The "Native" Missionary, the African Novel, and In-between

Abstract

In black Africa, as in the rest of the ex-colonial world, the expansion of European colonial interests was accompanied by the spread of Christianity and Western letters. Important to this process are the contributions of missionaries who introduced Western churches, schools, and ideas to the African populations amongst whom they worked. Like all contexts of religious conversion, the embrace of Christianity by indigenous Africans inevitably comes with complications of cultural identity, epistemology, and political alignments. If the African religious conversion was to generate unprecedented complications and ironies in traditional society as a whole, the ambivalent location of the black subjects who aided the missionary organizations-the native African or foreign-born figures from the New World-adds an entire new layer to the inevitable complications of cultural imperialism and religious conversion. Over the years, Africanist historians have extensively discussed this process, demonstrating its roots in a complex interplay of trends in Western Europe, the Americas, and black Africa.' That the arrival of Christianity and literacy is an integral part.of moder African cultural and intellectual history goes without saying. And yet, in the disciplinary context of the criticism of anglophone African literature, the conceptual implications of Africans' considerable role in Christian evangelism has not been given the attention it deserves. In the wake of current work like Simon Gikandi's annotation and republication of Ham Mukasa's Uganda's Katikiro in England (a 1904 travelogue of a visit to England by Ham Mukasa, an early Christian convert in Uganda) or V.Y. Mudimbe's The Invention of Africa, this aspect of the historicity of African letters appears to be getting more attention. With the emergence of an interdisciplinary dimension in postcolonial studies, as well as the genealogical excavation of the discourses that have over the years sought to get a handle on Africa as land and concept (see Mudimbe and Fabian), worthwhile questions will emerge on the ambiguous place of native missionaries in African writing. In what follows, my aim is to suggest two related claims. First, to appreciate fully the historicity and conceptual implications of anglophone African literature, it is helpful to engage very directly the native Christian missionaries and converts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; and second, such a recovery not only sheds greater light on the body of literary texts we read and teach as "African literature"; it also adds a unique inflection to ongoing discussion, in postcolonial theory, of issues of hybridity, diasporic identity, and social agency. The figures and geographical setting upon which rests my discussion of Christian evangelicalism and its bearing on contemporary black African writing belong in the national-juridical entity that came to be called Nigeria. However,