Fiction
Barbara Kingsolver's best-selling
novel, The Poisonwood Bible, has been
described by some reviewers as a modern classic.
It's the story of a missionary
family in Congo
who are all misfits in the environment in which they find themselves. The
missionary husband, Nathan Price, is deeply insensitive to the culture and
needs of the local people. His insensitivity is exemplified by the fact that he
tries to baptize new Congolese Christians in a
river filled with crocodiles. He proclaims Tata Jesus is bangala!,
thinking he is saying, "Jesus is beloved." In fact, the phrase means,
"Jesus is poisonwood." Despite being corrected many times, Price
repeats the phrase until his death — Kingsolver's heavy-handed metaphor for her
perception of the culturally insensitive folly of modern missions in general.
I'm
afraid that his piece of fiction feeds the already existing prejudice of many
people: they like to believe that the missionaries who continue to go out to
Africa and Asia do more harm than good by
imposing alien values on foreign cultures.
I've come across this view several times over the years - a colleague who scoffed at the many Christian
'do-gooders' in Hong Kong (as though doing good was somehow bad!) and another
acquaintance who had been in Borneo and
condemned out of hand the Christian missionaries who were working there.
Fact
My own
observation in Africa of missionaries and
their work has been just the opposite: From a practical point of view they have
been to the forefront in medical work and in establishing schools and
universities. They have spearheaded equality for girls and women. They have
fought against corruption and drunkenness. They have introduced more productive agriculture. The list is
endless. Then of course, and even more
importantly, they brought the Christian gospel with them, which, where it took
hold, revolutionised the lives of the converts and altered society very much
for the better.
Mengo
Our
first child, Janine, was born in Mengo Hospital,
Kampala.
The Mengo Hospital website says
Sekabaka Mutesa 1(King of Buganda) invited Missionaries to come to Uganda. By the
second half of the 19th Century, Christianity and western medical
care had not reached Uganda.
Ugandans were in “Spiritual darkness”; they believed in and practiced
witchcraft. Diseases like Sleeping sickness and Syphilis were occurring at
epidemic levels in the country.Realizing that his subjects needed the “light”,
the then King of Buganda Sekabaka Mutesa 1 invited men of Good will from
England to come and evangelize; to bring the “light” that consisted of
three important elements namely: Evangelism, Health care and education.
In response to the King’s invitation
mentioned above, the Church Missionary Society (CMS) of England sent a team of Missionaries to Uganda. In the
team was a Physician, Dr. Sir Albert Ruskin Cook (RIP), who arrived in Uganda on 15th
February 1897. Soon after his arrival,
Dr. Cook realized that in order to minister to the spiritual lives of people of
Uganda,
he had to give attention to their enormous physical problems as well.
Consequently on 22nd February 1897, Sir Dr. Cook held his first
outpatient clinic under a tree on Namirembe hill. With that single event, the
first seed for the Christian Medical work in Uganda was planted. Ever since,
that work has continued to grow and to develop in size and scope uninterrupted
for the last 120 years.
For a bit more on this subject see
https://mengohospital.org/history/
Kigezi High School, and other schools…
I taught for several years at Kigezi
High School, originally founded in
1922 as a mission school to give education to those in South-western Uganda
who otherwise would not have had an education.
 |
| 6th form members of the KHS Christian Union, aged between 18 and 23. |
(Click on picture to enlarge it)
Nearby was Hornby High School,
founded by Constance Hornby (a relative of Frank Hornby, the originator of Hornby Trains!) who wanted to ensure that in a male dominated
society, girls would get an education too.
 |
| Hornby High Schhol for girls |
After we had left Uganda,
one of my Christian colleagues, Elizabeth Traill, became the first headmistress
of another mission school, Bishop Kivengere Girls' School, Muyebe.
Leonard Sharp
Not far from Kabale is Lake Bunyonyi,
where in 1920 Dr Leonard Sharp, a pioneer missonary doctor, set up a leprosy hospital on Bwama Island. He built a home and lived with his family on a nearby island which has become known as Sharp island and which is now a tourist destination.
 |
| Sharp Island -( now Gorilla Lodge Hotel) |
 |
| Bwama Island |
When I returned to UK and settled near Corsham, I wa surprised to discover that Len Sharp's daughter Joy was living in Corsham with her husband Leon Gower, who was teaching at Hardenhuish School, as I was. As a result of this coincidence the Gowers and ourselves became firm friends.
Joy wrote a book about her life on Lake Bunyonyi, and there is an extract from it on the following website:
https://gorillahighlands.com/places/lake-bunyonyi/sharps-island/
John Mackenzie
Finally, I'll add a little story about another missionary to Africa… My own experience of what missionaries have done, as well as the following story make the opposite point to the one
Kingsolver makes: the true story of the 19th-century missionary John
Mackenzie. When white settlers in South Africa
threatened to take over the natives' land, Mackenzie helped his friend and
political ally Khama III travel to Britain. There, Mackenzie and his
colleagues held petition drives, translated for Khama and two other chiefs at
political rallies, and even arranged a meeting with Queen Victoria. Ultimately their efforts convinced
Britain
to enact a land protection agreement. Without it, the nation of Botswana
would likely not exist today. The annals of Western Protestant missions include
Nathan Prices, of course, like Kingsolver's fictional missionary. But the truth is that they include many more
John Mackenzies. In fact, research done by the sociologist Robert Woodberry shows that the work of missionaries like Mackenzie turns out to
be the single largest factor in ensuring the health of nations.
For more on Woodberry's research see
http://intersectproject.org/faith-and-economics/robert-woodberry-world-missionaries-made/
The amount of good done by Christians who ditched promising careers to go
out to spread the gospel in far-flung places is inestimable. During my time in Africa I was surrounded by enormous amounts of evidence of this.
My attention was drawn recently to a short
video by Milton Jones, a Christian stand-up comic, who said
Apart from being involved at the beginning of science, systems of
government, philosophy, art, schools, hospitals, the emancipation of
women, the abolition of slavery, social welfare, helping form the basis
of the moral code most people live by, and introducing popular notions
of justice, mercy, decency and compassion – what has Christianity ever
really done for the world?
