Victorian Missionaries to Africa [15min]

British missionaries, sometimes in league with Dutch pastors, colonised Africa with the Ten Commandments. However, their zeal could not simply be directed at a nation. They faced the sacrificial obedience of tribes within tribes under the authority of the paramount chiefs. Undeterred, the missionaries were convinced pagans (they used the term in the AD 4th Century sense) would respond to a Christian belief that would give them the spiritual identity they lacked. "This Sceptred Isle: Empire" is a narrative history of the British Empire from Ireland in the 12th century to the independence of India in the 20th, told in 90 programmes written by historian Christopher Lee and narrated by actor Juliet Stevenson. (You may listen again online to the five most recent episodes of "Empire".)

Of the pioneer British missionaries, Robert Moffat was the most celebrated until Livingstone who married Moffat's daughter, Mary. Moffat went to Africa in the early 1820s and famously preached at the London Tabernacle on "Africa or Gospel Light shining in the midst of heathen darkness". The missionaries saw Africa rousing what Moffat called the "noblest energies of their nature and the tenderest sympathies of the British heart".

Roman Catholic missionaries had arrived in West Africa in the 16th century, but it was the 19th Century breed that made the most inroads into the Christian spiritual education of Africans. They were supported by the arrival of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) founded in 1799 and the source of almost all British missionaries for decades. They began in 1807 in Sierra Leone and were followed by the Wesleyan Mission Society in 1813.

In South Africa the British missionaries tended to come through the London Missionary Society and this was the society David Moffat joined and extended his evangelism into Rhodesia in 1859. David Livingstone went to Africa with The Universities' Mission to Central Africa and joined another famous preacher, John Philip. It was he who became Livingstone's tutor when the latter arrived in Africa.

The flaw on the drive for conversion was that there was no missionary plan for what should be done to help Baptised Africans who for the most part then found themselves isolated from their tribal origins? An African ostracised by his or her tribe was homeless. Therefore, the ounce of respectability the missionary believed necessary for conversion was a dilemma for the convert and the responsibility of the evangelist. The answer was to either create a new community or convert a whole tribe.