RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Africa
ship. There is a political sound in some of the utterances of the " Ethiopian " leaders; and the local governments are on the alert to check any developments along that line, more especially since American Africans have taken a hand in the movement. There appears to be some connection between this movement and the revolt of the tribes in the south of German Southwest Africa. Whatever the final outcome, it appears certain that as the African tribes learn to think for themselves they must assert their manhood; and, however foolish and futile some of the manifestations of this growing manhood may be, the fact itself is a token that ought to be welcomed. Through it Africa may yet have a history of its own.
II. The Political Divisions of Africa: Abyssinia: The only Christian country of Africa which resisted the Mohammedan irruption. It consists for the most part of a mountain knot in which rise the Atbara River and the Blue Nile, and lies between the Egyptian Sudan and the Red Sea. Area about 150,000 sq. miles; population about 3,500,000; religion, a debased form of the Coptic Church with over 3,000,000 adherents. There are also between 60,000 and 100,000 Jews (called Falashas, " exiles "), and about 50,000 Mohammedans, besides 300,000 pagans. The prevailing language is the Amharic with dialects in different sections. The sacred books of the church are in Ethiopic or Geez. The Gallas in the south have a language of their own. In 1490 Portuguese explorers introduced the Roman Catholic religion into Abyssinia. In 1604 a Jesuit mission was established which finally won the adhesion of the emperor. Intrigues led to their expulsion after about thirty years. The Carmelites and Augustinians also engaged in the work, but with no lasting results; the mission was entirely abandoned in 1797 All attempts to reestablish Roman Catholic missions were thwarted until the early part of the nineteenth century. The Lazarists succeeded about 1830 in gaining a foothold in various provinces. They were again expelled from the interior provinces, and now have their headquarters* in the Italian territory of Eritrea (see below). A strong missionary advance into Harrar is also being made from Jibuti.
The earliest effort to establish a Protestant mission in Abyssinia was that of Peter Heyling, a law student of Lubeck. He went there in 1640, won favor with the Abyssinian court circles, and began to translate the Bible into colloquial Amharic. He was captured by Turks in 1652, and, refusing to become a Mohammedan, was decapitated, leavingno trace of his work. In 1752 Christian Frederick William Hocker, a Moravian physician, began a persistent effort to establish a mission in Abyssinia. But the mission got no further than Egypt, and was recalled after the death of Hocker in 1782. In 1830 the Church Missionary Society established a mission in Abyssinia, which was broken up in 1838. Later the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews sent missionaries to the Falashas. Suspicions of political designs hampered the missionaries; and in 1863 they were imprisoned by the emperor. A British military expedition stormed Magdala, the capital, in 1868
and freed the captives; but the mission was not again undertaken. In 1866 the Swedish National Missionary Society began a mission in the border of the province of Tigre, near Massowah. For fifteen years the mission made little progress, suffering through the hostility of the people and through attacks of disease. Then the earliest converts were baptized, the first a Galla slave, and next a Mohammedan. In 1904 the society had ten stations in Eritrea (see below) and had succeeded in sending, with the consent of the authorities, native preachers into the southern Galla country west of Gojam. The Bible has a limited circulation in Abyssinia in several versions. The old Ethiopic Church version has been revised, and printed by the British Bible Society. The whole Bible has been translated into Amharic (1824), and into the southern Galla dialect (1898). The New Testament has been rendered (1830) into the Tigre dialect of the Geez, and single Gospels into Falasha, into two Galla dialects, and into Bogos. See Abyssinia and the Abyssinian Church.
Alg-eria: A French possession in northern Africa extending southward from the Mediterranean a somewhat uncertain distance into the Desert of Sahara. Area about 184,474 sq. miles; population about 4,739,000. The Algerian Sahara has about 198,000 sq. miles in addition, with a population estimated at 62,000. Although Algeria is regarded as a part of France, it still remains a Mohammedan country. The Mohammedan population is rather vaguely estimated at about 4,100,000, considerable uncertainty existing as to the number of inhabitants of the military district in the hinterland. The Christian population of Algeria is chiefly Roman Catholic (527,000). There are also about 25,000 Greeks, Armenians, and Copts, and about 30,000 Protestants. The number of Jews is 57,000. The language of the country outside of the European colonies is Arabic with several dialects of the Berber language known here as Kabyle (i.e. " tribesman ")• Algeria forms an archdiocese of the Roman Catholic Church, and is the seat of the Algerian Missionary Society organized through the energetic efforts of Cardinal Lavigerie (q.v.), for missionary enterprises on the edge of the Sahara and in Senegambia and other African districts as far south as Lake Tanganyika. Protestant missionary enterprises are represented in Algeria by the following: two French societies working among the Jews; Miss Trotter's educational mission; the Plymouth Brethren, who have ten missionaries in different cities in Algeria, but publish no statistics; a small Swedish mission; and the North Africa mission, which occupies four stations and carries on a number of small schools for Mohammedans. None of these missions has a very large following among the natives. In fact missionaries are not allowed by the French authorities to engage in open evangelization among Mohammedans. The Arabic version of the Bible has a limited circulation in Algeria. A colloquial version of some of the Gospels has been prepared for the use of the common people who have difficulty in understanding the classical Arabic. Some parts of the Bible have
Africa