Vol. 28, No. 4 October 2004 Mission and Memory century ago 80 percent of Christians lived in Europe “covenant of love” for Muslims—expressed through kindness, Aand North America; today 60 percent live in the Southern service, and quiet witness—could span the abyss between them Hemisphere. Yet the tools, institutions, and scholarly resources and God in Jesus Christ. And Jeffrey Klaiber’s short overview of requisite to memory preservation—libraries, archives, and pub- the Peru’s Truth Commission is an encouraging reminder of the lications—are found primarily in nations whose combined Chris- palliative role ordinary Christians have played in protecting and tian populations are of diminishing global significance. assisting victims of violence. This concern drew some fifty librarians, archivists, and In his essay “Poetry and American Memory” (Atlantic scholars of mission studies to Rome in 2002 for a conference Monthly, October 1999), Robert Pinsky, America’s poet laureate sponsored by the International Association for Mission Studies from 1997 to 2000, observed that “a people is defined and unified and the International Association of Catholic Missiologists.The not by blood but by shared memory,” and that “deciding to conference, called “Rescuing the Memory of Our Peoples,” gen- remember, and what to remember, is how we decide who we erated an ongoing series of oral-history workshops and archival are.” Our Christian story attests this to be so. seminars in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Perhaps more than is usually the case, this issue of the IBMR is about memory. Nothing distinctively human—personal and collective identities, languages, social and material traditions, or On Page religions—can exist apart from the gift of memory. Always selective, sometimes distorted, inevitably partial, and at times 146 Missionaries and Revolutionaries: Elements of falsified, memory is nevertheless our lifeline for holding on to Transformation in the Emergence of Modern these distinctives. Jehu Hanciles suggests that Western mission African Christianity archives have never been up to the task of telling the story of the Jehu J. Hanciles African church. The preserved letters and reports of foreign 153 Ecclesiastical Cartography and the Invisible missionaries, written with an eye to supporters and administra- Continent tors back home, only touch the surface of African church history. Jonathan J. Bonk Not surprisingly, Africans and missionaries who occupied the 159 Christian Presence in a Muslim Milieu: The same space and time do not remember the same thing. There is Missionaries of Africa in the Maghreb and the a growing awareness, to use Hanciles’s words, that the construc- Sahara tion of African church history has long been in thrall to “exagger- Aylward Shorter, M.Afr. ated claims for the Western missionary movement and European 165 My Pilgrimage in Mission initiatives . so that the African (or non-Western) element has Russell L. Staples been portrayed simply as passive, dependent, and exploited.” 169 The Legacy of Byang Kato In a similar vein, the Dictionary of African Christian Biography Keith Ferdinando is showing that the history of Christianity in Africa is much more 170 Noteworthy than a mere footnote to the story of the European military, 174 The Legacy of François Libermann economic, and political hegemony. The catechists and evange- Henry J. Koren, C.S.Sp. lists chiefly responsible for the astonishingly dynamic church in 178 Peru’s Truth Commission and the Churches that continent are beginning to take their rightful place beside Jeffrey Klaiber, S.J. their earlier African fathers: Agrippa Castor, Cyprian, Ambrosius, 180 Book Reviews and the like. 190 Dissertation Notices Readers will be moved by Aylward Shorter’s account of 191 Index, 2001–2004 Henri Marchal and his humbly incarnated conviction that only a 200 Book Notes Missionaries and Revolutionaries: Elements of Transformation in the Emergence of Modern African Christianity Jehu J. Hanciles he emergence of Africa and Latin America as the new Herculean task. It requires scrupulous attentiveness on the part Theartlands of the Christian faith has profound implica- of the researcher, for their voices and cries are often lost beneath tions for the study of global Christianity. Already the nature of the stentorian choruses of the dominant group(s), preserving this epochal development—an inexorable consequence of exten- whose experiences and testimony is often the primary function sive Christian recession within Western societies, in conjunction of those records. with phenomenal growth in the non-Western world—means In the remainder of this article I examine briefly the events that much scholarly analysis now focuses on the potential signifi- and profound reactions stimulated by the implementation of cance of non-Western (or Southern) Christianities. Rightly so. Henry Venn’s experiment with a native pastorate in the colonial The possibility that as little as one-fifth of the world’s Christians context of Sierra Leone (West Africa) from the nineteenth cen- will be white Caucasian by 2050 is a matter of no little conse- tury. My aim is not to rehash the significance of Venn’s ideas but quence. But renewed attentiveness to non-Western Christianities to briefly explore the African interpretation and experience of his should not be allowed to displace ongoing appraisal of the vision. As I have argued elsewhere, Venn’s experiment un- Western missionary movement, which transformed the course leashed powerful racial conflicts and profound ecclesiastical of Christian history and acted as a vital catalyst for the transfor- challenges.3 The primary objective here is to spotlight the trans- mations in question. formative role that ordinary African Christians and little-known For African Christians, careful investigation of this move- influences played in stimulating Venn’s thinking and in shaping ment remains a priority not only because it provides critical African appropriation of his strategy. connection points for self-understanding but also because African perspectives and an African imagination are indispensable for a The Sierra Leone Experiment full understanding of the impact and legacy of the European- African encounter. That story is as much African as it is European. Sierra Leone, the settlement from which the present country Exaggerated claims for the Western missionary movement and derives its name, formed the context for a number of British European initiatives have long dominated historical construction experiments at the turn of the nineteenth century, all related to and analysis, so much so that the African (or non-Western) ele- abolitionism. After a few ill-fated efforts as far back as 1787, the ment has been portrayed simply as passive, dependent, and settlement became home to freed American blacks, whose deci- exploited. While such perspectives are no longer dominant, they sion to fight with the British in the American War of Indepen- remain influential. Non-Western assessments are critical, if only dence had ended with deportation to the inhospitable climes of because “without this Third World dimension, mission would Nova Scotia. Baptized Christians all, these Nova Scotian settlers languish as the flawed instrument of alien subjugation, and an landed in Sierra Leone in 1792, complete with their own churches important part of Christian history would thereby be lost.”1 and preachers. They named the settlement Freetown and estab- lished a Christian community steeped in religiosity and revival- Searching for an African Story ism. Their preferred way of life was only briefly disturbed by the arrival in 1800 of another group of 550 former African slaves from From the 1960s, prominent African historians have produced Jamaica, called Maroons.4 richly detailed (often regional or nationalist) accounts that have In 1808 the settlement was taken over by the British Crown uncovered critical historical insights from an African perspec- and became the focus of another abolition scheme that saw the tive. Many have gone to great lengths to elucidate the role and blockade of the West African coast by the British navy and the contribution of indigenous agency and to illuminate both the rich recapture of thousands of African slaves (bound for the Ameri- heritage of pre-Christian past and encounters with the Christian cas) who were now relocated in Freetown and surrounding Gospel outside the direct influence of European missionary villages established around it for the purpose. These “recaptives,” action. Their painstaking historical investigation opened a new who numbered 18,000 by 1825 and an estimated 67,000 by 1840, chapter in African scholarship and provided rich resources for became the dominant element in the life and future of the colony. theological education.2 Yet, all too often, efforts at telling the Their conversion to Christianity in vast numbers represents one African story simply elevated the actions and impact of a few of the most spectacular achievements in modern mission history prominent African Christians—Bishop Samuel Crowther or and “the first mass movement to Christianity in modern Africa.”5 Bishop James Dwane, for instance—at the expense of a more Indeed, one African historian calculates that Freetown in 1820 thoroughgoing representation of the full range of African voices, boasted more African Christians than the rest of tropical Africa.6 reactions, and experiences. These early successes augured well for an experiment aimed at Discerning and extracting from the vast