THE AFRICAN DIASPORA IN GERMANY
MEDICAL SECTION

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Review title: [African hemorrhagic fever as a new problem in medicine] Afrikanische hamorrhagische Fieber als neues Problem in der Medizin.

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[Vitamin D status of children and adolescents of African and Asian diplomats in Germany]
Vitamin D-Status bei afrikanischen und asiatischen Diplomatenkindern und -Jugendlichen in Deutschland.

Vitamin D-deficiency has been observed among immigrant children with rickets and osteomalacia in Western Europe. So vitamin D-status in 34 children and juveniles (17 girls, 17 boys) of African and Asian diplomats staying in West Germany only for a certain time is examined. During summer 1989 plasma levels of alkaline phosphatase, calcium, phosphate, 25-hydroxy-cholecalciferol and 1,25-dihydroxycholecalciferol is measured. According to their native country the subjects are divided into three groups: I North Africa (n = 7), II Central Africa (n = 18), III Asia (n = 9). No clinical signs of rickets or osteomalacia are detected. All plasma levels of calcium and phosphate are in the normal range so as most of the values of the alkaline phosphatase. In Group I 85.7% (n = 6), group II 77.8% (n = 14) and group III 44.4% (n = 4) have decreased values of 25-OHD whereas most strikingly elevated amounts of 1,25-OH2D are measured in 57.1% (n = 4) of the subjects in group I, 66.7% (n = 12) in group II and 11.1% (n = 1) in group III. Normal values for both 25-OHD and 1,25-OH2D are rare: one case (11.1%) in group I, no case in group II, four cases (44.4%) in group III. The influence of the time staying in West Germany on vitamin D-status, a possible dietary lack due to inadequate nutrition, the role of skin pigmentation and a potential genetic abnormality of vitamin D-metabolism is discussed to explain the results.
Tags: Female; Human; Male
DESCRIPTORS: *Emigration and Immigration; *Ethnic Groups; *Vitamin D Deficiency--Epidemiology--EP; Adolescence; Africa--Ethnology--EH; Alkaline Phosphatase--Blood--BL; Asia--Ethnology--EH; Calcium--Blood--BL; Child; Child, Preschool; Cross-Sectional Studies; Germany; Incidence; Infant; Phosphates--Blood--BL; Reference Values; Vitamin D--Blood--BL; Vitamin D Deficiency--Enzymology--EN; Vitamin D Deficiency--Etiology--ET
CAS REGISTRY NO.: 0 (Phosphates); 1406-16-2 (Vitamin D); 7440-70-2
(Calcium) ENZYME NO.: EC 3.1.3.1 (Alkaline Phosphatase)

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[Burkitt lymphoma of African type in Europe (author's transl)]
Burkitt-Lymphom vom Afrikanischen Typ in Europa.

A 34-year-old German woman who had never been to Africa developed a Burkitt lymphoma of African type during the fifth month of pregnancy. The diagnosis was confirmed during life by cytological and virological tests. There was a markedly increased antibody titre against the Epstein-Barr virus in serum as well as virus antigen in the tumour tissue. There was extensive involvement of almost all abdominal organs and of the breast. After spontaneous abortion of a female foetus in the sixth month of pregnancy cytostatic treatment was started, but without achieving remission. The patient died five weeks after admission to hospital; the autopsy confirmed the clinical findings.
Tags: Case Report; Female; Human
DESCRIPTORS: *Burkitt Lymphoma--Diagnosis--DI; *Pregnancy Complications --Diagnosis--DI; Abdominal Neoplasms--Diagnosis--DI; Abdominal Neoplasms --Pathology--PA; Abortion, Spontaneous--Complications--CO; Adult; Autopsy; Breast Neoplasms--Diagnosis--DI; Breast Neoplasms--Pathology--PA; Burkitt Lymphoma--Pathology--PA; Pregnancy

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[Immunity to diphtheria of African guest workers and students]
Diphtherieimmunitat afrikanischer Gastarbeiter und Studenten.

This study investigated the immuno-protective diphtheria antitoxin titres of 38 guest workers from Mozambique and 44 students from Cameroon 18 to 35 years of age. Two methods were used to analyse the sera: the cell culture method and the indirect haemagglutination test. The results of both methods were comparable. Approximately 69% of the guest workers from Mozambique showed protective diphtheria antitoxin levels (> or = 0.1 IE/ml), 24% had a boosterrequiring basic immunity (> or = 0.01-0.09 IE/ml), whereas 7% showed no protective diphtheria antitoxin levels. This compared with 46, 35 and 19% respectively among the students from Cameroon.
Tags: Female; Human; Male
DESCRIPTORS: *Diphtheria--Immunology--IM; *Diphtheria Antitoxin--Blood --BL; *Emigration and Immigration; *Ethnic Groups; Adolescence; Adult; Cameroon--Ethnology--EH; Diphtheria--Ethnology--EH; Diphtheria--Prevention and Control--PC; Germany; Mozambique--Ethnology--EH
CAS REGISTRY NO.: 0 (Diphtheria Antitoxin)

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[Tinea capitis and corporis caused by Trichophyton soudanense in an immigrant family from Africa]
Tinea capitis et corporis durch Trichophyton soudanense bei einer afrikanischen Immigrantenfamilie.

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Conference message from Salvador: Conference on World Missions and Evangelism, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, November 24 - December 3, 1996.

ABSTRACT: The Conference on World Mission and Evangelism in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, on Nov 24-Dec 3, 1996 provide countless lessons on the relationship between the gospel and culture. Much of what has been discussed and experienced have provided fuel to the hope that all people will be reached by the gospel. These include the broad range of cultures represented in the conference, the genuine attempt to bridge the cultural gaps, and the churches and mission agencies' acceptance that they have made mistakes in the past and are determined to cooperate with each other for the common goal of the mission.

TEXT:

The Conference on World Mission and Evangelism has met in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, at a significant moment in history - the approach of the end of the century and of a new millennium.

Soon after the start of this century, the first comprehensive ecumenical mission conference took place in Edinburgh. It stated: "The work (of mission) has to be done now. It is urgent and must be pressed forward at once." The work of mission, however, did not turn out to be straightforward. Within four years of that conference the world was engulfed in war. Since then it has known massacres and mass deportations, another world war, the development of new forms of colonialism, life under nuclear threat, the destruction of ecosystems by human greed, the growth and collapse of the Soviet bloc, violent and separatist ethnic struggles, rampant capitalism leading to an ever-greater gap between rich and poor.

We believe that it is still the church's primary calling to pursue the mission of God in God's world through the grace and goodness of Jesus Christ. Yet this mission, history-long, worldwide, cannot be seen today in narrow ways - it must be an every-member mission, from everywhere to everywhere, involving every aspect of life in a rapidly changing world of many cultures now interacting and overlapping.

In conference here in Salvador, we have sought to understand better the way in which the gospel challenges all human cultures and how culture can give us a clearer understanding of the gospel. It would be difficult to find a more appropriate venue for such a conference. Brazil has the second largest population of people of African origin of any nation. Salvador is a microcosm of the world's diversity of cultures and spiritualities. Yet this very place made us aware of the pain and fragmentation that comes from the racism and lack of respect for other religions that still exist in sectors of the Christian churches.

The theme of the conference was "Called to One Hope - The Gospel in Diverse Cultures."

The hope of the gospel is expressed in the gracious coming of God in Jesus of Nazareth. From the day of Pentecost this hope manifests itself as the fruit of faith and in the struggle of the community of faith. It reaches out to all people everywhere. This conference has been a foretaste and impulse of this hope.

In the conference we have experienced much which has given us such hope.

* The wide diversity of peoples and churches represented (in Edinburgh in 1910 the large majority of the participants were European or North American; in Salvador over six hundred Christians of a wide spectrum of cultures from more than one hundred nations participated in the life of the conference).

* The genuine attempt which has been made to listen and to share ways and wisdoms across cultures.

* The thrill of participating in the life of a community where the voices of young and old, women and men from Christian churches around the globe have all been speaking out.

* The willingness of the churches and mission agencies to admit past failures and to refuse to engage in stereotyping, and the determination to stay together and work together for the good of our common mission.

* The solidarity of standing at the dockside in Salvador where, for three hundred years, the African slaves who were still alive after their capture and deportation were unloaded. By the "Stone of Tears" together we wept tears of repentance.

* The encouragement of participating in the rhythm of daily worship where the honouring and use of different sounds and languages did not result in a divisive and confusing "Babel," but rather gave a hint of the unity and inspiration of a Pentecost.

* The privilege of sharing for a short time in the life of a continent and people with a rich cultural history and a diversity of religious spirituality, whose churches are responding to the challenges of social change and poverty through the embodiment of gospel hope.

It is our profound hope that this last great mission conference of the 20th century has clearly illuminated that the gospel to be most fruitful needs to be both true to itself, and incarnated or rooted in the culture of a people. We have had a first-hand experience of seeing and hearing Christians from many diverse cultures expressing their struggles and hopes.

* We have heard the cries of pain from indigenous peoples who have faced the near extermination of their communities and cultures, and we have marvelled at their resilience and their determination to make connections between their indigenous spirituality and their Christian faith so that their identity is not divided.

* We have heard the longing of women around the world for a real partnership in church and society.

* We have listened to the voices of young Christians telling us that they do not wish to be objects of the church's mission but to be full partners in the work of mission particularly in relating the faith to the energy and aspirations of youth culture today.

* We have learned from our Latin American hosts the importance of "doing" theology which seeks to create a "community called church" which is rooted in the life of the people amongst whom the church is set, and which shows itself, for example, in their response to the plight of the street children in their cities.

* We have heard the voices of Christians in the Pacific who seek mutuality with their Christian partners from the West, insisting that full partnership in mission is reciprocal, not paternalistic.

* We have heard the anger of African people, Afro-Caribbean people, Afro-Latino people and African people of North America at the horror of slavery, and we have heard how the faith, though presented to them in distorted forms, became the hope of liberation. We have admired their determination not to be trapped in a lament over history but to cooperate together in a strengthened partnership between African people and people of the African diaspora.

* We have been moved by the stories of disaster and disease which led one speaker from Africa to say, "Times are ripe for flirting with hopelessness," and we have been astonished at the strength and determination of African Christians, women in particular, to share the pain of their people and to combat despair and plant the seeds of both food and hope.

* We have benefited from hearing of the long-term experience of Asian Christians of living a life of Christian discipleship in multifaith societies, sometimes as vulnerable and threatened minority groups. We have also heard of a surge of grassroots missionary activity.

* We have been moved by the experiences of Christians in the Middle East living with the privilege and pain of life in a "holy land" torn apart by division and injustice, and their indignation at the way in which biblical texts are misinterpreted so that their culture is blemished and some are made to feel strangers in their own land.

* We have admired the commitment of those from the Orthodox and other local churches in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe now determined, in the new atmosphere of religious freedom, to serve their people in such a way that the faith which sustained many through times of persecution might now be an equal blessing in times of new challenge. We have heard their protest at the ways in which rich foreign Christian groups are seeking to proselytize their people.

* We have recognized the caution of Christians in Germany about being too ready to see God's spirit in all human cultures, growing out of their painful memories of how the churches risked becoming captive to Nazi ideology in a previous generation.

* We have heard how the churches, against the background of the post-modern culture influencing much of Western Europe, are studying the phenomenon of secularism and engaging with those turning from traditional faith and seemingly seeking a private "pick and mix" spirituality.

* We have heard reports of the growing localism of North American churches which, while strengthening their commitment to mission and evangelism in their own context, may lead to an isolation and insulation from global realities.

* We have shared the concern of many at how the global free-market economy seems to exercise sovereign power over even strong governments, and how the mass media disseminate worldwide images and messages of every description which influence - and, some believe, undermine - community and faith.

* We have discussed how, perhaps as a reaction to these developments, new fundamentalisms are emerging in all world faiths, adding to the divisions in an already fractured world.

* We have heard how Christians in many places around the globe are engaging in serious dialogue with people of other faiths, telling the Christian story, listening attentively to the stories of others, and thus gaining a clearer and richer understanding of their own faith and helping to build a "community of communities" to the benefit of all.

In such ways we have recognized how the church engages in mission with cultures around the globe today. What then would we want to emphasize from this conference?

* The church must hold on to two realities: its distinctiveness from, and its commitment to, the culture in which it is set. In such a way the gospel neither becomes captive to a culture nor becomes alienated from it, but each challenges and illuminates the other.

* Perhaps as never before, Christians in mission today need to have a clear understanding of what God has done in history through Jesus Christ. In this we have seen what God requires of individuals, communities and structures. The biblical witness is our starting point and reference for mission and gives us the sense of our own identity.

* We need constantly to seek the insight of the Holy Spirit in helping us better to discern where the gospel challenges, endorses or transforms a particular culture.

* The catholicity of a church is enhanced by the quality of the relationships it has with churches of other traditions and cultures. This has implications for mission and evangelism and calls for respect and sensitivity for churches already located in the place concerned. Competitiveness is the surest way to undermine Christian mission. Equally, aggressive evangelism which does not respect the culture of a people is unlikely to reflect effectively the gracious love of God and the challenge of the gospel.

* Local congregations are called to be places of hope, providing spaces of safety and trust wherein different peoples can be embraced and affirmed, thus manifesting the inclusive love of God. For congregations in increasingly plural societies, inclusion of all cultural groups which make up the community, including those who are uprooted, marginalized and despised, is important. Strengthening congregations through a spirituality which enables them to face the vulnerability involved in this openness is critical.

* Small steps which involve risk and courage can break through barriers and create new relationships. Such steps are available to us all. They can be the "miracle" which changes a church or community's self-image and enables new God-given life to break forth.

Music at the conference has had a rhythm, a harmony, a beat. In a place with a deep African tradition it is natural that in our worship the beat of the drum has frequently been the vehicle to carry our souls to resonate with the beat of God's love for us and for all people. With hearts set on fire with the beat of mission and a prayer on our lips that many will share with us in being "Called to One Hope" and take and find "The Gospel in Diverse Cultures," we commend to Christians and churches everywhere the fruits of the conference. Our profound hope is that they too may be renewed in mission for the sharing of the knowledge of Christ, to the glory of the triune God.

COPYRIGHT 1997 Overseas Ministries Study Center
DESCRIPTORS: World Council of Churches--Conferences, meetings, seminars, etc.; Missions--Conferences, meetings, seminars, etc.; Christianity-- Social aspects
FILE SEGMENT: AI File 88

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The African factor in Christian mission to Africa: a study of Moravian and Basel mission activities in Ghana.

ABSTRACT: Missionaries coming from intra-African families erased the notion that Christian missions can only be done by Europeans and people from the West. This became possible with the efforts made by Andreas Riis, who led the Basel Missionary Society, to recruit black West Indian Moravians to do missionary work in Ghana in the 1840s. Although, they have encountered problems at first because of using half-African Svane and Protten, they later succeeded in immersing Christianity with the African culture.

TEXT:

One of the most stimulating developments in Christian mission studies during the last decade or so is the gradual shift of emphasis from Western, Eurocentric interpretation and initiative to an emphasis which takes African participation seriously. Missiologists and students of mission history are becoming increasingly aware of this. Lamin Sanneh has pointed out quite clearly that Christianity cannot be explained simply as "subject to the history of Western imperialism."(1) The fact is that the only effective way to analyze the historical transmission of Christianity under Western agency is to subordinate it to its "local assimilation and adaptation under African agency."(2) The benefit of such methodology is to study local Christian history on its own terms, to free the agents to tell their own story from their own perspective. Too often the story is told only from the perspective of mission records in North Atlantic archives.(3)

Unfortunately, a failure to view historical Christian missions as the consequence of the Missio Dei has resulted in Western mission being presented as no more than propagation of a European ethnocentric commodity.(4) It should therefore come as no surprise that the contributions of the indigenous people of Africa in Christian mission to their own continent have been treated on the periphery of mission history. However, a study of missionary activity in West Africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries shows that Africans and the African diaspora made their mark in the effort. Side by side with missionaries from the United States, Great Britain and the West Indies were the Africans in the "back to Africa" movement. No doubt some may have embarked on romantic expeditions for recreating the lost glory of Africa, but most of them were simply obeying the call to "go into all the world and make disciples". Liberated slaves of African origin were often anxious and willing to carry their new religion to their native home.(5) This is amply underlined by the leading role played by those who were brought as settlers to West Africa from Nova Scotia, Britain and the United State of America. That some of these "returning Josephs" were not willing to stay in the comfort of Pharaoh's Egypt but were prepared to return to live in Africa and to spread the Christian faith, must be seen as a substantial factor in the success of Christian mission to Africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

How did this factor in mission come about? What course did it take? Was it seen at the time as an exercise of mission in intra-cultural perspective? This essay seeks to answer some of these questions and to do so by describing the efforts of the Basel Missionary Society to recruit black West Indian Moravians in the 1840s to engage in mission work in Ghana (then the Gold Coast). The intention is to offer some suggestions about the foundation of horizontal mission which is proving so effective in the mission efforts of the younger churches in Africa today.

THE MORAVIANS, THE BASEL MISSION AND MISSIONARY INTEREST IN GHANA

Both the Moravians and the Basel Mission - two missionary bodies of German pietistic tradition - suffered considerable disappointments in their initial endeavours to evangelize West Africa during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Moravians, who operated from Herrnhut, in Saxony, Germany, under the leadership of Count Zinzendorf, tried to take Christianity to the indigenous people of Ghana by using Africans - but they were unsuccessful. As early as 1735, Frederick Pedersen Svane, a Ga young man from Christiansborg in Ghana, who had graduated in the arts and philosophy from the University of Copenhagen, found a friend in the Moravian Carl Adolph von Plessen.(6) Svane had felt a strong desire to return as an independent missionary to his native land and people. With the support of his friend von Plessen, and no doubt backed by the blessing and goodwill of the Moravian Brethren, Svane sailed to Christiansborg with his Danish wife. He was the first African Protestant missionary to his fellow Africans.

Initially, Svane was not successful. The long stay outside his cultural environment had resulted in his forgetting the Ga language, which meant that he could not communicate effectively with his own people. Nevertheless Svane is a prime example of the African factor in mission in Ghana.

The second African and Moravian to carry out mission in Ghana was Christian Protten. Protten, whose mother was a Ga from Christiansborg and whose father was Danish, also completed his education in Copenhagen. A chance meeting with Count Zinzendorf in that Danish city led Protten to join the Moravians, who gave him training in mission work.

Protten and another volunteer, Henrick Huckuff, were sent as missionaries to Ghana (called Guinea by the Moravian Brethren) in 1737. After arriving in Elmina, the two made their way to the Danish port at Christiansborg. Tragically, however, Huckuff died that same year. Working alone, Protten braved the difficulties of life on the coast and attempted some mission advances while maintaining his Moravian connections. He was engaged in establishing a school for Mulattos in Elmina when, due to a political intrigue, he was imprisoned in Anecho. Compounding this difficult situation was the decision of the Dutch governor of the Gold Coast to fight a war against Dahomey. With the death of his colleague, Huckuff, and the failure of the mission work that had been initiated by his friend and countryman Svane, Protten must have lost heart. After his release from prison, and following a serious bout of malaria, he was recalled to Europe by Zinzendorf in 1740. He did not return to Europe immediately, however, but worked in the West Indies for some five years.

The African factor in mission to Africa and the Moravian connection in the West Indies and Ghana gained an interesting momentum at this stage. Protten married a Moravian, Rebecca Freundlich, a West Indian Mullato, and eventually returned to the Christiansborg school as a teacher and catechist between 1756 and 1761.(7) His work was interrupted once more when he accidentally shot one of his schoolboys. Having been dispatched to Europe by the governor as a form of punishment, Protten was eventually pardoned by the King of Denmark. He returned to Christiansborg in 1767 and continued to work under Moravian auspices(8) until his death five years later.

In June 1767 at their meeting in Herinhut, the Moravian Conference agreed to send new missionaries to the Gold Coast. This move was in response to an appeal made by the directors of the Danish Guinea Company, who wanted "a few missionaries to preach the gospel to the heathen and make out of them decent, faithful and industrious persons, as in St Thomas, St Croix and St John."(9)

The directors of the company were no doubt referring to the work of the Moravians among the African slaves on the plantations of the Danish West Indian Islands. Already in Ghana the Danish chief trader, L.F. Romer, had dreamed of a wider missionary enterprise and developed a plan. He proposed the establishment of a Christian boarding school for African boys on an island along the river Volta, well away from the bad influences of the coast. The school was to instruct the boys in agriculture and manual work as well as in the Christian faith. He believed that this would make it possible for "the Africans to earn something, for it is as necessary to accustom African youth to steady work as it is to bring them to a knowledge of God ... The execution of this project would be costly but I believe that these young Africans would be able to support themselves in ten years' time."(10)

Five men - Jacob Meder, Daniel Lemke, Gottfried Schultze, Sigmund Kleffel and Sanyek Gakk - were set aside for this work. They arrived in Ghana in 1768 and were welcomed by both Protten and the Danish governor of Christiansborg Castle.(11) Sadly three of them died of fever within three months of their arrival. Yet another group, comprised of M. Schenk, R.Bradly, S.Watson, and J.E.Westman, was dispatched three years later. The shocking news that they had succumbed to the deadly fever soon after their arrival reached the Moravian Brethren only two years later in 1773.

From all indications, this attempt by the Moravians to engage in mission on the Gold Coast was ill-fated. It seemed to be God's will to stop any further work on the Gold Coast, so they refused a further request by the Danish Guinea Company for more missionaries. Within a period of some thirty-four years, the missionaries had sacrificed their lives without any visible fruit, so a line was drawn under this chapter.

As we shall see presently, it took another Danish Moravian missionary, working under the auspices of the Basel Mission, to re-establish the Moravian connection and begin the chain of African initiative in mission to Africa.

THE BASEL MISSION, ANDREAS RIIS AND THE WEST INDIAN MORAVIAN CONNECTION

Just as the Danish king had been instrumental in the Moravian mission to the Gold Coast in the eighteenth century, so was one of his successors helpful to the Basel Evangelical Mission to Ghana in the early nineteenth century. With his encouragement, the Basel Mission sent four young men, who, arriving in Christiansborg in December 1828, were charged "to show the people of Africa forbearance and beneficial love, even though only a few of the bleeding wounds may be healed which greed... and craftiness of the Europeans have caused."(12) Their hopes were crushed, however, when each of these died of illness shortly after the initiation of their work. In spite of these heavy losses, the Basel Mission - moved by its sense of mission to Africa which comprised restoration, reparation and renewal - agreed to send three more young men. These three Danish pastors Andreas Riis and Peter Jager, and a medical doctor from Saxony, Frederick Heinze - arrived in Ghana in March 1832. Tragically, this experience met with almost the same fate, in that Jager and Heinze died within four months of their arrival, leaving only Riis to carry on the mission.

The Basel committee agreed that Riis could remain if he so wished, and they were prepared to give him the necessary funds. Riis decided to remain - a decision that was to prove providential. As we shall see presently, it gave him the opportunity to observe, plan and execute a remarkable mission strategy that would be culturally rooted and that would result in calling the West Indian Moravians to mission service.

"BECOMING AN AFRICAN FOR THE AFRICANS": RIIS AS STRATEGIST AND FACILITATOR IN HORIZONTAL MISSION

The assessment of Andreas Riis' performance as a missionary has sometimes been purely negative. For example, he has been described as "in some ways a religious imperialist".(13) Riis' attitude in later years might indeed have given this impression. But considered from the perspective of an African, a different Riis emerges. His methodology of "becoming an African for the Africans" is worth pondering. From the perspective of nineteenth century Eurocentric mission, it was probably an aberration.

Riis' sense of mission arose from his deeply missionary Moravian background and his training in Basel. Once in Ghana, he too suffered from repeated attacks of malaria fever, but he recovered. He ascribed his recovery to the treatment he received from an African herbalist.(14) Thus spared from death, he set out to become "an African for the Africans" in order to win them for Christ.

After a short time of service in Christiansborg, where he served as chaplain and teacher both to a congregation and to the Mullatto school, Riis became restless. He considered his period there as time wasted. "It is real burden for me to lead an idle life, and it cost me almost all my strength to stand this"(15).

Several reasons drove Riis to a firm resolve to go to Akropong on the Akuapem mountains. For purely health reasons, he would be better off on higher lying land. For political and diplomatic reasons also his chaplaincy was difficult. Riis probably wanted to escape the annoyances of the Danish colonial officials on the coast.(16) Furthermore, the garrison community resented the presence of the chaplain. Some of them were slave traders in open defiance of the law. Many indulged in a life of debauchery, and in their hour of spiritual need would consult the traditional African priest rather than the chaplain.(17)

From the perspective of mission strategy, Riis must also have realized that concentrating his mission in Christiansborg, with its corrupting European influence, offered no long-term advantage. True to Danish tradition, the chaplains did not reach out to the indigenous people. Riis, on the contrary, wanted to work among the very people who were not yet heavily influenced by the degrading behaviour of the Europeans. He wanted, he said, "to begin my real job among the mountain dwellers of Akuapem."(18)

Riis had been attracted to Akropong through the advice of the Copenhagen Missionary Society and the beautiful accounts of it by Dr Paul Erdman Isert, friend of the Danish Prime Minister. Isert, who had come to Christiansborg as a surgeon to the Danish community, had become acquainted with some African traditional rulers, including Nana Atiemo, the paramount chief of Akuapem. Furthermore, Riis was probably influenced by Isert's plan to counteract the slave trade by establishing an African Missionary Institute. His project was to establish a colony of Christian farmers from Europe and craftsmen from the Gold Coast, all with a mission orientation. Isert, empowered by the Danish crown to found this plantation, received the following instructions from Prime Minister Schimmelmann:

1. The "colony" should aim at becoming self supporting through the introduction of West Indian Crops;

2. Former slaves from the West Indies should be given a piece of land, while no European should be allowed to acquire land for himself;

3. Moravian missionaries should be invited to join the community as soon as the enterprise was underway.(19)

Though Isert died soon after making requests for direct assistance from Denmark and from the Moravians, he laid a remarkable blueprint for a Christian settlement. Notable is the fact that it would include former slaves, and even crops, from the West Indies, and that it echoed Romer's view of an agricultural settlement with a Moravian missionary orientation.

Riis was familiar with these early strategies, of course, and when the Basel Mission later decided - with the cooperation of the Danish Crown and the Moravians - to bring African West Indians to Ghana, they had the example of the earlier attempt, the experience of the Danish Crown in mission work, the knowledge of Isert's desire to settle in Akropong, and some acquaintance with the language, religion and culture of the indigenous population.

Riis went to Akropong and was warmly received. Being the pioneer and strategist that he was, Riis took advantage of this reception and soon endeared himself to the paramount chief, Nana Addo Dankwa, and his people. After his arrival, he spent two weeks visiting the surrounding areas and making house-to-house contact with the people. Unknowingly he was being prepared for horizontal mission. For nearly a year, he lived "together with his carpenter, interpreter, labourers, goats, sheep, hens and chicks in a windowless room whose roof was badly leaking".(20)

While his Danish compatriots at Christiansborg scorned his "crazy" idea of "becoming an African for Africans", Riis was undaunted. Following Pauline mission strategy, Riis lived like the Africans, spending weeks in the forest, sleeping on palm branches and feeding on pepper soup, snails and wormy fish.(21) He built a house for himself and for those who would eventually follow him in mission. The construction of this impressed the people of Akropong so much that he was called "Osiadan" (the house builder).

Riis' request to Basel for a wife from among the congregation of the Moravian Church in Christiansfeld, Denmark, found response in the availability of a young woman, Anna Wolters, the sister of a missionary on the Danish Island of St. Jan in the West Indies.(22) The eventual connection of Riis with the West Indian Moravians and the subsequent joint African mission of the latter with the Basel Mission, were thus further strengthened. Anna, (the first European woman to live in the interior of the Gold Coast), arrived together with two new workers, Murdter and Stanger, in 1836.

The next three years would be extremely challenging. Stanger died soon after arrival, leaving only Riis and Murdter to establish contacts for expanding the work in other indigenous areas. However, disaster loomed at Akropong, where Riis' wife became seriously ill, and the couple's little daughter died. Within weeks of these events, Murdter also died of fever. On the political side, there were disagreements with the governor (Morck) and - what was worse - civil strife in Akuapem seemed to threaten any further missionary work. Indeed, Riis had been drawn into the crisis and become a pawn in a political intrigue between the Danish governor and the chiefs and people of Akuapem.

Twelve years of pioneering mission work had resulted in nine deaths, local conflicts, opposition and/or suspicion of the Danish government. These circumstances were taking a toll on Riis' health. In 1839, the Basel Mission directed him to make a trip to Kumasi, in order to explore the possibility of beginning mission work there, and then to report to Basel for recovery and to plan the future of the mission.

"FROM WEST INDIES TO AFRICA": RIIS, THE MORAVIANS AND BASEL MISSION POLICY OF HORIZONTAL MISSION

When Riis returned to Switzerland, he was confronted with some probing questions about the work that had been undertaken. A principal issue was that of results: after eight years of his ministry there had not been a single baptism.

There were further questions about the priority given to building a house (an issue raised by governor Morck to the Basel Mission), and there was serious concern about the loss of young lives. The fact that the Basel Mission resolved to continue the work - in spite of such serious doubts - is to be attributed to Riis' convincing long-term strategy. He had said:

"This Gospel which they (Africans) never heard before is something new for them and we must not expect that the business of planting the Gospel will proceed quickly. It is a peculiarity of Christianity that it needs a solid basis and therefore time to spread."(23)

Riis' attitude to Africans and their culture and religion was one of sympathetic understanding. He did not demonstrate the fanatic or destructive spirit that lay behind the tabula rasa approach; rather, he sought to become an African for the Africans and win their respect as they had won his. Riis was able to urge the Home Board to continue the mission by assuring members that the people of Akuapem desired to have him back, "...And when I told them that there had been but little success in my work, they said, 'How can you expect so much from us? You have been staying among us all alone and for a short time only.'"(24)

The dawn of a new day for African mission appeared when contacts were made to involve African Christians from the West Indies in mission to Africa. Already such a suggestion had come to Basel from England, but the impetus for Basel's involvement must have come from Riis. An interesting statement is attributed to Nana Addo Dankwa, who is reported to have made it to Riis:

"When God created the world, He made a book for the whiteman and juju for the blackman. But if you could show me some blackman who could read the whiteman's book, then we would surely follow you".(25)

It is likely that, with this encouragement, Riis convinced the Board of the need to look for African Christians to bring back with him.

In light of the above, the Basel Mission contacted the Moravians to seek their cooperation, and they identified some assurances that had to be secured in order to proceed. One was that the Danish government was to concur with the project and give it final sanction. In view of that government's involvement in the initial mission work of both the Moravians and the Basel Mission, this seemed essential; (besides, the unhappy hostility between Riis and governor Morck was still fresh in their minds).

A second assurance was that of the absolute cooperation of a few West Indies Christian families of African extraction, who, already skilled in their own crafts and trades, would have the following responsibilities: (a) assisting the European missionaries in cultivating the ground, (b) constructing homes suitable for Africans, (c) offering service of instruction to the youth, (d) practising other useful services and (e) exhibiting the character and demeanour of a humble African Christian community among the indigenous Africans.(26)

It was agreed that, for language reasons, the families should preferably come from British colonies. Through his strategic work, Riis had observed that the use of English was destined to become important in the territory.(27) That the British West Indies were favoured over Danish West Indian Islands was further justified by the fact that the former had declared the emancipation of slaves in 1839.

Recruitment from Sierra Leone was also rejected, the Board not being sure that it could secure second and third generation tested African Christians there. It was also not certain whether the Church Missionary Society (Church of England) would agree to part with the best of its African Christian families. Added to this was the fact that the Anglican form of liturgy used by C.M.S. was foreign to continental Protestant pietists. In the British West Indies, however, the Moravians, whose form of worship and church discipline were familiar and acceptable to the Basel Mission, had established numerous congregations, and had done so among the Africans for almost one hundred years.(28)

Riis and a carefully chosen team, which included his wife and a young African from Liberia (who had been trained as a missionary assistant in Basel),(29) were designated to do the selection of the African colonists. Before departing for the West Indies, Riis visited his homeland, Denmark, to get assurance of support. He was received by the King who assured him that the request had been granted. Armed with this written consent by the King of Denmark, Riis and his colleagues arrived in London in May 1842 to visit the Moravians and to obtain support from government officials there. Meticulous steps were taken to arrange letters of recommendation from Her Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Stanley. Stanley wrote letters of recommendation to the governors of Jamaica, Antigua, St. Kitts and the British settlement of Cape Coast Castle in Ghana. These measures, related by Peter Latrobe,(30) were a clear demonstration of the active interest taken by government officials in the missionary efforts of both the Basel and the Moravian missions.

The group arrived in the Caribbean, on the island of Antigua, in July 1842. Disappointment awaited them. Though the missionary pastor in Antigua had indicated in an earlier letter that the matter at hand had been maturely considered, all seemed to indicate that the conversation had only been held at the level of the European missionaries, and that the African Christians were unaware of the request. Last-minute passionate appeals were made to the congregations on the island, and in this way a sixteen-year old man was found for the enterprise.(31)

In contrast to Antigua, Jamaica proved to be highly successful. Already before the arrival of the party, a number of interests and efforts had prepared the soil for the African factor in Christian mission to Africa. Rev. Miller of the Mico Charity School had advocated the mission venture and had offered to train young men for the work of evangelists "in the land of their fathers."(32) Rev. Jacob Zom, superintendent of the Moravian Mission on the island, had, seven years earlier, proposed a plan "for training native African missionaries and teachers for needy Africa". Against all odds, Zom had founded a training institution in Fairfield. The relevance of such a centre in the West Indies was highlighted by the historian Buchner who, in 1854, wrote:

"If ever the blackman shall arise, there must be men of his own colour to take the lead; and it is from such institutions as Zom's they must go forth. Those now under training may in the course of time not only take the place of the European teacher and missionary in the West Indies, but they may also go forth as missionaries to preach the gospel to their countrymen in Africa."(33)

In many ways, Jamaica was spiritually alive to this challenge and, even at an official level, the mission project brought by Riis and his colleagues was to be warmly supported by the island's governor, Lord Elgin. Within one month, Riis had travelled some 500 miles on horseback and muleback, preaching in Moravian congregations, speaking at meetings, interviewing people and securing further support.

While the recruitment process did not pass without difficulties, it was a great achievement when twenty-three persons of varying ages from Moravian congregations throughout the island enlisted in this service. There were couples, couples with children, and a few single persons. Their members included a young lady, Catherine Mulgrave, who had been rescued from slavery and adopted by the wife of the governor, and had trained as a teacher in Fairfield (she was to become Thompson's wife). Another member, Alexander Worthy Clerk, had also come from Fairfield as one of the first group of three trainees of the institution. From Zom's congregation in Fairfield alone, some ten persons were committed and ready to become missionaries.

In terms of skills and qualifications, Buchner records their high value and worth in this comment about a particular couple, John Walker, a carpenter, and his wife: "They are both pious, intelligent, self-denying and hard-working people. I can recommend them fully and unreservedly."(34)

No doubt the best expression of the sense of commitment to the divine call to serve in Africa is contained in the words of Walker himself. Speaking at a meeting of the Lititz congregation, he said:

"My dear friends, it is now about sixteen months since I felt what the dear Saviour had done for me. There were moments when I thought: 'Don't go, they will enslave you or kill you'. But at such moments there was no peace in my heart. When I thought: 'I will go where my good Lord wants me to go', I felt contented. I therefore cannot be persuaded to stop going, and I do not want to be prevented ... I want to do something worthwhile for my Lord with my hands. If the Lord helps me, I hope to be able to set an example for the poor people over there."(35)

Commitment to the African mission further manifested itself in the remarkable awareness of the West Indians that they were not going into some strange, unknown land. In a way they were "returning Josephs" who were "going home" with good news. In Walker's words:

"If I leave you, I go not to a foreign country. Africa is our country. Our fathers and grandfathers have been brought here by force and we have brethren and sisters to pray for Africa and for us, when we go there ... to pray that the Lord may help us and bless us."(36)

Zorn had no doubts about the faith and courage of these missionaries. "I may say all of them have forsaken house and lands, fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters ... by their industry they had made themselves comparatively comfortable, and were doing well in the world, but this they cheerfully resigned..."(.37) He and his brothers and sisters were delighted by this response to God's Spirit and his prayer for them was "that God's pillar of cloud and of fire go before them, and once they are settled on the mountains of Africa, may He let his blessing flow abundantly on their labour and give them eternal rest."(38)

Zom's Moravian sense of mission led him to insist on a proper contract between the black missionaries and the Basel Mission. A five-clause agreement, reached on January 4, 1843, would in fact constitute something new in the history of the nineteenth century missionary enterprise in Africa. Its substance was:

a) The form of public worship and the rules of the Moravian church in regard to church discipline were to be maintained;

b) The West Indians were to undertake to serve the Mission willingly. In return the Mission would take care of all their need for the first two years;

c) The Mission Society would provide houses for the West Indians and give them land for farming on which they could work one day each week;

d) After five years, if anyone wanted to return to Jamaica, the Mission Society would pay the passage, provided that they had not been guilty of moral aberration.(39)

The provision which allowed the West Indian Moravians to use their own forms of worship and discipline was an indication of the extent to which both the Moravians and the Basel Mission were prepared to go in order to enlist Africans in the mission. With this agreement in hand, Riis' group and their new colleagues departed from Jamaica on 8 February 1843, sailing to Christiansborg where they arrived on 17 April 1843.

That was the commencement of a new and effective model in mission which had profound effects on the indigenous community in Ghana. Its thrust may be seen today in the massive Ghanaian Presbyterian Churches and their continuing initiatives in mission work among their own ethnic and cultural neighbours.

Conclusion

In the heyday of Eurocentric Christian mission in the eighteenth century, it comes as a refreshing breeze to observe that there was a growing understanding of mission from the intra-African family perspective among such mission bodies as the Moravians and the Basel Missionary Society. Early attempts in the mid-eighteenth century by the Moravians to establish a mission by Africans in Ghana, though significant, may have been unsuccessful because they relied on individuals like Svane and Protten, who were only half-Africans and who had been uprooted from their cultures and schooled in a European way of thinking.

The role played by Andreas Riis of the Basel Mission was indeed as remarkable as it was revolutionary. Through his gradual immersion into African society, and his strategically "becoming an African for the Africans", the radical shift in mission described above emerged. As a result of the contract with the West Indian Moravians, the Basel Mission laid a firm foundation for supporting the African's natural sense of community. It was this sense of belonging which, rooted and nurtured within the Moravian ex-slaves in the West Indies, was brought to bear in the new mission model. In this way, it may be affirmed that the paradigm shift that was seen by David Bosch in mission today(40) was foreshadowed and prepared for by the Moravians and the Basel Mission over a hundred years ago.

NOTES

1 Lamin Sanneh, "The Horizontal and Vertical Mission: An African Perspective," International Bulletin of Mission Research No.4, October 1983:165-171

2 Ibid

3 Ibid

4 See the recent works of David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Missions, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, N.Y. 1991. Cf. also Kwasi A. Dickson, Uncompleted Mission: Christianity and Exclusivism, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, N.Y. 1991

5 O.E. Uyo, "Alexander Crummel; Apostle of African Redemption through Christianity": West African Religion, XVI, 1975. Hope for mission work in Africa by Christians of African origin in Jamaica is expressed in the words of William Jamieson: "The hearts of the Presbytery are set on an Academy for training young men for the ministry, with the view to Africa and the islands": quoted in Alex Robb, Life and Letters of William Jamieson, Edinburgh, 1861: 105-106

6 H. Debrunner, Frederick Pedersen Svane: 1701-1789, EMM, February 1957, passim

7 H. Debrunner, A History of Christianity in Ghana, Accra: Waterville Publishing House, 1967, 62ff

8 For a detailed account of Protten's work with the Moravians, see P.Steiner, Ein Blatt aus der Geschichte der Brudermission, Basel; 1888:18-28

9 H. Debrunner, Frederick Pedersen Svane, 25ff

10 L. F. Romer, Nachrichten von der Kuste von Guinea, Copenhagen: 1762, cited by H.Debrunner, Anfange Evangelischer Missionsarbeit auf der Goldkuste bis 1828, Jan/March 1954: 51-52.

11 C.C. Reindorf, The History of the Gold Coast and Asante, Basel: 1889. Reprinted 1954: 216-217

12 P. Eppler, Geschichte der Basler Mission: 1815-1899, Basel: 1908, 43-44

13 H. Debrunner, "The Moses of the Ghana Presbyterian Church: An Historical Meditation of Rev.Andreas Riis (1804-1854)": Ghana Bulletin of Theology, Vol. 1, No.4, June 1958: 10ff

14 See the mimeograph of A.A.Opoku, Riis the Builder, Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon 1978: 9ff, 13ff. The herbalist prescribed cold ablutions and the rubbing of lime to cure fever.

15 Quoted in A.A.Opoku, Riis the Builder, 14

16 H. Debrunner, "Notable Danish Chaplains on the Gold Coast"; Transactions of the Gold Coast and Togoland Historical Society, 11/1, Achimota 1956: 13-39

17 See I. Tuffour, "Relations between Christian Missions, European Administrators and Traders in the Gold Coast, 1828-1874", in C.G. Baeta (ed.) Christianity in Tropical Africa, London: Oxford University Press for International African Institute 1968:36-56

18 A.A. Opoku, Riis the Builder: 15

19 Noel Smith, The Presbyterian Church of Ghana, 1835-1960: A young Church in a Changing Society, Accra: Ghana Universities Press, 1966. Isert was influenced, no doubt, by the experience he had on board the slave ship to Europe which went first to the West Indies with slaves from Ghana. He is reported to have been indignant at the "countless means to torment the African slaves" used by the white traders and owners; cf. H.Debrunner, "Ein Rousseau Schiller in Afrika: Paul Erdmann Isert" in Evangelisches Missionsmagazin 103, 1959: 72-84

20 H. Debrunner, The Moses of Ghana Presbyterian Church, p. 13

21 Ibid: Riis could write about his fellow countrymen in 1836: "I can find no consolation in the company of my people, since their moral life is so bad..." cf. A.A. Opoku, Riis the Builder, 41

22 Periodical Accounts Vol.16, 1842, p.156. In this publication the name of Anna's brother is given as "Br.H.Wotiler"

23 A.A. Opoku, Riis the Builder p. 85

24 A.A. Opoku, Riis the Builder p. 93

25 N.T. Clerk, Centenary Report: Basel Mission 1843-1943, mimeographed, p.2

26 Periodical Accounts, 16, 1842: 156

27 A.A. Opoku, Riis the Builder: 89. Riis and Murdter were conscious of their language handicap. Riis was not prepared to use Danish for instruction and insisted on the vernacular. By the time he went home in 1839 he had compiled a 1,200 word Twi-English dictionary which he took along with him and which the West Indians used on their way to Ghana as a textbook for studying the Twi Language.

28 The Moravians started missionary work in the West Indies in the mid-eighteenth century, the first missionary arriving in Jamaica in 1754. See J.H.Buchner, The Moravians in Jamaica: A History of the Mission of the United Brethren's Church to the Negroes in the Island of Jamaica from the year 1745-1845, London: Brown, 1854. Repr. The Black Heritage Library Collection, Books for Libraries Press, Freeport, New York, 1971: 14f. The impact of Moravian worship and church discipline on the African Church is discussed in my forthcoming article: "The Moravian Legacy to the Worship Life and Discipline of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana".

29 Periodical Accounts 16, 1842: p. 157

30 Ibid

31 A special conference of the Moravian missionaries was held on 6 July 1841 in Antigua. Harvey had communicated that good craftsmen and teachers would be found, but it would be difficult to find farmers. See Periodical Accounts, Vol. 16, 1842, p.50. A.A. Opuku, Riis the Builder, 100

32 Walter Hark and Adolphus Westphal, The Breaking of the Dawn: Moravian Work in Jamaica 1754-1904, London: William Strain & Sons, 1904, 84

33 J.H. Buchner, The Moravians in Jamaica: 136

34 Quoted in W.Hark and A.Westphal, The Breaking of the Dawn: 84

35 A.A. Opoku, Riis the Builder, 112

36 Ibid: 113. See further, N.T.Clerk, Centenary Report: 4-5

37 W. Hark and A. Westphal, The Breaking of the Dawn: 84

38 See Diary of the Congregation at Fairfield, 1843, entry on Wednesday 4 January. (Housed in the Jamaican National Archives, Spanish Town - Moravian section)

39 Quoted in W. Schlatter, Geschichte der Basler Mission Vol. III: 35Y-36

40 David J. Bosch, Transforming Missions, passim

DANIEL J. ANTWI is currently Principal of Trinity Theological College, Legon, Ghana and teaches New Testament Studies and Christian Missions there.

COPYRIGHT 1998 World Council of Churches
DESCRIPTORS: Christianity and culture--Research; Christianity--Africa; Africa--Religion
FILE SEGMENT: AI File 88

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The scandal of continuing intercultural blindness in mission historiography: the case of Andreas Riis in Akwapim.

ABSTRACT: Missionary Andreas Riis and his Basel Mission in Ghana from 1832-1839 and 1843-1845 has always been depicted as a story of death and survival, of self-sacrifice on behalf of the good fight and of disaster in the 1830's. Taking a different perspective of his experience in Ghana, however, will show the role of the leadership of the Akwapim in establishing the Presbyterian church in Africa. This realization was made after analyzing Riis' diary and considering the incident when the Akwapim king twice offered Riis appropriate dwelling.

TEXT:

There are episodes in mission history which may seem to have exhausted themselves. They have been written about to such an extent that even enthusiasts find it difficult to uncover further information, at least in documentary form. One such episode is the history of the beginning of Basel Mission work in Ghana, and the role in this story of the key missionary Andreas Riis (1804-1854) who worked in Ghana from 1832-1839, and 1843 to 1845. Within the framework of the Basel Mission's presentation of its own past it has been used over and over again as a typical story of death and survival, of self-sacrifice on behalf of the "good fight", of disaster in the 1830s, and of enormous, many-sided long-term consequences in the 150 years since. Over the generations, people with the capacity and the opportunity to do original archival work have re-written the story and added to it.(1) Consequently, as Archivist, for many years I consciously steered people away from Riis. I thought that the episode of the beginnings of Basel Mission work in Ghana had been milked dry. But I was wrong.

People with new questions were able to analyze, from new angles, the episodes in which Riis took a leading part, and have even found new pieces of information about him in the Basel Mission Archive. For instance, someone interested in the history of medicine was able to point out that European treatments for tropical diseases in the 1830s were almost as deadly as the diseases themselves.(2) And Gustav Franz, the most recent writer to attempt to use Riis' story as a subject for religious instruction in German secondary schools, revealed a whole new dimension through his decision to communicate mission history "warts and all."(3) Riis is, as we shall see, a heroic figure. But Franz drew attention to a history of stubbornness and quarrelsomeness, showing a Riis who endangered the work he had himself founded. These features of the man's life and work led to his quiet recall to Europe and his forced withdrawal from the Basel Mission in 1846. Riis thus offered, in Jon Miller's more recent analysis of the Mission's organisation and its problems, a prominent case-study for the discussion of internal conflict in the 19th century.(4)

What I am proposing in this essay, however, is not a reconsideration of the figure of Riis in the context of mission history, but rather a reconsideration of his place in the history of Akwapim, the Ghanaian kingdom in which he settled in 1835, and the role of the leadership of the Akwapim in the founding of the church. To ask questions about the role of indigenous initiative outside what has become the church is somewhat unusual in the historiography of church and mission in Africa. But such questions do make possible the kind of new approach I am urging. And as a basis for this reorientation I have used two small items of information which have long been publicly available in German, but which have never, as far as I know, been integrated into the familiar historiography of Riis and his arrival in Akwapim.

My thoughts were turned in this direction during an intensive one-week university seminar held in March 1994 in the Basel Mission Archive with students of anthropology and history. Its title was: "Looking for African History in European Sources: using early accounts of travel in Ghana in the Basel Mission Archive."(5) In this framework we looked at Riis' published diary.(6) What began purely as an exercise in which I thought I "knew all the answers" ended with my realization that Riis' diary has never been intensively read as a source for the history of the Kingdom of Akwapim.(7) Furthermore: precisely the two entries that clearly point to authoritative initiatives by the Akwapim in the beginnings of Basel Mission work there have never appeared in our secondary literature. In revealing that an indigenous leadership intended to be active agents in support of the presence of the missionary, these entries may be regarded as providing central evidence about early African church history in this region. So it is all the more striking that this original thrust was long ago muffled and, indeed, concealed, by a typical piece of old-fashioned missionary public relations which, re-echoed in both European and indigenous discourse through mutual feed-back, hid the point that there is a major question to be asked about the indigenous culture and state tradition that received Andreas Riis. To write of the "scandal of inter-cultural blindness" is, in this context, not to exaggerate. To call this scandal "continuing" depends on the present-day reception of the material and the questions I am trying to communicate here.

Riis is depicted as a founding hero in the Basel Mission's traditional discourse about its own work in Ghana, and, indeed, he deserves this status. There is no doubt that the way he risked his life for the establishment of a Basel Mission in Ghana, and his own ability to survive there, were crucial in ensuring that the Mission did not give up its work there in the early years. There were urgent grounds for a withdrawal of the Mission. By 1839, of the first three parties of missionaries sent by the Basel Mission to Ghana since 1828, only two people - Andreas Riis and his wife Anna - were still alive. On furlough in Basel in 1840, Riis' plea for the continuation of the Mission was effective, not least because of the risks everyone knew he had been prepared to face and was obviously prepared to face again.

Riis was also a founding hero of Basel Mission activity in Ghana in the sense that he worked out what was necessary to enable the organisation and its people to become viable there. It was he who apparently turned his back on the European treatment of tropical diseases, and put himself in the hands of an indigenous healer - a pragmatic example followed by many later Basel missionaries right up to the beginning of this century.(8) He had also abandoned the unhealthy and, for a puritan soul, very stressful environment of the Danish trading settlement of Christiansborg on the coast, settling instead about 30 km inland on the crest of a ridge, in Akropong, the capital town of the kingdom of Akwapim. This was a move into a somewhat healthier environment and into more direct contact with relatively uneuropeanised African cultures and communities. And it was Riis who led the recruitment of a party of Christian ex-slaves from the West Indies for work in Ghana; they went to Ghana with him and other members of a missionary party in 1843. Those who persisted in the Mission community were, together with their European superiors, the non-indigenous co-founders of Christianity in the Basel Mission/Presbyterian tradition in Ghana.

Was Riis in fact a hero in the eyes of indigenous people? One Twi word, used in the Basel Mission's traditional discourse, indicates that the answer to this question is "yes". It is asserted that the people of Akwapim called him osiadan, the "house builder", or, as Christaller's Twi Dictionary translates this word, "architect."(9) In the context of general knowledge about the nineteenth century Basel Mission, both in its homeland and in Ghana, this word calls up powerful associations. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards the Basel Mission built a series of stately two-storey mission houses in Ghana, most of which still survive today. Their architectural history and their full significance in Ghanaian social history has not yet been properly studied, though pro-mission historiography argues that they demonstrated the kind of solid, practical, effective, European Christian rural life-style which became an eye-opener for indigenous people and a major factor in the attraction the Basel Mission exercised later in the century. The reason for which Riis was called osiadan is clear: in 1835 he began building this kind of mission house.

The word "osiadan," invariably spoken in the Basel Mission in tones of admiration and even reverence, puts indigenous people in the role of receptors who became active only in dependence on the missionary's skills and initiative. It is, however, precisely in his references to buildings and accommodation that Riis' own diary indicates that the indigenous initiative concerned with his settlement in Akropong in 1835 needs to be reconsidered and placed in the foreground of this story.(10) Two passages in his published diary, which have not been analyzed before, give this process of reassessment a surprisingly solid start.

On 22 March 1835 Riis arrived in Akropong. He records that during that very afternoon he was invited to go to a courtyard of, or near, the palace where, under the leadership of the King of Akwapim, the population of the town had gathered to welcome him. The king explained the four taboos which Riis had to observe and which are repeated in much of the secondary literature.(11) That evening the king visited Riis in his lodging and informed him that his whole kingdom had agreed to build him a better and more comfortable house.

Some days later, on 25 March, Riis wrote that he was invited to a meeting with the king and the Divisional Chiefs of Akwapim or their representatives, exclusively to discuss his presence in the kingdom. Again he was assured that the people of the kingdom desired his presence in Akropong and again he was given the promise that a house would be built for him.

This double offer, expressed by the King of Akwapim on behalf of his people (the second time in the presence of representatives of the whole kingdom) should never have been overlooked, and deserves very careful consideration indeed.(12) But the question of how to analyze it has never, as far as I can see, been posed in general or in particular terms. So we are faced with questions to which concrete replies from the context of Akan culture are not yet known. How was the offer expressed and what did it imply?

It is axiomatic, I think, that an offer of this kind made by an Akan king had precedents in the history of the kingdom, especially when it was made so quickly.(13) It must have fitted into some pre-existing and generally-accepted indigenous institutional and intellectual framework. We ought to be able to identify the Twi term for the offer. We ought to be able to ascertain for what sort of outsiders an Akan kingdom was normally prepared to build a house. We ought to know what the people who proposed to carry through the work expected of its missionary beneficiary.

To be fair to the Basel Mission's traditional blindness to this question, however, I must admit that my attempts to clarify this issue with the people from southern Ghana and with the non-Akan experts on the Akan world who have recently crossed my path, have not been particularly successful yet. Some ask whether a non-Akwapim would have been allowed to build a house in Akropong in the traditional dispensation. Most people, however, agree that the offer probably had to do with the response of a host to the arrival of an honoured guest. We are looking, in other words, at a kind of institutionalised hospitality. My informants agree that the offer to build a house was an attempt to bind the guest to the existing cultural and political structures. The powerful and mighty of the kingdom, having performed this service for him, would presumably have expected Riis to realise that he was under a clear general obligation to them, and that he would recognise them as his patrons on their terms.

Presumably we have to think in terms of clientage - Riis is offered high status in Akwapim-by the king, his "sponsor", and the king and his supporters in turn expect that Riis, as "client", will be loyal to them. To quote from an innovative essay about aliens as a cause of changes in society and religion in precolonial Lagos:

...it was imperative that alien clients be loyal to their hosts. As one proverb puts it. "You cannot harm the person who feeds you"...to go against someone who was helping you - and "going against" could be interpreted broadly. It incurred loss of business and other sanctions.(14)

Having reflected in this very preliminary way on the significance of the offer to build Riis a house, the tensions which surrounded the house-building process - well documented in Riis' own diary m acquire a new profile and importance. The missionary demanded that the people working on this house should be paid in Akkord - which can best be translated as "piece work", or daily payment for the work actually done. There is also a strong implication that Riis was expecting regular work to be done. This wish to make Akkord payments was pushed through against the expressed opposition of the king(15) and resulted in a lengthy, acute, and debilitating intercultural struggle, which almost certainly linked up with internal power struggles in the kingdom itself.

If Riis hoped people would work regular hours on building his house, there is no sign in this section of his published diary that he realised that Akwapim people already exported significant quantities of palm-oil, which not only had to be produced, but also head-loaded 30 to 50 km to the trading-points on the coast. Labour could almost certainly only be spared for house-building when palm oil production was (seasonally?) in abeyance.

Furthermore, since the house which Akwapim planned to build for Riis used swish (wet clay) as a major construction material, and since it would be up on a ridge, far away from a river, major pans of the construction could only be undertaken when water was plentiful at the end of the rainy season.

Riis' ideas about the organization of the work and the form of payment were still more difficult to apply in Akwapim, where labour was organized on a family or "house" basis. Obviously, big men reckoned to set their subordinate family members to work on Riis' house, and expected that they - the big men - would be appropriately rewarded.(16) No doubt they and their subordinates would find ways of channelling the wages received from Riis into the traditional structures of debt and dependency that operated in Akwapim at that time. Riis' proposals ran counter to their attempts to integrate him into their community.(17)

That the Akwapim intention to build Riis a house was serious is attested to in sections of the published diary that cover the period from March to October of 1835. In one of the last entries - for 28 September - Riis reports that large numbers of people had gathered to make swish to plaster his house after heavy rain, and that they had called in more people from the surrounding settlements to help them.(18) But back in May the diary implied that it had been agreed that the house to be built by the people of Akwapim would be a simple traditional wattle-and-daub building. For this reason, between May and September Riis and the members of his household spent days in the forest sawing timber to make beams and planks, in order to build "proper" doors and windows and a "proper" wooden floor in the indigenous construction he was being offered.(19)

So the building of this house raised all sons of issues of inter-cultural relations and misunderstanding.(20) It certainly was, in Riis' account, a point of continuing conflict. The word "osiadan" may echo through the Basel Mission's own literature in tones of reverence for Riis. But even a fleeting knowledge of Ghanaian humour will suggest that those who suffered from Riis' stubborn use of European models of co-operation may have used the word with quite another accentuation and in a very different tone of voice - "Oh boy! Was he the one who built that house!"(21) And, indeed, Riis himself says in a diary entry for 27 May that the Akwapims were calling him not "osiadan" but "pig-headed" and "impatient" because he was refusing to respect the views of the constituted Akwapim authorities on what he was doing.(22)

Sources for African history and African church history are inevitably patchy. The offer to build a house is, as we have seen, clearly documented. So are some aspects of the tensions which developed around the building activities. The mid-term impact of Riis and his house on Akwapim are not so easy to ascertain. But a scenario can be sketched in which the difficulties over the building work can be seen as a cause of the major political crisis which developed in the kingdom in 1836, and which was resolved only in the mid-1840s.

The crisis itself is documented.(23) We learn that the king lost his ability to hold the state together. Representatives of the warring factions traveled to Accra to seek adjudication and support by their rival supporters in the Danish and British colonial forts. In the course of this process the king committed suicide. A new king, who was independent of the warring factions of the late 1830s and whose authority was generally respected, was elected only in 1846. Anglo-Danish rivalry, linked with the competition between the various parties in the Akwapim state, was clearly one major reason why the crisis could not be resolved easily and promptly.

The specific origins of this political crisis are not so easy to determine, however. Michelle Gilbert's work on Akwapim as a bicultural kingdom emphasises the endemically precarious nature of its unity.(24) So it is at least valid as a hypothesis to argue that this king's authority was seriously weakened by the conflicts around Riis and his house. Even a king operates within political constraints. As the figure in Akwapim politics who, above all others, tried to invest in Riis' presence, that house and its building process became, in the crucial months leading up to the crisis, a constant irritant in the body politic. This problem must have consumed much of the credibility and political capital he needed to maintain his authority.

A re-assessment of these episodes leads me to place a small sacrifice in honour of the Akwapim king concerned, Okwapemhene Addow Danka I. Riis is celebrated as a pioneer, but this king and his notables, who tried to construct an appropriate dwelling for a new kind of representative of the European peoples and of European religion among them, also deserve the reputation of pioneers. They were people who, faced with an unusual and unprecedented situation, had their own ideas of what was rational, expedient and culturally justifiable. Carrying through these ideas turned out to be just as risky for them as living in Ghana was for Riis, if for different reasons. The ideas and customs which provided the cultural framework for their actions undoubtedly had a history when Riis arrived in Akropong in 1835 and certainly they continued to be part of the complex indigenous cultural framework which has shaped much of Akwapim's dialogue with Christianity ever since.

We have, in fact, not only tried to correct the historical reputation of an African monarch now chronologically quite distant from us; the culture and the state he represented need also to be seen in their proper light. In the course of the last century and a half - in the face of massive pressure for change of many kinds and at many levels - the latter have shown a great historical tenacity.

But within the world of missiology we have never really considered what it means that this state-form exists to the present day and that many peoples' attitude to Christianity continues to be influenced by the values and structures. of the state. We have not sufficiently considered what it means that the traditional state and the church in Akropong live in ever closer intimacy, nor have we come to terms with the fact that, since the beginning of this century, an increasing proportion of office-holders of the state are convinced Christians, though, at the same time, under church discipline because they perform traditional sacrifices banned by the church.(25) The situation referred to here is similar to those of most classical missionary organisations in relation to the partner churches that were founded through their work. The former understand the latter as a somewhat more colourful mirror image of themselves. But to understand a partner church as a product of an indigenous search for answers to problems formed by, and expressed through, indigenous culture, is a more difficult exercise which few of us attempt in more than most general terms.

The easiest way to dismiss the issues raised here would be to argue that "osiadan" refers to the rebuilding of the Akropong mission station when the missionaries returned with the West Indian settlers in 1843, and that it really refers to a whole group of missionaries, subsumed in oral tradition under the name of the most prominent of them. But I am not arguing here about dating. The role of the political leadership of Akwapim in the history of the Presbyterian Church there has never been properly addressed from the church history side. This goes for both the important decade of 1835-1845 as well as the other decades of the first century of the church in Akwapim.(26)

It is not a provincial argument which I am presenting here. The persistent failure to see the active role played by Akwapim's political leaders in Riis' settlement in 1835 is an index of a widespread cultural blindness which not only affects the missionary organisations' present-day view of their own past, but handicaps their attempts to understand what "culture" should mean in their present-day work. It certainly indicates that the continuities which flow from the traditional discourse about God, humankind and the world into peoples' contemporary understanding of Christianity have never been more than instrumentalized here in Europe and in international discussion. The scandal of inter-cultural blindness is a product of a discourse in missiology about African culture which is still too little inter-disciplinary and too much theological and normative; too little concerned to ascertain what people actually do and think, and too much concerned to justify and apply certain Western standards.

As I worked on an early draft of this paper I was coincidentally reading Primo Levi's The Periodic Table.(27) The chapter entitled "Argon" struck me as very appropriate to this discussion. Levi (who was Jewish) chose argon, a very inert gas, as a metaphor for the situation of the long-established Jewish culture among the predominantly Christian population of his north-west Italian homeland. The Jewish culture was perceived by the general population only in very cursory terms, as a simple recognition that it existed. Conscious interaction was minimal.

The metaphor could easily be adopted here - anything in Akwapim culture which is not already a theme in the international missiological discourse on church and mission is like argon in that discourse. But the metaphor could also be developed and extended. One could argue that what is oxygen in indigenous discourse "there", is argon in the discourse about African churches "here", and it may be - heaven help us - that what is oxygen "here" turns out to be argon "there", too.(28)

The writing of African church history as part of African history has perhaps begun. But its essential assumptions and the potentially radical nature of its findings are anything but accepted, or even understood, in the metropolitan discourse about mission.

Author's Note

I would especially like to thank my colleague and doctoral student, Peter Haenger, for his help and advice both in formulating this essay, and in searching for Basel Mission references to Riis' work in Akropong. I would also like to thank the participants in the University of Basel "Block Seminar" in 1994 for providing the occasion through which the thoughts expressed here came together; the members of Basel IG Afrikanische Geschichte (Basel Students for African History) for their very stimulating conviction that this sort of reflection about our joint Afro-European past is important for our African and European future. Finally, I thank my father, Noel Jenkins, and my father-in-law, Jack Chorley, who both went through this text with critical and appreciative faculties and helped it to become an article of, I hope, more than local and pedantic significance.

NOTES

1 A full bibliography on Riis would be too long for an essay of this character. I have based my analysis of the Basel Mission's traditional literature especially on the following publications: Steiner, Paul: Die Basler Mission auf der Goldkuste (Handbucher zur Missionskunde, Bd.3), 144 pp., 1909. Schlatter, Wilhelm: Geschichte der Basler Mission, 3rd volume, Afrika, 1915. Oelschner, Walter: Landung in Osu, 224 pp., 1959. Two more recent publications in English are important in reflecting this Basel Mission reception of the story: Smith, Noel: The Presbyterian Church of Ghana 1835-1960, 290 pp., 1966. Debrunner, Hans W.: A History of Christianity in Ghana, 380 pp., 1967.

2 Fischer, Herman Friedrich: Der Missionsarzt Rudolf Fisch und die Anfange medizinischer Arbeit der Basler Mission an der Goldkuste Ghana, 585 pp., 1991, above all part 2.1.

3 Jesus kommt nach Akropong, Modelle fur den Religionsunterricht 7, Materialheft and Lehrerheft, 1976. Franz, Gustav: Jesus kommt nach Akropong, Unterrichtsskizze fur das 4./5. (6.)Schuljahr, ca 200 pp., duplicated, n.d.

4 Miller, Jori: The Social Control of Religious Zeal: A Study of Organisational Contradictions, 238 pp., 1994, esp. pp. 120-6.

5 Originally: Afrikanische Geschichte und Europaische Quellen am Beispiel fruher Reiseberichte aus Ghana im Archiv der Basler Mission.

6 "Einige Mitteilungen aus dem Tagebuche des Missionars Andreas Riis, von seinem Aufenthalte unter dem Aschanti-Volke auf der Goldkuste: Vom 19. Marz bis zum 7. Oktober 1835", Magazin fur die neueste Nachrichten der protestantischen Bibel- und Missionsgesellschaften, 1836, pp. 510-64. (This periodical is often cited under its later name Evangelisches Missions Magazin). It should be noted that Akwapim was not part of Asante.

7 The standard work on the history of Akwapim is Government and Politics in the Akuapem State 1730-1850, by M.A.Kwamena-Poh, 177 pp. 1978. Dr Kwamena-Poh was able to work directly on the Danish archives, but had to rely on an English summary of Basel Mission materials in the EC Series of the Ghana National Archives in Accra (p. 166).

8 Unfortunately we have no systematic reports on this in the Archive, but Fischer's dissertation is a good compendium of the evidence we have, (see note 2 above), especially chapters 2 and 4.

9 J.G. Christaller, Dictionary of the Asante and Fante Language, here in the 2nd ed., (607 pp. 1933) p. 452.

10 See note 6 above.

11 See e.g. Kwamena-Poh op.cit., p. 113.

12 I should perhaps nail this point down with reference to the Basel Mission literature on this episode listed in note 1. Steiner's Die Basler Mission auf der Goldkuste (1909) represents the typical late 19th century reception of this story: a contrast between heathenism and missionary activism, the missionary "clearing the top of a small hill near the black peoples' town (Negerstadt) and preparing to build a house in the local style" (p. 16). The mid-20th century historical novel about Riis, Walter Oelschner's Landung in Osu, 1959, concentrates on Riis' first reconnaissance visit to Akropong before his settlement there. His main arrival in 1835 is referred to only by implication. C.C. Reindorf's History of the Gold Coast and Asante (356 pp., 1895), probably the first major history of a region of Africa to be published by an African, indicates how far someone who knew the facts from the indigenous side could be forced by a unanimously-held myth into an ambivalent statement of what went on: "King Ado Dankwa, who desired Riis to establish a mission (in Akropong), rendered him all assistance, A piece of land was sold to him, and the king ordered his chiefs and people to build him a house: hence the natives called him (sic!) "Osiadan" ("house builder")." (p. 225, my emphasis).

13 I am assuming here that an oral political culture was especially concerned to maintain continuities and uphold what was generally considered to be legitimate.

14 Barnes, Sandra: "Ritual, Power and Outside Knowledge," Journal of Religion in Africa 1990, pp 248-68, here p. 253. Sandra Barnes concerns herself exclusively with religious and cultural change in the pre-missionary and pre-colonial period. But whole paragraphs of her writings could profitably be tested to see how far they clarify the authochthonous attitude to missionary aliens in any given African state or culture.

15 Riis 1835 op.cit., p.524, entry for 9 April 1835. The entry for 6 May confirms widespread local hostility to Riis' way of organising payment for work done.

16 Peter Haenger's current Basel doctoral research is concerned with the plentiful evidence in the Basel Mission Archive that forms of traditional dependency in south-eastern Ghana still existed in the 1850s and 1860s, a generation later than the episode we are analyzing here.

17 Riis, in his diary (op.cit. n.7), complains continually that people were asking for payment in schnapps (Branntwein). I read this as being Riis' oversimplification and misunderstanding of what was in reality a broad demand for traditional kinds and modes of payment.

18 Riis' diary, op. cit. n.6, pp. 562-3.

19 Riis' diary, op. cit. n.6, entry for 6 May, pp. 533-5 and passim.

20 Riis' diary text (see note 6 above) might well stimulate detailed intercultural analysis with people from present-day Akwapim.

21 One of the ironies of the story is that it is not clear how far Riis' house survived into the 1840s. It does not seem to be part of the historical Basel Mission station in Akropong as currently understood.

22 Riis' diary, op. cit. n.7, p. 540.

23 Kwamena-Poh, op. cit. pp. 62-68

24 See, for example, Michelle Gilbert: "The cracked pot and the missing sheep", American Ethnologist, 1989, pp. 213-229.

25 See John Middleton's pioneering anthropological essay on the history of Christianity in Akropong: "One Hundred and Fifty Years of Christianity in a Ghanaian Town", Africa, 1938, pp.2-18.

26 See, for example, the quite new information about a pastor's wife being almost (if not quite) the Queen Mother of Akwapim c. 1900, in one of Michelle Gilbert's essays: "The Cimmerian Darkness of Intrigue: Queen Mothers, Christianity and Truth in Akwapim History", Journal of Religion in Africa, 1993, pp. 2-43.

27 Primo Levi, The Periodic Table, Italian original 1975, English translation 1984. The chapter on Argon is pp. 3-20 in the English paperback edition of 1987.

28 Akropong is a town where, at least until recently, a prominent sign on the main approach road from Accra informed everyone that a particular villa is called "Mein Kampf". It seems that the implications of this name are not well-understood in the town. If this is so, it would mean that a major part of our western historical consciousness (the struggle against Nazism) is at most a very weak part of the general historical consciousness of the local population. That the reverse is also true will be clear, I hope, to all non-Akwapim readers of this paper.

PAUL JENKINS is Basel Mission Archivist and part-time Lecturer in African History at the University of Basel, Switzerland.

COPYRIGHT 1998 World Council of Churches
DESCRIPTORS: Missions--Analysis
NAMED PERSONS: Riis, Andreas--Criticism, interpretation, etc.
FILE SEGMENT: AI File 88

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Orishatukeh Faduma and the new theology

ABSTRACT: A critique by native African Orishatukeh Faduma of an 1890 article entitled "Thoughts for the Times or the New Theology" is discussed. Faduma's article, when viewed from a broader historical and cultural perspective, is illustrative of the manner in which black liberals selectively critiqued and appropriated the tenets of Protestant liberalism and its New Theology to further their own racial and religious agendas.

TEXT:

1.

In 1890 the Boston Herald carried the following review of an article entitled "Thoughts for the Times or The New Theology": "A curiosity is a paper by a native African, Orishatukeh Faduma, on "Thoughts for the Times," by which he means the new theology. This is the first time that a critic of the new theology has turned up from the dark continent, and is a curious and significant paper. When a native can write like this on subjects in which he has been obliged to educate himself, it means that we are to say nothing more against the intelligence of the African race." (1) While correct in noting the historical significance of Faduma's efforts, the reviewer's condescension disclosed his failure to appreciate and understand the sophistication and depth of Faduma's theological analysis and agenda. Faduma's critique of elements of the New Theology did not entail his rejection of this controversial theological synthesis which emerged during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Rather, his comments on religion and science, the historical-critical method, comparative religion, missiology, the historical development of Christianity, and Christian ethics reveal that he essentially shared the theological orientation of its formulators.

Faduma's article, when viewed from a broader historical and cultural perspective, is illustrative of the manner in which black liberals selectively critiqued and appropriated the tenets of Protestant liberalism and its New Theology to further their own racial and religious agendas. His efforts placed him at the forefront of the small cadre of persons of African descent who acted as mediators of this emergent theological movement that attempted "to bring Christian thought into organic unity with the evolutionary world view, the movements for social reconstruction, and expectations of 'a better world' which dominated the general mind." (2)

Although contemporary scholars acknowledge the influence of Protestant liberalism upon black religious figures such as Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King, its broader impact within African and diaspora African religious communities has yet to be explored. (3) Contemporary religious historiography conveys the impression that Protestant liberalism and its theological synthesis were negligible within late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century African and diaspora African communities. Faduma's article, however, is part of the accumulating evidence that proves that these communities were not immune to the scientific, intellectual, and academic developments that provoked the rise of Protestant liberalism and its New Theology. (4)

An assessment of the influence of Protestant liberalism and its New Theology within African and diaspora African communities awaits serious study of the theological backgrounds and orientations of numerous figures. This work seeks to make a contribution toward this end by examining the life and writings of Orishatukeh Faduma. For more than fifty years this London University, Yale Divinity School, and Chicago Theological Seminary educated minister, educator, theologian, missionary, and missiologist selectively appropriated and attempted to actualize the New Theology of Protestant liberalism on both sides of the Atlantic. His long life (1857-1946), spent primarily in Sierra Leone and the southern United States, bridges both a geographical and chronological expanse of major importance for theological liberalism. Faduma's activities and writings also reflect much of the intellectual, theological, and ideological ferment present within African and diaspora African communities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

2.

Faduma was born in British Guiana (Guyana) of Yoruba parentage in 1857 and christened William J. Davis. With his family's repatriation to Sierra Leone, he was exposed to the nationalist and incipient Pan-African thought being nurtured in the West African community by churchmen such as James Johnson, Joseph Claudius May, and especially Edward Blyden. Their theological and ideological teachings induced his participation in a movement critical of the policies of mission societies in West Africa. In response to the cultural and theological arrogance implied in the practice of encouraging Africans to accept European names, he rejected his baptismal name in favor of the more indigenously significant appellation, Orishatukeh Faduma. (5) With this controversial and provocative act, Faduma overtly critiqued and distanced himself from the traditional theology and missiology of nineteenth century evangelical Protestantism.

Attendance at the University of London in the early 1880s had already exposed Faduma to the intense debates raging: in Victorian England over the compatibility of the "truths" of Christianity with the findings of Darwinism, geology, comparative religion, and biblical criticism. (6) However, Sierra Leone, founded in 1787 as the West African outpost of British Christianity and civilization, had not proved immune to the currents of modernity nor the religious controversy provoked in their wake. Ecclesiastical and educational leaders such as Joseph Claudius May had been educated in Britain during the height of the controversy. Moreover, Sawyerr's Bookstore on Water Street in Freetown provided ready access to the flood of British publications which the controversy provoked. Thus the parishioner of James Johnson who "had his faith shaken by reading Essays and Reviews" was not the only West African Christian who found his traditional Christian beliefs challenged by the era's new scientific, intellectual, and academic currents. (7)

Perhaps the most important conduit of Protestant liberalism in the West African matrix was Edward Wilmot Blyden. Although it is impossible to definitively place the eclectic Blyden, it is obvious that his theological orientation shifted from the conservative and thoroughly orthodox Calvinism of Old School Presbyterianism to liberalism. By 1886 his increasing liberalism and preference for a "universalistic deism to a narrow religious creed" resulted in his resignation from the Presbyterian ministry to become a "minister of truth." (8) Subsequently engaged in extensive biblical, historical, linguistic, theological, and comparative studies, Blyden articulated many of the tenets of theological, missiological and pedagogical liberalism developing within progressive Protestant circles during the last half of the nineteenth century. Lecture tours and widespread publication of his writings in journals such as the AME Church Review made him a respected, influential, and controversial figure throughout West Africa and the African diaspora. (9)

In 1887 Faduma wrote to Benjamin Tanner, editor of the AME Church Review, informing him that "through Dr. Blyden, a veritable friend of the Negro, your Church Review came into my hands. A Negro indeed, of unmixed blood, I feel proud that there is existing today a Review such as yours. I shall always read it with pleasure." (10) Subscription to the Review provided Faduma with access to the religious thought and concerns of the African-American and the broader American religious communities. The Review also introduced Faduma to the controversy provoked in both communities by the emergence of Protestant liberalism and its New Theology. (11)

9.

The New Theology that Faduma assessed from afar emerged in the United States in the aftermath of the Civil War. (12) In 1883, Congregational pastor and theologian, Theodore Thornton Munger, wrote an essay entitled "The New Theology" that announced the advent of this new theological mood and movement which attempted to reconcile the essentials of Christianity with modern scientific thought. After listing its defining characteristics, he concluded: "Such are some of the features of this fresh movement in the realm of theology....It makes no haste, it seeks no revolution, but simply holds itself open and receptive under the breathing of the Spirit that has come, and is ever coming, into the world; passive, yet quick to respond to the heavenly visions that do not cease to break upon the darkened eyes of humanity." (13) In numerous books, articles, and sermons, an impressive cadre of "pastor-theologians," similarly disillusioned with the "archaic orthodoxy" of their youth, joined Munger to popularize, defend, and give definitive shape to the New Theology. (14)

Even as the post-Reconstruction African-American community struggled in the face of resurgent racism to marshal its limited spiritual and material resources, it was not impervious to the scientific and intellectual currents that were forcing realignment of the theological, pedagogical, and missiological contours of mainstream Protestantism. In fact an increased sense of religious and racial crisis provoked one of the most creative eras of theological and missiological ferment within the African-American religious community. (15)

Black religious journals such as the AME Church Review, the Christian Recorder, the National Baptist Magazine and even the Sierra Leone-based Methodist Herald attest that the scientific and intellectual currents that gave rise to Protestant liberalism and the New Theology were filtering into black religious communities from a variety of sources and provoking a variety of responses. Neither journal editors nor contributors of articles were disinterested spectators as they commented upon most of the disputed theological issues of the era and illuminated increasing tensions between black defenders of orthodoxy and black proponents of liberalism. (16)

Within the AME Church, the defenders of orthodoxy, led primarily by Tanner, Levi Coppin, and Jabez P. Campbell, used the pages of the Church Review to argue that the Darwinian thesis, biblical criticism, and disciplines such as comparative religion were incompatible with the tenets of Christianity. Thus in 1884, Campbell reasserted that Moses was the author of the Pentateuch and defended the literal accuracy of the Genesis account of creation and humanity's fall. A year later, James A. Handy presented a less dogmatic though no less orthodox refutation of Darwinism in an article entitled, "The Mystery of Man." He affirmed that "geology, ethology and the natural history of man bear ample testimony of the truth of the Mosaic statement as recorded in the book of Genesis." (17)

The equally controversial findings of the historical-critical method also occasioned heated discussion within the pages of the Review. Over against the efforts of liberals to appropriate the findings of biblical criticism, the defenders of orthodoxy affirmed the authority and divine inspiration of the Scriptures. In an 1888 article entitled "Biblical Criticism," James Theodore Holly, Episcopal bishop of Haiti, rejected liberalism's "hypercriticism" as "a mere literary recreation, or intellectual speculation." Tanner also denounced "The Higher Criticism" and "portrayed the German higher critics as descendants of the defeated skeptics of earlier ages." (18)

One of the most extensive apologies for Protestant orthodoxy ever published in the AME Review came from the pen of Tanner. In an article entitled "The Origin of Man," he rejected the claims of the evolutionary theory and the historical-critical method while defending the orthodox interpretation of humanity's origins. In response to what he viewed as the confident and expansive claims of "Mr. Darwin" and "Mr. Huxley," Tanner predicted "the grounds upon which they propose to erect so vast a superstructure will in the end prove to be so much quicksand." He concluded, "Can evolution be accepted as true and the character of the Bible be maintained? We frankly answer: No." (19)

In contrast, black proponents of the New Theology argued that their critical appropriation of modern theories was consistent with the essentials of Christianity. In an 1887 article entitled, "Heaven and The Divinity as Seen by The Poets," Charles A. Johnson drew upon the writings of Theodore Munger to defend the compatibility of evolutionary theory with Scripture and the doctrine of immortality. Two years later the Reverend A.W. Upshaw invoked the writings of Lyman Abbott to defend the "New Theology" and its synthesis of "Reason and Revelation." Upshaw noted that "Among the most advanced thinkers of the present day a 'New Theology' is gaining acceptance. It sacrifices nothing of dogma or orthodox theological formulae, but claims to interpret them in greater harmony with the nature and character of God." He concluded with the assertion that "These ideas are based upon what must be accepted as the true inspiration as set forth by the New Theology against the inspiration of diction of the Old School." (20)

The responses of both black liberals and conservatives to the new scientific, academic, and intellectual currents of the era were rooted in racial as well as religious concerns. The proponents of Protestant liberalism optimistically believed that it offered a prescription for the era's virulent racism and the most constructive foundation for a theology, pedagogy, and missiology that would meet the needs of the race as it entered the corridors of modernity. In contrast, the defenders of orthodoxy discerned a linkage between theological liberalism and the era's resurgent racism. (21) Tanner was explicit in his fear that the Darwinian theory and biblical criticism as employed in the liberal assault upon Scripture and traditional Christianity would be employed to deny the humanity and rights of the black race. Thus in works such as The Negro's Origin and The Descent of the Negro, he vigorously defended the Scriptural account of the black man's origin and humanity. (22)

4.

With publication of his critical apology for the New Theology in 1890, Faduma joined the theological debate within the AME Church and the wider American religious community. Consistent with efforts of evangelical liberals to "seek reapproachment with science," Faduma opened his article by identifying theology as "the science of religion" which "like other sciences [is] progressive" as evidenced by the development of its "new Truths" from the elaboration and transformation of "old ones." In contrast to the defenders of orthodoxy who regarded science as "antagonistic to religion," he argued that "true science" and "true religion" could never be in opposition: "The seeming conflict between them is a conflict between the old theology and the new--a conflict between the old systems of thought and the new." (23)

Although supportive of the use and findings of Biblical criticism, Faduma insisted that it should not be allowed to distract from the deeper significance and meaning of Scripture: "It is of small account that we have mastered all the schools of New Testament criticism, that we can place every incident in its right setting, and give the true interpretation of every text: our real lesson is what we find at the heart: of the Gospel of Christ, and is recorded for us in the imagery of the Baptism, the Temptation, the Transfiguration and the Cross." (24)

Faduma also accepted the New Theology's emphasis on the historical development of Christianity and its incorporation of the findings of the emerging discipline of comparative religion. In support he cited an article published in the Homiletic Review which referred to a lecture by Professor Auguste Sabatier of Strasbourg on "The Inmost Life of Dogmas and the Power of Evolution." Sabatier, explained Faduma, "shows that dogmas are not dead, but that they live and grow....[Moreover] Christianity itself, has followed the law of adaptation. It was Hebrew in Palestine; in passing into the Hellenic world it received a Greco-Roman coloring." (25) Thus from a position firmly rooted in theological liberalism, Faduma could echo Blyden in asserting: "The fundamental principles of Christianity will ever remain the same, while in their application to meet the necessities of the human race, adaptation is a desideratum. This is as fair as it is scientific. Upon the Hebrew mind, there is and ought to be a Hebrew coloring; upon the Negro mind, a Negro coloring; upon the European mind, a European coloring." The missiological implications of this position would become foundational for his subsequent advocacy of missionary theories and policies sensitive to the ethnic, racial, religious, and cultural propensities of non-European peoples. (26)

Although insistent that the new theoretical and scientific advances were not to be ignored, Faduma argued that the New Theology must not be consumed with theory at the expense of practical application. Convinced that praxis was the decisive test of the New Theology, he firmly embraced the tenets of the "ethical-social" wing of evangelical liberalism which included social gospel leaders such as Washington Gladden and Walter Rauschenbusch. (27) Faduma also shared their optimistic and idealistic belief that the New Theology heralded the in-breaking of the "kingdom of God" on earth. Even from a distance, he claimed to discern evidence of this development in America: "Christian America of today compared with what it was a hundred years ago is manifesting signs of progress. The Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, in spite of political hate and ecclesiastical pride, are being better, though slowly understood, because her conceptions of God are being elevated and the teachings of His words are being better grasped." It was a combination of optimism, idealism, and naivete that led Faduma to affirm, in spite of the era's increasing racism and imperialism, that the New Theology was "destined to uproot American prejudice against the Negro, elevate and purify the State, the Church, conquer Anglo-Saxon haughtiness, and make all nations confess that 'God is no respecter of persons.'" (28) He concluded with a ringing endorsement of the New Theology as the needed prescription for the world's ills:

Without this New Theology our multiplication of churches at home and foreign lands serves only as fuel for the wrath of God.....What the world needs today, I repeat and emphasize, is a New Theology, a new creation, a new method of life, a new order of thought....It is needed in the schoolroom...in the State and society, where the imbibed principles should become practical realities; and the Church, the visible representative and living exponent of truth. When these separate departments shall be infused with this new truth and new life...the world will see what it has not yet been privileged to see--a new North and a new South, new spiritual Church and a new America in a spiritually new world--and men shall behold in living reality what the divine John saw in his apocalyptic vision--"A new heaven and a new earth." (29)

5.

Faduma's decision to migrate to the United States in 1890 and enter Yale Divinity School in preparation for the Congregational ministry was thoroughly consistent with the convictions espoused in his article on the New Theology. Not only was Congregationalism "the most fertile soil for liberalism," but predominantly Congregationalist Yale Divinity School and its immediate environs was one of the primary breeding grounds of the New Theology. (30) As a student at Yale Divinity School from 1891-1894, Faduma studied under scholars who labored constructively and effectively to reconcile the old faith and new scholarship. Among his professors were George E. Day, George Park Fisher, Samuel Harris, Lewis O. Brastow, George B. Stevens, Edward L. Curtis, and Frank Chamberlain Porter. Their influence would be fondly recalled by Faduma more than fifty years after his graduation. (31)

Sharing Faduma's immersion in the liberal environs of Yale Divinity School and New Haven was a small group of African-American students. This group included Hugh Henry Proctor, Bernard Tyrell, and Thomas Nelson Baker. The Tennessee-born and Fisk-educated Proctor recalled that the Divinity School provided a congenial environment for students of color: "although there were many students from the South, one's color counted nothing against one, and nothing in one's favor." He also recalled that the professors of his day were "Giants." Moreover, at Battell Chapel and local churches "presided over by Munger and Smythe...Phillips, Twitchel [Twichell], Luckey, and Mutch," students had the opportunity to hear some of the "ablest preachers of the country." (32)

The academic and intellectual skills exhibited by Faduma as a student in Sierra Leone and Britain were displayed once more at Yale. Alluding to the pseudo-scientific racism of the era, Proctor noted with pride: "although his [Faduma's] parents were natives taken right from the bush, he was one of the brightest men in the class of over thirty coming from the picked universities of the world. He upset all the theories of the phrenologists and ethnologists." (33) Graduation in 1894 with honors and a four hundred dollar scholarship enabled Faduma to pursue graduate studies at Yale University for an additional year. The year was spent engaged in the study of two disciplines of additional import for adherents of the New Theology--linguistics and the philosophy of religion.

Faduma's efforts to appropriate the rich harvest of liberal theology and scholarship were reflected in a number of articles published in the AME Review during his time at Yale. (34) His familiarity with the new methods of biblical scholarship was displayed in an exegetical work published in 1894 wherein he joined the debate among biblical scholars such as Henry Alford, Joseph Barbar Lightfoot, Philip Schaff, Johann A.W. Neander, Ferdinand Christian Baur, Johann Gottfried Eichorn, Heinrich Julius Holtzmann, Otto Pfleiderer and Joseph Ernest Renan regarding the "authenticity" and purpose of the "pastoral epistles." (35)

Faduma's acceptance and appropriation of the theory of evolution was also reflected in his writings. In confronting the hotly debated issue of evolution's compatibility with the scriptural account of creation, he characteristically affirmed the scriptural legitimacy of the evolutionary thesis:

The writer of Genesis chapter 2 gave a pictorial representation of the Creation, including man, ending with a mechanical reproduction of Eve from man's ribs after God had put him into a deep sleep. But chapter 1 had already pointed out, in spite of the human language used, that creation, including man, was not mechanical but out of divine fiat, and evolutional. It is therefore left to the thinking student to judge between the evolutional process in chapter 1 and the mechanical in chapter 2 verses 7, 21, 23. The account in chapter 1 has appealed to my reason as the orderly process of creation." (36)

Further proof of Faduma's successful appropriation of the tenets and scholarship of evangelical liberalism came with passage of his ordination examination and ordination to the Congregational ministry in May 1895. Of his theological orientation at this time, Faduma, in a statement which reflected the broad-based and eclectic stance characteristic of moderate evangelical liberalism, recalled that he was "in some respects an Arminian, in other respects a Calvinist, and a Puritan in theology." (37)

6.

With completion of his studies at Yale, Faduma applied to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions for appointment to an African mission post. While "under appointment of the American Board to return to Africa as soon as finances will allow," he accepted "temporary assignment" with the American Missionary Association (AMA) to work in the South. Reversing mission tradition and stereotypes, Faduma served in effect as an African missionary to his "kith and kin" in the South. (38) However, in 1914 Faduma, disillusioned with America's resurgent racism, returned to West Africa as theologian and ideologue of the ill-fated "Back To Africa Movement." Upon the movement's collapse, he remained in Sierra Leone as a minister and educator until returning to the United States in 1923. (39) Thus in classrooms, churches, journals, and numerous public forums on both continents, Faduma incessantly preached and attempted to actualize the tenets of theological, missiological, and pedagogical liberalism.

Although the vast majority of black clergy and laity were ill-prepared and ill-disposed to adopt the tenets of the New Theology, Faduma was not alone in his efforts. A small though significant minority, responding to "the compelling demand that living faith come to terms with the modern world," joined him in selectively and critically appropriating its tenets. (40) Some of Faduma's African-American contemporaries were adherents of Protestant liberalism's New Theology including such well-known clerical activists as Sutton E. Griggs, J. Milton Waldron, Reverdy Ransom, R.R. Wright, Jr., Hugh Henry Proctor, Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. George Edmund Haynes, Jesse E. Moorland, William H. Ferris, and Theophilus Gould Steward. (41)

It appears that most African-American adherents of Protestant liberalism's New Theology were, like Faduma, members either of predominantly white liberal denominations or studied at educational institutions associated with these denominations. (42) Also indicative of the variety of ways that theological liberalism was mediated to the wider African-American community was a paper written by black Congregational minister Jesse E. Moorland and published by the American Negro Academy. Aware of the limited opportunities for theological education available to black clergy, Moorland recommended a program of ministerial self-study that included a reading list heavily weighted with authors and issues associated with theological liberalism: "Every preacher should own, read and ponder the following books ...The Social Crisis by [Walter] Rauschenbusch....The Social Message of the Modern Pulpit by [Charles R.] Brown...The Religion of a Mature Mind and The Spiritual Life by [George Albert] Coe...The Psychology of Religion by [Edwin] Starbuck...Elements of Sociology by [Franklin Henry] Giddings...and Proceedings of the Religious Education Association." (43)

Additional sources of liberal influences within African and diaspora African communities include the "colored" and international divisions of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) under the leadership of black liberals such as Moorland and George Edmund Haynes. (44) However, the prolific and often controversial writings of the AME minister and United States Army chaplain Theophilus Gould Steward illustrate perhaps the most significant appropriation and presentation of the tenets of theological liberalism within the African-American community. After graduating from Protestant Episcopal Divinity School in Philadelphia in 1880, Steward brought his considerable theological talents to bear on the issues of the era. His writings also attest that black proponents of theological liberalism were neither slavish imitators of their white colleagues nor oblivious to the glaring deficiencies of the New Theology. (45)

Faduma's efforts to act as a mediator of various currents of liberalism within the West African and African-American communities were especially apparent in his attempts at pedagogical and missiological reform. While acknowledging the many contributions that missionary societies had made in laying the foundations of black education, he noted that their methods had often been "nonscientific" and too Eurocentric. Among the more controversial of his proposed educational and missiological reforms were his advocacy of equal educational opportunities for females, the incorporation of Islamic subjects into the educational curriculum, and the Africanization of Christianity. Among the theological pillars of his expansive pedagogy and missiology was his liberal conviction that God is "the revealer of all truth, whether scientific, religious, social, mathematical [or] legal. Therefore all truth is divine whether uttered by a Christian, Mohammedan, Hindu or pagan." (46)

Faduma's calls for the liberalization of Protestant missiology and his numerous contributions to the missiological debates of the era did not go unnoticed. In 1896 the Missionary Review of the World, one of the foremost missiological journals of the era, praised his presentation before the 1895 "Congress on Africa" as "the excellent views of one of the most highly and broadly cultured natives concerning missionary work." Almost thirty years later, it again acknowledged Faduma's enlightened and liberal missiological insights with publication of his reflections on Islam and Christianity in Africa. (47)

While there are consistent themes and concerns cogently presented in Faduma's numerous writings, he did not develop a systematic presentation of his mature theological convictions. Like most of his fellow African and African-American clergy, he addressed his existential situation as a preacher and pastor rather than as a professional theologian. He was in short, a "practical theologian" who was more concerned with praxis than with sustained reflection upon praxis. However, his prolific occasional writings reflect his continuous efforts to apply his theological beliefs on behalf of the beleaguered African and African-American communities. For example, the deadly influenza epidemic that ravaged Sierra Leone in 1918 provided the context for his public reflections on the problem of evil and suffering. In the midst of this tragedy, he drew upon the soteriology of theological liberalism to offer solace to members of the Sierra Leone Christian community who found their traditional theological beliefs of little comfort. (48)

Faduma appears to have come closest to presenting a comprehensive and systematic summary of his mature theological convictions in a series of articles published in the Sierra Leone Weekly News in 1923 under the title "The Faith That Is In Me." (49) In this public and often poignant reflection of his theological development, Faduma presented a cogent analysis of the theological convictions and beliefs that shaped his life and work. This series also sounded a new note of realism in Faduma's theology. It suggests that by 1923 he, like many of his fellow liberals, had tempered his earlier optimism and idealism about the efficacy of liberal theology. (50) This transition was reflected in his use and emphasis of traditional theological terms and concepts which were given only minor and incidental attention in his earlier works. Hence a review of topic headings in this series reveal such concerns and preoccupations as "Law and Sin," "Divine Grace and Sin," "The Forgiveness of Sins," and "The Origin of Sin." Despite such concessions he concluded this series with renewed affirmation of his faith in "the New Theology preached by John over a thousand years ago which we are just grasping." (51)

Faduma's role as a mediator of the currents of modernity and the tenets of theological liberalism continued after his return to the United States in 1923 and reassociation with the American Missionary Association. His efforts are reflected in his response to the "fundamentalist-modernist" controversy which climaxed with the Scopes trial of 1925. In an attempt to help rural black ministers reach some understanding and resolution of the issues involved in this controversy, Faduma, who had long since reconciled the theory of evolution and the scriptural account of creation, lectured during 1925 and 1926 at conventions throughout North Carolina on "The Christian Minister's Attitude toward Religion and Science." (52)

Faduma's unwavering commitment to evangelical liberalism was also convincingly exhibited by his enrollment in 1927 at the age of seventy in the "Summer Quarter" at Chicago Theological Seminary. (53) This brief sojourn at one of the nation's leading liberal theological institutions afforded the seventy-year-old scholar an opportunity for study with a new generation of liberalism's adherents and formulators. Ironically, in his later writings, Faduma remained strangely silent about his study at Chicago Theological Seminary. Perhaps this reticence reflected his disappointment with a mediocre academic performance which earned him grades of "C" and "B" in his Biblical courses, a "P" in Education, and a "C" in Social Ethics. (54) To the aged Faduma, who still prided himself on academic excellence and continuously stressed such to his students, this may have been a humbling and perhaps traumatic experience. More likely, both Faduma's silence and his grades reflect his discomfort with the seminary's theological and methodological perspective. The tenets and methodologies of the moderate evangelical liberalism which he had been comfortable with and proficient in for almost forty years may have been a liability at the seminary where influences emanating from the "rationalistic atmosphere" of the University of Chicago and its Divinity School had fostered a theological shift in the direction of the more radical liberalism of "scientific modernism." (55)

8.

The sparse materials that are available relating to Faduma's final years provide little in-depth insight into his perceptions and reactions to the major theological, ideological and missiological transitions which occurred between 1930 and 1946. A number of these developments, most notedly, the call for a more rationalistic missiology as well as the neo-orthodox response to liberalism, drew upon and challenged the tenets and convictions that had informed his life and work. Nevertheless, an analysis of Faduma's final writings reveal that amid the intense theological, missiological, and ideological controversies of the era he continued to adhere to the central tenets of moderate evangelical liberalism. (56) Although he may have been in agreement with Fosdick's admonition that liberals "must go beyond modernism," he was not among those whose minds had been "changed" by either the fundamentalist or the neo-orthodox polemic on the failings of liberalism. The position of Yale theologian Robert Lowery Calhoun, who declared himself "A Liberal Bandaged but Unbowed," perhaps best approximated the dogged and consistent liberalism of Faduma as he approached his final years. (57)

A measure of the extent to which a significant segment of the African-American religious community was aware of the major theological and missiological issues of the era as well as engaged in exploring and exercising its own theological, missiological, and ethical options is reflected in the establishment of the Fraternal Council of Negro Churches in America and the Negro Journal of Religion by progressive and liberal black clergy. The organization of the Fraternal Council in 1934 under the leadership of the Social Gospel activist and AME Bishop Reverdy Ransom was additional testimony of the distinctive way in which black liberals and progressives appropriated the tenets of liberalism and the Social Gospel in their efforts to improve the condition and status of the race. (58) The Negro Journal of Religion, which billed itself at its founding in 1935 as "An Interdenominational Review," reflected in its format and contents the basic perspective, concerns, and goals of the Fraternal Council. (59) Its editor, Lendell Charles Ridley, an AME minister and head of the department of philosophy at Wilberforce University, appropriated the ecumenical and intellectual tone of theological liberalism as he explained in its founding issue that the Journal:

is for all the race, regardless of denomination. It comes to serve churchmen and non-churchmen. As a cross-section of religious faith it should help the most rabid sects to become more tolerant of each other. As a general source of information on Negro religion it should be of service to the whole of Negro life. As an outlet for laymen and ministers from whose pen have come unpublished ethical and religious gems it should be a welcome door. It finally should be an encouragement to trained and gifted race scholars to write on the weightier, sociological, religious and metaphysical problems. (60)

A review of existing copies of the Journal reveals an impressive list of contributors commenting on a broad range of theological, social, racial, political and missiological issues. (61)

It is difficult to assess the extent to which the aged Faduma was fully abreast of these developments. After retiring as assistant principal of Lincoln Academy in 1934, he served for eight years as Professor and Acting Dean at Virginia Theological Seminary and College in Lynchburg, Virginia. At this traditional center of black Baptist theological, missiological and ideological thought, he continued to serve as a mediator of evangelical liberalism to a later generation of African and African-American students. (62)

Likewise, it is also impossible to accurately assess how many students Faduma influenced on both sides of the Atlantic during his more than fifty years as an educator and minister. However, the career of Ernest Kalibala suggests that Faduma's theological, pedagogical, and missiological tenets did not fall upon deaf ears. Born in Uganda, Kalibala migrated to the United States in 1925 and deserted Tuskegee University to study with Faduma at tiny Lincoln Academy. After successfully completing two years of high school study at Lincoln Academy, he moved to New York where he enrolled in New York University, studied anthropology and obtained a bachelor of science degree in 1933. The following year he earned a master's degree in education from Columbia University Teachers College with a thesis that coincided at numerous points with the progressive and race-conscious pedagogical theory advanced by Faduma. In an article published in 1940 in the Mission Herald, Kalibala also echoed Faduma's liberal missiology as he expounded upon "Africa--The Unknown Quality." (63) Kalibala, who eventually earned a doctorate from Harvard University in 1946, was only one of a number of African students who came to the United States to study during the interwar years and found the theological, pedagogical, and missiological tenets of liberalism, as mediated by Faduma and his contemporaries, more acceptable and consistent with their vision of modern Africa than those of traditional evangelical Christianity. (64)

During the waning years of his life, which were spent in High Point, North Carolina, with Henrietta, his wife of almost fifty years, Faduma's dogged evangelical liberalism was further assaulted by the brutalities of World War II and the continued intransigence of southern racism. (65) It was from High Point that Faduma issued the final summaries and testimonies of his life's work. Ironically, they were requested by Yale Divinity School. Apparently intrigued by the aged African liberal, Dean Luther Allan Weigle of the Divinity School requested additional information. (66) Faduma replied in a letter that rehearsed his missionary labors and recounted his years as a student at the Divinity School. He recalled his instructors in the disciplines of theological liberalism: "Dean Day, Professors Fisher, Harris, Brastow, Stevens, Curtis, [and] Porter." All of whom, Faduma confessed, "left behind them and in my life memories which are indelible." On 22 May 1945, Dean Weigle responded with a letter that expressed the Divinity School's pride in Faduma's accomplishments: "I congratulate you heartily upon the long and effective service that you have rendered in the field of Christian missions and Christian education, and I assure you that we of the faculty of your old school take pride in what you have accomplished." (67)

Less than a year later, on 25 January 1946, Faduma died. He was buried at High Point in the adopted soil he had come to call home on this side of the Atlantic. (68) No eulogies have been found of Faduma through whom so many of the theological and ideological currents of the era had converged and been creatively reshaped. Nevertheless, the final statement made by Faduma in his autobiographical sketch serves as a most appropriate epitaph. Faduma, the aged evangelical liberal, simply confessed: "Like a hound, I am in pursuit of truth, retired but not tired, nor yet ready to depart, but still on the war path of duty; For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. Again I say, retired, but not tired." (69)

1. Orishatukeh Faduma, "Thoughts For The Times; Or the New Theology" AME Church Review, 7 (Oct. 1890): 139-143; Christian Recorder (13 Nov. 1890), p. 3.

2. See Daniel Day Williams, God's Grace and Man's Hope (New York, 1961), p. 22. For a brief profile of Protestant liberalism see Lloyd J. Averill, American Theology in the Liberal Tradition (Philadelphia, 1967), pp. 69-94 and Bernard M.G. Reardon, ed., Liberal Protestantism (Stanford, Calif., 1968).

3. On King see James H. Cone, Martin & Malcolm & America: a Dream or a Nightmare (New York, 1991) p. 19; James H. Cone, "The Theology of Martin Luther King, Jr.:" Union Seminary Quarterly Review 40: 4 (1986): 21-39. David Garrow, "The Intellectual Development of Martin Luther King, Jr.: Influences and Commentaries," Union Seminary Quarterly Review 40: 4 (1986): 5-20. On Howard Thurman see Luther E. Smith, Jr., Howard Thurman; The Mystic as Prophet (New York, 1987).

4. David Wills notes that the "history of theological liberalism and the social gospel has generally been written as if these movements--and the current of thought which prompted them--left no mark on the black churches." David W. Wills and Richard Newman, Black Apostles at Home and Abroad: Afro-Americans and the Christian Mission (Boston, 1982), pp. xxiii-xxiv. See also Martin E. Marty, Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America (New York, 1970), p. 193 and David W. Wills, "Aspects of Social Thought in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, 1884-1910" (Ph. D. dissertation, Harvard University. 1975), and Evelyn Brooks Higginbothan, Righteous Discontent: the Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, 1993) pp. 136-149.

5. See Robert T.W. July, The Origins of Modern African Thought (London, 1968) and E.A. Ayandele, The Missionary Impact in Modern Nigeria, 1842-1914 (New York, 1967); "An Important Notice," Sierra Leone Weekly News (5 Aug. 1887). For the heated controversy which accompanied Faduma's change of name see "My View of Things," Sierra Leone Weekly News, 20 Aug. 1887.

6. Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, 2 vols., 2d ed. (London, 1972); Clement C.J. Webb, A Study of Religious Thought in England from 1850 (Oxford, 1933); L.E. Elliott-Binns, English Thought 1860-1900, The Theological Aspect (London, 1956) and James R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870-1900 (Cambridge, 1979).

7. John Peterson, Province of Freedom: A History of Sierra Leone, 1787-1870 (Evanston, Ill., 1969); Christopher Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone (London, 1962), p. 350; and Leo Spitzer, Creoles of Sierra Leone, pp. 24-25.

8. Hollis Lynch, Edward Wilmot Blyden: Pan-Negro Patriot, 1832-1912 (London, 1967), pp. xv-xvi. Exposure to progressive secular and religious thought in both the United States and Britain, coupled with a growing appreciation of Islamic and indigenous African culture and religion resulted in Blyden's increasingly strident rejection of traditional Protestant theology and missiology. Gayraud Wilmore has observed that "Blyden ...did not consider himself an orthodox Christian in the tradition of American evangelicalism. Theologically, he felt a greater congeniality with the most nonconforming luminaries of New England Protestantism--the Channings, Theodore Parkers, and Emersons" (Gayraud Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism [Maryknoll, 1983], p. 117). See also Edith Holden, Blyden of Liberia: An Account of the Life and Labors of Edward Wilmot Blyden, LL. D. As Recorded in Letters and in Print (New York, 1966).

9. Blyden's reflections upon the problematic of race, religion, and modernity were presented in 1887 in his major work entitled, Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race. See Edward Blyden, Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race, (London, 1887). In 1890 Blyden became an honorary member of the American Society of Comparative Religion and was forced by illness to decline an invitation to give a paper on comparative religion at the World's Parliament of Religion in 1893. Unfortunately, his major theological work entitled Comparative Theology has not been located. Lynch, Blyden, pp. 78-79, 82 and Holden, Blyden of Liberia, pp. 646 and 848.

10. Faduma to Tanner (20 August 1887), published as part of an editorial by Tanner: "The Review in Foreign Lands," AME Church Review 4 (5 July 1888) p. 5.

11. The AME Church Review was established by the General Conference of the AME Church in 1884 as the literary and scholarly supplement to the denomination's official organ, the Christian Recorder. Walter C. Daniel, Black Journals of the United States (Westport, 1982) pp. 27-32. Educated at Avery College and Western Theological Seminary, Tanner sought to keep his readers abreast of the issues of the era. Wills, "Aspect," p. 68.

12. For assessments of the religious crisis perceived by the white religious community during this era see Francis Weisenburger, Ordeal of Faith: The Crisis of Church-Going America, 1865-1900 (New York, 1959); Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr,. "A Critical Period in American Religion, 1875-1900." in John M. Mulder and John F. Wilson, Religion in American History: Interpretive Essays (New Jersey, 1978), pp. 302-317 and Ferenc Morton Szasz, The Divided Mind of Protestant America, 1880-1930 (Alabama, 1982).

13. Theodore T. Munger, "The New Theology," quoted in Robert R. Mathisen, ed., The Role of Religion in American Life, An Interpretive Historical Anthology (Lanham, Md., 1982), pp. 252-258.

14. Members of this group included Newman Smyth, Egbert C. Smyth, George Harris, George A. Gordon, William Newton Clarke, Lewis French Stearns, Washington Gladden, William Adams Brown, and Lyman Abbott. William R. Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 122-132; Averill, American Theology, pp. 30-49; and Reardon, Liberal Protestantism, pp. 9-65. The fact that not all of the formulators or subsequent adherents of the New Theology interpreted and emphasized its characteristic tenets and concerns in the same way and to the same degree gave rise to different varieties of theological liberalism. See Kenneth Cauthen, The Impact of American Religious Liberalism (New York, 1962), pp. 26-37.

15. Wills and Newman, Black Apostles at Home and Abroad, pp. 23-24.

16. David Wills, "Aspects," pp. 88-158 and James Melville Washington, Frustrated Fellowship: The Black Baptist Quest for Social Power (Macon, 1986), pp. 184, 192-193, 212-213. On theological ferment and controversy within West Africa during this era see Toboku-Metzger, "Missionary Effort," AME Church Review 6 (July 1889); "Letter to the Editor," Sierra Leone Weekly News, 24 Sept. 1887; and "The Dress Reform Society." Methodist Herald 21 Dec. 1887.

17. Jabez P. Campbell, "A Scriptural View, Or the Statement Concerning Paradise that Was Lost Regained," AME Church Review 1 (July 1884): 12. James A. Handy, "The Mystery of Man," AME Church Review 2 (July 1885): 20.

18. James Theodore Holly, "Biblical Criticism," AME Church Review 4 (April 1888): 367. Benjamin T. Tanner, "The Higher Criticism," AME Church Review 10 (July 1893): 115. Quoted in Wills, "Aspects," p. 89.

19. Benjamin T. Tanner, "The Origin of Man," AME Church Review, 4 (Oct. 1887): 203-213.

20. Charles A. Johnson, "Heaven and the Divinity as Seen By the Poets," AME Church Review 4 (July 1887): 527. In 1891 Upshaw presented a critical appreciation of biblical criticism. See A.W. Upshaw, "Biblical Criticism," AME Church Review 8 (Oct. 1891): 198-201. Note also the sympathetic treatment of evolution by Henry L. Phillips in "Alfred Russell Wallace, LL.D., F.L.S., Etc., On Darwinianism." AME Church Review 6 (Oct. 1889): 161-165. A.W. Upshaw, "Reason and Revelation," AME Church Review 5 (April 1889): 327-328.

21. Alfred Moss observed that "though they produced a number of creative theological reconceptualizations, and were, at times, perceptive and courageous in tackling some sources of social injustice, these religious liberals were unable to transcend the orthodox racism of the day." (Moss, Academy, p. 8 and Wills, "Aspects," pp. 124-125, 127.) See Glenn R. Bucher, "Social Gospel Christianity and Racism." Union Seminary Quarterly Review 28 (Winter, 1973): 146-157; Thomas Gossett, Race: The History of An Idea in America (New York, 1965): 144-197. See also Ralph E. Luker, The Social Gospel in Black and White: American Racial Reform, 1885-1912 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991), pp. 268-311 and Ronald C. White, Liberty and Justice for All: Racial Reform and the Social Gospel (1877-1925), (San Francisco, 1990).

22. Benjamin T. Tanner, The Negro's Origin: And is the Negro Cursed? (Philadelphia, 1869) and Benjamin T. Tanner, The Descent of the Negro (Philadelphia, 1898). Tanner concluded the latter work with the assertion: "The Negro is a man. He is of Adam. He is of Noah. The Negro is a brother, and will be until science can demonstrate the Bible is no more than a fable--that Moses made mistakes, and that the divine Son of God with men hitherto supposed to be inspired, endorsed them." (Tanner, The Descent of the Negro, pp. 6, 23.)

23. Faduma, "The New Theology." p. 139.

24. Ibid.

25. On Sabatier, one of the major formulators of a "thoroughly liberalized Protestantism," see Reardon, Liberal Protestantism, pp. 10, 31, 34, 44-58, 65, 163. 'The Life of Dogmas," Homiletic Review (May 1890), quoted by Faduma, "The New Theology," p. 142.

26. Faduma, "The New Theology," pp. 142-143. Compare with Blyden's "Christian Missions in West Africa," in Blyden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, pp. 46-70. William Hutchison has provided perhaps the most comprehensive analysis of the changes fostered in American missiology by Protestant liberalism and the New Theology. See by Hutchison, Errand to the Word: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (Chicago, 1987); American Protestant Thought: The Liberal Era (New York, 1968); and "Modernism and Missions: The Liberal Search for an Exportable Christianity, 1875-1935" in John K. Fairbank, ed. The Missionary Enterprise in China and America (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 110-131.

27. Faduma, "The New Theology," pp. 149-144 and Cauthen, Impact, pp. 33-34. On the relationship between the New Theology and the Social Gospel Movement, see Charles H. Hopkins, The Rise of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism, 1865-1915 (New Haven, 1940) and Robert T. Handy, The Social Gospel in America, 1870-1920: Gladden, Ely, Rauschenbusch (New York, 1966).

28. Faduma, "The New Theology," p. 143. Thus, unlike Tanner and other black conservatives who were fearful of the racial as well as religious implications of the new sciences and theology, Faduma readily, though critically, appropriated them and proclaimed that they exposed the old scientific and theological props of racism as "pseudo-science" and "pseudo-theology." Orishatukeh Faduma, "African Negro Education," Sierra Leone Weekly News, 24 August 1918. For a more realistic appraisal of America's racial situation during this era, see Rayford W. Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro from Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson (New York, 1965).

29. Faduma, "The New Theology," p. 143.

30. Sydney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, (New Haven, 1972), pp. 775-776.

31. All sought to clarify the issues and challenges presented to their respective disciplines by the new scientific and intellectual currents. See Roland Bainton, Yale and the Ministry: A History of Education for the Christian Ministry of Yale from the Founding in 1701, (New York, 1957), pp. 169-170, 178-183, 189-190, 202, 225, 219. Letter from Faduma to Dean Luther Allan Weigle, 10 May 1945. Alumni File, Yale Divinity School, During Faduma's enrollment the divinity school also added a number of courses to the traditional curriculum which reflected the impact that the new scientific and academic currents were having within progressive seminaries throughout the nation. For example, in 1892 a course on "The Religious and Theological Conditions in Germany" was offered by Dr. Stuckenberg, pastor of the American Church in Germany. Its purpose was to inform students of current theological trends in Germany. In 1891 and 1892 courses in missions were introduced into the curriculum. The 1892 course, entitled "Modern Missions in the East," was taught by the Congregationalist missionary and liberal mission theorist, Edward A. Lawrence. It sought to help "the men of the seminary to more intelligent ideas on missions." See "Lectures at Yale Divinity School." The Congregationalist 77 (17 November 1892): 448 and Edward A. Lawrence, Modern Missions in the East; Their Methods, Successes and Limitations (New York, 1895).

32. James M. Washington, "Pan-African Religionists at Yale University." n.d., Private papers of James M. Washington, Union Theological Seminary, New York, New York. Proctor, Between Black and White, pp. 40-43, 45, 95, 106-108; Knight, Children, pp. 84-85.

33. Proctor, Between Black and White, p. 42.

34. See Orishatukeh Faduma, "Africa or the Dark Continent," AME Church Review, 9 (Jan. 1893): 1-8 and Orishatukeh Faduma, "Religious Beliefs and Worship of the Yorubas in West Africa," AME Church Review 12 (July 1895): 150-158. Faduma's efforts to similarly appropriate the teachings and tenets of comparative religion were also illuminated in a number of articles published in the AME Review during this period. See for example Orishatukeh Faduma, "Materials for the Study of the World Religions," AME Church Review 12 (April 1896): 461-473. He argued elsewhere that that "the study of comparative religion is vital in the study of religion." Orishatukeh Faduma, "Drawbacks and Successes of Missionary Work in Africa," Sierra Leone Weekly News, 20 Apr. 1918.

35. Orishatukeh Faduma, "The Pastoral Epistles," AME Church Review 11 (Oct. 1894): 215-230.

36. Orishatukeh Faduma, "The Faith that Is in Me." Sierra Leone Weekly News, 16 June 1923,p. 1.

37. On the traumatic nature of this examination for some liberals see David E. Swift, "Conservative Versus Progressive Orthodoxy In Latter 19th Century Congregationalism," Church History 16 (March 1947): 22-31 and Hutchison, Modernist Impulse, p. 134. Faduma, "The Faith That Is In Me," Sierra Leone Weekly News, 2 June 1923. pp. 1-2.

38. His initial assignment as superintendent of Peabody Academy and pastor of the Congregational Church at Troy, North Carolina marked the start of what would eventually be a thirty-nine year tenure as an AMA missionary and educator. See "Rev. Orishatukeh Faduma." American Missionary 58 (Jan. 1904): 15; and "Reverend Orishatukeh Faduma," Sierra Leone Weekly News, 2 Aug. 1902, p. 4.

39. Orishatukeh Faduma, "The African Movement," African Mail, 4 Dec. 1914 and Orishatukeh Faduma, "Some of My Experiences in the Southland," The Expected (July 1943): 9.

40. Cauthen, Impact, p. 5.

41. Although major studies of the theological convictions of most of these figures have yet to be produced, close scrutiny of their educational backgrounds, writings and ministries warrants confidence in labeling them evangelical liberals of various stripes and commitment. On Sutton Griggs see S.P. Fullinwider, The Mind and Mood of Black America: 20th Century Thought, (Homewood, 1969), pp. 73-74; Sutton Griggs, Guide to Racial Greatness or the Science of Collective Efficiency (Memphis, 1923); Sutton Griggs, New Thoughts for a New Era, (Memphis, 1913) and Sutton Griggs, The Story of My Struggles, (Memphis, 1914). On Waldron see Fullinwider, Mind and Mood of Black America, pp. 47. 63. On Ransom see Reverdy C. Ransom, The Pilgrimage of Harriet Ransom's Son (Nashville, n.d.), pp. 38, 866-887, 93 and Calvin S. Morris, Reverdy C. Ransom: Black Advocate of the Social Gospel, (Lanham, Md., 1990). On Wright see Wills, "Aspects," p. 290 and Richard R. Wright, Jr., 87 Years Behind the Black Curtain: An Autobiography (Philadelphia, 1965). On Proctor and Powell see Hugh Henry Proctor, Between Black and White: Autobiographical Sketches (Boston, 1925) and Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., Against the Tide: An Autobiography (New York, 1938). On Haynes, see Samuel K. Roberts, "George Edmund Haynes: Advocate for Interracial Cooperation," in Burkett and Newman, eds., Black Apostles, p. 114. On Ferris see William H. Ferris, The African Abroad: Or His Evolution in Western Civilization; Tracing His Development Under Caucasian Milieu, Vols. I, II (New Haven, 1919). On Moorland and Steward see footnotes 43 and 45 below.

42. For example, the American Missionary Association (AMA), sponsored primarily by Congregationalists, supplied monies and staff for schools which provided a significant proportion of black secondary and college-level education in the South. The "heritage of liberal Christianity" in AMA schools has been noted by Clifton H. Johnson. See Clifton H. Johnson, Our American Missionary Association Heritage (New York, 1967), p. 40 and Joe M. Richardson, Christian Reconstruction: The American Missionary Association and Southern Blacks, 1861-1890 (Athens, Ga. 1986).

43. Moorland was granted the Doctor of Divinity degree from Howard University in 1906. See Jesse E. Moorland, The Demand and the Supply of Increased Efficiency in the Negro Ministry, American Negro Academy Occasional Papers, No. 13 (Washington, D. C., 1909), pp. 9-10 and Alfred A. Moss, Jr., The American Negro Academy Voice of the Talented Truth (Baton Rouge, La., 1981), pp. 117, 133-134, 142-146, 159, 164-165, 223-224, 245, 261.

44. See Woodson, History of the Negro Church, pp. 250-251; August Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1800-1915: Racial Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Washington (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1966), pp. 133, 232, 271 and Roberts "George Edmund Haynes," pp. 112-113. Its impact is noted in the biography of Ras Makonnen who observed that the "Y" operated with a "new theology" which insured that its concern "wasn't only religion" nor "provincial." To Makonnen who later became a "Y" secretary and an important theorist of modern Africa, the YMCA "held to portray in the most dramatic manner the role of Christ in the modern world." See Ras Makonnen, Pan-Africanism From Within (London, 1979), pp. ix-xi, 41-51, 47, 77, 105-283.

45. Theophilus Gould Steward, Fifty Years In The Gospel Ministry (Philadelphia, 1921), pp. 157-166, 182. Steward's perception of the Darwinian theory and its impact upon the authority and credibility of Scripture was presented in Genesis Re-read; Or the Latest Conclusions of Physical Science, Viewed in their Relation to the Mosaic Record. Citing Christian evolutionists such as James McCosh and George Mivart, Steward concluded: "Evolution has been examined, its debts have been sounded, and no response has come forth inconsistent with the declaration that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Theophilus Gould Steward, Genesis Re-Read; Or the Latest Conclusions of Physical Science, Viewed in Their Relation to the Mosaic Record [Philadelphia, 1885], pp. 248-249). On Steward's critique of the racism and imperialism of fellow liberal Josiah Strong see Theophilus Gould Steward, The End of the World; or, Clearing the Way for the Fullness of the Gentiles (Philadelphia, 1888), Luker, Social Gospel in Black and White, p. 273 and William Seraile, Voice of Dissent: Theophilus Gould Steward (1843-1942), (Brooklyn, 1991), pp. 72, 76, 88-91, 175.

46. On the relationship between Protestant liberalism and progressive educational reform see H. Shelton Smith, "Christian Education," in Arnold S. Nash, ed. Protestant Thought in the Twentieth Century: Whence and Whither? (New York, 1951), pp. 225-246; George A. Coe, Education in Religion and Morals (New York, 1904) and George A. Coe, A Social Theory of Religious Education (New York, 1917). See also Orishatukeh Faduma, "Lessons and Needs of the Hour," Sierra Leone Weekly News, 5 Oct. 1918; Orishatukeh Faduma, "African Negro or Education," Sierra Leone Weekly News, 3, 24, 31 Aug. 1918; and Orishatukeh Faduma, "The Study of Science in Elementary and Secondary Schools," Sierra Leone Weekly News, 7 Oct. 1922.

47. "Addresses on the Congress on Africa," Missionary Review of the World 9 (19 Sept. 1896): 693. See Orishatukeh Faduma, "Christianity and Islam in Africa: A Native African's View of the Situation," Missionary Review of the World 48 (Nov. 1925): 865-868. See also Orishatukeh Faduma, "Drawbacks to Missionary Work in Africa," Missionary Echo 24 (Apr. 1917): 54-56; 24 (May 1917): 71-72. For the Congress on Africa and Faduma's presentations see J.W.E. Bowen, ed. Africa and the American Negro Addresses and Proceedings of the Congress on Africa (Miami, 1896, 1969). For additional insight on African and African American thought on African missions during this era see Blyden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race; Albert J. Raboteau, "Ethiopia Shall Soon Stretch Forth Her Hands: Black Destiny in Nineteenth-Century America." University Lecture in Religion, Arizona State University, 27 January 1989; Walter L. Williams, Black Americans and the Evangelization of Africa (Madison, Wis. 1982); Sylvia M. Jacobs, ed., Black Americans and the Missionary Movement in Africa (Westport, Conn. 1982); and Timothy E. Fulop, "The Future Golden Day of the Race: Millennialism and Black Americans in the Nadir, 1877-1901," Harvard Theological Review 84 (Jan. 1991): 75-99.

48. Orishatukeh Faduma, "Lessons and Needs of the Hour." Sierra Leone Weekly News, 21 Sept. 1918; 5 Oct. 1918.

49. Orishatukeh Faduma, "The Faith That Is In Me." Sierra Leone Weekly News, 2 June, 1923; 16 June, 1923; 14 July, 1923; 21 July, 1923; 28 July, 1923; 18 Aug., 1923; 1 Sept., 1923; 15 Sept., 1923; 20 Oct., 1923; 3 Nov., 1923; 8 Dec., 1923.

50. If so, he was among a number of theological liberals who, amid the carnage of World War I and theological liberalism's manifest failure to usher in the "Kingdom of God," were forced to re-examine and temper their earlier idealism and optimism. Their revised theological schemas reasserted the reality of both individual and collective sin. See Walter Rauschenbusch, A Theology for the Social Gospel (New York, 1917); Smith, Changing Conceptions of Original Sin, pp. 200-201; and Cauthen, Impact, pp. 97-99, 127-143, 61-74.

51. Faduma, "The Faith That Is In Me." Sierra Leone Weekly News, 18 Aug., 1923; 1 Sept., 1923; 15 Sept., 1923; 20 Oct., 1923; 3 Nov., 1923; 8 Dec., 1923.

52. Orishatukeh Faduma, "The Christian Minister's Attitude Toward Religion and Science;" Raymond Gavins, Perils and Prospects of Southern Black Leadership: Gordon Blaine Hancock, 1884-1970. (Durham, N.C. 1977), pp. 36-37; and William H. Ferris, "Viewpoint of Science and Religion." Negro World 13 (13 Jan. 1923): 4 and Negro World 14 (9 Mar. 1923): 4. See also Willard Gatewood, Controversy in the Twenties: Fundamentalism, Modernism, Evolution, (Nashville, Tenn. 1969); N.F. Furniss, The Fundamentalist Controversy, 1918-1931, (New York, 1954) and Stewart G. Cole, The History of Fundamentalism, (New York, 1931).

53. Founded by Congregationalists in the mid-nineteenth century, the Seminary had been under the increasing influence of theological liberalism since the 1880s. See Arthur Cushman McGiffert, Jr., No Ivory Tower: The Story of The Chicago Theological Seminary (Chicago, 1965), pp. 3-5.

54. Official transcript of Orishatukeh Faduma, Chicago Theological Seminary.

55. See Cauthen, Impact, pp. 147-206; McGiffert, No Ivory Tower, pp. 87-90, 123, 165, 187, 218-219, 224, 226 and Averill, American Theology in the Liberal Tradition, pp. 95, 100-106.

56. See Faduma's autobiographical sketch entitled, "An African Background," and Orishatukeh Faduma, "Africa, The Unknown," Mission Herald 43 (Nov., Dec. 1939): 20, 44 (Jan., Feb. 1940): 16-17.

57. Fosdick, "Beyond Modernism," Christian Century 52 (Dec. 1935): 1549-1552. See also series of thirty-four articles published under the title, "How my Mind has Changed in this Decade." in Christian Century 56 (18 Jan.-20 Sept. 1939), and Hutchison's assessment of this series in William R. Hutchison. Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism, (Cambridge, 1976) pp. 304-305. Robert L. Calhoun, "A Liberal Bandaged but Unbowed," Christian Century 56 (3 May 1939): 701-704.

58. Both aspired to unite the leadership of African-American churches in a concerted assault on the myriad social, economic, and political injustices which afflicted the race. On the Fraternal Council see Reverdy C. Ransom, "Why a Federation of Negro Denominations in the United States," Negro Journal of Religion 1 (Feb. 1935): 5; "Thus we Go." Negro Journal of Religion 1 (Feb. 1935): 15 and Ransom, Pilgrimage, pp. 96-300.

59. Daniel, Black Journal of the United States, pp. 279-281.

60. "Editorial." Negro Journal of Religion 1 (Feb. 1935): 3.

61. In an editorial section entitled, "A World View of Religion," Ridley attempted to keep readers informed of the issues involved in the current theological and missiological controversies. See also articles by R.R. Wright, Jr. on "The Challenge to the Negro Church," Negro Journal of Religion 2 (Feb. 1936): 5 and Arthur Evans, Jr., "Personalism," Negro Journal of Religion 2 (Feb. 1936): 6. The second issue of the Journal contained a sympathetic analysis of "Barthianism" and its "theology of crisis." The author, Charles L. Hill, was dean of Turner Theological Seminary. See Charles L. Hill, "The Religious Crisis of the Present," Negro Journal of Religion 1 (Mar. 1935): 5, 6, 19.

62. Faduma, "Some of My Experiences." p. 9 and Orishatukeh Faduma, "Africa The Unknown," Mission Herald 43 (Nov., Dec. 1939): 18. Encouragement of and concern for African students studying in the United States was an important dimension of Faduma's life and work. For example, in 1925 he addressed a joint meeting of the African Students Union and the Student Bible Institute at Hampton Institute on "Africa's Claims and Needs." Orishatukeh Faduma, "Africa's Claims and Needs," Southern Workman 54 (May, 1925): 221-225.

63. On Kalibala see Kenneth James King, Pan-Africanism and Education: A Study of Race Philanthropy and Education in the Southern States of America and East Africa, (Oxford, 1971), pp. 282, 230, 240-245. See also Ernest B. Kalibala, "Education for the Villages in Uganda, East Africa" (MA Thesis, Teachers College, New York, New York, 1934) and Ernest B. Kalibala, "Africa--The Unknown Quantity," Part I, Mission Herald 44 (May-June, 1940): 10-12 and Part II (July-Aug. 1940): 11-13. Compare with Faduma's "Drawbacks and Successes of Missionary Work in Africa," Sierra Leone Weekly News, 16 Mar. 1918; 30 Mar. 1918; 6 Apr. 1918.

64. Kalibala's dissertation was entitled, "The Social Structure of the Baganda Tribe" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1946). Note also the experiences of Kwame Nkrumah who would become one of the architects of modern Africa. After coming to the United States in 1935, he obtained a Bachelors of Theology degree in 1942 from Lincoln University and preached in a number of African-American churches. However, his increasingly non-traditional theological orientation and defense of African culture eventually pitted him in theological controversy with Dr. George Johnson, professor of theology and philosophy at Lincoln. On Nkrumah's theological orientation and evolution see Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah, (New York, 1957), pp. 1-13, 31-33 and Bankole Timothy, Kwame Nkrumah: His Rise to Power (London, 1955), pp. 43-44.

65. High Point was the site of a normal and industrial school for African-American students. In 1943 Faduma recalled his experiences with racism during the course of his thirty-nine-year ministry in the South. Orishatukeh Faduma, "Some of My Experiences," The Expected (July 1943): 9, 10.

66. When the Divinity School mailed Faduma an alumni information form in 1944, he replied in an aged script that he was a "Retired Missionary" who had spent a total of "57" years at various mission posts and institutions in the United States and Sierra Leone. He also included a listing of fifty of his "literary contributions," the typescript of his autobiographical sketch entitled, "My Nigerian African Background," and a copy of his 1943 article, "Some of My Experiences in the Southland." Alumni File, Yale Divinity School; New Haven, Connecticut. On Dean Weigle who had also been decisively influenced by evangelical liberalism, see Luther Allan Weigle, The Glory Days: From the Life of Luther Allan Weigle (New York, 1976).

67. Letter from Faduma to Dean Luther Allan Weigle, 10 May, 1945. Alumni File, Yale Divinity School. See Bainton, Yale and the Ministry, pp. 169-170, 178-183, 189-190, 202, 225, 219. Letter from Dean Luther A. Weigle to Faduma, 22 May 1945. Alumni File, Yale Divinity School.

68. Alumni File, Yale University. "Certificate of Death," North Carolina State Board of Health, Bureau of Vital Statistics.

69. Faduma, "My Nigerian African Background." Alumni File, Yale Divinity School.

Mr. Moore is assistant professor of American and African-American religious history in Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona.

Copyright American Society of Church History 1994
DESCRIPTORS: Literary criticism; Theology; Protestantism; Blacks; History
NAMED PERSONS: Faduma, Orishatukeh SPECIAL FEATURES: References

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