Abstract
While most Protestant missions in Belgian Congo gladly accepted the colonial state’s offer of educational subsidies in 1946, a strong emphasis on church–state separation led the American Mennonite Brethren Mission (AMBM) to initially reject these funds. In a surprising twist, however, the AMBM reversed its position in 1952. Through archival research, I demonstrate that a major factor that led the AMBM to accept subsidies was the creation and institutionalization of a racially separate ecclesial identity from that of Congolese Christians. Moreover, the development of this separate identity was closely intertwined with missionaries’ vision for a “white children’s school,” geographically separated from their work with Congolese. The enactment of white identity helped pave the way for the acceptance of subsidies, both by bringing the missionaries more strongly into the orbit of the colonial logic of domination, and by clarifying the heavy cost of failing to comply with the state’s expectations. Through this case study, I engage with the complexity of missionaries’ political role in a colonial African context by focusing on the everyday political choices by which missionaries set aside their children as sacred, by exploring how ideas about separateness were embedded into institutions, and by demonstrating how attention to the subtleties of identity performance can shed new light on major missionary decisions.
Keywords
Introduction
In 1950, a small committee of missionaries of the American Mennonite Brethren Mission (AMBM)
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in Belgian Congo wrote a letter to their denominational mission board in the United States, explaining that they had decided not to accept the offer of government subsidies for their mission-run primary schools. As pacifist Mennonite missionaries, they placed a strong emphasis on the importance of the separation of church and state. They wrote, We felt definitely that there is a principle involved which would link the Church and State in an unholy union. During our consideration of this point a meditation from Spurgeon’s devotional book “Morning and Evening Daily Readings” for September 24 was read in which he deals with this very subject upon the basis of Ezra 8:22. As to the medical subsidies we felt differently in that as far as the State is concerned that ministry is only to the physical, whereas the school ministry is to the soul and to the intellect, in which the State is vitally interested especially from the R.C. [Roman Catholic] standpoint.
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The AMBM’s refusal of subsidies was a strong statement of nonconformity. By rejecting the offer of subsidies, they were going against the flow of several dozen other Protestant missionary societies, who had been only too happy to accept the offer of funds in 1946 and to embark on a massive educational enterprise over the next decade until independence in 1960. The Congo Protestant Council (CPC) united most of them in a consultative body, with a paid full-time secretary who worked hard to promote the interests of Protestants in a context where the colonial state was heavily allied with the Catholic Church (Irvine, 1978: xviii). While the acceptance of educational subsidies led to a clear shift for these Protestant missions from a critical to a more collaborative stance vis-à-vis the colonial state, the AMBM remained somewhat isolated from the CPC member missions, who were spearheading the push for subsidies. AMBM missionaries even desisted from CPC membership in 1947 on the grounds that to affiliate with such a theologically liberal organization would be to associate with “unbelievers.” 3
In a surprising twist, however, the AMBM did not maintain its rejection of subsidies for very long. By 1952, after several years of tension and heavily divided votes on this matter, the missionaries finally accepted the funds and embarked on a new phase of building and expansion that would be of far-reaching significance for the history of the nascent Congolese Mennonite Brethren church (Kumedisa, 2006: 63–64; Toews and Hiebert, 1978: 106). In this study, I attempt to explain how these Mennonite Brethren missionaries, devoted as they were to the separation of church and state, could nevertheless move into a much closer collaboration with a colonial state than they had initially believed to be appropriate. My research suggests that this policy shift became imaginable to the missionaries because of the everyday decisions and actions by which they performed their whiteness in a colonial context during a crucial period of transition and consolidation of their mission. Between 1946 and 1952, the AMBM missionaries created and institutionalized structures that reinforced the racial and ecclesial separation of missionaries and Congolese Christians. Within these narratives of separateness, missionaries’ attachment to the racially segregated education of their children as a sacred ideal then played a decisive role in overcoming their resistance to colonial educational subsidies. The example of AMBM thus speaks to a larger question: How does attention to everyday political choices—the creation of social groupings, the naming of others, the patterns of worship and the discourses of sacredness—illuminate the subtle forms of collaboration that can develop between a colonial state and other white actors through the complex performance of separate racial identity?
Theoretical orientations: missionaries and the “thin white line”
Well before Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. famously accused missionaries of being agents of cultural imperialism (1974), the complex relationship between missionaries and the colonial state has been debated. While it is clear that the introduction of Christianity in Africa occurred in some sense within a “logic of conquest” (Mbembe, 1988: 40), it is equally clear that if and when missionaries played a part in upholding or legitimizing colonial domination, they did not usually see this an explicit part of their mandate, which they considered to be one of evangelism and church-planting (Fields, 1985: 101). In this section, I present the working assumptions and methods on which I draw in order to engage as fully as possible with the complexity of missionaries’ political role in a colonial African context.
First, I adopt one of the broadest possible definitions of politics, as articulated by Harold Lasswell (1950), seeing politics as the struggle over “who gets what, when, how.” This opens up space to see organized religion as inherently political, even when it does not engage directly with the state (Longman, 2010: 313). Such a perspective will shed light on the concrete political effects of missionaries’ “religious” activities and discourse.
Second, I draw on the work of sociologist Karen Fields in order to explore how missionaries working in colonial contexts could subtly participate in the logic of colonization even when they ostensibly rejected collaboration with the regime (1985: 50). Fields has explored how European governance of vast African territories could be effective even with a sparse imperial presence. Through a detailed exploration of several central African contexts in the early twentieth century, she argues that all whites within the colony, including missionaries, contributed to the legitimization of the colonial order insofar as they tacitly accepted and enacted the “unwritten laws of colonial order—its etiquette” (Fields, 1985: 33, 49). By enacting acceptable “white” behavior, they could “bear the state’s arms and its flag … simply by wearing their white skins” (Fields, 1985: 49). In this way, they subtly “sustained the logic of domination,” and so “made themselves colonizers in their own right” (Fields, 1985: 50). I will pay close attention to the ways in which missionaries enacted their whiteness in interaction with the etiquette of the colonial regime.
Third, I adopt methodological perspectives from performance theory and political theology that emphasize the political potency of seemingly mundane, everyday decisions as they are used to socially enact the missionaries’ identity. Performance theorist Yolanda Covington-Ward points out that “critical insights can be gained if we pay attention to what people do with and through their bodies in their everyday lives” (2016: 9). Political theologians such as William T. Cavanaugh call attention to the importance of embodied practices as the “liturgies” through which religious organizations both demonstrate their political reality, and potentially enter into competition with alternative liturgies promoted by the state or other political actors (1998). Throughout this study, I pay particular attention to missionaries’ embodied practices of eating, working, worshiping, and meeting, as they are expressed, often indirectly, in missionary meeting minutes, letters, and reports.
Fourth, I draw on the work of sociologist of religion Christian Smith for insight into the way that people create narratives to bestow meaning on their lives (2003: 78, 80). Smith emphasizes that specific practices help to create stories which then increasingly encompass and define people’s lives. An examination of these key stories helps to identify what is sacred and untouchable in a given social order (Smith, 2003: 77). In the case of AMBM, I will show how the education of missionary children became a sacred ideal that could reinforce or undermine other stories within the missionaries’ social universe.
Finally, and most broadly, I draw on each of these theoretical orientations in order to respond to Richard Elphick’s call for more mission historiography that examines the relationship between key ideas, people, and missionary institutions in the twentieth century (2012: 8). As Elphick’s study of the ideal of racial equality in South Africa demonstrates, missionaries can play a significant role in promoting and institutionalizing ideas that have major political repercussions. This study of AMBM, then, is a case study of how the idea of racial separation can be embedded into institutions over time, through the everyday practices of specific people, to the point where explicit collaboration with a colonial government becomes imaginable to a missionary society that has previously expressed strong theological opposition to such a move.
Enacting separateness during the consolidation of AMBM work in Belgian Congo
The AMBM missionaries’ reflection about subsidies took place within a context of expansion and consolidation during the period immediately following World War II. For all Protestant missions in Congo, this was a new era. The depression and the war were over, missionaries and government officials could once more move freely between Africa and Europe, and the colonial government was finally extending to Protestants the same educational subsidies with which they had been supporting Catholic mission schools since 1924 (Markowitz, 1973: 55–58). Even though the AMBM missionaries had rejected subsidies, they were caught up in a similar wave of expansion because their board had finally agreed to take on official responsibility for the Congo field in 1943. Although a handful of pioneer missionaries had labored in Congo since 1922, supported partly by funds from churches at home and partly through self-financing activities, the official adoption of the Congo field now allowed Mennonite Brethren missionary efforts to Congo to expand rapidly. New missionaries poured in through the regular recruitment channels of the mission board. Between 1945 and 1946 alone, the number of AMBM missionaries more than doubled, from five to thirteen. Their number would nearly double again twice more before independence. 4
Over the next several years, the energy of this enlarged group of missionaries was channeled into several major areas or tasks: the creation of new structures of decision-making and governance appropriate for a larger group of missionaries; new policies that ended previous missionary practices of adopting or raising Congolese orphans in their homes; and a drastic uptick in building activities on the mission stations that cast the missionaries increasingly into the roles of supervisor and manager of complex station issues. In previous research, I have examined these changes and shown how they involved the institutionalization of practices and modes of interaction that tended to entrench an increased separation, both socially and ecclesially, between missionaries and Congolese Christians (Fast, 2017). While this separation was not necessarily articulated in racial terms—it was also ethnic and cultural—the fact that all the missionaries were white meant that this separation did line up with race.
In this article, I focus on the two other major tasks of the missionaries during this period: the task of providing schooling to their children, and the task of determining what kind of education to provide to Congolese children through their mission schools. During the period of consolidation between 1946 and 1952, these two tasks collided with each other and reinforced each other to even further support racial and ecclesial separation between missionaries and Congolese Christians.
School for missionary children: the “white children’s school”
As the AMBM missionaries’ children grew to school age, their parents faced a tension between the sense of responsibility they felt to provide their children with a good education, and the lifestyle sacrifices that they saw themselves to be making for the sake of mission work in the Congo. There was a sense that the missionary children should not need to make the same sacrifices as the parents. As one of the missionaries said, “The Lord has given us our children to train for His glory even if we be in a heathen land.” 5 The way the missionaries chose to resolve this dilemma was through a strategy of geographical separation for their children. The school project, alternately dubbed in official minutes as the “school for missionary children” or the “white children’s school,” became an arena in which separate white identity was strongly enacted by the missionaries.
When the proposal for a missionary children’s school was first adopted by the field council in 1949, it was framed in terms of the necessity of geographical and cultural separation between their children’s school and the missionaries’ work of evangelism, church planting, and schooling on the stations. This separation was linked both with the supposedly unwholesome influence of the surrounding environment and with the special calling or destiny of the missionary children. The proposal expressed it this way: We deeply recognize the unspiritual and tragic impression that the influence of the wicked environment has on our dear children. This has made it urgent to have a separate school where no other such work is done. These are children who are called and appointed of the Lord for further great service.
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AMBM home board secretary A.E. Janzen, visiting Congo in March 1949, concurred. In his view, the school should ideally be located within the geographical boundaries of the mission field, but on a separate compound, one where no “work with natives is being conducted” (Janzen, 1950: 64). While Janzen did not spell out his reasoning, one may deduce a desire to avoid a too-obvious juxtaposition of the missionary children’s schooling conditions with those of the Congolese. The sense that missionary children needed to be protected from the polluting influence of Congolese culture was also expressed by missionary J.C. Ratzlaff, who was a strong advocate for the missionary children’s school from his arrival in 1948, and who eventually ran the school with his wife Edna. In 1950, he argued that moving the school to a separate location was urgently necessary in order to prevent an inappropriate intimacy from developing between missionary and Congolese children. “The children are in need now,” he wrote, “and if we are to help them it must be now. We have seen children growing up too much like natives because of the lack of a school.” 7
Given this vision, it seemed providential to the missionaries when a distant but very attractive piece of property became available at Kajiji, approximately 250 miles south of the main Kafumba station. This beautiful piece of land was located at a high elevation in the mountains, near the border of Angola, with a much cooler and pleasanter climate than that of the existing AMBM stations. The good soil and climate meant an abundance of fresh vegetables, and the ability to raise cattle for milk and meat. Equipment for electrifying the place and providing running water were available, and stone buildings were already on site because this had previously been a silkworm experiment of the Smithsonian Institute (Toews and Hiebert, 1978: 89–90). Other than the fruit and vegetables that grew at Kafumba, none of the existing AMBM stations had access to any of these luxuries.
The initial reaction of the home board in 1949 was outright refusal due to the distance and the expense. 8 However, the idea of Kajiji did not go away. Missionaries strongly pushed for the purchase of this site despite the objections of the home board. Several more times, the possibility of this purchase recurred and was prevented by circumstances or by direct board action. Throughout the process, home board secretary Janzen urged caution and wisdom in the decision, and constantly tried to slow down or calm the missionaries’ enthusiasm. Careful discernment was necessary, he insisted, because “the location of that school will have far-reaching consequences.” 9 The missionaries, however, continued to assert in the strongest terms their desire to purchase this property for the purposes of a children’s school as well as a retreat or vacation spot for missionaries. By equating the conditions of their children’s schooling with their own ideal vacation site, the missionaries were making a strong statement about the kind of lifestyle to which they aspired for their children, in contrast to what was considered appropriate for Congolese children or for their own working conditions as adults. They expressed their sentiments through letters, votes in their field councils, and even a petition in early 1950, with 18 of the 22 missionaries signing in favor of the purchase. 10 Missionary A.F. Kroeker emphasized that the missionaries were more united about this project than they had been about any other project—a rather disingenuous claim, given that four of the oldest and longest-serving missionaries had indicated their disagreement with the Kajiji site purchase. 11
Finally, in early 1951, circumstances aligned to make the purchase possible: the price was lowered, and Roman Catholic missionaries were beginning to eye the site with interest. These two factors seem to have convinced the home board to finally approve the purchase. 12 The first term of the new school, christened the École Belle Vue, began that fall.
After acquiring Kajiji, missionaries continued to assert their children’s special destiny and to enact both ecclesial and racial separateness. Promotional literature for the school emphasized the beautiful natural surroundings, listed the cool climate with “few mosquitos,” “running water system,” and “productive gardening area” as particular attractions, and referred to the students’ “happy white faces” to indicate their identity as missionary children. 13 Interestingly, about a year later the AMBM acquired the nearby Kajiji mission station from another mission. Now, a large Congolese congregation associated with the AMBM mission was worshiping less than half a mile away. However, missionary children continued to worship separately on Sunday morning in their own purpose-built chapel, using Sunday school materials “ordered from America” and welcoming missionaries from the Kajiji station for another worship service in the evening. 14 As late as 1957, the secretary of the collaborating Congo Inland Mission (CIM) 15 expressed concerns about the segregated character of the schooling, suggesting that with new high schools opening up for Congolese due to looming independence, it might be more appropriate for the missionary children to integrate into local schools. 16 He noted that both the American Baptists and the Unevangelized Fields Mission had taken this route. However, AMBM and CIM parents rejected this proposal and went ahead with expansion to a four-year high school program. 17 In the end, few students attended the high school, since the Belle Vue school was permanently closed after the upheavals of Independence in 1960. 18
To sum up, the rationale for the purchase of the Belle Vue school site was related to the missionaries’ deep desire to provide a high-quality education for their children in a way that would somehow compensate for the sacrifice that missionaries believed they were making. Placing the school in a location like Kajiji was seen as a way for missionaries to protect their children from the discomforts of life on the mission field, ensure that their future educational prospects remained intact, and provide the children with a Christian education that would lead them to develop a strong personal commitment to the faith and encourage them to consider future missionary service. Missionaries’ discourse about the school was suffused with racial language and with a sense of white missionary children’s special destiny that needed to be protected at all costs. The tone of the discussion about this school reveals that missionary children had been set aside in the minds of missionaries as sacred or inviolable. Moreover, the current of sacredness that surrounded the school extended to the Christian identity of the children, separating them from those who claimed to be part of the church a few minutes’ walk away.
Educational subsidies
The other major item on the missionaries’ agenda during this period was the question of whether to accept colonial government subsidies for mission-run primary schools that served Congolese children. As the missionaries moved to accept these subsidies, the increasingly entrenched dynamic of white separateness, epitomized by the white children’s school, now played out in a way that led to concrete and far-reaching political consequences.
The AMBM’s initial rejection of subsidies in 1948 appears to have been straightforward; no reason for rejection was given. 19 By the 1949 field council, however, the discussion was much more contentious and culminated in a tied vote that had to be broken by the chairman. 20 Although the Home Board asked the missionaries to reconsider, it respected their conclusion that subsidies would “link the church and the State in an unholy union.” 21 During 1950 and 1951, the missionaries and the board began to increasingly reconsider the possibility of subsidies. Missionaries in 1951 expressed openness to the possibility of subsidies “if this is necessary, and if the Home Board does not consider this as a violation of scriptural principles.” 22 However, until early 1952 they were still hoping to find a way to provide government-recognized educational institutions to Congolese without necessarily accepting government funds.
Several factors clearly played a role in the missionaries’ change of heart regarding subsidies. One of the most significant was undoubtedly the religious landscape of rivalry between Protestant and Catholic missionaries. The AMBM missionaries were often worried that Catholic missionaries, whom they regarded as completely non-Christian, might come in and “engulf” their work if they did not occupy their territories fully. 23 Ultimately, however, despite concern about Catholic encroachment, this was not the concrete impetus for the acceptance of subsidies. That came when the question of educational subsidies collided dramatically with the trajectory of the missionary children’s school in early 1952.
While the missionary children and their teachers were happily settling into their new school at Belle Vue in late 1951, an unresolved question of land title was brewing. The arrangement to purchase the property earlier that year had been made only with respect to the buildings; government approval of the land title was necessary before the purchase of the buildings could be finalized. The unresolved issue of land title was not causing excessive concern, but the fact that the children were already on site, that administrative committee meetings were being held there, that improvements of the buildings were envisioned, and that plans were being made to hold the next field council there all made it imperative that the title be received soon. In early 1952, however, the situation took a dramatic turn.
In April, AMBM received a letter from the governor of the province that refused the mission’s application for land title on the grounds that AMBM had refused government subsidies for their schools. “Mainly,” the governor wrote, “the Mission not having signed the Convention in the scholastic interest of the natives, it behooves that before embarking on teaching white children the Mission proves its ability to teach natives.” 24 This response threw the missionaries into disarray and led them to immediately reconsider signing the agreement for subsidies. Their previously articulated concerns about the subsidies seemed to evaporate overnight. J.B. Kliewer, the legal representative for the mission, wrote the news to all his fellow-missionaries.
It seems that this is one of the first issues we face as a result of failure to accept the government subsidies in our schools… As it looks from the above letter, we cannot look forward to having Kajiji. However, “THE EARTH IS THE LORD’S AND THE FULLNESS THEREOF.” The negotiations for Kajiji, and the move to Kajiji were made in faith believing that God would give us the place and that it was the place of His choice for the school. HE IS ABLE even yet. How? He knows … and “HE WILL BRING IT TO PASS” if it is His will.
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Kliewer invoked God’s support for the missionaries’ title to Kajiji by claiming that the move to Kajiji had been God’s will, thus implying that missionaries’ earlier convictions about God’s will in relation to government subsidies might need to be set aside.
By holding out on subsidies, the AMBM missionaries had discovered what kind of pressure the state could exert to encourage them to submit to its goals. However, their strong desire for the Kajiji property meant that they were not willing to resist this pressure for long. After Kajiji was threatened, the move to accept subsidies proceeded rapidly. The missionaries, along with J.B. Toews, a visiting representative from the home board, immediately traveled to Leopoldville for interviews with relevant government officials. Although the question of land title to Kajiji was not completely settled until 1955, the AMBM missionaries were reassured that they were back on the state’s good side. 26 Over the next few months they moved quickly toward the acceptance of subsidies, with final board approval in October 1952 basically a formality. 27
During the missionaries’ June 1952 field council at Kajiji, they found ways to justify their policy about-face as consistent with church–state separation. As a highly educated theologian and respected pastor, the visiting J.B. Toews played a major role in this reframing and in overcoming missionaries’ reluctance. With the “educational question” as the first order of business at the Council, the minutes record the following discussion: [Toews] presented the history and development of the school program for the Congo, from the side of the Government, the Mission’s relationship to the question of a state-subsidized program, and the pros and cons in case we would affiliate with such a program, and that we have to decide now what way we want to take. He closed his comments by saying that he did not see a danger in such an educational program itself, but in the relationship between such an educational program and the indigenous church unless we find a way of making a proper provision. Upon this valuable presentation on this point, the chairman pointed out that we need first of all to determine whether we can find a way to accept the Government Convention for our schools.
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By essentially reframing the problem as one of how to make subsidies work without undermining the separation of church and state, Toews helped to redefine the respective roles of mission, church, and school. The relationship between the mission and the government became a secondary issue as Toews’s presentation focused missionaries’ attention on the relationship between the school and the church. In a resolution passed the next day, the missionaries insisted that “[t]he School, built up according to Government pattern must be a seperate [sic] institute and not a part of the Church.” 29 While this affirmation allowed them to retain the sense that they had not completely given up on their cherished “fundamental principle of the seperation [sic] of state and church,” 30 it essentially meant that the burden of owning and running the schools would fall onto the mission. In this way, missionaries rhetorically exempted the mission from the need to remain disentangled from the state by making “church” apply only to the Congolese believers and not to the missionaries. By legitimizing the acceptance of subsidies on the grounds that the mission was not church, missionaries reconceived their mandate to include the co-management of a massive colonially funded enterprise. At the same time, they side-stepped their own ambiguous ecclesial status, allowing the white separateness of the Belle Vue school to continue unchallenged.
The immediate result of accepting subsidies was a drastic expansion in educational work. Enrollment in subsidized schools sky-rocketed, with 952 students enrolled in 1956 and nearly 10,000 by 1971. 31 Perhaps unsurprisingly, the missionaries’ fears that the subsidized school work would predominate over the development of the local church proved justified. During a 1956 visit to Congo, the home secretary concluded that the “demands of the educational program” had come at a “heavy cost to the major objective: that of evangelism and the building of the indigenous church.” 32 The acceptance of subsidies also laid the groundwork for increased penetration of the Congolese MB churches by the state, in a way that was comparable to the trajectory of other Protestant churches in Congo. Historian Philippe Kabongo-Mbaya has suggested that the eventual development of the Congolese Protestant church into a hierarchical state church, with an almost complete inability to speak out against the dictatorial Mobutu regime, had its roots in the early shift of the Protestants from a marginal to a mainstream position through the acceptance of subsidies (1992: 79–80, 392). The AMBM and the burgeoning Congolese MB church were involved in a progression “from ‘free church’ mission to ‘colonial mission’ to ‘mainline establishment church’” (Shank, 2001: 128), and the decision to accept subsidies was a key factor in launching them onto this trajectory. 33
Conclusion
In this study, I have tried to show how even a mission that strongly emphasized the separation of church and state could still act as a colonizing presence. AMBM’s decision to accept subsidies was the culmination of countless subtle political choices that progressively strengthened and normalized a racially separate ecclesial identity for the missionaries and their children. The institutionalization of separation between missionaries and Congolese was epitomized in the move to create a school for children that would safeguard their white privilege. The missionaries’ realization that they could not enjoy this kind of privilege without accepting the role the state wanted them to play was the tipping point that led them to abandon their earlier caution about an “unholy union” with the state. I found no evidence that AMBM missionaries intentionally set out to create a two-tiered understanding of church or to disavow Christian ideals of the equality of believers. However, in the absence of structures that performed racial equality within the church, their ideal of state–church separation was not enough to allow them to withstand the increasing pressure to collaborate in the legitimization of colonial domination.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Timothy Longman for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.
Funding
I gratefully acknowledge a grant from the Mennonite Brethren Historical Commission for travel to the MB Mission Archives in Fresno, CA in June 2016.