IV. Africa
There are three Africas, each with its difficult problems.
Christian Africa is at the southern end of the continent where live nearly five and one-half million people. This is more nearly evangelized than any other portion of the continent. Some notable Christian leaders have been developed in South Africa, of whom the Rev. Andrew Murray is one of the most widely known. In Abyssinia is the old Coptic Church which is without much real Christian life.
Pagan Africa comprises the greatest solid mass of paganism on the earth.
Mohammedan Africa numbers at least forty millions of population spread over the vast regions from the Equator to the Mediterranean Sea. With the exception of Abyssinia, Liberia and Sierra Leone, practically the whole of North Africa is under the sway of the false prophet and even in the lands mentioned the pressure of Mohammedan invasion is rapidly growing more severe.
The intellectual task on this educational frontier of the world is indicated by the fact that there are 843 languages and dialects on the continent. The Edinburgh Conference estimated that in Pagan and Mohammedan Africa combined there are a hundred millions of people without a written language or even an alphabet of their own.
On the whole continent of Africa there are 3,244 missionaries, each with a parish of 3,614 square miles and 46,239 people. There is only a handful of missionaries to guard 3,000 miles of Mediterranean coast from Egypt to Gibraltar. From Khartum to Uganda, along the rich Nile valley, a distance of 1,000 miles, there are about a dozen missionaries.
As far as the proportion of missionaries to population is concerned, Africa is much better supplied than Asia, yet in Africa there are five great blocks of territory which are unoccupied and other areas with missionaries only around the fringes or reaching only a small fraction of the people. These areas are irregular in shape and the lines bounding them have been drawn so as to exclude all mission stations. Some of the people in them no doubt are hearing the gospel, but there are no resident missionaries in any of them, according to the maps of the World Atlas of Christian Missions.
The smallest of these five unoccupied areas is in Portuguese and German East Africa. It is four times the size of the State of New York.
A second near the west coast, south of the equator, has three times the extent of New England.