Niangara

“For we preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake.”

— 2 Corinthians 4:5, ASV

A Witness Who Was Not an Admirer

For most of Studd’s life in Africa we depend on the accounts of people who loved him and worked under him. For one short period we have something different. In 1914 an American named Hayes Perkins was working at the mission’s station at Niangara, and he kept a diary. Perkins did not share all of Studd’s convictions. His diary, which has since been published online, is frank, sometimes sharp, and occasionally unfair. It is also the only record of the first year of the Heart of Africa Mission written by someone who was there and was not writing for its supporters. This chapter uses it with care, as one man’s view, but it uses it.

Bwana

Niangara stood on the Uele River, in a region where many peoples met: Mangbetu, Azande, Medje, Babua and others, each with their own language, customs and history. Belgian officials, traders, African soldiers in the colonial army, and porters and workers recruited from many districts lived side by side with the people of the surrounding villages. The common language of trade and government was Bangala, a form of the Lingala spoken along the Congo River; in other parts of the north-east people used Kingwana, a Congolese form of Swahili.

Perkins records a small detail that says a good deal. Studd, he notes, had announced that his African name was to be “Bwana,” a Swahili word for “master.” Perkins pointed out, with some irritation, that the word was not even used in Bangala. White men across East and Central Africa were commonly addressed as bwana, and to many of them it meant no more than “sir.” But it is not a title Jesus would have chosen for himself. “Whosoever would become great among you shall be your minister; and whosoever would be first among you shall be your servant” (Matthew 20:26-27, ASV). The man who had worn a Chinese gown in Shanxi had, in Africa, slipped back into the role of the white master. The detail is a reminder that the habits of the English country house and the colonial order did not vanish because a man had given away his fortune.

Perkins also records that in 1914 it was Buxton, not Studd, who preached to the people in Bangala. Studd had not yet learned it. He was fifty-three, unwell, and impatient to be moving on to new districts, and he relied on his young colleague and on African interpreters to speak for him. He would gain some command of the languages of the region in the years that followed, and he would share in the translation of Scripture into Kingwana late in life, but he was never as fluent as Buxton or the younger missionaries who came after.

Services and the Freedom to Come

One of the most revealing entries in the diary concerns worship. The mission employed local men as workers, building houses, clearing ground and carrying loads. Perkins records that when he was left in charge of the station, during one of Studd and Buxton’s journeys, the first thing he did was to line up the men and tell them that they were no longer required to attend the morning and evening services.

It is not clear from the diary how the requirement had been enforced, or whether Studd or Buxton had ordered it in so many words. Perkins disliked Studd’s methods and may have overstated the matter. But if workers who depended on the mission for wages had been made to attend prayers, the effect is easy to imagine. They were not choosing the gospel; they were doing what the white man required. Perkins’s instinct, that faith must be freely chosen, was a sound one, and it is the instinct that Studd himself, at his best, had learned from Hudson Taylor in China.

The people of the Uele were not passive in all this. They decided whether to work for the mission and on what terms, whether to come to its services, and whether to believe what they heard. It is reasonable to suppose that, as at every new station, many came to listen out of curiosity and went away unconvinced, and that some came back. In time, Congolese men and women accepted the gospel through the mission, were baptised, and became evangelists themselves. Their names do not survive in the sources available to this book, but it was their choices, and not the missionaries’ plans, that decided whether there would be a church at all.

Four Stations

Studd and Buxton did not stay long in one place. In their first year and a half they travelled widely through the region, looking for places to settle and asking permission of officials and chiefs. By the time Studd left for England, the accounts say, they had opened four stations among peoples of eight different languages. Among the places named in the records of these years are Niangara itself and Nala, which would later be Studd’s main base for a time.

Perkins describes their comings and goings. On 1 August 1914 they returned to Niangara, he writes, full of renewed zeal. On 19 August an official telegram arrived from Rejaf, on the upper Nile, with the news that war had broken out in Europe. The Belgian authorities immediately sent most of their African troops from Niangara to the front, a reminder of how thinly the colonial state was spread and how much it depended on Congolese soldiers. In October Studd and Buxton set off again, in a large canoe paddled by Bakango boatmen, for Bambili, some hundred and sixty miles down the river.

Perkins was not a friend of Studd’s methods, but his diary records that Studd thought highly of him, and once described him as too good a man to lose. The two men seem to have respected each other more than they agreed.

A word should be said about how to read a witness like Perkins. He was not an admirer, and some of what he wrote was coloured by his own disagreements with Studd and Buxton. But a critical witness who was present is often more valuable than an admiring one who was not. The book of Proverbs says, “Faithful are the wounds of a friend; But the kisses of an enemy are profuse” (Proverbs 27:6, ASV). Perkins was neither a friend nor an enemy, but his candour serves the same purpose. He shows us the mission as it looked to an outsider in its first year, and that view is worth having, even when it is uncomfortable.

War Comes to the Uele

The telegram that reached Niangara in August 1914 brought a war that would cost the Congo dearly. Belgium itself was invaded and almost entirely occupied by Germany within weeks. Its colony fought on. The Force Publique, the colonial army of African soldiers under Belgian officers, fought in Cameroon and then in German East Africa, where in 1916 it captured the town of Tabora. The campaigns in East Africa were fought across vast distances, and the armies depended on huge numbers of African porters to carry their supplies. Tens of thousands of Congolese men were conscripted as soldiers and carriers, and very many died, of disease, exhaustion and hunger, far from home.

The north-east of the Congo, where the Heart of Africa Mission had just begun, was close to the frontier with British territory and on the routes to the eastern front. Soldiers were withdrawn from posts like Niangara and sent east. Villages were required to provide men, food and labour. The people whom Studd and Buxton had come to serve were drawn into a European war of which they had known nothing a few months before, and they paid a heavy price for it.

The missionaries’ own accounts of these years say little about this, and that silence is itself part of the record. It is a reminder that the history of the mission was being lived inside a much larger and harsher history, which shaped the lives of the Congolese far more than anything the missionaries did.

Called Home

Towards the end of 1914 news came from England that Priscilla was seriously ill. Studd left the work in Congo in Buxton’s hands and went home, reaching England in the early part of 1915. He had been in Africa for less than two years. He had seen enough to be certain that this was where he would spend the rest of his life.

Servants for Jesus’ Sake

Paul’s words to the Corinthians at the head of this chapter describe exactly the relationship that every missionary is meant to have with the people he serves: “we preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake.” The missionary is a servant, and Christ is Lord.

The first year of the Heart of Africa Mission shows how hard that was to live out in colonial Africa, even for a man who had given away everything. Studd lived simply, far more simply than most Europeans in the colony. He was entirely sincere in his love for the people. But he also took the name of master, relied on others to speak for him, and seems to have expected his workers to come to prayers. None of that was unusual for a European in Congo in 1914. Much of it was milder than what most Europeans did. It is told here not to condemn him, but because the gospel he came to preach called him to something better, and in later years, with Congolese Christians beside him, he would sometimes reach it.