Costantino l'africano. Il progetto politico religioso di Charles Lavigerie per l'Africa centrale (1878-1885)

This article analyzes the political-religious project that Charles Lavigerie
(founder of the White Fathers Missionary Society, 1868) worked out for the
evangelization of Equatorial Africa. The aim is to investigate the ideology of
Christianitas in the context of the Scramble for Africa and in the background
of the coeval racializing and ethnicizing European interpretations of African
societies. In this regard the analysis of his project shows how Lavigerie
conceived the evangelization of Africa as laying on the basis of a Constantinian
pattern of conversion, planning to found an African Christian Kingdom
independent from European imperialist powers. Consequently, the article
highlights the peculiar relationship that Lavigerie established, through a
Catholic vision of the civilization of Africa, between ‘African culture’ and
Christian universality.