Unveiling the entanglements of Western Christianity and racialisation in Africa

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this essay, I critically engage with scholarship on race and racism on Africa, which closely connects race and Western Christianity, to argue that modern race and Christianity in Africa are essentially entangled. I will show that race and racism in modernity emerged as the name for religious difference, and racialisation became the process by which human beings were inserted into the Christian history of salvation, only to be kept at a distance from “true” conversion. Christianity meant full humanity and living outside full Christianity meant living outside the constructed category of the human. The physical manifestation of the spiritual quality of Christianity became associated with human phenotype. Simultaneously, political belonging, cultural and economic practices became premised on religious/racial difference. By critically looking at the discourses on reason, commerce (chattel slavery) and modern Western empire(s), this article will show how the three interfaced within Western Christian anthropology which engendered and sustain race and racism in Africa. In conclusion, the article argues that race and racism within Africa and projected on Africa cannot be fully understood without its Western Christian religious foundations and mutations.