Harri Englund's book is a challenge to the scholarship on missions to Africa in the nineteenth century as well as a challenge to twenty-first century readers to reflect on how their own worldviews envisage strangers and issues of racial injustice. The book examines the life of David Clement Scott, a visionary missionary of the Church of Scotland who ran the Blantyre mission in south-eastern Africa from the 1870s to the 1890s. Scott's life is explored through the theme of reversals – reversals in race relations, reversals in theology and reversals in expectations of missionary views of colonialism. In a reversal of his own, Englund is reviving biographies of missionaries to Africa, but with a new purpose. Instead of celebrating self-sacrifice in order to galvanise one's faith and dedication to Christian evangelism, as was often the case in the early twentieth century, Englund is using the genre to prod a contemporary secular readership to consider ‘hard questions about the intellectual and political horizons of racial equality’ (pp. xii–xiii). Englund uses the thought and practice of Scott both to critique the literature on missions and imperialism, but also to prod readers about the importance of considering new ways to create racial equality beyond the traditional conceptions of liberal thought which dominated the views of Scott's successors and continue to be influential today.
Central to Scott's Christian conception of race relations was the figure of the risen Christ. The Jesus who appeared to the disciples after his burial was not who they thought he would be, and thus they had to learn anew about his identity and mission. For Scott, this was a call for humility in the face of commonly-held certainties about the world, and more specifically the prejudices against Africans widely held among Europeans of the day. The outcome of this thinking was demanding that Europeans in Africa take the stance of learners along with Africans. Though many missionaries had come out to establish schools, Scott argued that ‘Africa is an education, here you come to school again’ (p. 1). Indeed, Scott at times appeared to turn the idea of civilising mission on its head by suggesting that European civilisation had something to gain and learn from Africans. Englund argues that Scott was pursuing epistemic justice, correcting the wrongs committed when people are disregarded as knowers and have suffered prejudice. This pursuit of being ‘co-knowers’ with Africans led Scott to encourage learning about and embracing African customs and languages. These were marks of a common humanity and worthy of knowing. Scott utilised the mlandu negotiation process of the peoples living near Lake Malawi, extolled the beauty of ‘heathen’ burial customs, and promoted African songs. Indeed, Scott believed that true friendship should serve as the foundation of Christian work in Blantyre and he saw Whites and Blacks as the co-builders of a unified Christian Church where Europeans and Africans would worship together in Chimang'anja/Chinyanja, follow one communion in the worship of one God, ‘not side by side but as one’ to use Scott's phrase (p. 82). Englund juxtaposes this somewhat radical vision against the more paternalistic liberalism of Scott's successors which thought that ‘the native African church’ should grow separately and along parallel lines from Western Christianity. But this did not challenge Europeans to learn from their fellow Christians. While some liberal missionaries championed African interests, this was often accompanied by a stricter regulation of African leaders and more oversight of activities, and not the racially unified Church Scott envisioned which respected the dignity and unique contributions of all of God's children in one Church. In this way Englund not only offers us a glimpse at the uniqueness of Scott, but also helps us understand the complicated shift in African missions from a more radical egalitarianism to benevolent paternalism at the end of the nineteenth century.
Englund's discussion of the nuances among those missionaries traditionally seen as liberal leads to his interventions in the broader scholarly debates around missionaries to Africa. Simplified binaries of liberals versus primitivists, or imperial collaborators versus resistors, are thrown out. Missionaries cannot all be lumped in as unofficial imperialists or a simple extension of colonial rule, but, as Englund demonstrates, there was an array of differences between missionaries, even those of similar societies, locations or dispositions. Scott is an interesting case study in that his nationalism and fears of Portuguese takeover led him to support British political actions to control the Shire Highlands around Blantyre, but he soon became, according to Englund, the new administration's fiercest critic. Scott contrasted the militarism of the British against the negotiated mlandu tactics of the chiefs they were subduing. He berated Harry Johnston and the newly-installed British administration for receiving what amounted to a bribe by Cecil Rhodes so that the British would look the other way while Rhodes ‘looted’ the country. He asked probing questions about the fairness of using Africans’ taxes to help pay for Rhodes's schemes instead of the people the British were there to protect. Sounding the alarm over European land-greed and land-grabbing did not win Scott many friends in the administration, yet he continued to assert that the land was not theirs, and though he believed legitimate commerce brought potential benefits to African people, it often was used by Europeans to cover up selfish motives. Scott's interracial vision of the future was incompatible with Johnston's view of a racialised division of labour, and he used his platform to try and get Europeans to reflect on the purposes of colonisation and mission work and how failing to protect native rights would harm the potential to work and live together in pursuit of joint prosperity.
Not only is this a thought-provoking book, but it is very well written. The prose in places draws the reader in as Englund writes in very moving ways about issues of death and friendship. Visions for racial equality is an invaluable study for those interested in intellectual biographies related to Africa, the challenges of imperialism in the past and present, and for all interested in being co-knowers across racial divides.
