Ruminations about relationships between missionaries and African converts in constructing and communicating the Christian message in Africa

The introduction of Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa is part of the long conversation between what most critical scholars still characterize negatively as the colonizers versus the colonized, a clash of cultures between a dominating Western culture and an alien and resistant African culture. Western missionaries in this scenario most often have been rendered as adjuncts or even tools of the colonial project. I have argued against this binary, reductionist interpretation in two recent studies that explore the mission-church relationship within one missionary enterprise—the American Zulu Mission—and its relationship with other missions in southern Africa during the period covered by both volumes (1830s-1930s). The cultural practices in postcolonial America during the nineteenth century that defined missionary recruits heavily influenced their interactions with the African church, but male mission powerbrokers never spoke with one voice and there were so few of them that Zulu preachers and evangelists were actually in charge of a few AZM stations and setting up their own outstations within a decade or so after the establishment of the British colony of Natal in 1845. African Christians controlled all matters affecting their congregations, including the punishment of individual members, by at least the 1880s—the decade when mission and church began to establish a presence in urban South Africa and beyond. The African church—now the dominant partner in the mission-church relationship within the AZM—became a significant component in Protestant Christianity’s ecumenical expansion across the subcontinent after World War I.

Les Switzer has been a journalist and an academic (in South Africa and the US). He retrained to be a chaplain-cum-minister in Houston, Texas, and again "retired" after a three-year stint as executive director of the Foundation for Contemporary Theology, a venue for  discussion and debate on contemporary issues and concerns in theology and religion in general that featured a wide range of American scholars and activists presenting their perspectives in lectures and workshops to Houston audiences.