant share of the world’s 2.2 billion Christians. It has about 30% of the world’s evangelicals, 20% of the world’s Pentecostals and charismatics, and about 15% of the world’s Roman Catholics. In addition, Africa has significant Orthodox groups such as the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Churches and the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria.

It Began in North Africa

Christianity was well established in North Africa in the first few centuries after Christ. From a solid foundation in North Africa, Christianity moved deeper into the heart of the continent. The challenge by Islam and African traditional religions deepened the faith of believers. The fifteenth century was a turning point when Catholicism from Portugal circled the continent.

Africa is one of the most dynamic centres of Christianity in the world.

The modern missionary movement and indigenous Christian movements in Africa of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries built upon these earlier foundations. Contemporary Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity has brought a renewal to the church in Africa. And now the churches of Africa in the twenty-first century are missionary-sending churches that are spreading the gospel around the world . This story can be told in four overlapping waves.

Wave 1: Early Christianity in North Africa and Ethiopia

Jesus said, “You will be my witnesses, telling people about me everywhere—in Jerusalem … and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). One of the first places that the story of Jesus went was to Sudan when “the treasurer of Ethiopia” (probably Meroe in modern Sudan) believed the good news that Philip told him, was baptised, and took the message to Africa.

The Coptic church of Egypt has long claimed that the apostle Thomas and the evangelist Mark played important roles in the formation of the Church in Alexandria, Egypt. But the key moment in early Christianity in North Africa was in the late third century when there was rapid growth, in part due to the conversion of many people in large Jewish communities. But perhaps the most surprising thing that helped Christianity grow was persecution. Persecution deepened the commitment of believers in Africa and gave them courage to witness to an increasingly sympathetic African audience.

Persecution deepened the commitment of believers in Africa.

Christian growth was also encouraged by Pantaenus, Origen, and Clement, all teachers at the catechetical school in Alexandria . They attempted to define Christianity in terms of Greek philosophy that well-educated people in North Africa could understand. However, this created a backlash, and sometimes violent debates erupted over the nature of Christ and the Trinity.

Dramatic Conversion of Emperor Constantine

Constantine, emperor of Rome in the fourth century, had a dramatic conversion to Christianity, and that had a direct impact on the early Coptic (Egyptian) church, especially in urban Africa. At the council of Nicaea in 325 , Constantine attempted to have church leaders agree on how to understand the deity of Christ. But his efforts were only partly successful. Theological orthodoxy became identified with political loyalty and caused splits that would mark the church for centuries.

The Shaping of Roman Christianity in Africa

Egyptian Christianity grew and spread. The Bible was translated into several variations of the Coptic language, and monasticism, which originated in Egypt, spread to the Latin-speaking church of western North Africa. Monasticism is a religious way of life in which priests renounce living in the world and instead live in monasteries—and sometimes by themselves as hermits. By the fourth century, monasticism became a powerful force in evangelism and discipleship, although at times it was disruptive. A part of the church around Carthage (in modern Tunisia) protested against the strong ties other parts of the church had with Rome.

Theological orthodoxy became identified with political loyalty that would mark the church for centuries.

Movements such as Do­n­a­­tism in the fourth century considered imperial Christianity, which owed its allegiance to Rome, as exploitative and compromising. Such movements developed their own clergy and churches. However, great Africans who helped shape Roman Christianity included Bishop Cyprian of Carthage and Augustine, Bishop of Hippo. Both of these men were inspired by the second century firebrand and theologian, Tertullian of Carthage.

Christian Kings in Ethiopia

While Christianity in North Africa and Egypt flourished and North African Christians strongly influenced the church in Rome, Christianity was also growing in the powerful kingdoms of Nubia (ancient Sudan) and Ethiopia. Nubia is one of two countries that claim to be the world’s oldest Christian nation (the other is Armenia). In both Nubia and Ethiopia, the king or emperor determined the religion of his people. Frumentius, a fourth-century Syrian missionary, tutored Ezana, the young prince of the kingdom of Axum, which is in present-day Ethiopia, in the Christian faith. Ezana became one of the great Christian kings of Africa. Important popular Christian movements also flourished, motivated in Ethiopia by Syrian monastic missionaries, known to tradition as “the nine saints,” and in Nubia by Jewish converts.

A Thousand Years of Growth

Over the next thousand years, Christianity in Ethiopia grew stronger while in Nubia it declined. Between 1200–1500, the Zagwe dynasty in Ethiopia, a family of Christian kings, revived Christian art, literature, and church expansion. Lalibela, the greatest emperor of the Zagwe dynasty, built eleven famous stone churches carved out of solid rock to create a “new Jerusalem.” But not everyone was happy with the Zagwe kings, and by 1225 the History of the Kings appeared as a protest. This book purported to tell the story of Solomon and the queen of Sheba and their son Menelik, first king of Ethiopia.

In 1270, a new “Solomonic” dynasty replaced the Zagwe dynasty. This new dynasty reached its peak in the fifteenth century during the reign of Zara Yaqob, who saw himself as an African Constantine. He convened church councils to address debates about Christ and Sabbath worship. Zara Yaqob also purged Ethiopia of African traditional religion. While Ethiopia reached its height as a Christian kingdom under Yaqob, Christianity was eliminated in Nubia. Nubian forces were defeated in battle by a sultan from Cairo, Babyars I, and came under the control of the Muslim Egyptians. By 1500, Christianity in Nubia all but disappeared.

Wave 2: Portuguese Catholicism

Missions, politics & slavery.

From 1420 until 1800, Portuguese politics and Christian missionaries from Portugal and Spain dominated much of coastal Africa. A controversial decree by the pope, called the Padroado, granted to the king of Portugal all rights to economic, military, and evangelistic activities in the areas he controlled. Slave traders and missionaries wrestled with one another for the souls of Africans. Portuguese missionary efforts were spread too thin, however, to make a significant, lasting impact. The result was only a thin veneer of Christianity in most places they influenced. Kongo and Soyo (kingdoms of Angola) and the Republic of the Congo were exceptions. There, Catholicism, indigenous popular Catholicism, and traditional religion clashed for centuries.

Wave 3: The Evangelical Era

As the glories of Catholicism faded in the late eighteenth century, a new force arose: Evangelicalism.

Christianity was both a movement of spiritual revival as well as a force for justice . It combined a passion for personal religion with a crusade against slavery and changed the face of Africa forever. Evangelical Christianity has been described as a fourfold commitment to the Bible, the cross, conversion, and mission.

Christianity was both a movement of spiritual revival as well as a force for justice.

The Abolition of Slavery

In the late eighteenth century, evangelical and other British leaders formed a movement that sought to abolish slavery. Great nineteenth-century British leaders such as William Wilberforce (member of the British parliament and champion of anti-slavery legislation), Thomas Clarkson (leader of the anti-slavery society in England), and Granville Sharp (English abolitionist) did much good.

Evangelicals in Africa such as Ottobah Cugoano and Olaudah Equiano were just as crucial to the anti-slavery cause. They were two Nigerian former slaves who lived in England and published stories of their liberation and conversion to Christianity. Many African slaves who were freed during the American Revolution found their way to the Canadian maritime provinces where their faith was deepened by the fiery preaching of Henry Alline of Nova Scotia.

Freetown, Liberia, and Evangelising West Africa

Sierra Leone, a West African colony for freed slaves, was founded in 1787. From Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, the evangelisation of West Africa began through liberated slaves such as Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the first Anglican bishop in Africa. Liberia, founded for free-born American blacks in 1822, played a similar role.

Evangelical Missions

The evangelical revivals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the United States and England produced the modern missionary movement. Denominational missions and faith missions such as the Africa Inland Mission, Sudan Interior Mission, Sudan United Mission, and the South Africa General Mission (later the Africa Evangelical Fellowship) influenced African societies. Schools, hospitals, churches, and many social agencies in Africa were the result of missionary efforts in partnership with African Christians. The same partnerships translated the Bible or a portion into more than 640 African languages, an effort which has helped promote literacy as well as the knowledge of God.

The commitment of the missionaries to Africa is illustrated by the many who took their coffins with them when they travelled from their homelands, knowing that their lifespan would probably be short. Many were martyred for their faith, including the American medical missionary Paul Carlson, who was killed by rebel insurgents in 1964 in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Wave 4: Indigenous Movements, Pentecostalism, and Post-Independence

Colonialism and african initiated churches.

The shape of missions changed in 1884–1885 with the Berlin Conference in Germany. At this meeting, European powers partitioned Africa for colonization and trade. France was given certain countries, and King Leopold II of Belgium was given the Congo, for instance. Europeans justified their imperialism as being a part of a civilizing mission to an Africa that they perceived as still in bondage to the dark past. Africa answered the challenge of colonialism through the voice of new prophets like William Wadé Harris of Liberia and members of the Organization of African Instituted Churches (African initiated churches—AICs) throughout the continent.

These AICs took the names of Zionist in Southern Africa, Aladura in West Africa, and Roho movements in Kenya. When independence dawned in 1960, Christianity below the Sahara was no longer merely a European import. Christianity in Africa now included many churches with an African understanding of Christianity and African ways of worship.

Political Saviours

Many of the newly elected presidents of independent African nations had graduated from missionary schools and were affiliated with specific Christian denominations. But in spite of these connections, many ruled in a way that promoted themselves as saviours of their countries .

Many new nations took control of missionary schools, hospitals, and social agencies in the 1960s. Then in the 1970s and 1980s, they staggered under the weight of the obligations they had taken on. In many cases, African governments that were once critical of the church asked churches for help in education, medicine, and nation-building. For instance, Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, a product of missionary education, described his movement of political independence as an alternative to Christianity. He summarised his thinking by saying the following. “Seek first the political kingdom, and all things will be added unto you”. But his regime disintegrated in a coup in 1966. Similar upheavals happened to several other African nations. Coup leaders eventually gave way to multiparty politics. By the early 1990s, new nations had a new desire to work with the church.

Today, most Christians in Africa have been touched in some way by Pentecostal teaching.

Pentecostalism in the 1990s

By the 1990s, charismatic Christianity had transformed the face of many Christian traditions in Africa. Some new Pentecostal churches began preaching a message of healing and power. This message captured not only the poor and disenchanted but also the young, upwardly mobile urban professional class in Africa’s growing cities. Today, most Christians in Africa have been touched in some way by Pentecostal methods and teaching.

The story of Christianity in Africa is now a global movement changing the world.

There are two significant trends in Christianity in Africa since independence. First, the emergence of a large African theological fraternity composed of both Catholics and Protestants. Second, a new missionary zeal on the part of the African church.

A New Era of African Missions

This second trend has seen African Christians move around the world in migration and mission. In the early years of the twenty-first century, the largest church in England was led by a Nigerian missionary pastor. Similarly, in Kyiv, Ukraine, Europe’s largest church was shepherded by a Nigerian. Churches like Ghana’s Church of Pentecost and Nigeria’s Redeemed Christian Church of God have established centres all over the world. This is a trend sometimes described as ‘reverse mission’. The new era of African missions is still in its infancy. Yet it promises that the story of Christianity in Africa, begun in a quiet corner of Alexandria, Egypt in the first century, is now a global movement changing the world.

Points to Remember

• Christianity in Africa dates to the first generation of the church. Any attempt to label Christianity as a “white man’s religion” or European religion should be rejected.
• Africans played a crucial role in establishing the doctrines and theology of the early church. We should stand on their shoulders in the way we seriously study the Bible.
• Praise God for his work across Africa. His Spirit has moved in many different ways: through African leaders, through foreign missionaries, and various political movements. We should rejoice in our diversity and unite around the core doctrines of our shared faith.
• The powerful African church is coming to maturity in the twenty-first century. We should claim our Christian identity and mission with both boldness and humility. Boldness in proclaiming our vibrant faith to the world. Humility in learning from others and working together. Building churches based on both biblical teaching, excellence and integrity in organisation and leadership.

The Africa Study Bible app is available on the Tecarta Bible App , the world’s best study Bible app, which is available to download on Google Play Store and Apple App Store .

Contact Oasis Regional Directors to order your  Africa Study Bible :

• Regional Director East Africa: WhatsApp: +27 79 572 4877
• Regional Director West Africa: WhatsApp +234 809 111 1184

The Africa Study Bible (ASB) is an ethnically diverse, single-volume, biblical resource. Written by 350 contributors from 50 countries, it includes the Holy Bible: New Living Translation (Anglicised) and more than 2,600 features that illuminate the truth of Scripture with a unique, African perspective.

The Africa Study Bible is a monumental study Bible, with notes by scholars and pastors in Africa who see the critical need to make Scripture relevant to our everyday lives. It’s an all-in-one course in biblical content, theology, history, and culture.

Find out more about the impact of this amazing resource at africastudybible.com .

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Missionaries in africa doing more harm than good.

Christian missionaries devote time, energy and billions of dollars to helping African children orphaned by the AIDS epidemic. But sometimes well-meaning efforts can do more harm than good. In this week's Faith Matters conversation, host Michel Martin speaks to writer and journalist John Donnelly about his new book, A Twist of Faith: An American Christian's Quest to Help Orphans in Africa.

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