The Cross and The Colony; Christianity’s Cost to Africa, The Shear Arrogant of Religious Brutality…

Sunday morning in much of Africa is a complex scene: hymns swelled in cathedrals and broom-swept chapels, televangelists broadcasting prosperity promises, and millions of faithful surrendering an hour, then a life, to a faith that arrived on foreign ships. Christianity is not native to Africa, yet it is woven into the daily rhythms of so many African societies. That fact alone should invite sober reflection — not as an indictment of private belief, but as a call to examine how a religion, as practiced and institutionalized here, has often been a vehicle of harm rather than liberation.

A History of Complicity and Violence

Christianity’s spread across the continent cannot be disentangled from conquest, commerce and coercion. Missionary activity accompanied — and sometimes facilitated — colonial occupation. Churches provided moral cover, cultural justification and bureaucratic structures that smoothed the imposition of foreign rule. Land was taken and repurposed for mission stations and plantations; indigenous systems of governance and faith were delegitimized and outlawed; languages and education were reshaped to serve imperial ends. This was not incidental: it was systematic. The moral authority of the Church lent legitimacy to a project that dispossessed, humiliated and, in many cases, destroyed African lives and cultures.

Some religious institutions — including branches of the Roman Catholic Church and various Protestant mission bodies — have since acknowledged parts of this legacy. But acknowledgment without meaningful redress, without restitution or sustained structural change, is hollow. Too many apologies have been gestures unaccompanied by the redistribution of wealth, restoration of land rights, or sustained support for healing and education on African terms.

The Enduring Patterns of Exploitation

The violence of colonization is not merely historical. The modes have changed, but patterns persist. Churches and missionary-founded institutions sometimes remain entwined with foreign interests that extract resources and influence local politics. Western theological frameworks continue to carry cultural assumptions that demean African customs as “backwards” or “pagan,” pressuring people to abandon their languages, medicines and communal practices in favor of imported norms. Where mission schools and hospitals did introduce literacy and health care, they also introduced dependency and curricular erasure of indigenous knowledge.

On a human level, the record contains too many stories of clergy and church-affiliated actors abusing power — sexual abuse, economic exploitation, and complicity in state violence. Those scandals are not isolated aberrations; they reflect organizational cultures in which secrecy, hierarchy and external protection too often shield perpetrators and silence survivors.

Charismatic and Prosperity Movements: New Charismatic Faces, Old Brutal Harm

In postcolonial Africa, charismatic and prosperity-focused churches have filled spiritual and social vacuums left by states and older denominations. Many of these congregations provide genuine community, psychosocial support, and hope. But a potent pattern has emerged: theology that equates wealth with divine favor, leadership styles that elevate pastors to quasi-royal status, and fundraising practices that extract the last pennies from desperate congregants.

Instead of redistributive teachings that address structural poverty, too many churches preach individualized salvation and material reward. Temple-like auditoriums and private jets for pastors sit alongside slums, underfunded schools and malnourished children. The spectacle of opulence in pastoral leadership — mansions, flashy cars, designer brands — is not merely tasteless when set against poverty; it is corrosive. It transforms spiritual authority into a private economy, where loyalty is bought and accountability is rare.

A Call to African Responsibility and Courage

This critique is not aimed at every believer or at the private practice of faith. It is directed at institutions, leaders and systems — and at our own responses to them. Africans must be honest with ourselves: we have sometimes welcomed, protected and profited from the very structures that harm our people. Political elites and elites within the Church have too often colluded, trading social control for legitimacy. Ordinary people, exhausted by survival, have at times embraced comforting doctrines rather than confrontations with power.

The remedy begins with accountability. Africans should demand full transparency and independent investigations into abuses linked to religious institutions. We should push for reparative measures — land restitution where appropriate, financial redress, community-led healing programs, and curriculum reforms that restore indigenous histories and philosophies. Churches that operate as businesses or political machines must be regulated: tax statuses contingent on clear social benefit, financial disclosures, and legal accountability for fraud and abuse.

Reclaiming spiritual life and public ethics

Spirituality need not be a tool of domination. Christianity in Africa can — and should — be a source of radical critique of injustice, a force for communal care, and a language for dignity. That will require theologies rooted in African realities: readings of scripture that foreground liberation, communal obligations, and stewardship rather than individual enrichment. It will require training clergy who are economically and ethically accountable to their communities, and lay movements that insist public religion serve public goods.

Beyond reforming Christianity, Africans must reclaim and revitalize indigenous spiritual and social practices that colonial religion suppressed. Cultural renewal is not a rejection of faith but a reassertion of identity and moral imagination. It creates plural religious ecosystems in which no single foreign-imported institution can monopolize truth or social power.

Conclusion: a Vocation to Justice

To remain silent in the face of this history and its continuing effects is to be complicit. This article does not seek to condemn the millions who find comfort and meaning in Christian worship on Sundays; it seeks to expose the hypocrisy of institutions and leaders who, shielded by sacred language, have profited from and perpetuated suffering. Africans must demand a Christianity worthy of its highest claims — a Christianity that stands unequivocally with the poor, that dismantles the structures of exploitation it helped create, and that submits itself to democratic oversight and moral scrutiny.

If Africa’s churches are to be agents of healing rather than instruments of harm, they must be remade by an accountable, justice-driven local conscience. Sunday worship should not be the quiet curtain behind which power repeats the injustices of yesterday. It must become, instead, a public witness to repair, dignity and the shared work of liberation.10:00-18:00