THE role of missionaries in colonisation was considerable in terms of cultural and political domination of the African people.
Although the missionaries’ task was to make people accept the Bible and its teachings, Christianity was turned into an ideology used to convince people to embrace white domination.
Religion was also used by whites to legitimise, sustain and promote tyranny and oppression.
Regardless of claims that missionaries regarded themselves as opposed to the colonial ideology, they were part of the colonisation process and brought with them religions, beliefs and practices which were alien to Africans.
In the words of Father Wolf Schmidt: “The early missionaries did not differentiate between their faith and their own culture.”
Christianity was introduced in North Africa as early as the First Century AD, but it was only in the late 19th Century, when colonialism was advancing, that Christianity seriously increased its presence in Africa.
In what later became Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, the first mission station was opened at Inyathi, close to Bulawayo, in 1859 by the London Missionary Society through Reverend Robert Moffat.
There may have been many reasons for missionaries to travel to Africa, but as remarked by some theologians: “The community culture of Africa fascinated the European missionaries who came from individualistic cultures.”
They remarked that the introduction of Christianity made the mistake of believing that to become a Christian, people had to be ‘removed from their indigenous cultures’.
African religions were treated as an evil that had to be crushed.
This can be seen in the following quotation: “Once their children have gone to school, they begin to show interest in the strange religion of the white missionaries, religion which denies the truth of tribal religious beliefs.”
It was frequently believed by Western missionaries that traditional religious beliefs and practices were inferior and traditional customs had to be done away with before the acceptance of Christianity.
For example, David Livingstone was the best known Protestant missionary in Africa.
Despite criticism of him being more of an explorer than a missionary, he directly started the evangelisation of today’s Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi.
He was found dead in his camp, bent over his bed in prayer.
He saw himself as a ‘servant to Africa’ and respected the local people as ‘capable of holding an honourable rank in the family of man’.
From them, he secured much goodwill towards Europeans.
Because of his ‘friendliness’ towards Africans, Livingstone became the ideal missionary to English-speaking people.
As to his involvement with colonialism, it is evident that he contributed to it by his explorations.
Other early European explorers, such as Portuguese Diego Cam or Vasco Da Gama or even the Arabs with their Moslem faith, had some missionary’s zeal in them.
Their core business was initially centred on Biblical gospel message of the New Testament as found in St Mark 16 verse 5: “Go ye to the entire world, baptising all men in the name of Jesus Christ.”
It was this social-religious gospel of the 19th Century that drove hundreds of Christian missionaries from Europe to Africa to evangelise the Africans or pagans and win them over to the salvation of the Kingdom of God.
It was the Kingdom of God, through their spiritual conviction rather than tangible experience of the Kingdom of God.
Whereas this Christian interpretation of missionaries is generally acceptable, there is, however, another interpretation of missionary activity and missionaries that needs to be looked at closely.
It is important from the onset to make clear distinction between Christian missionary activities centred on their original mandate to preach and spread the gospel and the actual missionary activities on the ground.
The missionaries affected the interactive process of human endeavor in sub-Saharan Africa.
The continent had its own people with their own way of life.
The African was a living entity with his/her own philosophy of life.
The missionary was undoubtedly the fore-runner or front-runner of subsequent infiltration by the colonialist who was eager to carve an empire in Africa for purposes of exploiting African resources for his own good.
In consideration of their element of exploiting African resources, the early religious missionaries were to open up Africa for more secular missionaries whose travels to other countries was not the Bible, but other documents of conquest such as dubious treaties, guns and trinkets to lure the unsuspecting African.
Missionaries often aligned themselves with the powerful in order to achieve their prime objective of ‘saving souls’ more rapidly.
It is these missionaries who prepared the ground for later waves of colonial agents such as Cecil John Rhodes in Southern Africa.
Norman Hetherington in Mission and Empire quotes a chaplain of British East India Company who traded with India and the rest of East Asia as saying: “We’ve annihilated the political importance of the natives, stripped them of their power and laid them prostrate, without giving them anything in return.”
The British East India Company being a purely trading company in spices and other commodities had in its midst a ‘missionary’ operating as a chaplain who had no interest in the welfare of the inhabitants within whom he operated.
His motive was to strip the native of his power and lay him prostrate for exploitation.
Using what has been termed ‘soft power’, missionaries were useful in reconciling colonial subjects to submission to the colonial power.
Some theological studies on the means to success in world politics show how missionaries, by the use of less aggressive language, were able to solicit and obtain the co-operation of Africans in sub-Saharan Africa more readily.
It is this ‘soft power’ which works through attraction and co-option which has largely been used, even within the United Nations machinery, to effect seemingly attractive provisions given by the missionaries.
Although it is generally acceptable that missionaries were the forerunners of colonial imperialists, it is worth noting that not all missionaries subscribed wholly to the onslaught of Africans.
Catholic missionaries were, to a large extent, not the servants of the colonial powers as were many Protestant missionaries who were hardly at odds with the colonial power.
According to A History of Christianity in Africa from Antiquity to the Present by Elizabeth Isichel: “The clergy did more harm than good to the progress of Christianity among the Kongo.
“Most of them spent more time in trade and connived in or participated in the slave trade.”
The missionaries hardly owned up to such sinister activities.
It is justifiable to argue that the scramble for Africa and in Africa was exacerbated by missionaries’ activities.
The competition between Catholic and Protestant prepared the groundwork upon which European cultural ambitions against indigenous people found root.
This intended then, and subsequently, to entrench both moral and religious superiority of their own European faith and culture over tribal cultures and to implant in indigenous people a high level of inferiority complexes.
This stunted creativity among Africans.
Colonial oppression and injustice were so insidious and persuasive that even independent African governments have fallen prey to the belief that African indigenous people cannot chart their own destiny without the blessing of Europeans.