Discourses of Indigenous Christian Elites in Colonial Societies in Asia and Africa around 1900: A Documentary Sourcebook from Selected Journals, edited by Klaus Koschorke et al.

Abstract

For the period covered by the Sourcebook (effectively, 1885–1915), a good research library in Europe or North America will house at least a few missionary periodicals from the global South; of course, more in the digital age will be available online, making it relatively easy to read up on what it was that missionaries wanted the world to know about their work abroad. Whether they be British Anglican, American Presbyterian, or of some other denomination, home societies promoted missions through the mass distribution of foreign “intelligence” and news from the field. While it was occasionally possible to discern the voices of indigenous Christians between the lines, it was generally true that global South Christians had a hard time being heard in the missionary press.Thanks to the assiduous efforts of the chief editor, Klaus Koschorke, widely known for his advocacy of “polycentricity” as a decentered and less Eurocentric way of charting Christianity’s diffusion globally, and his team of specialist collaborators (Adrian Hermann, E. Phuti Mogase, and Ciprian Burlacioiu), we now have access to a variety of extramissionary periodicals initiated by indigenous Christians in South Asia (India), Africa (South Africa and West Africa), and Asia (the Philippines). While there are fewer than ten such periodicals, the coverage is extensive and organized by means of a helpful topical grid. Until such periodicals and others are digitized in a searchable database by the British Library or commercial providers like Proquest, this is as convenient as documentation without an index is ever going to get. As such, the volume is a welcome addition to Koschorke’s series, Documents on the History of Christianity in Asia, Africa and Latin America.In an era of world Christianity when scholarship tends to focus on disprivileged groups at the outer edges of society—due, say, to their caste or class or race or gender—the Sourcebook unabashedly amplifies the voices of a church cohort somehow perceived as “elite.” And while the qualifying criteria for meriting such a status could have been spelled out more clearly (given that perception is, of course, perspectival), it was perhaps unavoidable that such a volume would restrict itself to periodicals in the colonial lingua franca of the time (English for India, South Africa, and West Africa; Spanish for the Philippines) used in mission schools. There, graduates mastered new genres of writing, including periodicals of the kind that missionaries themselves wrote for and read, the difference being that now the voices were their own—uncensored. One might hope, as I do, that the periodicals being published concurrently in indigenous languages by traditional “elites” (the bilingual Tamil/English Morning Star, for instance, continuously published since the 1840s from Jaffna, Sri Lanka) will also find a place in a sourcebook similar to Koschorke’s. That, of course, would be a gargantuan translation project, and different from the one under review.Within its limitations, the Sourcebook opens a window widely onto the intrachurch and public square debates of a geographically diverse cohort of articulate Christians. Their aspirations (for political and ecclesiological equality, chiefly) and their vexations (mainly, but not exclusively, the racist attitudes of their missionary “superiors”) are indeed vocalized. On a whole host of collateral concerns having to do with gendered practices and the perceived clash between “tradition” and “modernity,” from marriage practices (monogamy versus polygamy, dowry versus bride-wealth) to the promotion of women’s education, one can squeeze out a great deal of fine-grained detail from the Sourcebook’s selection of periodicals.All in all, Koschorke and his collaborators brilliantly succeed in buttressing the argument for polycentricity, which necessarily entails the emergence of a “transregional ‘indigenous Christian public sphere’” (19), thus subverting the axiom that all change worth our time was missionary-initiated, North to South, instead of also South to South. Its chronological aperture may be small, but the slice of time it opens up was hardly insignificant, starting with the nascent independence struggles that colonial-era Christians endorsed and envisioned through the medium of print and ending with the global turmoil of WWI. Of the ever-widening webs of inter-Christian, global South connectivity, Koschorke rightly observes that “Africa could serve as a model for Asia” and “Asia for Africa” (19). Indian readers, for instance, yearned for bishops of their own like the Niger Delta Diocese’s Samuel Ajayi Crowther, while African readers were inspired by reading about India’s Pandita Ramabai and Japan’s Uchimura Kanzo, among other contemporaneous exemplars of faith. Overall, the Sourcebook gets us a step closer to its stated goal, that of liberating world Christianity from its captivity to Euro-dominated missionary-cum-colonial print material.