CHAPTER IV

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THE LUTHERAN CHURCH IN AFRICA

[Sidenote: The Land.] The continent of Africa has been likened to a great ear which waits upon the word of the rest of the world. It is enormous in extent, its area being nearly twelve million square miles. If a line should be run east and west a little north of the Equator, the northern section would enclose all North America, the southern section all Europe. The coast line is low, and the country near the coast unhealthy; the interior is high, composed of vast table lands and mountain ranges. The Congo River, which is said to be thirty times the size of the Mississippi, rushes to the sea over gigantic waterfalls and through deep-cut channels which are almost unfathomable. Besides the Congo there are three other large rivers, the Niger, flowing toward the west, the Nile, toward the north, the Zambesi toward the east.

[Sidenote: The People.] It is estimated that the native population of Africa numbers about one hundred and seventy-five millions. Among this vast throng there is the widest diversity of character, religion and speech. Beside the negroes there are millions of Arabs, Copts, Berbers and Moors. One of the better tribes of negroes, the Kondes of Central Africa, is described by a Lutheran missionary. “You can hardly imagine, for Africa, anything more idyllic than a Konde village. First, well-tilled fields announce that it is near; then we often see a widely-extended banana grove. The dwelling houses are often so neat and clean that they would draw attention even in Europe. The people are strong and of muscular build, their color is dark. You notice among the men many whose features speak of reflection. They are sober and honest. There appears, therefore, to be such a soil for the diffusion of the Gospel as is seldom found.”

Of the worst tribes it is difficult to speak or write. Their degradation seems to put them below the level of the beasts. Indescribable practices, cannibalism and slavery are common. A member of the Congo medical service said of that section of the country: “At N’Gandu, we found that the chief had gathered together about ten thousand cannibal brigands, mostly of the Batatela race. Through the whole of the Batatela country for some four days’ march, one sees neither gray hairs, nor halt, nor blind. Even parents are eaten by their children on the first sign of approaching decrepitude. N’Gandu is approached by a very handsome pavement of human skulls, the top being the only part showing above ground. I counted more than a thousand skulls in the pavement of one gate alone. Almost every tree forming the fortification was crowned with a human skull.”

Commenting upon the conditions in which many Africans live, a missionary says that “when eleven men, women and children, and seventeen goats live together in a hut seventeen feet square, it is difficult for the flowers of love and tenderness to flourish.”

If we wait for evolution to raise these poor people, we will wait forever. Fortunately, here and there, another theory of human development has been applied with magical results.

[Sidenote: The African Woman.] A student of Africa and the Africans has seen in the shape of the continent the figure of a woman with a huge burden on her back, looking toward America. If it is true that “the index of civilization of every nation is not their religion, their manner of life, their prosperity, but the respect paid to women”, then we need seek no further for proof of the sad degradation of the Dark Continent. Bought and sold, rented or given away, living in polygamy or worse conditions, “she is the prey of the strong, her virtue is held of no account, she has no innocent childhood, motherhood is desecrated, and when she wraps vileness about her as her habitual garment, it is encouraged.” In the words of Doctor Dennis, “she is regarded as a scandal and a slave, a drudge and a disgrace, a temptation and a terror, a blemish and a burden”. It is far easier for an African to accept the Gospel for himself than to believe that it is intended also for women. Doctor Day describes the vigorous driving away of the women from his services by the headman or “king-whip” who laid about him briskly as he cried out, “This God-palaver is not for women!”

[Sidenote: The Riches of Africa.] The riches of Africa are for the most part surmised rather than accurately known. The country is fertile and crops can be cultivated with a minimum of effort. Great forests abound--ebony, teak, rosewood, mahogany and almost every other known kind of timber. An investigator with a fondness of mathematical speculation has said that the forests of Africa would build a boardwalk round the globe six inches thick and eight miles wide. The names of certain localities, “Diamond fields”, “Gold Coast”, “Ivory Coast”, tell us of the riches to be found therein. The coal deposits are estimated as covering eight hundred thousand square miles. The copper fields equal those of North America and Europe combined; the undeveloped iron ore amounts to five times that of North America. Nor is the power for the development of these riches wanting. Human strength is there; the black who carries on his back for the many hours of a long march a sixty pound burden can learn to apply his muscles to other tasks. Water power is there in enormous waterfalls, and there are many navigable rivers.

W. E. Burghardt Dubois, himself of African descent, declares that in Africa may be found not only the roots of the present war, but the menace of future wars. Of the process by which the European nations have gained possession of practically all the black man’s continent he speaks with passionate indignation. “Lying treaties, rivers of rum, murder, assassination, mutilation, rape and torture” have marked the progress of these nations in their campaign for African land. There is the spoil “exceeding the gold-haunted dreams of the most modern of imperialists” there is the prize for which nations will struggle indefinitely unless a new spirit is bred among them.

[Sidenote: A Continent Betrayed.] The great missionary command, “Go ye into all the world and preach my Gospel to every creature” is a sufficient direction for the Christian world in its relations with Africa; but re-inforcing it there is, or there should be, our enormous obligation to this most benighted country. Africa is the most helpless continent, the most degraded, and, alas, that it should be so, the most fearfully abused. Livingstone described it as the open sore of the world. Small countries have been exploited, the Papuans of Australia have been almost exterminated, the American Indian has been driven from hunting ground to hunting ground until all that he can call his own is a small donation of the vast land which was once his. But Africa is a whole continent which has been betrayed. The white man has in the main not sought to enlighten, to show the hideousness of sin, to point the better way, but upon the evil fires of paganism he has poured gin so that the smouldering ashes have leaped into destroying flame. The slavery which was one of the most horrible products of paganism he did not try to abolish, but himself stole and bought human beings; in all one hundred million souls.

The history of the African rum traffic would seem to take forever from England and Germany and the United States their boasted name of Christian. Upon the heart of our Doctor Day this fearful evil lay with a heavy weight. Said he:

[Sidenote: The Traffic in Gin.] “Within a stone’s throw of us lay a large steamer laden to the water’s edge with rum. When we remember that one of these steamers carries four thousand tons of freight and that hundreds of them are running to the country laden with rum, the very vilest that chemistry can invent and concoct, we may have some conception of what it means, not only to the heathen, but to missionaries at work there. At the mouth of every river and stream wherever there is a rod of beach smooth enough to land, the traffic goes on. In the name of God, in the name of all that is high and holy, why do not the owners of these ships, who live in luxury in Boston, Liverpool, Hamburg and London, paint their ships black and run up the black flag, or better still, nail it to the mast? Never pirate sailed the seas whose crimes were so black as the crimes now perpetrated on this continent in the name of commerce.

“At Freetown, our ship had a lot of powder to discharge. It could not be landed at the regular wharf, but must be landed in a state of quarantine a quarter of a mile away. What a farce! There lay the liquor ship landing thousands of cases of rum, dangerous in a thousand fold greater sense than all the powder that ever went into the dark continent.

[Illustration: GIRLS OF EMMA V. DAY SCHOOL, MUHLENBERG, AFRICA.]

[Illustration: CARRYING WATER AND SEWING IN GARDEN.]

Think too of the awful caricature of ships carrying in their holds these untold millions of gallons of rum, holding on Sabbath the beautiful services of the Church of England! More than all this, along this coast are ships of war, bristling with cannon, and on these ships, too, are read the Sabbath service, and there is a chaplain to read daily prayers. They are here to protect commerce, a trade that is transforming so many of these people into driveling idiots, gibbering maniacs, thieves, harlots, everything that is low and wicked, then launching their sinful souls into the lake that burns.”

To the horror of its own situation Africa is not dull. Like the American Indian, like every poor besotted wretch in his hours of sanity, the African has besought that this curse be removed. In 1883 the natives of the diamond fields implored the Cape Parliament to have public houses removed at least six miles. The petition was refused. [Sidenote: Mohammedanism in Africa.] A little over six hundred years before the Christian era Mohammed preached his new religion in Arabia, urging upon those who followed him prayer, almsgiving, fasting and pilgrimage to Mecca, and allowing them slavery, concubinage, polygamy and easy divorce. With the rapidity of fire in a field of dry grass the new faith spread, not the least productive of the methods of the prophet being wars of subjugation and extermination.

The Mohammedans soon conquered North Africa sweeping away the early Christianity, and then crossed into Spain from which they were finally driven. For a long time the great desert served as an impenetrable barrier to further advance in Africa, but presently they crossed the desert, and when Christian missionaries arrived on the west coast, they found that Islam had preceded them. Forbidding none of the old practices of heathendom, imposing only a few new rules which are easily followed, the Mohammedan faith has had an enormous following. Between the Crescent and the Cross West Africa must make her choice and upon the Christian Church depends the decision.

In meeting Islam and its active missionaries the Christian cannot but be sadly aware that the evil of drink was and is condemned by the prophet and his followers and that to a true Mohammedan all forms of alcohol are taboo, a fact with which the Mohammedan has not failed to taunt his rival.

Dr. Zwemer and Dr. Westerman estimate the total population of the Moslem world to be two hundred million of whom forty-two million are in Africa. To them as well as to the pagan should the Gospel message go.

A missionary book or a missionary address to which I am not able to give credit describes the parting of an English trader from the African woman with whom he had lived during a long residence in Africa, who had served him and truly loved him. Having accumulated riches, he was about to return to England without even bidding her farewell, but she had heard of his departure and followed him to the shore, where throwing herself at his feet, she besought him not to cast her aside. Indifferent to her grief, annoyed by her importunity, he angrily thrust her from him and embarked. Such have been the dealings of the white race with Africa.

[Sidenote: Africa Under European Flags.] Except for a few almost negligible sections the continent is under European flags. France owns a colony twenty times the size of France itself; Great Britain a colony as large as the United States, which extends almost without interruption from the coast to Cairo, a distance of six thousand miles; Germany, a colony one and one-half times as large as the German Empire in Europe; Belgium, a territory equal to that of Germany; and Portugal, Spain and Italy a twelfth of the continent between them.

[Sidenote: The Picture Not All Dark.] But the picture is not all dark. The mention of Africa recalls to our minds the names of Livingstone, of Robert Moffatt, of David A. Day. The Christian world has in Africa its records of shame, it has also its records of glory. It has at Kimberly the deep shafts of diamond mines, symbol of the pride and lust of man’s heart; it has nearby the graves of many pious German Lutherans. Lingering along the western shore there must be still the cries of the afflicted, the wailing of mothers torn from their children, of husbands beaten from their wives! Yet here are the graves of the children of David A. Day. Into the distant interior penetrated the slave raiders, torturing, driving the inhabitants from their villages, binding them with chains, marking their course with blood; yet here is buried the heart of Livingstone. Whether or not we heed the call, we are bound to Africa by an unbreakable bond.

[Sidenote: The First African Missionary a Lutheran.] It is a satisfaction and an inspiration to know in the searching of heart which should be ours that our own church has heeded the Ethiopian call. If it is true that “when the history of the great African States of the future comes to be written, the arrival of the first missionary will be the first historical event”, then will the Lutheran Church have its Peter Heiling (