By the Rivers of Water

by Erskine Clarke

  4. JLW to RA, 28 June 1836, ABCFM; JLW to RA, [?] January 1839, ABCFM. For West African foods and the history of cassava, see Judith A. Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (Berkeley, CA, 2009), esp. 54, 108–111. For the ways in which European and African eating habits intersected and borrowed from one another, see Carney and Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery, esp. 46–64; and Jeremy Rich, A Workman Is Worthy of His Meat: Food and Colonialism in the Gabon Estuary (Lincoln, NE, 2007), 22–44.

  5. “Cape Palmas,” Charleston Observer, 7 May 1836. For discussions of European clothes and various African cultural practices, see Hildi Hendrickson, ed., Clothing and Difference: Embodied Identities in Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa (Durham, NC, 1996). For the history of the knife, fork, and spoon and how they were used in the West, see Bee Wilson, Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat (New York, 2012). Cf. Nancy Rose Hunt’s description of a “knife and fork” education used by missionaries to promote European domestic order and ideas of hygiene, in A Colonial Lexicon of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo (Durham, NC, 1999), 118–123, and Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik, eds. Food and Culture: A Reader (New York, 1997).

  6. Quotations: J. Leighton Wilson, Western Africa: Its History, Condition, and Prospects (New York, 1856), 122.

  7. Stephen Wynkoop, “Journal of S. R. Wynkoop to Western Africa,” 33, ABCFM.

  8. Cf. Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York, 1985), 3–5.

  9. Quotation: JLW to RA, 28 June 1836, ABCFM.

  10. For William Polk and the school at Rock Town, see JLW to RA, 24 August 1836, ABCFM; 3 November 1836; 26 May 1837, ABCFM. For Yellow Will, see Jane Jackson Martin, “The Dual Legacy: Government Authority and Mission Influence Among the Glebo of Eastern Liberia, 1834–1910” (PhD diss., Boston University, 1968), 99; JLW to RA, 24 August 1836, ABCFM. For John Banks and the school at Graway, see RA to JHBL, 28 June 1837, ABCFM and MSCS. For the graduate, see Epilogue.

  11. JLW to RA, 25 June 1836, ABCFM. Cf. Margaret D. Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940 (Lincoln, NE, 2010), esp., xxi–xxxii.

  12. JLW to RA, 3 November 1836, ABCFM; JLW to H. Hill, 18 March 1836, ABCFM; JLW to RA, 8 June 1839, ABCFM; West Africa, “Annual Report,” 1839, ABCFM. For the dialectical tensions between the Grebo world and the world being introduced in the mission school, cf. Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, From Revelation to Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in Southern Africa (Chicago, 1993); Robert W. Hefner, “World Building and the Rationality of Conversion,” and Terence Ranger, “The Local and the Global in Southern African Religious History,” in Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation, ed. Robert W. Hefner (Berkeley, CA, 1993).

  13. JLW to RA, 7 March 1836 and 3 November 1836, ABCFM; JLW to “Dear Parents, Brothers, and Sisters,” 18 May 1840, SCL. For the role of boarding schools in nineteenth-century Protestant missions, see “Annual Report,” Missionary Herald, January 1835, 12–16; Clifton J. Phillips, Protestant America and the Pagan World: The First Half Century of the ABCFM, 1810–1860 (Cambridge, MA, 1969); Jon Rehner and Jeanne Eder, American Indian Education (Norman, OK, 2004).

  14. Quotation: JLW to RA, 6 August 1836, ABCFM.

  15. JLW to RA, 24 August 1836, ABCFM.

  16. Quotations: JLW to RA, 20 July 1836, ABCFM.

  17. JLW to RA, 3 November 1836, ABCFM.

  18. For Grebo customs of dress and the physique of Grebo bodies, see JLW to RA, 5 July 1836, ABCFM; JLW to RA, 7 February 1839, ABCFM. JLW makes many observations in Western Africa about the variety in size, complexion, and general appearance of different African peoples. See comments on this in Michael O’Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004), 181. Cf. Alexander Butchart, The Anatomy of Power: European Constructions of the African Body (London, 1998). See also, for white images of African bodies, George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York, 1971); Philip D. Curtin, The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780–1850 (Madison, WI, 1964), esp. 28–57; Jan Nederveen Pieterse, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (New Haven, CT, 1995). For an important analysis of these images, see V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington, IN, 1988), esp. 1–23. Cf. the reflection of the Victorian explorer Samuel White Baker about the “educational advantages” for “young ladies” in being exposed to scenes of African nudity. See Tim Jeal, Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure (New Haven, CT, 2011), 243.

  19. JLW to RA, 10 July 1836, ABCFM; JLW to RA, 16 March 1837, ABCFM.

  20. JLW to RA, 3 November 1836, ABCFM.

  21. Quotations: JLW to RA, 3 November 1836, ABCFM; JLW to Elipha White, 8 July 1837, in “Fair Hope, Cape Palmas,” Charleston Observer, 21 October 1837.

  22. JLW to RA, 20 July 1836, ABCFM. For a succinct summary of the difficulties in developing an orthography for a language, see Patrick Harries, Butterflies and Barbarians: Swiss Missionaries and Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa (Oxford, 2007), 157.

  23. For the operation of the printing press, see JLW to RA, 2 February 1839, 7 June 1839, ABCFM. For an introduction to the complex philosophical problem of the relationship between reading and memory and the challenge that reading presents to oral cultures, see Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago, 2004), 141–145. For the issue of “literacy and religion” in the conversion of Africans to Christianity, see Terence Ranger, “The Local and the Global in Southern African Religious History,” in Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation, ed. Robert W. Hefner (Berkeley, CA, 1993), esp. 85–88.

  24. For the focus on indigenous leaders and the Bible being translated into the vernacular of the people, see Missionary Herald, January 1839, 30.

  25. Quotation: Acts 17:23.

  26. See Andrew Porter, “‘Cultural Imperialism’ and Protestant Missionary Enterprise, 1780–1914,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 25, no. 3 (1997): 367–391. For the important role in African Christianity of the Gospel of Matthew and the Acts of the Apostles, see Philip Jenkins, The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South (New York, 2006), 53–54.

  27. See “Missionary Translation in African Perspective,” in Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture, rev. ed. (New York, 2009), 191–228. For missions as “cultural imperialism,” see Comaroff and Comaroff, From Revelation to Revolution, esp. 8, 88; William R. Hutchison, Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (Chicago, 1987); Brian Stanley, The Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Leicester, UK, 1990). For a counteremphasis on the agency and activism of indigenous peoples in mission efforts, and for the fluidity of cultures generally, see Sanneh, Translating the Message; Paul S. Landau, The Realm of the Word: Language, Gender, and Christianity in a Southern African Kingdom (London, 1995); Porter, “‘Cultural Imperialism.’” The insistence that indigenous peoples have not been passive in the face of various imperialisms can be found with increasing frequency in a variety of studies. Cf., for example, on the slave trade, John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1650 (Cambridge, UK, 1992); and for the fur trade, John R. Bockstoce, Furs and Frontiers in the Far North: The Contest Among Native and Foreign Nations for the Bering Strait Fur Trade (New Haven, CT, 2010).

  28. Wilson, Western Africa, 229. For the history of Bible translations into various Grebo dialects, see Sue Hasselbring and Eric Johnson, “A Sociolinguistic Survey of the Grebo
Language Area of Liberia,” SIL Electronic Survey Reports 2002-074: 100, www.sil.org/silesr/abstract.asp?ref=2002-074. For the vernacular language as the bearer of the divine, see report on the work of Wasa Baker in a Grebo village near Big Town, in J. Leighton Wilson, “Annual Report of the Mission,” JLW to RA, 30 December 1840, ABCFM. See also Kwame Bediako, “Epilogue,” in Ype Schaaf, On Their Way Rejoicing, trans. Paul Ellingworth (Carlisle, UK, 1994); Sanneh, Translating the Message, 142–163, 191–228; Jenkins, The New Faces of Christianity, esp. 21–31. For the way a pre-Christian past was embedded in Grebo Christianity, see Andrew F. Walls, The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History (Edinburgh, 2002), 119–122. Cf. the way African Americans made the Bible their book and identified with many of the stories in the Bible in Allen Dwight Callahan, The Talking Book: African Americans and the Bible (New Haven, CT, 2008). Perhaps the most vivid example of Africans today claiming their own interpretation of the Bible is in the Anglican Communion, where African Anglicans are challenging North American Episcopalians over the issue of ordination of gay and lesbian people. See Jenkins, The New Faces of Christianity, esp. 18–21.

  29. Missionary Herald, January 1837, 30. See also JLW to RA, 8 September 1837, ABCFM; JLW to RA, 7 February 1839, ABCFM.

  30. Quotation: JLW to RA, [?] January 1839, ABCFM.

  31. Quotation: ibid.

  32. Ibid.; B. V. R. James to RA, 3 October 1842, ABCFM; JLW to RA, 15 October 1843, ABCFM; WW to RA, 16 September 1846, ABCFM; JLW to B. V. R. James, 1 November 1853, PHS; B. V. R. James to JLW, 15 March 1856, PHS; B. V. R. James to JLW, 20 December 1859, PHS; B. V. R. James to JLW, 9 May 1861, PHS; “Twenty-Seventh Annual Report of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in America, New York, 1864,” PHS; William Rankin, “Mr. B. V. R. James,” in Foreign Missionaries of the Presbyterian Church (Philadelphia, 1895).

  Chapter Eleven: The Conversion of William Davis (Mworeh Mah)

  1. For Cape Palmas as a launching place for the mission to West Africa, see “Mission to West Africa: The Prudential Committee of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to the Rev. John Leighton Wilson,” Charleston Observer, 8 November 1834; “Western Africa,” Missionary Herald, January 1837, 28.

  2. They left on 27 March 1837, and JLW completed his journal and marked it 6 April 1837. See JLW to RA, “Journal of a Tour to Grabbo,” 6 April 1837, ABCFM. The Kong Mountains, or the Mountains of Kong, appeared on almost all nineteenth-century maps of West Africa. Late in the century they were found to be an illusion. What JLW saw in the distance were mountains of the Nimba Range.

  3. JLW to RA, “Journal of a Tour to Grabbo,” 6 April 1837, ABCFM.

  4. For the important role of African agriculture in providing supplies for slave ships and making the international slave trade possible, see Judith A. Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (Berkeley, CA, 2009), esp. 53, 57, 65–79. For the role of rum in the trade for rice and slaves, see also JLW to RA, 26 May 1837, ABCFM; J. Leighton Wilson, Western Africa: Its History, Condition, and Prospects (New York, 1856), 151.

  5. For Haidee, or the “Grand Devil Oracle,” see James Hall to JHBL, 6 November 1835, MSCS; Wilson, Western Africa, 217–218; Anna M. Scott, Day Dawn in Africa; or, Progress of the Prot. Epis. Mission at Cape Palmas, West Africa (New York, 1858), 68–70; Richard F. Burton, Wanderings in West Africa: From Liverpool to Fernando Po (London, 1863), 284–285. For the continuing role of “sacred places” in African Christianity, see reflections of John Mbiti in Philip Jenkins, The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South (New York, 2006), 52–53. For a comparable development, cf. the continuing role of sacred places in Britain—from pagan Britain to Post-Reformation Britain, see Alexandra Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2011).

  6. Quotation: JLW to RA, “Journal of a Tour to Grabbo,” 6 April 1837, ABCFM.

  7. Wilson, Western Africa, 228–229. For some Grebo proverbs, see Edward Sapir, assisted by Charles G. Blooah, “Voice of Africa: Some Gweabo Proverbs,” Africa 2 (1929): 183–184.

  8. Quotation: JLW to RA, “Journal of a Tour to Grabbo,” 6 April 1837, ABCFM. For the controversial subject of cannibalism, see Peggy Reeves Sanday, Divine Hunger: Cannibalism as a Cultural System (Cambridge, UK, 1986); Paula Brown and Donald Tuzin, eds. The Ethnography of Cannibalism (Washington, DC, 1983). For widespread reports of the consumption of human flesh during the Liberian Civil War, see Stephen Ellis, The Mask of Anarchy: The Destruction of Liberia and the Religious Dimension of an African Civil War (New York, 1999), esp. 221–224, 230–237.

  9. JLW to RA, “Journal of a Tour to Grabbo,” 6 April 1837, ABCFM.

  10. JLW to RA, 14 January 1839, ABCFM. For the warfare between the settlers around Monrovia and the indigenous peoples, see Svend E. Holsoe, “A Study of Relations Between Settlers and Indigenous Peoples in Western Liberia, 1821–1847,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 4, no. 2 (1971): 349–351. For the hostility of Cape Palmas settlers toward the conversion of Grebo, see JLW to RA, 14 January 1839, ABCFM.

  11. Robin Horton, in two influential essays, pointed to the ways in which conversion to Christianity involved the experience of a broader social world and practical and cognitive adjustments to that world. See Robin Horton, “African Conversion,” Africa 41 (1971): 85–108; and “On the Rationality of Conversion,” Africa 45 (1975): 219–325, 373–399. Davis’s experiences in Sierra Leone and at Fair Hope were apparently important elements in his conversion.

  12. Quotations: JLW to RA, 7 February 1837, ABCFM; JLW to Elipha White, 8 July 1837, in Charleston Observer, 21 October 1837. For JLW’s early reluctance to preach in Grebo, see JLW to RA, 28 June 1836, ABCFM.

  13. Quotation: JLW to RA, “Annual Report of the Mission,” 30 December 1840, ABCFM. On the lack of power to coerce a conversion, see Andrew Porter, “‘Cultural Imperialism’ and Protestant Missionary Enterprise, 1780–1914,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 25, no. 3 (1997): 367–391; J. D. Y. Peel, “For Who Hath Despised the Day of Small Things? Missionary Narratives and Historical Anthropology,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, no. 3 (1995): 581–607. Porter and Peel argued that Protestant missionaries throughout much of the nineteenth century had little power to coerce conversions. For sincerity and authenticity in the conversion process, see Webb Keane, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (Berkeley, CA, 2007), 1–13, 197–222. On images of Catholic understanding of baptism, see JLW’s reflections on baptism and the early Catholic mission in the Congo and the later collapse of the church there in Wilson, Western Africa, 327–337; cf. Keane, Christian Moderns, 216. JLW’s understanding of conversion, an orthodox Calvinist perspective, was being challenged in the United States by many, but especially by the evangelist Charles G. Finney, who insisted that all one had to do to be converted was to make up one’s mind to accept Jesus as savior. For Finney’s position and the response of his critics, see Keith J. Hardman, Charles Grandison Finney, 1792–1875: Revivalist and Reformer (Syracuse, NY, 1987); and for the ways Finney reflected the individualism and egalitarian impulses in US society, see Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, CT, 1989), esp. 95–201. For a full exposition of JLW’s theological position, especially as it opposed nineteenth-century ideas of personal self-determination, see the work of JBW’s cousin, Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology (New York, 1873). For a succinct statement of this theological position, see Eberhard Busch, Drawn to Freedom: Christian Faith Today in Conversation with the Heidelberg Catechism, trans. William H. Rader (Grand Rapids, MI, 2010), 299–300.

  14. Quotations: JLW to “My Dear Parents, Brothers, and Sisters,” 21 June 1837, SCL; Wilson, Western Africa, iii. For the organization of a church at Fair Hope, see “Western Africa: Exacts from letters of Mr. Wilson, at Cape Palmas,” Charleston Observer, 8 September 1838. The ch
urch was organized as an adaptation of Presbyterian polity, with JLW as pastor and James as a lay elder. Together they formed the church session, which examined and received church members. For the “performance of sincerity,” see Keane, “Conversion and the Performance of Sincerity,” in Christian Moderns, 197–222.

  15. Religious conversion raises demanding questions about human agency and the cultural construction of reality. See Robert W. Hefner, ed., Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation (Berkeley, CA, 1993), esp. “Introduction: World Building and the Rationality of Conversion,” 3–44. See also Andrew Buckser and Stephen D. Glazier, eds., The Anthropology of Religious Conversion (Lanham, MD, 2003), esp. xi–xviii.

  16. See Peel, “For Who Hath Despised the Day of Small Things?”

  17. Cf. Sean Hawkins, “Disguising Chiefs and God as History: Questions on the Acephalousness of Lodagaa Politics and Religion,” Africa 66, no. 2 (1996): 202–241, esp. 241.

  18. For the continuity in African religion in its pre-Christian and its Christian forms, see Andrew F. Walls, The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History (Edinburgh, 2002), 116–135; Terence Ranger, “The Local and the Global in Southern African Religious History,” in Hefner, ed., Conversion to Christianity, 65–98. Cf. also Kwame Bediako, Christianity in Africa: The Renewal of a Non-Western Religion (Edinburgh, 1995), and for continuity in British religion, see Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape.

  19. For Grebo wives, see Wilson, Western Africa, 112–119; JLW to RA, 1 April 1836, ABCFM; Scott, Day Dawn in Africa, 49–50; Richard L. Hall, On Afric’s Shore: A History of Maryland in Liberia, 1834–1857 (Baltimore, 2003), 87–88.

  20. Quotations: JLW to RA, 26 February 1838, ABCFM; JLW to Charles Hodge, 1 December 1844, CTS.

  21. JLW to RA, 18 April 1838, ABCFM.