Dissertation Fellow 2000-01
Paul V. Kollman, C.S.C. (History of Religions)
University of Chicago Divinity School
Making Catholics: 19th Century Slave
Evangelization
at the East African Coast
Recent studies of missionaries and colonialism in Africa and elsewhere
have grown in sophistication, overturning previous stereotypes casting
missionaries as mere abettors of the colonial project. Yet anthropologists,
historians, and literary critics undertaking this research often
show scant awareness of the deeper theological motivations of missionary
practice.
Mission historians and theologians, on the other hand, regularly
steer clear of close, critical readings of missionary materials.
My dissertation, a study of Catholic missionaries of the Congregation
of the Holy Ghost, or Spiritans, who evangelized slaves in an effort
to found the church in East Africa, seeks to overcome this impasse
by combining critical attention to the multiple and changing motivations
of the participants in this encounter – the missionaries as
well as that of the Africans they tried to convert -- as well as
the equally complex context in which they acted.
Attention to the evangelization of slaves in particular yields
two other dividends. In the first place it gives new insight into
European social ideals motivating missionary practice. Since the
slaves were often children and came from a variety of places and
peoples in Africa, the Spiritans felt free in evangelizing them
to ignore cultural questions of accomodation of the Gospel. As a
consequence their own views about proper personhood and the ideal
eccesial polity become more salient in practice. Second, foregrounding
the slaves as targets of evangelization defined politically and
economically rather than culturally generates new understandings
of African responses to evangelization. Their resistance or acquiescence
to the missionary message, in need of careful interpretation because
discernible mainly through missionary records, becomes not merely
"cultural" but meaningful in relation to a variety of
considerations often overlooked.
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