WPT University Place	Global Hot Spots		Amy Stambach, "Religion, Education and the International Political Economy"		December 10, 2010	UP534    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]