Christianity and Public Culture in Africa

1: Christian Mission Stations in South-Central Africa: Eddies in the Flow of Global Culture

27 O N E Christian Mission Stations in South-Central Africa Eddies in the Flow of Global Culture J A m e S A . P r i t C H e t t T h E C l I C h É that early missions attracted the African outcast, the vulnerable, and the marginal obscures the reality of mission stations as complex hierarchies of individuals, collectively constructing novel institutions .1 Africans residing at a rural mission station could have been teachers, lay preachers, schoolchildren, carpenters, bricklayers, mechanics , craftspersons, cooks, cleaners, launderers, seamstresses, farmhands, herders, buyers, clerks, accountants, stockers, or day laborers. in many instances these were occupational categories that had not long existed, whose gender assignment remained unclear, and whose relative hierarchical rankings had yet to be sorted out. Clearly the individuals recruited to these categories had not all been equally marginal characters in the societies from whence they came, if at all. Clearly they exercised differing levels of influence on the functioning of the mission station. And clearly their individual relationships with the missionaries varied from possibly intimate and meaningful daily interaction to only occasional and rather incidental contact. African chiefs and headmen routinely sent family members or trusted subjects to live at mission stations, to report back on their operations, to assess the threats or opportunities contained therein.2 disadvantaged social or ethnic groups routinely ensconced themselves at mission stations seeking escape and protection, a fresh start under a new dispensation. Some early mission stations, with their array of sacred and secular aims, their occupational and ethnic diversity, their daily 28 JAMES A. PRITChETT experimentations with new forms of cultural and economic intercourse, and the concomitant possibilities for social friction, could easily have been the most complex social aggregates on the African landscape.thus, to discuss the impact of mission stations in terms of generalized narratives about the tenets of particular ecclesiastical orders juxtaposed to so-called traditional African belief systems, or the political configuration of particular european nations juxtaposed to traditional African social structures, is to overlook the complexity and contingency of everyday life, the power of circadian interaction to generate new modes of thought and action for both Africans and missionaries alike. An opening caveat: while this chapter may appear as one more study of the “encounter” that transforms African consciousness, i nevertheless agree wholeheartedly with derek Peterson’s assertion that we “must discard the idea that colonialism was an ‘encounter’ between a textual, rational european world of modernity and an oral, negotiated African world of experience. framing colonial history in this way forecloses investigation into the hard work that colonized people did within their own intellectual traditions.”3 Complex conversations about change, otherness , and social reorientation in Africa did not begin with the coming of europeans. nor did such conversations begin with decoding the contingencies of urban life. engaging and negotiating colonialism did not produce the first cultural, aesthetic, or epistemological bricolage on the African continent. life in south-central Africa has long been characterized by the movement of people, ideas, forms of social organization, and ritual practices whose multiple intersections required constant social and psychological adjustments.4 the arrival of europeans may have required somewhat greater adjustment, but frameworks and models for thinking about such adjustments already existed. in this chapter, i will first illustrate a bit of the local character of the epistemological tête-à-tête that characterized the African-european encounter in mwinilunga, Zambia. i will also present a few vignettes from daily life on and around mission stations that buttress my view of them as early,and continuing,sites for the development of African popular culture. finally,i will tilt the analytical lens slightly to show how the same material could contribute to emerging discourses on public culture that draw our attention to new forms of imagined communities, mediated by a range of communicative technologies, linked and underpinned by distinctive imagery, rhetorical modes and performative styles. this chapter is much too short to explore these topics in any depth but simply aims to suggest 29 Christian mission Stations in South-Central Africa some of the rich possibilities of approach. the material is derived from longer case studies of two mission stations in the mwinilunga district of northwestern Zambia: one, Kalene mission, organized by an evangelical Protestant group, the Christian missions in many lands (Cmml), who settled in Central Africa in the 1890s; the other, lwawu mission, founded by Catholics...