Jesuit history in Africa is complicated and fascinating, and finally in Jesuits in Africa: A Historical Narrative from Ignatius of Loyola to Pedro Arrupe we have a concise introduction to the ministry and mission of the Society of Jesus on the mother continent. Its author, Festo Mkenda, is a Tanzanian Jesuit and a highly credentialed scholar, trained in African history and politics respectively at SOAS and Oxford. He is also ideally situated professionally, as for several years he served as director of the Jesuit Historical Institute of Africa in Kenya (Jesuit Historical Institute in Africa (JHIA)), while more recently he has been academic director at the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (jesuits.global) in Rome. Mkenda’s mining of primary source materials is thus most impressive, as is his wide reading in relevant secondary scholarly sources and his ability to work across several languages with seeming ease.
Throughout most of their history in Africa, Jesuit missionaries served as key participants in the colonial process, with their evangelizing efforts taking on a “peculiarly European nationalist tone” (78). In early-contact West Central Africa, for example, Portuguese Jesuits owned great swaths of land, actively traded in slaves, and were vital to the Conquista in Angola, as they were, too, in Mozambique. Mkenda does not sugar-coat these disturbing matters, later highlighting how “Jesuits featured as chaplains in Rhodes’s Pioneer Column that facilitated the conquest of Mashonaland to the north in 1890 and exposed Matabeleland to easy European takeover” (97).
But there is also much good to the Jesuit story in Africa, like spreading the Gospel, building and staffing schools and fomenting literacy, caring for orphans, establishing health clinics, and inspiring the hope for salvation through Jesus Christ that so many Africans have enthusiastically embraced, from Addis Ababa to Cape Town. For the Jesuits, this history began as early as the founding of the order of the Society of Jesus itself, as St. Ignatius of Loyola had a vision for Ethiopia to install Jesuit missions in the land of Prester John, a mythic Christian ruler of medieval lore. Meanwhile, St. Francis Xavier was one of the first Jesuits to missionize in Africa, arriving in Mozambique in 1541 and later ministering among the 'peaceful Moors' in what is today Kenya. Xavier eventually established his mission in Gao, India, which served as something of a mothership for early Jesuit work in East Africa and the Horn (3). Soon thereafter the Society of Jesus had a presence in Morocco and Kongo, where “in 1548, they reportedly baptized as many as 2,900 people in a span of twenty-five days” (5).
Seven years later, Loyola commissioned fifteen friars to Ethiopia, in 1555, one of whom, Jerónimo Lobo, would later reflect on the purpose and challenge of their mission: “To bring back this people into the enclosure of the Catholic Church . . . was the sole view and intention with which we undertook so long and toilsome a journey, crossed so many seas, and passed so many deserts, with the most hazard of our lives” (7). Passages like this from primary sources help to give Mkenda’s readers a deep sense of what the establishment of early Jesuit missions in Africa entailed and the struggles that Jesuit friars faced, from imprisonment to malaria, to hunger and execution.
For a narrative that is just 127 pages long, the amount of information that Mkenda lucidly packs into this book is amazing. The five chapters are organized by century—16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th—and are book-ended by a good introduction and a sound conclusion, all followed by an excellent bibliography and a serviceable index. The chronological sequencing of the chapters was at times disorienting as Mkenda jumped from region to region, but given that he covers half a millennium and an entire continent, such a negligible structural flaw was simply inevitable.
Jesuits in Africa is most engaging when telling the amazing stories of remarkable individual Jesuit missionaries. Take Father Gonçalo da Silveira, who was sent from India to Mozambique carrying a “human bone” as a kind of fetish meant to kill a local chieftain (29). Instead, according to Mkenda, he became Christianity’s first recognized martyr in Sub-Saharan Africa, strangled to death by the chieftain’s agents in 1561 (30). Or consider two Jesuits sent to Ethiopia from Goa who “were taken captive and, in seven years, were moved from one place to another in the Hadhramaut desert until they were eventually ransomed and sent back to Gao in 1596” (51). For one final example, in this case from the second wave of Jesuit missions in Africa, take the order’s superior in the Congo Free State, Father Emiel van Hencxthoven, whose “ingenuity” in the late 19th century was behind the construction of a network of roads connecting the controversial “chapel farms” (90), which were religious communes and work camps for Congolese youth that also provided recruits for the Congo Free State’s notoriously brutal Force Publique (the “public force,” or the paramilitary of the Congo Free State).
The book’s final chapter takes us through the 20th century, weaving together the efforts of French and Italian Jesuits in Madagascar, Irish Jesuits in Zambia, English and German Jesuits in Zimbabwe, Canadian Jesuits in Ethiopia, Indian and Maltese Jesuits in Tanzania and Uganda, and American Jesuits in Ghana and Nigeria. In various ways, they all have contributed to “the Africanization of the Society” (117), a movement inspired by the Second Vatican Council and guided by the controversial Basque Jesuit superior Pedro Arrupe (1907-1991). In all, Jesuits in Africa is a richly informative, well researched, and clearly written book, an important contribution to the study of Christianity on the mother continent and to Jesuit studies more generally.
Terry Rey is a professor of religion at Temple University.
Terry Ray
Date Of Review:
October 31, 2024
