Hunting, Planting and Malaria: How Cameroonian Ecosystems Changed the Basel Missionaries’ Worldviews

Abstract

How did the land change the missionary? Almost all early missionaries, sent by the Basel Mission to the African colony Kamerun of the German Empire, died of malaria ( Klimafieber). On the fourth day after arrival in 1886 the first missionary died. In any case, Cameroonian ecosystems reshaped the self-conception and worldviews of missionaries. They used hunter's language, romanticised and conquered the land and its imagined virgin forests; Basel missionaries became strangers to themselves – involved in plantation policy, violent against, but at the same time absolutely dependent on, the local population. Most anthropological or historical studies on the Basel Mission and other Protestant missions in Cameroon focus on politics, economics, education and how the missionaries did change the land. However, how African agency influenced missionaries’ perspectives and activities is rarely acknowledged or discussed, which has so far limited historiographical works to a humanocentric understanding of mission. The article explores how the worldviews of the missionaries (especially Friedrich Autenrieth, Paul Steiner and Heinrich Norden) were challenged by the natural environment. In particular, it investigates how concepts of God, mission, culture/nature and human were renegotiated and reshaped while working and travelling the land. This analysis of printed travelogues, novels and articles therefore combines the question of the missionaries’ reactions to climate, disease, fauna, flora and the montane environment with an examination of how these were presented to specific target groups. To concentrate on the agency of African ecosystems consequently decentres the historiography of Christian mission that has separated the human from the non-human agency of nature. 1