cc >> Cynthia Williams: We welcome
Amy Stambach as our speaker. She's a professor of educational
policy studies here at the UW-Madison and an affiliate of
the Department of Anthropology and director of our
Global Studies program. Professor Stambach's early
research and publications are the result of two years of
anthropological fieldwork in the Kilimanjaro region of Tanzania.
More recently, she has expanded her interest to include the
study of educational initiatives of trans-regional religious
groups who work in government and private settings.
This research informs several recent publications including
her 2010 book Faith in Schools: Religion, Education and American
Evangelicals in East Africa from which her Global Hot Spots talk
today derives. Please join me in welcoming Amy
Stambach as she presents "God Spends Most of His Time in
Africa: Religion, Education and the International Political
Economy." [APPLAUSE]
Amy Stambach: Thank you very much.
Thank you to Cynthia Williams and the Division of
International Studies and to the Wisconsin Alumni Association for
sponsoring this talk. And thank you all very much for
joining us today. It's good to see everyone here.
So today I would like to speak to you, with you, about
religion, education and the international political economy.
And you've already said to yourself, this is a huge topic,
what really is this talk going to be about?
But I will very quickly narrow it down.
My talk will focus on the role of evangelical missions,
American evangelical missions working in Africa.
And my overarching argument will be that this first decade of the
21st century marks, not the end of, but a high point in
missionary involvement in international development work.
The smaller role of governments and the larger role of
nongovernmental organizations, NGOs, is providing social
services in Africa and has created new spaces for religious
groups to act. The kinds of religious groups
that have moved into the empty and underfunded spaces of
governments are different from the kinds of ecumenical groups
that have served as missionaries in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Yesterday's groups were pluralistic and main line, they
were open to working with many different kinds of religions and
indeed these groups continue. I am thinking of the English
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 are a different slice of
Protestantism, an important slice of Protestantism but one
that is no longer of the main line denominations.
Today's new missionaries are characterized by a highly
literalist or singular interpretation of the bible,
and, not as I but as many East Africans describe them, by a
lack of tolerance for religious perspectives other than their
own. And I'll draw on my field
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 mission organizations also
undermine African independence and self-determination, which
was the original goal of the post colonial state.
And that's an argument I think that's on the table and really
is one to be made or discussed. My big overarching argument then
is, number one, far from being irrelevant today, missionaries
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 program, and the program I'll
tell you about involves missionaries from the United
States working in several locations across East Africa.
I'll argue from ethnographic evidence that when this
particular missionary group is perceived as trying, in
particular, to convert Muslim children, their work backfires,
and instead of helping people they are seen by Africans as
promoting American foreign policy.
I will also argue, the third point here, that the work of
these missionaries is not a lasting solution.
While it's definitely important and provides a space for social
services that are not well funded, it's not a lasting
solution for providing free and mass education.
Nor, number four, does missionary work adequately
substitute for international development aid.
It may parallel it but it does not adequately substitute for
international development aid. And I'll illustrate that with
some things through my field research.
Now I'm interested in this subject because it's been part
of the, in a sense, national conversation that we've had here
in the United States for some time.
New York Times political commentator Nicholas Kristof has
argued in a number of editorials that this new wave of
evangelicals are, as he puts it, America's new foreign policy
force. He's right in a way.
And yet, as I show through fieldwork experience, this
picture is more complicated than he tells it.
So before I begin, let me tell you just a little bit about my
previous research and the story behind my title God Spends Most
of His Time in Africa. I'll then share with you my
framework for thinking about religion and education, and then
I'll present some of my findings and discuss some of the
implications of this work for international development
agencies and for those of us who may volunteer our time or give
money to religious groups and other groups in Africa.
So, first beginning with, sorry, where are we here?
One click will do it. One click.
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 going to show you a picture of a
school, I first began working, there it is, it's a little dark
in this light, I first began working in East Africa in the
early 1990s when I was a doctoral researcher studying the
expansion of private secondary schools.
At that time new funding streams were coming in so that new
secondary schools were opening through private sources.
I was interested then in understanding new opportunities
that these schools provided, particularly for girls living in
rural areas. And what I found at that time,
across the '90s, was that more girls than boys attended new
secondary schools. This research, in a sense,
corrected a popular perception that school boys outnumbered
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 Africa.
The second project has enabled me to conduct a series of
short-term field trips to East Africa between the years 2000
and 2006. During one of those early trips,
in fact during a trip to Tanzania in the year 2000, I
encountered a group of missionaries who were teaching
English at a public primary school.
Now I was used to coming across American missionaries,
particularly American missionaries, in the work I had
been doing for many years. Indeed, as you likely know, the
history of formal education across much of Africa is closely
tied the history of mission schools.
And here you can see a picture from the archive.
This is a late 19th century school.
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, in fact, and these schools are
still there. You still see the history of
this connection between mission and school across the landscape.
Today the buildings are cement and wood structures.
But the group I encountered in the year 2000 was not of this
earlier history, this earlier colonial history.
These were American missionaries not from the long established
ecumenical churches to whom many Africans in the area belong, the
Lutheran or the Presbyterian or the Catholic churches.
This was a nondenominational group whose missionaries came
from various independent church congregations coming from around
the United States. And the kind of work that they
were doing was different from that longer history of
missionaries who were part of that landscape for generations
already. These groups, this group, was
teaching English in public Tanzanian government schools.
They were working with Christians and Muslim students
in public settings, not teaching in religious settings where
students and teachers were of the same faith.
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 presence of religious
missionaries from the United States, or religious
missionaries generally, is indicated in the title of my
presentation: God Spends Most of His Time in Africa.
Spoken by a friend and colleague --, the phrase points to the
growing presence of foreign missionaries in Tanzania.
He was speaking specifically about Americans who had recently
arrived to set up a new orphanage and who were involved
in food security work in Arusha. He did not disparage their work,
nor do I, but rather he noted that the scale and numbers of
their projects had seemed to grow in recent years.
His impression is supported by research data.
At the beginning of the 20th century, 62,000 missionaries
worked worldwide. By the end of that century, the
20th century, the number was about five times higher at
320,000. And for reference, the world
population grew at a three-fold rate, less than that five-fold
rate of missionary activity. The fastest growing section of
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 in Africa increased 36%, from
361 agencies, now these are agencies, organizations, 361
agencies in 2004 to 492 agencies in 2007.
In terms of funding, income for Protestant overseas missions,
coming from the United States specifically, funding from the
US for overseas Protestant missions, increased more than
79% between 1996 and 2005, from $2.9 billion, with a B,
$2.9 billion in 1996 to over $5.2 billion in 2005.
To put these numbers in context, consider that in 1994, World
Vision, which is an active religious organization including
in the area where I work, an active religious organization
partly funded by the United States government through USAID,
and in 1994 World Vision had a budget of $300 million.
In 2007, World Vision had a budget of about $752 million.
Consider, in comparison, that in that 1994 era, the GDP
of Eritrea, a country of 2.5 million people,
was estimated to have been $250 million, less than the
then budget of world vision. Clearly then, I would argue,
it's no exaggeration to say that some religious NGOs, some
religious organizations, have as much money as some independent
states. Some US embassies, including
that in Nairobi, Kenya, has Hearn documents, report that the
greatest percent of Americans registered with our embassies
overseas are missionaries. Yet despite this clear presence
in public visibility of American missionaries to many Africans
and to many people working in Africa, most of the scholarship
that we have on religion organizations and activities in
Africa is about 19th century missionaries.
It's been about the western impact on indigenous culture and
the loss of African tradition, important topics to be sure.
But little research has been conducted on the ground of these
21st century missionaries. A group that is, as I have just
shown, increasingly American, well-funded and involved in
public service work. So to address this gap, I
carried out research in four countries on two continents: the
United States and then in Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda.
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 and members and US missionaries
who are largely funding the projects with these groups and
who share a theological common ground with the African church
as well. Although, as you'll see, there
are different understandings of how the mission unfolds.
So in the US here, in the United States, I focused on the
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. In East Africa I looked a what
these missionaries do and at how Africans themselves see these
missionaries and their work. I'm including in particular
Africans in the churches, Africans who share the same sort
of theological religious understanding as the
missionaries. I observed evangelical's
activities in public primary schools.
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 missionaries trained African
evangelists. And I analyzed mission textbooks
and curricula to understand how world evangelism is
conceptualized and taught through these churches.
So I need to thank the governments of Kenya, Uganda and
Tanzania for providing me official permission to conduct
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, what I found was that many
schools of faith, so to speak, played out in and through this
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. Everyone shared that ideal.
Another, a particular theological faith that schools
should be at the center of a global world united, as this
particular group saw it, through new testament bible-based
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 related than is often thought.
In the US, we often have this sense that the two are separate.
Religion is private; education is public.
To put it overly simply but for the sake of starting here.
And we often believe that as people modernize, they become
secular. Irrational beliefs fall away.
Yet, these ideas do not hold up empirically.
Religion has not gone away with greater doses of education.
And we see this, for example, in the United States or Canada
where religion is a big part of public life and politics.
And we see the intersections of religion and education, albeit
in different ways, in international programs and
policies including in, for instance, UNESCO's
interreligious dialogue program or the World Bank's development
dialogue on values and ethics. Both of which work through
religious organizations to address poverty through
education, through schools. Those programs were started in
this first decade of this 21st century.
So my conceptual framework for this project then is not that
sacred or secular are antithetical or opposite or
categorically different, that's, I would say, an artifact of how
we think about things, but I don't see empirically that one
is precluding the other. Rather, I argue, that secularism
is better viewed as the reorganization of religion with
respect to social life. Put another way, religion and
education go hand in hand. The question is how and
according to whom? In East Africa, as elsewhere,
the relationship between religion and education is under
debate. As an initial example of the
deep connection between religion and education in East Africa,
picture a Tanzanian public school in which American
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 sort of a typical day of some of
what they do. Now to frame this vignette, we
need to understand, first, that these missionaries have agreed
not to identify themselves as missionaries when they are
working in public schools. But they are permitted in
Tanzania and by Tanzanian officials to use the old
testament to teach English language lessons.
Why? Why can they use the old
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 is part of public life there's a
general sense that it imbues what people do all the time, and
insofar as it imbues what people do all the time, certain texts
speak to some people more than others.
And in Tanzania, officials and teachers and these missionaries
argued the old testament contains stories that are known
and believed in by both Christians and Muslims, the two
main groups of students at these schools.
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. They gathered in the courtyard
of the school where most of the school's students were
assembled. The Tanzanian head mistress, the
head mistress instructed these Tanzanian students to sing that
Father Abraham song. American missionaries who had
taught English at this particular school the previous
year had taught this Father Abraham song to grade five
students. And let me just say, when I
first began observing these missionaries this was the fourth
year that they had worked in these locations.
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. The song's words go like this:
Father Abraham has seven sons and seven sons has Father
Abraham. I am one of them and so are you,
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. So the song, as it was being
taught in local Tanzanian English would have had that
praise the lord code as a Christian kind of tag to it.
But not to missionaries' knowledge.
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 dance or performance that goes
with this song. And so this Father Abraham song
involved them in a left hand, right hand, left leg, right leg,
head, body exercise. The purpose of which, as
missionaries taught it to these students, was to teach Tanzanian
students the English words for parts of the body.
Okay? So you can see that the text of
the song is sort of presented as a way of teaching English
concepts that have to do with basic vocabulary.
And it's based upon an old testament story of Abraham.
Students were enthusiastic on this particular morning.
Their head mistress was pleased that they were speaking English.
She had tried to introduce English as the language of
instruction in this school, thinking that English would help
her students get jobs, but the Tanzanian ministry required that
except for this particular English language program, the
school had to continue using Kiswahili.
Kiswahili is the national language, and it's the national
language of instruction. What many people find this
country and in this region is that students don't have
particular language skills that will sort of enable them to move
into a commercial economy. And so those who can afford to
send their children to private English schools do so, and
increasingly we see a cohort of impoverished students at public
schools who are required to or who learn their lessons in
Kiswahili. There's a whole background to
that which is complicated and not clear cut.
I'd be glad to go into that also if you would like.
Missionaries, these missionaries in this program were college
students. Most were from Christian
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 English were similar to what the
head mistress herself wanted. They wanted to help poor
students gain some skills so that they could enter the wage
economy. So with Tanzanian officials'
permission, these missionaries integrated bible stories with
academic lessons. On this particular day when the
school students settled down after singing Father Abraham,
the missionaries stepped forward and divided the students into
six groups of roughly equal numbers.
One missionary moved with each group to one of six activities.
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 the bible creation story.
At the reading center, one missionary read the creation
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. On the first day, counting one,
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. And the numbers went beyond
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 them, which is sort of the way
the missionaries had given each group a color animal name.
So I'll call this group the pink flamingos, moved from the
reading center to the conversation center where they
practiced a dialogue involving numbers using English.
And then the students moved to an art center where they
received construction paper with seven doors cut into it, and
students numbered the doors one through seven and drew the day's
creation episode under it. Next, they moved to the drama
center. This, in fact, is not the
numbers lesson, this was the animals lesson and Noah's Ark
story was used as the text for the animals lesson, but the
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 involving numbers, in this case.
So I hope you get a sense then of some of how the program is
organized and indeed some of the ways in which students are
actively engaged in a way that the head mistress and the
students and the teachers at this school really appreciated
and felt that the interactive mode of instruction of extremely
useful and different from the didactic means of instruction
that most schools use. Parents at this school,
Christian and Muslim alike, generally supported the English
program, although with qualification.
One Muslim parent, whose daughter attended the program,
said that English gives light, -- in Swahili, English gives
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 she liked the program and valued
English, she could see why Muslim parents would withdraw
their children. And indeed Muslim parents did
withdraw their children in the subsequent years of this
program. Muslims, she said, are afraid
that their children will become "attracted to the missionaries.
Muslim parents don't want their kids singing Christian songs,"
as she put it. "It makes no good relationship
at school." When questioned off school
grounds, parents and teachers were even more critical and
questioning of the missionaries' program.
One parent said, "They want to steal our children and make them
into Europeans. The missionaries are like
witches in our village. They make our children to turn
against us." And I can assure you that was
not the missionary group's intention at all.
However, this is reporting back from some parents of the
children with whom they work. Now some people laughed at this
description because witchcraft and sorcery were supposed to
have been put aside. Church and school make these
things go away. Others recognized that this
parent was using the concept of witchcraft metaphorically for
characterizing the controversies and the hidden implications of
these missionaries' work. So this is sort of a picture of
what the program is about, the support that it has as an
English language program and then some of the outside of the
program comments that parents and teachers make about the
value and also potential drawbacks of the program itself.
So I'd like to turn now to another group.
Some Muslim groups consider the American missionaries more
specifically to be a proxy for the US war on terror.
This opinion was voiced, not only by people with whom I
spoke, but within an Islamic weekly that described the use of
religious curricula in Tanzanian schools as part of the US plan
to fight terrorism in East Africa by introducing
evangelical Christianity. I want to underscore I don't
think this is the intention, this is not the intention of
those evangelical missionaries with whom I worked.
I do want to underscore that this is an argument that their
work plays into in this region, and many of the college students
who were on this program newly for the first time every year
are not aware of these dynamics that they were working in.
So a little bit more specifically, in Tanzania in
this particular place where these missionaries work, the
politics of English versus Kiswahili language and religion,
put really strictly Christian versus Muslim religion, are
significant. The interface of those two
things are big issues that people talk about.
The East African Muslim Welfare Society had owned the school
that I just described. The Muslim welfare society was a
regional organization formed in the 1940s to promote economic
and educational opportunities for Muslims.
Nationalized, that means brought into the independent Tanzanian
state, in the 1960s, this group and the school are now part of
ministry organizations including this school is part of the
ministry of education public school system.
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 to involve religious groups in
working with public schools, some leaders from the Muslim
Welfare Association who are associated with the school have
called for its return to Muslim ownership and are particularly
vocal in questioning the presence of this American group
in teaching English in the school.
One of the classrooms where missionaries taught English, had
in fact, sort of a classroom about this size, had in fact
been an EAMWS Madrasa hall, where students used to recite
daily prayers and where adult members held Friday prayers,
prayers on Friday afternoon. So the very room where the
interactive lessons were taught had been the Madrasa hall of the
Muslim Welfare Society school. Were missionaries in fact trying
to convert students? Were they drawing them into a US
or American world view? In teaching children English, a
language that most students' parents, in this context, do not
know, were missionaries trying to influence and change
Tanzanian society? These were questions, reasonable
questions I would argue, that some Tanzanians asked.
They were also questions to which missionaries had very
clear answers when they were off school grounds.
Yes, they did hope to convert students.
This is the project which groups engage of course.
And yes, they did hope to connect students with an
international political economy that was, in missionaries'
minds, linked but not solely driven by US interest.
Most missionaries, however, had no idea of Tanzanian parents'
concerns. They were interested in using
biblical narratives as a backdrop to teach English and
thus to lay religious foundations for building public
education. I'd like to switch from that
setting to another setting, this one in Uganda.
And this particular vignette will emphasize a second strand,
or a third really, from parents, Muslim groups to now I'd like to
look at particular voices of the East African evangelical
ministers within the churches that these missionaries are
working to look at some of their thoughts on this mission group's
work. And this is the group that is
most closely connected theologically in terms of sort
of world view, if you will, with the missionaries themselves.
And they share a lot of common ground.
And I'd like to point out some of the places where there is not
only common thinking, I will accept and present that common
thinking for you up front, but I will also present some of the
thinking that is not always heard in the presentations that
missionaries themselves heard. So in addition to African's
concerns about evangelical missionaries' work dovetailing
with American policy, some East Africans within these churches
also expressed concern about missionaries lack of knowledge
about Africa and colonial history.
And here is something where I need to be sort of an emissary
myself because one Ugandan asked that I come back to the United
States and tell every audience that I spoke to that Americans
need to learn more about Africa and history.
And so this is the message that I'm bringing back.
Tell your students, he said, to study more about Africa and
history. They don't know enough.
So I'm going to plug African Studies 277 which is
a great course here that would be wonderful to have accessible
to lots of people. So some Ugandan evangelists
working with these missionaries, let's see, where am I here?
We'll stay there for a second. Some Ugandan evangelists working
with these missionaries described American evangelism as
a form of neocolonialism. Not questioning its theological
core but questioning the context in which people are working.
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. His language entirely.
Sometimes they say that where there is American money, there
should be American leadership. But if funding came directly to
Ugandans, we could pay Ugandan evangelists a living wage
instead of paying missionaries the equivalent of $75,000
annually, which is apparently what they get.
I thought it was very interesting.
As part of this research, I worked in the Billy Graham
archives down in Wheaton College, and this kind of
argument is something that I saw in the records from the 1970s
which was very shortly after independence.
The same kind of issues in these churches between more autonomy
for an independent African church and school and more sort
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 being made.
So funding, this Ugandan suggested, polarized the church.
He said, "It turns the Americans into masters and the Ugandans
into slaves. Like other evangelists," he
said, "he wanted Ugandans to run and manage the church's
projects." And in this place 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 African church to grow at a very
slow rate. This evangelist's Ugandan
colleague, so a colleague of this person, another 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 transparent.
This is especially true of the young men who come.
They're just making up their life," he said.
Meaning that they're not thinking clearly or planning
rationally but inventing a strategy as they go.
And he continued, "If things grow slowly, that is if the work
in church progresses poorly," he said, "missionaries will have an
excuse to keep returning. As it is, new cohorts of
missionaries reinvent the wheel," he said, "instead of
starting where their parents left off."
So I would argue that this generational imagery of father
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 and close connections in this
area that fathers and sons do have to one another.
And it's a kind of transposition of the sort of patrilineal
framework that people in East Africa live with onto what
they're seeing going on in African missionaries.
There's a kind of an irony to this perhaps that whereas
American missionaries I heard sometimes felt that East
Africans were nepotistic and employing family members in the
independent churches, the East Africans were arguing that
Americans were doing as much themselves in passing authority
from fathers to sons. And indeed I saw in this Uganda
church, this evangelical church, which is connected through
networks and missionaries and evangelists to the school that I
showed you in Tanzania, missionaries, American
missionaries, there is a father/son lineage that goes
down through the history of American evangelical groups
working there. So these are some of the parts
of the ethnographic research that I conducted, some of it.
There's a lot more detail that I'd be happy to go into in other
kinds of strands here. But I want to talk just a bit
about the implications of this. And there are many and I hope
you draw many more than what I'm presenting here.
But on the face of it, I would say that these ethnographic
details, you might argue, you might be skeptical, you might
say these ethnographic details are really parochial.
There are about a handful of missionaries working in
particular schools in Uganda and Tanzania and also there's a
Kenyan site too, but to return to the data that I cited earlier
and to look at an additional data point, between 1992 and
2001 the number of US missionaries working
internationally, not only in African here, I didn't have that
data, but number of US missionaries working
internationally increased by about 16%.
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 evangelism and away from sort of
pulpit preaching to more development in educational
public work. More and more, sorry, EMIS,
which is based at the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton
College, observes that these changes continue to occur.
More and more US missions are involved in providing Africans
with healthcare, family planning and education.
And to be sure, foreign missions provide social services that
African state programs cannot fund.
The smaller role of African states and the presence of NGOs,
nongovernmental organizations, has helped to position US
missionaries as key social service providers.
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 least, complex, particularly
when there is so much intolerance and tensions among
believers. No would be my answer, but this
topic requires more than a yes/no answer.
It requires us to think about what lessons, more broadly,
might be learned for various audiences.
And so, from what I see, the case that I've described here
provides insights into tensions that arise when well-intentioned
missionaries attempt to convert, specifically in this case,
Muslim students to Christianity or when they, specifically in
this case again, overlook the history and culture of fellow
African church members and colleagues.
It also provides insight for those who work in international
development agencies. And it does so by illustrating
or suggesting that it is important to recognize that
local counterparts are local colleagues, not passive
recipients of funding. African colleagues and
counterparts are well-educated, aware of history, they are
increasingly savvy about making sure that local development aid
meets local needs, as John Whitman, a colleague, recently
pointed out to me. For those who may volunteer, to
take another audience now, for those who may volunteer time or
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 to African run and African owned
agencies. Most countries in Africa have
been independent for over half a century.
Nearly two generations of Africans have grown up in an
independent world. Africans have studied history
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 many, many, many who I come
across in the work that I do have graduated from the UW
Madison or have siblings and cousins who come into contact
with UW Madison. It brings the point home even
more about the need to study Africa and history.
At the same time, I would argue, it's important to recognize that
the place of government agencies remains.
The NGO revolution of the late 1990s and the 21st century
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 US foreign policy, their work
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. Clearly missions are valuable.
Not only spiritually for many believers, but for providing
much needed social services. With their grassroots networks,
grassroots network of programs and churches, they're well
placed to deliver education. And far from being out of date
or a thing of the past, they are squarely involved in the
political economic changes occurring in contemporary
Africa. What remains to be seen is
whether their involvement today is a local high water mark or
will continue to grow. The trend has been upward over
the first decade of the 21st century.
Which direction it will continue to flow is an important question
that, I would argue, requires further observation and
research. Thank you.
I look forward to your questions and discussion.
[APPLAUSE]