African workers and the Universities' Mission to Central Africa in Zanzibar, 1864–1900

Abstract

This research paper explores the connections between African workers and Christian missions in late nineteenth century Zanzibar, focusing on the Universities' Mission to Central Africa (UMCA), a High-Church Anglican missionary society. Procuring and managing labour was central to the everyday lives of Christian mission societies because missionaries demanded a range of skilled and unskilled workersincluding builders, cooks, waterfetchers, porters and servantsin order to establish an ideal setting for the core aims: the conversion of souls and establishment of an African ministry. The missionaries constantly veered between submitting to local customs and conditions and imposing their own ideals of what they felt to be the proper management and division of labour. A good example of this was their employment of slaves, a practice that was not always illegal for British subjects and particularly widespread amongst explorers in need of porters. At the same time, the missionaries often had to abandon their belief that they must not exercise formal authority outside of the main nucleus of the clergy as they managed their labour forces and attempted to reform freed slaves into (ideally skilled) free wageworkers. These issues bear on how historians understand the tensions between conversion, cultural adaption, industrialisation and capitalism but it also says something of the role of missionaries and Christian Africans as cultural brokers between the mission economies and the local economies they interacted with. This article addresses the missionaries' employment of hire slaves, the attempts to establish Christian working communities and the use of household labour with regards to women and children.

Scholarly identities in war and peace: the Paris Peace Conference and the mobilization of intellect

“…16 Universities also led Christian missions to Central Africa and East Asia, further underscoring their connectedness and overlap with wider imperial policies. 17 Gatherings of scholars took place in different international venues before the First World War. The British Association for the Advancement of Science, founded in 1831, soon began holding meetings abroad and electing foreign corresponding members, from countries such as Brazil, the United States, Japan, and Russia.…”

Sin, Slave Status, and the “City”: Zanzibar, 1865–c. 1930

“…As Weston's anecdote suggests, the missionaries' initial optimism about emancipating slaves, or rescuing and advancing slaves and simultaneously converting them, was short lived. Missionaries believed that slaves and former slaves were "bad material" for conversion-that they were predisposed to immoral behavior and that this immorality was contagious (Liebst 2014). They also assumed that academic education was wasted on most of them (Maples 1899).…”

In Pursuit of Freedom: Oaths, Slave Agency, and the Abolition of Slavery in Western Tanzania, 1905–1930

“…It is clear that even missions which were self-consciously abolitionist institutions often ended up reinforcing hierarchies that kept former slaves in lowly positions. 11 Moreover, as has long been debated, questions remain as to how to understand the aspirations and aims of former slaves. Rather than a sovereign state of independence, they typically sought reinsertion into social networks, even if in a state of dependence.…”