Empire in Africa: Angola and Its Neighbors

4. A Swiss Community in Highland Angola

4 A Swiss Community in Highland Angola This chapter, which was first published in the proceedings of a conference on African history held in Lisbon in September 1999,1 explores the last ten years of Héli Chatelain’s entrepreneurial endeavors as he tried to sustain his small Christian community on the edge of the southern highlands. Although his village of local peasants and emancipated slaves was isolated and remote, Chatelain was able to maintain a worldwide correspondence in English, French, German, Dutch, and Portuguese with his theological sponsors and commercial suppliers in Switzerland and America. He also understood the people of the local Ovimbundu kingdoms and wrote hymns for them in their own vernaculars. After his death the Swiss churches took over Chatelain’s venture, and some of the leading politicians of modern Angola went to school at the Swiss mission before being sent to Switzerland for further training. The concept of establishing self-sufficient Christian communities in Angola did not die out immediately when Bishop Taylor’s Malange mission, which Héli Chatelain had helped to create, was converted into an officially sponsored Methodist field of proselytizing . Ten years after he had visited Benguela as a convalescent, Chatelain returned to Angola’s southern harbor city determined 41 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. to try out for himself the ideals that had inspired the now-retired Bishop Taylor. Resolving the problem of how to maintain a balance between missionary idealism and merchant pragmatism had not become any easier. When Chatelain arrived in Benguela in 1897, the slave trade had revived so vigorously that the city was shipping out some 4,000 men and women each year. The aim of the new mission was to stem the flow of this trade and create a chain of hostels for escaped slaves all the way from Benguela to the great raiding grounds among the Nganguela people of the upper Cunene and Zambezi rivers. Such was the dependence of missionaries on merchants, and of merchants on the sale of slaves, however, that no such chain of safe havens could be established. Without ox trails and bush stores, any mission penetration was virtually impossible. Chatelain’s Swiss-American mission only ever set up one station. It was located not in the remote hunting grounds of the slave catchers, but in settler territory on the high plateau, and its best customers were not free Africans, but Boer immigrants from South Africa. The Dutch settler community at Caconda with which the mission traded was an offshoot of a larger Boer colony at Humpata on Angola’s southernmost plateau. The dependence of the Swiss mission on the Boer colony began from the moment when Chatelain landed at Benguela and found that rinderpest fever had decimated Angola’s stock of oxen. He had a long wait before he could negotiate the hire of Boer wagons to haul his equipment through the coastal scrub and up the escarpment to Kalukembe, the site near Caconda that he had chosen for his station. Once established, the mission became a trading post that depended on its Boer customers for its economic viability . Had the mission agreed to harbor slave refugees from the Boer slave farms, the commercial side of the enterprise would have lost its most lucrative business clients. Although Boer customers did not like the mission’s social ideology, they had little direct access to suppliers in Europe and no network of international credit that would enable them to order goods from abroad. They therefore welcomed Chatelain’s business acumen, his ability to make credit deals with overseas suppliers, and his famil42 / Empire in Africa You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. iarity with the necessary settler crafts. His workshop installed anvils and forges with which Boer carts could be repaired, and his mission artisans kept the transport system of southern Angola running. Chatelain’s import-and-export business underpinned the semi-self-sufficient mission’s finances. To remain solvent, the mission had to play down any antislaving ideals its sponsoring League of Friends had dreamt of. These sponsors...