The argument that Christianity is foreign to Africa depends on a date. It assumes the faith arrived with the European missionaries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which would make an African who follows Christ a convert to the colonizer’s religion. The date is wrong. Africans appear in the New Testament, and Ethiopia, Kenya’s neighbor, has churches far older than the colonial missions. You can love your African heritage and follow Christ, because the faith’s history in Africa began long before colonialism.
Kevin Muriithi Ndereba founded a ministry called Apologetics Kenya and lectures in practical theology and apologetics at St. Paul’s University, about 30 kilometers outside Nairobi. The first question he names from young Kenyans concerns colonial history, and he describes a saying that captures it. The white man arrived with the Bible and Africans closed their eyes. When they opened them, the land was gone and only the Bible remained. In his telling, it begins: “the white man came with the Bible, we closed our eyes.” The saying names a real loss. It also contains a historical claim, that colonialism was Africa’s first contact with Christianity, and a historical claim can be checked.
Which wave were the missionaries?
Ndereba starts by placing the missionary era in a longer sequence. He says that when people call Christianity a white man’s religion, “they’re thinking of 18th century, maybe missionary enterprise, 18th, 19th century, right? But that’s the third wave.” He adds: “We have the second and the first wave.”
In this conversation he does not describe the first two waves in detail. He does point to three kinds of evidence, and each can be placed in time relative to the missionary era: the biblical narrative, the old Ethiopian churches, and the African theologians who helped form Christian doctrine. A fourth point he raises comes from a much later period. It explains how the opposite view of African culture became so common.
What the record places before the missionaries
The earliest evidence is in Scripture. Ndereba thinks the Bible is the right place to begin, because “there’s this significant presence of Africa, African people and places in the redemptive story of the Bible.” He also names why so few people know this: “The challenge, I guess, is that this is never said very explicitly.”
Acts 8 shows what is at stake. Luke tells of a man of Ethiopia, a eunuch with great authority under Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, who managed her treasury and had traveled to Jerusalem to worship (Acts 8:27). He is riding home and reading Isaiah when Philip joins him. Philip explains the passage, which is from Isaiah 53, and tells him about Jesus. The official asks to be baptized and then continues home rejoicing (Acts 8:28-39).
The position of this story in Acts matters. Luke places it before Saul’s conversion in Acts 9 and before Peter’s visit to the Roman centurion Cornelius in Acts 10. In the order Luke gives, an African official hears and receives the gospel before the narrative turns to the mission among the nations. He was already worshiping Israel’s God and reading Israel’s Scriptures before he met Philip. Luke presents this as part of the gospel’s movement outward from Jerusalem. He records it as something that happened, without commanding anything.
The text also has limits. The Ethiopia of Acts is usually understood as the kingdom along the Nile south of Egypt, which does not match the borders of the modern country. Luke does not say what the official did after he returned home. Acts 8 proves that Africans were part of the church’s first generation. It does not prove that this man founded a church.
The second kind of evidence comes from institutions. Ndereba points north from Kenya: “So in places like Ethiopia, which is just next to Kenya, we have churches there that are very old.” This evidence is a living tradition, and a Kenyan student does not need to travel far to find it. Ndereba gives no founding dates here, and none should be added on his behalf. His argument does not depend on an exact year. It depends on order: an established Christian tradition on the continent existed long before the colonial missions arrived.
The third kind of evidence is intellectual. Drawing on the theologian Thomas Oden’s work on how Africa shaped the Christian mind, Ndereba names Augustine among the African theologians who served the whole church. He describes what they did as “African people, again, contributing to the thinking around what Christian faith means, who Jesus is, what we make of God, how we understand his action in history.” These are central questions of the faith, including the identity of Jesus and the nature of God. If African thinkers helped the church answer them, then the doctrine missionaries carried back to Africa centuries later already included African work.
That is why Ndereba describes Christianity as a global faith that does not belong to one ethnic background or one race. His summary is short: “it’s a colorful faith.”
When did “everything traditional must go” take hold?
If the roots are this old, the attitude many African Christians grew up with needs an explanation. Many were taught that their inherited culture was darkness and that conversion meant leaving all of it behind.
Ndereba places that attitude in a specific period. He describes a Kenyan scholar, an Anglican priest who later did much of his ministry in Switzerland, who studied concepts of God across about 300 African cultures. Ndereba dates the work to the seventies and eighties. He says the scholar wrote at a time when there was a negative view that everything traditional should be thrown out, and his work was an effort to restore balance.
That detail matters in two ways. First, the wholesale rejection of African culture appears in Ndereba’s account as the view of a particular era, not a teaching that came from Scripture. Second, African Christian scholars challenged that view from inside the church. Ndereba’s own work continues the same effort. The sharp separation between faith and heritage was one generation’s position, and the African church did not simply accept it.
The objection from family history
The strongest objection does not dispute the ancient history. It goes like this: Acts and Ethiopia are fine, but the Christianity my family received came through colonial missions, and it came with contempt for our names and customs. Why should old churches elsewhere change how I see that?
Much of this is true. For many communities across the continent, the first lasting contact with Christianity probably did come in the later missionary era. A Kikuyu or Luo family may have no ancient Christian line to trace. The contempt was real too, and the chronology does not excuse it.
The chronology does separate two questions the objection treats as one: where the faith came from, and how some people behaved while carrying it. Christianity was rooted in Africa before colonialism, so it cannot be defined as a colonial invention. Hostility toward African culture fits the period Ndereba describes, and African Christians argued against it. When someone today says that following Christ means despising African names or African ways of grieving together, the history shows that demand to be one generation’s addition. Scripture does not require it.
Sorting what stays
The history does not mean every tradition fits with following Christ. It gives an African believer a fair starting point for asking which ones do. That question becomes a matter of discernment within one identity. It stops being a test of loyalty between a foreign religion and an ancestral culture.
Ndereba compares the sorting to traffic lights. Red marks what conflicts with the faith, and he names divination, some rituals, and oaths that bind a person to other spiritual powers. He explains the problem with oaths through covenant: “Now we have a new covenant in Christ, right?” He continues: “when there is another oath, then that challenges this concept of covenant.” Amber marks neutral practices that need wisdom. His example is naming. Many cultures name a child for a season, a virtue, or a grandparent, and he says his own son is named after his father. Green marks what is good. Community is his clearest case: people come to a wedding whether or not they were invited, and neighbors come to mourn with a family after a loss.
The ancestors fall on both sides of that line. Ndereba links the naming practice to keeping continuity with the family line. He treats rituals meant to connect with the ancestors, such as pouring libation, as carrying spiritual significance. Jude 3 Project’s position on ancestor veneration draws the same line: memory and honor, yes; veneration and spiritual contact, no. A grandson who carries his grandfather’s name is remembering him. A libation offered to reach the dead seeks contact with him.
The alternative to sorting is blanket condemnation. Lisa Fields, host of the Jude 3 Project podcast, says it is common in talk about African spirituality: “it’s a lot of demonization of everything.” Her objection is that it is uninformed. She describes how it sounds to the person being corrected: “well, do you actually know what I’m doing? And so you sound ignorant trying to win them.”
Both Fields and Ndereba look to Paul in Athens. Paul starts with what is already in the city: “For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you” (Acts 17:23). Before he finishes, he calls his listeners to repent (Acts 17:30). Beginning with what the culture had did not soften his message.
Ndereba draws on another line from the same speech, where Paul says God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation” (Acts 17:26). He reads it to mean that the places and peoples we are born into are within God’s plan, and concludes that “we should understand culture really also as a gift from God.” He also holds that every culture needs what “the gospel clarifies or cleanses.” That applies to the cultures the missionaries came from as much as to the ones they reached.
The chronology changes who is doing the sorting. An African believer deciding between a naming ceremony and a libation is continuing work African Christians have done before: the Kenyan scholar who catalogued concepts of God against the dismissive view of his era, the theologians Oden studied, and the official reading Isaiah on his way home. Ndereba describes the African church as having “a rich heritage that we can borrow from of those who’ve gone before us.” Anyone working through their traditions in light of Scripture starts with that heritage already available to them.