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Church, State, and “Native Liberty” in the Belgian Congo
Abstract
This essay describes a religious freedom controversy that developed between the world wars in the Belgian colony of the Congo, where Protestant missionaries complained that Catholic priests were abusing Congolese Protestants and that the Belgian government favored the Catholics. The history of this campaign demonstrates how humanitarian discourses of religious freedom—and with them competing configurations of church and state—took shape in colonial contexts. From the beginnings of the European scramble for Africa, Protestant and Catholic missionaries had helped formulate the “civilizing” mission and the humanitarian policies—against slavery, for free trade, and for religious freedom—that served to justify the European and U.S. empires of the time. Protestant missionaries in the Congo challenged the privileges granted to Catholic institutions by appealing to religious freedom guarantees in colonial and international law. In response, Belgian authorities and Catholic missionaries elaborated a church-state arrangement that limited “foreign” missions in the name of Belgian national unity. Both groups, however, rejected Native Congolese religious movements—which refused the authority of the colonial church(es) along with the colonial state—as “political” and so beyond the bounds of legitimate “religion.” Our analysis shows how competing configurations of church and state emerged dialogically in this colonial context and how alternative Congolese movements ultimately challenged Belgian colonial rule.
Missionaries played a central role in the colonial system in Congo – they were a key part of the well-known triad consisting of state, church, and corporations. During the Belgian Congo period (1908–1960), missionaries of diverse congregations were in charge of health care and education, and their religious services were the only ones officially recognized. Narratives have strongly shaped how these missionaries operated. One could even say that the conversion and missionary narrative define what it means to set up a successful ‘mission’. In my contribution, I explore how these narratives surface in two novels written in the two decades after Congo’s Independence in 1960. Entre les eaux (1973) by V.Y. Mudimbe and Het stigma (1970) by Jacques Bergeyck both refer to the missionary activities in mid-century Congo but their use of the conversion and missionary narrative complicates the common-sense understanding of them. By comparing a Flemish and a Congolese novel, this article aims to decentre the Flemish literary world as the locus where these narratives gain their meaning. By taking a more transnational, multilingual context as a starting point, it wants to shed new light on the ways in which the European missionary presence in Congo has been imagined.
This chapter contains short descriptions of topics that have been peripheral to or entirely absent from Global Christianity scholarship, along with suggestions that could frame their inclusion within the literature. These topics include religious freedom, violence and persecution, failure and decline, power imbalances, and Catholicism and Orthodoxy.
The study of Global Christianity is tightly woven with the history of the modern missionary movement. This movement is generally traced to the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century expansion of Protestant voluntary societies, which were convened for the purpose of sending missionaries from the United States and Western Europe to convert non-Christians both at home and abroad. These developments were inseparable from the expansion of Western imperialism and colonialism, especially in the contexts of Africa, Asia, and the Pacific Islands. The theme of missions should not be understood exclusively as a preoccupation with its Western expressions. Indigenous and Native converts also took up these convictions, serving as translators, cultural experts and mediators, and themselves as missionaries and evangelists. Additionally, the field of Global Christianity coalesced in an era of decolonization in which the presence of Western-funded missionaries was falling out of favor with many indigenous church leaders, who felt that their presence and the continued paternalism they represented inhibited churches from finding their own footing, yet global missionary work has endured in many forms. Many Western missionary agencies, which tend to have greater access to material resources, have long debated what missionary work should entail or prioritize. The expansion of faith-based non-profit organizations and short-term missions are important elements of the global outreach of many churches and Christians. Additionally, ideas of “partnership” and being “missional” are ways that some Western missionaries have sought to account for power imbalances.
The history of religious missions and the provisioning of western medical care in the region that was known as the Congo Free State and later the Belgian Congo reveals the complicated dynamics between competing religious missions vis à vis the Belgian colonial state. This essay highlights divisions between identities and purposes of different religious groups in medical care provisioning, focusing on the divide between the Catholic and Protestant churches. Because most Protestant missions in the Congo were American or British, the medical care provided by the Protestant church was outside of, and sometimes at odds with, the Belgian colonial state until the 1920s. In contrast, the Catholic Church served in an auxiliary role in the colonial state's medical infrastructure. This was not an ideal situation, leading Catholic leaders to attempt to rework the church's role in medical provisioning. Ultimately, mission, medicine, and empire were not always comfortable bedfellows.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Congolese pastor Jean Bokeleale’s church union movement divided US Protestant missionaries. Bokeleale’s goal of uniting all Congolese Protestant churches was sanctioned by Congolese leader Mobutu Sese Seko, and Bokeleale relied on cultural nationalist arguments to criticize missionaries who opposed his aims. Liberal missionaries gave financial assistance to Bokeleale and criticized evangelicals opposed to church union. Evangelical missionaries denounced Bokeleale as a demagogue, similar to Western criticism of Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba. This essay examines how missionary discussion of Bokeleale reveals debates over the role of missionaries in an independent Congo.
There is now a burgeoning scholarship at the intersection of new imperialism and the history of humanitarianism. Scholars have not only pointed to the continuing need to historicise humanitarian developments, but, importantly, argued for more consideration of humanitarian developments outside of Europe and the “Third World.”1 As Alan Lester and Fae Dussart have recently argued, we must reassess entrenched understandings of the development of humanitarianism as originating from an “anti-slavery mother” and “European battlefield father,” especially in the “light of trans-imperial governmental experiments in violently colonised settler colonial spaces.”2 The diverse forms of imperial humanitarian history, and their entanglements with violence in colonised regions such as Australia, New Zealand, North America, India and the Pacific, demand attention.
This special collection takes up this challenge to consider the diverse and contested relationship between humanitarianism and violence in the Anglophone colonies, and the experiences and impact of humanitarians from the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries who sought to ameliorate various forms of colonial violence, advocate for non-violence and/or engage in anticolonial and humanitarian activities. We are particularly interested in exploring the various conceptualisations of colonial conflict by humanitarians: their written accounts “on the ground” and assessments of both epistemological and physical violence; their appeals, strategies and interventions to arrest violence and protect suffering subjects; the local and transnational protests against violence; the politics of witnessing; and the economies of affect and sentiment, and narratives of humanitarianism and violence that circulated with personnel and though text within imperial networks. Interrogated here too are the ways that humanitarians, protectors and others could simultaneously be implicated in or oversee various forms of violence; indeed, the refutation of outright conflict or brutality could sometimes lead to other forms of harm and organised coercion of colonised, unfree and convicted peoples alike. Early cross-cultural contact resulted in explicit and undeniable physical conflict and indeed acts of colonial terror, associated with the classic frontier of European invasion, but a consequence of colonial state formation and the extension of European-style laws and other “civilising” regimes was that while violent interpersonal conflict may have subsided (or have been more easily hidden), methods for identifying, representing and managing Indigenous and unfree populations rose with the development of colonial state infrastructure. Over time, such tensions only increased in many colonial cultures. These forms of social management, which may be described as infrastructural or bureaucratic violence, could have highly destructive effects upon Indigenous communities, even if the everyday practices of protection and surveillance were apparently benevolent in intention.3
“The history of humanitarianism importantly is also the history of those who suffer,” writes Michelle Tusan. Crucially important, therefore, are the experiences of humanitarianism’s recipients—Indigenous peoples, enslaved and convicted peoples, and other unfree labourers—and their political engagement with or refutations of colonial humanitarian endeavours. Scholarship which posits humanitarianism as a unilinear, beneficent alleviation of the suffering of its putative objects can also be delimited. As Tusan remarks, comprehending the humanitarian response to violence, atrocity and genocide “necessarily requires considering the relationships of power that inevitably shadow any thinking about intervention on behalf of persecuted populations.”4 In analysing these complex imperial and multidirectional power relations, we seek to foreground subversions of power on the ground and also the ways that the precepts and rhetoric of liberal humanitarianism might be received and actively reworked by colonised peoples. Further, as Sean Scalmer’s essay in this collection shows, such discourses could be effectively harnessed to anticolonial struggle, despite the implicit limits and disjuctures of an imperial humanitarian discourse of nonviolence.5
For well over three decades, a growing body of scholarship on the Australian and New Zealand colonies and humanitarianism in general has studied the varied forms of humanitarian history and their multivalent entanglements with violence in colonised regions.6 Work on humanitarianism and missionaries across settler colonies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is particularly notable.7 Nevertheless, “humanitarianism” as an area of scholarly engagement has often tended to gloss over historical, political and spiritual specificities. Until recently, the particular entanglements of humanitarianism and colonial governance and the question of violence and...
Explorers and ethnographers in Africa during the period of colonial expansion are usually assumed to have been guided by rational aims such as the desire for scientific knowledge, fame, or financial gain. This book, the culmination of many years of research on nineteenth-century exploration in Central Africa, provides a new view of those early European explorers and their encounters with Africans. It shows that explorers were far from rational—often meeting their hosts in extraordinary states influenced by opiates, alcohol, sex, fever, fatigue, and violence. The book presents little-known source material, and points to its implications for our understanding of the beginnings of modern colonization. At the same time, it makes a contribution to current debates about the intellectual origins and nature of anthropological inquiry. Drawing on travel accounts—most of them Belgian and German—published between 1878 and the start of World War I, the book describes encounters between European travelers and the Africans they met. It argues that the loss of control experienced by these early travelers actually served to enhance cross-cultural understanding, allowing the foreigners to make sense of strange facts and customs.
This book looks at the origins, meaning, and uses of Conjure—the African American tradition of healing and harming that evolved from African, European, and American elements—from the slavery period to well into the twentieth century. Illuminating a world that is dimly understood by both scholars and the general public, the author describes Conjure and other related traditions, such as Hoodoo and Rootworking, in a detailed history which presents the voices and experiences of African Americans and shows how magic has informed their culture. Focusing on the relationship between Conjure and Christianity, she shows how these seemingly contradictory traditions have worked together in a complex and complementary fashion to provide spiritual empowerment for African Americans, both slave and free, living in white America. As she explores the role of Conjure for African Americans and looks at the transformations of Conjure over time, the author also rewrites the dichotomy between magic and religion. With its analysis of an often misunderstood tradition, the book helps to explain the myriad dimensions of human spirituality.
In 1812, eight American missionaries, under the direction of the recently formed American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, sailed from the United States to South Asia. The reason for the voyage was to take part in the Protestant conversion of the entire world. Over the next several decades, these men and women were joined by hundreds more American missionaries at stations all over the globe. This book shows the surprising extent of the early missionary impulse and demonstrates that American evangelical Protestants of the early nineteenth century were motivated by Christian imperialism—an understanding of international relations that asserted the duty of supposedly Christian nations, such as the United States and Britain, to use their colonial and commercial power to spread Christianity. In describing how American missionaries interacted with a range of foreign locations and imperial contexts, the book provides a new perspective on how Americans thought of their country's role in the world. While in the early republican period many were engaged in territorial expansion in the west, missionary supporters looked east and across the seas toward Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. This history of the mission movement reveals that strong Anglo-American and global connections persisted through the early republic. Considering Britain and its empire to be models for their work, the missionaries of the American Board attempted to convert the globe into the image of Anglo-American civilization.
How should the international community react when a government transgresses humanitarian norms and violates the human rights of its own nationals? And where does the responsibility lie to protect people from such acts of violation? In a profound new study, Fabian Klose unites a team of leading scholars to investigate some of the most complex and controversial debates regarding the legitimacy of protecting humanitarian norms and universal human rights by non-violent and violent means. Charting the development of humanitarian intervention from its origins in the nineteenth century through to the present day, the book surveys the philosophical and legal rationales of enforcing humanitarian norms by military means, and how attitudes to military intervention on humanitarian grounds have changed over the course of three centuries. Drawing from a wide range of disciplines, the authors lend a fresh perspective to contemporary dilemmas using case studies from Europe, the United States, Africa and Asia.
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.
Witchcraft-related violence in Ghana has been the subject of international media attention for decades. In the past few years, increasing interest in the sensational stories of Ghana’s northern witch camps have enthralled readers and elicited furore. While much of this outcry is motivated by concern, it is also greatly misinformed regarding local realities, witchcraft phenomena, and the impact of international interventionism in general, and in Ghana specifically. This paper aims to stress the importance of informed and reflexive engagement with the subject of witchcraft in Ghana and elsewhere. Based in part on my own doctoral research on the subject of witchcraft and witchcraft-related violence in Ghana, this paper stresses the power of language of international actors, looking specifically at the discursive interventions of one non-governmental organization, ActionAid International, that have led the charge against the witch camps in Northern Ghana. This paper concludes that a critical discourse analysis of Action Aid International’s ‘anti-witch camp campaign’ reveals numerous layers of neo-colonial intervention.
Religious freedom is so often presented as a timeless American ideal and an inalienable right, appearing fully formed at the founding of the United States. That is simply not so, Tisa Wenger contends in this sweeping and brilliantly argued book. Instead, American ideas about religious freedom were continually reinvented through a vibrant national discourse--Wenger calls it "religious freedom talk--that cannot possibly be separated from the evolving politics of race and empire. More often than not, Wenger demonstrates, religious freedom talk worked to privilege the dominant white Christian population. At the same time, a diverse array of minority groups at home and colonized people abroad invoked and reinterpreted this ideal to defend themselves and their ways of life. In so doing they posed sharp challenges to the racial and religious exclusions of American life. People of almost every religious stripe have argued, debated, negotiated, and brought into being an ideal called American religious freedom, subtly transforming their own identities and traditions in the process. In a post-9/11 world, Wenger reflects, public attention to religious freedom and its implications is as consequential as it has ever been. © 2017 The University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
Belgium was a major hub for transnational movements. By taking this small and yet significant European country as a focal point, the book critically examines major issues in modern history, including nationalism, colonial expansion, debates on the nature of international relations and campaigns for political and social equality. Now available in paperback, this study explores an age in which many groups and communities - from socialists to scientists - organised themselves across national borders. The timeframe covers the rise of international movements and associations before the First World War, the conflagration of 1914 and the emergence of new actors such as the League of Nations. The book acknowledges the changing framework for transnational activism, including its interplay with domestic politics and international institutions. By tracing international movements and ideas, the book aims to reveal and explain the multifarious and sometimes contradictory nature of internationalism.
The Congo Free State was under the personal rule of King Leopold II of the Belgians from 1885 to 1908. The accolades that attended its founding were soon contested by accusations of brutality, oppression, and murderous misrule, but the controversy, by itself, proved insufficient to prompt changes. Starting in 1896, concerned men and women used public opinion to influence government policy in Britain and the United States to create space for reforming forces in Belgium itself to pry the Congo from Leopold’s grasp and implement reforms. Examining key factors in the successes and failures of a pivotal movement that aided the colonized people of the Congo and broadened the idea of human rights, British Humanitarianism and the Congo Reform Movement provides a valuable update to scholarship on the history of humanitarianism in Africa. The Congo Reform movement built on the institutional experience of overseas humanitarianism, the energy of evangelical political involvement, and innovations in racial, imperial, and nationalist discourse to create political energy. Often portrayed as the efforts of a few key people, especially E.D. Morel, this book demonstrates that the movement increasingly manifested itself as an institutionalized and transnational campaign with support from key government officials that ultimately made a material difference to the lives of the people of the Congo.
Understanding the current civil war in the Congo requires an examination of how the Congo's identity has been imagined over time. Imagining the Congo historicizes and contextualizes the constructions of the Congo's identity in order to analyze the political implications of that identity, looking in detail at four historical periods in which the identity of the Congo was contested, with numerous forces attempting to produce and attach meanings to its territory and people. Dunn looks specifically at how what he calls 'imaginings' of the Congo have allowed the current state of affairs there to develop, but he also looks at the broader conceptual question of how the concept of identity has developed and become important in recent international relations scholarship.
The history and politics of secularism and the public role of religion in France, India, Turkey, and the United States. It interprets the varieties of secularism as a series of evolving and contested processes of defining and remaking religion, rather than a static solution to the challenges posed by religious and political difference. © Linell E. Cady and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, 2010. All rights reserved.
This book provides a detailed account of the negotiation of the European Convention on Human Rights, the major achievement of the Council of Europe, and of its impact on the British Empire in its closing years. The book concentrates on the role of the United Kingdom in the negotiations, and the consequences which followed ratification. To provide the historical context for these negotiations it gives a detailed history of the protection of individual rights in the common law system, and of the rise of the movement for the international protection of human rights. This was largely a product of the Second World War, though having antecedents back in the 16th century and earlier.
While the impact of a colonising metropole on subjected territories has been widely scrutinized, the effect of empire on the colonising country has long been neglected. Recently, many studies have examined the repercussions of their respective empires on colonial powers such as the United Kingdom and France. Belgium and its African empire have been conspicuously absent from this discussion. This book attempts to fill this gap. Belgium and the Congo, 1885–1980 examines the effects of colonialism on the domestic politics, diplomacy and economics of Belgium, from 1880 – when King Leopold II began the country's expansionist enterprises in Africa – to the 1980s, well after the Congo's independence in June of 1960. By examining the colonial impact on its mother country Belgium, this study also contributes to a better understanding of Congo's past and present.
Across Africa, Christianity is thriving in all shapes and sizes. But one particular strain of Christianity prospers more than most - Pentecostalism. Pentecostals believe that everyone can personally receive the gifts of the Holy Spirit, such as prophecy or the ability to speak in tongues. In Africa, this kind of faith, in which the supernatural is a daily presence, is sweeping the continent. Today, about 107 million Africans are Pentecostals - and the numbers continue to rise. This book reviews Pentecostalism in Africa. It shows the amazing diversity of the faith, which flourishes in many different forms in diverse local contexts. While most people believe that Pentecostalism was brought to Africa and imposed on its people by missionaries, the book argues emphatically that this is not the case. Throughout, the book demonstrates that African Pentecostalism is distinctly African in character, not imported from the West. With an even-handed approach, the book presents the religion's many functions in African life. Rather than shying away from controversial issues like the role of money and prosperity in the movement, it describes malpractice when it is observed. The book touches upon the movement's identity, the role of missionaries, media and popular culture, women, ethics, Islam, and immigration.
This book is about the crucial role that black religion has played in the United States as an imagined community or a united nation. The book argues that cultural images and interpretations of African American religion placed an enormous burden on black religious capacities as the source for black contributions to American culture until the 1940s. Attention to black religion as the chief bearer of meaning for black life was also a result of longstanding debates about what constituted the "human person" and an implicit assertion of the intellectual inferiority of peoples of African descent. Intellectual and religious capacities were reshaped and reconceptualized in various crucial historical moments in American history because of real world debates about blacks' place in the nation and continuing discussions about what it meant to be fully human. Only within the last half century has this older paradigm of black religion (and the concomitant assumption of a genetic deficiency in "intelligence") been challenged with any degree of cultural authority. Black innate religiosity had to be denied before sufficient attention could be paid to actual proposals about black equal participation in the nation, though this should not be interpreted as a call for insufficient attention to the role of religion in the lives of African Americans and other ethnic groups.
Since the emergence of religious studies and the social sciences as academic disciplines in the late nineteenth century, the concept of "magic" has played a major role in defining religion and in mediating religion's relation to science. Many of the most important scholars in these disciplines have debated the relation of magic to religion and science, yet traditional efforts to formulate distinctions among these categories have proved notoriously unstable, the subject of repeated critique and deconstruction. The notion of magic has remained stubbornly amorphous. This book seeks to account for the extraordinary vitality of scholarly discourse purporting to define and explain magic despite its failure to do just that. The book argues that the persistence of scholarly debates over magic can best be explained in light of the Western drive to establish and secure distinctive norms for modern identity--norms based on narrow forms of instrumental rationality, industrious labor, rigidly defined sexual roles, and the containment of wayward forms of desire. Magic has served to designate a form of alterity or deviance against which dominant Western notions of appropriate religious piety, legitimate scientific rationality, and orderly social relations are brought into relief. Scholars have found magic an invaluable tool in their efforts to define the appropriate boundaries of religion and science. On a broader level, magical thinking has served as an important foil for modernity itself. Debates over the nature of magic have offered a particularly rich site at which scholars have worked to define and to contest the nature of modernity and norms for life in the modern world. © 2004 by The American Academy of Religion. All rights reserved.
This article investigates the fraught relationship between violence and healing in Central African history. Looking at the case study of one of the largest uprisings in the colonial history of Congo – the Lobutu–Masisi Kitawalist uprising of 1944 – the article asks how the theories of power that animated the uprising might help better illuminate the nature and role of violence not only in the uprising itself but in the broader history of the region. Drawing attention to the centrality of discourses that relate to the moral and immoral use of disembodied spiritual power (
puissance
/
nguvu
/force) in the uprising, the article evokes critical questions about the deeper history of such discourses and the imaginaries and choreographies of violence that accompanied them. Thinking about violence in this way not only breaks down imagined lines between productive and destructive/legitimate and illegitimate violence by highlighting that such distinctions are always contentious and negotiated, but also demonstrates that the theories of power animating such negotiations must be understood not as tangential to the larger anti-colonial political struggle of Bushiri and his followers, but as central to that struggle. Moreover, it paves the way towards thinking about how these same theories of power might animate negotiations of legitimacy in more recent violent contexts in Eastern Congo.
This article explores the history of Kongo female prophets in the colonial-era kingunza (prophetic) movement between 1921 and 1960 in the Lower Congo region of the Democratic Republic of Congo. While much of the literature on the kingunza movement focuses on male prophets, especially Simon Kimbangu, I use multiple sources such as colonial reports, missionary correspondence, and oral interviews of Congolese themselves to show that women also were prominent. I examine particular roles, embodied actions (especially trembling), and deeds that defined a person as a prophet in the Kongo context. A focus on two major spheres of spiritual activity, premonition/divination and healing, reveals that some women were, from a Kongo perspective, considered to be prophets in their own right. This research suggests a need in studies of African religious movements for greater attention to embodiment, an emphasis on the diversity of activities that define religious expression, and refocusing on local prophets.
This article examines the relationships between the Belgian colonial administration, Catholic missionaries, and local African leaders during the early twentieth century in eastern Congo. The article extends the argument that the state was weak by outlining how Belgian rule was shaped by local elites in the first instance. This study also reconsiders the misconception of an all-powerful Catholic Church that grew up in this period. This misunderstanding arose from works by historians that drew more on metropolitan agreements and missionaries’ self-promotion than on local archives. Instead, this article is one of the first studies to use the local archives. It examines the experiences of two Latin missions in the territory of Kongolo, in northern Katanga; the Society of Missionaries of Africa (SMA) and the Holy Ghost Fathers (HGF) and their relationships with local polities. A concordat Leopold II signed with Rome in 1906 may have sped the growth of Catholic out-stations, but both sets of missionaries struggled to expand their congregations in the face of opposition from traditional elites and the pervasive influence of the rural economy. Leaders of the SMA and HGF congregations lacked the personnel and resources needed to impose their agendas in full. The limits of Church and state control in conjunction with the power wielded by local big-men in their dealings with European priests have been greatly understated in the recent literature.
Two conventions tend to shape appraisals of the Belgian Congo and the manner of its decolonisation. The first describes the colonial power structure as an alliance of state, church, and large corporations. ¹ This trinity was ‘not only… a virtually seamless web’, writes Crawford Young, ‘but each component, in its area of activity, was without peer in Africa in the magnitude of its impact’. ² The second convention typically portrays decolonisation as tumultuous, chaotic, bungled, or simply ‘gone awry’. ³ Indeed, the mutiny and secession movements that followed hard upon the proclamation in June 1960 of the Republic of the Congo (renamed Zaïre in October 1971) resulted in the rapid internationalisation of responses to them, thereby demonstrating the fragility of domestic political arrangements.
Growing out of a tradition of charity to one's neighbors or dependents as a religious and social duty, the movement to abolish the slave trade inaugurated British humanitarianism directed to the suffering of distant strangers. Abolitionists saw the world as their responsibility, a perspective carried forward by other groups through the present. The Congo reform movement of 1890-1913 built on Victorian experience and pioneered a more popular and multifaceted overseas humanitarianism. Although historians have not studied Congo reform in the context of humanitarianism, its origins and success lie not only in the work of particular individuals, but in the structure of British voluntary humanitarian associations and in British society. This legacy helps us understand its triumph, with all its flaws, in the context of volunteers' motives, the movement's methods, and its outcomes.
King Leopold II of Belgium, the proprietor or king-sovereign of the Congo Free State from 1885-1908, made a fortune from Congo ivory and rubber. All lands not actively cultivated or inhabited by Africans became Leopold's property, in some places granted to a concession company in exchange for fees and an ownership stake. In remote districts, away from prying eyes, a few Europeans backed by an impressed African army terrorized villages to deliver rubber, provisions, and men. The massive disruption of local society, tendency of the system to encourage violent behavior in the pursuit of profits, and the consequent death toll made the Free State a dramatic and tragic example of colonial exploitation and oppression.1
The movement for reform started when the London-based Aborigines' Protection Society took up the cause. Despite the Society's efforts, the British government would not act. The Foreign Secretary, Lord Lansdowne, was reluctant to interfere in another country's business and felt that no colonial power's hands - even Britain's - were altogether clean. The movement for reform accelerated when E. D. Morel, a shipping clerk, compared the falsified official reports of the Free State with shipping records and rubber sales. Far from being a loss-making enterprise, as Leopold complained, the Free State was reaping a hidden fortune for its proprietor on the scale of £500,000 in a single two-year period (1899-1900), or over £40,000,000 ($70,000,000) in today's money.2 Finding the Free State's imports composed primarily of weapons, Morel concluded that these fortunes were reaped from the coerced labor of unwilling subjects. Morel published his findings, arousing public concern. Information from the Aborigines' Protection Society and Morel, supported by several Chambers of Commerce, led Parliament to pass a unanimous resolution protesting mistreatment of the Congolese as well as Leopold's trading monopoly. As a result, the reluctant Foreign Secretary acceded to the requests of his Congo consul, Roger Casement, for permission to report on the conditions in the interior. Casement's report provoked a public outcry. To sustain the outcry and exert pressure, Morel, Fox Bourne, and businessman John Holt founded the Congo Reform Association in 1903. The campaign spread to include an American Congo Reform Association, reformers in Belgium, and auxiliaries in other countries. By 1906, the new Liberal Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, had committed to reform. Yielding to pressure, King Leopold sold the Congo Free State to Belgium in 1908. Grey and the association labored for four more years to convince Belgium to fix Leopold's system. Finally, in 1913, Grey and the association concluded that Belgium had reformed the administration sufficiently to justify ending the campaign.
The roots of the reform campaign lay in the humanitarian tradition, which had developed over time, as loosely conveyed by the terms charity, philanthropy, and humanitarianism. Some historians use these words interchangeably and others maintain rigid distinctions, but David Owen usefully implies an expanding meaning, reflected in the etymology.3 Charity, the oldest term, reflects Christian principles, while philanthropy (first used in 1623) is not necessarily religious. Humanitarianism first appeared in the 1800s to describe those concerned with the welfare of mankind. In this paper, the shift from charity to philanthropy to humanitarianism means broadening purview and increasing preference for improving the human condition over meeting immediate needs. The...
“Cultural imperialism” has been an influential concept in the representation of the modern Christian missionary movement. This essay calls its usefulness into question and draws on recent work on the cultural dynamics of globalization to propose alternative ways of looking at the role of missions in modern history. The first section of the essay surveys the ways in which the term “cultural imperialism” has been employed in different disciplines, and some of the criticisms made of the term within those disciplines. The second section discusses the application of the cultural imperialism framework to the missionary enterprise, and the related term “colonization of consciousness” used by Jean and John Comaroff in their influential work on British missionaries and the Tswana of southern Africa. The third section looks at the historiography of missions in modern China, showing how deeply the teleological narratives of nationalism and development have marked that historiography. The concluding section argues that the missionary movement must be seen as one element in a globalizing modernity that has altered Western societies as well as non–Western ones in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and that a comparative global approach to the missionary movement can help to illuminate the process of modern cultural globalization.
The Contested History of an American Ideal; citation_author=Wenger
- Freedom
La Méthode d'Evangélisation chez les Non-Civilisés
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The Moral Hazards of Humanitarian Intervention
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La Politique des Missions Protestantes au Congo” (Elisabethville 1929)Google Scholar, Missionary Research Library Pamphlets, UTS (hereafter, MRL Pamphlets, UTS)
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The Ethiopian Movements in South Africa
- Frederick Bridgman