Issues In African Mission History

For a long time, African mission history has been equated with the history of Western missionaries on the African continent. However, Christian mission in Africa was never an exclusively Western enterprise. On the contrary, as Blessing Chishanu and Thorsten Prill in their articles on African Initiated Churches and African pioneer missionaries show, African Christians made significant contributions to the growth of the African church. That Western missionaries even hindered that kind of growth at times is demonstrated by Anthony Brendell who compares the approaches of two European mission societies. While the Finnish Missionary Society that worked among the Ovambo people in the north of Namibia fostered indigenous church leadership, the majority of Rhenish missionaries from Germany struggled to transfer the work to Herero, Nama and Baster Christians in the central and southern parts of the country. The same kind of ambivalence can be seen in the treatment of African women by Western Protestant missionaries in Southern Africa. Thorsten Prill shows that the role missionaries played as catalysts for the liberation of African women was rather complex. Some missionaries played their part in the subordination of women. Others, however, promoted gender equality by providing refuge, education and opportunities for African women to become decision-makers and agents of change. In his final article, Thorsten Prill identifies both the lack of cross-cultural training and first-hand cross-cultural experience as the main reasons for the mistakes many Protestant missionaries made in Africa in the second half of the 19th century. Because of their deficiencies in cultural intelligence missionaries underestimated cultural barriers which resulted in misunderstanding and miscommunication between them and the indigenous African population.