Building and Rebuilding the African Church: French Catholic Missionaries in Interwar Colonial Algeria

In 1933, the Catholic missionary society known as the White Fathers celebrated the consecration of a church in the Algerian village of Bou-Noh.   While the building itself was not remarkable, it nonetheless represented to the White Fathers a significant moment in the history of their evangelistic efforts in Algeria.  The Catholic missionaries had been working in Bou-Noh, located in the Kabylia region of Algeria, since the mid-1870s.  During their time there, the White Fathers had faced competition from the Rahmaniya, a prominent Muslim brotherhood whose mosque was headquartered in Bou-Noh.  Moreover, the missionary work in Bou-Noh had faced closure by the Third Republic in 1914, only to be saved by the advent of the First World War.  Through their hardships, the White Fathers had developed a small contingent of Christian Kabyles whom they hoped would become the foundation of a strong Christian church in Kabylia.  Accordingly, the consecration of the Bou-Noh church, the first in Kabylia, served as a vindication for the White Fathers’ work in Algeria.
For the White Fathers, though, the Bou-Noh church was more than a simple validation of their evangelism.  It symbolized the revitalization of a North African Christianity that had largely disappeared with the Muslim invasions of the seventh century.  While the missionaries believed that remnants of Christian belief and practice had persisted in Muslim Algeria, the Bou-Noh church, a clearly defined sacred space, represented a clear turning point in the entire history of Christian Algeria.
This paper, then, will examine how the White Fathers conceived of Algeria, because of its ancient Christian past, as a sacred space in its own right.  It will also address how the missionaries understood their efforts to build the Bou-Noh church constituted an important step in reclaiming the sacred space of Algeria in both physical and spiritual terms.