Women Mission and Church in Uganda

Ethnographic encounters in an age of

imperialism 1895 1960s Routledge
Studies in Modern British History 1st
Edition Elizabeth Dimock
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmeta.com/product/women-mission-and-church-in-uganda-ethnographic-
encounters-in-an-age-of-imperialism-1895-1960s-routledge-studies-in-modern-british-
history-1st-edition-elizabeth-dimock/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

The Historical Value of Myths Routledge Studies in

Modern History 1st Edition John Karabelas

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-historical-value-of-myths-
routledge-studies-in-modern-history-1st-edition-john-karabelas/

Civil Religion and the Enlightenment in England 1707

1800 Studies in Modern British Religious History vol 40
1st Edition Ashley Walsh

https://ebookmeta.com/product/civil-religion-and-the-
enlightenment-in-england-1707-1800-studies-in-modern-british-
religious-history-vol-40-1st-edition-ashley-walsh/

Routledge Library Editions British in India Routledge

https://ebookmeta.com/product/routledge-library-editions-british-
in-india-routledge/

The Muslim Reception of European Orientalism Reversing

the Gaze Routledge Studies in Modern History 1st
Edition Susannah Heschel

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-muslim-reception-of-european-
orientalism-reversing-the-gaze-routledge-studies-in-modern-
history-1st-edition-susannah-heschel/
Green Landscapes in the European City 1750 2010
Routledge Studies in Modern European History 1st
Edition Peter Clark Marjaana Niemi

https://ebookmeta.com/product/green-landscapes-in-the-european-
city-1750-2010-routledge-studies-in-modern-european-history-1st-
edition-peter-clark-marjaana-niemi/

Nicholas of Cusa s Brixen Sermons and Late Medieval

Church Reform Studies in the History of Christian
Thought Studies in the History of Christian Thought 182
Richard J. Serina
https://ebookmeta.com/product/nicholas-of-cusa-s-brixen-sermons-
and-late-medieval-church-reform-studies-in-the-history-of-
christian-thought-studies-in-the-history-of-christian-
thought-182-richard-j-serina/

Cross Cultural Encounters in Modern World History 1453

Present 2nd Edition Jon Thares Davidann

https://ebookmeta.com/product/cross-cultural-encounters-in-
modern-world-history-1453-present-2nd-edition-jon-thares-
davidann/

Gender Authorship and Early Modern Women s

Collaboration Early Modern Literature in History
Patricia Pender

https://ebookmeta.com/product/gender-authorship-and-early-modern-
women-s-collaboration-early-modern-literature-in-history-
patricia-pender/

The Trial of Giordano Bruno Routledge Research in Early

Modern History 1st Edition Maifreda

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-trial-of-giordano-bruno-
routledge-research-in-early-modern-history-1st-edition-maifreda/
Women, Mission and Church in
Uganda

This volume recounts the experiences of female missionaries who

worked in Uganda in and after 1895. It examines the personal
stories of those women who were faced with a stubbornly masculine
administration representative of a wider masculine administrative
network in Westminster and other outposts of the British Empire.
Encounters with Ugandan women and men of a range of ethnicities,
the gender relations in those societies and relations between the
British Protectorate administration and Ugandan Christian women
are all explored in detail. The analysis is offset by the author’s
experience of working in Uganda at the close of British Protectorate
status in the 1960s, employed by the Uganda Government Education
Department in a school founded by the Uganda Mission.

Elizabeth Dimock is Honorary Research Fellow in the History

Programme at La Trobe University, Australia.

Routledge Studies in Modern British History

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com

8 Disability in Eighteenth-Century England

Imagining Physical Impairment
 David M. Turner

9 British Student Activism in the Long Sixties

Caroline M. Hoefferle

10 Philanthropy and Voluntary Action in the First World War

Mobilizing Charity
Peter Grant

11 The British Army Regular Mounted Infantry 1880–1913

Andrew Winrow

12 The Chartist General

Charles James Napier, The Conquest of Sind, and Imperial
Liberalism
Edward Beasley

13 The Great Church Crisis and the End of English

Erastianism, 1898–1906
Bethany Kilcrease

14 Opening Schools and Closing Prisons

Caring for Destitute and Delinquent Children in Scotland 1812–
1872
Andrew Ralston

15 Charles Pelham Villiers

Aristocratic Victorian Radical
Roger Swift

16 British Politics, Society and Empire, 1852–1945

Essays in Honour of Trevor O. Lloyd
David W. Gutzke
Women, Mission and Church
in Uganda
Ethnographic Encounters in an Age of Imperialism,
1895–1960s

Elizabeth Dimock
First published 2017
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2017 Elizabeth Dimock

The right of Elizabeth Dimock to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by
her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered

trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Dimock, Elizabeth, author.
Title: Women, mission and church in Uganda : ethnographic encounters
in an age of imperialism, 1895–1960s / Elizabeth Dimock.
Other titles: Routledge studies in modern British history ; v 16.
Description: New York : Routledge, 2017. | Series: Routledge studies in
modern British history ; v 16 | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016048339 | ISBN 9781138228344 (hardback : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781315392745 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Church Missionary Society. Uganda Mission—History. |
Women missionaries—Uganda—Social conditions—20th century. |
Women—Uganda—Social conditions—20th century. | Missions,
British—Uganda—History—20th century.
Classification: LCC HQ1797 .D56 2017 | DDC 305.432660234106761—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016048339

ISBN: 978-1-138-22834-4 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-39274-5 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
For my five beautiful granddaughters: Grace, Imogen, Leela,
Alwynne and Madeline
Contents

Illustrations
Acknowledgements
A note on orthography and semantics
A note on primary sources

Introduction

PART I Imperial awakenings

1 Women, the Church Missionary Society and imperialism

2 ‘In journeyings oft’: missionary journeys to and around Uganda at

the end of the nineteenth century

PART II Arrivals

3 ‘Welcome’ encounters: early relations with Ugandans

4 Female missionaries and moral authority: a case study from Toro

PART III Mission and Church

5 Ugandan women and the Church: generational change

6 The experience of women in mission and Church organisations

7 Training for motherhood: the Mothers’ Union

PART IV Tensions within

8 A Christian women’s protest in Buganda in 1931

9 Tensions within the Uganda Mission: gender and patriarchy

Conclusion: links – 1895–1960s

Index
Illustrations

Figures

0.1 The missionary party for Uganda, 1895

1.1 Administrative structure of the Church Missionary Society in 1895
1.2 CMS missionaries by gender
3.1 Kabaka Mwanga’s Namasole, 1894
5.1 Deborah Kiwanika, Gayaza School Archive
9.1 Administrative structure of the Uganda Mission in relation to the
CMS in London, 1895–1935

Maps

0.1 Districts of Uganda

3.1 Route of the 1895 Uganda party
Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the continuing support of La Trobe University over

many years, for grants for fieldwork that enabled me to visit libraries
and institutions in England and Uganda and funding for the
Borchardt library to purchase CMS archives on microfilm of the
Uganda Mission for the period 1914–1935. Academic staff and
postgraduates in the History programme have been a source of
intellectual stimulus, and I gained much from seminars on theory
and method and from a Feminist History reading group, along with
specific criticism of my work. The winds of change blew
postmodernism through History during my doctoral candidature, and
I particularly acknowledge the inspiration gained from the late
Emeritus Professor Rhys Isaac. I thank Professor Diane Kirkby for
her early encouragement to publish in the area called ‘Dealing with
Difference’. I owe many thanks to Drs Cheryl Crockett and Lee-Ann
Monk for reading recent chapters of this volume; to them and to my
colleagues Yvonne Ward and Janet Butler, thank you for your
friendship and continued encouragement. Dr Apollo Nsubuga Kyobe
assisted me with the translation of documents in Luganda, for which
I am most grateful. I have had considerable help from staff in the
Borchardt library, and thank Eva Fisch who has been a continuing
source of support.
Dr David Dorward attempted to keep me on a steady course in
supervising my doctoral research, and I am deeply indebted to him;
his knowledge of African history has been invaluable. I take full
responsibility, however, for the production of this volume.
In Uganda, the National Council for Science and Technology and
the President’s Office gave permission for my research project, and
the Maker-ere Institute for Social Research (MISR) gave me
affiliation and access to the Makerere University Library. Amos
Rwabera (MISR) translated letters from Luganda. There were many
who helped to make my brief period of fieldwork satisfactory. The
late Bishops Amos Betungura and Akisoferi Wesonga drove me
around their dioceses enabling me to interview people. The late
Bishop Misaeri Kauma encouraged me, and I am appreciative of the
late Archbishop Yona Okoth who allowed me to use the archives of
the Church of Uganda at Namirembe. I was able to use the library at
Mukono College. The principal of Gayaza Girls’ High School, Ruth
Kavuma, allowed me to use the school’s historical records, and I was
able to discuss the school’s history with staff members; I also thank
Victoria Kisarale, Head Teacher in 2016, for further allowing the use
of historical photos. The headmistress of Kyebambe Girls School in
Toro allowed me to use school archives. Helen Wangusa, the
Mothers’ Union worker for the Province of Uganda, helped me to
locate women who had been associated with the Mothers’ Union
some decades ago. It was most pleasurable interviewing women and
men about the early history of the Church of Uganda, their
experience as members of the Church and their memories of, and
friendships with female missionaries. These included Elsie Kajubi,
Deborah Kiwanika, Norah Pande, Yemima Sajjabi, Florence Nekyon,
Ruth Nsubuga, Christine Sebaduka, Lillian Mukwaya, Eresi
Muntukwonka, Mrs Bikangaga, Erina Kigozi, Geraldine Sabiti, Betty
Kanyamunyu, Mrs Magali, Marjorie Kabuzi, Grace Bwayo, Ruth
Baddakwaya, Janet Wesonga, Canon A. J. Binaisa, Eridade Mulira,
Ananias Murumba, Eriasa Mugimba, many of whom are now
deceased. I thank them, or their families, all.
In Britain, I had access to the CMS Archive, first in Waterloo Road
and later in the University of Birmingham, Cadbury Research Library:
Special Collections Services, and I thank Ken Osborne, for allowing
the use of images in this volume, and the Archivist in the University
of Birmingham. I have talked with many former missionaries and
others involved with the CMS, and thank Gwen Cashmore, a
colleague and friend from my work period in Uganda, the late Dr
Louise Pirouet, who read an earlier draft of my work and Dr Kevin
Ward who read more recent chapters. My contact with the Church
Mission Society of Australia has also been fruitful and I particularly
thank Dr Colin Reed for his advice and friendship.
I thank Professor H. B. Hansen for allowing me to use Map 0.1.
My son, Joss Dimock, has helped in the production of maps and
photographs, for which I am very grateful.
Finally, my thanks go to my whole family for their patience and
forbearance through a long period of time, when gender roles in the
family have been greatly disturbed. Their encouragement has never
wavered.
A note on orthography and
semantics

The use of titles and descriptive words in several local languages in

Southern Uganda requires an explanatory note. Prefixes determine
variations of base words. Although these vary between languages,
and orthography is contested, I have maintained a uniform,
simplified method. This is demonstrated in the usage of Buganda,
the territory of the Baganda people (singular muganda), whose
language is Luganda. In describing the culture and artefacts, I have
used baganda for the sake of simplicity, rather than the linguistically
correct kiganda.
In other parts of Southern Uganda, culturally and linguistically
distinct from Buganda, there are some common prefixes. These are
used in the text, but where deviation occurs, explanation is given in
a footnote.
Place names are particularly difficult because of variations in
usage. To maintain consistency I have used the orthography of the
Atlas of Uganda, which provided an authoritative orthography when
it was published in 1962, at the end of the colonial period. There
are, nevertheless, a few names that do not appear in the Atlas,
which have either fallen out of use, or are minor names. Some I
have been unable to locate on any map. For these, the orthography
of the archival source is used.
A note on primary sources

I have used archives of the Church Missionary Society (courtesy of

Adam Matthew) in the Microfilm collection of the Borchardt library at
La Trobe University. The microfilm series is from the CMS archive in
Special Collections in the University of Birmingham library, and
includes incoming and outgoing correspondence, original reports,
papers and letter books of the Nyanza, the East Equatorial Africa and
the Uganda Missions for the period 1895 to 1935. These are referred
to by the classification system of the CMS archive, and I have used
the abbreviation CMSB to precede the classification. G3 is the area
code for Africa (Group III), A5 refers to the East Equatorial Africa
Mission and A7 to the Uganda Mission, which separated from the
East Equatorial Africa Mission when Uganda became a separate
diocese in 1898. O denotes Original Papers, L Letter Books (for
outgoing correspondence from London), P Precis Books (for
incoming correspondence). Footnotes specify details of each
document with its date. Miss Furley’s Journal, though published in
part in the Church Missionary Gleaner during 1896, is also listed
among Incoming Letters from Uganda. Both have been consulted.
Other CMS archives were examined at the University of
Birmingham. These included Women’s Department archives, which
come under a code W/, and Miss Allen’s letters under a
Miscellaneous code, listed as Z/38. In describing the latter, the
recipient of the letter and the date are given. At CMS headquarters
in London before the complete transfer of the archive collection to
Birmingham, I viewed publications such as the Church Missionary
Gleaner and the Church Missionary Intelligencer as well as an
unpublished Register of Female Missionaries, List II, for the period
after 1905.
In Uganda, archives of the Uganda Mission and the Church of
Uganda were consulted in the library of Makerere University. I have
used the abbreviation CMSM to precede the classification. These
included minutes of Ladies’ Committees and Missionary Committees,
and of the Women’s Conference meetings held at Mengo from 1919
to 1935. The latter are in Luganda. These are referred to in the text
with a full description and date. I used translated copies.
In the Provincial headquarters of the Church of Uganda, I
examined Mothers’ Union archives. The Mothers’ Union letters and
other correspondence covering the 1931 Christian Women’s protest
were classed together in the collection called the Bishops’ Files,
under a subcategory, Women’s Central Conference.
Abbreviations: CMSB: CMS University of Birmingham Library;
CMSM: CMS Makerere University Library.
Introduction

In 1895 five women set out from England for the East African coast
to travel to the inland kingdom of Buganda. The Misses Edith Furley,
Mary Thomsett, Louise Pilgrim, Eleanor Brown and Elizabeth
Chadwick were the first female recruits for the Church Missionary
Society’s Uganda Mission. Only five months before, the Church
Missionary Gleaner had noted:
Shall a party of Christian ladies start for Uganda next spring? No English woman has yet
reached Uganda, or even essayed to go; but the Mission sorely needs them; the Baganda
women are waiting to be taught as only women can teach them; and Bishop Tucker
earnestly desires them. But the road is long and trying; the journey will be a severe test
of physical strength; there can be no frequent coming and going… and the party should
be a picked one indeed.
(CM Gleaner, December 1894)

These words, published in a widely read monthly journal of the

Church Missionary Society (hereinafter CMS), reflect the thrill of the
anticipated departure of these women on an epic journey to the
interior of East Africa at a time when European imperialism was
impacting on this part of the continent.
The women were all ‘ladies’, that is, women of the middle or upper-
middle class, with experience in teaching, nursing and parish work.
These were all aspects of Women’s Work and part of the domestic
sphere, but these women were moving into the public sphere
through their involvement, indeed employment, by a major
missionary society (CM Gleaner, February, May 1895: 66; Stock 1899
III: 735–736; Register of Missionaries 1905; Pirouet 1978: 233–234).
All were part of a wave of enthusiasm by women for overseas
missions in the last two decades of the nineteenth century.
 Edith Furley, the senior woman, was the only one with missionary
experience, having worked in Mombasa in the East Equatorial Africa
Mission since 1892. Mombasa was the port of entry for travel to the
interior. Alfred Tucker, who became Bishop in 1890, travelled
extensively through the diocese that extended from the coast to
Uganda and included the whole of what is now Kenya and much of
Tanganyika. Bishop Tucker’s primary interest in the following years
was Uganda, where he eventually became Bishop when a new
diocese was created in 1897. Prior to this he had seen Miss Furley at
work in the Mombasa area, recognised her attributes, asked her to
join the party for Uganda, then sent her home to prepare for the new
work and join the other women who had been selected.1 At forty-one
and the oldest woman in the group, she had been a teacher of
cookery and a nurse at the Royal Infirmary, Hull, before starting her
missionary service.
Mary Thomsett (age thirty-four) also had personal knowledge of
Britain’s empire, having lived for some years in Hong Kong. She was
a qualified nurse and trained in Church work in Aston, Birmingham.
Louise Pilgrim (age thirty-two) from Cheltenham, another qualified
nurse, had studied in Glasgow and trained as a missionary at ‘The
Willows’, the CMS training house for women, as did Eleanor Brown
(age twenty-nine) from Dublin who was a governess with experience
in nursing. Elizabeth Chadwick (age twenty-six) came directly from
Ireland where she had done voluntary work in her father’s parish and
subsequently in the diocese of Armagh where her father was dean;
she had worked there in the Girls’ Friendly Society. She represented
another element in the recruiting of women, as daughter of a senior
clergyman who was part of the Establishment.
There were five new male missionaries and two doctors, one
specially appointed to accompany this party from London to its
destination, the other, a missionary on loan from the CMS mission in
Tanganyika. Bishop Tucker was to lead the party from Mombasa to
Uganda. The women, along with the new men, were farewelled at
Queen’s Hall in Langham Place on 16 May 1895 before a gathering of
more than two thousand people, the floor, balcony and upper
galleries all crowded, the President of the Society Sir John Kennaway
in the chair, and the ‘Instructions’ for the five ladies given by the Rev
Baylis, secretary for the Africa group of missions. Edith Furley
responded for the women, referring to the difficulties of the journey,
the work before them in Uganda, and telling of her confidence in ‘the
guidance and grace of God’, all this a remarkable feat of public
speaking at a time when women were not encouraged to take to the
rostrum, and not an easy task before such a large gathering.
Two days later, the party set out for Southampton and large crowds
of well-wishers assembled at Waterloo station and at the docks to bid
them Godspeed. This was the start of a four and a half month
journey, via the Cape of Good Hope. We will follow their journey
more fully in Chapter 2, but suffice it to say here that the route to the
interior was regarded as dangerous and the decision to send women
had been contentious in the CMS. They reached Mengo, the
headquarters of the CMS in Uganda on 4 October, 139 days after
leaving London. As they passed the British government fort, Miss
Furley noted in her diary, the British colonial officer at the
government station dipped the Union Jack (Furley, CM Gleaner,
February 1896: 26), a symbolic gesture undoubtedly, honouring the
completion of their epic journey to the fountains of the Nile.
Following in the footsteps of Speke, Burton, Stanley and others who
had contributed so stirringly to the perceptions of the British people,
the arrival of these first women delighted the interest of missionary
supporters at home and in Buganda where hundreds of people came
out to greet them.
Figure 0.1 The missionary party for Uganda, 1895
Left to right: Miss Brown, Miss Chadwick, Miss Furley, Miss Pilgrim,
Miss Thomsett, Dr Rattray, Mr F. H. Wright, Rev. M. J. Hall, Rev. T. R.
Buckley, Mr J. B. Purvis (CM Gleaner, 1895: 104).

Background
Eastern Africa had for several decades been a region that excited the
thoughts of British people as exploration, particularly for the sources
of the Nile gave way to a new wave of anti-slavery endeavour. David
Livingstone had drawn attention to Arab slave-trading routes inland
from the east coast of Africa, and after his death many British and
European missionary societies became involved in efforts to
Christianise and replace the trade in slaves with other goods. The
Church Missionary Society had been active in planning a missionary
party for Buganda since 1875 following the visit of journalist turned
explorer Henry Morton Stanley. Stanley found that the ruler, Kabaka
Mutesa, was interested in pursuing links with European powers and
was not averse to hearing about Christianity. On the strength of this
the CMS established the Nyanza Mission, named after the lake next
to which Mutesa’s kingdom was situated, and the first missionaries
set out for Buganda in 1877 (Matson 1981). The imaginings of an
earlier explorer, John Hanning Speke, named the lake Victoria after
the English Queen, and thus it was called in the British lexicon. The
Mission was later renamed the Uganda Mission.
Map 0.1
From Districts
H. B. Hansen,of Uganda
Mission, Church and State in a Colonial Setting: Uganda 1890–1925,
London, Heinemann, 1984.

The missionaries’ early experience with Mutesa was not promising.

From the start they were embroiled in political as well as religious
issues. Mutesa’s desire was to secure European support in his
hostilities with the neighbouring kingdom of Bunyoro and protection
from Egyptian advances along the upper Nile valley. Mutesa was
disappointed because they did not bring the firearms that he needed.
He and his successor Mwanga, furthermore, were confronted with
competing Islamic, Roman Catholic and Anglican religious factions.
Arab traders had introduced Islam into the interior earlier in the
century, and Roman Catholicism arrived with the White Fathers
Mission in 1879 shortly after the Anglican CMS missionaries. The
Kabakas shifted their interest from one faction to another through the
1880s and early 1890s with accompanying clashes and at times full-
scale civil war. Religious factionalism went hand in hand with a
further constraint as European powers sought control over this part
of Africa. Britain, Germany and Belgium were pressing Mutesa and
other nearby rulers to make trade treaties in return for guaranteeing
protection against local or external powers, thus commencing a
complex interaction between them that continued through several
decades (Hansen 1992; Twaddle 1992, 1993; Musisi 1999; Hansen
and Twaddle 2002; Low 1963, 1965, 2010).
In this politically charged melee, male missionaries of the CMS
sought to advance Christianity, with considerable success. They
represented the interest of Church of England evangelicalism which,
linked with Radical politics in mid-century, had supported the
‘civilising mission’ in Africa. Increasingly between 1877 and 1894,
missionaries in Uganda and the CMS administration in London
advocated annexation, aligning the CMS with those interests that
favoured a British imperial presence in this region of Africa. Bishop
Tucker was an outspoken exponent of annexation, spending
considerable periods of time in London to this effect (Griffiths 2001).
There were no female missionaries in Uganda before 1895, nor had
male missionaries had approval to be accompanied by wives or other
female relatives. English women were striving to gain entry into the
CMS not merely as the wives, sisters or daughters of male
missionaries but in their own right, a theme more fully explored in
Chapter 1. In Uganda, however, there were increasing numbers of
Baganda women converts in the fledgling Church.2 In 1892 a meeting
of Mengo Church Council, the administrative core of the Native
Anglican Church, discussed the need for female teachers for Baganda
women, and female ‘elders’ were appointed while requests were sent
to London for female missionaries (Pirouet 1978: 16). It was not until
the affirmation of Protectorate status in 1894 that Bishop Tucker
asked the CMS secretaries in London to send women to Uganda. The
arrival of the first five women thus coincided with the beginning of
British administration. While Buganda was the first territory to be
accessed, missionary work soon expanded into adjacent lands.3
While they were the product and were proud of their British
imperial background, which I refer to throughout, the role of these
women nonetheless was to be marginal to the public sphere of
administration and imperial politics, although they had significant
influence on Ugandan women, bringing ideas from the English
domestic sphere in which Christian tenets and middle-class values
were integrated; separate from, but nevertheless supportive of the
public sphere. There was a paradox, for these single women did not
wholly represent the domestic sphere. They were in many respects
‘fleeing the confines of their times’ (Pratt 1992: 171). Work in mission
fields overseas had become a means by which middle-class women
could find an alternative to marriage, although it did not necessarily
preclude marriage, as I will show in Chapter 8.
The arrival of this party marked the beginning of Women’s Work,
that is, work specifically with women as a separate section of CMS
work in Uganda. I use the term Women’s Work as it was used in CMS
archival material. Although there was, as we will see, a strong focus
on spiritual and devotional matters, domesticity, the family, marriage
and children were a component of teaching and practice. This agenda
was acceptable to the Baganda and other inter-lacustrine ethnicities,
in part because it affirmed aspects of the pre-colonial period, as
shown in Chapters 5, 6 and 7. Chapter 8 however reflects the reality
that marriage and inheritance issues were in conflict with cultural
values. My reading of a protest by Christian women in Buganda in
1931 shows an increasingly divided society concerning matters that
were of extreme importance to Baganda women.
My text is concerned with women and imperialism, with analysis of
gendered institutions in Britain and colonial Uganda and with gender
relations in some of the ethnicities that make up Uganda. CMS
archival material, which includes extensive writings by these early
female missionaries, gives insight as to how gender determined the
manners, conduct and performance of missionaries, intersecting
variably with their imperial or colonising self-construct. Esme Cleall
recently used missionary writings ‘as a prism through which [she] can
write about colonial discourse’ (Cleall 2012: 2), a central theme here,
but of special relevance in Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 9. As my analysis
shows, however, the personality of individuals was sometimes at odds
with anticipated outcomes. By examining the experience of women
and men in given situations, I try to show the complexity of the
ethnographic encounter between missionaries and Ugandan men and
women and between men and women within the Mission.
The CMS was the only Protestant society to be active in Uganda in
the colonial period, although there were several Roman Catholic
missionary societies, and within the Protestant society eventual
divisions and breakaway movements. The East African Revival (EAR)
evolved from the Bible Churchman’s Missionary Society formed within
the CMS in 1922. The EAR has been the subject of important
scholarship in relation to new understandings of the politics of the
middle colonial period (Reed 1997; Peterson 2012; Ward and Wild-
Wood 2012) but here I touch on the subject only marginally.
My undertaking lies in the borderland of history and ethnography,
and within mega-narratives of mission history, African encounters
with Christianity in the modern world, women’s history and imperial
studies specifically between 1895 and the mid 1930s, more generally
for the whole of the colonial period. Of these, I will say more, but
first, I must explain my role in this present volume.
My interest and personal connection with Uganda relate to the
closing years of British imperial involvement in East Africa. As a
teacher in the 1960s I worked in Uganda shortly after Independence.
Teachers for East Africa (TEA) was an Anglo-American government
project designed to assist the expansion of secondary schooling in
East Africa with the purpose of creating an educated workforce for an
Africanised civil service and new Uganda government projects, but
also to enable American as well as British influence in the East
African territories. My journey was a nine-hour flight from London to
Entebbe, a very different experience from those first British women
travelling in 1895. Walking down the steps of a Comet aircraft onto
the airstrip, as one did in the 1960s, the sudden jolt of arriving in the
tropics was unlike the gradual three-month sojourn of those women
travelling by sea and land. The musky smell of tropical vegetation in
the dawn landing, only a few night-time hours from bustling, cold
Heathrow, was a delight to the senses furthered by the sight and
sounds of exotic birds and monkeys and on the road into Kampala
increasing numbers of Baganda men and women, the men often clad
in white kanzus, the women in brilliantly coloured bisuttis with babies
on their backs and water-pots on their heads.
Met by friends, I was helped with purchasing a car to drive to my
final destination. I was posted to Nyakasura, a boarding school close
to the western border of Uganda, a further five- to six-hour drive on
mainly murrum roads, a journey that I was able to do by myself. The
headmaster of the school, the Rev Everard Perrens, also met me in
Kampala and he and his wife drove half an hour behind me, to stay
out of my dust cloud, but to cover any untoward happenings. Later, I
was to hear stories of buses carrying students to school at the
beginning of term delayed by lions sleeping on the warm road
surfaces. My destination, a school for boys, founded in the 1920s by
ex-naval Commander Caldwell in the Uganda Mission, had come
under the direction of the Uganda Government Education Department
before Independence and was in a senior secondary school, in which
teaching was in English, and in one that was chosen to have an
intake of girls, important at a time when girls’ education to high
senior secondary levels was being rapidly expanded. Women teachers
were needed as well as men.
Arriving there was a magical moment, for the school nestled below
the northern end of the Ruwenzori Mountains, those fabled
Mountains of the Moon that Ptolemy had added to his map of the
world in the second century. As a geographer I was thrilled to have
employment in this environment on the edge of one of the major rift
valleys of Africa, an area of relatively recent volcanic activity and lava
flows, with views of the mountains and occasionally of the snow-
capped peaks on the equator. There was the privilege of teaching
young Ugandan boys and girls, men and women, some of whom
were much older than their equivalents in secondary schools in
Britain because of the way the education system had evolved. Senior
secondary schools were closely associated with the English education
system and my school submitted students to the highest levels of the
Cambridge Education Board.
A lasting memory of my experience was of the turmoil existing
below the surface of teacher-pupil relations, a situation that reflected
frictions between pre-Independence mission authorities and
government alongside tensions between a people wanting
independence and the colonial authority, in other words the
aftermath of British imperialism. In those early post-Independence
years, these attitudes and feelings were still raw, added to by various
interethnic rivalries in a secondary school system where students
were drawn from the whole country, as part of government policy.
While English was the language of teaching, and dormitories were
mixed groups of students from different districts and ethnicities, it
was hard for students to accept that they should not speak their own,
first language; but this was a school rule.
My approach now has been coloured by my experience of working
in Uganda in the 1960s, which has provided reflective material for my
text. I was not a missionary, but the school still had missionary
teachers and my appointment, sanctioned by the missionary
headmaster, was probably approved because I had an Anglican
background. As a child I had won Sunday school prizes, often
publications from the South India Mission where my vicar had worked
before returning as incumbent in an English parish when his children
had reached a critical school age. As Clare Midgley noted, aspects of
empire are deep-rooted in the lives of many British people in some
form or other (2007: 4–5). For me, growing up in the 1940s and ’50s,
this was a limited awareness of missionaries at work in the empire, of
newspaper and newsreel interest in India and the partition of the
subcontinent, and of activism by political leaders in Africa. By the
1960s however there was sweeping change, which overlapped with
my early career and set in motion my own questions about Africa and
decolonisation.
Historiography and theory

My doctoral research, which forms the core of this volume, belongs to

the 1990s, when I was reconsidering these earlier events in my life
and the effects of the colonial period and missionary enterprise on
Uganda. Looking back now and reflecting on changing histories, we
know that the period following World War II was pivotal in the British
and other European empires, as demands for self-government
increased and funding requirements for post-war reconstruction in
England superseded to some extent the needs of the colonies. Frantz
Fanon and Albert Memmi asserted the right of blacks and the
‘colonised’ to their own cultural and political expression in opposition
to imperialist culture (Fanon 1952; Memmi 1967) and Leopold
Senghor, Aimé Césaire and Cheik Anta Diop expounded the concept
of Negritude, furthered by Ali Mazrui, Bethwell Ogot and a younger
generation of academics writing Africa-centred histories. British
historians of empire only slowly took these into account. In 1963,
Oliver and Mathew in the introduction to a History of East Africa
(ironically a Colonial Office publication) wrote that their volume was a
new venture that moved away from focusing entirely on the imperial
structures or seeing East African history solely as a record of
European enterprise (Oliver and Mathew 1963: xi). This was a shift of
emphasis for Western academics, towards examining colonial
histories from the point of view of the colonised.
Through the 1950s and 1960s African colonies became
independent and initiatives like Teachers for East Africa, the American
Peace Corps, British Voluntary Service Overseas and many European
ventures sent thousands of personnel into Africa, many of them
young, highly educated and intellectually curious. On returning to
their home countries, they carried new understandings of Africa that
fed into the Civil Rights and black consciousness movements in the
US, and new questionings of Western hegemony during and after the
Vietnam War. Students demonstrated against structures of authority,
power and privilege, and women took up a similar challenge as
gender-based critiques pointed to their own disadvantaged status.
 The women’s movement led to new disciplinary fields in feminist
history and Women’s Studies. Critiques of male control of knowledge
production thus emerged paralleling critiques of imperialism and a
decentring process in Western epistemologies. Overall, this pointed
the way for new approaches. These have all affected the ways in
which histories are now written and how I approached my subject in
the 1990s and now.
Importantly, from Africa, while there had been a history of
nationalist movements from earlier in the century, an African literary
genre emerged with the early writings of Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o
and Okot p’Bitek and the woman-centred work of Flora Nwapa and
Bessie Head, all expressing an African world view. Ngugi’s later works
Decolonising the Mind (1981) and Moving the Centre (1993) were
important texts in post-colonial writing, engaging with the politics of
language and cultural freedom in relation to Western thinking and
scholarly practice. For me, teaching in western Uganda in the 1960s,
the early fiction of Ngugi and Achebe was important in opening my
eyes, but also in my students gaining greater understanding of the
background to internal conflicts in their own country.4 The English
department in my school was progressive and some of those early
texts were available as class sets, and new publications came into the
school library or personal staff libraries that students had access to.
Those writers were role models for students. The conclusion looks
briefly at education in the 1960s in the immediate wake of
independence, when there was an extended focus on the education
of girls and increasing recruitment of women, not only as
missionaries but also as Uganda Education Department employees.
In the same period there was critical assessment of the imposition
of Christianity on pre-colonial religions not only by African theologians
but also by missionaries. The scholarship of John V. Taylor (a CMS
missionary who worked in Uganda before becoming the general
secretary of the CMS in London) and later Lamin Sanneh and Kwame
Bediako have taken this theme further in fields that intersect with
anthropology, religious studies and history and prioritise African
understandings of God and religion (Taylor 1963; Sanneh 1989,
1993; Bediako 1992, 1995; Spear and Kimambo 1999). African
theologians have contributed powerfully to understanding how and
why Christianity has spread across the continent absorbing African
cultural imperatives.
Valentin Mudimbe in The Invention of Africa made a major
contribution to what has become known as the ‘imperial turn’ (Said
1978; Mudimbe 1988). Mudimbe’s analysis of the invention of Africa
in Western epistemology pointed to the integration of knowledge and
power in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western culture and to
the development of a Western-centred intellectual paradigm,
Africanism. Although Mudimbe’s analysis offered too simplistic a view
of the complexities of colonising structures and thought, it provided
challenging models for examination that I take up in Chapter 4 in an
analysis of the moral authority of female missionaries and the
intersection of imperial and missionary discourses with local African
world views.
Mudimbe’s writings and the scholarship of Joan Scott were of
particular relevance to my research in the 1990s, and in this
rewriting. The use of gender as an analytical tool suggested methods
by which gender could bring new definitions and fresh ways of
looking at history. I was interested in those missionary women, how
they were motivated and how they worked with each other, with
male missionaries in the Uganda Mission and with African women
whom they worked alongside. I wondered what my motivation in the
1960s had in common with them. I was concerned with the notion of
‘power as dispersed constellations of unequal relationships’ (Scott
1986: 1067) and a focus on the personal, on experience and lived
realities (Scott 1992: 34).5 Different from the imperial histories of an
earlier period, such ideas gave a framework to examining gender
relations in a missionary society in which hierarchy and male
authority were significant; relevant also to examining how white
female missionaries related to black African women in a colonial
setting, and to gender relations in African societies that were already
being transformed by colonising influences and Christianity.
The roles that women played in English imperialism, the exclusion
of women from British political and administrative involvement and
how women counteracted these male-constructed positions also set
new parameters for feminist scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s.
Examining both the complicity of Western women with colonialism
and their resistance to it, Margaret Strobel addressed this in relation
to the British Empire, pointing to the dilemma in analyses of those
who went to the colonies ‘to help’. ‘Good intentions’, she wrote, ‘do
not compensate for destructive actions,’ yet she believed that one
should not ‘expect people to transcend completely the values and
attitudes of their times’ (Strobel 1989, 1991: ix). This is a fitting
problem when looking at missionary women who went to Uganda, for
their raison d’être was to convert women and to raise those women’s
lives from the perceived degradation of ‘heathenism’. They were
women of their time and they went ‘to help’. The encounters however
were more complex. Those first female missionaries found Christian
communities that included women with a serious involvement in
evangelism (Pirouet 1978). Assessment of their success must look to
the response of Ugandan women, which I explore in this volume,
though recognising that African women’s voices from a century ago
can be only incompletely heard from the distance of time, relative
archival silences and through the intermediary of Western women’s
voices like my own.
When I went to Uganda in 1964, I too was swept up in an ideology
of ‘help’, of giving assistance to those new African countries. The
official view in London, still an imperial imperative, was that raised
levels of education, health and agricultural development would help
bring African political and economic systems more in line with the
West. At the time, internal criticism of this view was limited, at any
rate to my generation of recruits, although questioning was beginning
to arise. Understandings of the Cold War and the conflicting influence
of Western powers vis-à-vis the USSR, China and the Eastern bloc
seemed of minimal significance on the ground. There was, however,
for we men and women, as with those of the 1890s, the excitement
of travelling and working in Africa, along with the partially blinkered
views of a Western upbringing.
A considerable body of scholarship had emerged by the 1990s that
enabled a better understanding of the gendered culture from which
imperialism and the missionary movement evolved. Davidoff and
Hall’s early feminist publication Family Fortunes was important in
examining women’s subordinate yet influential roles, and ‘the
Protestant ethic [that] endowed women with a strong sense of self, a
belief in their individual responsibility for their own souls’. This was a
factor in determining women moving into philanthropic and
missionary ‘work’ at home and, increasingly, towards the end of the
century, overseas. Scholarship by Alison Twells developed these
nineteenth-century themes in vivid personal and family stories
(Davidoff and Hall 1987: 117; Twells 1998). Chapters 1 and 2 here
provide background to similar women including the first five and
others who went to Uganda.
Hall’s later work showed the importance of ‘white, male and middle
class’ in the social landscape of England, which contribute to my
understandings of the CMS (Hall 1992, 2002: 11–13). The central
administration of the CMS was essentially English rather than British
even though the development of the home support network
increasingly progressed westward and north from London and
southeast England and recruits came from a wider area. When
women missionaries were being recruited in the CMS in large
numbers in the 1890s, they came from different parts of the British
Isles and from other countries in the British Empire. Yet I contend
that women from England were more central to CMS ethos and
practice in the Home Department and the Uganda Mission.
Occasional tensions however developed between women of different
regional backgrounds even within England. Speech dialects could be
a telling variant concerning a woman’s position in the hierarchies, and
this related to whether a woman was English from Lancashire,
Yorkshire or Surrey or came from Ireland or from Australia, as much
as to her class origins.6 There is thus a more complex meaning of
‘middle class’ in relation to CMS missionary culture.
The CMS was closely linked with Establishment interests in
Westminster and the City of London as Chapter 1 demonstrates. The
organising structure of CMS headquarters in Salisbury Square
paralleled that of the Indian administration from the mid-nineteenth
century, the notion of white, male and middle class relevant through
the whole century. In more recent scholarship feminists have used
the description homosocial, ‘connoting communities or societies not
only composed solely of men, but exhibiting or endorsing behaviours
or characteristics more readily associated – certainly historically –
with men’ (Levine 2004: ix). Parliament in Westminster, the Church of
England, the India Office, Foreign Office and later the Colonial Office
along with the Church Missionary Society administrative structures
were essentially homo-social, although in the latter, by 1895, women
were disputing this male-dominated state. Norman Etherington
argued that analysis of the micro-level in missions imitated the
macro-level of political and economic imperialism (Etherington 2005:
4). The CMS certainly replicated the larger political norm in London,
and in the Uganda Mission the macro was copied locally at mission
stations where hierarchy, authority and discipline were performed.
This is exemplified time and again in events described here.
Earlier imperial histories looked from centre to periphery in the
ethno-graphic encounter, but critiques such as Susan Thorne’s
challenged the idea that authority moved ‘down the hills of power’
(Thorne 1999a: 3). Her analysis, and others, focused on the impact
of imperialism on the self-construct of nationality that led to
theorising on the nation and modernity and a larger analysis of
‘British-ness’, which Linda Colley attempted to disentangle (Colley
1992; Gilroy 1993; Hall 2002). In assessing a two-way movement in
the missionary encounter in Uganda, it is clear that the Ugandan
people were influential in determining mission policies from an early
period, female missionaries being especially astute at understanding
this need with regard to creating girls high schools. More nuanced
readings of texts give more complex understandings of how power
was and is constituted. In considering the ethnography of the Uganda
Mission white women confronted white male hegemony. In each of
these contexts, negotiation of issues occurred, whether of class,
gender or race.
With reference to nineteenth-century missionary recruits and
especially those women who went to Uganda, I like Jane Haggis’s
idea that ‘a religious idiom and imperial imagery combined to allow
these young women to leave the garden by gently opening the gate,’
a view that my reading of women and the CMS as described in
Chapter 1 affirms (Haggis 1998: 187). The role of women in
Protestant missionary societies has moved forward to become central
in mission studies and in the intersection of these studies with
imperialism, and extending the concept of missionary or religious
feminism, an idea that I believe was not negotiable by feminist
historians two decades ago (Francis-Dehqani 2000; Prevost 2010,
2009). However, the idea that missionary imperial feminism was in
theory dependent on ‘the existence of a degraded female Other in
the colonies and at home’, as Susan Thorne has written (Midgley
1998; Thorne 1999b: 60) is, I suggest, a far more complex issue,
varying with the colonial constituency and ethnic Other, with the
personal narratives of missionaries themselves and with the
difference between rhetoric at home and shifting realities in the
colonial context. Chapter 4 explores these possibilities, demonstrating
that within the broader frameworks individual women contributed in
different ways.
Scholarship on race has progressed in the opening decades of the
twenty-first century and an exchange of ideas concerning white and
black studies has become prominent. Alastair Bonnett, in analysing
‘whiteness’, made the suggestion of a triple conflation of whiteness,
Christianity and Europe, at the same time linking it with what he calls
a ‘moral lineage’ traceable through the last two hundred years and an
aspect of the transition in the West to modernity (Bonnett 1997;
Dimock 2010). Studies of race and imperialism have also focused on
the notion of resistance, but my reading here has examined multiple
relations of power showing that specific events or situations were not
constituted in simple polarities.
My work in the 1960s, my research in the 1980s and 1990s and my
current reflections have overlapped these changes. Having enrolled in
the History Program at La Trobe University, I came under the
influence of ‘the Melbourne Group’ of historians who focused on an
ethnographic approach drawing anthropology and history into close
association. The scholarship of Rhys Isaac, Inga Clendinnen and Greg
Dening, along with that of American anthropologist Clifford Geertz,
became important in how I looked at the encounter between
missionaries and Africans in Uganda. The meeting at one level was
that between people of different backgrounds, language and
education, of one group on their home ground and the other on
foreign territory. At another level it was an encounter of different
belief systems and world views, an ethno-graphic encounter. Geertz’s
use of ‘thick description’ and his idea that getting to the bottom of
understanding a story or event is complex, involves peeling off layer
after layer of understanding, and is never complete seems valid in
relation to some of the events and consequences of events that I
have tried to understand. Geertz wrote of explanation, so aptly, ‘the
more deeply it goes the less complete it is’ (Geertz 1993). For me, a
specific example in Chapter 4, of a fire thought to be an act of arson,
comes into this category. But throughout the volume, my attempts at
understanding are never wholly resolved, leaving questions
unanswered or partially so. Rhys Isaac’s idea that actions are
statements, that ‘Action in the social world is patterned by culture’
and his paper on ‘the terrifying power of ethnographic history’ have
relevance here where actions or events, sometimes inexplicable to
missionaries or other Europeans, are examined as ‘texts’ (Isaac 1982:
339, 1993). The analysis of ‘texts’, be they black African action
statements, or white missionary, is central to this volume.
Some of the early missionaries understood the ethnographic
encounter, as did John Taylor some decades later. John Roscoe,
missionary and ethnographer, working in Uganda from 1884 to 1909
in close association with Sir Apolo Kagwa, Mwanga’s prime minister,
acquired an extensive knowledge of Baganda history and customs.
Roscoe’s publications and papers and those of Kagwa remain of
importance to scholars of both history and anthropology and form a
base on which much contemporary scholarship stands, although
Ugandan and other historians, especially those using oral history,
have shown new understandings of earlier events. I refer here to
Wright (1971), Feierman (1990), Kasozi (1994), Musisi (1999),
Hanson (2003), Schoenbrun (2006), and Kodesh (2008). The early
missionaries established printing and publishing, encouraging a first
wave of indigenous scholarship that was responsible for written
histories of the region based on oral history, significant at a time
when outside influences were only minimal and writing was newly
introduced. At the beginning of the twenty-first century Uganda has
undergone upheavals that make those actors seem very remote.
Nevertheless the documentary record for Uganda after 1895 is
extensive and includes the early scholarship, the official archive
collection of the CMS, now largely on microfilm, and various deposits
of documents in Uganda and Britain.
Research by Nakanyike Musisi, along with more recent
interdisciplinary studies of Holly Hanson and Rhiannon Stephens have
taken this deeper into pre-colonial time, which is particularly relevant
to Ugandan women’s history. Musisi along with Laurence Schiller
drew attention to the importance of royal women, especially that of
the Namasole (‘Queen Mothers’), and their role in state formation. I
examine this briefly in Chapter 3. Hanson has examined nineteenth-
century antecedents, changing patterns of power and the role of the
Namasole in relation to the power of the clans, while Stephens using
historical linguistics with archival and archaeological evidence
proposes longer-term meaning to women’s position in society and an
ideology of motherhood. Stephen’s theory came to my attention too
late for examining or absorbing in this volume, but my knowledge of
late nineteenth-century missionary texts leads to acknowledging that
motherhood was essential in Ugandan women’s self-constructs in the
period of early contact. I would agree that the role of the
Kaddulubale as the senior wife transposes well into the arguments of
the Christian ‘ring wife’ in issues around inheritance that arose after
the institution of Christian marriage. I examine issues around
Christian marriage in Chapter 8.
Aili Mari Tripp has examined the role and autonomy of voluntary
women’s organisations in Uganda since Independence tracing their
origins to earlier women’s associations such as the Mothers’ Union
established by CMS female missionaries and Roman Catholic women’s
associations. Elizabeth Prevost has written on comparative women’s
Church and Mission organisations in Uganda, Madagascar and the
metropole in terms of professionalising women’s social services. This
current volume hopefully contributes further threads to these links.
Finding the voices of African women goes to the heart of
Antoinette Burton’s ‘Archive Stories’ in which she analysed the larger
problem of how archives were constructed and managed, by men,
and the difficulties that historians of indigenous women had faced
through many decades (Burton 2004: 288). My Chapter 9, ‘The
Silence of African Women?’ addresses this in relation to sources for
Uganda (Dimock 1997). The main CMS archive is extremely limited in
giving voice to African women, I wondered whether archives in
Uganda would offer more access. In a four-month period in the field
in 1991 I planned to interview Ugandan women, especially those who
had known their Christian forebears and some of the early female
missionaries, hoping this would compensate for the shortage of
written documents. One of this volume’s aims is to explore women’s
roles in the Church and in Church organisations such as the Mothers’
Union, Women’s Conferences and Women’s Church Councils.
Chapters 6 and 7 examine these and show how such institutions
evolved and fulfilled the needs of Christian women. Interviews, along
with a small collection of documents found in Uganda, gave more
insight to these structures.
My analysis attempts to show the connectedness of these themes
through the discourses that determined the actions of the actors
across boundaries of gender, hierarchy, race and ethnicity. My focus is
particularly on the period between 1895 and the 1930s. Change
inevitably occurred after 1895 and the colonial government became
increasingly involved, as did African resistance to colonial rule.
Uganda was a British Protectorate between 1894 and 1962, a period
that encompassed two world wars and extensive political, economic
and social change, which impacted on the roles of women, on white
women in the metropole and across the empire and on African
women across the continent. In an imperial context, British
administrative structures slowly absorbed women, and colonial
governments undertook responsibility for health and educational
services. In Uganda, this was built on a base of missionary programs,
Protestant and Roman Catholic.
Returning to Uganda in 1991 was for me a further shock, not
unexpected as I had followed Uganda’s tragic history between 1970
and 1986, but nevertheless disturbing. The country was emerging
from civil war. Walking the pavements in Kampala one had to be
careful not to fall into uncovered manholes, the metal covers used by
the various armies. Many buildings, including those on the Makerere
University campus, had the defacing marks of weaponry. The
university library had barbed wire enclosing the staircases to prohibit
illicit movement through the floor levels and, even sadder, rain was
dripping through the roof onto the precious Africana collection of old
books and manuscripts on the top floor. The poorly paid librarians
tried to deal with these issues as best they could in an underfunded
library which at that time had no acquisitions more recent than the
late 1960s, but the task was onerous. I felt then, as I still do, that my
visit for research was an intrusion when everyone had so much to do
to make their day-to-day lives more comfortable and feasible
economically, as was the case with some of my former students. At
night there was still the sound of gunshot, and many people with cars
or four-wheel-drives were reluctant to move around after mid-
evening. Getting out into the rural areas by bus or matatu (the local
form of shared taxi), the signs of a run-down economy were evident
in the state of the roads and badly maintained houses, although I
was assured that paint supplies were then becoming more readily
available and work was beginning in the effort to recover buildings
from years of neglect. The land itself seemed much the same with
bananas, plan-tains, growing abundantly. Prices in the markets were
high, however, because marketing arrangements and transport were
disrupted. People worked more than one job, or had a job and a
business to help cover living costs, educate their children and provide
health expenses. In 1991 the HIV/AIDS situation in Uganda was at
critical levels. Everywhere there were deaths and the rituals of
mourning. I managed to visit the school where I had taught in the
1960s and there too were indications of an impoverished institution,
poorly maintained buildings, a library without new books, and
demoralised staff.

Notes
1 Bishop Tucker was a married man but his wife did not accompany him to Uganda at any
time.
2 Reference to ‘the Church’ throughout this volume is always to the Church in Uganda that
evolved from the Church of England, of which the CMS was a subsidiary. In places the
title ‘Native Anglican Church’ is used. This refers more correctly to the self-governing
Church after the constitution was accepted in 1909. The constitution allowed for
extensive African participation. There were clergy and lay representatives in councils at
all levels up to the Diocesan Synod. The bishop and leading administrators however were
clergy from the Church of England in Britain, and these were also missionaries of the
CMS. The Native Anglican Church was linked first and foremost with that of the Anglican
Church in Britain. Its close association with the CMS meant that it was influenced by the
Low Church tradition.
3 The name Buganda as used by the British referred to a stretch of eastern Africa in 1894
that included areas beyond the territory ruled by the Kabaka, and treaties were
eventually signed between British Colonial Office officials and other local rulers that came
under the colonial aegis of Uganda.
4 Song of Lawino, an Acholi text, was also written in the 1960s, translated by the author
and published in English in 1966.
5 Scott pointed to different understandings of the meaning of power and the political,
suggesting the replacement of ‘the notion that social power is unified, coherent, and
centralised’.
6 A large number of Australian missionaries went to Tanganyika, particularly after 1925
when CMS Australia undertook the funding and staffing of the Tanganyika Mission. There
were strong antagonisms between Australian and British recruits in the build-up to the
separation of the Tanganyika Mission as an Australian enterprise.

References

Bediako, K. (1992) Theology and Identity: The Impact of Culture

upon Christian Thought in the Second Century and in Modern
Africa, Oxford, Regnum Books.
Bediako, K. (1995) Christianity in Africa, Edinburgh, Orbis Books.
Bonnett, A. (1997) ‘Constructions of whiteness in European and
American anti-racism’, in Werbner, P. and Madood, T. (eds.),
Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the
Politics of Anti-Racism, London, Zed Books: 173–192.
Burton, A. (2004) ‘Archive stories’, in Levine, P. (ed.), Gender and
Empire, Oxford, Oxford University Press: 281–293.
Church Missionary Gleaner, CMSB.
Cleall, E. (2012) Missionary Discourses of Difference: Negotiating
Otherness in the British Empire, 1840–1900, Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Colley, L. (1992) ‘Britishness and otherness: An argument’, Journal of
British Studies, 31, October: 309–329.
Davidoff, L. and Hall, C. (1987) Family Fortunes: Men and Women of
the English Middle Class, 1780–1850, London, Hutchison
Education.
Dimock, E. (1997) ‘The silence of African women? A Christian
women’s protest in Buganda in 1931’, in The Post-Colonial
Condition: Contemporary Politics in Africa, New York, Nova
Science; also published in Kirkby, D. and P. Grimshaw (eds.),
Dealing with Difference: Essays in Gender, Culture and History,
Melbourne University History Department Conference Series.
Dimock, E. (2010) ‘Women, missions and modernity: From anti-
slavery to missionary zeal, 1780s to 1840s’, Itinerario, 34, 3: 53–
66.
Etherington, N. (2005) Missions and Empire, Oxford, Oxford
University Press.
Etienne, M. and Leacock, M. (eds.) (1980) Women and Colonisation:
Anthropological Perspectives, New York, Praeger.
Fanon, F. (1952) Peau Noir, Masques Blancs, Paris, Editions du Seuil.
Feierman, S. (1990) Peasant Intellectuals: Anthropology and History
in Tanzania, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press.
Francis-Dehqani, G. (2000) Religious Feminism in an Age of Empire:
CMS Women Missionaries in Iran, 1869–1934, CCSRG Monograph
Series, Centre for Comparative Studies in Religion and Gender,
Department of Theology and Religious Studies, University of
Bristol.
Furley’s Journal, CM Gleaner.
Gilroy, P. (1993) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double
Consciousness, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.
Griffiths, T. (2001) ‘Alfred Tucker and the establishment of a British
Protectorate in Uganda, 1890–1894’, Journal of Religion in Africa,
31, 1: 92–114.
Haggis, J. (1998) ‘“A heart that has felt the love of God and longs for
others to know it”; conventions of gender, tensions of self and
constructions of difference in offering to be a lady missionary’,
Women’s History Review, 7, 2: 171–192.
Hall, C. (1992) White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in
Feminism and History, Cambridge, Polity Press/Blackwells.
Hall, C. (2002) Civilizing Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the
English Imagination, 1830– 1867, Chicago, University of Chicago
Press.
Hansen, H. B. (1992) ‘Church and state in a colonial context’, in
Twaddle, M. (ed.), Imperialism, the State and the Third World,
London, British Academic Press: 95–123.
Hansen, H. B. (2002) ‘The colonial state’s policy towards foreign
missions in Uganda’, in Hansen, H. B. and Twaddle, M. (eds.),
Christian Missionaries and the State in the Third World, Oxford,
James Currey.
Hansen, H., & Twaddle, M. (2002). Christian Missionaries and the
State in the Third World. Oxford, James Currey.
Hanson, H. (2003) Landed Obligation: The Practice of Power in
Buganda, Portsmouth, NH, Heinemann.
Hurditch, R. ([1911] 1970) Twilight Tales of the Black Baganda, 2nd
edn, London, Frank Cass.
Isaac, R. (1982) The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790,
Williamsburg, University of North Carolina Press.
Isaac, R. (1993) ‘On explanation, text and the terrifying power of
ethnographic history’, Yale Journal of Criticism, 6, 1: 217–236.
Kasozi, A.B.K., Musisi, Nakanyike and Sejjeng, James Mukooza (1994)
The Social Origins of Violence in Uganda, 1964–1985, Montreal,
McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Kodesh, N. (2008) ‘Networks of knowledge: Clanship and collective
well-being in Buganda’, Journal of African History, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 49: 197–216.
Levine, Philippa (ed.) (2004) Gender and Empire, Oxford, History of
the British Empire, Vol. 5, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Low, D. A. (1963) ‘The Northern interior, 1840–84’, in Oliver, R. and
Mathew, G. (eds.), History of East Africa, Vol. 1, Oxford, Oxford
 University Press: 337–351.
Low, D. A. (1965) ‘Uganda: The establishment of a Protectorate,
1894–1919’, in Harlow, V. and Chilver E. (eds.), History of East
Africa, Vol. 2, Oxford, Clarendon Press: 57–120.
Low, D. A. (2010) Fabrication of Empire: The British and the Uganda
Kingdoms 1890–1902, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Matson, A. T. (1981) ‘The instructions issued in 1876 and 1878 to the
pioneer CMS parties to Karagwe and Uganda’, Journal of Religion
in Africa, 12, 3: 192–237.
Memmi, A. (1957) The Coloniser and the Colonised, translated by
Howard Greenfield, Boston, Beacon Press, 1967, from Portrait du
Colonise preached du portrait du Colonisateur.
Midgley, C. (1998) ‘Anti-slavery and the roots of ‘imperial feminism’, in
Gender and Imperialism, Manchester, Manchester University
Press: 161–179.
Midgley, C. (2007) Feminism and Empire: Women Activists in Imperial
Britain, London, Routledge.
Mudimbe, V. Y. (1988) The Invention of Africa, Bloomington, Indiana
University Press.
Musisi, N. (1999, February) ‘Morality as identity: The missionary
moral agenda in Buganda, 1877–1945’, Journal of Religious
History, 23, 1: 51–74.
Oliver, R. and Mathew, G. (1963) History of East Africa, London,
Clarendon Press. p’Bitek, Okot (1966) Song of Lawino, Nairobi,
East African Publishing House.
Peterson, D. (2012) Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival: A
History of Dissent, c.1935–1972, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press.
Pirouet, L. (1978) Black Evangelists, London, Rex Collings.
Pratt, M. L. (1992) Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation,
London and New York, Routledge.
Prevost, E. (2009) ‘Assessing women, gender and empire in Britain’s
nineteenth century protestant missionary movement’, History
Compass, 7, 3: 765–799.
Prevost, E. (2010) The Communion of Women: Missions and Gender
in Colonial Africa and the Metropole, Oxford, Oxford University
 Press.
Reed, C. (1997) Pastors, Partners and Pastoralists: African Church
Leaders and Western Missionaries in the Anglican Church in
Kenya, 1850–1900, Leiden, E. J. Brill.
Register of Missionaries (1905) CMSB.
Said, E. (1978) Orientalism, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Sanneh, L. (1989) Translating the Message, Maryknoll, NY, Orbis.
Sanneh, L. (1993) Encountering the West: Christianity and the Global
Cultural Process: The African Dimension, Maryknoll, NY, Orbis.
Schoenbrun, D. (2006, December) ‘Conjuring the modern in Africa:
Durability and rupture in histories of public healing between the
Great Lakes of East Africa’, American Historical Review, 111, 5:
1403–1439.
Scott, J. W. (1986) ‘Gender: A useful category of historical analysis’,
American Historical Review, 91, 5: 1053–1075.
Scott, J. W. (1992) ‘Experience’, in Butler, J. and Scott, J. W. (eds.),
Feminists Theorise the Political, London and New York, Routledge:
22–40.
Spear, T. and Kimambo, I. (1999) East African Expressions of
Christianity, Oxford, James Currey.
Stock, E. (1899) History of the Church Missionary Society, Vols I–III,
London, Church Missionary Society.
Strobel, M. (1989) Three Swahili Women in Mombasa, Kenya,
Bloomington, Indiana University Press.
Strobel, M. (1991) European Women and the Second British Empire,
Bloomington, Indiana University Press.
Taylor, J. V. (1963) Primal Vision: Christian Presence amid African
Religion, London, SCM.
Thorne, S. (1999a) Congregational Missions and the Making of an
Imperial Culture in Nineteenth Century England, Stanford, CA,
Stanford University Press.
Thorne, S. (1999b) ‘Missionary-imperial feminism’, in Huber, M. T. and
Lutkehaus, N. (eds.), Gendered Missions: Women and Men in
Missionary Discourse and Practice, Ann Arbor, University of
Michigan Press: 39–65.
Twaddle, M. (1992) Imperialism, the State and the Third World,
London, British Academic Press.
Twaddle, M. (1993) Kakungulu and the Creation of Uganda, 1868–
1928, London, James Currey.
Twells, A. (1998) ‘“Happy English Children”: Class, ethnicity and the
making of missionary women in the early nineteenth century’,
Women’s Studies International Forum, 21, 3: 235–245.
Ward, K. and Wild-Wood, E. (2012) The East African Revival: History
and Legacies, Farnham, Ashgate.
Wright, M. (1971) Buganda in the Heroic Age, Nairobi, Oxford
University Press.
Wright, M. and Hay, M. (eds.) (1982) African Women and the Law,
Boston, Boston University, African Studies Centre.
Part I
Imperial awakenings
1
Women, the Church Missionary
Society and imperialism

Gender and the Church Missionary Society: The

society’s home front
Christian Matrons! from whose endeared and endearing lips we first heard of the
wondrous Babe of Bethlehem, and were taught to bend our knee to Jesus.… And what
more laudable ambition can inspire you than a desire to be the Mothers of the
Missionaries.… Ye wives, also… tell the missionary story to your little ones, until their
young hearts burn,… and they cry ‘Shall we not also be the Missionaries of Jesus Christ?’
(Stock 1899, I: 108)

This extract from the Anniversary Sermon of 1811 affirmed the

practice and teaching of the CMS from the start, and accompanied an
eloquent appeal for men, especially clergy, to volunteer for
missionary service. The five women setting out for Uganda in 1895
could not have gone as missionaries at this time with the CMS, for
while other Protestant missionaries recognised a role for women, the
CMS from its foundation in 1799 reflected private and public spheres
practice, placing emphasis on family life, the feminine as private and
domestic and the masculine as public. ‘Good works’ were highly
regarded, and voluntary and philanthropic works were seen as an
extension of domestic sphere activity (Prochaska 1980; Davidoff and
Hall 1987: 108–148, 419–426).
Established, yet contested, separate roles for men and women
remained through to the end of the century (Stock 1899, I: 75;
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
permanently only about “twenty years” since. The latter statement is
sufficiently correct, as 1623 was the year when a permanent colony
was established by the Dutch. The former statement carries us back
to the date of the “Greenland Company.”
So far as present evidence goes, it is perhaps unnecessary to say
anything more in vindication of the statement of the Dutch
Committee of 1644, claiming that representatives of the Greenland
Company wintered here in 1598. Nevertheless, as a matter of
interest, and to show how well the Hudson was known at this time by
both Dutch and English, we may quote from the English translation
of the Dutch narrative of Linschoten, which clearly describes the
coast. He says: “There is a countrey under 44 degrees and a halfe,
called Baccalaos.” This country of Baccalaos reached nine hundred
miles, that is, from the Cape de Baccalaos [Cape Race] to Florida.
The distances are given approximately, of course, by Linschoten,
being on the decimal system, but they distinctly mark the principal
divisions of the coast and fix the fact beyond question that the
Hudson was perfectly well known.
On the general subject it may be said, that the record of the
“Greenland Company” is not satisfactory, yet the word “Greenland”
at that time had a very general use, and all that the Committee of
Accounts may have meant by the phrase was, that a company or
association engaged in the fur and fish trade, which for centuries,
even, had been prosecuted at the north, had sent some ships to this
region in 1598. There is certainly nothing unreasonable in this
supposition, the coast being so well known. Various adventurers of
whom we know nothing doubtless came and went unobserved, being
in no haste to publish the source from which they derived such a
profitable trade in peltries. The Committee of Accounts either falsified
deliberately or followed some old tradition. Why may not a tradition
be true?
We turn next to examine a map recently brought to notice and
which is of unique value. Formerly the map usually pointed out as
the oldest seventeenth century map of this region was the Dutch
“Figurative” Map, which was found by Mr. Brodhead in the Dutch
archives. We have now, however, an earlier map of 1610, which was
prepared from English data for James I., a copy finding its way to
Philip III., by Velasco, March 22, 1611. Sandy Hook, though without
name, is delineated about as it appears in later maps, while Long
Island is shown as a part of the main, with no indication of the
Sound, though Cape Cod and the neighboring islands are well
delineated, and Verrazano’s Island of “Luisa” appears as “Cla[u]dia,”
the mother of Francis I. Clearly at this time neither Block nor any
other Dutch navigator had passed through Hell Gate into Long Island
Sound.
There is nothing whatever in this map relating to explorations by
any nation later than 1607. Jamestown appears on the Virginia
portion, and Sagadehoc in Maine. It was simply a copy of a map
made soon after the voyage to New England and Virginia in 1607.
The compiler had not heard of Hudson’s voyage, as that navigator
did not reach England until November 7, 1609. If he had received
any information from Hudson, he would have shown the river
terminating in a shallow, innavigable brook, whereas the river is
indicated, in accordance with Captain John Smith’s idea, as a strait,
leading to a large body of water. Further, the map contradicts
Hudson, who represents the Hoboken side of the river as
“Manhatta,” while this map puts the name on both sides, “Manahata,”
on the west and “Manahatin” on the east. It is not unlikely that
Hudson had with him a copy of the map, for his guidance on the
voyage in the Half-Moon.
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH.

Though this map bears a date subsequent to Hudson’s voyage,

the contents prove that the original could not have been drawn later
than 1608. It was evidently one of the various maps of which Smith
spoke and which he underrated. Its substance indicates that it was
drawn from a source independent of the Dutch and French, showing
that the English knew of the Bay of New York and its relation to
Sandy Hook, and that they supposed the great river delineated was
a broad stream which, in someway, communicated with the Pacific.
On the original map of which Velasco’s example was a copy, the land
west of the river was colored blue, and the legend says that it is
described by information drawn from the Indians. What we need now
is the original map, which may still exist in some obscure collection
in England or Holland, and quite as likely in the archives of Spain,
sent thither by jealous Spanish spies, who lingered, like Velasco, at
the court of James I., to learn what they could with respect to English
enterprise in America. At all events we have in this English map the
first seventeenth century delineation of this region, and one showing
that the English knew the form and general character of the country
which the crown conveyed to the colonists of North and South
Virginia in 1606. So far as now known, it was clearly the English who
first became acquainted with the name that the Aborigines applied to
the island upon which our great metropolitan city stands. Whether or
not this was an aboriginal word or a corruption of a Castilian term
future investigators may decide. The unexpected finding of this old
English map in the Spanish archives revives our hopes relating to
the discovery of new sources of information concerning early
voyages to this coast. English enterprise and adventure on the
Virginia coast, extending from Raleigh’s expedition, 1584, to
Gosnold’s fatal quest, 1603, must have brought Englishmen into the
Bay of New York, unless miracle was balanced against curiosity and
chance. There are archives yet to be opened that may give the origin
of the delineations of this region found in the remarkable map from
Samancas, and we need to be cautious in making claims even for
the priority of the Dutch in 1598.
The period under consideration was a period of reconnoissance,
one that offered some romantic incident, but more of disappointment
and mortification. Here was a site for one of the noblest cities in the
world, but the voyager was blind. The river offered no route to the
gorgeous Indies, and Verrazano had little inclination to test its swift
tide. Gomez, in the short January days of 1525, had no desire to
ascend, for when his ship met the drift ice tossing on the cold,
swirling stream, he thought of Anthony in his desolate retreat on the
Red Sea, put the river under his charge, and sailed away in search
of happier shores. Sailors of other nationalities, doubtless, ascended
the river; but, finding it simply a river, they took what peltries they
could get, and, like Gomez, turned the whole region over to the care
of the solitary Saint, who for nearly a century stood connected with
its neglect. Much remained to be done before steps could be taken
with regard to colonization. The initial work, however, was
inaugurated by the sturdy Englishman, Henry Hudson, and the proud
Spanish caravel disappears, while the curtain rises upon the
memorable voyage of the quaint Dutch fly-boat, the Half-Moon.

FOOTNOTES
[2] Letter addressed to the writer in 1890.
[3] The vignette on proceeding page is a faithful representation
of the Florentine portrait.
[4] The usual course was to sail southward and reach Florida
coasting north, or to sail to Newfoundland and coast southward. It
required especial boldness to take the direct course, and, in 1562,
when Ribault followed this course, he was proud of the
achievement. The fact that Verrazano sailed the direct course at
that time proves the authenticity of his voyage, as a forger would
not have invented the story.
[5] On the Map of Verrazano, to which attention will be directed,
this triangular island is delineated. The voyager approaching the
island from the west comes to a point of the triangle where he can
look away in the easterly direction, and at a glance take in two
sides; while on reaching the eastern limit the third side plainly
appears. In sailing past Block Island, as Verrazano did, from west
to east, the navigator could not fail to discover its triangular
shape. Indeed it is so marked that one is struck by the fact.
[6] The story of this map is curious. The American contents
were first given to the public by the writer in the “Magazine of
American History,” and afterward reprinted in “Verrazano the
Explorer.”
[7] In “Cabo de Arenas,” the coast names taken from a large
collection of maps are arranged in parallel columns, illustrating
three main divisions of the coast, showing that Cabo de Baxos
was the name applied to Cape Cod, and Cabo de Arenas to
Sandy Hook. Capo Cod in the early times was not a sandy cape,
but a beautiful and well-wooded cape. Sandy Hook ever since it
was known has borne its present character.
[8] Those who have fancied that Cape Arenas was Cape Cod,
and that the bay behind it was Massachusetts Bay, have the
same difficulty as regards dimensions. Students of American
cartography understand perfectly well that latitudes in the old
maps were often more than two degrees out of the way, the
instruments of that period being so defective.
[9] To convince himself of this fact the reader may compare the
reconstructed Map of Chaves with the coast surveys, when the
main difference will be found to consist in the exaggeration of
Sandy Hook. The “Narrative and Critical History of America,”
dealing with this point, suppresses all allusion to the fact that Kohl
recognizes the cape on the Map of Chaves with the names
“Santiago” and “Arenas” as Sandy Hook, which follows, as the
river inside of the Hook he identifies with the Hudson. Dr. Kohl,
though generally very acute, failed to see that Oviedo’s
description of the Map of Chaves was, substantially, the
description of Ribeiro, and that in identifying, as he chanced to,
the “Arenas” of Ribeiro with Cape Cod, he stultified his own
reasoning. Nor did he consider this, that if the great Cape
“Arenas” was intended for Cape Cod, there is no representation
whatever of Sandy Hook and the Hudson in the old cartography
and that all the voyages to this region geographically went for
nothing. Credat Judaeus Appellus! This exaggeration of Sandy
Hook is conceded, yet the inlets along the New Jersey shore may
have been viewed as connected by Gomez; and indeed, so great
have been the changes along the coast that no one can well deny
that they were connected in 1525, and formed a long bay running
down behind Sandy Hook. It will prove more historic to follow the
writer, who says, “that the coast of New York and the neighboring
district were known to Europeans almost a century before Hudson
ascended the ‘Great River of the North,’ and that this knowledge
is proved by various maps made in the course of the sixteenth
century. Nearly all of them place the mouth of a river between the
fortieth and forty-first degrees of latitude, or what should be this
latitude, but which imperfect instruments have placed farther
north.”—Nar. and Crit. His. of Amer., 4: 432.
 EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE.
Seventy-odd years ago the Rev. Sydney Smith wrote in the
Edinburg Review as follows: “Literature, the Americans have none—
no native literature, we mean. It is all imported. They had a Franklin,
indeed, and may afford to live for half a century on his fame. There
is, or was, a Mr. Dwight, who wrote some poems, and his baptismal
name was Timothy. There is also a small account of Virginia, by
Jefferson, an epic by Joel Barlow, and some pieces of pleasantry by
Mr. Irving. But why should the Americans write books, when a six
weeks’ passage brings them, in their own tongue, our sense, science
and genius in bales and hogsheads?”
Times have changed since Mr. Smith wrote this somewhat
sarcastic summary of our native literature; for, while it is true that we
still import British “sense, science, and genius in bales and
hogsheads,” it is done now on principles of reciprocity, and we return
quite as good and perhaps nearly as much as we receive.
Americans do not instance Mr. Dwight, whose “baptismal name
was Timothy,” or Mr. Barlow, the author of the epic so sneeringly
referred to, as the chiefs of American poesy; yet we need not blush
for either of them; for the first was a distinguished scholar the
President of Yale College, and the author of the hymn so dear to
many pious hearts:

“I love thy kingdom, Lord!

The house of Thine abode;
The church our blest Redeemer saved
With His own precious blood.”

The other, Mr. Barlow, was a well-known man of letters and

politician in his day, author of the “Columbiad,” the epic referred to by
Mr. Smith, and minister plenipotentiary of the United States to the
coast of France at a critical period of our history. As to the
“Columbiad,” it has been pronounced by competent critics to be
equal in merit to Addison’s “Campaign,” and surely it is no disgrace
to have equalled Addison.
It was the fashion in those days for Englishmen to sneer at
Americans; and so we find in another review, written by the same
gentleman in 1820, this language: “During the thirty or forty years of
their independence, they have done absolutely nothing for the
sciences, for the arts, for literature, or even for the statesmanlike
studies of politics or political economy.... In the four quarters of the
globe who reads an American book? or looks at an American picture
or statue? What does the world yet owe to American physicians or
surgeons? What new substances have their chemists discovered? or
what old ones have they analyzed? What new constellations have
been discovered by the telescopes of Americans? What have they
done in mathematics? Who drinks out of American glasses? or eats
from American plates? or wears American coats or gowns? or sleeps
in American blankets?” In the very same year that this array of rather
insolent queries was propounded by Sydney Smith, the genial
Washington Irving, in the advertisement to the first English edition of
his Sketch Book, remarks: “The author is aware of the austerity with
which the writings of his countrymen have been treated by British
critics.” We have not a particle of doubt as to the “austerity” in
question. The salvos of Old Ironsides and the roar of Jackson’s guns
at New Orleans, were unpleasant facts not yet forgotten by
Englishmen.
But Sydney Smith was not quite fair towards our countrymen. It
was “during the thirty or forty years of their independence” referred to
that Fulton’s steamboat revolutionized navigation, that Rittenhouse
developed a mathematical skill second only to that of Newton; that
West delighted even royalty itself with the creations of his pencil;
while in “the statesmanlike studies of politics or political economy,” it
was during this very period that Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, and
their coadjutors did more to develop the true principles of
government and politics than had ever been done before in the
history of the world. True, we had not much to boast of, but it would
have been only just to give us credit for what we were worth.
Moreover, in a small way, but to the extent it was possible under the
circumstances, the English colonists in America had cultivated letters
from the beginning. In 1685, Cotton Mather wrote his Memorable
Providences; in 1732, Franklin began to issue his Poor Richard’s
Almanac; in 1749, Jonathan Edwards published his Life of David
Brainerd, and in 1754, his famous treatise on The Freedom of the
Will and Moral Agency. Besides these, which perhaps stand out
most conspicuously, there were many minor works of more or less
excellence, over most of which the iniquity of oblivion, to use the fine
phrase of Sir Thomas Browne, hath scattered her poppy.
The moment that the Edinburg Review was thus dealing our
fathers these heavy blows seemed to be the real starting point in our
career of literary greatness. William Cullen Bryant, Washington
Irving, James K. Paulding, Richard H. Dana, James Fenimore
Cooper, Mrs. Sigourney and a host of others were giving direction to
that stream of literature that has since flowed broad and free over
our land, imparting life and vigor and beauty to our society and
institutions. It is, however, anterior to the year 1820, the thirty or forty
years of our national independence, during which Mr. Smith says we
have done “absolutely nothing” in literature, science or art, to which
we must more particularly advert. The literary product of those years
was scanty enough, it is true. The student of this period will not find
much, and not all of that of the first order, to reward his labor—not
much, at least, as compared with other nations at the same time. But
may there not have been some sufficient reason for this, outside of
any downright intellectual deficiencies on the part of our fathers? Let
us for a moment consider the condition of things at that time in this
country.
In the first place, at the time referred to, the citizens of the United
States were in a daily struggle with the material difficulties of their
situation. The country was new. The region west and north of the
Ohio and Mississippi was yet an almost unbroken wilderness, while
the country east and south of those rivers was but sparsely
populated. At the same time the tide of immigration was sweeping
into the country, and with it all the rush and turmoil incident to life in a
new country was going on. Forests were to be cut down; farms were
to be cleared up; houses were to be built; roads were to be made;
bridges were to be thrown across the rivers; while a livelihood was to
be compelled from the forests, the streams, and the fields. The
conditions of a new country are not favorable to the cultivation of the
arts, of sciences, or of literature. Why do not Englishmen twit the
people of Australia because during the past forty or fifty years in
which they have prospered so greatly in material things, they have
not produced a Macaulay, a Tennyson, a Gladstone, a Tyndall, or a
Huxley? It would be just as fair to do it.
Not only was there this hand to hand contest with their physical
environment, but the political conditions were also unfavorable to
any general dalliance with the Muses. Only in times of tranquility and
ease is it possible.

“To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,

Or with the tangles of Neaera’s hair.”

The country at the period referred to, had just emerged from a
long and exhausting war. Society was almost broken up; the arts of
peace were well nigh forgotten; the finances were in almost hopeless
confusion; the form of government was unsettled, and scarcely yet
determined upon. The first thing to do was to evolve some system
and some security out of this chaos. Politics alone occupied the
moments of leisure. When, finally, authority had crystallized into
definite government the people were not allowed to be at rest.
Murderous wars with the Indians on the frontiers; the machinations
of French emissaries; British oppression of American commerce,
and at length another long and bloody war with England, harassed
the minds of the people, and prevented them from giving themselves
up more generally to the kindly and refining influences of literature
and art. When we consider all the circumstances in the case, there
seems a degree of severity in Sydney Smith’s sneers and taunts.
But though circumstances were thus unfavorable to the cultivation
of letters, yet something was done in this direction nevertheless.
Smith refers flippantly enough to Dwight, Jefferson, Barlow and
Irving. But besides these there were others, not brilliant luminaries
perhaps, yet stars shining in the darkness according to their orders
and degrees. We do not design here to enter upon any discussion of
their respective merits, but we may mention as a writer of that period
no less a character than George Washington, whose greatness in
other spheres of life has entirely eclipsed any fame of which he may
be worthy as an author, yet whose Farewell Address alone would
entitle him to a place among the most accurate writers of English.
Among others we may name John Adams, whose pen was scarcely
less eloquent than his tongue; Francis Hopkinson, author of The
Battle of the Kegs and many other pieces, of which it has been said,
that “while they are fully equal to any of Swift’s writings for wit, they
have nothing at all in them of Swift’s vulgarity;” Dr. Benjamin Rush, a
distinguished writer on medical and social topics; John Trumbull, the
author of McFingal and The Progress of Dullness; James Madison,
afterward President of the United States, one of the ablest writers in
The Federalist; Philip Freneau, a poet of the Revolution and the
period immediately following; Alexander Hamilton, a contributor to
The Federalist, and one of the clearest of political writers; Joseph
Dennie, the author of The Lay Preacher, and editor of The Portfolio;
Joseph Hopkinson, author of Hail, Columbia; Charles Brockden
Brown, author of Wieland, Arthur Mervyn, and other works, and who
was perhaps the first American who wholly devoted his life to literary
pursuits; William Wirt, author of the British Spy, the Life of Patrick
Henry, and other works; and Lyman Beecher, the author of a work on
Political Atheism, anti several volumes of sermons and public
addresses. This list might easily be extended, but its length as it now
stands, as well as the merits of the writers adduced, is sufficient to
contradict effectually the statement that America had “no native
literature,” and that during the thirty or forty years immediately
subsequent to the Revolution she had done “absolutely nothing” for
polite letters. Much of this early literature still remains, and is read;
many of these authors are still familiar to this generation, and it is
generally admitted that the writer whose fame survives a century is
assured of a literary immortality. Sydney Smith was an acute man, a
learned man, a great wit, a ready and elegant writer, a trenchant
critic, but the names of some of these humble Americans whom he
did not deign to mention, or mentioned only to scoff, bid fair to stand
as long in the annals of literature as his own.
On the eastern slope of the Andes are a thousand springs from
which the slender rills, half hidden at times by the grass, scarcely at
any time seen or heard, trickle down the side of the immense
mountain range, here and there falling into each other and swelling
in volume as they flow, until at length is formed the mighty Amazon,
that drains the plateaus and valleys of half a continent. So the
beginnings of our literature, like the beginnings of every literature,
are small, indistinct, half hidden; but as they proceed, these little rills
of thought and expression grow and expand, until the mighty stream
is formed that irrigates the whole world of intellectual activity.
This stream, as we have said, first began to assume definite form
and direction about the time that Sydney Smith was uttering his
tirades against the genius and achievements of our countrymen. In
1817, appeared in the North American Review a remarkable poem
called “Thanatopsis.” The author was a young man named William
Cullen Bryant, only twenty-three years of age; yet the poem had
been written four years before. The annals of literature do not furnish
another example of such excellence at so early an age. The poem
yet stands as one of the most exquisite in the language. A recent
critic has characterized it as “lofty in conception, beautiful in
execution, full of chaste language and delicate and striking imagery,
and, above all, pervaded by a noble and cheerful religious
philosophy.” This first effort on the part of Bryant was succeeded by
a long career of eminence in the field of literature. In 1818 appeared
a volume of miscellanies called “The Sketch Book,” by Washington
Irving, a young man who had already acquired some slight
reputation as a dabbler in literature of a trifling or humorous kind.
The Sketch Book was almost immediately honored by republication
in England. This initial volume was followed by a second series of
miscellanies called “Bracebridge Hall,” which was published in
London in 1822. In the preliminary chapter the author pleasantly
adverts to the general feeling with which American authorship was
regarded in England. “It has been a matter of marvel to my European
readers,” says he, “that a man from the wilds of America should
express himself in tolerable English. I was looked upon as something
new and strange in literature; a kind of demi-savage, with a feather
in his hand instead of on his head; and there was a curiosity to hear
what such a being had to say about civilized society.” In the same
year with Irving’s Sketch Book appeared Drake’s Culprit Fay, a poem
that has not been surpassed in its kind since Milton’s Comus. In
1821 Percival issued his first volume of poems, Dana his Idle Man,
and Cooper, his Precaution. His last named volume was at once
followed by a long list of works including such famous titles as The
Spy, The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder, and The Deerslayer.
It marked the advent of our most distinguished novelist—a man who
has been styled the Walter Scott of America. He justly stands in the
same rank with the mighty Wizard of the North, and has no other
equal. Thus the stream of American literature rolled on its course,
and was swelled as it flowed by the contributions of Everett,
Prescott, Bancroft, Emerson, Hawthorne, Poe, Willis, Holmes,
Whittier, Lowell, and a host of others, whose names the world will not
willingly let die.
America has not yet produced a Shakespere or a Milton; but it
must be remembered that England has produced but one, each of
these in a period of a thousand years. Anywhere below these two
great names, American literature of the last seventy years is able to
parallel the best work that has been produced by our kinsmen on the
other side of the Atlantic. In wealth and elegance of diction, in depth
of thought or feeling, in brightness and grace of expression, in any of
the thousand forms and flights in which genius seeks to express
himself, the current literature of America stands on a level with the
current literature of England; and Sydney Smith’s sneers, which
must have touched our fathers to the quick, find no response now
except the smile of contempt which alone they ever deserved.
T. J. Chapman.
 THE OHIO SOCIETY, AND OHIO IN
NEW YORK.
I.

There are many things that link the capital city of financial and
commercial America, to the State of Ohio, that New England
enterprise, and New York encouragement, and Virginian patriotism,
did so much to build beyond the Alleghenies. It is not merely in the
associations and connections of to-day that New York and Ohio are
bound together. A pregnant era of the early past, was disposed
toward good results forever, by the patriotic generosity of the Empire
State, at a time when Ohio was but a name in the far off wilderness;
a promise that many things must nurture, before it could be realized.
Historians will recall, when this much has been said, the events
that were pressed close upon each other, before the soil upon which
Ohio now stands, was declared the property of the nation,
disentangled from the conflicting claims of jealous States, and how
New York by her self-renunciation, led the way to harmony. For a
century had Virginia and Connecticut made their claims to the vast
westward territory; vaster than the imagination of any living man then
conceived. When the French were driven from the lands west of the
bounds of Pennsylvania, the contention commenced, and claims
were urged from time to time, until both voices of dispute were
temporarily silenced by the war in which the rivals fought side by
side for the freedom of both. When that conflict was ended, the
question again arose; not, this time, with the English Crown as the
greater power, but with the loose jointed Confederation, under which
America endeavored to work out a national salvation. Virginia, made
her demand under the grant of James, in 1609, which gave her: “All
those lands, countries and territories, situated, lying, and being in
that part of America called Virginia, from the point of the eastern land
called Cape or Point Comfort, all that space and circuit of land lying,
from the seacoast of the precinct aforesaid, up into the land,
throughout, from sea to sea, west and northwest, and also all the
islands lying within one hundred miles along the coast of the both
seas of the precinct aforesaid.”
This generous King, who was giving away so much that did not
belong to him, was really giving more than he dreamed of; for the
writer of the grant evidently believed that the South Sea, or Pacific
Ocean, was but little westward of the Atlantic, and never dreamed
that he was extending his line so as to take in the magnificent
Western and Northwestern empire of to-day.
Connecticut made her claim under Charles the II, who in 1662,
gave to the colony “All that part of our dominion in New England, in
America, bounded on the east by the Narragansett River, commonly
called Narragansett Bay, where the said river falleth into the sea, and
on the north by the line of the Massachusetts plantation, and on the
south by the sea, and in longitude as the line of the Massachusetts
colony, running from east to west; that is to say, from the said
Narragansett Bay, on the east to the South Sea on the west part,
with the islands thereto adjoining.”
It was under this very vague, but very extensive grant, that
Connecticut laid claim to, and maintained that claim, for that part of
Ohio known the world over, as the “Connecticut Western Reserve.”
While Virginia, Connecticut and Pennsylvania were warring in the
courts, in the legislatures, and before the people over their various
claims, there were many others who virtually assumed that the whole
unoccupied and unorganized land to the west, belonged to the
nation at large, and that no state had a right to exclusive jurisdiction.
This discussion threatened all sorts of difficulties, at a time when
peace and prosperity could only come through a mutual helpfulness
and internal harmony, and the wisest and most patriotic declared
themselves willing to waive all personal claims, and allow the
national government to administer the general estate for the general
good. Congress so viewed it, and appealed to the States to yield
their claims. The first response came from New York, which
conceded all her possible ownership to western territory, to the
general government, and the other States followed in her wake.
Virginia followed New York; and Massachusetts Virginia; and
eventually Connecticut came into line.
In the appeal of Congress to the States there was no ambiguity as
to the purpose to which these lands were to be devoted. The act of
October 10, 1780, resolved that “the unappropriated lands that may
be ceded or relinquished to the United States by any particular
State,” should be disposed of “for the common benefit of the United
States, and shall be settled and formed into distinct republican
States, which shall become members of the Federal Union, and
have the same right of sovereignty, freedom and independence as
the other States; that each which shall be so formed shall contain a
suitable extent of territory not less than one hundred nor more than
one hundred and fifty miles square, or as near thereto as
circumstances will admit, that the necessary and reasonable
expense which any particular State shall have incurred since the
commencement of the present war, in subduing any part of the
territory that may be ceded or relinquished to the United States, shall
be reimbursed.” It was further agreed that said lands should be
“granted or settled at such times and under such regulations” as
should be thereafter agreed upon by the United States, or any nine
or more of them.
In less than six months after the issuing of this broad invitation,
New York set an example of generosity to her young sister States,
which had so much yet to learn in the way of mutual concessions for
the general good. And she made no conditions in her surrender. She
simply said that she would draw a line across the western end of
Lake Ontario, north and south, and that while all east of it should be
hers, all west would be forever quit-claimed to the nation. It took
Virginia three years to make up her mind, and when she waived her
claim in March, 1784, she yet reserved nearly four million acres to
the south and east of the Ohio. The year following, Massachusetts
came in with no conditions, while Connecticut followed, in the fall of
1786, conditioning that she should retain the magnificent Western
Reserve, upon which a New Connecticut was eventually built in the
wilderness—that Reserve that has played so important a part in the
history, and the moral development of the republic. South Carolina,
North Carolina and Georgia, at last straggled, one by one, into the
path of manifest destiny; although the century had turned the point of
time by two notches, before the last hand was lessened, and the
Nation became in law what she had already been in fact—the
architect and master of the splendid empire that stretched from the
western edge of the civilization of that day, to where the Spaniard
and the Frenchman still held a nominal right to the westward of the
Mississippi.
With these cessions, the territorial system of our government
came into existence. That which Georgia gave, became the
Mississippi Territory; that from the Carolinas, the Southwest Territory;
and all that north of the Ohio River, the Northwest Territory; and this
brings us to a point where New York again had a part in creating the
State of Ohio, and in dedicating the soil upon which she was reared,
forever to the cause of human liberty.
It was within the limits of her chief city that the very foundation
stones, not only of the one State but of many, were laid with a far-
seeing wisdom and prophetic foresight that mark the men of that
early Congress as among the sages of legislative wisdom. In the old
hall, that stood at the corner of Wall and Broad streets, where the
restless oceans of a financial world roll in a flood that never rests,
and to which the lines of monetary interest center from all the far-off
corners of the land, upon the spot now hallowed to the memory of
Washington by a colossal statue of bronze, there was enacted, in the
midsummer of 1787, an ordinance that has well been called[10] “The
most important legislative act in American History”—there came into
existence a law that gave Ohio and Indiana, and that galaxy of
northwestern states to the Union; those free states, without which
that Union never could have been saved in the day of its imminent
peril.
Many States have been created, many important acts have been
passed by the various Congresses that have sat in New York, in
Philadelphia, and in Washington, but there was in this measure
something that saved the nation from being sometime all slave; that
reserved for freedom an empire that by mere stress of moral
example if in nothing else, was a menace forever before the
slaveholder. In that ordinance was one little clause that made Ohio
and Wisconsin and Illinois what they afterwards became.
“There shall be,” it recited, “neither slavery, nor involuntary
servitude in said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of
crimes.” Simple enough these words sound now, when human
bondage upon American soil is but the echo of a dead past, but for
the day in which they were uttered, they were the clarion call of a
new era—the death knell of a monster wrong; and the voice was
none the less that of God speaking in human legislation, because
many of the men who had become His instrument, had no dream of
the great things to which they had put their hands, and to which they
had given their votes.
So, in one sense, Ohio may be said to have had her beginning in
New York. From the days of her earliest childhood, she has been a
willing neighbor, willing to give and take of friendly offices with her
elder sister to the East. Two of her chief magistrates were the sons
of the Empire State; she has borrowed not a little of her legislation
from the experience of the older State; she patterned her canals
after those which DeWitt Clinton had so largely aided to bring into
being; she has developed many of her native resources by New
York’s financial aid; she has sought to build her railways so that they
should lead direct to the metropolis; she has in a thousand ways
acknowledged the commercial and financial supremacy of the
greater city and State; and last, but not the least, she has sent
scores of her sons to the East, to prove that the Buckeye is capable
of gaining and holding his own among the best, in any lines of
human labor or human thought—and it is with this subject largely,
that we have at present to deal.
There hangs in certain cheerful rooms at No. 236 Fifth avenue, a
modestly framed document that is more significant in that which it
suggests, than in what it declares. It is a call for a meeting, and a
pledge of certain gentlemen whose names are attached, that they
will do what lies within their power to create in this great metropolis,
a hearthstone around which those who claimed Ohio for a mother or
a foster-mother, might congregate now and then, for such mutual
help or association as would keep the memory of the old home alive
in the new. The beginning was modest and quiet, and yet out of it
has grown an organization that is in many ways a model of its kind,
and that certainly has fulfilled the intentions of its originators.
“We the undersigned,” to quote from the language of the call,
“hereby agree to unite with each to form an association to be known
as The Ohio Association in New York, and to that end will meet at
any place designated, for the purpose of completing such
organization upon notice given to us whenever twelve persons shall
have signed this agreement. There is to be no expense incurred until
the organization is completed, and assented to by each member.”
“New York, October 7th, 1885.”
Attached to this document were names that would have carried
weight in many of the walks of the business and professional life of
the metropolis. General Thomas Ewing, an honored member of the
New York Bar, Samuel Thomas and Calvin S. Brice, of the more
active fields of Wall Street and the railway world, C. W. Moulton, Col.
W. L. Strong, one of the leading merchants of the city, Hugh J.
Jewett, Wallace C. Andrews, Homer Lee, J. W. Harman, Warren
Higley, Milton Sayler, Anson G. McCook, Col. Fogg, Mahlon Chance,
J. Q. Howard, General Henry L. Burnett, and others who had
acquired reputation at home, before making New York the scene of
later operations and more recent successes. There was more than
mere formal agreement in this compact; it was understood by all that
such a society should come into being, and all were in one mind that
then was the time for beginning.
Other attempts looking in the same direction had been made in
times past, but had come to naught. Early in the days of the great
war, many of the sons and daughters of Ohio, residing in this city,
met at the Murray Hill Hotel, and took steps to give active aid to the
soldiers in the field; but these weekly gatherings ended with the
noble purpose that called them into being. In the first annual report of
the Ohio Society, its first secretary, Homer Lee, gives a brief sketch
of this effort, and of the things that followed in its wake. “The object,”
says Mr. Lee, “was to send supplies, clothing, medicines, etc., to the
soldiers at the front. A handsome silk and satin banner was made at
a cost of some $500, upon which was a beautifully embroidered
Coat of Arms of the State of Ohio, to be presented to the bravest
Ohio regiment. As might have been expected there was much rivalry
for the possession of this prize, as glowing descriptions of the
beautiful souvenir were given by the newspapers at that time. The
commanding officers were appealed to, but could not be prevailed
upon to decide the question, because, as one officer put it ‘It could
not easily be decided which was the bravest, where all the regiments
by their valor and heroism had covered themselves with glory.’ At the
close of the war the 7th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, of Cleveland,
secured the prize.”
Another organization, somewhat similar in character and purpose,
was called into being about the same time. It was the Ohio Soldier’s
Aid Society, and Theron R. Butler, was its president, and Mr. John R.
Cecil the treasurer. Its members made it their duty to call upon the
Ohio soldiers in the New York hospitals, and to minister to their
wants. In various forms of help, this society expended over fifteen
thousand dollars, and performed many eminent services for the
wounded and the sick, and like its companion organization above
described, its days ended with the close of the war.
In 1877, the subject of an association of Ohio men was again
discussed, when a number of gentlemen had been called together
by the death of Chief Justice Chase, but it came to naught. Again, in
1874, some of the younger sons of the Buckeye State in this city,
held various meetings and talked organization, but nothing came of
the movement beyond talk. It was reserved for the call above quoted
to produce enduring results, and to bring into being the flourishing
society that has bound the Ohioans of New York together with bonds
of enduring union.
When the twelve, and more, had signed the call and thus made it
operative, a meeting was held in the office of General Ewing, No.
155 Broadway, on November 13, 1885. There was then no question
of success, and the gentlemen present went to work in a mood to
make that success of the most pronounced character. General
Ewing was elected president pro tem., and Mr. David F. Harbaugh