An Educational Mission: Gender, Schools, and Canadian Missionaries in Central Angola, 1880s–1920s

Abstract

In this dissertation, I examine the mission education developed by the Canada Congregational Foreign Missionary Society (CCFMS) in central Angola between the 1880s and 1920s. This missionary work emerged at the intersection of the interests of the CCFMS, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), the Portuguese colonial government, and central Angolans. With a focus on missionary school curricula, I explore the implications of the gendered and racist dimensions of the CCFMS’s mission agenda, especially industrial trades as “manly” occupations and domestic work as “appropriate” labour for girls and women. Drawing on transnational and global frameworks, I argue that Angolans were integral to the establishment of the West Central Africa (WCA) mission – particularly mission stations operated by the Canadian missionaries. The mission itself, especially education, represented an adaptation and convergence of missionary and Angolan values, knowledges, and desires.

This dissertation is the first history of the CCFMS in Angola that interrogates the agendas of their mission education from the beginning of the WCA mission in the 1880s until the drastic expansion of its services in the 1920s. Missionaries fed into larger debates and discourses around Christianising the “uncivilised” world – part of the global “civilising mission.” But at the same time, Angolans indirectly became part of global conversations around Christianity and education as they worked with and influenced how mission education unfolded in central Angola. To demonstrate these arguments, I triangulate missionary literature from the United Church of Canada Archives and the ABCFM collection at Houghton Library, Harvard University, with oral histories with former Angolan attendees, former North American missionaries, and their descendants. Methodologically, I illustrate that, regardless of the underlying colonial agendas of the West Central Africa mission, it is essential to interweave Angolans’ lived and living experiences of Congregational missions into this history. Moreover, my work demonstrates the influence of Canadian missionaries beyond the settler colonial context in Canada, providing new insight into Canada’s entanglement in colonial (educational) projects. Most importantly, I situate Angolans in the history of Canadian mission work through their significant contributions to the establishment and continuation of the WCA mission and more recent attendees’ memories of mission life.