Christian Presence in a Muslim Milieu: the Missionaries of Africa in the Maghreb and the Sahara Aylward Shorter, M.Afr
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Christian Presence in a Muslim Milieu: The Missionaries of Africa in the Maghreb and the Sahara Aylward Shorter, M.Afr. or more than 130 years, the Society of Missionaries of port of Napoleon III and French public opinion, took his stand on FAfrica has maintained a Christian presence in the Mus- freedom of conscience and the freedom to practice charity. He lim world. This experience has resulted in the development of a forbade any of his refugees to be baptized, except for babies in distinctive approach to Islam that renounces overt proselytism danger of death, and he was able to claim that not one of the and espouses a dialogue of life. Founded in 1868 by Charles surviving 1,100 orphans had been baptized.6 Lavigerie (1825–92), Missionaries of Africa, popularly called A large number of children were still in Lavigerie’s care White Fathers because of their white Arab dress, are still working when the famine was over, and requests for baptism grew. in the Maghreb and the Sahara. They work also in sub-Saharan Lavigerie acquiesced for those he considered worthy.7 About Islamic countries such as Mali, Niger, Chad, and Sudan, as well 1,000 were eventually baptized. Some of this number were sent as in the Near East, in Jerusalem. to populate the two Christian villages established in the Chélif Valley in 1872 and 1874. By 1906, however, the two villages Lavigerie’s Vision for Muslim Mission numbered only 360 Christians in 36 families.8 The villagers, who now owned the land, merged with the French settler population, Lavigerie’s interest in Islam began in 1860, when, as director of as did most of the other baptized orphans.9 Lavigerie, who saw the work of the Eastern Schools (a French Catholic organization these young Algerians as a Christian elite for the evangelization for supporting missionaries in the Near East), he visited Lebanon of the whole continent, was disappointed. As he explained later, and Syria to bring relief to Christian survivors of a massacre the Christian villages of Algeria made not the slightest impact on carried out by the Druze. His first impressions of a Muslim jihad surrounding Muslims but were costly and ineffective ghettos.10 were inevitably negative, but he was impressed by the humanity and culture of the exiled Algerian leader the amir Abd-al-Qadir, Efforts in Kabylia, Algeria whom he met on this journey. About the same time Lavigerie met Abbé F. Bourgade, who had established a college for Muslims, From his first arrival in Algeria, Lavigerie was attracted by the Jews, and Catholics in Tunisia. Bourgade was the author of three mountainous region of Kabylia. The so-called Kabyle myth held books that proposed a Socratic dialogue with Islam.1 The books that the area had originally been Christian and that its people envisage Islam as a preface to the Gospel. Left to God’s provi- might be disposed to return to the religion of their ancestors.11 In dence, thought Bourgade, Islam would eventually bear fruit in fact, these mountain dwellers had been virtually untouched by Christian truth.2 Lavigerie did not favor such a dialogue, but he Roman civilization, let alone Christianity. The Kabyles had de- recommended the books to his missionaries.3 He probably thought veloped their own amalgam of Islam and traditional beliefs, and that a religious encounter between Christianity and Islam would they had no desire to be Christians. In 1871, after the defeat of eventually be possible. France in the Franco-Prussian War, the Kabyles conducted a A year after becoming archbishop of Algiers in 1867, Lavigerie serious uprising that took the French several months to suppress, founded the Society of Missionaries of Africa. They were to and Lavigerie’s missionaries went to Kabylia in 1873 in a climate disarm Islamic disdain for Christians by adopting the Muslims’ of hostility. Twenty years later, Kabyles told the White Fathers external manner of life—their clothing, food, language, poverty, that they were still hoping for another uprising.12 During that and nomadism.4 In 1868 Pius IX made Lavigerie apostolic del- time the mission stations of the White Fathers increased from two egate for the Sahara and (French) Sudan. Lavigerie’s responsi- to seven. At the turn of the century another two stations were bilities were thus extended to the enormous territories that lay founded in the Saharan Atlas. beyond the narrow confines of the Diocese of Algiers. In order not to play into the hands of the anticlericals, as well Lavigerie’s approach to Islam was far from bookish or as to avoid offending Muslim susceptibilities, Lavigerie forbade theoretical. It derived from his ongoing experience of the Muslim any open proselytism. There were to be no boarding schools or milieu. From the outset he claimed the right to love, and pray for, public catechumenates. Day schools could be started, and a small the Muslims of Algeria, not merely to be a chaplain to French number of boarders were allowed at the mission stations, but settlers, soldiers, and officials. Soon after his arrival in Algeria a religion was not to be taught in school. Instead, there was to be succession of calamities occurred: an earthquake, followed by a solid moral formation implicitly inspired by Christian prin- drought, a plague of locusts, and a cholera epidemic, accompa- ciples. Catechism could be given to those who requested it, but nied by famine. Some 90,000 people died of cholera, and a further there were to be no baptisms without the authorization of the 20,000 of starvation. The French took no extraordinary measures parents and of Lavigerie himself.13 Babies, however, could be to deal with the crisis, but Lavigerie set up camps and took in baptized at the moment of death. “We talk as little as possible nearly 2,000 orphans, 800 of whom died of cholera.5 The anticleri- about religion,” wrote a missionary in 1892.14 Dispensaries and cal administration suspected Lavigerie of proselytism and feared hospitals were to be opened, and the whole purpose of the a fanatical Muslim reaction. Lavigerie, however, with the sup- missionaries’ social and humanitarian action was to create a favorable climate for ultimate conversion to Christianity. It was Aylward Shorter, M.Afr., is Principal Emeritus of Tangaza College in the a long-term strategy that Lavigerie believed would take at least Catholic University of Eastern Africa, Nairobi, Kenya, and former president of a hundred years to bear any fruit. the Missionary Institute, London. He is currently working on the history project The missionaries’ primary contact was with children and of his missionary society. young people outside the parental culture. Few adult baptisms October 2004 159 took place. By 1900 there were thirty-nine Kabyle Christians, and oases in Gourara, the Tuat and Tidikelt, inhabited by Arabs, ten years later just under three times that number.15 These believ- Berbers, the enslaved descendants of the original inhabitants ers were grouped in tiny Christian communities at five of the (Harratin), and large numbers of more recently enslaved Ne- mission stations. They were an outgrowth of the mission schools groes from the south. To the far south lay the mountains of and had no influence on the wider community. It is fair to say Hoggar, the homelands of the warlike Tuareg and Ahaggar.26 that, although there had been a missionary insertion into Kabyle Only in 1894 did French armies from the south occupy the society, the missionaries failed to provoke an interest in Chris- fabled town of Timbuktu. In the meantime, the White Fathers, tianity.16 who were establishing posts in the northern borderlands of the Although adult conversions were few, there were many Sahara, opened a station in the Mzab at Metlili in 1874.27 From baptisms of dying babies. For example, between September 1904 there a party of three missionaries set out to cross the desert in and September 1905 thirteen adults and thirty-five children of January 1876, only to be massacred by Ajjer Tuaregs, near El Christians were solemnly baptized in the whole of the Algerian Golea. Seven years later a second party of White Fathers took a Province, but there were nearly a thousand baptisms of infants in different route, setting out from Ghadamès in December 1881. danger of death.17 “Our neophytes are the dying,” wrote one They were massacred two days later by a coalition of Tuareg missionary in Kabylia.18 The surreptitious baptism of dying tribesmen. Lavigerie had hesitated to let them go after news of babies was not merely a function of the pessimistic salvation the annihilation of the Flatters expedition earlier in the year, but theology then in vogue, but it was seen as the creation of a he allowed himself to be persuaded that it was safe.28 After this Kabylian Church Triumphant. These “Holy Innocents” were disaster the Sahara was abandoned for several years. Gradually, now intercessors for Kabyles on earth. as the French army moved south, the White Fathers returned to As they saw it, the missionaries’ first aim was to “destroy the Saharan oases in the 1880s and 1890s, reopening four mission Muslim fanaticism,” to undermine faith in Muhammad, and— stations. Not until the advent of Colonel Henri Laperrine in 1901, even more implausibly—”to detach North Africa from the Arabs the friend and former comrade-in-arms of Charles de Foucauld, and Islam.”19 Although they were forbidden to indulge in polem- was the road to Timbuktu and the Niger opened in 1904–9.29 ics themselves, polemical literature was recommended reading, Meanwhile, in the oases of the northern desert, the White Fathers such as Michel Nau’s The Qur’an Against the Qur’an.20 The mis- pursued, with tireless devotion, the same evangelization policies sionaries in fact had no preparation for their encounter with as their brothers in Kabylia: education, medical work, and the Islam.