An African Church? Decolonizing Catholicism in French Sub-Saharan Africa, 1919–67

This paper examines how both European and African Catholics thought about the role of the Catholic Church in Africa in the first half of the twentieth century. French missionaries had introduced Catholicism to Africans in the French colonies, though missionary priests often did not see eye to eye with the colonial regime. Nonetheless, the faith was susceptible to the critique that it was a European colonial import, and was not African in any meaningful sense. In the interwar period, the Vatican, concerned about the future of the church in Europe’s colonies, pushed for the indigenization of clergy and the church hierarchy throughout the world. This impulse was strongly resisted by French missionaries in Africa, however, who were unwilling to cede their authority to locals. Meanwhile, especially in the 1940s and 1950s, some African priests and students began advocating for Catholic practices and institutions that embraced African language and culture. These opposing points of view would ultimately come to a head at Vatican II in the 1960s, when the church hierarchy had to decide if whether it would embrace the diversity of its global following, or remain a Eurocentric institution.