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).

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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, he notes that Foster has provided a genealogy for how African Catholics decolonized their Church that is sure to inspire other scholars of African Christianity.

Unlike Jenkins, Charlotte Walker-Said sees African Catholic as a very successful model of a certain kind of global history – the kind that calls for analysis of one or more transnational networks. In the hands of less-skilled historians, such networks have often remained diffuse and inchoate. The network at the heart of African Catholic, in contrast, is a clearly defined transnational Church community in which a distinctive group of African and French actors share the stage equally. Foster is a master historical portraitist who artfully weaves together stories of cosmopolitan individuals from Dakar and Ouagadougou to Paris, Toulouse, and Rome. Walker-Said also calls attention to Foster’s extraordinary ability to make us feel the racism and/or paternalism that permeated Franco-African Catholic relations, even when the latter were at their best. For Walker-Said, Foster’s conclusion that African Catholics chose integration, not assimilation into the universal Catholic Church echoes Frederick Cooper’s recent argument in his 2016 book Citizenship Between Empire and Nation that African statesmen in the 1950s pushed for a federal relationship with France in lieu of total independence.5

For Anna Konieczna, one of Foster’s most important accomplishments is to show that the debates inspired by the decolonization process were key to reforming the Catholic Church in the twentieth century and to precipitating Vatican II. She compliments Foster for casting new light on how influential religion actually was in postwar France; here Foster’s

5 Frederick Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945-1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

3 | Page H-Diplo Roundtable XXI-47 findings echo some of the best new scholarship on French Catholicism since World War II.6 Among the book’s many strengths, Konieczna lists the depth of archives unearthed, the book’s superb organization, and its carefully nuanced approach to the many complex issues raised by the French Church’s long presence in Africa. She raises two points for further discussion: given the persistent racism in the Church, were African students and intellectuals as able to affect the changes Foster claims? And how representative were the aspirations of the elite African priests and students of the views of the majority of ordinary Africans during decolonization? She reminds us that with the opening of Pope Pius XII’s archives in March 2020, we can hope for answers to these questions in the near future, not least thanks to Foster’s pioneering work.

In her thoughtful response, Elizabeth Foster explains how her earlier work left her with questions about what happened to the Catholic Church’s missions and their African adherents at the end of French colonial rule. Three factors, the paucity of work in English, her desire to write a fine-grained and deeply archival study of people and places, and the fact that the Franco-African story had an outsized impact on the Church globally, drove her decision to write a “network” history focused exclusively on French Africa rather than a comparative study. Archival choices also led her to produce a male- centered narrative; for a more bottom-up approach that focuses on both men and women, Foster recommends Walker- Said’s own work on Christianity in French Cameroon. Readers of this forum will recognize the originality of Foster’s research and the exciting new perspectives that she has opened up for thinking about the growth and transformation of the Catholic Church in Latin America as well as Africa in the wake of Vatican II. Together Foster and her enthusiastic reviewers confirm that the important history of African Christianity and its impact on Catholicism’s global reach since the 1950s is just beginning to be written.

Participants:

Elizabeth Foster is Associate Professor of History at Tufts University. In addition to African Catholic, she is the author of Faith in Empire: Religion, Politics, and Colonial Rule in French Senegal, 1880-1940 (Stanford University Press, 2013), which won the Alf Andrew Heggoy Prize of the French Colonial Historical Society for the best book on the French colonial experience since 1848. She has also published in The Journal of African History, The Journal of Modern History, French Politics, Culture and Society, and French Historical Studies. Her work has been supported by ACLS, Fulbright, and ACLS fellowships.

Alice L. Conklin is College of Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor of History at Ohio State University. She specializes in the history of modern France and its empire, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between ideas and practices. She is the author most recently of In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850-1950 (Cornell, 2013, translated into French as Exposer l’humanité, 2015). Her earlier books include A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930 (Stanford University Press, 1997); European Imperialism: Climax and Contradictions (co-author, Houghton Mifflin, 1998); and Modern France and its Empire, 1870-2005 (co-author, Oxford, 2014). Her current project, tentatively entitled Race by Another Name: France and the UNESCO Antiracist Campaign, 1947-1962, looks at French antiracism in the postwar decade in comparative perspective

Philip Jenkins was educated at Cambridge University, where he received his Ph. D. in History. From 1980 through 2011, he taught at Penn State University, where he holds the rank of Emeritus Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Humanities. In 2012, he became a Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University, and serves in the Institute for Studies of Religion. He has published 29 books, which have been translated into sixteen languages. These include The Lost History of

6 In addition to the 2015 edited volume by Denis Pelletier and Jean-Louis Schlegel cited by Konieczna below, see Sarah Shortall and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins eds, Christianity and Human Rights Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2020); Giuliana Chamedes, A Twentieth-Century Crusade : The Vatican's Battle to Remake Christian Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019); James Chappel, Catholic Modern : The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018).

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Christianity (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2008) and The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity 3rd edition (Oxford University Press, 2011). His most recent titles include Crucible of Faith: The Ancient Revolution That Made Our Modern Religious World (New York: Basic Books, 2017); and Fertility and Faith: The Demographic Revolution That Is Transforming All the World’s Religions (Baylor University Press, 2020).

Anna Konieczna is a teaching fellow at the Institut Catholique de Paris and at Sciences Po Paris. Her research focuses on the history of the French foreign policy in Africa with the specific emphasis on Southern Africa. She recently edited A Global history of Anti-Apartheid. Forward to Freedom in South Africa (Palgrave Macmillan, St Antony’s series, 2019).

Jacob K. Olupona is Professor of African Religious Traditions, with a joint appointment as Professor of African and African American Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. In his book City of 201 Gods: Ilé-Ifè in Time, Space, and the Imagination (University of California Press, 2011), he examines the modern urban mixing of ritual, royalty, gender, class, and power, and how the structure, content, and meaning of religious beliefs and practices permeate daily life. In 2012, he was named one of Harvard’s Walter Channing Cabot Fellows, for distinguished publications. Olupona has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the Ford Foundation, the Davis Humanities Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Getty Foundation.

Charlotte Walker-Said is Associate Professor in the Department of Africana Studies at CUNY-John Jay College. She is the author of two books, Faith, Power, and Family: Christianity and Social Change in French Cameroon (James Currey, 2018), and (with John D. Kelly) Corporate Social Responsibility: Human Rights in the New Global Economy (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Her articles have appeared in French Culture, Politics, and Society, Gender and History, and the International Journal of African Historical Studies. Her research interests include Christianity, Gender, and Human Rights in Africa.

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Review by Philip Jenkins, Baylor University

lizabeth Foster’s African Catholic is an exemplary work of historical scholarship which greatly expands our knowledge of African Christian responses to the era of decolonization. It should however be said that, for all its Evirtues, it offers somewhat less than its title might suggest. Over the past two decades, the global spread of Christianity beyond Europe and North America has been widely recognized as a historic transformation in the history of that faith. Although churches in both Asia and Latin America have reported amazing numerical growth, the African story is particularly remarkable. The number of believers on that continent will probably grow from its present number of around half a billion to a full billion by mid-century, a change that will have its effects on any and all denominations with global pretensions.

Such epic expansion has resulted in an outpouring of books and articles, and African theologies and traditions of Bible reading are now the subject of extensive scholarship.7 Yet for all the outstanding work that is emerging in such volume, the regional and linguistic bias is evident. Overwhelmingly, the available scholarship focuses on Anglophone nations, with countries like Nigeria, Kenya, and Uganda to the fore. Far less attention has been paid to the continent’s French speakers – who are perhaps 120 million strong—and their particular traditions. That sad neglect owes much to the precipitous decline of the knowledge of French among educated Westerners, including most academics. Africa’s Lusophone nations are also profoundly under-studied, but that is another story.

In contrast, African Catholic focuses strictly on the French-speakers, the heirs of the sprawling French empire. The book describes the history of that empire in the mid-twentieth century, and the progress toward independence. France had been dreadfully weakened by the Second World War and the subsequent defeats in Indo-China (1945-1954) and Algeria (1954- 1962). Technically, Algeria was not a colonial war as the territory was included as an integral part of metropolitan France, but the crisis here boded ill for the maintenance of France’s imperial possessions. Overshadowed by the Algerian conflict, France was also facing the bloody Bamileke revolt in French Cameroon, the guerre cachée of 1955-1964, which raised the nightmare prospect of insurgency spreading across black Africa. Events in the British Empire also proved decisive, and the grant of independence to the new state of Ghana in 1957 showed that London planned a rapid wind-up of its African commitments: Nigeria gained independence in 1960. Acknowledging the inevitable, France granted independence to most of its African possessions in 1960, creating such new states as Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Madagascar, and the Central African Republic. Even so, the French retained a much closer relationship with their former colonies than the British had done, giving rise to complaints that much of Francophone Africa remained part of a continuing informal empire.8

7 From a large literature, see Philip Jenkins, The New Faces of Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Lamin Sanneh, Summoned from the Margin (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s, 2012).

8 Aguibou Y. Yansané, Decolonization In West African States, With French Colonial Legacy (Cambridge: Schenkman 1984); Charles-Robert Ageron, La décolonisation française second and revised edition (Paris: A. Colin, 1994); Anthony Clayton, The Wars Of French Decolonization (London and New York: Longman, 1994); John D. Hargreaves, Decolonization in Africa, 2nd ed. (New York: Longman, 1996); Martin Thomas, The French North African Crisis: Colonial Breakdown and Anglo-French Relations, 1945–62 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000); Roy Bridges ed., Imperialism, Decolonization, And Africa: Studies Presented To John Hargreaves (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000); Tony Chafer, The End Of Empire In French West Africa: France's Successful Decolonisation (New York: Berg, 2002); Todd Shepard, The Invention Of Decolonization: The Algerian War And The Remaking Of France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006); Ryo Ikeda, The Imperialism of French Decolonisaton: French Policy and the Anglo-American Response in Tunisia and Morocco (London: Palgrave 2015); Tony Chafer and Alexander Keese, eds., Francophone Africa at Fifty (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015); Andrew W.M. Smith and Chris Jeppesen, eds., Britain, France And The Decolonization Of Africa: Future © 2020 The Authors | CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US

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Although the literature on French decolonization is substantial, it pays surprisingly little attention to matters of religion. Islam receives limited treatment in particular nations, where it clearly played a role in inspiring anti-colonial sentiment, but policymakers at the time tended not to treat religious factors too seriously in analyzing such movements.9 When nationalist agitation did arise, European observers were much more likely to seek out Marxist motivation, whether overt or clandestine. Christianity, meanwhile, received little attention at the time, because of the common sentiment that this was a colonial European importation that would likely fade as the empires themselves dissolved. If Islam was underplayed, Christianity – which in the context generally means Roman Catholicism—was all but ignored. That perception is reflected in modern academic writing on decolonization, which finds little need to discuss the African Catholicism of the era. The paucity of modern scholarship is unfortunate given the enormous significance of African believers in the larger story of the Catholic Church today, and of Christianity more generally. Foster thus makes an invaluable contribution by tracing the establishment of the Catholic Church in those imperial territories and the successor states. In so doing, she especially stresses the work of African Catholic leaders themselves in accommodating to the new situation.

To frame some critical questions, how could the Church of an independent Africa liberate itself from the European assumptions of the faith as currently constituted? In practical terms, what would that mean for liturgy and theology? Was it possible to create an African Catholicism that took full account of the cultural and political currents of the day, such as Négritude and pan-Africanism? Or was Catholic Christianity so badly tainted by the imperial past that a future Africa should look rather to the other great missionary faith, of Islam? Underlying all these questions was the still more fundamental issue of whether the Church could truly live up to its vaunted claims of universalism, or whether it was irretrievably mired in whiteness and privilege. Was it really possible to be “African Catholic,” or was that term an oxymoron?

The ensuing debates divided Catholics for a generation, roughly from 1945 to the early 1970s, and the echoes are still heard today. As Foster shows convincingly, all these matters were in the minds of key participants at the Second Vatican Council of 1963-1965.

Many aspects of this story are barely known to Anglophone scholars of modern Christian Africa, who will find Foster’s story illuminating and surprising. Above all, they will find how central a role the colonized peoples themselves played in the emerging post-independence synthesis. Far from being the humble recipients of imperial decrees, African people were in frequent dialogue with Parisian intellectual circles, including the many French Catholics who had gravitated to the anti- colonial left. The thousands of African students who passed through French institutions of higher education also had their impact. Moreover, missionary orders were crucial intermediaries of ideas and innovations, and the influences definitely passed both ways.

Foster usefully structures her narrative around figures who were pivotal to the dialogues of the time, but who are little known to non-specialists (and even, it seems, to many specialists). That includes Alioune Diop, a hugely influential Senegalese exponent of Négritude, and a Catholic convert from Islam. As Foster demonstrates, while his views challenged white racial assumptions within the Church, his own positions owed much to that Catholicism. If the book had simply drawn attention to Diop’s role in shaping the African culture of the time, it would have fully justified its existence.

Another of Foster’s key figures is Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who earned notoriety as an ultra-reactionary foe of liberal Vatican reforms until his death in 1991. But as Foster shows, he had a long and influential career in French Africa, and in

Imperfect? (London: UCL Press, 2017); Emmanuelle Saada, “France: The Longue Durée Of French Decolonization,” in Martin Thomas and Andrew S, Thompson, eds., The Oxford Handbook Of The Ends Of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

9 Outside the academic literature, some of the most thoughtful discussion of the relationship between Islam and the nationalism of the time comes in the fictional work of Senegal’s Ousmane Sembene, especially in novels like Les bouts de bois de Dieu (Paris: Livre Contemporain, 1960), published in the great independence year of 1960.

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1955 became the first Metropolitan Archbishop of Dakar. In 1959, he sparked controversy with a savage attack on Islam and its legacies in Africa, and the counter-attack did much to mobilize newer and more liberal Catholic voices. Those newer Catholics favored interfaith cooperation and dialogue, setting an example that influenced the Vatican Council.

A couple of absences in the book rather surprised me, particularly in terms of fiction produced by French African writers. The best example would be the brilliant Le Pauvre Christ de Bomba (1956), by Cameroon’s Mongo Beti. The book illustrates many of the themes that Foster highlights elsewhere.10

African Catholic deals with extremely important topics: it is thoroughly researched (in multiple countries), lucidly written, and it repays repeated reading. Any comment or criticisms I might make should be taken in that light. But we should emphasize what the book does and does not offer. In spite of its subtitle, it is not in fact about decolonization as such, as opposed to the dismantling of the French empire. It does not cover the experience of the other mighty realm, namely that of Belgium, which left a profound mark on Francophone Catholicism. That matters enormously in a vast country like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which by 2050 could have as many as 200 million people. That number would include a hundred million Catholics – making it one of the world’s most populous Catholic nations – besides perhaps sixty million other Christians.

As decolonization approached in the 1950s, Belgian Church leaders and missionary orders experienced almost exactly the same pressures and influences as their French neighbors. One illustrative product of that rethinking is a cultural item which enjoyed surprising global influence in the 1960s. This was the setting of the mass in African style in the so-called Missa Luba, sung by a Congolese choir. After its use in the British film If… (1968), the Missa Luba became an international sensation, which did much to awaken Euro-American Catholics to the new cultural syntheses emerging from the wreck of colonialism. At the same time, the catastrophic violence that overwhelmed the independent Congo did as much as anything to reinforce racist stereotypes about African primitivism, and the imagined unfitness of the African people for self-rule. For good or ill, that Belgian story matters as much for global Catholicism in that era as do the affairs of French-ruled territories, although it does not fall within Foster’s declared scope. She does, however, discuss the former French territory of Congo- Brazzaville.

That absence is unfortunate because in more recent times, Francophone Christians in Europe have worked and worshiped together, regardless of whether their ancestors fell under French or Belgian suzerainty. In their way, pastors and evangelists form the Democratic Republic of Congo are as enterprising and widely traveled as their Anglophone Nigerian counterparts, and Congolese-run megachurches are a familiar phenomenon across France and Belgium. It would have been interesting to see how the experiences of French and Belgian Catholics before and after decolonization matched up, and how they influenced each other. Did Church leaders from the two countries exchange ideas? What about colonized peoples themselves? Did someone like Diop have a readership in the Belgian Congo, or Burundi?

The book is also about the cultural dilemmas of being “African Catholic,” rather than offering a survey of African Catholicism more broadly defined. This comment is not intended as a critique of the author’s decision to limit the book within a manageable scope, nor to critique her for failing to write a quite different book. But a larger context might have been valuable.

Viewed on a longer time frame, the modern story of Catholicism in Africa is deeply impressive. In 1900, there were perhaps two million Catholic believers on the whole continent, compared with 130 million by 2000, and a projected figure of some 460 million by 2050. To put that growth in context, that 2050 figure would be roughly equal to what the global total of adherents of that faith was back in 1950. In terms of the history of religions, such growth finds few if any parallels. A list of the world’s most populous Catholic nations by 2050 would include at least four African states, including the Democratic

10 Mongo Beti, Le pauvre Christ de Bomba (Nendeln: Kraus Reprint, 1970).

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Republic of Congo (as noted earlier) but also Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda. Such a listing ignores the substantial presence of African Catholic migrants, whether Anglophone or Francophone, in Europe and North America.11

In other words, a large part of the “African Catholic” story is English-speaking, and therefore lies entirely outside Foster’s scope. It was, for instance a Tanzanian, Laurean Rugambwa, who in 1960 became the Church’s first black African Cardinal, at least in modern times.12 (The first native Cardinal from French Africa, Paul Zoungrana of Burkina Faso, followed in 1965). It would be a wonderful project for some future author to compare the thought that emerged in Catholic settings under British or French rule, and how each side viewed the prospects for a new and thoroughly indigenized faith on African soil. Certainly African intellectuals made their homes as thoroughly in London as in Paris. What did they make of the prospects for “Decolonization and the Transformation of the Church”?

Also, missionary orders and missionary schools in both empires played roles that were somewhat similar, and equally paradoxical. In both cases, missionaries worked for the improvement and education of native peoples, and in the process aroused aspirations that were all but impossible to fulfil while retaining imperial structures. Often too, missionaries regarded themselves as the protectors or advocates of the native peoples against oppressive colonialists and imperial officials. Knowingly or otherwise, those missionaries were laying the foundations for later nationalisms, and for the successor states of both empires. In both cases, some of the fiery nationalist leaders of those states recorded their warm thanks to those orders, and especially to their schools. Comparisons across imperial frontiers would be instructive, and rewarding.

The highest tribute I can pay to Foster’s book is that it inspires so many possible lines of fruitful inquiry.

11 This discussion is drawn from Jenkins, The Next Christendom 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

12 Celestine Bohlen, “Laurean Rugambwa, Chosen Africa’s First Cardinal, 85,” New York Times, 11 December 1997.

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Review by Anna Konieczna, Sciences Po

lizabeth Foster’s book constitutes a valuable contribution to the history of decolonization of the French Empire and to the modern history of France. While scholarly literature focused traditionally on the evolution of the colonial institutions and the role of French and African political leaders in the decolonization process, Foster’s book further deconstructsE this process by analyzing its impact on the Catholic Church and Catholic networks in France and in so-called Francophone Africa. Foster reminds us that Catholicism played an ambiguous role in the history of the French-African encounters. It was both one of the tools of the supposed French ‘civilizing mission’ and ‘a medium of contact’ between European and Catholic Africans13. Until 1960, the French missionary groups such as Fathers of the Holy Spirit (Spiritans), the Society of African Missions, and the Society of the Missionaries of Africa (White Fathers) closely controlled the Church’s structures and institutions in so-called French Africa and provided most of priests for missionary work. Since the late 1940s, the evolution of the French Empire in the post-war period inspired a broad internal and public debate on the universalism of the Catholic Church and its position in Africa. At the heart of this debate was the relationship between sacred and profane, that is, the opposition between the proclaimed universalism of the Catholic Church’s evangelical message and its collusion with the European colonialism and hegemony. Two overlapping issues structured the debate, namely the need of reform of the Catholic institutions in Africa through the promotion of indigenous clergy as well as the need of decolonization of the French Catholics’ mindsets that were still dominated by racial imaginations. The question of how and where to draw the line between the religious and political sphere created divisions among the French and French-African Catholics. Foster documents four stances in the debate: the preservation of the status quo, calls for more reformist agenda, the need of de-occidentalisation of the Church, and support for a full divorce between the French and African Church.

To document these debates, Elisabeth Foster chose a global history approach. First, the book defines the Church both as an institution and as a community of believers. It brings onto the scene a spectrum of actors – or “the constituents of a Franco- African world” (6) – ranging from the Vatican’s highest hierarchy, the French Catholic hierarchy, French and African intellectuals, students, and missionaries. Second, African Catholic aims to situate the debates on the future of Catholic Church and of the French empire in “the broader political, intellectual, and cultural movement of the time” (7) such as the Cold War, black internationalism in Paris, as well as the demise of the European colonial empires. It ultimately tends to show that the debates inspired by the decolonization process were a “pivotal factor in the reorientation of the Church in the mid-twentieth century” (13). Foster reminds us that many of the actors who are analyzed in the book attended the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) or even, as was the case of Alioune Diop, the founder of the journal Présence africaine, exerted a direct influence on the opinions of the Pope John XXIII. Finally, contrary to the common tropes of benign colonialism in French discourse, the book also unveils the persistence of paternalism and racism against Africans and therefore shows the limits of the ongoing public debate in France on post-colonialism and decolonization14.

13 See as well the first book of the author: Elizabeth A. Foster, Faith in Empire: Religion, Politics, and Colonial Rule in French Senegal, 1880–1940 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013).

14 See two controversial articles published recently by the French pundits: Amandine Hirou, “Les obsédés de la race noyautent le CNRS,” L’express, 24 December 2019, https://www.lexpress.fr/actualite/societe/les-obsedes-de-la-race-noyautent-le- cnrs_2111788.html; Laurent Bouvet et al., “Les Bonimenteurs Du Postcolonial Business En Quête de Respectabilité Académique,” L’express, accessed 22 May 2020, https://www.lexpress.fr/actualite/politique/les-bonimenteurs-du-postcolonial-business-en-quete-de- respectabilite-academique_2112541.html; Several important replies were published in the French newspapers and in the blogosphere. See for instance: Pascal Blanchard-Achac, “Il faut brûler la recherche postcoloniale: l’Empire contre-attaque,” Mediapart, accessed 22 May 2020, https://blogs.mediapart.fr/pascal-blanchard-achac/blog/271219/il-faut-bruler-la-recherche-postcoloniale-l-empire-contre-attaque; Alain Mabanckou and Dominic Thomas, “Pourquoi a-t-on si peur en France des études postcoloniales ?” Histoire coloniale et postcoloniale, 20 January 2020, https://histoirecoloniale.net/Pourquoi-a-t-on-si-peur-en-France-des-etudes-postcoloniales.html; On the French postcolonial identities see, for example, two important contributions: Nicolas Bancel et al., Ruptures postcoloniales. Les nouveaux visages de la société française (Paris: La Découverte, 2010); and Dominic Thomas, Africa and France: Postcolonial Cultures, Migration, and Racism © 2020 The Authors | CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US

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African Catholic also expands our understanding of modern French history. In line with the writings of Denis Pelletier and Jean-Louis Schlegel,15 it challenges the widespread belief that France and its society are secular. While Pelletier and Schlegel focused on the Left-wing political parties, Foster brings to our attention the role of religion in the black movement in France. The book shows that the Catholic faith was an important element of the French-African intellectual and political landscape. French-African elites in France and in Africa such as Léopold Sédar Senghor, the deputy of Senegal in the French National Assembly (1945-1958) and the future president of Senegal (1960-1980), and Alioune Diop were all faithful Catholics. The Association of Catholic African students took an active part in anti-colonial students’ activism in France along with the Federation of Black African Students in France (FEANF). Finally, the cultural initiatives associated with the black movement in Paris were not disconnected from Catholicism. In 1950s the journal Présence africaine and its publishing house produced articles and edited volumes on the future of the Catholic Church in Africa while the bookstore at Rue des Ecoles was a space for discussion between black Catholic students, writers, scholars, and Alioune Diop himself.

Moreover, Foster documents the collusion between French colonial authorities and the French Catholic missions in Africa. Félic Eboué, the governor of Chad (1938-1940) and the wartime governor general of French Equatorial Africa (1941-1944) “effect[ed] a rapprochement between French colonial officials and Catholic missionaries” (35). He aimed to secure the implementation of long-delayed developmental projects, namely in the field of education, and to preserve the French possessions from the supposed threat of Islam. Given Eboue’s early role in the triumph of Free French movement in Africa, his policies “were influential in the immediate post-war period and enjoyed a long after-life” (35). In the post-war period, French missionary schools came to play the role of subcontractors of the French ‘civilizing and developmental mission.’ This link was perceptible in the “unimaginable infusions of cash” (48) for the French catholic missions in Africa through the state-based fund Fonds d’Investissement pour le développement économique et social/Fund for Economic and Social Development (FIDES). Foster argues that the funding provided by the French state delayed the reform of the Catholic Church in Africa. As she points out, this aid had “some strings attached” and “chief among them was French officials’ insistence that missions be staffed exclusively by French nationals” (51).

Finally, the book constitutes a valuable contribution in term of the primary documents it uncovers. While the scholarly literature relies predominantly on the State archives of the French colonial authorities, Foster undertook research in an impressive array of the archives of the Catholic Church, its Congregations, its external missions, Catholic grass-root organizations, and private collections. In addition, the author analyzed very carefully almost thirty periodicals or newspapers, both Catholic and secular. Such an approach shows that our understanding of the decolonization process, which is still dominated by the Gaullist narrative of a linear successful decolonization16, is limited. It could be expanded, provided that new perspectives and, therefore, new primary sources, are explored.

The strength of the book also comes from the fact that it is beautifully organized. Each of seven chapters brings to the fore one specific group of actors and analyses one specific issue. The first two chapters describe the political and intellectual landscape of the French-African Catholics. The first chapter shows how the proximity of the French-African political leaders and of Vatican itself with the French colonial regime precluded them from promoting an ambitious reformist agenda of the Catholic Church. The second focuses on the intellectual framework. It brings into our attention the left-wing African Catholic intellectuals such as Alioune Diop and his dialogue on the de-occidentalisation of the Church with the European progressive Catholic intellectuals, such as Umberto Campagnolo and Emmanuel Mounier. The five remaining

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). More recently: Haythem Guesmi, “Postcolonialism Does Not Exist in France,” Africa is a country, 24 January 2020, https://africasacountry.com/2020/01/postcolonialism-does-not-exist-in-france.

15 Denis Pelletier, Jean-Louis Schlegel, A la gauche du Christ. Les Chrétiens de gauche en France de 1945 à nos jours (Paris: Point, 2015).

16 See the discussion of this point: Tony Chafer, ‘French African Policy in Historical Perspective’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies 19:2 (1 July 2001): 165-182, https://doi.org/10.1080/02589000120066443.

11 | Page H-Diplo Roundtable XXI-47 chapters focus on “the key constituencies and urgent questions that animated Franco-African Catholic world” (20): the French clergy and “theologies of colonization” (95, see the title of the Chapter 3) that is moral and legal basis of the Catholic Church’s relationship with the colonial powers (chapter three); collective biography of African Catholic students in Paris and the role of their activism in the decolonization of the Church (chapter four); the obstacles in the promotion of the African clergy and their vulnerability in the independence period (chapter five); Catholic perceptions of Islam (chapter six), and the language of the Catholic fund-rising campaigns (chapter seven). As Foster shows, the position of individual actors in the debate went far beyond a binary division between French and African Catholics. It was rather determined by one’s proximity or distance with French political power or the French church, previous contacts with African societies and their elites, personal experience and convictions, and age. Chapter five, for instance, shows the ambiguity of African leaders of the newly independent countries when it came to the nomination of African archbishops. It is interesting to note that those who were members of the so-called Françafrique’s networks such as Maurice Yaméogo, then president of Upper Volta, were reluctant to accept such nominations for fear of losing their influence in their respective countries. Those who distanced themselves from France after independence and encompassed the Pan-African ideals such as Sékou Touré, the president of Guinea and Modibo Keita, the president of Mali supported “the appointment of Africans to lead the church on the continent” (174). Touré grew more hostile towards the French missionaries and the private Catholic schools run by French. In 1967, he abruptly expelled all French missionary from Guinea; this gesture was one of the first symptoms of the authoritarian turn of his regime.

Notwithstanding its strengths, there seems to be one inconsistency in the book. Foster argues that the activism of African students who were supported by African intellectuals and their French chaplains pushed for change in the Catholic church from inside. The Second Vatican Council is shown as the moment when all trends and sensitivities represented in the French-African Catholic Church came together to debate about the future of the Catholic Church. However, such a point seems inconsistent with the previous chapters of the book in which the author reveals the conservatism of the leading French spiritual leaders as well as the persistence of racial mindsets even among the most progressive French Catholics. The book features, for instance, Marcel Lefebvre, the Vicar Apostolic of Dakar (1947-1955) and later Apostolic Delegate in French Africa (1955-1962). It documents his controversial statements on the Communism in Western Africa or on Islam and his opposition to the decolonization of the Catholic Church in Africa. While it is true that his attitude heralded his future revolt against the papacy, it is also true, as Foster notes, that he was “the most powerful French prelate in Africa” (7) at a very crucial moment of decolonisation. The author shows as well how the Vatican delayed in 1958 the nomination of the Spiritan Gabonese-Guinean priest Raymond-Marie Tchidimbo as the first African bishop of Conakry and moved the ceremony of nomination from Conakry to Dakar in order to “control its own narrative of ‘decolonization’” (174). “The path of Tchidimbo,” she adds, “sheds light on the paths [African priests] trod in their early years on the job.” They “navigated racial tensions within the clergy and within the realms of independence” (184). As a consequence, it seems rather that the activism of African students had accentuated the failure of the French ‘civilizing mission’ given that the elites that the French Catholic schools were supposed to form proved to be the most vocal opponents of the French presence in Africa.

The book also raises an important question that could be addressed in future publications. Foster recognizes that the decolonization process in Africa had an impact on the debate on the ‘theology of colonization’ (chapter 3) and the activity of the African students in Paris. However, Foster gives only a short account of this process. She summarizes the war in Algeria in one paragraph and she only mentions the loi-cadre of 1956 as a decision of the French authorities to expand the autonomy of the African colonies. The author disconnects her analysis from the political debates taking place at that time in Africa. While it is true that the French-African deputies based in Paris promoted the idea of African autonomy in the framework of the French-African double federal system, such a reformist agenda was rarely shared by political leaders, trade unionists, and activists in West Africa who more openly supported the full independence from France.17 The intellectual debate on the

17 Charles-Robert Ageron et Marc Michel, eds., L’Afrique noire française: l’heure des indépendances. Actes du colloque: ‘La France et les indépendances des pays d’Afrique noire et de Madagascar.’ Aix-en-Provence, 22-29 avril 1990 (Paris: CNRS, 1992); Elisabeth Schmidt. “Cold War In Guinea: The Rassemblement Démocratique Africain and The Struggle Over Communism, 1950–1958,” The Journal of African History 48:1 (2007): 95-121, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853707002551.

12 | Page H-Diplo Roundtable XXI-47 universality of the Church within the French-African Catholic networks – and particularly the students’ networks – might have echoed the intellectual and political debates on independence taking place in Africa at the same time. Such a broader perspective would have made more explicit the dilemma that African students and intellectuals in France faced as Catholics. It would also have highlighted the very limits of the Vatican’s ‘reformism’ and the disconnection of the French Church from the concrete aspirations of local societies. A future study could move the attention away from the French-African elites to tell the story of this intense intellectual debate from the perspective of the French-African believers. It would be a fascinating continuation of the work that Elisabeth Foster and Giuliana Chamedes initiated five years ago.18

To conclude, these points should not diminish my deep appreciation of Foster’s contribution to the scholarship on the French-African relations and the history of the Catholic Church during the decolonization period. On 2 March 2020, the Vatican made available the archives of the pontificate of Pius XII (1939-1958). This collection covers almost the entire period analyzed in the book. The book itself will undoubtedly constitute the inspiration for those who will travel to Rome to explore the newly available sources. Elizabeth Foster will certainly be one of them. I am looking forward to her next books.

18 Giuliana Chamedes and Elizabeth A. Foster, “Decolonization and Religion in the French Empire,” French Politics, Culture & Society 33:2 (1 June 2015): 1-10, https://doi.org/10.3167/fpcs.2015.330201.

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Review by Jacob K. Olupona, Harvard University

lizabeth Foster’s African Catholic tracks significant transformations in the Catholic Church during the 1940’s, 50’s, and early 60’s and leading up to Vatican II in the Franco-African Catholic world (i.e. France and its African territories). The book considers key figures both from France and Africa and how they influenced and participated Ethrough their positions representing both the liberal and conservative sides of the divide. One side argued that the Church must rid itself of its baneful ties and involvement in colonialism, while the other side argued that the colonies were established and benefitted from a western civilization that they could only be rid of to their own detriment. The colonial legacy of the French and their significant sway over their territories is still a bone of contention to this day. Countries in Africa that were colonized by the French are still in the process of regaining their autonomy. The Catholic heritages they bear have been instrumental in restoring the balance between self-direction and the complications of colonial parentage. The first two chapters of the book lay out the political and intellectual contexts being studied in this volume, and the remaining chapters focus on key people and groups while questioning the events that contoured the Franco-African Catholic world during these years including the Second World War and the Vatican councils.

Foster’s argument contends that scholars have not paid adequate attention to the place and utility of Catholicism in the decolonization process. African Catholic therefore tracks, on the whole, how the African Catholic Church in the French territories moved towards semi-independence and autonomy in regards to the nature of the Church in formerly French- Catholic Africa, which rapidly developed in the 1950's, and into the independence era of the 1960’s. The role the Church played in ushering in independence for African countries is one that needs closer scholarly examination. In my brief review of this book, I would like to highlight a few central themes that are central to Foster’s argument that make it an important text for the contemporary moment.

First is the role of missionaries either in supporting or detracting the push against colonial occupation and domination in Franco-African territories. As Foster notes, there were indeed missionaries who feared that the Catholic future of Africa was in danger at this time, but it turned out European Catholicism would enter into decline and African Catholicism would thrive. As it endures now, too, African priests would be sent back to France to do the work of missions just as their counterparts had done in the 1940s and 50s. In my work, I have referred to this phenomenon as reverse missions.19 Whereas the Church became more prolific in the global south, its influence in the global north has dwindled. By 2050, there will be a billion Christians in Africa. France's clergy are in large part aging priests, and very few people in France are practicing Catholics. We are seeing European Catholic clergy increasingly staffed by Africans in Europe and America. It is a time of transformation in the Church, as evidenced by the 2013 election of Pope Francis who is a non-European bishop. This significant trend is of worthy note in the study of Global Christianities, and a book like this is useful for charting the history of its beginnings.

Second is the role of interdisciplinary engagement for scholars of religion and history. Foster’s book exemplifies the importance of bringing in different disciplines to explore religious events. Her book engages and brings together several different fields of study, including political, social, and intellectual history and their intersection with the domain of religion. As a documentation of the history of missions and missionaries, the events of this book are key to scholarly research. The interactions between missionaries and local clergy people mediated the impact of religion, its performance, money, and education, and the diplomatic relations between France and Francophone African countries. The findings represented in this book explicate how the aforementioned elements determined in many ways how Africans came to know Catholicism and the way in which French Catholics came to understand and know Africans and Africa.

19 Jacob K. Olupona, “The Changing Face of African Christianity: Reverse Mission in Transnational Perspectives,” in Mojúbàolú Olúfúnké Okome and Olufemi Vaughan, eds., Transnational Africa and Globalization (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011): 179-194.

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Additionally, as Foster explains in this volume, Catholicism was a key link between France and its colonies, and scholars have not paid sufficient attention to this defining aspect of the European legacy of colonization, especially those outside the Church. The Church was often used not only as an instrument of domination, but also of indoctrination of African peoples into European culture, traditions, and religions at the expense of their own local religious practices. The legacy of colonial and Christian influence, particularly as it pertains to its erasure of African indigenous systems and cultures is a crucial aspect of the colonizer and colonized relationship that delineates how Christianity was complicit in suppressing African religiosity. In the recent past, scholars have given more attention to African Christians as those that are/were "collaborators" in the colonial enterprise, along with a focus on nationalism as the rejection of colonial projects, and not on African Christians themselves.20 Moreover, the role of religion in cementing the ideas of négritude and black internationalism has been overlooked, perhaps due to certain biases that present the Pan African project as a failed attempt at self-direction for African countries.

Last is the continued presence of the French colonial legacy on Francophone African nations. For years to come there would be deep French influence through education or schools in Africa and resources flowed from France to Africa for some time, as well as personnel for funding missions and other endeavors. These sometimes precipitated political crises, such as in 1967 when President Sekou Touré expelled French missionaries, compelling Africans to fill in the gaps left by mission hospitals, schools, and, more importantly, in the creation of contextualized African churches that would usher in the era of African Christianity both indigenized and tailored to the African context.

All in all, African Catholic is an important book for investigating African Christianity in particular and Global Christianities overall. Foster examines how both the French and the Africans imagined a future for Catholicism early on, thus greatly influencing and accommodating the political, intellectual, and social developments that would lead to decolonization of the African church. The genealogical retelling of African Catholicism as laid out by Foster charts out the trajectory of Franco- African Christian relations and how they have changed the landscape of global Christianity and its scholarship and highlights how African Christianity became authentically “African.” It is my opinion that Foster’s book will invigorate conversations on the foundations of Catholic Christianity in Africa and contribute to arguments that demonstrate how beneficial African Catholics were in cementing Catholicism’s global reach.

20 Examples of such works are J.F Ade Ajayi, Christian Missions in Nigeria 1841-1891: The Making of a New Elite, Ibadan History Series (London: Longmans, 1965), and E .A Ayandele, The Missionary Impact on Modern Nigeria, Ibadan History Series (London: Longmans, 1966).

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Review by Charlotte Walker-Said, City University of New York

or the past several decades, academic historians have tended to emphasize the importance of ‘imagined communities’ that have linked geographically distinct people and imbued in them a sense of identity and belonging, even spurring individuals and groups to mass action.21 David Bell has referred to this phenomenon as the “global turn” in historical Fresearch, and he has rightly perceived that there has been a self-conscious effort to demonstrate not only how Western powers affected the world, but how the rest of the world affected the West.22 While recognizing the contributions of this “turn,” Bell takes historians to ask for perhaps over-applying what he calls a “controlling metaphor” in historical narratives that argue for the flow of ideas and practices back and forth in a constant flux of appropriation, transformation, and resistance between the center and the periphery: the network. Bell notes that the enormously difficult task of writing global history, and indeed, of bringing whole continents and nations together into a coherent story, falls prey to vague and abstract explanations of what precisely “networks” are—who belongs to them, who controls them, and what motivates their actions, and, more importantly, how relevant they are to change over time in different regions.23

In this historiographical landscape arrives Elizabeth Foster’s African Catholic: Decolonization and the Transformation of the Church, which makes sense of past human experience by examining one particular network in an updated, careful, and inventive fashion: the Catholic Church. Foster’s book notes that the Catholic Church is an institution, but that it has multiple and competing governing bodies, as well as competitive and singular leaders, members, and affiliates. In African Catholic, uniquely, the reader is immersed in a “network” that is not nebulous or vague, but has explicit leaders (clergy and the ecclesiastical hierarchy), members (baptized believers), official representatives and agents (missionaries, emissaries, and consuls), and ideological influencers (theologians). Foster convincingly demonstrates how this network shaped the Franco- African world in the last decade of the French colonial empire and the decade following its dissolution. With this book, then, Foster makes a significant contribution to global history in that she demonstrates clear evidence of global interconnectivity—not in terms of trade, exchanged goods, technological feats, or mass migration—but rather through the integrative mechanisms of shared faith in Jesus Christ and loyalty and service to the institution of the Catholic Church.24

As Foster states, this book is principally a history of “decolonization, black internationalism, and reform of the Catholic Church in the 1960s” (8). But it is also a sensitive collection of portraits of a range of European and African agents who struggled to influence and be constituted within the Catholic Church’s vision of humanity. Foster portrays three simultaneous processes/emerging movements: decolonization, negritude/black internationalism, and the reform of the Catholic Church, and she argues persuasively for the divisions and unstable alliances within the Church, state, and French and African society that shaped the slow-moving and oftentimes contradictory actions of their leaders and constituents. The book succeeds as a global history in part because it portrays the lives and work of the cosmopolitan individuals who completed the work of institutional change, ideological reorientation, and intellectual influence in the Catholic Church in

21 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Revised edition (New York: Verso, 2006); Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Nicholas Terpstra, ed., The Politics of Ritual Kinship: Confraternities and Social Order in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); S. Ilan Troen, Imagining Zion: Dreams, Designs, and Realities in a Century of Jewish Settlement: Dreams, Designs and Realities in a Century of Jewish Settlement (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).

22 David Bell, “This Is What Happens When Historians Overuse the Idea of the Network,” 25 October 2013, http://newrepublic.com/article/114709/world-connecting-reviewed-historians-overuse-network-metaphor.

23 Bell, “This Is What Happens…”

24 For discussions of what constitutes a contribution to global history, see Martin Thomas and Andrew Thompson, “Empire and Globalisation: From ‘High Imperialism’ to Decolonisation,” International History Review 36 (2014): 142-170, and Bruce Mazlish, “Comparing Global History to World History,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 28 (1998): 385-395.

16 | Page H-Diplo Roundtable XXI-47 the period of decolonization. Chapters two through five provide the richest examples of Foster as a historical portraitist— telling the stories of individuals in life. She demonstrates that through their scholarly production, dinner table conversations, letter chains, and assertive lobbying, Senegalese writers and Négritude intellectual founders Alioune Diop, Leopold Senghor, African Catholic students and seminarians, African bishops like Raymond-Marie Tchidimbo and Bernardin Gantin, and many others contributed to a Catholic modernity that developed Christianity in Africa and around the world from a missionary religion to a framework for liberation.

Throughout the book, Foster pays keen attention to the role of missionaries and indigenous priests in increasing global integration—particularly at a time when there were contradictory forces in the form of decolonization and the breaking apart of empires. How and why many members—particularly members from the Global South—sought integration in a moment of separation (decolonization) rather than dissolution or detachment is a fascinating investigation. In working to understand how white and black coreligionists perceived the underlying bonds of faith and the reciprocal benefits of tighter mutual inclusion, Foster parallels the recently published careful study by Frederick Cooper, who, in Citizenship Between Empire and Nation, also studies African and European leaders who seek both autonomy and membership in an expanded vision of an institution.25 Cooper argues that African political leaders sought degrees of autonomy but continued participation in a “Franco-African ensemble.”26 Foster demonstrates how African Catholic leaders sought integration but not assimilation into the Catholic Church’s global vision. Africans articulated their affirmation of the Church’s desire to consolidate its membership, but sought to influence the terms of this consolidation, i.e. to draw all members closer in the spirit of Christian brotherhood, fraternal love, and mutual cooperation, instead of simply closer in terms of doctrinal alignment, cultural assimilation, or the global acceptance of a western orientation of the church.

Foster’s book also uniquely makes real sense of global history by integrating a sense of the human experience within the “network.” In many ways, what motivated African priests, deacons, evangelists, and everyday believers to make claims on the Catholic Church was their experiences with racism, indignity, and exclusion by their white co-religionists. Africans’ recognition of the hypocrisy inherent in white Catholics’ actions and behaviors speaks to the depth of their belief in the concept of Christian universalism and the knowledge that they could and should make claims on the Catholic Church as members of the religious community.

But Foster also goes farther than this. She is also able to tease out from the archives such as those of the Congrégation du Saint Esprit (Holy Spirit Fathers) how racism felt to African Catholics—how their emotions, including shame and indignity, motivated their demands to which white institutions like missionary societies, fraternal religious orders, and the Vatican were compelled to listen. The richness of the archive material Foster uses provides these remarkable emotional insights, but she displays real talent in weaving them into the narrative and proving how Africans translated emotion into ideas and philosophies for crafting a more inclusive and anti-racist Church.

In all, it can be said that this book is one of the most compelling ‘global histories’ to emerge in recent memory. Foster demonstrates that the Catholic Church was not an ‘imagined world’ of interconnectivity; it was a real institution, with hierarchies, representatives, monumental structures, communities of believers, emissaries, leaders, and influencers that spanned the globe and were continually communicating with each other. In this book, Africa is not presented as a ‘peripheral’ space, but rather a central node of the network that motivated and influenced the process of reconsidering what Christian doctrine and ethics mean in the postcolonial world. Foster also notes that the very concepts of “core” and “periphery” are not only to be questioned by contemporary scholars. These concepts were questioned by Catholic believers throughout the world at the time of decolonization. The book’s final chapters provide an examination of the philosophical

25 Frederick Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945-1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).

26 Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation, 308.

17 | Page H-Diplo Roundtable XXI-47 debates surrounding ‘universalism’ at the highest levels of the Catholic Church and how decolonization and Africa’s numerous and influential constituents made their cases for a more ‘open’ Church, responsive to a modified culture of accepting Jesus Christ in localized contexts, with indigenized clergy and recognizably Christian and indigenous family and social practices. Foster demonstrates that opponents like ultraconservative Roman Catholic archbishop Marcel Lefebvre decried that this was a slide into “relativism,” (82) but Foster demonstrates how the decolonization moment paved the way for a reorientation of the Church away from absolutism and toward dialogue and engagement for mutual comprehension.

Imperial histories and global histories have made much of “circuits” and “networks”27 that were in many ways more nebulous systems without specific agents or leaders, but rather inchoate groups contributing to them. This book is rare in that it demonstrates a network that was formally institutionalized and in which there were Global North and Global South members, leaders, and verifiable participants. This network created tangible circuits—i.e. movements of Africans and French between Africa and the metropole to study, evangelize, and train; and circulations of theology, philosophy, and other ideas between mentors and students, clerical superiors and acolytes, missionaries and seminarians. This is not imperial or global history that uses spatial metaphors. These ‘linkages’ (another commonly used term) are tangible. Few have done as well in bringing the metropole and colony into a single frame of analysis.

27 Gareth Curless, Stacey Hynd, Temilola Alanamu, and Katherine Roscoe, “Editors’ Introduction: Networks in Imperial History,” Journal of World History 26:4 (2015): 705-732. See also Bell, “This Is What Happens…”

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Response by Elizabeth Foster, Tufts University

irst of all, I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to Alice Conklin, Philip Jenkins, Anna Konieczna, Jacob Olupona, and Charlotte Walker-Said for taking the time to engage critically and creatively with my book. It is a great honor and a privilege to be part of a scholarly conversation with distinguished colleagues whose work I respect and admire.F I would also like to thank Frank Gerits, Diane Labrosse, and the team at H-Diplo for putting together this forum and guiding it to publication. In what follows I would like to say a bit more about the scholarly journey that resulted in this book, comment on some of the critiques raised by the reviewers, and reflect on new avenues for research.

African Catholic germinated from queries I had about religion at the end of European colonial rule in Africa. As Alice Conklin notes in her introduction, my first book examined the complex relationships between French Catholic missionaries, Africans they sought to convert, and French administrative authorities in Senegal between 1880 and 1940.28 In the context of nineteenth and twentieth century French empire building, historians have focused on the question of whether bitter acrimony between church and state in the metropole extended to the colonies, and whether missionaries were ‘handmaidens’ of colonial rule.29 Did missionaries further the cause of the colonial state alongside that of the church? Did their religious undertakings pave the way for colonial exploitation? Or, conversely, did they defend subject peoples from state depredations? Finally, how did converts mobilize missions and use new religious affiliations to contest or to accommodate colonial rule?

As I examined these questions in the colonial period, I started to wonder about the trajectories of Catholic missions and their African adherents after the end of formal European political control. What happened to missions and churches when the French colonial state left, especially since French Catholic personnel remained on the ground in large numbers after independence? Indeed, when Guinea became the first French colony in sub-Saharan Africa to accede to independence in 1958, there was not a single African archbishop in the vast French African territories. Yet change happened, and it happened quickly: just two generations later, as Philip Jenkins points out, Catholicism had become a galloping force in Africa, while it simultaneously waned in Europe. As Jacob Olupona emphasizes, the flow of clergy has entirely reversed from colonial times—now African priests come in the hundreds to occupy vacant pulpits in France and staff missionary congregations of European origin. How then, did the Catholic missions in Africa disentangle themselves from the colonial order in the postwar period? And was Catholicism itself—the actual faith—“decolonized?” If so, how, and by whom? As Jenkins and Jacob Olupona both observe in their reviews, there has been relatively little analysis of these questions in the context of French Africa, particularly in English, though France’s huge territories on the continent bristled with Catholic missions. As I delved into missionary archives, it became increasingly clear to me that there was a very important story to relate, and a giant void to start to fill.

This brings me to the scope of the book, something which Jenkins, Charlotte Walker-Said, and Anna Konieczna all take up in their reviews. In my very first imaginings of the project, I considered a comparative study across French and British Africa, but ultimately concluded that such an approach would preclude the kind of meticulous archival work I wanted to undertake in the understudied French context. As Jenkins emphasizes, therefore, my book focuses squarely on the French political sphere, and does not pull in the francophone Belgian Congo, nor developments in lusophone or anglophone

28 Elizabeth A. Foster, Faith in Empire: Religion, Politics, and Colonial Rule in French Senegal, 1880–1940 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018).

29 For scholarship in this vein that concerns francophone Africa and Madagascar see Joseph-Roger de Benoist, Église et pouvoir colonial au Soudan français: administrateurs et missionnaires dans la boucle du Niger (1885-1945) (Paris: Karthala, 1987); Gérard Vieira, Sous le signe du laïcat: documents pour l’histoire de l’Église catholique en Guinée (Dakar: Presses de l’Imprimerie Saint-Paul, 1992); J. P. Daughton, An Empire Divided: Religion, Republicanism, and the Making of French Colonialism, 1880-1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Aylward Shorter, Cross and Flag in Africa: The “White Fathers” during the Colonial Scramble (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2006).

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Africa.30 This reflects my historical training and expertise on France and its empire, as well as the kind of book I wanted to write: a fine-grained, archivally driven history that would bring people and situations to life for readers across the boundaries of metropole and colony. I maintain, however, that the Franco-African Catholic story I relate is a singularly compelling one, and that it had outsized effects on the global church. It strikes me as particularly intriguing that Alioune Diop, one of the most important African intellectuals and one of the most influential Catholic intellectuals of the twentieth century, and Marcel Lefebvre, the most vocal Catholic traditionalist of the postwar period, emerged together from the French colonial African context and took their respective viewpoints to the Vatican and a global public in the era of decolonization and beyond.

At the outset of my research, I thought that I would orient the book geographically within the French sphere, delving deeply into the situation in various locales: Guinea, where independence leader Sékou Touré attacked the church as a bastion of colonialism; Senegal and Mali, where the Church grappled with the dominance of Islam; and areas where rates of conversion were high, such as Dahomey, Togo, Gabon, or Cameroon. Once I was in the archives, however, it became clear to me that the work would be best organized around constituencies and conversations in a discernible Franco-African Catholic world that crossed boundaries of metropole and colony and that was knit together by faith, circuits of Catholic education, missionary organizations, a francophone Catholic press, and charitable endeavors—what Walker-Said refers to as a network. This means, of course, that while the book covers a wide geographic span, it is not encyclopedic in its reporting of developments in every corner of French Africa. Nor, as Konieczna points out, do I chart Catholic reactions to every political development in the decolonization of the French empire, though I do not fully agree that I treat the Algerian War in a dismissive manner. In fact, I try to show how the war in Algeria sparked radical activism among African Catholic students, and how it was a central topic in French theological debates about colonization and decolonization.31

I would like to conclude my response by suggesting some ways forward—most of them inspired by my generous readers. Konieczna’s review suggests that future inquiries could expand our understanding of decolonization of the French empire and postcolonial Franco-African relations. Attention to Catholicism, one of the most important sites of institutional and affective ties between French and African people during the colonial era, highlights the fact that much of the scholarship on decolonization in sub-Saharan Africa has been narrowly confined to the realm of French and African political parties and their maneuverings. There are other institutions and imaginative spaces which deserve close attention in this period of transition, and which might alter prevailing understandings of decolonization. For one example, I would cite the military, another French-led institution which incorporated tens of thousands of Africans in its ranks in the colonial period. When the transition to independence occurred, military career trajectories both in France and in Africa were interrupted and reframed, but links did not disappear overnight—indeed, they persisted for decades to come, and had a variety of outcomes, including ongoing French military missions and engagements in Africa, and debates over pensions and the meaning of service. In my view, despite some excellent scholarship in this domain, there is much more to be done to elucidate a social, intellectual, and political history of military transitions that would shed additional light on Franco-African relations during and after formal political decolonization.32

Meanwhile, in the realm of Catholic Church history, there is a need for more in-depth analysis of the Papacy’s approach to Africa at mid-century, which should be greatly aided by Pius XII’s newly opened archives. To what extent, if at all, did Pius

30 As Jenkins notes, the lusophone story of African Catholicism has been even more neglected than the French, though Eric Morier-Genoud has just published a welcome addition with his Catholicism and the Making of Politics in Central Mozambique, 1940-1986 (London: Boydell and Brewer, 2019).

31 For a thorough examination of French Catholic and Protestant positions on the Algerian War, see Darcie Fontaine, Decolonizing Christianity: Religion and the End of Empire in France and Algeria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

32 For important interventions see Gregory Mann, Native Sons: West African Veterans and France in the Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006) and Ruth Ginio, The French Army and its African Soldiers: The Years of Decolonization (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017).

20 | Page H-Diplo Roundtable XXI-47 grasp that the future of the Church would lie in its mission fields outside of Europe? And then there persist questions about what connects the period I examine to the present day. In the book, I argue that the years between the end of the Second World War in 1945 and the close of Vatican II in 1965 set the table for the extraordinary growth of Catholicism in Africa in later years. It is hard to imagine the subsequent trajectory without the reorientation accomplished in those two decades, which owed much to African Catholic activists like Alioune Diop. Yet that does not mean that the 1970s, 1980s and beyond saw linear progress to the current state of affairs. Subsequent research I have done in the past year suggests that even by the mid-1970s Diop himself felt that the Church still had a lot more work to do to be truly hospitable to Africans. So there is still more to be done to elucidate the full story of the evolution of African Catholicism both within the francophone African sphere and beyond it, and to put Catholic developments in conversation with those in Protestant contexts across the continent.

To take an even broader lens, however, there is also the issue of how the African story fits into a global view of Catholicism in the twentieth century. One question that I have been asked repeatedly in recent months is how the African Catholic story I have told relates to the development of liberation theology in Latin America. Was there any specific link that can be traced through actual contact between Africans and Latin American Catholic activists? Or were activists in Latin America simply responding to widely shared global impulses in ways that reflected their own experience of the place of the church in their societies?

I do not pretend to be an expert on liberation theology or on Latin America, and I defer entirely to those who are. My one observation on this score is that I have been struck by multiple French connections between Africa and Latin America that I have come across accidentally in my work. To name three: Gustavo Gutierrez, the Peruvian Dominican who famously articulated the movement’s ethos in Teología de la liberación; perspectivas, studied in Belgium and in Lyon, France in the 1950s, just at the time when theological questions about colonization and decolonization were being debated in the French church.33 At that time, Lyon was the headquarters of the Dominican Louis Lebret, who founded the group Economie et humanisme, and subsequently served as a close advisor to Prime Minister Mamadou Dia in Senegal and then worked extensively on problems of development in Latin America. Lebret, who espoused a Catholic vision of development for the Third World, was a major influence behind Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Populorum Progressio.34 And imagine my surprise and curiosity when the French Jesuit Pierre Bigo, who turns up in my book in the 1950s hubbub over whether the sixteenth- century teachings of Spanish theologian Francisco de Vitoria supported colonization or decolonization, appeared in 1960s Chile in the pages of a doctoral dissertation that I evaluated in 2018.35 Clearly, there is much more to be said about transnational networks of Catholics at mid-century, and about the international migration of ideas and persons through fraternities like the Dominicans and the Jesuits.

Finally, I have been criticized elsewhere, though not here, for the fact that my book is populated largely, though not exclusively, by French and European men. This stems from the fact, of course, that the Catholic Church was and is a patriarchal institution in which women cannot join the clergy or rise to central leadership roles. This outcome was also a consequence of my decision to focus my archival research on the male missionary groups who oversaw evangelism and controlled the episcopal seats in the various territories of French sub-Saharan Africa. As I note in my introduction to the book, there is much more to be done to bring African women into the story of African Catholicism in the era of decolonization. African nuns and laywomen were key actors in their communities, even if they were theoretically

33 Gustavo Gutiérrez, Teología de la liberacíon; perspectivas (Lima: CEP, 1971).

34 On Lebret’s Catholic development ideas in the context of decolonization, see Giuliana Chamedes, “The Catholic Origins of Economic Development after World War II” in French Politics, Culture & Society 33:2: 55-75. For the encyclical (published in 1967, a year after Lebret’s death) see http://w2.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi_enc_26031967_populorum.html.

35 Luz María Díaz de Valdés, “Blessing the Revolution: Leftist Christians in Chile, 1957-1973” Ph.D. Dissertation: Tufts University, 2018.

21 | Page H-Diplo Roundtable XXI-47 subordinate to male clergy. There is a concomitant need to blend more bottom-up developments with the picture I present of shifting perspectives among clergy, in the church hierarchy, and in elite intellectual circles, particularly in the francophone sphere. One compelling model of scholarship that examines gender and Christianity in the African context, both in terms of femininity and of masculinity, and gives a closely-researched portrayal of developments on the ground, is Walker-Said’s own Faith, Power and Family: Christianity and Social Change in French Cameroon.36 It deals primarily with the interwar period, but holds fruitful lessons for those would study later times.

In conclusion, I would like to reiterate my thanks to all of the reviewers for their close attention to my work. I feel very fortunate and humbled that colleagues of their stature took the time to share their thoughts about it. I am most grateful for their effort and for their wisdom.

36 Charlotte Walker-Said, Faith, Power and Family: Christianity and Social Change in French Cameroon (Oxford: James Currey, 2018).

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