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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Private Thoughts for Private Ears? Female missionaries and the transfer of knowledge between Europe and Sierra Leone in the 19th century
| Panel |
70. Trading Places: Knowledge Production and Transfer between Europe and sub-Saharan Africa - the Missionary Context
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| Paper ID | 331 |
| Author(s) |
Strickrodt, Silke
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | In the growing body of literature on the cultural brokerage performed by missionaries in Africa relatively little attention has been paid to the role of woman missionaries in the transfer of knowledge between Africa and Europe in the nineteenth century. This is partly a reflection of contemporary views of women as ‘helpmates’ to their missionary husbands rather than agents in their own right. Yet women – single women as well as missionary wives and widows – did play an active role in the missionary endeavour, sometimes using mission service to emancipate themselves from prescribed gender roles in Europe. One area where women were particularly important was the education of children and young women. Teaching and caring for the young was accepted as an extension of woman’s ‘natural’ role as mother in the domestic sphere and thus constituted a logical step towards a more professional and public role.
The ensuing tension between restrictive gender roles on the one hand and women’s initiatives on the other raises questions concerning the production and transfer of knowledge: What kind of knowledge about Africa and Africans did female missionaries produce and transmit? Was it different from that of their male counterparts? Were there differences in their interaction with Africans, i.e. did they interact with different individuals, in different contexts and different ways? Another set of questions relates to channels for the transfer of knowledge. Given the difficulties encountered by women who wanted to publish their experiences, which means did they use to transmit and present their knowledge? Who were the intended and actual audiences of their accounts? What role did gender play in the ‘information networks’ that were established? Did the information conveyed among women differ from that communicated among men or between men and women?
My paper explores some of these questions with reference to European and African women who were employed as teachers by the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in Sierra Leone, where the CMS began work in 1804. European women were active in the mission from the beginning as wives and, very soon, as widows. From the mid-1840s, with the recognition of the importance of female education for the success of the missionary enterprise, single women (British Anglicans as well as Calvinist Protestants from Switzerland and Württemberg) were sent to Sierra Leone as teachers for children and young women. Particularly important was the Female Institution in Freetown, founded in 1845/49, which provided secondary education for middle-class girls and was staffed exclusively by female European and African teachers. My sources include a large body of correspondence that survives in the CMS Archive.
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