Black Europeans, White Africans: Some Missionary Motives in West Africa
Sierra leone was the first success story of the modern missionary movement. The years from 1787 to 1830 saw it pass first from a green if not very fertile land supporting subsistence farmers and riverine slaving factories to Utopia in a disaster area; then transformed again as free blacks from Nova...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
1978
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| In: |
Studies in church history
Year: 1978, Volume: 15, Pages: 339-348 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | Sierra leone was the first success story of the modern missionary movement. The years from 1787 to 1830 saw it pass first from a green if not very fertile land supporting subsistence farmers and riverine slaving factories to Utopia in a disaster area; then transformed again as free blacks from Nova Scotia and Jamaica, full of evangelical religion and American republicanism carried out a Clapham-inspired scheme in ways the men of Clapham did not always like; and again as this population was overwhelmed by new uprooted peoples from all over west Africa, brought in from the slaveships before they had ever seen the transatlantic plantations. The new population responded, sometimes with enthusiasm and rarely with prolonged resistance, to missionary preaching; and, with those same missionaries appointed to superintend their temporal as well as their spiritual welfare, adopted the norms and characteristics of their Nova Scotian and Maroon predecessors. Contemporary British sources do not suggest that at the time Sierra Leone was regarded as a huge success; people in England tended to think of the appalling loss of missionary life in the white man’s grave, and the enormous expense of the Sierra Leone mission; besides, they heard stories which suggested that the serpent still dwelt in their west African garden. Nonetheless, here was the first part of Africa, one of the very few parts anywhere in the world, where there was a mass movement towards the Christian faith, where a whole non-Christian people became Christian. |
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| ISSN: | 2059-0644 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Studies in church history
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1017/S0424208400009098 |
