Unintended Consequences

This book should become required reading, alongside David Maxwell on Zimbabwe, Birgit Meyer on Ghana, and John Peel on Nigeria and the Yoruba, when it comes to illuminating the missionary enterprise, and as an important text for the relation between Christianity and the sciences. It is also a work of cultural history, juxtaposing the modernization of Switzerland with modernization in southeast Africa, through a lens provided by missionaries from the Free Church in the French-speaking cantons of the Swiss Romande, above all the cartographer, naturalist, linguist, and pioneering anthropologist Henri-Alexandre Junod. This remarkable man saw himself as simultaneously spreading the light of Christianity and the enlightenment of reason and science.

Butterflies & Barbarians: Swiss Missionaries and Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa

Patrick Harries (Author)

Ohio University Press

304 pages

$30.03

We are by now acquainted with the very different relations between Christianity and the Enlightenment that obtained in France, Italy, Germany, Holland, England, Scotland, and the United States, but are probably rather vague about the specific situation in Switzerland, poised as it was between French influences and Prussian ones. In Switzerland the heirs of Calvin created a tolerant, broad, and enlightened church very closely aligned with regional consciousness and governance. In the course of the upheavals of the first half of the 19th century, a Free Church emerged which retained the regional consciousness but separated itself from the religious and political establishment in a way reminiscent of the Great Disruption in Scotland. It did so in response to various intellectual and religious developments, including influences from English evangelicalism, and retained throughout a scientifically informed high culture. Relevant points of reference are intellectual developments in Presbyterian Princeton as well as in Scotland, and I would think it useful to cross-reference this particular piece of cultural history with Colin Kidd’s The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600-2000, especially his chapter on the controversial issue of enlightened racism and of the space left for the construction of racism by the decline in the authority of the Bible. We are dealing here with Christian missionary Aufklärer, as well as with the missionary origins of anthropology as a discipline (discussed in Patrick Harries’ article on Anthropology in Norman Etherington’s 2005 edited volume on Missions and Empire).

Harries’ book is not in essence an intellectual biography of Junod the missionary, who became a renowned anthropologist celebrated by such later eminences as Max Gluckman and E. Evans-Pritchard. Instead it is an extraordinarily rich and wide-ranging micro-study of a small missionary society treated as a site for the construction of knowledge about Africa, and for the creation of an African voice, which came eventually to include Tsonga ethnic self-consciousness. The missionaries not only created narratives about Africa, for example concerning European, indigenous, and Arab slavery, but through those narratives they helped people back in Switzerland to make sense of their own place in a rapidly changing Europe. The Swiss could envisage themselves in a hierarchy of evolutionary development as mediated by Swiss missions, including not only numerous new worlds discovered elsewhere but also the vastly expanded historical and prehistorical vistas revealed by geology, biology, glaciology and paleontology. And this included, for example, new approaches to their own alpine landscape, such as a sense of the sublime.

The missionary Kulturträger applied a set of enlightened scientific practices which made them experts on “the native question” with influence on leaders of opinion in southern Africa, including politicians and representatives of Tsonga ethnic consciousness. As is invariably the case they were not in control of the destination or use of their ideas. Their attempt to begin over again by careful oversight of the creation of a new culture, protected from the multiple immiserations introduced into Africa from an industrializing Europe, could feed willy-nilly into the ideologies of segregation. On the one hand the missionaries promised an enthusiastic public at home to apply religion and science in tandem to raise up enigmatic pagans over time from intellectual childhood to a liberated and responsible maturity. On the other hand they appealed to a more “secular” readership with their accounts (partly derived from native informants) of everything from medicine to music, from plant life, meteorology, and cartography to linguistics. This information they needed in a practical way to understand and to control their environment and its inhabitants. In the case of Junod, however, that quest for understanding included indigenous structures of meaning in relation to landscape and plant and animal life (hence the butterflies’ in Harries’ title), as well as in relation to linguistic forms, music, folklore, and kinship. At one and the same time, Junod investigated these structures of meaning and advocated and created more universal modes of intellectual organization, which Africans in turn adapted and modified for their own purposes.

One of those indigenous adaptations included Swiss Calvinist Christianity itself, in particular what seemed to Africans to be biblical permission for various practices—such as free recourse to visions and revelations or the retention of polygamy—that made missionaries doubt whether the democratic structures of their faith were entirely suitable in Africa. Christianity was, after all, communicated in any number of ways, for example through migrant workers in the gold mines, putting into question how far centralized missions, with their numerous out-stations, can be regarded as colonial institutions or as sites for the colonization of consciousness. Christianity has expanded in Africa primarily through indigenous evangelization. In some of the developments on the periphery of missionary control one can even see a nascent Pentecostalism waiting to happen.

It is impossible in a brief review to convey the kinds of intellectual control Patrick Harries has had to establish in numerous sub-disciplines in order to give an account of the taxonomic endeavors of these missionaries as they fulfilled their religious vocations in the most tragic personal circumstances. In relation to butterflies alone, and the stocking of European museums with hitherto unknown specimens, the amount of intellectual work involved is impressive. Then there are the diverse and often unwanted consequences of ways of reading following from the introduction of literacy and the creation of a literate indigenous élite. Harries comments that the converts of the Swiss mission read the Bible aggressively, reworking its stories into their own cosmos. The sacred book could itself become a totem and a sign of status in a way that contradicted what the Swiss saw as its essential message; and there are interesting parallels here with the problems Webb Keane explores in Christian Moderns, where Dutch Calvinists tried to introduce a Protestant interiority into a Sumatran culture based of external objects and tangible ritual. For example, private reading introduced a modern individualism at odds with collective custom in a way that led Junod to see his mission as including the liberation of the will. Converts might feel uneasy with tunes reverberating with demands for recognition of sin and acts of contrition, and might respond by preferring the lively hymns of Moody and Sankey, or by adapting imported music to local tonality. Here the relevant comparison might be with Joel Robbins’ ethnography of Christianity in New Guinea, Becoming Sinners. Indeed this book is replete with intriguing possibilities for comparison, as well as for a reassessment of the missionary enterprise the more persuasive since Harries is not himself a Christian.

Nor was Junod alone in his remarkable endeavors. David Maxwell is currently exploring the context of another such figure, the Pentecostal missionary W. F. P. Burton, who, while founding in 1915 an iconic Pentecostal faith mission in the (then) Belgian Congo and believing in the end-times, also earned the gratitude of posterity for his scientific retrieval of Luba art and material culture. Among many paradoxes, it was missionaries intent on changing customs and beliefs who often provided the most intimate and persuasive ethnographic accounts, and so helped create the secular discipline of anthropology, which in the course of its professionalization has been distinctly ambivalent about their contributions. Gradually, it seems, an extremely complex record is being properly and fairly excavated.

David Martin is the author of On Secularization: Towards a Revised General Theory (Ashgate). He was recently elected as a Fellow of the British Academy.