Welcome to Breaking Down Patriarchy. I'm Amy McPhee, all the best. If I were to ask you to take a pre-test on African religion, what would you guess about the historical timeline and the current religious affiliations of the population of the African continent? Make a guess in your mind, and now I'll set the scene for today's episode.

Like human beings everywhere, for thousands upon thousands of years, the people of the

African continent practiced animism, which is a religion that focuses on nature and on deities

that represented different strengths. It's a religion that honored ancestors

and imagining possibilities for an afterlife. There was almost an innumerable diversity of

these religions on the whole African continent. But in the year that Western civilization

retroactively labeled the year one, Christians

believe that Jesus was born in Israel, and soon after that, his family fled to Egypt to

escape the King Herod's murder of all the Hebrew baby boys. This story is told by Egyptian Christians

to this day, and legend has it that Christianity

first officially arrived in North Africa when St. Mark arrived in Alexandria, Egypt, in the

year 60 of the common era. So Christianity has been on the African continent for a long, long time.

Once in North Africa, Christianity spread slowly west from Alexandria and east to Ethiopia.

Through North Africa, Christianity was embraced as the religion of dissent against the expanding Roman Empire.

In the 4th century, the Ethiopian king Azana made Christianity the

kingdom's official religion. In the 7th century, Islam arrived from the Arabian Peninsula

and began to gain converts very rapidly. Large swaths of the continent became Muslim and

others Christian, and still other regions retained their traditional religions.

In the 15th century, Christianity came to sub-Saharan Africa with the arrival of the Portuguese,

and in the south of the continent, the Dutch found at the beginnings of the Dutch Reformed Church

in 1652. In the interior of the continent, most people continued to practice their

own religions, undisturbed until about the 19th century. At that time, Christian missions to Africa

...