PUBLIC LECTURE: Ethnography, Collecting and Photography: Missionaries and Africans in the Making of Colonial Knowledge

Abstract: Over the past three decades the figure of the missionary has been neglected in scholarship on African Christianity. The historical and anthropological study of African Christianity has flourished, enabled by some of the best sources for African research and driven by lively historiographical debates but it has become increasingly unfashionable to make missionaries the explicit object of study. Nationalist and Africanist historiography cast them as cultural imperialists, the heroes of a discredited colonial historiography. Moreover, by reading missionary sources in combination with oral history historians and anthropologists realised that the real agents of Africa’s Christianisation were Africans: evangelists, catechists, teachers and Bible women.

In this lecture, David Maxwell will seek to re-locate missionaries within the historiography of African Christianity, and more broadly within the history of empire by arguing that they were significant agents in the creation of colonial knowledge. Whilst missionaries often simply facilitated evangelism, leaving most of the work to indigenous agents, they were enormously important as ethnographers, collectors, photographers, cartographers and linguists. But even so called ‘colonial science’ was shaped by local actors. Translators, porters, research assistants, ritual specialists and ‘men of memory’ all made a contribution. Through a case study focussed on Belgian Congo, he will explore the cultural encounter between missionaries and Africans and begin to delineate ways in which colonial knowledge emerged out of their interaction.



Biographical note: David Maxwell is a Senior Lecturer in History at Keele University, England. His research has focussed on the history of African Christianity, one of the key areas of historiographical debate within African Studies. He has written monographs on the missionary encounter in Zimbabwe and the emergence of more autonomous transnational African Christian movements within Southern Africa. His approach is one of a social historian interested in the complex relations between African traditional religion and Christianity and their social context. Dominant themes in his work have been the relation of Christianity to economic and political change, and its role in the creation of identities of class, gender, generation and ethnicity. He now engaged on a new project on the 20th century missionary movement and the construction of colonial knowledge. His intention is to address gaps in the understanding of mission work in colonial Africa through a biography of a missionary ethnographer and collector who worked in Belgian Congo. He is particularly interested in the African contribution to ethnographic research. He has spent a good deal of time, almost five years, living and working in Africa, principally Zimbabwe, but also South Africa and Mozambique

The African Studies Association, UK, awarded him the Audrey Richards Prize for Best African Studies Thesis 1994-96 for his Oxford University doctoral dissertation. He has secured a number of major research grants and awards from British and American institutions: the Economic and Social Research Council; the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation; the Rockefeller Foundation and the Nuffield Foundation. He has published widely in journals such as The Journal of African History; Africa; The Journal of Southern African Studies, Comparative Studies in Society and History. He was Senior Editor of the Journal of Religion in Africa 1998-2005. He was the Vice-Chairman of the Britain-Zimbabwe Society.

David Maxwell is a 2006 Fred Alexander Fellow, UWA.

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