The Nature of a Mission Community

The influence of missions on African history is a much-studied subject. Indeed this is, in a sense, where modern academic study of African history started. ¹ Mission sources provide, in many areas, the earliest comprehensive written records, and this enforced reliance on missionary sources has understandably guided historians into studies of the interaction between missions and African societies, often concentrating on the political aspects of the relationships between powerful men in African societies and missions. ² Very rarely, however, does this literature discuss the actual internal structure of the mission: how did a mission station work from day to day, and what were the hierarchies that existed within these often complex institutions? ³ “The mission”, after all, could be a station with dozens of schoolchildren, cooks, builders, teachers, priests and messengers. As one historian who has given some attention to this issue has pointed out, the study of mission stations as institutions offers useful insights into the societies among which they were established: both because some missions came to be partly modelled on surrounding communities, and because missionary writings on the way in which people were taken into the institution of the mission provide, in passing, much evidence on the nature of social relations in local society. ⁴