Africanization or Exile

White missionaries are in trouble throughout much of Africa. A decade after the continent's initial leap toward independence, Christianity faces a new and ominous hostility on the part of black leaders, who resent the churches as vestigial relics of colonialism. In recent months, a number of priests and ministers have been forced into exile, and the churches are being threatened with new restrictions.

A short while ago Uganda expelled ten Catholic priests, allegedly for smuggling arms and funds to anti-Moslem rebels in neighboring Sudan. The priests claimed that they had only been aiding refugees from the fighting. In Zambia, President Kenneth Kaunda recently warned that missionaries would be tolerated only if they did not "spread subversion." Many African rulers now expect missionaries to bulwark their policies. Tanzania's President Julius Nyerere, for example, exhorts his country's churches to preach his own brand of social revolution.

Land Surrender. Although virtually all African leaders are products of mission schools, many of them are now suspicious of Christian-supervised education. Uganda Strongman Milton Obote, who was educated by Protestants, has already nationalized all missionary schools; religious instruction is included in the curricula, but the churches claim that many government-appointed teachers refuse to teach it. Tanzania last month demanded that missions give up unused landholdings.

Ironically, the churches are in almost as much trouble in white-ruled Africa, where they are suspected of too fervently supporting the black man's cause. Rhodesia has plans to turn over control of its 2,781 missionary-run primary schools--which constitute 95% of the country's elementary-education system --to semiliterate tribal chiefs. In the pay of the white-supremacist government, the chiefs can be counted on to make sure that the schools teach the secondary status of black men. South Africa's apartheid regime has reduced missionary visas from three years to one; in its protectorate of South West Africa, six of the seven U.S. Episcopal missionaries have been denied extensions.

Cult of Goodness. A more subtle threat than exile and expropriation is the black-African demand that the churches adapt their teaching and worship to indigenous culture in ways that threaten authentic Christian doctrine. In Kenya, there have been suggestions that the Bible be rewritten so that the first man and woman are not Adam and Eve but Gikuyu and Moombi, the primordial spirit-beings of Kikuyu legend. Zambia's Kaunda, the son of an ordained Presbyterian minister, believes that Christianity has wrongly stressed the "sinfulness and depravity" of man, and that Africa needs a more positive faith emphasizing human goodness. Africans, he contends, never "really knew what misery was until the missionary came. They never made misery a cult of life, which is what bad religion taught them."

Up to a point, the missionaries are more than willing to "Africanize." Protestants and Roman Catholics are cooperating on new translations of Scripture into local languages. Worship services increasingly feature hymns based on tribal folk tunes. As fast as possible, black priests and ministers are being trained to take over white-founded mission churches. But many missionaries are doubtful whether these steps will be enough to keep alive a faith that, for too many political leaders, remains a symbol of the day when Africa was simply a continent to colonize.

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