Elizabeth A. Foster - African Catholic: Decolonization and the Transformation of the Church

I T WAS PRECISELY WHAT the Vatican had long feared might happen in French sub-Saharan Africa: an acrimonious divorce between metropole and colony that jeopardized Catholic interests. In 1958, Guinea became the first, and at that time the only, French Overseas Territory in sub-Saharan Africa to accede to independence. Its citizens, both inspired and coerced by their charismatic leader Skou Tour, voted overwhelmingly in a referendum to reject membership in the French Community, Charles de Gaulles replacement for the French Union that accorded member territories more sovereignty under a French umbrella.

In the aftermath of this bitter exchange of blows, Tour and his allies in the Democratic Party of Guinea (PDG) assumed a hostile stance toward the Catholic missions in Guinea, which they accused of complicity in French colonialism. From their perspective, it was an easy case to make. The missions, which catered to a small African Catholic population and ran over seventy schools throughout the country, were still almost exclusively staffed by white French men and women, despite efforts to train more local clergy. In 1958, there were seventy-nine European priests in Guinea and only six Guinean clergymen, while sixty-two European nuns labored alongside seventeen Guinean sisters. The missions were thus vulnerable to Tours onslaught, and church officials, who feared Tour was a communist at heart, fretted that he would inspire other emerging African leaders to mount similar attacks.

The archbishops of French Africa, 1958. From right to left: Joseph Cucherousset, CSSp, archbishop of Bangui; Michel Bernard, CSSp, archbishop of Brazzaville; Jean-Baptiste Boivin, SMA, archbishop of Abidjan; mile Socquet, MAfr, archbishop of Ouagadougou; Louis Parisot, SMA, archbishop of Cotonou; Ren Graffin, CSSp, archbishop of Yaound; Marcel Lefebvre, CSSp, archbishop of Dakar and apostolic delegate to French Africa; Grard de Milleville, CSSp, archbishop of Conakry; Joseph-Paul Strebler, SMA, archbishop of Lom; Pierre Leclerc, MAfr, archbishop of Bamako; Victor Sartre, SJ, archbishop of Tananarive. From Horizons africains, no. 102 (May 1958): 1. Courtesy of ACSSp.

In the years that followed, Skou Tour repeatedly found the Catholic Church to be a useful political scapegoat, as well as a source of the conspiracies he increasingly imagined, or pretended to imagine, around him. This Calvary of the Catholic Church in independent Guinea turned out to be both painful and protracted.

Guinea offers the most dramatic example of a new African state targeting the Catholic Church as a bastion of colonialism in the former French colonies of sub-Saharan Africa. Yet Skou Tour did not have a monopoly on scathing views of the churchs role in French Africa in the turbulent years just before and after independencesome French observers attacked it for the exact opposite reason. In 1956, Franois Mjan, a French Protestant lawyer and civil servant with socialist ties, expertise in religious questions, and administrative experience in Africa, published a lengthy article in Lanne politique et conomique entitled Lglise catholique et la France dOutre-Mer.

Mjans criticism of the Catholic Church cannot be ascribed to his Protestantism; in fact, he accused Protestant missions in French Africa of pursuing similar policies.

Despite the hysterical edge to his arguments, Mjan was no quixotic voice in the wilderness. His book was widely reviewed and debated in a host of Catholic and Protestant periodicals, mainstream French press organs, and prominent media outlets abroad, including Der Spiegel and Time magazine.

Thus, while Mjan and like-minded French people felt that the church was forsaking a generous French civilizing mission in Africa at midcentury, Skou Tour believed it was perpetuating a harmful one. Though Mjan and Tour probably never crossed paths, their contrasting perspectives comprise a virtual conversation about the historic role and the future of the Catholic Church in Africa at midcentury. The church found itself at a crossroads in the postwar period, as the inhabitants of its vast mission fields in Africa began to question and reject European political and cultural dominance. Taken together, Tours and Mjans views illustrate the delicacy of the Vaticans position at the end of French rule in Africa. On the one hand, the church was attacked by Africans, including a bevy of devout Catholics, for being Eurocentric, insensible to African culture, and too often personified by racist French missionaries who looked down upon fellow African believers. On the other hand, critics such as Mjan and conservative French clergy felt that church attempts to make Catholicism more attractive to Africans constituted a betrayal of France, of Western civilization, and of the legions of French missionaries who had made sacrifices and continued to work to anchor it in African soil in the first place.