The Missionaries of Africa, popularly known as ‘the White Fathers’ due to the white Arab robes they adopted as their religious habit, was founded in 1868 by Cardinal Charles Lavigerie, Archbishop of Algiers and Carthage in North Africa. They are a Catholic missionary society of priests and brothers, currently working in 25 countries of Africa and the Middle East, as well as in other parts of the ‘African World’. Professor John Iliffe of Cambridge University justly called the White Fathers ‘Africa's most dynamic missionary society’.
This book is one of the fruits of a history project launched in 2001 with the intention of addressing deficiencies in the historical study of the Catholic Church in Africa and to make better use of the White Fathers’ general archives in Rome. These archives contain a wealth of material and constitute an incalculable heritage for the history of Africa. Considerable investment is also being made in the conservation and modernization of these archives. Three volumes by Jean-Claude Ceillier and Aylward Shorter have already appeared that take the story of the White Fathers from their founding up through the First World War. Francis Nolan's book covers the interwar period from 1919 to 1939.
Nolan, who is himself a White Father, studied modern history at Oxford and Cambridge and then spent several years teaching in seminaries in Great Britain and Africa. After this, he worked for 24 years in rural parishes in Tanzania and is currently based in Dar es Salaam. He is well acquainted with the society's archives and makes extensive use of them in his book. He begins by looking at the training that White Fathers received, its methods and numbers. By 1939, the society had more than 2,000 members and, in the African countries they served, there were 1·5 million baptized Christians as well as up to half a million catechumens. Uganda led the missions in both quantity and quality. However, this period also saw mass conversion movements in Rwanda, Burundi, and the Gold Coast (Ghana).
Nolan then takes his reader on a tour of all the White Fathers’ missions, moving in a counter-clockwise direction from North Africa (Algeria and Tunisia) where the society began, via the Sahel to West Africa, then to Belgian Congo and British East and Central Africa. This is a helpful method of organizing the enormous amount of material and it enables readers interested in one or another region to concentrate on their area of choice. Thematically, it also allows the author to build his narrative to the climax of the book, which focuses on the White Fathers’ schools and seminaries in this period.
During the interwar years, Africans, in Nolan's words, ‘tolerated’ the colonial powers. It was a period of consolidation, when governments concentrated on education in order to build up an indigenous leadership. For the church, too, it was a period of consolidation during which African clergy gained experience towards eventually taking over from the missionaries. The foundations laid in these years made the Catholic Church a permanent feature of the new Africa, while the colonial regimes were destines to be short lived.
For the church, a high point came with the Vatican's appointment of an apostolic visitor to British Africa, in the future cardinal archbishop of Westminster, Arthur Hinsley. The ostensible purpose of Hinsley's African journey in 1928–9 was to raise the standards of mission schools and secure the cooperation of the missionaries with colonial educational policy. As a result, the policy was reassessed and redefined. What Hinsley had not expected was the impressive development of the seminaries run by the White Fathers and he subsequently became their ardent advocate. Nolan's study of the Hinsley visitation not only makes use of missionary sources but also includes an examination of material in the Vatican's secret archive.
Nolan concludes his study with a pen portrait of Paul Voillard, superior general of the White Fathers for most of the period under discussion. Although he was not in episcopal orders, he was perfectly capable of calling White Father bishops to order, even on one occasion reprimanding the formidable Bishop Victor Roelens of Upper Congo. Voillard did not simply deal with day-to-day matters from his office in Algiers, but felt it was his duty to undertake the arduous task of visiting virtually all the mission stations in Central and West Africa. This was the first time a superior general visited missionaries in the field and marked the extent to which the missions of the White Fathers had developed. Henceforth, the task was to deal with the rapid growth of Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa.
