African leaders engage mission Christianity: Anglicans in Tanzania, 1876–1926

This dissertation is a history of an English mission, the Anglican Universities\u27 Mission to Central Africa (UMCA), in what is now southeastern Tanzania, both before and after European colonization. It is a mission history, however, that focuses on the African leadership and their engagement of mission Christianity. In addition to English missionary sources, this study is based on an extensive collection of documents written by African priests and teachers in Swahili from the 1890s through the 1950s, including over 120 Swahili logbooks. The author also interviewed over 200 descendants of African church leaders and village elders. Arriving in southeastern Tanzania almost 20 years before colonial rule, the UMCA found numerous small chiefdoms. Among them were several chiefs interested in allying with the mission, but the UMCA was preoccupied with the freed-slaves it had brought from Zanzibar. It was only after an Ngoni attack in 1882 that the mission recognized the necessity of responding fully to the overtures of local chiefs. The subsequent alliances with interested chiefs were crucial to the history of the mission because children in these chiefdoms began attending mission schools. As a result, the first generation of local teachers quickly arose who were dedicated to building the new Christian community. Many of these teachers were poised to become the first generation of African clergy when colonial rule arrived in the region. After colonial rule, the UMCA ordained only handfuls of African clergy despite the steadily increasing numbers of adherents. The Africans who were ordained, however, continued to engage the mission. African clergy allied with sympathetic English missionaries to create such new institutions as Christian initiation and girls\u27 boarding schools. The mission was well rewarded for responding to these African initiatives since these new institutions came to be viewed as the work of enlightened English missionaries who sought to uplift and accommodate African culture. This dissertation, then, moves beyond the framework of European initiative and African response, and it also contributes to the rethinking of colonialism in terms of engagement and interaction rather than simply domination and resistance