Modupe G. Labode, "A Native Knows a Native"

vol. 4, no. 1 (Fall 2000)
ISSN 1094-902X

Modupe Labode
"A Native Knows A Native":
African American Missionaries' Writings about Angola, 1919-1940¹

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Modupe Labode received her D. Phil. in history from Oxford University. She is an Assistant Professor at Iowa State University, where she teaches courses in African history, the African diaspora, and women's history. During the 2000-2001 academic year, she has a fellowship with the Black Women in Church and Society program at the Interdenominational Theological Center, Atlanta University Center.

In 1930, the Galangue mission choir, under the leadership of Bessie McDowell, introduced a new song at the celebration commemorating fifty years of Congregational missions in Angola. In addition to singing the oratorio "Esther, the Beautiful Queen" at the Jubilee, the choir sang Bessie McDowell's Ovimbundu translation of "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing." This song was dear to the African American missionaries who ran the Galangue mission. African Americans called "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing," composed in 1900 by the brothers James Weldon and J. Rosamond Johnson, the "Negro National Anthem." Reverend Henry Curtis McDowell, Bessie's husband, wrote to African American supporters of the mission in the United States and informed them that "Galangue has made the first step, so far as I know, in making it [Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing"] the international anthem." ² The McDowells considered this anthem appropriate for the Ovimbundu Christians because they considered the Ovimbundu to be part of the worldwide family of Negroes.

Black Congregationalists founded, funded, and operated the Galangue mission and it existed as an African American enterprise from 1922-1940. The Galangue station was a black-run station in a predominately white church, and this form of organization made it unique among Protestant missions in Africa in which African Americans participated. Most other such stations were either operated by African American denominations or were run by predominately white churches, with black missionaries working alongside white missionaries.

The African American missionaries who worked at Galangue informed their supporters about the activities of the mission, Angola, and the Ovimbundu through letters, circulars, and articles. Missionaries used this correspondence to meditate on important aspects of their identity and experience: race, culture, and the nature of their connection to Africa. This correspondence is significant for the light it sheds on the experiences of black Congregationalists. More generally, the missionaries' writings demonstrate the complex ways in which African Americans situated themselves in the African diaspora.

This essay examines the writings, or mission discourse, generated by the missionaries who worked at Galangue and discusses the interpretations which missionaries ascribed to their experiences.³ The Galangue mission discourse contains tensions which arose as missionaries documented conflicts between the imagined Africa and the particular experiences of black Americans, who lived among the Ovimbundu, in the central highlands of Portuguese-colonized Angola. These missionaries understood themselves as essentially linked to Africa and the Ovimbundu, through race and the legacy of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and saw this connection as central to their work. ⁴ The Ovimbundu could never simply be "the other" or the exotic, for the missionaries saw themselves in the Ovimbundu: they were part of the same family.

The writings generated by the missionaries at Galangue served multiple functions. Missionaries informed their supporters of their activities and the progress of the mission. This information was intended to encourage support for Galangue in the form of funds, goods, and prayers. Throughout Galangue's existence, women's mission societies, college students, and the missionaries' friends sent money and household items to supply the mission and make a direct connection with Angola. The circulars and magazine columns provided a focus for the supporters of Galangue and helped reinforce a sense of community among dispersed black Congregationalists.

Mission discourse occurred in multiple sites. Black Congregationalists sponsored a pamphlet dedicated to "news items from the field" and accounts of the supporters of Galangue.⁵ Missionaries wrote circulars, mimeographed letters sent by missionaries to various groups and constituencies, such as the National Convention of Congregational Workers Among Colored People, the Friends of Talladega College and Church, and students at AMA colleges such as Tougaloo College. They also wrote columns for the black Congregational periodicals, The Southern News and The Amistad. The private letters which missionaries sent to friends and associates circulated widely and excerpts from these letters appeared in mission periodicals.⁶ The formal reports which missionaries filed with the ABCFM often appeared, in altered forms, in pamphlets and the principal Congregational mission magazine, The Missionary Herald.

In its division by gender, the writings of the Galangue missionaries followed a pattern common in most Protestant mission periodicals. Women missionaries' writings appeared in the "women's pages" of the magazines and the topics focussed on areas of their presumed expertise, African women and children. The male missionaries usually had a higher profile than that of their female colleagues. Male missionaries' writings ranged widely and broached topics such as colonial politics, religious, and cultural change; these perspectives were privileged in the Galangue mission discourse.⁷

Reverend Henry Curtis McDowell's writings set the tone of Galangue's mission discourse. He was the public face of the mission. At his commissioning ceremony, he was described in the Missionary Herald as "the one man best fitted to inaugurate the new work."⁸ Although there does not seem to have been serious conflicting points of view among the missionaries in this discourse, the coherence of the Galangue mission discourse comes, in part, from the prominence of McDowell's voice.⁹

The missionaries shaped their narratives to address the concerns of their African American readership. The missionaries knew their readers were passionately committed to Africa and they used this interest to instruct their audience and shape its opinions. The letters and circulars were not intended to be disinterested or encyclopedic. The commitment and engagement of the missionaries' writings were important components of this discourse.

The Galangue missionaries also engaged with the ways in which Africa, as a symbol and reality, was used in African American thought. The missionaries and their supporters operated within an influential intellectual and religious tradition that attempted to reconcile slavery, Christianity, and black Americans' relationship to Africa. From the 1700s, many abolitionists, black and white, saw Christian missions as a form of recompense for slavery. By the nineteenth century, a "providential theory" circulated widely in African American religious circles. According to this theory God had allowed some Africans to be taken into slavery and subsequently converted to Christianity. It was the special responsibility of the descendants of those slaves to introduce Christianity to their distant brothers and sisters. This theory provided an intellectual framework for African Americans' interest in African missions.¹⁰

Black Congregationalists began the Galangue mission as an experiment in autonomy within the white dominated church. In 1910, the Reverend Henry Hugh Proctor, an Atlanta-based minister, approached the secretary of the American Board of Congregational Missions (ABCFM), Cornelius Patton, with his idea of establishing a mission in Africa that would be supported by African American Congregationalists.¹¹ Reverend Proctor was the minister of the largest black Congregational Church in the South and wanted to create a project black Congregationalists could call their own.

Black Congregationalism was itself, in part, the product of missionary work.¹² During the Civil war and Reconstruction, Northern missionaries employed by the American Missionary Association (AMA), a group associated with the Congregational Church, provided economic relief and education for the freed people in the South.¹³ In the course of their work, AMA missionaries proselytized and succeeded in converting a small but committed core of African Americans.¹⁴ This group, along with the people who were converted by their experiences at AMA-schools and colleges, created the basis for the black Congregational community. By 1916 there were about 9,000 black Congregationalists in the South.¹⁵

The white-dominated AMA and Congregational Church officially supported interracial work in its schools, projects, and religious gatherings. Black Congregationalists, however, were often bitterly disappointed by the condescending attitude of white colleagues and by the bigotry, racial segregation, and racism within the church.¹⁶

Such discrimination extended to the church's foreign missions. In the 1880s and 1890s, four African Americans worked on ABCFM missions in Africa: Samuel Miller worked in Angola; Nancy Jones in Mozambique and Rhodesia; Benjamin and Henrietta Ousley in Mozambique. These missionaries worked with white colleagues and all experienced, in varying degrees, hostility which they attributed to racism. In the 1890s the ABCFM, like many other predominately white mission societies, stopped sending African Americans to its foreign missions.¹⁷

African American clergy and laity protested their treatment in the church. They also quietly worked to create realms within the church where they could realize their ambitions and practice their faith with minimal interference or direction from white colleagues. For African American Congregationalists, the Galangue project provided a congenial sphere in which they could act on their religious fervor and commitment to the African continent.

In 1915, Reverend Proctor and two other black clergymen established a fund of one hundred dollars toward founding a mission station in Africa which would be run by black Americans.¹⁸ The project's progress was delayed until the ABCFM found a suitable location in southern Africa, where the Congregationalists conducted their mission work. Most of the colonial governments were hostile to African Americans in their territory because they feared that black Americans would incite discontent among the Africans. Only the Portuguese colonial authorities of Angola, who did not care for Protestant missionaries in general, voiced no objections to African American missionaries.¹⁹

With a guaranteed location, the AMA and the ABCFM forged an unusual arrangement to support this station. The "Colored Congregational Churches" and the AMA were jointly responsible for selecting the missionaries and raising funds to support the mission, while the ABCFM administered the mission. In 1917 the Congregational Church officially launched the enterprise. Alfred Lawless, the first black supervisor of the Colored Congregational Churches, became a tireless promoter and supporter of this African mission. For black Congregationalists, the support and funding of Galangue represented their maturity and independence within the church.²⁰

The first task for the project was selecting the missionaries. During the years of Galangue's existence as an African American mission, six missionaries - three married couples - worked on the station. All the missionaries were college graduates and were, by that measure, part of the elite of African American society.²¹ The founding couple was Reverend Henry Curtis McDowell and his wife Bessie Fonvielle McDowell. The McDowells were both graduates of the AMA-associated Talladega College. Before his selection, McDowell was the pastor of a church in Chattanooga. The McDowells and their child arrived in Angola in 1919. They initially worked at an established station in order to learn the language and survey a site for their mission. In 1922 the McDowells and an Ovimbundu couple, Mr. and Mrs. Chitue, established the Galangue station. In the following year Samuel Bracy Coles, his wife Bertha Terry, and their daughter arrived in Angola. Samuel Coles had known the McDowells at Talladega College. Bertha Coles joined Bessie McDowell in working among the Ovimbundu women and girls, the "women's work" of the station. Samuel Coles supervised the mission's farm and physical plant. Aaron and Willena McMillan were the final missionary couple on staff. Aaron McMillan was a medical doctor in Omaha, Nebraska. After serving a term in the state legislature, he was overcome with a spiritual calling to work in Africa. The McMillans were Baptist, but because the ABCFM had a non-denominational policy, they were welcome to work at Galangue. The McMillans and their children arrived in Angola in 1931. Aaron McMillan established the mission's hospital and his wife, though not formally trained as a nurse, was his principal assistant.²²

In form and function, the Galangue mission resembled other mainstream, Protestant missions of its time and place. Under Reverend McDowell's leadership, the mission pursued evangelism, education, social welfare, agriculture, and western medicine. It was run with the cooperation of the local Ovimbundu, Christian and non-Christian. Because this was a mission run by African Americans in a predominately white church and because of the historic ties between Africa and black Americans, the missionaries saw Galangue as different from other missions, with a special place in history. This sense of distinction ran through the narratives created by African American missionaries for their supporters.²³

What follows is a discussion of some prominent themes and concerns in the Galangue missionaries' writings. This is not a comprehensive account of this mission discourse. I have chosen the themes discussed here to illustrate the ways in which missionaries explored aspects of their identity and their place in the African diaspora.

Mission Writings and Galangue

Information

The mission discourse was intended to be, among many other things, didactic.²⁴ The Galangue missionaries used the authority of their position to provide their readers with information about Africa and Africans.25 Missionaries were aware that in the popular culture of the West, Africa was a symbol of depravity. Some African Americans responded to this negative image by disavowing any significant links to Africa and Africans. For other black Americans, Africa and its glorious, albeit mythic, past became a source of pride and a rallying point for African American nationalism and uplift ideology.²⁶ These views had little to do with the way Africans lived and experienced their environments and were ultimately concerned with the place of African Americans within the United States.²⁷ The missionaries engaged with, and often wrote against, these perspectives as they attempted to inform their readers about Africa.

Missionaries, like travel writers and explorers, attempted to make the unfamiliar familiar. In one 1919 circular, Reverend McDowell simultaneously disabused his readers of their fanciful preconceptions about African geography and also assured them that a specific location in Angola was, indeed, just like home.

We are accustomed to think of it [Africa] as the Sahara Desert and jungles of coconut trees and monkeys. I saw about ½ doz. coconut trees at the coast and not one since. I haven't seen nor heard of the African monkey yet. Lobita reminds one of Florida and our station is very much like Talladega with its iron mts. and red soil.

As to the natives they are like American Negroes in that they have shades of color. They only need a few more clothes to make them look the same.²⁸

The missionaries used detail and specificity to confront stereotypes about Africa and also to link the reader with the African continent and its people. This use of detail implicitly countered the monolithic, undifferentiated Africa which was a staple of western thought, and also of many black Americans' construction of Africa.

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