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Amy Stambach as our speaker. >> Cynthia Williams: We welcome
policy studies here at the She's a professor of educational
the Department of Anthropology UW-Madison and an affiliate of
Global Studies program. Professor Stambach's early
research and publications are the result of two years of
anthropological fieldwork in the
More recently, she has expanded Kiher interest to include thea.
study of educational initiatives
groups who work in government of and private settings.ous
This research informs several recent publications including
her 2010 book Faith in Schools: Religion, Education and American
Evangelicals in East Africa from
today derives. which her Global Hot Spots talk
Stambach as she presents Please join me in welcoming Amy
Africa: Religion, Education and "Gthe International Politicalin
Economy." [APPLAUSE]
Amy Stambach: Thank you very much.
Thank you to Cynthia Williams and the Division of
International Studies and to the
sponsoring this talk. And thank you all very much forr
joining us today. It's good to see everyone here.
So today I would like to speak
religion, education and the international political economy.
And you've already said to
what really is this talk going yourself, this is a huge topic,
But I will very quickly narrow to be about?
My talk will focus on the role it down.
American evangelical missions of working in Africa.ns,
And my overarching argument will
21st century marks, not the end be tof, but a high point inf the
missionary involvement in international development work.
The smaller role of governments and the larger role of
nongovernmental organizations,
services in Africa and has NGOs, is providing social
groups to act. created new spaces for religious
that have moved into the empty The kinds of religious groups
governments are different from and underfunded spaces of
that have served as missionaries the kinds of ecumenical groups
Yesterday's groups were pluralistic and main line, they
were open to working with many
indeed these groups continue. diI am thinking of the Englishnd
Anglican church, European and North American denominations.
Today's new groups, which is to say a newer wave of
missionaries, by contrast are increasingly coming from the
United States, not Europe, and
Protestantism, an important slice of Protestantism but one
that is no longer of the main line denominations.
Today's new missionaries are
literalist or singular characterized by a highly
and, not as I but as many East interpretation of the bible,
lack of tolerance for religious perspectives other than their
own.
research to show you where some of those arguments come from.
These new groups are working in public settings including
African schools, clinics, orphanages and the media.
It's important to note that African governments largely
embrace their work because they provide free and skilled labor
force and an educated labor force as well.
But, arguably, in institutionalizing what they do,
both African governments and
undermine African independence mission organizations also
was the original goal of the and self-determination, which
And that's an argument I think post colonial state.
is one to be made or discussed. My big overarching argument then
is, number one, far from being
are at the heart of important political and economic changes
occurring in Africa since independence, since roughly the
1960s, late '60s, early '70s. My more focused argument, which
is number two, has to do with the operations of a specific
faith-based English language
tell you about involves pmissionaries from the United
States working in several locations across East Africa.
I'll argue from ethnographic
particular missionary group is evidence that when this
particular, to convert Muslim children, their work backfires,
and instead of helping people they are seen by Africans as
promoting American foreign
I will also argue, the third policy.
these missionaries is not a pointlasting solution.ork of
While it's definitely important and provides a space for social
services that are not well
solution for providing free and fundemass education.asting
Nor, number four, does
substitute for international missionary work adequately
It may parallel it but it does development aid.
international development aid. not adequately substitute for
some things through my field And I'll illustrate that with
Now I'm interested in this research.
of the, in a sense, national subject because it's been part
in the United States for some conversation time.we've had here
New York Times political
argued in a number of editorials commentator Nicholas Kristof has
evangelicals are, as he puts it, that this new wave of
force. America's new foreign policy
And yet, as I show through He's right in a way.
picture is more complicated than fieldwork experience, this
So before I begin, let me tell he tells it.
previous research and the story behind my title God Spends Most
of His Time in Africa.
framework for thinking about I'll then share with you my
I'll present some of my findings religion and education, and then
implications of this work for international development
agencies and for those of us who
money to religious groups and mayother groups in Africa.give
So, first beginning with, sorry,
One click will do it. wherOne click.ere?
You're getting a preview of everything all at once.
This slide is sticking. Oh, well, nonetheless, I first
began working, okay we'll leave it there.
I first began working, I was
school, I first began working, going to show you a picture of a
in this light, I first began there it is, it's a little dark
early 1990s when I was a working in East Africa in the
expansion of private secondary doctoral researcher studying the
At that time new funding streams schools.
secondary schools were opening were coming in so that new
I was interested then in through private sources.
that these schools provided, understanding new opportunities
rural areas. particularly for girls living in
across the '90s, was that more And what I found at that time,
secondary schools. girls than boys attended new
corrected a popular perception This research, in a sense,
school girls. With assistance from the Mellon
Foundation and the National Academy of Education, I
published that work in the year 2000 in this book Lessons From
Mount Kilimanjaro, and I then turned to the next project that
Cynthia just noted, which is an examination of international
development policy in East
The second project has enabled Africa.
short-term field trips to East me to conduct a series of
and 2006. During one of those early trips,
in fact during a trip to
encountered a group of Tanzania in the year 2000, I
English at a public primary missionarieschool.ere teaching
Now I was used to coming across American missionaries,
particularly American missionaries, in the work I had
been doing for many years.
history of formal education across much of Africa is closely
tied the history of mission schools.
And here you can see a picture
This is a late 19th century from school.hive.
You can see the church bell and you can see children
coming from the church and into the school.
This is an early example of a church and school built close
together on Mount Kilimanjaro,
still there. in fact, and these schools are
this connection between mission and school across the landscape.
Today the buildings are cement
But the group I encountered in and wood structures.
earlier history, this earlier the yecolonial history.f this
These were American missionaries
ecumenical churches to whom many not from the long established
Lutheran or the Presbyterian or Africthe Catholic churches., the
This was a nondenominational
from various independent church congregations coming from around
the United States.
were doing was different from And that longer history ofthey
missionaries who were part of that landscape for generations
already.
teaching English in public These groups, this group, was
They were working with Tanzanian government schools.
in public settings, not teaching Christians and Muslim students
students and teachers were of in relthe same faith. where
I'm sorry it's so dark. I hope you can at least see a
bit of the school setting here. The public nature of this
group's work is key to my story here, as is a general sense
among many East Africans that the number of American
missionaries in Africa is large and growing.
African's sense of the growing
missionaries from the United presence of religious
missionaries generally, is States, or religious
presentation: God Spends Most of indicated in the title of my
Spoken by a friend and colleague His Time in Africa.
growing presence of foreign -missionaries in Tanzania.he
He was speaking specifically
arrived to set up a new orphanage and who were involvedy
in food security work in Arusha.
nor do I, but rather he noted Hthat the scale and numbers ofk,
their projects had seemed to
His impression is supported by grow in recent years.
At the beginning of the 20th research data.
worked worldwide. By the end of that century, the
20th century, the number was
320,000. about five times higher at
population grew at a three-fold rate, less than that five-fold
rate of missionary activity.
global ministry, according to Julie Hearn of the University of
London and other sources, has been that of American
evangelicals. Between 2004 and 2007 the number
of American evangelical agencies
361 agencies, now these are iagencies, organizations, 361
agencies in 2004 to 492 agencies
In terms of funding, income for Protestant overseas missions,
coming from the United States specifically, funding from the
US for overseas Protestant
79% between 1996 and 2005, missions, increased more than
$2.9 billion in 1996 to over from $2.9 billion, with a B,
To put these numbers in context, $5.2 billion in 2005.
Vision, which is an active consider that in 1994, World
in the area where I work, an religious organization including
partly funded by the United States government through USAID,
and in 1994 World Vision had a
In 2007, World Vision had a budget of about $752 million.
Consider, in comparison, that in
of Eritrea, a country of 2.5 million people,
was estimated to have been
then budget of world vision. $250 million, less than the
it's no exaggeration to say that Clearly then, I would argue,
religious organizations, have as some religious NGOs, some
states. mSome US embassies, includingt
that in Nairobi, Kenya, has Hearn documents, report that the
greatest percent of Americans registered with our embassies
overseas are missionaries.
in public visibility of American Yet despite this clear presence
and to many people working in Africa, most of the scholarship
that we have on religion
Africa is about 19th century organizations and activities in
It's been about the western impact on indigenous culture and
the loss of African tradition,
But little research has been important topics to be sure.
21st century missionaries. conducted on the ground of these
shown, increasingly American, A well-funded and involved inst
public service work.
carried out research in four So to address this gap, I
United States and then in coTanzania, Kenya and Uganda.the
I have a pointer here which I will use, taking us to East
Africa, the specific countries, the work in northern Tanzania,
Kenya, Nairobi, western Kenya and in Uganda.
I studied the connections among these religious transnational
groups. Both their African-based
churches and African evangelists
who are largely funding the aprojects with these groups and
who share a theological common
as well. ground with the African church
are different understandings of Althow the mission unfolds.ere
So in the US here, in the United
training of missionaries in Christian colleges, and I'd be
glad to take up that part of my research in the Q&A but I'm not
going to focus on it here.
these missionaries do and at how In East Africa I looked a what
missionaries and their work. Africans themselves see these
Africans in the churches, Africans who share the same sort
of theological religious
missionaries. I observed evangelical's
activities in public primary
I met with East African officials and with community
members who are familiar with these missions.
I conducted research in a bible college in Nairobi, one of many
bible colleges in Nairobi, where
evangelists. missionaries trained African
and curricula to understand how And I world evangelism isxtbooks
conceptualized and taught through these churches.
So I need to thank the
Tanzania for providing me gofficial permission to conductd
research on this topic. And I also need to thank faculty
and students at various Christian colleges who were
generous with their ideas and time.
What I found, to anticipate a bit or to cut to the chase
before I get into the details,
schools of faith, so to speak, what I found was that many
evangelical group's work. In particular, I found two kinds
of faith emerged. One, a secular modernist faith
that schooling can and should change social inequalities and
help people move out of poverty.
Another, a particular theological faith that schools
should be at the center of a
particular group saw it, through global world united, as this
Christianity. Going into the project, I knew,
to give you a little bit of the background, I knew that religion
and education are more closely
In the US, we often have this sense that the two are separate.
Religion is private; education
To put it overly simply but for the sake of starting here.
And we often believe that as
secular. people modernize, they become
Yet, these ideas do not hold up Irrationaempirically.ll away.
Religion has not gone away with greater doses of education.
And we see this, for example, in
where religion is a big part of tpublic life and politics.a
And we see the intersections of religion and education, albeit
in different ways, in international programs and
policies including in, for
interreligious dialogue program or the World Bank's development
dialogue on values and ethics.
religious organizations to Both of which work through
education, through schools. Those programs were started in
this first decade of this 21st
So my conceptual framework for century.
sacred or secular are tantithetical or opposite ort
categorically different, that's,
we think about things, but I I would say, an artifact of how
is precluding the other. don't see empirically that one
is better viewed as the reorganization of religion withm
respect to social life. Put another way, religion and
education go hand in hand.
according to whom? The question is how and
the relationship between In East Africa, as elsewhere,
debate. reAs an initial example of ther
deep connection between religion
picture a Tanzanian public and education in East Africa,
evangelicals staff and run an English language program.
And in the next few minutes I'd like to tell you briefly about
these missionaries' work, and I'll present it in the form of a
vignette here so you can see
what they do. sNow to frame this vignette, wef
need to understand, first, that these missionaries have agreed
not to identify themselves as missionaries when they are
working in public schools.
Tanzania and by Tanzanian Bofficials to use the old
testament to teach English
Why? language lessons.
testament in schools? They're allowed to because as
many East Africans, including Tanzanians in this particular
case, as many East Africans see it, religion is a part of public
life, religion is a part of public school.
It's part of that history, if you will, of formal schooling
itself. That's one reason.
The second reason that East Africans argue is that the old
testament, well because religion
general sense that it imbues is part of public life there's a
insofar as it imbues what people what people do all the time, and
speak to some people more than do all the time, certain texts
And in Tanzania, officials and others.
argued the old testament teachers and these missionaries
and believed in by both Christians and Muslims, the two
main groups of students at these
Okay? So one of the public schools
where missionaries worked was located off of a busy city
street. One day around 7:30 in the
morning, a group of the Americans arrived to teach
English to Tanzanian students.
of the school where most of the Theyschool's students wereyard
assembled.
head mistress instructed these The Tanzanian head mistress, the
Father Abraham song. Tanzanian students to sing that
taught English at this American missionaries who had
year had taught this Father paAbraham song to grade fiveus
students. And let me just say, when I
first began observing these missionaries this was the fourth
year that they had worked in
So the head mistress asks her Tanzanian students to perform
for the new cohort of missionaries who are coming in
that Father Abraham song. And I'm not going to sing for
you, but I'll say the words.
Father Abraham has seven sons Thand seven sons has Fatheris:
Abraham.
so let's all praise the lord. Incidentally, praise the lord is
coded in Tanzanian English as a particularly Christian phrase,
not old testament phrase, but I do not think the missionaries
realized that.
taught in local Tanzanian English would have had thatg
praise the lord code as a Christian kind of tag to it.
But not to missionaries'
Students involved in this early assembly threw their left hands
in an imaginary circle in front of them and shouted left hand
when they, there's a sort of
with this song. And so this Father Abraham song
involved them in a left hand, right hand, left leg, right leg,
head, body exercise.
missionaries taught it to these students, was to teach Tanzanian
students the English words for
Okay? So you can see that the text of
the song is sort of presented as
concepts that have to do with a wabasic vocabulary.lish
And it's based upon an old
Students were enthusiastic on tethis particular morning..
Their head mistress was pleased that they were speaking English.
She had tried to introduce
instruction in this school, thinking that English would help
her students get jobs, but the
except for this particular Tanzanian ministry required that
school had to continue using English language program, the
Kiswahili is the national language, and it's the national
language of instruction.
country and in this region is Wthat students don't haves
particular language skills that will sort of enable them to move
into a commercial economy.
send their children to private And so those who can afford to
increasingly we see a cohort of impoverished students at public
schools who are required to or
Kiswahili. who learn their lessons in
that which is complicated and There's not clear cut.ound to
I'd be glad to go into that also
Missionaries, these missionaries if you would like.
students. inMost were from Christiange
colleges in Texas and Tennessee on this particular year.
Some were preparing for careers in evangelism but most have come
to fulfill service learning requirements with their colleges
and to teach English to young Tanzanians.
Their reasons for teaching
head mistress herself wanted. EnglThey wanted to help poor the
students gain some skills so
economy. that they could enter the wage
permission, these missionaries So with Tanzanian officials'
academic lessons. On this particular day when the
school students settled down
the missionaries stepped forward after singing Father Abraham,
six groups of roughly equal and dividednumbers.dents into
One missionary moved with each
Today's English lesson, this is a picture of the activity of the
song itself, today's lesson was about numbers, learning how to
count in English, taught using
At the reading center, one the bible creation story.
story in English and then asked students to read sentences out
loud. The story went, generally, which
may be familiar, in the beginning God created the
heavens and earth.
God said, let there be light. On the second day, counting two,
God made the sky. On the third day three, and so
on, up to seven.
seven to be sure. But the program used this story
as a means to introduce the concept of numbers in English.
When a certain time had passed, students in this group, in the
reading group, moved to a different center.
The pink flamingos, as I'll call
the missionaries had given each thgroup a color animal name.ay
So I'll call this group the pink
reading center to the conversation center where they
practiced a dialogue involving
And then the students moved to numbers using English.
received construction paper with an art center where they
students numbered the doors one through seven and drew the day's
creation episode under it.
center. NeThis, in fact, is not thema
numbers lesson, this was the
story was used as the text for animals lesson and Noah's Ark
drama center where they enacted the lesson of the day and the
academic content of it. Last, they moved to the games
center where they learned a game
So I hope you get a sense then involving numbers, in this case.
organized and indeed some of the of some of how the program is
actively engaged in a way that ways in which students are
students and the teachers at the head mistress and the
and felt that the interactive mode of instruction of extremely
useful and different from the didactic means of instruction
that most schools use.
Christian and Muslim alike, generally supported the English
program, although with
One Muslim parent, whose qualification.
said that English gives light, daughter attended the program,
light to my child but missionaries should not insist
on bible reading. Doing so can cause conflict
between Muslims and Christians. A teacher from this school,
whose own child participated in this program, argued that
although as a Christian parent
English, she could see why she liked the program and valued
their children. And indeed Muslim parents did
withdraw their children in the
program. subsequent years of this
that their children will become "attracted to the missionaries.
Muslim parents don't want their kids singing Christian songs,"
as she put it.
at school." "IWhen questioned off schoolip
grounds, parents and teachers were even more critical and
questioning of the missionaries'
One parent said, "They want to program.
into Europeans. steThe missionaries are likethem
witches in our village. They make our children to turn
against us."
not the missionary group's And I can assure you that was
However, this is reporting back from some parents of the
children with whom they work. Now some people laughed at this
description because witchcraft
have been put aside. and sorcery were supposed to
things go away. Others recognized that thise
parent was using the concept of witchcraft metaphorically for
characterizing the controversies
these missionaries' work. So this is sort of a picture of
what the program is about, the
English language program and support that it has as an
program comments that parents thand teachers make about thehe
value and also potential
So I'd like to turn now to drawbacks of the program itself.
Some Muslim groups consider the American missionaries more
specifically to be a proxy for
This opinion was voiced, not the US war on terror.
spoke, but within an Islamic only by people with whom I
religious curricula in Tanzanian weekly that described the use of
to fight terrorism in East schools as part of the US plan
evangelical Christianity. I want to underscore I don't
think this is the intention,
those evangelical missionaries this is not the intention of
I do want to underscore that with whom I worked.
work plays into in this region, and many of the college students
who were on this program newly
are not aware of these dynamics fothat they were working in.r
So a little bit more
this particular place where these missionaries work, the
politics of English versus
put really strictly Christian Kiversus Muslim religion, areon,
significant.
things are big issues that The interface of those two
The East African Muslim Welfare Society had owned the school
that I just described.
regional organization formed in Tthe 1940s to promote economic a
and educational opportunities for Muslims.
Nationalized, that means brought
state, in the 1960s, this group and the school are now part of
ministry organizations including
ministry of education public this school is part of the
But in today's context of international calls for public
and private partnerships in education, including such calls
as UNESCO's and the World Bank
working with public schools, to involve religious groups in
Welfare Association who are associated with the school have
called for its return to Muslim ownership and are particularly
vocal in questioning the
in teaching English in the presence of this American group
One of the classrooms where missionaries taught English, had
in fact, sort of a classroom
been an EAMWS Madrasa hall, where students used to recite
daily prayers and where adult members held Friday prayers,
prayers on Friday afternoon.
interactive lessons were taught had been the Madrasa hall of the
Muslim Welfare Society school.
to convert students? Were missionaries in fact trying
or American world view? In teaching children English, aS
language that most students'
know, were missionaries trying parents, in this context, do not
Tanzanian society? to influence and change
questions I would argue, that Thesesome Tanzanians asked.nable
They were also questions to which missionaries had very
clear answers when they were off
Yes, they did hope to convert schstudents.ds.
This is the project which groups
And yes, they did hope to connect students with an
international political economy that was, in missionaries'
minds, linked but not solely
Most missionaries, however, had no idea of Tanzanian parents'
concerns. They were interested in using
biblical narratives as a
thus to lay religious foundations for building public
education.
setting to another setting, this I'd like to switch from that
And this particular vignette one in Uganda.
or a third really, from parents, will emphasize a second strand,
look at particular voices of the Muslim groups to now I'd like to
ministers within the churches that these missionaries are
working to look at some of their
work. tAnd this is the group that is's
most closely connected
of world view, if you will, with theologically in terms of sort
And they share a lot of common the missionaries themselves.
And I'd like to point out some ground.
only common thinking, I will of the places where there is not
thinking for you up front, but accept and present that common
thinking that is not always heard in the presentations that
missionaries themselves heard.
concerns about evangelical So in addition to African's
with American policy, some East Africans within these churches
also expressed concern about
about Africa and colonial missionariehistory.f knowledge
And here is something where I need to be sort of an emissary
myself because one Ugandan asked
States and tell every audience that I come back to the United
need to learn more about Africa that I spand history.Americans
And so this is the message that I'm bringing back.
Tell your students, he said, to study more about Africa and
history.
So I'm going to plug They don't know enough.
a great course here that would African Studies 277 which is
to lots of people. be wonderful to have accessible
working with these missionaries, So some Ugandan evangelists
We'll stay there for a second. let's see, where am I here?
with these missionaries described American evangelism as
a form of neocolonialism. Not questioning its theological
core but questioning the context
Indeed, East African church goers drew explicit connections
among religion, colonialism and politics.
Several saw the missionaries' work as extending American's
economic control over Africans. And this is just specific
context in connotation within the church.
As one Ugandan member put it: Americans use their money to
divide and rule.
Sometimes they say that where there is American money, there
should be American leadership.
Ugandans, we could pay Ugandan But if funding came directly to
instead of paying missionaries evangelists a living wage
annually, which is apparently the eqwhat they get.5,000
I thought it was very interesting.
As part of this research, I worked in the Billy Graham
archives down in Wheaton
argument is something that I saw College, and this kind of
which was very shortly after in the records from the 1970s
The same kind of issues in these independence.
for an independent African churches between more autonomy
of willingness to directly fund those independent organizations
rather than through mission agencies.
It's very interesting that, how many decades late, four decades
later, a similar argument is
So funding, this Ugandan being made.
He said, "It turns the Americans suggested, polarized the church.
into slaves. into masters and the Ugandans
said, "he wanted Ugandans to run Like other evangelists," he
projects." and manage the church's
projects included a school, health clinic, Internet cafe and
some consulting work as well. Now he described the problem of
American management as one of "fostering dependency."
As he put it, missionaries in East Africa don't want church
projects to develop fast. They want their own children to
come back, and they want the
slow rate. African church to grow at a very
colleague, so a colleague of This evangelist's Ugandan
put it this way: He said, "American missionaries are not
transparent." He was speaking specifically
about the church he was working with, this evangelical church.
"American missionaries are not
This is especially true of the transparent.
They're just making up their young men who come.
Meaning that they're not life," he said.
rationally but inventing a thinking clearly or planning
And he continued, "If things strategy as they go.
in church progresses poorly," he grow slowly, that is if the work
excuse to keep returning. saidAs it is, new cohorts ofe an
missionaries reinvent the wheel," he said, "instead of
starting where their parents
So I would argue that this left off."
mission to missionary son, this generational imagery of father
and son reproducing and reinventing the wheel instead of
progressing in modern progress, it reveals cultural ideas across
East Africa about patrilineality
area that fathers and sons do and chave to one another.this
And it's a kind of transposition
framework that people in East Africa live with onto what
they're seeing going on in
There's a kind of an irony to this perhaps that whereas
American missionaries I heard sometimes felt that East
Africans were nepotistic and
independent churches, the East employing family members in the
Americans were doing as much Africans were arguing that
from fathers to sons. And indeed I saw in this Uganda
church, this evangelical church,
networks and missionaries and evangelists to the school that I
showed you in Tanzania, missionaries, American
missionaries, there is a
down through the history of American evangelical groupss
working there.
of the ethnographic research So these are some of the parts
There's a lot more detail that that I conducted, some of it.
kinds of strands here. I'd be happy to go into in other
about the implications of this. And there are many and I hope
you draw many more than what I'm
But on the face of it, I would presenting here.
details, you might argue, you might be skeptical, you might
say these ethnographic details
There are about a handful of are really parochial.
particular schools in Uganda and missionaries working in
Kenyan site too, but to return Tanzania and also there's a
and to look at an additional to the data that I cited earlier
2001 the number of US datamissionaries working and
internationally, not only in
data, but number of US African here, I didn't have that
internationally increased by missionaries working
And financial support to US Protestant missions overseas was
up during that time, '92 to 2001, by about 45%.
The Evangelism and Missions Information Service, EMIS, whose
survey research documents these changes notes that during these
years a shift occurred away from
pulpit preaching to more evangelism and away from sort of
public work. development in educational
which is based at the Billy MoGraham Center at Wheaton,
College, observes that these
More and more US missions are involved in providing Africans
with healthcare, family planning
And to be sure, foreign missions and education.
African state programs cannot provide socfund.ervices that
The smaller role of African states and the presence of NGOs,
nongovernmental organizations,
missionaries as key social has helped to position US
But are they, as Nicholas Kristof says, American's new
foreign policy force. Are religious NGOs a substitute
for government diplomacy? My research suggests no.
The delivery of educational services through faith-based
organizations can be, to say the
when there is so much intolerance and tensions among
believers.
topic requires more than a No would be my answer, but this
It requires us to think about what lessons, more broadly,
might be learned for various
And so, from what I see, the audiences.
provides insights into tensions that arise when well-intentioned
missionaries attempt to convert,
Muslim students to Christianity or when they, specifically in
this case again, overlook the history and culture of fellow
African church members and
It also provides insight for colleagues.
development agencies. tAnd it does so by illustrating
or suggesting that it is
local counterparts are local important to recognize that
recipients of funding. colleagues, not passive
counterparts are well-educated, aware of history, they are
increasingly savvy about making sure that local development aid
meets local needs, as John
pointed out to me. Whitman, a colleague, recently
take another audience now, for For those who may volunteer, to
give money to religious and other NGOs in Africa, this case
suggests that it may be important to consider that
resources might be sent directly
agencies. tMost countries in Africa haveed
been independent for over half a
Nearly two generations of Africans have grown up in an
independent world.
and world politics. Rich in intellectual capacity,
many have seen, frankly, I find in my work, many have seen more
of the world than you or I or more of the world than I have.
And I'm constantly reminded that
across in the work that I do many, many, many who I come
Madison or have siblings and have graduated from the UW
with UW Madison. cousins who come into contact
more about the need to study It brings the point home even
At the same time, I would argue, Africa and history.
the place of government agencies it's important to recognize that
The NGO revolution of the late remains.
growth of religious NGOs, I would argue, is important.
Yet it has had also different consequences than may be
anticipated or highlighted. In East Africa, where religious
NGOs are associated by some with
has posed problems for East African governments themselves.
Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania have all required all religious
missions to register with the government as nongovernmental
organizations, and, in some cases, these governments have
asked these particular American evangelical missionaries to
leave.
Not only spiritually for many Cbelievers, but for providing.
much needed social services.
grassroots network of programs With their grassroots networks,
placed to deliver education. and churches, they're well
or a thing of the past, they are And far from being out of date
political economic changes squarely involved in the
Africa. What remains to be seen is
whether their involvement today is a local high water mark or
will continue to grow.
the first decade of the 21st The trend has been upward over
Which direction it will continue century.
that, I would argue, requires to ffurther observation andstion
research. Thank you.
I look forward to your questions
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