Missionaries and Their Activities

1The source: a photograph of a bishop

Look at the photograph below before you read the caption. It was taken in England in 1867, at a meeting of Anglican bishops from around the world. Who do you think this man was, and how did he come to be there?

Analyse it. Samuel Ajayi Crowther was born around 1809 in Osogun, in Yoruba country (today's Nigeria). At about twelve he was captured by slave raiders. A British navy squadron enforcing the ban on the Atlantic slave trade freed him and landed him in Sierra Leone, where the Church Missionary Society (CMS) educated him. He joined the Niger expedition of 1841, opened a mission at Abeokuta with Henry Townsend in 1843, wrote a Yoruba grammar and translated much of the Bible into Yoruba. In 1864 he was consecrated in Canterbury Cathedral as the first African bishop of the Anglican Church.

The photograph corrects two easy assumptions. Missionaries were not only Europeans: Africans such as Crowther, and thousands of African catechists, spread Christianity, often further than Europeans could. And Christianity was not new to Africa: the churches of Egypt and Ethiopia are among the oldest in the world. What was new in the 19th century was the scale of European missions and their link with European power.

2Why missionaries came

• Religious duty: a wave of religious revival in 19th-century Europe made spreading the gospel a central task of the churches.
• Anti-slavery: missionaries saw the Christian mission as the answer to the slave trade. Livingstone's lectures of 1857 inspired the founding of the Universities' Mission to Central Africa, whose two goals were missions and opposing the slave trade; the White Fathers began in Algeria by caring for children orphaned by the cholera epidemic of 1867.
• Rivalry: Catholics and Protestants, and French, British and German missions, raced each other for converts.
• The "civilising mission": many believed African cultures were inferior and had to be replaced. This belief made missionaries natural allies of colonial rule.

3Activities: intended and unintended

4Case study 1: missions and power in Buganda, 1877 to 1894

The CMS (Protestant, British) arrived at the court of Kabaka Mutesa I in 1877, the White Fathers (Catholic, French) in 1879, and Muslim traders from Zanzibar were already there. The court's young officials split into Protestant, Catholic and Muslim parties. Kabaka Mwanga II, who came to the throne in 1884, saw the converts as disloyal: between 31 January 1885 and 27 January 1887, 22 Catholic and 23 Anglican converts were executed on his orders, remembered today as the Uganda Martyrs. In 1888 armed converts deposed Mwanga, and a four-year civil war followed. Then the European powers arrived: Protestant missionaries worked for British control, while the French Catholics supported the German claim or Buganda's independence. In 1892 the two Christian parties fought; the Imperial British East Africa Company's agent, Captain Lugard, used Maxim guns for the Protestants, the French Catholic mission was burnt, and with the Protestant chiefs on its side Britain declared a protectorate in 1894. Here missions did not just prepare the way for colonial rule; they became the parties through which it was won.

5Case study 2: the first missions in Rwanda, 1899 to 1916

The missionaries' plan was to convert the Mwami and the chiefs first, believing that ordinary people would then follow. Musinga was at first hostile and refused baptism, and chiefs resented the growing power of the missions. Many peasants who were made to work, often unpaid, on building the mission stations distrusted them too, so progress was slow at first. One of the first two priests sent to Rwanda, Léon Classe, would later, as bishop, shape both the Church and Belgian policy, and in 1931 the Belgians deposed Musinga, partly because he refused to become a Catholic (units 7 and 8).

A balanced view. The missions built many of Rwanda's first schools and health centres and gave Kinyarwanda its first printed books. They also served colonial rule, and their teachings about Rwandan society later helped to divide Rwandans (unit 8). Islam reached Rwanda too in the early 20th century, through Muslim traders from the East African coast, but under Belgian rule, when the Catholic Church held great influence, Muslims were often excluded from education and government jobs.