A History of the Colonization of Africa by Alien Races by Harry Johnston

If I were writing this book for dramatic effect and less with a view to historical sequence, I should have been disposed to put this chapter next to the one dealing with the slave trade, as an effective pendant; for if Europe has dealt wickedly in enslaving Africa, she has sent thither a high-minded army of men and women, who, acting nearly always from noble and unselfish motives, have raised the African from a callous ignorance to a distinctly higher stage of civilization. And whether or not Britain was a greater sinner than other white peoples in the thoroughness with which she prosecuted the slave trade, she at any rate deserves credit for a degree of missionary effort far surpassing that attributable to any other nation.

The Portuguese were the first European nation to send missionaries to Africa. Their zeal was great, and, with one or two exceptions, wholly praiseworthy. Portuguese priests and Jesuit fathers accompanied most of the early expeditions to Africa; in fact hardly any explorer or conquistador sailed without chaplains in his company, who raised the cross and preached Christianity as soon as they set foot on shore. In the chapter on the Portuguese in Africa I have touched upon the introduction of Christianity into Congoland in 1491. But any race of purely negro blood accepts and loses Christianity with great facility. The Negro (unless he be Muhammadanized) is easily converted, and as easily relapses into gross superstition or a negation of all religion, including his former simple but sound ideas of right and wrong. In order that Christianity may become permanently rooted in a negro race it is necessary for it to be maintained by a European power for a long period as the religion of the State. If the negro kingdoms which remained independent retained their Christianity it was in an unrecognizable form. It is not so with Muhammadanism, the explanation being that Muhammadanism as taught to the Negro demands no sacrifice of his bodily lusts, whereas Christianity with its restrictions ends by boring him, unless and until his general mental condition, by individual genius or generations of transmitted culture, reaches the average level of the European. As instances of the former, one might mention some ten or a dozen individuals living at the present time, who are priests and deacons of Christianity in Africa; while for examples of permanently rooted Christianity as the result of inheritance it is only necessary to point to the two or three millions of really good negro men and women to be found in the United States, the West Indies and Cape Colony. Portugal, however, never attempted to rule the Kingdom of the Congo till the last quarter of the 19th century; so after more than three centuries of propaganda[134] the Ba-kongo fell away from Christianity, and in less than a hundred years had absolutely relapsed into Heathenism, when once more, against their wishes, missionaries returned to Western Congoland.