innonimatu
the resident Cassandra
- Joined
- Dec 4, 2006
- Messages
- 15,374
No, I was thinking earlier. First you have the arab slave trade across the Sahara and over the eastern coast (the Swahili), where every "infidel" was game. In terms of number of africans enslaved they probably captured and moved more (roughly between the 8th and the late 19th centuries) than the European slave trade did. The obvious way out of becoming a target was for the communities within their reach (a thin strip along the coast) converting to islam. If you look at short accounts of the period you'll see some innocuous comments about how "trade" with Arabia led to conversion, but you'll have to dig deeper to know what that "trade" was - slaver raids. There's plenty of accounts about the evil european slavers, but the history of arab slaving is still something you'll hardly see - possibly because the arabs had this nasty habit of castrating their house slaves, thus few descendants exist today (an exception being one place they were used as agricultural laborers in large numbers, southern Iraq).
Thus conversion to Islam was very much a by-product of conquest and of that raiding, just as in their mediterranean conquests conversions were a by-product of taxing policies and other discrimination. It did not penetrate deep into tropical Africa because the arabs, as the europeans in the other coast, died like flies when venturing into the interior. And the local swahili who converted and became the local slave gatherers for the trade showed little interest in proselytizing and losing their source markets.
Then you have european christian slavers, who basically did the same in the west coast starting almost immediately after their arrival, in the 16th century. And, here as in the east cost, the reach of the newcomers was very small, only the coastal areas. Between diseases killing both missionariers and soldiers, and the rough terrain and extreme political fragmentation of the interior, Christianity, just as Islam, had no chance of penetrating Africa's interior South of the Sahara until the era of quinine and railroads.
But here it is worth mentioning the curious case of the kingdom of Kongo, which peacefully converted to catholicism right after first contact, in the early 1500s. Whether genuine religious interest or smart political calculation to get an alliance motivated them (or both) we don't really know. They went on to set up their own roman catholic ecclesiastical hierarchy, sending students to Europe. Unfortunately for them the european missionaries, traders and craftsmen sent there kept dying, so they ended up acquiring little technology in the deal. Their version of christianity "went native", out of control of the papacy, which there meant the portuguese, installed in the nearby colony of Luanda. That allowed some unscrupulous governors to occasionally declare them heretics and intervene in religious and political conflicts. The kingdom lasted a few centuries, which was extraordinary at the time in the region, but between this interference and the civil wars it had collapsed into warring little lordships in the 18th century.
So, there were attempts at conquest by both christians and muslims, justified with the fact that the africans were heathens or heretics or infidels. They just failed (with very limited success, only some coastal areas and islands) because of Africa's formidable natural defenses. Until the 20th century when the interior was opened. Fortunately for the africans then, colonial european powers in the 20th century (Europe having gone secular by then) couldn't care less about forcing them to convert, allowing some missionaries only where they were useful aides for the ever short-staffed colonial administration. But after independence, and up until now, you got to see religious conflict fueling wears there. It even started in the final days of the colonial era, when certain missionaries/preachers were already playing politics and turning their armies into militias. And you'll see more of it in the future. Nigerian is a powder keg waiting to be blown. And the great lakes area is a mess. Not to mention several countries in the Guinea coast, where coups and counter-coups keep happing as different tribes who distinguish themselves mainly because of their religions (animists/muslims/christians) fight over power.
