From Hampton "[i]nto the Heart of Africa": How Faith in God and Folklore Turned Congo Missionary William Sheppard into a Pioneering Ethnologist

I

The African-American missionary, William Henry Sheppard Jr. (1865-1927), lived in the Kuba kingdom of central Africa at the turn of the twentieth century.¹ A student of Virginia's Hampton (Normal) Institute in the early 1880s, Sheppard left the United States a decade later to preach in the Congo Free State, a colonial territory claimed by Belgian monarch Leopold II. This king's army, the Force Publique, and its local auxiliaries spawned suffering throughout the equatorial region. They pillaged villages in Kasai, the southern Congo area surrounding Sheppard's Presbyterian outposts, killing families and driving survivors into brigades that collected wild rubber for European concessionary companies.² This rubber boom, in turn, generated profits that not only enriched Leopold II and his business allies,

Figure 1.

William Henry Sheppard Jr., Congo Missionary, 1893³

but also propelled a revolution in transportation that culminated in the mass production of tires for the bicycle and automobile.⁴ Sheppard is known for bearing witness to Congo atrocities, but his ground-breaking ethnological research remains unfamiliar to many Africanists.⁵ It is fortunate for these scholars that the college that nurtured Sheppard's fascination with folklore, Hampton Institute (now Hampton University), houses his papers, photographs, and artwork. This paper introduces and analyzes these sources.

II

Between the 1890s and first decade of the 1900s, William Sheppard's writings and speeches depicted a Christian revival in the Congo amid the brutality of rapacious imperialism. When he first informed his Presbyterian sponsors of the terror in Kasai, his accounts revealed such shocking carnage—detailing, for example, the burning and mutilation of women by Belgian-backed Songye mercenaries (or Zappo Zaps)—that his supporters back home alerted leading newspapers of a crime against humanity unfolding in Africa.⁶ Journalists did the rest. Their broadsheets featured Sheppard's dispatches, among them haunting excerpts from his Pianga Massacre report (1899) on the murderous raids of Songye henchmen around his Luebo mission. Articles condemning "Horrors in Congo" and "Natives . . . Tortured" fueled outrage in the West and boosted an international human rights campaign led by Edmund Morel, one of the founders of the Congo Reform Association.⁷ Headlined as a hero, Sheppard enjoyed rare fame for an African-American man in the United States during the Jim Crow era. The Boston Herald extolled this "Son of a Slave" who "Informed [the] World of Congo Abuses."⁹ By 1910 Sheppard had earned accolades from President Theodore Roosevelt and the memorable sobriquet, "Black Livingstone."

Figure 2.

Sheppard's Map of Kasai Region, with Luebo Mission in Lower Right, 1893⁸

Sheppard is the subject of two quite different biographies published in 2002, one comprehensive study by Presbyterian Church scholar William Phipps, the other an impressionistic work by novelist Pagan Kennedy.¹⁰ Similar to Sheppard's own memoir, Phipps and Kennedy focus on the Congo missionary's crusade against colonial oppression and "heathen" ignorance.¹¹ The two contemporary biographers revel in Sheppard's daring qualities. Their protagonist eludes countless brushes with danger—virulent disease, bush predators, rogue warriors, and Belgian persecutors. He is the consummate explorer, according to Kennedy, more thrilled by the "outback with a rifle across his shoulder" dressed "as a colonial Brit" than preaching to the pagan.¹³ The global dimensions of Sheppard's dramatis personae, i.e., the humanitarian movements in Europe and America that celebrated his evangelism, also structure several chapters in Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa and James Campbell's Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa.¹⁴

Figure 3.

"Black Livingston": Sheppard in the Congo, ca. early 1900s¹²

In illuminating Sheppard's epic feats and unusual profile as a swashbuckling black missionary, these otherwise engaging books skim over his formative spiritual, physical, and intellectual experiences. During his youth, Sheppard read...