3. Providing Ideological Cover

 

“What should have been made clear was that the role of missionaries, like that of the soldiers, was to be agents of the Crown. The Crown was acting on the behalf of the colonial industry. In short, the Holy Trinity, no disrespect intended, was made up, not of the ‘Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,’ but instead, ‘the Missionary, Mercenary, and Merchant.”

– The Toronto Coalition for the Truth about Africa responding to the 1990 Royal Ontario Museum exhibit Into the Heart of Africa 1

 

The first Canadian missionary arrived on the continent in 1860.2 Dozens followed in subsequent decades and by the end of the colonial period as many as 2,500 Canadians were proselytizing across Africa.3

Canadian Christian activists helped the colonial powers penetrate African society. In “Christian Missionary Activities in Africa in the Age of Imperialism and the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885”, Horst Grunder explains: “Christian missionary work and colonial conquest were closely related.”4 More bluntly, 19th century British imperialist adventurer Henry Johnson said “each mission station is an exercise in colonization.”5

Missionaries generally aligned themselves with the colonial state. They tended to promote “obedience” to European rulers, encouraging Africans to see colonialism as a “blessing”.6

Christian activists in Africa overwhelmingly believed in the superiority of European ways. This was fed by mid-19th century pseudoscientific racism, which classified human populations into superior and inferior races. Many missionaries were also informed by an anti-African interpretation of the Bible. Grunder explains that “blacks had inherited Noah’s curse (Genesis 9:25) from their alleged ancestor, Ham.” He further explains the “Ham theory” by arguing “the divine ‘chastisement’ of Africa had become a missionary dogma, allegedly verified by the black skin color of the Negro and historical fact of slavery.”7

Gripped by a sense of cultural and racial superiority, as well as religious dogma, most early missionaries came “to despise both African culture and African capacity”, wrote Adrian Hastings in A History of African Christianity.8 As such, they undermined African familial customs, lifestyle and economic systems.

In their home countries missionaries attacked African ways, encouraging imperialist sentiment among the general public. Notwithstanding a few notable exceptions, their speeches and publications denigrated African traditions and authorities, while ignoring European abuses and the greed and self-interest driving colonial policy.

(Of course, what transpired in Africa mirrored what took place inside Canada with missionaries providing ideological cover for the destruction of First Nations’ culture and economy.)

Canadians played a sizable role in the Africa missionary movement. Prominent Québec historian Lionel Groulx found that 1,500 French Canadian Catholics from 48 different religious societies worked on the continent in 1959.9 By the end of the colonial period there were at least nine Canadians bishops in African dioceses.10

While Catholic Québec led the missionary charge, Protestant Ontario followed close behind. In 1888, for instance, 43 Torontonians pursued missionary work globally.11 By the late 1950s approximately 1,000 Protestant Canadians were proselytizing in Africa and, according to a mid-1970s study, 22 separate Canadian Protestant societies had at some point operated in Africa, either directly or through a counterpart foreign mission.12

Canadian churches raised substantial sums of money to support missionaries and to construct mission stations. Initially, Canadian churches worked through US, British and French societies such as the Society of Missionaries of Africa (White Fathers), Plymouth Brethren or American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. The first missionary sent to the continent by a Canadian denomination departed for Angola in 1886.

The earliest Canadian missionaries hailed from Québec. According to Les relations Entre le Québec et L’Afrique 1880-1905, an unknown Roman Catholic Trappistine monk from today’s Québec joined French colleagues in founding an Algerian monastery in 1860.13 Two years later Francois Allard, a French missionary who laid roots in Québec, brought Catholicism to Basutoland (present-day Lesotho).14

Québec priest Arthur Bouchard arrived in Khartoum in 1879 where he spent two years. He returned to Canada to cross the country lecturing and fundraising for African missions. In 1884 Bouchard was the chaplain who accompanied the 400 Canadian Voyageurs sent to defend British control of Khartoum.15

Four Québec Jesuit fathers left for the Zambesi Mission in southern Africa beginning in 1883.16 Two died in the 1880s but the other two, Alphonse Daignault and Louis LeBoeuf, became prominent members of the Catholic male congregation. LeBoeuf worked in the region for three decades. A veteran of the 1870 papal state war, Daignault rose through the ranks to become Prefect Apostolic of Northern Rhodesia (Zambia).17 Then Superior of the Jesuits’ Zambezi Mission, Daignault backed the British South Africa Company’s invasion of Mashonaland (Zimbabwe) in 1890. With their evangelizing shunned by the Ndebele people, the Jesuits and other foreign missionaries supported the “destruction of [the] Ndebele system.”18

Granted a charter from London in 1889, Cecil Rhodes’ British South Africa Company offered white men in Kimberley, South Africa, 3,000 acres of land and mining rights if they joined the Company’s fight to conquer part of today’s Zimbabwe. Daignault offered the invading force chaplaincy services, mobile ambulances and nurses.19 The British South Africa Company paid the Jesuit nurses’ costs and compensated Daignault’s mission with conquered territory, including a major piece of land on the outskirts of today’s Harare. In A History of Christian Missions in Zimbabwe C. J. M. Zvobgo writes that the Harare “farm which consisted of 12,000 acres, beautifully surrounded by hills, was given to the Jesuits by the BSA Company in recognition of FR Alphonse Daignault’s service to the [Company’s] sick.”20

The Jesuits fully partook in the colonialist theft of African land, livestock and resources. In The Catholic Church and the Struggle for Zimbabwe A. J. Dachs and W. F. Rea characterize the Jesuits’ land gains as “part of a process which dispossessed Africans and reduced them to a state of dependence.”21

The Québec Jesuit leader worked with Rhodes and British officials for years. He also supported the colonial authorities’ efforts to drive Africans from their traditional economies into wage work.22 Reflecting the settler community’s attitude in 1897, Daignault told the deputy administrator of the city of Bulawayo in 1897 that the “natives of this country … are but grown-up children” prone to “idleness”. “Men in authority who have the true interests of the natives at heart ought to treat the natives not only as children but are also to do all they can to make them acquire habits of work. As this cannot be obtained by mere moral persuasion, authority must necessarily be used.”23

To the north, Hamilton Ontario’s William Henry Faulknor and a fellow Plymouth Brethren missionary arrived in southeast Katanga at the end of 1887. They relieved the first white missionary to establish a mission station in eastern Congo. Until 1891 Faulknor worked under the ruler of the Yeke kingdom, Mwenda Msiri, who would later meet his death at the hand of RMC graduate William Stairs. In 1890 the Plymouth Brethren explicitly called for European rule (either Belgian or British) over Katanga, concluding: “The one great hindrance to the gospel was the lack of settled government.”24 They were correct. In Plymouth Brethren and the Occupation of Katanga, 1886-1907 Robert Rotberg notes: “Msiri’s death at the hands of soldiers of the Belgian Katanga Company meant that the Brethren were free to evangelise as they wished to do.” Rothberg adds that local people came to see “all white people as chiefs” who “could help them with the authorities … and so, for the first time, gravitated to the missionaries.”25

Following Faulknor, Mother Marie-Bernadette (born Bernadette Beaupré) left for north-western Congo in 1900.26 Trained in typesetting, Marie-Bernadette published the first (religious) books in Lingala, which is now the country’s lingua franca.

Toronto-born Henry Grattan Guinness II established the Congo Balolo Mission (CBM) in 1889. Based in London, England, the CBM sent a number of Canadians to its mission stations along the tributaries of the Lulonga River near the equator in north-eastern Congo. Toronto-based Reverend T. Hope Morgan took charge of CBM operations in Stanleyville (now Kisangani) and spent a great deal of time traveling to isolated mission posts between 1891 and 1911. During this period, Morgan and his wife ran an open house for traveling missionaries passing through Leopoldville, sparking the creation of a Union Mission House.27

CBM missions were located in remote areas of the colony, where King Leopold’s Anglo-Belgian Rubber Company obligated individuals and communities to gather rubber latex. The rubber economy was barbarous. Company and state officials chopped off the hands of thousands of individuals who failed to fulfill their quotas.

Faced with the violent disruption of their lives, the Lulonga, Lopori, Maringa, Juapa and Burisa were increasingly receptive to missionaries, who became “the interpreter of the new way of life”, writes Ruth Slade in English-Speaking Missions in the Congo Independent State.28 A CBM missionary wrote home that “it is very pathetic to hear the question often asked in the districts worked by the Rubber Company: has the Savior you tell us of any power to save us from the rubber trouble?”29

Not wanting to jeopardize their standing with the Congo Free State authorities, the CBM refused British-based solidarity campaigners’ appeals to publicly expose the abuses they witnessed. In 1895, the CBM Council privately agreed that “it would probably be more effective not to make the matter known through the press, but to appeal direct to the King of the Belgians, who controls the laws that bring about such desolation and the wholesale slaughter of human lives for the purpose of procuring rubber.”30

The CBM remained silent for years. But the Protestant society found itself increasingly at odds with the Congo Free State, which favoured Catholic Belgian missionaries. Once they’d lost hope for improved relations with the Congolese authorities, the CBM joined the growing international humanitarian campaign.31 In A Civilized Savagery Kevin Grant explains, “it was only after years of failed attempts to expand in land, that the executive of the Congo Balolo Mission condemned the Congo Free State in the British press in April 1903.”32

Congo Free State officials responded to missionary criticism by claiming the Christian activists were themselves complicit in the rights violations they condemned, notably the redemption of slaves as servants. Grant concludes that there is “significant evidence that supports the [Congo Free] State’s charges.”33 In 1902, for instance, the CBM Council felt the need to explicitly forbid the use of the chicotte, “a long whip made of dried hippo hide that cut the skin like jagged glass.”34

After the international solidarity movement forced King Leopold II to relinquish the Congo in 1908, the CBM abandoned its campaign allies. They did so before the new Belgian administration promised to stop the abuses. Grant writes, “the Congo Free State, now under Belgian national authority, offered new stations to the CBM, and the mission’s brethren in the field began to report a decrease in state violence. As a result, the CBM Home Council expressed public support for the new regime and instructed its missionaries to stop publicizing their evidence of continuing abuses.”35

John Forbes, a priest from Vaudreuil, Québec, was the first Canadian “White Father” as well as the North American founder of the Catholic missionary group. In 1885 he traveled to the Society of Missionaries of Africa training centre in Algiers, which had been under French control since 1830. Prior to leaving, Forbes wrote: “Is God really calling me to Africa? Should I not rather work for the conversion of our poor savages of Canada?” For his part, John’s brother, Guillaume, chose to proselytize among the Iroquois of Kahnawake.

After a decade of training and fieldwork, Forbes returned to build support in North America for the White Fathers whose popular nickname came from their Arab-style dress. In 1895 and 1896 he toured Québec, Ontario and parts of the US to recruit missionaries and solicit donations for the Society of Missionaries of Africa. He returned to North Africa for four years and in 1900 began establishing a Canadian chapter of the White Fathers, which included a recruitment and training house in Québec City. A few years later a training house for White Sisters was also built in the city.

Dozens of Canadians studied in Québec City, traveled to the White Fathers training centre in Algiers and onto mission stations across the continent. By 1914 more than 30 Canadian White Fathers had become missionaries in Africa and at the end of the colonial period 330 Canadian members of the missionary society operated across the continent.36 There were also 300 Canadian White Sisters in Africa in 1960.37

At the ceremony where Forbes was ordained bishop in 1918 one White Father described the Québec City school as a place a “where he trained a magnificent cohort of good soldiers to combat against the demons in Africa.”38 In a letter to his brother detailing plans for the recruitment house, Forbes linked the school to British conquest. He wrote that his superior, Bishop Livinhac, asked if it would “not be a good idea for Canadians to join our efforts to convert the countries that have submitted to Great Britain.” Forbes’ letter to his brother included an article from the London Tablet Catholic newspaper sent to him by Bishop Livinhac concerning the proposed school and Britain’s violent conquest of the Sudan. It stated: “Isn’t it providence that the British are being asked to carry out a civilizing and Christianizing mission in central Africa? It permits English Catholics to show their zeal at the opportunity to increase adherents to their faith in these regions. If they aren’t able to provide enough apostles for conversions in such a vast country they have the resources to ask fellow apostles from other colonies to aid them. Canada in particular should be invited to look at the centre of Africa to express the fervor of its zeal, as Canadians have always been distinguished by their generosity to the apostolate and are proud citizens of the British Empire.”39 Excited by the prospect, Forbes wrote: “Hey! Well, dear brother, is this not tempting? There must be, in our great, big and dear Canada young people who have a generous heart, as Bishop Livinhac said, ‘to join our small society to help Jesus Christ conquer the countries, through us missionaries, that have submitted to England?’”40

After building the White Fathers in Canada for a decade and a half, Forbes left for Uganda. He rose to the position of Bishop and coadjutor vicar apostolic, making him second in charge of over 30 mission posts.41

A 1929 biography describes his “good relations” with British colonial authorities and the “important services Forbes rendered the authorities of the Protectorate.”42 Chief Secretary of Uganda Edward Blackwell Jarvis wrote to thank Forbes and the White Fathers for their help during World War I and “admirable loyalty towards the Empire.” Forbes responded to Jarvis’ letter by saying it “encouraged them to work even harder with your government for the prosperity of the Empire and Protectorate.”43

In 1918 Forbes participated in a major conference in the colony, organized by Governor Robert Coryndon in the hopes of spurring indigenous wage work. He wrote home that “it’s a big question. The European planters in our area, who cultivate coffee, cotton and rubber need workers for their exploitation. But the workforce is rare. Our Negroes are happy to eat bananas and with a few bits of cotton or bark for clothes, are not excited to put themselves at the service of the planters and work all day for a meager salary.”44 British officials offered to subsidize the White Fathers schools as part of a bid to expand the indigenous workforce.45 Forbes led negotiations with authorities and traveled to Europe and Canada to build support for their school project.46

After his 1926 death L’Action Populaire, L’Action Catholique, Le Devoir and other Canadian papers honoured him with obituaries. La Presse wrote that “Bishop Forbes did great things and his name will live on.”47

A Forbes disciple, Francis-Xavier Lacoursière departed to the British East African Protectorate in 1913. Born near Trois-Rivières, Lacoursière joined his sister, Mother Marie du Bon Secours, who worked with the White Sisters. Lacoursière was later ordained first Bishop of Rwenzori Vicariate in Mbarara and spent a half-century in Uganda. Another Canadian White Father, Bishop Edouard Michaud, was made Vicar Apostolic of Uganda from 1933-1945.48 In the years that followed, three more Canadian White Fathers went on to make the rank of bishop in Uganda and many more Québec City-trained Canadians proselytized across the British protectorate.49

According to the Foreign Affairs website, “In 1906, Québec missionaries established a church in Navrongo in northern Ghana, thus marking the arrival of a Canadian presence in the country.”50 Oscar Morin and Leonide Barsalou set up the first White Fathers post in the Gold Coast where Canadians would dominate the church for half a century.51 One of the first students to attend the White Fathers school in Québec City, Morin would become Prefect Apostolic, Bishop of Uthina and Regional Superior of the White Fathers in West Africa.52 He worked in Africa for more than 40 years.

During World War I, Canadian White Fathers Ernest Paradis and Wilfred Sarrazin helped Brigadier General Edward Northey conquer German East Africa. Serving as civilian transport officers, Paradis and Sarrazin focused on organizing African carriers, who were generally press ganged into service.53 Paradis became senior transport officer for all British forces east of Nyasaland and North of Zambesi in today’s Malawi and Zimbabwe.54 “Mentioned in Dispatches” to the high command, Paradis “was constantly getting himself mixed up in battles, much to the embarrassment of his superiors.”55 In Empires in World War I, Andrew Jarboe explains “in the excitement of one such occasion he so far forgot himself as to get hold of a rifle and begin firing madly in the direction of the enemy.”56

By volunteering to join the war, the White Fathers sought “respectability … in the eyes of planters and government officials.”57 Afterwards, Paradis used his heightened status from his swashbuckling antics to gain the colonial administration’s support for the White Fathers’ educational work.58

Paradis evangelised in Malawi for several decades. He led the White Fathers campaign to supress “the Nyau”, a religious belief among the Chewa and Nyanja people that included elaborate dances.59 In May 1929 Paradis wrote an East Africa article titled “Devil Dancers of Terror” that claimed Nyau dances were seditious.60

Another Canadian missionary engaged in the White Fathers’ efforts to outlaw Nyau customs in Nyasaland. Father Superior David Roy called on colonial officials to criminalize their dances and in 1928 Christians in the Likuni district, which he oversaw, killed two Nyau.61

The Spiritans, also known as the Holy Ghost Fathers in English-speaking countries, were founded in Paris in 1703. The first Canadian Spiritan left for Cameroon in 1924.62 Country-mate, and member of the Holy Ghost Fathers, Pierre Patenaude, soon joined Charles Chalifoux.63 Appointed Vicariate of Efok, Patenaude was in charge of a sizeable part of the French colony for most of his 18-year stint.64

Thomas Buchanan Reginald Westgate was a Canadian missionary who joined the Church Missionary Society in German East Africa. A graduate of Huron College in London, Ontario, Thomas Westgate was dispatched to Tanzania in 1902. With the support of the Ontario branch of the Church Mission Society, Westgate remained in the German colony for over a decade. The Watford, Ontario, born missionary translated parts of the Old Testament into Cigogo, the language spoken by the Gogo nation in the central region of the colony.65 Westgate worked with the colonial administration. His son, Wilfrid Westgate, authored a book about his father’s life titled T. B. R. Westgate: A Canadian Missionary on Three Continents. In the biography, Westgate writes: “Governor [Heinrich] Schnee looked upon the mission as an asset to this part of the German colonial empire.”66

German soldiers protected the Canadian’s mission post when the population rose up in 1905 against the colonial authority. Dissent was sparked by measures to force Africans to grow cotton for export, and an uprising known as the Maji Maji rebellion swept across the vast colony. It lasted two years. During the rebellion, Westgate coordinated with German Captain von Hirsch. Westgate’s wife, Rita, later wrote, “at times we feared the Germans could not suppress the rising.”67 The Germans succeeded, however, and the Westgate’s fears did not come to pass. In The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective, Isabel Hull writes that 15 Europeans and 389 allied African soldiers were killed by the rebels. By contrast, writes Hull, whole areas of the colony were depopulated with 200,000 to 300,000 Tanzanians killed between 1905 and 1907.68

In 1913, Westgate was awarded an honorary degree from the University of Western Ontario.69

Born in Sherbrooke, Québec, Reverend Herbert Edward Randall was the first missionary dispatched by the Ontario-based Holiness Movement Church. Randall arrived in Egypt in 1899 and would be part of a missionary effort that stretched southward along the Nile into Sudan. Three Canadian women joined Randall’s expedition: Cora Van Camp, Edith Burke and Carrie Reynolds. A biographical account of his life noted that Randall’s “departure for Egypt was precipitated by the results of the Anglo-Sudan War” in which British forces killed tens of thousands between 1896 and 1898.70 Conquering Khartoum, where they had previously been defeated, was an important victory for British imperialism. Randall praised the first British military victory on the Nile in Egypt. “The entrance of the English in 1882,” he argued, “made a great change for the Copts [Christian Egyptians], which literally meant their deliverance from bondage, and they are not slow in expressing their thankfulness to their deliverers.”71

Randall later joined the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada (PAOC). In 1908, PAOC dispatched missionaries to Liberia and South Africa. Among the members sent to Liberia was a Canadian woman named Sophie Nygard, who evangelised there for four decades.72

Another missionary affiliated with PAOC, Charles W. Chawner served for over four decades in South Africa where he died in 1949.73 During his time, he established churches in the Natal and Transvaal. His son Austin followed in his footsteps, spearheading the first Pentecostal Bible colleges in South Africa and Mozambique, as well as a publishing house that distributed Pentecostal literature in a number of African languages.74

South Africa was home to another Canadian Pentecostal missionary for five years. John G. Lake, originally from St. Mary’s, Ontario, Lake followed his church’s racist baptism policy whereby whites were put in the immersion pool before blacks.75 Having moved to the US at 17, Lake complained about American missionaries who taught “race equality” without understanding that the “African native is very different from the American Negro. The African man is a heathen. He does not wear anything but a blanket until he is taught.”76 He levelled even harsher criticism against politicized African churches. Lake described so-called Ethiopian (or African-led) churches as “breeding grounds for anti-European political propaganda. Instead of teaching freedom from sin and self, they… teach freedom from the European rule, and sing … ‘Africa for the Africans’ and ‘drive all white men into the sea’.”77

Another Ontario native by the name of Marion Wittich (later Marion Keller) felt called to missionary work while working as an Anglican schoolteacher in Parry Sound. She set off with her husband to proselytize in Tanzania in 1913. Her husband died in Tanzania and several years later she remarried a man by the name of Otto Keller, a German born US émigré, who the PAOC sponsored to set up a mission station in western Kenya. In 1914 Otto Keller claimed that “here [Africa] we see the power of the devil in an astonishing form, almost beyond belief. The noise of drunken men and women, fulfilling the lusts of the flesh come to our ears. All seemingly bound and determined to fulfill the cup of their iniquity.”78 By the time Marion Keller died in 1942, the socially conservative PAOC had over 200 branch churches in Kenya.79

An official history of PAOC attacked the anticolonial movement in Kenya as “a resurgence of primitive animism.”80 Published in 1958, What God Hath Wrought: A History of the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada notes: “Unfortunately, sinister forces were bidding high for the souls of Kenya’s millions. In the 1950s there was to be a resurgence of primitive heathenism which had as its aim the expulsion of the white man from Kenya and the extinction of everything Christian in their land. This was the Mau Mau uprising.”81 In putting down the uprising the British killed tens of thousands.

In western Africa, Canadian missionaries played a central role in Christianizing fervently religious Nigeria. It was here that the Bethany Missionary Church in Kitchener, Ontario, sent Emma Hostetler in 1907. “Greetings from dear dark Africa”, Hostetler wrote in her first annual report to home supporters.82

A few years earlier, in 1905, the Ontario Conference of the Mennonite Brethren in Christ sent Toronto’s Alexander Woods Banfield to proselytize among the Nupe of north-western Nigeria. It was their first foreign mission. Banfield took it upon himself to learn the language and translated the Bible into Nupe. He also founded the Niger Press, which aimed to secure “in printed form the word of God in Nigerian languages.”83 Banfield’s personal writings were not free from outbursts of racism, including an assertion that “people along the banks of the Niger are almost wild … almost entirely untouched by the white man.”84 He also expressed support for colonial authorities. “The British government”, said Banfield, “is deserving of much praise for the developments that have been made in northern Nigeria since 1900.”85 Banfield established the United Missionary Society (UMS) in Nigeria.86 Jebba, the largest town in the UMS’ area of operations in Western Nigeria, became its unofficial headquarters “since it was a centre of the colonial government.”87 In 1915, Banfield was appointed General Secretary for West Africa of the British and Foreign Bible Society, a non-denominational Protestant umbrella group.88 During his two decades in the field, Banfield’s journeys to mission posts took him hundreds of thousands of miles throughout West and Central Africa.89

The largest interdenominational Protestant mission on the continent was founded several decades earlier in 1893 by Torontonians Walter Gowans and Rowland Victor Bingham. This would ultimately become the Sudan Interior Mission (SIM). (Though SIM initially focused on modern-day Nigeria, at the time “Sudan” generally referred to the area south of the Sahara and North of the equator from the east to west coast of the continent.) A Flame of Fire describes a scene before Bingham’s departure to the continent: “In his room that night God gave Rowland Bingham a vision of ‘Darkest Africa’ as it was then, a continent of unspeakable horror and darkness where the souls of great multitudes still lay bound in affliction and iron awaiting the gospel.”90

Bingham and Gowans, together with an American missionary, traveled up the Niger River in 1893. Only Bingham survived. Seven years later, a second SIM expedition failed as well, and the fledgling missionary society’s future looked bleak. The mission and its new recruits eventually caught a break when the High Commissioner of Northern Nigeria decided to support their efforts. According to Bingham’s biography, Commissioner Sir Frederick Lugard said “he would do whatever he could to help missionaries enter southern Nigeria. He even suggested that the four missionaries sail back to Africa on the same ship with him so that he could assist them in traveling up the Niger River upon their arrival and help them settle inland.”91

A 1911 report from colonial administrators praised SIM. It argued that “the converts” were “well behaved and eager to carry out all government instructions.”92 That year a chief Oba Asalu, who resisted a SIM mission in Yagbaland, lost a power struggle with the Christian activists. In Christian Missionary Activity in Colonial Nigeria, Adeleye Liagbemi writes that formerly British-backed chief Asalu “discovered too late that the colonial regime placed greater value on the mission than on him.”93 Writing about northern Nigerian missionaries, Brad Faught surmises that Governor “Lugard and the colonial state were the guarantors of the SIM’s operations.”94

Head of SIM for four decades, Bingham expressed a colonialist outlook. He reflected a preoccupation with a “dark Africa” typical of his day. At different points in his writing and speaking, the pre-millennialist described “facing millions of people in the darkness of their heathenism” and “seeing the people in all their savagery and sin.”95 His stated goal was to “lay siege to the … devilry hitherto undisturbed.”96

A year after its first successful mission, SIM dispatched Toronto physician Andrew P. Stirrett to West Africa. In transit through Liverpool in 1902, Stirrett secured a letter from a representative of the Royal Niger Company granting him permission to travel on the company’s boat up the Niger River.97 (London chartered the Royal Niger Company to operate as a quasi-state in parts of today’s Nigeria.) The doctor preached among the northern Nigerian Hausa for four and a half decades. A fellow SIM missionary, Douglas Percy paid tribute to him in the 1948 biography, Doctor to Africa: The Story of Stirrett of the Sudan. The work reflected an anti-African sentiment common among missionaries. “For the next half-century,” wrote Percy, “he was to know the foul huts of pagan Africa, the acrid stench from wood-smoke and sweating bodies mingled in one nauseating fetid, mal odour to test the strongest stomach, the unspeakable orders of ulcerated bodies — the whole miasma of evil living and loathsome smells of native villages.”98 As a leading missionary in the region, Stirrett participated in numerous government functions.99 In 1936 Stirrett received a coronation medal from King George VI.100

Beginning his fieldwork alongside Stirrett, Toronto pharmacist Thomas Titcombe spent more than two decades proselytizing among the Yagba of central Nigeria. Describing his first night in a SIM station Titcombe wrote: “I couldn’t sleep as I thought how deep was the darkness, not only of the tropical night around us, but of the hearts of these people bound by Satan. How I longed to tell them of Jesus Christ, who could break their bonds of sin and superstition.”101

After learning their language and gathering converts, Titcombe worked to shape Yagba life according to his interpretation of the Bible. He pushed for dowry and a strict relationship between husband and wife, which his biography claims, “resulted in a much happier and scripturally-acceptable marriage relationship among the believers.”102 Titcombe didn’t approve of African ways. In 1908 he claimed his Yagba hosts “had no moral standards. Their lives were little above the beasts.”103 Later, he wrote: “Every time I hear anyone talk lightly about Satan, it almost makes my blood run cold. They do not realize who or what he is. … Those of us who have lived in Africa, who have seen his power made manifest in the lives of vast multitudes of people, and how he can drag them down to the level of animals themselves, are not in the least impressed by the easy verdicts of 20th century science based on the testimony of enlightened and progressive nations that demon possession just does not exist. Let them go to Africa, let them have their dwelling for a year amongst a people where belief in the devil is universal, where he may see such strange and shaking things as we have recorded here and many others among the devil-worshipers, and we venture to say it will not be long before he is convinced that there is some evil Power in the universe whose base designs are being effected through weak, unfortunate human instruments.”104

For nearly a half-century Manitoba’s Guy Playfair was a leading member of SIM. Field director for 27 years and general director for another 13, Playfair later wrote “when I joined the mission and came to Nigeria in 1911, I made the 13th member of our staff. I was appointed to the office of Field Director in 1917. When I turned over the office of General Director to Dr. A D Hesler in October 1957, the Sudan Interior Mission numbered 1260.”105 By the end of the colonial period SIM missionaries operated in Nigeria, Niger, Dahomey (Benin), Liberia, Ghana, Upper Volta (Burkina Faso), Ethiopia, Sudan and the Somali Republic.106 At the time the Toronto-based mission was considered the largest nondenominational missionary society on the continent.107

In the 1950s SIM described growing Nigerian nationalism as “dark and threatening”.108 Adeleye Liagbemi writes that “the nationalist upsurge of the post Second World War era engendered a new spirit of independence and experimentation; positive, forward-looking, purposeful and militant. The situation sent chills down the spines of some Christian missionary organizations in the country — including the S.I.M.”109 In response SIM ramped up its literature output, deciding to “take the offensive out of Satan’s hands”, which it felt had “been winning the war of words among the new literates” of Africa.110

Alongside their support for colonialism, SIM promoted various controversial views. They openly espoused aggressive religious views. They openly and aggressively criticized Islam. In a 1943 book titled From Cannibalism to Christ: a story of the transforming power of the gospel in darkest Africa, SIM missionary John S. Hall claimed “the 10 or more millions of pagans” in Nigeria were “threatened from the north, by Moslem invasion and absorption.”111

For decades SIM aimed to confine educational activities to those serving narrow religious purposes.112 Andrew Stirrett explained that “care must be exercised not to introduce subjects on the curriculum other than reading of the Bible and writing, because if subjects such as English, mathematics, commercial arithmetic, bookkeeping and other worldly arts and sciences are taught, they become a source of temptation to the pupil to enter government service, receive lucrative positions and often to spend his substance on riotous living … As soon as a young man has been taught to read his Hausa Bible fluently and to write, let him go.”113

In keeping with its religious fundamentalism, SIM withdrew from the Conference of Missions in the Northern Provinces of Nigeria, complaining about the other Christians’ insufficient devotion to scripture. The missionary society explained: “The Sudan Interior Mission seeks always to ensure that each of its members holds and teaches the whole Bible as the infallible word of God (involving belief in the authenticity of the Genesis account of Creation as opposed to modernistic theories of evolution).”

SIM was boldly fundamentalist. In a book about the organization titled Evangelical Christians in the Muslim Sahel, Barbara M. Cooper notes that to be a SIM missionary one had to accept that “the Bible is the ‘inerrant’ word of God (a rejection of historically grounded Biblical criticism); God consists of three persons (father, son, and Holy Spirit); all humans suffer from original sin and must be reborn; humans will go to heaven or hell in the afterlife as a consequence of their spiritual condition (their rebirth or failure to be ‘born again’); Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary, he atoned for human sin with his bodily resurrection, and his second coming is imminent; Satan exists literally (not simply figuratively) and acts in the world; the Christian church is the whole body of those who have been reborn (implicitly excluding Christians who are not ‘born again’); and Christ’s great commission was to order his followers to share these ‘truths’ to every people (therefore to be a Christian is to evangelize).”114

The Canada Congregational Foreign Missionary Society (CCFMS) was formed in 1881. Formerly part of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, CCFMS dispatched Toronto Reverend Walter T. Currie to Angola in 1886. He was the first Canadian sent to Africa by a Canadian society, and was joined by eight other Canadian Congregationalists over the next decade.115 His biography, Currie of Chissamba, compared him to famed brethren, describing him as “an ideal missionary. He ranked with Moffat, Livingston, McKay and others who opened Africa to the Christian message.”116 Before venturing away from the Portuguese-dominated coast to establish himself among the Ovimbundu people, Currie wrote: “We turn our backs on the last traces of civilization and our faces toward the centre of the Dark Continent.”117 In the end, however, the Torontonian only survived due to the goodwill of the Ovimbundu.

Currie, the sole missionary in his region, depended on locals for charity and recruitment was slow in central Angola. It took Currie seven years to perform his first baptism.118 Interest picked up as Portuguese influence traveled inland and by the early 1900s about 700 Ovimbundu attended Sunday congregation.119 Most of the initial converts were of marginal socio-economic status and generally attracted to the positions offered by Currie (who had become akin to a local chief).120 In Canadian Missionaries and the Ovimbundu of Angola, 1885-1915 John C. Butcher explains: “The terms of their conversion stressed their willingness to be loyal and obedient to the ways of the white man rather than reflecting an understanding of Christian principles.”121 The mission pushed men to work in a carpentry shop and flourmill that produced white bread, an alien food, for their consumption. Women converts were pressed to take up “modest” European dress and become “homemakers” who set the table with local versions of Western goods.122 Currie also moved to replace “drumming and dancing” with sports.123 Currie set up a small town in Cisamba where he lived for more than two decades. The town introduced a new style of house meant for nuclear families that came with doors to keep neighbours out.124

Currie resided in a large North American-style home and gained neighbours amongst the growing number of Canadian missionaries, who built houses on higher ground. Butcher writes “by 1900 Cisamba’s form had become that of the new colonial era — with an upper town for the whites and a lower town for the blacks.”125

Between 1886 and 1961 Canadian Congregationalists sent more than 60 missionaries to Angola.126 Many spent half their lives working at mission sites in the colony.127

As Portuguese influence grew, Currie depended less and less on local rulers. The CCFMS mission repeatedly sought the aid of Portuguese authorities. After a heated disagreement with a local leader over spoils from a joint trade caravan, for instance, Currie turned to Portuguese officials to mediate.128 Currie pulled his own weight as well. During a major uprising in 1902, Currie and several Ovimbundu Christians visited a rebel chief and “implored him to desist” his resistance to European rule.129

In 1930, the CCFMS (then United Church of Canada) and its US partner, the West Central Africa Mission of the American Board, celebrated a 50-year jubilee that included a “Portuguese Day”. The day of festivities paid homage to early Portuguese explorers and commemorated colonial rule.130

As part of his legacy, Currie established an institute in Dindo, Angola. The first principal of the Currie Institute, John Taylor Tucker, founded the Angola Evangelical Alliance in 1922. Trained at Montréal’s Congregational College, Tucker would represent all Angolan Mission Societies and Protestant churches vis-à-vis Portuguese authorities (except the Seventh-day Adventists). In 1948, Tucker moved to the capital, Luanda, where he expanded his role in the Angola Evangelical Alliance. Not long after he was appointed representative of all missions in the Portuguese Empire, for which he relocated to Lisbon.131

Often close to authorities, Canadian missionaries failed to publicly criticize Portugal’s brutal rule in Angola until the 1960s.132 In New Wine in a Very Old Bottle: Canadian Protestant Missionaries as Facilitators of Development in Central Angola, 1886-1961 Paul Byam explains: “These Protestant missionaries were never official agents of the Portuguese State; yet in submitting to the requisites of Portuguese colonial policy and by maintaining for many decades an official line of silence on the atrocities such as forced labour and excessively brutal forms of punishment committed by the colonial regime they were accomplices in the promotion of Portuguese colonialism.”133

Regardless of experiences or personal opinion, missionaries had a self-interest in relaying desperate messages about African “heathenism” and “nakedness” to Canadians. Adeleye Liagbemi wrote that “missionaries must paint a dismal picture of the communities among which they are labouring, and exaggerate their own hardships and dangers in order to enlist the support of their people and attract generous donations, which, in the case of the S.I.M., — a ‘faith’ mission — formed the sole basis of support for its workers.”134

A supporter from home asked Walter Currie “how great are the needs of your field?” He responded “they are as great as the superstitions of the people are dark, blinding their eyes. The immorality is horrible, destroying their souls; the slavery is devilish, hastening their ruin.”135 Another piece of CCFMS promotional material reported: “In the pagan villages, disorder, filth, immorality; in the Christian villages, streets laid out in squares; houses of several rooms, with doors, windows and furniture; a family life centering in the common meal; a community life, taking its color from the daily prayer service in the church; on every side cleanliness, intelligence, prosperity, morality. To travel in Angola is to know the social power of Christianity.”136

Canadian missionaries and their supporters published dozens of books and pamphlets from the late 1800s to mid-1900s. The content was often racist and self-serving.

A SIM missionary for two decades, Douglas C. Percy was probably the most prolific of these authors, writing a trilogy of novels set in 1950s Nigeria.137 In When the Bamboo Sings Percy writes that “there was no thanks in his words, for none existed in the language of his people.” But 27 pages later a Hausa woman thanks a missionary, employing what one commentator points out is probably the most common phrase in the language.138 In an ostensibly nonfictional tract Percy argued “the people of Africa have associations with demonic powers that are not readily acceptable or credible to the Occidental mind. Behind the face of Africa looms a dark, evil intelligence, the shadow of Satan, the great enemy of God and man.”139

Official Canada generally supported these Christian activists. Missionary leaders were well-regarded and received sympathetic media coverage. Leading business people financed mission work and Ottawa sometimes looked to missionaries for advice. In A World Mission: Canadian Protestantism and the Quest for a New International Order, 1918-1939 Robert Wright explains: “In the 1920s and the 1930s, when government representation abroad was minimal and non-governmental organizations as we know them today were nonexistent, foreign missionaries were widely, and appropriately, heralded as Canada’s ‘ambassadors’ to the world. Officials in Ottawa regularly sought their opinions on world events and, indeed, missionaries were not above lobbying the government on international matters of particular concern to the churches. More than this, missionaries were well known to the churchgoing public — many Canadians got their first exposure to the cultures of Asia, South America, and Africa, in fact, at lectures and slideshows given by furloughed [on leave] missionary personnel.”140

The ideas of Christian missionaries were shaped by the needs of mid-nineteenth century European/American capitalism and imperialism, but those ideas also took on a life of their own, becoming powerful tools both in Canada and Africa. At home they motivated engagement in imperial adventure; abroad they justified poor behaviour and were an ideological tool used to undermine resistance. In fact, many of the Canadians who participated in the imperial system in Africa were “good Christians” who saw themselves as helping to “civilize the dark continent” while largely benefiting themselves.