From Bolivia to the Belgian Congo: Protestant Faith-Based Development in an Era of Authoritarianism and Decolonization

Flying over the lowlands of eastern Bolivia one observes the unmistakable impact of half-a-century of colonization.  Amid an eclectic landscape of large farms and smallholder plots a strange formation stands out.  Just to the east of Rio Grande, dozens of giant “pinwheel-like” colonies give the appearance of massive central pivot irrigation systems.  Grouped in blocks of nine and connected by a grid of access roads, each “pinwheel” or núcleo contains forty narrow pie-shaped plots (of 50 hectares) extending out from a central point.   This is San Julián, Bolivia’s largest and most “successful” colonization endeavor. 

This paper explores the unlikely ecumenical coalition – including several Methodist missionaries, volunteers from a Mennonite relief agency, and a few Maryknoll sisters - that administered this unusual project.  Long active in rural development after Bolivia’s mid-century socialist revolution, these faith-based development workers successfully negotiated the transition to authoritarianism under Hugo Banzer.  Forming an NGO (the United Church Committee), they pioneered a settler “orientation” program in San Julián, arguing that the project’s unique circular design would, facilitate service provision, ameliorate the isolating effects of jungle colonization and lead to an inescapable sense of community solidarity.  All would serve to reduce the universally high levels of abandonment that plagued colonization. 

Even as they became central actors in colonization in authoritarian Bolivia, both the Mennonite Central Committee and the Methodist church were also active across the Atlantic in the former Belgian Congo.  Here too faith-based development proved adept at negotiating moments of political transition – in this case between colonial and post-colonial regimes.  Bringing together these simultaneous development endeavors, that blurred the distinction between the secular and religious, I show how these actors became important proxies for nascent states and presaged the flood of NGO activity across the global south.