the black atlantic missionary movement …. black missionaries.pdfthe black atlantic missionary...

THE BLACK ATLANTIC MISSIONARY MOVEMENT AND AFRICA, 1780s-1920s

by

DAVID KILLINGRAY(Goldsmiths College, University of London)

ABSTRACT

Over a period of 150 years African American missionaries sought to spread theChristian Gospel in the ‘Black Atlantic’ region formed by the Americas, Africaand Britain. Relatively few in number, they have been largely ignored by mosthistorians of mission. As blacks in a world dominated by persistent slavery, ideasof scienti� c racism and also by colonialism, their lot was rarely a comfortable one.Often called, by a belief in ‘divine providence’, to the Caribbean and Africa, whenemployed by white mission agencies they were invariably treated as second-classcolleagues. From the late 1870s new African American mission bodies sent menand women to the mission � eld. However, by the 1920s, black American mis-sionaries were viewed with alarm by the colonial authorities as challenging pre-vailing racial ideas and they were eVectively excluded from most of Africa.

A recurring theme in Adrian Hastings’s magisterial study of thechurch in Africa is the central role of Africans in the evangelisation ofthe Continent. His account also embraces Africans of the diaspora, that‘black, Protestant, English-speaking world which had grown up in thecourse of the eighteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic in thewake of the slave trade’. Hastings suggests that by the 1780s the smallblack elite in London, which included men such as Olaudah Equianoand Ottobah Cuguano, ‘appear already conscious of constituting some-thing of a cultural, linguistic, and religious bridge’ with Africa.1 A fur-ther group to whom he refers, although � eetingly, is African Americanmissionaries. It is this small group of black men and women from North America and the Caribbean with which this essay principally isconcerned.

African American (the term is used here in the widest continentalsense) missionaries were exclusively Protestant, English speaking, andtheir endeavours were directed mainly towards their own people in theAmericas and their forebears in Africa. In British America few blacks,

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4 David Killingray

slave or free, were Christians before the latter part of the eighteenthcentury when a tide of conversions occurred as a result of the ‘GreatAwakenings’ in North America, which led in turn to small-scale mis-sionary work in the Caribbean islands. This corresponded with thebeginning of the modern missionary movement which was primarilyProtestant. There was some evangelisation by Roman Catholics amongblack people, but the church was a minority denomination in NorthAmerica and most of the British Caribbean. Its hierarchical structureand claim to be universalist prevented schism and the creation of inde-pendent black churches, while a strong notion of a limited priesthoodhindered the development of overseas mission work.2 Another diVerencebetween African American Protestants and Catholics was that blackProtestants had a strong biblical focus that directed their gaze towardsAfrica as a mission � eld. The Bible spoke powerfully of exodus fromslavery, and for some blacks this was interpreted as a need to returnto Africa. Also there were many who believed that God’s providentialdesign had brought Africans as slaves to America in order that theymight return to evangelise Africa, for, according to Psalm 68: 31, ‘Princesshall come out of Egypt and Ethiopia shall soon stretch forth her handsunto God’.3

African Americans constituted a small but visually signi� cant elementin the modern Protestant missionary movement. They are generallyignored in the standard literature and mission histories. This is not sur-prising as it is only relatively recently that black people, certainly out-side the Americas, have begun to be noticed by historians. Nevertheless,black missionaries to Africa have received certain scholarly attention inseveral doctoral theses, most notably in Campbell’s splendid study ofthe AMEC in South Africa, published as Songs of Zion (1995),4 and alsoin a number of biographies.5 On the African side of the equation isPeel’s recent study of the African agents of the CMS in southernNigeria.6

This essay has three main purposes. First, it places black missionaryactivity centre stage and draws attention to an aspect of mission workoften ignored or marginalised. Second, it places the movement in awider Black Atlantic context. This draws, in part, on Paul Gilroy’s ideaof how the tri-continental experiences of black people helped to shapetheir ‘intercultural and transnational’ identities.7 This idea is well rep-resented by the life of Catherine Zimmermann (c. 1825-1891), the sec-ond wife of Johannes Zimmermann, the Basel missionary in the GoldCoast. Catherine was born in Angola, enslaved as a child and takenacross the Atlantic where she was given a new name (Mulgrave), sub-

The Black Atlantic Missionary Movement and Africa 5

sequently freed and then trained as a teacher. She volunteered to returnto Africa where she eventually married Zimmerman and ‘she is saidto have assisted him in his pastoral and ethnographic work’.8 The closeconnections between African Americans and Africa, with Britain as notonly a stepping-oV point on the trans-Atlantic route but also a placefor spiritual encouragement, was well established from the early decadesof the nineteenth century following the establishment of the Freetownsettlement. An example, one of many that could be given from themiddle of the century onwards, is provided by the Rev. Edward Jones,an African American Episcopalian who joined the CMS in Sierra Leonein 1840, in the next year becoming principal of Fourah Bay College.Jones was � rst married to Hannah Nyländer, daughter of a whiteGerman missionary and his Nova Scotian black wife whose sister wasmarried to Jacob Schön. Jones and his second wife retired to Englandin 1864 and lived with the Schöns in Kent.9 A further example is inpart re� ected in the sub-title of the autobiography of the AfricanAmerican missionary Thomas L. Johnson, Twenty-Eight Years a Slave orthe Story of my Life in Three Continents.10 Johnson, from Virginia, engagedin evangelistic work in the United States, studied in London and wasan evangelist in Britain before going to Africa as a missionary for theBMS. Ill health soon forced his withdrawal from Africa, after whichhe worked in the United States but spent most of his life as an itin-erant preacher in Britain where he died in Bournemouth in 1921.

The trans-Atlantic traYc was in both directions as African protegesof white and African American missionaries were sent to study inAmerica, invariably travelling via Britain. John Chilembwe, who raiseda revolt against the British in Nyasaland in 1915, is a notable exam-ple. Sponsored by Joseph Booth, a white missionary, in 1897 he wentto study in the United States and probably spent a short time in Britain.When he returned home in 1900 to found the Industrial ProvidenceMission, a close associate was the African American Baptist minister,Landon Cheek, who married Chilembwe’s niece. When Cheek returnedto the US with his wife in 1906, he took with him two African boys,Matthew and Frederick Njilima.11 His missionary associate, EmmaDelany, in turn sent back for Daniel Malekebu who was educated inthe United States and became a doctor. Malekebu was reluctantly re-admitted back into the colony by the government of Nyasaland in 1926but found the social climate oppressive for a black missionary. Heremoved to Liberia where he had a distinguished medical missionarycareer.12

A third purpose of the essay is to examine the reasons for and the

6 David Killingray

impact of black mission work in Africa from the 1780s to the 1920s,a period of 150 years marked at one end by enduring slavery and atthe other by colonialism. Race was a dominating theme in this periodand black missionary activity and experiences were hedged about byquestions of colour and race. Although relatively small in number andin� uence, African American missionaries were unique in the UnitedStates in being the one ethnic group that had a primary focus on evan-gelising peoples who were racially similar.

Africa and the idea of ‘Divine providence’

African American interest in African missionary work needs to beseen against the back-cloth of the persistent idea of ‘back to Africa’,that sense among African Americans, especially in the United States,of a close identity with Africa that dates back to the late eighteenthcentury.13 Black slaves, many only recently arrived in the Americas,had a strong consciousness of a lost home from which they had beencruelly torn. In a perverse way, some freed Christian African Americanseven entertained the idea of the ‘fortunate fall’, that slavery had beenpart of providential design enduing them with a pressing responsibilityto ‘redeem the race’.14 This led to Black evangelisation among slavesand also to overseas missionary work. In the 1780s George Liele andMoses Baker left Georgia to begin Baptist work in Jamaica; at the sametime an unknown ex-slave began evangelistic work in New Providence,in the Bahamas. This was the start of an increasing � ow of Baptistpreachers going to Jamaica and Trinidad.15 Liele was � rmly in theidiom of the ‘Black Atlantic’, being involved in mission work amongblack people in Georgia, then in Canada and also in London.16 Theearliest African American mission to West Africa was led by the formerslave and Baptist preacher, David George, who went with the expeditionto Sierra Leone in January 1792.17 The role of the missionary-settler,a common feature of African American migration to Liberia, was ini-tiated by Lott Cary, a Baptist who settled in Monrovia in 1815 as anagent for the Richmond African Baptist Missionary Society. Race drewhim to Africa. He said, ‘I am an African, and in this country [UnitedStates], however meritorious my conduct and respectable my charac-ter, I cannot receive the credit due to either. I wish to go to a coun-try where I shall be estimated by my merits, not by my complexion,and I feel bound to labor for my race.’18

Black-led churches, such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church(AMEC), founded in Philadelphia in 1816, and the African Methodist


Episcopal Zion Church (AMEZ), founded in New York in 1821, sentmissionaries into the Southern states and the West, into Canada, andalso to the Caribbean. Haiti, as the � rst Black republic in the Westernhemisphere, was of special interest to many African Americans. The� rst AME church was established there in 1828. At mid-century BishopJames Holly stated that an object of the Episcopal mission in Haiti wasto ‘aid in making the Haytian nationality and government strong, power-ful and commanding among the civilized nations of the earth’.19 Thefocus of the Jamaica Baptist Missionary Society, founded in 1842, wasevangelisation within the island, to the islands of the Caribbean, includ-ing Haiti, and areas of the central American isthmus where there werepeoples of African descent, but from the outset also to West Africa.20

Africa was the persistent geographical focus of African American mis-sionary thought throughout the nineteenth century. The Second GreatAwakening stirred black Christians to a strong belief in the vital pur-pose of evangelism, and in this Africa had a special signi� cance. Thebelief in ‘providential design’ and ‘race redemption’ was a recurringtheme and had a two-fold meaning. By engaging in mission activity,African Americans would not only ful� l the Christian command topreach the Gospel, but also prove their worth to the doubtful whiteconstituency that largely paid to send them to Africa. The idea thatGod’s providential hand had been at work in African slavery was alsoembraced by some whites. William Knibb, the veteran missionary toJamaica and a fervent anti-slavery campaigner, believed that ‘whatevermay have been the designs of Man, whatever he may have contem-plated in enslaving Africa, we know that the moral Governor of theUniverse had other designs superior to them all’.21 Many decades later,in 1888, a white missionary told the black student body at AtlantaUniversity that God had not only ordained slavery but in return hadgiven to African Americans the continent of Africa ‘for their work andreward’.22 An African American delegate to the Student VolunteerMovement for Foreign Missions convention, in 1902, spoke of the ‘prov-idential preparation of the American Negro for mission work in Africa’.23

Similar ideas were echoed by black delegates attending the BaptistWorld Alliance in London in 1905; one spoke of ‘poor bleeding Africa’,while the Revd Dr C.G. Gordon, from Louisville, argued that ‘theAlmighty had sent his own people into slavery that they might learnto love the Bible, and then return to Africa and take the light of theGospel to the many who remained in darkness there’.24

A contrary view nevertheless predominated among African Americansin the United States, who argued that the promised land was not to

8 David Killingray

be found in Africa but to be struggled for in North America. The ‘exo-dus’ from slavery to freedom, from serfdom to liberty, from discrimi-nation to equal rights, had to be achieved in the land built and createdby the sweat and skill of black men and women. Those who arguedthus and opposed the idea of ‘divine providence’ did not disclaim theneed for Christian missionary activity. This was a vital work but the� rst and major claim on the black churches was to evangelise withinthe United States among black people, and even among whites. Notionsof a ‘return to Africa’, and even an emphasis upon the priority of mis-sionary work in Africa, it was argued, were a diversion from the realtask which was to achieve the promised land in the place where blackpeople were born, lived and worked.

The idea and employment of ‘native’ agents

The idea that African Americans could serve as civilising agents inAfrica greatly appealed to many whites, especially to white missionarybodies. As early as the 1770s, Dr Samuel Hopkins, Congregational min-ister of Newport, Rhode Island, and an opponent of slavery, proposedsending African Americans to Africa as missionaries. A local Africanfund was created by the Missionary Society of Rhode Island, and twoblacks, one a slave, the other free since birth, but both with a knowledgeof a ‘Guinea language’, were sent to Princeton to study theology. Theoutbreak of the revolutionary war interrupted the plan.25 A few yearslater, in 1779, when the ex-slave Olaudah Equiano volunteered for mis-sionary work in West Africa, his application for ordination was rejectedby the Bishop of London ‘from some certain scruples of delicacy’.26

The Anglican Church was not quite ready for black clergy (althoughan African, the Rev. Philip Quaque, was then serving on the Gold Coast)and had little interest yet in foreign mission. However, in the UnitedStates, Hopkins’s in� uence helped found the American Board of Com-missioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) in 1810, and this essentiallyCongregational body soon began sending black missionaries to Africa.By 1847 the American Board was arguing that ‘the work of evange-lising Western Africa must be mainly upon the colored race’, althoughit was not yet time to dispense with ‘the agency of the white man’.27

Indeed, it was white agencies that sent and supported African Americanmissionaries for most of the nineteenth century. Although membershipof black denominations in the United States was steadily increasing,their constituents were predominantly rural, economically weak andlacking the institutional structures to support overseas work. The churches


in the West Indies were considerably poorer and the economic depres-sion that hit the islands in mid-century greatly reduced their ability tosupport foreign mission work. Among white sending agencies there wasthe belief that African American missionaries had greater resistance totropical diseases than white people. The death, mainly from disease, ofone-third of the white members of the Niger expedition of 1841 helpedto reinforce this idea although Jakob Schön argued that ‘it must neverbe thought that a black skin is a suYcient safeguard against diseasesincident to the climate of Africa’.28 Nevertheless, there were plenty ofvoices in the Americas claiming climatic advantage for blacks overwhites in the tropics.

The pleas by Thomas Fowell Buxton, Henry Venn of the ChurchMissionary Society, and Rufus Anderson of the American Board fornative agency, strengthened the argument for employing AfricanAmericans as missionaries in West Africa. The geography of race tookhold: black Christians, as long as they were of the right moral andsocial sort, were appropriate for employment in the ‘white man’s grave’,whereas Europeans were best suited to work in temperate regions suchas southern Africa. While Africans were being schooled to becomenative agents—‘the deliverance of Africa by calling forth her ownresources’, as Buxton put it—West Indians and American blacks couldtemporarily � ll the gap. Native agents oVered obvious economies.Europeans were expensive as missionaries in terms of training, condi-tions of service and life expectancy; African Americans cost consider-ably less, while Africans came at knock-down prices. At times, and inplaces, black men might be more appropriate in the � eld but the widelyaccepted view at mid-century, in both the Americas and Britain, wasthat African American missionaries were best suited as a civilising leaven,as artisans, teachers and itinerant evangelists. On each side of theAtlantic, missionary bureaucrats propounded the idea of self-supporting,self-governing and self-regulating indigenous churches in which nativeagents would play a prominent role. It was a view that continued toappeal even late in the century when crude ideas of ‘scienti� c racism’tainted white missionary thinking. For example, in the 1890s the well-meaning Christian doctor James Johnston, who had worked for manyyears in Jamaica, advocated the use of West Indians ‘as aids in mis-sion work’ and to relieve Europeans of ‘manual toil’.29

A small but steady stream of African American missionaries had goneto Sierra Leone and Liberia since the second decade of the nineteenthcentury. Many were indistinguishable from their fellow black settlersand few attempted to evangelise the African peoples of the coast. The

10 David Killingray

addition of freed African slaves to those communities, particularly inSierra Leone, led to rivalry with African Americans, including WestIndian missionaries. Relations between the two groups of black Christians,with their diVerent cultures and world-views, were rarely smooth orcomfortable. Class, status, competition and privilege, the very diVerencesthat dogged the work of the Liberian church and the AmericanColonisation Society, and that later drove a wedge between Europeanand African American missionaries, similarly beset the relationship ofthe two groups of native agents. Of course, there was graciousness andgoodwill, but all too often tension and misunderstanding hindered thework that both were supposed to be engaged in.

Britain’s abolition of slavery was followed by a brief burst of mis-sionary activity by the West Indian churches directed towards WestAfrica. The loss of European missionary lives in West Africa duringthe 1830s spurred Baptists, Moravians, Scottish Presbyterians and ulti-mately the Anglicans to think in terms of using West Indian agents.For example, Hope Waddell of the Scottish Mission wrote: ‘From theday the sun of negro freedom arose in 1834, it was hoped by all friendsof Africa that among the emancipated Christians of the West Indies,valuable agents would be found for propagating the gospel in the landof their progenitors. The subject engaged the attention of our Presbyteryin 1839.’30 In Sierra Leone and the Gold Coast, West Indians estab-lished new � elds or worked alongside the small handful of AfricanAmerican missionaries who had arrived during previous decades. Amongthese black Christians was Thomas Birch Freeman, a British mission-ary employed by the Wesleyan Methodists, who began work in thesouthern Gold Coast in 1838. He spent a long and active life in WestAfrica, evangelising, farming, being involved in politics, and travellingto Asante, southern Nigeria and Dahomey, about which he wrote anotable account.31 Unlike his fellow European missionaries, Freemannever returned to Britain after 1845, choosing to remain in West Africa.Despite his colour, he recorded only one occasion when he experiencedracial discrimination, although unknown to him, in 1880, the whiteChairman of the Gold Coast and Yoruba Missions could pose the ques-tion as to whether Freeman should receive grants as a ‘European’ ora ‘Native’ pastor.32

By 1838 one or two Jamaicans had worked their way to West Africato spread the Gospel but nothing further is known of them.33 In 1843,the Basel Mission recruited several Jamaican families for service in theGold Coast where it was hoped they would provide ‘correct examples’of Christian living. The same year in Jamaica, William Knibb founded


the Baptist Calabar Theological Institute to train men for service inAfrica. And somewhat prematurely an ill-assorted party of 36 Jamaicansset sail on the Chilmark to establish a Baptist mission station in FernandoPo. Three years later Hope Waddell arrived in southern Nigeria accom-panied by Samuel Edgerley and his black wife, both from Jamaica.34

These early attempts to use West Indians in West Africa had mixedresults. There was social and racial tension on the ships that carriedWest Indians and whites across the Atlantic; the long voyage with poorfood and con� ned conditions raised tempers; whites accused blacks ofbeing ‘puVed up’ while Jamaicans were highly sensitive to real andimagined slights.35 Many of the members in the Chilmark party had lit-tle sense of calling. Nevertheless, among these early black pioneers therewere men and women robust in health and faith. Henry Wharton,enlisted from Grenada by Freeman in 1843, served for 28 years in theGold Coast.36 Joseph Merrick, in a short life before he fell victim todisease in 1849, translated portions of Genesis and Matthew into Isubuand was at work on a dictionary.37 His fellow Jamaican, Joseph JacksonFuller, who arrived in West Africa as a very young man with littlesense of purpose, went on to spend three fruitful decades in Cameroon,his latter years being marked by his gracious forbearance of certainwhite colleagues.38

The � rst Anglican proposal to use West Indians as missionaries inAfrica came from Archdeacon J.B. Trew of Barbados. In a letter tothe Bishop of London in 1843, he suggested that an ‘Africa wasted byBritain’ might be restored by Native Agents.39 He proposed CodringtonCollege as a training institute. This was agreed in 1850 and was fol-lowed by the formation of the West Indian Church Association, sepa-rate from but closely linked to the Society for the Propagation of theGospel. The Association resolved ‘that a Mission to Western Africawould be a work particularly suitable to the Church in the West Indies,where the population consists so largely of persons deriving from thatcountry’.40 Like the Baptists, the Anglicans determined that West Indiansshould go to West Africa as missionaries and not as colonists. By 1855work had begun on the Rio Pongas in Sierra Leone. The leadershipwas white but within a short time the white superintendent had diedand the mission was eVectively in the hands of J.H.A. Duport, a grad-uate from Codrington, recently ordained a deacon and active in bothevangelism and translation work. Funds for the work came from thelimited resources of the West Indian church but also from the ‘poorslaves of Tennessee . . . and the free Negroes of Canada’.41 Althoughwhite superintendents were appointed, and appear prominently in the

12 David Killingray

oYcial reports of the Mission, it was ‘under Mr. Duport’s care [that]the Mission prospered’.42 By 1861 a black schoolmaster had arrived onthe Rio Pongas to be followed by a family who were ‘imbued with athoroughly Missionary spirit’ and were intent on being ‘industrial mis-sionaries’ involved in training and teaching.43 The ideas persisted thatWest Indians were resistant to tropical disease and that there was acontinued need for white supervision. ‘It is hoped’, wrote Henry Caswallin the Report of that year, ‘that with an increased number of Missionariesof African descent, and with a single white superintendent, there willhereafter be fewer causes of illness and death, and more ability toendure the African climate’.44 Disease and ill health continued to taketheir toll of whites and for most of the 1860s ‘the Missionaries and allothers in the employ of the Mission, were now, without exception,African by origin’.45

As in other mission situations, West Indian and African Americanagents did not always enjoy good relations with local Christians. In theRio Pongas, argues Vassady, the West Indians feared competition fromand replacement by African agents and they ‘used their powers to pre-vent the emergence of African “native agency” in the Mission’. Duport’srelations with local people deteriorated and there followed a periodduring which he was re-assigned, his deacon’s licence was revoked, andthen he was restored; he died in Liverpool in 1873.46 The Rio Pongasmission, although directed by whites, was actually run by blacks. Bythe 1880s the weakened Barbadian economy led to the Mission beingtransferred into English hands although it continued to be staVed byWest Indians.

The Jamaican Baptist Missionary Society had run into similar eco-nomic problems in the 1850s. By then the BMS had determined thatthe experiment with West Indians had not been a success, althoughpart of the blame can be put down to European authoritarianism andmismanagement, as well as lack of purpose and endeavour on the partof the Jamaicans. By 1879, J.J. Fuller was the lone black BMS agentin Cameroon. The decision was taken to press on with developingAfrican agents and dispensing with West Indians, although this did notprevent selected African Americans being employed by the BMS inCongo in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Baptist‘failure’ in the late 1840s in� uenced the thinking of Waddell and theABCFM as to the value of African American agents. As the AmericanBoard stated in 1847: ‘The idea, therefore, of dispensing with the agencyof Europeans and Americans in evangelizing Africa ought not at thepresent time be entertained’.47 To Waddell’s way of thinking, Jamaicans


in the Calabar mission exercised a degree of independence that seriouslychallenged his ideas of what was appropriate to their class and status.

Most African American missionary activity from the United Statesuntil the late 1870s had been sponsored mainly by white mission agen-cies and focused mainly on West Africa, principally to Liberia andSierra Leone, and to a lesser extent on the Caribbean. In Liberia thetwo most prominent African American missionaries were Edward WilmotBlyden and Alexander Crummell. Blyden, born in the Danish WestIndies, studied in the United States and went to Liberia in 1851 spon-sored by the New York Colonisation Society and with the support ofthe Presbyterian Board of Foreign Mission. He became involved in thepolitical and social aVairs of the newly created black republic. Later,his sympathetic views on Islam and his insistence that only ‘pure Negroes’should be sent to Africa as missionaries ruptured his relations with hischurch.48 By 1890, Blyden was advocating African church independencefree of European control. Crummell, a free black from New York anda graduate from Cambridge University, was ordained by the Episcopalianswho sent him to Monrovia in 1853 where he acted mainly as a pastorto Americo-Liberian settlers; he also became entangled in local politics.

African American missionary societies

The formal end to Reconstruction, and the rolling back of much ofits achievements after 1876, stimulated a renewed interest among manyAfrican Americans for a return to Africa and also for missionary activ-ity in the Continent. Black churches, predominantly in the rural South,often served as a focus for black communities, providing prime groundfor stimulating interest in African mission. Black churches, such as theAMEC, the Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians, set up their ownmission boards in the 1880s-90s, although white agencies continued tosend black missionaries to Africa. There were African Americans whocontended strongly for a ‘civilising’ mission in Africa. Alexander Crummellargued that ‘The hand of God is on the black man, in all the landsof his distant sojourn, for the good of Africa. This continent is to bereclaimed for Christ. The faith of Jesus is to supersede all the abound-ing desolutions of heathenism.’49 His view, expressed in a sermon ‘Howshall Africa be redeemed?’, was that ‘the sons of Africa themselves mustbe the agents of Christianity’ in what he saw as the vital work of ‘regen-eration’ in the continent.50 But there were also voices that persistentlyopposed emigration to Africa or an untoward African American focuson the continent. For example, Daniel Payne, the senior bishop in the

14 David Killingray

AMEC until his death in 1893, argued that it was his duty to work forthe salvation of his people in the United States and that attempts toplant missions in Africa was a form of ‘African Methodist imperialism’.51

Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) work had begun in West Africain 1849 when Thomas J. Bowen and two African Americans, RobertF. Hill and Harvey Goodall, were sent to Nigeria.52 Racial tension wasever present and by the late 1870s William Colley, a black Virginian,with the SBC in Nigeria, decided that blacks should work alone as ‘thisis their � eld of labor’.53 The outcome was that Southern Black Baptistsorganised the Baptist Foreign Mission Convention, in Montgomery,Alabama, in 1880, although the body represented regional rather thandenominational interests. Fifteen years later a degree of black denom-inational unity was achieved with the creation of the National BaptistConvention (NBC). Between 1895 and 1915 most NBC missionarieswent to Africa, the � rst being sent in 1883, although there was alsowork in the Caribbean, South America and even in Russia. The viewin the NBC, and also among many other African American Baptists,was that all humanity needed salvation, so a small part of NBC fundswas regularly allocated for general mission work. But the NBC was alsoinsistent that it should be an exclusively black funded and directedorganisation. These, and other diVerences within the NBC, led to theformation of the Lott Cary Baptist Foreign Mission Convention in1897.54 The � rst Lott Cary Convention missionary, Clinton C. Boone,went to Congo in 1901, with � nancial support from the AmericanBaptist Missionary Union.

The AMEC had formed a Home and Foreign Missionary Societyas early as 1844. The church was small until the 1860s and its foreignfocus was limited to Liberia. By 1865 the AMEC had grown to over200,000 members and had in James Townsend a mission secretary withorganising skills and a passion for African mission, although not foremigration schemes. Mission funds grew and work was extended toSierra Leone. By 1893 the AME had appointed Henry Turner as Bishopof Africa. Turner, also an emigrationist, founded and edited the Voiceof Missions from 1893-1900, the � rst periodical from an African Americandenomination, in which he fanned enthusiasm for mission work. TheAMEZ church followed suit and in 1896 also appointed a Bishop forAfrica, John Bryan Small, a West Indian who had worked in BritishHonduras and the Gold Coast. By the end of the century, AMEZ workwas established in Liberia and the Gold Coast. An independent ‘Ethiopian’Methodist church was formed in South Africa in 1892. Four years laterit aYliated with the AMEC, the � rst time that an African American


church had entered into an association with an independent Africanchurch. In 1898, Bishop Turner arrived in Cape Town for a six weekstour to organise the new work. The institutions were hastily put intoplace but all was not easy with the merger. As Campbell says: ‘For allthe talk of racial aYnity and providential reunion, African and AfricanAmericans had come together in distinctly self-referential terms’.55 Andthe political climate in South Africa, and in the newly emerging set-tler colonies to the north, was to prove distinctly unwelcoming to AfricanAmerican missionaries.

Education and professionalism

Both the white-led and the African American churches placed con-siderable emphasis on training men and women for African mission. Alater vision of the African American missions was to bring Africans tothe United States for education in their new schools and colleges. The� rst known institution was the Foreign Mission School for blacks atCornwall, Connecticut, founded in 1825, which closed within two yearswithout seeing a single student. As we have seen, the Calabar TheologicalInstitute and Codrington College led the way in initial missionary train-ing in the 1840s-50s. In the United States the American MissionaryAssociation, founded in 1846 and combining abolitionism with mission-ary zeal, opened schools and universities for blacks. Wilberforce Universitywas bought by the AMEC in 1863 and trained black missionaries.White agencies also sponsored schools to train blacks for work in Africa,for example Lincoln University in Pennsylvania founded in 1854 bythe Northern Presbyterians, and the Stewart Missionary Foundation,established in 1894, which later became part of the Northern Methodistssponsored Gammon Seminary at Atlanta. Other major black colleges withmission training programmes were Spelman, Hampton and Tuskegee.56

Many of these institutions also began to train Africans sent by whiteagencies or by the AMEC. For example, John Chilembwe trained atLynchburg, a college opened by the Virginia State Baptist Convention‘to prepare Christian preachers, teachers and workers for work amongNegroes’;57 James Aggrey, from the Gold Coast, studied at the AMEZLivingstone College, Salisbury NC;58 John Dube, later to become the� rst president-general of the South African Native National Congressin 1912, studied at Washington’s Tuskegee Institute.

There were also British institutions that trained people of Africanorigin and descent for missionary and Christian service. The oldest, StAugustine’s College, Canterbury, was established to train missionary

16 David Killingray

clergy for the Anglican Church overseas. Students included men fromthe West Indies, for example Lambert MacKenzie from British Guiana,the � rst black from that region to become an ordained Anglican, whosubsequently served in West Africa, and several men sent from south-ern and central Africa by the CMS and the Universities Mission toCentral Africa.59 Pastors’ College, founded by C.H. Spurgeon to trainBaptist preachers, took in several African Americans between 1875 and1903, as did the East London Institute for Home and Foreign Mission,where James Newby, another African American, was trained beforegoing to work in West Africa.60 Thomas L. Johnson, a former slave,brie� y served in West Africa with the BMS before becoming an evan-gelist in Britain;61 Calvin Richardson, also from the United States, servedwith the Baptist Missionary Society in Cameroon and then in Congo,as did Simeon C. Gordon from Jamaica; William Forde, from Barbados,worked for more than 50 years in Costa Rica for the Jamaican BMS.Less well known was the Congo Training Institute at Colwyn Bay,North Wales, founded in 1887 by a former Baptist missionary to Congo,William Hughes. Hughes’s idea was to ‘train African young men inthis country, in the hope that many of them will return to their nativeland either as missionaries, schoolmasters, or useful handicraftsmen’.62

The � rst two students were from Congo and they were followed bymore than 150 others, mainly from Nigeria but also from the Caribbean.The result was few eVective missionaries although some Africans returnedhome � uent in Welsh! Closure came in 1911 with scandal over a localgirl made pregnant by a West Indian who was loosely attached to theInstitute, all richly aired in the local press—‘Black Baptists BrownBaby!’—and nationally in the pages of John Bull.63

Colleges in the Caribbean, the United States, and Britain were train-ing black missionaries from both sides of the Atlantic. The traYc wastwo-way with Africans coming to Britain and America, and AfricanAmericans going to Africa, often via Britain where they might speakin churches and attempt to raise funds. But there was also the movementof models of education from black institutions to Africa, especially theindustrial schools of Tuskegee and Hampton that found fertile imita-tion in Liberia and at the hands of John Dube at Ohlange in SouthAfrica.64

Congresses and conventions

Besides education and training, the enthusiasts for African Americanmissionary work also organised congresses and conventions. The American


Missionary Association sponsored The World’s Congress on Africa inconjunction with the Chicago World’s Fair in August 1893. A furtherCongress on Africa was held in Atlanta in late 1895 with ‘discussionscentred around the industrial, intellectual, moral and spiritual “progress”of Africa’.65 At the Negro Young People’s Christian and EducationalCongress in Atlanta, 1902, listeners were told that

African natives can best be reached by the American Negro. First because he isidenti� ed with him; this identi� cation gives him a true knowledge of those whohe would help. This is one of the essentials to the success of all missionary eVort.The Negro, in the second place, is in sympathy with his race. It is his own andnot another’s. The American Negro is the bone and sinew of the African Negro. . . .66

The expectation was that young men and women would respond toEthiopia’s open arms and take heed of the Continent’s call to ‘comeover and help us’. However, when Booker T. Washington called togetherthe International Conference on the Negro at Tuskegee in April 1912,most of those who attended were white. Together with the few AfricanAmericans present, they looked at how missionaries and educators couldwork within the new colonial systems of Africa. And the colonial orderhad become increasingly hostile to the presence of African Americanmissionaries.

The central question of race

Ironically, the increase in African American missionary activity inAfrica coincided with European imperial expansion across the Continent.White colonialism with its overt racial agenda steadily determined thatAfrican Americans were unsuitable for missionary work in Africa. Indeed,by the � rst decade of the twentieth century their presence was increas-ingly seen as being a destabilising one. The issues of race and colourhad always been central to the African American missionary venturein Africa. White agencies such as the ABCFM and the SBC deemedblack missionaries to be inferior to white, while many African Americans,and certainly the black agencies, assumed their racial appropriatenessfor evangelising Africa. At the same time most African American mis-sionaries viewed African peoples and institutions through a Westernprism of prejudice. There were a few rare exceptions to this, for exam-ple Alexander Camphor and William Sheppard, who did not demeanAfrican culture but made great eVorts to understand and explain it.

African Americans employed by white agencies invariably functionedwithin structures that were discriminatory at home and in the � eld. Itwas assumed that whites would be in positions of leadership and in

18 David Killingray

control of � eld operations. Archdeacon Holkerton of Antigua, discussingthe employment of black people in West Africa in 1839, stated: ‘Whenyou forward them from England, send as their superintendent, one ofourselves, a minister who shall direct their energies, bear with theirweaknesses’. Four years later he totally opposed sending black men.67

Most black missionaries soon became all too aware of their place inthe racial order. It was most obvious to the Rev. Harrison W. Ellis,who, along with his wife and two children, had been freed from slav-ery with the help of churches in Mississippi and Alabama in order thathe could be sent by the Presbyterians from New Orleans to Liberia.68

It was made palpably clear to most black missionaries that they werenot the equals of their white colleagues. The appointment of Dr ArchibaldHewan, a Jamaican graduate of the Royal College of Surgeons inLondon, to the Scottish mission in Calabar took many months to processwhile a fellow white missionary was accepted within days. Nevertheless,in West Africa, Hewan’s skills and his ‘amiable industriousness’ as doc-tor and preacher ensured that he was treated as an equal. In 1865 hesuccessfully brought charges against his senior white missionary whohad been vindictive and unreasonable.69 Clinton C. Boone, sent by theABFMU to Congo, received patronising treatment from his white col-leagues; he returned to the United States, trained as a doctor and thenwent to Liberia but with the Lott Cary Baptists.70 James Hemans andhis wife, the � rst West Indian missionaries to serve with the LMS incentral Africa, were shamefully ‘ostracized and deprived of ordinaryspiritual fellowship’ by white colleagues. At the end of their secondtour, after nearly 20 years service, the Hemans resigned and returnedto Jamaica.71 William Sheppard, employed by the Southern Presbyteriansin Congo, was similarly treated by his sending agency.72

Most black missionaries were subjected to diVerent terms of servicefrom whites. They received lower pay, were expected to serve for longerperiods in the � eld, had shorter and less frequent furloughs, climbedmore slowly up the promotion ladder and rarely achieved seniority overwhites, and their children were unlikely to be oVered the educationalbene� ts available to white missionaries. As white notions of racial supe-riority increased in the late nineteenth century, so also did the ambiguousposition of black missionaries in Africa. According to a white mission-ary with the Scottish mission in Calabar, writing in 1880: ‘The nativesthere are natives, the Europeans are Europeans; but those from Jamaicaare neither, and yet would wish to be on equal footing with theEuropeans’.73 Occasionally black missionaries complained at discrimi-natory treatment, as did the Jamaicans Clerk and Jarrett in a joint


letter to the Scottish Presbyterian home board, written in October 1882,stating that they had been under the impression that ‘their status asordained missionaries were [sic] in every respect equal to other mis-sionaries’.74 In 1901 one white missionary with the Southern BaptistConvention argued that black missionaries should be sent only if ‘theyare willing to come out and stay with no hope of returning home’.75

Segregated mission stations were not unknown, the American Boardadmitting that their station at Galangue in Angola had been so at var-ious times.

Besides the structural diVerences accorded to black missionaries bywhite agencies, there were also personal distinctions. Rarely were blackmissionaries addressed formally with ‘Rev’, ‘Mr’, ‘Mrs’, although theSouthern Presbyterians in Congo did so. Higher standards of personalbehaviour appear to have been expected from black missionaries thanfrom whites. Blacks were often regarded as being less stable in per-sonality than whites, and certainly it was thought that they were morelikely to fall prey to lust when confronted with the sight of scantily cladAfrican women. Although inter-racial marriage by and among mis-sionaries had not been uncommon in the early and mid-nineteenth cen-tury, by the latter part of the century it was increasingly frowned upon,particularly black missionaries marrying white women. Christian mis-sionaries and their supporters were no more immune than other sec-tions of the white population from the then current ideas of scienti� cracism. Predictably, the more rigid racial lines drawn by Americanwhite agencies re� ected the discriminatory social divisions of the UnitedStates.

The gender diVerences within mission work were also � rmly drawn,in principle if not in practice. Black women missionaries, in particular,were patronised by white colleagues more than were men. Their role,as indeed that of white women as well, was seen principally as teachersand evangelists of women and as models of Christian home-making.However, some forceful black women missionaries were involved intranslation work, for example Althea Edmiston in the Congo.76 MrsSamuel ‘Mammy’ Fuller worked in Duke Town, Nigeria, from 1858to 1921, and by hard work, linguistic skill, and through personal con-tacts acquired over many years became a presence to be reckoned with.Another Jamaican, Mrs Samuel Edgerley, with the Scottish Calabarmission, was ‘headstrong and self-willed and knew how to use theMission’s weak spots to her own advantage’ thus securing advantagesgiven to whites but rarely extended to blacks.77

20 David Killingray

Black missionaries and European imperialism

African American responses to European colonial rule in Africa weredivided. Most black missionaries, predictably, viewed Africa throughWestern eyes and saw the imposition of European rule as helpful inextending Christianity in the Continent. But there were also black mis-sionary critics of colonialism and particularly of speci� c colonial rulers.The atrocities carried out by the Congo Free State were publicised byWilliam Sheppard and Henry P. Hawkins, and their white colleagueSamuel Lapsley, all of whom worked for the Southern Presbyterians.This led to Sheppard being prosecuted by the Free State authorities.78

One black missionary gave up Christian evangelism to become apersistent critic of empire. Dr Theophilus Scholes, from Jamaica, anda graduate of Edinburgh and Brussels universities, had worked for theAmerican Baptists as a medical missionary in both Congo and WestAfrica during the 1880s. By the late 1890s he appears to have aban-doned his Christian faith; he turned to writing political works that crit-icised European racism and imperial rule.79 Scholes had spent sometime at Hughes’s Congo Institute; he had been an evangelist in Britain,and was known to a good number of black British and African Americans.He is an enigmatic � gure and little is known of his life and activitiesafter 1912, not even the place and date of his death, which probablyoccurred in the late 1930s.

In the early years of colonial rule there was increasing opposition toAfrican American missionaries, although Harry Johnston held a con-trary view. He argued that ‘Some of the best, hardest-working andmost satisfactory sensible missionaries I have ever known have beenWest Indians—in colour as dark as the African they go to teach, butin excellence of mind, heart and brain capacity, fully equal to theirEuropean colleagues.’80 By the � rst decade of the twentieth century inSouth Africa and in the white settler colonies, black missionaries wereviewed with increasing suspicion and the ‘honorary white’ status accordedto African Americans was ended. The role of the AMEC in SouthAfrica after 1896 and the northward spread of its work into centralAfrica, aroused fears of Ethiopianism and anxiety that African Americanswere likely to stir up racial unrest. The Bambatha rebellion in Natalin 1906 reinforced oYcial and popular fears. These were graphicallypresented in John Buchan’s novel, Prester John, published in 1910, wherethe menacing Zulu minister, John Laputa, is the product of an AfricanAmerican college. John Chilembwe’s revolt in Nyasaland � ve years laterseemed to con� rm for many whites Buchan’s prescience. The ‘sea of


charismatic � re’ which swept across central Africa after the First WorldWar, Kimbanguism in the Belgian Congo, and the strident demandsof racial rights from Garvey and his followers that penetrated Africa,further increased white colonial apprehensions about the presence andthe activities of black missionaries.

South Africa and white settler colonies made entry increasingly diYcultfor black missionaries. The Southern Rhodesia government, it wasreported, ‘does not view the introduction of these people for missionpurposes, whether independently or under control, with favour’.81 InKenya, African Americans were clearly unwelcome although Max Yerganand several black colleagues served there with the YMCA, 1916-18,and then later in South Africa.82 South Africa’s Immigration Act, 1913,was used to restrict the entry of black missionaries into the country:the Rev. Herbert A. Payne and his wife, sponsored by the NBC, abody outspoken in its condemnation of Ethiopianism, were detained atCape Town as ‘undesirable aliens’ in early 1917; Bishop Vernon, ofthe AMEC, was similarly detained for three days in January 1921.83

The oYcial view in British and French colonies by 1921 was that thepresence of black missionaries was inappropriate. A few remained orcontinued to enter colonies, those entering French colonies requiringthe governor’s permission to do so; the least race conscious colonialadministration was the Portuguese in Angola. As the Lott Cary Missionreported in 1922: ‘We have scarcely begun to redeem Africa. We areshut out from large areas by the strong arm of human laws. We � ndlittle welcome in our Fatherland save in the Republic of Liberia.’84

Colonial discrimination against black missionaries was discussed atthe Le Zoute International Conference in September 1926. As EdwinSmith reported: ‘There are no legislative restrictions speci� cally directedagainst the American Negro, but most African Governments are opposedto, or place diYculties in the way of, the sending of American Negroesto Africa’.85 A guarded and cautious recommendation by the confer-ence oVered to support African American missionaries that were sentto Africa provided they went under the auspices of ‘responsible soci-eties of recognized and well-established standing’.86 It was hardly theringing endorsement that African American delegates had hoped for.However, it was the most that white international mission agencies wereprepared to oVer. They too had deep suspicions about certain AfricanAmerican activities in colonial Africa. The result was that in the inter-war years the number of African American missionaries in Africa steadilydeclined. Only after 1945 did they begin to pick up again.

22 David Killingray

Conclusion

In the period 1780-1920, relatively few African American mission-aries went to Africa. By 1900 just over 115 African American mis-sionaries were working in sub-Saharan Africa: 68 in Liberia, 20 in theBelgian Congo, 13 in Sierra Leone, six in South Africa, three each inNigeria and Mozambique, and one each to Cameroon, Angola andSouthern Rhodesia.87 Between 1877 and 1900, the black U.S. agen-cies, the AMEC, AMEZ and the NBC, sponsored nearly 80 mission-aries in Africa and supported 30 Africans in training in the UnitedStates. However, in the period under discussion, and beyond, the num-ber of African Americans in Africa as missionaries relative to the totalblack population of the U.S. was exceedingly small. In the years 1820-1980, some c. 30,000 Americans served as missionaries in Africa. AfricanAmericans from the United States, who represented 11.6 percent ofthe total population in 1900 and a slightly larger percentage in 1970,provided only c. 600 missionaries for sub-Saharan Africa in that sameperiod. (The � gure for the West Indies is not available.) Of that num-ber, half were women, two thirds being unmarried and the other third‘missionary wives’. Most African Americans served in English-speakingWest African countries, the largest number going to Liberia.

Although African Americans constituted over ten percent of theUnited States population, and as a community were noticeably religiousand with some speci� c motivation towards Africa, this essay has indi-cated some of the reasons why so few black missionaries went to Africaand why there was a marked decline in their number after c. 1900.Despite the growth of black churches after the Civil War, most wererural and poorly endowed with little sense of overseas mission purpose,and where that did exist they were often reliant on the benevolenceand the patronage of richer white mission boards and agencies. Althougha good number of African Americans did go to West Africa, their pur-pose was to settle and not to evangelise indigenous peoples. The StudentVolunteer Movement, so in� uential in mission growth during the latenineteenth century, recruited most of its mission volunteers from theuniversities, the places where African Americans were least likely to befound. Black missionaries who made it to the � eld were subject to whitepaternalism that discouraged long-term service. And, by the � rst twodecades of the twentieth century, black missionaries were increasinglyunwelcome in colonial Africa. An additional reason why so few AfricanAmerican Christians volunteered for mission work may be that, bornand raised in relative poverty, they sought material advancement athome rather than sacri� cial service overseas.88


Although there were stories of success, generally African Americanmissionaries gained few converts. Nevertheless, black missionary activ-ity helped to stimulate an interest in Africa among ordinary AfricanAmericans in the United States, and to a lesser extent in the Caribbean.This was conveyed to church congregations by returning missionaries,by mission literature, and by denominational conferences that promotedan awareness of the Continent. African American Christian missionactivity in Africa thus needs to be seen as a signi� cant contribution toa growing awareness of pan-Africanism among ordinary black peoplein the United States well before the rise of Garveyism and the HarlemRenaissance.89

NOTES

An earlier version of this essay was read to the Imperial History seminar, Institute ofHistorical Research, University of London, in late November 2002. I am grateful tomembers of the seminar, and particularly to Professor Andrew Porter, for various help-ful comments.

1. Adrian Hastings, The Church in Africa 1450-1950 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1994),p. 175.

2. Albert J. Raboteau, A Fire in Their Bones. Re�ections on African-American Religious History(Beacon Press, Boston, MA, 1995), ch. 6, ‘Minority within Minority: The History ofBlack Catholics in America’.

3. Raboteau, Fire in Their Bones, chs. 2 and 3, looks at ideas of black exodus andalso black destiny in nineteenth-century America.

4. James T. Campbell, Songs of Zion. The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the UnitedStates and South Africa (Oxford University Press, New York, 1995). On US black missionactivity see Walter L. Williams, Black Americans and the Evangelization of Africa 1877-1900(University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 1982); Sylvia M. Jacobs, ed., Black Americansand the Missionary Movement in Africa (Greenwood Press, Westport, CT, 1982); Sandy D. Martin, Black Baptists and African Missions. The Origins of a Movement 1880-1915 (MercerUniversity Press, Macon, GA, 1989). Major doctoral theses are by W.C. Harr, ‘TheNegro as an American Protestant Missionary in Africa’, University of Chicago, 1945;Donald Franklin Roth, ‘“Grace not Race”: Southern Negro Church Leaders, BlackIdentity and Mission to West Africa 1865-1915’ , University of Texas at Austin, 1975;Carol A. Page, ‘Black Americans in White South Africa: Church and State Reactionto the A.M.E. Church in Cape Town and Transvaal, 1896-1910’ , 2 vols., Universityof Edinburgh, 1978; Eunjin Park, ‘Black and White American Missionaries in Liberia1820-1875’ , Columbia University, 1999. On the Caribbean contribution see Horace O.Russell, The Missionary Outreach of the West Indian Church. Jamaican Baptist Missions to WestAfrica in the Nineteenth Century (Peter Lang, New York, 2000), originally an Oxford UniversityD.Phil degree (1972); another thesis is by Bela Vassady, ‘The Role of the Black WestIndian Missionary in West Africa, 1840-1890’ , Temple University, 1972.

5. Biographies of notable Black missionaries have been written on Cary: Leroy Fitts,Lott Cary: First Black Missionary to Africa ( Judson Press, Valley Forge, PA, 1978); Freeman:Allen Birtwhistle, Thomas Birch Freeman. West African Pioneer (Cargate Press, London, 1950),although a modern full biography is needed; Blyden: Hollis R. Lynch, Edward WilmotBlyden: Pan Negro Patriot 1832-1912 (Oxford University Press, London, 1967); Crummell:Wilson J. Moses, Alexander Crummell: A Study of Civilization and Discontent (Oxford UniversityPress, New York, 1989); Sheppard: Pagan Kennedy, Black Livingstone. A True Tale ofAdventure in Nineteenth Century Congo (Viking, New York, 2002), and William E. Phipps,

24 David Killingray

William Sheppard: Congo’s African-American Livingstone (Geneva Press, Louisville, 2002). Fora list of missionary autobiographies see Jacobs, Black Americans and the Missionary Movement,p. 231.

6. J.D.Y. Peel, Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba (Indiana University Press,Bloomington, 2000).

7. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Verso, London,1993).

8. Paul Jenkins’s entry on Johannes Zimmermann in Anderson, Biographical Dictionaryof Christian Missions, p. 762.

9. Nemata A. Blyden, ‘Edward Jones: An African American in Sierra Leone’, in J. Pulis, ed., Moving On: Black Loyalists in the Afro-Atlantic World (Garland Publishing, NewYork, 1999).

10. Johnson’s autobiography, originally published in London, 1882, went into seveneditions; see 7th edn., Mace & Sons, Bournemouth, 1909.

11. George Shepperson & Thomas Price, Independent African. John Chilembwe and theOrigins, Setting and Signi�cance of the Nyasaland Native Rising of 1915 (Edinburgh UniversityPress, Edinburgh, 1958), pp. 89-90 and 136 V. Frederick Njilima served in the Britisharmy during the Great War.

12. For Malekebu see H.J. Sindima, Drums of Redemption: An Introduction to AfricanChristianity (Greenwood Press, Westport CT., 1994), pp. 78-9.

13. See Stephen Howe, Afrocentricism: Mystical Pasts and Imagined Homes (Verso, London,1998); and Wilson J. Moses, Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History (CambridgeUniversity Press, Cambridge, 1998).

14. Wilson J. Moses, The Wings of Ethiopia. Studies in African-American Life and Letters(Iowa State University Press, Ames, Iowa, 1990), ch. 9. Also Donald F. Roth, ‘The“Black Man’s Burden”: The Racial Background of African American Missionaries inAfrica’, in Jacobs, Black Americans, ch. 2.

15. Sylvia R. Frey & Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American MissionaryProtestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (University of North CarolinaPress, Chapel Hill, 1998). See also Peter D. Brewer, ‘British Baptist Missionaries andBaptist Work in the Bahamas’, Baptist Quarterly 32 (1987-8), pp. 295-301.

16. The Annual Baptist Register, vol. 1, 1791-4, pp. 212-3. Russell, Missionary Outreach,pp. 13-20, 25-28. John W. Pulis, ‘Bridging Troubled Waters: Moses Baker, GeorgeLiele, and the African American Diaspora to Jamaica’, in Pulis, ed., Moving On, pp.183-221.

17. Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock. Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (PrincetonU.P., Princeton NJ, 1991), pp. 38-9; and Grant Gordon, From Slavery to Freedom. The Lifeof David George, Pioneer Black Baptist Minister (Lancelot Press, Hantsport, NS, 1992). AsAndrew Walls has recently commented in The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History(Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY, 2002), p. 28: ‘The � rst church in Africa in modern timeswas not a Western missionary creation, but an African one, an African creation markedby the experiences of America.’ See further Lamin Sanneh’s Abolitionists Abroad. AmericanBlacks and the Making of Modern West Africa (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA,1999).

18. R.R. Gurley, Life of Jehudi Ashman . . . with an Appendix, Sketch of the Life of Rev. LottCary (Washington DC, 1835), p. 148.

19. Quoted by David Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier. Race, Colour and NationalIndependence in Haiti (Macmillan, London, 1979), p. 5. On Holly see David Dean, ‘JamesTheodore Holly, 1829-1911: Black Nationalist and Bishop’, PhD thesis, University ofTexas at Austin, 1972.

20. Russell, Missionary Outreach; I.K. Sibley, The Baptists of Jamaica ( Jamaican BaptistUnion, Kingston, Jamaica, 1965), ch. V.

21. Quoted by Russell, Missionary Outreach, p. 71.22. Quoted by Williams, Black Americans, pp. 7-8.


23. Student Volunteer Movement. 4th International Convention, Toronto, February26-2 March 1902, The Urgent Business of the Church (Student Volunteer Movement, NewYork, 1902), pp. 294-98.

24. The Baptist World Congress, London July 11-19, 1905. Authorized Record of Proceedings(Baptist World Congress, London, 1905), pp. 12 & 127.

25. J.A. Conforti, Samuel Hopkins and the New Divinity Movement: Calvinism, the CongregationalMinistry, and Reform in New England between the Great Awakenings (Christian University Press,Grand Rapids, MI, 1981).

26. Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings (1789), edited and with an introduction by Vincent Carretta (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1995), pp.221-3.

27. Quoted by Harr, ‘The Negro as an American Protestant Missionary’, p. 16.28. James F. Schön and Samuel Crowther, Journal of the Expedition up the Niger in 1841

(London, 1842; Cass reprint, London, 1970).29. James Johnston, Reality Versus Romance in South and Central Africa (London, 1893;

Cass reprint, London, 1969), pp. 10, and 326-7.30. For example, Hope Masterton Waddell, Twenty-Nine Years in the West Indies and

Central Africa: A Review of Missionary Work and Adventure 1829-1858 (Nelson, London, 1863;Cass reprint, London, 1972), p. 206.

31. Thomas Birch Freeman, Journal of Various Visits to the Kingdoms of Ashanti, Aku, andDahomey in Western Africa (London, 1844; Cass 3rd edn., London, 1968). On Freemansee Arthur E. Southon, Gold Coast Methodism. The First Hundred Years 1835-1935 (MethodistBook Depot, Cape Coast, & Cargate Press, London, 1934), and F.L. Bartels, The Rootsof Ghana Methodism (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1965).

32. See ‘Introduction’ by Harrison M. Wright, to new edition of Freeman, Journal(Cass reprint, London, 1968), p. xxv and footnote*. J.F.A. Ajayi, Christian Missions inNigeria 1841-1891 (Longmans, London 1965), p. 257.

33. John H. Hinton, Memoir of William Knibb (London, 1847), pp. 257 V.34. Waddell, Twenty-Nine Years, pp. 211 & 229.35. Russell, Missionary Outreach, pp. 150-1.36. William Moister, Memorials of Missionary Labours in Western Africa, the West Indies

and at the Cape of Good Hope (London, 1866), pp. 346-7.37. John Clarke, Memoir of Joseph Merrick, Missionary to Africa (London 1850).38. Angus Library, Regents Park College, Oxford. BMS Archives. A/5/19, ‘Auto-

biography of the Rev. J.J. Fuller of Cameroons, West Africa’, ts. Russell, Missionary Outreach;Brian Stanley, The History of the Baptist Missionary Society 1792-1992 (T & T Clark,Edinburgh, 1992), pp. 109-10, 113-14 & 116. Las Newman, ‘A West Indian Contributionto Christian Mission in Africa: The Career of Joseph Jackson Fuller (1845-1888)’ ,Transformation (Oxford), 18, 4 (2001), pp. 220-31. Paul R. Dekar, ‘Jamaican and BritishBaptists in West Africa, 1841-1888’ , paper given to Baptist World Alliance Heritageand Identity Commission, Charlottetown, PEI, July 2001. I am also grateful to JeVreyGreen for a copy of his unpublished paper, ‘Family History—Joseph Jackson Fuller ofJamaica, Africa and England’.

39. J.B. Trew, An Africa Wasted by Britain, and Restored by Native Agents (London, 1854).40. West Indian Church Association, Occasional Paper Respecting the West Indian Mission

to Western Africa (London, 1858).41. Ibid.42. Henry Caswall, Progress of the Pongas Mission in Western Africa during 1859 (London,

1860).43. Caswall, Progress . . . during 1861 (London, 1862), p. 9.44. Ibid., p. 14.40. Caswall, Progress . . . during 1863 (London, 1864), p. 8. Vassady, ‘Role of the West

Indian Missionary’, ch. V.46. Vassady, ‘Role of the West Indian Missionary’, ch. V.

26 David Killingray

47. Quoted by Vassady, ‘Role of the West Indian Missionary’, p. 77.48. Lynch, Edward Wilmot Blyden, ch. 6. See Blyden’s Christianity, Islam and the Negro

Race (London, 1887; reprinted by Edinburgh University Press, 1967), for an expressionof these views.

49. Quoted by Williams, Black Americans, p. 11.50. Quoted by Sylvia Jacobs, The African Nexus. Black American Perspectives on the Partition

of Africa, 1880-1920 (Greenwood Press, Westport, CT, 1991), p. 42.51. Quoted by Jacobs, African Nexus, pp. 39-40.52. T.J. Bowen, Adventures and Missionary Labours in Several Countries in the Interior of Africa

from 1849 to 1856 (Charleston, 1857).53. Quoted by Martin, Black Baptists and African Missions, p. 49; this is primarily a

study of the home organisation of Black Baptist missionary activity. See also Roth,‘Grace not Race’, ch. 3.

54. Fitts, Lott Carey, chs. 4 and 5.55. Campbell, Songs of Zion, p. 138. See also J. Mutero Chirenje, Ethiopianism and

Afro-Americans in Southern Africa, 1883-1916 (Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge,LA, 1987), ch. 3.

56. See J.W.E. Bowen, ‘The Need and Possibilities of the Student Volunteer Movementfor Foreign Missions among the Colored Students of America’, in The Student MissionaryAppeal. Addresses at the Third International Convention of the Student Volunteers Movement for ForeignMissions, Cleveland, Ohio, February 23-27, 1898 (Student Volunteer Movement, NewYork, 1898), pp. 159-67.

57. Shepperson & Price, Independent African, pp. 112 V.58. Edwin A. Smith, Aggrey of Africa. A Study in Black and White (London, 1929),

ch. V.59. Occasional Papers from St. Augustine’s College, Canterbury, from 1861; R.J.E. Boggis, A

History of St. Augustine’s College Canterbury (St. Augustine’s College, Canterbury, 1907).60. Spurgeon’s College, London. Student Records. James Newby worked � rst with

the CMS and then the Baptists in the late 1870s; see E. McHardie & Andrew Allan,The Prodigal Continent and Her Prodigal Son & Missionary; Or, the Adventures, Conversion andAfrican Labours of Rev. James Newby (London, 2nd edn., 1885). The Institute, also knownas Harley College, was founded in the early 1870s by Henry and Fanny Guinness whowere both active in promoting mission work in the Congo.

61. Johnson, Twenty-Eight Years a Slave. See JeVrey Green, ‘Thomas Lewis Johnson(1836-1921): The Bournemouth Evangelist’, in Rainer Lotz & Ian Pegg, eds., Under the Imperial Carpet. Essays in Black History 1780-1950 (Rabbit Press, Crawley, 1986), pp.55-68.

62. W. Hughes, Dark Africa and the Way Out (Sampson Low, Marston & Co., London,1892), p. 1.

63. Ivor Wynne Jones, ‘Hughes the Congo: The Rise and Fall of the Congo Institute’,in Charlotte Williams, Neil Evans & Paul O’Leary, eds., Tolerant Nation? Explaining EthnicDiversity in Wales (University of Wales Press, CardiV, 2003).

64. Thomas C. Howard, ‘Black American Missionary In� uences on the Origins ofUniversity Education in West Africa’, in Jacobs, Black Americans. Shula Marks, TheAmbiguities of Dependence in South Africa. Class, Nationalism and the State in Twentieth-CenturyNatal (Ravan Press, Johannesburg, 1986), ch. 2 on John Dube.

65. Jacobs, African Nexus, p. 46; see also pp. 41, 46-7 & 77.66. Quoted by Lillie M. Johnson, ‘Missionary-Government Relations: Black Americans

in British and Portuguese Colonies’, in Jacobs, Black Americans, p. 198.67. C.P. Groves, The Planting of Christianity in Africa. vol. II 1840-1870 (Lutterworth,

London, 1964), p. 27.68. Harr, ‘Negro as an American Protestant Missionary’, p. 31.69. Vassady, ‘Role of Black West Indian Missionary’, pp. 160-1.70. Roth, ‘Grace not Race’, ch. 6.


71. Robert I. Rotberg, Christian Missionaries and the Creation of Northern Rhodesia 1880-1924 (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1965), pp. 159-60. Also ‘James Hemans’,in Gerald Anderson, Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions (Eerdmans, Grand RapidsWI, 1998), p. 287. During his furlough, Hemans spoke at North Street CongregationalChurch in Kingston. A young Jamaican, Harold Moody, undoubtedly heard his fellowcountryman’s account of mission endeavour, although it is doubtful if Hemans spokeof the racial slights he had experienced. Later Moody con� ded to a friend that hewished to do something for ‘the race’ and this, and an entry in his Bible, indicates hishope of going to Africa as a missionary. As a student in London he continued to enter-tain this idea. Although his subsequent medical career kept him in Britain, Moody nev-ertheless remained an active supporter of missionary societies, particularly the LMSwhose chairman he became in 1943. This is drawn from a biography of Moody thatI am writing.

72. Roth, ‘Grace not Race’, ch. 7.73. Quoted by Vassady, ‘Role of the Black West Indian Missionary’, p. 290.74. Quoted Vassady, ‘Role of the Black West Indian Missionary’, p. 298.75. Harr, ‘Negro as an American Protestant Missionary’, p. 21.76. Jacobs, ‘Their “Special Mission”: African-Americans Women as Missionaries to

the Congo 1894-1937’ , in Jacobs, Black Missionaries, ch. 8.77. Vassady, ‘Role of the Black West Indian Missionary’, pp. 158-60.78. For a splendid account of Sheppard in the Congo, see Adam Hochschild, King

Leopold’s Ghost. A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Houghton MiZinCo., New York, 1998). See also Robert Benedetto, ed. and introduction, PresbyterianReformers in Central Africa. A Documentary Account of the American Presbyterian Congo Mission andthe Human Rights Struggle in the Congo, 1890-1918 (Brill, Leiden, 1997).

79. Theophilus Scholes, British Empire and Alliances: Britain’s Duty to her Colonies andSubject Races (London, 1899), and Glimpses of the Ages, or, the ‘Superior’ and ‘Inferior’ Races,so-called, Discussed in the Light of Science and History ( John Long, London, 2 vols, 1905 and1908).

80. Harry H. Johnston, British Central Africa (London, 1897), p. 203.81. Quoted by Johnson, ‘Missionary-Government Relations’, in Jacobs, Black Missionaries,

p. 205.82. Birmingham University Library. YMCA papers. K31.83. Robert Trent Vinson, ‘African Americans in South African-American Diplomacy:

A Case Study in Race and Citizenship Debates, 1895-1925’ , Negro History Bulletin 61, 1(1998), pp. 7-19. Campbell, Songs of Zion, p. 314.

84. Quoted by Harr, ‘The Negro as a Protestant Missionary’, p. 37.85. Edwin W. Smith, The Christian Mission in Africa. A Study Based on the Proceedings of

the International Conference at Le Zoute, Belgium, September 14th to 21st September, 1926 (EdinburghHouse Press, London, 1926), pp. 122-3.

86. Ibid., pp. 123-4.87. Williams, Black Americans, p. 85.88. Robert Gordon, ‘Black Man’s Burden’, Evangelical Missions Quarterly (Fall 1973),

reprinted in Vaughn J. Walston & Robert J. Stevens, eds., African-American Experience inWorld Mission: A Call beyond Community (COMINAD, Chesapeake, VA, 2002), pp. 55-60.

89. African American clergy also played a prominent role in the � rst Pan-AfricanCongress held in London in 1900. By 1910, former missionaries in the Congo such asWilliam Sheppard and Dr Clinton C. Boone, were regarded by African American opin-ion as experts on Africa. This eminence was further endorsed by W.E.B. Du Bois, whohad no natural sympathy for Christian mission work, when he invited Sheppard to beprincipal speaker at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoplessymposium on Africa in 1919. See Williams, Black Americans, pp. 161 V.

28 David Killingray

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