“A Real Heaven on Their Own Earth”: Religious Missions, African Writers, and the Anticolonial Imagination

In postcolonial discourse, religious missions are generally described as the benign mask of empire, the enemy of African cultures and freedoms. While that critique has been a necessary response to Western narratives of Africa’s salvation and to the very real role missions have played in colonial violence, it has also obscured their place within the anticolonial imagination. Drawing on the early novels and recently published autobiographical texts of Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, this essay demonstrates that while missions were surely implicated in colonialism, they have also been central to Africans’ own narratives of improvement ranging from the reformist to the radical, particularly when the horizon of improvement was decolonization. Through a focus on education and literacy, this essay examines the relationship between missions and anglophone African literature and teases out the ways in which missions, as put to work by African subjects, enabled new practices of freedom, becoming the ambiguous ally of anticolonial movements and even Marxism itself.