Parallel Lives

Two notable Africans¹ were born around the year 1865, on either side of the continent. One was at Half-Graway in the east of Liberia, not far from the disputed boundary with what became the Ivory Coast. The other was at Kiwanda, in the kingdom of Buganda, thirty years before it was incorporated in the British Protectorate of Uganda. They took the names by which they are remembered, William Wadé Harris and Apolo Kivebulaya, later on. Harris began life in an animist home, where people prayed to the spirits through a rock in the middle of the town. Kivebulaya likewise was raised according to traditional Ganda customs and rituals, but in his childhood the family became notionally Muslim when the kabaka (king) Mutesa imposed the observance of Friday prayer and Ramadan throughout his kingdom. By the end of their lives–Harris died in 1929, Kivebulaya in 1933–one was revered as a prophet, the other as a saint. This study notes some remarkable parallels and coincidences in their lives and ministries, as well as considerable divergences in their evangelistic ministry and in the outcome of their labours.

Although the nineteenth century has been called ‘The Great Century’² of Christian mission, that epithet comes from a distinctly Western perspective. It is true that European and American missionary societies proliferated in the nineteenth century and established thousands of ‘mission stations’, and that, as Latourette wrote, ’Never before had Christianity, or any religion, been introduced to so many different peoples and cultures’. Nevertheless, the numbers of new Christians were insignificant compared with the groundswell of conversions in the twentieth century. Harris and Kivebulaya were at the forefront of a missionary movement that saw the proportion of Africans claiming Jesus Christ as their Lord rise from one in ten in 1900 to one in two by the year 2000. Their pioneering ministries, quite different from one another, helped sow the seeds of modern African Christianity. To the church in Corinth the apostle Paul wrote, ‘I planted, Apollos watered’; the Ugandan Apollos, like the Liberian Harris, was a sower. Numerous others, indigenous Africans and foreign partners, shared in the watering and nurturing–and ‘God gave the increase’.

Christian missionaries arrived in Liberia along with the Afro-American settlers from the United States who founded and named the colony. One of their early converts was Jessie Lowrie, who became a minister of the Methodist Episcopal Mission. When the young Wadé (sometimes spelled ‘Waddy’) was about twelve years old, he was sent to live with Lowrie and attended the school he supervised. He became literate in their native Glebo and in English. He was baptised, seemingly at Lowrie’s instigation rather than after any personal spiritual experience, and took the names ‘William Harris’ at some unknown prompting. Unlike his Ugandan contemporary, the baptismal names do not see to have had any particular significance.

Missionaries did not arrive in Buganda until 1877. Sent by the Anglican Church Missionary Society, prompted by a letter from the explorer H. M. Stanley that was printed in the Daily Telegraph, two (out of a party of eight who sailed from London) reached the court of Mutesa. As was almost invariably the case in missionary history, these first missionaries were not the first purveyors of the gospel: they were preceded by a freed slave, Dallington Maftaa, who left Stanley’s entourage and remained at Mutesa’s court, where he taught literacy using the Swahili Bible. The French Catholic Missionaries of Africa, known as the White Fathers, arrived in 1879. Young Waswa (his given name denoted the elder of twins) would have heard about the Europeans, and, in 1886, about the execution of some two hundred Baganda converts. He himself was in his twenties before his interest in the Christian gospel was aroused, and the differences between Roman Catholics and the Church Missionary Society (CMS) were explained to him.

In his late teens, Waswa left his village for the capital, where he worked as a road builder. He got the nickname Munubi because he wore the cast-off clothes of a Nubian (Sudanese) soldier. At this time the territory was riven by sporadic civil conflicts, and his construction team became a band of mercenaries. He ended up fighting with the Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEAC) force under Captain (later Lord) Lugard, which brought the wars to an end in 1894, when the Protectorate was declared. By then he had decided to be a Protestant Christian, but had not enrolled for baptism both because he smoked cannabis and because he was barely literate. However, with more of the Bible becoming available in his native Luganda, he overcame these hurdles and was baptised in 1895. ‘The greed to become a man of God seized me’, he said. He took the baptismal name ‘Apolo’, reflecting his desire to emulate the biblical Apollos who ‘spoke with burning enthusiasm and taught accurately the things concerning Jesus’ (Acts 18.25), and possibly also out of respect for an older compatriot of that name. He was already called Kivebulaya, meaning ‘one from England’, because he now took to wearing a scarlet British military jacket (indeed, much later he was still wearing it under his cassock) and gladly accepted the name. And before the year was out, Apolo Kivebulaya volunteered and was taken on by the church as a ‘native teacher’ and went to work in the neighbouring kingdom of Toro to the west.

Harris too left home in his teens and, like many a Glebo youngster, worked as a deckhand on ships trading along the West African coast. After four voyages and a stint in Gold Coast gold mines he settled in Cape Palmas, a larger town not far from his birthplace, and worked as a bricklayer. He married and transferred his allegiance from the Methodists to the Protestant Episcopal Church, where by 1892 he became an assistant teacher and catechist back in Half-Graway. Like Kivebulaya, he felt an affinity with Britain and shared an opinion current among the Glebo people that Liberia would be better off as a British Protectorate like Uganda. He is said to have brought a treasured Union Jack home from his travels.

Thus, through the rest of the decade and into the twentieth century, both men were in church employment: Harris in his homeland, Kivebulaya far from home—it was a fortnight’s march, wading through swamps, from Kampala to Karabole (the capital of the Toro kingdom, nowadays engulfed by the bustling city of Fort Portal). Harris, the better educated, also served as a government interpreter, and was a respected leader of the Glebo people. Kivebulaya, finding that the Batoro did not follow his Luganda as easily as he had imagined, set about learning their tongue and soon became convinced of the importance of using the vernacular, a conviction he carried with him in later years as his ministry took him yet further afield. Harris, on his voyages, had seen more of the world, but as teacher and catechist he hardly ventured further than a twenty-mile stretch of coastline, whereas Kivebulaya was soon trekking far and wide in Toro country. As it happens, both ran afoul of the law. Kivebulaya spent a month in prison in 1895–1896 and was again detained in 1898. Harris’s imprisonment was yet to come.

After only three months in Toro, Kivebulaya was arrested by an inexperienced officer of the IBEAC force on an unjustified charge of sedition and marched back to Kampala in a chain gang. After an uncomfortable month in prison, he was released without trial. His second incarceration came in more dramatic circumstances. Late in 1896, he was posted to Mboga, much further westward, an area administered by the British though claimed by the Belgians. The first thirteen baptisms in Mboga were celebrated in 1897. The following January he was accused of murder: the sister of the local headman had tripped on a spear near the church and been killed. It may have been an accident, but people believed that accidents were caused by evil influences; Kivebulaya’s teaching had challenged their customs, and in revenge his house was surrounded and set on fire. He was rescued but sent to Fort Portal for ‘English’ justice and was kept in prison until April when again he was released without trial. He attributed his sufferings to a divine purpose and his survival to divine protection. He boldly returned to Mboga for another sixteen months before he was called to move on, and his ministry resulted in a growing number of baptisms. In 1899 he had a powerful vision, or dream, in which he was visited by Jesus with the words ‘I am with you’. In this assurance he wrote, ‘I walk happily because the Lord Jesus said “I will never let you down”’.

A few years later, it was Harris’s turn to experience both imprisonment and a life-changing vision. He was a ringleader in defending the rights of the Glebo people against the Afro-American government of Liberia and was dismissed as an official interpreter. He got involved in a plot to stage a coup that failed, or more probably never happened, but he was known to be sympathetic to the rebels and was jailed for treason. He was in prison from 1909 to 1912, though whether this was a single term or he was arrested and sentenced more than once is not clear. In prison in 1911 he was, as he described it, visited in a trance by the angel Gabriel who told him ‘God is coming to anoint you. You will be a prophet’. On his release, he abandoned European attire, clothed himself in a long white robe, and began to preach. Among his fellow Glebo he had little success; his wife is said to have died of grief at seeing him so changed. A prophet without honour amongst his own people, he shook the dust from his feet and set off eastward into Côte d’Ivoire.

There are notable parallels and two evident contrasts in the careers of these two evangelists. Both left their homeland to preach the gospel. Kivebulaya, a Muganda, began his work in Toro and only returned to Kampala rarely and briefly. His ministry in Mboga, where he returned in 1915, and his pioneer work among the various pygmy peoples of the Ituri forest, was exercised in what by then was the Belgian Congo. He made it his home and made sure that he would die and be buried there. Harris’s preaching tour took him along the Atlantic seaboard and into the British colony of the Gold Coast before returning to Côte d’Ivoire. By contrast with Kivebulaya’s long ministry, Harris’s ministry was cut short when he was arrested and deported to Liberia. The other contrast is that Harris was a freelance evangelist, whereas Kivebulaya worked throughout under the auspices of the CMS. Starting out as a lay teacher and catechist, he was ordained deacon in 1900, priest in 1903, and an honorary canon in 1922, not to mention an honorary vice-president of the CMS. Harris, on the other hand, had no affiliation. At the time, the Roman Catholic missionaries of the Société des Missions Africaines de Lyon, who had arrived in Côte d’Ivoire in 1895, recorded 1,100 baptised converts, while a handful of Methodist groups, outposts of the Gold Coast District, consisted of Ghanaians, many employed as clerks or storekeepers in European trading posts, who worshipped in their own tongue and were not inclined to convert Ivoirians. Harris instructed those he baptised to join the church in their locality if there was one, but otherwise to erect their own.

Carrying a bamboo staff in the form of a cross, a Bible, and a gourd strung with a net of cowrie shells, Harris made his way, barefoot, along the Atlantic shore and into the Gold Coast. The rattle of the cowrie shells attracted people in village after village to come and listen to his simple message: God is not as far off as you suppose. God is love. He has come to us in Jesus. Burn your fetishes and be baptised. Sometimes the entire village responded as one and were baptised, their amulets, charms and idols piled up and set ablaze. In other places his message was met with indifference. When he reached Grand Bassam, the largest port of the territory, he was arrested and ordered to leave. He cursed the French administrator and moved swiftly on. He spent six months in the Gold Coast, where he was known as ‘Professor’ Harris. Here both Roman Catholic and Wesleyan Methodist missionaries had long been at work. They had mixed reactions to his campaign and, though thousands of converts came to their doors, they did not recognise Harris’s baptism and imposed their usual strict conditions for membership which, inter alia, debarred polygamists. Retracing his steps Harris was welcomed with enthusiasm in Côte d’Ivoire. The administrator he had cursed had died a week later! Harris’s reputation had spread far and wide. From villages far in the interior, people journeyed to the coast to hear him and be baptised. They went home to burn their fetishes, build little pole and dagga churches, to observe Sunday as a holy day, and to pray for a missionary to come and teach them to read the Bible—all as he instructed them. It is claimed that 100,000 or more took Jesus as their Lord after hearing him or other preachers associated with him.

His activity was curtailed in 1915 when Marc Simon, a French official who was on trek through the villages under his jurisdiction, was compelled to lose a whole day in the middle of the jungle because his porters, recently converted by the prophet, refused to continue the journey on a Sunday. He resolved to rid the country of this troublemaker. He had no difficulty in persuading the Governor that a foreigner addressing vast crowds in a country now at war was unacceptable, and Harris was expelled. He made several attempts to return in later years but was prevented.

For Kivebulaya, 1915 was not the end, but the start of a new phase of ministry. After fifteen years in Toro, he was due leave, but as he had no reason to return to Kampala, he chose to go back to Mboga, now definitively in the Congo, which became his base for the rest of his life. And six years later, another new phase, consequent upon another mystical experience of which he wrote, ‘Christ appeared before me as a man. It was like seeing a man who was my brother. He said to me, “Go, preach in the forest, because I am with you. I am who I am–this is my Name.”’ He rose to the challenge and sought out the reclusive peoples of the Ituri forest. Small in stature and speaking seven different languages, they were semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers. Kivebulaya went among them in friendship, traveling with them, sleeping in their homes, and eating their food. There was no rush to hear him as in Côte d’Ivoire; the task of evangelisation was painstaking and the first fifty pygmies were baptised only in 1932.

Baptism in the context of a CMS mission area followed a careful period of preparation, and the baptised continued to receive pastoral care and direction. Kivebulaya prepared the ground through schooling—his first appointment in Toro was as a schoolmaster; he made every effort to use vernacular tongues; and he exercised a healing ministry. In the Congo, covering an area up to sixty miles from Mboga, he organised and supervised schools, appointing and moving teachers. With help he translated Mark’s gospel for the Wambuti (never published but an invaluable tool for the fellow-preachers who had access to it) and produced a ten-page primer of the language. He introduced basic Western medicine, personally dressed sores and nursed the sick, and his prayers were reputed to be powerful, with some instances of miraculous recovery. He rejected the use of amulets and charms, which he had learned in his youth when apprenticed for a time to a traditional healer. He had come to see that the customs in which he was raised were flawed and that to come to Christ entailed a radically changed way of life.

Kivebulaya’s wife had died when they were both very young, and, most unusually in that culture, he never remarried. But in Mboga, he gathered around him a very assorted household, and was described as the patriarch of an extended family. Some seventy young people were proud to be called ‘Apolo’s children’; they formed a missionary taskforce as volunteer teachers, interpreters, translators, and catechists. When, in time, converts were ready for baptism, they arranged for charms and fetishes to be publicly burnt first. After twelve years of missionary activity in the forest, six congregations had been formed.

Harris, on the other hand, offered instant baptism to all who responded to his preaching and then moved on. He found interpreters, since he spoke only English, Glebo, and other Kru dialects, and some of these interpreters remained preaching and baptising in his wake. English-speaking clerks from the Gold Coast and Sierra Leone encouraged new churches, and taught them their hymns, but the converts’ knowledge of the faith was shallow. Not a few bought large family Bibles, in English, which they did not open but kept in their little mud chapels, awaiting the day when a missionary would come. For ten years these ‘Harris’ Christians were exploited and oppressed by the French authorities, but they turned out in vast numbers to welcome him when that day arrived.

Harris himself, following his expulsion from the Ivory Coast, continued to preach in Liberia and Sierra Leone, but with less success than in those short years. Unlike Kivebulaya, he did remarry: of the women who accompanied him in Côte d’Ivoire and Gold Coast, at least one was his wife. Another, calling herself Madam Harris Grace Thannie, tried to carry on Harris’s work in the Gold Coast; she and her followers dressed in white, called themselves prophets and prophetesses, and named their church ‘The Church of William Waddy Harris and his Twelve Apostles’. Several other locally initiated churches also came about in the aftermath of Harris’s tour. They all took issue with white missionaries, whether on the validity of Harris’s baptism or on the subject of polygamy. In the 1920s, back in Liberia, Harris lived with two wives and proclaimed ‘Jesus Christ had twelve disciples and they were men. I shall have fourteen disciples and they will be women. This polygamy talk is white man’s mouth.’

Kivebulaya’s relationship with European missionaries was very different. He affirmed that ‘we are all one in Christ Jesus’ and the church is an international, inter-ethnic fellowship. When CMS missionaries needed a local guide or interpreter, Kivebulaya was their preference, a knowledgeable and cheerful companion. Although a missionary appearance in the Ituri forest was a rarity—Bishop Willis’s two visitations were in 1925 and 1931–on such occasions he was able to introduce the Wambuti to white people and demonstrate that their little worshiping communities were part of a world church. He wrote letters and articles that informed the diocesan leaders and the CMS in London of God’s work in the Congo.

Whereas Kivebulaya kept a journal and corresponded, Harris did not and almost all the details of his extraordinary career have been compiled at second or third hand. The three extant letters he wrote in 1926 were probably dictated, or at least prompted, by Pierre Benoit, a French pastor working with the Wesleyan Missionary Society. For in 1924, the Wesleyan Missionary Society (WMS) had been persuaded to follow up Harris’s ministry; the long-awaited missionaries who would open the Bible had arrived. Thousands welcomed them; numerous churches were brought under the care of the ‘French West Africa’ District of the Wesleyan Methodist Church, with personnel from Britain, France, and Dahomey. Some, however, were hesitant. So, Bill Platt, who had first made contact with them and now headed the District, despatched Benoit and Victor Tano, one of Harris’s interpreters, to Liberia. The old man had a stroke in 1925, which brought an end to his evangelistic career. Partly recovered, he was flattered by his visitors’ attention and wrote a message to his Ivoirian followers telling them to become Methodists, to shun fetishes, to read the Bible, and to observe the Ten Commandments. Two other notes went to specific local chiefs, to the same effect. Platt also sent a photograph of Benoit and Harris shaking hands to London, where 500 copies were made to be distributed to the village churches. Not all the independent churches were convinced, however, and in 1929 two Ivoirians came and spent some weeks with Harris. To the younger, Jonas Ahui, he declared ‘You shall carry on my work’. In due course the Eglise Harriste developed, incorporating most of the churches that rejected Methodism.³

Harris died later that year, in his homeland. Kivebulaya, on a visit to Kampala in 1933, was diagnosed with a terminal heart condition; he insisted on making his painful way back to Mboga to die in his adopted home among his adopted children. He was buried, not according to Ganda custom with his head facing towards his birthplace, but away from it, pointing towards the vast interior of the Congo, befitting the one who is acknowledged as the founder of the Eglise Anglicane du Congo.

Although Kivebulaya worked within European structures, they did not limit his mission in the Congo, where he had the freedom to take initiatives and seize opportunities as they arose. He was guided by his long experience in Toro and his familiarity with the Anglican tradition, 39 Articles and all, but they did not restrain his activity. Harris’s itinerant venture, on the other hand, could not have been contained within ecclesiastical limits. That can be seen from the experience of the Yoruba ex-slave Samuel Crowther. Back in 1864, the CMS had been bold enough to have him consecrated bishop in charge of the vast Niger Mission (Eastern Nigeria). Though Crowther was a man of ‘personal integrity, graciousness and godliness’,⁴ before long Crowther’s authority was being challenged and undermined by his missionary colleagues, who drove him to resign. Harris, who in all probability knew something of Crowther’s history, was not one to compromise his vocation by putting himself under European or American oversight. His choice of dress when he began to itinerate is evidence of a definitive rupture with the mission churches he had previously served.

Both of these heroes of the faith belong to the communion of saints, though of the two, the attribution of saintliness is more justly applied to Kivebulaya, the preacher and teacher with the pastoral heart. Harris called himself a prophet and the name has stuck, pre-eminent among the many prophets and prophetesses of African-initiated churches. From the 1920s onwards, their names and their deeds have been popularised in missionary literature⁵. But the outcome of their very different ministries is striking.

The great crowds who greeted Platt were only a small part of the Harris movement. Methodist missionaries were still discovering churches far in the interior decades later. Roman Catholics too were indebted to the prophet: 400 catechumens in 1914 became 8,000 by 1917, and the number of baptisms surged from 80 a year to over 600. The wholly African Eglise Harriste grew in numbers and influence during the struggle for political independence. Adrian Hastings justly described Harris’s all-too-brief venture as ‘the most extraordinarily successful one man evangelical crusade that Africa has ever known’.⁶ On the other hand, the Eglise Anglicane du Congo grew much more slowly, and for many years only in the northeast of that huge country. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the Congo, the Kimbanguist movement spread like wildfire after the even briefer activity of another African prophet, Simon Kimbangu, in 1921. But that is a different story.