Critical Readings in the History of Christian Mission [3, 1 ed.] 9789004399600

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Critical Readings in the History of Christian Mission Volume 3

Critical Readings in the History of Christian Mission volume 3

Edited by

Martha Frederiks Dorottya Nagy

LEIDEN | BOSTON

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2021937176

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. isbn 978-90-04-39552-7 (hardback, set) isbn 978-90-04-39543-5 (hardback, vol. 1) isbn 978-90-04-39544-2 (hardback, vol. 2) isbn 978-90-04-39545-9 (hardback, vol. 3) isbn 978-90-04-39546-6 (hardback, vol. 4) isbn 978-90-04-39958-7 (e-book, vol. 1) isbn 978-90-04-39959-4 (e-book, vol. 2) isbn 978-90-04-39960-0 (e-book, vol. 3) isbn 978-90-04-39961-7 (e-book, vol. 4) Copyright 2021 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. Brill has made all reasonable efforts to trace all rights holders to any copyrighted material used in this work. In cases where these efforts have not been successful the publisher welcomes communications from copyright holders, so that the appropriate acknowledgements can be made in future editions, and to settle other permission matters. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents VOLUME 1 Introduction 1 Dorottya Nagy and Martha Frederiks

Methods 1

Recent Trends in the Historiography of Christianity in Southern Africa 39 Norman Etherington

2

Writing of Past Times: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Mission History 67 Andrea Schultze

3

‘Trained to Tell the Truth’: Missionaries, Converts, and Narration 76 Gareth Griffiths

4

The Quest for Muted Black Voices in History: Some Pertinent Issues in (South) African Mission Historiography 95 Tinyiko Sam Maluleke

5

Sources in Mission Archives 116 Adam Jones

6

The Midwest China Oral History Collection 127 Jane Baker Koons

7 From Beyond Alpine Snow and Homes of the East—A Journey Through Missionary Periodicals: The Missionary Periodicals Database Project 134 Terry Barringer

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Missionaries as Social Commentators: The Indian Case 145 Geoffrey A. Oddie

9

Thinking Missiologically about the History of Mission 159 Stanley H. Skreslet

10

Jesuit Scientific Activity in the Overseas Missions, 1540–1773 174 Steven J. Harris

11

The Global ‘Bookkeeping’ of Souls: Quantification and Nineteenth-Century Evangelical Missions 186 Martin Petzke

12

The Visual Embodiment of Women in the Korea Mission Field 222 Hyaeweol Choi

13

On Using Historical Missionary Photographs in Modern Discussion 255 Paul Jenkins

14

The Anthropology of Christianity: Unity, Diversity, New Directions. An Introduction to Supplement 10 270 Joel Robbins

15

Expanding Mission Archaeology: A Landscape Approach to Indigenous Autonomy in Colonial California 302 Lee M. Panich and Tsim D. Schneider

16

Schooling on the Missionary Frontier: The Hohi Mission Station, New Zealand 330 Ian W. G. Smith

17

Objects of Expert Knowledge: On Time and the Materialities of Conversion to Christianity in the Southern New Hebrides 352 Jean Mitchell

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VOLUME 2 Approaches 18

Eusebius Tries Again: Reconceiving the Study of Christian History 375 Andrew F. Walls

19

From Missions to Mission to Beyond Missions: The Historiography of American Protestant Foreign Missions Since World War II 388 Dana L. Robert

20 The Overly Candid Missionary Historian: C. G. A. Oldendorp’s Theological Ambivalence over Slavery in the Danish West Indies 421 Anders Ahlbäck 21

The Colonization of Consciousness 447 John and Jean Comaroff

22

Beyond Cultural Imperialism: Cultural Theory, Christian Missions, and Global Modernity 469 Ryan Dunch

23

The Culture Concept and the Mission of the Roman Catholic Church 499 Michael V. Angrosino

24 The Problem of Colonialism in the Western Historiography of Christian Missions 511 Jane Samson 25

Theology and Mission between Neocolonialism and Postcolonialism 531 Joerg Rieger

26 Translating the Word: Dialogism and Debate in Two Gikuyu Dictionaries 555 Derek Peterson

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The Gospel, Language and Culture: The Theological Method in Cultural Analysis 579 Lamin Sanneh

28 Women and Cultural Exchanges 600 Patricia Grimshaw and Peter Sherlock 29 Understanding the World-Christian Turn in the History of Christianity and Theology 620 Paul Kollman 30 Transcontinental Links, Enlarged Maps, and Polycentric Structures in the History of World Christianity 635 Klaus Koschorke 31

World Christianity as a Theological Approach: A Reflection on Central and Eastern Europe 665 Dorottya Nagy

VOLUME 3 Themes I Mission and Language 32

Bunyan in Africa: Text and Transition 689 Isabel Hofmeyr

33

Translation Teams: Missionaries, Islanders, and the Reduction of Language in the Pacific 704 Jane Samson

34 Christianizing Language and the Dis-placement of Culture in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea 722 Bambi B. Schieffelin 35

Exploring Nineteenth-Century Haida Translations of the New Testament 749 Marcus Tomalin

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Mission and Politics 36 Race, History, and the Australian Faith Missions 787 Joanna Cruickshank 37

British Missions and Indian Nationalism, 1880–1908: Imitation and Autonomy in Calcutta and Madras 804 Chandra Mallampalli

38 Medical Missionaries and Modernizing Emirs in Colonial Hausaland: Leprosy Control and Native Authority in the 1930s 828 Shobana Shankar

Mission and Social Change 39 Christian Mind and Worldly Matters: Religion and Materiality in Nineteenth-Century Gold Coast 859 Birgit Meyer 40 Mission or Empire, Word or Sword? The Human Capital Legacy in Postcolonial Democratic Development 887 Tomila Lankina and Lullit Getachew 41

A Saturated History of Christianity and Cloth in Oceania 922 Margaret Jolly

Missionaries 42 Christian Missionaries as Anticolonial Militants 951 Karen E. Fields 43 Saint Apolo from Europe, or ‘What’s in a Luganda Name?’ 966 Emma Wild-Wood 44 ‘Culture’ as a Tool and an Obstacle: Missionary Encounters in Post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan 990 Mathijs Pelkmans

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45 ‘It’s Really Where Your Parents Were’: Differentiating and Situating Protestant Missionary Children’s Lives, c. 1900–1940 1016 Hugh Morrison

Mission, Women, and Gender 46 ‘God and Nature Intended You for a Missionary’s Wife’: Mary Hill, Jane Eyre and Other Missionary Women in the 1840s 1049 Valentine Cunningham 47 Female Emancipation in an Imperial Frame: English Women and the Campaign against Sati (Widow-Burning) in India, 1813–30 1070 Clare Midgley 48 Married to the Mission Field: Gender, Christianity, and Professionalization in Britain and Colonial Africa, 1865–1914 1094 Elizabeth Prevost

VOLUME 4 Themes II Mission, Education, and Science 49 From Heathen Kraal to Christian Home: Anglican Mission Education and African Christian Girls, 1850–1900 1137 Modupe Labode 50 From Transformation to Negotiation: A Female Mission in a ‘City of Schools’ 1154 Julia Hauser 51

Some Reflections on Anthropology’s Missionary Positions 1178 John W. Burton with Orsolya Arva Burton

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Natural Science and Naturvölker: Missionary Entomology and Botany 1190 Patrick Harries

Mission, Health, and Healing 53

The Medical Mission Strategy of the Maryknoll Sisters 1233 Suzanne R. Thurman

54 Converting the Hospital: British Missionaries and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Madagascar 1249 Thomas Anderson 55

Chinese Perspectives on Medical Missionaries in the 19th Century: The Chinese Medical Missionary Journal 1268 Gao Xi

56 Language, Medical Auxiliaries, and the Re-interpretation of Missionary Medicine in Colonial Mwinilunga, Zambia, 1922–51 1290 Walima T. Kalusa

Mission and Other Faith Traditions 57

Towards a Missionary Theory of Polytheism: The Franciscans in the Face of the Indigenous Religions of New Spain 1323 Sergio Botta

58 Some Hindu Perspectives on Christian Missionaries in the Indic World of the Mid Nineteenth Century 1346 Richard Fox Young 59 Methodists and Muslims in the Gambia 1370 Martha T. Frederiks 60 Evangelicalism, Islam, and Millennial Expectation in the Nineteenth Century 1386 Andrew Porter

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Mission and Art 61

Dance, Image, Myth, and Conversion in the Kingdom of Kongo, 1500–1800 1413 Cécile Fromont

62 The Indian Conquest of Catholic Art: The Mughals, the Jesuits, and Imperial Mural Painting 1438 Gauvin Alexander Bailey 63 The Truth-Showing Mirror: Jesuit Catechism and the Arts in Mughal India 1452 Gauvin Alexander Bailey 64 Africanising Christian Imagery in Southern African Missions 1472 Elizabeth Rankin Index of Places 1489 Index of Personal Names 1501

part 3 Themes I

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Mission and Language

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Bunyan in Africa: Text and Transition Isabel Hofmeyr In dealing with literary texts in postcolonial settings, questions of readership and reception assume a critical importance. One key claim of much postcolonial literary theory is that ‘Imperial’ texts from the ‘centre’ are changed, subverted, creolized and appropriated by the colonial audiences they encounter. However, questions of such reception are generally read off solely at the level of the text. Texts are hence imbued with extraordinary powers. They can, for example, ‘create obedient subjects’ (Tiffin 1996: 152). They ‘circulate’ and ‘proliferate’ creating meaning, effects and identities as they go. Such textcentric approaches obscure questions of how meaning is made and of how books and their audiences interact. Instead, texts are assumed to carry an a priori meaning (often Imperial) which is imposed upon or hydraulically resisted by colonized populations. In either scenario—imposition or resistance—the intellectual agenda is set by the text’s Imperial meaning. One way out of this impasse is to pay more attention to the text as a material object. Once we take this as our analytical field we are forced to describe much more precisely how, and in what form texts are circulated, how they are taught and how their meanings are determined, not prior to their circulation but in the social arenas of their dissemination. By taking such an approach, we can also examine the cultural activity of a wider social spectrum than the waferthin elite whose work has thus far been the focus of postcolonial study. In this article, these ideas are explored in relation to John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, a text that has been translated into 80 African languages. As such, it offers a useful field against which to re-evaluate some of the orthodoxies of postcolonial thinking regarding textual transition.

Source: Hofmeyr, I., “Bunyan in Africa: Text and Transition,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 3.3 (2001): pp. 322–335. Reprinted by permission of the publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandfonline.com.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/97890

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In relation to Bunyan, the claim for an Imperial imprimatur has been clearly made. Bunyan translations, we are told “[parallel] British imperial expansion … these texts [function] within imperialist and colonialist frameworks…. They are produced to promote certain values, succinctly defined by the missionary and explorer, David Livingstone, as ‘Christianity, Commerce, and Civilisation’” (Spargo 1997: 105). The situation is however somewhat more complicated as Bunyan (long diasporized and entrenched across the Protestant Atlantic) entered Africa from a number of national, linguistic and denominational directions. Translations were undertaken by some thirty mission societies—eighteen were British-affiliated organizations (one of them in Jamaica), six European organisations in Sweden, Finland, Germany, France and Switzerland, four USbased societies and two South African missions. The Bunyan traditions in these areas were very obviously different from each other. A Swedish version, heavily influenced by pietism (Esking 1980: 197–203), for example, would have been very different from a French Protestant reading formed in the heat of ongoing persecution. These versions in turn would have differed somewhat from a Jamaican Baptist Bunyan used by someone like Joseph Jackson Fuller, an ex-slave who undertook the Duala translations in the Cameroon (Fuller n.d.). Within Britain itself, numerous Bunyan traditions prevailed, inflected by features like Welshness, Scottishness, class, gender and the like (Hofmeyr 1988). Different missionaries, then, brought very different ‘Bunyans’ with them, reflected, for instance, in the particular edition they favoured and the type of illustrations it contained. In the Protestant patches of the continent, it was these particular versions that various missionaries—working with African catechists—set out to translate. Animated by an affective theory of texts (not unlike that used in postcolonial studies), missionaries believed tracts could seize and capture their readers, imprinting them indelibly with their messages (Cutt 1979; Mair 1960: 8). Yet texts do not infiltrate communities or travel by themselves. They must be disseminated by people in particular places, sites and venues. In an evangelical world, the parameters of this process were set by the imperatives of Christian education and the role missionaries hoped Bunyan would perform in this broader task. Like any other form of religious instruction, Christian education involves a ceaseless iteration of portions of particular texts. These are taught and conveyed in numerous ways and through several media with the expectation that they will through time cohere in an overarching narrative and field of

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symbol which binds believers together. This broad objective is of course met by deploying many different genres and forms which take on different kinds of work and produce different spiritual effects. Nonconformist hymns, for example, reinforce the sermon as well as playing a central emotional part in religious experience (Wolffe 1997: 61). Catechisms, by contrast, promote memory and recall of a denomination’s key tenets. As a type of speech act, prayers make God real. Within this ensemble, a key text particularly for British Protestants of an evangelical persuasion was The Pilgrim’s Progress. Composed of memorable tableaux and illustrated from its very earliest editions, the book vividly captured the evangelical drama of sin and conversion (Owens 1987: xxiii). As such, it conveyed what evangelicals saw as the core verities of the Protestant message in a ‘user-friendly’ form and, for many, it took on the status of a type of shadow Bible (Bebbington 1989: 2–4). Its long-standing status as a classic among the dissenting and nonconformist poor gave the book a wide social reach (Thompson 1968: 34–8). As a text of the poor, it became infantilized and was frequently seen as an ideal book for children. This spiritual centrality was supported by an omnipresence of the book in everyday life. It was read aloud at home on the Sabbath (often the only nonBiblical text allowed) (Keeble 1988: 253). It was memorized, enacted, recited and read intensively with the help of devotional aids (Blatchford 1900: 191–2; Burbidge n.d.). Many nonconformist homes boasted Bunyan memorabilia and commodities such as teacups and jigsaw puzzles (Borough of Bedford 1938: 39). In one case, a devout Methodist relandscaped his Cheshire garden as a Bunyan theme park (Anon. 1993: 86–91). Towards the end of the nineteenthcentury, Bunyan had come to be adopted as a great symbol of Englishness, and his likeness appeared in monuments, memorials and museums. In their new contexts of evangelization, many missionaries used the book as a point of reference and as a way of orienting themselves. Initially, it was used to make sense of their new environments and their journeys were often likened to scenes in The Pilgrim’s Progress, particularly the Slough of Despond and Hill Difficulty (Lewis n.d.: 184–5). The progress of their work was also often cast in terms derived from the text—hence backsliding converts were compared to those in the story misled by Mr Worldly-Wiseman (Sutton-Smith n.d.: 242). These allusions usefully created a shared field of reference that could unite the missionary and his or her European funding community to whom much mission writing was implicitly addressed. As a book of such spiritual centrality, it was quickly adopted for converts. In the eyes of many missionaries, the text had a unique ability to put across

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‘foundation truths of the Gospel’ in ‘teachable form’ (RTS 1924: 12). This ‘userfriendly’ ability to compress a complex message and its pictures made it suitable for converts who were inevitably seen as ‘childlike’. Furthermore, missionary perceptions of ‘the African mind’ as ‘figurative’ and ‘pictorial’ (‘natives speak in pictures’) further recommended the book (ibid.). Yet aims and outcomes seldom coincide, and in mission contexts are separated by the exigencies of proselytization. Here, as any number of studies have shown, missionaries had to try out bits and pieces in their efforts to establish a shared field of metaphor and symbol (Landau 1995: 131–59). Furthermore, they were, as one missionary put it, ‘too few, too expensive, too European, too shortlived’, and the day-to-day business of evangelisation was done by Africans (Miller 1948: 16). In such situations of ambiguous dependence, most particularly in the field of translation, missionaries had only a tenuous control over how texts were used and interpreted. These constraints impacted on the dissemination of Bunyan texts which likewise were initially reproduced in bits. These reproductions could take the form of a passage or episode, translated in conjunction with a catechist and then read to a group (Hawker n.d.: 318). If it found favour it would then be written out by hand, copied and circulated to other catechists. Later on sections of a book could be typed out and stuck into disused magazines (Anon 1946b: 14). In other instances, sections of the book were serialized in mission periodicals. These translation opportunities no doubt allowed various options to be tried. The Pilgrim’s Progress has a lot of textual paraphernalia like prefatory poems, biblical marginalia, illustrations, songs and the like. These small-scale experiments would have given translators some idea of how to deal with these features of the text, a decision taken in relation to popular response brokered back to missionaries by translators and interpreters. Such popular taste could, for example, determine the ultimate material shape of the book. In one instance, the abridged serialization of Bunyan’s text (which omitted much of the theological discussion) proved so popular that it was decided to use the serialized version as the basis for the book. Popular taste also registered itself powerfully in the almost ubiquitous pattern of only translating Part I of the text which tells the story of Christian’s journey from this world to the next. Part II relates the journey of his wife Christiana and their children who, along with several companions, travel the same road. The first part generally came to be seen as the male story, the second, the female story. Indeed, some Protestant women enthusiastically assumed ‘ownership’ of Christiana’s story which they enacted in pageants, quoted in their diaries and cited on their deathbeds (Hawker 1923: 5; Mac-Donald 1925). The

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A Sunday school class on the Upper Congo c. 1928. The picture being shown to the class is an enlarged illustration by Harold Copping used in Religious Tract Society editions of The Pilgrim’s Progress and appears here as Plate 2 Source: Anon. 1928c: 89. (The dating of this mission journal, Religions Beyond which covers the years 1927–1931 is not clear.)

paucity of African translations of the second part of the story points to the overwhelmingly male shaping of the mission world. Illustrations were another site in which popular taste could make itself felt. A long-standing and popular part of the text through which most readers recalled the story, illustrations in African translations were initially taken over from the particular editions used by the missionary in question. Late nineteenth-century editions favoured an ‘English’ style of illustration with seventeenth-century dress and the landscapes of southern England, leading one commentator to ask what readers in other parts of the world made of ‘late romantic landscapes, idealized Puritan maidens, abundant lace, and steeplecrowned hats’ (Sharrock 1980: 50). From the early 1920s, these traditions of illustrations in some areas began to be replaced by various styles of Africanized illustration (Austin 1923). This world of illustrations in turn intersected with the numerous ‘spectacles’ which clustered around the text. These included pageants, dramas, choir services, wall charts (Plate 1) or postcards with pictures of the various episodes and the hugely popular magic lantern shows (Austin 1923: 150–4; RTS 1919: 2; RTS 1931: 52, 54).

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These renditions of the book all demonstrated that any episode could stand alone or that episodes could be used in a random order just as the postcards illustrating the episodes could be shuffled. Makers of the postcard would of course assume that the viewer knew the full story and hence could arrange the images in the ‘right’ order. But such ideal viewers/readers could not always be ensured, particularly as one got further away from the mission station itself into its vast ‘hinterland’ which could measure several thousand square miles. Under such circumstances, the components of the story would become ‘liberated’ from a predetermined order and become available for use in other contexts. This ‘decomposition’ of the plot in turn accords closely with how story episodes behave in certain oral narrative traditions. Here stories are postmodernly open-ended and there is no sense of climactic ‘closure’ so that plot episodes have no strictly preordained sequence. The way in which episodes are knitted together depends much on the moment of performance and the performers’ assessment of the interests and composition of the audience (Scheub 1975: 90–100). Within such a system, any ‘randomized’ episodes deriving from The Pilgrim’s Progress become narrative fodder. The storyteller’s intention is not to ‘subvert’ or counter a text of whose existence he or she is probably unaware. Instead, the person is practising a craft and using resources for this as they become available. Accounts of oral narratives featuring a man with a burden on his back could be an example of such a practice. Another variation of this approach would be instances where elements of the story are contextualized in a quotidian, everyday experience. In Nyasaland, for example, in 1938, a young man was shown a book cover of The Pilgrim’s Progress. ‘Behold the load of the traveller’, he was reported as saying, ‘certainly a man of wealth is that one’ (ICCLA 1938). In the Belgian Congo in the late 1920s, a man, Bayolo, ‘died’, but as he was about to be buried, some movement was noticed and he came back to life. He reported that he had made his way to the gates of heaven where two men had asked him for his ‘road book’. He did not have one and so they told him, “Return and get your road book, confess your sins, remove your ngola (camwood powder) and make yourself clean” (Anon. 1928b: 26). In The Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian and other characters are given scrolls or other types of documents which are the sign of their election. These they have to hand in when they arrive at the Celestial City. Those without documentary proof of their election go to hell. Bayolo’s vision appears to draw both on this fragment of the story as well as on colonial laws regarding passes and travel documents, and mission obsessions with hygiene.

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These particular examples of textual ‘randomization’ often tended to cluster around the particular nodes of the story made prominent through its dissemination by ‘bits and pieces’. The most obvious of these was of course the image of the man with the burden on his back foregrounded on covers and in illustrations. Interestingly, this image did not represent the core of the stories for many missionaries, who instead looked to the scene at the cross where Christian’s burden representing original sin falls off and rolls into the grave. In the words of one missionary, ‘I can see what a help such a story as the burden rolling off Christian’s shoulders at the cross into the empty tomb would be to enable [converts] to grasp free forgiveness of sin’ (RTS 1924: 12; RTS 1922: 9). However, it was the burden ‘on’ rather than the burden ‘off’ which attracted the imagination, particularly in a context in which the idea of original sin never caught on and where Christ was consequently seen as a mediator rather than a scapegoat (MacGaffey 1986: 120; Peel 1995: 600). Under such circumstances, the idea of the burden could be subject to very different kinds of interpretations. In some instances, for example, the book itself became the burden as thousands of copies had physically to be portered across vast distances (RTS 1930: 57). In other instances, it became shorthand for the trials of life under colonial rule. A South African newspaper series entitled ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ (written by ‘Gaoler’) announced itself as being ‘for the amusement of students … but also about the grim realism of the African Pilgrim’s progress in a hostile world’ (Anon. 1942). Another mnemonic cluster in the story which also attracted attention was that of the Interpreter. In this section of the story, Christian stops at the Interpreter’s House. Here he is shown a series of tableaux and pictures whose allegorical meanings are explained to him by the Interpreter. Missionaries with strong Bunyan traditions liked to compare themselves to Bunyan’s Interpreter (Anon. 1924: 107) and in one Baptist missionary exhibition, the Interpreter’s House featured as a symbol of the mission seffort (Anon. 1928a: 264). Missionaries too spent a lot of time explaining religious pictures which were widely and consistently used in evangelization and hence must at times have resembled the Interpreter. The role however was one which converts could equally claim. They were often literally interpreters, and in their itinerations, catechists would also have spent time showing people pictures and interpreting the hidden truths of the scriptures. In the Sesotho translation undertaken by Adolphe Mabille of the Paris Evangelical Mission and Filemone Rapetloane in 1864 (published 1872), the Interpreter appears as Mosenoli, the one who reveals (ho senola) in turn the verb underlying the Book of Revelation—Tshenolo. Here an Interpreter takes on a work of revelation very different from that of a literal interpreter, toloko, derived from the Afrikaans tolk.

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Another method of broadcasting the story was via illustrations and pictures which were reproduced in magic lantern shows and on wall charts and posters. In this piecemeal form, they could be easily taken up and used elsewhere. One such example concerns Simon Kimbangu, the leader of a prominent prophet movement that emerged as a ‘fall-out’ of Protestant missions in the Congo region in the 1920s. One story told of Kimbangu is that when colonial officials were sent to arrest him, he passed through a river and emerged on the other side carrying the Book of Psalms in his hand. Despite their dunking, the book remained entirely dry, hence proving that it had magical qualities and had been ‘captured’ by Kimbangu from the other world (Mackay 1987: 138; Mackay and Ntoni-Nzinga 1993: 241). The Bunyan pictures in circulation at the time around Baptist missions where those used by the Religious Tract Society. Drawn by Harold Copping, many of the pictures show Christian carrying a Bible. In one of the pictures (Plate 2), he is being helped from the Slough of Despond. He is clearly soaking wet. The Bible in his hand is dry. Its similarity with the Kimbangu incident might of course simply be coincidence, but it does none the less point to the types of affiliation which could ostensibly occur. These various examples all suggest the ways in which texts disintegrate under systems unaware of or indifferent to their supposedly ‘correct’ and ‘original’ meaning. A slightly stronger variation on this model emerges from situations where texts disintegrate and disappear not because they are ‘resisted’ for their ‘difference’ but because they are so similar to existing story traditions into which they evaporate. One good example of such ‘evaporation’ comes again from the Congo region where Bunyan-obsessed British Baptists (joined by two other Bunyan-loving nations, Sweden and the USA) had propagated the text intensively since the 1880s. However, beyond a small Protestant enclave, the book appears to have had almost no impact (Mpiku 1972: 129–30). The Kimbangu movement, for example, which drew on other features of Baptist church organization as well as catechisms, sermons and hymns evinced no systematic interest in the text. One way of looking at the issue would be to consider the book against the background of existing Kongo belief. From this perspective, the story would seem quite unexceptional. Tales of a man with a bag on his back travelling from this world to the next were a dime a dozen. Featuring a trickster protagonist who in some variations is called Moni-Mambu, the one with affairs and concerns on his back, the narratives follow a pattern whereby the protagonist sets off from this world to the next (Janzen and MacGaffey 1974: 102–6; Struyf 1908: 158–64). There he has a series of encounters with the gods and ancestors,

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plate 2 Harold Copping illustration used in Religious Tract Society editions of The Pilgrim’s Progress Source: Bunyan (1913)

and through his wit and the objects stored in his bag he is able to bring back some desired items be they ideas, solutions to problems, hunting luck or what have you. The overall pattern of the story is hence a movement from this world to the next and back again. Against this background, Bunyan’s story is a bit of a yawn. A man with a bag on his back sets off on a journey and has adventures along the way often with creatures like Apollyon from the other world. What’s the big deal? Not only is the story quite ordinary, it is also incomplete. It starts off promisingly enough but then stops abruptly half-way through just at the point where the protagonist reaches the next world and the story is getting really interesting. (At least

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one later West African writer, D. O. Fagunwa, was to put this ‘right’ when in two of his novels he ‘completed’ Bunyan’s story by reinserting it into the matrix of a tale which moves from this world to the next and back again (1968, 1994)). Another common-sense Kongo way to read the story which until the 1920s had white characters in its illustrations would have been in terms of existing ideas regarding missionaries. As MacGaffey has shown, missionaries with white skins were initially seen as spirits or ancestors from the next world, since the skin of the dead was thought to be chalky or the colour of manioc after it had been soaked for a while (1986: 50–74). At the same time mission proximity to the colonial state meant that they were seen as continuing the witchcraft of trading in souls. The novel containers of Europeans such as suitcases, hat boxes and tin cans provided ample opportunity for the export of enslaved souls (MacGaffey 1983: 126–35). Against this background, a picture of a white character beloved of the missionaries with a big bag on his back could ostensibly represent a neo-slave-trader spirit carrying off a lot of souls in his bag (which would explain its heaviness) to the world of the dead. It might of course be argued that such a reading is indeed consciously ‘subversive’ of Imperial intentions, and at some level such an interpretation is correct. However, it is not the only one. As MacGaffey has pointed out, Kongo explanations of colonial rule focused as much on the unchecked effects of witchcraft as they did on Imperial intention (1983: 134; 1986: 180). Explanations of global change hence reside at various levels rather than being exclusively focused on an Imperial centre which in much postcolonial scholarship becomes posited as the only magnetic pole of imagination. One implication of the latter assumption is that the colonial ‘encounter’ is conceptualized as a confrontation of only two parties. A brief look at The Pilgrim’s Progress illustrations in Northern Angola (Plate 3) demonstrates something very different (Austin 1923). Undertaken in the early 1920s on the Baptist mission at San Salvador (Mbanza Kongo), previously the capital of the Kongo kingdom, the photographs were intended to Africanize the story and to be used in school books and for magic lantern performances. The project was led by P. H. Austin and included three of the missions’ most prominent teachers and catechists. One of them, Kitomene, a teacher, acted as the character Christian. In various scenes he appears carrying a staff and dressed partly in white. The white was no doubt chosen for its visibility and as the Christian colour of purity. (In another scene the ‘goodie’ wears white and the ‘baddie’ wears black.) However, white was also the colour associated with the dead and the colour favoured by Kongo prophets. Likewise, the staff was one of the key symbols of the priest/prophet’s ability to communicate with the next world

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plate 3 A selection of photographs used to illustrate the Kikongo version of The Pilgrim’s Progress Source: Austin 1923: 153

(MacGaffey 1986: 52, 125). Given that Kimbangu had been arrested in 1921 and the prophet movement was still a burning issue in all Kikongo-speaking areas, Kitomene may have attempted to portray himself as a ‘true’ Kongo-Christian priest/prophet. The photographs can hence be seen to address a number of different audiences simultaneously. Likewise the scenes of Doubting Castle (Plate 3) were photographed against the background of the ruins of the Catholic cathedral which fell just within the perimeter of the Baptist mission precinct. The cathedral had been built in an earlier period by the Portuguese during their long and continuing presence in the area. In another photograph (Plate 4) which was ultimately not used, Giant Despair (enacted by Austin) looked remarkably like a Portuguese rogue.

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plate 4 Photograph of ‘Portuguese’ Giant Despair. Included in Austin’s photograph album (Austin: n.d.)

Together, these pictures became a series of cross-cutting ripostes to various imagined audiences: Protestant to Catholic; British to Portuguese; missionary and convert to ‘heathen’; Christian prophet to Kongo prophet and so on. The idea of an encounter between two parties only would overlook much of the imaginative complexity of these photographs. As this article has attempted to show, one way of correcting such ‘overlooking’ is instead to look very carefully at books as material objects. By focusing on texts in this way, we are better able to trace exactly how they are circulated and disseminated and hence we are better positioned to try and grapple with how they are received, used and interpreted. The outcomes of such encounters are unpredictable and can in certain instances involve the ‘disappearance’ or ‘evaporation’ of particular texts. In much postcolonial scholarship, such an option can never be contemplated since the precondition for the entire exercise

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is the presence of ‘Imperial’ texts which, even if changed and subverted, always remain there as a trace. How—we ask in conclusion—must things change if this precondition were to be removed? Acknowledgement Grateful appreciation is expressed to the Baptist Missionary Society of Didcot, UK for permission to consult and select my own quotations from their archive material which is housed in the Angus Library at Regent’s Park College, Oxford. The Churches’ Commission on Mission granted permission to quote from material in the ICCLA collection. The United Society for Christian Literature granted permission to use material from the RTS/USCL papers. References Anon. (1924) ‘The Interpreters on the King’s High Way’, Missionary Herald, May. Anon. (1928a) ‘The Congo in Bristol: A Great Exhibition Success’, Missionary Herald, November. Anon. (1928b) ‘Remarkable Story of Bayolo, Loma’, Regions Beyond, 1927–31. Anon. (1928c) ‘An Open-Air Sunday School Class’, Regions Beyond, 1927–31. Anon. (1932) ‘English Books for Northern Nigeria’, Books for Africa 2 (1): 7–9. Anon. (1942) ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’, Inkundla ya Bantu, 26 May. Anon. (1946a) ‘Mende Literature Programme’, Books for Africa 16 (1): 8–10. Anon. (1946b) ‘Bring the Books’, Congo Mission News, July. Anon. (1949) ‘East African Literature Bureau’, Books for Africa 19 (3): 38–40. Anon. (1993) ‘Devotion of Progress’, Period Garden, December. Austin, P. H. (1923) ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress in a Congo Setting’, Missionary Herald. Austin, P. H. (n.d.) Papers, A/40, Baptist Missionary Society Archives, Regent’s Park College, Oxford. Bebbington, D. W. (1989) Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s, London: Unwin Hyman. Blatchford, R. (1900) My Favourite Books, London: Walker Scott. Borough of Bedford Public Library (1938) Catalogue of the John Bunyan Library, Bedford: Borough of Bedford Public Library. Bunyan, J. (1913) Uhambo Lomhambi, trans. Tiyo Soga, London: RTS. Bunyan, J. (1988) Leeto la Mokreste, 17th edn, trans. Adolphe Mabille and Filemone Rapetloane, Morija: Morija Sesuto Book Depot. Burbidge, J. (n.d.) Half-hours with Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Liverpool: J. A. Thompson.

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Cutt, M. N. (1979) Ministering Angels: A Study of Nineteenth-century Evangelical Writing for Children, Wormley: Five Owls Press. Esking, E. (1980) John Bunyan i Sverige, no place of publication indicated: Verbum. Fagunwa, D. O. (1968) The Forest of a Thousand Daemons: A Hunter’s Saga, trans. Wole Soyinka, London: Nelson. Fagunwa, D. O. (1994) Expedition to the Mount of Thought (The Third Saga), trans. Dapo Adeniyi, Ile-Ife: Obafemi Awolowo University Press. Fuller, J. J. (n.d.) ‘Autobiography of the Rev. J. J. Fuller of Cameroons, West Africa’, unpublished ms., A/5, Baptist Missionary Society Archives, Regent’s Park College, Oxford. Hawker, G. (1923) ‘Funeral Address for Emily Margaret Lewis’, Papers of the Camden Road Baptist Church, Camden Road, London. Hawker, G. (n.d.) An English Woman’s Twenty-five Years in Tropical Africa, London: Hodder and Stoughton. Hofmeyr, I. (1998) ‘Making Bunyan English via Africa’, Paper Presented to the Comparative History Seminar, SOAS, University of London, March. ICCLA (International Committee for Christian Literature in Africa) (1938) Article from The Missionary Monthly, file 511/9, ICCLA papers, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Janzen, J. M. and MacGaffey, W. (1974) An Anthology of Kongo Religion: Primary Texts from Lower Zaire, University of Kansas Publications in Anthropology, 5. Keeble, N. H. (1988) ‘“Of Him Thousands Daily Sing and Talk”: Bunyan and His Reputation’, in N. H. Keeble (ed.) John Bunyan: Conventicle and Parnassus: Tercentenary Essays, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 241–70. Landau, P. S. (1995) The Realm of the Word: Language, Gender and Christianity in Southern Africa, Portsmouth: Heinemann. Lewis, T. (n.d.) These Seventy Years: An Autobiography, London: The Carey Press. MacDonald, Mrs G. (1925) Dramatic Illustrations from the Second Part of The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan, London: Oxford University Press. MacGaffey, W. (1969) ‘The Beloved City: Commentary on a Kimbanguist Text’, Journal of Religion in Africa 2 (2): 129–47. MacGaffey, W. (1983) Modern Kongo Prophets: Religion in a Plural Society, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. MacGaffey, W. (1986) Religion and Society in Central Africa: The Bakongo of Lower Zaire, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Mackay, D. J. (1987) ‘Simon Kimbangu and the B. M. S. Tradition’, Journal of Religion in Africa 17 (2): 113–71. Mackay, D. J. and Ntoni-Nzinga, D. (1993) ‘Kimbangu’s Interlocutor: Nyuvudi’s Nsamu Miangunza (The Story of the Prophets)’, Journal of Religion in Africa 22 (3): 233–65.

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Mair, J. H. (1960) Books in Their Hands: A Short History of the USCL, London: USCL. Miller, D. M. (1948) ‘Missionary Methods’, Congo Mission News, January. Mpiku, Mbelolo ya (1972) ‘Introduction à la Littérature Kikongo’, Research in African Literatures 3 (2): 117–61. Owens, W. R. (1987) ‘Introduction’ to John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, London: Penguin. Peel, J. (1995) ‘For Who Hath Despised the Day of Small Things? Missionary Narratives and Historical Anthropology’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 37 (3): 581–607. Religious Tract Society (RTS) (1919) Seed Time and Harvest, December. Religious Tract Society (RTS) (1922) Seed Time and Harvest, September. Religious Tract Society (RTS) (1924) Seed Time and Harvest, September. Religious Tract Society (RTS) (1930) One-Hundred and Thirty-First Annual Report. Religious Tract Society (RTS) (1931) One-Hundred and Thirty-Second Annual Report. Scheub, H. (1975) The Xhosa Ntsomi, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sharrock, R. (1980) ‘Life and Story in The Pilgrim’s Progress’, in V. Newey (ed.) The Pilgrim’s Progress: Critical and Historical Views, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, pp. 49–68. Spargo, T. (1997) The Writing of John Bunyan, Aldershot: Ashgate. Struyf, I. (1908) Uit den Kunstschat der Bakongos, Vol. I, Amsterdam: van Langenhuysen. Sutton-Smith, H. (n.d.) Yakusu: The Very Heart of Africa, London: Marshall Brothers. Thompson, E. P. (1968) The Making of the English Working Class, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Tiffin, H. (1996) ‘Plato’s Cave: Educational and Critical Practices’, in B. King (ed.) New National and Post-colonial Literatures: An Introduction, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 143–63. Wolffe, J. (1997) ‘“Praise to the Holiest Heights”: Hymns and Church Music’, in J. Wolffe (ed.) Religion in Victorian Britain: Culture and Empire, Vol. V, Manchester: Open University Press, pp. 61–83.

Translation Teams: Missionaries, Islanders, and the Reduction of Language in the Pacific Jane Samson In 1818 Cambridge was treated to the sight of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionary, Thomas Kendall, in company with two Maori chiefs from New Zealand, walking to and fro among the colleges to consult with specialist linguists. Hongi and Waikato also accompanied Kendall to London, although it should be noted that both chiefs, especially Hongi, were far more interested in London’s armouries than in Kendall’s translation work. Kendall’s view, how­ ever, was that this joint visit was “for the purpose of settling the orthography and, as far as possible, of reducing the language itself of New Zealand to the rules of Grammar, with a view to the furtherance of the Mission sent out to that country”.1 Anyone researching Victorian linguistics will have noted a repeated use of the word “reduced” in connection with the introduction of literacy to oral cultures. This term seems particularly ironic when it is used in celebratory, contemporary accounts of missionary translation work. To our eyes there is inevitably something disturbing about the concept of “reduction” or “render­ ing” in this context, with its overtones of diminishment at the hands of some outside force. There seems no better term for linguistic colonialism. Agreeing with Claude Lévi-Strauss’s diagnosis of “organised tyranny”, literary theorist Christopher Herbert has declared that missionary literacy projects in the Pacific involved “covert violence” aimed at “‘reducing’ the wild Polynesian libido by imposing a system of restraint upon it”. According to Herbert, “the very idea of ‘oral languages’ in this context carries perhaps a hint of puritani­ cal dread of bodily orifices themselves and of the brutish desires fixated upon them”.2 Teaching islanders to read and write was simply “a means of reorder­ Source: Samson, J., “Translation Teams: Missionaries, Islanders, and the Reduction of Language in the Pacific,” in Patricia Grimshaw and Andrew May (eds.), Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples and Cultural Exchange, Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2010, pp. 96–109. For the shortened book titles referred to in the footnotes of this article, the complete biblio­ graphic data have been added between square brackets by the editors (M. Frederiks and D. Nagy) of these Critical Readings in the History of Christian Mission-volumes. 1 Kendall, Language of New Zealand [T. Kendall, R. Garnett, and S. Lee, A Grammar and Vocabulary of the Language of New Zealand, [with a Preface by S. Lee.], London: Church Missionary Society, 1820], preface. 2 Herbert, Culture and Anomie [C. Herbert, Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991], p. 167. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/97890

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ing the mind itself and putting it in thrall to new institutions”.3 This theory allows Herbert to contrast bigoted missionary ethnography unfavourably with the “disinterested cultural study” of modern times; for missionaries, the proper study of culture was “ruled out beyond recall” because of “the divine author­ ity of his own religion and his own ‘civilized’ society”.4 Can something called “disinterested cultural study” ever be identified, let alone privileged at the ex­ pense of other forms of cross-cultural engagement? Surely modern scholars of culture are as capable as missionaries of reifying the authority of their own standpoint. Recent endorsements of Herbert’s work by Pacific specialists invite a reassessment of his assumptions.5 Let us look again at Kendall’s visit to England with his two Maori patrons. I say “patrons” because Kendall and the rest of the CMS mission in New Zealand were completely dependent upon support from sponsoring chiefs: so much so that they had been forced to trade firearms and ammunition for food to keep themselves and their families alive. It was not the first time that Maori chiefs had visited England. Tui and Titere had arrived two years earlier and spent some time at Cambridge with the linguist Professor Lee at the urging of the CMS Committee, which had suspicions about Kendall’s translation methods.6 Incensed, Kendall planned his own trip and brought his own Maori support­ ers. His modesty concerning his own knowledge of their language was striking. Writing aboard ship en route to England, Kendall informed the CMS that Maori was “a matter of such importance that I cannot allow myself to be a competent judge”. He added later that he was indebted to Parkhust’s Hebrew Lexicon “for much of my little knowledge of the true idiom of the New Zealand Language” because the Hebrew placement of suffixes and affixes, for example, was helpful to him, whereas his knowledge of English grammar was not.7 The key role of Maori themselves in the development of the first printed Maori grammar is clear, as is the influence of the language and people on 3 Herbert, Culture and Anomie, p. 167. 4 Herbert, Culture and Anomie, p. 167. 5 See Edmond, Representing the South Pacific [R. Edmond, Representing the South Pacific: Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gauguin, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997]; Smith, Literary Culture and the Pacific [V. Smith, Literary Culture and the Pacific: Nineteenth-Century Textual Encounters, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998]; and Johnston, “The Strange Career of William Ellis” [A. Johnston, “The Strange Career of William Ellis.” Victorian Studies 49, no. 3 (2007): 491–501]. Johnston’s Missionary Writing and Empire [A. Johnston, Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2003], however, presents carefully nuanced historical research that actually belies Herbert’s theory of translation-as-violence. 6 Binney, Legacy of Guilt [J. Binney, The Legacy of Guilt: A Life of Thomas Kendall, Auckland: U.P, 1968], p. 50. 7 Thomas Kendall to CMS Secretary, 3 July, 1820.

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Kendall himself. His biographer Judith Binney noted that Kendall based his new Maori orthography on the “Italian” open-vowel system because it was an appropriate fit with spoken Maori, while his critics believed that Maori should be forced to conform to English symbols.8 A process of mutual conversion had taken place between Kendall and his Maori colleagues: The intense and constant study of words, and of ideas expressed in those words, to which Kendall had devoted himself, had created a sympathet­ ic attitude towards the complexities and implications of a Language of which understanding is gained only through knowledge of the traditions of the people.9 This process appears similar to that described by Vicente Rafael in his pioneer­ ing book Contracting Colonialism published in 1988. An early critic of theories about hegemonic colonial discourse, Rafael instead proposed that “translation and conversion produce the vernacular as that which simultaneously insti­ tutes and subverts colonial rule”.10 This thesis demands that we consider the complexities of European interaction with non-European cultures. Stuart Hail once declared that Christian humanitarianism was merely one of “racism’s two registers,” and similarly reductionist conclusions about missionary activity re­ main alive and well.11 We should ask, therefore, who is “reducing” the histori­ ography of missionary translation?

Indigenous Christians

Contemporary missionary accounts often occluded the voices and roles of non-Europeans. The most obvious example of this is simply the omission of any mention of indigenous assistance in the work of translation, especially in published accounts. Helen Gardner’s sophisticated analysis of the work of the Methodist missionary George Brown is especially helpful here. She notes that first person and past tense journal entries recorded “discomfiting differenc­ es” between indigenous interpretations (of cannibalism, in this case) and the 8 Binney, Legacy of Guilt, p. 62. 9 Binney, Legacy of Guilt, p. 62. 10 Rafael, Contracting Colonialism [V. L. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society Under Early Spanish Rule, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988], p. xv. 11 Cited in Hall, Civilising Subjects [C. Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867, Cambridge: Polity, 2002], p. 17.

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missionary’s own. Brown’s published anthropology texts, however, used the third person and the present tense; this alteration “removed the action from real time, making it [cannibalism] an abstract possibility and thus eliminating his Christian responsibility to intercede in the events”.12 These important tex­ tual points about person and tense could also include analysis of the role of the passive voice in obscuring the actors involved in translation and other shared activities. How often do we read that “the gospel was translated” or “the Bible was rendered into the local language” without learning much, if anything, about the role of indigenous people in this important enterprise? In some cases, the occlusion of Pacific Islanders’ roles is more overt. Re­ porting on his progress in translating the New Testament into Aneiteumese (or Anejom), the Canadian Presbyterian missionary John Inglis wrote of his reliance on the Reverend T. W. Mellor, rector of Woodbridge, Suffolk. Mellor was editorial superintendent of the British and Foreign Bible Society and had somehow learned enough Aneiteumese to impress Inglis. “How he has ac­ quired it I do not know,” reported Inglis, “but that is of little consequence”.13 After praising Mellor for pages in his report, Ingis concluded with a reference to Williamu, a convert whose brief account of himself (as translated by Inglis) had been given to the mission board in Nova Scotia. Appended here to Ing­ lis’s report, it declared that Williamu had “lived here [Aneityum] a long time with Mr. and Mrs. Inglis,”14 and according to Inglis’s report he had “thrown his whole heart into the work in which we are engaged”.15 Whatever Williamu’s other duties might have been in the Inglis household, Inglis himself revealed that he was a partner in the translation work. Williamu received no paeans of praise, however. Using language appropriate to that of a master writing about a servant, Inglis simply noted that he had “great satisfaction in Williamu”, whose devotion to the mission persisted even after a recent epidemic had killed large numbers of his fellow Aneityumese, including family members.16 Williamu’s obviously crucial role in the translation of the Aneityumese New

12 Gardner, Gathering for God [H. Gardner, Gathering for God: George Brown in Oceania, Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2006], p. 16. 13 J. Inglis to Reformed Presbyterian Synod, n/d, The Home and Foreign Record (October, 1862), p. 274. 14 “Williamu’s Address,” appended to J. Inglis to Reformed Presbyterian Synod, n/d, The Home and Foreign Record (October, 1862), p. 277. 15 “Williamu’s Address,” appended to J. Inglis to Reformed Presbyterian Synod, n/d, The Home and Foreign Record (October, 1862), p. 276. 16 “Williamu’s Address,” appended to J. Inglis to Reformed Presbyterian Synod, n/d, The Home and Foreign Record (October, 1862), p. 276.

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Testament should not have been obscured by Inglis, but neither should it be forgotten by us. The critical importance of indigenous teachers to the spread of Christianity in the Pacific must be clearly understood. Islanders themselves undertook the most widespread, intensive and dangerous work of missions. Indigenous teachers, clergy and congregations made Pacific churches what they are today. Writing in 1996, Doug Munro and Andrew Thornley introduced their essay collection on indigenous ministry by “retrieving the pastors” who had been neglected: “Pacific Islanders need no such reminding of the key role of the homegrown pastors” but only recently had “Academic perception  … finally caught up with what Pacific Islanders had known all along”.17 With refreshing candour, Helen Gardner writes that “It was more than a little disconcerting to finally admit that Islanders were not following me down a post-Christian path, or embracing a Marxist critique of Christian mission. It is now clear that Christianity is entering a new stage in its long history”.18 Given that the Gospel could not be preached nor churches founded with­ out indigenous participation, it should be no surprise to find the development of theological anthropologies that required missionaries to regard Pacific Christians as brethren. As I have written elsewhere, both an “othering” and a “brothering” of Islanders was required of missionaries; one cannot be reduced to the other.19 Western-mediated knowledge is not necessarily entirely under western control, as C. A. Bayly and Tony Ballantyne have pointed out.20 A deep ambivalence characterizes missionary translation work and ethnography; that is the main point of the inevitable inter-relationship between “othering” and “brothering”. Sometimes a missionary’s views changed over time, altering the balance between the two aspects. The Reverend J. E. Newell of the London 17 Munro and Thornley, The Covenant Makers [D. Munro, and A. Thornley (eds.), The Covenant Makers: Islander Missionaries in the Pacific, Suva, Fiji: Pacific Theological College and the Institute of Pacific Studies at the University of the South Pacific, 1996], pp. 1, 3. 18 Gardner, Gathering for God, p. 12. 19 For more on this see Samson, “Ethnology and Theology” [J. Samson, “Ethnology and Theology: Nineteenth Century Mission Dilemmas in the South Pacific”, in Brian Stanley, ed., Christian Missions and the Enlightenment, London: Curzon Press, 2001, 99–122] and Race and Redemption [Jane Samson, Race and Redemption: British Missionaries Encounter Pacific Peoples, 1797–1920, Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2017]. 20 For more on this see Bayly, Empire and Information [C.A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996] and Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race [T. Ballantyne, Orientalism, Racial Theory & British Colonialism: Aryanism in the British Empire, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001].

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Missionary Society (LMS) mission to Samoa wrote several drafts of a review of E. Schultz’s Sprichwortliche Redensarten der Samoaner (1906), one of which contained a commentary on the Samoan role in translation work: What inexhaustible patience was required in interviewing the thirty na­ tives whose aid Dr. Schultz enlisted for his work, only those who have endeavoured to fathom the irregularities and peculiarities of this style of speech can truly estimate. Such knowledge as the author was in search of is a severe demand on the native intelligence, and implies a mental training and an appreciation of our European eagerness to know the rea­ sons and usages of exceptional phraseology which very few (hardly any) natives possess.21 The colonial discourse analysis writes itself: Newell’s stolid lack of reflex­ ivity and his racist conceptions are clear. Even Newell, however, cannot help pointing the way to another reading. Later in his review he praises the “Miscellaneous” section of Schultz’s book “because it gives us expressions and similes quoted from the folklore which is alas! almost a sealed book to us, not­ withstanding the labours of Powell, Pratt, Dr. Kramer, Dr. Stuebel and others”.22 The fact that Samoan folklore remained a “sealed book” to outsiders, despite the alleged superiority of European intelligence and mental training, points to an alternative hermeneutic. Perhaps, despite the efforts of “the thirty natives” who did their best for Doctor Schultz, the demands on European intelligence and mental conditioning were simply too great for Schultz to grasp the mean­ ing or significance of what they were telling him. Newell would later reflect on his own inadequacies, as we will see. This raises the important question of European preconceptions about Pacific languages, especially during the early mission period. Christopher Herbert has claimed that “Having selected the South Seas for proselytizing largely from a belief that the ‘primitive’ Polynesian languages could readily be mastered in a few weeks’ time by an intelligent European, the missionaries were profoundly 21 “Dr. Schultz on Samoan proverbial sayings and figures of speech: A criticism and an appreciation by the Rev. J. E. Newell, London Missionary Society,” J. E. Newell Papers, Box 9 “Anthropological”, South Seas Personal—Special, CWM Archives (SOAS, London). Schultz’s book was originally published in Apia in 1906; the first English edition appeared as Proverbial Expressions of the Samoans (Wellington: The Polynesian Society, 1953). 22 “Dr. Schultz on Samoan proverbial sayings and figures of speech: A criticism and an ap­ preciation by the Rev. J. E. Newell, London Missionary Society,” J. E. Newell Papers, Box 9 “Anthropological”, South Seas Personal—Special, CWM Archives, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, hereafter SOAS.

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impressed by the discovery of the complexity of these languages, which taxed their intellects nearly to the breaking point”.23 This undocumented “belief” cries out for investigation, especially when it is used to enable Herbert (and presumably his readers) to be surprised by missionary respect for the com­ plexity of Pacific languages. “Even the bigoted George Turner exclaims over the intricate subtlety of Polynesian tongues,” Herbert told us smugly, leading us to believe that missionaries went out to the Pacific for generations in a state of lin­ guistic and philological ignorance.24 The unexpected discovery of indigenous sophistication “seems to have altered their perception of Polynesian life in a fundamental way,” Herbert concluded, remarking: “though the alteration was in good measure unconscious and never caused them to abandon the rhetoric of ‘unbridled passions’”.25 The alteration was “unconscious”? Research reveals the opposite: copious evidence of immediate respect for the complexity and sophistication of Pacific languages. As the pioneering historian of Pacific mis­ sions, Niel Gunson, recognized, the primary question was not whether Pacific languages were complex, but whether they were Semitic, or Aryan, or other­ wise intimately linked with the Holy Land and ultimately with Europe itself.26 Where did an alleged belief in a simple, easily-learned Tahitian language come from? It did not actually originate with missionaries at all. Captain William Bligh had met with the Society’s leading director, Thomas Haweis, after returning to England following the Bounty mutiny. The two men at­ tempted to send missionaries to Tahiti on Bligh’s second voyage, but without success.27 It was Bligh who had assured Haweis that Tahitian would be easy to learn and provided him with a wordlist that he had compiled.28 There was no pre-existing prejudice against Tahitian; it was on Bligh’s supposed authority 23 Herbert, Culture and Anomie, p. 185. 24 Colley, Captives [L. Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600–1850, London: Cape, 2002]; Michaud, “French Missionary Expansion” [J. Michaud, “French Missionary Expansion in Colonial Upper Tonkin,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 35, no. 2 (2004): 287–310]; Coombes, Reinventing Africa [A. E. Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture, and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997], especially p. 162. 25 Herbert, Culture and Anomie, p. 185. 26 Gunson, Messengers of Grace [N. Gunson, Messengers of Grace: Evangelical Missionaries in the South Seas 1797–1860, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1978], p. 207. 27 The plan was thwarted by the missionaries themselves when they demanded (and were refused) ordination before departure; Newbury, The Tahitian Mission [C. W. Newbury, The History of the Tahitian Mission, 1799–1830, Written by John Davies, Missionary to the South Sea Islands: With Supplementary Papers of the Missionaries, Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2011], p. xxviii. 28 Newbury, The Tahitian Mission, xxix confuses the source of the quotation. Haweis, “The Very Probable Success” is actually found in 3:7 (July) of the 1795 Evangelical Magazine.

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that Haweis declared that becoming “masters of the language” would be “an attainment, I am assured, of no great difficulty”.29 As for the LMS missionaries themselves, it is clear that from the very beginning of the mission Tahitians themselves revealed the complexities of their language and culture. Recovering in New South Wales after the forced evacuation of the first mission, the semiliterate William Shelley wrote that the Tahitian language was: not as easily attained as is generally imagined. It is true a person may in five or six months gain such a knowledge of it as to be able to ask a ques­ tion or give an answer & the natives adapting themselves to their mode of speech thay imagine thay have attained a greater knowledge of it than thay have but the farther thay advanse in knowledge the more thay see of their Ignorance. After a close application of two years & nine months I did not account myself to have half attained it.30 An implied criticism of Haweis and other elements of the metropolitan leader­ ship is clear, and after the re-establishment of the mission it was repeated by John Jefferson, who made enough progress with the language to emphasize “that it a copious language, and not a barren one  … it is sufficient to teach any Doctrine taught in the Bible”.31 There is no doubt that presumptions about European superiority and indigenous inferiority were widespread in Britain and elsewhere well into the twentieth century; popular conceptions of nonEuropean societies were usually based on those presumptions. My point here, however, is that missionaries were challenging these presumptions. The early journals of Shelley and Jefferson of Tahiti echo the much later writings of Bob Love of the Presbyterian Kunmunya Mission at Port George IV in Western Australia. Clearly conscious of prejudice against “primitive” Aboriginal culture, Love praised the “amazing complexity” of the Warora language and the “beau­ tiful regularity of the grammatical construction”.32 Pacific peoples quickly impressed upon their strange visitors the sophisti­ cation of their languages. Perhaps the most eloquent description of delight comes from William Colenso, one of the early CMS missionaries to New 29 Haweis, “The Very Probable Success”, p. 266. 30 William Shelley to “Rev. Fathers”, 30 April, 1800; MI/SSJ, Box 1; CWM Archives, SOAS. Also see Newbury, The Tahitian Mission, p. xliv (where the date is given erroneously as 10 April 1779). 31 Cited in Gunson, Messengers of Grace, p. 255. 32 McKenzie, Road to Mowanjum [M. McKenzie, The Road to Mowanjum, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1969], p. 48. This was James “Bob” Love who arrived in 1914 to allow the found­ ers of the mission, Frances and Robert Wilson, to go on furlough.

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Zealand. “The more I have seen and known of the works of the Ancient New Zealander,” he wrote: the more I have been struck with the many indications of their superior mind,—of their fine perception of the beautiful, the regular, and sym­ metrical; of their desire and labour after the beautiful; of their prompt and genuine, open and fearless criticisms,—in a word, of their great Ideality. And this high faculty of theirs which they possessed in an emi­ nent degree, will probably be better known and understood hereafter than it is at present.33 As evidence of this, he listed various cultural attributes including language: “its great grammatical precision, its double duals and double plurals, its euphony, its rhythm, and its brevity, and its many exquisite particles and reduplications, both singular and plural, all highly pregnant with meaning, which almost defy translation into English”.34 For Methodist missionary Lorimer Fison, one of the most distinguished missionary anthropologists of his day, the matter came back to the imperative of “brothering”. During a speech in Fiji, he defended missions from a scientific point of view, praising “They who give an alphabet to a savage tribe, who make a spoken language a written one, who ascertain its grammatical construction & the rules wh. govern its combinations”, but his defence was not limited to this highly colonial discourse. He left the most important theological point to his concluding remarks, emphasizing that through their researches mission­ aries “add link after link to the chain of evidence, now possibly approaching completion, which form[s] the truth of that grand Bible Proposition ‘God hath made of one blood all nations of man to dwell on all the face of the earth’”.35 The quest for human unity was by no means a preoccupation for scientists by the later nineteenth century, but it remained a priority for missionaries and it must be taken seriously in any analysis of their work on translation. The quotation about “one blood”, taken from the Book of Acts, was at the heart of the “brothering” which missionary work demanded. This in no way forestalled prejudice, but neither was prejudice able to close the door on a biblical invita­ tion to more respectful engagement. 33 Colenso, “Better Knowledge of the Maori Race” [W. Colenso, J. von Haast, and Hawke’s Bay Philosophical Institute, On a Better Knowledge of the Maori Race, Wellington, N.Z.: New Zealand Institute, 1878], p. 80. 34 Colenso, “Better Knowledge of the Maori Race”, p. 82. 35 Lorimer Fison, “Press copy book: Sermons, articles and letters, 1867–1873”; ML B591 (CY Reel 1360), ff. 365–6.

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Consider again the case of Newell, last seen making disparaging remarks about how difficult it was to get savages to be useful informants. This is not all that can be gleaned from the Newell papers: they also shed light on the neglected career of Timoteo, one of two Samoan mission teachers the LMS dispatched to Papua with their wives in 1884.36 Timoteo comes to life in the Newell manuscripts, especially in a makeshift notebook titled “Timoteo’s notes on Kabadi translated by Newell 1895”. A letter by Newell to the Polynesian Society explained that Timoteo, “a friend and correspondent”, had sent him extensive notes on the language and customs of the Kabadi people of New Guinea. “Unfortunately Pastor Timoteo does not know English and our exten­ sive correspondence during the 12 years has been in Samoan,” and Timoteo had published Samoan-language articles on che Kabadi for Sulu Samoa, a periodi­ cal edited by Newell. Recognizing the anthropological value of Timoteo’s work, Newell had translated portions of it into English for submission to the society’s journal. He added that Pastor Timoteo had recently sent him a grammatical outline of the Kabadi language, adding that: “So far as I am aware Timoteo is the only living authority on this dialect. He is the only Native Teacher in [Rabade] who is capable of classifying his knowledge, as he is the only man possessing adequate knowledge of the dialect for philological purposes.”37 A multiplicity of translations lie behind the subtitle “translated by Newell 1895”. Newell was translating Timoteo, who had translated information from his Kabadi informants. Perhaps more intriguing, however, is the dramatic shift in Newell’s opinion of the intellectual capacity and partnership of Pacific Islanders. Years earlier, he had declared Samoans inherently incapable of clas­ sification work, but by 1895 he says that a Samoan is the only person capable of such work because he is the only one who has conducted the appropriate linguistic research. Timoteo is a friend, correspondent, pastor and scientific “authority” to whom Newell openly defers in the context of formal scientific correspondence.38 Along with developing respect for the intellectual capacity of Pacific Islanders, Newell learned to reflect on his own limitations. A manuscript titled 36 Latukefu and Sinclair, “Pacific Islanders as International Missionaries” [S. Latukefu and R. Sinclair, “Pacific Islanders as International Missionaries”, in M. T. Crocombe, R. G. Crocombe, and University of the South Pacific, Institute of Pacific Studies. Polynesian Missions in Melanesia: From Samoa, Cook Islands and Tonga to Papua New Guinea and New Caledonia, Suva, Fiji: Institute of Pacific Studies, University of the South Pacific, 1982], p. 2. 37 “Timoteo’s notes on Kabadi translated by Newell 1895”, J. E. Newell Papers, Box 9 “Anthropological”, folder 2, South Seas Personal—Special, Council for World Mission (here­ after CWM) Archives, School of Oriental and African Studies (hereafter SOAS), London. 38 The notes were duly published as Newell, “Notes on the Kabadi Dialect”.

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“Notes: chiefly ethnological of the Tokelau, Ellice and Some of the Gilbert or Kingsmill Islands” tells us that Newell visited these islands in 1885 and 1894 and was now writing some “brief and discursive and partial” account of the anthropological information he gathered. He added that “The writer’s Samoan experience & the limits of his knowledge of other South Sea peoples & igno­ rance of Western Polynesia will no doubt have coloured his views as to the ori­ gin of the peoples embraced in this survey.”39 My point here is simply to show the impact of Pacific peoples on the views of outsiders like Newell, challenging preconceived notions, breaking down barriers, and provoking self-reflection. Reflexivity can be found from the earliest mission days, as in the manuscript attributed to William Pascoe Crook, the first missionary to the Marquesas Islands. Written in 1799, the manuscript describes Crook’s attempts to learn the local language. “He had met with unexpected difficulties” because: having no idea of any language but their own, they seemed wholly inca­ pable of returning intelligent answers to enquiries about the meaning of their words. If asked the name of anything, they would reply “a maia havea”, a thing, to be sure. Wishing co find our a term for “adrift”, Mr. C. described a Canoe in that situation, & enquired how they called it. They replied, “A Canoe,” & cried that they never heard of such a thing; express­ ing their surprise that Gods could not talk as men did.40 No wonder Greg Dening observed that “Crook’s perceptions were changed more than Enara’s”.41

Translation Teams

One of the earliest missionary translators in Fiji, John Hunt, recorded his methodology in detail: 1. To read over the chapter for translating in the Greek Testament, and examine particularly any word of which I have any doubt as to its mean­ ing. I read Bloomfield’s Notes and Campbell’s translation and any other books that I have to assist me to ascertain the meaning of the text. 2. After 39 “Notes: chiefly ethnological of che Tokelau, Ellice and Some of the Gilbert or Kingsmill Islands”, J. E. Newell Papers, Box 9 “Anthropological”, folder 2, South Seas Personal— Special, CWM Archives (SOAS, London) published as Newell, “Notes: chiefly ethnological”. 40 [William Pascoe Crook], “Account of Marquesas Islands, 1799”, ML CY Reel 329, ff. 165–6. 41 Dening, Islands and Beaches [G. Dening, Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land: Marquesas, 1774–1880, Honolulu, Hawaii: University Press of Hawaii, 1980], p. 142.

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having mastered the chapters as I think, I commence translating and I use as my standards for the text the Greek and the English translations and for the translation not any man exclusively, but myself, all the Natives I can have access to, and the translations that have already been made.42 Hunt was more sensitive to the differences between the Fijian dialects and while at Somosomo he worked particularly closely with Noa, a convert. Noa ac­ companied Hunt to Viwa when the mission was relocated there. They worked together on a Viwa dialect translation of the Wesleyan catechism, but after it was printed in 1843 some of the other missionaries objected to the liberties Hunt had taken with the original English version. Hunt’s greatest defender was Noa who declared that “the new catechism was using the Viwa language as it had been before missionaries came” while the older catechism was the “lan­ guage of the Lotu people since the introduction of Christianity”.43 These words of Noa’s come down to us mediated by Hunt, so we must be wary of taking them entirely at face value. Nevertheless, Noa’s pride in the use of a traditional Fijian language comes through clearly, as does his suggestion that the English version might be inappropriate for non-English people. There was a demonstrable focus on indigenous driven translation work at Hunt’s station: he and his wife began teaching English at Viwa in order to enable Fijians to undertake their own translations of literary and scientific works in English.44 Despite all of this, there is no doubt that later mission accounts of early pioneers like Hunt conspicuously shrink the composition of the transla­ tion team of which the missionary was only a part. Reflecting on the occasion of the centenary of the Fijian mission, Methodist superintendent J. W. Burton discussed the co-operative process of translation, but only as a collaboration between English missionaries; he made no mention of Fijian participation.45 George Sarawia was the first Melanesian Anglican priest, and in his auto­ biography he recalled how he taught the Mota language to John Coleridge 42 Quoted in Birtwhistle, In His Armour [N. A. Birtwhistle, In His Armour: The Life of John Hunt of Fiji, London: Cargate Press, 1954], pp. 92–3. 43 Quoted in Thornley, Inheritance of Hope [A. Thornley and University of the South Pacific, Institute of Pacific Studies, The Inheritance of Hope: John Hunt : Apostle of Fiji = Nai Votavota Ni I Nuinui : Ko Joni Oniti : Na Apositolo Ki Na Kawa I Taukei, Suva, Fiji: Institute of Pacific Studies, the University of the South Pacific, 2000], 4. Hunt’s views of Fijian dia­ lects was not unproblematic however; he was the main advocate for Bauan as a lingua franca, claiming (probably wrongly) that most Fijians understood Bauan as well as their own local dialect. He himself disputed this claim later on. (Thornley, Inheritance of Hope, pp. 250, 266). 44 Thornley, Inheritance of Hope, p. 232. 45 Burton, A Hundred Years in Fiji [J. W. Burton and W. Deane, A Hundred Years in Fiji. London: Epworth Press (E.C. Barton), 1936], p. 63.

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Patteson (later the first Bishop of Melanesia) in 1857.46 This was momentous: the Melanesian Mission would eventually select Mota as its primary language and it is significant that the mission’s first knowledge of Mota came from the gift of a Melanesian man’s time and expertise. Sarawia recalled the first visit of the mission ship and how fear and confusion wrestled with curiosity as he decided to go on board. He, Selwyn and Patteson sat down in the stern “and they asked me the name of the island, and the names of people. I told them and they wrote them down in a book, but I did not know then what a book was.”47 Nervously, Sarawia continued the lesson when “they wrote down some other words too, the words for you, he, you (plural), we two, I, all of us … they wrote down a few words of Mota that day, and we were astonished that they understood so quickly a little Mota and could speak it properly”.48 This rapid progress was due in part to Patteson’s astonishing linguistic abil­ ity, but also to Sarawia’s willingness to teach him. Mutual teaching frequent­ ly characterized their future relationship, including catechetical sessions where Patteson imparted information about Christian beliefs while receiv­ ing first-hand testimony about the beliefs of Sarawia’s people.49 Much later, after Sarawia had returned to Vanua Lava, Patteson began teaching on the island of Mota and sometimes Sarawia visited him there. “I saw some of the things he was doing,” Sarawia recalled: “He was always going round the vil­ lages, talking to the older men about some of their customs …”50 The purpose of this was to admonish the islanders that some of these practices “were not good”,51 but as with the Mota language lessons years before, the ethnographi­ cal information gathered by Patteson was valued later in its own right by more anthropologically-minded members of the mission like Robert Codrington.52 The Anglicans also founded missions in Papua New Guinea, where the Reverend Copland King provided one of the most detailed explanations that exists of the teamwork involved in translation work. When the white staff from 46 George Sarawia, They Came to My Island [G. Sarawia, They Came to My Island: The Beginnings of the Mission in the Banks Islands, Siota, British Solomon Islands: S. Peter’s College, 1968], p. ii. See also H. B. Gardner, “Practising Christianity, Writing Anthropology: Missionary Anthropologists and Their Informants,” in P. Grimshaw and A. May (eds.), Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples and Cultural Exchange, Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2010, 110–122. 47 Sarawia, They Came to My Island, p. 2. 48 Sarawia, They Came to My Island, p. 2. 49 Sarawia, They Came to My Island, p. 10. 50 Sarawia, They Came to My Island, p. 17. 51 Sarawia, They Came to My Island, p. 17. 52 Codrington, The Melanesians [R. H. Codrington, The Melanesians: Studies in Their Anthropology and Folk-Lore, Behavior Science Reprints. New Haven: HRAF Press, 1957], pp. v–vi.

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the up-river mission station were recalled in 1900 due to illness, most of the boarders there were sent to Dogura (at Wedau). There the young men finished school, some were baptized, and some would eventually return to teach at Dogura themselves. King recalled: I started one of these boys, Edmund Dudu, after he had been at Dogura for six years, and back in the district as pupil teacher for two, at trans­ lation work. He took the Wedau Gospel, and wrote it out in Binandere. As he did so, I read over his translation with him, making corrections as necessary, then typed it, made him read it over with me, and then typed it again. Several other boys, who in their turn came from Dogura, read it over with me. Every revision involved numberless discussions on the meaning of the original, the force of the words chosen, and other matters. It was my business to keep my eye on the Analytical Concordance. The boys had to tell me of anything which sounded strange or hard or wrong; then we could discuss how it could be amended.53 Readers at the Binandere services used drafts of the new translation in their readings, welcoming help from the congregation in clarifying meanings. Copland King was clear about his position of dependency: “I have to take the natives’ opinion on trust”, he declared. He was happy to do so because “they were working, not to satisfy the Missionary, but to enlighten their own people”.54 Further revisions were made after the trial run in church, and only then was a final copy typed for the printer. In Western Australia in the 1920s the Presbyterian Kunmunya Mission had a self-described “translating team” which gathered around Bob Love to begin the translation of the Gospel of Mark, and which continued to assist him when work began on the Hebrew Scriptures. Love’s partners were “Ernie (whom Bob addressed by his native name, Njimandum  …), Albert Barunga  … and Wondoonmoi, quite an old man now, the native who had tried twice to kill him [Love] in 1914, but who had since become his friend”.55 Every day the group met on the verandah of Love’s house, sitting together around a cane table. Sharing daily life with Aboriginal people sometimes solved tricky translation problems: the great man did not simply come up with ideas and then call for indigenous responses. Love told a story about his difficulty with the word “be­ ginning” (a serious drawback when attempting to translate the first chapter of Genesis), which plagued his team for a considerable length of time. Out pigeon 53 King, A. B. M. Review (February 1914), pp. 187–8. 54 King, A. B. M. Review, p. 188. 55 McKenzie, Road to Mowanjum, p. 89.

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hunting one day, Love and some Aboriginal friends traced a stream of water to its source in a spring: Next language day I told my team what we had done, in following a stream to its beginning. I sketched a map of the stream, naming the place, and following up the course to the place where it sprang from under the rock. I asked, What is this? Quick as a flash, Wondoonmoi put his finger on the source of the stream and said ‘Wundjanguru’. He then ran his finger along the course of the stream rill, at the place where it debouched into the sea, he said ‘Umindjunguru’. A great discovery! Alpha and Omega, the begin­ ning and the end!56 Perhaps the greatest depth of obligation felt toward indigenous translators was expressed by the Anglican missionary Charles Elliot Fox as he recalled his work on the Arosi language of San Cristoval in the Solomon Islands. Having performed baimarabuda with his friend Martin Taki, they exchanged names and possessions and Fox began a new life as a member of a San Cristoval fam­ ily. Living and working with his new relatives, he felt that “the main thing was to listen to them and to imitate them”. Often he and the other men of the vil­ lage would wake in the night to replenish their fire and there was a particu­ lar candour to these midnight conversations when “the people would speak very freely, and you could listen to what they were saying and pick up a great number of new words and phrases, writing them down later on”.57 Eventually he learned enough to create a dictionary and grammar of Arosi, and begin work on an Arosi translation of the New Testament. Fox cautioned his readers against crediting him with primary agency in this project: The real work of translation is done by the Melanesians, and not by the white men. We speak of Codrington translating the New Testament into Mota, but really he did the explaining of the meaning to Edward Wogale, who was a native of Mota, and Wogale did the actual phrasing of the translation in the native idiom, and this has been so in all the transla­ tions of the Mission. The Melanesians have not really got the credit that they deserved for these translations, which are spoken of as having been done by the white men.58

56 McKenzie, Road to Mowanjum, p. 90. 57 Fox, “A Missionary in Melanesia” [C.E. Fox, “A Missionary in Melanesia”, MS-Papers-1171-03]. 58 Fox, “A Missionary in Melanesia”.

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Of interest here is the difference between how missionaries like Codrington actually lived and worked and how others reported their activities. Codrington would have been the first to acknowledge his debts. Late in his life, hard at work on translating the prophetic books of the Hebrew Scriptures into Mota, he declared: “I am not altogether in favor of translating obscure passages & parts of the scripture until a fair number of natives can make something out of them”, meaning that the “triumph” of completing some translation or other should take a distant second place to the needs of the audience.59

“Sacred Philology”?

This subsection’s title comes from the work of Jaroslav Pelikan, who traces the practice of sacred philology to the Renaissance study of classical Greek and Latin texts.60 Unlike some other religions, such as Islam, where the original language of Scripture is considered normative, Christianity endorsed the authority of its sacred texts in translation. This was not simply a question of mechanically producing a vernacular Bible. The act of translation itself was an affirmation of human unity, as understood in New Testament “one blood” terms, and it is no surprise to find that philology was one of the earliest forms of Christian ethnography. This is what Pelikan means by “sacred philology”, and missionaries were among its most earnest practitioners. A highly critical article by Sidney H. Ray, the noted linguistics specialist at Cambridge at the turn of the twentieth century, is helpful here. Ray worked closely with western Pacific missions in order to gather material, and his article on “The Study of Melanesian Languages” appeared in the Anglican Southern Cross Log in 1908. The article was ruthless in its condemnation of the tradition­ al philology that so many missionaries still used to theorize about the origins and relationship of Pacific languages. “These students [of Melanesian lan­ guages] are content to take the languages, as far as they are known, and base upon comparisons various theories of origin. These theories are wrong, both in direction and method, and are also premature.”61 The method was wrong be­ cause similarities were assumed to always indicate relationship; theories were premature because relatively little was known of interior districts in Indonesia 59

Cited in A. K. Davidson, “The Legacy of Robert Henry Godrington,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 27, no. 4 (2003): 174. 60 Pelikan, Jesus Through the Centuries [J. Pelikan, Jesus through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985], p. 152. 61 Ray, “The Study of Melanesian Languages” [S. H. Ray, “The Study of Melanesian Languages”, Southern Cross Log (May 1908)], pp. 176–8.

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and Melanesia. The direction was wrong because various writers had argued that Melanesian languages were related, variously, to Aryan, Semitic, American Indian, Japanese, Inuit, Ural-Altaic, Dravidian, and Australian Aboriginal. “Unless all these linguistic families be regarded as related, the arguments in favour of any one of them is destroyed by the arguments in favour of the others”.62 So much for the scientific veracity of most missionary philology. Ray, the scientist, knew that no such universal linguistic relationship ex­ isted, and, therefore, he was confident about discarding theories based on it. For missionary theorists, however, there was a wider relationship to consider. Theirs was a universalist anthropology (often enthusiastically evolutionist for that precise reason) demanded by faith. Long after metropolitan scientists had embraced modern linguistics, we find missionaries publishing theories about the “Semitic” roots of Polynesian languages, or proclaiming the discovery of Sanscrit terms among some group or other of “Aryan” Aboriginal Australians.63 They believed that they were tracing the shape of universal human nature and destiny. This theological priority generated a matrix of activity in which indigenous people were (and remain) full participants. Recalling the discussion of “ren­ dering” Which opened this chapter, it is useful to note that the Oxford English Dictionary records early uses of “to render” as meaning “To give or hand back, to restore”.64 This earlier definition is being recovered through current col­ laborations between indigenous leaders, academics and religious organisa­ tions in language retrieval and preservation projects. Here at the University of Alberta we celebrated the appearance of the Alberta Elders’ Cree Dictionary in 1998 and honoured the leadership of Sister Nancy LeClaire, a Samson Cree and Roman Catholic nun, in initiating this remarkable project.65 The intro­ duction praises the pioneering translation work of Father Albert Lacombe, Father Rogier Vandersteene, Brother Frederick Leach and the Anglican priest, the Reverend E. A. Watkins of the CMS, among others.66 The Dictionary was intended to bring the voices of ancestors (of various races) and descendants together. Another project, the complete translation of the Bible into Inuktitut 62 Ray, “The Study of Melanesian Languages”, p. 177. 63 Possibly the most persistent of these sacred philologists was Daniel Macdonald of the Presbyterian New Hebrides Mission; he published dozens of articles into the early twentieth century and even found a leading publisher for his lengthy book on “Semitic” Polynesian languages: see D. MacDonald, The Oceanic Languages: Their Grammatical Structure, Vocabulary, and Origin, London etc.: Frowde, 1907. 64 Oxford English Dictionary Online. 65 LeClaire and Cardinal, Alberta Elders’ Cree Dictionary [N. LeClaire, G. Cardinal, E. H. Waugh, and E. Hunter, Alberta Elders’ Cree Dictionary: Alperta Ohci Kehtehayak Nehiyaw Otwestamâkewasinahikan, Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1998]. 66 LeClaire and Cardinal, Alberta Elders’ Cree Dictionary, pp. xii, xiv.

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for Christians of the eastern Arctic, relied on the expertise of indigenous cler­ gy, one of whom declared that the project “has given our language importance and has preserved it”.67 However meticulously theorised, any historical analy­ sis that reduces this complex collaborative matrix down to something that is “really just” mimicry, racism or textual determinism, is unable to explain fully the historical complexities involved. Even less is it able to explain the legacy of those complexities: thriving indigenous Christianities who often construct their own orthodox identities against an immoral post-Christian west.68 Andrew Porter has argued that “what one might call ‘cultural concessions’” were being made on all sides throughout the process of missionary transla­ tion work. The fusion of language and ideas produced a complexity of influ­ ences that is at odds with an insistence on a western “cultural imperialism”.69 R. S. Sugirtharajah noted the strange reluctance of postcolonial scholarship to engage with missionary records that “confront their own colonial and mis­ sionary administration” in order “to empower the invaded”.70 Having earlier mentioned Vicente Rafael’s work on early modern Spanish translations in the Philippines, I would like to conclude with Lawrence Venuti’s call to arms in his 1998 book The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference. After dissecting the ongoing colonization of texts by English translators in today’s world of globalized publishing, he observed: “Translation clearly raises ethical questions that have yet to be sorted out.”71 Indeed they do. 67 Solange de Santis, “Team Translates Bible Into Inuktitut” [Solange de Santis, “Team Translates Bible Into Inuktitut”, Anglican Journal [Canada] (June 1, 2002)]. 68 For more on race, colonialism and theology see Kidd, The Forging of Races [C. Kidd, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600-2000, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006] and Carter, Race: A Theological Account [J. K. Carter, Race: A Theological Account, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008]. 69 Porter, Religion Versus Empire [A. N. Porter, Religion Versus Empire?: British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004], p. 328. 70 Sugirtharajah, The Bible and Empire [R. S. Sugirtharajah, The Bible and Empire: Postcolonial Explorations, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005], p. 5. 71 Venuti, The Scandals of Translation [L. Venuti, The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference, London: Taylor & Francis, 1998], p. 6.

Christianizing Language and the Dis-placement of Culture in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea Bambi B. Schieffelin In communities worldwide, the introduction and uptake of evangelical Christianity has resulted in profound changes in how people view themselves and their worlds. These changes have been primarily studied by social and cultural anthropologists and have led to the emergence of an anthropology of Christianity. In joining this scholarly enterprise, I wish to highlight what linguistic anthropology and its focus on language and language ideologies can offer to this conversation. First, attention to speech practices and language ideologies can contribute to anthropological theorizing about continuity and discontinuity in the context of evangelical Christian missionization and Christianization more broadly. In particular, Christian missionaries and the people they are missionizing tend to think in “received categories” that shape how they culturally understand and explain their worldviews. Both groups also hold particular views of the relationship between culture and language or cultural and linguistic ideologies and practices and what they signify. Culture and language as conceptual objects may be defined in many ways, seen as deeply interdependent or independent symbolic systems. Second, translation practices have always been, and continue to be, central to Christianity and missionization. While sometimes imagined as simply turning textual objects (from words to book-length treatises) from one language into another, translation theories and practices are intrinsic to every language and specific to speech communities. Translation depends on cultural and linguistic knowledge, which includes semiotic and pragmatic conventions. As we know from multiple translations and versions of the New Testament, for example, translations are often contested because of their potential as sites for

Source: Schieffelin, B. B., “Christianizing Language and the Dis-placement of Culture in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea,” Current Anthropology 55.10 (2014): pp. 226–237. Published by University of Chicago Press; © 2014 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/97890

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interpretation, as well as their intertextual connections to original texts that themselves define religious communities.1 From the perspective of linguistic anthropology, translation is a culturally shaped communicative activity that has always been critical in the global circulation of people, texts, objects, and knowledge. Thus, careful attention to how translation is thought about and practiced can contribute to our understanding of globalization processes that figure significantly in evangelical Christianity’s creation of a particular type of textually based community that is often imagined to be more textually stable and consistent than it actually is.2 Ironically, my analysis of social and linguistic processes that helped shape the early phases of missionization in Bosavi parallels Christian tropes of division and separation. Examining this mission’s ideologies of language and culture shows how its assignment of radically different valences to language and culture resulted in their detachment from each other and subsequent change to both in several critical domains of Bosavi society. In addition, in pre-Christian Bosavi society, persons were deeply connected to local named places, and their emplaced experiences with others gave meaning to relationships and activities throughout their lives, as well as providing ways to memorialize them. These mission-initiated dynamics of cultural and linguistic change resulted in what I call displacement, processes through which connections between persons, activities, and place become detached and change. I draw on my ethnographic and linguistic fieldwork on missionization in Bosavi (1975–1995) and research of other ethnographers of Bosavi, as well as archival evidence produced by missionaries, to track the trajectory of transmission of these mission ideologies mediated through Bosavi interpreters and translators. Before taking up dis-placement, some framing about continuity and discontinuity, and how we—and everyone else—tend to think and speak in received cultural categories is in order.

Continuity/Discontinuity and Received Categories

In writing about evangelical Christianity, Robbins (2003, 2004, 2007) poses a critical set of questions regarding the status and nature of cultural continuity 1 For example, Handman’s (2010) insightful analyses of language choice and translation practices in Protestant churches among Guhu-Samane (PNG). 2 B. B. Schieffelin (2007a, 2008b) addresses changes in Bible translation practices in Bosavi.

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in anthropological theorizing and how it affects the ways in which anthropologists, as well as local people, try to make sense of the varieties of Christianity encompassed by this term. Robbins (2003) recommends that we go beyond a preference for viewing continuities and think more productively about cultural discontinuity, suggesting that one of the main reasons we have been inhibited in making this move has to do with “how anthropologists imagine that people perceive the world” (230). Drawing on studies of Pentecostal and charismatic religious movements, Robbins suggests that we assume that “people only understand the world in terms of their received categories” (230). With regard to religious transformation, where language practices are always relevant, he adds, we expect that “people cannot but view the new ‘through the prism of indigenous categories,’” citing LiPuma (2000:212). My argument here is that even as received categories embedded in language use do play a powerful role in fostering cultural continuity, language can also be a key player in processes of radical change. Robbins’s encouragement to think about discontinuity is a productive point of departure. In contexts of missionization, language practices are always central and deeply tied to the formation and production of new social and cultural categories. In my research on the introduction of fundamentalist Christianity in Bosavi, I found a curious disconnect between the cultural and the linguistic, two systems usually thought to act in tandem. While the mission insisted on discontinuity in cultural domains, it simultaneously privileged continuity in linguistic ones, an orientation grounded in this mission’s own conceptions of culture and language. Not surprisingly, Bosavi pastors, who played a critical role in missionization, drew on their cultural prisms and language ideologies as they translated Christian messages from Tok Pisin (the national lingua franca) into their vernacular, interpreting Bible passages and missionary meanings and producing their own articulations of what fundamentalist Christianity is and is not about. Their understandings and the ways in which they communicated them in Bosavi communities have reshaped everyday sociality, language structures and practices, and cosmology and created a local Christian theology, though it must be said that not all Bosavi people have taken up these ideas in the same way, nor have these ideas held everyone’s attention over time. The goal of missionization is transforming persons. Language ideologies and discourse practices play central roles in transforming and replacing received social categories and are essential in theorizing and conceptualizing this type of change. New language and discourse practices are prerequisites to changing ways of thinking and feeling, critical to the introduction of and socialization into cultural practices that constitute Christianization in mission

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contexts. For those interested in conversion, language provides not only the scripts that convey the content of introduced ideas but also the discursive structures for reevaluating and assigning new meanings to and affective stances toward precontact experiences and relationships. Such verbal practices and their achievement are never neutral but are part of larger hegemonic systems. In Bosavi, conversion to fundamentalist Christianity required a rupture between the past and the present, essential to the creation of discontinuity in how one understood or valued cultural practices constituting persons, place, and community. Missionization, through its totalizing discursive framework, used particular language practices and linguistic ideologies to accomplish this radical transformation and rupture. New concepts, including ideas about time (B. B. Schieffelin 2002) and theory of mind (B. B. Schieffelin 2007a, 2008a) were introduced into Bosavi, but the focus here concerns how pre-Christian concepts about social relationships and place were replaced with Christian ideas about social relationships and space.3 In some sense, this should not be surprising, as Robbins (2006)4 has pointed out that Christianity in general, with its focus on the person of Christ, not on a particular place it takes to be holy, is not a territorially focused religion. Furthermore, Christianity tends to emphasize a universal rather than a territorial or ethnic-based sense of community, and conservative branches of Protestantism, for example, fundamentalist and Pentecostal groups, explicitly disregard territory in favor of creating a particular type of imagined global community. In what follows, I examine this shift from place to space, highlighting the role language plays in reshaping the moral geographies of Bosavi communities as evidenced in practices of sociality and lived environments. In Bosavi, this shift was dramatic, as the mission’s notion of space not only interrupted but sought to erase and replace Bosavi ideas about place. Accomplished in a relatively brief period of time, this discontinuity project of dis-placement required refiguring the meaning of place in linguistic and cultural practice and ideology. This happened across several social and linguistic domains with the introduction of new spatial metaphors that also came to

3 Gieryn’s (2000) conceptual differentiation between place and space is useful here. Place entails geographic location and is unique; place has physicality, material form; and place is invested with meaning and value. As Feld and Basso (1996) point out, without naming, identification, or representation by ordinary people, a place is not a place. See Bandak (2014); Casey (1993, 1996); and Cresswell (2004) for further distinctions between place and space. 4 Citing Davies (1994); Sack (1986).

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signify social division, identifying and reclassifying persons in terms of relative and evaluative spaces and spatial categories. This was evident both in the village (at the interpersonal level) and in talk (in terms of moral categories), ways of speaking that have come to index each other and prevail. According to the Australian mission and local Bosavi pastors acting as missionizers, traditional notions of place, which are connected to practices and persons that evoke the pre-Christian past, play no role in the biblically based narrative of the end-times. They must be forgotten. While notions of place and place names (toponyms) were a major means for indexing and memorializing social identity and relationships, both autobiographically and community wide, spatial categories, including insider/outsider, now distinguish membership and relationships in Christian communities. In many situations these new social categories replaced those based on kinship. Through their introduction and use they articulate and accomplish new Christian-based social hierarchies and power asymmetries in this previously “egalitarian” society. Two sets of practices that became increasingly interrelated over time (1975–1995) are relevant to understanding how such profound transformations are accomplished. The first includes the totalizing discursive framework (in the Foucauldian sense) of fundamentalist Christianity introduced in Bosavi through missionaries—whose rhetoric is based on a literalist biblical interpretation in which truths do not change across time or space and binary oppositions prevail. Their discursive framework is viewed in conjunction with a second set of practices: Bosavi versions of this discursive framework created and articulated by first-generation Bosavi pastors during church services, the major context for Christian language socialization. Local translations from Tok Pisin into Bosavi of the New Testament not only changed the Bosavi language at all levels but also produced local discursive frameworks for interpreting that text. The close examination of the early use and emergence of these two sets of linguistic and cultural practices and ideologies makes visible the tensions between discontinuity and continuity allowing for theorizing in terms of points of integration and connection, as well as how they become disarticulated from each other or reassigned new valences.

Reframing and Relocating

We all tend to think in “received categories,” what Sapir (1958 [1929]:162) called “language habits” or what Whorf (1956) described as “fashions of speaking.” This concept of interpreting experience through language is central to

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appreciating the role of language in Christianity and conversion,5 because in the course of becoming Christian, persons (and communities) must shift from habitual uses of language (and other embodied practices), to new or potential ones, which are typically made explicit in the course of evangelization. Conceptualizing language as a verbal activity that can guide worldviews, or any interpretive practice, provides a powerful, added dimension to the notion of received categories, highlighting the role of agency and choice in contexts of knowledge acquisition and change, as well as knowledge loss. Throughout the life cycle, speakers ordinarily acquire more than one language variety, register, even dialect—mixing varieties and switching codes to express identities or stylistic and aesthetic preferences. Just as speaking in new ways can change ways of thinking and acting, speakers can also lose verbal competencies and their associated ways of thinking and feeling from lack of use, for example, when such varieties become stigmatized in association with practices deemed unacceptable within the context of Christianization. Languages also undergo transformations, some more rapidly than others. These processes are shaped by language ideologies, which, like languages and speakers in contact with each other, also result in complex changes, both synchronically and diachronically due to nonlinguistic factors, in particular, power asymmetries, be they political, social, moral, and/or economic. How this happens and the consequences of this change for speakers and languages are especially salient and relevant during Christian evangelization. Harding’s (2000) compelling study of the language and politics of American fundamentalist Baptist preachers offers provocative points of comparison with the Bosavi situation, since both center on fundamentalist Christianity. Harding asks how the Bible-based language of American fundamentalist Christians works as a rhetoric of conversion, how it persuades and produces effects (Harding 2000:xii). While not framing it as such, she is in fact investigating the language ideology that underlies her assertion that conversion requires “acquiring a specific religious language or dialect” (34).

5 The ideas of Sapir and Whorf about linguistic relativity have often been referred to as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. This is a somewhat misguided interpretation of their writings, since neither Sapir nor Whorf wrote about hypotheses. It is more productive to focus on how language practices affect the way we habitually think, categorize, and remember events, persons, and things in our lives. While many of their formulations changed over time, both Sapir and Whorf assumed language homogeneity, a one-language/one-culture model, in addition to a model of a monolingual speaker/speech community which we now know is an idealized exception rather than the rule.

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Harding’s perspective on the centrality of language acquisition for conversion can also be reframed as language socialization: socialization to use language and socialization through the use of language, a process that takes place between experts and novices throughout the life cycle (Ochs and Schieffelin 1984). Language socialization is critical in missionization and offers a theoretical perspective for investigating how language is both displayed and, where translation is involved, reshaped to affect how one views the world and, ultimately, one’s self in that world. The embodied practices that Harding describes are deeply intertwined with a particular language ideology, which is based in Western philosophical and religious traditions, one that she in fact shares. In becoming communicatively competent in Bible-based language, to speak in this way, rather than another, indicates more than competence. It is an act of identity that presumes sincerity and belief. As Harding points out, listening to the Gospel enables you to experience belief, but belief that becomes you comes only through speech: speaking is believing (Harding 2000:60). The introduction and uptake of Christian language practices illustrates an important lesson from Sapir’s (1958 [1929]) and Whorf’s (1956) discussion of habitual language practices and the potential humans have for acquiring new fashions of speaking. Speakers in the secular as well as the Christian community within which Harding (2000) worked share a vernacular code, English. We should not assume, however, that just because the code is the “same” that there is continuity in thinking (especially in particular moral and religious domains) for those who become Christian. Harding’s argument strongly supports a discontinuity argument in terms of belief, but what makes the case especially relevant is that there is continuity at another level: between the new discursive frameworks (Bible-based language) and mainstream language ideology of American secular and religious (Christian) speech communities. One is supposed to speak sincerely most of the time. Language ideology, however, can become separated from the language with which it is habitually associated. This commonly occurs when contact between speech communities takes place, as in colonizing and missionizing contexts, especially where translation occurs. Such slippage can result in a misalignment in the relationship between speaking and believing, and it is in such contexts that misalignments and/or realignments become visible or audible. In addition to whatever vernacular(s) are spoken in a community, missionization brings at least one other language with its fashions of speaking and language ideologies to deliver the Good News. These languages and their

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translation help constitute and convey new cultural logics, destabilizing or replacing received categories and the activities and worldviews they constitute or reflect. Words and expressions that are stable or unitary may take on multiple meanings in the context of multiple registers, codes, and systems of signification. New terms designating social classification, such as “Christian/ non-Christian” or “insider/outsider” enable the creation and deployment of multiple subjectivities, alerting us not to buy into an old one-language/ one-culture type of thinking. Whether they consider themselves modern, postmodern, or neither, most people participate in seemingly polyvalent or contradictory cultural practices.6 Missionization, however, directly and often explicitly challenges habitual language practices in order to effect a particular type of change and, as such, offers a dramatic context in which to document multiple attempts to break unreflective or unconscious language habits and put new ones in their place. These changes in both the words and fashions of speaking are among the critical embodied practices that can lead the charge toward discontinuity. This is especially ironic in Bosavi where mission policy insisted on the use of the vernacular for proselytizing as the only way to convert local people. From the Bosavi perspective, the vernacular was essential to the cultural definition and identity of the community, part of a semiotic framework that tied language to identity and place.

Brief Background to the Bosavi People and the Asia Pacific Christian Mission

The Bosavi people live north of Mount Bosavi on the Great Papuan Plateau in Papua New Guinea’s Southern Highlands.7 In this rain forest environment, 2,000 or so Bosavi people inhabit scattered communities ranging from 60 to 100 people. They practice swidden horticulture and hunt and fish for most of the animal protein in their diet. There are four mutually intelligible named

6 There are interesting correspondences between how Bosavi create and acquire new repertoires of knowledge, such as Christianity and language socialization of bilingual and multicultural subjectivities. 7 For additional scholarship on the Bosavi people, see Feld (2013 [1982], 1988, 1996); B. B. Schieffelin (1990); E. L. Schieffelin (1976, 1981).

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dialects of the Bosavi language, one of which is called Kaluli. Here I refer to the language as well as the people as Bosavi. The majority of people are monolingual in their vernacular and, at least through 1998, most village activities were carried out in the Bosavi language. Like other small-scale “egalitarian” societies in Papua New Guinea, before contact with anthropologists, missionaries, and government representatives, Bosavi people lived in a nonliterate world. Government contact in Bosavi began in the 1930s but was always and has continued to be extremely intermittent,8 as is often the case where populations are small, scattered, and relatively inaccessible and where local resources (e.g., timber) are not easily extractable. Such areas, however, are of interest to missionaries, and in 1964 two members of the Unevangelized Fields Mission (UFM) made brief contact with Bosavi people. They laid the groundwork for its missionizing effort, which began with the construction of a small airstrip and preliminary linguistic work (B. B. Schieffelin 2000). While sharing a number of doctrinal tenets with Pentecostals and charismatics, the UFM rejected their ecumenical orientation as well as what they saw as their dramatic, highly emotional, and visible signs of Christian conversion, such as speaking in tongues and other gifts of the spirit. They also found the idea that there might be something of value in the local culture repugnant (Weymouth 1978) and rejected the view taken by mainstream missions (e.g., Catholics, Lutherans) that anthropological insights into local cosmologies could potentially facilitate conversion or at least create syncretic bridges. This small, conservative, nondenominational, “faith” mission interpreted the Bible literally and viewed original scripture as the divinely inspired center of all preaching. They emphasized a doctrine of the “last things”—death, judgment, heaven, and hell, elaborating the dire consequences of the Second Coming, which they believed was imminent, for non-believers. Renamed the Asia Pacific Christian Mission (APCM), active missionization began in 1970 with the arrival of an Australian missionary couple who established a mission station set apart from the villages.9 They had their own ideas about Melanesians and held that ordinary Christians, guided by their faith, 8 Schieffelin and Crittenden (1991) provide a detailed ethnohistorical account of first contact in the Bosavi area. 9 Schieffelin and Crittenden (1991:262–268) summarize government contact and the establishment of the mission station, consisting of a school, clinic, church, small trade store, and grass airstrip. Feld (2013 [1982]:xiv–xxiii) highlights the impact of the government and mission on expressive practices from the mid-1970s through the late 1990s.

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could convert the unevangelized without knowledge of the local culture. The only mission in Bosavi, their goal was rapid conversion and their missionization activities intensive. Over 2 decades, they told Bosavis who wanted to become Christian to give up traditional practices; many, but not all, did exactly that.10 For them, evangelical work, rather than education or development projects, was the highest priority because, due to satanic and government influences, those living in Bosavi had become “a people so bewildered as to barely be able to discern the good from the bad” (prayer letter, 1971). Like other conservative Christians, members of the APCM categorized persons in terms of evaluative binary oppositions, including Christian/nonChristian, fundamentalist/nonfundamentalist, and saved/unsaved. Such evaluative binaries that signaled social and moral difference were also emplaced in their descriptions of the tropical rain forest and life in the bush. Coming from Australia, their expectations of what civilized land should look like shaped their view of local environments. They described the jungles and rain forests as “Dark, chaotic, filled with spirits,” and could not wait to clear the trees and grow grass. They demonized the forest or bush (hena usa) as a place where whatever people were doing was suspect, out of sight of pastors and Christians who stayed in the village. As far as they were concerned, time in the bush (hunting, gathering, socializing) was time not spent in church, and they characterized people who chose to stay in the bush as stubborn and resistant, making bad choices. This created a tense opposition between church/village and bush activities.11 The mission presented everything as an issue of choice, so that decisions about everyday life on earth was said to determine life after death, heaven or hell. Such notions of choice and division were not part of pre-Christian Bosavi cultural belief, where death, for example, was always due to supernatural causes such as witchcraft and not related to the past or present moral or social status of the person ensorcelled. From the missionaries’ perspective on time, 10 E. L. Schieffelin (1977) details Bosavi responses to Christianity in the early years of missionization. His example of spirit mediums who, during seance performances, comment on Christian ideas illustrates the tensions that existed between traditional beliefs and Christian beliefs, two versions of the world coexisting. In some ways, the translation practices discussed in this paper also reflect an initial coexistence, but over time, Christian practices overwhelmed traditional ones, including those of spirit mediums. 11 When speaking to the anthropologists, Bosavis who became Christian said they felt cut off from their pasts and that meanings of the places where memories resided, or were emplaced, were neutralized.

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the present was always about preparing for the future. Their task, to constitute a community based on their moral identity in postapocalyptic time, was realized through a discourse of division, which, located in scripture, was conveyed through tropes of warfare and other common Christian themes of opposition. Needing signs of evangelical progress, the missionaries looked for the performance of acts of free will that signified Christian beliefs. In a prayer letter sent to their Australian supporters, they reported that Bosavi Christians had decided not to attend traditional dances, evidence of their change of heart. “It was an opportunity to point out that it is in these vital social matters that the line will be drawn between Christians and “outsiders” and that Christ’s forecast of division for his sake will be inevitable, and some of the cost of being a Christian will have to be counted” (prayer letter, 1973). For this mission, ideas of division were linked to processes of othering, and those who would not conform were labeled “outsiders”; the benefits of a Christian future outweighed any cultural or societal consequences of such division in the present.12 Like many missions in Papua New Guinea, the APCM paid little attention to local or cultural realities of geographical boundaries.13 With government support, the missionaries cleared the land and established a mission station, naming it with the local place name. The station, however, was a new type of space, a religious and social center with authorities (missionaries) who controlled the land, enabling and prohibiting the circulation of people, objects, and information about it. The missionaries determined what activities could occur and what languages were used (Tok Pisin, English, and Bosavi). They defined themselves and the station as the center (misini us) from which their everyday activities and moral stances were transmitted through training pastors and teaching Bible school. Bosavi pastors learned these new spatial categories, transforming and extending them and others into social and moral designations in villages. Language choice was central to how the missionaries communicated their ideas and those in scripture to members of this nonliterate society. In contrast to their view of local cultural practices as obstacles to conversion, like most 12 They did express concern about marriage practices, fearing that Christian men might marry non-Christian women, compromising the groom (prayer letter, September 1985). 13 At the end of the nineteenth century, in an effort to avoid conflict among missions seeking “unevangelized fields,” “spheres of influence” were established, though over time, many missions, including the UFM, circumvented or ignored these agreements (Trompf 1991:148–149).

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Protestant missions, they regarded vernacular languages as critical to proselytizing and conversion (e.g., Handman 2007). APCM missionary-linguist Murray Rule described the vernacular as “the shrine of the people’s soul” (1977:1341), evoking Edwin W. Smith’s 1929 book on Bible translation, which articulated the language ideology that underlies many Protestant mission and Bible translation projects (Summer Institute of Linguistics, Wycliff).14 Smith viewed vernacular language as a shrine holding something sacred, as the path to the heart, and deeply linked to cultural practices. He expected missionaries to be fluent in the local vernacular so as to convey the most important message, that of the Bible, as well as to be able to compile dictionaries and grammars to create vernacular literacy materials. The Bosavi missionaries did not match this ideal. Fluent in Tok Pisin, however, they used it to communicate with the few Bosavi men who could understand it. Their goal was rapid conversion, and while they carried out basic vernacular literacy initiatives (B. B. Schieffelin 2000), they put little effort into written Bible translation. Instead, using the Tok Pisin Bible, Nupela Testamen (1969), they trained local men to become pastors, leaving to them the work of translation, which would be exclusively oral and relatively spontaneous (Tok Pisin to Bosavi). While the missionaries thought of the vernacular as simple, inadequate, and lacking in essential vocabulary, they nonetheless imagined that local pastors literal translations from Tok Pisin into the vernacular would make the meaning of the Gospel transparent and accessible.15 Not viewing linguistic and cultural practices as interconnected semiotic systems, they assumed that detaching cultural meanings from linguistic codes was relatively straightforward.16

14 Missionary-linguist Edwin W. Smith worked in southern Africa (1902–1915) and viewed linguistic and cultural practices as interconnected. Smith (1929) writes, “The missionary aims at influencing, not the shallows of a people’s life, but the deepest depths—to touch the springs of conduct, to reach down into the inner-most recesses of their being. There is no path to the heart save the mother-tongue” (43). Prominent in the British and Foreign Bible Society, from 1933 to 1935 he was president of the Royal Anthropological Institute (B. B. Schieffelin, “‘The Shrine of a People’s Soul’: Ideologies of Vernacular Languages,” unpublished manuscript). 15 The UFM/APCM drew selectively on Nida’s (1964) theories of functional equivalency in translation. 16 The possibility that Bosavi people had their own language ideologies was not one that the missionaries could imagine. In addition, that there would be profound differences in the pragmatics of language use across cultures was not something they had ever considered.

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Two decades of missionary activity did little to change their preconceptions or descriptions of Bosavis as a “Stone Age” people living in Satan’s bondage and chaos, a generic collection of witch doctors, cannibals, and headhunters. Their job was to repudiate traditional beliefs and practices, all of which were counter to biblical morality. They required those who wanted to become Christian to do the same and make a complete break with their past, which meant not only separation from but clear rejection of many traditional activities, cultural beliefs, values, and practices. This included dissociating from kin who did not take up Christian ways. In terms of local cultural and social practices, cultural discontinuity was the only acceptable choice, in contrast to the linguistic continuity of the vernacular they required.

Bosavi Shifts from Place to Space

As a consequence of missionization and the totalizing Christian discourse that organized it, Bosavi concepts about place (and named places) as the locus of symbolic meanings and social relationships shifted to Christian ideas about space. Generating new terms and idioms to express these spatial binaries and metaphors from Christian rhetoric and practices resulted in a break with Bosavi customary practices, though within certain domains, continuities were evident. These continuities, sometimes ephemeral, were backgrounded against more substantial reframing and renaming of categories of persons and places that took place through Christian language socialization. In much of Papua New Guinea, everything happens in a named place. In Bosavi, locality and place names served not only as mnemonic anchors for significant ceremonies and events as remembrances of personal experience but also as reference sites of everyday sociality (E. L. Schieffelin 1976). Feld’s (1988, 1996) ethnomusicological research (1970–1990) further elaborated the relationship of Bosavi poetics, sentiment, and place, showing, for example, how the sequential citation of place names in song and lament created maps that memorialized social relationships and their temporalities. While place name sequences were deeply connected to the place where, rather than the time when, people had done things together, as Feld (1996) notes, when talking, singing, or lamenting, “it is striking to notice how quickly and thoroughly a person and a memorable feature of his life are narratively located in a placed space-time” (111).17 For Bosavi people, named places encoded shared memories, 17 B. B. Schieffelin (2007b) examines the centrality of place in children’s earliest language socialization activities.

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and people’s notions of the social and symbolic relevance of their places in the bush differentiated them from each other and their neighbors, as well as the larger outside Christian world. Language and place were also linked.18 One’s dialect conveyed one’s mother’s identity, or the place of the person who raised you, and who you were related to. Given the affective associations inscribed in the vernacular, Smith’s (1929) observation that “the mother tongue is the key which unlocks the door of a people’s heart” (45) provides another well-founded reason for its use in proselytizing. For Bosavi people, the activity of speaking their vernacular offered continuity and an embodied, semiotic indicator of who they were and where they were from. These indexical relations, central to Bosavi sociality and social life more broadly, were deemed not relevant in Bible translation and related literacy activities, as linguistic varieties that signaled one’s local affiliation were literally erased in Christian configurations of Bosavi identity.19 For Bosavi people, however, the lexical changes that were taking place in the vernacular through calquing or loan translations were not locally perceived as “changing” it. In contrast, introduced genres and discursive strategies that emerged as a result of mission and government contact while still in the vernacular were metalinguistically marked as new as they were introduced or new fashions of speaking (B. B. Schieffelin 2008a, 2008b).

Local Responses to the Mission’s Message

In Bosavi, sharing space is like sharing food; both are contexts in which one participates in acts of sociality and reciprocity, enacts affiliation and identity, and exchanges information. It is precisely these social acts and the ways they are remembered that transform “space” into “place” (Casey 1996; Feld 1996). The uptake of Christianity altered patterns of shared spaces through changes in house style and village layout, changes that came to index Christian and non-Christian orientations and identities. Traditional Bosavi villages (60–100 individuals) were composed of a gendersegregated communal longhouse in which all ceremonial and domestic activities took place. In the late 1960s, government patrol officers, claiming reasons 18 19

In Tok Pisin one refers to one’s mother language as tok ples, and people from your place are called wantoks. These remain visible through orthographic struggles that conveyed dialect and thus indexed place distinctions.

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of hygiene but also viewing such longhouses as “primitive,” urged smaller dwellings. Extended families built smaller houses (modeled on the longhouse) along the sides of the village yard, while keeping their places around the fire pits in the longhouse where they cooked, socialized, and slept when they felt like it, which many often did. The mission not only supported this move to smaller family dwellings but also encouraged pastors to adopt Christian lifestyles, resulting in new de facto forms of village social division, which could be seen and heard. Building a church, pastor’s gardens, and house helped constitute one area of the village as Christian space. Instead of traditional bush material construction, the pastor’s house was constructed with nails and used sawn timber for windows and a door, which had a lock. In contrast to low interior dividers in longhouses over which husbands and wives could see each other as they cooked or slept around their fire pits, woven bamboo walls created separate rooms for cooking, socializing, and sleeping. Over time, other Christians followed suit, and with new Christian-style dwellings in proximity, village layout was rearranged, affecting the organization of everyday sociality and the types of talk one heard in each area. In Christian spaces, one was supposed to talk quietly, pray, or sing hymns. Loud or angry words, gossip, and profanity (among other verbal acts) were forbidden. The missionaries strongly encouraged Christians to give up their places in the longhouse so they would not participate in or overhear negatively evaluated activities. Before mission contact, kinship and gender shaped social interactions and social differences (age, gender, marital status, etc.) were marked and regulated by verbal and nonverbal practices. For example, observing traditional taboos (e.g., food, cross-gender contact, and verbal and visual in-law avoidance) not only indexed social status but also spatially determined who could interact and share with whom. Christians, who were expected to give up traditional taboos, also experienced changes in communication patterns as well as other aspects of sociality. In so doing, they constituted new categories of similarity and continuity made visible in their village and household configurations, as well as creating new forms of division and discontinuity clearly marked through new visual and verbal practices meant to distinguish Christian spaces from non-Christian places. Mission rhetoric aimed to establish the primacy of religious affiliation over all other types of social and linguistic identity, and Bosavi pastors drew on what they had learned at the mission station to accomplish this in villages. Taking the missionary’s statement about drawing a line between Christians and outsiders literally, they positioned themselves as the ‘center’ or on the

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‘inside’ us,20 using the phrase ‘Christian center’ geleso us, and designated nonChristians as living ‘to the side’ or on the periphery ha:la:ya. Translating the Christian concepts of division and exclusion into the local vernacular had far-reaching discursive and practical consequences; for example, received categories of community membership or kinship could change, and did. The spatial terms us ‘center’ and ha:la:ya ‘periphery’ became iconically linked and semiotically extended to new social binaries with shifting membership. Bosavi people interested in becoming Christians adopted these new labels to index social differentiation based on religious affiliation. Christians, claiming superiority over those “to the side,” used these terms to reposition themselves and grant themselves authority over their non-Christian relatives. There was virtually no contestation of this newly named hierarchy by nonChristians in this previously egalitarian society.21 As they emerged, these new social categories were used across speech contexts. Example 1 illustrates their potency. It is taken from a 1976 audiocassette letter initiated by Hasili, an unmarried man who had been among the first Bosavis involved in the church. Not literate, he asked me to record and play the cassette to his relatives, Degelo and Osolowa, the first Christian couple from Bosavi to attend a 3-year pastor training school in Lae, and whom I had planned to visit. He informs them that their money, which he had been keeping, has been stolen along with his own, and also reports the probable cause for the theft: the discovery of his affair with Osolowa’s sister, his cousin. Previously ‘Christian center’ geleso: us, he now describes himself as ‘gone to the side’ ha:la:ya ane and banned from the church for 2 years. Degelo’s audio recorded response to Hasili illustrates the use of these concepts. Example 1 1. misini usami godeya: ene wi wa:la iliki I am inside the mission, staying in God’s name 2. ge o:go: mada ha:iten hena lab ge nodo: sedaleob:da: dowo: ko:m you are now really in heathen land, you completely went to Satan’s side

20 21

The concept of center us is found in several key idioms, e.g., nulu usa ‘in the middle of the night’, hena usa ‘in the forest, bush’. This is connected to expressed Bosavi senses of autonomy, underscoring the importance of people making their own choices, ina:li asula:sa:ga:.

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Degelo positions himself ‘inside the mission’ as well as staying ‘in God’s name’, new terms of emplacement. While Hasili had referred to himself as ‘to the side’ ha:la:ya, as part of his new moral geography based on Christian rhetoric, Degelo (line 2) extends the difference between Hasili and himself. He relocates Hasili even further out, reassigning him to a cosmic realm, ‘heathen land’, and ‘Satan’s side’, locations that connote death. As Hasili is living in Bosavi, this reference to ‘heathen land’ can also refer to the village. Degelo goes on to assert that even if the money is found, he wants none of it, as he is no longer interested in “things of the earth,” another important Christian category discussed below. Misini usa ‘inside the mission’ indexed everything that the bush was not. It was orderly, scheduled, and modern, and what everyone did was visible and public. A physical space, more importantly, it was a moral space. The missionaries wanted villages to be like that too and they, along with local pastors, told people to stay in the village, attend church, and be seen. In one 1984 sermon, the local pastor singled out and chastised Tulinei, an older, non-Christian man, for being ‘far away’ ko:na: from the village, not ‘close by’ mo:uwo:. Because he was off in the bush (a location with a negative moral evaluation for Christians), he did not hear the medical orderly call out for him to treat his sore leg. The pastor made it clear to Tulinei, and everyone else in church, that being in the wrong place means you cannot hear and thus cannot be healed, rhetoric that, when used by a pastor, directly linked physical to moral healing. Pastors repeatedly warned people that it was not enough to be in the correct physical space, the village, but one had to actively inhabit the correct moral space, the church.

“Things of the Earth”

As part of traditional cultural cosmology, Bosavi people had relationships with different types of spirits who were positioned along a vertical axis. The spirits of the dead (ane mama ‘gone reflection’) primarily lived above (iwalu) them in the treetops as birds,22 and people lived on the ground or earth (hena). Local pastors used this vertical spatial relationship to reframe how people were supposed to think about themselves in relation to a new Christian iconography. Discarding traditional beliefs about the ane mama, they positioned God and Jesus high up (iwalu), emphasizing that they are always above everyone. People were located on the ground or earth (hena), and Bosavi pastors designated them as henfelo: kalu (literally ‘person of the earth’). This not only emphasized 22 See E. L. Schieffelin 1976:212–215; Feld 2013 (1982):30–31, 45.

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the difference but also expressed the importance of people literally looking up to Jesus and God and taking a submissive stance. While seemingly unremarkable, in sermons and through these idioms pastors resignified the value of the ground or earth and bush more generally, assigning them a negative meaning that would participate in a new binary opposition, earthly/non-earthly. The Christian idiom ‘things of the earth’ hen felo:wa: no: keligo:, which could be taken as an abstract Christian concept, was taken literally by many to refer to a broad category of things and desires and for this mission included money and other commodities said to be tainted.23 Those who wanted to become Christian were told to avoid all ‘things of the earth’. Furthermore, in the broad outlines of the apocalyptic narrative of the endtimes with its division between believers and nonbelievers, not only was the earth depicted as a place of chaos but pastors established a new social category based on this cosmological spatial division: ‘those who are left on the earth’ hen felo:wa:no: ta:fa:no: ha:na:ib and those who were not.24 This social division stood in contrast to the pre-Christian idea that at death, everyone more or less stayed together in the same realm of the mirror world. The idiom “things of the earth” was also conflated with hena usa ‘bush deep in the land’ or the forest, and Christian associations of the bush with its negative moral connotations were opposed to being inside a Christian space, which was explicitly designated as positive. For example, in her response to Hasili’s 1976 cassette letter, Osolowa (Degelo’s wife) draws on this opposition to make her point; her lexical switch to the Tok Pisin term bus ‘bush’ further emphasizes her negative stance. Example 2 niyo: mogago: henamima ko:lo: bus amima ko:lo; niyo: mada geleso: usa, nafa usa so:l we are not in a bad land, not in the ‘bush’; we are inside a Christian space, inside a good space

New Social Categories for Becoming a Christian

As part of the mandate that they distance themselves from their past, Bosavi Christians developed ways of speaking to distinguish categories of ideas and 23 Hen felo: ‘earth’ from hen ‘ground’, felo: (past tense felema ‘open up, roll out’). Robbins (2006) also notes the salience of “things of this ground” among Urapmin Christians. 24 In Bosavi Christian rhetoric, heaven was infrequently mentioned, in contrast to talk about death, which is opposed to not dying.

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things that they rejected from those that they desired. They not only expressed their affirmation of discontinuity with their past but vigorously aligned themselves with Christian stances and activities. In conversations they bracketed practices and beliefs that they rejected as “what their fathers knew/did,” thus making public and explicit that they were no longer relevant or valuable to their own subjectivities. For example, when talking about hymns, they pointedly remarked that hymns were “not one’s father’s songs” (gisalo).25 These expressions, drawing on kinship and generation, indexed the requisite opposition and discontinuity required for expressed membership in the Christian community. Bosavi Christians continued to use their vernacular but also reconfigured it through constant references to Christian concepts as a way of expressing their new identity. Christians also developed new terms to designate what they identified as three stages of becoming a Christian, which they also used as additional categories of social differentiation. The first category, wiyo: dife ‘name put down’, referred to a public act of writing one’s name (or more usually, having the pastor write one’s name) in the local church registry. This not only signaled one’s willingness to attend church services and contribute labor to church activities but writing one’s name in a book made it official, permanent, and modern. People self-identified using this term as a reason for not participating in nonChristian activities, (e.g., anything related to traditional ceremonial activities, smoking tobacco). Pastors said that while God could see this book, what really mattered was baptism and continued commitment. One could be wiyo: dife for a long time, and many were. The second stage, geleso moso ‘plain or empty Christian’, referred to people who attended church and participated in Bible study, but were not yet baptized. Combining the term for Christian (geleso) with the term moso, which often modified words for food, for example, man moso ‘plain or empty sago without greens, meat’, it meant that something desired was missing. People often identified as geleso moso for years before they were baptized. The third term, ho:na to:lolo: ‘pushed down in the water’, referred to baptized Christians who used this label to discursively position themselves at the end point along a continuum of Christianization.

25

Making efforts to link local Christians to larger social units, local pastors sometimes referred to the fact that Papua New Guinea calls itself a Christian country and that they were part of the Evangelical Church of Papua New Guinea. These constructs, however, were largely illusory in terms of local experiences, as no national and very little provincial government presence was evident and larger polities were not understood.

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These terms created hierarchical categories of Christian affiliation and recognition and, along with other phrases, were used to discursively mark and assert Christian identities. Example 3 is from a 1976 audiocassette letter exchanged by two Christian Bosavi men, Degelo (who was enrolled in pastor training in Lae) and Kulu, an unmarried man living in Bosavi. Kulu had sent news of his baptism, and what follows is my transcript of Degelo’s audio taped response to him. Example 3 1. ne ho:na to:lolo: ge ha:lu geleso kalu dowo: I was baptized, you were just becoming a Christian 2. o:go: mada ge ha:la:doba: elen ko:sega ya:sa:ga: nelo:wa doma:miyo:…. you were on the side but now you are staying with me 3. mo: ge ha:la:ya elenba kosega hedele ge ho:namiyo: se mo: to:lolo: a:namiyo: niyo:liya:yo: ha:lu ele o:ngo:wo: difa:ya sen no, you were not really to the side, but because you had not yet been baptized it was like there was a small boundary marker between us 4. a:la:fo:ko:sega o:go: ge ta:nufo:miyo: nelo:wamiyo: ko:lo:—mada sagalo: a:la: so:lo:l—a:la:fo:ko:lo:—mada hedele kobale mada— so now you have crossed over to where I am, I am saying that I am really happy so really 5. o:go: ge mada ho:na to:lolo: ko:m a:la:fo:ko:lo: made ne sagalab hedele nilo:doba:da: dowo: nelo:lo:ba:da: doma:miyo: lo:do: a:la: asula:sa:ga; now that you are finally baptized I am really happy you were on our side, you are obviously on my side I see so thinking like that 6. o:go: na:no: imilisi bowo: o nowo: imilisi dowo: imilisi dowo:lo:do: a:la: asula:sa:ga: mada o:m so:lo:l— now we are like we suck from the same breast, or have the same mother, same father, so thinking like that I am saying thank you Degelo’s response not only conveys a certain amount of Christian competition between the two men, both of whom had been among the first Bosavis to have extensive contact with native pastors and the Australian missionaries, but it is also an example of a new rhetorical style articulating difference. Degelo, one of the first local pastors, while pleased with this news, nonetheless reminds Kulu that they were not always the same. Using new Christian categories of difference (line 1), he refers to himself as already baptized when Kulu was just becoming a Christian (literally ‘a little bit Christian’). He uses the binary images of Christian space, telling Kulu (line 2) that he had been “on the side,” but has now crossed over to the center, where Degelo is; as he puts it, “You are staying

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with me.” Degelo (line 3) then reformulates his previous assertion about Kulu being ‘on the side’, making explicit how the difference felt to him. Using the word for a boundary marker (ele) that distinguishes one person’s garden or land from another’s (always a named place), he proposes that Kulu’s baptism has not only removed this “boundary marker,” that is, their difference, but Kulu now shares Degelo’s space in the Christian center/periphery dichotomy, one that has no place name. Positioning himself (and Christianity) in the center, Degelo (line 4) describes Kulu as having crossed over to where he is, additionally elaborating (line 5) that it is “our” (plural) side, (the side of the Christians), then repeating his assertion that it is his, “my” (singular) side. From Degelo’s Christian framework, it is all about taking sides, ones that are in opposition to and in competition with each other, and his response articulates this new way of thinking about who they are. Where they are is one way of defining who they are, though the spatial domain that Degelo outlines is far from the traditional Bosavi sense of place, which indexed identity from shared, named places and emplaced experiences. Degelo’s last utterance (line 6) further emphasizes their relatedness as Christians and, by implication, their difference from non-Christians. Using kinship terms, Degelo invokes images of shared siblingship as he reassigns Kulu, his cross-cousin, to the category of brother. He portrays them as two children not only drinking from the same breast (same mother) but as also having the same father. Shared blood is the closest one can get, and through language, Degelo creates a new fictive social relationship of equality, evoking kinship, and, without mentioning it, place.26 Conclusions This paper offers a perspective from linguistic anthropology as a contribution to understanding Christianization, in particular, how various processes and dynamics of continuity and discontinuity can be viewed and theorized. Taking the view that multiple interests and competing ideologies are always at play in such contact settings, the focus has been on how one type of Protestant mission—a fundamentalist one—viewed culture and language, and its stance toward each, with regard to accomplishing the desired transformation— conversion—of Bosavi people. Mission ideology held that Bosavi culture and 26 One is reminded here of Weber’s (1993 [1922]) notion that members “set the coreligionist in the place of the fellow clansmen” (211). In Bosavi one creates closer kinship relationships.

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language were distinct and independent entities and could be easily separated and evaluated in different ways. In fact, in order to accomplish their goals, they had to be. Thus, from this mission’s perspective, to become Christian meant achieving a cultural break or rupture (discontinuity), but to do so required linguistic continuity, the use of the vernacular language. Bosavis categorized cultural practices prohibited by the mission as a discrete set of taboos (mugu). Those desiring to convert as well as those already baptized were expected to observe them without modification. This stood in contrast to how Bosavis treated and talked about their vernacular: language was viewed as relatively malleable and could be adapted through linguistic innovations to create a Christian language variety or register. There were even ways to get around the prohibition of particular taboo words and phrases. With local pastors translating Christian concepts from Tok Pisin into their vernacular, along with their own linguistic and cultural ideas, linguistic innovations did not challenge local language ideology since Bosavis had historically incorporated lexical items and song texts from other places into their verbal practices.27 The development of a new Christian vernacular language variety (misini to) was just more systematic, extensive, and purposeful than anything that had been previously experienced, and written Tok Pisin (Nupela Testamen) which provided the source, had its own local prestige. Audio recordings, transcriptions, and ethnographic analyses of the development of these new discursive practices over 20 years offer evidence of how Bosavis themselves were actively involved in these processes of change as they worked at understanding, translating, making sense of a different discursive universe through their own interpretive procedures, reshaping their language while staying close to the literal meanings of Tok Pisin as dictated by this mission’s literalist tradition. While many of the details are particular to Bosavi given its history and trajectory of missionization, I would argue that linguistic innovations and the emergence of new social categories can be documented in any context of dynamic and rapid change, even when those innovations are interactionally produced and potentially ephemeral. Such transformations, however, are usually out of the awareness of speakers, and not part of a narrative of conversion or cultural change. These and other textual and interactional materials show that depending on whose perspective is foregrounded (mission, local missionizers, anthropologist), as well as what practices and 27

Without an ideology of linguistic purism, speakers historically incorporated new words and ideas into their language when there was a reason to do so. Feld (2013 [1982]) describes the incorporation of song texts and ceremonies from other areas into Bosavi traditional practices.

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ideologies are foregrounded (linguistic, cultural), questions of continuity and discontinuity become complexly interwoven and dynamic. While one domain might be changing, others might stay more or less the same, at least according to local perceptions.28 In contrast to maintaining their local vernacular,29 the meanings and importance of place and place names have rapidly shifted from ones that were locally produced and central to senses of self and memories to introduced Christian notions of space. We see a clear case of discontinuity in this domain, and this has had a profound impact on cultural and social life. This dis-placement, a consequence of APCM rhetoric, is not unique to Bosavi and is occurring with variations throughout Papua New Guinea. As Robbins (2006) has argued, there is a great deal to learn from examining a single case in detailed and locally significant terms in order to understand the various ways in which different societies give meaning to places and maintain social and symbolic connections to them but also to track how they give up strongly felt associations that define their very sense of who they are, in some cases, rather suddenly.30 Similar to the Urapmin case described by Robbins, Christianity has also provided Bosavis with a new set of conceptual categories and ritual means to dissociate themselves from their senses of place. In Bosavi what is salient is the promise of joining an imagined Christian community of global proportions that is not grounded or emplaced, but one based on membership as a result of choice, difference, division: those who converted and those who did not. In Bosavi, as these new conceptual categories were translated into the vernacular 28

The “starting” point of a particular time frame is also a factor when examining change of any type, even when working in a relatively small-scale society without written records or a literate tradition. 29 Bosavi people do not describe their language as changing or different. Schieffelin and Feld (1998), however, document linguistic innovation, addition, and loss attributable to the influence of Tok Pisin loan translations as well as new styles of speaking with pragmatic implications. 30 While Urapmin share many similarities with Bosavi, there are also important differences, especially with regard to the notion of territoriality, local ground spirits, opportunities for development, and the type of missionization that occurred. Dundon (2012) offers another perspective on ideas about place, spatial transformation, and conversion among the Gogodala, who were missionized by the UFM in the early 1930s, 40 years before missionization in Bosavi. Elaborating Robbins’s notion of continuity, she claims that Gogodala read their landscapes for evidence of their ancestral culture’s deep connection to Christianity. In addition, she views acts of emplacement that included clearing the ground, abandoning traditional longhouses for small family dwellings, and inscribing these places with new Christian significance as central to missionary success. This was not the case in Bosavi, but Dundon’s work is suggestive of what can happen over successive generations of Christian experience.

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and became part of local Christian discursive practice, they were well on their way to becoming “received categories” that would shape social life and relationships. Through vernacular usage, these discursive practices would become naturalized, thought of as the way things are, or at least for Christians, the way they say they are. By saying it enough times, Christians hoped to produce a new social reality and set the terms of engagement, which through the late 1980s, they were able to do. Changing local senses of time, and reorganizing villages into Christian and non-Christian space helped produce material and embodied senses of this new regime. In 1990, however, the Australian missionaries decided to leave Bosavi. Frustrated by their sense that many Bosavis could not stay “inside the mission” and fell “to the side,” their prayer letters expose their doubts that Bosavi Christians could be included in their global Christian community. As unanticipated outside opportunities to earn money appeared from government, development, and resource extraction projects, many young men left Bosavi seeking “things of the earth.” It remains to be seen how Bosavis, having been through intensive missionization, manage not only to find their place but also to create a coherent sense of who they are in a rapidly changing social world. Acknowledgments Thanks are offered to the National Science Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research for fieldwork support in Bosavi; to the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowships, and New York University’s Humanities Initiative for the time necessary to think about this project; and to Joel Robbins, wantok tru tru. References Cited Bandak, Andreas. 2014. Of refrains and rhythms in contemporary Damascus: urban space and Christian-Muslim coexistence. Current Anthropology 55(suppl. 10): S248–S261. Casey, Edward S. 1993. Getting back into place. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Casey, Edward S. 1996. How to get from space to place in a fairly short stretch of time. In Senses of place. Steven Feld and Keith Basso, eds. Pp. 13–52. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research.

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Cresswell, Tim. 2004. Place: a short introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Davies, W. D. 1994. The Gospel and the land. Sheffield: Sheffield University Press. Dundon, Alison. 2012. The gateway to the Fly: Christianity, continuity, and spaces of conversion in Papua New Guinea. In Flows of faith: religious reach and community in Asia and the Pacific. Lenore Manderson, Wendy Smith, Matt Tomlinson, eds. Pp. 143–159. Dordrecht: Springer. Feld, Steven. 1988. Aesthetics as iconicity of style, or ‘lift-up-over-sounding’: getting into the Kaluli groove. Yearbook for Traditional Music 20:74–113. Feld, Steven. 1996. Waterfalls of song: an acoustemology of place resounding in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea. In Senses of place. Steven Feld and Keith Basso, eds. Pp. 91–135. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research. Feld, Steven. 2013 (1982). Sound and sentiment: birds, weeping, poetics, and song in Kaluli expression. 3rd edition. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Feld, Steven, and Keith Basso, eds. 1996. Senses of place. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research. Gieryn, Thomas F. 2000. A space for place in sociology. Annual Review of Sociology 26:463–496. Handman, Courtney. 2007. Speaking to the soul. In Consequences of contact: language ideologies and sociocultural transformations in Pacific societies. Miki Makihara and Bambi B. Schieffelin, eds. Pp. 166–188. New York: Oxford University Press. Handman, Courtney. 2010. Events of translation: intertextuality and Christian ethnotheologies of change among the Guhu-Samane, Papua New Guinea. American Anthropologist 12(4):576–588. Harding, Susan F. 2000. The book of Jerry Falwell: fundamentalist language and politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. LiPuma, Edward. 2000. Encompassing others: the magic of modernity in Melanesia. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Nida, Eugene. 1964. Toward a science of translating. Leiden: Brill. Nupela Testamen. 1969. Port Moresby: Bible Society of Papua New Guinea. Ochs, Elinor, and Bambi B. Schieffelin. 1984. Language acquisition and socialization: three developmental stories and their acquisition. In Culture theory: essays on mind, self, and emotion. Rick Shweder and Robert LeVine, eds. Pp. 276–230. New York: Cambridge University Press. Robbins, Joel. 2003. On the paradoxes of global Pentecostalism and the perils of continuity thinking. Religion 33(3):221–231. Robbins, Joel. 2004. Becoming sinners: Christianity and moral torment in a Papua New Guinea society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Robbins, Joel. 2006. On giving ground: globalization, religion and territorial detachment in a Papua New Guinea society. In Territoriality and conflict in the age

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of globalization. M. Kahler and B. Walter, eds. Pp. 62–84. New York: Cambridge University Press. Robbins, Joel. 2007. Continuity thinking and the problem of Christian culture: belief, time and the anthropology of Christianity. Current Anthropology 48(1):5–38. Rule, Murray. 1977. Institutional framework of language study: the Asia Pacific Christian mission. In Language, culture and society and the modern world. Fascicle 2: New Guinea Area Languages and Language Study, vol. 3. S. A. Wurm, ed. Pp. 1341–1344. Canberra: Australian National University. Sack, Robert D. 1986. Human territoriality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sapir, Edward. 1958 (1929). The status of linguistics as a science. In Selected writings of Edward Sapir in language, culture, and personality. David G. Mandelbaum, ed. Pp. 160–166. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schieffelin, Bambi B. 1990. The give and take of everyday life: language socialization of Kaluli children. New York: Cambridge University Press. Schieffelin, Bambi B. 2000. Introducing Kaluli literacy. In Regimes of value. Paul Kroskrity, ed. Pp. 293–327. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research. Schieffelin, Bambi B. 2002. Marking time: the dichotomizing discourse of multiple temporalities. Current Anthropology 43(suppl. 4): S5–17. Schieffelin, Bambi B. 2007a. Found in translating: reflexive language across time and texts in Bosavi, PNG. In Consequences of contact: language ideologies and sociocultural transformations in Pacific societies. Miki Makihara and Bambi B. Schieffelin, eds. Pp. 140–165. New York: Oxford University Press. Schieffelin, Bambi B. 2007b. Langage et lieu dans l’univers de l’enfance. Anthropologie et Societies 31(1):15–37. Schieffelin, Bambi B. 2008a. Speaking only your own mind: reflections on talk, gossip, and intentionality in Bosavi (PNG). Anthropological Quarterly 81(2):431–441. Schieffelin, Bambi B. 2008b. Tok bokis, tok piksa: translating parables in Papua New Guinea. In Social lives in language—sociolinguistics and multilingual speech communities. Miriam Meyerhoff and Naomi Nagy, eds. Pp. 111–134. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Schieffelin, Bambi B., and Steven Feld. 1998. Bosavi-English-Tok Pisin dictionary. Pacific Linguistics, Series C, vol. 153. Canberra: Research School of Pacific Studies, ANU. Schieffelin, Edward L. 1976. The sorrow of the lonely and the burning of the dancers. New York: St. Martin’s. Schieffelin, Edward L. 1977. The unseen influence: tranced mediums as historical innovators. Journal of the Société des Oceanistes 33(56–57):169–178. Schieffelin, Edward L. 1981. Evangelical rhetoric and the transformation of traditional culture in Papua New Guinea. Comparative Studies in Society and History 23(1): 150–156.

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Schieffelin, Edward L., and Robert Crittenden. 1991. Like people you see in a dream: first contact in six Papuan societies. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Smith, Edwin W. 1929. The shrine of a people’s soul. London: Edinburgh House. Trompf, Garry W. 1991. Melanesian religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weber, Max. 1993 (1922). Sociology of religion. Boston: Beacon. Weymouth, Ross. 1978. The Gogodala society in Papua and the Unevangelized Fields Mission, 1890–1977. PhD dissertation, Flinders University of Australia. Whorf, Benjamin L. 1956. Language, thought, and reality. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Exploring Nineteenth-Century Haida Translations of the New Testament Marcus Tomalin

Missions and Language

During the past twenty years or so, there has been a resurgence of interest in the sermons, commentaries, and scripture translations that were produced by successive generations of missionaries from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. Sometimes motivated by a desire to challenge the conviction that missionary activity invariably advocated a form of cultural supremacy, much of the recent research has sought to reveal the true complexity and diversity of the movement. For instance, David Bebbington has repeatedly discouraged a passive acceptance of the naïve belief that missions were merely “the ideological arm of territorial expansion,” noting in particular that (during the nineteenth century) […] there was no simple correlation between missions and empire. Sometimes, as in northern Nigeria at the end of the century, the British authorities discouraged evangelistic effort since it might cause public disorder. Missionaries themselves were often wary of the colonial authorities because they might do as much to corrupt the peoples under their care as to protect them. Within British territory, the advance of evangelical bodies usually owed little or nothing to government patronage, which in a formal sense had all but disappeared by the middle of the century. […] Consequently, the relationship between missions and empire is much more ambiguous than it is usually supposed to be. Evangelicals were by no means consistent apologists for painting the map red.1

Source: Tomalin, M., “Exploring Nineteenth-Century Haida Translations of the New Testament,” Journal of Religious History 35.1 (2011): pp. 43–71. Published by John Wiley and Sons. © 2011 The Author, © 2011 Religious History Association. 1 David Bebbington, The Dominance of Evangelicalism: The Age of Spurgeon and Moody (Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 2005), 106–7.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/97890

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Since ambiguities of this kind permeated the socio-political contexts in which many missionaries lived and worked, it is perhaps no surprise that the written texts they produced are often characterised by a beguiling indeterminacy. Recognising this, publications such as Brian Stanley’s The Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1990), Robert Bickers’ and Rosemary Seton’s (eds.) Missionary Encounters: Sources and Issues (1996), David Chidester’s Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (1997), and R. S. Sugirtharajah’s The Bible and Empire: Postcolonial Explorations (2005) have forced cultural historians and theologians alike to reconsider the nature of the relationship between mission and empire by destabilising previously conventional beliefs. In a related development, the relatively new academic subdiscipline known as “missionary linguistics” has concentrated particularly upon the language-focused studies produced by the men and women associated with missions of different denominations, and research in this area has shown repeatedly that far from mindlessly imposing conventional Greco-Roman analytical frameworks upon indigenous languages, the missionaries frequently produced bespoke grammatical studies which synthesised techniques from contrasting analytical traditions. By illuminating these sorts of complexities, texts such as Elke Nowak’s (ed.) Languages Different in All Their Sounds: Descriptive Approaches to Indigenous Languages of the Americas 1500 to 1850 (1999) and the Missionary Linguistics volumes that form part of the John Benjamins Studies in the History of the Language Sciences series (2004–2009) have challenged prevailing assumptions, thereby necessitating a profound reassessment of this vast topic.2

2 Studies in the History of the Language Sciences series are: (1) Otto Zwartjes and Even Hovdhaugen, eds, Missionary Linguistics / Lingüística misionera: Selected papers from the First International Conference on Missionary Linguistics, Oslo, 13–16 March 2003, Vol. 106 (Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2004); (2) Otto Zwartjes and Cristina Altman, eds, Missionary Linguistics II / Lingüística misionera II: Orthography and Phonology. Selected papers from the Second International Conference on Missionary Linguistics, São Paulo, 10–13 March 2004, Vol. 109 (Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2005); (3) Otto Zwartjes, Gregory James and Emilio Ridruejo, eds, Missionary Linguistics III / Lingüística misionera III: Morphology and Syntax Selected papers from the Third and Fourth International Conferences on Missionary Linguistics, Hong Kong/Macau, 12–15 March 2005, Valladolid, 8–11 March 2006, Vol. 111 (Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2007); and (4) Otto Zwartjes, Ramón Arzápalo Marín and Thomas C. Smith-Stark, eds., Missionary Linguistics / Lingüística misionaera IV, Lexicography: Selected Papers from the Fifth International

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Prompted in part by this conflux of academic concerns, the present article seeks to contribute to these related research areas by exploring the scripture translations that were produced by the Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionaries who were based on Haida Gwaii (situated off the Northwest Pacific coast of North America) in the late nineteenth century. In particular, the work of William Henry Collison (1847–1922), Charles Harrison (d. 1926), and John Keen (c. 1851–1950) will be discussed. Curiously, although these translations have sometimes been briefly mentioned in previous studies of Haida, they have never been carefully explored. For instance, the prominent linguist Michael Krauss has observed laconically that “[t]he missionary work was poorly spelled and did little to strengthen the position of the language,”3 while in his epochal Haida Syntax (2003) and Haida Dictionary (2005), John Enrico does not include sentences from the Haida translations as examples of attested usage. This apparent neglect has arisen mainly because modern work in Haida linguistics is generally understood to have begun in the late nineteenth century when anthropologists such as Franz Boas (1858–1942) and John Swanton (1873–1958) began to probe the language more systematically. While it is certainly the case that Swanton’s work (in particular) provided an unprecedentedly detailed account of Haida, it is important to remember that the scripture translations published by the CMS missionaries were the first substantial printed texts to be written in the language. Indeed, although the translations cannot and should not be treated in the same way as, say, the elicited renderings of oral narratives that Swanton transcribed, they are valuable documents nonetheless, especially when viewed from a historiographical perspective in the context of North American missionary activity. For instance, as will be shown in this article, rather than being produced in isolation by proselytising Europeans, the translations emerged as a result of extensive consultation with native speakers, and therefore they help to elucidate some of the cultural interactions that characterised missionary contact along the Pacific Northwest Coast. Accordingly, it is worthwhile to try to reconstruct the translation practices used, and this process can involve such basic considerations as determining

Conference on Missionary Linguistics, Mérida, Yucatán, 14–7 March 2007, Vol. 114 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009). 3 Michael Krauss, “Foreword,” in Haida Dictionary, edited by John Enrico (Fairbanks, Alaska: Alaska Native Language Center and Sealaska Heritage Institute, 2005), vi.

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whether a given missionary took the Greek text, the King James Version (KJV), or the newly available Revised Version (RV) as the primary source material— or whether a number of different sources were used. Similarly, it is helpful to establish whether a single Haida speaker assisted the missionaries, or whether groups of native speakers were consulted while the translations were being prepared. In addition to practical concerns such as these, it is possible also to examine the way in which specific vocabulary items were rendered into Haida, especially those words and phrases that are inextricably rooted in a Judeo-Christian socio-political and religious worldview. When topics such as these are considered, it soon becomes apparent that the Haida scripture translations inevitably illuminate the manner in which Western ideas were converted into a form that was intended to make them accessible to the indigenous communities living on Haida Gwaii. The above are just a few of the issues that await consideration, and the current article will seek to initiate an exploration of such topics. Before commencing a focused analysis of the translations themselves, though, it is necessary first to say something about the Haida communities and the CMS missionaries who encountered each other in the late nineteenth century.

Haida and the Masset Mission Station

The Haida language is spoken on Haida Gwaii, an archipelago off the west coast of Canada, and in the southern Prince of Wales and Dall Islands in Alaska.4 It is currently classified as being an “endangered” language, and recent estimates suggest that only a handful of people now speak it as their mother tongue.5 Perhaps as a result of its precarious position in modern North America, in the past few decades there has been a noticeable revival of interest in both the language and the (oral) literature of the Haida people, and this renewal has been predominantly inspired by the work of several individuals. For instance, since the 1970s, Enrico has sustained an ambitious research programme that has focused on many aspects of Haida linguistics, and his authoritative publications have provided an incomparably detailed analysis of the language. In addition, 4 This archipelago was formally known as “the Queen Charlotte Islands.” The two main islands are Graham Island (to the North) and Morseby Island (to the South). 5 For a relatively recent detailed study by Indian and North Affairs Canada, see http://www .aincinac.gc.ca/pr/ra/fgg/via_e.html.

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several recent volumes, such as Robert Bringhurst’s Haida-related texts, have sought to elucidate the power and artistry of traditional Haida story-telling, emphasising in particular the distinctive linguistic structures that were deployed in oral renderings of mythological narratives by master nineteenthcentury poets such as Ghandl (c. 1851–c. 1920) and Skaay (c. 1827–c. 1905).6 Revealingly, Bringhurst’s work has provoked considerable controversy, and Enrico has vehemently criticised the latter’s knowledge and ability. In addition, members of the Haida community were displeased with these publications, and despite Bringhurst’s obvious advocacy of, and enthusiasm for, the pre-missionary Haida traditions, he was accused of appropriating and misunderstanding indigenous culture.7 In some ways, these modern conflicts have their roots in the eighteenth century (at least), since the sustained period of contact between Europeans and Haidas began in 1774 when the Spanish explorer Juan José Pérez Hernández moored of the coast of Haida Gwaii. Although the initial interactions were fleeting, increasing trade along the Pacific Northwest Coast gradually brought more non-natives to the area, and, as a result, during the course of the nineteenth century, smallpox epidemics and migration to nearby emerging economic centres (such as Victoria and Vancouver) reduced the Haida population from around 6,000 in 1835 to around 800 only fifty years later.8 Significantly, although a century of sustained contact with Westerners had resulted in the development of the “Chinook Jargon” (a trade pidgin that was used extensively along the coast), Haida was still the first language of the vast majority 6 The volumes in question are: A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1999); Nine Visits to the Mythworld: Ghandl of the Qayahl Llaanas (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000); and Being in Being: the Collected Works of Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighawaay (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001). 7 For an insight into this important and complex debate, see Enrico’s review of Bringhurst, which was originally published on http://www.bringhurst.net (subsequently removed, but now archived at http://web.archive.org/web/20010124034300/http://www.bringhurst.net/), and Bringhurst’s “Since When Has Culture Been about Genetics?” The Globe and Mail, 22 November, 2000, R3. 8 The population fluctuations of the Haida communities are discussed in some detail in Wilson Duff’s The Indian History of British Columbia: The Impact of the White Man (Victoria: Royal British Columbia Museum, New Edition, 1997), especially Chapter 2; as well as Robert Boyd’s “Demographic History, 1774–1874,” in Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 7, edited by Wayne Suttles (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1990), 135–48; and “Smallpox in the Pacific Northwest: The First Epidemics,” BC Studies 101 (1994): 5–40.

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of the indigenous Haida Gwaii communities in the late nineteenth century. Consequently, when the Irish CMS missionary William Collison arrived in Masset (a small settlement to the north of Graham Island) in November 1876, he knew that he would have to acquire a working knowledge of the language, and fortunately, he seems to have possessed an impressive ability as a linguist. Like his fellow CMS missionaries, he had received focused language training in Latin, Greek, and other Indo-European languages while at the Islington Institute. Although the details of the syllabus seem to have varied from year to year depending upon which individuals were employed to teach the students, it is highly likely that Collison would have encountered standard Greek and Latin textbooks such as G. N. Wright’s The Eton Greek Grammar (1830), and John William Donaldson’s A Complete Latin Grammar for the Use of Learners (1852) and A Complete Greek Grammar for the Use of Students (1862). In addition, given the early involvement of the orientalist Samuel Lee’s (1783–1852) connection with the college, it is certainly possible that his 1827 A Grammar of the Hebrew Language was still in use. Texts such as these would have provided the CMS students with analytical frameworks (such as parts of speech, case systems, verb paradigms, tense and mood categories, and the like) with which they could approach the languages that they encountered in their work abroad. In Collison’s case, though, he also became fluent in Smal’gyax while based at the mission station in Metlakatla, on the Pacific Northwest Coast, and, once in Masset, he necessarily devoted a considerable amount of time to learning Haida.9 As soon as Collison was able to speak Haida with some ease, he produced translations of scriptural and liturgical texts. Sometimes these were carefully prepared, and sometimes they were impromptu. In his 1915 autobiography, In the Wake of the War Canoe, he describes how George Cowhoe, a Haida “chief,” unexpectedly produced a copy of the New Testament that he had been given eighteen years earlier by James Prevost (1810–1891), the captain of H.M.S. Satellite. Collison continues: I took it out of his hand again, and turned to a text I had just been teaching them. It was St. John’s Gospel, the third chapter, and the sixteenth verse. This I read to him first in English, and then in Haida, “Alzeil Sha 9 Collison’s work discussed at length in Marcus Tomalin’s “‘My Close Application to the Language’: William Henry Collison and Nineteenth-Century Haida Linguistics,” BC Studies 155 (2007): 93–128.

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Nung Etlagedas hahada wautliwan il quoyada uan, alzeil Laou’l Keet an swanshung tlak Laou’l ishthian alzeil wautliwan kestho Laou’l yetang, kum 1 goowangshang waigen hininga et shwanung shang laou’l keyiyen.” “Are these words really there?” he asked; “I have had it so long, and yet did not know it, but now I shall learn to read it myself.” And as he carried away his prize with a face beaming with satisfaction. I was reminded of another passage from the inspired word, “Thy words were found, and I did eat them, and Thy word was unto me the joy and rejoicing of my heart.” From that time he became one of my most attentive and persevering pupils.10 The lines that are translated into Haida here are given in the KJV as John 3:16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. Although it will not be discussed in detail here, Collison’s translation certainly merits careful reading. For instance, he uses “Sha Nung Etlagedas” (literally, “the Chief above”) to translate “God” (a Haida phrase that he seems to have introduced himself, possibly adapting an existing expression that was used in the Chinook Jargon) while “loved” is translated using quyaada (“quoyada” in Harrison’s spelling), a verb which can convey a range of meaning including “love; esteem; not want to part with.”11 Details such as these indicate the way in which Collison sought to find points of contact between the source and target languages that he was obliged to utilise, and these sorts of correspondence will be discussed at length later in this article. Although Collison produced numerous Haida translations of scriptural and liturgical texts (both improvised and prepared) during his time on Haida Gwaii, they all remained unpublished, and therefore few have survived, apart from the fragments that were preserved in the CMS Archive. Consequently, the first published translation that appeared under the auspices of the CMS’s

10 11

William Henry Collison, In the Wake of the War Canoe (London: Seeley, Service & Co. Ltd, 1915), 173–4. John Enrico, ed., Haida Dictionary (Fairbank, Alaska: Alaska Native Language Center and Sealaska Heritage Institute, 2005), 1475.

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North Pacific Mission involved the Kwak’wala language rather than Haida. Specifically, in 1882, Alfred Hall (1853–1918), a CMS missionary based at Alert Bay, published a translation of The Gospel According to St. Matthew, Translated into the Qā-gūtl (or Quoquols Language), and this small text set the standard for all similar projects in the region. Crucially, Bishop William Ridley (1836–1911) was convinced that the venture was of considerable importance; he actively encouraged Hall to complete the work, and he became personally involved during the final stages, requesting a copy of the proofs.12 Indeed, Ridley’s close involvement established a precedent: all subsequent translations were submitted to the bishop before potential publishers were contacted. Since Hall’s work was so influential, it is of interest to examine the way in which he created his translation. For instance, although he was directly assisted by “our native teacher” (i.e. William Brotchie), there were subsequent stages of more extensive consultation: Several months have elapsed since I have finished my translation and many hours since have been spent in reading it to the natives and re-vising and re-writing the whole. I believe it to be now a very fair translation.13 Rather than being a product of disconnected isolation, then, the final text of the translation emerged from an elaborate process of interaction and revision. If the above account is trustworthy, then Hall and Brotchie’s initial draft was “read” to other indigenous Kwak’wala speakers who gave feedback concerning the language of the text, and Hall (assisted by Brotchie?) subsequently modified the translation in the light of the comments that had been received. Consequently, in some sense, the final text was produced by the Alert Bay community as a whole rather than by Hall working independently, and this is an important point. As noted earlier, it is sometimes implied that missionaries crudely forced linguistic and ideological structures upon the indigenous peoples they encountered. While this kind of imposition certainly occurred from time to time, it was perhaps not the most prevalent form of interaction, and, as this article will demonstrate, collaboration of the kind detailed in Hall’s letters was much more typical, at least in the context of the CMS North Pacific Mission. Far from being merely academic exercises, it is clear that the published Kwak’wala translations provided a practical means of instruction for Hall’s parishioners—a fact that insinuates the evangelical conviction, widespread at 12 CMS Archive G2C1O/1881/18. 13 CMS Archive G2C1O/1881/17.

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the time, that scripture should be accessible to native speakers in their own language. In a letter written on 19 March 1883, for example, Hall noted that By post we received 10 copies of St Matthew and already several children in our school are partially able to read it. It is pleasing to see the children in our house take up this book in their leisure and spell out the word.14 So, Hall’s translations were read during “leisure” periods, and it is of interest that at this stage in the Alert Bay mission, he was still encouraging the children in his care to read texts in Kwak’wala, since this was a convention that would alter later in the century when English became the dominant language of education.15 Indeed, Hall went on to publish several further scripture translations in Kwak’wala, and his industry inspired other missionaries working along the North Pacific Rim. In particular, the CMS agents based on Haida Gwaii were keen to ensure that the Haida communities were able to have similar access to the Bible, and the various translation projects for which they were responsible can be seen to have been directly inspired by Hall’s labours. The importance accorded to the task of translation by the Masset missionaries is apparent in the numerous documents preserved in the CMS Archive. For instance, when Harrison arrived on Haida Gwaii in March 1883, and he started to focus on various translation projects almost as soon as he had acquired a working knowledge of the language. Consequently, by 6 March 1885, he had produced “a manual in Hidah on the O.T. [Old Testament] characters” as well as “a translation of the Morning and Evening Service with part of the Communion Service.”16 Despite the turmoil caused by the accidental burning down of the Masset Mission House in 1885 (the fire was attributed to a faulty stove), he continued with his programme of translations, and therefore, by January 1886, he could present an even longer list of texts that now existed in Haida: This winter I have written some short lessons on the O.T. characters, also a Dictionary and easy lessons in the Haidā language. I have also translated into the Haidā language

14 CMS Archive G1C2O/1883/24. 15 This shift away from indigenous languages towards English is briefly discussed in John Enrico, Haida Syntax, Vol. 1 (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 6–7. 16 CMS Archive G2C1O/1885/25.

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Morning Prayer Evening Prayer Litany Prayer for all conditions of men General Thanksgiving Communion Service Publick Baptism of Infants Baptism of such as are of Riper years Order of Confirmation Solemnization of Matrimony The Burial of the Dead The Churching of Women.17 Harrison sent copies of all these translations to the CMS and started to tackle the more onerous task of translating the Gospels. When he received no reply though, he wrote again, asking the CMS for an update, and mentioning that “I hope to send you the translations of the Gospels of S. Matthew and S. Mark.”18 This suggests that he was planning to produce translations of the Gospels in their canonical order (i.e. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John). Although the CMS made no immediate moves to publish his existing Haida translations, Harrison went ahead with his plan to produce a Haida version of Matthew, and his working method can (to an extent) be reconstructed. Significantly, like Hall before him, he wisely ensured that his translations were subjected to extensive consideration involving a range of native speakers. Indeed, he seems to have worked even more closely with Haida informants than Hall did with native speakers of Kwak’wala, and an 1889 “Annual Letter” to the CMS sets the scene: During the past winter I have conducted daily Bible-class for the young men and the women, and we have read the first fourteen chapters of St. Matthew’s Gospel, and translated the whole into the Hydah language. The members of this class were then allowed to make comments on any passage read, and to ask questions.19

17 CMS Archive G1G2/01886/33. 18 CMS Archive G2C1O/1887/66. 19 Church Missionary Society Extracts from the Annual Letters of the Missions for 1889–1990 (London: Seeley & Co. Ltd., 1910), 79.

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So, a translation of the first fourteen chapters (at least) of Matthew’s Gospel was produced in conjunction with the (male and female) members of the daily Bible class. It is likely that the participants began by considering a verse (in English, from the KJV?) before translating it into Haida, with one person proposing an initial rendering and other people commenting and correcting, and (presumably) with Harrison writing down the final agreed version in order eventually to accumulate a complete translation. Alternatively, though, following Hall’s approach, Harrison may have prepared an initial Haida version that was then discussed by the group. Either way, the members of the Bible class appear to have had a considerable influence over the content of the final Haida text, and this is an important point since it indicates that Harrison did not work in isolation. Although it is impossible to determine the extent to which the translation that emerged from the class differed from the Haida version of Matthew’s Gospel that Harrison finally published in 1891, it is hard to believe that the two versions were vastly different.20 Harrison’s remarkable period as a CMS missionary came to an abrupt end in 1890. Officially, it was stated that he had struggled to adjust to the climate on the Pacific Northwest Coast, but this is surely untrue since he returned to live in Masset only a year or so later. Indeed, subsequent comments from his contemporaries suggest that an adulterous wife and alcoholism had caused him to resign.21 However that may be, when he left the mission station in Masset, the CMS determined that his translations should appear in print: […] the committee much regret that it has become necessary for the Rev. Chas Harrison to tender his resignation which they have no alternative but to accept. […] They instruct the Secretaries to receive from Mr Harrison any manuscripts bearing on the Hydah language, and any translations which he may have compiled, and to communicate with him with a view to his seeing through the press such portions of his literary work as it may be determined to print.22

20

From henceforth, in order to avoid any ambiguities, Harrison’s Haida version of Matthew will be referred to as “Matthew” (i.e. in italics) while general references to this Gospel will be written as “Matthew.” When necessary it will be indicated in the main text if the Greek version, KJV, or RV of the Gospel is being referred to. 21 Although it is difficult to establish the facts of the case, Hall refers to Mrs Harrison’s adultery in G2C1O/1899/47, while Keen mentions Harrison’s alcohol problems in G2C1O/1893/43. 22 British Columbia Précis Book, Vol. 1 1881–April 1892, entry for 18 November 1890.

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So, despite entirely neglecting Harrison’s translations during the period 1885 to 1890, the CMS now seemed eager to publish them—and this is where some of the intriguing internal divisions with the CMS start to manifest themselves, since his successor at Masset, John Henry Keen, argued strongly that Harrison’s work should never appear in print. Since these particular conflicts have never been discussed previously, it is necessary to explore them briefly before considering the translations themselves in greater detail. Keen was swiftly chosen to be Harrison’s replacement, and he was already in Metlakatla by 1st August 1890. From the outset, it was clear that he was rather proud of his own abilities as a linguist. He was somewhat patronisingly impressed, for instance, by James McCullagh, a soldier-cum-missionary, referring approvingly to the latter’s interest in “comparative philology.”23 While still on the mainland, though, Keen met with Harrison; the latter kindly allowed him to make copies of “his Hydah MSS,” and later documents make it clear that Keen was specifically in possession of a draft of Harrison’s Haida Grammar and his Matthew.24 While still at Metlakatla, then, Keen was able to begin his study of the Haida language, partly using Harrison’s materials and partly benefiting from the guidance of an unnamed Haida-speaking Metlakatla resident: “[o]ne of the Bp’s [Bishop’s] students is a Hydah, & from him I am learning the elements of the language.”25 When he eventually arrived at Masset in September 1890, Keen immediately began (like Collison and Harrison before him) to concentrate on improving his knowledge of the language. At first, he was perhaps rather overconfident, stating in one letter that “the language […], as far as I can judge of it from Mr Harrison’s little M. S. grammar, is not difficult.”26 Despite this assurance, though, it was not until August 1891 (almost a year later) that he was able to preach his first improvised sermon in the language, and, more pertinently, it was later that same year that he began to advise the CMS not to print any of the translations that Harrison had prepared. Initially, he offered his remarks in a reasonably polite and cautious manner: I hoped to have heard from you before this what arrangements if any, you had made in regard to printing Harrison’s translations. […] If I may be allowed a suggestion, I wd advise that, if you have not yet begun to print any of Harrison’s translations, it wd be well not to do [sic] begin 23 24 25 26

CMS Archive G2C1O/1890/47. CMS Archive G2C1O/1890/48. CMS Archive G2C1O/1890/48. CMS Archive G2C1O/1890/75.

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them at all. […] This is the only station where they will be used; & as they stand, they are simply unintelligible to me, owing to the peculiar system of spelling he adopts—which is neither that in use at the other missions on the mainland, nor, as far as I can make out, any of the recognised philological treatises. I had to transcribe the whole of his prayer book, with the help of my teacher, before I could read it.27 This passage is remarkably dismissive. Clearly, Keen was convinced that Harrison’s work was irretrievably flawed because of his use of an inadequate transcription system which was too idiosyncratic to be useful. Incidentally, this passage contains one of the few references in Keen’s letters to his “teacher.” This unnamed individual was probably Charles Edenshaw’s cousin, Henry Edenshaw (a.k.a. Kihlguulins), who also assisted Keen when he came to produce his translations of the Gospels.28 If Keen began his campaign against Harrison’s translations with robust yet discreet advice, he soon became more explicit and more condemnatory when he received no response from the CMS: The translations themselves I consider being faulty, but the spelling is still more so. […] To give one example of the defects in translation:— throughout St Matthew’s Gospel the word “man,” which of course ^ usually means “one,” or “person,” is rendered by the Haida word meaning man as opposed to woman, though the language has an exact equivalent to our English “person,” or Lat. “homo.” And, to make matters worse, the expression “Son of man” is rendered “son of a man”!!29 Conveniently, this passage prompts an initial exploration of the actual translations rather than merely the context in which they were produced. The Haida word to which Keen takes exception here is Ītlinga (i.e. man; written as 7iihllng in modern Haida), which Harrison uses in the phrase nung Ītlinga kit (i.e. the Son of man; see Matthew 8:20, 9:6, 10:23, etc.). By contrast, in his own translations, Keen consistently uses the phrase nung haade Git, where haade means people or humans (xàayda in modern transcription; see Luke 5:24, 6:5, 27 CMS Archive G2C1O/1891/67. 28 For a discussion of this connection, see Charles F. Newcombe’s “The Haida Indians,” International Congress of Americanists 15, No. 1 (1906): 149. Charles Edenshaw, whose Haida name was Daxhiigang, was the father of Florence Davidson. Her life is explored in considerable detail in Margaret Blackman’s During My Time: Florence Edenshaw Davidson, a Haida Woman (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1982). 29 CMS Archive G2C1O/1895/17.

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6:22, etc.).30 As the above quotation indicates, Keen’s contention was that 7iihllng indicated merely biological gender and lacked the more inclusive generic implications of words such as person or the Latin noun homo in the Vulgate phrase Filius hominis. Given this, it is of interest that Harrison did use the word xàayda in his translation of Matthew, and he seems to have been fully aware of its generic implications. For example, Matthew 8:16 is given in the KJV as follows: Matthew 8:16 When the even was come, they brought unto him many [Greek = polloús] that were possessed with devils: and he cast out the spirits with his word, and healed all that were sick.31 In this case, Harrison renders the many-polloús pair as “hāada” (his spelling of xàayda), presumably in order to convey the sense that the possessed individuals were not necessarily all male. In a similar manner, the noun phrase “the whole city” (which appears in Matthew 8:34; Greek = “pâsa hi pólis”) is translated as “lana asku hāade,” once again avoiding all unambiguous indications of gender. It is not always the case, however, that Harrison uses hāade when the KJV or Greek texts use a word or phrase that refers to an individual or to a group without specifying biological sex. One example occurs in Matthew 9:17 when the noun men in the clause “Neither do men put new wine into old bottles” is translated as “hāade.” Significantly, the Greek text contains a verb vállousin (Lit: they put) which does not take an explicit subject, and this may be why Harrison has chosen to adopt a less specific interpretation here. Given his apparent awareness of the generic nature of xàayda, then, it is curious that when translating the phrase the Son of man, he should have invariably preferred to deploy gender-specific vocabulary, and this may simply indicate the extent to which he allowed himself to be guided primarily by the wording of the KJV. Despite Keen’s advice, Harrison’s Matthew was printed by the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1891, and, seven years later, Keen published his own Haida version of Acts, while his Luke and John appeared in the following year. As it proved, these texts constituted the end of a movement rather than the beginning of one, since in the early twentieth century, the Pacific Northwest missionaries became aware of a cultural shift that was being prompted and

30 31

Keeping with the convention adopted earlier in this article, Keen’s Haida NT translations will henceforth be referred to as “Luke,” “John,” and “Acts” (i.e. in italics). All transliteration of the Greek use the ISO 843:1997 Type 2 transcription system.

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sustained by the indigenous communities themselves. At one point in In the Wake of the War Canoe, for example, Collison notes that by the late nineteenth century, the Haida community at Masset wanted to read the Bible in English: Mr Keen’s knowledge of the language enabled him to confer a great benefit to the Mission by his translations. He succeeded in translating the Gospels of St Mark, St Luke, and St John, together with the Acts of the Apostles, and the first Epistle to the Corinthians from the New Testament, and the books of Genesis and Psalms from the Old Testament; as also portions of the Book of Common Prayer and hymns. But his experience of the unpopularity of translations of the hymns and canticles for the service of praise in public worship was identical with that of the other missionaries amongst the languages of the mainland. The native Christians all prefer the hymns and chants in English, and all hold to their English Bibles and prayer books. Nevertheless, the translations are of great value to the Mission teachers in imparting religious instruction, and also to the native Christians in enabling them to grasp the true meaning of the English version.32 Although the CMS missionaries generally maintained an insistent belief in the importance of translated texts, the communities along the Pacific Northwest Coast gradually began to demand that their church services were conducted in English, an alteration in practice that certainly contributed to the gradual marginalisation of the native languages during the first half of the twentieth century. Given this brief overview of the manner in which the Haida scripture translations were produced, the following sections will explore a number of related themes concerning these texts, and the main purpose is simply to consider, from a range of perspectives, the way in which the Haida Gwaii missionaries attempted to present the Gospels in the context of the Haida culture that they encountered. Obviously, there are many possible beginnings to an investigation of this kind, and the following analysis will start by considering the missionaries’ rendering of notions associated with the spirit world.

32 Collison, In the Wake of the War, 262. This passage contains the only known reference to a translation of Mark’s Gospel by Keen. If this text ever existed, it was never published, and it is not mentioned in any of the documents in the CMS Archive.

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Souls and Spirits

In the New Testament (NT), angels convey messages to startled recipients, while devils and evil spirits trick, delude, and sometimes possess their unfortunate victims—and the descriptions of these encounters, which necessarily articulate a first-century Judeo-Christian worldview, inevitably present difficulties when they are translated from one language, and from one culture, into another. Obviously, the Haida scriptures are no exception. Therefore, in order fully to understand the manner in which the Masset missionaries approached this task, it is helpful to determine the extent to which they believed that the modern world was riven by the battle between supernatural forces of Good and Evil.33 Certainly there are numerous passages in the surviving documents which insinuate convictions of this kind. For instance, while discussing the Lachkaltsap Mission on the Nass River, Collison recalls a potlatch in the dwelling of a certain chief; he refers to the dwelling as “that citadel of heathenism,” and he comments that […] around this custom and accessory to it were the “halied” or Indian devilry, which in its hydra-headed divisions of cannibalistic, destructive, and necromantic practices kept the Indian camps in a continual turmoil, and made the medicine men a terror to their own tribes as well as to those outside.34 Although this description does not refer specifically to a Haida shaman, the phrase “Indian devilry” and the adjective “necromantic” clearly imply that the practices of the Pacific Northwest “medicine men” were of satanic origin. Or do they? Over twenty years ago now, the Nigerian theologian Osadolor Imasogie argued that although most nineteenth-century missionaries were content to use words and phrases which appear to acknowledge the existence of supernatural beings, the majority did not in fact believe that angels, devils, and spirits were anything other than metaphorical conveniences. Viewed from this still provocative perspective, Collison’s references to “devilry” may simply provide religious clothing for convictions that are fundamentally secular in nature, a use of language which is designed to reflect “the afterglow of the biblical

33

For a collection of essays that explore various aspects of this broad topic from a range of theological perspectives, see Anthony Lane, ed., The Unseen World: Christian Reflections on Angels, Demons, and the Heavenly Realm (Grand Rapids, MI: Paternoster Press, 1996). 34 Collison, In the Wake of the War, 42.

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worldview.”35 If it is indeed true that many missionaries (perhaps including those based in Masset) would refer to supernatural beings without accepting their ontic validity, then these ambiguities only complicate an already dauntingly complex interpretative task. Another difficulty is caused by the paucity of historical evidence concerning nineteenth-century Haida views concerning supernatural beings, and the standard sources provide only limited assistance. For instance, Swanton published the first detailed discussion of what he termed Haida “spirit-theory” in 1905, and he noted that there were a large number of “supernatural beings” whom the Haida believed inhabited “the atmosphere, the ocean, the woods, lakes, and streams.”36 Crucially, according to Swanton, “every animal was, or might be, the embodiment of a being who, at his own pleasure, could appear in the human form,” and this shifting polymorphism problematises any attempt to construct an ontological hierarchy based merely on identifiable physical qualities.37 In another important passage, Swanton considers the specific Haida vocabulary that could be used with reference to the spiritual realm: There are three words for ‘soul,’ or ‘spirit,’ in Haida. Two of these are applied to the soul in the living body, and one to the soul after its separation. The former xAndj and ġā’tand-i, are said to be two words for the same thing. The Haida denied that there are two souls. When any one dies, they say “the soul flies away” (ġā’tand-i xī’dAñ); and when a man was thought to be born again, they said that his xAndj was born again, but they meant to include both. After death the disembodied soul was called giet, and the land that most of the souls inhabit was called the Land of Souls (Giä’Lga-i [Giet Lga-i]).38 So (in Swanton’s account) there are three words for soul or spirit; two of these are synonymous (xAndj and ġā’tand-i), referring to “the soul in the living body,” while the third, giet, denotes the disembodied soul as it is manifest after the death of the body. As the above passage indicates, reincarnation was a dominant notion in Haida spirit-theory, and it was widely believed that the soul of an ancestor could be reincarnated within the body of a child born within the 35

Osadolor Imasogie, Guidelines for Christian Theology in Africa (Achimota, Ghana: African Christian Press, 1983), 51–3. 36 John Swanton, Contributions to the Ethnology of the Haida, Vol. 8 (Pt 1) of Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History (Leiden: E. J. Brill; New York: G. E. Stechert, 1905), 13. 37 Swanton, Contributions to the Ethnology, 16. 38 Swanton, Contributions to the Ethnology, 34.

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same moiety. This belief seems to have persisted long after the missionaries had established themselves on Haida Gwaii.39 Although for a long time Swanton’s account was accepted as being largely accurate, in recent years it has been challenged, and Enrico, in particular, has proposed a modified system. In Enrico’s version, the Haida supernatural realm is populated by beings called sraana (i.e. spirits), and he identifies several subrealms that are associated with the sea, the forest, and the sky. With specific reference to the sraana, he notes that [t]heir spiritual aspect consisted in their raahlaandaay or “soul,” their earthly aspect being their “skins.” Humans also had raahlaandaay, best translated as “conscious spirit,” contrasting with “reincarnated spirit” […] The souls or spiritual aspects of both humans and animals had the appearance of humans, so at this level humans and animals were identical in form. The shaman travelled to the spirit realms in raahlaandaay form, leaving his body behind.40 The Haida word which means roughly “reincarnated spirit” (which Enrico mentions in the above passage) is xanj—a retranscription of the noun Swanton wrote as xAndj. In his Haida Dictionary, Enrico comments that the kind of spirit indicated by this word “was not conscious, nor did it ever leave the body while the owner was alive (compare raahlaandaay).”41 The contention is that (contra Swanton) in nineteenth-century Haida spirit-theory, the words xanj and raahlaandaay referred to distinct notions and were certainly not interchangeable. Although it is impossible to determine whether Enrico’s revised account of the spirit realm accurately presents a belief system that was familiar to the Masset Haida who helped Collison, Harrison, and Keen prepare their translations, it certainly provides a plausible frame of reference in relation to which their writings can be considered—and there is plenty of evidence to suggest 39

Swanton suggests that reincarnation could occur within the lineage rather than the moiety. Florence Davidson, who was born in 1896 and baptised by Keen, recalled that “My dad used to favour me because I used to tell him, ‘Hada, ding awu di ijing,’ ‘Dad, I’m your mother.’ They used to believe in second-birth” (Blackman, During My Time, 78). Swanton’s existing letters suggest that he obtained most of his information about these matters from Henry Moody in 1903. For a discussion of this, see Bringhurst, A Story as Sharp as a Knife, 188–9. 40 John Enrico, Skidegate Haida Myths & Histories (Skidegate: Queen Charlotte Islands Museum Press, 1995), 7. 41 Enrico, Haida Dictionary, 1554.

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that the missionaries understood something of indigenous Haida beliefs concerning the spirit world. Collison, for instance, noted that the Haida identified several different kinds of “spirits”; he records that a young man was once forced by the “medicine men” to drink salt water in order to determine whether he was loyal or not, noting that “[i]t is believed and asserted by the necromancers that the saltwater will kill and expel the evil spirit which is causing trouble in the camp.”42 The noun “necromancers” certainly implies that an act of supernatural summoning took place, and although (unfortunately) Collison does not give the actual Haida vocabulary that he has translated here as “evil spirit,” his terminology suggests that his Haida informants believed in the existence of malicious non-corporeal beings. Given this sort of rather imprecise and high-level evidence, it is of particular interest to examine the manner in which the Haida Gwaii missionaries translated scriptural passages concerning supernatural phenomena into Haida. Not surprisingly, perhaps, given the difficulty of the task, they adopted a range of approaches, sometimes simply realising that translation of any kind was essentially impossible, sometimes constructing periphrastic expressions in order to convey notions associated with single lexical items in their source text(s), sometimes using existing Haida words if they felt that these were sufficiently close in meaning—and these various approaches will be briefly considered in turn. Words and phrases in a source language, which are deemed untranslatable from the perspective of a target language, always merit close scrutiny. This way of dealing with “culture-specific items” is sometimes classified as “repetition” in contemporary translation theory, and untranslated elements invariably pose intricate problems.43 As Javier Franco Aixelá has observed [p]aradoxically, this “respectful” strategy involves in many cases an increase in the exotic or archaic character of the CSI [culture-specific item], which is felt to be more alien by the target language reader because of its linguistic form and cultural distance.44 Significantly, in the Haida scriptures, there are only a few nouns associated with supernatural beings and phenomena that are not converted into the Haida language. These include àngelos (angel in the KJV) which is simply left 42 Collison, In the Wake of the War, 117. 43 For a detailed theoretical discussion of this aspect of translation theory, see Javier Franco Aixelá’s “Culture-Specific Items in Translation,” in Translation, Power, Subversion, edited by Román Álvarez and M. Carmen-África Vidal (Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters Ltd., 1996), 52–78. 44 Aixelá, “Culture-Specific Items,” 61.

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untouched, apart from necessary morphological modifications. Consequently, in Matthew 1:20, the phrase “angel of the Lord” (KJV) is given as “shālānā giē Angelgē,” and in 4:11 the “angels” that came and ministered unto Jesus in the wilderness are referred to as “ga angelgas ge,” where “ga … ge” simply indicate plurality.45 By contrast, the periphrastic approach manifests itself in phrases such as shā tligē (i.e. heaven; Matthew 6:20), which literally means the land above, in contrast to hētle tligē, which means the land below (i.e. earth; see Matthew 6:19). Although these details are revealing, there is no doubt that the word-for-word English-Haida, or Greek-Haida, translations provide the richest instances, and the noun phrase Pneyma Hagion (which is variously rendered in the KJV as “the Holy Ghost” or “the Holy Spirit”) provides a convenient starting point. To begin with a non-scriptural example, in one of the Haida hymns that he wrote in 1878, Collison uses the line “Neung Hants Lass eelt git isthang,” which he translates as “Give to us thy Holy Spirit”.46 The phrase “Holy Spirit” here corresponds to the Haida phrase “Hants Lass”—that is, xanj ’láas in modern transcription, where ’láas functions adjectivally and means (roughly) “good.” Since xanj ’láas does not appear in any of the existing transcriptions of traditional nineteenth-century (non-Christian) Haida myths and songs, it seems likely that Collison introduced this phrase himself, and, if so, then presumably his intention was to convey this distinctly Christian concept by combining conventional Haida lexical items in an unconventional manner. In particular, the aim was no doubt to devise a phrase that was not already present in existing Haida belief systems, but which could be comprehended (to a certain extent) by people familiar with those systems. Given the meaning of the two words concerned, though, Collison’s contemporaneous (Haida) audience would most probably have understood the phrase to mean something like “Benign Reincarnated-Spirit,” and the established distinction between xanj and raahlaandaay (discussed above) ensures that there are a number of difficulties here. For instance, if Enrico is correct when he claims that xanj referred to a reincarnated spirit that “was not conscious” and which did not “leave the body while the owner was alive,”47 then Collison’s usage would have suggested that the xanj’láas either has, or used to have, a corporeal manifestation of some kind, since (unlike raahlaandaay) xanj specifically denotes a spirit that is 45 For a contemporaneous discussion of these plural structures, see Charles Harrison, “Haida Grammar,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada 10, Section 2 (1895): 135. 46 CMS Archive CMS/OMS/B/CC204/18. 47 Enrico, Haida Dictionary, 1554.

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inseparable from its associated body while the latter is living. Therefore (seemingly) the noun cannot simply indicate a purely disembodied spiritual being. Inevitably perhaps Collison’s lexical choices present “the Holy Spirit” in a startlingly unconventional manner, specifically introducing implications that are certainly not associated with standard Christian pneumatological theories. Nonetheless, whether he was responsible for devising it or not, Collison’s use of the phrase xanj ’láas ensured that it was adopted by his successors. In Matthew, for instance, Harrison clearly follows Collison’s lead: the second half of verse 1.18 (“she was found with child of the Holy Ghost,” KJV) contains the phrase “Hants Las,” a phrase that differs from Collison’s only as a result of the usual minor orthographical discrepancies. Keen also uses this phrase extensively (e.g. Luke 1:35, 1:41, 1:67, 2:26, 3:16, 3:22, and so on), which suggests that by the 1880s, it had become a standard part of the version of the Haida language that can perhaps be referred to as “missionary-Haida.” This identifiable variety can be viewed as a sociolect, specifically one that was associated with nonnative speakers of Haida as well as those indigenous communities who were closely involved with the work of the Masset mission. Although xanj ’láas had already become a familiar phrase by the time Keen started to produce his translations in the 1880s, there are several passages which suggest that the missionaries were certainly not translating the scriptural texts in a mindless, algorithmic fashion. For example, in Luke 4:14, Jesus is described as returning to Galilee in “the power of the Spirit [Greek = Pneýmatos]” (KJV), and in this particular instance, the adjective Holy (Greek = Hagion) is not present. Significantly, though, Keen translates this phrase as “Hants Las gia dugwīgai,” where dugwīgai means (roughly) “power” and gia simply indicates possession. In using this phrase, Keen is apparently trying to eliminate all possible ambiguity by clarifying the precise nature of the spiritual being mentioned in this specific verse, and this kind of elucidatory zeal is a characteristic feature of his approach to translation. In this instance, his desire for clarity could have been prompted by his awareness of the richness of the Haida spirit-world; given a culture that standardly recognises a vast array of supernatural beings, it is surely imperative that no ambiguities predominate when a specific being is mentioned, since this would obfuscate the message of the Gospel. Therefore, from Keen’s perspective, it must be absolutely clear that “Spirit” in Luke 4:14 means “Holy Spirit,” even if this requires a minor deviation from his source materials. The phrase “Hants Las gia dugwīgai” raises other issues, though. It is revealing, for instance, that Keen should have selected dugwīgai when translating “power” (dynámei in the Greek). In modern spelling, this noun is dagwi.ig (in

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the Masset dialect), and it can refer to a shamanic spirit or (more generally) a shamanic power.48 It is highly likely, therefore, that his Haida parishioners would have recognised the implied spiritual connotations here, and, indeed, Keen may be intentionally trying to suggest that certain capacities that were traditionally associated with the Haida shamans should be re-associated with the Holy Spirit, thereby encouraging a reassessment of indigenous notions of spiritual potency in an explicitly Christian framework. Whether this is so or not, the use of the noun surely reveals something of Keen’s knowledge of shamanic customs, since it demonstrates that he was familiar with certain pieces of technical vocabulary associated with the work of these individuals. Significantly, according to Enrico, as a result of “missionary usage,” the word dagwi.ig eventually came to mean “Holy Spirit.”49 While this semantic shift certainly took place, the change must have occurred after the 1880s (at the earliest), otherwise phrases such as “Hants Las gia dugwīgai” would have been bizarrely tautological, conveying something like “the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit.” If this mooted chronology is broadly correct, then it provides an illustrative instance of the way in which the Haida Gwaii missionaries succeeded in redefining and delimiting the range of meanings that were associated with particular Haida words, a process of readjustment that involved the reinterpretation of shamanic vocabulary in the context of Judeo-Christian culture. While the phrase the Holy Spirit merits being discussed in detail, there are many other references to spirits and souls in the NT, and, recalling the contrasting spirit-theories propounded by Swanton and Enrico, the vocabulary used by the missionaries in these contexts is invariably informative. In general, three basic usage patterns can be identified. These can be represented schematically as follows: Greek English Haida pneyma psychi

spirit xanj soul raahlaandaay

In the majority of cases, then, when the noun pneyma (and cognate forms) appears in the Greek text, it is translated as spirit in the KJV, and as xanj in the Haida scriptures. By contrast, the noun psychi (and cognate forms) in the Greek is usually rendered as soul in the KJV and as raahlaandaay in the Haida

48 For details, see Enrico, Haida Dictionary, 34. 49 Enrico, Haida Dictionary, 34.

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texts. Consequently, to be explicit, pneyma is presented in the Haida scriptures as a reincarnated spiritual entity that cannot leave its associated body, while psychi is presented as a spiritual entity that can leave its associated body. Clearly, this distinction is not one that is manifest in either the Greek version or the KJV of the NT. Although this basic mapping is followed in the majority of cases, there are several exceptions. For example, in the pericope that occurs towards the end of Luke 8, Jesus revives a dead girl, and verses 52–55 appear as follows in the KJV: Luke 8:52 And all wept, and bewailed her: but he said, Weep not; she is not dead, but sleepeth. Luke 8:53 And they laughed him to scorn, knowing that she was dead. Luke 8:54 And he put them all out, and took her by the hand, and called, saying, Maid, arise. Luke 8:55 And her spirit [Greek = pneyma] came again, and she arose straightway: and he commanded to give her meat. In this example, verses 52–53 emphasise the fact that the young girl was dead, and therefore it is important that verse 55 should begin with the deceptively simple clause “And her spirit came again.” If Keen were following the standard schema given above, then he would have translated spirit here as xanj. Significantly, though, he uses the noun althandai (i.e. his spelling of raahlaandaay). It is possible, of course, that this is simply a mistake and that he has erroneously selected the wrong word. There are, however, comparable examples which suggest that this choice is indeed intentional. One such example occurs in Luke 23:46: Luke 23:46 And when Jesus had cried with a loud voice, he said, Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit [Greek = pneyma]: and having said thus, he gave up the ghost [Greek = èxépneysen]. In this example, the verb èxépneysen (the aorist of èkpnéo, which means to breathe out; to breathe one’s last) is translated as “gave up the ghost” in the KJV. Once again, despite the fact that the Greek verb is derived from the root pneyma, Keen again uses althandai rather than hants (i.e. raahlaandaay rather than xanj) in his Haida text. This example is particularly intriguing since hants had been used to translate spirit-pneyma earlier in the very same verse. To give just

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one more example of the same phenomenon, Acts 7:59 appears as follows in the KJV: Acts 7:59 And they stoned Stephen, calling upon God, and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit [Greek = pneyma]. Yet again, the spirit-pneyma pair is translated here as althandai, and therefore it is worth considering whether these examples have any common characteristics that can account for this pattern. Obviously, Luke 8:55, Luke 23:46, and Acts 7:59 all refer to instances in which an individual’s soul/spirit separates from its associated body. In Luke 8:55, the young woman’s soul returns to its body; in Luke 23:46, Jesus’ soul leaves its body, while in Acts 7:59 Stephen’s soul is about to leave his body. Perhaps this provides the explanation for Keen’s lexical choices in his translation. It may be that Keen believed that the Haida word raahlaandaay was the one that should be used when referring to the soul as it separates from the body at the point of death. Certainly his usage suggests that he interpreted it in this way. Seemingly, then, he was convinced that it was inappropriate to use the word xanj when referring to the moment when the spirit separates from its associated body. As ever, there are further complications. The following lines are from Matthew 12:18 (KJV): Matthew 12:18 Behold my servant, whom I have chosen; my beloved, in whom my soul [Greek = psychi] is well pleased: I will put my spirit [Greek = pneyma] upon him, and he shall shew judgment to the Gentiles. As expected, spirit-pneyma appears as hants in Harrison’s Haida version, and this is entirely in keeping with the general pattern of lexical associations that were discussed above. Rather than translating soul-psychi as althandai (or even as hants), Harrison renders it as kwutungē, thereby introducing a new term into the semantic group associated with spirits and souls. In modern notation, this word is gudaang, and it usually indicates “feelings, heart, mind, thoughts.”50 In this particular verse from Matthew, emotional properties are being explicitly associated with the soul, and seemingly Harrison hesitated when he was required to attribute such qualities to raahlaandaay. Rather than being a unique occurrence, though, this hesitation was systematic, and Christ’s words in Matthew 26:38 provide another example: 50 Enrico, Haida Dictionary, 1023.

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Matthew 26:38 Then saith he unto them, My soul [Greek = psychi] is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death: tarry ye here, and watch with me. Once again, an emotional state (i.e. sorrow) is being attributed to the soulpsychi, and Harrison again substitutes kwutungē in his translation. Intriguingly and perhaps revealingly, Keen also followed this practice: John 11:33 When Jesus therefore saw her weeping, and the Jews also weeping which came with her, he groaned in the spirit [Greek = psychi, Haida = gudung], and was troubled. John 13:26 When Jesus had thus said, he was troubled in spirit [Greek = psychi, Haida = gudung], and testified, and said, Verily, verily, I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me. Acts 17:16 Now while Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit [Greek = psychi, Haida = gudung] was stirred in him, when he saw the city wholly given to idolatry. Acts 18:5 And when Silas and Timotheus were come from Macedonia, Paul was pressed in the spirit [Greek = psychi, Haida = gudung], and testified to the Jews that Jesus was Christ. Despite the usual superficial orthographical differences, Keen’s gudung is merely gudaang, and it should be clear that these examples again involve situations in which some kind of strong emotional state is associated with the soul concerned. In essence, whenever this occurred in their source material, both Harrison and Keen chose to deviate from the psychi-soul-raahlaandaay pattern by using the word gudaang instead. It is not clear why this convention was followed, but the fact that both men adopted this approach, even though they worked independently, is of particular interest. It certainly suggests that their Haida informants were adamant that it was inappropriate to associate emotional states with raahlaandaay and that such qualities were more correctly attributed to the gudaang—that is, to the heart or mind rather than to the soul. Assuming that the lexical choices manifest in the missionary translations are sufficiently accurate to be representative of wider practice, then they certainly seem to offer glimpses into the indigenous nineteenth-century Haida understanding of the spirit realm.

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Social Hierarchies and Power Structures

It is not only supernatural phenomena that caused translation difficulties for the Masset missionaries, though, and socio-political power structures are another area that required careful treatment. Specifically, in the context of nineteenth-century evangelical missionary activity, attitudes towards servitude and slavery (of various kinds) were especially resonant since, from the last decades of the eighteenth century onwards, numerous evangelical groups had argued vehemently for the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade.51 Consequently, many texts appeared in which the examples of servitude found in the Bible were re-evaluated. As a result, during the period 1830 to 1870, an extensive debate was sustained concerning the legitimacy of slavery, and scriptural evidence was standardly adduced in order to bolster arguments both for and against the practice. Pro-slavery justifications were promulgated in works such as Josiah Priest’s Bible Defence of Slavery, and Origin, Fortunes, and History of the Negro Race (1852) and Morris Raphall’s Bible View of Slavery in Fast Day Sermons: Or, The Pulpit on the State of the Country (1861), while the alternative position was outlined in publications such as Richard Fuller’s and Francis Wayland’s Domestic Slavery Considered as a Scriptural Institution (1845) and Reuben Hatch’s Biblical Servitude Re-examined (1862). While it is neither possible nor desirable to explore these complex texts exhaustively here, it is worth briefly indicating some of the concerns that were raised. For instance, Hatch claimed that “it is a part of the mission of the present age to settle the question of human liberty,”52 thereby explicitly associating the abolition of the slave trade with broader socio-political ideologies, and accordingly, he offered a detailed exploration of servitude in both the OT and NT, identifying different sub-types and discussing pertinent linguistic difficulties posed by the Hebrew and Greek texts. At various points in his discussion, he argues specifically that the prevalent understanding of such topics is inaccurate and that this inaccuracy has arisen partly as a result of the translation practice adopted in the KJV:

51 Detailed recent analyses of the transatlantic slave trade can be found in David Eltis’ Routes to Slavery: Direction, Ethnicity, and Mortality in the Transatlantic Slave Trade (London: Frank Cass, 1997); Herbert Klein’s The Atlantic Slave Trade (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Beverly McMillan’s Captive Passage: The Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Making of the Americas (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press in association with The Mariners’ Museum of Virginia, 2002). 52 Reuben Hatch, Biblical Servitude Re-examined, with Special Reference to Pro-Slavery Interpretations and Infidel Objections (Cincinnati: Applegate & Co., 1862), 8.

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One of the greatest and most ruinous mistakes of modern literature is the pro-slavery coloring which the venerable translators gave to certain passages in our English Bible. That these passages have a pro-slavery cast, can not be denied: that they ought not to have, is equally certain. Readers of our English Bible almost universally get the impression that there was chattel slavery in the Patriarchal households, and that some sort of provision was made for its continued existence among the Jews. The translation is calculated to produce that impression. Whether this was designed, on the part of the translators, we do not pretend to say. True to the original Hebrew, which had no single word for “slave” or “slavery” in it—they never use these words in the translation. But the translation itself looks just as if the translators did understand that slavery existed in the Patriarchal families, and was the subject of legislative regulation and sanction in the Mosaic code. In numerous passages they make an apparent distinction between “servant” and “bond-servant,” when no such distinction exists in the original Hebrew.53 This passage, and others like it, explicitly foreground the responsibilities of translators in seeking to delineate correctly the precise nature of culturally specific social power hierarchies, and as a result of such analyses, those scholars who were tasked with the job of translating the NT in the late nineteenth century were certainly obliged to confront these issues directly. In this context, it is intriguing to compare the KJV and RV translations of the NT, since the latter, which first appeared in 1881, was produced at a time when arguments about slavery were still particularly prominent. To take one specific passage, 1 Corinthians 7:20–21 is translated as follows in the two versions: KJV: 1 Corinthians 7:20 Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called. 1 Corinthians 7:21 Art thou called being a servant? care not for it: but if thou mayest be made free, use it rather. RV: 1 Corinthians 7:20 Let each man abide in that calling wherein he was called. 53 Hatch, Biblical Servitude, 261–2.

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1 Corinthians 7:21 Wast thou called being a bondservant? care not for it: but if thou canst become free, use it rather. These lines contain the very words that Hatch had identified as implying a distinction that was not present in the Hebrew texts. Although the Greek (rather than the Hebrew) provides the source material here, these verses indicate that the KJV’s generic use of servant for the Greek doûlos was deemed to be inadequate by the RV translators. In this case, they have selected the noun bondservant instead, presumably explicitly to identify the particular sub-type of servitude that is implied in verse 21. Small details of this kind are important, since they insinuate that the RV is more accurate than the KJV, and, in this way, the authority of the latter was gradually destabilised in the late nineteenth century. This is a point that is often neglected, and it is frequently claimed that the KJV remained dominant until the early twentieth century. Sugirtharajah, for instance, has described the KJV as being “a landmark text,” noting that [b]efore the First World War, this translation reigned supreme. This provincial and vernacular text of the English people became a cultural and colonial icon and eventually emerged as a key text of the empire, playing a prominent role in colonial expansion. It was more than a religious text, for its influence extended to the social, political, and economic spheres. The King James Version became not only the arbiter of other people’s texts and cultures but also set the pattern for vernacular translations and even acted as a role model for the printing and dissemination of other sacred texts.54 While this summary is generally convincing, it perhaps overstates the case for the period 1880 to 1915, since it was during these years that revised versions of the Bible began to appear, challenging the hegemony of the KJV—and the consequences of this were considerable. As will be shown, although the Masset missionaries were, of course, entirely familiar with the KJV, they did not adopt it unquestioningly as a template for their Haida translations, and, at times, their rendering of the NT texts seem to exist in dialogue with the KJV, probing and querying it. Before exploring particular details concerning slavery and servitude in the Haida scriptures, it is worth briefly summarising the kinds of hierarchical social power structures that Collison, Harrison, and Keen are likely to have 54 R. S. Sugirtharajah, The Bible and Empire: Postcolonial Explorations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 2.

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encountered when they arrived in Masset. Yet again, Swanton is a useful source of information. For instance, he notes that “[a] chief’s house-hold” was composed of “those of his immediate family who had no places for themselves, his nephews, his retainers or servants, and the slaves,” and this certainly suggests that servants and slaves were distinct, identifiable social groups in nineteenthcentury Haida culture.55 Indeed, Swanton describes these two groups as follows: “[t]he servants seem generally to have been taken from ā’1gA families; the slaves were captives taken in war,” where “ā’1gA families” were extremely impoverished.56 Unfortunately, Swanton does not provide detailed linguistic information concerning the vocabulary that was used to refer to servant and slaves, yet not surprisingly, nineteenth-century Haida contained various nouns and verbs that were associated with different kinds of servitude. For instance, ji7inra meant (roughly) maidservant, while a giits’aad indicated a young kinsman or kinswoman who acted as a servant during a special event of some kind (e.g. a ceremonial feast). By contrast, a low-status, low-prestige person who worked as a slave for a rich person primarily out of idleness was called a ginra, while a person who was in servitude because blood money could not be paid was an 7aalgu. Two further nouns are relevant here: xaldaang and q’uhlraaw. These were used to refer to a first-generation slave and a second-generation slave, respectively. As for verbs, kidxaaw meant something like “to serve to ceremonially,” while daaying meant merely to serve a meal. Given this range of available lexical items, it is helpful to identify those that were used most frequently by the Masset missionaries, and to take the simplest cases first, it is convenient that Collison, Harrison, and Keen usually deployed a stable vocabulary when seeking to convey notions associated with masters, servants, and slaves. The authors of the KJV had (with only a few exceptions) consistently translated the Greek nouns doûlos, paîs, and oìkitís as servant, and in the Haida scriptures, this basic many-to-one mapping is adopted as a model. In Matthew, for instance, Harrison standardly uses the noun kitzadalung for servant (e.g. Matthew 8:6, 8:8, 8:9, etc.), while in Luke, John, and Acts, Keen uses gitsadang (e.g. Luke 1:54, 1:69, 2:69; John 12:26, 13:16, 15:15; Acts 2:18, 4:25, 4:29, etc.), and these are merely orthographical variants of the Haida noun giits’aad. At this point, it is worth emphasising that although in Classical Greek doûlos could only mean slave, in Koine Greek, it could convey several distinct types of servitude depending upon the context in which it was used. In particular, as will be shown below, it could indicate servant rather than slave, and determining which meaning is intended is sometimes an intricate and nuanced task. 55 Swanton, Contributions to the Ethnology, 70. 56 Swanton, Contributions to the Ethnology, 70.

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In a similar fashion, the Greek nouns didáskalos and èpistátis usually appear as master in the KJV and as itlagidas (Harrison) or itlagadas (Keen) in the Haida versions. Once again, these are simply different spellings of the same Haida noun 7iitl’xagiid (literally, “chief”). Consequently, at the most basic level, in the conceptual space circumscribed by the Haida scriptures, 7iitl’xagiid and giits’aad define two distinct roles that can function in accordance in order to establish a precise relation of social subordination: a giits’aad is inferior and subservient to his or her 7iitl’xagiid. Seemingly, then, in the missionary-Haida sociolect, these two words were used in a distinctive manner and therefore came to acquire specific connotations in addition to those they possessed in the standard nineteenth-century Haida dialects. Predictably, though, the situation is more complex than this. Although the conventional lexical mappings described above determined the standard pattern, it is the exceptional cases that illuminate the manner in which the Masset missionaries attempted to convey core notions in Haida. For instance, one passage that deserves close attention is John 8:34–35 (KJV): John 8:34 Jesus answered them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whosoever committeth sin is the servant [Greek = doûlos] of sin. John 8:35 And the servant [Greek = doûlos] abideth not in the house for ever: but the Son abideth ever. As expected, doûlos has been standardly translated as “servant” in the KJV. It is clear, however, from the broader context that in this passage, slavery is implied specifically: in committing sin one becomes enslaved to sin. Recognising this, the RV distinguishes itself from the KJV by translating doûlos in verses 34–35 as “bondservant,” explicitly emphasising that this particular type of relationship differs from that associated with being a servant. Given this, it is revealing that in Keen’s Haida text, the standard doûlos-servant-giits’aad convention is rejected, and vocabulary that is derived from the root noun haldung (i.e. xaldaang, the noun that means “first-generation slave”) is used instead. It seems clear that in passages such as this, Keen is seeking to draw a clear distinction between the lexical items giits’aad and xaldaang. Specifically, while the former can be associated with positive connotations (e.g. Matthew 25:21 “Well done, thou good and faithful servant [Greek = doûle, Haida = giits’aad]”), the latter appears exclusively in contexts in which negative connotations accrue. This seems to be in accordance with the missionaries’ abhorrence for the tradition of slavery that they encountered among the First Nations on the Pacific

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Northwest Coast. For instance, Collison’s In the Wake of the War Canoe contains numerous passages such as the following: I found a number of these [people] enslaved amongst the Haidas, who had been sold in exchange for food when young. They had grown up in slavery, and knew nothing of their own people or of their own tongue. Under the teachings of Christianity the Haidas granted them their freedom. Some of them returned to their own people, but the majority preferred to remain where they had been brought up under the improved conditions.57 […] I conducted a service, Edenshaw interpreting for me, as he had promised, but I saw that he hesitated and failed to convey much of what I said to his people. I found that he was averse to my proposed Mission, as he had a number of slaves, and feared that it might lead to their obtaining freedom, and his consequent loss. He had heard that those of the Tsimshean chiefs who had embraced Christianity had freed their slaves or had adopted them into their families.58 These extracts certainly suggest that the Haida Gwaii missionaries were inclined to look with disfavour upon the traditional Haida use of slaves, and given this, it is perhaps no surprise that in their translations, they presented slavery in negative ways in order to demonstrate that enforced servitude was not compatible with the message of the Gospel. Harrison also wrote about such things, and in his 1925 book Ancient Warriors of the North Pacific (1925) he noted that slaves were sometimes treated with considerable cruelty; when a “totem pole” was raised, slaves were sometimes “bound hand and foot and placed in the hole alive.”59 Intriguingly, although Collison states that as a result of the influence of Christianity, “[s]lavery has been abolished,”60 Harrison associates its abolition primarily with the intervention of a particular politician:

57 Collison, In the Wake of the War, 66. 58 Collison, In the Wake of the War, 111. 59 Charles Harrison, Ancient Warriors of the North Pacific (London: H. F. & G. Witherby, 1925), 69. 60 Collison, In the Wake of the War, 140.

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Lieutenant-Colonel Powell, when Superintendent of Indian Affairs for British Columbia, could not break down all at once the custom of slavery, but he issued an order that all the slaves had not to be called slaves but tenas men and tenas klootchmen, i.e., little men and little women. […] The Haida word for slave is hal-dung-ā, and the Chinook word is e-lait-e. From the day the Colonel’s order was received, slavery began to decline. Forty years ago able-bodied slaves were valued at 200 or 300 blankets and exchanged or sold accordingly.61 It seems highly unlikely that Israel Wood Powell’s (1836–1915) recommendations concerning nomenclature effected an abrupt reduction of slave trading among the Haida communities. Nonetheless, Harrison’s somewhat opaque account at least suggests that the missionaries and politicians alike laboured to try to discourage such practices among the indigenous peoples. To return to the Haida scriptures, examples such as those discussed above suggest that the noun xaldaang was mainly used in contexts in which a reprehensible dependency of some sort is involved (e.g. a sinner is shamefully enslaved by sin), yet of course there is no reason why these implications should reveal themselves only in the nominal domain. Indeed, it is equally fascinating to explore the manner in which Harrison and Keen selected Haida verbs in order to convey ideas concerning Judeo-Christian social hierarchies. Once again, a few specific examples should help to indicate the nature of the particular difficulties encountered. For instance, in the KJV, Matthew 6:24 begins with the clause “[n]o man can serve [Greek = douleýein] two masters.” In his translation of this clause, Harrison uses the verb lthāangwilē, and it is possible to determine precisely what Harrison understood this to mean since, in his Haida Grammar, he associates it explicitly with the verb “to work.”62 Guided by these details, it seems most likely that Harrison is using the Haida verb which, in modern notation, is written as hlranggula. Generally, hlranggula means “to work (on NP),”63 and given the implications of the verbs douleyo and serve, the verb hlranggula seems to be a rather odd choice; but what is most surprising is that rather than being merely an exception, the douleyo-serve-hlranggula grouping becomes the standard convention for both Harrison and Keen. Consequently, servants work for their masters, and the nature of their servitude is conveyed by cognate forms of the verb hlranggula (e.g. Matthew 5:16, 11:23; Luke 10:13, 13:14; John 5:17, 9:4; Acts 14:26, 18:3).

61 Harrison, Ancient Warriors, 69–70. 62 Harrison, “Haida Grammar,” 155, 211. 63 Enrico, Haida Dictionary, 814.

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Since hlranggula is used consistently in the Haida scriptures to convey the basic idea of serving a master, it is important to determine which particular Haida verb is selected when notions associated with the generic Greek and English verbs such as èrgázouai and work must be translated, since neither of these necessarily imply some kind of subordination. Is a different verb used to indicate this kind of activity? The following examples provide the answer to this question: Matthew 21:28 […] A certain man had two sons; and he came to the first, and said, Son, go work [Greek = èpgázou, Haida = lthāaangwila] today in my vineyard. Acts 18:3 And because he was of the same craft, he abode with them, and wrought [Greek = ìrgázonto, Haida = lthong-gwilawon]: for by their occupation they were tentmakers. In both these cases, the Greek verb èrgázouai, which indicates some kind of employment that is not necessarily characterised by relation of subordination, has been translated using the corresponding form of the Haida verb hlranggula. This choice has profound consequences for the manner in which the Haida scriptures convey an understanding of certain actions that are associated with power hierarchies of different kinds in the Judeo-Christian tradition. For instance, one direct consequence is that the hierarchical structures implied by verbs such as doûleo and serve become much more opaque in the Haida translations: since hlranggula does not unambiguously imply subordination, and since it is explicitly used in contexts were no such relationship is conspicuously signalled, it becomes impossible to distinguish between these two distinct usages. The following verse from John 5:17 is useful here: John 5:17 But Jesus answered them, My Father worketh [Greek = èrgázetai] hitherto, and I work [Greek = èrgázouai]. In this verse no implications of servitude are present. Indeed, how could they be? Surely an omnipotent deity cannot exist in a subordinate relationship to a superordinate power? Therefore, the working of God is presumably a selfgoverned activity. Similarly, if Jesus were merely God’s servant, simply following commands, then this would have profound consequences for standard Christological theories. In Keen’s Haida version of this verse, the verb lthonggwilgung-gung is used, which is the third person singular progressive form of the verb hlranggula. Clearly, when deployed in contexts such as this, the verb hlranggula cannot accrue connotations of servitude.

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It is possible, of course, that the above conventions may have arisen as a result of sloppiness, inconsistency, and/or ignorance. It is much more likely, though, that they were adopted knowingly, prompted by a desire to present the message of the Gospel (at least as this was understood by the CMS missionaries) as accurately as possible. As noted earlier, the Haida scripture translations manifest a strong tendency to equate the act of serving with mere employment, and an inevitable result of this is that the hierarchical aspects of servitude are effectively destabilised. Indeed, if the idea of serving is provocatively conflated with the more general notion of working, then this suggests that the vision promulgated in the Haida scriptures is more egalitarian than that presented in, say, the KJV. The power hierarchies that existed in the Judeo-Christian world of the NT are rendered largely indistinct: servitude becomes synonymous with mere activity, implying the possibility of a new social order. At this point it should be remembered that the Haida Gwaii missionaries sought insistently to discourage the practice of slavery among the indigenous communities, and therefore it is certainly possible that their reforming agendas, which became a characteristic feature of many missions along the Pacific Northwest Coast during the late nineteenth century, were knowingly promulgated in the translations they produced. It is needless to add that such practices severely complicate the task of determining how a contemporaneous audience would have interpreted words such as hlranggula when they are used in the Haida scriptures, yet such considerations are essential if the influence of the missionary-Haida sociolect upon the Haida language more generally is ever to be understood. Conclusion Translation necessarily reveals the fault lines that separate different cultures, and scripture translations provide distinctive challenges. About a decade ago, Román Álvarez and M. Carmen-África Vidal offered the following observation: If we are aware that translating is not merely passing from one text to another, transferring words from one container to another, but rather transporting one entire culture to another with all that this entails, we realize just how important it is to be conscious of the ideology that underlies a translation.64 64

Román Álvarez and M. Carmen-África Vidal, “Translating: A Political Act,” in Translation, Power, Subversion, edited by R. Álvarez and M. C.-Á. Vidal (Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters Ltd, 1996), 5.

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This may well be excellent advice. The difficulty is sometimes that the underlying ideologies are hard to identify with assurance—and the Haida scriptures exemplify this difficulty particularly aptly. The Masset missionaries attempted to translate the scriptures from a range of source languages (Greek, Latin, English) into a target language that they spoke with only partial fluency (at least initially), and in order to accomplish this, they had to seek assistance from the indigenous communities. Therefore, to some extent, the Haida scriptures can be viewed partly as works of integration rather than imposition: the books themselves may have been published under the names of certain Euro-Canadian missionaries, but the language of the texts enables us to hear, albeit faintly, the voices of their Haida parishioners. This type of collaborative venture is not atypical of missionary linguistic research in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—indeed in many areas it seems to have been the norm. Towards the end of his discussion of two Gikuyu dictionaries, for instance, Derek Peterson refers to the interactions that involved missionaries and native interlocutors in Eastern Africa in the early twentieth century, and he comments that “this long conversation was a hybrid, sitting uneasily at the intersection of coercive missionary discourse and Bakhtinian dialogue.”65 This description applies equally to the interactions involving the Masset missionaries and the Haida communities. While the indigenous Haida were certainly closely involved in the various acts of translation, there were undoubtedly aspects of coercion also. For instance, as shown in this article, new meanings were sometimes associated with existing lexical items, and this seems often to have occurred for principled reasons, for instance to undermine the social influence of the shamans or to destabilise certain indigenous power structures which systematically institutionalised slavery. It is clear, then, that the Haida scriptures embody the complexity of the social interactions which occurred between Euro-Canadians and the First Nations up and down the Northwest Pacific Coast during the nineteenth century, and therefore they shed light upon the nature of these cultural exchanges. And this illumination is certainly needed since the history of language-related missionary activity in North America has received less critical attention than, say, similar contemporaneous endeavours in Africa, Asia, or South America. This neglect seems to be partly due to the fact that by the time that the missionaries had begun to concentrate on the task of analysing the various indigenous languages that they encountered along the Pacific Northwest Coast, linguistics had started to become a more professional discipline, a development that 65

Derek Peterson, “Translating the Word: Dialogism and Debate in Two Gikuyu Dictionaries,” Journal of Religious History 23 (1999): 50.

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is sometimes associated with the founding of the American Anthropological Association in 1879 and with the emergence of the type of research broadly associated with Boas and Swanton. Whatever the reasons for it, though, this neglect is unfortunate, undesirable, and, more pertinently, anomalous, since many other aspects of missionary activity along the Pacific Northwest Coast have been explored in considerable depth in recent years. For instance, while John Grant’s Moon of Wintertime: Missionaries and the Indians of Canada in Encounter since 1534 (1984) remains a classic general account, later studies such as Susan Neylan’s ‘The Heavens Are Changing’: Nineteenth-Century Protestant Missions and Tsimshian Christianity (2003) and Alvyn Austin and Jamie Scott’s Canadian Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples: Representing Religion at Home and Abroad (2005) have concentrated (at least in part) upon distinctive complexities that characterised missions in Western Canada, exploring such convoluted issues as the role of women in church communities, the hybrid nature of aboriginal Christianity, and the impact of residential schools. Although broad cultural topics such as these have received considerable attention, there have been few focused studies that concentrate specifically on the linguistic analyses that were produced by CMS missionaries based on the Pacific Northwest Coast in the late nineteenth century. Nonetheless, as this article has demonstrated, this linguistic work can provide remarkable insights into particular theological and sociological convictions which cannot always be detected in the English-language letters and reports which have been preserved in the CMS archives. In summary, although they present many interpretative challenges, the Haida scriptures certainly deserve to receive more attention than they have done in the past; they are an important part of the story of the establishment of the Anglican Church in Western Canada, and this astonishingly complex story is one that should certainly be told in its entirety.

Mission and Politics

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Race, History, and the Australian Faith Missions Joanna Cruickshank In 1901, the parliament of the new Commonwealth of Australia passed a series of laws designed, in the words of the Prime Minister Edmund Barton, “to make a legislative declaration of our racial identity”.1 An Act to expel the large Pacific Islander community in North Queensland was followed by a law restricting further immigration to applicants who could pass a literacy test in a European language. In 1902, under the Commonwealth Franchise Act, “all natives of Asia and Africa” as well as Aboriginal people were explicitly denied the right to vote in federal elections.2 The “White Australia policy”, enshrined in these laws, was almost universally supported by Australian politicians, with only two members of parliament speaking against the restriction of immigration on racial grounds.3 Among the broader white community, voices protesting the policy were in the definite minority, but came from many sections of society, including the churches.4 One such criticism appeared in the first edition of a magazine titled The New South Wales Aborigines’ Advocate, launched on 23 July, 1901 by a fledgling organisation named the New South Wales Aborigines’ Mission (NSWAM). In their first editorial, the editors spoke pointedly of contemporary politics: We hear a loud cry to-day about “Australia for the Australians”, a cry which, if carried to its logical conclusion, would considerably surprise and disconcert the utterers, for, whilst most of them claim to be ultrademocratic, they are sadly conservative in democratic practice, and unChristian both in theory and in practice when they say that a native born Australian is not a man and a brother because his skin happens to be a few shades darker than their own … One of the missions of our little

Source: Cruickshank, J., “Race, History, and the Australian Faith Missions,” Itinerario 34.3 (2010), pp. 39–52. © Research Institute for History, Leiden University (2010), published by Cambridge University Press. 1 Edmund Barton, untitled speech on federation, Barton papers MS 5/977, National Library of Australia. Quoted in Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, 138. 2 See Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, 137–55. 3 Ibid., 152. 4 Ibid., 152, 159.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/97890

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paper will be to dispel the illusion that a black Australian is not as good a man as a white one.5 While this critique of the White Australia policy by the NSWAM undoubtedly had little effect on Australian politics at the time, in retrospect it takes on new significance. Shortly after this, the NSWAM would split to form two new mission organisations, the Aborigines Inland Mission (AIM) and the United Aborigines Mission (UAM). As will be shown, these missions were different, in both theology and practice, from the majority of those previously working in Australia. Known as “faith missions” because of their commitment to relying on God for funds, these two organisations became the largest and arguably most influential Christian missions working among Aboriginal communities during the twentieth century. John Harris notes that in the middle of the twentieth century, the AIM and UAM between them made up “nearly half the missionaries of all denominations in the whole of Aboriginal Australia and ninety per cent of those working in settled areas”.6 Despite the significance of these mission organisations, only a small amount of scholarly work has been done on their history, practices and impact. This article considers the relationship of these organisations to particular aspects of the social and cultural context in which they emerged, noting their emergence at the same historical moment as the Commonwealth of Australia. Specifically, I want to consider how, why and to what extent the NSWAM and its successors developed a different understanding of race from the racialised perspectives which dominated Australian political life at the time, perspectives which I argue must be considered an integral part of any historically-specific definition of “Australian modernity”. To tease out these differences, I focus particularly on early faith missionaries’ theologically-driven perceptions of historical time—past, present and future. My analysis focuses particularly on the early years of the Australian faith missions, from their formation until the late 1930s. My main sources include early histories of the two missions, written by missionaries; other autobiographical accounts of missionary experience; and the unpublished papers of the founder and co-director of the AIM, Retta Dixon Long. My conclusions build on the existing scholarly work on the two missions, especially Anne O’Brien’s perceptive discussion of Retta Dixon Long in her broader study of Australian

5 New South Wales Aborigines Advocate, vol. 1, quoted in Telfer, Amongst Australian Aborigines, 45–46. 6 Harris, One Blood, 555.

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religious women, God’s Willing Workers.7 O’Brien identifies a number of theological distinctives of the AIM, which I argue below are part of a broader theological framework. Other useful studies include the overview of the AIM and UAM in John Harris, One Blood, and a number of articles and unpublished theses on UAM and AIM missionaries.8 Like O’Brien’s work, significant studies by Alison Holland, Alison Longworth, and John Maynard focus on women, most of them single, who made up the majority of faith missionaries. While drawing on these previous works, my primary focus is issues of race rather than gender. The Australian faith missions emerged in the context of a number of broader developments in world Christianity during the second half of the nineteenth century. The most significant of these was the wider explosion of “faith missions”, following the example of the China Inland Mission (CIM), founded by Hudson Taylor in 1865. Taylor founded the CIM after becoming disillusioned with the policies and practices of mainstream mission societies in China. He placed a new emphasis on enculturation for missionaries, arguing that missionaries should learn local languages, live among the people they evangelised and as far as possible adopt local customs and dress. He emphasised evangelism over institution-building, as Sarah Paddle’s article in this volume describes. And he valued spiritual devotion and character over all other qualifications, accepting single women and people of working-class background as missionaries to a degree unusual in the mainstream mission societies of the period.9 Central to Taylor’s theology was the requirement for Christians to live in absolute, moment-by-moment reliance on God. This gave rise to what became known as “the faith principle” which, as summarised by the CIM, required that: … all who went out as Missionaries should go in dependence upon God for temporal supplies, with the clear understanding that the Mission did not guarantee any income whatever … The Mission is supported entirely by the free-will offerings of the Lord’s people. The needs of the work are laid before God in prayer, no personal solicitations or collections being authorised.10

7 O’Brien, God’s Willing Workers, 142–55. 8 See Longworth, “Upon Past Ebenezers” and “Was it Worthwhile?”; Maynard, “Light in the Darkness”; Holland, “Whatever Her Race”; Brett Vickers, “A Missionary in the Family”. 9 See Semple, Missionary Women, 154–9. 10 Broomhall, The Evangelisation of the World, 224.

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This determination to avoid any direct solicitation for financial assistance became a defining quality of both the CIM and the other missions which emulated it. Taylor’s model of mission was enthusiastically taken up by a variety of new missionary societies in the late nineteenth century, such as the Africa Inland Mission and the Regions Beyond Missionary Union. In Australia, his approach influenced the formation of a number of missions—including the Queensland Kanaka Mission, established by Florence Young in 1886.11 An Australian branch of the CIM was established in 1890, just before Taylor himself arrived for a hugely successful preaching tour.12 Taylor’s emphasis on moment-by-moment reliance on God in all things both influenced and reflected a wider development in British and American evangelicalism in the 1870s, often described as the “holiness movement”.13 This movement was also an important influence on the Australian faith missions. Proponents of “holiness” teaching promoted evangelical doctrines regarding the sinfulness of humanity, the coming judgment of God and the possibility of salvation through the atoning death of Jesus. More unusually, the movement drew on existing elements of Methodist theology, which encouraged converts to seek the gift of individual freedom from sin, otherwise known as complete sanctification or holiness. Proponents of this blessing distinguished between Christians who were simply converted, and those who had received by faith the “second blessing” that allowed them to defeat sin in their lives. Holiness was understood as a total submission to and dependence upon God, in which the human self was completely surrendered to the power of the indwelling Holy Spirit. An alternative and influential strand of the movement took on a slightly different theological shape, generally known as the “higher life” movement, most influentially promoted through the Keswick Convention. The “higher life” movement, which was influenced by Reformed rather than Wesleyan theology, did not adopt the Methodist belief of complete sanctification, but preached the possibility of a “victorious life” in which sin could be resisted moment-bymoment through the indwelling power of the Spirit.14 These different strands

11 See Moore, Florence Young and the Queensland Kanaka Mission, 2–5. 12 Stuart Piggin, Spirit of a Nation: The Story of Australia’s Christian Heritage, 72. 13 For a scholarly history of the holiness movement, see Dieter, The Holiness Revival and Bebbington, Evangelicalism, 180–226. 14 Dieter, The Holiness Revival, 249–50. See also O’Brien, “North American Wesleyan-Holiness Churches”, 32–34.

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of the holiness movement had an impact on Australian evangelicalism, with the first Australian Keswick Convention held in 1891.15 In the context of these trends in world and Australian evangelicalism, in 1893 the New South Wales Aboriginal Mission (NSWAM) began work in La Perouse, New South Wales. In 1902, following the visit to Australia of Henry Grattan Guiness, founder of the Regions Beyond Missionary Union and a famous British proponent of the “faith principle”, the Committee of the NSWAM announced that in the future it would operate as a faith mission.16 By 1903, the NSWAM had two established missionaries: Retta Dixon, who was based at La Perouse, and Ernest Telfer, who was based at Kempsey. These two missionaries itinerated long distances between Aboriginal settlements and reserves in NSW, Dixon often in the company of an Aboriginal convert and evangelist, Ellen Timbery. There were also three probationary missionaries: Mabel Timbury, Annie Lock, and Maud Oldrey.17 In 1905, Retta Dixon and the mission organisation’s treasurer, Leonard Long, left the NSWAM, along with Mabel Timbury. Dixon established a home for Aboriginal girls in the town of Singleton, from where she formed a new mission, the Aborigines Inland Mission (AIM). Shortly afterwards she married Leonard Long. It is not entirely clear what caused the split, but Dixon wrote that the NSWAM had not accepted faith mission principles to the degree that she considered necessary.18 After Dixon’s departure, in 1908, the NSWAM was renamed the Australian Aborigines’ Mission (AAM) and from 1929 the United Aborigines Mission (UAM). The two missions were occasionally in competition with each other and developed along somewhat different trajectories in their organisational structure and in their relationship with the state. As John Harris has noted, the AIM remained committed to the original faith mission principle of resisting any pressure to build institutions, claiming: The work is strictly evangelistic in character—the salvation of the Aborigines and their rooting and grounding in the faith being one aim of the mission, no industrial work is undertaken. Missionaries, money, time and strength are concentrated upon the purpose of bringing Australia’s original people to the knowledge of Christ.19 15

Piggin, “The American and British Contribution”, 298. See also Piggin, Spirit of a Nation, 49–78. 16 Longworth, “Upon Past Ebenezers”, 175. 17 Ibid., 179. 18 Long, In the Way of His Steps, 9–10. 19 Quoted in Harris, One Blood, 556.

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By contrast, the UAM, which became the larger of the two missions, established more institutions—in particular, mission stations and children’s homes.20 This has led to greater implication of the UAM in the government policies that led to the widespread removal of children known as the Stolen Generations, though some leading early UAM missionaries like Mary Bennett were vocal critics of government policies of child removal.21 In addition, in the 1940s, splits within the denominational base of the UAM appear to have meant that after this time “holiness” teachings were generally rejected by the missions’ directors and supporters.22 Both missions, however, retained a commitment to the “faith principle” in relation to mission finances. In considering the relationship of the faith missions to their contemporary context, we can examine both the explicit statements of the faith missionaries and the broader characteristics of the missions. The statements of the missionaries themselves demonstrate their own perception of their relationship to their contemporary context. Struggling to explain the doctrine of substitutionary atonement to Aboriginal people at Mt Margaret mission in Western Australia, a UAM missionary named Rod Schenk wrote: The natives still show great dislike to our mention of the death of Jesus, and when we sing “Nothing but the Blood of Jesus” even Nardie says “No good”… If we joined the Modernists, and were satisfied to teach the life of Christ and not salvation through His death, it would be all plain sailing; but we thank God for grace which prevents us being hoodwinked by a bloodless theology.23 Here “Modernism” refers to the liberal theologies gaining influence in the Australian churches from the 1870s onwards.24 The application papers of the AIM demonstrate that those who were attracted to the mission certainly saw themselves as reclaiming an authentic, biblical faith against the theological tide of the times. At a doctrinal level, applicants affirmed their belief in the authority of scripture, in the atoning death of Jesus and in the reality of heaven and hell, all concepts which were being roundly rejected by liberal theologians

20 Harris, One Blood, 558. 21 Ibid., 558. 22 See O’Brien, “North American Wesleyan-Holiness Churches”, 100. For Mary Bennett, see Paisley, “Unnecessary Crimes and Tragedies”. Paisley discusses Bennett’s resistance to child removal but not her affiliation with the UAM. 23 Schenk, The First Ten Years, 47. 24 Piggin, Spirit of a Nation, 74–89.

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and many churchgoers in the early twentieth century.25 In the late 1920s, as Alison Longworth has found, the UAM (then the AAM) explicitly defined itself as “fundamentalist” rather than “modernist” in theology and practice.26 This rejection of theological modernism reflected in part what Dieter has called “a growing Pentecostal primitivism” within the holiness movement of this period. He notes that this primitivism looked to the first century church of Pentecost as a model—not in its doctrinal formulas or structures, but “to experience again the power and purity which they believed the first Christians had experienced because of Pentecost”.27 Two increasingly influential trends within the holiness movement, both of them found within the Australian faith missions, indicate this primitivism. The first of these trends was a growing emphasis on the miraculous. Holiness preachers increasingly taught that just as the early church had seen “signs and wonders”, those present-day Christians who submitted to the transformative power of the Holy Spirit could expect to see and perform miracles. This can be clearly seen throughout the writing of those associated with the faith missions in the early years. In the 1930s, when ill health limited Retta Long’s more active ministry, she published a series of accounts of the work of the AIM.28 The title page of the first of these books, Providential Channels, included a brief poem that encapsulated Long’s convictions: The centuries go by, and now THEY say The age of miracles is wholly past; When did it pass, we ask. And who are they?29 The book contained story after story of “providential” intervention by God— as cash, food, people, trucks, and abundant catches of fish arrived in timely answer to the prayers of missionaries and Indigenous Christians. In 1933, the UAM published an account of the establishment of Mt Margaret Mission in Western Australia, drawn from the letters of the long-serving missionary Rod Schenk, who had recorded a similar stream of stories of miraculous provision and intervention.30 During the early years of the mission societies, the letters written by Aboriginal children living in the AIM home at Singleton show that 25 26 27 28 29 30

See ML Candidates’ Applications forms, AIM Papers, MSS 7244/1. Longworth, “Was it Worthwhile?”, 243–4. Dieter, The Holiness Revival, 250–1. See Radi, “Long”. Long, Providential Channels, title page. Schenk, The First Ten Years.

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they were being encouraged to interpret their experiences in the same way. “God answered our prayers on Saturday night and sent us such a nice tea of scones and cake”, a girl named Ada wrote to Long.31 While some expectation of the miraculous (particularly in the provision of funding) had always been part of the faith mission culture, the “primitivism” of this period also produced a new emphasis on “faith healing”.32 A belief that Christians should have victory not only over sin, but also over disease, clearly had some influence within the Australian faith missions. The application papers for the AIM included a medical questionnaire. Responding to the question “Have you had any accident, or injury, or required a surgical operation?” a candidate named Lavinia Burgess gave the abrupt answer: “Christ is my Healer.” To the question, “Is there any history in your family, or amongst your relations, of consumption, cancer or mental trouble?” she responded similarly: “Christ is my Health.”33 Lavinia and her husband William went on to work for the AIM for some years. The notion that holiness brought with it perfect health was not an official part of faith mission doctrine or culture, but the influence of faith healing theology was clearly present.34 The primitivist nature of this emphasis on the miraculous can be seen in faith missionary accounts, through the use of Scriptural references. Anne O’Brien notes that Long’s writing in Providential Channels is “detached from time, place and individual self”.35 As she argues, this reflects Long’s commitment to emphasising divine action over human agency. In her introduction, Long wrote that the incidents in the book “are not intended to portray the history of Aborigines’ Inland Mission, but are given as typical of God’s faithfulness and power in every emergency of life and service”.36 In addition, however, I would argue that the style of Long’s writing, repeated to a lesser degree in other AIM and UAM publications, reflects the “primitivist” view of the faith missionaries. Throughout Providential Channels and other accounts written by faith missionaries, events and actions are repeatedly described in terms that reference biblical descriptions of the growth of the early church or the Old Testament prophecies that were seen to be fulfilled with the coming of Jesus. 31 ML Letter Ada to Retta Long, 25 April 1907. AIM Papers MS 7244/1/37. 32 Dieter, The Holiness Revival, 251–2. 33 ML Application papers for Lavinia Burgess in File for Lavinia and William Burgess, nd. AIM Papers, MS 7244/1/9. 34 An exchange of letters between Retta Long and a friend demonstrates that Long rejected an absolute belief in faith healing. See ML Letters Marie Morris to Retta Long, 21 May 1907 and 9 October 1908, AIM Papers, MS 7244/1/23. 35 O’Brien, God’s Willing Workers, 145. 36 Long, Providential Channels, 13.

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For faith mission supporters, drawn from a variety of denominations but undoubtedly familiar with the gospels and book of Acts, these accounts were replete with meaningful allusions. Prior to the division of the NSWAM, the mission held a conference it described as “Our Jerusalem” to determine whether or not to extend its ministry. This title referred to the pivotal meeting of the early church, described in Acts 15, which resulted in the expansion of Christianity to the west.37 Describing a group of Aboriginal converts who went to St. Clair to build a mission house, Long wrote “These dark men set out, as the disciples of old, taking neither gold, or silver, or brass, in their purses, nor wallet for the journey—neither coats, neither shoes, etc.”38 Elsewhere she wrote, “hearing the Macedonian Call from the 20,000 Aborigines of Queensland, we went to Brisbane, in August 1909”.39 An Aboriginal convert who saw a vision of Jesus after being badly wounded by other Indigenous men was compared to the early church martyr, Stephen.40 For Rod Schenk, the willingness of Indigenous communities to settle at Mt Margaret Mission was the fulfilment of Luke 13:29: “And they shall come from the East, and from the West, and from the North, and from the South, and shall sit down.”41 Ernest Telfer, a long-standing UAM missionary, explained the more common mission model among the UAM of itinerancy by quoting Christ’s words: “I must preach in other cities also, for therefore I am sent.”42 Accounts such as these placed the experiences of faith missionaries and Indigenous Christians within a historical narrative shaped and determined primarily by God’s plan of salvation. This understanding conflated times and places: early twentieth-century Australia was fundamentally no different from first-century Palestine, because God was at work in the same way in both times and places. The focus of the Christian should not be on abstract historical forces or changes over time, but on the will and work of God as revealed in the present. As one missionary applicant wrote to Retta Long, “I am waiting His clear directions as to next settled work, if He pleases to give me such. Of course it is a Moment by Moment life we are to live.”43 This prioritising of the theological meanings of history is obvious in the histories of the two mission societies 37 The NSW Aborigines’ Advocate (Sep. 1907), 2. Quoted and discussed in Longworth, “Upon Past Ebenezers”, 181. 38 Long, Providential Channels, 37. The allusion is to Jesus sending out the disciples in Matthew 10: 9–10. 39 Long, Providential Channels, 52. The allusion is to Acts 6:6–13. 40 Long, Providential Channels, 64. The allusion is to Acts 7:51–60. 41 Schenk, First Ten Years, 48. 42 Telfer, Among Australian Aborigines, 69. 43 ML Letter Miss M. E. Hay to Retta Long, 18 May 1908. AIM Papers, MS 7244/1/2.

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written by missionaries in the 1930s. Though these histories provided detailed accounts of the missions’ development, including far more dates, names and places than Providential Channels, both made virtually no mention of broader events. The period covered by these histories included the First World War, which was not mentioned in the UAM history and given one brief mention in the account of the AIM.44 This understanding of the present was connected to but also complicated by a second major “primitivist” development in holiness circles at the end of the century: the rise of the belief that Christ’s return was imminent. Tied to the growing influence during this period of premillenial theology, this belief defined the present historical moment as part of the “last days”, a brief time of both crisis and opportunity before Christ returned to gather his people to himself.45 Such thinking certainly influenced the thinking and practices of the Australian faith missions. After establishing the Mt Margaret Mission, Schenk wrote: We were well aware of the danger some mentioned of our losing our natives at any time because of their migratory habits, but Dr. Elkin, as an expert on these matters, said he considered because of our position, etc., that we should be sure of our congregation for about 150 years. We feel sure the Lord will come before that time, so we feel happy.46 This quote affirms the contention of O’Brien that the premillenialist assumptions of the faith missionaries meant that they were not interested in the longterm earthly future of their Indigenous converts—or themselves—because such a future was foreshortened.47 The imminent return of Christ meant that the future which mattered was eternal, and for this the most important preparation was conversion and sanctification. O’Brien has noted that this short-term focus had specific and detrimental consequences for the Aboriginal people among whom the faith missions worked. Though faith missionaries deplored the conditions in which Aboriginal people had been forced to live, at least in the early years of the mission societies the focus of the missionaries was on conversion not material or political assistance.48 In the remainder of this article, however, I want to go 44 45 46 47 48

Long, In the Way of His Steps, 21. Dieter, The Holiness Revival, 250–1, 253–4. Schenk, The First Ten Years, 50. O’Brien, God’s Willing Workers, 150–1. Though, in the longer term, faith missionaries like Mary Bennett advocated for Aboriginal people on the basis of broader analysis of the structural causes of their oppression. See Holland, “Whatever Her Race”, 129–42.

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beyond O’Brien’s insight to argue that the view of historical time described above, of which premillenialism was only one part, had significant implications for the faith missionaries’ understanding of race. These implications can be seen more clearly when contrasted with the assumptions of many of the missionaries’ contemporaries in white society. As noted, the Australian faith missions formed in the context of the establishment of Australia as an independent nation state in 1901. The most prominent proponents of Federation, men like Charles Henry Pearson and Alfred Deakin, were self-conscious progressives, who promoted democracy, women’s suffrage and free, secular, universal education. Integral to their progressive vision, as many historians have noted, was the concept of a White Australia.49 Social justice, sexual equality and national unity were all seen as dependent on the maintenance of White Australia. Alfred Deakin, the second Prime Minister of Australia, argued that “a White Australia is not a surface, but it is a reasoned policy which goes to the roots of national life, and by which the whole of our social, industrial and political organisation is governed”.50 Notions of racial purity, national identity and progressive social policy were thus profoundly connected in turn of the century Australia. These connections must be seen as significant in any understanding of “Australian modernity” which attempts to move beyond an ahistorical concept of modernity to historical specificity. Angela Woollacott has argued that in the late nineteenth century, Australia could be represented within the British Empire as the “paradigm of modernity”, “exemplifying the conquering of distance, space and time; the conquest of ‘civilized’ coloniser over ‘primitive’ colonised; the proliferation of industrial technologies in multiple sites; and the springing up of cities in no time at all where none had existed before”.51 In the colonial context, the association of modernity with advanced civilisation, industrial technology and the city could clearly be understood in relation to racial stereotypes and categories. In fact, as Woollacott argues, “Western modernity must be viewed as having been created in a symbiotic relationship with its racially constructed others; racial hierarchies, including whiteness as a constructed racial identity, have been integrally constitutive of modernity.”52 In Australia, the determination of early twentieth century nationalists to define the new nation in terms of “whiteness” appears as a striking illustration of this. As Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds have recently argued, in establishing 49 The best recent discussion of Federation and the White Australia policy is Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, 137–65. 50 Alfred Deakin, “Policy Speech of the Deakin Government”, Ballarat, 1903, 12. Quoted in Birrell, “Immigration Control”, 108. 51 Woollacott, To Try Her Fortune, 208. 52 Ibid.

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the white Australia policy, Australians “embarked on a social experiment that placed them, so they thought, at the cutting edge of modern history”.53 As this comment suggests, the views of these nationalists were largely tied to a particular conception of history. In Charles Henry Pearson’s influential book, National Life and Character: A Forecast, he portrayed history in social Darwinist terms as a battleground for the races. Though the white “higher races” had achieved ascendancy through their adaptability and intelligence, they faced the possibility of being engulfed by the rapid growth of the “inferior races” such as “Chinamen, Hindoos and negroes”.54 Published prior to Federation, Pearson’s book was constantly quoted and discussed by politicians supporting the White Australia policy.55 Pearson wrote in response to what he saw as the more broadly accepted view in Australia, which assumed that the “higher races are bound to gain more and more upon the lower”.56 This cruder form of social Darwinism was perhaps even more influential among white Australians during this period than Pearson’s views.57 Nevertheless, both shared a common belief that in the past, the “higher races” had developed or evolved beyond the “lower races”. More significantly for the purposes of this article, both shared a common belief regarding the future of the Aboriginal people in Australia. Unlike Africans or Chinese, Pearson argued, in Australia “the natives have died out as we approached”.58 Australian modernity was thus tied to a racialised view of both past and future, in which the fate of Aboriginal people was to die out or be assimilated, leaving Australia as a “white man’s country”. In this modern Australia, to paraphrase Frantz Fanon, there was only one destiny for “the black man” and it was white.59 The writings of the faith missionaries suggest that they were influenced by this view of historical time but resisted some of its implications. This can be seen in one of the few discussions of Australian history in Retta Long’s Providential Channels, where she described the arrival of Captain Cook, as recounted to her by an Aboriginal man named Jimmy. She noted that Jimmy’s “old people” had passed down this account of the arrival of “a civilisation which has well-nigh destroyed a branch of the oldest stock of the human race”. Since that time, Long wrote: 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, 138. Pearson, National Life and Character, 31–34. Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, 138–9. Pearson, National Life and Character, 31. See Broome, Aboriginal Australians, 92–94; Reynolds, Dispossession, 114–9. Pearson, National Life and Character, 16. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 228.

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Jimmy lived to see a great city rising, less than a score of miles away, from whence civilisation’s backwash had reached his camp, and the white man’s gambling, drinking and immorality had done their deadly work. The weaker race became degraded, almost beyond recognition, and was despised and looked upon as refuse, fit only for destruction … Coupled with this was the mistaken belief that our Aborigines occupied, naturally, the lowest place in the human scale. Possessing no form of worship, and with little or no intelligence, they were considered beyond the pale of redemption.60 This account both reflects and resists a social Darwinist view of the impact of colonisation on Aboriginal people. On the one hand, Long repeats the prevalent notion of an older and “weaker” race. On the other hand, she rejects the common belief in a natural racial hierarchy, with Aboriginal people positioned in “the lowest place”. And both the “white man” and “civilisation” were seen as bearing no inherent moral superiority. Similarly, Ernest Telfer, in his history of the UAM, repeatedly described Aboriginal communities who had not come into contact with white “civilisation” as having superior moral and physical qualities to those who had been “degraded” by white society.61 For faith missionaries, then, the past was not primarily a story of evolutionary competition and development but of an ongoing spiritual battle. This meant that early faith missionaries resisted anthropological accounts of cultural development. When A. P. Elkin, the influential anthropologist, visited Mt Margaret in 1930, Schenk reported: One of our men made a comparison of what Dr Elkin thought and what he himself thought in these words: “Dr Elkin thinks our native stories and ceremonies came from some man long time ago, but I think they came from the devil. What do you think, Mr Schenk?” Some of the ceremonies are harmless enough, but others are filled with evil, so I readily agreed with Steve.62 While Schenk’s comments reflected the faith missions’ often negative view of Indigenous culture, it is arguable that this exchange also demonstrates the ways in which faith missionaries’ highly supernatural worldview could provide a point of contact with Indigenous culture. While Schenk interpreted Steve’s 60 Long, Providential Channels, 13–14. 61 Telfer, Amongst Australian Aborigines, 194, 203. 62 Schenk, First Ten Years of Mt Margaret, 58.

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comment primarily as a condemnation of aspects of his own culture, Steve’s words could also reflect an insistence upon the spiritual origins of “stories and ceremonies” in the face of a more rationalist interpretation. In rejecting a “modern” and racialised view of history, faith missionaries developed an understanding of the present and future of Aboriginal people that diverged from those contemporary understandings which I have argued should be seen as part of “Australian modernity”. While the early literature of the faith missions at times repeated the general settler assumption that Aboriginal people might be “dying out”, this was not seen as inevitable. Retta Long, in particular, believed strongly in the establishment of a “Native Church”, to be ultimately led by Aboriginal converts rather than missionaries. Her writings say little about the “dying race” but focus instead on the participation of Indigenous people in the urgent mission to save souls before Christ’s return. She described the Aboriginal members of the first AIM church at Singleton, going into town each Sunday night where “for an hour or two [they] poured forth a telling witness to the power of the Gospel to several hundreds of people, and then marched back to their meeting room singing the Songs of Zion”.63 This theological perspective on history and race must be taken into account when seeking to interpret the response of Indigenous people to faith missions. The accounts studied here are obviously very limited in what they can tell us about the motivations of Indigenous people in relation to the faith missions and I do not presume in this article to draw conclusions on these. It is clear, however, that Aboriginal people participated in the faith missionary enterprise in ways that were historically unusual. Both the UAM and AIM created a category of “Native Worker” or “Native Helper”, and early histories of both missions recorded repeated examples of Aboriginal people preaching, becoming involved in itinerant evangelism and building churches.64 There are, of course, plenty of examples of Aboriginal people prior to this time who converted to Christianity and became involved in evangelistic work among their own people. Recent historical studies have emphasised that Indigenous people could and did exercise choice in accepting as well as rejecting aspects of Christian belief and practice.65 Particularly in the AIM, however, Aboriginal people appear to have chosen to take (and been given) leadership to an unprecedented degree. According to Retta Long’s account, Aboriginal 63 Long, In the Way of His Steps, 15. 64 For example, Alison Longworth has demonstrated that Indigenous mission workers were not always included, even in the AAM/UAM lists of “Native Helpers”. Longworth, “Was it Worthwhile?”, 89, 140. 65 For example, Miller, Koori, 127–128; Brock, Outback Ghettos; Kenny, The Lamb Enters the Dreaming.

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men and women were independently involved in itinerant evangelism and at times were appointed sole “pastor” and/or “missionary” to a number of AIM mission churches. From 1908, the AIM was running day conferences for training “Native Helpers” and a Native Training College was established in 1938.66 In 1924, Long claimed that twelve Aboriginal people had volunteered to become helpers in that year alone.67 The first Aboriginal man ordained in Australia, Eddie Atkinson, was a pastor with the AIM.68 While Aboriginal “helpers” were apparently seen to generally require supervision from white missionaries, evidence of racism within the missions, this degree of support for Indigenous ministry was unusual.69 To conclude, the AIM and UAM emerged out of a particular theological understanding, in which a focus on intense, “moment-by-moment” experiences of God, a desire to return to the “primitive” zeal of the early church, and a premillenialist expectation of the imminent return of Christ were notable. In this article, I have argued that these qualities were linked to a distinctive view of historical time, which contrasted significantly with the racialised narrative of history that characterised the new Australian nation in which the missions developed. This resistance of racialised understandings of history helps explain why faith missionaries, in spite of their hostility to many aspects of Aboriginal culture, were open to Aboriginal participation and leadership within the faith missionary enterprise. In addition, it provides important context for understanding the experience and motivations of the large numbers of Aboriginal people who associated with the faith missionary enterprise and without whom the missions’ widespread influence cannot be understood. Bibliography of Works Cited

Archival Sources

Mitchell Library, Sydney (ML): Aborigines Inland Mission (AIM) Papers 66 For report on day conference, see “Aborigines Inland Mission”, 31 October 1908, Sydney Morning Herald, 11. For Native Training College, see Radi, “Long”. 67 Radi, “Long”. 68 O’Brien, God’s Willing Workers, 153–5. Longworth has discussed the inferior status of “Native Helpers” within the UAM. Longworth, “Was it Worthwhile?”, 89–90. 69 Robert Kenny has argued that support for Indigenous leadership within mission churches, in both Australia and elsewhere, strongly declined in the second half of the nineteenth century with the rise of social Darwinism and its impact on missiology. Kenny, Lamb Enters the Dreaming, 276–99.

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Published Sources

Bebbington, David. Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s. New York: Routledge, 1993. Birrell, Robert. “Immigration Control in Australia”. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 534 (July 1994): 106–17. Brett Vickers, Christine. “A Missionary in the Family: George and Jennie Smith and Aboriginal People, New South Wales 1890–1920”. PhD Thesis, La Trobe University, 2007. Brock, Peggy. Outback Ghettos: A History of Aboriginal Institutionalisation and Survival. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Broome, Richard. Aboriginal Australians: Black Response to White Dominance, 1788– 1980. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1982. Broomhall, Benjamin. The Evangelisation of the World: A Missionary Band, a Record of Consecration and an Appeal. Marshall and Scott, 1889. Dieter, Melvin Easterday. The Holiness Revival of the Nineteenth Century. Second ed. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 1996. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto Press, 1986. Harris, John. One Blood: 200 Years of Aboriginal Encounter with Christianity, A Story of Hope. Sutherland, NSW: Albatross Books, 1990. Holland, Alison. “‘Whatever Her Race, a Woman is Not a Chattel’: Mary Montgomery Bennett”. In Uncommon Ground: White Women in Aboriginal History, edited by Anna Cole, Victoria Haskins, Fiona Paisley. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2005. Kenny, Robert. The Lamb Enters the Dreaming. Melbourne: Scribe, 2007. Lake, Marilyn and Henry Reynolds. Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Long, Retta. Providential Channels. Sydney: The Central Press, 1935. Long, Retta. In the Way of His Steps. Sydney: The Central Press, 1936. Longworth, Alison. “‘Upon Past Ebenezers We Built Our Jehovah-Jireh’: The Vision of the Australian Aborigines’ Mission and Its Heritage in the China Inland Mission”. Journal of Religious History, vol. 21 (June 2007): 169–84. Longworth, Alison. “Was it Worthwhile? An Historical Analysis of Five Women Missionaries and their Encounters with the Nyungar people of South-west Australia”. PhD Thesis, Murdoch University, 2005. Maynard, John. “‘Light in the Darkness’: Elizabeth McKenzie Hatton”. In Uncommon Ground: White Women in Aboriginal History, edited by Anna Cole, Victoria Haskins, Fiona Paisley. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2005. Miller, James. Koori: A Will to Win. Sydney: Angus & Robinson, 1985. Moore, Clive. Florence Young and the Queensland Kanaka Mission, 1886–1906: Beginnings of an Indigenous Pacific Church. Solomon Islands Museum Occasional Paper

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No. 2. School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics, University of Queensland, December 2009. O’Brien, Anne. God’s Willing Workers: Women and Religion in Australia. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2005. O’Brien, Glen. “North American Wesleyan-Holiness Churches in Australia”. PhD Thesis, La Trobe University, 2005. Paisley, Fiona. “’Unnecessary Crimes and Tragedies’: Race, Gender and Sexuality in Australian Policies of Aboriginal Child Removal”. In Gender Sexuality and Colonial Modernities, edited by Antoinette Burton. New York: Routledge, 1999. Pearson, Charles Henry. National Life and Character: A Forecast. London: Macmillan, 1894. Piggin, Stuart. “The American and British Contribution to Evangelicalism in Australia”. In Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles and Beyond, 1700–1990, edited by Mark A. Noll, David W. Bebbington, and George A. Rawlyk. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Piggin, Stuart. Spirit of a Nation: The Story of Australia’s Christian Heritage. Sydney: Strand Publishing, 2004. Radi, “Long, Margaret Jane (Retta) (1878–1956)”. Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 15, 121–2. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2000. Reynolds, Henry. Dispossession: Black Australians and White Invaders. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1985. Schenk, Rod. The First Ten Years of Mt Margaret Mission, W. A., edited by H. P. Smith. Melbourne: Keswick Book Depot, 1933. Semple, Rhonda. Missionary Women: Gender, Professionalism and the Victorian Idea of Christian Mission. Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2003. Telfer, E. J. Amongst Australian Aborigines: Forty Years of Missionary Work, The Story of the United Aborigines Mission. Melbourne: Fraser & Morphett, 1939. Woollacott, Angela. To Try Her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism and Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

British Missions and Indian Nationalism, 1880–1908: Imitation and Autonomy in Calcutta and Madras Chandra Mallampalli In October 1909 the English writer G. K. Chesterton argued that the “art of politics is not managing a machine, but managing a personality.” By this he meant that political life ought to give expression to the distinctive cultural ethos of a people. Applying this thesis to India, Chesterton wrote, “The principal weakness of Indian Nationalism seems to be that it is not very Indian and not very national. It is all about Herbert Spencer and Heaven knows what…. When all is said, there is a national distinction between a people asking for its own ancient life and a people asking for things that have been wholly invented by somebody else. There is a difference between a conquered people demanding its own institutions and the same people demanding the institutions of the conqueror.”1 In making such bold assertions, Chesterton was probably unaware that by the end of the nineteenth century Indian nationalists were far along in their quest for a distinctly Indian concept of nationhood.2 They had expanded the scope of nationalism from a purely political project of securing rights within the British Empire to a cultural project of defending “Hindu society” and

Source: Mallampalli, C., “British Missions and Indian Nationalism, 1880–1908: Imitation and Autonomy in Calcutta and Madras,” in A. Porter, (ed.), The Imperial Horizons of British Protestant Missions, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 2003, pp. 158–181. © 2003, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, MI. Reprinted by permission of the publisher; all rights reserved. 1 G. K. Chesterton, “The Indian Nationalist Movement,” Illustrated London News, 2 October 1909 (American edition). A word of thanks is owed to Vishal Mangalwadi for making this article available to me. Special thanks, as well, to Christi-An Bennett, Alan Guenther, and Dorothea Woll Rice for their helpful critiques of an earlier draft. 2 Here the term “nation” refers to a group that has the sense of its own peoplehood based on claims to a common past, destiny, ethnicity, religion, or ideology. This is to be distinguished from a “state,” which is a governing apparatus whose administration and control over a population is prescribed by specified territorial boundaries. “Nationalism” is that process whereby the claims to nationhood are generated and the specific entitlements of the nation (e.g., “home rule” or statehood) are pursued. This process contains both “cultural” and “political” elements.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/97890

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“Hinduism” against the culture and religion of the conqueror.3 Often Indian nationalists defended Hinduism against the influence of British missionaries who embodied, in their minds, the soul or conscience of the European standing in judgment on their way of life. Whether such defenses actually constituted an outcry for indigenous institutions or amounted to an imitative reaction against the “Christian nation” is a question that warrants further inquiry. Much of the writing on Indian nationalism presents the nationalist encounter with Christian missionaries as a contest for religious allegiance, one that ends either in “conversion” to the “foreign religion” or in effective “Hindu resistance.”4 My central aim in this essay is to show that by the end of the nineteenth century, missionaries and Indian nationalists were engaged in a contest not so much over conversion, but over the cultural personality or imagining of the Indian nation. Rather than competing for the “souls of Indians,” they competed for the “soul of India.” Missionaries supported Indian nationalism when, even in its most Hindu colors, it manifested signs of “the Christian impact” on India. Conversely, Indian nationalism achieved its greatest autonomy from missionary influence when it ceased to allow Christian religious or societal norms to measure its own legitimacy. This dialectical quest for agency and autonomy within nationalist consciousness can be viewed with greater clarity by applying theoretical tools found in some of the more recent studies on nationalism to the specific urban contexts of Calcutta and Madras from 1880 to 1908.

The Construction of Religious Difference

According to Liah Greenfeld, nationalism originates in unconscious feelings of ressentiment or envy toward another culture or civilization, which lead one group to define its identity in distinction to the values and beliefs professed by the other. Particularly significant is Greenfeld’s discussion of how the one who envies, in the very act of rejecting or denigrating the values of the rival civilization, unconsciously borrows or mirrors those values, in her words “borrowing

3 The term “Hinduism” here encompasses a wide array of devotional sects, philosophical schools, deities, and local traditions, predominantly Sanskrit based and native to India. Nineteenth-century apologists of Hinduism attempted to synthesize this plethora of “smaller” traditions into a single monolithic religion, which could compete with Islam and Christianity in the competitive market of religions. “Hindu society” in this essay, refers primarily to the traditional customs, practices, and institutions of the twice-born castes of India. 4 The theme of conversion versus resistance is a fundamental trope not only of “missionary histories” but also of Indian nationalist historiography.

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with an opposite sign.”5 This notion of ressentiment seems applicable to how, for example, the Hindu Tract Society (HTS) in Madras tried to defeat missionaries at their own game by preaching the “superiority of Hinduism.” However, to apply the concept of ressentiment to Hindu-Christian dynamics in India requires not only that we treat “religions” as “nations,” but also that we do so within a colonial context.6 This transition to the analysis of Hinduism as an expression of “anticolonial nationalism” is facilitated by Partha Chatterjee’s discussion of the “spiritual” and “material” domains of Indian nationalist thought. Chatterjee, while agreeing with Benedict Anderson’s insights concerning the “imagined” character of nations, objects to Anderson’s claim that the historical experiences of western Europe, the Americas, and Russia have provided the modular forms of nationalism for the rest of the world.7 If colonial subjects of the Third World had simply adopted hook, line, and sinker the forms of nationality derived from the West, there would have been nothing left, in Chatterjee’s view, for them to imagine. Anticolonial nationalists of the Third World, he contends, set themselves apart from Western forms of nationalism by preserving the distinctiveness of their “spiritual culture” before they “politically” contested colonial rule.8 Though Bengali nationalists, according to Chatterjee, conceded superiority to the West in the domain of the “outside,” which includes economy, statecraft, science, and technology, they established sovereignty in an inner, “spiritual” domain in which the “essential marks” of cultural identity were “insulated from colonial intrusion.”9 While Chatterjee’s analysis offers insights on how the Indian nationalist mind organized its world, his analysis raises other questions about the religious component of nationalism. If Indian nationalism was “posited not on identity but on difference” from the West, to what extent was the positing of difference governed by the dynamics of ressentiment? By about 1900 numerous societies were formed to defend the “inner domain of culture” in terms of a religious nationalism, that is, a monolithic “Hindu religion” upon which Indian identity must be based. If this defense of the Hindu religion essentially borrows the modular form of “the Christian religion” and simply gives it “an opposite [Hindu] sign,” how can the inner domain of Indian nationalism be said 5 Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, 1992), p. 16. 6 By the end of the nineteenth century, Western-educated Hindu publicists, Theosophists, and more radical members of the Indian National Congress (INC) all had made some facet of Hinduism central to their nationalist politics. 7 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (New Delhi, 1993), pp. 4–5. 8 Chatterjee defines the “spiritual” broadly to include many aspects of cultural activity—e.g., mother tongue, art, novel, drama, and family. 9 Chatterjee, p. 6.

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to evade the universal history Chatterjee decries? To address this question, it is necessary to gauge the extent to which the Hinduism espoused by nationalists was either grounded in the institutions of local society or constructed as a reaction to Christian influence. The following section on Bengal addresses this issue by comparing the outlook of Bhudev Mukhopadhyay with that of Bankimchandra Chattopadyay. The section on Madras approaches the same issue by analyzing the rhetoric of the Hindu Tract and Theosophical Societies. By such examples, it will be shown how some expressions of nationalist sentiments are reflective of Christian influence while others seem far removed from any molding by Christianity. In each case it is necessary to determine whether nationalist responses betray either imitation or autonomy.

Defenses of Hinduism in Bengal

Toward the turn of the century, upper-caste, English-educated Bengalis (known as bhadrolok, or “respectable people”) rigorously defended Hindu culture and religion against different aspects of Western influence. When responding to Christian interlocutors, Hindu apologists such as Swami Vivekenanda stridently defended the superiority of Hinduism as the religion best suited to guide India’s national regeneration. Such ethical claims for Hinduism, as missionaries themselves observed, often implied that Hindus were adopting, however unconsciously, Christian notions of what a religion ought to look like.10 Other Hindus, suspicious of this resemblance, defended not a religion but a traditional way of life, grounded in caste, against any and all forms of “servile imitation” of Western culture and religion. During the Swadeshi movement (1903–8), nationalists sought to “reclaim” traditional practices and institutions of Hindu society (e.g., caste, the joint family, image worship, and child marriage) that had been attacked by missionaries, Indian reformers, and British officials. The traditionalist approach was less imitative than defenses of modern 10 This refashioning of Hinduism relates not only to its presentation as a monolithic religion, but also to the recasting of traditional symbols and doctrines to give them a more activist or ethical character. See Indira Chowdhury-Sengupta, “Reconstructing Spiritual Heroism: The Evolution of the Swadeshi Sannyasi in Bengal,” in Myth and Mythmaking, ed. Julia Leslie (Richmond, 1996), pp. 124–42. Also, Sumit Sarkar, “Indian Nationalism and the Politics of Hindutva,” in Making India Hindu: Religion, Community, and the Politics of Democracy in India, ed. David Ludden (New Delhi, 1996). pp. 270–94; Robert E. Frykenberg, “The Emergence of Modern Hinduism as a Concept and as an Institution,” in Hinduism Reconsidered, ed. Gunther D. Sontheimer and Hermann Kulke (New Delhi, 1989).

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Hinduism, but also less able, because of its adherence to caste, to encompass all segments of the Indian population. These different responses to Western influence are well illustrated in Tapan Raychauduri’s account of the lives of two Calcutta Brahmans, Bhudev Mukhopadhyay (1827–94) and Bankimchandra Chattopadyay (1838–94). Their experiences, inside and outside their families, offer critical insights into why they defended Hinduism as they did. In the following discussion I argue that while Bhudev’s defense of Hinduism was rooted in his total commitment to his family’s caste traditions, Bankim’s defense was more severed from those familial roots, and hence more de-cultured. This rupture between Bankim’s immediate, familial experience of Hindu tradition and his ideological formation contributed to a more reactionary construction of Hinduism. Well situated in the social world of a Bengali Brahman, Bhudev only once questioned the values of his upbringing. During his college years he experienced a crisis of faith when, under the influence of missionaries, he disavowed idol worship and refused to participate in household rituals to various deities.11 Under the patient and caring tutelage of his father, who explained to him the symbolic meaning of idol worship, Bhudev eventually resumed his belief in every aspect of his ancestral faith. His father’s influence convinced him to preserve his orthodox Brahmanical identity against the fashionable departures from Hindu tradition encouraged by his Western education. Bhudev grew up deeply admiring his father and, following the crisis over idol worship, remained intensely committed to the ritual observances of a Brahmanical home. The strong sense of religiosity he developed early in life led him to become formally initiated into the Hindu Tantric tradition.12 The satisfaction Bhudev derived from following the strict injunctions of his religion and caste, however, was accompanied by frustration over the “servile imitation of the ruling race” he saw in his friends.13 Throughout his writings he affirms and defends Hindu Brahmanical values, which he regards as the core of Indian identity that was under siege by Western cultural influence.14 He believed Indians had nothing to learn from the West regarding familial and social ethics. The norms of Indian society, he contended, which emphasized the “selfless,” corporate values inherent in the joint family system, are superior to the 11 Tapan Raychauduri, Europe Reconsidered (New Delhi, 1988), p. 28. 12 Raychauduri, p. 30. 13 Bhudev was deeply hurt by the conversion to Christianity of one of his most admired friends, Madhusudan Dutt, as well as by other conversions by students of Henry Derozier. Raychauduri, pp. 30–31. 14 Raychauduri, p. 58.

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egalitarian ideals of Europe.15 His defense of Indian society against Western critiques led him to defend even the most contentious practices of the day. “Those who are alive only to the evils of early marriage,” he wrote, “and are blind to its advantages, may be safely described as constantly striving to ape the English.”16 Bhudev also attributed the harsh treatment of household servants by their Indian masters to the imitation of patterns set by British officials in India: “I am afraid the disease of beating one’s servant is getting contagious with us. That is the effect of undue imitation. English masters beat their native servants. They also beat their servants who look admiringly on all actions of Englishmen.”17 Bhudev’s unwavering defense of things Indian must not be seen as a crude variety of indigeneism. His critique of the West derived from his adherence to his caste identity, coupled with a careful study of a wide range of Western philosophical ideas. Bhudev was acutely aware of the potential for reactionary behavior, even in the way Hinduism would be defended against missionary critiques. Not fooled by what he regarded as the Westernized Hinduism espoused by an Indian Theosophist, Rajnarayan Basu, Bhudev asked, “In what way has the author proved the superiority of Hinduism? He has only shown that it is similar to the Englishman’s religion. In the author’s mind, the English are the measure of all things.”18 Though he engaged the developments of science and social philosophy from the West, Bhudev made it a priority to remain answerable to the authority of his Brahmanical heritage. In contrast to Bhudev’s unyielding acceptance of Brahmanical tradition, Bankim’s personality is defined, in Raychauduri’s account, by his ongoing “conflict” with European attitudes as well as his own Hindu tradition.19 Bankim’s writings carry a recurring theme of Indian humiliation at the hands of Englishmen. He often referred to himself and others who worked for the government as “petty servants” of the ruling race. Some of his closest friends and relatives were deeply immersed in this bureaucracy and its values Bankim himself worked as a deputy magistrate, moving to a “First Class” ranking in salary and status. Yet, even as so-called petty servants of the European, “Bankim’s family with its five Deputy Magistrates in two generations achieved a status in the new colonial context higher than the one they enjoyed in traditional

15 Raychauduri, p. 91. 16 Priyaranjan Sen, Western Influence in Bengali Literature (Calcutta, 1966), p. 245; from Bhudev Mukhopadhyay, Paribarik Prabandha, First Essay (1882; 11th ed., Chinsurah, 1939), p. 1. 17 Sen, p. 244. 18 Raychauduri, p. 35. 19 Raychauduri, pp. 104–6.

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Brahman society.”20 The investment of Bankim and his family in the status and security of government positions contributed to their compromise of traditional, Brahmanical practices (including ritual and dietary observances and adherence to hereditary professions). Internal factors also confused Bankim’s attitudes toward Hindu tradition. His great-grandfather’s marriage to a woman from a considerably lower caste background and the consequent loss of ritual status may have diluted the “Brahmanical glue” within his family.21 As an oldest son who had acquired public acclaim for his writings, Bankim shouldered the burdens of huge financial debts from his father and a younger brother who constantly needed money. These pressures, according to Raychauduri, influenced Bankim’s movement toward values of self-reliance and individualism early in his writing career.22 In contrast to Bhudev, who deeply admired his father, Bankim found himself torn between “deference, a sense of duty, impatience and resentment.”23 Though he strained to display filial piety toward his father, he maintained inner feelings of resentment. Such incongruity permeated his attitudes toward Hindu tradition as a whole. Because of these ruptures in his personal world and his ambiguous relationship to Hindu tradition, Bankim was able to experiment, more freely than Bhudev, with elements of Western thought. For a time the positivism of Comte as well as the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill profoundly influenced him. This secular, philosophical influence from the West led him to become a passionate skeptic of all religion, while retaining some appreciation for the logic and rationalism to be found in the samkhya and nyaya schools of Hindu thought. From Comte and Mill he derived tools of social analysis to diagnose various illnesses within Hindu society such as apathy, idleness, superstition, and inequality. By 1917 he had reached the conclusion that Hindu philosophy in its entirety was “a great mass of errors,” but only a year later he criticized the “slavish imitation” of Western ways.24 A decade later Bankim shifted from being a harsh critic of Hindu thought to being an ardent defender. This abrupt shift in his thinking coincided with a heated confrontation in the columns of the Calcutta Statesman (September to October 1882) between himself (writing under the pseudonym Ram Chandra) and the Reverend William Hastie, principal of the General Assembly’s 20 Raychauduri, p. 106. 21 His father’s grandfather married into a wealthy family of considerably lower caste status, probably for material reasons. Raychauduri, pp. 105–6. 22 Raychauduri, pp. 110, 105–6. 23 Raychauduri, p. 108. 24 Raychauduri, pp. 138, 145.

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Institution of the Church of Scotland. Bankim’s debate with Hastie is significant for two reasons: First, it was during this debate that he made his “first, uncompromising avowal of faith in Hinduism.”25 Second, the debate illustrates a shift in the response of nationalists to their European interlocutors. Rather than measuring the worth of Hindu society according to the external criteria of Western culture, nationalists such as Bankim sought, as Chatterjee suggests, complete sovereignty over the intimate domain of culture and religion. A summary of the exchange will help illustrate both points. The controversy ignited when news broke that some of Calcutta’s most prominent Hindu citizens, known for their stand against image worship, had attended a funeral ceremony at the famous Sobha Bazar Raj house in Calcutta, in which an idol of Krishna (worshiped as Gopinath, lord of the milkmaids) was venerated. In the first of his six letters to the Statesman, Hastie, shocked by this news, criticizes the learned Hindus for sending the message to their unenlightened countrymen that they approved of “idolatry.” He explained: “But it is just because I know that they are not inwardly sincere or true to themselves in any of their forms of idolatrous worship, and because I believe that this practical insincerity or unreality of theirs is sucking the life-blood out of the very hope of their community, that I venture to touch however slightly, upon this delicate subject.”26 Regardless of how aware he claimed to be of the “delicate” nature of the subject, Hastie’s tone was triumphalistic. Discoursing on idolatry with pompous alliteration and assorted polemical quips, he offered “a god-send to any satirist.”27 He followed up his initial courtesies with blaring condemnation of the “Shiva temple that makes one shudder,” the “elephantheaded and huge-paunched Ganapati,” and the “merry music and mincing movements” of sensuality underlying Krishna worship.28 Hastie’s tone makes him seem either unaware of or indifferent to the rising Hindu nationalist sentiments of this period, his polemics echoing the antiHinduism of early nineteenth-century evangelicals.29 His rhetorical strategy, first, isolates the educated, “enlightened” Hindus of Calcutta from their 25 Raychauduri, p. 146. 26 Statesman, 23 September 1882. All the articles from the Statesman are printed in Shri Jogesh Chandra Bagal, ed., Bankim Rachanavali (Calcutta, 1969), hereafter BR. 27 Raychauduri, p. 122. 28 Statesman, 23 September 1882; BR, p. 187. 29 See David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance (Berkeley, 1969), Hastie argues against the claims that idolatry (1) is necessary for those who cannot conceptualize a formless God; (2) is a step along an evolutionary ladder toward higher forms of spirituality; and (3) is no more harmful than the adoration of dolls by children in the West: 23 and 26 September 1882 to the Statesman.

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countrymen who continue sincerely to worship idols; second, amplifies the dissonance that he reads into their participation in Hindu ceremonies; and third, exhorts them to use their status as cultural leaders to dissuade others from worshiping idols.30 The goal of this strategy was not to convert learned Hindus, but to make them fellow crusaders against idolatry, the single greatest source, according to Hastie, of Indian degeneracy.31 In his third letter, Hastie shifted from idolatry to an assault on the “higher” philosophy of Brahmanism. Here he cited European scholars such as Monier Williams as authorities on the meaning of Hindu scriptures.32 He went so far as to say that “both Sanskrit language and the Sanskrit literature are much better understood at this moment in Europe and America than they are in India.”33 Yet, in Hastie’s mind, the dissemination of this knowledge in the West only served to display to all the error of Hinduism. It was to such claims that Bankim took the most serious objection. The central theme of Bankim’s replies to Hastie was the distinction between, first, the “husk” or nonessential, surface characteristics of Hinduism that preoccupy and inform European scholarly interest and, second, the essentials, or “kernel,” of Hinduism. Bankim’s rhetorical strategy appealed to an authentic and intimate knowledge of Indian religion to be derived from vernacular traditions. He challenged Hastie to learn about Hinduism by studying the original Sanskrit scriptures under Hindus who actually believe in them, not by reading European translations or commentaries.34 While acknowledging the contributions of European scholarship, Bankim distinguished a “scholarly” understanding or Hinduism from the understanding that comes from true belief, the use of vernacular languages, and oral traditions. Translation dilutes the meaning of the original text because of the inability of the new language to adequately capture ideas foreign to it: “Now, a people so thoroughly unconnected with England or Germany as the old Sanskrit-speaking people of India … had necessarily a vast store of ideas and conceptions utterly foreign to the Englishman or the German, just as the Englishman or the German boasts a still vaster number 30 Statesman, 26 September 1882; BR, pp. 191–94. 31 This shift in missionary emphasis from religious conversion to a cultural conversion to be led by Western-educated Hindus increasingly shaped the ethos of educational branches of missionary societies during the late nineteenth century. His alarmist rhetoric notwithstanding, Hastie’s letters can in fact be situated within this ethos. For a detailed description of this change in missionary strategy, see A. Mathew, Christian Missions, Education, and Nationalism: From Dominance to Compromise, 1870–1930 (New Delhi, 1988), pp. 50–93. 32 Hastie begins his 26 September 1882 letter to the Statesman defending European Sanskritists; see also BR, p. 191. 33 Statesman, 7 October 1882; BR, p. 201. 34 Statesman, 6 October 1882; BR, p. 200.

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of ideas utterly foreign to the Hindu. These, which form the spirit and the matter of religious and philosophical treatises, are entirely distorted and, as a matter of necessity, misrepresented in every translation—even in the best.”35 In addition to distortion through translation, Bankim called attention to the “vast mass of [traditional] and unwritten knowledge in India, used to supplement, illustrate, or explain the written literature.”36 These oral traditions, maintained by generations of learned pandits, form the “flesh and blood to the dry bones of the written literature,” and were wholly inaccessible to the European scholar.37 Bankim also refers to Tantric literature, about which the European knows nothing, as having powerfully influenced the fate of “some of the Indian people.”38 Hence, rather than engaging Hastie on his terms, Bankim redefines the rules of the game by invoking an intimate domain of cultural knowledge outside Hastie’s reach. Attacking Hastie’s original criticism of those attending the Calcutta funeral, Bankim wrote, Mr. Hastie attacks, without any provocation, the proceedings, in a solemn mourning ceremony held in the private dwelling-house of one of the most respectable Hindu families in the country; attacks all the most respected members of native society; attacks their religion; attacks the religion of the nation. And all this without the slightest provocation…. And then, when a humble individual of the nation whose religion he tramples upon, ventures upon a single retort, Mr. Hastie’s temper is on fire and it explodes. The combatant who loses his temper in fight is rarely believed to be on the winning side…. If this is the attitude which the Christian missionary of the present day thinks it proper to assume towards Hinduism, Hinduism has nothing to fear from his labors.39 Bankim’s statements are significant not only because he designated Hinduism the religion of “the nation,” but also because he located himself within that nation and, by implication, within Hinduism. Casting aside his earlier ambivalence regarding Hindu philosophy and traditions, Bankim rose to defend the religion of his nation against the onslaught of the verbose Scotsman. 35 36 37 38

Statesman, 16 October 1882; BR, p. 204. Statesman, 28 October 1882; BR, p. 211. Statesman, 28 October 1882; BR, p. 211. Statesman, 28 October 1882; BR, p. 212. The Tantras are texts which set forth esoteric practices by which the mother goddess Shakti and its host of lesser female divinities are to be worshiped. 39 Statesman, 16 October 1882; BR, p. 203.

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While the impact of the Sobha Bazar controversy on Bankim’s thinking must not be exaggerated, the much stronger Hindu emphasis in his writing from 1882 on is noteworthy. This emphasis along with the fact that Bankim’s responses to Hastie contain his “first, uncompromising avowal of faith in Hinduism” suggest that a degree of ressentiment, of “borrowing with an opposite sign,” now governed his outlook. In response to Hastie’s Christian polemics, Bankim reified a brand of Hinduism that previously he was reluctant to embrace. His sudden, self-conscious return to Hinduism was not to orthodox caste observances nor to its rationalist traditions, but to its theistic, devotional expression.40 In the years following Hastie’s attack on Hindu gods, Bankim extolled the path of bhakti (devotion or love of God) in praise of the mother goddess, worshiped as Shakti (power incarnate). In so doing, he constructed a feminine object of national devotion directly antithetical to Hastie’s masculine, Christian nationalism. His famous hymn, “Bande Mataram,” personified the Hindu nation as a Mother whose weapons in her ten arms represented an image of great power. By 1905 Bande Mataram (which means “Hail Motherland”) became the chief slogan and symbol of militant, defiant, “Hindu” nationalism. By refusing debate on another’s terms, Bankim was able to assert an imagined Hinduism impervious to European learning and criticism. This strategy of disengaging the foreign interlocutor, far from being confined to the realm of religious polemics, became a crucial, defining feature of the new forms of political agitation during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nationalist politics of this period disengaged the British parliamentary process and asserted “Hinduness” as a means of furthering national objectives. During the Swadeshi movement (1903–8), leaders such as Lal Lajpat Rai, Bipan Chandra Pal, and Sri Aurobindo Ghose abandoned the “moderate,” constitutional methods of the early congress and advocated the more “extremist” politics of boycott, civil disobedience, and the politicization of Hindu festivals and slogans.41 The aim of the Swadeshi movement was to force the government to reverse Lord Curzon’s decision of 1903 to divide the province of Bengal into two administrative units. The Partition most adversely affected the Hindu bhadrolok of East Bengal,42 and as a means of protest, Hindu leaders called for the largescale boycott of all foreign (bideshi) goods, especially British-made goods, and promoted the purchase of indigenous (swadeshi) goods. This economic 40 Raychauduri, pp. 137, 145. 41 Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal: 1903–1908 (New Delhi, 1973). 42 Gordon Johnson, “Partition, Agitation and Congress: Bengal, 1904 to 1908,” in Locality, Province, and Nation, ed. Gallagher, Johnson, and Seal (Cambridge, 1973), p. 240.

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strategy had a very strong cultural component as well. The Swadeshi emphasis on “self-reliance” (atmasakti) not only entailed support of indigenous products, but also a comprehensive defense of Hindu society against the ideals of liberal, Christian society. In pushing for cultural self-reliance, Swadeshi advocates reasserted features of traditional Hindu society previously attacked by missionaries and Indian reformers. They replaced the coldly rational petitions of congressmen with an unprecedented evocation of vernacular songs, slogans, drama, and popular Hindu festivals aimed at awakening the masses to Swadeshi ideals.43 Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who used both the Shivaji and Ganesha (the elephant god) processions as tools for political mobilization in the Bombay Presidency, captured the revivalist sentiments of the day when he declared in a Bengalese newspaper, “We are all idolaters and I am not ashamed of the fact.”44 Following Tilak’s example, agitators in Bengal used the Shivaji festival to fire nationalist sentiments at the popular level. In addition to the politicization of popular, devotional symbols, Swadeshi advocates in Bengal sought to apply the norms of caste discipline at a more collective, societal level.45 They imposed a “social boycott” or caste sanction against anyone exposed even indirectly to foreign goods. The boycott included “withdrawal of ritual services, refusal of inter-dining, boycott of wedding receptions and funeral ceremonies and other pressures amounting to partial or total ostracism of those considered guilty of deviation from swadeshi norms.”46 This unmitigated defense of traditional Hindu society and rejection of everything “foreign” brought Swadeshi advocates into direct conflict with more progressive, reform-minded Hindus.47 The tension that developed was not simply between tradition and reform, but between different notions of what it meant to nationalize Hindu tradition. Should Hindus project all aspects of their local cultural experience—including caste hierarchy—onto their emerging concept of nationhood? Or should they selectively appropriate aspects of Western culture toward the construction of a more progressive and dynamic Hindu nationalist identity?48 Ranajit Guha describes the tension as one between caste and nation: “Heedless of what a maturing nationhood could do, 43 Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement, p. 254. 44 Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement, p. 422. Taken from Bengalee, 6 June 1906. 45 They did this by ascribing “impurity” to foreign products and to those who trafficked in them. “Purity and pollution” are, according to Louis Dumont, the organizing principles of Hindu caste hierarchy. 46 Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement, p. 5. 47 Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement, p. 60. 48 Cf. Chatterjee, pp. 34–37.

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in theory, to undermine primordial caste formations, social boycott thus went ahead to serve the interests of the big society that was the nation by insisting on procedures used by the little society of castes to resist innovation and change.”49 This move from caste, or jati, to nation, or mahajati, most closely resembles the outlook of Bhudev Mukhopadyay, who shunned all imitation of the West and presented Brahmanical leadership as the key to India’s advancement. In line with the nationalist vision of Bhudev, the Swadeshi movement, by its use of caste sanctions, gave the Brahman new, national prominence as the priest, warden, and mentor of Hindu society.50 This reification of Hindu culture as national culture alienated Muslims as well as Christians. In one sense the status of Christians became even more marginal than that of Muslims. Unlike Muslims, who stood at the center of the politics surrounding the Partition, Bengal’s Christians made little political contribution. While both Muslims and Christians were inevitably alienated by Hinduized politics, the inclusion of Muslims was nevertheless an essential aspect of the nationalist ideal during this period, at least at the level of rhetoric. The same cannot be said for Christians. The swadeshi ideology of selfreliance, when extended from the economic to the cultural domain, reified Christianity, as never before, as a “foreign religion.”51 While missionaries themselves were infrequent targets of swadeshi rhetoric, some complained that loud and deliberate chanting of the slogan Bande Mataram interrupted their openair meetings.52

The “Hindu Public” of Madras

Throughout much of the nineteenth century, an educated, professional class of Hindus shaped public opinion in Madras in a manner similar to the bhadrolok of Calcutta. Like the bhadrolok, Madras Hindus used their status as cultural leaders to advance Hindu revivalist causes.53 In contrast to the bhadrolok, who opposed policies that empowered Muslims, Madras Hindus opposed evangelical influence upon government policy and tried to check conversions

49 Ranajit Guha, A Disciplinary Aspect of Indian Nationalism (Santa Cruz, Calif., 1989), p. 11. 50 Guha, p. 16. 51 “Spirit of Unrest,” Harvest Field, April 1908. See also Vincent Kumaradoss, “The Attitude of Protestant Missionaries in South India towards Indian Nationalism with Special Reference to Tamil Nadu, 1900–1907,” Indo-British Review 15, no. 1 (1988): 134. 52 “Spirit of Unrest.” 53 See D. Sadasivan, The Growth of Public Opinion in the Madras Presidency (Madras, 1974).

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to Christianity.54 It should be noted, however, that the revivalist interests of Madras Hindus did not influence the politics of southern nationalism to the degree that Hindu revivalism influenced nationalism in Bengal and north India. This is not to suggest that Tamil and Telugu districts within the presidency were not deeply Hindu. Richly endowed temple establishments, maths or religious schools, pilgrimage sites, festivals and ceremonies of Brahmans and other high-caste Hindu communities all flourished under the Madras government. Yet these expressions of Hindu vitality did not form the brick and mortar of an anticolonial “cultural nationalism” as this developed in Bengal. This disparity between Bengal and Madras stems from a number of factors: the highly segmented social terrain of the presidency, the rise of Tamil and Telugu linguistic nationalisms, which resisted the hegemony of Sanskritic culture, and the emergence of non-Brahman caste politics.55 Nevertheless, a self-conscious Hindu public did arise to defend Hinduism against missionary influence. Members of this public founded new societies during the 1880s whose principal aim was to defend Hinduism and undermine the public legitimacy of Christianity. Among these societies were the Hindu Sabha, the Aryan Forefathers’ Society, and the HTS. These “countermovements” show the clearest signs of imitative, reactionary tendencies. Although their nationalist rhetoric is predicated on the theme of religious difference from the West, it borrows the modular form of a religion from Christianity while invoking the ideas of European radicals in its assault against missionaries. To use the language of the last section, these societies demonstrate the ressentiment of Hindu elites against the Christian religion. What made the pro-Hindu rhetoric of these societies reactionary was its absence of grounding in institutions and categories of thought germane to the religious landscape of south India. The impetus for the founding of various Hindu societies came from Western-educated publicists backed financially by Hindu merchants. Under the influence of the Theosophical Society, which by 1879 had established offices in major Indian cities, these publicists borrowed radical, secularist ideas from Europe and deployed them in their campaign against Christianity in India. This strategy simply countered the rhetoric of Christian missionaries

54 Robert E. Frykenberg, “On Roads and Riots in Tinnevelly: Radical Change and Ideology in Madras Presidency during the Nineteenth Century,” South Asia, n.s., 4, no. 2 (December 1981): 46. 55 Eugene Irschick, Politics and Social Conflict in South India (Berkeley, 1969); also David Arnold, The Congress in Tamilnad (New Delhi, 1977), pp. 16–17.

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who denounced “Hindu superstition” with rationalist arguments.56 Under such rationalist influences, Madras Hindus discarded the orthodox arguments that had been used to denounce Christianity by Tamil, Shaivite groups (which invoked the authority of the Vedas and the concepts of orthodox, Shaivite tradition) in the earlier part of the century.57 They replaced orthodox arguments with rhetoric that emphasizes the radical inclusiveness or tolerance of the Hindu religion. This profession of “Hindu tolerance” was almost invariably pitted against the intolerance and sectarianism of Christian missionaries.58 While borrowing the modular form of a religion from missionaries, modern Hindus attacked the doctrinal substance of Christianity.59 Some, either under the influence of the Brahmo Samaj or Theosophy, pointed to the decline of Christian influence in the West as they sold Hinduism as the religion best suited for the modern world. The fundamental doctrines of Christianity, they noted, were breaking down under the stress of modern science and biblical criticism: “[Christianity] is losing its hold on the cultured minds of the West as unhistorical and unethical…. There seems to be no limit to this process of expurgation and elimination. It is impossible to say what will remain of Christianity in years to come. In those circumstances, it is extremely unlikely that the philosophical mind of India will cut itself adrift from its ancient moorings and turn to Christ for its spiritual sustenance.”60 Other modern Hindu apologists made no issue of Christian decline in the West, but directly attacked Christian doctrine. Their offensive, however, did not rest on the unadulterated doctrines of the Vedas, but on the ideas of Robert Ingersoll, Charles Bradlaugh, and Thomas Paine, as well as “facts” derived from biblical higher criticism. Missionaries keenly observed the influence of Western anticlerical thought on Hindu nationalist

56

57 58

59 60

Ironically, both “modern” Hindus and evangelicals staged their contest for public legitimacy within the ideological framework of the European Enlightenment. For western India, see Rosalind O’Hanlon, Caste, Conflict, and Ideology: Mahatma Jotirao Phule and Low Caste Protest in Nineteenth-Century Western India (Cambridge, 1985). Dennis Hudson, “Arumuga Navalar and the Hindu Renaissance among Tamils,” in Religious Controversy in British India, ed. Kenneth Jones (Albany, N.Y., 1992), or Richard Fox Young and S. Jabanesan, The Bible Trembled (Vienna, 1995). The themes of sectarianism and tolerance were not only prominent in the writings of Vivekenanda, but also in the literature of the Theosophical Society. See “Religion and Sectarianism,” Theosophist 27, no. 1 (October 1905), and “Is the Moral Supremacy of Christendom in Danger?” Theosophist 27, no. 5 (February 1906). Brahmo Samajists were among the first to observe declining relevance for the distinctive doctrines of Christianity while upholding its moral and spiritual significance. See “Interview with Mr. Sibanath Sastri,” Harvest Field, March 1889, p. 315. G. Venkataranga Row, “A Christian View of Hinduism,” Indian Review, January 1913, p. 22.

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ideology in Madras, an influence they attributed to the charismatic Theosophist Annie Besant.61 Besant embodied the curious romance between the Western ideologies of secularism and “free thought,” and the new apologetic of Hinduism. Many critics, mystified by the so-called nine lives of Annie Besant, describe her journey from Christianity to revivalist Hinduism in terms of radical breaks and discontinuities.62 Yet her intellectual itinerary epitomizes the ongoing symbiosis between a Europe that was becoming increasingly “post-Christian” and a class of Indians deeply flattered by foreigners’ romanticization of Hinduism. While other nationalists, Justice Party members, and orthodox Hindus had their differences with Besant,63 few modern Hindus could resist her praise of Hinduism and her conviction that Indian nationality must be based on its free thought and catholicity. Yet, few could have been aware of how Besant’s proHindu hymnody appropriated India to the patterns of European secularism: “Hinduism, beyond all other faiths, has encouraged intellectual effort, intellectual research, and intellectual freedom. The only authority recognized by it is the authority of Wisdom, and that convinces the reason, it does not trample on it. The six Darashanas are the proofs of Hinduism’s intellectual liberty.”64 Besant’s Orientalism made Brahmanical leadership and Hindu revival centerpieces in the struggle for home rule. Her personal charisma, vision for social reform, and outspoken criticisms of British rule eventually earned her the presidency of the Home Rule League and the Indian National Congress. Besant shared the convictions of many nationalists that India’s growth and freedom had to be argued for along Hindu lines. “Hinduism,” she said, “is peculiarly fitted to shape and color the National future, for it is non-aggressive as regards to other religions: it makes no converts, it assails no beliefs, it is as tolerant as the earth itself.”65 In describing Hinduism in this manner, Besant may or may not have had in mind the various organizations that had been formed within the Madras 61 According to T. E. Slater, the names of Bradlaugh and Ingersoll had already become “household words.” See Report of the Third Decennial Missionary Conference held at Bombay, 1892–3 (Bombay, 1893), 1:277. See also Rev. E. W. Thompson, “Movements of Hinduism in South India,” in Fourth Decennial Missionary Conference Held at Madras, 1902 (London, 1902), pp. 292–311. 62 Bipin Chandra Pal, Mrs. Annie Besant: A Psychological Study (Madras, 1917), pp. 69–72. 63 Besant was convinced of the intellectual “superiority” of Brahmans over other castes, views which elicited heated responses from Tamil anti-Brahmanical movements. V. Geetha and S. V. Rajadurai, “One Hundred Years of Brahminitude: Arrival of Annie Besant,” Economic and Political Weekly 30, no. 28 (15 July 1995): 1768–73. 64 Annie Besant, “Hinduism and Nationality,” New India, 9 January 1915. 65 Besant, “Hinduism and Nationality.”

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Presidency to defend Hinduism and counter the influences of Christian missionaries. Among these were the Hindu Sabha (1880); the Aryan Forefathers’ Society, founded in Tinnevelly (with many members who were Theosophists); the Bellary Sanmarga Samaj; and the Association for the Propagation of the Aryan Vedic Religion, founded by Ragunatha Rao (who also became a Theosophist) in 1886.66 Shortly following the formation of Rao’s society, the HTS was formed in 1887 primarily with the goal of countering Christian missionary activity. The Tract Society’s campaigns involved the distribution of both Tamil and English tracts along with public preaching and lectures.67 Far from displaying yogic indifference to Christianity, the society published numerous tracts that vented its outrage over the inferiorization of Hinduism. Tracts such as The Absurdity of Christianity or Is Jesus God? attacked Christian morality, theological claims, and the Bible while defending the legitimacy of Hinduism, largely with scientific or rationalist arguments.68 This assault upon Christianity by the HTS was accompanied by the adoption of many Christian techniques for the propagation of Hinduism. Religious newspapers, public lectures and “sermons,” “catechisms” for Hindu children, and street preachers were all employed by Hindus. From 1888 to 1889 alone, the Tract Society had twenty-six affiliated branches, twenty-one in Tamil districts and five in Telugu districts. According to Geoffrey Oddie, the imitation of Christian methods was taken to extreme measures. The Madurai branch is said to have sent out “Bible women” to distribute tracts and other materials, which, according to the Missionary Herald, were often “filled with low jokes” against Christianity “from Ingersoll and Bradlaugh.”69 This borrowing of Christian apologetic forms was labeled by the editor of the Harvest Field a purely reactionary development, orchestrated by Annie Besant. The editor reviewed the content of the Sanatana Dharma Catechism, a Catechism for boys and girls in Hindu Religion and Morals, a work issued by the English Board of Trustees of the Central Hindu College in Benares in hopes of 66 Geoffrey Oddie, “Anti-missionary Feeling and Hindu Revivalism in Madras: The Hindu Preaching and Tract Societies, 1886–1891,” in Images of Man: Religious and Historical Process in South Asia, ed. Fred W. Clothey (Madras, 1982), pp. 217–42. 67 Vincent Kumaradoss identifies these defenses of Hinduism in Madras with nationalism, in “Christianity and Hindu Nationalism: A Reassessment of the Hindu Tract Society, 1887–1891” (paper delivered at the meeting of the Church History Association of India, Mangalore, Karnataka, 16–18 October 1998), p. 4. 68 Kumaradoss, “Christianity and Hindu Nationalism.” Some Christians even believed that in denouncing Christianity, the HTS was disseminating some truths about Jesus Christ. S. V. Thomas, “The Hindu Tract Society,” Madras Christian College Magazine, April 1889. 69 Oddie, p. 229, from Missionary Herald 84 (October 1888): 439.

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teaching children the basics of the Hindu religion.70 He then questioned the whole project of turning Hinduism into “a religion of the book.” Citing first the challenges in store for those who wished to homogenize Hindu religion into a single entity (e.g., caste inclusiveness), the editor moved on to identify theological themes in the catechism resembling Christian belief such as faith in a personal God, and concepts of sin and righteousness. Besant he labeled “a Westerner who came to employ the methods of the West to teach the wisdom of the East.”71 Such borrowing shows that Hindu tractarians in Madras were answerable to two starkly contrasting sets of interlocutors: to missionaries, against whom they posited a more tolerant and enlightened Hindu religion, and to radical secularists to whom they presented a rational, nonsectarian ideology.72 Hindu nationalist imagination permitted ample room for the borrowing of religious form and content from the West while maintaining a sense of its own historical agency in the process. Regarding Christian conversion, however, the nationalist mind immediately assigns agency to the “foreign power,” to the “colonizer” who induces conversion by his superiority in the “outer,” material domain. Ironically, Hindu nationalism, though consciously attempting to “decolonize” the inner domain of culture by opposing Christianity, was unconsciously being fashioned by the organizing forms and dialectics of so-called Christian society. Because it accepted so many “foreign” criteria for legitimacy, it is difficult to regard public defenses of Hinduism in Madras as a “powerful, creative, and historically significant project,” as Chatterjee describes nationalism.73 Such defenses of Hinduism might alternately be viewed as the fulfillment of a very foreign agenda—either as Europe’s own project of secularization re-creating itself in the ethos of “Hindu tolerance” or as Hinduism climbing the evolutionary ladder of religion toward its ultimate “fulfillment in Christ.”74 Missionaries themselves debated these issues in the face of nationalist “unrest.”75 Their cri70 “Two Catechisms,” Harvest Field 13, no. 7 (July 1902): 250–51. According to this report, another catechism was written and published in Kanarese by an orthodox Brahman. 71 “Two Catechisms,” p. 251. 72 This concurs with O’Hanlon, pp. 52–55. Lesslie Newbigin (drawing on sociologist Peter Berger) argued that missionaries and modern Hindus often accepted the same “plausibility structure” within which beliefs derived legitimacy: see his Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture (London, 1991). 73 Chatterjee, p. 6. 74 For a recent study of conversion, belief, and cultural crosscurrents between Europe and India, see Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton, 1998). 75 “Restlessness,” “unrest,” and “awakening” had become terms most often used by missionaries in reference to rising nationalist consciousness. See “Restless India,” Harvest Field,

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tiques of Indian nationalism toward the turn of the century were part of the larger discussion of missionary policy toward the educated classes.

A New Missionary Policy

The development of missionary ideology toward the end of the nineteenth century paralleled developments within Indian nationalist thought in a way that made it difficult to determine who was reacting to whom. As Hindu leadership sought to transform nationalist rhetoric from an elitist discourse to a more popular one, evangelical missionaries urged their mission societies to redirect missionary resources away from education and toward the evangelization of the masses.76 By the 1890s educational missionaries had to respond to evangelicals who cited the low numbers of conversions along with the rising nationalist sentiments among educated Indians (who were often hostile toward missions) as evidence of a failed policy. As a corrective measure, evangelicals urged their societies to devote more resources to popular preaching. The response of educational missionaries, by contrast, was to redefine missionary objectives from religious conversion to cultural conversion.77 According to this new logic, even nationalism in its most Hindu and anti-Christian expressions was the work of God in India. By way of fulfillment theology, educational missionaries such as T. E. Slater, J. N. Farquhar, and W. H. Findlay identified missionary agency or influence upon nationalist consciousness, not formal conversion or baptism, as the crux of their mission to India. In 1889 a heated controversy within the ranks of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society (WMMS) revealed growing concerns over the relationship between nationalist sentiments, Christian education, and missionary lifestyle. The controversy erupted when the Methodist Times ran a series of anonymous articles that attacked missionary adherence to Alexander Duff’s educational policies along with the “luxury” of the missionary lifestyle.78 Henry S. Lunn, a medical missionary to Madras, wrote the articles, but Hugh Price Hughes, September 1896, pp. 327–37; J. A. Bourdillon, “Opportunity of the Unrest in India,” Church Missionary Review, August 1909, pp. 449–57. 76 See “Education and Mass Movements in India: Report and Resolutions Adopted by the General Committee of March 12, 1912,” Church Missionary Review, April 1912, pp. 247–49. 77 This redefinition of missionary goals is outlined in Eric J. Sharpe, Not to Destroy but to Fulfil (Uppsala, 1965), and in A. Mathew, Christian Missions, Education, and Nationalism. 78 Excerpts were eventually published as The Missionary Controversy: Discussion, Evidence and Report, 1890 (London, 1890).

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the Methodist Times editor and a close friend of Lunn, assumed responsibility for the views expressed in the articles before Lunn’s identity eventually was disclosed. The articles not only decry the “failures” of missionary education, but also speak of the separation of WMMS missionaries from “natives” caused by the more extravagant lifestyle of the former and the inferior status given to Indian Christians in the Society’s official functions.79 Lunn’s articles evoked caustic responses from other WMMS missionaries in the columns of the Harvest Field, and even prompted the WMMS to appoint a subcommittee to review his claims. The subcommittee’s report “completely exonerated” the missionaries from all of Lunn’s charges regarding their lifestyle and relation to the indigenous population.80 Lunn’s first article criticized the initial Duff strategy, of attacking Hinduism by converting Brahmans through the English medium of Christian education. With rash, apocalyptic boldness Lunn condemned the Duff policy as a “disastrous failure” because of how it equipped Brahmans to “dominate” the nationalist movement. Instead of an explosion within the citadel of Brahminism, as the result of missionary work, we witness the walls of that citadel crumbling beneath the influence of the “Zeit Geist,” built up again in a new form and with a new strength by the young Brahmans educated in our missionary colleges…. [The policy of educating Brahmans] has produced a haughty and exclusive caste to substitute an intellectual ascendancy for the spiritual supremacy possessed by their fathers. There is no greater danger to the National Movement in India, than that it should be dominated by a Brahminical caucus, and if that result ever does ensue it will be due to the carrying out of the policy of Alexander Duff.81 Lunn also claimed that missionaries spent a “startling proportion” of their total budget on Brahman education, and committed “at least three-fourths of the ablest men sent out by all the Protestant Missionary Societies” to educating Brahmans, who constituted a mere 4 percent of India’s total population.82 As sweeping as Lunn’s claims were perceived to be, they revealed certain assumptions central to missionary debates over nationalism. For instance, Lunn 79

These criticisms are summarized in Hughes and Lunn’s Summary Statement of the Facts and Arguments upon which the “New Missionary Policy” is Based (n.p.: Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, 1890). 80 See Harvest Field, August 1890, p. 78. 81 The Missionary Controversy, p. 2. 82 The Missionary Controversy, p. 4.

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contended that the spirit of nationalism was serving the redemptive project of eroding Brahmanical orthodoxy. However, instead of demolishing the “citadels of Brahminism,” missionary schools raised Brahmans to be national leaders with an anti-Christian bias. While Lunn assigned agency to missionary schools in furthering Brahmanical ascendancy, he said very little about the origins of nationalist consciousness itself. It was precisely this question of agency that educational missionaries addressed in their responses to Lunn. One of the most distinguished was William Miller, principal of Madras Christian College, who argued that Brahmans would have been just as educated and had just as much “intellectual ascendancy” even without Christian schools. If some of them have become openly critical of Christianity, this merely shows that they are at least not ignorant of Christian claims. As for the nationalist movement, Miller applauded the Brahman leadership within the congress. “It is a strange use of words,” he retorted, “to speak of the ‘danger’ of a movement coming to be ‘dominated’ by those who originated it and have all along taken the leading part in it.”83 In response to the charge that graduates of missionary schools were promoting an “anti-Christian renaissance” of Hindu thought, Miller, drawing from his experience at Madras Christian College, stated that he did not know of even one student to whom the charge applied. Even if true, Miller explained that it would be no cause for alarm, since there had always been resistance to Christianity among those who “know the truth.” Such resistance never provided grounds to cease efforts to “inculcate truth.”84 This was not to deny, however, that an “awakening” was indeed occurring among those educated in Christian schools (one-fifth of the total number of educated Indians). According to Miller, this awakening and the reactions it elicited from the uneducated, orthodox Hindus was in fact the “explosion” within Hinduism to which Duff had referred. Far from being a cause for alarm, Hindu revival, opposition, and antagonism were necessary steps in India’s “movement Christward.”85 Miller is one of several “fulfillment theorists” who, in essence, validated the flourishing of modern Hinduism by locating it within their own theological 83 Harvest Field, June 1889, p. 404. 84 Harvest Field, June 1889, p. 403. 85 Miller’s view of Hindu revival and national awakening as the realization, not the failure, of Christian educational policy derives from his own idea of the purpose of Christian education. The aim of the Chistian college is not to convert, but to spread or diffuse Christian thought and Christian influence throughout non-Christian India. Sharpe, Not to Destroy, p. 83. For an excellent discussion of the secularization of education in India, see Rudolph Heredia, “Education and Mission: School as Agent of Evangelization,” Economic and Political Weekly, 16 September 1995, pp. 2332–40.

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framework. Other fulfillment theorists included G. M. Cobb and F. W. Kellett of the WMMS, and T. E. Slater and J. N. Farquhar of the London Missionary Society. Against evangelical charges that they were diluting the gospel and ignoring the masses by working with the educated classes, such thinkers defended their more irenic posture toward Hinduism along with the enterprise of Christian education by contending that Hindu nationalism was a movement toward Christian ends.86 In contrast to evangelicals who measured the success of missions primarily by conversions, fulfillment theorists celebrated Hindu revival insofar as it signified the creation of another religion in “the image of Christianity.”87 Among the various responses to Lunn’s rousing articles, W. H. Findlay’s most outspokenly advanced a fulfillment position. To him the very construction of modern Hinduism provided grounds for believing that Christian educational policy was a glorious success. The main task of missions in India, he argued, was not to “wean the people from a religion to which they are passionately devoted,” but to “teach the value and nature of religion to a people wholly indifferent to it.”88 The “coma” from which the Indian people had to be awakened was the superstitions, ceremonies, and “meals offered to stone idols in temples.” The construction of Hinduism, by contrast, represented something new, and something very much derived from Christianity: [The revivers of Hinduism] are not supporting Hinduism as their fathers believed it or as we describe it; they are trying to imagine it to be, or to frame out of it, a worthy rival of Christianity, worthy when measured by the highest spiritual standards. I do not say they are consciously doing this. So ignorant have Hindus, in general, been in the past, of what their conglomerate religion is, that they can easily persuade themselves that what they now call Hinduism is the old genuine belief of their fathers, which in our descriptions we grossly malign…. Our triumph is that the Hindus who have, at last, begun to value religion, have a high, a Christian ideal of what a religion should be.89

86

For example, A. G. Hogg, cited in Eric Sharpe, The Theology of A. G. Hogg (Madras, 1971), pp. 51–52. 87 G. Studdert-Kennedy, British Missions, Indian Nationalists, and the Raj (New Delhi, 1991), and Providence and the Raj: Imperial Mission and Missionary Imperialism (New Delhi and London, 1998) place these theological developments amidst other Christian imperialist influences upon the policies of the Raj. 88 Harvest Field, June 1889, p. 422. 89 Harvest Field, June 1889, p. 423.

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Findlay, as if acquainted with the latest, “postmodern” theories of identity formation, identified and celebrated something very Christian in the construction of a “sanitized” Hinduism. Like Miller and others, he spotted the triumphs of a Christian historical project even in a movement aimed at checking conversion to Christianity! Though the fulfillment theorists disagreed with evangelicals on the significance of baptism and conversion, and on the methods of evangelism, they agreed on one point. History moved from the Protestant missionary movement outward. Like the cue ball on a billiards table, they were the impetus behind the changing face of Hinduism.

Summary and Concluding Remarks

The previous sections described, in line with Partha Chatterjee, how nationalists in Calcutta and Madras were not engaged in a purely political project of contesting imperial policies. Nationalists also engaged in the cultural project of asserting their difference from the West by publicly defending and celebrating social, philosophical, and popular aspects of Hinduism. The cases of Bhudev, Bankim, and other advocates of “cultural self-reliance,” however, show that autonomy over nationalist imagination requires something beyond the mere construction of an oppositional Hinduism. True autonomy requires that the very idea of the nation be grounded in the concrete, local reality of indigenous institutions such as lineage (vamsha) or caste ( jati). Without such grounding, nationalism ultimately derives its modular form and public legitimacy from the rival nation. This factor makes Bhudev’s nationalism, grounded in his adherence to his own Brahmanical tradition, more autonomous and authentic than Bankim’s nationalism, which was much more a case of ressentiment—of “borrowing with an opposite sign.” The Swadeshi movement’s call for cultural self-reliance combined the outlooks of both Bhudev and Bankim. In its effort, however, to project the symbols and discipline of the “little society” of castes onto the “big society” of the nation, the Swadeshi movement’s Hindu, Brahmanical orientation inevitably alienated the non-Hindu segments of Bengali society. Defenses of Hinduism in Madras show the clearest signs of reactionary behavior, a development that was evident to the missionaries themselves. Hindu tractarians and Theosophists borrowed the form of a religion from Christianity while using the ideas of European religious radicals to counter missionary influence. But rather than regarding “the missionary” and “the freethinker” as two distinct interlocutors, it can be argued that Christianity

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was the primary interlocutor of the new Hindu organizations in Madras.90 When Madras Hindus invoked the tolerance and universality of Hinduism while assaulting the sectarianism of Christian missionaries, they were only reenacting episodes of Western history. Such rhetoric reveals the imitative tendencies of Hindu organizations, not the creative agency of nationalism that Chatterjee describes. Finally, as objects of ressentiment, missionaries themselves did not avoid reactionary behavior. What explains, after all, the call to redirect missionary efforts away from the Brahmans and toward the masses? Many of these calls, including Lunn’s articles to the Methodist Times, were framed in such a way as to suggest that popular preaching was not central to missionary endeavors throughout the nineteenth century. It was. The call to redirect attention toward the masses, then, derived from the alarm within Christian circles over the rising revivalist sentiments of the educated classes, which signaled a “failed” Duffian policy. As calm, collected, and theologically equipped as Miller, Findlay, Slater, and other fulfillment theorists were in interpreting Hindu nationalism, their attitudes were far more paternalistic than evangelicals, who measured success strictly by conversions.91 Unlike evangelicals, who at least recognized Hindu nationalists as the agents of their own actions, fulfillment theorists saw their own “Christian” agency behind the Hindu face of nationalism. Such paternalism, however, evaded the scrutiny of nationalists who continued to identify the colonialist threat to Hinduism with conversion. Unlike Findlay, who saw in the birth of modern Hinduism the triumph of a Christian project, Hindu revivalists were unaware that the borrowing implied in their very defense of Hinduism preempted the workings of their own imagination. 90 Free thought and secularism, after all, were ideologies of modernity, which challenged Christian influence in the West: Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1975). 91 Studdert-Kennedy explores this new paternalism in British Missions, Indian Nationalists, and the Raj.

Medical Missionaries and Modernizing Emirs in Colonial Hausaland: Leprosy Control and Native Authority in the 1930s Shobana Shankar In 1938, the Sudan Interior Mission (SIM) heralded its ‘Peaceful invasion of the Northern emirates of Nigeria’ with a photo spread in the quarterly Sudan Witness.* The previous year, the Mission had formalized agreements to work with the Native Administrations (NAs) of Kano, Katsina and Sokoto in the management of three provincial leprosaria. In celebration of Christian–Muslim cooperation, the magazine featured photos of the Emir of Gwandu, who had shown special friendship to SIM missionaries in supporting their leprosy work and granting them a site for their first regular non-medical station in Sokoto Province (Fig. 1).1 These photos belie the prevailing view of cultural separation and conservatism in colonial Hausaland, a model of British ‘indirect rule’ through indigenous political authorities. Writing two years before Nigerian independence, James Coleman judged the resistance of Northern emirs to Christian missions as a major obstacle to the progress of nationhood: ‘Perhaps the most important factor was the hostility of the traditional Muslim rulers of northern Nigeria

Source: Shankar, S., “Medical Missionaries and Modernizing Emirs in Colonial Hausaland: Leprosy Control and Native Authority in the 1930s,” Journal of African History 48.1 (2007), pp. 45–68. © Cambridge University Press. * I dedicate this paper to the memory of Phil Shea, whose contributions to and support for Northern Nigerian history told from Nigerian perspectives are beyond measure. I thank Bob Arnold at the Sudan Interior Mission (SIM) Archives in North Carolina, and, in Nigeria, Dr. Kiru, Ayuba Usman, Halima Wayi, staff at Ya da Kunya and the Katsina State Health Services Management Board for their assistance with this research. The following readers generously gave comments on early drafts of this paper: Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia, Mary Dillard, Karen Flint, Marcus Green, David Hardiman, Murray Last, Julie Livingston, John Manton, Michael McGovern and Brian Peterson. I am grateful to the Journal’s anonymous readers for their insightful suggestions for elaborating key ideas. This research was supported by Fulbright/IIE; Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, UCLA; and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship from Barnard College-Columbia University. 1 ‘Peaceful invasion of the Northern Emirates of Nigeria’, Sudan Witness, 14, 1 (Jan.–Feb. 1938).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/97890

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figure 1 From Sudan Witness, 14, 1 (Jan.–Feb. 1938)

to Christian evangelization and Western education, and the British policy of sustaining them in their opposition’.2 More recently, scholars have blamed British administrators, not emirate authorities, for restrictions on education, missions and even other Muslim sects as a means of ‘preserving’ political tradition and order.3 While it seems beyond dispute that the colonial government in Northern Nigeria took a reactionary and often repressive stance on 2 James S. Coleman, Nigeria: Background to Nationalism (Berkeley, 1965), 133. 3 Jonathon Reynolds, ‘Good and bad Muslims: Islam and indirect rule in northern Nigeria’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 34 (2001), 601–18; Andrew E. Barnes, ‘Christianity and the colonial state in northern Nigeria: 1900–1960’, in Toyin Falola (ed.), Nigeria in the Twentieth Century (Durham, 2002), 281–92; also by Barnes, ‘“Evangelization where it is not wanted”: colonial administrators and missionaries in northern Nigeria during the first third of the twentieth century’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 25 (1995), 412–41; P. K. Tibenderana, ‘The emirs and the spread of western education in northern Nigeria, 1910–1946’, Journal of African History, 24 (1983), 517–34; E. O. Ayandele, ‘The missionary factor in Northern Nigeria 1870–1918’, in Ogbu Kalu (ed.), The History of Christianity in West Africa (London, 1982), 133–58; C. N. Ubah, ‘Problems of Christian missionaries in Muslim emirates, 1900–1928’, Journal of African Studies, 3 (1976), 351–71; E. P. T. Crampton, Christianity in Northern Nigeria (Zaria, 1975).

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potential ‘threats’ to Muslim authority as a matter of political expediency, we still know little about what the inclusion and adaptation of ostensibly ‘rival’ institutions may have meant for the constitution of native authority and for colonial politics. This article explores the political implications of the Mission–NA leprosy campaign, a topic yet to be studied in detail.4 Using new evidence from SIM archives and oral interviews, I argue that the significance of this cooperative medical work, after nearly three decades of an unofficial yet tacit prohibition on missions in the Northern Nigerian emirates,5 goes beyond religious interaction. Emirs translated Islamic ideals of charity into governmental responsibility for medical welfare, demonstrating their modernizing impulse in matters of social progress. Indeed, the leprosy scheme brought together the elite and non-elite in ways that would have previously been unimaginable and took emirs’ power to new reaches in an era of expanding native authority in Nigeria and throughout much of British Africa. The case of leprosy control in the Northern Nigerian emirates prompts us to look more closely at colonial medicine in the practice of political power by both European and African regimes. Histories of medicine and native authority, in separate scholarship, point in a common direction: the impossibility of capturing the cultural complexities of lived experiences and legacies of empire in dichotomies of African tradition and European modernity, Western and non-Western, and colonizer and colonized. Scholars have described the dynamics of these encounters in many ways, as processes of invention and accommodation in politics, on the one hand, and as pluralism and entanglement in body politics, illness and health on the other.6 Yet ongoing social construction is as much a factor in Megan Vaughan’s account of a syphilis epidemic in British East and Central Africa as it is in Thomas Spear’s survey of indirect rule and African cultural categories.7 Bringing medicine into the realm of native authority envisions politics as more than government and sees the effects of

4 C. N. Ubah, ‘Christian missionary penetration of the Nigerian Emirates, with special reference to the medical missions approach’, Muslim World, 77 (1977), 16–27; Ralph Schram, A History of the Nigerian Health Services (Ibadan, 1971), 59, ch. 10. 5 Barnes, ‘“Evangelization where it is not wanted”’, 413. 6 Lynn Thomas, Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya (Berkeley, 2003), 17–20. 7 Megan Vaughan, ‘Syphilis in colonial east and central Africa: the social construction of an epidemic’, in Terence Ranger and Paul Slack (eds.), Epidemics and Ideas (Cambridge, 1992); Thomas Spear, ‘Neo-traditionalism and the limits of invention in British colonial Africa’, Journal of African History, 44 (2003), 3–27.

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health care beyond narrowly defined communities of practitioners, patients and colonial governmental authorities. My aim in drawing together studies of medicine, Native Administration and missions is to cast the Northern Nigerian emirs—who have been characterized as quintessential traditionalists and therefore idealized indirect rulers—as agents of change, not merely ‘compromisers’ who ‘kept the old apparatus of governance in place and allowed Europeans to impose their idea of civilization’.8 Medical work was a symbol of their progressive outlook and solidified the ‘colonial caliphate’, Murray Last’s apt expression for the Northern Nigerian Muslim leadership that ruled in the first half of the twentieth century and was ‘able to explore modern ideas while still firmly held within the matrix of Islam’.9 The leprosy campaign shows, too, that the north and the south of colonial Nigeria, understood by Coleman and others to be on different courses, shared the experience of colonial welfare, though with different results.10 The British saw a colony-wide campaign of mission-run leprosaria as a means of introducing ‘western education and cultural values’ to a wide cross-section of their subjects. Modern ideas, here, clearly meant Christian mission culture and other aspects of what Brian Larkin calls ‘the classical paradigm of the West’.11 While his examination of Hausa engagement with Indian films interrupts the binary of African responses to Western rule, I suggest here that the ‘classical’ itself may need rethinking. The Northern Nigerian leprosy campaign bears less of the direct tension assumed in the classic Muslim versus Christian opposition than one might expect. Quite the contrary, Muslim Hausa and Christian missionaries shared scriptural and charitable traditions in which leprosy had a special significance. In the context of their encounter, both plumbed their historical experiences and knowledge of the disease. Even ‘secular’ British authorities were not immune to the Christian imagery deeply embedded in their cultural upbringing. Historical specificity is therefore needed to define modernity and 8

David Robinson, Paths of Accommodation: Muslim Societies and French Colonial Authorities in Senegal and Mauritania, 1880–1920 (Athens OH, 2000), 238. 9 Murray Last, ‘The “colonial caliphate” of northern Nigeria’, in David Robinson and Jean-Louis Triaud (eds.), Les temps des marabouts: itinéraires et stratégies islamiques en Afrique occidentale francais v. 1880–1960 (Paris, 1997), 72. 10 Kalu O. Kalu, ‘Beauty for ashes: Presbyterian leprosy work in south-eastern Nigeria, 1926– 56’, in Ogbu U. Kalu (ed.), A Century and Half of Presbyterian Witness in Nigeria, 1846– 1996 (Enugu, 1996), 193–219; C. N. Ubah, ‘Hope for the despondent: a colonial health care scheme at Uzuakoli, eastern Nigeria’, Transafrican Journal of History, 21 (1992), 51–68. 11 Brian Larkin, ‘Indian films and Nigerian lovers: media and the creation of parallel modernities’, Africa, 67 (1997), 408.

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tradition in particular moments and encounters. As Ogbu Kalu rightly notes about welfare practices, ‘the past has its uses for the present’.12 Rather than simply describe this concurrence of worldviews, my interest lies in how binary oppositions gained or lost significance in particular historical circumstances, interpretive processes and social interactions. Dichotomies, such as the Muslim–Christian one, do have currency, and the cultural logic of colonialism, so dependent on them, sometimes sharpened and entrenched them. As Sandra Greene demonstrates, cultural imperialism transformed Africans’ understanding of their very bodies and their environment, in often oppositional terms and in ‘different epistemologies within the same society’.13 For most colonized people, modernity was not everywhere.14 The very process of defining and differentiating the old and new involved social relations of power within colonized societies. Who, not what, defined the meanings of traditional and modern. In the history of medicine, leprosy is a special case through which to explore how old and new were perceived and deployed. Because of its antiquity, its unpredictability and its global presence, the disease found a prominent place in the colonial civilizing mission. As Eric Silla rightly notes in his study of leprosy in French Soudan (later Mali), ‘though limited to a minority of sufferers, leprosy was an historical phenomenon in the broadest sense and had far-ranging implications’.15 The French and British targeted leprosy as a way of demonstrating the benefits of their rule for their subjects, whose tolerance for leprosy sufferers was proof of their ignorance.16 Both powers emphasized segregation, but their approaches were different. According to Silla, French government medical work was authoritarian, separated by the Law of Laicization from missions, which ‘provided a more appealing form of health care’. Sufferers avoided state institutions.17 The British, on the other hand, launched a campaign 12 13 14

15 16 17

Ogbu Kalu, ‘Poverty in pre-colonial and colonial west Africa: perceptions, causes and alleviation’, in Emmanuel Akyeampong (ed.), Themes in West Africa’s History (Athens OH, 2006), 183. Sandra Greene, Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter: A History of Meaning and Memory in Ghana (Bloomington, 2002), 7. Larkin, ‘Indian films and Nigerian lovers’, 410, quoting Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge. His discussion concerns media, which does not depend on the actual encounter between people. Medicine, similar to film as a material culture, can operate the same way. Space does not allow a full discussion of material culture in this medical encounter, but this paper differs from Larkin’s in giving more attention to the adaptations of those in power, not their opposition, in the face of new ideas and technologies. Eric Silla, People are not the Same: Leprosy and Identity in Mali (Portsmouth NH, 1998), 22. Ibid. 88. Ibid. 93, 115.

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from the Indian subcontinent to Africa, with researchers, colonial and local authorities and voluntary agencies together establishing segregated facilities and providing treatment and palliative care. This health project ‘shows how close medical humanism and Christian caring could become’18 and raised the hopes of sufferers of the disease.19 Megan Vaughan has distinguished between mission and state forms of medicine in the ways that each imagined, categorized and valued African bodies; but in leprosy work these modes of representation are not so easily distinguished.20 As Sanjiv Kakar notes, ‘there existed for leprosy a consensus which overrode differences and which cut across the colonial divide of religion and medicine’.21 As I show here, from the point of view of emirs and Muslim patients, the leprosy campaign was ‘hospital medicine’ that bore great resemblance to almsgiving in Islamic tradition. I begin with a consideration of the changes in leprosy control introduced with the coming of the British and continue by examining how Christian missionaries and emirate NAs entered into cooperative agreements to establish segregated settlements. I focus on SIM, which became the largest mission in the emirates, making particular reference to Kano Province, where refinements in leprosarium operations gave rise to the largest institution of this type in Hausaland. The leprosaria in all the provinces stood outside main cities and served as central government institutions. Their history therefore is one of networks connecting urban to rural, Muslim and non-Muslim, elite and poor, and emirs and missionaries.

Changing Attitudes towards Leprosy in Hausaland: Colonial Segregation and Centralization

Leprosy sufferers continue to have a place in Hausa society. Many live as mendicants with relative success in an environment where Islam enjoins the support of the unfortunate with alms (zakat). Those with more mobility may join a begging troupe, such as the ones seen today singing in the Kano Pilgrims’ Camp for people waiting to perform the hajj or who have just returned. Former 18 Michael Worboys, ‘The colonial world as mission and mandate: leprosy and empire, 1900–1940’, Osiris (2nd ser.), 15 (2002), 207–18. 19 John Iliffe, The African Poor (New York, 1987), 214–29; Ubah, ‘Hope for the despondent’. 20 Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Stanford, 1991), 74; see also Ulrike Kistner, ‘The walls without and the walls within: leprosy and social control in South Africa’, Berichte zur Wissenschafts-Geschichte, 21 (Dec. 1998), 237–50. 21 Sanjiv Kakar, ‘Leprosy in British India, 1860–1940: colonial politics and missionary medicine’, Medical History, 40 (1996), 228.

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patients identified a ‘uniform’ they wore in begging, a simple red fez (dara) that marked the wearer’s piety and asceticism.22 In this largely Muslim society, leprosy had an iconographic value, reminding the faithful to show charity. Recalling John Peel’s caution about assuming the necessary relationship between begging and poverty and the intentions of almsgivers raises questions about the fortunes of leprosy sufferers in Hausaland.23 Stories are told— perhaps only jokes—about the wealthy sufferers in Zaria who return the generosity shown them by sponsoring pilgrims’ air flights to Mecca.24 Such a joke may be made in the vein of Hausa calling sufferers of dwarfism Malam Dogo (or ‘Mr. Tall’) out of politeness, which certainly seems to be a greater concern than pity in dealing with leprosy sufferers. Rather distinct from pity, stereotypes and jokes refer to their stubborn tempers and hot-headedness and warn people to take care not to offend them by being patronizing. The disease also has significance in the performance and therapeutic features of the Hausa possession tradition of bori. A leprous spirit, known as Auta or Goje, is believed to move about on a horse. If Auta possesses or ‘rides’ a person, the adept’s hands and feet curl and the voice becomes hoarse.25 Said to cause coughing, ulcers and leprosy, the spirit-caused form of the illness is considered curable in some areas of Hausaland, while the incurable form is believed to be caused by God.26 In 1910, British medical officer J. M. Dalziel undertook research on leprosy in the Sokoto area and maintained that the region’s peoples held no one explanation for contagion. Rather, regional, ethnic and clan identity accounted for the varying etiologies of leprosy in different parts of the Northern Provinces. Believing that Islam accounted for laxity towards the disease, Dalziel focused on Hausa and Fulani theories of leprosy transmission that included physical contact, heredity, the ingestion of certain kinds of fish, and atavism, a theory that alien blood activated leprosy that lies dormant in the body. Children of leprosy sufferers were believed to be immune.27 These ideas may have struck

22 23 24 25 26 27

Interview with Umaru Usman Baba Ladan, 6 June 2001, Ya da Kunya, Kano. This plain hat contrasts with the more ornate hats worn in Hausaland. John Peel, ‘Poverty and sacrifice in nineteenth-century Yorubaland: a critique of Iliffe’s thesis’, Journal of African History, 31 (1990), 465–84. Personal communication with Dr. Fatima Palmer, 24 Apr. 2001, Nassarawa, Kano. Joseph Greenberg, The Influence of Islam on a Sudanese Religion (New York, 1946), 37. Interview with Anna Wayi Doba, 27 May 2001, Hausawa, Kano. L. Lewis Wall, Hausa Medicine (Durham NC, 1988), 191. J. M. Dalziel, ‘Some notes on leprosy in Sokoto Province’, Northern Nigeria Gazette Supplement, 12 (31 May 1911), 150–4.

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the medical officer as similar to others throughout the world,28 but Dalziel dismissed them, suggesting the need to instill greater fear in Africans: ‘Whatever theory is held as to the mode of spread …, the leper himself must be regarded as the chief danger and should therefore be isolated’.29 Until 1910, British Residents had practiced leprosy segregation as one part of general ‘sanitary improvements’ that included new quarantines for smallpox and leprosy sufferers in Kano and burial grounds for victims of contagious diseases outside the city.30 Charles Robinson, a visitor to Hausaland in the 1890s, reported the existence of a quarter for sufferers in Kano city,31 but Dalziel simply noted ‘the tendency to segregate lepers in the neighborhood of the hill Dala within the town’.32 Robinson might have seen a transient group, rather than an entire neighborhood. Where leprous people lived apart from the rest of the population, they were typically compelled to resettle with their families by their community, not by government.33 The colonial administration, on the other hand, made leprosy a priority after Dalziel deemed it an ‘alarming’ problem in Hausaland. He advised British officers to focus on native rulers, who had shown some willingness to support modified isolation. Although the Sultan of Sokoto had reportedly asked that sarakuna (titleholders) suffering from the disease be left undisturbed, Dalziel felt that British officers should use such discussions with Muslim rulers to ‘educate native opinion’. A campaign emerged that targeted common people. More intensive anti-leprosy efforts began with census taking. Starting in 1910, in each province, local officials provided information about the numbers of sufferers in each division as a proportion of the total population.34 The afflicted population in Kano was estimated as the highest, at 9,366, just over onethird of 1 per cent of the entire population. The Resident admitted that the statistics were less than accurate: ‘The figures set out in the attached tabular statements have however been collected with considerable difficulty, and only after enquiries which have taken some time’.35 The data were collected unsystematically, in some cases at junctions of main roads and, in others, in city 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

Worboys, ‘Mission and mandate’, 213–14; Eric Silla, ‘“After fish, milk do not wish”: recurring ideas in a global culture’, Cahiers d’études africaines, 36 (1996), 613–24. Ibid. Kano History and Culture Bureau (KHCB), SNP.7/472/1908, Kano annual report 1908, 13. Charles Robinson, Hausaland or 1500 Miles Through the Central Soudan (London, 1896), 147. Dalziel, ‘Some notes’, 150. Ibid. See, for example, KHCB, R.951, Kano annual report 1910, nn. 187–8. Ibid.

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wards of Kano and Katsina. No separate leprosy enclave was mentioned. The methodology of data collection is also unclear, but it appears that the British were entirely dependent on tax collectors for information. In 1911, the government issued the Lepers Proclamation, giving officials greater powers of inspection and punishment. Defining a ‘leper [as] any person suffering from any kind of leprosy, and any person lawfully detained as a leper’, the law mandated punishment for anyone withholding information about leprosy sufferers, real or suspected.36 The code granted an exception to those able to practice isolation at home and focused on excluding sufferers from certain occupations, including food preparation, leather-work and domestic service. Any breaches of this ban were to result in fines. The Proclamation constructed a new juridical category in the leprosy sufferer and unprecedented responsibilities for emirate authorities, even though the British emphasis on segregation contradicted most indigenous theories of contagion and imposed a general practice where none had existed previously. In Kano, the NA reportedly began a public awareness campaign shortly after the new Proclamation went into effect: In September [1911] the Emir of Kano issued a Memorandum on the subject of Leprosy drawn up by the Senior Medical Officer Doctor Graham describing the dangers of contagion with lepers and the probable causes of the dissemination of the disease … This memorandum was read aloud by the District Alkali to the assembled people in every market town of the Emirate.37 The government maintained ‘a carefully revised list … of the lepers in Kano town showing their occupations and sources of livelihood with a view to placing all whose conditions of life are in any way dangerous to the community in a settlement outside the walls of Kano’.38 The NA also required the diseased to wear special dress, a strategy first implemented by the Emir of Katsina. In that province, in the year following the issuance of the Proclamation, fifty patients had come under the Medical Officer, whose ministration simply involved the disinfection of the sufferers’ clothing and bandages once weekly. Residents had a tendency to exaggerate the accord between British and indigenous rulers; therefore, the level of participation on the part of the emirate authorities is uncertain. Sources suggest that the new measures gave emirs the 36 Proclamation no. 8, Northern Nigeria Gazette (1911), 39–45. 37 KHCB, SNP.7/13 (114), Kano annual report 1911, 19. 38 KHCB SNP.7/13 (114), extracts from Katsina annual report 1911.

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power to monitor the movement of people, in town at least. For example, leprosy and syphilis, seen as increasingly prevalent, were stated reasons for the Emir of Katsina to monitor transients.39 According to Dalziel’s report, most Hausa did not believe that leprosy was sexually transmitted or came from strangers. He gave little proof for his qualification that ‘many intelligent natives in all of the Hausa provinces believe that leprosy may be acquired by intercourse with a leper woman’.40 The linking of the disease to migrants reveals a British preoccupation. Immigrants were a primary issue in the definition of native spheres of power, particularly as the completion of the Baro–Kano Railway in 1913 and the amalgamation of the Northern and Southern provinces of Nigeria in 1914 brought more ‘strangers’ to the emirates. In Kano and Zaria, especially, where strangers’ quarters (sabon gari) were created, colonial officials tried in vain to keep Muslim and non-Muslim enclaves separate, with the NA responsible for the former and with British oversight in the reserve areas for non-native Africans. The Resident of Kano justified stringent controls on movement in the ‘township’, the newer urban areas, in 1913: I think that it is better to dissociate the whole township from native authority. Otherwise control will be divided and as it is impossible that the Native Administration should exercise full and effective control over native foreigners in accordance with Mohammadan [sic] Law and native custom, it will strengthen, rather than weaken, the Emir and Native Administration if the township is excluded in practice from their sphere of authority. The danger that natives might settle in the township in order to escape the authority of their lawful Superiors is guarded against by not allowing such persons to settle there. It is probable that only the criminal classes and undesirable parasites would desire to do so.41 Residential segregation did not work because local Muslims moved into sabon gari to establish businesses and take advantage of new markets.42 It is striking, however, that public health, in its widest medical and social sense, justified segregation amongst Africans, though not to the extent that it was used for separating Europeans and Africans. It demarcated the boundaries of political 39 40 41 42

Kano annual report 1911, 19–20. Dalziel, ‘Some notes’, 150. KHCB 95/1914, Kano annual report 1913, 10. Ahmed Bako, ‘A socioeconomic history of sabon gari Kano, 1913–1989’ (Ph.D. thesis, Bayero University, Kano, 1990), 115.

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authority, however fluid they really were. It also had the effect of reinforcing an idea of original inhabitants and strangers, as well as the new geography of Southern and Northern Nigeria. Though the medical rationale strengthened emirs’ powers over Muslim subjects, it also restricted them to carefully defined ‘Muslim’ spheres that at first meant the urban seats of the emirates. Colonial medicine, from its earliest beginnings, had an important function in upholding the apparatus of indirect rule by delimiting spaces of native authority. How emirs responded to this delimitation is explored more fully below. The leprosy scheme was symbolically important, if not aggressively put into practice. As of the 1920s, few sufferers lived in government custody. The Kano NA constructed a formal lazaret or almshouse for outcast leprous people in 1925. The camp housed 100 ‘voluntary inmates’. Among these inmates, each adult received a monthly allowance from the NA and regular visits from the Medical Officer.43 The Emir of Hadejia operated such an almshouse in the Northern Division of Kano Province.44 Though little more than a charity, these provisions for leprosy sufferers entailed a new financial responsibility for the NA. With the lazarets, moreover, the government began to link urban and peri-urban spheres and gain greater visibility and control beyond the city. This early public health program was reshaped in the later 1920s and 1930s, when new medical research and resources became available for the implementation of a centralized leprosycontrol regime.

Teaching Tolerance: Missions’ Place in the Reform of Native Administration

Michael Worboys notes that, in the development of colonial medicine, the period from the late 1920s saw intensifying debates over the welfare of subject populations.45 Medical personnel and policymakers were not the only ones involved. Situated more ‘locally’, missionaries and indigenous rulers had great stakes in any changes affecting the daily lives and welfare of ordinary people, and their levels of participation in government schemes to improve health were matters of intense debate. The development of an imperial leprosy campaign demonstrates this tendency towards inclusive government. In the early twentieth century, the 43 KHCB, R.24, Kano annual report 1925, 30. 44 KHCB, No. 400, Northern division quarterly report 1930, 10. 45 Worboys, ‘Mission and mandate’, 212.

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medical approach to leprosy in the colonies was radically rethought. Although there was much disagreement about the efficacy of containing the disease by isolating sufferers, segregation became the common practice in the face of pressure from some British medical officers and Indian elites; for missionaries, whose opinions were mixed, isolation was an aid to conversion.46 Through the efforts of Sir Leonard Rogers and Dr. Ernest Muir, researchers at the Calcutta School of Tropical Medicine, the Indian model of segregation was fine-tuned and promoted by the British Empire Relief Association (BELRA), established in 1924. Rogers developed a solution of chaulmoogra oil, derived from varieties of the hydnocarpus tree, for administration by injection at the leprosaria. His successor, Muir, took the new therapy on the road, touring African colonies in the 1930s to export the Indian model, but, by that time, the oil was deemed ineffective and actually sometimes harmful. Nonetheless, Muir continued to promote its use in segregation settlements. Despite doubts, oils and segregation were prescribed, and segregation remained in practice in the 1960s, even after more effective sulfone drugs were in use. While this realignment in leprosy control was occurring in India, the subject of social welfare was being rethought in Northern Nigeria, and mission societies used the issue to renew their efforts to enter the emirates. Claiming that their exclusion was inhibiting religious freedom and denying subjects the benefits of ‘western civilization’, the Church Missionary Society (CMS), SIM and several other societies together brought the matter before the Governor of Nigeria, Graeme Thomson, in London in 1927, with the help of the Bishop of Salisbury and the prominent Christian statesman Joseph H. Oldham.47 Thomson took a much softer position on missions than any previous governor. He emphasized that restrictions were not permanent and explained that the only remaining obstacle to missions to Muslims was the uncertainty of the political climate on the ground. The Governor summarized his position: ‘I insisted … that as soon as I was satisfied that it would safely be undertaken, I would try to have the principles of religious toleration instilled into the minds of the Emirs’.48

46 47

Kakar, ‘Leprosy in British India’, 215–30. Arewa House Archives (AHA), K.5333, Mission Representatives to Thomson, 23 June 1927, 32. Oldham’s activism on behalf of missions in Africa was primarily related not to medicine but to education, about which he, five governors of African colonies, and others were meeting in June 1927: Keith Clements, Faith on the Frontier: A Life of J. H. Oldham (Edinburgh, 1999), 220–4. 48 GB National Archives, formerly Public Records Office (PRO), CO 583/160/5, Thomson to Wilson, 26 June 1927.

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The British aimed to move missions into Muslim territories as part of a gradual exposure of native rulers to the assumed benefits of Western culture.49 The governor saw medical work as a way of doing so. In December 1927, he suggested to the Colonial Office the benefit of cooperative leprosy-control work, citing the success of the United Missionary Society at Itu in southeastern Nigeria, where the number of leprous residents had multiplied by a hundredfold in one year.50 Shortly thereafter, Thomson negotiated an arrangement between BELRA and the North American Church of the Brethren Mission to establish a leprosy settlement at Garkida, in Biu, Bornu Province, a religiously mixed area under an emirate NA. The mission agreed to run the institution, and the NA provided farmland, housing assistance and allowances for residents’ food.51 Garkida leprosarium was just a beginning, almost a way of moving from the ‘margins’ of the emirates into their core. Medicine was not the only tool in what Thomson called ‘the education of emirs in religious tolerance’, which by 1930 broadened to become the inculcation of the emirs in ‘principles of liberty of conscience’.52 Echoing the Anglo-American tradition of separation of church and state, the British wanted to use their relationships with the Hausa and Fulani rulers as the basis for a cultural transformation, and, paradoxically, religion was a major part of educating the emirs. Residents filled their reports with the initiative of emirs and their staff in taking English-language tuition and otherwise exposing themselves to secular European culture.53 More important, however, was the pilgrimage of the Emir of Katsina, Dikko. His was the first officially sponsored flight to Mecca, with a stop in England. Dikko was an exemplar of the newly exposed Muslim ruler and a paragon of the Westernized Muslim elite that the British aspired to cultivate as indirect rulers; moreover, his successes symbolized respect for religion and its actual facilitation under the British. The colonial government began soliciting Residents’ assessments of the various emirs’ potential for ‘tolerating’ Christian missions. In September 1930, the Secretary for the Northern Provinces prepared a précis of reports from all the provinces. Most Residents agreed that little work had yet been undertaken to prepare emirs for missions, but they felt, in contrast to Governor Thomson, 49 GB National Archives, CO 583/160/5, Strachey to Thomson, 25 July 1927. 50 GB National Archives, CO 583/156/2, Thomson to Secretary, Northern Provinces (Scty. NP), 30 Dec. 1927, 1–4; Scty. NP to Thomson, 30 Apr. 1928. 51 GB National Archives, CO 583/167/3, Thomson to Scty NP, 16 Sept. 1929; Scty NP to Thomson, 30 Apr. 1928. 52 GB National Archives, CO 583/160/5, Thomson to Oldham, 26 June 1927; CO 583/176/15, Thomson to Oldham, 14 Dec. 1930. 53 KHCB, 25673/SNP 17/8, Kano Province annual report 1935, 8.

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that the onus lay on the European missionaries to respect local custom if they were to enter Muslim areas. The Resident of Bauchi went so far as to complain that the North American missionaries of SIM expected too much, when they themselves were intolerant.54 Christian–Muslim relations were not the only religious interactions under discussion; so, too, was the relationship between Muslims and ‘pagans’. Thomson invoked the theme of tolerance in 1930, in his address at the first meeting of members of Northern Nigerian native councils, which was to serve as the basis for the NA Advisory Council for the Northern Provinces. Noting the welcome given by Muslim leaders to the non-Muslim Attah of Igbirra and the Aku Wukari, the ‘representatives of more primitive peoples’, the Governor described it as: a significant witness to the disappearance of ancient differences and prejudices, and to the growth of a generous and tolerant spirit, springing in some measure from a sense of their common privilege and responsibility in being called to a share in the counsels of Government.55 Appealing to elite paternalism, as well as to the ethnic superiority of Fulani over Hausa, he likened ‘the poorest and least enlightened subjects’ under the non-Muslim rulers to the ‘ignorant Habe’ in the emirates and enjoined all those present at the meeting to ‘remember … the need of wise tolerance and equal justice for all, … so that the benefits of progress shall extend to all men’.56 Magnanimity towards the poor was an important matter on the agenda. The question of support for leprosy sufferers and others with disabilities arose when the Muslim representatives reached the subject of zakat in grains, to be stored in the beit-al-mal (native treasury), revealing that rulers considered infirmity in terms of poverty, not medical work, which was discussed separately. The Emir of Gwandu suggested that each village create a grain reserve to sustain lepers, the aged and the disabled, and for the public in emergencies. The British agricultural officer objected that this plan would burden the poor and that payment in kind was retrograde, but the alkali (Muslim judge) Bauchi explained that zakat was a gift, not a tax, and paid only in relation to one’s

54 AHA, 5333, Religious tolerance: précis of replies from residents to secretary’s confidential memorandum No. 1.5533/188 dated 15 Sept. 1930, 1. 55 GB National Archives, CO 583/180/6, Record of proceedings at full meeting with native rulers, Dec. 1930, 1. 56 Ibid. 10.

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capacity. The judge added that the emir received this money and retained sole responsibility for it.57 This characterization of the emir as a religious figurehead—as the collector of alms and the overseer of good works—was an important assertion of political boundaries, between the colonial government and the NAs. Zakat was hardly sacrosanct and had been subject to manipulation in the past. M. G. Smith reports on a situation in 1914 when, during famine in Kano, district heads (hakimai) sold portions of their tithes to starving commoners ‘at considerable profit’. The heads were criticized, and, shortly thereafter, commoners were allowed to dispense with their own tithes as they saw fit, ‘thereby abolishing the hakimai’s prescriptive rights to it’.58 The voluntary nature of zakat was clearly questionable,59 but in suggesting to the British that tithes were not collected by force and came under the discretion of emirs, the alkali simplified alms as a matter of faith better left to the NAs. These discussions about leprosy and alms reveal that negotiation and debate over ‘traditions’ were important, but that simplicity for the sake of uniformity was often the result. This was true on the emirs’ side but also for the British, as illustrated by their compromises in leprosy control, in spite of the evidence against the efficacy of segregation and oil injections; and by the application of a single leprosarium model in many colonies, in spite of their different local circumstances. The ‘reform’ of indigenous rule, which Governor Donald Cameron formally carried out in 1933, was a process of streamlining which helped the British and the NAs at a time of worldwide economic depression. That year, the mission movement into the emirates began, giving NAs control over new institutions and non-Muslim peoples.

Converging Interests and Agreements

Although the British saw themselves shepherding Christians and Muslims in forging a closer relationship, Muslim officials in large measure shaped the course of missions in the emirates. In 1933, the Kano NA began helping SIM select sites in the province, the first in any Muslim area since the CMS settled in Zaria in 1899. The NA Survey Department provided the Mission with maps 57 Ibid. 12. 58 M. G. Smith, Government in Kano 1350–1950 (Boulder, 1997), 432. 59 On debates about the payment and uses of zakat, see Holger Weiss, ‘Zakat and the question of social welfare: an introductory essay on Islamic economics and its implications for social welfare’, in Holger Weiss (ed.), Social Welfare in Muslim Societies in Africa (Uppsala, 2002), 15–18.

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of rural areas,60 and, after a site was selected in Garko in southeastern Kano, the emir visited and approved it. The same year, the NA approved a site in Kano township for SIM to use as a ‘forwarding center’ between their stations in Northern Nigeria and the French colonies of Niger and Upper Volta.61 The sultan in Sokoto and other NA officials followed a similar procedure.62 The choice of southeastern Kano for the mission site is significant for two reasons. First, the area had concentrations of Maguzawa and other nonMuslim populations, a clearly important factor for NAs. In the early 1930s, the Emir of Kano refused SIM’s request for a location in a town with a District Head, i.e. a Muslim center, and suggested instead Farin Dutse.63 This location was identified with Warjawa and Ajawa, groups described as having ‘only a vague connection with  … Kano’.64 After opening Garko, SIM’s Albert Helser and C. Gordon Beacham received ‘Maguzawa figures’ from the Kano NA. Helser wrote, ‘[Assistant District Officer] Mr. Dewar urged that we look at several sites. The Galadima said that he would make a good metalled road to whatever site was chosen. The Galadima has several good sites to show. He seemed very happy about the possibility of a Mission’.65 The two sites that SIM acquired following these negotiations were at Roni in Kazaure emirate and Malumfashi, in southern Katsina, both known as Maguzawa centers. Sani Mohammed Bako has suggested that Maguzawa had little influence, hence missions among them would have little impact. Rural people, he argues further, were less likely to attack missionaries.66 The reported statement of Galadiman Kano reveals yet another possible motivation for Muslim authorities to urge missions towards rural ‘pagans’: Europeans among non-Muslims would mean a step in extending the central government’s power in rural areas. Yet it seems that the colonial government and NAs were working at odds here. For the colonial government in Kaduna, the interest in Maguzawa had to do with the reform of Native Administration. Seeking for ‘true tribal organization’ 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

Sudan Interior Mission Archives (SIMA), Kano Province correspondence 1926–39 (Nigeria Box 11), Early administrative era Kano emirate, Map department to SIM, 18 Sept. 1933. SIMA, Kano miscellaneous 1934–45 (Sr-18/A), Notes from diary of Mrs. C. Gordon Beacham, in letter to C. Ferrier, 20 Aug. 1983. SIMA, Kano miscellaneous 1934–45 (Sr-18/A), Beacham to Bingham, Grigwood, Trout, Jones, 29 Mar. 1933; SIMA, Helser, AD Correspondence, 1 Jan. 1938–30 June 1939 (CH-2/A), Helser to Beacham, 11 May 1938. SIMA, Kano province correspondence 1926–39 (Nigeria Box 11), Lindsell to Playfair, 5 Sept. 1930. KHCB, KANO PROF. HIS/5/1936, ‘Pagans in Kano province’, 1936, 5. SIMA, Correspondence Albert Helser 1936–56, Helser to Beacham, 19 May 1936. Sani Mohammed Bako, ‘The impact of the SIM/ECWA activities on the rural areas of Kano state’ (MA thesis, Bayero University, Kano, 1985), 62.

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to be ‘dug out of the ruins caused by alien administration’,67 British officials wanted to retrench the emirate-type political organization earlier extended into non-Muslim polities.68 Among Maguzawa, for instance, the British had noticed the unpopularity of Muslim courts.69 This resistance may, however, have urged the NA to demonstrate their power in southeastern Kano, where administering the law was complicated.70 The NA might have wanted authority not only over Maguzawa, but also to limit the power of ‘pagans’ over Muslims. The Sumaila NA tax surveyor was known to be ‘a habitual drinker of native beer’ and a participant in ‘unholy orgies’ of Maguzawa and Mbutawa.71 Though different interests may have been at play, non-Muslims in the emirates came into the spotlight around the time of negotiations between government officials and missionaries, who were happy merely to have a place in the emirates. The second important consideration in settling SIM in southeastern Kano in 1933 likely related to the distribution of medical facilities. Out of nine NA dispensaries in Kano, Wudil was the southeastern-most point where any government medical site stood.72 Mission stations meant more medical facilities with no expense to the NA. Likewise, in 1934, the NA allowed BELRA to open a provincial leprosy segregation settlement at Sumaila. Similar facilities were opened near Katsina and Zaria cities in the same year. The first workers at all three leprosaria came with the Anglican-affiliated Toc H Society. Probably as early as 1930, the founder, Reverend Tubby Clayton, and six lay workers assisted in lazaret construction in Kano. In 1935, Toc H transferred missionary volunteer W. A. Lambert from Itu to help run Sumaila and later Zaria.73 At Sumaila, he had 24 residents under a chief who formerly had served as the head of a lazaret.74 Lambert lodged in a government rest-house two miles from the camp and trekked daily on horseback. The NA purchased the animal and saddle for him, in addition to providing him a dogari (native 67 Rhodes House, MSS.Perham 402/2, Native administration policy: pagan administration, Scty. NP to all Residents, 15 Mar. 1934, 2. 68 Margery Perham, Native Administration in Nigeria (Oxford, 1937), 91, 93, 142. Margery Perham undertook research in Kano for this book in the early 1930s, and her diaries record comparisons of, and discussions she had about, ‘pagans’ and Muslims in the emirates. 69 ‘Pagans in Kano Province’, 4. 70 Alhaji Mahmadu Koki, Kano Malam, trans. and ed. Neil Skinner (Zaria, 1977), 130. The author, who worked as an alkali in the district, discussed the difficulty of deciding cases amongst non-Muslims and between Muslims and non-Muslims. 71 KHCB, Sumaila district reassessment report 1924, 17. 72 KHCB, SNP 17/3, Vol. I, Kano province annual report 1933, 34. 73 University of Birmingham Library Special Collections (BSColl), ACC 118 F1, W. A. Lambert, ‘My life with the lepers’, manuscript (no date), 11, 24. 74 Ibid. 11.

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policeman). His main responsibility entailed overseeing the residents in bushclearing, road-building, farming and other work. Lambert also trained several ‘leper nurses’ who reportedly administered 7,000 oil injections.75 British sources do not mention Toc H workers, but the NAs had been cooperating on their own with Christian missionaries with little fanfare when Dr. Muir toured leprosy settlements and lazarets in Nigeria and recommended a joint mission–government campaign. The doctor was proposing nothing new with the idea of Mission–NA partnership, but his call for the reorganization of existing leprosy facilities into a system of centralized government leprosaria, managed according to formal agreements between colonial authorities, NAs and missions, was a departure. Muir wanted greater colonial government oversight of a bureaucracy formed of a provincial leprosy board, central settlements that were residential treatment and worker-training facilities and a constellation of scattered leprosy villages and clan settlements connected by a public information network and periodic visits by government representatives.76 Muir officially contacted missionaries to gauge their interest in leprosy work. He approached Walter Miller of the CMS and Albert Helser, who worked at the Brethren-run Garkida leprosarium.77 Miller was pessimistic about the possibilities for cooperation, writing that Islam has looked upon the leper as a man or woman to give alms to, not to cure or help. The Native Administration is passively opposed to segregation and british [sic] treatment, and resents the removal of people who as recipients of alms help the pious moslem [sic] go to Heaven.78 Miller was not entirely incorrect in his assessment of Hausa views of leprosy sufferers as alms-seekers and the disease itself as not curable, and nor was his idea that in Northern Nigeria the need for ‘preventive medicine is greater than healing’.79 Yet he misjudged the level of support that emirs would give to the British scheme. 75 Ibid. 12. Lambert does not specify whether he himself gave any injections, but, in this period, foreign workers typically did not do so, instead instructing ‘cleansed’ patients to do so. These ‘middle figures’ merit closer study, as in Nancy Rose Hunt’s A Colonial Lexicon: Of Birth Ritual, Medicalization and Mobility in the Congo (Durham, 1999). 76 AHA, POR/A17, Dr. E. Muir, ‘Leprosy in Nigeria: a report on anti-leprosy work in Nigeria with suggestions for its development’ (Lagos, 1936). 77 BSColl, CMS/ACC 237 F2, Miller to Muir, 17 Mar. 1936; SIMA, Playfair personal papers, etc., Playfair to friends, 29 Apr. 1937, 2. 78 Miller to Muir. 79 Walter Miller, Reflections of a Pioneer (London, 1936), 122–3.

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Helser had less experience with Hausa than Miller, who had lived in Zaria for many years, and had a very different reaction. Leaving the Brethren at Garkida over theological disagreements in 1936,80 he joined SIM and saw medical work as a necessity for its entry into the Muslim areas. SIM had become involved in informal medical work south of the emirates, and, at posts in Niger Province, local missionaries helped Residents with leprosy segregation.81 Helser saw in Muir’s plan the opportunity to formalize government–mission cooperation and step up evangelism. The government and missions began to implement Muir’s plan in 1937, with the North American missions having the most prominent place. The Brethren continued at Garkida, while SIM took over provincial leprosaria in Kano, Katsina and Sokoto; later, in the 1940s and 1950s, this Mission took charge of leprosaria at Bauchi, Niger and Ilorin-Kabba. The mostly European Sudan United Mission (SUM) worked in Maiduguri in Borno, Vom on the Jos Plateau and Mkar on the Benue. Because the CMS already had a presence in Zaria, it took over the leprosarium there, without the participation of Miller. The missionaries from these societies replaced the Toc H workers. The contracts governing the leprosy settlements divided the parties’ responsibilities, laying out the NAs’ more explicitly. The NAs would build all structures, including the dispensary, toilet facilities, patients’ quarters and furniture. It also pledged to pay a weekly sum of about 1s. 3d. per patient, in addition to a yearly allowance of 1s. for drugs and dressings for each. The Resident initially set the number of NA-supported patients at 400, while the mission could accept and support any over this number. Patients would grow food crops and cotton for spinning and weaving into bandages, to supplement the NA allowance.82 The mission’s chief role was to manage daily operations, all medical matters, staffing and maintenance.83 The negotiations for Katsina and Sokoto were concluded in 1937, but negotiations on the Kano contract dragged on because of a disagreement over limits on missionary activity. The Secretary for the Northern Provinces wanted to clarify that SIM would not proselytize among Muslims. The contracts for Katsina and Sokoto included the SIM-approved definition of proselytism as unwelcome visitation and pressure; in the Kano contract, however, ‘unwelcome’ had been removed, and proselytization had come to mean any house-to-house 80 Raymond Hickey, Christianity in Borno State and Northern Gongola (Nigeria, 1984), ch. 3. 81 SIMA, Annual reports: Nigeria and French West Africa 1911–1945 (EM-1), Annual report 1911, 3; AHA, 5333, Resident, Niger province, to Scty. NP, 14 Nov. 1930, 2. 82 Lambert, ‘My life’, 12. 83 SIMA, Early administrative era (Nigeria box 12), Agreement between NA and mission, Apr. 1938.

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visitation, teaching Christianity to any Muslims or inducement to religious conversion. The SIM leadership objected to the changes, particularly the language that would prevent ‘explaining the tenets of the Christian faith to any honest inquirer’.84 The contract was amended with the more specific stipulation that Muslims had to request Christian teaching before missionaries could give it. The Secretary warned the Mission against ‘aggressiveness of any nature’.85

Compromise and Competition at the Kano Leprosarium

The leprosaria was a kind of theater where the NAs, missions and colonial officers played politics that had little to do with the explicitly medical aspects of the place or even the economic arrangements. Gaining the loyalties of the settlement residents seems to have been more important. Some of the strategies used were outwardly competitive, but emirs and missionaries more often used subtle tactics in order to be perceived as the kinder authority figure. They outdid themselves in their kindness to one another and in their demonstrations of goodwill and charity towards the residents. The Kano NA’s about-face with regard to the leprosarium’s relocation illustrates the lengths to which it would go to have ‘its people’ on site. After all of the efforts to place medical and mission institutions in southeastern Kano, the leprosarium was moved from Sumaila to Ya da Kunya, a village 11 miles northeast of the city, in Ungogo District, shortly after the mission takeover. The lack of water at Sumaila site was the reason given for the move and was certainly a problem.86 Perhaps the large amount of fallow land at Ya da Kunya, on the outskirts of the district, was another reason, for residents were to feed themselves by farming and raising livestock.87 From the point of view of Kano, the most important reason was surely Ya da Kunya’s central location. One missionary noted that the Madaki of Kano had bluntly told him about Sumaila: ‘Our people from here will never go there’.88 A comparison of two rosters of inmates in SIM care, one compiled before the move in December 1937 and the other after in May 1939, shows the dramatic 84 SIMA Kano lep. miscellaneous 1936–1945, Notes on leper settlement agreement (no date), 2. 85 Ibid. 3. 86 Lambert, ‘My life’, 8; SIMA, Helser, AD 1937 (CH-3/A), Helser to Playfair, 7 May 1937. Ya da Kunya was located near a river by the same name, and pipe-borne water was supplied from wells: KHCB, 32098, Kano Province Report 1939 I, 65–6. 87 KHCB MLG 525/1924, Assessment report, Ungogo district, 2. 88 SIMA, Helser, AD 1937 (CH-3/A), Helser to Playfair, 17 May 1937.

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impact of the proximity to Kano city. Nearly one-quarter of the 200 residents at the original settlement identified Sumaila as their home district. At Ya da Kunya, the resident population had tripled, close to half (45 per cent) coming from Kano district. About one-third of the Kano people reported coming from the city itself.89 While the vast majority of Kano city natives reported birni, the walled city, as their place of origin, a few were from sabon gari and Christians, judging from their names. The Kano orientation appeared to benefit both the NA and the missionaries. The emir and his council members enjoyed more influence over the institution. Given the limitations on NA authority in the migrants’ section of town, the leprosy settlement was the first religiously mixed (Muslim and Christian) population over which the NA had control. SIM missionaries had greater access to the Muslim populations and to well-placed Muslims they had longed to reach with a Christian message. SIM essentially became a medical extension of the NA. Helser headed the reorganization of the Kano lazarets, a project that involved closing the lazarets to consolidate sufferers at the Mission institution. He suggested that all but the most incapacitated patients move to Ya da Kunya and that lazarets’ residents should be given NA allowances that were no greater than those earned by leprosaria patients.90 Missionaries regularly visited the NA City jail and hospital to find leprosy sufferers. They also trekked quarterly on foot and by car to each district in the province for the purpose of identifying prospective residents and escorting them to the settlements.91 Because Christian workers traveled and dispensed medicine with the tacit support of the emirate authorities, they were well received by district and village heads. Several SIM workers succeeded in establishing a respected reputation in and around Kano and other main towns. Asharomo (Drink Broth), the Hausa sobriquet by which many people in and around Kano remember Helser even today, illustrates the image of wellbeing, beyond a literal idea of medicine, that Christians left through treks and word of mouth.92 89 SIMA Kano lep. miscellaneous reports and info 1937–45 (SR-19/A), Reports of the Kano leper settlement SIM, Dec. 1937 and May 1939. The later list shows each resident’s town and district. 90 SIMA, Kano province correspondence medical 1933–40 (Nigeria Box 12), Helser to Resident Featherstone, 17 May 1938. 91 Mrs. Harry L. Cox, ‘In search of lepers’, Sudan Witness, 14 (Mar.–Apr. 1938), 20–2; Helser to Resident Kano, 26 Aug. 1937, 4. 92 Group interviews at Giginyu, Jigiria, 17 Aug. 2001, and at Mariri, 22 Jul. 2001. Umaru Usman Baba Ladan interview; SIMA, Helser correspondence 1940–2 (CH-2/A), Playfair to Helser, 2 July 1941.

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The mutual benefits notwithstanding, the missionaries grumbled about the NA as a worker might complain about a moody and inconsistent boss. In their public voice, in the Sudan Witness magazine, SIM featured effusive descriptions of emirs for Christian readers at home. According to SIM tradition, the Emir of Gwandu, after reading the Bible, presented to him by SIM, told missionaries, ‘Christ healed the lepers and it is becoming of you, His followers, to do the same. You are the only ones who can heal them’.93 Bibles were also dedicated to the Sultan, the Emir of Kano, and at the Kano Public Library as tokens of Muslim–Christian friendship; in Mission news, these gifts symbolized the Christian advance into Muslim areas.94 In correspondence amongst field workers, SIM complained about the untrustworthiness of the NA. SIM missionaries suspected that ‘lepers were usually spotted by the Hospital staff and disposed of before the weekly visit’.95 The treks were opportunities for the British and emirate officials to monitor SIM activities through spying district heads.96 The Christians so desperately needed the NA, however, that they proposed that the Emir of Kano present alms directly to leprosarium residents in order to discourage their movement to the city to beg.97 In an ironic twist of circumstances, the inability to keep leprosy sufferers segregated led Christian missionaries to contemplate the institutionalization of a fundamental principle of Islam. Just as missionaries in many parts of Africa often tolerated certain practices of ‘rival’ faiths for the sake of gaining converts, in the Northern Nigerian leprosaria they even tolerated Islam, in order to have leprosy sufferers remain in their care for as long as possible. For their part, the emirs and their representatives made the leprosarium their own. They visited Ya da Kunya regularly. The Emir of Kano, after seeing the church building at Ya da Kunya, requested that the government construct a mosque,98 to give the institution a Muslim seal but also to mark the NA’s investment. Most importantly, in a complete reversal of earlier practice, the members of the sarakuna came to stay at the leprosarium. The NA sent ill members of its staff there; one Kano employee was sent to the Katsina leprosarium.99 93 94 95 96 97 98 99

‘Field Director’s report for Nigeria and French West Africa, 1936’, Sudan Witness, 12 (Mar.– Apr. 1937), 2. Interview with June and Ian Hay, 25 June 2002, SIM Retirement Village, Sebring, Florida; interview with Marge Cummins, 25 June 2002, Sebring. ‘News in Brief: Kano’, Sudan Witness, 15 (Jan.–Feb. 1939), 23. SIMA, Kano leprosarium miscellaneous reports and info. 1937–45 (SR-19/A), Kano Lep half-yearly report 1939, 2. SIMA, Helser, AD 1 Jan. 1938–30 June 1939 (CH-2/A), Helser to Beacham, 19 May 1938. SIMA, Early administrative era (Nigeria Box 12), Report of the 1st Leprosy Board meeting, provincial office, 25 Jan. 1938, 2. SIMA, Playfair personal papers, Playfair to Holms, 8 Nov. 1939. SIMA, Helser, AD 1937 (CH-3/A), Helser to Playfair, 18 Oct. 1937.

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figure 2 Muslim officials in attendance at discharge ceremony at the Kano Leprosarium (Ya da Kunya), c. 1950s. From ‘The war against leprosy’, Nigeria 47 (1955), 247

Members of the royal families also sought the care of the Christian doctors. A wife of the Emir of Katsina and a son of the Kano Emir were reportedly leprosaria residents at one time.100 Muslims of good standing participated in the many functions held in the leprosarium chapel (Fig. 2). For commoners, the presence of royalty at the leprosaria made a distinct impression that is remembered today as an amazing testament to the Christian– Muslim friendship shared in Northern Nigeria’s past and the ‘political’ nature of religious conflict today. This ‘intimacy’ was new; in the mid nineteenth century, Heinrich Barth noticed that no poor man was allowed in the presence of the Kano Emir, a practice that was followed more strictly in Kano than in Sokoto.101 One can imagine that, similar to the durbars at Id festivals today, the leprosarium functions were times to see and, for the fortunate, to be seen by the emir and his retinue. 100 SIMA, Katsina leprosarium report 1938–45 (SR-21/A), Katsina leprosarium daily report, 12 May 1939; interview with Abdulkarim Umar dan Asabe, 2 Aug. 2004, Federal Government College, Kano; interview with Usman Karkarna, 5 Aug. 2004, Ya da Kunya, Kano. 101 Heinrich Barth, Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa (4 vols.) (New York, 1857), 11, 146.

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The missionaries could not, it seems, see anything other than religion in NA actions. For instance, the NAs created the office of medical representative (wakilin magani), the incumbent living at the leprosaria and reporting to the emirs. The missionaries wrongly interpreted the official’s functions as oversight of the establishment of a leprosarium mosque and the appointment of leaders of the Muslim community.102 While the wakilin magani may have served the NAs’ surveillance needs, the office was not religious. In one secular medical institution, the representative acted as little more than a social liaison ‘holding court in his office’.103 The SIM account of the visit of the ciroma (crown prince) to Ya da Kunya in 1938 reveals another misunderstanding and the sense of competition the missionaries felt. The purpose of the visit had been to formalize the wakili’s residence at the leprosarium and to announce that discharged patients were to meet with the emir for an explanation of follow-up procedures, a measure intended to prevent them from begging or becoming involved in undesirable activities. According to the mission staff, the ciroma helped the assembled patients select a liman (Hausa, imam, a prayer leader) ‘to name babies, bury the dead, marry and divorce and conduct devotions’.104 The missionaries interpreted even the religious office wrongly, in Christian terms, not Muslim ones. Divorce in Muslim Hausa marriage does not require any presiding authority, and the appointment of a liman does not require emirate oversight.105 Before leaving, the ciroma spoke of the emir’s appreciation to SIM and left instructions to the wakili to follow the medical superintendent’s order and ‘not let religion interfere’. At the meeting convened immediately afterward, the missionaries spoke amongst themselves about the visit: The fact that the mission was allowed to have charge of everything even when the Chiroma, who now has the work of Madaki over the whole of Kano Province, was present, made it clear to the lepers that they are to continue to look to the mission as the party in charge of the settlement.106

102 SIMA, Kano leprosarium résumés 1937–45 (SR-19/A), 2nd quarter report 1939. 103 School of Oriental and African Studies Library Special Collections, Jean Boyd collection, MS 36/SP/57-75 Box 19, ‘Medical notes of officers serving in the north’, 1940–60, 10. 104 SIMA, Kano province correspondence medical (leprosy) 1933–40 (Nigeria Box 12), Early administrative era, notes on chiroma’s visit to Kano leprosy settlement, 6 July 1938. 105 It is questionable whether the leprous leader was really supposed to act in the roles listed by the missions, for illness would typically disqualify a person from serving as liman. Personal communication with Philip Shea, 18 July 2004, Bayero University, Kano. 106 Notes on chiroma’s visit.

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The intentions and interpretations are somewhat difficult to read with certainty through the missionaries’ filter, but it seems that the NA gave full support to the mission, even if it intended also to strengthen the leprosarium’s Islamic character with the building of a mosque and appointing a liman. The missionaries seem not to have interpreted the support for Islam as a direct challenge, but they doubtless felt insecure, given their dependence on the NA to lend legitimacy to the institution. The question of who was ‘in charge’ seems to have vexed SIM but not the emirate authorities. They were sufficiently comfortable that the leprosarium was theirs to send their wives and children to the place. The ambiguity of authority led to an outright confrontation in 1939. At a meeting of native rulers, the emirs of Kano and Katsina, possibly with others, shared their discontent about SIM. They reported to British authorities on statements by leprosaria patients and rural heads that missionaries had removed children, including some under five, from their parents and given them Christian instruction. This is neither surprising nor untrue, for SIM attempted to separate uninfected children from their parents on medical grounds, in keeping with Dr. Muir’s recommendation.107 Martha Wall, a missionary nurse at Katsina, remembered the enormous difficulty in convincing mothers to give up their children, and the gradual process, with special feasts and regular visits, intended to woo mothers ‘to show them that we are kind to babies and children, and that they would be happy with us’.108 Emirs’ belief that missionaries used their kindness to entice and overpower vulnerable people was not unfounded.109 The missionaries reckoned that the emirs were reacting to the conversions of a number of adult Muslims, whom SIM sources describe as well-placed malamai (scholars).110 Apparently, several NA scribes and the firstborn son of the village head of Ya da Kunya had begun attending Bible-reading classes, but some of their fellow Muslims had objected and threatened to end Muslims’ participation in Christian fellowship.111 Conversations between SIM representatives and Dr. Naudi, the senior medical officer, suggest that colonial officials had known about Muslims’ conversions, and, by implication, missionaries’ evangelism, at the leprosaria for some time. According to SIM’s Helser, Naudi felt that the mission had an ‘unanswerable lever with the Government in 107 Muir, ‘Leprosy in Nigeria’, 10. 108 Martha Wall, Splinters from an African Log (Chicago, 1960), 98. 109 GB National Archives, CO 583 257, 30063, Policy of Nigerian Government as regards mission activities in Moslem areas, Hoskyns-Abrahall to Williams, 2 Jan. 1942, 4. 110 SIMA, Helser, AD 1939 (CH-2/A), Playfair to Helser, 3 Sept. 1939, 2. 111 SIMA, Kano leprosarium 1936–45 (SR-18/A), 2nd Quarter report, 30 June 1938; 3rd Quarter report.

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providing professionally trained doctors and nursing sisters’.112 SIM rued the relocation of the Kano leprosarium from a rural area, where ‘little notice would have been taken of converts for a long time’.113 It is likely that both the coercion of women and children and the conversions angered the emirs. What is also noteworthy is the emirs’ acceptance of many mission practices. Though they clearly did not believe in segregation as a medical necessity, as seen in their opposition to the removal of children, emirs never voiced any objection to other measures of the missionaries, who inspected, touched and treated people, including women and children.114 But the missionaries’ attempts to extend their power beyond medicine into childrearing and religious education rankled. The NAs reacted strongly by forcing the stoppage of work at the leprosaria crèches for children under 5. They requested that the following clause be inserted into the certificates of occupancy of every SIM mission site, medical and general: ‘No Mohammedan children shall be taught religion by the Mission, whether with or without the consent of the parents. Second, Adults may be taught religion by the Mission if they come asking for it without persuasion’.115 When SIM missionaries rejected this stipulation and threatened to pull out of the leprosaria, the government, in turn, intimated it might take them away from SIM.116 In the end, stipulations on children’s education applied only at the leprosaria. Following the crisis of 1939, in which the NAs viewed children as captives, they maintained that medical missionaries should be managers and not use their positions to bring undue pressure on those who were under the age of 18.117 Because SIM was an indispensable provider of medical services in the Northern Provinces and a virtual extension of the NA, it could not easily be discounted or ejected, but Muslim officials grew more vigilant in scrutinizing 112 SIMA, Helser correspondence, 1 Jan. 1938–30 June 1939 (CH-2/A), Helser to Beacham, 2 Aug. 1938. 113 Playfair to Helser. 114 As I have shown elsewhere, nearly half the patients at the Kano leprosarium in one brief period were females. The gender dynamics of the mission merit a separate study, but it is important to note that the initial appearance of girls and women at the mission institutions surprised colonial officials and missionaries. See Shobana Shankar, ‘The social dimensions of Christian leprosy work among Muslims: American missionaries and young patients in colonial northern Nigeria, 1920–1940’, in David Hardiman (ed.), Healing Bodies, Saving Souls: Medical Missions in Asia and Africa (Amsterdam, 2006). 115 SIMA, Kano leprosarium 1936–45 (SR-18/A), Notes on the Leprosy Board meeting, 19 July 1939, 2. 116 Playfair to Helser. 117 Policy of Nigerian Government as regards mission activities.

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Christian medical and non-medical work. SIM–NA relations remained delicate, although cooperative leprosy work continued until the early 1970s, when Kano State took over Ya da Kunya and other states followed. Conclusion Mission medicine clearly did not belong only to the missionaries or the British authorities. Northern Nigerian indigenous rulers found their own strategies for empowerment in the leprosy scheme, though they may have participated in it for exactly the same purpose as the Christian missionaries—to convert people, not necessarily to Islam, but to their camp. Emirs and other Muslim officials clearly understood this colonial medical enterprise as political and social. They acted as representatives of the Islamic community while upholding secular medical progress, even supporting Christian missions, and protecting, in their view, their most vulnerable subjects, ill women and children. In medical work, NAs gained the moral authority as enlightened leaders over a diverse body of subjects—Muslim and Christian, African and European, urban and rural—alike. Regardless of their private beliefs and interests, in their public roles the emirs translated their authority into ‘native’ and European terms, but, importantly, not medical ones. As the missionary Dr. Miller had guessed, they concerned themselves little with the actual leprosy treatment. Writing about traditional medicine in Hausaland, Murray Last proposes that ‘not knowing’ or ‘not caring’ is a part of the diverse cultural landscape. The idea of medicine as ‘cultural camouflage … that enables one to survive’ in ‘the place where one happens to be’ may well have operated in the leprosarium.118 This new institution was certainly a heterogeneous place, and an odd one that was picked up and moved around—in many ways a revolving door. While not doubting the seriousness with which all involved took leprosy and the care of sufferers, one can sense that emirs saw the leprosarium as a place for exploring ‘hospital medicine’ and its potential for their families and friends. The leprosaria arrangement began a relationship between missions and Muslim NAs that lasted through the reform of Native Administration and came again into the spotlight on the eve of independence. Speaking before

118 Murray Last, ‘The importance of knowing about not knowing: observations from Hausaland’, in Steven Feierman and John Janzen (eds.), Social Basis of Healing in Africa (Berkeley, 1992), 398.

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SIM workers and government officials, Ahmadu Bello, the Northern Nigerian Premier, acknowledged missionaries’ contributions in Northern Nigeria: I am pleased to know … that relations between the Government and the Missions have generally been cordial, co-operative and friendly. We cannot deny that there have been differences from time to time, but I believe that such differences when they occur can generally be settled by tolerance and good will; the differences in our religions need be no bar to our continuing to work together for the good of our people.119 He promised that missions would continue to be welcome and emphasized two points. ‘Our Government is a Government of Northerners, both Moslems and Christians’, he said. Second, he stressed that young men must respect authority and advised that missionaries teach their ‘young men that differences in religion must not mean that they can do what they like and ignore those who are set in authority over them’.120 The rulers of Northern Nigeria clearly believed that religion and religious difference could be subordinated to medical welfare and to political authority. They themselves had submitted to the British, a ‘Christian’ administration under which they were able to exercise great power. Among ‘their people’, their power grew, not always in the mold of ‘precolonial aristocracies’,121 but as a model of moderation in modernization. 119 SIMA, Nigeria independence, etc. (Box 88), Nigeria—news releases, 1964–71, Speeches made at independence event, 22 Nov. 1958, 2. 120 Ibid. 121 Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, 1996), 203.

Mission and Social Change

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Christian Mind and Worldly Matters: Religion and Materiality in Nineteenth-Century Gold Coast Birgit Meyer All over Africa, the so-called Prosperity Gospel as it is being propagated by pentecostalist churches has attracted an increasing number of followers.1 When I conducted research on African appropriations of the missionary message in Ghana, I encountered a great number of pentecostalists, who, though not uncritical about the dangers imbued in money and commodities, were looking for ways to enhance their consumptive possibilities. Pentecostalist churches offer prayer sessions devoted to the improvement of people’s business and provide room for members to give testimony of how the Lord ‘blessed’ them with money. Riches being represented as blessings that God has showered upon his true servants, it is regarded as self-evident that church leaders drive Mercedes Benz cars, live in huge mansions and dress themselves in the most exquisite fashion. Several pentecostalist leaders assured me that they regarded poverty as a sign of sin and wondered whether poor people could be good Christians. In their view, good Christians would be blessed with money by God and, in turn, were to glorify Him through their lifestyle and outlook. A column written by the publisher of the monthly magazine The Living Testimony aptly summarizes the pentecostalist point of view: here the Western missionaries who brought the Gospel and who left Ghanaians with ‘the legacy of the moneyshy Christian’ are accused of having been ‘most hypocritical’ and ‘wicked’. For although they themselves received full payment for their occupation, they taught Ghanaian Christians to ‘be poor to be holy’; and this attitude was reflected in the sober life style and poor outlook of African pastors and evangelists (The Living Testimony 1(11):2).

Source: Meyer, B., “Christian Mind and Worldly Matters: Religion and Materiality in NineteenthCentury Gold Coast,” Journal of Material Religion 2.3 (1997): pp. 311–337. Copyright © 1997 by SAGE. Reprinted by Permission of SAGE Publications, Ltd. The original article holds three illustrations which are not included here. 1 For their useful and stimulating comments I would like to thank Gerd Baumann, Peter Pels, Patricia Spyer, Peter van Rooden, Milena Veenis, Jojada Verrips, and two anonymous reviewers of this journal.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/97890

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The Prosperity Gospel is met with great contempt by the leaders of mission churches, that is, churches resulting from the efforts of 19th-century Western missionaries. They warn that worldly matters such as the striving for riches would not befit a true Christian and explain the fact that many people leave the mission churches for pentecostalist churches by referring to their materialistic inclinations, which are taken as a sign of spiritual immaturity. Echoing the missionary point of view, they argue that Christians are to lead sober lives and not to lose themselves in this-worldly matters. Although wealth is not considered bad as such, one should not pray for it and should be wary not to find oneself on the broad path of worldly pleasures. The criticism raised with regard to the Prosperity Gospel, and, indeed, the very term, makes it seem as if pentecostalism would offer a completely new attitude towards material things and their consumption. Even pentecostalists themselves present their point of view not only as being diametrically opposed to that of the missionaries, but also assume that in colonial times converts simply adopted the missionary stance. Yet, it remains to be seen whether these converts actually were exponents of the sober, ascetic life style so aptly described by Weber (1984[1920]) as the key feature of Protestantism and whether pentecostalism’s stance is as new as it claims. For despite Protestantism’s emphasis on the Word, it is clear that 19th-century Protestant mission activities also focused on more mundane, material matters, such as the construction of Christian settlements with a church, school and new types of homes, or the clothing of Christians in new styles. While anthropologists studying the impact of missions in the non-Western world have laid much emphasis on the investigation of newly evolving Christian discourses, the material dimension of missions has received much less attention (but see Comaroff and Comaroff, in press; Keane, 1996; Pels, 1993). Still more neglected have been struggles between missions and converts about the proper relationship between mind and worldly matters, between the Word and things. It seems that thereby Protestant missions’ complicated stance towards material matters has eschewed closer examination. There definitely is need for a detailed investigation of Protestant mission’s actual and alleged attitudes towards materiality under the conditions of colonialism, and of tensions arising between missionaries and African converts about missionary materializations in general and consumption in particular. In this paper, I approach this topic by investigating the 19th-century encounter between missionaries of the German Pietist Norddeutsche Missionsgesellschaft (NMG) and the Ewe in what is now southeastern Ghana and southern

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Togo. Through this historical investigation2 it will become clear that ever since the spread of Christianity in Ghana, the material aspects of the mission have been a very important and, at the same time, highly problematic field. Examining the role missionary materializations played in conversion processes and investigating tensions between missionaries and converts about the proper relationship between ‘civilization’ and ‘salvation’, I show that so-called worldly matters mattered much more than Protestant missionary rhetorics were prepared to acknowledge. ‘Civilization’ and ‘salvation’ actually went hand in hand and missions played a crucial role not only in the ‘development’ of the colony but also in the making of modern consumers, who were, however, expected to maintain an uneasy attitude towards things. This ambivalence is still part and parcel of contemporary Christian discourse.

The Ewe’s Quest for ‘Civilization’

The encounter between the missionaries of the NMG and the Ewe,3 who inhabited the area between the river Volta to the west and the Mono to the east, started in 1847 with the arrival of the missionary Lorenz Wolf. By contrast to the neighbouring Asante, the Ewe did not form one united kingdom, but rather separate, autonomous states allying themselves with others whenever the political need arose. Each state consisted of several clans, which, in turn, each consisted of patrilineal and patrilocal families. Polygamous marriage was possible provided a husband was able to take care of his wives and children. Land

2 The historical documents considered are the Monatsblatt der Norddeutschen Missionsgesellschaft (MB), a German-written monthly periodical for the supporters of the mission; missionary ethnography produced for an academic audience, especially students of comparative religion: unpublished documents written for the mission board by missionaries and Ewe mission workers in either German, English or Ewe, which are kept in the NMG archives in Bremen; moreover, during my research among the Peki Ewe I received much information through oral history. In making use of these sources one has to take into account that they were produced for different audiences and were to serve different aims. Although the archival documents reflect the asymmetrical power relations in which the missionaries and the Ewe were involved, they need not be dismissed as mere distortions of pre-missionary culture and Ewe ideas and practices with regard to conversion. By reading them ‘from below’ and against the background of oral history, it is possible to get a glimpse of the Ewe point of view (cf. Meyer, 1995a: 102 ff.). 3 For the pre-colonial history of the Ewe see Amenumey (1986); Mamattah (1976).

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was the base of production and the Ewe made a living through the cultivation of staple crops, palm trees, vegetables and local cotton. Access to land being allocated to all male family members by the family head, wives would receive a piece of land for cultivation from their husbands. There was a clear division of labour both on the farms and in the house between the sexes. For the Ewe the unit of production, distribution and consumption was the extended family. When Wolf settled in Peki, the most powerful inland Ewe state, which was the centre of the kingdom of Krepe, he immediately asked the Peki king for a piece of land and employed some people to build him a house. His new home was constructed with the usual materials, but it differed in size and form from the customary Peki houses. Wolf supposed that the (in his view) ‘unhealthy’ African climate had to be compensated for by houses of European style. Together with his ‘houseboys’ and some workers Wolf started to lay out his fields and gardens, where he grew yams as well as plants and flowers unknown to the Peki. He made a path through the garden to the house and planted trees on both sides. He also raised pigs, sheep, goats and chickens. In other words, he created a classical south-German peasant farm (the so-called ‘economy’)—a piece of home in the ‘wilderness’ of Africa, thereby realizing the Pietist ideal of life. Though Wolf was not yet able to preach his message in Ewe, the mission post must have spoken for itself. Even before Wolf could reach the Peki with his words, the architecture of his house and the objects it contained proclaimed their message about the white way of life. Yet Wolf’s mission did not prove successful, at least not according to his own standards. The Ewe hoped that through the presence of the white missionary they would be able to become involved in the trade with Europeans that had been going on in the coastal area for three centuries.4 Since Wolf disappointed them in this respect, they showed little interest in converting to Christianity. Eventually the NMG abandoned the Peki mission post and gradually established new stations on the coast at Keta (1853) and Anyako (1857), and inland at Waya (1856) and Ho (1859), albeit with very limited success. The NMG started its work by taking care of so-called slave children, that is, children caught by slave traders, who were offering them for sale in the coastal markets where illegal slave trade went on well into the 1860s. The NMG bought these children ‘free’ with the money of German supporters (Ustorf, 1986a). Many Ewe regarded these children as slaves of the mission and refused to send their own 4 This was an expectation widespread among Gold Coast chiefs (see Odamtten, 1978: 21–2). Being subject to the neighbouring Akwamus, the Peki had been involved in the slave trade. After its abolition they were looking for new, ‘legitimate’ forms of trade.

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children to the mission school or to convert themselves. The situation deteriorated further when, as a result of the war that the powerful Asante waged against the kingdom of Krepe, all mission posts were (partly) destroyed. Only after Krepe had defeated the enemy with the assistance of the British, and the European influence over the Ewe territory became stronger, did the inland Ewe show more interest in the mission, especially in its schools. Many refugees who had fled the Asante returned home to reconstruct their destroyed towns and now, possibly because the war had disrupted previous routines, they were in for change. For that reason the missionaries praised the war as a blessing (MB, 1878: 10), which made the Ewe change their minds and develop an interest in the missionary message. For instance, in 1878 the Peki teacher Joseph Bansa, a young man from Peki Blengo who had attended an NMG mission school on the coast, reported that he had opened a small school with four pupils. Next to books and other equipment he asked for free clothes for the pupils and one shilling per month to give to each child’s parents. The editor of the mission magazine exclaimed jubilantly: ‘… a negro, who by himself develops the idea to run a school! That is a sign of the times!’ (MB 1878: 11). Moreover, Bansa preached every Sunday and visited the nearby villages to proclaim the Gospel to the ‘heathens’. In a letter written in English to the board he wrote: … the King Kwadzo Dei [the Peki king], chiefs, and the natives wanting one minister here, many of them wish to be baptize[d], always they are troubling me about the minister’s affairs. Now their eyes are opened, as they were driven by the Ashantees away from their places to Battlok and Akropong and stopped there some years, they saw how that places are going on [developing]; therefore some of them now are civilized more than Ho people I may say; like their sons will go [they like their sons to go] to school. (NMG-archives at Staatsarchiv Bremen, Stab 7, 1025–26/3, letter of Joseph Bansa, 18.1.1878) Though this particular school did not last, there was an enduring desire for education. For three years afterwards the Peki king again asked a visiting missionary to establish a school. The missionary assumed that this wish was caused by the busy traffic with Accra and the influence of Ho and the British Gold Coast.5 5 In these places people already understood the profitability of education. In 1877 a missionary reported: ‘On the coast the European influences, the factories of the traders have taught the people that education brings money’ (MB, 1877: 188).

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Moreover, the wish for a school must be seen against the background of the mission’s practice of providing its pupils with free clothes and even a small allowance. Western education, new clothes and money clearly implied each other and constituted a newly evolving nexus of ‘civilization’. The desire for schools was embedded in a general openness for change. For the missionary noticed further ‘signs of invading civilization’ (Zeichen eindringender Kultur), such as the broadening of roads and the spread of chairs (MB, 1881: 26).6 It is telling that the missionary describes people’s adoption of Western styles by using a military metaphor of conquest, thereby neglecting any constructive activity on the part of the Africans. This being typical for missionary reports of that period, historical documents about how Ewe thought about and dealt with Western styles and things prior to their conversion are virtually absent. For that reason it is difficult to find out what exactly ‘civilization’ meant to them and what attracted them to change. In any case, Bansa’s letter suggests that people associated school and baptism with the ‘civilizatory’ achievements that went with colonization. It was commonly known that the skills taught in the mission schools and stations, as well as a Christian name to mark one’s ‘civilized’ state, were a prerequisite for getting jobs in European firms or the colonial administration. We may therefore conclude that many Ewe saw the mission as a vehicle through which to achieve the things that—once their ‘eyes were opened’—they had seen in the coastal region where the presence of European traders, officers and missionaries had already led to incalculable materializations. Thus, the attraction of the mission for the Ewe initially lay in their wish for changing their way of life by adopting the material aspects of European ‘civilization’. The term ‘civilization’, which was employed by all the parties engaged in the colonial endeavour, covers a complex semantic domain containing different meanings. In Ewe, ‘civilization’ is translated with the expression ‘open eyes’ (ṉku v̱ u), which probably existed already prior to contacts with Europeans. The use of the term in Bansa’s letter suggests a connection between the state of ‘opened eyes’ and the experience of the hitherto unfamiliar. To the Ewe 6 I am aware that by translating Kultur as ‘civilization’ part of the specific meaning of the German term is lost. Elias has pointed out that 19th-century German intellectuals associated Kultur with the development of inward qualities such as intellectual sophistication achieved through education [Bildung], and Zivilisation with the refinement of outward behaviour (1976: 1–42). However, it seems that the Pietists did not differentiate between Kultur and Zivilisation and regarded both as outward, behavioural matters. For them, only true Christian faith could bring about inward changes.

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‘civilization’ meant the adoption of new things seen elsewhere and found worthwhile to supplement, or even replace, the familiar.7 However, in talking about ‘civilization’ or ṉku v̱ u the Ewe took up the central term of colonial discourse. In this discourse the term ‘civilization’ was used in a general way to submit the ‘primitive’ culture of the Africans to Western ‘civilization’ and to legitimize the domination of the former by the latter. In their quest for the possession of Western things, the Ewe not only appropriated Western products to suit their own needs with ‘open eyes’, but they also opened themselves up to the civilizing offensive of Western agents who sought the domination of the colonized. Thereby, the Ewe made their first step in the ‘long conversation’ (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1991) with Western agents. As we shall see, it was a conversation entailing a continuous dialectical process of appropriation and alienation in the course of which Ewe Christians were neither totally free in their appropriation of Western products, nor fully dominated by missionaries.

Christian Villages on the Hilltop

As a consequence of the Ewe’s increased interest in schools, the NMG rebuilt and expanded its posts. Next to the four stations already mentioned, after 1890 more posts were opened in what became German Togo.8 Moreover, the main posts became the centres of districts with new sub-stations headed by native teachers in all villages asking for education. In this way, the mission developed a network of posts all over the Ewe area and contributed to the emergence of an infrastructure of roads. Ewe country, initially a missionary construct based on the wish to unite the various scattered Ewe ‘tribes’ into one Christian people (Volk) (see Meyer, 1995c), thus materialized as a geographical unit.

7 In the Ewe–German dictionary, Westermann, who based his linguistic observations on many years of work with old Ewe speakers, translated the expression as: ‘his eye is open, he is openminded, intelligent, cute, cultivated, civilized’ (1905: 400). The first two meanings given after the literal translation designate an open, inquisitive attitude. I think that this attitude was associated with the term ‘civilization’, because Ewe people considered it a sign of ‘open eyes’ to open oneself up to the new things known as ‘civilization’ by European agents. It would be worthwhile to devote more attention to African people’s understanding of and ideas about ‘civilization’ (until now such studies are scarce, but see Brown (1982)). 8 Though Togo became a German colony in 1884, the border between Togo and British Gold Coast was only defined in 1890.

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A mission post can be regarded as a ‘contact zone’ where ongoing relationships between Africans and Europeans are established that involve ‘conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict’ (Pratt, 1992: 6). In what follows I shall situate the encounter between the missionaries and the Ewe in the power constellation of the contact zone and examine conflicts arising from the intricate dialectics of the mission’s striving to uplift the Ewe to a higher level of ‘civilization’ through evangelization, and the Ewe’s longing for ‘civilization’ as a way to profit from the presence of Western agents. A mission post, which consisted of the missionaries’ home, a school and a chapel if it concerned a main station headed by a European and of a school and teacher’s house if it concerned a sub-station, was located preferably uphill and in the bush (gbeme) at some distance from the ‘heathens’. In many cases, the place allocated to the mission by local chiefs had previously been sacred and had, for instance, served as a special burial place for people who had lost their lives in a bloody accident (Greene, n.d.).9 According to general understanding, such a place was unsuited for cultivation or settlement. By building on sacred land in the bush, the mission could demonstrate its contempt for these local conceptions and at the same time claim the superiority of its power. Yet, this superiority was not only constructed through this politics of space, but also through a politics of time that represented the mission post as a harbinger of ‘civilization’ in the midst of ‘wilderness’. The missionaries requested converts to settle at the station and in this way separate Christian villages evolved. They were called Kpodzi, ‘on the hilltop’, that is, spatially and symbolically ahead of the rest.10 In this way, Christians could claim to lead their lives under the banner of ‘progress’ and characterize non-Christians as staying behind, thereby denying them, to use an expression employed by Fabian (1983), coevalness. The price to be paid for ‘civilization’ was the submission under the NMG’s congregational order. On the one hand, this order was instrumental in the mission’s attempts to discipline its converts; on the other, it reflects the standards of ‘civilization’ (and thus separation and alienation from the hitherto familiar) that Christians themselves aimed to achieve. All inhabitants of Kpodzi had to be baptized and had to submit themselves to the congregational order, which requested that Christians would draw a strict boundary between themselves and the ‘heathen’ village (for a full description of this order see Meyer, 1995a:

9 10

In Peki Wudome, too, the mission school was built on such a place. This was a common missionary practice all over Ghana (see also Mobley, 1970: 73 ff.).

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84 ff.). They were to abstain from any religious ceremony performed by their non-Christian relatives—and since religion was entangled with all domains of life this request amounted to a far-reaching separation from their family in the ‘heathen’ village—and were to live up to what the mission defined as a Christian way of life. They lived in new types of houses, wore different clothes, used Western medicines,11 sang to European tunes, held different feast-days, and instead of the traditional taboo days, the ‘rest’ days of the trō̱wo, they observed only the Christian Sunday. For the Christians, polygamous marriages were forbidden and preferably they were to intermarry. In order to create Christian families, the mission stimulated their students’ marriage and taught them about Christian marriage and family way of life. The mission stimulated men much more than women to take up paid labour. Young women could only work as ‘housegirls’ at the mission posts or as childcare attendants in the kindergarten, and after marriage they were expected to devote themselves fully to their families. The materiality of Kpodzi was impressive and entirely different from the usual standards. The Christian villages were permanent construction sites that attracted large numbers of people.12 For local men, women and children these projects provided the opportunity to earn cash by collecting construction materials such as earth, stones, planks and water or by grinding stones and moulding earth. Next to these unskilled workers, who were either employed on a weekly basis or traded their products for a negotiated price, the mission also employed and trained craftsmen such as brick-makers, stonemasons, masons and woodworkers (including sawyers, cutters and carpenters). Many young men from all over the area were attracted by the possibility of learning a profession and among this category the mission could eventually recruit its first adult converts. These crafts were so closely associated with Christianity that even those who performed them and did not get baptized no longer considered themselves ‘heathens’:

11

Until the end of the 19th century, when Western tropical medicine took a big step forward through the discovery of quinine as prophylaxis, the missionaries had unscientific medical ideas. They stuck to ‘humoralpathology’, which explained sickness as the result of an unbalanced relationship between bodily fluids and demanded therapies such as bloodletting and purging (Fischer, 1991). Their medical ideas were thus not superior to those of the Ewe, and less well adapted to tropical circumstances. 12 For an extensive account of the history of building and the construction of the Amedzofe-station see MB 1892: 2 ff.

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However, those who come now are Christians, or do at least regard themselves as such, for everybody who frequently visits the missionaries no longer wants to be a heathen. Thus, in their view a student or craftsman, although not baptized, is not a heathen, but exactly a student, a craftsman. (MB, 1894: 19) This adoption of the category ‘heathen’ as an opposition to Christian industriousness shows the extent to which many Ewe strove to change. Although they differed from the mission in that they regarded work, rather than baptism, as an appropriate means to achieve Christian identity, they certainly adopted the mission’s representation of Ewe society as ‘backward’ and in need of being ‘uplifted’. Building appearing as an inalienable part of Christianity, it is not surprising that craftsmen became key symbols of Christian identity. These craftsmen were the ones who transformed through their skilled work the wilderness of the bush into the ‘civilized’ orderliness of Christianity. They were the embodiment of progress. This major material operation was accompanied by a rhetoric of antimaterialism that opposed the ‘worship of idols’ and entailed a utilitarian stance towards nature. The mission’s stance towards local deities, who were located in the bush, comes to the fore clearly in an account in the MB (1892: 3), which reports that during the construction of the Amedzofe station foreign workers once brought to the construction site a big stone that they had found in the bush. However, since this stone, which was to be split up ‘to be desecrated to a wall stone’ was the dwelling place of a local deity, the local people intervened and obliged the mission to return the stone and pay some money in order to pacify the god. Representing Christianity as an anti-materialistic religion, the missionaries regarded such sacred objects as idols or fetishes, through whose worship the Ewe were actually serving the Devil.13 Basing themselves on the Second Commandment the missionaries preached against such practices and propagated the destruction of sacred objects, preferably in fire. Having deprived natural objects of all traces of sacrality, they were making use of them in a hitherto unknown and unrestrained way. Through the work of craftsmen, ideally, idols in the form of stones were to be turned into useful objects. These men were to desacralize the bush and thereby realize Christian ‘civilization’.14

13 14

On the diabolization of Ewe religion see Meyer 1992, 1995a, 1995b. This attitude towards the forces of nature was a general feature of missionary Christianity, which also came to the fore in the neglect of taboos, such as not to work in the ground on

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When the mission founded posts, it did not spend much energy on the construction of churches and there was no particular church architecture. This changed only in the beginning of the 20th century, when the mission was firmly established and some large congregations were able to build and finance chapels. In principle, the mission considered schools far more important than churches and in most of the sub-stations church services were held in the school building. They were conducted by native teachers, another typically Christian professional category, who also played a major role in communicating the Gospel to non-Christians and who were expected to provide true models of a Christian way of life. The emphasis on schools echoes the NMG’s evangelizing strategy, which was based on the idea that (religious) education in the Ewe’s mother tongue was the key to conversion. Indeed, Christians came to be called sukuviwo, school children, irrespective of their actual capability to read and write. The mission house, of course, was the paradigm of Christian architecture. It was a two-storey building with a veranda all round and at least four big rooms on each floor and a separate kitchen in the compound. At first, the walls were made from earth, as was usually the case; what was new was that they were plastered and had wooden doors and windows. As construction skills developed because the mission was able to send out missionaries with a special training, stones and bricks were used for the construction of walls, and roofs were no more covered with grass, but with tiles and, later on, iron sheets. The furniture in these houses was Western and did not differ much from what the missionaries were accustomed to at home. The Christian village was usually built around the mission post, which served as a model for the construction of the new Christian home, virtually the first duty of any Christian man. While some prosperous Christians also built a second floor, others at least plastered their walls and got doors, windows and locally produced chairs and tables. These homes differed from traditional architecture not only in terms of the material used, but also in that they were focused on the nuclear family. This implied that husband and wife would share table and bed permanently, rather than living in separate houses on one large compound and observing menstruation taboos as had previously been the case. The emphasis on the nuclear family at the expense of extended family

particular days, not to cut certain trees, not to enter running water during menstruation (see Meyer, 1995a: 144–5).

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ties was also reflected in new inheritance regulations. Rather than sharing a deceased person’s belongings among his or her extended family, among the Christians the spouse and children were the rightful heirs. Though it is difficult to determine Ewe converts’ position in society before their move to Kpodzi, we do know that this move implied a radical change in their status. These Christians became members of a new (contra-)elite whose education and life style predestined them to become the avant-garde in the changing traditional society. Moreover, by earning money through new professions they were more independent of the patrilineal family and its land, which had hitherto been the means of production. Nevertheless, farming remained important for subsistence and for the production of cash crops and so it was difficult for Christians to dissociate themselves completely from their lineages. Trade stores run by Western Christian firms, which bought raw materials such as cotton, rubber and, from the 20th century onwards, cocoa and coffee from local producers and offered Western objects (such as iron-made tools, textiles, chinaware, biscuits, but, in contrast to non-Pietist traders, no alcohol) were also part of at least the larger Christian villages. Unlike other Protestant mission societies such as the Basler Mission, which was active among the neighbouring Asante, the NMG did not run stores on its own.15 However, both at home and in the mission field it co-operated closely with the trading company of the Bremen Pietist merchant Vietor.16 The following quotations show that for both parties the spread of the Gospel and world trade clearly belonged together: The merchant, by wishing to earn for himself, sees to the exchange of the goods of the earth. This is his profession in the world economy and he is to accomplish it. God wishes that humanity exchanges its goods. (Missionsinspektor Franz Michael Zahn quoted by Tell and Heinrich, 1986: 272; original in German, my translation) Thus, to be working for both the spread of the Lord’s realm and a fair trade is the old custom of Bremen merchants. (Trader and NMG Committee Member C. R. Vietor. MB, 1857: 339)

15 For an analysis of the relationship between trade and mission in the case of the Basler Mission see Rennstich (1981). 16 The history of this cooperation has been analyzed in detail in a volume edited by Ustorf (1986b), and in a paper by Buhler (1979).

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The NMG and Vietor’s company often settled at the same places and at least for the local population their association was evident, despite the usual disclaimers of NMG missionaries, who desperately tried to keep Christianity at a distance from worldly matters such as stores, albeit in speech. While the mission stimulated the production of cash crops among its converts, the Vietor company bought their harvest from them. The NMG and the company were both convinced that the creation of a working class of plantation workers had to be avoided because of the social upheaval this would entail—also at home they felt threatened by workers’ political claims—and stimulated the ‘free labour of free peasants’ (Weißflog, 1986). These peasants, of course, became highly dependent on the world market both as sellers of raw materials and buyers of foodstuffs. For through the cultivation of cash crops, subsistence production, and thereby the co-operation of husbands and wives in food production, became less important; to the dismay of the mission, many wealthy Ewe would spend their money on buying (imported) food on the market. It is telling that, although the NMG promoted paid labour through its educational system, it did not favour converts’ adoption of trade as a profession (though against the wish of the mission, many married women engaged in trade). Ewe mission workers were not allowed to supplement their little income through trading activities at all. The only thing they were expected to do next to their job was to grow their own food. Trade was to remain a European monopoly and Africans were merely to sell raw materials to, and buy commodities from, Western trading companies. This promotion of work for money and people’s subsequent incorporation into world trade, be it as producers of raw materials or as consumers of Western commodities, was part and parcel of the propagation of a new Christian life style. Christianity not only had an impact on the landscape and the outlook of villages, but also on the appearance of the human body, the Christian microcosm as it were. Clothes were an inalienable marker of the new religion. As mentioned earlier, in the first years the mission provided children with free clothes (short trousers and a shirt) in order to attract pupils, thereby representing European dress as an educated person’s new skin. Also the congregational order required that converts dressed ‘decently’. While women, who had hitherto dressed in a loincloth wrapped around their hips and a cover-cloth for the shoulders that was only worn if it was cold, were to cover their breasts with a blouse and their children were not to go ‘sparsely dressed’, men were expected to either cover themselves by the traditional cover-cloth, or, preferably, to wear a Western-style suit. At least teachers were expected to dress in this manner and indeed, black coat and tie became the trade-mark of this professional group. Teachers regarded themselves as the avant-garde within the Christian

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group and in many places they organized themselves in societies devoted to the ‘development’ and ‘improvement’ of social life. The missionaries’ wives trained young women to sew clothes for themselves and their children from imported Western materials. I did not find indications as to how the male attire was produced, but I suspect that it was made in Europe and then sold in stores. In this way the mission contributed to undermining the traditional co-operation of husbands and wives in the production of clothes. It had been the exclusive task of the women to spin thread and a man had to pay his wife for spinning the cotton he had grown for his own clothes. In turn, it had been the exclusive task of the men to weave strings of cloth (about 10 cm broad) and sew them together to form a large piece of cloth; the repair of torn clothes also depended on them. Yet in order to put on adequate clothes, people now depended on European imports, wax prints especially designed for Africa in the case of women, and suits, shirts and ties in the case of men.17 While formerly a person’s clothes were a gift representing his or her involvement in a social relationship with spouse or parent, now clothes were commodities bought with individually earned money. European clothes became the symbol of the new time, which stood for the alliance of Christianity and ‘civilization’. Christian identity was not only defined by the adoption of a new material culture, but also by a new concept of selfhood. The Ewe defined themselves in terms of lineage membership and attributed personal character to a spiritual being (aklama) that was held to be embodied in a person and to determine the course of his or her life. Aklama was symbolized by a statue that was to receive sacrifices as a sign of gratefulness, or, if need arose, as a sign of pacification from the person who embodied it (Spieth, 1906: 510–12). This spiritual permeability of the person also came to the fore in the notion that one might be caught by a local god and be possessed by it. The mission condemned the fact that the Ewe allowed themselves to be dominated by spiritual entities, or even to be possessed by local gods, and propagated the notion of the modern subject, which was defined by proprietorship of the self and a bounded identity. In line with its anti-materialistic rhetoric, the mission taught people not to confound the boundary between people and things and not to allow the

17 This process had been underway for some time. Already, earlier on, men had had the opportunity to become independent of their women’s spinning work because European thread was offered in the trade stores.

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latter to possess the former. Christians were supposed to have full control over themselves and the material world.18 Thus, through the influence of the mission, which both materially and ideologically promoted the Christian family as the appropriate place for individual growth, the nuclear family became for Christians the main unit of production, distribution and consumption. Especially in the first decades of mission Work, when colonial rule was not yet firmly established, the NMG was the sole company that would employ Ewe as unskilled labourers or trained craftsmen. Though the mission stimulated agriculture and never aspired to create a working class, it offered young men especially a certain amount of economic and spiritual independence from their extended families. Since masons, woodworkers and teachers were required at many places, men with these professions also became increasingly mobile; they could migrate to wherever it was commercially attractive. In order to avoid the danger of adultery, they were to be accompanied by their spouses, who were expected to behave as devoted housewives. In this way the mission stimulated the emergence of a new social class that was economically and socially much less dependent on kinship ties with the extended family than had hitherto been the case19 and which was able to spend a considerable amount of money for the purchase of Western goods. Christianity certainly cannot be held responsible for the fact that people wanted to be wealthy. The Ewe’s openness to being linked to the world market both as producers and consumers suggests that they were not locked up in a ‘moral economy’ incompatible with the capitalist market economy. Rather, they strove to profit from the latter as much as possible and there were no moral qualms concerning this involvement as such, but only with regard to the 18 Supposed to—for involvement in the market economy, of course, brought new fetishes in the form of commodities (cf. Taussig, 1980). The Mami Wata cults and imagery, which became increasingly popular all along the West African Coast in the course of this century, addresses this new fetishism. According to this popular imagination, beautiful European and Indian women dwelling at the bottom of the ocean lure African men into their arms and make them rich in exchange for their sexual fertility (Drewal, 1988; Wendl, 1991). Currently this imagery is referred to frequently in pentecosalist churches whose leaders offer ritual means to de-fetishize Western commodities, thereby making sure that members possess the things they buy, rather than being possessed by them (cf. Meyer, in press). 19 On the other hand, many converts found it difficult to become fully separated from their extended families, with which they remained linked at least by the collective ownership of land. Many cases of so-called ‘backsliding’ occurred in which Christians sought help from their ancestors or family gods and returned to live in the midst of their families (Meyer, 1996).

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distribution of wealth (cf. Parry and Bloch, 1989). Prayers for health and wealth formed an important part of Ewe religion and the wish to prosper and to possess Western trade goods instigated Ewe in the 19th century to participate in new religious cults.20 The decisive difference between these cults (and, for that matter, cargo cults in Melanesia) and Christianity lay in their different attitude towards the distribution of riches. The mission set new directives for the distribution of income. The husband was expected to maintain his children and his wife, who should confine herself to housework and childcare rather than engaging in trade as her non-Christian fellows would do, and to contribute some money to the congregation. They were not required to share their income with members of their non-Christian extended family. In this way, Christians were free from the duty to share their wealth with less fortunate family members; witness the following complaint of a native teacher about his congregation: ‘Some people seem to hide among the Christians in order to find the opportunity to spend their money undisturbed’ ((Stab, 7,1025–2/27), Halbjahresbericht von Peter Alomenu, Dzake 21.7.1915). Given rich people’s fear of being bewitched by envious relatives with whom they failed to share in non-Christian society (see e.g. Spieth, 1906: 300), it seems as if in Kpodzi the wealthy—and this is what most Christians in the early days actually were, at least if compared to non-Christians—felt protected against witchcraft attacks inflicted upon them by less fortunate, envious relatives. Here they could spend their money on all those things that they considered indispensable for a ‘civilized’, and for that matter Christian, way of life. Christianity’s new individualist ethics liberated Christians from existing obligations to share their riches and from the fear of being bewitched if they failed to do so. Life in Kpodzi therefore was attractive to all those who wanted to accumulate and spend more money for themselves than was possible in the context of the non-Christian village. Yet, although the NMG endorsed the Ewe’s involvement with the international market economy and their striving for ‘civilization’, it had an uneasy attitude towards these material matters. This attitude appears most pointedly in 20 This certainly applies to the Dente cult, a cult which originated in the north and spread among the Ewe in the 1880s. Maier (1983) has described how the Dente priest at Kete-Krachi, where Dente originated, was able to gain political control over Kete-Krachi at the expense of the Asante, the local chiefs, and even the British and Germans. The translation of religious power into political authority enabled the priest to profit from the market, which was an important center of commerce on the trade route connecting the coast with Salaga. His power was only broken by the German and British colonial powers in the 1890s. It would be worthwhile to study the spread of the Dente cult beyond its original area. I think this spread has to be understood against the background of the Dente priest’s position. It was an attempt to gain political power and prosperity through traditional, not Christian, religion.

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its complicated stance towards consumption, that is, towards the question as to how Ewe converts should spend the money gained through their engagement in paid labour. The tensions arising from this stance will occupy the remainder of this article.

Tensions about ‘Worldly Matters’ in Africa

After Africa had been distributed among the European imperialist powers at the Berlin conference of 1884–5, the mission employed the term Kultur (civilization’)21 more than had hitherto been the case because it became involved in dialogue with the British and German colonial authorities, between whom the Ewe area was divided. Though the mission’s relationship with both colonial administrations was not free from tensions, the missionaries themselves proudly advertised their important contribution to the colonial project of bringing ‘civilization’ to the Ewe.22 In an article entitled ‘Einige Kulturfortschritte’ the editor of the MB, the mission inspector F. M. Zahn, explained that, although it was not the proper task of the mission to bring ‘civilization’, its presence among less developed peoples would certainly entail cultural progress: By leading the people to the one who made heaven and earth, Jesus’ messengers give them a new impulse to value what God created, to care for it, to free the field from the thorns and thistles and from many other things in patient and faithful work so that it can yield its fruits. Even if the missionary does not say anything about civilization, he is a carrier of civilization [Kulturträger]. It would be very interesting if somebody could narrate how everything changes where a missionary arrives. Who moves on now does not realize the change so much. But if Wolf could 21 I have the impression that the missionaries started to talk more about Kultur than Zivilisation in the context of the so-called Kulturkampf against German Catholicism, in which they felt they had to play a major role as devout Protestants (see MB, 1886: 8). 22 When Togo became a German colony in 1884, the NMG, which originally did not present itself as a national mission society, accommodated itself to the new political and economic circumstances and co-operated with the government officials as best it could. In 1912, the mission inspector Schlunk summarized the benefits of the mission to the colonial administration and vice versa. Whereas the NMG had provided pioneer services by studying the Ewe language, bringing about the Ewe’s confidence in white people, training them in modern professions and teaching them to respect the government, the colonial administration had ‘opened up’ the interior and developed remedies against tropical diseases (Tell and Heinrich, 1986: 280 ff.).

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visit Peki now and tell us what changed since 1847, we would be surprised. Yet any change, any progress in civilization is a sign that there is a transformation going on which turns a heathen people into a Christian. (MB, 1886: 9; original in German, my translation) In this vein, the missionary Jacob Spieth emphasized the achievements of the mission: ‘The civilization which was brought by the mission and which also enters the country from other sides is best maintained in the Christian congregations’ (1903: 15). He praised the missionaries for teaching the Ewe crafts and the cultivation of cotton, cocoa, coffee and rubber. This contributed not only to the development of the colony, but also to the evolution of new individual needs. Through their work, the Christians had sufficient means to satisfy their want for European goods, thereby supporting colonial trade (ibid.: 16). Similarly, the Pietist trader Vietor (1912) praised the achievement of the mission; he emphasized that the mission had enhanced the economic capacity of African farmers by stimulating individual entrepreneurs. And he boasted: Furthermore the mission provides the most important services to the colonies. It turns lazy polygamists living from the work of their wives into industrious farmers and workers. It increases people’s needs and educates them according to the word of the Scriptures ‘Submit yourselves to the government’ to loyal citizens. (Vietor quoted in Weißflog, 1986: 276; original in German, my translation)23 Though they were proud of their contribution to ‘civilization’, the missionaries considered material achievements to be ‘outward’, ‘worldly’ things whose possession had to be paralleled by a proper inner individual development. This was a stance that they propagated both at the home base in Württemberg and in Africa. Facing the tremendous changes in the fields of production and consumption that occurred in the NMG’s home base,24 the missionaries clearly propagated the Weberian ‘Protestant ethic’ against the emerging new 23 For a critical evaluation of Vietor’s ideas, see Weißflog, 1986. 24 In Germany in the second half of the 19th century industrialization and urbanization, which brought about new patterns of (mass) production and (mass) consumption, gradually got under way. This entailed not only an increasing number of commodities becoming available to an increasing number of people, but also consumption itself becoming important as a meaningful activity. Whereas social scientists have shown considerable interest in changes in the sphere of production, the study of consumption has only recently been placed on the agenda by sociologists and anthropologists (e.g. Appadurai, 1986; Campbell, 1987; Carrier, 1995; Miller, 1987, 1994, 1995).

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consumptive possibilities that Campbell (1987) has described as the rise of the ‘spirit of modern consumerism’, that is, the modern person’s entanglement in a continuously frustrated hedonistic striving to realize himself or herself through consumption.25 Pietists regarded the striving for pleasures through consumption as a dangerous temptation that might lure Christians onto the ‘broad path’ of worldly pleasures, which would eventually end up in hell fire; good Christians were to follow the ‘narrow path’ of the cross and lead sober lives in order to reach the heavenly Jerusalem.26 This ascetic attitude is expressed by the following quote from an opening article published in the NMG journal: In the fourth demand [Give us our daily bread] one should be careful not to go beyond the daily, that is, beyond what is absolutely necessary. Hence the Lord’s addition ‘daily’. In the striving for heavenly goods it is ‘The more the better! Never enough!’ But in the striving for the worldly the motto is: ‘If we have food and clothes let us be content.’ Oh, how bitterly will it avenge itself especially in the case of Christians, if they want to, and do gain more worldly happiness and temporary property than they would strictly need to perform the tasks which they received as children of God in their lives. How much does the collection of treasures in the widest sense burden, hinder and grieve the Christian on earth! No, we should only be after the daily bread, only after what is strictly necessary for our life task. And the one who receives, should be thankful and 25 Campbell argues that modern consumption is part of a ‘complex pattern of hedonistic behaviour, the majority of which occurs in the imagination of the consumer’ (1987: 89). Modern consumers expect to realize dream images of themselves, which are generated by gazing at commodities, through consumption; they continuously long for pleasure. Never achieving permanent satisfaction, they experience an ‘inexhaustability of wants’ and are in a ‘permanent desiring mode’ (p. 95) in which they open themselves up to always consume new things. Campbell traces the emergence of this ‘spirit of modern consumerism’ back to the romanticist focus on self-development and selfhood (though, ironically, romanticism denied the importance of consumption), which was, in turn, fed by an optimist version of Calvinism with its emotionalism and cult of benevolence and melancholy. In his view, this ‘romantic ethic’, which gave rise to the ‘spirit of modern consumerism’, is the flip side of the well-known ‘Protestant ethic’ with its focus on rationality and instrumentality, and its suspension of pleasure, which brought forth the ‘spirit of capitalism’ so well described by Weber (1984[1920]). Campbell argues that the former has contributed as much to the industrial revolution and the emergence of middle-class culture as the latter, and that both traditions of thought exist side by side. 26 Elsewhere I have examined the image of ‘The broad and the narrow path’ and the missionaries’ world-view in detail (Meyer, 1995a: ch. 2).

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content and praise his God with word and deed. But the one who is granted more, should remain humble and discover in the greater gifts also greater tasks, and should be economical and beneficent. Again, the one who receives less happiness in his earthly life than he thinks he would need, should first look at himself penitently and examine himself; then he should watch out for envy and resentment and be content with God’s grace in Christ! (MB, 1900: 52; original in German, my translation) The mission clearly propagated a sober utilitarian stance of inner-worldly ascesis: irrespective of one’s wealth one should just seek to fulfil one’s daily needs—a practice that was represented as natural and therefore taken for granted—and devote oneself to one’s God-given task. Though the maintenance of the thin line dividing natural needs and worldly desires may have been a feasible option for the south-German Pietists that may have resulted in a feeling of victory because they resisted buying the latest fashion, things were more complicated in the African context, where the ‘natural’ need for certain European commodities did not yet exist. The missionaries’ accounts abound with complaints about the inner state of the Ewe Christians, who had eagerly taken up the material aspects of the mission but failed to supplement this with the Pietist world-view that required that the material advantages offered by the mission should be subordinated to a person’s inner development. Clothes, being a matter of a person’s ‘outward appearance’, became a frequent matter of tension between the mission and Ewe converts. For instance, the missionary D. Bavendamm, a man who supervised various NMG construction sites, reported with much satisfaction that the mission had stimulated the Ewe to work, thereby subordinating themselves to the harsh regime of Europeans (MB, 1894: 19). However, he was much less pleased about how people spent the fruits of their work: Their ideal is and this is what they work for: Beautiful clothes and good food, or to speak with Augustine: ‘Pleasure, worldly pleasure is their shibboleth, but instead of bread they receive stone,’ because they do not look for the bread. Often, when I leave church service on Sunday I go to them and try to talk to them. Then often in the midst of a spiritual talk somebody may ask: Master, how much is your hat, your dress-coat, your shoes? Or in a free hour they ask me to look at my photograph album. I allow it. They have submitted all pages to a precise examination and correctly found out the gentleman who wears the best collar and the best tie and now they come with this picture: Master, order us such a collar, such a tie for Christmas.

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And he continued: Beautiful clothes the aim of their wishes? And should we condemn it, should we not understand it? Where Christianity arrives the peoples become more demure and dress themselves more demurely. In the old Roman Empire this meant that they would dress more simply than before; here, in a country that is bereft of all civilization, it means to wear less simple, that is, better clothes than before. And I think we should only be happy, when our Christians no more want to be seen with the fig-leaf of paradise. (MB, 1894: 19; original in German, my translation) Nevertheless, for the missionary it was clear that most Ewe Christians still had a ‘highly materialistic orientation’ (hochgradiger irdischer Sinn), and this, as the Bible taught, was a typical trait of the ‘heathens’ in general. The missionary himself, however, hoped, that Ewe converts would soon develop metaphorical hunger for the word of God, and ended his account with the rhetorical question: ‘Yet the One who gave the people a heart to work, should he not also be able to plant in them a divine sense?’ (MB, 1894). It is by no means exceptional that in this account clothes formed the matter of tension. The individual body was regarded as the location par excellence that could reveal to what extent converts had reached the mission’s ideal of conversion, or to put it more neutrally, how they had appropriated Christianity. This account brings to the fore the dilemma in which the mission was caught: it tried to transform the Ewe into ‘civilized’ Christians by involving them in paid labour relations and by requiring them to live up to the standards of Kpodzi (and this certainly entailed a new type of clothing), but, though it was successful in this respect, it lacked the means to control their inner being and their desires. The mission was desperate that for Ewe Christians work merely seemed to be a road towards pleasure, rather than a virtue in itself and that for them consumption satisfied and re-created desires, rather than fulfilling naturalized basic needs. That the Ewe did not adopt the mission’s sober stance towards consumption is, of course, not surprising. What were ordinary objects of use meant to fulfil basic needs to the missionaries, to the Ewe were new (and often luxury) goods whose possession was closely related to new, modern notions of personhood and which became the targets of new desires.27 This is 27

The church order required Christians to lead sober lives and not to squander things nor to keep them avariciously. Yet the complaints show that this requirement was difficult to meet for Ewe Christians.

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expressed clearly in the request to look at the missionary’s personal collection of photographs. Through this gaze the photograph album is virtually transformed into a mail-order catalogue that entices its onlookers to dream about themselves as dressed in these fine clothes. The images of the missionaries and their friends with their beautiful hats, ties, shoes and collars functioned as advertisements of Western clothes and modern identity. Concomitantly, the church service itself probably also offered a sort of fashion parade. I would like to suggest that here, in the gaze at these images, one may detect a trace of the ‘spirit of modern consumerism’ that Campbell (1987) described as a characteristic feature of modern society and against which the NMG defined itself at home. For Bavendamm describes the converts about whom he complains as qualified consumers—they correctly pointed out the best dressed man— who are in search of pleasure. This pleasure in looking at and dreaming about clothes was the problem, and not the fact that people were actually wearing them. Though he welcomed the fact that the Ewe started to cover their bodies in a—in his view—decent and morally correct way, Bavendamm detested the fact that they failed to adopt a more utilitarian stance towards clothes and that they merely seemed to work for ‘worldly’ pleasures. Clothes were to form a Christian’s second skin, no more or less than that. Many other examples testify to the fact that this was a stance shared by Bavendamm’s colleagues. It seems that, against their declared aims, among the Ewe the missionaries failed to implement their sober ascetic ethic and, rather, contributed unintentionally to the rise of hedonistic inclinations that they themselves defied so much. Yet, although the mission kept on about the virtue of hard work and the temptations imbued in commodities, about the superiority of the ‘inner being’ to the ‘outward appearance’, it is important to keep in mind that the mission actually required converts to consume Western goods. Ewe Christians were expected to settle in Kpodzi, to furnish their homes in the European style and to dress in the new way, for only then were they recognizable as Christians. There was a crucial difference between the mission’s and the Ewe’s attitudes towards consumption: while the former strove to reduce it to a natural affair meant to satisfy basic needs, for the latter it was a vehicle for the construction of a new, modern and ‘civilized’ identity. Being involved in a process of becoming new persons with ‘opened eyes’, Ewe converts transgressed the line that the missionaries carefully drew between consumption for the satisfaction of naturalized needs and the striving for worldly pleasure. Living in circumstances in which Western clothes had not yet become a second skin and in which the material culture found in Kpodzi was not yet taken for granted, but rather appeared as a symbol of a modern, Western way of life for which one longed

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without having attained it fully, they could not follow the mission’s naturalizing conceptualization of consumption. Clearly, for Ewe converts Western commodities and things made in a European style were building blocks for a new life style, by which they could distinguish themselves from other people in society, for instance the traditional elites, and turn upside down existing societal and familial constraints. Thus, Western goods offered new ‘means of objectification’ (Miller, 1987) by which Ewe converts could construct a new, modern and ‘civilized’ identity— modern and ‘civilized’ not only in the sense that they possessed formerly unknown things (rather than being possessed by all sorts of ‘fetishes’), but, above all, in the sense of a change of notions of selfhood. Often this was a desired ideal rather than a reality attained; given that family ties were still socially and economically relevant, many converts could not dissociate themselves as much from their extended families as they had in mind (cf. Meyer, 1996: 221–2). Nevertheless, Christian converts clearly longed to leave behind local patterns of production and consumption, and to reproduce themselves through the objects and images that they encountered in their contacts with European missionaries, bureaucrats and traders. In this sense, they certainly were on their way to become what the mission expected them to be: modern, individual subjects who were independent of their extended families and the concomitant ethics of sharing, as well as free from local spirits imbued with ‘fetishes’, and ‘free’ to submit themselves to the Almighty God and his representatives on earth. On the other hand, in the eyes of the mission most of these modern individual subjects realized ‘civilization’ at the expense of ‘salvation’ and took things much more seriously than the Word. For they failed to adopt the mission’s paradoxical stance, which required that Christians made use of European goods but kept a critical distance towards them at the same time. While in actual practice missionary materializations were vital for the construction of Christian identity, their importance was to be denied at the level of ideology. At this level they were either taken for granted as a means to satisfy basic needs, or represented as ‘outward’ objects of desire that could easily be employed by the Devil to tempt believers onto the path of destruction by promising them utmost pleasure. Thus, there was a gap between actual missionary practices and their antimaterialist ideology. While, ideally, a person’s ‘outward appearance’ was regarded as a mere reflection of an inner development, actually the material and the spiritual, the outward and the inner person, were related to each other dialectically: worldly matter constituted the Christian mind as much as personality was reflected through appearance. By representing missionary Pietism as

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an anti-materialistic form of worship focused on the inner person and, at the same time, requesting converts to adopt a distinct material culture, the mission mystified its own actions. Ewe converts’ attitudes towards consumption were so disturbing to the mission because they laid bare a characteristic feature of the Pietist religion: the fact that conversions to Christianity actually required a large amount of Western commodities. Christianity certainly provided access to Western material culture and people were attracted to the new religion because of the appeal of the impressive missionary materializations emerging in the midst of ‘wilderness’. Yet providing access to Western goods was not just a by-product of the missionary endeavours, but was at the core of conversion. Rather than merely enabling people to buy European commodities and adopt Western styles, Christian identity itself was produced through their consumption.28 Epilogue These findings do not merely suggest that 19th-century Protestant missions’ self-representation—a representation that is echoed in the still-current idea that Protestantism is a religion of the Word—does not match reality. More importantly, by drawing our attention to the much neglected and intricate relationship between religion and materiality, our investigation of the tensions about so-called worldly matters in the encounter between Ewe Christians and missionaries shows that any crude opposition of material versus spiritual, outward versus inward, is a mystifying, ideological construction that has served to denounce the other as less sophisticated and more worldly-minded and to conceal how much objects actually matter in the West. The anthropological fascination with the Other’s concern with Western commodities in a situation of ‘contact’ (for a critique of this view see Thomas, 1991: 103 ff.)—a fascination that comes to the fore most openly in the examination of Melanesian cargo cults—really is the flip side of the Western inclination to reduce consumption to the satisfaction of basic needs. Therefore it is appropriate that, rather than reiterating the boundary between the West and the Rest, anthropologists have come to ‘acknowledge’ consumption as a global cultural practice (Miller, 1995). This new awareness certainly has to be applied to the study of religious 28 This conclusion, of course, owes much to Miller’s stimulating work on material culture (1987, 1994).

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movements in past and present, all over the globe. Then matters such as the current attraction of the Prosperity Gospel appear in a new light. Clearly, with their materialistic orientation these churches do not corrupt the nature of Protestant religion as Christian critics suggest, but rather uncover one of its main characteristics, which the missionaries themselves failed to acknowledge, but which was evident to the Ewe converts of the first hour who were not to be fooled by the rhetorics of anti-materialism and of a sober ascetic ethic. Protestant missionary materializations were not subordinate to the proper message, but were part and parcel of its realization and were, despite possible objections to certain aspects of the colonial endeavour, firmly embedded in the modern market economy and vital for the making of modern consumers. References Amenumey, D. E. K. (1986) The Ewe in Pre-Colonial Times. A Political History with Special Emphasis on the Anlo, Ge and Krepi. Ho: E. P. Church Press. Appadurai, Arjun (1986) ‘Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value’, in A. Appadurai (ed.) The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, pp. 3–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, David (1982) ‘On the Category “Civilised” in Liberia and Elsewhere’, Journal of Modern African Studies 20(2): 287–303. Buhler, P. (1979) ‘The North German Missionaries in Eweland. Religion and Economics: 1847–1884’. Paper Presented at the Twenty-Second Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association, Los Angeles, California, 31 October–3 November. Campbell, Colin (1987) The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Carrier, James C. (1995) Gifts & Commodities. Exchange & Western Capitalism Since 1700. London and New York: Routledge. Comaroff, Jean and Comaroff, John (1991) Of Revelation and Revolution. Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa, Vol. 1, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Comaroff, Jean and Comaroff, John (in press) Of Revelation and Revolution. Vol. 2, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Drewal, Henry John (1988) ‘Peforming the Other. Mami Wata Worship in Africa’, The Drama Review 32(2): 160–85. Elias, Norbert (1976) Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation. Soziogenetische und Psychogenetische Untersuchungen. Band 1. Wandlungen des Verhaltens der weltlichen Oberschichten des Abendlandes. Frankfurt am Main: Surhkamp.

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Fabian, Johannes (1983) Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Fischer, Friedrich Hermann (1991) Der Missionsarzt Rudolf Fisch und die Anfänge medizinischer Arbeit der Basler Mission an der Goldküste (Ghana). Herzogenrath: Verlag Murken-Altrogge. Greene, Sandra (n.d.) ‘Sacred Terrain: Gbakute and the Church of Pentecost (Anloga, Ghana)’. Submitted for publication to the International Journal of African Historical Studies. Keane, Webb (1996) ‘Materialism, Missionaries, and Modern Subjects in Colonial Indonesia’, in P. v.d. Veer (ed.) Conversion to Modernities; The Globalization of Christianity, pp. 137–70. New York and London: Routledge. Maier, D. J. E. (1983) Priests and Power: The Case of the Dente Shrine in Nineteenth-Century Ghana. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mamattah, Charles M. K. (1976) History of the Eves. The Eves of West Africa (Oral Traditions Vol. 1). The Anlo-Eves and Their Immediate Neighbours. Accra: Volta Research Publications, printed for publication by the Advent Press. Meyer, Birgit (1992) ‘“If You Are a Devil You Are a Witch and, If You Are a Witch You Are a Devil.” The Integration of “Pagan” Ideas into the Conceptual Universe of Ewe Christians in Southeastern Ghana’, The Journal of Religion in Africa 22(2): 98–132. Meyer, Birgit (1995a) ‘Translating the Devil. An African Appropriation of Pietist Protestantism. The Case of the Peki Ewe, 1847–1992.’ Dissertation, University of Amsterdam. Meyer, Birgit (1995b) ‘Delivered from the Powers of Darkness.’ Confessions about Satanic Riches in Christian Ghana’, Africa 65(2): 235–55. Meyer, Birgit (1995c) ‘Christianity and the Arise or the Ewe Nation. On the Encounter Between German Pietist Missionaries and Ewe Mission Workers.’ Paper presented at the International Conference ‘Religion and Nationalism in Europe and Asia’ at the Research Centre Religion and Society, Amsterdam, 27–29 November. Meyer, Birgit (1996) ‘Modernity and Enchantment: The Image of the Devil in Popular African Christianity’, in P. v.d. Veer (ed.) Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity, pp. 199–230. New York and London: Routledge. Meyer, Birgit (in press) ‘Commodities and the Power of Prayer. Pentecostalist Attitudes Towards Consumption in Contemporary Ghana’, in P. Geschiere and B. Meyer (eds) Globalization and Identity. Miller, Daniel (1987) Material Culture and Mass Consumption. New York: Basil Blackwell. Miller, Daniel (1994) Modernity. An Ethnographic Approach. Dualism and Mass Consumption in Trinidad. Oxford: Berg. Miller, Daniel (1995) ‘Consumption as the Vanguard of History’, in D. Miller (ed.) Acknowledging Consumption, pp. 1–57. London and New York: Routledge.

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Mobley, Harris W. (1970) The Ghanaian’s Image of the Missionary. An Analysis of the Published Critiques of Christian Missionaries by Ghanaians 1897–1965. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Odamtten, S. K. (1978) The Missionary Factor in Ghana’s Development (1820–1880). Accra: Waterville Publishing House. Parry, J. and Bloch, M. (eds) (1989) Money and the Morality of Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pels, Peter (1993) Critical Matters. Interactions Between Missionaries and Waluguru in Colonial Tanganyika, 1930–1961. Amsterdam: Amsterdam School of Social Research. Pratt, Marie Louise (1992) Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation. London and New York: Routledge. Rennstich, Karl (1981) ‘Die Basier Mission und die Basler Handelsgesellschaft’, Pietismus und Neuzeit. Ein Jahrbuch zur Geschichte des neueren Protestantismus. Band 7: 180–217. Spieth, Jacob (1903) Die Entwicklung der evangelischen Christengemeinde im Ewe-Lande. Bremen: Verlag der Norddeutschen Missions-Gesellschaft. Spieth, Jacob (1906) Die Ewe-Stämme. Material zur Kunde des Ewe-Volkes in Deutsch-Togo, Berlin: Dietrich Reimer. Taussig, Michael T. (1980) The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Tell, Birgit and Heinrich, Uwe (1986) ‘Mission und Handel im missionarischen Selbstverständnis und in der konkreten Praxis’, in W. Ustorf (ed.) Mission im Kontext. Beiträge zur Sozialgeschichte der Norddeutschen Missionsgesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert, pp. 257–92. Bremen: Übersee-Museum. Thomas, Nicolas (1991) Entangled Objects. Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ustorf, Werner (ed.) (1986a) Mission im Kontext. Beiträge zur Sozialgeschichte der Norddeutschen Missionsgesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert. Bremen: Übersee-Museum. Ustorf, Werner (1986b) ‘Norddeutsche Mission und Wirklichkeitsbewältigung: Bremen, Afrika und der “Sclavenfreikauf”’, in W. Ustorf (ed.) Mission im Kontext. Beiträge zur Sozialgeschichte der Norddeutschen Missionsgesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert, pp. 121– 236. Bremen: Übersee-Museum. Vietor, J. K. (1912) ‘Die wirtschaftliche Leistungsfähigkeit des Afrikaners’, in Der Afrikaner, seine wirtschaftliche Leistungsfähigkeit, geistige Befähigung, religiöse Veranlagung. Vorträge auf dem II. Deutschen Kolonial-Missionstag zu Cassel. Bremer Missionsschriften Nr. 36, pp. 1–10. Bremen: Verlag der Norddeutschen MissionsGesellschaft. Weber, Max (1984[1920]) Die protestantische Ethik I. Eine Aufsatzsammlung. Herausgegeben von Johannes Winckelmann. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus.

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Weißflog, Stefan (1986) ‘J. K. Vietor und sein Konzept des leistungsfähigen Afrikaners’, in W. Ustorf (ed.) Mission im Kontext. Beiträge zur Sozialgeschichte der Norddeutschen Missionsgesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert, pp. 293–306. Bremen: Übersee-Museum. Wendl, Tobias (1991) Mami Wata oder ein Kult zwischen den Kulturen. Münster: Lit Verlag. Westermann, Diedrich (1905) Wörterbuch der Ewe-Sprache. I. Teil. Ewe-Deutsches Wörterbuch. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer.

Mission or Empire, Word or Sword? The Human Capital Legacy in Postcolonial Democratic Development Tomila Lankina and Lullit Getachew Do colonial institutional legacies trump those of human capital development in accounting for the stark democratic variation in former colonies?* Recent scholarship on colonialism has leaned towards the institutional argument in the debate on the determinants of the diverging postcolonial pathways (Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson 2001; Bernhard, Reenock, and Nordstrom 2004; Porta et al. 1998; Sokoloff and Engerman 2000; Treisman 2000). Such a focus detracts from societal factors, which are bound to have a bearing on the sustainability of the wider institutional architecture for democracy. The hitherto widespread reliance on the “identity of the colonial power” analytical category would also complicate an effort to uncover the variable institutional and societal effects of political, economic, military, or religious actors subsumed under this broader identity. So does the nation-state focus of much of the relevant work, whereby colonies are assumed to map uniformly onto territories of postindependence nation-states (Arat 1991; Barro 1999; Bernhard, Reenock, and Nordstrom 2004; Bollen and Jackman 1985; Lange 2004; Przeworski et al. 2000). This tendency is at odds with the historical record of the spatially and temporally uneven penetration of authority of succeeding colonial and other

Source: Lankina, T. and L. Getachew, “Mission or Empire, Word or Sword? The Human Capital Legacy in Postcolonial Democratic Development,” American Journal of Political Science, 56.2 (2012): pp. 465–483. Reproduced by permission of John Wiley and Sons. * The authors are grateful to the British Academy and De Montfort University for providing funding for this research and to the Department of Politics and International Relations at Oxford University for providing access to superb research resources as part of its Visiting Research Fellow Programme. We are particularly grateful to the staff of the Indian Institute of the Bodleian Library for support in conducting research for this project. We are also grateful for advice on data and comments on earlier versions of the article, to Ed Morgan-Jones, Henry Hale, Dinshaw Mistry, Michael Phillips, Latika Chaudhary, Julia Chernova, and participants of the 2009 Second International Symposium of Comparative Research on Major Regional Powers in Eurasia, “Comparing the Politics of the Eurasian Regional Powers: China, Russia, India, and Turkey,” Hosei University, Tokyo, Japan. Jing Pan, Inga Saikkonen,

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/97890

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actors and their diverging institutional and human capital impacts (Abernethy 2000; Dirks 2001). Our study shifts the debate from the generic “identity of the colonial power” to distinguishing among the impacts of key actors associated—rightly or wrongly—with colonialism; from a preoccupation with institutional foundations for democracy to a concern with its societal preconditions; and from a focus on the polity in its present political-administrative contours to one more in tune with colonial-era administrative divisions. British colonialism provides a good testing ground for refining existent theories. While many cross-national studies have found positive democratic effects of British colonialism (Barro 1999; Bernhard, Reenock, and Nordstrom 2004; Bollen and Jackman 1985; Przeworski et al. 2000), others have questioned this assumption (Arat 1991; Lipset 1963; Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens 1992). We address some of these ambiguities by hypothesizing that an important set of actors operating in the colonial domains—Christian missionaries— have had a crucial bearing on democracy through literacy initiatives. Religion has featured prominently in debates on the historical determinants of democracy. Much of the debate has been couched in terms of the contrast between Western Christianity and its importations through European settlers in “neo-Europes” and other religions (Barro 1999; Bollen and Jackman 1985; Huntington 1996; Landes 1998; Lipset 1959). With few exceptions (Abernethy 2000; Bolt and Bezemer 2008; Gallego and Woodberry 2008; Posner 2003; Woodberry 2004), the effects of Christian mission enterprise in colonial domains have received scant attention. This omission is regrettable given that missionaries, Protestants in particular, provided the human development component wanting in the policies of colonial powers. We make our case by conducting panel data and historical process-tracing analyses of subnational literacy and democracy variations in Britain’s most populous former colony, India. The article is structured as follows. Section 1 summarizes the relevant literature. Section 2 presents results of statistical analysis. Section 3 backs the statistical analysis with case studies of two states. The findings are then summarized in the concluding section.



and Alisa Voznaya provided excellent research assistance. All errors are solely our own. An electronic copy of the replication data will be posted on http://www.dmu.ac.uk/faculties/ business_and_law/business/research/lgru/.

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Numerous democracy studies have discussed the lasting effects of colonialism (Arat 1991; Barro 1999; Bernhard, Reenock, and Nordstrom 2004; Bollen and Jackman 1985; Lange 2004; Lipset 1963; Przeworski et al. 2000). When distinguishing among the democracy impacts of various colonizing powers, British colonialism has been singled out for its ostensibly benign effects on democracy (Bernhard, Reenock, and Nordstrom 2004; Bollen and Jackman 1985; Grier 1997; Lipset, Seong, and Torres 1993; Treisman 2000). There are nevertheless dissenting voices coming from scholars with more ambiguous findings. Arat points out that only half of the 42 British colonies managed to sustain democracy, with the British average only slightly better than that of former Spanish colonies. Likewise, Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2001), while not specifically concerned with democracy, find that the identity of the colonizer does not affect institutional variation in postcolonial settings. Fish also does not find the British legacy control to be statistically significant in his cross-national study of religious impacts on democracy (Fish 2002). Przeworski et al. (2000) find that colonial status does not matter for the emergence of democracy, although in the former British colonies it is “somewhat” more likely to survive. When it comes to uncovering the causal mechanisms behind the purported association between British colonialism and democracy, several pathways have been proposed. The widely held assumptions are the beneficial effects of Westminster-style institutions of electoral democracy (Abernethy 2000; Diamond, Linz, and Lipset 1989; Lipset, Seong, and Torres 1993; Weiner and Ozbudun 1987); common law (Porta et al. 1998; Treisman 2000; Young 1994); modes of colonial extrication (Bollen and Jackman 1985; Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens 1992; Smith 1978; Young 1994); and the training of native politicians in British colonies (Smith 1978; Weiner 1965; Young 1994). Recent theorizing on democracies “with adjectives” is a sobering corrective against assumptions that such state-level democratic institutionalization, legal institutional architecture, or elite training is sufficient for democracy (Collier and Levitsky 1997; O’Donnell 2001). Broader societal conditions that would make democracy effective and meaningful matter (Inglehart and Welzel 2005; Power and Gasiorowski 1997). With respect to the societal underpinnings for democratic development, the record of British colonialism is not very laudable. Scholars have highlighted the ambiguous attitude of the British towards social modernization in non-European settler colonies (Woodberry 2004; Young 1994); their elitism and selectivity in granting education to colonized peoples (Lipset 1963; Sokoloff and Engerman 2000); the orientalization of society and conservation

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of backwardness (Dirks 2001; Mamdani 1997); racially based repression and exclusion (Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens 1992; Young 1994); the setting up of extractive institutions concentrating power in the hands of a narrow elite (Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson 2002); and the conservation of a despotic rural social order in British colonies (Irschick 1989; Panikkar 2007; Washbrook 1999). We argue that the ambiguity stems from a conceptual neglect of mission actors filling in the human capital component of democratic development. Missionaries feature prominently in colonial historiography as “lobbyists for empire” and training agents of “collaborators” (Abernethy 2000, 222, 237); or alternatively, as benign crusaders for social reform (Cox 2002; Porter 1999); as destroyers of the traditional social order (Hardgrave 1970); or, contrariwise, as obsessive gatherers of ethnographic material on colonized peoples, rigidifying indigenous hierarchies (Bayly 1989; Dirks 2001). The richness of this scholarship notwithstanding, we have yet to systematically test the democracy effects of these actors. Our call to isolate the impact of missionary activity from that of colonial authority rests on the role of Christian missions in the promotion of education. There is a prominent theoretical tradition of linking education to democracy going back to modernization theorizing (Jackman 1973; Kamens 1988; Lerner 1958; Lipset 1959). This link has been restated in a large number of recent empirical studies (Barro 1999; Boix 2003; Krishna 2008; Przeworski et al. 2000). Even basic literacy skills could help foster democracy in otherwise underdeveloped settings (Arat 1991; Sen 1999). Literacy is but one element in the extensively theorized causal link between education and democracy, however. Missionary schooling may have had multiple indirect, and even unintended effects on democracy because it spurred indigenous social reform movements both from among the hitherto underprivileged groups and the native elite threatened by conversions (Bellenoit 2007; Blouet 1990; Frykenberg 2003; Porter 1999). Theorists who have touched upon the importance of colonialera education for democracy have tended to attribute it to colonial powers (Barro 1999; Brown 2000; Lipset, Seong, and Torres 1993); however, they have not incorporated the possible missionary effects into their analyses (but see Woodberry 2004). India illustrates how our framework could be fruitful for explaining democratic variation in postcolonial settings. Hailed as a “puzzle” of democratic resilience against the odds of underdevelopment (Lijphart 1996), it is also a nation of stark subnational developmental and democratic variations (Heller 2000; Lijphart 1996; Sinha 2005; Varshney 2002). While several widely cited national-level studies have attributed India’s democracy to Westminster-style

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institutions and common law tradition (Diamond, Linz, and Lipset 1989; Weiner and Ozbudun 1987), those on subnational democracy have been largely couched in terms of state-level variations in caste constellations, religious tradition, civil society, party-political factors, or governance (Crook and Manor 1998; Heller 2000; Kothari 1970; Varshney 2000; Wilkinson 2004). Although missionary Christianity’s contribution to literacy has been discussed elsewhere (Desai 2005; Rudolph and Rudolph 2008; Weiner 1991; Woodberry 2004), we are not aware of other scholars linking missionary activity and democracy in India through cross-sectional time-series analysis. Several studies have pointed to the role of colonial legacies in accounting for subnational human capital variations; however, they do not systematically consider missionary impacts (Banerjee and Iyer 2005; Chaudhary 2009; Iyer 2010). In order to examine the effect of missionary activities on literacy, and subsequently, on democracy, in the following section we start by conducting statistical analysis of these relationships.

Statistical Analysis

Two district-level datasets have been assembled. The first dataset will help uncover the relationship between missionary activity as measured by the population share of Christian adherents (independent variable) and literacy (dependent variable) in the colonial period. The second dataset will help establish the path-dependent effects of literacy (independent variable) on democracy (dependent variable) in postcolonial India. District-level data allow us to link observations from the two periods in a way that would not be possible with state-level data because of the 1950s linguistic reorganization and the India-Pakistan partition (Government of India 1955). We matched the colonial districts with the postcolonial ones using the India Administrative Atlas, 1872–2001 (Singh and Banthia 2004). We note that our analysis seeks to capture both the direct effects of missionaries on literacy and their indirect effects on education and democracy through the development of indigenous schools that emulated missionary institutions, as well as through social reform movements that their activities spurred. We are not able to quantify these indirect influences, so we discuss them in the case study part of the article. Data for the first dataset, which has 207 districts,1 are based on the censuses for 1901, 1911, 1921, and 1931, which provide the most comprehensive data for the 1 These districts are in the following administrative territories: Ajmer-Merwara, Assam, Baroda, Bengal proper, Berar, Bihar, Bombay, Central India Agency, Central Provinces, Chota Nagpur,

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decades leading up to India’s independence as the Second World War limited the scope of the 1941 census. We exclude districts that are now in Pakistan, Burma, and Bangladesh. To ensure consistency between the two datasets, Portuguese- and French-ruled districts were also excluded.2 Some districts with missing data also had to be excluded. The measure for the key independent variable in the colonial analysis is the percentage of Christians in the total population. Since we are using crosssectional data from four decades, we want to ascertain that there is enough variability in Christianity in the districts over this time period. In order to examine such variability we have employed the coefficient of variation (CV), defined as the ratio of standard deviation to the mean. Distributions with CV < 1 are considered low variance, while those with CV > 1 are considered high variance. The coefficient of variation for Christianity in the 1901–31 period is 2.8, which supports the appropriateness of employing panel data estimators using cross-sectional data observed over time. Censuses do not consistently disaggregate Christian populations by denominational affiliation. While the denominational nuance may be lost, our generic Christianity measure permits systematic district-level analysis. Nevertheless, we have the breakdown of Christians by denomination at the start of the period we are analyzing. We present this in the online Supporting Information (SI) Table 9. In the analysis, the control variables are the percentage share of urban population; of what the census lists as “European and allied races” (henceforth referred to as “Europeans”) and of Muslims; state-level per capita expenditure on education;3 whether the district belongs to South India; and British colonial status. Urbanization is employed as a proxy for modernization, which has been linked to literacy. District-level GDP data over time are not available from colonial sources, and in any case, there are known issues of endogeneity in employing GDP with literacy (Barro 1991; Easterly and Levine 1997; Hanson 1989). We include “Europeans” because of hypothesized links between European settlement and better institutions (Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson 2001; Lange 2004), which could have a bearing on literacy. We include Islam because of the lower levels of recorded literacy among Muslims (Hutton 1933). The colonial status variable will help assess the impacts of colonial rule on directly ruled territories subject to British sovereignty as distinct from princely states and Cochin State, Coorg, Hyderabad, Kashmir, Madras, Mysore, Northwest Frontier Province and Punjab, Orissa, Rajputana Agency, Travancore, United Provinces of Agra, and Oudh. 2 Goa, Daman and Diu, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, and Pondicherry. 3 Missing data on educational expenditure are taken from the University of Chicago Digital South Asia Library http://dsal.uchicago.edu/ (June 15, 2010).

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agencies, formally outside of it, but maintaining treaty or other association with the British Raj (for an administrative map of colonial India, see Figure 1, SI). Although a British resident was normally stationed in the states and agencies, and there was often interference in their political affairs, these entities had not been consistently subjected to British policy in the same way that the provinces had been (Desai 2005; Fisher 1991; Menon 1985). In directly ruled territories, the British set up embryonic institutions of popular representation (Chaudhary 2009). Including this variable allows us to control for the hypothesized association between the British institutional component of colonialism and human capital. The variable takes the value of 1 for directly ruled territories and 0 otherwise. Because district-level data on per capita expenditure on education are not consistently available, state-level spending data were employed to control for state educational policy, such as that of progressive native rulers (Bhagavan 2003; Kooiman 2002). Another control for which only statelevel panel data were available is the combined share of the population that belongs to the “exterior castes” and tribal group census categories. The variable will help account for the effects of the lower literacy of these disadvantaged groups who converted en masse to Christianity in some districts (Bayly 1989; Dirks 2001; Hardgrave 1970). Finally, we employ the South variable because of hypothesized links between the Southern caste structure, social mobilization, and human capital in districts now part of Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Karnataka (Subramanian 1999; Varshney 2000). The variable takes the value of 1 for South and 0 otherwise. The dependent variables, in the first stage of the analysis, are the percentage shares of total, male, and female literates. Literacy pertains to that in any language and is defined as “the ability to write a letter and to read the answer to it.” The definition excludes those who can read but not write, such as many Muslims at the time, taught to read the Quran in Arabic, but not writing (Hutton 1933, 324). An alternative measure of missionary effects on literacy would have been the number of mission-run schools, given that they were open to non-Christians. Over time data are not available on these schools; however, the SI Tables 10–12 contain figures for schooling and teacher training in Christian schools and literacy by religion. For the postcolonial period dataset we employed the Vanneman and Barnes (2000) Indian District Data, supplementing them with author-gathered data on the variables of interest. The 1951 census year is not in the dataset since only limited data are available for this immediate postindependence period. The data are taken from cross-sections for four periods, corresponding to the census years of 1961, 1971, 1981, and 1991. The data for the dependent variable democracy are from the electoral period of 1971–91.

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The main independent variables in this second stage of the analysis are the overall share of literates and male and female literates. Urbanization data are not available from the Vanneman and Barnes (2000) dataset. As an alternative, we employ data on the percentage share of people employed in manufacturing. The control variables of the percentage share of scheduled castes and tribes in a state’s population, South, and state-level per capita educational expenditures were also employed.4 To instrument for the path-dependent effects of British colonial and missionary activity, we employ additional controls of colonial status and literacy in 1931. We follow Iyer’s strategy (2010) in dealing with the reality that some postcolonial districts contain areas from both the British Empire and native states by coding the district as colonial if the major part of it was under British direct rule. The SI Tables 1 and 3 present summary statistics for the two datasets.5 Democracy A widely cited democracy definition is employed here with democracy assessed by the degree to which subnational jurisdictions correspond to a system “that hold[s] elections in which the opposition has some chance of winning and taking office” (Przeworski et al. 1996, 39). Efforts to employ wider definitions are plagued by data scarcity and measurement validity challenges (Beetham 2004). The more diverse the contexts studied, the more difficult it might be to come up with a multidimensional indicator, particularly for the district level. The Przeworski et al. definition is rooted in liberal theory that considers elections as barometers of the quality of democratic institutions and the wider environments that enable free and fair competition for office (Bollen and Paxton 2000; Dahl 1971; Lipset 1959; Przeworski et al. 2000; Schumpeter 1950). Accordingly, elections are the preferred measures in many democracy indices (Altman and Perez-Linan 2002; Gleditsch and Ward 1997; Hadenius and Teorell 2005; Przeworski et al. 2000). Minimalist indices, such as those based on turnout and competitiveness, are often highly correlated with more complex indicators, such as those of Freedom House (Coppedge 2005; Gleditsch and Ward 1997). The strong associations suggest that the indicators measure the same systematized concept, thereby providing “convergent validation” (Adcock and Collier 2001).

4 There are missing data on postcolonial educational expenditure in Kashmir. 5 There are more districts in this dataset (270) as compared to the colonial one (207) because some districts were split in the postcolonial period.

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Our democracy index is based on the Vanhanen measures employed in a previous study of democratic variation in Indian states, which capture the participation and competitiveness dimensions of elections (Beer and Mitchell 2006; Vanhanen 2007). The first measure is electoral turnout (poll percentage), while the second one is 100 minus the winning party’s vote percent. To ensure equal weight for the two variables, they are multiplied and the outcome is divided by 100. Similar to other democracy indices, the Vanhanen Index, which employs Dahl’s criteria of “polyarchy,” has been criticized for its focus on procedural aspects of democracy (Berg-Schlosser 2007). We are fully aware of the limitations of this measure. Unfortunately, more nuanced data for other, substantive aspects of democracy are hard to come by. This is particularly true for the subnational level. However imperfect, the Vanhanen procedural measures make systematic subnational analysis of the kind we are undertaking feasible. For the index we gathered State Assembly elections data. Unlike the Lok Sabha constituencies, State Assembly constituencies are mostly contained within district boundaries (Election Commission of India 1976). Because there are usually multiple constituencies per district, district averages for some 4,000 constituencies were calculated. State Assembly elections are not all held in the same year. We identified an election period of one to three years corresponding to the end or beginning of a decade in which most of the states held elections. Two moving average scores were then computed, corresponding to the 1970s–1980s and 1980s–1990s electoral periods. This technique, also called “exponentially mapped past average,” is commonly used to reduce stochastic noise effects, which might otherwise complicate the uncovering of underlying trends (Fan and Yao 2003). The average is adjusted to eliminate cyclical variations, which reduces random fluctuations. The data were lagged such that the time-variant data for the independent variables for the 1971 census period were used to analyze democracy outcomes in the 1970s–1980s, and those in 1981 for outcomes in the 1980s–1990s. Colonial Period A colonial period bivariate correlation matrix is presented in Table 2, SI. We begin by exploring our hypothesized relationship between literacy and the combined range of factors that influence its levels. For this purpose, we specify a log-linear model where the logged values of the various measures of literacy are postulated to be functions of logged values of various combinations of Christianity, urbanization, Europeans, exterior castes and tribes, education expenditure, South, and colonial status. In particular, the model takes the form lliterit = αi + xitβ + εit, i = 1… N, t = 1… T, where the term on the left-hand side is

896 table 1

LANKINA AND GETACHEW GEE Colonial period models 1–6, 621 observations, 207 groups

Literacy model 1

Male literacy model 2

Female literacy model 3

Variables

Coefficient Standard estimates error

Coefficient Standard estimates error

Coefficient estimates

Standard error

Colonial Status Muslim Christianity Europeans Caste & Tribes Education Exp. South Urbanization Constant

0.150 0.021 0.061 −0.010 −0.052 0.020 0.108 0.033 2.031

0.167 0.022 0.053 −0.011 −0.044 0.014 0.098 0.031 1.913

−0.011 0.076 0.157 −0.007 −0.117 0.082 0.082 0.067 −0.396

0.128 0.047 0.018** 0.016 0.026** 0.016** 0.132 0.021** 0.190**

0.088* 0.029 0.009** 0.008 0.012** 0.007** 0.092 0.013** 0.120**

0.085** 0.028 0.009** 0.007 0.011** 0.007** 0.089 0.013** 0.115**

Literacy model 4

Male literacy model 5

Female literacy model 6

Variables

Coefficient Standard estimates error

Coefficient Standard estimates error

Coefficient estimates

Standard error

Christianity Urbanization Education Exp. Caste & Tribes Constant

0.062 0.033 0.021 −0.053 2.258

0.055 0.031 0.015 −0.045 2.158

0.153 0.075 0.082 −0.117 −0.216

0.015** 0.020** 0.016** 0.026** 0.082**

0.008** 0.013** 0.007** 0.012** 0.050**

0.008** 0.012** 0.007** 0.011** 0.048**

With the exception of dummy variables, all variables have been logged. ** statistically significant at the 5% level and * at the 10% level.

the log of literacy, x is the logged values of the various explanatory variables, α and β are model parameters, ε is the stochastic term that captures random noise, and i and t subscripts are district and time period, respectively. In the colonial period, we have a balanced panel data with 621 observations, consisting of 207 districts or cross-sections and three time periods. To estimate our model using this dataset, we use a panel data estimator. It is well known that random effect (RE) estimators are both consistent and efficient when regressors are uncorrelated with the cross-sectional heterogeneity or effect terms that are specified as part of the error term of a model, whereas fixed effect (FE)

897

Mission or Empire, Word or Sword ? table 2

Colonial period two-sample t-tests

Literacy two-sample test

Mean Variance Standard Deviations Observations Hypothesized Mean Difference Df t Stat P(T< = t) one-tail t Critical one-tail P(T< = t) two-tail t Critical two-tail

Direct rule

Princely states

117.50 7056.00 84.00 15.00 0.00 22.00 1.03 0.16 1.72 0.31 2.07

88.40 7056.00 84.00 22.00

Christianity two-sample test

Mean Variance Standard Deviations Observations Hypothesized Mean Difference Df t Stat P(T< = t) one-tail t Critical one-tail P(T< = t) two-tail t Critical two-tail

Direct rule

Princely states

179.10 17, 415.00 132.00 15.00 0.00 21.00 −1.57 0.07 1.72 0.13 2.08

538.00 1,074,102.00 1, 036.40 21.00

estimators are consistent but not efficient. In cases where the regressors are correlated with the panel-specific effects, the RE estimator is no longer consistent and FE can be used to estimate the panel model. The major drawback of the FE estimator is that it does not permit the inclusion of time-invariant regressors. As an alternative, it is possible to use the Hausman-Taylor panel

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estimator, where a subset of the regressors is assumed to be correlated with the composed-error term while the rest are assumed uncorrelated (Hausman and Taylor 1981). It is, however, not always evident which variables should receive the former versus the latter treatment. Therefore, we fit population-averaged (PA) panel data models in order to bypass the shortcomings of the former models. For comparison, we also illustrate the phenomena we examine using the basic FE panel data estimator, which is always consistent even if not efficient under certain conditions. These results are presented in Tables 5–7, SI. The PA panel data estimator, also known as the generalized estimation equations (GEE), combines the desirable properties of the fixed and random effects estimators by controlling for panel-effects as well as possible effects-regressor correlations. It does this by averaging the panel-specific effects across all panels. The resulting estimates of the effects are not correlated with regressors, but neither are they cross-section or panel specific; instead, they are estimates of the average effects across all panels or cross-sections (Harrison 2007). In particular, unlike fixed and random effects estimators that produce subject-specific (SS) estimates, GEE produces PA estimates. The former indicate the effect of a covariate on any given individual while the latter show the effect of a covariate on an average individual or cross-section. For instance, in the FE model, our SS fixed-effects estimator would show how the level of Christianity affects literacy in individual provinces. The PA estimator, on the other hand, allows us to infer whether literacy, on average, depends on Christianity. Like the SS panel estimators, the PA estimator takes account of within-panel, or district, correlation as well as among-panel, or between-district, heterogeneity when estimating a given model. In essence, SS estimators fit models based on patterns of each individual i’s covariance matrices of α and ε, whereas the PA estimator fits models as if it is averaging these over all individuals6 (Hardin and Hilbe 2003). The independent variables were lagged to correspond to the subsequent census year dependent variable. Thus, the time-variant right-hand variables in 6 The variance components of the PA covariance matrix can take several forms. The simplest is the independent model that characterizes the within-panel correlation as the identity matrix. This can be modified by assuming that all within-panel observations have the same correlation resulting in the exchangeable model. If within-panel observations are temporal, an autoregressive correlation matrix may be used to fit the correlation structure. It is also possible to fit an unstructured model, though such models often have difficulty converging. We fit our model using the more general exchangeable, rather than autoregressive, correlation matrix because we have decade and not annual time-series-based cross-sectional data. As detailed in Zorn (2001) and others, the resulting GEE estimates are consistent even if the within-group correlation matrix is misspecified.

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1901 are postulated to affect literacy in 1911, those in 1911 to affect literacy in 1921, and so forth. Model 1 (Table 1) shows that for every 1% increase in the share of Christians, there is a .061% increase in literacy, holding all else constant. Urbanization and educational expenditure are also positive and statistically significant. For every 1% increase in urbanization, there is a .033% increase in literacy, while for every 1% increase in expenditure on education there is a .020% increase in literacy. Exterior castes and tribes have a statistically significant and negative effect on literacy: for every 1% increase in their share, there is a .052% decrease in literacy. Colonial status has a statistically significant and positive impact on literacy; literacy in provinces under direct rule is 15% higher than in those under indirect rule. Islam, Europeans, and South are not statistically significant. Next, we fit the same model by gender (Models 2 and 3) and find broadly similar results with the exception of colonial status, which has a positive and statistically significant effect on male literacy in Model 2, but no effect on female literacy in Model 3. The coefficient for Christianity is substantially higher in the female literacy Model 3 as compared to the overall literacy Model 1. For every 1% increase in the share of converts, there is a .157% increase in the share of female literates. In Models 4–6 for overall, male, and female literacy, we exclude the variables that were not significant in the above models. We note that the coefficient for Christianity remains virtually unchanged. Comparing the male and female literacy models, we see that while directly ruled territories seemed to have experienced beneficial effects of colonial rule on male literacy, there are no discernible effects on female literacy. This result echoes colonial scholarship on the utilitarian approach of the British to human capital: unlike missionaries, who were keen on social reform, colonial officials were narrowly concerned with training male officialdom to service industries or staff the Raj (Oddie 1999; Weiner 1991). Because we had to exclude some districts from the panel data analysis due to missing data, as a further robustness check on the findings on colonialism and literacy we perform a two-sample t-test on state-level data, with 38 observations corresponding to all territories listed in the 1931 census, the most comprehensive one prior to India’s independence (Table 2). For literacy, the mean literacy rate7 was 117.5 for the 15 directly administered territories and 88.4 for the 22 princely states and agencies.8 Both groups have a standard deviation of 84.0. The first group of British territories has a higher average literacy rate than the second group. The two-sample t-test revealed, however, that there

7 As measured per mille for individuals aged five and over. 8 There was one missing value for princely states and agencies and one for provinces.

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was no statistically significant difference in the mean rates for the two groups, and we fail to reject the null of equal means with a p-value of 0.16. Were British territories more likely to be more Christian? The mean rate for Christianity was 179.0 per 10,000 persons for the directly administered territories and 538.0 for the princely states and agencies. Thus, the first group of territories under British sovereignty has a lower average share of Christian populations than the second group. The variation in both groups was very dissimilar, with the first group of directly administered territories having a standard deviation of 132.0 and the second group having a value of 1036.4. The Levine’s test, which seeks to test the hypothesis that group variances are equal, has a significance value of 0.001, which refutes the null hypothesis that the variances are not significantly different. The two-sample t-test was again employed to compare the two groups of territories. Unlike in the first case of literacy, this difference in the variation within the two groups has to be taken into consideration. Therefore, the t-test employs the assumption of unequal variances. The test revealed that there is statistically significant difference in the mean rates for the two groups with a p-value of 0.07. These results indicate that directly administered territories did not have, on average, higher literacy rates. On the other hand, on average, these territories had a lower share of Christian populations. They are also more homogenous in terms of shares of Christians as compared to the heterogeneity in the princely states and agencies, as can be seen from the standard deviations reported above.9 We note that these results do not suggest educational achievement, as measured by literacy, is independent of the shares of Christians present as the t-test only looks at difference in average levels. By contrast, in the regression setting, the impacts of varying levels of Christianity on varying levels of literacy are assessed, and thus we are able to identify the effect of Christianity on literacy on the overall average. Postcolonial Period Next, we seek to ascertain the effects of colonial-era missionary activity on democracy in the postcolonial period. Again, we specify log-linear models, which we estimate using both the GEE and fixed-effects estimators. In particular, we hypothesize ldemoit = αi + xitβ + εit, i = 1… N, t = 1… T. As before, α and β are model parameters, and ε is random noise. Idemo is the log of the democracy measure

9 We performed similar tests for Christianity for 1901, 1911, and 1921 and found the results comparable with an increasing upward trend over time in the averages for both groups.

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while x is a matrix of explanatory variables, including the key independent variable literacy and the control variables of South, colonial status, Muslim, manufacturing, and scheduled castes and tribes. Because for the dependent variable democracy, we have two moving average scores corresponding to the 1970s–1980s and 1980s–1990s electoral periods, the panel dataset consists of 540 observations and 270 groups. Summary statistics and bivariate correlation matrix for these data are presented in SI Tables 3 and 4. The regressions results are presented in Table 3, Models 7–9. In the PA Model 7, overall literacy has a statistically significant and positive effect on democracy. For every 1% increase in literates, there is a .073% increase in the democracy score. The variables South and Islam also have a positive and statistically significant effect on democracy. For instance, Southern states are 9% more democratic than their counterparts. Colonial status and scheduled castes and tribes are not statistically significant. In the next two male and female PA literacy Models 8 and 9, these results hold except that manufacturing is significant in the male literacy Model 8 and the coefficients for literacy are slightly lower in both the male and female literacy Models 8 and 9. Next, we seek to better ascertain the path-dependent effects of colonial status and Christianity on post-colonial literacy. States vary in the amount of expenditure on education coming from various sources; some of the heavily Christianized Northeastern states with high literacy levels (SI Figures 2 and 3) in particular have been recipients of large national fiscal transfers, which could aid educational development. These effects have to be taken into account. We also ought to distinguish between postcolonial changes in the share of Christians (recent spatial variations in Christianity are illustrated in SI Figure 3) and colonial-era missionary activity, given that our hypothesized channels of influence on literacy are the missionary-laid and -influenced human capital foundations in the colonial period. We estimate additional PA Models 10–13 (Table 4). We hypothesize that although postcolonial share of Christian adherents is likely to positively affect postcolonial literacy, colonialera foundations have a path-dependent effect on postcolonial literacy. We begin by estimating the effects on postcolonial literacy of colonial status, South, lagged values of share of Christians in the postcolonial period, Islam, educational expenditures, and scheduled castes and tribes.10 Model 10 shows that postcolonial Christianity has a positive and statistically significant effect on literacy. For every 1% increase in Christians, literacy increases by .006%. 10

Manufacturing could not be included in the models alongside educational expenditures because of high positive correlation between the two variables.

902 table 3

LANKINA AND GETACHEW GEE Postcolonial period models 7–9, 540 observations, 270 groups

Democracy model 7

Democracy model 8

Variables

Coefficient estimates

Standard error

Variables

Coefficient estimates

Standard error

Literacy South Colonial Status Muslim Manufacturing Caste & Tribes Constant

0.073 0.096 −0.017 0.006 0.021 −0.010 3.478

0.024** 0.025** 0.022 0.002** 0.016 0.008 0.093**

Male Literacy South Colonial Status Muslim Manufacturing Caste & Tribes Constant

0.067 0.094 −0.017 0.005 0.040 −0.008 3.507

0.040* 0.025** 0.022 0.002** 0.015** 0.008 0.148**

Democracy Model 9 Variables

Coefficient estimates

Female Literacy 0.066 South 0.084 Colonial Status −0.021 Muslim 0.006 Constant 3.579

Standard error 0.022** 0.026** 0.022 0.002** 0.064**

With the exception of dummy variables, all variables have been logged. ** statistically significant at the 5% level and * at the 10% level.

Colonial status, South, and educational expenditures have a statistically significant and positive effect on literacy, while Islam and scheduled castes and tribes have a statistically significant and negative impact on literacy. In the next PA literacy Model 11 where we substitute postcolonial Christianity with Christianity in 1931, we find that it has a statistically significant positive effect on postcolonial literacy, and the coefficient is considerably higher as compared to that for postcolonial Christianity in the previous Model 10. For every 1% increase in the share of Christians in 1931, there is a .052 increase in postcolonial literates. South is not statistically significant, which suggests that in Model 10 it may have been proxying the effect of 1931 Christianity. The other variables perform as in the previous model, and their coefficients remain virtually unchanged except for that of colonial status, which drops from .16 to .073. When

903

Mission or Empire, Word or Sword ? table 4

GEE Postcolonial period models 10–13, 527 observations, 264 groups

Literacy model 10

Literacy model 11

Variables

Coefficient estimates

Standard error

Variables

Coefficient estimates

Standard error

Christianity South Colonial Status Muslim Education Expenditures Caste & Tribes Constant

0.006 0.210 0.160 −0.006 0.163

0.003* 0.048** 0.043** 0.002** 0.006**

0.052 0.066 0.073 −0.007 0.165

0.009** 0.052 0.043* 0.002** 0.006**

−0.035 3.788

0.014** 0.056**

Christianity 31 South Colonial Status Muslim Education Expenditures Caste & Tribes Constant

−0.038 3.944

0.013** 0.060**

Male literacy model 12

Female literacy model 13

Variables

Coefficient estimates

Standard error

Variables

Coefficient estimates

Standard error

Christianity 31 South Colonial Status Muslim Education Expenditures Caste & Tribes Constant

0.033 0.031 0.076 −0.004 0.137

0.007** 0.042 0.034** 0.002** 0.005**

0.094 0.136 0.082 −0.011 0.232

0.013** 0.081* 0.066 0.003** 0.009**

−0.034 3.588

0.011** 0.049**

Christianity 31 South Colonial Status Muslim Education Expenditures Caste & Tribes Constant

−0.056 2.703

0.020** 0.092**

With the exception of dummy variables, all variables have been logged. ** statistically significant at the 5% level and * at the 10% level. These models are estimated with 264 groups and 527 observations due to missing data on educational expenditure for Kashmir’s districts.

we run the model by gender, in the male literacy Model 12, both Christianity and colonial status are positive and statistically significant, while in the female literacy Model 13, colonial status is not statistically significant and the coefficient of .094 for 1931 Christianity is substantially higher than that of .033 in the male literacy Model 12. The South is not statistically significant in the male literacy Model 12.

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These models suggest that Christianity has a positive effect on literacy, female literacy in particular, and that it also has a robust association with democratic outcomes. At the same time, we find that British colonial institutions captured by our colonial status variable matter for male education, but not for female education outcomes. British colonial institutions do appear to have indirect effects on democracy. Our models show that male literacy outcomes were better in British India, and, as we have established, literacy in turn has strong democracy effects. When it comes to direct effects on local democracy, human capital trumps British institutions, however. These results were confirmed when additional robustness checks were performed with only key variables of interest (reported in SI Table 8). Our analysis echoes recent scholarship, which interrogates the assumptions of positive links between British colonialism and democracy. Chaudhary found that the Brahmin-dominated local government institutions that the British set up in directly ruled states did not consistently promote literacy, while the lower caste and tribal groups were too marginalized to secure higher expenditures on education (Chaudhary 2009). Iyer found that directly ruled territories had fewer schools in the post-colonial period than those under native rule because the British tended to invest into agriculture while neglecting human capital (Iyer 2010). And Banerjee and Iyer’s groundbreaking study has shown that some land tenure systems that the British put in place in India have had negative effects on postcolonial public goods provision (Banerjee and Iyer 2005).

Mission and Empire in Education and Democracy in India

The historical survey and two case studies presented in this section further illuminate the role of missionaries in education, as distinct from that of colonial powers and the effects of their education initiatives on colonial and postcolonial democracy. For much of the British Raj, colonial policy in education was colored by Orientalism and Victorian-era elitist “downward filtration” theories. Stellar centers of advanced learning were founded for the propagation of Oriental knowledge, but limited to the Hindu and Muslim elite (Nurullah and Naik 1951; Oddie 1999). A turning point was the 1854 Education Dispatch. It provided for a grants-in-aid system whereby private, including missionary, schools received subsidy; the government also committed itself to broadening vernacular education to include all groups in society (Nurullah and Naik 1951). Nevertheless, colonial policy in education had come to be regarded as a failure.

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In 1916, less than 3% of the population of British India had received elementary education (Commission of Inquiry 1920). The few fee-paying government schools were not accessible to the socially marginal (Oddie 1999); most of the grants-in-aid were provided to higher-class schools to the financial neglect of basic education; and the education system was largely geared towards the training of an indigenous male elite to staff colonial bureaucracy (Bellenoit 2007). Between 1835and 1931, national literacy rates had gone down by an estimated .5%, while a more optimistic estimate is that they increased by a mere 1.75% (Nurullah and Naik 1951). Much of the education initiative came from Christian missionaries, who were often harassed by colonial officials fearing anti-Western social unrest (Bellenoit 2007; Mani 1998; Porter 1999). Scholars trace the origins of mass literacy to Evangelical conversions of untouchable groups by Danish missionaries in the South in the early eighteenth century. This work inspired successive generations of Western Protestant missionaries, who were part of a modern ecumenical and transnational movement in reformist Christianity of the eighteenth–early twentieth centuries bent on the worldwide propagation of the Gospel (Frykenberg 2003; Stanley 1990). The work of these missions differed from that of earlier Eastern Christian communities and those associated with Portuguese and French conquests (Frykenberg 2003). Education became central to Protestant missionaries’ work because of their faith in its social reform potential and the need to provide converts with the tools for understanding the Gospel. Despite the elitism of some, Protestant missionaries were known for their abhorrence of the caste system; most converts were drawn from lower caste and tribal groups eager to escape the oppression of their status. Missionary education also had multiple democratic implications, though one would be hard-pressed to find direct references to democracy in mission work (Stanley 1990). Protestant missionaries in particular stressed the potential benefits of Christian schooling by associating it with science and economic progress (Bellenoit 2007; Sengupta 2003; Woodberry 2004). They were among the first to adapt progressive Western ideas on pedagogy, such as the “object theory” of the Swiss educator Johann Pestalozzi. According to this method, students were encouraged to link objects to ideas and thereby develop abstract reasoning and critical thinking (Sengupta 2003). Admittedly, some missionaries crudely juxtaposed Protestantism’s abstract reasoning to the ostensibly “childish” object thinking that they associated with Hindu idols (Mani 1998; Sengupta 2003). Nevertheless, in promoting critical thinking, reflective debate on the moral and spiritual foundations of Indian and Christian faiths, and mass literacy in the vernaculars that enabled a personal interpretation of texts, Protestant schooling was a far cry from rote memorization and the feeding of

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“ready-made answers” (Sengupta 2003, 102) characteristic of both established Western and native schooling systems (Bellenoit 2007; Mani 1998). Mission schools also served as hubs for missionary organizational activity that contributed to the development of civil society and political activism. Protestant missions taught the notion that an individual’s salvation is bound with his or her community (Mayhew 1968). Mission teachers, often through personal example, propagated the humanistic values of the public sphere, public morality, and “effective knowledge” that focused more on action than doctrine (Bellenoit 2007, 87); they challenged Indian pupils to pursue such social projects as medical aid, child welfare, and adult literacy (Sushil 2009). Unlike in British government schools, which often preserved caste segregation to avoid upsetting higher-caste sensibilities, missionaries insisted on communal and caste integration in their schools and hostels. They thereby contributed to unifying tendencies which scholars have linked to the development of Indian political consciousness (Bellenoit 2007). The vernacular education that missionaries pioneered—they compiled dictionaries and grammar textbooks for scores of languages—likewise had democracy implications (Mayhew 1968). Missionary presses in the vernaculars became active sites of polemics on social progress (Woodberry 2004). Two princely states, Travancore and Baroda, now in Kerala and Gujarat, further illustrate the importance of missions for education and democracy. These states, similar in many ways, also both boasted progressive education policies. Yet, while Kerala has achieved universal literacy and is among the most democratic of Indian states, Gujarat has lagged behind (SI Tables 14 and 15). Located close to coastal trade routes of Malabar and the Persian Gulf, the two states had been crucial nodes in the commercial links between Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia (Kooiman 2002). In the nineteenth century, their rulers entered into semiautonomous British paramountcy arrangements common for princely territories at the time (Kooiman 2002). In neither state did the British assume responsibility for native education. Mission presence, however, had been massive in Travancore and negligible in Baroda. The same could be said for the other parts of the state of Kerala formed in 1956, Cochin, and the Malayalam-speaking Malabar regions, formerly part of the Madras Presidency. In terms of Christian penetration, they contrasted with the princely and Bombay Presidency districts, merged in 1960 to form the state of Gujarat. While Kerala is representative of a Southern state where missions have a centuries-long history—Tamil Nadu would be another example—Gujarat is an example of a Northern state with a historically weak mission presence.11 11 Substantial variation existed in missionary penetration within South India as well. Mysore, whose literacy lagged behind Travancore and Cochin, had a weak Christian

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Our selection of otherwise comparable cases, which are, however, situated at polar ends of the continuum of mission activity, would thus also illustrate how missions may have influenced some of the hitherto observed North-South variations in human capital and democracy (Subramanian 1999; Varshney 2000). Travancore and Kerala Travancore has fascinated scholars for its enlightened native policy in education (Desai 2005; Mathew 1999). In 1817, its female ruler, the Rani Gouri Parvathi Bhai, issued an edict commanding “that the state should defray the entire cost of the education of its people in order that there might be no backwardness in the spread of enlightenment among them” (Travancore, Census of India 1931, 301). In practice, groups comprising the vast majority of Travancore’s population remained excluded from these initiatives—the untouchables, tribal communities, and women. Now lauded as socially egalitarian and progressive, at the time Travancore was “a highly conservative, hierarchical, and caste-ridden society” (Mathew 1999, 2817). Although a small percent of Brahmin and other high-status women had access to education, most women and the lower-status groups remained overwhelmingly illiterate (Mathew 1999). Evangelical missionaries were the first to introduce modern primary education to the backward castes and women. Kerala stands out in terms of the scope of this effort because of the historical record of indigenized Syrian Christianity, which dates back to at least the fourth century AD and is associated with privileged groups in Kerala society constituting nearly a third of the state’s population. The Syrians maintained caste hierarchy in church practice, while the limited accessibility of the liturgical language Syriac to the learned few reinforced the historical association of Syrian Christianity with elite groups (Frykenberg 2003). Despite differences in doctrine and practice, the Syrian Church played a pivotal role in the establishment and spread of Evangelical Protestant missions (Bayly 1989; Kooiman 2002). The Evangelicals’ abhorrence of the caste system over time led to divisions among Syrian Christians, many of whom associated themselves with Protestants, forming the Mar Thoma Church, while others, the orthodox Jacobites, retained traditional allegiance to the Eastern Church (Bayly 1989; Kooiman 2002). The Church Missionary Society (CMS) and the London Missionary Society (LMS) led the effort to eradicate illiteracy among disadvantaged groups (SI Table 13). By 1920, CMS and LMS ran some 700, or 27%, of the 2,581 schools presence compared to Travancore although it was influenced by missionary activity (such as missionary vernacular press in Kannada language) of the other neighboring territories in the Madras Presidency.

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(Mathew 1999). Missionaries were the first to bring the low-status communities, until 1910 not allowed into government schools, into the educational system. Mission schools were recognized as providing better-quality education and hence a preferred educational option for caste Hindus as well (Desai 2005; Mathew 1999). In a hitherto rigidly stratified society with its barriers to interaction between caste Hindus and the untouchables, this provided incentives for the eventual tolerance of integration. Missions also led the way in the eradication of female illiteracy. The first mission girls’ school was set up in 1819, while the first native school for girls was opened decades later, in 1859, and it was a Brahmin girls’ only school. The missionaries also set up the first girls’ teacher training school in 1848. In 1903–04, of the 182 girls’ schools, the majority were missionary-run (Mathew 1999). Some colonial officials, like the fervent Christian Resident of Travancore and Cochin (1810–19) Colonel John Munro, actively aided mission work. It is the missionaries, however, who took the lead and consistently promoted education transcending short-term support of individual native or British rulers (Bayly 1989; Frykenberg 2003). Mass literacy in turn fed the growing demand for printing press. Until the end of the nineteenth century, Travancore’s only newspaper was a missionary publication (Imperial Gazetteer 1908). By the 1930s, Travancore boasted over 100 periodicals (Kooiman 2002). A mass reading public in turn contributed to that other famous Kerala institution, the reading club, originally set up as a political and social discussion forum by caste associations and now lauded as an indicator of the vibrancy of Kerala’s democracy (Desai 2005; Varshney 2002). By the late nineteenth century, educational expansion led to greater social awareness among lower-status groups, spurring social reform movements (Dirks 2001; Hardgrave 1970). Their leaders, like the founder in 1903 of the Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana (SNDP) Yogam, a beneficiary of LMS training, deplored the continued denial of government education to his fellow ezhavas (Mathew 1999). The caste Hindus also started lobbying the government to open more lower-caste Hindu schools to stem the tide of Christian conversions (Bayly 1989; Oddie 2003). Social pressures from both the backward groups and the privileged Hindu and Christian elements in 1909–10 forced the government to adopt an Education Code, which called for setting up schools “without distinction of class or creed” (cited in Desai 2005, 471). By 1929–30, only 12 of Travancore’s recognized 3,641 schools excluded the untouchables (Mathew 1999).12 12 North-South caste peculiarities are usually discussed as key factors affecting the nature and scope of social mobilization (Subramanian 1999; Varshney 2000). Compared to

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Postcolonial governments appropriated and built on this legacy, placing educational equality at the center of Kerala’s developmental agenda. Kerala’s private schools, many of which trace their origins to the colonial period, had also come to constitute powerful lobbies shaping state policy in education (Desai 2005; Mathew 1999; Nossiter 1982). Baroda and Gujarat Pioneering and ambitious educational reform was also pursued in Baroda. Yet, while Kerala entered the twenty-first century boasting universal literacy, Gujarat, including the Baroda districts, had lagged behind Kerala. The missing elements in Baroda were (1) a sociocultural change in values and attitudes towards education for women and the “backward” groups brought about by missionary involvement; and (2) an integrated public school system which would ensure the durability and intergenerational transmission of mass access to literacy. Christianity had no historical roots in Baroda; even at the height of Evangelical proselytizing in colonial India, Christians constituted less than 1%. Baroda’s rulers did not permit the operation of missionaries on its territory (Kooiman 2002). Between 1921 and 1931, there had been a 2.1% decline in the share of Baroda’s Christians against a 25.4% increase India-wide (Census 1931). Baroda’s education had been pioneered by the enlightened ruler Sayaji Rao Gaekhwad. In 1906, the Prince adopted a law on compulsory free schooling for boys and girls (Bhagavan 2003). By 1946, the state boasted 2,563 government primary and 41 secondary schools. Provisions were also made for backward castes’ access to schooling (Imperial Gazetteer 1908; Kooiman 2002). Why then did Baroda, despite the compulsory nature of its system, succeed in having far fewer literates than Travancore, where education was voluntary? Baroda’s apparent success conceals within-group discrepancies in access to North India, a larger share of the populations in the South had been in the lower-caste “polluting” category both in status and treatment that they received from higher caste groups (Rudolph and Rudolph 1967). The caste factor in itself would not have been sufficient to spur lower-caste mobilization for social advancement. Even scholars who have highlighted the role of caste in the South in promoting lower-caste social mobilization acknowledge that, for instance, in Tamil Nadu, where colonial policy in employment and education disproportionately favored the Brahmin caste, missionaries were the first to incorporate anti-Brahminism into a systematic ideology that also stressed the more socially inclusive Dravidian identity (Subramanian 1999, 82, 89). Missionary work with lower-status groups could be, therefore, regarded as a contributing factor in fuelling caste consciousness (Dirks 2001; Hardgrave 1970; Rudolph and Rudolph 1967; Subramanian 1999).

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education and literacy retention over time, with Christians by far surpassing the Hindus and Muslims (SI Table 12 and annotations). Unlike in Travancore, Baroda’s Christian population represented a tiny minority. The American Methodist Episcopalian Church, which between 1895 and 1906 scored close to 14,000 Gujarati converts (Hardiman 2007), did not have the option of building alliances with a nonexistent native Christian Church. Christian schooling in Baroda could thus have marginal effects on existent socioeconomic inequalities. Reaching out to far fewer people, it failed to spur a mass-based grassroots movement of social reform, and the development of such democratic values as civic consciousness and caste and religious tolerance characteristic of Travancore. The Hindu organisation Arya Samaj, formed to combat Christian missionary influence, became the key nonstate educational provider in Baroda, patronized by the native ruler. Militant anti-Christian, anti-Muslim Hinduism plagued its education policy with numerous contradictions (Hardiman 2007; Jones 1968). While apparently embracing modern and inclusive education, the Samaj advocated the sole usage of Vedic texts. Although it voiced support for backward caste education, it infused its work with rituals of purity echoing caste hierarchies. Despite the proclaimed goal of women’s education, some of the Samaj groups exclusively focused on the education of Hindu boys (Hardiman 2007). Mahatma Gandhi, who returned to Gujarat in 1915, attracted some of the moderate Samaj groups into his social movement; the Samaj militant wing remained strong, however, and was responsible in the 1920s for a string of Hindu-Muslim riots. The Samaj legacy has been in evidence throughout Gujarat’s postcolonial history. By the 1980s, the state acquired nation-wide notoriety as a seat of caste and religious violence (People’s Union for Civil Liberties [PUCL] 2007; Sushil 2009). In 1954, Gujarat outlawed private schools and took over the few surviving mission schools, thereby eliminating Christian presence in the educational system. Much like the Samaj with its Vedic texts, government functionaries rarely learned vernacular non-Gujarati languages to facilitate outreach to the underprivileged groups in the same way that missionaries did. The mediocre quality of state education by the 1970s led some local councils to invite missionaries to set up a handful of Christian schools in the most deprived areas (Sushil 2009). One hundred years into Baroda’s educational reform, the inequalities in access to education continue to be reproduced (Hirway and Mahadevia 2002; Sushil 2009) (SI Table 14). And, in what is a marked contrast to moderate politics in Kerala which had long accepted caste integration (Varshney 2002), the

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lower-status groups have been targets of violence in response to government policies of affirmative action in jobs and schooling (PUCL 2007). The association between education and democracy is more systematically explored, and additional robustness checks on the democracy measure performed, in SI (Tables 15 and 16 and annotations). Conclusion Our analysis has demonstrated that colonial-era missionary activity is an important influence on human capital in Indian states. There are also clear links between mission work and democracy in postcolonial India. One straightforward and easily quantifiable causal factor linking Christianity to democracy in India is literacy. Missionaries set up the foundations for a more literate, and hence more competent, electorate. Literacy, however, is but one among a number of factors related to missionary involvement that contributed to the democratization of the electorate. Protestant mission curricula, which included modern subjects and put a premium on critical and abstract thinking, was a departure from uncritical rote memorization of classical texts characteristic of traditional schooling in both metropolitan and colonial settings. It helped equip the most downtrodden—women, the lower caste, tribal, and untouchable groups—with practical skills and confidence to escape the clutches of a hierarchy that had kept them at the bottom. The inclusivity of mission schooling alone had a devastating effect on existent social inequalities. In turn, this practice, along with the missionaries’ message of brotherly love, equality of all before God, and responsibility for the welfare of the community, contributed to the development of social activism. Mission activity also stimulated a defensive reaction among native groups threatened by conversions and demanding that native governments provide schooling of similar quality. Where missions had been active, mission schooling thus had human capital, social mobilization, and civic activism effects extending far beyond the community of converts. This account differs from what had become conventional truisms on why some Indian states and not others boast better literacy and democracy outcomes. We are able to demonstrate that the causal links between Christianity, education, and democracy hold throughout India. We therefore challenge the validity of the oft-repeated association between such state-specific factors as communist government, matriliny, or progressive native rulers as central to the success of some states like Kerala in combating illiteracy, elevating the

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status of women, and maintaining quality democratic governance (Bhagavan 2003; Heller 2000; Jeffrey 1987). We also interrogate the causal effect on social mobilization and democracy of such broader factors as the historically determined peculiarities of caste structure in the South (Subramanian 1999; Varshney 2000). While we do not negate the importance of such state- or region-specific factors, our analysis suggests that their effects may have been exaggerated because of omitted variable bias. This is an intriguing omission. Despite overwhelming historical evidence of the prominent role of missions in colonial India, we are not aware of comparative analyses of democracy and development in Indian states that have systematically studied their effects along with such conventionally employed variables as caste, communalism, state party systems, or socioeconomic factors. Our work, however, has much wider implications for comparative scholarship transcending the debates on the determinants of national and subnational democracy in India. Our analysis should help refocus the emphasis of much of the scholarship on colonialism from colonial powers to other actors operating in colonial domains. We also draw attention to the hitherto undertheorized human capital dimension of colonialism, which is distinct from the institutional focus of much of the existing scholarship. Although as our statistical analysis shows, British rule may have had indirect effects on democracy through the human capital variable of male literacy, we also demonstrate that better literacy outcomes are more consistently attributable to missionary involvement than to British colonial institutions. This is because unlike colonial effects, which are limited to male literacy, Christianity has had consistently strong effects on both male and female literacy outcomes. We found no evidence of direct links between British rule and democratic outcomes in Indian states. In India’s subnational contexts, the human capital effects of colonialism therefore trump its institutional effects. Admittedly, subnational evidence from one British colony does not negate the findings on the ostensibly beneficial literacy and democracy effects of British colonialism in cross-national studies, although it does help explain some of the ambiguities in their findings. In terms of neglect of basic, particularly female, education, other colonial powers may well have performed even more dismally than the British. At the same time, national-level parliamentary institutions that the British set up in their colonies are likely to be more important for democracy than the embryonic popular representation bodies that they set up at the subnational level. Our methodological strategy does not

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allow us to establish to what extent such institutions are superior to those of other colonial powers in terms of lasting democracy effects. Nevertheless, we still do not know whether British colonialism comes out in a favorable light because of British colonial institutional and human capital factors, or because of the nature of missionary endeavors in British colonies. Robert Woodberry’s masterful analysis of missionary activity worldwide suggests that it is the latter, largely neglected, factor that helps explain at least some of the observed variation between British and other European colonies. The nature of Britain’s church-state relationships, domestic liberal climate, and free press facilitated Protestant missionary activity in the colonies (Woodberry 2004; Woodberry, forthcoming). The emphasis on domestic factors is distinct from accounts that equate missions with colonialism—the vibrancy of British democracy at home and the strength of revivalist Protestant movements simply made it impossible for colonial officialdom to undermine mission work even when it went against colonial objectives. Our research therefore mirrors revisionist scholarship (Bellenoit 2007; Frykenberg 2003; Porter 1999) in that it questions the conventional narrative of mission-empire links. It also interrogates recent influential works, which downplay missionary effects independent of imperial policy. Thus, Abernethy sees missionaries as part of a “triple assault” of imperial, commercial, and religious “workhorses of empire,” whose combined efforts directly or indirectly aided Western colonial expansion (Abernethy 2000, 226). While admitting that congregational autonomy of Protestant churches in particular often precluded the fusion of imperial and missionary interest, he highlights the role of missions in training colonial administrators with a “compliant demeanour,” socialized as collaborators and possessing skills like numeracy and literacy valuable for colonial bureaucracies (Abernethy 2000, 234). Although we do not deny that in some settings, mission work directly or indirectly aided colonialism, our research highlights missionaries’ role in creating a democratic citizen, equipped with skills to challenge hierarchy and authority—colonial or native—and contribute thereby to a vibrant democratic process. References Abernethy, David B. 2000. The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European Overseas Empires, 1415–1980. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Acemoglu, Daron, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson. 2001. “The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation.” American Economic Review 91(5): 1369–1401. Acemoglu, Daron, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson. 2002. “Reversal of Fortune: Geography and Institutions in the Making of the Modern World Income.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 117(4): 1231–94. Adcock, Robert, and David Collier. 2001. “Measurement Validity: A Shared Standard for Qualitative and Quantitative Research.” American Political Science Review 95(3): 529–46. Altman, David, and Anibal Perez-Linan. 2002. “Assessing the Quality of Democracy: Freedom, Competitiveness and Participation in Eighteen Latin American Countries.” Democratization 9(2): 85–100. Arat, Zehra F. 1991. Democracy and Human Rights in Developing Countries. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Banerjee, A., and Iyer, L. 2005. “History, Institutions, and Economic Performance: The Legacy of Colonial Land Tenure Systems in India.” American Economic Review 95(4): 1190–1213. Barro, Bobert. 1991. “Economic Growth in a Cross—Section of Countries.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 106(2): 407–43. Barro, Robert J. 1999. “Determinants of Democracy.” Journal of Political Economy 107(6): 158–83. Bayly, Susan. 1989. Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society, 1700–1900. New York: Cambridge University Press. Beer, Caroline, and Neil J. Mitchell. 2006. “Comparing Nations and States: Human Rights and Democracy in India.” Comparative Political Studies 39(8): 996–1018. Beetham, David. 2004. “Towards a Universal Framework for Democracy Assessment.” Democratization 11(2): 1–17. Bellenoit, Hayden J. A. 2007. Missionary Education and Empire in Late Colonial India, 1860–1920. London: Pickering and Chatto. Berg-Schlosser, Dirk, ed. 2007. Democratization: The State of the Art. 2nd ed. Opladen, Germany: Barbara Budrich. Bernhard, Michael, Christopher Reenock, and Timothy Nordstrom. 2004. “The Legacy of Western Overseas Colonialism on Democratic Survival.” International Studies Quarterly 48(1): 225–50. Bhagavan, Manu Belur. 2003. Sovereign Spheres: Princes, Education, and Empire in Colonial India. Delhi, India: Oxford University Press. Blouet, Olwyn Mary. 1990. “Slavery and Freedom in the British West Indies, 1823–33: The Role of Education.” History of Education Quarterly 30(4): 625–43.

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Social Transformations among Weaker Sections, ed. Takashi Shinoda. Mumbai, India: Popular Prakashan Pvt. Ltd., 347–73. Huntington, Samuel P. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster. Hutton, J. H. 1933. Census of India, 1931. Vol. I. Delhi, India: Manager of Publications. The Imperial Gazetteer of India. 1908. The Imperial Gazetteer of India. Vol. VII. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Inglehart, Ronald, and Christian Welzel. 2005. Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy: The Human Development Sequence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Irschick, Eugene F. 1989. “Order and Disorder in Colonial South India.” Modern Asian Studies 23(3): 459–92. Iyer, Lakshmi. 2010. “Direct versus Indirect Colonial Rule in India: Long-Term Consequences.” Review of Economics and Statistics 92(4): 693–713. Jackman, Robert W. 1973. “On the Relation of Economic Development to Democratic Performance.” American Journal of Political Science 17(1): 1–21. Jeffrey, Robin. 1987. “Governments and Culture: How Women Made Kerala Literate.” Pacific Affairs 60(3): 447–72. Jones, Kenneth W. 1968. “Communalism in the Punjab: The Arya Samaj Contribution.” Journal of Asian Studies 28(1): 39–54. Kamens, David H. 1988. “Education and Democracy: A Comparative Institutional Analysis.” Sociology of Education 61 (2): 114–27. Kooiman, Dick. 2002. Communalism and Indian Princely States: Travancore, Baroda and Hyderabad in the 1930s. New Delhi, India: Manohar. Kothari, Rajni. 1970. Caste in Indian Politics. New Delhi, India: Orient Longman. Krishna, Anirudh. 2008. “Introduction: Poor People and Democracy.” In Poverty, Participation, and Democracy: A Global Perspective, ed. Anirudh Krishna. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1–27. Landes, David S. 1998. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor. New York: W. W. Norton. Lange, Matthew K. 2004. “British Colonial Legacies and Political Development.” World Development 32(6): 905–22. Lerner, Daniel. 1958. The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Lijphart, Arend. 1996. “The Puzzle of Indian Democracy: A Consociational Interpretation.” American Political Science Review 90(2): 258–68.

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Lipset, Seymour Martin. 1959. “Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy.” American Political Science Review 53(1): 69–105. Lipset, Seymour Martin. 1963. “The Value Patterns of Democracy: A Case Study in Comparative Analysis.” American Sociological Review 28(4): 515–31. Lipset, Seymour Martin, Kyoung-Ryung Seong, and John Charles Torres. 1993. “A Comparative Analysis of the Social Requisites of Democracy.” International Social Science Journal 45(May): 155–75. Mamdani, Mahmood. 1997. Citizen and Subject: Decentralized Despotism and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Delhi, India: Oxford University Press. Mani, Lata. 1998. Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mathew, E. T. 1999. “Growth of Literacy in Kerala: State Intervention, Missionary Initiatives and Social Movements.” Economic and Political Weekly 34(39): 2811–20. Mayhew, A. I. 1968. “The Christian Ethic and India.” In Modern India and the West: A Study of the Interaction of Their Civilizations, ed. L. S. S. O’Malley. London: Oxford University Press, 305–37. Menon, V. P. 1985. Integration of the Indian States. Hyderabad, India: Orient Longman. Nossiter, T. J. 1982. Communism in Kerala: A Study in Political Adaptation. London: Hurst. Nurullah, Syed, and J. P. Naik. 1951. A History of Education in India (During the British Period). Bombay, India: Macmillan. O’Donnell, Guillermo. 2001. “Illusions about Consolidation.” In The Global Divergence of Democracies, ed. Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 113–30. Oddie, Geoffrey A. 1999. Missionaries, Rebellion and Proto-Nationalism: James Long of Bengal, 1814–1887. Richmond, VA: Curzon Press. Oddie, Geoffrey A. 2003. “Constructing ‘Hinduism’: The Impact of the Protestant Missionary Movement on Hindu Self-Understanding.” In Christians and Missionaries in India: Cross-Cultural Communication since 1500, with Special Reference to Caste, Conversion, and Colonialism, ed. Robert Eric Frykenberg. London: Routledge Curzon, 155–82. Panikkar, K. N. 2007. Colonialism, Culture, and Resistance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. People’s Union for Civil Liberties. 2007. Vadodara Violence on Gujarat’s ‘Gaurav’ Day. New Delhi, India: Promilla. Porta, Rafael La, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, Andrei Shleifer, and Robert W. Vishny. 1998. The Quality of Government. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research.

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Porter, Andrew. 1999. “Religion, Missionary Enthusiasm, and Empire.” In The Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. Andrew Porter. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 222–46. Posner, Daniel N. 2003. “The Colonial Origins of Ethnic Cleavages: The Case of Linguistic Divisions in Zambia.” Comparative Politics 35(2): 127–46. Power, Timothy J., and Mark J. Gasiorowski. 1997. “Institutional Design and Democratic Consolidation in the Third World.” Comparative Political Studies 30(2): 123–55. Przeworski, Adam, Michael Alvarez, José Antonio Cheibub, and Fernando Limongi. 1996. “What Makes Democracies Endure?” Journal of Democracy 7(January): 39–55. Przeworski, Adam, Michael Alvarez, José Antonio Cheibub, and Fernando Limongi. 2000. Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Weil-Being in the World, 1950–1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rudolph, Lloyd I., and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph. 2008. “Regional Patterns of Education: Rimland and Heartland in Indian Education.” In The Realm of the Public Sphere: Identity and Policy, ed. Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 65–82. Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens. 1992. Capitalist Development and Democracy. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Schumpeter, Joseph A. 1950. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. New York: Harper and Row. Sen, Amartya. 1999. Development as Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sengupta, Parna. 2003. “An Object Lesson in Colonial Pedagogy.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45(1): 96–121. Singh, R. P., and Jayant Kumar Banthia. 2004. India Administrative Atlas, 1872–2001: A Historical Perspective of Evolution of Districts and States in India. Delhi, India: Controller of Publications. Sinha, Aseema. 2005. The Regional Roots of Developmental Politics in India: A Divided Leviathan. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Smith, Tony. 1978. “A Comparative Study of French and British Decolonization.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 20(January): 70–102. Sokoloff, Kenneth L., and Stanley L. Engerman. 2000. “History Lessons: Institutions, Factor Endowments, and Paths of Development in the New World.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 14(3): 217–32. Stanley, Brian. 1990. The Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Leicester, UK: Apollos. Subramanian, Narendra. 1999. Ethnicity and Populist Mobilization: Political Parties, Citizens, and Democracy in South India. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Sushil, Aaron J. 2009. “Emulating Azariah: Evangelicals and Social Change in the Dangs.” In Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Asia, ed. David Halloran Lumsdaine. Oxford, UK: Oxford Scholarship Online Monographs, 87–131. Travancore, Census of India 1931. Calcutta: Superintendent Government Press. Treisman, Daniel. 2000. “The Causes of Corruption: A Cross-national Study.” Journal of Public Economics 76(3): 399–457. Vanhanen, Tatu. 2007. “Vanhanen’s Index of Democracy.” http://www.prio.no/CSCW/ Datasets/Governance/Vanhanens-index-of-democracy/ (accessed June 16, 2010). Vanneman, Reeve, and Douglas Barnes. 2000. “Indian District Data, 1961–1991: MachineReadable Data File and Codebook.” College Park, MD: Center on Population, Gender, and Social Inequality. http://www.inform.umd.edu/~districts/index.html (accessed May 20, 2010). Varshney, Ashutosh. 2000. “Is India Becoming More Democratic?” Journal of Asian Studies 59(1): 3–25. Varshney, Ashutosh. 2002. Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Washbrook, David A. 1999. “India, 1818–1860: The Two Faces of Colonialism.” In The Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. Andrew Porter. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 395–421. Weiner, Myron. 1965. “India: Two Political Cultures.” In Political Culture and Political Development, ed. Lucian W. Pye and Sindey Verba. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 199–244. Weiner, Myron. 1991. The Child and the State in India: Child Labor and Education Policy in Comparative Perspective. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Weiner, Myron, and E. Ozbudun, eds. 1987. Competitive Elections in Developing Countries. Durham, NC: AEI/Duke. Wilkinson, Steven I. 2004. Votes and Violence: Electoral Competition and Ethnic Riots in India. New York: Cambridge University Press. Woodberry, Robert D. 2004. The Shadow of Empire: Christian Missions, Colonial Policy, and Democracy in Postcolonial Societies. Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Woodberry, Robert D. “Weber through the Back Door: Protestant Competition, Elite Power Dispersion, and the Global Spread of Democracy.” American Political Science Review. Forthcoming. Young, Crawford. 1994. The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Zorn, Christopher J. W. 2001. “Generalized Estimating Equation Models for Correlated Data: A Review with Applications.” American Journal of Political Science 45(2): 470–90.

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Supporting Information

Additional Supporting Information may be found in the online version of this article. Figure 1. Map of Colonial India, Imperial Gazetteer, 1907 Source: DSAL13 Figures 2, 3. District Literacy and Christianity, 1991 Source: Office of the Registrar General, 1991 Table 1. Summary Statistics, Colonial-Period Variables Table 2. Bivariate Correlations (Pearson), Colonial Period Variables (1921 and 1931 data) Table 3. Summary Statistics, Postcolonial Period Variables Table 4. Bivariate Correlations (Pearson), Postcolonial Period Variables Table 5. Fixed Effects Colonial-Period Models 1–3, 621 obs., 207 groups Table 6. Fixed Effects Postcolonial Period Models 4–6, 540 obs., 270 groups Table 7. Fixed Effects Postcolonial Period Models 7–10, 527 obs., 264 groups Table 8. Additional Robustness Checks, GEE Models 11a–13b Table 9. Christians by Race and Denomination (1901 Census) Table 10. Professional and Technical Teacher Training According to Religion, 1881–82, Report on Education Table 11. Distribution of Population According to Religion and Education, Census of 1911 Table 12. Literacy and Christianity in Baroda, Travancore, and Neighboring Princely and British Territories Table 13. Christian-run Schools, 1908, Travancore Table 14. District Profile. Source: Census of India 2001 Table 15. Electoral Outcomes, State Assembly, 1957–2007. Source: Author Compilation Table 16. Additional Robustness Checks for the Democracy Measure, 95 obs., 19 groups, GEE Model 14 Please note: Wiley-Blackwell is not responsible for the content or functionality of any supporting materials supplied by the authors. Any queries (other than missing material) should be directed to the corresponding author for the article. 13 Maps of colonial-era spatial variation by religion are available from Digital South Asia Library. http://dsal.uchicago.edu/reference/gaz_atlas_1909/pager.html?object=22 (June 10, 2010).

A Saturated History of Christianity and Cloth in Oceania Margaret Jolly

Tupela i marit?1: Christianity and Cloth

Cloth and Christianity have long been seen as intimate partners in Oceania. The introduction of manufactured cloth—cambric,2 calico, chintz, linen, serge and silk—from the mills of Manchester and New England and the workshops of China, the cultivation of the arts of sewing, quilting and embroidery and the adoption of Western-style clothing: modest dresses for women, demure trousers or laplaps for men, have all become iconic of Oceanic Christianity. Integral to the “before and after” story of indigenous conversion is the narrative of how Oceanic Christians “covered up” beautiful bare breasts, exposed bottoms or penises previously proudly displayed. In the eyes of some scholars and popular observers Oceanic people thus succumbed to the colonial power of a Western Victorian model of gender and sexuality, characterised by heterosexual monogamy, modesty and sexual repression and the celebration of a novel form of domesticity focused on the faithful wife and good mother. She was allegedly both creator and creature of a “home,” bearing and nurturing children, cooking, cleaning, washing, sewing. Many scholars have challenged and complicated such stories from the perspective of Europe, North America, Africa and Asia: revealing the class, national and regional specificities in the emergence of ideals of “domesticity”; demonstrating how the realities of working women’s lives differed markedly from any idealised demarcations of a masculine public Source: Jolly, M., “A Saturated History of Christianity and Cloth in Oceania,” in H. Choi and M. Jolly (eds.), Divine Domesticities: Christian Paradoxes in Asia and the Pacific, Canberra: ANU Press, 2014, pp. 429–454. The original article holds four illustrations of which two, figures 37 and 39, are not included here. The locations of those illustrations are marked with asterisk notes in the text. 1 This is a Bislama phrase which can be literally translated as “are the two married?” but which is used metaphorically to ask whether two things are conjugated. All words in Bislama, the pidgin lingua franca of Vanuatu are marked B., while those in Hawaiian are H. and those in Sa, the language of South Pentecost, S. 2 This fine, dense cloth also called batiste, was originally from Cambrai in Northern France, and was made from linen and later cotton.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/97890

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sphere and a feminine domestic sphere; arguing that these spheres were leaky rather than hermetically sealed.3 Resonating with such critical histories of domesticity in Europe, North America and Asia, there have been several attempts to interrogate the relevance of the Western concept of domesticity in Oceania and to subvert any simple story of Christian missionaries “domesticating” Pacific women.4 Increasingly, since the early studies of Patricia Grimshaw, Christine Ward Gailey, Martha Macintyre and myself, the poignant paradoxes of the missionary project have been exposed.5 Foreign missionary women although promoting a cult of “true

3 For example see Lenore Davidoff, “Gender and the ‘great divide’: public and private in British gender history,” Journal of Women’s History 15(1) (2003): 11–27; Lenore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987; Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda (eds), Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism, Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1998; Hyaeweol Choi, Gender and Mission Encounters in Korea: New Women, Old Ways, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009. 4 Margaret Jolly and Martha Macintyre, “Introduction,” in Family and Gender in the Pacific: Domestic Contradictions and the Colonial Impact, ed. Margaret Jolly and Martha Macintyre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, 1–18; Marilyn Strathern, “Domesticity and the denigration of women,” in Rethinking Women’s Roles in the Pacific, ed. Denise O’Brien and Sharon W. Tiffany, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, pp. 13–31; Holly Wardlow, Wayward Women: Sexuality and Agency in a New Guinea Society, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006; Wardlow, “Paradoxical intimacies: the Christian creation of the Huli domestic sphere” (this volume). 5 Patricia Grimshaw, “New England missionary wives, Hawaiian women and the ‘cult of true womanhood,’” Hawaiian Journal of History 19 (1985): 71–100; Grimshaw, Paths of Duty: American Missionary Wives in Nineteenth-Century Hawai’i, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1989; Grimshaw, “New England missionary wives, Hawaiian women and the ‘cult of true womanhood,’” in Family and Gender in the Pacific: Domestic Contradictions and the Colonial Impact, ed. Margaret Jolly and Martha Macintyre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 19–44, updated version of 1985; Christine Ward Gailey, Kinship to Kingship: Gender, Hierarchy and State Formation in the Tongan Islands, Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1987; Margaret Jolly and Martha Macintyre (eds), Family and Gender in the Pacific: Domestic Contradictions and the Colonial Impact, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989; Margaret Jolly, “‘To save the girls for brighter and better lives’: Presbyterian missions and women in the south of Vanuatu: 1848–1870,” The Journal of Pacific History 26(1) (1991): 27–48; Jolly, “Divided mothers: changing global inequalities of ‘nature’ and ‘nurture,’” in The Globalization of Motherhood: Deconstructions and Reconstructions of Biology and Care, ed. Jane Maree Maher and Wendy Chavkin, London and New York: Routledge, 2010, pp. 154– 79; Latu Latai, “Changing covenants in Samoa?: From Brothers and Sisters to Husbands and Wives?” forthcoming in Gender and Person in Oceania, ed. Anna-Karina Hermkens, Rachel Morgain and John Taylor, Oceania Special Issue, projected March 2015; Latai, “From open fale to mission houses: negotiating the boundaries of “domesticity” in Samoa” (this volume).

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womanhood”6 hardly embodied an idealised figure of dedicated wife and mother, as Latu Latai persuasively argues for the earliest London Missionary Society couples in Samoa.7 Moreover Samoan Christians did not so much adopt these models of domesticity but, as they converted and evangelised, adapted Christianity as part of fa’a Samoa.8 So too, in Vanuatu, I have argued that Christian missionary wives failed to embody the idealised figure of the wife-mother: indigenous women and girls assisted them as maids and nannies (B. haosgels); their children were often separated from them in hopes of sustaining their physical and spiritual health and purity; and they were focused on “uplifting women” not just through classes in domesticity but through literacy and education towards the vocations of teaching and nursing.9 Moreover, although Christian missionaries and indigenous converts early transformed patterns of gendered segregation of men’s houses and domestic dwellings and ended male initiations and ancestral cults, extended patterns of kinship, rather than nucleated families, perdured and Christian women continued to work hard gardening tubers, nurturing pigs, hauling wood and water, and plaiting pandanus alongside the “domestic” work of child care, cleaning, cooking, sewing and washing clothes.10 In this chapter I explore the domestic paradoxes of the missionary project by concentrating attention not on foreign missionary women but on indigenous women converts. I hope to further unsettle the simple story of the Christian “domestication” of Pacific women by looking at that icon of conversion: cloth. 6 Grimshaw, “New England missionary wives, Hawaiian women and the ‘cult of true womanhood.’” 7 Latai, “Changing covenants in Samoa”; Latai, “From open fale to mission houses,” (this volume). 8 See Latai, “From open fale to mission houses,” (this volume); and Latai, “Changing covenants in Samoa”; contra Gailey, Kinship to Kingship (for Tonga). See also Serge Tcherkézoff, “‘On cloth, gifts and nudity’ regarding some European misunderstandings during early encounters in Polynesia,” in Clothing the Pacific, ed. Chloë Colchester, Oxford and New York: Berg, 2003, pp. 51–75; Tcherkézoff, “Culture, nation, society: secondary change and fundamental transformation in Western Samoa: towards a model for the study of cultural dynamics,” in The Changing South Pacific: Identities and Transformations, ed. Serge Tcherkézoff and Françoise Douaire-Marsaudon, Canberra: Pandanus Books, 2005, pp. 245–301. 9 Jolly, “‘To save the girls for brighter and better lives’”; Jolly, “Divided mothers: changing global inequalities of ‘nature’ and ‘nurture.’” 10 Margaret Jolly, Women of the Place: Kastom, Colonialism and Gender in Vanuatu, Chur and Reading: Harwood Publishers, 1994; Jolly, “Divided mothers: changing global inequalities of ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’”; Jolly, “Material and immaterial relations: gender, rank and Christianity in Vanuatu,” in The Scope of Anthropology, ed. Laurent Dousset and Serge Tcherkézoff, Oxford: Berghahn, 2012, pp. 110–54.

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Through scrutinising the materiality of cloth, its threads and textures, its colours and patterns we can weave a far more interesting and nuanced narrative about Christianity and domesticity in Oceania. I highlight three threads in this narrative. First, I stress how introduced cloth was related to several pre-existing textile traditions across Oceania—felted barkcloth (tapa/kapa), plaited pandanus and a myriad of other fibres including flax, banana leaves, bush lianas, bog irises and feathers. These cloths, typically created by women (but sometimes dyed or decorated by men), were variously used for clothing, bedding and baskets and most importantly as valuables in gift exchanges linked to life-cycle rituals or ceremonies to celebrate or elevate rank. The diverse histories of how making indigenous cloth was abandoned and later revived, moved from quotidian to episodic ritual use, was creolised and layered with introduced cloth are fascinating and complex.11 In earlier writing, I have explored transformations in several indigenous forms of cloth: doba in the Trobriand Islands, bilums in Papua New Guinea, and pandanus textiles and barkcloth across much of Oceania.12 Here I focus on introduced cloth. Second, the adoption of introduced cloth and clothing was not simply a colonial imposition by foreign missionaries on passive Oceanic peoples, a repressive disciplining of the savage bodies of the heathens.13 Without denying the semiotic chainmail which linked nakedness, sexuality and sin in Christian conceptions, we need to acknowledge how introduced cloth was actively sought by Oceanic peoples; its very materiality a sign of the spiritual efficacy and power of foreigners. Fervent desire for foreign fabrics can be seen on early 11

I prefer to use this word, analogous with its use in studies of language rather than “hybridity” which is the concept deployed in a special issue of Pacific Arts. See Ping Ann Addo, Heather E. Young-Leslie and Phyllis Herda (eds), Hybrid Textiles: Pragmatic Creativity and Authentic Innovations in Pacific Cloth, Special Issue in Honor of Jehanne Teilhet-Fisk, New Series, 3–5, 2007. Yet several contributors to that volume including Herda and Kamehiro critique the term. Like Kamehiro I think hybridity carries many racial and racist associations and that it locks interpretation into organicised models and binaries rather than more fluid processes of translation and power. It is paradoxical that it became so popular in some postcolonial celebrations of multiculturalism. See Pnina Werbner, “The limits of cultural hybridity: on ritual monsters, poetic license and contested postcolonial purifications,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute New Series 7 (2001): 133–52. 12 Margaret Jolly, “Of the same cloth: Oceanic anthropologies of gender, textiles and Christianities,” invited distinguished keynote lecture for the Association of Social Anthropology in Oceania, Canberra: The Australian National University, 14 February 2008. See also, Anna-Karina Hermkens and Katherine Lepani’s edited collection on Women’s Wealth in preparation. 13 Richard Eves, “Colonialism, corporeality and character: Methodist missions and the refashioning of bodies in the Pacific,” History and Anthropology 10(1) (1996): 85–138.

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exploratory voyages; for example during Cook’s three voyages (1768–1779). Oceanic peoples from Tahiti to Vanuatu (Cook’s “New Hebrides”) enthusiastically exchanged food and artefacts for soft sheets and crimson comforters, fabrics of lustrous beauty and sensuous efficacy and emblems of mana or divine power.14 Greg Dening relates the wonderful story of how the red British naval flag with which Tobias Furneaux had taken “possession” of Tahiti in 1767 was woven by Tahitians into the sacred red and yellow feather belt used in the installation of high chiefs, a symbol of indigenous sovereignty.15 The imbrication of the material and spiritual potency of the foreigners was perhaps even more obvious in the early stages of Christian conversion. Converts eagerly appropriated, wore and fashioned this new cloth as a sign of their adherence to this new God whose power eclipsed that of ancestral spirits and indigenous deities. Indigenous alacrity for introduced cloth is pervasive across Oceania attested not just in the fabrication of modest, modern clothing (such as the “Mother Hubbard”16 or island dress) but in innovative and creative textile arts such as the tivaevae/tifaifai of the Cook Islands and Tahiti and the Hawaiian quilt.17 Third, the dominant forms and the hegemonic meanings of introduced cloth were dramatically transformed in such appropriations by Oceanic women. They were not just materials for and signs of cosy domesticity and Christian modernity. They were and are fabrics saturated with the values of indigenous sanctity and rank, anti-colonial resistance, cultural pride, women’s collectivities, national identities and transnational connections in an increasingly globalised world. I now trace these three interwoven threads through two exemplary fabrics which have both been the subject of much recent scholarly reflection and popular debate: the Hawaiian quilt and the “island dress” of Vanuatu. Hawai’i and Vanuatu are very different Oceanic archipelagos, typically segregated by the culture area labels inherited from Dumont d’Urville: Polynesia and

14 See Jennifer Newell, Trading Nature: Tahitians, Europeans and Ecological Exchange, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2011. 15 Greg Dening, “Looking across the beach—both ways,” in Discovering Cook’s Collections, ed. Michelle Hetherington and Howard Morphy, Canberra: National Museum of Australia Press, 2009, pp. 11–24, p. 16. 16 Mother Hubbard refers to a comic character in an English nursery rhyme from 1805. The link to the dress form is obscure, as is the reference to a form of camelback locomotive. 17 See my paper, “Matisse between North Africa and Oceania: Orientalism, Modernism and Métissage,” for a discussion of the influence of Tahitian tifaifai made by women on Matisse’s late works, Oceania the Sea and Oceania the Sky. Being revised for journal submission.

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Melanesia.18 Despite the dubious, racial origin of such enduring distinctions, there were important indigenous differences between these island groups in the situation of women and the salience of hereditary rank, and in how the Hawaiian islands were united by a common language before their unification as a kingdom whereas Vanuatu was characterised by extreme cultural and linguistic diversity (110 indigenous languages are still extant). Both archipelagoes were subject to intense and contesting colonial influences from the early nineteenth century, in Hawai’i, primarily British and American, in Vanuatu, British and French. In Hawai’i, the indigenous monarchy was overthrown in 1893 by a cartel which combined American missionary and mercantile interests. The islands were annexed by the United States in 1898, declared a state in 1959, and despite strenuous struggles for indigenous sovereignty, remain so today. Vanuatu was subject to the conjoint control of a British and French condominium from 1906–1980 (as New Hebrides/Nouvelles-Hébrides) in which colonial agents were far more divided by diverse metropolitan interests in land, labour and Christian missions. Vanuatu became an independent state in 1980 despite French-backed secessionist movements on Tanna and Santo. Despite these differences of indigenous culture and colonial history, there are striking affinities in the histories of Christianity and cloth, as exemplified in the Hawaiian quilt and island dress.

The Hawaiian Quilt

The history of the Hawaiian quilt is typically traced back to an originary moment in April 1820 when Protestant missionary couples of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) arrived in Honolulu on board the brig Thaddeus. They were warmly welcomed by high-ranking Hawaiians, including four women of high rank, two widows of King Kamehameha, the ali’i nui (high chief) who had united the islands in one kingdom ca. 1795, and the wives of two of his senior advisors. The interaction between the missionary wives and these Kanaka Māoli women was recorded by Lucy Thurston in her memoirs: Monday morning, April 3d, the first sewing circle was formed that the sun ever looked down upon in His Hawaiian realm. Kalakua, queen-dowager 18

See Margaret Jolly, “Women of the east, women of the west: region and race, gender and sexuality on Cook’s voyages,” in The Atlantic World in the Antipodes, ed. Kate Fullagar, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2012, pp. 2–32.

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was directress. She requested all the seven white ladies to take seats with them on the mats, on the deck of the Thaddeus. Mrs. Holman and Mrs. Ruggles were executive officers to ply the scissors and prepare the work. The four native women of distinction were furnished with calico patchwork to sew,—a new employment to them.19 Because of the reference to patchwork, this oft-quoted passage is frequently deemed to be the moment when Hawaiian women were taught to quilt. Yet, as Phyllis Herda suggests it was likely a far more modest sewing lesson, since “patches” at that time referred to small pieces of fabric used to instruct novices on how to use a needle and thread.20 And, as Herda observes, the broader textual and discursive context makes it plain that the first cloth sought to be fashioned was not a complicated quilt but a modest dress. The sentences in Thurston’s memoir immediately preceding this passage tell us that “Kalakua brought a web of white cambric to have a dress made for herself in the fashion of those of our ladies, and was very particular in her wish to have it finished while sailing along the western side of the island before reaching the king.”21 The sentences immediately following describe the Queen’s dress: The dress was made in the fashion of 1819. The length of the skirt accorded with Brigham Young’s rule to his Mormon damsels,—have it come down to the tops of the shoes. But in the queen’s case, where the shoes were wanting, the bare feet cropped out very prominently [emphasis in original].22 Kalakua’s keen desire to wear the new fashions from New England were no doubt matched by the fervent enthusiasm of the missionary wives that Hawaiian women of all ranks cover their bodies with something less revealing than barkcloth (even if like many missionary women they were inclined to searing satire at the expense of Kanaka Māoli when they wore their new clothes ineptly).23 As Grimshaw, Herda and others insist, the missionaries 19 Lucy G. Thurston, Life and Times of Mrs. Lucy G. Thurston. Wife of Rev. Asa Thurston, Pioneer Missionary to the Sandwich islands, Gathered from Letters and Journals Extending Over a Period of More than Fifty Years, 3rd edition, Ann Arbor/Honolulu: S. C. Andrews/ The Friend, [1882] 1934, p. 32. 20 Phyllis Herda, “Hybrid identities and the transference of Hawaiian quilt imagery,” in Hybrid Textiles: Pragmatic Creativity and Authentic Innovation in Pacific Cloth. Pacific Arts, ed. Ping Ann Addo, Heather Young Leslie and Phyllis Herda, Special Issue in Honor of Jehanne Teilhet-Fisk, New Series, 3–5, 2007, pp. 37–45. 21 Thurston, Life and Times of Mrs Lucy G. Thurston, p. 32. 22 Ibid., pp. 32–33. 23 See Jolly, “‘To save the girls for brighter and better lives.’”

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equated Hawaiian “nudity” with spiritual depravity24 (but see Tcherkézoff on Tahiti and Samoa).25 This is patent in Bingham’s quotation from another missionary wife who ran in startled horror to her cabin with the words: O, my sisters, you cannot tell how the sight of these poor degraded creatures, both literally and spiritually naked, would affect you! I say naked. They have nothing but a narrow strip, which they term a marrow, tied around them.26 Although covering the nakedness of Kanaka Māoli was doubtless urgent, teaching Hawaiian women to quilt would, as Herda adjudges, hardly have been a priority in the balmy climate of islands far removed from the cold winters of the eastern United States.27 Yet quilting soon became central in the social interaction between high-ranking Kanaka Māoli women and foreign missionary wives, and in the creolisation of indigenous and introduced textiles.28 Lucy Thurston may have thought this was the first “sewing circle” in God’s Hawaiian realm but Hawaiian women had long collaborated in the collective creation of indigenous textiles: barkcloth (H. kapa), pandanus (H. lauholo, makaloa) and featherwork (H. ahu’ula, mahiole). This was similarly stratified by rank.29 Although all women made barkcloth from the paper mulberry tree only high-ranking women of the ali’i nui (H.) class had the prerogative to make fine, decorated barkcloth. Women were responsible for creating the brilliant red and yellow feather cloaks, capes and helmets worn by male high chiefs, which figured so prominently in early Western paintings of Hawai’i and in museum collections of Oceanic things.30 24 Grimshaw, Paths of Duty; Grimshaw, “New England missionary wives”; Herda, “Hybrid identities and the transference of Hawaiian quilt imagery.” 25 Tcherkézoff, “On cloths, gifts and nudity.” 26 A maro was a waistband of tapa. Bingham quoted in Grimshaw, Paths of Duty, pp. 26–27. 27 Herda, “Hybrid identities and the transference of Hawaiian quilt imagery.” 28 Stacey L. Kamehiro, “Women, quilts and chiefly aesthetics: self-representation in nineteenth-century Hawai’i,” M.A. thesis in Art History, University of California at Los Angeles, 1991. 29 Herda, “Hybrid identities and the transference of Hawaiian quilt imagery”; Stacey Kamehiro, “Hawaiian quilts: chiefly self-representation in 19th century Hawai’i,” in Hybrid Textiles: Pragmatic Creativity and Authentic Innovation in Pacific Cloth. Pacific Arts, Special Issue in Honor of Jehanne Teilhet-Fisk, ed. Ping Ann Addo, Heather Young Leslie and Phyllis Herda, New Series, 3–5, 2007, pp. 23–36. 30 Commoner men and women were involved in the collection of the feathers but only women fabricated them according to Jocelyn Linnekin, “Who made the feather cloaks? A problem in Hawaiian gender relations,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 97 (1988): 265–80; Adrienne Kaeppler (ed.), James Cook and the Exploration of the Pacific, London: Thames and Hudson, 2009, pp. 250–51, for Adrienne Kaeppler’s recent appraisal.

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Kapa: The Intimate Affinity of Barkcloth and Quilts

In the Hawaiian language, kapa denotes both barkcloth and quilts. As Stacey Kamehiro has so consummately argued their linguistic identification is mirrored in myriad ways: in material, formal design properties, in their uses and in the meanings and values which saturate the cloth.31 The best Hawaiian barkcloth was soft like linen; its felted fibres sometimes resembled lace. Barkcloth such as the kapa moe (H.) used for bedding was layered; several undecorated sheets were covered by a decorated top sheet, which had both a textured watermark design beaten into its surface and a design applied centrally and to the borders. They were often filled with fern mulch, pulu (H.), as batting. Quilts similarly had several conjoined layers, were filled with hair or padding and the top layer was decorated with distinctive designs, stitching and embroidery, which secured the layers together. Both barkcloth and Hawaiian quilts are described in very similar terms, using an aesthetic imagery drawn from the legendary origins of the paper mulberry tree which grew from the body of the ancestor Maikoha, beside a flowing stream where the land met water. The underside of both barkcloth and quilt is pili (H.) that which clings to the body of a person, the upper surface is kahua (H.) the “ground,” while the pulu (H.) is the moist space between, akin to the soft ground where land meets water. On a canonical Hawaiian quilt, the rows of patterns, of stitches and embroidery from centre to the edges are perceived as a series of breaking waves as they approach the “shore,” the borders of the cloth. From the 1820s New England missionary women taught high-ranking Hawaiian women the art of quilting in sewing circles in their homes and from 1830 in mission schools. They hoped that thereby all Hawaiian women would learn the art, but chiefly women maintained a monopoly not just on the art of quilting but the materials of sewing: thread, needles, thimbles and cloth. This perpetuated the dominance chiefly women had earlier attained in controlling the import of foreign goods not just vis-à-vis low-ranking women, but vis-à-vis chiefly men.32 High-ranking women had been prominent in early conversions to Christianity; indeed several had urged the overthrow of the kapu (H.) of the ancestral religion in 1819. This had forbidden men and women from eating together, had proscribed women from eating some delicious foods (including pork, coconut and banana) and from engaging in certain activities such as

31 Kamehiro, “Hawaiian quilts.” 32 Ibid.

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figure 36 Left to right at the quilting horses: Adelaide Gifford carding wool; Mrs. Milia Kaiawe, Mrs. Leialoha Kanoho, Mrs. Akao Lock, Mrs. Louisa Malina, Mrs. Kalei Montgomery, working collectively on an appliqué quilt, 1933 Source: Senda Photos, “Mokihana Club 1933 Exhibit,” in Robert J. Schlek, The Wilcox Quilts in Hawaii, photographs by Hugo de Vries, Kauai, Hawaii: Grove Farm Homestead and Wailoi Mission House, 1986. Courtesy of Kaua’i Museum

deep sea fishing, canoe building and war.33 These divine taboos had already been eroded by the seeming immunity of foreign men such as those on Cook’s third voyage who infringed kapu by eating with women, survived the experience and were thus credited with extraordinary mana (H. divine power).34 Unlike Cook’s Resolution, the ABCFM missionary ship Thaddeus had landed not just foreign missionary men but women. High-ranking Hawaiian women forged an early alliance with these Christian women from New England but also challenged their mana, through the materiality of their quilts (Figure 36). The distinctive “Hawaiian quilt,” a layered appliqué quilt which emerged in the 1840s–1860s is radically different from the American prototypes not just in form and design but in meanings and values. The dominant form of quilt made by New England missionary women was “patchwork” or “piecework,” 33

34

Caroline Ralston, “Changes in the lives of ordinary women in early post-contact Hawaii,” in Family and Gender in the Pacific: Domestic Contradictions and the Colonial Impact, ed. Margaret Jolly and Martha Macintyre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 45–64, p. 48. I cannot here enter into the very complex debate between Marshall Sahlins and Gananath Obeyesekere as to whether and how Hawaiians identified Cook as a manifestation of the god Lono.

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composed of many small pieces of diverse fabrics sewn together to make an overall design of harmonious colour and pattern, usually of rectilinear forms such as triangles or hexagons. In collections of early quilts made by Kanaka Māoli women (called H. kapa pohopoho) the influences of New England piecework (patchwork) are obvious but so are the transformations. American design blocks were used but were invested with local meanings: e.g. the bear’s paw became human fingers; the “drunkard’s path” the “coconut knife.”35 Some more abstract, geometric designs replicated both New England models (like the “Log Cabin”) and earlier kapa patterns, indented on barkcloth with beaters, such as the zig-zag patterns of “Bent Knee.” Such geometric patchwork patterns were used on some very famous quilts such as that attributed to Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop and two which were laid on the floor of the Honolulu Catholic Cathedral in 1866 in a funerary mass on the occasion of the death of Spain’s King Alphonso.36 In Hawai’i, New England piecework forms were soon surpassed by an appliqué technique. This involved folding a single piece of fabric into eight parts and then cutting a design so that either four or eight identical motifs were created in a symmetrical pattern. The source of this innovative technique is disputed. Some see it as inspired by the “snow flake” cutting of paper, popular as a pastime for Euro-American children in this period. Some see it as practical indigenous innovation: “to cut new materials into bits to be sewn together (for a patchwork quilt) seemed like a futile waste of time.”37 Some suggest that since Hawaiian gowns (H. holoku) worn by high-ranking women were full-cut rather than tailored like Western dresses, there were no small pieces left over to sew patchwork quilts. Others have queried such utilitarian explanations, rather seeing the innovation as high-ranking Hawaiian women appropriating the “aura and prestige associated with the Western appliqué technique.”38 Kamehiro has developed this argument in a sophisticated interpretation of the history of the Hawaiian quilt. She suggests that Kanaka Māoli women early discerned the rarity and the higher value which American women invested in the appliqué technique. In their creation and celebration of this form they

35 See Joyce Hammond, Tifaifai and Quilts of Polynesia, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1986, Table Two, pp. 38–39. 36 Kamehiro, “Hawaiian quilts,” p. 17. 37 S. Jones, Hawaiian Quilts, Honolulu: Daughters of Hawai’i, Honolulu Academy of Arts, Mission Houses Museum, 1973, p. 10. 38 Hammond, Tifaifai and Quilts of Polynesia, p. 14; Joyce Hammond, “Polynesian women and tifaefae: fabrications of identity,” Journal of American Folklore 99 (1986): 259–79.

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invested the quilt with indigenous values of sanctity and rank and with hidden meanings (H. kaona) which reinscribed their mana as high-ranking women.39 Design elements and motifs in Hawaiian quilts swiftly changed, privileging local flora and fauna: snowflakes and grapevines were supplanted by breadfruit, coconut and pineapples, pikake (jasmine), lehua (red flower) and tuber rose, dracenas, fish and coral. Sometimes motifs celebrated the perfumed, sensuous appeal of specific locales such as the bombax trees, growing in the grounds of the Queen’s Medical Center, in Honolulu. Most Hawaiian quilts have a strong bipolar contrast between layer and ground, at first primarily red on white, blue on white or yellow on white and in later decades an expanded palette such as black on yellow or khaki on deep turquoise. Appliqué quilts often have a pronounced symmetry around the central point or navel, the piko (H. which, Kamehiro suggests, refers to Maikoha’s navel). Hawaiians distinguish between two types the kapa lau (H. leaf) where a single design is appliquéd and the kapa apana (H.) where two pieces are appliquéd, one centred on the navel and another around the border or lei (H.). There are several variants of a Hawaiian story which tell of how a Hawaiian woman was inspired to create this new design when the shadow of a breadfruit tree was cast upon her sheet drying on the grass. Kamehiro links this idea of the design as a “shadow” or “silhouette” with the origin story of the paper mulberry tree and with the notion of mana, described by Marshall Sahlins as a divine power, a creative force “which makes invisible things visible.”40 Flows of mana were especially concentrated in the persons of high-ranking people; high chiefs were enjoined to walk around only at night so that their dangerous shadows would not fall on common people and sicken them or require their execution. Aristocratic beauty and efficacy were likened to the rays of the sun, shining brilliantly and creating life from the darkness and chaos of the night (H. po). Clearly missionary tropes about Christianity bringing light into heathen darkness found fertile ground in Hawaiian imaginaries of rank and cosmogony. And some quilts celebrated that other bright light of modernity: the chandeliers which hung in the royal palaces of King Kalākaua and later Queen Lili’uokalani. Kamehiro highlights how often motifs which celebrate the natural beauties of Hawai’i, were simultaneously affirmations of chiefly power over the fertility of the land.41 Many of the flowers imaged were known to be the favourite blos39 40 41

Kamehiro, “Hawaiian quilts.” Marshall Sahlins, Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1981, p. 31. Kamehiro, “Hawaiian quilts.”

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soms of queens and princesses, e.g. the milkwood blossoms or the imported roses growing in the gardens of Queen Lili’uokalani. Emblems of ali’i power abounded and, especially during the reign of the nationalist King Kalākaua (1874–1891), icons of royalty*.42 Such quilts then were not just benign, sentimental celebrations of Hawaiian nature, but claims to custodianship of place and articulations of Hawaiian sovereignty through celebrations of rank and royalty: for example, the comb of Princess Ka’iulani, her fan and feather plume, and more overt articulations of support for the monarchy in a series of quilts dating from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, imaging the Hawaiian flag, the coat of arms, the crowns and feather cloaks and feather standards (H. kahili) of Hawaiian royalty.43 On occasion flags were imaged upside down to signal the distress and suffering of foreign occupation. Writing was early incorporated to commemorate historical events. And, under the seeming simplicity of symmetrical surfaces, lay kaona (H.) or hidden meanings, often with political import. Kamehiro suggests that the common image of the sea urchin, evoked associations with an opened eye and the rays of the sun, and thus with aristocratic brilliance in making the invisible visible.44 Following Kaeppler, she observes how a series of stacked parallel chevrons mediated by a central line referenced not just the backbone of a sea eel but the seriation of chiefly genealogical succession.45 For the most part Hawaiian designs, unlike those from New England, were not rectilinear but curved and arched, imaging crescent moons and rainbows, both strongly associated with chiefly power. The predominant palette also signalled their mana: red for sacred power, yellow for political authority and white, the colour of Lono, the god of rain and fertility. As Kamehiro notes, Hawaiian quilts were not just generalised evocations of indigenous sanctity and rank but were associated with particular persons and genealogies.46 The particular woman who created a new named quilt design had rights to be known as its creator and to prohibit other women from using or stealing that pattern. Although other women collaborated in creating quilts, they could not sit on the basting or the design nor complete the final stitching *

Figure 37 (Appliqué quilt (1886) …) is not included here. See: Reiko Mochinaga Brandon and Loretta G.H. Woodard, Hawaiian Quilts: Tradition and Transition, Tokyo: Kokusai Art, 2004, p. 20. 42 Kamehiro, “Hawaiian quilts”; Stacey L. Kamehiro, The Arts of Kingship: Hawaiian Art and National Culture of the Kalākaua Era, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009. 43 Joyce Hammond, “Hawaiian flag quilts: multivalent symbols of a Hawaiian quilt tradition,” Hawaiian Journal of History 27 (1993): 1–26. 44 Kamehiro, “Hawaiian quilts.” 45 Adrienne Kaeppler, Kapa: Hawaiian Barkcloth, Bay: Boom Books, 1980. 46 Kamehiro, “Hawaiian quilts.”

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before the quilt’s public display. Quilts were so suffused with the mana of their maker that they were sometimes burnt on her death. Throughout life such valued creations were only rarely used as bed coverings; as with decorated barkcloth it was forbidden to sit or to sleep on such a quilt. They only rarely adorned double beds; less prestigious piecework quilts sufficed for that.47 They were rather stored in sealed boxes, annually aired, used in display for special occasions and were occasionally offered as extremely valuable gifts at weddings and funerals. Nineteenth-century photographs show Hawaiian royals sitting in front of exquisite quilts and their bodies in death, draped in quilts, as they would have been swathed in barkcloth in the past. Thus Hawaiian quilts were not so much icons of cosy Christian conjugality but embodied the mana of ali’i nobility and ultimately the monarchy. Rather than a sign of Hawaiian peoples succumbing to the fatal allure of Christian gods and capitalist commodities, Hawaiian quilts might rather be read as appropriations of valued foreign things for indigenous purposes, as a willing and passionate embrace of Christian modernity and even as a resistance to colonial power, especially on the part of high-ranking Hawaiians. Quilts became potent icons of Hawaiian monarchy and anti-colonial resistance particularly in the context of the overthrow of Queen Lili’uokalani by a cartel of American missionaries and businessmen in 1893. As well as signing petitions for the return of the monarchy, as Noenoe Silva has so consummately analysed, Hawaiian women gathered around the Queen to create a giant silk patchwork quilt, emblazoned with their names and declarations of loyalty to royalty.48 While she was incarcerated in the Iolani palace for ten months after her overthrow in 1893, the Queen and her Ladies in Waiting sewed a “crazy quilt,” with irregular shapes and bright colours, and adorned with exquisite embroidery, which in part details the events of those months. It is now known as the “Queen’s Quilt” and, as Marata Tamaira has eloquently evoked in a recent paper on contemporary Hawaiian art, is a cherished and potent reminder of American occupation.49 Deborah (Kepola) U. Kakalia’s stunning gold and purple quilt from 1993, displayed as part of the fifth Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane, Australia, titled simply Lili’uokalani evokes the poignant moment of the overthrow a century later, with central images of crowns and feathered standards, and an eight-point star 47

Reiko Mochinaga Brandon and Loretta G. H. Woodard, Hawaiian Quilts: Tradition and Translation, Honolulu: Honolulu Academy of Arts and University of Hawai’i Press, 2004, p. 18. 48 Noenoe Silva, Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism, Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. 49 Marata Tamarai, “Visual sovereignty and indigenous countervisuality: picturing contemporary Kanaka Māoli art practice in Hawai’i,” Ph.D. thesis proposal presentation, Canberra: The Australian National University, 10 April 2012.

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representing Kakalia’s husband, all framed by the Queen’s favourite flowers of milkwood and her fluttering fans.50 This quilt is not just a nostalgic lament for a lost past but an affirmation of sovereignty sentiments in opposition to the United States in a contested present. Curator Maud Page affirms, “Techniques originally taught by American missionaries have been adapted to create inimitable textiles that appear to pulsate.”51 The pulsation is simultaneously aesthetic and political. The revival of Hawaiian quilt-making in the 1980s–1990s coincided with the reanimation of the Hawaiian sovereignty struggle and a cultural renaissance. As Herda avers, “During the Hawaiian cultural renaissance in the latter half of the 20th century, Hawaiian quilts were embraced as an icon of indigenous culture, just as they had been part of the 19th century’s indigenous patriotic expressions of Kanaka Māoli.”52 Yet, as the catalogue of an exhibition mounted in 2002 documents, contemporary quilt-makers include not just women identifying as Kanaka Māoli but those with mixed and foreign ancestry and a Japanese-American man.53 The authors of that catalogue insist Hawaiian quilt-making is still a vibrant art. Herda suggests that Hawaiian quilts are now rare and expensive to create and their exhibition in the Honolulu Academy of Arts suggests they are now a high art form for wealthy connoisseurs.54 The final rather poignant and perhaps paradoxical chapter in the story of Hawaiian quilts ends in the shopping centres of Ala Moana and Waikiki. Indeed most quilts being sold there as “Hawaiian” are manufactured in the Philippines. Yet the image of the Hawaiian quilt, the shadow of its afterlife perhaps, is everywhere: on T-shirts, pillow slips, coffee mugs, pot holders, coasters, key rings, greeting cards and computer mouse pads. As Herda observes these circulating images of quilts adorn not just the favoured souvenirs of the six million or so tourists who flock to Hawai’i annually but are regularly consumed by locals, Kanaka Māoli and others alike.55 Such circulating images of 50 Maud Page and Ruth McDougall, “Pacific textiles project, Pacific threads,” in The 5th Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, ed. Lynne Seear and Suhayana Raffel, Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery Publishing, 2006, pp. 172–75. See also Margaret Jolly, “The south in southern theory: Antipodean reflections on the Pacific,” Australian Humanities Review 44 (2008): 75–100, online: http://epress.anu.edu.au/ahr/044/pdf/essay05.pdf, accessed 4 July 2014. 51 Ibid., p. 172. 52 Herda, “Hybrid identities and the transference of Hawaiian quilt imagery,” p. 19. See also Phyllis S. Herda, “The political nature of quilting in late 19th century Hawai’i,” Baessler Archiv 45 (1997): 223–33. 53 Brandon and Woodard, Hawaiian Quilts. 54 Herda, “Hybrid identities and the transference of Hawaiian quilt imagery.” 55 Ibid.

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Hawaiian quilts have in Herda’s view become signs of a benign even safe “local” identity, far removed from their earlier associations with Christianity, nobility and struggles for sovereignty.

“Mother Hubbards” and Aelan Dres

Across Oceania, forms of women’s clothing introduced by Christian missionaries have been both satirised and deplored by foreign observers in a lineage from early twentieth-century lady traveller Beatrice Grimshaw to late twentieth-century feminist art historian Griselda Pollock. In Tahiti, Grimshaw described the huge wardrobe of long muslin gowns of her hostess as “night dresses,” evoking her “dreamworld” In the Strange South Seas.56 Pollock in her critical account of Paul Gauguin was more scathing about “the shapeless sack inflicted on Tahitian women by missionaries.”57 In a stinging rebuttal of Pollock, Nicholas Thomas writes: “these garments have not been inflicted but adopted by entirely dignified women who had found ways of making … Christian colonial modernity … their own.”58 Most scholars working on clothing in the Pacific over the last decade echo this view, insisting on the agency of Islanders rather than the colonial power of missionary impositions: that introduced clothing was eagerly adopted by Oceanic Christians not inflicted and that these new clothes were not just icons of Christian conversion and signs of a new sexual culture of modesty but worn as objects of beauty, dignity and power in an embrace of modernity.59 But these scholars also suggest rather more complex local stories in the relationship between indigenous and introduced clothing, the gendered and racial salience of such clothes and the way in which women’s agency, collectivity, religious and ethnic identity was engaged in the arts of sewing and in wearing these “new clothes.” I now focus on some stories from the archipelago of Vanuatu and in particular the work of Lissant Bolton and Maggie Cummings.60 56 Beatrice Grimshaw, In the Strange South Seas, London: Hutchinson and Co., 1907, pp. 14–15. 57 Griselda Pollock, Avant-Garde Gambits: Gender and the Colour of Art History, London: Thames, 1992, figs 25–26. 58 Nicholas Thomas, “Preface,” in The Art of Clothing: A Pacific Experience, ed. Susanne Küchler and Graeme Were, London: UCL Press, 2005, pp. ix–xi, p. ix. 59 Colchester, Clothing the Pacific; Susanne Küchler and Graeme Were (eds), The Art of Clothing: A Pacific Experience, London: UCL Press, 2005. 60 In the conference version of this chapter I also alluded to the cognate arguments of Anna Paini in New Caledonia apropos la robe mission. See Anna Paini, “Rehabiller les symbols: les femmes kanak et la robe mission à Lifou (Nouvelle-Calédonie),” Journal de la Société des Océanistes 117 (2003): 233–53.

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But I start with a more personal vignette. During my doctoral fieldwork in South Pentecost, Vanuatu in the 1970s I lived with people who were strenuously anti-Christian, who portrayed their way of life as following kastom (B. the ways of the place) rather than skul (B. Christianity, modernity).61 This was daily signalled in their clothes: for women rais (S.), grass skirts they fashioned from ivory pandanus or, for special occasions, lustrous silky banana spathe fibres; for men the pandanus penis wrapper, bipis (S.) plaited from pandanus and dyed with red stripes, tucked up in a bark belt. Women’s breasts were bared, men’s testicles exposed. And yet when these fervent adherents of kastom crossed the fast flowing river which separated them from their Christian kin at the Catholic mission station of Baie Barrier, they stopped at the hamlet of Sai and changed their clothes, men donning shirts and shorts, women island dresses, in respect of the sartorial codes of their Christian kin.62 As a young white woman and, following the advice of a protective supervisor, I routinely wore modest dresses, although my hosts knew I was not a practising Christian. I wore a grass skirt only for major rituals celebrating life crises or elevations of rank. This delighted my hosts but I found it rather uncomfortable, only partly since it chafed my ample hips. A couple of friends and colleagues who visited me in Bunlap village photographed me so dressed but I was wary of such a display of immodesty or “going native” and never dared show such photos to my late father or mother. This was wise since when I gave my father a copy of my book Women of the Place he was visibly shocked by the photos of bare-breasted women and men with penis wrappers with testicles exposed and turned the pages in relief to a photograph of me in a modest T-shirt.63 Intriguingly, a later ethnographer and film-maker in the region, a German man Thorolf Lipp, was not so restrained, wearing the bipis throughout his fieldwork in the 1990s– 2000. He says that local men applauded his thus embodying kastom (B.) I tell this story since it reveals how deeply many of us have imbibed and embodied the associations between nakedness, sexuality and sin in Western imaginaries and according to Webb Keane, a particularly Christian sense of the indexicality of signs, between the outer surface of the body and the inner moral

61 Skul is now almost obsolete and has been replaced by fasin blong waetman as Christianity has been progressively embraced as part of kastom (by Christians at least) and especially since the period of national independence in 1980. 62 In April 2013 when I walked from the kastom village of Bunlap to the Church of Christ village of Ranwas in South Pentecost, men from Bunlap changed into shorts before entering Ranwas, while women, clad only in rais, remained sitting down on the edges of Ranwas and did not enter. 63 Jolly, Women of the Place, pp. 4, 12.

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state of the person.64 Serge Tcherkézoff has written persuasively about the misrecognitions in early encounters in Tahiti and Samoa such that Europeans saw nakedness when women’s breasts were bare, whereas in indigenous opinion they were clothed.65 And there is no doubt that the same argument could be made for Vanuatu: there were indigenous codes of respectable clothing which exposed breasts, bottoms and testicles but which Europeans, most consequentially Christian missionaries, saw as “nakedness.” How did these contrary codes interact in the process of Christian conversion? Since the arrival of the London Missionary Society in the southern islands in 1839, Presbyterians who spread from the island of Aneityum in 1848 throughout the southern and central archipelago, the Anglicans in the north from 1849, the Catholics from the 1880s, the Church of Christ and Seventh Day Adventists from the 1920s, and a plethora of new evangelical churches more recently, ni-Vanuatu have become pervasively Christian and, for the most part, well-covered. All denominations urged their converts to adopt the new clothes, although with varying degrees of zealousness. Indigenous clothes are worn only by a tiny minority of those who still adhere to the ancestral religion, or by Christians on rare ritual occasions, in museum displays or for tourists (see below). Bolton offers an exhaustive overview of indigenous clothing in Vanuatu; I distil only the main contours here. Like the languages and cultures of the archipelago, clothing was regionally diverse.66 Men wore either plaited pandanus textile skirts from waist to thigh or passed through their legs, or bark belts with pandanus penis wrappers (B. nambas). Women wore either a “grass” skirt, plaited from pandanus or other fibres, or a plaited pandanus textile passed between their legs or wrapped around their hips. Uniquely in east Santo women wore only a single leaf at the front and a bunch of leaves behind, both suspended from a fibre band. Clothing styles as much as language defined local identities for both ni-Vanuatu and foreign observers, including anthropologists. Early anthropologists like Rivers and Layard distinguished between 64 Webb Keane, “The hazards of new clothes: what signs make possible,” in The Art of Clothing: A Pacific Experience, ed. Susanne Küchler and Graeme Were, London: UCL Press, 2005, pp. 1–16. 65 Tcherkézoff, “On cloths, gifts and nudity.” 66 Lissant Bolton, “Gender, status and introduced clothing in Vanuatu,” in Clothing the Pacific, ed. Chloë Colchester, Oxford and New York: Berg, 2003, pp. 119–39; Bolton, “Dressing for transition: weddings, clothes and change in Vanuatu,” in The Art of Clothing: A Pacific Experience, ed. Susanne Küchler and Graeme Were, London: UCL Press, 2005, pp. 19–32; Bolton, “‘Island dress that belongs to us all’: mission dresses and the innovation of tradition in Vanuatu,” in Body Arts and Modernity, ed. Elizabeth Ewart and Michael O’Hanlon, Wantage: Sean Kingston Publishing, 2007, pp. 165–82.

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“mat” and “skirt” cultures,67 speculating about their associations with matrilineal and patrilineal descent and the historical sedimentation of cultures.68 On Malakula groups were classified as Big or Small Nambas depending on the size of the men’s penis wrappers. As Bolton suggests indigenous “clothing” can be seen as far more than cloth since it included a range of ornamentation and corporeal modification which marked both gender and status: necklaces, ear-rings, bracelets and anklets of shells, fibres and seeds; tattooing, tooth evulsion, nose piercing, head-binding, body painting, coconut oiling and hair-bleaching.69 Clothing, ornamentation and body modification was not a matter of individual personal style but tightly specified by collective codes about gender, rank and life course.70 So, in Erromango a girl’s fibre skirt was lengthened when she was betrothed while widows who were available to remarry shortened theirs. On special ritual occasions Erromangan women wore beautiful decorated barkcloth, trailing to the ground in long streamers when they were married (Figure 38). On Tanna men grew their hair at puberty, bleached it and bound it in long strands which, lengthening with age, signifying enhanced masculinity and seniority. (This hairstyle, remarkably similar to later Jamaican rasta style, was recorded in a drawing by the artist William Hodges on Cook’s second voyage).71 In the northern islands elevation in rank for both men and women was marked in rituals with body painting and the wearing of leaves like cycas, dracaenas and crotons, or in islands like Ambae more precious, fine and elaborate pandanus textile costumes. These emblems of rank elevation were closely restricted to those who had earned the right to wear them. As Anna-Karina Hermkens suggests, Christian missionaries not only persuaded people to discard their old clothes but also to eschew such ornamentation and modification of the body (and often collected clothes and artefacts

67 William Halse Rivers, The History of Melanesian Society, two volumes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914; John Layard, Stone Men of Malekula, London: Chatto and Windus, 1942. 68 See Haidy Geismar and Anita Herle, Moving Images: John Layard, Fieldwork and Photography on Malakula since 1914, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press / Adelaide: Crawford House Publishing, 2009. 69 Bolton, “Gender, status and introduced clothing in Vanuatu.” Hermkens (this volume) following Wetherell, suggests that clothing the Maisin people was not such a priority for the Anglicans operating in that region. 70 Bolton, “Gender, status and introduced clothing in Vanuatu,” p. 122. 71 See Margaret Jolly, “‘Ill-natured comparisons’: racism and relativism in European representations of ni-Vanuatu from Cook’s second voyage,” History and Anthropology 5(3–4) (1992): 331–64.

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figure 38 Erromangan woman in a dress of decorated bark cloth, worn on ritual occasions such as marriage, ca. 1880s. Photographer H. A. Robertson Source: H. A. Robertson, Erromanga: The Martyr Isle, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1903, facing p. 448

as curios and testaments to “heathen savagery” for museum collections).72 Thus as well as “covering up” perceived nakedness there was a desire on the part of both European and Pacific missionaries in Vanuatu to refashion the Christian body. The journals, memoirs and magazines of Protestant missionaries in particular are laced with textual and visual exemplars of the “before and after” story of Christian conversion. So in the Presbyterian journal, Quarterly Jottings from The New Hebrides South Sea Islands reports, there are many 72 Hermkens, “The materiality of missionisation in Collingwood Bay, Papua New Guinea” (this volume).

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photographs of recent male converts fully clothed in shirt and trousers, although this may have been only occasional attire worn to please the missionary visitor photographer.73 But an anonymous author in that Presbyterian journal makes much of the ironclad association of clothing and Christianity, “Thirty dressed natives carries little meaning to our minds at home. But it should be realised that a savage prides himself on nudity as a badge of heathenism. He needs the courage of conviction to adopt dress. Persecution follows.”74 Apart from the confident indexicality between clothing and religious conviction,75 this imputation of “persecution” from local heathens suggests two opposed camps of clothed converts versus naked savages, but as we know from the broader history of Christianity in the archipelago, conversion could be a slow and fitful process and there was much “backsliding.”76 Moreover, introduced clothing was not immediately and exclusively adopted but often worn layered and creolised with indigenous clothes. Here is the Reverend H. A. Robertson writing in Erromanga, The Martyr’s Isle (1903): In their heathen state the men of Aneityum had been dressed like the other New Hebridean savages, if dress it was. The women however, wore and still do wear, skirts made of the pandanus leaf…. These skirts with the addition of a short print jacket, formed a woman’s week-day attire; while on Sundays and on all state occasions, a wonderful head gear, in the form of a large barrel shaped bonnet made of plaited pandanus leaf surmounted all. These bonnets were cut into shape and sewed by Esther [the widow of a local man Lazarus who had been an early convert and assistant to the Inglises, a missionary couple]. The hair on the woman’s head being thick and woolly, the bonnets were usually worn on their shoulders, the strings being tied securely in front, and the Aneityumese belle thus equipped was, to herself and her admirers, a thing of beauty. The men, as Christians, were clad in shirts and short kilts or lava–lava, no covering being worn on their heads [italics in original, insert mine].77 73 Bolton, “Gender, status and introduced clothing in Vanuatu,” p. 128. 74 Quarterly Jottings from the New Hebrides, South Sea Islands. 1895–1961, Woodford, England: John G. Paton Mission Fund, 1895, p. 10, cited in Bolton, “Gender, status and introduced clothing in Vanuatu,” p. 128. 75 Keane, “The hazards of new clothes.” 76 See Margaret Jolly, “Devils, holy spirits and the swollen God: translation, conversion and colonial power in the Marist Mission, Vanuatu, 1887–1934,” in Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity, ed. Peter Van der Veer, New York: Routledge, 1996, pp. 231–62. 77 H. A. Robertson, Erromanga, The Martyr’s Isle, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1903, pp. 100–01.

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Creole clothes, which are often satirised by the very missionaries who were trying to change the clothes of ni-Vanuatu, appear in photographs of mission stations and plantations throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Women in the southern islands often wore their fibre skirts over Mother Hubbard-style European dresses as late as the 1940s,78 a pattern of layering witnessed in many parts of the Pacific.79 By comparison the photographs of the British anthropologist John Layard from 1914 show women at a Catholic mission station on Vao consummately and exclusively clothed in early versions of “island dress” while women of non-Christian villages on Atchin are seen barebreasted but wearing a loincloth and headdress of trade “calico.”80 Increasingly island dresses became iconic of the good Christian woman. The Presbyterian journal Quarterly Jottings published a description of the preferred style with a wide yoke and puffy elbow sleeves, adorned with red frills and braid: “the natives dearly love bright colours.”81 The Anglicans in the north rather promoted blouses and skirts and these two dress styles are still seen to distinguish these respective denominations in Vanuatu.82 Such dress styles were clearly seen by European missionaries as distinct from their own; their voluminous rather than tailored shape meant an “ordinary native dress” was “something like a lady’s nightdress.”83 Although we might perceive racialisation in the missionary promotion of this form of dress, ni-Vanuatu Christian women, in both villages and towns, “grassroots” and elite women, up to and beyond national independence in 1980 seemed to eagerly embrace the sewing and wearing of such dresses. Bolton’s several publications on aelan dres (B.), associated workshops with women fieldworkers at the Vanuatu Cultural Centre and a film on the subject evince the pleasure and pride of women in such dresses. Details such as the colours and patterns of cloth, the addition of “wings” or “ears” at the side, the quality and abundance of lace and braid on the bodice mark the island, the denomination and even the village of origin. And collectively aelan dres also came to be seen as a generic national dress.84 The generation of women who lived through the struggle for independence from the conjoint colonisers, Britain and France, 78 79 80 81 82

Bolton, “Gender, status and introduced clothing in Vanuatu.” Colchester (ed.), Clothing the Pacific; Jolly, “Of the same cloth.” Geismar and Herle, Moving Images, pp. 97, 166 and 294. Quarterly Jottings, 1896, p. 7. Bolton, “Gender, status and introduced clothing in Vanuatu”; Bolton, “‘Island dress that belongs to us all.’” 83 Quarterly Jottings, 1896, p. 7. 84 Bolton, “Gender, status and introduced clothing in Vanuatu”; Bolton, “‘Island dress that belongs to us all.’”

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were urged to see it as iconic not just of their Christianity but their nationality. Like the Hawaiian quilt, a material form which was introduced as part of a colonially and racially inflected Christianity, aelan dres has been appropriated as indigenous. But significantly there is no marked masculine counterpart,85 an asymmetry which might occasion more reflection. Bolton has both explored and animated the revival of indigenous forms of cloth, and especially the pandanus textiles of Ambae.86 These textiles are being made and worn by women on important occasions such as life crisis and grade-taking rituals, although often with bras and some layers of cloth. They signal a new phase in the creolisation of clothes, a new and visible conjunction of kastom and Christianity. And in the sequestered context of the Vanuatu Cultural Centre and its museum in August 2006, at the conclusion of the Women’s Filwoka Workshop led by Jean Tarisesei and Lissant Bolton I was the privileged witness to a number of older women filwokas, the vast majority of whom were practising Christians, daring to bare their bodies in a public fashion parade of what kastom dres blong yumi (our indigenous dress) looked like.87

Trouble with Traosis

As Bolton acknowledges and Maggie Cummings documents in detail, not all ni-Vanuatu women are comfortable with aelan dres.88 Younger women and especially those in urban centres like Port Vila and Santo are rejecting this style of dress as old-fashioned and uncomfortable. Maggie Cummings quotes many younger women who prefer more tailored clothes, shorter dresses and even traosis (B. loose wide pants like culottes or surf shorts).89 They see the 85 86 87 88

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See Bruce Knauft, “From self-decoration to self-fashioning: orientalism as backward progress among the Gebusi of Papua New Guinea,” in Body Arts and Modernity, ed. Elizabeth Ewart and Michael O’Hanlon, Wantage: Sean Kingston Publishing, 2007, pp. 88–107. For example see Bolton, “Gender, status and introduced clothing in Vanuatu.” For an appraisal see Jolly, “Material and immaterial relations.” Maggie Cummings, “Looking good: the cultural politics of island dress for young women in Vanuatu,” in The Contemporary Pacific 25(1) (January 2013): 33–65, makes an important distinction between this concept and stret fasin blong dresap, “the proper way to dress.” Bolton, “Gender, status and introduced clothing in Vanuatu,” p. 36; Bolton, “‘Island dress that belongs to us all,’” p. 177; and Maggie Cummings, “The trouble with trousers: gossip, kastom and sexual culture in Vanuatu,” in Making Sense of AIDS: Culture, Sexuality and Power in Melanesia, ed. Leslie Butt and Richard Eves, Honolulu. University of Hawai’i Press, 2008, pp. 133–14; Cummings, “Looking good.” Cummings, “The trouble with trousers”; and Cummings, “Looking good.”

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aelan dres as hot and oppressive and suggest they would only wear it to hide a pregnancy or when they were married and became a mother. Traosis are especially celebrated as comfortable, but as in many parts of the western Pacific have become the subject of fierce debate.90 Opponents say, since traosis show the contours of the body they are immodest and thus invite rape and violence from men, or that such women are usurping the right of men to wear the trousers. Cummings’ young women interlocutors retort that they can run faster from men’s unwanted sexual advances in trousers and that they offer a layer of protection from rape. They even suggested that voluminous island dresses which billow in the wind made them feel naked. Yet, on several islands of Vanuatu, such as Paama, chiefs have banned women from wearing trousers in public places in the last decade. Such bans have been supported by some older Christian women’s groups but denounced by NGOs like Amnesty International who have suggested to the UN that such bans, like associated bans on women’s mobility, constitute a denial of a basic constitutional freedom and of women’s universal human rights. More than pleasure and national pride are involved in this sartorial struggle. In their desires to “look good,” young women are not just embroiled in debates about local fashions in a global world of consumption but a moral and political economy about clothing which associates modest dress and comportment with women’s sexual virtue.91 In choosing not to wear aelan dres young women say they invite violent retribution from men, including from jealous boyfriends and controlling husbands, and severe criticism from older women. Bolton herself reports the case of a woman from Pentecost who married a man and lived in Port Vila, but refused to wear the aelan dres characteristic of his island.92 He subjected her to violent abuse and a kastom court (community hearing) which ordered her to pay a fine on several occasions. But she persisted in wearing her preferred jeans. It would be hard to deny that notions of rispek (B. respect) and sexual modesty are at play here, along with notions about the right of men and of male-dominated kastom courts to control women’s comportment, clothing and sexual behaviour. Such adjudications simultaneously engage kastom and Christian values in reinscribing patterns of male control. Yet increasingly 90

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See Deborah McDougall, “Fellowship and citizenship as models of national community: United Church Women’s Fellowship in Ranongga, Solomon Islands,” Oceania 74(1–2) (2003): 61–80; Martha Macintyre, “Police and thieves, gunmen and drunks: problems with men and problems with society in Papua New Guinea,” The Australian Journal of Anthropology 19 (2008): 179–93. Cummings “Looking good,” 2013. Bolton, “‘Island dress that belongs to us all,’” p. 177.

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younger women are resisting such imputations and adjudications and wearing what “looks good.” As Cummings suggests, “looking good is both an aesthetic and a moral imperative.”93 So even though older ni-Vanuatu women and some scholars have insisted that the wearing of aelan dres is primarily about women’s collective pleasure and religious and ethnic identity rather than about Christian sexual modesty and shame**, the spurning of such dress styles by younger women might suggest that it is not a question of either/or but of both/and.

Some Missing Threads?

Scholarly approaches to Christianity in Oceania have lurched between the clichéd polarities of treating Pacific peoples as victims of the colonial power with which Christianity was palpably if tensely articulated94 and seeing them as eager agents embracing new gods and foreign goods.95 The history of cloth has been an integral part of such narratives. For too long the adoption of Western clothes and women’s sewing classes were seen simply as part of a colonially imposed discipline of domesticity. Over the last decade scholars have consummately queried such verdicts stressing the indigenous agency at work in acts of appropriation, translation and transformation of cloth and clothing. As we have seen the histories of both the Hawaiian quilt and of aelan dres are imbued with Oceanic meanings and values which often go unappreciated by the casual observer. Yet in our discursive stress on indigenous agency and appropriation it is important not to completely lose sight of the colonial power and capitalist modernity which was part of the saturated “light” of Christianity as it penetrated “heathen darkness,” nor the way in which novel Christian values about “sexuality” which associated bared bodies with sin, which indexically connected the surface of the body and the inner person or the “soul” were internalised by generations of Pacific peoples.96 Hawai’i and Vanuatu are places where ** Figure 39 (Ni-Vanuatu women marching together on the streets of Port Vila wearing identical aelan dres to celebrate women in business, July 2009) is not included here. See: “Open Day 2009,” VANWODS Microfinance, 17 July 2009, online: http://microfinance.van essasuen.com/2009/07/open-day-2009, acc. 5 Aug. 2013. 93 Cummings, “Looking good,” p. 34. 94 For example see Roger M. Keesing, Custom and Confrontation: The Kwaio Struggle for Cultural Autonomy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. 95 For example see Joel Robbins, Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 96 Keane, “The hazards of new clothes.”

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Christianity has so long prevailed that it is now seen as an inherent aspect of indigenous culture. But in the high valleys of Papua New Guinea (PNG) evangelical Christianity has only recently triumphed. Here sexual cultures characterised by secret male initiation, the insemination of boys and gendered segregation have been supplanted by companionate heterosexual marriage, greater female autonomy and perceptions of homosexuality as a foreign import only in the decades since the 1970s.97 Some ethnographers of PNG are reporting a sense of “humiliation” about past practices or a state of “moral torment” among Christians.98 Gilbert Herdt has recently spoken of denial, shame and even “aphasia” about past sexual cultures among the Sambia given the force of the novel Christian fabric of “sexuality,” as married women and men nestle down under one blanket.99 Holly Wardlow rather evokes the continuing struggle and self-discipline of Christian couples living and sleeping together.100 Foreign Christian missionaries too often assumed the binaries of naked heathens and clothed Christians clearly distinguished sexual lasciviousness from chastity and modesty. Yet diverse indigenous patterns of clothing were never indexical of sexual cultures. Women’s grass skirts and men’s penis wrappers were dignified forms of dress in sexual cultures which practised long periods of heterosexual abstinence (as in South Pentecost, Vanuatu)101 or where heterosexual relations were suffused with anxious fears of mutual pollution (as in parts of Highlands PNG). Women’s breasts might be routinely exposed in a culture where female virginity was sacralised but then ritually deflowered, as in Samoa. And the clothing introduced by Christian missionaries was surely no guarantor of greater sexual modesty or monogamy. As Webb Keane has suggested in his brilliant essay “The Hazards of New Clothes”: Herein lies a persistent tension in missionary efforts to clothe the naked. For in covering our nakedness and directing attention to our artificial surface, clothing threatens to supplant us. Mission history across the colonial world shows a persistent and troubling tension between the hope 97 98 99 100 101

Gilbert Herdt, “From ritual sex to sexual individuality: tradition and modernity in Sambia sexual culture,” Public lecture, Canberra: The Australian National University, 11 July 2012. Joel Robbins and Holly Wardlow (eds), The Making of Global and Local Modernities in Melanesia: Humiliation, Transformation and the Nature of Cultural Change, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005; Robbins, Becoming Sinners; Wardlow, Wayward Women. Gilbert Herdt, “From ritual sex to sexual individuality”; see Wardlow, Wayward Women; Wardlow, “Paradoxical intimacies,” (this volume). Wardlow, “Paradoxical intimacies,” (this volume). See Margaret Jolly, “Damming the rivers of milk? Fertility, sexuality and modernity in Melanesia and Amazonia,” in Gender in Amazonia and Melanesia: An Exploration of the Comparative Method, ed. Tom Gregor and Donald Tuzin, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001, pp. 175–206.

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that clothing will change people, and the danger that people once clad will invest their clothing with too great a significance.102 He situates this tension in the strenuous efforts by Christian moderns and especially Protestants to radically distinguish persons and things, subjects and objects and thereby to extinguish the animated materiality, the sensuous embodiment of cloth which characterised ancestral religions.103 But, he does not and we cannot say that these “new clothes” had nothing to do with new Christian values about sexuality, bodily comportment and domesticity. The Hawaiian quilt may have been appropriated enthusiastically and imbued with the values of indigenous sanctity and rank, but practices of royal incest and the Hawaiian hula were abandoned (but the latter revived) and the chants which celebrated the sexual organs of the ali’i nui, their virility and fertility, gave way to Christian hymns praising Jehovah’s creation. The fabric of the aelan dres may now be imbued with women’s pleasures and collective ethnic and national identities, but it also signals sexual modesty, gendered rispek and the crucial significance of being a married mother. The repressive control and sexual violence experienced by some young women who prefer not to wear it should make us pause. There is a tendency for either/or explanations of Oceanic cloth which perhaps unduly associate indigenous values and things with continuity and agency and exogenous values and things with rupture and oppression. We need to get beyond these ideologically charged antinomies and pursue a both/and approach. I have advocated the writing of a history of Oceanic cloth which is “saturated.” This is not just a metaphoric play with “Oceanic,” suggesting clothes which are soaked, but imagines a cloth which is imbued with both indigenous and exogenous values, impregnated with continuity and rupture and saturated with ongoing struggles about embodied gendered persons and sensuous, beautiful things. 102 Keane, “The hazards of new clothes,” p. 3. 103 Webb Keane, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

Missionaries

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Christian Missionaries as Anticolonial Militants Karen E. Fields It is an ancient paradox of Christian otherworldliness that, because congregations of believers must be organized in this world, accommodations have been reached with all kinds of political regimes. Christian missionaries in British colonial Africa were no exception: they made peace with colonial domination—and all its attendant inequities—to make war on “heathenism”. The colonial histories of Malawi (Nyasaland) and Zambia (Northern Rhodesia) illustrate both the peace and the war. Imperialist voices such as that of David Livingstone loudly proclaimed the missionary accommodation to Empire and thereby encouraged the view that the accommodation was unambiguous, with a spiritual colonization naturally seconding the political one. But missionaries also subverted colonial political arrangements. Their determined assault upon customary religious observance had as its inevitable consequence an equally determined assault on customary authority. The missionaries’ evangelistic war against “heathenism” amounted to a militant and concerted campaign against colonial law and order. The British colonial machinery pressed African customary rulers into the service of the Empire. The well-known principle of “indirect rule” provided a two-tiered structure, in which black and white rulers worked in separate but necessarily interdependent spheres. The administration would transfer to African rulers many of the tasks of the new colonial state—tax collection, census, public works, law enforcement, and, gradually, others. At the same time, in all respects consistent with the sovereignty of the British Crown and “not repugnant to British law and custom,” the old hierarchy would be preserved in the villages with the blessing and support of the regime. According to Leo Marquard, an enthusiastic observer who wrote in 1931, indirect rule might “almost be described as the theory of self-determination as applied to Native Tribes.” It seemed to him “a positive theory of government based on the assumption that sound administration rests on the traditions of the people.”1 Source: Fields, K. E., “Christian Missionaries as Anticolonial Militants,” Theory and Society 11.1 (1982): pp. 95–108. Reprinted by permission from Springer, Copyright © (1982). 1 Leo Marquard, “The Problem of Government,” in J. Merle Davis, ed., Modern Industry and the African: An Enquiry into the Effect of the Copper Mines of Central Africa upon Native Society and the Work of Christian Missions, Made Under the Auspices of the Department of Social and Industrial Research of the International Missionary Council (London, 1933), 251–252.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/97890

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The colonial regime intended to channel for its own purposes the legitimate authority it lacked but that customary rulers possessed. And it was prepared to uphold those customs that went with the exercise of legitimate chiefly authority. According to Lord Frederick Lugard, the famous theoretician of indirect rule, there was to be rule by native chiefs, unfettered in their control of their people as regards those matters which are to them the most important attributes of rule, with scope for initiative and responsibility, but admittedly—as far as the visible horizon is concerned—subordinate to the control of the Protecting Power in certain well-defined directions.2 By “the most important attributes of rule” Lugard assuredly did not mean the right to enact laws, levy taxes, try capital crimes, coin money, or raise armies. He meant “native law and custom,” so long as they neither conflicted with the Crown’s sovereignty nor scandalized British notions of justice. In this way African custom acquired a definite political role in colonial arrangements. The hallmark of mission work was the attack upon “heathenism,” the missionaries’ term for wide ranges of African custom. Although the missionaries might serve colonial power by mediating the spread of Western culture or by giving imperialism a humanitarian face, they could not simply snap into position side by side with the grass-roots institutions of indirect rule. The political success of these institutions presupposed the continuing validity of African custom; missionary success would mean its disappearance. In a system that strove to maintain African village life much as it had been before colonial rule, changing it slowly and building upon its hierarchy, the missions remained an anomaly. Mission Christianity, by deliberate plan, corroded African village life. Its Gospel included such tangibles as Lancashire cotton, cash crops, red-brick houses, Western medicine, tombstones, books, and money. The intangibles pertained not only to Christianity’s transcendent God, but also to individualism, formal schooling, the nuclear family, middle-class values and virtues, skilled trades, and ambition. All had religious meaning. Christian conversion aimed at a cultural, as well as a religious, conversion. As missionaries were fond of saying, the converted “set themselves apart”; they “declared for a completely changed life”.3 Reverend Robert Laws of Livingstonia Mission boasted that because a good Christian artisan could easily surpass a non-Christian 2 Frederick John Dealtry Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, 5th ed. (Hamden, Conn., 1965), 197. 3 Rev. W. Vernon Stone in a personal communication.

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chief in wealth and personal attainment, he would speedily displace the chief as a model for the people.4 Missions sought to create conditions to effect the total conversion of individuals. When possible they transplanted young pupils onto mission soil to cut them off from village influences and thus prepare them for their future role as witnesses to a “completely changed life”. Toward this end Livingstonia Mission campaigned to have indenture laws passed in Malawi.5 African pupils might then be kept in long association with their Christian mentors. Livingstonia generously provided haven to fugitives and ex-slaves, as well as to other people with little motivation to return to their homes.6 Converts transformed by their experience on Christian soil would then be sent forth to become foreign elements in non-Christian villages—in but not of them. It is easy to be misled by the manner in which British officials talked about indirect rule. Following Lugard, they would refer to African customary rulers as “mouthpieces” and “intermediaries,” forgetting that these rulers were only useful so long as they had authority of their own. As elsewhere, Africans in colonial Zambia were mobilized en masse during World War II. Some were called into the armed forces, others into warconnected work. Ordinary villagers were pressed to grow supplementary food supplies to meet the needs of urban workers in industrial enterprises. They were even invited to invest their cash savings in bonds and to take part in a Food for Britain campaign at the end of the war.7 In rural localities the burden of executing these various projects—and of meeting resistance to them—fell upon the shoulders of chiefs and headmen. One chief, a certain Mulendema, protested to the local District Commissioner that members of the Watch-tower sect were making it difficult for him to carry out his orders. The Watchtower, he began, is “agitating our sons”: We do not like it, sir, together with all our headmen who replied the same word, “we do not like it at all.”…. The reasons why we do not like it are 4 William Pringle Livingstone, Laws of Livingstonia: A Narrative of Missionary Adventure and Enterprise (London, 1921), 377. Livingstonia was founded by the United Free Church of Scotland—a Presbyterian denomination now joined with the Church of Scotland—in honor of David Livingstone. 5 7884, Elmslie to Smith, 14/2/1901, National Library of Scotland; Livingstone, 275. 6 Livingstone, 176. 7 Sec/Nat 312, Vol. VII, Provincial Commissioner (Broken Hill) to Chief Secretary, 5/4/1943 and 16/3/1943; Sec/Nat 312, Vol. VI, A Muwamba to T. F. Sanford, 31/8/1940; Sec/Nat 312, Vol. VI, Tour Report (Copperbelt) to Secretary for Native Affairs, 7/1942; Sec/Nat 312, Vol. VIII, Acting Provincial Commissioner to Chief Secretary, 26/3/1946, National Archives of Zambia.

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these—1) they have not help to government, they do not offer themselves for war work; 2) they do not respect their country and their chiefs; 3) they send women on long journeys to preach without the consent of their husbands; 4) they do not keep well their dead relatives.8 It would appear at first glance that Mulendema has put together disparate complaints in an old man’s rambling discontent with changing times. It is not immediately obvious that young men’s failure to revere dead relatives, or young women’s exercise of new independence, has much to do with the orders of the colonial administration. But Mulendema has affirmed their interconnection, associating them with proper respect to himself. He was right: The colonial regime needed Mulendema and his colleagues not only as executive agents, but as defenders of customary piety—the ideological grounding on which their own authority over their customary subjects depended. If customary superiors could not compel a man to honor his elders, including deceased members of his lineage, how could they compel him to do anything else? Refusal to do war work and “keep dead relatives” were manifestations of a single problem of authority. Lugard saw these matters in their correct perspective when he wrote, “The profession of any creed … shall in no way absolve the convert from obedience to customary rulers, or from the observance of native law and custom, when not repugnant to his conscience.”9 He recognized that because African custom and the execution of colonial policies could not be separated, impiety could become sedition, the ill effects of which could go far beyond offending the oldfashioned sensitivities of traditionalist chiefs. Hence, administrators engaged in surprising activities. In the Southern Province of Zambia, for example, they struggled to enforce wives’ obedience to their husbands and uphold various rituals of rule; in the Northern Province they defended the integrity of the Bembas’ royal burial groves.10 In short, colonial officials acquired a lively interest in indigenous customs, and even a genuine respect for them. Indirect rule took them a long way from the primitive hostility with which they had first viewed Africa’s “heathen despots”. Whereas administrators had responsibility for the maintenance of order in vast territories, missionaries needed only to keep order among the Christian 8 Sec/Nat 312, Vol. VII, Mulendema to District Commissioner (Luangwa), 2/8/1942, National Archives of Zambia. 9 Lugard, 590–591. 10 Marquard, in Davis, 239; ZA 1/10 (1919–1926), Native Commissioner (Fort Jameson) to Magistrate, 21/7/1925; Sec/Nat 312, Vol. VI, District Commissioner (Mongu-Lealui) to Provincial Commissioner, 25/8/1935; BS1/115, Young to Wallace, 9/9/1908.

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faithful. Anyone who disturbed this order by, as they put it, “reverting to heathenism,” had only to be excommunicated.11 But officials had to be more pragmatic about the speed with which they tried to carry forward the “civilizing” mission. When local politics required it, they were prepared, for example, to restore to chiefs the customary labor service they had at first regarded as a form of slavery. Indeed, they were prepared to qualify their attitudes toward witchcraft. Mulendema’s troubles with the Watchtower sect, a millenarian breakaway movement, had wider significance. It has become so commonplace to view groups like the Watchtower as outstanding troublemakers that their kinship with conservative missions is often missed. Breakaway movements were in many respects the true spiritual offspring of ordinary Christian missions. Attitudes toward funeral custom provide many cases in point, for like Watchtower groups, ordinary missions were forever vigilant against customs that smacked of ancestor worship. Monica Wilson informs us that the Berlin Missionary Society in Tanzania demanded that African Christians refuse to make an obligatory contribution of food to their chiefs when a relative died.12 Demanding that converts overcome the fear of supernatural punishment, missionaries believed that converts would manifest shining belief in the superiority of their new God. They understood that chiefs’ ascendency in the religious sphere could not easily be separated from their right to command in other spheres. Thus, writes Wilson, when a non-Christian chief sent out a request for roadworkers to Christian and non-Christian subjects alike, the local missionary himself went to the district boma (administrative headquarters) to complain. He apparently understood that authority in one sphere implied authority in the other. Christianity gave people principled grounds for denying customary obligations of all kinds—arranged marriages, prescribed remarriages, customary labor. That such obligations had supernatural sanction did not mean they might not be onerous or irksome, or that people would let pass the opportunity to be free of them. A Bemba, refusing to fulfill a customary labor obligation, gave this classic expression when he told the anthropologist Audrey Richards: “I am a Christian. I don’t do things for nothing.”13 Christian belief could also be appealed to against the demands of the colonial regime. Seventh Day Adventists, 11 As one may well imagine, such expulsions could lead to agitation by disgruntled exmembers of a mission. Missions were sometimes explicitly criticized for the political difficulties that were created in this way. For a principled defense of this practice, see United Free Church Foreign Mission Committee, Report, 1909, 4, National Library of Scotland. 12 Monica Wilson, “An African Christian Morality,” Africa (1937), 288–290. 13 Audrey I. Richards, Land, Labour and Diet: An Economic Survey of the Bemba Tribe (London, 1939), 258.

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members of the Dutch Reformed Church, and Watchtower adherents alike preached pacifism during World War II, on the principled grounds of the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill.” Scoffing at the Watchtower pacifists, Isaac Muwamba commented to an official, “They do not say that because they want to be good Christians. They only want to avoid death by being killed.”14 Whatever the motivation, the very possibility of an appeal to conscience beyond wordly authority, an integral part of all Christian teaching, was subversive in itself. It is curious how seldom genuine missionary activism against customary authority is recognized for what it was, and in its full ramifications. Missionary subversion seems to have been most clearly heard when uttered by members of breakaway sects. Yet, the missionary assault upon customary authority was continual, and conflicts between missionaries and administrators sensitive to breach of custom were commonplace. African evangelists employed by missions were notorious radicals who did not hesitate to scandalize village opinion by destroying ancestor shrines, breaking ceremonial beer pots, disrupting communal rituals, insulting and disobeying “heathen” elders, and aggressively advertising and displaying the material advantages of mission membership. Because such activities were already common, officials prohibited Livingstonia from sending evangelists into the Chinsali District of Zambia in the early years of this century. Chinsali was the chiefdom of the official burier of the Bemba kings and site of the sacred burial groves, and administrators feared large-scale rioting if Christian evangelists began work there.15 Despite strict prohibition, evangelists led by David Kaunda (father of the President of Zambia) entered the area in 1904 or 1905. Given that Kaunda remained in the good graces of Livingstonia, which eventually promoted him to pastor, it is obvious that missionaries felt themselves subject to an authority higher than that of the terrestrial regime.16 Believing that Christian evangelists, operating far from mission centers, were causing havoc in the villages, administrators demanded that they be placed under “adequate supervision”. The Native School Ordinance of 1908, revised in 1915 and many times subsequently, was the outcome. But the missions, with limited resources, could not provide the close oversight that the Ordinance envisaged. Like the regime, the missions had quickly resorted to their own 14 ZA 1/10, Vol. II, I. C. Muwamba to D. MacKenzie-Kennedy, 22/6/1924, National Archives of Zambia. 15 BS1/115, Young to Wallace, 9/9/1908; ZA 7/1/4/1, Annual Report (Northern Province, Chinsali District), 1919–1920, National Archives of Zambia. 16 W. Vernon Stone, “Livingstonia Mission and the Bemba,” Bulletin of the Society for African Church History (1968), 312–313, 315.

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version of indirect rule for the same reason: they had few workers relative to the task they undertook. According to one estimate, during the first decade of the twentieth century each of Livingstonia’s mission stations claimed spiritual jurisdiction over 40,000 to 100,000 people.17 Missions could only succeed by depending heavily on African initiative. Thus evangelist-teachers, products of the intensive program at the mission centers, traveled widely, opening schools, holding services, preparing new candidates for baptism, and finding new talent. The congregation founded by Mr. Kaunda, for example, acquired a Missionary-in-Charge only in 1913. By that time some twenty schools already existed. The schools, together with the congregation, were managed without white supervision for fully eight years.18 The Native Schools Ordinance was revised repeatedly to spell out what the administration meant by “adequate supervision” of African evangelistteachers.19 Naturally, the missions themselves subscribed to the principle, but to them the advantages of spreading the Christian net far and wide usually outweighed the disadvantages of occasional trouble. If confronted with the choice between non-Christian order and Christian disorder, they were prepared to accept the latter without hesitation. When in 1915 the administration revised the Ordinance to require a large increase in the proportion of European to African teachers, Reverend Walter Elmslie declared his readiness to violate an “intolerable” law. The law meant either that missions would have to bear the higher cost of employing white teachers or they would have to withdraw practicing black teachers from the field. Wrote Elmslie: “The spread of the Gospel has been by the life and testimony of those whose hearts have been changed and we cannot admit any rule which would shut the mouth of a Christian who desires to lead others to Christ.”20 Elmslie and his colleagues at Livingstonia then proceeded solemnly to ignore the new enactment. Missionaries and administrators never saw eye to eye on the matter of adequate supervision. Missionaries did not always agree with administrators about which acts by evangelists were excesses meriting punishment. The immediate stimulus for enacting the Native Schools Ordinance in 1908 was a violent confrontation between a young evangelist and a village headman. The headman flogged the 17 Livingstone, 378. 18 The first baptisms were performed in 1911, during a rare pastoral visit by the Rev. Mr. Chisholm to the area. See Stone, 314. On African initiative, see also Kenneth John McCracken, “Livingstonia Mission and the Evolution of Malawi, 1875–1939,” Ph.D. diss., University of Cambridge, 1967. 19 ZA 1/9/158/2, “Memo re Closing of Schools in Petauke District,” National Archives of Zambia. The text of the Ordinance is included here. 20 United Free Church Foreign Mission Committee, Review of Foreign Missions (1915), 43.

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youth and his colleague for speaking and acting “disrespectfully”. For his part, the youth claimed that he had only resisted the headman’s efforts to stop his preaching. When the events had been reported, the youth’s supervisor, the Rev. Mr. Prentice of Livingstonia, defended the youth. There followed an acrimonious exchange of correspondence. The missionary upheld the youth’s right to preach and condemned the headman’s action: the official insisted that it would shortly be impossible to keep order if white men abetted young African “scoundrels”.21 Freely admitting that their teachers were sometimes overbearing, intolerant, arrogant, and high-handed, missionaries were disinclined to judge harshly when their teachers’ opponents were old men who sought to retard the advance of the Christian Message. And they were prepared to shed few tears for the demise of customary order. Writing about the efforts of village headmen to obstruct hearers’ classes, the Rev. Mr. Henderson admitted that “the new teaching tends to sweep aside before it is able to make adequate compensations, customs not in any way wrong but apparently childish, which nevertheless are the real bonds of native society and the main safeguards of its moral code.” But, he continued, “To attribute [weight] generally to considerations of this nature would be a great stretch of generosity.”22 As these remarks of Reverend Henderson intimate, missionaries in person might be quite as dangerous to law and order as the black men (and occasionally women) whom they recruited as their proxies.23 In the Northern Province of Zambia, for example, there was for years a running feud between (Catholic) White Father missionaries and the regime on the matter of divorce.24 The Fathers opposed it. When authorized African judges accorded divorces to converts, the Fathers moved to overrule them. While officials could appreciate the 21 BS1/113, Wallace to Prentice, 10/4/1908, National Archives of Zambia. 22 United Free Church Foreign Mission Committee, Livingstonia Mission Report (1901), 6, National Library of Scotland. 23 This language conveys the missionaries’ conception that evangelists were mere appendages of their white employers. For an interesting commentary on this outlook from an African viewpoint, see Paul Mushindo, The Life of an African Evangelist, with an Editorial Foreword by J. van Velsen (Lusaka: University of Zambia. Institute for African Studies, Communication no. 9, 1973). 24 Brian Garvey, “The Development of the White Fathers Mission Among the BembaSpeaking Peoples, 1891–1964,” D. Phil. diss., University of London, 1974, 115, 123. See also ZA 7/1/5/1, Annual Report (Northern Province, Kasama and Luwingu Districts), 1920–1921; ZA 7/1/10/1, Annual Report (Northern Province, Luwingu District), 1925–1926; ZA 7/1/15/1, Annual Report (Northern Province, Kasama District), 1931–1932; ZA 7/1/16/5 (Northern Province, Mweru-Luapula and Kasama Districts), 1933, National Archives of Zambia. The order acquired its name from the Fathers’ habit of a long white cassock and mantle. Founded by Charles Martial Allemand Lavigerie, Archbishop of Algiers and later Cardinal, it was originally called the Society of Missionaries of the Venerable Geronimo.

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religious principle, they also understood the serious political issue at stake. In societies organized on the basis of kinship, marriage and divorce engage important public interests; they are not merely private, domestic matters. Marital discord could disturb the peace of a whole village community and might extend far beyond into the respective kin groups of the partners. The regulation of marriage and divorce constituted an integral part of the maintenance of law and order. And because enforcement fell to customary authorities, missionaries’ interference with it was, as administrators quickly recognized, a farreaching political act.25 Thus the men concerned with overseeing the peace had to block the White Fathers’ pursuit of religious ideals. Sometimes missionaries’ radicalism came in the guise of accommodation to Empire. They sought in various ways to overrule those village headmen and elders who refused to permit evangelists to preach and to organize classes. Opposing young upstarts from the missions, headmen and elders sought to protect both their religion and their power. But faced with this opposition, missionaries tended to think of these men as wholly selfish, as well as ignorant, superstitious, “beer-bloated” (a favorite phrase of teetotalling Protestant sects), and “lascivious” (i.e., polygamous). Launching an all-out invasion into these moral depths seemed fully justified, with all means fair. One expedient was to appear in person and use, as Reverend Donald Fraser put it, “the prestige of his white face,” to overcome resistance.26 Parading in this special uniform of the Empire could be effective because villagers generally assumed that mission and boma were kith and kin, and that missionaries did whatever they did with the blessing of the regime. A variant of Fraser’s tactic was to summon a chief or headman to the mission to “speak to him,” just as local officials summoned these men to the boma for instructions and discipline.27 Here then was radicalism of a peculiar kind. It consisted in using the prestige of the colonial state to advance teaching that would presently free men and women from the moral authority of customary religion and from the political authority it justified. To appreciate fully the import of missionary radicalism, we must keep in mind the nature of indirect rule and of customary rulers’ place within it. The village headman was, to use Max Gluckman’s phrase, the “non-commissioned

25 ZA 7/1/3/1, Annual Report (Awemba Province), 1915, refers to “great mistakes” made in divorce cases by early “direct” rulers, National Archives of Zambia. See also note 24. Annual District Reports show that there was very little theft and violent crime in the villages. The great preponderance of cases tried in African courts concerned marriage disputes. 26 United Free Church Foreign Mission Committee, Livingstonia Mission Report (1902), 36, National Library of Scotland. 27 BS1/115, Peuth to Leyer, 18/7/1910, National Archives of Zambia.

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officer”28 of the Empire. Along with chief and elder, he carried the burden of keeping the Pax Britannica in the villages. Through these efforts the work of administration was done in rural areas. Through him His Majesty spoke the local vernacular. But indirect rule was not simply a matter of passing “modern” duties into the hands of indigenous leaders. It provided for their continued performance of old-fashioned ones. Above all it strove to maintain customary controls on the behavior of individuals. The Pax Britannica, as enforced by African rulers, comprised both the Crown’s law and order and customary law and order. Not anxious to have the full burden of ruling “directly” thrust upon them, clear-sighted imperialists speedily grasped the point. As early as 1909 the nightmare vision of having the rule directly had already come to a British governor, Girouard, whom Lugard quotes in his treatise on indirect rule. After noting that “various agencies” were “breaking down the tribal system, denationalizing the native, and emancipating him from the rule of this chief,” Girouard continued: If we allow tribal authority to be ignored or broken it will mean that we, who numerically form a small minority in the country, shall be obliged to deal with a rabble, with thousands of persons in a savage or semi-savage state, all acting on their own impulses, and making themselves a danger to society generally.29 Commenting after World War I on the decline of “respect for tribal authority,” Justice P. J. Macdonnell used apocalyptic language: he “saw the abyss opening”.30 (It will surprise no one to learn that Macdonnell’s plan for closing the “abyss” included revisions in the Native Schools Ordinance designed to make it easier for headmen to reject the services of Christian teachers.) Book after book about indirect rule contains such expressions as: “But all real power remained in the hands of the colonial authorities,” or worse, “in the hands of the British Monarch” and similar confusions of legal formulation with political fact. Quite the contrary, the authorities and the Crown derived power from the customary order; and they derived it not in the legal sense but in a political one. When a District Commissioner reported year after year, on the basis of an annual or biannual tour to a locality, that all was orderly, he was not reporting on his own doing—whatever the mystique of Empire led him to believe. For 28 Max Gluckman, J. A. Barnes, and J. C. Mitchell, “The Village Headman in British Central Africa,” Africa (1949), 89. 29 Lugard, 216. 30 ZA 1/10, Macdonnell to Administration, 5/5/1919, National Archives of Zambia.

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the rural masses, most of the time, and in most aspects of day-to-day life, white officials could not and did not rule. Failure to recognize that customary rulers remained, necessarily, real rulers leads to misreading the extent of missions’ accommodation to the political requirements of colonial domination. While officials acquired some of the “respect for tribal authority” which they enjoined upon the African masses, missionaries remained intent on their battles against “heathenism”. They were among Girouard’s “various agencies” that were injecting foreign bodies into the “tribal systems,” which Girouard and the other technicians of indirect rule labored to keep in good working order. This primary concern with order generated what might be called a “politics of custom”—a set of transactions and adjustments designed to harness local beliefs and practices to give His Majesty power, even in remote villages. The term “politics” may appear inappropriate. For most of the colonial period, the regime recognized no African politics as such. Officials spoke instead of “native administration” and fell back on the language of bureaucracy. (Thus they spoke of the “performance” of chiefs, “employees” of the administration, as “competent” or “inefficient.” As Karl Mannheim said so well, “The inherent tendency of all bureaucratic thought is to transform problems of politics into problems of administration.”31) But if when we speak of “politics” we refer to contests over the ultimate deployment of legitimate authority in a population,32 then indirect rule demanded a vigorous politics within the customary order. Because the regime was a consumer of some of the power generated here, the “politics of custom” regularly drew officials in. A substantial part of their behavior cannot be explained in other terms. One example must suffice: the astonishing way in which administrators could be led to modify their views about custom, even on such matters as witchcraft. At first administrators stood with missionaries in a common unbelief in witchcraft and in a common hostility to the practices associated with its control in African societies. After the passage of the Witchcraft Ordinance of 1914 in Zambia (1911 in Malawi), they operated in a legal context that prohibited

31

Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (New York, 1936), 118. 32 Lugard’s case for indirect rule rested on a strategy of skillful organization—potentially quite cheap—rather than force, which would engender high costs. Martin Kilson has aptly called indirect rule “colonialism-on-the-cheap”. See Martin L. Kilson, Political Change in a West African State: A Study in the Modernization Process (Cambridge, Mass., 1966), 24.

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the indictment and prosecution of witches.33 Thus administrators soon found themselves arresting chiefs and village headmen for undertaking such prosecutions illegally—as well as arresting villagers who, vigilante-like, did what their own law enforcement agencies were no longer authorized to do. But the practical logic of indirect rule could lead white officials to moderate this policy. In the mid-1930s a huge anti-witchcraft movement, called the Mucapi Movement, spread rapidly through Malawi, Zambia, and parts of neighboring territories. The essence of the Mucapi Movement was to organize the surrender of medicines and magical objects during large communal rituals. Witches would confess, and all would drink the mucapi medicine together, so that they would henceforth be invulnerable to witchcraft. Missionaries were deeply disturbed by a movement that drew Christians away from the rituals of their new faith. Administrators, however, were disturbed by this new, large-scale violation of the Witchcraft Ordinance, for the movement swept through huge areas at an amazing speed. Some administrators soon noticed that many chiefs gave the Bamucapi medicine men their wholehearted support—even chiefs whom they had become accustomed to calling “loyal,” “responsible,” and “competent”. In a curious chain of developments, the regimes of Malawi and Zambia decided to tolerate the Bamucapi rather than to arrest and prosecute them, despite their evident violation of the law.34 Remarkable as this step was, it grew directly from the effort to maintain law and order. Officials were in a delicate position. Trying at first to arrest and prosecute the Bamucapi, they soon recognized that the logistical problem of arresting the men exceeded their resources. The Bamucapi carefully skirted mission and boma, concentrating on the villages, moving swiftly from one village to the next. Arresting them would have required the active cooperation of villagers and local leaders. But villagers usually failed to inform the authorities of these visits, and the first word received at the boma typically came long after the Mucapi had done his work and moved on. Thus the officials could at best hope for a few arrests carried out haphazardly. It became clear that any attempt to 33

For a detailed discussion of this enactment, see Geoffrey St. J. Orde Browne, “Witchcraft and British Colonial Law,” Africa (1935), 481–487. 34 The medicine was called mucapi, its purveyors Bamucapi (Mucapi, singular). On the Mucapi episode, see Audrey I. Richards, “A Modern Movement of Witchfinders,” Africa (1935), 448–456, and Terence O. Ranger, “Mucapi and the Study of Witchcraft Eradication,” paper presented to the Conference on Central African Religions (Lusaka, Zambia, 1973, mimeographed). This account is drawn mainly from ZA 1/15/M/2, National Archives of Zambia, a folio of contemporary reports, circulars, and correspondence. The episode is presented in greater detail in Karen E. Fields, “Revival and Rebellion in Colonial Central Africa: Social and Political Consequences of Missionary Enterprise,” Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1977, 106–150.

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crush the Mucapi Movement systematically was bound to fail. Thoughtful men pondered the ramifications of trying hard to enforce existing law and failing in full view of all the villagers. The immense popularity of the mucapi medicine among the villagers raised the stakes higher. While yielding no significant result, isolated arrests would generate much ill will. And complicating further the problem of ill will, the villages were full of restless young men whom the Great Depression had thrown out of work in the urban centers. For all these reasons, when officials saw that chiefs whose abilities they had come to count on were determined to bring the Bamucapi into their chiefdoms, they had to pay attention. The chiefs’ position was as delicate as that of the officials. Custom provided that they should be responsible for the control of crime, including witchcraft, so as to protect the health and well-being of their people. The Witchcraft Ordinance prevented their acting officially in their own right, but the Bamucapi provided the opportunity to offer a service in popular demand. Few serious politicians anywhere would lightly let such an opportunity pass. Insofar as the early efforts to prosecute required their help, these efforts must have been an embarrassment. For if chiefs could enhance their popularity by accepting the Bamucapi, equally they could do themselves incalculable political harm by appearing to stand in the way of men determined to help the people. Richard Stuart reports that some reluctant chiefs in Malawi were actually pressed by their people to cooperate in the distribution of the mucapi. As he puts it, they “had to appear to take the lead”.35 Opposing the mucapi medicine could easily appear as favoring witchcraft. For these and other reasons, chiefs supplied officials with favorable reports about the Bamucapi and their medicine. The officials responded, after considerable discussion and correspondence, by according to the Bamucapi a “watchful tolerance” while holding the chiefs responsible for any violence that might result from the medicine men’s work. F. H. Melland, District Commissioner in one of the areas affected by the Mucapi Movement, published in 1935 a remarkable paper entitled “Ethical and Political Aspects of African Witchcraft.” He contended that it was necessary, if indirect rule was to work, that customary rulers be allowed to protect their subjects against witchcraft, as custom demanded: It is not recognized that in this system of indirect rule we are making the position untenable. We tell headman to try cases, but not when they refer to a non-existent thing like witchcraft, the greatest evil in all their eyes. 35 Richard Stuart, “The Mucapi on Likoma Island,” paper presented to the Conference on Central African Religions (Lusaka, Zambia, 1972, mimeographed), 10.

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We tell the people to listen to their headmen and abhor the witchdoctor. The two may be one and the same! … Even when they are not the sub rosa trial will take place…. As regards this particular matter we have put the headman in an impossible position, and that is ethically wrong while politically it is a very serious introduction of “foreign matter” into the machinery we have established.36 This logic led Melland to suggest that administrators not only permit witchcraft eradication, but also that they seek actively to cooperate with witchfinders. And he made the extraordinary assertion that there are “better-class” witchdoctors, with whom Britons ought to make common cause: Everyone who has intimate knowledge of such matters knows that the word of a witchdoctor has infinitely more weight with the majority of Africans than that of an official or missionary. Is it not common sense that we should make an alliance with him—get the use of his power [!] and of his services? From personal experience in individual cases, I have found that the better-class witchdoctor can so cooperate and is perfectly willing to do so.37 These suggestions belie the simplistic view that indirect rule transformed customary rulers into mere “mouthpieces” of the colonial administration. They show in what direction the practical logic of indirect rule could lead. What was good for the practice of indirect rule was not always good for mission evangelism—and vice versa. The “foreign” matter to which Melland referred was being ground into the machinery of the regime by the missions as well as by the Witchcraft Ordinance. Missions had their own Christian reasons for denying the right and responsibility of customary rulers to protect all their people from witchcraft. On this issue the missionaries obviously could not afford to make concessions in the interest of colonial law and order. To be sure, an occasional missionary had the boldness of a Melland. The Rev. Mr. Fraser of Livingstonia is reported on one occasion to have used techniques like those of the Bamucapi, inviting his congregation to bring their medicines and magical objects to church.38 But by and large such adaptations could not become widespread or open practice in the missions, even though many African Christians did not accept the missionaries’ attitude toward witchcraft as 36 Frank H. Melland, “Ethical and Political Aspects of African Witchcraft,” Africa (1935), 503. 37 Ibid. 38 Peter Bolink, Towards Church Union in Zambia (Sneek, The Netherlands, 1967), 108.

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reasonable. Indeed, one of the reasons commonly given for the success of various breakaway churches is their freedom to take into account indigenous conceptions of sin. Thus, missionary accommodation to colonial rule was far from straightforward. Men and women who left for the African missions in the late nineteenth century could dream of the overthrow of “heathen” and “despotic” chiefs by the ever-growing legions of converts they would raise. They had no way of knowing that these same “despots” would presently be converted by indirect rule into line officers of His Majesty’s power. But even after they had learned better, they could hardly change their viewpoint and remain missionaries: The triumph of Christianity over “heathenism” remained their foremost ambition, but “heathenism” supported rule within the customary order. Missionaries had to part company with the colonial regime on the matter of custom. To the missions custom was a stumbling block, to the regime a prop. Attacking custom, therefore, missionaries attacked indirect rule at its foundation. Acknowledgments The author gratefully acknowledges the support of a grant from the Social Science Research Council to carry on the research on which this paper is based.

Saint Apolo from Europe, or ‘What’s in a Luganda Name?’ Emma Wild-Wood Apolo Kivebulaya was a Ganda Christian, an evangelist to Toro and to Boga and an Anglican priest.1 He remains a beloved saint in the Anglican churches of Congo and Uganda. Without exception, he is described as a humble, unassuming man who owned few material possessions and who was willing to evangelize isolated places that other missionaries were reluctant to visit. Recent studies have emphasized the African connections made by African evangelists because they were able to create local, traditional, linguistic, and cultural links between the Gospel and their hearers. Apolo2 might seem to be a prime candidate for such a study. Yet many aspects of his life and mission were closely associated with Europe. His very name shouts out this connection. Born Waswa, he chose the name “Apolo” at his baptism in 1894. “Kivebulaya” was given at about the same time. It means “the one from” (Kive) “Europe” (bulaaya).3 An African clergyman so greatly respected during his life and revered in death for his missionary work who carries the moniker “one from Europe” might be said to indicate the pervasive power of the imperial endeavor and its colonization of the mind. Apolo demonstrates the conundrum of interpreting the interface between African contexts and western Christianities at the point when Christianity was first introduced to much of sub-Saharan Africa. Briefly, some scholars have suggested that early African Christians were prey to European hegemonic

Source: Wild-Wood, E., “Saint Apolo from Europe, or ‘What’s in a Luganda Name?’” Church History, 77.1 (2008): pp. 105–127. © American Society of Church History 2008, published by Cambridge University Press. 1 A shorter version of this paper was presented to the Yale-Edinburgh Group on Mission and Non-Western Church History in Edinburgh from June 29–July 1, 2006. I thank those whose questions and comments prompted further reflection and research. 2 Apolo is the name used in Congo and Uganda with affection and reverence when referring to Apolo Kivebulaya by only one name. This usage is followed here. 3 “The term ‘Kive’ in Luganda is derived from the Luganda verb ‘Okuva,’ which means ‘to come from.’ The infix ‘bu’ is a marker of size. Thus, ‘Kive’ the one ‘bu’ from big ‘laaya’ Europe (Britain)”: Isaac Kakange, personal communication. “Ebulaya” can be used loosely to mean “western” or “foreign” or a particular foreign country.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/97890

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influences presented by missionaries and colonialists who commandeered local languages and imposed a “pre-packaged” systematic Christianity complete with particular beliefs, practices, and structures, thus colonizing traditional religious identity.4 Others have criticized this interpretative approach toward missionary action and African reaction because it appears to ignore or belittle the agency of Africans. They argue that in accepting missionary Christianity, Africans adapted it to their own situations, emphasizing aspects that appeared appropriate. Furthermore, they argue that Africans contested its meaning with missionaries, gained power from developing their own Christian discourse, and developed new social formations.5 This essay, by examining to what exactly “Kivebulaya” refers, attempts to understand what influenced Apolo. It also examines how he may have been understood by those he converted. Thus the essay explores the cultural and religious choices made by one African missionary and the meanings with which they were imbued. I begin with a brief explanation of the historical context and an introduction to the sources on Apolo.

Context and Sources

Ganda society underwent a period of acute social change during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Kabaka (King) Muteesa was open to new ideas and explored Islam until he became aware of Egypt’s potential political threat. When H. M. Stanley visited Buganda in 1875, Muteesa welcomed contact with Europe and with Christianity. Stanley appealed for missionaries, and the Church Mission Society responded by sending a group who arrived at the kabaka’s court in 1877. With relative speed they won a significant number of converts, as did the Muslims and the White Fathers of the Roman Catholic Church, who arrived in 1879. For these converts, “A new world was opening up, symbolized by the power of literacy.”6 Muteesa attempted to return his kingdom to traditional Ganda forms of worship, but modern ideas had taken 4 For example, V. Y. Mudime, The Invention of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); and Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume 1: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 5 For example, Paul Landau, The Realm of the Word: Language, Gender, and Christianity in a Southern African Kingdom (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1995); and J. D. Y. Peel, Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). 6 Kevin Ward, A History of Global Anglicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 166.

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hold and the stage was set for the political differences among the Ganda to assume different religious identities.7 During the reign of Muteesa’s son, Mwanga, a series of civil wars began. Many Ganda took refuge in neighboring kingdoms and so further spread their new-found faiths. When the wars ended, the Anglican Church introduced by the CMS had gained a quasi-established position throughout Baganda, Toro, Ankole, and Buyoro. Its influence eventually spread to all regions in the area that became known as Uganda. The British Protectorate of Uganda was established in 1893. For the CMS, the rapid conversion of the Ganda and their willingness to share Christianity with the Bunyoro, Toro, Ankole, and others was considered one of the greatest successes of the era. The CMS had been founded in London in 1799 as a voluntary lay society inspired by the evangelical revival to preach the Gospel to all nations. In the mid-nineteenth century, the CMS general secretary, Henry Venn, famously articulated the society’s aim as the establishment of a self-governing, self-propagating, and self-financing “Native African Church” and the eventual “euthanasia” of missions.8 This ideal was often honored in the breach, but it inspired members of the early Ugandan mission. Bishop Alfred Tucker, for example, recognized the extent to which Ugandans had adapted and owned the Christian faith in its Anglican form by ordaining the first clergy in 1891. Tucker prioritized the rapid establishment of a local clergy over an emphasis on lengthy theological training.9 He maintained an emphasis on Ugandan leadership, despite some resistance from fellow missionaries, and expected significant local autonomy in the growing church. Apolo Kivebulaya was a product of this expanding, confident, indigenous expression of Christian faith and its CMS influence. He was in the employ of the CMS from 1895 as a catechist and was ordained by Tucker in 1903. His work was directed, albeit at some distance, by CMS archdeacons and bishops, yet his own leadership qualities were recognized when he was installed as a canon of Namirembi Cathedral in 1910 and was made rural dean of Toro in 1927. British CMS personnel had neither Apolo’s familiarity with African cultures nor his ability to travel. He is best known for his work in the Congo across the Semeliki plain from Toro. This area came under Belgian control in 1910, and it became difficult for British missionaries to visit the area. The CMS maintained an influence in the area through Apolo. He first visited Boga in 1896, although he 7 S. R. Karugire, A Political History of Uganda (Nairobi: Heinemann, 1980), 62–92. 8 See Peter Williams, “‘Not Transplanting’: Henry Venn’s Strategic Vision,” in The Church Mission Society and World Christianity, 1799–1999, ed. Kevin Ward and Brian Stanley (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2000), 147–172. 9 Adrian Hastings, The Church in Africa: 1450–1950 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 468.

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did not live there for any sustained period of time until 1916 when he gave up a year’s leave to attend to the Boga church. From 1921 he made a concerted effort to preach beyond the Hema of Boga to those with whom they had client relations. He formed relationships with some Mbuti pygmies, preaching to them and spending time in the Ituri forest with them. He continued evangelism, teaching, and translation when many of his peers had returned home to assume hereditary chieftancies. His commitment was understood by CMS missionaries as a fulfillment of the ideals of the missionary society of forming local churches. There is a substantial body of primary sources on Apolo. Significantly for the researcher, he kept a diary. It starts in 1899, although the first years are written retrospectively, and charts his itinerant ministry until the year of his death. It records the long distances that Apolo traveled and the different peoples to whom he preached. Most of the entries are lists of places and people visited with the briefest descriptions of his preaching or other events. An example from events that took place on a safari from Kabarole at some time in 1901 illustrates the style: In the a.m. we got up and went on to Kasuiga, we met together there with about 40 people and preached Jesus Christ is our Lord and that he wants them to believe on Him. In the a.m. we got up and went on to Ruhweza and met with 35 people. In the a.m. we left there and arrived at the house of Mutagwanda Kanyamino, we prayed by ourselves, we besought them to meet with us but they refused. We left there in the a.m. and went to Mubuku, we slept at [?] and met about 25 people. We preached to them Jesus, that he wants them to believe on him and as how he has prepared to give them all they need.10 Having Apolo’s own words on his work is invaluable, and the diary will be analyzed below. Little of the detail of Apolo’s early life is known, although there are a few oblique references to it.11 His name begins to appear in written sources from 1895 when he went to Toro. Many of the primary sources are from CMS administration and missionaries’ private correspondence, although some letters from Ugandan friends and colleagues have also been preserved. There 10 A. K. Diary, 1910, Makerere University library archives, Kampala. 11 A. K. Diary, 1916: “I was born during the campaign of Pokino Mukasa, which was at Busongoza. My father, Samueri Sarongo, Kisangi, of the Nvuma clan. And my mother is Nalongo Tezira Singabadda of the Ngabi clan, a daughter of the princess line.” Pokino Mukasa was the county chief of Buddu during the 1870s, one of three immediately under the kabaka of Buganda.

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are also newspaper articles, an unpublished memoir by Bishop Balya, photographs, and a short film. Early missionary comments on Apolo express a certain patronizing fondness for Apolo. They did not expect him to be an outstanding evangelist. His unassuming, slow manner was different from the confidence of many of his Ganda peers. It is stated several times that he lacked education and even “natural ability,”12 that he was “simple.”13 His work in the Boga area attracted great attention because of its apparent isolation and its proximity to pygmies and supposed cannibals. CMS missionaries began to praise his faithfulness and his commitment to the peoples of the Semeliki escarpment. A number of them were particularly struck by the affection with which he held the pygmies and his willingness to endure the hardship of forest living to bring them the Christian message. The manner of his death also provoked admiration. In 1933 Apolo was told in Kampala that he was terminally ill, and he decided to make the long journey back to Boga to die there. He requested that he be buried with his head facing west toward the forest he worked in rather than be buried in the customary position with his head pointing toward his Ganda homeland in the East. Such acts of symbolic dedication impressed British missionaries and Ugandan Christians alike, as the effusive eulogy in the otherwise dry minutes of the Native Anglican Church Council Standing Committee demonstrates. It stated that the church has met with a crushing [loss]. To know him was to love him and those who knew him longest loved him most. He was the genuine apostle of the type of St Paul  … he was emphatically one who has hazarded his life in the service of the Lord Jesus … His gentleness, his sympathy, the transparent sincerity of his life, and the domination of his will over his ageing body presented an outstanding example of the grace of God in a chosen vessel.14 Apolo far exceeded early missionary expectations of him. He developed a role for himself in places isolated from the center of ecclesiastical or political authority. He appears to have engaged with peoples of other cultures, being

12 J. J. Willis in Forward to A. B. Lloyd, Apolo of the Pygmy Forest (London: CMS, 1923). 13 A. B. Fisher in Anne Luck, African Saint, The Story of Apolo Kivebulaya (London: SCM, 1963), 102. 14 Quarterly Meeting of Standing Committee, 6 July 1933, box AR N3/10 NAC Church Council Minute Books.

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particularly remembered for his evangelism of the pygmies, and to have been willing to face difficult circumstances. From the 1920s, Apolo Kivebulaya was recognized by western missionaries as a significant figure in East African Christianity, as demonstrated by a relatively substantial corpus of secondary material about him in English, mainly in the form of missionary biographies written before and after his death in 1933. Most of these books are concerned with the latter half of Apolo’s life and his work as a Christian evangelist and model of Christian missionary service. They are all written in a similar hagiographical tone with titles such as The Apostle to the Pygmies and Apolo the Pathfinder—Who Follows?.15 Apolo was a CMS success story: an African Christian who gave himself tirelessly for the furtherance of the Gospel, an example of courage and faithfulness to Christians in Britain. He was praised for his dedication to itinerant ministry in remote places among peoples feared by the Ganda. His successes in establishing churches and inspiring young men and women to become catechists are described with awe and pride. A number of biographies also appeared in Luganda, Runyoro, Swahili, and other languages of the region. The evangelicalism of CMS missionaries at this time had shifted to a more quietist approach. In the late nineteenth century, CMS missionaries had been actively engaged in the power struggles of the Ganda; they had admired the dedication and faith of the Ganda in public life. By the 1920s they were critical of the personal morality of Protestant Christians in public life and insisted on high standards for Ugandans assuming authority within the church. Apolo’s asceticism, modesty, and faithfulness were exactly the qualities they admired. His life on the margins rather than at the center of influence made his biography less contentious to write. Here, it seemed, was a humble man uninterested in the machinations of power. The last of the biographies was published 30 years after Apolo’s death. Anne Luck’s African Saint provides more historical background and attempts to read the other biographies critically. But, as with the others, there is an attempt to distance Apolo from his Ganda background by providing a clear-cut “before” and “after”—often, metaphorically, “darkness” and “light”—to the results of his Christian conversion. Archbishop of Uganda Leslie Brown wrote with great approbation in the forward to African Saint: “There is no trace in the records that after his conversion he was consciously influenced by an African world view or

15 A. B. Lloyd, Apolo of the Pygmy Forest; More About Apolo (London: CMS, 1928); Apolo the Pathfinder—Who Follows? (London: CMS, 1934); W. J. Roome, Apolo, The Apostle to the Pygmies (London: Morgan & Scott, 1934); P. Yates, Apolo in Pygmyland (London: Highway, 1940); Margaret Sinker, Into the Great Forest (London: Highway, 1950); Luck, African Saint.

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figure 1 Apolo Kivebulaya with Mbuti Pygmies, c. 1930, taken by A. T. Schofield

by the attitudes which his parents must have passed on to him.”16 For Brown this confirmed Apolo’s character as “apostolic” and “directed by the Holy Spirit.” Brown’s suggestion is that one could not have an African worldview and exhibit characteristics of outstanding Christian leadership. Was this indeed the case with Apolo? The picture painted of Apolo “the-one-from-Europe” by his biographers seems to debunk the idea of African evangelists—or this particular one—making Christianity local and situational for his hearers. Missionaries like Leslie Brown saw a much more desirable aim, that of Apolo presenting a universal message that should not be localized. For those concerned that missionaries projected an imperialist agenda, it suggests that the consciousness of Apolo Kivebulaya was colonized and that he became an agent of colonization. This latter interpretation might be borne out by comparisons of other studies on African Christians. Since the 1960s, Apolo Kivebulaya has fallen from public attention. There has been a greater appreciation of independent churches and their founders, like Apolo’s contemporaries William Wade Harris in West Africa 16

Forward to Luck, African Saint, 12.

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and Simon Kimbangu in western Congo. Apolo’s approach was very different from theirs. He did not draw large crowds or influence an obviously different form of Christianity. He did not upset colonial authorities. On the contrary, although Apolo, as one of the few African church leaders in Congo, was watched carefully by the Belgian colonial authorities after Simon Kimbangu’s brief ministry in 1921, nothing untoward was ever reported about him.17 He remained a clergyman in the Anglican Church until he died. Dedicated to introducing an Anglican form of Christianity wherever he went, he appeared to comply with European ideals of African Christians and clergymen. Those interested in an African Christianity that appeared independent of western influence and confident in its African identity did not look to Apolo. More recently, African mainline churches have been studied and their “African-ness” acknowledged, but Apolo by name and by reputation appears too European for interest. Like the others, however, he made a particular response to new influences coming from Europe at a time when his own culture was in flux.

The Red Military Jacket

There are two references to the meaning of kivebulaya from CMS missionaries.18 They say the name referred to the red military jacket Apolo wore. It could have come from serving in Captain Frederick Lugard’s Imperial British East Africa Company19 police patrol in 1891 or could be a guardsman’s red dress tunic given by an English officer. They note that Apolo was particularly fond of this jacket and wore it most of the time.20 CMS missionaries thought it endearing that in a life of self-sacrifice Apolo allowed himself the vanity of this jacket. For

17 The Ministre des Colonies sent a circular letter to the provinces warning of the Protestant tendency to “organize indigenous churches, independent of the authority and control of missionaries from the white race.” The administrator of Ituri reported back that Apolo was the only African church leader among the Protestant missions in the area and that he would be “particularly observed”: Quoted in G. Samba, “Tolérance religieuse et Intérêts politiques belges au Kibali-Ituri (1900–1940),” Etudes Zaïroises 1 (1973): 106. Translation mine. 18 A. T. Schofield, Memories of Apolo Kivebulaya (unpublished, 1958), 5; Ruth Fisher in African Saint, 62–63. 19 For more on the IBEAC and the political turmoil, see Michael Twaddle, Kakungulu & the Creation of Uganda, 1868–1928 (London: James Currey, 1993), 71f. 20 Fisher mentions him wearing it at his ordination, and Schofield saw it in the 1920s, although photographs taken later in Apolo’s life suggest that he is wearing an ordinary dark European jacket by that time.

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the missionaries, kivebulaya simply referred to a piece of clothing he habitually wore. The tag of “European” was not considered worthy of further comment. So should we make any more of the nickname kivebulaya? Was it simply an amusing reference thought up in a moment of idleness? Luganda names were usually given with some thought to their meaning such as an event surrounding the birth, a family relationship, or a characteristic of the child as he or she grew up. Waswa, Apolo’s first name, was given because he was one of twins. Before he became Apolo Kivebulaya, he seems to have had another name given to him for a short period: Omunubi, the Nubian. Once again, the name referred to clothes he wore. This time the clothes came from Sudanese soldiers with whom he may have been associated.21 The verbal connection between an item of clothing and alliance with a particular group indicates the importance of clothes in the man’s identity. In the words of Adrian Hastings, clothes are “a crucial part of consciousness, culture, and group identity.”22 Following this argument, Apolo was declaring his identification with a particular group of people and a particular culture. The clothes Apolo wore suggest a great deal about the alliances he made. These alliances were military and they were foreign, and ultimately and definingly they were European. We may suppose he was not called kivebulaya simply because he wore European things. Wearing European clothes was the outward and visible sign of an inward acceptance of European ways. He made European (and more particularly British) connections, had European friends and colleagues, learned European communication methods, followed a religion brought directly from Europe, and introduced these things to others. It is here that we may understand something of what might be signified by the red military jacket. In her introduction to the edited volume Religion, Dress and the Body, Linda Arthur notes that although clothes in a mission context can have a “constraining” role, clothes can also permit the assertion of a changed identity. They can be “used as a means of negotiating a new social environment.”23 Apolo had to negotiate the changing Ganda culture. For over a decade there had been power struggles in the influential Buganda kingdom. Muslim, Christian, and traditionalist factions had fought for power. If we can speak of “old certainties,” they were, for many, eroded by the turmoil. Apolo was part of this militaristic culture and had, in his youth, fought on all these sides. In 1892, two years before he was baptized, the Christian faction split between Protestant and Catholics. 21 Georgy Schofield, Memories of Apolo Kivebulaya (unpublished 1958), 2. 22 Hastings, Church in Africa, 477. 23 Linda B. Arthur, “Introduction: Dress and the Social Control of the Body,” in Religion, Dress and Body, ed. Linda B. Arthur (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 6.

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The Protestants, with their British allies headed by Captain Frederick Lugard, gained the upper hand. Apolo found himself on this side. Apolo was involved in the political turmoil of the times and sought to make sense of the upheaval. Apolo Kivebulaya’s Christian conversion came as a result of the turmoil and is to be understood in its context.

Representing Power

In the historical context, the military jacket did not simply have European cultural connotations. It had Ganda ones as well. Apolo’s baptismal name provides a verbal reference to his association with modern Ganda society. It was common practice to assume a biblical name at baptism, thus clearly identifying oneself with the Christian faith. “Apolo” was a reference to the upright, hardworking Apollos in Acts 19,24 but it was a nearer reference in time and space to the influential Anglican Katikiro (Chief Minister) Apolo Kagwa, who led the Protestant Christians and liaised with their British allies. Indeed, it could be supposed that even in wearing the jacket Apolo was attempting to associate himself with Apolo Kagwa. Photographs of the chief minister from the 1900s show him wearing a dark silk robe or joho over a white kanzu or full-length robe. In one,25 two of the four men accompanying him are wearing short, dark, tailored jackets. Apolo Kivebulaya wore his jacket over a kanzu and in later life was photographed wearing a dark civilian jacket. He may have been attempting to follow the sartorial fashion for respected men among the political elite. By attiring himself thus, however, he was visually positioning himself with contemporary Protestant leaders. It is difficult to escape the impression that Apolo’s dress associated him with military victors, Ganda and British, both Protestant. Missionary Ruth Fisher said Apolo called himself “a soldier of Jesus” and was reluctant to remove his jacket for his ordination service.26 Although he seems to have left his military past behind when he became an evangelist in 1895, turning to pacific, itinerant ministry, the military connections remained visible as a way of interpreting his Christian convictions in his historical context. Indeed, such connections are to be expected. J. D. Y. Peel in his work on the Yoruba explains that the decision to 24

“A learned man, with a thorough knowledge of the Scriptures. He had been instructed in the way of the Lord, and he spoke with great fervor and taught about Jesus accurately … he was a great help to those who by grace believed … proving from the Scriptures that Jesus was the Christ” (Acts 19:24–28). 25 Twaddle, Kakungulu, 109. 26 Ruth Fisher in African Saint, 62–63.

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convert to Christianity arises from judgments made in the pre-Christian situation. Since these judgments “undergird the decision to convert, they are likely to continue as a substrate of the new beliefs and practices.”27 Apolo could not leave his past behind him because his conversion had arisen from it. His past continued to inform his present. In attempting to understand Apolo, the fact that he wore the kanzu should not be forgotten. To illustrate his point about the relationship between clothing and identity, Hastings says: In Buganda the good Christian did not wear trousers, but a kanzu, just like a Muslim or a traditionalist. In nothing perhaps is the self-confidence of Ganda Christianity better expressed…. In most places from the early nineteenth century on an African Christian, a missionary, and a settler all dressed alike, in European style…. In Buganda this was not so.28 The kanzu was probably introduced through trade with Arabs on the East Coast. By the late nineteenth century, it was common Ganda dress, and the wearing of bark cloth was on the wane. Interest in Apolo’s jacket should not distract from the fact that Apolo dressed as all Ganda men dressed. There were, nevertheless, many other Christian Ganda who had also been caught up in these historical events but were not called “kivebulaya” because of the clothes they wore. Was Apolo more “from Europe” than others? Was he more wholeheartedly convinced of the usefulness of European things than others? Perhaps Apolo lacked the self-confident air of importance that was said to characterize many of his Ganda colleagues. Louise Pirouet has described the mixture of “genuine religious motivation, paternalistic beneficence and expansionism”29 among Ganda catechists working beyond Buganda. They understood themselves to be natural rulers, and many became chiefs in later life. Apolo, however, was markedly different. He was unassuming and quiet, less educated than many and less well-connected. Ironically, he felt, perhaps, that the European military jacket made a statement, not clear by his poverty, that he was associated with the powerful in a rapidly changing society and that he brought new and better things. Visual symbols and verbal associations rooted Apolo’s evangelism in troubled times. They also associated it with the material trappings of the victors. He 27 Peel, The Making of the Yoruba, 216. 28 Hastings, Church in Africa, 477. 29 Louise Pirouet, Black Evangelists: The Spread of Christianity in Uganda, 1891–1914 (London: Rex Collings, 1978), 195.

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must have cut a striking figure in his white kanzu and red jacket over top when the majority of those he worked among wore bark cloth or similar materials. He represented two forms of power, both potentially predatory: Ganda and British. All the evidence suggests that Apolo did not particularly distinguish between spiritual and political influence and was proud to associate himself with military power. In order that he could carry out his unassuming, gentle ministry, his clothing—and thus his name—made a statement about temporal power and influence. The outward appearance of Apolo “from Europe” heralded the arrival of new influences in distant places. Wearing a military jacket, he preached the Christian Gospel and offered people new skills and new objects that he associated with political victory, social security, and eternal life; this package was understood to have come most directly from Europe. Other objects that Apolo used in his missionary work demonstrate this, and it is to these we turn now.

Literacy, Narrative, and Social Order

Apolo was part of the literacy-conversion movement of the modern missionary era. He appeared to propagate Christianity as presented by western missionaries. As the Christian movement spread throughout Uganda, CMS missionaries encouraged the founding of bush schools alongside chapels. Medical missionaries were engaged to introduce biomedical practices, establish clinics, and introduce European ideas of sanitation. Apolo carried with him the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer with hymn book. Like other CMS evangelists, he was a keen founder of schools and taught in them for a while. Wherever he went, he encouraged praying and reading. Apolo believed they provided security for life. He records in his diary that he told one group “that they should love books as they are the spears which protect us. Therefore the one without a book was really without a spear.”30 In the political and social upheaval of the region at the time, this was an apposite analogy with which to encourage his audience to appreciate the value of trying a new skill to face the challenges of living in a disordered colonial state. It also suggests that in his communication he connected antithetically his warring past with his literate present. Significantly for his European credentials, Apolo went further than public literacy and kept a private account of his life in his personal diary. As has already been illustrated, many of the diary entries are brief statements of location and 30 A. K. Diary, 3 June 1925.

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action. The primary tasks he records are traveling, preaching, and teaching: the latter two were helped by his ability to read. It seems that he had been encouraged by CMS missionaries to keep a diary. Although there is no suggestion that it was anything but a private journal while he was alive, it certainly contains all that a CMS missionary would want to read: an unstinting schedule of itinerant preaching and teaching, a conviction in the power of personal prayer, and a “religion of the heart” that included at least one vision of Jesus at a particularly difficult time in his life. Like the jacket, the literary introspection of journal keeping came directly from Europe. In his diary, however, and to his listeners, Apolo was communicating a past that he had adopted as his own, that of the Christian story contained in the Bible. J. D. Y. Peel calls it the “trans-historical memory,” which is “ceaselessly reactivated in the consciousness of … adherents.” The Yoruba mission agents of West Africa, whom Peel studies, kept journals. In them they interpreted their life and work through biblical lenses and paralleled their contemporaries to biblical characters.31 Apolo had a similar profound commitment to the narratives and beliefs of Scripture, with which he identified entirely. Ultimately, he was a Christian because he believed that he had encountered Jesus Christ, whom he knew from the Bible and who fortified him in daily life. Here is a passage from his diary that looks back on unpleasant events in the year 1898, when he was accused of killing someone and spent four months in prison before being found not guilty. In it, one can hear biblical references and cadences: When this one fell upon the spear sorrows heaped upon me  … They brought spears to stab me [saying] “You have stabbed him” … I then remembered that God is my helper. I will fear no evil … God strengthened me and I did not get weak in our Lord’s work. But God helps those who believe in him for I believed and he rescued me. And he hears the prayers of his people as the Baganda say, “Seek advice from the one who has gone through the same thing,” I too was caught and put in chains but because of prayer they let me go. My God helped me greatly and my enemies could not overcome me.32 There are resonances with the psalms and a clear reference to the 23rd Psalm, followed by a quotation of a Ganda proverb. Apolo’s mention of “chains” refers almost certainly to the chains of St. Paul mentioned three times in his epistles.

31 Peel, The Making of the Yoruba, 9, 17. 32 It is unclear how many years later Apolo wrote this section.

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Apolo draws on his own culture and biblical texts to set his suffering in wider narratives of courage and salvation. Apolo does not directly mention St. Paul in his diary, but Bishop Aberi Balya, a pupil of Apolo’s, frequently connects Apolo with the apostle. He notes that Apolo enjoyed teaching Paul’s missionary journeys and knew them by heart. Several times he compares Apolo with Paul. “They were very much alike,” he says; “… Apolo … had his special education from God like Paul,” and their travels for the sake of the Gospel were similar. Finally, he exhorts, “those people determined to serve Jesus must first look at Paul’s and Apolo’s lives.”33 Such close equivalence closes the temporal gap between biblical times and Apolo’s. Leslie Brown’s incorporation of Apolo into the wider Christian narrative by referring to his apostolic nature may have resonated with Apolo. It certainly resonated with Balya and others who made biblical narratives alive and contemporary in the life of their own saint. Brown’s assumption, however, that using the description “apostolic” for Apolo indicated a rejection of African culture was not only wrong but impossible. The discussion of cultural influences cannot assume that the biblical narrative was read by Apolo, Balya, or the Yoruba with a European mind. CMS missionaries provided some interpretation, but the usage and meaning of the biblical text was flexible. Once the text was translated and Africans were reading it for themselves, they developed their own ways of engaging closely with the text. The act of translation instigated a negotiation of meaning in which some definitions and cultural expressions were chosen over others. Furthermore, Africans interpreted their actions in terms of the text. By doing so, they acknowledged the “trans-historical” power of the biblical narrative. The missionary package Apolo offered went beyond literacy, conversion, and engagement with the biblical narrative into areas of social order and health. Apolo adopted many of the ideas propounded by CMS missionaries and supported by colonial authorities. In doing so, he changed the physical appearance of the places in which he worked by introducing European ascetic and sanitary sensibilities to his converts. He planted gardens with flowers as well as food, encouraging others to do the same. He planted fast-growing eucalyptus trees everywhere he went and stipulated that they be used for the building of rectangular-shaped houses, schools, and churches. His desire to change domestic architecture was also a health issue; smoke-filled, round grass houses often induced respiratory problems. Aberi Balya considers Apolo to have excelled in improving health and sanitation: “Rev Apolo was not only clean and tidy but he was the first man to bring cleanliness and tidyness (sic) 33 Bishop Aberi Balya’s Account of Apolo Kivebulaya (unpublished, 1950?), 6, 17.

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in the churches.”34 He taught people the advantage of keeping their water sources clean.35 He distributed basic medicine and accompanied medical missionaries like A. T. Schofield on their trips. By encouraging these local innovations, Apolo was introducing new methods for enhancing one’s well-being. Apolo “of Europe” associated himself with material changes introduced by the Europeans with whom he worked. He also disseminated these changes more widely than Europeans could do.

Anglican Structures

Apolo introduced to Toro and Boga a European church with liturgy and hymns translated into Runyoro/Rutoro from their English setting, a church structure borrowed from the Church of England, and even clerical vestments more suitable for a colder climate. He expected people to adopt the governance and liturgy of the Anglican Church on their conversion to Christianity. There was no suggestion that a different model might be more appropriate. Apolo himself had become a Christian through the Anglican Church and was ordained into it. Why was such a thoroughly European—not to say English—religion attractive to Apolo Kivebulaya, and to many of his fellow Ganda? Apolo’s diary suggests that the Protestant political movement and the Anglican Church offered to Apolo a sense of order, an offer of well-being, and a contact with ultimate power. Apolo may have found in the Anglican Church in Uganda a sense of order and a connection with power. In engaging with the bewilderment of the rapidly changing society around him, Apolo opted for modernity in its spiritual manifestation as well as its political one. This suggestion assumes that Apolo acted as a Ganda of his era, assessing the Anglican Church in terms of his pre-Christian values. The Ganda people and other peoples around them were concerned about the issue of power. They had a holistic approach to life that did not divide ideas of power into temporal and divine but assumed that temporal power was a manifestation of divine power. When Apolo spent time in prison as a result of false accusations, he mentions his faith in God’s power several times—“Jesus gave me great strength,” and “God is merciful to those who trust him … he saved me”—and pertinently, in the light of Apolo’s former occupations, “It is God who saved us and, therefore, we know that God saves without spears or guns.”36 God’s power transcends war making and political 34 Aberi Balya’s Account, 5. 35 A. T. Schofield, Memories, 3. 36 A. K. Diary, 1899.

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machinations. Once again we see that Apolo rejected militarism but with constant reference to the need for an alternative, more powerful resource. Far from being uninterested in power, as the missionaries thought, the source of ultimate power motivated Apolo’s ministry. This does not yet explain why the Anglican Church worked as a vehicle for that power. Titre Ande makes some general comments about power in the African worldview, which help: [The] African view of power is built on the concept of life. Life is ordered hierarchically. This hierarchy belongs to both the invisible and to the visible world. The visible world in which human beings live is inconceivable without the infiltrating power of the invisible (spiritual) world. Therefore the visible world is continuous with the invisible world.37 The hierarchy of authority provided by the structure of the Anglican Church was a framework comprehensible to the Ganda. Its temporal influence suggested that it was capable of linking the visible and invisible world, thus providing a continuous recourse to the ultimate divine power from which life comes. Power in the Ganda context also seems to have become connected to modernity. Before the political upheaval of the 1880s, Ganda society had already been interested in modernity. Kabaka Muteesa invited foreigners to court so they could exchange ideas and demonstrate technology and so that he could learn new skills. “Modernity” is used here to indicate a collective of ideas, objects, and cultural manifestations that are relatively new to a particular society. They may connect with a western enlightenment understanding of modernity but do not necessarily entail the same philosophical understanding of the world. Therefore, the kabaka’s interest in Islam, clocks, and the written word can all be understood as an interest in modernity. Also, the Book of Common Prayer, while not signaling modernity in nineteenth-century Britain, would be a sign of it in nineteenth-century Buganda. Modernity, therefore, denotes the relative position of an object or idea in a society. Ultimately, Apolo chose a modern and influential way to be Ganda, a way that linked him to places far beyond Ganda society, as far away as Europe—and then to the Ituri forest. His interest in modernity caused him to explore new connections to divine power and to share those connections with others.

37

Titre Ande, “Modern African View of Power: A Parody and Pitfall for Prophetic Ministry,” Conference of the Yale-Edinburgh Group on Mission and Non-Western Church History, Edinburgh 2002, 1–2.

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Interpreting Apolo

In commenting on Apolo’s work so far, I have presented only half the story. It is a story of the intersection of African identity with European influence. I have suggested that Apolo originally evaluated these influences from his preChristian position. He chose them rather than the other options available to him because he understood them as modern and “power-full” and interacted with them as such. The second half of the story is about how these influences were understood by those around Apolo. Scholars who emphasize African agency in the adaptation of Christianity have emphasized the issues of interpretation and of meaning. They appreciate that the content messengers intended to transmit differed from the message the recipients understood and acted upon. Terence Ranger articulates it thus: What did Africans think of what they could see and hear of Christian rituals, institutions and teaching? What use could they make of particular Christian ideas and ceremonies? They certainly did not just accept everything exactly as it was offered them and cease all participation in African religion.38 Like Apolo, his listeners engaged with the beliefs and practices they brought from their own cultural background. There is little direct evidence of the reactions to European influence by people among whom Apolo worked, but certain observations can be made from their actions. By the end of his life, Apolo had made a considerable impact on both sides of the Semeliki plain. On the Congolese side of the Semeliki, for example, his early work was frequently mistrusted and disrupted. Yet some individuals were quickly attracted to what Apolo had to offer, and the first baptisms took place in 1897, within a year of his arrival.39 In 1931, J. J. Willis, bishop of Uganda, visited the Congo and reported that there were forty-two churches within a three-day walk from Boga with fifty-eight teachers and 1,426 baptized Christians from six ethnic groups.40 Two years later, Willis reported that there were eighty teachers. A local church emerged as a direct result of Apolo’s ministry. He was the senior clergyman in the area and, while there were CMS missionaries in Toro 38 39 40

Terence Ranger, “Religion in Africa: Mission Christianity,” 4 October 2005, Oxford Centre for Mission Studies, http://www.ocms.ac.uk/docs/20051004_Ranger.pdf. Sedulaka Zabunamakwata and Petero Nsugba worked in Boga for a few months in 1896, but strained relations with Omukama Tabaro curtailed their stay. They had laid the groundwork for Apolo. Church of Uganda archives, 2bp10.1, report 1931.

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on the Ugandan side of the Semeliki, there were none in the Boga area. People were responding to Apolo’s preaching of “Jesus, as He came to save all people” and of “God, as He creates us.”41 In Toro, where Apolo first worked, Omukama (King) Kasagama had grown up in the Ganda court and was allied to it. Apolo went to Boga as a direct result of Boga’s omukama, Tabaro, seeking to form alliances with Kasagama in the face of increasing unrest on the other side of the Semeliki plain. The Toro people, ruled by Kasagama, and the Hema people, ruled by Tabaro, were related. They shared a common language and had similar centralized structures of societal authority with hierarchies of leadership. The political upheaval the Hema faced was different from that in which Apolo had fought, but the perceived need for a client relationship with powerful allies was similar. It is possible to imagine the complexity of Tabaro’s position. It was a particularly uncertain and confusing time for those in leadership who were desirous of guiding their people to peace and prosperity when the forces of power were new and changing rapidly. Slave-raiders still presented a problem, and the malignant influence of colonial government was being unleashed. Apolo’s military jacket was a visible sign of an association that was at best desirable and at worst better than other available options. Apolo was the vanguard of a system that Tabaro hoped would save his people from crisis. The associations that were perceived to be European—and in this case particularly British as opposed to Belgian— were also perceived to be useful and even to offer some sense of security.42 In the world of realpolitik, Apolo’s red jacket could be interpreted as reassuring as well as menacing. But it worked on the cultural assumption that divine power was, inextricably, both spiritual and political. Thus it challenged those who presently channeled that power for their communities. If Apolo was perceived by Tabaro to offer possible stability and well-being to the Boga area, he was also perceived as a threat to Tabaro’s own position. As omukama, Tabaro was expected to be the conduit of political, social, and spiritual well-being. Isingoma Kahwa explains the omukama’s role as the symbol of unity for his people: He is seen as the successor of the ancestor common to all the people he represents. He incarnates the divine law and ensures the respect of ancestral traditions and customs. He takes care of the sacred objects that

41 A. K. Diary, 18 September 1924. 42 However, any British security they may have hoped for was rather short-lived because Boga came under Belgian control in 1910.

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symbolize the unity of the people with the royalty. He represents a religious power that is visible in the sacred drum and in the throne.43 When some Hema began to accept Christianity, they indirectly challenged the authority of the omukama as the conduit of sociopolitical and religious wellbeing. Tabaro’s antagonism of Apolo in the first few years of his ministry in Boga can be understood as one whose position in the hierarchy of sacred power was being threatened. However, despite initial misgivings about its efficacy and its demands, Tabaro eventually converted to Christianity and took the baptismal name Paul. Hema society was dynamic and flexible, and Tabaro took this innovative route as a way of dealing with the social crisis he was expected to resolve on behalf of his people. Indeed, he permitted Apolo’s audacious appropriation of the sacred drum to call people to Christian worship. The engoma yobukama, the object of the unity of Tabaro’s kingdom, which had been venerated in the same way as the omukama,44 now united Tabaro’s people in a modern way of worshiping ultimate divine power. In turn, Tabaro took a significant role in the church while maintaining his community role and certain rites of traditional kingship. The new system accommodated the old and maintained a conservative hierarchy of church and community governance. Although spiritual and temporal powers were more diffuse than they had been, they were not entirely separate, and the omukama still played a role in both. The nature and effects of the power Apolo introduced may also have been signaled by the color of Apolo’s clothes, if anthropological evidence is taken into account. Apolo carried out much of his ministry wearing red and white. There is no historical evidence that these colors had any significance for Apolo or those he worked among. There is, however, a wealth of anthropological literature on the universal importance of these colors, and it would be unwise to ignore it.45 The connection between the color red and blood signals both life and the danger of death for many African peoples. Red is powerful and ambiguous. White is often associated with goodness, justice, strength, purity, health, 43 Isingoma Kahwa Henri, “La notion Traditionnelle de la Communauté en Afrique Noire et son intergrations dans la Vie Ecclesiale (Cas de Banyoro en Republique du Zaïre),” (Master’s diss., Bangui, 1989), 31. My translation. 44 Ibid., 31. 45 For example, Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (London: Cornell University Press, 1967), and Anita Jacobson-Widding, Red-White-Black as a Mode of Thought: A Study of Triadic Classification by Colours in the Ritual Symbolism and Cognitive Thought of the Peoples of the Lower Congo (Uppsala: Uppsala University Press, 1979).

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and authority. If the practice of the BaKongo on the western side of the Congo basin is analogous to that of the peoples Apolo worked among, then the combination of red and white might be particularly potent. The two colors are used together in ritual ceremonies of healing and protection. Those who wear them would be associated with magical power. It may be that, in the eyes of the Toro, Hema, and others, Apolo made a fundamental connection with the elemental power of a healer or a rain-maker through the color of his clothes before they associated the style of the clothes with the particular, contemporary forms of British and Ganda power. If this were true, then it would further support some of the views of him examined below.46

Modernity and the Missionary Package

Another example of reaction to Apolo’s work comes from Basimasi Kyakuhaire.47 Daughter of one of the first Christians, she was baptized soon after her birth in 1906. She attended Apolo’s elementary school in Boga. The education she received from Apolo allowed her to study in Uganda and then work as a catechist for a time. Her husband followed a similar trajectory, eventually leaving employment in the church for a job as a clerk in a mining company. The European things they had learned from Apolo allowed them to make the most of the opportunities available to them in colonial Congo; they traveled, joined a monetary economy, and further educated their children.48 Basimasi’s family embraced the new things Apolo introduced with an enthusiasm that left little room for old things. If her words are to be taken at face value, the family rejected traditional religious beliefs and practices to such an extent that Basimasi knew almost nothing about them. She said, most emphatically, during an interview,

46

Red and white do have significance for the people along the Semeliki plain and escarpments among whom Apolo worked, but my research so far has not ascertained the details of that significance nor whether the color needed to take a certain form or be linked to a particular ritual before it gained that significance. 47 Basimasi Kyakuhaire, early catechist in Boga, interview in Komanda, Swahili, 21 September 2000. 48 In West African Christianity: The Religious Impact (London: Hurst, 1983), 127f., Lamin Sanneh highlights the desirability for Africans of education as “the gateway to a new and secure future.”

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There were these gods, but I did not know them. I was born into the hands of a Christian. My mother is a Christian. My father is a Christian. We do not know these things. These things never entered our house.49 Instead, schools, western medicine, secretarial work, and the leading of and participation in Christian worship filled her family’s time. Things associated with Europe were attractive to the first converts, many of whom wished to develop new socioreligious skills in order to respond to a rapidly changing situation. Yet even those most influenced by European things could interpret them in a way that maintained conceptual and cultural contact with life before they were introduced. Basimasi’s understanding of Apolo was not simply of one who brought modern medicine and books. She also regarded him as a healer, testifying to his power to heal school children simply by praying and laying them on his bed while continuing to teach. Western medicine was no substitute for the power of personality and prayer. One story told by early Christians in Boga recounts that a diviner gave Apolo hospitality on the Semeliki plain. During their time together, Apolo also claimed to be a diviner and opened up his Bible as his divining tool and read John 3:16.50 This story may well be more myth than history. It gives insight, however, as to how the Bible could be understood. It may have been considered a new and foreign tool, but its function was regarded as analogous to ancient ways of discerning the future and knowing how to act in the present. The Europeans who brought the Bible might have felt uncomfortable with the way Apolo used it in this instance. Likewise, events recorded in Apolo’s diary, such as his public and successful prayer for rain51 and for the demise of a difficult chief,52 present Apolo as rain maker and king slayer, thus asserting spiritual power and taking the genre of missionary journal into new realms. Apolo and his converts understood his jacket, books, medicine, and eucalyptus trees differently from CMS missionaries. European things were given new significance and power because they were made to serve an African context. The missionary package was often unpacked in ways unexpected by the employees of the CMS.

49 50 51 52

Basismasi Kyakuhaire interview. African Saint, 70, recounted by Ibrahimu Katalibara. A. K. Diary, 18 March 1914. A. K. Diary, 1 January 1916.

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Structures and Hierarchies

What did Apolo’s converts make of Anglican structures? The adoption of western church structures has been criticized as a sign of imperialism: the Church of England arose as a result of particular historical and ecclesiastical circumstances, and it is considered to be a grave imposition to replicate these structures in an entirely different historical setting. If the structures were not forced on Africans, it is assumed that their attitudes had been so colonized as to leave them little choice but to accept them. The understanding of power and modernity already laid out in this paper suggests another interpretation that allows a measure of autonomy, interpretation, and choice on the part of Africans. It is likely that Apolo’s converts found in Anglicanism a similar sense of power and order to that, I suggest, which Apolo found. Apolo was not introducing them to nineteenth-century English Anglicanism but to an Anglicanism that had already been changed by its encounter with the Ganda. Apolo followed the pattern of evangelism he knew from Buganda, a pattern that fit the culture of the ruling class. He targeted the omukama and his entourage through living with and teaching children of family heads in a manner analogous to the Ganda custom of educating young men by sending them to the household of a chief.53 In Buganda, the result had been that the first ordained Ganda were also significant chiefs.54 Using this model meant that Apolo attracted a following of well-connected young people whom he catechized and taught to read. They worked alongside him, accompanying him in his journeys into the forest and becoming walimu, teachers, in the small chapels.55 In many respects, growth in the areas influenced by Apolo was driven by young people with a strong personal loyalty to Apolo, many of whom inherited influential positions in society. There was a parallelism between Anglican polity and the traditional socioreligious order that the ruling elite developed to their advantage in the 1930s and beyond. The heads of clans and families were responsible for maintaining harmony through retaining their stratified social order, handing down religious rites from generation to generation, and carrying them out with solemnity and dignity. When these heads became Christians, they made the Anglican Church their own through their identification of local, traditional 53 W. A. Anderson, The Church in East Africa 1940–1974 (Dodoma: Central Tanganika Press, 1988), 23. 54 Elizabeth Isichei, A History of Christianity in Africa from Antiquity to the Present (London: SPCK, 1995), 147. 55 Ndahura Bezaleri, “L’Implantation de l’Anglicanisme au Zaire, 1896–1972,” (Master’s diss., Protestant Faculty of Kinshasa, 1974), 60.

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structure and order. A Hema clergyman looking back at the conversion of his people understood the appreciation of Anglican structures in this way: The Anglican Church, in the place where it started, was led by the traditional ruler or King. Here in Boga we are led by the traditional ruler or Omukama … And in the Anglican church [there are] important leaders from the lowest to the highest [level] and even so with our tradition there are leaders for house [level] to section [level] and even to the leader, Omukama, who leads all the sections together. Such is the traditional way, so there is no difference for us Hema, we see the Anglican [church] has a good tradition like our indigenous one.56 The hierarchical and ritual order already known in society57 was seen to bind together local society with the Anglican Church. Orderliness in religious rites and respect for those who retained social order were the cement that bonded the new religion with the old culture. People already prominent in society became leaders of the new religion. The Anglican hierarchy of church leaders and the rites they performed were now clothed in local concepts instead of English ones. The meaning and significance of outward forms had been adapted to enable them to be easily adopted by the majority in a new location. An alien religious structure now fitted local structures to the benefit of ruling elites. While Apolo may have been in the vanguard of modernity by introducing literacy and biomedicine, he retained a conservative social structure by adapting Anglican governance into the existing local socioreligious order. Ultimately, Tabaro considered the structure Apolo introduced acceptable because it sufficiently conserved the influence of the chiefly office. Certain beliefs, codes of practice, and religious rites had clearly changed—and people hoped they had changed in order to improve the engagement with divine power—but social structures were maintained and even strengthened within hierarchical society. Conclusion The study of Apolo Kivebulaya has permitted a focused reflection on the question of what happens to culture during Christian conversion in Africa. How much change is the result of European influence or European domination? How much is change welcomed through African innovation, participation, 56 57

Tito Balinda, clergyman, interview in Boga, Swahili, 2 October 2000. Bénézet Bujo, African Theology (Nairobi: St. Paul Publications, 1992), 20–21.

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action, and so forth? This paper has assumed that cultures are always adapting to new circumstances and that there is always continuity as well as change in cultural exchange. It is precisely in the fusion of different influences through their reworking and their appropriation that a culture remains vibrant. Apolo and his converts interpreted new influences in the light of their own priorities of engaging with power and modernity and ensuring their well-being. In doing so they were engaged in a process of remaking cultures. Apolo’s “European-ness” was a very visible influence in this process. It held some or much appeal for those with whom he worked. His “African-ness” was much less visible; it was assumed by Apolo himself and largely ignored by his missionary biographers. Apolo and the biographers both wanted to emphasize his connection with the “trans-historical” biblical narrative. Apolo’s modernity was read by European missionaries from a European perspective largely as a rejection of his African identity. For his converts, Apolo’s modernity was read within an African worldview of social and spiritual power. Apolo, “the one from Europe,” dressed in a British military jacket, was a transmitter of modernity—in all its material, spiritual, political, and cultural aspects—to isolated places. He and his converts believed in the Gospel in its European package of temporal power and literary and medical innovation. In converting, their identity was altered. Apolo used and reinterpreted foreign materials to assert visibly the connections between temporal and divine power and his personal connection with both, and thus he convinced many of his listeners of the power of Christianity. In the process, the European package was unpacked and reassembled, and Christianity itself was “remade.”58 58 Landau, The Realm of the Word, xviii.

‘Culture’ as a Tool and an Obstacle: Missionary Encounters in Post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan Mathijs Pelkmans In May 2004 an American evangelical missionary invited me to attend the circumcision feast (sunnet toi) of an Uzbek pastor’s son in the south of Kyrgyzstan.1 The host and his family had made extensive preparations for their numerous guests, including twenty-five foreign missionaries and about a hundred Kyrgyz and Uzbek Christians.2 In many respects the celebrations resembled similar non-Christian festivities. The guests were seated at long tables covered with typical party food: fried bread, colourful candy, melons, nuts, rice dishes, mineral water, and soda, though no alcoholic drinks. Professional musicians played local instruments as well as a Yamaha synthesizer, once in a while interrupting the music to announce the arrival of new guests. Less usual were the dance ensembles that performed throughout the day, featuring missionaries and representatives of various ethnic groups—Uyghur, Kyrgyz, and Uzbek. Speeches were made. An American missionary spoke of the biblical origin of circumcision, arguing that although in Kyrgyzstan circumcision is often thought of as a Muslim custom, it had biblical roots. He cited passages from the Bible that described the ‘covenant of circumcision’ between Abraham and God (Genesis 17: 9–11), insisting that such similarities between Central Asian and Hebrew customs highlighted that Christianity should be seen as an Eastern instead of a Western religion.

Source: Pelkmans, M., “‘Culture’ as a Tool and an Obstacle: Missionary Encounters in Post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13.4 (2007): pp. 881–889. © Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (2007). Reproduced by permission of John Wiley and Sons. 1 I employ the terms ‘Uzbek’ and ‘Kyrgyz’ in the way that they are used locally. This means that the terms refer to official ethno-national categorizations as inscribed in passports and other documents, which are locally seen as based on biological descent. 2 The term ‘evangelical’ denotes a range of Protestant denominations that emphasize the authority of the Bible and the importance of evangelization. I prefer the term ‘evangelical’ over ‘Protestant’ because it underscores differences with mainstream Protestant groups that are less engaged in missionary activities.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/97890

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What made this celebration special was that it simultaneously employed and challenged locally popular ideas of culture and religion. The celebration was provocative because the Christian participants actively appropriated cultural markers—circumcision itself as well as ‘national’ dresses, foods, dances, and music—that in Kyrgyzstan are usually associated with Muslimness. From an evangelical perspective, this Kyrgyz-Uzbek atmosphere was the feast’s prime attraction. It ostensibly demonstrated that missionaries were sensitive to local culture and showed that Christianity was compatible with Central Asian cultural identities. At the same time, the conspicuous role of foreign missionaries in financing, organizing, and consuming the event raised pertinent questions concerning the nature of this ‘identity’. A remark by an American missionary during the festivities was telling in this respect: ‘I know that missionaries have often been accused of destroying culture. But if you look here, I would say that we are doing the exact opposite’. Statements such as these underscore the argument that the employment of culture by indigenous rights groups, national elites, international NGOs, and missionaries have infused ‘culture’ with new ethnographic importance, while complicating its analytical use (Hann 2002; Kaneff & King 2004). That is, the divergent uses of ‘culture’ by various interest groups highlight that there is no underlying stable core to the concept. Therefore, as Gupta and Ferguson have argued, recognition of the contingent nature of what counts as culture requires that analysis focuses on the ‘processes rather than essences [that] are involved in present experiences of cultural identity’ (1992: 9). Moreover, since much is at stake in defining and defending the meaning of cultural identity, it is crucial to examine ‘the processes through which the state, conflicting groups and/or elites, and people in general tend to appropriate “culture” in pushing particular agendas’ (Andrade 2002: 236). While some authors have celebrated the empowering potential of ‘culture’ for indigenous movements, others have insisted that it is a ‘double-edged sword: both a weapon of the weak and yet a potentially dangerous tool for nationalisms and oppression’ (Kaneff & King 2004: 16). In post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan, where missionaries, national elites, individual Muslims, and new Christian Kyrgyz compete over the definition of ‘culture’, these oppressive and empowering elements of ‘culture’ need to be analysed in specific social contexts. Although this short discussion highlights the unstable nature of ‘culture’, it is equally important to note that what counts as culture cannot be freely confiscated, appropriated, or created. The history of Christian missions has abundantly demonstrated that cultural translations of biblical messages often have unforeseen consequences (e.g. Jordan 1993; Keane 1996; Meyer 2002; Orta 2004). In this article I analyse such unintended consequences, but also

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aim to explain why, in this post-Soviet context, the cultural endeavours of evangelical missionaries found acceptance among certain layers of the Muslim Kyrgyz population. This question is particularly relevant because Christian missions have often found themselves incapable of making significant inroads among Muslims (Sharkey 2005: 47). The communist attacks on Muslim structures and the socio-economic disruptions that occurred after the collapse of socialism account in part for the relative evangelical success in Kyrgyzstan (Pelkmans, Vaté & Falge 2005). Beyond such structural factors, however, I suggest that only by analysing the particular ways in which culture is appropriated, defended, and mobilized is it possible to capture the dynamics and implications of post-socialist religious encounters. What makes the case at hand especially interesting is that the notions of culture applied by evangelicals build upon seventy years of Soviet cultural politics that simultaneously objectified ethno-national categories and fostered a folkloristic understanding of culture (Peyrouse 2004; Slezkine 2000).3 My central argument is that unexpected synergies between communist cultural legacies and new evangelical cultural appropriations are particularly relevant in explaining the attraction of Christianity as well as the unintended consequences of evangelical efforts. Despite the seemingly unbridgeable difference between Soviet ‘atheizers’ and Christian evangelizers, their efforts at cultural appropriation (or their efforts to apply culture) show striking similarities. Both communists and evangelicals endeavoured to disentangle the ties between religion and culture. Ironically, in doing so they unavoidably folklorized and objectified ‘culture’, setting the stage for the emergence of new lines of inclusion and exclusion, sometimes along the ethnic boundaries they intended to overcome.

Religious and National Categories in Soviet Kyrgyzstan

Estimates of the number of Kyrgyz converts to Christianity vary widely from 10,000 to 100,000 (Iarkov 2002: 84; Murzakhalilov 2004). My own estimate— based on oral information, internet data, and church visits throughout the

3 The term ‘folklore’ is generally used to indicate ‘traditional customs, tales, sayings, or art forms preserved among a people’ (Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary). In this article, however, ‘folklore’ indicates selective appropriations of cultural forms for representative purposes. A statement by Miller about the role of folklore in the Soviet Union is particularly relevant: ‘Folklore … had a purpose—the destruction of the old way of life and the building of communism’ (1990: 13). This assertion is applicable not only to communists but, as we will see, to evangelical Christians as well.

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country—would be around 20,000 Kyrgyz converts.4 If this estimate is roughly correct, then approximately one per cent of the titular Kyrgyz population has converted to Christianity Since these new Kyrgyz Christians are not evenly distributed over Kyrgyzstan’s territory, but live concentrated in the north and especially in urban areas, conversion has in certain locations become a phenomenon that is both socially visible and threatening to many Kyrgyz. To appreciate the challenge that evangelical Christianity poses to established ideas about culture and nationality, it is crucial to review how the relationship between religious and ethnic categories developed during Soviet times. It has by now been well documented that the Soviet regime did not act as a ‘breaker of nations’, but rather served to channel and institutionalize ethno-national categories in specific ways (Hirsch 2005; Pelkmans 2006; Slezkine 2000). What is important to point out here is that Soviet nationalities policies also greatly influenced the trajectories of religious categories. The following discussion, taken from historian Lemercier-Quelquejay, between a Soviet ‘atheizer’ and a young Kyrgyz member of the Komsomol (Communist Union of Youth), provides a telling example of the ethno-religious dilemma in the late Soviet period: ‘“Why do you pretend to be a Muslim?” a Soviet anti-religious lecturer, Dorazhnov, asked a young member of the Kirghiz Komsomol. The answer was: “Because I am a Kirghiz”’ (1984: 22). Lemercier-Quelquejay used this two-line dialogue to illustrate the tight connection between ethno-national and religious categories in Central Asia in the 1980s. Because of this tight connection, she contended, it was not uncommon that devoted communists and atheists would also stress that they were Muslim. In effect, what had developed—and was labelled as such in Soviet literature—was the formation of non-believing, ‘atheist Muslims’ (1984: 22). Rather than attributing the continued relevance of the label ‘Muslim’ to the presumed strength of pre-Soviet religious traditions, it is more fruitful to point out that the links between religious and ethnic identification were inadvertently perpetuated by Soviet national and cultural politics. Whereas the Soviet regime de-legitimized religious structures and repressed most aspects of religion’s public manifestations, the regime ironically also encoded religious identities through its nationality politics. Kemal Karpat shows that in Soviet Central Asia the appeal of newly created national categories derived (in part) from ‘the incorporation of many elements of the religious culture in the 4 Estimating the number of Kyrgyz Christians is not a straightforward matter. For example, should one include children of Kyrgyz Christians, or Kyrgyz who were baptized but no longer attend church? Though important for understanding the impact of evangelical Christianity in Kyrgyzstan, I did not include them in this estimate.

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emerging “national” cultures [which gave] the adherents of the latter a sense of the historical continuity, strength, and durability of their cultures’ (1993: 416). Importantly, this process also backfired: the incorporation of religious elements in ethnic definitions also enshrined the position of Islam. Shahrani writes in an article on identity dynamics in Central Asia: ‘The modern concept of nationalities has provided “legitimate” basis through which some of the most critical traditional notions of Muslim Turkestani identities and loyalties are communicated, and in which traditional values are reinvested’ (1984: 35, emphasis original). Following Shahrani, it may be said that the creation of Central Asian ‘nations’ was facilitated and given legitimacy by the mobilization and institutionalization of local Muslim registers. Vice versa, it may also be said that Islam continued to be an important frame of reference because of this amalgamation of religious and national categories. The relaxations on religious expression in the late 1980s and the sudden independence of Kyrgyzstan in 1991 led to a renewed interest in cultural and religious roots, much like elsewhere in the post-socialist world. As the political leadership looked for nation-binding themes, and large layers of the population explored their ‘national religion’, the ethno-religious amalgamation—the connection between Kyrgyz and Muslim identity—achieved a visible and public profile. At the same time, this ‘ethnicization’ of religion (Saroyan 1997: 95) invited critical responses from within, and recruitment attempts from the outside. This has been very true for the Muslim-Kyrgyz composite, which has become more vulnerable in the post-atheist era. Although most Kyrgyz continue to conceive of their ethnic identity as inseparable from Islam, this claim is now increasingly under attack. In fact, the challenge posed by the anti-religious lecturer who asked ‘why do you pretend to be a Muslim?’ has returned with renewed force. The interrogators are no longer atheists (who have ceased to exist, at least in public) but Christian and Muslim ‘believers’. Both speak of the Kyrgyz as ‘people who call themselves Muslim’, but ‘in fact’ are only superficially so. Moreover, both groups view the pairing of religious and ethnic identity as unfortunate, because in their view faith should transcend ethnic or national categories. Clearly there are differences between both groups as well. Many newly pious Muslims (Hefner 2005) interpret the identification of Islam with Kyrgyz tradition as a perversion of their faith. Thus, their anti-syncretism challenges aspects of ‘Kyrgyz culture’—like weddings, funerals, and healing practices—that are seen as incompatible with Islam, and that prevent people from becoming ‘true Muslims’ (see also McBrien 2006). By contrast, evangelical Christians direct their primary criticism not at culture but at religion, claiming that Islam not only is a false religion but also distorts Kyrgyz culture.

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Instead, they propose a Christianity which they see as culturally consistent with Kyrgyz ways of life.

Evangelical Logics

Official sources in Kyrgyzstan claim that there are about 1,000 foreign missionaries active in the Kyrgyz Republic (population five million), of whom 700 are Protestant Christians (Mamaiusupov 2003: 305–6; Murzakhalilov 2004: 84). The actual numbers may be still higher, because not all missionaries register with the authorities. Many short-term missionaries, for example, do not have the time (nor face the necessity) to undergo the protracted registration procedures. Others are registered as development workers, even though they acknowledge that missionary work is a major part of their activities.5 This interest in Kyrgyzstan reflects a broader trend of increased evangelical attention for post-communist as well as Muslim societies. In the early 1990s postcommunist societies were considered to be ‘virgin fields’ in which it was an ‘exciting time to be ministering as God is bringing in the harvest’.6 Likewise, since the first Gulf war and especially after 9/11, evangelical interest to work among Muslims—considered the largest group of ‘unreached people’—has sharply increased (Love 2000).7 As a post-communist and Muslim region, Central Asia combines the attractions of both evangelical dreams. Moreover, of the Central Asian republics Kyrgyzstan stands out as the most liberal one. In the words of a commentator: ‘Kyrgyzstan is what the US Center for World Missions is calling the most open Muslim country’.8 Missionaries arrive from countries as diverse as the United States and Ukraine, South Korea and Germany. They have ties to denominations like the Mennonite Brethren, Southern Baptists, Evangelical Lutherans, and various 5 Such missionaries often call themselves ‘tent-makers’, a term which refers to the missionary activities of the apostle Paul, who combined his religious service with the profession of making tents (Acts 18: 1–5). 6 http://www.wccpc.org/our_mission_work_files/MarkPalmer.doc, last accessed 28 November 2005. 7 An indication of this increased interest is that the widely circulated International Journal of Frontier Missions devoted seven issues to Islam between 1994 and 2005, but none in the ten years prior to 1994. 8 http://www.wccpc.org/our_mission_work_files/MarkPalmer.doc, last accessed 28 November 2005. The range of missionary activity varies greatly among the Central Asian republics. Relatively few missionaries work in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, where missionary activity is prohibited. The largest concentration of missionaries is in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

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Pentecostal churches, which differ in their theology and missionary approach. Some of these missionaries establish churches along strictly defined denominational lines and maintain close contact with their congregations at home. A significant group of long-term missionaries, however, aims to escape denominational categorization and present themselves as non-denominational or as evangelical. My focus is on this group of long-term missionaries who are involved in promoting and assisting the emergence of what they called a Kyrgyz church. Associated with four American and German organizations— Youth with a Mission (YWAM), Asian Alliance, Central Asian Partnership, and Logos—these approximately 100 missionaries all know each other and frequently co-operate in specific mission activities.9 Most significantly for the purpose of this article, they all see a so-called ‘ethnic barrier’ as the main obstacle to the conversion of the Kyrgyz. In the words of one missionary associated with Logos: Initial negative attitudes of Kyrgyz towards Christianity should in most cases be attributed not to Islamic conviction, but to people’s quest for national identity. At the religious level they connect their national identity with Islam and traditional beliefs. A change towards another religion will therefore be seen as betrayal of the nation … In order to weaken the argument that Christianity is a religion of Russians or Germans, it is crucial that a Kyrgyz stays a Kyrgyz after his conversion (Zweininger 2002: 89, translation MP). What is at issue here are the ties between belief, religion, and ethno-national identity, which the evangelicals aim to untangle and reassemble. To many evangelical Christians, the term ‘religion’ has negative connotations, as it reeks of ritualized performance and of clerical hierarchies. To them, religion is only the form or the social cover, and should always be secondary to the real issue: belief in the fundamental tenets of the Christian message. This stance is grounded in the evangelical Christian discomfort with the relation between spirit and matter and the resulting effort to maintain or produce, as Keane (2007: 28) phrased it, ‘discrete boundaries between materiality and meaning’. In this particular missionary encounter the stress on meaning— on the fundamentals of Christianity—has been combined with an internal 9 Of these organizations only YWAM is internationally known. Central Asian Partnership has an all-American staff linked to the Southern Baptists. Asian Alliance is registered as a Kyrgyz NGO, though most associates are Americans linked to various denominations. Logos is a German organization with a Mennonite background.

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critique of previous ‘imperialistic’ roles played by missionaries, triggering renewed attention to ‘cultural contextualization’ as a precondition to missionary success.10 Analysis of evangelical missionary work in Kyrgyzstan reveals three—often implicit—basic logics that underlie their activities. Respectively I have termed these ‘de-Russifying Christianity’, ‘de-Islamizing Kyrgyz culture’, and ‘Kyrgyzifying Christianity’. The first theme addresses the Russian connotations of Christianity, as reflected in common parlance among Muslim Kyrgyz that ‘Jesus is a Russian God’. This conflation of Christianity with Russianness can be traced back to the incorporation of Kyrgyzstan into the Russian Empire in the mid-nineteenth century as well as to Soviet anti-religious propaganda. As a result, Christianity came to be associated with people worshipping icons and crossing themselves, and with bearded priests dressed in long black cassocks uttering religious formulas. Among Kyrgyz these images often arouse negative emotions. As an acquaintance told me while referring to Orthodox Christian practices: ‘All this is barbaric to us’. De-Russifying Christianity is not only crucial for overcoming such negative stereotypes, it also allows evangelical missionaries to exhibit their dissimilarity from Orthodox Christianity. Part of this ‘de-Russification’ comes naturally, as the services of evangelical congregations are very different from Orthodox services and show none of the Orthodox symbols and signs. In fact, the absence of visual religious symbols in evangelical churches allow missionaries to claim that they are not just proposing a different religion—a different branch of Christianity—but that they are a ‘gathering of believers’, who have overcome religion. Religion, in this line of thinking, is just ‘form’: at best it distracts, at worst it leads people astray. Thus, because of its Russian ‘religious’ connotations, some evangelicals avoid the word ‘Christian’ altogether, and instead talk about ‘followers of Jesus’. While the visual characteristics of evangelical churches and services may be sufficiently different from Russian Orthodoxy, missionaries have taken more active steps to adjust Christian language. This is not simply an issue of translation into Kyrgyz. In fact, many urban Kyrgyz are more fluent in the Russian than in the Kyrgyz language. But even if some Kyrgyz converts prefer to go to Russian-language services, the ethnic connotations of many Christian terms still arouse negative sentiments. To counter this problem, evangelicals often employ what they call ‘Central Asian Russian’ in their writings. This is standard 10

An overview of the ongoing discussions can be retrieved from the International Journal of Frontier Missions. During the 1990s, especially, many articles discussed the ‘imperialist’ legacy and designed new ways to dissociate evangelical efforts from its colonial and imperialistic connotations.

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Russian with the difference that Christian names and terms have been replaced with Turkic or Arabic equivalents. Thus, the Russian word Biblia is substituted with the Arabic Injil (Gospel or New Testament) or Yiyk Kitebi, which literally means ‘holy book’. Likewise, the name for Jesus, known by most Kyrgyz as ‘the Russian God’ Isus Khristos, has become Isa or Isa Mashayak (Jesus the Saviour). The word for church is equally problematic. The Russian word tserkov as well as its Kyrgyz derivative tsirkö both indicate an Orthodox church. Because of these connotations the word ‘church’ is preferably avoided, and the term favoured instead is jiin (meeting), or less frequently syiyny üiü (house of prayer). These innovations reduce associations with Russianness and offer the additional advantage that Kyrgyz Christians can speak in public about religious affairs without revealing their religious affiliation. At the same time, though, these discursive techniques provoke accusations of deception. In particular, voices in the national media have repeatedly criticized the use of Islamic vocabulary by missionaries as an attempt to hide Christianity in Islamic guise and thus mislead people into conversion.11 A second crucial element in evangelical efforts is to ‘de-Islamize’ Kyrgyz culture. It is telling that evangelical Christians rarely speak of Kyrgyz people as Muslims point blank, except to prove to their donors that they are working among the largest group of so-called ‘unreached people’. More often, they characterize Kyrgyz people as having a Muslim tradition, a Muslim background, or Muslim customs. And when talking about the religious situation in Kyrgyzstan, phrases like ‘communist oppression’, ‘spiritual vacuum’, and ‘religious degeneration’ predominate. In conversations they further trivialize Islam in Kyrgyzstan by insisting that it only has a superficial influence on Kyrgyz culture or by insisting that Islam in Kyrgyzstan is ‘just about identity’, an identity that makes sense only in opposition to Russians. Implicitly, like the previously mentioned Soviet atheizer (see above), these missionaries basically ask Kyrgyz people ‘why they pretend to be Muslim’. There appears to be a twofold logic behind the described discursive practices. By implying that Kyrgyz are not real Muslims, they create the possibility of a directed dialogue in which the missionaries may raise their objections: you drink alcohol, you don’t pray five times daily, those are actually shamanic healing practices, etcetera. In such dialogical encounters, the discursive practices function to dissociate the respondent from Islam. Moreover, by dissociating local religious practices from 11

Negative portrayals of missionaries and converts (as well as newly pious Muslims) are intimately linked to secular fears of ‘the religious’. See McBrien and Pelkmans (forthcoming 2008) for a discussion of how these fears are rooted in Soviet conceptions of culture and religion and their invocation in the post-Soviet period.

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Islam, the evangelicals imply that there is only one true Islam, which they see as dogmatic by nature.12 In essence, by stressing an essentialist core to Islam— with which very few Kyrgyz identify—evangelicals are able to argue that Islam and Kyrgyz ‘culture’ are incompatible. This way, they tempt people to make a decisive choice. And Christianity, they suggest, is far more in line with Kyrgyz ways of life. This brings us to the third element—Kyrgyzifying Christianity. I repeatedly heard missionaries say that it is a common misunderstanding to see Christianity as a Western religion. Instead, they insisted, Christianity is an Eastern religion, and therefore by nature more in line with Eastern cultures than with European or American ones. One American missionary (linked to YWAM) told me that the Bible had captivated him since he read it for the first time, yet that translating its messages to contemporary North American life was often challenging. ‘But when I came here’, he continued, ‘it was amazing. For these people reading the Bible must be like reading about their own forefathers, about their own culture!’ A significant number of young American missionaries claimed to value the preservation of Kyrgyz culture among converts. After having attended a festive service in a Kyrgyz-led church in Bishkek, a YWAM missionary who speaks Kyrgyz told me how pleased he was with the use of Kyrgyz cultural idioms in the service: ‘The way they were dancing in the church and then went outside and slaughtered a cow. I love that, they were not asked to do anything that was not part of their heritage, of their culture’. Similar ideas surfaced in other practices. The set-up in several churches, for example, was arranged to stress Kyrgyzness. Everyone, including the pastor, sat on felt carpets (shyrdaks) on the floor; the elderly received seats of honour, whereas young people sat near the entrance. The songs were in Kyrgyz, accompanied by music played on ‘typical’ Kyrgyz instruments. The intentionality behind such arrangements may be seen from the comment of a German missionary to Kyrgyzstan, who wrote that church services ‘are deliberately designed to be as culturally relevant as possible’ (Rempel 1999: 6). So what is happening here? The missionaries want to carry across the message that Jesus is for everyone and that all cultures are equal, or equally special. But the contextualization of Christian messages, and the resulting stress on ‘local culture’ in missionary discourse and church activities, raises questions concerning the involved definition of culture. As the examples presented above showed, in the hands of evangelicals, Kyrgyz ‘culture’ implied a selective 12

The involved stereotyping was, for example, evident in the words of a German missionary who confided in me: ‘You can’t disconnect Islam from the sharia. If [Muslims] have it their way they would be cutting off hands again’.

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rendering of national symbols and signs, with an obvious emphasis on the visual and oral through music, dance, and public displays. In short, the kind of culture that evangelicals promoted was Kyrgyz in form and Christian in content. Indeed, there were clear parallels with Soviet uses of culture as condensed in the communist slogan ‘national in form and socialist in content’. Both communists and evangelicals heralded the external manifestations of ‘national cultures’ as evident in dressing-styles, cuisine, handicraft, and the like, while simultaneously advancing specific ideologies. Like in the communist parallel, the culture promoted by evangelical Christians was of a folkloristic nature. And like in the communist parallel, there was always the risk that ‘form’ would take predominance over ‘content’.13

Challenging Identity: Employing Culture in the ‘Church in Bishkek’

The relevance of discussing missionary practices is, of course, dependent on the question of how the ideas advanced by missionaries are interpreted, appropriated, and modified by Kyrgyz Christians. As Terence Ranger argued for the African context, the common tendency to focus exclusively on missionaries, and to see missionaries and local Christians as opposing categories, fails to recognize the complexity of missionary encounters and of religious change (1987a: 182–3). Instead, he argued, ‘we should see mission churches as much less alien and independent churches as much less “African”’ (1987b: 31, quoted in Meyer 2004: 454–5). Since this article focuses on evangelical Christians who actively try to ‘contextualize’ religious messages and practices, tend to deemphasize denominational differences, and aim to foster the emergence of a ‘Kyrgyz church’, assuming a straightforward division between missionaries and local Christians would be particularly problematic.14 Indeed, although some of the missionaries led their own ‘missionary church’, they also actively supported ‘independent churches’ by providing financial support and technical assistance, facilitating study visits, and providing theological training.

13 Slezkine (2000) describes the precarious relation between ‘national form’ and ‘socialist content’ during the Soviet period, pointing at the inherent tendency of ‘national form’ to take predominance. Elsewhere (Pelkmans 2006: 58–70) I analyse how in Soviet Georgia attempts to employ culture for advancing socialist ideals over time developed into a celebration of essentialist notions of ethnicity. 14 See Wanner (2004) for a similar argument. She shows that in Ukraine the ‘mission field’ is characterized by numerous alliances and rifts that cross-cut an imagined division between foreign missionaries and local evangelical believers.

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One ‘independent’ church—the ‘Church in Bishkek’—received particular attention from missionaries, precisely because it embodied the promise of becoming a truly ‘Kyrgyz’ church. Although not officially linked to a missionary organization, the church received substantial donations from individual missionaries and missionary organizations. The leaders of the church had extensive contacts with missionaries of the previously mentioned organizations (YWAM and CAPS in particular) and its services were almost always attended by several foreigners. At the same time, the wish to be (seen as) ‘independent’ meant that leaders of the ‘Church in Bishkek’ publicly stressed difference between their church and missionary churches; they were also critical of foreign missionaries who failed to appreciate the cultural specificities of Kyrgyzstan. A focus on this church, then, can provide important insights into the possibilities and limitations of the cultural endeavours undertaken by missionaries and selectively appropriated as well as enhanced by Kyrgyz evangelicals. To sketch the origins and development of this church, I will start by introducing its founder and senior pastor. Pastor Tamaz had undergone a tumultuous spiritual journey, which he eagerly described to me.15 Born in the provincial town of Naryn (East Kyrgyzstan), he had moved to Bishkek to study at a madrasah in the early 1990s. While studying at the madrasah, Tamaz heard about Kyrgyz people who had converted to Christianity. Outraged by the possibility, he and a friend decided to investigate the situation. Having arrived at the church, his friend entered into a heated debate with the Baptist pastor. Tamaz stood by and observed his friend becoming ever more enraged, while the pastor retained his calm posture and replied patiently and convincingly to the questions and accusations. Tamaz presented the event as a turning-point in his life. Soon after he gave up his studies at the madrasah and joined the Baptist church instead. In the following years Tamaz climbed the church hierarchy. He served first as group leader and eventually as pastor leading a congregation across the border in Kazakhstan. However, disagreement over the doctrine of eternal security (in salvation) led to his excommunication from the church.16 Subsequently Tamaz founded a church in Bishkek together with a Korean missionary. Although it had presumably been agreed that Tamaz would lead the church, once the congregation had grown to fifty members the missionary decided that he himself would be pastor. Tamaz 15 To guarantee anonymity, I have replaced the names of my interlocutors with pseudonyms. 16 The doctrine of eternal security, though existing in various forms, basically adopts the idea ‘once saved, always saved’. Tamaz had adopted this stance but clashed with the leaders of the Baptist church, who argued that people who stray from God’s path can lose their salvation.

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felt abused and claimed that the ‘disrespectful’ way he was treated characterized a general pattern: foreign missionaries tend to use Kyrgyz believers to do the hard work (evangelizing) and subsequently impose their faulted Western ideas. Nevertheless, Tamaz was hopeful for the future. He explained that while years ago Kyrgyz pastors ‘scolded each other like small children’, they had finally come to realize that they could survive without the assistance of foreigners. In 1998, Tamaz decided to set up his own independent church. Starting with a dozen believers who gathered in his apartment, the church had steadily expanded. In 2004 the church had some 200 regular attendants at the central church in Bishkek, and another 300 people attending six daughter churches. The name of the central church—Church in Bishkek—may be confusing given the fact that there were as many as fifty Protestant churches in the city. Nevertheless, the name was carefully chosen. ‘Church in Bishkek’, according to Tamaz, was similar to the names of New Testament churches like the ‘Church in Antiocha’ or the ‘Church in Jerusalem’.17 Thus, the name indicated a symbolic return to biblical models of Christianity and reflected the wish that denominational differences would disappear in the future. Instead, the church Tamaz envisioned would be a church for all believers and fit within Kyrgyz culture. Constructing a Christian Self The spoken word occupies a central place in evangelical Christianity. In her study of fundamentalist Baptists in the US, Harding shows convincingly that conversion was both produced and revealed through distinctive speech patterns. In this process, she argued, ‘listeners become public speakers of the Gospel’ (1987: 16). A related question relevant to the purpose of this article is to what extent this principle produces continuity in discourse between foreign missionaries and Kyrgyz church members. In this section I will show that the ideas about culture promoted by foreign missionaries tended to be replicated in self-portrayals and conversion accounts, not least because these ideas allowed Kyrgyz Christians to counter allegations of national betrayal. The importance of speech—of recounting conversion stories in particular—also means that the stories I was told were in no sense ‘hidden scripts’ that needed to be painstakingly solicited; they were public statements repeated for potentially interested audiences. They were simultaneously narrations of experiences and invitations for the listener to accept Christ (see also Harding 1987). In my discussion I focus on this first aspect in order to illustrate how conversion 17

Since ‘Church in Bishkek’ was a confusing name in everyday communication, members would generally refer to the church by mentioning the name of the street.

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stories connect ideas of cultural and ethnic belonging with notions of faith.18 The story of Mirgul, a member of the Church in Bishkek, is illustrative of how converts carve out Christian space in Kyrgyz society and how they constitute themselves as culturally specific persons. Almost immediately after we started talking, Mirgul stressed that she did not belong to any particular religion or denomination. In her view, religions hinder people from finding the truth: ‘God told me that he didn’t create religions—he didn’t create Islam. The only thing you need is faith’. She continued by describing how ‘religion’ had hindered her when she was a child. Her parents had died at an early age and Mirgul was raised by her grandparents in a village in Talas province, 200 kilometres southwest of Bishkek. As she told it, being deprived of parental love had caused an ‘emptiness in her heart’ which made her sensitive to existential issues. At that time she considered herself a Muslim and was proud of it. Whenever she was afraid, she would repeat the phrase la ilaha illa llah wa (there is no god but God), which her grandmother had taught her. Also, she felt protected by the magical power of stones she collected at the burial site of the Kyrgyz hero Manas. Mirgul may well have discussed these and other instances to show how ‘hopeless’ her previous beliefs had been, because she concluded: ‘At that time I wanted to believe so badly, but [my religion] didn’t give me anything’. Mirgul’s rendering of her pre-conversion background explicitly challenged what she disapprovingly called ‘religion’. First, she stressed that her conversion was not about religion or religious practice—which she saw as human inventions—but about truth and faith, as reflected in her search for the meanings of life and death. Second, she depicted the religious ideas taught by her grandmother as ineffective superstitions. Her story thus strongly resembled the discourse of missionaries on ‘folk Islam’, which, intentionally or not, functioned to trivialize the Muslim affiliation of Kyrgyz. Mirgul’s doubts concerning the effectiveness of her native religion grew more intense after an encounter with a German ‘believer’ (probably a Mennonite), whom she met after she had moved to Bishkek. She described this person as very different from other people, standing out in honesty and emotional stability. Although she enjoyed his stories about Jesus, she was convinced that they were not meant for her because she was not a German. None 18

The account is based on two interview sessions in August 2003. Because my focus is on key phrases and narrative structures rather than rhetorical techniques (repetitions, silences, changes in intonation) aimed at converting, I have condensed Mirgul’s account considerably.

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the less, she continued to think about Jesus and even approached an elderly Russian Orthodox woman to enquire if she could be baptized. The lady dismissed the idea, saying: ‘Girl, you are a Muslim! Anyway, baptism is only for the very young’. Some time after this disappointing encounter, Mirgul visited her sister and other relatives in Talas province. Mirgul’s sister told her about a new group of Christians which included some Kyrgyz. Together they decided to attend a service: ‘We entered, and for the first time in my life I experienced that atmosphere. I was in awe to find such a place, such people … Afterwards it was as if I had wings. The only thing in my head was that Jesus is alive’. Not long thereafter Mirgul returned to Bishkek. Although she considered herself a believer at the time, in retrospect she recognized that she continued ‘to live in sin’, enmeshed in the ‘worldly life’ of the city. This second part of Mirgul’s story described the obstacles to finding and accepting the truth—obstacles which she located both in herself and in the social environment. For Mirgul, the faith of the German believer was unattainable because she was not a German. The negative response of the Russian Orthodox woman further affirmed that differences between Christians and Muslims were inborn and ethnically fixed. Only when Mirgul met a Kyrgyz believer was she able to find ‘the truth’. But having overcome this ‘ethnic barrier’ and knowing ‘the truth’ was not the same as accepting it. The attractions of city life—presented as social pressures in other conversion narratives—kept her from leading a ‘holy life’ herself. Mirgul discussed extensively the circumstances under which she finally became a true believer. She had travelled to Kazakhstan to assist in selling the apartment of a relative. After several weeks, a potential buyer finally came forward: ‘She was a beautiful lady, about sixty years of age, very richly dressed … She said that she had been to Mecca and that she was a Muslim … She was also president of all the ekstrasensy (visionaries) in central Kazakhstan’. The woman agreed to buy the apartment but negotiated that she would start using it immediately and would deliver the money within fifteen days. When the woman delayed making payments, Mirgul threatened to call the police. Then [this lady] started shouting that she would paralyse me and turn me into an invalid, so that I would never again be able to move my arms and feet. And she would do it that very night. You see, she worshipped Satan to bring this harm to me … Right then and there—on the street while snow was falling—I accepted Christ as the Lord, as Saviour. It was as if I was drunk. I felt so good and strong, and I easily fell asleep … The

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next morning I met the woman again. She stood there, shivering as if sick, and without a word she handed me the money. It turns out that when she [used her magic that very night] she was struck by horrible pains. I was so happy. Since then my life completely changed. My friends, that world, it fell away … It has been five years since and I still thank God every single day. Whereas in the first two sections of her story Mirgul described the social and psychological factors that played a role in her conversion, here she staged the active presence of Jesus. She positioned her own conversion experience at the epicentre of the struggle between powers of good and evil, in which she managed to survive only with Jesus’ help. Tellingly, evil was represented by a Muslim woman who employed ‘occult’ powers which—symbolically at least— referred back to the ‘superstitious’ beliefs Mirgul had held in her youth. The relation between faith, culture, and religion was important not only in Mirgul’s coming to faith, but also in the way she practised it as a believer. Mirgul insisted that she had remained fully Kyrgyz and that her customs all stayed the same: The only things I disposed of are the occult practices of Kyrgyz people. I no longer worship trees, water, or stones. But for the rest everything stayed the same. We [Christians] have circumcision, we have wedding customs that include the kalym [bride-price] and we have all kinds of national celebrations. Mirgul also explained that she continued to attend funerals of her nonconverted relatives. During such funerals she would pray in her own way, but would complete the prayers like the others with ‘omen’.19 She explained that some new believers start copying foreigners, something to which she objected: ‘We don’t need American culture. We need Kyrgyz culture’. A little later she added: ‘I think that our culture should be a biblical culture. We didn’t change our nationality. Instead of [having] religion we now believe. That is all’. Mirgul was an enthusiastic and compelling narrator. This may well have been the reason why church members introduced me to her in the first place. Significantly, her story closely paralleled stories of converts who were less 19

In Kyrgyzstan Muslims say ‘omen’ and make an accompanying gesture of the hands along the face when ending a prayer, a meal, or, for example, passing a graveyard. Evangelical Christians translated the term conveniently as ‘amen’.

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vocally apt. Stories typically started with a pre-conversion stage in which one was left unsatisfied with available religious beliefs and practices, followed by a move to a city and/or a personal crisis. Subsequently the person had an encounter with believers, dealt with obstacles related to family or social environment, experienced a crisis and miraculous recovery, and finally found joy of assured salvation through Christ.20 This spiritual journey served not only to highlight the sincerity of conversion, but also to criticize the corruptions of worldly life in post-socialist Kyrgyzstan. However, the selective reading of such stories was clear: potential converts face difficult obstacles but the rewards are worth the pain. Moreover, the implication was that one could accept Jesus and still be a true Kyrgyz. Of course, the message did not ease the social exclusion experienced by most converts, but it did provide them with a self-image and a vocabulary that could be used to counter negative reactions. In part, then, the insistence on Kyrgyzness may be seen as a way to neutralize negative reactions of people who accuse converts of selling or betraying the nation, just as it can be seen as a conversion strategy that makes conversion to Christianity acceptable and imaginable. Still, the employed concept of Kyrgyzness as well as the extent to which believers could participate in ‘Kyrgyz culture’ had limitations. It did not allow full participation in social life, and was not necessarily accepted by non-believers. Folklorization and Deception The selective reading of Kyrgyzness corresponded closely to the cultural endeavours undertaken by the Church in Bishkek, and especially to the critical connection between cultural ‘form’ and Christian ‘content’. It was almost standard practice at church celebrations or life-cycle rituals to make the events look as Kyrgyz as possible. For example, during one Christian fundraising event (co-organized by the church) dancers were dressed in ‘traditional’ clothing, while the musician who played the komuz (stringed instrument) wore a kalpak (felt hat) and chapan (long black coat). In the lobby were stalls that sold Christian Kyrgyz handicraft like small shyrdaks (felt rugs) with texts in English like ‘North, South, West, East, Jesus is for everyone’ and ‘Pray for Kyrgyzstan’. A central place was reserved for a nativity scene in which Joseph wore a kalpak and Mary a ‘traditional’ Kyrgyz dress. Such cultural displays may be described as ‘folkloristic’, in the sense of being systematic attempts to convey notions of tradition and authenticity through stylized displays of culture. Obviously these displays had limited significance 20 Coleman (2002: 96) notices a similar uniformity in conversion stories in her study of Russian evangelicals.

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in social life, something which Mirgul’s story already indicated. It was possible to attend funerals, but not to pray in the same way as Muslims. Likewise, though evangelical codes did not proscribe attending parties, the ban on consuming alcohol limited participation in common forms of conviviality.21 And although Mirgul stressed that ‘everything stayed the same’, conversion to her new faith did not only require her to denounce the spiritual ideas held by Muslim Kyrgyz, but also meant that, as she put it, her previous ‘friends, that world, it fell away’. The performances and commodities revealed the tendency to treat ‘culture’ as a set of free-floating images and signs that could be attached to a new set of morals and worldview. Discomfort with this understanding of culture partly explained negative reactions of several Muslim Kyrgyz acquaintances to pictures that I showed them of the events organized to celebrate the five-year mark of the Church in Bishkek. For this special event a yurt (boz-üi) was erected in the church-yard, the worship group was dressed in brightly coloured shiny Kyrgyz dresses, and many men wore kalpaks. The pictures also showed the slaughtering of a cow and several sheep, an open-air prayer meeting in the yard, and people praying with arms outstretched. For my acquaintances these visual images signified Kyrgyzness. They were astounded to learn that the people in the pictures were Christians, for what they saw in the photographs indicated Kyrgyzness and could not possibly have had anything to do with Christianity. Since several of them had previously mentioned that abandoning Islam implies a betrayal of Kyrgyz nationality, I asked them to revisit that statement after having seen the pictures of Kyrgyz Christians. One of them said, ‘Well yes, they dress like Kyrgyz, they act like Kyrgyz, but still … inside they must be different’. My acquaintances would not easily give up their convictions about the ties between religion and nationality. One of them exclaimed: ‘Dressing up like that is plain deception’. According to him, this ‘abuse of Kyrgyz culture’ was even worse than becoming a Russian—an Orthodox Christian. Thus, at least two limitations followed from the evangelical uses of ‘culture’. On one hand, the displays were not necessarily accepted by non-Christians, for whom the appropriation of Kyrgyz styles was sometimes a sign of superficiality or of cultural theft. On the other hand, the extensive cultural displays did not mean that believers could fully participate in social life. After having converted, 21

It should be stressed that though the majority of the population in Kyrgyzstan are Muslim, they regularly consume large quantities of alcohol at most social events. These practices are generally not perceived as incompatible with a Muslim affiliation, except among a growing minority of newly pious Muslims (McBrien 2006). Evangelical churches generally discouraged the consumption of alcohol and many banned it altogether.

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their social world often became centred on other Christians. Precisely because of these challenges and difficulties, there was an inherent tendency to assign a more active role to ‘cultural form’. Cultural Objectification and Ethnocentrism The evangelical attempt to disconnect faith, religion and culture runs into its own limits here. There is an unavoidable contradiction in disconnecting Christianity from ‘Russian culture’ and then abundantly displaying Kyrgyzness. One obvious consequence of this valorization of Kyrgyz culture was that people of different ethnic background became less attracted to the services. Several female Russian believers told me about their disillusionment with the churches that they used to attend. The services had been in Russian and were attended by Tatars, Koreans, Russians, and Kyrgyz alike. One of the women said: ‘Suddenly everything had to change into Kyrgyz: the new pastor was a Kyrgyz, we had to sing Kyrgyz songs, etcetera. Just because they think that Russian [language] would make people think of icons and church bells’. Apart from such ‘earthly’ exclusionary effects, the objectification of culture also formed the basis for a new ethnocentric cosmology. At the end of a service at the Church in Bishkek, Pastor Tamaz announced the performance of an Isachi. The term Isachi, he explained, was derived from Manaschi, or narrator of the famous Kyrgyz Manas epic. The Isachi in question, a woman wearing a pink and black ‘national Kyrgyz dress’, was seated on a felt carpet on the podium. She closed her eyes for a moment, then lifted her hands with palms up, and started reciting. Her sitting posture and arm movements, as well as the rhythm and intonation of her voice, strongly resembled performances by manaschis. The story she told, however, was that of the life of Isa (Jesus). Several people I spoke to after the service, including two Kyrgyz-speaking American missionaries, were full of praise for this remarkable performance. One of them commented that this was such a perfect example of the way the ‘good news’ can be contextualized, presenting it in a form that was recognizable to Kyrgyz people. When I met Pastor Tamaz again, he mentioned that another five Isachis were in training, and would soon be able to perform all over Kyrgyzstan. Pastor Tamaz’s efforts were not just attempts to contextualize Christian messages, but also reflected what he imagined to be God’s plans with the Kyrgyz. Tamaz had become convinced that the Kyrgyz were descendants of one of the lost tribes of Israel.22 He based this view on certain similarities between the 22

The ‘lost tribe’ myth has parallels in many corners of the earth. Colonizers and missionaries implemented the myth in the Pacific and Amazonia to understand or remake indigenous histories. While the myth has often served to obscure indigenous histories and limit

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Old Testament and the Manas epic. This epic tells the story of the hero Manas, who managed to integrate feuding Kyrgyz tribes into one nation and to defeat its enemies. Aside from the fact that the Manas epic pays as much attention to bloody battles and etiquette as the Old Testament does, Pastor Tamaz was especially intrigued by several more specific similarities. One of these was a semblance of personal names. The hero Manas has a father called Jakyp, which resembles the biblical story of Jacob, who adopts as his native son his grandson Manasseh (Genesis 48:5). Moreover, this grandfather-grandson adoption corresponded to the Kyrgyz custom to allow grandparents to adopt their first-born grandson. The hero Manas, according to Tamaz, was at times ‘like David, who also had forty commanders of whom three stood out’, and at others like Jesus, because it was likewise predicted that Manas ‘would come to save his people’. Moreover, Tamaz continued, ‘After Jesus was born, all infants were killed. When Manas was born they also killed all the children his age’. To Tamaz such similarities indicated that the Manas epic was rooted in the Bible. The biblical stories had been orally transmitted within the Jewish Manasseh tribe (the Kyrgyz, that is), meanwhile being changed and transformed into what is now known as the Manas epic. Tamaz was not the only one to cherish these views. One of his friends, an American missionary associated with YWAM, had written a booklet titled Ak Kalpak in which he documented what he called ‘God’s fingerprints’ on Kyrgyz culture, paying particular attention to the similarities between the Manas epic and the Old Testament. The booklet was translated in Kyrgyz and distributed by the ‘Church in Bishkek’.23 Moreover, in June 2004, Asian Alliance (mentioned above) organized a public event, titled ‘Who is Manas?’, in which (mostly foreign) evangelical Christians approvingly discussed similarities between the characters in the epic and the Bible. While this cross-fertilization between missionaries and the Church in Bishkek forms an important backdrop to the story, it is equally important to note that the ‘lost tribe’ thesis was controversial within evangelical circles. Some Kyrgyz Christians and foreign missionaries had second thoughts about the ideas that Pastor Tamaz was propagating so actively. For example, a German lecturer of Central Asian church history at a theological seminary in Bishkek pointed out that even though he considered the similarities to be remarkable, they could just as well be the result of interaction between Kyrgyz bards and

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local agency, in some cases it proved instrumental in the construction of cultural identity (Friedman 1992: 196; Kirsch 1997). The booklet was written in 2002 and the Kyrgyz translation appeared in 2004. It was not officially published but circulated widely in Kyrgyz evangelical circles.

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Nestorian monks in medieval times. However, Tamaz and his followers were convinced that such cynical remarks would be proven false in the future. Certain that the Kyrgyz were actually Israelites, Tamaz foresaw a special role for the Kyrgyz in the last wave of missionary activity before the second coming of Christ. According to Tamaz, the Kyrgyz are more charismatic, spiritually predisposed, and energetic than Europeans and Americans. The latter might have organizational qualities but are unable to ignite the passion in others. It seems to me that God needs humble, open-minded people. Not like Germans or Dutch, who have a lot of money and a technocratic way of thinking. They may have big plans, but they are not able to establish large churches [i.e. attract many believers]. Simple Kyrgyz people can achieve much more. Probably God meant it to be that way. Because otherwise people would say, ‘oh well, it is just because of those rich Americans, that is why they [converted]’. In January 2004, at a national evangelical convention, Tamaz expressed these ideas to a broad audience of Kyrgyz pastors. His ideas met with strong opposition from several pastors, who threatened to excommunicate him because they felt that his preoccupation with Kyrgyz history was distorting Christian teachings. But the controversy subsided and Tamaz continued to popularize his idea of the Kyrgyz as a lost tribe of Israel. Just before I left the country in August 2004, Tamaz arranged a nationwide competition to search for hidden similarities between the Manas epic and the Bible and had this broadcast on regional and national television channels. The emphasis on the Manas epic and the idea of ‘spiritual superiority’ based on biological descent go a long way in infusing Kyrgyz Christianity with new ‘racial overtones’. Ironically, this Kyrgyz Christian ethnocentrism was a logical, if unintended, outcome of evangelical attempts to contextualize biblical messages in a post-Soviet context. The core of the evangelical message is that people should pursue a personal relationship with God, and that Jesus died for people from all nations. The efforts to disconnect the Christian message from its Russian connotations and to prove that it is possible to remain Kyrgyz after conversion were part of this ideal. But although the intent was to disconnect the biblical message from its Russian cultural connotations so that it would be accessible to Kyrgyz as well, these efforts created new divisions within the community of believers. Ironically, dissolving one ethnic barrier meant that new boundaries were created in the process. This is so because actually practised faith, even in the case of evangelical Christianity with its stress on personal salvation, is deeply social. Therefore, ‘form’ and ‘content’ can never be durably separated.

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Culture and Religion

Almost a century ago, Émile Durkheim made his classic argument that religion expresses collective realities, indeed that ‘the idea of society is the soul of religion’ (2002 [1912]: 48). Durkheim saw religion as ‘an eminently social thing’ (2002 [1912]: 38), a view that still forms the basis of many anthropological studies of religion. But how does this principle hold in relation to religious groups that stress individual relations with God, operating in a country that has experienced seventy years of state atheism? As I outlined above, the social nature of religion took specific forms in the Soviet Union, whose narrow religious and ethno-territorial policies encouraged the fusion of ethnic and religious categories. In a way, the recent surge of ethnic imagery and the disappearance of Soviet ideology have made these connections even more important. The continued importance of the ethno-religious connection is one of the reasons why many (secular) Muslim Kyrgyz resent the influx of Protestant missions and why the conversion of Kyrgyz people is so much feared: they pose a threat to familiar patterns of belonging and non-belonging. These fears have started to resonate in national politics. Whereas in the early 1990s evangelical missionaries were welcomed as agents of Western values, in recent years the government has made attempts to limit the activities of missionaries and to undermine the basis of the most successful churches. National media outlets have also grown increasingly negative about the missionary ‘invasion’, portraying evangelical churches as ‘totalitarian cults’ using hypnosis and psychological manipulation to brainwash their members.24 The most frequently expressed fear by reporters and state officials is that these churches may destabilize the nation by introducing foreign religions based on ideas alien to Kyrgyz culture.25 Received notions become increasingly dear to people only when they lose their self-evident nature. In line with this I suggest that the increased stress on the ethno-religious connection reflects its vulnerability and that the relative success of evangelical Christians (as well as of scripturalist Muslims) is related to the effects of the Soviet pairing of ethnic and religious labels. Though 24 The (translated) titles of the following articles, taken from a major Kyrgyz newspaper, speak for themselves: ‘Beware the foreign preachers’ (Vechernii Bishkek, 8 September 2000), ‘Psychological terror or dark totalitarian sect’ (Vechernii Bishkek, 10 November 2000), ‘Spiritual narcotics’ (Vechernii Bishkek, 19 March 2002). 25 For example, an analyst at the State Committee of Religious Affairs declares that new religious movements negatively impact ethnic relations because they destabilize the ‘way of life, traditions and mentality of [the] nations and nationalities of Kyrgyzstan’ (Murzakhalilov 2004: 86).

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on the surface this pairing secured the position of Islam in Soviet Kyrgyzstan, it simultaneously undermined its viability in the post-Soviet context. In particular, the conflation of religious and ethno-national categories ignored and partly excluded other aspects of religious life (such as belief, morality, aesthetics) as well as different personal motivations (devotion, existential questions) which became increasingly important in destabilized post-Soviet contexts. Phrased differently, the very success of the amalgamation of Muslimness with Kyrgyzness partly carried its own demise as it made the constituting parts seem shallow to people who started reconsidering them in the 1990s. While notions of Muslimness and Kyrgyzness were previously positioned against an atheist ideology and a Russian ‘other’, these negative frames of reference became less relevant after the collapse of the Soviet Union. For many, this raised the troubling question of what else was involved in their Muslimness beyond Kyrgyzness. This lack of clarity concerning the position of Islam is one of the reasons why evangelical Christianity managed to make significant inroads in Kyrgyzstan. Evangelical Christians challenged people’s religious affiliation by stressing differences between religion, culture, and faith. Like the Soviets they aimed to stress differences between ‘form’ and ‘content’, while simultaneously advancing stereotypic views of ‘real’ Islam. In the context of post-Soviet decline and existential uncertainty the evangelical emphasis on individuality—on salvation through an individual relation with Christ—proved attractive. Evangelical logics dictated that people would be able to see this message of salvation once they had overcome the ‘ethnic barrier’. But despite their proclaimed intention to disconnect faith from religion and culture, and despite the emphasis on individuality and private faith, evangelicals ended up strengthening these cultural connections in new ways. While foreign missionaries viewed Kyrgyz cultural displays as effective means (the form) of transmitting biblical messages (the content), the case of Tamaz clearly indicated that ‘form’ and ‘content’ did not remain conveniently separated. His insistence on viewing the Kyrgyz as a lost tribe of Israel demonstrated the importance of finding Kyrgyz authenticity in Christianity, thus blending ‘form’ and ‘content’ in the idea of a chosen nation. In spirit, this historical narrative resonated with Soviet ideas of culture and ethnicity as primordial features, but also reflected the need to respond to accusations of national betrayal befalling Kyrgyz who abandoned Islam. As such, the incursions of evangelical Christianity underline that actually practised religion is deeply social and tightly entwined with ideas of belonging, even if the proposed combinations between ethnicity, culture, and religion are entirely novel.

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Notes This article is based on fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan between August 2003 and September 2004, carried out in the context of the project ‘Religion and Civil Society after Socialism’ at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany. Earlier versions of this article benefited from the stimulating comments of Chris Hann, Julie McBrien, Johan Rasanayagam, Lale Yalçin-Heckmann, and four anonymous referees for JRAI. References Andrade, X. 2002. ‘Culture’ as stereotype: public uses in Ecuador. In Anthropology beyond culture (eds) R. Fox & B. King, 235–57. Oxford: Berg. Coleman, H. 2002. Becoming a Russian Baptist: conversion narratives and social experience. The Russian Review 61, 94–112. Durkheim, É. 2002 [1912]. The elementary forms of the religious life. In A reader in the anthropology of religion (ed.) M. Lambek, 34–49. Oxford: Blackwell. Friedman, J. 1992. Myth, history, and political identity. Cultural Anthropology 7, 194–210. Gupta, A. & J. Ferguson. 1992. Beyond ‘culture’: space, identity, and the politics of difference. Cultural Anthropology 7, 6–23. Hann, C. 2002. All Kulturvölker now? Social anthropological reflections on the German-American tradition. In Anthropology beyond culture (eds) R. Fox & B. King, 259–76. Oxford: Berg. Harding, S. 1987. Convicted by the Holy Spirit: the rhetoric of fundamental Baptist conversion. American Ethnologist 14, 167–81. Hefner, R. 2005. Introduction: modernity and the remaking of Muslim politics. In Remaking Muslim politics (ed.) R. Hefner, 1–36. Princeton: University Press. Hirsch, F. 2005. Empire of nations: ethnographic knowledge and the making of the Soviet Union. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Iarkov, A. 2002. Ocherk istorii religii v Kzrgzystane. Bishkek: Tsentr OBSE v Bishkeke. Jordan, D. 1993. The glyphomancy factor: observations on Chinese conversion. In Conversion to Christianity: historical and anthropological perspectives on a great transformation (ed.) R. Hefner, 285–303. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kaneff, D. & A. King 2004. Introduction: owning culture. Focaal: European Journal of Anthropology 44, 3–19. Karpat, K. 1993. The old and new Central Asia. Central Asian Survey 12, 415–25. Keane, W. 1996. Materialism, missionaries, and modern subjects in colonial Indonesia. In Conversion to modernities: the globalization of Christianity (ed.) P. van der Veer, 137–70. New York: Routledge.

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Keane, W. 2007. Christian moderns: freedom and fetish in the mission encounter. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kirsch, S. 1997. Lost tribes: indigenous people and the social imaginary. Anthropological Quarterly 70: 2, 58–67. Lemercier-Quelquejay, C. 1984. From tribe to umma. Central Asian Survey 3: 3, 15–38. Love, R. 2000. Disciplining all Muslim peoples in the twenty-first century. International Journal of Frontier Missions 17: 4, 5–12. Mamaiusupov, O. 2003. Voprosy (problemy) religii na perekhodnom periode. Bishkek. McBrien, J. 2006. Listening to the wedding speaker: discussing religion and culture in Southern Kyrgyzstan. Central Asian Survey 25, 341–57. McBrien, J. & M. Pelkmans forthcoming 2008. Turning Marx on his head: missionaries, ‘extremists’, and archaic secularists in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan. Critique of Anthropology. Meyer, B. 2002. Christianity and the Ewe nation: German Pietist missionaries, Ewe converts and the politics of culture. Journal of Religion in Africa 32, 167–99. Meyer, B. 2004. Christianity in Africa: from African Independent to PentecostalCharismatic Churches. Annual Review of Anthropology 33, 447–74. Miller, F. J. 1990. Folklore for Stalin: Russian folklore and pseudofolklore of the Stalin era. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe. Murzakhalilov, K. 2004. Proselytism in Kyrgyzstan. Central Asia and the Caucasus: Journal of Social and Political Studies 25: 1, 83–7. Orta, A. 2004. Catechizing culture: missionaries, Aymara, and the ‘new evangelization’. New York: Columbia University Press. Pelkmans, M. 2006. Defending the border: identity, religion, and modernity in the Republic of Georgia. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Pelkmans, M., V. Vaté & C. Falge 2005. Christian conversion in a changing world: confronting issues of inequality, modernity, and morality. Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology report 2004–2005. Peyrouse, S. 2004. Christianity and nationality in Soviet and post-Soviet Central Asia: mutual intrusions and instrumentalizations. Nationalities Papers 32, 651–74. Ranger, T. 1987a. An Africanist comment. American Ethnologist 14, 182–5. Ranger, T. 1987b. Religion, development and African Christian identity. In Religion, development and African identity (ed.) K. Holst Petersen, 29–57. Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute for African Studies. Rempel, H. 1999. Research paper on the church in Naryn, Kyrgyzstan, submitted to Prof. R. P. Prigodich. Denver Seminary, Denver, Colorado. Unpublished MS. Saroyan, M. 1997. Minorities, mullahs, and modernity: reshaping community in the late Soviet Union. (Research Series 95). University of California. Shahrani, M. 1984. ‘From tribe to umma’: comments on the dynamics of identity in Muslim Soviet Central Asia. Central Asian Survey 3: 3, 27–38.

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Sharkey, H. 2005. Empire and Muslim conversion: historical reflections on Christian missions in Egypt. Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 16, 43–60. Slezkine, Y. 2000. The USSR as a communal apartment, or how a socialist state promoted ethnic particularism. In Stalinism: new directions (ed.) S. Fitzpatrick, 313–47. London: Routledge. Wanner, C. 2004. Missionaries of faith and culture: evangelical encounters in Ukraine. Slavic Review 63, 732–55. Zweininger, J. 2002. Religiöse Ansprechbarkeit der Post-Sowjetischen Kirgisen: Eine soziomissiologische Fall-studie des Bekehrungsprozesses der zum Christentum konvertierten Kirgisen. MA thesis, University of South Africa.

‘It’s Really Where Your Parents Were’: Differentiating and Situating Protestant Missionary Children’s Lives, c. 1900–1940 Hugh Morrison In November 1902, eight-year-old Willie Marwick began writing a diary documenting his daily life. Typically he wrote: [Today] I got up and dressed…. I went down-stairs and put on my shoes and then went with George, James and Marjory to the post. [Then] followed worship, breakfast and going to school. Then I came back for dinner at ½ past twelve and went back to school. I got home a little after 3. I read a part of one book went out for a few minutes and after sitting in the windowsill I began to write this. I went out for the walk with Mother, James and Margaret and was met by George and Father on the way. I had tea in the garden, went to an open-air meeting, learned my lessons and wrote this.1 In 1925, in quite different circumstances, James Gray noted in a letter that his two-year-old son Scott had been: taken most seriously ill with dysentery some two months ago and as his case seemed almost hopeless I was wired for and for 6 weeks he hung between life and death. A further complication in the shape of meningitis set in. He had of course to be at once removed to a nursing home where he has been for 2 months. The best medical advice was got as our own Doctors were not available and I am very glad to say that after a great struggle he is out of danger and only extreme weakness remains. The

Source: Morrison, H., “‘It’s Really Where Your Parents Were’: Differentiating and Situating Protestant Missionary Children’s Lives, c. 1900–1940,” Journal of Family History 42.4 (2017): pp. 419–439. Copyright © 2017 by SAGE. Reprinted by Permission of SAGE Publications, Ltd. 1 Willie to Grannie and Auntie, December 6, 1902, “Letters of Children of Rev. W. Marwick from Jamaica to Relatives at Home, 1902,” (Children’s Letters, 1902), William Hutton Marwick Papers (Marwick Papers), Acc. 4886/2, National Library of Scotland (NLS), Edinburgh, Scotland.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/97890

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meningitis has left its mark but we are hopeful that in time this too will pass away. Our hearts are very full of thankfulness that he is still with us.2 There is nothing that distinguishes the seemingly ordinary experiences of Willie Marwick or of Scott Gray. Children’s diary keeping was a common pursuit and life-threatening illness was an oft-repeated, albeit tragic historical childhood experience. When the geography of their lives is factored in, however, the apparent “ordinariness” of these two accounts becomes more intriguing. Willie’s seemingly mundane quotidian life occurred in Jamaica, where his parents were Scottish Presbyterian missionaries, and Scott’s illness occurred in north India where his parents were missionaries of the New Zealand Presbyterian Church. Where they lived thus distinguished Willie and Scott from their childhood peers at home, even if the actual details of their lives were less exotic than their contemporaries might have imagined. Yet Scott later recalls that his significant childhood marker was not so much his location, as the fact that India was “where your parents were.”3 Family connections trumped geographical location in his memories of childhood, rendering his experiences ordinary. In this article, the historical spotlight is focused specifically on the children of early twentieth-century British world missionary families. This is significant in that the lives and stories of children like Willie Marwick and Scott Gray have remained hitherto largely untold in the histories and literature of the modern Protestant missionary movement. They were hidden behind the more exotic stories of heroic men and women or glossed over in favor of writing about theology, grand policies, strategies, and movements. More recent mission historiography has rightly emphasized the place or roles of women (especially single women missionaries)4 but in the process missionary children’s stories have typically been subsumed within these discussions and narrated more for the nineteenth than for the twentieth century. Often in the contemporary literature of missions, especially aimed at home-base constituencies, children 2 James Gray to Henry Barton, October 10, 1925, Staff File 6.6, GAO149 Punjab Mission, Presbyterian Research Centre (PRC), Dunedin, New Zealand. 3 Scott Gray, interview by Hugh Morrison, Dunedin, June 15, 2014, privately held. 4 For example, Dana Robert, American Women in Mission: A Social History of Their Thought and Practice (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1997); Rhonda A. Semple, Missionary Women: Gender, Professionalism, and the Victorian Idea of Christian Mission (Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2003); Elizabeth E. Prevost, The Communion of Women: Missions and Gender in Colonial Africa and the British Metropole (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010); Barbara Reeves-Ellington, Kathryn Kish Sklar, and Connie A. Shemo, eds, Competing Kingdoms: Women, Mission, Nation, and the American Protestant Empire, 1812–1960 (London, UK: Duke University Press, 2010).

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were taken for granted or were obliquely referred to with respect to missionary families or education. As this article outlines, the missionary family was indeed both a critical institution and lens through which to identify and understand children’s lives. Yet as new scholarship is unveiling5 and as oral history manifestly demonstrates, children were present, visible, and sometimes pivotal to missionary endeavors, and they certainly had perspectives on their experiences that differed from those of their parents. Therefore, this article is an exploratory investigation of early twentiethcentury missionary children as a subcategory of historical childhood, with an emphasis on examining the potential for existing written and oral archives of children’s religious historical lives to elicit both preliminary answers and creative avenues for further conceptualization. By way of two case studies that focus on geographically disparate missionary families (the Marwick family in Nigeria and Jamaica, 1899–1911 and the Gray family in India, 1921–1939), it addresses the underlying question: “how might we usefully historicize the lives of early twentieth-century missionary children?”6 The case study material indicates that early twentieth-century children’s historical lives were primarily framed within the religiously defined narratives of the missionary family— albeit narratives that varied depending on geographical, cultural, theological, and temporal contexts or with respect to points of family origin—and that these narratives were articulated differently from children’s and parents’ perspectives. First, following a historiographical and methodological discussion, this article outlines data about these children’s experiences as constituent members of missionary families. Second, it considers a range of nonexclusive themes that emerge from the data, which provide useful parameters for discussion and indicate fruitful areas for further research and conceptualization. These themes focus on parents’ religious vocation, on family narratives (emphasizing differentiation and identity), and on family separation. 5 See, in particular, Emily J. Manktelow, Missionary Families: Race, Gender and Generation on the Spiritual Frontier (Manchester, UK: University of Manchester Press, 2013), 162–89; Joy Schulz, “Crossing the Pali: White Missionary Children, Bicultural Identity, and the Racial Divide in Hawai’i, 1820–1898,” Journal of the History of Childhood & Youth 6, no. 2 (2013): 209–35; Mary Clare Martin, “Play, Missionaries and the Cross-cultural Encounter in Global Perspective, 1800–1870,” in Creating Religious Childhoods in Anglo-World and British Colonial Contexts, 1800–1950. Studies in Childhood, 1700 to the Present, eds. Hugh Morrison and Mary Clare Martin (London, UK: Routledge, 2016), 61–84; Hugh Morrison, “Situating Pākehā Children and Protestant Christianity in New Zealand’s Religious History,” Stimulus 23, no. 1 (2016): 34–36. 6 “Children” embrace children and teenagers of school age: in other words, the progeny of missionary parents up to the age of eighteen.

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Historiographical and Methodological Considerations

Historiographically, family and childhood are obviously linked concepts that sit together as historical categories of analysis. At the same time, childhood has clearly emerged over recent decades as a widely accepted analytical category in its own right7 and is the focus of an increasingly diverse and comparative body of writing.8 However, recent global and transnational approaches to the history of childhood9 indicate that the category of “childhood,” important as it is, too neatly embraces a multitude of variations, experiences, and issues and therefore itself becomes potentially problematic. Childhood as a historical category needs to be differentiated carefully, paying attention to identifiable subgroups as well as the boundaries (such as the nation) which childhoods straddled, negotiated, or crossed. Protestant missionary children constitute one such dynamic subgroup that deserves further consideration as to its meaning and contours. From the inception of the modern European and Anglo-American Protestant missionary movement in the late eighteenth century, missionary children were a continually present but often hidden quantity as Western families moved into increasingly diverse non-Western contexts for religious reasons. Their presence was more often assumed than explicitly acknowledged. Over the decades, these children existed in considerable numbers and, by the early 1900s, missionary policy makers could not ignore the implications. Across the various branches of the Church of Scotland, for example, there were at least 796 missionary 7 See Stephen Mintz, “Reflections on Age as a Category of Historical Analysis,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 1, no. 1 (2008): 91–94; Mary Jo Maynes, “Age as a Category of Historical Analysis: History, Agency, and Narratives of Childhood,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 1, no. 1 (2008): 114–24. 8 The nature and scope of this literature are appropriately reflected in four reference works: Paula Fass, ed., Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society(New York: Macmillan Reference, 2004); Elizabeth Foyster and James Marten, eds, A Cultural History of Childhood and Family (London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2014); Heidi Morrison, ed., The Global History of Childhood Reader (London, UK: Routledge, 2012); Peter Stearns, Childhood in World History (London, UK: Routledge, 2006). 9 See, for example, five recent publications: Richard I. Jobs and David M. Pomfret, eds., Transnational Histories of Youth in the Twentieth Century (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Stephanie Olsen, ed., Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History: National, Colonial and Global Perspectives (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Shirleene Robinson and Simon Sleight, eds., Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); David M. Pomfret, Youth and Empire: Trans-Colonial Childhoods in British and French Asia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016); Hugh Morrison and Mary Clare Martin, eds., Creating Religious Childhoods in Anglo-World and British Colonial Contexts, 1800–1950. Studies in Childhood, 1700 to the Present (London, UK: Routledge, 2016).

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children between 1870 and 1940. Again, between c. 1870 and 1940, some ninetythree New Zealand Presbyterian missionary children doubled the number of adults in India, south China, and the New Hebrides (Vanuatu).10 If these two denominations were representative, then Presbyterian missionary children were the tip of the iceberg. Yet while missionary children became a focus of policy making, their voices were seldom officially heard and as a consequence their stories remain largely unknown. For British, Anglo-world and European settings, while there is still a relatively small body of published research focusing explicitly on missionary children,11 they are the focus of a growing body of contextualized scholarship. Not surprisingly, there is a noted emphasis on these children within the contexts of missionary families largely but not exclusively focusing on the early to mid-nineteenth century and, following the work of Catherine Hall, situating these families in the context of imperialism.12 Beyond the family, there is also a growing body of scholarship that considers missionary children with respect to colonialism, race, education, and emotions.13 For the British context, missionary children in the late nineteenth to the early twentieth-century period are typically identified or subsumed within a broader category of “empire children,” whose families lived and worked in various parts of the British Empire 10

Figures extracted from “Register: Education of Missionaries Children 1901–1931,” Acc. 7548, NLS; Annual Reports of the Presbyterian Synod of Otago and Southland, 1870–1901; Annual Reports of the Presbyterian Church of New Zealand, 1870–1940; Break of Day Magazine, 1909–1940. 11 See, in particular, Emily J. Manktelow, Missionary Families, 2013; Joy Schulz, “Crossing the Pali,” 2013; Mary Clare Martin, “Play, Missionaries and the Cross-cultural,” 2016; Hugh Morrison, “Situating Pākehā Children and Protestant Christianity,” 2016. 12 Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination, 1830– 1867 (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press), 86–98; Vyvyen Brendon, Children of the Raj (London, UK: Phoenix, 2006), 185–212; Elizabeth Buettner, Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004), 154–62; Manktelow, Missionary Families, 2013; Dana Robert, “The ‘Christian Home’ as a Cornerstone of Anglo-American Missionary Thought and Practice,” in Converting Colonialism: Visions and Realities in Mission History, 1706–1914, ed. Dana Robert (Cambridge, UK: William B. Eerdmans, 2008), 134–65. 13 Representative examples: Hugh Morrison, “‘I Feel That We Belong to the One Big Family’: Protestant Childhoods, Missions and Emotions in British World Settings, 1870s–1930s,” in Emotions and Christian Missions: Historical Perspectives, eds. Claire McLisky, Daniel Midena, and Karen Vallgårda (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 218–39; Schulz, “Crossing the Pali,” 2013; Rhonda A. Semple, “‘The Conversion and Highest Welfare of Each Pupil’: The Work of the China Inland Mission at Chefoo,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 31, no. 1 (2003): 29–50; Karen Vallgårda, Imperial Childhoods and Christian Mission: Education and Emotions in South India and Denmark (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

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for imperial, colonial, military, educational, religious, or commercial reasons. For these children, the metropole (British or settler colony) was typically regarded as home, and this involved multiple travelling and/or long-term separations from their parents. Within this “empire family” trope separation of the domestic family unit thus emerges as an understandably dominant theme for interpreting children’s voices and parents lives,14 with victims or “casualties of Empire”15 a commonly occurring motif. As Elizabeth Buettner notes, for British children in imperial India, separation (especially for education) was conceived for both negative and positive reasons, especially removal from the “physically and culturally threatening contacts with India’s climate and indigenous and mixed-race populations,” the ameliorative influences of British climate and culture, and especially for boys, an education at “home” that ensured adult career advancement and social mobility.16 Yet it also came at a significant financial and emotional cost.17 The varying experiences of children in boarding school and residential institutions in the British metropole were testament to that cost, not for all but for many. For example, the case of the Wilkins children (English missionary family in India) domiciled at the Walthamstow Hall and schools for missionary children in north London makes for sad and distressing reading.18 Recent work on deviance and empire, however, indicates that a “victim’s” approach to historicizing missionary children is but one interpretive angle among many. For example, the nonexemplary missionary child, resisting family or social mores, is also an important motif. It figures early on in the literature; in Neil Gunson’s analysis of the Henry family (London Missionary Society) in early nineteenth-century Tahiti and in Ewen Johnston’s narrative about New Zealand Presbyterian Oscar Michelsen and his family in early twentieth-century

14 See further, Elizabeth Buettner, “Parent-child Separations and Colonial Careers: The Talbot Family Correspondence in the 1880s and 1890s,” in Childhood in Question: Children, Parents and the State, eds. Anthony Fletcher and Stephen Hussey (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1999), 115–32; Poul Pedersen, “Anxious Lives and Letters: Family Separation, Communication Networks and Structures of Everyday Life,” Culture and History 8 (1990): 7–19. 15 Brendon, Children of the Raj, 212. 16 Buettner, Empire Families, 110, 139–45. 17 This article notes that “emotions and missions” is an important and newly emergent topic in its own right, and that this is referenced at a number of points throughout the article. Emotional responses, practices, and constructions are integral to this present discussion. However, it is not the remit of this article to theorize or expand further. That is the task for a monograph to be written from the wider project within which this article sits. 18 See Brendon, Children of the Raj, 189–93; for context, Buettner, Empire Families, 154–62.

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New Hebrides.19 More recently, Emily Manktelow has argued vociferously, in the context of early nineteenth-century London Missionary Society families in the South Pacific, for a degree of children’s agency with respect to their daily lives and extends the motif of the deviant missionary child to discussions of family, sexuality, the body, and colonial politics.20 The combined effect of this scholarship is to accentuate the fact that while separation clearly was traumatic and life shaping for many missionary children, this was not the whole story. Policies and institutions that attempted to address the issue at various points emerged as much from parental concerns over child welfare or responses to how their children acted, as they did from a more generally sentimentalized or child-centered Western notion of childhood current by the late nineteenth century.21 As in any setting, the realities of life for children of empire, and missionary children in particular, were varied and complex. Beyond the imperial turn, more recent anthropological, sociological, and educational literature, especially referencing children living in multiple international contexts since World War II (WWII), has tended to define contemporary groups like missionary children as “third culture kids” or as “global nomads.”22 In this literature, the children of military, diplomatic, corporate, 19 Neil Gunson, “The Deviations of a Missionary Family: The Henrys of Tahiti,” in Pacific Island Portraits, eds. J. W. Davidson and D. Scarr (Auckland, New Zealand: A. H. & A. W. Reed Ltd., 1973), 31–54; Ewen Johnston, “‘Cannibal Won for Christ!’: Oscar Michelsen Presbyterian Missionary in the New Hebrides, 1878–1932” (MA thesis, University of Auckland, 1995). 20 See, further, Emily J. Manktelow, “Rev. Simpson’s ‘Improper Liberties’: Moral Scrutiny and Missionary Children in the South Seas Mission,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 40, no. 2 (2012): 159–81; William Jackson and Emily J. Manktelow, eds. Subverting Empire: Deviance and Disorder in the British Colonial World (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Emily J. Manktelow, “Making Missionary Children: Religion, Culture and Juvenile Deviance,” in Creating Religious Childhoods in Anglo-World and British Colonial Contexts, 1800–1950. Studies in Childhood, 1700 to the Present (London, UK: Routledge, 2016). 21 See, for example, Eric Hopkins, Childhood Transformed: Working-class Children in Nineteenth-century England (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1994), 315; Shurlee Swain and Margot Hillel, Child, Nation, Race and Empire: Child Rescue Discourse, England, Canada and Australia, 1850–1915 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2010), 3. 22 Manktelow, Missionary Families, 164; in turn referencing: David C. Pollock and Ruth E. Van Reken, Third Culture Kids: The Experience of Growing Up among Worlds (Yarmouth, UK: Intercultural Press, 2001); Mary Langford, “Global Nomads, Third Culture Kids and International Schools,” in International Education: principles and practice, eds. Mary Hayden and Jeff Thompson (London, UK: Logan Page, 1998), 28–43. See also Justin B. Hopkins, “Coming ‘Home’: An Autoethnographic Exploration of Third Culture Kid Transition,” Qualitative Inquiry 21, no. 9 (2015): 812–20.

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and missionary families again tend to be grouped together (albeit with varying national traits), in much the same way as the earlier category of empire children.23 Here, the emphasis is on both their mobility and their location in a third “interstitial” space between the cultures of origin and immediate location. Typically, this literature emphasizes negative elements of that space (a “neither/nor world”), resulting problems of identity formation (particularly various combinations of national, geographical, or cultural identity and dislocation), and the grief attached to movements from the familiar to the unfamiliar (which typically means that non-Western contexts are often retrospectively viewed by these children in a more positive light in later adulthood).24 Mobility, in particular, emerges as an important motif for children and young people of both the imperial and post-WWII eras, especially when set amid the large-scale movements of people worldwide in both nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Richard Jobs and David Pomfret highlight for the twentieth-century context, however, “in spite of the recognized importance of youthfulness to twentieth-century international migrations, whether occasioned by war, trans-oceanic travel, indentured or bonded labor [sic], seasonal work or the fragmentation of vast empires … ‘it is rare to find this key factor the focus of debate.’”25 I would argue that juvenile and youthful mobility is fundamentally central to the narratives and identities of missionary children and their families and that the extant body of scholarship on this is one exception to Jobs’ and Pomfret’s more general observation of scholarly neglect.26 Manktelow, in this respect, further notes that the notion of “children flowing across and between cultural boundaries is potently relevant to the lives and experiences of missionary children.”27 Across both nineteenth- and twentiethcentury settings, missionary children’s mobility was therefore as much cultural as it was geographic. At the same time, the geographic element was important, especially for missionary children of the early to mid-twentieth century. For these children, as for others more broadly, the new century increasingly provided “opportunities to move both more swiftly and more frequently across 23 Langford, “Global Nomads,” 29, 30–34. 24 Hopkins, “Coming ‘Home’”, 813–14. 25 Richard I. Jobs and David M. Pomfret, “The Transnationality of Youth,” in Transnational Histories of Youth in the Twentieth Century, 6; in turn referencing M. Byron and S. Condon, Migration in Comparative Perspective: Caribbean Communities in Britain and France (London, Routledge, 2008), 12. 26 Again see especially, Buettner, Empire Families; Brendon, Children of the Raj, 2006; Esme Cleall, “Farflung Families and Transient Domesticity: Missionary Households in Metropole and Colony,” Victorian Review 39, no. 2 (2013): 170–73; Manktelow, Missionary Families, 2013. 27 Manktelow, Missionary Families, 164.

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borders and over much larger distances,” which “inspired a sense that the world was both becoming a smaller place and that it was spinning faster on its axis.”28 Methodologically, this article adopts a microhistorical approach, drawing upon case studies of children from two Presbyterian missionary families: one Scottish (the Marwick family) and the other New Zealand (the Gray family). Missionary sources are not unproblematic; they were produced for specific reasons and audiences and often followed particular conventions or employed a discursive structure common across national boundaries. Such, however, is the nature of all historical sources and therefore mission-derived sources should not be automatically disqualified; two further qualifications to this are pertinent. First, mission sources have benefits and usefulness beyond their immediate provenance. Jacqueline van Gent, for example, notes in the context of discussing historical missions and emotions that “the nature of mission sources … is of interest to historians [of missions], but equally to [other historians] more generally, because the value of mission sources—letters, diaries, journals, memoirs, poems and even ethnographic description at times—is not confined to mission history. They are historical sources that can inform other historical questions as well.”29 This approach now has a long history and is evidenced in the literature cited here as one example of such. In this essay, New Zealand and Scottish Presbyterian published or administratively focused sources, in particular, provide the opportunity to reconstruct missionary families in terms of demography, household, and routines; to trace their movements; and to gain a limited sense of what people thought and how they felt. Second, mission sources, while varied and requiring different protocols for interpretation, can be used with confidence. For example, in this article, I use missionary application records to reconstruct and evaluate parents’ motivation toward missionary service, sources which reveal rhetorical devices common to evangelical discourse and which potentially pandered to the concerns of missionary organizations. Studies of missionary motivation from across a number of British world contexts, however, attest to the essential veracity of these kinds of documents for the early twentieth century given the careful scrutiny by and increasingly professional expectations of selection boards, rigorous selection processes that resulted, and a climate of intense spiritual

28 Jobs and Pomfret, “The Transnationality of Youth,” 6. 29 Jacqueline van Gent, “Emotions, Missions and Colonial Histories: An Epilogue,” in Emotions and Christian Missions: Historical Perspectives, eds. Claire McLisky, Daniel Midena, and Karen Vallgårda (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 248.

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self-examination influenced by popular movements of evangelical piety and exerted by the candidates themselves.30 Given these constraints and opportunities, this article seeks in particular to differentiate between parents’ and children’s perspectives of the experience of being missionary children. As for existing nineteenth-century studies of missionary families and children, this study typically uses a range of archival sources—missionary personnel files, letters, and selected memoirs—which were further informed by contemporary official published materials and a selection of denominational periodicals. These sources give access especially to the voices of parents and allow us to discern parental narratives about their children. Letters in particular play an important role in this excavation, conveying both information and a sense of the emotions that suffused missionary family life and separations. They were certainly gendered both in their subject matter recounted by father or mother and in the expectations of daughters and sons.31 At the same time, missionary letter writing “served as a site of family formation” across significant local, regional, and global distances and provides further evidence of the formative moral or educative roles played by fathers in an era when this was otherwise thought to be the domain of mothers.32 In the case of the Marwick family, however, children’s voices are also heard in a limited way, from an extant cache of children’s letters from Jamaica to relatives in Edinburgh for 1902 and by reading against the grain from parents’ letters to individual children while separated. Surviving children of the Gray family give the child’s voice a greater prominence through oral history interviews and a recently published memoir. The Gray brothers’ interviews, conducted independently in 2014, are part of an oral history project recording the lives of 30 For example, Diane Langmore, Missionary Lives: Papua, 1874–1914 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989), 39–40; Hugh Morrison, Pushing Boundaries: New Zealand Protestants and Overseas Missions, 1827–1939 (Dunedin, New Zealand: Otago University Press, 2016), 100–1; Stuart Piggin, “Assessing Nineteenth Century Missionary Motivation: Some Considerations of Theory and Method,” in Religious Motivation: Biographical and sociological problems for the church historian, ed. D. Baker (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1977), 328–30; Semple, Missionary Women, 18–20, 25–36; Brooke White-law, “A Message for the Missahibs: New Zealand Presbyterian Missionaries in the Punjab, 1910–1940” (MA thesis, University of Otago, 2001), 41–48. 31 See further, for example, S. E. Duff, Changing Childhoods in the Cape Colony: Dutch Reformed Church Evangelicalism and Colonial Childhood, 1860–1895 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 17–18. 32 Cleall, “Far-flung Families and Transient Domesticity,” 174; Stephanie Olsen, “The Authority of Motherhood in Question: Fatherhood and the Moral Education of Children in England, C. 1870–1900,” Women’s History Review 18, no. 5 (2009): 765–80; Stephanie Olsen, “Daddy’s Come Home: Evangelicalism, Fatherhood and Lessons for Boys in Late Nineteenth-century Britain,” Fathering 5, no. 3 (2007): 174–96.

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New Zealand and Scottish Presbyterian missionary children from the 1920s to the 1950s.While oral testimony itself represents childhood memories mediated through adult hindsight and is therefore open to scrutiny, questions of veracity, and wide interpretation, it does provide an opportunity for triangulation with other extant printed material such as parents’ letters home to New Zealand and allows us to further differentiate to a certain extent the perspectives of children and parents.

Two Sets of Missionary Bairns

William and Elizabeth (née Hutton) Marwick were Scottish missionaries; first for the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland at Calabar in Nigeria throughout the 1890s (separately and together) and then in Jamaica (at Falmouth) for the United Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland from 1901 to 1911.33 William was an ordained minister whose lineage in public and academic circles ran from his uncle Sir James Marwick (town clerk of Glasgow 1873–1904) through to both his eldest son Willie (later a Quaker pacifist, World War I conscientious objector and Scottish labor historian) and his grandson Arthur (a noted modern British historian).34 In Jamaica, where the children experienced missionary life, William largely fulfilled the role of parish minister which included working with both expatriate British and local Jamaican communities. Reading between the lines of family correspondence their children therefore largely lived within a British ambit of school and home. They had six children: William junior (Willie) and Margaret both born in Scotland; George born in Nigeria; and James, Gertrude, and Mabel all born in Jamaica. The family was together in Jamaica from 1902 to 1906, although Willie and Margaret returned to Edinburgh for education in 1904. Gertrude died prematurely in Jamaica aged one. Elizabeth returned to Edinburgh with the remaining children in 1906. William senior remained in Jamaica until 1911 and then served as a wartime colonial chaplain in India before finally rejoining the whole family back in Edinburgh in 1916. The experience of being “missionary children” for this

33 Marwick Letter Books 1890s to 1917, Marwick Papers, Acc. 4886/33–38, NLS. See also Brian J. Orr, Bones of Empire (Raleigh, NC: LULU Enterprises, 2013), 175; “Papers of William Hutton Marwick,” accessed July 17, 2015, http://test.archiveshub.ac.uk/features/ 0605marwick.html; and “Rev. William Marwick,” accessed October 16, 2012, http://hist fam.familysearch.org/getperson.php?personID=I89235&tree+Fasti. 34 Ian MacDougall, Essays in Scottish Labour History: A Tribute to W. H. Marwick (Edinburgh, UK: John Donald, 1978), ix–xi.

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family was variable and indicated early on that separation and mobility would be important defining markers. Willie and Margaret’s experiences are instructive. At ages four and two, respectively, both were left in Edinburgh in their paternal grandmother’s and aunt’s care, while their parents returned to Calabar between c. 1898 and 1900, to temporarily fill a missionary vacancy. They were clearly missed by both parents and were written to frequently. Parents’ mail home to Scotland often contained exotic presents or interesting details for the children. In return, it is difficult to assess any impact on the two children. Snippets of information indicate that they lived life as might be expected: toys and play, church attendance, and helping out at a local Barnado’s home.35 While the parents’ letters were probably read to the children, there is no evidence of their personal responses. Then followed two years in Jamaica with the whole family, to which they appeared to adapt with little trouble. Daily life continued as normal, dominated in their own terms primarily by the routines and domestic space of home (house and garden)—where imaginative or interactive play was a consistent feature—and the social/educative/spiritual spaces of school and church. Their letters home contained little that was identifiably Jamaican, with sporadic comment on their immediate environment. On holiday at another manse Willie enthusiastically wrote about the “huge breadfruit trees, mango trees, lime trees, …, a pomegranate tree, oranges bitter & sweet & sour sop trees. Cocoanuts [sic], tamarind & a great lot of flowers…. We have much room to run about here & Mother says James would live in the fresh air.”36 They referred to Jamaican places like Kingston and Montego Bay but without elaboration. Each year they toasted their grandmother’s birthday with tamarind juice, and sugar cane was an obvious treat. In the garden, they used exotic objects like oranges as substitute balls to bat around and they washed in a “big stone bath.”37 In 1904, both children returned to Edinburgh to continue their education. The following year was one of change marked particularly by their grandmother’s death, a new place of residence, and the eventual return of the family on furlough. In the interim, the substance of their letters suggests that they negotiated these changes without apparent trauma and that they took on a range of

35 William to Willie and Margaret, June 30, 1899; William to Willie, December 3, 1899; William to Willie and Margaret, January 1, 1900, Marwick Papers, Acc. 4886/36, NLS. 36 Willie to Grannie and Auntie, July 4, 1902, Children’s Letters, 1902, Acc. 4886/2, NLS. 37 Margaret to Grannie and Auntie, n.d.; Willie to Grannie and Auntie, March 1, 1902; Margaret to Grannie and Auntie, March 8, 1902, Acc. 4886/2, NLS; Willie to Auntie, March 29, 1902, Acc. 4886/2, NLS.

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family responsibilities.38 Over subsequent years, both older children became less visible in the family correspondence, with school their main focus. Willie joined the ranks of Marwick boys at George Watson’s College39 in Edinburgh, where he began to academically excel.40 Margaret also pursued an academic track, at George Watson’s Girls’ College, studying French and German.41 Unlike many other Scottish missionary children of this period, they did so in the company of mother and siblings. In 1906, their parents made the decision for Elizabeth to remain with all the children in Edinburgh while William returned to Jamaica for a final term of service; what he referred to as a “sacrifice” that he was “willing to make.”42 By the time, he rejoined the family in 1916, Willie and Margaret were young adults aged twenty-two and twenty, respectively. James and Marion (née Scott) Gray were missionaries for the New Zealand Presbyterian Church from 1921 to 1941 in the northern Indian Punjab region based near the city of Jagadhri, a mission taken over from American Presbyterians in 1908. Both parents were also Scottish born. James’ family emigrated to New Zealand c. 1901 when he was eight.43 Marion was a physical education teacher from Glasgow who met James in Scotland after World War I and then emigrated in 1921 (first to New Zealand to marry James and then to India).44 In the Punjab, James was a jack-of-all-trades missionary, primarily fulfilling the role of evangelist. Alongside this role, he dispensed medical treatment, produced literature, trained local pastors, and during the summers filled the role of minister to expatriate communities at Landour in the northern hills. The four boys—Scott, Ian, Robert, and David—were all born in India between 1923 and 1931, with Patricia born while the family was on furlough in Glasgow in 1934. At this point, the family traveled on to New Zealand where Scott and Ian remained to attend St Andrew’s College (a Presbyterian boys’ boarding school in Christchurch), while the rest of the family returned to India. Longer term, however, the children’s ongoing educational needs proved to be the catalyst for the family’s eventual return to and reunion in Auckland, New Zealand. Marion and the three younger children relocated there in 1939, 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

William to Uncle James, November 28, 1905; William to Willie and Margaret, December 4, 1905; William to Willie and Margaret, December 11, 1905, Acc. 4886/38, NLS. Hinted at in a letter from William to James, September 21, 1909, Acc. 4886/40, NLS. William to Willie, August 13, 1907, Acc. 4886/39, NLS. William to Margaret, April 26, 1910, Acc. 4886/41, NLS. William to Willie, August 13, 1907. “Rev. Henry Begg Gray” and “Mr George Tasker Gray,” Register of New Zealand Presbyterian Church Ministers, Deaconesses & Missionaries from 1840, accessed July 29, 2015, http:// www.archives.presbyterian.org.nz/Page166.htm. Ian Gray, We Travel Together: Lesley’s and Ian’s Journey (Nelson, New Zealand: The Copy Press, 2014), 10.

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when they were rejoined by Scott and Ian. James finally returned to the family and to longer-term Presbyterian ministry, just prior to the outbreak of war in the Pacific in December 1941. Again the experiences of the two eldest boys, Scott and Ian, are instructive, with mobility and periods of separation also demarcating their boyhoods in significant ways. Until their trip to Scotland and New Zealand in 1934–1935, India had been their home from birth. Like many expatriate children, they were raised partly by their parents and partly by an Indian ayah.45 They lived in an inland continental environment; the first time that they can remember seeing the ocean was when they embarked from Mumbai to England in 1934.46 They also lived within the intersecting spaces of British, Indian, and American cultures. Most of each year was spent at home within and around a four to five acre compound that incorporated missionary and Indian staff houses, plus gardens, and that was adjacent to the mission’s hospital and nurses’ quarters. This compound defined a good deal of their daily life ranging between family time together, schooling, and play. They were given license to roam around this larger space at will. In their younger years, Marion tutored them at home using New Zealand Correspondence School materials.47 Both remember very little of excursions into Jagadhri, although they did accompany a servant to buy butter in the local bazaar and the family went on occasional picnics in a model T Ford nicknamed “Lizzy.”48 They do have variable memories of those who passed by, including the long “caravans of camels” with “bells on their necks” and “companies of cavalry” of the British armed forces.49 Longer distance or longer term movements are more clearly remembered and in these terms Scott refers to their lifestyle as being “nomadic.”50 On the one hand, there were the winter camping sojourns with their father—when he embarked on evangelistic tours—and the seasonal displacements that took place as the family (mostly Marion with the boys) sought refuge from the summer heat in the northern hilltop town of Landour. In their younger years, this trip to the hills was a holiday, but, with increasing age, this turned into longer stints at the nearby American expatriate Woodstock School, where the boys variably attended both as day and boarding students. For Ian, this boarding experience marked the beginning of his “deeply engrained fear and detestation 45 Ian Gray, interview by Hugh Morrison, Hamilton, December 29, 2014, privately held. 46 Gray, We Travel Together, 20. 47 “Our History,” Te Aho o Te Kura Pounamu—The Correspondence School, accessed July 31, 2015, http://www.tekura.school.nz/about-us/our-history/(). 48 Scott and Ian Gray, interviews. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid.

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of life in a boarding school,”51 with which he would continue to struggle in New Zealand as a teenager and which indelibly marks his memories of those years. On the other hand, both boys intermittently moved between India, Scotland, and New Zealand. For Scott, his first visit to both countries in 1926 was predicated on his recovery from serious infantile illness; but of course, he has no memory of that experience. Both boys do remember the trips made in 1934–1935. Scotland was memorable for meeting family members, holiday sights, and experiences (riding a steamer on the Clyde, seeing the Queen Mary under construction, and riding donkeys at the beach on the Firth of Forth) and the birth of their sister Patricia.52 At that point, the onward journey to New Zealand marked a definitive end to their Indian upbringing. Once the furlough was completed, their parents and younger siblings returned to northern India, and both older boys moved from Auckland south to Christchurch where they began their time as students at St Andrew’s College, which would last until the family’s partial reunion back in Auckland in 1939. At that point, Auckland became the family’s focal point for subsequent decades.

Emerging Themes

These family vignettes cut through a lot more detail that could be considered. They provide enough information, however, to consider a number of emerging themes that require exploratory comment. These nonexclusive themes are broad ranging enough to at least have indicative value. They encompass parents’ religious vocation, family narratives, and family separation. Parents’ Sense of Religious Vocation By the early 1900s, British and settler society missionary children’s lives were framed within a wider set of global and cultural imperatives, in which both “empire” and “missions” were important interrelated contextual factors. While this missions–empire relationship was important and has solid support in wider historical scholarship, it is also usefully cast as problematic53 and is best teased out for specific sites. Missionary children and their families were often located within the ambit of the British Empire, but the reasons for their 51 Gray, We Travel Together, 19. 52 Ibid., 20–23. 53 For example: Andrew Porter, “‘Cultural Imperialism’ and Protestant Missionary Enterprise, 1780–1914,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 25, no. 3 (1997): 367–91.

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location were not exclusively linked to imperial factors, priorities, or motives. Likewise, while New Zealand and Scotland’s profiles in overseas missions were integral to the international missionary movement, they were not wholly defined by it. Scotland’s significant involvement as a missionary-sending nation was out of proportion to its size and place within both Great Britain and the Empire and was inseparably linked to a profound religious dynamic at work within nineteenth-century Scottish society. In similar fashion, New Zealand’s contribution, as a small British colonial society, was as much an expression of its own nascent national self-expression, as it was a reflection of wider links to influential cultural and religious transnational networks centered on Australia, North America, and Britain.54 By taking a “family-orientated” approach to missionary children’s lives, it is reasonable to argue that parents’ missionary or religious vocations were central to any definition of children’s lives, while at the same time often framed by the imperial or colonial contexts in which they lived. From their perspective, the religious factor was important, and missionary involvement was integral to Protestant religious identity throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The decisions that parents made to pursue a religious vocation, as “foreign” or overseas missionaries, need to be taken seriously on their own terms, irrespective of the ways in which motivation was undeniably a complex mix of the “religious” and the “secular.”55 Idealism, spiritual fervor, life circumstances, pity, romantic and heroic imaginations, gendered notions of service and duty, new opportunities, nationalism, and imperial citizenship were all a part of this mix. With respect to empire, for example, Scottish missionaries were “neither insidious champions of imperialism” nor were they “other-worldly idealists”,56 although the extent to which missionaries in general both pursued their religious vocation and maintained the imperial or colonial status quo certainly 54 For wider reference, see Esther Breitenbach, Empire and Scottish Society: The Impact of Foreign Missions at Home, c. 1790 to c. 1914 (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2009); T. M. Devine, To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland’s Global Diaspora, 1750–2010 (London, UK: Penguin Books, 2012), 188–208; Kenneth R. Ross, ed., Roots and Fruits: Retrieving Scotland’s Missionary Story (Oxford, UK: Regnum Books International, 2014); Semple, Missionary Women, 114–19; Morrison, Pushing Boundaries, 123–64. 55 See further, Morrison, Pushing Boundaries, 95–120; J. H. Proctor, “Scottish Missionaries in India: An Inquiry into Motivation,” South Asia 13, no. 1 (1990): 43–61; Myrtle Hill, “Women in the Irish Protestant Foreign Missions C. 1873–1914: Representations and Motivations,” in Missions and Missionaries, eds. Pieter N. Holtrop and Hugh McLeod (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2000), 170–85. 56 Proctor, “Scottish Missionaries in India,” 61.

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varied from site to site.57 An answer as to what motivated them lies somewhere in-between the two extremes and that space should be one in which productive dialogue can occur. In this respect, Manktelow notes insightfully that missionaries were “colonial actors” whose often controversial actions (when viewed from hindsight) sat alongside “a more placatory side of benevolence, philanthropy, and a genuine desire to do good.” Yet we are left with a subject that often sits uncomfortably alongside present-day sensibilities. With respect to missionary families, suggests Manktelow, this “discomfort with the past and continuing calls for public heroisation [sic] has led us to ignore the role of the intimate, the personal and the emotional in the history of Christian mission.”58 This “discomfort,” however, should not limit further discussion. The religious factor thus complicates a more strictly secular hermeneutic for missionary motivation. Although missionary children’s lives were not necessarily religious lives, at least not in the ways that they are self-remembered or interpreted in later life, they were defined and framed partially by parents’ religious decisions, contexts, and expectations. It is this religious factor, for example, that helps to partially differentiate them within the wider analytical category of empire children or of “third culture kids.” How were these decisions conceived by the adults involved? For William and Elizabeth Marwick, the evidence is indirect, gleaned in particular from letters to children and their extended family. This material indicates two adults whose lives were theologically suffused in ways that flowed naturally out into everyday life and relationships. William was a well-educated man of faith whose correspondence demonstrated a noted ability to marry or integrate both reason and faith. At the same time, faith was highly personalized, with an emphasis on both its relational aspects (the believer in relationship with God and others) and its high obligatory and ethical demands. In these respects, the formation of lifelong Christian character was central, irrespective of the contexts in which these ideals were lived out. The details of this were neatly captured, for example, in a letter from William to son Willie in 1898, which accompanied a Bible sent as a birthday present. William wrote: The Bible is the best of books because it tells, as no other book does, about God & His love in sending His only Son Jesus Christ to save us all & 57 For a provocative appeal to take religion seriously in the context of new imperial history, see the review essay, Tony Ballantyne, “Religion, Difference, and the Limits of British Imperial History,” Victorian Studies 47, no. 3 (2005): 427–55. 58 Manktelow, Missionary Families, 206. The same point is emphasized in Jessica Thurlow, review of Missionary families: Race, gender and generation on the spiritual frontier, by Emily J. Manktelow, Journal of British Studies 54, no. 1 (2015): 236–67.

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make us good, & about Jesus Christ Himself, & His life in this world & His death on the Cross for our sins, & about His life in heaven as Mediator & Intercessor & the Holy Spirit’s work & saving men & making them holy. Much of the Bible you & dear Margaret cannot understand as yet, & it is enough at present that you hear read to you the stories & parables of the Bible, & that you learn about Jesus Christ … and what He says to all young & old…. My darling Willie if you try to follow Jesus & to learn of Him while you are young—which just means giving your heart & your mind to Him—you will grow up a good boy & become a good man. That is the best birthday message I can give you.59 The path that James and Marion Gray took toward missionary work can be more fully reconstructed from their application records.60 James grew up in a typically evangelical Protestant family environment, describing his childhood faith in terms of “growth” rather than personal “crisis.” This naturally flowed on to him receiving “Christ as my Saviour” at age fourteen. As a young adult, he further “learned the truth about the Indwelling of the Spirit and was led definitely to yield my whole life to his control,” an experience to which he attributed a “new power and reality, a new restfulness in service.” This translated into a life pathway that took him from school to university, Presbyterian ministry training, and two years as a Young Men’s Christian Association traveling secretary.61 After World War I service with the Medical Corps, he completed his theological study in Glasgow, where he met Marion and applied for missionary work, initially to work in China. His desire to “serve God” in the “foreign field” emanated from a strong sense of “duty” and of other peoples’ perceived “need,” and he iterated that “as far as I know my own heart, it is for the glory of God.” This was a common sentiment threaded through the application narratives of many New Zealand Presbyterian missionaries of this period. Marion also came from a family of active faith, but her decisions were, in part, predicated on those of James’s. She candidly related in her application that “until 1½ years ago—when I met Mr Gray—Christ was rather a vague personality, not as now—a Vital necessity; and since Christ has become an essential part of my being, I am consumed with the desire to give up the rest of my life to His work.” She expressed her missionary motivation more particularly as a “great 59 William to Willie, September 10, 1898, Marwick Papers, Acc. 4886/36, NLS. 60 “James Gray” (6.06), and “Marion Scott” (6.08), Folder 1, Staff Files, GAO149 Punjab Mission, PRC. 61 “Very Rev. James Lundie Gray,” Register of New Zealand Presbyterian Church Ministers, Deaconesses & Missionaries from 1840, accessed December 15, 2015, http://www.archives .presbyterian.org.nz/Page166.htm.

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wish to do something really useful in trying to tell others of the great thing I have found.” At the same time, there was a clear sense that Marion was her own person. Ian related that his mother “was a very powerful character,” and he suggested that his father’s reputable career as a missionary and minister was due in no small measure to “having my mother behind him.”62 She was an indomitable character and left her own legacy both in India and New Zealand. Missionary parents’ actions and motivations were thus formative for their children. Christian beliefs and sentiments initially propelled William and Elizabeth Marwick separately toward missionary service and later sustained them as parents. These same beliefs and sentiments continued to drive William’s sense of ongoing vocation and sacrificial service, separated further from his children over a decade. In these terms, theologically constructed missionary motivation provided the rationale for family separation; albeit with torn parental emotions and during significant years of growing up for the children. As such, religious activities framed many of the daily routines that shaped their lives. Both parental conviction and personality also framed Ian and Scott’s lives, although not entirely without problems. James Gray alluded to this in a letter home concerning the children’s education, noting that “we don’t feel it right that the children should be deprived of parental influence during their most crucial years” and that “one is torn betwixt conflicting duties.”63 As further discussion indicates similar sentiments of regret or concern over separation are also found in the Marwick correspondence. Over the longer term, however, despite this tension, their parents’ theological conviction and force of personality combined to undergird a strong and enduring commitment to the missionary task, initiating and straddling periods of both short and prolonged family separation for both sets of children. Parental religious priorities also rubbed off on the children. Ian recalled shooting and killing a local bird with an air gun while “on safari.” Due to his “basic Christian upbringing,” he buried it straight away, so that it would “get to heaven quickly.” The next day, his “faith was significantly strengthened” when he found nothing there; “it had gone to heaven.” As an adult, he observed that “that was the sort of brainwashing that I’d had.”64 The religious factor mattered at the time for adults and children alike, irrespective of how far such convictions were shared by children at the time or how that element was later interpreted by children in their adult lives.

62 63 64

Ian Gray, interview. Gray to Mawson, January 12, 1932, August 11, 1932, PRC. Ian Gray, interview.

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Shared and Differentiated Family Narratives If missionary children’s lives were framed by distinctively religious parameters, then these two cases suggest that this self-understanding may have come later. The Marwick and Gray children, for example, appear to have taken their circumstances and context largely for granted. Thus, family and family activities more clearly demarcated their own sense of existence and identity. These formed a cluster of common factors by which these children selfidentified through their interviews or which emerge from the written archive of their lives. Family was the main reference point for both sets of children. In Scott’s words, “that’s all we knew and … parents are doing this and you’re going with them and, and so it went on.”65 Children’s memories were constructed around family activities, locations, priorities, and values, with the proximate nuclear or kinship family their primary concern (circumscribed by the spaces of the “mission compound” or home). In the children’s minds, however, “family” also included extended relationships with geographically dispersed kin and with mission personnel. While Willie and Margaret interacted with a range of other significant people, in the Jamaican context, family primarily consisted of their immediate parents and siblings but also close kin in Edinburgh. The regular letters written between the children and their immediate Scottish relatives indicated close, emotionally sustaining kinship bonds over significant distances of space and time. These letters also revealed a daily regimen in Jamaica centered on family routines of collective worship, domestic tasks, school, and play. As such both family and home were, for Willie and Margaret, the “locus of life in all its dimensions, providing emotional and physical security as well as the freedom to pursue interests and imaginations.”66 For Ian and Scott, family and home were more geographically proximate; connections to family in Scotland or New Zealand were less tangible or important. They were India born and more obviously interacted with a wide range of people in their immediate setting who they seemed to regard as family, including Indian household and compound staff, other missionary personnel, missionary families on holiday at Landour, and close boarding school friends. Again, however, for most of their younger years—especially while resident in the mission compound— both boys depended primarily on one another for company, recreation, and entertainment; and the domestic family unit provided them with education and socialization.

65 66

Scott Gray, interview. Morrison, “‘I Feel That We Belong to the One Big Family,’” 227.

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At the same time, there are some interesting points of differentiation in this family narrative. One concerns this wider sense of family and who it embraced. In Margaret and Willie’s letters, local Jamaican people were curiously absent, with only ambiguous or occasional references to a buggy driver and unnamed children with whom they played.67 On one level, perhaps this simply reflected their daily priorities and perceptions of who was more or less important. In similar fashion, Scott and Ian recalled the names of some of the New Zealand missionaries or of their school mates, but the Indian personnel remained nameless in their testimonies, possibly a function of their younger ages while resident at home in India. They existed simply as “servants,” an “ayah,” or the “mali” (gardener) in their adult memories.68 The wider colonial context for this is not insignificant. Servants and household staff occupied liminal, stratified, and negotiated spaces within the households of European residents. Scholars have documented the “ambiguities and complexities” that were inherent, for example, in the ways mothers in contexts like India regarded the servants or ayahs who interacted directly with British household children. They might, like civil servant wife Annette Beveridge, “by turns fear and praise servants, attempting at times to limit [their] children’s interactions with them but considering them harmless at other junctures.”69 At the same time, from a child’s perspective, these people were not without significance, irrespective of their nameless presence in the narratives and their employed status. Ian and Scott’s ayah was remembered as a “motherly Indian woman, whose only task was to care for the sahib’s two young children.”70 Ian mused further that: She could very well have been an outcast woman but she didn’t speak English and she conversed with my older brother and I [sic] in her native tongue of Urdu. So you might almost say that my mother tongue was Urdu because that’s the language that we had spoken at us for probably twenty hours of the day and my parents of course were hovering on the side-line busy with missionary work and they did keep in daily contact with us but I think the Indian eye was a very significant influence on those formative years.71

67 Margaret to Grannie and Auntie, n.d.; Margaret to Grannie and Auntie, March 8, 1902. 68 Scott and Ian Gray, interviews. 69 Buettner, Empire Families, 53; see also Nupur Chaudhuri, “Memsahibs and Their Servants in Nineteenth-century India,” Women’s History Review 3, no. 4 (1994): 549–62. 70 Gray, We Travel Together, 11. 71 Ian Gray, interview.

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In Scott and Ian’s case, this does not appear to have been a concern for their parents; both boys had freedoms to create their own leisure and to mix readily with whoever was present in their compound. Therefore, it is worth speculating further that there were differing cultures of missionary households that varied from one nationality to another. One observation made for New Zealand Presbyterians in India between the wars, for example, is that “they lived [somewhat uncomfortably] on the periphery of both Indian and Anglo-Indian society.”72 As a result, many were noticeably more ambivalent about opposing Indian nationalism and, by implication, may have sat more uncomfortably with some of the racial divisions or hierarchies observed by British missionary or imperial households in particular. Such relationships were part of a much larger daily swirl of people with whom missionary children related in the home and mission context, at school (local or expatriate), in the street, on trains, and in villages. Both sets of children may have been atypical in that their main play and school relationships were with other European children. Wider evidence suggests that local and missionary children did play or study together and that contact with European children of other nationalities also left its mark.73 Anecdotally, this multicultural exposure may be a further factor in more specifically defining and historicizing missionary children; in that they interacted in their homes on a regular basis both in mission field and final home base contexts, with people of different cultures, languages, and shades of Christian faith.74 It has certainly had an influence on Ian and Scott who each attribute both their years growing up in India and of readjusting to life in New Zealand as helping them to be people who were independent, self-reliant, sensitive to others, and open to diversity. Identity provides a second point of differentiation within this family narrative. Both sets of children inhabited that interstitial space “caught between, but also connecting, two [if not more] cultural manifestations.”75 While the Gray boys repeatedly referenced a mixture of their immediate families, their Indian setting, and their later New Zealand upbringing as teenagers, the Marwick children most clearly looked to Scotland and their parents for identity and meaning. Willie and Margaret’s identities were doubly defined by domesticity and nationality. In a sense, their two years in Jamaica may have been 72

Diane Rixon, “New Zealand Mission and Nationalism in the Punjab: The Missionaries of the Presbyterian Church of New Zealand in the Punjab and Their Encounter with Indian Nationalism between 1910 and 1932” (BA (Hons) dissertation, University of Otago, 1997), 4. 73 See again, for example, Martin, “Play, Missionaries and the Cross-cultural,” 2016. 74 Discussion arising from research seminar, Department of History, University of Otago, September 23, 2015. 75 Manktelow, Missionary Families, 164.

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viewed by them as a sojourn or as an adventure experienced primarily in the context of their family’s life. At heart, they were Scottish children, living for a time outside of Scottish space and at a distance from various family members. Maintaining this identity was important for the parents. Their father wrote to them in 1908, extolling the virtues of the Scottish writer George Macdonald and hoping that the children would learn to “understand and love Scotch [sic], for, as Macdonald says, ‘the man who loves it and knows how to use it possesses therein a certain kind of power over the hearts of men which the most refined and perfect of languages cannot give.’”76 Scottish influences may have been more ingrained in the two older children from an earlier age than for the younger siblings raised for a longer period of time in Jamaica. Unfortunately, the evidence does not exist to test this notion further. For the Gray children, however, identity was more complex. Both Ian and Scott could claim to be born in India, of Scottish parents but with New Zealand nationality, speakers of Urdu, nurtured in infancy by an Indian ayah and, in later years, multicultural students further enculturated in American values at Woodstock School, and finally reenculturated into New Zealand society through a boarding school experience. Their perceptions of the Scottish influence, for example, were highly variable. Ian located it primarily in his mother’s character and in her positive impact on him; “her dour, her energetic absolutely honest Scottish approach to life has been valuable to me. And the little success I have had … I put down really to the character strain that she sowed in me. So that’s my Scottish background, true Scottish character I think.”77 For Scott, this was much harder to define or identify. He clearly remembered, however, that while on holidays up in the north India hills, “Mum would take [us] across to the rail to look across and down to the Plains to say ‘Good Night’ to her mother in Scotland.”78 Yet at least two visits to Scotland did not instil a sense of being Scottish as a child. He did reference a love of the bagpipes but suggested that this dated from his high school years in 1930s New Zealand. Despite the generational closeness, in his own words, he does not feel “Scottish” or perceive any particularly close bond “with things Scottish.” A final point of differentiation was in the ways that missionary parents constructed the family narrative differently from their children. Children’s perspectives typically accentuated the apparent “normality” of family membership, focusing particularly on their lives being more “ordinary” than “extraordinary.” 76 77 78

William to Master J. D. Marwick, [undated] 1908, Marwick Papers, Acc. 4886/36, NLS. Ian Gray, interview. Scott Gray, interview.

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Conversely, parents turned this discourse of normality on its head, emphasizing the maintenance or replication of family life, health, and education. This has a broader context. On the one hand, by the late nineteenth century, there was a well-articulated ideal of the family as the primary institution for children’s socialization and emotional security. Families were becoming much more concertedly “child centered” and “companionate” social units.79 On the other hand, taking this ideal and giving it a theological rationale, the early twentieth-century Western missionary family or household was typically constructed in both domestic and missiological terms, with the focus often on maintaining family life and demonstrating exemplary domestic Christianity to missionary subjects. This construction of the exemplary missionary house and home had a long history among Protestants in particular.80 By the 1930s, reflecting both the emphasis on children as individuals and the extent to which the nuclear domestic family had become a Western cultural norm, the ideal Christian home in missionary contexts acted as a complex space simultaneously acting as a “place of physical and spiritual wellbeing and support,” a “‘democracy’ where each individual could thrive,” a place of “rest and comfort,” and the “beginning point of responsibilities to the larger community.”81 For both the Gray and Marwick parents, family existed primarily to “provide an emotional and social framework in which children could grow up as normally as possible in abnormal circumstances.”82 Ultimately, it was this version of the family narrative that often forced separation or prompted the return home. Ostensibly, this was for children’s further high school education. Yet by the early twentieth century, there were also cultural reasons but not necessarily ones based on the oft-stated fears of environmental, racial, or religious contamination commonly expressed by both missionary and other imperial

79 80

81 82

James Marten, “Family Relationship,” in A Cultural History of the Childhood and the Family in the Age of Empire, ed. Colin Heywood (London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2014), 19–23. See Diane Langmore, “The Object Lesson of a Civilised, Christian Home,” in Family and Gender in the Pacific: Domestic contradictions and the colonial impact, eds. Margaret Jolly and Martha MacIntyre (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 84–94; Robert, “The ‘Christian Home’ as a Cornerstone of Anglo-American Missionary,” 158–64; Esme Cleall, Missionary Discourses of Difference: Negotiating Otherness in the British Empire, 1840–1900 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 31–34; Cleall, “Far-flung Families and Transient Domesticity,” 163–79. The conflation of missiological and domestic familial functions was also discernible in the families of colonial society clergy. See further, Duff, Changing Childhoods in the Cape Colony, 44–64. Robert, “The ‘Christian Home’ as a Cornerstone of Anglo-American Missionary,” 163. Morrison, “‘I Feel That We Belong to the One Big Family,’” 229.

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parents.83 Reading between the lines for the Marwick family, a Scottish high school education leading to further university study was a deep-seated family value, one that was personified through the wider family’s connection with the George Watson merchant colleges in Edinburgh. For example, other members of the Marwick family feature on the school’s roll of honor for World War I and in the school magazine (The Watsonian) from 1906 to 1917. The qualitative differences in educational opportunities, between British colonial Jamaica and urban Scotland, were astutely perceived through a lens of Marwick family values and history, and as a result, there was clearly no contest in William senior’s mind at least. For James Gray, the problem was not so much India, as it was the American culture of Woodstock School. As a British settler missionary, with experience of New Zealand’s comprehensive secondary education system for those children who gained proficiency at the end of primary school, he was ultimately disconcerted by “the fact” that the school was “frankly & wholly an American one in aims & methods.”84 As such, he perceived most keenly, perhaps, the potential pitfalls for his children growing up in a third cultural space. Thus, he preferred replacing the American-influenced system at Woodstock with the more familiar New Zealand high school system in which he had been raised, even if it meant initial separation from his two eldest sons or ultimately curtailing his own missionary vocation in the process. Family Separation James Gray’s concerns highlight one final issue to be considered that of family separation. As indicated earlier, this was a significant and complex issue. Current literature tends to emphasize either the emotional impact on children or parental anxieties over the disruption of the supposedly normal nuclear family.85 Two observations here simply preview some larger possible issues for future consideration. First, there are some elements that, while specific to these case studies, need to be considered for the wider British world context. By the early 1900s, Scottish Presbyterian missionary families (like those from England, Wales and Ireland) routinely sent their children home for all or some of their schooling or, like the Marwick children, were periodically split between home and mission contexts. This was facilitated by two things: an increasingly comprehensive system 83 See, for example, Buettner, Empire Families, 29–45; Manktelow, Missionary Families, 149–50 and also chapter 6; Semple, “The Conversion and Highest Welfare,” 29–30, 35–38; Cleall, Missionary Discourses of Difference, 59–60. 84 James Gray to Rev. Mawson, January 12, 1932, Staff File 6.6, GAO149 Punjab Mission, PRC. 85 See Brendon, Children of the Raj, 212; Morrison, “‘I Feel That We Belong to the One Big Family,’” 229–32.

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of educational subsidies for Church of Scotland and United Free Church of Scotland missionary children and the establishment of residential missionary homes in which children could live while attending Scottish schools, especially Cunningham House and Duddingston Home House in Edinburgh. The latter was a financial measure, but it also helped to mitigate the known traumas of school boarding.86 This allowed parents to maintain family life in two discrete, but connected, geographical spheres. For New Zealand Presbyterian missionaries, children’s allowance schemes existed but not the residential option. In 1932, James raised the possibility of a New Zealand missionary children’s home similar to the Scottish system, but this never came to fruition.87 Therefore, at crucial transition points in children’s lives, families faced two choices to be split between mission field and home or to definitively leave their mission context, prematurely and often with a sense of personal dissatisfaction or failure. Family separation was a deeply emotional issue, and one that had a profound impact on both parents and children. This was officially acknowledged and authorities, parents and church communities all attempted to mitigate its impact. This institutionalization of separation still awaits a more nuanced history, one that focuses on both the implementation and efficacy of missionary policy and its reception by children and parents. Sometimes, the focus on missionary children led to more far-reaching and unintended developments in church life and polity. In the earlier New Zealand context, for example, concerns for the welfare of Presbyterian missionary children in the New Hebrides sent to New Zealand for school in the later 1800s, evolved into a nationwide women’s movement that then led to the formation of the deaconesses’ movement and later women’s ordination, both much larger issues than simply missionary children’s welfare.88 Therefore, this issue sits within a wider set of social dynamics that differed across different home base or point of origin settings, which also deserve to be considered more broadly. Second, there needs to be a more nuanced analysis of the complexities of this experience of separation written from the perspectives of child participants. As Manktelow notes further “the painful difficulties of separation leap out from missionary letters and journals, and speak most eloquently to the bonds of love and affection that existed between missionaries and their children.”89 While separation had become institutionalized, at heart, it was an

86 87 88 89

Note again, Brendon, Children of the Raj, 189–93. Gray to Mawson, January 12, 1932; Rev. Mawson to James Gray, August 11, 1932, PRC. Morrison, Pushing Boundaries, 38. Manktelow, Missionary Families, 149.

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emotional issue, irrespective of such definitions as nationality. Manktelow’s observation references specifically the context of the nineteenth century for English and Scottish missionaries, but its application was not nationally restricted. Karen Vallgårda notes that early twentieth-century Danish missionaries writing from India “were adamant about bearing witness to their love for their children, underscoring that although periods of separation may be necessary, they were deeply painful.” The implication of some of these writings was that separation was “harder on the parents than on the child.”90 In the Danish context, this may have been accentuated by the fact that it was not as customary for middle-class families to send children to boarding school as it was in England, reflecting a “growing consensus in most parts of Danish society that children should live ideally at home with their parents.”91 Furthermore, as an emotional issue, it was accentuated by the existence and discursive impact of three related narratives: parents, children, and the churches. These narratives need to be considered together. We have already noted parents’ focus on maintaining family life and on children’s health and education. Official church narratives extended this further, by glowingly representing missionary children’s residential homes, for example, as a “home that is like home” or acting as surrogate “happy families.”92 This rhetoric obviously needs to be treated with caution in terms of interpreting children’s experiences in or reactions to these institutions. Yet at the time, these narratives fairly reflected the desires of both missionary families and churches alike to provide emotionally secure, livable and “normal” living circumstances for children especially when separated from parents and home. From children’s perspectives, however, separation was a double-edged experience and their response to it was shaped by things like personality, disposition, and position in the family. The varying stories of Scott (eldest and consistently positive) and Ian Gray (younger brother and much more negative) exemplified this. Even so, Ian spoke for both boys when he poignantly observed that when they all finally regathered as a family in New Zealand “Scott and I came back to a family that we didn’t know.”93 Furthermore, the fact that many

90 Vallgårda, Imperial Childhoods and Christian Mission, 193. See also Morrison, “‘I Feel That We Belong to the One Big Family,’” 227, 228–29. 91 Vallgårda, Imperial Childhoods and Christian Mission, 182. 92 Lily F. Wilkie, “The Home That Is Like Home,” Other Lands: The Magazine of the Overseas Work of the United Free Church of Scotland, January 1922, 62–63; Life and Work, March 1934, 121–22. 93 Ian Gray, interview.

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missionary children, hitherto separated from family, went on to missionary or expatriate careers suggests that, from their perspective, the experience cannot be interpreted categorically in negative terms. Annual reports for Cunningham House, for example, indicate that a number of the resident children returned to work with their families in missionary settings or trained (especially in medicine) with further overseas work in mind (colonial service or missionary).94 This was also illustrated in Ian Gray’s adult life. His missionary childhood had not been exactly happy, especially through the high school years away from his family. Yet from 1953 to 1960, Ian served, with his wife and children, as the founding principal of the Onesua School in the New Hebrides (Vanuatu), as a joint venture of the New Hebrides and New Zealand Presbyterian Churches.95 This remains an abiding and significant adult experience for Ian that was unimpeded by previous childhood experiences. At the same time, the parents of both families were equally conflicted. As noted previously, this was evident in James Gray’s sense of being “torn betwixt conflicting duties” when contemplating his children’s future education.96 The Marwick family correspondence reveals particularly poignant observations in this regard. There was a deeply emotional seam running just under the surface of the parents’ letters from Nigeria to their infants Willie and Margaret in Edinburgh. Reading their children’s letters, William stated that “I could hardly control my voice sometimes and the tears flowed in my eyes,” while a year later, the pathos was clear as they wrote to Margaret on her birthday that both parents were “thinking a great deal of you today, and wishing we could be beside you to give a great many sweet kisses.” At one point, William confided to his own mother and sister in Edinburgh that he was “sometimes tempted to wish I had never come back, & sometimes to make up my mind not to come back if I am asked to finish this term.”97 One possible reading of William’s later letters, after 1906, suggests that he was looking for theological reasons to rationalize his continued separation from the family. In a letter to Sir J. Alexander Swettenham (a past Governor of Jamaica), William linked his own circumstances to the letter’s focus on developing a theology of “childlike

94 Annual Reports, 1919–1939, Cunningham House for Missionaries Children, 1919–1973, Acc. 12398/78, Church of Scotland Board of World Missions, NLS. 95 Gray, We Travel Together, 98–138; J. S. Murray, A Century of Growth: Presbyterian Overseas Mission Work 1869–1969 (Christchurch, UK: Presbyterian Bookroom, 1969), 78, 110. 96 Gray to Mawson, January 12, 1932, August 11, 1932, PRC. 97 William to Mother, Lizzie and Bairns, May 22 1898; William to Margaret, November 5 1899; William to Mother and Lizzie, October 13, 1899, Acc. 4886/2, NLS.

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obedience” to God. He wrote: “It so happens that I am in the position of that imaginary father, having four & a half years ago left my wife & five children in Scotland, the youngest being then a child of ten months…. The youngest who cannot remember her father has yet been taught to love him & even obey his wishes [by?] the simple undogmatic ways referred to above. In the same simple childlike ways even an adult can be taught to love & obey his heavenly Father.”98 There were also obvious tensions between William and third son George during his early teenage years. These letters were more sober epistles of censure, correction, moral guidance, and theological expectations, reflecting his frustrations over George’s struggles at school and, at a more fundamental level, of being an absentee father. Thus, he was inextricably caught between familial and vocational obligations.99 Conclusion This article, much like Karen Vallgårda’s recent book on children and childhood in the Danish-Indian contexts, obviously does not “exhaust all aspects of childhood or the norms surrounding it.”100 As the lives of the Marwick and Gray children indicate there is clearly much more to say about this group of children and a whole raft of other possible analytical considerations to bear in mind. In this instance, it has explored how we might historically find and interpret missionary children’s lives, with an explicit focus on two early twentieth-century British world families variously located in Scotland, Jamaica, India, and New Zealand and by attending to the perspectives of both children and parents. In doing so, it has attempted to excavate, curate, and interpret a historical group that is “often shadowy in the archive and obscure in mission history,”101 and which hitherto has been studied mostly for the nineteenth century. While family here is both the primary site of excavation and interpretative lens, children’s voices and experiences (written and oral) have been emphasized where the archive allows this in tandem with those of their parents. The focus on two nationalities and the early twentieth century provides the opportunity to

98 William to Sir J. A. Swettenham, February 23, 1911; Letter book, 1911–c. 1917, Marwick Papers, Acc. 4886, NLS. 99 See further, Morrison, “‘I Feel That We Belong to the One Big Family,’” 227–29. 100 Vallgårda, Imperial Childhoods and Christian Mission, 35. 101 Manktelow, Missionary Families, 207.

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make tentative comparisons across time and between British cultures and to interact with some of the participating children through interviews. For the early twentieth-century context, the evidence from these two case studies suggests that while the domestically tight family unit was centrally important to children’s self-definition, their experiences within these families were unique in terms of their parents’ religious motivation and national origin, possibly the actual missionary site inhabited, the complex negotiations that children had to make over identity formation, their age and position in the family, and gender. They also shared the experience of separation, as did a host of other Western children caught up in parents’ imperial and colonial vocations. That experience, however, was itself complex and variegated as the discussion has attempted to outline, with differing impacts on their adult lives. More than anything else, then, these case studies emphasize the point that missionary children’s lives—while framed within the tight domestic family unit commonplace by the early 1900s and sharing many commonalities shaped by expectation, circumstances, and discursive rhetoric—were individual lives perceived and experienced differently according to a range of factors. The case studies thus remind us that historical children such as those of the Marwick and Gray families were more than a concept or a category. Notwithstanding the complexities of interpretation, the archive of their lives reveals flesh and blood individuals for whom life was different but at the same time normal, growing up within family bonds of love, nurture, and security in otherwise exotic locations; yet at times physically and emotionally separated from those bonds. Their stories deserve to be heard: for their own sake and for missionary children’s empowerment as historical agents, for the enrichment of our historical understanding, and simply because they are just so fascinating. Acknowledgments I wish to thank the National Library of Scotland (Edinburgh) and the Presbyterian Research Centre (Dunedin) for access to archival material, the two interview participants (New Zealand), the Gray family for being able to sight (but not directly quote from) additional unpublished memoir material, panel participants at the eighth biennial conference of the Society for the History of Childhood and Youth, Vancouver, June 2015, and Angela Wanhalla (University of Otago) for reading and commenting on an early draft of the article.

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Author’s Note

This article forms part of a larger project examining both the relationship of Scottish and New Zealand Presbyterian children to the modern Protestant missionary movement and the lives of those children who grew up in missionary family contexts. While I take full responsibility for what is written here, both the comments by the two anonymous readers and editorial direction have contributed significantly to the final product.

Mission, Women, and Gender

∵

‘God and Nature Intended You for a Missionary’s Wife’: Mary Hill, Jane Eyre and Other Missionary Women in the 1840s Valentine Cunningham

Victorian India Texts

In an arresting accident of chronology the year 1847 witnesses an illuminating convergence between the lives of two missionary-minded Protestant Englishwomen. On 7 September 1847 Mary Hill, wife of the Rev. Micaiah Hill, a Congregationalist missionary to Bengal and acting pastor of the Congregationalist Union Chapel in Calcutta, died in that city, aged 57. Just a month or so later there appeared in London a novel called Jane Eyre, apparently from the pen of one Currer Bell, actually written by the daughter of the Anglican minister of the parish of Haworth in Yorkshire. Charlotte Brontë’s sensationally successful plot featured a young woman who would eventually find marital happiness only after refusing to go out to Calcutta as the wife of a missionary. The tombstone to Mary Hill is now in the British graveyard in South Park Street, Calcutta. It was moved there, along with other missionary memorial stones, in April 1987 from the Scottish Cemetery just around the corner in Karaya Road. Cheek by jowl with the scores of graves of East India administrators, river pilots, clerics, clerks, scholars, soldiers, younger sons, young men all seemingly in their twenties and early thirties, young wives and mothers, many of them scarcely out of their teens, babes in arms, toddlers, small children, Mary Hill’s stone takes its place among the mouldering remains and collapsing mementoes of all those once deeply grieved-over ones who gave up their lives in the service of King or Queen, Empire, Duty, Mammon, European education, the religion of Christ. South Park Street Cemetery is a moving place, full of compelling public texts of pious testimony and tribute. The text of Mary Hill’s tombstone runs thus:

Source: Cunningham, V., “‘God and Nature Intended You for a Missionary’s Wife’: Mary Hill, Jane Eyre and Other Missionary Women in the 1840s,” in F. Bowie, D. Kirkwood and S. Ardener (eds.), Women and Missions: Past and Present: Anthropological and Historical Perceptions, Providence: Berg, 1993, pp. 85–106.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/97890

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In Memory of Mary Hill, Wife of the Revd Micaiah Hill, of the London Miss.y Society And Acting Pastor of Union Chapel, Dhurrumtollah. Obit 7th Sept 1847, Aetat 57. This monument is erected by the church and congregation From respect and esteem for her Christian virtues; and missionary zeal, In establishing and superintending religious schools, Both for heathen children and poor Christian females, during a period of 24 years at Berhampore; and also to record their grateful remembrance, of the deep interest she untiringly took, in the spiritual and temporal welfare, of the people among whom in the providence of God, she came for a time to reside, and among whom she closed her earthly career of usefulness and Christian benevolence. She was born Mary Beardmore in 1790 in Newcastle-under-Lyme. She married Micaiah Hill, a man of her own age, from Walsall. She was an Anglican; he was a Congregationalist, a member of Birmingham’s famous Carr’s Lane Chapel, then pastored by John Angell James. Dutifully, Mrs Hill joined the Congregationalists. Micaiah Hill was ordained into the Congregationalist ministry in July 1821, and on 10 October 1821 Mr and Mrs Hill sailed for India under the auspices of the still young London Missionary Society. It took them until 5 March 1822 to get to Calcutta. There they laboured in the station already established around the Union Chapel. Mr Hill did some journalism. After two years and various abortive ventures in the region they were posted to Berhampur, 120 miles or thereabouts from Calcutta, a large military centre, to set up a new Dissenting missionary outpost. It was hard going, ‘a wilderness of Idolatry and sinful abomination’, as a letter of Micaiah Hill puts it (11 December 1824), ‘far from European friends and severed from Christian Society’. (Hill’s letters that survived the journey home are now kept in the London Missionary Society archive at the London School of Oriental and African Studies.) Mrs Hill was often ill. After prolonged physical suffering she returned to England with three of her children, sailing from Calcutta on Christmas Day 1836 and arriving in London on 24 April 1837. In 1838 Micaiah Hill’s health was sufficiently broken down to compel him to make the return journey home, and he arrived in London on

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22 May 1839. After three years of his recuperation the, family returned once more to India, setting sail on 14 July 1842, arriving in Calcutta on 29 October, and then going on to Berhampur. In January 1847 they left Berhampur for good: Hill was appointed replacement pastor for Dr Boaz of the Union Chapel who had returned to England. After only eight months in Calcutta Mrs Hill died, her death ‘occasioned by severe injury received from a fall about six weeks before’.1 Her husband survived her by only sixteen months: he died on a boat on the Ganges, sailing to Benares in order to recover his health. The bare narratives of the tombstone text and the simple published chronological record2 reveal something of what such missionary labours involved—for instance, the huge number of months spent aboard ship, merely in transit, just travelling between England and India. But the heroic physical and spiritual endurance test that India imposed is something that these public glimpses scarcely touch on. Nor are the published Annual Reports of the London Missionary Society and the Quarterly Chronicle of Transactions of the LMS (which turned into the Missionary Magazine and Chronicle) much better at registering either the distresses of the Hills, or their few successes. The British Christian public was clearly felt by the LMS’s London administrators to need stories of spiritual triumph—distinct conversions of the heathen, pagan temples cast down, idol worship vanquished, positive missionary action and positive missionary thinking. They got a little of that from Micaiah Hill. But not much. He was in fact nagged at by the LMS Secretaries in London for his dilatoriness in sending publishable news, journals of itineraries, diaries of life on station, and so on. On one occasion in 1831, accused of not communicating since 1828, he replied that ‘remissness in correspondence’ was caused by heavy work-loads, a dislike of diary keeping (too ‘egotistical’), and of repetition (reporting a ‘sameness of occurrences and events’) and, in any case, there was yet no triumphalist outpouring of the Spirit, no ‘shaking’ in ‘this valley of vision’. If he produced a daily record the result would be, every month, ‘an octavo volume of disappointments’ (letter of 18 August 1831). The very paper for extensive correspondence was hard to come by. In 1836, when Hill was embroiled in a quarrel with fellow-missionaries about how the Bengal mission should be managed, a debate that provoked very lengthy epistles, he expostulated at the end of one enormous and closely-written missive (29 September 1836) that he was ‘unable to comply’ with London’s ‘request to write my letters on Fool’s cap 1 Mary Hill’s death is noticed in The Missionary Magazine and Chronicle, CXXXVIII, November 1847: 174. Extracts from the funeral sermon appeared in this LMS journal, CXLI, February 1848: 28–9. 2 James Sibree (ed.), 1923: 22–3. Micaiah Hill was missionary No. 222.

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with a broad margin’: paper was short; the Directors’ last consignment of paper had sunk on its way up-river; and that was ten years previously.

Medicinal Living and Soldierly Dying

What such correspondence as survives does reveal (and Hill claimed that numbers of letters were going astray) is the awful physical truth behind the bare public records of illness and death. ‘We are constrained in this climate to live medicinally’ (18 August 1831); ‘My eldest boy has been several times on the verge of the grave and last year was ten months under the influence of Mercury’ (16 June 1828); ‘perpetual mortality around us’ (18 August 1831); ‘death is making havock of many around’ (30 December 1832). The Hills’ eldest boy, William, had to be sent home to England for his health (‘has every year more or less been so ill that we have despaired of his life’, 21 August 1827). Their fifth child, a boy, died aged eleven months in February 1832. They were luckier than some. One of their colleagues the Rev. Gogerly wrote home in January 1831 of the sudden death through cholera of his thirteen-year-old son, which meant he had lost three children and a wife in India; his nine-year-old boy was ‘almost reduced to a skeleton’ and must return to England lest he become ‘the fifth victim of the insalubrity of the climate in Bengal’. Mary Hill was repeatedly ill: ‘continual illness in the first years (sic) residence in Bengal’ (11 December 1824); ‘has twice been dangerously ill with no medical person at hand’ (June 1824); travelling about with her husband in the cold season in order to stay healthy she has been, two years running, ‘unable to walk across the room’ (5 October 1836). On one occasion in 1830 the Hills were evicted at short notice from their militaryowned bungalow in the rainy season and had to move themselves and their belongings three miles in pouring rain: ‘I was just able to walk about. Mrs Hill could not rise from her bed & … our second son lay to appearance at the point of death’ (23 September 1830). The published records tend to skim over such plights. They note them, of course, bluntly in obituaries. But the letters of the LMS archive are, by contrast, a long litany of illness and deaths through epidemics, dysentery, fever, cholera. They tell of ailing children, dying wives, dead missionaries, missionary widows and orphans, as well as the occasional mad woman who has to be shipped home (at great expense, accompanied by costly female attendants, against the will of reluctant ships’ captains who increase the fare in consequence of their worries). They offer urgent pleas and present accumulated medical evidence for returning to England, costly to the Society and heartbreaking to the missionaries though these journeys are.

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At the end of 1837 Hill reports his alarm ‘at the large numbers of missionaries whom Mrs Hill met in London’—the Devil has evidently been busy making mission-fields too pestilential for God’s servants to stay in them—and he regrets that illness is compelling him to add himself to their number: ‘a return to England is opposed to the plan I have always cherished, viz as the Venerable Waugh charged me on leaving England “To die with my face towards the foe” never shall I forget those words’. And, of course, Hill would in fact die in just that way upon his subsequent return to India. So would Mary Hill. So would the Hills’ eventual colleague at Berhampur, James Paterson; and Paterson’s first wife, Isabelle, who died there in April 1847 only months before Mary Hill’s death; and the second Mrs Paterson, who was brought out from Britain to die at Berhampur in 1853. Just how soldierly a death Mary Hill’s (and Isabelle Paterson’s and the other Mrs Paterson’s) would be accounted by the LMS’s London organisers and the Christian public in Britain is something of a moot point. For missionary work at this stage of the LMS’s history was clearly perceived as a task performed by men which women merely supplemented. Missionary was a male noun; it denoted a male actor, male action, male spheres of service. Mary Hill was not a missionary by the definition of her day, she was a missionary’s wife. In the standard printed LMS ‘Schedule of Returns’ form the slot headed ‘Missionaries’ would be for a long time filled with the names of men only. Wives and children occupied the form’s space for dependants. The Society was solicitous of wives’ welfare, conscious of their value, but it is possible to detect an official suspicion that they might not always pull their weight unless kept up to the mark. ‘In answer to your question Is Mrs Hill endeavouring to learn the language? I answer, from continual illness in the first four years residence in Bengal she was not able to attend to the language, but since that period she has daily studied with the Pundit and now reads in the Bengallee Testament’ (11 December 1824). When Micaiah Hill pleads with London for ‘a fellow-labourer to strengthen my hands’ (5 February 1825), he is asking for a male coadjutor: his fellow-labouring wife is not accounted a fellow-labourer in the fullest sense (and, in fact, she only itinerated the villages with him of health necessity: had she been well enough, paradoxically, she’d have stayed behind in Berhampur). The LMS was a male affair. Hill’s letters to the ‘missionary rooms’ in London commonly begin ‘Dear Fathers and Brethren’. A man speaks to men about this mission-field. The official history of the Society by John Morison is entitled The Founders and Fathers of the LMS. John Angell James’s commemorative sermon of 1849 was entitled a ‘Tribute to the Fathers and Founders of the LMS’. The Society’s Quarterly News of Women’s Work seems not to have been founded

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until 1887. There are signs that some womanly details got edited out of the letters that the (male) missionaries sent home, when they were prepared for publication. For example, the one from Micaiah Hill (1 March 1828), corrected for publication in the Monthly Chronicle of January 1829, has the details of the difficulties encountered in their girls’ school by Mary Hill and her colleague Mrs Warden (‘Mrs Hill regrets to state are not so encouraging as she could desire’) deleted by an editor’s pen. Letters from wives rarely appear in the archives. There is an occasional communication from a returning widow conveying an update of the work But only one missive from Mary Hill appears. It is a complaint (12 April 1825) that she and her husband receive letters too infrequently Some they have just received ‘lay’ more than eleven months at the London ‘Rooms’ before being sent on. ‘In consequence of this delay I did not hear from my beloved Mother for nearly two years after my arrival in Bengal.’ But this little outburst of womanly querulousness, so rare in the correspondence, instantly collapses into the expected notes of wifely duty: she attaches to her missive a copied-out extract from the journal of her ‘dear partner’ about a fair he recently attended for purposes of evangelism—the sort of report Hill would later declare himself too busy to send.

The Prom. of Fem. Educ.

There is some discussion in the 1820s correspondence from northern India about whether ‘unmarried females’ should be sent out. A letter from Calcutta signed by Messrs Trawin, Warden and J. Hill (no relation) opposes the idea: single women would be a nuisance in that they could only accompany married couples; they might get married to Europeans not belonging to the mission and so quit the work; they cost as much to send out and support as unmarried (male) missionaries, so why bother; and (male) missionaries can just as easily found girls’ schools as females can (31 August 1824). Women widowed in the field were also felt to be a problem. Warden and Trawin both died in India. J. Hill (16 January 1826) had to obtain London’s support for Mrs Warden’s staying on to help with ‘female schools’ (she was the Mrs Warden of the edited letter from Micaiah Hill). For her part the widowed Mrs Trawin earned a generous tribute from Micaiah Hill when weakness from perpetual dysentery compelled her return to England. She was, he wrote, not only ‘the most useful female in our Mission in Bengal, as she has obtained a knowledge of the Bengalee and a partial knowledge of the Hindustanee language’ (21 August 1827), she was also ‘a most excellent Missionary’ (16 June 1828). As good as a man in fact. But such a male concession was rare at the time, and

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women were not to be allowed officially to show whether they were equal to male missionaries for some time after this. There were only three officially appointed female LMS ‘missionaries’ before 1875. The first of these in the LMS register is Maria Newell—‘appointed to carry on Women’s Education among Chinese at Malacca’. She left England in 1827, but is clearly the object of some oversight or afterthought, so anomalous was she, since she is tucked late into the list at No. 270a. There is not another registered woman missionary until No. 605—E. M. H. Sturrock, and hers is no straightforward appointment either. She is said, carefully, to have been ‘Connected with the Society for the Promotion of Female Education in the East, by which she was appointed to Peelton, Kafirland, South Africa, and which bore the expenses of her voyage and journey to Peelton; while the LMS paid her salary at her station.’ She spent twenty years in Peelton, then ‘In 1884 it was arranged that her connection with the LMS as one of its missionaries should cease, and that she should be regarded solely as an Agent of the Soc. for the Prom. of Fem. Educ. in the East’. The third independently listed LMS woman is Lilly White, ‘appointed to superintend Caste Girls’ Schools’ in Madras—the first widow of an LMS missionary to be granted separate official status (her husband died in Madras in 1866). It is only after 1875, when policy clearly changed, that the flood of acknowledged LMS women missionaries begins—Mary Anne Heward, Edith Annie Tubbs, Mary Teresa Bliss, Emmeline Mary Geller, Lucy Margaret Bounsall, Christina Brown, E. Bear, and so on and on. For all the early hesitancies and grudging tributes, though, the work of the wives and widows was obviously indispensable, especially among women and girls, both Indian and European, and among orphan boys. The ‘Prom. of Fem. Educ.’ relied on them. The allegation that (male) missionaries might found girls’ schools just as readily as women did, seems not have been much put to the test. Women’s education in India was firmly in women’s hands; so was ministering to women in general. Very soon after she arrived in Berhampur Mary Hill had one Girls’ School in operation, was ‘erecting’ another, and had ‘two others in contemplation’ (11 December 1824). In 1826 Mrs Warden was running a Sunday School for children of the European regiments stationed in Berhampur, and she and Mrs Hill were devoting ‘a portion of each day’ to the European women attached to these regiments (14 March 1826). The Bengali girls of the Orphan Asylum that was being planned in 1831 were to be ‘instructed in Mrs Hill’s school in reading, sewing, plaiting straw for Bonnets, spinning, &c’ (18 August 1831). In 1834 Hill’s new colleague James Paterson reports that the dozen boys in Mrs Hill’s Orphan Asylum are being taught by her several ‘arts’ for their future self-support. Mrs Paterson and Mrs Hill (‘when she is able’) run the Bengali Girls’ School, where the girls every day sing hymns, repeat the

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Catechism and the Lord’s Prayer and ‘write on the ground’, as is the Bengali custom (7 October 1834). There was local support for the education of women. In 1828 the Moha Raja Oodwent Singh donated 500 rupees towards Mrs Hill’s Schools, in which, according to the Quarterly Chronicle of Transactions of the LMS, ‘Some of the girls … could read more fluently than many Sircars. Those in attendance read Mala Konya, learn the Catechisms and Mr Jetter’s spelling-book.’3 Despite some opposition from (male) missionaries in the LMS (correspondence in the archive suggests the effort to educate Indian women to be an unrewarded waste of time) the first printed Report of the Native Female School Society, Connected with the London Missionary Society appeared in Calcutta in 1828. And on the second of January 1832 one Agnes Gogerly of the Native Female School Society of Calcutta addressed a fund-raising pamphlet To the Members (more particularly the Female) of the Churches of Christ in England and Scotland. She declared that there were fifty million females in India and fewer than 2000 of them perhaps could write their names. Christian women must support the ‘movement in favour of Female Education’ lately manifest in India. The Native Female School Society is the last to be formed of the twenty-two voluntary aided institutions of Calcutta and so the least supported. The former neglect by British Christians of the ‘female part of the population’ of India must be remedied. Sympathy and help are therefore requested ‘for the daughters of India, who, through the degrading influence of a most abominable system of idolatry, are suffered by their natural protectors to remain in the grossest ignorance and vice, and in consequence are thrown upon the charities of strangers’. Women’s education, conducted by missionary wives and widows (‘the female department of the Mission’ as Hill called it, 14 March 1826), would be supported above all by women’s contributions. In 1824 Hill reports that the European regimental ‘ladies’ of Berhampur have ‘nobly patronised and generously contributed towards’ Mrs Hill’s schools to the tune of 456 rupees, which will pay for three schools for a year. Mrs Hill has written to her friends back home in Newcastle-under-Lyme for ‘their assistance in female education’. She called one of her earliest schools the Newcastle. And support came from England in the form that ordinary chapel-going and generally propertyless (because married) British women could contribute it—in womanly stuff. The 1832 Schedule of Returns from Berhampur reports that ‘a box of articles’ has come 3 Quarterly Chronicle of Transactions of the LMS, 1825–8, III: 418. Sircars were local political or domestic or financial officials. Mala Konya: enigmatic, but sounds like a school primer for girls, or a slightly misrecorded title of a fairy story about a girl with flowing black hair; at any rate, a text for young girls (my thanks to Richard Gombrich for this clarification).

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‘from Sandbach Ladys Sewing Society which sold for 75 rupees’ and was ‘applied to Female School’. ‘From Miss Bayley London’ came ‘some pincushions which sold for 5 rupees 10 annas’, which was applied to the same purpose. In 1834 James Paterson writes that ‘Mrs Paterson will feel obliged if the Directors will take the earliest opportunity of inserting in the Monthly Chronicle her thanks to Mrs Romanis … and other friends for a box of fancy articles which she has just received, in aid of the Girls’ School. As soon as the articles are disposed of, she will inform her friends of the amount they have realised’ (7 October). Presumably these female offerings were sold to the European women attached to the local garrison. Occasionally, as well, English women with private wealth at their disposal are envisaged as supporters. In 1824 Hill regrets the absence of medicines which would grant an entrée for ‘Mrs Hill and myself’ into people’s abodes: perhaps ‘some pious Druggist or Lady’ would supply medicines if the need were publicised. The 1832 Schedule of Returns reports ‘A very acceptable supply of medicine received in Aug. last’.

Marginal People

For all the evident caginess within the male-dominated LMS, in India and at home, about missionary women, their status and their labours, it is nonetheless clear that a sort of radical emancipatory motive, rooted in particular interpretations of Scripture, inspired the likes of Mary Hill in her work among women, and shaped the rhetoric that was employed to describe it: As female education in raising morals of a nation is so important, we earnestly entreat Honoured Fathers and Brethren your prayers and those of the Churches, will assist our efforts and help to draw upon us the influence of the Holy Spirit, that we may soon see a reformation here of Males and Females, congregated together in the name of Him who has said ‘There is no Male or Female but all are one in Christ Jesus’. (4–24 June 1824) What exactly the Honoured Fathers and Brothers thought of this particular quotation and application of that Scriptural text is only guessable. What is clear is that already—and this would still be the case later on when the ranks of all Protestant missionary societies filled up dramatically with women missionaries—the rhetoric and the cause of women and women’s ministry were running ahead more speedily in mission-field circumstances than at home. It is no accident that the ordination of women in the Anglican Church would be in the twentieth century accepted first in what were Anglicanism’s

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missionary branches. More pertinently, it seems even less accidental that in the earlier part of the nineteenth century this radical-sounding tone should have been adopted by a Congregationalist pastor and his wife (even if she had been brought up in the Church of England). It is at least arguable that the Hills’ interest in the marginal people of India was incited by their own status as marginals within English religious society and within the versions of British society exported to India. As a woman, of course, Mary Hill was by definition a marginal person. When she married her Congregationalist husband she left the religiously and socially centrist Church of England, and so added a religiously inflected marginality to the already given marginality attaching to her gender. The Hills were made to feel the sharp end of that Dissenting marginality in all of their Indian dealings with what Micaiah Hill continually refers to in his letters as ‘the Establishment’. The Bishop of Calcutta—from 1823 to 1826 he was Reginald (‘From Greenland’s Icy Mountains’) Heber—and his clergy were at the centre of this colonial outpost. They wielded and represented its authority and privileges in ways utterly denied the LMS’s nonconformist preachers and educators. The Berhampur Anglicans seem, for a start, to have had greater wealth for their mission, at any rate early on in the Hills’ work. In 1824 the Anglicans were luring children from the Hills’ schools with a ‘system of presents’ (4–24 June 1824). Since Berhampur was a garrison town the smile and frown of the European military jurisdiction mattered in all aspects of day-to-day functioning. The only decent houses the Hills could rent were owned by the military, which generated native suspicions as well as giving them particularly bad moments like the eviction in the monsoons of 1830. And ‘the Establishment’ sometimes presented a united hostile front of military authority in collaboration with its official Christian expression, the Anglican Church. The Hills had gradually won the respect of the pious churchgoing soldiery of Berhampur, to the extent that the men of regiments like the 38th, the Buffs, came to regard Micaiah as their pastor and the Berhampur Mission as their church, to be supported by gifts of money even when they were posted elsewhere. Even Anglican soldiers were receiving the ‘dissenting sacrament’ and were happy to worship ‘on Congregational principles’. But in 1835 there arrived as Anglican and ‘government’ chaplain the Rev. Richard Chambers. He regarded himself, so James Paterson sneered (21 August 1835), as ‘the government (and therefore divinely appointed) guardian of the spiritual interest of the European soldiers’. Clearly peeved to discover Hill’s pastoral success with English soldiers and other English speakers whom he thought should be his flock, Chambers provoked a division between the Anglicans and Dissenters attending the Hills’ ministries. Going further, he published a sharp attack on

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missionaries such as Hill who preached in English. His article ‘On the Proper Sphere of Missionary Labour’ appeared in the Calcutta Christian Intelligencer in June 1835, and at a time when, as Paterson pointed out, the Hills had just buried their youngest child, their next youngest was severely ill with dysentery, and Mrs Hill had had to remove up country for her health. The kind of hostility and disabilities imposed upon Dissenters at home were thus being transposed with a vengeance to the foreign field. No wonder a large packet of letters accumulated as Hill defended his right to minister to whomever he felt led, and above all to preach in English. (The truth was that his English-speaking congregation essentially paid for the much smaller Indian one.) It is not difficult to imagine that the Hills’ care for local outcasts was infected by their own position as outcasts in relation to the Establishment. The man from Walsall and from Carr’s Lane Birmingham, and the wife who had gone down-market, religiously and socially speaking, were not gentlefolk. Their dealings with ‘the upper classes’ were, Hill reported, ‘always visits of necessity’, tempered by religious not social ambition, and thus were conducted in the evenings after dinner. They were not much on calling terms with the Empire’s more accredited agents. If they were invited to tea, they would, Hill wrote, always produce a Bible immediately afterwards and conduct family worship (23 September 1830). In any case their more natural social inclinations were towards the ‘women of colour’ who get mentioned in the same letter. Certainly from the start in Berhampur they had directed their attentions to the illegitimate children of Spanish, Portuguese and British men by native women, and to the females who lost caste by being sold by their parents (11 December 1824). The girls in Mrs Hill’s and Mrs Paterson’s Bengali School were all (7 October 1834) of the ‘lowest caste’. The behaviour of the Rev. Richard Chambers can only have rubbed their Dissenting noses into the fact that the Establishment thought them fittest, socially and religiously speaking, for ministry to these cast-outs, the lowest castes, and the half-caste. And as a woman, of course, Mrs Hill was, by a consensus that Dissenting and Anglican males more or less agreed on, closer still to the condition of these marginalised ones, not least the females, among whom she toiled.

Fellow-Missionary?

The kinds of social, religious and genderised marginalities that Mrs Hill lived with were well known back home. Charlotte Brontë was by no means unfamiliar with them. She was not one of those who enjoyed what Matthew Arnold designated ‘the tone of the centre’. She was a woman of the provinces,

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acquainted with spartan conditions and deprivations of all kinds, living at a great distance from the geographical and cultural centre and centres, brought up in Church-Methodism as a kind of surrogate Dissenter under the hand of a loving, but also rough, eccentric, evangelical Ulsterman of a father. And she knew about India and missionaries, not least through the magnetic influence upon her father’s life of Henry Martyn, the Cornishman who, before the likes of David Livingstone stole his thunder, was the most famous English missionary of the nineteenth century. The translator of the New Testament and the Prayer Book into Hindustani, and of the New Testament, the Psalms and the Gospels into Persian, Martyn had been a chaplain to the Bengal establishment of the East India Company in Calcutta. He laboured at his translations in various locations across northern British India, travelled widely in Persia, translating his Christian texts and disputing with Muslims, and finally died of the plague, aged thirty-one, 16 October 1812, in Turkish Tokat on his way back from St Petersburg (where his Persian New Testament was printed) to England in order to marry Lydia Grenfell and take her back with him to the East. Martyn had gone up to St John’s College, Cambridge, in 1797, and had served as curate to the great evangelical Charles Simeon at Holy Trinity Church in Cambridge before leaving for Calcutta. In 1804 he had arranged for a poor evangelical Irish student of St John’s, at that time called Patrick Brunty, to receive £10 a year from each of Henry Thornton and William Wilberforce. This piece of patronage was a key stepping stone in a career of evangelical patronage that was gradually leading Charlotte Brontë’s father from Ulster, via Cambridge, through a chain of plum Simeonite Yorkshire parishes, to Haworth. It has been assumed, and with good reason, that Charlotte Brontë read Sargent’s Memoir of Henry Martyn in the Keighley Public Library copy.4 When her father read Jane Eyre he believed he was being presented with old family stories and that Charlotte had had Henry Martyn in mind when she conceived St John Rivers. For one thing, he bore the name of Martyn’s and Patrick Brontë’s old College. But for all the family enthusiasm for Henry Martyn (the national enthusiasm too: Samuel Wilberforce’s two-volume edition of Martyn’s Journals and Letters appeared in 1837), Charlotte Brontë calculatedly resists having Jane Eyre accept St John Rivers’s plea to go to India with him as a missionary wife. Jane would not join the ranks of the Mary Hills. To be sure, she submits to learn Hindustani, ‘poring’, under Rivers’s tutelage, ‘over the crabbed characters and flourishing tropes of an Indian scribe’. But she is resistant to going out as ‘a conductress of Indian schools, and a helper among Indian women’ (Ch. 34), 4 DNB (for Henry Martyn); T. J. Wise and J. A. Symington, 1933: 1, footnote p. 172; and I: 2–3 (for Martyn’s letter to Wilberforce about Brunty/Brontë).

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though not because of fear of dying prematurely. She is, of course, mindful of India’s terrible climate, mindful that she would probably succumb to illness like so many missionaries—‘I feel mine is not the existence to be long protracted under an Indian sun’. But it is Rivers’s sister Diana, not Jane herself, who thinks the very suggestion of going to be ‘frantic folly’, on the grounds that Jane is ‘much too pretty, as well as too good, to be grilled alive in Calcutta’. Nor does Jane allow her manifest snobbery to stand in the way. St John Rivers is an evangelical Anglican, so that his labours would not have been so socially démodé as Micaiah Hill’s. But if Jane finds her northern peasant pupils so degrading to teach—‘I felt degraded. I doubted I had taken a step which sank instead of raising me in the scale of social existence. I was weakly dismayed at the ignorance, the poverty, the coarseness of all I heard and saw around me’—there is little doubt that India would have seemed even more so. But this is not allowed to intrude. Jane’s resistance focuses rather on the issue of the only role that St John will allow her: the missionary wife. ‘God and nature intended you for a missionary’s wife.’ For St John Rivers, as for Micaiah Hill and the fathers of the LMS, a missionary is a man. Charlotte Brontë recognised this contemporary fact: her poem entitled ‘The Missionary’ celebrates a travelling male hero of the faith. And in Rivers’ view the place for a woman in the mission field is as a wifely supplement or subordinate to the male missionary. ‘I want a wife: the sole helpmeet I can influence sufficiently in life, and retain absolutely till death.’ Jane is prepared to go out as an unmarried assistant, a free, ‘unenslaved’ helper. But for St John Rivers, as for the LMS at the time, there’s little or no role for independent women missionaries. By then current definition, a female ‘fellow-missionary’ does not really exist. When Jane consents to ‘go with you as your fellow missionary’ (Ch. 35) she is projecting an impossibility. As the LMS males readily assumed, there’s no room in all decency for unmarried women on missionstations with only a single white male colleague. ‘How can I’, Rivers demands, ‘a man, not yet thirty, take out with me to India a girl of nineteen, unless she be married to me? How can we be for ever together—sometimes in solitude, sometimes amidst savage tribes—and unwed?’ Jane’s reply is a refusal to accept this piece of conventional wisdom. Even though she were single she would be able to accompany Rivers ‘very well’: ‘under the circumstances, quite as well as if I were either your real sister, or a man and a clergyman like yourself’. No wonder Rivers labels her words as ‘violent, unfeminine’. Jane would be ‘a man’, would invade and break down the preserves and prerogatives conventionally assigned to and possessed by missionary and clergyman. These conventional agreements as to the social and religious nature of woman and wife, their proper sphere of action and selfhood, are then, being

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put sharply to the question in Jane Eyre, and in direct reference to Indian missions. The novel grants that great good is being achieved among Eastern people, and particularly women, by missionaries like St John Rivers and by missionary wives such as Rivers wished Jane to be and that Mary Hill actually was. But Jane Eyre’s refusal to join in this work on Rivers’ terms—which were the LMS’s terms—focuses a logical flaw and a serious moral contradiction in a Christian endeavour that would seek to elevate, educate, emancipate Eastern women but saw no need to challenge the kinds of subordination required of the very married European women who were invited, to become, as Jane Eyre is invited, to become, the agents of that foreign liberation. There is also much good to be achieved at home, Jane thinks. Were Rivers to marry the fair Rosamond Oliver and ‘become the possessor of Mr Oliver’s large fortune, he might do as much good with it as if he went and laid his genius out to wither, and his strength to waste, under a tropical sun’ (Ch. 32). And for Jane Eyre it is the subordination of wives—subordination particularly pronounced in the case of the missionary’s wife, but shared by all British wives—that demands particular reformation. And the plight of the wives of Britain is reflected in the mirror of the missionary wife that St John Rivers holds up to Jane, and to us.

Eastern Allusions

Jane refuses to go East. But all her life she’s been in an Eastern condition. As girl, young woman, wife-to-be and ultimately as wife, her condition is presented by the text as pointedly Eastern. The opening chapter of the novel has Jane sitting reading Bewick’s Birds in her window-seat refuge, ‘cross-legged, like a Turk’. She reads ‘Arabian tales’ and ‘usually’ finds them ‘fascinating’ (Ch. 4). But Arabian tales and Turkish reading positions are no consolation for, nor any ultimate refuge from, the brutalities of British males for this young Victorian girl and woman: Master John Reed soon interrupts Jane’s solitary enjoyment of Bewick, throws the book at her, makes her head bleed; the Rev. Mr Brocklehurst upsets Jane so much with his terrorising talk and texts about Hell for naughty girls that she cannot concentrate on reading her Arabian tales. What Charlotte Brontë is teaching her heroine and us is that British women are by no means as free of Eastern bondage as we all might have supposed. ‘You are like a slave-driver,’ Jane tells John Reed. Even males who appear in kindlier guise, as Rochester does in the immediate run-up to the aborted marriage ceremony with Jane, cannot shed their part as Eastern tyrants. Marriage in Britain is demonstrated to be enslaving along Eastern lines. The arresting

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charades enacted by Rochester and Blanche Ingram (Ch. 18) have the pair ‘attired in oriental fashion’. She is got up like ‘some Israelitish princess of the patriarchal days’. He, turbanned, swarthy, with ‘Paynim features’, ‘looked the very model of an Eastern emir’. The scarcely cryptic meaning of the pantomime turns out to be ‘Bridewell’—the name of London’s notorious penitentiary for women. And this notion of English marriage as an Eastern transaction and of the bridegroom as an Eastern-style potentate, pervades the text. When Rivers fantasises himself as a husband of Rosamond Oliver (Ch. 32) he imagines himself ‘stretched on an ottoman in the drawing-room’. And Jane’s resistance to wifely subservience is cast in what are in these circumstances appropriate Eastern terms. On the eve of the aborted marriage attempt (Ch. 24) Rochester ‘obliges’ Jane to go to a ‘silk warehouse’ with him where he ‘orders’ her to choose material for half-a-dozen dresses. Hostile to extravagance, she beats the number down to two. She cannot ‘bear being dressed like a doll by Mr Rochester’. He is not to be her ‘idol’—Christianity forbids idol worship—and she will not allow herself to be his. He smiles possessively: ‘and I thought his smile was such as a sultan might, in a blissful and fond moment, bestow on a slave his gold and gems had enriched’. Jane expostulates (‘You must not look in that way’) and there follows an exchange about harems which is peculiar only if it is read outside of the novel’s carefully contrived set of ‘Eastern allusions’: He chuckled; he rubbed his hands, ‘Oh, it is rich to see and hear her!’ he exclaimed. ‘Is she original? Is she piquant? I would not exchange this one little English girl for the Grand Turk’s whole seraglio—gazelle-eyes, houri forms, and all!’ The Eastern allusion bit me again. ‘I’ll not stand you an inch in the stead of a seraglio,’ I said; ‘so don’t consider me an equivalent for one. If you have a fancy for anything in that line, away with you, sir, to the bazaars of Stamboul, without delay, and lay out in extensive slave-purchases some of that spare cash you seem at a loss to spend satisfactorily here.’ ‘And what will you do, Janet, while I am bargaining for so many tons of flesh and such an assortment of black eyes?’ ‘I’ll be preparing myself to go out as a missionary to preach liberty to them that are enslaved—your harem inmates amongst the rest. I’ll get admitted there, and I’ll stir up mutiny; and you, three-tailed bashaw as you are, sir, shall in a trice find yourself fettered amongst our hands: nor will I, for one, consent to cut your bonds till you have signed a charter, the most liberal that despot ever yet conferred.’

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‘I’ll be preparing myself to go out as a missionary to preach liberty to them that are enslaved.’ But the idolatrous sultans and pashas, the purchasers of female flesh are at home too. They are called husbands. Jane Eyre does not have literally to go out East to aid the cause of women’s emancipation. That particular Eastern missionary work is, metaphorically speaking, required to be done also at home. And Charlotte Brontë and her novel Jane Eyre will co-operate in the insistence that this particular missionary enterprise, laudable and necessary though it also be overseas, must start at home.

In Darkest England

As the great nineteenth-century missionary ventures became a more and more prominent feature of British religious and social life, so the sense grew that Britain too was a mission-field in ways that simply mirrored the overseas ones. Africa, India, China, the world’s dark continents, were plundered by Christian rhetoric to provide metaphors for the work of home evangelism. ‘And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth’: Marlow’s comment at the end of the century in Conrad’s story Heart of Darkness, a fiction that shows morally proud Europeans their own face in the corrupted African mirror, that confronts Europe with its Congo Doppelgänger, is only a secularised version of what had become by then a recurrent trope of Christian rhetoric. Dickens’ criticisms in Bleak House (1853) of African missionary enterprise, are built upon a heavily ironised parallelism. Mrs Jellyby’s involvement in charitable missionary works in Africa simply disables her as a mother of a family in London. This woman’s missionary goodwill should be concerned in the first place with her own daughter’s welfare. Neglect of home duties makes nonsense of her massive care for Borrioboola-Gha. The very word is gibberish. Just so, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts should do more for the needy of London, the waifs pausing to breakfast on dirty bits of bread on its splendid doorstep. (Joe, the crossing-sweeper, ‘admires the size of the edifice, and wonders what it’s all about. He has no idea, poor wretch, of the spiritual destitution of a coral reef in the Pacific, or what it costs to look up the precious souls among the cocoa-nuts and bread-fruit’, Ch. 16.) When John Henry Newman thought of missionary work he saw foreign and home missions as running necessarily in parallel—‘missionaries for China or Africa … evangelists for our great towns’.5 And what was perhaps the most potent written home-evangelistic summons ever uttered in Victorian times was structured on 5 John Henry Newman, 1974: 423.

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an extended analogy between Darkest Africa and Darkest England, namely In Darkest England and the Way Out by William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army (1890). The ‘African Parallel’ it draws is inspired by what Booth calls the literary sensation of ‘this summer’, ‘the story which Mr Stanley has told of “Darkest Africa”.’ Noticeably, women feature recurrently in such parallels. Dickens is actively concerned with the mess Mrs Jellyby is making of her daughter Caddy’s life. Among the most impressive of the many impressive analogies Booth makes in his In Darkest England is the paragraph comparing the lot of ‘the negress in the Equatorial Forest’ with the plight of penniless girls in London: The lot of a negress in the Equatorial Forest is not, perhaps, a very happy one, but is it so very much worse than that of many a pretty orphan girl in our Christian capital? We talk about the brutalities of the dark ages, and we profess to shudder as we read in books of the shameful exaction of the rights of feudal superior. And yet here, beneath our very eyes, in our theatres, in our restaurants, and in many other places, unspeakable though it be but to name it, the same hideous abuse flourishes unchecked. A young penniless girl, if she be pretty, is often hunted from pillar to post by her employers, confronted always by the alternative—Starve or Sin. And when once the poor girl has consented to buy the right to earn her living by the sacrifice of her virtue, then she is treated as a slave and an outcast by the very men who have ruined her. Her word becomes unbelievable, her life an ignominy, and she is swept downward ever downward, into the bottomless perdition of prostitution. But there, even in the lowest depths, excommunicated by Humanity and outcast from God, she is far nearer the pitying heart of the One true Saviour than all the men who forced her down, aye, and than all the Pharisees and Scribes who stand silently by while these fiendish wrongs are perpetrated before their very eyes.6 But Jane Eyre is unique in working the overseas/home-mission parallel exclusively in terms of women and wives. Even at their most feminist—and the indignations of Bleak House and In Darkest England on behalf of women do run at times very high—the other parallel-mongers are at best only partly preoccupied with the female aspects of the case. But Jane Eyre is wholly so. And specialisation of the home/overseas issue as a matter of and for women and 6 General William Booth, 1970: 13–14.

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wives makes one more reason for regarding this fiction as a fully, and not just crypto- or ur-feminist text.

The Last Word?

And yet, for all her resistance to being the enslaved wifely possession of the English version of an Eastern male, Jane finally married Rochester. And for all her refusal to accept the terms offered by the Indian missionary, the novel’s last word is granted to St John, and to St John twice over—St John Rivers quoting the last words of the last book of that greatest male text, the Judaeo-Christian Bible, the words of St John the Revelator. Why? Is Jane Eyre succumbing after all, by some terrible failure of nerve, to the Sultanic conventions of English marriage and to the terms offered English women by the missionary societies? Yes; but also not altogether so. Granted financial independence at last by her uncle’s will (‘What, Janet! Are you an independent woman? A rich woman?’ Ch. 37), Jane surrenders her freshly liberated self and what is left of her newly acquired cash (some went to the Riverses), giving it and herself to the charge of her husband (as all contemporary married women had to). Rochester is her master, for all that he has been purged by fire, reduced physically, and has also undergone a spiritual or moral conversion. And even though a certain Biblical rhetoric, suggestive of mutuality in union—and rather shockingly outspoken in an overground novel of the time—clusters about their marriage, it remains a rhetoric of female submission: ‘I am my husband’s life as fully as he is mine. No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh.’ His bone, his flesh. Adam is still Adam, Eve still Eve. The potential missionary liberator of the harems of Istanbul succumbs to English wifehood. Radical critique gives place spectacularly and with apparent completeness—it is like the end of Emma or The Mill on the Floss— to convention. But with St John Rivers the case is less cut and dried. The novel’s last paragraph does indeed reinstate him as the heroic male missionary in India: ‘resolute’ and ‘indefatigable’, a ‘pioneer’, ‘firm’, faithful, and devoted, full of energy and zeal, and truth, he labours for his race; he clears their painful way to improvement; he hews down like a giant the prejudices of creed and caste that encumber it’. He is laden down with approving analogies and textual parallels from The Pilgrim’s Progress (he’s Greatheart besting Apollyon) and from the New Testament. And when he has the last word, when those words from ‘the

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last letter’ that Jane received from him turn out to be the last words of the last book of the Bible, it would seem that endorsement and ultimate tributes could scarcely come more fulsomely. But this array of last words is not quite all that it at first seems. Letters are, of course, crucial here, as they have been all along in the novel. This ending endorses not least the power and importance of the foreign mails that have been felt repeatedly through the text. Letters from abroad are the occasion both of the interruption of Jane’s first marriage ceremony with Rochester and of her financial emancipation. Overseas correspondence—utterly central to the management of empire—naturally feature prominently in this and other Victorian fictions (the plot of Great Expectations, for instance, relies heavily on the Australian mail). Jane Eyre is special in bringing home the centrality of letter-writing in the running of the missionary enterprise. It is a recognition in a fiction of what the LMS correspondence brings home—that, chancy, irregular, subject to loss and delay though it was, missions could not exist without the mail. It is also a recognition of what the LMS Bengal correspondence manifests above all else—that that correspondence was in male hands. The public epistolary dealings of the missionary scene in Charlotte Brontë’s time have little space for women writers. Their private letters—to and from mothers and children and female well-wishers—have scarcely survived. They rarely have the temerity to correspond, as Mary Hill did on that one occasion, with the male Directors at home. In terms of the record the pen has—to use the words of Jane Austen’s Emma—‘ever been’ in the hands of the male missionary. And so it is in Jane Eyre, apparently: the epistle from India that’s put on the record is one from St John Rivers.

A Stranger’s Hand

But on closer inspection this ‘last letter’ is not, in fact, the last letter. After all, St John Rivers’s last word is not contemplated as the actual last word. At this final moment of our text, in this very moment of apparent total surrender to the words of St John Rivers, this surrender of the Indian correspondence to this man, it turns out that another voice, other words, the words of another, the presence of a subsequent epistle, are anticipated. ‘I know that a stranger’s hand will write to me next.’ Admittedly this stranger is anticipated as endorsing St John once more, and in Biblical terms (‘to say that the good and faithful servant has been called at length into the joy of his Lord’). But it is the case that

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this voice, this pen, this letter from the stranger are to have their say when St John and his last piece of male missionary mail are silenced. And there is, clearly, much affinity between the pen-holding hand of the stranger and the pen-holding hand of Charlotte Brontë. Throughout the novel, the stranger, the alien, the Other has been a woman—especially Rochester’s women, Bertha Mason and Jane Eyre, the one a madwoman in the attic, a Creole from the West Indies, literally the dark stranger who is finally burnt to death in a terrible conflagration which consumes her and her person, the other a woman and wife who is presented as Easternised, a European version of the dark stranger—both of them women who have been as it were struggling to get their voices, their texts, their stories heard above the din of the predominant male discourse. Now, right at the last moment, even as the male discourse looks and sounds so predominant, it is suggested that a stranger from India will have the last word. And it is, of course, the manifest case that some of the English versions of that stranger, our narrator Jane Eyre, and behind her our author Charlotte Brontë, are already having the final word. The pens are, in fact, already in their hands. These are hands, female ones, that have yielded to Rochester in marriage, and that are quoting, repeating, and on the face of it endorsing a dense palimpset, a whole tradition of male writings—St John Rivers’s, St John’s, Christ’s, the Bible’s, the mass of male missionary correspondence of the time. But they are also hands that, at this very last moment, are lifting the curtain, turning the page, to reveal a future in which the hand of the stranger will hold the pen, will command the correspondence, will provide discourses that are currently unheard or scarcely heard, filling the page with alternative voices from the likes of Jane Eyre, Bertha Mason, Charlotte Brontë, Mary Hill, Isabelle Paterson, the women who were ‘grilled alive’, sickened, went mad and died in Calcutta and Berhampur for the cause of Eastern women’s betterment, and the women who went mad and burned and bled in England for what Jane Eyre suggests was an identical or analogous cause, the betterment of the lives of the women of England. Jane Eyre ends: ‘Amen; even so, come, Lord Jesus.’ In opening the future to the ‘stranger’s hand’ it is also saying ‘even so, come, the letter, the text, the discourse, of the stranger, the (present) female Other’—which includes the wife as missionary, to be accepted at last as ‘your real sister, or a man and a clergyman like yourself’.

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Bibliography Booth, General William (1890, Salvation Army; 6th reprint edn, 1970) In Darkest England and the Way Out, Charles Knight and Co., London. Newman, John Henry (1845, edn 1974) An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Pelican, Harmondsworth. Sibree, James (ed.) (1923, 4th edn) London Missionary Society: A Register of Missionariesl Deputations, Etc., from 1796 to 1923, London Missionary Society, London. Wise, T. J. and J. A. Symington (1933) The Brontës: Their Lives, Friendships and Correspondence, Shakespeare Head, Oxford.

Female Emancipation in an Imperial Frame: English Women and the Campaign against Sati (Widow-Burning) in India, 1813–30 Clare Midgley Between 13 February 1829 and 29 March 1830 a total of 14 separate groups of women from around England sent petitions to Parliament calling on it to abolish sati, or rather what they described as ‘the practice in India of burning widows on the funeral piles of their husbands’.1, 2 Amongst the earliest female petitioning, and directly preceding women’s more extensive petitioning for the abolition of colonial slavery, this step outside the private domestic sphere was taken not by women who identified as political radicals or supporters of the ‘rights of women’ but rather by women associated with the evangelical missionary movement. Petitioning formed part of a broader campaign against sati which also involved English women being drawn into the first co-ordinated attempt to provide Christian education for Indian girls and women. All this took place some 40 years before the emergence of an organised women’s movement

Source: Midgley, C., “Female Emancipation in an Imperial Frame: English Women and the Campaign against Sati (Widow-Burning) in India, 1813–30.” Women’s History Review 9.1 (2000): pp. 95–121. Reprinted by permission of the publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandfon line.com. The original article holds three illustrations which are not included here. The locations of those illustrations are marked with asterisk notes in the text. 1 I would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Leverhulme Trust, for a Research Fellowship which facilitated the research and writing of this article. Thanks also to members of the Women’s History Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, to my colleague Dr James Chiriyankandath and to the two anonymous readers of this article for their valuable comments. 2 See, for example, text of petition of the female inhabitants of Melbourne (Derbyshire), Journal of the House of Commons, vol. 84 (1829), entry for 2 April 1829, p. 192. The term ‘suttee’ rather than sati was used in British nineteenth-century texts. Definitions of sati vary in English and Indian languages: see John Stratton Hawley (Ed.) (1994) Sati, the Blessing and the Curse: the burning of wives in India (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 11–15. In this article the term sati is used to refer to the practice of widow-burning (rather than to the woman herself). The key recent study of the debate over sati which took place within late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century colonial India is Lata Mani (1998) Contentious Traditions: the debate on sati in colonial India (Berkeley: University of California Press).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/97890

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in Britain. What, then, was the significance of English women’s involvement in the campaign against sati in the early nineteenth century?3 The mobilisation of sati in British colonial discourse has been identified by Gayatri Spivak as providing a major justification for imperial rule: ‘White men are saving brown women from brown men’.4 What, then, happens when white women are inserted into Spivak’s formulation of the contest over sati? What new perspectives does a consideration of English women’s involvement in the British campaign against sati offer on the relationship between the beginnings of evangelical Christian missionary activity in India, the shift to a culturally interventionist imperial policy, and the growth of justifications of imperialism in the name of saving indigenous women? Did English women conceptualise and enact their relationship to Indian women in a way which differed from that of English men? To what ways did identification along gender lines operate across cultural divides and within an imperial framework? The interventions of English women into Indian women’s lives have hitherto been studied mainly with reference to the period of the organised women’s movement in Britain during the second half of the nineteenth century. Then, as Antoinette Burton has shown, feminist interventions on the imperial stage on behalf of Indian women became a way of promoting their own claim to a place in the national body politic.5 Did women’s involvement in the campaign against sati earlier in the century perhaps fulfil a similar function, providing one of the roots out of which modern feminism began to develop in Britain?6 To put it another way, how was the evangelical philanthropic project of ‘women’s mission to women’ played out on the imperial stage, and how important

3 The use of the term ‘English’ (rather than ‘British’) reflects the fact that I have not found any evidence for active involvement by Scottish, Welsh or Irish women in the campaign against sati. 4 Gayatri Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak? in C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds) (1988) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education), p. 296. For an interesting critique of Spivak’s argument that this colonial discourse allows no space for the subaltern woman to have agency see Ania Loomba (1993) Dead Women Tell No Tales: issues of female subjectivity, subaltern agency and tradition in colonial and post-colonial writings on widow immolation in India, History Workshop Journal, 36, pp. 209–227. See also Anand A. Yang, Whose Sati? Widow-burning in Early Nineteenth-century India, in Cheryl JohnsonOdim & Margaret Strobel (Eds) (1992) Expanding the Boundaries of Women’s History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), pp. 74–100. 5 Antoinette Burton (1994) Burdens of History: British feminists, Indian women, and imperial culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press). 6 Jane Rendall (1985) The Origins of Modern Feminism: women in Britain, France and the United States (Basingstoke: Macmillan).

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was this imperial philanthropy in shaping the development of feminism in England? This article attempts to address such questions through a study of English women’s developing involvement in the missionary campaign against sati, from their organisation in general support of missionary activity in India, through their specific promotion of Indian female education as a mean of eradicating sati, to their petitioning of Parliament as part of the campaign to abolish sati by legislative means. This investigation provides the basis for the concluding discussion of the meaning of female emancipation within an imperial frame.

Christian Missions, Female Supporters and ‘Family, Fireside Evils’

The roots of the British campaign against sati lay in the beginnings of missionary activity in India by the new missionary societies set up by evangelical Christians in the 1790s.7 This ‘foreign mission’ movement was concerned with the conversion of the heathen abroad, particularly within the British Empire, but it had close links with the ‘home mission’ movement, which focused on the propagation of ‘active’ Christianity to the working class within England.8 The missionary movement as a whole was informed by the evangelical conviction that the key to the eradication of vice and sin lay in combating both religious infidelity at home and ‘heathen’ idolatry in the Empire.9 One of the first major battles which evangelicals fought was to get the Charter of the East India Company modified so that India would be opened up to missionary activity. Their first attempt in 1793 failed, but in 1813 success followed a concerted campaign conducted both within Parliament and by pressure from without.10 As well as achieving its immediate objective, the

7 The Baptist Missionary Society was formed by the Particular Baptists in 1792; the nondenominational, but predominantly Congregational, London Missionary Society was founded in 1795; and the Evangelical Anglicans founded the Church Missionary Society in 1799. 8 For the close link between ‘home’ and ‘foreign’ missions see Susan Thorne, ‘The Conversion of Englishmen and the Conversion of the World Inseparable’: missionary imperialism and the language of class in early industrial Britain, in Frederick Cooper & Laura Stoler (Eds) (1997) Tensions of Empire: colonial cultures in a bourgeois world (University of California Press), pp. 238–262. 9 Brian Stanley (1990) The Bible and the Flag: protestant missions and British imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Leicester: Apollos), chapter 3. 10 Stanley, The Bible and the Flag, p. 98; Ernest Marshall Howse (1953) Saints in Politics: the ‘Clapham Sect’ and the growth of freedom (London: George Allen & Unwin), p. 92.

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campaign gave wide public exposure to missionary propaganda and drew a large section of the public into active support for missions. The missionary campaign was spearheaded in Parliament by Evangelical Anglicans who were members of the influential Clapham Sect. In their propaganda the position of women, and in particular the practice of sati, played a crucial role in arguments that Britain had a duty to bring Christianity and civilisation to its Indian subjects. A practice which was confined to a minority of Hindus came to stand for the depravity of the culture of the Indian subcontinent as a whole. Thus, Charles Grant, who had spent over twenty years in India and who was elected to the Board of the East India Company in 1794, sought to combat positive views about India promoted by eighteenth-century British Orientalist scholars such as William Jones by stressing the suffering of women ‘doomed to joyless confinement through life, and a violent premature death’.11 His colleague William Wilberforce, who led the successful Parliamentary campaign to open India to missions in 1813, gave a powerful speech in the House of Commons in which he described ‘the evils of Hindostan’ as ‘family, fireside evils’, paying particular attention to the ill-treatment of women, as evidenced by polygamy and sati, and contrasting this with the equality to which women were entitled in all Christian countries.12 Wilberforce’s rhetoric of ‘fireside evils’ would have had a powerful resonance for evangelicals. It set up a contrast between the fireside as the scene of the horrible spectacle of the Hindu widow burning on the funeral pyre, and evangelicals’ idealised view of ‘fireside enjoyments, homeborn happiness’ as the hub of the Christian family.13 Indeed, interlinking the domestic and the political in characteristic evangelical fashion, Wilberforce would read out at the dinner table a list of women who had recently committed sati.14 Evangelical women were expected to exert an important influence over moral and religious matters from such a domestic base and, while the public campaign of 1813 was 11 Charles Grant (1813) Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain, Particularly with Respect to Morals; and on the means of improving it— written chiefly in the year 1792 (London: House of Commons), pp. 30, 56. 12 William Wilberforce, Substance of the speech of William Wilberforce, Esq. on the clause of the East India Bill for promoting the religious instruction and moral improvement of the natives of the British dominions in India, on the 22nd of June, and the 1st and 12th of July, 1813, in The Pamphleteer (London), vol. 3, no. 5 (March 1814), pp. 43–113: quote from p. 70. 13 The quotation is from leading evangelical poet William Cowper, The Task, as quoted in Leonore Davidoff & Catherine Hall (1987) Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850 (London: Hutchinson), p. 165. 14 John Pollock (1986 edition) Wilberforce (Tring: Lion Publishing; first published 1977, London: Constable), p. 236.

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an exclusively male preserve, the leading female member of the Clapham Sect, Hannah More, worked energetically behind the scenes to encourage signatories to petitions in favour of the opening up of India to missionaries.15 As missionary activity in India expanded in the period after 1813, missionary societies became increasingly reliant for financial support on organised networks of local ladies’ associations, which mobilised thousands of middle-class women to conduct systematic fund-raising among the poor.16 Sati became the focus of appeals designed to draw such English women into such active support for missions. In June 1813, for example, the Missionary Register based their appeal to British women on an item ‘On the burning of women in India’ which they had selected from the influential four volume Account of the Writings, Religion, and Manners of the Hindoos by the Rev. William Ward, one of the early group of British Baptist missionaries at the Danish enclave of Seramapore.17 The appeal, in contrasting the lot of British women living in a Christian land with that of Indian women living in a land of superstition, set a pattern for future calls for English women’s help: Let every Christian woman, who reads the following statement, pity the wretched thousands of her sex who are sacrificed every year in India to a cruel superstition, and thank God for her own light and privileges, and pray and labour earnestly for the salvation of these her miserable fellow subjects.18 Soon members of the new ladies’ associations themselves began to shape missionary discourse on sati, drawing on missionary accounts but presenting them in ways which they felt would have most appeal to an audience of English women. An early example is the 1814 Address of the Southwark Ladies’ Association. One of the first female auxiliaries of the Church Missionary Society, the Association had as its patroness Mrs Henry Thornton, wife of one 15 Letter from Mrs H. More to Wm. Wilberforce, Barley Wood, 12 April 1813, as quoted in Robert Isaac Wilberforce & Samuel Wilberforce (Eds) (1840) The Correspondence of William Wilberforce (London: John Murray), vol. 2, pp. 240–241; Howse, Saints in Politics, p. 86. 16 Frank Prochaska (1980) Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press), pp. 23–29; Eugene Stock (1899) The History of the Church Missionary Society, 3 vols (London: Church Missionary Society), vol. 1, p. 243. Prochaska identifies the first female auxiliary of a missionary society as the Female Missionary Society in Northampton, set up in 1805 as an auxiliary of the Baptist Missionary Society. 17 Ward’s text became a key source of information on Hindu religion and society in Britain at this period—see Mani, Contentious Traditions: the debate on sati in colonial India, ch. 4. 18 Missionary Register, June 1813, p. 215.

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of the Clapham Sect leaders of the CMS. The women’s Address described sati as ‘one picture of misery … which appeals to their own sex’. Breaking with the usual pattern of a lurid account accompanied by general expressions of horror at the barbarous practice, the Appeal instead set out to draw women into sympathy for, and empathy with, Indian women. Defining a characteristic of the female sex as being ‘to commiserate with suffering humanity’, the Appeal opened with an attempt to get women to identify as mothers with the sufferings of Indian widows, taking it for granted that Indian and English women shared the same loving feelings for their children: Let the anxiously fond mother, who trembles lest her tender offspring should, by a wise but inscrutable Providence, be deprived of either of the guardians of their early years, for a moment endeavour to realize the poignant anguish which must rend the breast of that other, who in the decease of her children’s best support, hears the summons for her to forsake them, at a time, too, when they most need her fostering care; and to immolate herself on her husband’s funeral pile!—The affecting representation excites our sympathy: let it stimulate our exertions.19 English women supporters of missions thus couched their opposition to sati in terms of an Indian widow’s duty as a mother. This accorded with evangelical idealisation of motherhood; it also linked their support for missions in the Empire to their preoccupations in the domestic philanthropic arena with work among working-class women and children.20 Here we see middle-class ‘women’s mission to women’ taking on an imperial dimension at a very early stage.21 Here, too, we see the evangelical ideology of domesticity being deployed to promote a pro-imperial message. Readers were encouraged to evoke the following scene of family prayer along the ideal evangelical model: enter the dwelling where your messenger has proclaimed the glad tidings of salvation. Behold a father, a mother, a family, forming an assembly 19 Missionary Register, April 1814, pp. 136–140. 20 Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy. 21 For pioneering examinations of the links which women made between metropolitan and imperial philanthropic missions to women and children at this period see Alison Twells (1998) ‘Let Us Begin Well at Home’: class, ethnicity and Christian motherhood in the writing of Hannah Kilham, 1774–1832, in Eileen Janes Yeo (Ed.) Radical Femininity. Women’s Self-representation in the Public Sphere (Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp. 25–51; Alison Twells (1998) ‘Happy English Children’: class, ethnicity and the making of missionary women, 1800–40, Women’s Studies International Forum, 21, pp. 235–246.

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of humble, grateful worshippers, who, while they adore the Fountain of their mercies, are fervently craving Heaven’s richest blessings on the British Isles, the medium through which those blessings flowed. The building block of the ambitious missionary project of the conversion and moral reform of India is represented not as the individual convert but rather as the Christianised family, in accordance with the centrality of the household to the Evangelical project.22 The reward for English women’s exertions will be the gratitude of Indian families towards both Christian missionaries and the British nation. In such ways were evangelical English women encouraged to imagine that they had the power, under the auspices of the British Empire, to extend their own ‘privileges’ to other women, and so to mitigate what Wilberforce had labelled the ‘family, fireside evils’ of ‘Hindostan’, epitomised in the horror of sati.

Rescuing Indian Women: Female Education and the Eradication of Sati

From the outset, a central element of missionary activity in India was the spread of education. The setting up of mission schools was motivated by the belief that intellectual enlightenment would lead to rejection of Hindu idolatry, conversion to Christianity, and moral reform of society. However, missionary provision for girls’ education lagged well behind that of boys during the first two decades of the nineteenth century, relying on small-scale initiatives by missionaries’ wives.23 The obvious solution was to specifically recruit qualified women from Britain as teachers, but there was considerable resistance among the male leadership of the missionary societies to the idea of employing

22

For the similar centrality of family and household to the British missionary project in the West Indies see Catherine Hall (1992) Missionary Stories: gender and ethnicity in England in the 1830s and 1840s, in White, Male and Middle Class: explorations in feminism and history (Cambridge: Polity Press), pp. 205–254. 23 M. A. Laird (1972) Missionaries and Education in Bengal, 1793–1837 (Oxford: Clarendon Press); Kenneth Ingham (1956) Reformers in India, 1793–1833: an account of the work of Christian missionaries on behalf of social reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); Kanti Prasanna Sen Gupta (1971) The Christian Missionaries in Bengal, 1793–1833 (Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay). All these texts have sections on the development of girls’ education. See also E. Daniel Potts (1967) British Baptist Missionaries in Indian 1793–1837. The History of Seramapore and its Missions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

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single women.24 Frustrated by this situation, Baptist missionary William Ward decided to appeal directly to British women to raise funds to send women teachers to India. In a series of appeals made to English women between 1817 and 1821, he linked support for female education with Britain’s imperial mission to eradicate sati.25 Sati, he argued, exemplified ‘the awful state of female society in this miserable country’.26 Imperial rule had come about so that Britain would have the opportunity to ‘accomplish some very important moral change’ in the ‘long-degraded state’ of India.27 Privileged British women had a duty to help the seventy-five millions of less fortunate Indian women. As Stanley has concluded in his study of the relationship between missions and empire, the ‘Christian belief in divine providence led by logical steps to the concept of Britain’s imperial role as a sacred trust to be used in the interests of the gospel’.28 Here we see articulated British women’s duty to help fulfil this sacred trust. To fulfil this duty Ward advocated organised support for female education in India. British women should organise themselves into societies to ‘rescue [Indian women] from ignorance, and by that means from these funeral piles’.29 Government action against sati would fail without such educational initiatives to back it up: ‘government may do much to put an end to these immolations; but without the communication of knowledge, the fires can never be wholly quenched’.30 This project, Ward argued, was capable of success. His optimism was grounded in evangelical missionaries’ faith in the potential of all, regardless of cultural background or ‘race’, to become ‘civilised’. It was also informed by his own personal high evaluation of women: he went beyond most evangelicals 24 Stock, The History of the Church Missionary Society, vol. 1, pp. 124–125; for similar problems faced by single women who wished to undertake Christian educational work in West Africa in the 1820s see Twells, ‘Let Us Begin Well at Home’. 25 William Ward (1817) A View of the History, Literature and Religion of the Hindoos, 3rd edn (London: Baptist Missionary Society), vol. 1, preface; William Ward, Letter to the Ladies of Liverpool, and of the United Kingdom, The Times, 3 January 1821, p. 3; William Ward (1821) Farewell Letters to a Few Friends in Britain and America, on Returning to Bengal in 1821 (London: Black, Kingsbury, Oarbury & Allen), letter to Miss Hope of Liverpool, pp. 62–85. For information on Ward’s visit to Britain see John Clarke Marshman (1859) The Life and Times of Carey, Marshman and Ward. Embracing a History of the Seramapore Mission, 2 vols (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans & Roberts), vol. 2, pp. 199, 242. 26 Ward, Farewell Letters, p. 73. 27 Ward, A View, vol. 1, preface, p. xvii. 28 Stanley, The Bible and the Flag, p. 68. 29 Ward, A View, vol. 1, preface, p. 1. 30 Ward, ‘Letter to the Ladies’.

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in stressing not only women’s spiritual and moral qualities but also their intellectual capacities. Indian women, he suggested, had as much intellectual potential as Indian men: ‘a few individuals have been found, by their knowledge of letters and of philosophy, putting the other sex to the blush’.31 They also had the potential to emulate British women: with education they would be ‘behind none of the sex in the charms which adorn the female character; in no mental elevation to which the highest rank of British females have attained’;32 they could become the Hannah Mores and Elizabeth Frys of India—the moral reformers of their own society.33 Ward’s high evaluation of Indian women was accompanied by expressions of confidence in the power of British women to bring about social improvements: ‘There can hardly be a misery, connected with human existence, which the pity and the zeal of British females, under the blessing of Providence, is not able to remove’.34 This was truly a women’s cause, one only they could successfully carry out: ‘Other triumphs of humanity may have been gained by our Howards, our Clarksons, our Wilberforces; but this emancipation of the females and widows of British India must be the work of the British fair’35 this was ‘the cause of woman—but especially of every christian widow—of every christian mother—of every christian female’.36 Ward’s appeals to women were translated into a specific plan of action in 1820 by the British and Foreign School Society.37 The Society’s ‘Appeal in behalf of Native Females’ evoked the horror of sati to persuade British women to contribute to a special fund set up to allow the sending out of one of their countrywomen to train Indian women as teachers: is it not manifest that the Ladies in Britain are the natural guardians of these unhappy Widows and Orphans in British India? Is it possible that our fair countrywomen … can … continue unmoved by the cries issuing from these fires, and from the thousands of orphans which surround them This appeal cannot be made in vain: such a tale of woe was never before addressed to the hearts of British Mothers. Let every Lady of rank 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

Ward, A View, p. 1. Ward, ‘Letter to the Ladies’. Ward, Farewell Letters, p. 84. Ward, ‘Letter to the Ladies’. Ward, ‘Letter to the Ladies’. Ward, Farewell Letters, p. 82. The British and Foreign School Society was a society set up in England in 1814 to organise schools in Britain and abroad along on the monitorial system developed by Joseph Lancaster as a way of providing basic education within a Christian framework to large numbers of working-class children.

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and influence in the United Empire do her duty, and these fires cannot burn another twenty years.38 British women were now being urged to take on an active, guiding, ‘maternalistic’ role as tutors and guardians of suffering Indian women. The Missionary Register urged support for this initiative, pointing out that the issue of sati was currently being raised in Parliament and suggesting that ‘If the Females of the United Empire will act on the appeal now made to them, the Voice of the Country will be so decisive in behalf of just and efficient measures on this subject, that the wishes of humane Senators will be fully accomplished.’39 In other words, widespread female support for the educational initiatives would in itself act as strong public pressure on Parliament to take action against sati. By May 1821 a total of £521.9s had been collected by the Ladies Committee of the British and Foreign School Society to fund sending a woman teacher to Calcutta.40 Mary Anne Cooke was selected: she had worked as a governess in England, and ‘to a sincere love of her sex and fervent piety towards her Saviour, united long acquaintance with the work of education’.41 Cooke, who went on to marry CMS missionary the Rev. Isaac Wilson but was soon widowed, was highly successful in setting up a network of schools in the Calcutta district which taught over 800 pupils over a three year period to 1825.42 In 1828 she became head of the new Central School for Girls in Calcutta, an impressive stone building providing education for some 150–200 scholars with the aim of training them to be teachers.43 In developing girls’ education, Cooke attempted to gain support from several sources. First, there were prominent local Hindu reformers who were supportive of girls’ education despite their suspicion of missionaries’ religious agenda, and lent private support to her work though they stopped short of publicly promoting it.44 Secondly, there were well-to-do English women resident in Calcutta, who in 1824 set up a Ladies’ Society for Native-Female

38 39 40 41 42 43 44

Missionary Register, October 1820, p. 434. Missionary Register, October 1820, p. 435. Missionary Register, May 1821, pp. 197–198. Missionary Register, November 1822, p. 481. Missionary Register, June 1825, p. 245. Church Missionary Society (1849) The Quarterly Papers of the Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East (London: Seeleys), Missionary Papers no. 49 (1828). Sen Gupta, Christian Missionaries, p. 120; Ingham, Reformers in India, p. 93.

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Education and brought Cooke’s schools under female management.45 Thirdly, there were women in England itself. Voluntary financial support from Britain was particularly important given that it was against imperial policy to give official financial support to schools in India which had an explicitly Christian curriculum.46 An ‘Indian Female Education Fund’ in aid of the Ladies’ Society was opened in England in 1825, under the auspices of the Church Missionary Society, and it issued an ‘Appeal to the Ladies of the United Kingdom’.47 In 1829 the fund-raising passed into the hands of the Ladies’ East India Female Education Society, set up in London by Amelia Heber, widow of the former Bishop of Calcutta. Drawing support from a number of aristocratic ladies and Evangelicals associated with the Clapham Sect, it was the first society in Britain to focus specifically on Indian female education.48 Throughout the 1820s, support for female education was presented as a vital complement to the evangelical campaign to get the British government to ban sati. The CMS quarterly Missionary Papers, distributed free to its working-class supporters, juxtaposed engravings and accounts of the horror of sati with appeals for support of Mary Anne Cooke’s schools.49 Anglican vicar Thomas Shuttleworth Grimshawe’s 1825 pamphlet, An Earnest Appeal to British Humanity in Behalf of Hindoo Widows, which called on the British government to abolish sati, concluded by urging support for Mrs Wilson’s schools in an appeal which contrasted the ‘high and manifold privileges’ of British women with ‘the situation of the ignorant, the abject, and deluded Hindoo female, offering her tender infant as a propriatory sacrifice to the Ganges, and finally expiring amidst the flames of the funeral pile’.50 In a similar appeal in 1827 to General Baptist Sunday school teachers and children to raise funds for schools 45 Missionary Register, November 1822, pp. 509–510; June 1826, pp. 346–350. Cooke’s activities had initially been placed by the British and Foreign School Society under the direction of the Calcutta School Society (set up in 1818 mainly to improve indigenous elementary schools for boys), but Hindu members of the society were unhappy about the Christian curriculum in her schools, and control was soon shifted to the Church Missionary Society. 46 It was on these grounds that the Governor-General Lord Amherst in 1825 overruled his council and refused a government grant to the Ladies’ Society for Native-Female Education—see Bengal General Letter, 30 September 1825, paragraphs 54–57, India Office Records E/4/116. 47 Missionary Register, March 1825, pp. 124–125; April 1825, pp. 192–193, June 1825, pp. 244–246. 48 Missionary Register, September 1829, p. 392. 49 Church Missionary Society, The Quarterly Papers, Missionary Papers nos 26 (1822), 32 (1823), 34 (1824), 41 (1826), 49 (1828). 50 Thomas Shuttleworth Grimshawe (1825) An Earnest Appeal to British Humanity in Behalf of Hindoo Widows; in which the abolition of the barbarous rite of burning alive, is proved to be both safe and practicable (London: J. Hatchard & L. B. Seeley), pp. 42–43.

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for girls in Orissa in Bengal, missionary and anti-sati campaigner the Reverend James Peggs evoked the image ‘of a girl of twelve or fourteen years old, burnt alive with the body of her dear husband’.51 Sati continued to be evoked in calls for British women to become missionaries in India even after 1829–30, when it was officially banned in areas of India under direct British control.52 Conversations between Cooke and her pupils and their mothers—mediated by an interpreter—were reported in the Missionary Register with the comment that ‘This is the beginning of an intercourse between the Christian Females of India with the Heathen Women of that land, which will, we trust, rapidly increase, and be imitated in all quarters’.53 There is little evidence of real dialogue, however. Rather than attempting to understand Indian women’s own varied social backgrounds, perspectives and wishes, Cooke seemed secure in her own conceptualisation of her mission: to raise Indian girls from ignorance so that they would be able to gain the respect and affection of their husbands, to ‘properly discharge the important duties of their sex’, and to exercise good influence from a familial base.54 An image of Cooke’s ideal type of young Indian womanhood appeared in the Missionary Papers: bearing book and sewing workbag, symbols of education and domesticity, her demeanour poised and serious, she is foregrounded against the open sky and a neat landscape with schoolhouse*. The sense of Mary Ann Cooke bringing order into Indian women’s lives through education is also emphasised by an image in the Missionary Register which shows the scene inside one of her schools: the neat rows of Indian girls, supervised by two English women, with three Indian women looking on, all set in a peaceful rural scene complete with bathing children**. * Figure 1 (A scholar of the native-female schools in Calcutta) is not included here. See: Church Missionary Society, Missionary Papers, no. 49 (1828). By permission of the British Library (shelfmark: PP936b). ** Figure 2 (School of Hindoo girls at Calcutta) is not included here. See: Missionary Register, March 1826. By permission of the British Library (shelfmark: PP940). 51 The General Baptist Repository and Missionary Observer, 1827, p. 257. 52 Jemima Thompson (1841) Memoir of British Female Missionaries with a Survey of Women in Heathen Countries (London: William Smith). 53 Missionary Register, 1822, p. 485. 54 Missionary Register, 1825, p. 246. David Savage has argued that there was a shift in the nature of missionary education for Indian women between the 1830s and the 1850s, from a focus on the moral rescue of degraded and oppressed women to a focus on training women to be mothers and moral reformers (see David Savage [1997] Missionaries and the development of a colonial ideology of female education in India, Gender and History, 9, pp. 201–221). However, the writings of Cooke and Ward suggest that in the 1820s missionary education for girls combined both objectives.

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These images are in stark contrast to the frontispiece of the 1830 edition of James Peggs’s anti-sati tract: here a half-naked widow is consumed by flames on the funeral pyre of her husband, surrounded by billowing smoke and men waving fire-brands and cutlasses, the horror of the scene emphasised by the two European men shielding their eyes at the edge of the image***. Cooke represented her educational mission in terms of self-sacrifice: she had left ‘her country, her parents, her friends, and every other advantage’ and ‘given up great expectations’.55 Cooke’s positive presentation of womanly selfsacrifice to the Christian missionary cause set up an implicit contrast with the self-sacrifice of the Hindu widow in obedience to ‘superstition’. Cooke’s sense of self-sacrifice had a very real basis: many missionaries died of tropical diseases after only a few years in the ‘field’. The image of the self-sacrificing single woman missionary had another side to it, however: it promoted women’s duty to women as an alternative vocation to marriage—indeed, Cooke described herself as single but ‘married’ to her work as an educator of Indian women. She had previously occupied a marginal status in British society: she worked as a governess, one of the few respectable but poorly paid jobs open to women from middle-class backgrounds who were forced by family circumstances to earn their own living.56 In moving from Britain to India she shifted from a subservient private position in a wealthy household into a position of some public prominence in which she was expected to take initiatives and to superintend a network of schools. As the first single British woman to enter the missionary education field in India, Cooke was the forerunner of a group of single female missionaries who, as Jane Haggis has pointed out, found in India a new sphere of opportunity which contrasted with their constricted lives in Britain.57

***

Figure 3 (A suttee: or, the burning of a Hindoo widow with the body of her husband) is not included here. See: James Peggs, India’s Cries to British Humanity, 2nd edn (London: Seeley & Son, 1830). By permission of the British Library (shelfmark: 1570/1857). 55 Missionary Register, November 1822, p. 483. 56 For the difficult position of the governess see M. Jeanne Peterson, The Victorian Governess: status incongruence in family and society, in Martha Vicinus (Ed.) (1980 edn) Suffer and be Still: women in the Victorian age (London: Methuen; first published Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), pp. 3–19. 57 Jane Haggis, White Women and Colonialism: towards a non-recuperative history, in Clare Midgley (Ed.) (1998) Gender and Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp. 45–78.

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Outlawing Sati: Women’s Participation in the Petitioning Campaign

Alongside attempts to undermine Hindu support for sati through Christian education, missionaries and their supporters put increasing pressure on the British authorities to take legal steps to eradicate the practice. This pressure was stepped up when official statistics suggested that the regulation of sati introduced from 1813 onwards had actually led to an increase, rather than a decline, in widow immolation. At the same time, a growing campaign against sati was developing within indigenous Indian society itself, led by the influential Bengali Hindu reformer Rammohun Roy. Roy’s tracts on sati set out the grounds for his opposition to sati and championed the cause of Indian women’s education. He not only gained the support of a section of the Bengali elite but also heavily influenced missionary discourse against sati: English editions of his tracts were published and his evidence that Hindu scriptures did not sanction sati was deployed by British campaigners.58 Within the British Parliament, missionaries gained vital support from Thomas Fowell Buxton, Wilberforce’s successor as leader of the Evangelical Anglican group of reformers. In 1820 the first Blue Book on sati was published, and the following year Buxton initiated the first Parliamentary debate on the issue.59 In 1823 public pressure for the prohibition of sati began to mount, with the presentation of the first anti-sati petition to Parliament.60 The campaign gained renewed momentum in 1827, following the publication of the first edition of what became the most widely circulated and extensively reviewed antisati tract, the Reverend James Peggs’s The Suttees’ Cry to Britain.61 Peggs urged that petitions be sent to Parliament, and promoted his anti-sati campaign by a tour around England addressing local missionary meetings, and by setting

58 There is an extensive literature on Roy: a useful starting point is V. C. Joshi (Ed.) (1975) Rammohun Roy and the Process of Modernisation in India (Delhi: Vikas). For the English text of Roy’s tracts on sati see Translation of a Conference between an Advocate for and an Opponent of the Practice of Burning Widows Alive, Calcutta, 1818, and A Second Conference between an Advocate for and an Opponent of the Practice of Burning Widows Alive, Calcutta, 1820, in J. C. Ghose (Ed.) (1982) The English Works of Raja Rammohun Roy (New Delhi: Cosmo), vol. 2. 59 The Parliamentary Debates, new series, vol. 5 (London: Hansard, 1822), entry for 20 June 1821, col. 1217. 60 A Petition of the Gentry, Clergy and other Inhabitants of the County of Bedford, Journal of the House of Commons, vol. 78 (1823), p. 404, entry for 18 June. 61 Joseph Peggs (1827) The Suttees’ Cry to Britain (London: Seeley & Co.).

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up in Coventry the Society for the Abolition of Human Sacrifices in India.62 Its remit was broader than sati alone: it aimed to campaign for the passage of British laws to abolish a range of ‘heathen’ practices. By the beginning of 1830 the Society had circulated thousands of pamphlets, arranged a public meeting to Coventry to petition Parliament against sati, and stimulated the formation of similar committees in both London and Birmingham.63 Altogether, between 1823 and 1830 a total of 107 petitions against sati were presented to the House of Commons, the majority from 1827 onwards, with petitioning reaching a peak in the first half of 1830.64 Despite this substantial expression of public opinion, historians have largely ignored the extra-Parliamentary campaign against sati which took place in Britain, probably because it was completely overshadowed in scale by the contemporary anti-slavery campaign. The participation of women in the anti-sati campaign has gone unrecognised. What, then, was the extent of women’s involvement? All three human sacrifice abolition committees were led by men, as was customary at the period, and there is no evidence for the formation of related ladies’ associations. While Peggs and other activists were keen to draw women into active support of the campaign, they were cautious about urging women to undertake public action. At this period, although there was no explicit rule prohibiting women from signing petitions to Parliament, it was generally felt to be inappropriate: women should not meddle in the masculine sphere of politics, and it was feared that the presence of their signatures would bring discredit and ridicule to the causes they supported.65 In the first edition of The Suttees’ Cry (1827), Peggs included a tentative call for public action by women against sati. He closed The Suttees’ Cry with a long quotation from the Asiatic Observer of 1824 which urged the British inhabitants of Calcutta to petition against sati and suggested that the ladies of Calcutta 62 For reports of the society’s formation see, for example, General Baptist Repository and Missionary Observer, 1829, p. 37; Baptist Magazine, vol. 21 (Jan. 1829), p. 33; Missionary Register, March 1829, p. 146; Monthly Repository new series, vol. 3 (Jan. 1829), p. 71. 63 First report of the Coventry Society for the Abolition of Human Sacrifices in India. 1 February 1830, The General Baptist Repository and Missionary Observer, pp. 113–118. 64 Journal of the House of Commons, vol. 78 (1823), p. 404; vol. 79 (1824–25), p. 144; vol. 82 (1826–27), pp. 234, 334, 340, 462, 472, 478, 486, 491, 505, 511,567, 567, 571, 575; vol. 83 (1828), pp. 6, 313, 409, 443, 467, 477, 491, 494, 525, 555; vol. 84 (1829), pp. 28, 192, 370, 384, 406; vol. 85 (1830), pp. 69, 148, 160, 184, 190, 214, 235, 242, 255, 282, 402, 590, 603. 65 For debate about female petitioning among anti-slavery campaigners in the 1790s and again in 1830 see Clare Midgley (1992) Women Against Slavery (London: Routledge), pp. 23–24, 62–64; for debate in 1829 over female signatures to petitions against Roman Catholic Emancipation see Linda Colley (1992) Britons, Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press), pp. 278–279.

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should petition, to ‘impress on their husbands the importance of rescuing a degraded part of the female sex’.66 Here female petitioning was safely removed to a distant colonial setting and presented as nothing more than a way of exerting private wifely moral influence on husbands. Peggs made a bolder suggestion in March 1828 when he produced a second updated edition of The Suttees’ Cry. In this he suggested ‘petitions to the British Parliament, signed by females from the principal Cities and Towns in Britain and Ireland’. He justified his call in these terms: ‘should it be objected—this is an unprecedented method of expressing public opinion: it may be replied, “Is not the destruction of so many hundred unhappy widows annually in British India, a sufficient justification of it?”’67 Peggs’s suggestion, however, was tucked away in a footnote, and others were wary about taking it up. The Coventry society never publicly called for female petitions, and the London committee did not do so until January 1830, nearly seven years after the first men’s petition against sati.68 Similarly, the Baptist Magazine made no mention of female petitions until March 1830, when it sought to establish their acceptability by stressing the exceptional circumstances and the respectable femininity of the women petitioners ‘who, touched by the urgency of the case, are coming forth from their accustomed retirement, clad in the veil of modesty, and in a tone of amiable commiseration to express their feelings.’69 Despite the cautious approach by the male leadership, between February 1829 and April 1830 a total of 14 separate groups of women from around England sent anti-sati petitions to Parliament, comprising around one-fifth of the antisati petitions presented over this particular period and around one-eighth of total anti-sati petitions.70 Anti-sati petitions were presented to the House of Commons from the female inhabitants of the towns of Castle Donnington and Loughborough in Leicestershire, from Melbourne, Heanor and Ilkestone in Derbyshire, from Stroud in Gloucestershire, from Alcester in Warwickshire, and from Blackburn in Lancashire. Petitions were also presented from the female members of the following congregations: Protestant dissenters of the Independent denomination meeting at Bassingbourn in Cambridgeshire; Protestant Dissenters of Old Gravel Pit Meeting in Hackney in Middlesex; 66 Peggs, The Suttees’ Cry, p. 81. 67 Joseph Peggs (1828 edition) The Suttees’ Cry to Britain (2nd edn, London: Seeley & Co.), p. 91, footnote. 68 Baptist Magazine, vol. 22 (February 1830), pp. 74–75. 69 Baptist Magazine, vol. 22 (March 1830), p. 116. 70 Unfortunately, as with the men’s petitions, there is no surviving record of the number of individual signatories to each petition.

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Protestant Dissenters’ meeting in Eagle-Street, London; Protestant Dissenters of the Calvinistic Meeting-House in Kettering, Northamptonshire; and Baptists of Cockspur-street Chapel in Liverpool, Lancashire. In addition, a mixed petition was sent from the male and female inhabitants of Falmouth in Cornwall. Five of the groups also presented petitions to the House of Lords.71 Female petitions thus came from a wide range of English counties, from both nonconformist religious groups and town inhabitants, and from communities ranging from small rural towns to large industrial cities. This is not totally surprising, given the wide diffusion of missionary propaganda at this period, and Peggs’s own tours of the country to address missionary meetings; it mirrors the overall spread of petitions against sati, which all came from England—many from the same towns as the men’s petitions—with the exception of one from Belfast.72 Unfortunately, however, definite information about the organisation of the petitions is lacking: in particular, we know nothing about women’s own initiatives. Interestingly, there is no evidence that female petitions against sati excited the disapproval or ribald dismissal that greeted women petitioners against Roman Catholic emancipation at this period.73 Perhaps this was because sati had long been presented in evangelical and missionary circles as an appropriate area of female concern—a part of women’s philanthropic mission to women. Certainly the women’s petitions presented the issue as one within ‘women’s sphere’. One way the women petitioners did this was to stress their identification with the sufferings of their own sex. They urged Parliament to take action ‘on a subject in which, as females, they are deeply interested’ and which demanded their ‘peculiar sympathy’. They described sati as ‘degrading to the character, and disgusting to the moral feelings, of every British female’, and they expressed ‘heartfelt commiseration with Indian widows’. Presenting their public action as an extension of their private familial roles, they stated that ‘as Wives, as Mothers, as Daughters, or as Sisters’ they could not contemplate practices such as sati and infanticide ‘but with emotions of the most painful Nature’. Women also presented the issue as one of humanity—and thus within their 71 Journal of the House of Commons, vol. 84 (1829), pp. 28, 192, 370, 375, 406; vol. 85 (1830), pp. 69, 148, 184, 235; Journal of the House of Lords, vol. 61 (1829), p. 591; vol. 62 (1830), pp. 45, 74, 136, 183. 72 For the widespread distribution of missionary propaganda at this period see Thorne, ‘The Conversion of Englishmen’. 73 Colley, Britons, pp. 278–279; for Parliamentary reception of these petitions in 1829 see Parliamentary Debates, new series vol. 20 (London: Hansard, 1829), pp. 570–572, 372–373; 1322–1327.

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sphere as philanthropists and guardians of morality—rather than one of politics. Acknowledging that they were ‘aware that it is unusual for persons of their sex to express opinions on matters of legislation’, they attempted to disarm criticism by stating that they would not ‘have done so on the present occasion, had they not been impelled by the convictions of conscience and the claims of benevolence’. Nor would they have acted ‘on any other subject than humanity’. Finally, women petitioners diffused the potential interpretation of their action as usurping men’s role by presenting themselves as pleading for Christian paternal protection for women. Thus, the women of Eagle-street congregation described Indian women as ‘their fellow-subjects’ who ‘had an equal right to the paternal protection of the British Government’. One group of petitioners even appended the following lines of verse to their appeal: Say but a single word and save Ten thousand mothers from a flaming grave, And tens of thousands from that source of woe, That ever must to orphan’d children flow.74 Like the women anti-slavery petitioners who followed them, the women petitioners against sati thus presented the issue as one of humanity and morality rather than politics, and framed their petitions as appeals to powerful men rather than challenges to male authority.

Female Emancipation in an Imperial Frame

By 1830 the British campaign against sati had achieved its objective. The recently-appointed Governor-General of India, Lord William Bentinck, was an Evangelical Anglican who supported missionary activity and was determined to tackle the question of sati.75 After canvassing opinion in India, on 4 December 1829 he issued his regulation on sati which forbade widow-burning in the Bengal Presidency; the Governors of Madras and Bombay followed suit 74 For texts of petitions from which these quotations are taken see: Appendix to the Votes and Proceedings of the House of Commons, 1830, p. 148, p. 285; Baptist Magazine, vol. 22 (March 1830), p. 116; Journal of House of Lords, vol. 62 (1830), p. 183; Appendix to the Votes and Proceedings of the House of Commons, 1829, p. 1515. 75 John Rosselli (1974) Lord William Bentinck: the making of a liberal imperialist, 1774–1839 (Delhi: Thompson Press). Rosselli describes Bentinck as a supporter of anti-slavery, a friend of Charles Grant, an active member of the British and Foreign Bible Society and an associate of the Clapham Sect.

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in February and April 1830.76 News of these developments filtered back to Britain and petitioning came to a halt in the middle of 1830. Indigenous reaction in India was mixed: a group of orthodox Hindus made a petition appeal to the British government against Bentinck’s ruling; this, however, was countered by a petition by Hindu reformers in support of Bentinck. The latter was brought personally to London in 1831 by Rajah Rammohun Roy, who, as the first prominent Indian to visit the metropolis, became something of a celebrity in radical, Unitarian and feminist circles.77 The successful conclusion of the missionary campaign against sati marked the beginnings of a more culturally interventionist imperial policy by the British in India during the ‘Age of Reform’ associated with Bentinck’s governorship (1828–35): the era of expanding military conquest was succeeded by a period of consolidation of administrative control.78 In British evangelical circles the abolition of sati was represented as the rescue of Hindu widows by feeling Christian men, erasing the earlier impotence of missionaries, the initial sanctioning of ‘voluntary’ sati by the British authorities, and the vital input of Hindu reformers such as Rammohun Roy—as well as British women’s active contribution to the campaign.79 Mrs Phelps’s poem ‘The Suttee’ (1831) epitomises this presentation of events, describing the abolition of sati in the form of an imagined rescue of a young widow from the funeral pyre by Reginald Heber, Bishop of Calcutta. Heber appears before the ‘passive victim’: And dashing from his cheek the manly tears, Bids the attendants raise the wretched wife And stops the fiery brand, and quells the murderous strife. 76 C. H. Philips (1977) The Correspondence of Lord William Cavendish Bentinck (Oxford: Oxford University Press), vol. 1, pp. xxvi–xxviii, 94, 191–195, 335–345, 360–362 (text of the regulation). For Bombay and Madras see Kenneth Ballhatchet (1957) Social Policy and Social Change in Western India (London: Oxford University Press), pp. 304–305. 77 For Roy’s stay in Britain (he died and was buried in Bristol in 1833) and his influence here as described by three nineteenth-century English Unitarian feminists see: Philip Hemery le Breton (Ed.) (1824) Memoirs, Miscellanies and Letters of the Late Lucy Aikin (London: Longmans & Co.), pp. 226, 230–231, 248, 257–259, 282, 289–290, 297–298; Mary Carpenter (1866) The Last Days in England of the Rajah Rammohun Roy (London: Tubner & Co.); Sophia Dobson Collett (Comp. & Ed.) (1900) The Life and Letters of Raja Rammohun Roy (London: Harold Collett). 78 C. A. Bayly (1988) Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire, The New Cambridge History of India, vol. 2, no. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), chapter 4. 79 Arvind Sharma highlights the contest between Indian and British scholars over assigning credit for the abolition of sati—see Arvind Sharma (Ed.) (1988) Sati. Historical and Phenomenological Essays (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass), pp. 10–14.

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Gives to her arms the helpless babes, And from the fire the destined Suttee saves.80 Phelps’s description drew on an eighteenth-century literary tradition of the sati as a tragic victim rescued by a chivalrous British man81 reshaping it to create in Heber the ideal of evangelical manhood: sensitivity combined with steadfastness and moral authority.82 Heber stands for the benefits of opening up India to Christian evangelisation under benevolent male leadership. The poem is an early example of what Rajan has identified as the persistent use of the ‘trope of chivalry’ by the ‘colonial imagination’ to represent the administrative abolition of sati. To paraphrase Spivak, Heber is a white man saving a brown woman from brown men.83 What then of the white women obscured in this dominant colonial discourse: the women who have been the focus of this article? In particular, how can the findings of this article be related to the conclusions reached by Lata Mani following her intensive scholarly examination of the colonial debate on sati? Mani challenges the way in which ‘the abolition of sati has been canonized both by colonialist and nationalist texts as a founding moment in the history of women’s emancipation in modern India’.84 She argues persuasively that the colonial debate on sati focused on the proper interpretation of Hindu scriptures rather than on the sufferings of women or questions of women’s rights: ‘women are neither subjects nor objects, but rather the grounds of the discourse on sati’.85 However, Mani’s study has a different focus from mine: her 80 Mrs Phelps, The suttee, in The Suttee, and Other Poems (Thame: H. Bradford). The foreword to the book gives the information that Phelps decided to write on the subject because suttee was the subject for the Oxford Prize Poem in 1831. 81 For an important contribution to this genre by a British woman see Mariana Starke (1791) The Widow of Malabar (London: William Lane). 82 For the evangelical ideal of sensitive manhood see Davidoff & Hall, Family Fortunes, pp. 110–113. 83 Spivak, Can the subaltern speak? See also Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (1993) Real and Imagined Women. Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism (London: Routledge), p. 42. 84 Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: the debate on sati in colonial India, 1780–1833, unpublished PhD thesis, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1989, p. 11. See also Mani, Contentious Traditions, p. 2. 85 Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: the debate on sati in colonial India, in Kumkum Sangari & Sudesh Vaid (Eds) (1990 reprint edn) Recasting Women: essays in Indian colonial history (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press; first published in India by Kali for Women, 1989), p. 117. See also Lata Mani, The Production of an Official Discourse on Sati in Early Nineteenth-century Bengal, in Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iverson & Diana Loxley (Eds) (1985) Europe and its Others, vol. 1 (Colchester: University of Essex), pp. 107–127.

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prime interest is on the debate which took place within colonial India; mine on the debate which took place within Britain. As she herself acknowledges, evangelical arguments against sati circulating within Britain were cast not in relation to brahmanic scriptures but in terms of the degradation of contemporary indigenous society, the oppression of women, and the horror of sati. It is within this British context that the writings directed at and written by English women need to be placed, and it is in these writings, in particular, that we find a central place accorded to the question of female emancipation. As the first part of this article has indicated, missionary discourse targeted at the English public was influenced by the need to appeal to a female audience. As women became vitally important as fund-raisers for missions from the 1810s onwards, missionaries began to target propaganda specifically at women, focusing on aspects of ‘heathen’ societies with which they considered women would be particularly concerned. Given that women were already demonstrating their particular philanthropic concern for their own sex within the English context, it is hardly surprising that missionary appeals to women focused on the ill-treatment of Indian women, and most graphically, on the horror of sati. Similarly, missionaries in India recognised as early as 1820 that female education was vital to achieving their aim of reforming society from a familial base, and that English women could potentially play a leading role in promoting this. English women, in turn, began to actively shape discourse about Indian women: through the appeals of ladies’ missionary associations and of the committees raising funds for Indian female education, and later through women missionaries’ descriptions of their own educational work with Indian women, and through the texts of women’s petitions against sati. In the process, early nineteenth-century English women became involved in defining the parameters of female emancipation for Indian women within a British imperial and Christian evangelical framework. As this article has discussed, the emancipation of women was presented in missionary discourse as only achievable through the spread of Christian civilisation under British imperial rule: through British legislative intervention and Christian education. English women’s campaigning on behalf of Indian women was made possible by the context of British imperial rule in India, and shaped by missionary beliefs about non-Western peoples: their innate capacity, regardless of biologically-defined ‘race’, to become civilised; and their present cultural inferiority. Like evangelical men, English women saw themselves at the potential rescuers of Indian women, but with a particular and unique role to play in a mission to educate Indian women, who were inaccessible to English men. Through their promotion of missionary education of women and participation in the campaign against sati, English women helped shape ‘the association of

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women’s emancipation with the influence of Western culture’ which, as Liddle and Joshi among others have pointed out, ‘is still widely held in the West’.86 British appropriation of sole credit for the abolition of sati provided a key moral justification for the continuation of British imperial control in India, particularly in the face of nationalist agitation in the 1920s.87 Imperialism thus made English women’s interventions in Indian women’s lives possible, and in turn a stress on the beneficial impact of such interventions was used to justify the continuance of imperialism. In anti-sati texts written by or for women in England, female emancipation is defined primarily as the enlightenment of Hindu women so that they can become good wives within a Christianised and reformed patriarchal family, with widows enabled to fulfil their proper role as mothers rather than leaving their children orphaned by committing sati. Certainly patriarchy is not challenged by asserting a widow’s rights: but it is suggested that the duty of a mother to her children should override her wifely duty to her dead husband. Female emancipation is also envisioned as part of the broader evangelical project of bringing about the moral reform of society by removing the fetters of heathen superstition and ignorance. Within this there is envisioned some scope for Indian women’s agency along approved English evangelical lines: Western-educated women as the moral reformers of society from a domestic base. True, once again there is no direct challenge to male authority, but nevertheless, as in the British context, the value and power of female influence in a wider social context is asserted. What then about the campaigners’ view of English women’s own position within a patriarchal society? In petitioning parliament women were becoming publicly involved in defining the limits of acceptable male behaviour, asserting the value of a woman’s life and the unacceptability of male violence. However, in contrasting their own position to that of Indian women, English women campaigners against sati, like women anti-slavery campaigners, signalled acceptance of their existing social role by stressing their own privileges in a civilised and Christian country.88 This contrasted with the approach of the writers of feminist tracts during the 1790–1850 period, who highlighted the oppression of British women by likening it to the sufferings of colonial slaves, and

86 87 88

Joanna Liddle & Rama Joshi (1986) Daughters of Independence: gender, caste and class in India (London: Zed Books), p. 7. Liddle & Joshi, Daughters of Independence, pp. 30–32; Sharma, Sati, pp. 9–12. For women anti-slavery campaigners’ perspectives see Midgley, Women Against Slavery, chapter 5.

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women in the ‘Oriental harem’ and in ‘savage’ societies.89 In anti-sati literature Christian British men’s patriarchy was presented as good—associated with paternal protection of women; Hindu Indian men’s patriarchy was presented as bad—associated with male violence and the ill-treatment of women. While middle-class English women campaigners did not directly challenge their own social subordination, they were nevertheless actively involved in widening their sphere of action and influence. When their involvement in missionary societies, support for Indian women’s education, and campaigning against sati is viewed alongside their participation in the anti-slavery movement, we can see that during the period between 1813 and 1838 there emerged an important imperial dimension to women’s philanthropic work. From an early stage middle-class ‘women’s mission to women’ encompassed not only working-class women within the local community but also black and Indian women in distant parts of the British Empire. They asserted themselves as the group best able to speak on behalf of and offer help to women within an imperial frame. Their mission was based both on notions of cultural superiority and on a sense of identification and empathy with non-Western women on the grounds of women’s common experiences as wives, as mothers and as widows. This helped to shape English women philanthropists’ sense of their own identity as not simply middle class but also as civilised, Christian and British; it also encouraged them to feel that they had the power to bring about change in womens’ lives worldwide. It was to challenge women’s social position in a colonial rather than a metropolitan context that British women first felt impelled to intervene directly in the political process through petitioning Parliament, and it was the women campaigners against sati who initiated this process, closely followed by much larger numbers of women anti-slavery campaigners. The emergence of British women into public life and politics in the 1820s and 1830s was thus intimately linked to missionary evangelicalism and British imperialism. The implications of this for the origins of modern Western feminism need to be considered. The British feminists of the 1860–1914 period who championed colonised women on the imperial stage had foremothers in the anti-sati and anti-slavery campaigns, who had already been involved in defining the nature of women’s imperial mission to women.90 Indeed, just as many leading anti-slavery activists and their daughters went on to become leading feminist campaigners, so Mary Carpenter provides a personal link between the campaign against sati and later 89

Clare Midgley (1998), Anti-slavery and the Roots of Imperial Feminism, in Midgley (Ed.) Gender and Imperialism, pp. 161–179. 90 Burton, Burdens of History.

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feminist campaigns concerning Indian women: as a young woman in the 1830s she was deeply impressed by her meetings in Bristol with the leading Bengali campaigner against sati, Rajah Rammohun Roy, and this led her eventually in the 1860s to focus her energies on Indian women’s education.91 Exploring the views and actions of English women who opposed sati enables us to obtain new insights into how the creation of an image of the modern Western woman depended from the beginning on the creation of a contrasting image of the victimised non-Western woman.92 As Spivak has pointed out, this new Western woman can be seen inventing herself in Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 narrative of the governess, Jane Eyre. Jane defines herself in distinction to both the mad West Indian woman in the attic who burns in a fire of her own making, and the self-sacrificing Indian woman who is ‘hurried away in a suttee’.93 It is worth noting, however, that the fictional governess of the 1840s also rejects the self-sacrificing Christian missionary path chosen by that reallife governess of the 1810s, Mary Ann Cooke. Middle-class English women were beginning to publicly question the limitations of an evangelical framework of female privilege and duty as they began to draw attention to their own oppression and call for their rights. It was within this rather different, explicitly feminist, framework that campaigns on behalf of Indian women took place in the second half of the nineteenth century. For English women, the meaning of female emancipation within an imperial frame had shifted. 91

Mary Carpenter (1868) Six Months in India (London: Longmans, Green & Co.), vol. 1: frontispiece engraving of Roy and dedication to Roy. 92 Chandra Tolpady Mohanty, Under Western Eyes: feminist scholarship and colonial discourse, in C. T. Mohanty, A. Russo & L. Torres (Eds) (1991) Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), pp. 51–80. See also See Valerie Amos & Pratibha Parmar (1984) Challenging Imperial Feminism, Feminist Review, 17, pp. 3–19. 93 Gayatri Spivak (1985) Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism, Critical Inquiry, 12, pp. 243–261. See also Antoinette Burton (1996) Recapturing Jane Eyre: reflections on historicizing the colonial encounter in Victorian Britain, Radical History Review, 64, pp. 58– 72. The quotation is from Charlotte Brontë (1966 reprint edn) Jane Eyre (Harmondsworth: Penguin; first published London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1847), p. 301.

Married to the Mission Field: Gender, Christianity, and Professionalization in Britain and Colonial Africa, 1865–1914 Elizabeth Prevost Beginning in the 1860s, a number of young British women journeyed to Africa as part of a global campaign of female missionary expansion. Responding to a changing social and international landscape, missionary programs in the late nineteenth century shifted women’s mission work from the effort of unpaid missionary wives and kin to a vastly expanded, salaried enterprise of primarily single women.1 This movement provided both opportunities and challenges for ambitious and socially conscious women, for the new brand of female missionary embodied not only Christian zeal but an increasing standard of professional and religious authority—traits that often came into conflict with each other and with Victorian prescriptions of gender. Moreover, women missionaries found that the challenges of the mission field further Source: Prevost, E., “Married to the Mission Field: Gender, Christianity, and Professionalisation in Britain and Colonial Africa, 1865–1914,” Journal of British Studies 47.4 (2008), pp. 796–826. © North American Conference of British Studies 2008, published by Cambridge University Press. 1 This article forms part of a larger study of women’s mission communities in colonial Africa and the impact of female evangelism on British feminism. The author would like to thank Anna Clark and the journal’s anonymous reviewers for their very helpful feedback. She would also like to thank Seth Koven for commenting on an earlier version of this article, which was presented at the 2003 Middle Atlantic Conference of British Studies. For overviews of the Protestant and Anglican women’s missionary movement, see Patricia Grimshaw, “Faith, Missionary Life, and the Family,” in Gender and Empire, ed. Philippa Levine (Oxford, 2004), 260–80; Jocelyn Murray, “Anglican and Protestant Missionary Societies in Great Britain: Their Use of Women as Missionaries from the Late 18th to the Late 19th Century,” Exchange 21, no. 1 (April 1992): 1–20, and “The Role of Women in the Church Missionary Society, 1799–1917,” in The Church Mission Society and World Christianity, 1799–1999, ed. Kevin Ward and Brian Stanley (Grand Rapids, MI, 1999), 66–90; Sean Gill, Women and the Church of England: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (London, 1994); Deborah Kirkwood, “Protestant Missionary Women: Wives and Spinsters”; and Peter Williams, “‘The Missing Link’: The Recruitment of Women Missionaries in Some English Evangelical Missionary Societies in the Nineteenth Century,” in Women and Missions: Past and Present; Anthropological and Historical Perceptions, ed. Fiona Bowie, Deborah Kirkwood, and Shirley Ardener (Providence, RI, 1993), 23–69.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/97890

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complicated the terms and meanings of their “vocation” by calling into question the relative value of their identification as women, Europeans, professionals, and Christians. In a recent article in this journal, Clare Midgley argued that early nineteenthcentury advocates of female missionaries appropriated missionary narratives of heroism and exploited the fault lines of evangelical ideology to expand the gendered terms of what it meant to be a “missionary.”2 By the later nineteenth century, this expansionist trend had become a full-scale missionary movement, which not only endorsed women’s status as missionaries but actively privileged a single professionalized version of mission work. This movement built on earlier discursive patterns of legitimizing women’s independent mission activity by highlighting the gendered needs of “heathen” women and arguing that evangelism constituted an extension of the private sphere and an expression of the feminine virtues of service and self-sacrifice. But paradoxically, because missionary institutions rendered spinsterhood a condition of a true vocational calling, they precluded women from pursuing the ultimate manifestations of Victorian femininity: marriage and motherhood. Therefore, although the imperatives of domestic gender ideology and overseas evangelism made it possible (even necessary) for women to be missionaries, the question became, could missionaries still be women? Of course, the question of how to negotiate the boundaries of work and marriage was not unique to missionaries in this period. Like many other stories of middle-class feminism, the missionary women’s movement struggled with how to reconcile familial desires and responsibilities with political, educational, and professional goals, particularly when conservative backlashes cast unmarried or working women as either overly sexualized or desexed.3 Yet the tensions of marriage and vocation also posed a special set of challenges for missionary women. First, missionary work and lifestyles in the field made it impossible to adhere to metropolitan gender norms. Second, unlike formal 2 Clare Midgley, “Can Women Be Missionaries? Envisioning Female Agency in the Early Nineteenth-Century British Empire,” Journal of British Studies 45, no. 2 (April 2006): 335–58. Midgley’s argument complicates the prevailing understanding of “missionary” as an officially male designation until the later nineteenth century; see Williams, “Missing Link,” and Valentine Cunningham, “‘God and nature intended you for a missionary’s wife’: Mary Hill, Jane Eyre, and Other Missionary Women in the 1840s,” in Bowie, Kirkwood, and Ardener, Women and Missions, 85–105. 3 On spinsterhood and the women’s movement, see Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850–1920 (London, 1985), and Ellen Jordan, The Women’s Movement and Women’s Employment in Nineteenth-Century Britain (New York, 1999). On the gendering of professional and marital status, see Susan Kingsley Kent, Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860–1915 (Princeton, NJ, 1987).

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religious orders, the laywomen’s missionary enterprise allowed enough room for marriage to take place, albeit at great cost to those women’s sense of missionary “self.” Third, missionaries were charged with modeling for indigenous women a Christian lifestyle that had marriage and family at its core. Therefore, the question of whether missionaries could or should lay claim to evangelical norms of womanhood had deep implications not only for women’s individual sense of purpose but for the mission project as a whole. This article explores the gendered relationship of missionaries’ marital status, spiritual vocation, and professionalism to reveal the disjuncture between metropolitan promotional literature and the experience of mission work and community life. Specifically, it argues that missionaries needed to be “women” for metropolitan purposes of professionalizing women’s mission work but not in carrying out that work in the mission field. In legitimizing the work and lifestyles of single missionaries and marginalizing married women’s evangelistic capacity, mission institutions in the field consistently prioritized the vocational over and above the feminine ideals of evangelism. This reordering of gender norms allowed room for women to exercise new forms of professional and religious authority, even as it placed certain constraints on their agency within mission hierarchies. Historicizing the vocational contours of missionary marriage, spinsterhood, and professionalism can help elaborate upon two recent scholarly discussions. First, as Jane Haggis has argued, mission work shows why feminism and religiosity cannot be mutually exclusive frameworks of investigation: “The overt religiosity of many women prominent in the various strands of the women’s reform movement has most often been passed over as an unfortunate conservative influence on otherwise exemplary feminist credentials. The case of women missionaries, however, illustrates the importance of finding ways of rendering this religiosity more complexly into the histories of women and of feminism, to show how it could empower as well as hobble the lives and imaginations of women.”4 The case of Anglican missionary women illustrates how religiosity might operate at the center of feminist analyses of the civilizing mission. The professionalization of women’s mission work did indeed advance the larger women’s movement by enabling independent work and unmarried lifestyles outside the home and outside the metropole. Yet this challenge to Victorian paradigms of femininity was more an effect than a cause of the 4 Jane Haggis, “‘A heart that has felt the love of God and longs for others to know it’: Conventions of Gender, Tensions of Self, and Constructions of Difference in Offering to Be a Lady Missionary,” Women’s History Review 7, no. 2 (1998): 173.

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women’s missionary movement, which was motivated above all by evangelical religious conviction. That its feminism was an unintended consequence does not diminish the feminist implications of mission work, but it does require a more careful understanding of the Christian framework in which missionary institutions and individuals construed their sense of purpose and how mission work itself advanced and complicated that purpose. Missionary advocates moderated conflicting norms of femininity and professionalization by situating women’s independent role in the mission enterprise within an evangelical discourse of service and vocation—a call that legitimized the mission field simultaneously as an extension of the private sphere and an outlet for skilled employment. The fact that missionary institutions often abandoned this delicate balancing act in the mission field in favor of a more masculine, independent paradigm of evangelism perhaps confirms the significance of mission work for the women’s movement. However, the confusion experienced by individual women who faced a conflict of womanly vocation—professional evangelism versus marriage and motherhood—belies an easy distinction of mission work as either advancing or hindering feminist goals or embodying progressive or conservative outlooks. To explain the distinctive scale and experience of British women’s evangelism, historians must carefully explain how the mission field required women to mobilize and negotiate received notions of femininity, religious conviction, and professionalism.5 Second, scholars of “the new imperial history” have begun to establish the centrality of both gender and mission work in mediating the cultural boundaries of colony and metropole.6 Yet in exploring the interconnected ways in 5 Haggis is one of a small but growing group of scholars who are using religion as a central category of analysis for historicizing the relationship between British feminism and empire. See Rhonda Semple, Missionary Women: Gender, Professionalism, and the Victorian Idea of Christian Mission (Woodbridge, 2003); Gulnar Francis-Dehqani, Religious Feminism in an Age of Empire: CMS Women Missionaries in Iran, 1869–1934 (Bristol, 2000); Judith Rowbotham, “‘Soldiers of Christ’? Images of Female Missionaries in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain: Issues of Heroism and Martyrdom,” Gender and History 12, no. 1 (April 2000): 82–106; Susan Thorne, “Missionary-Imperial Feminism,” in Gendered Missions: Women and Men in Missionary Discourse and Practice, ed. Mary Taylor Huber and Nancy C. Lutkehaus (Ann Arbor, MI, 1999), 39–65. 6 On missions and colonialism, see Norman Etherington, ed., Missions and Empire (Oxford, 2005); Jeffrey Cox, Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818–1940 (Stanford, CA, 2002); Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Chicago, 2002); Susan Thorne, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-Century England (Stanford, CA, 1999); Andrew Porter, Religion versus Empire: British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700– 1914 (Manchester, 2004); Elizabeth Elbourne, Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions, and the

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which Britain remade the rest of the world and was itself “made” by its material and spiritual empires, it is important not to lose sight of the equally complex processes by which the British periphery unmade metropolitan forms of social, political, and cultural power. Religion is central to that investigation, for colonial Christianity did not always transplant metropolitan norms of either gender or religious authority. The case of missionary spinsterhood and marriage shows how the mission field formed a site where metropolitan norms came into conflict and sometimes came undone altogether. This discussion focuses on Anglican women’s mission work in Britain, Madagascar, and Uganda to show how debates around spinsterhood and marriage forced a renegotiation of metropolitan paradigms of religious vocation, professional authority, and social relations. The first section looks at metropolitan promotional and periodical literature to trace how the expansion of women’s mission work depended on a religious idiom of vocation that was capable of reconciling gender and professionalism. The next section contextualizes the formative role of single women in expanding Anglican evangelism in Madagascar and Uganda, where the connection between Protestantism and state building legitimized female missionary authority. The remaining sections examine the cultural politics of missionary spinsterhood and marriage through the personal records and correspondence of individual missionaries to illustrate how the discourse of vocation could not fully reconcile gendered and professionalized roles within the practical boundaries of mission work. Together, these discussions show how the gap between the discursive and material dimensions of missionary professionalism had profound consequences for missionary women and their mission communities. Although the contested terrain of the mission field undermined certain Victorian norms of gender, it also could not entirely accommodate either a married ideal of womanhood or a professional ideal of mission service as an unmarried domain.

Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1853 (Montreal, 2002). On gender and empire, see Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1994); Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York, 2003), and Gender and Empire; Claire Midgley, ed., Gender and Imperialism (Manchester, 1998); Angela Woollacott, Gender and Empire (New York, 2006); Mary Procida, Married to Empire: Gender, Politics, and Imperialism in India, 1883–1947 (Manchester, 2002); Margaret Strobel and Nupur Chaudhuri, eds., Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington, IN, 1992).

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Professionalizing the Call: British Missionary Discourse

The expansion of Anglican female mission workers in the late nineteenth century transformed the nature of British evangelism by challenging assumptions of mission work as a necessarily male endeavor.7 Although the wives and kin of male missionaries had long been central players in missionary endeavors, professional agencies did not officially recognize or financially support their service.8 Beginning in the 1860s, however, missionary societies such as the SPG and the CMS actively sought out single women as missionaries in their own right, responding to developments both at home and overseas. In Britain, the opening of higher education, the professionalization of many social services, and the widespread concern over “surplus” or “redundant” women coincided with a growing legitimization of lay ministry and professional work within Protestant churches and presented new opportunities for women across a wide social spectrum to become employed as missionaries.9 7 The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) was founded in 1701 to help establish Anglican churches for English settlers overseas; soon thereafter it launched programs to evangelize nonwhite peoples. The Ladies’ Association (LA) was formed in 1864, renamed the Women’s Mission Association (WMA) in 1894 and the Committee for Women’s Work after its amalgamation into the administration of the SPG in 1904. The Church Missionary Society (CMS) was founded in 1799, a manifestation of the eighteenth-century evangelical movement that also produced the Baptist Missionary Society in 1792 and the London Missionary Society (LMS) in 1795. The CMS was reluctant to endorse women’s mission work, blocking opportunities to employ women professionally in 1815, 1859, and 1863; however, it finally began sending women abroad in the 1870s and permitted the formation of a Women’s Department in the 1890s, headed by Miss Gollack. See Murray, “Role of Women in the Church Missionary Society”; Williams, “Missing Link”; Gill, Women and the Church of England, 173–205; Brian Heeney, The Women’s Movement in the Church of England, 1850–1930 (Oxford, 1988), 58–63. 8 On the “invisibility” of missionary wives within professional British missionary organizations, see Jane Haggis, “Professional Ladies and Working Wives: Female Missionaries in the London Missionary Society and Its South Travancore District, South India, in the Nineteenth Century” (PhD diss., University of Manchester, 1991); Gulnar Francis-Dehqani, “CMS Women Missionaries in Persia: Perceptions of Muslim Women and Islam, 1884–1934,” in Ward and Stanley, Church Mission Society and World Christianity, 91–119; Murray, “Anglican and Protestant Missionary Societies”; Deborah Kirkwood, “Wives of Missionaries Working with the Society,” in Three Centuries of Mission: The United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 1701–2000, ed. Daniel O’Connor (London, 2000), 314–29; Kirkwood, “Protestant Missionary Women.” 9 Jane Haggis’s observation of the LMS that the call to women of ideal marrying age posed mission work as an appropriate professional alternative for middle-class women also held true for the Anglican societies (Haggis, “Heart that has felt the love of God,” 174–75). On the professionalization of female mission work, see Semple, Missionary Women; Murray, “Anglican and Protestant Missionary Societies”; Williams, “Missing Link”; Kirkwood, “Protestant Missionary Women.”

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Abroad, Protestant missionaries feared that the ongoing race with Islam and Catholicism threatened their special status as the world’s evangelizing agents, compelling Protestant missionary societies to reevaluate their strategies.10 Women were key players in addressing this latter concern, both as missionaries and converts: societies sent single women into the mission field because they believed European women alone could bring indigenous women into the Christian fold. Missionaries, social activists, and feminists argued that the institutionalized seclusion of women living in Hindu and Muslim societies prohibited any but Western women from gaining access to and emancipating them from the enslaved conditions of the zenana.11 Moreover, beginning in the later nineteenth century, the perceived social crises of moral and racial degeneration, secularization, and economic downturn placed additional responsibility on women to heal the British national character and protect the virtue of the empire through a renewed emphasis on home and family as the foundation of the state.12 The missionary movement therefore charged women with a number of objectives—often conflicting—to respond to shifting national, international, and ecclesiastical interests: securing converts, liberating non-Western women, establishing new Christian social and political orders, stabilizing and regenerating national life, and offering a professional outlet for 10 Although in practice, Protestant—especially Anglican—missionaries had greater intercourse and collaboration with Catholic missions than with Muslim institutions, propaganda would often pose Catholicism as an equal barrier to the advancement of Protestant Christianity. Emma Raymond Pitman argued for the institutionalization of women’s work as a preventative measure against either Catholic or Muslim ascendancy: “A further argument for the necessity for such an agency, lies in the fact that Roman Catholicism largely employs the aid of women, even among the recently-converted adherents of Protestant churches, and sets them to neutralize the work done by European missionaries, by winning over the women and children. This course was recently adopted in Madagascar. The Catholic Sisters of Mercy caught hold of the mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters of the Christian converts, and made such mischief. Their success was mainly due to the fact that the natives preferred to have female teachers for wives and daughters” (Pitman, Heroines of the Mission Field: Biographical Sketches of Female Missionaries Who Have Labored in Various Lands among the Heathen [London, 1880], 4; emphasis in original). 11 The “zenana” refers to spaces that were segregated by sex. On the representation of the zenana in metropolitan discourse, see Janaki Nair, “Uncovering the Zenana: Visions of Indian Womanhood in Englishwomen’s Writings, 1813–1940,” Journal of Women’s History 2, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 8–34; Antoinette Burton, “Contesting the Zenana: The Mission to Make ‘Lady Doctors for India,’ 1874–1885,” Journal of British Studies 35, no. 3 (July 1996): 368–97; Judith Rowbotham, “‘Hear an Indian Sister’s Plea’: Reporting the Work of 19th-century British Female Missionaries,” Women’s Studies International Forum 21, no. 3 (May 1998): 247–61; Thorne, “Missionary-Imperial Feminism.” 12 See Anna Davin, “Imperialism and Motherhood,” History Workshop Journals, no. 1 (1978): 9–66.

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women’s education, skills, and networks. The high number of female responses to this call suggests that the mission field also held an appeal for certain women to combine Christian conviction and professional expertise in a capacity that they could not at home.13 Yet the women’s missionary movement also faced a growing debate within Britain over the proper role of women in society and, more specifically, within the Church of England over women’s religious authority. The gendered ideology of middle-class evangelicalism was central to the social construction of separate spheres that prescribed marriage and family as the only valid expression of “true womanhood.”14 Mainstream Protestant churches subscribed to this ideology and marginalized women’s opportunities for formal religious leadership, even though women formed the base of nineteenth-century church membership and voluntary work.15 The female missionary movement muddied this picture by underscoring women’s active participation in public and professional life, evidenced in particular by the missionary organizations’ growing numbers of training institutes and by their increasing preference for women with a university education.16 Moreover, the Anglican revival of women’s religious orders of deaconesses and sisterhoods in the mid-nineteenth century, which helped staff domestic and foreign missions, blurred the lines of church hierarchy and eventually fueled the organized movement for women’s 13

Between 1873 and 1883, the CMS sent sixteen women overseas; by contrast, during the following ten years, 1884–93, it sent 192 women abroad, and by 1900 that number had grown to 388. By 1907 the CMS supported 450 women missionaries working worldwide. The WMA of the SPG supported about 100 women missionaries working worldwide in 1900; by 1915, the number had grown to 343, including fifty-eight non-Europeans. In 1892, the number of CMS women recruits began to outnumber men, and the 388 women sent abroad between 1891 and 1900 represented 51 percent of total recruits. More broadly, Jeffrey Cox has found that by 1900, women accounted for two-thirds of all British missionaries working worldwide; by 1931, women constituted 70 percent of the 622 Protestant foreign missionaries working in northwest India. See Murray, “Anglican and Protestant Missionary Societies,” 15–16; Williams, “Missing Link,” 55; Cox, Imperial Fault Lines, 152; Minutes of the Women’s Committee of the Pan-Anglican Congress, 1907–1908, United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Archives (hereafter USPG), Committee on Women’s Work Series (hereafter CWW) 11; M. D. Rice, “The Progress of SPG Women’s Work in the Mission-Field, 1866–1915,” Mothers in Council, July 1915, 183. 14 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London, 1987); Kathryn Gleadle, British Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 2001). 15 Heeney, Women’s Movement in the Church of England, 5–18. 16 G. A. Spottiswoode, ed., The Official Report of the Missionary Conference of the Anglican Communion (London, 1894), 584–85, 599, 604, 665; Advisory Group on Conditions of Service for Women Workers Abroad Minute Book, 1907–1920, USPG, CWW 7.

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ordination after the First World War.17 Mission work thus provided a space for women’s professional and religious legitimacy, which most medical, educational, and ecclesiastical establishments did not afford. The women’s missionary movement drew upon and contributed to two related brands of social justice and humanitarianism, both of which had strong proponents in the Anglican church. First, the evangelical strain of British feminism promoted the distinctive virtues of womanhood by seeking a comprehensive cultural transformation in gender relations, which in turn established middle-class women’s special vocation to emancipate other women through social reform at home and humanitarian interventions abroad. Such interventions included lobbying against cultural practices such as sati (widow burning) in India, polygamy in various Islamic and indigenous societies, and stateregulated prostitution in Britain and British colonies.18 Second, the rationale of domestic missions and philanthropic organizations explained the increasing mobility and public visibility of women as a necessary prerequisite for the enactment of larger social and charitable responsibilities.19 The Mothers’ Union (MU), the Church of England’s largest women’s organization (which itself supported extensive mission work at home and overseas), embodied how progressive social thought and action could complicate an otherwise conservative approach to politics and gender relations.20 A regular contributor to an MU journal, who wrote under the pen name of “Stella,” justified 17

Both deaconesses and nuns belonged to religious orders. In the Church of England, sisterhoods were revived in 1845, in the wake of the “high-church” Oxford Movement; the deaconess movement began in 1861, largely as an evangelical alternative to sisterhoods. Gill, Women and the Church of England, 146–72; see also Susan Mumm, Stolen Daughters, Virgin Mothers: Anglican Sisterhoods in Victorian Britain (London, 1999). 18 Clare Midgley, “From Supporting Missions to Petitioning Parliament: British Women and the Evangelical Campaign against Sati in India, 1813–1830,” in Women in British Politics, 1760–1860: The Power of the Petticoat, ed. Kathryn Gleadle and Sarah Richardson (New York, 2000), 74–92; Strobel and Chaudhuri, Western Women and Imperialism; Levine, Gender and Empire; Burton, Burdens of History, Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society (Cambridge, 1980). 19 On Christian philanthropy and the women’s movement, see Philippa Levine, Feminist Lives in Victorian England: Private Roles and Public Commitment (Oxford, 1990); Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society; F. K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1980); Vicinus, Independent Women; Jordan, Women’s Movement; Heeney, Women’s Movement in the Church of England; Gill, Women and the Church of England. 20 The MU was founded in 1876 by Mary Sumner, the wife of a bishop, as a British women’s voluntary association; it became active overseas beginning about 1900. For an overview of the institution, see Olive Parker, For the Family’s Sake: A History of the Mothers’ Union, 1876–1976 (London, 1976).

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women’s emancipation according to Christian principles rather than feminist or professional objectives, pointing to “the onslaught made on the dark places of our large areas, and the efforts now made to reach the masses of population which used to be practically untouched” as women’s most significant contribution to British religious and public life in the second half of the nineteenth century. The great change in our social customs as regards women has naturally borne fruit in setting them free to do much which would formerly have been impossible. When women of the upper classes were not supposed to go out in London or our large towns without any escort, it is obvious that their charitable flights could only be of the most restricted order…. The amount of valuable work now done by women as guardians, inspectors of factories, members of the Charity Organization Society, and countless other bodies, should be the best justification for the emancipation which the last fifty years has gradually conferred upon them.21 Stella pointed to philanthropists like Octavia Hill, Anna Jameson, and Ellen Ranyard, who were instrumental in institutionalizing women’s philanthropy according to evangelistic paradigms and in reformulating the criteria for proper women’s work by linking religious with social imperatives of training “district visitors” and “biblewomen.”22 An address at a regional Anglican Church Congress in Britain in 1912 invoked figures like Hill and Maria Montessori in urging Christian women “to gain and use influence in the life of the world.” The speaker contrasted an older evangelical tradition of religious revelation as “emotional and fervent verbal expression” with a modern religion, which “is called upon to reveal its reality in a very definite and practical matter.” Accordingly, women too were “called upon” to assume a public persona in order to enact this collective Christian transformation, despite its assault on the gender sensibilities of prior generations: “Women have to face the facts of life and its dangers as never before; they have to take their part in discussion and control of matters formerly left untouched; and, however repugnant to our traditions, it is right that this should be so, for otherwise we could not meet the needs of our time…. The fact that we are more in touch with the world 21 22

Stella, “Fifty Years and Their Changes: #10, Philanthropy and Religion,” Mothers in Council, July 1906, 163–73. Octavia Hill, District Visiting (London, 1877), and “Trained Workers for the Poor,” Nineteenth Century 33 (1893): 36–43; Ellen Ranyard, The Missing Link; or, Bible Women in the Homes of the London Poor (London, 1859).

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makes it incumbent upon us to ask, ‘What is to be our witness as Christians, as Churchwomen, in the life and thought of the world today?’”23 This address legitimized women’s activism according to a larger evolution of religious expression from emotional sentiment to practical application. In recasting women’s social and moral responsibility as a consecrated vocation, the speaker collapsed the binary between masculine rationality and action and feminine emotionalism and passivity. The gendered ideology of evangelical Christianity with its emphasis on women’s innate qualities of spirituality, self-sacrifice, and moral purity fueled and complicated the objectives of missionary societies and individuals.24 Missionaries considered these aspects of Western womanhood to be just as crucial in gaining spiritual access to heathen women’s hearts as was the bare fact of their sex in gaining institutional access to their secluded circumstances.25 In turn, missionary publicists deployed this discourse in arguing for the feminization of professional skills and social services. Miss Fanny Patteson, vice president of the LA of the SPG, intimately linked the “material” and “spiritual” dimensions of women’s social activism at the Missionary Conference of the Anglican Communion in 1894: “Surely the demand for sympathy points to a great need, and woman’s gifts enable her to supply it more fully than men. Is not often, though unconsciously, the cry of the heathen woman a call for this sympathy, expressed in need of material as well as spiritual assistance? The need is indeed great of women to teach and tend the young, to nurse the sick, to comfort the afflicted, to show sympathy. None but women can do this for women.”26 Paradoxically then, the same gendered attributes that had long justified British women’s confinement to a separate, “private” sphere of home and family also equipped them with the necessary skills to liberate other women from non-Western forms of domestic confinement. Ostensibly, the discourse of the zenana confined female missionary agency to a safely “private” sphere of work among heathen women. As Emma Raymond Pitman emphasized in promoting the educational, medical, and 23

Mrs. Drayton, “The Witness of Women,” address given at a women’s meeting in Stockton in connection with the Church Congress, 3 October 1912, reprinted in Mothers in Council, January 1913. 24 Gill, Women and the Church of England, 77–80, 173–81. 25 Sex-segregated spaces were distinctive to certain classes and regions in India, and the majority of Asian and African women with whom missionaries came into contact did not actually live in institutionalized seclusion; nonetheless, the imagined space of the Indian zenana consistently worked to justify Western women’s missionary interventions in metropolitan discourse. 26 Spottiswoode, Official Report of the Missionary Conference, 605.

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domestic importance of zenana work, “No one who engages in it steps out of her proper sphere in the slightest degree…. It would be unwomanly to stand idle in Christ’s kingdom, to refuse to help our perishing sisters, but to obey the great command is most Christ-like.”27 Pitman went on to emphasize, “These lady missionaries, together with their trained native helpers, penetrate where male missionaries would be rudely and resolutely denied admittance…. As the result of the sending forth of this class of laborers, many thousands of degraded, down-trodden, uncared-for heathen women have been brought into our Christian sisterhood, have been lifted out of the mire of heathen serfdom, and have recognized with grateful emotion the truth that they, even they, are ‘one in Christ Jesus’ with the good and blest of other lands.”28 Other missionary publicists pointed to a long scriptural and apostolic tradition in which the ultimate manifestation of Christian womanhood did not consist of a life of secluded piety (in either a middle-class home or a religious order) but one of public action and independence.29 By establishing the continuity of prevailing gender ideology and evangelical theology with new paradigms of women’s work, the women’s missionary movement effectively confronted both the sanctity of separate spheres and the naturalized image of female passivity. Even more than other British voluntary associations and professional agencies, however, missionary organizations demanded that the religious capacity of evangelism should distinguish mission work from parallel developments for women in British professions and social services. This qualification reinforced the meaning of a missionary “vocation” as a divine calling to service, as opposed to the more secular connotation it was gaining as a professional standard of training. Mrs. Bannister, a representative of the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society (CEZMS) and the Church Missionary Society Ladies’ Committee, outlined this distinction at the Missionary Conference of the Anglican Communion in 1894: “If a ‘Vocation,’ in the popular meaning of the term, signifies to us a sphere of work for which we find ourselves naturally, or otherwise, fitted, a missionary vocation is something far higher; for we believe it to be founded upon a divine basis, to imply a Divine call, and to require a Divine equipment.”30 Bannister also established the continuity of women’s work with an older model of apostleship, posing female evangelism as only the 27 Pitman, Heroines of the Mission Field, 4–5. 28 Ibid., 1–2, 8–9; emphasis in original. 29 See, e.g., Eleanor MacDougall, “The Ideal of Womanhood as a Factor in Missionary Work: The Influence of Christianity on the Position of Women,” International Review of Missions 1 (1912): 435–51. 30 Mrs. Bannister, “The Call of Women to Missionary Service,” in Spottiswoode, Official Report of the Missionary Conference, 580; emphasis in original.

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most recent manifestation of an ancient Christian tradition of public service: “True missionary work is not the outcome of philanthropic feeling; it is not primarily the result of sympathy with ignorance and suffering, though it includes these. It is not a ‘vocation’ in the sense of a profession open to any who may volunteer for service in its ranks. It is a Divinely instituted Calling, as much so today as it was in the early Christian Church, whose Apostles, or ‘sent ones,’ were the earliest missionaries. Our Lord and Master Himself founded and commissioned a missionary Church, composed of men and women who had forsaken all to follow him.”31 Promoters of women’s missionary service therefore deliberately distinguished the professional credibility accorded women by their evangelistic duties from that represented by more secular outlets of private philanthropy and public social services.32 Mission organizations required women who went abroad to take strict precautions against viewing the professional aspects of their work in anything other than a religious light. As a CMS missionary in Karachi illustrated, “It is only such spiritual women who are needed in the mission field, be they literary, educational, or medical workers. Especially with regard to the latter an opinion has been gaining ground, even among Church people, that true Christian work can be done by women doctors who go out solely as healers of the body, not as missionaries with the primary purpose of bringing healing to the soul. There is no scope for such like mere philanthropy in the Church’s missionary work among the heathen.”33 Thus, while recruitment efforts wove together various ideals of education, practical experience, and personal character, mission societies placed the highest value for missionary success on deeper levels of spirituality and religiosity, demonstrated by diligent prayer and meditation, regular church attendance, a strong background in church doctrine and history, and—particularly for members of the evangelical CMS—adept knowledge and interpretation of scripture. The societies attempted to discern candidates’ spiritual inclination ahead of time as part of the selection process and to weed out those who had more worldly motives in offering their service.34 The head of The Willows, a CMS training 31 Ibid.; emphasis in original. 32 Antoinette Burton has found the inverse to be true: that secular medical training programs for women (specifically, the London School of Medicine for Women) sought to discredit missionary medical practice as unscientific and nonprofessional and to deemphasize religious conviction in favor of professional expertise in legitimizing a new brand of “medical missionary” (Burton, “Contesting the Zenana”). 33 Mrs. A. E. Ball, in Spottiswoode, Official Report of the Missionary Conference, 603. 34 For parallels outside the British context, see Catherine Prelinger, Charity, Challenge, and Change: Religious Dimensions of the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Women’s Movement in Germany (New York, 1987), and Catherine Brekus, Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740–1845 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998).

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home, promoted a system of probation and preparation as a way of “withholding from the mission field restless souls, unsatisfactory workers, and failures,” thus counteracting a newly professional and secular climate that she feared was attracting those who were only in search of independence or social mobility: “Christian work has, to a certain extent, become a fashion, a profession even, entered into, alas! by some from love of activity, and by others as an improvement on the position they might naturally occupy. These altered conditions necessarily call for even more careful and diligent training than might have been needed in former days.”35 Metropolitan missionary literature thus privileged spiritual strength over professional status. Yet the missionary movement could not completely elevate a spiritual “calling” at the expense of professionalism; instead, spiritual and professional ideals of vocation were reciprocal elements of women’s missionary ideology. By simultaneously deploying and subverting social expectations of femininity, this spiritual discourse created a space for women’s skilled labor and independent activity. Asserting the primacy of women’s spiritual authority had implications for foreign missions as well as home recruitment because the explicitly religious aspects of mission work were traditionally reserved for men. Official policy dictated that women’s role in evangelism was domestic, medical, and educational—women were responsible not for conversion itself but for the cultural institutions that would solidify conversions: the Christian home and the Christian school.36 Yet for the women working in the mission field, it was impossible to separate the religious and professional aspects of evangelism.

Expanding the Gendered Boundaries of the Mission Field: Anglicans in Madagascar and Uganda

Anglican missionary institutions and supporters in Britain used many of the same discursive and material vehicles as did the larger Protestant missionary movement to professionalize women’s evangelism in the last third of the 35 Spottiswoode, Official Report of the Missionary Conference, 591. In contrast to this characterization, Cecillie Swaisland has argued that missionary societies had a difficult time competing for recruits with other more secular outlets of middle-class women’s professionalism (Swaisland, “Wanted—Earnest, Self-Sacrificing Women for Service in South Africa: Nineteenth-Century Recruitment of Single Women to Protestant Missions,” in Bowie, Kirkwood, and Ardener, Women and Missions, 70–84). 36 Both the CMS and the MU had policies against missionary women working with “heathen” women, and the LA of the SPG only employed missionaries as schoolteachers.

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nineteenth century. The discourse of the zenana, the connection with social action and moral reform, and the expansion of educational and training institutes all worked to legitimize a missionary vocation that navigated between social expectations of “true womanhood” and the increasingly professional standards of women’s skilled, independent labor. Yet Anglicans also occupied a privileged place in the missionary movement, by virtue of their membership in an established church and the diversity of theology and devotional practice it encompassed. The various strains of “churchmanship” were reflected in the different Anglican missionary societies, as well as in the domestic and foreign organization of women’s religious orders—another distinctive feature of Anglicanism.37 Thus, while other Protestant denominations recruited women earlier and operated within less hierarchical structures, Anglican missions did offer women a wide spectrum of vocational and religious affinity. Missions in Africa in general, and Madagascar and Uganda in particular, offer unique contexts for studying how institutions and individuals put this vocation to work. For one thing, women’s evangelism in Africa was not formally circumscribed within a zenana or other sex-segregated space. Although the zenana legitimized white women’s mission and medical work within acceptable boundaries of a gendered “sphere,” the Orientalist discourse that fueled the metropolitan missionary movement did not encapsulate African social relations. Moreover, the fact that the majority of British women recruits and resources were deployed to Asia meant that missions in Africa were not as extensively institutionalized along educational and medical lines.38 Therefore, the gendered terms of women’s spiritual and professional authority had to be reinvented. 37 The CMS was evangelical, emphasizing preaching, literacy, scripture, and the convert’s personal relationship to Christ. The SPG was “high-church,” characterized by an emphasis on ritual and priesthood. The evangelical approach of deaconesses idealized the Word as the “light of Christ” that women evangelists would carry into individual homes, transforming the conditions of heathenism from within; by comparison, high-church sisterhoods deployed an ideology of protection and retreat, whereby the order would remove women and girls from the influences of heathenism and provide them safe haven (Vicinus, Independent Women, 46–84). Missionary societies, however, did not rigidly stratify differences of “high” or “low” churchmanship in employing women missionaries; the high-church SPG, for example, employed deaconesses as well as nuns. 38 In 1907, the Pan-Anglican Congress listed nineteen women doctors working abroad for the CMS, sixteen for the CEZMS, and eleven for the SPG. Most of these worked in India, and none were stationed in the African fields studied here. The number of trained nurses employed by the societies (for which comprehensive figures are not available) far exceeded those of doctors (Minutes of the Women’s Committee of the Pan-Anglican Congress, 1907–1908, USPG, CWW 11). For a contrasting example in India of extensive mission institution building, see Cox, Imperial Fault Lines.

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More specifically, Anglican missions in Madagascar and Uganda present illustrative cases of the feminization of mission work because of the formative role of single women’s professional, independent evangelism in establishing Protestant Christianity. In both Madagascar and Uganda, a close connection developed between the Anglican mission presence and late nineteenthcentury African state building. Ruling elites in Madagascar in the 1860s and 1870s and Buganda in the 1880s and 1890s used Protestant Christianity to centralize and consolidate authority over competing political factions and, in turn, depended on catechists (indigenous teachers and clergy) and white missionaries to secure their ascendancy in rural districts.39 This strategy prompted not only the formalization of Anglican governance and institutions but a corresponding shift in the gendered composition of Anglican missions. Women’s mission work formed a central component in a collaborative missionary and indigenous project of evangelization—first through work with elite women in the capitals and then in rural districts among marginalized ethnic groups. The arrival of single women in Madagascar in the 1870s and Uganda in the 1890s constituted the first professional Anglican (Protestant, in the case of Uganda) women’s work in both places. In other areas of Christian evangelism like India, the Middle East, and southern Africa, which had a longer history of colonial and missionary families, the wives and daughters of male missionaries laid the groundwork for the professional careers of single women later in the nineteenth century.40 However, in these parts of Africa, married women’s mission work only took root after professional single women had formulated a discourse and a program of female evangelism. In Madagascar, while a few unpaid missionary wives and daughters accompanied the first Anglican missionaries in 1864, their tenure was brief, and the Anglican mission presence on the island was tenuous before the conversion of Ranavalona II in 1869. The arrival of Emily Lawrence, who was the first professional worker sent out by the SPG LA after it was formed in 1866, coincided with (and may have been enabled by) the formal creation of an Anglican bishopric in 1873.41 Lawrence then 39 Steven Feierman, “A Century of Ironies in East Africa,” in African History: From Earliest Times to Independence, ed. Philip D. Curtin, Steve Feierman, Leonard Thompson, and Jan Vansina (New York, 1995), 352–76; Louise Pirouet, Black Evangelists: The Spread of Christianity in Uganda, 1891–1914 (London, 1978); Pier M. Larson, “‘Capacities and Modes of Thinking’: Intellectual Engagements and Subaltern Hegemony in the Early History of Malagasy Christianity,” American Historical Review 102, no. 3 (June 1997): 969–1002. 40 See Haggis, “Professional Ladies and Working Wives”; Francis-Dehqani, Religious Feminism in an Age of Empire; Kirkwood, “Protestant Missionary Women.” 41 Emily Lawrence left for Madagascar in 1867, but she spent an unexpected seven-year layover in Mauritius while waiting for conditions in Madagascar to be made suitable for a single woman’s work. Some reports detail such “conditions” as the creation of a bishopric;

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began a program of girls’ education, assisted by other LA-employed women, which formed the basis of Anglican women’s evangelization in Madagascar for the next twenty years. In Uganda, the first male missionaries of the CMS had been prohibited from taking wives with them. The CMS only deemed it suitable to send women in 1895, when the creation of the Uganda Protectorate—a collaborative effort of colonial, Anglican, and Ganda authority—and advances in transportation made it feasible for British women to travel to and live in the interior.42 The five women (the Misses Furley, Chadwick, Thompsett, Pilgrim, and Browne) who traversed the 850 miles from the coast to Mengo over the course of five months in 1895, therefore, represented the first white Protestant female presence to work in that part of east Africa. These new evangelistic schemes were also an outgrowth of the initiative of individual bishops (Bishops Kestell-Cornish and King in Madagascar and Bishop Tucker in Uganda), who provided a relatively friendly ecclesiastic arena for women. In an ostensibly male Anglican church structure, these bishops sanctioned and encouraged female work and activity, especially in the context of women’s independent mobility and management of peripheral mission stations.

others, the securing of other British female chaperonage to ensure a respectable working environment for an unmarried lady, after the unexpected departure of an SPG missionary couple whom Lawrence had been sent out to join in Tamatave. These two explanations may even be linked; that is, the need to create a respectable environment for Anglican women to work in Madagascar accelerated the creation of the new diocese and the appointment of a bishop in 1873–74. (Apparently the presence of other European mission communities did not serve the requisite function of mediating the problem of unmarried women since there were already agents of the LMS, Quakers, Norwegian Lutherans, and Catholic sisterhoods operating in Madagascar.) In the meantime, another SPG missionary was assigned to Tamatave, and his daughter Miss Percival began a school there. The appointment of Bishop Kestell-Cornish prompted Lawrence to renew her association with the LA, and she finally arrived in Madagascar in 1874. General Committee Analysis of Minute Books, 1866–1876, USPG, CWW 59, and Ladies’ Association Annual Reports, 1866–1894, USPG, CWW 329. 42 The CMS did not wish to shoulder responsibility for childbearing women’s arduous journey inland and their isolation from medical help once there. The first female party traveled the 800 miles inland on foot in 1895, and a description of the challenges of the 1895 journey illustrated the concern attached to women’s travel: apart from illness and bandits, the party contended with the “the waterless plain near the commencement of the journey, angry torrents, troublesome riverbeds and perilous bridges made with branches of trees, swamp and slush, dense, dark forest, deep ravine and cold mountain height” on their eleven-week traverse. By the following year, however, a major road connected the coast to the interior, steamers had arrived on Victoria Nyanza, and the railway was nearing completion (Sarah G. Stock, The Story of the Tear: Being the CMS Short Popular Report [London, 1895–?], for the years 1895–96, 17–18; for the years 1896–97, 23).

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The minimal institutional structure of the missions further encouraged a high degree of women’s autonomy. The SPG and its women’s component were small organizations, and they only supplied a handful of British workers to the Madagascar mission at a given time: about six women on average, spread among five mission centers. The loose institutional framework of the SPG afforded women—those who had the initiative as well as certain linguistic, professional, and financial resources—a large measure of independence and influence in the spread of Anglican mission Christianity. The Anglican presence was also a small proportion of the total mission community in Madagascar, which included the LMS, Norwegian Lutherans, Quakers, Catholic sisterhoods, and Jesuits.43 Anglicans thus offered one choice among many Protestant institutions, but Anglicans also benefited from the official adoption of Protestant Christianity by the Merina state, before French colonization in the mid-1890s displaced the Protestant ascendancy.44 In Uganda, the CMS was the only nonCatholic mission working during this period, and it enjoyed a privileged position as the exclusive representatives of Protestant Christianity.45 As not only 43

Subsequent directors of women’s evangelism attempted to emulate the Norwegian mission’s model of boarding school to revive Anglican competitiveness in the educational marketplace. Bishop George King to WMA home secretary, 19 October 1899, Gertrude King to home secretary, 25 February 1901, and George King to home secretary, 5 August 1901, USPG, CWW 98. For a discussion of the two-fold Norwegian educational scheme of promoting domesticity and creating a Christian marriage pool, see Line Nyhagen Predelli, “Sexual Control and the Remaking of Gender: The Attempt of Nineteenth-Century Protestant Norwegian Women to Export Western Domesticity to Madagascar,” Journal of Women’s History 12, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 81–103. 44 The LMS introduced Protestant Christianity in 1818 under the sanction of the successors of King Nampoina, who had centralized power in Imerina in 1806 by unifying the four ruling Merina kingdoms and establishing the capital in Antananarivo. Merina kings and queens attempted to institute Christianity to consolidate the religious authority necessary to claim political supremacy—by subjugating the ancient ritual objects (sampy) controlled by the nobles, appropriating literacy as a bureaucratic tool, and taking advantage of British military benefits. Religious state power vacillated over the next fifty years, and missionary activity ceased in the wake of persecution under Queen Ranavalona’s regime. In 1869, Ranavalona II was baptized and declared Protestant Christianity the official religion, thus ending the half century of politicized struggles and safeguarding the interests of Anglican missionaries, who had begun work in Madagascar in 1864. Larson, “Capacities and Modes of Thinking”; Feierman, “Century of Ironies,” 372–74; R. S. M. O’Ferrall, Madagascar: A Hundred Years (Saffrom Walden, UK, 1964). 45 The colonial and ecclesiastical boundaries of “Uganda” basically overlapped. Under Lugard’s treaty in 1892, which ended the civil war of succession and laid the groundwork for the Protectorate, various politico-ethnic groupings were reassigned both within and outside Buganda: kingdoms became “districts,” more generally grouped together as provinces (the western, northern, and eastern provinces surrounding the Buganda province). The Diocese and Protectorate of Uganda encompassed Buganda and the neighboring

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the largest Anglican but the largest British missionary society, the CMS could also rely on greater resources and staffing. Its mission in Uganda was much larger: by 1910 about forty women missionaries and the same number of men worked in roughly twenty-seven mission stations in Uganda, and these figures do not include stations run by African catechists. Yet British missionaries accounted for only a small number of evangelists against the backdrop of the rapid spread of indigenous Christianity. The fact that white women were such a minority meant that mission establishments depended heavily on their work with indigenous men and women and generally gave them the space to develop these networks outside the mission stations (and, thus, away from central mission authorities). Therefore, although Anglican women went abroad as members of a conservative and hierarchical institution, mission work in these areas offered certain empowering opportunities for women outside the British Isles. In both Madagascar and Uganda, the formalization of the Anglican church in an ecclesiastical and political capacity sanctioned professional women’s work and gave the first single women a wide latitude for shaping the tenor of female evangelism, particularly outside the central mission stations. Yet, as the next section shows, the mission field’s suspension of British norms of respectability and social relations carried the potential to limit as well as to expand women’s authority.

The Opportunities and Constraints of Missionary Spinsterhood

Like other Protestant denominations, individual Anglican missionary agencies promoted unmarried women as uniquely suited to the physical rigors and vocational demands of the mission field, arguing that spinsters were unhindered by familial responsibilities, stronger than women who had born or would bear children, and at greater liberty to develop specialized skill sets. Yet these ideological reformulations of gender, professionalism, and evangelism represented not only a necessary measure in recruiting women but also a necessary justification for the conditions of mission service itself. Indeed, for all of the missionary movement’s emphasis on single womanhood as a suitable channel for middle-class women’s employment, single women’s life and work in the provinces. See Holger Bernt Hansen, Mission, Church, and State in a Colonial Setting, 1890– 1925 (London, 1984), xvi–xix, 48–51. Outside Buganda, the most important districts for women missionaries’ early work were Toro and Ankole to the west, Bunyoro to the north, and Busoga to the east.

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mission field posed a significant threat to conventional British constructions of femininity. Individual women’s initiative, societies’ standards, and the particular conditions of these areas of the African mission field combined to create a significant outlet for single women to exercise authority and independence. Yet this authority was not unlimited; while women working outside central mission stations had a fairly wide scope of agency, their position within the mission station was often circumscribed by gendered ecclesiastical hierarchies and constrictive communal settings. Therefore, although mission establishments in the field privileged the evangelistic over the feminine terms of a missionary vocation, they did not always accord women corresponding equality with male missionaries; women were left to their own devices to carve out a space in the mission hierarchy, establish professional and personal credibility with fellow mission workers, and plead their cases to metropolitan authorities in the event of disputes. The professional, personal, and physical spaces of women’s missionary vocation were highly permeable. The small staff and loose institutional framework of missions in Madagascar and Uganda set fewer rules of work and conduct than missionaries would have been accustomed to in Britain; moreover, specialized labor was not as highly valued as it was in Indian missions. The specific nature of mission work varied according to the station setting, but single women’s duties in these parts of the African field typically included some combination of school teaching, dispensary care, women’s meetings, Bible study, baptismal preparation, and home visitation, in addition to household and mission management and organizing and attending social functions. In Madagascar, the scarcity of women workers made a diversification of skills essential to successful evangelism, despite the fact that SPG women were officially employed in a purely educational capacity. In CMS fields like Uganda, the mission allocated women’s division of labor along professional lines, so that different missionaries were responsible for carrying out medical, educational, and evangelistic work. Yet even among these comparatively larger and more specialized staffs, women missionaries found it impossible to subject their labor to strictly professional categorization. Since a relatively small number of British missionaries staffed these missions, women frequently operated outside the direct purview of male-dominated authority structures. The material circumstances of women’s lives were difficult for some sensibilities to accommodate, and reactions from both inside and outside the mission community reveal the degree to which women’s mission work transgressed normative gender boundaries. Travel arrangements for the initial voyage out often provided women with their first indication of the changed standards of

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respectability to which they had subjected themselves upon leaving Britain. Usually the sponsoring society and mission worked to arrange suitable escorts for the extent of the voyage, but circumstances sometimes dictated otherwise. When Miss Woodford arrived at the coastal port of Tamatave in Madagascar in 1880, the mission was unable to find any married men to escort her on the journey inland, and the bishop’s wife was obliged to meet her at the coast and accompany her to the capital alone.46 Soon thereafter Mr. Hammond, a member of the SPG mission in Mauritius, who would occasionally host missionaries traveling to and from Madagascar, admonished the SPG and LA for their negligence in failing to provide safe and respectable passage for its ladies: “Mr. Hammond cannot let this opportunity pass without protesting most strongly against the great want of sympathy manifested by the SPG towards the lady missionaries sent out by that Society to do its Mission Work. Miss Woodford would have been allowed to leave England for Madagascar alone in a  … vessel which was afterwards wrecked, but for the personal interest taken in her position by Bishop Copleston and other friends.”47 Highlighting an egregious abandonment of decorum, he chastised the SPG for its failure to protect not only women’s safety but their feminine integrity. The evangelistic work of Anglican women also involved a fair amount of independent mobility away from the central mission compounds where they were stationed. “Itinerating” (short-term travel to rural outstations) was crucial to fostering the medical, instructional, and social networks on which British women relied to catechize African women, and it required frequent travel across vast terrain (by foot, bicycle, rickshaw, or canoe, accompanied by porters to carry and set up bedding, tenting, and food). Sponsoring societies endorsed the practice, but the British colonial administration in Uganda perceived the unsupervised movement of large numbers of white women through rural expanses as a safety concern. After a roadside robbery in Busoga in 1907, District Commissioner H. Hesketh Bell criticized the CMS for its failure to provide guardianship for unmarried women who did not have the option of relying on husbands: “Considering the unprotected position in which your ladies often find themselves, and the freedom with which they move about among the natives, I am surprised, indeed, that catastrophes have not already occurred…. The spirit and pluck shown by your ladies is most admirable, but I hope you will agree with me in thinking it unwise to allow them to expose themselves to disasters only to be expected in the neighborhood of sensual

46 Emma Kestell-Cornish to LA home secretary, 6 October 1878, USPG, CWW 192. 47 W. Hammond, Esq., to SPG, received 12 August 1880, USPG, CWW 193; emphasis in original.

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and curious-minded negroes.”48 Although Bell drew on a widely circulated trope of the danger posed to white women’s virtue by native sexual aggression, the CMS must not have found it compelling. Mission authorities placed too much evangelistic value on women’s itinerating to restrict these excursions. Mission authorities faced a conflict of propriety versus practicality in these situations, charged as they were with protecting women’s respectability, the mission’s efficiency, and missionary relations with the colonial state. But when forced to choose between these objectives, the evangelistic needs of the mission usually won out. For example, CMS policy forbade single women to reside in or manage outstations on their own or with unmarried male missionaries, but that rule was often overlooked in Uganda due to short staffing.49 Such was the case in Toro in 1900, when the sudden departure of a missionary couple, the Lloyds, left an important station in the hands of two single women, Misses Pike and Hurditch. When Mr. Lloyd had originally petitioned the bishop to allow him to take up his former post in Toro after his marriage and to overlook the fact that “it was not considered wise policy to allow a young married woman to go where no doctor is available,” the bishop had granted the request largely to enable the beginning of the two single women’s work in Toro, “as there certainly were obvious difficulties in two young girls going so far off where only young men are working, and a few government officials are stationed.”50 The Bishop’s decision also went against the recommendation of the CMS Ladies Consultative Committee in London, which questioned the wisdom of sending two such young and inexperienced women where “there are European Government officials in the near neighborhood.”51 When the Lloyds’ departure due to ill health the following year created a situation that was less than ideal, Bishop Tucker nonetheless felt that Pike and Hurditch’s evangelistic importance rendered the moral dilemma of keeping them there worth the risk. There were 700 children under their supervision in the mission schools, and 48 H. H. Bell to Rev. John Roscoe, 1 July 1908, Church Mission Society Archives (hereafter CMS), Under-Africa Committee (G3), Uganda Mission (A7), Original Papers, 1908 (O6), 206. 49 In 1911, Chadwick wrote home to her friend Ethel McGowan that there were at least three women living alone in different stations or districts: Miss Attlee in Hoima, Miss Thompsett in Busoga, and Miss Bingham in Ndeje. 11 April 1911, CMS, Jane Elizabeth Chadwick Papers, Accessions 167/F3/23. 50 Hurditch journal letter, 20 April 1900, reprinted in Footsteps of Truth, July 1900, 253, CMS, G3 A7 Original Papers, 1898–1907 (O). 51 In fact, this was a moot point because Pike and Hurditch had already been working in Toro for five months when the Ladies Consultative Committee made its recommendation—a reflection of the practical disconnect between the channels of authority in Britain and in the mission field. Minutes of the Ladies Consultative Committee, CMS, G3 A7 O/1900/169.

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the bishop wrote the CMS home secretary that he “would rather that all the ladies should be withdrawn from Uganda than these two from Toro.”52 Women’s independent management of missions underscores how they were able to forge new spaces of authority. Emily Lawrence’s work in Mahanoro, Madagascar, provides another salient illustration of this point. In the late 1870s, Miss Lawrence began formulating a plan to establish a mission on the eastern coast, in response to a request from several local chiefs for teachers.53 The bishop and the LA approved the plan in 1883, and in June 1884, Lawrence traveled with a Malagasy priest from Antananarivo to Mahanoro in order to establish an Anglican mission. During the weeks that followed, Lawrence successfully launched the mission by engaging in a complex series of political and cultural negotiations with the Merina government’s representative and the local Betsimisaraka community and by employing her medical expertise to foster receptivity to the mission.54 The SPG did not appoint a priest in charge 52 Tucker to Baylis, 4 January 1901, CMS, G3 A7, Precis Book, 1898–1907 (P1). Pike and Hurditch had actually been placed in a similar position on their initial trek to Toro the previous year, when the Lloyds were compelled by fever to return to Mengo midjourney, leaving the two women to continue to Toro on their own with only one young Ganda man to escort them. Hurditch herself commented that “one would scarcely have chosen to go so far from everybody with only one other young girl,” but she embraced the opportunity to ameliorate isolation by entering into a closer relationship with God: “No longer was I one wee thing alone in a great, big, strange land, but I was the child of a King, who reigneth in Africa as well as in England…. Oh, it is worth coming to Africa to know ‘Immanuel’ [‘God with us’]” (Hurditch journal letter, 5 May 1900, reprinted in Footsteps of Truth, July 1900, 253–54, CMS, G3 A7 O/1900/132). 53 Ranavalona’s government actively promoted education and eventually issued a law in 1882 requiring all Malagasy to send their children to the school of their choice, but it was a long time before this policy could take effect since in many places there were no schools at all, and the first French-Malagasy war (1883–84) set back efforts of expanding educational opportunities. The Anglican mission at Mahanoro was first constructed on the site where provincial Merina representatives had tried to establish a school three years prior, which was run for two years by a male LMS-trained Malagasy teacher and then abandoned. Lawrence to LA secretary, 26 March 1879, USPG, CWW 192; Emily Lawrence diary, 1884, USPG X Series (miscellaneous papers), 697. 54 Lawrence to LA secretary, 29 November 1883, 28 July 1884, and 24 November 1884, USPG, CWW 194; Lawrence to home secretary, 18 December 1888, USPG, CWW 196; Lawrence diary, 21 July and 9 August 1884, USPG X, 697; Lawrence, retrospective of ten years work in Mahanoro, included in report given to WMA while on furlough, 1893 Annual Report, USPG, CWW 329/30–31. Missionary ties with the royal family and prime minister linked them with Merina (“Hova”) hegemony in the eyes of eastern coastal ethnic groups (in the case of Mahanoro, the Betsimisaraka). Early programs of mission education on the coast, which relied on Hova assistants, tended to elicit and exacerbate anti-Hova sentiment. Amelia Stracham’s slow progress with the boarding and day schools in Tamatave was due in part to this friction (Stracham to home secretary, 10 May 1878, USPG, CWW 192).

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until November, which meant that Lawrence supervised the educational, medical, religious, and administrative workings of the mission throughout its inceptive stage and periodically thereafter when the resident priest was on leave or the mission was between priests. The Malagasy mission staff gradually grew under her purview, and in 1887 there were two schoolmasters/catechists and four live-in teachers at the girls’ school, along with her Creole assistant Lydia Tessier. The bishop put Lawrence in charge of overseeing “male” mission work as well as her own for up to nine months at a time, even though she delegated much of the responsibility to the Malagasy workers. Both the frequent absence of a priest in charge as well as the unmediated presence of unmarried priests indicated that the mission had begun to look the other way in matters of missionary propriety when the efficacy of the work was at stake.55 Lawrence also lobbied for an Anglican hospital, and in 1889 she secured a grant from the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge to begin a full medical mission. In 1892 (her last year in Mahanoro and her twenty-fifth year of mission work), she oversaw the building of the first mission hospital on Madagascar’s eastern coast.56 Single women’s missionary activity was therefore highly independent in settings like Uganda and Madagascar, where women founded and managed many Anglican mission centers on their own.57 Women’s evangelism appropriated many of the functions traditionally reserved for their male counterparts, including almost every aspect of lay and religious leadership except the administration of sacraments. Therefore, unlike in Britain, where women were barred from preaching or becoming ordained, in the African mission field, their evangelism assumed an almost clerical capacity. Moreover, the professional fluidity of mission settings allowed women like Lawrence—who was officially employed as a teacher but also skilled in medicine—to develop networks with indigenous authorities and to diversify their evangelistic strategies in the service of religious conversion. Yet the defeminization of women’s vocational functions, which created a space for female autonomy and authority Therefore, although several Betsimisaraka chiefs had requested teachers for Mahanoro, recognizing the social and political advantages of literacy under Merina rule, Lawrence found that appealing to the larger community required multiple channels of persuasion. 55 Lawrence to LA secretary, 21 May 1887, USPG, CWW 195; LA Annual Reports, USPG, 329. 56 “The Church in Madagascar, SPG Mission: Report of 15 Years Progress, 1874–1889” (unpublished pamphlet, 1889), USPG X, 695; Lawrence to LA secretary, 14 April 1892, USPG, CWW 197. 57 The women’s committee of the Pan-Anglican Congress in London in 1907 debated whether women were more successful than men in starting new mission stations and concluded that ideally a joint effort was best. Minutes of the Women’s Committee of the Pan-Anglican Congress, 1907–1908, USPG, CWW 11.

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outside the central stations, could also subject women to stringent constraints within mission communities. The issue of housing pitted the realities of communal living against the ideal of protecting the virtue of single womanhood. While many women spoke of clean and comfortable living situations in mission stations, others were less than pleased with arrangements that compromised not only their health and comfort but the seemliness of communal relations. In 1901, Miss Chadwick asked the CMS overseas secretary to take up the issue of women’s housing in Mengo and outlying stations with the CMS Parent Committee.58 The shortage of housing meant that new women arrivals were forced to turn male missionaries out of their homes, which made the women “to feel that we were under a personal obligation to one or other of the gentlemen of the mission for the houses we have lived in…. It certainly is not pleasant for us.” Moreover, the existing housing was unsatisfactory, subjecting women to small, dark, unventilated conditions that were prone to flooding: “I do not honestly think that any gentleman in the mission would be content with the quarters that Miss Robinson and Miss Allen have cheerfully put up with during the last few months.” The two women working at the mission in Ngogwe were compelled to inhabit “a very much smaller house than that occupied by a single gentleman and so dark that Miss Tanner’s eyesight has been considerably affected by it while it is depressing in the extreme, even to an occasional visitor.” Chadwick argued that the mission’s abandonment of gender norms had actually resulted in unequal treatment of women. She was exasperated with the mission administration for neglecting to ameliorate unmarried missionaries’ quality of life and for failing to recognize how their living conditions affected their mission vocation: “I cannot but think that here, with all the wear and tear of climate and hard work, with somewhat uncongenial food and the well-known temptation to irritability and ‘nerves’ that Africa brings, that the lady missionaries should at least be sure of light and airy and sufficiently commodious dwelling-houses, and, at least where three have to live together, more than one common sitting-room, as it is exceedingly difficult, say, for a newcomer to study the language while another may be entertaining a number of native visitors.”59 Chadwick’s petition ultimately succeeded in obtaining a grant for a new building later that year.60 However, her representation of single 58 Chadwick to Baylis, 23 April 1901, CMS, G3 A7 O/1901/130. 59 Ibid. 60 When Chadwick applied for the housing grant, she expressed doubt that any of the men at the mission had time to take on the construction of new homes, leading her to suggest that the CMS give women the same training in carpentry and architectural design

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women’s disadvantages reveals an underlying sense of women’s vulnerability to male missionaries, the mission administration, and the natural elements. Miss Agnes Cooper, who worked in Madagascar from 1876 to 1880, asked the LA to relieve her of her appointment after she had served her term, citing not only the stress of running a large school without assistance but also the anxiety of living alone in an unfamiliar setting: “I certainly never expected when I came to Madagascar that I should have to live and sleep in a large school house entirely alone. I firmly believe that a very great deal of my ill health is attributable to the wakeful restless nights I always have, and must necessarily have owing to my position.”61 Lawrence confirmed the toll that mission work had taken on Cooper when the two crossed paths the following year in Mauritius on Cooper’s return trip: “I think you will find Miss Cooper much altered. She looks miserably thin and ill and does not seem happy.”62 Single women’s experience seems to have fluctuated between extreme isolation and a total lack of privacy, and while some resented having to live alone, others preferred their independence to sharing tight living quarters with others. Missionary homes did not constitute the private sanctuary removed from the professional world that middle-class ideology idealized in Britain. Instead, houses often doubled as outpatient clinics, schoolrooms, study space, and reception areas for entertaining African visitors; moreover, missionaries often commented that African customs of social intercourse were much more casual and spontaneous, which produced a high degree of unpredictability in provisions of hospitality. As Rhonda Semple has observed in the case of mission communities in Asia, mission work blurred the boundaries between personal and professional duties, private and collective existence.63 For this reason, many women preferred a living situation that would allow them the greatest possible measure of privacy. Woodford complained of having to surrender both her personal and professional freedom when she moved to a different that it apparently gave male missionaries before leaving Britain. Chadwick to Baylis, 23 April 1901, CMS, G3 A7 O/130. 61 Cooper to LA home secretary, 6 November 1879, USPG, CWW 192. 62 Lawrence to LA home secretary, 31 May 1880, USPG, CWW 193. Surprisingly, Cooper reapplied for service in Madagascar late in 1882, but the LA declined her offer. The bishop’s reaction upon hearing the LA’s decision suggests that Cooper was unpopular with the other mission staff, due to both a lack of success at the school (although she claimed otherwise) and her penchant for pettiness: “She might possibly have done better as a teacher than she did before, but she is a person who did not rise superior to a good deal of very mischievous scandal and gossip when she was with us, and there is no one in the Mission who does not share with me in the relief which I felt when I heard that she was not coming out” (Bishop to home secretary, 2 November 1883, USPG, CWW 194). 63 Semple, Missionary Women, 199.

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school in Antananarivo, changing from a situation in which she ran her own school and occupied her own house to one in which she shared both teaching and living arrangements: “I prefer solitude for many reasons…. Altogether I feel like a tree plucked up by the roots. However, for the sake of the Mission I suppose it is best.”64 Clearly then, although missionary service implied an understanding that individuals should subsume their own wishes under those of the administration, many women experienced some inner conflict when they were expected to sacrifice their own well-being for the sake of the mission project. Such resentment could become acute when personalities clashed, as they were prone to do in small mission communities. Sometimes these clashes reflected the contested boundaries of professional and ecclesiastical authority. Mary Simpson’s brief tenure in Madagascar is a case in point: in 1890 she sparred with the bishop over who had the ultimate authority to administer examinations in her Antananarivo school, with Simpson arguing that her “secular” capacity as a teacher and her employment by the autonomous LA (rather than by the SPG) insulated her from episcopal oversight. Simpson was dismissed before the end of the year.65 In the central mission stations, there was little room for women to use professional status to contest ecclesiastical hierarchy. Even more frequently, relations with other missionaries became strained when women felt unduly subjected to crippling standards of work and selfsacrifice for the good of the mission community and the evangelizing project. Scheduling furloughs (i.e., leaves to return to Britain) could elicit resentment on all sides since those who came up for furlough felt entitled to claim the right they were granted in their contract, while those left to carry on the work in the field disliked having to take on any extra work in their absence. When Agnes Buckle applied for furlough in 1889, the LA denied the request on the grounds that she had not yet served five full years in Madagascar (her arrival had been delayed by the war in 1884, which compelled her to commence work in Mauritius instead). The LA cited Emily Lawrence’s willingness to wait five years before taking her first furlough, even though she had served in Mauritius for seven years prior to that. Buckle retorted that she had already done twice the work to which she had been assigned since the marriage of her coteacher Miss Haviland had left the work of two schoolmistresses in her hands. Moreover, she refused to follow Lawrence’s example of self-sacrifice for the sake of her evangelistic vocation: “You write that Miss Lawrence remained about 10 years. 64 65

Woodford to LA home secretary, 31 December 1880, USPG, CWW 193. Letters exchanged between Mary Simpson, Bishop Kestall-Cornish, and the LA secretary Miss Bullock, March–October 1890, USPG, CWW 196.

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Because she wished to stay I suppose! I do not. No call in the world would induce me to leave England for 10 years.”66 Lawrence herself, however, acutely felt the effects of failing to take regular leave. Health was one of the worst causalities of the mission field, and Lawrence’s first furlough took on greater urgency after a prolonged illness worsened throughout 1878. Although Lawrence was reluctant to leave until another recruit from England could take over, the doctor felt that she would run a great risk by staying in Madagascar. Lawrence described her condition as work inflicted: “I have no organic disease, I am suffering from severe nervous debility and loss of strength.”67 Since Lawrence would have to break up the journey home by staying for a time on the coast, she suggested that she take over Amelia Stracham’s work on the coast and that Stracham temporarily take over the school in the capital. Stracham, however, died suddenly not long after, which came as a shock for Miss Woodford, who had spent several months with Stracham after first arriving in Madagascar and had left only two weeks before her death (the exact cause of which is unknown). The suddenness of the event convinced Woodford that even the hardiest constitutions would falter under the expectations and demands of mission work: When I saw her to say goodbye, she spoke of being healthy and strong. This is indeed a climate to wear one down very quickly—ay! Even at the Capital. Were I to know of anyone thinking of joining the Mission I would earnestly say, “do not come unless very strong.” Then you may work well, and not feel it too much, otherwise you will see much, very much that wants doing and your spirit will be stirred within you. You will strive to do it, and the consequence will be—well in all probability an early death, or a breakdown of health.68 The bishop often accused Woodford of hypochondria, and he expressed his doubts early on about whether she would be equal to the task: “I am sorry to observe that Miss Woodford takes every opportunity of impressing upon me how delicate she is, how much afraid of the sun, and how unequal to hard work. This does not look promising.”69 When she finally gave in to poor health and left in 1882, the bishop expressed his resentment at her poor timing, coming on the heels of the recent arrival of a new woman missionary who would have to work alone in Antananarivo (particularly since his own wife had recently 66 67 68 69

Buckle to LA home secretary, 11 July 1888, USPG, CWW 195. Lawrence to LA home secretary, 15 April 1878, USPG, CWW 192. Woodford to LA home secretary, 4 December 1878, USPG, CWW 192. Bishop to LA home secretary, 6 November 1878, USPG, CWW 192; emphasis in original.

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died). In requesting that the LA send out a replacement immediately, the bishop added: “Let me beg you not to send out a person who either is or fancies herself to be delicate. Miss Woodford’s failure is from the latter cause.”70 The bishop’s rebuke of both Woodford and the LA made it clear that feminized traits of “delicacy” had no place in the mission field. Woodford herself conveyed a different picture of her departure. While the bishop questioned both the validity of her health concerns and her dedication to the mission community, her own correspondence indicates that she deeply regretted having to abandon the mission. She had successfully built up both Anglican girls’ schools in the capital, and she was frustrated that she would not have the chance to witness the fruits of her labor. “It is very sad to have to leave my work now that all is going on so well. Ten of my dear girls were baptized on Easter Day (with the full consent of their relatives) so that now I have not one unbaptized girl or woman in my school…. I am so grieved to leave my dear people and scholars, many of whom are deeply attached to me as I to them.”71 Her ultimate sense of satisfaction in her work was particularly significant in light of the despair she had frequently experienced along the way. Like many missionaries (particularly women, according to official mission reports), Woodford took the disappointments of mission work personally, and her perpetual encounters with “heathen” moral standards produced discouragement and depression. She was more candid than most, however, in admitting the potential of such encounters to weaken her own religious faith. Writing home in 1881, she conveyed the following plea: “In conclusion let me beg the earnest remembrance of myself and work in the prayers of our friends at home. The low standard of morality here, the sad things which one sees and hears daily, all tend to lower the tone of one’s own spiritual life, and especially as one has not the bright English services and sermons of home, and so one trembles lest after having striven to show others the way to the Kingdom, oneself should be a ‘castaway.’”72 Woodford was not alone in questioning the narrative of inevitable progress and glorious sacrifice that official mission literature scripted for the evangelizing project. Women’s encounters with “heathenism” produced frequent disillusionment with the mission enterprise, but their self-definition within that enterprise was also shaped in relation to competing versions of professionalism and womanhood.

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Bishop to LA home secretary, 15 April 1882, USPG, CWW 193. The secretary’s reply to the bishop suggests that she concurred with his assessment of Woodford. Woodford to LA home secretary, 30 April 1882, USPG, CWW 193. Woodford to LA home secretary, Antananarivo, 16 June 1881, USPG, CWW 193.

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The collective ethos that projected the needs of the mission over and against individual concerns marginalized women’s recourse to either a professional model of the independent missionary or an evangelical ideal of womanhood. The contested terms of a missionary vocation, which slid unevenly between deference and autonomy, self-sacrifice and self-reliance, lay at the heart of the tension of missionary marriage.

The Problem of Missionary Marriage

Evangelical discourse cast mission work as an equal fulfillment of woman’s natural vocation because it channeled the same qualities of service, selflessness, spirituality, virtue, and compassion that characterized marriage, motherhood, and domesticity. In the mission field, however, many women discovered the impossibility of fitting mission work and marriage into the same vocational space. Many women did not remain spinsters after they left Britain, and the ramifications of their decision to marry revealed the ideological limits of a missionary vocation to encompass both a gendered and professionalized ideal. In actively policing women’s marriages, mission institutions went beyond posing spinsterhood as an option and made it instead a nonnegotiable condition of mission service. If evangelism served the cause of spinsterhood in metropolitan discourse, spinsterhood was the unremitting tool of evangelism in the mission field. The self-sacrifice demanded by missionary service was projected particularly keenly by institutional expectations of celibacy. Mission organizations in Britain did not hire married or engaged women at the deployment stage; in cases of wives or fiancées who applied to join male missionaries in the field, the CMS did review their applications but used less selective criteria as it did when reviewing “independent” candidates, assuming that married women would not be responsible for a high proportion of mission work.73 Thus, even 73 For example, when deciding whether to accept Miss Isabel Barnes, an applicant for nursing work in Uganda who was engaged to another missionary but whose “poor exam results” at The Olives (a CMS training home) showed “weak” Bible knowledge, the CMS determined that while “under ordinary circumstances we should not consider her ready for acceptance as an independent missionary … as a fiancée I do not think we need be afraid to send her out as soon as possible” (Report from The Olives, 12 March 1907, CMS, G3 A7 O/1907/77). Barnes’s fiancé, Rev. Owen, had requested leave to marry her the previous year, but the Parent Committee had denied the request because Owen had not yet served the full probationary period. Ironically, however, he was not permitted to take up his new post at Ankole until they married because there were other, unmarried ladies

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at the deployment stage, the CMS signaled a discrepancy in the standards of married and single women’s evangelistic contribution and vocational integrity and in the gendering of the professional standards and financial support. This division was sustained in the course of mission employment. Official mission policy was designed to prevent marriage whenever possible since missionary marriages disrupted mission work by necessitating the untimely redistribution and replacement of labor.74 Most Anglican societies imposed probationary terms that missionaries had to serve before marrying, and certain practical circumstances precluded marriage altogether.75 For women, significant financial incentives were attached to these decisions since sponsoring societies would downgrade or curtail the salaries of those who married prematurely, require a proportional repayment, or both.76 Men were not held to the same standard of celibacy. In theory they too were expected to forgo a traditional family life, and the CMS required its male missionaries to serve a longer tenure in the field before they could marry (four years, by contrast with the one for women); in practice, however, mission institutions did not expect that family life would interfere with their duties in the same way. In fact, in some cases missionary working there. Rev. Roscoe to secretary, 19 March 1906, CMS, G3 A7 P1/85; Owen to secretary, 11 April 1906, CMS, G3 A7 P1/115. 74 For example, Miss Agnes Buckle, working in Madagascar in the 1880s, repeatedly voiced her frustration with the unreasonable demands placed on her by the marriage of her coworker Miss Haviland, which doubled her teaching responsibilities in the Antananarivo mission school and later delayed her scheduled furlough. Buckle to LA secretary, 10 September 1885, USPG, CWW 194; Buckle to LA secretary, 11 July 1888, USPG, CWW 195. 75 Although neither the CMS nor the SPG adopted the policy of total celibacy practiced by the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (the most Anglo-Catholic of the Anglican societies), the CMS did prohibit the first generation of male missionaries in Uganda from bringing wives with them for health and logistical reasons. The infrastructural “opening” of the African interior and the creation of the Uganda Protectorate in the mid-1890s prompted the arrival of single women missionaries beginning in 1895 (see n. 42). 76 The CMS required its female missionaries to wait at least one year in the field, or until the first language examination had been passed, before marrying. CMS women who married could expect their salaries to be downgraded; however, there is some evidence that single women in the Uganda mission were paid (uncharacteristically) on equal terms as men. The WMA of the SPG required a pledge from its workers to remain unmarried for three years, and those who married prematurely would forfeit all financial support entirely. In the CEZMS, women who married before five years of service had elapsed were required to pay a proportional refund to the society. Regulations Regarding Marriage of CMS Missionaries Connected with the Uganda Mission, 3 August 1897, CMS, G3, East Africa Mission (A5), Precis Book, 1896–97 (P5); CMS secretary to Uganda missionaries, 28 January 1898, CMS, G3 A7 P1; Archdeacon Walker to secretary, 26 February 1907, CMS, G3 A7 O/86; Women’s Committee of the Pan-Anglican Congress, 1907–1908, USPG, CWW 11; see also Kirkwood, “Wives of Missionaries Working with the Society,” 326.

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wives were seen as benefiting the particular work for which male missionaries were responsible, particularly in medical missions.77 Accordingly, if men married in the field, they were still entitled to the full benefits of the society’s financial and institutional support. Therefore, marriage represented a personal comfort in which women missionaries were entitled to indulge only if it fit into the greater evangelistic scheme. As the CMS reminded its Uganda missionaries in 1897, “many devoted missionaries, men and women, of the CMS and other societies have deliberately denied themselves the privileges and blessings of married life in order that they may the more fully do Christ’s work in the world.”78 Bishop Tucker of Uganda asked the CMS to specifically recruit women who were not looking to get married and “who for the sake of the work would be content to live a single life.”79 His assessment of efficient missionary service stipulated that the only way for women to remain faithful to their vocational calling and maintain professional credibility was to avoid marriage. These priorities led to a number of regulations that governed the probationary period preceding marriage, particularly that furloughs not be taken prematurely in order to facilitate marriage and that discrete contact be maintained between engaged couples. Such initiatives were passed by the CMS in London in response to a series of engagements and marriages during the first several years of women’s missionary presence in Uganda in the late 1890s, in an attempt to codify missionaries’ sexual boundaries and to uphold individuals’ responsibility to the mission over any personal or social commitments. The CMS could not reasonably condemn the idea of marriage itself; instead, the Parent Committee directed its critique at monitoring the “mutual intercourse of Missionaries before or after such mutual understanding.”80 The rules were designed to ensure the respectability of mission living arrangements and to avert any rupture in the financial and logistical efficacy of the mission.81 Those 77

In 1898–99, the brothers Dr. A. R. Cook and Dr. J. H. Cook were both permitted to marry their fiancées (nurses Katherine Timpson and Ethel Maddox, respectively) prematurely on the grounds that expeditious marriages would be more useful to staffing the medical mission. By contrast, Mr. H. E. Maddox’s simultaneous request to marry fellow missionary Bertha Taylor before their probationary time had expired was denied (CMS, G3 A7 P1/199, 203, 204, 207). 78 CMS Memorandum on Marriage of Missionaries in Uganda, 3 August 1897, CMS, G3 A5 P5. 79 Tucker to CMS secretary, 18 January 1899, CMS, G3 A7 P1/62. 80 Circular letter from CMS secretary to Uganda missionaries, 28 January 1898, CMS, G3 A7 P1. 81 When Rev. Owen applied for leave to marry in 1906, the CMS required that he wait to take up his new post at Ankole until he married since there were single women already living there. Letter from Rev. Roscoe, 19 March 1906, CMS, G3 A7 O.

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who applied for exemption from the regulations were successful only when their arrangement could be construed as benefiting the mission. Those who married without the permission of the CMS were dismissed, as in the case of a Miss K. Potter, who had only served half a year in Uganda when her marriage to another missionary in Kenya resulted in their discharge from the society.82 These attempts to assert control over mission workers’ marital patterns did not succeed, however, in curtailing missionary marriages. In 1907, the CMS listed 133 women currently in the field worldwide who had married after beginning mission work; in Uganda, during the first decade after the first single women missionaries arrived in 1895, fourteen of the thirty-four women employed by the CMS married after beginning service for the society.83 Yet those who acted within as well as outside officially sanctioned conditions of marriage had trouble reconciling their decision to marry with their role in mission work since marrying a fellow missionary constituted both a breach of contract and a betrayal of one’s evangelical calling. Married women in Madagascar who were initially employed by the LA of the SPG felt this dilemma acutely. These missionary wives usually kept a relationship with the LA and participated actively in mission life, but they forfeited full missionary status and the right to an independent salary when they married. They also found themselves having to justify their decision to sponsoring committees and local mission authorities, who resented the inconvenience of having to replace them and who worried about the break in continuity of the female mission staff. Barbara Druitt had only been in Madagascar nine months when she became engaged in March 1902 to Rev. H. H. Blair, the SPG priest in Mahanoro.84 Her letter to the LA secretary announcing this development conveyed very mixed feelings, being happy about the engagement but also regretful of any trouble her resignation might cause the mission. She assured the LA that she would compensate their loss through volunteer work, simultaneously reassuring herself that marriage and missionary work were not mutually exclusive: “I look forward to helping after I am married, for I couldn’t think 82 M. Louise Pirouet, “Women Missionaries of the Church Missionary Society in Uganda, 1896–1920,” in Missionary Ideologies in the Imperialist Era, 1880–1920, ed. Torben Christensen and William R. Hutchinson (Århus, 1982), 233–34. 83 Women’s Committee of the Pan-Anglican Congress, 1907–1908, USPG, CWW 11; Pirouet, “Women Missionaries of the Church Missionary Society,” 233–34. 84 This was the same year in which the WMA of the SPG passed the rule prohibiting its workers to enter into a marriage contract before three years had elapsed, in order that they might “give themselves wholly and without distraction to the work to which they were sent out to fulfill,” even if “it is not true to say that women are lost to mission work if they marry other missionaries” (quoted in Kirkwood, “Wives of Missionaries Working with the Society,” 326).

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of being married if that meant ceasing to be a missionary.”85 The bishop of Madagascar’s response to the engagement revealed similar tensions, and he did not share Druitt’s confidence that her marital position would allow her to sustain the full import of the work in a voluntary capacity. Although he could not outwardly decry the marriage of two capable missionaries—his predecessor had made it a point to encourage unions when they complied with mission policy—he nonetheless assumed her retreat from full missionary service as a foregone conclusion.86 As he wrote, “I am exceedingly sorry that this engagement has taken place…. We lose an official worker who is exceptionally strong, and who would have filled splendidly any educational position in the Mission. I am afraid her future usefulness as missionary’s wife does not compensate for all this loss.”87 The bishop’s distinction between a woman’s function as a missionary versus a missionary wife reflected a widespread assumption that work and marriage constituted essentially irreconcilable paths, even in a mission setting where domestic, educational, and church-related affairs all coexisted in the same physical spaces. The organization of mission hierarchies around this principle resulted in the paradoxical dismissal of women’s evangelical calling by ecclesiastical figures who prioritized the professional dimension of the work over the vocational one. CMS women in Uganda who married in the field experienced a similar conflict of calling, particularly when children entered the picture. Beatrice Glass was a graduate of Newnham College, Cambridge, who went to Uganda in 1900 full of zeal and optimism. She became close with the Ganda students and teachers in the Mengo school where she worked while studying for her language exams and wrote extensive letters home about the fulfillment she found in her work. She married fellow missionary Mr. Fraser in 1901 and stayed involved in mission work during the first year of her marriage, but the birth of a child in 85 86

87

Druitt to WMA secretary, March 1902, Original Letters Received, 1898–1902, USPG, CWW 98. When Miss Louisa Barker announced her engagement to Mr. McMahon in the summer of 1882, she also made it clear that the marriage would not take place before her threeyear term at the school had expired, which met with the bishop’s approval: “They are exceedingly well suited to one another, and I supposed so long as Miss Barker performs her duties in her school she will not lose her position on account of her marriage” (Bishop Kestell-Cornish to LA secretary, 20 July 1882, USPG, CWW 193). Barker, however, found herself in a paradoxical position: although her professional status would be temporarily preserved intact by the delayed marriage, her ability to prioritize professional over spousal commitments would end after the marriage had taken place, at which point she would have to give up her work in the capital and move to an outstation: “Should his time be then entirely given up to country work, as is thought desirable, my work, I suppose, I shall find there too” (Barker to LA home secretary, 14 September 1882, USPG, CWW 193). Bishop King to LA secretary, 23 March 1902, USPG, CWW 98/270.

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1902 required her to withdraw from teaching in the mission schools and to shift her attention to informal modes of evangelism such as home visitation. Glass found it difficult to validate the new terms of her missionary contribution as legitimate evangelistic work. “I hope the chats I get with [our native friends] do really help as missionary work: they fall to my share, as my husband is out teaching 5 hours a day—but sometimes I feel so much time goes in[to] looking after our own large family and visitors and so little in[to] what at home and by most single missionaries here is considered real missionary work.”88 In Glass’s experience, marriage and motherhood did not measure highly on the yardsticks of vocational worth set out and maintained within metropolitan and mission networks.89 Her sense of detachment from the mission mainstream intensified when her husband’s new assignment required them to relocate from Mengo to a more remote mission station. Separated from her missionary coworkers and from her African friends, her only social intercourse in the new station came through her husband’s pastoral networks and from the boys who worked as house servants. She was frustrated by her British friends’ failure to write, for they did not apparently sympathize with either the difficulty of her work or the spiritual connection she longed to maintain with them. The tone of her letters became increasingly discouraged throughout her three-year tenure in Uganda; as she grew isolated from the mission project, so too did she lose faith in the transformative power of the gospel in an African context. I do hope all my readers continue to pray for us here that we may be kept free from worry and care and filled with love for Baganda and fellow Europeans and that our work may prosper. We do need it. One is apt to get discouraged sometimes and tired and to feel that one’s home friends are so far off and that unless one can steal hours from duties to write personal letters they lose interest and cease to pray for us a good deal and then here the signs of blessing are not half so wide spread as many think and one fears that preparation for baptism and then on to confirmation 88 Glass journal letter, 15 November 1902, CMS, G3 A7 O. 89 Wendy Urban-Mead has examined a similar case in mid- to late nineteenth-century Bechuanaland (Botswana). Bessie Price, the daughter of Robert and Mary Moffat, struggled to stay engaged with what she considered the “real” work of the mission, after she assumed the domestic duties of marrying a fellow missionary and raising twelve children. Unlike Glass, however, Price spent most of her life in the mission community and found continued opportunities of intercourse with Tswana women, which eventually contributed to her own eschewal of European “civilization” (Urban-Mead, “Dynastic Daughters: Three Royal Kwena Women and E. L. Price of the London Missionary Society, 1853–1881,” in Women in African Colonial Histories, ed. Jean Allman, Susan Geiger, and Nakanyike Musisi [Bloomington, IN, 2002], 48–70).

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is often a routine without much idea of what real conversion means. Uganda even much less the surrounding countries is not evangelized or anything like it, so please pray.90 Glass was not alone in expressing frustration with the “nominal” basis of Ganda Christianity. In Glass’s changed circumstances, however, she felt powerless to combat this trend without any spiritual tools of her own. Moreover, there is evidence that her husband’s church convictions were moving away from Anglicanism in favor of Presbyterianism, a possible reflection of the impotence both felt to enact change through the CMS.91 Perhaps most revealing is Glass’s plea for prayers to help them stay “filled with love” for both the Baganda and European communities, suggesting that discouragement (or perhaps a less progressive attitude on her husband’s part) had taken its toll on the mutual respect she had initially felt for those she encountered in the mission field. Soon after she wrote this journal letter, her poor health and Fraser’s studies compelled them to return to England in 1903. The optimism she displayed upon her arrival had transformed into despondency by the time of her departure, and her health prevented them from ever returning to missionary service.92 These instances highlight how little room there was for marriage and motherhood within the discourse and practice of professional evangelism and how the uncompromising value that Anglican missionary societies and individuals placed on single womanhood produced a dilemma for women who were unable to reconcile married life with their role in the mission project. By virtue of their decision to marry fellow missionaries, these women were placed at odds with the professional and spiritual commitment of the mission. In this way, the paradigm of the celibate single missionary prompted a departure from earlier nineteenth-century models of women’s mission work in Africa, which had projected marriage and vocation as two sides of the same evangelistic coin.93 Moreover, the devaluation of married women’s vocation inverted normative categories of femininity and “redundancy” circulated in the métropole: instead of upholding mission work as a respectable and even sacred alternative

90 91 92 93

Glass journal letter, 15 November 1902, CMS, G3 A7 O. Mr. Fraser to CMS secretary, 24 October 1903 and 12 February 1904, CMS, G3 A7 O. Ibid. Deborah Kirkwood has demonstrated that “it would be inaccurate to make too sharp a distinction between marriage and vocation as alternative routes to missionary work” in this earlier context because marriage partnerships were considered an asset to the expansion of mission work in south central Africa (Kirkwood, “Protestant Missionary Women,” 25–31).

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to marriage, the rules of the mission field dictated that marriage was an unacceptable alternative to evangelism. Conclusion These cases from Anglican missions in Africa show how the concern in metropolitan rhetoric to preserve the “womanhood” of women missionaries was not sustained by either the ideology or the practice of mission work in the field. This disjuncture had real consequences for missionary women, who inhabited a contested space where the terms and meanings of vocational authority were perpetually in flux. Marriage constituted a particularly charged issue for professional women’s missionary enterprises, pitting normative ideologies of gender and evangelicalism against the vocational and practical imperatives of the work. The mission field was therefore both liberating and bewildering for women missionaries, who had to reinvent or violate inherited rules of social relations in order to assert their independence and remain faithful to an evangelical conception of vocation. Andrew Porter has recently suggested that “the circumstances of missionary life led to debate about the role of women and inevitable departures from many of the rigidities of socially or functionally separate spheres.”94 Indeed, the cases above highlight how women’s mission work interrogated metropolitan standards of gender by challenging the boundaries of religious authority and social respectability. At the same time, such “circumstances of missionary life” could also reinforce naturalized understandings of femininity in metropolitan discourse. Missionary reports maintained that women’s predisposition to weakness, sensitivity, and spirituality, while an asset in reaching out to their heathen sisters, also made women more susceptible to the hardships of the mission field. In 1910, the ecumenical World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh represented a wide spectrum of Protestant missionary sentiment with this gendered characterization: There is no doubt that the circumstances and experiences of missionary life tell more severely upon women than upon men. Women are constitutionally—though there are striking exceptions—more emotional and less controlled, more anxious minded, more easily “worried,” more given to overtax their strength. Their health is more affected by climate, and it is stated on good authority that they are more careless and less 94 Porter, Religion versus Empire, 319.

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teachable regarding laws of health. Also, a considerable proportion of women missionaries are, by the conditions of their work, more exposed to the sun’s fatal rays during the most trying hours of the day. Women are frequently thrown into closer association with each other in the house, and can command less privacy than can men missionaries. They are also, in many countries, less free on social grounds to take active exercise. Uncongenial companionship is probably more frequent in their case than in the case of men. Women are more sensitive to the spiritual and moral atmosphere surrounding them, they therefore miss more keenly the comfort and support of the Christian community at home, and are also, consciously or unconsciously, more depressed by the influences of heathenism.95 In fact, as this article has highlighted, the challenges to women’s health and well-being just as often took the form of overwork, isolation, and mission infighting, and the above passage indicates a number of difficult circumstances arising from housing, work, and mobility that were presumably beyond individuals’ control. Yet the report also ascribed the higher instances of failure among women to their physical deficiency, emotional fragility, and pettiness in communal living. Such reified assumptions died hard: fourteen years later, an SPG missionary replicated the 1910 report word for word in a memorandum to the Committee for Women’s Work on the conditions of women’s life in the mission field.96 Hence, the mission field could reconstitute naturalized forms of femininity as well as collapse them. This discourse was not without its critics: the Church League for Women’s Suffrage, an Anglican feminist society that included missionaries among its leadership and membership, argued that the gendered hierarchies of the mission field were a detriment to the spread of Christianity, premised as it was on the essential equality of humankind. In 1914 Dr. Mary Weston, a missionary in India, drew attention to the uneven pay scale of men and women missionaries and to the inequitable policy of marriage that increased men’s salaries while eliminating women’s. Weston observed that missionary women’s financial instability undermined their ability to ameliorate “a life of nervous strain, monotony, and often great loneliness” through leisure and consumer activity, and she postulated that naturalized gender attributes 95 World Missionary Conference, 1910: Reports of Commission (London, 1910), report 5, 149. In paraphrasing the testimonies by individual missionaries and their sponsoring societies, the conference reports usually omitted the names (and sex) of the original authors. 96 Cited in Kirkwood, “Protestant Missionary Women,” 34.

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were rooted in women’s financial disadvantage: “May not this be, in the case of missionaries, an explanation of the commonly accepted opinion that women do not stand the Tropics as well as men? Yet it is never taken into account, the generalizes preferring easily to assume that this is another of woman’s ‘natural disabilities’ about which we hear so much.”97 This critique, although advancing a particular agenda, captured the ambiguous function of spinsterhood and marriage in delineating mission work as Christian vocation, professional employment, and womanly fulfillment. More broadly, these two reports, which grappled with the relationship between evangelism and womanhood, illustrate how the individual cases discussed here were part of a larger discourse and experience of mission work. Professionalized standards of medical, educational, linguistic, and religious expertise, along with missionary societies’ expectation of an exclusive vocational commitment, effectively privileged an unmarried ideal of womanhood and helped designate an independent outlet for women’s energies outside the home and outside of Britain. Yet the demands of the mission field also placed constraints on both single and married women’s authority, and neither married nor unmarried modes of mission work completely reconciled the competing paradigms of professionalization, femininity, and spiritual vocation. Like the larger women’s movement, the feminization of mission work simultaneously contested and reinscribed a world of “separate spheres.” 97

Mary Weston, “The Status of the Woman Missionary,” Church League for Women’s Suffrage Monthly Paper, January 1914, 4–5.