The Secret History of Missionaries to Africa

Few topics are apt to generate such a negative response among academics and intellectuals in the U.S. as the subject of missionaries.  One of the interesting parts of traveling to Ghana has been discovering that most people there--and history textbooks--are generally enthusiastic about missionaries.  Of course the major reason for this is that most academics in the U.S. are hostile to Christianity--particularly the variety that entails conversion--and most Ghanaians at least give the appearance of being enthusiastic Christians.  It's often a subject of great puzzlement to both sides of the cultural divide.

So it has been with a certain amount of trepidation that I have begun studying accounts by missionaries from the U.S. in Africa in the early twentieth century.

There is plenty of material to offend modern sensibilities in the accounts of missionaries such as Jean Kenyon Mackenzie, pictured here.  These missionaries were far from being cultural relativists.  They frankly regarded many if not most cultural practices other than their own as savage if not demonic, usually conflated Christianity and modern Western norms.  They also seemed very comfortable being toted around Africa in litters or on carts and other privileges of whiteness that they enjoyed.

But the missionary women, especially, often showed a deep respect for African Christians.  Missionary periodicals in the U.S. featured articles by black Africans long before mainstream secular magazines did.  Truth be told, missionaries were about the only Americans in Africa who were more interested in African people than in African animals.  Teddy Roosevelt, Ernest Hemingway, and the great white hunters were there to prove their masculinity through hunting, though they occasionally wrote about the "boys" who made the safaris run.  Naturalists such as Carl Akeley or the Johnsons were there to collect animal specimens or film.  The best friend that Akeley's first wife, Delia, made in Africa was a monkey that she took back home with her.  She hired an African to take care of him while in East Africa and wrote an entire book about the animal, whose death left her shattered.

Mackenzie wrote many lyrical letters and observations about the remarkable people she met and worked with in Cameroon.  Here is a sampling from 1913, as she recounts talking about God with a group of villagers who are working at various tasks: "The hands of the women bruising green leaves in wooden troughs and the grinders at the stones were idle.  Men laughed with a kind of wonder.  One woman flashed with interest behind her mask of purple tattoo and bright beads. . . . I see this thing in my heart like a thing shut in from time and change, and I wish I may never forget it."