Missionary children were usually sent back “home” to Europe at around five or six years of age, when they became of school age. There they were expected to gain different kinds of knowledge, through formal and informal instruction, thought to be of value then and in their later lives, too, which they were to devote to the Mission, and thus continue their transnational existence. What skills, training and education did this entail?
In a second step, the paper will compare the findings on missionary children with those on indigenous children and the knowledge they were confronted with. What knowledges were thought to be important to obtain for the indigenous children at the mission stations in Africa, India and China? How were these decisions shaped by discourses about race? This second part will probe more deeply into travelling knowledge and knowledge hierarchies in the colonial context.
Finally, the paper will focus on the intersection of youth, knowledge and agency on the background of migration. It will investigate if and how missionary children and indigenous children were able to develop agency in an institutional setting far away from their parents and their birth communities. How did absence and distance shape that agency? In what ways did the knowledges acquired in their youth open up unexpected avenues for agency, locally and further afield? This paper will take a relational and comparative approach to explore these questions.