GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Compared to Asia, sub-Saharan Africa is relatively uniform socio-culturally and in its history of colonialism and independence. The South African experience, though, has unique features for our purposes. Another fault line runs between countries in which Christianisation is overwhelming and those in which Islam constitutes a formidable presence and where evangelical politics is largely constructed by that reality.

Fault lines also run between the colonial heritages, especially Anglophone and non-Anglophone. In general, Protestantism is stronger in the former. But sometimes the religious pluralism of British colonial policy and metropolitan reality diluted or overturned Protestant predominance; and anti-clerical governments in France and Portugal, and in the latter case the opposite extreme of a Catholicism at the service of the state, helped to give Protestantism a reasonable presence in some Francophone and Lusophone states. Angola is possibly as Protestant as Tanzania. However, in only one Francophone country, the Central African Republic, is Protestantism predominant (Baur 1994: 464).

In continental West Africa, Christianity is probably only a majority in Ghana. Islam and even African Traditional Religion are strong competitors in West Africa. According to Baur (1994), Protestantism has a majority only in South Africa, but is near one in Kenya, Swaziland, Namibia, Zambia and Malawi. Sub-Saharan Africa has about one hundred and twenty million Protestants, some 30 per cent of the population; a massive numerical base, much of it post-independence, and still growing (it is commonly asserted that six million Africans per year become Christians (Haynes 1996: 201)).