Women, Mission and Church in Uganda

Ethnographic encounters in an age of imperialism, 1895-1960s

Elizabeth Dimock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315392721
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

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

Part I
Imperial awakenings

1
Women, the Church Missionary Society and imperialism

Gender and the Church Missionary Society: The society’s home front

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

(Stock 1899, I: 108)

This extract from the Anniversary Sermon of 1811 affirmed the practice and teaching of the CMS from the start, and accompanied an eloquent appeal for men, especially clergy, to volunteer for missionary service. The five women setting out for Uganda in 1895 could not have gone as missionaries at this time with the CMS, for while other Protestant missionaries recognised a role for women, the CMS from its foundation in 1799 reflected private and public spheres practice, placing emphasis on family life, the feminine as private and domestic and the masculine as public. ‘Good works’ were highly regarded, and voluntary and philanthropic works were seen as an extension of domestic sphere activity (Prochaska 1980; Davidoff and Hall 1987: 108–148, 419–426).

Established, yet contested, separate roles for men and women remained through to the end of the century (Stock 1899, I: 75; Heeney 1988). Nevertheless women were interested in the Society’s work from this early period and especially with the formation of local Associations that enabled expansion of CMS interests from London to the provinces. Women were important in collecting funds and were major contributors of money (Murray 1992: 9). Ladies’ Associations were also started, the first in Norwich in 1813. Eugene Stock, in his centenary history of the CMS in 1899, affirmed that ladies were ‘a great power in those days’. Funds raised by these activities went through a network of local Associations at district, county and regional level, to headquarters in Salisbury Square, and coming from London, the aims and ideals of CMS were diffused to the local network (Stock 1899, I: 130, 140). Jeffrey Cox has estimated that CMS income came very largely through the Associations from 1814 through to 1872 (Cox 2008: 263).

The evangelical character of the CMS, based on revival movements of the later eighteenth century, opposed the perceived lack of spiritual fervour and rigour in the Church of England. Early meetings of the founders consisted of clergy and eminent laymen, the laymen from the world of trade and commerce, notably involved with Britain’s expanding role in India.¹ These leading interests, with middle- and upper-middle-class connections, became the public face of the Society, to the exclusion of women (Stock 1899, I: 109). Like other formal institutions, the CMS developed as a hierarchical and patriarchal institution, conforming to class and gender norms in English society.

The first five women for Uganda would more likely have been involved in fundraising had they lived earlier in the century, reaching out for the souls of the working class and through Missionary Unions, Sunday schools and Juvenile Associations to younger people. These efforts reflected the twofold motive of middle-class women, of fundraising aligned with evangelism. ‘Ladies’ moved across class boundaries in the missionary endeavour, the involvement of women in Home missions a further aspect of this (Stock 1899, III: 31). Interest in the conversion of the heathen overseas was an extension of concern with conversion of souls closer to home. Middle-class women were able to couple these interests in the work of Ladies’ Associations, constructing themselves as providers of the Gospel message to the local population and as collectors of funds that would enable the message to be carried to the heathen overseas. Sales of work were a means of women making a collective effort. These too were not only the concern of the rich; it was often, as Stock wrote, ‘the bedridden, the poor, the solitary, the young’ who worked with ‘busy fingers’ to produce items for sale, conforming to the self-denial that was a feature of evangelical practice. As the empire grew, so did the feeling that British upper and middle classes were the centre of the social world (Davidoff 1973: 39), but working-class women could also be providers for the overseas work; thus they too were drawn into an imperialising discourse.² A new CMS publication, the Quarterly Paper started in 1816, was ‘for free distribution to those humble but regular contributors’.

The missionary cause thus enabled women of all social backgrounds to contribute to the work of the Society (Stock 1899, I: 243; III: 56–58). The work of women in the home activities of the CMS is thus seen against intersecting themes of gender and class and an increasing interest in overseas missions. Susan Thorne has shown that this was operative in Congregational missions, which she related to the making of an imperial culture in England and engaging with the complex nature of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century evangelicalism and revivals that has been the subject of extensive scholarship in recent decades (Bebbington 1989; Thorne 1999; Holmes and O’Brien 2006; Stanley 2006).

Understanding the spiritual dimension of evangelicalism gives insight to the first female missionaries and subsequent women going to Uganda, and to African women in the Uganda Mission and the Native Anglican Church who took to it readily, as we will see in later chapters. Bible reading and prayer, self-discipline and piety were part of the way of life, and these were features of revivalism in the eighteenth century significant in the newly industrialising communities and urban centres, carrying into the breakaway movements in Protestantism and the foundation of a wave of missionary societies at the turn of the century (Thorne 1999; Elbourne 2002, 25–70).³

Scholarship in the closing decades of the twentieth century and into the 2000s has shown that women’s involvement in voluntary work (initially at parish level) and then the anti-slavery movement impacted on women’s consciousness of their broader role politically, leading perhaps to an eventual imperial feminism (Midgley 1998).⁴

Gender and the Church missionary society: recruits for the mission field

The home organisation in which women were deeply involved was the support base for the work of the CMS overseas, but the involvement of women in overseas work was another matter. Women were acceptable as the wives of missionaries, but not as missionaries in their own right. The word missionary referred to a man: ‘it denoted a male actor, male actions, male spheres of service’ (Cunningham 1993: 89). It is surprising however to realise, and the archival silence confirms the homosocial character of the CMS, that the first English person to be sent to a mission field by the CMS was a woman, Sarah Windsor, a governess in the household of John Venn whose marriage to Peter Hartwig enabled her to go to Sierra Leone. Sarah died in Africa in 1815, a few weeks after her husband’s death (Register of Missionaries 1904: 1). When three single women applied to the Society in 1815 however, the Committee resolved that unmarried women should not be sent, except sisters who might accompany their missionary brothers. Considering, in Stock’s words, ‘what seemed the hopeless backwardness of Englishmen’ coming forward, this was a remarkably early date for women to be applying (Stock 1899, I: 81–91). For the first few years the Society was dependent on German missionaries (Stock 1899 I: 122; Jenkins 2000), but the women who accompanied their husbands, fathers or brothers often did valuable work and some outlived the male relatives they accompanied, which forced the CMS to start List II, a record of female missionaries who received an allowance in their own right. List II, as its title implies, was adjunct to List I, the men’s roll. Despite this new step, it remained the Society’s practice to allow only female relatives of male missionaries to go. What is remarkable is that some women, a few, were accepted at all (Murray 2000: 71). But List II grew slowly and wives still remained invisible, noted only by ‘m’ after the male missionary’s name in List I. The rhetoric behind this continued until well into the twentieth century. When Barbara Stanway wrote a biography in 1991 of her husband, a notable Bishop of the Diocese of Central Tanganyika, she described herself as a ‘little “m”’ (Stanway 1991).⁵

The reality, however, was different. The value of the ‘invisible women’, who were neither listed nor for the most part recognised, was in creating a labour pool for Women’s Work in the CMS (Murray 1985: 109; Dimock 2011). While it is difficult to assess how many women went to CMS Missions during the first century, it is likely that many more went than those listed (Murray 2000: 71). Jeffrey Cox is forthright that ‘the majority of white, British missionaries who embarked from Great Britain to foreign lands were female’ (Cox 2008: 17). In India, where women gained access to upper-class zenana Hindu households that were closed to male missionaries, there was demand from the field that encouraged a flow of women despite official policy, and many women worked outside the formal structures, in some cases making their own arrangements to reach the mission field.⁶ Stock records that the Committee was reluctant to say much about women who were working in CMS Missions, affirming by this male control of the Society and its archives.

Recruiting women as missionaries remained elusive in the CMS and the gendered organisation remained similar to other public institutions. The Society was proud of its presidents and committee members and their aristocratic, clerical or military ranking (Stock 1899, III: 37–44), of ‘great symbolic value to the middle-class elite’ (Davidoff and Hall 1987: 422). Increasingly the administration looked to officials who had served overseas to fill committee positions, enhancing relations between the Society, new colonial territories in the East and the Establishment. At weekly meetings of the General Committee an illustrious array of clerics, members of Parliament, former military staff from India and retired senior India Office personnel might be seen. A banker, a barrister and an engineer also represented lay interests in the 1870s. It was a group with formidable social connections, composed entirely of upper- or upper-middle-class men.⁷ Although the Society had long been associated with reform issues such as anti-slavery, it was a conservative environment when it came to altering formal gendered structures, at the same time reflecting the ‘gentlemanly order’ in the expansion of British imperialism (Cain and Hopkins 1993).

Change, however, was in the wind. The decade 1880–1890 was one in which conventional attitudes were contested partly from within. The year 1887 was a turning point, with the recruitment of a number of women from families of Committee members and other influential families. These included Miss Agnes Wright, the daughter of the Rev Henry Wright, who had been honorary clerical secretary from 1872 to 1880 in Salisbury Square, the Misses Alice and Elizabeth Wardlaw Ramsey, nieces of the Marquis of Dalhousie, and a daughter of the Bishop of Sierra Leone. In addition there were nine other daughters of clergy or missionaries, and one daughter of a London physician.

Further impetus came from requests for women missionaries from the mission field. The Bishop of East Africa asked for women for his diocese, and a request from the Palestine Mission was put to the Keswick Convention, an annual gathering founded out of revival activity, with an immediate response from women attending the meeting. Women were not excluded from the annual gathering at Keswick, and women missionaries had input to the conventions, in itself a progressive step forward. Between 1887 and 1890 sixty-one female missionaries were added to the CMS lists, nine going to Palestine, eight to East Africa, thirteen to Japan, and others to the Yoruba, Sierra Leone, Egypt, Indian and China Missions (Register of Missionaries 1904). Those going to East Africa went to the Mombasa area: the first, Caroline Fitch in 1887, was sent to Frere Town, on the mainland opposite Mombasa Island; three more were sent in 1888, two in 1889, two in 1890, three in 1891 and six in 1892. This last group included Edith Furley, who did her initial missionary work in Mombasa and attracted the attention of Bishop Alfred Tucker who passed through Mombasa each time he moved to or from Uganda. In 1894 Tucker asked her if she would go to Uganda and then sent her back to London to prepare for the new work.

Women’s enthusiasm for missionary work was clearly indicated, along with financial means to influence the London administrators. Almost one-third of the women recruited in the late 1880s went as honorary or part-honorary missionaries, or to accompany other family members (Register of Missionaries 1904).⁸ Stock himself wondered whether this large group of women would have been accepted if the Society had incurred the total expense (Stock 1899, III: 369). There was no immediate alteration in the policy, but in the period 1884–1904, 639 women missionaries were sent by the Society. An enormous increase, this included many of the early female recruits for Uganda. Keswick and a new period of revival had captured the imagination of many women, but more time was needed for this to become part of the ‘everyday workings of the mainstream’ (Porter 2005: 59), and for women to be recruited on more comparable terms with men. In the field, furthermore, as I will show in Chapter 8, the old discourse prevailed for much longer.

Stock pointed to the years 1885–1887 as most significant in developing new, more open attitudes to women as missionaries and home workers, shifting the language to make his point. He described the impact of a lady medical missionary of the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society telling

in the simplest way the story of her work at a drawing room meeting. She preached no sermon; she delivered no ‘discourse’; it was plain narrative, with a very few words of appeal at the end. But the tone and spirit and language and grouping of facts were such that we have rarely, if ever, seen so deep an impression apparently produced.

Drawing room meetings indicated the class culture within which Ladies’ Associations and other sub-organisations operated, but we see here how Stock recognised women’s speech and manner as different from men’s (Stock 1899, III: 325). This was an important indicator of how women brought a range of qualities different to men’s to the service of the CMS, which slowly came to the attention of the administration.

This major change, gathering momentum in the 1890s came about as a result of general growth in overseas work, but also as women of wealthy middle-and upper-middle-class families put pressure on administrators in the CMS. That some women were recruited in ‘local connexion’, indicates that another subgroup were already residents in the area where they were recruited, affi...