TY - JOUR
AU - Gamble, Harry
AB - Whereas the subject of decolonization has often been approached through the lenses of politics and emerging nation-states, Elizabeth A. Foster’s recently published book, African Catholic: Decolonization and the Transformation of the Church, examines the end of empire through the novel prism of the “Franco-African Catholic world.” By the middle of the twentieth century, that world was being rocked by questions, anxieties, hopes, and transformations. For actors navigating this dense historical moment, the outcomes of these transformations were anything but preordained. African Catholic succeeds masterfully at probing the uncertainties and high stakes of competing efforts to shape the future of the Catholic Church in the midst of decolonization. The intertwined histories of Catholic missionary activities and French colonial rule have been brought into much sharper focus in recent years, thanks to a spate of insightful studies. As these studies have made clear, church-state relations in the French Empire often proved very complicated. Although punctuated by moments of comity, such as during the First World War, these relationships were frequently marked by major tensions and misunderstandings resulting from the overlapping but ultimately divergent projects of colonization and evangelization. Whereas other studies have tended to examine these tensions in the context of colonial expansion or high colonialism, African Catholic skillfully leads us through a later period extending from World War II through decolonization. This fresh terrain holds many surprises. Church-state relations in French Africa improved significantly during and after World War II, as plans for colonial development came to depend more heavily on Catholic contributions, especially in the areas of education and heath care. French authorities made big claims about new development programs and the progress they would soon bring to local communities. And yet short-staffed colonial administrations and their thinly spread schools and health-care facilities often appeared woefully incapable of meeting raised expectations without outside help. Many Catholic priests and prelates responded with satisfaction when France’s new Investment Fund for the Economic and Social Development of the Overseas Territories (FIDES) began directing unprecedented sums of state money toward Christian—and predominantly Catholic—entities. For some, all of this could seem like a belated affirmation of the place of Catholicism within France’s “civilizing mission.” By demonstrating the centrality of these partnerships, Foster complicates accounts of postwar colonial development, which have usually foregrounded state initiatives. As African Catholic clearly shows, the full embrace of Catholic contributions at the end of the war and during the Fourth Republic also reflected other strategic considerations and particularly the desire of French authorities to limit international “intrusions” into French-controlled territories. Authorities in French Africa and in Paris worried extensively about potential interventions by organizations connected with the United Nations. At the same time, French officials also feared that well-funded American Protestant missionaries were positioning themselves to make new inroads into “Overseas France.” If colonial authorities sought to forge new partnerships with Catholic structures on the ground, it was partly because the latter were largely run by French personnel. This very fact led to the frequent conflation of “French” and “Catholic” across the many territories of French Africa. Foster explores this conflation at considerable length, revealing both its salience and also its eventual weakening. While examining shifting relations between Catholic actors and the colonial state, Foster is ultimately more concerned with contests that took place among Catholics. Readers might have benefitted from a fuller conceptual discussion of “the Franco-African Catholic world.” While the general meaning of this framework is clear, its reach, gaps, and forms of connectivity are not the subject of much detailed commentary. However this is just a quibble. Much more striking are the commanding ways in which Foster moves around the Franco-African Catholic world as she examines the questions, debates, and tensions that accompanied decolonization. After assessing the new optimism that many Catholic leaders felt immediately after the war, Foster moves on to explore—in even greater depth—the uncertainties that spread along with decolonization. Many established church officials came to believe that the window for Catholic expansion was closing and that bold action needed to be taken to evangelize quickly before a less favorable political order was ushered in. Despite this sense of impending change, much of the Catholic leadership in French Africa did not call for dramatic new efforts to train African priests. As the period of decolonization was opening up, the number of Africans within the clergy remained astonishingly small. As late as 1952, French West Africa, French Equatorial Africa, French Togo, and French Cameroon had a combined total of just 180 African clergy members. By contrast, the number of European—and largely French—clergy stood at 1,096 (156). Although aware of these glaring imbalances, French Catholic officials initially seemed more focused on dispatching new contingents of metropolitan priests to mission fields in Africa. As Foster explains, an important gap had opened up between Catholic leaders in France and French Africa and those at the Vatican, who called more urgently for the training and promotion of African priests and prelates before decolonization had run its course. In some ways, the array of actors who populate the pages of African Catholic defy easy categorization. Rather than trying to pin down particular figures, Foster often prefers to explore their hesitations and multidimensionality as they struggled to chart their courses through rapidly changing times. And yet we can nonetheless discern broad orientations, which both organized and divided the Franco-African Catholic world near the middle of the twentieth century. In many cases, more conservative church officials and priests had developed their outlooks during the interwar period, when colonialism had been particularly ascendant. As we see in telling detail, these men often struggled to come to terms with the encroaching realities of decolonization. Such figures could be found within the three missionary societies most active in the territories of French Africa: the Fathers of the Holy Spirit (the Spiritans), the Society of African Missions (the Fathers of Lyon), and the Society of the Missionaries of Africa (the White Fathers). The Vatican’s official delegates to the African territories under French control also frequently hewed to more conservative positions. Moving freely around the Franco-African Catholic world, Foster also takes careful stock of the interventions of key church officials in France and at the Vatican. We see, for example, how leaders of the Propaganda Fide, the Vatican entity devoted to evangelism, frequently struggled to accept, let alone endorse, clear moves toward decolonization. Such hesitations also permeated the pronouncements of Pope Pius XII, whose long tenure overlapped with most of the period of decolonization. While helping readers to discern many competing voices, Foster returns frequently to the interventions of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who was appointed as the Vatican’s official delegate for all of French Africa in 1948. Lefebvre repeatedly inveighed against “premature” moves toward decolonization, which in his view could only lead to civilizational regression and harder times for Catholicism. Eschewing interconfessional dialogue, Lefebvre did not hesitate to portray Islam as a deleterious force, whose spread would invariably prepare for the way for communism, authoritarianism, and diminished human personhood. Although some of his more bigoted statements eventually touched off large protests, Lefebvre managed to retain his position as the highest-ranking Catholic official in French Africa all the way until 1959. But while much of the church establishment struggled to reconcile itself to decolonization, Foster devotes half of her study to Catholic leaders who saw new opportunities in the end of empire. These figures worked proactively to open up Catholic teachings, practices, and power structures to the rapidly changing world. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, leading African Catholic figures were still refining their messages, and there was no guarantee that their calls would be heard by the European-dominated church. In many ways, African Catholics had to first build an infrastructure that could support and amplify new exchanges and emerging schools of thought. Founded in 1947, the upstart journal and publishing house Présence Africaine quickly developed into a core part of this infrastructure. Foster builds an entire chapter around Alioune Diop, the Senegalese convert to Catholicism who presided over the founding, development, and activism of Présence Africaine. Despite his erstwhile prominence, Diop has continued to receive rather selective attention from scholars. If Diop enters into many accounts of postwar negritude, his Catholic activism is often downplayed or elided altogether. Taking a different approach, Foster sets out to explore the interwoven nature of Diop’s campaigns for decolonization, negritude, and a revitalized and more inclusive Catholicism. Like so many actors featured in this book, but perhaps even more so, Diop worked along the junctures of various worlds. He was a Catholic convert from the largely Muslim territory of Senegal, an African Catholic leader in a faith still dominated by Europeans, and a Black African sojourner in an overwhelmingly white metropole that had scarcely begun to adjust to the presence of citizens from the overseas territories. In many ways, these tensions helped Diop to become an unparalleled mediator and interpreter as well as a pioneering champion of a “Catholic negritude.” By focusing much of her attention on Diop, Foster inevitably moves her analytic lens away from other prominent actors, such as Léopold Sédar Senghor. But although much more could be said of Senghor’s role as a shaper of the Franco-African Catholic world, Foster ultimately makes a bigger intervention in the historical literature by highlighting the engagement of the less-studied Diop. The leader of Présence Africaine worked tirelessly to promote a Catholicism that would be open to and enriched by African cultural practices and spiritual inflections. Diop insisted that these African infusions would help the Catholic Church move away from the constraints of colonialism and European cultural hegemony, toward a truer, more universal future. Diop’s calls for a more universal Catholic Church that clearly aligned itself with the struggle against colonialism found powerful echoes, especially among the growing numbers of African students who had found their way to metropolitan France. Although Catholicism remained a minority religion in all the territories of French Africa, Catholics were overrepresented within these developing student communities. Studies of African student activism in metropolitan France have tended to highlight the Federation of Black African Students in France (FEANF), which in many ways occupied a vanguard position in the struggle for decolonization. But as Foster convincingly argues, such a focus has often obscured the important roles played by African Catholic students. The latter were pulled in uncomfortable ways, as they tried to live their faith, which was still frequently associated with France and Europe, while also working to bring about a new, independent Africa. However, tensions of this sort did not keep prominent African Catholic student leaders, such as Joseph Ki-Zerbo, from taking their pointed calls for decolonization and a more inclusive Catholic Church directly to the church hierarchy in France and all the way to the Vatican. Channeling mounting pressures for decolonization, Catholic African students staged a number of public events within the Holy See. As the book’s title suggests, African Catholic emphasizes the decisive influence that Africans had on new currents of Catholic reformism. This influence clearly shaped the changing outlook of Father Joseph Michel, the chaplain who had been appointed to minister to African Catholic students in Paris. Spurred on by his persuasive “charges,” Michel eventually felt compelled to give a 1954 lecture assertively titled “The Duty to Decolonize.” Michel’s efforts to build a theological case for decolonization led not to quick victory but to protracted sparring with more conservative Catholic figures. Over the centuries, Catholic theologians had written surprisingly little on the subjects of colonialism and decolonization; these increasingly problematic silences now fed hesitations and feuds among European Catholic leaders struggling to find their way forward. As was so clearly the case with Michel, African Catholics often stepped in to provide needed guidance. Some of this guidance emanated from the new cohort of African prelates that took shape during the period of decolonization. When he was appointed as the apostolic prefect for the Casamance region of Senegal on the eve of World War II, the Senegalese priest Joseph Faye appeared as a lonely exception within the Catholic hierarchy in French Africa. It was not until the mid-1950s that the Vatican showed a new determination to appoint Africans to leadership positions. Although appointed belatedly, these prelates would go on to play outsize roles, negotiating transitions toward decolonization and African independence. Nowhere was this more striking than in Guinea, which had wrested its independence from France in late 1958. After leading Guinea to independence, the nation’s new head of state, Sékou Touré, went on to practice a highly personal blend of anticolonialism, leftism, nationalism, and authoritarianism. Touré’s regime quickly tightened the vices on the Catholic Church in Guinea, which remained predominately French run. By pressing for the rapid Africanization of the Catholic Church in Guinea, Touré precipitated disarray among French priests and prelates. It was in this tense context that Raymond-Marie Tchidimbo, a Guinean priest, emerged as the de facto leader of the country’s Catholic community. Tchidimbo would eventually be ensnared by Touré’s authoritarian regime—to the point of spending over eight years in prison—but not before he had interceded to guide the local Catholic Church through much of the turbulence and uncertainty of decolonization. A telling photograph selected as the cover illustration for African Catholic shows a confident Tchidimbo seated next to an equally self-assured Touré as the two men celebrated the former’s consecration as archbishop of Conakry in 1962. By carefully examining the intercessions of Tchidimbo and others, Foster shows just how influential African Catholics were in helping the church to reimagine and reorient itself at mid-century. After painstakingly exploring the complex and shifting landscapes of the Franco-African Catholic world during the period of decolonization, Foster is able to project an illuminating light on the origins and opening moments of the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II). Written with exceptional poignancy, the book’s conclusion invites readers to appreciate the emerging positions of Pope John XXIII, whose accession to the papacy in 1958 had produced a palpable but still largely unformulated reformist spirit. As he worked to collect his thoughts just prior to the opening of Vatican II in late 1962, Pope John XXIII confided that the council would focus especially on “the church of the poor” and that Africa loomed large in his thoughts. But if Pope John XXIII helped to nurture shifting outlooks at the Vatican, the latter were also inspired to no small degree by a broad array of African actors. For the first time, an African delegation was poised to take part in the deliberations of a church council. The sixty-one African prelates present for the opening of the first session of Vatican II worked in unified fashion to help shape developing discussions. Less constrained than their European counterparts by the past and the weight of Catholic tradition, these African delegates could approach the future more openly. Although they coalesced only progressively and are still works in progress today, moves to open the church to local cultures and languages and a broader variety of spiritual practices had many of their roots in struggles for decolonization. The same was true of accompanying efforts to imagine and fashion a more inclusive and more tolerant Catholic universalism that could look confidently into the future. Although far from clear at the middle of the twentieth century, the Catholic Church ultimately did find ways to transition to the postcolonial era. Africa continues to be an integral part of that success. As the ranks of the faithful have thinned out in France and in much of Europe, and as the ordination of new European priests has slowed, sometimes to a trickle, African believers and clergy have stepped in not only to fill gaps but also to continue imagining and building the church of the future. © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Elizabeth A. Foster. African Catholic: Decolonization and the Transformation of the Church.
JO - The American Historical Review
DO - 10.1093/ahr/rhab062
DA - 2021-03-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/elizabeth-a-foster-african-catholic-decolonization-and-the-NHb9HSaHu7
SP - 245
EP - 248
VL - 126
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -