Philip Yancey in Christianity Today:

• Resiliency. The West tends to view Africa as the news portrays it: a relentless succession of disasters. Africans themselves, however, go about their lives with survival skills honed over time. After several centuries of evisceration by slave traders and several more centuries of exploitation through colonialism, most of Africa has experienced only a few short decades of independence. Hardship is nothing new.

That Africans embrace Christianity so widely is astonishing in light of the treatment they endured from those who brought the faith to their continent. South Africa starkly demonstrates both the history of oppression and the modern resiliency. I toured the Apartheid Museum, which visitors must enter through separate entrances labeled "Europeans Only," "Blacks," or "Coloured" and walk through a maze of steel bars on which are mounted actual photo identity cards enlarged, with racial categories designated on each one. That classification determined where you could live and where you could work, not to mention where you could eat or even sit in a park. Kate, our white tour guide, seemed shaken. "They had a right to take us whites out and shoot us in the head for how we treated them," she said. "It’s a miracle that they didn’t." After that sobering visit, I emerged to see blacks, whites, and coloureds sitting together in tables at the café, drinking coffee, laughing, socializing.

Rwanda, a site of genocide, is now a laboratory case for restorative justice. Uganda is showing how the AIDS plague can be reversed. The challenges of modern times—encounters between Christians and Muslims, rich and poor, sick and well—will continue to play out in Africa, which has a chance to become a light to the world even as the lights of faith grow dim in much of the West.

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