The Mission School and Its Graduates

Missionaries reached the Congo on Belgian shipping, under Belgian protection, in a territory whose seizure had been justified partly by the civilising work they were there to do.

And the campaign that exposed what was happening in that territory (the mutilations, the rubber quotas, the death toll) ran substantially on photographs and testimony that missionaries collected and sent home. Alice Seeley Harris's photographs of Congolese with severed hands did more to end Leopold's regime than any diplomatic protest.

Both of those sentences are true, and any account of missions that cannot hold them together is not describing the thing.

The relationship with empire was structural rather than chosen. Missions depended on imperial transport, imperial protection and imperial law; their presence was routinely used to justify intervention, and the murder of a missionary was a standard casus belli. Missionaries frequently held the racial assumptions of their era in full. They also produced a great deal of the documentation by which colonial abuses became known, staffed the hospitals, and built the schools.

Those schools turn out to be the most consequential thing they did, and not in the way anybody planned.

For most of the colonial period, mission schools provided the overwhelming majority of formal education available to colonised populations; colonial states were generally unwilling to pay for it. What those schools produced was a literate class: clerks, teachers, journalists, lawyers, catechists. And that class went on to lead the independence movements, arguing in the coloniser's own political and moral vocabulary, which they had been very thoroughly taught.

Nkrumah, Kenyatta, Nyerere, Mandela, and a long list besides, passed through mission education. The institution intended to secure loyalty supplied the tools for refusing it, which is a pattern worth generalising: teaching someone to read your foundational texts is not a controllable act.

The Bible translation programme makes the same point in a different register. Missionaries produced the first written form of hundreds of languages, and the consequences run far past religion. Choosing which dialect to translate into often created a standard language where none had existed, fixing an orthography and a grammar that later became national. Missionary grammars and dictionaries remain the earliest descriptions of many language families, and in some cases the only record of languages that no longer have speakers. Work undertaken for evangelism, used ever since for everything else.

And the moment a community can read scripture in a language it thinks in, without an authorised interpreter standing over it, the readings stop being controllable. African independent churches began breaking away in large numbers from the late nineteenth century, frequently over precisely the question of whether European missionaries had any authority that the text supported. The Reformation's own mechanism, exported and then applied to the exporters.

Christianity's demographic centre is now in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and the theology being produced there was not written in Europe.

The single best illustration of what missions ran into is the Chinese Rites controversy, which is also a case study in who gets to define what counts as culture.

The Jesuits in China, under Matteo Ricci and his successors, made real progress at the Ming and then Qing courts by arguing that Confucian ancestor veneration was a civil and familial ceremony rather than worship, and therefore compatible with Christian practice. It was a sophisticated position, arrived at by men who had spent decades in China and learned classical Chinese.

Rival orders disagreed and appealed to Rome, and after a long argument Rome ruled the rites idolatrous and forbade them. The Kangxi Emperor's response was to ask, reasonably, by what authority a cleric in Italy who had never been to China determined the meaning of a Chinese practice, and to restrict the mission accordingly.

Two centuries of careful accommodation were undone by a ruling made elsewhere about the meaning of something happening here. The question underneath it (whether a religion travels as a set of beliefs that local culture can carry, or as a package including the culture it arrived in) is the question every mission faced, and the one nobody has ever settled.