Knowledge systems in tension: South Africa’s Dutch Reformed Church’s missionary enterprise in Nyasaland/ Malawi and the indigenous response
Retief Müller
Senior Lecturer in Church History
Faculty of Theology, Stellenbosch University
Nyasaland was an early foreign destination for missionaries from the Dutch Reformed Church. The network of churches, schools, hospitals, and other institutions they founded there since the late 19th century had a significant impact on the land and its people. Although missionaries generally speaking had benign if rather paternalistic intentions, their legacy is an ambiguous one. Missionaries combatted a slave trade that was still scourging these parts of Africa in the late 19th century. Many indigenous people received sound basic education as a result of the mission. Many were cured of tropical diseases that might otherwise have killed or severely disabled them.
On the other hand, missionaries unwittingly contributed to severe ecological damage due to the large game hunting culture they helped to foster there. They encouraged the planting of trees, often exotic varietals such as eucalyptus, only to later on institute tree eradication programs, at Nkhoma Mountain for example, upon the realisation that these trees had become invasive species.
More generally in propagating an evangelical Christianity, missionaries introduced a new and alternative system of sacred knowledge that would situate itself in direct competition with indigenous systems of knowledge. This produced a dialectic tension, because although the majority of the population eventually converted to some form of Christianity, this did not mean, as many missionaries and colonial administrators might have hoped, that indigenous conceptions of the world simply vanished. To the contrary, all across Christianised Africa, indigenous discourses remain just underneath the surface and in some cases wide in the open.
My paper will specifically focus on the history of this indigenous-missionary dialectic with a view to highlight some unexpected outcomes emerging from this internally conflicted context. Malawi remains one of the poorest countries in Africa, while South Africa is one of the most affluent. Therefore in the final analysis I shall ask whether further connections between Malawian and South African institutions, particularly on the socio-religious front, might still serve any purpose at all. And if one answers in the affirmative to this, then what might be the most appropriate types of relationships to foster in future?
This proposal forms part of a larger research project that I am working on together with a colleague who is of Malawian origin. The sources will mainly be archival materials, and counterweighted by oral histories of selected Malawian individuals who still have active memories of the DRC missionary enterprise amongst them. The missionary sources are mostly located in the DRC archive in Stellenbosch. Additionally, I have access to much personal documentation of Nyasaland missionaries through various connections. I am planning a research trip to Malawi during the course of next year to initiate the oral historiographical aspect of the research.
