After a brief period of pioneering work by European missionaries, local people took over the main work of preaching the gospel and making converts. However, two subsidiary branches of mission work, education and medicine, remained largely under the direction of overseas missionaries right up to the era of decolonization. It is easy to forget just how remarkable they were. When European states had barely begun to assume responsibility for public education, missionaries provided free schooling to people who had yet to grasp the benefits of literacy. Not only did they not charge the fees common in British private schools, they held out inducements for parents who would allow their children to be taught. Missions sought girls as pupils as well as boys and in many places introduced the first co-educational schooling. Missions were also among the first in the world to offer the services of medical practitioners free of charge. In some cases, advances made in missionary education and medicine were exported back to the mother countries. Missions figure prominently as pioneers of modern welfare states and international philanthropy. The first two-thirds of this chapter explore some aspects of mission education, while the more neglected topic of medical missions is taken up in the last section.
Few missionaries treated education as an end in itself; schooling was ancillary to the primary object of Christian evangelism. Some missions neglected education altogether, believing that itinerant preachers going about in small groups could fulfil the biblical injunction to carry the gospel to the ends of the earth. (See p. 55.) The great majority of Protestant missionaries, however, understood Bible-reading to be an essential tenet of their faith. This had driven the remarkable spread of basic literacy through England, Scotland, and Wales and caused even the poorly educated missionaries first sent out by the London Missionary Society to make schooling, along with translating and printing Bibles, the first business of their missions to the South Pacific islands and southern Africa. Catholic missions had different but equally compelling reasons to spread schools. Servicing the Irish diaspora after the great famine of the 1840s absorbed most of the attention of the Irish Catholics, who dispatched thousands of priests, nuns, and lay staff to teach in schools like those established by the Christian Brothers in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa. Ireland alone could never have supplied all the needs of Catholic parishes abroad, so seminaries and convents sprang up in the new colonies to train male and female agents. Until well into the twentieth century the Vatican took the position that ‘Christians’ outside the Western Catholic Church had lost touch with God and were therefore worthy objects of missionary attention. Schools for new colonies of settlement were also essential if Catholic children were to escape induction into ‘heretical sects’. The Jesuit Reductions of seventeenth-century Paraguay, where South American Indians had gathered together in pious Christian agricultural villages isolated from their former culture and defended against the greed of European settlers, provided an inspiration for many Catholic missions to the ‘heathen’.
The impact of Christian missionary education varied enormously with local circumstances. In most of sub-Saharan Africa the European concept of schooling was a novelty of unproved value. When people did not come running to their schools, missionaries were puzzled. In nineteenth-century Europe most people expected to pay for schooling, but in Africa early missions needed material inducements to attract students. American and Anglican missionaries in Natal and Zululand offered clothing and wages to children who attended their schools. In order to reap these rewards without running the risk of conversion, parents often sent one of their children for a period of months and then replaced them with another. An added problem was that in the first instance most African societies refused to allow girls to be taught. Sometimes this reflected a general patriarchal anxiety about control of women, which proved to be well grounded. Mission stations, like cities, offered unprecedented opportunities for African women to escape social control. Few, if any, missionaries were inclined to turn away women fleeing from an angry father or violent husband, unless compelled to do so by colonial officials. Chiefs and husbands complained that they had lost control of women and that mission stations made whores of their daughters. Missionaries complicated their own attempts to attract women to school by opposing key cultural institutions, especially polygamy and bride wealth. Although rare individuals like the Anglican Bishop of Natal, John Colenso, countenanced conversion without insisting that existing wives cut loose from their husbands, neither he nor any other mainstream missionary would allow men to acquire new wives after their conversion to Christianity. According to the custom of lobola, which pervaded Bantu-speaking Africa from Cameroon to South Africa, a man presented cattle or other gifts to the father of his bride as an acknowledgement and guarantee of the sanctity of his marriage. Most early missions misinterpreted this as bride purchase or even ‘female slavery’. By prohibiting it in their congregations they interfered with the entire social system for the transfer and distribution of wealth. As knowledge of missionary attitudes on such intimate and central institutions of society spread, people were inclined to keep their children away from schools. Ironically, some missions reacted to this problem by making payments of cattle to acquire girls for their schools. Another indirect method of coercion was to require school attendance from children whose parents resided on mission-owned land. Decades passed before the changes wrought by economic development and colonial rule demonstrated the virtues of schools in Africa.
Such problems were practically unknown in the southern Pacific, where Christianity spread so quickly that schooling faced little resistance from traditionalist parents worried about the corrosive impact of missionary teaching. In Australia and Canada, however, missions faced obstacles of a different order. It was nearly impossible to provide conventional schooling for indigenous societies based on economic exploitation of sparse resources spread over vast distances and subject to seasonal variations. People moved with the buffalo, the reindeer, or the rains. In these conditions missions turned to strategies designed to encourage settlement. This seemed a natural and obvious thing to do, because nineteenth-century missionary theory accorded a special place to self-sufficient agriculture and village life, perversely idealizing a way of life that was already disappearing in Europe. In an Anglican version of the Reductions of Paraguay, the South Australian archdeacon Matthew Hale tried a bold experiment in 1850. He proposed to wrench Aboriginal people out of their ‘nomadic’ existence and protect them from abuse from white settlers by establishing a self-supporting agricultural community in an isolated location. When his first choice, a desert island, proved inhospitable, he settled his little community at Poonindie, near the village of Port Lincoln. At the centre of the settlement stood a stone church that doubled as a schoolhouse. Similar ideas of agricultural settlement, protection, and isolation motivated missions throughout Canada and Australia. When the missionaries could not persuade people to settle down, they asked that they allow their children to be taught in boarding schools. The impact of residential schools varied with the circumstances of the society around them. In most parts of Africa, South Asia, and the Pacific the boarding school seldom stood apart from the local culture; parents, friends, and relatives were close by even if they took no interest in Christianity. Only elite institutions like Lovedale and Zonnebloem Colleges in South Africa aimed to be total institutions, controlling every aspect of student life. In Canada and Australia, on the other hand, boarding schools aimed deliberately to cut students off from their cultural roots and to inculcate in them the norms of the dominant white settler society. The Canadian schools hoped that their students would return to their own people as adults and act as emissaries of ‘Christian civilization’. Australian schools had a more sinister character. State policy made them a dumping ground for Aboriginal children of mixed descent, whose descendants, it was hoped, would eventually lose all visible traces of ‘coloured’ ancestry. Most of those children—the so-called ‘stolen generations’—never saw their mothers again.
Mission schools in British India ran on very different lines. They had no need to hold out inducements to students where schooling with obvious material benefits had already struck deep roots in local cultures. ‘Every larger Hindu village had its school on some pial (verandah) and every mosque its teachers.’ When boarding schools sprang up, they acquired some of the characteristics of elite public schools in the British Isles. The extent of organized education prior to the advent of missions was remarkable. A government survey of education in Madras in 1823-5 counted 12,498 schools teaching 188,000 pupils out of a total population of nearly 13 million, at a time when organized Christian missionary work was minuscule. Not all of this schooling was traditional in language or culture. An appetite for Western education had been growing since the early eighteenth century, encouraged in the 1820s and 1830s by important government initiatives such as Governor-General Bentinck’s 1835 Resolution directing that state funding should favour English-language schools. Thomas Munro, Governor of Madras in 1826, had proposed a sweeping plan of government-funded education ranging from outdoor village schools to universities. These initiatives arose less from abstract ideals than from the practical need for Indians to staff the lower levels of the public service. The government of India, no less than the army, relied principally on local talent. As opportunities for employment increased, so did demand for education in English. When sweeping schemes for government education—schemes that would have astonished the world—failed for lack of funding, missions helped fill the gaps. Their schools filled as fast as they could build them, despite obstacles caused by unwillingness to compromise on key issues of religious content, class, and gender. They instructed all pupils in basic precepts of Christianity, regardless of protests from Hindus and Muslims. They also insisted on opening the schoolhouse doors to people of all social castes and classes. In the early days some concessions to local sensibilities occurred. For example, the indigenous St Thomas (Syrian) Christians, whose Indian roots date back to the first centuries of the Christian era, ranked as equals to the higher castes. Many Catholic and Protestant services in the nineteenth century catered to caste prejudices within their congregations. (See p. 000.) However, over time it became apparent that most converts to Christianity came from the lower castes, pariahs and Harijans (Untouchables). Under these circumstances it seemed unscriptural and impractical to make caste distinctions in schools. Schooling for girls by its very nature carried revolutionary implications. As early as 1820 in the city of Madras girls constituted a third of all pupils and nearly half by 1838. The Medical College in Madras opened its doors to women in the mid-1870s, ahead of most institutions in Europe and North America. Throughout the colonial period Christian women were disproportionately represented in Indian schools and universities.
The character and content of mission education reflected the incredible variety of societies and ideologies at work throughout the Empire. It would be a mistake to imagine that all or even most of them displayed the ordered character of Robert Moffat’s Kuruman in South Africa or Matthew Hale’s Poonindie in South Australia. In many places Christian schools resembled the Muslim Qur’anic schools that may still be seen in many parts of Africa and the Middle East where children gather on the street with their slates and memorize verses. School might be a group gathered on the porch of a missionary’s house or an unruly crowd stifling in the heat of a corrugated- iron shack. As an African priest in Northern Rhodesia remembered the Jesuit school he attended in the 1920s, ‘we used rags for writing and we came together in a cowshed. Some time later we were given slates.’ Whatever the physical surroundings, the first task of all elementary education was to teach reading, even in Catholic schools, which disdained the Protestant emphasis on individual interpretation of Scripture. Ferocious arguments raged over the language of instruction. While nineteenth-century governments recommended English, most missions favoured elementary education in local languages as the fastest way to spread their religion. Although the initial work of translation was slow, once texts and concepts had been expressed in the vernacular, they could spread by word of mouth far beyond the reach of mission stations. It is safe to say that the translation of hundreds of languages into written formats would never have happened but for the missionaries’ educational programme.
Secondary education progressed much more slowly than elementary schooling and aimed primarily to create an indigenous Christian pastorate.
Young men received instruction in European and ancient languages as well as basic science, history, and geography so that they could properly interpret the Bible and proclaim Christianity from the pulpit. Young women received the secondary education thought appropriate for pastors’ wives and teachers. Almost all mission-sponsored university education grew out of theological seminaries such as Fort Hare in South Africa and Fourah Bay in Sierra Leone. Only in the twentieth century did some high-minded missionaries influenced by anthropology and cultural relativism begin to argue that non-European pastors needed both secular and theological education adapted to their own milieu. Following the work of theorists such as Edwin Smith, Henri-Alexandre Junod, Placide Tempels, and Charles F. Andrews, some mission education took an ‘adaptationist’ turn, grounded in local understandings of learning, ethics, and spirituality. (See pp. 255-56.)
Missionary aims were one thing and results another. Literacy could not be confined to the narrow, pious channels envisioned by mission societies in Europe and North America. Some young men trained to read the Bible discovered messages and meanings that white missionaries had never preached to them. They read that Old Testament patriarchs had married numerous wives and kept concubines. They discovered biblical precedents for levirate marriage and the execution of witches. They read how Pharaoh’s army perished trying to stop Hebrew slaves from escaping. Prophecies that ‘Babylon the great’ would perish in the Apocalypse brought some people a welcome sense that imperial rule might soon come to a spectacular end. John Chilembwe of Malawi believed that the battle of the nations in the First World War heralded the end of Satan’s reign on earth and called his compatriots to rise against their oppressors. If missions could not prohibit subversive readings of Scripture, they stood no chance of keeping inappropriate secular literature out of the hands of their converts. As colonial systems of migrant labour expanded across the globe, newly literate Christians gained access to a feast of literature: newspapers, cheap novels, and political tracts. In India and West Africa the imperial need for the low-level bureaucrat gave an added impetus to education in English, which ironically opened the door to unauthorized reading. Even when readers had only acquired literacy in their native tongues, the output of mission presses brought them more than just religious tracts. Mission newspapers conveyed commercial and political information as well as morally uplifting stories. The Yoruba newspaper Iwe Irohin—the first ever published in an African language—originated as a fortnightly production of a mission press at Abeokuta in 1859. Many others followed this initiative, some of which became important conduits for the expression of political opinion, including John Dube’s Ilanga Lase Natal, founded in 1904.
Outsiders, settlers, and officials suspected literacy almost from the moment missions began to spread it. The South African high commissioner George Grey in the 1850s recommended that most African education should be practical, with literary instruction only allowed to a tiny elite. A Canadian government commission in 1879 recommended that Indian education should be primarily ‘industrial’ By the turn of the twentieth century criticism of missionary education acquired a nasty edge. Cecil Rhodes sneered that mission schools in southern Africa ‘seemed destined to produce a nation of preachers and editors’. Mary Kingsley’s influential Travels in West Africa (1897) argued that the utility of African workers was inversely proportional to the amount of missionary education they had received. The ‘Kruman’ with no education was ‘as fine a ship-and-beach-man as you could reasonably wish for, but no good for plantation works’. The ‘Accra’ trained by Basel missions for practical work was ‘a very fair artisan, cook, or clerk, but also no good for plantation work, except as an overseer’. And the Christian Sierra Leonean was ‘a poor artisan, an excellent clerk, or subordinate official, but so unreliable in the matter of honesty as to be nearly reliable to swindle any employer’. Kingsley had no doubt that the problem with missionary teaching was its failure to take account of racial difference:
The bad effects that have arisen from their teaching have come primarily from the failure of the missionary to recognise the difference between the African and themselves as being a difference not of degree but of kind the mental difference between the two races is very similar to that between men and women among ourselves.
The novelist Joseph Conrad took up Mary Kingsley’s critique in ‘An Outpost of Progress’, a short story that served as a dress rehearsal for his celebrated Heart of Darkness. The mission-trained Sierra Leonean Henry Price ‘spoke English and French with a warbling accent, wrote a beautiful hand, understood bookkeeping, and cherished in his innermost heart the worship of evil spirits’. Denunciations of mission education contained an obvious internal contradiction. On one hand, they complained that Africans, Canadian Indians, Australian Aborigines, and other peoples were incapable of understanding or making use of ‘literary education’ and should therefore be given manual training suited to their limited intellects. On the other hand, they argued that mission education at the higher levels would be only too well understood by converts, who might imbibe doctrines of equality, demand equal rights, and foment insurrections.
In most parts of the Empire the ability of the missions to withstand the onslaught of racist criticism was tempered by their need for financial assistance. With cash-strapped boards at home continually demanding that the missions be self-supporting, they grasped at government funding though they knew very well that it came with strings attached. A settler-dominated government in Natal began insisting as early as the 1860s that a certain portion of educational grants to missions be devoted to ‘industrial education’. In the late 1870s the same demand surfaced in Canada. By the opening decades of the twentieth century the crass objective of confining colonized people through inferior education had been dressed up with ‘scientific’ justifications and permeated almost every corner of the Empire apart from South Asia. Alarmed by John Chilembwe’s revolt in Southern Rhodesia, the government of Northern Rhodesia in 1918 tried to gain control of mission education by withholding registration from any school which spread teaching of a ‘seditious nature’. When the missions complained against this regulation of schools that had not received a penny in state support, the government responded by creating a system of tied grants for industrial education. The Graham Commission in Southern Rhodesia (1910) recommended that anyone in control of the native population be ‘authorized and requested to preach the doctrine of labour as a civilizing factor’. On the ‘mission farms’ of Southern Rhodesia government grants were tied to demands for schools that would educate African boys to be manual labourers and girls to be servants. It should not be imagined that such demands reflected the colonial State’s requirement for labour on white farms, plantations, or mines. Testimony at successive commissions on education reveals that almost any education was regarded as too much. As the Revd. R. Bathe of Southern Rhodesia remarked in 1902, ‘I am sorry that on the part of the whites there is a reluctance to encourage education among the Natives under the pretext that they will not be useful as servants when they can read and write.’ A white woman solemnly testified to a later Rhodesian commission that after trying two ‘mission girls’, she much preferred to have ‘a raw girl’ doing her housework.
Given the crudity of the assault it may appear surprising that many missionaries and some indigenous Christian educators took up the cause of industrial and agricultural education. Eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century missions cherished the hope of creating genuinely self-sufficient Christian farming communities. Moravian missions turned away from aggressive evangelization in favour of small, tightly regulated villages sealed against the evil influences of the outside world. A museum version of Moravian village life can be seen today in Genadendal, South Africa. A somewhat similar educational village model developed by a Presbyterian missionary to the Cherokees in 1804 was regulated by a ‘schedule that allotted equal time to study and to work in the fields, shops, or kitchen of the institution’. Some Canadian Indians welcomed the experiment as a possible independent alternative to a life on the move in a land increasingly filled with white settlers. Similar visions motivated William Duncan and his followers at Metlakatla in British Columbia and Matthew Hale at Poonindie, South Australia. In the long run these versions foundered, partly on economic
grounds but mainly because of white settler resistance to any educational programme that might spawn competitors. Poonindie fell victim to its own success. When local farmers saw Aboriginal farmers making a good living, they pronounced the land too good for ‘Natives’ and pressured the colonial government into releasing the land for sale—a strategy that closed out Aborigines who lacked the ability to raise loans to buy their own farms.
In other parts of the Empire, Christian converts proved equally adept at competing with white farmers but were too numerous to be easily pushed aside. Educational strategies designed to direct them into unthreatening channels owed much to theories and practices originating in the southern United States. As the courts opened the way to segregation of public facilities through the Plessy v. Fergusson decision, black Americans looked for ways to provide a first-rate training for people forced out of white schools. Booker T. Washington accepted the premiss of ‘separate but equal’ education as a necessary evil and aimed, through his Tuskegee Institute (1881), to train efficient farmers, mechanics, and tradesmen. Embarrassingly he found himself feted by white segregationists at home and abroad. Tuskegee spawned a clutch of imitators. Black men and women known colloquially as Jeanes teachers were employed as travelling vocational demonstrators of agricultural methods for men and ‘home economics’ for women. All pretence of equal education soon fell away as subject matter diverged sharply from state- funded programmes for whites. As segregation spread through British colonies in southern and eastern Africa, so did variations on Tuskegee and the Jeanes system. People unfamiliar with the circumstances that made industrial education popular in the United States often welcomed the practical emphasis. Lewanika, paramount chief of the Barotse kingdom, told the French Protestant missionary Francois Coillard why he had welcomed black industrial missionaries from the American Methodist Episcopal Church: ‘What do we want with that rubbish heap of fables that you call the Bible?... What I want is missionaries... who build big workshops and teach us all the trades of the white man... That’s what I want, industrial missionaries; that is what all the chiefs want. We laugh at the rest’ John L. Dube, a Zulu Christian from Natal, returned from university studies in the United States and founded his own version of Tuskegee, Ohlange Institute. However, the dominant strain in the promotion of industrial education in white settler colonies was better represented by Natal’s Chief Inspector of Schools, Charles T. Loram. After studying at Teachers’ College, Columbia University, he used his influence to push fashionable American theories of separate education ‘adapted to inferior intellects of African pupils’. Distrusting mission schools in general, Loram ignored the dissenting voices of missionaries and African elites, and touted the role of the secular white expert. He acquired an unparalleled opportunity to influence education throughout British-ruled Africa when he joined the Phelps-Stokes Commission on African education in the 1920s. While it made praiseworthy efforts to raise government expenditure on primary education, the philosophical bent of the Commission was to push schools to adopt vocational curricula adapted to African needs. For example, the Commission commended the Church of Scotland mission schools in Kenya, whose philosophy was that ‘only through working with the hands could the vices of idleness and ignorance be overcome’. In line with Phelps-Stokes theories, Uganda in the 1930s made a determined effort to drag the Church Missionary Society away from literary subjects in the middle school syllabus while allocating ‘periods to agriculture, carpentry, and instruction in the keeping of native court records, and the collection of poll tax’. Only the African elites of West Africa and some institutions in Central Africa managed to hold the line at efforts to debase high educational standards. The durability of Mary Kingsley’s thinking is reflected in Lord Hailey’s amusement that ‘a large mission school in the Gold Coast could in 1938 appeal for assistance in England on the ground that it performed a Greek play every year and ‘‘rendered the odes in the original Greek’’ ’. However, the whole drive to implant industrial education suffered from no less ridiculous assumptions about the future of Africa. Too often, as James Campbell observes, it ‘offered preparation for a life which never existed’, reassuring settlers that African education was compatible with white supremacy by its inculcation of attributes ‘such as docility and industriousness’.
Mission schools in India also felt occasional pressure from the colonial State to emphasize vocational training. However, the absence of white settlers protected them against the dramatic interventions seen in Australia, Canada, and Africa. (Maoris in New Zealand suffered similar regimes of practical education in the government school system.) The presence of so many parents willing and able to pay fees freed many missions from government control. India’s educational needs so outran the willingness of government to provide funds that in the end the State concentrated attention on the elite end of the scale, leaving the lower levels in private and missionary hands through the grant-in-aid system. An additional factor working against philosophies of manual and vocational training was the competition the South Asian missions faced from other faiths, particularly Hindus, who did their best to counter the challenge of Christianity by raising the volume and quality of their own schools. However, the persistence of patriarchal institutions left female education mostly in the hands of the missions. The heavily evangelized southern states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala attained female literacy estimated at 31 per cent in 1971, more than in any other Indian state. At Madras University in 1933,56 percent of the Bachelor of Science degrees were awarded to Christian Indian women.
It is impossible to imagine what education under the British Empire might have been without the presence of Christian missions. They so dominated the provision of educational services for indigenous populations that in many lands the term ‘native elite’ was synonymous with ‘Christian-educated’. Lord Hailey estimated in 1938 that as much as nine-tenths of education in Africa was in the hands of missionary bodies. Only a tiny fraction of what they did was subject to direct government control or supervision, the most dramatic instances of which occurred when German-speaking missionaries were interned during the world wars and pupils were forbidden to learn German in many parts of the Empire. Missions bent to government directives on industrial training partly because some mission educators bought the Booker T. Washington line, but more often because they wanted to maintain control of their schools and keep Christianity on the curriculum. Students often expressed resentment at the controls implemented in mission schools—especially in Australia and Canada, where many schools forbade students to speak in their native tongues. Yet when the roll is called of leaders who agitated for freedom or led their new nations to independence, the products of mission education outnumber all others. Among the boys and girls dressed in white robes at a Presbyterian Easter service in Kenya 1912, was Jomo Kenyatta, who little imagined that his planned apprenticeship in carpentry would be sidelined by a political career that led him, via a colonial gaol, to the presidency of his country in 1963. Kwame Nkrumah sits in the middle row at the left in his 1927 class photo from Prince of Wales College (later Achimota College), unaware that his career would develop from his first job as a village schoolteacher, through study for a Bachelor of Theology degree from Lincoln Theological Seminary in the United States, to Prime Minister of the Gold Coast. Julius Nyerere’s path to the presidency of Tankanyika included six years as a teacher in Roman Catholic schools. Another Catholic politician who led his country was Robert Mugabe, who obtained the first of his university degrees at a Protestant mission college, Fort Hare in South Africa. Nelson Mandela was merely one among many South African leaders who passed through Fort Hare; his ‘long walk to freedom’ began in a one-room Methodist school. As an Australian Aborigine removed from his family to St Francis Boys’ Home, Charlie Perkins could not have realistically dreamed of becoming Prime Minister of his country, but he led ‘Freedom Rides’ to bust segregated facilities and went on to become head of the Australian Department of Aboriginal Affairs. When Colonel Rabuka seized power in a coup d’etat, he remarked (provocatively) that being Methodist was part of what it meant to be Fijian, a statement that might have been echoed on many other Pacific Islands. The list could be almost indefinitely extended with names of influential men and women who passed through mission schools. Their influence appears likely to outlast the Empire by many centuries, just as the influence of Roman Catholicism lingered long after the last Roman citizen had passed away.