Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (120 page)

In counterpoint to this success was a fatal entanglement with politics, both Portuguese trading policy and the internal concerns of Japan. The Portuguese trade was led by their so-called 'Great Ship' trading in bullion and luxury goods annually; the Jesuits not only invested in this to support what had proved to be an extremely expensive mission, but also encouraged the ship to travel to as many Japanese ports as possible to excite interest in Christianity. The missionaries and merchants were lucky enough to arrive at a time when Japan was split between rival feudal lords. Many lords saw Christianity as a useful way of attracting Portuguese trade and also of furthering their own political aims, particularly the powerful Tokugawa family, who initially encouraged the missionaries. By 1600 the Tokugawa had eliminated all their rivals in politics, and now saw Christianity not as a convenience but as a nuisance, even a threat. They had some justification: the Philippines fell under Spanish royal control with such comparative ease because missionary activity by Augustinian friars had preceded the arrival of King Philip's ships and soldiers.

Matters were made worse when Franciscan friars arrived in Japan to establish a missionary presence in 1593. Anticipating the controversies with Jesuits that were to arise in the Chinese Empire, they adopted an aggressively negative attitude towards Japanese culture, which led to a number of them suffering death by crucifixion. In the early seventeenth century the Tokugawa expelled Europeans from Japan except for one rigorously policed trading post.
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They then launched one of the most savage persecutions in Christian history, and their repression of Japanese Christians was not without some military assistance from the Protestant Dutch, who were doing their best to wreck Portuguese power in eastern Asia, and had few regrets about campaigns against popish Jesuits and friars. The Church in Japan, despite the heroism of its native faithful, was reduced to a tiny and half-instructed remnant. It struggled to maintain even a secret existence for more than two centuries until Europeans used military force to secure free access to the country after the 1850s, and rediscovered it with astonishment. They had then to abolish the official imposition of 'Christ-stepping', a test of rejection of Christianity in which those suspected of Christian allegiance were forced to walk on pictures of Christ or the Virgin. The Japanese persecution is a standing argument against the old idea that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.
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COUNTER-REFORMATION IN AFRICA: THE BLIGHT OF THE SLAVE TRADE

Christian mission in Africa was likewise based on Portuguese trading posts and contacts with local powers, and, as in Japan, it achieved some success among local elites. There were even efforts to create an indigenous clergy, spurred by a chronic shortage of clerical manpower: the climate and disease ecology proved lethal to most European missionary clergy, in an exact reversal of the American situation. An early attempt at what might now be called indigenization occurred in one of the first forts which the Portuguese built on the West African coast, Fort St George of Elmina, in what is now Ghana. A wooden statue of St Francis was so affected by the humid heat that his face and hands turned black: the Governor announced a miracle, in which the saint had proclaimed himself patron of the local population by identifying with them.
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Yet Francis's favour could not counterweigh the disastrous flaw in European Christian mission in Africa, its association with the Portuguese slave trade. Millions were rounded up in the African interior by local rulers and shipped out through the Portuguese forts across the Atlantic to sustain the economy of American plantations; they introduced a third element to the racial kaleidoscope of the Iberian American empires. Portuguese Brazil accounted for the largest number - perhaps 3.5 million people over three centuries - but from the late sixteenth century the Portuguese were (unwillingly) sharing this trade with the English and Dutch, and hundreds of thousands of slaves were taken to new plantations in Protestant colonies in North America.
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The Spaniards were not actively involved in the shipping trade, but their plantation colonies could not have survived without it.

Depressingly, as we have noted in discussing the polemic of Bartolome de las Casas (see p. 692), the expedient of importing African slaves was in part meant to protect the native American population from exploitation. Not many clergy comprehended the moral disaster. One Franciscan based in the University of Mexico City, Bartolome de Albornoz, in a book on contract law published in 1571, had the clear-sightedness to condemn the common argument that Africans were being saved from pagan darkness by their removal to America, remarking sarcastically, 'I do not believe that it can be demonstrated that according to the law of Christ the liberty of the soul can be purchased by the servitude of the body.'
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His words found few echoes: such missionary concern as there was was mostly limited to souls. In early-seventeenth-century Cartagena in what is now Colombia, one of only two entry points for slaves in the Spanish dominions, two maverick Jesuits, Alonso de Sandoval and Pedro Claver, spent years amid terrible conditions ministering to and baptizing those West African slaves who had managed to survive the Atlantic crossing and were newly arrived in the docks. A telling detail of the Jesuits' ministry was to make sure that their baptismal ceremony included plenty of cool drinkable water; the desperate and grateful slave would be more receptive to the Christian message.

In its context, this pastoral work was bravely countercultural, arousing real disapproval among the settler population, but the Jesuits' efforts to instil first a sense of sin (particularly sexual sin) and then repentance in their wretched penitents now seem oddly placed amid one of the greatest communal sins perpetrated by Western Christian culture.
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Attempts to adjust the system and improve on their work by transferring baptism across the Atlantic do not impress. The city of Loanda in what is now Angola was the main departure point for enslaved people from the south-west, and the clergy's main role in the city became to baptize them before departure; right up to the 1870s, forty years after the British had declared slavery abolished in their dominions and the Portuguese had officially followed suit, the Portuguese Bishop of Loanda was accustomed to being enthroned in a marble chair at the dockside, presiding over the rite before captives were dispatched across the Atlantic.
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It was hardly surprising that popular mission was hampered in Africa or that the native population despised Christianity.

The most promising initiative for Catholic Christianity came under local patronage rather than at the command of Portuguese guns: in the Central African Atlantic kingdom of Kongo. Here the ruler Mvemba Nzinga became a fervent Christian and adopted the Portuguese title of Afonso I. He welcomed Iberian priests, saw to it that one of his sons was consecrated in Portugal in 1518 as a bishop, opened schools to teach the Portuguese language, and created a stately inland cathedral city, Sao Salvador, as his capital; he has been called 'one of the greatest lay Christians in African Church history'.
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His successors continued officially Catholic into the eighteenth century, and together with their nobility they created a genuinely indigenous Church (see Plate 16). Its government was always problematic. The kings of Kongo were constantly at odds with the Portuguese, who tried to impose
Padroado
rights in appointing bishops: this inhibited the arrival of non-Portuguese European clergy, severely limited the creation of a native clergy, and drew attention to official Christianity's entanglement with the slave trade. The Italian Capuchin Franciscan missionaries whom the Kongo monarchy welcomed in during the seventeenth century (at a moment when the Portuguese were distracted by war with the Dutch) did their best in protest; in 1686 they secured from the Roman Inquisition an unprecedented general condemnation of the slave trade, long predating any such Protestant official action or statement.
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Yet despite this striking symbolic pronouncement, the papacy continued to employ slaves in its Mediterranean galleys up to the French Revolution, some of them market-purchased. While Capuchin anger was ignored, the slave trade continued to subvert Central African society. When the Kongo descended into political chaos in the seventeenth century, the official structures of the Catholic Church were also crippled.
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As in Iberian America and China, what Church life survived continued to depend on local catechists, who with their knowledge of Portuguese could communicate with such European clergy as remained, but who could also perpetuate what they knew of Christian belief and practice to their own people, albeit necessarily in a non-sacramental form. This pattern was to flourish once more in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Africa, and it sustained what remained of Africa's first indigenous Catholicism, in a variety of creative popular syntheses of Christianity with local religions. Two successive prophetesses arose around 1700, and significantly a major element in their visions was the demand from Heaven that the ruined capital Sao Salvador should be rebuilt. The second of them, Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita, who had taken on herself the character of the Capuchins' much-loved saint Antony of Padua, was burned at the stake in 1706 by one of the kings of the now-fragmented Kongo, but she had indicated a future strength in African Christianity: independent Churches which would build what they wanted out of European Christian teaching (see pp. 887-8).
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Ethiopia's ancient Miaphysite Christian culture proved not to be headed by Prester John, Europe's hoped-for ally against Islam. Events indeed entirely reversed expectations, for in the 1540s a Portuguese expeditionary force at very great cost in lives helped the Ethiopian kingdom defeat an Islamic holy war under the charismatic Muslim emir Ahmed Granj, which had nearly annihilated both it and its Church. Latin Christianity could therefore initially count on Ethiopian goodwill; indeed, one of the first authentic African voices to be heard in Western literature is that of an Ethiopian ambassador to Portugal, whose account of his homeland's Church was printed in 1540 within a widely popular Latin description of Ethiopia by a Portuguese, Damiao de Gois.
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Yet the Jesuits thereafter dissipated the advantage, despite zestful and heroic wanderings which may have led them to be the first Europeans to see the source of the Blue Nile, a century and a half before the Scotsman James Bruce.
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Contemporary Catholic battles with Protestants created a blind spot in the missionaries. Just as with the Dyophysite Christians of India, the Society was much less prepared to make allowances for local custom in fellow Christians than it was for other world faiths such as Hinduism, Shintoism or Confucianism. Ethiopian public immersion baptisms in which both priest and candidates were entirely naked were something of a shock. There was also a fatal reminiscence of Iberia's cultural wars: Jesuits violently criticized the Ethiopian Orthodox Church for what they saw as Judaizing deviations - celebration of the Sabbath, male circumcision and avoidance of pork. Eventually the Ethiopians were infuriated into retaliation: brutal expulsion of the Jesuits, including some executions, followed in the 1630s, together with an emphatic reassertion (and perhaps a little invention) of authentic Ethiopian custom and theology. The missionaries left behind them some evocatively Mediterranean church ruins and a paradoxically large amount of new iconographic themes in Ethiopian art: Christ with his crown of thorns, European-style compositions of the Virgin and Child, and even motifs deriving from engravings by Albrecht Durer. The Ethiopians clearly enjoyed the Jesuits' pictures more than their theological instruction.
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So Africans made their choices when confronted with Western Christianity. They still made choices when choice had apparently been taken away from them, in the vast diaspora throughout the Spanish and Portuguese (and latterly French) plantation cultures in America. They brought to America a mass of memories of religious belief and practice. Particularly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, slave masters made an effort to split up groups related to each other, but that became less easy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as restrictions began to bear down on the slave trade and more coherent groups survived from particular areas of Africa in a new setting. Given endemic warfare in Benin and Nigeria, which sent great numbers of captives to the slave markets of the coast, West African religions dominated. So much of it was difficult to sustain, tied as it was to place and group identity, both now lost. So ancestor cults were replaced, and familiar deities given new honour by drawing on the Catholicism which surrounded the people imported to the colonial world. The Catholic Church allowed slaves confraternities and, as everywhere else in Catholic societies, confraternities proved to have a life which it was not necessarily easy for officialdom to control. Out of this subculture of Catholicism constructively melded in syncretist fashion with memories of other spiritualities came a variety of new religion with various identities: among much overlap were the
Vodou
(voodoo) of French Haiti, the
Candomble
of Portuguese Brazil, the
Santeria
of Spanish Cuba. In turn the syntheses in America fertilized and reinvigorated African religion back in Africa: part of a continuous traffic across the Atlantic.
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That name
Santeria
is itself instructive because, as with so many other Christian labels, it began as an insult or term of condescension - an English coinage equivalent to this Spanish word might well be 'saintery' - but it is now a label of pride for a form of religion constructed, like so much Iberian-African syncretism, with practical good sense.
Santeria
is probably the variety of these syncretist religions closest to Catholicism, so that in Cuban Catholicism it is difficult to separate much Catholic practice in the parish churches from
Santeria
, and it is really impossible to put statistics on the number of its practitioners, so all-pervasive is its influence. The great advantage of the panoply of saints which the enslaved might encounter in their confraternities was that the saints could stand in for the hierarchy of divinities who in West Africa were offered devotion in the place of the supreme creator god Olurun (who was himself too powerful to be concerned with the affairs of feeble humans). Below the creator god were also
orishas
, subordinate divinities in African religion connected with the whole range of human activities. Every person born might have a connection to an
orisha
, and it was also perfectly acceptable in Catholic practice for everyone to choose a personal patron saint; it was only natural to look for compatible attributes between sacred figures from the two worlds. The Virgin Mary could hardly be ignored in Catholicism and in the interiors of churches, and it was not a problem to identify her omnipresent image with the Taino goddess Atabey or the Yoruba
orishas
Oshun and Yemaya. In Cuba, Mary has never had any competitor as the national patron saint.
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