Missionaries and Colonial Powers in Africa: The Erasure of Muslim Identity

The Missionary-Colonial Alliance

Christian missionary activity in Africa was not independent of European colonialism; it was its ideological arm. Missionaries arrived with or before colonial armies, established schools and hospitals that created dependency on colonial institutions, and produced African elites educated in European languages and Christian frameworks who served as administrators of colonial governance.

In Muslim-majority regions, the missionary project had a specific additional function: the conversion of Muslims or, where conversion was impossible, their cultural assimilation into a European-Christian framework that erased Islamic identity without replacing it with a new Muslim consciousness.

The Education System

The colonial education system (staffed largely by missionaries) was designed to produce administrative functionaries, not educated citizens. It taught African children in European languages, with European history, European religion, and European frameworks for understanding the world.

The effect on Muslim communities was deliberate erosion: children educated in missionary schools lost Arabic literacy, lost connection to Islamic scholarship, and often lost practice of the religion itself over one or two generations. They gained the ability to serve colonial administrations. They lost the intellectual and spiritual heritage of their communities.

The Post-Colonial Continuation

The erasure did not end with formal independence. Post-colonial African states often maintained educational systems built on the colonial model. European and American NGOs, many with explicitly Christian missions, continue to operate in Muslim-majority regions of Africa: running schools, health systems, and development programmes that carry implicit or explicit pressure toward Christian identity.

The contemporary missionary project in Africa (funded by American evangelical organisations, European Catholic missions, and others) operates in regions where Islam has existed for centuries, targeting specifically the conversion of Muslims or the cultural assimilation of Muslim communities into a Western secular-Christian framework.

The Geopolitical Dimension

Western support for post-colonial African governments that suppress Islamic political expression (in Algeria, Egypt, Nigeria, and elsewhere) has been part of the same project: maintaining the colonial settlement of Africa as a Christian or secular continent by supporting governments that control or persecute Muslim communities.

The Algerian civil war of the 1990s, in which a Western-backed military government cancelled elections that an Islamic party had won and conducted a brutal suppression of Islamist movements, is the most documented example. Estimates of the dead range from 100,000 to 200,000.

What Was Lost

The Islamic civilisational heritage of West Africa (the libraries of Timbuktu, the scholarly tradition of the Sahel, the administrative sophistication of the Songhai Empire) was systematically suppressed, its physical heritage destroyed or neglected, its intellectual tradition made inaccessible to the populations that inherited it.

The Timbuktu libraries (containing hundreds of thousands of manuscripts of Islamic scholarship in mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and theology) survived colonial neglect only through the efforts of private families who hid them. They are only now being systematically catalogued and digitised.