Religion: Troubled Africa

Dean Liston Pope of Yale Divinity School believes strongly in the “study of society as it is in relation to what it ought to be.” This spring and summer, slim, spectacled Liston Pope (TIME, Jan. 24) made a study in Africa, under the auspices of the Phelps-Stokes Fund and the Julius Rosenwald Fund. Last week he delivered a somber report of what he saw on his 25,000-mile air tour.

A Vague Appeal. In Liberia, British West Africa, the Belgian Congo, the Union of South Africa and the Rhodesias, Dean Pope conferred with 125 native leaders, as well as missionaries and government officials. “As a whole,” he said, “the African leaders are as embittered, confused and without hope as any group of men on earth…Grievances vary, but there is almost universal bitterness against white men—a small minority in every country who have arrogated to themselves all the most important political prerogatives, economic resources and cultural opportunities.” The leaders have little contact with one another and Communism as a movement has little influence—”though among the native peoples there is a vague appeal in the use of the word as a symbol of racial equality.”

Under Africa’s threatening skies, Pope sees the Christian missions as facing many critical decisions. Foremost is the question of the schools. “The situation in Southern Rhodesia illustrates it. There the government pays most of the bill of those Protestant and Catholic mission schools which meet government standards, instead of providing universal free education. Under this system, about a third of the children are in school. If the missions turn education.over to the government, it would have to be provided for everyone, and it would cost three times as much. But the missionaries are worried about doing this because they know that most new church members now come from the schools, rather than the oldtime evangelism. And they are also well aware of the dangers of secularization and government propaganda if they turn their schools over to the state.”

New Missionary. Pope concluded that many Africans do not expect much help from the missions on the road to equality. “In fact, they often look upon the missions as in the camp of the opposition, due to the white control of the mission program and arrangements whereby governments support mission schools.”

A new kind of missionary is needed in Africa today, according to Dr. Pope. “The oldtime missionary sat down in a hut with a dozen natives. Today the missionary has largely become the chief of staff of an institution doing work much of which could be and should be done by government agencies. Perhaps missionaries need to get back to the day-to-day life of the African again…The new kind of missionary Africa needs is a moral and spiritual technician [who will] not preach the Gospel vaguely, but relate Christian philosophy to the needs and aspirations of the people where they are.”