I. Walter Trobisch and I Loved a Girl

In 1962 Walter Trobisch, a missionary of German ethnicity working in Cameroon for the American Lutheran Church, published a book for young Africans that advocated modern marital practices like spouse self-selection, and marrying for love. He called the book J'ai Aimé Une Fille (I Loved a Girl). Trobisch wrote the book as a series of letters between himself and a hypothetical former student, whom he called François. It opened with an angry letter from François, who had just been fired from his teaching position for having premarital sex: “Last Friday, I loved a girl—or, as you would put it, I committed adultery—at least that's what the whites call it and the Church, too.”Footnote ¹ François believed he was blameless since “the girl wasn't married, nor had any bride-price been paid for her.”Footnote ² Trobisch responded in a letter arguing that “sexual union fulfills its purpose only when it is an expression of love.”Footnote ³ He then elaborated on his view of love:

The emphasis on intimacy, exclusivity, and personal sacrifice that constituted Trobisch's view of love came in large part from his Swiss marriage counselor, Theodor Bovet. Bovet had written a popular book on the topic a few years earlier, in which he argued that “love should govern the whole field of sexuality, and . . . God should govern the whole field of love.”Footnote ⁵ Trobisch's book I Loved a Girl explored love, sex, and marriage from that same perspective. The conflict in I Loved a Girl centered on the bride-price. The heroine's father demanded that François give him four hundred dollars as a bride-price. The story ended in despair with a letter from François to Trobisch:

Despite the tragic ending or perhaps, as Trobisch argued, because of the tragic ending, I Loved a Girl was wildly popular in Africa.Footnote ⁷ Trobisch soon began working on a sequel, I Love a Young Man, which would tell more of the story of the heroine, Cecile.Footnote ⁸I Love a Young Man introduced Monsieur Henri, a wealthy suitor able to pay Cecile's bride-price. Although François and Cecile try to pursue Cecile's father to allow them to marry, they are ultimately forced to elope in order to escape Cecile's impending marriage to Henri.

Because Trobisch wrote I Loved a Girl and I Love a Young Man as a series of letters and included his own address on the back cover, several thousand readers of the books wrote to him for advice about the relational issues in their own lives. In 1964, Trobisch proudly told a friend that he had received letters “from over 20 different countries.”Footnote ⁹ He started an impromptu counseling service by mail, which he called Marriage Guidance Service for Africa.Footnote ¹⁰ In 1971, Trobisch's wife Ingrid told a friend, “We have received about 7000 letters from 32 different African countries.”Footnote ¹¹ Most of these letters were written in French or English. Today between four and five thousand of these letters are housed in the archives of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.Footnote ¹²

The letters to Trobisch shed light on the complex relationship among modernity, mission Christianity, and sexuality. This article will consider “modernity” to encompass social and economic forces generally associated with the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, such as urbanization, industrialization, the transition to a monetary economy, increased access to education, and the growth of certain values like individualism and self-fulfillment. Studies concerned with modernity, mission Christianity, and sexuality generally address how western, Christian gender ideologies have affected women or how they have affected modernization. For example, Jessie Lutz and Ryan Dunch argue that Christianity in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century China stimulated modernization and created new opportunities for women. A Christian primary or secondary school education “raised a girl's standing and marital prospects” and in some cases caused her to marry later or not at all.Footnote ¹³ Christian education “cultivated ambition and prepared the girls for leadership and public life.”Footnote ¹⁴ It opened up doors for women to attend graduate school, perhaps even abroad.Footnote ¹⁵ Although Christianity would by the 1920s be seen by many Chinese “as an obstacle to China's modernization,” Lutz points out that “for a brief time in the early twentieth century many urban Chinese . . . joined the missionaries in linking modernization and Christianity.”Footnote ¹⁶

Much of the scholarship on modernity, mission Christianity, and sexuality in Africa has highlighted the intrusive, oppressive quality of western sexual ethics. In an article about family life in South Africa, Sylvia Moena has argued, “The Christian gospel became a destructive agent used to propagate the expansion of capitalism or cultural imperialism.”Footnote ¹⁷ John and Jean Comaroff have argued that missionaries were especially successful in enforcing their model of family because they were able to colonize consciousness: “The European colonization of Africa was often less a directly coercive conquest than a persuasive attempt to colonize consciousness, to remake people by redefining the taken-for-granted surfaces of their everyday worlds.”Footnote ¹⁸ Tabitha Kanogo and Modupe Labode have described the oppressive atmosphere of mission schools for girls in Kenya and South Africa, where girls would occasionally revolt against the school's program for them, which included being indoctrinated with the virtues of “purity and integrity, humility and industry” and participating in a grueling training regiment of “laundry, housework, and cookery.”Footnote ¹⁹ Fiona Bowie has said that most missionaries “were as arrogant in their enforcement of monogamy as they were blind to the benefits offered by institutionalized polygyny.”Footnote ²⁰

This article approaches the nexus of modernity, missionary Christianity, and sexuality from a different angle. One of the notable consequences of modernization during the mid-twentieth century was the fact that young people in industrializing nations began demanding the right to choose their own spouse and marry for love rather than have their parents select a mate for them.Footnote ²¹ This motif surfaces repeatedly in the letters to Walter Trobisch. Young people wrote to Trobisch to ask for help finding a spouse. They wanted to know how they could convince their parents to let them marry the person of their choosing. They asked about the relationship between sex and love.

The dynamic that unfolds in the letters to Trobisch is an altogether different dynamic than that suggested by much of the literature on modernity, missionary Christianity, and sexuality in Africa. The dynamic is not one of “colonizer and colonized,” “imposition and response,” or “hegemony and resistance.”Footnote ²² Rather, the letters to Trobisch reveal a conversation. The letters demonstrate the ways in which African women and men were using Christian teaching on sexuality to make sense of their experience of growing up in modern, urban Africa. The letters help to counteract what Nancy Rose Hunt has called “the archival absence of African female voices.”Footnote ²³ So much of the scholarship on colonial Africa, particularly that pertaining to African women, has had to deduce and construct African voices from missionary and colonial documents. The letters to Trobisch—written by African women and men, themselves—enable the researcher to see the particular ways in which African women and men were negotiating their sexual identity and shaping marital practices in colonial and post-colonial Africa.

Given that it was the era of African nationalism, the “moratorium” on foreign missions, and the birth of African theology—movements that sought African independence from the West—one would expect readers of I Loved a Girl to express some pushback against Trobisch's advocacy of marital practices that many considered to be “western.”Footnote ²⁴ However, the letters to Trobisch give no sense that readers found these marital practices to be antithetical to either nationalism or the indigenization of Christianity in Africa. Neither did they feel that spouse self-selection and marrying for love somehow impinged upon their African identity.Footnote ²⁵ On the contrary, most believed these practices enabled them to more fully express their identity as modern Africans. They found these practices to be in line with their desire for political independence. And the process of spouse self-selection also proved for many to be a means of deepening their Christian faith. Thus this article will argue that Christianity's support of spouse self-selection and marrying for love was an important part of the matrix that made Christianity attractive and relevant to young people in modern sub-Saharan Africa.

Most of the people who carried on a lengthy correspondence with Trobisch were already Christian or were sympathetic to the Christian religion. Thus, this article does not seek to argue that Christianity's endorsement of spouse self-selection and marrying for love caused young people to convert to Christianity. Neither does the article seek to argue that conversion to Christianity caused young people to marry for love. Lawrence Stone has argued that protestantism in early modern England caused the growth of “affective individualism,” which in turn led to the development of the “closed domesticated nuclear family.”Footnote ²⁶ Certainly what Stone calls the “open lineage family” could be compared with family arrangements in many traditional African societies, and some of the trends that led to the “closed domesticated nuclear family” in England could be compared to trends that led to spouse self-selection in twentieth-century Africa. Nevertheless, this article will not make a cause and effect argument about Christianity and spouse self-selection in Africa. The letters to Trobisch suggest only that young people associated Christianity with modern marital practices like dating, spouse self-selection and marrying for love and that they appreciated Christianity's endorsement of these practices.

II. Christianity, Modernity, and Marital Practices in Africa

Since their first missions to Africa in the fifteenth century, western Christians have taken an interest in African marital practices. Initially, missionary teaching about Christian marriage consisted of proclaiming monogamy and condemning polygamy. There was a diversity of opinion about whether to admit polygamists to baptism, but “nearly all missions in Africa were agreed from the first that any baptized Christian taking more than one wife must be excommunicated.”Footnote ²⁷ Missionaries also opposed the bride-price. They believed that it perpetuated an inferior view of women and that the logic behind it reinforced other undesirable practices like polygamy, divorce, and levirate marriage.Footnote ²⁸

In the nineteenth century, as protestants got increasingly involved in the missionary project, the presence of missionary wives on the mission field intensified the missionary message about monogamy. Most protestant missionary couples considered equality and partnership to be essential aspects of Christian marriage, and many experienced high levels of marital satisfaction from the experience of working together in the mission cause. Natasha Erlank has said of missionaries John and Jane Philip that theirs was “a close relationship. Their love and regard for one another did not diminish throughout their married life.” They “envisaged marriage as a relationship of two people whose different abilities would complement one another in the creation of a harmonious partnership.”Footnote ²⁹ Perusing the journals of missionary couples reveals that the notion of partnership was a common motif among missionaries.Footnote ³⁰

Many protestant couples were intentional about putting their marriage and home life on display for interested onlookers.Footnote ³¹ The civilizing approach to mission dominated nineteenth-century, Anglo-American mission theory, and showing the superiority of Christian marriage was an essential part of the civilizing project. As American Board Secretary Rufus Anderson said, “The heathen should have an opportunity of seeing Christian families. The domestic constitution among them is dreadfully disordered, and yet it is as true there as everywhere else, that the character of society is formed in the family.”Footnote ³² Missionary wives in particular made it part of their missionary duty to model the benefits of marital partnership, hygiene, discipline, manners, and housekeeping.

The domestic ideologies of missionary wives were as significant to the development of African culture as the ecclesial ideologies of missionary husbands.Footnote ³³ Karen Tranberg Hansen writes, “By shaping notions of labor and time, architecture and space, consumption and accumulation, body and clothing, diet and hygiene, and sexuality and gender, the ideologies associated with domesticity played a crucial . . . role in influencing the cultural ordering of African history.”Footnote ³⁴ Some missionaries found it particularly effective to communicate domestic ideologies to the African young people they employed in their home: “Marriages between former ‘house girls’ and ‘house boys,’ approved, if not in fact arranged, by missionaries, were the crowing aspiration of mission endeavor.”Footnote ³⁵ Missionary publications were replete with comments about the way in which Christianity could “elevate” and “civilize” the heathen, and gender relations were commonly cited as an example of this process.Footnote ³⁶ Enforcing monogamy, discouraging the bride-price, and getting Africans to imitate western spousal relations were essential aspects of nineteenth-century, Anglo-American mission in Africa.

It was not until the twentieth century that large numbers of missionaries began to speak of “adapting” and “purifying” customs like polygamy and the bride-price rather than condemning such practices.Footnote ³⁷ As mission theory moved from a “civilization” to an “indigenization” paradigm, there was more room to be critical of western marital practices and open to African marital practices.Footnote ³⁸ In the course of debate, mission theorists acknowledged both the diversity and commonalities across African societies. Roman Catholic historian Adrian Hastings noted, “The variety of marriage practice in Africa has been vast indeed . . . It would be highly misleading to paint a single picture . . . and label it ‘African traditional marriage.’”Footnote ³⁹ Nevertheless, Hastings did find that “most African societies” exhibited an “extensive articulation of kinship relationships and responsibilities, the full social acceptability of polygamy, the early age at which girls normally married, [and] the widespread lack of extensive political and economic structures beyond lineage and village.” These features, said Hastings, contributed to a view of marriage that differed significantly from the way that most westerners viewed marriage. In Africa, “the greatest stress was laid upon the group significance and procreative purpose of marriage,” whereas in the West the stress was laid “upon its character as a union of and for two persons.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Arthur Phillips identified similar features of “African customary marriage” in his introduction to the massive Survey of African Marriage and Family Life. Phillips said the widespread approval of polygamy, the payment of bride-price, the view of marriage “primarily as an alliance between two kinship groups,” and “the emphasis laid on procreation as the chief end of marriage” were “the main distinguishing features of African customary marriage, as compared with ‘European marriage.’”Footnote ⁴¹

The two studies just mentioned, Phillips's Survey of African Marriage and Family Life and Hastings's Christian Marriage in Africa, were two of the most important texts to come out of a desire to contextualize Christian sexual ethics in Africa. The discussion that led to both texts began with the founding of the International Missionary Council (IMC) in 1921. At Edinburgh House, the headquarters of the IMC in London, the Africa Education Group was formed, and by the late 1920s and early 1930s African marriage was one of the most pertinent issues discussed by members of the group.Footnote ⁴² The issue was of such importance that a subgroup on African Marriage was formed. One of the questions that interested the African Marriage Group was whether polygamy could be considered a valid form of Christian marriage.Footnote ⁴³

Ironically, missiological openness to African culture occurred at the same time that traditional African societies were deteriorating under the pressures of modernization. Male heads of household spent long periods of time working in towns far from their rural family compounds, a practice which led to the rise of concubinage and prostitution.Footnote ⁴⁴ Rural communities found it difficult to maintain initiation ceremonies, so young people grew up without the customary teaching about their sexuality and the moral obligations associated with it.Footnote ⁴⁵ The process of urbanization and the separation of young people from the ethical norms that governed rural life led to an increase in premarital sex and, consequently, an increase in the rate of illegitimate births.Footnote ⁴⁶

The deterioration of traditional African sexual ethics was, itself, one of the catalysts for missionary interest in contextualizing Christian sexual ethics in Africa.

As missionaries witnessed the collapse of sexual restraint in the wake of modernization, they realized their own complicity in this collapse and began to urge the church to develop a more positive theology of sexuality to counteract the negative approach for which Christianity was known. Writing in the 1930s, Scottish missionary James W. C. Dougall urged missionaries to end “the conspiracy of silence” about sexuality: “The missionary movement will do little to prevent the breakdown of African marriage and family-life unless it adopts fearless and imaginative attitudes to sex, and, by these or other means, shows quite plainly that it is not afraid to honour the reproductive functions as divinely ordained and necessary to its own spiritual health.”Footnote ⁴⁷

Missionaries also began to express a desire to understand the purpose of many of the traditional marital practices they had previously condemned.Footnote ⁴⁸ Adrian Hastings said of the bride-price: “It is the view of this report that it [the bride-price] is as such an acceptable and valuable custom and it is not the task of the Church to preach or struggle against it.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Similarly, missionaries and African Christians at a family life seminar in Kitwe, Zambia in 1963 said that the bride-price system should “be not condemned in itself because of its acknowledged abuse . . . [but rather] that the traditional exchanges be ‘Christianized’ into a token of the covenant between the partners and their families.”Footnote ⁵⁰

Interestingly, although Walter Trobisch served as the chaplain at the Kitwe family life seminar, he did not share the majority view on the issue of the bride-price. The stories he had heard at Cameroon Christian College, where he worked as a teacher and chaplain for six years, led him to the conclusion that the bride price had turned from being “a very meaningful custom which served to stabilize marriage” to being a veritable “slave trade in girls.”Footnote ⁵¹ Trobisch strongly believed that both western and African marital practices contradicted the “biblical concept of marriage,” which he said was best expressed by Genesis 2:24: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.”Footnote ⁵² In his books, letters, and marriage seminars, Trobisch elaborated on each element of this verse. He called “leaving” the legal, public declaration of marriage and described how necessary it was for the new couple to make a clean break from their kin. He described “cleaving” as the personal, emotional side of marriage and “becoming one flesh” as the physical side of marriage. He argued that a married couple should “share everything they have, not only their bodies, not only their material possessions, but also their thinking and their feeling, their joy and their suffering, their hopes and their fears, their successes and their failures.”Footnote ⁵³ For Trobisch, polygamy, the bride-price, and divorce (or what Trobisch called “successive polygamy”) prohibited a couple from fully “cleaving” and “becoming one flesh.”Footnote ⁵⁴

Trobisch's perspective on Christian marriage was similar to that of James Dougall and Adrian Hastings. Like them, Trobisch understood Christian marriage to be about love, companionship, equality, complementarity, and reciprocity.Footnote ⁵⁵ He shared their excitement about marriage guidance in Africa even as he was less optimistic than Hastings about the capacity to Christianize the bride-price.Footnote ⁵⁶ Trobisch's students at Cameroon Christian College had often complained to him about the ways in which the bride-price impeded their ability to marry. The story Trobisch told in I Loved a Girl was based on his students’ stories. In fact, while he was working on I Loved a Girl, one of his students was writing a play that also dealt with the bride-price and the desire of young people to marry for love. The student, Guillaume Oyono Mbia, went on to publish his play, Trois Prétendants . . . Un Mari. In a speech that constituted the climax of Mbia's play, the main character expressed her frustration with the bride-price system: “Am I to be sold to the highest bidder? Can I not be consulted about my own wedding?”Footnote ⁵⁷

Both Trobisch's and Mbia's stories depicted the transition in African society from a kin-based marital system to an individual-based marital system.Footnote ⁵⁸ This transition occurred in the crucible of modernization, education, and nation-building. The modern, free-market economy encouraged young people to obtain a job without the aid of their family.Footnote ⁵⁹ The workplace environment further instilled an individualistic orientation to life. Interactions with a potential spouse could not be as strictly monitored by custom and family oversight, so the family began to play a lesser role in marital negotiations.

Modern education also encouraged an individualistic orientation to life. According to Chuks Mba, Deputy Director of the United Nations Regional Institute for Population Studies, “The acquisition of modern education leads to changes in values and intellectual development across generations as younger people place greater emphasis on self-fulfillment as individuals rather than on their responsibilities toward relatives.”Footnote ⁶⁰ As increasing numbers of men and women encountered each other in the school environment, it was natural for romantic relationships to develop. Numerous studies from the mid twentieth century noted the increasing numbers of young people arranging their own marriages in Africa and expressing the desire for marital intimacy and partnership.Footnote ⁶¹ In 1961, Kenneth Little conducted a survey among college students in Freetown, Sierra Leone. He wrote, “What emerges from these data is that overall both Creole and non-Creole young men and women regard marriage as a companionate relationship . . . marriage is to be a true union of husband and wife, as well as an economic partnership.Footnote ⁶² In 1966, P.C. Lloyd looked broadly at all educated young couples across Africa and concluded, “Within the elite nuclear family the pattern of relationships between husband and wife tends towards one of shared roles, greater intimacy, and equality.”Footnote ⁶³

The African independence movements also facilitated the transition to a model of marriage based on self-fulfillment and equality rather than on tradition or family ties. Educated, urban society was infused with the longing for and the language of political and economic freedom. It was natural for this longing to infiltrate the arena of personal relationships. And it was natural for young men and women to begin to use the language of rights to describe their personal relationships. For example, when several African women attended an international congress of Catholic women in October of 1957, “They insisted upon recognition of their equality with men as human persons, their equal dignity and their equal fundamental human rights . . . before, during, and after marriage.”Footnote ⁶⁴ In 1958, African women held congresses in Ibadan (Nigeria), Nkongsamba (Cameroon), and Lomé (Togo) and in each case “asked that the free consent of the spouses be made an obligatory condition for marriage.”Footnote ⁶⁵

In sum, many young, urban Africans in the mid-twentieth century decided to choose their own spouse and marry for love because these behaviors made the most sense in modern, independent Africa. The structural conditions of modernization and the experience of modern education encouraged an individualistic orientation to life. The political movements for independence carried over into peoples’ personal lives, and they began to demand the right to spouse self-selection. Factors like these made many Sub-Saharan Africans in the middle of the twentieth century pursue a “modern” model of marriage. That is to say, it was a model of marriage based more on love, companionship, and self-fulfillment than on tradition and family alliances. Interestingly, many of the sexual ethics that marked this modern model of marriage—monogamy, spouse self-selection, marrying for love, marriage as an equal partnership, the independence of the married couple from extended kin—were also sexual ethics that corresponded with the vision of marriage that Christian missionaries had long been advocating in Africa. As both modernization and Christianity in Africa spread substantially over the course of the twentieth century, both triggered the development of these sexual ethics.

It would not be accurate to say, however, that the “modern” and “Christian” visions of marriage were equivalent. To name just one difference, most Christians lamented the modern acceptance of premarital sex in both Africa and the West.Footnote ⁶⁶ Christian opposition to premarital sex in Africa aligned far more closely with traditional African attitudes towards sex.Footnote ⁶⁷ The Christian vision of marriage in mid-twentieth-century Africa, then, represented a balancing act. On one hand, Christianity was thoroughly modern in advocating spouse self-selection and marrying for love, ethics that corresponded with modern values of individualism and self-fulfillment. On the other hand, the Christian ethic of premarital chastity could be seen as a direct critique of individualism and self-fulfillment. Premarital chastity required the lover to sacrifice his or her own desire on behalf of another person. In the midst of this balancing act, Walter Trobisch made an interesting move. He argued that premarital chastity could actually lead to a more satisfying life, that it was a way of achieving a deeper, more meaningful form of self-fulfillment.Footnote ⁶⁸

III. Spouse Self-Selection, Marrying for Love, and Following God

Whether they longed for a mate, were cynical about premarital chastity, or were frustrated by intergenerational conflict, the young Africans who read I Loved a Girl and its sequel, I Love a Young Man, found concrete advice for how to deal with the situations they faced. When twenty-one-year-old C. Tanmi of Cameroon read I Love a Young Man, she was shocked at the extent to which the story mirrored her own. She wrote to Trobisch, “The whole book seems to be dealing with my personal difficulties.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Tanmi was “in love with a class-mate” of hers, but was engaged to a man her parents had chosen for her.Footnote ⁷⁰ “When I was only 17 my parents influence me to like a certain young man,” she wrote. “It was later decided that we should become married in future but sorry that I have not even a grain of love for this young man.”

In 1965, Tanmi's letter was one of a thousand letters that Trobisch had received from people in twenty different African countries.Footnote ⁷¹ Like Tanmi, many of the young people who wrote to Trobisch expressed their desire to marry for love. For example, T. Bogale of Ethiopia told Trobisch that he loved a girl “more than any body on the earth. I will never marry another girl if I cannot marry her.”Footnote ⁷² The problem for Bogale was that he did not trust the girl he loved. He felt she had betrayed him by dating other men and lying to him about it. “I love her truly and my love to her is not a hidden treasure—I usually reveal it to her and to others as well; but I feel that I am not equally loved,” he wrote.Footnote ⁷³ J. Ngbede Elijah of Nigeria had a similar problem. The girl he loved and expected to marry had left him. He wrote to Trobisch, “How I wish I forget her, but it seems that when she left that day along with her she took my heart, if so how can I love another when my heart is somewhere far away? She taught me to love her and now she has gone.”Footnote ⁷⁴

N. Tangwan of Cameroon told Trobisch that she loved two boys, both of whom were interested in marrying her. “The first one who hunted for me has been four years doing medicine in America,” she told Trobisch.Footnote ⁷⁵ “There had been a climax of sentiments in our correspondence. Now the writing is just normal but we hope to marry when he comes in June, 1966.” The other boy was in Cameroon. Tangwan's father preferred the boy in America, and so did she. The problem was that “the boy in America says he cannot show himself so much [cannot be as expressive in his affection], because he feels that if there is not much sentiment now, there will be no great effect to both of our feelings in case of disappointments.” This worried Tangwan: “I am afraid he might leave me when he comes back, but I love him with passion tenderer than the boy here. Which of them do you think will be my husband?” Clearly, Tangwan hoped to marry the boy in America, for whom she felt such tender passion. Knowing Trobisch's endorsement of marrying for love, she wrote for affirmation that following one's heart was the right thing to do, despite the risks involved.

The letters Trobisch received show not only that young people were interested in marrying for love but that they associated Christianity with this practice. F. Tekele from Ethiopia told Trobisch, “When I reached the age of nineteen I met my first love (my husband) we use to love and understand each other very deeply, we were very very much in love that we thought we couldn't be apart from each other.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Tekele and her husband were both Christians. Like the characters in I Loved a Girl, Tekele and her fiancé experienced obstacles to their marriage, so Tekele made the choice to “run away from home with the man I loved so dearly . . . my parents didn't know about it, all the world was against us, but we were still happy and faithful to each other, because there was love between us, so every thing was bearable.” Because of her husband's “kindness his faith in God his love, it was the happiest time of my life.” For Tekele, marrying for love and having faith in God were closely connected during this “happiest time” of her life.

The connection between Christianity and marrying for love was also evident in a letter from A. Suh of Cameroon, who wrote to Trobisch about her fiancé, George. Both Suh and George were Christians, and this influenced their search for a potential spouse. As Suh said, “Girls here now only want to marry either a rich man or a well educated man,” but she wanted to marry George simply because she loved him and believed he was “the one God has chosen for me.”Footnote ⁷⁷ She told Trobisch that George had impressive self-control when it came to sexual temptation. “Girls like him very much,” she wrote, “but he knows it is not right for him to go as far as he likes with girls.” Trobisch responded by affirming George as a good marital choice and assuring Suh that George's self-control was “a certain sign of real love, which always seeks the happiness and comfort of the partner.”Footnote ⁷⁸ He also suggested that George's self control might be a way that God was blessing her for not getting caught up in the pursuit of wealth and prestige, as other girls were doing. “I share your happiness,” wrote Trobisch, “especially, as you did not choose a rich man . . . Yet he is rich in God's eyes . . . Has not God given a very precious reward to you in return?—A man, a friend, who has decided to wait [to have sex until marriage].”Footnote ⁷⁹ For Suh, this answer both confirmed her choice of marital partner and solidified the connection she perceived between following God and marrying for love.Footnote ⁸⁰

The story of W. Kyereh, a young Ghanaian who wrote to Trobisch, illustrates the way in which membership in the Christian community often provided a context for young people to find a spouse and fall in love. Kyereh met a young woman at church. He told Trobisch that he and the young woman “have been working together for the cause of the Gospel: attending choir practice, service, prayer meetings etc.”Footnote ⁸¹ The two initially became interested in each other “as we discussed our problems and shared our joys together.”Footnote ⁸² Their friendship progressed, such that Kyereh felt he was able to discuss things “which I cannot otherwise discuss with anybody.” He told Trobisch that he had “really fallen in love [with the girl] . . . To confess, she is the girl I really want to be my better half. I can't just imagine what my life will be without her.”

Not all of the young people who wrote to Trobisch were like Kyereh, gushing about their romantic relationships. However, even if they had not experienced romantic love themselves, many who wrote to Trobisch desired to do so and refused to acquiesce to marital arrangements that did not originate with romantic love. The experience of M. Bekele from Ethiopia, who carried on a lengthy correspondence with Trobisch in the 1960s, is illustrative of the widespread desire for freedom of choice in marriage. Seventeen-year-old Bekele met a thirty-five-year old man while she was visiting a relative. Her relative simply introduced her to the man, “nothing more,” but

Because of the intercession of Bekele's brother, her parents did break off the engagement. Bekele's story shows how strongly Africans of her generation and education opposed the traditional practice of arranged marriage and desired to be in control of their own decisions. Bekele was not about to allow her parents to marry her off to a man twice her age. She had her own ideas about how a marriage should come about:

Bekele wanted God, not her parents, to help her find a spouse. For young people like Bekele, following God, finding a spouse, and marrying for love were intricately connected.

IV. Dating and Praying for a Mate

The young Africans who wrote to Trobisch had largely embraced modern concepts of dating, but many of them were unsure exactly how to go about meeting a potential spouse. Twenty-year-old L. H. Chikoya of Malawi wrote to Trobisch after his girlfriend of two years broke up with him. He told Trobisch, “I want to start looking for a Life-partner. So I want you to help me.”Footnote ⁸⁵ W. Banutalira of Zambia also wrote to ask for help finding a girlfriend. He told Trobisch he was “too shy” and was unable to “express my self to a girl because I don't know what I can tell her first and last.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Trobisch advised Banutalira to hang out in “a group of girls and boys” or to get himself invited to the home of “a friend who has sisters.”Footnote ⁸⁷ In either case, Trobisch said, Banutalira would get himself accustomed to hanging out with girls. Banutalira wrote back a couple years later to thank Trobisch for his advise and to say that it had worked: “I can now tell you that, I meet girls without any difficulty due to your two possibilities.”Footnote ⁸⁸

For other young people, meeting someone to date was not so much the problem as knowing which people were acceptable to date and which were not. In I Loved a Girl, Trobisch gave advice for how to choose a spouse, but many people still wrote to him for advice pertaining to their particular situation.Footnote ⁸⁹ S. Iyoku, a twenty-five-year-old Bible translator in Nigeria, wrote to Trobisch about his inability to find an appropriate girl to date and marry. “Looking around I can only see children of ten and twelves. Hardly any 15yr old girl has not been married. Also you can not see an educated girl. Every girl is married before she starts schooling.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Iyoku wanted to know whether he should simply propose to a child and wait until she came of age or whether he should perhaps marry a widow. He said he did have one friend who was a widow, but he doubted that she was a suitable choice because she was a Roman Catholic. Iyoku was also worried about marrying the widow because she was “bigger than I am and if I marry her, I will be like a house boy to her.”Footnote ⁹¹ Trobisch favored marrying the Roman Catholic widow and tried to assure Iyoku, “You will not be her boy but you will be an equal partner with her . . . Marrying such a woman would show that it is not the height of the body which counts but the union of the heart.”Footnote ⁹²

T. Fosu, a twenty-eight-year-old man from Ghana, also wrote to Trobisch with a question about choosing a spouse: “The problem I am facing to-day is how to choose a wife since I want to marry. I wouldn't like to marry and divorce the wife since it is against Christianity. How can I know that the girl I intend to marry loves me, obedient and there will be no separation in the years to come?”Footnote ⁹³ M. Chulu, a woman from Zambia, was also concerned about choosing the right person to date and marry:

Chulu's question was echoed by Bekele, the woman whose brother helped her get out of the engagement to the thirty-five-year old man. Bekele told Trobisch that her “real problem is how to choose the right man.”Footnote ⁹⁵ After exchanging several letters with Trobisch, Bekele did start dating someone. She eagerly wrote to Trobisch,

Trobisch told Bekele he was “very glad” about her new acquaintance at the university and urged her to continue to rely on God for guidance: “He will surely hear you. For in Psalm 32:8 he has promised: I will instruct you and teach you the way you should go; I will counsel you with my eye upon you.”Footnote ⁹⁷

As is evident from Trobisch's advice to Bekele, Christianity not only endorsed spouse self-selection and marrying for love, it also offered help in the difficult task of choosing ones’ spouse. Young people like Bekele learned that they could pray to God for guidance in selecting their spouse. Prayer was the advice Trobisch gave to J. Kizza, a twenty-one-year-old man from Uganda. Kizza loved a girl who did not seem to return his love.Footnote ⁹⁸ Trobisch told Kizza the signs seemed to suggest that the girl was not the right one for him. Rather, he should “ask God for guidance to show you the right girl who could become your life partner.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Kizza appreciated the advice and put it into practice, writing in his next letter, “Now I will pray God for his help . . . I feel thanks to God because he has passed in you to help me. Now my heart has settled down well.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰

J. Kinyanjui, a twenty-one-year-old Kenyan man, also wrote to Trobisch with questions about the dating process. Kinyanjui told Trobisch that he knew many Christian women, but he did not know how to go about dating one of them. “Among the group that I am in there are very many sisters but I don't know how it will work. Will the Lord tell me that it is that one . . . so take her.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Trobisch told him to pray about it: “It is never too early to pray for your future wife. Did you already start to do it regularly? Even if you do not yet know her, you can pray that the Lord leads you and her the right way, and that at the right time you will find and know each other.”Footnote ¹⁰² In his next letter, Kinyanjui seemed even more worked up about the difficulties of dating: “One problem here in Africa is that you can't have this thing the whites call dating . . . Another problem is that . . . there are so many of sisters and you can't know whom is whom for they all seem to have the same actions and attitude towards me.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Trobisch again urged Kinyanjui to turn to God:

Just as he urged Kinyanjui to pray about his situation, prayer was also the advice Trobisch gave to G. Mashaba of Pretoria when she wrote to him with the following situation:

Mashaba wanted to know whether Trobisch recommended that she break off her relationship with Isaac, since he was not a Christian. Trobisch's response was measured. On one hand, he urged her, “You must continue to pray for Isaac that he will become a Christian . . . Perhaps God will use your testimony to lead Isaac to Christ.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ On the other hand, Trobisch warned Mashaba that she “must be ready to sacrifice him—just as Abraham did—if it becomes clear to you that God does not like your being together.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Trobisch made the same point about sacrifice when twenty-five-year-old Y. Beiene of Eritrea wrote to him about his seventeen-year-old fiancé. The two had been secretly engaged for three years. Because the girl had an unmarried elder sister and custom required the elder to marry before the younger, Beiene felt that all he could do was continue to pray for his fiancé and for the increase of their love.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ He asked if Trobisch would “pray for ‘our love’ in the name of Heaven.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In his response, Trobisch commended Beiene for his prayers: “This really is the best thing you can do and must absolutely have the first place.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ He assured Beiene “that this girl will be yours in spite of all difficulties if she is the one God has chosen for you.” However, Trobisch also challenged Beiene, “Are you willing to give this girl up if this is God's will?” Trobisch told Beiene that if he continued to pray daily, “God will answer your prayers by either strengthening your and her love, or by bringing about . . . a clean break.” He told Beiene to be content with whatever path God chose for him, and Beiene seemed to accept this advice, writing in his next letter, “I am very much pleased to get such nice advice which gives mental rest and God's belief. I read your letter several times and . . . I found it to be like some drops of water in a desert which quenches thirst!”Footnote ¹¹¹

A. Wibaba of Ethiopia also wrote to Trobisch about praying while dating. She told Trobisch that the man she loved had no idea that she loved him. She wondered whether it was “right for me to pray to get him.”Footnote ¹¹² Trobisch replied,

In advising Wibaba to initiate a relationship with the pastor, Trobisch knew he was giving countercultural advice. That was why he assured Wibaba, “This is not at all a sin for a girl to do that.” Being encouraged to take such an active role in pursuing a man must have meshed well with Wibaba's conception of herself. Her letter reveals that she already had a fairly independent conception of herself, despite the fact that she had so far lacked the confidence to initiate a relationship with the pastor.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Just as he had told Wibaba to be more assertive, so Trobisch told P. Kagotho, a twenty-seven-year-old Kenyan man, to be more assertive. Kagotho told Trobisch that he had been praying for a spouse for a decade: “Even when I was a young kid of about 15 years I was praying God about the same issue. Up to now I have not found God's answer to my prayer . . . Now I really want a wife not a girlfriend.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ In his response, Trobisch told Kagotho that rather than simply waiting for God to present him with a wife, he should “look around in [his] church, or among the relatives of [his] friends . . . Sometimes we expect God to do great miracles, but indeed we simply have to do a very small step in faith. It's not always God who has to act, but sometimes we have to act.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ A year later Kagotho wrote again to tell Trobisch that he had finally found a girl: “I have really prayed God to help me . . . I have followed your advice just as you told me and at last I am successful.”Footnote ¹¹⁷

R. Klu, a twenty-two-year-old man from Ghana, also wrote to Trobisch about prayer in the context of dating. Klu's correspondence demonstrates the role of prayer not only in finding and choosing a spouse but also in dealing with disappointment during the dating process. When Klu first wrote to Trobisch it was to say, “I seriously need a partner in my life.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ Trobisch gave him the advice he gave to so many others: “Pray regularly (daily) that God may show the girl whom he prepared for you and who will be your wife.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ Trobisch closed his letter with a verse from Psalm 37: “Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.” When Klu next wrote, he used this verse to tell Trobisch his good news: “I GOT WHAT MY HEART DESIRES . . . I fell in love with a Girl or rather we both fell in love simultaneously. If really she is the girl God prepared for me I shall very very be thankful to Him.”Footnote ¹²⁰ A few months later, however, the girl's father put an end to the relationship. Klu told Trobisch that his faith was sustaining him: “I am happy and this is my astonishment though it troubled me for sometime past but now I'm happy because I feel God's good earth and the world is still beautiful.”Footnote ¹²¹ Throughout the next two years, Klu continued to write to Trobisch as he waited for God to guide him to a wife. When his parents began pressuring him to marry, he told them he could “never marry a girl I don't really know . . . I can't cheat any girl by accepting a marriage planned by someone else.”Footnote ¹²² Trobisch commended him for postponing marriage until he found the right girl, and Klu thanked Trobisch “for guiding me not to have picked on a girl which would not have been the chosen one for me from God.”Footnote ¹²³ Klu then offered a testimony of how God was sustaining him while he waited for the right girl:

Klu's testimony illustrates the way in which Christian faith could sustain a young person while he waited to find the right woman to marry.

The archives contain no further correspondence between either Klu, Wibaba, Beiene, Bekele, or Iyoku and Trobisch. We do not know if Klu eventually found a woman to marry, whether Wibaba initiated a relationship with the pastor, whether Beiene ended up marrying his seventeen-year-old fiancé, whether Bekele married the man from the university, or whether Iyoku married the Roman Catholic widow. However, it is clear that these African young people were committed to modern marital practices like spouse self-selection and marrying for love, and they appreciated Christianity's endorsement of these practices. They also found prayer helpful in the context of dating. By making God ultimately responsible for guiding their decisions, prayer relieved some of the pressure of finding and choosing a spouse.