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The Baptists in Cameroon to 1930

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The Baptists in Cameroon to 1930 CHAPTER ONE THE BAPTISTS IN CAMEROON TO 1930 This study concerns itself with the first century of Baptist presence in Cameroon extending from the initial work of Alfred Saker to the end of World War II. In this chapter the emphasis is on the origin of the Baptist work in the mid-nineteenth century under the Baptist Missionary Society to the return of the Baptist missionaries following World War I, especially in their interests in education. BRITISH BAPTIST lWSSIONARY SOCIETY IN CAMEROON, 1844-18841 Baptist missionaries were the first Western missionaries to establish a permanent work in Cameroon. These early missionaries serving under the Baptist Missionary Society (London) were British, Jamaican, and African and first settled on the island of Fernando Po in 1841 working among the indigenous peoples there. Then in 1844 some of these Baptist Missionary Society's missionaries from Fernando Po established missions on the mainland on either side of the Wouri estuary at Bimbia and Duala. The Bimbia mission station and school, the first in what would become the British Cameroon Province, was founded by the Jamaican families of Joseph Merrick and Alexander Fuller, a former slave. Britisher Alfred Saker and his family and Sierra Leonian Thomas Horton Johnson settled the Duala station. In 1858 Saker, who had gone to Fernando Po in the interim, returned to the mainland with a group of liberated slaves to establish Victoria (Limbe today) as an autonomous Baptist community purchased from King William of Bimbia on Am bas Bay. All three of these mission settlements­ Bimbia, Duala, and Victoria-centered around "a physical and organizational trilogy; a chapel, a dwelling house, and a school." This became the pattern for 1This section is based upon the following works which also may be consulted for amplification on the topics mentioned: Robert Glennie, Joseph Jackson Fuller: An African Christian Missionary (London: The Carey Press, n.d.); Uoyd Kwast, The Discipling of West Cameroon: A Study of Baptist Growth (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1971); Victor LeVine, The Cameroons from Mandate to Independence (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1964); Thomas Lewis, Those Seventy Years: An Autobiography (London: The Carey Press, n.d.); Harry Rudin, Germans in the Cameroons (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1938); Edward Bean Underhill, Alfred Saker: Missionary to Africa (London: The Carey Kingsgate Press, 1958); and Hugh Owen Hardinge Vernon­ Jackson, "Schools and School Systems in Cameroon: 1844-1961" (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1970); and Jaap van Slageren, Les origines de l'Eglise evange/ique du Cameroun (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1972). 2 INTERNATIONAL INFLUENCES IN WEST CAMEROON later mission stations and other missionary societies.2 The Baptist work grew rapidly from the mid-1840s to 1850, when the Baptist Missionary Society was active both on Fernando Po and in the schools and churches on the Cameroon mainland. After 1850 the work leveled off. However, during the growth period in the late 1840s a pattern of missionary work itself and of missionary influences on African society developed. Essentially the Baptist missionary endeavors centered around the following efforts: learning the indigenous languages, evangelizing the local populations, translating Scripture, hymns, etc. into the vernacular, teaching literature in the vernacular to Africans, and establishing churches. Much of this activity stemmed from the importance placed by Protestants on a literate population which could read and study Scripture for themselves. Thus mission schools provided the essential function of training African congregations with indigenous leadership. This resulted in local congregations with a written language, literate constituents, and a body of vernacular literature. In this context schools also served a significant function in imparting secular knowledge along with religious wisdom. This dual function often resulted in those hostile to the religious message still seeking schooling for their children in the Baptist schools because of the secular training available there.3 The schools on the nascent mission stations began in missionary homes and moved to the chapels, which were built to serve as schools also. Thus began day schools for area residents, as well as the advent of boarding schools for pupils living outside commuting distance. In these schools advanced classes often used the English language. In addition, missionaries conducted vernacular classes for adults in Bible study, reading, and manual skills. Missionary wives did much of the teaching in both day schools and adult classes. One of the intents of these initial schools was to train Cameroonians to assume teaching responsibilities in the mission schools in order that the missionaries could devote more time to supervision, construction, evangelization, and station management. Thus from the mission perspective the schools served the important function of preparing an indigenous teaching force. This was deemed necessary for a variety of reasons in the development of the local church and society. The difficult living and working conditions in Cameroon provided a significant personal concern for the health of the missionaries as well as a continual preoccupation. These situations included a debilitating physical environment, high missionary work loads, chronic fevers and dysentery, and continuous financial shortages. As a result, by 1850 no Baptist missionaries remained in Cameroon, since they had either died or returned to Britain or Jamaica. The important consequence of this decrease of the missionary forces was that the Cameroonians who were associated with these early mission stations assumed responsibility for the functioning of their churches and schools. In this context of missionary work 2Vemon-Jackson, "School Systems," p. 13. 3Kwast, p. 71. .
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