This paper explores missionary efforts to introduce new conceptions of space, time, and personal and social identity through the built environment, time discipline, and classroom instruction that shaped life on the mission station of Baraka, in modern-day Gabon. The paper also explores the Mpongwe response, particularly that of the young women who boarded in the missionary school and combined their own cultural practices with those offered by the missionaries.
Additionally, the paper seeks to uncover the ways in which encounters at Baraka influenced and even reshaped missionary ideas. Rather than conceiving of these encounters only in terms of the attempted transfer of static conceptions of gender, domesticity, race, etc., I explore the possibility that missionary encounters helped construct evolving American ideas about these matters from the outside, through an "other" who was at once a social actor and, in the hands of missionaries writing for home audiences, a discursive creation.
The American men and women who worked at Baraka were keenly aware of their unusual relationship to the "Christian civilization" of which they were emissaries. Their commitment to its ultimate triumph led them to renounce its comforts and even adopt the language and some of the practices of people they considered less than fully civilized. For this reason, missionaries themselves were exotic and fascinating figures for home audiences. Their frequent descriptions of their personal negotiations of the borderlands between "civilization" and "savagery" provided American readers with a widely consulted map of that politically significant terrain.