The claim goes like this. Christianity came to Black people on the slave ship. Slaveholders handed it over to keep the enslaved obedient, so a Black person who follows Jesus is practicing someone else's religion. The record contradicts this at nearly every point. Africans heard the gospel at Pentecost. African theologians shaped the church's teaching about God and Christ centuries before most of northern Europe was Christian. An African kingdom was Christian by around the fourth century, and a Central African king chose the faith through his own envoys in the 1490s. Some of the Africans later carried across the Atlantic were already baptized believers.
A correct conclusion is still fragile if you cannot show how you reached it. A list of famous names falls apart under one sharp follow-up. That follow-up says the church fathers were North Africans, the enslaved came from West and Central Africa, and a thousand years lie between them. Answering it means treating the slave-ship story as a claim to be investigated. You decide what evidence could settle it, examine the sources in order, give the strongest objection its full force, and keep a scholar's proven findings apart from a scholar's proposals.
The investigation moves in four stages, and each one builds a skill the next requires. First comes the biblical text, read closely enough to separate what it describes from what later readers added. Second comes the early African church, sorted into documented contributions and interpretations of them. Third comes the gap between North Africa and the enslaved, which is the objection most defenders never answer. Fourth comes the question of why this history went missing and how to discuss it honestly with a doubter. At the end you should be able to say what the record establishes, where it stops, and why the slave-ship story fails even when you claim no more than the record allows.