The great age of missionary anthropology was built on tribal monographs taking a holistic approach to aboriginal communities. These works generally aimed to capture a picture of primitive society before it was transformed by capitalism and colonialism. Primitivism had many faces for these missionary anthropologists for, while it constituted the major obstacle to conversion, it also embodied the creative originality of a society that had not been corrupted by cold logic and dry materialism. These primitive communities displayed a respect for community, family, and hierarchy that Europe had forgotten. For a few missionaries, as for Marlow in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the hollow nature of European ‘civilization’ was most evident in the African bush or on a Melanesian island. However, natives also practised customs that missionaries found repugnant and sought to suppress, such as infanticide, abortion, slavery, human sacrifice, and, in India, widow- burning, child marriages, and hook-swinging (a festival ritual in which a devotee is suspended by hooks piercing his flesh from a pillar in front of the temple and swings to and fro). Missionaries debated the morality of customs that some thought could be adapted to conform to their definitions of Christianity. The polygamous condition of men joining the Church was acceptable to Bishop John Colenso in Natal in the 1860s, for instance, because he wanted to avoid the pain caused by the dissolution of their marriages. But he refused to allow Christians to take new wives and he banned polygamists from holding office in the Church. Most missionary societies, on the other hand, allowed polygamists to join the Church as on-trial members but would not baptize them, or bring them into the congregation of communicants, until they had suppressed their polygamous marriages. In most cases, although a polygamist’s wives could receive baptism, a Christian man could neither inherit wives nor secure his marriage through the payment of bride price. Some missions even obliged their Christian converts to terminate their polygamous marriages entirely by recalling the bride prices, paid for their wives, that held their in-laws’ marriages in place.
The point is that missionary anthropologists were unable to observe aboriginal life without suggesting ways it could be improved. Indeed, they could hardly develop a purely scientific, objective gaze when their vocation required them to propagate a fundamental reformation of the lives of the people to whom they brought the gospel. Many missionary anthropologists were fully aware that, just as they documented aboriginal cultures, they were undermining and destroying those same cultures. Henri-Alexandre Junod tried to overcome this problem by appending to his ‘scientific’ monograph various appendices suggesting how missionaries and administrators might ameliorate the conditions of the tribe during a time of rapid change. However, few of Junod’s readers made this distinction and, instead, tended to treat his monograph as a scientific work containing various proposals on how to ‘improve’ the lives of the people he studied. The missionaries’ attempts to ‘salvage’ or ‘reconstitute’ a picture of primitive society, even as they colluded in its destruction, met with no more success. The image of a pure, pre-contact indigenous society uncontaminated by colonialism or capitalism would eventually undermine the tribal monograph. This genre of writing made distant peoples far more visible to Europeans; but it was based on situations and suppositions that would rapidly be overtaken by events.
Meanwhile, many missionary anthropologists remained content to serve as local agents for metropolitan figures. James Frazer’s set of questions encouraged several missionaries to adopt an evolutionary perspective and to concentrate on topics such as kinship and taboo. This led to some startling discoveries. Through comparative work engaged in an evolutionist register, missionary anthropologists working in very different parts of the world discerned a hierarchy of cultures that seemed to explain the successes and failures of different societies. Aspects of missionary work also reflected some of the darker ideas of the age. Dudley Kidd noted that Africans suffered from a form of arrested mental development at puberty and, in a highly influential work, turned to eugenics to solve this problem. Even Henri- Alexandre Junod, whom Adrian Hastings portrays as the most eminent missionary intellectual of his age, tentatively accepted the notion that Africans could be intellectually precocious as children and then experience an arrested development in mid-adolescence. He certainly believed that Africans had yet to evolve from childlike ignorance to the enlightenment of adulthood and exaggerated the weight of tribal traditions and customs. From his perspective, aboriginal intelligence was a collective act concerned with the well-being and reproduction of the tribe. Individuals performed specific functions, lived and died, were replaced and renewed, as if driven by instinct and habit rather than by will or reason; and only on very few occasions did they exercise the power of thought or the ability to act in innovative ways. Both Junod and Kidd opposed the extension of the Cape’s qualified franchise when, in 1909-10, the British colonies and old Boer republics were incorporated into a new Union of South Africa.
The professionalization of anthropology initially created vocational openings for some missionaries at colonial universities. But within a short time they found themselves excluded from the network of interests that developed along with the new discipline. The first salvo in the conflict between missionary and secular anthropology took place at the University of Cape Town, where, in 1918, South African lobbyists ensured the election of a missionary linguist to the first professorship of Bantu languages. Three years later an English advisory committee offered the Chair in Anthropology, the first in the British Empire, to a Cambridge graduate, A. R. Brown. The future Radcliffe-Brown set about defining the professional frontiers of his discipline on the basis of anthropological theories that left little place for amateur practitioners. Rather than focus his criticism on the evolutionist ideas of his patrons at home, Radcliffe-Brown turned on the missionary rivals with whom, in the colonial context, he competed for funding and posts. These included his hapless colleague Professor Norton, as well as some of the major figures in the field. In a seminal article published in the mouthpiece of the South African Association for the Advancement of Science he developed a functionalist critique of the evolutionist hypothesis used by Junod to explain the relationship between a Thonga man and his mother’s brother. In another, equally seminal article, he relegated all studies of culture and society that used an evolutionist approach to the category of ‘ethnology’. This he distinguished from ‘social anthropology’, which was concerned with ‘the application of certain logical methods’ and ‘certain general laws’ In this way, Radcliffe-Brown placed the tribal monographs written by missionaries somewhere between the travel literature of the nineteenth century and the social anthropology practised by the university graduates. In practice, he was unable to implement a clear distinction between the work of amateurs and professionals, partly because he had to rely on missionary monographs for teaching purposes and partly because, in the process of establishing the utility of anthropology, he ran diploma courses for missionaries and civil servants. These courses attracted a remarkable number and range of scholars working within the ambit of missionary anthropology. However, as anthropology grew stronger and more self-confident, this working alliance with missionaries would break down. In the meantime, the crack in the discipline would work its way from the periphery to the centre of Empire.
In Britain anthropology remained firmly in the hands of the friends of the missionaries. In 1920 W. H. R. Rivers continued to alert missionaries to the benefits of an understanding of native customs, particularly through means of intensive participant observation. When Bronislaw Malinowski returned to London from Melanesia two years later, he brought an acquired antipathy towards missionaries, who, he considered, interfered unnecessarily in the lives of native peoples (though he limited any public expression of this opinion to a short caricature in the introduction to Argonauts of the Western Pacific). In 1923, the year after the publication of his monograph, he employed the missionary as one of a series of shadowy straw men in his Frazer lecture. In outlining the methodological basis of his new approach to the discipline, Malinowski famously called on the anthropologist to relinquish the comfort of the long chair on the verandah of the missionary compound. At the same time he heaped public praise on the work of missionary anthropologists and developed a strategic relationship with their chief representative, J. H. Oldham.
Oldham had initially seen anthropology as a rather impractical science devoted to theoretical issues; but Malinowski’s stress on fieldwork convinced him of the discipline’s utility to the missionary movement. Missionaries played a key role in colonial education, and Oldham, as Secretary of both the Church Missionary Society and the International Missionary Council, sat on an important committee advising the Colonial Office in this domain. In 1924-5 he and his colleagues organized a series of conferences that resulted in the formation of the Institute of African Languages and Cultures. Through his contacts with evangelical movements in America, Oldham was able to link scholars at the African Institute with philanthropists in America, particularly the Phelps-Stokes Fund, Carnegie Corporation, and Rockefeller Foundation. (See p. 272.) By 1928 this alliance of missionaries, professors, and administrators, supported by American funders, had placed the southwest Pacific in Radcliffe-Brown’s hands and was about to deliver Africa to Malinowski and Oldham.
The American philanthropists valued the settler colonies in Africa as spaces in which to experiment with educational theories. In colonies of settlement, as in America, ‘industrial’ or ‘adapted’ education was aimed at reducing competition and conflict between the races. In colonies governed through indirect rule or limited self-government, members of the International African Institute saw this form of education as a means of encouraging and perpetuating the contribution to humanity of Africans as a group. This educational policy required a thorough, dispassionate understanding of all African cultural practices. Unlike the missionaries, who sought to amend, even suppress, cultural practices that contradicted their sense of morality, functionalist anthropologists insisted on the value of all African institutions, customs, and beliefs. In the lexicon of functionalist anthropology, even the most irrational or immoral practices served a purpose. For the new anthropologists, the institutions, customs, and beliefs of primitive societies were organically related in such a way as to maximize the smooth functioning of the whole. ‘In all groups except the Nguni’, Schapera wrote with icy detachment in 1937, ‘it is not only justifiable but also customary to kill one or both of twins, or children born feet first, or cutting their upper teeth first, or presenting some other abnormality. Such children are regarded as evil omens who must be put out of the way as soon as possible lest they bring disease to their families.’ It was difficult for missionaries, with their moralistic approach and interventionist tradition, to objectify their research in this way.
The effect of a rapidly changing world on primitive societies concerned the functionalist anthropologists even more than missionaries. From their perspective, the destruction of one element in the overall structure could lead to a social imbalance and the general decline of the group. The destruction of native cultures transformed aboriginal peoples into dangerous proletarians no longer subjected to the social and political controls of their communities. Alternatively, through the creation of ‘black Englishmen’ or ‘copies of Europeans’, missionaries and others obliterated the genius of African peoples and reduced their novel contribution to the growth and development of humanity. This perspective underlay the new emphasis on education adapted to local aptitudes and conditions, and it called for new strategies of conversion concentrating on the organic community rather than the individual. It also deterred nationalist critics from denouncing the mission as a tool of cultural imperialism. In Asia the cultural arrogance of the early missionary movement had fired nationalist criticisms of colonialism; in Africa the situation could still be saved by a more sensitive approach to cultural differences.
A growing number of missionaries believed that, through the ‘retention and sublimation’ of indigenous cultural practices, they could construct a form of Christianity adapted to the needs of local peoples. Initiation was a central cause of concern for it combined explicit references to sex, and deeply painful forms of excision, with educational practices that could be harnessed by the missionary. An earlier generation had equated the transfer of bride wealth with the purchase of a wife but, on closer inspection, it became possible to see lobola as a source of dignity for the woman and as a guarantee of fair treatment by her in-laws. Sharp differences of opinion arose on these issues. Henri-Alexandre Junod was by this stage a retired, but still leading, missionary anthropologist. He stressed the continuing importance of ‘salvage’ or ‘reconstructive’ anthropology, for the ‘conflict of cultures’ could only be understood once missionaries had a good grasp of the meaning of original, primitive practices. He was convinced that detailed ethnographic accounts were more valuable in recording cultural practices than functionalist theories or works concentrating on their disintegration. Ancestor worship, Junod thought, ‘guaranteed social morality, respect for hierarchy, the maintenance of order and authority in the tribe’. He questioned the need to sublimate or temporarily allow practices such as bride price exchange that created bonds of indebtedness and mistrust between families. Despite reservations of Junod and others, missionaries who attempted to naturalize Christianity in the held were drawn to the opinions of the proponents of indirect rule and the functionalist anthropologists. Rather than destroy the finely balanced texture of primitive societies, they sought to build Christianity on the basis of indigenous beliefs and practices and in this way respond to the needs of local society. For the missionary committed to the construction of an indigenous Christianity, social anthropology was a key tool.
In the 1920s missionaries and professional anthropologists became alarmed at the large-scale movement of native peoples to the cities. As women moved to the cities in greater numbers, it became clear that the African family had rooted itself in the urban areas and that missionaries would have to familiarize themselves with its structure and problems. If the process of urbanization in the Empire was monitored and controlled, the work of scholars and social activists could serve to reduce the social disruption and class conflict caused by industrialization. With the centre of the ‘native problem’ moving from the rural areas to the settler-dominated cities, the spectre of racial competition and conflict became a growing reality; articles on economic conditions and social problems in the cities started to fill missionary journals and publications. In 1925 the General Missionary Conference of South Africa published a handbook filled with these topics, several written by black political leaders sympathetic to the missionary movement. From the vantage point of the university, professional anthropologists were required to maintain more distance from the objects of their study. Nevertheless, the two approaches to urbanization frequently overlapped.
The policies adopted by the coalition of interests grouped around Malinowski and Oldham appealed to a human rights culture in Britain and Africa, but in racially divided colonies of settlement their ideas tended to support segregation. In South Africa this led to a growing divide within the anthropological fraternity. Isaac Schapera was one of the first to turn a critical eye on the homespun methodologies of the missionaries, as well as their notions of social change. In 1928 Schapera fired a cannon across the bows of the missionary movement when he expanded the anthropologist’s unit of study to include missionaries in the field. To understand the ‘native problem’, claimed Schapera, fresh from one of Radcliffe-Brown’s classes at the University of Cape Town, anthropologists had to turn their gaze from the stable African tribe and focus on transitional figures like migrant labourers, as well as the dislocating forces of ‘culture contact’ and change. As segregation was clearly impossible within a common economy, anthropologists should include in their studies of African populations figures like the missionary, the native commissioner, and the labour recruiter.
This perspective transformed the missionary from an empathetic observer committed to solving ‘the native problem’ into a major source of the upheaval that caused the problem in the first place. It was perhaps this concern with the compromised position of the missionary that led Schapera to exclude works by missionary anthropologists from his edited collection of essays The Bantu-Speaking Tribes of South Africa (1937). It might reasonably be suspected that Schapera’s portrayal of the missionary as a compromised observer was dominated by his concern to undermine the position of a competitor in the workplace. A more important criticism of missionary anthropology came from the ex-missionary educator and liberal politician Edgar Brookes, who, in 1934, declared that ‘the older anthropological school’ dominated by missionaries had ‘supplied the segregationists with a badly- needed philosophy’. By regarding ‘tribal natives’ as the only phenomenon of study, it had created the impression that Africans formed a homogenous category and that they belonged in the rural reserves where they continued to live under chiefs ‘on their own lines’. Through this native policy the development of the African population was held back and the contribution to the country of Africans in the city was ignored.
W. M. Macmillan, Professor of History at the University of the Witwa- tersrand, also berated the ‘scientists’ who, by protesting against Europe’s ‘perverting influence’ on ‘pure African culture’, were responsible for ‘the break away from the ideal of common citizenship’. By contrasting ‘a highly idealized African rusticity’ with ‘diabolical slums’, anthropologists represented the rural reserves as the natural environment of the African population. ‘The facts of Africa as we begin to know them’, he continued, ‘make nonsense of the dream that tribal life is a state of idyllic peace and contentment marred only when civilization interferes.’ These rural societies were dominated by hunger and disease, witchcraft and superstition, and they lacked freedom and democracy. Macmillan found shards of the old anthropology in the work of the new generation. He criticized the patchwork approach taken by Schapera in his collection of essays on the tribes of South Africa because it racialized the tribe as the classic unit of study for Africans and represented the African population not as a national force, but as what Margery Perham would go on to call a ‘multi-cellular tissue of tribalism’. By stressing the importance of ‘decaying native customs’, Schapera’s collection exaggerated the importance of ethnic and racial differences in the country. Only one isolated chapter was devoted to a history of the forces that united the members of the different tribes. Macmillan also criticized the anthropologists’ concern with ‘data collection’ and ‘social change’ as this approach ignored the root causes of poverty in South Africa and obscured the need for a political solution. In sum, anthropological work was politically divisive and reformist in nature; and it offered, as a solution to ‘the native problem’, only an ameliorative form of social work. More seriously, functionalist anthropology viewed social change as an unsolicited source of disruption to life in the timeless tribal village. From this perspective, change was a source of trouble and confusion rather than innovation and progress. It merely highlighted the Africans’ inability to adjust and adapt to new conditions and served to legitimize the protective aspects of segregation.
Macmillan certainly overstated his position, for anthropologists like Schapera had shown how African laws and customs grew and adapted to suit the conditions of a changing society. But in general, the ‘new anthropologists’, particularly those working in the cities, portrayed Africans as victims of change. This outlook fuelled the popular opinion that the Africans’ natural home lay in the rural reserves where they could be protected from the dislocating forces of change and undergo a period of tutelage. The opinion that the ‘new anthropology’ had not shaken off the segregationist bias of the previous generation was compounded by the prefaces written by the South African prime minister Jan Smuts to important monographs by Monica Hunter (Wilson) and Eileen Krige.