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Black Europeans, White Africans: Some Missionary Motives in West Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

A. F. Walls
A. F. Walls*
Affiliation:
University of Aberdeen
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Extract

Sierra leone was the first success story of the modern missionary movement. The years from 1787 to 1830 saw it pass first from a green if not very fertile land supporting subsistence farmers and riverine slaving factories to Utopia in a disaster area; then transformed again as free blacks from Nova Scotia and Jamaica, full of evangelical religion and American republicanism carried out a Clapham-inspired scheme in ways the men of Clapham did not always like; and again as this population was overwhelmed by new uprooted peoples from all over west Africa, brought in from the slaveships before they had ever seen the transatlantic plantations. The new population responded, sometimes with enthusiasm and rarely with prolonged resistance, to missionary preaching; and, with those same missionaries appointed to superintend their temporal as well as their spiritual welfare, adopted the norms and characteristics of their Nova Scotian and Maroon predecessors. Contemporary British sources do not suggest that at the time Sierra Leone was regarded as a huge success; people in England tended to think of the appalling loss of missionary life in the white man’s grave, and the enormous expense of the Sierra Leone mission; besides, they heard stories which suggested that the serpent still dwelt in their west African garden. Nonetheless, here was the first part of Africa, one of the very few parts anywhere in the world, where there was a mass movement towards the Christian faith, where a whole non-Christian people became Christian.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 15: Religious Motivation Biographical and Sociological Problems for the Church Historian , 1978 , pp. 339 - 348
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1978

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References

1 See Fyfe, [C. H.] [A History of Sierra Leone] (London 1962)Google Scholar; Peterson, [J.], [Province of Freedom: a history of Sierra Leone 1787-1870] (London 1969)Google Scholar; Walk, A. F., ‘A Christian experiment: the early Sierra Leone colony’, The Mission of the Church and the Propagation of the Faith, SCH 6 (1970) pp 107-29Google Scholar.

2 Compare Porter, [A. T.], [Creoledom] (London 1963)Google Scholar; Spitzer, L. The Creoles of Sierra Leone: responses to colonialism 1870-1941 (Madison 1974)Google Scholar.

3 Porter p 85.

4 Compare Peterson esp pp 259-63; Sawyerr, H., ‘Traditional sacrificial rituals and Christian worship’, S[ierra] L[eone] B[ulletin of] R[eligion] 2, 1 (Freetown 1960) pp 18–27 Google Scholar; Sawyerr, H. ‘Graveside libations in and near Freetown’, SLBR 7, 2 (1965) pp 48–55 Google Scholar; compare Rowe, S., ‘Judas die don tidday’, SLBR 7, 1 (1965) pp 1–12 Google Scholar.

5 Compare Walls, A.F., ‘A colonial concordat: two views of Christianity and civilisation’, Baker, D., Church, Society and Politics, SCH 12 (1975) pp 293–302 Google Scholar.

6 Compare Walk, A. F., ‘Missionary vocation and the ministry: the first generation’, New Testament Christianity for Africa and the World: essays in honour of Harry Sawyerr, ed Glasswell, M. E. and Fasholé-Luke, E. W. (London 1974)Google Scholar.

7 Fyfe p 237.

8 Fyfe pp 178, 211, 220 seq, 229.

9 Compare Hair, P. E. H., ‘Niger Languages and Sierra Leonean Missionary linguists, 1840-1930, Bulletin of the Society for African Church History 2,2 (London 1966) pp 127-38Google Scholar.

10 See for example Ajayi, [A. F. Ade], [Christian Missions in Nigeria 1841-1801: the making of a new élite] (London 1965)Google Scholar.

11 Ajayi pp 25 seq. There is still no full treatment of the Sierra Leone diaspora. On the nature and importance of the Saro in Yorubaland, see Kopytoff, J. H., A Preface to Modem Nigeria: the ‘Sierra Leonians’ in Yoruba 1830-1 Sgo (Madison 1965)Google Scholar.

12 Instructions of the committee of the Church missionary society, 30.6.1868. The address is reprinted in Knight, W., The Missionary Secretariat of Henry Venn (London 1880) pp 282 seq. Google Scholar

13 A full account of the background is still awaited. Some of the flavour is conveyed in the works (unfortunately undocumented) of Pollock, J. C.: compare A Cambridge Movement (London 1953)Google Scholar; The Cambridge Seven (London 1955); The Keswkk Story (London 1964). See now ako Porter, A., ‘Cambridge, Keswick and late nineteenth-century attitudes to Africa’,J[ournal of] I[mperial and] Commonwealth] H[istory] 5, 1 (London 1976) pp 5–34 Google Scholar.

14 For a variety of interpretations, compare: Beyerhaus, P., Die Selbständigkeit der jungen Kirchen als missionarisches Problem (Wuppertal 1959) pp 123-62Google Scholar; Ajayi, chapter 8; Webster, J. B., The African churches among the Yoruba 1888-1922 (Oxford 1964)Google Scholar; Hair, P. E. H., The Early Study of Nigerian Languages (Cambridge 1967) p 60 Google Scholar; Tasie, G. O. M., Christianity in the Niger Delta 1864-1918, unpublished PhD thesis, Aberdeen 1969 Google Scholar; Tasie, G. O. M., ‘The story of S. A. Crowther and the CMS Niger Mission crisis of the 1880s: a reassessment’, Ghana Bulletin of Theology 4, 7 (London 1974) pp 47–60 Google Scholar.

15 [Letters of Henry Hughes] Dobinson (London 1899) pp 49 seq. Dobinson, Repton and Brasenose College Oxford, had just joined the mission from an English curacy a month or two previously.

16 Dobinson p 40.

17 Ibid.

18 Dobinson, who lived longer than some of his companions (he died ‘of African fever’ at Asaba in April 1897) came to argue for ‘more trust on God and more trust in the Africans’, to deduce that ‘a European missionary is of little use unless he has a native agent alongside of him to help him for a year or two at least’, and to reflect that ‘I certainly feel my ground more than I used to in the days of Brooke and Robinson; when I was hurried along in unknown depths of a fierce-flowing river’. Dobinson pp 166 seq.

19 Wilmot Graham Brooke, often singled out as the representative of these men, indicates their assumptions about the peoples of the upper Niger: ‘our equals in intelligence, our superiors in courtesy, our inferiors in education’. CMS Archives G 3A3/04, 23.12.1890. Brooke, Haileybury and ‘reading for Woolwich’, had worked first as a freelance missionary before being accepted in 1889 as joint leader of the new Sudan mission. He was unordained, and like a number of the wealthy young men who entered missionary service, took no salary from the society. See Porter, A., ‘Evangelical enthusiasm, missionary motivation and West Africa in the late 19th century: the career of Brooke, G. W., JICH 6 (1977)Google Scholar.

20 Dobinson p 39.

21 Dobinson p 40 (italics mine).

22 Compare Ajayi chapter 5.

23 Thus the ‘Cambridge Seven’, a few years earlier: ‘I have been laughing all day at our grotesque appearance. Stanley, Monty and A. P.-T. have been converted into Chinamen; we put on the clothes this morning, were duly shaved and pigtailed . . . Monty, Stanley and I make huge Chinamen; it makes us very conspicuous’. C. T. Studd, quoted in N. P. Grubb, C. T. Studd (London 1933) p 55.

24 CMS Sudan Mission Leaflet no 1 (January 1890).

25 Compare Owoh, A. C., CMS Missions, Muslim Societies and European Trade in Northern Nigeria, 1857-1900, unpub MTh thesis, Aberdeen 1971, pp 297 seq Google Scholar. Owoh also describes the difficulties when the white mallams like their muslim counterparts, responded to requests for written passages of scripture. (Quranic texts were much used as charms). The problem arose from the fact that the missionaries made no charge for their passages of scripture, and thus distorted the market.

26 CMS Sudan Mission Leaflet no 18 (February 1891).

27 CMS Sudan Mission Leaflet no i (January 1890).

28 On Goldie, see J. E. Flint, Sir George Goldie and the Making of Nigeria (London 1960). His alarm is indicated in letters of 22.7.1889 and 9.8.1889 appended to CMS general committee minutes of 29.10.1889. Brooke meanwhile, was equally alarmed lest the CMS committee make an agreement with the Royal Niger Company and compromise him, ibid, letter of 16.9.1889. The general committee resolved to forswear force or the threat of it (minutes 9.2.1889).

29 CMS Sudan Mission Leaflet no 18 (February 1891). Compare Owoh p 284 seq.