"True Lies": American Missionary Sayings in South Africa (1835-1910)

Abstract

The nineteenth-century missionary enterprise in the United States was given an enduring African dimension when six men and their families left for Southern Africa in 1834. Here they succeeded in establishing missions stations along the eastern coastline of Natal, where their main objective was to convert the Zulu king Dingaan and establish self-supporting indigenous churches among his people. Motivated in part by guilt over complicity in slavery, but also by a burning desire to save the heathen world, the missionaries carried with them a view of Africa that would be severely challenged by their new converts. There was a distinct lack of urgency to establish a native ministry, despite the principle of self-government which was consistently upheld as critical for successful missions. Africans were considered to be living in the muck and mire of sin, with no moral backbone, and having no conception of a God. How American missionaries in Africa, then, might have contributed to the mythological world of make-believe that characterized so much of the propaganda of Christian missions is the subject of this article.