Early Afrikaner Missionaries and the Central African Natural Ecology: A History of Ambiguous Interactions

This article assesses the role of late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century Afrikaner missionaries in their ecological positioning in Nyasaland. As envoys of South Africa’s Dutch Reformed Church, they were predisposed to self-identify with the dominant colonial culture as representative of ‘‘European civilization.’’ However, their own environmental sensibilities were also shaped by the rural agricultural background from which many of them had come. This article considers their role in the ecological values they directly or indirectly propagated. The theme of ‘‘hunting’’ is especially emphasized here, as well as the planting of trees. A following section concerns indigenous environmental concerns, especially dealing with the theme of rain, and the missionary response. The argument is made that the missionary discourse was implicitly infiltrated by the indigenous point of view, to the point that missionaries were occasionally convinced to go along with the indigenous perspective in order to get their message across. In the final analysis the suggestion is made that the missionary discourse effectively became hybridized, and that this historical example might in fact serve as an analogy for the kind of methodological conversion that this article suggests as something that might helpfully challenge dominant contemporary globalization norms that threaten the environment.