West African Christianity
Lamin Sanneh's West African Christianity: The Religious Impact is a historical study of how Christianity took root along the Guinea coast and its hinterland, from the arrival of Portuguese traders and priests in the fifteenth century through the abolitionist settlements, the nineteenth-century missionary expansion, and the prophet and independent church movements of the twentieth. Sanneh, born in The Gambia into a Muslim family of Nyancho royal descent and a convert to Christianity, trained as a historian of Islam before turning to the history of mission. He wrote at a moment when African church history was still largely narrated as the history of European missionary societies, and when post-independence critics were arguing that Christianity was simply the religious wing of colonial conquest. He accepted the seriousness of that charge and answered it with archival history rather than apologetics.
The book's central claim is that the decisive agents in West African Christianity were West Africans. Sanneh traces the recaptive communities of Sierra Leone, the career of Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the Liberian settlements, the mass movement gathered by the Liberian prophet William Wadé Harris, Garrick Braide in the Niger Delta, and the Aladura churches of Yorubaland, showing in each case a pattern of appropriation rather than imposition. Underlying this is his argument about vernacular translation: because missionaries rendered Scripture into African languages, they were compelled to adopt indigenous names for God and indigenous religious vocabulary, thereby conceding that African cultures already possessed the conceptual furniture for divine revelation. Translation relativized the translator. It handed Africans a text in their own idiom, which they then read against the missionaries who brought it. Sanneh also sets Christianity alongside Islam throughout, comparing a religion that translates with one that preserves a sacred language, and refusing the tidy separation of the two that most mission histories assume. This book is the historical groundwork for the theoretical argument he would make more famously in Translating the Message.
It has continued to matter because it reframed the question. Debates about Christianity and colonialism, about inculturation, and about the shift of Christian demographic weight to the global South all run through the ground Sanneh cleared here. His account of translation as an anti-imperial mechanism remains contested and remains unavoidable.
Who should read this: those studying the history of mission, African Christianity, or Christian-Muslim relations, and anyone who has absorbed the assumption that African Christianity is a colonial inheritance and wants that assumption tested by evidence. It is a work of scholarship, not devotion — readers seeking prayer, practice, or personal formation should look elsewhere. Written in 1983, it predates the explosion of West African Pentecostalism and the diaspora churches, and should be supplemented for that story.