Both John Williams and Robert Moffat, seminary classmates and fellow agents with the London Missionary Society, wrote best-selling accounts of their missionary activities among the peoples of the South Pacific and Africa, respectively. Williams's A Narrative of Missionary Enterprises (1837) and Moffat's Missionary Labours and Scenes in Southern Africa (1854) represent significant developments in missionary self-representation. Against the exotic background of the country of the "perishing heathen," both men establish their "humanitarian authority" over potential converts and win support from local leaders through their apparent wealth, and the novelty of European trade goods. This wealth leads to social status and political influence over their neighboring chief in ways that earlier missionaries could not claim.
Williams presents himself as a supervisor of his energetic army of native catechists who do the daily work of evangelization. He frequently feels threatened by the fierceness and brutality of the island peoples. Instead, he feels that his role is to be the sympathetic Englishman, to prepare the islanders for trade with the British. He even encourages the people's desire for commerce, since it can prepare the way for the gospel, and he feels that Divine Providence justifies such authority.
Moffat, on the other hand, portrays himself as someone willing to take African culture seriously, despite his evangelical mission. He develops allies among the tribes he lives among, and his self-representation is that of a benign peacemaker. He is avid in his study of African languages, but one gets the sense that he is as eager to communicate with his new friends as he is to do Scriptural translation. Unlike Williams, Moffat discourages commerce until the people have been converted. Because he ultimately believes that British culture is the best hope after Christianity which he can offer the Bechuana, he is eager to depict himself as a wise teacher to converts happily British.
Ultimately, missionary humanitarian authority legitimated greater and greater European interference in the internal affairs of indigenous peoples. Whether this influence was truly more benign than that of the traders is not as straightforward as it appears. In my paper, I suggest that ultimately the missionaries' use of exotic locales, their depiction of the natives as eager converts, and their self-representations as servants of divine Providence and British culture blinds the British public to the true difficulties of the missionary situation.
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