Overview

The churches in Africa probably constitute the most important growth area for Christianity in the second half of the twentieth century. From being a number of rather tightly controlled 'mission fields' zealously guarded by the great missionary societies, Catholic and Protestant, they have emerged across the last decades in bewildering variety to selfhood, a membership of close on a hundred million adherents and an influential role both within their own societies and in the world Church. This book surveys the history of Christianity throughout sub-Saharan Africa during the third quarter of this century. It begins in 1950 at a time when the churches were still for the most part emphatically part of the colonial order and it takes the story on from there across the coming of political independence and the transformations of the 1960s and early 1970s.