The first African converts
Christianity takes root in sub-Saharan Africa
The history of Christianity in Africa did not begin with European missionaries in the nineteenth century. It began with the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8, continued in the North African church of Tertullian and Augustine, and reached sub-Saharan Africa through Portuguese contact with the Kingdom of Kongo in the 1480s.
The Kongolese king Nzinga a Ntinu is baptized in 1491 and takes the name João I. His son Mvemba a Nzinga — baptized Alfonso I — rules for nearly forty years and makes Christianity the state religion of Kongo. He writes letters to the King of Portugal that are among the most eloquent documents of early African Christianity — and among the most damning indictments of the slave trade that Portuguese merchants are conducting in his territory.
Alfonso writes: each day the merchants are kidnapping our people — children of this country, sons of our nobles and vassals, even people of our own family. This corruption and depravity is so widespread that our land is entirely depopulated.
He is a Christian king writing to a Christian king, asking him to stop the Christian merchants who are enslaving his Christian subjects. The letter receives no effective response.
Ethiopia, meanwhile, has been Christian since the fourth century — since the conversion of King Ezana and the work of Frumentius, which predate the conversion of Constantine. The Ethiopian church, never subject to Rome, maintains its own ancient liturgy, its own distinctive theology, its own calendar.
Africa received Christianity before Europe did. It is receiving it back now, transformed.
“We cannot reckon how great the damage is, since the above-mentioned merchants daily seize our subjects, sons of the land and sons of our noblemen.”
— Alfonso I of Kongo, letter to King João III of Portugal, 1526 AD
“He arose and went. Behold, there was a man of Ethiopia, a eunuch of great authority under Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, who was over all her treasure, who had come to Jerusalem to worship.”
Africa received the gospel before most of Europe. The Ethiopian church traces its founding to Acts 8 — to an encounter on a desert road between an evangelist and a court official who was already reading Isaiah.
The history of Christianity in Africa is not the history of a Western religion being brought to a previously faithless continent. It is the history of the faith returning — coming back, in new forms, to a continent where it was ancient.
The center of global Christianity today is sub-Saharan Africa. This is not a recent development. It is the long arc of a story that begins on a desert road in Acts 8.
The chain holds, all the way back to the beginning.