THE African Catholics who welcomed Pope Paul to their continent last week are among the newest and the oldest Christians in the world. In Egypt, Alexandria had a colony of Christians at the time of the Apostles, and it became a prominent center of early Christian scholarship. The great 4th century church father, St. Augustine, was bishop of Hippo in what is now Tunisia. Yet North African Christianity was virtually erased by the massive Moslem invasions that swept across the northern part of the continent in the 7th and 8th centuries; only the churches of Ethiopia and Egypt survived. Even today, Islam remains the largest religion in Africa, claiming almost one-third of the continent's 300 million people.
Below the Sahara, Arab traders and slavers established footholds for Mohammedanism in East and West Africa. But Portuguese sailors of Prince Henry the Navigator also dutifully carried Catholic missionaries with them on their 15th century voyages along the coast of Africa; King Nzinga of the Congo became a Catholic a year before Columbus discovered America. The ebb and flow of colonial fortunes kept the coastal missions weak, but a start had been made. Finally, spurred on by both imperialism and the new humanitarianism of the 19th century, missionaries penetrated the interior.
The new Christians, whether Catholic or Protestant,* were asked to give up many of their tribal cultural traditions. Not only were the most dehumanizing practices proscribed—ritual murder, human sacrifice, slavery—but also many other institutions that were an intricate part of the fabric of communal life. Polygamy was almost universally forbidden. The ancestor cult, a belief that the dead remained a part of the village and should help control its life, was discredited. Ritual dances and chants, ritual drinking, even the traditional and critical rites of passage—ceremonies marking birth, death, puberty, marriage—were treated as lapses into heathenism. Though the tribesman believed deeply in the evil that could be wrought by black magic, and felt he needed charms to resist it, Christianity derided his fears; Catholicism offered him little more in the way of protection than holy water and the Latin ritual. Yet the convert cherished the idea that a Christian had a kind of magic of his own: he was "a good man." Even though a Christian in a bush parish today may have violated church law by taking more than one wife, he will still busy himself with parish affairs, support the church generously, and probably be recognized for his kindness and charity.