“By October 1875 he [Missionary Gruenberger] had had enough. Outraged at the impertinence with which the congregation claimed the right to dress as they pleased for Sunday worship, he ordered the women to surrender the 'fashion items' instantly into the hands of their spiritual guide…
“With two elders I went from house to house, starting off with the house of this very reluctant woman, and we confiscated all crinolines to burn them to death before their eyes””
Missionary Gruenberger’s incendiary activities demonstrate that he was not only concerned with the question of local people’s doctrinal beliefs, but that he also took a very active interest in the clothes they wore. This essay will focus on the relationship between local populations and the material culture that accompanied Christian missions. Considering the complexities of these engagements will allow us to assess their implications for the identities and perceptions of local individuals. The essay will take the following structure. Section one will outline the general relationship between Christianity and material culture, and then will consider how Christian institutions tried to promote European material culture among the individuals affected by them. Section two will look at how the local populations engaged with these processes, examining the idea of reappropriation in conceptual terms, and then looking at how Africans reconfigured the material culture promoted by Christians and used it to their own ends. Section three will reflect on the outcomes of this engagement; it will be argued that Africans’ adaptations and reinventions of the material culture associated with Christianity contributed to the emergence of new kinds of people in Africa, people who lived their lives in different ways to before. This phenomenon, in turn, has significant implications for our understanding of what is meant by “modernity”.
The narrative of evangelical conversion represents only one dimension of Christians’ activities in Africa; their massive impact in terms of material culture also presents a rich field of inquiry . The missionary enterprise was bound up with the introduction of a new material culture from the very start. Missionaries’ first contact with the local population often involved the distribution of gifts, used to secure goodwill and to attract interest . The novelty and power of their material culture was underlined by the new technologies that the missionaries employed, ranging from the aeroplanes that later missionaries arrived in, to the introduction of new agricultural techniques. The mission stations they constructed were physically impressive and represented a territorialisation of missionary power , imposing new conceptions of space that were novel in the African context .
The missionaries’ relationship with the material realm was far from incidental; rather, for long periods it was an integral part of their strategy, in what has been labelled “conquest by way of consumption” . The “civilising mission” aimed to entirely transform African values and self-conceptions, reshaping their identities to conform to Christian (Western) civilisation, and in so doing to bind the local population more closely to the outlooks and interests of the colonising power . These aims would be achieved by the remaking of the everyday world , by the control of the most ordinary and mundane practices of which individuals’ lives are constituted . Missionaries aimed to alter individuals’ desires relating to exchange and consumption – desires pertaining to the material world . Bayart notes the “long-standing missionary tradition equating the development of trade to the spreading of the Christian faith” . In fact the relationship between Christianity and trade was complex. True, it overcame early conflicts and moved to a position of explicit coupling and association . However even then their relationship was not wholly symbiotic , as the rapacity of trade was criticised by some missionaries , and the new strategies in the late nineteenth century abandoned links with commerce . Generally, however, religious conversion cannot be abstracted from conversion to Western economic values .
Christians tried to transmit their values to local individuals through the institutions of the mission station, which might include a school, hospital or orphanage in addition to a church. These institutions were populated by local people, and were largely staffed by local converts , and so the mission station created a large variety of new social groups; catechists and congregations, teachers and pupils, nurses and nuns. The mission’s internal diversity allowed a uniquely total involvement in virtually all areas of the local populations’ lives. Domination and control were secured through myriad rules, timetables, discourses and coercive procedures , with the missionaries de facto authorities . In conjunction, these factors produced an environment of what Foucault would have called “disciplinary rationality” . It was at least partly in the historical contexts of particular missions that the lives of many individuals came to be constituted, emerging through processes of innumerable transactions and interactions. They were submitted to external rule (domination), but many also felt a form of belonging due to their sincere adherence to the “conducts of life” imposed on them , and the roles that they were given within the system. In this way missionary institutions developed “cultures of the self” .
Mission stations used clothing as their central means of promoting European material culture. From their earliest days Protestant missionaries had been obsessed with nakedness and shame . The Africans’ apparent lack of social stratification as regards clothing troubled Europeans because it implied a different sense of self . The Europeans’ own attire and uniforms asserted the importance of dress , as did uniforms worn by people in the new social roles that missionary institutions had created. The body was of importance because it was the interface between the individual and the social world, between the private and the public realms . For missionaries it was meeting place between (enlightened) consumption and the soul, and it was thought that in clothing the body lay the essence of civility . Clothing not only helped mediate the individual’s relationships with other people, but also influenced how the individual saw himself . So in the attempt to remake Africans through their everyday activities clothes were an important tool for instilling values . As such, clothing can be seen as a strategy for indirectly generating spiritual outcomes , or, equally, as an indicator of spiritual transformation .
SOURCE 1
This missionary postcard shows “Black sisters at work” in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. It nicely demonstrates a number of the themes outlined above. The nuns would have constituted a new social group, introduced by the missionaries, and which would have contributed to the constitution of the identities of the people in the picture. That they are both making clothes and wearing uniforms confirms the importance of clothing to the missionary agenda. The fact that the black nuns are all wearing the same thing suggests a body of rules and expectations that governs and orders their mode of dress. Their clothing clearly identifies them as being associated with the mission, and it is possible that the missionaries thought it to indicate an interior – spiritual – transformation; it is perhaps no coincidence that their uniforms are white. The postcard’s caption helpfully clarifies that it is the black nuns who are working - the white nun is not! Her role appears to be supervisory. Hierarchy is also suggested by her different uniform. One can imagine another body of rules governing techniques and the times that work had to be done. There are only women in the photograph. This activity is gendered but differently to African society in which men made the clothes . More broadly, the sewing machine represents an introduction of European technology and techniques. The missionaries’ power is also indicated by the solid construction of the brick building the nuns are working beside. The cloth used to make the clothes implies integration with the capitalist economy. The fact this is a postcard indicates the missionaries’ willingness to present this image of their activities; as an introduction of Christianity, civilisation, and an ethos of work.
SOURCE 2
This procession after a Christian marriage took place in Senegal somewhere between 1920 and 1940. The bride and groom, along with a great many of the guests, are wearing European-style clothes.
The procession follows the Christian sacrament of marriage, which, along with baptisms, confirmations, and funerals would have punctuated the lives of the Christian community. This ceremonial aspect of the Christian tradition helps to flesh out our understanding of the mission’s relationship with individuals’ lives, and also the shared meaning that the community found in this. Individuals’ subjectivation was not just a matter of exchanges within the context of rules and procedures, but also took place in the many services, sacraments and ceremonies that punctuated the Christians’ year. While participation may well have been willing due to identification with the mission, on another level it represents submission to the authority and subjection of the missionaries.
This procession is a very public spectacle, a point that ties in with Foucault’s discussions regarding theatricality and the role of the visual in the operations of power .
The church in the background is of a more modest size than many one might find in the University of Southern California archive, but its location at the water’s edge is prominent, as is its cross. Its visual assertion of power is important here, and its commanding view resonates with Foucault’s discussion of Bentham’s panopticon .
Whether or not the boat is linked to the church is uncertain. However if it is there are obvious points to be made about missionaries’ impressive and attractive links with new technology and power.
Missionary Gruenberger’s frenzied crinoline burning demonstrates, however, that African converts were not as obedient as he might have liked. They were not “docile” ; they had not been made mere ciphers of power . The key idea here is that of reappropriation. Missionaries imposed new ways of thinking and new forms of material culture, but local populations actively reconfigured the Christians’ ideas, adapting them for their particular purposes, before making them their own. Further, in the very processes of reshaping the Christians’ ideas before their integration, the ideas themselves were transformed; they were creatively developed into something new. This point applies to the issue of Christian belief , as well as to the realm of material culture. Local populations selected and integrated different aspects according to what resonated with ideas and practices from within their own culture, and giving it a new meaning and function. So for example some Africans reshaped Christianity so that it was more like the familiar ideal of the healing cult. In a sense, as a result of these multiple and historically contingent processes, Christianity was itself converted .
Reappropriation also very much applies to Africans’ engagements with the material culture imposed by the missionaries. Contrary to Europeans’ perceptions, there was a long African tradition of using the “social skin” of clothing for the purpose of social differentiation and so to mediate social relations . In the Transvaal the Sotho and Tswana communities used European-style clothing as a sign of opposition to the social and political order of Transvaal society, which was endorsed by the missionaries . These examples of dissidence and deviation as expressed through clothes run directly counter to the assumptions regarding the body’s docility and malleability tacitly made by missionary institutions. In this context conflict – such as the battle of wills between Missionary Gruenberger and his congregation – demonstrated missionaries’ inability to impose their own vision of appropriate clothing. As such, conflict serves as an indicator of Africans’ reappropriation of material culture . Missionary Gruenberger’s evident anger and his spectacular tactics demonstrate that his congregation’s use of dress was now beyond his control, and very different to his original intentions.
Reappropriation is even more obviously evidenced by the fact that dress was also used to send messages to audiences within the African’s own communities . Converts used clothes to impress their peers with their sense of fashion , to demonstrate their ambitions , and to assert their position on contested issues of gender, class, and generational authority . Africans created new and innovative forms of dress, and new kinds of social institutions sprang up, for example dance clubs forming around an interest in fashion . Material culture was also significant in issues such as the ongoing negotiation of gender relations within African society; for example, newly salaried women were criticised for dressing up and going out to bars . These examples of Africans using European dress to send messages to other Africans are particularly interesting; the missionaries are no longer in the picture and so these stories provide crystal clear incidences of reappropriation. This becomes clear when one adopts a “decentred” perspective – one that is not blinkered by a focus on the relationship between coloniser and subject .
African reappropriation of European dress richly demonstrates how local converts - and others - were able to use Christianity, and in particular the material culture that came with Christianity, to their own ends. Some of these ends were political, with clothes being used to articulate and contest power relationships . Here clothing, or “bodily praxis”, was fashioned into an incisive political language, and one that – unusually – brought women to centre stage in a predominantly male realm . But in addition to being political the uses made of European-style clothing were also social, with clothing being used to articulate status and ambition within the most ordinary contexts of human relationships .
SOURCE 3
This photograph is of “The Chief” in Ekombe, KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. His posture is relaxed and authoritative. He is wearing an elegant cream-coloured jacket, and a pith helmet of the kind that Europeans frequently wore in Africa in the first half of the twentieth century. Strikingly, he is not wearing anything on his lower half, apart from an item of clothing around his waist. This picture tells us something about reappropriation. Our initial reaction – very possibly shared by Europeans at the time - is that it appears incongruous to be wearing a beautiful jacket, yet to be virtually naked from waist down. However as a chief this man would be taken as a serious and authoritative figure, especially by members of his community. His clothing reflects his status in that community, and also the image that he is trying to cultivate. There was African tradition of the “politics of costume” long before missionaries arrived. Here his power is indicated by the fact he has access to high quality European clothes. His outfit may also represent a desire to associate his leadership with the culture of powerful colonialists. However the very fact he allows himself to be photographed, presumably - although not necessarily - by someone of European origin suggests that he may have a message for this audience as well. It may represent an assertion of equality, and so constitute reappropriation in this further sense.
SOURCE 4
Caption: “Father Jarreau in a raincoat made of palms of Guangzhou, China”.
It seems very possible that Father Jarreau’s raincoat is in a style used by Chinese labourers, rather than being of his own invention. Certainly his hat appears to be of the kind that local Chinese people might have worn. Below his coat seems to be wearing a Western undershirt. He is not wearing any shoes.
This picture suggests that the material culture of missionaries themselves was changed in the processes of engaging with local populations. Interactions between the different participants were complex and it was far from being a one-way street. The simple narrative of missionaries converting local populations is inadequate. Father Jarreau seems to have adopted and integrated at least some Chinese practices as regards agriculture. One might question the extent to which this photograph is representative of missionaries in China, missionaries in general, or indeed even of Father Jarreau’s own experience. Without more information, and research, it is difficult to say.
One might, however, speculatively apply one of the missionaries’ own ideas about clothing: might Father Jarreau’s modified appearance suggest that his way of thinking about the world had changed in some way? Certainly some Christians – adherents of “fulfilment theology” - came to hold the belief that non-Christian religions contained at least a measure of revelation .
More broadly, this picture gestures towards the impact of missionary work on European domestic societies, of which Father Jarreau was a part, and which he was connected to in the shape of his family and friends, relatives and readers. Recent historiography has begun to examine how missionaries contributed to the development of new currents of thought in their countries of origin, especially as regards the issues of race, gender and the study of anthropology.
From this protracted dialectic of impositions and reappropriations there emerged people who thought and felt - who lived - in different ways; people with new and different conceptions of themselves and others, people with different values and aspirations, different ways of making a living, and different ways of seeing the world. The totality of the mission – with its aim to reform every aspect of life – meant that it played a surprisingly large role in the formation of new types of men, a new “Menschentum” . Local peoples’ reappropriations of missionary impositions saw the historical emergence of new types of human beings; the creation of people with new life styles, new life conducts and new senses of what was right and wrong in their worlds. Material culture was an essential part of the constitution – the subjectivation – of these new “moral subjects”.
The complex and creative engagements outlined above have major implications for our understanding of “modernity”. The key idea here is that of plurality. All mission stations were different, meaning that the nature of their subjection - and hence the subjectivation of individuals they attempted to form - was heterogeneous . This point is accentuated by the fact that individual missionaries enjoyed relative autonomy . More broadly speaking, the colonial project was itself vastly complex and cannot in any sense be construed as monolithic . Plurality also applies to the local populations’ processes of reappropriation. These creative dialectics of challenge and riposte meant that different kinds of newness were emerging in different places. The historical particularity of these events means that their modernity must be understood as local, specific, and so as multiple. The processes of reappropriation cause problems for the conventional distinction between things being either “modern” or “traditional” . If traditional cloth is cut in a modern style then how is this to be classified? Similarly, if contemporary witch doctors integrate with the capitalist economy then is this “modern” or “traditional” ? The idea of modernity as local and multiple also creates difficulties of a political nature: if everything contemporary is by definition “modern” then the term may be rhetorically manipulated to suggest that poorer parts of the world as just as “modern” as we are, only “different”, and so to argue that there is no longer any need to engage with ongoing discourses calling for their right to modernity in the more substantive sense of economic development .
To conclude: local reappropriations of Christianity’s material realm richly demonstrate the ways in which converts and others were able to use Christianity to their own ends. We have seen that the political and social uses of European-style dress are central to the development of African modernity , and have contributed to new understandings of modernity as local and so therefore as being multiple. The study of interactions within the material realm complements recent work on how locals reappropriated Christian doctrine. Local people used both these facets of Christianity to their own ends. Considering the multi-faceted nature of these engagements allows us to understand the relationship between Christianity and local populations in ways that are both more complex, and more accurate.
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