William H. Sheppard: Missionary to the Congo, and Collector of African Art

Abstract

Reverend Dr. William Henry Sheppard was an Afro-American missionary of the Presbyterian Church, South. He distinguished himself, and the Church, through service in the Congo Free State (now Zaire), Africa, from 1890 to 1910. During the first decade of the twentieth century his public image was substantially defined by his militant opposition to cruel and exploitative treatment of peoples in the Kasai District of the Congo by the Kasai Rubber Company (Compagnie du Kasai) during the reign (1865-1909) of King Leopold II of Belgium.' Thus, he emerged, and is still regarded, as an early fighter for African rights.2 However, while in Africa, Sheppard availed himself of opportunities to collect extensively and consistenly African art. More specifically, Sheppard collected the art of the Kuba (formerly Bakuba). Thus, he also emerged as a pioneer collector of this art form. Jan Vansina, historian and anthropologist, in 1978 reinforced Sheppard's pioneer status with this comment: The three great early collections of Kuba art are those of Sheppard (1892), Frobenius (1905), and Torday (1908).4 Although Sheppard achieved national and international repute because of other accomplishments during the 1900s, at that time only peripheral references were made about his extensive collection of Kuba art and artifacts. Throughout the decade, 1900-1910, Sheppard's collection was, then, impressive in terms of size and quality but was rarely mentioned publicly. For many years it was generally unnoticed by most except as an accumulation of souvenirs and curiosities. This essay presents summarily Sheppard's life and missionary activities as these subsume his religious, societal, and political involvements in Africa. These aspects have been chronicled most adequately in other available sources.5 Yet something of these facets of his experiences must be noted, however briefly, because it is difficult to separate the person, the missionary, and his collective African experiences from his role as a collector of African art and artifacts. It is essentially because of the three factors comprising the former that he was able to accomplish the latter. Thus, Sheppard emerged perhaps as one of the earliest known Afro-American collectors of African art. Apart from the historical significance of this activity of Sheppard, the collection, because of its extensiveness and quality, achieved importance also as a substantial cultural and educational resource at a predominantly black American college, Hampton Institute, Virginia.6