This is one of several films made by Halifax school teacher Audrey Lewis during the 1950s and the early 1960s.  As well as film of her family, most of the films concern her work with the St. Andrew's Methodist Church in Halifax: one film documents the laying of the foundation stone for a new St. Andrew’s Methodist Church in Halifax in January 1964.  Audrey worked as a Speech and Drama Tutor for the Halifax Youth Clubs, and two of the films were made by members of the youth clubs with...

This is one of several films made by Halifax school teacher Audrey Lewis during the 1950s and the early 1960s.  As well as film of her family, most of the films concern her work with the St. Andrew's Methodist Church in Halifax: one film documents the laying of the foundation stone for a new St. Andrew’s Methodist Church in Halifax in January 1964.  Audrey worked as a Speech and Drama Tutor for the Halifax Youth Clubs, and two of the films were made by members of the youth clubs with Audrey directing.   One is a comedy, The Trophy (1961), made by over 40 members of eight Halifax youth organizations, while the other is an updated version of the Biblical story The Prodigal Son, from 1962.  Before this Audrey taught in Africa for several years, and here made this film together with one other covering the years 1953-58.

Before this film was made Audrey had been working in London, and had met her fiancé Ian Lewis, who had been influenced by the books about missionary tales he had been given at Sunday school.  It was Ian who accepted an invitation to go to Africa on missionary work.  Audrey remembers that moving to Africa was something of a culture shock, and that it took a while to get used to it.  It was here that the couple got married – the service being in both Swahili and English – with most of the guests being the local villagers, as can be seen in the film.   Ian recounts that: “The chief said the men would like to know how much you paid for your bride and so I said 7 shillings and sixpence and then a cheeky man in the front row said ‘She can’t be much good then’.”

Another missionary had already been doing some filming and he offered his camera for sale for about £30 when he was returning home.  Audrey bought this in order to record her experiences there.  What they found was people inflicted with many diseases; with children having to walk on their knees and women suffering from elephantiasis.  As a result of this experience, Audrey states that, “I think my faith, which wasn’t terribly deep before I went out there, was deepened”.

Although filmed by Audrey Lewis, this film was made by the Methodist church, and clearly reflects their thinking at the time – Audrey made a more personal film around the same time, African Scenes.   So even though there are strong elements of the travelogue in the film, it principally aims to promote the work of the mission.

It was a time when a great many people across Africa still adhered to the old ancestral spirit cults, and many others were Muslim.   The Lewis’s believed that the tribalism in Africa, including Kenya, was holding up progress.  Ian was aware that previous missionaries – who had been visiting Africa since the mid-19th century – had stifled many traditional customs, such as the women dancing when the men arrived back from a hunt, but that he sanctioned these – as well as joining in with his accordion.  Nevertheless, the film is a good example of the colonial narrative of a progression from a ‘primitive’ culture to a more civilised one.

The film presents a vivid picture of a couple of missionaries doing what they believed was good work at a time when the very idea of missionary work was coming under intense scrutiny.  Shortly before this film was made another, rather more famous film, The African Queen,  came out in 1952 (made in 1951), of British Methodist missionaries in a village in Africa, played by Robert Morley and Katharine Hepburn as brother and sister.  Although set in German East Africa during World War I – filmed in the Congo, Uganda, Zaire, England, Turkey, and Southern California – their portrayal of a hapless pair of innocents, against the experienced boat captain played by Humphrey Bogart, must have left an impression of typical western missionaries.

There are those for whom taking religion to a new country or culture is an unjustifiable imposition, a cultural imperialism.  But the motivations and consequences of missionaries are much more varied than this suggests.  Missionaries were, and are, pulled in two directions, being both Christians and Westerners, sometimes more one than the other.   Christianity has never had a unified view of how to take the gospel out to others.  Wallis draws our attention to a tension from the beginning within the church, and within the Gospels, between what he has called the ‘Indigenizing’ principle and the ‘Pilgrim’ principle: the former accepting existing people and their culture, the latter seeking to transform them.  One seeks to convert, if at all, simply by example; the other is much more pro-active.  This latter has come to become associated with evangelism, a term that only came to take on its more modern meaning in the mid-19th century.  But its Greek root in the New Testament allows it to be interpreted as just ‘living the good news’ as well as ‘proclaiming the good news’.   What is more, the words ‘mission’ and ‘evangelism’ have come to take on different meanings since the rise of the evangelical movement in the US and Europe since the 1920s.  The former emphasising the activities of love, justice and peace; the latter the announcement of the good news of Jesus (see Thangaraj). 

In fact Christianity had roots in North Africa from its first centuries, as seen with some of the early Christian Fathers: Origen was Egyptian and Tertullian and Augustine from the ancient North African region of Maghrib.  From then until the 19th Christianity had been in decline, apart from the Ethiopian Churches and the Coptic Christians in Egypt, with little missionary activity prior to then.  Islam had converted much of Northern African, and from the 16th century the Catholic Church, mainly from Portugal, had missionaries on the west-central coast.  But the early missionaries were so involved in the slave trade that it is hardly surprising that they found few converts.

That missionary work was closely bound up with colonial expansion from the 18th century is generally accepted: each helped the other in many ways.  This is clear from the documents of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, founded in 1698, and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, founded in 1701, financed by the British government (see Porter, References).   But in many ways missionaries run counter to the needs of the colonising power, especially with the growing opposition to the slave trade.  In fact in the early days of Anglican missions missionaries were recruited from Germany.

It is difficult to generalise on missionary work because there were so many different churches involved, in so many different places, and over a long time span.  So the experience differed greatly across Africa, not least because there were so many tribes with differing customs.  Elizabeth Isichel remarks that there was no such thing as an African religion: there were simply certain beliefs – such as, ancestors returning from a spirit world, nature gods and witches – that were common among many tribes.  Into this Christianity might be adopted, mainly for pragmatic reasons of material advantage, existing alongside the pre-existing beliefs or conjoined in a syncretism (Isichel, References).

The late 18th century saw an upsurge in evangelism, with the foundation of the London Missionary Society in 1795, the Church Missionary Society in 1799, the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1804, the Leeds Methodist Missionary Society in 1813, and the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society four years later.  Yet little headway was made in winning converts against a background of blatant racist stereotypes, with cartoons of missionaries in pith helmets standing in large cooking pots surrounded by dancing savages waiting for their white victims to cook.  Indeed, many missionaries sought more to convert those from other Christian denominations than non-Christians.  That missionary work could also have an insidious effect on those promoting it in Britain is brought out vividly in Jeanette Winterson’s semi-autobiographical novel Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit.

Although the missions brought education for some, this was restricted to the needs of the missionaries, and caused inequalities to grow.  In Kenya the missions sometimes even reinforced the racism against Indians who had come to help build the railways.  Yet there are examples of the local British administrators preferring the old African traditions, or even Muslims, over the newly converted Christian natives, who might develop ideas above their place.  What is more, some of the more fervent puritans got in the way of their leisure pursuits, such as drinking!

With the arrival of the Imperial British East Africa Company in 1888, Kenya became a British protectorate in 1895, acquiring the German held territory, and a colony in 1905.  But by 1938 only 8% of the population were Christians; by the end of the 20th Century that figure had reached 60%.  The mission in the film was based in the Kikuyu area, the largest ethno-linguistic group in Kenya.  The first mission among the Kikuyu arrived in 1898: Mr Willis (later Bishop) arriving by boat across Lake Victoria (Nyanza).  This was followed by Anglicans, United Methodists and Presbyterians spreading inland from the coast.  A combination of famine and avoiding white demands for labour led some of the poorer to convert, and this led nationalists to accuse the missions of being divisive and undermining local customs.  One point of contention was over female circumcision, an entrenched practice that wasn’t outlawed until 1982.  Africans were by the early decades of the 20th century establishing their own independent churches, such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which was banned in Kenya and elsewhere.  These became increasingly separate, frequently criticising the white churches as paternalistic, and for taking their lands and collaborating with the colonial systems.

Audrey and her husband arrived just at the time when the Mau Mau uprising took off in 1952 among the land squatters of the Kikuyu people, who had lost 60,000 acres and were forced to work on white land in appalling conditions, and being required to carry a pass, the kipande.   By 1948, 1,250,000 Kikuyu were restricted to 2,000 square miles, while 30,000 British settlers occupied 12,000 square miles. The Mau Mau, a secret society with still obscure origins, was dismissed as terrorists at the time, and their bloody methods much publicised.  But both their motives and tactics were complex, and there has been much argument about these subsequently.  Many of the Mau Mau’s victims were also Kikuyu.   The film doesn’t mention the injusticies over land that was a powerful motivation for the rebellion, instead characterising it as expressing “the sub-conscious resentment of the soul”.

Although the Mau Mau was guilty of atrocities, some have argued that these were much less than those of the British forces.  There are great variations in the number of war causalities that have been claimed, with some estimates putting the numbers of Kikuyu killed during the conflict as running into hundreds of thousands, whilst some estimates put at only 32 the number of British civilians killed by Mau Mau militants – the entry on the Mau Mau uprising in Wikipedia is a particularly good account of the conflict, while the Adam Foulds’ long poem The Broken Word attempts to capture the experience of being caught up in it. 

Even though the Mau Mau continued to be a proscribed organisation up till 2003, in 1999 the Mau Mau Original Group was set up to gain recognition from the British Government of the actions of past governments and compensation for the surviving victims.  Thanks largely to the work of American historian Caroline Elkins, the Kenyan Government stepped up its support for this campaign a campaign.  Caroline Elkins published her research in a book, Imperial Reckoning, in 2005.  Although Elkins has been criticised for her statistics and for being partisan, no-one seriously disputes the basic outlines of the story of British atrocities she relates.

After initially fighting the claims as being out of date, the British Government finally relented, and on June 5th 2013, William Hague stated in Parliament, "We understand the pain and the grief felt by those who were involved in the events of emergency in Kenya.  The British government recognises that Kenyans were subjected to torture and other forms of ill-treatment at the hands of the colonial administration."   He also announced compensation payments of £2,600 to each of 5,228 elderly Kenyans who were subjected to torture and other forms of ill-treatment at the hands of the colonial administration.

It must indeed have been severely difficult for the Methodist missionaries to carry on in the circumstances of this war.  Their work at the Othaya Health Centre continues, especially treating HIV/AIDS and TB, although it is unclear whether this is now the Othaya Health Clinic or part of the Othaya Sub-District Hospital.  In many respects the situation has deteriorated from the 1950s.  Some 56% of the population live in poverty, and yet this 56% contributed 51% of the total healthcare expenditure in 2002.  Many Kenyans are hindered by cost or by the long distance to the nearest health facility.  Life expectancy is also in decline: in 2006, life-expectancy for women was 51 years and 50 years for men. This is expected to decrease further due to the rising incidence and prevalence of HIV/AIDS.  In 2006, the child mortality rate was 78 per 1,000 live births.

It is against this background that organisations like Christian Mission Aid continue to operate, running health care centres, along with Kenya Relief, with the support of Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt and Bono, among others.  Missionary work, far from being a historic relic, is flourishing, especially with the more evangelical, or prophetic, churches, who are expanding in many places – raising concerns for some observers (see Talk to Action, References).   But now, for the traditional churches at least, it is home grown members who do much of the missionary work.  Thangaraj notes that at the World Mission Conference held in Edinburgh in 1910, of the 1,200 delegates only 17 were non-European or North American; when its equivalent met in Texas in 1989, 70% of the 649 delegates were from outside Europe and North America, and 44% were women.

The thinking behind missionary work varies enormously, but in many instances the aims are far more humanitarian now, and more ‘enlightened’ in relating to non-Christians – see the selection in Norman Thomas.  Thangaraj, for example, as an Indian whose father was converted by Christian missionaries, has called for a radical re-thinking of the idea of Christian Mission, and there are many others who have offered similar contributions. As Andrew Wallis writes: “Christianity is a generational process, an ongoing dialogue with culture.” (p. xv11).  As a result there is now a distinctive African Christianity (see Bediako).  The Methodist Church remains working in Kenya, despite the violence that followed in the wake of the 2007/8 election, when more than 1,000 people were killed and 600,000 had to flee their homes.  Whatever ones religious beliefs, it remains true to say that Christian churches are often at the front line helping those in desperate need in Africa, and pushing for western governments to help put right the consequences of their actions.

References

Kwame Bediako, Christianity in Africa: the renewal of a non-western religion, Edinburgh University Press, 1995.

Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag, New York, 2005.

Caroline Elkins, ‘Alchemy of Evidence: Mau Mau, the British Empire, and the High Court of Justice’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Volume 39, Issue 5, 2011

Adam Foulds, The Broken Word, Cape Poetry, 2008.

Elizabeth Isichel, A History of Christianity in Africa, SPCK, 1995. 

Andrew Porter, ‘An Overview, 1700-1914’, in Norman Etherington (editor), Missions and Empire, Oxford University Press, 2007.

M Thomas Thangaraj, The Common Task: A Theology of Christian Mission, Abingdon Press, Nashville, 1999.

Norman Thomas (editor), Readings in World Mission, SPCK, 1995.

Andrew Wallis, The Missionary Movement in African History, Orbis Books, 1996.

Entry on the Mau Mau Uprising in Wikipedia

The Methodist Church Mission Partners in Kenya

Talk to Action