FROM CHINAMWALI TO CHILANGIZO:

(2001:12) points out, three things motivated colonialism: 'commerce, Christianity and
civilisation (or gold, God and glory!). As the colonial powers searched for new sources
of wealth, civilisation and Christianity went hand in hand to eradicate the superstitious
beliefs in magic, spirits, ancestors, and witchcraft of the 'primitive' people. Hence the
zeal to evangelise the 'pagan' world must also be seen against this background of the
Enlightenment worldview. Kwame Bediako (1995:192-93) observes that the major con­
cern of the World Missionary Conference of 1910 held in Edinburgh, as it considered
the 'missionary problems in relation to the non-Christian world' was the primal relig­
ions, especially of Africa, for which the term 'animism' was used. The concern was
therefore whether the animists could really be converted, since the general feeling was
that the animists had no religion to prepare them for the Christian faith.
The nineteenth and twentieth century Western missionaries were therefore greatly influ­
enced and shaped by their worldview in that, while 'they retained their faith in God and
the domain of the supernatural, ... they also placed great value on science and reason'
(Hiebert, et a 1991:89-90). This was evident in their building of churches to focus on
religious matters, while schools were to civilise the people, and hospitals were where
nature and disease were to be explained in natural terms. The world of the spirits,
magic, witchcraft, and other supernatural forces was rejected as fiction and illusion.
This kind ofbackground becomes evident in the way the Baptist missionaries responded
to the issue ofchilangizo in Malawi in the 1970s as discussed in chapter five.
The Southern Baptists' cultural background therefore cannot be understood outside of
the contexts of both American Christianity and the Western worldview. The African
context too - directly or indirectly, congenial or hostile - provided its own dynamics
which helped to shape Baptist Christianity in Malawi, as discussed below.
3.3 SOCIAL-POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS REALITIES IN THE AFRICAN
CONTEXT
Southern Baptists arrived in Nyasaland, still a British Protectorate, in 1960, when politi­
cally it was a period ofthe growth of African nations on the continent. Malawi was in a
27