The Church of Women: Gendered Encounters between Maasai and Missionaries

Introduction: Gender, Power, and the Missionary Encounter

1 INTRODUCTION: GENDER, POWER, AND THE MISSIONARY ENCOUNTER A significant paradox of the missionary endeavor in many parts of Africa , as elsewhere, is the preponderance of female adherents to Christianity despite concerted efforts by most mainstream missionary groups to convert men.1 “Again and again in a mission history,” notes Adrian Hastings, “the early significant baptisms were mostly of women” (Hastings 1993: 112). Much of the ethnographic and historical literature on missionization in Africa corroborates Hastings’s findings (Barrett 1968: 148; Isichei 1995; Landau 1995: 197; examples discussed in Hastings 1993: 112–114). Although not self-evident, such an outcome is of course more understandable for missionary groups who directed their efforts at converting and training African women to be the “good wives and mothers” necessary for the propagation of the Christian family and the “domestic” duties of the Christian home (Gaitskell 1979; Hunt 1990; Labode 1993; Kanogo 1993). But how do we explain the predominance of women in churches where missionaries did not, in general, seek their participation or encourage their involvement? Consider the case of Maasai in Tanzania, where Catholic missionaries from the Congregation of the Holy Spirit, also called Spiritans, have spent over fifty years trying to evangelize Maasai men. In vain they have tried to convert men first through schools, then in their homesteads, and finally in individual instruction classes. Maasai women were restricted from attending school, tolerated but not encouraged to attend homestead instruction and services, and dissuaded from holding formal leadership positions in the church. Despite these gendered evangelization strategies and objectives, however , significantly more Maasai women than men have sought instruction and baptism in the Catholic Church. Conversion to Catholicism was never easy for these women, as they had to overcome not only the reluctance of the missionaries but also the objections of their husbands and fathers. Yet they persevered, and now comprise the majority of practicing Catholics. In- THE CHURCH OF WOMEN 2 tent on creating Christian communities premised on male leadership and patriarchal authority, the men of the church have instead facilitated the creation of a “church of women.” The most basic purpose of this book is to use ethnographic and historical data, methods, and theories to explain this paradoxical outcome: Why have so many Maasai women and so few men converted to Catholicism, despite sustained missionary efforts to evangelize men? How and why did Maasai women overcome the cultural, social, and institutional barriers to their participation in the Catholic Church? How do Maasai women and men, and Catholic catechists and priests, understand and worship in the contemporary “church of women”? To address these questions, the book analyzes how gender has shaped the terms, contours, and outcomes of the missionary encounter between Maasai and Spiritans. As such, it examines how spirituality and conversion serve as sites for the negotiation of gender and ethnic identities, the relationship between spirituality and other domains of power, and religion as a source of personal, political, and collective empowerment for women. Gendered Perspectives in the Study of Mission The study of gender in Africa and elsewhere has flourished in recent years, building on the important insights of anthropologists, historians, and other scholars as they have explored the everyday lives, ideas, practices, and relationships of men and women across the globe. In Africa, new sources and the creative, critical use of older sources have enabled scholars to rethink certain prior assumptions, such as the universal subordination of women, and analyze new topics, such as the study of masculinities, local-global interactions , and gendered forms of modernity and agency.2 As a result, gender itself has become a much more sophisticated concept and category of analysis , requiring attention to culture and political economy, agency and structure , processes of social change, relationships of power, and other forms of social difference. It is therefore much more than just the study of “women” (with which it is still too often conflated), or, more recently “men.” Instead, it explores the relationships among and between men and women, probing how these relationships are produced, reproduced, and transformed, and thus how the very categories and meanings of being a “man” or a “woman” in different societies and at different times are configured and reconfigured. Central to these dynamic relationships are the intersections, articulations, Introduction 3 and mutual constitution of gender with other forms of social difference such as ethnicity, “race,” sexuality, religion, class, and nationality. An...