The role of space and aesthetics in directing and reinforcing human agency: organizing space in a Protestant mission station in colonial Congo

Abstract

This chapter analyses the work of Swedish Protestant missionaries at their mission stations in the Lower Congo 1881–1924. In its very essence, Christian mission in the European colonies in Africa was a method to reconfigure human desire, human agency, and human subjectivity through the reorganization of space. The Swedish missionaries’ explicit ambition was to change the “human nature” of the Congolese proselytes. They did that through buying Congolese slave children and nurturing them in orphanages and schools and through vocational training and church activities. The mission station was both a disciplinary unit (using spatial restriction to influence human agency) and a biopolitical unit (using incentives and rewards to influence human agency). Positioning itself within organization studies, this chapter shows how the dialectical relation between space (physical, social, and mental) and human agency constitutes the mission as a social phenomenon.