The spread of Christianity through the British Empire depended only in the first instance on European missionaries. Very soon local agents, themselves recent converts to Christianity, came to outnumber foreign-born missionaries in almost all mission fields. The 10,000 official missionaries employed by British societies at the turn of the twentieth century may have represented a high-water mark of European evangelism, but that figure is dwarfed by the legions of missionaries drawn from local communities across the Empire. In Africa conversions of large numbers only began when locally recruited Christians constituted a critical mass. Any discussion of missions and Empire that ignores the armies of non-European evangelists grossly misrepresents the grass-roots dynamics of Christianization. If, as some assert, the missionary movement was part of a larger imperial project of cultural colonialism, it is important to recognize that the footsoldiers of the advance were the indigenous preachers. Mission statistics affirm their existence but rarely do we hear their voices. These ‘new Christian’ men and women not only proselytized among their own communities, but also volunteered to take their message to peoples of different cultures and languages. They communicated their own understandings of Christianity based partly on what missionaries had taught them and partly on their own cultural assumptions. Those who evangelized among distant peoples not only carried messages forged during the development of European Christianity, they often carried technical, social, and political concepts from their own cultures with them such as new forms of housing, village organization, and cuisine. If they were agents of imperialism, then they were double agents. Their known world did not include the imperial metropole or even its peripheral centres. What they knew well were their own societies and cultures embellished by superficial understandings of Christian Europe.
Most knowledge of the historical experience of new Christian evangelists comes through the filter of mission reports. Louise Pirouet’s study of black evangelists in Uganda exemplifies the problems raised by such sources. We can know what they did, but remain removed from their lived experiences. Some indigenous agents, however, have left records in their own words. J. D. Y. Peel has found reports from Yoruba evangelists from the inception of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) mission in 1845. E. Palmer Patterson and Susan Neylan have used the writings of Tsimshian and Nisga’a Christians to investigate religious change in the Pacific north-west of Canada. The South Pacific provides a relatively rich source of texts as islanders took to Christian evangelism in greater numbers than elsewhere, and several recorded their experiences.
First-hand accounts by new Christian evangelists reveal the complex realities of people experiencing revolutionary change in their spiritual and material worlds. Neylan’s analysis of Tsimshian writings uncovers ‘diverse expressions of what it meant to be Christian. Tsimshian uses of both indigenous and Christian modes to describe conversion span the entire ‘‘outside- inside’’ spectrum, and ultimately demonstrate not just “inbetweenness” but the multiple identities of Native missionaries.’ New Christians who became evangelists put themselves in an ambiguous relationship to their own communities. They were, as Peel also notes, both insiders and outsiders. Most, although not all, adopted some traits of cultural outsiders along with their Christian beliefs. European clothing was a common marker. Housing, food, bodily decoration (or lack of it), as well as Christian religious observance might single out Christians from non-Christians, but were not always firm indicators of religious adherence. Evangelists almost by definition stood in judgement on their fellows, as their aim was to change beliefs, religious practices, and moral standards. They cherished a sense of superiority over those not yet enlightened by the word of God.
While some new Christians visibly improved their material circumstances by aligning themselves with missions, those who became evangelists stepped outside the social hierarchy of their own societies. Their insider-outsider status depended on the success of their preaching. Evangelists might begin despised and marginalized, but as their following grew, so too did their status and material circumstances. Some who went to foreign communities were invited and quickly attained status as teachers, or even as alternative sources of authority and power; others had to work hard to gain acceptance. They used a variety of evangelical strategies to convey their message to nonbelievers by translating indigenous concepts into Christian equivalents, Christianizing customary rituals, or advocating the destruction of preexisting rituals and beliefs.
The heart of this chapter concerns texts produced by new Christian evangelists who left first-hand accounts of their lives. These men (unfortunately, accounts by women are even rarer) came from different regions of the Empire. All were committed Christians who used the Bible as the authoritative source of their Christian teaching. Some had encountered Christianity as children and were inducted into its teachings and mores over many years. Others had a very brief training before absorbing aspects of Christianity which they then communicated to others. Some learned about Christianity in their own, or a closely related, tongue. Others were taught in English, but preached in their own language or the language of the people they were evangelizing. Most writings of new Christian evangelists have not been readily accessible, only coming into the public domain in the last thirty to forty years through the painstaking work of historians who have tracked down the manuscripts lodged in widely scattered archives. Some were translated soon after they were written; others have presented formidable problems for recent scholars, who have had to grapple with discontinued orthographies and grammatically ambiguous texts. Commenting on one such text, Marjorie Crocombe, notes:
Maretu was not an easy writer to understand. His handwriting was cumbersome and irregular, and he did not understand punctuation or divide the narrative into paragraphs. Nor was he always sure what constituted a word. In some cases a single word was divided into two, and in others several words were joined into one. There were also many words and letters within words omitted.
Five new Christian evangelists have been selected because of the richness of their first-hand accounts. Each was originally introduced to Christianity by missionaries from other parts of the British Empire, the United States, or Europe. They in turn took their version of Christianity, modified by their own cultural understandings, to the communities they taught. Tiyo Soga, a Xhosa man from the brutal frontier war zone of South Africa, kept a journal intermittently from 1857 to 1870. His other writings include letters to his mission society (Foreign Missions of the United Presbyterian Church) and articles for a Xhosa mission magazine. Soga had a thoroughgoing Christian education in Scotland and returned to southern Africa as an ordained persuaded her to write. See Peter B. Anderson, ‘Revival from a Native Point of View: Prosely- tization of the Indian Home Mission and the Kherwar Movement among the Santals’, in J. M. Brown and R. E. Frykenberg, eds., Christians, Cultural Interactions, and India’s Religious Traditions (London, 2002).
Minister with a Scottish wife. Arthur Wellington Clah, a Tsimshian who lived in British Columbia, maintained a diary from the late 1850s until 1910. After a few months of schooling from an Anglican missionary, Clah began making diary entries in idiosyncratic English. Maretu and Ta’unga were Rarotongans of the Cook Islands in the South Pacific. Maretu, who never left the Cook Islands, wrote an autobiography in his native language. Ta’unga attended a mission school where he learnt to write in Rarotongan in an orthography developed by the missionaries. He used this limited orthography to write about his evangelism in the Tuauru language of New Caledonia, where he spent some of his working life. Moses Tjalkabota was a western Arrernte from central Australia, who dictated an account of his life to the Lutheran missionary F. W. Albrecht in the 1950s.
All five men were first-generation Christians born into unsettled times in the nineteenth century. Four of them were introduced to Christianity by missionaries as children. Clah, who grew up in a Tsimshian village by a Hudson’s Bay Company trading post, did not gain access to Christian teachings until he was 26 or 27. The first Europeans Tjalkabota met were the Lutheran missionaries who established the Hermannsburg mission. Although Soga had visited Europe, and Clah had a taste of Canadian town life in Victoria, British Columbia, they, like the other three, lived mainly among their own people. Four of them were formally affiliated to Protestant mission societies. The fifth, Clah, had also been closely associated with Protestant missionaries but never formally aligned himself with a church. He would exhort his own family, the people in his village, and the peoples, including occasional Europeans, whom he met as he went about fishing, hunting, trading, and mining. Soga, after his sojourns in Scotland, proselytized among the Xhosa and other groups in his region. Ta’unga alone had to learn a new language in order to preach in New Caledonia to people who were culturally and (as he noted) physically different from his own people.
Tjalkabota could only visit people within walking or donkey-riding distance of his home in central Australia.
The accounts these local missionaries left behind them come as close as modern scholars are likely to get to the spirit that animated the key agents of missions within the British Empire.