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SCHWEITZER AND AFRICA*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 June 2016

RUTH HARRIS
RUTH HARRIS*
Affiliation:
New College, Oxford
*
New College, Oxford, ox1 3bn[email protected]
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Abstract

This work analyses Albert Schweitzer's complex relationship to Africa, and places him within the context of medical missionizing. Although he worked in Africa for over fifty years, Schweitzer was strangely indifferent to the continent's culture. Unlike his fellow missionaries, he never learned native languages, and his service was primarily grounded in a Nietzschean rejection of European conventionalities and a desire to develop his unique ‘ethical personality’. Schweitzer's self-belief enabled him to create a village-hospital where the sick could come with their families for treatment and refuge, and contributed to his idea of the ‘reverence for life’, a secularized ethics of compassion and environmental protection that made him famous in the West. The village-hospital enabled him to tend the sick more effectively, but after the First World War it became more hierarchical and de-personalized. Schweitzer's missionary experiment in Lambaréné was simultaneously radical and conformist, daring and self-protectively conservative. His desire to serve was as profound as any of his clerical colleagues, but it was built, as will be seen, upon rebellious ethical foundations. Schweitzer stands out not so much for his therapeutic innovations (though these were important), as for his later formulation of a neo-Christian ecologism that assured his fame in Europe and America.

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Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 59 , Issue 4 , December 2016 , pp. 1107 - 1132
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Lyndal Roper, Megan Vaughan, and Iain Pears for their unstinting help. Special thanks go to two of the anonymous reviewers for their incisive comments and bibliographical knowledge.

References

1 ‘The greatest man in the world’, Life Magazine, 6 Oct. 1947, pp. 95–8.

2 Winthrop Sargeant, ‘Albert Schweitzer’, Life Magazine, 6 Oct. 1947, p. 77; the saintly image remained despite growing criticism: George Silk, ‘The white wizard's 90th’, Life Mazagine, 19 Feb. 1965, pp. 83–94.

3 See ‘The Schweitzer declaration’, Saturday Review, 18 May 1957, pp. 13–20, broadcast worldwide on 23 Apr. 1957.

4 Rhena Schweitzer Miller and Gustav Woyt, The Albert Schweitzer–Helene Bresslau letters, 1902–1912 (Syracuse, NY, 2003), p. 60, letter 53. He felt that Jesus had put him in chains.

5 See Erica Anderson's The world of Albert Schweitzer: a book of photographs (New York, NY, 1955).

6 See ‘Albert Schweitzer: an anachronism’, Time Magazine, 21 June, 1963, p. 31, and Gerald McKnight, Verdict on Schweitzer: the man behind the legend of Lambaréné (London, 1964), pp. 21, 31, 54–5.

7 See Jean and John Comaroff, Of revelations and revolution: Christianity, colonialism and consciousness in South Africa, i (Chicago, IL, 1991), pp. 172–250, who focuses on the difficulty of securing conversions and the fluidity of ‘translation’; P. Landau, The realm of the word: language, gender and Christianity in a southern African kingdom (Portsmouth, NH, 1995), concentrates on religion and language, and their relation to sacred power, gender, and local and elite autonomy; see also Derek R. Peterson, Creative writing: translation, bookeeping, and the work of imagination in colonial Kenya (London, 2004); and T. Faloloa, Christianity and social change in Africa: essays in honor of J. D. Y. Peel (Durham, NC, 2005), particularly part E.

8 Elizabeth Elbourne, Blood ground: colonialism, missions, and the contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1853 (Montreal, 2002).

9 Adrian Hastings, The church in Africa, 1450–1950 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 264–6; Toyin Falola, Christianity and social change in Africa, particularly part E.

10 Patrick Harries and David Maxwell, eds., in The spiritual and the secular: missionaries and knowledge about Africa (Grand Rapids, MI, 2012); see also Charles Good, The steamer parish: the rise and fall of missionary medicine on an African frontier (Chicago, IL, 2004), pp. 46–7, 297–8; and W. T. Kalusa and M. Vaughan, Death, belief and politics in central African history (Lusaka, 2013), especially ch. 4.

11 See Hokkanen, Marku, ‘Scottish missionaries and African healers: perceptions and relations in the Livingstonia Mission, 1875–1930’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 34 (2004), pp. 320–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Kalusa, Walima T., ‘Language, medical auxiliaries, and the re-interpretation of missionary medicine in colonial Mwinilunga, Zambia, 1922–1951’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 1 (2007), pp. 57–78 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 See Patrick Harries, Butterflies and barbarians: Swiss missionaries and systems of knowledge in South-East Africa (Oxford, 2007), pp. 10–34; for more on this process elsewhere, see n. 7.

13 J. Brabazon, Albert Schweitzer: a biography (2nd edn, Syracuse, NY, 2000).

14 See Pierre Lassus, Albert Schweitzer (Paris, 1995); Robert Arnaut, Albert Schweitzer: l'homme au-delà de la renommé internationale (Paris, 2009).

15 In Empire of humanity (Ithaca, NY, 2011), for example, Michael M. Barnett has no entry for Schweitzer.

16 See Nils Ole Oermann, Albert Schweitzer, 1875–1965: eine Biographie (Munich, 2009). In both East and West he represented, especially for the young, the continuity of German Bildung, despite war and holocaust. See pp. 241–2, 271–87.

17 Harris, R., ‘The allure of Albert Schweitzer’, History of European Ideas, 40 (2014), pp. 804–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Paget, James Carleton, ‘Albert Schweitzer's second edition of “The quest of the historical Jesus”’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 88 (2006; imprint 2009), pp. 3–39 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, ‘Theologians in context: Albert Schweitzer’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 62 (2011), pp. 116–31Google Scholar; idem, ‘Schweitzer and Paul’, Journal for the Study of the New Testament, 33 (2011), pp. 223–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, ‘Albert Schweitzer and Adolf von Harnack: an unlikely alliance’, Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte, 122 (2011), pp. 257–87Google Scholar; idem, ‘Albert Schweitzer and Africa’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 38 (2012), pp. 277–316 Google Scholar.

19 His most important contributions were Das Messianitäts- und Leidensgeheimnis: eine Skizze des Lebens Jesu (3rd edn, Tübingen, 1956); The mystery of the kingdom of God, trans. Walter Lowrie (Amherst, MA, 1985); Von Reimarus zu Wrede: eine Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung (Tübingen, 1906); and The quest of the historical Jesus: a critical study of its progress from Reimarus to Wrede , trans. W. Montgomery (London, 1954).

20 Harries, Butterflies and barbarians, p. 2.

21 See A. Schweitzer's Die Religionsphilosophie Kant's von der Kritik der reinen Vernunft bis zur Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft (Freiburg, 1889).

22 Harris, ‘The allure of Albert Schweitzer’, pp. 807–9.

23 Miller and Woyt, The Albert Schweitzer–Helene Bresslau letters: for the theological college, see 3 Mar. 1903, pp. 17–18, and 26 Nov. 1903; for his loss of academic motivation, see pp. 32–3 and 21 Dec. 1904, for indecision over Africa, pp. 57–8; see also Carleton Paget, ‘Albert Schweitzer and Africa’, pp. 281–4.

24 André Encrevé, Les protestants en France de 1800 à nos jours (Paris, 1985), pp. 45–8, 59, and Jean-François Zorn, Le grand siècle d'une mission protestante: la Mission de Paris de 1822 à 1912 (Paris, 1993), pp. 565–89.

25 René Blac, Jacques Blocher, and Etienne Kruger, Histoire des missions protestantes françaises, iii (Namur, 1970), pp. 28–33.

26 See Patrick Cabanel, Le Dieu de la République: aux sources protestantes de la laïcité (1860–1900) (Rennes, 2003); Marianne Carbonnier-Burkard and Patrick Cabanel, Une histoire des protestantes en France, XVI–XXe siècle (Paris, 1998).

27 Blac, Blocher, and Kruger, Histoire des missions protestantes françaises, p. 70.

28 Jean-François Zorn, The transforming gospel: the mission of François Coillard and Basuto evangelists in Barotseland (Geneva, 2004).

29 Zorn, Le grand siècle d'une mission protestante, p. 592.

30 Miller and Woyt, The Albert Schweitzer–Helene Bresslau letters, pp. 212–15.

31 Zorn, Le grand siècle d'une mission protestante, pp. 594–5.

32 An earlier liberal theologian had been rejected in 1897, ibid., pp. 589–90.

33 Cited in Zorn, Le grand siècle d'une mission protestante, p. 592.

34 Ibid., p. 593.

35 Ibid., p. 595.

36 Ibid., p. 598.

37 A. Schweitzer, On the edge of the primeval forest: the experiences and observations of a doctor in equatorial Africa (London, 1953), p. 7; idem, Zwischen Wasser und Urwald (Munich, 1925), p. 5: ‘Die Lehrtätigkeit an der Universität Strassburg, die Orgelkunst und die Schriftstellerei verliess ich, um als Arzt nach Äquatorialafrika zu gehen.’

38 David K. Goodin, The new rationalism: Albert Schweitzer's philosophy of reverence for life (Montreal, 2013), p. 15.

39 Miller and Woyt, The Albert Schweitzer–Helene Bresslau letters, 26 [25] Feb. 1905, p. 65.

40 den Boer, Pim, ‘Civilization: comparing concepts and identities’, Contributions to the history of concepts, 1(2005) p. 57 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 See Edward Berenson, Heroes of empire: five charismatic men and the conquest of Africa (Berkeley, 2011).

42 It was finally edited by Ulrich H. J. Körtner and Johann Zürcher, Wir Epigonen: Kultur and Kulturstaat (Munich, 2005).

43 Den Boer, ‘Civilization’, p. 55; see Schweitzer's preface to The philosophy of civilization, trans. C. T. Campion (New York, NY, 1960), p. xii.

44 Schweitzer, The philosophy of civilization, p. 16; Albert Schweitzer, Verfall und Wiederaufbau der Kultur (Munich, 1923), p. 16: ‘übermäßigen Organisation unserer öffentlichen Verhältnisse’.

45 Schweitzer, The philosophy of civilization, p. 44; Schweitzer, Verfall und Wiederaufbau der Kultur, p. 46: ‘Einzelindividualitäten’, ‘Regeneration der Kultur hat nichts mit Bewegungen zu tun, die den Charakter eines Massenerlebnisses an sich tragen.’

46 Schweitzer, The philosophy of civilization, p. 57; Schweitzer, Verfall und Wiederaufbau der Kultur, p. 58: ‘Ethik ist die auf die innerliche Vollendung seiner Persönlichkeit gerichtete Tätigkeit des Menschen.’

47 Gray, Christopher and Ngolet, François, ‘Lambaréné, Okoumé, and the transformation of labor along the middle Ogooué (Gabon, 1870–1945)’, Journal of African History, 40 (1999), pp. 87–107 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See Blac, Blocher, and Kruger, Histoire des missions protestantes françaises, pp. 157–66.

48 Blac, Blocher, and Kruger, Histoire des missions protestantes françaises, pp. 157–69.

49 See Mary Henrietta Kingsley, Travels in West Africa Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons (ebooks@Adelaide, 2012), chs. 12–16.

50 James W. Fernandez, Bwiti: an ethnography of the religious imagination in Africa (Princeton, NJ, 1982), pp. 30–40.

51 Ibid., pp. 41–8.

52 Christopher Gray, Colonial rule and crisis in equatorial Africa: southern Gabon, ca. 1850–1940 (Rochester, NY, 2002), pp. 133–69.

53 See Maryinez Lyons, The colonial disease: a social history of sleeping sickness in northern Zaire, 1900–1940 (Cambridge, 1992).

54 See Verena Mühlstein, Helene Schweitzer Bresslau: ein Leben für Lambarene (Munich, 1998).

55 Uberfill, François, ‘Schweitzer (Albert) Bresslau (Hélène), Correspondance 1901–1905: l'amitié dans l'amour ’, Revue d'Alsace, 132 (2006), p. 573 Google Scholar.

56 Miller and Woyt, Albert Schweitzer–Helene Bresslau letters, 19 Jan. 1904, p. 65.

57 See Cinnamon, John M., ‘Missionary expertise, social science, and the uses of ethnographic knowledge in colonial Gabon’, History in Africa, 33 (2006), pp. 413–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 See Comaroff, Of revelations and revolution, i, pp. 172–250; Elbourne, Blood ground; Harries and Maxwell, eds., The spiritual and the secular; Landau, The realm of the word; Hastings, The church in Africa, pp. 273–5, Peterson, Creative writing; and Faloloa, Christianity and social change in Africa, particularly part E.

59 Cinnamon, J. M., ‘Robert Hamill Nassau: missionary ethnography and the colonial encounter in Gabon’, Le Fait Missionnaire: Social Sciences and Missions, 19 (2006), pp. 37–64 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60 Schweitzer, On the edge of the primeval forest, p. 27: ‘One arranges at once in Africa (so the missionaries impress on me from the beginning) that the blacks shall be in the white people's quarters as little as possible.’ Idem, Zwischen Wasser und Urwald, p. 31: ‘Man richtet sich, so belehren mich die Missionare gleich von Anfang an, in Afrika so ein, dass die Schwarzen die Wohnräume der Weissen so wenig als möglich betreten.’

61 See his The Christian mission in Africa (New York, NY, 1926), pp. 19, 37–41, 45–6.

62 For the problems of (mis)communication, see Nancy Rose Hunt, A colonial lexicon of birth ritual, medicalization and mobility in the Congo (Durham, NC, and London, 1999).

63 Steven E. G. Melamed and Antonia Melamed, ‘Albert Schweitzer in Gabon’, in Michael C. Reed and James F. Barnes, eds., Culture, ecology and politics in Gabon's rainforest (New York, NY, 2002), pp. 172–5 for sermons; p. 172 for palavers. The Melameds uncritically accept Schweitzer's vision of these parleys as ‘pointless, destructive, Gabonese arguments’.

64 See Hokkanen, ‘Scottish missionaries and African healers’.

65 For more on the likes of Joseph, see Kalusa, ‘Language, medical auxiliaries, and the re-interpretation of missionary medicine’.

66 Schweitzer, On the edge of the primeval forest, pp. 59–60.

67 Schweitzer, A., ‘The relations of the white and coloured races’, Contemporary Review, 133 (1928), p. 65 Google Scholar.

68 Ibid., p. 68.

69 Davenport, Manuel M., ‘The moral paternalism of Albert Schweitzer’, Ethics, 84 (1974), pp. 117–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

70 Schweitzer, On the edge of the primeval forest, p. 31; Schweitzer, Zwischen Wasser und Urwald, p. 36.

71 Schweitzer, On the edge of the primeval forest, p. 70; Schweitzer, Zwischen Wasser und Urwald, p. 84: ‘dass es der Herr Jesus ist, der dem Doktor und seiner Frau geboten hat, hier an den Ogowe zu kommen und dass weisse Menschen in Europa uns die Mittel geben, um hier für die Kranken zu leben’.

72 I tend here to disagree with James Carleton Paget. He may have refrained from using the term because in his first missionary contract he was a ‘visiting physician’. See ‘Albert Schweitzer and Africa’, pp. 287–8. See also M. Vaughan, Curing their ills: colonial power and African illness (Cambridge, 1991); David Hardiman, ed., Healing bodies, saving souls: medicial missions in Asia and Africa (Amsterdam, 2006); Christoffer H. Grundmann, Sent to heal: emergence and development of medical missions (New York, NY, 2005); and N. Etherington, ed., Missions and empire (Oxford, 2008).

73 Schweitzer, ‘The relations of the white and coloured races’, p. 70.

74 For more on these hygienic imperatives, see Philip D. Curtin, ‘Medical knowledge and urban planning in colonial tropical Africa’, in Steven Feierman and John M. Janzen, eds., The social basis of health and healing in Africa (Berkeley, CA, 1992), pp. 235–55.

75 Schweitzer, On the edge of the primeval forest, p. 93.

76 See Bernault, Florence, ‘Body, power and sacrifice in equatorial Africa’, Journal of African History, 47 (2006), pp. 207–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

77 A. Schweitzer, More from the primeval forest (London, 1958), p. 62.

78 In the Belgian Congo, where the ravages of the rubber trade made sleeping sickness more virulent, doctors performed compulsory lumbar punctures, with the ‘natives’, convinced that they were injected with poison. Given that diagnosis required isolation, their fears were hardly irrational. Lyons, The colonial disease, pp. 188–90.

79 Schweitzer, More from the primeval forest, p. 25.

80 Ibid., p. 71.

81 Hunt in A colonial lexicon of birth ritual, discusses these beliefs, p. 7.

82 Hokkanen, ‘Scottish missionaries and African healers’; for a good example of the healers’ effectiveness, see p. 332, and Kalusa, ‘Language, medical auxiliaries, and the re-interpretation of missionary medicine’.

83 Schweitzer, On the edge of the primeval forest, p. 30.

84 Ibid., p. 41.

85 See Luise White, Speaking with vampires: rumor and history in colonial Africa (Berkeley, CA, 2000).

86 Kalusa, W. T., ‘Missionaries, African patients, and negotiating missionary medicine at Kalene Hospital, Zambia, 1906–1935’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 40 (2014), pp. 283–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This hospital, unlike Schweitzer's, received a subsidy from the colonial authorities to train African physicians after 1926, a move that neither Schweitzer nor the French administration was to emulate.

87 Schweitzer, On the edge of the primeval forest, p. 100; idem, Zwischen Wasser und Urwald, p. 121: ‘Dass viele Eingeborene die Frage in sich bewegen, wie es möglich sei, dass die Weissen, die ihnen das Evangelium der Liebe bringen, sich jetzt gegenseitig morden.’

88 Schweitzer, On the edge of the primeval forest, p. 21.

89 Ibid., p. 22.

90 See Schweitzer, Die Religionsphilosophie.

91 Schweitzer was a leading figure in the Organ Reform Movement or Orgelbewegung in the early twentieth century. Worried by the industrial production of organs (especially in Germany) that, he felt, blurred sound and subtlety in favour of volume, he advocated restoration and new organs created by great craftsmen.

92 Schweitzer, The philosophy of civilization, p. 21; in German, Verfall und Wiederaufbau der Kultur, p. 21: ‘gefährlichen Gemenge von Kultur und Unkultur’.

93 Schweitzer, The philosophy of civilization, p. 38.

94 Ibid.

95 A. Schweitzer, My life and thought, trans. A. Campion (London, 1946), p. 156; idem, Aus meinem Leben und Denken (Leipzig, 1931), p. 136.

96 See Carleton Paget, ‘Albert Schweitzer and Africa’, pp. 289–94, for some of the ambivalence, impressions which I share.

97 Schweitzer, On the edge of the primeval forest, p. 83.

98 There is no evidence that Schweitzer later read the path-breaking work of the Belgian Franciscan missionary Placide Tempels, whose La philosophie bantoue, trans. A. Rubbens (Elisabethville, 1945), analysed a distinctive African ontology.

99 Kalusa and Vaughan, Death, belief and politics in central African history, pp. 293–327.

100 George Marshall and David Poling, Schweitzer: a biography (London, 1971), argue for the breakdown on pp. 148–54, while Brabazon, Albert Schweitzer, suggests a milder depression, pp. 286–7.

101 A. Schweitzer, My childhood and youth (London, 1960); idem, Aus meiner Kindheit und Jugendzeit (Munich, 1924).

102 Arnaut, Albert Schweitzer, p. 173.

103 Ibid., pp. 176–7.

104 Schweitzer, More from the primeval forest, p. 14; idem, Mitteilungen aus Lambarene. Erster Teil: Frühjahr bis Herbst 1924 (Bern, 1925), p. 19.

105 Schweitzer, More from the primeval forest, p. 13; idem, Mitteilungen aus Lambarene. Erster Teil, p. 18: ‘Erscheinungen eines unheimlichen Gärungsprozesses in Afrika.’

106 David Pratten, The man leopard murders: history and society in colonial Nigeria (Edinburgh, 2007), pp. 8–17, describes the different motivations and contexts in which these incidents occurred.

107 Gray, Colonial rule and crisis in equatorial Africa, pp. 196–203.

108 Ibid., 197–215.

109 Ibid., and James. W. Fernandez, Bwiti: an ethnography of the religious imagination in Africa.

110 Gray, Colonial rule and crisis in equatorial Africa, p. 203.

111 Arnaut, Albert Schweitzer, pp. 260–5.

112 Hastings, The church in Africa, outlines the many different African ‘prophetism’ and ‘independency’ movements, pp. 493–539.

113 Schweitzer, More from the primeval forest, p. 41; idem, Mitteilungen aus Lambarene, Zweiter Teil: Herbst 1924 bis Herbst 1925 (Strasbourg, 1926), p. 9: ‘Heute besteht ein grosser Teil meiner Kranken aus Wilden, die aus dem Inneren zugezogen sind und…auf den Holzplätzen der Weissen im Urwald arbeiten. Es sind heimatlose Proletarier im traurigsten und auch im schlimmsten Sinne des Wortes.’

114 Schweitzer, More from the primeval forest, p. 51; idem, Mitteilungen aus Lambarene, Zweiter Teil, p. 10: ‘vertierte Menschen, nicht nur Wilde’.

115 Scheitzer, More from the primeval forest, p. 79; idem, Mitteilungen aus Lambarene, Zweiter Teil, p. 57: ‘Was bin ich doch für ein Dummkopf, dass ich der Doktor solcher Wilden geworden bin.’

116 Gillespie, Noel, ‘With Schweitzer in Lambarene: Noel Gillespie's letters from Africa’, Wisconsin Magazine of History, 54 (1970–1), pp. 166–203 Google Scholar.

117 Nessman became a résistant and was tortured by the Gestapo.

118 See Arnaut, Albert Schweitzer, pp. 591–2, for a list of the physicians.

119 For more on the gender and racial hierarchies in colonial and mission hospitals, see Anne Digby, Diversity and division in medicine: health care in South Africa from the 1800s (Oxford, 2006); she explains how imperial medicine kept a rather strict racial and gender divide (pp. 116–87), though there were instances where enterprising women could become almost as dominant as Schweitzer (Nurse Ida Gordon, pp. 74–84); the training of female African nurses (elsewhere in the continent seen as a male profession) also took time, pp. 229–66.

120 See Lassus, Albert Schweitzer, pp. 87–94, for Helene's difficulties in seeing her husband.

121 Fernandez, James W., ‘The sound of bells in a Christian country: in quest of the historical Schweitzer’, Massachussetts Review, 5 (1964), p. 542 Google Scholar.

122 Arnaut, Albert Schweitzer, p. 338.

123 Louise Jilek-Aall, Working with Schweitzer: sharing his reverence for life (Surrey, BC, 1990), pp. 26, 28–9, 51–5, 75–7; on the separation from Africans, and the incomprehension between the local people and the staff, see pp. 114–32, and her attempts to bridge the gap, pp. 133–43.

124 Edouard Nies-Berger, Albert Schweitzer as I knew him (New York, NY, 2003), sought to deify Schweitzer as an incomparable genius, but revealed his ambivalence when he noted the authoritarian and manipulative way the Great Man created competing fiefs among his collaborators both in Africa and in Alsace. On p. 26, he recounts the laments of Helene; for more on the tension with his wife, see Brabazon, Albert Schweitzer, p. 389; Trudi Bochsler, who worked with the lepers, was one of the few who seemed ably to defy Schweitzer and win his respect, but she was cast out later (p. 394); on the mistrust of the other women towards Erica Anderson who became a new favourite in the 1950s (p. 395); and the jealousy of Helene towards Mme Martin (p. 397).

125 Schweitzer, More from the primeval forest, p. 51; idem, Mitteilungen aus Lambarene, Zweiter Teil, p. 19: ‘Vielleicht hätten wir im Spital weniger Schwierigkeiten mit unseren Wilden, wenn wir uns zuweilen zu ihnen um das Feuer setzen könnten und uns ihnen gegenüber auch als Menschen, nicht nur als Medizinmänner und Wächter der Spitalordnung geben könnten. Aber wir vermögen nichts dawider. Vorläufig sind wir dazu verurteilt, den Kamf gegen Krankheit und Schmerz als ein aufreibendes Handwerk zu betreiben, bei dem alles andere zu kurz kommt.’

126 Melamed and Melamed, ‘Albert Schweitzer in Gabon’, pp. 165–6.

127 Arnaut, Albert Schweitzer, pp. 281–2

128 Rita Headrick, edited by Daniel R. Headrick, Colonialism, health and illness in French equatorial Africa 1885–1935 (Atlanta, GA, 1994), pp. 191–272. The table which suggests Schweitzer's success is on p. 263. He had many more resources, and the Europeans also privileged his hospital.

129 James Cameron, Point of departure (London, 2006), pp. 153–5.

130 This debate went back decades. The physician, Frédéric Trensz, who worked in Lambaréné between 1926 and 1927, had tried to convince his older colleague to install both a water purifier and electricity – all to no avail. See Arnaut, Albert Schweitzer, pp. 234–5.

131 Fernandez, ‘The sound of bells in a Christian country’, p. 557.

132 Harris, ‘The allure of Albert Schweitzer’.

133 Melamed and Melamed, Albert Schweitzer in Gabon, p. 180.

134 André Gide, Travels in the Congo (Harmondsworth, 1986) p. 186.

135 See Jack D. Flam and Miriam Deutch, Primitivism and twentieth-century art: a documentary history (Berkeley, CA, 2003); Rupert Richard Arrowsmith, Modernism and the museum: Asian, African, and Pacific art and the London avant garde (Oxford, 2011), pp. 1–22.

136 See Anne Anlin Cheng, Second skin: Josephine Baker and the modern surface (New York, NY, 2011).

137 Carole Sweeny, From fetish to subject: race, modernism, and primitivism, 1919–1935 (Westport, CT, 2004); Donna V. Jones, The racial discourses of life philosophy: négritude, vitalism, and modernity (New York, NY 2010), p. 1–26.

138 Albert Schweitzer and Rachel Carson: two courageous and inspiring people, georgianbayearthdays.org.

139 Ibid.