Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0012/00122.txt

Text File | 1991-06-24 | 41KB | 635 lines

$Unique_ID{COW00122}
$Pretitle{259}
$Title{Angola
Chapter 2D.   Religious Groups and Religious Life}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Irving Kaplan}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{church
religious
protestant
roman
local
community
catholic
angola
groups
party}
$Date{1978}
$Log{}
Country:     Angola
Book:        Angola, A Country Study
Author:      Irving Kaplan
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1978

Chapter 2D.   Religious Groups and Religious Life

Religious Affiliations

     Information on the religious affiliation of Angolans after independence
is lacking, and the estimates available for affiliation in the colonial period
are in conflict. Moreover the meaning of religious affiliation is ambiguous.
An individual may, for example, claim membership (or be recorded as belonging)
to a specific Christian denomination, a claim recognized by the domination and
by his local community, but he may also share perceptions of the natural and
supernatural order characteristic of indigenous religious systems and
participate in some of the rituals embedded in those systems. Sometimes the
Christian sphere of the life of a community will be institutionally separate
from the indigenous sphere. In other cases the local meaning and practice of
Christianity may be modified by indigenous patterns of belief and practice.

     The problems of conflicting data and ambiguous meaning notwithstanding,
it may be useful to present available estimates as a rough approximation to
the preindependence situation and as a basis for reasonable conjectures on
affiliation in the late 1970s. A religious census in 1960 gave the entire
white population (3.6 percent of the total) and 48 percent of all Africans as
Roman Catholics. In the absence of data for mesticos (roughly 1 percent of the
population), it may be assumed that half or more were Roman Catholics. The
Annuario Pontificio for 1966 (information furnished by the relevant dioceses),
however, gave the proportion of Roman Catholics in Angola at 36 percent and
that for 1968 at roughly 40 percent. Assuming the white population at from 3
to 4 percent, African Catholics constituted roughly 33 to 36 percent in the
mid- to late 1960s. The discrepancy between the official figures for 1960
(repeated in a number of sources) and those given by the Vatican publication
may be accounted for in part by the fact that the 1960 figures are based on a
census and that some Africans living in communities with substantial numbers
of Roman Catholics or Protestants may refer to themselves as such when asked,
whereas church sources are likely to list as Christians only those who meet
the formal criteria for membership. In the absence of unambiguous information
for the end of the colonial era, it is estimated that African Roman Catholics
constituted from 40 to 45 percent of the population.

     Most Roman Catholics are to be found in western Angola, not only
because that part of the country is the locus of the densest population,
but also because Portuguese penetration into the far interior was
comparatively recent and Roman Catholic missionaries tended to follow the
flag. The most heavily Roman Catholic areas before independence were Cabinda
Enclave, where most of the people may be included in the Kongo ethnolinguistic
category but are separated from the Kongo of Angola proper not only
geographically but in other respects as well. The latter are not quite so
heavily Roman Catholic, and Protestantism has been very influential there.
There was a substantial proportion of Roman Catholics in Luanda and Cuanza
Norte districts. Luanda, particularly the city, is ethnically mixed; but there
are large numbers of Mbundu in the area, and a kiMbundu dialect is the local
lingua franca. Cuanza Norte is heavily Mbundu. Less heavily Catholic were the
Ovimbundu-populated districts of Benguela and Huambo although Huambo has been
estimated at two-thirds Catholic. In the southern and eastern districts the
proportions of Roman Catholics fell off considerably.

     It is not possible to determine whether the not-very-cordial relations
between the MPLA-Labor Party government and the Roman Catholic Church have
affected church affiliation (see Church, State, and Community, this ch.). The
functioning of the Roman Catholic Church in its usual fashion requires the
availability of priests, and most of those were foreigners and members of
missionary orders. Less than 20 percent of all Catholic clergy were Africans
in the colonial era. The state formally permits the presence of foreign
religious personnel, but continuing conflict may lead to their departure,
weakening the institutional structure of the church.

     Official data in 1960 gave the proportion of Protestants in the
population at 17 percent, the great bulk of them presumably Africans, although
some mesticos may have been affiliated with one or another Protestant church,
and one source claims 8,000 white Protestants. Here again, either the official
figures are belied by another source or there was a substantial falloff by the
mid-1960s. The tendency noted for individuals living near Christian
communities to identify themselves as Christians of the appropriate kind
applies to those living in largely Protestant communities. The World
Protestant Handbook, 1968 gives the total number of communicants (full
members) of the Protestant churches in Angola at 95,926 and of members of the
total Christian community at 350,000. The dates for the information available
for each of the churches or denominations listed vary, but in general it may
be assumed to refer to the mid-1960s, and the proportion of Protestants in the
category of total Christian community may therefore be estimated at under 10
percent. That category includes (in addition to communicants) other
worshipers, children of Christian parents, catechumens, and members of groups
associated with the church. It may be noted that, by contrast, children of
Roman Catholic parents are likely to have been baptized and to be enumerated
as fully Roman Catholic. Some churches (e.g., the Church of God) recognize
only full communicants. In churches where the distinction was recognized the
ratio between the two categories ranged from roughly two to one to as much as
four to one. Altogether omitted from the 1968 handbook are figures of the
Baptist Missionary Society. This mission and several smaller Baptist groups
were located entirely in the northwest among the Kongo. After the uprisings
of 1961 these districts were declared a military zone by the colonial
authorities, and foreign missionaries were not permitted to operate. Then and
thereafter, substantial numbers of Kongo fled to Zaire, and the missions
dispersed northward with them. In many cases, even if the figure for total
Christian community in the mid- to late 1960s is raised by 50 percent, the
proportion of Protestants would have been substantially under the 17 percent
given by official sources in 1960 and the proportion of communicants or full
members much smaller.

     There was a very strong tendency for specific Protestant denominations to
place their missions in particular regions and therefore to become involved
with the ethnic groups living there. Lawrence W. Henderson, a Methodist
missionary, has gone so far as to refer to Protestantism as a "tribal
religion," by which he means not only that there was a link between specific
denominations and ethnic groups, but also that the social structure of the
ethnic community affected the way in which the local church was organized (see
Church, State, and Community, this ch.). The fact of such links does not mean,
however, that only one Protestant group carried out missionary activity among
the communities of any ethnolinguistic category.

     Among the Ovimbundu the missionary group longest in situ consists of the
smaller units that eventually came to make up the United Mission (combining
the United Church of Canada and the United Church of Christ Congregational-an
American group). The World Christian Handboo