In the period of European expansion and colonialism, schools were the means by which many indigenous and non-European groups in disparate colonial settings received both initial and prolonged exposure to European forms of knowledge. In mission schools, indigenous and European knowledge were transferred and transformed through the intermingling of different generations, as well as different religious, social, cultural, and gender groups, leading to intellectual and cultural synchronicities. Although there was a common nineteenth-century belief that preaching was the most important form of evangelical work, schooling was such an integral aspect of the missionary project that virtually all groups involved established schools in an attempt to extend their religious influence.Footnote ¹ Indeed, schools were often referred to as “nurseries” of the church, with pupils expected to form strong confessional bonds to the church during the period of their schooling and beyond. The primary object of schooling was to mould pupils into morally upstanding Christians. A subordinate aim prevalent in settler colonies, although not adhered to by all missionary groups, was to shape converts into good subjects of the state. For Protestant missionary organizations in particular, schooling was imperative so that non-European communities could obtain the kinds of skills necessary to read the Bible themselves. Missionary groups all over the colonial world established institutes of various degrees of formality and structure: infant schools, day-schools, bush schools, village schools, secondary schools and colleges, boarding schools, industrial schools, universities, and seminaries.

In addition, there were also informal methods of instruction such as the provision of good role-models and moral literature. Over the broad array of schools there was potential for infants, youth, men and women to be instructed in Christianity, Christian morals, and, in many cases, Western forms of secular knowledge. Once local people had obtained a level of schooling deemed suitable by missionary groups, there was also potential for local people to teach in these institutions, and to go on to become evangelists for the missions, colporteurs, or even ministers themselves. This potential was not always realised, leaving indigenous people in the “waiting room of history,” to use a phrase from Dipesh Chakrabarty.Footnote ² However, there were thousands, if not tens of thousands, of non-European teachers engaged in mission schools over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, diffusing and transforming Western knowledge.

This dossier, with its three case studies, sheds light on the roles of non-European mission teachers as well as their recruitment and training, their self-representations, and methodological and conceptual issues about how information on these often inconspicuous intermediaries of mission education can be retrieved from disparate sources.

Over the last decade scholars have examined Christian missionary education and the diffusion and transformation of Western and non-Western knowledge chiefly within a framework of global entangled history and as a history of transcultural knowledge appropriation, with the acknowledgment that European missionaries could not control how non-Europeans used such knowledge.Footnote ³ The three studies here all engage with the global scope of missions, while simultaneously focussing upon individuals engaged in teaching in mission schools at a local level. The studies from German East Africa/Tanganyika, Bolivia, and the Danish West Indies encompass multiple sites, different languages of operation, and different missionary organisations. The non-European teachers in these cases were respectively East African, Latin-American, and free Afro-Caribbean people. Not all were native to the places where they taught, as epitomised by freed slaves in the Caribbean. Not all were local, as the case study of East Africa demonstrates. At times these teachers were labelled “native teachers,” a term corresponding to native bishop or native preacher. The difficulties in finding a nomenclature that encompasses teachers reflect the heterogeneous nature of non-European teachers in general and in these three case studies in particular. Each underscores the vital roles that non-European teachers played within mission schools, and the ways in which missionary sources downplayed these roles. The commonalities of these case studies can be generalised to many other times and places. The cases also describe the liminal positions of, and the potential that, these teachers had in shaping educational settings that were themselves evolving in often precarious and unstable (post-)colonial environments.

Over the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, the numbers of local workers, including teachers, connected to Christian missions grew to significantly outnumber European workers.Footnote ⁴ The use of local teachers was a common strategy for both Protestant and Catholic groups in the transition from missions to self-supporting churches (Protestant) or self-governing unities (Catholic). When Sunday school teachers are included, the numbers of native teachers becomes even more significant.Footnote ⁵ The reasons for engaging local teachers rested upon a desire to engage the local community in the religious community, as well as financial considerations that made it too expensive to employ more Europeans. European missionaries received higher remuneration (when they were paid at all), cost more to send into the field, and had more expensive training, medical, and equipment needs. Conversely, local teachers received less pay than their Western counterparts (when paid), were usually not sent as far to their location of employment (although there are counter examples, such as West Indians being sent to Africa),Footnote ⁶ and were seen to be more physically robust in climates or altitudes that were considered unhealthy for Europeans. Native teachers were also valued for their abilities as cultural mediators and as translators of secular and religious knowledge into terms and concepts with which local people could more easily engage. These teachers, however, never constituted a homogenous group. Differences in culture, language, geographical location, conversion status, gender, race, social status, age, and denominational affiliation all contributed to the heterogeneous nature of native mission teachers. Moreover, as these three case studies demonstrate, external influences beyond those of the mission structures themselves, such as local political situations, confessional tensions, and judicial changes, affected the roles of non-European mission teachers.

Local teachers within mission systems were party to formalised schooling as part of a strategy that many missionaries (and often governments) used to promote non-European assimilation into society, and to “raise” non-Europeans socially, morally, and economically. Mission schools were some of the first spaces in which literacy was taught to non-European groups and where non-Europeans were brought into sustained contact with Western forms of knowledge. When governments in colonial and post-colonial spaces supported the creation of educational systems for non-Europeans during the nineteenth century, they often looked toward missionary groups to help them, with the West Indies in the 1830s and Canada in the 1870s being just two examples.Footnote ⁷ Local people were engaged in teaching in both of these places. The ideological assumption that non-Europeans required Western knowledge, and that missionary groups were best placed to provide them with it, rested upon a belief in the cultural and intellectual superiority of the post-Enlightenment West held by Christian Europeans, which also formed part of the justification for imperial conquest.Footnote ⁸ Far from being a purely benign philanthropic offering, education was bound up in various ideological assumptions, including the need to train the “rising generation”—a common term used by missionaries for the younger generation of non-Europeans—in Western epistemology and to dispel pagan, heathen, and superstitious beliefs. In the age of imperialism, mission schools were commonly called upon to educate both future subaltern administrators (as was often the case in India) and the workforce in the colonial state (as was often the case in southern Africa).

In a more general context missionary education often led to epistemic violence, meaning that the knowledge that was produced and disseminated about and for non-Europeans was distorted and stereotyped, and generalised the condition and state of non-Europeans as lesser than Europeans, thus leading to the justification of Westerners to speak for and to save non-Europeans from themselves.Footnote ⁹ Local people at times helped spread such information in their work as teachers, yet what they thought about the knowledge that they disseminated is not often reported on in the printed reports, periodicals, and monographs produced by Western missionaries for a Western audience.

Teaching was just one of a variety of jobs that local people could do in Christian missions, alongside assistants, preachers, helpers, and other, non-religious work. Local teachers have received less attention than native evangelists, and also less attention than indigenous Christian elites such as native bishops.Footnote ¹⁰ Nevertheless, it must be said that the roles that people played in missions were often blurred, so that the label “teacher” might mean more than instructing pupils within a (semi-)formalised situation. To name just one example, Pacific Islander evangelists of the London Missionary Society were called “teachers” rather than evangelists.Footnote ¹¹ As missions became more established and progressed on their way to becoming native churches, roles of local assistance often became more defined, with teaching being a critical role in the handing down of normalised knowledge to the next generation of Christians.

As with native evangelists, non-European teachers embraced their position within the Christian mission for various reasons. Teachers had positions of responsibility within the mission hierarchy and were in positions of trust in terms of the knowledge that they imparted to the rising generation. Yet these positions all put them under the surveillance and control of Western missionaries. Norman Etherington argues that, unlike local evangelists, teachers were not given autonomy in their work until well into the twentieth century.Footnote ¹² However, people that had acquired knowledge at mission schools could themselves establish schools outside of the mission structure.Footnote ¹³ As Richard Hölzl demonstrates in his contribution to this dossier, African missionary teachers could work independently to establish Christian communities, within the broader structure of the mission yet outside of the official procedures expected within the colony. In doing so, they fulfilled Christian religious expectations as opposed to colonial secular ones.

There are many reasons why non-Europeans taught in mission schools. Some did so because they were devout Christians and had strong faith.Footnote ¹⁴ Some turned to teaching as a form of stability. Some were trained from a young age within missionary structures. Some did it for the money. Some were in it to gain social status and standing within their communities. Some saw their role as cultural mediators. Some saw teaching as a stepping-stone to something better. Some accepted a position as a teacher in a Christian school simply as a means to acquire knowledge. Some used their positions as teachers to subvert Western knowledge, and to instil their pupils with a sense of pride in their indigenous culture.Footnote ¹⁵ There were many reasons to become a teacher at a missionary school, and not all teachers were themselves converts. In many locations, though not all, missions were first accepted by marginalised people. Teachers, having an auxiliary role to that of preaching, may have been in the first wave of converts for a mission field. In order for them to instruct pupils, local teachers themselves needed to be versed in Western knowledge, which required time and effort, whilst simultaneously maintaining a high social standing amongst actual and potential pupils and their parents. Without the support and respect of the local community, the ability of native teachers to impart knowledge that would be valued by the local community was compromised.

Much has been written on the key role that indigenous and non-European people played in the expansion of Christianity throughout the colonial world, as well as how this knowledge was contested and reframed.Footnote ¹⁶ When examined, mission schools are often subject material for the history of education, and less commonly a subject of colonial or imperial historians, leading to different emphases being placed upon research questions.Footnote ¹⁷ Such studies commonly focus upon local elites, and not on work in the schoolroom. The contributions of schoolteachers to the dissemination of European missionary education as well as the ways in which they utilized classrooms (or other didactical “spaces”)Footnote ¹⁸ to diffuse, transform, and adapt missionary knowledge to their own ends were complex, yet often only fleetingly recorded in the sources. These three case studies and this introduction highlight the ways in which non-European teachers were able to influence both their local contexts as well as global missionary networks, and they examine closely both representations of teachers and their own self-representations. All contributions point to the ways in which local people could be frustrated by missionary, governmental, or local structures and authorities, and to the ways in which native teachers overcame such frustrations to impact upon local, colonial, and global networks.

Non-European teachers were overwhelmingly spoken for, and not allowed to speak for themselves, both at missionary meetings and in missionary reports. From the beginning of the ecumenical missionary conferences in the mid-nineteenth century, the topic of education was discussed at such forums without any significant indigenous or non-European representation.Footnote ¹⁹ Moreover, non-European voices were often overlooked when educational policy for mission schools was made. Pertinent examples are the boarding and residential schooling systems in North America, which were devised and established without substantial input from indigenous peoples.Footnote ²⁰ In these schools, indigenous languages, cultures, and traditions were systematically suppressed in order that indigenous children become assimilated in Western ways of knowing. Similar forms of knowledge were disseminated in day schools on reservations, though native teachers were employed in at least some schools (although they comprised only a small minority of the overall teaching population).Footnote ²¹ Having local teachers in the classroom had the potential to allow for change in educational policy at a micro level.

In other contexts during the twentieth century, concepts such as trusteeship and the disputed theory of adaptation, at least in the British colonies, raised questions as to the nature and form of education for non-Europeans, with many of these debates occurring in the metropole.Footnote ²² Non-Europeans were often left out of discussions about education policy and administrative practice for non-European schools in British colonies and former colonies. As Donald Schilling stated in relation to educational policies in Kenya in the first third of the twentieth century, the input from white government, settler, and missionary quarters both in Kenya and in Britain “formally excluded input from Africans,” despite significant local interest in education.Footnote ²³ White elitist practices were reflected in the dissemination of such transcolonial journals as Overseas Education, published from 1929 to 1963. This journal was circulated amongst white bureaucrats, and as Clive Whitehead has argued, by “no stretch of the imagination . . . could it be argued that the contents of the journal were seriously directed at indigenous teaching staff.”Footnote ²⁴

Not only were non-Europeans routinely left out of policy discussions, the forms that western education took, including the education that missionaries propagated, were embedded with ideologies which, in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, were often insensitive to non-European ways of knowing and ways of learning, and often made no attempt to recognize or include non-European knowledge. Nevertheless, many mission schools relied upon the labour of non-Europeans to teach and to create self-supporting churches and schools. From the turn of the twentieth century, disappointment and disillusionment in the restrictive nature and poor quality of missionary schooling led to the establishment of African ‘independent education’ in many parts of East and Central Africa.Footnote ²⁵ Such examples speak to the ability for non-Europeans to work outside of missionary frameworks. However, the focus here is on those who maintained their connections to mission schools.

The fact that little has been written about non-European teachers in mission schools may be attributed in part to the paucity of historical data such as autobiographical material, and to the sources’ focus on policies and structures of colonial education rather than on the individuals who were the foundations upon which missionary schooling was built.Footnote ²⁶ It might also be that, as many of these workers were females, the same gender biases that contributed to the neglect of the role of European female missionaries applied equally to native female teachers.Footnote ²⁷ Is the oversight of non-European teachers simply a problem of sources? Non-European teachers were by the nature of their work literate, yet we cannot expect that literacy alone would lead to the creation of memoirs, letters, and journals similar to those which European missionaries left behind. Even when such documents do exist they need to be read with caution, given the proclivity for such documents to be framed in terms of Western ideas of respectability. This is not to say that ego-documents created by non-Europeans cannot be useful. Rather, just as colonial archives are notorious for the ways they silence non-European voices, we must also examine the sources that we do have from non-European missionary teachers with an eye both to the value of such sources and to their problematic nature.Footnote ²⁸ In writing about this in the context of Papua New Guinea, John Barker has suggested that there has been a tendency for two distinct forms of historical accounts of indigenous missionaries and teachers to emerge, being “broad surveys piecing together a general picture of the position and impact of native missionaries,” with a second form being “narratives of the experiences of individuals who, either because they themselves wrote an autobiographical account, or were celebrated by mission propagandists, stand out in the record.”Footnote ²⁹ He argues that such accounts are “invaluable, but taken on their own they tend to create two opposed and somewhat exaggerated views of indigenous activities.”Footnote ³⁰ The surveys, he argues,

Barker moves towards a different type of analysis by “viewing indigenous missionaries in the context of their place of work” and examining them as one point on a “triangular arrangement with clergy and local villages within which was generated the localized expression of the Christian religion.”Footnote ³² Whilst Barker’s insightful comments are to be kept in mind, the fact remains that the main sources of information about native teachers were prepared by missionaries. Most missionary sources were written by white missionaries for their superiors at home. When these writings reached a broader audience, for example through missionary periodicals, they had generally been edited to conform to a certain image that the missionary society had of itself, which often deemphasized the role of native teachers. This glossing over may be due to Western missionaries seeking praise for their work, or to their anxiety about the roles of native teachers, who they were never entirely able to control. When the voices of non-European teachers are heard, it is also through the filter of missionary ideals and thus the “actual” voices of these teachers are hard to discern. This is not to say that missionary sources are not useful, rather that they need to be read with caution and “against the grain” if the subaltern voice is to be discerned.Footnote ³³ As Hölzl demonstrates in his article, auxiliary information on native teachers can be found in unexpected places, such as in the district courts of German East Africa. Such sources point to the struggle for authority that teachers and other stakeholders in the community had over the emergence of an intellectual class that was educated in mission schools as well as the competition that such schools had from “other forms of education and socialisation.”Footnote ³⁴

Reading missionary reports one gets an impression that the hundreds, indeed tens of thousands, of local teachers played very minor roles in relation to Western missionaries—an impression strengthened by the fact that missionary narratives seldom gave “credit to the vital and self-reliant role of … mission personnel.”Footnote ³⁵ Yet the roles of non-Western teachers in mission schools were far from marginal. Rather, these people were often central to the running of mission schools, especially schools in outstations at a distance from the centres of missionary activity. In Africa, as in other parts of the colonised world, mission schools run by local teachers were incubators for pupils who emerged as a new intellectual class that challenged traditional authority structures, as well. Mission schools continued to be important sites for educating African leaders during the twentieth century, and some of the most noted leaders of decolonisation movements attended mission schools.Footnote ³⁶ This is just one example of the important role that native teachers were able to perform, with other, more subtle ways of engaging in knowledge transmission and transformation permeating throughout the colonial world in mission classrooms.

The paucity of research on non-European teachers is noteworthy given the historiographical development in studies on missionary education that has followed broader movements away from a focus in the 1970s upon Western “cultural imperialism,” as the one-way imposition of European structures onto non-Western peoples the 1970s.Footnote ³⁷ In the twenty-first century, there is a tendency to use “cultural imperialism” to describe Western encounters with non-Europeans in the extra-European world as part of “global modernity,” which is in and of itself dynamic and multidirectional.Footnote ³⁸ For example, writing in the early 1970s, Barbara Yates described a three-stage progression in how non-Western people responded to schooling provided by Western missionaries, beginning with indifference, to curiosity, and finally acceptance.Footnote ³⁹ It is not the point here to critique the sequence of the stages, which other people have done elsewhere.Footnote ⁴⁰ What is important to note is that Yates does not note the actions, or agency, of indigenous peoples themselves in spreading Western knowledge and producing new hybrid forms of knowledge. Robert Strayer, writing around the same time as Yates, urged scholars to examine the role of indigenous peoples in missionary schooling as missionaries were not the only ones with agency in the transmission of Western education to non-European groups.Footnote ⁴¹ Within the historiography of missions, and by extension missionary education, such changes in terminology and viewpoints are also evident, with recent scholarship acknowledging the roles of indigenous peoples as transmitters, transformers, and adaptors of missionary education.Footnote ⁴² However, the teachers themselves are often subsumed by the concept of mission schooling.

As noted above, a recent historiographical development that historians of both missions and empire have engaged in is the global turn. Missions are conceptualized in terms of global networks, and knowledge as a commodity to be transferred and transformed within contact zones and through cultural exchange.Footnote ⁴³ Indeed, the mission project was global, extending beyond the confines of the metropole-periphery dichotomy. In the transferal of knowledge, ideals, morals, people, goods, and commodities through the various layers and webs of empires, non-Europeans acculturated, adapted, and changed their forms of knowing. The colonial world was in flux and people were exposed to many new ideas, incorporating some and rejecting others outright. As Hölzl notes, local mission teachers were invaluable in these roles as they were entrusted to transfer Christian religious concepts without distorting the perceived inherent truths; yet white missionaries often remained sceptical of the religious conviction of native teachers. This once again demonstrates that white missionaries were willing to judge native teachers as lacking regardless of their skills and abilities. Native teachers, as Hölzl further demonstrates, moved through various networks and came in contact with other local indigenous groups thanks to their work. Teachers had the potential to move across broader areas than many of their contemporaries. Knowledge about them also circulated in global networks, with self-representations (albeit edited at the hands of white missionaries) appearing in European Catholic missionary periodicals.Footnote ⁴⁴ In Hölzl’s context, knowledge about native teachers was an important thread linking the mission field with Germany, with native teachers hoping that the German readership would pray for them and thus include them within the spiritual community of Catholics. Yet as Hölzl argues, we have no way of knowing whether these self-representations of African missionary teachers impressed their European audience in the way they hoped.

In his article, Hugh Morrison tackles this central question of locating native teachers in missionary sources. His case study examines the Bolivian Indian Mission (BIM), which was established in New Zealand in the early 1900s, noting that any knowledge that we have about Bolivian teachers in the BIM was mediated through Western missionaries. This is of course a general problem for historians examining cross-cultural spaces, and one that is pronounced in places where a literary tradition did not exist prior to Western contact. Some missionary sources, such as those that Morrison examines, “humanize these individuals” through listing names of local teachers (although with inconsistent spellings), and thus Morrison’s article demonstrates the need to spread a wide net around the limited material available in missionary sources in order to gain an understanding of who these teachers were. At times, individual voices can be uncovered, albeit through the filter of a missionary publication in a language other than their own. While these snippets of information hint at individuals, however, many questions remain, such as why these people chose to teach in mission schools, how they were recruited, and how were they influenced the trajectories of mission schools. The extant sources that Morrison uses do not include such information. This is not the case everywhere, however. As John Barker has written in the context of the Pacific, “almost everything we know about indigenous missionaries, including the crucial matter of their understanding of Christian doctrine, comes from the writings of the outsider missionaries who supervised their work.”Footnote ⁴⁵ His words can be applied to local teachers. The one-sided nature of such sources frustrates attempts to grasp who these native teachers were. As teaching was less prestigious than evangelising, even less was recorded about non-European teachers than about native evangelists. That said, even local preachers were rarely presented as individuals and invariably remained in the shadows of Western missionaries. With much attention to detail, Morrison is able to put names to faces and numbers in the BIM, and in so doing to demonstrate the value that these people had within the mission as individuals.

In his contribution, Jan Hüsgen examines the rationale behind the recruitment of teachers from the Afro-Caribbean population in the Danish West Indies in the 1840s. A mandatory education system was established on the Island of St. Croix prior to emancipation. The salaries provided for teachers by the government was so meagre that the Moravian Church, the sole administrators of slave education, looked towards the local free black population to form the teaching staff in mission schools because their wages were assumed to be less than that of European missionaries. As there were no training schools within the Danish West Indies at the time that the education system was established, trainee teachers from St. Croix were sent to the British colonies of Jamaica, Antigua, Trinidad, and British Guiana. The movement of people between empires and colonies demonstrates the investment made in human capital in order to establish the educational project. Moreover, as Hüsgen notes, these teachers were “agents of knowledge transfer within the British and Danish Caribbean.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The teachers in Moravian schools were not necessarily members of the Moravian Church, which allowed for another form of knowledge transfer between religious groups and led to conversions to the Moravian faith. Hüsgen’s article also uncovers the tensions that arose between white missionaries and Afro-Caribbean teachers as the latter group became established within and integral to the mission hierarchy. Local teachers were more suited to the task than the German Moravians who ran the mission because they had received professional teacher training and were confident in the English language. Yet the missionaries’ prejudices against the teachers forced them to find ways to negotiate their new roles in the changing society. Hüsgen’s work thus highlights the double standards of many missionary societies that relied on local people to teach, but who were unwilling to view them as equals or to integrate them into the rigid structures of missionary societies.

As this collection of essays demonstrates, local teachers were central to the mission project and helped to disseminate Christianity and Western knowledge across the globe. They worked alongside native evangelists, informants, assistants, and missionary helpers to support the work of European Christian missionaries. Local teachers also helped translate, transmit, and transform both Western and local forms of knowledge and contributed to broader knowledge discourse. Nonetheless, the importance of their work has often been overshadowed by scholars focused on examining missionary elites. The work of teachers was commonly understated, or taken for granted by missionary groups in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and the paucity of archival and printed material reflects the inconspicuous nature of their work. As they have not been the subject of intensive research, we know much less about teachers as individuals in mission schools than we do about their roles, or the impact of their work. With its three case studies, this dossier highlights some individual teachers in the spread of Western education and the diffusion of Western modernity around the globe, and provides methodological insights into how to learn more about these important mediators of mission and indigenous knowledge.