The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour

by Martin Meredith

  Alongside the growing power and status of episcopal authority, an alternative form of Christian practice evolved in Egypt during the third century: a monastic movement devoted to austerity and self-denial. Its most famous proponent was Antony, an Egyptian hermit. As a result of an admiring biography of him written shortly after his death by Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria, Antony became one of the most revered figures in Christian history. Born to wealthy Coptic-speaking parents in the village of Coma, near Heracleopolis Magna in Lower Egypt in about 251, Antony in the days of his youth took a deep interest in monastic ways, seeking out individual Christians in neighbouring villages who had adopted a solitary existence or practised an ascetic discipline. At the age of twenty, his parents died, leaving him all their possessions. But, on hearing a passage from the Gospel of Matthew, in which Christ tells a rich man, ‘If you want to be perfect, go and sell everything you have and give the money to the poor’, Antony decided the instruction applied to him. He duly sold all his possessions and began a life of fasting and prayer, discovering, according to Athanasius, that ‘the mind of the soul is strong when the pleasures of the body are weak’.

  After fifteen years of austerity, living first in his village, then in a nearby tomb, Antony resolved to shun all contact with other people. Travelling across the Nile, he took up residence in an abandoned Roman fort on a hill called Pispir (now Der el Memun) in the eastern desert.

  He spent twenty years there, seeing no one, surviving on bread and water passed to him through a crevice in the wall, often assailed by demons in the form of wild beasts, snakes, scorpions and a seductive woman, but overcoming them, according to Athanasius, with the power of prayer. To general amazement, he emerged vigorous in body and mind and encouraged others to seek self-denial and the hermitic life.

  Moving further eastwards in the desert, he established a new retreat on a mountain that bears his name, Der Mar Antonios, and spent the last forty-five years of his life there, offering instruction and advice to followers who visited him. He died at the age of 105 in 356. In posterity, Antony was regarded as the founder of Christian monasticism.

  A different form of monastic life was advocated in the fourth century by Pachomius, a monk born in Thebes, who devised a simple set of rules for hermits to preserve their solitude while becoming members of a common group living together. Pachomius set up his first community not in the desert but in the deserted houses of a village close to the banks of the Nile.

  By the end of the fifth century, there were hundreds of monasteries and thousands of cells and caves scattered throughout the Egyptian desert where Christian ascetics dedicated their lives to seclusion and worship, a tradition followed by generations of monks and nuns in the Christian world.

  In north-west Africa, as in Egypt, Christianity first took hold among Jewish communities in polyglot coastal towns, jostling alongside a motley collection of other cults. Carthage became host to a Latin-speaking Christian community. By 180, Christianity had spread inland from the coast in all of Rome’s north African provinces. Christian communities were noted for their dogmatism and obstinacy, but also for their care of the poor and their concern for proper burial. They remained a minority but a significant one.

  Rome was accustomed to dealing tolerantly with the variety of cults it found in its conquered territories. Its subjects were allowed to worship whatever gods they liked provided they took an oath of loyalty to Rome’s emperors and made the sacrifice of a pinch of incense. But some Roman emperors deemed the phenomenon of Christianity, as it spread across different parts of the empire, to constitute a threat to their authority. They were further angered when groups of Christians adamantly refused to swear allegiance. What followed were sporadic episodes of persecution over several centuries that gave rise to a powerful Christian tradition of martyrdom.

  The first known account of Christian martyrdom in north Africa records events in Carthage in 180. Seven men and five women from the inland town of Scilli were brought before the proconsul Saturnius for refusing ‘to swear by the genius [guardian spirit] of the Emperor’. The proconsul begged them to ‘have no part in this madness’. But they persisted. The trial transcript related how one of martyrs, Speratus, retorted: ‘The Empire of this world I do not recognise; but rather I serve that God whom no man has seen nor can see with human eyes.’ When the proconsul offered them time to reconsider, they refused it. And when sentence of death was pronounced, ‘they all said, “Thanks be to God”’.

  Another account comes from the diary of a young mother named Vibia Perpetua facing death in Carthage in 203. In one of the most poignant pieces of writing by a woman surviving from the ancient world, she records how she had to defy her own father and abandon her infant son for the sake of her faith. A noblewoman aged about twenty-two, well educated, Perpetua was sent to prison to await trial. Her father, a pagan, visited her there, pleading with her to deny she was a Christian and save herself.

  ‘Father,’ I said, ‘for the sake of argument, do you see this vase or water pot or whatever you want to call it, lying here?’

  ‘Yes I see it,’ he said.

  And I told him, ‘Could it be called by any other name than what it is?’

  And he said, ‘No.’

  ‘Well, so too, I cannot call myself anything other than what I am – a Christian.’

  At this my father was so angered by the word ‘Christian’ that he moved towards me as though he would pluck out my eyes. But he left it at that and departed, vanquished along with his diabolical arguments.

  Before her trial, her father visited her again, pleading passionately, throwing himself down before her, kissing her hands. ‘Do not abandon me to be the reproach of men. Think of your brothers; think of your mother and your aunt, think of your child, who will not be able to live once you are gone. Give up your pride! You will destroy all of us! None of us will ever be able to speak freely again if anything happens to you.’

  But Perpetua remained resolute. On the day of her trial, she appeared with five other Christians, including her slave Felicity, before the governor Hilarianus.

  We walked up to the prisoner’s dock. All the others when questioned admitted their guilt. Then when it came to my turn, my father appeared with my son, dragged me from the step, and said: ‘Perform the sacrifice – have pity on your baby!’

  Hilarianus the governor tried to get her to change her mind. ‘Have pity on your father’s grey head; have pity on your infant son. Offer the sacrifice for the welfare of the emperors.’

  Perpetua refused: ‘I will not.’

  ‘Are you a Christian?’ asked Hilarianus.

  ‘Yes, I am,’ Perpetua answered.

  Hilarianus duly passed sentence. ‘We were condemned to the beasts, and we returned to prison in high spirits,’ Perpetua recounted.

  The death of Perpetua and her fellow martyrs in the amphitheatre at Carthage was witnessed by an anonymous Carthaginian who wrote a description of it that was subsequently published along with her diary. The Christians, he wrote, marched from the prison to the amphitheatre ‘as if they were on their way to heaven, with gay and gracious looks; trembling, if at all, not with fear but with joy’. They were savaged by a leopard, a bear, a boar and a wild heifer and finally dispatched by the sword of a gladiator. The witness was probably Tertullian, who later wrote: ‘The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.’

  Despite several periods of repression in Rome’s African provinces during the third century, Christian communities there continued to expand. In north-west Africa, Christianity became the dominant religion of the poor, in both urban and rural areas. It spread to the olive country of the Numidian plains, to the semi-desert region further south and to the tribal interior of Mauretania. In many cases, converts simply swopped their worship of the old god Saturn for the new one urged on them by Christians.

  But a new round of persecution in 303 – ‘the Great Persecution’ – led to fierce controversy and a lasting split in the Christian community. On
the orders of the emperor Diocletian, Christian meetings were forbidden, their places of worship were to be destroyed and their scriptures handed over for burning. When two fires mysteriously broke out in his palace, Diocletian further ordered the arrest of all bishops and priests.

  Rather than face martyrdom, most senior clergy decided to comply and surrendered their scriptures. But the compromises they made infuriated zealots who preferred martyrdom and who found considerable support in urban areas of Carthage and in Numidia among Berbers, for whom traditions of honour and loyalty remained paramount.

  The dispute reached a climax in 312 when the two factions each elected their own candidate as bishop of Carthage. The zealots chose Donatus, a highly respected priest from a Numidian oasis community. Under the leadership of Donatus, the zealots formed a schismatic church known as the Donatists. The established Church meanwhile gained the support of the Roman authorities and became, in effect, a pillar of the state.

  The rivalry between the two factions – the Donatists and the Catholics – was intense. Both claimed to represent the true Church. Each attempted to surpass the other in the splendour of their monuments; some of the finest basilicas in north Africa were built by Donatists in Numidia. Occasionally, bouts of inter-communal violence broke out, Christian fighting Christian. One Numidian bishop and his army of followers were besieged and massacred in their own basilica. A fanatical sect known as the Circumcelliones, bands of itinerant ascetics who congregated around the tombs of martyrs, waged war against landlords, usurers and Catholic clergy, actively courting martyrdom and seeking to overturn the established order. In 397, militant Donatists were implicated in a rebellion against Rome.

  The Catholic cause found an ardent champion in Augustine, the newly appointed bishop of Hippo Regius, a major port in eastern Algeria. Revered as a philosopher and theologian, Augustine was obliged to devote much of his career struggling to defeat his Donatist adversaries. A Numidian, born in 354 in the largely Donatist town of Thagaste (Souk Ahras in Algeria), the son of a pagan landowner and a Catholic mother, Augustine enjoyed a hedonistic lifestyle as a young man, but converted to Christianity in 387 while working as a teacher in Milan. Returning to Thagaste in 388, he founded a celibate community there and for the rest of his life he lived as a member of a monastic community.

  His teachings on a whole spectrum of Christian beliefs, enshrined in books and pamphlets, stand as intellectual milestones in human thought and made a lasting impact on Christendom. But his campaign against the Donatists was less successful. In 405, Donatism was officially declared a heresy; in 411 it was made a criminal offence. But the Donatists expected harassment and persecution, and though weakened in some towns, they held firm in much of the countryside. After half a lifetime spent fighting Donatism, Augustine died in 430, believing that he had failed.

  The Roman empire in north-west Africa was itself in trouble. By the end of the third century, the Romans had been forced to abandon Mauretania. As Roman control of the interior waned, Berber chieftains on the frontier established their own territories. Then in 429, the Vandals, a Teutonic tribe who had swarmed through Europe to the Iberian peninsula, crossed the Strait of Gibraltar, marched rapidly eastwards, took possession of Hippo and Carthage and installed themselves as the new ruling caste. After expelling Roman landlords and seizing their estates, they then settled down to a life of luxury, as the Greek historian Procopius recorded:

  The Vandals, since the time when they gained possession of Libya, used to indulge in baths, all of them, every day, and enjoyed a table abounding in all things, the sweetest and best that the earth and sea produce. And they wore gold very generally, and clothed themselves in garments [of silk], and passed their time, thus dressed, in theatres and hippodromes and in other pleasurable pursuits, and above all else in hunting. And they had dancers and mimes and all other things to hear and see which are of a musical nature or otherwise merit attention amongst men. And most of them dwelt in parks, which were well supplied with water and trees; and they had great numbers of banquets, and all manner of sexual pleasures were in great vogue among them.

  Vandals enjoyed their stay in North Africa for a hundred years until the Roman emperor Justinian dispatched an army from Byzantium – the Greek-speaking capital of the eastern half of the old Roman empire – to oust them.

  In Egypt, the Christian Church, despite bouts of Roman persecution, went from strength to strength, much of it resulting from the respect accorded to St Antony of the Desert and the ascetic movement. By 400, the vast majority of Coptic-speaking Egyptians, perhaps 90 per cent, counted themselves as Christians.

  But the Christian Church in Egypt soon faced its own crisis, stemming not from internal divisions but from an interminable theological dispute that afflicted the wider Christian world about how the Church should distinguish the human Christ from the divine Christ. The Coptic Church adhered to a ‘one nature’ or Monophysite doctrine; their opponents to a ‘two natures’ or Dyophysite doctrine. Underlying the dispute was a struggle for power and influence between the bishops of Alexandria, Constantinople, Rome and Jerusalem. The emperor Marcian and his formidable wife Pulcheria, a fierce opponent of ‘one-nature’ theologians, also sought to meddle in the dispute to demonstrate imperial power at a time when the empire was steadily disintegrating. The bishop of Alexandria, Dioscorus, argued that the emperor had no right to intervene in the affairs of the Church.

  The climax came in 451 when, much to the fury of the Egyptian Church, a council convened by Marcian at Chalcedon, near Constantinople, decided on a definition that favoured the ‘two natures’ doctrine. Dioscorus was deposed and replaced as bishop by a compliant priest, Proterius. In overwhelming numbers, Egyptians supported Dioscorus in rejecting the Chalcedon agreement and, as a means of separating themselves from the Greek Christianity of the Church in Constantinople, made increasing use of the Coptic language and their own distinctive culture. The fate of Proterius in 457 was to fall victim to a mob in Alexandria which pursued him into the baptistery of a city church, butchered him and six of his clergy and paraded the bleeding corpses round the city.

  A formal schism followed. Alexandria became the seat of two sets of patriarchs: one appointed by the Melkite or Greek Church; the other chosen by the Coptic Orthodox Church. The Coptic Church not only retained the loyalty of most Egyptians, it had a remarkable influence on Christian outposts in the interior of Africa.

  On a journey along the Red Sea coast in about 316, a Christian youth from the Levant named Frumentius was captured, along with his brother Edesius, and taken up a steep escarpment to the kingdom of Aksum on a high plateau a hundred miles inland. Held as slaves, the two brothers managed to gain the trust of the king and his family and, shortly before his death, the king set them free. The widowed queen, however, persuaded them to stay at Aksum and help educate her young son, Ezana, until he succeeded to the throne. On becoming king in about 330, Ezana urged the two brothers to remain in Aksum but they decided to leave and set off for Alexandria. While Edesius travelled on to their home town of Tyre, Frumentius approached Bishop Athanasius in Alexandria, appealing to him to send a Christian mission to Aksum. Athanasius duly chose Frumentius as a suitable candidate to lead the mission and consecrated him as bishop. Returning to Aksum, Frumentius established an episcopal see there and converted Ezana and his court to Christianity. He was the first of 111 Egyptian monks to take up the post. For the next sixteen hundred years, until the 1950s, patriarchs of the Coptic Church in Alexandria continued to provide bishops to the highland region of Abyssinia, or, as it later became known, Ethiopia.

  At the time of Frumentius’s tenure as bishop, Aksum was at the height of its power and prosperity. Founded as a town in the first century CE, it grew into the capital of a highland kingdom with a sophisticated culture that blended indigenous Cushitic practices with traditions originating from southern Arabia brought to the African side of the Red Sea by several generations of Semitic colonists. Its prosperity came from cereal crops grown
on fertile plains with the use of ploughs, terracing and irrigation and from trade that passed through the Red Sea port of Adulis linking it both to Mediterranean lands and to Indian Ocean territories. Among its exports were ivory, rhinoceros horn, hippopotamus hides, gold dust, frankincense and even live elephants. Imports included cloth, glassware, pottery and metalwork, items enjoyed by an urban elite. The language of the towns and of commerce was Ge’ez, a Semitic language, written in a script derived from southern Arabia, which became the kingdom’s lingua franca. By the third century, Aksum was making extensive use of its own coins as currency, struck in gold, silver and copper and bearing portraits of its kings. Early coins also incorporated the crescent-and-disc symbol of a pre-Christian religion.

  The burial practices of the elites of Aksum became ever more elaborate. As well as building underground tombs, they erected tall obelisks of finely cut granite which were carved with decorative reliefs to represent a multistorey building, complete with false doors and windows. More than 120 stelae still survive today, in whole or in part, some remaining upright. One still standing reaches more than 66 feet high. Another, now fallen, measures 108 feet and weighs over 500 tons; cut from a quarry two miles west of Aksum, and carved to represent a thirteen-storey building, it is one of the largest stelae ever made.

  Although King Ezana readily converted to Christianity, the new religion was slow to spread beyond ruling circles. It was not until the fifth century that a second phase of evangelisation began when a group of nine priests from Syria, fleeing persecution for their Monophysite beliefs after the Council of Chalcedon had branded them to be heretical, arrived in Aksum. The ‘Nine Saints’, as they became known, took Christianity into the countryside, translated the scriptures into Ge’ez and founded churches and monasteries at several locations which became widely revered. A monastery they built at an inaccessible site on a mountain top at Debre Damo still stands today and can be reached only by climbing a long leather rope. By the sixth century, Aksum was regarded as a Christian state, with its own Orthodox Church incorporating local traditions and with a strong monastic tradition.