Page 79 - Volume 1_Go home mzungu Go Home_merged with links

Prelude to m’zungu colonisation of Africa

"Veni, Vidi,"

prominently by the Germans, Belgians, and Italians, as European hegemony was

extended into Africa, Asia, and the Pacific.

***
Of profound importance to Christian missions, Protestant churches, under the influence
of German pietism and English evangelicalism, launched a second wave of proselytizing
that had a deep impact in these areas.

*****
Protestant missionaries and colonialism

The expansion of traders into Asian and African interiors brought rapid, often disruptive,

changes to indigenous societies, not least because the staples of those trades were
often guns, cash, and drugs like liquor and opium. Increasingly, traders came under the

intense criticism of burgeoning numbers of Protestant missionaries.

***
Protestant missionary societies emerged suddenly in Britain, led by the Baptists (1792),

Congregationalists (1795), and evangelical Anglicans (1799), to be followed by other
denominations and in other nations like Switzerland and Germany

***
By the first decade of the twentieth century approximately ten thousand voluntarily

supported European Protestant missionaries (about 80 percent British, 15 percent
German, 5 percent Scandinavian, French, Dutch, and Swiss, supplemented by a rapidly

increasing American force of about four thousand) were concentrating their efforts in
Africa, China, and India; a parallel revival of Catholic missions, strongly French and newly
aided by voluntary organizations, fielded some eight thousand missionary priests.

***
European missions continued to have an ambivalent relationship with colonialism.

***
As professionalized strategies increased, so did a "social work" emphasis in missions, to

which women, and especially after 1885 unmarried women, were of growing importance;
by 1899 women accounted for at least 56 percent of all British missionaries in the field,

while as many as forty thousand Catholic sisters worked in charitable and educational
missions. “

"Explorers, Missionaries, Traders" 55
Encyclopedia.Com
*****