There is scarcely one [African people]…which has not been affected, to a greater or less extent, by the work of the Christian missions, and among most of them organized communities of native Christians play an integral part in the social organization. No contemporary social study can afford to neglect this element, the form it takes, and its relations with the other groups with which it co-exists and interacts.
Beattie 1953, 178There is perhaps no aspect of the African experience that has been analyzed with less objectivity than the Christian missionary effort.
Herskovits 1962, 204I found it difficult, when actually in the field, not to feel disappointed at having to study the religion of the Kgatla by sitting through an ordinary Dutch Reformed Church service, instead of watching a heathen sacrifice to the ancestral spirits.
Schapera 1938, 27Thus the missionaries and the colonial administrators and the British military recruiting officers were not really part of my story. I see now that this was a mistake.
Leach 1989, 4An increasing number of studies highlight the important role played by Christian missionaries in the processes of change that occurred in African countries before independence. Fifteen years ago a bibliography listed no fewer than 2,859 publications on Christianity in Tropical Africa and their number has grown even more considerably in recent years (Ofori 1977). Both historians and social scientists have taken a keen interest in this issue (see Etherington 1983). But it has not always been so.