Missions in fiction.
Scott, Jamie S.
Biblical portraits of the apostles are as much the products of
fictional imagination as of historical fact, as are such early Christian
texts as the Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity (ca. 203) and
Athanasius's Life of Anthony (ca. 357). Later writers have reworked
these ancient portrayals throughout the centuries, from hagiographies
like Jacob de Voragine's Golden Legend (ca. 1260) to contemporary
novels like Walter Wangerin Jr.'s historical drama Paul (2000) and
Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code (2003), which depicts the apostle Peter
as ambitious and misogynistic. More important, though, the lives of
apostles, martyrs, and saints epitomize two interlacing themes: the
inner turmoil of the soul resisting apostasy and the public struggles of
believers committed to spreading the Christian Gospel among
nonbelievers. Though classic Christian proselytizing narratives from St.
Augustine's Confessions (398) to Dante Alighieri's Divine
Comedy (1321) play variations on such themes, the rise of the novel in
eighteenth-century western Europe offered the most suitable vehicle for
dramatizing missionary tales of discovery and self-discovery. Early
Christian Europe or the Middle Ages sometimes provides the backdrop for
missions in fiction; St. Augustine of Canterbury is the main character
of Donna Fletcher Crow's Glastonbury: The Novel of Christian
England (1992), for example. Generally, however, novelists and short
story writers have looked for inspiration to two great flourishes of
missionary activity: the Portuguese, Spanish, and French Roman Catholic
missions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which in many ways
was revived in the nineteenth century; and the British and North
American Protestant missions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Both periods saw Christian missions established around the world as
spiritual outposts of Western colonial and imperial expansion.
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Roman Catholic Missions in Fiction
Among the earliest depictions of Roman Catholic missions is Sydney
Owenson's The Missionary: An Indian Tale (1811), which is set in
seventeenth-century Kashmir and dramatizes an unconsummated romance
between the Portuguese Franciscan missionary Hilarion and the Hindu
priestess Luxima. The Goan Inquisition sentences Hilarion to burn at the
stake for apostasy, and Luxima prepares to commit sati on his pyre. A
riot allows both to escape but also results in Luxima's death,
leaving Hilarion a lonely recluse back in Kashmir, where he worships by
the sacred rivers at sunrise and sunset as Luxima used to do. Largely
orientalist in ethos, The Missionary issues salutary lessons on cultural
encounters; as one scholar has suggested, Hilarion unmakes Hindus but
makes no converts, and he himself ends up neither one nor the other.
In a sense, both historically and thematically James Hilton's
Lost Horizon (1933) picks up where Owenson's book leaves off. In
May 1931 a plane crashes near the hidden lamasery of ShangriLa in
Tibet's Kuen-Lun Mountains. The crash strands a group of
Westerners, including Roberta Brinklow, an indefatigable Protestant
missionary. The lamasery's high lama turns out to be the
200-year-old Father Perrault, a Belgian missionary who had traveled from
Peking to Shangri-La in the early eighteenth century to found a Capuchin monastery. When Brinklow determines to start her own mission in
Shangri-La, the high lama comments on her ambitions with a certain
amount of indifference. He dies shortly afterward, his legacy a
mysterious blend of Buddhism and Christianity.
Several other authors, some writing sympathetically, some from more
ambivalent postcolonial perspectives, have portrayed Roman Catholic
missionaries in the New World and elsewhere. Brian Moore's Black
Robe (1985) explores the interplav between indigenous and European
cultures in seventeenth-century New France. Tormented by self-doubt and
tortured by the Iroquois, the young French missionary Father Laforgue
begins in the novel zealously intent on restoring the Jesuit mission of
Saint Marie. He ends a sadder and wiser man, whose compassion for the
doomed Hurons displaces doctrinal dogmatism. Another story, Willa
Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), dramatizes
nineteenth-century Roman Catholic efforts to revive the faith in the
American Southwest after the United States annexed the New Mexico
Territory at the end of the Mexican War (1846-48). The French Jesuit
missionaries Jean Marie Latour and Joseph Vaillant journey west from
Sandusky, Ohio, their conviction tested both by geographic adversity and
by hedonistic frontier priests who gamble, drink, lie, and womanize,
abusing Mexicans and Indians alike. A new cathedral in the desert almost
apologetically symbolizes Latour's nearly forty years of selfless
service. Explicitly sympathetic, Bernice Scott's fictionalized
biography Junipero Serra, Pioneer of the Cross (1976) portrays the
eighteenth-century founder of the California mission system in virtually
hagiographic terms. By contrast, the huge cast in Almanac of the Dead (1991), by Native American Leslie Marmon Silko, includes missionaries in
a radical critique of Christian complicity in the nonnative exploitation
of North and South American indigenous peoples. The Native Canadian
writer Tomson Highway concentrates upon a particularly harrowing
instance of this exploitation in Kiss of the Fur Queen (1998), in which
Father Roland Lafleur, oblate of Mary Immaculate, sexually abuses Cree
Indian boys in the church-run, government-financed Birch Lake boarding
school.
Roman Catholic missions to Africa have also received mixed reviews
in fiction. In Graham Greene's A Burnt-Out Case (1961) the colonial
leprosarium at a Roman Catholic medical mission in the Belgian Congo
simultaneously symbolizes the fallen world and offers possibilities for
spiritual renewal to the novel's central character, Querry, a
celebrated French ecclesiastical architect who begins the story consumed
by apathy and ends realizing, "I suffer, therefore I am."
Indigenous African writers are often more openly censorious of missions.
In Nigerian Onuora Nzekwu's Blade Among the Boys (1962), Patrick
Ikenga's mother tries to rear her son as a tribal leader, fearing
the Roman Catholic church will make him "a eunuch." Ikenga
rejects his birthright, becomes a priest, and allows the family line to
die. Unlikable missionaries also appear in Nigerian John Munonye's
The Only Son (1966) and Malawian Legson Kayira's Jingala (1969). In
Munonye's novel, Roman Catholic priests are "lunatics"
who scorn African birthright traditions and conspire to remove boys who
are only sons from their families to the mission school. Likewise, in
Kayira's novel a Roman Catholic mission school disrupts tribal ties
by alienating Gregory, an only son, from his father, Jingala. More
ambivalent, Kenjo Jumbam's The White Man of God (1980) portrays the
destructive effects of the bullying dogmatism of "Big Father,"
who heads the Roman Catholic mission, upon Cameroon's traditional
Nso village life. At the same time, though, Jumbam suggests a common
humanity between Europeans and Africans with his portrayal of Father
Cosmas, a compassionate young priest who fights tirelessly to prevent an
epidemic among the local people, only to die from the disease himself.
By contrast, the mission school in A Fighter for Freedom (1983), by
Zimbabwean Edmund Chipamaunga, is controlled by the white supremacist
missionary Father Truss, who belongs to Ian Smith's Rhodesian
Front. Tinashe, a star pupil, becomes a leader in the liberation army,
having realized that his father, who heads the school, is really only
helping the white regime to oppress blacks. Also set in Zimbabwe, Tsitsi
Dangarembga's The Book of Not (2006) explores life for girls at the
Roman Catholic mission's Young Ladies' College of the Sacred
Heart.
Evangelical Missions in Fiction
The evangelical revivals that have spawned successive waves of
British and North American Protestant missionaries since the late
eighteenth century have provided fruitful material for writers. In
Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847) a choice between "the wild
field of mission warfare" and "the parlours and the
peace" of English country life faces the born-again St. John
Rivers, who opts for the former and tries to persuade Jane to join him
as "helpmeet and fellow-labourer" in India. In a more ironic
vein, in Bleak House (1853) Charles Dickens's Mrs. Jellyby lets her
children starve while she raises money for missions to Africa. Another
nineteenth-century British writer, Charlotte Yonge, draws upon the
career of John Coleridge Patteson, a Church Missionary Society cleric in
the Loyalty Islands, as a model for Norman May in The Daisy Chain; or,
Aspirations (1856). Notable for lauding the proselytizing efforts of
Samoan converts in the South Pacific, this novel also endorses women as
missionaries; the "perfectly feckless" Norman and his wife,
Meta, together make "a noble missionary," while his sister
Ethel ministers among the rough and ready in the remote English village
of Cocksmoor. In a sequel, The Trial (1864), the family's black
sheep, younger brother Leonard, also sees the light and gives up
"home, land, and friends, for the Gospel's sake." In a
similarly enthusiastic vein, Sir William Wilson Hunter's The Old
Missionary (1890) paints a sympathetic picture of early
nineteenth-century mission life in Bengal. In contrast, Herman
Melville's autobiographical novels Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life
(1846) and Omoo (1847) recognize that missionaries have improved
morality, translated the Bible into the vernacular, and established
churches and schools in the Marquesas, Sandwich, and Society Islands,
but Melville laments their racial prejudice and insensitivity to local
traditions, arguing that "they had exaggerated the evils of
Paganism, in order to enhance the merit of their own disinterested
labours."
By the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Protestant
denominational publishing houses were saturating the market with popular
tales of British and North American missionary heroes carrying the white
man's gospel to benighted heathens. A brief selection of titles
from North America alone would include William H. Withrow's Neville
Trueman, the Pioneer Preacher (1880), Egerton Ryerson Young's
Oowikapun; or, How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians (1894),
Ralph Connor's Black Rock: A Tale of the Selkirks (1898) and The
Sky Pilot: A Tale of the Foothills (1899), Norman Duncan's Dr. Luke
of the Labrador (1904), Basil King's Duncan Polite (1905), Hiram A.
Cody's The Frontiersman: A Tale of the Yukon (1910), and Ernest
Thompson Seton's The Preacher of Cedar Mountain: A Tale of the Open
Country (1917). All portray the missionary as a man mighty in flesh and
spirit in the standard colonial and imperial romance model of fearless
crusader, lone adventurer, and chaste lover. These novels proceed from
action scene to action scene, exciting the sensibilities of a cloistered
urban audience with descriptions of natural calamities and wild animal
attacks, robberies and frontier bar brawls, tragic heroines and Roman
Catholic perfidy. Similar lists of titles might be tallied for fiction
set in various parts of Africa and, to a lesser extent, in India,
Australia, New Zealand, and the South Pacific, with authors ringing
changes on the romance formula by taking into account local differences
in the kinds of natural challenges and spiritual trials that beset the
muscular Christian missionary's evangelical resolve. Occasionally,
a writer of this era expresses ambivalence about Christian complicity
with Western expansionism. In Siri Ram, Revolutionist (1912) and
Abdication (1922), for example, Edmund Candler identifies the missionary
presence in India with imperial power exercised in hypocritical
self-interest.
Between World Wars I and II this skepticism increases, and critical
portrayals of Protestant missions and missionaries begin to outnumber
sympathetic depictions. Three short stories set in very different parts
of the world epitomize this trend. Edith Wharton's "The Seed
of the Faith" (1919) tells of the American Evangelical Mission in
the small Arab town of Eloued, Morocco. Driven to despair by his
wife's death and twenty-five years of failed ministry, Mr.
Blandhorn, a Baptist missionary, invokes the martyrs of old and
contrives his own persecution by entering a mosque, desecrating the
Qur'an, and declaring "Christ crucified!" He dies at the
hands of the furious crowd, his wife's name the last word on his
lips. Equally controversial, W. Somerset Maugham's "Rain"
(1921) finds the missionary Alfred Davidson quarantined in American
Samoa with the prostitute Sadie Thompson. Arguing that punishment will
atone for her past sins, Davidson convinces Thompson to return to San
Francisco to face a murder inquiry, even though he believes her
innocent. Having then slept with Thompson himself, the missionary
commits suicide, while she moves on to Australia, a woman changed for
the better not because of Davidson's moralizing but because she has
found love with a serviceman. The third short story, E. M.
Forster's "The Life to Come" (1922), explores interracial homosexual relations. Vithobai, a tribal chieftain in central India,
identifies the love of Christ with Paul Pinmay, the young English
missionary who offers it. Renaming him Barnabus, Pinmay manipulates
Vithobai's devotion, colluding with colonial officials and land
speculators to dispossess the chieftain of his heritage and royal
authority. A decade later Pinmay visits the dying Vithobai, hoping to
alleviate his guilt with one last gesture of reconciliation. Vithobai
stabs the missionary through the heart and hurls himself from the roof
where he has been languishing, naked and alone.
Numerous novels of the interwar years elaborate on the ambivalence
toward missions and missionaries characterizing these short stories. In
Sylvia Townsend Warner's Mr. Fortune's Maggot (1927) Timothy
Fortune leaves the Hornsey branch of Lloyd's Bank and joins the
Church of England to serve as a missionary on the volcanic island of
Fanua in the South Pacific. Equipped with a used harmonium and a sewing
machine, Fortune makes one convert in three years, the boy Lueli, whose
purity inspires a deep love in the missionary. When the volcano erupts,
killing Lueli, Fortune loses his faith and leaves the island, reflecting
on the contrasts between South Pacific innocence and the civilization
that produced World War I. C. S. Forester's The African Queen
(1935), by contrast, celebrates missionaries and the war, though
somewhat ironically. In 1914 Reverend Samuel Sayer and his spinster
sister Rose are running a mission in German Central Africa. Samuel
invokes God's wrath upon the Germans, "as another Samuel had
once prayed for victory over the Amalekites," but local military
activities force the mission to close, and the shock kills Sayer.
Unwillingly liberated from her brother's ecclesiastical
paternalism, Rose finds love with the Canadian river rat Charlie
Allnutt, as the pair avenge Samuel's death by sinking the German
steamer Konigin Luise, which dominates Lake Wittelsbach.
Other writers of the interwar period depict missionaries at work in
Africa, as well as in South Asia and Australia. Joyce Cary's Aissa
Saved (1932) features the Shibi Mission, run by Mr. Carr and his wife,
Hilda, on the banks of the River Niger in southern Nigeria. Transfixed
by the strains of his favorite hymn, "None of Self and All of
Thee," the missionary fails to stop African converts from
interrupting a rain-making festival at the pagan village of Kohi across
the river Bloodshed ensues, and the lapsed convert Aissa is captured and
sentenced to death as a Christian witch. She escapes and reconverts,
vowing to give herself over more fully to Christ. Chanting "All de
tings I lak de mos / I sacrifice dem to His blood," she decapitates
her infant son Abba in a rain-making ritual that conflates Carr's
teachings about Christ's self-sacrifice with African juju
traditions of sacrificial appeasement. In The African Witch (1936) Cary
ironically turns these events on their head, so to speak. Modeled
loosely on Albert Schweitzer, the medical missionary Dr. Schlemm
ministers in northern Nigeria not as an evangelical enthusiast but as a
humane figure of quiet dignity and moral reasonableness. For his
troubles, though, Schlemm is murdered by a fanatical convert who parades
his head as a triumphal trophy of indigenized African sacrificial
Christianity. Less violent, Rumer Godden's Black Narcissus (1939)
nonetheless expresses ambivalence about British ambitions to
Christianize India. The novel explores the difficulties confronting
Sister Clodagh, the youngest mother superior in the history of the
Anglican Saint Faith Order, as she tries to establish a convent, a
mission school, and an infirmary in premises that used to serve as a
pleasure palace for the local potentate in Mopu in the Himalayas.
Turning to Australia, we find Xavier Herbert writing rather sardonically
in Capricornia (1938) of the way in which the Gospel Mission makes a
good profit off coconut plantations worked for free by the Reverend
Theodore Hollower's Aborigine converts, who receive free Christian
indoctrination in return. Over thirty years later in Poor Fellow My
Country (1975), which is set in 1937, Herbert satirizes denominational
rivalries in the persons of the humorless teetotaler Reverend James
Tasker, head of the Protestant Mission Society, and Father Glascock, who
greets visitors to the Leopold Islands Mission with a beer.
In the postwar era we see still further elaborations of missions in
fiction, some sympathetic, some antagonistic. Several North American
writers have located their work in China. Cornelia Spencer's The
Missionary (1947) explores tensions among American clerics whose mission
serves as troop barracks and shelter for the wounded in China's
brutal civil conflict, while John Bechtel's The Year of the Tiger
(1946) depicts missionaries as beacons of faith and hope when World War
II threatens to overwhelm the Tsui clan. John Hersey's historical
novel The Call: An American Missionary in China (1985) embodies over one
hundred years of the Protestant missionary presence in China in the
person of David Treadup. Interned by the Japanese, this American
evangelical realizes that his long career as educator and agricultural
reformer has expressed more of an impulse to serve fellow human beings
than a divine call to save souls. Other North American novelists depict
missions and missionaries in other locations. Charles E. Mercer's
Rachel Cade (1956) portrays an American nurse at Dibela in the Belgian
Congo. The mission doctor dies, and, left alone, she finds herself
cursed by local shamans for climbing the sacred Mountains of the Moon.
Also involving Africa, Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982)
reverses the Middle Passage, representing Nettie's letters about
Reverend Samuel's missionary work among the tribal Olinka as the
vehicle by which Celie, her horribly abused sister, recovers her
psychological health and spiritual identity. In First and Vital Candle
(1963) Canadian Mennonite writer Rudy Wiebe suggests that both Roman
Catholic and Protestant colonial missions were interested only in
imposing ecclesiastical disciplines upon Arctic Inuit peoples, whereas
later nonconformist Protestant missionaries, like the novel's
"Good News Man," the Reverend Joshua Bishop, convert by
example. In Australia we find Randolph Stow's To the Islands
(1958), which portrays a disillusioned Anglican missionary who,
mistakenly believing he has killed an Aborigine, flees into the desert,
not to avoid justice but to explore the frontiers of his tormented soul.
The decades on either side of the new millennium have also produced
a flurry of novels depicting missions and missionaries, many of them set
in Africa. "Pagan Coast," the first part of Crossing the River
(1993), by black British writer Caryl Phillips, describes how Nash
Williams, an emancipated slave sent as a missionary to Liberia by the
American Colonization Society in the early nineteenth century, feels
alienated in both the United States and Africa, suffers an identity
crisis, disappears, and dies. Other missionaries to Africa face further
challenges. English lay missionaries Ralph and Anna Eldred, confronted
with the violence of South African apartheid and with the sale of an
infant son for body parts to a spirit healer in Bechuanaland, discover
that radical evil transcends race in Hilary Mantel's A Change of
Climate (1994). Less despairing, Swimming in the Congo (1995), a
collection of short stories by Margaret Meyers, explores the interplay
between Protestant and tribal African beliefs from the perspective of a
seven-year-old. Growing up at the Boanda Mission Agricultural Institute
in the Belgian Congo of the 1960s, little Grace Berggren negotiates her
way among the ndoki spirits of enchanted forests and the narrow
dogmatism of her parents, for whom even ballet lessons are sinful. Late
colonial Belgian Congo also provides the setting for Barbara
Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible (1998), which portrays the American
Baptist missionary Nathan Price, whose crazed zealousness eventually so
infuriates the villagers of Kilanga that they burn him, still preaching,
from his perch atop a colonial coffee plantation tour de maitre, to be
dragged to his death by animals. We find a more salubrious picture in
Joshua's Bible (2003), by the African-American writer Shelly
Leanne. Set in the 1930s and 1940s, this novel revolves around Joshua
Clay, a Philadelphia preacher sent to South Africa by a white mission
because he is black. Abandoning the mission board's instructions to
preach in English from an English Bible, Clay turns to a Xhosa
translation and takes a leading role in the struggle against racism.
Ranging from the early twentieth century to its close, Owen
Sheers's The Dust Diaries (2004) reimagines the career of Arthur
Cripps, an eccentric missionary in Southern Rhodesia and an obscure
relative of Sheers.
Other recent novels are set in parts as various as the Indian
Ocean, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, and the Sudan. In Julia
Blackburn's The Book of Colour (1995) a nineteenth-century English
missionary's obsessive efforts to "civilize" the natives
on an island in the Indian Ocean engender a cursed legacy of madness for
his descendants. Tapu (1997) and Slow Water (2003), by New Zealanders
Judy Corbalis and Annamarie Jagose respectively, both draw widely upon
historical events. Beginning in 1814, Tapu follows the story of
missionaries Thomas and Jane Kendall, who violate the tapu world of the
Maoris they hope to convert. Slow Water fictionalizes the scandal
surrounding William Yate, who in 1836 is returning by ship from London
via Sydney to the Anglican mission in Waimate, New Zealand, when he
falls foul of fellow missionary Richard Taylor. Disgraced by
Taylor's allegation that he indulged in a homosexual affair with a
crew member, Yate ends up back in Dover, England, where he serves as
chaplain of St. John's Mariner Church, ministering to seamen till
his death in 1846.
Contemporary American authors take us to other mission fields. In
Nora Okja-Keller's Comfort Woman (1998) and Fox Girl (2002), for
example, American missionaries in Korea patronize the victims of
Japanese violence in World War II and preach the superiority of the
United States to the "throwaway children" of American
servicemen from the Korean War. John Dalton's Heaven Lake (2004)
follows Vincent Saunders from Red Bud, Illinois, to Toulio, Taiwan,
where he loses a job teaching English in a Presbyterian Bible school
after having an affair with a student. Mainland China then serves as the
backdrop for a series of lessons in self-discovery for the compromised
missionary. More uncompromising, Philip Caputo's Acts of Faith
(2005) follows the career of Quinette Hardin, an American missionary
from Iowa who works with a human rights group buying back slaves from
Arab raiders in Sudan's civil war in the 1990s. Hardin immerses
herself in local ways in order to save souls, then marries a commander
of the Sudanese People's Liberation Army, rationalizing their armed
resistance to the Muslim government in Khartoum as a front in the global
war between good and evil.
Indigenous Writers and Christian Missions
Echoing themes from novels depicting Roman Catholic missions,
several of the late twentieth-century novels mentioned above dramatize postcolonial issues arising from encounters, conflicts, and occasional
accommodations between Western and non-Western cultures. Not
surprisingly, these themes dominate the work of indigenous writers
attempting to come to grips with the European and North American
colonial and imperial presence and its aftermath. The British legacy in
Africa, for example, has by itself inspired a small library. In Akiki K.
Nyabongo's early novel Africa Answers Back (1936) Mujungu finds in
biblical stories far more meanings than his missionary instructors
intend, including scriptural backing for polygamy. More subtle, Things
Fall Apart (1958), by the celebrated Nigerian author Chinua Achebe,
portrays the missionaries Mr. Brown and Mr. Smith as the two faces of
colonial Christianity, one benevolent, the other autocratic. For Achebe,
African converts also play a crucial role. In Arrow of God (1964), for
instance, John Goodcountry, a native Christian missionary, and Ezeulu,
the titular head of the priesthood of the traditional god Ulu, embody
the clash between tribal Igbo and European Christian mores. Ezeulu
miscalculates the strength of his control over the tribe, which turns
from the cult of Ulu to Christianity. The symbol of the python captures
this tension: the snake functions at one moment as a sacred native
totem, at another as a Christian figure of original sin. Another giant
of the contemporary African literary scene, Kenya's Ngugi wa
Thiong'o, also embodies the ambiguities of the missionary presence
in Africa in his novels. In Weep Not, Child (1962) Ngugi writes warmly
of the missionaries, who "never talked down to Africans" and
whose school seemed "a paradise where children from all walks of
life and of different religious faiths could work together without any
[race] consciousness." But in The River Between (1965) the efforts
of missionary Livingston to ban female circumcision create conflict
between the traditionalist Kameno and the Christian Makuyu. Dividing to
conquer, the missionary misconceives the nature of Christian charity.
Neither the Christian convert Joshua nor the traditionalist Kabonyi, who
both attend the mission school, shows compassion for Muthoni, who dies
from a badly performed circumcision, as the river between the two
communities carries the girl's body "into a darkness that no
one could fathom."
The effects of missionary teachings on traditional ways also
preoccupy other indigenous African writers. In Francis Selormy's
The Narrow Path (1967), for instance, the upbringing of a Ghanaian boy
in a strict mission household leads to conflict with his father and the
fracturing of the patrilineal line. In another story, missionary
deception makes a martyr of Ndatshan, the main character in Stanlake
John Thompson Samkange's The Mourned One (1975). A native teacher
at the mission school, Ndatshan is falsely accused of rape and sentenced
to death. The missionary testifies against him, "his brother in
Christ, but not his brother in law", a white man first and a
Christian second." In Zimbabwean Dambudzo Marechera's The
House of Hunger (1978), the ethical authority of the Anglican missionary
church is compromised by its conniving with Ian Smith's racist
Rhodesian regime. Also set in Zimbabwe, Dangarembga's Nervous
Conditions (1988) dramatizes the ambiguous effects of a British mission
school upon the traditional roles of Shona women. Religion and politics
also intertwine in Andre Brink's Praying Mantis (2005), which
reimagines the Bethelsdorp ministry of the London Missionary
Society's J. T. van der Kemp and James Read, who served on the
eastern frontier of the Cape colony at the turn of the nineteenth
century. Abandoning the Khoi convert Kupido Kakkerlak, who loses his
desert congregation but not his personal faith, the mission epitomizes
the mixed messages between imported Christianity and the indigenous
faith it spawns. Indeed, from early in the twentieth century to the
present, similar issues preoccupy not only indigenous African novelists
but also writers from various formerly British domains. A pair of
examples will have to suffice. Set in India, Mulk Raj Anand's The
Un touchable (1935) satirizes the Christian missionary Colonel
Hutchinson, whose inability to persuade Bakha, a lavatory cleaner, of
the benefits of conversion leaves Hutchinson convinced that technology
in the form of the flush toilet is a more likely cure for the ills of
untouchability. By contrast, Sweet Water--Stolen Land (1993), by the
Aboriginal Australian Philip McLaren, fudges historical and geographic
facts to create a murder mystery. The German Lutheran missionary Karl
Maresch sets up the Neuberg Mission near Coonabarabran, New South Wales,
but fails to attract converts. This failure turns him into an insane
serial killer of settlers, who in panic blame Aborigines for the murders
and herd them off the land and into the mission, thus justifying the
murders in the evangelist's crazed mind.
Missions in Modern Popular Fiction
We find a wide array of Christian missionary stories in modern
popular fiction, especially in the United States. Sympathetic treatments
of missionary endeavors include Catherine Marshall's Christy (1967)
and Margaret Craven's I Heard the Owl Call My Name (1967), both of
which tell of missions in remote communities in North America.
Marshall's Christy Huddleston, guided by the Quaker missionary
Alice Henderson, grows in faith as a teacher at the mission in
poverty-stricken Cutter Gap, in Tennessee's Great Smoky Mountains.
Craven's Mark Brian heads an Anglican mission in the Kwakiutl
native village of Kingcome, on British Columbia's northwest Pacific
coast, where he works to prevent alcoholism, modern housing, and
residential schools from overwhelming the traditions of salmon fishing,
totems, and the potlatch.
With the late twentieth-century rise of the evangelical right in
the United States, Christian publishing became big business, and its
vast catalog of pulp fiction often features missionaries. A few examples
will suffice. Typifying evangelical adaptations of the Western romance,
Alan Morris's Bright Sword of Justice (1997) presents Hunter Stone,
who trails outlaws to a Blackfoot Indian village where he falls in love
with the beautiful missionary Reena O'Donnell. One of the outlaws
turns out to be Reena's brother, and Stone must choose between love
and justice. In other evangelical romances women take the lead roles.
The Calling of Emily Evans (1990), by the Canadian writer Janette Oke,
features an inspirational young woman called to start a church in a
nineteenth-century pioneer prairie settlement. Stephanie Grace
Whitson's Valley of the Shadow (2000), by contrast, describes the
triumphs and hardships of Genevieve LaCroix, an eighteen-year-old Sioux
who is sent for an education to the Renville Mission at the time of the
Dakota Sioux uprising of 1862. Her loyalties divided between the
missionary and his wife and her family and friends, Genevieve puts her
faith in God to show her the way forward. Evangelical heroes and
heroines are also portrayed in overseas missions. In Jeffrey W.
Bennett's Under the Lontar Palm (2001), for instance, a dispute
between Indonesian tribesmen leaves the missionary Raymond Springer
dead. His wife, Marta, continues their call with the help of a Vietnam
veteran, John Braddham, who flies missionaries over Irian Jaya for
Prayer on a Wing in order to gain experience for a career as an airline
pilot.
Other authors, less willing to take the American evangelical agenda
at face value, dramatize its ambiguities. For instance, the loosely
autobiographical No Graven Image (1966), by Elisabeth Elliot, explores
the mysteries of the divine will. The twenty-five-year-old Margaret
Sparhawk ministers to the Quechua in Ecuador's Andes Mountains. The
shocking death of a much-loved convert causes Sparhawk, like Job, to
question the foundations of her own faith: "'And does He
now,' I asked myself there at the graveside, 'ask me to
worship Him?'" Still other writers simply satirize evangelical
certainties. Frank Schaeffer's Calvin Becker trilogy, for example,
features Ralph and Elsa Becker, Reformed Presbyterian missionaries from
Kansas, and their son, Calvin. In Portofino (1992) Calvin wryly observes
his parents' efforts to convert Roman Catholics; in Saving Grandma
(1997) he celebrates his grandmother's heathen ways while they fret
over her soul; and in Zermatt (2003) a hotel waitress initiates him into
the pleasures of the flesh while his parents forbid dancing and Mad
magazine.
Mission Fiction in Other Languages
Finally, we consider fictional depictions of missions and
missionaries in languages other than English. The widely celebrated
novel Silence (1966), by the Japanese writer Shusaku Endo, tells the
story of Sebastian Rodrigues, a young Portuguese priest who travels from
Macao in the 1630s to work among Japan's persecuted Christians as
atonement for the apostasy of his mentor, Christovao Ferreira. As God
remains silent, Rodrigues profanes a bronze image of Christ in order to
save tortured peasants. He later takes a Japanese name and wife and
presides over an underground church.
More frequently, though, missions and missionaries appear in the
growing national literatures of Europe's former colonial and
imperial domains, notably in Latin America and Africa. In the early
Brazilian novel Sired (1857), by Lourenco da Silva Araujo Amazonas, for
instance, Carmelite missionaries help natives displaced by Portuguese
colonizers to transform the jungle into an agricultural settlement. In
Herculano Inglez de Souza's O missionario (The Missionary) (1891),
by contrast, Father Antonio de Morais abandons noble intentions to
convert the native Mundurucus, takes a mistress, and pursues personal
ambitions in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Other Brazilian novelists
have dramatized the Guaranitica War (1752-56) and its aftermath, which
destroyed dozens of mission settlements, saw the powerful Jesuits
expelled from Portuguese and Spanish possessions, and helped determine
the modern borders of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. Erico
Verissimo's O continente (The Continent) (1943), Manelito de
Ornellas's Tiaraju (1945), Alcy Cheuiche's Sepe Tiaraju
(1978), and Rui Nedel's Esta terra teve dono (This Land Has an
Owner) (1983) ring the changes on the relationship between the Jesuits
and the legendary Sepe Tiaraju, who served as prefect of the Mission of
San Miguel before becoming a native guerrilla defender of the mission
settlements against Portuguese and Spanish colonial forces. Religion and
politics intermingle in other Brazilian fiction too. Against the
backdrop of the military coup of 1964, time among the Xingu natives
inspires the young priest Nando in Antonio Callado's Quarup (1978)
to become a political activist, while Darcy Ribeiro's Maira (1976)
portrays Italian Jesuits competing to transform the lives of Mairum
natives with apocalyptic American evangelicals whose mission station is
shaped like a flying saucer. Similar themes permeate other Latin
American fiction as well. Mario Vargas Llosa's El hablador (The
Storyteller) (1987), for example, laments the way in which Roman
Catholic missionary efforts to convert the Machiguengas along the Urumba
River in Peru's Amazon rain forest have contributed to the loss of
tribal culture.
In African vernacular fiction, numerous short pieces celebrate the
triumph of Christianity over native superstition, among them Malawian S.
A. Paliani's Nyanja narrative In 1930 Came a Witchdoctor (1930),
Zairean Stephen A. Mpashi's historical fiction The Catholic Priests
Arrive Among the Bemba (1956), and Zimbabwean works like David
Ndoda's Ndebele tale In Days Gone By (1958) and Patrick
Chakaipa's Shona story Love Is Blind (1966). A. C. Mzolisa
Jordan's Xhosa novel The Wrath of the Ancestors (1940), by
contrast, associates Anglican missionizing with the awakening of African
pride, only to suggest that such pride is really a masked revival of
precolonial tribal identity. Francophone and Lusophone African writings
also unflatteringly portray Roman Catholic missions. Written in the form
of an altar boy's journal, Le pauvre Christ de Bomba (The Poor
Christ of Bomba) (1956), by Cameroon's Mongo Beti, satirizes Father
Drumont's efforts to frustrate premarital sex. Native girls are
confined for months in the sixa (a settlement for women escaping
polygamy), where catechists rape them, sowing seeds of syphilis among
future generations of Africans. As heartless as the colonial rulers, the
church exacts huge tithes even from the poor, the old, and the infirm.
In other works, missionary hypocrisy assumes the explicit form of sexual
immorality. In Une vie de boy (Life of a Houseboy) (1956), by another
Cameroonian, Ferdinand Leopold Oyono, Father Gilbert uses conversion to
bring French civilization to Africa, but gonorrheal catechists reflect
European Christianity's true decadence. Zairean Thomas Mpoyi-Buatu
also frames missionary corruption in sexual terms. Ranging from
mid-nineteenth century to contemporary Kinshasa, La re-production (1986)
attacks Roman Catholic missions for being partners in the colonial
exploitation of Africa. Ngandu Nkashama perpetuates these negative
impressions. Written in the form of a prison journal, this Zairean
novelist's La mort faite homme (Death Made Human) (1986) identifies
the mission school's father director as an abusive hypocrite.
Similarly, Josh Luandino's Lusophone Angolan collection Vidas novas
(New Lives) (1976) includes the short story "Dina," which
implicates missionaries in colonial cruelties. The title character, a
prostitute, recalls how Portuguese troops killed her parents even as
they sought sanction in the Mission of Sao Paulo. Once again, the
missionary here fares ill in the hands of the secular skeptic.
Images in fiction portraying missions have ranged from the heroic
to the hypocritical, from the comic to the catastrophic. As the
interplay of cultures continues apace worldwide, the panorama of
missions and missionaries portrayed in vernacular and in
English-language and other national literatures will doubtless grow
still more varied and more colorful. Mindful of the frequently mixed
motives of their former mentors, for example, indigenous churches now
send missionaries to preach the Gospel in former colonial and imperial
centers in Europe and North America, and we may expect to see these
figures featuring in future short stories and novels. At the same time,
ironically, lecturers in Western seminaries and theological colleges,
equally aware of the checkered record of colonial and imperial
missionizing, today include mission fiction in their syllabuses in an
effort to add a degree of human ambiguity to the idealistic image of the
missionary enterprise so often portrayed in less self-reflective mission
histories and missiological treatises. Lastly, globalized literary
studies promise multiplied opportunities for comparative readings in
missions, missionaries, and fiction. In some cases we have translations
of literary classics, such as Anthony C. Yu's glorious rendition of
Wu Cheng'en's Chinese epic, Journey to the West (1977-83
[orig. ca. 1595]), which describes the adventures of the Buddhist monk
Xuanzang, who traveled to India to obtain scriptures for the propagation
of Buddhism in China. In other cases, a plethora of best-selling
contemporary novels invites mission studies analysis, from Salman
Rushdie's magic realist classic The Satanic Verses (1988), which
works on one level as an ironic critique of extremist tendencies in
certain kinds of Muslim proselytizing, to Myla Goldenberg's more
conventionally imagined Bee Season (2000), in which Aaron Naumann finds
Hindu rituals transplanted to New York more satisfying than the Jewish
traditions of his father, a cantor and scholar of Kabbalah. Aaron
abandons plans to become a rabbi and converts to the Hare Krishna
movement.
Jamie S. Scott, Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Research
Institute for the Advanced Study of Humanity, University of Newcastle,
Newcastle, Australia, teaches courses in religion and culture. He is the
editor of Religions of Canadians (Oxford, forthcoming).