H-Diplo ROUNDTABLE XXI-47
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H-Diplo ROUNDTABLE XXI-47 Elizabeth A. Foster. African Catholic: Decolonization and the Transformation of the Church. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019. ISBN: 9780674987661 (hardcover, $45.00). 22 June 2020 | https://hdiplo.org/to/RT21-47 Editor: Diane Labrosse | Commissioning Editor: Frank Gerits | Production Editor: George Fujii Contents Introduction by Alice Conklin, The Ohio State University ..............................................................................................................................................2 Review by Philip Jenkins, Baylor University ..............................................................................................................................................................................6 Review by Anna Konieczna, Sciences Po ...............................................................................................................................................................................10 Review by Jacob K. Olupona, Harvard University ............................................................................................................................................................14 Review by Charlotte Walker-Said, City University of New York .............................................................................................................................. 16 Response by Elizabeth Foster, Tufts University ................................................................................................................................................................. 19 H-Diplo Roundtable XXI-47 Introduction by Alice Conklin, The Ohio State University ecolonization of formerly French sub-Saharan Africa has only rarely been studied through the prism of religion. Recent literature on the end of French rule has focused instead on the political transition to new nation states, or decolonization and African labor movements, or clashes between postwar imperialism and postwar D 1 internationalism. Elizabeth A. Foster thus breaks genuinely new ground by insisting that decolonization also touched private institutions and mentalities beyond the purview of the state, such as the Franco-African Catholic world. Foster is a historian of France and its Empire, whose first book deftly analyzed the role played by religion, and more specifically, the Catholic Church in colonial politics in Senegal between 1880 and 1940.2 This prize-winning work joined a spate of new studies on the complex position of the Catholic Church in France’s empire in Africa, Asia and Oceania. For the first time, historians outside the church began to recognize that Catholic missionaries constituted one of the most important groups of French men and women working abroad in the age of the new imperialism, and that Catholicism was a central medium of contact between Europeans and certain colonized peoples, especially in Africa.3 There is now a small but growing body of work that gives equal weight to the voices of both French Catholics overseas and their converts, and considers how together they forged a culture of religious life under colonialism despite European racism.4 African Catholic: Decolonization and the Transformation of the Church innovatively carries the story of the French Catholic Church in Africa into the post-World War II decade. Surprisingly, historians have not thought to ask how the actions of African Catholics shaped the choices of the Catholic Church at a moment of intense debate about Africa’s political future– despite the fact that half of francophone Africa’s first heads of state were Catholic. Foster takes up this question, and the answer is fascinating. With the onset of the Cold War and wars of independence in Indochina and Algeria, the Church found itself at a crossroads. Several centuries of entanglement with colonial regimes had blinded most of the Catholic hierarchy to the immorality of working hand-in-hand with imperialists. Yet with Church attendance drastically shrinking in Europe, the future of Catholicism clearly lay in the global South and particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. As decolonization gained momentum, would the Church abandon its historic racism in Africa in favor of a genuine universalism that recognized blacks as equals? In France, a resurgent Catholic Left concerned with social justice began sympathizing with growing African demands for self-rule and respect for their cultures. At the same time more traditionally patriotic Catholic groups on the Right did not easily accept the end of empire. Meanwhile African Catholic intellectuals such as Alioune Diop—a Senegalese prime mover of a Catholic negritude movement whose existence most scholars have ignored; African students in France; and African prelates in the colonies forced the hierarchy to confront its continuing pattern of prejudice and discrimination. Foster analyzes with great subtlety the intellectual debates, political struggles, and crises of conscience that these cascading events triggered. Across seven lucidly argued chapters, she shows how a generation of Catholics in 1 Tony Chafer, The End of Empire in French West Africa: France’s Successful Decolonization (London and New York: Berg Publishers, 2002); Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Gregory Mann, From Empires to NGOs in the West African Sahel: The Road To Nongovernmentality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); and Jessica Lynne Pearson, The Colonial Politics of Global Health: France and the United Nations in Postwar Africa (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018). 2 Elizabeth A. Foster, Faith in Empire: Religion, Politics, and Colonial Rule in French Senegal, 1880–1940 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018). 3 See among others, J.P. Daughton, A Republic Divided: An Empire Divided: Religion, Republicanism, and the Making of French Colonialism, 1880-1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Sarah A. Curtis, Civilizing Habits and the Revival of French Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 4 For example, Charles Keith, Catholic Vietnam A Church from Empire to Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); see also select essays in Owen White and J.P. Daughton eds., In God’s Empire: Missionaries and the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). © 2020 The Authors | CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US 2 | Page H-Diplo Roundtable XXI-47 France and Africa challenged the morality of continued colonialism and began making plans for an independent African Church in a part of the continent that was dominated by Islam. Decolonization was a process that produced new and often surprising social relations between Europeans and Africans and among groups of Africans of different faiths. The many questions that roiled the Franco-African Catholic world throughout the 1950s would take center stage at Vatican II (1963- 1965), and decisively influence its outcome. African Catholic is based on truly impressive research in missionary, Church, and state archives and an exhaustive reading of the francophone Catholic press. Given Foster’s central concern with the impact of decolonization on late colonial Catholicism in French Africa, it is fitting that three of the distinguished reviewers for this H-Diplo round-table are scholars of global Christianity, while the fourth specializes in French foreign policy in Africa. Philip Jenkins begins his review by reminding us that, in terms of the global spread of Christianity over the last two decades, the African story is particularly remarkable: it is estimated that the number of adherents there will reach the billion mark by 2050. He, however, regrets that most of the literature on this “epic expansion” in Africa deals with the Anglophone world only– an artifact he attributes to the loss of fluency in French in the academy. Foster’s remarkable study will thus come as a revelation to scholars working in English, and no chapter will surprise them more than the one devoted to Diop, the founder of the legendary journal and Parisian publishing house Présence Africaine. These observations nevertheless lead Jenkins to his one criticism of the book: Foster’s subtitle promises more than the book delivers, because the larger story of Catholicism’s success in sub-Saharan Africa after decolonization is, of course, a truly global one that recognized no borders. Jenkins concludes his review by providing his own comparative context to Foster’s story, pointing in particular to the enormous success of Catholicism in the former Belgian colonies of central Africa. Jacob K. Olupona also flags how understudied African Catholicism in the French-speaking territories has been. For him, Foster’s work speaks critically to our contemporary moment in several important ways. He credits her with laying bare how much the “reverse missions” at work in the world today owe to the struggles of the 1950s – that is to say the phenomenon of African priests increasingly staffing parishes in Europe as the faith wanes on that continent. Her work highlights how interdisciplinary approaches benefit the study of religion. He especially applauds Foster’s central focus on African Christians themselves rather than on Church-state relations or narratives of nationalism. For Olupona, the fact that earlier scholars have overlooked Diop’s Catholic négritude is proof positive of their obsession with a certain kind of elite politics at the expense of more bottom-up experiences of faith. Finally,