Africa’s Service to the World

Abstract

… There is not a tribe on the continent of Africa, in spite of the almost universal opinion to the contrary, in spite of the fetishes and greegrees which many of them are supposed to worship — there is not, I say, a single tribe which does not stretch out its hands to the Great Creator. There is not one who does not recognize the Supreme Being, though imperfectly understanding His character — and who does perfectly understand His character? They believe that the heaven and the earth, the sun, moon, and stars, which they behold, were created by an Almighty personal Agent, who is also their own Maker and Sovereign, and they render to Him such worship as their untutored intellects can conceive. The work of the Christian missionary is to declare to them that Being whom they ignorantly worship. There are no atheists or agnostics among them. They have not yet attained, and I am sure they never will attain, to that eminence of progress or that perfection of development; so that it is true, in a certain sense, that Ethiopia now stretches out her hands unto God.

‘Ethiopia Stretching Out Her Hands Unto God; or Africa’s Service to the World.’ Discourse before the American Colonization Society, May 1880. Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (1887) pp. 113–29