ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the idiom of charity was envisioned and enacted by African and European agents in the last decade of colonial rule. It presents the rival visions for Catholic humanitarian practice at the end of empire begins with an analysis of the Bureau international catholique de lenfance (BICE) as a critical force in faith-based humanitarian work in the postwar decades. The chapter reveals how European scepticism of African religious conviction and pious work constructed in the final years of colonial rule. It presents a sceptical European lay and ecclesiastical Catholic leadership rather than promoting African leadership in the Church in Cameroon, posited that a "universal fatherhood" and an "international brotherhood" in the form of transnational Catholic organisations should direct religious work in the fragile new nation. The chapter examines how nongovernmental lay and Catholic ecclesiastical agents devised religious rationales for eroding African sovereignty over the Catholic Church in Cameroon and banished African influence in late twentieth-century Christian humanitarian philosophies.
