Professional anthropologists continued to distance themselves from missionaries during the early 1930s. Winifred Hoernle had expressed privately the same reservations about missionaries as Malinowski when, in 1912, she undertook fieldwork in Namaqualand. As the influential Head of Anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand (1923-37), and one of the leaders of the ‘social work’ approach of which Macmillan was so critical, she often invited professional anthropologists to address welfare circles in Johannesburg. On one occasion, in July 1934, Malinowski, Hoernle, W. M. Eiselen, Monica Hunter, and Isaac Schapera all addressed a New Education Fellowship Conference in Johannesburg.
The missionary anthropologist Henri-Philippe Junod attended the symposium, from which he departed with the feeling that missionaries and their anthropology, perhaps particularly that of his father, had been unfairly criticized by these ‘scientists’ for failing to accept native customs or protect them from the destructive forces of modernity. In a combative article in the International Review of Missions, the younger Junod defended the right of missionaries to protect the interests of their communicants by prohibiting or amending unacceptable cultural practices. The payment of bride wealth for a wife was acceptable, he essayed, but not the rights of possession that went with the lobola and that condemned a wife to be inherited by one of her deceased husband’s male relatives. He rejected what he considered obscene aspects of initiation but praised their educative elements, and he stressed the importance of Wayfarers’ and Pathfinders’ associations in educating young people. He also drew attention to the importance of religion and spirituality in the missionary anthropologists’ work, which combated the sterile materialism that, he considered, was the real cause of the destruction of native customs. In a final outburst, Henri-Philippe Junod decried the detachment of professional anthropologists from their object of study and their tendency ‘to preserve native custom as a curio for some African museum’.
This form of confrontation was rare, at least partly because of the missionaries’ silence on the issue. Instead, missionary anthropologists increasingly wrote textbooks for practitioners in the field or, like E. W. Smith, adopted a functionalist approach.36 They also threw themselves into the study of social change in urban areas, where their work tended to be strongly empirical and concerned with the practicalities of welfare during a period when Malinowski continued to publish articles in the International Review of Missions. Professional anthropology in South Africa gradually divided into two wings. Anthropology in the English-speaking universities came to centre on social change, racial discrimination, and the applied anthropology that could ameliorate the deteriorating conditions under which Africans lived. At these institutions the children of Jewish immigrants, themselves the victims of local bigotry, came to replace Haddon’s Cambridge imports in the mid-1930s. Cultural relativism flourished at the Afrikaans universities and in the Ethnology Section of the Native Affairs Department. The old anthropology fed into the view of the tribe, defined by language and culture, as the primary social institution on which rested the stability of the black population. The children of German missionaries played a particularly important role in establishing a form of anthropology that called for Africans to develop along their own lines and in their own communities. But other missionary children also supported this perspective, either through their work in the Native Affairs Department, or through an anthropology that continued to focus on rural communities and cultural difference.
The decline of missionary anthropology in the 1930s was accompanied, even aided, by the Trojan horse role played by the functionalist paradigm. Many metropolitan Christians were confused by compromises with far-off cultural practices that seemed to contradict the essence of their religion. Others were disconcerted by the self-critical approach of missionaries who blamed themselves and their religion for destabilizing or destroying African societies. G. T. Basden’s critical picture of the effects of Christianity and colonialism on Ibo society, following his thirty years as a missionary in south-east Nigeria, did little to encourage the support of the faithful at home. Nor did Bengt Sundkler’s Bantu Prophets in South Africa (1948) inspire confidence in the supporters of mission work who read of converts’ tendencies in the region to slide from the mission church to Ethiopianism, Zionism, and then back into the arms of animism. Many metropolitan Christians failed to see a link between the advance of the gospel and the exposure, by missionary anthropologists, of poor conditions on the copper mines of Northern Rhodesia. Perhaps as a sign of this faltering commitment, the International Review of Missions gradually stopped publishing anthropological articles in the late 1940s.
If the link between functionalist anthropology and the advance of the gospel was only vaguely perceived by Christians at the heart of Empire, it was more visible to their co-religionists in Africa. In Kenya a heated debate over female circumcision and schooling brought several missions into conflict with the growing nationalist movement. This encouraged Jomo Kenyatta, one of Malinowski’s students in London, to write a monograph on the Kikuyu as an organic community. For Kenyatta, the missionaries had ‘shattered’ Kikuyu institutions and ‘condemned customs they did not understand’. In Nyasaland, Hastings Banda also rejected missionary criticisms of African ‘traditions’, while at the same time working closely with the missionary anthropologist T. Cullen Young to ‘reconstitute’ Cewa customs and to build democracy and Christianity on these indigenous practices. In South Africa the rhetoric of African nationalism shifted from the ‘grievances’ expressed by D. D. T. Jabavu to the illegitimacy of minority rule. In 1949 Robert Sobukwe criticized missionaries for ‘maintaining an unbroken and monastic silence’ during the years of the Smuts government and for ‘bamboozling’ the people; and a Cape Town Trotskyist, Dora Taylor (writing under the pen name Nosipho Majeke), produced an entire book on the missionaries’ contribution to the conquest of African societies. By this time, the missionaries’ opposition to ‘the old ways’ in Kenya had grown into a bitter struggle against the cultural ‘revival’ associated with the Mau Mau insurrection.