The Journal of Religious History introduction 1

Vol. 23, No. 1, February 1999

DEREK PETERSON AND JEAN ALLMAN

Introduction: New Directions in the History of

Missions in Africa

This short article introduces a selection of papers originally presented at the confer-
ence, “Africans Meeting Missionaries: Rethinking Colonial Encounters,” held at
the University of Minnesota in May 1997. Until quite recently much of the scholar-
ship on missions in Africa tended to reproduce early eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century images of the colossal, all-powerful missionary. Whether celebrated as an
heroic, civilizing agent in mission accounts or branded as a cultural imperialist in
nationalist-era scholarship, the European missionary remained an actor scarcely
soiled by the cultural commerce of the people on whom he worked. In short,
African religious or political initiatives were seldom taken seriously. The papers
which make up this collection give voice to and extend current debates surrounding
the contested history (and future) of the missionary enterprise in Africa.

A popular American missionary journal recently published a cartoon which

seems to be representative of the ways in which Christian missionaries are
usually imagined in both academic and popular circles.1 The cartoon/icon on
the cover of the magazine features a globe on which are plastered the pictures
of various “native” people, all of them bedecked in “traditional,” exotic garb.
The globe is dominated by the figure of a white-clad missionary (himself
adorned with nary a bangle), a colossus whose legs are firmly planted directly
on the one-dimensional visages of the “natives.” This missionary is bending
down and planting symbolic crosses in various locations around the globe,
embedding them directly into the faces of the emblematic natives. Evangelism,
we learn, is the work of a few good missionaries, themselves scarcely soiled
by the cultural commerce of the people on whom they work.
This picturing of the colossal missionary, and its implied soteriology, is
hardly unique, nor is it new. The British imperialist Cecil Rhodes presented
himself in a similar fashion in his famous Cape to Cairo cartoon of a hundred
years ago. What is troubling is the durability of the image, both in popular
imaginings and in academic work. The image was first crafted in the memoirs,

1. U.S. Center for World Mission, Mission Frontiers 17 (5–6) (1995).

Derek Peterson is a graduate student at the University of Minnesota; Jean Allman is an associate
professor of African history at the University of Minnesota.

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 2 journal of religious history
prayer letters and biographies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century mission-
aries in Africa, which celebrated Christian evangelism as a heroic enterprise
largely carried forward by a few intrepid men.2 By the 1960s and ’70s,
nationalists,3 liberal social scientists,4 and functionalist anthropologists,5 more
critical of the “fruits” of Christianization in colonial Africa, adopted mission-
aries’ heroic presentation of their work but reversed its value: Christianity, in
this account, was either about “cultural imperialism” (the nationalist account)
or about “modernization” (the liberal/functionalist account). Neither account
took African religious or political initiatives seriously: Africans seemed to be
sealed within a comprehensive but brittle cultural system which allowed them
little creativity in the face of powerful European cultural brokers. Nor did these
early literatures attend to internal fragmentations within European “Christian-
ity.” Missionary evangelism would seem to have presented a fully articulated,
comprehensive worldview which Africans either acceded to by “converting”
or rejected by turning to an equally static “traditional religion.”
More recently, scholars informed by the tenets of social history and
historical anthropology have effectively revised the axioms undergirding
the missionary colossus. John and Jean Comaroff’s pioneering work on early
nineteenth-century missionaries among Tswana people in southern Africa at-
tends not so much to the proclamative activities of missionaries as to the means
by which they articulated their message.6 Looking glasses, neatly arranged
houses, and fields cultivated with ploughs were, for the Comaroffs, more to

2. Missionaries’ travel narratives were enormously popular and widely read in nineteenth-
century England and throughout Europe. See, as prime examples of this genre, David Livingstone’s
Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (London, 1857) and Robert Moffat’s Mis-
sionary Labours and Scenes in Southern Africa (London, 1842). Critical analysis of this liter-
ature is now a growth industry in itself; for which see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel
Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992) and Carolyn Martin Shaw, Colonial
Inscriptions: Race, Sex and Class in Kenya (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).
3. See, for example, Nosipho Majeke, The Role of Missionaries in Conquest (Johannesburg:
Society of Young Africa, 1952).
4. Social scientists have, until recently, generally been much more attentive to “independent”
church movements than to mission churches, viewing religious independency as a manifestation
of protonationalist consciousness. See, as a paradigmatic example, George Shepperson and Thomas
Price, Independent African: John Chilembwe and the Origins, Setting and Significance of the
Nyasaland Native Rising of 1915 (1958; reprint, Edinburgh: The University Press, 1987). Mis-
sion churches, in this account, are generally presented as crucibles in which adherents learn to be
suitably “modern”: that is, rational, non-“tribal” citizens. For which see Carl Rosberg and John
Nottingham’s The Myth of “Mau Mau”: Nationalism in Colonial Kenya (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1966).
5. Anthropologists were the first to debate the significance and etiology of “conversion” in
Africa, for which see Robin Horton, “African Conversion,” Africa 41 (1971): 85–108; Humphrey
Fisher, “Conversion Reconsidered: Some Historical Aspects of Religious Conversion in Black
Africa,” Africa 43 (1973): 27–40; and Robin Horton, “On the Rationality of Conversion,” Africa
45 (1975): 219–35. For a critique of this debate, Emefie Ikenga-Metuh, “The Shattered Microcosm:
A Critical Survey of Explanations of Conversion in Africa,” in Religion, Development and African
Identity, ed. Kirsten Holst Peterson (Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1987).
6. The Comaroffs’ most influential work (for these purposes) is Of Revelation and Revolution:
Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1991). See also John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, “Through the Looking-Glass: Colonial
Encounters of the First Kind,” Journal of Historical Sociology 1 (1988): 6–32; John Comaroff
and Jean Comaroff, “Home-Made Hegemony: Modernity, Domesticity, and Colonialism in South
Africa,” in African Encounters with Domesticity, ed. Karen Hansen (New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 1992), 37–74.

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 introduction 3
the point of the missionary enterprise than was the pulpit. By insisting that
Africans think and live within the particular paradigms of enlightened mod-
ernism, missionaries introduced their interlocutors into a “long conversation”
structured by a foreign set of assumptions about life and being. As a product
of this engagement, they argue that Africans (converts and pagans alike) were
made subjects of colonial “hegemony,” a non-indigenous symbolic order which
privileged the binary categories of modern Europeans (European/African;
traditional/modern; pagan/Christian).
The Comaroffs’ significant work has sparked renewed debate in the history
of missions and Christianity in Africa—a debate which has been conducted
largely among academics. J. D. Y. Peel criticizes the Comaroffs’ attention to
the structuring of missionary–Tswana conversations, arguing that their focus
on the “hegemonizing” directions of missionary work effaces the ways in
which African Christians narrated the faith and made it their own.7 Paul
Landau, too, seeks to direct scholarly attention toward the gendered strategies
used by African Christian folk to construct their own forms of political prac-
tices and religious languages, strategies drawing from the rich resources of
Tswana life and missionary religion.8 Lamin Sanneh’s work distinguishes
Christianity from the coercive technologies by which it was presented to
Africans, arguing that the translation of the Bible into African vernaculars
rendered it liable for appropriation and recrafting by Christians in search of
new religious idioms.9 African theologians, meanwhile, continue to produce
important work which dwells on the vexed intersection between missionary
religion and African cultural practices, highlighting the ways in which the
admixture between “Christian” and “African” cannot be reduced to simple
equations of coercion or consent.10
The papers which comprise this issue of The Journal of Religious History
give voice to and extend contemporary debates surrounding the contested his-
tory (and future) of the missionary enterprise in Africa. The papers are them-
selves products of a socio-religious conversation involving secular academics,

7. J. D. Y. Peel, “For Who Hath Despised the Day of Small Things? Missionary Narratives and
Historical Anthropology,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37 (1995): 581–607. See
also J. D. Y. Peel, “The Pastor and the Babalawo: The Interaction of Religions in 19th century
Yorubaland,” Africa 60 (1990).
8. Paul Landau, The Realm of the Word: Language, Gender, and Christianity in a Southern
African Kingdom (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1996). See also Paul Landau, “When Rain Falls:
Rainmaking and Community in a Tswana Village, c. 1870 to Recent Times” in International
Journal of African Historical Studies 26 (1) 1993; and Paul Landau, “Explaining Surgical Evan-
gelism in Colonial Southern Africa: Teeth, Pain and Faith,” Journal of African History 37 (1997).
9. Lamin Sanneh, Encountering the West: Christianity and the Global Cultural Process: The
African Dimension (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993). See also his “Translatability in Islam and
Christianity in Africa: A Thematic Approach,” in Religion in Africa: Experience and Expression,
ed. Thomas D. Blakeley, W. E. A. van Beek, and Dennis L. Thomson (London: James Currey,
1994).
10. The work to which we refer here is immense: among the most recent are John Mbiti,
Introduction to African Traditional Religion (Oxford: Heinemann, 1971; reissued, 1991); J. N.
K. Mugambi, African Heritage and Contemporary Christianity (Nairobi: Longman, 1989); Jacob
Olupona, African Traditional Religions in Contemporary Society (New York: Paragon House,
1991); and L. Namwera et al., Towards African Christian Liberation (Nairobi: St Paul Publica-
tions, 1990).

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 4 journal of religious history
African Christians, and missionaries convened at the conference, “Africans
Meeting Missionaries: Rethinking Colonial Encounters” (held in May 1997 at
the University of Minnesota).11 The conference was structured around three
lectures (from Lamin Sanneh, Paul Landau and Thomas Spear) and five panels.
Each panel was organized around a series of questions having to do with
missionary enterprises in Africa. The first dealt with textual translation and
theology, and sought to unpack the complex ways in which the rendering of
biblical languages into African vernaculars was inflected by and shaped pre-
existing ideas about religion and ontology. The second, on Islam and Christi-
anity in Africa, dwelt on the religious dialectic between missionary labour in
Western Africa and Islam, an equally evangelistic religious system. The third
panel, on identity and hegemony, highlighted African men and women’s
efforts to modulate powerful Christian ideas in churches, prayer groups, par-
liaments, and households. The fourth panel, focused particularly on women
and the making of moral boundaries, brought home the ways in which coer-
cive missionary ideas about sexuality and gender roles gave rise to and shaped
older disputes about generation, family life, and patriarchal authority. The
fifth panel, on “combat zones,” highlighted on the one hand missionaries’
efforts, through hospitals, schools, and graveyards, to shape Africans’ concep-
tions of space and being and, on the other hand, the ways in which African
adherents worked to contest missionary authority.
On many of the panels, and in ensuing conversations, the inherited short-
hand with which both secular and believing academics described Christian
expression in Africa seemed to break down in light of the vexing questions
raised by attendees. “Hegemony” made little sense in light of the retold life
stories of African Christians. “Dialogue” seemed inappropriate when one
attended to the experiences of victimized wives and junior men, many of
them made marginal to powerful alliances between older men and Christian
missionaries. “Conversion” was inadequate to describe the long and mutually
informing debate out of which missionaries were as much changed as were
their African adherents. Even “Christianity,” the unitary sign under which the
conference had been organized, fragmented in light of the complex hybridity
of religious practices discussed.
Spatial constraints and authors’ prior commitments have limited the number
of papers we can include in this special collection. Yet those appearing are
very much representative of the conference. Not only do they constitute a rich
cross-section of the original twenty papers, but in their revised forms they
owe much to the probing questions and troubling destabilizations evoked at
the conference. They share with each other and with that broader range of
papers a fundamental concern with problematizing the categories, concepts,
and vocabularies of much of the earlier scholarship on Africans and European

11. The conference was organized by the MacArthur Program on Peace and International
Cooperation of the University of Minnesota and the Graduate Christian Fellowship of the same
institution. Sponsors included the College of Liberal Arts, the Graduate and Professional Student
Assembly, the departments of History, Afro-American and African Studies, and Anthropology,
the MacLaurin Institute, Augsburg College, and Bethel College.

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 introduction 5
missionaries. Open to scrutiny is everything from foundational concepts like
“religion,” “encounter,” and “translation” to the social vocabularies of identity—
masculine and feminine, child and adult, Christian and “traditional.” They
share, moreover, new and innovative approaches to historical evidence. Well
cognisant of the serious limitations of and distortions inherent within written
mission texts, the authors have all sought out new kinds of evidence. Life his-
tories and African Christian narratives are thus foregrounded in many of the
articles, but so, too, are less obvious sources of evidence like dictionaries and
landscapes or dress and symbolic colouration. Through this creative and re-
sourceful use of evidence, the authors are able to explode the meta-narrative
embedded in core mission-produced texts.
In many ways, the collection begins at square one with Paul Landau’s
provocative exegesis on “religion.” In “ ‘Religion’ and Christian Conversion
in African History: A New Model,” Landau asks us to see what missionaries
could not, by discarding at the outset the very notion of “religion” or “reli-
gions.” Through a rigorous discussion of translation—the process by which,
for example, God was rendered as Tui-qua for the Khoikhoi—Landau argues
that the notion of “religion” is an artefact of the conversion process. How,
he asks, can it then be used to provide insight into the very historical pro-
cesses which produced it? He calls, instead, for a series of retranslations that
will allow historians to transcend the universalizing cognates of conversion.
Historians must, he argues, abandon the language we have inherited from
missionaries—a language based on perceived congruencies between one “re-
ligion” and another—and work on getting at the creative circuits of meaning
arising out of the encounters with evangelism.
Derek Peterson’s “Translating the Word: Dialogism and Debate in Two
Gikuyu Dictionaries” takes up Landau’s challenge by getting inside the “lan-
guage games” which produced the word in central Kenya. Much of the liter-
ature on missionaries and translation has tended to view missionary or colonial
authored dictionaries and grammars as instruments through which European
meanings were imposed upon Africans. In a detailed comparison of two Gikuyu
dictionaries—one authored by an Anglican missionary and the other by a
Presbyterian missionary some ten years later—Peterson locates significant
contradictions in meanings, particularly in words associated with religion
and authority. By situating these contradictions in the social history of early
twentieth-century Gikuyuland, Peterson is able to demonstrate that they are
not “mistakes,” but rather evidence the hybridity of the texts themselves. For
Peterson, who draws theoretical insight from Homi Bhabha and M. M. Bakhtin,
mission texts like dictionaries are fundamentally dialogical, the product of
sustained and contentious conversations between missionaries and African
interlocutors. Thus, they not only shaped Gikuyu life, as earlier scholarship
contended, but were profoundly shaped by contemporary Gikuyu debates
over religion, power, and authority.
Extended conversations between missionaries and converts, as Peterson
and Landau suggest, produced new meanings. They also produced new iden-
tities. The next four papers, utilizing gendered lenses of inquiry, demonstrate

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 6 journal of religious history
that “language games” and sustained dialogues were also about constituting
identities and reconfiguring power. Nakanyike Musisi’s “Morality as Identity:
The Missionary Moral Agenda in Buganda, 1877–1945” examines the ways
in which a very much contested “Baganda” ethnic identity emerged out of
extended conversations between European travellers, missionaries, and male
Christian converts in the interlacustrine region of east-central Africa. Musisi
argues that the very notion of “Baganda” first appeared in early travellers’
accounts and then became central to the dialogue between missionaries and
Buganda’s rulers. After 1900, it was appropriated by male converts who
dominated the Lukiiko (the ruling council of colonial Buganda). These men,
Christian and middle class, articulated a unitary vision of a Christian nation—
an imagined community that was aimed, Musisi argues, at silencing compet-
ing ethnic, gender, and class identities and at privileging Christian morality.
Ethnic identity in Buganda was thus intimately connected to the missionary
project and to consequent reconfigurations of power.
Like Musisi, Carol Summers is concerned with questions of identity and
power, but on a more intimate level. In “Mission Boys, Civilized Men, and
Marriage: Educated African Men in the Missions of Southern Rhodesia, 1920–
1945,” Summers looks at the ways in which African male converts sought to
construct a new identity as socially mature, adult men. “Mission boys,” as
they were known, were in a rather ambiguous position. The missions needed
them to staff their institutions, but at the same time distrusted them, espe-
cially when they sought to establish their “adulthood” by acquiring land,
building a house, or becoming local political leaders. Particularly after 1930,
African male converts began to use what Summers calls “strategic marriage”
—marriage to educated Christian women—both to establish their adulthood
and to blunt mission criticism. While much recent literature has looked at the
impact of missionary domesticity on African women, few have extended the
analysis to men.12 Summers demonstrates through the life histories of two
male converts how domesticity and missionary notions of companionate mar-
riage allowed African male converts to construct a new identity as “civilized
men”—an identity that brought authority, as well as access to scarce resources.
Kathleen Smythe’s article is similarly grounded in the lived experiences of
African converts and is concerned with the transition to social maturity. It is
also very much about marriage, but in this case it is about the decision not to
marry. Smythe’s “ ‘Child of the Clan’ or ‘Child of the Priests’: Life Stories of
Two Fipa Catholic Sisters” recounts the personal narratives of two women
who made the decision, as young girls, to become Catholic nuns. Smythe is
particularly concerned with intergenerational relations in the Ufipa commun-
ity. The two girls made the decision to become nuns at the same time that
most in their age cohort were ready to marry. Their decisions brought father
and father, household and mission into direct conflict. Smythe details the
private, spiritual processes which brought the girls to their decisions to marry

12. See, for example, several of the essays collected in Hansen, ed., African Encounters with
Domesticity.

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 introduction 7
Jesus and then carefully recounts how those processes refracted throughout
the Fipa community. She is thus able to demonstrate how little control mis-
sionaries had over how their message was received or how, when, and why
it was acted upon. It was, after all, “on Fipa soil,” Smythe reminds us, “that
Christianity took root.”
Barbara Moss, like Smythe, is concerned with the voices of African women
converts—voices that have too often been silenced in the literature on mis-
sionaries and conversion—and with the ways in which African women made
Christianity their own. But while Smythe’s approach is centred on the indi-
vidual, Moss is concerned with the collective, specifically with how women
in colonial Zimbabwe created for themselves a vibrant space within the
Methodist Church. The centrepiece of “ ‘And the Bones Come Together’:
Women’s Religious Expectations in Southern Africa, c. 1900–1945” is the
ruwadzano (women’s prayer unions) that spread through Zimbabwe after the
First World War. By situating the ruwadzano both within the specific context
of white-settler expropriation of land in southern Rhodesia and within the
longer historical trajectory of Shona women’s spirituality, Moss is able to
demonstrate the ways in which the prayer unions, like spirit possession
before them, became central to women’s daily survival. Indeed, by the 1930s
the ruwadzano bore all the markings of an autonomous “women’s church”
and threatened the patriarchal order of the Methodist Church.
Taken as a whole, these six articles raise serious new questions of the
developing literature on missions and religious history in colonial Africa.
How are we to think about “conversion,” a category which has much reson-
ance in African Christian communities, but which secular academics are ill-
equipped to address? Is it even possible for non-believing academics to write
meaningfully about what is, for their interlocutors, a very real experience?
Are “hegemony,” “dialogue,” or “fusion” sufficient to capture the complex
bricolage of religious practices embraced by African Christians—practices
varying from old to young, men to women, poor to rich? Can these practices,
in fact, be attributed chronologically or ideologically to the evangelistic work
of missionaries—that is, has our attention to the “missionary encounter” (a
term which lacks any sense of process about it, and must surely be discarded)
effaced the ways in which Christianity must be located within older and
continuing debates about being and religious life? Is “religion,” in fact, even
a useful way of thinking about that which missionaries did in Africa, or about
how African Christians received it? Finally, and perhaps most to the point,
how are we to talk meaningfully and at the same time about both coerciveness
of missionary discourse on the one hand and the invention and creativity of
African Christians and their missionary interlocutors on the other?

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