The Chad Mission and the Failure of Africanisation

The contemporary Jesuit mission in West and Central Africa began in Chad in 1935. Although initially conceived by a single individual, it was associated with the vagaries of the colonial system. From the time the mission was officially approved in 1946, the first Jesuits collaborated with the colonial administration in their deployment and in the organisation of the mission. They considered themselves to represent the cultural and spiritual arm of the French colonial project of civilisation in Africa, and were intimately connected to this. The ideological battles of France were the spiritual battles of the missionaries on the Chadian terrain. For instance, in the context of the Cold War, France opposed the Marxist–communist Eastern Bloc, and in Chad, the fight against the communist ‘invasion’ and the secularism of the Chadian elites was one of the objectives of the mission. The French empire was threatened by a double political crisis in Vietnam (threatened by Communism) and in Algeria (where the nationalists embraced Pan-Arabism); on the ground in Chad, the Jesuit mission intended to stop the progression of this Islam towards the south. In France, the working class turned its back on Christianity and scholars believe that France was on the way to becoming a mission country itself. In Chad, as everywhere in French-speaking Africa, the culprit of this reversal of the working classes was Communism. It was to be countered in Chad by a mass evangelisation, often anti-elite.

While this triple crisis created confusion among the French, in search of the recovery of France's prestige, the mission was built as a civilising mission, a form of ‘Frenchification’. This Frenchification presupposed the exclusivity of French missionary personnel, the isolation of Chadian Islam from the great international umma, the conversion of less radical Islam to Christianity, and an anti-Americanism that explained the initial distant relations with the Protestant churches.

Moreover, as the book has shown, Chad had a predominantly rural population, with low levels of literacy and little knowledge of the Christian faith. The Jesuit mission therefore took a populist turn and embraced mass evangelisation. Churches were built and baptisms were carried out en masse with the help of Jesuit Brothers.