Afro-Christianity: the diversity of a religion once thought to be European

Abstract

This article aims to address the presence of Christianity in Africa since the first centuries of our era, showing how, from countries such as present-day Ethiopia, it spread throughout the north of the African continent, long before the arrival of Europeans in the 15th century who, from the 16th century onwards, brought discriminatory and authoritarian versions full of orthodoxies generated by the Council of Trent (1545-1563) and the Protestant Reformation. The text also speaks of one of the most significant contacts of Portuguese Catholic Christianity in Africa, which occurred, still in the 15th century, with the peoples of present-day Congo and Angola and which generated, in slave-owning Brazil, the devotion and festivals dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary and Saint Benedict, celebrated in several Brazilian states and known as Congadas, Reinados and other variations, in addition to having influenced the different forms of Candomblé and Umbanda in Brazil. Finally, it deals with the current situation of Christianity on the African continent, thus covering a circle of more than 1000 years in which Christianity left Palestine, was structured in Africa, crossed the Mediterranean and entered Europe, returning to Africa with colonization, quite transformed.