Missionary Archives Research Articles

Enhancing access to missionary archives: the role of digital libraries and online repositories

Purpose The purpose of the paper is to explore how digital libraries and online repositories enhance access to missionary archives. It investigates how the digitalization of missionary archives fosters the access, searchability, interactivity, dissemination and preservation of the historical and cultural knowledge of missionary documents and legacies. The selected topic stems from a genuine and deeply ingrained desire and interest to explore the digital archiving landscape, majorly in the context of missionary archives. Design/methodology/approach The study relied heavily on the literature review of the most current scholarly articles. Additionally, the study relied on case studies on missionary institutions and churches that rely on technology to digitize missionary archives and online repositories to make them accessible. Generally, reliance on scholarly articles relevant to the topic was an avenue for examining the existing studies and projects affiliated with digitizing and using missionary archives. Findings Missionary archives and records provide a distinct perspective regarding the realities faced by missionaries and indigenous populations. Digital libraries and online repositories are invaluable and instrumental in improving access to missionary archives. They help users overcome physical barriers while supporting the preservation of fragile materials. Additionally, the digitization efforts of various institutions foster the broader dissemination of missionary records. Digital platforms and online repositories foster collaborative research globally in remote settings. Online repositories are instrumental in enhancing access to missionary archives. They achieve this by providing centralized access points to digitalized collections of historical documents, photographs, manuscripts and artifact. Major challenges include substantial costs affiliated with digitization, environmental factors heightening degradation of the original materials and intellectual property dictations and copyright. Originality/value By using scholarly and authoritative sources of information and evidence, the study contributes to the existing literature by providing insights into the instrumentalism of digital libraries and online repositories to enhance access to missionary archives. There should be comprehensive digitization, adherence to preservation standards, commitment to stakeholder engagement and collaborative decision-making.

Zooming In

At the heart of this article is the presence of Indigenous children in photographs of explorative travels taken by Dutch Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Netherlands New Guinea (present-day West Papua, Indonesia) in the early twentieth century. Departing from the hypothesis that the children may have been guiding the missionaries, this research studies if and how young West Papuans acted as ‘local intermediaries’ in the early years of colonial settlement. ‘Zooming in’ on engagements between missionaries and children in both visual and textual sources, two paradoxical aspects of Indigenous children in missionary archives are grappled with: their centrality as objects of civilising practices on the one hand, and their marginalisation as historical subjects in colonial textual practices on the other. The visual and textual are brought in conversation: the active presence of children as individual historical actors participating in processes of colonisation in the photographs helps to see children and their actions in ‘still’ discourse, to contextualise captured instances in time and space. This shows how and when missionaries depended on the knowledge, skills, and networks of local children to introduce them to their new working ground. This article thus adds to the existing body of literature on colonial intermediaries, in which young people constitute an overlooked group, and to complement understandings of non-elite colonial childhoods of Indigenous children outside of familial or institutional contexts.

MANUSCRIPT XLI: Papeiha, E tuatua no te taeanga mai o te tuatua na te atua ki Rarotonga nei (An Account of the Coming of the Word of God to Rarotonga), c. 1830

ABSTRACT Papeiha’s manuscript, which Mata Tumu-Makara introduces, translates, and annotates, is a historically important example of a very early Indigenous Pacific voice in a region where Christianity remains an intensely lived experience for most people. Makara’s work contributes to an understanding of the divergent meanings of ‘mission’ and ‘missionary’ by identifying a critical moment in the contemporary history of evangelism in the Pacific when Maeliau’s prophetic movement challenged established evangelical practices. Although the Deep Sea Canoe has not yet been relaunched from the Cook Islands, Makara’s work makes a major contribution to the focus on the history of Cook Islander missionaries and their families, a theme of the CICC bicentenary celebrations that is celebrated in this special issue of JPH, the CICC Newsletter and the School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS), Special Collections, blog series, Cook Islander missionaries: recovering hidden histories from missionary archives.

Caste, space, and schooling in nineteenth century South India

ABSTRACT This paper examines the spatial and temporal dimensions of varied schooling agendas for poor and oppressed caste children and adults in the princely state of Travancore in nineteenth-century colonial south India. Schools became socially contested and politically charged spaces in which various subaltern castes, particularly the Dalits and Nadars, articulated a new language of social and religious self-fashioning. British Protestant missionaries played a crucial role in provoking these imaginations and yet, the joint workings of caste and racial prejudices resulted in ambivalent cultural encounters in the educational landscape. Caste was central to these contestations and negotiations in making modern child subjectivities and tended to produce new forms of inequality and reproduce existing ones. I argue that schooling campaigns for the poor resulted in the perpetuation of hierarchised, caste-inflected norms of childhood and produced multiple marginal children in local society. This paper draws upon British Protestant missionary archives to highlight the unstable and violent geographies in which children of subaltern castes navigated the sphere of modern schooling in colonial Travancore and the constitutive function of schools in the making of marginal childhoods.

‘Reconstructing babel’: Christian missions and knowledge production in the Middle East, nineteenth-twentieth century

ABSTRACT How was missionary knowledge received and interpreted by scholars and church historians in Europe and Russia? Many late nineteenth and early twentieth-century academics utilised knowledge production from Christian missions, notably by way of scholarly Orientalism. However, the history of this knowledge is also a history of representations: while missionary knowledge helped showcase the cultural and religious traditions of Eastern Christianity, what were the underlying motives and especially the consequences? This article examines the formulation and circulation of Eastern Christian knowledge on either side of the Mediterranean, especially on the basis of Catholic missionary archives and academic productions, the study of which is sometimes rooted in non-Anglophone academic traditions. The aim is to shed light on how knowledge relating to Eastern Christianity was assimilated in Europe, as well as the role missions played in this process, especially from the last third of the nineteenth century, when the institutions and instruments for the circulation of knowledge emerged. Another objective is to address the circulations and transformations of this knowledge on either side of the Mediterranean: collected and developed in major European libraries and universities, it was integrated by the governance structures of churches, but quite often also returned to the space it originated from, where it was reappropriated and gave rise to patrimonial processes, notably alongside the sometimes tragic experiences of certain communities during the end of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of new states. Christian missions, at the intersection of East and West, were at the heart of this dynamic .

Christian Globalism at Home: Child Sponsorship in the United States,

Combing through missionary archives, periodicals, sponsorship cards found in church parlors, visits to the major organizational headquarters of ChildFund, World Vision, Compassion International, and Unbound, as well as a “roving variety” of ethnography (240) with US churches, families, and individuals who sponsor children abroad, Hillary Kaell takes readers on a thorough journey of how two centuries of child sponsorship conjure globalism within American Christianity. The breadth and detail of Kaell’s account is staggering, and yet she is also astutely aware of the borders of her research: with the exception of two “interludes” that reconstruct sponsor duos in the 1840s and 2000s, Kaell otherwise interprets sponsorship from the perspective of those who seek it out, the missionaries, the funders, the churches, and the sponsors in the United States, and how it is they imagine themselves, the nations, and the children they sponsor. Kaell argues that the paradox of immensity and particularity activated in child sponsorship serves to affirm God’s power and cultivate global intimacy. Fittingly, this balance between immensity and particularity is a hallmark of Kaell’s work, too: she brings Christian missions and contemporary Christianity into conversation with sophisticated social-cultural theories of globalization, parsing centuries of history with thoughtful and precise descriptions of sponsorship’s particular participatory techniques.Christian Globalism at Home will have far reach among sociologists, anthropologists, historians, missiologists, and theologians. Because Kaell is not writing a history of child sponsorship (18), the book experiments with structure by exchanging a loose chronology for thematic organization, and interspersing postscripts and the above-mentioned interludes to emphasize the resonance between historical periods, as well as the gaps, time lags, and absences characteristic of global relationships. The theoretical analyses in the first two chapters are particularly poignant: Kaell’s attention to how sentimentality comes to function through the (theological) paradoxes of love and disgust in chapter 1 and how statistics or “big numbers” come to uplift rather than undermine God’s chosen ministry in small sacrifices in sponsorship in chapter 2 thoughtfully reconceptualize Christian globalism born from the early days of Christian missions.Although chapter 3 is meant to serve as a resonant historical linchpin emphasizing the impact of photography and the way it changed the sponsorship game for good, I ultimately found the contemporary postscripts at the ends of chapter 2 and 3, as well as the 1980s quotations at the front of chapter 3 dizzying, especially as chapter 3 then plunges back into the 1880s! In chapter 4, the author’s ethnographic point of view also surfaces quite suddenly: for instance, on p. 123, she mentions laughing when a young adopted adult talks about concern that his mother’s sponsor child could have somehow replaced him, and this detail seems oddly out of place for two reasons. First, it abruptly draws the reader’s attention to the challenging variety of source material seamlessly integrated in the otherwise cohesive narrative. Second, it offers striking alarm to the feat that the text accomplishes so effortlessly throughout, which is the sensitive, respectful treatment of the author’s research subjects as real people, not plot points, in the author’s thorough analysis.Overall, yet another one of Kaell’s strengths is the way in which funders, sponsors, and families are treated as purposeful actors, whose theology is not so much critiqued on its own merit, but further unpacked and explained as it supports and extends the project of Christian globalism into the twenty-first century. Kaell’s ethnographic mastery comes full circle in the final three chapters, which drive home the complexity of relationality, materialism, and audit culture for everyday Americans committed to child sponsorship. The thickness of her ethnographic detail, despite the breadth of her subjects, is highly compelling, especially the second interlude, in which we grasp the challenges and nuances of an over twenty-year sponsorship relationship between Carol, a mother of modest means in Millhouse, Massachusetts, and her sponsor child, Rizal, living in the Philippines. Although World Vision discontinues its sponsorship work in Rizal’s community, a woman Carol meets at church reconnects them through a phone call nearly ten years later, and another decade later, the two send messages over Facebook, uneasily wading through their financial, emotional, and spiritual ties to one another. To Kaell’s credit, I would have loved to read several more chapters on this challenge virtual communication poses to sponsorship and globalism that arises organically in chapters 6 and 7. But I suppose that is yet another credit to this book: it theorizes Christian globalism at home with such richness that we are left wanting for more.

Documenting the Armenian Genocide in Norway: the role of a National Archive in the social life of a collection

ABSTRACT This paper applies the methodological premise of the ‘social life of things’ to give insight into the context and movements of a collection of records found at the Norwegian National Archive, that contribute to the documentation of the Armenian Genocide. A study of the life of this collection tells the story of Norwegian missionaries in the Ottoman Empire in 1915, their witnessing of the Genocide and the subsequent activations of the records. It explores the use and impact of these records in Norway, which have led to international collaborations for the historical memory of Armenia and acknowledgement of the Genocide, taking a different political stand to that of the Norwegian government. Nevertheless, silences have been encoded in the making of the archives, the making of narratives, and at the moment of retrospective significance. It highlights the circumscribing predominance of national narratives to documents and raises questions about the silences in other missionary archives in Norway.

In Search of a Touchable Body: Christian Mission and Dalit Conversions

This paper significantly wishes to unpack the social and cultural impact of the mass religious conversion movements in Rayalaseema society with specific reference to Dalits during the period 1850 to 1880. This paper will use the archival material such as missionary records, magazines, pamphlets, and books written by missionaries; further, it will also utilize oral interviews collected from the field. The mass conversion movements established a relationship between Dalits and missionaries and brought them together. In their efforts to create a new Christian community of Dalit converts, missionaries had interacted with Dalits, shared meal with them, stayed with them and transformed forbidden and “polluted” ghettos into social spaces. The present paper argues that the practices of the missionaries were liberating and humanizing for Dalits. It will examine how these practices led to unintended consequences. It needs to be remembered that the missionaries’ aim was not to abolish caste but to develop Christianity. How did the missionaries contribute to social interaction and build a spirit of solidarity among the Dalit converts? Based on specific situations, incidents, and examples recorded in the missionary archives and oral interviews, the article observes that community conversion movements destabilized the caste structure and brought significant changes in the social life of Dalits in colonial Rayalaseema.

Missionary Archives on Africa: A Fine Grained Understanding

Much historical evidence for the activities and reception of early African converts and indigenous Christian movements is found in the vast corpus of documentation produced and preserved by western missionary societies in Europe. In order to understand the evidence, historians, archivists and librarians do well to comprehend the nature of the sources that they use. In recent years there has been greater attention to archives as collections in order to appreciate the rationale behind historical events, personages and thought. This short essay gives some background to these historiographical issues before examining the outputs of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionaries in order to provide a case-study that may be a useful comparator for similar collections. My reflections emerge from my own research into socio-religious change in East Africa through a biography of a prominent Ugandan clergyman, Apolo Kivebulaya, who worked alongside CMS missionaries from the British Isles.

Missionary Photography: The Liberian Archive of Doctor Georgia Patton

This article focuses on the personal missionary experience of an African American woman physician, Dr Georgia Ester Lee Patton (1864–1900), later known as Georgia Washington. Patton worked in Liberia, a unique setting for missionary activities, being a colony established by former American slaves. The primary resource materials used here are missionary photographic archives, which comprise a distinct category of colonial cultural production. Photography assisted missions in promoting western achievements, disseminating Christianity, and advancing progress, by exposing Africans to western civilization. Such imagery was largely created by European photographers working within the social milieu of missionary organizations. Missionary photographs, therefore, functioned as an official public record of the missionary enterprise; today they are invaluable records of the histories of Christian missions around the globe. Missionary archives exist as both public and private archives. Private archives, as opposed to the images planned for a public audience, were compiled by individual missionaries and intended for private viewings. For this case study I use the private archive Patton compiled after she worked as a medical missionary in Liberia between 1893 and 1895. Patton later returned to Tennessee, where she became the first woman physician in the city of Memphis. This article seeks to determine how Patton’s perception of herself as an African American, as a woman, as a Christian, and as a physician influenced her unusual experience as a medical missionary in late nineteenth-century West Africa.

Coffee, Cash, and Consumption

This essay reflects on the study of coffee production in Angola, following research in business and missionary archives in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. After observing that African coffee farmers were consumers of foreign goods as much as they were producers for the global market, the essay makes a case for tying histories of consumption into histories of labor and production. It suggests there were long-term continuities as well as changes in African consumption patterns. Finally, it underlines the importance of studying the history of labor and consumption in Africa outside the traditional framework of colonial history, focusing instead on the global dimensions of commodity production.

Script as constellation among Munda speakers: the case of Santali

ABSTRACTSince the early twentieth century, numerous scripts were developed for Munda languages such as Santali, Ho, Sora, and Mundari in eastern India. Unlike Brahmi or Persio-Arabic scripts, these scripts are alphabetic, yet unlike Roman, many of the letters have visual meanings in addition to representing the sounds of language. Though these scripts are recent in origin, a closer analysis of their structure and conditions of emergence reveals exposure to wider, and long entrenched, graphic trends in South Asia, including ritual diagramming, Sanskritic notions of phoneme-grapheme correspondence (akṣara) and European ideas of phonological representation. The article draws on missionary archives and ethnographic field research among the Santals, the largest Munda-speaking tribe. It argues that for Santals, a wide exposure to different graphic traditions in combination with a politics of autonomy in the form of the Jharkhand movement led to a proliferation of independently derived scripts in the mid-twentieth century. The Santali scripts are then compared with other Munda-language scripts and recently created scripts in Southeast Asia, highlighting shared structural and historical elements. In focusing on scriptmaking as a practice, the article demonstrates the importance of writing to history, politics, and aesthetic expression among eastern India’s Adivasi communities, contesting long-held stereotypes that grounds Adivasi cultural identity primarily in oral practices.

Brill's Companions to the Christian Tradition 55

Brill's Companions to the Christian Tradition 55

Some Gender Implications of the ‘Civilising Mission’ of the Anglican Church for the Acholi Peoples of Northern Uganda

Anglican missionaries arriving in Uganda’s Acholiland in 1903 saw the local peoples as in need not just of Christianisation but also of civilising. This last consisted primarily of inculcating western notions of gender identities for both men and women, with an emphasis on the wearing of gender-appropriate clothing and terminating the practices of polygyny and bride-price payment. The first missionaries considered the Acholi to have high levels of gender equality but they still believed conversion would improve women’s status through domesticating them and instilling the notion of male superiority, despite the fact that local customary rituals did not distinguish on grounds of gender. Over decades, the population gradually converted to various Christian denominations, mainly Anglicanism and Catholicism, but without abandoning their customary rituals, using them as and when required, to ward off evil or ask for rain, for instance. The most significant impact of the civilising process was arguably the institutionalisation of the notion of masculine superiority now legitimised by appeals to what happened in the Garden of Eden. The paper is based on historical documents, both published and from the missionary archives, as well as on ethnographic research into gender in the region today.

Baptists in Burma: collaboratively mapping missionary archives

Purpose – The purpose of this case study is to discuss and analyze the process of developing and sustaining a multi-institutional digital humanities projects across several institutions. Design/methodology/approach – This case study will provide an overview of a multi-institutional digital humanities project from the planning phase to implementation. In particular, this case study will discuss identifying institutional partners, collaborating with a design, designing for curricular integration and best practices for sustaining a project of this size and scope. Findings – Sustainable collaboration develops slowly over time. Communication and consensus-building are key components to completing and sustaining a multi-institutional digital project. Scalable design is a crucial step in planning for project expansion. Originality/value – Though many journal articles articulate “best practices” for collaboration among geographically dispersed institutions, very few case studies discuss “best practices” within the context of project development, from initial idea to completion.

The Orphan Scandal: Christian Missionaries and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, by Beth Baron

The Orphan Scandal: Christian Missionaries and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, by Beth Baron. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2014. xxii, 245 pp. $85.00 US (cloth), $24.95 US (paper). The brutal beating of a fifteen-year-old Muslim girl, Turkiyya Hasan, at the Swedish Salaam Mission's Home for Destitutes in Port Said in June 1933 exploded into a scandal. Beth Baron's micro-history of the incident provides an excellent lens for examining the interaction of Protestant missionaries, Hasan al-Banna's fledgling Muslim Brotherhood, British imperialism, and Egyptian politics in the first half of the twentieth century. Writing the history of Christian missions is no longer left primarily to missionaries, and Islamist movements have attracted much scholarly attention. Bringing the two fields together, Baron emphasizes unintended consequences: Christian proselytizing helped provoke the rapid rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in semi-colonial Egypt. She draws on US and British national archives, missionary archives, and Arabic articles, memoirs, and cartoons. After a prologue outlining diverse perspectives on the Turkiyya Hasan affair, chapter one discusses Islamic law and practices regarding destitute children. In mid-nineteenth century Egypt, inadequate social services allowed Protestant and Catholic missionaries to move in with schools, hospitals, and orphanages. Muslims who turned children over to these institutions hoped for care, schooling, and a moral upbringing, but the ultimate goal for most missionaries was winning for Christ. Beginning in 1882, the British occupation provided an umbrella under which the missions flourished. Chapters two and three discuss the Fowler Orphanage, which Presbyterians operated in Cairo, and the orphanage which Pentecostal Lillian Trasher founded in the southern town of Asyut. The United Presbyterian Church of North America's American the largest Protestant missionary enterprise in Egypt, ran the Fowler Orphanage with Quaker support. The Mission was headquartered in Asyut, where a substantial minority of the population were Coptic Orthodox Christians. The Mission primarily proselytized Copts. Trasher's orphanage, which was affiliated with the Assemblies of God, was located across the Nile from Asyut. Taking in widowed mothers as well as children, grew into a village. Much of its support came from local Copts. Chapter four returns to the Swedish Salaam Mission and Turkiyya Hasan's beating by a woman missionary. Maria Ericsson, the Swedish founder of the Mission, was an adherent of the Holiness revival movement who came to Port Said in 1911 to convert Muslims. Islam is not an invention of man, she wrote, it is an invention of Satan himself against the Son of God and against human souls (p. …

HISTORY - Andrew Burton and Hélène Charton-Bigot, eds. Generations Past: Youth in East African History.Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010. vii + 301pp. Maps. Contributors. Index. $29.95. Paper.

HISTORY Andrew Burton and Helene Charton-Bigot, eds. Generations Past: Youth in East African History. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010. vii + 301 pp. Maps. Contributors. Index. $29.95. Paper.Originating at Kenyan conference in 2006, this collection examines youth and generation in East Africa (i.e., Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania) in historical perspective with nuanced insights drawn from anthropology. A well-argued introduction by Andrew Burton and Thomas Burgess leads to twelve chapters mostly by leading social historians trained in North American and British universities, whose seminal research is reflected here. Although these scholars have tackled some of the topics elsewhere, they are indeed essential to the volume's cumulative argument. One co-editor, who contributed chapter, is French historian; only two contributors-in literature and in religious studies-are from East Africa (Kenya).Drawing on extensive evidence (secondary works, state and missionary archives, oral sources, pamphlets, explorers' accounts, Swahili and English newspapers), the collection concentrates primarily on the twentieth century, with the first two chapters examining the precolonial period. This asymmetry might be explained by the lacunae of extant sources and by the scant studies of the earlier period, or it may stem from the book's thesis that colonialism engendered unprecedented tensions in generational relations in Africa, when adulthood had to be negotiated in new ways.The introduction sets the book's intellectual agenda in three key themes: the deep socioeconomic and political changes of the nineteenth century; the attempts by elders, colonial officials (often overlapping), and postcolonial authorities to control youth over the longue duree (18); and the methodology of studying youth and generation in Africa-is youth primary or secondary identity? is it homogeneous term? Although hardly straightforward and unproblematically defined grouping, youth is seen to be discrete social category that emerged mostly in the twentieth century. Besides being culturally specific, the notion of youth varies depending on the historical circumstances: when society experiences social crisis, new ideas of childhood and adolescence emerge.The shifting category of generation-which scholars should examine because it matters in African cultures-has long governed relations in the continent, where it has served to explain social and regulate customs (19). Gerontocracy and patriarchy served to maintain social order in Africa, where complex systems of obligations, submission, and sacrifice were used by seniors to exercise control over social subordinates. Although local differences make generalizations difficult, it is largely true that marriage in most agrarian societies afforded young man social advancement through access to women and reproduction. Generational tensions, then, resulted from changing expectations among youth regarding their obligations and responsibilities (18).Seen as marking turning point in relations between youth and elders, colonialism had significant repercussions for local ways of thinking about the generations. And yet colonialism notwithstanding, considerable continuities with the past and the resilience of local modes of thought persisted, particularly in rural areas where youth remained largely dependent on and deferential to elders.In the first chapter, Richard Reid shows that in the interlacustrine regions of Uganda and northern Tanzania the institutionalized exercise of violence and participation in war-often a young man's game- marked key moments of transition to adulthood amid the rapid changes of the nineteenth century. Across the region aggressive male youth were revolutionaries hubristically challenging the status quo, but without completely rejecting the existing social structure. Their recruitment of boys-at once victims and perpetrators of violence-is reminiscent of the seemingly recent phenomenon of child soldiers. …

Theorising missionary education: the Bolivian Indian Mission 1908‐1920

PurposeEducation was an enduring feature of the modern Protestant missionary movement. Historiographically, however, scholarship on the subject is often fragmented geographically and focused on the micro contexts in which missionary education occurred. The purpose of this paper is to explore the nuances of the missions‐education relationship, using a particular case study, in order to indicate alternative ways of conceptualising that relationship. It focuses on a small New Zealand evangelical mission working in Bolivia from 1908 and utilises the concept of “sites” to indicate the complexities that need to be considered in any particular study of missions and education.Design/methodology/approachEducational activities and explanatory factors pertaining to the Bolivian site of missionary education are re‐constructed from missionary archives. Different voices, agendas and readings are acknowledged in this re‐construction. In this way the article moves from a plain narrative about the mission and its educational activities to a more conceptual attempt to explain the application of education in the Bolivian context. The archives are read in the light of both historiography and theory.FindingsThe article indicates that a simple or monochrome reading of the missions‐education relationship is deficient. It grapples with the reasons why an explicitly evangelistic mission invested considerable energy and resources in education. Using the concept of “sites” it argues that this emphasis on education can be explained by a set of complex and overlapping factors reflecting historical timing, evangelical culture ormentalité, missionary geographical origins and local socio‐political context. While this will not explain all “sites” of missionary education, the approach is a model of how to construct a complex reading that enables us to discern multiple voices and motivations.Originality/valueThis article addresses a lacuna of conceptual scholarship on missionary education. Furthermore it attempts to shift the focus onto four relatively neglected aspects in missions‐education scholarship: missionary projects from colonial contexts, the South American context, the early twentieth century, and conservative evangelicalism.

Highly Educated Mission: The University of Leuven, the Missionary Congregations and Congo, 1885-1960

AbstractThis article discusses the relationship between the Catholic University of Leuven and the missionary congregations during the period when they were involved in the Belgian colony of the Congo. Their relationship was successful and longstanding, thanks to local networks and interaction between the two institutions, as well as to their shared values and complementary strengths. The forms of cooperation in which they engaged ranged widely, from setting up student missionary movements and teaching programmes for missionaries to providing agricultural and medical university support at the mission stations; and from studying the colonial language experience of the missionary to large-scale cooperation as was the case with Lovanium. These examples indicate that the partnership was active both in Leuven and in the Congo. The missionary archives, however, reveal that the colonial reality could differ from the image that was created in official language and propaganda. From 1955 onwards, as the movement for independence was gaining strength, the process of decolonization set in and the cooperation collapsed.

Reflections on Libraries and Archives I

I am very pleased to be asked to say a few words to this meeting of archivists and librarians. I am myself a historian, and therefore I love archives. I actually find it a sensual experience to see and feel old documents. Terry Barringer, who invited me to talk to you this morning, encouraged me to say something about my personal experiences of archival research, so allow me to begin with some personal remarks and anecdotes.I started my PhD, on the history of nineteenth-century Madagascar, in 1976. Before then, I don't believe I had ever been in an archive. In the course of doing research for my PhD, I made quite extensive use of government, missionary and private archives in the United Kingdom, France and Madagascar. An exciting moment was locating the archives of the first French Resident of Madagascar after its conquest by French troops in 1895, Hippolyte Laroche.