2012/09/10 · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Religion, Society, and Development #Christian Theology and Mission #African history and culture analysis
paper · doi:10.4324/9780203867815-19
openalex publication_date 2012/09/10 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
In 1935 the Church Missionary Society established a station at Salara, in the western part of the Nuba Mountains of Sudan. The station received considerable financial support from the colonial administration, as well as from donors in the United Kingdom, but it was strikingly unsuccessful in its attempts to create a local Christian community, and in the early 1950s the station was abandoned by the CMS. This paper explores the circumstances of this failure, and suggests that missionary work in Salara was undermined by the missionaries' ambivalent attitudes to tradition and modernity. These attitudes derived partly from engagement with colonial officials who were chronically uncertain as to the proper policy to pursue in the Nuba Mountains, and partly from a wider uncertainty in mission attitudes that had come to emphasize the need for a distinctly African form of Christianity but yet remained profoundly suspicious of the reliability of African Christians. I stood one morning with several British officials in these mountains. We were surrounded by a crowd of black tribesmen. With a great dignity the elder men stood and watched us, the children scrambled for sweets, while the women stood at a little distance watching us with the amusement of those who find themselves suddenly faced with foreigners from an unknown part of the world. 'Look at them', said the wife of an official standing near me, 'does it not make you want to help them?' The appeal of such people is irresistible. (W. Cash)'