Protestant missionaries and humanitarianism in the DRC: the politics of aid in Cold War Africa

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Notes

¹ Vincent Viaene, ‘Nineteenth-century Catholic Internationalism and its Predecessors’, in Religious Internationals in the Modern World, ed. Abigail Green and Vincent Viaene (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 82–110; Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall Of Self-Determination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).

² Timothy Longman, Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 313.

³ David Maxwell, ‘Photography and the Religious Encounter: Ambiguity and Aesthetics in Missionary Representations of the Luba of South East Belgian Congo’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 53, no. 1 (2011): 38–74.

⁴ While Rich picks up on various continuities between the colonial and post-colonial period, he tends to focus on the more obvious ones, such as paternalism, racism and the belief in the need to ‘improve’ Africans. As such, he overlooks more subtle ones, such as the belief that African ‘wellbeing’ can be engineered through diet. This oversight stems from the fact that he, perhaps, reads too much into missionaries’ anti-colonial stance. In addition, he somewhat overestimates Protestant missionaries’ independence vis-à-vis the Belgian colonial project. His claim that Protestants were ‘unsullied by close Catholic cooperation with racist Belgians’ is not entirely correct. The Belgian colonial state’s overt preference for Catholic, generally Belgian, missionaries, did not impede it from collaborating with particular Protestant individuals. Moreover, Rich fails to mention that in 1948, after decades of lobbying, Protestants were also admitted to the colonial subsidy scheme for missionaries, (p. 41).

⁵ John David Yeadon Peel, Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003).

⁶ Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall Of Self-Determination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019) and Elizabeth Foster, African Catholic: Decolonisation and the Transformation of the Church (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019).

⁷ Phrasing loosely adapted from: Birgit Meyer, ‘What Is Religion in Africa? Relational Dynamics in an Entangled World’, Journal of Religion in Africa 50, nos 1–2 (2021): 156–181.