Nala and Ibambi

“Except Jehovah build the house, They labor in vain that build it: Except Jehovah keep the city, The watchman waketh but in vain.”

— Psalm 127:1, ASV

Return to the Uele

Studd returned to the Congo in 1916 with his daughter Edith and a party of new recruits. The journey was long, and wartime made it longer. When he arrived, he found that the little work he had left in Buxton’s hands had held together. The handful of stations opened in 1913 and 1914 were still there. A few Congolese had become Christians and been baptised; the accounts suggest that the first baptisms took place around 1917. The new missionaries were sent out to learn languages and to open further stations. The Heart of Africa Mission was becoming a real mission, not just the venture of one man and a young companion.

In 1917 Edith Studd and Alfred Buxton were married in the Congo. For a father so often accused of putting his family second, it must have been a deep joy to see one of his daughters married to the young man he trusted more than anyone in Africa. For a time, the Buxtons lived and worked at Ibambi, in the forest country to the south, while Studd had his own centre at Nala, two days’ journey away.

The Forest Country

The region in which the mission now worked lay where the savanna of the Uele gave way, to the south, to the great Ituri forest: a vast, dense rainforest crossed by rivers and footpaths, with clearings for villages and gardens. Several peoples lived there. The most numerous around Ibambi were the Budu, known to Europeans then as the Mabudu, a farming people whose villages were scattered through the forest. To the north and east lived the Mangbetu and the Azande, with their own kingdoms and courts. In the forest itself lived the Mbuti, the forest hunters whom Europeans called Pygmies, who traded meat and forest products with the farming villages and had their own long traditions.

It is important to say what the mission found when it came, and not only what it brought. The people of the forest country had their own beliefs about God, the spirits, the dead and the moral order of the world. They had elders, chiefs, healers and diviners, their own ways of settling disputes, and a deep knowledge of the forest. They had also been through a generation of upheaval: raids by slavers from the north in the nineteenth century, conquest by the Congo Free State, forced labour for rubber and ivory, and now the Belgian colonial administration with its taxes, its demands for porters and road-workers, and its African soldiers. The world into which the missionaries came was not timeless and unchanged. It was a world that had already been turned upside down, and in which people were looking for ways to make sense of what had happened to them.

The missionaries were also not the first Christians in the region. Catholic missionaries had reached some of these peoples, including the Budu, before Studd did. Studd, who shared the anti-Catholic convictions of most British evangelicals of his time, regarded their work as no work at all, and relations between the two missions in the Congo were often bitter. A modern reader is likely to see the matter differently, and to regret that the two missions spent so much energy competing with one another. But it is a fact of the story, and it shaped the way Studd thought about his own task.

Ibambi

About 1921 or 1922 Studd moved his own centre from Nala to Ibambi, which became the headquarters of the mission in Africa. The sources differ on the exact year. Ibambi lay in the territory of Wamba, in Budu country, and the area around it was thickly populated. Studd lived there for the rest of his life.

His way of life at Ibambi became legendary, and some of the legends are probably true. He lived in a simple house built in the local manner, ate local food, and worked very long hours, often far into the night, writing letters, preparing addresses, and later translating. He rarely took a day off. He refused most of the small comforts that other missionaries thought necessary in the tropics. He held meetings for the Christians and enquirers, sometimes very large ones, and he loved to preach to them. Those who came, by the accounts, often walked long distances through the forest to do so.

Those who worked with him found it exhausting, and some found it frightening. Studd expected his colleagues to keep his hours, live as he lived, and share his urgency. He had little patience with illness, rest or caution in others, though he suffered constantly from illness himself. In later years this would be the root of many conflicts. In the early years at Ibambi, when the mission was small and those who joined it had chosen it knowing what it was, it was also part of what made the mission grow.

One more detail from these years deserves mention. As at most stations in the region, the mission’s early buildings were raised by Congolese builders in the local manner, with poles, mud and thatch. That was a matter of necessity as much as principle, but it was also a sign of how much the mission depended, from its first day, on the skills and goodwill of the people it had come to serve.

The Weight of the Colony

The 1920s were hard years for the people of the north-east Congo, and it is important to see the mission’s growth against that background. The Belgian administration was extending its control into every district. It imposed a head tax, payable in money, which forced men to find paid work or to sell crops. It required villages to provide labour for roads and for the posts of officials. In the 1910s and 1920s it began to impose the compulsory cultivation of cash crops, especially cotton, in many districts. And in the Ituri, not far from the mission’s stations, the state-run gold mines of Kilo and Moto drew in large numbers of workers, many of them recruited under heavy pressure from chiefs who were themselves under pressure from the administration.

None of this was the mission’s doing, and the missionaries had little power to change it. But it shaped the lives of the people who came to their meetings. Men who had walked for days to hear the gospel might have to leave the next week to work on a road or in a mine. Families who wanted to support an evangelist might have no money left after the tax. Christians who refused to take part in certain customs might find their chief less willing to protect them from the demands of the state.

It also helps to explain why the gospel was heard as it was. The message that God loved them, that every person was precious to him, that the poor and the despised were welcome in his kingdom, and that a day was coming when every wrong would be judged, came to people who had good reason to long for it. They did not hear it as a European message, whatever the messengers thought. Many of them heard it as good news for themselves.

Norman and Pauline

In 1919 Studd’s youngest daughter, Pauline, married Norman Grubb, a young man who had served as an officer in the war and been wounded, and who had gone up to Cambridge afterwards. The following year, 1920, they sailed for the Congo. Grubb was a gifted linguist and a thoughtful, energetic man, and he quickly became one of the leading missionaries of the field. He worked on the translation of the New Testament into Bangala, the trade language of the region.

The Grubbs knew grief in the Congo, as so many missionary families did. Their son Noel died on his first birthday and was buried at Nala. Studd’s grandson lies there still.

So by the early 1920s two of Studd’s daughters and two sons-in-law were working beside him in Africa. To his admirers it looked like a family entirely given to the cause. It was. It also meant that the mission was, to an unusual degree, a family business, and that when disagreements came, they would be family quarrels, with all the pain and bitterness that family quarrels carry.

Except Jehovah Build the House

The psalm at the head of this chapter was a song for pilgrims going up to Jerusalem, and it is a song about building. “Except Jehovah build the house, They labor in vain that build it.” The builders still have to build, and the watchmen still have to watch. But neither the building nor the watching will last unless God is in it.

Studd believed that with all his heart. He also, at times, acted as if the building depended on his own unceasing effort, and on the effort of everyone around him. Those two convictions sat side by side in him, and he does not seem to have noticed the tension between them. The psalm goes on, “It is vain for you to rise up early, To take rest late, To eat the bread of toil; For so he giveth unto his beloved sleep” (Psalm 127:2, ASV). Studd rose early and took rest late, every day, for years. It is a strange and moving verse to read beside his life. God gave the increase in the Ituri forest, as the next chapter tells. Much of that increase came through people who were not driven, as Studd was, but who had heard good news and could not keep it to themselves.