There’s a phrase that you don’t hear much anymore: “darkest Africa.” Back around the turn of the twentieth century, Joseph Conrad wrote a novella, “Heart of Darkness,” in which his hero travels up the Congo River into that very same “darkest Africa,” where he finds that the sun does shine but the world is still a very dark and horrific place.
Today, it’s not politically correct to speak of “darkest Africa,” but also today, Africa isn’t quite as dark a place as it used to be. A few centuries back, Africa appeared as simply a large obstacle for European ships hoping to reach China and points in East Asia. Around that same time, however, Europeans discovered that Africa had a plentiful natural resource, human slaves. Only in the nineteenth century did Europeans get really serious about exploring the “dark continent,” coming to realize that it held treasures—mineral ones especially—that were worth exploiting. Through the nineteenth and a good part of the twentieth centuries, Europeans extracted gold and diamonds from the earth while growing rubber and other crops on the ground. King Leopold of Belgium is especially notorious for running the entire area known as the Belgian Congo as his own private mega-plantation. Throughout those years, a lot of bad things happened. A lot of bad things continue to happen in Africa, not all of which, despite the arguments of liberal academics, can be laid at the feet of colonial oppressors.
But something else happened during those centuries of Western dominance in Africa. Christianity, something that had barely penetrated beyond Egypt and Ethiopia before, began to enlighten the dark areas. Christian missionaries of various traditions brought the gospel of love to a people who had never heard such a crazy notion. Today there are some seventeen African nations where a majority of the people claim Christianity. Another ten have a large minority of Christians. The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.
We mustn’t be naïve, of course. The coming of Christianity to Africa has not put a stop to awful things happening. We could point to bad things happening in predominantly Muslim Somalia or Sudan, or in the religious mix of Rwanda, but fairness insists that we note equally bad things in Christian Burundi and Liberia. Just as Christianity has not put all things right in the U.S., it hasn’t done so in Africa. Still, we can demonstrate the benefits of “the light” on all the nations of Africa.
We could say the same thing of South Korea. A current Christianity Today article explains that Korea sends more missionaries abroad than any other nation in the world aside from the U.S. and that they will overtake the U.S. in a few years if current trends continue. That’s pretty incredible for a nation with a negligible Christian population just a century ago. The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.
But this shouldn’t come as a surprise. Each of us, individually, walked once in darkness and we have seen a great light. Let us never forget the difference that the light has made in our lives. Let us live lives that help to dispel the darkness.
Tune My Heart is primarily an aid to the devotional life of its author, Mark Browning, who holds the copyright for this material. It is provided online in hopes that some will find it edifying. All contents, unless otherwise noted, may be redistributed freely provided that you give credit for its origin and do not charge anything.