Going Native: Teaching Indigenous Knowledge in Protestant Mission Schools, 1900–30

Protestant mission schools have since the late eighteenth century played a preeminent role in the global distribution of Western concepts of knowledge. Focusing initially on the “three R’s” (reading, writing, arithmetic) to facilitate potential disciples’ understanding of Christian religion, missionary education was re-conceived in the early twentieth century to address the specific needs of the local populations missionaries sought to enter. Often referred to as native or adapted education, this educational reform aimed at making mission schools a building block of a larger program of “indigenization,” in which Protestant missionaries turned away from attempting to assimilate their followers to Western standards in favor of safeguarding what they saw as worthwhile indigenous characteristics.

This paper will explore the curricula and teaching materials Protestant missionaries devised for students in the context of the indigenization reform movement from a dual perspective. It asks, first, where the content of these materials originated, and how and by whom they were edited and distributed. Based on a case study of Protestant mission schools in the British parts of sub-Sahara Africa, the paper examines, secondly, how students’ responded to the forms of knowledge missionaries offered them as suited to serve their idiosyncratic needs. By tracing the production and local reception of missionary teaching materials, the paper demonstrates that the ways in which missionaries envisioned indigenous knowledge were not congruent with the notions African students had of the same. The processes by which Protestant mission schools defined and disseminated concepts of indigenous knowledge reveal, instead, how students appropriated, subverted and at times overtly contested the ideas of indigeneity they were taught, alongside other presumably firm categories of difference – including race, religion and age – thus offering a rich account of “traveling” knowledge and the competing epistemic systems in which mission schools were situated.