Christianity and African popular religion
Even at their height political organizations and trade unions never reached more than a fraction of the African population, especially in rural areas. In many areas witchcraft-eradication movements became a sensitive barometer of social distress: in 1933–34, for example, amid worldwide depression, drought, and locusts, a cult offering adherents a medicine called mchape that would deliver them from witchcraft swept central Nyasaland and eastern Northern Rhodesia. Antiwitchcraft cults and prophet movements drew on traditional religious and cultural beliefs, offering hope to a sorely pressed and poverty-stricken populace.
By the beginning of the 20th century, however, parts of South Africa had already experienced almost a century of Christian endeavour. The scope of mission work, already entrenched in the Shire Highlands and south of the Limpopo, was vastly extended as new societies appeared on the scene. The Roman Catholic church revived its presence in Angola and Mozambique and spread rapidly in the rest of the subcontinent, after its virtual disappearance by the late 19th century when Baptist and other Protestant missions began working there. The consolidation of colonialism and the new challenges facing African society gave mission activity renewed vitality, and throughout the region black education and health remained largely the responsibility of Christian missions until after World War II.
At the same time, by the late 19th century many missionaries had come to oppose African religious leadership and practiced their own colour bar. Thus, many Africans turned instead to the independent churches that emerged in South Africa in the late 19th century and spread rapidly throughout the subcontinent in the 20th century. Independent churches originated in the countryside but spread rapidly on the Rand, with the formation in 1892 of the Ethiopian church, which was linked to the African Methodist Episcopal church in the United States. Its “back to Africa” ideology was an essential part of what became known as Ethiopianism, a Christian movement that stressed African political solidarity and religious autonomy.
African independent churches were often characterized by a millenarian vision that disturbed missionaries, settlers, and administrators. In some areas whites sought to suppress them. Although the break with a mission church betokened a desire for independence from whites, there were many motives for separatism. In Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia, adherents of the millennial Watch Tower sect violently confronted state authority, but among the rural Shona and Kongo in Angola the millenarian churches were not confrontational. Everywhere, however, the independent churches subverted the norms of colonial society but lacked the capacity to transform it.