A Truly Universal Church

African Catholic: Decolonization and the Transformation of the Church is a groundbreaking history of how Africans in the French Empire embraced both African independence and their Catholic faith during the upheaval of decolonization, leading to a fundamental reorientation of the Catholic Church. Elizabeth Foster recreates a Franco-African world forged by conquest, colonization, missions, and conversions — one that still exists today. We meet missionaries in Africa and their superiors in France, African Catholic students abroad destined to become leaders in their home countries, African Catholic intellectuals and young clergymen, along with French and African lay activists. All of these men and women were preoccupied with the future of France’s colonies, the place of Catholicism in a postcolonial Africa, and the struggle over their personal loyalties to the Vatican, France, and the new African states. Here is a brief excerpt from the book that paints an interesting portrait of Alioune Diop, an under-researched but very important figure at the heart of the negritude movement.

While French officials and Catholic missionaries were working out a new modus vivendi in Africa in the immediate postwar period, African intellectuals in France were at the forefront of the development and expansion of the pan-African negritude movement. In recent years, negritude has enjoyed enthusiastic scholarly attention. Studies of black artistic and literary innovations, of global black cultural networks and their political ramifications, or of one or more members of negritude’s famed triumvirate of Senegal’s Léopold Senghor, Martinique’s Aimé Césaire, and Guyana’s Léon-Gontran Damas are multiplying on library shelves. Yet Alioune Diop, the man who arguably did more than any other person to coordinate and sustain the postwar international black cultural movement, remains largely in the background. Indeed, one of the few books devoted to Diop denotes him in its title as “The unknown builder of the black world.” By founding the journal Présence africaine and the Parisian publishing house and bookstore of the same name, organizing groundbreaking international conferences of black culture in Paris in 1956 and Rome in 1959, cofounding the African Society of Culture (SAC) in 1956 and serving as its secretary general, Diop created the institutions that were essential to negritude’s lasting impact. His personal efforts to build and maintain networks between black writers, artists, students, scholars, philosophers, and priests, and to link them with their European counterparts, forged solidarity among black intellectuals and gave them an international audience from the 1940s onward. Moreover, his intellectual contributions are notable in their own right, and had particularly important ramifications in the Franco-African Catholic world explored in this book.

If Diop has been neglected by researchers, so too have important Catholic strands of black thought, which he actively encouraged and developed. It is not merely that scholars have tended to discount or disregard the Catholicism of leading lights in the black cultural movement, such as Senghor or Diop himself, but also that they have ignored explicitly Catholic engagement with pan-Africanism and colonialism in the pages of Présence africaine or in the books that issued from the eponymous publishing house. This Catholic negritude, which became explicitly anticolonial, insisted on a “deoccidentalization” of the Catholic Church. It demanded that the church embrace African peoples and African culture, and cease to privilege white people and European culture, so that it could incarnate its own universal premise. It provided a crucial intellectual engine for the changes taking place in the church at midcentury.

The Catholic presence at the heart of negritude is a reminder that Présence africaine had a robust Catholic audience encompassing both French intellectuals and African elites. In the words of the Guadeloupian French writer Daniel Maximin, who came to know Alioune Diop and the circle of intellectuals around Présence africaine in his student days and later served as the journal’s literary editor, “People forget that Présence was a movement that started with leftist Christians.” Indeed, a contemporary Marxist African critic, the Guinean playwright Condetto Nenekhaly Camara, went so far as to charge in 1961 that Présence africaine was founded by African Catholic intellectuals “with the covert sponsorship of French Catholic intellectuals.” Camara argued that the colonizing powers, realizing their days were numbered in their overseas possessions, used Christianity as part of a backdoor effort to “stimulate cultural movements” that denounced some Western values but “remained Catholicism at the heart of the negritude movement. A group including (from right) Jacques Rabemananjara, Jean Price-Mars, Émile Saint-Lôt, Édouard Glissant, Alioune Diop and attached to others which were given a halo of universalism, to conserve western-European influence in Africa.” Diop probably bristled at these statements if he read them, as Camara’s evocation of veiled, “colonialist” French Catholic influence at Présence africaine unfairly diminished his own personal initiative, anticolonial activism, and commitment to representing a wide range of viewpoints in his publications. Présence africaine welcomed and showcased the writing of contributors of various religious backgrounds who held divergent political views, including communists. Yet Diop would have likely ruefully acknowledged Camara’s perspective as the result of the church’s failure to denounce colonialism and divorce itself more emphatically from Europe in the postwar period.

Camara was right insofar as Diop served as a link between European thinkers and African intellectuals, though there was absolutely nothing “covert” about this engagement. Diop was deeply interested in European culture and he believed wholeheartedly in the importance of dialogue and the exchange of ideas with people of various races, cultures, and religions. He both borrowed from European intellectuals and challenged them in a variety of ways, not least about their understandings of Christianity. The most prominent and influential French Catholic intellectual that Diop introduced, literally, to Africa and Africans was Emmanuel Mounier, a leading exponent of Catholic personalism, who visited Diop in Senegal in the spring of 1947. Personalism was an anti-materialist “third-way” philosophy that celebrated the human person in his or her community, simultaneously denouncing the individualism of capitalism and the negation of the individual in communism. Mounier had a great influence on African Catholic students, intellectuals, and clergy who found personalist ideas useful as they struggled to reconcile their Catholic faith with its European origins and their critiques of French colonialism. Yet the relationship between Diop and Mounier also demonstrates that while Diop found elements of French Catholic thought persuasive and seductive, he rejected the paternalism of even his most supportive French interlocutors.

Indeed, over time, Alioune Diop became an increasingly strident and vocal critic of the church’s identification with Europe and of European intellectuals whose concepts of “universalism” and Catholicism he found self-referential and limited. By the mid-1950s, he was authoring pieces in Présence africaine accusing European Catholics of “religious racism” and calling on them to embrace a truly catholic commitment to universality. His increasingly militant public stance on the necessity of decoupling the Catholic Church from the “West” grew in part out of interactions with provocative European intellectuals, including Umberto Campagnolo, the founder of the European Society of Culture (SEC). In the course of the 1950s, Diop engaged in a public and private dialogue with Campagnolo about the meaning of a “civilization of the universal,” a broad concept that had implications for Christianity. Diop grew increasingly frustrated by Campagnolo’s Eurocentric mindset, and his anodyne view of colonialism. Diop admired European civilization, but he hoped Europeans, especially Catholics, would likewise appreciate and accept African contributions to dialogue and exchange. Their frequent failure to do so, whether conscious or not, irked him and prompted his adoption of a more radical tone on questions of religion and of culture more broadly.

Diop’s advocacy for change in European Catholic mindsets and institutions was also influenced and buoyed by younger African Catholic students and clergymen whom he mentored and encouraged. Moved by their conviction, he used his publishing platforms to air their ideas, experiences, and concerns, thus multiplying the African voices that were calling on the church to reset its approach to the non-European world. Indeed, throughout his life, Diop maintained that Africa had ideas and values to offer the world at large and the Catholic Church in particular. In the articles, book prefaces, and books on Catholicism that he either authored or published, he made the case that Africa could help make the church truly universal. These efforts were not in vain: by 1963, Diop was repeating his message on Vatican radio and lauding the early results of Vatican II. Though he remained critical of the persistent discrepancies between his vision of the church and its daily reality, he had done much to move the pendulum on the church’s approach to Africa and the developing world more broadly.