Introduction: New directions in the history of missions in Africa

Journal of Religious History

Volumn 23, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 1-7

  Peterson, Derek ^a   Allman, Jean ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0002580491     PISSN: 00224227     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-9809.00070     Document Type: Article

References (28)

1. U. S. Center for World Mission, Mission Frontiers 17 (5-6) (1995).
2. Missionaries' travel narratives were enormously popular and widely read in nineteenth-century England and throughout Europe. See, as prime examples of this genre, David Livingstone's Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (London, 1857)
3. and Robert Moffat's Missionary Labours and Scenes in Southern Africa (London, 1842).
4. Critical analysis of this literature is now a growth industry in itself; for which see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992)
5. and Carolyn Martin Shaw, Colonial Inscriptions: Race, Sex and Class in Kenya (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).
6. See, for example, Nosipho Majeke, The Role of Missionaries in Conquest (Johannesburg: Society of Young Africa, 1952).
7. Social scientists have, until recently, generally been much more attentive to "independent" church movements than to mission churches, viewing religious independency as a manifestation of protonationalist consciousness. See, as a paradigmatic example, George Shepperson and Thomas Price, Independent African: John Chilembwe and the Origins, Setting and Significance of the Nyasaland Native Rising of 1915 (1958; reprint, Edinburgh: The University Press, 1987).
8. Mission churches, in this account, are generally presented as crucibles in which adherents learn to be suitably "modern": that is, rational, non-"tribal" citizens. For which see Carl Rosberg and John Nottingham's The Myth of "Mau Mau": Nationalism in Colonial Kenya (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966).
9. Anthropologists were the first to debate the significance and etiology of "conversion" in Africa, for which see Robin Horton, "African Conversion," Africa 41 (1971): 85-108;
10. Humphrey Fisher, "Conversion Reconsidered: Some Historical Aspects of Religious Conversion in Black Africa," Africa 43 (1973): 27-40;
11. and Robin Horton, "On the Rationality of Conversion," Africa 45 (1975): 219-35.
12. For a critique of this debate, Emefie Ikenga-Metuh, "The Shattered Microcosm: A Critical Survey of Explanations of Conversion in Africa," in Religion, Development and African Identity, ed. Kirsten Holst Peterson (Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1987).
13. The Comaroffs' most influential work (for these purposes) is Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
14. See also John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, "Through the Looking-Glass: Colonial Encounters of the First Kind," Journal of Historical Sociology 1 (1988): 6-32;
15. John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, "Home-Made Hegemony: Modernity, Domesticity, and Colonialism in South Africa," in African Encounters with Domesticity, ed. Karen Hansen (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 37-74.
16. J. D. Y. Peel, "For Who Hath Despised the Day of Small Things? Missionary Narratives and Historical Anthropology," Comparative Studies in Society and History 37 (1995): 581-607.
17. See also J. D. Y. Peel, "The Pastor and the Babalawo: The Interaction of Religions in 19th century Yorubaland," Africa 60 (1990).
18. Paul Landau, The Realm of the Word: Language, Gender, and Christianity in a Southern African Kingdom (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1996).
19. See also Paul Landau, "When Rain Falls: Rainmaking and Community in a Tswana Village, c. 1870 to Recent Times" in International Journal of African Historical Studies 26 (1) 1993;
20. and Paul Landau, "Explaining Surgical Evangelism in Colonial Southern Africa: Teeth, Pain and Faith," Journal of African History 37 (1997).
21. Lamin Sanneh, Encountering the West: Christianity and the Global Cultural Process: The African Dimension (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993).
22. See also his "Translatability in Islam and Christianity in Africa: A Thematic Approach," in Religion in Africa: Experience and Expression, ed. Thomas D. Blakeley, W. E. A. van Beek, and Dennis L. Thomson (London: James Currey. 1994).
23. The work to which we refer here is immense: among the most recent are John Mbiti, Introduction to African Traditional Religion (Oxford: Heinemann, 1971: reissued, 1991);
24. J. N. K. Mugambi, African Heritage and Contemporary Christianity (Nairobi: Longman, 1989);
25. Jacob Olupona, African Traditional Religions in Contemporary Society (New York: Paragon House, 1991);
26. and L. Namwera et al., Towards African Christian Liberation (Nairobi: St Paul Publications, 1990).
27. The conference was organized by the Mac Arthur Program on Peace and International Cooperation of the University of Minnesota and the Graduate Christian Fellowship of the same institution. Sponsors included the College of Liberal Arts, the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly, the departments of History, Afro-American and African Studies, and Anthropology, the MacLaurin Institute, Augsburg College, and Bethel College.
28. See, for example, several of the essays collected in Hansen, ed., African Encounters with Domesticity.