How Was Christianity Effective Spiritually to African Slaves When They Essay

How Was Christianity Effective Spiritually to African Slaves When They Were Forced Into Slavery - Essay Example ery being the darkest and most excruciating as they must have been too the period that drew the best abilities and most noble of traits among the race, a look into their spirituality during those periods must be a whole enlightening exercise that should provide truly relevant references for our present situations. This paper shall be specific to the Christian Spirituality of the African slaves during the Atlantic Slave Trade era between the 16th and the 19th century. Christianity was first introduced in West Africa by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. I have no source to indicate the extent of Christian conversions in the western coasts of Africa by the 1700’s . But that side of Africa having had trade relations with Europeans already at those times, notably with the Spaniards, the Portuguese and the Dutch, there must have been some extent of evangelization going on by those times. In the book From Slavery to Freedom, author John Hope Franklyn mentions resistance of the native Africans to the Christian Faith as the bearers of the teachings were associated with the institutions of the slave trade to the New World. "It was a strange religion, this Christianity," he wrote, "which taught equality and brotherhood and at the same time introduced on a large scale the practice of tearing people from their homes and transporting them to a distant land to become slaves." Compounding this local resistance is the deliberate and methodic eradic ation of the Africans’ identity in the slave trade. Folk religions, as were the African traditional beliefs and cultures, even their languages, were being systematically suppressed to deter organized resistance. â€Å"Slaves in the eighteenth century came from various African societies, cultures and nations, such as the Ibo, Ashanti and Yoruba on the West African Coast. Consequently, slaves from differing ethnic groups displayed little commonalities. Africans were black, but did not experience a homogenous existence they shared