Avis de soutenance - doctorat - François Joachim DE PIERRE DE BERNIS

The period from 1918 to 1960 was significant for the modification of the religious structures of three countries in equatorial Africa (Cameroon, Congo-Brazzaville, Gabon). Catholicism, through the training of indigenous clergy, and Islam, through the progressive control of spaces linked to the establishment of its économico and social system, are major players. The region was not new for the European colonizer in 1918. The French had just ousted the Germans, the Congregation of the Holy Spirit replaced the Pallotine fathers after 1916. Going beyond a classic missionary pattern, the Catholic Church attached itself to train indigenous clergies, the only ones capable of accomplishing the complete evangelization of these territories. The task turns out to be difficult, challenging and ultimately not very linear in its achievements. In the period after 1945 in particular, the superposition of several components (nationalist, demographic, socio-economic) accentuates the difficulties of the formative and missiological process undertaken. Islam, for its part, begins a migration towards the south, backed by its market exchange structures and the holism of its social model. For a long time, the micropsy of the colonial administration made its socio-cultural progression in the countries of equatorial Africa invisible. The result nonetheless is that Islam and Catholicism have changed the religious map of the region in half a century, with a depth little imagined until then.