‘Science in the Hands of Love’: British Evangelical Missionaries and Colonial Development in Africa,c. 1940–60

During the era of colonial development, the Church Missionary Society (CMS) and the London Missionary Society (LMS) revitalised their work by taking advantage of the 1940 Colonial Development and Welfare Act to uplift British Africa. These evangelical organisations did not simply appropriate governmental ideas of development, but formulated their own concepts based on the incarnational theology of the ‘whole man’ with body and soul. In implementing their developmental policies, these evangelicals promoted Christ's example of a ‘servant’ to guide missionary conduct as they encountered increased African criticism of colonialism following the Second World War. Both organisations shifted to focusing more closely on souls rather than bodies when African independence movements strengthened during the mid and late 1950s in hopes that Christian ideology would steer Africans towards Christian democracies. By 1960, the CMS and LMS stressed their relationship within the ecumenical Church in their efforts to emancipate themselves from their colonial ties. Through examining missionary discourse on colonial development, this article reveals not only the complexity of development discourse, but also the various ways in which evangelical missionary organisations sought relevance within the context of the Cold War, the rise of the welfare and expert state, and decolonisation.     

Chiefs,hunters and adventurers: the foundation of the Okavango/Moremi National Park,Botswana

This article is about the politics of wildlife management in Botswana. The existing literature on the origins of wildlife conservation in Africa has portrayed the formation of protected areas as an imposition of colonial state authorities. Preservationist policies are usually cast as the product of European conservationist ideas, and related notions of the ‘wilderness’ value of African landscapes. Many recent studies have emphasized the negative effects of such ideas and policies in a colonial context: they have drawn attention to the way in which they devalued local African ideas, undermined local management strategies, and criminalized access to important economic and cultural resources. The case discussed here, however, suggests that this interpretation needs closer scrutiny: the meaning and impact of global ideas and policies of wildlife conservation depends on how they are localized in particular places. The key actors in the foundation of Botswana's Okavango/Moremi National Park in the 1960s were not state officials but local BaTawana chiefs and a network of hunters and adventurers turned conservationists. The initiative was conceived as a means of protecting wildlife from the depredations of illegal South African hunting parties and ensuring future local use, and was initially opposed by the colonial state. The article discusses why Okavango/Moremi was an exception, and why the initial coalition of African and local settler interests came to see preservationist policies as being in their interest.     

‘It Was Necessary to Do Something With Those Women’: Colonial Governance and the ‘Disposal’ of Women and Girls in Early Nineteenth-Century Sierra Leone

The colonial archive offers comparatively few glimpses of the individual lives of enslaved African women and girls brought to Sierra Leone in the nineteenth century and ‘liberated’ under the terms of the British Abolition Act of 1807. This article sets out to do four things: first, to consider what colonial sources reveal about how women and girls experienced and responded to becoming ‘liberated Africans’, and to the ‘disposal’ practices of the Liberated African Department – including schooling, indenture and arranged marriages. Second, it considers what factors might have shaped those experiences. Third, it seeks to make a contribution to the literature on marriage in early colonial Africa by considering whether, and to what extent, British colonial policy towards liberated African women in Sierra Leone meets a modern definition of government-led coerced or forced marriage. Finally, it evaluates the usefulness and limits of official archives, missionary records, court records and the accounts of self-styled British Sierra Leone experts for studying the experiences of women and girls, and indicates potential avenues for further research.     

J.S. Marais,a great South African historian: a personal re-assessment

This article is a personal assessment aimed to establish J.S. Marais’s legacy. It is written in the light of the insights I gained as I interacted with him as an undergraduate and honours student (starting in 1949), as a research student, and finally as a departmental colleague over a period of ten years or so. It begins with my experience of his teaching. He was a poor lecturer, especially to large classes. This improved with smaller classes. He came into his own in the honours year. He was a specialist in South African history as a case study in the colonial era, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Marais was excellent as a supervisor of postgraduate research from honours to doctoral level, empathetic and patient in handling his students’ needs. A further feature of his honours teaching was his development of a course in historical method and philosophy of history. Next, the article covers Marais’s preparation for an academic career, first at UCT and then at Oxford, leading in both cases to BA and honours degrees. Then his studies culminated in his doctoral thesis on the colonisation of New Zealand. This enabled him by 1927 to become a lecturer at UCT, a post he held until he moved to Wits as a senior lecturer in 1937. Marais’s high reputation rested mainly on his books. The article continues with an assessment of each of these, including their reception by his colleagues. The article ends with an appraisal of Marais’s qualities. Poor as an administrator, he was outstanding as a head of department at the intellectual level and also as a leader of the joint campaign of the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) and UCT against the imposition of apartheid on the universities.     

Translating the Word: Dialogism and Debate in Two Gikuyu Dictionaries

Much of the literature on missionaries and translation in colonial Africa has tended to view missionary or colonial authored texts (Bibles, dictionaries, and grammars in particular) as instruments through which foreign ways of thinking were imposed upon unsuspecting 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—this article locates significant contradictions in meanings, particularly in words associated with religion and authority. By situating these contradictions within the social history of early twentieth-century Gikuyuland, the author is able to demonstrate that these contradictions are not "mistakes"; rather, such inconsistencies evidence the complex ontological and political debates provoked out of early evangelistic activity. For the author, 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 bycontemporary Gikuyu debates over religion, power, and authority.     

David Meetom: Interpreting,Power and the Risks of Intermediation in the Initial Phase of German Colonial Rule in Cameroon

ABSTRACT

David Meetom, a Duala subchief, was an important interpreter in the coastal region of Cameroon at the beginning of German rule, which was shaped by colonial officials’ lack of language skills, the colonial state’s low level of institutionalisation, its necessity to rely on intermediaries, and tensions within Duala society. In this circumstances, new opportunities opened up to those who had knowledge of a colonial language. The article examines Meetom’s actions as an interpreter, broker and intermediary between colonial and African languages, authorities and interests. It covers his actions from his informal participation in negotiations between African and German authorities, to his work as official government interpreter, to a trial in which he was accused of having exceeded his authority before finally being shot fleeing German authorities. For Meetom, the consequences of his intermediary position veered between being personally advantageous and disadvantageous. His work held potential for conflict, both with the colonial government and with the Duala or other African groups in the region. Meetom’s life serves to illustrate how interpreters facilitated and controlled contact between colonisers and Africans and proves the distinction between the colonisers and the colonised which underlay the concept of colonial rule as having been surprisingly fragile.     

Reverend James Macdonald Auld and the disintegration of traditional leadership in Xhosaland

This article examines the missionary assault on traditionalism and traditional leadership. It also analyses the origins of Columba Mission. The article sets out to unearth the role of missionaries in the colonial assault on traditionalism, using James Macdonald Auld (2 April 1848–5 December 1932) as a case study. It describes the operation of the Columba Mission from its small beginnings in Kentani (Centane today) in 1878 until the annexation of Gcalekaland by the Cape Colony in 1885. The Cape forces reopened Gatyana (Willowvale) to the colonial authorities following the acceptance of an amnesty. Many of the amaGcaleka remained in Xhorha (Elliotdale), including King Sarhili himself. King Sarhili’s vicissitudes at the hands of the colonial government are used as a scaffolding to see Columba in historical perspective. This article puts the spotlight on King Sarhili and James Macdonald Auld, the Presbyterian missionary at Columba, as a vehicle to explore the reorganisation of Centane. The article also broadens its base of sources by drawing on oral history with intent to add materially to our knowledge about the missions at that often opaque moment in Eastern Cape history. In attempting to examine the relations between the traditional leaders, the colonial governing authorities and the missionaries, this article shows the colonial conflict as an ongoing encounter between the missionaries and the heirs of Phalo, i.e. the amaGcaleka and the amaNgqika     

George Weekes: Rogue Missionary to New England Indians, 1731–1755

During the mid‐1700s, an uneducated layman named George Weekes began preaching to Native Americans in the town of Harwich, Massachusetts. Weekes’ missionary activity triggered a passionate response from Nathaniel Stone, the local minister, and inaugurated a debate regarding ministerial qualifications within the community. Scholars who study English missionary activity in colonial New England tend to focus upon the careers of trained clergy, such as John Eliot or Josiah Cotton. Other individuals, who possessed questionable moral character and little education, also preached to New England Indians, however. In this instance, the career of George Weekes, a rogue missionary, reveals that contact with Native Americans could shape ecclesiastical life in colonial Massachusetts. It also suggests that Native Americans encountered popular, as well as elite, English religious culture when they interacted with English missionaries in early New England.     

Acts of Faith: Muscular Christianity and Masculinity among the Gogodala of Papua New Guinea

This article examines the way Gogodala men in Western Province experienced colonialism and change not simply in terms of alienation or emasculation but as a dynamic process that reinforced many aspects of their work ethic, bodily capacities and lifestyle. Through an analysis of local narratives and colonial reports encompassing the way Sosola, a Gogodala leader, instigated and negotiated European contact, I discuss how, despite colonial changes, he continues to embody the male way of life or dala ela gi. As the only ‘faith’ based mission to enter Papua prior to World War II, I propose that the Unevangelized Fields Mission's muscular approach to evangelism enabled Gogodala men to determine their own response to Christianity. The early evangelical missionary disposition of demonstrating faith through action, through a reliance on the virtues of physical strength, work and tenacity rather than theological knowledge, resonated strongly with a Gogodala masculinity that was epitomised by displays of strength through work. Rather than rendered powerless by colonial authority, I discuss some of the ways men have experienced and interpret the colonial past in ways that assert the continuing dynamics of dala ela gi.     

Indigenous management of teak woodland in Zimbabwe, 1850–1900

African forests provide the focus for a growing body of historical research. This study draws on economic and environmental history approaches in exploring the exploitation and conservation of woodland, respectively. The main focus of the investigation is the consumption–conservation relationship between pre-colonial African people and the forest zone, an interaction viewed by colonial foresters in Zimbabwe as wasteful and based on religious superstition. In spite of the open criticism of rapacious timber cutting by mining companies and poor farming techniques by settlers, colonial perceptions over time stressed the notion of ‘improvident Africans’ as the prime cause of environmental destruction, in particular, deforestation and erosion. Within the African context, historical forest literature is bound to reject colonial misconceptions regarding the scope of indigenous woodland management. Customary forest practice in the Zambezi teak or Baikiea woodland points towards a better understanding on the subject, informed by a wide range of sources; oral tradition, missionary records, travel accounts and colonial documents. In reconstructing pre-colonial resource use from interviews and archival data, this study adopts a multi-source approach, while guarding against an overly romanticised view of indigenous practice.     

Can the Subaltern Woman Run? Gender,race and agency in colonial missionary texts

This article challenges the contention that it is not feasible to trace the agency of subaltern female subjects in colonial documents without at the same time distorting and even violating that very agency. Taking as its prism a letter written by a male Danish missionary chronicling a young Pariah woman’s escape from missionary control in early 20th-century South India, it argues that while a search for authentic, autonomous agency is a highly dubious endeavour, relinquishing attempts to recover the acts and interventions of persons at the bottom of social hierarchies is equally problematic. Suggesting a reading ‘along as well as against the grain’, the article tracks the ways in which the subaltern woman’s agency has been simultaneously recorded and denied, and argues for the necessity of probing both the possibilities and impossibilities presented by this type of a source.     

Les Hommes nouveaux (Marcel L’Herbier, 1936): Nostalgia,masculinity and the French colonial film of the 1930s

This article examines the meaning of nostalgia and some of the reasons why the France of the 1930s was prone to nostalgic longings. It then considers why the colonial film lends itself to the expression of these nostalgic feelings whilst also pointing to some of the paradoxes attached to such an endeavour. Finally, the article offers a study of Les Hommes nouveaux which focuses exclusively on the ‘biopic’ element of the film and on the kind of past that is reconstructed through the figure of Marshal Lyautey, as well as on the exclusions necessary for the preservation of ideological harmony.     

Troubled Traditions: Female Adaptive Education in British Colonial Africa

This article examines African female education reform between the wars as a conjuncture of transnational philanthropic initiatives and state and missionary objectives on the ground. Through a comparative treatment of four schools in West, East and South-Central Africa, it shows that the search to recover and re-create the authentic African subject was a gendered process that aimed to critique one brand of colonialism (settler and industrial capitalism) by bolstering another (indirect rule). The schools at Achimota (Gold Coast), Kabete (Kenya), Hope Fountain (Southern Rhodesia) and Mbereshi (Northern Rhodesia) all idealised women’s traditional education as the key to offsetting the dangers of modernisation and preserving the integrity of the social body, and ‘adapted’ their curricula accordingly to their perception of women’s normative economic and social roles. However, the internal contradictions of this project stymied any possibility of implementing it in a cohesive way, and even its advocates and architects were often forced to admit the limits of tradition as a coherent logic or redemptive force. The gendered contours of adaptation, therefore, showed the potential of education to destabilise as much as to reinforce the shifting paradigms of the colonial project.     

Decolonial Challenges and Post-Genocide Archaeological Politics in Rwanda

Abstract

This paper narrates in an autobiographical manner PhD research regarding pre-colonial Rwandan archaeology and its contemporary socio-political relevance. The paper re?ects on the decolonial challenge that inspired the research and the ways in which, and reasons why, the research fell short of achieving its decolonial aims. In response to this complex personal, national, and disciplinary case study, the paper questions activist archaeologies and suggests that, whilst political engagement remains essential, the outcomes of well-intentioned approaches may actually perpetuate the undesirable political paradigms they seek to challenge. In conclusion, the paper proposes a hybrid set of decolonial responses that might be usefully employed in African Archaeology and the colonial discipline of archaeology more broadly.     

The Grammar of Domination and the Subjection of Agency: Colonial Texts and Modes of Evidence

This article focuses on colonial accounts of the killing of the Xhosa chief, Hintsa, in 1835 at the hands of British forces along what came to be known as the eastern Cape frontier. It explores the evidentiary procedures and protocols through which the event came to be narrated in colonial frames of intelligibility. In proposing a strategy for reading the colonial archive, the paper strategically interrupts the flow from an apartheid historiography to what is commonly referred to as ‘alternative history.’ The aim in effecting this interruption is to call attention to the enabling possibilities of critical history. This is achieved not by way of declaration but rather through a practice whereby the foundational category of evidence is problematized. The paper alludes to the limits of alternative history and its approaches to evidence on the one hand, and the conditions of complicity within which evidence is produced on the other. Whereas alternative history identifies its task as one of rewriting South African history, critical history, it issuggested, offers the opportunity to reconstitute the field of history by addressing the sites of its production and also its practices. In exploring the production of the colonial record on the killing of Hintsa, the paper seeks to complicate alternative history's slippage in and out of the evidentiary rules established by colonial domination even as it constitutes the category ofevidence as an object for a politics of history of the present.     

Cultural Innovation and Translation in the Eastern Cape: Jan Tzatzoe,Xhosa Intellectual and the Making of an African Gospel, 1817–1833

Abstract

This article describes the construction of a truly African Bible on the London Missionary Society's Eastern Cape Buffalo River mission station in the early years of the colonial encounter. Largely unacknowledged in the historical record, the isiXhosa translations were made in an intellectual partnership involving Jan Tzatzoe, a cultural and intellectual intermediary and innovator, and two European missionaries, John Brownlee and Friedrich Gottlob Kayser. A particular focus is Tzatzoe's breakthrough in moving the depiction of Jesus Christ towards Christ as Xhosa healer or ‘physician’. The article builds upon the renewed scholarly attention directed towards intermediaries by examining African involvement in the creation of crucial discourses and the conditions under which colonial texts were produced. It is suggested that Tzatzoe and other African linguistic intermediaries might be thought of as the vanguard of an African intellectual tradition born in the colonial encounter.     

‘The Gospel of Health’: American Missionaries and the Transformation of Ottoman/Turkish Women's Bodies, 1890–1932

This article explores an overlooked aspect of American missionary modernisation efforts in the late Ottoman Empire: the attempted transformation of women's bodies. By the late nineteenth century, American missionary women and Ottoman government officials both viewed Ottoman women's bodies as a visible reflection of the empire's weaknesses, yet also as central to its survival and revival. The transformation of women's bodies from ‘uncontrolled’ to ‘robust’, they believed, was a prerequisite for a modern society. Through a close reading of missionary reports, correspondences and student memoirs, this study traces the development of physical education, hygiene and recreational sports at the missionary‐run American College for Girls (ACG) in Istanbul. Over time, the female teachers at the ACG partnered and collaborated with male Ottoman/Turkish government officials to implement these courses at girls’ schools across the region. While the government endorsed physical education as key to national progress and regeneration, the ACG educators framed it as a mode of international, feminist self‐empowerment. In reality, the missionaries continued to assert their own Western superiority and advance Orientalist notions through the education courses. By highlighting the shifts in women's body ideals, curricular development and nationalist rhetoric, I argue that women's bodies must be studied as a crucial site of missionary and republican reform.     

Land,Labour and Ambivalence: Lutheran Missionaries Managing Land Disputes at Cape Bedford Mission

This article provides a close reading of a land dispute between Lutheran missionaries at Cape Bedford mission during the 1920s and 1930s in order to extrapolate understandings of missionary ambivalence, power, and privilege within colonial processes of dispossession. The main contention is that missionaries felt compelled to promote Aboriginal engagement in agricultural labour in order to ensure that they could visibly demonstrate the land's productivity, and then maintain access to it. It also contributes to understandings about missionary power and privilege within the colonial context and how at times the authority of missionaries was undermined by bureaucracy. It points to the discrepancies between settler and humanitarian discourses around Indigenous land use in Queensland's north during this period, and the relationships between missions and the state.     

The social life of ruins: sites of memory and the politics of a Zimbabwean periphery

This article explores conflicts over a series of ruins located within Zimbabwe's flagship National Park. The relics have long been regarded as sacred places by local African communities evicted from their vicinity, and have come to be seen as their ethnic heritage. Local intellectuals' promotion of this heritage was an important aspect of a defensive mobilization of cultural difference on the part of a marginalized minority group. I explore both indigenous and colonial ideas about the ruins, the different social movements with which they have been associated and the changing social life they have given the stone relics. Although African and European ideas sometimes came into violent confrontation – as in the context of colonial era evictions – there were also mutual influences in emergent ideas about tribe, heritage and history. The article engages with Pierre Nora's notion of ‘sites of memory’, which has usefully drawn attention to the way in which ideas of the past are rooted and reproduced in representations of particular places. But it criticizes Nora's tendency to romanticize pre-modern ‘memory’, suppress narrative and depoliticize traditional connections with the past. Thus, the article highlights the historicity of traditional means of relating to the past, highlighting the often bitter and divisive politics of traditional ritual, myth, kinship, descent and ‘being first’. It also emphasizes the entanglement of modern and traditional ideas, inadequately captured by Nora's implied opposition between history and memory.     

Hawaiian health and the filibuster of Walter Murray Gibson

ABSTRACT

Scholars know Hawai‘i’s “minister of everything” as an upstart who rose to prominence by defending Hawaiian sovereignty. Few have noticed that Walter Murray Gibson’s influence stemmed from a paternalistic campaign to improve Islander health and expand the labor force for an emerging plantation complex. Improbably, public health presented Gibson, an excommunicated Mormon missionary, with a platform to pursue his lifelong dream of ruling a Pacific empire. This article explores the entangled issues of health, labor, and empire amid disparate and unpredictable colonial incursions in the Hawaiian Islands after 1860.