Missionaries invested an inordinate amount of energy in producing written material. Apart from the obvious priority given to the primary aim of conversion—such as printed Bibles and catechisms in the languages of their intended audiences—missions utilized the whole range of media of their day from print and colour reproduction tracts to screen technology (magic lantern slides). Personal accounts of the newly converted in the form of life stories and autobiographies were particularly widespread. They are among the earliest texts in colonial languages that feature the lives and experiences of colonized peoples. Such accounts were important to the colonized subjects themselves, to the missionaries who wrote them down, and to the Christians readers at whom they were aimed.
As one might expect, the texts were censored through complex systems of patronage and control. What missionaries wrote in their personal diaries, or even in the daybooks of the mission stations, differed significantly in tone and content from accounts submitted to mission headquarters. Mission journals also rewrote such material for their pages, imposing further filters. Shifting from the voice of the native subject to the pen of the mission recorder was only the first step in a long process of control exercised over the record of the lives of their converts. These texts provided the principal lens through which home audiences viewed the imperial world beyond colonial homelands and so decisively shaped the attitudes by which colonized cultures were judged. Despite the profound limitations on personal agency involved in their production, they were also among the earliest means by which the subjects of the imperial venture could communicate some of their own views to those who had invaded their lands and to their fellow colonized people. Eventually, they would even be employed to speak to other colonized people across linguistic and cultural divides. Mission texts, like other texts in the colonial languages, could thus be both an instrument of oppression and a means of resistance, depending on the circumstances of their production and dissemination.
While societies expended much energy on material for use in the mission held, at least as many of their publications were aimed at encouraging interest and financial contributions from the home audience. By the end of the nineteenth century mission presses rivalled secular publishers and printers in volume of output and had adopted many of the secular presses’ genres, forms, and discursive features. This was only to be expected until such time as a significant literate local audience of converted ‘natives’ existed in the mission field, a phenomenon that came late—usually after the control of evangelistic effort had passed from the hands of Euro-American missionaries into those of local converts. Even then a legacy of mission conventions persisted, partly because institutional control of the publishing remained in overseas or expatriate hands.
Gauri Viswanathan emphasizes that conversion did not necessarily mean a total deculturation, even when it was a massively disruptive event. Since converts frequently continued as an active part of their communities, they retained a significant degree of agency. While acting upon their own society as agents of change, they also brought the values and viewpoints of that society into their dealings with the converting society. The great majority of converts discarded neither their pre-existing culture, nor the totality of their previous identity. Viswanathan emphasizes that new Christians worked for change in two directions. While acting as forces for modernization among their own people, they could simultaneously act as forceful critics of the Euro-American Christian societies—a phenomenon exemplified by such converts as the Revd. Attoh Ahuma and J. E. Casely Hayford in West Africa, and Ham Mukasa in East Africa. The case was quite different when converts had been previously ripped from their cultures, as was the case of the ‘recaptives’—people freed from slave ships and caravans through the intervention of British imperial officials. Seldom did they return to their own communities, being consigned instead to artificial communities peopled by other recaptives, who often spoke different languages and practised different customs. For these converts the only convenient vehicles for communicating their stories were the languages and texts controlled by missionaries, texts whose forms were profoundly limiting. However, as these new communities began to succeed in converting people from the established undisrupted African communities, the processes described by Viswanathan in the Indian context slowly come into play.
This chapter employs close analysis of recaptive life stories and personal conversion narratives produced from the 1870s to the 1920s to demonstrate that, even in the most unfavourable circumstances, the voices of the colonized subjects cannot be completely suppressed. The necessity for a narrow focus in such a detailed textual investigation has led this chapter to focus on East and Central African sources dating from about 1870, though the occasional passing reference to texts from West Africa might suggest that in a fuller analysis of such texts a wider range of examples might usefully be compared. The texts reveal how narrative conventions operated to contain the ‘native voice’ they claimed to express, while, paradoxically, that very act of containment inscribed a record of its presence and even its actual operation in the choices and narrative strategies of the texts themselves. Although the voices of the missionized ‘subjects’ may seem to have got rather lost in these ventriloquized texts, read against the grain they reveal traces of the silenced voices of the converted colonized subject. Such is the case in West Africa of J. B. Danquah’s work, which set out to rehabilitate and reaffirm the value and effectiveness of Akan traditional culture, law, and even religious thought in, for example, The Akan Doctrine of God: A Fragment of Gold Coast Ethics and Religion. In East Africa there are comparable cases, such as Jomo Kenyatta’s work on the Kikuyu in texts such as My People of the Gikuyu and The Life of Chief Wangora. That these figures, both leading nationalists and anti-colonial fighters, felt able to publish in mission series shows how complex were the relations between this generation of African leaders and the missions, and how they felt, even in the 1940s when these texts were published, that mission presses were effective tools for communicating their ideas, if only in indirect and subtle ways. Read in this way, the life stories form an interesting and revealing accompaniment to the self-authored texts discussed by Peggy Brock in Chapter 7 and even the more radical texts by mission-educated nationalists which mission presses produced in the lead-up to decolonization.
These early ‘ghosted’ accounts of native life and conversion are sometimes openly stated to be the product of the missionary pen, but at the same time purport to give the ‘true’ account of the life of these subjects, ‘as told to’ a mission amanuensis. In fact, a dominant concern of these texts is the claim to authenticity. That discloses the troubled awareness the missionary amanuensis had of exercising controlling power over the agency of the colonized convert, a power at odds with the missionaries’ stated aim to free these converts. The strenuous assertions of authenticity also reveal uneasiness about the missionary’s role in the imperial process. It is clearly problematic to discuss overall how much the mission ‘patron’ exercised direct control over such texts. In some cases the control was almost total, to the extent that the ‘subject’ of the text was simply the passive pretext for the authorization of the mission amanuensis’s own ideas and attitudes. However, from the earliest period even these ghosted texts allow their subjects’ voices to disturb the stereotypical imperial presentation of them and their culture. Of course the missionary discourse of a savage, barbarous, ‘dark’, and benighted heathenism continued to condition these accounts, but the very presence of this stereotype creates in the gaps and silences of these texts an awareness of its enabling, silenced, and repressed opposite. The question these early conversion accounts pose is what agency, if any, the native subjects of mission texts authored by missionaries on their behalf could achieve within the boundaries of mission literary forms and narrative conventions which still largely represented them. Can the very silences and repressions of these early accounts in which missionary authors speak for the native subject reveal the nature of that control and so reveal through the rents in the veil of a dominant discourse the disturbing presence of the hidden subjects of the tale? And is the repressed desire for control and power of the missionary amanuensis also revealed within the very forms which they create and impose on their subjects, rendering their condition, too, as part of these text’s occluded subject?
This is not to claim that the forms of mission narrative examined here were present in all missions. Imperial mission conversion narratives and forms are legion and diverse. The question posed here is simply, how far does the mission text of the high imperial period enable us to assert the existence of a paradigmatic relationship between missionary and native convert lodged within mission narrative form itself? Does it expose the hidden subject of their narrative choices and rhetorical structures, namely the voices of the enunciated colonized native subjects and of their missionary enunciator and the relations between them?
Many narratives published by missionaries in East Africa take the form of ‘release’ narratives: stories that purport to tell the ‘unvarnished tale’ of slaves purchased by missionaries, or rescued from slavery by the British Navy and brought to missions where missionary amanuenses write down their life stories. A typical example appeared in Central Africa, the journal of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) in 1884, entitled ‘The Story of a Nyassa Boy, as Told by Himself’. As with so many similar tales, the actual missionary ‘author’ claims only to be the ‘translator’ and/or recorder. ‘The following story of a Nyassa boy’s life and wanderings, up to the time when he was received by the Mission, was written out by himself in the Swahili language . . . There is no reason, from the character and ability of the lad to doubt the story.’ Though ‘allowance must be made for the fact that he was certainly very young, perhaps ten or twelve years of age at most, when first carried away from his home. He is now probably eighteen years of age.’ Elsewhere the author asserts, ‘It is the story of an intelligent boy who has been seven years at the Mission Schools and risen to be a teacher and to promise well for future usefulness.’ The final proof for the ‘translator’ of the truth of the story is the closeness with which it conforms to existing ideological and narrative expectations. In a classic early statement of the conventions of the release form, he offers one final proof of authenticity.
Lastly, the substance of the story is not only typical of the experiences of hundreds, even thousands, of East African children, but of some intrinsic interest as a picture of the state of society and operations of the slave trade in the Eastern Lake district. The stages may be distinguished as follows: first, the normal state of the Nyasa tribes, war among themselves, and war with their common enemies; next, the sequel of war, the passing of the captives from owner to owner, until they fall into the hands of Arabs forming large caravans for conveyance to the coast; then the long march down to the coast, with all its hardships and terrible cost of human life; lastly, the attempt to ship the slaves to meet foreign demands, their capture by an English man-of-war, and the final consignment of a portion of them to the care of the Universities’ Mission.
There could hardly be a clearer statement of the essential features of the ‘narrative’ mission texts embraced as the ‘typical’ life of the now freed, once enslaved, convert. It is followed by a renewed assertion of truthfulness on the part of the missionary recorder. ‘In translation, care has been taken in no way to make any substantial change in the story, only to render it in simple and readable English.’ The assertion is disingenuous. Not only had the ‘author’ of the original Swahili version been a pupil of the mission for seven years by the time of its composition, but he had become a trusted teacher. In the process of becoming literate in Swahili, and probably having a spoken if not written knowledge of English as well, he would have absorbed the ideological determinants of mission narrative. Thus, while there is truth in the basic facts recorded in the release narrative—experiences common among freed slaves at the mission—the transformation of those experiences into a text was inextricably bound up in the narrative form which focused, shaped, and ordered the raw events that were related. This is a more profound ‘translation’, which precedes the mere act of transferring narratives from one language to another, or even from a source oral narrator to a missionary- authored written text. By the time this story was published in 1884, the form of the release narrative that shaped it had long been established as the template for all such life narratives.
Women were often the authors of mission accounts of African life and experience, partly because many of the journals which printed them had began as children’s journals. Thus, in the case of the UMCA they appear mainly in the journal African Tidings (originally Children’s Tidings) rather than in the society’s official journal, Central Africa. The audience for these stories quickly spread beyond young people as the adult readership broadened to include less educated members of the home congregations who responded to the human appeal of these stories of native life couched in personal rather than official discourse. There was, of course, the appeal of the exotic. The window this kind of account opened for home readers into what they assumed to be the ‘true’ world of the native, a world recognizably human but tinged with a frisson of horror, gelled with the seemingly perennial taste for the combination of the shocking and the moral, providing them with both a justification for their interest and a sense of satisfaction in their own superiority to the cultures depicted. In this respect the mission journals helped disseminate the wider ideology of imperialism, notwithstanding their unintended effects when read as potential counter-discursive texts. Since the texts examined here emerged from an area later absorbed into the British Empire (Tanganyika-Zanzibar), they are relevant to the wider story this volume seeks to tell. But since this part of Africa attracted attention from several European powers—France, Belgium, Germany, and Britain—and the missionaries came from many nations, the narrative conventions embodied in the texts they produced appear not to be rooted in any particular national culture. They clearly share a broader set of concerns. There was, of course, to some degree a shared culture of mission representation of Africans in this period. However, one must be equally mindful that crucial differences existed in individual missions. In the same way, it is arguable that the similarities these texts display were rooted in the broader structures of imperial control itself, structures common to all the nations engaged in the colonization of Africa, despite their differences in detailed practice.
Thus conversion narratives of an identical kind also occur in the journals of the Catholic society operating in the whole Central and East African region, the Peres de Saint Esprit, or Spiritans, as they came to be more familiarly known, and their accompanying nuns, the Sreurs de Sacre Creur de Marie, who looked after the rescued girl slaves (it was deemed unseemly for male missionaries to be in charge of females). For similar reasons, by the mid-i88os a substantial force of laywomen were managing the Anglican UMCA reception house at Shangani Point and the girls’ training establishment at Mbweni. Unlike women in some other Protestant missions, these High Anglican women were mostly spinsters who remained unmarried and who lived in all-female communities, in effect if not in name an order of Anglican nuns. These unmarried women missionaries, Catholic and Anglican, were often the channels through which the voices of Africans telling their tales were translated. This was especially so in the case of the UMCA, whose missionary laywomen were often from a very highly educated upper-class background, making them perhaps more inclined to engage in this kind of‘literary’ work. The UMCAwomen were frequently independent, intellectual women who resisted the restrictions of a late nineteenth-century marriage. Mission work in East Africa, India, and China offered such women a more independent existence than a late Victorian marriage afforded. While in other Protestant missions marriage to a fellow missionary was sometimes a precondition for acceptance, even then the status and isolated location of these missionary couples afforded women more authority and a broader scope for the exercise of their talents than was usual at home. It was perhaps to be expected that such women would take an interest in the expressions of the voiceless subjects to whom the condition of their gender bound them in coils of sympathy and fellow feeling.
In 1896 the Spiritans’ journal printed an example of the classic ‘release narrative’ which indicates clearly how exactly the Catholic missionaries at Bagamoya reproduced the narrative template employed by their Anglican rivals in the region. The ‘Histoire d’Angelina’ recounts the story of a woman who comes to beg food in a famine. She is told the mission has only enough food to feed the hungry abandoned children it has taken in and instead is given some advice on how to trade in the local material of the forest to people in the hills for maize and bananas. She returns to tell her story, together with a present of a magnificent woven mat that she has made, clearly a product of the skills she learned as a result of the mission advice. She relates how she was born near Lake Nyasa, and was captured, ‘stolen from my parents, like so many others, an Arab from Zanzibar bought me’. The phrase ‘like so many others’ declares the generic quality of the tale, which the narrator is at no pains to hide, since its stereotypical nature is part of its design and the foundation of the claim it makes on its intended audience of mission supporters at home. After an account of maltreatment rendered in the usual generalized terms, she goes on to tell of her escape and how she learned about the fathers at the mission to which she fled to find the familiar sanctuary. ‘Under the protection of the Mission I found happiness. I was instructed in the religion of our Dear Lord Jesus, and baptized.’
Another revealing narrative in the standard mould is ‘Ambimoya; or, The History of a Young Slave, Told by Himself’. In this case the identity of the amanuensis, R.P. (Reverend Pere Le Roy, later Mgr Le Roy, a significant figure in the Spiritans’ African mission), is incorporated into the text. Although the narrative includes few details of the process of the telling, it emphasizes the slowness of the procedure, a feature whose significance will emerge in later discussion of this process of relating and recording the testimonials of the converts. In this case the subject, Patrice Ambimoya, is a Christian child who in earlier times ‘has accompanied Mgr. De Courmont on all his travels’. Perhaps the arduous character of one particular journey—‘We were still walking, as long as the sun lightened our way, until our legs refused to carry us any further’—and the unusual intimacy inspired the lengthy conversation that ensues, at least in this textual dramatization of the event. ‘Gradually a conversation began and Patrice told us his story at length’. This dramatization forcefully claims the authentic voice through the conventions of reported speech: ‘I begin’, said Patrice. Despite these signifiers of an ‘authentic’ voice and the unusual amplitude and detail the text affords, it remains confined within the narrative convention of what is by now a classic, well-established form of slave capture and release through Christian conversion.
Patrice, we are told, was born near Ungindo. The grammar and syntax suggest that the stealing and enslavement of children in this inland location were so widespread as to be universal conditions. ‘Where I come from they steal children.’ The central event of his enslavement, foretold if not almost predestined by the narrative structure, is fulfilled: ‘The thief seized me. Put me into a sack made from palm leaves and stuffed my mouth with maize paste to smother my cries.’ The plethora of similar details serves to reinforce the concrete existence of the source narrator, whose substantive life story the narrative purports to relate. Against such detail is ranged the enveloping narrative patterning into which all such stories are now enfolded, a process of containment, as much, one suspects, for the convert who is their source as for the missionary who is their scribe. That Patrice Ambimoya is an older child and not a recent convert may indicate that he has told this story more than once, indeed, that his life and its memory have been shaped, as in all narratives of the past, by the expectations and conventions of the forms into which they are cast, which in turn were shaped by the audiences for which they are intended. In any case, following more details, including extended dialogues between the narrator and his parents, Patrice is captured and sold. There follows a riveting, gruesome account of the caravan journey to the coast to Kiloa (Kilwa), along with conversations between Patrice and his various owners. These are far more precisely distinguished than is usual in these narratives; one is ‘a great Arab, Abdallah bin Seliman’. These acknowledgements of the different qualities of individual Arab slave owners, differences usually disguised in these texts by a generalized, pejorative characterization and by the use of the generic term ‘Arab’ or ‘Mussulman’ in place of individual names, make this a fascinating example of the edges and boundaries of the standardized release narrative genre. This text is also one of the few mission accounts to acknowledge the historical reality that Arabs were not just slavers but also potential rivals in the conversion of their captives: ‘An Arab with a white beard appeared, looked me over, asked me some questions, and bought me: ‘‘Don’t cry,’’ he said, ‘‘in ten days we’ll leave for Mascate, you’ll come with me, you’ll be taught the Koran, and God willing you’ll be a good Muslim.’’ ’ For a moment the potential rupture between the viewpoint of the subject of the text and its mission recorder is glimpsed. Of course this textual fissure soon closes. The good master dies and Ambimoya is again sold, but this time he is rescued by the missionaries. However, the presentation of this event once again allows a leakage of unstandardized material into the form of this account of rescue. Ambimoya is terrified since he has been warned while at Kiloa that the white-robed fathers are slavers whose slaves are summoned to service in their ‘stone house’ by cords, which are attached to them and to the bed of the White Ones (the Spiritans). ‘These Whites have houses of stone, and in these houses a type of chair that is like a bed. All their slaves are lodged in adjoining rooms, tied with ropes that are attached to the White’s bed. When he wants a slave he pulls on the rope, without disturbing himself, and the slave arrives.’
No wonder Ambimoya is terrified. ‘That is why I said to myself ‘‘I am lost’’ upon seeing the Whiteman approach.’ This little vignette is clearly designed by the missionary amanuensis to illustrate false ideas about the missions promulgated by the Arab slavers to prevent slaves from seeking the sanctuary of the mission. The preamble is again very revealing. Ambimoya, we are told, has been warned thus by his fellow slaves: ‘There are Whites who are wickedness itself, and you should never speak to them concerning yourself, or concerning your village.’ The story the missionary amanuensis records is clearly meant to disprove this assertion, showing that Ambimoya can and does speak openly to his new mission friends. But at a deeper and ironic level the warning against revealing anything of oneself or one’s society to these intruders may have an unintentional force in a text and form whose ultimate goal is the conversion of the subject and the transformation and ‘civilization’ of their cultures. At such moments the suppressed, ‘disordered’ perceptions of the unreconstructed narrated subject seem about to erupt into open discourse. Almost, but never quite. In the end even the least well-policed ‘authentic’ testament must conform to the mission’s ideological and narrative patterns. Thus, for all its fascinating detail and moments of textual fracture, the narrative closure is as inevitably fixed by the form as in the most simple example of the genre, ending as early release narrative demands at the moment of baptism (‘You have brought me to Bagamoya, you have taught me to work, to read, to wash my soul through baptism, and here I am’).
Meanwhile, when the good Arab master dies, the narrator piously notes that it ‘is the Good Lord who wished it thus; otherwise where would I be today?’ In fact, one might conclude by his own earlier account that had he in fact been taken as a slave to ‘Mascate’ (Muscat) by this master, been taught to read and converted, his experience might not have been profoundly different from what occurs when he is converted by the white missionary (Le Blanc). The fissures in this version of the release narrative suggest alternative narrative outcomes that lurk within and behind the story that eventually is recorded. Now the further possibilities of reading the text, as counterdiscourse for example, may be more easily perceived. The story of Ambimoya reveals how much the mission amanuensis needed to suppress or transform the oral narrative to enable the officially acceptable version of the ‘truth’ of the convert’s experience to be recorded.
Another elaborate example of how such processes operate, entitled ‘Panya’, appeared in the pamphlet series Stories of Africa, which, although it is undated, was published sometime in the first decade of the twentieth century. This product of the Anglican UMCA mission on Zanzibar recounts the rescue of a 9-year-old girl, Panya, from Arab slavers. The exceptional interest of this tale lies in its foregrounding of the process by which the paradigmatic narratives of the tracts were produced through a controlled transmission of story from ‘subject’ to ‘author’. This example clearly shows how hollow were the claims of the mission amanuensis to be a simple, objective recorder of lives. Panya’s tale starts with the customary claim that it is ‘as told’ by its subject herself to A.F., a female missionary at the Mbweni Training Establishment in 1894-5. Panya had been released from an Arab dhow in April 1893. Her ‘conversion’ had occurred in the interval between the release and the finding of ‘peace’ and baptism at Mbweni, a process that is made an explicit subject of the narration. Also explicit is the degree to which this transformation and reconstruction is intertwined with the production of the allegedly unmediated ‘true’ textual narrative of Panya.
The text describes an elaborate training process centred on control of the child’s perception and memory. ‘I remembered Panya’s story,’ A.F. observes, ‘and I gave her fair warning I should expect it to be ready in a week.’ A.F. had taught Panya Swahili but was surprised to find that she had also picked up some knowledge of English. ‘I found if I didn’t want the Little Pitcher to enjoy all my talks with the other ladies, she must be sent away before we began.’ This aside makes plain that A.F. must have translated the Swahili original of Panya’s oral narrative into English, a fact that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. Communication then was to be a controlled process, with information flowing from A.F. to Panya only if the missionary chose. Panya, A.F. tells us, had to be ‘trained to tell the truth’. That complex process of training is then described, the purpose of which was to determine the ‘truth’ of Panya’s story.
And now Panya began to tell the truth sometimes. I found she very much disliked having to say afterwards what she ought to have said first, when she had told a lie. At first she only cared a little, but I think each time she cared more, and the last time she lost her temper; in fact, we both did considerably, and she gave me a lot of trouble. But when I came up a long time afterwards, and found her lying with her face pressed down upon the concrete floor, and saw that sympathizing friends were met by silence and kicks, if they came too near, I said to myself, ‘Good, we have learnt something at last’. And from that day forward she began to try to speak the truth.
The idea that Panya’s anger expressed her frustration at having to modify her story to fit the expectations of her listener and the structure required by mission release narratives does not seem to occur to the amanuensis A.F.
Only after this complex process of control has been narrated is ‘Panya’s story’ told. By this time, of course, the identification of Panya as its controlling agent and A.F. as a mere neutral recorder implicit in the phrase ‘as told to’ has been exposed as a determining fiction. The story which we now hear is not that story of ‘misery’ which the ‘men and women’ of the mission heard from Panya’s lips during her illness, but a reorganized, probably bowdlerized, version. What aspect of her story has been altered or suppressed and for what motives? It is possible to speculate that the ‘unvarnished tale’ described, among other things, a sexual relationship between the child and the slaver. The slavers’ sexual abuse of children could not be recorded in the evangelical tracts because of the sensitivity of its intended audience and the negative impact this might have on the mission presentation of Africans as ‘innocent victims’. Of course, for late Victorian readers no female victim of sexual abuse could ever be rendered as ‘innocent’, however traduced and pressured. Whatever adjustments were required of this and other kinds to ensure the ‘truth’ of Panya’s story before it could be released, what this long process of negotiation and control finally produces bears the hallmark of the by now paradigmatic release narrative. Thus A.F.’s struggle with Panya to get her to ‘tell the truth’ resulted in a narrative that fulfilled all the patterns of the well-established mission narrative of release and conversion. This provides a telling comment on the interchangeability of the concepts of ‘training’ and ‘truth-telling’ by which both the subject and the scribe of the text are profoundly overdetermined.
Panya goes on to relate how at 3 years old she went from Uganda to ‘live among the Nyamwezi’ (how or why is not explained). She is approached by a man who ‘carried me away to the houses of his people, and then that deceiver took me away to another house and sold me’. She is sold on until she ends at ‘Saadani (an Arab town on the coast, nearly opposite Zanzibar) and we stayed there two months (meaning some little time)’. These internal glosses are interesting both in terms of their stress on the text’s intended audience, the ‘home’ audience, which needs to be ‘informed’, and, even more significantly, as evidence of the intrusive ‘voice’ of A.F. even within the narrative we are offered as an accurate ‘transcription’ of Panya’s ‘own’ tale.
And we went on from Saadani just the same, only we went in a boat. It was a very large boat, so high that I could not climb up into it by myself. And we stayed in the boat, and we slept in it at night; but the man who had bought me loved me and took care of me in the boat, till one day we landed near a town.
At this juncture an Arab steals her and she is smuggled out of the town on another dhow. After she has been beaten for screaming, Panya’s ear is cut off and fed to a dog. Eventually an English gunboat rescues her. The rest of the story concerns her reception and settlement ‘in great peace and quietness’ at Mbweni. This last phrase suggests none of the complex tensions between Panya and the rescuing missionaries recorded in A.F.’s long preamble. Thus the text reveals the complex, palimpsestic nature of the construction of this text vis-a-vis alternative and more complex ‘truths’ the tale cannot voice. The tale reveals remarkable open evidence of the process of construction involved in the making of paradigmatic texts of the nineteenth century release narrative, a process that later examples ignore. This may reflect the different practices of the missionary transcribers, but it may also reflect the different instrumental functions of the text with regard to the mission project and the audience it addressed in the different periods of the mission text’s production.
The UMCA mission worker Alice Foxley, who worked at the mission on Zanzibar from 1894 until 1911, was almost certainly A.F. because she was the only person at Mbweni in 1894 with those initials. A.F. authored numerous other contributions to mission journals during Foxley’s period of residency in Zanzibar, but none appeared after her departure. It may be that the self-revealing discussion of the processes of text production reflected unconsciously an essential sympathy felt by women for the controlled nature of their subjects, though this must remain merely speculative. For whatever reason, it is to a woman missionary, Alice Foxley, that we are indebted for one of the most revealing accounts of the personal life and narrative of an African convert and of the processes by which it was recorded.
Over the course of several decades a shift can be discerned from the texts narrowly focused on the anti-slavery campaigns in the region to the emergence of forms addressing wider concerns. Later texts retailing the experiences of converted natives were designed not only for a home audience but also for a growing body of converted Africans literate in both African languages and English whom the missions wished to provide with appropriate reading matter. These later texts (especially those produced after the First World War) address different concerns, notably those of ‘backsliding’ by converts under the pressures on these converts of the societies from which conversion has purportedly removed them. That this shift reflected a change in the target audience is confirmed by the fact that the daybooks that have survived at the missions at Bagamoya and at the Anglican Cathedral on Zanzibar regularly record struggles with backsliding converts in entries as early as 1870. Similar accounts appear only rarely in the published records until the audience for these publications include literate native converts, perhaps because struggles with backsliding and errant converts held little appeal to a ‘home’ audience, which needed to hear tales of success to ensure their continued contributions to mission funds. Despite the different emphasis of these later texts and their shift to the concerns of a local target audience, they remain strongly controlled by a process of editing or recording by mission amanuenses. Consequently, they remain equally problematic expressions of the actual concerns of Africans.
The series Little Books for Africa, issued by the Sheldon Press, an imprint of the Society for the Promoting of Christian Knowledge in the late 1920s and early 1930s, typifies the reading materials produced by missionary presses in the period between the wars for congregations of African Christian converts. The series lays frequent claim to African authorship, with titles including the words ‘autobiography’ or ‘as told by himself’. A number of texts are even attributed to specific individuals, thereby implying that they were directly authored by Africans. Despite the increasing claims to be ‘authentic’ and ‘unmediated’, the process of transmission and transcription continued to be very problematic, as an investigation of the provenance of the texts being circulated as late as the 1920s and 1930s as ‘authentic’ life accounts of African converts will reveal.
The Sheldon series includes Ways I Have Trodden, subtitled The Experiences of a Teacher in Tanganyika Told by Himself. The translation is dated 1932; however, since the text is translated from German, it clearly had a prewar origin. The collapse of the time frame between the events and the republication is again passed over without comment. This may be because, as with the earlier accounts ofpre-Christian and pre-mission Africa recorded in the early release narratives, the point of these stories is to emphasize the unchanging, negative side of African life for those not converted and so saved. Even in the late 1930s they anachronistically conjure up an Africa riven by tribal divisions, warfare, and intertribal enslavement. Moreover, their form retains the features of classic release narratives. A war occurs; the protagonist (male or female) is captured and enslaved, and then sold to slavers. They escape. They are taken into the mission. They are healed in body. They are baptized. These late published stories confirm the view of the African past currently favoured by the mission societies, presenting as they do an essentially anachronistic picture of warfare and enslavement.
Another production of the Sheldon series was Stories of Old Times: Being the Autobiographies of Two Women of East Africa (Narwimba and Chisi-Ndjurisiye-Sichayunga). Subheadings set out the narrative structures that shape the ‘life’ of the African subjects: ‘Childhood’, ‘Stolen from Home’, ‘Slavery’, ‘Escape’, ‘Marriage’, ‘Ill-Treatment’, ‘Death of my Husband’, ‘I Marry Again’, ‘The Sin of Senga’, ‘Utengule (the Mission Station)’, ‘Baptism’. This final chapter concludes with the two sentences ‘I was baptized on August 1, 1914. I have finished.’ The narrative contains its lives within a frame of representation in which the African past—presented as violent, arbitrary, and brutal, especially in its treatment of women—is redeemable only by Christian conversion. The African ‘life’ is defined in these terms, and the arrival at the state of conversion is literally the ‘end of life’, that is to say they are not just born again but literally disappear from narrative possibility. The convert’s life displays no continuity with the past, nor does it connect to a post-conversion present. No indication of how conversion affects the subjects subsequently is aired, nor of how it changes their relations within and towards African society. In the same way the colonized state of recent African history also disappears, overwritten by a determining myth of unchanged and unchangeable heathenism to which only conversion can bring an end. To account for this one might postulate that these pieces dealing with the African ‘past’ are meant to act as contrasts, and one must ask if they are not preaching (literally) to the converted since by the time they were published or republished in the inter-war years they were dealing with matters decades out of date. Indeed in cases such as The Story of Dorugu, set in Nigeria and recorded by the same J. F. Schon who was Samuel Crowther’s superior on the 1841 expedition up the Niger-Tshadda, the time lag is obviously much longer. The overriding purpose is to contrast postconversion African life with the brutish and savage African past from which the present congregations, descendants of these early converts, are now happily released. It is the present Christian congregation that is now the text’s determining audience, replacing the ‘home’ audience for which the earlier release narratives were primarily published. Although the ostensible theme of the text remains conversion, its principal aim is not to encourage new conversions but to confirm the present, already converted audience in its superior status and correctness of belief, and to reinforce its identity as a people saved from darkness.
In some of these later narratives the ‘rescue’ and conversion theme extends beyond actual enslavement to metaphorical enslavement by ignorance and heathenism. The release is from the demands of their communities and the ‘pagan customs’ to which they may be tempted to return. In The Tale of Rachel Dangilo, also from the Sheldon series, the burden of its narrative concerns post-conversion trials. Although Rachel, the heroine, has her leg saved by the mission doctor after her release from slavery, where she has been tortured, the text stresses that this is not the central miraculous event. The real miracle is her conversion, since even after the operation she remained lame and in pain throughout her life. The main body of the narrative recounts a series of temptations to return to the pre-Christian community structure. Rachel is praised for following the Bible injunction to ‘forsake all others and follow me’. Those she forsakes include even her parents. This allegory of excision from ‘pagan’ life clearly aims to arm converted people against temptations to regress into ‘pagan ways’. The fact that such regression also involves a rejection of traditional and customary practice is, of course, ignored or even seen as beneficial. Since, as Viswanathan and others have pointed out, conversion need not and often does not involve deculturation and may, indeed, act to stimulate a critical attitude to the society and values of the converting culture as much or even more than of the convert’s own culture, the politics of these late publications may be seen as part of a powerful attempt to justify the destructive impact of missions and the larger imperial enterprise within which such cultural onslaughts are embedded.
Although this chapter has concentrated on mission texts about conversion, especially the release narrative that served a variety of evangelical purposes in different historical periods, it has argued that the texts provide a paradigm of the kind of control involved in all imperial narratives. Indeed, as a polemic and instrumental form, mission narratives may be especially prone to such control. The release narratives are ranged alongside other related mission genres in these early to mid-twentieth-century mission series, including the ‘lives’ which claim the status of a full autobiography, since the amanuensis is removed from the narration. An example (this time from West Africa) in the Sheldon series is The Life of Aaron Kuku of Eweland Born 1860-Died 1929 By Himself. This ‘autobiography’ is nevertheless remarkable for the extent to which it replicates the narrative structures of the earlier missionary tales of ‘release’ through conversion, as witnessed by its subheadings: ‘Childhood’, ‘The Ashanti War 1869-70’, ‘The Report of the War to the King’, ‘How I Was Nearly Killed’, ‘Three Months with Pagan Priests’, ‘I See my Father’, ‘Flight’, ‘The Return to the Ewe Country’, ‘At Home’, ‘The Death of my Wife and How I Revenged her Death’, ‘I See my Mother and Relations Again’, ‘I Become a Christian’, ‘My Work as Evangelist’, ‘How I Teach’. Despite its more sophisticated shape and a time-frame extended again beyond the moment of conversion, the basic account of pre-mission and pre-colonial African life in these later narrative forms continues to stress its disruptive and barbaric nature. This late mission genre of the exemplary life of the famous convert retains the basic evangelical Christian pattern of sin and redemption derived from the earlier narrative form, incorporated now into this overtly historicized ‘autobiographical’ form. The title claim to first-person authentic authorship disguises this ongoing control, and here, unlike in the earlier examples discussed, the absence of the amanuensis from the text, far from removing the fundamental narrative control implicit in the form, serves only to disguise more successfully the control exercised by the form and by the institution which maintains and produces it, the mission press.
For all their self-consciously ‘liberal’ surface and overt praise for the individual achievement of exemplary African converts in these late narratives, African traditional societies are still presented in many of these later mission texts as wholly negative. Intertribal warfare is the ‘cause’ of the enslavement of the Africans either directly, when they are sold as captives, or indirectly, when they are separated from their families as a result of the disruptions caused by warfare. The Life of Aaron Kuku of Eweland continues to structure its story along the established narrative spine of the ‘release’ form, which has become the standardized, seemingly now inescapable, way of framing any mission-generated African life story even in the late colonial period. Before Africans could fully subvert such controlling mission forms and redirect them to new ends, the narrative forms themselves needed to be substantially reworked and their audiences redefined. In particular, the forms of the ethnography, or ‘history’, and of the ‘exemplary life’ needed to be released from the narrative spine inherited from the ‘release’ form of the conversion narrative culminating in baptism and personal salvation. It needed to be directed away from the salvation of the individual subject towards the preservation and development of the social group and culture he or she represents. In addition the audience of mission-educated ‘readers’ needed to be perceived not simply as converts but as modern Africans, eager to hear their past presented in positive and affirming ways. Thus Jomo Kenyatta’s 1942 text The Life of Chief Wangombe wa Ihora, which was itself published by a mission press, displays a clear intention to counter the presentation of the past in missionary exemplary lives as ‘nasty, brutish and short’. In Kenyatta’s text the mission genre of the exemplary life is employed for a much more radical end, divesting itself of concern with conversion as the narrative conclusion or even its principal subject. Now the form is appropriated for the purpose of establishing and celebrating communal African identity as an alternative model for the future of the peoples of Africa. In this thoroughly appropriated form of the mission genre of the exemplary African life narrative Wangombe wa Ihora is presented as a self-sufficient leader whose example provides his people with the strength to resist enemies and also the insight to be able to form alliances with them. The account records how Wangombe negotiates a peace with the Maasai. The wars of Africa in which he is involved are presented not as the brutal tribal encounters featured in earlier mission texts, but as conflicts analogous to European warfare, with causes rooted in similar processes of expansion, economic interest, and cultural pride, able to be resolved by negotiation between peoples. Kenyatta also records how, at the end of his life, Wangombe warns his people to beware the Europeans and to ‘learn their clever way of talking for it is by using your wisdom that you may safeguard your country’. The subject of the mission text is now exhorted to resist control by taking over the form rather than allowing the form to take them over. These late texts thus seek to reverse the flow of control across the site of the early mission genre and text.
As this account of these earlier texts has also tried to illustrate, even at the height of that textual control, when the native subject of the text had little or no agency through the control of his or her own representation, the very act of the mission amanuenses engaging discursively with the native ‘other’ created texts which always threatened to escape the control they sought to embody. In the silences and spaces of the classic accounts of the salvation and conversion of the native subject we may now discern personal and cultural engagements which could never be fully contained within the lineaments of the mission text conventions. Speaker and spoken stand revealed in these texts as intimate enemies, bound together in a linked if unequal process of self-definition. The missionary writing down the life of her native convert expressed and revealed the limitations and boundaries of her own subjectivity even in the act of rendering mute the unacceptable truths of that subject’s unmediated expression.