ABSTRACT
One month after George Washington Williams’s departure for the Congo, another Black American, William Henry Sheppard, also left for the country on a Christian mission motivated by the same theory of “Providential Design.” Sheppard’s early childhood was immersed in Christian ethics that includes brotherly and sisterly love, justice, humility, and service. Sheppard’s interest in the evangelization of Africa that Ann Bruce first planted in his mind was rekindled at Hampton by Dr. H. B. Frissel, a Presbyterian minister, who was the Institute Chaplain. In 1886, Sheppard graduated from the Institute and was ordained by Atlanta Presbytery to pastor Zion Church in 1888. Like Equiano, Sheppard also dispels the Western-imagined notion of African savagery in his description of the Kete people’s spiritual beliefs and judicial system.
