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THE MISSIONARY MOVEMENT IN AFRICAN AND WORLD HISTORY: MISSION SOURCES AND RELIGIOUS ENCOUNTER*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 October 2015

DAVID MAXWELL
DAVID MAXWELL*
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
*
Emmanuel College, Cambridge, cb2 3apdjm223@cam.ac.uk
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Abstract

This article is a revised and expanded version of my inaugural lecture as Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Cambridge, delivered on 12 March 2014. It highlights the evolution of Ecclesiastical History to include the study of Christianity in the global south and shows how recent developments in the study of African and world history have produced a dynamic and multi-faceted model of religious encounter, an encounter which includes the agency of indigenous Christians alongside the activities of missionaries. Investigating the contribution of faith missionaries to the production of colonial knowledge in Belgian Congo, the article challenges stereotypes about the relations between Pentecostalism and modernity, and between mission and empire. Throughout, consideration is given to the range of missionary sources, textual, visual, and material, and their utility in reconstructing social differentiation in African societies, particularly in revealing indigenous African criticism of ‘custom’.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 58 , Issue 4 , December 2015 , pp. 901 - 930
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

Adapted versions of this lecture were given at the University of Copenhagen, Queen's University Belfast, and Basel University. I am grateful to Niels Kastfelt and Karen Lauterbach, Eric Morier Genoud and Patrick Harries for their invitations and hospitality on these occasions. My thanks also go to those who attended the lectures. I am also grateful to James Gardom, Reuben Loffman, John Lonsdale, and David and Bernice Martin for their helpful comments. I am particularly indebted to Patrick Harries from whom I have learnt much as both collaborator and friend. This article is dedicated to the memory of my former supervisor, Terence Ranger, who passed away on 2 January 2015. This research was funded by the Nuffield Foundation and the Economic and Social Research Council, grant RES-00023-1535.

References

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10 See for example D. Peterson, Creative writing: translation, bookkeeping and the work of imagination in colonial Kenya (Portsmouth, NH, 2004).

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16 For a useful survey of the literature on Africa, see P. Harries, ‘Anthropology’, in N. Etherington, ed., Missions and empire (Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series) (Oxford, 2005), and D. Maxwell and  P. Harries, eds., The spiritual in the secular: missionaries and knowledge about Africa (Grand Rapids, MI, 2012). See also S. Sivasundaran, Nature and the godly empire: science and evangelical mission in the Pacific, 1795–1850 (Cambridge, 2005); Elshakry, M., ‘The gospel of science and American evangelism in late Ottoman Beirut’, Past and Present, 196 (2007), pp. 173–214CrossRefGoogle Scholar; J. Michaud, ‘Incidental’ ethnographers: French Catholic Missions on the Tonkin–Yunan frontier, 1880–1930’ (Leiden, 2007).

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19 For a recent reassessment on the church in relation to mission, science, and secularization in the nineteenth century, see essays in Brian Stanley and Shreidan Gilly, eds., The Cambridge history of Christianity: world Christianities, c. 1815–1914 (Cambridge, 2006). For a broader view, see also T. Dixon, G. Cantor, and S. Pumphrey, eds., Science and religion: new historical perspectives (Cambridge, 2010), and J. Brooke and R. Numbers, eds., Science and religion around the world (Oxford, 2011).

20 R. Gray, Black Christians and white missionaries (New Haven, CT, 1990).

21 A. Green and V. Viaene, ‘Introduction: rethinking religion and globalization’, in Green and Viaene, eds., Religious internationals and the modern world: globalization and faith communities since 1750 (New York, NY, 2012), p. 1.

22 E. Stock, The history of the Church Missionary Society: its environment, its men and its work, i (London, 1899) pp. 382–403. The Anglican church drew missionaries from Germany, Switzerland, and of course the mission field itself for most of the nineteenth century.

23 C. Tyndale-Biscoe, Tyndale-Biscoe of Kashmir: an autobiography (London, 1951), p. 44.

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27 N. Hunt, A colonial lexicon of birth ritual, medicalization, and mobility in the Congo (Durham, NC, 1999), p. 127.

28 Walima Kalusa, ‘Christian medical discourse and praxis on the imperial frontier: explaining the popularity of missionary medicine in Mwinilunga District, Zambia, 1906–1935’, in Harries and Maxwell, eds., The spiritual in the secular, p. 248.

29 A. Ross, David Livingstone, mission and empire (London, 2002), p. 106; Etherington, ‘Education and medicine’, p. 278; Megan Vaughan, Curing their ills: colonial power and African illness (Oxford, 1991), pp. 57–8. For a particularly grounded study of Livingstone's work in Central Africa, see L. Dritsas, Zambesi: David Livingstone and expeditionary science (London, 2010).

30 T. Ranger, ‘Godly medicine: the ambiguities of medical mission in Southeastern Tanzania, 1900–1945’, in S. Feierman and J. Janzen, eds., The social basis of health and healing in Africa (Berkeley, CA, 1992), p. 276.

31 This point was made by anthropologist Beidelman, Tom, ‘Contradictions between the sacred and secular life: the Church Missionary Society in Ukaguru, Tanzania, East Africa, 1876–1914’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 23, (1981), p. 74CrossRefGoogle Scholar. His monograph, Colonial evangelism (Bloomington, IN, 1982), was something of an exception. For early work by historians on mission and the missionary encounter in Africa, see T. Ranger and N. Kimambo, eds., The historical study of African religion (Berkeley, CA, 1972); T. Ranger and J. Weller, Themes in the Christian history of Central Africa (Berkeley, CA, 1975); A. Hastings, African Christianity: an essay in interpretation (London, 1976).

32 However, Nigerian historians Jacob Ajayi and Emmanuel Ayendele representing nationalist and Africanist agendas wrote influential books on the role of missions in African elite formation. J. F. Ajayi, Christian missions in Nigeria, 1841–1891: the making of a new elite (London, 1965); E. A. Ayendele, The missionary impact on modern Nigeria, 1842–1914: a political and social analysis (London, 1966).

33 Hastings, A., ‘African Christian studies, 1967–1999: reflections of an editor’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 30 (2000), pp. 30–44Google Scholar.

34 For a magisterial synthesis of this Africanist approach to Christianity, see A. Hastings, The Church in Africa, 1450–1950 (Oxford, 1994). See also Tom Spear, ed., East African expressions of Christianity (Oxford, 1999). For a review of the literature, see Ranger, T., ‘Religious movements and politics in Sub-Saharan Africa’, African Studies Review, 29 (1986), pp. 1–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar. John Peel's Religious encounter in the making of the Yoruba (Bloomington, IN, 2000) is an unrivalled example of a historical anthropological approach to African reception of Christian mission.

35 John Lonsdale, ‘Kikuyu Christianities: a history of intimate diversity’, in D. Maxwell, ed., with Ingrid Lawrie, Christianity and the African imagination: essays in honour of Adrian Hastings (Leiden, 2002); D. Peterson, ‘The rhetoric of the Word: Bible translation and Mau Mau in colonial Kenya’, in B. Stanley, ed., Missions, nationalism and the end of empire (Grand Rapids, MI, 2003).

36 J. Cox, The British missionary enterprise since 1700 (London, 2008), pp. 263–72.

37 See Patrick Manning's survey, Navigating world history (New York, NY, 2003), p. 248. An important exception is Chris Bayly's discussion of nineteenth-century religious revival and expansion in Birth of the modern world, ch. 9.

38 Green and Viaene, ‘Introduction’, p. 3 and passim.

39 Lindenfeld, D., ‘Indigenous encounters with Christian missionaries in China and West Africa, 1800–1920: a comparative study’, Journal of World History, 16 (2005), p. 327CrossRefGoogle Scholar and passim.

40 J. Barker, ‘Where the missionary frontier ran ahead of empire’, in Etherington, ed., Missions and Empire.

41 Lindenfeld, ‘Indigenous encounters’, pp. 342–9; David N. Livingstone, ‘Scientific enquiry and the missionary enterprise’, in Ruth Finnegan, ed., Participating in the knowledge society (London, 2005), p. 60.

42 Barker, ‘The missionary frontier’.

43 Hunter, E., ‘Language, empire and the world: Karl Roehl and the entangled history of the Swahili Bible in East Africa’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 41 (2013), pp. 600–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 C. Clark and M. Ledger Lomas, ‘The Protestant international’, in Green and Viaene, eds., Religious internationals.

45 Susan Thorne, ‘Religion and empire at home’, in C. Hall and S. Rose, eds., At home with the empire: metropolitan culture and the imperial world (Cambridge, 2006); P. Harries, Butterflies and barbarians: Swiss missionaries and systems of knowledge in South-East Africa (Oxford, 2007); Anna Johnston, Missionary writing and empire, 1800–1860 (Cambridge, 2003). Jean and John Comaroff played a significant role in drawing scholarly attention to missionary discourses and the construction of alterity. See their Of revelation and revolution, i, ch. 5.

46 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, NY, 978); V. Y. Mudimbe, The idea of Africa (Bloomington, IN, 1994).

47 J. M. Mackenzie, ed., Imperialism and the natural world (Manchester, 1990), p. 5.

48 Livingstone, ‘Scientific enquiry’, p. 61.

49 Kay, P., ‘Cecil Polhill, the Pentecostal Missionary Union, and the fourfold gospel with healing and speaking in tongues: signs of a new movement in missions’, North Atlantic Missiology Project, Henry Martyn Centre, Cambridge, Position Paper, 20 (1996)Google Scholar.

50 G. Heenen to governor general, Elizabethville, 5 July 1923, Archives Africaines: Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Bruxelles (AAB), m640 xiv, CEM, Katanga, Governor, p. 1. The initial report was dated 10 May 1923.

51 W. Burton, Luba religion and magic in custom and belief (Tervuren, 1961).

52 W. Burton, The magic drum: tales from Central Africa (London, 1961).

53 Burton's collecting and photography was the subject of an exhibition in South Africa, A. Nettleton, ed., The collection of W. F. P. Burton, University of Witwatersrand Galleries (Witwatersrand, 1992). It also figured highly in two American exhibitions in 1996 at the Museum for African Art, New York, and the National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC: see Mary Roberts and Allen Roberts, eds., Memory: Luba art and the making of history (New York, NY, 1996).

54 Vansina, Jan, ‘The ethnographic account as genre in Central Africa’, Paideuma, 33 (1987), p. 443Google Scholar; J. D. Y. Peel, ‘Problems and opportunities in an anthropologist's use of a missionary archive’, in R. Bickers and R. Seton, eds., Missionary encounters: sources and issues (London, 1996), pp. 70–1.

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56 B. Stanley, The Bible and the flag: Protestant missions and British imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Leicester, 1990).

57 Burton, Luba religion.

58 Ibid., pp. 149–78. More recent scholarship suggests that associations such as Bambudye were relatively recent creations or that their significance had increased under colonialism. They were a response to the diminished powers of traditional chiefs. See Johnson, D. H., ‘Criminal secrecy and the case of Zande “secret societies”’, Past and Present, 130 (1991), pp. 170–200CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

59 Burton, Luba religion, p. 1.

60 Ibid.

61 W. F. P. Burton, ‘Un Rapport des Activités de la Mission Evangélistique du Congo Belge’, 10 Jan. 1926, AAB, M640 XIV, CEM, Katanga.

62 W. Burton, When God changes a village (London, 1933).

63 Congo Evangelistic Mission Report (CEMR), 43, July – August 1933.

64 C. Pinney ‘Introduction’, in Pinney and N. Peterson, eds., Photography's other histories (Durham, NC, 2003), pp. 7 and 12. For an extended discussion of Burton's photography and more detailed commentary on the images below, see Maxwell, ‘Photography and the religious encounter’.

65 M. Nooter, ‘Luba art and polity: creating power in a Central African kingdom’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia, 1991), p. 12.

66 Hastings, The church in Africa, p. 324.

67 Burton to Owen Saunders, South Africa, 14 Oct. 1925, UWAG (University of Witwatersrand Art Gallery), file, Burton personal.

68 Burton, W., ‘Bwanga’ (witchcraft), CEMR, 8, Apr.–June 1925Google Scholar.

69 Unpublished preface to Luba religion, UWAG, box W. F. P. Burton, file correspondence with Wits, 1929. The image of a boxer striking the air is a well-known Pauline allusion about the effectiveness of Christian service. 1 Corinthians 9.26.

70 Peel, Religious encounter, p. 238.

71 Burton entered the lodge in 1928. Burton to Salter, 19 Sept. 1928, Central African Missions (CAM) (formerly CEM), Preston, file, Burton to Salter letters and reports, 1919–30. The image was used in an article by W. Burton, entitled: ‘Vile Secret Society Broken Up: Chief Members Converted’, CEMR, 79, July–Aug. 1939Google Scholar. He used it in a vignette entitled, ‘Invading a Bambudye Sanctuary’, published in Congo sketches (London, 1950), pp. 55–8.

72 Burton, W., ‘Letter to Mr Myerscough’, CEMR, 1, July–Aug. 1923Google Scholar. The story was first recounted in full in CEMR, 18, Oct.–Dec. 1927. Burton may have been referring to an nzunzi, though he and his missionary colleague Harold Womersley continued to use kanzundji along with more derogatory terms such as ‘dreamchild’ or ‘bogey’: CEMR, 42, May–June, CEMR, 43, July–Aug. 1933; CEMR, 69, Nov.–Dec. 1937. There were differences in dialect across Luba territory.

73 For instance, 7, 1927; Burton, W., ‘Wells in the desert’, CEMR, 25, July–Sept. 1929Google Scholar; Taylor, C., ‘From cannibalism to Christ, at Kaseba and Mpasu: notes from one of Mr Taylor's itineraries’, CEMR, 30, Oct.–Dec. 1930Google Scholar.

74 W. Burton, Honey bee: the life story of a Congo evangelist (Johannesburg, 1959), p. 11; J. Salter, Abraham: our first convert (London, c. 1936), p. 11; M. Moorhead, Missionary pioneering in Congo forests: a narrative of William F. P. Burton and his companions in the native villages of Luba-Land (Preston, 1922), pp. 75, 96–7.

75 H. Burton, My black daughters (London, 1949), pp. 9–10 and 76–8. The magic lantern slide was untitled but the informants in Katanga recognized her. Interviews, Lubaba Rubin (Lubenyi) Bikomo, 14 May 2007, Ruashi, DRC, and Mama Andyena, Kyungu Dyese, and Numbi Martha, 21 May 2007, Mwanza, DRC.

76 M. Gullestad, Picturing pity: pitfalls and pleasures in cross-cultural communication: image and word in a North Cameroon mission (Oxford, 2007).

77 Burton, Congo sketches, pp. 103–4.

78 Interviews, Lubaba Rubin (Lubenyi) Bikomo, Ruashi, DRC, 14 May 2007; Banze Kitwa Kapasa Zacharie, Mwanza, DRC, 22 May 2007; Banze Kalumba Shayumba, Mwanza, DRC, 23 May 2007.

79 Burton, W., ‘Kanya oral literature in Lubaland’, African Studies Review, 2 (1943), pp. 93–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The proverbs were initially serialized in BJI, 23, 3 (1955), pp. 69–76Google Scholar; ibid., 26, 9 (1958), pp. 251–8; ibid., 26, 10 (1958), pp. 293–305. They were published in full in one volume as Proverbs des Baluba (Elizabethville, 1958); idem, The Magic Drum.

80 For a recent exploration of themes of rupture, revival, and reprise see R. Werbner, Holy hustlers, schism and prophecy: apostolic reformation in Botswana (Berkeley, CA, 2011).

81 A key founding text was George Matheson's The distinctive message of the old religions (London, 1893). Matheson used comparison to discern a universal concept of religion that was believed to coincide with liberal Christianity. His model remained hierarchical because Christianity was the only true universal religion while Buddhism and Islam were closer to natural religion. The idea was developed by Geoffrey Parrinder, former Methodist missionary to West Africa and Professor of Comparative Religion at Kings College, London. An early indication of Parrinder's thinking is his African traditional religion (London, 1954).

82 Significantly, Placide Tempels's influential study, which explored the ontology of Bantu religion, also arose from research in Katanga. The limitations of space do not allow for comparison of Burton's and Tempels's work. P. Tempels, Bantu philosophy (Paris, 1953; orig. edn 1945).

83 Helen Gardner, ‘Practising Christianity, writing anthropology: missionary anthropologists and their informants’, in Grimshaw and May, eds., Missionaries, pp. 116–17.

84 Maxwell, ‘Photography and the religious encounter’, pp. 71–3.

85 Westermann, D., ‘The missionary as anthropological fieldworker’, Africa: The Journal of the International Institute, 4 (1931), pp. 166–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

86 George Basden, ‘How far can African customs be incorporated into the Christian system?’,  with comment by J. Kenyatta, Congrès International des Sciences Anthropologiques et Ethnologiques. Compte-rendu de la Première Session, Londres 1934 (London, 1934), pp. 213–15.

87 B. Berman and J. Lonsdale, ‘Custom, modernity, and the search for Kihooto: Kenyatta, Malinowski, and the making of Facing Mount Kenya’, in Helen Tilly with Robert J. Gordon, eds., Ordering Africa: anthropology, European imperialism and the politics of knowledge (Manchester, 2007). Kenyatta wrote Facing Mount Kenya (London, 1938) partly in response to two earlier Kikuyu ethnographies written by contemporary converts. Pers. Comm. John Lonsdale. More specifically, Kenyatta was defending clitorodectomy, which was under attack by missionaries.

88 J. D. Y. Peel, ‘Problems and opportunities in an anthropologist's use of a missionary archive’, in Bickers and Seton, eds., Missionary encounters, pp. 84–5.

89 Miller, Joseph, ‘History and Africa/Africa and history’, American Historical Review, 1 (1999), p. 15Google Scholar.

90 Gardner, ‘Practising Christianity’, pp. 115 and 120.

91 Harries, ‘Anthropology’.