The political and the economic decisions to partition the entire continent of Africa into the different European colonies were taken by the then European powers that were present at the Berlin Conference of 1884. The primary goals of these colonial powers in Africa was economic in nature.
After the breaking up of the entire Africa continent into many colonies, Germany, Great Britain, Portugal and France played a major role in this new political arrangements. Simultaneously, "European Churches and their missionaries also came to Africa to introduce Africans to a type of Christianity that was practiced in Europe for hundreds of centuries".
"This form of Christianity had no single element of the prosperity gospel in it. The new African converts into Christianity were never promised wealth or high finances for being a Christian. These missionaries focused their energy on soul winning, evangelism, church establishment, education and health care. Christianity was never presented to Africans as a means of getting rich. Education, financial prudence and hardwork were the focal points of these European church missionaries in Africa".
At the close of the 19th century, Africans across the continent started to demand for political independence and freedom from these European powers. Their struggles continued into the middle of the 20th century and started to yield results in the 1950s and 1960s. Many colonies got their political independence from these colonial masters and nations. The European type of Christianity was the order of the day at that time all over the new independent nations of Africa.
Shortly after the end of the second world war and the great American economic depressions of the 1930s were both over. A group of American Christian preachers in the southern United States in the middle of 1940s started a "Faith and Healing Movement", a new form of Christianity that promises healing and wealth to its followers. The pioneers of this new form of Christianity were the late Oral Roberts and Kenneth Hagin Sr respectively. This strange form of Christianity known as the "Prosperity Gospel" became popular in the southern United States with tens of thousands of new followers or converts embracing this new doctrine.
"In the middle of 1950s and 1960s, these American prosperity preachers saw the new nations of Africa as a fertile and untapped land for their prosperity gospel". Many of them came to Africa in the 1960s and introduced the traditional African Christians and their new coverts to this new form of Christianity through their crusades and church meetings or programs. Their books, pamphlets, monthly magazines and radio programs also flooded the new nations of Africa.
By the middle of the 1960s into the 1970s, this unbiblical form of Christianity had won tens of thousands of new followers across many African countries. The unbiblical teachings of these American prosperity preachers became the sound doctrine of the many new African converts, churches were established by the new African converts after the pattern of their American prosperity teachers and their ministries.
Today in the 21st century, this new formed of Christianity that started in America and had been successfully exported to the poorest nations of Africa with mixed results, as well as a false hope that can never solve the massive continental problems of poverty and underdevelopment in Africa. The answers to the political, economic and social problems of Africa in the 21st century that continue to elude the mineral-rich nations of African continent can only come from good democratic governance and not from the so called "Prosperity Gospel".
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