Who Were the Missionaries?

This article aims to reconstruct the social origins of 124 Swedish missionaries who worked for the Swedish Mission Covenant in the Congo Free State (CFS) from 1882 to 1908, while analysing the impact of the missionaries’ origins on their work and on their interactions with Congolese peoples. The results show that most of the missionaries came from a rural background and had a low socio-economic status. This social background affected the Swedish missionaries’ relationships with Congolese people and contributed to an encounter that was both ambivalent (mixed on both sides) and ambiguous (marked by contradiction). On the one hand the missionaries’ humble backgrounds, combined with the universalism of their Protestant revivalist culture, cultivated an ethos of egalitarianism. On the other hand, their position as white missionaries in a colonial society and their vocal support for the idea of civilizing mission in Africa fostered attitudes of arrogance towards Congolese society.