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. That 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 hears 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, and 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. When people call Christianity a white man’s religion, he says, “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, each of which can be placed in time before the missionary era: the biblical narrative, the old Ethiopian churches and the African theologians who helped form Christian doctrine. A fourth point comes from a much later period, and 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 believes 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 it: “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 of great authority under Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, who had charge of her treasury and had traveled to Jerusalem to worship (Acts 8:27). He is riding home reading Isaiah when Philip joins him. Philip explains the passage, which comes from Isaiah 53, and tells him about Jesus. The official asks to be baptized and then goes on his way rejoicing (Acts 8:28–39).
Where Luke places this story matters. It comes before Saul’s conversion in Acts 9 and before Peter’s visit to the Roman centurion Cornelius in Acts 10. In Luke’s order, 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 when he met Philip. Luke presents the episode as part of the gospel’s movement outward from Jerusalem; he records it as something that happened, not as a command.
The text also has limits. The Ethiopia of Acts is usually understood as the kingdom along the Nile south of Egypt, not the modern country. Luke does not say what the official did after he returned home. Acts 8 shows that Africans were part of the church’s first generation. It does not show that this man founded a church.
The second kind of evidence is institutional. 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 is a living tradition, and a Kenyan student does not have 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 existed on the continent 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 their work 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 the central questions of the faith. If African thinkers helped the church answer them, then the doctrine missionaries carried to Africa centuries later already contained African work.
That is why Ndereba calls Christianity a global faith that belongs to no single ethnicity or 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 1970s and 1980s. He says the scholar wrote when a negative view prevailed that everything traditional should be thrown out, and that his work was an effort to restore balance.
That detail matters in two ways. First, in Ndereba’s account the wholesale rejection of African culture was the view of a particular era, not a teaching drawn from Scripture. Second, African Christian scholars challenged that view from inside the church, and Ndereba’s own work continues the 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 somewhere else 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.
What the chronology does is 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 belongs to 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. The question becomes a matter of discernment within one identity rather than a test of loyalty between a foreign religion and an ancestral culture.
Ndereba compares the sorting to a traffic light:
- Red marks what conflicts with the faith. 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?” And “when there is another oath, then that challenges this concept of covenant.”
- Amber marks neutral practices that call for wisdom. His example is naming. Many cultures name a child for a season, a virtue or a grandparent, and 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 continuity with the family line, but he treats rituals meant to connect with the ancestors, such as pouring libation, as carrying spiritual significance. The 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, founder of the Jude 3 Project, says it is common in talk about African spirituality: “it’s a lot of demonization of everything.” Her objection is that it is uninformed, and 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, who 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, Paul 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:
“And 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 in hand.
