Swedish Protestant Missionaries and Social Reordering in King Leopold's Congo

Simon Larsson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781041138549
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040617120
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: Social Sciences

This book offers a historical-anthropological study of Swedish Protestant missionaries in the Congo Free State during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It examines how a Swedish mission society, working in the Congo Free State during the brutal regime of King Leopold II, attempted to reshape Congolese society by transplanting Western Christian ideals into the local Kikongo-speaking context. The author analyzes the relationship between missionaries, the violent colonial state, and the Bakongo people among whom they worked, showing how mission stations became contested sites where Christian ideals were translated into institutional practices and repeatedly destabilized by colonial violence and existing social arrangements. The chapters document the missionaries' activities and experiences using rich archival sources, drawing on Swedish-language mission archives and their personal writings such as letters, diaries, and reports. They tell a story of missionary efforts to improve the lives of Congolese converts, as well as failures, misunderstandings, and abuses of power. The author combines detailed empirical narrative with critical examination of topics including family and kinship, labor and economy, and state formation in a colonial context. By approaching Protestant mission in colonial contexts as a project of institutional reorganization, the book reframes familiar debates about domination, translation, hybridity, and local agency in mission studies and colonial history. It also offers a broader framework for understanding how transformative projects depend on the alignment of institutions, practices, and modes of governance, and why they tend to falter when such alignment cannot be secured.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Background
• 3 Education and translation: Changing the world to fit the language
• 4 Work, individualization, and the moral economies of the mission
• 5 Family, kinship, and the making of Christian domestic life
• 6 The congregation, moral formation, and Christian community
• 7 The Christian mission and the state
• 8 Christian mission as an institutional project
• Index