SHALL CHRIST OR MOHAMMED WIN AFRICA?
Ultimately Christ will, as we know by the sure word of prophecy; immediately, Mohammed gains most rapidly, as present facts seem to indicate. The rapid strides of Mohammedanism in Africa have been noticed by nearly all recent explorers and travelers, but the full statement of the fact has been brought forth more vividly in a remarkable book written by a remarkable man. The book is entitled, "Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race." The author is Edward W. Blyden, LL.D., of whom it is said by a competent witness—and our own personal acquaintance with him confirms the testimony, so far as we are competent to judge—that he is a great traveler and an accomplished linguist, equally familiar with Hebrew and Arabic, with Greek and Latin, with five European and with several African languages, and, had he been born a European, might fill and adorn almost any public post. Dr. Blyden was born a full-blooded Negro in the Danish Island of St. Thomas, emigrated in his seventeenth year to Liberia, entered an American missionary school and rose to the head of it, became in 1862 Professor in the College of Liberia, and, two years later, Secretary of State in the African Republic. In 1877, he represented Liberia at the Court of St. James, as Minister Plenipotentiary, and has been abundantly decorated with honorary degrees.
Dr. Blyden's opportunities for knowing the facts are unquestioned, and his book presents in very striking array the advantages which in some respects Islam enjoys over Christianity in the propagation of its faith in Africa. The discussion has been continued by Canon Taylor of York, England, and, more recently, in a very clear article in the Nineteenth Century, by Dean R. Bosworth Smith. Our space does not permit us either to summarize the facts as to this progress, nor can we present all the reasons for it. But one of these reasons touches so nearly a point that is of such vital interest to American Christians, that we feel called upon to state it and emphasize it. We abridge the full statement thus: Christianity has labored under the great disadvantage of coming to the Negro in "a foreign garb." Its teachers came from a land that first reached the Negro by capturing him as a slave; they came to him with the conscious or unconscious air of superiority born of race-prejudice. Christianity came to him as the creed, not of his friends, his well-wishers, his kindred, but of his masters and oppressors. They differed from him in education, in manners, in color, in civilization. Mohammedanism, on the other hand, reached the Negro in his own country, in the midst of his own surroundings. When it had acclimatized itself and taken root in the soil of Africa, it was handed on to others, and then no longer exclusively by Arab missionaries, but by men of the Negro's own race, his own proclivities, his own color. The advantages of this method of approach cannot be over-estimated. We care not to enter at all into the question of the value of the two religions nor of the good they may respectively do for poor Africa. We wish simply to deal with the methods and means, and with the peoples who may best employ them. We again summarize the language of Dean Smith: The very fact that there are millions of Negroes in America and the West India Islands, many of whom are men of cultivation and lead more or less Christian lives, is proof positive that Christianity is welcomed by them. Is there not room to hope that many of these men, returning to their own country, may be able to present Christianity to their fellow-countrymen in a shape in which it has never yet been presented,—in which it would be very difficult for Europeans or Americans ever to succeed in presenting it—to them, and may so develop a type of Christianity and civilization combined which shall be neither American nor European, but African, redolent alike of the people and of the soil?
This is a point which the American Missionary Association has frequently urged, and which it had begun to exemplify by sending colored missionaries to Western Africa. The experiment was in many respects satisfactory, but we realized that a longer training and a more thorough maturing of character were needed in those who had just emerged from the darkness and limitations of slavery. But what greater hope can there be for Africa than in the training of these millions, so apt in learning, so earnestly religious, and so well qualified to meet as brothers and friends their kindred in the Dark Continent! Here is a work for American Christians, full of promise of a glorious harvest.