the missionary movement in african and world … · the papacy during the reformation, and before...

THE MISS IONARY MOVEMENT INAFRICAN AND WORLD HISTORY :

MISS ION SOURCES AND RELIGIOUSENCOUNTER*

DAV ID MAXWELLUniversity of Cambridge

A B S T R A C T . This article is a revised and expanded version of my inaugural lecture as DixieProfessor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Cambridge, delivered on March . Ithighlights the evolution of Ecclesiastical History to include the study of Christianity in the globalsouth and shows how recent developments in the study of African and world history have produceda dynamic and multi-faceted model of religious encounter, an encounter which includes the agency ofindigenous Christians alongside the activities of missionaries. Investigating the contribution of faithmissionaries to the production of colonial knowledge in Belgian Congo, the article challenges stereo-types 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 revealingindigenous African criticism of ‘custom’.

I

The first Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History was Mandell Creighton,Anglican cleric and future bishop of Peterborough () and London(). His election in represented a departure in the approach toChurch History in the University of Cambridge. Creighton’s research was on

* Adapted versions of this lecture were given at the University of Copenhagen, Queen’sUniversity Belfast, and Basel University. I am grateful to Niels Kastfelt and KarenLauterbach, Eric Morier Genoud and Patrick Harries for their invitations and hospitality onthese occasions. My thanks also go to those who attended the lectures. I am also grateful toJames Gardom, Reuben Loffman, John Lonsdale, and David and Bernice Martin for theirhelpful comments. I am particularly indebted to Patrick Harries from whom I have learntmuch as both collaborator and friend. This article is dedicated to the memory of my formersupervisor, Terence Ranger, who passed away on January . This research was fundedby the Nuffield Foundation and the Economic and Social Research Council, grant RES--.

Emmanuel College, Cambridge, CB AP [email protected]

The Historical Journal, , (), pp. – © Cambridge University Press doi:./SX

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the papacy during the Reformation, and before his arrival most Cambridgescholars assumed that Ecclesiastical History was the study of the ancientchurch, a field in which Joseph Lightfoot had set the standard of scholarship.But according to Creighton’s biographer: ‘the electors were determined thatcontinuity in Christian history should not be overlooked’.

In some respects, my own election years later represented something of abreak with the Cambridge tradition of Ecclesiastical History. This time, the elec-tors, mindful of the necessity for historians to make comparisons and connec-tions across the world, sought to assert a new set of global continuities. Theperiod marked by the existence of the Dixie Chair has witnessed a remarkabletransformation in the constituency and character of what used to be known asChristendom. This change commenced with the intensification of the mission-ary movement, which was global in reach and multi-national in membership,and resulted in the shift in the heartlands of Christianity to the global south.On the turn of the twenty-first century, The Sunday Times (London) reportedthat ‘The average Anglican in the world is a year old African woman.’

The publication in of Philip Jenkins’s influential The next Christendomoffered, in popular form, a description of that transformed global religiouslandscape. African bishops now considerably outnumber British ones in theAnglican Communion; the vast majority of baptisms within the Catholicchurch take place outside of Europe, and the largest chapter of Jesuits nolonger resides in the United States but in India. Evangelical Christians inNigeria, Ghana, Brazil, and South Korea view the European church as apostateand its post-Christian societies as sites of mission.

Missionary movements have had an immense effect on changing patterns ofChristian adherence across the globe and more generally on the making ofworld history. Mission work created close encounters of peoples from a great di-versity of ethnic and racial backgrounds, well ahead of the globalization andmulti-culturalism of the later twentieth century. As some of the first great trans-national organizations, missions linked communities in disparate parts of theglobe via travel, correspondence, print, and shared institutions. The SwissBasel Mission, for example, connected workers in India, China, New Guinea,and what became Cameroon and Ghana. While in the early eighteenthcentury, the Dominican Order relocated two troublesome African friars fromEast Africa to Goa, then to Macao and finally to Bahia, Brazil.

W.G. Fallows, Mandell Creighton and the English church (London, ), p. . C. A. Bayly, The birth of the modern world, – (Oxford, ) p. . Sunday Times (of London), Mar. . P. Jenkins, The next Christendom: the rise of global Christianity (Oxford, ), pp. , ,

passim. P. Grimshaw and A. May, ‘Introduction’, in Grimshaw and May, eds., Missionaries, indigen-

ous peoples and cultural exchange (Eastbourne, ), p. . S. Mudenge, A political history of the Munhumatapa, c. – (Harare, ).

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Indeed, the study of missions breaches traditional boundaries of periodiza-tion allowing us to write deep histories of cultural encounter which beginwith the Iberian empires in the early modern age. And there are fruitful com-parisons to be made between the nineteenth- and twentieth-century missionaryencounter and the expansion of the church in antiquity. Missionaries in themodern era sought to make connection with what Peter Brown describes asthe neutral technologies of civilized living – feasts, sacrifices, holy places – inmuch the same manner as Pope Gregory’s instructions to his evangelistsembarking on mission to seventh-century Britain, recounted by Bede. Mostsignificantly, analysis of missions also has broad implications for central histor-ical narratives of the modern era. A key task for religious history is to historicizethe southwards relocation of the church’s axis and to interrogate its relation tomajor processes such as globalization, racial interaction, the construction ofnew social and political institutions, scientific advance, and identity formation.Such an enterprise must necessarily be interdisciplinary, drawing upon anthro-pology, sociology, literary studies as well as history.

Since the publication of the Comaroffs’ Of revelation and revolution:Christianity, colonialism and consciousness in South Africa in , the subject ofthe missionary encounter has been one of the supreme historical and anthropo-logical topics of research. The extraordinary and unpredictable nature ofcontact, in which the actors found themselves in unfamiliar and challenging cir-cumstances, presented situations where the struggles of human existence wereamplified and values were laid bare. The interaction of religions with contrastingcodes of belief and practice has provided rich examples of how the constructionof identity through difference, or ‘otherness’, has occurred. Post-modernists’suspicion of grand narratives and disposition to view socio-cultural formationsas constructions have undermined anthropologists’ confidence in the authenti-city and stability of the cultures they had hitherto made the object of study. Thisin turn has made the more dynamic notion of religious encounter a new andfertile field for scholars interested in the study of cross-cultural fertilizationwhether understood as hybridity, bricolage, creolization, syncretism, or, mostrecently, entanglement. Historians of religious encounter are fortunate inthe wealth of their sources. Missionaries provided copious, though not unprob-lematic, accounts of such moments motivated by their need for propagandist

P. Brown, The rise of Western Christendom: triumph and diversity, A.D. – (Oxford, rev.edn, ), pp. –; Bede, Ecclesiastical history of the English people (Oxford, ), pp. –.

Jean and John Comaroff,Of revelation and revolution: Christianity, colonialism and consciousnessin South Africa, I (Chicago, IL, ), and Of revelation and revolution: the dialectics of modernity on aSouth African frontier, II (Chicago, IL, ). For a useful discussion of the Comaroffs’ work andits significance, see E. Elbourne, ‘The Word made flesh: Christianity, modernity and culturalcolonialism in the work of Jean and John Comaroff’, American Historical Review, (),pp. –.

D. Lindenfeld and M. Richardson, ‘Introduction’, in Lindenfeld and Richardson eds.,Beyond conversion and syncretism: indigenous encounters with missionary Christianity, –(Oxford, ), pp. –.

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literature and images, their curiosity, and sense that they were reliving theActs of the Apostles. Converts also produced their own texts such asdiaries, memoirs, canonical and tribal histories, and newspapers. In Africa,where new Christians were usually the first literate colonial subjects, theseliterary productions were also important in shaping political as well asreligious cultures.

My own research has sought to expand the notion of missionary encounter inAfrica. First, I have tended to work on missionary movements within radicalevangelicalism and Pentecostalism, which have often been neglected infavour of historic mission churches. These lesser-known movements representan important primitive strand of Christian religion that emerged from theshadows of Western states in response to secularization and which, in missionaryform, often eschewed connections with empire and were selective in their re-sponse to modernizing Christianity. Today, however, their born-again descen-dants have a global reach and remarkable influence. Secondly, I havesought to reconstruct the encounter over the longue durée, attentive tomoments of rupture, revival, and reprise within a sequence of religiouschange. Thirdly, I have become interested in the explanatory power of intim-ate relations between missionaries and indigenous peoples on whom they oftenrelied. I am intrigued by how these contacts brought about changes embodiedin dress and deportment, manners and mores, and how they were domesticatedwithin new Christian households. This connects with my fourth concern: theagency of indigenous Christians in the spread of Christianity and the creationof religious communities and cultures. Finally, I have examined the impact ofthe environment – disease, death, hunger, and isolation – in shaping patternsof missionary interaction. This last point causes me to observe that I am notthe first Dixie Professor to work on the missionary encounter. In , OwenChadwick published a less-well-known but no less remarkable book,Mackenzie’s grave, a study of the tragic failure of the pioneering endeavour ofBishop Charles Frederick Mackenzie’s Universities Mission to Central Africa

See for example D. Peterson, Creative writing: translation, bookkeeping and the work of imagin-ation in colonial Kenya (Portsmouth, NH, ).

On radical evangelicalism, see G. Wacker, Heaven below: early Pentecostals and Americanculture (Cambridge, MA, ) ch. . See also W. Hollenweger, The Pentecostals (London,), ch. .

D. Maxwell, African gifts of the spirit: Pentecostalism and the rise of a Zimbabwean transnationalreligious movement (Oxford, ).

D. Maxwell, Christians and chiefs in Zimbabwe: a social history of the Hwesa people c. s–s (Edinburgh, ).

D. Maxwell, ‘Photography and the religious encounter: ambiguity and aesthetics in mis-sionary representations of the Luba of South East Belgian Congo’, Comparative Studies inSociety and History, (), pp. –; idem, ‘Freed slaves, missionaries and respectability:the expansion of the Christian frontier from Angola to Belgian Congo’, Journal of AfricanHistory, (), pp. –; idem, ‘The missionary home as a site for mission: perspectivesfrom Belgian Congo’, in John Doran and Charlotte Metheun, eds., The church and the household(Studies in Church History) (Woodbridge, ).




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in . Rejecting the triumphalism that characterized so many accounts ofmission at that time, Chadwick narrates a story of missionary failure amidstthe trials of hunger, isolation, and disease encountered within the widercontext of the violence and the instability of Africa’s internal slave trade. Hisbook is an important reminder of the contingency of Christian mission inpre-colonial Africa.

Returning to my own work, my current research explores religious encounterthrough the lens of the missionary contribution to scientific research. There isnow a considerable body of literature, which establishes that Catholic andProtestant missionaries were responsible for much of the knowledge producedabout Africa and parts of Asia and the Pacific, before the establishment of uni-versity disciplines. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries whenamateur science was viewed as an educational and recreational activity at almostall levels of society, missionaries also viewed themselves as both scholars andrepresentatives of science of every kind. Working in collaboration withmuseums, universities, collectors, and armchair academics, these amateur intel-lectuals made contributions to zoology, entomology and botany, medicine, and,in particular, linguistics and social anthropology. In addition, they were zealouspractitioners of other fields of measurement and delineation ranging fromgeography, cartography, meteorology, and hydrography to archaeology andpalaeontology.

My concern is to reconstruct knowledge pathways to illuminate how Africansdialogically shaped missionary texts, images, and collections, and consider whatthis reveals about the missionary encounter. In the latter half of this article, I willillustrate how much criticism of missionary ethnography was made in ignoranceof what that ethnography reveals about indigenous African dissent. Throughtheir contact with missionaries, Africans were offered the opportunity andexample of other ways of looking at life. Drawing authority from new social com-munities (churches), which they were deeply involved in creating, AfricanChristians generated a far-reaching critique of ‘custom’. In the first instance,however, it is useful to examine the ways in which the missionary encounterhas been portrayed in both popular and scholarly literature, and what we canlearn from this.

Owen Chadwick, Mackenzie’s grave (London, ). 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 CompanionSeries) (Oxford, ), and D. Maxwell and P. Harries, eds., The spiritual in the secular: mission-aries and knowledge about Africa (Grand Rapids, MI, ). See also S. Sivasundaran, Nature andthe godly empire: science and evangelical mission in the Pacific, – (Cambridge, );M. Elshakry, ‘The gospel of science and American evangelism in late Ottoman Beirut’, Pastand Present, (), pp. –; J. Michaud, ‘Incidental’ ethnographers: French CatholicMissions on the Tonkin–Yunan frontier, –’ (Leiden, ).




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In England, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the missionary wasregarded as kind of tinker who, in the words of the Reverend Sydney Smith,‘could not look a gentleman in the face’. This view was supported by a travellerto Tahiti who claimed that no great discernment was necessary to grasp thatEnglish missionaries were ‘selected from the dregs of the people’. However,by the mid-nineteenth century, the social position of Protestant missionarieshad been transformed from religious eccentrics to representatives ofVictorian values. Much of this rehabilitation was due to the missionary icon,David Livingstone. His influential work of , Missionary travels and researchesin South Africa, sold , copies while his scientific lectures of the same year inCambridge met with considerable acclaim.Urbanization and industrializationhad not yet diminished Christian adherence in most of Western Europe. Andneither had scientific advances undermined religious belief. Missionary soci-eties emerged out of new prominent groups in urban industrial society, a mani-festation of the respectability and self-confidence of this aspiring middlingsort. Literate, prosperous, and earnest, they made missionary periodicalsthe most widely circulated literature of the Victorian era. As new types ofsocial organization, voluntary transnational missionary bodies crystallizedaround international issues such slavery and the condition of so-called nativewomen, allowing ordinary members to work alongside religious specialists asactivists.

Nevertheless, the image of the missionary as social failure seemed to stick insome quarters, even in the established church, which was not as interested inmission as one might assume. The autobiography of the Anglican missionaryCecil Tyndale-Biscoe makes the point well. Like Bishop Mackenzie, Biscoe wasone of the many Cambridge graduates who participated in successive waves ofmissionary outreach in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However,

N. Gunson,Messengers of grace: evangelical missionaries in the South Seas, – (Oxford,), p. .

J. MacKenzie, ‘Missionaries, science and the environment in nineteenth-century Africa’,in Andrew Porter, ed., The imperial horizons of British Protestant missions, – (GrandRapids, MI, ), pp. –.

For a recent reassessment on the church in relation tomission, science, and secularizationin the nineteenth century, see essays in Brian Stanley and Shreidan Gilly, eds., The Cambridgehistory of Christianity: world Christianities, c. – (Cambridge, ). For a broaderview, see also T. Dixon, G. Cantor, and S. Pumphrey, eds., Science and religion: new historical per-spectives (Cambridge, ), and J. Brooke and R. Numbers, eds., Science and religion around theworld (Oxford, ).

R. Gray, Black Christians and white missionaries (New Haven, CT, ). A. Green and V. Viaene, ‘Introduction: rethinking religion and globalization’, in Green

and Viaene, eds., Religious internationals and the modern world: globalization and faith communitiessince (New York, NY, ), p. .

E. Stock, The history of the Church Missionary Society: its environment, its men and its work, I

(London, ) pp. –. The Anglican church drew missionaries from Germany,Switzerland, and of course the mission field itself for most of the nineteenth century.




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Mackenzie and Biscoe were rather different characters, representing differentends of the Anglican missionary spectrum. Mackenzie was an outstandinggraduate in Maths from St Johns who was made Fellow of Caius before foundingthe Anglo-Catholic Universities Mission to Central Africa. Biscoe, graduate ofJesus College, joined the evangelical Church Missionary Society. He was agreat all-round sportsman who coxed the Cambridge crew to victory in theBoat Race of but made a rather unpromising student. After completinghis curacy in the slums of White Chapel, London, Biscoe was summoned to ameeting with Frederick Temple, then bishop of London. Biscoe writes:

On his desk were my examination papers, and as he turned over the sheets heexclaimed loudly: ‘Shocking! Shocking! You don’t know anything Biscoe’ ‘I knowI do not’ I replied.Bishop: Then how do you think you can teach anybody if you do not know anythingyourself?Biscoe (scratching his head): Well, sir perhaps there may be some people in theworld almost as ignorant as I am.Bishop: I doubt it! I doubt it! You are only fit to teach the blacks, there now!Biscoe: Sir, if you can only persuademy parents and the ChurchMissionary Society tosend me to central Africa, I shall be most grateful.Bishop: Ah, then you’ll do! You’ll do!

The embodiment of muscular Christianity, Biscoe ended up in Kashmir wherehe was renowned for founding schools, introducing soccer, and for his strongimperial sentiments.

A survey of the popular cultural representation of missionaries in film in thetwentieth century shows that they were invariably portrayed either as figures offun or people with high ambitions who were frustrated by the overwhelmingforces they took on – not least the power of human nature itself. But what isnotable about these representations is that they amount to the precise oppositeof missionaries’ own self-image. To quote John Mackenzie, missionaries viewedthemselves as ‘a people who controlled their own natural and human environ-ments with the help of their technology, science, and Western medicine, as wellas through their moral aura, their moral force and state of grace’. The truthlies between these two sets of characterizations.

Some scholars are rather too quick at reproducing familiar literary tropesabout missionaries, reducing them to objects of anthropological irony or whatMark Sweetnam describes as ‘a two dimensional metonym for ignorance, re-pression and hypocrisy’. Undoubtedly, such characterizations do emergefrom a limited reading of missionary popular literature. While creative encoun-ters and exchanges did occur in the contact zone, missionaries often felt

C. Tyndale-Biscoe, Tyndale-Biscoe of Kashmir: an autobiography (London, ), p. . MacKenzie, ‘Missionaries, science and the environment’, p. . M. Sweetnam, ‘Dan Crawford, Thinking black, and the challenge of a missionary canon’,

Journal of Ecclesiastical History, (), pp. –.




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compelled to characterize their work as a battleground between diametricallyopposed Christian truth and heathen superstition. They deployed defamatorycategories about heathen darkness, ignorance, and superstition and they lovedto tell evolutionary stories of progress because, as Nancy Hunt observes, quainttales of reformed cannibals eating with knives and forks, and female ex-slaveswho became house girls, mothers, and Bible translators, convinced metropol-itan readers of the value of their work. When conversions were not forthcom-ing, descriptions of hard-hearted, sinful, slothful heathens helped account forfailure to mission supporters back home. Nowhere was missionary rhetoricstronger then when describing combat with the traditional healer who hadimmense social and moral influence, especially when it came to marking keyliminal moments. Mission doctors often cast themselves as heroic agents whosingle-handedly annihilated ‘traditional’ systems of healing even though theyonly had limited control over a range of diseases in an age prior to the availabil-ity of antibiotics. Such triumphalism was also out of place when it is remem-bered that Livingstone, the great missionary role model, had actively engagedwith African therapeutic systems and sought to remain on good terms withlocal practitioners. Moreover, the late nineteenth-century missionary dualwith the traditional healer occurred when theWestern church was experiencinga revival of spiritual healing.

It is hardly surprising, then, that until recently, the figure of the missionary didnot fare well in Africanist historiography. From the s to the late s, it wasunfashionable to make missionaries the explicit object of study. Nationalist,Marxist, and Africanist historiography cast them as cultural imperialists, the

N. Etherington, ‘Education and medicine’, in Etherington, ed., Missions and Empire,p. . See also Jeffrey Cox, ‘Master narratives of imperial mission’, in J. Scott and GarethGriffiths, eds., Mixed messages, materiality, textuality and missions (New York, NY, ), p. .

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

Walima Kalusa, ‘Christian medical discourse and praxis on the imperial frontier: explain-ing the popularity of missionary medicine in Mwinilunga District, Zambia, –’, inHarries and Maxwell, eds., The spiritual in the secular, p. .

A. Ross, David Livingstone, mission and empire (London, ), p. ; Etherington,‘Education and medicine’, p. ; Megan Vaughan, Curing their ills: colonial power and Africanillness (Oxford, ), pp. –. For a particularly grounded study of Livingstone’s work inCentral Africa, see L. Dritsas, Zambesi: David Livingstone and expeditionary science (London, ).

T. Ranger, ‘Godly medicine: the ambiguities of medical mission in SoutheasternTanzania, –’, in S. Feierman and J. Janzen, eds., The social basis of health and healingin Africa (Berkeley, CA, ), p. .

This point was made by anthropologist Tom Beidelman, ‘Contradictions between thesacred and secular life: the Church Missionary Society in Ukaguru, Tanzania, East Africa,–’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, , (), p. . His monograph,Colonial evangelism (Bloomington, IN, ), was something of an exception. For early workby historians on mission and the missionary encounter in Africa, see T. Ranger andN. Kimambo, eds., The historical study of African religion (Berkeley, CA, ); T. Ranger andJ. Weller, Themes in the Christian history of Central Africa (Berkeley, CA, ); A. Hastings,African Christianity: an essay in interpretation (London, ).




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heroes of a discredited colonial history. It was argued that missionaries had dis-paraged and undermined indigenous cultures in ways that made them complicitin colonial domination. Instead, scholars chose to research a different type ofChristianity. Africanist historians were in search of the resilient African initiativethat had produced new and vibrant forms of Christianity or that, in associationwith missionaries, had created successful peasants, entrepreneurs, and politicalleaders. In their quest for a usable past, they wrote about African independentchurches led by great African prophets who could be turned into proto-national-ists and resistance figures. But the passage of time showed that most AfricanChristians continued to adhere to the historic mission churches and scholarsreturned to study their legacy. By reading out African voices from missionarysources, through the collection of oral history and the observation of Africanappropriations of mission Christianity, historians and anthropologists came tograsp that the real agents of Africa’s Christianization were Africans themselves:evangelists, catechists, labour migrants, teachers, and Bible women. It wasthese local actors who seized hold of the material, spiritual, and intellectualresources of Christianity and used them to find healing and personal security,to make the most of the colonial labour economy, and to take hold of the landthrough pilgrimage and the construction of new holy places. The linguisticwork of missionaries was surely their greatest achievement but recent work onthe production of vernacular scriptures shows how Africans were creativelyinvolved in the translation process, placing their own ideas and images into thefinal texts. Indeed, Jeffrey Cox’s reconstruction of the material basis of theBritish missionary enterprise has shown that it could not have happened onsuch a large scale without its considerable level of non-Western support. Hiscareful statistical analysis reveals that over per cent of themissionary workforcewas African or Asian and that white women outnumbered white male workers.

However, Nigerian historians Jacob Ajayi and Emmanuel Ayendele representing nation-alist and Africanist agendas wrote influential books on the role of missions in African elite for-mation. J. F. Ajayi, Christian missions in Nigeria, –: the making of a new elite (London,); E. A. Ayendele, The missionary impact on modern Nigeria, –: a political andsocial analysis (London, ).

A. Hastings, ‘African Christian studies, –: reflections of an editor’, Journal ofReligion in Africa, (), pp. –.

For a magisterial synthesis of this Africanist approach to Christianity, see A. Hastings, TheChurch in Africa, – (Oxford, ). See also Tom Spear, ed., East African expressions ofChristianity (Oxford, ). For a review of the literature, see T. Ranger, ‘Religious movementsand politics in Sub-Saharan Africa’, African Studies Review, (), pp. –. John Peel’sReligious encounter in the making of the Yoruba (Bloomington, IN, ) is an unrivalledexample of a historical anthropological approach to African reception of Christian mission.

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, ); D. Peterson, ‘The rhetoric of the Word: Bible translation and Mau Mau in co-lonial Kenya’, in B. Stanley, ed., Missions, nationalism and the end of empire (Grand Rapids, MI,).

J. Cox, The British missionary enterprise since (London, ), pp. –.




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World historians, with some notable exceptions, were slow to engage with re-ligious history. This paucity of reflection on the global dimensions of religiouschange was partly because social and cultural historians within area studies wereinterested in processes of localization and adaptation. Scholars were also rathertoo quick to relegate religious expansion to a facet of imperial or politicalhistory. But recent advances in world history have brought new insights, his-toricizing processes such as the growth of transnational religious connectionsand consciousness, increasing hybridization, and the dialectical play of hom-ogenization and indigenization. They have also illuminated the multi-polarityof these developments. The initial emphasis on more tangible types ofcross-cultural encounter such as trade, technology, disease, and developmenthas given way to a growing interest in the sharing of knowledge and themeeting of ideologies, including religions. Comparative study of religiousencounters reveals notable patterns in the reception of Christianity such as itsinitial attraction to the socially marginal and the importance of Western educa-tion and biomedicine in broadening the appeal. There were other contextsalongside Africa, such as the Pacific, where the massive scale of conversion rela-tive to the number of Western missionaries was such that indigenous peopleshad much latitude to inculturate Christianity. Comparison of China withAfrica highlights the presence of large-scale, sometimes violent Chinese resist-ance to Christianity and the inability of missionaries to dismantle the socialeconomy of healing in Chinese traditional medicine, and missionary failureto come to terms with Chinese nationalism. The tendency to decentreEurope in accounts of global transformation relocates missionary impetus innew hubs such as Los Angeles, Freetown, and Johannesburg. And the searchfor lateral connections and exchanges outside of the West draws out the signifi-cance of religious movements and religious agents beyond formal mission. Ithighlights, for instance, the importance of Christianized ex-slaves in spreadingChristian modernity into the African interior from the West African coast, orthe role of Polynesian missionaries in evangelizing Melanesia. Work on net-works and modes of diffusion of knowledge across the globe highlights

See Patrick Manning’s survey, Navigating world history (New York, NY, ), p. . Animportant exception is Chris Bayly’s discussion of nineteenth-century religious revival and ex-pansion in Birth of the modern world, ch. .

Green and Viaene, ‘Introduction’, p. and passim. D. Lindenfeld, ‘Indigenous encounters with Christian missionaries in China and West

Africa, –: a comparative study’, Journal of World History, (), p. and passim. J. Barker, ‘Where the missionary frontier ran ahead of empire’, in Etherington, ed.,

Missions and Empire. Lindenfeld, ‘Indigenous encounters’, pp. –; David N. Livingstone, ‘Scientific

enquiry and the missionary enterprise’, in Ruth Finnegan, ed., Participating in the knowledgesociety (London, ), p. .

Barker, ‘The missionary frontier’.




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missionary exchange outside the formal structures of colonialism. Lastly, thestudy of missionary itineraries, the transnational activities of Bible Societies andtheir colporteurs, and the linguistic regions created by vernacular scriptureschallenge the conventional geo-political spatial categories of historical writing,particularly the nation-state. These insights also help us move beyond the aca-demic fixation with mission’s relationship to empire, or at least help us compre-hend how Christianity came to outlast its framework of transmission.

Other scholarship, influenced by post-colonial theory, has analysed mission-aries as agents in the making of colonial and metropolitan identities.

Following Edward Said’s path-breaking Orientalism (), and ValentinMudimbe’s idea of a ‘colonial library’, scholars have read missionary publica-tions for their imperialist discourses to show how Africa was used as a negativetrope in the delineation of the colonial ‘other’, a means of constructingEuropean identities of race, class, and gender. But while missionaries oftenused the tropes of darkness and savagery to elicit funding from their readers,they just as frequently stressed the picturesque and romantic sides of Africanlife in their ethnographic writings. At the same time, their publications also con-tained fascinating references to science as ordered knowledge. In the latenineteenth- and early twentieth-century mission field, science was the apothe-osis of Christianity. Living on the edge of empire and beyond its confines, mis-sionaries quickly became men-(and occasionally women-)-on-the-spot whosupplied scholars in the metropole with objects and images of indigenous ma-terial culture and detailed ethnographies. Their engagement was more abouta reordered world than plunder and the accumulation of profits. DavidN. Livingstone called these missionary contributions ‘a significant chapter inthe global story of modern science’.

I I I

My current research reconstructs the ethnographic processes of William F. P.Burton, co-founder of the Congo Evangelistic Mission (CEM) established in

E. Hunter, ‘Language, empire and the world: Karl Roehl and the entangled history ofthe Swahili Bible in East Africa’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, (),pp. –.

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

Susan Thorne, ‘Religion and empire at home’, in C. Hall and S. Rose, eds., At home with theempire: metropolitan culture and the imperial world (Cambridge, ); P. Harries, Butterflies and bar-barians: Swiss missionaries and systems of knowledge in South-East Africa (Oxford, ); AnnaJohnston, Missionary writing and empire, – (Cambridge, ). Jean and JohnComaroff played a significant role in drawing scholarly attention to missionary discoursesand the construction of alterity. See their Of revelation and revolution, I, ch. .

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

J. M. Mackenzie, ed., Imperialism and the natural world (Manchester, ), p. . Livingstone, ‘Scientific enquiry’, p. .




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Mwanza, South-East Belgian Congo in . The case-study approach allows usto gauge in detail how the interaction of metropolitan, colonial, and localinfluences shaped missionary knowledge production. Burton’s missionary or-ganization, the CEM, embodied the changing face of the twentieth-century mis-sionary enterprise. It was a transnational Pentecostal faith mission founded inSouth Africa and initially managed in the USA before it transferred its baseto England. It drew personnel from all three of these locations as well asSwitzerland, the Netherlands, and New Zealand. This type of Protestant move-ment was in the ascendant as many of the historic liberal missionary agenciessuffered a crisis of confidence following the First World War and Britaindeclined as a sending nation. The CEM’s theology and practices were both con-servative and destabilizing in their relation to Belgian colonialism. Missionariesencouraged proselytizing and preaching by the laity and stressed spiritualrebirth through the descent of the Holy Spirit made manifest in revival,public confession, dramatic testimony of faith, and gifts of the spirit. Theyrejected formal politics but also shunned the formal colonial project ofhealth, education, and development because it slowed continuous gospel proc-lamation in a time of millennial urgency. They preferred divine healing to bio-medicine. Suspicious colonial officials collected and collated their publicationsand forwarded them to superiors. Burton’s claim to have healed another mis-sionary’s arm through prayer was met with incredulity, and his account of ter-mites being chased from the house following a time of intercession wasaccompanied by a large exclamation mark in the margin added by the provin-cial governor, Gaston Heenan, who received the report. Regarding the CEM’spneumatic practices such as glossolalia, Heenan observed: ‘Certain members ofthe group bordered on otherworldliness or neurosis.’

Burton was public school educated and studied for a degree in Engineeringat Liverpool University. He was a member of the Royal Geographical Society, towhich he delivered a lecture in Oxford in . He wrote twenty-eight booksand numerous articles in a range of missionary and scientific publications.His principal scientific text was L’âme Luba (The Soul of the Luba), whichappeared in the Belgian native affairs publication Bulletin des juridictionsindigènes in , later updated and published by the Central Africa Museumin Tervuren, Belgium, as Luba religion and magic in custom and belief in .

More popular inspirational versions of these studies appeared as sketches ofAfrican life and missionary work. Burton also adapted some of his work on

P. Kay, ‘Cecil Polhill, the Pentecostal Missionary Union, and the fourfold gospel withhealing and speaking in tongues: signs of a new movement in missions’, North AtlanticMissiology Project, Henry Martyn Centre, Cambridge, Position Paper, ().

G. Heenen to governor general, Elizabethville, July , Archives Africaines: Ministèredes Affaires Etrangères, Bruxelles (AAB), M XIV, CEM, Katanga, Governor, p. . The initialreport was dated May .

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




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fables and proverbs into children’s stories published by Methuen. He was also acollector, photographer, cartographer, botanist, and painter. He supplied artefactsand photographs to the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, and the CentralAfrican Museum in Tervuren, Belgium. He was in regular correspondence withWinifred Hoernlé, the so-called ‘mother of south African Anthropology’, andAudrey Richards her colleague, who became a pioneer of British anthropologyand was the founder of the Cambridge African Studies Centre.

According to the pre-eminent historian of Central Africa, Jan Vansina:‘Ethnographic accounts are the single most important, most massive andmost used source of knowledge we claim to have of Central African societiesand cultures.’ They remained important sources on cultural change into theearly twentieth century. Burton’s data covers a remarkable range: unpub-lished correspondence and published propaganda and ethnography, visualand material culture. He devotedly recorded African Christian confessions,sermons, and testimonies, sometimes verbatim, sometimes stereotyped, inorder to demonstrate the redeeming power of the Word. When this data is sup-plemented with fieldwork it is possible to engage in much-needed source criti-cism of his published scientific work and to examine how it relates to thebroader dynamics of religious encounter. Missionary images, in particular,reveal a far more complex attitude towards African subjects than the simpleoppositions that evangelical prose usually allowed because, as Paul Jenkinsobserves, photography permitted missionaries ‘a greater freedom to pursue’their interest in non-Western cultures ‘than did [their] written reports to theguardians of orthodoxy at home’.

Missionaries embodied a good number of contradictory tendencies. Theyembraced empire because it appeared part of God’s providential plan for thespread of the gospel. But the practical workings of imperial policies oftenhorrified them, such as when indirect rule empowered Muslim emirs or trad-itionalist chiefs, or when labour migration and urbanization were accompaniedby what they saw as the less savoury aspects of modern living. Missionaries also

W. Burton, The magic drum: tales from Central Africa (London, ). 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, ). It also figured highly in two American exhibitions in at theMuseum 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, ).

Jan Vansina, ‘The ethnographic account as genre in Central Africa’, Paideuma, (),p. ; J. D. Y. Peel, ‘Problems and opportunities in an anthropologist’s use of a missionaryarchive’, in R. Bickers and R. Seton, eds., Missionary encounters: sources and issues (London,), pp. –.

Paul Jenkins, ‘On using historical missionary photographs in modern discussion’, Le faitmissionnaire, (), p. .

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




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often manifested a schizophrenic attitude towards Africans, seeking simultan-eously to preserve the past, promote economic change, and protect themfrom the worst effects of modernity. This was apparent in Burton’s career,which spanned forty-five years in Belgian Congo. In the s, he movedfrom an epistolary ethnography, providing armchair specialists with data, tosalvage anthropology: a commitment to preserving a vanishing Luba culture.In his ethnographic texts, he did not so much write about what was happeningaround him but write about what he imagined pre-contact Luba society lookedlike. His ethnography was characterized by a bounded timelessness in which fewof his observations were given an orientation in time or space. In the instancesthat he did provide a geographical location for his material, it often came fromvillages and chieftaincies close to his mission at Mwanza, or from Kabongo inthe north where his colleague, Harold Womersley, also conducted research.Specifics were often generalized to give the impression that the Luba lived inan unchanging, unified culture called Lubaland. There was little referenceto the transformations that urbanization, labour migration, and the productionof cash crops had brought across CEM territory. Burton preferred to write aboutso-called ‘traditional’ secret societies such as Bambudye or Bakasandji whichhad a strong Luba constituency, rather than more recent neo-traditional soci-eties that had a multi-ethnic reach and had assimilated aspects of Western cloth-ing and modernity into their practice. His writing style was descriptive withlittle progression of argument, the major concern being to identify normativebehaviour. In the preface to Luba religion and magic Burton admitted ignoring‘all that was uncommon’. The use of the passive voice, the impersonal ‘we’,and generalized statements created the impression of scientific authority, al-though Burton, as missionary, could not resist intervening in his texts tocondemn certain practices as ‘vile’, ‘filthy’, or ‘immoral’. It is difficult to fithis work into a single theoretical school. At times, he took a historical/diffusion-ist perspective, but he also employed notions and terminology from functional-ist anthropology, writing about ‘types’ within a Luba ‘social system’.

This reproduction of a homogeneous tribal culture was also manifest inBurton’s collecting and photography. He photographed coiffures and cicatriza-tion, dancers and diviners, hunters and fishermen, craftsmen and their artisticproductions. Most human subjects, beside chiefs and sculptors, were de-indivi-dualized, reduced to ‘types’ involved in traditional activities. His ethnographicphotography contained few images of modernity – Western clothes, brick

Burton, Luba religion. Ibid., pp. –. 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 D. H. Johnson,‘Criminal secrecy and the case of Zande “secret societies”’, Past and Present, (),pp. –.

Burton, Luba religion, p. . Ibid.




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houses and bicycles – and the modern objects that did impinge were usuallyignored in accompanying commentaries. Burton was of course deeply awareof social and religious change. He wrote to the Belgian colonial authorities pro-testing about how labour migration emptied the countryside of able-bodiedyoung men. As a missionary, he worked for the transformation of bodiesand spaces but his ethnographic thinking had been captured by the Belgianethno-museological genre.

Under the tutelage of museum curators at Tervuren, Burton was initiated intothe Trait School of collecting and requested to locate objects that would com-plete the museum’s collection of sculptures from Katanga. He was asked to dis-course on the makers, users, and purpose of the artefacts he collected, andidentify analogous objects. In this collecting, he was participating in abroader colonial exercise of mapping so-called tribes in terms of the presenceor absence of certain cultural elements. He arrived at a similar set of arrange-ments with University of Witwatersrand anthropologists. Burton’s commitmentto the study of so-called tribal cultures represented through the Trait School atTervuren and the functionalism of Witwatersrand anthropologists in the ssat well with his missiological aims. His ideal was a stable rural community ofmonogamous nuclear families under a Christian chief who would protect hispeople from the pitfalls of colonial modernity.

Burton’s missionary writings and photography provide a strong contrast to hissocial scientific work. He wrote hagiographies and cameos of named evangelistsrecounting their spiritual and material development. And in a genre also foundin colonial publications, his missionary photographs were records of progress:roads, railways, bridges, houses, and Western clothing which were all intendedto demonstrate the benefits of colonial rule and modernizing Christianity.Figure was a popular type of image found in missionary propaganda. Takenfrom a magic lantern slide, it shows a pastor and his nuclear family in cottonclothes outside a square brick house: the products of patient evangelical activity.

Another favourite missionary trope was the ‘before and after’ shot (seeFigures and ). In this case, an ethnographic image of two Luba Bavidye(mediums) originally taken for the University of Witwatersrand was recycledto create a visual narrative of conversion. It was printed in a edition ofthe bi-monthly journal, the Congo Evangelistic Mission Report (CEMR), alongsidethe post-conversion picture of the same two men – now called Peter andDavid – smiling and dressed in modern clothing. The CEMR caption reads‘“Kabondo Dianda Sorcerers”. Three years ago we photographed theseConsulters with the spirit world. Since then they have been saved, and nowthey are happily testifying of Jesus Christ and his abounding grace’.

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

W. Burton, When God changes a village (London, ). Congo Evangelistic Mission Report (CEMR), , July – August .




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While missionary photographs were created within an unequal power rela-tionship in a colonial setting, Christopher Pinney highlights how scholars inter-preting such images should consider ‘the “photographic event” – the dialogicperiod during which the subject and photographer come together’, observingthat ‘no photograph is so successful that it filters out the random entirely’.

Close scrutiny of Figure reveals that the outward transformation of themediums into converts was not complete. Peter continues to wear a coneshell necklace as a sign of status amongst the Luba and both men’s smilesreveal their filed front teeth, which acted as a ‘tribal’ mark.

Although Burton’s research interests were numerous, his ethnographic pub-lications focused on Luba religion and magic, particularly as they were practisedby so-called secret societies, better termed associations. Easily demonized bymissionaries who found them difficult to comprehend, these were populist

Fig. . An evangelist and his family. Courtesy of CAM, Preston no. .

C. Pinney ‘Introduction’, in Pinney and N. Peterson, eds., Photography’s other histories(Durham, NC, ), pp. and . For an extended discussion of Burton’s photographyand more detailed commentary on the images below, see Maxwell, ‘Photography and the reli-gious encounter’.




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institutions, which were committed to the maintenance of traditional moralityand certain rites of passage. They could control healing, initiation, and funeralsand were essentially educational societies with a strong public presence. Burton

Fig. . Peter and Stephen. Courtesy of CAM, Preston, CEMR, , July–Aug. .

Fig. . ‘LUBA bavidye’. Courtesy of the University of Witwatersrand Art Museum and theBurton Collection at the Witwatersrand Museum of Ethnology (BPC G.).




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was much exercised about the Bambudye and Bakasandji Associations. Theformer was a political faction whose function was to initiate candidates intothe rules and regulations of royal authority. The latter were doctors who dealtwith malevolent spirits through spirit possession and controlled witchcraft ac-cusation. Essentially, the associations covered the same ground that thechurch wanted to occupy. Burton was irked that some officials saw their activ-ities as harmless entertainment and so he set out to expose them. As Burtondescribed it in a CEMR article, research was literally a means of ‘drawingback a veil’, of making public what lay beneath surface appearances. In theunpublished preface to his manuscript Luba religion and magic in customand belief, he explained:

The causal white may scarcely notice the startled cry in the darkness of the night, thesmall white mark upon a native’s body, or the waving of a few leaves in the hand ofone of his caravan porters, accompanied by a muttered spell. Yet a few judiciousenquiries conducted in the right way, would lay bare a whole underworld offearful custom, of which the white man has not even dreamed. We are convincedthat for lack of such knowledge much missionary preaching is like a boxer strikingthe empty air instead of planting well-directed blows in the spot where they aremost likely to take effect.

In this scientific mode of revelation, Burton used photography to subject trad-itional practitioners and their sacred objects to the spectator’s gaze, therebyneutralizing their power. His image of the lion drum of the Tupoyo Society(Figure ) was a prime example. The accompanying caption read: ‘Theturning, first in one direction and then in the other, of the small stick, causesa roaring noise, at the mouth of the water pot, very much resembling roaringof lion in the distance. It is this “lion roaring” that is used by the TupoyoSociety to deceive the outsiders into believing that there is a lion in theirsociety lodge.’

Although Burton cast these associations as fraudulent, debauched, and canni-balistic, he was not simply reproducing notions of alterity present in Europeandiscourses about Africa but also reflecting the views of his informants. Many ofthese were converts who had chosen to locate themselves outside of traditionalLuba society and cast it in negative terms. Young men were his most enthusiasticand active informants. They bore the brunt of elder male gerontocratic power inLuba society. As John Peel observes from the Nigerian context, conversion

M. Nooter, ‘Luba art and polity: creating power in a Central African kingdom’ (Ph.D. dis-sertation, Columbia, ), p. .

Hastings, The church in Africa, p. . Burton to Owen Saunders, South Africa, Oct. , UWAG (University of

Witwatersrand Art Gallery), file, Burton personal. W. Burton, ‘Bwanga’ (witchcraft), CEMR, , Apr.–June . Unpublished preface to Luba religion, UWAG, box W. F. P. Burton, file correspondence

with Wits, . The image of a boxer striking the air is a well-known Pauline allusion aboutthe effectiveness of Christian service. Corinthians ..




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offered young men an exit strategy and Christianity, in its ideology of individual-ism, provided ‘a ready legitimation to the new cultural choices which now beck-oned’. Young male converts were willing to break secrets or make public whatwas unspoken. They told Burton the passwords needed to gain entrance to asecret lodge. His photography and missionary articles recording the event, oneof which was aptly entitled ‘Invading a Bambudye Sanctuary’ (Figure ), madewhat was private and sacred accessible to the viewer’s gaze.

These youthful converts also engaged in acts of disenchantment and icono-clasm, using the resources of Christianity to purify and intensify their own

Fig. . ‘LUBA. Tupoyo Society’. Courtesy of the University of Witwatersrand Art Museum andthe Burton Collection at the Witwatersrand Museum of Ethnology, BPC L.

Peel, Religious encounter, p. . Burton entered the lodge in . Burton to Salter, Sept. , Central African

Missions (CAM) (formerly CEM), Preston, file, Burton to Salter letters and reports, –. The image was used in an article by W. Burton, entitled: ‘Vile Secret Society Broken Up:Chief Members Converted’, CEMR, , July–Aug. . He used it in a vignette entitled,‘Invading a Bambudye Sanctuary’, published in Congo sketches (London, ), pp. –.




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religious experience. The young male evangelist, Lomami, pictured in Figure ,seized the sacred object, known locally as a Kanzundji. The object had been usedby a local traditional religious practitioner to divine witches. Burton consideredthe object as no more than a trophy and subsequently sawed it in half, encour-aging his evangelists to parade it around local villages to demonstrate itsmundane nature.

While Burton arrived in Belgian Congo with preconceived ideas about thepervasiveness of ‘cannibalism’, like most missionaries he never witnessed itand his accounts were second hand, fleshed out by his African co-workers.Many of his accounts of anthropophagy were provided by Christian porterson evangelistic trek, men who were keen to distance themselves from the threa-tening pagan ‘others’ they encountered in alien territories. Pioneering mis-sionaries depended on these workers for introductions and local knowledge,especially before they had honed their linguistic skills. Burton and his

Fig. . A Bambudye Association Lodge. Courtesy of CAM, Preston no. .

W. Burton, ‘Letter to Mr Myerscough’, CEMR, , July–Aug. . The story was firstrecounted in full in CEMR, , Oct.–Dec. . Burton may have been referring to annzunzi, though he and his missionary colleague Harold Womersley continued to use kanzundjialong with more derogatory terms such as ‘dreamchild’ or ‘bogey’: CEMR, , May–June,CEMR, , July–Aug. ; CEMR, , Nov.–Dec. . There were differences in dialectacross Luba territory.

For instance, , ; W. Burton, ‘Wells in the desert’, CEMR, , July–Sept. ;C. Taylor, ‘From cannibalism to Christ, at Kaseba and Mpasu: notes from one of Mr Taylor’sitineraries’, CEMR, , Oct.–Dec. .




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colleagues describe evangelists intervening in their preaching to clarify mean-ings, and missionaries wryly acknowledged that once they had retired to theirtent at night it was their carriers and servants who explained to villagers whatthey had really meant to teach in their sermons. Evangelistic treks weregreat occasions for Burton to collect ethnographic data. But, always on themove, there was little opportunity for corroboration and hence he was deeplyreliant on his porters for their interpretations (see Figure ).

Another group of informants who distanced themselves from traditional reli-gion were Christianized former slaves. Slavers had originally taken them fromKatanga to the Angolan coast, to work in plantations. There, they were

Fig. . ‘LUBA. A Kanzundji’. Courtesy of the University of Witwatersrand Art Museum and theBurton Collection at the Witwatersrand Museum of Ethnology, AL.

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




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Christianized by Protestant missions and returned as missionaries in their ownright when the Portuguese Republic abolished domestic slavery in . Thereturnees were literate Christians with marketable skills. They built in brick,were trained in carpentry and animal husbandry, and planted different crops.They had no wish to live under traditional chiefs and exhibited a deepanxiety about the contaminating effects of contact with pagan lower orders.Residing at mission stations or in Christian villages, they drew upon idioms ofrespectability to assert spatial and moral boundaries between themselves and‘pagan’ neighbours. Working closely with the CEM and American Methodistmissionaries, the ex-slaves pushed the Christian frontier well beyondmission sta-tions. Clothes were a key marker of their respectable status. In Figure ,Kaluwashi, one of the most influential ex-slaves dons the apparel of a mission-ary: khakis, boots, braces, and all-important pith helmet. The accompanyingimage, Figure , provides an important insight into how evangelism has oftenbeen conducted in Africa. It is Kaluwashi, Bible in hand, who preaches to theparamount Chief Kabongo, while the linguistically challenged white missionar-ies remain seated.

The final social category who put itself outside traditional Luba society waswomen fleeing abusive relationships and domestic slavery. William Burton’swife, Hettie, founded a women’s refuge. Besides women in flight, the refugeattracted other socially marginal females such as widows who lacked the securityof living children. Deeply affected by the loss of her new born baby son, Hettiethrew herself into women’s work, recording her experiences in a book entitledMy black daughters. She formed deep friendships with women such as the former

Fig. . Porters on trek. Courtesy of CAM, Preston no. .




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Fig. . ‘Kaluwashi and wife’, , Mission Albums Collection, Africa , . Courtesy of theGeneral Commission on Archives and History, The United Methodist Church, Madison, NewJersey, USA.

Fig. . ‘Kaluwashi preaching to Chief Kabongo’, c. , Mission Albums Collection, Africa ,. Courtesy of the General Commission on Archives and History, The United MethodistChurch, Madison, New Jersey, USA.




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slave, Sala Kamone (Figure ), who revealed to her the traumas of slavery andthe details of female initiation.

William Burton also engaged with chiefs, mediums, sculptors, and secretsociety members, often drawn by beauty and curiosity as much as by the evangel-ical desire to know and confront his enemy. Although he wrote in derogatoryterms about the ‘weird dances and paraphernalia’ of Luba diviners, therewere numerous occasions when his aesthetics ran counter to his written apprai-sals. In spite of his commentaries, Burton took many fine photographs of theLuba. The images exhibited no trace of pity as part of a strategy to raisefunds, but rather creativity and dignity through their depiction of skills, arts,and crafts. Many of them were subsequently transformed into carefulgouache and watercolour paintings and together they represent some of hismost significant social scientific work.

While much of Burton’s published work for church audiences was con-strained by the simple oppositions of modernizing Christianity versus heathen

Fig. . Sala Kamone. Courtesy of CEM Preston, no. .

H. Burton, My black daughters (London, ), pp. – and –. The magic lanternslide was untitled but the informants in Katanga recognized her. Interviews, Lubaba Rubin(Lubenyi) Bikomo, May , Ruashi, DRC, and Mama Andyena, Kyungu Dyese, andNumbi Martha, May , Mwanza, DRC.

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




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superstition, it is clear that during his forty-five years of mission work he con-structed deep relations of trust and respect with Luba traditionalists, evidentfrom the negotiations involved in posing photographs. Like many pioneeringmissionaries, he was dependent on the patronage of the local chief,Mwanza – Kazingu. Although Kazingu never converted, and to Burton’shorror continued to imprison his rivals, the two nevertheless became goodfriends. Kazingu allowed Burton to photograph him in his precious crownand subsequently to have a copy made for the University of Witwatersrand(Figure ).

Burton also spent much time in a local village called Kabishi, which was anatelier producing sculpture for chiefs across the Luba polity. Burton photo-graphed and painted the shrine on the perimeter which intrigued him, andhe eventually formed a close friendship with a sculptor, Kitwa Biseke, whomhe proselytized in a dialogue of proverb and scripture. Burton’s technicallybrilliant photograph of Biseke (Figure ) in which the sculptor became thesculpture, with sacred objects on display, would have required a good deal ofco-operation between the photographer and carver. Through his connectionwith Kabishi, Burton was drawn into local networks of artistic patronage, com-missioning sculptures for museums and sending local children to art schoolin Elisabethville.

Burton’s desire to convert chiefs and his interest in history led him to inter-view numerous traditional leaders and ‘men of memory’: keepers of royal tradi-tions. These gerontocratic elites, whose status and powers of arbitrary justicehad declined under colonialism, exaggerated the pre-colonial reach of theLuba polity and their connection with it. They also elaborated models ofcustom that suited their interests over and against women and youth. These par-tialities found their way into language primers, local histories, and native affairspublications, all of which equated Luba identity with a specific body of proverb,tradition, and folklore. The texts were disseminated back across the Luba polityvia schools and churches by a committed body of teachers and evangelists, be-coming one of a number of ways CEMmissionaries unintentionally participatedin the construction of Luba ethnic nationalism.

The triumphal tone of printed missionary sources often obscured the contin-gencies of early mission work. Loneliness, illness, the necessities of food, shelter,protection, and translators made Burton and other missionaries reliant on localsociety in the opening stages of the encounter. Such close engagement with theLuba meant that his view of them shifted over time. He moved from an aggres-sive intrusive mode of research to a position of greater sympathy as he came toappreciate their cultural riches through study of language, folklore, and

Burton, Congo sketches, pp. –. Interviews, Lubaba Rubin (Lubenyi) Bikomo, Ruashi, DRC, May ; Banze Kitwa

Kapasa Zacharie, Mwanza, DRC, May ; Banze Kalumba Shayumba, Mwanza, DRC, May .




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proverb. Embarking on a second sequence of research in the s and s,he collected and collated, with African assistants, a vast collection of pro-verbs, and wrote on Luba oral culture. His sympathies and understanding alsoshifted in sympathy with the second generation of Luba Christians. This groupof converts did not experience the rupture of conversion, or the old life, as asocial and spiritual entity. Disenchantment had rendered practices such asdrumming and dancing or the partaking of palm wine as no more than harm-less heritage. Thus, second-generation Christians sought a self-conscious rap-prochement with their parents’ former culture in acts of ‘reprise’. Burton’sshift, which drew upon nineteenth-century fulfilment theology in assertingChristianity’s continuity with so-called primal religions, brought him in linewith contemporary missiological thinking. He came to believe that beneath

Fig. . ‘LUBA. My old friend Chief Kajingu [sic] of Mwanza in full regalia’. Courtesy of theUniversity of Witwatersrand Art Museum and the Burton Collection at the WitwatersrandMuseum of Ethnology, BPC ·.

W. Burton, ‘Kanya oral literature in Lubaland’, African Studies Review, (), pp. –.The proverbs were initially serialized in BJI, , (), pp. –; ibid., , (),pp. –; ibid., , (), pp. –. They were published in full in one volume asProverbs des Baluba (Elizabethville, ); idem, The Magic Drum.

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

A key founding text was George Matheson’s The distinctive message of the old religions(London, ). Matheson used comparison to discern a universal concept of religion that




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the superstructure of so-called African superstition lay a deeper metaphysics,which could be marshalled and Christianized.

I V

There was an intrinsic tension between missionaries’ interest in local cultureand their endeavours to transform it. Indeed, as this article has shown, some

Fig. . ‘LUBA. A Kitwa (chief’s personal wood carver) carving a Kitumpo (for divining) with aknife & adze only. The Kitwa’s Kibango (carved staff) is behind him’. Courtesy of the Universityof Witwatersrand Art Museum and the Burton Collection at the Witwatersrand Museum ofEthnology, BPC ·.

was believed to coincide with liberal Christianity. His model remained hierarchical becauseChristianity was the only true universal religion while Buddhism and Islam were closer tonatural religion. The idea was developed by Geoffrey Parrinder, former Methodist missionaryto West Africa and Professor of Comparative Religion at Kings College, London. An early indi-cation of Parrinder’s thinking is his African traditional religion (London, ).

Significantly, Placide Tempels’s influential study, which explored the ontology of Bantureligion, also arose from research in Katanga. The limitations of space do not allow for compari-son of Burton’s and Tempels’s work. P. Tempels, Bantu philosophy (Paris, ; orig. edn ).




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of the data missionaries gathered was generated through their efforts to chal-lenge local beliefs and practices. This was certainly the case when missionariesrelied upon information provided by converts, especially if it was presented inthe form of a triumphal narrative of overcoming a custom that was believedto be inimical to Christianity. In such circumstances, any sense of the inherentvalue of the custom was lost. Nevertheless, missionary interactions with indi-genous peoples were recorded in a range of literary genres extending fromethnographic writing to public and personal correspondence, reportage andhistory, propaganda and inspirational writing. Photographs and the collectionof material objects also marked their encounters. Moreover, they did notsimply interact with converts. Curiosity, a sense of aesthetics, a desire to knowtheir ‘enemy’, and the need to make converts drove them from their verandasto engage with a great variety of people. Their ethnographic photographsrecord them in situations far from mission stations interacting with dancersand diviners, chiefs and sculptors in a manner that could shock supportersback home. Missionary scholars were also aware of the charged nature of ma-terial gathered from and by youthful converts. This was made clear in an impres-sively reflexive article published in Africa: The Journal of the International Institute(). The article was written by Diedrich Westermann, an ethnographer andmissionary statesman who advised researchers to seek out informants and assis-tants from a range of social categories. However, scrupulous researchmethods did not make missionaries immune to criticisms from their detractors.

At the inaugural International Conference of Anthropological andEthnological Sciences (London, ), George Basden, a missionary ethnog-rapher working with Church Missionary School in Nigeria presented a paperentitled ‘How far can African customs be incorporated into the Christiansystem?’ After the lecture, Jomo Kenyatta, then student at the London Schoolof Economics and future first president of independent Kenya, stood up toattack the methods of missionaries:

In Kenya, missionaries have not gone the right way in presenting Christianity toAfricans, declaring that all African customs and beliefs are bad, and that before anAfrican can adopt Christianity he must cast such things away, and overlooking thefact that the African obtains much good by adherence to his beliefs, and that theidea of ‘brotherhood’ is so great a part of African beliefs and life. Missionaries haveobtained most of their ideas of African customs from converts to whom their oldgods have become devils… Co-operation with Africans themselves is what is required,for African beliefs and customsmaintained a social system adequate to African needs.

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

Maxwell, ‘Photography and the religious encounter’, pp. –. D. Westermann, ‘The missionary as anthropological fieldworker’, Africa: The Journal of the

International Institute, (), pp. –. George Basden, ‘How far can African customs be incorporated into the Christian

system?’, with comment by J. Kenyatta, Congrès International des Sciences Anthropologiques




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While Kenyatta’s observation about the partial nature of converts’ testimony waspowerfully articulated, what is also notable about his intervention was his rigor-ous functionalism. Learnt from his mentor, Bronislaw Malinowski, andexpressed more clearly in his book Facing Mount Kenya, it causedKenyatta to see Kikuyu life as an ‘integrated culture’ from which ‘No singlepart’ was ‘detachable’. In his distinction between converts and Africans themselves,he ignored the religious choices made by some Kikuyu, elevating instead aversion of pristine culture over society, thereby suggesting that AfricanChristians were no longer part of the social field. As Bruce Berman and JohnLonsdale show in their work on Kenyatta, his functionalism was more thanjust a tool of social science. Functionalism was the means by which he assertedhis authority as a Kikuyu spokesman schooled in local wisdom and tradition,against youthful self-confident mission converts whom he cast as detribalizedand disorientated. He believed that he could shepherd the Kikuyu into modern-ity along a different path from that advocated by paternalistic missionaries.

Kenyatta’s struggles within Kikuyu society illustrate how the charged nature ofethnographic information given to missionaries is its saving grace. If untram-melled by evangelical rhetoric, a convert’s rejection of traditional practicescould illuminate customs and the regard in which they were held.

Moreover, the sum of local testimonies were a means of reconstructing thefull extent of missionary interactions and the parameters of social conflictand debate within African society between Christian and traditionalist, menand women, elders and youth. The multitude of local religious encounters cap-tured in the sources counters the tendency to describe collective representa-tions and systems of coherence and stability found in interwar socialanthropology. It rescues Africans from the depersonalized, abstracted aggre-gates known as ‘tradition’. The Protestant missionary desire to create newindividualized subjects and to celebrate their progress in writing also offersthe opportunity to identify informants shrouded in anthropological texts.

Because missionaries recorded testimonies from a range of social categories,Christian and traditionalist, as well as studying how consensus was achievedthrough public ritual, their data provides a sense of the contested nature of

et Ethnologiques. Compte-rendu de la Première Session, Londres (London, ),pp. –.

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,). Kenyatta wrote Facing Mount Kenya (London, ) partly in response to two earlierKikuyu ethnographies written by contemporary converts. Pers. Comm. John Lonsdale. Morespecifically, Kenyatta was defending clitorodectomy, which was under attack by missionaries.

J. D. Y. Peel, ‘Problems and opportunities in an anthropologist’s use of a missionaryarchive’, in Bickers and Seton, eds., Missionary encounters, pp. –.

Joseph Miller, ‘History and Africa/Africa and history’, American Historical Review, (), p. .

Gardner, ‘Practising Christianity’, pp. and .




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religious ideas and the contingent nature of religious identities. Religiousboundaries shifted and were transgressed, and religion was a process in whichdifferent actors made new religious arguments in the context of shifting rela-tions of power. Missionaries appear more grounded, deeply involved in theseprocesses.

Burton was a representative of a small but influential group of missionariesand administrators who had a keen interest in ‘native culture’ but were alsoactors in colonial settings. When combined with radical evangelicalProtestantism, this stance at times could lead to contradictory attitudestowards Africans. There has been a tendency to see missionaries as unyieldingproponents of a Western lifestyle and indeed their published propagandaoften suggests this. But Burton’s photography, collecting, and ethnographyalso show him to be moved by those he encountered. It was missionaries suchas Burton, intent on changing customs and beliefs, who provided some of themost intimate and detailed early ethnographic accounts, thereby helping toshape the development of the secular discipline of anthropology, which inthe course of its professionalization has been distinctly ambivalent about theircontributions. Thus, the paradoxical role of missionaries as social scientistsas well as proselytisers usefully expands the notion of religious encounter.

Harries, ‘Anthropology’.




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the missionary movement in african and world … · the papacy during the reformation, and before...

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