Missionary Sources and African History: the Case of Two Swedish Lutheran Missions

Encouraged by the scholarly generosity and broad learning of Irma Taddia, including her interest in African religious modern history, this article explores contrary tendencies in the missionary sources of the two major Swedish Lutheran missions operating in Africa from around the 1890s to the 1930s: the Swedish Evangelical Mission (SEM) in Eritrea–Ethiopia beginning in 1865 and the Church of Sweden Mission (CSM), from the early 1870s in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The attempt is to shed light on the distinctiveness, the scope and the categorisation of different materials and how social and political tendencies are seen in the archival sources. Originating from the Swedish nineteenth century popular mobilisation from below, the SEM was a vehicle for egalitarian ideals and the modernisation of society, manifest in its educational endeavours in Eritrea–Ethiopia, but also in a criticism of local, traditional Ethiopian society. The CSM, on the other hand, representing a romanticist-inspired, nationalist folk-church movement, had rather been formed against the forces of modernity. In KwaZulu-Natal, the missionaries encouraged Zulu history, culture, ethnic and national unity in the face of an aggressive colonialism and capitalism. The two missions shared the Swedish Lutheran background, but the divergent tendencies of the sources indicate that social and political background overruled both national and confessional belonging as well as the different contexts of their mission fields, respectively.