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East African Christians and World War I

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

M. Louise Pirouet
M. Louise Pirouet
Affiliation:
University of Nairobi
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Extract

It has usually been supposed that World War I was ‘an injury to the Christian cause’ because of the disruption of missionary work when mission personnel were called up, interned or not replaced. This view is questioned. Evidence is adduced from the history of the church in East Africa to show that African Christians responded to the situation by shouldering responsibilities in a way which surprised the missionaries on their return. The churches best placed to survive were those in which a beginning had been made to train African clergy. Only the Anglicans and Catholics had made any progress in training indigenous leadership by 1914. But even where this had not been done, leaders emerged, and some churches even grew considerably in numbers without any loss of quality. One example of this is drawn from the Usambara–Digo synod of the Lutheran Church in Tanzania. The missionaries' attitudes and actions on their eventual return are surveyed. Often they were surprised to find that in their absence the Christian communities had not disintegrated as they had feared. But almost always their concern was to ‘discipline’ the church, and return to the ways of doing things at the outbreak of war, instead of building on the developments which had occurred in the meantime. This sometimes had disastrous consequences as natural leadership became frustrated. The greatest ‘injury to the Christian cause’ may have been the missions' failure to see that a new method of working was now required of them rather than a return to the old.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , January 1978 , pp. 117 - 130
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1978

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References

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