Maxwell, David. "Christianity", in The Oxford Handbook of Modern African History, edited by John Parker and Richard Reid. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Maxwell, David. "Christianity", in The Oxford Handbook of Modern African History, edited by John Parker and Richard Reid. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

• The first active missionary activity in Africa since the conversion of Ethiopia in Late Antiquity was the conversion of King Alfonso I of Kongo to Catholicism in 1483. This success reflected the efforts of individual missionaries and the character of King Alfonso more than any structured Portuguese initiative, and Christianity spread throughout Kongo via native elites connected to the court rather than foreign missionary work (263-264).
• Christian missionaries during the active imperial and colonial period beginning in the mid-1800s often had imperial sympathies, and brought along modern medicine, Western education, and the conventions upon which the larger imperial state would eventually rest (266).
• By the mid-1910s, Protestant missionary work in African had begun to be less imperialist than at the outset of the 20th Century, and begin accepting local customs and ideas as legitimate and worthy of preservation. This policy attracted both praise and criticism, including from W.E.B. du Bois, who argued that it preventing African advancement (267).
• Missionary work in Africa was continued into the present, with a decline following decolonization picking back up again in the 1980s with the expansion of American evangelical and pentecostal missions in Africa (268).
• Missionaries in Africa had an immense mandate, mainly composed of the translation of religious texts, mapping territory, building infrastructure, and education. This left little time for massive conversion campaigns, which were almost entirely conducted by African Christians. This process really started around the 1880s, as the social disruptions caused by colonialism propelled Africans to participate in the radical faith of Christianity (268-269).
• Many of these mass conversions to Christianity took place during times of chaos, either following colonization, during civil war, or during the shortages of the First World War. They frequently feature millenarian figures or pentecostal preachers who promise salvation in an immediate sense, capitalizing on the insecurity (269-270).
• Many Africans of the interior were unwilling to convert to Christianity until the social upheaval caused by colonialism caused them to doubt their previous world order. They sought out missionaries to help them manage relations with the Europeans, but usually did not convert or allow their subjects to do so in large numbers (272).
• Conversion to Christianity was often accompanied by the rejection of some traditional practices viewed as barbaric. While some certainly did violate the tenants of Christianity, there is a lot of overlap between practices banned by the colonial state and those that Africans believed Christianity prohibited (270).
• The first Africans to convert to Christianity in large numbers and spread the faith were former slaves, who had much to be inspired by in Christ story. This was most prominently the case in Sierra Leone, where slaves rescued by the British spread throughout West Africa proselytizing (271).
• After the conversion of slaves and social outcasts, the next major group to convert were young men, who usually felt left out and discriminated against by social orders dominated by older men and which forced them to marry late. They were the most important in spread the faith, and engaging in the active public displays of idol burning and mass baptism which characterized conversion in Africa (272).
• Women, especially in some parts of the interior of Southern Africa, appear to have been involved in the conversion to Christianity. Involvement varies over region, but some women certainly were the major converts, as Christianity provided a new power structure that was less patriarchal (273).
• From the 1880s onward, Christian converts in Africa began to associate their identity with a new middle class status based in employment and Christian virtue. Many of those employed at missions later became the native bureaucrats of Africa, meaning that Christian identity and social norms became used to distinguish the 'immoral' lower class from the Christian morality of the middle and upper classes of Africa (273-274).
• The translation of the bible into vernacular languages was the most significant aspect of Christianity in Africa, as it marked a transition between the limited success the European missionaries and the localized version of Christianity that could now be spread by Africans armed with vernacular bibles and able to select culturally resonant elements (276).