Abstract
Kimberly Hill’s research has brought to light the story of two African-American missionaries who may not be as familiar as the likes of George Liele or Lott Carey, yet their ministry was of great significance. Althea Brown and Alonzo Edmiston “became the African Americans with the longest missions tenure among Southern Presbyterians and two of the few travelers of African descent to interact with the colonial governments in the Congo Free State and the Belgian Congo” (77). While Julia Kellersberger’s hagiographical A Life for the Congo (Revell, 1947) provides the story of the Brown-Edmistons in typical missionary biography fashion, Hill’s book delves more deeply into the missionary work of this couple and its connections to their educational background in historically black colleges and universities.
The book begins with a historical timeline that helps orient the reader to the life and ministry of the Brown-Edmistons in the broader context of African-American and Congolese freedom movements. This timeline is helpful at the beginning of the book, as the core of the text is not organized entirely chronologically. Rather, the two main themes of the book are the educational goals of the Brown-Edmistons (chs. 1–2), followed by a longer section on their specific educational and ministerial strategies (chs. 3–5). The introduction situates the book’s unique contribution in the broader context of biographical literature on the Brown-Edmistons by exploring connections between African-American higher education and missionary activity: “The transnational approach of A Higher Mission helps recover the historical memory of historically-black college and university (HBCU) alumni and students who contributed to the mission movement and helped shape colonial policy” (3). While the reader may have been better served with more front-loaded biographical information on this missionary couple, the introduction helpfully situates their ministry in the transnational dynamics of Congolese resistance to Belgian colonialism, as well as the climate of African-American higher education.
The first chapter outlines the influence on the Brown-Edmistons of leaders such as William Henry Sheppard, who founded the American Presbyterian Congo Mission and who deployed educational tactics from his Hampton Institute alma mater. The theme of the African mission field as “home” for African-American missionaries to escape the terrors of US Jim Crow is an organizing theme for the first chapter. The Brown-Edmistons served in Sheppard’s predominately African-American Ibanche mission station in the Congo and built their own home modeled after Fisk’s Jubilee Hall. The theme of home would be contested as the Brown-Edmistons witnessed the destruction of the mission station by the nearby Kuba Kingdom as an act of colonial resistance. The Brown-Edmistons responded to such colonial tensions with a blend of aspirations of American exceptionalism and an acknowledgment of the importance of local Kuba traditions in their missionary work. Chapter 2 starts again from the beginning and provides an overview of the Brown-Edmistons missionary work, with a focus on their managerial practices. African-American missionaries initially experienced resistance from the Executive Committee on Foreign Missions, based in large part on their having been educated at Fisk University. All the same, the Brown-Edmistons were allowed to return to the Congo after furlough and aided the colonial government in establishing cotton fields among indigenous Kasai lands. Alonzo Edmiston administered travel “permits” to indigenous residents and served as mediator for local conflicts, all of which “involved an essential aspect of power acquisition for the colonial government” (65). The Brown-Edmistons navigated Belgian colonial practices in Congolese agriculture through various processes of participation and reappropriation. The colonial government often sponsored agricultural exhibitions, which highlighted the allure of colonial participation through a spectacle of material goods that were presented as attainable to participants in the colonial economy. The Brown-Edmistons, however, conducted similar exhibitions with a focus on the crops themselves, thus responding “to the perspectives of local people” (75).
In the book’s third chapter the goal of demonstrating the connections between HBCU educational approaches and the missionary strategies of the Brown-Edmistons is realized. Hill outlines how the Brown-Edmistons’ interdisciplinary approach (combining agriculture, classics, and theology), the students’ daily schedule, and student self-support through noncash crops were influences of the couple’s training in various HBCUs. Although the agricultural college run by the Brown-Edmistons eventually closed because of financial difficulties, it represented “a highlight in the careers of both Alonzo Edmiston and Althea Brown because it embodied their different academic ideals and experiences within a single institution” (102). The connection between missions and HBCU dwindles a bit in the fourth chapter, which outlines ways in which the Brown-Edmistons—and African-American missionaries more broadly—adapted and adopted notions of family and communal identity in Congolese mission. Rather, the strategies for negotiating traditional African religion are compared to those of later African theologians such as John Mbiti and Mercy Amba Oduyoye. At the end of the chapter, however, Hill highlights the Ibanche Mission’s gospel choir, modeled after the renowned Jubilee Singers of Fisk.
The fifth chapter explores the manner in which the authority of the Brown-Edmistons was challenged and reinforced during their final years of missionary work by authorities among colonial, US missionary, and indigenous Congolese contexts. The authority of the Brown-Edmistons was disregarded in matters of protection for indigenous Congolese from abuse from Belgian colonists. Indeed, one of the most poignant examples of the complicated ways the Brown-Edmistons responded to African and African-American freedom struggles was the mandate from their white superiors in the Presbyterian mission that they cancel their subscription to the Chicago Defender for its association with the civil rights movement. Following a brief conclusion, several appendixes offer transcriptions of letters by Alonzo Brown and the family’s colleagues. More engagement with primary literature from the Brown-Edmistons throughout the book would have helped keep these figures centered. However, A Higher Mission offers an invaluable study not only into the lives of the Brown-Edmistons but also into transnational connections in black religious and educational institutions.