The Heart of Africa

“By faith Abraham, when he was called, obeyed to go out unto a place which he was to receive for an inheritance; and he went out, not knowing whither he went.”

— Hebrews 11:8, ASV

A Mission of His Own

At the end of 1912, with no society willing to take him on his own terms, Studd and a small circle of friends formed a new venture. They called it the Heart of Africa Mission. The order of events is not entirely clear from the sources, since Studd was also, briefly, a member of the Africa Inland Mission; but within weeks of his sailing in 1913 that membership had ended, and the Heart of Africa Mission stood on its own. Its aim, at first, was simple: to carry the gospel to the peoples of the north-eastern Belgian Congo, beyond the reach of any Protestant mission then at work. Its methods were those Studd had learned in the China Inland Mission, made stricter. Its workers would receive no salaries and would make no appeals for money. They would live simply, close to the people, and trust God to supply what they needed.

The new mission needed a base at home. The Studds took a house at 17 Highland Road, Upper Norwood, in south London, and it became both the family home and the mission’s headquarters. It would remain so for many years.

Priscilla

Priscilla Studd did not want her husband to go. The sources agree on that, and it is to their credit that they do not hide it. She had been seriously ill; she had a heart condition that would at times leave her an invalid; and she could see, as anyone could, that her husband was not fit for tropical Africa. She was also being asked to accept that he would leave her and their daughters, perhaps for years, and quite possibly for good.

Studd’s admirers have generally told this part of the story as a test of his faith, which he passed by going anyway. It was that. It was also a test of their marriage, and it is not obvious that it was handled well. A husband who believes himself called by God to a task his wife opposes faces one of the hardest questions in Christian life, and there is no easy rule for answering it. Studd answered it in the way he answered everything, completely and at once. He went.

What happened afterwards is a story about Priscilla as much as about him. Within a short time she not only accepted his going but threw herself into the work at home with an energy that astonished those who knew how ill she had been. She took charge of the mission’s correspondence, its finances and its recruitment. She spoke at meetings around the country. She became, in effect, the home director of the Heart of Africa Mission, and for most of the next sixteen years the mission in Africa depended on her work in England as much as on her husband’s in the field. Whatever the cost of his decision to her, she did not let it defeat her. That, too, was a kind of courage, and it has been less celebrated than his.

Alfred Buxton

Studd did not go alone. His companion was a young man of about twenty-one named Alfred Barclay Buxton. Buxton came from one of the great evangelical families of England. His father, Barclay Fowell Buxton, had been a missionary in Japan, and the family was descended from Thomas Fowell Buxton, who had led the campaign in Parliament against slavery in the British Empire. According to the accounts, Alfred had been a student at Cambridge preparing for a medical career. He gave it up to go with Studd. He would later marry Studd’s daughter Edith, in the Congo in 1917.

By the accounts of those who knew them both, Buxton was in many ways the opposite of Studd: patient where Studd was impatient, a quick learner of languages where Studd was slow, gentle where Studd was fierce. He became the first real linguist of the mission, and an American who worked with the two men in 1914 noted that it was Buxton, not Studd, who preached in the local trade language. For more than ten years he would be Studd’s closest partner. Their eventual parting, told later in this book, was one of the saddest events of Studd’s life.

Living by Faith

The Heart of Africa Mission adopted, from the start, the financial principles that Studd had learned from Hudson Taylor and George Müller. It would not ask anyone for money. It would not go into debt. It would pay no salaries. Whatever came in would be shared among the workers, and if nothing came in, they would go without. Missions run on these lines came to be called “faith missions,” and in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries they sent thousands of workers into parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America where the older denominational societies had not gone.

The principle had great strengths. It freed the missions from dependence on wealthy patrons and denominational committees, and allowed them to go where they believed God was leading without waiting for a budget. It attracted people who were willing to live simply and trust God for their needs. It meant that missionaries were close in their standard of living to the people they served.

It also had real dangers, and Studd’s mission would discover many of them. In faith missions generally, missionaries with no guaranteed income sometimes went short of food and medicine. The refusal to ask for money did not always prevent the mission from making its needs known in ways that came very close to asking. And the principle could be turned into a test of spiritual quality, so that those who worried about money were treated as lacking in faith. In the hands of a leader as demanding as Studd, that test could be applied without mercy.

But in 1913 none of that was yet apparent. A small group of friends in Norwood, an ailing man of fifty-two and a young medical student had committed themselves to a mission with no money, no committee of any standing, and no promise of support. If God did not provide, it would fail. They believed he would.

The Journey

Studd and Buxton sailed from England in the early weeks of 1913. Most accounts give 30 January as the date of sailing. Studd was fifty-two. Their route took them by sea to the coast of East Africa, then inland through what are now Kenya and Uganda by railway, steamer and on foot, to Lake Albert, and across into the Belgian Congo. The whole journey took about nine months. It was hard travelling, much of it on foot, through country that the doctors had told Studd would kill him. He did not turn back.

They reached Niangara, a government post on the Uele River in the north-east of the Congo, on 16 October 1913. The date is still remembered by the church that grew from their work, which celebrated its centenary in 2013. At Niangara they obtained permission from the Belgian authorities to settle and the use of land for a first station.

The Congo in 1913

The land Studd entered had only lately emerged from one of the worst episodes in the history of colonial rule. From 1885 to 1908 the Congo had been the personal possession of King Leopold II of Belgium, under the name of the Congo Free State. Leopold’s regime had extracted wild rubber and ivory by forced labour enforced with terror. Villages that failed to meet their quotas were burned, hostages taken, and men and women beaten, mutilated and killed. Millions of people died through violence, famine, disease and the collapse of village life. An international campaign of protest, led by Protestant missionaries, journalists and humanitarians, forced the Belgian state to take over the colony in 1908.

The north-east, where Studd came, had seen its own share of violence. The Azande and Mangbetu kingdoms of the Uele had resisted conquest for years, and the Belgian authorities still kept a large force of African soldiers at Niangara, partly from fear of a Zande uprising. The peoples of the region had suffered raids by slavers from the north long before the Belgians came, and then the demands of the Free State. They had every reason to be wary of white men who arrived uninvited, whatever they said they had come for.

Studd and Buxton came as missionaries, not as agents of the state, and the Belgian authorities of the time were generally more favourable to Catholic missions, most of them Belgian, than to Protestant missions run by foreigners. But to the people of the Uele, the distinction between one white man and another was not always clear, and the missionaries depended on the colonial authorities for permission to live and work. That was the world in which the Heart of Africa Mission began.

Not Knowing Whither

Abraham, the letter to the Hebrews says, “went out, not knowing whither he went.” It was an act of faith, and the Bible honours it. It was also an act with consequences for other people. Sarah went with him, and so did Lot, and the people of the lands through which they passed were not consulted.

Studd’s going to Africa was, in its own way, an act of the same kind of faith. He went because he believed God had called him, and he went at great cost to himself. It is right to honour that. It is also right to remember that his going depended on his wife’s willingness to carry the burden at home, on a young man who gave up his own plans to go with him, and on the permission of a colonial government that had only just stopped killing the people he had come to serve. The heart of Africa did not ask for Studd. He came anyway, and the people of the Uele would decide for themselves what to make of him.