Picturing Pity: Pitfalls and Pleasures in Cross-Cultural Communication.<BR>Image and Word in a North Cameroon Mission 9781782388807

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PICTURING PITY PITFALLS AND PLEASURES IN CROSS-CULTURAL COMMUNICATION. IMAGE AND WORD IN A NORTH CAMEROON MISSION

Marianne Gullestad

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

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10/1/07

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First published in 2007 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com

©2007 Marianne Gullestad

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed in the United States on acid-free paper ISBN 978-1-84545-343-5 (hardback)

CONTENTS List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Propaganda for Christ

v viii x 1

2. Establishing a Goodness Regime

35

3. Imagining a Call from Africa

75

4. Reflections on Taking Photographs

99

5. God’s Sowers and Reapers

135

6. Women and Children: Both Marginal and Central

169

7. Muslim Men: Dangerous Rivals and Exotic Villains

203

8. Victims and Villains in a Feature Film from 1960

217

9. From Religions Propaganda to Cultural Heritage

247

10. Goodness and Its Side-effects

265

Bibliography

283

Index

294

This book is dedicated to idealists all over the world, to everybody who wants to remedy unequal global conditions. I hope that alongside the work of numerous others, my ideas and interpretations will contribute to making a new intellectual foundation for moving beyond the almost unavoidable opposition between ‘givers’ and ‘receivers’, between ‘the North’ and ‘the South’.

LIST OF FIGURES 1. Painting made by Adolf Thunem in 1923.

77

2. Abolitionist engraving, 1809.

80

3. Hugo Höppener (Fidus): ‘Prayer to the light’ (Lichtgebet). Painted 1894 or 1924.

81

4. Frontispiece 1883–92.

83

5. Frontispiece 1892–1911.

85

6. Frontispiece 1911–25.

87

7. Frontispiece 1925–26.

88

8. Frontispiece 1926–37.

89

9. Frontispiece 1937–49.

90

10. Frontispiece 1949–56.

92

11. Frontispiece 1956–66.

93

12. Studio photograph of ‘The Pioneers’, probably from 1924.

101

13. Karl Flatland and his servants, reproduced from Flatland (1922).

102

14. The king of Shellem and some of his wives. Reproduced from Flatland (1922).

103

15. Field pictures of Gudrun Røst and her husband. Reproduced from Røst (1942).

108

16. Children and young girls. Reproduced from Røst (1942).

110

17. Upper picture: Halfdan Endresen and an anonymous baptismal candidate. Lower picture: Geddal. Reproduced from Endresen (1965).

112

18. Upper left: Rundok. Upper Right: Fatuma and Adamu. Below: The church in Ngaoundéré. Reproduced from Endresen (1954).

114

19. Upper picture: Yiglau. Lower picture: Geddal. Reproduced from Endresen (1969). 116 20. Rundok. Reproduced from the digitized collection.

118

21. Book cover. Olaf Ellingsen, Jan Dalland, and an anonymous boy. Reproduced from Dalland (1960).

120

22. Wives of a lamiido. Photographer: Olaf Ellingsen, 1960. Reproduced from Dalland (1960).

122

23. Paul Ngonom. Photographer: Olaf Ellingsen, 1960. Reproduced from Dalland (1960).

124

24. A lamiido and praying Muslims. Photographer: Olaf Ellingsen, 1960. Reproduced from Dalland (1960).

126

25. Upper picture: A missionary meets Muslims. Lower pictures: Two women and their children. The woman to the right is Numjal. Photographer: Olaf Ellingsen, 1960. Reproduced from Dalland (1960).

127

26. Anonymous Mbororo herdsman. Photographer: Olaf Ellingsen, 1960. Reproduced from Dalland (1960).

128

27. Anonymous woman. Photographer: Olaf Ellingsen, 1960. Reproduced from Ellingsen’s slide show.

132

28. Missionary conference 1944 in Ngaoundéré. Reproduced from Jørgensen ed. (1992, II).

140

29. Two missionaries (Else Marie Farestad and Borghild Ruud) and the anonymous wives of the students at the Bible school. Photographer: Borghild Ruud. Reproduced from Jørgensen ed. (1992, II).

145

30. The church at Ngaoubela. Photographer: Olaf Ellingsen, 1960. Here reproduced from Larsen (1973).

147

31. Three anonymous Cameroonians in front of the clinic in Galim. Photographer: Jan Sandsmark. Reproduced from Jørgensen (1992, II).

148

32. Two missionaries (Ove Aasen and Halfdan Endresen) in the foreground with anonymous construction workers and women in the background. Photographer: Olaf Ellingsen, 1960. Reproduced from Jørgensen (1992, II).

149

33. Cover of Henny Waala Nelson’s memoir (1996), showing the author and anonymous children.

151

34. Back cover of Aarhaug (1985), showing the author and an anonymous child.

152

35. Ingeborg Mosand with anonymous children at the orphanage in Yoko between 1950 and 1954. Photographer: Karen Ulland (Haarr). Reproduced from the digitized collection.

153

36. Famous painting made in 1915 by Harold Copping, commissioned by the London Missionary Society and called The Hope of the World. Reproduced from a Sunday school picture issued by the London Missionary Society. 155 37. Arranged picture of a baptism. Halfdan Endresen and an anonymous woman. Photographer: Erik Larsen. Reproduced from Jørgensen (1992, II).

158

38. Cover of a booklet listing NMS missionaries (1977). Title: ‘God’s reapers: Missionaries of the Norwegian missionary society 1842–1977.’

164

39. Missionary grave. Back cover of the list of missionaries (1977).

167

40. Cover of the main journal 19 February 1966. Photographer: John Taylor.

170

41. Cover of the 50th anniversary book (Larsen (1973)). Photographers: Njell Lofthus (upper picture) and Erik Larsen (lower picture).

175

42. Bouba Yaya’s second wife. Photographer: Lars Gaustad, 1968. Reproduced from Larsen (1973).

179

43. Bouba Yaya’s second wife. Photographer: Lars Gaustad. First photograph in a series of three.

184

44. Bouba Yaya’s second wife. Photographer: Lars Gaustad. Second photograph in a series of three.

184

45. Bouba Yaya’s second wife. Photographer: Lars Gaustad. Third photograph in a series of three.

184

46. Anonymous baby. Photographer: Erik Sandvik. Reproduced from Larsen (1973).

185

47. Tipani André. Photographer: Erik Sandvik. Reproduced from Larsen (1973).

185

48. Anonymous young boy. Title page of the chapter about Cameroon in the official NMS history volumes, Jørgensen (1992, II).

189

49. Anonymous woman and child. Photographer: Olaf Ellingsen, 1960. Reproduced from Jørgensen (1992, II).

191

50. Anonymous woman and child. Photographer: Olaf Ellingsen, 1960. Reproduced from Olaf Ellingsen’s assorted slides.

192

51. Satou Marthe, Ahmadou Simon and their twins. Photographer: Erik Larsen. Reproduced from Jørgensen (1992, II).

193

52. Mouna. Cover picture of Sundby (1991). Photographer: Jorunn Sundby.

195

53. Aissatou. Photographer: Eli Vollen. Reproduced from Sundby (1991).

197

54. Three pictures reproduced from Aasen (1952).

207

55. Per Arne Aasen and an anonymous Muslim. Reproduced from Aasen (1952).

208

56. The orchestra of the lamiido in Foumban. Photographer: Aksel Aarhaug. Reproduced from Aarhaug (1985).

211

57. Oumarou. Photographer: Inger Aanstad. Reproduced from Sundby (1991).

214

58. Saïdou. Photographer: John Steinar Dale. Reproduced from Sundby (1991).

215

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The research for this book was conducted in the triangle between the Programme for Visual Cultural Studies at the University of Tromsø, University of Ngaoundéré, Cameroon, and the archive of the Norwegian Missionary Society (NMS) and the School of Mission and Theology at the NMS headquarters in Stavanger. Without the scholarly support at every stage of the project in Cameroon and in Norway of Professor Lisbet Holtedahl at the Programme for Visual Cultural Studies at the University of Tromsø and at the Ngaoundéré-Anthropos programme, the project would never have been either conceived of in the first place, nor carried out in practice. She inspired me to start working on this material, hosted me in Cameroon, and has been an enthusiastic and critical reader of numerous drafts. Her long term experiences of working with photographs and films in Cameroon have profoundly influenced this project. My thanks to her are therefore beyond words. I also thank the other teachers at the programme for Visual Cultural Studies for inviting me every year to lecture and tutor students, receiving every time much more than I give. I extend my thanks to the students at the programme. In particular, the Cameroonian students offered inspiring suggestions. At the headquarters of the Norwegian Missionary Society (NMS) in Stavanger, it has been a pleasure to work with the leader of the archive, Nils Kristian Høimyr, and his assistant, Bjørg Bergøy Johansen. Nils Kristian Høimyr generously shared his immense knowledge about the pictures in the archive and the history of the NMS. He also read and commented upon the manuscript for this book. I thank the NMS, represented by Arne B. Samuelsen, the leader of the library and Nils Kristian Høimyr for the permission to freely publish the photographic material in the archive and the books for my research purposes. In particular, all the original pictures in the history volumes of the NMS, published in 1992, are located at the NMS Archive in Stavanger, as well as Olaf Ellingsen’s slide show and assorted slides and a digitized collection of mission pictures from Cameroon. They are reproduced here by courtesy of the archive. Moreover, I thank all the many present and former missionaries in Stavanger, in Cameroon, and all over Norway with whom I have been in touch during the writing of this book. In particular, I thank Tomas Sundnes Drønen, Lars Gaustad, and the NMS representative in Cameroon, Ranveig Kaldhol. Moreover, I also warmly thank Ivar Barane, Erik Larsen, Torunn Lunde, Ragnhild Mestad, Solveig Bjøru Sandnes and Jorunn Sundby. They all read the book manuscript and suggested useful improvements. Kåre Lode generously made a particularly thorough reading and shared his comments. Numerous Cameroonians, also, helped me and were willing to talk to me about the pictures. Among them I thank the professors Mahmoudou Djingui and Taguem Fah at the University of Ngaoundéré, the leader of the women’s organization, Femmes pour Christ, Satou Marthe, and Daouda Ja’e at the Radio Sawtu Linjiila for sharing their ideas and

experiences with me. Vakoté Dieudonné, who now lives in Oslo, read and commented upon the whole manuscript. Rachel Issa Djesa, who lives in Tromsø, read selected parts and provided thoughtful advice. Moreover, I thank everybody in Lisbet Holtedahl’s household in Ngaoundéré for good care, proficient help and much encouragement: the managers the late Hajja Dapetel, Saliou Abba and his wife Hadidjatou, the housekeeper Moussa, as well as the technical adviser Adamou Galdima and the drivers/research assistants Ahmadou and Ousmanou Babawa. I was a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago, for a few months in 2005; at the CIESAS sureste (Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social), San Cristobal de las Casas for two months in 2002, and a ‘Guest of the Rector’ at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and the Social Sciences (NIAS) in the spring of 2003. I have presented the project as guest lectures at the Humboldt University in Berlin; the University of Edinburgh; the University of Oslo; Oslo University College; Agder University College; and the School of Mission and Theology in Stavanger. I also participated in the stimulating and inspiring workshop ‘Gender and Visuality’ at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa in 2004. All these experiences were important for the development of the ideas in this book. The research work for the book was funded by the programme for basic research of the Research Council of Norway and by my place of work, the Institute for Social Research in Oslo. I thank the librarians, the information staff and the computer specialists at the institute for their outstanding professionalism and helpfulness. In particular, I have received much help from Rune Hoelseth, Sven Lindblad, Guttorm Aanes, Jørgen Moland, Johanne Severinsen, Stig Muren, Nils-Eivind Naas and Vegard Kleiven. Thanks also to Jean Hannah who did the first round of proficient copy-editing. Furthermore, I have been nurtured academically by numerous friends and colleagues. I hope that they all know that their critical comments are crucial to my work. Here I will only mention the names of a few colleagues who, in different ways and at different stages, have been involved in the development of this project. Sandy Breewer, Paul Jenks, David MacDougall, Siri Meyer Joron Pihl and David Morgan provided useful pieces of advice at crucial points in the process. Helge Høibraaten, Inger Marie Okkenhaug and Jarle Simensen read parts of the manuscript. Nina Dessau, Solveig Greve, Gunvor Lande and Berit von der Lippe read and commented upon the whole manuscript. I also thank the anonymous reader employed by Berghahn Books for insightful comments. Finally, I thank my family: my daughters Maria Gullestad Holsten and Frida Holsten Gullestad, my sons-in-law Gunnar Lien Holsten and Håvard Kallestad, my nephew Anders Gullestad, and last but not least, my husband, Jan Terje Faarlund, for commenting on preliminary ideas and for always being supportive in intellectually stimulating ways. However, none of all these helpful individuals and institutions, of course, bears any responsibility for the ideas and interpretations in this book. The responsibility for the faults of which this book, no doubt, has its share is mine alone.

INTRODUCTION The poor little ones in the land of the heathens do not know our Savior! Have not heard the angels’ song at Christmas night on the meadow, cannot sing silent night. Poor heathen does not know the light that can show the way to the great and good shepherd who carried the burden of sins and redeemed the wrecked earth. Poor little ones on the distant beach wait for help from Christian land Longing for consolation in their need, for help and hope in death and eternal bliss. Happy child in Christian home will you help the heathen to come forth to our Jesus, the joy of the earth, to praise and adore him to give him praise and glory? Yes, we will; in the name of Jesus we soften the want of the poor heathen, oh bless our little work, dear Lord, build thy church soon in the dark heathen land. Valborg Andersen1 This book presents an analysis of the continuous transformation and reproduction of colonial categories and relations in spite of intensive and well-intended efforts to move beyond them. It identifies a representational dynamic – a vicious circle – in the relations between Europe and Africa; between ‘donors’ and ‘receivers’; between the rich and the poor countries of the world. Social, religious and economic life is characterized by interaction and commonality in global networks across discursive boundaries, at the same time as the boundaries are constantly transformed and reproduced. I argue here that while colonial binaries are reproduced in transformed forms, they also gain new meanings as a result of the long-term interactions across the very same categories. A complex play of mutual appropriations is going 1. The song was written by Valborg Andersen to the melody of a well-known Christmas hymn (Deilig er den himmel blå). (Source: Søndagsskole-Sangbok. 35th reprint. Oslo: Norsk Søndagsskoleforbund, 1949). Translated from Norwegian. The song contains the ideas of missionary paternalism at the time, expressed in terms of light versus darkness. It even includes a reference to the beach in the many visualizations of ‘the call from Macedonia’ that I discuss in Chapter 3: ‘Poor little creatures on the distant beach are waiting for help from the land of the Christians.’ Like all quotes in Norwegian, Danish, Swedish and French in this book, it is translated into English by me.

Introduction

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on, implying that ideas and practices that are seen as African are influenced by the encounters with Europeans, as well as vice versa. On the most abstract level of description, these dynamics characterize many different areas where cross-cultural communication occurs – such as development programmes, humanitarian aid, political observation, the mass media and academic anthropology. Nobody in the present world (including the author of this book) falls outside this vicious circle. In order to analyse the mechanisms of how the dynamic is established and reproduced, I have made a detailed case study of one specific activity – a Protestant mission, more specifically the Norwegian mission to Northern Cameroon. During the research for the book, I have encountered two kinds of false assumptions regarding my choice. Some people seem to think that studying the publications of missionaries involves studying something which is both marginal and boring. When I mention the word missionary, their eyes flicker and their thoughts quickly move elsewhere. Other people immediately seem to think that the missions are more caught up in vicious dynamics than other organizations. Both assumptions are wrong. I argue in the chapters to follow that the missions constitute an exemplary case which provides an interesting entry into the more general dynamics. First, they represent in some ways the beginnings and preconditions of development programmes and anthropological knowledge. Second, because of the idealism and devotion of the missionaries, the tensions between the goodness of intentions and the sometimes unforeseen results are perhaps even more painful in their work than within other cross-cultural fields of activity. Part of the problem in present-day global politics is precisely that many people unwittingly seem to take for granted that having the best of intentions somehow allows one to completely escape structural determinations. Third, this material is far from marginal. When I had almost finished writing the book manuscript, by chance I passed one day a second-hand store in the south of Norway run by a religious charity. Well inside the shop, I found an old, small greyish songbook intended for Norwegian Sunday schools, which contained a song that I had been looking for because it is mentioned in a missionary memoir as an important source of inspiration. The song expresses the missionary ideology of the past in words appropriate for children. It is called ‘The poor little ones in the land of the heathens’ (Stakkars små i hedningeland), and I have reproduced it at the beginning of this introduction. In the Norwegian language the term stakkars (‘poor, unfortunate, wretched, pitiable, miserable’) invites pity, even more strongly and unambiguously than the word ‘poor’ in English. The ‘poor heathens’ (de stakkars hedningene) was for many years a key concept in the missionary publications. In the second-hand store, I was given the book for free, apparently because it was considered outdated and of no interest today. When examining the unassuming little songbook more closely, I noticed that it was published in 1949 as the 35th reprint and that 730,000 copies had already been published at that point in time. Having worked for several years on missionary publications, this figure should have come as no surprise to me. Nevertheless, I was truly impressed. The entire Norwegian population was 2.2 million in 1900 and 3.2 million in 1949, when the 35th reprint was published. This particular song was also a part of the next edition of the songbook, called Barnesangboka, which appeared in 1954. Barnesangboka had four reprints, the last one in 1970, and altogether sold 220,000 copies. When it was replaced in 1977, the new 2. Source: Torunn Matre in Norsk søndagsskoleforbund.

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songbook no longer contained this particular song.2 To me, these figures indicate the tremendous impact of the Christian missions. Similarly, the information activities of the society I have studied, the Norwegian Missionary Society (NMS), have been impressive. The missions constitute a powerful movement which nevertheless tends to feel like a neglected and misunderstood minority in relation to secularized organizations because of its negative treatment by some of the mass media and its relative negligence by academic institutions. Many missionaries saw themselves as soldiers fighting for the Kingdom of God in rapidly secularizing societies.3 The historical role of the European missions is greater than many people believe both inside and outside academic life. In my view, the examination of missionary publications can tell us something about the historical beginnings and social transformations of social categories and boundaries that are currently regarded as more or less self-evident and help us assess to what extent and in what ways present-day cultural changes are grounded in historical continuity. By presenting a sustained and explorative analysis of missionary publications, I hope to contribute to the groundwork which will make it possible to arrive at a more thorough evaluation of the historical role of the missions in the future.4 In such an evaluation, I think one will find that the pictures and texts brought to Norway in the course of the protracted encounter between Norwegian missionaries and Africans in Cameroon (and people elsewhere in the world) have influenced the development of the Norwegian welfare state; the Norwegian involvement in developmental aid, peace negotiations and foreign policy; and the ways that ethnic relations are conceptualized and played out in Norway today. At the same time, the encounter has also influenced the widespread corruption in Africa and the ways that many Africans now conceptualize their relations to the rich ‘donor countries’ and international NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) and how they act strategically on the basis of these conceptualizations. Over the years, new ideas and practices have developed that are generally characterized as ‘African and European’ or ‘Cameroonian and Norwegian’, but that can nevertheless be characterized as a result of the long-term encounter. A central argument in the present study is that even if Norwegian children no longer sing about ‘the poor little ones in the land of the heathens’, representations of asymmetrical relationships between Europe and Africa are still reproduced and transformed in word and picture by the missions as well as by other actors. In spite of changing contexts and content, the central symbols of these discourses show a remarkable stability and adaptability. While the socially acceptable vocabulary for portraying human difference has changed dramatically during the Norwegian missionary presence in Cameroon – in scholarly work, among the missionaries, as well as among the general public – and is today an intensively value-laden and sensitive issue, the content of many popular concepts and stereotypes have not changed as much as the terms. Stereotypes often live on while the terms change, and social 3. See, for example, Øglænd (1988: 14). In the Bibliography, I have listed the Norwegian missionary books from Cameroon. 4. It is outside the scope of this book to trace the specific lines of influence from the missions to secular activities such as aid programmes, peace initiatives and African politics. In order to demonstrate how public consciousness in Norway has been influenced by the missionary images, one would have to: (1) demonstrate in detail the actual lines of influence; (2) argue from general considerations of the cultural context; or (3) argue from analogies in the content and structure of thought (Stocking 1982 [1968]: 94).

Introduction

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relations can be characterized by the simultaneous fixity of categories and the fluidity of content. Like all of us, the missionaries are men and women of their times, and deploy and elaborate upon the ways of understanding cultural difference that are available. As an anthropologist, my goal is to provide a nonjudgemental, empathetic, and, as far as possible, a contextual account. The research behind the book has brought me in touch with a large variety of people, artefacts and institutions: the archive of the Norwegian Missionary Society (NMS) and the School of Mission and Theology at the headquarters in Stavanger; current and former missionaries in Norway and Cameroon; church members in Cameroon, as well as both Muslims and Catholics at various levels of Cameroonian society; colleagues and students at the University of Ngaoundéré; artists, journalists and politicians in Cameroon; people involved in missionary support work in Norway; and last but not least, the many films, slide shows, books and other publications intended for the public in Norway. The work of the mission societies is generally constructed around the central opposition between the ‘saved’ and the ‘unsaved’; between the insider and the outsider. I was raised as a Roman Catholic in Protestant Norway, and I have not been a member of any church since my early twenties.5 Thus, in the eyes of the NMS, I am an outsider. On this basis, I am grateful for the exceptionally warm reception given to me by the NMS. Without exception, the people I have worked with have been positively interested and helpful. At the same time, my relationships to the many different kinds of people involved in or related to the mission took on different qualities, depending on which of my many identities – as a middle-aged Norwegian woman with a solid academic standing – were most in the foreground. In particular, I have shared many precious moments with the old women of the mission and the younger male and female missionaries. Moreover, male and female missionaries of all ages who take a special interest in photography and the use of pictures seemed to see my work as presenting new possibilities. Some were pleased that somebody took an interest in their pictures, others saw the interest more as a support of the point of view that pictures are important in the mission, and that the mission society needs to take better care of the treasures in the archive and/or work actively and professionally with visualizations as a missionary tool. Still others, who had taken the presence of photographs in missionary publications for granted, and had therefore not reflected on the issue, were surprised because of my questions and interpretations. A few middle-aged and old male missionaries seemed to take a defensive attitude, perhaps fearing that I might not only hurt the organization because of my outsider perspective but also devalue the worth of their individual contributions. In the words of Fiona Bowie, speaking about European and North American missions more generally, ‘Missionary journals and academic studies made by missionaries tend to emphasize the positive sides of the missionary activity, whereas as more negative evaluation is common in the writings of those from missionised countries.’6 Thus, the differences between the general tone of praise in the missionary publications and the scholarly perspective of this study can sometimes be considerable. Like all photographers and authors, including the author of the present book, the publications issued by the missionaries inevitably reveal more than they intend to about

5. I have written about my personal biography in other works. See, in particular, Gullestad (1992: 1–34) and (1996a: 48–66). 6. Bowie (1993: 11).

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themselves and about their relations to the people they work with. To be made aware of interpretations from a different angle than one’s own can, of course, be painful. When I presented my work to the research seminar at the School of Mission and Theology in Stavanger, one participant was so furious that he was not able or willing to formulate his disagreements in a polite way. His reaction is complemented by those of a few university academics. When I present this work in secular academic contexts, one or two people in the audience almost inevitably start talking about missionaries in very negative ways.7 Both kinds of reaction bear testimony to social and cultural divisions that I try to explicate in this book. Since 1998, I have visited Cameroon six times, each time staying about three weeks. The first two times I taught and tutored students at the University of Ngaoundéré. I remember vividly the occasion when we asked the doctoral students to participate in the 17 May celebrations – the Norwegian national day – at the Norwegian mission, and give us a report afterwards about what they had observed during this mini-fieldwork. The male students, in particular, were shocked to see some of the Norwegian men playing games with the children: ‘They made a fool of themselves in front of their children!’ In 2003, I started more systematically to talk to missionaries and locals about the missionary pictures – Muslims as well as Christians. I gave a talk and presented my work to the small group of missionaries and conducted long conversations with both active and retired missionaries. I also sought out and made appointments with Cameroonians in key positions in relation to the photographs. At the same time I showed the pictures I worked on to people on numerous informal occasions – for example, when they were waiting in the shade to make a visit to my hostess, when we had guests for dinner, when I was traveling, and when making visits. Sometimes I knew well the people I talked to, sometimes not. Because I do not speak Fulani or any other local language, these conversations were conducted in French, the official language of the region. People in Cameroon had different reactions, depending on their religious affiliation and their differing experiences with the Protestant mission. Some church members profited from the occasion to air their anger and resentment about the mission, others to portray the activities of the church. Sometimes Muslims would have a different interpretation of the pictures from Christians, sometimes not. My colleagues at the University of Ngaoundéré and their students pointed out aspects of the context of the pictures in terms of Cameroonian history as well as their differing perspectives on the mission. Similarly, the Cameroonian students at the University of Tromsø, with their combined experiences of contemporary Norwegian and Cameroonian society, made interesting comments concerning the nature of the encounter between Norwegian missionaries and Cameroonians in Northern Cameroon. When I started working on this book at the beginning of 2003, a case of serious embezzlement of funds was discovered within the collaborative research programme between the University of Tromsø and the University of Ngaoundéré. Since the accounts were administered by the national Protestant church (EELC), the NMS was also indirectly

7. Such attitudes confirm the missionaries’ self-image as a neglected and misunderstood minority. A common designation for conservative Protestant Christians in Norway is mørkemenn, ‘men of darkness’, which is a reversal of the self-image of the missionaries as the ones who bring light into the darkness of heathenism. This fact underlines the importance and the many meanings of the metaphors of light and darkness in the Nordic countries. Furthermore, the gendered expression indicates that the critics have uncritically taken over the public marginalization of the female supporters within these movements.

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involved. In the following years, the embezzlement generated accusations, counter-accusations and an abundance of rumours in both Cameroon and Norway. These events could not but colour my perceptions of the nature of the cross-cultural relations between people and how they have been represented in photographs. Thus, the many different relationships I entred into released a series of differentiated and nuanced reactions that gave me additional information about the current situation of the mission society I worked with. In a way, the qualities of the relationships validated the ideas that I developed during the project. I nevertheless want to stress emphatically here that, like all interpretations, my interpretations are provisional. When looking at the pictures and reading the texts, my approach is informed by many sources, theoretical and empirical as well as personal and political. One source of knowledge is my research on the practices and moral values of contemporary Norwegians for more than thirty years. One of the themes running through most of my research in Norway is the specific character of egalitarian individualism in Norwegian society as a form of ‘imagined sameness’. Because of this, I probably have a keener eye for how paternalism and hierarchy are coded in the composition of many photographs than most Cameroonians and Norwegians. Another source is my visits to Cameroon. I, of course, do not know enough about the various African perspectives, but my interpretations have profited from the many discussions in Cameroon about the missionary pictures. Where I know that differences of perspective do exist, I have tried to include them in the text. My hope is that this hybridity and multiplicity of perspectives allows me to defamiliarize pictures whose meanings might seem self-evident to the various people who have taken them, cropped them, decided to publish them, added captions to them and found pleasure and enlightenment in viewing them. Stressing the provisionality of the interpretations should not be regarded as false modesty, but as a precondition for sound scholarship. In scholarly work, the intersubjective agreement on the reasonableness of particular interpretations can only be arrived at by continuous critical discussion and argument. In order to allow my readers to judge for themselves, I therefore try as much as possible to present the visual and verbal material I work with in ways that leaves it open to further discussion and potential reinterpretation. The book has ten chapters. Chapter I (‘Propaganda for Christ’) presents the theoretical ideas of the study, drawing together perspectives from sociocultural anthropology, visual anthropology, photographic picture theory, postcolonial studies, critical race theory, media studies, cultural studies and feminism. Viewing the photographs in relation to the texts that originally accompanied them, and being inspired by Edward Said’s study of ‘Orientalism’ and the culture of imperialism,8 I argue that the analysis of missionary photographs is not fruitfully framed as an analysis of ‘manipulation’ versus ‘accurate representations’, but rather as representations made in terms of specific ideas, visual idioms and goals and within specific institutional arrangements. In order to pinpoint the specific communicative modalities of the mission, and the relational dynamics within which they emerged, I have coined the concept of mission propaganda by adapting the concept of propaganda to the missionary publications and giving it a more complex and more precise analytical definition than the usages that are current in research and everyday life. The analysis of mission propaganda illuminates very well how the exercise of power often works by means of seduction rather than just manipulation 8. Said (1978, 1985).

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by coercion. A part of my discussion of mission propaganda is a distinction, adapted from Hannah Arendt, between compassion and pity.9 The missionaries operate within a tension between compassion and pity: they want to inspire compassion, but almost unavoidably elicit pity. Since the interpretations I make depend on my particular ways of looking at the materials, I also situate my anthropological perspectives in relation to the missions. Chapter 2 (‘Establishing a Goodness Regime’) presents the context for the publications of the NMS in the form of an overview of the work of the Norwegian missionaries in Cameroon, and examines how their photographs have been distributed to audiences in Norway within a range of mixed media genres (slide shows, magazines, books and films), in association with specific kinds of commentary and narration. In particular, I discuss the hybrid genre of the missionary book. It is the suffering of the African that is at the center of attention in these publications, not the suffering and helplessness of the missionary. The goodness of the mission’s tasks depends upon the perceived goodness of the missionaries, and the ethos of the missionaries is formulated in terms of self-sacrifice. I argue that the publication to the general public of doubts which even tacitly question the imperative task of the evangelical mission seems to have been regarded as inappropriate. Chapter 3 (‘Imagining a Call from Africa’) examines a set of visualizations of a passage in the Holy Scriptures that has been central to the Norwegian missionaries, in order to use them as a guide to the photographs. All through the twentieth century, specific visualizations of ‘the call from Macedonia’ (Acts 16:9) illustrate and resolve a central tension in the missionary conception of the social relations in which they were engaged, softening the many difficult experiences related to the fact that they arrived in the mission fields with a generous yet unsolicited set of gifts. This motif can be regarded as a creative solution to the tensions and dilemmas connected to a weak point in the missionary worldview. Jesus’ commissioning of the disciples specifies each missionary’s relation to God, and indirectly God’s relation to ‘all nations’, but not the missionaries’ relations to the people they work with. Chapter 4 (‘Reflections on Taking Photographs’) uses the missionaries’ verbal reflections in their memoirs on the photographic situations they engaged in as a second entry point to the analysis of their published photographs. On this basis I identify three main kinds of photographic situations. The first is the stolen nonoccasion in which the subject has been deliberately fooled. The second is the snapshot nonoccasion – the situation in which the photographic subject is simply unaware of the camera. The third is the photographic occasion – the negotiated situation. In the missionaries’ materials the photographic occasions are often based on the subjects’ gratitude to and the trust of the missionary photographer. Chapter 5 (‘God’s Sowers and Reapers’) presents the subject matter in the photographs in terms of the central biblical notions of the field and the harvest. The field and the soil often emerge visually as feminine, while the sower of the word and the fruit emerge as masculine. In particular, this chapter discusses pictures of missionary conferences, transport, buildings, school classes and gatherings, the work among the sick, missionaries holding little children, baptisms, agricultural programmes and missionary graves. Many pictures indicate a continuous struggle to find a balance between hierarchy and equality, between being generous donors or knowledgeable experts and modest servants, and between being celebrities among their

9. Arendt (1990).

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Norwegian supporters and everyday workers in the garden of the Lord. Some photographs indicate the tacit visual codes employed by the missionaries in their imitation of Jesus. Chapter 6 (‘Women and Children: Both Marginal and Central’) discusses the specific roles of visualizations of women in the missionary propaganda – in terms of the concepts of moral character, sensualization, naturalization and victimization. Missionary pictures of women often focus on women’s shyness, sweetness and thoughtfulness, representing them as potentially receptive to the Word. At the same time, the many close-ups of young, beautiful women function as eye catchers (and the fact that the books contain almost no pictures of old or middle-aged women) and invite a form of low-key sensual interest. The naturalization of women’s bodies appears in folk-life pictures of females engaged in food preparation and child rearing, usually without a caption. More recently, there has also been a vigorous focus on women as victims of male violence. Pictures of smiling young anonymous boys in white shirts, however, tend to symbolize the fruits in terms of the young national church. Chapter 7 (Muslim Men: Dangerous Rivals and Exotic Villains) presents the missionary portrayal of Muslim men, in particular the sultans (singular: lamiido, plural: lamiibe). The pictures of the lamiibe and their courts provide the representations of the Cameroonian experience with visual specificity. The missionaries have represented the lamiibe as both attractive equals and as exotic and evil villains. As the exotic, bodily signifiers of the evils of Islam, they are both demonized and represented as fascinating, dignified, distant, and powerful. This is the missionary subject matter where the direct influences from Orientalism seem most evident. The reign of the sultans is depicted as despotic – political power characterized by a static lack of social change, lack of rationality, as well as cruelty, lechery, fanatism, fatalism, exotic abundance and, last but not least, the oppression of women. In missionary publications, the recurrent motif of the harem underlines the need to rescue Cameroonian women. Chapter 8 (‘Victims and Villains in a Feature Film from 1960’) continues this discussion by analysing a missionary feature film from the time when Cameroon achieved political independence and developmental aid was institutionalized in Norway. Precisely at the moment of political decolonization, the missionaries sent out a forceful message about the need for both the Christian religion and Western technologies in independent Cameroon. At this particular point in time, the victimization of nonwhite women by nonwhite men was brought to the attention of the Norwegian public with new force through this film. The missions were thus quick to adapt certain parts of feminist thought for propaganda purposes. The analysis identifies a missionary master narrative about sexuality, gender, ‘race’, age and family life. The film can be regarded as an interesting document in the historical construction of the self-image and authority of Norway as a benevolent donor country with a role in lifting Africa up. Chapter 9 (‘From Mission Propaganda to Cultural Heritage’) presents the recent making of a digitized collection of missionary photographs that has been returned to Cameroon. Based on the very same photographs that the missionaries took for consumption (privately and/or publicly) in Norway, it represents the mission’s serious effort to decolonize the pictures by taking into account the views of those who have been visually depicted. The focus of representation is shifted away from a Norwegian audience constituted as active helpers of pitiable Cameroonians and towards the people of Cameroon as the producers of their own histories. These photographs can now potentially be used both to restore and build social

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relationships and to reproduce divisions – between blacks and whites and between different ethnic groups in Cameroon. Notwithstanding the best of intentions, the collection simultaneously both transcends former communicative modalities and reproduces colonial binaries, now as a response to locals who have internalized these categories and use them for their own purposes. The focus on African history erases the history of the way these pictures have been used in Europe. Nevertheless, people in Cameroon now have the opportunity to use these missionary pictures in new ways. Chapter 10 (‘Goodness and Its Side-effects’) sums up some aspects of the complex relational dynamics within which the photographs have emerged and circulated over time, identifying three main communicative modalities: ‘evangelizing’, ‘development’ and ‘partnership’, involving the extension of missionary communication to new communities of practice. The goodness regime of the missionaries has unforeseen side effects which continue to affirm a social and cultural divide between themselves as ‘givers’ and the locals as ‘receivers’, to some extent concealing what people in Europe receive from Africa in terms of economic wealth, goods, ideas, and a positive self-image. As a result of the protracted encounter within the structured relations of colonialism, neocolonialism and development programmes, new worldviews and new ways of legitimizing actions have developed. I point out that the pronounced goodness of the ‘donors’ almost inevitably implies the potential humiliation of the ‘receivers’. Some Cameroonians in positions of trust seem to redefine the uneasy relation between a generous giver and a thankful receiver into one between what I have chosen to call a ‘foolish giver’ and a ‘crafty taker’. The reversal is no less uneasy, certainly, but carries other possibilities of power and agency – to become an actor and a benefactor rather than somebody to whom things are done. The missionaries are sometimes fooled, but tend to play down their problems when communicating to the various supporters at home. In sum, missionary texts and photographs not only reflect general pictorial conventions and political trends, but have played a part in producing and reproducing them as well. These conventions are now used by many other transcontinental actors for their specific purposes.

1 PROPAGANDA FOR CHRIST In the local prayer house of my childhood, the Negroes in Africa came much closer to us than people in Oslo. Berge Furre1 Visuality is about a direct route to one of the senses; its impact can be visceral, especially when it creates a sense of identification. Moreover, photography’s indexical status in particular operates with powerful claims to transparency. Patricia Hayes and Andrew Bank2 Colonialism continues to live on in ways that perhaps we have only begun to recognize. Nicholas Dirks3 It has by now become quite common to characterize the changes in contemporary culture because of the mediation of social life as a ‘pictorial turn’.4 As a corollary to these changes, there is also a pictorial turn in the academic world, constituting visual images as an exiting site of convergence across disciplinary and thematic lines. In this book, I argue that the analysis of missionary photographs adds new insights to the ongoing conversation about the meanings and effects of pictures. The work of European and North American Christian missionaries not only included evangelizing, medical care, teaching and institution building, but also

1. Berge Furre (former MP and professor of history and theology in Norway) in a speech at a doctoral dinner in Oslo, 8, February 2003. 2. Hayes and Bank (2001: 7). 3. Dirks (1992: 23). 4. Mitchell (1994). He focuses on the regimes of ‘spectacle’ and ‘surveillance’ in his analysis of pictures and texts.

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documenting the foreign ways of life that they encountered across the globe for the supporters ‘at home’. I discuss what kinds of knowledge about Africa the public was invited to share, which qualities in the relations between Europeans and Africans this knowledge encouraged, and the role of prints, photographs and films in its transmission. My aim is to identify and reflect upon the implied social categories, relations and boundaries in this cross-cultural field of activity. In a way, this is a study of the role of the missionaries as ethnographers, transmitting information about distant people. The book is based on an interpretive analysis of a selection of the published texts and photographs from the Norwegian evangelical missionary experience in Northern Cameroon from the 1920s, when the Norwegian Missionary Society (NMS) started working in this region, and until the present.5 Norway has sent out more missionaries per capita than any other country in Europe,6 and in the twentieth century Northern Cameroon was their most important ‘missionary field’ on the African continent. Because regional variations are considerable, I do not regard the field in Cameroon as typical for Norwegian or European mission fields in any simple sense. But I do think that the communication to the supporters at home from this field provides an interesting case which makes it possible to identify more general dynamics. In a way comparable to – but not identical to – anthropological publications, advertisements for developmental and humanitarian relief, museum exhibits and the news media, the missionaries have taken pictures from their African contexts and arranged them in ways that address their particular preoccupations. They were among the first to inform the public extensively about these regions, and missionary information materials are at present the object of considerable international interest. At this very moment, many institutions are involved in collecting, systematizing and making available the photographs of various Christian missions.7 According to Terry Barringer, the role of missionary photographs in disseminating visual images from distant regions of the world can hardly be overestimated.8 However, while interesting research has

5. The primary material for this study consists of a total of around forty books (personal accounts, history books, chapters in history books and booklets) produced by Cameroon missionaries about the mission’s work, most of them illustrated; a feature film; and a digitized collection of 2,000 photographs, recently selected and collected by the Norwegian missionary and historian Kåre Lode and the late African historian Eldridge Mohammadou and brought to Cameroon. I have supplemented the photographic and textual material with formal and informal conversations both with missionaries in Norway and Cameroon and with church leaders, church members and other observers of the mission in Cameroon. With a few exceptions (such as the analysis of the cover of the main journal in Chapter 3), I have not used the missionary magazines in a systematic way. They constitute an interesting source which needs to be further explored. Of particular note is the picture magazine Til Jordens Ender (‘To the Ends of the World’), which came out between 1960 and 1963, with a trial issue in 1959. 6. Tvedt (2003: 292, note 61). The Danish, Swedish and Finnish missions have also been numerous and strong. 7. See, for example, the special issue ‘Rediscovering Missionary Photography’ of the International Bulletin of Missionary Research 26 (4), October 2002. The archive of the Norwegian Missionary Society is taking part in the international project Internet Mission Photography Archive funded by the Getty Grant Foundation. Ten missionary organizations are participating in the project. See also the information about the Basle collection at www.bmpix.org. 8. Barringer (2002: 170).

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been done internationally on the history and anthropology of the missions,9 so far, relatively little analytical work has been done on their photographs,10 and the present monograph is an effort to remedy this situation. This is an explorative study, which presents empirical material and puts into practice new analytical categories and a mode of analysis that is intended to contribute to the construction of a framework that may also be useful for the examination of other cross-cultural materials. To what extent did the missionary photographs allow Norwegian audiences to ‘see with their own eyes’ what went on in Cameroon, and to what extent did the publications create and reproduce popular stereotypes about the backward, exotic native? What are the representations of space, ‘race’, gender, age and sexuality in the pictures from Cameroon? How did the missionaries represent themselves? How did they categorize and represent the various others that they encountered? How did they visualize other people’s neediness in order to inspire the European audience to become involved in the mission? Were they able to document the realities of human suffering without reducing people to positions of suffering and thus to being depicted as pitiable victims, as receivers of help, and as people with limited agency? To what extent did their photographs invite not only sight but also new insight? These are some of the questions I address. In this chapter, I present the theoretical ideas informing the study, seeing the missionary documentation as an articulation of a specific point of view in relation to particular audiences in Norway. Throughout the book I attempt to pinpoint the specificities of this point of view. It is both related to and distinct from the ideas of other colonial and neocolonial actors, in particular colonial administrators and adventurous travellers, but perhaps not so different from the views of the teachers, nurses and medical doctors employed by the colonial administrations. In the ideologies of colonialism and imperialism there was a basic tension between exploitation, on the one hand, and civilization and nurture, on the other. Like the work of doctors and nurses employed by the colonial administrations, the work of the missionaries (some of whom were also doctors and nurses) was civilizing and nurturing. I thus interpret the distinctness of the missionary publications within the ideological and institutional structures of colonialism and neocolonialism. The missionaries did not arrive in Northern Cameroon to extract wealth or to reign; they came with charitable gifts – first of all the gift of the Gospel, but also the tangible gifts of medical and educational work. Given the tensions between unequal global structures of power and the missionary focus on the equality of all human beings before God, their generosity set in motion specific relational dynamics. An evangelical missionary is on the most basic level a person with a calling to preach the Gospel and share his or her most cherished spiritual beliefs with people in the field. Evangelizing is the pivotal activity around which medical and educational work turns, and evangelizing implies attracting and keeping people’s attention. This is so both in the field and in the home country of the missionaries. Thus, to be engaged in missionary work involves on the most basic level two sets of closely interrelated information strategies – evangelizing ‘out

9. See, for example, Ardener (2002); Bowie, Kirkwood and Ardener (1993); Huber and Lutkehaus (1999); Kipp (1990). 10. Exceptions are Geary (1988); Jenkins (1990, 1993); Long (2003); Mathur (1996–97); Morgan (2005); Thompson (2004). However, most of these studies focus on the regions where the missionaries were active, not on the history of representation in Europe and the USA.

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there’ and informing actual and potential support groups ‘at home’ (also involving evangelizing). At the grass-roots level of the support groups in Norway, women were the most central actors. When interpreting the photographic images of the mission, I see them within the context of the changing structures of colonialism, political independence and economic neocolonialism, as well as within the more specific dynamics of the complex networks of relations among the missionaries, the people they work with and take photographs of in Africa, the leadership at their headquarters in Norway (including editors and publishers), and their audiences in Norway. I focus on the various relational and ideological tensions and contradictions that are unavoidably a part of missionary work, and on how these tensions have been managed over time. The more general theoretical problem is how paternalistic relations between Norway and Africa are reproduced and transformed in spite of the missionaries’ focus on the equality of all humans, and in spite of the complex and partially overlapping nature of the practical social interactions within which the polarized ideologies emerge and which they also purport to grasp. In particular, I present three interconnected ideas. The first idea is that all through the twentieth century the missionary publications exhibit visual and verbal tensions between the central metaphors of Christian light and heathen darkness, on the one hand, and the whiteness and blackness of the represented bodies, on the other.11 The persistence of the metaphor connected to the opposition of light and darkness has many sources: the Bible, the Enlightenment ideas, and Nordic light symbolism. The second idea is that the missionary materials exhibit transformations over time, from being (not always harmoniously) linked to the ‘civilizing mission’ of colonialism and imperialism, to being linked to the ideologies of ‘development’ which followed political independence, to being linked to a more recent rhetorical focus on partnership following an expansion of the kinds of audiences involved. The third and most basic idea is that the need to continuously justify their activities to the various donors in Norway has led to the creation, maintenance and transformation of patronizing ways of portraying Africans, as well as to a hierarchical division between what goes on in Norway and what goes on in Africa, hindering (without blocking) the feedback processes on which effective learning and innovative thinking depends. These effects are neither intended nor wanted by the actors themselves. My aim is to identify and explicate some of the visual and textual mechanisms through which the reproduction and transformation of the paternalistic hierarchy is made self-evident. The missionary genres of publication were developed within a distinct and changing communicative situation, which encouraged a more or less unquestioned representation of the overall goodness of the missionary enterprise and the deep needs of the Africans. I argue both that the original written texts provide an important context for the visual materials and that the visual materials provide entry points to the identification and interpretation of self-evident and deep-seated idioms that are seldom explicitly verbalized and that are often different from the actors’ explicit intentions. I also argue for the need to pay more attention to the way European constructions of ‘the other’ was vital to the construction of the European self, and for seeing these constructions as interrelated.12 In other words, I maintain that the Norwegian

11. I use the terms ‘heathen’ and ’heathenism’ as historical notions. In order to avoid visual clutter in the text, I write these without quotation marks. 12. Cohn (1996); Cooper (2005); Stoler (2002).

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mission and their activities in foreign lands need to be seen together, as cross-cultural, transnational, large-scale and dynamic fields for analysis, including social actors in both Cameroon and Norway. This encounter generated new social categories, new cultural boundaries and new hierarchies. In Norway, it had implications for nation building, the national welfare and the modern state, as well as for the situation of ‘immigrants’ and ethnic minorities and the development of international relations. In particular, the missionary publications produced interest, pity, and a form of involvement, as well as a disjuncture and hierarchical distance between the Cameroonians and the Europeans who supported them by prayers and donations from afar. I focus on the role taken by the Norwegian mission in this process, and explore the formation of categories such as ‘donors’ and ‘receivers’, and the cultural boundaries they involve, as well as their implications in a larger transnational and transcontinental context. The main goal of the publications is to catch the attention of the public and inspire them to become involved in the work of the mission. Each missionary had a personal calling from God and was sent out (utsendt) by the society and the supporters at home. The ‘friends of the mission’ took an active interest in the people they had sent out and how they were doing among the heathens. When sending back messages from the field, the missionaries tried to meet the needs of the supporters; at the same time, they also wanted to modify their perceptions, applying both explicit strategies and tacit intuitions to that effect.13 Since there seem to be certain limits to how many human beings a person can empathize with in a sustained way, the missionaries had to avoid the cognitive and emotional over-stimulation of the people in the audience. The most difficult point seems to be to touch people emotionally and at the same time avoid evoking feelings of shame or powerlessness. In the words of Lauren Berlant, scenes of vulnerability can ‘produce a desire to withhold passionate attachment, to be irritated by the suffering in some way’.14 The missionaries seem to have tried to focus on what they see as the problems in Africa in ways that are meant to give hope, to make the audiences feel that they can do something to help, and that it is worthwhile for them to become involved in prayers and organizational work. The publications should ideally empower the public in Norway to take action, not discourage them. I document in the chapters to come that the various people involved in the Norwegian Missionary Society have acted strategically when compiling their information about the mission to the audiences at home. The overall representations of Africa in texts and pictures had to work on the perceptions of the audience of what Africa was like. Even if they often did not agree on all details, the missionaries and their leadership at home had explicit ideas about what would work and what would not work. The leadership acted as mediators between the missionaries in the field and the various kinds of supporters. Each missionary author’s control of the production process was structured by the available pictures and conventions of genre, constrained by contemporary definitions of, for example, marketable books in a competitive market, and was involved in processes which negotiated, reproduced and transformed these conventions. Nevertheless, the materials produced were perhaps most striking in what the missionaries took for granted – such as bourgeois family values, Western biomedicine and agricultural technologies, a commonsense view of the transparency of photography, specific 13. The context for the popular reception of missionary propaganda has changed over the years, with the development of television, mass tourism, and the information campaigns of international NGOs. 14. Berlant (2004: 9).

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pictorial conventions with a long history in Europe, and the typical Orientalist narrative plots of the stories they told to the supporters in Europe.

The Power of Representation Like other cross-cultural photographs, missionary photographs can be interpreted and contextualized in many ways. First, they can be viewed as historical documents, produced over time in a particular and changing historical context – and thus as resulting from specific photographic situations involving specific places and peoples. This kind of research interest ideally necessitates an approach which documents the who, where, when and why of every picture and which cross-references photographs with other types of historical documents.15 Second, they can be viewed in relation to the history of the visual narratives about a particular region. Typical visual narratives have been patterned and framed not only by missionaries but also by anthropologists, travellers, colonial administrators and commercial photographers – who have reflected upon and represented the region and its inhabitants. Third, the discursiveness of the missionary images also emerges from their cross-reference to other images, both from this specific region and from other places and other times. They can fruitfully be viewed not only against a long trajectory of images of ‘natives’ but also against the conventions of the history of both artistic and other kinds of representation. Fourth, the photographs can be examined for traces of how men, women and children in the region have engaged with photography as a space for self-presentation. The nature of the subjects’ involvement or lack of involvement in the photographic situation influences the photographic output. And fifth, the photographs can be examined within the context of how the missionaries and the African subjects have been represented to audiences in Europe. While attempting to constantly keep the other contexts in mind, I focus in this study primarily on the last context – the missionaries’ communications with people in Europe, in this case Norway. As internationally inspired transnational social movements within a national organizational framework, the missionary societies engaged in communication activities of a dual nature. The missionaries moved between continents long before the terms transcultural and transnational became the order of the day. They disseminated information in order to instil a sense of responsibility, commitment and involvement in Europe in relation to the ‘unreached people’ (who had not yet been reached by the Gospel) and – after some time – in relation to the national ‘sister churches’ they helped establish. I see their photographs as a central element in an extensive and long-lasting contact between Europe and what is now usually called the Third World or the South (Sør). The missionaries mobilized, as it were, the indexicality of photography for their own specific ends and in their own specific ways. Their societies have for many years striven to familiarize European viewers with parts of the world beyond their personal experience. Until recently, and to some extent still today, most people in Norway could only dream of visiting Northern Cameroon.16 The photographs functioned as a proof that these places and peoples 15. Jenkins (1990). 16. From time to time the mission societies now organize guided trips to the mission fields. Often members of local congregations go together. This can be regarded as an adaptation to mass tourism intended to create new interest in the work of the missions and the national churches.

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existed, and that the missionaries were actually working there. They became powerful images in an ongoing discussion in Europe about who ‘non-Westerners’ are, their needs, and the nature of their relationship to people in Europe. And they created new links of a specific kind between people across the globe, contributing to complex transcontinental networks. I therefore argue in this book that the missionary publications document a crucial part of what might be termed the historical development of a specific kind of involvement in the fate of unknown people who live far away. Like other photographs, they do not only convey ideas, meanings and beliefs, they configure them. Thus, the photographs and films about distant peoples in some ways brought them closer to people in Europe and provided a basis for Europeans becoming interested in the various figures within the missionary repertoire of typical characters. My analysis both supports and challenges current picture theory, developed by theorists such as Roland Barthes, John Berger, and Susan Sontag.17 Like other photographs, the missionary photographs are ‘both there and not there’,18 both indexical and iconic,19 exhibiting a tension between absence and presence. Many theorists of photography have in their analyses focused on absence, memory, death and frozen time. In partial contrast, the effect of the missionary photographs on the viewer in Europe is often a feeling of sensory immediacy and the presence of foreign people in the photographs, more than the absence of their real bodies. In a certain sense, and in certain ways, these photographs brought faraway people to life for European viewers.20 The real faces and bodies of faraway people are absent, but their features were made available for inspection in new ways. The photographs from Cameroon presented a specific expansion of the world of ordinary Norwegians to include places they had never been to and people they had never met – and, with some very few exceptions, were never going to meet – but they could not examine the photographic subjects with their own eyes. This fact adds a certain element of fiction to the viewing of the photographs, both for contemporary viewers and for me as a present-day analyst. The photographs helped the viewers to imagine Africa and Africans in general and Northern Cameroonians in particular. They constitute a meeting point between two worlds, making people in foreign lands understandable in specific, mediated ways. Thus, the missionary texts and pictures transmit cultural knowledge derived from an intensive and long-term encounter between people with different value systems and frameworks of knowledge. As already noted, I examine each photograph in relation to the accompanying texts and written captions (when they occur), with a special focus on the strategies of persuasion employed in the many missionary books for the general audience (including the core supporters). Because they allow me to examine aspects of the life-worlds of the missionaries, the written texts are crucial to my interpretations of the missionary meanings of the documentary photographs. This kind of ideological discourse often works through selective attention rather than through outright suppression.21 Moreover, I analyse the specific ways of 17. Barthes (1977a, 1977b); Berger (1972, 1973); Sontag (1977, 2003). Walter Benjamin is a partial exception to the theoretical focus on death and frozen time. 18. Mitchell (1994). 19. Barthes (1977a, 1977b). 20 See Rugg (1997: 214) for a discussion of the identification of memory and photography in the work of autobiographers. 21. Rosaldo (1989: 120).

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seeing which individual images inspire, as well as the subject matter, composition, pictorial conventions, directions of gazes in individual pictures, the arrangement of images in composite mixed-media genres, and the complex and often contradictory relationship within and between images and verbal texts. Thus, I link the photographs to the missionary discourses – to the notions structuring them, limiting them, and providing them with a certain identity.22 Texts can anchor, explain, contradict, narrate, describe, and/or label – speaking for (or to) the photographs. The photographs, for their part, can illustrate, exemplify, clarify, ground and/or document the texts. I regard the relation between texts and pictures as infinite, processual and dynamic – an unstable dialectical field of forces.23 Since photographic images and verbal texts are different media with different limitations and possibilities, they construct different objects. In the words of David MacDougall, texts about people in foreign lands often focus on difference, while visual images, and ethnographic films in particular, sometimes have what he calls a ‘transcultural’ quality, communicating commonalities of human existence across cultural boundaries: ‘Visual images have a way of undermining writing’, he argues.24 To some extent this is also true for missionary photographs. Like other cross-cultural publications, the missionary publications are often rife with tensions and contradictions – between different parts of the texts, between texts and their illustrations, and between pictures and verbal commentary. At the same time, I do not find that ‘undermine’ is the most appropriate word. On the contrary, the fact that texts and pictures are often not in step can be central to the message conveyed. The message resides not in the text alone, not in the visual images alone, but in their combined force – be it in the form of contradiction, supplement or reinforcement. Sometimes the pictures can be interpreted as eye catchers or distractions that circumvent counterarguments to the verbal message; sometimes emotionally touching pictures allow the text to be persuasive; sometimes the message depends more directly on the pictures; and sometimes the missionary photographs both provide evidence and touch the heart, while the verbal texts provide the explanatory stories. Quite often old missionary pictures have more freshness and a richer potential for new uses than contemporary verbal texts. The missionaries’ transmission of knowledge linked different social worlds within global colonial structures, and these structures granted the missions the power to represent the ways of life of Africans in Europe. To some extent the missions have therefore directed the ways Africans are represented in Norway, in particular in the era before the age of mass tourism, multichannel television, and the penetration of development experts and humanitarian organizations. In drawing attention to the suffering of others, documentary photography often treads a fine line between the highlighting of injustice, on the one hand, and stereotyping, objectification and abuse on the other. There is generally an aspect of power inherent in the photographic medium, and taking and circulating photographs strengthened and consolidated the power of colonialism. Whether they intended to or not, Euro-Americans exercised a power over what is seen and represented in relation to Africans. At the same time, the working of this ‘scopic regime’ is, of course, far more complex than just a simple

22. Blanchard et al. (1995: 15). 23. Foucault (1973: 16); Mitchell (1994). 24. MacDougall (1998: 264).

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dichotomy between Norwegians with power and Africans without power. The material under analysis exhibits examples of situations in which Cameroonians have been able to stage and present themselves in accordance with their own values, as well as situations in which the photographer has been able to represent them in ways that they can perhaps now use in their attempts to build a new future. In other words, viewing and performing are multidimensional and need to be carefully explored. I see the photographs as negotiated products, informed, on the one hand, by the missionaries’ (and their editors’ and publishers’) ideas about the preconceptions of the audience, as well as by pictorial conventions and the technologies they mastered. On the other hand, the pictures were influenced by the ideas and perceptions of the people they worked with, wrote about and photographed in Cameroon. Both the ideas of the missionaries and the people they worked with changed over time, due to the encounter.

A Postcolonial Analytical Perspective In one of the quotes introducing this chapter, Nicholas Dirks suggests that colonialism continues to live on in ways that we have perhaps only begun to recognize.25 In this book I substantiate his thesis by attempting to identify the mechanisms which help to reproduce the relational asymmetries. The term ‘postcolonial’ does not simply mean ‘after colonialism’ but refers to an analytical perspective: the study of practices affected by colonialism and imperialism. Thus, postcolonial theories explore the continuing material and discursive impact of colonialism on people’s lives and ideological constructions. In the present book, I use the missionary texts and pictures to analytically pinpoint some aspects of specific relational dynamics which started before and during colonialism and continue in transformed ways during the changes from colonialism to economic neocolonialism and development programmes. Applying a postcolonial analytical perspective, I argue that pictures are important tools in the reproduction of asymmetrical relations and contain both intended and unintended cultural codes. Within the theoretical framework of this study, the Christian missions represent, as already noted, a distinct set of perspectives and activities within colonialism.26 I see colonialism as a structured inequality – as a shifting, regionally differentiated and transforming set of unequal social and economic relations embedded in discursive practices. Although their application was not at all uniform, it is possible to argue that colonial ideologies were largely characterized by a relentless binarism and dualist segregation. The mental world as colonialism was one of boundaries and distance: between metropole and colony, colonizer and colonized, governors and governed, centre and periphery, whites and blacks, economic accumulation and exploitation, observers and observed, men and women. In a very material sense, asymmetric colonial relations determined the terms under which some subjects could get access to the

25. Dirks (1992: 23). 26. The association of colonialism and missionary work is well established in international scholarship (see for example Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, 1997a; Dirks 1992; Pratt 1992). In Norwegian popular consciousness, however, Norway was not involved in colonialism. Nevertheless, as citizens of DenmarkNorway until 1814, Norwegians participated in the slave trade and the later colonial activities in many ways.

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technological means of production and representation, and thus also how objects were created and represented. Colonial structures influenced authorship and ownership, the ways in which texts and pictures circulated, and how they were used, consumed and archived. Not least, they shaped the amount and quality of the accompanying information about and interpretations of the people in the images. In other words, colonialism comprised more than capitalist political economy, and its prime agents were more numerous than states, statesmen, capitalists and corporations; it was not only a result of the power of superior arms, military organization, political power, and economic wealth, but also of what we might call cultural agents and initiatives. In other words, colonialism was also a cultural process involving socially transformative projects. It is therefore impossible to separate the missionary movement from both colonialism and broader processes of modernization.27 Colonialism was not one thing, but a differentiated encounter in which local and global forces, Africa and Europe, interacted on multiple levels and in subtle, many-stranded, and mutually determining ways.28 It can fruitfully be seen as mutually transforming plays of social forces, as locally variable interplays of culture, religion, military power and political economy, often with unanticipated consequences. It was not a monolithic phenomenon; the colonial messages were sometimes accommodated, sometimes resisted or transformed into something new. In fact, if it were not so stylistically cumbersome, it would be most appropriate to speak about colonialisms in the plural. Colonialism not only had cultural effects but was itself a cultural project. It included official reports and texts related directly to the process of governing colonies and extracting wealth, representations produced by other colonial actors such as missionaries and anthropologists, as well as fictional, artistic, photographic, cinematic and decorative appropriations.29 The study of colonialism is among other things, and as already noted, also the study of the history by which binary categories such as the colonizer and the colonized became established in certain ways and were further developed. Nicholas Dirks argues that the concept of culture was in part produced during the colonial encounter: ‘Before places and peoples could be colonized, they had to be marked as “foreign”, as “other”, and as “colonizable.” ... Colonialism was therefore less a process that began in the European metropole and expanded outwards than it was a moment when new encounters within the world facilitated the formation of categories of metropole and colony in the first place’.30 Furthermore, Dirks argues: Colonialism provided a theatre for the enlightenment project, a grand laboratory that linked discovery and reason. Science flourished in the eighteenth century not merely because of the intense curiosity of individuals working in Europe, but because colonial expansion both necessitated and facilitated the active exercise of the scientific imagination. It was through discovery – the siting, surveying, mapping, naming, and ultimate possessing – of new regions that science itself could open new territories of conquest: cartography, geography, botany and anthropology were all colonial enterprises. Even history and literature could claim vital colonial connections, for it was through the

27. 28. 29. 30.

Comaroff and Comaroff (1991; 1997a), Pels (1997). Comaroff and Comaroff (1997a: 246). See also Thomas (1994: 16). Dirks (1992: 6).

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study and narrativization of colonial others that Europe’s history and culture could be celebrated as unique and triumphant.31

Over time, colonial categories became incorporated into conventional wisdom.32 And, as already noted, the present book analyses how they live on in transformed ways. Even today, the power of representation, rather than just the force of arms and economics, is a key to Western hegemony. In this book I attempt to grasp empirically and analytically some aspects of the transformed cultural dynamics brought on by political independence and economic neocolonialism. Dichotomies such as ‘donors’ and ‘receivers’, North and South, black and white, as well as the stereotypes that often accompany them, are continuously applied, transformed and reaffirmed by being used in new discourses (such as the discourses of tourism and development programmes), at the same time as important social and economic processes cross the boundaries around the social entities designated by these categories. With political decolonization and the expansion of capitalism, privileged individuals and classes are based in many regions of the world, not only in the so-called North. The social boundaries have often hardened on the ideological and discursive level; at the same time, it is no longer self-evident which persons occupy which positions. Furthermore, colonial histories were shaped not only by the various colonial actors with their distinct agendas, but also by indigenous resistance to, as well as active deployment of, the introduced institutions, beliefs, material objects and discourses. Within the field of postcolonial studies, the perspective has largely been reversed from a focus on oppression to a focus on local agency and resistance. I do not subscribe to a total reversal – victims of exploitation and oppression existed in the past and do indeed also exist in the present. But the various distinct colonizing projects were inflected or altered by the people they encountered, as well as well as by how the encounters influenced the institutions of the West. I see colonialism as multiple struggles that constantly negotiate and renegotiate the balance of dominance and resistance, rather than as a singular coherent strategy.33 The various colonizing projects also involved processes of ‘development’, the way this concept was later specified and put into practice. For example, the colonizers needed to install new forms of infrastructure. From about 1920, this was the main legitimation for the colonizing project and included – with considerable regional variation – establishing schools and contributing to social development. With their relative autonomy in relation to colonial control, missionaries supported the colonial authorities through education and other means of social change, but they also operated independently, and sometimes they resisted the politics of the colonial regime.34 Missionary work thus epitomizes a central paradox in modernization: it could work as a tool for imperial rule, but at the same time it also provided tools for threatening and subverting colonial hegemony.35 Both literacy and the importation of Western political and religious ideas became resources for personal self-control and political resistance. The inflections of these ideas now form part of a new relational dynamics in which historically established conceptual dichotomies, stereotypes and prejudices are reapplied and 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

Ibid. Dirks (1992: 1). Cooper and Stoler (1997); Pels (1997). Comaroff and Comaroff (1991, 1997a). Thomas (1994).

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reaffirmed, also by the formerly colonized. In particular, studying the missionary photographs makes visible how the mission has contributed to laying the foundation for the apparently softer ideologies and practices of ‘development’. I call these ideologies and practices ‘developmentalism’, and see them as a gentle face that softens the harshness of economic neocolonialism. At this point I want to mention Edward Said’s Foucault-inspired analyses of ‘Orientalism’ and the culture of imperialism as a source of inspiration.36 His pioneering and influential work transformed not only the field of so-called Middle Eastern studies, but also the studies of ‘others’ more broadly by drawing attention to the ways in which a whole series of ‘Western’ writers and scholars created ‘the Orient’ through repeated images and metaphors. Since Said’s work, colonialism is no longer seen as just being out there, in exotic places, but also as lying at the heart of European culture. Said wanted to reverse the scholarly gaze and therefore asked the Orientalists to examine their own preconceptions in their representations of others. Said thus forcefully shifted the issue from the prejudices and biases of particular depictions to one of the politics of discursive representations. His analysis concerned the Middle East, and not Africa south of the Sahara, but his general approach is also useful to the study of the European representations of this region. Said argued that the matter is not simply one of prejudicial distortions that can be removed to achieve true representations, but that the very language of investigation and description constitutes the represented object in specific ways. In other words, the analysis of missionary photographs is not fruitfully framed as an analysis of ‘manipulation’ versus an ‘accurate representation’ of their work in the field.37 Since the representation of anything is by definition to some extent the creation of something new, the missionary representation of Africa is by necessity the presentation of a specific and changing perspective. My aim in this study is to try to pinpoint this perspective, in the light of the relational dynamics within which it emerged. While much research on colonialism and neocolonialism has mainly focused on the consequences of the European presence for the colonized societies, I attempt to take into account the way the encounters between missionaries and missionized also had a profound impact on Norwegian culture and society. In particular, the encounters and their representations have shaped the ways nonwhite people are seen in Norway. Northern Cameroon is particularly interesting, since in some ways it can be considered a marginal outpost of the Muslim Middle East. Fulani and Hausa Muslims were present in the region as traders and conquerors long before the missionaries. As we shall see, the Norwegian mission was part of an international missionary effort to create an ‘apostle belt’ right across the African continent to stop further Muslim expansion south of the Sahara by reaching the heathens before they converted to Islam. This particular mission field thus represents an interesting crossroads for Christians, Muslims and pagans. The Muslims were rivals in the struggle to save heathen people’s souls, and this is visible in the missionary representations. Many well-known ideas and stereotypes from Orientalist discourse, as identified by Said, are present in the missionaries’ depictions of despotic and polygamous local sultans and their harems. Moreover, the work of Said has inspired me to identify the missionaries’ focus on women in Northern Cameroon as the objects of the pity of Europeans. 36. Said (1978; 1994). 37. See, for example, Thompson (2004) for such a framing of the research problem.

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The present study is also influenced by the critical work of the many scholars who have modified Said’s ideas. First, not only literary and scholarly texts but also photographs and films made by Europeans constituted influential forms of Orientalist discourse.38 In fact, working with photographs makes it possible to further develop Said’s idea that there is generally a primacy of vision over narrative in orientalizing discourses. Second, when the material I work with allows it, I attempt to take into account the intentions of individual agents, not only the logics of the structural complexities and tensions within which they operate.39 I look for the room for manoevre of Norwegian missionaries (as producers of the photographic images, subject matter and viewers), their core public in Norway (as imagined and actual viewers) and local Africans (subject matter and, more recently, viewers). Individual subjects do not just adopt roles which are mapped out for them; rather, they experience discomfort with certain elements implicit in discourse, find pleasure in some elements, and are openly critical about others.40 Thus, I am interested in the specific institutional and relational dynamics created by the actions of individuals within structured relationships. Third, while Said did not probe into the many ways that Christian and bourgeois images of family life enter into colonial discourses, missionary texts and photographs cry out for such an examination. And fourth, it is a challenge in scholarship today not only to identify differences and social boundaries, but also to focus on the many social interconnections and the multiple overlaps across social categories and ideological divides. In other words, the missionary photographs emerge within changing social and economic structures, without being fully determined by these structures. Colonial relations, the way they were structured in the nineteenth century and well into the first half of the twentieth century, are now gone but live on as changing, variable and differentiated socio-economic structures and forms of collective consciousness which are put to new kinds of uses by new social actors. Until recently – and to a large extent still today – in the era of humanitarian aid and development programmes, and mass communication through international media networks, the documentation of Africa in Europe is largely a one-sided communication. For example, in the news media today, a very small number of Western companies dominate the production of news from Africa and the so-called Third World more generally.41 Not only are Africans seldom able to present themselves to the rest of the world, but people in Europe have so far also largely missed the opportunity of profiting from the perspectives of Africans on Europe. This is part of the reason for the continued Eurocentrism of hegemonic discourses. This is also the case in Norway, a country with limited participation in imperialism and colonialism, and an almost total lack of popular self-reflection on such issues.42 Western cultural influence without equivalent reciprocity can be seen as a cultural corollary of economic neocolonialism. After political independence, unequal economic and cultural relations have continued as neocolonial structures in multinational capitalist corporate production, international trade, immigration and integration policies, development aid, academic cooperation and missionary work. Such structures and processes coopt leading Africans as actors in key positions. Black 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

Alloula (1986); Ryan (1997: 26). Mills (1997);Thomas (1994). Mills (1997: 97). Carlsson (1998: 63). See Gullestad (2006a).

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Africans are not only oppressed by whites coming from the outside but also by elite Africans involved in multinational corporations and organizations within new national and transnational hierarchies. In order to pinpoint how colonial binaries are reproduced in transformed ways, I have heuristically defined three overlapping communicative modalities in the material that I have examined, corresponding roughly to three historical periods. I call these modalities evangelizing, development and partnership. The communicative modality of ‘evangelizing’ lasted roughly until Cameroon’s political independence in 1960, but in some publications much longer. It is characterized by a primary focus on local people as ‘heathens living in fear’ and of the core supporters (often called the ‘mission friends’) as the primary audience in Norway. The communicative modality of ‘development’ started roughly with political independence and lasted to the end of the last millennium. It is characterized by a stronger focus on the transference of technology, and of the Norwegian government as an additional source of funding and audience for missionary information materials. The new visions involved in the third communicative modality – here heuristically called ‘partnership’ – are characterized by a more pronounced attention to African ideas and wishes. These modalities thus overlap and are also characterized by increasing complexity because of the addition of new audiences and new concerns. Many Africans in elite positions now use colonial binaries as a resource in understanding their current position and as a tool in mobilizing support. Intending to respect African interests, European missionaries (and development experts) to some extent continue using these categories and the dividing lines they imply. When the missions installed specific images of Africa in Norwegian hearts and minds, they simultaneously installed specific images of what it is to be Norwegian. In fact, both the international, the transnational and the national dimensions of the missions have always been strong. The various missions have been organized as denominational (in this case evangelical Lutheran) and national (in this case Norwegian) enterprises, inspired by international movements. The perceived otherness and backwardness of Africa has been a part of the backdrop for the construction of the self-evidence of the perceptions of national homogeneity and modernity ‘at home’. This idea can be pushed even further: the very idea of modernity and its celebration of civilization, progress and rationality are, of course, predicated on difference. The modern presupposes the existence of the traditional to acquire its meaning. Through the very terms in which they perceived Africa, the missionaries and other colonial actors simultaneously constructed both ‘our’ modernity and ‘their’ traditional society. These conceptual categories and boundaries have since been adopted by many Africans and are deployed with new meanings and effects, as sources of resistance, power and influence.43 The power of categories rests in their potential capacity to impose the realities they only purport to describe.

43. See Appiah (1997) and Howe (1998) about ‘Afrocentrism’ in the USA.

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Complexities of Gender, Age and ‘Race’ In present-day Northern Europe, racism is generally a powerful word, often serving to terminate public discussion, not to open it up. Because racism in present-day Norway is popularly defined in individualizing terms as acts based on hatred and with malevolent intentions,44 Norwegian historians writing about the Norwegian missionaries in Zululand from 1850 to 1900 maintain that ‘in contrast to much of the literature on Africa at the time, there is no trace of racism in the Norwegian missionary reports, there was on the contrary an optimistic belief in the African’s potential for conversion and salvation’.45 I agree with these historians that the missionaries’ view of Africans as equal to themselves in terms of being the children of God is crucial and should be underlined.46 This idea gave their work its distinct critical edge within colonialism. Furthermore, missionaries are in some respects less prone to essentializing than other colonial actors, because for them otherness was already preferably in the past. Their race thinking is therefore often of a nonessentializing kind. Since they are engaged with individual converts rather than whole groups, ethnic and racial essentializations did not often occupy the same position in their texts as in those of other colonizers.47 At the same time, the issue of racism becomes more complicated when it is seen more broadly as structured ideological and institutional phenomena, not only as individual malevolent intentions based on hate. As already noted, I focus in this book on the missionary publications as sites for tensions and contradictions. The missionaries’ production of knowledge could not but take part in contemporary racialized classification as well as contemporary white privilege. I do not see white privilege primarily as a matter of how people look (phenotype) but of Eurocentric ways of life at the expense of non-European and coloured peoples worldwide.48 Current critical race theories focus on the meanings that have been invested in people’s looks and actions at various times and in various places, in contrast to the discredited scientific theories about biological races. ‘Whiteness’ and ‘blackness’ are analysed as specific experiences and forms of economic and symbolic capital that sometimes cross the conceptual categories and boundaries associated with the way people look. Within this theoretical framework racialization is not an exception but the rule, affecting everybody, including the author of this book. Being driven by their own peculiar mixtures of radicalism and conservatism, the Norwegian missionaries both relied upon and transformed the concepts, categories, values and practices available to them, including contemporary ideas about racial hierarchies. They used and transformed these ideas in the light of their own

44. Gullestad (2006a). 45. Simensen (1995: 141), referring to Jørgensen (1985) and (1990: 144). See also Mikaelsson (2000: 206–16), who makes a similar point on the basis of missionary books published in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In a review of Mikaelsson’s book in Misjonstidende June/July 2004 159: 36, Ragnhild Mestad finds this conclusion surprising, given that ideas about race were widespread in Europe. 46. See, for example, Bue (1992: 79), 136 and Øglænd (1988: 55) about the spiritual ties uniting people who share the same faith. 47. Pels (1997: 172). However, in the 1990s, terms such as ‘race’ and ‘tribe’ were used in missionary publications (see, for example, Sundby 1991: 4; Nissen 1999: 81). These notions are also commonly used in Norway (Gullestad 2006a). 48. Escobar (2004: 216).

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specific agendas and the particular religious and political circumstances in the regions where they worked. The division between soul and body in European thinking provided a basis for seeing universal equality in terms of souls, and various sorts of inequality (gender, age, ethnicity, ‘race’ and class) in terms of bodily difference. The Norwegians brought with them to Northern Cameroon a polarized worldview, coloured by pietism, abolitionism and imperialism. In their publications for the general audience, they represented Cameroonian ways of life in terms of conventional colonial dualisms between light and darkness, and between Christianity and heathenism. While the symbolism of light and darkness has remained central up to this very day, the notion of the heathen is now outdated.49 During the first decades of contact in Cameroon, these binaries were applied in ways that turned hybrid and fluid realities in everyday life into dualisms on the ideological level. This can be regarded as a part of the general tendency of cross-cultural encounters to force even deeper conceptual wedges into ever more articulated, indivisible orders of relations.50 Contrary to popular belief, increased interconnections, knowledge and face-to-face contact often go hand in hand with polarization, disjunctures, new hierarchies, sharply differentiated notions and essentializing practices. The story I tell in this book is a story of both intimate and idealistic involvement and paternalist distance at the same time. In the early missionary books from Cameroon, the verbal stress was on the savage in his state of heathenism. At the time, the social and cultural differences between the missionaries and the various people they encountered were considerable. Some of these differences have now diminished. Because of the schools established by the missions and the colonial and national authorities, many Cameroonians were formally educated throughout the twentieth century. Nevertheless, categories such as ‘black’ and ‘white’ were constantly applied, reproduced, transformed and reaffirmed by both whites and blacks, I therefore draw on the scholarly literature on ‘race’ in this study,51 including the studies of European and North American images of blacks, such as the work of Sander L. Gilman, Nederveen Pieterse and Gustav Jahoda.52 This literature emphasizes both the changing nature of racial images and stereotypes and their continuous historical weight. According to Pieterse, in the European Middle Ages blackness symbolized sin, Satan, animality, gluttony, sexual promiscuity, laziness, and being happy-go-lucky. For Jahoda, the themes of animality (bestiality, apishness) and cannibalism show a transhistorical Eurocentric continuity.53 From the eighteenth century these ideas became important for the justification of slavery, and a polarity between the noble and the ignoble savage was introduced. From the nineteenth century blacks were also portrayed as big children who needed help in order to become civilized. The idea that the mental processes of savage men were similar to those of civilized children became a commonplace in colonial discourse and scholarship, together with the related notion that mental development in ‘the lower races’ came to a gradual halt in early adolescence.54 While some theories attributed this to ‘degeneration’, others attributed it to ‘immaturity’. Moreover, Sander Gilman has shown for Germany that stereotypes about Blacks 49. 50. 51. 52 53. 54.

See Chapter 5. Comaroff and Comaroff (1997a: 26). Such as Fanon (1967 [1952]); Goldberg (1993); Harrison (1995); Stoler (2002); Winant (2000). Gilman (1982); Pieterse (1992); Jahoda (1999). Jahoda (1999). Comaroff and Comaroff (1991, 1997a); Stocking (1982 [1968]).

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were in active use also in countries without blacks. It is not difficult to document that such stereotypes were widespread in Norway, and that they have to some extent persisted over the last hundred years.55 The terms have often changed, but not necessarily the underpinning ideological structures, images and stereotypes. Perceptions of class, gender and age frequently encode ideas of racial difference, and it is often these overlaid constructions that display the complexity and distinctiveness of particular modes of representation.56 Photographing a body as female or male does not just depend on the essential femininity or masculinity of that body, but on the discourses of gender (among other discourses) in which the photographing practice is situated.57 This is so concerning the camera work of the photographer, the socialized body and the intentions of the photographic subject, as well as the cultural conventions of the viewer. According to Sally Markowitz, the category of sex/gender difference itself has been saturated with racial meanings for centuries, and not always in ways that are easy to discern: ‘classifications of race and sex complement, even constitute, one another rather than simply cut across one another or even compete’.58 As in other colonial and imperialist discourses, the perceived status of women (including the men’s treatment of them) was (and is) central to missionary ideology and practice. In fact, colonial authority was generally bolstered by the often mistaken assumption that European women were less oppressed than women in other parts of the world, making women’s emancipation a justification for various kinds of intervention. In the chapters to come, I want to demonstrate that gender is not simply a ‘factor’ that can be entered into the analysis but is a crucial dimension of difference that encodes or valorizes other differences, such as those based in ‘race’, class or geographic area. Similar perspectives can be applied to children and childhood, and the almost ubiquitous infantilizing of the colonized from the nineteenth century onwards. While Norwegian missionaries regard local people as equal to themselves as children of God, children and childhood are also used as metaphors in many other ways. For example, in relation to specific conceptions of ‘modernity’, ‘tradition’ appears to be child-like. And children are perceived to be naturally innocent, and to have a specific role to play in the before-and-after narrative of religious conversion.59 In missionary narratives, grown-ups are often seen as children growing out of heathenism, led by the missionaries. Africans have been represented as children and the missionaries as their parents. These metaphors indicate some of the particular qualities in their relationship. And just like children in Europe who formerly ought to be ‘seen and not heard’, photographic subjects in the same time period ideally remain available for observation.60 In the missionary representations, specific codes of gender, sexuality, age and family life thus seem to reconcile tensions between the ideals of equality, on the one hand, and the inequalities of rank, prestige, power and monetary control on the other.

55. Botten (2003); Christensen and Eriksen (1992); Gullestad (2006a); Moldrheim (2000). 56. Thomas (1994: 67). In general, colonial writers have frequently attributed femininity to colonized peoples, and later to the ‘developing’ nation state (Mosse (1985); Parker et al. (1992); Spivak (1990). 57. Rose (1997: 279). 58. Markowitz (2001: 389, 398). 59. Thomas (1994: 131–33). 60. Mitchell (1994: 162).

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Mission Propaganda Like all transmissions of knowledge – including the present book – missionary documentation is shaped by the locations of the observers – their field of vision as well as blind zones. Any location is both enabling and limiting in this sense. The missionary photographs are assembled and shown within a range of distinct mixed-media genres (slide shows, magazines, newsletters, books and films), in association with some kind of commentary or narration. For the purposes of this study, I examine certain similarities among the many different publications directed at a general audience. These similarities are, above all, due to the shared particularities of the relations of production and dissemination. I ask not only what the publications mean, but what the missionaries want them to do. The short answer to this question is that these publications are intended to persuade and engage. First, the distinct genres emerge within similar institutional contexts, being used to present missionary experiences to actual and potential supporters in Norway. This is particularly so within the modality of evangelizing. The missionaries needed to effectively persuade the audience at home that the peoples in Cameroon needed to be saved. Second, the various publications have a specific religious anchoring in pietistic, revivalist Christianity with an emphasis on each individual’s personal experience of God’s presence in his or her life. The books can be read as documents about life in Africa as well as testimonials about the workings of God, based on selected biblical passages that serve as key metaphors throughout the century.61 Third, and closely related to the religious content, the transmission of knowledge in the publications contains an aspect of advertisement or propaganda for the mission. The main aim of the missionaries is not simply to transmit knowledge about Africa – it is of course that, too – but to transmit knowledge as a public relations tool to ‘win women and men, old and young and children for the Gospel and for Christ’ and encourage them to support the mission spiritually and financially.62 They wanted to keep the supporters they already had as well as recruiting new supporters at home and new missionaries to the various fields. In other words, these publications belong to a special kind of popular culture and constitute a special kind of mass media which is similar to and different from other genres of mass popular culture on the market. And similar to – but also in ways different from – other forms of popular culture, they do not primarily engage the critical intellect of the audience. To some extent they have to be entertaining and to live up to the expectations of the audience. But unlike most popular books and films, selling and entertaining is considered a means, not the end. The goal is serious in its own particular way: the dissemination of information in order to move the heart and engage people to support the mission’s work, devotionally, socially and financially. The publications are supposed to involve people at home in the missionary effort – in prayer, organizational work, donations of money and new recruitment. Thus, the transmission of knowledge has many dimensions and aims – informational, entertaining, devotional as well as promotional. The missionary activities (including the subsistence of the

61. See Chapter 3 and Chapter 5. 62. Paul B. Wegmueller, Filmevangelisering (‘Evangelization by means of film’), page 9 of an undated stencilled manuscript distributed to all the NMS missionaries by the film office of the NMS (Det norske misjonsselskaps filmsentral). The text is located in the NMS Archive.

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missionaries and their leadership in Norway) depend upon the support from the home country, and neither the leadership in Norway nor the authors of the materials want to present information that they think might offend the readers and discourage this support. The search for support inevitably influences their choices of pictorial and narrative strategies, often in the direction of the optimistic and inspiring. I want to argue that missionary books, magazines, films, talks and slide shows form part of a continuous and changing campaign directed at people in Norway. Telling the Norwegian public about their evangelizing, education and diaconal work among the sick is meant to move fellow Norwegians to see the need for the missionary venture, and to evoke specific responses – ‘to ignite a fire in the hearts’ (tænde ild i hjertene) for the missionary cause.63 In the forewords or introductions to their published books, missionaries often express their love for Africa and the hope that reading their books will enable the public in Norway to share this love.64 For example, Jorunn Sundby tells her young readers that she has become fond of the Cameroonians,65 and that she hopes her book has made them come closer to the reader.66 Henri Nissen wants to ‘give the readers a taste for Africa – in fact for the whole fantastic world outside the hustle and bustle of the West’.67 When wanting to pinpoint the distinct character of the missionaries’ campaigning, I have the choice between using market-oriented and politically-oriented conceptual language. In market-oriented language, the mission wants to ‘sell’ its projects to its various audiences, and the competition is hard for the attention of the audiences. In societies characterized by a pluralism of religions and ‘good causes’, religious actors have to ‘market’ their religious messages. This economist’s way of talking has not diminished with the expansion of economic neoliberalism since the 1980s. Neo-liberal economic concepts permeate most institutions, including the missionary societies. Moreover, the activities of the missions contain a marked business aspect. They need money to carry out their good works, and they know well how to collect it, allocate it, manage it and make it grow. I have nevertheless chosen to redefine the concept of propaganda and create the concept of mission propaganda. As we shall see, the concept of propaganda has from time to time been used by missionaries themselves to describe their information work. Moreover, an aspect of propaganda is almost inherent in the general definition of documentation.68 Documenting is usually a question of representing something for somebody else with a specific purpose in mind. Since the concept of propaganda directs attention to ideas, images and forms of knowledge, I have adapted it to the missionary publications by offering a more complex and

63. Flatland (1922: 41). 64. For example Budal (1962), Bue (1992); (foreword and the text on the jacket), Lode (1990), Røst (1942); the editors’ foreword). 65. Sundby (1991: 68). 66. Sundby (1991: 64). 67. Nissen (1999: 6). Nissen’s book is written for the Danish general public. He is a Danish missionary and journalist who worked at the radio station in Ngaoundéré for three years. He was sent by the Danish Sudan mission, but cooperated with the national church and the Norwegian missionaries. 68. The most well-known photographic propaganda project is perhaps the documentary project ‘Farm Security Administration’ (FSA) between 1935 and 1943 in the USA. The aim of the project was to produce photographs that could obtain the support of the public for the various New Deal programmes to help poor people, in particular poor people in the countryside.

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more precise analytical definition than the usages that are current in both research and everyday life. This analytical strategy has the added advantage of making it possible to trace the connections between mission propaganda and political propaganda, including development propaganda. The word ‘propaganda’ is of relatively recent origin. The first documented use of the term occurred in 1622, when Pope Gregory XV established a standing committee of cardinals in charge of missionary activities of the Roman Catholic Church. It went by the name Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (The Holy Congregation for Propagation of the Faith). At the time Pope Gregory realized that the holy wars were a losing endeavour, and established the Propaganda as a means of coordinating the efforts of the church to elicit the voluntary acceptance of church doctrines.69 There is thus an interesting etymological connection between the concept of propaganda and the Christian missions. This is also evident in the fact that the word propaganda is etymologically related to the Latin word propagare, meaning ‘to plant saplings’, a central biblical image in the missions.70 One of the great European Protestant missionary societies, founded in 1701, was called The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.71 In the twentieth century the word ‘propaganda’ took on odious connotations in everyday speech by being related to aggressive marketing and the political machineries of communism and Nazism. The negative flavour is to some extent also evident in contemporary scholarship. For example, in their book Age of Propaganda, Pratkanis and Aronson define propaganda as ‘the communication of a point of view with the ultimate goal of having the recipient of the appeal come to “voluntarily” accept this position as if it were his or her own”.72 In Propaganda and Persuasion, Jowett and O’Donnell define the concept as ‘the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that

69. Pratkanis and Aronson (1992: 9); Smith (1968: 579) in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. 70. Fafner (1985: 197). The term ‘propaganda’ was also used in Protestant theology by Martin Kähler in the second half of the nineteenth century. He distinguished between the terms ‘mission’ (referring to the work of winning souls for Christ) and ‘propaganda’ (referring to the work of winning people for the form of Christian life which at any point in time seems right). Genuine mission work degenerates into propaganda if one does not distinguish between Christianity and culture (Berentsen 1990: 107–12). I do not apply the distinction between ‘mission’ and ‘propaganda’ in this book, but I think it is relevant for some of the ideas involved in the discussion of the communicative modality of partnership in Chapter 9. Mission theologians now more consciously want to transmit the Gospel (Christianity) but not all aspects of European world views (culture). They thus tend to apply a kernel/husk view of religion, implying that it is somehow possible to pass on a pure form of Christianity separate from the culture in which it is embedded. But missionaries can only transmit their faith from within their own cultural presuppositions (Bowie 1993: 11). Propaganda is thus something to be avoided at the same time as it is unavoidable. I also think this discussion might be fruitfully related to the way I adapt Arendt’s distinction between compassion and pity later in this chapter. Missionaries want to transmit Christianity and inspire compassion, but almost unavoidably also transmit culture and inspire pity. In contrast to Kähler and Arendt, I see the relation between ‘mission’ and ‘propaganda’ and between ‘compassion’ and ‘pity’ as continuous tensions rather than as one being a perversion of the other. 71. It joined with the Universities Mission to Central Africa in 1963 to become the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (Kirkwood 1993: 24). 72. Pratkanis and Aronson (1992: 9).

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furthers the interest of the propagandist’.73 The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, for its part, defines it as ‘the relatively deliberate manipulation by means of symbols (words, gestures, flags, images, monuments, music etc.), of other people’s thoughts or actions with respect to beliefs, values, and behaviors which these people (“reactors”) regard as controversial’.74 These definitions both fit and do not quite fit the missionary publications. Evangelical missionaries want to convince people, not to make them accept their position ‘as if ’ it was his or her own. They want each individual to go through his or her own process of conversion; they do definitively not want to brainwash people into converting. A conversion has to be deeply felt in order to be regarded as valid and authentic. The affective aspect is explicit and positively valued. This is the case, whether the convert is European or African. The fundamental theological distinction is between the saved and the nonsaved, and between the believer and the nonbeliever, regardless of ‘skin colour’, geographical origin or other differences. Moreover, the term propaganda is most often used by outsiders, not insiders. For example, some Norwegian missionaries have used the word propaganda about the activities of Muslims in the region.75 And Muslims have regarded the Christian radio emissions as propaganda.76 However, some Protestant missionaries have used the term in a positive sense about their own activities. For example, while writing about filmmaking in a backstage publication (intended only for other missionaries) about strategies concerning photography and film, a missionary leader acknowledged that most missionary institutions ‘have one or more films in their propaganda arsenal’ and wanted to further develop this medium. He strongly advised his colleagues to use advertising as a model and think through the idea of their visual media, and where they wanted to lead the audience.77 However, because of its negative connotations, it is nevertheless with some hesitance that I redefine the concept of propaganda for the analysis of the missionary transmission of experiences and information. In contrast to everyday usage, I do not see ‘propaganda’ and ‘information’ as mutually exclusive categories. On the contrary, I see mission propaganda as a part of specific communicative modalities, a specific way of informing about cross-cultural encounters for specific readers with specific goals in mind. For the purposes of this study, I define mission propaganda as the communication of experiences and information from the field arranged in ways that are meant to touch people emotionally and spiritually and propel them into supporting the mission. Within the evangelizing modality, in particular, missionary stories aim at evoking engagement with the spiritual and material suffering of people in Africa (and elsewhere), piety to God, as well as confidence in the religious teachings of the mission and in its ability to help by acting on God’s behalf. 73. Jowett and O’Donnell (1999: 6). 74. Smith (1968: 579). 75. See, for example Flatland (1922: 14); Oseland (1946). In a commonsensical way, several analysts of missionary photography also use this term about the publication activities of Christian missionaries (Brewer 2005: 105, 119; Johnson and Seton 2002: 166, 167, 168). 76. Larsen (1973: 109). 77. The Danish general secretary H.P. Madsen in the stencilled Nordic newsletter Focus no. 1, March 1953: 9–11. The article was printed in the very first issue by Jan Dalland, the leader of the NMS film office in Stavanger, who edited the newsletter. The newsletter came out fourteen times between 1953 and 1963. See Chapter 2.

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It might be useful here to introduce and modify a distinction made by Hannah Arendt.78 According to her, the person or institution who wants to elicit compassion for people as categories, not as individuals, unavoidably elicits pity. Compassion, she says, is ‘to be stricken with the suffering of someone else, as though it were contagious’.79 It abolishes distance, while pity involves distance. It is incapable of institutionalization, while pity sets out to change the world. Arendt refers to Dostoevsky, saying that to him the sign of Jesus’ divinity was his ability to have compassion for all men in their singularity, that is, without depersonalizing the sufferers and lumping them together into aggregates and types: Closely connected with this inability to generalize is the curious mutedness or, at least, awkwardness with words that, in contrast to the eloquence of virtue, is the sign of goodness, as it is the sign of compassion in contrast to the loquacity of pity.80

Arendt goes on to say: As a rule, it is not compassion which sets out to change worldly conditions in order to ease human suffering, but if it does, it will shun the drawn-out wearisome processes of persuasion, negotiation, and compromise, which are the processes of law and politics, and lend its voice to the suffering itself, which must claim for swift and direct action, that is, for action with the means of violence.81

While compassion is symmetrical and involves solidarity, Arendt says, pity is paternalist, asymmetrical and potentially self-aggrandizing. With a few crucial modifications, I find Arendt’s distinction useful for my analytic purposes in this study. First, I want to stress that, for me, the social actors are not the passions and sentiments in themselves but human beings holding, nurturing and inviting others to engage in these emotional states and building institutions on that basis. Second, I ask whether this kind of compassion is possible across great cultural difference, or whether it first requires some level of comprehension and communication (i.e. the ability to speak to each other). Arendt argues that ‘compassion abolishes distance, while pity involves distance’. But perhaps the argument could be turned around to say that when the cultural distance is considerable – because of a history of separation and/or domination – then it is hard to achieve compassion. People can only be perceived as individuals by people in the audience at home if they have a way to know them and to share their experiences. Missionaries in the field do get to know individuals, but they often present them to audiences back home as stylized types. Third, I do not follow Arendt when she says that pity is the sentimental perversion of the passion of compassion. It is not necessarily a question of either (good) compassion or (perverted) pity but of a continuous tension between different modes of feeling. Given the communicative modalities of the mission, the continuous wish for compassion is almost unavoidably turned into an invitation to pity. The historical notion which most explicitly dramatizes the pity produced by missionary propaganda within the communicative modality of evangelizing, in particular, is ‘the poor heathens’ (de stakkars hedningene). As noted in the 78. 79. 80. 81.

Arendt (1990 [1963]: 85–94); see also Loga (2005: 37). Arendt (1990 [1963]: 85). Ibid. Ibid: 86–87.

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preface, in Norwegian the term stakkars (‘poor, unfortunate, wretched, pitiable, miserable’) invites pity. This notion has been central to the core supporters’ conception of the potential converts. While sharing certain formal properties with commercial and political advertisements, the missionary publications are also distinct – with reference to information strategies, the knowledge they transmit, their perspective on the world, as well as what they want to achieve. For example, commercial advertising aims at evoking desire and encourages people to buy specific products to satisfy this desire. The aims of the missionary propaganda are in some respects closer to political propaganda than to advertisements. But in contrast to much war propaganda, which uses negative images to dehumanize an enemy, and in spite of their own use of negative images of heathenism to justify the need for intervention, the missionaries have at the same time also consistently tried to humanize and idealize those Africans whom they regarded as potentially receptive to the Word. In particular, they have published many eyecatching pictures of beautiful, young, anonymous women. These pictures and the accompanying texts are in my view meant to seduce the viewer. The concept of seduction leads to a better understanding of the missionary publications and to a necessary reconceptualization of the concept of propaganda. While the conventional definitions of propaganda that I referred to above largely focused on manipulation by coercion, with the recipient accepting the message ‘as if ’ it was his own, I want to argue that current forms of propaganda focus more on seduction, on seducing the recipient into making the message his own. To have power over people thus consists of getting them to voluntarily adopt specific ideas, and this adoption very much depends on their own contribution. In this respect, the performative effects of missionary publications foreshadow an emerging and more complex notion of power through individual seduction rather than collective coercive manipulation, which made itself felt particularly from about the 1960s onwards. In Western countries, power today works in more sophisticated ways than ever before – through shaping, not breaking, the wills of the subjects. People now see themselves as individuals making their own choices, at the same time as these choices are largely (but not fully) shaped by powerful forms of seductive propaganda and advertisement. In other words, power often works through the autonomy and discipline of individual choice.

A Goodness Regime In the following pages, I present a theoretical description of some of the logical implications of the above discussion of propaganda, compassion and pity. These implications will be substantiated in the chapters to come. The Word of the Holy Scripture is, of course, primordial to the evangelical missionaries who went out into the world to save people for Jesus. They primarily want to baptize people who are competent in reading and writing, in order for them to be able to read the Bible themselves. Literacy epitomizes, as it were, the change from heathenism to Christianity and Civilization. But Christians also believe that Man is created in the image of his maker, and the Holy Scripture is full of descriptions, narratives and parables intended to bring people and places before the inner eye of the reader. In both face-to-face interaction and mass communication, the missionaries generally communicate by means of stories rather than by just providing arguments, and using stories

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and parables can be regarded as a way of communicating images verbally. Stories potentially have the ability to hold the audience’s attention, and to educate, inform, instruct, amuse, divert and entertain – all at the same time. When embedded in a personal story, persuasion works even better. In the words of Pratkanis and Aronson, ‘most people are more deeply influenced by one clear, vivid, personal example than by an abundance of statistical data’.82 It is often a question of presenting specific facts in a way that is both consistent and embedded in a story. In their publications for the general audience at home, the missionaries present (more or less deliberately) both everyday facts and what they take to be deep truths, using specific categories and narrative plots that are intended to touch the heart. Over time, they have cultivated a few master narratives from Cameroon. Through repetition of these narratives, they hope to establish a sense of responsibility for alleviating the need of the African in the audience. Since some repetition is often convincing, but too much can be boring, the best strategy is usually repetition with some variation. This kind of propaganda attempts to elicit high levels of emotion, and at the same time suggest a doable, effective response. Like all stories, the missionary stories and testimonials present heroes, villains, victims (deserving and undeserving) and good helpers. In the chapters to come, I show that the missionaries’ master narratives from Cameroon have portrayed African women and children as the soil in which to sow the Word as well as victims waiting for help, and heathen and Muslim men as villains. Depictions of Muslim leaders, in particular, tend to stress their exotic and bellicose character. The lives of people in Cameroon are thus visually and verbally absorbed within the symbolic framework of the mission. The evangelical God, including the central figure of Christ, is the main character, with the missionaries as his self-sacrificing spokesmen and helpers. In documentary photography, the agency of Christ cannot easily be depicted. Supported by theology and the traditions of European art history, the missionaries often stand pictorially in his place. Through the analyses of the photographs, I indicate some of the ways that missionaries imitate Jesus, the way they have learned to represent him, and how some photographs have perhaps been inspired by earlier Christian as well as nonChristian images. The missionary publications exhibit both intertextuality and what we might term ‘inter-imaginality’. Using a notion presented by Jill Loga, the missionary propaganda and the institutions and practices it involves can be analysed as a powerful ‘discourse of goodness’ involving a knowledge regime,83 defined as ideas and beliefs that both enable and limit what can be represented, which choices can be made and which actions can be understood as meaningful. Within a particular knowledge regime, some people are better able to articulate their experiences than others, and some experiences are easier to articulate than others. The dynamics created by the missionary interpretations of goodness and need underpin a knowledge regime that represent Africa and Africans in particular ways. The power of a goodness regime is put into practice in the ways it limits the articulation of opposing views and critical analysis.84 The one who is critical risks being regarded as ungrateful (the missionized in Africa) or cynical (the audience in Norway). However, it should be noted that the term goodness (godhet) is not a term which is often used by missionaries and supporters. 82. Pratkanis and Aronson (1992: 130). 83. Loga (2003). 84. Loga (2003, 2005).

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In my study, it summarizes a whole set of expressions and terms – such as self-sacrifice, the values of helping the needy, of generosity, and love for others. By supporting the mission, the core supporters at home build up a good conscience and the hope of their own salvation. The missionaries, for their part, obtain renewed confidence in the necessity and feasibility of their project. I argue throughout this book that the element of persuasion of the self in missionary propaganda cannot be underestimated. Goodness is such an elusive quality that a commitment to it needs to be reaffirmed many times to be persuasive. Credible speakers believe in what they are saying, and by convincing others, they also strengthen their own convictions. The value of goodness is inherent in the calling to strive for the salvation of others, as well as in the many charitable activities, such as education and work among the sick. Among the primary supporters in Norway, the value of goodness is expressed by the importance of ‘doing something for others’ and in the many sacrifices of the missionaries.85 Self-sacrifice is a recurrent theme, a symbol of the ultimate gift in the missionaries’ imitation of the goodness of Christ.86 As pointed out by Hannah Arendt, Christ did not give alms in public. In her view, Christian goodness is corrupted in relation to its own values when it is made public. In order to remain uncorrupted, it needs to remain hidden.87 I think that this is an idea that the Protestant missionaries partly share and partly had to disregard in order to be able to do their work. Since they had to enlist support at home, and since the information materials focused on the self-sacrifice of the missionaries, the tension between modesty and publicity in the missionary presentations of self is recurrent. The success of the propaganda depends on the self-evidence of the double perception of the overall goodness of the missionary enterprise and the deep needs of the Africans. The concept of missionary goodness depends, as it were, on a portrayal of Africa as a problem-ridden continent. With no problems, there is no need for the mission to help out. There is therefore almost inevitably an inverse logic implied in the portrayal of the relationship between the mission and Cameroonian life in the sense that the problematic aspects of life in Africa justify the claim that the mission is needed. In spite of the fact that there is much more in the missionary portrayal of Africa than just problems, the perspective on Africa as needing help and the accompanying perceptions of the goodness of the donors have over the years become generalized as unquestioned conventional wisdom. This conventional wisdom is today reproduced and transmitted by agencies of humanitarian relief and development programmes, as well as by African leaders in their search for economic support from abroad and political support at home. All through the social and political transformations of the twentieth century, the social categories of ‘donors’ and ‘receivers’ and the boundaries between them have been produced and reproduced, concealing what people in Europe receive from Africa in terms of economic wealth, goods, ideas and positive self-images. European codes have dominated both the building of transcontinental relations and the transmission of knowledge from the mission field. I will show throughout the book that the unquestioned goodness of intentions for a long time justified a certain lack of attention to the views of the people they worked with and a 85. See Holtedahl (1986). 86. In the terms of classical rhetoric, the establishment of the trustworthiness of the communicators (in this case by a focus on self-sacrifice) is called the ethos of communication. 87. Arendt (1990 [1963]: 83–89).

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certain lack of reflection on the formation of social categories and boundaries.88 I demonstrate in Chapter 10 that the missionaries’ belief in the need for each person’s salvation and their convictions concerning what was in the best interests of the converts has been strong, to some extent leading to the demonization of African belief systems and traditions of knowledge. These processes exemplify the more general point that unselfish acts of helping out – acts of goodness – can have unintended side-effects in terms of potentially challenging the selfrespect of the people on the receiving end.

Photographic Identification and Distancing Photographs are generally most powerful when they express moods and ideas that the spectators already have. They lend themselves to a kind of implicit but nevertheless productive visual rhetoric, ideologically shaping the points of view of the viewer by confirming them. This is so because they are usually not regarded as communicative messages with intentions and arguments. Instead they are often seen as transparent mirror images of the world. Then the spectators do not start reflecting and discussing in order to avoid cognitive dissonance. People do not generally argue with ‘the world the way it just is’. In the Western world, vision has been used as a metaphor for privileged knowledge for centuries. Modern science is based on the fact that ‘I have seen’ is in many situations a stronger statement than ‘I have heard’. In the Nordic languages, for example, the verb to know (å vite, in Norwegian) is etymologically connected to seeing. This foregrounding of vision underpins the power of photography. Photographic technologies and practices developed as a part of and a parallel to a fascination with the accurate recording of things within broader attempts at classification and possession.89 One could perhaps say that in missionary photography, the traces of light on the photographic plates came to represent the gradual victory of Christian light over heathen darkness. At the same time, I argue that photography is not always detached observation, but can be part of many kinds of relations, including relations of compassion and care. The publication of missionary images includes many stages. First, the pictures are taken, reflecting a more or less conscious and deliberate act on the part of the photographer, as well as the involvement or noninvolvement of photographic subjects. These acts are influenced by complex cultural codes and value systems. For better or worse, a photographer usually sees most clearly what appears as most strange to him or her. This is particularly evident in crosscultural photography. Like all photographs, the missionary pictures show a reality which is shaped by the choice of subject matter, the angle, the focus and the particular poses. Studies of photographs and films therefore have to deal with the double character of pictures – on the one hand, they are cross-linguistic and transcultural phenomena, and on the other hand, they are made, consumed and appropriated within specific (and changing) social, cultural and linguistic contexts and codes. For the missionaries and their core public, the published photographs were perceived as a window through which the people at home could see the faraway objects of their prayer and donations. Nevertheless, like the taking and

88. This also occurs in the discourses of humanitarian and developmental aid (Tvedt 2003). 89. Clarke (1997: 15).

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ordering of the photographs, their viewing and interpretation are influenced by complex cultural codes and value systems. Photographic images derive their evidential force both from their indexical relation to a prior reality and from the material, technical and cultural processes and discursive frameworks through which they are produced and made meaningful.90 Moreover, pictures are more than just messages – they carry additional meanings that are not easily decoded. Both photographs and films are generally characterized by forms of richness and redundancy, which can potentially provide the basis for new interpretations. What was ground for the photographer may become figure for the interpreter. Thus, as different media, pictures say both more and less than the written text. Sometimes they say less because not everything in the text has been photographed. Sometimes they say more because a picture generally presents more detail than a verbal account. The pictures release and generate interpretations; they do not determine them. The aim of my research is not primarily to look for a reality ‘behind’ the pictures by presenting ethnographic facts about the people and groups represented, but to contribute to the decoding of their power by reading them in the light of the accompanying original texts and presenting an interpretation of how they are composed. Throughout the book I refer to theorists of photography such as Walter Benjamin, John Berger, Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes. In particular, I use Barthes’ notion of the air of a photograph, as well as his distinction between the studium and the punctum. The studium is characterized as a general interest without love, and the punctum is something which pricks a particular observer: ‘It is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there.’91 For Barthes, the studium is ultimately always coded, the punctum is not: ‘What I can name does not really prick me. The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.’92 The punctum is personal, tied to the biography of the spectator. What touches one observer does not necessarily touch another. But in contrast to Barthes, I want to argue that by making interpretations public, they can be debated, and maybe modified and shared by a wider audience – or found wanting in relation to the pictorial and textual evidence. Inspired by Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of literary ‘othering’ – defined as distancing, an objectifying style, and a synthesis of the tropes of ethnography, evangelism, science and moralism93 – I introduce the concept of photographic distancing. As a rough definition, I define photographic distancing as the creation of exotic or pitiable scenes and types, inviting viewers to distance themselves from the subject. It invites a form of dis-identification in the viewer. But in contrast to Pratt, and in line with my focus on the importance of the potential for various degrees and modes of identification in the visual representations of the missionaries, I also want to introduce the concepts of literary and photographic identification. In the mission propaganda, photographs can be regarded as tools which encourage the viewers in Norway to identify with some of the photographic subjects and engage in their lives across cultural and geographic distance, and to distance themselves from others. In general, viewers identify with people who, according to their own ideas about beauty and moral value, are 90. Ryan (1997: 19). 91. Barthes (2000 [1980]: 55, italics in the original). 92. Barthes (2000 [1980]: 51). The distinction between the studium and the punctum can perhaps be linked to Arendt’s distinction between pity and compassion. Compassion is individual, momentary and speechless, just like the punctum before it is shared with others. 93. Pratt (1992).

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attractive and seem worthy. Some missionary pictures dwell on the beauty, humanness and moral character of Africans. Because a black appearance inevitably signals difference to Norwegian viewers, the missionaries have applied various strategies to counteract interpretations of difference by focusing on the subjects’ humanity. I argue in the chapters to come that in the missionary materials many pictures of women and children, in particular, attempt to communicate human sameness. Together with the accompanying texts, they bear witness to the ways the missionaries have read beauty into African bodies, and how they assume that their viewers will also read the same kind of beauty into the pictures they offer. Not only female victims but also male villains are often portrayed as attractive. By portraying the victims as attractive, the viewer is seduced into wanting to help. By portraying the villains as attractive, I assume that indignation on the part of the victim is heightened. The invitation to photographic identification is in my view crucial to the power of some of the missionary photographs, and is perhaps more central than photographic distancing to the effects of missionary propaganda. This is, however, a complicated issue. If identification is defined as the ability to see the world from the point of view of the other, the extent to which the Norwegian viewers were actually led to see the world from the point of view of the Cameroonian photographic subjects – and thus the potential for compassion – is relatively small. They have no doubt identified with the people in the photographs, the way they were seen by the missionaries within the relevant communicative modalities encompassing missionaries, Africans and the various viewers in Europe. They believed that they saw the world from the point of view of the locals, without always doing so. But when they believed that a particular mediated point of view was true, it might become true in its consequences. With a neologism created for the occasion, one could call the particular combination of identification and distance ‘pitification’. Pitification is the result of the ways the photographic subjects are portrayed as objects of the goodness of the missionaries, and through them of the goodness of the supporters in Norway. Most missionary photographs were probably taken just for private reminiscence. But some pictures were taken, or chosen after they had been taken, to be published in specific genres of publication and connected to various sorts of verbal commentary. The pictures published by Norwegian missionaries exhibit a repertoire of photographic subject matters that I will discuss in the chapters to come: missionaries engaged in evangelizing, teaching and medical work; missionary buildings (churches, schools and hospitals, with and without people); groups of students at different levels (often with the white missionary teacher at one side or in the middle); baptisms; missionary graves; heathens (represented by innocent-looking women and children); people with leprosy and other illnesses; former slaves who had escaped from forced labour; smiling converted Christians; the local Muslim rulers (their appearance, activities and buildings); as well as dangerous snakes and African animals and birds. This short survey of the inventory of representative photographic subject matter epitomizes a set of typical narratives and ways of justifying the missionary enterprise. Some of the meaning that can be read into these pictures is the result of the explicit intentions of photographic subjects, photographers and editors, but many aspects of meaning reside in unacknowledged underlying cultural codes and conventions which have to be teased out by means of careful analysis. The missionary books exhibit much variation concerning how pictures and text are distributed. The significance of each photograph is influenced by its location in relation to other photographs, through juxtaposition, contrast and/or a specific progression of the visual

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narrative. The number, sequencing and size of the photographs as well as the layout of the pages play an important role. I have examined images and texts by asking to what extent they bear witness to how missionaries and publishers have attributed meaning to what the missionaries observed in the field. For example, I ask if a dramaturgical strategy is deployed in the selection and ordering of the illustrations, and if there is a visual construction of equality or authority. Not every author tells the same stories, presents the same photographic subject matter, or uses the photographs in exactly the same way. Even within one and the same book, the relationship between pictures and texts is generally not uniform. In an everyday sense of the word, the pictures illustrate the missionary books. But to see them as ‘just illustrations’ simplifies the complex relationships between images and texts. In the missionary books, the photographs often function as eye catchers, telling a story of their own which is relatively loosely related to the story in the text. Besides being united between the covers of one book, the photographs and the narratives are united in the sense that both derive from the missionary experiences in the field, and sometimes also their experiences while travelling to the field. In missionary books and magazines, there are often at least two layers of text: the main body of text and the captions. In preparing their publications, the missionaries (and their editors and publishers) had to decide which pictures might illustrate the main body of the text, whether to add a caption or not, and if a caption is added, what information to include. Sometimes there have been differences of opinion between the leadership at home and the missionaries in the field about these issues when editing the texts and choosing the pictures. Since captions serve to prioritize certain sorts of information in relation to the pictures, both the presence and absence of captions confer meaning and influence the interpretations that contemporary viewers are invited to make. Through the captions, the missionary photographer and/or editor mediates between his or her framing of the life-worlds of the photographic subjects and the audience in Europe. Together with the particular perspective of the photographer, including the choice of subject matter and its framing, the captions are central to making African photographs fit audiences in Europe.

The Analyst is Both Outsider and Insider Since every point of view and every act of speaking is always partial and comes from somewhere, every piece of research has to be reflexively ‘situated’. Knowledge is situated when the researcher understands that it is partial, and that this partiality is connected to the contexts in which it is produced.94 My role in this book as the interpreter of cross-cultural photographs and religious texts necessitates that I reflect upon my social location in relation to the phenomena I discuss. Both images and religion constitute fields of experience that are difficult to conceptualize in rationalizing terms. Knowing only too well that one’s own blind zones are most clearly seen by others, I nevertheless try to be reflexive about my own complicity in neocolonial relations, including the contradictions implied in the social location of my study and the problematic aspects of the categories I use.

94. Haraway (1991).

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As an anthropologist I find that scientific and popular forms of representation often inhabit partially overlapping ideological spaces, and are not as far apart as is commonly assumed. I therefore see both parallels and links between missionary activities and anthropology – between the carving out of mission fields and the carving out of academic careers through the intellectual colonization of other people (as well as between these two and the carving out of political and economic empires). Both missionaries and anthropologists employ specific rhetorical strategies and specific strategic omissions of information which play down our complicity in the structured processes of imperialism and neocolonialism. Our selfunderstanding is based on what we see as human universals as well as on processes of selfconstruction though opposition to ‘the other’ from different sides of a power divide. Like the recent history of anthropology, the recent history of missionary publication could be described as a story about gradually having to take into account the reactions of the people we write about and take photographs of.95 This gradual taking into account of the reactions of the subjects demonstrates that a neat separation between scholars and research subjects or between missionaries and converts is no longer empirically tenable. Some of the former research subjects have become anthropologists, and some of the former converts have become influential theologians, destabilizing former social certainties. At the same time, there are also interesting differences between anthropology and the missions. While anthropologists have travelled to faraway places in order to study belief systems and practices, attempting to be cultural relativists in a descriptive sense, missionaries settled in some of those very same places in order to replace people’s belief systems and practices. They have definitively not been cultural relativists, but, yes, missionaries. While academic anthropologists sometimes express a need ‘to give something back’ in the form of minor services for the data they obtain and the hospitality they receive in the field, missionaries generally see themselves as the ones who are bringing the gift of the Gospel to the people they work with. And while the missions have made extensive use of photographs in their information materials until the very present, from about 1930 onwards, there has been a decline in the use of photographs in scholarly anthropological publications. I assume that part of the reason for this decline was precisely an attempt to upgrade the discipline academically by distinguishing it from the writings of travellers and missionaries. Anthropologists have tended to construct a Feindbild (enemy image) of missionaries as exemplary colonialist indoctrinators, thereby viewing their own writings as both more serious and as the result of an essentially harmless curiosity.96 They could also play down the fact that when developing intensive and long-term field research methods in the 1940s and the 1950s,

95. It is a well-known fact that the history of anthropology is not exemplary in this respect. See, for example, Rassool and Hayes (2002). There is also much to learn from the recent debates within anthropology concerning the practices of writing. See Clifford and Marcus (1986). See also Hsu’s (1979) discussion of the diaries of Bronislaw Malinowsky, one of the founding fathers of modern social anthropology: ‘In spite of his hostility towards Christian missionaries, Malinowski’s sense of racial and cultural superiority over the natives in his field came through loud and clear. He frankly called them savages, niggers, boys, not once, but repeatedly’ (Hsu 1979: 518). ‘Malinowski never seemed to relate to his natives as human beings who might be his equals or trusted colleagues’ (ibid.: 521). Hsu noted that Malinowski was unable ‘to relate to the natives on anything like their own terms’ (ibid.: 521). See also Rosaldo (1989: 116). 96. Pels (1997: 171).

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they depended on dictionaries and grammars written by European and American missionaries who had become proficient in many languages as a means of proselytizing, as well as on the social networks and institutions developed by the missions. Another reason for the decline in the use of photographs in anthropology was that the anthropologists were no longer interested in racial features and material culture. In other words, they were not interested in bodies, houses and tools, but in kinship systems, political decision making, economic allocations and other less tangible and less directly photographable aspects of human existence. This was linked to the change in theoretical perspectives from diffusionism to functionalism. Writing about British social anthropology, Elisabeth Edwards identified a shift from photographs as objects collected and exchanged by practitioners who treated them as ‘examples of isolated phenomena for the purposes of comparative study’ to ‘an increasingly integrated model of social structure for which the photograph was perceived as a less satisfactory mode of recording and expression’ and within which photography became one aspect of recording fieldwork.97 In a way, anthropological fieldworkers have themselves taken on the function of a plate of glass or a strip of film.98 To the extent that anthropologists still use photographs in their publications, there has been a shift from pictures which are commented on to illustrated texts.99 When presented as nontheorized ‘illustrations’, the anthropological use of photographs is often similar to the missionary publications. In a similar way as the missionaries, but with much less experience than they have in Cameroon, I, too, both inhabit and relate to colonial and neocolonial economic and political structures. And, as a scholar, I inevitably participate in transformed colonial relations within academic life. My writing in this book is thus doomed to exhibit dilemmas of representation which are similar to the ones exhibited in the missionary publications. For scholars in general and anthropologists in particular, colonialism is not a historical object which is external to the observer.100 Everybody in the world is today forced both to inhabit and to relate to the changing and unequally structured global relations left by colonialism and maintained by economic neocolonialism and developmentalism. As an analyst I am thus both part of and not part of what I analyse – both an insider and an outsider. This situation has been a challenge when I have been working to establish an analytical language in order to grasp the specific codes and legitimating practices of the system I study. When examining the discursive universe of the missionaries, I am forced to think and communicate by means of the categories in this universe at the same time as I examine them. This is made all the more necessary by the fact that some of these categories are now also used by Africans. It is an inescapable complication in this kind of analysis that the analytical language cannot be fully dissociated from the ideologies under examination. One example is the enduring tendency in Europe to talk about ‘Africa’ instead of about particular peoples and places on this vast continent. As discussed by Bill Ashcroft, among others, this is a highly problematic concept. Africa, he says, is the ‘unknown into which knowledge must advance. Thus the idea of Africa precedes and justifies colonialism; and this

97. 98. 99. 100.

Edwards (2001: 38, 47). Pinney (1992: 82). Wolbert (2000: 323). Pels (1997: 164).

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idea persists to the present.’101 In this book I am forced to continue this practice, since the materials I examine have to some extent actually been presented and interpreted as representations of Africa.102 At the same time, this practice is the object of my analysis. Other examples are the problematic notions of slavery and the ‘harem’ applied to practices in Northern Cameroon, the notions of heathenism (hedenskap), ‘false gods’ or ‘idols’ (avguder) for the beliefs of Cameroonians, as well as the catch-all term ‘magic remedies’ or ‘charms’ (tryllemidler) for ‘amulets’ and a range of other objects belonging to distinct traditions of knowledge which were lumped together and considered to be heathen by the mission. Similar problems relate to many terms used in this book. In particular, I am painfully aware of the problems related to the application of racial terms such as ‘white’ and ‘black’, racially coded terms such as ‘missionaries’ and ‘locals’, ‘European’ and ‘African’, ‘Norwegian’ and ‘Cameroonian’, as well as ethnic terms such as ‘Fulbe’ (town ‘Fulani’), ‘Mbororo’ (pastoral ‘Fulani’)’, ‘Gbaya’, ‘Dii’ and ‘Mbum’. All of these are problematic terms because they refer to socially constructed and historically mutable realities. There is therefore a great risk that the very terms of the analysis reproduce and affirm all the conceptions and binaries that I aim to critically explicate. For example, for stylistic reasons I sometimes use the term ‘local’ about Cameroonians, knowing all to well that they were as influenced by the cross-cultural encounter as the missionaries. The use of categories represents a serious problem with no easy solution. The only way to proceed is to question these and similar categories by attempting to make explicit their historical nature. Like the missionaries whose photographs I examine, I am a Norwegian citizen and thus an insider doing anthropology close to ‘home’. But in contrast to many authors who write about missionary activities, and who are themselves part of the organization they study, their activities constitute a social, religious and cultural world that was new to me when I started examining it. As a feminist scholar, perhaps I also notice slightly different things than a researcher with different analytical interests would have noticed. Nevertheless, as an ethnographer, I find that entering the published world of Norwegian missionaries is not fundamentally different from entering any other sociocultural world. But, as I have already had the occasion to emphasize, the outsider aspect of my location is caught up within the larger political-historical world that we have inherited from slavery, imperialism and colonialism, and thus also within the current agendas of capitalist and imperialist expansion and influence. As noted in the introduction, my reading of the texts and the photographs is informed by conversations with present and former missionaries, as well as with some of the Cameroonian subjects who are represented in the photographs. I also rely on my previous anthropological studies of aspects of culture and social life in Norway.103 The analytical perspectives that I bring to bear on the missionary material builds on theoretical reading as well as my former research projects, including a recent study of the Norwegian debates on immigration.104

101. Ashcroft (1997: 11). 102. But note that many core mission supporters in Norway have also been well versed in the details of the particular places and institutions that they supported in ‘their’ mission field. 103. Gullestad (1979, 1984/2002, 1992, 1996a, 2006a). 104. Gullestad (2006a).

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While this book has a thematic structure and concentrates most on the latter half of the twentieth century, I try to avoid judging the knowledge transmitted in the past in terms of present-day ideas and values, and to be sensitive to the disjunctures between the frameworks of past actors and me as a present interpreter. In other words, I attempt to pay attention to the historicity of the photographs by looking for the reasonableness of the missionary images and verbal texts in terms of the particular contexts and constraints of the time, including the materiality of the life situations of the missionaries in relation to local people and how the relations have evolved over time. This aim, of course, includes reading the texts and interpreting the photos in a scholarly critical way. I try to understand the motivations and experiences of the missionaries in the ‘mission field’ and their leadership ‘at home’, and how their roles as mediators between the supporters in Norway and the people in Cameroon influenced what they communicated back home, and also some of the reactions of the Cameroonians to them – the indirect voices and self-presentations of the missionized within the missionary representations.

2 ESTABLISHING A GOODNESS REGIME I think that the reason that positive ethnocentrism [the desire to change the ways of those who are seen as inferior or wrong] and proselytization are Western characteristics is the same as the reason why capitalism and free enterprise sprang from Europe. Missionary movements are expressions of free enterprise applied in the religious field. Just as the merchants seek bigger and better markets and material gain to beat other merchants, the missionaries – the religious entrepreneurs – wish to win more souls and build grander churches to outshine other savers of souls. Francis L.K. Hsu1 Every photograph is in fact a means of testing, confirming and constructing a total view of reality. Hence the crucial role of photography in ideological struggle. Hence the necessity of understanding a weapon which we can use and which can be used against us. John Berger2 When I entered the Norwegian missionary universe through the many books for the general public, I encountered a series of paradoxes which testify to the richness and complexity of the historical role of the Christian missions. Being God’s messengers with egalitarian ideas and practices, as well as actors within colonial and neocolonial economic and political structures, the work of the missions is inevitably founded on a series of historical tensions. The solutions they found to the dilemmas posed by these tensions set in motion specific social dynamics.

1. Hsu (1979: 523). 2. Berger (1972: 182).

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Attempting to represent the missionaries’ relations to people in the field in a way which would be inspiring to the supporters in Norway evidently put restrictions on how they have framed their pictures and stories. In this chapter, I present a context for the analyses in the following chapters. I first give an overview of the work of the Norwegian missionaries in Cameroon, then I discuss the kinds of photographs they have taken and how these photographs have been distributed. Finally, I discuss the missionary books for the general audience. My main contention is that the need to justify the activities to the supporters at home has supported a division between a (diverse and differentiated) backstage in the mission and two different kinds of front stage, one in Cameroon, the other in Norway. These various social arenas and representations, and the dynamics by which they are interrelated, constitute the missionary goodness regime. The ‘scopic regime’ of the photographs and their accompanying texts was meant to contribute to the goodness of the whole enterprise.

Historical Background The Christian Protestant missions developed rapidly in Norway from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. These are internationally inspired national movements and institutions. Many national organizations in Norway thus organize missionary work abroad. The three largest are the Norwegian Lutheran Missionary Association (Norsk Luthersk Misjonssamband), the Norwegian Missionary Society (Det Norske Misjonsselskap), and the Norwegian Santal Mission (Den norske Santalmisjon, today Normisjon). The oldest is the Norwegian Missionary Society (NMS), established in 1842, which soon became one of the largest popular movements and the first national voluntary organization. Inspired by British evangelism, German pietism and the home-grown teachings of Hans Nielsen Hauge,3 their theology is of a pietistic and revivalist kind,4 with a strong focus on the need for the missionary to have received a personal, inner calling (kall) from God. At the same time the NMS operates within the Church of Norway, employing educated theologians as pastors. This means that it includes a broad spectrum of points of view, devotional practices and lifestyles among its supporters and missionaries – meeting-house (bedehus) Christians as well as church Christians. One year after the founding of the society, they established a Missionary School (a three-year programme) in Stavanger. In 1844, Zululand, in South Africa, became their first missionary field, and Madagascar became their main field of operations from 1866. The NMS today works in Madagascar, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Mali, Cameroon, Japan, Thailand, Pakistan, Brazil, Estonia, Croatia, Paris and the Middle East. Considering the large scale of the Norwegian missionary activity, the institutional effects of the Norwegian mission are 3. Simensen (1986). 4. When former missionary Beate Øglænd was a child, drinking, dancing and going to the theatre was out of the question in her family. While working as a nurse, midwife and the principal of a school for assistant nurses in Cameroon from 1961 to 1981, she argued against the wish of local church leaders to serve alcoholic beverages at celebrations (Øglænd 1988: 103, 113). Even if many missionaries now have more liberal attitudes to alcohol, this is still a topic of some disagreement in Cameroon. As the number of missionaries is declining, the leaders of the national church see an opening for serving alcohol at church celebrations as a part of the Africanization of the church. Source: Paul Salatou, administrative director of the church (EELC).

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substantial, especially in the regions where their activity became most concentrated, such as Madagascar, Cameroon and South Africa. While spreading the Christian Gospel was the main objective, social work, especially concerning health and education, soon became accepted as a missionary activity. The three main ‘branches’ of missionary activities are related to the church’s congregations, the schools and the medical work in clinics and hospitals. In the beginning, medical and social work (diaconal work) was justified as a way of following Christ’s example as well as a strategy to catch the attention of the local population. The extent of these activities expanded with the progress of medical sciences in the nineteenth century.5 Nevertheless, over the years, many internal discussions focused on finding a balance between evangelizing and diaconal work, often conceptualized as a conflict between preaching the Word – the main task – and preparing the soil. While some missionaries used to argue that the medical work took away valuable time and resources from evangelizing, others wanted to see the work among the sick and the needy not just as a means to and end, but as an end in itself. In 1997, the NMS formally and finally abandoned the idea that social work was carried out in order to support their evangelizing work. Medical, social and education activities are now unambiguously seen as an end in themselves, firmly anchored in Jesus’ commissioning of the disciples, particularly as it is formulated in Luke 9: 1–2.6 Social and medical help is given to heal local people and to lessen their pain and suffering, as an embodiment of Christian compassion. This clarification slowly developed as a response to the institutionalization of development programme from 1950 onwards. The missions had to conceptually separate their medical and educational work from evangelizing in order to obtain funding from the Norwegian government’s agency for development cooperation (Norad). This is a key issue in the change of communicative modality from evangelizing to development. The NMS became involved in the Sudan mission in 1921 at a time when its missionaries already had much experience in Africa. Their experiences in this field have been different from their work, for example, in Madagascar, which started much earlier, and had educated local pastors already in 1900. In 1921, Sudan encompassed a large region, from the present East African state of Sudan to the west coast of Africa, through the many countries along the southern border of the Sahara desert. The Norwegians started working in Cameroon (then seen as part of the large region across the continent called Sudan) at the initiative of a man named Fredrik Müller. During a journey to Denmark in 1916, he was in contact with the Danish Sudan Mission and became ‘deeply moved by the need in Sudan’ (sterkt grepet av nøden i Sudan).7 The need he referred to was of a spiritual kind, and the explicit aim of the missionary activities was to stop further Muslim expansion in Africa. At the beginning, the new Sudan mission was separately organized within the NMS. The NMS wanted to see how the interest in this new field developed among potential supporters in Norway before it became fully involved.8 In order to develop this new mission field, they needed money, and in order to obtain a stable source of money, they depended on developing a well-functioning 5. 6. 7. 8.

Berentsen (2004: 255). See Chapter 3. Nikolaisen and Endresen (1949: 296). See Appendix. Nikolaisen and Endresen (1949: 298). According to these authors, some members found that this attitude ‘smacked too much of cold calculation’ (smakte vel meget av kald beregning).

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and stable ‘work at home’ (hjemmearbeid).9 In 1939 the Sudan Mission became fully integrated in the organization. The NMS’s presence in Cameroon started with four celebrated ‘pioneer missionaries’ who arrived in the town of Ngaoundéré on 6, March 1925, only a few years after Northern Cameroon was opened up to the Christian missions.10 They chose the region which today is called Adamaoua province as their mission field, partly because of the cool climate on the plateau (about 1000 metres above sea level), partly because of its large size with unlimited possibilities for expansion, and partly because it was close to the older mission field in Southern Cameroon from where they could secure catechists and evangelists.11 The mission field extends a little beyond Adamaoua province. Until recently, the NMS has been the only Norwegian missionary society working in Cameroon.12 Within Cameroon they have cooperated with other Protestant missions and competed with Catholic missions. This competition has been termed a Protestant–Catholic ‘race for souls’.13 More recently, the main competition has come from charismatic Pentecostalism. The Cameroon national church has lost some members to churches such as the Full Gospel International.14 The transmission of information from their experiences in Sudan to the Norwegian public started even before the NMS’s activities began. A book by one of the pioneer missionaries came out in 1922, based on his time spent with the Danish Sudan Mission.15 Over the years, the information about their social, diaconal, educational and evangelizing work in this field

9. 10. 11. 12.

Ibid: 299. Larsen (1973: 22). Nikolaisen and Endresen (1949: 308). A Norwegian Baptist missionary society works in the Maroua region in the North of Cameroon, starting about ten years ago, and a few Norwegian missionaries have worked in the region for other missions than the NMS. 13. Drønen 2005. According to Drønen, some groups, in particular the Dii, profited from this race. As a by-product of the present project I wrote a small article arguing that the negative attitudes towards Roman Catholics that the missions have transmitted to the general public perhaps played a part in producing the Norwegian ‘no’ to the European Union (Gullestad 2006b). 14. As a result of the evangelization campaign Vie nouvelle pour tous (‘New life for all’) in 1976, this church was established in Southern Cameroon, and its stronghold is so far still in the south. It remains to be seen if it will represent a rival for the souls of the Lutheran church in the north. There are also other charismatic churches, such as ‘La vraie église de dieu’ and ‘L’église apostolic’. The NMS was involved in the evangelization campaign in the 1970s (see Bue 1992). The attraction of these churches is that they take a firmer stand against corruption, adultery and alcohol than the Lutheran church. It is formulated as a difference between form and content, between living the faith and social belonging, between being engaged by the heart and simple materialism. In a way, the missionaries’ own ideas about religious awakening thus have come back, like a boomerang, in the form of attacks on the established church from people who have taken them up even more fervently. 15. Flatland (1922). See Chapter 3.

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has been transmitted through exhibits,16 slide shows, films, books and magazines.17 The magazines were often read aloud in the local associations; they thus reached many more people than just the subscribers. The ‘pioneer stage’ in Cameroon lasted from 1925 to about 1960. The number of Norwegian missionaries rose from twenty in 1950 to forty in 1960, to sixty in 1970, and to a little more than seventy in the 1980s.18 Thus the period from about 1960 to 1990 was a period of expansion. During this stage, between fifty and 180 Norwegians (including children) lived in the region. Then the number of missionaries declined. In 1995, forty-six Norwegian missionaries lived in Cameroon with their families.19 In 2003, only fifteen were left, including a few retired missionaries with a work agreement and young oneyear fellows.20 In 2004 the group of Norwegians consisted of six missionaries (two couples and two single women), three retired missionaries and four young men (two exchange students and two civil service workers). In the period from about 1995 onwards, some of their schools and clinics in the outlying areas closed down, because the poor Cameroon national church could no longer afford to run them. In some of these places the Cameroonian state has built schools and the need is not as urgent as before. To some extent, the different stages correspond to a succession of tasks and communicative modalities. At the beginning evangelizing was prioritized, in combination with diaconal work. They used Cameroonian Christians from the south as evangelists and catechists in the outlying areas, but they also travelled themselves to reach ‘unreached people’. Then the building of institutions became important. The NMS has constructed many institutions and activities – such as schools (primary schools, a high school, a Bible school, a theological seminary, courses for the wives of the students at the Bible school and the theological seminary), clinics, a town for leprosy treatment, an orphanage, two agricultural centres, a

16. In particular, the information activities include two exhibitions entitled ‘To the ends of the earth’ (Til jordens ender) (1948–60, with 990,000 visitors) and ‘Africa calls’ (Afrika kaller) (1960–66, with 342,000 visitors). The first exhibition travelled along the Norwegian coast in a boat and overland by railway; the second travelled in three large trucks. Together the two exhibitions had 1,332,000 visitors. Source: The Museum of the Mission: A treasury of artefacts and history (Misjonsmuseet: Eit skattkammer). Stavanger: Misjonshøgskolens forlag, 1995: 18. Parts of these exhibitions can be found in the small museum of the NMS in Stavanger. 17. Under slightly different names, the NMS magazine Misjonstidende had 2,000 subscribers in 1850, more than 6,000 in the 1870s, 20,000 in 1927, 40,000 in 1975, and 13,452 in 2003. In 1885, the number of subscribers was 10,000 in a population of about 1.9 million people. In comparison, the largest newspaper at the time, Morgenbladet, had about 2,000 subscribers in 1873. In contrast to the newspapers, the magazine was also read by common people. Source: Eivind Hauglid, the present editor (2004). In 1973 Norsk Luthersk Misjonssamband’s magazine Utsyn had also around 40,000 subscribers, and Den Norske Santalmisjon’s Santalen had 10,000 subscribers (Repstad 1973). 18. Raen (1987: 187). 19. Twenty-six of them stayed at the main station in Ngaoundéré, four in Gadjiwan, three in Mbe, three in Ngaoubela, two in Meng, two in Yoko, two in Meiganga, two in Poli, two in Tignere. Source: Grimstad (1997: 26). 20. Misjonstidende 159 (4B), 2004, (Det Norske Misjonsselskaps årbok 2004): 13.

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radio studio21 and two hospitals (the hospital in Ngaoundéré was built in cooperation with the American Sudan mission). Teaching people to become literate – and thus to be able to read the Bible themselves – was paramount. Like other missionary societies, the NMS has also invested much work in translating the Bible into the various local languages.22 During this period, the missionaries were the leaders of the institutions they founded. Now, during their decline, they function as links to the various funding agencies in Europe and support the national church with various services. Thus, the work of the few remaining missionaries is mainly of a professional kind – as teachers at the theological institute and the biblical school, communication specialists, economists, administrators and nurses. They are paid from Norway, while local pastors, evangelists and catechists are paid by the national church. With the exception of the doctors at the hospital, the wage difference between missionaries and local employees of the national church is considerable.23 The NMS supports the church economically by paying the missionaries, by supporting some of the institutions (such as the theological seminary and the Bible school), the administration of the church (the central leadership) and specific development projects connected to preventative medical work, reading instruction, education, translation work, rural development (such as agricultural projects and support for a few of the activities of the women’s organization Femmes pour Christ), but not the life of the congregations per se.24 The national church EELC (l’Église évangélique luthérienne du Cameroun) was founded in 1960, based on the Norwegian mission and the American Sudan Mission. After considerable controversy within the mission about the pace of the process of full independence, the leadership of the EELC was formally handed over to the Cameroonians in 1975, implying that the mission became formally integrated in the church.25 The EELC is an energetic organization with more than 120,000 members and complex internal hierarchies with Cameroonian church leaders and pastors in the main roles.26 Over the last years it has suffered several times from the serious embezzlement of funds by leaders and functionaries in positions of trust. The main problem today is that those who have committed economic crimes are often protected from above – in the church and in national politics. For example, the person who managed the budget at the Protestant hospital was moved to the Protestant high school because of suspicion of embezzlement of funds at the hospital. According to the current

21. Radio Voice of the Gospel (Radio Evangeliets Røst, Sawtu Linjiila in Fulani) broadcasts short-wave emissions in Fulani all across the African continent, in other words all over the area which was formerly called Sudan. The potential listeners are about 15 million Fulanis in this area. The expenses for the building and the equipment were covered by the NMS and the American Sudan Mission. Source: Larsen (1973: 108). Today the radio work is supported by many Christian missionary organizations through the Lutheran World Federation (Det Lutherske Verdensforbund). The programmes are made in Ngaoundéré and sent from Swaziland. Source: Nissen (1999: 8). 22. See for example Raen (1990). The NMS literature projects have been working with sixteen languages, in 2004 reduced to thirteen languages. Source: Ragnhild Mestad. 23. According to Nissen (1999: 112), ten local people are paid less than one Norwegian missionary. See also Øglænd (1988: 71); Grimstad (1997: 61, 121) and Chapter 10. 24. Source: Tomas Sundnes Drønen. 25. Bue (1992: 78–81); Saaghus (1983). 26. Vårdal (2002: 75).

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representative, the NMS would not give the Protestant high school as much as five Cameroonian francs until he was removed.27 Although the NMS has played down the seriousness of the situation in Norway, it has negatively affected their relations to the supporters in Norway, including Norad. At one point Kirkens nødhjelp (Norwegian Church Aid) contacted the NMS and asked them to stop their cooperation with the church in Cameroon. The national church also has supporters and sources of funding other than the NMS, but the NMS is one of two main partners. The Norwegian missionaries continually experience dilemmas because they want to respect the independence of the church; at the same time, they are channelling outside money to it which is vital to its maintenance, and they certainly do not want it to be wasted. The Cameroonian church leaders, for their part, know only too well that they are dependent on the goodwill of the missionaries and the central NMS leadership in Norway for the running of many institutions. The missions are still active and influential organizations in Norway and work hard with local support groups, with congregations within the state Lutheran church, as well as with Norwegian development programmes to be able to support the national ‘sister churches’ they have founded. According to the current representative in Cameroon, Ranveig Kaldhol,28 the monetary transfers from the NMS in Norway to the church in Cameroon have not diminished with the decline in the number of missionaries. Nevertheless, one could argue that in general, as well as in Cameroon, ‘the missionary epoch’ has ended, or is in the process of ending. There are many reasons for this. First, educated Cameroonians have, as already noted, taken over the leadership of the church and its institutions; second, sending missionaries abroad is expensive; and, third, very few young Norwegians now want to become missionaries. In the present era of individualization and social transformation, the notions of a calling and of self-sacrifice have slowly lost their attraction. Other kinds of motivation, such as getting ‘an exciting and challenging job’ (en spennende og utfordrende jobb), have gradually become more important, especially from the end of the 1980s. The era of development experts and peace negotiations has also opened up alternative possibilities for adventurous young people who want to extend their solidarity to other parts of the globe. One could perhaps say that the notion of self-sacrifice has been transformed into the notion of the (oneway) transfer as technologies, money, democracy, and human rights. It is therefore increasingly difficult to recruit new missionaries for more than a few years.29 The old-fashioned missionaries who stayed for many years and who were fluent in at least one of the local languages are slowly dying out. Moreover, like the former French administration of the protectorate, and the current development cooperation, the missions seem to measure their success in being able to withdraw. A key expression in both missionary work and development programmes is ‘to make them able to take over’ (å gjøre dem i stand til å overta). The implication is that either the Norwegians are there, when they inevitably are the managers, or they leave, letting local leaders take over. The possibility that the Europeans might have something important to gain from mutual cooperation is not easy to realize. 27. Source: Ranveig Kaldhol. 28. ‘Representative’ (representant) is the current title of the position which was former called ‘superintendent’ (tilsynsmann). 29. See also Vårdal (2002: 74–75).

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Northern Cameroon is a multiethnic region where Islam coexists with local religious practices (until recently referred to as ‘heathenism’ in the missionary publications to the general audience, and as animism – the cultivation of spirits – in the current missiological and anthropological literatures). Depending on how one counts, there are about 250–280 ethnic groups and languages in Cameroon, and about forty in the Norwegian mission field. According to some Cameroonian observers, the numerous ethnic groups can be reduced politically to about forty major alliances.30 The main mission station of the Norwegians is located in the town of Ngaoundéré, and over time eleven other stations were established in the region (at Galim, Bankim, Banyo, Tibati, Ngaoubela, Gadjiwan, Mbe, Meng, Yoko, Meiganga and Tignere), in addition to numerous local congregations served by a Cameroonian catechist or evangelist.31 To make evangelizing easier, the NMS missionaries first chose nondispersed peoples, living in villages and towns. For the missionaries and their families, the difference between living at the outstations and living at the main station in Ngaoundéré was considerable. At the smaller stations the missionary and his family were often the only whites in the village and had to socialize with their African neighbours in order to survive. In Ngaoundéré it was possible to live an almost ghettoized Norwegian life. Just like in their stronghold in Stavanger, the main station was a place where the missionaries could set the premises and provide the rules of conduct.32 The politically (but not numerically) dominant group is the Muslim Fulani (Peul, Fulbe), who first arrived in the region as peaceful nomads before the eighteenth century, and then as conquering warriors in 1809, more than a hundred years before the arrival of the missionaries.33 The primary targets of the Norwegians were the many non-Muslim ‘animist’ groups, such as the Mbum, the Di (Dii), the Gbaya, the Njem (Nyem-Nyem or Nizagh), the Gambai (Laka), the Pero (Pere), the Tikar, the Mambila, the Kunda (Koundja), the Doyayo (Dowayo), the Vute, the Dogon, the Sumbwa (Sumba, Chamba or Kamba), the Dupa (Duupa), the Konda (Kona) and the Sangu.34 Today many pastors, catechists and evangelists in the national church are Gbaya and Dii.35 While the Norwegian missionaries have had much success among the ‘animists’, they have not converted many Muslim Fulani and Hausa, and the Muslims have also increased their influence since the Christian missionaries started

30. Source: Bertrand Eyom, General Consul for Norway in Cameroon. 31. Both ‘catechist’ and ‘evangelist’ are titles that are used for local people who have received some schooling by the church and who are employed in the outlying areas to teach people about the Gospel. The catechist has a more limited responsibility than the evangelist. 32. There is a certain contrast between their life as pietistic Christians in secular Europe and the regime they were able to build up at the headquarters in Stavanger and at the main station in Cameroon. In the missionary literature, this contrast is sometimes evident during occasions in which individual missionaries were ridiculed while travelling in Europe or between Europe and Africa because they were teetotallers and would not accept offers of wine with their meals (Nelson 1996). Sometimes such situations are presented as emblematic examples of how their faith in God was put to test. 33. Njeuma (1978). 34. All these names and categorizations of ethnic groups are problematic, and ideally require a thesis of their own. There are also many different versions of the spelling, depending on whether the context is English, French or a local language. I have consulted Merrit Ruhlen, A Guide to the World’s Languages. Edward Arnold: London, 1991. 35. See Burnham (1996, 1997) about the Gbaya.

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working in the region. Today the situation is difficult to assess, because many people may be only partially Islamicized or Christianized. In villages with a Muslim chief, the whole village may be categorized as Muslim. Missionary publications suggest that in Cameroon around 40 per cent are Catholics, 20 per cent are Protestants, and 25 per cent are Muslims;36 or that 20 per cent are Muslims, 40 per cent are Christians and 40 per cent practice ‘traditional religions’.37 While most of the Catholics live in the south, most of the Muslims and Protestants live in the north. Through their education of local people, the Christian missions contributed to the creation of new forms of social stratification in Cameroon. More specifically, they created a basis for the social mobility of people from several non-Fulani origins. When the country became politically independent, Christians who had been schooled by the various missions were ready to take over the leadership posts left by the French administrators. Before that, the missionaries often acted as intermediaries between the subjugated groups and both the French colonial administration and the Muslim sultans (called lamiido in the singular and lamiibe in the plural).38 At the beginning of their presence in Cameroon, the Norwegians praised the French colonial administration.39 But soon they felt more ambivalent, in particular in their fight against the oppressive practices of the sultans and the village chiefs. Nevertheless, their problems with the French were somewhat attenuated by the fact that there was and is no large white settler population in Cameroon. After political decolonization, the mission has related to the new national government with similar ambivalence. Norwegian missionaries can simultaneously be characterized as part of a grass-roots movement and as an elite network with considerable ideological and political power. In the nineteenth century and in the first half of the twentieth century, many came from a modest rural background,40 and engaging in a missionary career represented the possibility of a free education and social mobility. They were ‘a dominated fraction of the dominating class’.41 From the middle of the twentieth century, quite a few sons and daughters of missionaries have become missionaries themselves, or politicians and experts involved in Norwegian development programmes. Many missionaries from the 1970s onwards have been the educated sons and daughters of nurses, physicians, pastors and teachers. There is often a difference of educational background between them and the core groups of supporters, especially in rural Norway. Since the beginning of the presence of the Norwegian mission in Cameroon, both countries have undergone profound transformations, especially since the Second World War. The status of Cameroon, a German colony until the end of the First World War, has changed

36. Source: NMS yearbook (1996). 37. Source: NMS yearbook (2005). 38. There are different ways of spelling these terms in the missionary publications. Most often they are written lamido in the singular and lamidoer in the plural. Often the missionaries just call them ‘kings’ (konger). 39. Nikolaisen (1937: 43, 107, 108). Nikolaisen suggested that the leader of the French colonial administration ought to be rewarded with a Norwegian decoration (påskjønnet med en norsk orden) (Nikolaisen 1937: 109). 40. See Simensen (1986) for the nineteenth century. 41. Bourdieu (1984: 421); Comaroff and Comaroff (1991: 59).

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from an English (the western province) and French mandate and later trust territory under the UN (United Nations) to an independent state in 1960.42 Then Cameroon was for a long time one of the most stable countries in Africa, politically and economically. From 1960 to 1982 the president was Ahmado Ahidjo, a Fulani Muslim from the north. While he governed, Muslims were often preferred in government positions, and quite a few people in the north converted to Islam. This was a period of intense rivalry between the mission and the Muslims. In this period Christians in the Adamaoua province felt like second-class citizens. Then Paul Biya, a Beti Christian from the south, took over. In 1983–84 Ahidjo’s supporters tried to get him back into power through a military coup. Since the end of the 1980s, Cameroon has suffered much unrest. In 1989–90 a general strike lasted for many months. As a result of strong outside pressure, a multiparty system was introduced in 1991. This new political space was soon filled by ethnic divisions and stereotypes.43 In November 1993, wages were cut in half, and in January 1994, the franc in French West and Central Africa (the FCFA) was devalued by 50 per cent, because of demands made by France and the International Monetary Fund. The economic crisis in 1993–95 had profound consequences for the standard of living of the inhabitants. Since then, many people have been in a very difficult economic position. Others manage better, but many of them have nevertheless experienced a considerable fall in their income. This situation provides the context for the work of the church, which allocates not only spiritual, but also material resources. The recent history of Norway is very different. In the twentieth century, people in Norway experienced the economic crisis and the class struggle of the 1930s; the forced assimilation of the Sami and the Romani,44 the eugenics movement; the German Nazi occupation during World War II, the rise of social democracy and the building of the welfare state; and the discovery of oil in the North Sea. Humanitarian aid to Africa reached a watershed with the Biafra War in Nigeria in 1967–70.45 Immigrants from Asia, Africa and Latin America started entering Norway at the end of the 1960s, and in the 1990s the debates about their integration became polarized and heated.46 National television started in 1960, but did not cover the whole country before December 1967, and it took another two decades before international multichannel television was fully developed. At the end of the 1960s, more married women than before started to take up paid work in Norway. Since the 1960s, also, Norway has been characterized by its ambivalent relationship to the institutionalization of the new forms of cooperation within the EU. Norwegian development aid was institutionalized in the 1960s – from the India Foundation (Indiafondet) in 1952, via Norwegian Development Aid (Norsk Utviklingshjelp) in 1962, to Norad in 1968.47 The current English name for Norad is the Norwegian Agency for 42. The eastern (formerly French) province became independent in 1960. The English province was divided in two parts. They were given the choice of affiliating with Nigeria or with Cameroon. People in the western area chose Cameroon in a referendum, the northern area (west of the Cameroonian Adamaoua province) chose to belong to Nigeria. The two territories belonging to Cameroon became a federation in 1961, and a single state on 20, May 1972. Its official name is République du Cameroun. 43. Geschiere (1997: 11). 44. Norwegian missionary societies were active in these processes of forced assimilation. See, for example Pettersen 2005 about the negotiated relations between Norsk misjon blant hjemløse and the Romani (tatere). 45. Berge (2005). 46. Gullestad (2006a).

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Development Cooperation. Even though the institutionalization of Norad is historically connected to struggles within the Labour Party, and even though the missions always had their own specific agenda, the missions and the government’s development aid have been related ideologically, economically, institutionally and socially. Missionaries in Norway were central in initiating state-based aid work. It might perhaps even be reasonable to speak of emerging family dynasties in missionary and development work.48 From the very beginning of Norad, the missions have received support for their medical, educational and agricultural work.49 Some of the Norwegian development aid is today channelled through the various Norwegian missionary organizations and their local partners.50 This is a strong indication of their success in transmitting their worldview to the general public in Norway. However, foreign national churches have to apply for what they can get, not for what they need according to their own specific priorities.51 Norway entered the international arena in the 1990s, attempting to become a ‘humanitarian superpower’ (humanitær stormakt)52 working for solidarity and peace on a global level. To a considerable extent, the activities connected to Norway’s national brandbuilding as a humanitarian country builds on the knowledge, contacts and information strategies established by the missions. In spite of popular beliefs to the contrary, I see not so much a profound break as a continuity – as goodness regimes – between the missions and the

47. According to Knut Nustad (2003), we can discern at least three stages in Norwegian development aid over the years. Development aid was introduced by politicians who wanted to give the people involved in the internal opposition in Norway to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) a more positive focus, and to stop the expansion of international communism. In stage one, from the 1950s, there was a stress on industrial development and contemporary conceptualizations relied on a sharp segregation between ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’ countries, playing down the connections between the differences in living standard. Stage two, in the 1970s, was influenced by academics emphasizing dependency between rich and poor countries, and the need for a new world order. During this stage Norwegian development aid was least dependent on US interests. But even if this approach emphasized external causes of poverty, it also established a distinction between state elites and the people. The explanatory models stressed that the elites enriched themselves at the expense of the people, and thus they reintroduced an internal cause of poverty. This distinction led to the third stage, from about 1980, which Nustad maintains is characterized by a new paternalism. It is no longer an aim for Norwegian authorities to cooperate closely with the authorities in the relevant countries; instead, they increasingly choose humanitarian NGOs and missionary organizations to represent the people. All through the various stages there is a certain focus on internal causes of poverty, as well as ideological and organizational links between the missions and development aid. 48. This characterization is not the result of a systematic collection of data on my part but conforms to many informal observations. For example, the former Minister of International Development, Hilde Frafjord Johnsen, grew up in Africa as the daughter of a missionary. 49. Simensen (2003: 215–217); Ruud and Kjerland (2003: 213). 50. So far, however, there has been little research on the precise historical links between missionary activities during colonialism and the governmental aid programmes after 1960 (Alsaker Kjerland and Liland 2003; Simensen 2003). 51. Source: Ranveig Kaldhol. The local representative of the Norwegian mission in Cameroon, Ranveig Kaldhol, is also the local representative of Norad, the Norwegian government’s development agency. According to her, she spends more of her time administering Norad projects than on the missionaries in Cameroon. 52. Labour Prime Minister Thorbjørn Jagland, quoted in Tvedt 2003: 37.

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state-organized development aid and peace initiatives. Both the missions and the governmental development programmes have been influenced by what goes on in the rest of Europe and the USA, but at the same time the discourses in Norway exhibit their own specific themes and inflections of more general ideas.

Women in a Patriarchal Organization While the NMS is a patriarchal organization, women play crucial roles – as supporters in Norway, as missionaries travelling between continents, as potential converts, and as church members who form their own groups within the new churches. The missionary movement in nineteenth-and twentieth-century Europe and North America provided a new arena for women’s participation beyond the domestic sphere. Feminist researchers regard female missionaries and missionary wives as pioneers, working for female emancipation within patriarchal organizational and ideological structure53 and see the missionary movement as the first feminist movement in Norway.54 Women in the missions were empowered by the idea that everybody, irrespective of gender and social status, had both a right to and a responsibility for their own personal relationship to God. This idea was strengthened by the importance of the idea of the inner, personal calling to do missionary work.55 The missionary societies, which included men and women from both rural and urban areas, and from different classes, occupations and educational levels, were thus part of the process of democratization in Norway. For the publications analysed in this book, it is of crucial importance to realize that a large part of the core audience consisted of women’s groups, and that there were both theologically conservative pietists focusing their religious activities on the meeting houses and more liberal church-oriented women among them. In a period when Norway was still a poor country, thousands of women worked for the mission, sharing their often meagre resources. It was important to practise goodness by ‘doing something for others’ (gjøre noe for andre).56 Anecdotes are told about rural women with just a few hens who donated all the money from one hen’s eggs to a particular mission.57 Women provided much of the support on the local level, while men were the leaders on the regional and national levels. Among other activities, the women spent months knitting and embroidering items to offer in local lotteries for the mission.58

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

Mellemsether (2001); Mikaelsson (2000); Okkenhaug (2003); Predelli (2003); Skeie (2003). Predelli (2003). Bowie, Kirkwood and Ardener (1993); Huber and Lutkehaus (1999); Kipp (1990); Mikaelsson (2000). Holtedahl (1986). See Klæbo (1963). In Norwegian meeting house pietism, drinking alcohol, dancing, watching moving pictures and playing cards was very much frowned upon. But interestingly, arranging lotteries (and thus gambling) for missionary purposes was not only allowed but also very much encouraged. As I will show in Chapter 8, the missions also used moving pictures to raise interest for the mission, in spite of some resistance from the most pietist mission friends.

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During the twentieth century, women’s roles have changed in Norwegian society and in the mission, but less so in Cameroon. In the mission, the change has been gradual, at each stage with little public recognition of and reflection on what was wrong before. The NMS national board in Norway gave women who represented women’s groups the right to vote at the general assembly in 1904 (but not the right to be elected to the regional and national boards). This was nine years before the universal vote was given to women in Norway. At that point in time, 3,500 independent women’s groups contributed two-thirds of the total income of the society. The women thus represented considerable economic power. In 1929, the women’s groups were given the same rights as the other missionary groups. In 1939, the first woman was elected to the national board of the NMS; in 1999 the first woman was elected as its leader. Since 1989, women have been able to become pastors within the NMS, but in some of their missionary fields, such as the one in Cameroon, the national church does not accept female pastors. Female pastors who go to Cameroon as missionaries have performed other tasks within the church and its institutions, such as teaching at the theological seminary. Among the Muslims of Northern Cameroon, female missionaries were needed, because they could enter the secluded spaces of women. During the period of institution building, the number of females in the mission was usually larger than the number of males, since almost all the men were married, while many of the women were not. However, until 2002, missionary wives in the NMS were not accorded the status of missionaries in their own right. Even though most of them were well educated, often as nurses or teachers, they were not assigned specified tasks like their husbands and the unmarried female missionaries. The husband was placed in a well-defined position. His wife followed him, and improvised her own tasks, such as, for example, working among the sick or teaching local women to knit on her veranda. Some of the missionary wives carried out pioneering social, medical or educational work.59 When missionary wives first started demanding an equal status in the field in the 1980s, they met firm resistance. Being a missionary wife was a question of selfsacrifice, it was held, not a question of self-realization.60 After a survey of the points of view of the missionaries conducted by the headquarters in 1996–97, it was decided in 2002 that both spouses would be assigned a defined position, and that each couple would occupy one and a half jobs together. It is thus assumed that two full jobs would be too much for a couple with children, and it is left to the spouses themselves to discuss the internal division of work. Until very recently, missionary wives thus embodied in particular ways the goodness of the

59. When Gunvor Lande did a study of missionary wives in Japan in the late 1970s, she found that the status of the married women differed across the various missionary societies. A few regarded the married woman as a missionary in her own right; some, such as the NMS, saw her as a missionary wife; while others regarded her as the wife of a missionary. According to Lande, he varying statuses of the married missionary showed that she lived within the tensions between the ideas of sacrifice (offertanken) and creativity (skapartanken). Lande also argues that before 1960 missionary wives in Japan were more equal with their husbands than afterward. She relates this to the possibility of having a maid to help her. Since about 1960–65 this became too expensive in Japan (see Lande 1979, 1985a, 1985b). The story has yet to be written about the different conditions of missionary sons and daughters. My impression is, that many missionary daughters in Cameroon have been given fewer opportunities than their brothers to mingle with local people. 60. Source: Gunvor Lande.

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mission, based on the idea of sacrificing the self. In the first history book of the NMS, appearing in 1949, they are often not mentioned by name, only as a named male missionary ‘with his wife’ (med frue) or ‘with his family’ (med familie).61 Unmarried female missionaries were not treated as equals of the male missionaries. Among other things, they were not allowed to preach during the church service. Nevertheless, because of their unmarried status and their work as teachers and nurses, some of the single women became particularly close to local people. Often they also had access to considerable separate economic and spiritual resources through their direct relations to female support groups at home.62 In the words of one unmarried female missionary, she experienced more respect from local people in Cameroon in the 1960s and the 1970s than from male colleagues. The mission field is thus an arena in which the categories of race and gender intersected in particular ways. The NMS actively sought to keep the categories pure by not encouraging marriages between missionaries and Cameroonians.63 Until recently, a female missionary who married a local man would have to stop working as a missionary, because the society would not grant him the

61. Nikolaisen and Endresen (1949). 62. Many missionaries received money directly from supporters at home. For example, Guri Sola, a Cameroon missionary nurse from 1957 to 1993, kept in touch during those years with a group of seventeen female friends who prayed for her, collected money and sent used clothes to be distributed by her. Source: Guri Sola. An anonymous questionnaire administered and analysed by Erik Larsen while he was the superintendent in Cameroon from 1970 to 1972 showed that, taken together, the missionaries received as much money from these direct sources as they did from the NMS. Female missionaries, in particular, could often distribute such resources as they saw fit. The leadership wanted to concentrate and control these flows of money. Source: Erik Larsen. 63. Since almost all the male missionaries were married when they arrived in the field, the temptation to marry an African mainly, but not solely, applied to the many single female missionaries. The reasons given for the relative lack of intermarriage are differences in material conditions, differences in family life (‘in Africa you marry a family and not a person’), and the fact that the unmarried female missionaries usually were well educated and in their late twenties or early thirties when they arrived in the field, and thus considerably older than the available local men. Source: Ranveig Kaldhol. I have been told that one female missionary considered marrying a local man in the early 1950s, but in the end refrained from doing so because he could not offer her the living conditions she was used to, and she would have to stop being a missionary. Source: Ellen Eliassen; Solveig Bjøru Sandnes. (As a missionary in Cameroon, Solveig Bjøru Sandnes’ name was Solveig Bjøru. She later married Kjell Sandnes and became Solveig Bjøru Sandnes.) The leaders of the society actively discouraged this union. It was said at the time that the prospective bridegroom already had a wife. Source: Solveig Bjøru Sandnes. In Madagascar, a female missionary married a local teacher in the 1970s. She had to stop being a missionary and experienced many difficulties. However, after a male missionary married a local woman in the 1980s, she was again accepted as a missionary. Cross-racial marriages were first accepted in Asia before they were accepted in Africa. At present a marriage between a (male or female) missionary and a local person is not only accepted but also celebrated as a happy event. For example, in the journal Misjonstidende 2005 (10): 4–6, there is an interview with a ‘Madagascan beauty’ and make-up stylist who has married a Norwegian missionary and has become a missionary herself. The article is illustrated by one full-page (and life-size) picture of her beautiful face and two smaller pictures of her with a baby and as a make-up stylist in front of a mirror. There are no pictures of the happy family together. As is typical in missionary publications for the general audience, the painful and very recent time when cross-racial marriages were not accepted is not mentioned.

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same status as her.64 This can perhaps be regarded as an example of the more general colonial reluctance against ‘mixed marriages’. A similar ambivalence is also present in the NMS’s relation to African women. The missionary establishment seems to have simultaneously both resisted the claims of feminism at home and redirected these claims towards nonwhite men in the mission field. I will argue in the chapters to come that from very early on, women have been regarded as central eye catchers in the sense that ‘the mission field’ has actually largely been imagined in terms of its women and in the sense that they have been seen as victims of male violence. In the publications of the Norwegian missionaries, the humble person who is receptive to the Gospel is often visualized as a woman. And in the rich life of the church today, the majority of the people of all ages who fill the churches for the many services each Sunday are female. As in many other parts of the world, the mission has offered primary education to women in Cameroon.65 Female missionaries and missionary wives also initiated the organization Femmes pour Christ (‘Women for Christ’) in 1976. This active organization is now a flagship of the church.66 It is, however, difficult for women to obtain further education and higher positions in the church. The first generations of nurses and teachers educated by the mission in Northern Cameroon were all men. There is a complex set of reasons behind this fact. On the one hand, local gender roles often imply that many girls are not sent to school and are married off early. On the other hand, the mission has encouraged primary education for girls and education for the wives of the prospective pastors and evangelists, but not professional education and leadership roles for women. The main reason was that they wanted the women to practise what they learned in their families, not as paid professionals. Moreover, mixed classes of young adults represented ‘great moral problems’ for the missionaries concerning the management of sexual relations.67 Very few women have been appointed as evangelists and catechists in the church, although there is no theological barrier to women attaining these positions. A woman named Numjal was the first female catechist in Cameroon, affiliated with the Bible school at Meng.68 More than thirty years ago, another woman named Maria Mbaihore became an evangelist,69 and there are probably one or two others today, but the church has no special programme for promoting women to these positions.70 Some women

64. Source: Ranveig Kaldhol. 65. For the Middle East, see Murre-van-den-Berg (2003). 66. A documentary film was made in 1987 called ‘Women’s liberation in Cameroon’ (Kvinnefrigjøring i Kamerun). It was made in cooperation with a firm called Lynor. It documents the work of the organization Femmes pour Christ in Cameroon. This documentary film is still shown on every open day at the NMS museum in Stavanger. Source: Nils Kristian Høimyr, former Madagascar missionary and the current leader of the NMS Archive in Stavanger. 67. Øglænd (1988: 94). She is describing the school for assistant nurses where she was the principal in the 1970s. 68. See Dalland (1960: 157–63), Bjøru (1968) as well as Figure 25, lower right. 69. According to Solveig Bjøru Sandnes, Maria Mbaihore was paid by the mission, not by the church. See also Bue (1992: 57–59) about Maria Mbaihore. 70. Source: Kåre Lode. According to Lode, if women are to gain the kind of experiences which lead to leadership positions, they need a separate organization. But then the women’s organization gives them so many new possibilities that they easily lose interest in the positions in the main church. These things may be changing now, he says.

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do similar work as evangelists and catechists within the women’s movement, but without the formal title. In 2004 there was one woman on the board of the national church.71

The Struggle against Slavery Between 1933 and 1966 the main mission station came to be a refuge for many people – some had fled from forced labour, others from forced marriages. The missionaries, in particular the superintendent from 1932 to 1963, Halfdan Endresen, took it upon themselves to fight for the human rights of the many mistreated people who literally arrived on their doorstep asking for help. This struggle took place on several levels (local, national and international). Many people who became Christians were people who in one way or another had been mistreated. For these reasons, the concept of slavery is central to the missionaries’ understanding of their historical achievements in Cameroon, and their publications contain quite a few pictures of former slaves. Accordingly, obtaining freedom from the chains of slavery is also a central metaphor for conversion. Halfdan Endresen worked hard not only to help individual people escape various forms of forced labour and other kinds of exploitative and oppressive relationships, but he also brought the issue to the attention of the UN in order to stop these practises in general.72 The slave concept worked well in the 1950s, when Endresen struggled to make the international community aware of the growth of truly oppressive practises. He documented his work in three missionary books,73 and he was also presented as a hero in a booklet for young people in Norway.74 In Cameroon, the existence of slave-like conditions was the result of the Muslim Fulanis’ conquest and subjugation of some local peoples and ‘alliances’ with others, such as the Mbum. Part of this agreement was that the Fulani leaders married Mbum wives. Because they used the local hierarchy to create order, some of the French colonial officials were reluctant to enforce the law on the local lamiibe (Muslim sultans), and thus they indirectly supported them. There were many different kinds of slaves in Northern Cameroon, and they were treated in different ways.75 The social categories were sometimes closer to ‘servant’ and ‘assistant’ than to ‘slave’. Slavery is a label that in Norway carries connotations of chattel slavery such as that practised on plantations in the West Indies and the American south. Unlike many African Americans in the USA today, whose family histories reflect a different and also more distant past, some people in Cameroon with a family background that can be used to label them as descendants of slaves have started to reject the use of this term. The mission society in Norway tends to interpret their objections as being a question of them not wanting to admit the truth, and that slavery has therefore become a ‘taboo topic’ in Cameroon.

71. Regine Moutsinka in Misjonstidende June/July 2004, 159: 13. 72. Endresen (1969: 45–57). 73. Endresen (1954, 1965, 1969). Endresen (1965) was translated into German and published in Germany. This book is a revised and expanded edition of Endresen (1954). See Chapter 4. 74. Skagestad (1971b). 75. See Burnham (1996); Hansen (1992).

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In order to understand the difference of perspective between the mission and some of the locals on this point, I want to suggest that there are many reasons for their opposition to the label ‘slave’, some general and others more specific. First, a person with a painful past may not enjoy having these facts thrown at them over and over again. Second, most people like to present themselves as the masters of their own lives. Third, a socially upwardly mobile person, in particular, may not like to be reminded of a past that is commonly regarded as stigmatizing and shameful. Thus, the objections to this label may also be connected to the rapid upward social mobility of quite a few Cameroonian Christians noted earlier, as well as to the almost inevitable ambivalence of being on the receiving end within a goodness regime. Because of their propaganda aims in relation to actual and potential supporters in Norway, the missionaries have tended to keep these historical events alive by using terms such as ‘slaves’, ‘former slaves’ and ‘liberated slaves’ (frigitte slaver) which continue to tie people to their former statuses, and by embedding these terms in stories with narrative plots that stress the missionaries’ own agency, and by implication not the agency of the people they assisted.76 These stories legitimate the need for the mission and demonstrate the positive effects of their presence. The missionaries are presented as heroes while the former slaves are victims. For example, in the published literature, the passive verbal construction ‘was freed by the mission’ is often applied to specific individuals. It has also happened that young Cameroonian students have been introduced in front of audiences in Norway as the children or grandchildren of former slaves who were ‘freed by the mission’, and not in terms of their individual identities and achievements.77 The effect can be a feeling of humiliation, even if this is, of course, not the intention of the person making the introduction. Thus, the disagreement is not about the historical facts, but about the victimhood and stigma implied in the missionary narratives and visual representations, as these are now interpreted by some people in Cameroon. It is as part of the emerging communicative modality that I have heuristically called ‘partnership’ that the mission now pays attention to these views. The Cameroonians who reject the label acknowledge the historical facts and are grateful for the help they or their relatives received from the mission, but do not want it to stick to themselves, and their children and grandchildren. It is a part of present-day relational and representational complexities that sometimes the historical humiliation of black Africans by Europeans is used by local leaders on various levels to mobilize support, often also related to rapid social mobility. This means that people sometimes read historically established categories and stereotypes into situations in which they may not be present, thus contributing to the continuous application and affirmation of the dichotomy between blacks and whites, and between Cameroonians and Norwegians. It is therefore with some hesitation that I use the terms ‘slave’ and ‘slavery’ in this book.78

76. A partial exception to this tendency is the novel written by Solveig Bjøru (now Solveig Bjøru Sandnes) (1968). In this novel the main character is a woman with her own agency. 77. See also Sundby (1991: 64). She mentions that one of the young persons she presents by photograph and text is the granddaughter of slaves. 78. The Fulani language makes a distinction between dimo (plural rimbe) and maccudo (plural maccube), meaning respectively ‘freeman’ and ‘slave’ (Burnham 1996: 20). The French word was serviteur (‘servant’), a milder expression than maccudo.

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Taking Photographs in the Mission Field The photographs from the mission fields were taken for many different reasons (for private reminiscence as well as for propaganda use). Some of them were published in Norway with the purpose of gaining support, and thus for what the mission assumed was for the ultimate benefit of the Cameroonians. Like their European and North American counterparts, the Norwegian missionaries understood very early on the importance of the photographic technologies for communicating about their work to audiences at home. For the mission, taking photographs was largely a secular activity serving missionary ends which was not framed by ritual. As far as I know, cameras were never blessed, and photographic situations were not introduced by prayer. I therefore think it is safe to say that the missionaries have had a pragmatic relationship to photography. In comparison, the doctors and nurses at the hospital always prayed before an operation, to ensure God’s blessing.79 The missionaries obviously found that taking photographs implied no special risks for the photographic subjects.80 When comparing almost a hundred years of missionary pictures from this one region, we can of course see wide-ranging historical changes in photographic and reproduction technologies, life in the region, and the relationships between missionaries and locals. A few pictures in the early publications from Cameroon were not photographs but xylographs, lithographs and copperplate engravings of photographic material, some of them probably borrowed and reproduced from ethnographic books and atlases. But from the very beginning, the Norwegian missionaries also took their own photographs. When the NMS started working in Northern Cameroon in the 1920s, easily portable cameras, light-sensitive lenses and film rolls were coming on the market. However, there is not much information in the missionary books for the general public about the particular cameras they used or other aspects of the technology and equipment. Individual missionaries have nevertheless often been at the technological cutting edge.81 For many years, the NMS had its own film office (filmsentral). It started its operations in the 1940s, had its peak period with five employees in the 1970s, and was slowly cut back until it closed in the early 1990s. Between 1953 and 1963, Jan Dalland, the head of the film office at the time, edited a small stencilled Nordic newsletter called Focus, which gave advice on photography and filmmaking to missionaries. During its ten years of operation, fourteen issues appeared. It was not produced for the general audience in Norway, but was an internal (backstage) tool aimed at missionaries working for many different missionary societies in the Nordic countries. Among other things, the newsletter held competitions among the Nordic missions for the best photographs and the best film scripts from the mission fields. For a period, the NMS film office distributed film rolls to some of the missionaries who owned a camera and established a film committee in each field. They also funded a few 79. Source: Kjell Sandnes, former physician at The Protestant Hospital in Ngaoundéré. According to him, they carried out about 1,000 operations during his time and lost only two patients, a fact that he attributes to their prayers. 80. See Chapter 4. 81. European missionaries in Madagascar used photographic techniques only ten or twenty years after photography was invented. British Rev. William Ellis from the London Missionary Society (LMS) is assumed to have been the first – in 1852 (Jenkins 2001: 71).

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filming and photo expeditions, and paid the missionaries whose slides were used for the slide shows they rented out to local associations. Nevertheless, the leaders only supported the taking of photographs to a limited degree. Other tasks were regarded as more important, and most missionary photographers were amateurs. There are, however, two important exceptions to this rule. One is Olaf Ellingsen, who went to Cameroon for two months in 1960, and whose film, slide show and many black-and-white stills have been widely published.82 The other professional photographer is the missionary Ivar Barane, who worked in Cameroon from 1995 to 2000, and 2002 to 2004.83 According to Ivar Barane, The leaders of the mission have always wanted photos to illustrate their publications, but they have done very little to facilitate their production. For them, a photograph is something they get for free. And if a picture is nice, and comes from a particular country, it is often used to illustrate almost anything, with captions that are not well founded in reality.84

In this way, photographs were mostly taken during the missionaries’ leisure time , at their own initiative and cost. A distinction has also to be made between the production and the publication of the pictures. Published photographs are often not credited (especially in the past, but also at present). The reasons for this were several: pictures were taken for granted; the editor or the publisher did not know the name of the photographer; the mission society wanted the society to be in focus, not particular individuals; and demanding credit was easily interpreted as individualism and self-realization at the expense of the self-sacrifice and solidarity expected by the organization. The use of pictures is generally based on a common view that the meaning of photographs is transparent. This understanding seems to be shared among authors, photographers, publishers and viewers. In other words, a crucial part of the power of these photographs relies on their perceived transparency. They are meant to be enjoyed, not critically examined. Following John Berger,85 I want to argue that this fact makes it all the more interesting to look at them with a critical eye. Nobody knows the exact number of photographs taken by Norwegian missionaries from Northern Cameroon, because most of them are privately owned. But over the years, they have taken at least 25,000 photographs connected to the work of the mission and to local life.86 This was in spite of the fact that the light in Cameroon is not the best for photography. The sun is at its zenith most of the day, and there is often haze. Even when the weather is good, 82. See Chapters 4 and 8, in particular, where I discuss Ellingsen’s work. 83. Ivar Barane grew up at Madagascar as the son of Norwegian missionaries. As a professional photographer, he is more reflective than others concerning the use of visual media in the mission. He also expresses the views of a new generation of missionaries. They conceive of their service more in terms of doing a professional job than in terms of a traditional calling. I discuss part of his work in Chapter 9. 84. Source: Ivar Barane. 85. Berger (1972). 86. This figure was suggested by the collectors of the digitized collection that I discuss in Chapter 9. This is approximately the number of photographs they considered. Due to time constraints, the two historians could only visit former missionaries who live in or close to the cities of Oslo and Stavanger. The figure is therefore probably far too small. There is no doubt a much larger number of missionary photographs around, perhaps as many as 100,000. Source: Kåre Lode.

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the light is optimal for taking photographs only for a short period in the morning and the afternoon. Based on conversations with former and present missionaries, I know that many pictures were taken for private purposes, in order to remember an important period in the life of the photographer and his/her family. These photographs were meant for private reminiscence and sharing within an intimate circle of relatives and friends – as travel photographs, pictures of colleagues, students or patients, or just as family snaps. This is part of the reason why few missionaries have handed their pictures over to the NMS archive. In the words of one of them: With the exception of a few pictures, the reason is not that I do not want them to be used. It is just that I cannot do it if my children are interested, because these are pictures from the environment in which they grew up. If my children are interested, the pictures belong to them. In this way missionaries regard their pictures as private, taken primarily for themselves and their children, and not for publication. But if the descendents have no personal connection to the experiences depicted, they usually hand them in to the archive or just throw them away.87

A few missionaries took pictures for ethnographic purposes, to document local rituals and practises ‘before they disappeared’ (or so they assumed).88 Before the digitized collection was assembled and brought to Cameroon at the turn of the millennium, relatively few missionary photographs had been distributed in Cameroon. According to one missionary, ‘we just did not think about it at the time’.89 This has many reasons: their primary aim of obtaining support in Norway, the missionaries’ modest economic means, the fact that they had other important tasks, the unsuitable conditions for keeping photographs in local homes, as well as local ideas about photography. Until recently, and to some extent still today, many Cameroonians do not want to possess pictures of people who have died after the picture was taken. And many people dislike seeing pictures in which they are smiling broadly, showing their teeth, or in which they are not represented as a full figure. In addition, the local conditions for developing the photographs were often not ideal – local photo shops tended to overexpose the films, so most missionaries had to send their films to Kodak in Paris or to Norway to be developed. Nevertheless, most missionaries took pictures that were meant for publication in Norway – as slide shows and illustrations in books and magazines. In practice, the distinction between the private photographs and those that were meant to be published is not always very sharp. Sometimes photographs underwent profound transformations of meaning from the 87. Source: Kåre Lode. 88. In particular, Sverre Fløttum and Per Arne Aasen took such photographs. According to Bjørn Aasen, his father Per Arne Aasen alternated between two roles, the role of missionary and the role of explorer. As an explorer, he took pictures of secret initiation rites. ‘If he had only preached about the advantages of Christianity, he would probably not have been allowed to participate in these rituals.’ Source: Email correspondence with Bjørn Aasen. 89. Source: Torunn Lunde. However, there are also examples of missionaries showing photographs to locals. For example, Njell Lofthus remembers well how he once went out into the forest to show a group of Mbororo the slides that he had taken of them during Ramadan that year. He worked as a missionary in Cameroon between 1968 and 1985 and took many pictures during his first years of service. Since then, he has visited Cameroon almost every year. In Chapter 6, I analyse a lovely photograph of a Mbororo woman by Lars Gaustad. The photographic occasion was characterized not only by trust and gratitude, but also by reciprocity in the sense that the woman and her husband received a copy of the photograph.

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representation of a specific individual to the representation of a general type when they were taken out of the private album or the personalized slide show to be published as illustrations in books uncaptioned or with a more general caption.90 This change from individual to type can also happen when photographs are moved from one published volume to another. For example, some of the pictures of ‘freed slaves’ in Halfdan Endresen’s 1954 book are accompanied by captions with the portrayed person’s name. But in a booklet about Endresen published in 1971 by a different author, and intended for schoolchildren and study groups, a few of the very same pictures are reproduced with new captions and no names. When Norwegian missionaries started working in Cameroon in the 1920s, their photography could potentially be inspired by many sources: scientific ethnographic pictures, travel and reportage photography, portraits, and last, but not least, amateur snapshots. Specific ideas about amateur photography were already largely in place in Europe – concerning distance from the camera, the composition of groups, the pose, the smile, the occasions for taking pictures, and so on.91 From a superficial perspective, the most striking change in the published photographs of local people is the change from wearing next to no clothes to being fully dressed. When the Christian missionaries arrived, only the Muslims wore clothes. In both these religions, it is important to cover up the body, especially for women. While women with bare breasts in public were still a relatively common sight in the 1960s, this is now generally a sign of destitution. The fact that most people now wear clothes is a result of both Muslim and Christian influence. From a less superficial perspective, the specific kinds of clothes that people wear signify professional, religious and ethnic affiliation, and these significations have changed over time. Until recently, missionaries distributed used clothes from Norway among local converts. Because of increasing customs duties, they have abandoned this practice.92 This is part of the reason that recent missionary pictures show more people in African clothing than in the 1950s and 1960s. For a long time the mission expected a man who converted to wear European clothes. According to the missionary Jostein Budal in 1979, it was ‘an unwritten rule’ that a man had to change from wearing a tunic or robe to shirt and trousers when he was baptized, in order to visibly signal his break with Islam in an unequivocal way: ‘Dressed in a tunic he could too easily camouflage his Christianity, which is dangerous. Very often the tunic has been the first sign of indecisiveness.’93 People still draw inferences on the basis of dress, but there is now more pluralism. Today the tunic and robe do not necessarily signal religious affiliation, but rather Africanization, and often the men wear different kinds of clothes for different occasions. Women’s clothing has always been mostly West African, but with significant changes over time, and also new tendencies in terms of a wider sartorial repertoire. 90. See also Geary (1998: 154). 91. In amateur photography, family photographs are central (Bourdieu 1990). In Norwegian families since the 1920s, the wives and mothers have often been the ones who take photographs and compile family albums (Tobiassen 1995). Both male and female missionaries have taken photographs in Cameroon, but women’s photographs seem to have been more extensively published as slide shows and in personal memoirs than as illustrations in the official history books of the mission society. 92. Source: Ellen Eliassen; Guri Sola. 93. Budal (1979: 122). He was probably expressing his own view rather than the official missionary policy at the time. Budal also criticized female missionaries for wearing necklaces, saying that it was difficult for Africans to understand that they were not magic amulets (tryllemidler). Source: Erik Larsen.

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There is, of course, also a change in the pictures concerning the missionaries’ own way of dressing. The most visible sign of change is the disappearance of the sun helmet in the 1960s. Moreover, the male missionaries used to wear khaki shorts and khaki shirts and are more often dressed informally in shorts in the earlier pictures, and the female missionaries are dressed in sleeveless dresses with skirts reaching to their knees. Over time, both men and women started to dress more formally when outside their own houses and courtyards, and also to cover themselves more extensively. Some of the ageing female missionaries now say that they wish they had been better instructed about which clothes to wear before they went to the field. They discovered slowly that the local Muslims found sleeveless and knee-length dresses indecent. Thus, the issue of clothing exemplifies a certain insensitivity in relation to local customs. Judging from the pictures, many missionaries seem until recently to have been reluctant to adopt elements of African dress. In the 1980s, the missionaries started to use African materials and some items of African clothing. In the Northern Cameroon mission field, there are significant differences in the way local people look – in terms of skin colour, facial features, hair texture and bodily constitution. It is difficult to verbalize these differences without undue simplification and recourse to outdated typologies. I nevertheless cannot avoid doing so, because such diversity carries significance. In spite of much diversity, both missionaries and Cameroonians constantly make inferences on the basis of physical appearance.94 Some people, like the prototypical Fulani and Tuareg, look ‘North African’ (slim, fair skin, narrow nose); while others, such as the Mbum, have the prototypical appearance of Africans south of the Sahara (well built, dark skin, full lips, broad nose); still others are dark-skinned, slender and tall. Because of intermarriage, these physical differences often do not follow ethnic lines. The urban Fulani, for example, have intermarried with Mbum women for about two hundred years, and other groups have interacted much longer. The nomadic Mbororo (a subgroup of the Fulani) have not intermarried as extensively with other groups, and therefore they tend look a little more ‘North African’ than the Fulani. In addition, they can often be identified in pictures by their hairstyle, clothes and other adornments. Like other Europeans and North Americans (including anthropologists), the Norwegian missionaries have tended to favour the appearance which is closest to the ideals of beauty that have been celebrated in the European history of art from Greek antiquity onwards. This is expressed both verbally – by praising ‘fair skin’, ‘exquisite features’ (fine trekk) and the ‘tall, slim and erect posture’ (høyreisthet) of particular individuals95 – and visually – in the prominent visual role in terms of number, order of appearance and size given to photographs of Cameroonians with a particular type of appearance (see, for example, Figure 42). But there is also a significant change over time in how differences in looks and clothing are described in the captions and in the main text. In the first half of the twentieth century there was a

94. For example, when showing Figure 49 to Yacoubou Luc, he immediately said: ‘She looks like a Gbaya woman.’ Yacoubou Luc grew up in the mission orphanage in Yoko, and later went to an agricultural school in Norway. He speaks Norwegian well, and is thus one of the ‘locals’ who has travelled in the opposite direction from the missionaries and knows Norway well. He now belongs to the Full Gospel International. 95. For example, Sundby (1991). Sundby often emphasizes how people look, and points out their ethnic affiliation, formulated in terms of ‘tribe’.

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tendency to attribute differences in looks to ‘tribe’ and ethnicity. This tendency diminished in the 1960s and 1970s but reappeared in the 1990s, following the political development in Cameroon. In the analysis of the missionary publications, it is fruitful to speak of negotiations of beauty on two levels: the interpretation and appreciation of beauty in the form of physical bodies; and the interpretation and appreciation of beauty in pictures. The written texts which accompany the photographs have helped me understand both levels, because they show how photographers and authors express their readings of the features of the physical bodies of local people. The texts bear witness to how they see, what they see, and how they attribute meaning to what they see.

The Distribution and Viewing of the Missionary Photographs in Norway The missionary society is an internationally inspired and transnational national society. It related to a national public realm in the Norwegian language, and to the Cameroonian context as the Norwegian mission. Their books, booklets, magazines, films and slides are distributed in Norway through extensive networks of small local groups coordinated by a strong national institution.96 For many years, the missionaries’ lives were divided into periods abroad – for the missionaries in Cameroon, three years abroad alternating with one year in Norway. When they arrived home after such a period, they usually enjoyed three months of vacation, and the rest of the year they travelled around the country to inform people about their work. While the slide show was the preferred mode of communication in local meetings in the 1950s and later, the ‘over toning series’ became popular in the middle of the 1980s and were used until the early 1990s. Then overhead projectors were used, now largely superseded by PowerPoint presentations.97 The film office also hired out documentary films and slide shows to associations, study groups and schools.98 In the 1980s some films were made in cooperation with the Norwegian Broadcasting Company (NRK). The slide show is now also having a renaissance in the form of the photo-documentary. To some extent old media live on in parallel with new forms. For example, during my research I met one retired missionary who presented her slide show publicly as late as 2001. Today only a few missionaries travel during their periods in Norway, and over the last ten years the strategy has been to involve local congregations of the Church of Norway in missionary projects, in addition to the separately organized missionary support groups and the information sent to Norad. There is a significant difference in genre between the books and magazine articles, on the one hand, and the individual slide shows, on the other. While some shows came ready-made and were hired out by the society, consisting of photographs taken by missionaries together with a text or a tape explaining each picture, most were presented by individual missionaries 96. In 1975, the NMS had about 5,000 local associations. By the end of 2002, the number was 2,680. Source: Eivind Hauglid. The work of women in missionary associations in Northern Norway in the 1970s and the 1980s is analysed by Lisbet Holtedahl (1986). 97. Source: Eivind Hauglid. 98. Source: Undated lists (from the 1970s and the 1980s) of films and film strips for hire from the NMS’s Lysbilde og filmsentral.

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during their periods at home. The slides allowed them to make a more personal choice of material according to the tastes of the varying audiences and their own interests and convictions. This form of presentation occupies an intermediate position between the private (and unpublished) album and the published book or magazine. When showing slides, the missionary could to some extent provide a suitable context for each image and monitor the reactions of the audience, if necessary. At its best, the communication could be more open for contextualization and better tailored to the interests of the particular audience at a particular place than an illustrated book or magazine article. But often the pictures were privileged over the commentary. The missionary assembled a few pictures from his or her collection and then talked about them. Therefore the slide show has been criticized for being boring and ineffective. In the renewed and more professional photo-documentaries, there is an attempt at first deciding what one wants to say, and then choosing pictures which illustrate that message.99 These various information activities belong to a pietistic Christian subculture. Although there is much diversity of opinion within and among groups, the notions ‘friend of the mission’ (misjonsvenn) or ‘the missionary people’ (misjonsfolket) are used by the mission for the primary local supporters in Norway. As already noted, these friends were to a large degree women in local communities. The notion of the ‘mission friend’ indicates modern and egalitarian goals in the creation of an in-group. In the many local meeting houses, the audience usually consisted of a core of devoted members, plus a varying number of potential followers in the form of people seated in the gallery or standing just outside. But the pictures have also circulated in other fora, such as Sunday schools, vacation camps and organizations for young people. Moreover, many missionaries presented their slide shows to classes in Norwegian primary and secondary schools. And quite a few missionary books and booklets are destined to be used in schools and by study groups (see the list in the Bibliography). It is generally difficult for people who have grown up in social circles unconnected with the missionary circuit to understand the strength of the effects of the missionary publications.100 And it may be difficult to imagine now – at a time in which European audiences often feel numbed and jaded, seeming to have reached a saturation point in their receptiveness to the suffering of distant others – how the missionary photographs and films were received in the era before multichannel television and mass tourism made their effects felt. In her memoir, former Cameroon missionary Beate Øglænd maintains that she had already decided to become a missionary when she was attending Sunday school as a little girl in the 1940s. There she and the other children were encouraged to give money to a home for leper children in Mangarano, Madagascar. In her story, the song called ‘The poor little ones in the land of the heathens’ that I presented in the introduction is described as ‘a triggering factor’ for her decision to become a missionary. She praises her parents for teaching their children to develop ‘matters dear to their heart’ (hjertesaker) and says that the home at Mangarano became such a matter for her.101 This part of her story thus underlines the aesthetic and affective

99. Source: Ivar Barane. 100. The difference between social circles is to some extent a question of region (southern and western Norway is popularly called ‘the dark coastal strip’ by others) and social class (the friends of the mission belong most typically to lower middle-class and middle-class social circles). 101. Øglænd (1988: 11,13).

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multimedia character of the missionary information, as well as the importance of music and song in this, and the fact that the social work of the missions was important to its supporters. 102 Moreover, she supports the many volunteer leaders of Sunday schools by thus valuing their work. The aim of the publications is both to strengthen the engagement of the friends who are already involved and to elicit interest among new groups, particularly among young people. Like all other transmissions of knowledge, the transmission of missionary materials can have at least two levels. First, it can provide a new repertoire of knowledge and, second, a new perspective on the world. For people who are already friends of the mission, the propaganda consolidates the perspectives they already have, adding new pieces of concrete information about the work in a particular area, such as the building of a new hospital or church. For people who have not been involved in the mission, these publications might provide new perspectives as well.103 As already noted, the distribution of the publications has taken place within three different communicative modalities involving ever wider sets of audiences – from the devoted mission supporters to the governmental development cooperation (Norad) to also including the church members in Cameroon. During their periods in Norway, the meetings with their core supporters nourished the missionaries and gave them a feeling of their preconceptions and needs. In the words of Beate Øglænd: ‘… I would not have been without the travelling service in the home field. It strengthened my calling and the knowledge that one was not alone.’104 This strengthening was necessary in order to deal with the hardships of life in Africa and to be a convincing communicator back home. I will show in the chapters to come that in Africa, the trust and gratitude of Africans play a similar role. According to Aksel Aarhaug, who was a deacon at the hospital in Ngaoundéré and was thus involved in medical work, what in the long run made the greatest impression on him in Cameroon was how much trust (tillit) they were given.105 He communicated this trust back to the supporters, to inspire them to continue their support. I want to stress here that the relationship between the missionaries and their supporters is a dynamic one, mediated by the leadership in their headquarters, the publishers and the editors of the magazines. Since the publications were meant to have certain effects, the publication strategies had to take the preconceptions of the audience into account, and the audience consisted of people with different views on sensitive issues. The power of the audiences, as perceived by the mission, is thus an important part of the constant reproduction of the asymmetric relations between ‘givers’ and ‘receivers’. This applies both to the mission circles and, from the 1960s, also to Norad. The photographs were shown together with accompanying tales of the works of God, faith and hardship that was overcome. For the audience, the missionaries represented a concrete embodiment of the possibility of goodness, far from the routines of everyday life. Most missionaries can tell stories about how the headquarters in Stavanger implemented strategies to enhance audience appeal, and about how the audience sometimes resisted the message of 102. It was generally easier for the missionaries involved in social and medical work to collect money in Norway than for missionaries who were mainly involved in evangelizing. 103. Some activities, such as the work among people with leprosy, also appealed to people outside the circles of the friends of the mission (Larsen 1973: 64). 104. Øglænd (1988: 76). 105. Til Jordens Ender 1965: 3, 16-17.

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the missionary, if it was too far removed from their expectations. For example, a former missionary told me about a woman in the audience who became angry during a slide show because the people in the pictures looked too beautiful and too well-off. ‘This is not Africa,’ she said. ‘These people are not the poor heathens!’ She apparently wanted the photographic subjects to look more pitiable. The missionary then tried to explain that for her the people in the pictures were ‘people I am fond of ’, and that she wanted to show a varied set of images of Africa, not only the negative ones.106 The angry woman in the audience was shown a different picture of Africa than the one she was used to. Her reactions indicate that a substantial part of the missionary materials she had seen before had focused on poverty, illness and need. More importantly, it indicates the power of the audience – as imagined and real viewers – over the communication process. The missionaries could try to modify the ideas of the people in the audience, but they could not afford to alienate them from the mission. In recent years, the NMS has started taking mission friends and members of Norwegian congregations on guided tours to some of the mission fields. These mission tourists often see what they expect to see: poverty and need. Quite a few Norwegian supporters of the mission come with a wish to be kind to African women and children directly, without the mediation of the missionaries. For example, one woman arrived with large amounts of candy that she wanted to distribute to poor children. She looked forward to seeing their happiness and gratitude, but was disturbed and disappointed when her gift to some children resulted in chaos when others came running from all directions to be part of the feast.107 I have talked to present and former viewers and readers of the missionary publications in Norway, but I have not made a systematic analysis of their reception. Even if pictures, captions and texts are encoded with specific preferred meanings, audiences of course receive the information in different ways, according to their own personal experiences, knowledge and interests. I understand reading the texts and viewing the photographs not just as a single moment of apprehension, but more processually and dynamically as involving an ongoing mixture of recognizing, acknowledging and potentially acting upon the represented realities. Being spectators can be regarded as situated improvisations, in which people make creative use of personal experiences and available cultural resources rather than just applying a fixed frame of interpretation. As Roland Barthes argues, when looking at specific photographs which in some way strike individual viewers, the spectators simultaneously animate and are animated by what they see.108 While some people read the material from Northern Cameroon simply as information about a generalized Africa, others possessed detailed knowledge about specific missionary institutions and their needs. Some people primarily remembered the fact that they met a black person face to face for the first time in the local meeting house.109 Others had a more subversive experience. For example, a few middle-aged men have told me about the excitement they felt as young boys in the 1950s and 1960s when they were shown slides of beautiful African women with bare breasts among the many slides presented in the local meeting house. This kind of excitement was not intended by the mission and can be regarded 106. 107. 108. 109.

Source: Torunn Lunde. Source: Ivar Barane. Barthes (2000 [1980]: 20). In 1951, Labour Party politician and industrial leader Tormod Hermansen saw the exhibit ‘Africa calls’ and met there a black man (from Cameroon) for the first time in his life. Source: Tormod Hermansen. See also Gudmund Hernes’ account in Morgenbladet 13–19 January 2006: 18.

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as a clandestine inversion of institutionalized rules of viewing. At the same time, I show in Chapter 6 that many pictures of beautiful young women actually invite both a quietly sensual viewing and a focus on moral character.

The Missionary Books The missionary books were published by the NMS itself or by various Christian publishing houses110 and are distributed by Christian book stores. Nevertheless, they have many links to mainstream middle-class society. Because the missionary books111 have been my point of entry into the missionaries’ written and visual universe, I want to use some space here to discuss the nature of this particular material and the way I have chosen to examine it. The books come in several genres: many individual memoirs based on work for the mission in Cameroon; one novel; several booklets for study groups, children and youths; one biography about the first missionary to Southern Cameroon, the Englishman Alfred Saker who arrived in Douala in 1844; and various official history books, including two about the history of the NMS with substantial chapters from Cameroon, published in 1949 and 1992;112 a fiftieth anniversary book about NMS’s work in Cameroon published in 1973.113 Moreover, there is a book in French about the history of the evangelical church in Cameroon published in 1990.114 All the historical works were written by authors who have been missionaries in Cameroon, and all are abundantly illustrated with photographs. The fact that one book is intended for a Cameroonian audience implies a crucial step in a new direction. Nevertheless, despite well-intended efforts to include the various contributions of local people, these history books are, for obvious reasons, written from a Norwegian missionary perspective.115 And, I want to add, they are written from a male perspective, without extensive consultation with the many women who have worked as missionaries and missionary wives in Cameroon. Among the authors of the individual missionary books, six out of eighteen individual writers are women, including two female missionaries – Beate Øglænd and Solbjørg Pilskog – who are the central characters of books written by male journalists. (However, the two books are different. In Beate Øglænd’s book she is the narrator, while in Solbjørg Pilskog’s book the journalist is the narrator. One can thus be read as an 110. Some of the former publishing houses have closed down over the years, and others have merged. The NMS’s own publishing house, Missionsselskapets Forlag, became Nomi Forlag in 1960. Later, three different publishers, Lutherstiftelsen, Nomi and Sambandet, merged as Luther Forlag. 111. See Appendix where I have listed the missionary books. 112. Nikolaisen and Endresen (1949); Jørgensen (1992, II). 113. Larsen (1973). 114. Lode (1990). 115. Some missionaries have been painfully aware of the one-sidedness of their representations of people in Cameroon. See Aarhaug (1985) and Erik Larsen’s introduction to his history book (Larsen 1973: 7): ‘African reactions, African points of view, and African efforts are not sufficiently presented.’ Kåre Lode, the author of the 1990 history book in French about the Cameroonian national church, is also fully aware of this bias, and in his foreword he therefore challenges people in the national church to write its history from their own perspective. In order to provide a sound base for Cameroonian authors to work from, he has attempted in his book to be very careful about documenting his sources. Source: Kåre Lode.

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autobiography, the other as a biography.) If these two books are not included, the figure is four females out of eighteen authors. If the missionary history books and pamphlets are also counted, five of twenty authors are women (several authors have published more than one text). The history volumes exhibit both similarities to and differences from the individual memoir. Since the history volumes are usually written by some of the actors, the difference is often more a matter of style than of perspective. In the first history of the NMS, the chapter about Cameroon was written by two prominent missionaries who also published individual books. While the chapter has a more objective style which avoids the use of the personal pronoun ‘I’, the authors nevertheless profited from the opportunity to enhance their own individual roles by presenting studio portraits of themselves as well as photographs in which they were seriously engaged at their desks or in the meeting room with other male missionaries.116 While the propaganda aspects of the history books textually draw on an impersonal style of writing, the individual memoirs present a personal voice. From 1922 and until the present day, Norwegian missionaries have published no less than twenty-two individual books based on their own experiences in Cameroon.117 The books had more diverse and wider functions in the period of limited travel and communication before, say, the 1980s, than in today’s era of mass tourism, international development, and advanced mass mediation of images. More than they can do today, the books illuminated areas of the world outside the audience’s personal experiences.118 Even so, in the 1990s six books were published about the mission in Cameroon. Of the twenty-two memoirs, four are without pictures, or perhaps with only one picture on the cover,119 one book is illustrated with drawings, and the remaining 17 books are illustrated with photographs, maps, and in one case also with prints.120 In each case, the publishers have had to balance the costs of photographic illustrations against the rewards in terms of attracting more readers. The photographs make the books look more exciting, and therefore more saleable, and the message of the mission more interesting. Sometimes a missionary memoir is relatively uniform in terms of genre, and sometimes very different genres (speeches, sermons, official documents, letters, diary entries, travel narratives, small portraits of local people, theological reflections and so on) are included in one memoir.121 Often the theme developed in a book relates to a specific topic, such as the struggle

116. Nikolaisen and Endresen (1949). See the discussion of Endresen’s individual books in Chapter 4. 117. In three cases, journalists working with missionaries (Arne Prøis in Øglænd 1988; Grimstad 1997; Klæbo 1963), and in one case a Danish missionary and journalist working with the Norwegians in Ngaoundéré (Nissen 1999). See the Primary Sources section of the Bibliography, where I list twentyfive books. The extra listings consist of an unpublished manuscript by Henny Waala Nelson and a partially published, illustrated diary by Rolf Ove Toftner from 2001. After I finished the manuscript, Walle (2006) was published, a memoir by an aging missionary wife about her life in Cameroon in the 1950s. 118. This is also so for documentary photography in general. Documentaries within the country illuminated the lives of poor people, who were otherwise not very visible to the middle classes. 119. Budal (1962, 1979); Bue (1992); Nelson (1996); Øglænd (1988). 120. Aarhaug (1985). 121. Flatland (1922); Aarhaug (1985); Bue (1992).

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against oppressive practises (slavery),122 a charismatic evangelical campaign and an agricultural project,123 a translation project124 or the author’s love for African literature, art and handicrafts.125 Among the twenty-two individual books there is, as already noted, also one novel based on the life of the first female catechist in the Norwegian missionary field in Cameroon.126 Some of the books contain many mini-narratives with portraits of local people.127 These books, in particular, appear to be closely linked to an oral tradition within lay organized religious activities. The mini-narratives had no doubt been told orally in religious meetings many times before they were written down as moral testimonials. Thus, the missionary memoir is a hybrid genre satisfying a complex demand for travellers’ tales, exciting stories of adventure, wonder, the exotic, the suffering of others, moral homilies, factual knowledge and the gradual progress of Africans, guided by faithful Christian missionaries. Much of the appeal and influence of the missionary documentation no doubt depends on the photographs. On the one hand, a few pictures have been reprinted several times in different contexts and with different captions. Sometimes the meanings change dramatically with the new captions. These pictures have almost become icons of the Cameroonian missionary experience. On the other hand, one book was reprinted as a new and revised edition, with a new title and a totally new set of photographs.128 The author and/or the publisher probably assumed that new photos would elicit new interest in the subject matter. Both the reprinting of some photographs and the total replacement of others indicate the importance of the pictures in these publications. The picture captions reveal both continuity and change over the almost hundred years of publication. Right from the very first book, some Cameroonians have been presented by name, while most have been represented as anonymous receivers of missionary care. There was a tendency all through the century to present pictures of Cameroonians without captions or with captions focusing on something other than the subjects’ identities. Quite a few pictures were taken in situations in which the photographer did not know the subjects well. Other pictures contain so many people that it would be an almost impossible task to find out and include their names. And in cases where the author knew the names, he or she perhaps decided that they were of little interest to the readers. This is probably a point where the power of the Norwegian audiences made itself felt. Many captions only identify the white people in the pictures, or they conflate Cameroonian subjects into identities that are well known to the readers. The captions often contribute to placing the missionary in the centre of attention, as the main character. The ‘friends of the mission’ are thus present in the publications in many ways as immanent readers and viewers. On the most elementary level, an immanent reader can be identified by the fact that many books assume that certain things are well known. For example, in Konstanse Raen’s well-written 1990 book, which gives glimpses of how she solved the difficulties involved in a translation project, she does not tell her readers why she was in 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128.

Endresen (1954, 1965, 1969). Bue (1992). Raen (1990). Aarhaug (1985). Bjøru (1968). Budal (1962, 1979); Nelson (1996, n.d.). Endresen (1965) is an expanded edition of Endresen (1954). See Chapter 4.

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Cameroon, who had sent her, nor who she was with. On page 10 and many times later, somebody called John Gunnar is mentioned without any introduction or explanation.129 The reader is supposed to already know that Raen went to Cameroon as the wife of a missionary pastor and that his name is John Gunnar Raen. These facts are never made explicit, and thus the book assumes a specific kind of familiarity derived from the fact that many missionaries were well-known celebrities to their core public in Norway.130 In the way she takes this knowledge for granted, Raen implicitly and unselfconsciously positions herself within the core group of missionary friends and positions the reader who does not know her as an outsider to this group. Although the book was published as late as 1990, it is primarily written within the evangelizing communicative modality. Konstanse Raen’s book is typical of the missionary perspective in other ways as well. She praises the help she received from a local assistant and collaborator in her translation work, at the same time as she, like other missionaries and development experts, presents herself as a donor, in her case as somebody who offers a translation to the Pere people. This is evident in the title of the book, ‘Through the language wall: With God’s Word to a people without writing’ (Gjennom språkmuren: Med Guds ord til eit skriftlaust folk), and the accompanying photographs. The title thus focuses on the lack of something among the Pere (writing) and on her work to fill that gap, by bringing them God’s words in their own language. The book contains seven photographic illustrations. The photographs were taken by Raen herself and by the members of her family.131 In line with the way the mission often takes photographs for granted, the photographers are not credited. The cover picture shows the faces and upper bodies of two unnamed Cameroonian men in a village who are lying on their stomachs with books in front of them. They are learning to read by means of an easy reader about biblical history and a book about snakes.132 The first photograph inside the book shows the author together with her male collaborator. They are sitting on opposite sides of a large table, absorbed in working on the translation. The picture represents the relationship between the two of them as egalitarian. The caption reads: ‘Didma Etienne was the Pere man Konstanse Raen needed in order to carry out the timeconsuming translation work. During 8 years they worked together at the table in the language house.’133 The next picture shows the author with an unnamed black man.134 The caption reads: ‘It is not easy to establish order in the grammar when it is being constructed for the first time.’ The pictures in which the author

129. Raen (1990). 130. Raen had planned to write an acknowledgement in which she thanked her husband and her colleagues at the mission station, but this was forgotten in the rush to publish it in time for the annual general assembly of the NMS in 1990. Source: Konstanse Raen. The information about the context for Raen’s book in this and the following paragraphs is based on a long telephone conversation with her in 2004. 131. Source: Konstanse Raen. 132. Source: Konstanse Raen. 133. When she started her translation work, she assumed that her assistant had to be a man, because only two or three people from the Pere group had gone to the Protestant high school, and they were all men. Source: Konstanse Raen. 134. The name of the man is Ahidjo Albert. The two of them are burning piles of original material after the project data had been digitized. Source: Konstanse Raen.

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appears are thus intimately related to the content of the book, and the captions do not focus on her. The third picture shows two black men. According to the caption, one of them is a teacher who is receiving books, a blackboard and chalk in order to start a new reading class.135 The following picture shows Adda, a named black woman who is a well-known local composer of songs and whose songs are published in a translated song book, and an unnamed person accompanying her (Adda is called a songbird in the caption, and her production of songs is thus presented almost as a natural process, not as a result of human effort). Except for Adda, Cameroonian women are missing in the photographs. The picture following is a reproduction of the cover picture of the two reading men, with the caption: ‘The home-work must be done if one shall be able to read, and after the evening porridge, the books are taken out.’ The next picture shows two of the musicians of the Muslim sultan in Gadjiwan. The last picture on the final page of the book is an almost full-page photograph of two easily identifiable but nevertheless unnamed black men. They carry books in their hands, and the picture is supplied with the telling caption: ‘The book with the glad tidings in the hands of those for whom it was made.’136 Thus, the implicit message is again that Raen has given the Pere a valuable gift, and that black men are its main recipients.137 However, the two men in the picture look wary rather than happy. There is thus a contrast between the photograph and the caption. I have gone into detail about this book here because it is typical of current transcontinental communication. As a form of tacit knowledge both authors and editors seem to assume that Norwegian audiences are generally not interested in knowing the names of Africans in the pictures presented to them, and that the main focus has to be on the missionaries and their gifts to local people. In other words, the publications have a Norwegian perspective. Konstanse Raen told me that one of the two men in this final picture is Pastor Bakhari Etienne; the other is a pastor who works in Balkossa. Bakhari Etienne has done much for the Pere language, through cooperation between Christians and Muslims in the Conseil élargi (an ‘extended council’ including members of different religious groups). When the translation work is presented in Cameroon, he is the main figure, she said, and her role is modest. But in this book for the Norwegian audience, Pastor Bakhari Etienne is visually represented as an anonymous African recipient. In other publications in Norway, he is typically represented as ‘the Muslim slave boy who became a pastor’138 or as a ‘slave who became pastor’.139 I think the different ways of relating to the Cameroonian and the Norwegian audiences is generally not acknowledged and reflected upon. It is often just a part of the tacit knowledge of the missionaries when they communicate to their audience, and is thus an example of the power

135. The other man is Ahidjo Albert. Source: Konstanse Raen. 136. Raen (1990: 136). 137. According to Raen, she wanted to present more photographs in the book, but the publisher kept the number down for economic reasons. Therefore the resulting selection was somewhat accidental. Local women were actually involved in the project as students in the reading classes and in other ways. But for Raen, gender was not a dimension in her translation work: its focus was, as she said, on another level. I have noticed that Raen has published photographs and texts about women in Cameroon in the main journal (see Misjonstidende no. 30 June 1984, 15/16: pages 10–12 and the cover). 138. Grimstad (1997: 52). 139. Jørgensen (1992, II: 86).

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of the audience. The need to continuously justify their work to their supporters in Norway leads to specific visual representations and narrative structures focusing on the agency and ethos of the missionary. These strategies continuously recreate the discursive disjuncture that they equally continuously attempt to bridge. The title, the cover, the text, the photographic illustrations and the captions of this Norwegian book reveal in repeated ways the author’s perspective on herself, on the Pere, and on her imagined readers in Norway.140 Similarly, in a memoir which was published almost fifty years before Raen’s book, the missionary wife Gudrun Røst did not tell the readers who she was with and which society sent them to Cameroon.141 The captions to the photographs of herself and her husband do not mention that these are pictures of themselves. The immanent reader is expected to already know what they look like, or to be able to understand that the white people in the pictures simply have to be the author and her missionary husband. Thus, she, too, seems to have taken for granted who her readers were.142 Raen and Røst are not exceptions but are fairly typical in this respect.143 Many missionaries are more familiar with their core supporters than with the conventions of public writing. In almost every book intended for the general audience, missionary notions such as ‘catechist’ and ‘evangelist’ are used without explanation. The readers are expected to know their meaning from their participation in missionary associations in Norway. In other words, the missionaries have communicated with a Norwegian core public (which has nevertheless become more complex and inclusive over time), and this has influenced what they write about and how they write it. This is a question of premeditated strategies and unacknowledged assumptions, as well as deep-seated written and visual codes.

Self-presentations in Terms of Self-sacrifice Because of the differences among the missionary books and their often composite nature, it is in my view fruitless to attempt to categorize them precisely in terms of genre. While the forewords written by the mission society or the Christian publisher often emphasize the selfsacrifice of the missionary, the beginning of the individual memoirs often focus on the prospects of being able to travel far away. Thus, an element of travel narrative is often present in these books. Syed Islam, in his 1996 book The Ethics of Travel, states that missionary books can usually be characterized as a negotiated product falling in between ‘sedentary travel’ and

140. The presentation of the translated Bible as a gift to the Pere is reproduced when other missionaries mention Raen’s work. See, for example, Sundby (1991: 50): ‘During her time as a missionary Konstanse gave them a written language, a grammar and a dictionary and translated the New Testament and parts of the Old Testament’, and by an article in Stavanger Aftenblad 28 April 1984: 29, reproduced as an illustration in Jørgensen (1992 II): ‘Konstanse Raen has given the Pere people a new written language.’ It was also reproduced in a reportage film about her work in Cameroon made by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK). 141. Røst (1942). 142. This is all the more astonishing in her case, since she did not belong to the NMS. Røst’s book is discussed in Chapter 4. 143. See also Mikaelsson (2000). She makes a similar point on the basis of her reading of missionary books from many different missionary organizations and from all the regions of the world where Norwegian missionaries have been engaged.

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‘nomadic travel’. For Islam, sedentary travel is when authors represent their travels in a way which barely registers an encounter with the other; it is driven by the need to secure a vantage point from which to represent difference. Nomadic travel, on the other hand, involves encounters with human diversity that break down the boundaries and the apparatus of representation. In my view, missionary writings can be characterized by a continuous tension between intense involvement and paternalist distance – between nomadic and sedentary travel. In a recent dissertation by Joakim Botten, Norwegian missionary books are analysed as examples of travel narratives, together with books written by adventurers, tourists, development experts and journalists,144 exemplifying the hybrid nature of both the travel narrative and the missionary memoir. The advantage of this categorization is to make it possible to identify common themes and stereotypes in the publications by different types of authors, based on different kinds of experiences in Africa. The disadvantage, as seen from the point of view of my study, is that the specific nature of the missionary books – their institutional contexts and communicative modalities – are not examined. For example, one of the conclusions in this dissertation is that the main characteristic of the Norwegian travel literature about Africa is the absence of human beings and the invisibility of the African: The lack of human beings. It is less threatening to look at camels than at human beings, Todorov writes when he characterizes the tourist in his gallery of portraits. Perhaps this utterance can contribute to the understanding of why it is the author’s meeting with African animal life we meet, instead of meetings between the author and the African. For if this literature has one main feature, it is the invisibility of the African.145

This generalization simply does not hold true for the missionary books. In these books, Africans are very much present, in the particular ways which constitute the topic of my study. When missionary authors now and then write a few passages about animal life, I interpret these more as a frivolous bonus for both the author and reader than as their main theme. The individual memoirs allow the authors to pursue their own particular interests and also to respond to specific audience interests outside of the official missionary domain – for example, by presenting pictures and stories about dangerous or exotic African animals.146 To some extent I also read the pictures of animals, snakes, scorpions and the like in some of the individual books as a symbolic ‘taking of land’. The pictures of African animals belong to a long tradition of depictions of Africa (seen as more or less empty land). Furthermore, the pictures of snakes also have biblical connotations. But most of all, the pictures of dangerous creatures and the stories associated with them catered to the taste for the exotic in the audience. These stories and the accompanying pictures contribute to the excitement of the audience by emphasizing the element of travel narrative in the memoir, as well as the adventurous nature of the missionary enterprise. Implicitly, they can also accentuate the selfsacrifice of the missionary.

144. Botten (2003). 145. Botten (2003: 64). 146. See, for example, Røst (1942) and Aarhaug (1985).

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Another way of analysing the individual missionary books is to read them as autobiographies. This has been done in a well-researched dissertation about Norwegian missionary memoirs from Cameroon as well as from other parts of the world, examined from the perspective of the history of religion. The author, Lisbeth Mikaelsson, perceptively observed the many variations in her material.147 Her basis for treating them as autobiographies is the strong aspect of eyewitness account. However, according to Philippe Lejeune, an autobiography can be defined as ‘a retrospective account in prose that a real person makes of his own existence, stressing his individual life and especially the history of his personality’.148 With a few exceptions,149 the individual books from Cameroon exhibit little reflection on the self-development of the authors. The emphasis is usually on what they as missionaries do in relation to local people, and on God’s work through them, and not on how the Africans they encountered have contributed to the missionaries’ personal development as human beings. One can discern an element of rivalry among the missionaries for fame among the Norwegian audience, but not much self-reflection. Even Beate Øglænd, who told her whole life story orally to the journalist Arne Prøis in 1988, with her experiences as a missionary in Cameroon as a central part of that story (thus inviting an autobiographical reading), is not particularly self-reflexive on this point.150 In Karl Flatland’s 1922 book, there is an autobiographical part which in my reading serves to emphasize his quest for fame, while some passages in Aksel Aarhaug’s 1985 book and Bjørn Bue’s 1992 book actually have a self-reflexive character.151 Autobiographical reflexivity is thus more of an exception than the rule in this literature. On the one hand, Aksel Aarhaug wrote in 1985 that he had no doubt that the missionaries would have accomplished a lot more if they had taken the time to learn about African philosophy, religion and society.152 On the other hand, Solbjørg Pilskog insists in one of the most recent books to be published about Cameroon that her aim is to do what God has already decided for her (gå i ferdiglagde gjerninger).153 In other words, she does not see the need to reflect on different conceptions of what constitutes goodness, but to act according to what she intuitively perceives as the will of God in her life. In the majority of the individual books, the element of the eyewitness account is not autobiographical but serves to give narrative authority to the testimonial. The text is written or told by a visible eyewitness, speaking from a well-defined point of view. The ‘I’ is thus strongly present but not developed. This is why I have chosen to focus on the aspects of propaganda in these publications, defined in terms of the relational dynamics in the complex networks among missionaries, their leadership, people in Cameroon and the public in 147. Mikaelsson (2000). Mikaelsson’s selection of books for analysis is more limited than mine in terms of genre and more inclusive in terms of geography. She has included nine memoirs from Cameroon, all of them written by individual authors about their own experiences. 148. Lejeune (1975: 14), translated from French. 149. Bue (1992); Aarhaug (1985). 150. Øglænd (1988). 151. I also depart from Mikaelsson’s fine work on another important point. Nowhere does she mention that missionary books quite often include photographs. This is typical of a tendency within academia to disregard the power of pictures. Often they are seen as ‘just illustrations’ with no important contribution to the content of the publication. Implicitly the pictures are seen as external to what the texts are about. This is, of course, a view that I challenge in the present book. 152. Aarhaug (1985: 49). 153. Grimstad (1997).

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Norway. In order to do their work, the missionaries needed spiritual and monetary support from Norway. These transnational networks constitute the most immediate relations of production of the missionary texts, photographs and films, within the wider structures of colonialism and economic neocolonialism. When analysed as autobiographies, the average missionary text exhibits few literary qualities compared to the autobiographies of professional authors. But when analysed as propaganda, what comes into view is a complex set of aims, a complex set of cognitive, affective and aesthetic strategies, and a complex interplay among authors, the various subjects they portray, the editors and the composite audience, as well as between text and photographic images. Even if the personal development of the missionary self is not in focus in their publications, their self-presentations are important for the performative effects. It is almost a truism that every propagandist tries not to appear as one.154 And, as originally maintained by Aristotle, a communicator needs to be perceived by the audience to be of good character in order to be convincing. Having put their health and safety on the line for the salvation of ‘the poor heathens’, the missionaries’ lives provide ample material for self-constructions focusing on goodness and self-sacrifice. They present themselves as good people, and these presentations of self are crucial to the effects of their propaganda. A comparable but not quite similar focus on goodness is also present in international development discourses in Norway. In their specific ways, development experts of various sorts also tend to position themselves as agents of goodness in relation to the global gap between the rich and the poor.155

Strong Feelings in the Name of Jesus The aim of propaganda is to persuade and to elicit emotional effects rather than just foster cool judgement. In the terms of classical rhetoric, the stress is on pathos, not only on logos. The pathos aspect of the missionary publications is related to pietistic religion’s emphasis not only on intellectual persuasion but also on religious, moral and emotional awakening and consequently on acting upon this awakening. Even though the Lutheran missions have been losing ground to charismatic Pentecostalists who emphasize even more the role of emotion, strong feelings play an important role in the evangelical work of the NMS, in Africa as well as in Norway. To be emotionally touched is potentially the beginning of more lasting spiritual and intellectual change. For the missionaries, there are thus religious reasons to elicit strong feelings. They have to catch the attention of the people they want to convert and convince them. In general, heartfelt emotions seem to be considered both as a state of the heart which leads to spiritual awakening and as a sign of this awakening. Accordingly, the aim of the missionaries’ publications is to ‘ignite a fire in the hearts’.156 In fact, the image of the heart as a synonym for emotions is so common that its origin as a metaphor has almost been lost. The heart is generally a positively loaded word. For example, like many others, Konstanse Raen uses the term ‘the language of the heart’ (hjertespråket)

154. 155. 156. 157.

Pratkanis and Aronson (1992: 94). Tvedt (2003). Bue (1992: 25, 31, 138, 145). Raen (1990).

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about the mother tongue of the Pere people. To translate the Bible is to give them the possibility to learn about the Christian God in the language of the heart.157 Among Cameroonians, the heart is also a central metaphor. For example, in the 1970s, Pastor Philippe Manikasset differentiated between the white missionaries by saying that not all had ‘light in their hearts’. The missionaries ought to ‘understand the Africans with their hearts’, but in his view not everybody managed to do so.158 His utterance can be interpreted as a critique of the missionaries’ claims to represent goodness, based on their good intentions. For him, real goodness is when there is ‘light in the heart’. Perhaps what he was thinking of was something akin to the distinction between compassion and pity, with the implication that compassion necessitates having light in the heart. Another example is Pastor Maïdawa, who translated ‘to believe in God’ into ‘to have one’s heart with God’ in the Dii language.159 The missionaries consider strong emotions as a sign of the common humanity of blacks and whites, and as evidence of God’s grace. For example, Missionary Aksel Aarhaug was overcome with emotions in a meeting with local workers in the church in Balkossa: Sitting on a hard mud block, I was listening, and I fought hard with the lump in my throat. For us, these simple people became a powerful testimonial about how the force of God is active in frailty.160

In this quote, Aarhaug emphasized the equality among human beings through the power of God, at the same time as introducing a distinction between ‘us’ and ‘these simple people’. It illustrates a commonplace conceptual division between the soul (as the basis for universal equality) and the body (as the basis for various sorts of difference and inequality). Another example is provided by missionary and photographer Ivar Barane, who wants his photos and photo-documentaries to ‘communicate with the emotional level’.161 These ideas are based on the common human experience that emotion is a part of cognition, and vice versa. Moreover, and more importantly, acting morally and responsibly depends on emotional engagement. But missionary authors nevertheless often also seem to think about their work within the conceptual dichotomy of heart and mind, and wish to reach emotional and bodily experiences directly, circumventing, as it were, intellectual interpretation. There is a tendency to reduce the workings of complicated structural forces to simple, concrete and emotionally loaded relations between people. In this way, complex relations can be made immediately recognizable in the light of the experiences of the reader and/or viewer. Both written materials and images can have this effect, but photography and film are particularly powerful eye catchers, and, as we shall see, particularly close-ups of the human face. Missionaries often feel that they have succeeded when the audience is visibly touched, most notably if they cry. In Europe, crying in public is usually an involuntary act, and because of established gender roles, especially so if a man is crying. But when eliciting strong feelings, there is always the risk that the emotions are not the beginning of a lasting emotional and intellectual engagement but that they displace the serious consideration of background

158. 159. 160. 161.

The context for this utterance was an introductory course for new missionaries. Source: Erik Larsen. Djesa (2002: 82). See also Nissen (1999: 88). Aarhaug (1985: 67). Source: Ivar Barane.

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information of a more abstract kind. There is a tendency in the transformed modern mass media towards intense emotion, which potentially undermines moral and political issues. It is not only missionaries, but also publicity departments and public relations officers and journalists working for secular agencies involved in international development, NGOs, the news media as well as tabloid journalism in general, that focus on emotions. In the words of a public relations adviser, ‘it is easier to sell a hungry child or a beautiful face than to elicit support for more systematic change’.162 The polar opposite of the heart, at least in modern Western thinking, is not only coldness and heartlessness, but also the mind and intellectual activity. Attempting to elicit strong emotions therefore treads a fine line between engagement and simplification, with the constant risk of continuously creating new dilemmas to solve.

No Public Doubts about the Goodness of the Missionary Task Some textual silences and photographic lacunae – what is not mentioned and not photographed – loom large in this material and are almost as interesting as what is explicitly present. It is the suffering of the African that is the centre of attention, not the suffering and helplessness of the missionary and the problems that they do not manage to overcome. For example, Bjørn Bue mentions in his book the missionaries’ hidden fight against tears (den løynde tårekampen) which he cannot write about.163 The reason is, I assume, that this would detract from the presentation of the mission in terms of its ability to convert the locals. The powerlessness of the missionary is thus excluded from the established genre of the missionary book, which should be inspiring and optimistic, not show missionaries’ suffering. If the tears derive from disappointment with Cameroonian co-workers in the national church, with their Norwegian colleagues, or with the decisions taken at headquarters back home, they do not normally voice it publicly. It seems to me that they fear that a critical voice might detract from the collective and individual image of goodness that the mission wants to project; in other words, it might detract from their ethos. If some missionaries and local church members lose the trust and respect of the Norwegian audience, the confidence in the mission and the church as a whole may suffer. To a large extent the missionaries seem to define their publishing task in such a way that their own suffering and their most difficult problems are not a part of the genres they employ.164 In spite of considerable individual variation, this literature does not express any doubts about the missionary task itself. This is the case in the individual memoirs, the history books and the educational books. The narratives are written by authors who wish to appear as people who are seriously and powerfully engaged in saving the African and doing good works. 162. Public relations adviser (formerly the leader of the public relations office) Ivar Christiansen at Norsk Folkehjelp (an NGO involved in development aid) in a radio programme on 24 January 2004 (NRK P2 Verdibørsen). 163. Bue (1992: 13). 164. For example, the NMS did not tell the Norwegian public about serious misappropriations of funds in the church in Cameroon until they were forced to by the Danish missionary-journalist Henri Nissen (see Nissen 1999 and Chapter 10). Some passages of Nissen’s writings published in Denmark were translated from Danish into French by Vakoté Dieudonné, a Cameroonian living in Norway. In this way the Cameroonian church members learned about how they were represented in Scandinavia.

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The goodness of the tasks depends upon the goodness of the missionaries, and the goodness of the missionaries is, as already noted, formulated in terms of their self-sacrifice and their good intentions. Serious problems and doubts are not spelled out. The airing of doubts which even tacitly question the imperative task of the evangelical mission seems to have been regarded as inappropriate. The various publications are intended as encouraging and empowering messages to actual and potential supporters, not as a full record of their engagement with people living in very different material and cultural circumstances. At the same time, the missionaries’ own doubts, suffering and disillusionment about their task, local people, and their colleagues perhaps constitute their most important source of knowledge. In a foreign cultural environment, one often learns something of lasting value about the life-worlds of other people when one’s expectations are dashed, one’s wishes not fulfilled, and one’s dignity trampled upon. This is probably the point where the differences among the missionaries are greatest, due to individual personalities, the specific tasks in the missionary enterprise, as well as gender, marital status, and length of service in the country. Some missionaries seem to have lived in Cameroon for many years without changing the preconceptions they brought along from Norway, while others became deeply involved with local people of many kinds, and came to change many assumptions. Missionaries of this last kind know much more than what is immediately apparent in their public presentations. The communicative modalities and the genres, codes and propaganda aims – but not necessarily their experiences – have influenced their representations. As one missionary said to me: ‘Much knowledge gives much pain. The more you know, the worse it is.’165 This has become particularly evident to me in the conversations I have conducted with present and former missionaries. It is an established fact in the mission that there is a difference between what is discussed internally and what is presented to the public in Cameroon and Norway.166 The public in Norway is only invited to share an edited version of some aspects of what goes on in the field. Problems are generally discussed openly in public only after they have been solved. Therefore people in the mission have voiced the opinion that my account might become one-sided because I focus on published materials, and not on private letters and the reports from the yearly missionary conferences in the mission field as well. The letters from the missionaries to the headquarters were often edited before they were published in the journal, and the publishers of the books have also made their influence felt.167 Differences of opinion could thus occur between the missionaries in the field and the leadership at home, and between missionaries and book publishers and journal editors. Such disagreements generally related to the perceptions of the needs of the audience, and thus were ultimately based on the missionaries’ dependence on the goodwill of the various sectors of the audience. The decisions taken by the leadership in Stavanger were influenced by their perceptions of the needs of the

165. Source: Tomas Sundnes Drønen, refering to Eccl. 1.18. 166. Mikaelsson (2000). 167. This could be a question of making the stories more touching, inspiring and optimistic, or, more recently, to avoid terms which are regarded as old-fashioned or no longer neutral, such as the Norwegian equivalents of words such as ‘heathenism’, ‘tribe’ and ‘race’. At the headquarters in Stavanger they still see a need to improve books and articles in this way. Source: Ragnhild Mestad.

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core audience, consisting of both theologically conservative and liberal groups and later on also the demands of the government’s funding for development programmes. Some editors wanted to publicize touching conversion stories, and not all missionaries were able or willing to deliver such stories.168 The editors and the publishers were important mediators in the triangle between the missionaries, people in Cameroon and the supporters in Norway. Therefore, the publications certainly constitute a ‘front stage’ in relation to the ‘backstage’ of the missionary conferences and private letters.169 My impression is, nevertheless, that backstage arenas and documents exhibit more individual variation and some disagreement concerning strategies, but not necessarily more reflection on the limitations and self-censorship imposed by the established missionary genres.170

Contributions to Norwegian Popular Culture When writing the memoirs, the history books and the educational books, the authors and their publishers and editors were influenced by their ideas about the missionary book as a genre – what belonged in it and what did not belong, and by their perceptions of the tastes of the audience at home – what they liked and needed in order not to lose heart. In my interpretation, the books for the general public are primarily designed to satisfy the readers’ expectations, and this aim almost by necessity implies focusing on the goodness of intentions and curbing the sharing of serious problems with the supporters, and accordingly also curbing the creation of new perspectives. Furthermore, the communicative modalities of mission propaganda imply the maintenance of paternalism and the separation of public spheres. In the chapters to come, I show not only how the missionaries often acted strategically in relation to their public in Norway, but also how they were often most effective because of the deeplyseated visual and narrative idioms they took for granted. The continuous need to justify their activities inspired them more or less unselfconsciously to emphasize certain themes and narrative structures and to disregard others; to focus visually on certain aspects of local life and not on others, and to compose and frame them in particular ways. This process seems to contain its own dynamics with wide-ranging effects in both Cameroon and Norway.

168. Mikaelsson (2000). 169. The distinction between front stage and backstage is adapted from Goffman (1959). 170. This is a point which needs to be further examined.

3 IMAGINING A CALL FROM AFRICA During the night Paul had a vision: there stood a man of Macedonia pleading with him and saying, ‘Come over to Macedonia and help us.’ When he had seen the vision, we immediately tried to cross over to Macedonia, being convinced that God had called us to proclaim the good news to them. Acts 16: 9–10, The call from Macedonia For evangelical missionaries the Bible is crucial – as the word of God, basic message, legitimating text and inspiration. When entering the missionaries’ visual universe as an ethnographer, I soon understood that I would get a deeper understanding of their texts and photographs if I examined the way they have founded their activities on the Bible. In this chapter, therefore, I discuss the use of a specific biblical reference in a few key visualizations. Within the vocabulary of my study, these representations belong to the evangelizing communicative modality. Some of them have a more official status and are more wide-ranging than the photographs in the individual memoirs. They were meant to inspire the activities of the Norwegian Missionary Society (NMS) all over the world, not only in Northern Cameroon. My contention is that these representations – and the biblical passage to which they refer – have helped the missionaries and their core supporters to live with tensions, reconcile conflicting ideas, and reduce uncertainty. I use them as guides in the analysis of the published photographs. Among the many relevant passages in the Bible, Jesus’ commissioning of the disciples in the New Testament is the theological foundation of the missions. The passages inspired the missionaries to form their historical role. Moreover, and equally important in this Lutheran mission, they seem to constitute the foundation for the important inner, personal calling of each missionary.1

1. Lande (1979: 12) mentions that in her experience there are nuances of difference between the Norwegian word kall and the English words call or calling. Lutherans often emphasize an inner, personal calling more than, for example, Anglo-American missionaries of other Protestant denominations. For them, the distinction between an internal and external calling is less important.

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And Jesus came and said to them, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember that I am with you always, to the end of the age.’ (Matthew 28: 18–20)2 And he said to them, go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation. (Mark 16: 15) Then Jesus called the twelve together and gave them power and authority over all demons and to cure diseases, and he sent them out to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal. (Luke 9: 1–2) … and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. (Luke 24: 47) Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’ (John 14: 6)

However, in contrast to what one might perhaps expect, these are not among the verses that are most often referred to in the missionary publications, probably because they were taken for granted. Jesus’ commissioning of the disciples specifies each missionary’s relation to God, and indirectly God’s relation to ‘all nations’, but not the missionaries’ relations to the people they work with in regions that are not mentioned in the Bible. In the day-to-day life of the missionaries, as well as in their information disseminated to the supporters in Norway, other passages seem to have been closer at hand; in particular, verses which could help them interpret their relations to the mission field. In the triangle of God, the missionaries and the people in the field, the missionaries’ relationship to the people seems to have been in most need of support. I think this is why the missionaries often refer in their books to a passage in Acts known as ‘The call from Macedonia’, as well as to the many passages in the New Testament about sowing and harvesting. In this chapter I discuss the representations of ‘The call from Macedonia’, leaving the passages about sowing and harvesting for Chapter 5. ‘The call from Macedonia’ is reproduced at the beginning of this chapter. Paul has a vision of a man from Macedonia who is pleading for help. This vision convinces him that God has called him to go to Macedonia and proclaim the good news of the Gospel. This short – and from a superficial perspective seemingly insignificant – passage has been important in the history of the NMS. When the missionaries started their work in Cameroon, it was because ‘the call from Sudan had reached them’.3 In the literature published by the NMS, the passage has been interpreted and visualized in specific ways by artists, artistically gifted missionaries and ‘friends of the mission’. The most prominent – but not the earliest – of the many visualizations is a large painting by a missionary pastor whose name was Adolf Thunem (Figure 1).4 The painting was made in 1923, at about the same time as the mission’s work in Northern Cameroon began. For many years it hung in a very visible position above everybody’s heads in the former main hall of the society in Stavanger. Today it hangs in their museum at the missionary school and is reproduced in the museum catalogue.5 Because the 2. All the quotations in this book from the Bible are taken from the Holy Bible. The New Revised Standard Version with Apocrypha, Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1990. 3. Nikolaisen and Endresen (1949: 296); Larsen (1973: 23). See also Flatland (1922: 33, 186, 190). 4. He edited the NMS journal Hellige jul, which for some years appeared every Christmas with costly illustrations, often reproductions of well-known art works. 5. In the museum, one can also find photocopies of some of the frontispieces of the main journal that I analyse later in this chapter.

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Figure 1. Painting made by Adolf Thunem in 1923.

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painting has been central to the history of the society, some people regret that it is no longer hanging in the main hall, while others find that it is too old-fashioned or belongs to a past that they no longer identify with.6

‘Come over and Help Us’ Referring to the passage in Acts, the painting is entitled Come over and Help Us. The painting shows a palm beach in the foreground, the sea with a few islands, a sailing ship on the distant horizon, and a large expanse of sky over the sea. The foreground is clear, while the background is more diffuse. The rising sun is indicated by a haze of light around the ship. In the sky above the ship is a large white figure with wings, hovering between the haze around the ship and the clear sky above. On the beach are two black adults – a man and a woman – as well as a small child held in one of the woman’s arms. The visual difference between the two adults is relatively small. Both the man and the woman are dressed in yellow loincloths and both have shaven heads. The skin colour of both is brown. The woman can be identified as such primarily because she is holding a baby, thus symbolizing motherhood, and by hint of a breast. The plants and bushes in the foreground seem thorny, otherwise the scene is idyllic. The woman is kneeling. With her left arm she holds the child close to her body, stretching out her right arm towards the ship. The man is standing beside her, lifting both his arms. We see both of them from behind, and we see that the ship is the focus of their attention. The painting does not portray Paul and the people in Macedonia but contemporary missionaries and contemporary peoples of the world who ‘had not been reached’ by the Gospel. We have to know the context of the painting in order to see that the vessel is meant to be an incoming missionary ship, and that the three people on the beach symbolize all the human beings in the various mission fields of the NMS.7 Thus, this is not a conventional biblical illustration; it transposes the scene from Macedonia to different peoples in a different land, adding new elements. The beach is a threshold between the sea and the dry land. We see a distant vessel in the haze, but not the number, appearance, gender and age of the missionaries. Their portrayal is thus both concrete and abstract at the same time. When reading the painting from left to right, there is a movement from the darkness of the beach to the light of the white figure which can be interpreted as God’s angel, or as the resurrected Christ. I interpret the halo of light around the boat symbolically, as a heavenly light associated 6. Nils Kristian Høimyr is one of those who regret that the painting is no longer centrally exhibited. He thinks it is part of the history of the mission, and that it still depicts the reality that ‘Some people in the world need help, and we have to help them’. Ranveig Kaldhol, who is the current representative in Cameroon, remembers being part of an initiative in the 1970s to remove it from its location in the new building. The society’s old house (built in 1876) was demolished in 1965 to make room for a new building with more modern architecture. The students at the time found that the old picture did not fit into the modern building. They reacted against the depiction of the people on the beach as halfnaked and found the colours of the picture glaring (glorete). Source: Ranveig Kaldhol. The painting was first stored in a back room in the new building, and then moved to the museum in 1983. Source: Nils Kristian Høimyr. 7. The society actually owned a sailing ship named the Elieser which went to and from South Africa and Madagascar with missionaries between 1865 and 1881. After 1881, they made, for some time, use of an iron bark named Paulus.

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with the missionaries as messengers of the Christian God. The rising sun and God’s angel (or the resurrected Christ) mediate between night and day, symbolizing the change from darkness to light and from heathenism to Christianity. In other words, the light of the rising sun symbolizes the salvation brought by Christianity. These metaphors have a long ancestry within colonialism and have also been central to the worldview of the missions throughout the twentieth century.8 We see a picture of an idealized moment of transition between heathenism and Christianity, with both the locals beckoning and the missionaries responding in one picture. It is a heightened moment, a representation of a threshold experience. In the cold Nordic countries, a beach with palm trees is both a romantic dream landscape and a potent symbol of social and cultural difference.9 Images of ships are common in the Bible, and one could perhaps also interpret the visualization of the missionaries on the ship in terms of biblical passages focusing on the disciples as fishermen and of Jesus walking on the water. Because the palm beach with blacks in loincloths represent the non-Christians within the many different regions where the NMS were engaged at the time, including the Far East, the picture also illustrates the central position of Africa in missionary imagination. In spite of the fact that many Africans live in polygamous marriages, the family group in the painting is a nuclear family with father, mother and child. They seem young, good-looking and healthy, and the picture does not focus on material need. The man is standing, while the woman is modestly and piously kneeling. He is making an ambiguous gesture which I interpret as primarily welcoming, but which could also be seen as praying. Among Norwegian Lutherans, the unmarked position of prayer is to fold one’s hands together with the arms close to the body, but from time to time the idea has been advanced to pray with the arms outstretched. I interpret the outstretched arm of the kneeling woman as a pleading gesture. The primary meanings of the picture are located in the gestures of the two humans, and in my interpretation it is the woman who most consistently embodies the idea that the ‘unreached peoples’ are calling for help. The spiritual need of the heathens is visualized by her kneeling and her pleading gesture, and maybe also by the thorny plants on the beach. She embodies the biblical passage: she is the most visibly religious person of the three on the beach, and because she carries the child, she is most closely associated with the future. Based on conventional European gender differences at the time, the picture presents an interpretation of the potential converts which in the eyes of the contemporary European viewer probably both attributed dignity (the palm beach, their good looks, the welcoming and perhaps praying gesture of the man, their potential for forming nuclear families) and a deep spiritual need (her kneeling and pleading gesture). Thus, in my analysis the image reconciles the idea of the noble savage on a palm beach with the idea of the spiritual needs of the heathen. The way the painting is composed, the spectator is offered a position behind the waiting Africans, and I think this is important. First, the symbolic value of the incoming ship and God’s angel is reinforced by a perspective in which both the spectator and the three people in the picture are looking in the same direction. Second, the viewers and the people on the beach share the same position in relation to the Christian God and his angel. Within this cosmology, the European spectators need the Word of God just as much as the three people in loincloths. The viewpoint of the painting thus underlines and reinforces the assumed universality of the 8. See Brantlinger (1985). See also Vårdal (2002) on the use of these binaries in the Norwegian missions. 9. See Moldrheim (2000) on Norwegian stereotypes of noble savages living in a ‘South Sea paradise’ (sydhavsparadis).

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missionary task and the equality between Norwegian viewers and African converts in terms of being the children of God. Third, the three people on the beach are apparently unaware of the spectators. The relevance of this last point will become clearer in the chapters to come. A few symbolically central missionary photographs have been taken from a viewpoint behind subjects who seem to be unaware of the camera. Thus, in this representation of the passage in Acts, the scene is moved to a beach with palm trees with black people waiting for an incoming boat. During my research I discovered that elements in the picture can be viewed in relation to other contemporary visual images. Since I have no documentation about direct influences, I want to stress here that I am only pointing at striking parallels. The first parallel is constituted by typical visualizations in abolitionist propaganda. In an article about the genealogy of the myth of the Dark Continent, Patric Brantlinger republished an engraving of what he calls a typical nineteenth-century Edenic African scene in abolitionist propaganda,10 originally published in the 1809 book Poems on the Abolition of the Slave Trade (Figure 2). The abolitionist engraving is made in the naturalist style of English Romanticism. The perspective is a bit different from the painting in Stavanger in that we see the scene from the side and not from behind. Some of the main ingredients are nevertheless similar: an incoming ship, a palm beach and three black people – a mother in loincloth, a baby and a young man. Similarly to the missionary painting, the woman is visually the most important of the three, but in the abolitionist engraving there is a more elaborate emphasis on her female beauty. With her full hips and breasts, she is like a black Venus. More importantly, there is a reversal of values between the two pictures: in the abolitionist motif we also see a ship, but here it is meant to be an incoming slave ship, Figure 2. Abolitionist engraving, 1809. carrying white slave traders, not missionaries, and the three people on the beach are not pleading, beckoning and eagerly waiting, but seem to be frightened and anxiously watching. The man seems to be warning the woman. He looks at her while stretching his right arm towards the ship. The woman is looking anxiously behind her towards the ship while protecting the child and holding on to the left arm of the man. The baby in the mother’s arms looks anxiously at her. Instead of coming with salvation, the Europeans in this ship are disrupting an imagined African paradise. The picture seems to build on earlier traditions of representation in European art, such as the Venus of Roman antiquity as well as Renaissance and baroque depictions of the Madonna and Child. Thus, the missionary painting Come over and Help Us might perhaps be interpreted as a transformation of an abolitionist subject matter, providing it with new intentions and meanings. This would not be strange, since British missionaries were active in the struggle 10. Brantlinger (1985).

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against slavery. In the words of Jean and John Comaroff, those who supported slavery at the time argued that slavery was the ‘natural law’ of Africa, while abolitionists tended to respond by blaming the slave trade itself for deforming the normal progress of civilization. Either way, they write, ‘Africa was degraded and debased. … Whatever else it might have entailed, abolitionism did not argue for European withdrawal from Africa.’11 This is perhaps part of the context for the similarities between the two pictures. But one ship brought horror, the other brought salvation. One ship came to capture bodies, the other to capture souls. Moreover, the liberation of the bodies – the abolition of slavery – can be regarded as the historic condition for the capturing of the souls. Whether there is a direct visual influence or not, the two pictures together demonstrate important visual connections and continuities across time and differences of representational aims. The other parallel that I have found is in the many paintings and drawings by the contemporary German artist Hugo Höppener (1868–1948), popularly called Fidus. One of his most well-known motifs was called Prayer to the light (Lichtgebet). One of the many variations is reproduced here as Figure 3.12 A naked young white man is standing on a cliff on his toes, with an arched back and his arms and head stretched out and up Figure 3. Hugo Höppener (Fidus): ‘Prayer to the light’ towards the sun, his posture showing (Lichtgebet). Painted 1894 or 1924. intense devotion. The motif was part of a German–Nordic popular revitalization movement at the time, focusing on the Aryan peoples, on the ascetic beauty of the male body, and on an almost cultic relationship to light in the Nordic countries. If there is an influence from the Fidus motif to the missionary motif, it runs across stark differences of ideology. However, a few of the ideas of this movement were parallel to the symbolism of light and darkness in the missions and in colonialism, and are perhaps part of the background to why this symbolism has been so strong. The German painting lacks the woman and the child, but the viewer is standing in a similar position in relation to the man and the sun as to the rising sun and the three people on 11. Comaroff and Comaroff (1997b: 690). 12. It is unclear when this particular version was made, but the dates given are 1894 or 1924. Source: Bernd Henningsen, Janine Klein, Helmut Müssener and Solfrid Söderlind (eds), Tyskland og Skandinavia 1800–1914: Impulser og brytninger, Oslo: Norsk folkemuseum. I thank Stephanie von Schnurbein for making me aware of the Fidus motif.

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the beach. Moreover, there is similarity but not identity of posture. The title of the painting tells us that the naked man is worshipping the sun. In comparison, I find that the gesture of the black man on the beach is welcoming, and thus less ostentatious as a religious gesture. His arms are lower and not as outstretched, making him look more like a laid-back family man than a worshipping youngster. He is also more firmly grounded on the beach than Fidus’s figure, which is almost floating above the cliffs. But, of course, these visual nuances of difference may have had different connotations for different spectators at the time.

Frontispieces of the Main Journal The large painting of the people on the beach beckoning to and waiting for the missionaries was neither the first nor the last visualization of ‘The call from Macedonia’ in the history of the NMS. The centrality of the motif is demonstrated by both earlier and later representations. For no less than seventy years, eight different drawings of this motif were used on the front page of the main journal of the NMS.13 The very first version that I know of appeared as the cover of the journal in 1883, forty years before the large painting was made, in volume 38 of the journal. Before that time, the journal carried no picture on the front page, just the title. The first frontispiece is a full-page xylograph in black and white, showing a palm beach, the sea, a sailing ship, the sun rising from the sea, a cross of light over the sun, and a white and a black figure on either side of the sun (Figure 4). The white figure is located to the right, over the ship, while the black figure is moving out of the picture to the left. On the beach, a fully dressed person is kneeling and holding a baby child with the left arm, while the right arm is stretched out towards the ship. We also see a few huts on the beach. The cross of light over the sun links the ship and the people on the shore to the core of the Christian message. The sailing ship is more finely drawn than in the later painting and is located beside the sun, under the white figure. The gesture of the kneeling person is, however, similar. Inside the magazine, the cover is presented in a one-page article with the title ‘About the frontispiece’. The article is unsigned, but I assume that it was written by the editors, D. Gjerløv and Chr. Knudsen. They express the hope that the cover will win new friends for the magazine and inspire those who are already friends to bring it further into their social circles. The ‘beautiful frontispiece’ is cropped from a drawing made by ‘an artist who is warmly interested in the work of the Christian church’, the marine painter Benetter. This very first version that I know of was thus made by an artist. The editors explain the use of this picture in the following way: Few words are necessary to explain the thought behind and meaning of this picture. The sun is just rising when ‘the Missionary ship’ approaches the heathen beach. A light of a higher and better kind than the sun is thus rising over the heathen country. This is the evangelical light, the message about

13. The spelling of the name of the journal changed from the Danish Norsk Missionstidende (‘Norwegian Missionary Times’) to the Norwegian Norsk Misjonstidende in 1937 to just Misjonstidende (‘Missionary Times’) in 1984. Visualizations of ‘The call from Macedonia’ appeared on the cover in: 1883–91 (woman and child/whole page); 1892–1910 (family/whole page); 1911–24 (a different biblical motif: a male sower/vignette); 1925 (family/vignette); (1926–36 (family/vignette); 1937–49 (family/vignette); 1949–56 (family/vignette); 1956–66 (family/vignette).

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Figure 4. Frontispiece 1883–92.

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Him, who is the Light of the world, the Road, the Truth and the Life. The angel of light, who is hovering over the ship, indicates its errand. The cross made by the sunlight indicates its aim, and the effects of its arrival are already indicated beforehand by the fleeing demon of darkness to the left in the picture; because the darkness hates the light and flees from it. – On the beach a heathen woman is on her knees with a child in one arm while she is stretching out the other arm pleadingly towards the ship. She embodies the unconscious search for an ‘unknown God’ that Paul found among the heathens of his time, and which exists at all times, – the spontaneous testimony that no heart is quiet before it rests in God. … In summary, our cover picture expresses or indicates all the main tasks, aims and effects of the mission among the heathens.14

The editors’ explanation of the motif thus makes it clear that the kneeling person is meant to be a woman, and that her gesture is one of supplication.15 While the Macedonian in the original passage in Acts is a man, ‘the heathen’ in this first frontispiece is imagined as a woman, in close association with a baby. The woman is childlike in her chubbiness. Her gender is not visually pronounced, except for the fact that carrying a child is conventionally associated with womanhood. This first version of the missionary motif in Norway – and maybe the most creative, since Benetter perhaps was the one who invented it – differs more from both the abolitionist motif and the Fidus motif than the later versions. The picture is an allegorical depiction of something invisible. Because of the presence of the angel of light and the demon of darkness, the struggle between good and evil is more explicitly symbolized in colour-coded terms than in the later painting. While the Lord gave Paul a vision in the Bible, the plea for salvation is described as ‘unconscious’ in the explanation. In terms of the history of ideas, this expression builds on a modern contrast between the (conscious) surface and the (unconscious) deeper realities. The picture depicts the invisible realities (unconscious searching), not the observable surface (a lack of interest or even resistance). The main idea of the image is that even though the missionaries experienced hardships in their relationships with local people, the locals harboured an unconscious pleading. This frontispiece was used for nine years before it was changed to a different version of the same motif. This version inspired the large painting from 1923 that I described above. Perhaps it was itself influenced by the motifs of Fidus and the abolitionists. Starting in January 1892, a man was added to the woman on the beach. We thus see a family group – a man, a woman and a child – waiting for the missionary ship while the sun is rising (Figure 5). The woman is now both slimmer and looks more grown-up than in the first picture, but she still has a baby in her left arm, she is still kneeling, and she still stretches her arm out in supplication. The man is standing with lifted arms. Both are dressed in large loincloths, and the woman seems to be wearing a small headscarf. The rising sun is more softly drawn, without clear boundaries, and the contours of the ship have also become softer in the haze of the rising sun. The demon of darkness and the Christian cross have disappeared. The white angel has assumed the shape of a cross and has become more prominent in the picture, with a finely drawn face. The ship is visually played down, while God’s angel (or the resurrected Christ) is emphasized.

14. Norsk Missionstidende, January, 1883, 38(1): 15–16. See Bibliography. 15. In Norwegian and Danish (the text is written in Danish) the word bedende potentially means both ‘pleading’ and ‘praying’. It is, however, more common to use the expression i bønn (‘in prayer, praying’) if one wants to say that a person is praying.

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Inside the magazine on page 24, there is a justification for the change and an explanation of the picture. The editor, Pastor Lars Dahle, wrote that the picture was drawn by a photographer called Sørensen in Christiania and was made (udført) by his successor, Mr Roverud. The beautiful idea of the old picture is kept, the editor continues, but because people with knowledge about art had found that it was too crowded with figures, and therefore not clear enough, and also that the perspective was not good, the new drawing was made. I find this explanation intriguing, since only two figures were removed – the cross and the demon of darkness – and an extra new figure was added in the form of the welcoming and worshipping man next to the woman on the beach. The cross is to some extent retained in the shape of the angel and the demon of darkness is gone. While the latter figure is called Figure 5. Frontispiece 1892–1911. a ‘demon of darkness’, what we see in the first frontispiece is a black angel. The visual similarities between the black angel and the black woman were perhaps disturbing for some viewers, producing cognitive dissonance by exposing contradictory metaphors. The metaphors of light (goodness) and darkness (evil) to portray Christianity and heathenism collide visually with the whiteness and blackness of bodies – the black body of the woman on the beach and the white body of the viewer. In other words, the figure of the demon of darkness might be too similar to the ‘darkness’ of the human being. One opposition interferes with the other in a way which was probably not productive for creating hope in the audience for the salvation of African blacks. In the new version, I see two marked visual changes that counteract this collision. First, as already noted, the black angel was removed. Second, the skin of the human figures was made lighter. These changes made the dissonance of the visual symbolism less blatant, but it did not take it away completely. The rising sun and the enlarged white angel, shaped almost like a cross, ensure the continuity of the central symbolism of the goodness of Christian light and

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the evilness of heathen darkness, and the continued potential for associating dark skin with evilness. As I will show in the chapters to come, the issue of degrees of darkness of skin colour is a recurring one in the missionary publications. Light skin is both closer to deeply seated Western ideas of beauty and to the positive pole in the central missionary opposition between light and darkness than black skin.16 The explanation of the editor inside the magazine focuses on the addition of a man next to the woman on the beach, welcoming God’s messengers and the new era: In the new picture we still see the mission ship with the angel of light above, and the rising sun in the horizon, as well as the pleading heathen figures on the beach that longingly wait for the day of salvation. Their expectation is expressed here in a stronger way in the man who stretches out his arms in supplication towards the sea and the Christian world on its other side, as if he wanted to say, like the man from Macedonia said to Paul in the vision: ‘Come over and help us!’ (Acts 16: 9).17

While the editor describes the gesture of the man as pleading, I would rather characterize it as welcoming and perhaps worshipping. It is of course difficult to know how the contemporary viewers interpreted the picture. The editor’s interpretation might be viewed with reference to the widespread Fidus motif of the naked man worshipping the sun discussed above. To me, there is nevertheless a contrast between the visual expression and the written explanation on this point, indicating the symbolic significance of adding a man as the head of the household. Visually the man and the woman take on different roles, and the woman in my view still embodies most consistently the pleading aspect in ‘The call from Macedonia’. The gender difference reflects bourgeois and Protestant family ideologies at the time. In my interpretation, the man is the most dignified of the two, and the woman is the most religious. In January 1911, the frontispiece was again changed. For fourteen years a drawing of a man sowing seeds at sunrise was used as a vignette on the cover (Figure 6), indicating the importance of the biblical passages referring to sowing (and by implication also harvesting). The vignette in question shows a flat landscape, looking more like dry, uncultivated land than a field. On the horizon to the left is the rising sun, sending rays of light all over the large expanse of sky. To the right we see an oasis with palm trees and one or more buildings. The bearded sower is barefoot and wears a piece of cloth around his waist and over one of his shoulders. He looks more like a person from biblical times than a modern European missionary. Even though the sower is a well-known motif in European art, this drawing looks like a biblical illustration. The change of motif was accompanied by a change from full-page cover drawing to a vignette taking up about one-third of the page. Below the picture is the following caption: ‘A sower went out to sow his seed. The Seed is the word of God. (Luke 8, 5).’ The first sentence is a quotation from Luke’s version of ‘The parable of the Sower’ (Luke 8: 4–8), while the second sentence is an added explanation. In contrast to the English Bible, the Danish and Norwegian translations of the term ‘sower’ are gender-marked as masculine (saaman; sædemand; såmann). Under the title ‘Our new frontispiece’, a two-page article justifies the new 16. A recent event shows how widespread these ideas are: Time Magazine darkened the face of O.J. Simpson for its 27 June 1994 cover, a move which was interpreted as a deliberate revisitation of the historical legacy of associating dark skin with evil (Arogundade 2000: 124). 17. Norsk Missionstidende January 1892, 47 (1–2): 24.

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Figure 6. Frontispiece 1911–25.

picture. The article is signed by L.D. (Lars Dahle), one of the two editors. He first justifies the new image as being a matter of space. In the meetings of the regional associations in 1909, several speakers wanted a new cover picture to leave more room for text. But other speakers did not want to lose the old picture because it evoked a beautiful idea, had become a tradition, and they would miss it if it disappeared. For this reason, the editors had decided that the old picture would follow the table of contents of each volume. The picture in subsequent volumes looks as if it has been redrawn, with subtle changes. Most importantly, the ship is now a little more visible in the haze. The editor wrote about the new frontispiece and the male sower: The new drawing is made by Mr Bloch. As you can see, it represents a sower who walks through a desert land and sows the good seed. This is precisely what our missionaries do out there, in the world of the heathens.18

The editor’s explanation thus makes it clear that the male sower is meant to symbolize the missionary. He goes on to describe the toil and the tears of the missionary by referring to specific biblical passages (Isaiah 32: 15; 60: 5; Psalms 126: 5–6; 126: 6; 2 Corinthians 4: 8). Then he makes a request:

18. Norsk Missionstidende January 1911, 66 (1): 18.

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We want to ask our dear readers, when they look at this frontispiece, to seriously reflect on the work of these sowers, and lift their hands in prayer for our sowers out there in the desert.19

He moves on to describe the joys of the mission at the time of the harvest: We have already experienced not only the tears during the sowing, but also the cries of joy at the harvest, and we have seen the many sheaves of grain being brought into the barn. More than 130,000 have already become members of God’s congregation through the help of our missionaries out there.20

The editor ends the article by asking his readers to work hard to distribute the magazine. The vignette of the male sower was used for fourteen years, with the old motif being republished once a year. But in 1925, the NMS went back to using the motif of ‘The call from Macedonia’ on the frontispiece in a new visualization (Figure 7). I want to suggest here that

Figure 7. Frontispiece 1925–26.

part of the reason for the change was the different potential of the two visual metaphors. While both pictures focus on the relationships between the missionary and the people in the field, the drawing of the sower does not seem to provide such a comforting visual solution to central missionary dilemmas as does the ‘The call from Macedonia’. In his explanation for the vignette of the sower, the editor refers to the tears of sowing and the joys of harvesting, but the drawing only shows one part of the process. Furthermore, the female missionaries are invisible, and the people ‘in the field’ are reduced to uncultivated land. As a representation of the relationship between the missionaries and the people they work with, the picture of the male sower may therefore be both too concrete and too abstract at the same time. When the journal went back to using the old motif with this new drawing of the people waiting for the missionary ship on the beach, two years had passed since the large and influential painting described at the outset here (Figure 1) had been completed. This was also the very year when the four ‘pioneer missionaries’ arrived in Northern Cameroon. Together with the new frontispiece, the size of the magazine was changed to a larger format, and two smaller missionary journals (one of them for women) along with their subscribers were taken 19. Norsk Missionstidende January 1911, 66 (1): 19. 20. Norsk Missionstidende January 1911, 66 (1): 19.

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over by Norsk Missionstidende. The pictorial motif was reduced in size because it was now framed on the right and the left by a stylized border, inspired by the Norwegian peasant version of rococo ornamentation (rosemaling), with the names of the two other journals on each side: Missionslæsning for kvindeforeninger (‘Missionary readings for Women’s’ Organizations’) and Kamp og seier (‘Struggle and Victory’). The ornamentation and the fonts were typical of the nationally oriented aesthetic and ideological climate between the two world wars. In the new drawing, the woman is still kneeling with a baby in her left arm, the man is still standing, the sun is beside the distant ship, and white clouds have been added to the sky. Most importantly, the white angel has disappeared from the picture and a cross of light is reintroduced over the sun and between the clouds. The ship looks small in relation to the cross. Inside the magazine, on page 5, the merger of the three journals is commented upon, and the editor promises that a new frontispiece will be introduced in the future. But because they want the best, it may take some time. In January 1926, the promised new frontispiece was launched (Figure 8). It was a new drawing of the same motif, with a different border from the one it replaced. To the left of the motif is a Bible open to Matthew 28: 16 (the introduction to Jesus’ commissioning of the disciples). To the right are terms referring to the four most important missionary fields of the NMS at the time: Zululand, Madagascar, China and Sudan. As already noted, Sudan included Northern Cameroon at the time. Both sides of the motif are surrounded by vines. Over the motif (and under the main title) are the names of the two former journals, one of them in an abbreviated form: instead of ‘Missionary readings for women’s organizations’, it just says ‘Missionary readings’. Within the main motif, the cross is toned down while the ship is emphasized. The sun’s rays create a belt of light in the sea, reaching from the horizon to the shore. There are still palm trees on the beach, and the beach has become grassier. The gestures of the two adults are similar to the earlier versions. Perhaps they have become just a little bit more similar, because the man is not leaning back as he raises both arms. Inside the magazine, on page 2, the editors explained the new vignette in a short, unsigned article under the title ‘New frontispiece’.

Figure 8. Frontispiece 1926–37.

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After much trial and many drafts, and with the consent of the main board, the editors have decided upon the frontispiece that you see on the first page. It is not easy to find a form which is fully satisfying. The new frontispiece is probably not the best one possible. But in our opinion it has the potential to give the magazine an attractive and characteristic look. It connects the old and the new parts of the name and expresses in the well-known main picture the conscious or unconscious call of the heathens: ‘Come over and help us’. The command of God’s word as the foundation of missionary work is expressed on one side by the Bible and Jesus’ commissioning of the disciples, and by the names of the missionary fields assigned to us, on the other. We hope that we will all become habituated to the new form and that it can decorate the magazine and provide the right aims for editors and readers.21

The editors thus express mixed feelings in relation to the form of the motif, without saying explicitly what the problem was. I assume this perhaps refers to disagreements about what constituted the best border, a national one (the rose painting) or a biblical one with vines. Many supporters’ restrictive attitudes towards alcohol might have made them a little reluctant to accept the representation of vines. There might also have been a disagreement about the abbreviation of the name of one of the former journals. The way the frontispiece appeared in 1926, any reference to the contributions of the many women’s organizations disappeared, to be replaced by the reference to the Bible and the names of the various regions of the world where the NMS was active. In January 1937, the title and the vignette were again changed (Figure 9). At the same time the size of the magazine was changed to a larger format. The fonts and the spelling in the title

Figure 9. Frontispiece 1937–49.

were modernized, the border was removed, and the drawing was further simplified, following the functionalist aesthetics of the times. But in spite of the modernized fonts and simplified drawing, the ship is still a sailing vessel, not a modern ship. The gestures of the three people on the beach are also more or less the same. While the woman is still kneeling and pleading, the standing man is again leaning back, but we see only one arm. More importantly, the Christian cross has disappeared together with the ornamentation. And while the boat was next to the rising sun in the former pictures, it is now in front of it. The ship backed by the sun is located to the right of the centre of the page. But if we disregard the empty grey space to the 21. Norsk Missionstidende 2, January 1926, 81 (1): 2.

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left of the people on the beach (and over part of the title), the ship with the missionaries is now in the centre of the main motif. The sun and some of the rays of sunshine in the sea make a dramatic gateway of light, formed as a Roman arch, reaching from above the horizon down to the beach, connecting the ship to both the (heavenly) sky and the shore. I interpret the Roman gateway of sunlight as a symbol of an opening, a new beginning, a new life. It replaced both the angel and the Christian cross as a symbolism in which the sunlight takes on even stronger spiritual dimensions than in the former versions. This effect is reinforced by the fact that the clouds are replaced by rays of sunshine all over the sky and the sea. The rays are darker than the gateway, but lighter than the sky and the sea. I assume that they symbolized heavenly light for contemporary viewers. In this version of the motif, the people on the beach have become marginal relative to the incoming ship. In my view, this is a dramatic change with theological implications. The triangle of the people on the shore, the incoming ship and the Christian cross/God’s angel is reduced to two parties – the missionaries in the ship within the spiritually enlightening sun and the locals on the beach – and the ship is visually emphasized relative to the locals. Inside the magazine on page 8, the editors explain the new vignette to the readers, but without commenting upon the changes: What most of all gives the magazine its new look is the new title. It will probably please many of our friends that the old motif, rich in tradition, is kept in the new drawing. This picture has spoken so strongly to the former generations about the calling to the fields, all white for the harvest. It shall continue to speak its simple but strong words to us about those who are waiting for the message.22

The editors seem to imply that the motif is so well known and the values invested in it so strong that it is no longer necessary for the drawing to refer explicitly to the religious aspects of the missionary endeavour by means of a cross and/or an angel. Moreover, in this explanation, the biblical passage ‘The call from Macedonia’, is connected to a passage about the fields, ‘all white for the harvest’, thus connecting the two main biblical themes of the missionary books. The next version of the motif ‘Come over and help us’ referring to ‘The call from Macedonia’, first appeared on April 9, 1949 (Figure 10). Inside the journal, on page 3, the change is explained in an article with the title ‘New face’: As the readers will notice, the journal appears with this issue in a partly new shape. Keeping the old and dear missionary motif, which we think Misjonstidende should never divorce itself from, we have tried to embellish the appearance of the journal by means of giving the title and the vignettes a new form. Furthermore, the magazine has demonstrated that it is not only the missionary society’s best worker at home, engaging every week large masses of people, but also the most effective and powerful means of propaganda that we have. How often do we not hear that people got their decisive calling to become a missionary friend through Misjonstidende, yes, in many cases also the calling to become a missionary. The magazine appears to be a part of their lives, the people who constitute the elite division of our troops.23

22. Norsk Misjonstidende 2, January 1937, 92 (1): 8. 23. Norsk Misjonstidende 9, April 1949, 104 (12): 3. The editors were Fritjov Birkeli and Sigurd Lunde.

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Figure 10. Frontispiece 1949–56.

In this justification, the editor used the term ‘propaganda’ in a positive sense, as a means to grab attention and draw good people to the mission. The quote thus supports the definition of mission propaganda that I presented in Chapter 1. Furthermore, the editor uses military language and makes a sharp division between ‘the great masses’ and ‘the elite divisions of our troops’. However, I find that the new frontispiece represents more than just an embellishment. The drawing itself is further simplified in the direction of the streamlining fashion of the day, while the fonts have been changed back to less modern versions. More importantly, the contrast between the ship in the sun and the radiating rays of sunshine in the sky and the sea is still there, at the same time as the sky and the sea have become lighter. The ship backed by

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the sun is now right in the centre of the drawing, and the three people have become further marginalized by being placed to the left of centre, complemented by a few extra islands with palm trees to the right. There is thus a further movement of focus from the heathens on the beach to the missionaries on the incoming ship. Moreover, the woman on shore is shown assuming a new and different posture. Her lower body is turned towards the viewer, and she is sitting, not kneeling. She holds her baby in her lap with both arms and her face is turned attentively upwards in the direction of the sailing ship, waiting for its arrival. The man is still standing, with at least one of his arms (we do not see the other one) raised in a welcoming gesture, still proud but somewhat more low key. The changes might be interpreted as making the woman’s gestures and body position less religious (she is not kneeling) and more passive (her body is not leaning forwards towards the ship; she has not raised her arm, but is holding her child with both arms; she seems more fully tied down by motherhood and less free to act), and this makes his raised arm more central to the symbolism of the picture. In my view, the textual explanation to the version from 1892, in which the man was considered to more strongly express supplication, first became visually real with this drawing. This new drawing was made in the middle of the so-called housewife era in Norwegian history (when married women were expected to stay home), and the small – but in my view very significant – changes of body posture can perhaps be interpreted in that light. In the issue appearing on 8 September 1956, the motif is again slightly changed (Figure 11). The change is justified, again under the heading ‘New face’, in the issue preceding the

Figure 11. Frontispiece 1956–66.

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change on 25 August 1956. On page 3, the editor explains that there is no dissatisfaction with the face of the magazine. The coming change was due to the decision to publish the magazine using rotation printing and that this new method was economically advantageous and would save time. When the new vignette was launched, it was again explained to the readers in an article entitled ‘Our new face’.24 In the new version, the motif is a little bit narrower in that the tops of the palm trees are cut off. One has to compare the new and the old version very closely in order to notice that the motif has actually been totally redrawn within the same style. The palm trees are different, while the positions and gestures of the people on the beach remain almost the same. The arm of the man has become a little longer (and maybe poised in a more pleading gesture?), and this makes him visually even more central. The sailing ship backed by the sun is smaller and farther away. Even more significantly, it has been moved out of the centre and to the right. The centre of the picture again lies between the ship and the three people, recreating to some extent – but without the mediating cross and/or angel – the former balance between the supplicants in the foreground and the invisible missionaries on the ship. This change is not verbalized in the explanation, and one is left to speculate to what degree it is the result of conscious theological reflection and discussion. The very last issue of the magazine which used this motif as a vignette appeared on 12 February 1966. In other words, still, in the 124th year after the foundation of the Norwegian Missionary Society, the cover of its main journal focused on the moment just prior to the missionaries’ arrival, symbolized by a sailing ship and three people on a beach. Over the years, first the black demon of darkness disappeared, and then the white angel of light and the Christian cross were replaced by a nature symbolism with the ship in front of the rising sun. While the symbolism of light and darkness is central to all the various versions, the rays of sunshine became gradually more important in the later versions. The explicit religious symbolism disappeared (the angels, the cross, the kneeling woman), indicating a secularization from within, as it were, in these official visualizations. The drawings of the people also became less expressive – the pleading gesture was reduced to a more conventional greeting, perhaps because the viewers’ interpretations of the picture could by then be taken for granted. At the same time, the various versions continued to build on the central oppositions between light and darkness and between Christianity and heathenism. Moreover, the palm trees, the sailing ship, the rising sun and the people on the beach remained in all versions. The changing postures of the people seem to be influenced by contemporary bourgeois conceptions of gender and family life. In most of the versions, the wife is pleading and receptive while the husband is the proud and welcoming head of the household. There is a change over time in the woman’s role: from active pleading and waiting to passive waiting. While all the pictures focus on the relationship between the missionaries on the ship and the heathens, mediated by God – symbolized by a cross, an angel and/or the sun – there are significant changes of emphasis between placing the heathens or the ship in focus. These changes move in one direction, towards a more pronounced emphasis on the missionary ship, although there were small oscillations back and forth over time. I cannot but assume that both the direction of the general change and the oscillations indicate uncertainties and dilemmas in the missionaries’ conceptions about their historical project. There is also over time a more pronounced emphasis 24. Norsk Misjonstidende 8, September 1956, 111 (28): 3. The editor was Sigvart Riiser.

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on the symbolism of the rays of light, which was in harmony with the enlightening ‘civilizing mission’ of colonialism as well as with the emerging ideologies of ‘development’.

A Private Album This motif found resonance both in the day-to-day work of the supporters in Norway25 and in the day-to-day life of the missionaries abroad. When missionary and teacher Henny Waala Nelson put together her album of photographs from her second period in Cameroon, she chose to make a title page with a postcard showing a palm beach. The title is ‘Africa calls to the second period’.26 Thus, both the title and the image on the postcard echo the many representations of ‘The call from Macedonia’. The implication is that she left for Africa not only because God had called her to do so, but because Africa had called her, just like Paul was called by the man from Macedonia in his dream. The motif of the beach with palm trees is a metonym for the full scene, and like the visualizations analysed above, it transposes the scene from Macedonia in the first century AD to a specific romantic image. The postcard is located underneath the title, and the dates 1955–59 are located to the right. The position of the viewer is the same as in all the representations discussed above, but no boat or natives dressed in loincloths appear in the picture. However, at the bottom of page 3 of the album, after a few pictures from her stays in Paris and Bordeaux on her way to Cameroon, two photographs are glued together showing a small crowd of black boys and young men – and one or two girls – standing beside a car. These are examples of typical missionary pictures of crowds of unnamed African children. Referring to the many drawings of the ‘The call from Macedonia’, the handwritten caption says the following: ‘some of those who are waiting’. Henny Waala Nelson was a teacher, and the young people were probably her students, most of them boys. One or two of the boys are dressed in tunics, but many wear torn and rumpled European-style shorts, shirts or undershirts. One girl wears a European-style summer dress. They do not lift their arms in pleading or welcoming gestures; quite a few look straight at the camera with curious and friendly faces.27 They seem to be waiting, certainly, but they are definitively not pleading. Nevertheless, I want to argue here that for a European viewer, their torn and rumpled clothes might function in a similar way as the pleading gesture. Together the two pictures – the beach with palm trees and the

25. The Norwegian novelist Olav Duun refers to an early version of the motif in his 1910 novel Nøkksjølia (Olav Duun, Skrifter i samling, bind II, Oslo: Olaf Nordlis forlag and Johan Grunt Tanum, 1957). The passage is commented upon in Hageberg (1996: 54–56). 26. This album from her second period in Cameroon is so far the only private missionary album from Cameroon in the NMS Archive in Stavanger. The album from Henny Waala Nelson’s first period is now in Cameroon. About ten years ago, before she died, she handed it over to the father of Marie Doudou Kolomeini, and it is now in her possession. Source: Marie Doudou Kolomeini. I was allowed to see this album in Yaounde in 2006. Henny Waala Nelson had no children of her own. 27. Quite a few published missionary pictures show children occupied in the classroom or as crowds of children or young people with happy, curious or sceptical faces, like the pictures taken by Nelson. The motif has a pragmatic explanation in that the missionaries did not meet local children in their homes, but at school, in the hospital or in the orphanage. In these visual representations the children of the mission field are symbolically presented as orphans. See also Chapters 4, 5 and 6.

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young people with torn clothes – establish the same point as the many visualizations of the motif: local people were calling and eagerly waiting.28

A Key to the Analysis of the Photographs The many visualizations referring to ‘The call from Macedonia’ can be regarded as representations of specific visions of the relationships between God, the missionaries and the people with whom they work. The visualizations have helped them to frame and edit their experiences in a way which has been comforting and inspiring both for the missionaries themselves and for their public in Norway. In particular, I want to emphasize that several of the representations depict a woman as the most central person in the picture. In the first version she is the only one, and with the exception of the last versions, she is visually central. On the one hand, this is well in line with the pronounced tendency in imperial discourses to liken the African continent to a female body, with all the contradictions, tensions and possibilities of devaluing femininity and Africanness that this implied.29 On the other hand, it should be noted that the woman in these missionary visualizations is also the most religious person, and potentially the most receptive to the Word. Changing conventional images of gender were creatively used to reconcile the contradictions between appearing pleading and proud, and accordingly, between being spiritually poor and potentially saved. The cover of the main journal was changed in 1966 because many people in the mission found it too old-fashioned and romantic compared to the actual relationships on the ground, and because Africans were presented in loincloths and thus as ‘primitive’.30 In 1966, most former colonies (including Cameroon) had become independent, with well-dressed national male elites, often in European-style suits. In addition, by 1966 the era of sailing ships had been over for a very long time, and the missionaries had started to travel to Africa by airplane. The national church in Cameroon – l’Église évangélique luthérienne du Cameroun (EELC) – was established in 1960. In 1966 the Norwegian missionaries were still struggling among themselves about the pace of their own full integration within this national church.31 And last, but not least, development aid had been institutionalized by the Norwegian government. The crucial point in all the different versions of the motif is that the non-Christians of the world were calling out for the missionaries and were eagerly waiting their arrival. No wonder that the visualizations of ‘The call from Macedonia’ helped the missionaries to endure and to fortify their own personal, inner calling. In the words of one of them, the first missionaries ‘were not exactly welcomed when they arrived’.32 The actual arrival of missionaries to a field was generally both ‘unexpected and uninvited’,33 and they needed no less than five years to baptize the first convert. Jan Dalland, the leader of the NMS film office, wrote in his book:

28. There is also a reference to ‘The call from Macedonia’ in the title of the missionary exhibition ‘Africa calls’, which toured Norway from 1960 to 1966. 29. See, for example, Comaroff and Comaroff (1997a: 694, 697–700). 30. Source: Nils Kristian Høimyr. 31. Saaghus (1983). 32. Sundby (1991: 64). 33. Dalland (1960: 40). See Chapter 4.

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Paul received a calling, a vision, when he saw the Macedonian standing there, calling ‘come over and help us’. In real life the heathens aren’t waiting to welcome us on the beach or at the airport. Most often one is met by empty indifference, but this is precisely the point of the calling.34

By mentioning the beach, this quotation from 1960, published six years before the frontispiece of the main journal was finally changed, alludes not only to the biblical passage, but also to the visual representations of the motif over the history of the NMS. The most common first reactions to the missionaries’ evangelizing efforts are described here as ‘empty indifference’. As we shall see later in this book, over time the missionaries met not only indifference, but also both anger and resentment because their lack of attention to the feelings of local people, and trust and gratitude because of their work among the sick and needy. On a day-to-day basis, the gratitude of local people seems to have substantiated the missionaries’ vision that the locals had been calling for help. The visual representations of ‘The call from Macedonia’ thus both illustrate and resolve a central tension in the missionaries’ conception of the social relationships in which they were engaged, softening the many difficult experiences related to the fact that they arrived in the field with a generous, yet unsolicited, set of gifts. The motif can thus be regarded as a creative solution to the dilemmas they encountered. These dilemmas were connected to what I consider a weak point in the missionary worldview, a point in relation to which they were vulnerable: they knew that they were called by God, but did not know the reactions of the locals. The representations of ‘The call from Macedonia’ justified and legitimized the historical intervention of the mission in the non-Christian world, and it did so in a particular way, not only as a public relations tool aimed at actual and potential friends of the mission, but also as an instrument of inspiration and comfort for the missionaries themselves, thus demonstrating the strong element of selfpersuasion in missionary propaganda. The persistence of the motif over the years is a testimony to the eagerness with which it was taken up by these various audiences. As far as I know, the long-term visual focus on ‘The call from Macedonia’ is relatively unique in the international world of the missions. The very first version of the motif was the result of the creative imagination of an individual artist, perhaps inspired by other pictures. But its reception and transformations are the result of the way it was put to work in the collective imagination of the missionaries and their supporters. The various versions of the motif were shaped by contemporary fashions, inspired by new technologies, new styles in art and advertisements, as well as changing social ideologies. The tendency towards secularization in the visualizations of the motif over time, as well as the end to its prominent place both as the frontispiece of the journal and as a painting in the main NMS hall, can perhaps be interpreted as an indication of the gradual contemporary adaptation of the mission to the realities of the institutionalized development aid from the Norwegian Labour government, and thus as an indication of the change in communicative modality from ‘evangelizing’ to ‘development’ that this involved.

34. Dalland (1960: 40).

4 REFLECTIONS ON TAKING PHOTOGRAPHS – Why do you write? he asked at last. Are you taking this down in order to laugh at us, the way you do when you take photographs? This way I learned a lesson about how they regarded our custom of taking photographs. Jostein Budal1 Although the history books about the Norwegian Missionary Society (NMS) in Cameroon are abundantly illustrated with photographs, the photographic practices of the mission (taking, developing, cropping, editing, disseminating photographs) are not discussed in these books. The history books discuss evangelization, education and the work among the sick, but not the prolific production and publication of photographs. This special combination of high visibility and high invisibility is in itself interesting, and supports the point made in Chapter 2 that the leadership of the NMS has taken the existence of photographs from the field for granted. To a considerable extent, and in spite of the regional film committees and Nordic stencilled newsletter Focus (fourteen issues between 1953 and 1963),2 missionary photographers more or less had to improvise their own ethical and practical guidelines, based on contemporary commonsense views of such issues in Europe. They did this in a new situation, working with people who were not at all like their neighbours back home. However, although there are no references to photographic practices in the history books, there is from time to time a reference to the act of taking photographs in the individual memoirs. The individual memoirs thus contain a rudimentary discursive practice concerning photography. In spite of being few and far between, these references can be used to illuminate the missionary views. The present chapter is therefore based on the individual memoirs. I present and analyse almost all the passages I have found where the taking of photographs is discussed by the authors. In particular, I have looked for information about the relationships between photographers and photographic subjects, and how qualities of the relationship – or the lack of one – influenced the photographic outcome. In other words, I use their own verbal comments as photographers as a guide. In this way their comments provide me with a new

1. Budal (1962: 134). 2. See Chapter 2.

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entry point for my analysis of the photographs. In order to contextualize these comments, I also discuss in some detail the five books within which I have found them. A photograph interferes with people’s self-presentation and shows an artificial static situation. While visiting a professional photographic studio in Ngaoundéré in 2004, I was not asked by the photographer to smile, and the many portraits exhibited in the entrance hall showed serious faces, except one in which the subject smiled a little, with her mouth closed. This is perhaps not primarily or not just because Cameroonians copy historical pictures but because of their interpretations of the way the camera fixes the fluidity of social life and takes away the specificity of their humanity by presenting just one version of themselves. Subjects who are used to photography know well that they are more complex than their photographic representations. While there are still old people in Cameroon who are afraid that the fixing of the image might stop their full development as human beings,3 photographic subjects generally try to present themselves according to their ideas both about the nature of photography and about how to look dignified and appear as a good person. When they are allowed to, Cameroonians face the camera and assume a serious ‘Victorian’ pose. They want the photographer to take a full-length picture, often arguing that the camera should not cut off the feet. Even today, old people, in particular, often do not want to show their teeth. For many people, smiling broadly is a sign of lack of control. At most, one should smile just a little with the mouth closed. According to Lamunière, commercial photographers did not establish themselves in the interior of French West Africa until after 1945, because the French wanted to control the production and circulation of images.4 Then local studio and itinerant photographers ‘appropriated the conventions of studio photography, including compositional centrality, fulllength figures shown frontally, shallow pictorial space, and the incorporation of backdrops and accessories’,5 allowing people to pose in idealized ways.6 The itinerant photographers can be regarded as representing a specific stage in the history of photography, before most families possess their own cameras. In West Africa, photography was established, above all, in the domain of portraiture, while landscape or still-life photography never really developed as genres.7 Photographers often use flash even in daylight to make the faces look lighter.8 One can get an idea of how local photographers worked from the well-known portrait photographs of the commercial photographers Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé in Bamako, Mali.9 These commercial studio photographers allowed the people portrayed in the photos to dress as they wished and stage themselves in vigorous and defiant ways. Often they brought along specific cherished objects, such as a bicycle or a radio, and they looked forcefully into the camera. The faces were often deadly serious, but the poses could sometimes be full of humour. Compared 3. 4. 5. 6.

Source: Daouda Ja’e. Lamunière (2001). Lamunière (2001: 14). Here I want to mention briefly the scholarly discussion about Edward Curtis’s romantic and idealized portraits of Native Americans (Lyman 1982), designed to record the last images of what he believed was a vanishing race. He allowed the people he photographed to dress according to their own ideas about how they wanted to appear. The pictures are therefore in one sense fakes, yet in another sense they are perhaps true to the shared ideals of the subjects and the photographer about how they should be represented. 7. Behrend and Werner (2001: 241). 8. Hersant (2001: 247). 9. Published in Lamunière (2001).

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to these pictures, the missionary photographs exhibit a more varied set of characters and scenes. At the same time, their master narratives seldom allow a similar forcefulness on the part of local women.10 As noted in Chapter 1, missionary photographs are produced and published within the complex relations among photographers, the subjects, their editors and publishers and their imagined viewers in Norway. The potential lookers-on in Africa can be added to this complex network. The photographers, the imagined viewing public and the lookers-on are outside the frame, but they nevertheless influence the outcome. People’s engagement in photography is often complex, and the photographic occasion can be analysed as a dialogue or a negotiation about what constitutes a good person as well as about what constitutes a good representation of a person. Some missionaries seem to have felt that their good intentions and their superior knowledge justified not always paying attention to the wishes of the locals on these matters. At the same time, their reflections show considerable variation – depending on individual interests, how well the photographer knew the subjects and the kinds of reciprocity involved – as well as a development over time in the direction of more sensitivity to local views.

Capturing a Photograph of an Attractive Woman: Karl Flatland in 1922 In the early stages of their work in Cameroon, the missionaries took pictures among people who had had little contact with photography. Even today, some people in the outlying areas are not used to seeing photographs, and particularly moving pictures. Karl Flatland is one of the four celebrated ‘pioneer missionaries’ whose collective portraits are often reproduced in books about the mission in Cameroon (Figure 12). The four missionaries self-consciously went to a photographic studio before they took off. Striking a serious pose for the photographer, they are formally dressed in black suits and look directly at the camera. Before

Figure 12. Studio photograph of ‘The Pioneers’, probably from 1924. 10. Female missionaries have taken many pictures of women and children, and in their pictures local women are portrayed as more energetic and lively than in the pictures taken by their male counterparts. Very few of these pictures have been published in the history books or in the digitized collection.

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he went to Cameroon as a pioneer for the NMS, Flatland had been working for two years with the Danish Sudan mission. On the basis of this experience, and because of the Norwegian plans to start working in Sudan, the NMS published the very first Norwegian missionary book from Sudan in 1922, two years before the four men left to find a suitable location for the Norwegian mission.11 Flatland’s book is illustrated by two maps, one drawing and twenty-nine pictures.12 Some of these pictures seem to have been borrowed from contemporary ethnographic works and carry titles such as ‘Dinka boys’, ‘A tattooed Sudanese’ and ‘A Native’. But most are photographs that he and his colleagues probably took in Shellem, where he stayed with the Danish Sudan Mission. These pictures have captions referring to place, activity, ethnic group or formal position, for example: ‘Kanakuru-women pounding grain’, ‘The King of Shellem’ and ‘The King of Shellem and some of his wives’. One picture shows a black man who is washing some clothes, with the following caption: ‘Doing the missionary’s laundry’. Such a playful (or extremely self-conscious?) colonial posture is otherwise rare in this literature. The caption of another picture is, ‘The author and his native servants’ (Figure 13), naming all the

Figure 13. Karl Flatland and his servants, reproduced from Flatland (1922). 11. The Danish Sudan mission worked in Nigeria, close to the border with Northern Cameroon (Nikolaisen and Endresen 1949: 306). The city of Shellem, today spelled Shelleng, is now located in Adamawa state in Nigeria. Karl Flatland was a missionary in Northern Cameroon from 1925 to 1931. The expedition started in 1924 and arrived in Adamaoua in 1925. 12. A few of the pictures seem to have been taken from engravings and photographs in contemporary ethnographic works, a few are formal studio portraits (of the central committee of the Sudan Mission, other missionaries, his parents, himself, and so on), and most of them were taken during his stay in Shellem with the Danish Sudan Mission.

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Figure 14. The king of Shellem and some of his wives. Reproduced from Flatland (1922).

servants: ‘Tai, Sani (my language teacher), Ape, Yingelato (Ape’s wife), Wazo, Musa (Moses)’. In the picture, the white missionary is sitting in an armchair while his black servants are standing behind him. A little naked black boy is sitting on the ground at the feet of Tai, one of the men, to the left of the missionary, with some distance between the child and the missionary. He is also named in the caption, as Musa (Moses). The composition is similar to a photograph of the local sultan and his many wives in the same book (Figure 14). In this picture, too, the sultan is the only one sitting in a chair.13 He is wearing a robe, while some of his wives have not covered their breasts, indicating that they were only lightly Islamicized. Both pictures seem to be influenced by more general European and colonial ways of composing pictures. The picture of the missionary and his servants suggests that Flatland was proud of having his own servants. This was a time when servants were more common in the Norwegian middle and upper classes than they are today. After the Second World War, Norwegian missionaries were generally at pains to explain that having servants was a necessity: they needed them to be able to carry out their own primary tasks. The picture caption shows that, right from the very first book from Cameroon, some Cameroonians were named and portrayed as individual human beings, usually people the author knew well, often his or her servants.14 Of particular note is the naming of the black child in the picture, which up to the present is rare in this literature. 13. This is different from the practice of the sultan in Ngaoundéré, who still today sits on a carpet or on a special throne. 14. In an autobiographical novel based on her experiences as a missionary in Congo, Erna Moen (1985) gives a fascinating description of the role of one of her servants in teaching her about local life. See Erna Moen, 1985, Gudenes Haug, Oslo: Tiden norsk forlag. Servants have played crucial roles as teachers and informants about local culture, and these roles are sometimes alluded to in the missionary memoirs. It would have been interesting to write the history of the missions (and of Norwegian development aid) on the basis of the stories that their former servants tell about their masters. For obvious reasons, this part of history is still largely unwritten.

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Flatland is a missionary author who included a large number of pictures of himself in his book – he appears in six out of twenty-nine pictures. In addition to the colonial-style photograph with his servants, he presented a series of portraits of all the missionaries in the Danish Sudan mission (including a portrait of himself ), a studio portrait of himself as a child with his parents (‘The parents of the author’), a studio portrait of himself as an adult wearing a dark suit (‘The author’), a photograph of a small person in front of a large African house (‘The author in front of his dwelling in Shellem’), and a photograph of himself sitting on a horse, like an equestrian monument (‘The author sitting on a Sudanese steppe horse’). While the formal studio portrait entitled ‘The author’ portrays him as an outsider in the African context, the pictures of him in Africa portray him as a colonial explorer. The captions implicitly present a narrator who is no longer the ‘I’ of the main text, but someone who objectifies the ‘I’ as ‘the author’. This textual strategy gives Flatland the opportunity to convey the impression that he is not engaged in an ambitious presentation of self in the missionary contest for visibility and fame, but in a more ‘objective’ presentation made by the mission society or the publisher. In the narrative about his journey to the field, Flatland mentions at one point that it would have been nice to be able to transform a particular view of large herds of cattle into slides.15 He was reminded of an animal fair back home, and would have liked to capture the lovely scene and show it to his readers. Perhaps the scene made him a little homesick, or perhaps he thought that his audience in Norway would more interested in Africa if the landscape looked like something with which they were already familiar. The passage focuses on the similarities between African and European landscapes and indicates a wish to conform to the views of the supporters, rather than expand their knowledge by showing them a radically new perspective or presenting new information. There is no picture like that in the book, but there is a picture of cattle called ‘Fulani cows wading across the river’.16 Flatland shared with his readers his observations about local people’s anxiety when they were photographed: ‘When the little black house with a glass eye is directed towards them, they flee, perhaps to prevent it from stealing their soul.’17 I do not know where this idea originally came from, but it has been imputed to people almost everywhere in the world by Euro-American photographers. Thus, Flatland probably brought the idea with him to the field. It is difficult to know why the people fled the camera at the beginning of the twentieth century. Perhaps this was the first time they had seen one? According to my experience in present-day Cameroon, people look at pictures as something more than just representations that are clearly divorced from what they represent, as representations that are also part of what they represent. A picture of a person is still a part of that person. People today may be reluctant to have their picture taken by people they do not know because they fear that the picture might be used for malevolent purposes involving sorcery; because they know that the overall representation of Africa in the West is one of poverty and misery; and because they suspect the photographer of becoming rich at their expense. At one point in his narrative, Flatland relates the story about how one of his Danish colleagues was able to take a particular photograph in spite of the anxiety and resistance of the subject: 15. Flatland (1922: 129). 16. Ibid., 127. 17. Ibid., 86.

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A young woman who was glowing with health one day came to the missionary station. … Kjær [his colleague] wanted to take a photograph of her, but then her boldness ended. She was overcome with profound fear, hiding behind the boys. Later she withdrew very quickly from us. But then a group of women approached, accompanied by several children. One of the women carried a child on her back. Kjær was crafty. He turns his back to them, and talks to a worker. While he is doing this, the women remain standing, and the one who fled also comes back. It was an easy task for him to turn around quickly, focus his apparatus and take the picture. They do not seem to know why they fear the camera so much. Perhaps they believe that they lose all power over their own lives. ‘Now I have caught you’, says the photographer, and the native fears this little black magic box with one eye as if it were an evil spirit.18

Assuming that the expression ‘glowing with health’ was a contemporary missionary euphemism for youthful female beauty, Kjær managed to take a picture of a particularly attractive woman. The photograph is not reproduced in Flatland’s book. The way the incident is reported, there was no photographic occasion in the sense of a negotiation between the photographer and the photographic subject. Flatland seems to see nothing wrong in the way his colleague fooled the woman. If he had, he would probably not have told the story, or he would have told it differently. His narrative is characterized by a lack of sensitivity or empathy with the feelings of the woman, as well as by a certain naïvety. I think that the innocence with which he relates this little scenario can be regarded as emblematic. I do not say that all missionaries are insensitive photographers because, as we shall see, this is not the case. What I want to point at is, on the one hand, the contrast between how the author, in this case Flatland, sees himself and the image that he thinks he conveys to the audience, and, on the other hand, my current reading, taking into account the traces in the text of the reaction of the woman. In Europe, to take the picture of an equal who does not want to have his picture taken is generally regarded as bad manners. I assume that Flatland and his missionary colleague would not have done the same thing to their neighbours in Europe. It is therefore interesting to ask exactly which aspects of the situation made the difference. There are at least four possible answers to this question, and all of them probably carry some truth. Flatland’s story can be interpreted in the light of contemporary racist ideas which he unambiguously expresses elsewhere in his book,19 a colonial situation in which the white missionaries felt that they did not need to take local feelings into account, his ideas about women, and contemporary ideas about science and superstition. 18. Ibid., 133. 19. As a man of some of the worst ideas of his times when it comes to assigning human beings to ‘inferior’ (laverestående) groups, Flatland was different from other NMS missionaries (see Lode 1990 about the early history of the mission in Cameroon). In his memoir Flatland wrote: ‘Mixed offspring or bastards of a Negro and an Arab or of a Negro and a European result in a degenerated and dangerous kind of people. This danger will in the future become even more serious’ (1922: 8). ‘The white passenger has to act in an imperious and commanding way, otherwise laziness will reign. The Africans often look like whipped dogs. In them one encounters the spirit of the slave, one has the impression that they receive what they get without resistance, be it a blow or a kick’ (1922: 78–79). ‘As is well known, the Negros are given to lying.’ (1922: 137). After the death of the young nurse Jensine Kristensen: ‘– It is hard to see the death of a white person out here. White life seems so exceedingly valuable out here. And she was white through and through, one of the good Lord’s very purest lambs’ (1922: 147).

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I choose here to focus most on the last suggestion. The basis of the missionary’s self-image of goodness and innocence (in the situation and while writing) is his absolute confidence that the woman was just superstitious, and that, accordingly, nothing bad would happen to her because she was photographed. She perhaps thought that the camera was an evil spirit, but the two missionaries knew better. Underlying Flatland’s confidence is the idea that there is a fundamental distinction between his own and his colleague’s scientifically based rationality, on the one hand, and local people’s ‘superstition’, on the other. Even though the missionaries also believed in evil spirits in the form of devils and ‘demons of darkness’, this fact was not considered to be relevant here. In missionary discourse, only Africans suffer from ‘fear of spirits’ (åndefrykt) as long as they have not put their lives in the hands of Jesus.20 In the situation reported above, the two missionaries apparently relied on rational science, not on the religion that had brought them to Africa. On this basis, as well as on the basis of their power to take the photograph against the subject’s will (through craftiness), her wishes were not taken into account. In the words of Susan Sontag, to photograph people can be to violate them.21 Flatland does not tell his readers how the woman reacted to having her picture stolen. Since one can assume that she noticed that she had been fooled, she would have felt nothing but fear and perhaps anger. Her fear was no less real for not being based in rational science. If she became angry, her anger was reasonable. This is perhaps why her reactions are not part of the story. In the narrative, the whole point is that Kjær successfully managed to take a photograph of an attractive woman. The underlying idea is that whether she wanted it or not, the two male missionaries had an unquestioned right to take her picture because of their good intentions, their superior technology and their superior scientific understanding of the situation. This right justified the lack of negotiation and consent, and also the lack of any report about the woman’s reactions in the book for the Norwegian audience. The interactions were such that they did not provide the basis for the development of some kind of shared understandings and consent. Like other travellers, the two men interpreted what they experienced in terms of their own worldview. Missionaries and locals interacted, but their interpretations of the situation were not negotiated and remained separate, and the missionaries’ paternalist attitudes were not confronted. In other words, acquiring first-hand knowledge in the field did not always, or not necessarily, explode the preconceptions the missionaries brought along from Europe. The result of situations like this one was inevitably an emerging cultural and social division between the missionaries and the people they worked with. It is, of course, much easier now than at the time to notice the historical nature of the selfevident way the two missionaries differentiated between superstition and rationality. More than eighty years have passed since the publication of the account of this incidence. Nevertheless, even though there are important differences of attitude among missionaries, both individually and over time, the obvious naïvety in the reporting of this small incident illustrates two aspects of the relationships between the mission and the people in the field. First, the missionaries came not only with a new religion, but also with science-based technologies such as photography, medicine and (later on) dentistry, agriculture and radio transmission. In Chapter 10, I explore how the assumed superiority of their specific 20. See Nissen (1999: 71) 94. 21. Sontag (1977 : 14–15). See also Pinney (1992: 75).

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combination of religion and technology created unforeseen side-effects and new dilemmas to solve. Second, the incident illustrates that quite a few missionary pictures have over the years been taken in an unnegotiated photographic situation. This is the case particularly when the photographic subjects were not well-known to the missionaries. This also occurs, of course, in the photographic materials of other cross-cultural actors such as the mass media, humanitarian aid organizations, development programmes and academic anthropology.

Documentation of Narrated Experiences: Gudrun Røst in 1942 Some of the missionary books exhibit a more explicit documentary intention in the use of photographs than others. In her 1942 book, Gudrun Røst presents brief stories about encounters with local people when she and her husband were establishing a new missionary station in the North of Cameroon around 1940.22 The book is a cross between a travel account and short written portraits of local people and events. It contains forty-five pictures with different kinds of subject matter. Most are photographs, apparently taken by Gudrun Røst (and since it contains three pictures in which she is present herself, perhaps also by her husband). Some pictures are of an ethnographic nature, with captions identifying the people portrayed as types in terms of their ‘tribal’ or ethnic identities; she mentions the Tuareg, the Fulani and the so-called Kirdi. But often she just presents the photographic subjects as ‘natives’. Since ‘Kirdi’ is the Fulani term for all the subjugated non-Fulani groups in the region, her use of this term indicates that she unwittingly adopted the point of view of the politically dominant Fulani.23 This is also expressed visually: several of Røst’s photographs are of Fulanis (she most often uses the term foulbé), and on two different pages she juxtaposes a photograph showing more or less naked ‘Kirdis’ with another showing clothed Fulanis. Her book is thus an early example of the fascination of the missionaries with the Fulanis. The book contains three snapshots of Røst in the field and no formal studio portraits (Figure 15). In fact, there is not a single formal studio portrait of a female missionary or missionary wife in the books from Cameroon, whether in the individual memoirs or in the history volumes. This is telling of patriarchal attitudes, since they were numerous. One of the snapshots shows her preparing food, sitting outside in a camping chair, seen from behind. The contrast between Flatland’s possessive colonial posture and the snapshot is remarkable. The second picture shows her quite literally in the field, posing alone with large plants. There is also a similar photograph of a white man that I assume is her husband. In the first picture she is standing close to a dry river, with an apron over her dress and a sun helmet on her head. The captions to these three photographs do not mention the author (or her husband) but rather various attributes of the field. Thus, in contrast to Flatland but like Konstanse Raen, whose book was briefly discussed in Chapter 2, Røst’s visual presentation of self is related to their work in the mission field. Both these authors were missionary wives.24 One of the findings of my study is that the missionary wife holds a position of relative invisibility in the publications 22. Røst (1942). Gudrun Røst does not state which society they worked for, but it was probably the Lutheran Brethren, who work in the far North and eastwards into Chad. Source: Kåre Lode. 23. Since then the term ‘Kirdi’ has changed meanings many times and is now often used as a term expressing pride and commonality among Christians and non-Fulanis. 24. See Lande (1979, 1985a, 1985b).

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Figure 15. Field pictures of Gudrun Røst and her husband. Reproduced from Røst (1942).

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of the society. Writing their memoirs can perhaps be interpreted as a way of circumventing the invisibility offered by the mission society. But the visual presentation of self is nevertheless conspicuously modest compared to some of the male memoirs and the history volumes. As in Flatland’s book, a few of Røst’s pictures were probably borrowed from contemporary ethnographic works. In particular, a frontal close-up picture of a woman with large extended lips looks like a picture from an ethnographic atlas. The unacknowledged loan is also indicated by a caption partly in French, ‘Femme à plateaux’, which Røst translates into Norwegian and supplements with more ethnographic information, perhaps from the same source. Her book also contains a brief chapter about wildlife in the region, with pictures of various animals, insects and birds, including a close-up of a scorpion. Some of these were perhaps also borrowed from other books, in this case from zoology books. But most photographs relate directly to her own experiences in Northern Cameroon: travelling by ship to the field; building the missionary station, including pictures of the local builders at work and the missionaries camping before more permanent houses were ready; ethnographic pictures of life in the region, including several pictures of beautiful women (for example, Figure 16, the lower pictures), and a picture of a woman grinding grain on a ‘primitive’ stone; pictures of local architecture; a close-up of a ‘tropical sore’; a picture of a man who is weaving, with a caption saying that in Africa weaving is regarded as ‘fine artisan work’ and is done by men, while women cultivate crops and fetch water and firewood; a hippopotamus which has just been shot; pictures of cars trapped in large holes in the road after a tropical rainstorm; a ferry boat; and a railway bridge. Twice Røst illustrates a mini-narrative about people she has met by including a photograph of them, and adding a discussion of the particular photograph in the main text. The first discussion appears in a story called ‘Two courageous children’, about how one night two unnamed children about 8–10 years old courageously saved a goat from a hyena. The story ends the following way: We admired the courageous girl and the valiant boy who had dared to fight the ruthless beast of prey. We took a photograph of the girl besides the hole made by the hyena in the wall of the hut. We also wanted her brave brother in the picture, but he was out herding the animals all day from sunrise to sunset.25

In this way, Røst uses the photograph to document the veracity of a specific story, and the text to fill out the missing elements in the photograph. This way of making a tight link between narrative and photograph is unusual in the missionary books. The photograph in question (Figure 16, upper picture) shows the girl sitting on the ground beside the hole, looking at the camera. It is no doubt the result of a negotiated photographic occasion in which the photographer introduced herself and the girl was asked to pose. The caption explains what we see: ‘This picture does not show the entrance to the hut, but the opening that the hyena dug the night it tried to get hold of the goat. – The girl in the picture was the one who saved the goat together with her younger brother.’ Røst did not give the children’s names, perhaps because children are not considered as significant as adults, or perhaps she did not know their names, or did not remember them or think they were relevant to her story when writing it. Since she does identify other locals by name, the reason is perhaps just that she assumed that her audience in Norway would not be interested in knowing the children’s’ names. 25. Røst (1942: 63).

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Figure 16. Children and young girls. Reproduced from Røst (1942).

In a short story called ‘A visit to a village’, the author visits several houses in a village, among them the house of Dudu, ‘a young, beautiful Fulani girl who had often visited us’: Dudu’s father was 90 years old. … the old man almost looked like a patriarch. We took a picture of him and a few of the people of his house. Unfortunately Dudu was not at home right then, and she did not become part of the picture. Her skin was very light, and her face had beautiful features.26

Røst regretted that she was not able to show a picture of beautiful Dudu together with her family. As already noted, the light skin and ‘beautiful features’ of many Fulanis correspond to the ideas about beauty of Europeans and many others. But unlike the first example, there is no 26. Ibid., 70.

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photograph in her book which unambiguously corresponds to the textual description of a picture of an old man with some of the people of his house. The picture which is probably the one alluded to shows a few people outside a round African house made of straw. It is juxtaposed with a similar picture of a few people outside another round house, and carries the following caption: ‘In stark contrast to the heathens above, the Mohammedans are standing with their almost full length bou bous.’ Thus, through the caption, as a second layer of text, the photograph is made to serve a different purpose from the one mentioned in the main body of the text. Some of the photographs in the book are of people Røst knew well and who were also part of her narrative. In the photographs they appear in serious and frontal poses, and the captions supply their names and help the reader to connect the picture to the narrated events: ‘Baraki with the rat that was finally cooked for dinner’; ‘Our old friend, the Muslim Laddan’; ‘The Kirdi leader Mamsur’. These captions refer to stories told in the main text. Other photographs are snapshots of a more ethnographic kind in which the subjects are not posing, and these were probably taken without their noticing. Since Røst does not discuss the taking of these pictures, I do not know if her photographic practice and the ideas underpinning it were similar to Flatland’s Danish colleague in this respect. The caption of one of these pictures refers back to the text by giving the name of one of the characters who is singing and dancing in the picture. With their rich diversity of subject matter, the photographs in the books by Flatland and Røst illustrate the hybridity of the missionary book as a genre, and its similarities to the genres of ethnographic writing and travel writing at this early stage of the missionary presence in the area.

Documenting the Mission’s Work against Slavery: Halfdan Endresen, 1954–69 I now turn to an author and a photographer with somewhat different documentary intentions. In Chapter 2, I mentioned Halfdan Endresen’s work against slavery.27 After much internal strife among the missionaries in Cameroon, he was redirected from his position in Madagascar to establish order in Cameroon in 1932. As the superintendent there from 1932 to 1963, he led the struggle against slavery, and published several books, as well as the chapter about Cameroon in the first history about the NMS on the hundredth anniversary of the organization. He is thus a central figure in both the history and the historiography of the mission. Halfdan Endresen died in 1973. With his first book, published in 1954, Endresen started to document his work to help people who had fled from the harsh oppression of the Muslim sultans and their subordinate leaders. The book is written for the supporters in Norway and is illustrated with twelve photographs and one map. One of them shows Endresen in a sun helmet, white shirt and long trousers, standing beside three Muslim men ‘The author with the Muslim pastor’28. There is 27. Endresen published three books about slavery (1954, 1965 and 1969). In Endresen (1969: 43, 71) there are a few additional references to his work as a photographer. 28. Endresen probably picked the word prest (‘pastor’) in order to refer to the Muslim dignitary in terms familiar to the audience in Norway and to express an egalitarian attitude. The drawback of this choice is that it is difficult to know precisely what kind of dignitary he was – an imam, a modibbo, a malam, an alkali or a marabout.

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also a photograph of his wife with a group of local women, but her presence is not acknowledged in the caption: ‘Sewing circle on the veranda.’ The visual presence without verbal acknowledgement illustrates the public modesty expected of missionary wives. His second book, published in 1965, is a revised and expanded edition of the first book, with new photographs. In contrast to Konstanse Raen and Gudrun Røst (who in their memoirs only presented modest snapshots of themselves in action in the field), but like Karl Flatland, Endresen sprinkled his second book with five dignified pictures of himself (out of twenty): performing a baptism in his white pastoral gown (Figure 17, upper picture); wearing a black suit, standing in the presence of the Cameroonian Prime Minister, who is in the foreground of the picture; talking to patients at the hospital in his white pastoral gown; wearing a white shirt and black trousers, standing beside the president of the Cameroon national church; wearing a black suit, receiving a decoration from the Cameroonian government. In the captions he applies a textual strategy similar to Flatland’s: The ‘I’ of the main text is transformed into ‘the author’ and ‘Pastor Endresen’. This objectifying strategy can be interpreted as an attempt to

Figure 17. Upper picture: Halfdan Endresen and an anonymous baptismal candidate. Lower picture: Geddal. Reproduced from Endresen (1965).

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reconcile high social ambitions and the aim of imitating Jesus in his modesty. The difference between the publications of the male and female authors is a question of both the nature of the selected photographs and the content of the captions. The third book by Endresen was published in 1969 and includes sixteen photographs and one map. In one of the photographs he is posing in a white suit with a sultan (‘Visiting the lamiido Mohauruadu in Ngaoundéré’). As in his first book, his wife, Birgit Endresen, is present in one of the pictures without being named in the caption. Endresen was thus again more modest on her behalf than on his own behalf.29 I had to read a dissertation written by a female Cameroonian student to learn that Birgit Endresen was an educated nurse, specializing in tropical diseases, who performed pioneering work among the sick in Ngaoundéré.30 Endresen included many pictures of himself with various male dignitaries, but no pictures of himself with his wife or his family. He also did not verbally mention her support in his published books. Like most male missionaries, he drew a different line between privacy and public life when representing his own life than when representing the lives of people in Cameroon. Endresen’s books contain stories about how he struggled to help various slaves and are illustrated with photographs of some of them. He let people pose; most often photographing the subject full-figure or almost full-figure. More than many other missionaries, he thus seems to have respected how people in Cameroon want to be photographed. Like Røst, he wrote about the photographic occasions behind a few of his published pictures. The following passage describes the happy reunion of a mother and her children: The following day Ramata was summoned by the district officer and he returned to her the two youngest children who lived in town. She was promised that later on she would receive the two older ones who were staying in the countryside. She came beaming with joy to the station in the evening. And she was beaming no less when a few days later she came to show us all four children. I then managed to take a picture of the happy and reunited family.31

The picture in the book shows a mother with her four children. In the caption the mother is named Rawota, and not Ramata, which is probably just a printing error. The children are not named. All five are posing in front of a house at the mission station. The picture is small, but they actually seem to be happy, smiling a little, without showing their teeth. Knowing that many supporters appreciate touching stories, Endresen apparently wanted his pictures both to augment the validity and truthfulness of his narrative and to recreate the ambiance of particular happy moments. Another time, he did not succeed in capturing such a happy occasion: But then, suddenly one day Adamu was standing in front of her hut. Beaming with joy she came up to us with her boy. He was a thin and frightened little guy – almost naked and with a large scar on his forehead. He looked at us with fearful and serious eyes, but soon lit up when we started talking to him in a friendly way. I brought out the camera in order to take a picture of him and his mother,

29. However, in Skagestad (1971b), a booklet for young people celebrating Endresen as ‘the liberator of the slaves’, the same picture is republished, with Birgit Endresen named in the caption, but not the black woman and child sitting beside her. 30. Dzaitonna (1995: 50). 31. Endresen (1954: 129).

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Figure 18. Upper left: Rundok. Upper right: Fatuma and Adamu. Below: The church in Ngaoundéré. Reproduced from Endresen (1954).

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but then he again got the serious and fearful look. Because of this, one cannot see the joy of reunion in the picture.32

Endresen’s text shows a wish to capture the moment as well as a wish to represent the ‘beaming joy’ which is the result of his and the mission’s work against the oppression of the lamiibe. Endresen had to be content with a serious picture, and the explanation in the text makes up for the missing smile. In the book, the picture is reproduced in a small format together with two other pictures – a portrait of an old woman and a picture of the station church in Ngaoundéré (Figure 18). The captions give the names of the people portrayed and the location of the church.33 The picture of the boy and his mother, Fatuma, shows them posing side by side, without touching, in front of the veranda stairs of one of the houses at the mission station. Both are serious, the mother’s hands are together in front of her body, and the boy’s hands are hanging down. She is well dressed; he wears only a loincloth or shorts. It is impossible to know how they felt from looking at the picture. But I assume that the fact that they were not on their own turf, as it were, but on the territory of the mission, played a role in their expressions as well as in their willingness to be photographed. They were no doubt deeply grateful for what Endresen had done for them. It thus seems to me that gratitude probably was the most important ingredient in the photographic occasion. Although the boy was fearful, he and his mother perhaps felt that it would have been inappropriate to refuse to be photographed. This last point comes through perhaps even more clearly in the picture of the old woman who is a former slave, on the same page. Her name, Rundok, is presented in the caption. She is photographed in front of a round African house with a thatched roof (probably one of the houses in the so-called slave village).34 The picture seems to be a snapshot, taken while she was fetching water from a larger container, and she was probably surprised in the middle of the task. The position of her naked feet and the appearance of her dress indicate that she had just moved when the picture was taken and barely had time to pose. Even though she is not looking straight at the camera but at something or somebody to the left of the photographer, she seems to be aware of it. She is facing the photographer, holding a bowl in one hand; the other hand is open. She is barefoot; her breasts are uncovered; and around her waist she wears a large piece of rumpled cloth reaching down to her knees. The expression on her face seems serious, wary and perhaps fearful. I assume that for Rundok, the photographic occasion was characterized by complex feelings of reluctance, gratitude and dependence. Living in the ‘slave village’, she was

32. Ibid., 16. 33. Ibid.: between pp. 32 and 33. 34. Given the sensitivity of the issue of slavery (see Chapter 2), and the changing sartorial customs, it is an ethical dilemma for me in this study whether or not to republish this and the next picture, and whether or not to include the names of the subjects. One issue revolves around republishing pictures of barebreasted women. The symbolic value of bare breasts has changed dramatically in Cameroon since they were taken. If the two old women had lived today, they would perhaps not have wanted to be represented publicly with bare breasts. Another issue concerns the suffering which is visible in the picture of Rundok. Perhaps she would have been ashamed to know that she has been represented in this way? After much hesitation, I have nevertheless chosen to include the names and pictures of both women. I decided, after all, that their dignity is best preserved by attempting to present as best I can the history of the representation of their lives.

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Figure 19. Upper picture: Yiglau. Lower picture: Geddal. Reproduced from Endresen (1969).

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dependent on the mission. Each former slave was assigned a specific duty in return for food and protection, and the children at the Norwegian school were every year involved in collecting money to provide all of them with new clothes.35 Perhaps she wanted to reject having her photograph taken, but had to comply? She does not seem to have had the strength to negotiate a definition of the situation in which she could pose in a way which would project an image of dignity. In my interpretation, her open hand is the most moving element in the picture, an element that creates a punctum, in Roland Barthes’ sense,36 expressing vulnerability and suffering rather than determination. Since the photograph in this book focusing on Endresen’s work against slavery is indirectly presented as a picture of a former slave, the spectator is invited to see her expression of pain as a result of the harsh treatment she had received as a slave. But, of course, her suffering may be due to old age and many other sorts of misfortune as well. The room for individual variation in photographic occasions can be illustrated by comparing the picture of Rundok with a picture of Yiglau which appears in Endresen’s last book about slavery, published in 1969 (Figure 19).37 It is a full-figure, frontal pose, like Rundok, her breasts are bare and she wears a rumpled piece of cloth around her lower body. She is standing in front of a house with a thatched roof. In these two photographic occasions, both Yiglau and Rundok were probably on their own turf, but that turf was also a part of the area of the mission. Yiglau’s facial and bodily expression is, nevertheless, totally different from the picture of Rundok – resigned and dignified. Yiglau has been allowed – or has demanded – more time to collect herself and pose. Her feet are together, her face is poised and enigmatic; with one hand she holds a long stick, holding the other hand in front of one of her breasts. The fingers are together. The caption refers to the story about her in the main text. It reads: ‘Yiglan, who was kidnapped and found again several times.’ Here, too, there is a printing error in the spelling of the name in the caption, indicating the general uncertainty about how African names ought to be spelled. According to a book by the retired missionary Jostein Budal, Yiglau was originally a Laka woman from the border area between Cameroon and the Central African Republic. She was taken as a slave as a little girl, and had watched both her parents being killed by Fulani raiders. Later on she had three children of her own, but all of them died.38 Once, as an old woman, she showed her gratefulness to Budal by dancing in front of him.39 As far as I know, no photograph of her dancing has been published. Yiglau’s picture appears on the same page as a picture of an old man. He is also facing the camera, in a less erect position than Yiglau, his arms hanging down, with a wary look on his face. His bent posture seems to be due to old age. The caption reads: ‘Old Geddal who was tortured in the prison of the lamiido.’ This picture can be compared to an earlier picture of Geddal in Endresen’s book from 1965,40 where he is sitting, occupied with making a basket or something else out of straw, looking at the camera with a sceptical expression on his face 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

Source: Torunn Lunde. Barthes 2000 [1980]: 51–55. See also Chapter 1. Endresen (1969): between pp. 64 and 65. Budal (1979: 10). Budal (1962: 35). Endresen (1965): the third page between pp. 80 and 81, on the same page as the picture of a baptism, which is analysed in Chapter 5.

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(Figure 17, lower picture). The caption reads: ‘A former slave, Geddal, is one of those who live at the mission’s home for old people.’ In other words, he was not photographed because of his own abilities and deeds, for example as a maker of straw baskets, but because he illustrated the need for the missionary institution. When familiarizing myself with the collection of 2,000 digitized pictures that has recently been returned to Cameroon and that I analyze in Chapter 9, I discovered to my surprise that the picture of Rundok had been chosen, and not the dignified photograph of Yiglau. Because of the controversy regarding slavery discussed in Chapter 2, the historians who chose the images for the collection did not want to include many photographs of former slaves who were identified as such. Nevertheless, they chose this picture of Rundok and categorized it as a photograph by an unknown photographer of an unknown woman, who was a ‘servant or perhaps a slave’ (serviteur, eventuellement esclave). There are probably pragmatic reasons for the choice of this picture and its caption: it is in the possession of the NMS Archive because it was at some point reused in the main journal without the name of the photographer and the subject. And since Endresen’s books are not read anymore, the two historians did not know the provenance of the picture at the time. This interpretation is supported by the fact that the copy which is included in the digitized collection has been marked with a pencil: Rundok’s face is framed by a square, as if an editor has decided to use only part of the picture (Figure 20). Reproducing just the face would avoid showing her naked breasts and the humbleness of her appearance, and make the picture look new as well. The editors of the journal often reuse pictures in this way, by cropping them. All the photographs in this particular book by Endresen are individually credited.41 He was in this book more conscientious about acknowledging his fellow missionaries’ photographic work than most of his colleagues, both before and after him. Since Endresen is credited with having taken the photograph of Rundok, I think that we can be fairly confident that this picture actually Figure 20. Rundok. Reproduced from the digitized collection. was taken by him. Looking at Endresen’s many published pictures of former slaves, it seems to me that the photographic occasions behind his pictures are usually characterized by the gratitude of the subjects. He did not go very close to people, he often photographed them full-length, and they seem to know that they are being photographed. Judging from his photographs, they had the time to arrange themselves 41. Endresen (1965) is different in this respect. In that book the photographers are not credited.

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somewhat, given the simplicity of their circumstances. With the exception of the picture of Rundok, I think that Endresen represented his subjects with dignity. At the same time, when looking at these photographs, I also see considerable emotional and relational distance between the photographer and the people he photographed. In the fiftieth anniversary history book of the mission to Cameroon two pictures of former slaves are presented.42 No names are given, but one of the pictures which just shows his face and his shoulders is perhaps a picture of Geddal. He is wearing a soft pointed cap and is smiling at the camera.43 The other photograph shows an old woman with bare feet sitting on a stool with a small cat in her arms. She is well dressed in a white blouse, an African skirt and a pastel-coloured headscarf, seemingly fully aware of the camera. Her expression is wary, but relaxed. I first thought that the photographic subject was Rundok, but I learned in Cameroon that this woman is Volaou, whose responsibility it was to sweep the area in front of the Norwegian school.44 In contrast to Endresen, who took care to present the photographic subjects as former slaves, the two pictures are captioned ‘Old slaves’. When Volaou and (perhaps) Geddal were photographed, they were not slaves any more, but in order to elicit pity in Norway, the mission here focused on this former identity.

To Let Them Pose or Not, That Is the Question: Olaf Ellingsen and Jan Dalland in 1960 Almost forty years after Flatland published his book, eighteen years after Røst, and six years after Endresen’ first book, the professional studio photographer Olaf Ellingsen and Jan Dalland, the leader of the NMS film office, made a two-month trip to Cameroon for the mission in 1960. Late that year, Dalland wrote a book about the expedition. When I started reading the mission books from Cameroon, this one stood out because filming and photography is its main theme.45 It is entitled ‘With a Camera in Africa’ (Med kamera i Afrika) and was published the same year as the expedition.46 On the cover we see a hand coloured picture of the two men dressed in sun helmets, shirts, long trousers and shoes, standing in front of a round African house with a thatched roof. They are busy setting up a camera on a 42. Larsen (1973: 59). See Chapter 6 and the Bibliography. I have not been able to find out who the photographers were. 43. Olaf Ellingsen took a full-figure picture of Geddal in 1960, while Geddal was sitting on the ground. The picture is published in Lode (1990) and Jørgensen (1992, II). In both captions he is anonymously presented as a former slave. 44. Source: Yacoubou Luc and Satou Marthe. As a young man, Yacoubou Luc fed her and looked after her during the last weeks of her life. 45. Dalland (1960). 46. Dalland’s book about the Cameroon trip was written during a few months of seclusion in the summer of 1960. The leaders of the NMS wanted it on the market in good time for Norwegian Christmas shoppers. Source: Nils Kristian Høimyr. Jan Dalland died in 1962, two years after the film expedition to Cameroon, and Olaf Ellingsen died in 1981. After the expedition to Cameroon, Ellingsen also went on film expeditions for the NMS to Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan, together with Fritjof Sandnes and Ottar Birkeli. Later on the NMS, in cooperation with the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) and various firms (such as Sebra film), produced several documentary films about Cameroon and other places. Ellingsen’s films and photographs from Cameroon are located in the NMS Archive.

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Figure 21. Book cover. Olaf Ellingsen, Jan Dalland, and an anonymous boy. Reproduced from Dalland 1960.

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tripod, while a little barefooted black boy, dressed in a knee-length tunic, is watching them with curiosity (Figure 21). The cover focuses on the two men as the main characters of the story, and is composed in terms of white male adults versus a black child, as well as modern Western technology versus traditional Africa. In the foreword Dalland expresses the hope that his impressions ‘will contribute to the creation of a stronger solidarity between the African on the threshold of a new era and us, who so undeservedly have benefited from the blessing of a rich Christian heritage’. The book is illustrated with thirty-six photographs taken by Ellingsen during their stay in Cameroon. Apart from the cover, one or the other of the two travellers seems to be present in five small pictures, but this is only acknowledged in one of the captions. None of these five pictures are dignified but rather serve to visually substantiate the fact that they had actually been to Africa, and thus to give authority to Dalland’s testimony. Their visual presentation of self is thus closer to those of Gudrun Røst and Konstanse Raen than to the way Karl Flatland and Halfdan Endresen represented their public selves. In Chapter 8, I present the feature film they made during this trip. Here I want to discuss Dalland’s reflections on how he and Ellingsen approached the people that they wanted to film and photograph. As a professional photographer, Ellingsen took pictures that the missionaries would never have imagined taking, for example a close-up of a missionary washing his feet. More importantly, his ideas about what constitutes a good photograph led him to try to capture people in action. Given the ideas of Cameroonians about how they wanted to be represented, Ellingsen and Dalland’s specific documentary ideas represented a challenge. In the book about the expedition, Dalland shares the following reflections about their methods when they photographed people at the market in Ngaoundéré: Everybody had something to sell, but we were out to film and take snap shots. Many people were nevertheless more than willing to be photographed. They gathered around the victim we had selected, in order to be part of the photo. Banga photo! Banga photo! Take a picture of me, too, they shouted. Others were more difficult to take pictures of. They had a special ability to disappear behind the walls of the harem or cover themselves up. Therefore we taught ourselves a diversionary maneuver. While I chatted with a group and waved the camera about, Ellingsen was standing nearby with his face turned to us, looking interested. But in reality he had his camera lens under his arm, and shot a portrait in a totally different direction. They of course could not know that he had a reflex camera. In this way he obtained many delightful pictures of unsuspecting spectators.47

Later on, they were filming a man who had climbed an oil palm tree to gather its fruits: Again it turned out to be important to be two persons to do the filming. Our otherwise fine subject knew nothing about filming, and saw it as his duty to stand stiff as a log before the camera, both on the ground and under the top of the palm tree. However much I shouted, and the missionary interpreted, the man did not take his eyes off the lens. We had to use all kinds of tricks to make him stop his staring. Finally we confused him with diverse apparatuses, so that he did not quite know by which one he was to let himself be hypnotized. At last he loosened up, relaxed and concentrated upon his primary task. But then I had talked to him in well-formulated Norwegian, the missionary and the evangelist had interpreted, and the others had willingly assisted as best they could.48 47. Dalland (1960: 97–98). 48. Ibid., 118.

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Figure 22. Wives of a lamiido. Photographer: Olaf Ellingsen 1960. Reproduced from Dalland (1960).

As in Flatland’s book, some subjects (the women who disappear behind the ‘harem walls’) did not want to be photographed at all, and their pictures are quite literally taken. Figure 22 is perhaps one of these pictures. On the other hand, quite a few of their subjects actually wanted to be photographed, but in a dignified pose. However, for Dalland and Ellingsen, taking good pictures was most of all a question of avoiding specific forms of posing. The passages quoted above therefore bear witness to a struggle about how to represent local people in photographs. On one level this involves the definition of the situation, and on another level the different

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views about the proper representation of a person. While the Cameroonians wanted to arrange themselves in serious poses, looking directly at the camera, Ellingsen and Dalland wanted them not to notice the camera and continue their activities. In other words, Ellingsen tried to take pictures in which the presence of the photographer was invisible to the spectator in Norway. The idea was to present local life as ‘naturally’ as possible, to portray life in Cameroon as if the photographer was not present This way of letting the photographer and the spectator become voyeurs into other people’s lives is part of a widespread ideology of documentaries which is also close to contemporary anthropological thinking about how to write up fieldwork experiences. The ideal is to be a fly on the wall and to catch the essence of a person or a group. This ideology underpins much photographic practice all over the world and is not limited to photography in Africa. It is, nevertheless, generally related to the perception of cultural and/or class differences. Documentary photography in the West historically originated as the documentation of the lives of certain people (often lower class) for others (often belonging to the middle and upper classes). The two photographers were not interested in learning about local ideas about good photographs and ways of posing. They took pictures for a different audience and with different goals, and knew best what a good picture should look like for their purposes. In spite of very different underlying ideologies, the situations depicted in these quotes from Dalland’s book are therefore to some extent similar to the first example discussed in this chapter: there was no negotiation, and therefore no photographic occasion. Like Flatland’s Danish colleague, Ellingsen and Dalland fooled their subjects in order to get the pictures they wanted, and, like Flatland, they saw nothing wrong in this. Flatland and Dalland express themselves based on doxic self-evidence on this point. But the examples also show that similar practices can be underpinned by different ideologies. In Dalland’s text, the refusal to take the wishes of local people seriously does not seem to build on a culture-specific and ethnocentric contrast between superstition and rationality, but on a contrast between a particular professional vision of what constitutes a good documentary photograph and local people’s views of how one stages oneself in front of a camera. The Cameroonians wanted to be represented in ways which are similar to the most prestigious studio portraits of leading male missionaries in the history books: they wanted to appear serious and formal. In addition, they want to appear in their full length. As already noted, the picture of Yiglau in Endresen’s last book (Figure 19) illustrates a Cameroonian way of posing, which is not far from the studio portrait of the four celebrated pioneer missionaries (Figure 12). The main difference is the wish to be photographed full figure which is often present in Cameroon. Ellingsen and Dalland, for their part, wanted to break these conventions of posing and present pictures in which the subjects were unaware of the camera, acting out selected everyday tasks. In this kind of documentary photography, the photographer uses the faces and bodies of the photographic subjects as raw material and seeks to turn away the subjects’ gaze. The alternative is to use Endresen’s approach, letting people present themselves by creating a negotiated photographic occasion. The direct gaze and the pose potentially create a form of symbolic equality, even when the photographer and the subjects do not know each other. Thus, I define a negotiated photographic occasion as one in which the photographer, even if briefly, expresses in word or deed who s/he is to the photographic subjects, and the subjects are allowed both the possibility to refuse to be photographed and to arrange themselves according to their own standards of how they want

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to be represented. The photographer and the subject share a moment in time; sometimes that is all, and sometimes this moment builds on and/or leads to other shared moments. In both cases, the picture is the result of a certain degree of negotiated cooperation. Compared to the missionaries at the time (with their better local knowledge and more developed relationships to at least some of their photographic subjects), Ellingsen and Dalland did not possess much knowledge about local Cameroonian life and also had not developed the necessary trust to get close to people. When photographing people that the missionaries did not know, subterfuge replaced human relationships, as it were. Besides being a professional and gifted photographer, Ellingsen thus also had the advantage of not having to stay on after the pictures were taken. As a visitor, he could catch people off guard and take pictures in unusual situations. In this way, a photographer who is just briefly visiting is sometimes able and willing to take more ‘daring’ photographs than one who lives with the people. There are thus interesting tensions between trust and audacity in documentary photography. The missionaries had to continue cooperation with local people after filming and photographing them and needed to some extent to take the feelings of the people who were close to them into account. Ellingsen’s vision, in particular, resulted in pictures that probably were easier for contemporary Norwegian viewers to identify with than pictures taken by local photographers. See, for example, the portrait of Paul Ngonom, the first man to be baptized by the Norwegian missionaries in Cameroon (Figure 23).49 Originally a Muslim, he was baptized together with his son Hamadou Joseph in 1930, five years after ‘the pioneer missionaries’ arrived. In the photograph of him taken by Olaf Ellingsen in 1960, Ngonom is looking not at the camera but to the left of it, his eyes fixed on the horizon with visionary determination. I think that to many European viewers this picture represents him as strong in a kind and unthreatening way; at least it does so for me. Nevertheless, when showing this photograph to Norwegians, I have also encountered people who interpret his expression as ‘hard’. But when I showed the picture to Figure 23. Paul Ngonom. Photographer: Olaf Ellingsen 1960. Muslim Cameroonians, what they Reproduced from Dalland (1960). first noticed was a little smile on 49. His name is most often spelled Gonom in the missionary literature. Just like the missionaries’ texts, my analysis is doomed to make mistakes in the uncertain terrain of how to spell Cameroonian names correctly. I apologize for that.

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Ngonom’s lips. These differences of reading perhaps illustrate the tendency of people unfamiliar with Africans to see them as threatening, and thus also the mission’s need to try to counteract that impression in their photography for propaganda purposes. If the supporters were to be moved to see the picture of Ngonom, ‘The first fruit’, as a picture of hope and success, the photographer needed to humanize him in their eyes. In contrast to the picture of Ngonom, the photographs of Muslim sultans and their men show them as fierce, looking directly into the camera (Figure 24). Dalland was also more daring than other missionaries when it came to editing the photographs and providing them with captions in his book. By juxtaposing contrasting pictures he created specific effects. Dalland’s editing sometimes involved a heavy-handed decontextualization and recontextualization in order to fit the preconceptions of the viewers and the propaganda aims of the mission. For example, he juxtaposed two pictures showing a woman and her child (Figure 25, lower pictures). The head of the first woman is covered by both a headscarf and a large piece of cloth. Her boy seems to be dressed in rags. The second woman wears a European summer dress and no headscarf on her elaborate hairdo. The first woman is looking straight at the camera with a wary expression; her 6 to 7-year-old boy is also looking at the camera, but with a friendly expression. The second woman is smiling, showing her teeth, and is looking at something to the left of the frame; her baby is looking in the same direction with a more guarded expression. The caption reads: ‘Two mothers: One is withdrawn and watchful. The other, Numjal, is secure and happy.’ The implication is that the first woman is a heathen while the second is a Christian. As the first local female catechist, Numjal is a well-known woman in the church in Cameroon. She is also mentioned in the main body of Dalland’s text (as well as in many other publications)50 as an exceptional person whom Dalland and Ellingsen came to know during their visit. I assume that the other woman is somebody they did not know and who was reluctant to have her picture taken. It thus seems to me that the author used the contrasting ambiance of two very different photographic occasions to formulate a visual and written message about the contrast between two religious universes: a difference in social relations between photographer and photographic subject is transformed visually and verbally into a contrast between Christianity and heathenism. The Christian woman is named in the caption; the heathen woman is anonymous. Neither of the children is named. One of Ellingsen’s most frequently reproduced photographs from Cameroon is a fulllength figure of a herdsman with a stick in his hand and a straw hat on his head (Figure 26). He is dressed in a long dark tunic or robe, with a coloured shawl around his neck, a piece of cloth over his shoulders, and amulets hanging from his waist. In Dalland’s book about the journey, the picture takes up a whole page and is placed to the right of one of a black man in a dark suit on the top of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, with the white (Catholic) Sacré Coeur church crowning the hill in the background. The man in the suit is facing the camera, while the herdsman was photographed from behind. The caption of the picture to the left is: ‘At the Arc de Triomphe in Paris we met this modern African with the highest level of education 50. In this picture she is photographed with her son Sambo. Like other Cameroonian names, her name can be spelled in different ways – in the missionary literature her name is sometimes spelled Numjal, sometimes Numdjal, sometimes Numnjal and sometimes Noumdjal. Solveig Bjøru wrote a novel based on her life (Bjøru 1968). See also Ivar Barane’s striking photograph of Numjal as an old woman in Misjonstidende April 2003: 7.

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Figure 24. A lamiido and praying Muslims. Photographer: Olaf Ellingsen, 1960. Reproduced from Dalland (1960).

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Figure 25. Upper picture : A missionary meets Muslims. Lower pictures : Two women and their children. The woman to the right is Numjal. Photographer: Olaf Ellingsen 1960. Reproduced from Dalland (1960).

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Figure 26. Anonymous Mbororo herdsman. Photographer: Olaf Ellingsen, 1960. Reproduced from Dalland (1960).

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attainable in the West, searching for something –.’ The picture to the right carries the caption: ‘In Africa we found this lonely wanderer who suspiciously listens to ‘the church bell’. In his belt he carries powerful magic remedies.’51 The captions thus underline both the contrasts and the similarities between the two pictures. Most notably, both men are black, both are dressed in dark clothes, and both are portrayed as (unconsciously) searching for the Christian truth. At the same time, one is modern and has been educated in the West while the other relies on ‘powerful magic remedies’. To me, the photograph of the herdsman and its caption illustrate well how pictures are presented in ways which make them part of the missionary stories to their audiences in Norway. The man is photographed from behind; this portrays him as ‘lonesome’ and ‘listening’. He is construed as a ‘wanderer’ and thus as somebody who is unconsciously searching for something, although ‘with suspicion’. His ‘magic remedies’ are contrasted to the improvised church bell, like heathenism to salvation. In other words, the strength of the story that the mission wants to tell influenced the reading of the picture, in spite of the considerable difference between what we can observe in the picture and the interpretation in the caption. The ‘lonely wanderer’ is apparently a Mbororo herdsman, belonging to a nomadic subgroup of the Muslim Fulani. The Mbororo were barely or only lightly Islamicized in 1960 when this picture was taken, probably without him being aware of the camera. He is looking from a distance at a house and a man in a white gown. There is a resonance between this picture and the visualizations of ‘The call from Macedonia’ discussed in Chapter 3. As spectators we are standing behind someone we are led to believe is a local heathen, and with him we are watching the activities of a person dressed in white in the background who apparently administers God’s words. Dalland’s use of Ellingsen’s pictures in his book seems to be in harmony with Ellingsen’s own ideas about what he wanted his pictures to achieve. In an interview in the main NMS journal in 1961, the interviewer asked him what he primarily wanted to show through his photographs. Ellingsen responded: ‘I have tried to show the missionaries at work and the difference between the people who live as heathens and those who are in touch with the mission, who have been educated and who have come to believe in God.’52 In other words, Ellingsen wanted to demonstrate the value of the mission by emphasizing the difference between heathens and Christians in terms of education and faith. In this iconography, a Christian ideally smiles happily while the unconverted Muslim shows a defiant facial expression and resentful body language. As noted earlier, Endresen also wanted to take photographs in which the former slaves were ‘beaming with joy’. A smiling face can symbolize the positive inner changes brought about by conversion (freedom from fear because one is in the hands of God), the gratitude of local people because of the medical or economic help they receive from the mission, as well as their participation in modern enlightened life. However, putting this iconography into practice was and is not easy, because, as already noted, people in Northern Cameroon do not normally smile showing their teeth when they are posing for a photograph. This is now changing, at least among some young educated Cameroonians. They allow a more varied set of facial expressions and tend to think that people’s faces often have an empty expression in old photographs.53 51. Dalland (1960: between pp. 40 and 41). 52. Olaf Ellingsen, interviewed by Helene Freilem in Norsk misjonstidende 18 March 1961, 10: 5. 53. Source: Daouda Ja’e.

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Because some of the missionary pictures were ‘stolen’, they to some degree expose the subjects. Nevertheless, Ellingsen’s work resulted in many beautiful pictures which focus on the subjects’ humanity and encourage the European viewer to identify with them. It seems to me that Ellingsen was fascinated by the people he encountered and often tried to capture what he saw as their moral character.54 Sometimes there seems to be a true negotiated photographic occasion behind Ellingsen’s pictures, also concerning the pictures of non-Christians whom he did not know. In his own comments to his famous slide show, Ellingsen sometimes shared with his readers his reflections on the difficulty involved in interpreting the photographs.55 His slide show is constructed as a travel account, and his comments contain similar interpretations of local problems as Dalland’s book. At the same time, his comments also reveal a strong interest in people’s inner life. For example, he asks himself and his audience what specific people in particular life situations might feel and think. A photograph of a beautiful young girl looking directly at the photographer with a serious yet open face (figure 27) was accompanied by the following comment: I lived mostly in Ngaoundéré, in the home of the physician at the mission, and as a physician he was often asked to go to rich people of the Fulani tribe when somebody was ill in their kiras. And once when I accompanied him on one of these sick calls, I asked the Fulani man if I could take some pictures inside his kira, among other things of some of his wives. And then I shot this one. She sat inside this dark mud hut. She came forward and leaned on the door and then sat down. I looked at her. I tried to find out what she must be feeling, what she must be thinking, because of the way she lived. But I could not judge more than you can when you look into her face. Her lot in life is to sit inside this dark mud hole or on this door step, or move around in a courtyard of 40–50 square metres. Down there she sat then, and down there she still sits right now, today, only a few hours from Europe.56

The viewers were invited to see a young pretty woman, beautifully dressed in an impeccable white West African dress and a patterned headscarf, wearing costly jewelry.57 This anonymous 54. Ellingsen also took less humanizing pictures, in particular of Muslim sultans. 55. Tape, slides and print-out at the NMS Archive. The stills of the slide show are less sanitized than the illustrations in Dalland’s book and the film images that I analyse in Chapter 7. For example, the slide show includes pictures of sick people with spectacular illnesses, as well as half-naked people. 56. Transcription of tape, p. 10. 57. When I showed this picture during a guest lecture at the University of Tromsø on 8, March 2005, Ahmadou Mouadjamou from Cameroon, who was then a Master’s student, commented that today, forty-five years after the picture was taken, the fact that her headscarf is made from a different material than the rest of her dress (meaning that the outfit is not made from one pagne), and that her shoulders are bare under the modjaare, would have indicated that she could not be a Fulani Muslim. If we assume that Ellingsen did not mix up his pictures, commenting verbally upon the life conditions of a different woman than the beautiful woman in the photograph, this observation illustrates how local female clothing is changing, even when it remains within a West African paradigm. Fabric for women’s clothing in Northern Cameroon is typically sold as pre-cut pieces of material, 6 yards (ca. 5.5 m) (French: pagne). This piece of material is divided in three pieces: a smaller one to make a blouse and headscarf, and two large pieces, one for a long skirt, while the other (French: pagne; Fulani: modjaare; Mbum: laa) is more versatile and can be worn over the head, to cover the shoulders or be wrapped around the waist. It is also often used to carry a child or to carry goods. When it is used wrapped around the body covering the breasts as the main piece of clothing it is called godel and the headscarf is called sallabi in Fulani. The French term pagne is used for both the whole length of material and the multiuse piece. A complete pagne can also be used to make a kabba and headscarf. The kabba is a long, wide dress, most typically worn by women in the south but also in the north.

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beauty is presented as a victim in the verbal commentary. In a way which is similar to Jorunn Sundby’s written and visual portrait of Aissatou (to be discussed in Chapter 6), there is a marked contrast between the apparent beauty and dignity of the photographic subject and Ellingsen’s interpretation of her life circumstances. Like Aissatou, but unlike the young Mbororo woman (whose pictures I also analyse in Chapter 6), she is looking directly at the camera. But whereas it is possible to trace the point of view of Aissatou in Sundby’s text, the young woman in Ellingsen’s story is silenced. What we have is only Ellingsen’s interpretation of her life conditions in a ‘mud hole’ and a small courtyard. On the basis of his own bleak interpretation of her life conditions Ellingsen says: ‘I could not judge more than you can when you look into her face’… he wonders what she must be feeling, what she must be thinking, and then brings this question home to his audience, who are invited to help him solve the mystery of a woman who, according to him, sits in a dark mud hole and rarely moves from the courtyard. But aside from seeing that she is attractive and looks calm and certainly not upset to be photographed, it is hard to say much about her feelings. The humanizing aspect of portraits like these is based on a not always reliable idea that viewers can project their own feelings and interpretations onto an image, and interpret it for themselves. To me, the sensuous picture and its accompanying narrative indicates Ellingsen’s wish to establish the need of Cameroonian women and provide male protection and care, a theme with a long history in the Christian missions. I assume that contemporary viewers saw a woman who looks serious, innocent and a little reticent. Like many of the young and beautiful women represented by the mission, she looks like a ‘good girl’, embodying moral values and the kind of femininity which I assume that Christian Norwegian viewers could identify with. Ellingsen’s commentary established the need to help women in her situation, while the photograph aimed at getting the audience to identify with her and thus to wish to help. The photograph portrays her as somebody who is worthy of help. It is eloquent, but does not work in mission propaganda without a story, and the accompanying story is indeed strong, but apparently needs the beautiful photograph and the mystery to ignite a fire in Norwegian hearts. The young woman in Figure 27 does look right at the camera. Her youth and serious looks make her less threatening. The Muslim sultan (lamiido) in Figure 24 also looks right at the camera. As a demonized rival, he is allowed to pose. However, most often the subjects are occupied with their own particular concerns. I assume that the strategy of having them avert their gaze made the Cameroonians appear less threatening and the photographs more comforting to European audiences. Depending on their activities while being photographed, they also often look more passive. In particular, Ellingsen portrayed women and children as timid and vulnerable. He contributed to the initiation of the stage in Norwegian transcultural photography in which photographic portraits were used more emphatically to represent moral character.58

58. See Figure 58, the portrait of a young man taken by John Steinar Dale in Sundby (1991), discussed in Chapter 7. The Muslim Saïdou is looking away from the camera with a pensive expression on his face, just like Paul Ngonom in Ellingsen’s picture.

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Figure 27. Anonymous woman. Photographer: Olaf Ellingsen, 1960. Reproduced from Ellingsen’s slide show.

Instead of Carrying a Gun: Jostein Budal in 1979 Jostein Budal was in Cameroon to establish and work in a dental clinic between 1957 and 1975, and he used his time there effectively. Based on his years in Ngaoundéré, he published two individual memoirs containing glimpses of his experiences while in Cameroon.59 Both books are without illustrations.60 But he did take photographs, and a few times in his books he mentions his photography.61 For example, I found the quote which introduces this chapter in his first book. In this short passage, he relates how he got a glimpse of the suspicions of local people concerning what the missionaries did with the photographs they were taking. The quote suggests that some Cameroonians might fear ridicule. Laughing implies derision, not 59. Budal 1962, 1979. 60. According to Budal, the publisher did not suggest that the books might be illustrated, and therefore he did not consider this possibility himself. 61. Budal took many pictures connected to his practice as a dentist. These pictures he mostly showed to dentists and medical doctors in Norway, who found them quite sensational: ‘I was able to show tumors and diseases that one never sees in Europe.’ Some of his pictures were published in scientific journals (Den norske tannlægeforenings tidende in 1967–1969, Oral surgery, oral medicine, and oral pathology in 1970). Interestingly, the photographs were made anonymous by covering the eyes of the subject in the US journal – according to Budal, at the suggestion of a professor at the University of Bergen – but not in the Norwegian journal. Budal also took pictures of everyday life and had a few series of slides that he showed to the mission supporters. Source: Jostein Budal.

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pity, and a sense of superiority which carries no moral imperative to reach out to inferiors. This interpretation of photographic intent perhaps applies to more people than the man who is quoted, and is therefore relevant to the understanding of the avoidance of being photographed and the wish to pose formally. Thus, it might be relevant to the contrast between the representation of the suffering of Rundok and the more posed picture of Yiglau. The person quoted by Budal is, of course, right in the sense that whoever is the photographer, the photographic subjects actually lose control of their own images when photographed. At the same time, he is wrong when he believes that the effect pursued by missionaries in their publications for the Norwegian audience is laughter. The missionaries want their audiences to be concerned, but, as with laughter, there is also paternalism associated with invitations to pity. In his second book, called ‘People in Cameroon’ (Menneske i Kamerun), Budal twice mentions that he went hunting with a group, but while the others carried weapons, he just carried a camera. For him, going hunting was just a pretext for being outdoors; for looking at the trees, the forest, the trail and the grass. He was not interested in wildlife hunting per se.62 In his account, the camera is thus implicitly compared to the guns by being explicitly opposed to them. His comparison between cameras and guns is interesting, since theorists of photography, such as Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, have sometimes considered photography to be a mild form of violence. Sontag, in particular, stressed the fatal attractions of photography by comparing the camera to a gun and taking pictures to ‘a soft murder’: ‘To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.’63 Roland Barthes, on the other hand, focused more on the photographer than on the camera itself. The photographer knows that the camera is a weapon, and this is why he wants to give life to his motives.64 It is thus no mere coincidence that in English, films and photographs are shot, not just taken. For me, as a reader in the twenty-first century, this association between cameras and guns symbolizes the critical difference as well as the links between the mission and the colonial administration, and between the benevolence of the mission and development aid, on the one hand, and the cruder structures of neocolonial and neoliberal capitalism, on the other.

A Variety of Photographic Situations With eyes tutored by the textual comments in the individual memoirs, the pictures assume new layers of meaning. In this chapter I have tried to approach the variety of photographic occasions and nonoccasions through the references to the taking of photographs that I have found in the published books about Cameroon. As we have seen, there is no linear historical development from the nonoccasion to the negotiated occasion, or from not naming African 62. Budal (1979: 29, 101). 63. Sontag (1977): 14–15. See also Pinney (1992: 75). In the photographic safari, which is now replacing the hunting safari, people have switched from bullets to film. Nevertheless, I show in the chapters to come that interesting missionary photographs have been taken within relations of care and trust. I therefore see Sontag’s precise observations as one-sided. 64. Barthes (2000 [1980]).

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individuals to naming them, but rather several coexisting sets of visions, photographic ideologies and kinds of social relations. In particular, I want to emphasize three main sorts of photographic situation. The first is the stolen nonoccasion in which the subject has been deliberately fooled. The second is the snapshot nonoccasion – the situation in which the photographic subject is unaware of the camera. The third is the true photographic occasion, the negotiated situation, which is often based on the subject’s gratitude to and the trust of the photographer and the mission. In none of the situations discussed in this chapter is there reciprocity in the sense that the photographer shared the images with the subjects – in other words that the subject at least got to see and perhaps to own the photograph. In Chapter 6, I will show a photograph that the missionary shared with his photographic subject and her husband. Although I have presented here different photographic practices by using individual practitioners as examples, it seems to me that quite a few photographers from time to time engage in all these kinds of situation. In spite of the missionaries’ general wish to be good people, and in spite of their good intentions, my analysis has revealed a certain insensitivity in some photographic situations – and thus a potential for anger and resentment among the photographic subjects.

5 GOD’S SOWERS AND REAPERS ‘A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seed fell on the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and it sprang up quickly, since it had no depth of soil. And when the sun rose, it was scorched; and since it had no root, it withered away. Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain. Other seed fell into good soil and brought forth grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirty and sixty and a hundredfold.’ And he said, ‘Let anyone with ears to hear listen!’ … ‘The sower sows the word. These are the words on the path where the word is sown: when they hear, Satan immediately comes and takes away the word that is sown in them. And these are the ones sown on rocky ground: when they hear the word they immediately receive it with joy. But they have no root, and endure only for a while; then when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately they fall away. And others are those sown among the thorns; these are the ones who hear the word, but cares of the world, and the lure of wealth, and the desire for other things come in and choke the word, and it yields nothing. And these are the ones sown on good soil: they hear the word and accept it and bear fruit, thirty and sixty and a hundredfold.’ Mark 4: 3–20. The Parable of the Sower The many passages in the Bible about sowing and harvesting have inspired the missionary imagination. All through the twentieth century, missionary publications have used the central

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biblical metaphors of planting the seed, toiling in the field and harvesting the crop. For example, in Chapter 3, I discussed the drawing of the male sower on the frontispiece of the main NMS magazine between 1911 and 1925 (Figure 6). Many NMS missionaries identified with the activities involved in running a farm, and the biblical images about the toil of the field therefore spoke to them in a direct way. This identification was no doubt reinforced by the location of the mission field in Cameroon, far from the sea.1 In this chapter, I therefore use pictures and texts from both the individual memoirs and the history volumes in order to examine how the metaphors of sowing and harvesting have inspired the missionaries’ representations of their work. The biblical passages about sowing and harvesting aid me in making a preliminary categorization of the most typical subject matter in the published missionary photographs from Cameroon. Photographs and texts are meant to document both the need for the mission and its results to the supporters at home. The aim of many of the photographs is therefore to present the work of the mission’s three main branches – church, education (including the radio transmissions in Fulani and a few agricultural projects), and the work among the sick (including a dental clinic). In terms of the biblical passages about sowing and harvesting, the mission needed to tell its supporters about the soil, the everyday toil, and the fruits of the harvest.

The Historical Notions of the ‘Mission Field’ and the ‘Heathens’ As sowers and harvesters of the word of God, the missionaries conceive of the regions where they work as ‘mission fields’ (misjonsmark in Norwegian). As with the term ‘heathenism’ and many other key terms in the missionary literature, this word has recently become controversial, and some people would now prefer to talk instead about their ‘sister churches’ or ‘the national churches’ rather than about their various ‘mission fields’. But, as historical concepts, the ‘mission field’ provides a framework for investigating the missionary pictures and lends them some coherence. This applies to both the evangelizing and development communicative modalities. Etymologically, the term mark (in misjonsmark) comes from the Old Norse word for the outfields, connected to the marking of the boundaries around properties. In comparison, the cultivated field was called a hage in Old Norse. The missionaries’ use of the word mark as a field to be cultivated can be compared to the anthropological notions of ‘field’ and ‘fieldwork’, which in Norwegian are translated as felt (from German) and feltarbeid. In Norwegian, the word mark is more concrete and more closely related to cultivation than the more abstract notion of felt. Both words are, nevertheless, also associated with war in expressions such as slagmark (‘battlefield’), feltmarskalk (‘field marshal’), feltprest (‘army chaplain’) and feltsykehus (‘field hospital’) . The cultivation of the outfield and the ‘planting of congregations’ (plante menigheter)2 are powerful metaphors in the missionary publications. Interestingly, the words culture, 1. One memoir from Cameroon has a visualization of the metaphor of the harvest on its cover. The title of the book is ‘The seed grain and the power of germination: Years in Africa’ (Såkornet og spirekrafta: År i Afrika), and on the cover is a photograph of ‘a spike of durra [sorghum], the most common grain in North-Cameroon’ (Bue 1992). 2. Raen (1987: 196, 203).

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cultivation and religious cult have the same etymological roots as colonization and colonialism. All these terms derive from the same Latin verb colo, whose past participle is cultus and whose future participle is culturus, thus indicating a constellation of values and practices connected to occupying land and cultivating the earth. But, unlike the colonial powers, the missions were not interested in the territories per se but in the people who lived there. Since the people they work with are tied to the land, the missions also took an interest in the territory of the mission field. The field is thus both a metaphor for the souls of the people who live on the land and the concrete context for the missionary work. It has been conceived as an area of responsibility as well as possibility. In the narratives in the missionary books, the mission field is discussed in terms of direction (inside/outside, up/down), light (light/darkness)3 and time (modernity/tradition). Seen from Norway, the mission field is ‘out there’. The relation between Norway and Africa is often conceived as a contrast between ‘home’ and ‘the outside’ or between ‘here at home’ and ‘down there’ or ‘out there’ (between hjemme and ute or her hjemme and der nede or der ute). Similarly, the relations between the main station and the outstations and between all the stations and ‘the bush’ (French: la brousse) are also conceived in terms of contrasts between spatial and directional hierarchies. Evangelizing has involved travelling ever farther ‘out’ from the station. At the same time, going ‘out’ from the station was also conceived as moving ‘into heathenism’ and also as going ‘downwards’ and backwards in time. To go ‘far out’ was to ‘dive deep down’ into premodern time. In line with other metaphors in the Western tradition, ‘up’ thus often connotes goodness and light while ‘down’ connotes heathenism and darkness. Evangelization was understood as a question of penetration (to the depths of heathenism) as well as of expansion and appropriation of African spaces (to reach out to the furthermost villages). Conceptions of space are thus connected to conceptions of time: the farther away from the station – in other words, the more outside, and also more into the wilderness of heathenism – the more backwards in time into the perceived timelessness of African ‘tradition’. Moreover, the farther out into the villages one went, the more one travelled ‘down into the darkness of heathenism’. These expressions connect the metaphors of space, time, and light and darkness, so central to missionary thinking throughout the twentieth century. The dual meanings of ‘field’ – both concrete and metaphoric – are present in the following typical statements about the mission field in Northern Cameroon: ‘As a natural landscape it is barren, compared to the savannah further to the North and the tropical forest in Southern Cameroon. Spiritually speaking it seemed to be a stony country.’4 ‘A very hard mission field’;5 a place where ‘the field is hard and the receptivity for the Gospel is small’.6 As I discuss in Chapter 7, the stones on the ground were the politically dominant Muslims. ‘The parable of the sower’, cited at the beginning of this chapter, is but one of many passages in the Bible about sowing and harvesting. Some of the other sources of inspiration include the following verses:

3. See for example, Nelson (1996); Bue (1992: 73) about the Christian religion as ‘light in the darkness’ (lys i mørket). 4. Bue (1992: 10). 5. Raen (1989: 70). 6. Raen (1987: 198).

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Then Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and curing every disease and every sickness. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, ‘The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into this harvest.’ (Matthew 9: 35–38. The Harvest Is Great, the Laborers Few) He also said, ‘With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.’ (Mark 4: 30–32. The Parable of the Mustard Seed)

The biblical passages about sowing and harvesting thus helped the missionaries communicate with their readers in Norway. For example, Beate Øglænd tells in her life story that she received the following verse as ‘nourishment’ (nistemat) from the Secretary-General of the NMS when she was consecrated as a missionary: ‘And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name, (John 15: 16). For her, all the various mission fields together constitute ‘the global field’ (verdensakeren).7 The various verses about sowing and harvesting helped the missionaries to justify the fact that evangelizing takes time: ‘The person who sows cannot expect to harvest at once.’8 It is in this light – the field as both metaphor and concrete context – that I interpret the concern expressed in the missionary history books over ‘too diffuse boundaries’ and the recurring rivalries with other missions. The NMS cooperated with some Protestant missions, establishing agreements about not encroaching on each other’s fields, and competed fiercely with the Catholic missionaries who first arrived in Northern Cameroon around 1946.9 But while the historical narratives often focus on the regulation of boundaries, and thus echo the scramble for land in colonial discourse on this point, there are relatively few pictures in the missionary books of panoramic views and landscapes.10 And European Catholics figure prominently as rivals in the historical texts, but not in the photographs. In fact, the publications from Cameroon contain next to no photographs of Catholic missionaries,

7. Øglænd (1988: 43). 8. Solbjørg Pilskog in (Grimstad 1997: 31). 9. Lode (1990). According to Mikaelsson (2000), negative descriptions of Catholics constitute a trait of the Norwegian missionary books, regardless of the missionary organization and where it worked in the world. However, from about 1990, a change in the Norwegian attitude to the Catholics can be discerned in the missionary texts from Cameroon. From then on, several authors tell about shared social events and some cooperation. See Solbjørg Pilskog (in Grimstad 1997: 107); Nissen (1999: 58, 69–70, 74); Raen (1990: 58). However, most authors seem to refer to the same man in the context of cooperation, the German-French Catholic missionary Cosmas Dietrich. 10. Nevertheless, the first history book starts out with a picture of a Cameroonian landscape and also contains other pictures of landscapes (Nikolaisen and Endresen 1949). Perhaps this can be related to the fact that establishing the boundaries of their field was regarded as an especially important task in the first decades.

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churches, hospitals or schools.11 In contemporary conceptions, they were rivals and apparently did not belong to the field.12 Seen from one perspective, more or less all the photographs taken by the missionaries are pictures of the mission field. Seen from another perspective, they are at the same time also pictures of the missionaries themselves. Many photographs include both missionaries and local people as photographic subjects, and these pictures are particularly interesting for the analysis of how they represented their relationship to the people they worked with. But whether particular missionaries are visible within the frame or not, the photographer is always at least indirectly present in the space of representation created by his or her pictures. As we have seen in the previous chapters, the study of the missionary pictures indicates qualities in their relationships to both the people they worked with and the viewers at home. In the very first issue of Focus, the newsletter about missionary film and photography for Nordic missionaries, which was published between 1953 and 1963, the ‘missionary picture’ was defined as ‘partly the geographical area where the mission works (in other words the environment and everything it might contain), partly the people in this area (heathens and Christians in all kinds of situations), partly the missionary work itself, in its different branches’.13 With the possible exception of pictures of the geographical area, which are actually not very prominent in the published books, I think this is a general description which accurately reproduces the aims of the missionaries when taking and publishing photographs. In addition to the notion of the mission field, the notion of the heathens (hedningene) is central here. These two concepts are connected in the sense that the field was largely meaningful in terms of the people in it, and among them the heathens who were still ‘not reached’.14 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, heathen is originally a Germanic word for ‘someone inhabiting open country, savage’. It is perhaps a loose translation of the Latin word paganus. In the publications from Cameroon heathens are not only contrasted to Christians but also to Muslims. The main characteristic of the heathens in this literature is that they are fearful because they worship ‘false gods’ (avguder). On the one hand, the missions were there to save (and civilize) the heathens. On the other hand, in order to sustain and communicate the need for this task, both to themselves and to the audience at home, the heathens had to remain foreign. Improved knowledge about them, their religious practices and their worldviews might damage and complicate the missionaries’ belief that they were being called by the Africans. For the missions, reliable first-hand information and relevant knowledge about the points of view of the heathens were thus simultaneously both necessary (in order to 11. Exceptions are a picture of the interior of ‘the Catholic Cathedral in Bamenda’ in Aarhaug (1985: 119), a landscape picture in Grimstad (1997: 108), showing a distant mountain with the farm of the retired Catholic missionary Cosmas Dietrich close at the top. In Sundby (1991: 10–11, 33–34), two Catholic young men are portrayed. 12. Kåre Lode remembers a missionary conference held in 1973. The Catholics in Gadjiwan had suggested that Catholics and Protestants in Gadjiwan should share one postman instead of employing one each. One of the missionaries spoke up strongly against the proposal – he wanted no cooperation whatsoever with the Catholics. 13. Hjalmar Brundin in Focus 1953. See also Chapter 2. 14. In the more recent literature, the word ‘heathenism’ is usually replaced by ‘animism’. But see, for example, Grimstad (1997: 16, 36, 74, 75).

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understand them so as to save them) and unwanted (because it might invalidate the missionaries’ understanding of them as uncivilized and in deep spiritual need).15 I thus see an interesting tension between involvement and detachment in the missionaries’ relationship to the heathens. For them, saving the Africans was paramount, and this took place within a largely unacknowledged and taken-for-granted relationship of power and dominance.

Pictures from Missionary Conferences Every year, all the missionaries in one mission field gathered for a conference in order to discuss their ongoing work and make new plans. On these occasions, pictures were taken, and some of these pictures were published in the books about the history of the mission. Figure 28 has been reproduced twice in the official history volumes. It shows six white men, four white women, two black men, a white and a black little girl. The picture was taken in 1944, during the Second World War, a period of much hardship for the Norwegian missionaries, who were cut off from their headquarters. This is an official picture because of the particular photographic occasion (the missionary conference) and because of the solemn context of publication in the mission’s own history books from 1949 and 1992.16

Figure 28. Missionary conference 1944 in Ngaoundéré. Reproduced from Jørgensen (1992, II). 15. When analysing the missionaries’ relationship to the heathens, I am inspired by Jacob Lothe’s (2001) discussion of J.M. Coetzee’s use of the notion of ‘the Barbarians’. 16. The picture was published in the NMS’s first history book, with the caption ‘Gathered for a missionary conference in Ngaoundéré’ (Nikolaisen and Endresen 1949: 343). By mentioning no names, this caption avoids omitting any.

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In terms of compositional parallels and contrasts, the photograph can be regarded as an almost classic group picture. At the same time, it represents contemporary social categories and boundaries in an almost graphic way. The subjects are posing on the steps of a house at the mission station in Ngaoundéré. We see three white women sitting together on the stairs, with the two little girls interposed between them. The white girl is looking at the black girl, who is looking at the photographer. The fourth woman is sitting to the right, one step above the other women, looking self-consciously at the camera. The six white men are standing behind the women and children. One of the men (Halfdan Endresen, the superintendent) is standing one step below the others. The white adults in the picture are thus visually organized according to gender, and the slight variation in their distribution does not disturb the marked visual separation of the social categories. Two black men are sitting on the same step as the two children, one step below the three women, neatly dressed in shorts and aprons. Their clothes thus distinguish them from the white adults, who seem to be in their best clothes. In this official context, their shorts and aprons indicate their status as servants doing the cooking and the laundry. Their lack of long trousers marks them as ‘boys’, attenuating, as it were, their adult masculinity. Moreover, their aprons mark them as men working under the supervision of the married women. I do not know why they were asked to be part of the picture, but I assume that the photographer wanted to add an African flavour to the composition or to show that the missionaries considered them part of the team. Their presence marks the picture, as it were, as a picture taken in Africa. By representing the people for whom the whites had arrived in Africa, they embody the need for the missionaries and justify their presence. The two black men do not appear together as a category, but are sitting symmetrically on each side of the group. Both are sitting in a crouched position, which perhaps indicates that they recognize their inferior status. Visually, the two almost identical figures hold the composition together, like bookends. The white men distance themselves from the women, the children and the two black men by standing upright while all the others are sitting, by standing together in a group, and by standing away from and above them on the stairs. The women and children are sitting apart from the black men. The visual relationship between the women and the two black men is thus characterized by closeness of position and pose in relation to the white men as well as conspicuous distance. The women do not set themselves off from the little girls, and there is no distinction in placement between the white and the black girl. It perhaps played a role for their closeness to the women that both children were girls. The two girls are symmetrically located, close to the women but separated from each other, like the black men. Both girls are dressed in European clothes, and I assume that the white girl was the child of one of the missionary couples while the black girl was a foster child. Although the white girl is looking at the black girl almost as if she is surprised that she is there, in this picture, the girls visually have the same status. Age is therefore a social category which is relevant to the analysis of the picture. The colour difference of the girls seems to be regarded as unproblematic because of their gender and young age. The people in the picture have arranged themselves – or were arranged by the photographer – in a human composition which visually spells out the underlying social categories and boundaries, as well as their complicated overlaps. Assuming that the underlying

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codes were just perceived to be ‘natural’ and not explicitly verbalized, I read the picture as emblematic of the contemporary social meanings of gender, age, ‘race’ and class.17 The continued self-evidence of these underlying codes in a photograph from 1944 is supported by the caption to the picture when it was republished in 1992. The caption tells the readers that the photograph was taken at the missionary conference in 1944, and then proceeds to list the names of all the white adults. The names indicate that there are four married couples in the group. This was the period just before the many single female missionaries arrived in this field. The presence of the two girls and the two black men sitting on the lowest step in the picture is not acknowledged in the caption. They thus function as an anonymous stage set in the adult white missionary presentation of self. The pragmatic reason for this omission is no doubt that, in 1992, the Norwegian editors did not know the names of the black men and the children. But this does not explain why the omission itself was not acknowledged. I assume that the main reason for this later omission – in this and many, many other captions – is precisely the continued naturalized self-evidence of the underlying social categories and boundaries. There is thus an important analytical distinction to be made between intentions and underlying codes. Moreover, I think that the missionary tradition of publication also plays a role. As noted in Chapter 2, the presentation of reflexivity, doubt and regret has little place in this tradition. Especially in the history volumes, the tone is usually impersonal and authoritative. Even though male servants were actually called ‘boys’ in 1944 (and later), in 1992, social categories and boundaries would not be directly verbalized as I have done here. They were, and to some extent still are, regarded as obvious. While the picture on the steps is carefully composed, many pictures from the annual conferences were never published. When all the missionaries were gathered together, they had a great deal of fun. Beate Øglænd’s description of a ‘Norwegian evening’ at a missionary conference is rich: But the high point of the conference was always the Norwegian evening, – one for the grown-ups and one for the children. I remember particularly well one year when we were invited to a party at the summer pasture (seterfest). The members of the organizing committee had borrowed a few sheep that were tied outside ‘the cottage at the summer pasture’. The hosts were dressed in national costumes, and the milkmaids in everyday national costumes, richly fitted with pillows here and there in order to look ‘full-bosomed’. Inside the house they had laid long tables with high stacks of big pieces of flat bread. And they served potato cakes, sausage made of mutton, cured leg of mutton and 17. There are a few photographs from missionary conferences are published in which the missionaries grouped themselves as families. One such picture from 1935, presumably taken on the same stairway, is published in Oseland (1946) and Lode (1990) (a book for the Cameroonian audience). This picture shows four white couples and three white children, all mentioned by name in the caption in Lode (1990). Everybody except a little boy is sitting on the stairs, the husbands close to their own wives and children, with the exception of Halfdan Endresen, who is sitting beside his wife at the top of the stairs, partly turned away from her, and with more distance between them than the other couples. For this official occasion he chose to pose in a formal way, and posing in a formal way to him apparently meant physical distance between himself and his wife and partly turning away from her. The Oseland family is sitting close together in the middle of the picture. The wife has a baby in her lap. A little boy is standing between his parents, a little closer to his father than to his mother. In the caption, however, both children are referred to in terms of who their mother is. The caption thus corrects the visual impression, as it were, by reassigning the little boy to his mother.

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ham. On the walls hang strainers, churns; they had gotten hold of a separator, yes even milk pails, in order to create the ambiance of a Norwegian summer dairy, there under the Equator. And the ambiance just became more and more high spirited. The nationals were not invited because of the language, but they experienced the party as seen from the outside. And on one occasion the church president said: – ‘I have never seen the missionaries drink, but they act as if they have.’ We had Norwegian music the whole night by means of tapes, and that made the illusion of an evening at a real summer pasture just perfect.18

Snapshots from similar kinds of events can be found in the private albums and the slide collections of former missionaries, but not in their books for the general public. In the private collections, especially of pictures taken by female missionaries, I have seen almost unending pages of photographs of people gathered around Norwegian-style tables laid with coffee and cake, with embroidered tablecloths, china and napkins. These photographs were probably regarded as uninteresting for the general public in Norway. What interested the public, the missionaries apparently assumed, was how the missionaries succeeded in changing the lives of Africans, not how the Norwegians lived among themselves in the mission field. There are just a few exceptions to this in the history books, and these are pictures such as the one analyzed above, showing a group of people posing formally during the conference.

Pictures of Transport Photographs of means of transportation are closely related to everyday toil. Like most of the missionary pictures, they have an obvious practical grounding, although they sometimes contain a rich symbolic potential. The more pragmatic reason for including pictures of transportation in the books is the location of the mission field in Cameroon, far from the coast, and its vast expanse, its weak infrastructure, as well as seasonal variations such as the flooding of roads in the rainy season. These conditions mean that the transportation of goods and people is a central aspect of the everyday lives of the missionaries. The journey to the field is long, and travel in the region is strenuous. Even today, it often takes quite some time to get there from the coast because the airplanes often do not work and the trains are delayed. No wonder, then, that transportation pictures constitute a recurrent photographic subject matter in many publications for the supporters in Norway. For many years, before local catechists and evangelists took over all of this work, the missionaries travelled out from the station and into the rural areas in order to preach the Gospel and evangelize. Many transportation pictures can therefore be interpreted as a way to visualize evangelization. The pictures of transportation illustrate the history of the means of transport in Cameroon. Some pictures represent simple modes of transport, for example two men carrying a sick person using a piece of cloth and a stick. Other pictures show missionaries walking beside black men who are carrying all their equipment.19 During the early mission period, missionaries, like other colonials, were carried by black bearers in a palanquin, a transportation device which disappeared in the 1960s. The carrying chair can particularly be regarded as a visualization of the inequality between missionaries and their servants. They also 18. Øglænd (1988: 69). 19. Dalland (1960: between pp. 136 and 137).

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travelled by horse, bicycle and car to sow the Word. While the palanquin has been consigned to history, many of the former means of transportation have survived and are currently used as alternatives. For example, the retired missionary Solbjørg Pilskog is shown as somebody who uses both a Toyota and a bicycle to get around. I see the picture of her on her old Norwegian bicycle in the book about her work in Cameroon as a strong symbol of the modesty and simplicity of her life. In the NMS’s anniversary history book from 1973, there is a photograph of a truck heavily laden with logs.20 A male missionary in a sun helmet is standing by the door of the truck, while black workers on the ground and on the top of the logs are loading and securing the cargo. The photograph is captioned ‘Transport’. Like some of the other transportation photographs, this is an ambiguous picture of everyday toil, since the Africans are doing the most strenuous work. Other photographs are representations of adventure. For example, the cover of one memoir shows a car in the middle of a flooded road – a transportation picture signifying the hardships of missionary life and the backwardness of the region.21 In some accounts, the car is celebrated as a signal of modernity. Sometimes even a photograph of a car with no people is included.22 As in many other nonmissionary contexts, cars are associated with masculinity. But in the book about former missionary Beate Øglænd, it transpires that, although she was a single woman and therefore not entitled to have a car in the 1960s, she nevertheless owned one, because her wealthy father had given her one. In her narrative, she praises the car highly.23 By focusing on it (at a time when a car was still considered a luxury in Norway and when relatively few women knew how to drive), she presents herself as a modern, mobile woman. Thus, transportation pictures can visualize many different aspects of meaning: distance from Norway, adventure, self-sacrifice, modesty, technological modernity and evangelization.

Pictures of School Classes and Formal Gatherings The books contain many formal pictures of white missionaries posing with groups of black people, such as school classes. These are from formal occasions, for example a graduation day. They are not very different from Norwegian class pictures, but in this context they have different meanings and serve different functions. In the group pictures, everybody in the group is standing together, signalling the missionaries’ control of the situation ‘out there’. Sometimes there is no white person within the frame. But he or she is nevertheless indirectly present as the 20. 21. 22. 23.

Larsen (1973). Nissen (1999). In Jørgensen (1992, I: 114) there is a picture of ‘the first car’ in this mission field. Her book is without pictures, but in the NMS journal from 1966, I found a two-page interview with her, presenting her as a single woman and the leader of a clinic 2 kilometres from Galim. The article is illustrated with three photographs. One is a close-up and shows her holding a black toddler in her arms. She is smiling at the toddler while the child looks at the camera. The other two are full-length figures. They show her with the large car that has a central position in her book. In one picture, she is standing behind the car in a sleeveless summer dress. In the next picture, the back doors of the car are now open, and many boxes and cans have been placed in front of her. The photographs of her beside her car present her as a modern woman, while the one of her with the child emphasize her feminine side. Norsk Misjonstidende February 1966, 7 (19): 4–5.

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force that has helped produce the transformation from a heathen life to the civilized Christian life that the spectator can witness in the picture. When there are white people within the frame, they are usually emphasized – by their location in the composition and by the caption. Most typically, we see a group of Africans with a white missionary teacher standing at the side or in the middle. The white missionary is singled out as the most interesting person to the supporters in Norway, and the others can remain anonymous. He or she is presented as somebody who has given his/her time and knowledge to black Africans, as a day-to-day worker in the garden of the Lord, and as a harvester at the end of the school year. Both women and men were teachers of such classes, and I have found no significant differences between how male and female missionaries are positioned in relation to the their students. The ordered class pictures represent the work which has been done within missionary institutions such as primary schools, the Protestant high school, the Bible school, the theological seminary, courses for the wives of the students at the theological seminary and so on. On all levels the mission also tried to give some education to the wives of the male students, in order for them to be able to take care of their home and support their husband in his tasks (Figure 29). There is a hierarchy of schools, with the theological seminary educating pastors at the apex, followed by the Bible schools, and with the kindergarten at the bottom. Those studying to become pastors are sometimes named, but not their wives and other young people and children. Black children are usually not named in the captions. Age and gender are thus again crucial organizing principles.

Figure 29. Two missionaries (Else Marie Farestad and Borghild Ruud) and the anonymous wives of the students at the Bible school. Photographer: Borghild Ruud. Reproduced from Jørgensen (1992, II).

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The class pictures serve a very different function compared to similar Norwegian ones. As is most often the case, the Cameroonian photographs were not primarily directed at the students themselves but at the mission’s supporters in Norway. The audience at home did not know the unnamed students, only the named missionary for whom they had made sacrifices to ‘send out’. Such photographs have been regarded as necessary in the presentations of the mission, especially in the history books. I interpret the relatively large number of such pictures as documentation to the supporters in Norway of the toil of the missionaries and to show that their money and prayers actually bore fruit.

Pictures of Missionary Buildings Similarly, I read the pictures of missionary buildings as representing the results of their toils, as petrified work, as it were. On the face of it, photographs of buildings, school classes and cars are not very exciting. They seem, nevertheless, to constitute a crucial background for the representations of the sacrifice and the hard work of the missionaries. From the very first books about Cameroon, one of the most common subject matters of the missionary photographs is the buildings they have helped erect in the field.24 The buildings provide a way of measuring the missionaries’ effort by showing some of its most tangible and visible results. Thus, the photographs of the buildings helped the supporters to ‘see with their own eyes’ that their prayers and donations helped produce something of lasting material and spiritual value. Like the pictures of the school classes and gatherings, these pictures can be interpreted as visible human monuments to hard work, faith, spiritual achievement and divine grace. I read them as visualizations both of the gifts that the mission brought to local people and of the harvest of their work, all in one photograph. All three main branches of missionary work are represented in the large number of pictures of missionary buildings – the churches, the schools at various levels, the hospital in Ngaoundéré, the clinics, institutions for people with leprosy, and the home for orphaned children. Like the school classes, the buildings constitute a hierarchy, with the churches at the apex, as places of worship and symbols of the results of evangelization. Often there are no people in the photographs of buildings – their existence is implied, as it were. Figure 18, the lower picture, shows the station church in Ngaoundéré. Figure 54, the upper picture, shows the mission station in Tibati. Figure 30 shows a photograph by Olaf Ellingsen, published in several contexts.25 In Jan Dalland’s book from 1960, the caption reads: ‘The church for the people with leprosy at Ngaoubela is the most beautiful of the whole field.’26 On close inspection, we can see four people outside the church, but they look small and insignificant in relation to the building. In the 1992 history volumes, on the opposite page to the photograph of the missionary conference analysed above, is a colour picture the same size, but taken from further away, of a similar house with three black people in African dress on the steps: a man and a woman and

24. See Nikolaisen (1937). 25. Dalland (1960: between pp. 136 and 137); Larsen (1973: 10). 26. Dalland (1960: between pp. 136 and 137). See also Chapter 4 and Chapter 8.

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Figure 30. The church at Ngaoubela. Photographer: Olaf Ellingsen, 1960. Here reproduced from Larsen (1973).

a girl (Figure 31).27 The man and the woman are sitting close together affectionately on the stairs. The girl is standing. In front of them is an open black umbrella. The woman is wearing bright red shoes that seem to be brand new. Perhaps she has bought new shoes because she was to be photographed? All three of them seem to be happy. Referring back to the main text, the caption reads as follows: ‘The clinic in Galim which was built by Kristian Skulberg.’ The point of publishing the picture is to show the building to the Norwegian readers. The presence of the three Cameroonians on the steps is not acknowledged in the caption, nor are the people who actually built the clinic. As in many other pictures, local people nevertheless left their traces. Usually the pictures of buildings have precise and informative captions telling the reader what kind of building this is and exactly where it is located, grounding the photographs in a way which adds to their role as factual evidence about the toil of the missionaries and the fruits of their labour. For example, the upper picture in figure 54 carries the short but informative caption: ‘Tibati mission station.’ In the captions or in the accompanying text, the missionary who ‘built’ the structure is often mentioned by name. Some pictures show the

27. According to Yacoubou Luc, the man in the picture is a Christian who worked as an aide at the hospital in Galim. The woman is his wife. I do not know who the girl is.

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Figure 31. Three anonymous Cameroonians in front of the clinic in Galim. Photographer: Jan Sandsmark. Reproduced from Jørgensen ed. (1992 II).

process of construction, with captions of the form: ‘[male name] when building [structure]’.28 For example, Figure 32 shows a picture with two missionaries in the foreground and two construction workers and two women in the background. The caption says: ‘Ove Aasen was responsible for most of the construction work at the hospital in Ngaoundéré. He and Halfdan Endresen are standing in front of one of the huts for the patients’.29 The black labourers function visually like props for the missionary presentation of self as construction manager transforming the material and spiritual landscape. By conforming to the contemporary European middle-class convention that the person who built the structure is the one who designed it or was in charge of the practical work, the labour of numerous African workers is not verbally acknowledged. In a manual for new Cameroon missionaries from 1974, the author argues that the missionaries need good houses, both for health reasons and in order to serve as a good example for the Africans.30 Through their European-style buildings, the 28. See, for example, Nikolaisen (1937). He presents a picture of three men building a house with a caption mentioning only the white missionary: ‘Thrana builds a house.’ 29. Jørgensen (1992, II: 38). As I have shown earlier, Halfdan Endresen generally took great care to project dignified representations of himself to the public. Interestingly, this published photograph shows him dressed informally and not posing. The picture was published many years after his death. 30. Aud Skagestad, 1974, Orienteringsbok for kamerunmisjonærer, Stavanger: Det Norske Misjonsselskap, p. 50.

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Figure 32. Two missionaries (Ove Aasen and Halfdan Endresen) in the foreground with anonymous construction workers and women in the background. Photographer: Olaf Ellingsen, 1960. Reproduced from Jørgensen ed. (1992 II).

mission inserted itself in the foreign land and changed the way it looked. While vernacular buildings are usually round, missionary buildings are rectangular. Thus, the photographs of the rectangular buildings visually introduce modernity in a perceived timeless African ‘tradition’ through the straightening of curves.

Pictures of the Work among the Sick The pictures representing the third branch of missionary work – the work among the sick – are more varied than the pictures of school classes and buildings. A distinction can perhaps be drawn between medical technology and human caring. It is easier to represent modern medical technologies than relationships of care. Still pictures of vaccinations and operations do not lend themselves easily to picturing goodness. There are nevertheless quite a few such pictures in the books. Some photographs focus on the work of doctors and nurses during operations or while using specific medical technologies, and at any point in time they present a modern and updated picture of the mission. Other photographs portray the missionaries

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dealing with the suffering of sick people in less technologically advanced ways. There are also pictures in which the work of a black male nurse is presented or the close cooperation between a missionary and a Cameroonian during an operation.31 To some extent, the increasing wish to visually represent African workers in the church meant making the white female missionaries and missionary wives less visible. Some pictures just show sick people in need of treatment. It is useful here to distinguish between pictures of the sick as representations of illnesses and pictures of the sick as representations of the field more generally. I will show in the next chapter that some of the most interesting portraits of non-Christians were taken by nurses and midwives of their patients.32 The missionaries were documenting, and therefore inevitably also exposing, African peoples. When attempting to make what they saw as heathen spiritual poverty palpable and concrete for the supportive public at home, they sometimes visualized it as spectacular bodily illnesses and material poverty. Material need and physical illness could potentially be used strategically as metaphors or analogies for the assumed spiritual need the missionaries were there to satisfy. Such photographs inspired a combination of fascination and loathing in the Norwegian audience. Even though dead children are seldom shown (which indicates some restraint and self-censure), this strategy has developed into its own caricature as used by international NGOs involved in humanitarian aid and the mass media. The representations of Africa in the media are dominated by wars and famines. Compared to, for example, shocking pictures of emaciated children in the mass media, I find that Norwegian missionaries have used such visual strategies modestly. Part of the reason may be that the mission has intuitively understood that if pictures with much pathos do not inspire the intended emotions, they might weaken the ethos (the trustworthiness) of the mission in the eyes of the spectators. The difference is considerable between, on the one hand, the photographs of untreated illnesses in the NMS Archive and in missionaries’ slide series33 and, on the other hand, what has been published in books and magazines.34

31. For example, on p. 62 of Larsen (1973) is a picture of a male nurse treating a woman. Caption: ’Menya Paul is dressing a bandage on a leprous person.’ On the opposite page (p. 63) is a noncaptioned photograph of two persons, one black and one white, performing an operation. Since the black man is the tallest of the two, he appears visually as the one most in control. 32. In Chapter 7, I discuss how the care of the sick was successfully represented in a missionary feature film, in particular Guri Sola’s careful hands when examining a little girl. Moving pictures often lend themselves more easily to representing care and tacit knowledge than still photographs. 33. For example, Bernt Bjaanes’ slides in the NMS archive, as well as the series of slides taken by Jostein Budal, Jon Fosse and Aksel Aarhaug (in private ownership). The slides of Olaf Ellingsen also contain pictures of people with spectacular illnesses. A booklet for study groups about the work among leprous people in Cameroon (Trønderaksjonen for spedalskehospitalet i Kamerun, 1960) contains two pictures of people with leprosy, one of them a close-up. However, their small size probably counteracted their shocking effect. Some missionaries refused to take pictures of sick people. For example, Kåre Lode claims that he has never taken such pictures: ‘When I have been in a situation which demands much background knowledge in order to interpret it correctly, I have not taken that picture. I have taken many pictures that I have shown publicly over the years, and only a few that I keep to myself.’ Source: Kåre Lode. 34. A missionary who worked in a Cameroonian hospital – and therefore had ample opportunity to photograph sick people – was criticized by medical doctors in the Norwegian audience for showing extremely gruesome slides of untreated illnesses. Source: Erik Larsen.

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Figure 33. Cover of Henny Waala Nelson’s memoir (1996), showing the author and anonymous children.

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‘Let the little children come to me’ Diaconal work also includes the running of homes for old people and for orphaned children. While there are few pictures of the elderly, except of former slaves as discussed in Chapter 4, several photographs have been published showing a white missionary with one or more black children in his or her arms.35 Henny Waala Nelson chose one such picture for the cover of her 1996 book of memoirs in which she is sitting and embracing many small children (Figure 33).36 Aksel Aarhaug picked a picture of himself playing with a toddler for the back cover of his book (Figure 34). Similar motifs have also been used on the cover of the main NMS

Figure 34. Back cover of Aarhaug (1985), showing the authorand an anonymous child. 35. For example: Else Strand in Jørgensen (1992: 64); Marit Fosse and Dalland or Ellingsen between pp. 136 and 137 in Dalland (1960); Guri Sola in Olaf Ellingsen’s slide series; in the digitized collection PCD: 2618-103, five female missionaries, each with a black child in her lap, picture taken in 1963. 36. According to Yacoubou Luc, who grew up in the orphanage in Yoko, he is the smallest toddler in Henny Waala’s (later Henny Waala Nelson) arms. His well-qualified guess is that the others are, from left to right: Joseph, Pauline, Bafia, Mbone and Etienne. Henny Waala Nelson relates how Yacoubou came to the orphanage in Nelson (1996: 82–83).

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journal.37 A particularly striking picture shows Ingeborg Mosand, who was the head of the orphanage in Yoko between 1950 and 1954, with some of the children in her care (Figure 35).38 The picture has not been published, except in the digitized collection that I discuss in

Figure 35. Ingeborg Mosand with anonymous children at the orphanage in Yoko between 1950 and 1954. Photographer: Karen Ulland (Haarr). Reproduced from the digitized collection at the courtesy of the NMS Archive. 37. For example, the cover of Misjonstidende no. 10 (Årbok 1991) shows an adult white man holding a black child, about two years old, in his arms. 38. The digitized collection PCD: 2966-046, photographer Karen Ulland (Haarr). Ingeborg Mosand later worked in Ngaoundéré from 1955 to 1959 and in Mbé from 1961 to1964. According to Yacoubou Luc, the children probably are, from left to right: Pauline, Bebé, unknown, Etienne and Njoka. The child in Ingeborg Mosand’s arms is probably Houmkren.

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Chapter 9. This type of photograph could be dismissed as just another version of a well used motif. To attract attention, politicians the world over seek to be photographed while holding or relating to a small child. I nevertheless find that in the missionary context this motif carries many meanings, some of them similar to its political use and some not. In terms of the metaphors of the field and the harvest, small children represent both the receptive soil in which to sow the Word and the future harvest. The interest in children is supported by the passage in the Bible called ‘Jesus blesses little children’: People were bringing even infants to him that he might touch them; and when the disciples saw it, they sternly ordered them not to do it. But Jesus called for them and said, ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly, I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.’ (Luke 18: 15–17)39

According to Sandy Brewer, the most popular picture of Christ ever produced in Britain is a picture called The Hope of the World, painted in 1915 by Harold Copping. It was commissioned and published for the Sunday school movement by the London Missionary Society (LMS) and became the focus of unparalleled sales to every continent of the world and to most of the nations in Europe (Figure 36).40 Inspired by earlier visualizations of the passage, it shows a white Jesus sitting while holding one child on his knee, and surrounded by four other children of different appearance, symbolizing the people in the various regions of the world where LMS missionaries were active. The aim of the picture was to ‘gather up the spirit of Christianity into a single picture that would appeal to young and old alike, but especially the boys and the girls’.41 Moreover, Brewer writes: ‘Significantly, the disciples and mothers were omitted from the scene, so that in The Hope of the World Jesus’ love for children is not mediated through a dialogue with others – the children become integral to the composition rather than simply functioning as the mechanism for illustrating the moral of the story.’42 The picture became firmly established in the public’s opinion as the missionary image. The photographs of Henny Waala Nelson and Ingeborg Mosand surrounded by children are composed in a way which indicates that the photographers and the subjects might have been inspired by earlier Christian visualizations, in particular The Hope of the World.43 These are pictures which represent unconditional love and goodness to Western viewers, and which also establishe visually the missionaries’ identification with a particular conception of Jesus. The emblematic value of this motif is connected to the place of children and childhood in modern Western culture. Little children symbolize innocence, the need to be nurtured, authenticity and hope for the future. The smallness and helplessness of young children in relation to adults makes concrete the imagined calling and pleading for salvation. The motif represents what is perceived as a natural hierarchy in a way that makes paternalism selfevident and unquestionable. Moreover, it is a good symbol of the caring aspects of missionary work. Both male and female missionaries have been photographed with a black child in their 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

See also Matthew 19: 13–15 and Mark 10: 13–16. Brewer 2005: 111. I thank Sandy Brewer for making a copy of The Hope of the World available to me. Quoted in Brewer (2005: 108). Ibid.: 109. According to Yacoubou Luc, he saw The Hope of the World in the orphanage where he grew up.

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Figure 36. Famous painting made in 1915 by Harold Copping, commissioned by the London Missionary Society and called The Hope of the World. Reproduced from a Sunday school picture issued by the London Missionary Society.

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arms (but I assume that not all male missionaries would be comfortable in such a situation). Some of the pictures of women with children are particularly touching to me. Looking at these pictures, it is clear that Ingeborg Mosand and Henny Waala were close to the children with whom they were photographed. In the missionary books, the pictures of missionaries embracing small children are complemented both by the orderly class pictures that I discussed above, on the one hand, and pictures of crowds of black children, on the other. All these photographs were usually taken at school. Many photographs show groups of children or individual children without their parents or another adult (e.g. the picture in Henny Waala Nelson’s album, analysed in Chapter 3). Just as the landscapes seemed to be empty to the conquering colonizers, so the children seem to be without parents in these representations.44 In a simultaneously analogical and metaphorical reading, one could say that the missionaries present themselves visually as the parents of Africa’s small children. Moreover, on a less representative and more personal level, the bodies of little children could represent innocent sensuousness for pietistic Christians. In some of the memoirs, the authors allow themselves to praise the beauty of the little black bodies in ways they never do about adult subjects. For example, Henny Waala Nelson describes the comfort she received from having the many ‘lovely brown curleyheads’ in her lap.45 There is a form of innocence in these descriptions of indulgence in sensuous pleasure which is probably connected to the fact that these experiences took place before the era of public suspicion concerning paedophilia and sexual abuse of children. My research on pictures of individual missionaries holding small children brings to light certain lacunae in the published missionary photographs: in the missionary books from Cameroon, there are almost no photographs of male missionaries shown as family men. Male missionaries are presented through studio portraits and professional pictures from the field, following bourgeois middle-class conventions. When they do appear with children, these are black children, not their own.46 As noted earlier, most of the male missionaries were married to well-educated women who performed important educational and medical tasks in the field, and most of them had children. Those who lived in the outstations had to send their children to the boarding school in Ngaoundéré from the age of seven. Thus, there are sometimes painful family stories behind the published pictures.47 As discussed above in the analysis of the picture from the 1944 conference, when posing for pictures together with their wives, the missionaries often chose to present themselves in close association with other men, and at some distance from their wives. As shown in the 44. In Chapter 6, I continue the discussion of the representational use of pictures of women and children. 45. Nelson (1996: 8). Nelson’s book was published in 1996, but I assume that most of it was written earlier. At the time of the narrated events, her name was Henny Waala. 46. However, there seems to be a difference between the main NMS magazine and the books in this respect. In the magazine, the missionaries are more often represented as families leaving or reentering Norway. Perhaps the reason is that the books are considered to be more solemn and long-lasting, while the magazine is considered to be more ephemeral and less formal? When I visited the second floor of the main building of the NMS in Stavanger in 2004, the informal bulletin board was full of family photographs. 47. The only Cameroon missionary who has written about this pain of separation from his child is Bjørn Bue (1992). It is not mentioned in any of the official history books. See also Lande (1979: 56–60). Nissen (1999 is one of the few missionary authors who tells the readers about his family life.

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discussion of Halfdan Endresen’s pictures in Chapter 4, he included many photographs of himself posing with other men, and no picture of himself with his wife. Moreover, the captions to the two pictures in which his wife was present did not acknowledge her presence. By writing their roles as fathers and husbands out of the missionary history, the male missionaries exemplify the ways twentieth- century discourse in general has largely written fathers out of families and fathering. Many photographs of male missionaries present a specific form of masculinity, detached from family life and its responsibilities. This practice conforms to the public presentation of contemporary European men in other middle-class professions. Maybe the male missionaries felt that they had to conform strictly to these ideals since being a missionary was regarded by some as a ‘soft’ (and feminized) profession in relation to the ‘hard’ professions active in colonialism and developmentalism, such as military men, engineers and businessmen. What nevertheless makes these practices special to a present-day feminist eye is that they contradict the family ideology that the Protestant missionaries relentlessly sought to transmit to the Africans, as well as the recurrent descriptions of Cameroonian family life as ‘cold’ in the missionary literature. The male missionaries probably saw themselves as caring family men, but this self-image is not visible in the pictures they presented to the Norwegian public. They came to the field to teach the locals about monogamy and bourgeois family life, but nevertheless presented themselves visually and in writing without their families. In the visual representations, caring for a family is fixed as a single-gender practice.

The Joyous Cries of the Harvest: Pictures of Baptism The main goal of the evangelizing – the process of sowing and toiling – is baptism. When local people are baptized, they are described as ‘the harvest’ or ‘the fruits’ in missionary texts. For example, missionary authors tell about their excitement over meeting ‘the first fruits’ of an evangelizing effort. Missionary books generally express much concern about the number of people who are baptized.48 These moments of heightened delight have sometimes been photographed, especially when the ritual was performed outdoors.49 Volume II of the NMS’s official history, published in 1992, contains an almost full-page black-and-white photograph of a baptism.50 We see two people in full length with some plants and trees in the background (Figure 37). The strip of sky above the figures is narrow in relation to the ground in front of them. A white male pastor is holding a book in his left hand. With his right hand he is pouring water over the head of a young woman who is kneeling on a footstool. The water comes from a bowl on a small table with a white tablecloth, solemnly decorated with flowers. The pastor is seen frontally, the young woman from behind. The caption reads as follows: ‘Baptism by Halfdan Endresen in Mbe during his visit to Cameroon in 1966. Photo: Erik Larsen.’

48. This is also the case in the missionary magazines (Vårdal 2002: 78). 49. There is, however, some disagreement among pastors concerning the appropriateness of taking pictures during this sacred ritual, because baptism is a holy sacrament. Both in Norway and in Cameroon some do not accept it. 50. Jørgensen (1992, II: 28). I discuss other pictures from this book in Chapter 6.

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Figure 37. Arranged picture of a baptism. Halfdan Endresen and an anonymous woman. Photographer: Erik Larsen. Reproduced from Jørgensen (1992, II).

In the analysis of this and other missionary pictures, I distinguish analytically between the intentions of the people involved in its production – the photographer and the editor –and the underlying categories and codes that it is possible to establish through an analysis of the composition of the picture and the knowledge at hand about its context. The scene was arranged to be part of a documentary film about the mission’s work against slavery in 1966.

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The film was made by a group called Afrikafilm 66 in close cooperation with the mission. This still picture was taken as a snapshot during the filming by one of the resident missionaries.51 Thus, the picture was taken in 1966 and published in 1992. The picture editor for the book chose it because it is a picture of Halfdan Endresen who, as noted in Chapter 4, has played a central role in the mission’s work as well as in the mission’s writings about its work.52 I interpret the published photograph and its caption in the light of the missionaries’ pragmatic view of photography, their continuous strategies to attract the attention of Norwegian readers, as well as deeply seated visual idioms that are seldom verbalized. I assume that the young woman represents ‘the fruit’, not ‘the soil’, while Pastor Endresen is the harvester. The white male pastor is standing in a dignified, erect and poised manner, while the footstool forces the young black woman to rest simultaneously on her knees and toes in a crouched position which looks uncomfortable, making her bottom protrude. He is ritually dressed in a long white pastoral gown; she is wearing a white European-style dress which seems a bit too small and a bit too childish for a young woman her size. He is wearing shoes, while her feet are bare. The pastor can be visually identified and he is also named in the caption. Since the young woman was photographed from behind, she cannot be identified visually and she is not named in the caption. In this representation, one anonymous woman could be exchanged for another. The transformation from the darkness of heathenism to the light of Christianity is visualized by dressing her in a white dress. For European viewers, the colour of her dress symbolizes innocence, purity and a new life. Like European confirmation gowns and wedding dresses, baptismal dresses are usually white. Thus, the picture again illustrates the centrality of the symbolism of light and darkness (often represented as whiteness and blackness) and how it sometimes visually interferes with the whiteness and blackness of bodies. The black girl is symbolically whitened, as it were, in the process of becoming a Christian. The childish cut of the dress reinforces the symbolism of purity by attenuating her femininity. At the same time, the people responsible for arranging the scene apparently did not provide her with a pair of shoes. This is a point on which Cameroonian and Norwegian perspectives on the picture seem to differ. In my interpretation, her bare feet is a realist detail within the otherwise idealized scene, a visual metaphor for backwardness.53 Her white European clothes remove her from the 51. Source: Erik Larsen. Larsen has altogether taken 2,000–3,000 photographs, and the NMS Archive had been allowed to copy as many as they wanted. He did not know that this particular picture was being used in the 1992 history volumes until he saw the finished books. He was the driver, the interpreter and the local support person for the filmmakers in the group Afrikafilm 66. The film was made by Øystein Stabrun, and was called ‘Does slavery exist in Africa?’ (Finnes det slaveri i Afrika?). It was transmitted by the Norwegian Broadcasting Company (NRK) on 25 September 1966. Since there are no copies of it in the archives of the NRK and the NMS, I have not been able to view this film. According to Erik Larsen, who took the photograph presented as Figure 45, Halfdan Endresen was reluctant to take part in the filming of the scene and had to be persuaded to do it. He agreed to be photographed and filmed because it was an arranged and not a real baptism. Source: Erik Larsen. Nevertheless, there is also a picture of Endresen performing a real baptism in one of his own books (Figure 20, upper picture). 52. Source: Nils Kristian Høimyr. He was the picture editor for Jørgensen (1992). 53. See also Chapter 8. In the film called Sinda, the camera repeatedly zooms in on the bare feet of the characters. Today bare feet are a sign of destitution in Cameroon. I watched a large group of poor beggars in January 2006 (many were old, leprous, blind, without one or more limbs) – most wore flipflops, and only the most destitute were barefoot.

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local context, while her bare feet tie her to it, as it were. However, I have shown this picture to both Christian and Muslim Cameroonians, and several people interpreted the bare feet differently. While a few said that her feet are probably bare because she did not own a pair of shoes, most interpreted it as the young woman, having entered a ritual area, showing respect for the pastor by removing her shoes. While the Muslims referred to removing the shoes as a sign of respect in general, one Christian young man mentioned the passage in the Old Testament called ‘Moses at the burning bush’54: ‘God called to him out of the bush. “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground”.’55 When performing a baptism, the pastor is Christ’s representative on earth in a very direct and substantial sense. There are therefore theological reasons for representing a pastor as a more dignified figure than the person about to be baptized, irrespective of whether they are a woman or a man, young or old, black or white, European or African. In my view, the contrast is visualized redundantly through multiple signals – in terms of gender, age, posture, dress and footwear. The scene is arranged in a way which emphasizes his pastoral dignity and her anonymous humility. To me, this is therefore a powerfully ambiguous picture. It can be read as an idealized representation of the relationship between the missionaries and the Cameroon national church, conceived as the relation between a middle-aged white male pastor and an anonymous young woman. I also find that the visual language relies on a specific visual repertoire of idiomatic dress and body language with long traditions in the Christian world. The bodies of the two humans form a Gothic arc, and the only decorative elements in the composition are the white tablecloth, the flowers, her white dress and his white gown. While the shadows of the trees in the background darken her head, they make his white gown stand out. The composition echoes medieval and early Renaissance art, in contrast to the golden exuberance, extravagance and sensuousness of Baroque art.56 This visual repertoire seems to implicitly shape both the ritual arrangements of the scene and the framing of the photographer. The photograph visualizes the pastor’s particular conception of Jesus and his identification with the role of being in his place. Moreover, if we recall the many visualizations of ‘The call from Macedonia’, the composition of the picture acquires additional symbolic meanings. In both motifs there is a kneeling woman, and in both representations the spectator is positioned behind the woman, looking at the missionary from a similar angle. But in contrast to some of the early visualizations of ‘The call from Macedonia’, in which the ship and the woman on the beach were equally central and active – one pleading and the other responding – the male pastor in this photograph is actively performing the ritual while the woman is submitting to it. In fact, the underlying codes of the arrangement seem to be closer to the later visualizations of ‘The Call from Macedonia’ from 1949 to 1966, in which the woman is passive. This is perhaps not so strange, since this photograph was taken in 1966. Visually and symbolically, the young 54. Exodus 3: 1–13, retold in Acts 7: 30–35. Source: Daouda Ja’e. 55. Exodus 3: 5. 56. The posture of the pastor and the folds of his white gown remind me of depictions of Jesus by artists such as Giotto. However, in many religious paintings from that period and later, Jesus and his disciples have bare feet. Also, in the current Italian Sunday school pictures that are sold in Norwegian religious bookstores, Jesus is usually barefoot.

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woman in the picture of the arranged baptism is presented as the object of the ritual, not as an acting subject. If the spectator had instead been invited to watch her poised engagement in the baptism, the resulting picture would have represented a very different kind of idealization – with different implications for the kinds of interpretations about the relationship between the missionaries and Africans that the Norwegian spectators were invited to make. We cannot judge by looking at Figure 37 how much of the scene’s arrangement is due to the filmmaker’s instructions. What were the instructions to the pastor and the young woman? Why did they introduce the footstool? If she had been kneeling in a more conventional way, on her knees with an erect back and head lowered piously to receive the baptismal water, her body would have been closer to the body of the pastor. Did the filmmakers want to create more visual space and distance between the two of them? Or was this the wish of the woman? Or of Pastor Endresen himself, who perhaps did not find it appropriate to be physically close to a young woman? And to what extent is the composition of this particular photograph also the result of the particular angle and framing by the photographer? How much choice did he have, given that he probably had to be careful not to interfere with the work of the film crew? I do not know the answers to these questions. The most important fact for my study is that, whatever the nature of the photographic situation, this picture was chosen in 1992 as a representation of a baptism in the Cameroonian field in 1966. I assume that the reason the readers were not told that the scene in the photograph was composed is that it closely resembles the way baptisms were performed in real life. Its composition is simpler than some earlier pictures of actual baptisms,57 reducing the number of figures to two – the pastor and the catechumen. However, the historical grounding of the arranged picture – and thus its accuracy as an emblem of the day of the harvest – can be illustrated by a similarly idealized picture of a real-life baptism taken a year before the arranged baptismal scene in 1966 and published by Endresen himself in one of his books (figure 17, upper picture).58 The photograph was taken inside a church, with the congregation in the background of the baptismal scene. It illustrates even more clearly than the arranged picture the identification of the pastor with a particular image of Jesus and the similarities to medieval and Renaissance art. Here, too, we see an almost full-figure profile of Endresen while he is performing the rite, the book in one hand, pouring the baptismal water with the other. His position and expression are similar to the arranged picture, while the male catechumen is seen frontally. But since the small table holding the baptismal water is between him and the camera, all we see is his lowered forehead and his shoulders clothed in white. Here, too, the whiteness of his shirt visually represents the light he has received. This representation of the male catechumen as a man not only without a face but also without a body renders him even more anonymous and also more abstract than the female convert in the arranged scene. In other words, he, too, is not shown as an active individual but rather as an anonymous type who is present in the picture in order to demonstrate the dignity of the missionary and his ‘cries of joy on the day of the harvest’. This interpretation is reinforced by the caption: ‘Superintendent Endresen baptizes a catechumen. A great moment for a missionary pastor.’ The caption and the photograph focus on the success of the white pastor who is known to the 57. Se also Nikolaisen and Endresen (1949, III: 326) for a different picture of a baptism. The digitized collection contains five pictures of baptisms. 58. Endresen (1965: between pp. 80 and 81).

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Norwegian audience rather than on the personal transformation of the unknown black man. The supporters had often worked hard and made sacrifices to help ‘send out’ the missionaries and were interested in learning about how they were doing. Theologically speaking, for the catechumen, baptism is the decisive dividing line between damnation and salvation and between heathenism and Christianity. This is the basis for the joy of the pastor who performed the ritual – and the people in Norway who supported his work by prayers and donations. The similarities between the two pictures indicate that we are witnessing not only how Endresen wanted to be seen by his audience in 1965 but also in the idealized self-presentation of the mission in 1992. This dense symbol focuses on the individuality and dignity of the pastor who represents Jesus, and on evangelizing as a central missionary task.59 The unintended side-effect is a paternalist visual reduction of the new church member to an anonymous, passive type. The picture was produced, published and captioned within communicative relations in which the Norwegian audiences demand a Norwegian angle on Cameroonian events.

God’s Reapers The most notable official visualization explicitly referring to the biblical passages of sowing and harvesting in the material from the NMS is the cover of a booklet from 1977, eleven years after the arranged baptism scene was filmed, and seventeen years after Norwegian development policies were institutionalized as Norad. The booklet presents the society and all its missionaries, not only the missionaries to Cameroon. The title is ‘God’s reapers: The missionaries of the Norwegian Missionary Society 1842–1977’ (Guds høstfolk: Det Norske Misjonsselskaps misjonærer 1842–1977). It contains maps of all their missionary fields during that period (in South Africa, Madagascar, China and Hong Kong, Cameroon, Taiwan, Japan, Ethiopia, Brazil and Thailand) and a list of all their missionaries from the foundation of the society in 1842 until the time of publication.60 Each missionary is listed with name, educational qualifications, and places and periods of work. All the missionaries who were still alive when the booklet was published in 1977 had a small photographic portrait included showing just their face. This booklet was sent to all the subscribers of the magazine in May 1978, accompanied by a letter from the Secretary-General of the NMS, written on his stationary: Dear missionary friends! I am sitting here with a ‘small’, new book in front of me; God’s reapers! Its format is not large! Simply and straightforwardly it presents all of those who have been and are missionaries in the Norwegian Missionary Society. Here is short and concise information about each and every one. I nevertheless think it is a long time since a book has appeared which in reality contains as much as this one.

59. A recent issue of the main journal, Misjonstidende 2005, 5: 33, shows a very similar picture of a baptism in Japan. But significantly, not only the pastor but also the catechumen are named in the text, and both are Japanese. 60. See Det Norske Misjonsselskap (1977), listed in the primary sources sectionnn of the Bibliography.

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Behind every name there is a life in service. Many of them were noticed. It is as if they acquired a kind of aura. But most are unknown, faithful and quiet-mannered servants. When I leaf through this book, which I have already done several times, the mission comes to life. It cannot be conceived without the missionaries. And everything seems so close. There was drudgery! There was much grief and there was much joy! But through it all the sense of service, to be a messenger in the place of Christ, was the most central task. This little book ought to be a part of every mission home. It contains prayer tasks. Here one obtains information about each individual missionary. In the mission it is the individual who counts. There lie the concrete prayer tasks. The individual who is prayed for and the individual who prays! The Norwegian Missionary Society is mailing this book to all the subscribers of Misjonstidende. We want you to receive it because we want you to get to know the missionaries. The book is meant as a gift. But if some people feel that they want to pay for it in order to support the work, we include a payment form. We hope you will enjoy the book. You will enjoy it if you use it!61

The letter asks the subscribers to pray for the missionaries as a messenger in the place of Christ. The competition among missionaries for fame and celebrity is implicitly alluded to by distinguishing between those who ‘obtained a kind of aura around their persons’ and the ‘unknown, faithful and quiet-mannered servants’. The text of the booklet starts off with one of the many passages about sowing and harvesting in the Bible: But I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting. The reaper is already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps’. I sent you to reap that for which you did not labour. Others have laboured, and you have entered into their labour. (John 4: 35–38)

The listed missionaries of former times are the sowers, and the missionaries who are presented both textually and by a photograph are the reapers. On the deep yellow cover of the booklet, with its suggestion of ripe fields, is a black-and-white photograph (Figure 38). It shows two men standing in the middle of a wheat field facing each other. There is no information inside the booklet about who took the picture, where it was taken or who the subjects are. The lack of location and names turns the two men into representative symbols. One man is tall, white, middle-aged and wearing a hat. The other is short, black, young and bareheaded. Interpreted in the light of the booklet’s title, ‘God’s reapers’ and its contents with the names and photographic portraits of white Norwegians, the biblical metaphor is doubly present in this picture. The white man represents the harvesting missionaries, and the black man represents the fruit of their concerted work. The harvest in the picture is thus both of the ripe wheat and the converted black soul. Within this universe of thought, the Christian faith of the black man is the fruit of God’s will and the hard work of the missionaries. The positions of the two men in the picture indicate the nature of their concerns. The middle-aged man is touching a shaft of wheat with his right hand, and the young man is touching one with his left hand. Together their outstretched arms form a half-circle. Both are looking down at the shafts of wheat. They are thus joined in their concern for the concrete harvest. I see the picture as a strong 61. Letter dated 22, May 1978. The Secretary-General was Magne Valen Sendstad.

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image of commonality of interest and concern between two men who work together for the church. There is no modern farm machinery within the frame, and no representation of the buyers of the grain on the capitalist world market, but their presence on the wider scene is indicated by the clothes of the black man. He is dressed in overalls, in other words in the typical EuroAmerican work clothes that are now used on a more or less worldwide basis. His clothes signal modernity and remove him from particular contexts. They help symbolize that this is indeed a new man who has laid his life in the hands of Jesus and has also entered modern technological times with the help of European missionaries. He is not calling out for salvation and waiting anymore but is actively working in the garden of the Lord (probably with the help of a tractor). Figure 38. Cover of a booklet listing NMS missionaries (1977). Modernity, c a p i t a l i s m , Title: ‘God’s reapers: Missionaries of the Norwegian missionary society 1842–1977.’ Christianity and development thus go hand in hand on this cover from 1977. The black man’s work clothes also indicate that he is the one who is carrying out the manual labour. The missionary is not dressed in work clothes, but in something which might pass as European Sunday clothes or leisure clothes – shirt, tie, pullover, trousers and a hat. The hat protects him against the sun and can also perhaps be read as a visual symbol of authority. It replaces, as it were, the former sun helmet. Although he is modestly dressed and therefore does not look like an upper-class person, the missionary definitely does not look as if he is in the middle of performing manual work. The manifest difference in clothing therefore visually indicates a hierarchical relationship between the two men. The missionary seems to be inspecting the field which is about to be harvested, and the black man seems to be expecting orders for when and how this is to be done. In a work hierarchy, they may represent specialist

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and worker, a foreman and his assistant, or a teacher and his student. In addition to the differences in their skin colour and clothing, the differences in age and height underline the hierarchical relationship.62 The difference in height is visually reinforced by the sloping hillside in the background. Clothing, headgear, age and height all point in the same direction – the representation of hierarchy, multiply and redundantly signalled. But the modest clothing and bearing of the missionary renders this hierarchical relationship relatively low key.63 We are thus seeing a visual portrayal of a contradiction in terms, but not in practice: the combination of hierarchy on the one hand and egalitarian modesty on the other. Furthermore, one could argue that there is an implicit gender dimension to the picture: the modern farmer is a man. Underpinning the image is a vision of family life with the husband as the main provider and the wife as mother and housewife. In missionary texts, the missionaries are often conceived metaphorically as ‘fathers’ and ‘mothers’ to African adults. For example, in an article by Else Hanche in the main journal about the Endresens leaving Cameroon after many years of missionary work, we can read the following: ‘It was moving to see the new beautiful church being filled with a Christian congregation who wanted to say goodbye to its dear ‘father and mother.’64 The missionaries went to Africa to serve local people, perceived metaphorically as children needing parental guidance. These metaphors are supported by local ideas. In Cameroon, to call somebody ‘mother’ or ‘father’ is often a way of creating a relationship of respect.65 The relation of the two men in the cover photograph can therefore perhaps be described in terms of both the paternalism of symbolic kinship and a professional vocabulary. Thus, the cover picture of the booklet invites the spectator to see it as a representation of the complex and many-stranded relationship between the missionaries and their human harvest. It turns out that the wheat field in this particular photograph is located in Madagascar, and that the white man is not a missionary but an agricultural expert working for Norad, the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation.66 At the beginning of the 1970s, the mission and Norad cooperated in trying to cultivate wheat in Madagascar, and the white man in the picture is an expert on wheat farming.67 The context of the photograph is the educational agricultural centre at Tombontsoa.68 For my specific research purposes, this historical information adds even more significance to its representational use on the cover of a list of missionaries entitled ‘God’s reapers’. The fact that the editor chose a photograph which shows an easily identifiable agricultural expert for the cover of a booklet listing Norwegian missionaries underlines its symbolic value. It also supports my ideas about the continuities between missionary work and development aid. The picture was taken and used

62. There are, of course, pragmatic reasons for the visual differences. But the reasons ‘behind’ this particular picture do not reduce its emblematic use on the cover of this booklet. 63. On the basis of my long-term research on egalitarian individualism in Norway (Gullestad 1984/2002, 1992, 1996a, 2006a), I am tempted to see this insistent but low-key hierarchy as typical for Northern Europe. 64. Norsk misjonstidende January 1964 11:8. 65. Mestad (2000: 28). 66. Source: Nils Kristian Høimyr. 67. Source: Nils Kristian Høimyr. 68. See Misjonstidende May 1977, 13 (7), where the very same picture was published to illustrate an article about the centre at Tombontsoa.

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in this emblematic way at the historical juncture when the mission both contributed to and adapted itself to the formation of new development ideologies and the institutionalization of development aid. For the mission, this meant redefining, revaluing and upgrading their medical and educational work in relation to pastoral evangelizing. In order to be eligible for governmental support, this work had to be given a definition and justification which was separate from religious evangelizing. Even though the missionary as professional or ‘expert’ is part of a continuous visual repertoire, it is also reasonable to read this picture as an example of the emerging communicative modality that I have heuristically called ‘development’. To some extent, missionaries and experts see their relationships to local people in similar ways, with the implication that an expert can sometimes visually be substituted for a missionary, and vice versa. As a typical picture of cooperation under white male leadership, the picture is a dense symbol with complex and many-layered meanings – indicating intersecting discourses about gender, modernity, capitalism, Christianity and technological development. I thus assume that the photograph was chosen for the cover because it was considered a good emblem of the essential qualities of the relationships between the missions and the field, between Norway and Africa, as conceptualized at the time of its publication and to some extent is still today. Seen together, the pictures of the female missionary surrounded by children, the pastor baptizing the young woman, and the agricultural expert and his male harvest illustrate three aspects of the visual repertoire for the relationships between the mission and the people they work with. Different as they are, all of them represent the paternalist, hierarchical relationship between missionaries and locals in terms of visual redundancy.

Pictures of Missionary Graves The back cover of this booklet listing missionaries carries a photograph of one of the many missionary graves ‘in foreign soil’ (Figure 39). The missionary grave is a photographic topic with complex and painful symbolic significance.69 In contrast to the picture on the cover, this photograph is provided with a caption: ‘One of the many missionary graves. Mrs Anna Hodnefjeld buried at Masinandraina, Madagascar, only 25 years old. Then follows a few lines of a hymn, made by mission pastor Johs. Johnsen “when he heard about the death of this young missionary wife in Antsisrabe in 1908”.’ Furthermore, the caption informs the reader that at the time of the publication of this booklet in 1977 ‘a total of 173 missionaries in NMS’s service had been buried in foreign soil, three of them were sunk into the ocean on their way home to Norway’. Like the photograph on the cover, the photographer is not credited. I interpret this picture, too, as a visualization of the relationship between the missionary and ‘the field’. The pictorial representations of missionary graves support the perception of the missionary work as self-sacrifice, a recurrent theme in this literature. In the words of Beate Øglænd: ‘Yes, the mission demands its sacrifices. In our mission fields there are many graves. 69. The very first NMS book, written by Karl Flatland (and discussed in Chapter 4) contains a picture of one such grave, that of Dr Uhrenholt in Shellem; Flatland (1922: 90). In 1995, the NMS made a documentary film about the many missionary graves, in particular in Madagascar. Its title is: Til døden tro: Norske misjonsgraver utenfor Norge (‘Faithful until death: Norwegian missionary graves outside Norway’). The documentary was made by Nils Kristian Høimyr, Fredrik Moss-Iversen and Erik Tangedal.

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But the wonderful and mysterious thing is that there are always new people who are willing to contribute the necessary sacrifices in order to “see the cross where the idol once stood”.’70 In this quote, the missionaries are not only portrayed as Christ’s messengers, but a parallel is also drawn between the sacrifice of Jesus, who died on the cross for the sins of humanity, and the missionaries’ sacrifice of their lives for the salvation of foreign peoples. Giving one’s life is the ultimate gift and establishes the person as the ultimate donor, as it were. I therefore see the pictures of graves as monuments of sacrifice of the utmost significance for the image of self that the mission wants to project. Moreover, the pictures of graves provide the mission with a specific and hard-earned relationship to the field. There is a characteristic unresolved tension in this, providing both richness of experience and a feeling of rootlessness: many Figure 39. Missionary grave. Back cover of the list of missionaries are buried in ‘foreign missionaries (1977). land’, not where they ‘belong’, at the same time as the mission in a certain sense lays claim to the foreign land by representing visually how they have inserted their dead bodies in it.71 On the one hand, most missionary families work hard to instil in their children the feeling that Norway is their home country, where they have a particular place that they are ‘from’, and where they belong within larger networks of kin.72 On the other hand, the missionaries rooted themselves in the soil of their mission fields by establishing lasting friendships, building solid institutions, and investing profound meanings in the missionary graves. The missionaries who have stayed for many years and learned local languages often feel

70. Øglænd (1988: 92). The line is from the hymn Jesus din søte forening å smake. 71. See also a picture in the digitized collection of the grave of Bertha Reimer, Swiss missionary, dead with her child in 1912. Photographer: Per Arne Aasen in 1951. In present-day Cameroon, burials are becoming ever more important ceremonies. Dead bodies are generally taken to the village where their ancestors came from as an element in political land-rights claims and belonging. 72. Lande (1979: 70, 72).

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more at home in Cameroon than in Norway. When they retire, they sometimes become ‘dry season missionaries’. spending the European winter working in Cameroon. At the same time they also often feel that they never fully become part of the field, neither in the eyes of local people nor in their own. Conceptually and practically, they are still visitors with another ‘homeland’, even though some of them stayed abroad for many, many years, became thoroughly influenced by what they experienced, and were buried in African soil. In the words of Ranveig Kaldhol, the current NMS representative in Cameroon, she feels that whether she is in Norway or Cameroon, she is always to some extent an outsider.

The Missionaries as Generous Donors and Modest Servants The photographs examined in this chapter indicate the extent to which the missionaries are not fully aware of the redundant signalling of inequality in their visual representations. The emblematic photographs indicate the many links, overlaps and boundaries associated with the categories of gender, age, ‘race’ and social class, as self-evidently embodied by photographic subjects and represented by photographers and editors. Usually the missionaries are represented as leaders. Many pictures show conversion or cooperation under white leadership. There is an explicit focus on self-sacrifice and hard work. At the same time, less explicit and seldom acknowledged aspects can be discerned: elitism, competitiveness and gender segregation. When the images which directly or indirectly refer to the passages about the field and the harvest are seen alongside the specific visualizations of ‘The call from Macedonia’ presented in Chapter 3, the field and the soil often, but not always, emerge visually as feminine, while the sower of the word and the fruit often, but not always, emerge as masculine. Moreover, both sets of motifs indicate the existence of missionaries’ dilemmas concerning their roles in relation to the photographic subjects. Many photographs suggest a continuous struggle to find a balance between being generous donors/knowledgeable experts and modest servants; between being adventurous celebrities and everyday workers in the garden of the Lord; as well as between being rooted in Cameroon and being foreigners with a different homeland.

6 WOMEN AND CHILDREN: BOTH MARGINAL AND CENTRAL It is the nature of pleasure to scrutinize its object detail by detail, to take possession of it in both a total and a fragmented fashion. It is an intoxication, a loss of oneself in the other through sight. Malek Alloula1 When analysing the many visualizations of ‘The call from Macedonia’ in Chapter 3, I suggested that images of women have played a special role in information sent by missionaries to their supporters in Norway. The significance of pictures of women was also indicated in the discussion in Chapter 4 of Karl Flatland’s account of how a Danish colleague managed to take a photograph of a reluctant woman who was ‘glowing with health’. As already noted, the missionaries’ use of pictures is not only a question of explicitly formulated ideas and objectives but also of underlying and unquestioned presuppositions and visual codes that have to be carefully examined. In this chapter, I examine more closely the representations of women and children (in particular young boys) in missionary iconography. Starting with a discussion of the very first cover photograph in the missionary magazine, I use the mission history books from 1973 and 1992 and a chapter in a book for young people from 1991 as examples. The NMS history books can be regarded as the most official representations of missionary ideology, and the book for young people is also official in the sense that it was supported by both the Norwegian Missionary Society (NMS) and the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad). All three books are illustrated with many photographs, and they provide clear evidence that black women are not visually underrepresented in the missionary publications, and that they are represented in specific ways which make them simultaneously both central eye catchers and marginal.

1. Alloula (1986: 49).

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The Three Graces – the Field or the Harvest? I start this discussion where I left the main NMS journal in Chapter 3. When the journal was changed to a smaller, A4 format, the editors decided to replace the ‘Call from Macedonia’ motif which had appeared on its frontispiece and cover for so many years with a new photograph for each issue which would fill the entire cover. The picture on the very first issue using this new format, published on 19, February 1966,2 thus carries great symbolic weight. It is a black-and-white close-up of three young and beautiful black women (Figure 40). The change in cover illustrations is thus from a vignette in the form of a small black-and-white drawing to a more modern full-page photograph.

Figure 40. Cover of the main journal 19 February 1966 showing three Cameroonian women. 2. The journal has continued using the same format with a new picture on the cover of every issue. The pictures are sometimes from one of the mission fields; or sometimes they relate to the seasons in Norway or to the supporters’ activities in Norway.

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The picture on the cover extends over part of the back cover of the journal, where we see two more women. The editor has thus cropped the photograph so that the front cover includes just three of the group, like three Graces. We see them frontally from the waist up, rather than from behind as in the old motif. There are no pleading gestures and no loincloths. On the contrary, the women are well-dressed: two are wearing a headscarf and a large piece of patterned West African cloth (Fulani: modjaare) over their left shoulders. The body of the third woman is hidden behind the others, and apart from her white or pastel headscarf, it is difficult to see what she is wearing. All three are standing in front of a white European-style house with a tin roof and windows with wooden sun shutters.3 In the upper right-hand corner of the photograph, next to the logo of the magazine, the leaves of a tree are visible. The women are not looking straight at the viewer but at someone or something to the right of the frame. It is difficult to judge if they were aware of the camera or not. In any case, the aim of the photographer seems to be similar to the aims of Dalland and Ellingsen in 1960, and to many documentary photographers like them: the subjects should avert their gazes in order for the photograph to look natural. My analysis of the picture is inspired by Walter Benjamin’s notion of the aura.4 According to Benjamin, a photograph is endowed with an aura when the photographic subject becomes a ‘thou’, that is, when the spectator projects a human reaction onto the inanimate piece of paper. This most often happens when the subjects look directly at the camera, and thus at the viewer. Although the cover is not presented as a portrait of three named individuals, and although the young women are not looking at the camera, I think many viewers might attribute them with the ability to suddenly turn their heads and stare back. In my view, this is the combined effect of the large size of the image and the particular expressions on their faces. The most striking aspects of the new cover picture are its size and the fact that it is a close-up, giving the readers the opportunity to scrutinize the faces and upper bodies of three African women. It signals the wish to seduce the reader, as well as the emerging communicative modality that I have heuristically called ‘development’. To my eye, one woman looks sweet and shy, another is serious and thoughtful, and the third is smiling in an open and friendly way. Visually they are distinct individuals with different appearances and expressions. But since no names are given, the cover invites the reader to see them as representatives or types. In spite of the enforced anonymity, their individual characters come through visually. Thus, the typification of individuality in this photograph presents a contradiction in terms, but not in practice. To me, as a present-day Norwegian viewer, the anonymous individuality turns the picture into a symbol of valued female virtues. At this point in the analysis, it might be useful also to refer to Roland Barthes’ concept of the air of a photographic portrait. For Barthes, the air of a portrait is its unanalysable expression or look. It ‘is that exorbitant thing which induces from body to soul – animula, little individual soul, good in one person, bad in another’.5 The way I read him, the air is 3. One Cameroonian viewer immediately noticed that the house has wooden shutters, and that the picture therefore was taken in Southern Cameroon. Many viewers commented that the modjaare two of the women are wearing are made of fabric from Northern Cameroon. 4. Benjamin (1998). See also F.K.H. Gullestad (2004), who discusses Benjamin’s theories about photography. 5. Barthes (2000 [1980]: 109, italics in the original).

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related to moral character. I assume that for a Norwegian audience at the time of its publication, the picture of the three women embodied valuable female virtues within the missionary universe, such as moral purity, sweetness, shyness, modesty, fertility, domesticity, softness, gentleness, timidity, tenderness, unselfishness, loyalty, thoughtfulness, piety and the capacity for self-sacrifice. Because of the air of the picture, and because of the way it has been cut for the front cover, I find that it embodies a specific conception of female goodness. In terms of the biblical passages about sowing and harvesting, I assume that many viewers would interpret the picture as a representation of the receptive soil in which to sow the Word. It communicates the female qualities the missionaries encourage, and demonstrates that young and beautiful women are central when it comes to visually presenting the people among whom they work. In spite of their modern look, I thus see an aspect of continuity between the three women and the pleading woman on the beach in the many visualizations of ‘The call from Macedonia’. There are, however, elements in the picture pointing in directions other than to a field which is ready for sowing. The fact that the woman to the right is smiling and the woman to the left looks particularly open and friendly could indicate that these are Christian women. As already noted, in missionary iconography, the smile is often a sign of the happiness brought on by conversion. In addition, since the 1920s in Europe, to smile showing one’s the teeth has also been regarded as a sign of modernity.6 Therefore, the picture illustrates a common puzzle when interpreting some of the most interesting missionary photographs of women: it is often not made visually or verbally explicit whether the subjects have been baptized or not, and therefore whether they are part of ‘the field’ or ‘the harvest’. On page 2 of the magazine, the reader is told that the three anonymous women are young nursing school students: ‘The photo on the cover was taken by John Taylor – World Council of Churches Information Service. It shows young nursing students in Douala, Cameroon.’ The photographer was thus not a Norwegian missionary, and the subjects in the photograph were modern African women who would soon be engaged in a valuable caring profession, compatible with Christian and European ideas about female virtue. Looking more closely at the way they are dressed, one can discern that the two at the front are wearing white European-style blouses under the piece of African cloth. Perhaps the white blouse is a part of their nursing uniform? To become nursing students in this region, the women no doubt would have been Christians educated at missionary schools. However, in 1966 there were no female nursing students in the Norwegian mission field in Northern Cameroon. For the viewer who knows the region, the women therefore seem to be part of the harvest of the missions in Southern Cameroon.7 I assume that the Norwegian editor chose this photograph and cropped it the way he did because the women were attractive to contemporary viewers in Norway in terms of their sensuous beauty and the virtues that can be imputed to them, and because they point towards 6. I assume that the smile is historically related to the advent of amateur photography. With amateur photography came informal relationships between photographer and subject and informal photographic situations. The subjects started to smile at the photographer when he or she was one of their own. I thank Solveig Greve for making me aware of this point. In advertising the smile takes on still other layers of meaning, often connoting an invitation to buy. 7. The first Christian missionary came to Douala about eighty years before the Norwegians, and the North Americans started their work in Northern Cameroon in the 1920s.

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a desired future, also for women in Northern Cameroon. It can be interpreted as an allembracing picture which represents both the field and its fruits in terms of female virtues which are central to the mission. Compared to the images of people in loincloths, it is modern at the same time as the women also signify African difference in relation to Europe, both because of their blackness and because of their clothes. I see it as a transformation and modernization of the kneeling and pleading woman on the palm beach and as a representation of the modern Cameroonian woman who has ‘received Jesus in her heart’ and embodies Christian qualities of femininity. This analysis raises new questions concerning how to interpret the picture. Has their Christian up-bringing imbued the three women with the timid sensuousness expected of them? Or are they posing as ‘good girls’ in front of the camera? Or is this an effect of the work of the male photographer? Or of onlookers standing beside him? Or of the perceptions of the male editor in 1966? Or of my assumptions as a female interpreter in 2006? Or perhaps all of the above? And what would the Cameroonian interpretations of the photograph be? For a Cameroonian audience today, would the three women perhaps symbolize pride, selfconfidence and an interest in the outside world rather than modesty and receptivity? I have no clear answers to these questions, but I think that gender is central to all these levels of analysis.

The Society’s 50th Anniversary Book from Cameroon I now turn to the pictures of women in the books about the history of the NMS. In 1973, the NMS published the book ‘Cameroon: Norwegian mission for 50 years’ (Kamerun. Norsk misjon gjennom 50 år) written by Erik Larsen. As a former missionary to Cameroon, he prepared this book for the 50th anniversary of the Norwegian mission in this region, at a point in time when interest in the mission was high.8 This is a crucial book in the official representation of the Cameroonian experience, and I will refer to it as ‘the Anniversary book’. In its preface, Einar Amdahl, the former Secretary-General of the NMS, wrote that the anniversary publication ‘gives us a touching introduction to the great tasks and problems encountered by the missionaries, and bears witness to their wholehearted and self-sacrificing efforts for the Gospel’. He thus explicitly formulated two central themes in missionary propaganda: the wish to move the audience’s hearts, and the representation of the missionary task as a sacrifice. The missionaries are presented as quintessential donors who wholeheartedly and self-sacrificingly work for people in Cameroon. In terms of its appearance, the 142-page book approaches the coffee-table book in format and style.9 In addition to two colour photographs on the cover, it is illustrated with fifty-nine 8. Larsen (1973). The anniversary was in 1975. It was celebrated in Cameroon in February–March 1974, as an anniversary of fifty years of evangelization in Adamaoua – forty-nine years after the beginning of the work of the NMS and fifty-one years after the beginning of the work of the American Sudan Mission (Lode 1990, in the caption to picture 47). Erik Larsen was a missionary in Cameroon from 1965 to 1972 and was the superintendent there from 1970 to 1972. After that, he worked twenty-three years as the administrative secretary and director of the Norwegian School of Mission and Theology in Stavanger before he retired in 1997/98. 9. The book measures 7.5 x 19 inches (19 x 25 cm).

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black-and-white photographs dispersed throughout the text, as well as by three maps. The photographers are not individually credited, but a list of names of eighteen photographers appears on page 132 in the book. The reader is therefore not told which photographer took which pictures. According to the author, they did not know the names of the photographers who took some of the older pictures. Because the list is not alphabetical, I assume that the photographers are listed in terms of the number of photographs they contributed.10 Two of the eighteen named photographers are women, listed at number 11 and 14. In other words, the number of photographs in the book taken by female missionaries and missionary wives is small. Given the patriarchal structure of the mission (and Norwegian society in general), this is to be expected.11 At the same time, it is also quite strange, since most of the pictures were taken after the Second World War, in the period when more women than men were missionaries (including missionary wives) in Cameroon. Nevertheless, the photographs give a rich and varied impression, both in terms of their subject matter and in terms of their style. They were chosen by a committee and can be read as an independent photo essay related to the story told in the text. Interesting visual variation is also created by the layout.12 While most of the photographs in the individual memoirs are relatively small and are often placed together on a series of pages, this anniversary book could afford to use more space, to vary the size of the photographs, and to distribute the pictures more evenly throughout the book. On some pages, or over two pages, we find a collage of two or three photographs, while on others there is just one picture. Some pictures cover a (varying) part of a page, some a whole page; some are spread over two pages. The subject matter of the photographs, their size, their location in relation to the other photographs, as well as the distribution and content of the captions, carry significance. Captions were added to 27 of the 59 photographs. Nine of these give the names of the people in the pictures, six state the locations of the churches and church ruins depicted, two give the locations of other missionary institutions, four pictures – all with male subjects – have more general captions inviting the reader to regard them as the fruits of missionary work (students at the college, the first students graduating from the theological seminary, some of the workers of the church in the anniversary year, a man on a tractor from the Rogaland Farm at Meng). A picture of a reading boy carries the caption ‘Koran School’, and a picture of a man in profile is captioned ‘One of the king’s men’. The ‘king’ is one of the Muslim sultans. Three captions are more of a general nature, such as ‘Old slaves’, ‘Transport’ and ‘Transport of a sick person’. Eleven Norwegian men, three Cameroonian men, one Norwegian woman and no Cameroonian women are named in the captions. Since only men can become pastors in Cameroon, this fact is not surprising. It illustrates the missionary hierarchy between pastoral work, on the one hand, and educational and medical work, on the other.

10. The first name in the list is Olaf Ellingsen. Some of his photographs from the 1960 expedition had been widely distributed before this anniversary book appeared in 1973, and readers who were familiar with the society would probably already have seen these pictures. See Chapter 4 and Chapter 8. 11. See Chapter 2. 12. According to Erik Larsen, the committee who helped with the collection of material selected the pictures. Moreover, he received valuable help concerning the layout from the printer, Terje Lie Pedersen. Pedersen was later also on the editorial committee for the two-volume history of the NMS published in 1992 (Jørgensen 1992).

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A Timeless Region The cover of this history book is especially important because it presents the missionary view of Cameroon at the time and was also intended to capture the attention of potential buyers. It is necessarily both official and commercial at the same time. The cover is divided horizontally in exactly two halves, juxtaposing a village vista and the picture of a girl (Figure 41). On the bottom half of the cover is a rectangular picture of three round African houses

Figure 41. Cover of the 50th anniversary book (Larsen (1973)). Photographers: Njell Lofthus (upper picture.) and Erik Larsen (lower picture).

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with large thatched roofs in the middle of bushes and trees. In the open space between the houses there are no humans, just a lamb, two baskets and a pottery jar. We also see a small bush in the open space, as well as what looks like a couple of stones used around an open fire. This picture is probably as close as a Norwegian photographer could come to the Scandinavian idea of homely cosiness when representing Cameroon to Norwegian viewers. Because there are no signs of modern utensils made of metal or plastic in the homestead, it is also an image of Africa as a timeless region.13 The scene connotes premodernity and closeness to nature, with a tenuous division between nature and culture. The houses look as if they could potentially be transformed back into their natural elements, and the bushes seem to encroach on the homestead. This photograph was taken in the early morning by Erik Larsen, during an eleven-hour hike from the Bankim area in Cameroon to Nigeria. He chose it for the cover because this kind of house is also typical of Northern Cameroon. Further south, the houses are thatched with banana leaves, not grass.14 On the top half of the cover, there is a photograph of the head, shoulders and one hand of a girl who looks about ten years old.15 Her image has been lifted from its original background in order to make space for the name of the book’s author and title to the right of her picture. She is, as it were, dislocated from her historical time and recontextualized on the cover of a book about history. Dressed in African garb – a colourfully patterned headscarf and a modjaare of a different pattern over her shoulders – the girl is looking directly at the camera, with one finger on her lower lip. She is not smiling. In my interpretation, she is good-looking, well-dressed and healthy, with a thoughtful expression on her face. She does not look desperate or resentful, nor simply happy and fulfilled. In contrast to the three Graces, her gaze is not averted. One could perhaps argue that her young age makes her direct gaze nonthreatening. The photograph presents her as a unique and easily identifiable individual. Nevertheless, her identity is not divulged to the viewer. I assume that many contemporary Norwegian viewers felt that her individuality represented people in Cameroon. According to the author of the book, this was his intention. He wanted to present someone typical, not a specific person with a particular identity. For some Muslim men in Northern Cameroon, the way she wears her headscarf tied firmly at the back of her neck and the way the modjaare is arranged around her shoulders indicate that she was born into a Christian family. Non-Christian women at the time usually wore their headscarves in more differentiated ways. Nevertheless, for Norwegian viewers in 1973, the girl most probably represented the local heathens they hoped the mission would convert, rather than the baptized members of the national evangelical church. Because of the pristine character of the village scene on the bottom half of the page, as well as the girl’s young age and thoughtful expression, I interpret this cover as a representation of people in Cameroon as fertile soil for the Gospel. In her gender and age, the girl embodies the calling out and waiting which were symbolized in the many visualizations of ‘The call from Macedonia’ but in a less modern way than the three 13. See Chapter 8 about how the filmmakers removed ‘all signs of civilization’ from the location when they made the film Sinda. 14. Source: Erik Larsen. 15. The photographer is Njell Lofthus. He took the picture at Meng where he worked at the agricultural project. He did not know the girl who, according to him, belongs to the Mbum group. Source: Njell Lofthus.

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nursing students in 1966. While the three students represented both the soil and the harvest in one picture, the little girl more unambiguously represents the waiting locals and the soil for Norwegian viewers. In my view, the picture embodies both ‘The Parable of the Sower’ (Mark 4: 1–20) and ‘The call from Macedonia’ (Acts 16:9), two central biblical themes discussed in Chapters 3 and 5. In terms of established Protestant/bourgeois gender ideologies, the bodies of women and girls at the time – and still today – can more easily illustrate longing and waiting than the bodies of adult men. This is so in spite of the fact that popular stereotypes in Norway depict African men as idle and African women as hardworking. In a low-key way, this photograph of an unnamed girl crossed the geographic and cultural distance between Cameroon and Norway with an invitation to the Norwegians to open their hearts to the Cameroonians. I call it a ‘close-up of the unknown – and noble – heathen’ who is peacefully and thoughtfully waiting for help. With her direct and thoughtful look at the camera, she seems to address herself to the viewer with a mild plea. Together, the two pictures on the cover present the Cameroonian people in terms of an unknown prepubescent girl, and Cameroonian material culture in terms of a premodern compound. For the Norwegian audience, the two pictures probably connoted beauty, innocence, asexuality, timelessness – and also promise and hope for the future. The aspect of hope is accentuated by the young age of the girl. To me, the message of the cover is that Cameroon would enter the modern world with the help of the mission. Inside the book, the first illustrations are two maps (one of Cameroon, the other of the NMS missionary field with a map of the African continent in the left corner). Then a large picture of a church (Figure 30) indicates that ‘planting congregations’ (and building churches) was seen as the main goal of the missionary enterprise.16 While all the other pictures of churches in this book carry captions telling the reader exactly where the church is located, this first one does not. The reason is, I assume, that the photograph of the church at the very beginning of the book was meant to invite a symbolic reading, and not just a documentary reading.17 The second photograph is the well-known and often reproduced formal portrait of four men in black suits, taking up less than a third of the page (Figure 12). The caption states that these are ‘the pioneers’ and lists their names. They are posing with serious faces, looking directly at the camera. These are the four men who first went to Northern Cameroon and selected this as the missionary field in 1925. The formal studio portraits of named individuals represent the most prestigious subjects in these books. Male missionaries are portrayed in this way, individually or in groups, and also a few male workers in the national church. The third and fourth pictures are two small photographs without captions, representing anonymous black men and boys carrying missionary equipment on their heads.18 These 16. Sprinkled throughout this history book are another three photographs of churches, two photographs of other monumental buildings (a hospital and a home for children), and three church ruins after they were burnt or torn down by Muslim men. 17. See Chapters 4 and 8 about Dalland and Ellingsen’s trip to Cameroon. 18. One of the two photographs was taken by Olaf Ellingsen and is reproduced in a smaller and differently cropped version in Dalland (1960: 137). In Dalland’s book, we see more of the landscape, the sky, and also Dalland himself wearing a sun helmet and not carrying anything but a camera around his neck. The cropping of the photograph thus turns it into a different picture and removes from view the comfortable life of the whites in relation to the drudgery of their servants. The other picture was perhaps also taken by Ellingsen.

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pictures are located on the pages where the author describes the strenuous journey of the pioneer missionaries to Cameroon. Although the pictures were taken at a much later date, they relate thematically to the text on the pages on which they appear.

The Unknown Heathen After this visual introduction, a full-page frontal photograph of a female face surprises the reader (Figure 42). It is a close-up of the face, hair, neck and bare shoulders of a lovely young woman. Around her neck is a thin necklace of beads, and her hair is arranged in several thick trailing braids and one thin braid running along her forehead. This photograph was apparently meant to represent the people in the field for the Norwegian viewers in a way which could capture their attention and touch their hearts. While the photographs of the named male missionaries are reproduced in a small format, this photograph of the face of an anonymous woman is almost life-size. To me as an analyst, the combination of the lack of a caption, the lack of direct connection to the main body of the text, and the size of the picture is intriguing. Who is she? Why just her face? Why the large format? The unknown young woman was not photographed and included in this book because she was a pioneer or a hero, or because she had done good work for the church. I assume that her picture appears here solely in terms of the power of attraction of her visual appearance. Uncaptioned, it stands for self-evident and uncomplicated truthfulness. Unlike earlier photographs published by authors such as Karl Flatland and Gudrun Røst, or later photographs published by Jorunn Sundby,19 but like the little girl on the cover, she is used as a representative not of a particular ethnic group but more generally of the human beings with whom the missionaries were sent to work. The way it has been reproduced, the photograph is timeless and placeless in the sense that for the Norwegian viewer who does not know the region there is no background and no clothes or other elements which can be used to date or locate the subject precisely. Also like the girl on the cover, she is alone. She has been abstracted, as it were, out of historical time and out of the networks of human relations and the landscapes in which she lived. This type of portraiture is perhaps an effect of the advice often given to amateur photographers: if you want a good portrait, go close, and remove all unnecessary detail. In the context of cross-cultural photography, such a photographic procedure tends to create pictures which remove the subjects not only from their usual work and social positions but also from appearing distant and exotic. The missionary publications do contain some photographs of women while they work. In contrast, pictures such as this one, without context, often emphasize the humanity of the subjects. Since blackness per se is usually an idiom of difference for the Norwegian public, this picture of a young woman simultaneously presents both the visual difference and the common humanity between the spectator in Europe and the African subject. As the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas has illuminated so well, the sight of a face has a strong moral appeal.20

19. Sundby (1991). See the discussion towards the end of this chapter. 20. Levinas (1998).

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Figure 42. Bouba Yaya’s second wife. Photographer: Lars Gaustad, 1968. Reproduced from Larsen (1973).

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In itself the picture does not invite compassion and pity, but rather the interest and empathy of the viewer. Unlike the little girl on the cover who is looking straight at the viewer, and unlike Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, whose eyes follow the spectator wherever he or she is located in the room, the young woman is not looking at the camera but at something to the left of the photographer. And unlike Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile and those of two of the three women in the cover photograph discussed earlier, her face is serious. Since she is not looking directly at the camera, the picture does not signal knowledge, challenge, openness or directness to a European viewer. Like most published missionary photographs of women, this is not a look which confronts and interrogates the viewer in an oppositional way. In the history of European art, pictures of young and beautiful women with downward, sideways or averted eyes, have tended to represent the female subjects as idealized objects to be looked at. According to John Berger in his 1973 book Ways of Seeing, such pictures often invite an erotic viewing. Unlike the little girl on the cover, the young woman in this picture is not a child. Her full lips and bare shoulders signal sensuality. Her attractive and pensive shyness draws the viewer into the picture, as it were. The picture can thus be read as an image of serious, seductive bashfulness. In the terms of some feminist analyses, it could be seen as the result of a ‘male gaze’.21 At the same time, I assume that it invites interest from both male and female viewers in Norway. The air of the picture is not one of happiness, curiosity or defiance but of a strikingly pensive and perhaps vulnerable sensuality. In my view, the photograph can be illuminated by some of the ideas of Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida – not only his ideas about the air of particular photographs, but also his distinction between the studium and the punctum.22 Barthes suggested that for an individual observer a disconcerting detail may disturb the surface unity and stability of an image like a cut, making the viewer begin the process of opening up that photographic space to reflection. For Barthes, the punctum belongs to the viewer’s personal history. However, I do not use Barthes’ ideas about the personal punctum in order to protect my interpretations from scrutiny, but rather to offer them for discussion and potential intersubjectivity. In most of Barthes’ examples, the punctum is a detail, but he also mentions the possibility of an unlocatable punctum. For example, he endows the portrait by Robert Mapplethorpe of Philip Glass and Robert Wilson with an unlocatable punctum because the picture inspires Barthes to want to meet Wilson.23 For me, the picture of the young woman has an unlocatable punctum and much visual energy because of her enigmatic expression. Does she look tired and sad, or does she look peaceful and comfortable? Or both at the same time? Was this a snapshot or a premeditated picture? Was she aware or unaware of the camera? Has she posed for the picture or not? Was she looking away from the photographer, or at something outside the frame? On the one hand, as discussed in Chapter 4, many documentary photographers practise a theory of the good photograph in which the subjects are not allowed to pose but have to be absorbed in their own preoccupations. On the other hand, Cameroonians often try to avoid looking 21. In film and media research there is an influential feminist theoretical tradition which, based on psychoanalysis, examines how women are constructed in the visual media as objects of the male gaze, both within the films and within their context of reception. More recently, the question of how masculinity is cinematically constructed has also been raised (Mulvey 1989; Hall 1992). 22. Barthes (2000 [1980]: 42–60). 23. Ibid.: 57.

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directly at the face of a person who is older or of higher status. And, as we have seen, Cameroonians who accept being photographed tend to pose in ‘serious’ ways. Because of her hairstyle and facial features, the viewer who knows the region would immediately assume that the young subject must belong to the Mbororo, a pastoral subgroup of the Fulani (or Fulbe) who had not yet become Muslims or were only lightly Islamicized when this book was published. I have shown the picture to many Cameroonians, and they seem to interpret its air in similar ways as in the analysis above. However, some Cameroonian men suggested very strongly that the photographic subject is not a woman, but a young man. They base this interpretation on the person’s hairstyle. One Cameroonian woman, however, was equally certain that the subject was a woman, and she based this on the holes in the earlobes and the necklace. In other words, like the interpretations of Mona Lisa (whom some see as a man in disguise), there is a certain amount of ambiguity in the Cameroonian perspective on this point. During my research, I learned that the picture was taken by the now retired missionary Lars Gaustad in the spring of 1968, when he was the head nurse at the small hospital in Galim.24 He does not know the name of the young woman, but he remembers her well. She was the younger of the two wives of a herd-owner named Bouba Yaya. He came with her because she was sick, and he stayed with her in the hospital for several weeks. She was treated by Gaustad and three Cameroonian aides at the hospital. The three helpers were more closely in contact with her than Gaustad himself. Bouba Yaya learned to read and write Fulfulde with Latin letters during that period. He got a booklet from Gaustad, and received some help both from him and one of the aides at the hospital, but basically he acquired the new skills on his own. Gaustad has kept in touch with him sporadically, and he also met this second wife once more when he and a Fulani colleague visited the family while he worked at Radio Sawtu Linjiila between 1971 and 1977. Because of a cattle plague in the area, Bouba Yaya and his brother had moved east with their flocks in 1970 – from the area around Galim to Koyraga, northeast of Meiganga. In both places they lived in a village and not as nomads. This means that they were Mbororo people in the process of transforming themselves into urban Fulani.25 Lars stayed overnight in their compound, and when he departed, the two brothers gave Lars a young ox and his wife a ram with fine horns. During the period in Galim when this particular picture was taken, Gaustad took many black-and-white photographs that he developed himself. He was thus a more reflected and knowledgeable photographer than most missionaries, and said about this particular photograph: ‘The Fulani are particularly beautiful people. I noticed that she was photogenic, and I took this picture while she was standing in the doorway of one of the huts of the hospital, illuminated by natural light and with a dark background.’26 Gaustad did not take a 24. Source for the information in this and the following paragraphs: Telephone conversation, letters and email correspondence with Lars Gaustad. He worked as a deacon in Galim from 1965 to 1969, and at the radio station in Ngaoundéré from 1971 to 1977. Later on, he worked as a missionary in Mali. Gaustad looks at his years in Africa as a privilege, not as a sacrifice. The picture of the young woman had been used to illustrate an article in the main journal, Norsk Misjonstidende, and this is how it came to be chosen for the anniversary book, although Lars Gaustad did not know at the time that it was also reproduced there. He still keeps an enlarged 42 x 50 cm copy of the picture in his home in Norway. 25. See Bocquené (2002 [1986]) about the Mbororo. 26. Source: Lars Gaustad.

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picture of her husband, but he owns a picture of himself and Bouba Yaya, taken many years later. His wish to take the photograph of this young woman indicates the central role of ‘photogenic’ women in the missionaries’ ideas about which pictures might be interesting to the public in Norway. Furthermore, it perhaps also indicates that, like Olaf Ellingsen, Gaustad was fascinated by local people and had a photographer’s eye for the sensuousness of local women. In a letter to me, Gaustad expanded on the description of the photographic occasion: The picture was taken in 1968 with a Pentax camera with a 135 mm lens. I always used this lens for portrait photography. I was allowed to take these pictures of her after having agreed with Bouba and his wife. I asked her to come into the opening of the door in order to get the right light. I took the 1 picture from a distance of between 2 and 2 2 metres. Since she had been at the clinic for a while, my impression was that she, too, had confidence in me because we could communicate in the Fulani language. I do not remember that she had any reservations about being photographed. The Fulani women, especially those who are nomads, are relatively open and candid. I believe the picture was taken towards the end of her stay at the hospital. Both she and her husband were very grateful for the help and the treatment they received at the clinic. Both Bouba and his wife have seen and received a copy of this picture.27 They also received a picture of us (my wife and our three children) while they stayed at the clinic. In a way, a personal friendship emerged, and as mentioned earlier, we have corresponded sporadically.28

I see the sentence ‘Both Bouba and his wife have seen and received a copy of this picture’, as an important detail in these reflections. Perhaps her willingness to be photographed was related to the potential for reciprocity, the sharing of the image between photographer and subject. Because he developed his pictures himself, it was easier for Gaustad than for many other missionaries to make a copy of the picture for the person portrayed. This gesture indicates the particular quality of the relationship between him and Bouba Yaya. Moreover, the word ‘grateful’ is a key notion in Gaustad’s reflections. Since people from many different groups came to be treated there, the hospitals were the most important arenas where the Norwegian missionaries met Muslims and other non-Christians. Even though the patients paid for the care they received, the young woman probably had good reason to be grateful. Like the former slaves photographed by Halfdan Endresen, she and her husband perhaps felt also that it would have been ungrateful to refuse to have her picture taken. Before the picture was published by Erik Larsen in the anniversary book, Lars Gaustad used it as the only illustration in an article for the Norwegian regional newspaper Stavanger Aftenblad about Mbororo and Tuareg women. Here he described the various customs of both groups concerning education, dance and music. The main point of the article was that, in spite of being Islamicized, Mbororo and Tuareg women have kept their freedom and strong position, enjoying many rights that other women under Islamic influence do not enjoy.29 The following quotes are taken from the passages about Mbororo women: The Mbororo woman gives us a good idea of the African woman uninfluenced by Islam. Her whole attitude reveals that she is free. The way she walks and the way she converses with the people she 27. The picture was given to the husband, who often came to visit Lars Gaustad and his family in his home. 28. Source: Letter dated 8, March 2005. 29. From a different perspective, the Mbororo women can also be described as oppressed because of many taboos in their society and their endogamous marriage practices. Source: Lisbet Holtedahl.

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meets on her way to the market place show that she still enjoys her freedom. The sedentary Fulani often hold the Mbororo woman in contempt, calling her ‘the wild dog’. The Mbororo woman holds a strong position in her family, and is often partially economically independent from her husband. For example, it is often the women who build the grass huts when they move from one grazing land to another. She sells the milk at the market place, and she buys the food for her family. The freedom of the Mbororo woman also has less fortunate effects. She sometimes uses her freedom to leave her husband when he no longer pleases her, in order to marry the man she wants. In these cases, she often leaves her children, who remain with their father. One therefore sees a great number of divorces among the Mbororo people. How long will these women retain their relatively free and independent position? It is probably only possible as long as they live their free nomadic life and follow their herds of cows from pasture to pasture. ‘Pullo singi nagge’ – The Fulani clings to the cow like a tick.30

Except for the comment on the number of divorces, Lars Gaustad described Mbororo women in an idealizing ethnographic mode. Underlying the positive description is a view of Islam as a threat to the freedom of women. Because of their nomadic existence, Gaustad argued, the Mbororo women have kept their independence, in spite of their religion. While the written text describes a woman who walks and talks self-confidently, the visual illustration shows a woman who looks beautiful and sensuous but seems serious and thoughtful rather than frank, free and independent. It turns out that Gaustad took two more pictures of Bouba Yaya’s wife on the same photographic occasion. They were, however, not copied and enlarged by Gaustad before I contacted him about the published picture, which is the second in the series of three (Figures 43, 44 and 45). In the first picture she is smiling warmly, showing her teeth and looking directly at the camera. In this photograph she looks more like a real-life individual, somebody one could meet and talk to, than an idealized beauty. And while she looks charming, she is also less idealized, feminine and sensuous than in the published picture. Her hair is not as visible, and more of her body is present within the frame. In the second, published photograph, she is serious and is looking pensively away from the camera. In the third she is even more serious and is looking straight at the camera. For some viewers, she appears a little angry in this third image. From the first to the second and third pictures, the photographer has moved closer to the subject.31 Or rather, I assume, he has asked her to come closer to the doorway in order to take advantage of daylight. I interpret the photographic occasion as one in which the first picture caught her a little bit off guard. She was aware of the camera but had not yet had the time to arrange her pose. The relationship between her and the photographer seems to be characterized by friendly trust. Did the photographer then instruct her to look away, in order to obtain the idealized and sensuous look for the published picture? Western photographic conventions as well as missionary ideals of femininity might support this interpretation. Or are the two following pictures a result of her wish to pose in a particular way? Her more serious (and somewhat wary) expression in the last picture, following West African conventions of posing, support this interpretation.32 Moreover, Mbororo customs 30. Stavanger Aftenblad 21 November 1970: 2. 31. But more of the young woman’s body is visible in the copy which was published in the 1973 anniversary book (Figure 50) than in the copy which Gaustad has kept in his home (Figure 52). 32. See, for example, Buckley (2005) about the conventions of posing in Ghana.

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Figure 43. Bouba Yaya’s second wife. Photographer: Lars Gaustad. First photograph in a series of three.

Figure 44. Bouba Yaya’s second wife. Photographer: Lars Gaustad. Second photograph in a series of three.

generally do not allow a woman to look directly at the face of a man or a senior person. The averted gaze in the published picture could therefore potentially also be the result of her own strategies. According to Gaustad, Bouba Yaya’s wife was quiet, modest and reticent, and not as frank as the typical Mbororo women he depicted in his article. While the smiling picture – or the serious picture in which she is looking directly at Figure 45. Bouba Yaya’s second wife. the camera – would have better fitted the Photographer: Lars Gaustad. Third content of the article in Stavanger photograph in a series of three. Aftenblad, he chose the most idealized, the most sensuous, the most pensive and the most enigmatic of the three pictures to illustrate his piece. And of the many different photographs they had to choose from, the author of the 1973 ‘anniversary book’– and the committee who helped him choose and edit the photographs – also selected this sensuous close-up of the face of a beautiful woman looking away from the camera to be produced as a nearly life-size, full-page illustration. I think that the large size of the picture and the young woman’s pensive expression are central to its effects on the reader. In my view she is presented as the soil, not as the fruit of the missionary efforts, and the picture is a means of seducing the reader. Her beauty invites the viewers to take an interest in her and support the mission devotionally and financially. According to the author of the book, it has never occurred to him that the sensuality of the picture might be out of place in a missionary publication. He maintains that if others in the mission had been of that opinion, they would have said so immediately.33 This use of a sensuous photograph of a young, attractive woman is therefore no doubt a part of a self33. Source: Erik Larsen.

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evident and tacit knowledge about what images might be effective in missionary publications. At the same time, I assume that, like me, both the photographer and the picture editors were impressed by her enigmatic expression. The photographer, moreover, was probably charmed by the charisma of the real-life woman. Within the book, the picture of the young Mbororo woman has a parallel in a similar fullpage picture of the face of an anonymous baby on page 93 (Figure 46).34 The baby is looking at the camera with an inquisitive expression on his/her face. The photograph is also uncaptioned. In addition, on page 75 there is a somewhat smaller close-up of the smiling face and upper body of an anonymous boy, about 14–15 years old, dressed in a white Europeanstyle shirt and looking straight at the camera (Figure 47). His smile and the whiteness of his shirt invite an interpretation of him as a Christian boy, and of the picture as a symbol of the

Figure 46. Anonymous baby. Photographer: Erik Sandvik. Reproduced from Larsen (1973).

Figure 47. Tipani André. Photographer: Erik Sandvik. Reproduced from Larsen (1973).

harvest. I assume that this is so both for Cameroonian and Norwegian viewers. As noted earlier, many people in Cameroon want to pose with serious faces. When I showed the photograph to Cameroonian Muslim men, they immediately said that the expression on his face (his smile and in particular the expression of his eyes) showed that he was a Christian boy. According to them, this particular facial expression of happiness is cultivated by Christians. The most typical example is Gospel singers when they perform – their visual embodiment of happiness because they have received divine grace is meant to invite others to join the church and obtain happiness. Moreover, drawing on the earlier visualizations of the mission society, the constellation of the parallel pictures of the faces of a pensive woman and a baby, together 34. The photographer was Erik Sandvik. The picture was taken at the hospital in Ngaoubela. The baby is sitting in the arm of his or her mother; they were both unknown to Sandvik.

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with a somewhat smaller picture of an anonymous young man, again reminds me of the drawings of the woman, the man and the baby on the beach in ‘The call from Macedonia’. During my research I learned that the photograph of the young boy was taken by Erik Sandvik. He was a missionary in Cameroon between 1967 and 2003, and he still lives in Cameroon in active retirement.35 As a teacher, his main achievement in Cameroon was to lead the establishment of the Protestant high school (College Protestant) and to be its principal for many years. In this role he came in touch with many gifted young people whom he helped to educate. The boy in the picture is Tipani André, a student at the high school at the time of the photographic occasion: Tipani André was one of the first students from the primary school in Yoko who was allowed to come to Ngaoundéré to go to high school. He came here with just the shorts and the shirt he was wearing. The picture was taken the day I bought him his first pair of long trousers and a new shirt. We were both very proud and happy that day. But the next day I saw one of his friends with the new shirt I had bought. I was disappointed and asked him why he had given away the shirt. He looked at me with serious eyes and answered ‘I already had a shirt, he had none at all’. The most impressive thing was that he gave away the new shirt, not the old one! His action shows the social solidarity at the time. Thus, I had my fingers smacked [e.g. he taught me a lesson]! In this way I often learned something from the students. But I am not sure if the same thing would have happened today.36

For me, this anecdote carries complex connotations. First, it shows that, like quite a few other missionary photographs, the picture was taken within a relationship of trust and gratitude. For the photographic subject, the situation was characterized by happiness, gratefulness and hope for the future. Second, Tipani André managed to explain his donation of the shirt to the other boy in terms of moral values that were deeply meaningful for the missionary. He moulded his act into the missionary worldview and system of values in a way which Sandvik not only had to accept but which made it possible for him to turn the events into a parable. When Sandvik told it to me, I could hear that he had told the story before as a part of his routine repertoire of parables from the field that he uses in many situations, including to the audiences back home. I think it is a good example of the oral culture in the mission. Similar stories are related in the missionary memoirs and in the NMS magazine. The main point of the parable is that it is important to give, and not only to give what you have too much of, but also to give what is dearest to you. The story thus has a potential for inspiring Norwegian mission supporters to give more to the mission, as well as Cameroonian church members to give more to the church, and this is, in my view, why it has probably been told many times. If this poor African boy could give away his new shirt, they could donate much more. In the story the poor African is the one who teaches the missionary something of lasting value. It is thus a representation which shows not only an egalitarian relationship between the principal and his student but a social reversal: the student was able to teach his superior a lesson. At the same time, the missionary had his established worldview reconfirmed; the incidents did not teach him something new about the worldviews of Africans. The story can perhaps be read as emblematic of a time when many African church members were willing and able to inscribe their actions within the missionary frames of interpretation. The 35. Erik Sandvik was also a member of the committee behind the anniversary book project (Larsen 1973). 36. Erik Sandvik in conversation in Ngaoundéré on 10 January 2006.

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social and cultural changes since then have not necessarily meant that African solidarity has disappeared (although it may have in specific situations) but that new hierarchies and new ways of legitimating actions have developed which have been strongly influenced by the encounter with Europeans but are not identical to their worldviews.

The Naturalization of Women and Girls The 1973 ‘anniversary book’ also contains nine other pictures of Cameroonian women and girls. Most of them are more or less full-length pictures of women. The special effects of the large close-up with no context described earlier can be compared to two full-length images of Mbororo women. On page 55, a woman is pounding grain with four small children around her and a flock of cows in the background. Two of the boys are naked, and the two older children, a boy and a girl, are fully dressed. The little girl seems to be aware of the camera. She is looking in the direction of the photographer, shading her eyes against the sun. This photograph shows an everyday work scene. The photographer has presented more context and this almost unavoidably implies inviting more distance between the viewer and the subjects. There is no caption explaining what the author wanted us to see in the picture. Page 95 carries an almost full-length picture of another Mbororo woman with a sleeping baby tied to her back. She was photographed from behind while turning her head to look at her child, apparently unaware of the camera. The background has disappeared from behind the upper part of her body, while there is a glimpse of the savannah around the lower part. Since this picture, too, is presented without a caption, the editors seem to have assumed that motherhood is universal and needed no explanation. In several of the pictures in this book, individual women have been photographed while performing their tasks as wives and mothers. Some of the women and girls seem to be Christian, most of them are young. Only one is old, and she has been labelled a slave. In fact, this is the only picture of women and/or children in this book which carries a caption. Perhaps the editors assumed that the inclusion of a photograph of an old woman needs to be explained? Although their ethnic identities vary, the women are portrayed in connection with family life and educational activities, not particular ethnic groups. It is also interesting that many pictures were taken from behind the photographic subjects. The pragmatic reason for this may simply be that this strategy did not necessitate a negotiated photographic occasion; in other words, that they are just snapshots taken of women who were unaware of the camera. To me, this perspective nevertheless creates yet another kind of symbolic resonance with the many visualizations of ‘The call from Macedonia’, in which the three people calling and waiting on the beach were also depicted from behind. When watching missionary albums and slide shows, I have noticed that, outside the context of the hospitals and the other missionary institutions, quite a few pictures of nonChristian women seem to have been taken off-guard, by both male and female missionaries. At the same time, when watching slides in the homes of retired missionaries, I have noticed that female photographers have taken many portraits of women who were allowed to pose. I interpret the large number of photographs that do not seem to involve a photographic occasion in the books as influenced by the gender of the photographer and the lack of an established social relationship.

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Young Boys in White Shirts, Women in Crowds and Women in Family Settings In order to further document the ideas presented above, I now briefly move to the chapter about Cameroon after the Second World War in the two-volume history of the Norwegian Missionary Society published in 1992.37 When the two history volumes were published, the national church in Cameroon had been working for thirty-two years and had been formally independent for seventeen years. The chapter is ninety-five pages long and was written by former Cameroon missionary Kåre Lode. It contains a total of forty-eight pictures, including a portrait of the author. The illustrations in both volumes have been edited by the leader of NMS Archive, Nils Kristian Høimyr.38 Three of the forty-eight photographs were taken by female missionaries or missionary wives.39 In the captions, Norwegian men are identified by name twenty times (one man is named five times, and two men twice), Cameroonian men thirteen times (two men are named twice), Norwegian women twelve times, a Cameroonian woman once, and Norwegian children are named (by their first names) five times. Cameroonian children are never named, although there are many photographs of them. Like the other publications, this history book presents no formal portraits of women, be they missionaries, missionary wives or African women. These numbers, tedious as they are, nevertheless indicate the limited use of the perspectives of female missionaries in the official visual presentation of this field as well as the continuous hierarchies of age, gender and ‘race’ in missionary representations. The very first picture in the chapter about Cameroon – on its title page – is a full-page image of the face and upper body of an anonymous, good-looking young boy who is maybe 14–15 years old (Figure 48). As the title page of the official history about the NMS in Cameroon, it carries high symbolic value.40 Dressed in a white European-style shirt and an African straw hat, the boy is looking straight at the camera, and he is flashing a charming smile which shows his teeth. The hat comes from Southern Cameroon and is worn by adult men. Since many members of the church in Ngaoundéré originally came from the South, he may well be a local boy. I interpret his smile and his vigorous and youthful face as a symbol of both Christian happiness and hope for the future. The white shirt is a symbol of the light of Christianity, while the straw hat symbolizes the Africanization of the church – forming a halo around his head. This picture is similar to the one just discussed of a young boy in the anniversary book. I think the spectator is invited to look at the photographs of these

37. Jørgensen (1992). These two volumes treat all the various mission fields, with the work covered in Cameroon in two chapters: pp. 110–16 in vol. I and pp. 7–106 in vol. II. All the pictures in these volumes are located at the NMS Archive in Stavanger, and they are reproduced here courtesy of the archive. 38. In Chapter 5, I have discussed a picture which is published only in this book: the arranged scene of a baptism. In addition, I have discussed two pictures that are reproduced here: a version of ‘the lonely wanderer’ (Chapters 4 and 7) and the photograph from a missionary conference in 1944 (Chapter 5). 39. Since the photographer of some of the pictures is not credited – only the archive in which the picture is presently located – it is possible, but not very likely, that a few more photographs were taken by women. 40. I have been able to identify neither the photographic subject nor the photographer.

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Figure 48. Anonymous young boy. Title page of the chapter about Cameroon in the official NMS history volumes, Jørgensen (1992, II).

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anonymous boys as visual representations of the harvest in the form of the national church and its many members.41 Comparing the 1973 anniversary volume to the 1992 volumes, we can thus see a change in the representations on the cover and title page from a pristine homestead without any signs of modern life and a serious little girl in African clothes to a smiling young boy in a white European shirt. The images of the anonymous boys who are smiling broadly, dressed in white shirts, and looking directly at the camera more unambiguously symbolize the transformations brought on through missionary work than the photographs of anonymous women and girls.42 Pictures of black women, children and young boys all represent the region where the missionaries work, but different ages, genders and expressions embody different aspects of the toil and the harvest. In contrast, missionary pictures of Cameroonian men generally come in three kinds. The first type was discussed in Chapter 5 and consists of pictures of students, pastors and church leaders;in other words, pictures that can clearly be identified as representing the fruits of mission work. The second kind consists of the pictures of anonymous young boys and can be regarded as a subgroup within the first category. The third consists of pictures of Muslim sultans and their supporters; I will discuss these in the next chapter. As in the anniversary volume from 1973, there is a significance in the progression of images in the 1992 book. The photograph that follows the title page is a small passport-size formal portrait showing the face of the middle-aged author next to the list of contents. He is also smiling, although not as broadly as the young boy on the title page. After the table of contents follow three full-page pictures as a visual introduction before the text. The first is an almost fullfigure photograph of a group of women from the organization Femmes pour Christ (‘Women for Christ’), singing under a cross in a church, all wearing similar clothes with the name of their organization and town (Tibati) across the chest. They represent the harvest and the independent national church. Most of them have a happy expression on their faces, smiling to reveal their teeth. Added to this picture is a short caption: ‘Women for Christ in Tibati.’ This is an important organization in the church; they are usually represented visually as large groups of anonymous women. The next photograph is a full-page close-up of an anonymous young mother and her baby (Figure 49). They are both shown in half profile. The mother appears serious and pensive and is looking to the left of the camera. She is young and beautiful, but her face shows a few disturbing scars that indicate suffering. The baby, who is also not smiling, is looking at the camera, or maybe a little to the right. We cannot see the woman’s hair, only that she is wearing a dotted European-style summer dress. Like the picture of the three Graces, the woman and her child can potentially represent both the field and the harvest, and I think that the viewer is invited to regard it as a representation of female moral virtue. Even though she is wearing a European-style dress, and I therefore assume that she is a Christian, I think that the viewers perhaps primarily see the picture as a representation of the field. Like most other photographs of women and children in the missionary books, this one has no caption, indicating that its

41. But see Endresen (1965) between pp. 80 and 81 for a picture of the face of a young boy represented as the soil for sowing the Word. He is, however, not smiling broadly. 42. Exceptions to this generalization are the photographs of women who belong to Femmes pour Christ and the picture of the arranged baptism analysed in the previous chapter.

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Figure 49. Anonymous woman and child. Photographer: Olaf Ellingsen, 1960. Reproduced from Jørgensen (1992, II).

meanings are regarded as transparent. The image’s self-evident power of attraction can be related to the beauty of the woman, her thoughtful expression, the perceived naturalness of the relationship between mother and child, as well as to the long traditions in European art of the motif of the Madonna and Child. The picture draws on the association of women with children and exemplifies how pictures of women and children accentuate the humanity of the people in the field. With its paradoxical combination of individuality and anonymity, it encourages identification with the African across racial boundaries.

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Figure 50. Anonymous woman and child. Photographer: Olaf Ellingsen, 1960. Reproduced from Olaf Ellingsen’s assorted slides.

By working in the NMS Archive, I found that this photograph was taken by Olaf Ellingsen in 1960. It is one of a series of four pictures of the same woman and/or her child. In that series, too, the woman is smiling broadly in the first picture, perhaps unaware of the camera, and then becomes serious. Figure 50 is the first picture. The woman is smiling, the child is looking away from the camera. We see a few people in the background, the face and upper body of one, the others are present with their feet or an arm. In the second picture the woman and her child has turned a little bit away from the photographer. In the third and published picture (Figure 49) the photographer has moved closer to the subjects. This picture thus has less local context. The fourth picture is a photograph of just the head of the baby. The editor thus picked a powerful picture of mother and child, a picture which stresses their humanity to Norwegian viewers. The third picture in the history book also fills a whole page. It is a colour photograph from the same situation as the well-known photograph of a Mbororo herdsman by Olaf Ellingsen, described in Chapter 4 (Figure 26). In this book the picture carries the caption: ‘Lonely wanderer who is listening to the “church bell”. In his belt he carries powerful magic remedies.’ The caption echoes the one by Dalland in his book; however, the word ‘suspiciously’ has been removed. This is one of the few photographs of Cameroonian men which is used to represent the soil rather than the harvest, or cruel and dangerous rivals. I find that it is highly meaningful that his gaze is not only averted, but that he is seen from behind, and thus is anonymous in a double sense. After this visual depiction of the national church and the mission field, the historical narrative starts. The first photograph within the text is the blackand-white photograph of missionaries gathered on the steps of a house during the conference

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in 1944, analysed in Chapter 5 (Figure 28) in terms of the categories of gender, age, ‘race’ and class. The next picture, on the opposite page, is the picture of three Cameroonians in front of the clinic in Galim (Figure 31). The pictures of women in this long chapter include a crowd of women gathered for a meeting, the arranged picture of a baptism analysed in the previous chapter (Figure 37), a picture of some of the wives of the lamiido in Ngaoundéré (from the same photographic situation as Figure 26) and a picture of the wives of the students at the Bible school with their female missionary teachers (Figure 29). The only photograph of a named Cameroonian woman is located on page 57 (Figure 51). It is a half-page colour photograph of the leader of the organization Femmes pour Christ with her family, and it is thus an exception to the rule that the members of this organization are represented in the books as crowds of anonymous women. We see a close-up of a young couple portrayed from the waist up, each carrying a baby dressed in white. The woman is wearing a sleeveless dress made of African material, a white pearl necklace and a yellow headscarf. Her dress is thus a mixture of African and European elements. According to some Muslim Cameroonian men to whom I showed the

Figure 51. Satou Marthe, Ahmadou Simon and their twins. Photographer: Erik Larsen. Reproduced from Jørgensen (1992, II).

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picture, they need to see nothing more than the way she has tied her headscarf to know that she is a Christian. The man is dressed more like a European, with white shirt, trousers and a little hat. She is smiling happily without showing her teeth, perhaps flirting innocently with the young male photographer or with somebody standing on his left side, while the man is serious, looking at something or somebody to the left of the photographer. In the background we see the green grass of the savanna in the rainy season and a few houses with thatched roofs. The caption reads: ‘Satou Marthe and her husband with their first born, around 1969. Satou Marthe became the leader of the work among the women in 1990. Both she and her husband were formerly employed at the studio. Photographer: Erik Larsen.’ Although she has not seen many of the photographs, Satou Marthe is perhaps the most photographed person in this mission field.43 This particular picture was taken at the baptism of her twins.44 While male missionaries and church leaders, as already noted, are presented visually as men without families in the books about Cameroon,45 the top leader of the women’s organization in the church is here represented by a family photograph. The picture thus illustrates the tendency to associate women with family life. The caption, nevertheless, emphasizes Satou Marthe’s role by giving her name and not the name of her husband, Ahmadou Simon. In my reading of the photograph, Satou Marthe is visually presented in terms of her Protestant family life, her roles as mother and wife, her feminine beauty and her happiness as a Christian. The photograph of her is therefore also a representation of the transformation which takes place when Africans become Christians.

Women and Girls as Victims I now want to discuss a book for young people in Norway, published in 1991. This book is of a very different genre from the history books. It is written by Jorunn Sundby in a personal voice, and it attempts to present named young Cameroonians in terms of their own interests.46 At the same time, it is also an official publication, supported by Norad and aimed at study groups. It contains thirteen written and visual portraits of young people, a few fairy tales from Cameroon, some facts about the country, as well as a letter from the author to young people in Norway about her experiences while she was a missionary in Cameroon for one year. The book’s intention to present young people in Cameroon as named individuals with particular interests and concerns is an interesting departure from the anonymous individuality of Africans. Based on interviews, the book lets young Cameroonians speak in their own words, translated into Norwegian and supplemented by the author’s comments. It 43. Often she appears in photographs of anonymous women and girls. In Chapter 8, I discuss a mission film in which Satou Marthe plays one of the main roles. She is also a central and named figure in the 1987 documentary film ‘Women’s liberation in Cameroon’ (Kvinnefrigjøring i Kamerun). 44. Source: Satou Marthe. 45. On pp. 22 in the same history volume, the portrait of the face of a catechist named Mpoali Etienne has been created by taking out a part of a group picture. The editor thus made an effort to present him as an individual in a way which is equivalent to the representations of highly ranked white male missionaries. Paul Ngonom, the first man in the field to be baptized, has been represented while he is posing with his family (Nikolaisen and Endresen 1949, III: 312) and individually, by Olaf Ellingsen (Figure 27). 46. Sundby (1991: 63).

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therefore foreshadows the emerging communicative modality that I have heuristically called ‘partnership’ and that I discuss in Chapter 9.47 The book contains visual and written portraits of seven young women and six young men: seven Protestants, two Catholics and four Muslims. The numbers in each category reflect the networks of the Protestant missionary more than the religious realities in the region. Each person is allotted a few pages of text and a full-page photographic portrait. The cover carries a colour photograph of the face of Mouna, one of the Protestant interviewees (Figure 52).48 Since the portrait is in profile, she is not looking at the viewer and

Figure 52. Mouna. Cover picture of Sundby (1991). Photographer: Jorunn Sundby. 47. The book has mostly been used by the NMS and not so much by Norwegian schools. Most of the young Cameroonians who were asked to cooperate agreed, but a few declined the invitation. The book was written in Norway from notes that the author took during one year in Cameroon in 1988–89 as the teacher of the children at the Norwegian school. Her intention was to provide a more nuanced picture of Africa to young people in Norway than the usual war and crisis reportages in the mass media. When the book was published, she gave a number of copies to a Norwegian missionary who was going back to Cameroon, one copy for each of the young people who had contributed their stories. However, she does not know if anybody in Cameroon translated the texts into French for them to read. The book is called Young in Africa and not Young in Cameroon because she sees Cameroon as more or less a microcosm of Africa. Source: Jorunn Sundby in a long conversation in 2005. 48. The same photograph is printed twice inside the book, first on the title page in a different cropping without her coiffure, and then the same version as the cover in connection with the verbal text about her.

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thus she is presented as someone to be looked at. While the perspective resembles old ethnographic pictures of ‘racial types’, this connotation is counteracted by the expression on her face. Although serious, she seems poised and comfortable. According to Jorunn Sundby, she chose this angle for aesthetic reasons and in order to portray the self-confidence of the young girl. The pose displays her facial profile, earrings, necklace and elaborate hairdo of many small braids. In the main text of the book, the author expresses her admiration for this kind of hairstyle. To the Norwegian missionary and most Norwegian viewers the hairdo in the picture just connotes Africa, but for some Cameroonian viewers it carries more specific meanings. When I showed this photograph to both Christians and Muslims, I first noticed that many people disliked the hairdo, making comments such as: ‘There is added artificial hair, I do not like that’ and ‘This is just fashion, it is not traditional’. I then learned that for some people the particular forelocks consisting of small braids connote a ‘free woman’ (i.e. a kind of prostitute). This of course does not mean that Mouna is a ‘free woman’ but merely that she is a modern young woman who has chosen a fashionable hairstyle, regardless of what some people might think. The titles of most verbal and visual portraits in the book refer to the concerns the young person expressed in the interview. These include the kinds of things that I suppose many young Norwegian readers can identify with. For example, the portrait of one young Protestant woman is entitled ‘Likes music and devours books’, another is ‘Wedding preparations’. In relation to the Christian youths, the author’s aim of portraying them in respectful and culturally sensitive terms comes through very well. But since respect and closeness for a Protestant woman is the most difficult in relation to the Muslim youths, the portrayal of Muslims can be regarded as a test case in this respect. In the next chapter I show that the pictures of the young Muslim men are interesting exceptions in the record of Protestant portrayals of Muslims. However, in contrast to the portrayal of Christian women, the portraits of the two Muslim women are not given titles that reflect the concerns of the interviewees. Probably without noticing, the author has changed her perspective when constructing these titles. One visual and verbal portrait is entitled ‘Her father has two wives’, while the other states ‘Married at the age of 15’. For a Muslim woman in Cameroon, it is probably quite unremarkable that her father has two wives or that she married early. For contemporary Norwegian readers, however, these facts carry much significance as markers of distance and difference. I think that the verbal portrait of Aissatou, one of the two Muslim women, is quite typical for current Norwegian attitudes to Muslim women. The text about her tends to focus more on what she lacks, what she does not say, and what she is not doing, than on expanding on what she actually says: … Therefore Aissatou has never learned to read properly. … Her grandparents arranged her marriage. She did not know her husband. The first time she met him was at the wedding. She does not say if it was a shock to meet him or not. As a Muslim she is used to accepting that this is the way things are – this is Allah’s (God’s) will, and therefore she cannot change very much. … Aissatou’s family gave her equipment for the house, three beds, and many cups and pans. But she did not know the bride price! Her life changed after she married. She was no longer allowed to talk to or look at other men outside the family. She could also not go out during the day without her husband’s permission. If

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she were to travel somewhere, she also had to ask her husband’s permission. What he said was the law. It seems as if Aissatou accepts this – this is the way things ought to be. Perhaps she does not know that things can be different. She is the second wife, in other words wife number 2, and accepts even that. We, the two wives, get along well together, she says. We share the work and help each other out. Aissatou is now expecting her second child. ... I do what I can to be a good Muslim, she says. As a married woman, she always covers her head. She wears a headscarf, and over it a large piece of cloth covering her head and reaching far down on her back. Her life is largely limited to the saare. She is a Fulani, and in her tribe it is the husband who provides the food. This means that she cannot go to the field, and thus she also loses this possibility to get out. She cooks, takes care of the children, talks to the other wives, and stays day and night inside the walls. But in a way she seems to be happy with her life; she does not know anything else. It also seems as if she has a good relationship with her husband. I can talk to him about everything, she says.49

Although Aissatou says that she enjoys her life, including cooking and taking care of her children in the company of her co-wife, the comments of the author focus on the limitations of her life in the saare (the compound), as seen from the perspective of a Norwegian woman in 1991.50 The text is accompanied by a photograph, here reproduced as Figure 53. We see a frontal picture of a young woman from the waist up. Dressed in West African garb, she poses, looking directly at the camera. She is smiling in a friendly way, showing her teeth. There is thus a marked contrast between the picture and the text. In the text, she is portrayed as somebody who lives a restricted life and does not know very much, whilst her expression in the picture, its air in Roland Barthes’ terms, shows a modest but good-looking and self-confident Figure 53. Aissatou. Photographer: Eli Vollen. Reproduced from Sundby (1991). young woman. To me, the most characteristic feature of this picture is its very ordinariness in terms of a lack of exotism. Despite her West African dress, and because of its air, her photograph is actually one of the pictures in this book which I suppose it is easiest for young people in Norway to identify with. The propaganda effects of the combined

49. Sundby (1991: 39). 50. Aissatou is presented in terms of Islam, but similar marriage practices can be found also among nonIslamicized groups.

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picture and text probably resides in this contradiction. The author tells the readers that Aissatou is oppressed, and the picture shows them that she is worthy of their help. There is also a contrast between the picture and the text in two other ways. First, in the text the author says that Aissatou always wears both a small headscarf and a large piece of cloth covering her head (a modjaare), whilst in the picture she is only wearing a headscarf. The modjaare is tied over her shoulder in the same way as in the picture of the three nursing students from Douala. The picture thus tells a less restrictive story about her way of dressing than the text.51 Second, given the way her life circumstances are portrayed, how could the interview have taken place, and how could the picture have been taken? A page in the beginning of the book states that several of the photographs were not taken by the author, and Eli Vollen is listed as the photographer of the picture of Aissatou. Vollen is a midwife who worked in Cameroon for thirteen years as a missionary. She told me that she has had too many patients in her life to remember each and every one of them, but she does remember that she met Aissatou as a regular patient at the health clinic in Gadjiwan and that the picture was taken in that context.52 I therefore see a similarity between the situation in which Lars Gaustad photographed the young Mbororo woman and that in which Eli Vollen photographed Aissatou. Both subjects were non-Christian female patients at a mission clinic – one barely Islamicized, the other a Muslim; one picture was taken in 1968, the other in 1989. Both photographic occasions took place on the missionaries’ turf, as it were, and were characterized by gratitude and trust. And in both cases there is a contrast between photograph and text. Although Gaustad’s text is written in a positive mode, and Sundby’s text is written in a more distanced mode, both texts concern the effects of Islam on women’s lives. While Aissatou posed self-confidently, the young Mbororo woman is looking pensively away from the camera in the published picture, but not in the unpublished ones. The difference in air between the photographs can perhaps be interpreted in the light of the fact that one photographer was a man, the other a woman, and/or that one author/editor was a man and the other a woman. In any case, I find that the missionaries who were involved in the medical work of the mission have taken interesting photographs of non-Christians within negotiated photographic occasions. The trust and gratitude of their patients provided the relational context for these photographic occasions. In relative contrast to the theories of possessive shooting and the colonizing camera, these photographs actually to some degree bring the subjects to life for European viewers. The midwife Eli Vollen also conducted the interview with Aissatou, based on questions formulated by the author. Most of the patients at the clinic in Gadjiwan were Muslims, and since Sundby wanted to include portraits of Fulani Muslims in her book, she made use of the 51. Her way of dressing was normal for the way many Fulani women would dress when posing for a photograph at the time. Jorunn Sundby does not remember if she also had other pictures of Aissatou to choose from. Nevertheless, the other young Muslim woman who is portrayed in this 1991 book actually posed with the modjaare covering her head and a serious expression on her face. This picture was taken by Sundby, and she had two more pictures to choose from. One shows just the smiling face of the subject, the other shows her with the modjaare over her shoulder, revealing that she wore a European-style pullover underneath. Sundby selected the most exotic picture precisely in order to show how Muslim women at times cover themselves up. Source: Jorunn Sundby. When portraying the Muslim women she thus deliberately focused on difference rather than sameness. 52. Source: Eli Vollen in a telephone conversation on 18 January 2005. The information in this and the following paragraph is based on this conversation.

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trust established by Vollen. Thus, the author and Aissatou never met. This is the only person portrayed in the book that Sundby did not know personally, and the distance expressed in the text may of course be due to that fact. The result of Sundby’s reworking of the material provided by Vollen in Norway in 1990 is that Aissatou’s words and picture are recontextualized in a way which seems to be relatively far from the original context. Aissatou presents herself as content, both verbally and visually, but is seen in terms of the restrictions on her life in the written text. In writing up her story, Sundby seems to have been caught within the confines of her own preconceptions, interpreting Aissatou’s life with a view from afar. I assume that part of the context for the distance in the text is that, over the years, the persistence of African polygamy has caused the Norwegian missionaries much grief. They have fought hard against it, but every now and then a baptized man – and also some church leaders – would take a concubine or an extra wife, causing deep disappointment to the missionaries. Moreover, I assume that another part of the context for the particular nature of this portrait is the change in the immigration debates in Norway around 1980–90.53 This was a point in time when concern for the oppression of Muslim women by their own fathers and brothers was becoming a central topic in Norwegian popular culture. Muslims started to be targeted as a category in the mass media with a consistent focus on the situation of women.54

Anonymity, Moral Character, Collectivization, Sensualization, Naturalization and Victimization Pictures of attractive women are important as attention-grabbing devices and as a focus for the supporters’ identification with people in Cameroon. The images of the women embody, as it were, the capability of the locals to receive the Faith, and thus the humanity they have in common with the (often female) viewers in Europe. At the same time, many publications displace the confident or critical voices of women even as they reaffirm the beauty of their bodies. While the photographs inspire identification, the accompanying text sometimes inspires pity. Close-ups of anonymous women seem to invite a reading in which they symbolize the receptivity of the field as well as Christian values of femininity. The many pictures of beautiful women in the missionary books are a result of deep-seated intuitions about which pictures might catch the attention of the audiences in Norway. In contrast to more recent war and crisis news reportage from Africa, many missionary photographs present black Africa as fertile soil for the Gospel by stressing the humanity of local women and children and the peacefulness of their day-to-day activities. However, as we have seen, close-ups of anonymous and smiling young boys in white shirts seem to symbolize the harvest in the form of the young Cameroonian church. While the churches that the missions helped establish are now called ‘sister churches’, they are nevertheless often visualized by using young boys. In addition, the books also contain many pictures of adult men – in school classes, groups of students, nurses and pastors. Apart from a few pictures of church presidents and other important men in the church, as well as Olaf 53. Gullestad (2006a). 54. See Thorbjørnsrud (2003). She uses the expression ‘weeping for Muslim Cinderellas’.

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Ellingsen’s portrait of the first convert to be baptized in this field (Figure 23), there are not many close-ups of black men. Apart from the pictures of Yiglau, Volaou and Rundok discussed in Chapter 4, there are also next to no pictures of middle-aged and old women. As noted earlier, the captions for the few photographs old women generally depict them as former slaves.55 Because the male editors and authors of the history books about the Norwegian Missionary Society in Cameroon have made limited use of photographs taken by female missionary photographers, there are several male filters between what went on in Cameroon and what is presented in Norway in these books. It is difficult to know how much difference this makes. After all, female missionaries and missionary wives largely share the ideologies and perceptions of their male counterparts. Jorunn Sundby’s book is interesting because of the way she names her interviewees and to some extent lets them speak. In most missionary publications, women and children are not underrepresented as subject matter but are depicted from particular stereotypical angles and within limited contexts. Here I want to summarize the analysis of the representations of Cameroonian women in the missionary publications by means of the concepts of anonymity, typification of individuality, moral character, humanity, collectivization, sensualization, naturalization and victimization. The meanings of photographs derive not only from their subject matter but also from the addition or absence of captions, from their location in the book in relation to the text and to other pictures, as well as from their size. The role of the captions is to mediate between the experiences and views of the authors and editors and their public in Norway. When there is no caption, the editors have apparently assumed that there was no need for mediation, because the meaning of the picture was considered to be self-evident. The close-ups of anonymous subjects are often printed in large formats without any textual explanation. There is a tendency to supply pictures of white men and male activities with captions and names, and, conversely, to treat black women and female activities as natural and thus in no need of an explanation. In my reading, the naturalization of women’s bodies is most often present in folk-life pictures of anonymous females. Not only gender and ‘race’, but also age, seem to carry significance: youth sometimes modifies the effects of gender and colour. While theories of colonialism, ‘race’ and modernity often do not discuss gender and age, feminist scholars have argued that colonial discourses are often characterized by a perspective in which the colonized country and the colonized people are regarded as feminine, in opposition to the colonizers who are portrayed as masculine.56 It is, of course, too simplistic just to contrast the feminine/traditional to the masculine/modern. Nevertheless, to me the many representations of black women with children in opposition to representations of white men without children often connote the absence versus presence of rationality and modernity. To a large extent, the missionary visualizations mirror the more general ideological assignment of black women to domestic and reproductive spheres. There is often an implicit analogy between blacks and whites, on the one hand, and women and men, on the other. In this hierarchy, black women are located at the bottom. Single female missionaries seem to be ranked in a way which is more or less comparable to black male workers in the church.

55. See Chapter 4. 56. Moane (1999); Markowitz (2001).

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Missionary publications often apply a ‘typification of individuality’ in the sense that the photographs make use of the particularity of an individual face – its youth and beauty as well as expressions of intelligence, strength, pensiveness, defiance or innocence – to create a typical figure in the missionary gallery of moral virtues. Therefore, typification and anonymity do not necessarily involve dehumanization or demonization. On the contrary, the pictures of women and girls often portray them as noble heathens, worthy of attention and help. Thus, the missionaries have more or less consciously used women’s beauty to capture attention and inspire interest in a way which focuses on moral character (the air of these pictures, in Barthes’ terms), in particular on women’s shyness, sweetness and thoughtfulness. Often representations of women symbolize the potential receptivity of the field and the equality of all human beings as the children of God. At the same time, many close-ups of young and beautiful women exhibit a form of modest sensualization. While the missionaries made ample use of the sensuality of young African women in their representations, their images of women nevertheless do not exhibit the crudeness of some other colonial photographs.57 As an embodiment of the ‘other’, the many photographs of young and beautiful women invite viewers to make a connection between their concrete relationships to people they are close to and their abstract photographically mediated relationship to people in Cameroon. On the one hand, I assume that the focus on young and beautiful women had a humanizing effect by emphasizing the common humanity between viewers and photographic subjects across differences of geography and colour. On the other hand, the pictures allowed Europeans to celebrate the physical beauty of black female bodies in an atmosphere devoid of politics and so forget the unpleasant face of colonialism and economic neocolonialism. They could create the illusion of possession through the mere act of looking. The pity that is elicited through the publications often resides more in the accompanying texts and how these texts work in relation to the pictures than in the pictures alone. More recently, there is a renewed focus on victimization in the missionary publications – especially on women as victims of their fathers and husbands. In colonial and imperial discourses, the maltreatment of nonwhite women by men in their own societies has been a recurrent theme with many variations.58 In a study of stereotypes about nonwhites in the weekly press in Norway, the author found no indignation on behalf of nonwhite women in relation to non-white men in 1952. In 1975, this had become a prominent theme.59 The question is whether the victimization of Muslim women exemplified in Sundby’s book is influenced by the surrounding cultural climate, or whether it is part of a deeper dynamics within missionary publication. In Chapter 8, I argue that the missions not only reflect general cultural trends but have actually played a part in producing some of them. In order to substantiate this idea, I present a feature film made in 1960 and argue that this was the beginning of the current popular rearticulation of the victimization of nonwhite women in Norway. But before that, I need to discuss the representations of the Muslim sultans – the lamiibe – and the men associated with them.

57. See Alloula (1986) for an analysis of colonial photography in picture postcards from Algeria. 58. See, for example, Thomas (1994). 59. Moldrheim (2000).

7 MUSLIM MEN: DANGEROUS RIVALS AND EXOTIC VILLAINS There is no phantasm, though, without sex, and in this Orientalism, a confection of the best and the worst – mostly the worst – a central figure emerges, the very embodiment of the obsession: the harem. A simple allusion to it is enough to open wide the floodgate of hallucination just as it is about to run dry. Malek Alloula1 As noted in Chapter 2, the Norwegian missionaries went to what is today Northern Cameroon in the 1920s because they wanted to participate in an international Euro-American effort to arrest the further expansion of Islam in Africa. Seeing Islam as an enemy that had to be fought, the idea was to make an ‘apostle belt’ of missionary stations across Africa. When they arrived in the region that became their mission field, it had already been conquered by Fulani Muslims. In this chapter, I present a few missionary representations of Muslim men in the region, in particular the pictures of Muslim sultans and their material and social surroundings. As already noted, a sultan is locally called lamiido (plural lamiibe); the missionaries call him lamido or just ‘king’ (Norwegian: konge). At the arrival of the missionaries in Cameroon, the colonial administration had recently changed hands from the Germans to the French, and the small French administration relied on the local lamiibe. For example, when building roads and other forms of infrastructure, they profited from the forced labour commanded by the sultans. The first houses of the Norwegian mission were also built by the labour force of the lamiido in Ngaoundéré. The lamiibe kept many servants – or slaves – and a large number of wives. As we have seen in the discussion of slavery in Chapters 2 and 4, by not keeping the lamiibe under strict control, the French colonial administration not only helped them to maintain their power, but also – for a period before political emancipation – to augment it in a direction which was more oppressive for the many non-Fulani people in the region. The mission’s fight against slavery and the other oppressive practices of the sultans constitutes the empirical and emotional context for the ways they chose to portray Muslim men for their supporters in Norway. 1. Alloula (1986: 3).

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For the missionaries, the lamiibe and their men represented a challenge to the vision that the locals were unconsciously calling and pleading for help. At the same time, their perceived brutality and cruelty provided a contrast to their own self-representations in terms of goodness. Nevertheless, in order to work in a district, the missionaries had to foster a relationship with the local lamiibe based on deference and politeness. The missionaries always paid a courtesy visit to the lamiibe when they arrived in an area to evangelize. Sometimes an official photograph was taken on those occasions. Judging from photographs and texts, the missionaries’ relations to the lamiibe were impersonal and ambiguous – they depict distance, disgust and fear as well as fascination and a kind of respect. The lamiibe, for their part, tried to appropriate the power of the white missionaries. For example a lamiido built a mosque as almost an exact copy of the station church in Ngaoundéré.2 While the influence exerted by both Muslims and Christians in the region has grown during the twentieth century, the missionaries nevertheless have contributed to the diminution/partial loss of power and resources for the Muslim political–religious leadership in the region.3 This can be regarded as the reverse side, as it were, of their project of saving local people by eliminating their traditions and systems of belief.

Verbal Portrayals of Islam: A Hard Field to Cultivate According to the written portrayals of Islam in the individual books, Muslim sultans were both rivals and potential converts. Karl Flatland, whose book was published by the NMS in 1922 in order to inspire the establishment of a Norwegian mission in the area, is the most explicit in his condemnation of Mohammedanism (muhammedanismen) as a religion.4 People in Norway were invited to engage in the fight against ‘the Mohammedan curse’ and for the Christening of the heathens. With a reference to ‘Pastor Baxter of the Church of England, who was one of the greatest interpreters of the prophesies about the final things’, the author maintains that ‘papacy and Mohammedanism’ are ‘the third of the unclean spirits whose arrival have been foretold’ (Revelation16: 12–14). He portrays Catholics and Muslims alike as holding on to ‘fanatic superstition’. In the future these two religions will be ‘combined under a high emperor (Anti-Christ)’. He substantiates these views by referring to the Bible (Revelation 13: 11–17 and 19, 20).5 The following quotes are just a few examples of his points of view: ‘fanatic Mohammedans’,6 ‘the most uncompromising Mohammedan enemies of the Europeans’,7 ‘the threatening expansion of Islam’,8 ‘the green danger’.9 Furthermore, ‘… Islam is Christianity’s most dreadful enemy. It makes no moral claims, approves polygamy, produces proudness and makes the human heart hard in relation to God and his word. It denies the divinity of Christ and places Muhammad above Christ. It works against all social and political 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

The two pictures of the station church and the mosque are reproduced in Skagestad (1971a: 3). See Lisbet Holtedahl’s film Africa’s Last Sultan. Flatland (1922). See Chapter 3. Flatland (1922: 123). Ibid.: 5. Ibid.: 6. Ibid.: 7. Ibid.: 20.

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reforms and is almost impregnable to Christianity.’10 ‘It is easy for the Mohammedan priests to lead the people astray into fanatic rebellions against the Christian colonial governments.’11 ‘The forces have to be united, we have to join hands in order for Christ’s gospel to reach these large countries as quickly as possible and save them from the Mohammedan curse.’12 In Flatland’s book, however, there is no photograph that matches these various rather sombre descriptions. There is a picture of ‘the house of the “king” (the sultan) in Shellem’, of a ‘Hausa-woman with her child’, ‘the mosque in Shellem’, and ‘the king of Shellem and some of his wives’ (I count twenty-three women in the picture) (Figure 14). The pictures are small and seem relatively unimpressive in relation to the written text. Furthermore, Flatland wrote: ‘We should not regard the Mohammedan as an enemy, but as a human being for whom Christ died just as much as for the heathen.’13 I showed in Chapter 4 that Flatland had a picture taken of himself and his servants (Figure 13) that, in terms of composition, was very similar to the picture he had taken of the Muslim ‘king’ and his wives. In later missionary books, Islam is not portrayed as crassly as in the passages above. Nevertheless, some of the themes continue over time in the missionary propaganda in more subtle versions, in particular the themes of fanatism, cynicism, the irrationality and ineffectiveness of the ‘magic remedies’, and the lack of inner conviction connected to learning the Koran by rote and to the ritualized ways of praying.14 For example, in 1952, Per Arne Aasen wrote about the need to ‘melt the hard Mohammedan hearts, enslaved in a cold and despotic religion’,15 and Halfdan Endresen wrote that ‘The Fulani are hard and arrogant’.16 In this way, the missionary texts often operated with homogenizing stereotypes about Muslims. They saw Islam as a threat, and this threat was highly gendered: Muslim men were represented as perpetrators, while women were represented as victims. The following vivid description of a lamiido and the people surrounding him is full of evocative richness of detail and ambiguity of feelings: I was interrupted in my sad thoughts by a procession of horsemen and men on foot passing by, shouting and bawling, accompanied by the booms and bangs of trumpets. This belated scene from ‘A thousand and one nights’ is no longer as strange as the first time. We sit in the orchestra stalls on the veranda and see them pass by in front of us almost every Thursday. Small horses, fiery and capricious, trot by with their proud horsemen in colourful costumes. In the middle of the procession thrones the Lamiido on a richly decorated steed. His Highness is dressed in a long, blue robe, and a white turban hides his whole face, only the eyes are visible. A slave runs alongside holding a parasol over his head, another slave fans the tip of his nose with a tassel made of feathers. Behind them follows a foul-smelling and howling crowd of court people and singers. They vigorously pound their little drums and flatter their ruler in flowery language: You are a lion! Not even the white man is like you! Some of them have strange, high-pitched voices and strange body deformities – long bodies and thick legs looking like sticks. At least a couple of them are no doubt eunuchs. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Ibid.: 12. Ibid.: 22. Ibid.: 188. Ibid.: 119. See, for example, Budal (1962: 81–99). Aasen (1952: 90). Endresen (1969: 137).

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A horseman lifts the long trumpet and blows roaring fanfares. A horse rears up, stands on two legs and kicks wildly, while the horseman remains sitting as if glued to the animal. Slaves are running alongside, dressed in small shirts made of native cotton cloth. Towards the back, free men walk in a leisurely way in small groups – tall Hausa men in long white dresses, dark wild men from far out in the bush wearing small waistcoats, the women in long, colourful shawls, refined clerks from the south in gleaming white clothes and hats at an elegant angle. … The court jester steps out briskly, gesturing with his arms and quoting Arabic brilliancies at a furious pace. Every now and then his voice jumps a little, hawking Semitic guttural sounds, his tongue rolls out the r’s, spitting out the words in fits and starts. —— Al harr, al harr, he shouts at us in a triumphant manner. We do not know if it is meant as flattery or a curse. He gazes ahead with the fanatic eyes of a madman and praises the prophet, the lamiido, and the priest following him. The screaming multitude disappears in the direction of the airport where the tournament is taking place. I am left with a feeling that they were triumphing …17

In these passages by Per Arne Aasen, I see admiration as well as jealousy, rivalry and attempts at ridiculing and belittling local Muslims in the way the events are described. Many typical themes are present: fanaticism, insanity, and the point of view that the life of the local Muslims is not part of modern times. The focus is on the men, while the women are there, in the background, as a kind of decorative element in their ‘long, colourful shawls’. The reference to eunuchs and ‘A thousand and one nights’ provides an ambiance of exotism, despotism and sensuality. It is evident that the author feels safe that the people he writes about will never read what he writes. If the author had to write to them, and not just about them, he could not have written the way he did, in such a humorous and exoticizing mode. In Aasen’s book, there are no pictures which illustrate the events described above. I have found a set of pictures in Aksel Aarhaug’s 1985 book which to some extent can be used to illustrate the description of the lamiido’s procession above (Figure 56).18 However, in this book the photographs serve a very different purpose. Aarhaug wanted to portray the musical instruments in the pictures as part of Cameroonian culture. Aasen’s book contains, however, some typical motifs from the Muslim Cameroon: a lamiido in his royal outfit, his house, ‘a big man and his slaves’, rows of men praying at the end of Ramadan with their bottoms in the air, ‘two adversaries, the evangelist Etienne and the chief Papa’, ‘the old chief of Ngambe’. Most of the photographs are small. The pictures of the lamiido and his house are located on the same page as a larger picture of a young beautiful Fulani woman carrying a calabash (a gourd) (Figure 54). In terms of size, the picture of the young woman is thus prioritized over the pictures of the lamiido and his house. The viewer is invited to inspect her picture more closely. The very first photograph in Aasen’s book is a full-page picture of him talking not to a lamiido but to a Muslim chief (Figure 55). This is the only full-page picture in the book. Its size and location signal importance. The caption says: ‘A visiting village chief.’ Like the books by Raen and Røst, the presence of the author is not acknowledged in the caption. In my interpretation, the picture serves to give authority to the written text, signalling ‘I was there’. We see two men, Aasen himself in a white shirt, shorts and sun helmet and a black man in his 17. Aasen (1952: 43–45). See also Nelson (1996: 17–19). 18. Aarhaug (1985: 114).

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Figure 54. Three pictures reproduced from Aasen (1952).

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Figure 55. Per Arne Aasen and an anonymous Muslim. Reproduced from Aasen (1952).

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long robe and round hat.19 They are standing in front of a house at the mission. Cameroonian viewers see a picture of a colonizer and a man from the court of the lamiido. The two men seem to be engaged in a lively conversation. There is a spatial distance between them. The village chief was talking when the picture was taken, gesticulating animatedly with his hands. Being more or less of equal height, there is a certain visual equality between the figures. The missionary seems to be listening attentively. His body language is open, but also a little wary, with his hands firmly on his hips. According to some Cameroonian observers, his body language indicates that he does not respect the other man. In my interpretation the picture signals both dialogue and distance at the same time. As late as 1999, the Danish missionary Henri Nissen, who is not representative of the current official view of the NMS, wrote that Islam is ‘a dark religion’ (formørket religion)20 and that it is not easy to communicate the Christian message to the Fulani.21 According to him, the Muslims need to be ‘spiritually liberated from traditions, rituals, fear and superstition’.22 Under the subtitle ‘What a waste of life!’ Nissen wrote: Satan probably claps his hands in joy over the billions of people who have been lured by one single false prophet. In the Book of Revelations one can read that ‘the false prophet who has seduced the peoples’ will end up in the sea of fire – I wonder if the text here does not allude to Muhammad. But it is still possible to save millions of Muslims from damnation, even give them a much better life – here and now. This is really a challenge! It ought to make Danish Christians line up for the missionary societies in order to come out here to help. Here at the radio station we attempt to help the Muslim Fulani to physically live a better life by means of information about health, social issues, family life, raising livestock, etc. – and spiritually by means of education intended to make the Fulani search for the real God, instead of making do with Muhammad’s false picture of an angry God.23

I interpret this utterance from 1999 as more judgemental than the vivid description by Aasen from 1954. Nissen legitimizes the Christian missions by pointing to ‘Muhammad’s false picture of an angry God’. His book has a small format, and most of the pictures are small, showing a variety of motifs, among them his family life in Cameroon, his servant Jonas, and several pictures of his car on a muddy road. The cover picture shows the family car deep into water in the rainy season. The book also features photographs of a lamiido in full regalia while he rides to Friday prayers,24 a Muslim ritual slaughter of an animal,25 as well as praying Muslim men.26 19. This kind of dress is most typically worn by the Muslim Fulani. An alternative to the robe (called bou bou in French, gandura in Hausa and gaaré in Fulani) is the long tunic called a saaro or jalabia. The saaro is a wide tunic, while the jalabia fits the body more closely and also has a collar. Under the bou bou men usually wear a long undershirt (djoumpa) and a pair of trousers (sarla). They also wear the sarla under the tunic. The round hat on the head, which is often finely embroidered, is called hufneere. 20. Nissen (1999: 71). 21. Ibid.: 48. 22. Ibid.: 71, 94. 23. Ibid.: 71. 24. Ibid.: 52. 25. Ibid.: 88. 26. Ibid.: 97.

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Missionary Orientalism The ubiquitous use of terms such as ‘fanatism’, ‘despotism’ and ‘harem’ by missionaries for the lamiibe and their polygamous households indicates that missionary judgements of Islam and Muslims echo Orientalist depictions. Within typical Orientalist discourses, as analysed by Edward Said (1978), things Oriental are often described within an erotic and sensual atmosphere. In Orientalist paintings, the motif of the harem was central – the Orient itself being imagined as an imprisoned woman waiting for a man. These particular depictions related as much to the imagination of the European viewers as to the realities they purported to describe, and tended to legitimize imperial intervention. The Orientalism in the missionary publications revolves around the choice of terms when characterizing the lamiibe and other Muslims, and stereotypes following these terms like shadows. The reign of the sultans is despotic – their political power is characterized by lack of social change, lack of rationality, as well as cruelty, lechery, fanatism, fatalicism, exotic abundance and, last but not least, the oppression of women. Such portrayals underline the need to rescue Cameroonian women. The Arabic word haram designates a space which is forbidden or sacred. In a Muslim household the term refers to that part of the dwelling where strangers are not allowed to enter. According to Malek Alloula, the harem represents collective dreams and fantasies in Europe: The phantasmic nature of the Harem is a function of this presumed absence of limitation to sexual pleasure lived in the mode of frenzy, and which is conceivable only if, in each instance, its object is different, unique, irreplaceable, and perfectly individualized.27

Alloula’s provocative and controversial book The Colonial Harem, from which this quote is taken, has encountered postcolonial feminist criticism. For example, Saloni Mathur argues that Alloula is speaking very much in the voice of a defensive Islamic male (‘how dare you look in this way at our women?’) and that he does not encourage empathy or understanding in relation to his subjects.28 Nevertheless, the centrality of the notion of the harem in the missionary literature adds new meanings to the many pictures of anonymous young beautiful women, to the pictures of ‘harem walls’,29 and to the pictures of the lamiibe and their wives.

Typical Photographic Motives: Pictures of the Lamiibe and Their Courts Most of the illustrated missionary memoirs and history volumes contain one or more pictures of a sultan, and perhaps also of his court. The subject matter of Muslim religion and Muslim men can be divided into the following main motifs: (1) sultans in full regalia, posing officially (see, for example Figure 24, upper picture and Figure 54, lower left). These are often fullfigure pictures, often with wives, court members, musicians or servants; (2) courtesy visits, posing with leading missionaries; the missionaries visiting the sultans. They show a kind of dignified equality between the missionaries and the sultans as leaders of parallel organizations; (3) the lamiido’s musicians (Figure 56); (4) the ‘harem walls’ and or some of the many wives 27. Alloula (1986: 49). 28. Mathur (1999). 29. See Figure 26.

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Figure 56. The orchestra of the lamiido in Foumban. Photographer: Aksel Aarhaug. Reproduced from Aarhaug (1985).

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of the sultans and chiefs (see, for example, Figures 14 and 22); (5) mosques; (6) Muslim men praying with their bottoms in the air (Figure 24, lower picture). The missionaries seem to have been both fascinated and repulsed by the acts of collective, public prayer. In contrast, there are few photographs of praying Christians in these books. This topic was perhaps regarded as too intimate and private, prayer being regarded as an act between the individual and God. Moreover, this motif was well known to the viewers. The motif of praying Muslims was perhaps more interesting because it was more exotic to them. Many photographs also portray the lamiibe and their men more indirectly by representing what the missionaries perceive as their misdeeds. One example is the pictures of former slaves. As I noted in Chapter 4, their suffering was usually presented as a result of the maltreatment they had received by the local sultan and his court. Another example is the pictures of ruins of churches and chapels in the history books. The ruins bear witness to the evil of the Muslim adversaries who burnt them down or otherwise destroyed them.30 In my view, these photographs indicate the following tendency: when Cameroonians are shown as social actors (in contrast to being suffering victims who are meant to inspire compassion and pity), they are often portrayed as evil. This is so also in the film that I analyse in the next chapter. The pictures of the Muslim sultans gave the Norwegian missionary field in Northern Cameroon a distinct visual character. At the same time, many of the photographs are small, and the photographic subjects appear exotic and distant. Presented simultaneously as villains and exotic visual attention-grabbers, I nevertheless find that the lamiibe are central to the visual and narrative appeal of these publications. While the Catholics are just rivals, and generally not visually represented, the Muslim rulers are both rivals in the fight for souls and embody the hardness of the field to be cultivated, as seen from the missionary perspective. Moreover, the Muslim lamiibe, the chiefs and their followers were seen as an alternative hierarchy in relation to the Protestant church. In the missionary publications, the representations of the exotic lamiibe serve to enhance the goodness of the missionaries, the beauty of the women of the mission field, as well as the need to help out. One could perhaps also say that the patriarchy of the mission became less prominent and appeared more natural when seen in relation to the heavy-handed oppression of both women and other labourers by the Muslim sultans. The power commanded by the lamiibe is visually evident in the fact that they are often posing formally in the missionary pictures (see, for example, Figure 24, upper picture). In contrast to pictures of local women, these photographs are also usually not anonymous. Even though their names are seldom given, the captions usually present their formal title and the geographic region. Nevertheless, like the pictures of women, they were verbally muted. As the exotic, bodily signifiers of tribal identity and the evils of Islam, they are both demonized and represented as attractive, dignified, fascinating and powerful. And unlike the pictures of young 30. ‘Burnt chapel in the Rey region’, Larsen (1973: 100). ‘Church ruins in Bankim’, Larsen (1973: 101). ‘The chapel in Bélel, destroyed by people ordered by the authorities May 23, 1975’, Lode (1990, picture number 59). ’The new chapel for the Toubouro was burned by the traditional authorities in Rey Bouba on Easter day 1967’, Lode (1990, picture number 60). The photograph before these last two in Lode’s 1990 book shows ‘the lamiido Hamadou de Rey Bouba at the door of his palace in Rey Bouba in 1968 with his interpreter Oumaro’ (translated from French, picture number 58). The interpreter is lying in an uncomfortable position behind the lamiido, who is sitting majestetically in full regalia. This is thus a strong representation of power.

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and beautiful women, the pictures of sultans and their men are characterized by distance and exoticization. In the published material discussed in this book, I have found no close-ups stressing the humanity of the sultans. However, this kind of photographs were taken by Anna Wuhrmann from the Basle mission of ‘King Njoya’ in Fumban at the beginning of the twentieth century.31 She developed a close friendship with Njoya and his family. Such friendship relations do not seem to have existed in the mission field of the Norwegians. I have, however, found pictures suggesting the humanity of the sultans among the still unpublished pictures of Ivar Barane.

New Tendencies When conversing with a retired missionary about changes in attitudes to Islam, she cut me short by saying: ‘For me the Mohammedans are heathens, no more, no less.’ However, some younger missionaries see these things differently. One of them once said to me: ‘When some of the old missionaries talk in their old-fashioned ways about “the Mohammedans”, I just can’t follow them. There is such a generational gap on this point.’ These new attitudes have so far not manifested themselves very much in the published texts and pictures. However, an effort to give neutral descriptions of Muslim men can be found in the book for young people by Jorunn Sundby discussed in the previous chapter. While the written portrayal of the young woman Aissatou is characterized by distance, the written and visual portraits of two young men named Saïdou and Oumarou seem closer to what they might have accepted as a reasonable representation of their lives, even though the photographs, the titles and the interviews focus on Islam. The title of the portrait of Oumarou, who is fourteen years old, is: ‘Goes to the Koran school and loves playing soccer.’ The photograph shows him full-figure, sitting on a carpet doing his Koranic writing, his shoes in front of him outside the carpet, his books and ink on the carpet (Figure 57). This is a photograph which in my view presents Oumarou in a way which makes him equal to the viewer without taking away all context and without averting his gaze. He is aware of the camera and is looking directly at the photographer with a slight smile on his lips. The title of the portrait of Saïdou, who is twentythree, is: ‘Islam influences everyday life.’ Saïdou is older, and therefore perhaps more threatening for Norwegian viewers. The photograph is a close-up of his face and shoulders (Figure 58). He is dressed in an embroidered jalabia or tunic with an embroidered round hat (Fulani: hufneere) on his head. This kind of dress is most typically, but not exclusively, worn by Muslims. He is not smiling in the picture and is looking dreamily away from the camera. The air of this picture, in Roland Barthes’ sense, is in my view similar to the air both of the picture of Paul Ngonom (Figure 23) and the picture of the young Mbororo woman (Figure 42). Both the Cameroonian and the Norwegian viewers to whom I have shown the photographs find his expression poised and serene.

31. See Geary (1988), where a selection of Wuhrman’s pictures is published. For example, figure 87 (p. 129) shows Njoya with his first grandchild in his arms and a tender look on his face.

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Figure 57. Oumarou. Photographer: Inger Aanstad. Reproduced from Sundby (1991).

A Story about Respect and Resignation To me the photographs of Muslim men and their captions articulate a story of both growing respect and disappointment. Perhaps the most telling example of the latter process involves the picture by Olaf Ellingsen of a Mbororo herdsman discussed in Chapters 4 and 6 (Figure 26). The different captions used for various reprints of this photograph illustrate the change from hope and promise to disappointment in missionary–Muslim relations. In Dalland’s book the full-page black- and-white image carried a caption referring to him as ‘this lonely

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Figure 58. Saïdou. Photographer: John Steinar Dale. Reproduced from Sundby (1991).

wanderer who suspiciously listens to “the church bell”. In his belt he carries powerful magic remedies.’ In the 1973 anniversary book, the picture reappears, spread over a page and a half with no caption. Its location at the end of the main text and as the next-to-last photograph in the book nevertheless suggests hope: it is men like this herdsman that the missionaries hoped to turn away from Islam and convert. In the 1992 history book, a colour photograph from the same situation appears as the last in a series of full-page introductory pictures before the main text, and its caption echoes Dalland’s: ‘Lonely wanderer listening to the “church bell”…’

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Another recent use of this image is in the book in French about the history of the national church that will be more thoroughly discussed in chapter 9. This book is aimed at the Cameroonian church members, and not at the Norwegian audience. The photograph takes up only half a page there and has the following caption, which strongly suggests disappointment and resignation: ‘A Fulani looks toward the chapel of a small village. The evangelization among the Fulani has had little success.’32

32. Lode (1990: picture no. 50).

8 VICTIMS AND VILLAINS IN A FEATURE FILM FROM 1960 Whether a film is capable of generating more complex statements seems to depend upon the filmmaker’s ability to make the film more than merely a report on a cultural encounter and, instead, embody it. David MacDougall1 In Chapter 4, I discussed the film expedition of photographer Olaf Ellingsen and the leader of the NMS film office, Jan Dalland, in terms of Ellingsen’s photographs and Dalland’s reflections on taking photographs in Cameroon. In this chapter I present an analysis of the most important film that they made during that trip. This analysis allows me to explore how the categories of gender, ‘race’, age and class that I have identified in the previous chapters come together in one sustained narrative. In particular, I emphasize the central roles that local women are made to play in missionaries’ visual and written representations at the crucial historical moment when Norwegian development programmes were being institutionalized and put into practice. The film is a good example of the emerging communicative modality that I have heuristically called ‘development’. The two filmmakers who travelled to Cameroon in 1960 were not ordinary missionaries, but, because their expedition was commissioned by the NMS, they were appointed as missionaries by the leadership for the duration of their expedition.2 Their main task during the journey to Cameroon in 1960 was to make the ‘narrative film’ (handlingsfilm) that I examine in this chapter.3 Because of the leadership’s fear of offending some of the core supporters, it was a victory for Dalland at the time that he managed to persuade the society 1. MacDougall (1998: 163). 2. Dalland (1960: 13). 3. According to Dalland, in Ny Horisont 1961 8: 35, they chose to go to Cameroon ‘both because this field was closest at hand and because we here meet perhaps the most authentic [opprinnelige] and primitive in our fields’. The results of the expedition were this feature film, two shorter and less popular films, the book by Dalland, a series of black-and-white stills by Ellingsen, as well as a popular slide show in colour presented by Ellingsen himself for numerous local missionary associations as well as in more general fora in the 1960s (Figure 27 was part of this slide show). Several of Ellingsen’s stills use the same people and situations as the films. They shot about 1,000 still pictures and 13,000 feet of Kodachrome 16 mm

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to allow him not only to make a documentary but to produce a film with a dramatic story. The deciding factor was that Ellingsen, the photographer, was willing both to do the work free of charge and to make valuable equipment freely available.4 Already in 1936, Gunnar Andreas Meling, a well-known and influential NMS missionary in Madagascar, had expressed his strong wish to make mission films: ‘If the friends of the mission could but see with their own eyes what I now see.’ He found that film was a hundred times more effective than photographic stills, and he could not understand why the mission hesitated to put this medium to its service.5 Even though the use of film to disseminate their experiences was controversial within the mission – the argument of the leadership was that many friends of the mission would not accept it because they regarded watching moving pictures as sinful, a ‘heathen medium’ – the NMS started showing a few reportage films early on. In 1925 the NMS in Stavanger bought their own film projector, and at the end of the 1930s they showed not only American and British mission films but also their own silent short documentary films. One could therefore say that the leadership of the NMS slowly changed from attempting to control the new medium by opposing it to making a concerted effort at using it to seduce the audience in Norway so they would become interested in the mission. Thus, in the history of filmmaking, the missionaries served both as obstacles to change and as pioneers. A film brings together the concreteness of photographs and the movement associated with language in a complex intersection between the producers, subjects and viewers. In the case of this film, the intersection was particularly complex, since, as we shall see, the filmmakers were both missionaries with lengthy experience in Cameroon and the visiting photographer and director with no such experience. The new visual medium provided the missionaries with new public relations possibilities. Jan Dalland considered making films as a ‘work tool’ for reaching actual and potential supporters.6 Like Gunnar Andreas Meling, he hoped that showing films would give the public a more dynamic idea of the work of the mission in foreign lands.

colour film during the expedition. The film cameras they used were two Paillard H.16 Rex with various lenses (Source: Ny Horisont 1961 8 : 35; Focus April 1960, 1 : 9). One of the two shorter and lesserknown films made by Dalland and Ellingsen during this expedition is Sambo. It is fifteen minutes long and is about three boys who go hunting. One of the boys breaks his leg and later also made a break with his former life. The story line for this film was probably written by Kjell Sandnes. He called it Bruddet (the break) because the boy broke with heathenism and became a Christian. The other film is called ‘Tam-Tam makes a big catch’ (Tam-Tam gjør storfangst). Source: Various undated lists (from the 1970s and the 1980s) of films and film strips for hire from NMS Lysbilde og filmsentral. The expedition to Cameroon cost about NoK 60,000, but the mission earned more than double that for the various activities it generated. Source: Ivar Barane. Elllingsen presented films and slides shows in many different institutions outside the normal mission circuit. By March 1961 he had already presented his slides 100 times in different fora: to ‘folk academies’ (folkeakademiene), rotary clubs, meetings in firms, women’s and men’s societies, ‘lodges’ (losjer), organizations for young farmers, housewives’ organizations, school associations, parents, associations and so on. Source: Norsk Misjonstidende 18 March 1961, 10 : 5. The slide show and a tape with Ellingsen’s comments are now located in the NMS Archive in Stavanger. I have made a transcription of the commentary, which is now also in the NMS Archive. 4. Focus April 1960, 1 : 9. 5. Quoted in Barane (1994: 3). 6. Dalland (1960: 13).

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The 45-minute film is entitled ‘Sinda: a description of real life in Cameroon’ (Sinda: En virkelighetsskildring fra Kamerun). It was the second fiction film made by the NMS, and by far the most popular.7 In order to give it as much publicity as possible, it was first shown in the central assembly hall at the University of Oslo (the Aula, used for doctoral defences, concerts and large meetings), together with the photographer Olaf Ellingsen’s slide show.8 The choice of venue indicates a wish to reach a wider audience than just the core groups of supporters. I regard it as a propaganda film for the mission and as an effort to transmit knowledge across cultural worlds. In terms of some of its aims, it thus approaches the ethnographic films of the period. In fact, making narrative films was well-suited to the missionaries’ propensity to teach by means of stories, and it turned out that the audiences appreciated receiving factual information about the mission woven into a dramatic story rather than in the form of documentary.9 Nine or ten copies of the film toured all over Norway for several years. It was well received and created much interest in relation to Cameroon. Because of this heightened interest created by the film,10 Ellingsen’s slide show, as well as other public relations activities at the time,11 several new missionaries were recruited to Cameroon and new projects were started with funding from Norway. The making and showing of the film took place at a crucial historical moment: at the beginning of the 1960s, many African countries, including Cameroon, had recently become politically independent. When the film was shot, the French colonial administrators were leaving this part of Cameroon and Africans were taking over. The Cold War was on, government-sponsored development aid was beginning, bourgeois family values – with the father as the breadwinner and the mother as housewife – were at their strongest in Norway, in northern European cities romantic love was well established as the legitimate basis for marriage, and Norwegian television had just started. This was also immediately before the second wave of political feminism took off in Europe, with its fight for women’s equal rights. Within the mission, this was six years before they changed the cover of the main journal from a drawing of ‘The call from Macedonia’ – in which the woman was no longer kneeling and no longer pleading, but passively holding her child in both arms – to a modern photograph. 7. The North American missions have produced many such films. The first story film made for the NMS was shot in South Africa in 1954 and was shown in Norway from 1955. It was called ‘In the realm of the medicine man’ (Der medisinmannen rår). NMS later made narrative films in South Africa, Madagascar and Japan. 8. Dalland in Ny Horisont 1961 8 : 35; Focus 1961 13(2): 7. 9. Barane (1994: 11). The reportage films from Cameroon included Der Lamidoen rår (about slavery), Legen på Savannen (about the work among the sick) and Utsett til tjeneste (about a Cameroonian pastor who was formerly a slave). Slide shows for hire included Atta, Barnehjemmet tar seg av Haua, En misjonsstasjon blir til, Kvinnen i Kamerun, Med kurs for Kamerun, Ngaoubela, nådefjellet, På besøk hos misjonæren, I Afrikas urskog, Radiomisjon i Kamerun, Streiftog i Kamerun, and Ut med evangeliet. Source: Various undated lists (from the 1970s and the 1980s) of films and film strips for hire from NMS Lysbilde og filmsentral. 10. According to Norsk Misjonstidende 23 September 1961 31: 1, the screenings of the film in Oslo and Bergen were both sold out. In Oslo, a chartered bus full of people from Tønsberg had to return because there were no tickets left. At that time, the film had not yet been screened in Trondheim. 11. In particular, the information activities included two exhibitions entitled ‘To the ends of the world’ (Til jordens ender) (1948–60) and ‘Africa calls’ (Afrika kaller) (1960–66). During the exhibition ‘To the ends of the world’, silent movies were shown daily, with added live piano music or music from two record players, adapted to the film. Source: Nils Kristian Høimyr.

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The Storyline In this chapter I am not able to show the film itself. I therefore have to give a detailed verbal description of what we see before I start the analysis. The film starts out with the image of the sun rising over the thatched roofs of round houses and continues with a group of four women walking to fetch water from the river and washing millet grains, their clothes and their children. Barefooted, they carry clay pitchers on their heads. One of them is dressed in a European summer dress while the others are wearing blouses, large pieces of cloth wrapped around their lower bodies, and headscarves, and carrying their babies in cloth slings. A male voice-over tells us: Africa is waking up. The Dark Continent. About three times as large as Europe, and with a population of 230 millions. It stands today on the threshold of a new era. One country after the other is receiving its independence and taking its place among the free nations of the world. How will these peoples, fragmented into countless tribes, and who still partly live at the level of the Stone Age, manage this transition? New ideas and thoughts find their way to the most out-of-the-way place and to the smallest village, bury the belief in the old ways and transform little by little both each person and the tribal society. Which ideas and which faith will fill the void left by the old ways and point Africa in a new direction? A simple story from real life in a small village in Cameroon can in many ways give us Africa’s problems in a nutshell. This is the story of little Sinda. Sinda’s surroundings are apparently idyllic. But her mother is seriously worried about her.

I interpret the first sentences as holding the key to the film. Africa is a Sleeping Beauty waking up in another time from the rest of the world. The passage is built on an opposition between the old and the new, between the asynchronous African ‘Stone Age’ and the European present. It expresses the optimism of a new beginning connected to political independence. At the same time, the viewers are invited to focus on local problems and to see the film as an instance of something more general – of ‘Africa’s problems in a nutshell’. At the beginning of the film, Sinda is a toddler. She is wearing yellow pearls around her neck and colourful pearls on her earlobes and around her waist. Her head is partly shaved, leaving some areas of curly hair. The problem is that she cannot walk. Her father is both the blacksmith and the medicine man of the village.12 He tries various divination techniques and medicines. First he consults his fortune-telling sticks for advice, but with no clear result.13 Then he tries to exorcize the illness using a gourd filled with pebbles. This, too, does not help. Everything indicates that the ‘serpent ghost’ (slangeånden) has invaded Sinda. As a last resort Sinda has to undergo ‘the serpent test’ in order to find out whether she is a human being or a serpent, and thus whether she should be allowed to grow up or not. The test demands that she is left by the river on her own. Her parents and another woman (a grandmother?) therefore bring her down to the riverside. ‘While she sits helpless at the river bank, with dangers lurking on all sides, the adults hide.’ The images cut back and forth from the child to a snake in the grass to the water in the river nearby and to the adults peering out from behind the bushes. 12. This part of the story builds on a practice among the Dii people in Cameroon. Source: Rachel Djesa. According to Tomas Drønen (2005), the Dii are farmers, but they have also been engaged in trade and are renowned for their blacksmith clan. 13. The sticks look new, as if they have never been used before.

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For a long time we hear the heartbreaking cry of the child, and the narrator informs us: ‘If Sinda does not crawl into the river, she can perhaps be saved.’ The test lasts the whole day. Sinda does not approach the river and the parents are relieved. She is no serpent. But still she cannot walk. At this point in the story, the evangelist in the village is introduced, a barefooted black man in shorts and T-shirt. He has been ‘liberated from superstition and the power of the witch doctor’. The evangelist and the blacksmith/witch doctor have had many disagreements over the years, because many people in the village do not believe as much as before in the power of the latter’s medicines and magic remedies (tryllemidler).14 Nevertheless, today the blacksmith is friendly. In the smithy he is dressed simply in rolled-up culottes and a soft pointed cap on his head,15 He wants to recount his problem, and the evangelist is happy to listen. The evangelist persuades the blacksmith to take the child to the mission clinic in the Duru valley. ‘If she goes there, she will get the help that really works. There they have strong medicines which have cured many people.’ At the clinic, they are met by the missionary nurse, sister Guri (Guri Sola) in her white uniform. We also see a black male evangelist in a white European shirt and trousers teaching the patients about Jesus. The camera focuses on some of the waiting children, and on Sinda and her mother. Sinda is first examined by sister Guri’s careful hands and then given injections, and she eventually gets well. ‘But even though Sinda really got well, the blacksmith did not want to have anything more to do with the mission.’ Years pass, visually symbolized by showing a fence with pointed poles. When we meet Sinda again, she is a fourteen year-old, dressed in a large piece of cloth wrapped around her body (Fulani: godel) and a pearl necklace. We are also introduced to her friend Martha, who is wearing a checkered red and white European summer dress, and to Martha’s Christian family: ‘At Martha’s home it is so cozy (koselig) under the large courtyard tree.’ Martha is a student at the mission school. Sinda also wants to go to school, but is not allowed to do so by her father. He never went to school and does not see the value of reading, and in particular not for a girl. Nevertheless, Sinda sometimes visits the mission school during the breaks, singing and playing with the other girls. When the school day is over, Martha teaches Sinda to read and write. Sinda’s father wants to marry her off to a much older man by the name of Maman. Maman has already paid several instalments, and one day he comes to visit, wanting to finalize the agreement by paying the last sum. There is a difference in dress between the two men, indicating a difference of social status. Maman is wearing an impressive full-length blue robe (French: bou bou), while the blacksmith is wearing his sleeveless shirt and culottes. The father and the suitor agree on a total amount of 350 kroner (the Norwegian currency), ‘half the price of a cow’. The father puts the money in his cap.

14. Quite a few Christians in Cameroon, including evangelists and pastors, believe in the power of magic and sorcery. For the missionaries it is a source of grief that even the leaders in the church have not totally abandoned these practices. See also Chapters 6 and 10. 15. He is dressed in the Dii way. Sometimes he is shirtless, like in the smithy; at other times he wears a sleeveless shirt and knee-length culottes. The only exception is during Sinda’s wedding, when he is wearing a full-length robe.

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Maman has several wives already, and Sinda and Martha sneak off to peek into his compound. They see two wives fighting over a pot, and Maman trying to stop the quarrelling without success. Inside his compound, he is dressed simply, without the robe. He struggles to get to his feet, having to use two sticks. The pot falls to the ground and breaks. Close-ups show Sinda’s and Martha’s sad faces. Sinda does not want to marry Maman and live in his polygamous household, but nobody is interested in her opinion. ‘If she refuses, her father will become angry and use the hippopotamus whip. If she flees, she might be rejected by her family. Then she would be completely helpless and would invoke the wrath of her ancestors.’ While her father is building or repairing the roof of a house, she goes to the forest: ‘here she finds peace to reflect upon her destiny’. The narrator continues: ‘High up in the sky carrion birds are sailing, waiting for their prey. The vultures come closer.16 It is as if the birds and the animals suspect that here is someone fleeing for her life. She does not mind the perils of the night. There is only one way out: the mission station!’ We hear frightening bird cries, and the scene is intercut with pictures of various animals, among them a hippopotamus disappearing under the water. At the mission station she is warmly received by a female missionary who is not named (Solveig Bjøru) and by her friend Martha who now lives at the boarding school; both are wearing their European summer dresses. Sinda is allowed to join the school. ‘Here going to school is not regarded as slavery.’ The teacher is a young black man, dressed in an impeccable European-style shirt and trousers, who teaches the children in French. While he is teaching them mathematics, the camera zooms in first on the hands and then on the bare feet of one of the students: ‘When she does not have an abacus, she has to make do in a different way.’ Outside, boys dressed in shorts and girls in summer dresses march happily together in the school yard, singing a song in French.17 When they enter the school building, the camera zooms in on the faces of a few students, and then on their bare feet. During the break, the mostly barefooted boys play soccer using a dry orange as the ball. Sinda is introduced to Jesus Christ for the first time. We see and hear her, Martha and a third young girl praying together with the missionary. Over their heads hangs a black-andwhite picture in a black frame that shows Jesus on the cross and a mourning woman (Mary?) kneeling underneath. One day, when the missionary is pumping up the tyres of her bicycle, Sinda’s mother comes to visit, nicely dressed in a West African outfit. She brings a live hen, wanting to thank the missionary for admitting Sinda into the school: ‘She loves her child, and does not easily forget the help they received when Sinda was little.’ We are shown a beautiful close-up of the face of Sinda’s mother: she looks down and smiles shyly, drawing the viewer into the film. The missionary, for her part, receives the gift in a way which reveals that she is not used to handling live hens. In an exceptional moment of playfulness, the voiceover comments: ‘One needs the proper knack to receive a flapping hen!’18

16. These ‘carrion birds’ are not vultures but a kind of bird which is appreciated by many locals. Source: Rachel Djesa. In a brief intercut image, we also see a real vulture. 17. Part of the reason why many children in the film are wearing European clothes is that they have received the clothes as gifts from the missionaries. Source: Ellen Eliassen; Guri Sola. 18. When watching ‘traditional games’ during a celebration in Ngaoundéré in 2004, I noticed that young people today are fully competent in handling the live chickens which were awarded as prizes in the games. I have also seen children carrying live chickens in the city.

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Back in class, the camera focuses on a conventional religious picture of a white Christ receiving the sick (who are also white). ‘With an open mind the children listen when the teacher tells about him who never differentiates between high and low, rich and poor, black and white, but reaches down to everybody.’ However, one day the two friends venture too far from the mission. Sinda’s father suddenly comes to fetch her, and Martha has to watch her friend being forced to follow him back home. Sinda is given hard work to do and becomes submissive under the threat of her father’s hippopotamus whip. While she is carrying a large bundle of firewood, the camera zooms in on her bare feet. In the village her marriage party is prepared. The women fetch water and make food and drink. The feast starts, and the guests are eating, drinking and dancing. The father and the bridegroom sit by themselves, drinking ‘strong beer’19 and talking.20 On this occasion, both are dressed in full-length robes and hats. At the age of fourteen, Sinda, her hair in an elaborate coiffure and dressed in a woman’s outfit, is forced to marry Maman and become his third or fourth wife. The woman who dresses her seems to be the same as the third adult person involved in the serpent test. The other guests mock her: ‘You seem to think that you are better than others. Oh, no, my girl! This is life itself. Be happy that you are getting a husband who can provide for you [brødfø deg].’21 The film cuts to the face of Sinda’s father. We also see Sinda sitting crouched and unhappy in the bridal hut. Later on, Martha brings her some other clothes, and ‘while the party continues recklessly, she disappears into the tropical night’. These words are spoken as we are shown a close-up of a burning fire, perhaps meant to symbolize the reckless partying. Sinda runs to the mission and is again welcomed by the missionary. The next morning we participate in Martha’s baptism in the station church in the city of Ngaoundéré. We see a close-up showing Martha’s face and the black hand of the pastor who baptizes her. Martha is dressed in a European summer dress, white with a green pattern, symbolizing purity. The camera moves around the congregation and zooms in on a few black persons. An organ is playing, and the congregation sings hymns in French whose melodies are well known to people in Norway (one of them is Kjærlighet fra Gud, the other is Oppløft ditt syn o kristen sjel). One day, when Sinda and the missionary are sitting peacefully on the mission’s veranda, Sinda’s father and Maman come to fetch her. Maman is walking with a stick. Twice during the scene, the camera dwells on their feet: the father is barefoot, Maman wears sandals. For them, Sinda is a married woman and belongs in her husband’s compound. But the missionary refuses to let her go. She tells the two men that the marriage is not valid since Sinda did not consent. In addition, she is only fourteen years old, and the law says she has to be sixteen to marry legally. The two men are angry. But because they respect the missionary, the voiceover informs the viewers, they will not take Sinda by force. But they threaten the missionary by saying that they will find a way to get her back. While this is going on, the film cuts to an image of Sinda sitting crouched, timid and unhappy on the steps of the veranda. 19. The ‘strong beer’ looks like water. 20. I screened the film at the University of Tromsø on 15 March 2004. According to Cameroonian students who were present, the film has simultaneously aggrandized and simplified events surrounding a Dii wedding. In real life, a second, third or fourth marriage of an older man to a young woman would most often not be celebrated with an elaborate party. And a marriage contract does not involve just father and bridegroom – many male relatives are involved. 21. Brødfø literally means to provide the necessary bread. This comment sounds more Norwegian than African, since among many non-Fulani groups (such as the Dii in this film) women cultivate the staple food and thus contribute to the provision of the staple food equivalent to the European bread.

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After this encounter, the female missionary approaches the police prefect. He is a black man dressed in a black suit. He promises that the case will be taken care of, and that Sinda can continue to go to school. It is the duty of the government to see to it that the laws are followed, he says. Cameroon has become a free country. The film ends with a few questions and statements: Will her new faith endure, or will she give up the fight against heathenism? And what will happen to all the others behind the walls? Africa is waking up. Even though many people are still tied down by fear and superstition, the belief in the old ways is breaking down. The African needs a new foundation for life that provides freedom and security.

These words are accompanied by images showing Sinda’s and Martha’s smiling faces, and the missionary raising her arm and moving it majestically in a half circle over the landscape in front of her, symbolically reaching out to all of Africa with the Gospel. The last film images show some of the walls surrounding a compound. Thus, the storyline is divided into two parts, both with a happy ending, but it does not contain a scene in which Sinda or her parents are dramatically converted from heathenism to Christianity. This kind of radical conversion story would have fitted well with the expectations of the core public in Norway, but perhaps not a wider public. Instead, we first see how little Sinda is healed by the science-based medical knowledge of the mission. Then young Sinda escapes from a marriage to a polygamous old man with the help of the mission. The missionaries and the people associated with them (such as Martha and her Christian family) are the good helpers, while the father and the bridegroom are the villains of the story. The film images and the way they are cut support the storyline. Often inter-cut shots reinforce or add a symbolic dimension to the drama. The filmmakers have used shots from both nature and local culture to enhance the story. For example, for European viewers the images of a real snake when little Sinda is sitting helpless by the river add to the suspense of the story.22 The snake represents the missionaries’ perceptions of her feelings of fear, how terrible it was for a child to be left alone in this way. Thus, they enhance the horrifying aspects of this heathen practice, as seen from the perspective of the mission. This effect is perhaps amplified by the fact that in the Bible the snake symbolizes Satan.23 For people in Northern Cameroon, a snake is not the same symbolically loaded metaphor as for people in Norway. The broken pot on the ground in Maman’s compound seems to be intended to symbolize the strife and lack of unity in a polygamous household. From time to time, the camera dwells on the bare feet of some of the protagonists, using them as powerful metaphors for the old versus the new, backwardness versus modernity, naked versus clothed, poverty versus wealth, hardship versus comfort, and low status versus high status. 22. The snake they filmed is a small poisonous snake that had just eaten a frog when it appears in the film. In his book, Dalland vividly narrates how they were waiting to get these shots. Jacobo, the man who played Sinda’s father, had promised to help them find a snake. One day he asked them to bring the camera in a hurry, because he had spotted something in the dry leaves behind the house. They watched the snake eat the frog (Dalland 1960: 85). For the Cameroonian students in Tromsø, the appearance of the snake in this context seemed strange, even though poisonous snakes constitute a real danger for small children who are left alone. In the Dii practice it is the child who is the potential serpent, and for them the snake does not belong in the story. 23. In addition, in a Freudian interpretation a snake also symbolizes the male sexual organ.

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The three times that Sinda appears at the mission, the scene is intercut with landscapes bathed in sunlight which penetrates through the clouds in an expanse of sky above the treetops. Drawing on European art history and the conventions of biblical films, I interpret these intercut scenes as attempts to visualize the presence of God at these important turning points in the story. In line with conventional binaries, God is associated with light, heathenism with darkness. The many ‘carrion birds’ that at first circle over Sinda in the forest are absorbed into the film to symbolize the vulnerability of the young woman.

Positive Information about the Mission This film was made before synchronous sound and subtitles had become common in documentary films and it has to be interpreted within that historical context.24 The voiceover explains what we see and what people are saying. It would not have been possible to give details of the storyline without making use of this commentary. But the narrator does more than just explain what is going on in an omniscient and authoritative way. He also transmits a variety of ideas and messages, among them additional information and specific evaluations. The drama of the story was meant to function as a conduit for information about the mission, showing it in a positive light. Thus the plot concerns Sinda and her fate, and it functions to justify the good intentions of the mission, which is the main message of the film. For example, when the evangelist is introduced, the narrator informs the viewers about his background and tasks. He has received a brief education at a Bible school, and his salary is not high. Therefore he has to farm and hunt, just like everybody else in the village. ‘He is one of their own, and is more easily accepted than the missionary who is a stranger.’ When Sinda is taken to the clinic, the narrator informs the viewers about typical diseases and ways of treating them. Many people suffer from infections, malaria and vitamin deficiencies. Most of the treatment at the clinic takes place outdoors. We also see an evangelist at the hospital who is teaching the patients and their relatives about God. The narrator’s comment that even though Sinda did get well the blacksmith did not want to have anything more to do with the mission expresses a certain level of disappointment. As noted in Chapter 2, medical care is a part of Jesus’ commissioning of the disciples. It is done out of compassion, to help. At the same time, medical work is also a way to bring Christain compassion to people’s attention and make them open up to the Gospel. The hope of the missionaries was that people who were healed would give up their former beliefs and follow the Christian religion. In this hope they were often disappointed, especially concerning the Muslim Fulani. When Martha’s family is introduced, the narrator tells the viewers that her mother is a woman who has suffered greatly. While we see her sieving grain, she is presented as a widow from a marriage to a Muslim, and as a former slave who was maltreated by the bigwig (storkakse) who owned her, the term storkakse adding a class dimension to her story. When she once tried to flee, he broke her knees. According to the voiceover, she obtained her freedom with the help of the mission. The camera briefly shows her smiling shyly. The contrast between the sad content of the commentary and the timid smile accentuates the happiness of her new life as a Christian. In terms of the usual missionary iconography, I see her smile as a 24. Synchronous sound had been used by some filmmakers since the 1920s, but Olaf Ellingsen and many others did not apply it.

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visualization of the transformations brought on by conversion. When Sinda is received at the mission, we are told: ‘At the mission station many who cannot defend themselves are helped.’ The film cuts to the image of a small antelope to illustrate this point.25 When Sinda visits Martha at the mission school, and when she later on starts going to school, the narrator informs the viewers about the educational work of the mission: the teachers work hard. They have to use French, because the children at school speak mutually unintelligible languages. The narrator links the mission to freedom from fear, to cleanliness, order and happiness: ‘Even though they live under poor conditions, the children who are in touch with the mission are often clean and well groomed. One also notices that a specific free and happy atmosphere often accompanies those who go to the mission school.’ The schools are described as one of the three ‘workshops’ (verksteder) of the mission (the other two are constituted by churches and hospitals). But the narrator warns that knowledge is not enough: ‘Knowledge is a good thing, but it is the attitude towards life that counts. Many ideas are now fighting to enter Africa’s soul. The Christian mission therefore is working actively in order for the Gospel to reach the people, in particular the coming generation.’ The many ideas that ‘are now fighting to enter Africa’s soul’ probably contain an implied reference to both Islam and communism. As already noted, the film was made during the Cold War at a time when a Muslim had just become President of Cameroon. When Martha is baptized, the authoritative voiceover informs us: ‘On the benches freeborn and slaves are sitting side by side. They remember well the day they were helped to be released from of the chains of heathenism.’ However, some of the people sitting on the benches were not slaves but former slaves. This comment thus illustrates the force of the fight against slavery for the missionary conception of self in Cameroon, the centrality of the metaphors of slavery and chains for life before conversion, as well as how the mission assumes that local people share their own conception of conversion as freedom from slavery. In addition to the voiceover commentary, the film images are accompanied by sounds such as people talking, singing, crying, pounding grain, making food, drumming, playing organ music, as well as the twittering of birds. Almost the entire soundtrack of the film is based on authentic recordings in the field, and Jan Dalland hired a professional film producer to add the soundtrack.26 As already noted, this was before synchronous sound and subtitles became common in film documentaries and the filmmakers and the people who worked for them had to make a series of choices concerning which sounds to add in order to elicit particular emotions and interpretations. The building up of suspense during the threatening situations is accompanied by African drums, the pitiful crying of the child and the frightening bird cries, while emotionally satisfying situations are accompanied by children’s songs and psalms with melodies that are well known to Norwegian viewers. For the filmmakers and Norwegian

25. The antelope in the film was perhaps a tame animal called Bambino that they filmed at Meng, a different missionary station from the one in Ngaoundéré (Dalland 1960: 109). 26. Source: Norsk Misjonstidende 2 September 1961 27: 3. His name was Jan Wikborg. According to the magazine, Wikborg found the film valuable, and he was the one who suggested that it should first be shown in the Aula at Oslo University to let as many people as possible see it.

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audience, Christianity is associated with organ music,27 hymns, French children’s songs (Alouette, gentil alouette), and schoolchildren playing soccer, holding hands, marching in a row and wearing European clothes. Heathenism is associated with drumming, local dances, beer drinking, polygamy and African clothes.28 Sometimes we hear the voices of the protagonists (especially when they are crying or quarrelling); sometimes we just see their lips moving. In both cases, what they say is not translated, and the audience is not told which languages they speak (Mbum and Dii). The implication is that local people are muted in the film, actually and symbolically.

‘Africa’s Problems in a Nutshell’ In the introduction to the film, the narrator announced that it would show ‘Africa’s problems in a nutshell’. His comments contain not only positive information about the mission, but also details about problematic aspects of local life, as seen from the mission. At times, the narrator’s commentary focuses on the difference and inferiority of local life in relation to life in Europe. He uses the conventional oppositions between light and darkness (‘Africa is waking up. The Dark Continent’), as well as conveying the need for new technologies. For example, when Sinda’s mother is shown using a hoe to prepare her field, the narrator comments: ‘They understand nothing about fertilizers and proper tools are nonexistent.’ Their agricultural practices are presented in terms of what they are not, not in terms of what they are, and women’s contributions are not acknowledged and appreciated. When we see Sinda grinding grain on a millstone, the narrator remarks: ‘This is the way women have ground the grain since time immemorial. In order to prevent worms from getting into the flour, they only grind what they need every day. The way of life is primitive and awkward, but nobody thinks of doing it in a different way.’ Again he focuses on the absence of something, this time a lack of inventiveness on the part of local women.29 Martha’s mother is presented in the following terms: ‘She struggles hard for herself and her children, but she is dutiful, and sees to it that her children can go to the mission school.’ The narrator praises Martha’s Christian mother because she sends her children to school,30 but the praise has a patronizing flavour. 27. Since the 1960s, the church has become Africanized in this respect. Organ music is no longer used by the church in Cameroon, only drums and other percussion instruments. They now also allow dancing during the church services. This is in contrast to the more conservative church at Madagascar. The reason why they turned to percussion instruments is that the organ in the station church suffered during the dry season (Bue 1992: 199). In contrast, the missionaries in Madagascar have tended to be more liberal about drinking wine than the missionaries in Cameroon. 28. The local music in the film is taken from two different traditions. The drumming is Fulani, while most of the other music is Dii. Source: Rachel Djesa. 29. In contrast, he might have commented on the scene as resembling a biblical motif. According to Sarah Graham-Brown (1988: 151), the theme of grinding wheat or corn with a millstone was particularly popular in photographs from Palestine because of the numerous allusions to this process in the Bible. Thus, the narrator chose to focus on technological development and not on biblical connections. This is in line with the aim of this film, which seems to be to portray the mission in a way which was in harmony with development ideologies. 30. At the time, many parents hid their children away instead of sending them to school. Source: Solveig Bjøru Sandnes.

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When Sinda and Martha peek into Maman’s compound, the narrator informs us about African family life in general: ‘... there is much quarrelling and envy among the wives. It even happens that the oldest wife poisons the child of the youngest out of jealousy. But it also happens that maa akira [the first wife] wants her husband to take a new wife. Then the younger one can take over the most strenuous tasks.’ Thus, both jealousy and the wish to have a co-wife are suspect within the shared life-world of narrator and viewer. The marriage party is prepared, and the narrator informs us: ‘In daily life people live simply, with only one meal in the evening. The rest of the day they grab a corncob, eat a few groundnuts, a papaya fruit or a banana. But when there is a party, a funeral or a wedding, nothing is spared.’ This comment does not focus on a problem, but the implication is that women’s everyday cooking is not worth mentioning. They only prepare one regular meal instead of the three to five daily meals in Norway. During Sinda’s marriage party, we see men and women dancing happily, some of the women with their babies on their backs. At this point the narrator states: ‘As time passes the beer makes the participants behave like they are possessed.’ ‘The mothers never dare to set the babies down because then somebody might cast a spell on them or poison them.’ Thus, the comments demonize local dancing and drinking. This way of depicting local celebrations does many things at once. It enhances the drama of the story, substantiates the contrast between their Stone Age heathenism and modern rationality, and informs viewers about the missionaries’ opposition to alcohol.31 When the father serves Maman a drink, the narrator comments that he drinks first from the bowl, because there have been instances of a bridegroom being poisoned at his own marriage party. Later on, when the two men arrive at the mission station, the narrator remarks that the Cameroonians are polite people. But their elaborate greetings are also described as just ‘the usual phrases of politeness’. When Sinda’s heathen father first appears, we see him in his rolled-up culottes and cap, washing his face, mouth and feet outside his house. In spite of the simplicity of Cameroonian material culture, I suppose that many Norwegians could at the time (and still can) appreciate this scene. But the scene is accompanied by the following comment: ‘Father takes it for granted that the jar will be full of water every morning. As the master of the house he expects to be waited upon. And it does not occur to him that fetching water from far away is strenuous work.’ Implicit in the comment is the idea that Father ought not to take the work for granted, but should rather be grateful. Moreover, fetching water seems to be regarded as too hard for women. Even though many Norwegian women on small farms had to fetch water and firewood while their husbands were away at sea, fetching water and firewood was traditionally regarded as men’s work in Norway. Moreover, women having to do hard work contradicted Western middle-class family values of the time, with the husband as the main 31. In Dalland’s book, there is a description of the filming of a Ramadan party in a village at some distance from Ngaoundéré. This may well be the party shown in the film: ‘On our way we observed that heathenism is still flourishing. When we passed a small village, we heard drums. We stopped and moved forward, listening. There, among the huts in an open space, people were dancing. … Even though this rhythmic dancing in a circle is perhaps the most innocent form of entertainment for the children of nature, I felt a cold rush down my back, standing there wedged in among them. Even from far away, the smell of beer struck us. At this point they were still standing on their feet and had some control over their movements. But how would things turn out later that night when darkness arrived and all inhibitions disappeared?’ (Dalland 1960: 167–69).

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provider. The voiceover of the film thus compares local ways of life to an implicit Western norm (modern technologies, monogamous marriage, and bourgeois family life with the wife at home). By enhancing the perception of cultural difference and turning it into deviance, the implicit comparison underscores a particular image of African women as figures in need of rescue by Europeans. The agreement between the father and Maman about the bride price is presented as a commercial matter in the crudest sense. Complex practices are reduced to buying and selling. She is only worth half the price of a cow, and ‘… nobody cares about Sinda’s opinion. The father and the bridegroom have made a good bargain, and she has been secured a home and a stable future’.32 In Africa, polygamy is not necessarily associated with Islam. As noted in Chapter 2, the history of the region is complex, with the Muslim Fulani as invading rulers in alliance with particular local tribes, and with first German and then French colonizers. The missionary literature from Cameroon generally distinguishes between Christians, heathens (more recently: animists) and Muslims. In this film, however, the voiceover implicitly subsumes Islam under heathenism, associating the evil of the two men with heathenism. In contrast to the many missionary presentations of still photographs from Cameroon, there is no exotic sultan in this film. Instead of colourful and exotic Muslim leaders, we are offered not only two men who are depicted as ordinary family fathers, but also a polarized worldview in which the influence of the Muslim religion in the region is briefly mentioned a few times but not elaborated upon as a social and spiritual force which is relevant to the story. When Sinda is forced home by her father, the narrator comments: ‘Heathenism has plenty of time. It is inexorable and can wait until the right moment arrives. That uncanny mill grinds slowly but surely.’ These lines are accompanied by a landscape scene with a vulture perched in the top of a tree. The film is interesting when compared to the published still photographs in the books in the way it lets the audience get to know mature Cameroonian men, who are not presented as exotic and distant. Although they are the villains of the story, the film allows the audience in Norway to inspect their bodies and their gestures. The heathen father is contrasted to the Christian father. In the scene from Martha’s baptism, the camera sweeps over many people in the congregation, among them a black man singing with a small child in his arms. When the camera rests on the two of them, the narrator informs us: ‘Isaac is of royal blood, but he prefers to be a servant in the mission rather than a chief in his home town.’ Isaac is the real name of the man; he was originally from the Duru valley and worked as a cook at the mission.33 Because local Muslim ‘kings’ (lamiibe), nobles and village chiefs generally have

32. This interpretation of the bride price as a buying and selling of women was well established in missionary publications. According to Hanna Mellemsether’s analysis of the society’s work among the Zulu from 1920 to 1930, ‘(t)he image of women in traditional Zulu society that was created by the missionaries through their texts in mission magazines was a sinister one. To the missionaries, women as a category were deprived of dignity and power, existing merely as a commodity in a masculine market place of “bride trade”’ (Mellemsether 2001: 5–6). But it apparently took some time before this image became common in Norwegian popular culture outside the mission circuits. According to Moldrheim’s study of Norwegian weekly magazines, in 1952 this practice was seen as a morally neutral custom with some advantages for women compared to the dowry system, but by 1975 it had become a reproachable practice (Moldrheim 2000: 76). 33. Source: Solveig Bjøru Sandnes; Rachel Djesa.

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several wives and sons, the chances for each son to replace his father are small. Nevertheless, the voiceover establishes a parallel between the hierarchies of the church and local power. The new Christian hierarchy is replacing the traditional Muslim hierarchy, as it were. The contrast between Christian and heathen is less stark when considering motherhood. In other words, gender modifies the religious binary. As already noted, the narrator maintains that Sinda’s mother cares for her child. And in contrast to her husband, she was grateful for the help they received from the mission when Sinda was little. Thus, she complies with missionary expectations. This is fully in line with other visual representations of local women, focusing on their moral character, and, consequently on their potential as receptive soil for the Word. When the father and Maman agree on the marriage contract, the narrator comments: ‘Mother witnesses father’s sale of the daughter, just like she herself was once sold.’34 Sometimes the narrator explicitly attempts to mediate between the protagonists in the film and the audience by describing local practices in terms of the values of the audience, or by pointing out similarities between local practices and those in Norway. One example is the description of Martha’s Christian family’s surroundings in terms of cosiness, and another is when he says that Sinda is going to the forest in order to find peace and reflect. Homely cosiness, as well as peace and quiet, are meaningful themes to the Norwegian audience.35 I think it is reasonable to say that the narrator is both the voice in the film and of the film.36 He tells the story, specifies what the missionaries see as the main problems in Africa, and presents the mission as the solution to these problems. It might almost seem as if the text of the voiceover was made first, and that the images were selected from the rushes and sequenced to function as a visual support for the verbal statements. In my analysis, the film has four main dimensions or levels: the storyline or plot, the themes, the messages of the voiceover and the images. The combination of positive information about the mission and the presentation of local problems enhances and deepens the drama of the story. ‘Africa’s problems’ are of many kinds – spiritual, educational, technological and medical. In line with his introductory remarks, the narrator builds the story into something more than just a tale, and the characters into something more than just a couple of individuals. Both the story and the characters become emblematic of life on the 34. This comment does read a sort of interior monologue into the mother, and is close to the contemporary ethnographic filmmaker Robert Gardner’s style of narration. It also has a faintly feminist theme of female solidarity. It could be interesting to compare the Sinda film with the choices made by other filmmakers to overcome some of the technical difficulties of filming without sync-sound and with a narration by a Western observer. The famous film Dead Birds by Robert Gardner focuses on warfare and exchange in Irian Jaya (now Indonesian Papua). It used an elaborate poetic and metaphoric structure to attempt to portray its characters in terms of a local myth (‘snakes are immortal, but birds, like men, must die’). It includes many scenes of violence and also of ritual, and developed two ‘characters’ which audiences respond well to (they are ‘humanized’), but it also has a narrator who ‘interprets’ the inner feelings of the characters in a sort of interior monologue that is now often regarded as paternalist and overdone. Another famous ethnographic filmmaker – Jean Rouch – probably the most celebrated European filmmaker to have worked in Africa (and who did work in West Africa with some of the same groups that are found in Cameroon), presented his narration as a ‘ciné-trance’, where he moved from disinterested observer to quasi-participant and then back to an observer’s stance in his extremely controversial film Les Maitres Fous, about possession cults. 35. Gullestad (1992, Chapters 3 and 6). 36. MacDougall (1998: 161).

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whole continent – for ‘Africa’s problems in a nutshell’. The comments inspire the viewer to see generalized problems, not a particular social environment with specific individualised human beings. Ethnic, gendered, religious and individual characteristics are turned into more general scenes and types by means of a fictional story ‘from real life’,37 in which heathen men are demonized while both heathen and Christian women are shown as victims. Nevertheless, when we also take the images into account, the film actually becomes a more complex intersection of different ways of life.

Complex Webs of Fact and Fiction Before I present my analysis of the film images, I need to discuss the credits. Making this film involved cooperation across two continents at a time when the specifications of roles in the production of documentary films were generally less precise than they are today. Moreover, the NMS film office for a long time interpreted claiming credits for photographs and films as acts of self-aggrandizement. The credits thus have to be interpreted within that historical context. The film ends with the logo of the Norwegian Missionary Society: the name is written as a circle around a moving globe and a Christian cross. The more specific credits are shown at the beginning of the film, accompanied by the sound of Fulani drums and on the background of a map of Africa, half of Europe as well as India. There the following names are listed: ‘Manuscript: Solveig Bjøru. Instruction (instruksjon): Jan Dalland. Photographer: Olaf A. Ellingsen. Co-workers (medarbeidere): Jon Fosse, Per Arne Aasen, Marit Fosse. Technical assistants: Sverre Fløttum, Mikael Strandenæs, Arna Harstad. Actors (medvirkende): Sinda – a girl from the Duru valley. Her friende – Martha. The blacksmith, Sinda’s father – Jacobo. Sinda’s mother – Fanta. The suitor – Maman. Missionaries – Solveig Bjøru, Guri Sola. Authentic recordings of folk-life.’ To a present-day viewer, it is not strange that there is no mention that Sinda the toddler was the actual child of Fanta, who played Sinda’s mother.38 But I was surprised that the young girl who played the lead is just listed as ‘a girl from the Duru valley’. In my research, I learned that her name is Djoumba Rachel.39 During the filming she ran away back home to the Duru valley and the film team had to follow her there in order to shoot the last scenes: ‘… we needed some happy scenes with her, and smiles are not delivered on command’.40 In the book about the expedition, Dalland calls her ‘the primadonna who disappeared’, without telling his readers why she ran away.41 The reason for her disappearance was that old Maman (who wants her as a wife in the fictionalized story of the film) had started to give her presents and show 37. According to Jan Dalland’s book, the manuscript was based on real events which had happened in the Duru valley. This is confirmed by Solveig Bjøru Sandnes. She wrote the storyline, but not the film script, and she was one of three missionaries in Cameroon who were asked by the superintendent (tilsynsmann) to do it. The other two were Per Arne Aasen and Kjell Sandnes. In the story she mixed different experiences that she had herself been part of. She wrote the story for a competition in the Scandinavian missionary film and photo newsletter Focus (Barane 1994: 10). Solveig Bjøru’s manuscript won one of the prizes. Source: Solveig Bjøru Sandnes. 38. Source: Solveig Bjøru Sandnes; Satou Marthe. 39. Source: Solveig Bjøru Sandnes. 40. Dalland (1960: 89). See also Chapter 4 about the smile in West African photography. 41. Dalland (1960: 88–91).

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his sexual interest in real life, and for a short period of time this made her very anxious. The scenes they shot in the Duru valley were taken at her school and when her hair was groomed.42 In the safety of her home area, and without Maman nearby, she relaxed.43 The change of plans is actually visible as an inconsistency in the film: when Sinda runs to the mission the first time, she is wearing clothes that are different from the ones she is wearing when she is filmed arriving. For Djoumba Rachel, playing one of the central characters, the filming thus briefly threatened to produce the problematic situation depicted in the film. The film project aimed to save girls like her from oppression but could not fully control the fact that the very real people involved in making the film had their own agendas. In addition, the girl who played Sinda’s friend in the film had at the time of the filming already had the experience of an old man coming to marry her, insisting that he had already paid part of the bride price. A missionary wife used her own private funds to pay the money back.44 These observations underline the complex webs of fact and fiction in this film – and how the fictional story both arose out of and interfered with the real-life problems of the people involved in making the film. Sinda’s friend is called Martha both in the film and in the credits (in the missionary literature her name is most often spelled Satou Marthe, and this is also the spelling she uses herself ).45 The suitor’s name is Maman both in the film and in real life. The missionaries referred to him as one of the former slaves who lived at the mission but never converted to Christianity.46 Jacobo, the man who played Sinda’s father, the blacksmith, was the Christian cook for the missionaries Jon and Marit Fosse. The filmmakers struggled to find somebody who could play this role, and when they tried out Jacobo, Dalland writes in his book, they immediately understood that they had discovered someone with talent.47 Some roles are not mentioned in the credits, including the evangelists, the teacher, Martha’s mother and the police prefect. Martha’s mother and the evangelists played themselves in the film. Martha’s mother’s name is Mbongje,48 and the evangelist in the village is Dadi; he worked in the Duru valley until retirement. I do not know the name of the man who played the teacher, only that he came from Southern Cameroon.49 The police prefect was played by Sindjui Elie,50 an agricultural inspector in the region and a well-respected member of the congregation in Ngaoundéré. Thus, some people in the cast played parts that were different from their real-life identities (Sinda, Sinda’s mother, the blacksmith, Maman, the police prefect); some played parts that were similar to their real-life identities (the evangelist, the 42. These scenes were shot by Dalland, not Ellingsen (Dalland 1960: 89). 43. Source: Solveig Bjøru Sandnes. 44. Source: Satou Marthe; Solveig Bjøru Sandnes; Dalland (1960: 65–67); and the tape with Olaf Ellingsen’s comments to his slide show. 45. In the caption of a photo of the two girls from the film, Dalland (1960: 40–41) calls her Martha. Endresen spells her name Saton in a caption in Endresen (1969: 112–113). Grimstad calls her Saatou Marthe (Grimstad 1997: 105). In Chapter 6, I examined a photograph of her, as the leader of the important organization Femmes pour Christ (‘Women for Christ’). 46. Source: Solveig Bjøru Sandnes. 47. Dalland (1960: 85). In Cameroon this name is sometimes spelled Yacoubou. 48. Ibid.: 63–68. 49. Source: Solveig Bjøru Sandnes. 50. Source: Solveig Bjøru Sandnes; Bjørg Bergøy Johansen; Satou Marthe.

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teacher, Martha, the missionaries, Martha’s mother and sister); while others were engaged in real-life situations that were just absorbed into the film story (the musicians and the people dancing at the party). According to Dalland, the Cameroonians who played specific parts in the film were paid by the missionaries for their participation.51 The varying specificity in the credits for the African participants indicates an assumption among the filmmakers that viewers in Norway would be more interested in the names of the people they knew (the missionaries and missionary wives) than in unknown people (be they Norwegian or African). Because of this assumption, the people in Norway who added the film’s finishing touches probably did not know the names of all the Africans involved. With the exception of Ellingsen, Dalland and Arna Harstad (who was a secretary at the film office in Stavanger), the Europeans in the credits were Norwegian missionaries working in Cameroon. Nevertheless, some participants are not credited. For example, Solveig Bjøru was only responsible for the storyline and not for the film script or the text of the voiceover, but no one was credited for these. And there is no acknowledgement of who did the cutting and editing of the film. Most likely Jan Dalland – perhaps helped by the professional producer they hired for the soundtrack and his colleagues in the NMS film office – wrote the film script, the script for the voiceover, and edited the film. As a professional photographer and owner of a studio in Stavanger, Olaf Ellingsen did not have much spare time.52 Dalland was the manager of the enterprise, and in his book he presents views and interpretations that are in line with those of the voiceover. He also expresses a strong need to verbalize his experiences in the foreword of the book: ‘Thus, our primary task was to film. But we experienced so much more that could not be captured on film. These experiences, during and around our work, did not give me peace of mind. I had to confide them to my typewriter and in this way supplement the film.’ I do not know whose voice was used for the narration. Since, as already noted, the soundtrack was edited by professionals outside the NMS, the man who read the text of the voiceover was perhaps just hired in to do this job. The fact that he does not pronounce the name of the town of Ngaoundéré the way they do in Cameroon, and that he pronounces the few French words in the film in a way which reveals that he does not speak French, indicates that he did not belong to the mission, or at least not to the group of missionaries who had worked in a French-speaking country. There are probably pragmatic reasons behind the choice of voice, given that the film was completed far from the missionaries in Cameroon. The storyline that Solveig Bjøru wrote for the film was based on her experiences as a school teacher in Cameroon, and more particularly on some events that had happened several years before the film was made. The girl who was at the centre of those events was grown-up and married when the preparations for the film began. At the time of writing, Solveig Bjøru was disappointed because she had not been able to help another young girl who had fought to avoid a similar marriage. Therefore she first wrote an ending in which Sinda had to remain in her marriage to Maman. But the two filmmakers insisted that this ending was too sad for the Norwegian audience and asked her to write a new and happy ending, which she did.53 As a female missionary working closely with women and children, she had acquired much knowledge based on experience. But on this point her knowledge had to yield to the 51. Dalland (1960: 87). 52. Ibid.: 63. 53. Source: Solveig Bjøru Sandnes.

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filmmakers’ perceptions of the preferences of the audience at home. In their view (based on established missionary genres), the audience needed a happy ending to be able to be receptive to the message of the mission. Solveig Bjøru’s disappointment and pessimism at the time were transformed into the optimism required in mission propaganda. Dalland, Ellingsen and their local helpers acted creatively in an uncharted terrain. Many people were involved in the film, and they were largely amateurs. All the parts in the cast were played by people who were not professional actors. Ellingsen was a professional studio photographer, and he had earlier made 16 mm films in Stavanger, but he was not a professional filmmaker; Solveig Bjøru, who wrote the storyline, later published a novel based on her experiences in Cameroon,54 but she was not a professional writer; the leader of NMS’s film office, Jan Dalland – a former pastor – was perhaps the most professional among them, but he did not know Cameroon very well. When arriving in Cameroon in 1960, the two filmmakers could draw on the local knowledge and social networks established by the Norwegian missionaries since 1925. A local film committee consisting of male missionaries had prepared the ground for their arrival.55 It seems that the cooperation during filming was friendly and flexible. For example, a few times Ellingsen directed and Dalland did the filming. According to Dalland, Ellingsen was particularly good at dealing with children. In his book, Dalland discussed the need for instructing the cast, and again touches upon his and Ellingsen’s views on local people’s wish to pose, discussed in Chapter 4: We very quickly discovered that we had to be two men working if we were to succeed. One did most of the shooting, the other gave instructions. In a way, the natives were used to being photographed. In the market, their own portrait photographers are working, and all the pictures are of the stiff kind in which the victim stares straight at the camera. As soon as they were standing in front of a camera, all life disappeared from their faces. They remained standing as if they were hypnotized, and whatever was said, they did not listen until they believed the shooting was over. Even when people around them made fun of them and laughed, they remained motionless. In the middle of the hot sun they had become icicles, or let us rather say pillars of salt.56

The reference to ‘pillars of salt’ in this quote is Biblical, recalling Lot’s wife who glanced back at Sodom and Gomorrah. Moreover, they could not relax a single moment during filming:

54. Bjøru (1968). 55. In addition to its leader, Deacon Fosse, the committee consisted of Pastor Aasen, Doctor Sandnes and Deacon Aarhaug: ‘Without their preparations and help it would have been impossible to carry out the expedition’ (Dalland 1960: 54). The assistance of female missionaries was also acknowledged by Dalland (1960: 54): ‘We had also been so lucky as to have with us Miss Solveig Bjøru, who had also delivered the manuscript to one of the films. She was indispensable for getting in touch with the women and helping with the instructions. Behind the stage Mrs. Marit Fosse was always ready to help. … When the sun burned most harshly, she arrived with fresh juice and cared for the members of the expedition like a mother.’ In line with the patriarchal attitudes at the time, Dalland mentions each man according to his professional title, but refers to the female teacher/school principal Solveig Bjøru according to her status as a single woman. In Ny Horisont 1961 8 : 35, he called her ‘Missionary Miss Solveig Bjøru’. The missionary wife typically provided her helpful assistance ‘behind the scenes’. 56. Dalland (1960 : 84).

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It happened that Martha, in spite of precise instructions, came back after dinner in a different dress than the one she had been wearing in the morning. But this, of course, would not work since we had to continue filming the same scene. It happened that we just had to keep necklaces, dresses etc. with us in order to make sure that we would not be forced to repeat long takes. They possessed so few garments that it should have been relatively easy to keep track of them, but in this respect they were as thoughtless as teenagers at home. Necklaces, scarves, shoes or no shoes, earrings or not, we had to pay attention to all these things. We liked to entrust our female collaborators with this detective work. They have an inborn capacity for seeing such details. More than once Solveig Bjøru stopped us because something was wrong.57

In this passage in his book, Dalland makes life in Africa familiar for his readers by finding similarities between the thoughtlessness of Cameroonian teenagers and the thoughtlessness of teenagers ‘at home’. And women everywhere seem to have an ‘inborn’ capacity to notice details of clothing. In the book, he thus switches between noticing sameness (a few times) and (most often) noticing difference. In the quote above, sameness is related to age and gender.

The Cinematic Construction of Authenticity In my view, the photographic images of the film are beautiful and provide the Norwegian audience with ample opportunities for identification across cultural and material difference. Quite often, they communicate something different from the voiceover. For example, when little Sinda is picked up by her mother after the serpent test, we see the father clumsily patting the child. This small visual sign of love contradicts the portrayal of him as a villain who sells his daughter for money, and is not commented upon by the narrator. More generally, the viewers are shown many peaceful scenes from daily life (such as washing, grooming, the carrying, pounding and grinding of grain, food preparation, fetching water, cultivation, house building and celebrations). In spite of the documented anxiety of the girl who played the lead, I find that the film images indicate an atmosphere of trust between the filmmakers and the actors during the shooting. Most of the film was shot outdoors. Exceptions are the scenes in the school, the church and when the missionary and the three girls are praying. There are few wide-angle shots of the landscape; most often social life is filmed from the middle distance, giving an overview of the scene, combined with a few close-ups. Even when Sinda is in the forest, or when we see the round village huts with thatched roofs from a distance, there is a certain intimacy in the way the scenes are filmed. The photographer has emphasized closeness, intimacy, everyday-life activities and the beauty of the local people. The physical environment reflects village life. In this respect the film parallels the still photographs. In the missionary publications from Cameroon there are few urban pictures. Much of the filming of Sinda was done in the so-called ‘slave village’ called ‘Little Liberia’ (Lille Liberia) by Dalland in his book.58 This consisted of a cluster of round huts with thatched roofs in Ngaoundéré, where people who had fled from the forced labour of a lamiido lived at the time. It was located only a few minutes, walk from the houses of the missionaries, 57. Ibid.: 83–84. 58. Halfdan Endresen also used this nickname, with its associations to plantation slavery, in Endresen (1954). Liberia was founded by former American slaves.

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and, according to Dalland, this is why it was chosen: ‘Here, almost at our doorstep, we found the simple, natural milieu that we were looking for.’59 He writes that before they could start filming, ‘the difficulty was just to get rid of tin junk and other more or less valuable signs of civilization in order for the surroundings to be completely authentic.’60 The women carry beautiful pottery jars to fetch water, not ‘the gaudy enamelled dishes that can be bought everywhere’.61 And in contrast to much present-day humanitarian aid propaganda, we do not see sick people (except for the lame leg of little Sinda), and we do not see emaciated and hungry people with flies in their eyes. Instead, we see good-looking locals going about their daily lives. Contrary to the comments of the narrator, the people in the film look as if they do not need any help. The intentional arrangement of African scenes and types in the film – and the complex negotiations through which this came about – were also evident in the discussions among the filmmakers about the appearance of the main character. The girl who played the lead had been chosen by Solveig Bjøru before Dalland and Ellingsen arrived in Cameroon to do the filming. But the two filmmakers were not happy with her choice. She was not pretty enough, they thought, because her skin was too dark. For the purposes of the film, they found Martha prettier and more photogenic because her skin was lighter.62 Accordingly, the camera also dwells on Martha’s face. The discussion among the filmmakers and the local missionary again illustrates not only the important role of young black female beauty in missionary propaganda, but also specific European perceptions of beauty. The filmmakers wanted the Norwegian viewers to take an interest in Sinda and to want to save her from her plight, and they probably just assumed that light skin might make that identification easier. A ‘not too dark’ skin would make it easier to elicit empathy across the differences. Moreover, they probably also took into account that when filming and photographing people with very dark skin, one usually needs extra light. The filmmakers thus deliberately sought to present African people at their best, according to contemporary European tastes.63 The prospective audience in faraway Norway was constantly prefigured and imagined during the production in Cameroon. In the field, decisions were thus predicated upon acts of imagined consumption based on hypotheses about audience appeal. The filmmakers wanted the public in Norway to find the girls attractive, and because of their attractiveness to feel compassion for them, and through them for the plight of African women. On the basis of this identification and the accompanying indignation on their behalf, the viewers might be persuaded to support the mission. If one did not know any better, one could interpret the difference between the images and the narration as a difference between the photographer (Olaf A. Ellingsen) and the person(s) who wrote the script for the voiceover (most likely Dalland). However, as I showed in Chapter 4, Ellingsen’s comments to accompany his own slide show demonstrate that he fully shared the evaluations and aims of the narrator in the film. Thus, in line with the needs of the mission, Ellingsen and Dalland interpreted local life within a story of ‘Africa’s problems’.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

Dalland (1960: 68). Ibid.: 63. Ibid.: 140. Source: Solveig Bjøru Sandnes. See also Røst (1942: 70), discussed in Chapter 4.

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These problems are expressed in terms of a profound distance in time and space combined with an equally acute feeling of closeness. But it seems to me that the man behind the camera was also charmed by the people portrayed and their surroundings. I find that as a photographer he visually emphasized the frailty, sensuousness, sweetness and timidity of local women. His sensual masculine gaze reflects tenderness. His pictures and his filming are therefore not as austere as many other missionary representations. He was seduced by the people in Cameroon, and he apparently knew how to seduce people in Norway by his representations of people in Cameroon. In my view, Ellingsen’s fascination with the local people he encountered creates extra interest even today. As we have seen, the romantic aspects of the film – the pristine and the picturesque – were intentionally and carefully orchestrated by the filmmakers. Their framing tended deliberately to exclude signs of modernity that could place the subjects in historical time. For them, ‘authenticity’ (det ekte) was not what was actually there, but a specific aesthetic and ideological vision of Africa unaffected by civilization and the passage of time. The appreciation of simplicity, naturalness and purity enhances the contrast with ‘civilization’.

Ambiguities of Gender, Age, ‘Race’ and Work The theme of the film deals with coercion and injustice within African marriage, sexuality, family life and the organization of household tasks. It takes the side of women against their fathers and husbands. It locates the reasons for Africa’s problems in family life, in the values and practices underpinning the oppression of women. This consistent focus on women’s problems is supported by the storyline, and I regard this as a result of both the female missionaries’ local knowledge and the ideas of the filmmakers about which problems would inspire most interest in Norway. Sexuality is implicitly central on the thematic level. In my interpretation, the drama of the story relies on the intended audience’s disgust at the thought of a sexual union between a polygamous man in his sixties and a teenage girl. This disgust builds on the underlying implicit assumption that an old man cannot sexually and emotionally satisfy a young woman.64 The contrast is culturally interpreted in a way that makes him repulsive and frightening compared to her. The age difference can thus be considered a tool used to visualize the coercion, suffering and injustice of heathen practices. He is too old for a young fertile girl who has her whole sexual and reproductive life ahead of her. On the level of the images, I find that both heathens and Christians, and blacks and whites, are presented as stereotypes rather than as individuals. To a certain degree, they are also presented as asexual or in terms of a modest sexual attractiveness. Not surprisingly, this tendency is most pronounced in the filming of the women. In the film, local women do not show their bare breasts (this was not uncommon in Cameroon at the time, especially in the rural areas) but are decently covered, according to European standards. The budding sexuality of the two young girls – Sinda and Martha – is visually played down. Shown as schoolgirls playing girly games, they are portrayed as sweet, innocent and reticent – as ‘good girls’ in a 64. In present-day popular culture in West Africa – such as the prolific video films from Nigeria – the theme of the relationship between rich middle-aged men (‘sugar daddies’) and young women is used, with a focus not only on the drawbacks but also on the advantages for young women (Okome 2004).

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European Christian sense – displaying a form of modest sensual attraction and vulnerability which I assume invited contemporary viewers’ concern, interest and desire to protect them. The camera also stylized the two female missionaries. Guri Sola appears only briefly in the film, and the camera zooms in on her careful hands when she examines little Sinda’s lame leg. This sequence visualizes in a beautiful way the mission’s work among the sick by showing her tacit knowledge and gentle touch. This is one of the most touching images of caring for the sick that I have found in the materials from Cameroon, and I think this is precisely because the images are on film and not on still photographs. The then 37-year-old Solveig Bjøru takes part in many scenes and is filmed looking erect, serene, poised – and asexual. The camera stylizes her female face and body by emphasizing the lines created by her hairstyle, belt and dress. The way they are filmed, the two mature women look like saints in the Christian iconic tradition from the Middle Ages or early Renaissance. To me, it is as if two saints had just come alive and left their assigned places on the front of a cathedral somewhere in Europe to take part in this film.65 In the scene towards the end in which Solveig Bjøru reaches out to all of Africa – she almost becomes a Christ-like figure. The filming and cutting of the scenes with Maman focus on his old age, often by just showing his head (and thus portraying him as a man without a body) or his whole feeble body, for example when he is struggling to get on his feet with the help of two sticks. Sinda’s father, who is also a villain in the drama, is its most charismatic figure. He is presented as cruel, at the same time as having an animated, almost clown-like presence, with a humorous twinkle in his eyes. I assume that this combination created both identification and distancing, in the sense that the audience’s indignation at his maltreatment of his daughter was counteracted by their fascination with his charismatic side. Thus, the stylization of the characters does not take away their attraction but shapes it in a direction which to some extent contradicts the narrator’s comments. Sometimes relationships that are polarized in the voiceover are mediated by visual connections – such as those between Africans and Europeans, between blacks and whites, and between heathens and Christians. According to the narrator, the ethnic and linguistic differences in the region are less important than the differences between Europeans and Africans. He sees the black evangelist as ‘one of their own’, while the white missionary is someone ‘who will always be a foreigner’, in spite of the division of the population into many different ethnic groups. In the film, the white missionaries are visually represented by two women – a nurse and a teacher – wearing European clothes. Both were single women and missionaries in their own right. The local employees in the church are represented by three black men – two evangelists and one teacher – wearing European clothes. No missionary wife and white male pastor is present in the pictures. In a way, the absence of white pastors parallels the absence of black sultans and is in line with the focus on ordinary family life rather than on the court and the household of the sultan. I find that the emphasis on two female missionaries is quite remarkable, considering the society’s overwhelming focus on male pastors in particular, and male missionaries in general, especially in its official visual presentations to the core supporters. Perhaps this emphasis reflects the intention to reach a wider audience? Reaching

65. Thus, in my view, the film images illustrate Kathryn T. Long’s comment that missionaries were ‘the closest Protestants came to having saints of their own’ (Long 2003: 835).

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a wider audience apparently implied focusing less on conversion and evangelization and more on education and health work. In these domains female missionaries were numerous, central and assertive. Moreover, perhaps the filmmakers assumed that putting female missionaries visually in the forefront might make the mission look less threatening to secularized Norwegian audiences. Just as established ideas about gender allowed the receptiveness of the mission field to be imagined in terms of its women, they perhaps also allowed the loving care of the mission to be strategically imagined by means of the female missionaries? In the context of the film, this weakens the hierarchy between Europeans and Africans established by the voiceover, and provides an interesting multiplicity of perspectives. Nevertheless, black women are still located at the bottom of the hierarchies. The white missionaries speak for black women, and this has specific consequences. The focus of the story is not on the agency of the main character but on the agency of the mission. Sinda is not a heroic character but rather somebody to whom things happen. She demonstrates her own initiative by fleeing to the mission, but is dependent on the white female missionary who takes care of her and speaks for her in relation to both the various local authorities and the public in Norway. My point here is not that the mission was getting the facts wrong, because the problems are real enough. I want to call attention to the effects of the specific narrative plot for the representation of local women.66 This is thus not only a question of which segments of social life the mission chose to portray, but of the specific angle and narrative structure within which they are portrayed. As gendered subalterns, women came to signify specific social meanings and values, and were spoken about and for in distinctive ways, within the intersecting discourses of gender, age, colour, social class, pietistic Christianity, colonialism, modernization and development. The comments in the voiceover consistently do not acknowledge the full extent of local women’s work – in agriculture (remarks about their nonexistent tools and absence of knowledge about fertilizers), cooking (grinding grain on a millstone is primitive and awkward, and people eat only one meal in the evening), the rearing of children (the patronizing tone in the remark about Martha’s mother) and fetching water (the focus on the drudgery of this task, indicating that women ought to be protected from it). There are no similar comments about the work of Sinda’s father in his smithy or when he is thatching the roof of one of the houses, or of the work of the white female missionaries and the black male evangelists and teacher. In these respects, the images represent a marked contrast to the storyline and the narration. The women are dressed well in African garb and perform their various everyday tasks in competent ways. All through the film there are images of women’s work processes that visually represent their dexterity and competence. At the beginning of the film, we see them fetching water, walking gracefully while carrying heavy jars on their heads, and doing their laundry in the river. Before the wedding, a woman arranges Sinda’s hair in an elaborate coiffure, with no comment by the narrator. Throughout the film they hold, carry and nurse their babies, and we see several close-ups of the beautiful faces of women and children. The women’s handiness 66. I saw the film for the first time in September 2003, forty-three years after it was made. In the Norwegian mass media heated discussions had been going on since January 2002 about forced marriages and honour killings. In particular, there was a debate raging about a book about family life in Afghanistan by journalist Åsne Seierstad (see Myhre 2004). These public debates indicate that the missionary master narrative lives on in secularized forms, with nonwhite men being demonized and nonwhite women portrayed as victims.

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and beauty are thus visually appreciated and absorbed into the film, at the same time as the skills involved in their work tasks is not verbally acknowledged. The work of the male villain is treated with more respect by the male narrator than the work of the female victims. The lack of explicit verbal recognition of local women’s work is, as it were, the reverse side of the struggle to protect them, to some extent transforming one kind of gender subordination into another. At the same time things are also more complex. On the one hand, Christian missions have actively promoted Western bourgeois family values, with women in subordinate positions to men. On the other hand, the missions have been admirable pioneers in offering primary education to women all over the world.67 These are, in my view, the two sides of one and the same coin. When the film about Sinda was made in 1960, the mission’s protection of girls’ and women’s right to go to school and to choose their own lives was fully in step with international ideological and political trends. However, their support for female education implies also support for the individualization and self-realization of women and children within patriarchal families and church structures, and thus support for driving a potential emancipatory wedge into these very same institutions. No wonder, then, that women have been instrumental in changing the missionary organizations in the twentieth century.

The Propaganda Aspects of the Film Ideologies of temporal segregation were central to much thinking in Europe underpinning the governmental development aid which was institutionalized in Norway in 1963.68 The film actualized and reaffirmed a European idea developed in particular ways from the seventeenth century onwards: to travel in space is to travel in time. Africa is presented as both physically segregated from Europe and as timeless, within ‘the Stone Age’. As we have seen, the filmmakers and their collaborators had a strategy about the messages they wanted to convey in Norway and the wider audience that they wanted to reach. At the same time, they were perhaps most effective in conveying the values and practices they took for granted, involving such things as Western medicine, modern technologies in agriculture and cooking, monogamy, a specific gendered division of household tasks, and eating three to five meals a day. Few, if any, NMS missionaries today would probably express themselves as starkly as the narrator does in this film from 1960.69 Nevertheless, missionary work (as well as international development aid) depends, as it were, on a portrayal of Africa as a problemridden continent.70 With no problems, there is no need to offer help. This is not to say that there are no problems in Cameroon, but it points to both the inherent logic in information put out by missionaries and by development and humanitarian aid organizations, and to the way this was acted upon at this particular historical moment. 67. For the Middle East, see Murre-van-den-Berg (2003). 68. Nustad (2003). 69. But see Nissen (1999: 43): ‘Marriage is something the families treat commercially’ (Ekteskab er noget familierne handler om), his discussion of Muslims (p. 71), and his statement that African women are often treated as second-class human beings (p. 95). 70. The focus on Africa’s problems may be due both to the wish to reach beyond the inner circle of supporters (for them, the spiritual need associated with heathenism is enough to motivate intervention) and to the way material need may be used to visualize spiritual need.

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From their very beginning in Cameroon, the missionaries have combined various discourses, most notably discourses of evangelical pietism and technological modernity. I nevertheless think that this film exemplifies an emerging communicative modality: the modality that I have heuristically called ‘development’. When the film was made, a massive effort had begun in Scandinavia to understand and work in Africa, linked to the particular forms of political and economic involvement which followed the formal decolonization of African countries. Precisely at the moment of political decolonization, the Norwegian Missionary Society strongly promoted a message about the need not only for the Christian religion but also for Western technologies in independent Cameroon. The film was directed to a wider audience in Norway than the missionary core public, presenting religious pietism in a way which did not undermine the discourse of rational modernity for contemporary Norwegian viewers. We see no white male pastor, but rather a female teacher and a female nurse, engaged in improving African education and health. We see no faith healing or healing through prayer, but rather the use of Western medicine in the form of injections. To the standard colonial oppositions between evil and good, darkness and light, the oppositions between backwardness and modern life are added with new force, based on the lack of modern technologies. Although the narrator does not use the terms ‘development’ and ‘underdevelopment’, the ideologies underpinning their use are present. With its focus on the oppression of women, the film can also be regarded a document from a crucial moment in the development of certain aspects of contemporary feminism. Within the mission in Cameroon, the theme continues Halfdan Endresen’s work against the oppressive practices of the Muslim sultans in Cameroon in the 1950s, as portrayed in Endresen’s books from 1954 to 1969.71 Most of the people who were ‘freed from slavery’ were actually women and children. But Endresen’s publications were written within a communicative modality shaped by the structures of colonialism. His indignation was directed at the sultans and at the French colonial administrators who supported them, while the indignation raised by the film is directed at African men in general. My interpretation is that the mission did not just reflect general ideological trends but also contributed to their production and dissemination. As we have seen, the film can be read as expressing the missionaries’ general lack of acknowledgement of the complexity of local women’s work at the time.72 This lack of interest had organizational and material effects. Because of the reinforced interest in the mission’s work in Cameroon, created by the film and by Ellingsen’s slides, new projects could be started. In 1967, an agricultural project was launched – including ‘the Rogaland farm’ (Rogalandsgården) at Meng,73 supported by several organizations in Norway. After some years, Norad was also involved. The agricultural work was based on advanced technology,74 and all 71. See Chapter 4. 72. See Goheen (1996) and Kaberry (2004 [1952]) about gender and power in the Cameroon grass fields. 73. The project name Rogalandsgården was used only in Norway, apparently as a way to create a form of ownership of the farm among the supporters in this region of Norway. In Cameroon the place name Meng was the most commonly used. Again we see a differentiation between the Cameroonian and the Norwegian audience. 74. See Bue (1992: 89–102, 146–153) and Larsen (1973: 105–107) for descriptions of the agricultural work at the time. None of these authors reflects on the fact that they only mention male participants by name.

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the published photographs from the projects show a white or a black man on a tractor.75 Because of the embezzlement of a large portion of the funds, the project collapsed towards the end of the millennium, but recommenced in 2006 on a more modest scale (PADIDA). The leaders have abandoned the focus on tractors and high-tech machinery; they now advise farmers to use horses or cows for plowing.76 To me, there is an ideological link between the frame of interpretation underlying the comments of the voiceover in the film and the way in which the agricultural projects were organized without taking local women’s agricultural work and networks of cooperation properly into account. In line with the general ideas of the mission, women were included as wives, but not as farmers in their own right. In their work for agricultural improvements at the time, the missionaries – and Norad – unwittingly encouraged a specific form of European bourgeois family life in Africa which replaced the local suppression of women. Compared to many high-quality fiction films, the characters in this film do not exhibit much immediacy, complexity and individuality. At the same time, the images are more complex than the comments by the narrator. To some extent the images therefore transcend the text. The missionaries wholeheartedly wanted the viewers in Norway to love Africans and Africa, and the images helped them to do so. They also wholeheartedly wanted the audience to support the mission, devotionally, spiritually, organizationally and financially, and the combination of images, storyline, themes and the message in the comments encouraged many people to do so. The images and the story were meant to inspire the viewers with feelings of indignation and compassion for the women in the film, and the narrator’s comments were there to channel this engagement in the direction of the mission. While the propaganda aspects are most pronounced in the narrator’s comments, I assume that the film reached the audience through its images. The images seduce, while the story and the voiceover build on the preconceptions of the audience. In other words, the images are as central to the propaganda effects as the voiceover. Paradoxically, by partly undercutting the spoken propaganda, the film images support it. First, the message of the voiceover was based on real-life experiences as seen by the mission. Second, the film images show the humanity of local people in a way the audience in Norway could identify with. Thus the images could inspire a wish to help to solve the problems described in the voiceover. Third, the film images present the missionary enterprise as worthwhile by portraying women in Cameroon, in particular, as worthy as help and a fertile soil for the sowing of the Word. The image of men is ambiguous, since they are the villains of the story. Nevertheless, because the evangelists and the teacher are men, the potential for male conversions is also visibly present. Without the beauty of the images and the drama of the story, the narrator’s message about the need for the mission might come across as just a didactic and tedious lecture. Thus, I find that the didactic and performative effects of the film in Norway at the time resided precisely in the complex and productive tensions between storyline, themes, images and the various elements of the commentary.77 Like the relationship between still photographs and text, the film images elicit interest and identification, while the voiceover elicits pity by firmly establishing a need. 75. Larsen (1973: 107); Lode (1992: 74, (picture number 53). One of the pictures of a male missionary on a tractor has been reused in the three-volume history of Norwegian development aid (Simensen 2003: 216). 76. Source: Ranveig Kaldhol. 77. In Dalland’s book there is a similar contrast between images and captions. See Chapter 4.

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Reactions in Cameroon to the Images The film was made as a 16 mm film in 1960, before the time of video production and television in Ngaoundéré, which started in the 1980s. It has been shown in Cameroon to the Norwegian children at the boarding school and to new missionaries, but not outside the Norwegian circles there. According to Satou Marthe, the woman who more than forty years ago played Martha, none of the people who acted in the film saw the finished result. It had not been made for them. Or, to put it more precisely, it was made to elicit money to help them. It just seemed natural to those who produced the film that the Cameroonians were not part of the intended audience. When Satou Marthe accidentally was able to see the film, more than thirty years had passed since the filming. As noted in Chapter 6, she is the leader of the organization Femmes pour Christ within the national church, and in that role she cooperates closely with the mission. She has travelled widely in the world and has visited Norway several times. Her office is situated in the main administrative building of the church, close to the station church and the mission buildings. At the beginning of the 1990s, she happened to hear that the film was to be shown in the hall of the boarding school to the children of the Norwegian missionaries. The audience included a few new missionaries who had just arrived. She asked if she could be allowed to watch it with them and later to receive her own copy. Since then, she has watched the film two or three times and has also shown it to her family.78 Her son-in-law, Salpou Daniel, studied in Norway for a period, and is now a medical doctor at the Protestant hospital in Ngaoundéré. He has watched the film no less than ten times. He appreciates it very much, for several reasons. First, he finds that it is true to life in that it focuses on a real problem – a forced marriage between a young girl and a polygamous old man. The problem was especially acute in the past, but to some extent it still exists today. Second, he thinks that the actors do well in the film, and he enjoys seeing the images of his mother-in-law when she was young. In his view, actors today do not act as naturally as they do in this film. Finally, he likes seeing the images of the church and the mission station from the past. For him, the film has therefore personal, aesthetic and historical interest.79 Since there is no copy of the film using a French narrator, Satou Marthe and Salpou Daniel have had access to the images and thus partly to the story, but not to the commentary. It is difficult to know how Cameroonians would react to the complete film if the comments were translated.80 I assume that the reactions would vary, depending on social position, gender, age and religious affiliation. In any case, the positive reactions of these two viewers indicate that the images might have survived the passage of time, at least for some viewers.81

78. Source: Satou Marthe. 79. Source: Salpou Daniel. 80. When I screened the film at the University of Tromsø on 15 March 2004, I presented a hand-out with the voiceover translated into English. Several Cameroonian students were present, and they seemed to be moved by the images and surprised by the comments of the narrator. 81. This point of view is also supported by the fact that Ellingsen’s stills from the film set have been used in many publications, and in these contexts (without the commentary) the images have different connotations from those in the film. For example, a large photo of Maman and the blacksmith appears in the1973 history book (Larsen 1973: 132–33). In that context they just seem to be two men chatting happily.

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A Potential for New Usages? The film images provide a peaceful everyday contrast to the war and crisis reports from Africa which today often appear in the Western news media. In contrast to verbal descriptions and still photographs, the film images present the purposeful skills, tacit knowledge, dexterity and pride involved in habitual everyday activities. This is so both for the caring hands of the missionary nurse and for the work carried out by local women, such as arranging elaborate coiffures, sifting, grinding and pounding grain, fetching water and carrying wood. The images exemplify the fact that expertise which resides in the hands and the body is not easy to represent in ways other than on film.82 One can imagine several different sorts of comments that could accompany these images, based on a variety of other ideologies and points of view. For example, from the viewpoint of romanticizing ideologies, one could comment on the local people’s simple and idyllic way of life ‘close to nature’ and portray them as examples for Europeans to follow, rather than as people in spiritual and material need. Or, viewed from oldfashioned ethnography, one could add ethnographic comments in which the omniscient narrator tells the audience about the role of women in African agriculture. Or one could add new remarks based on the interests of Cameroonians today. It might be possible to use the images to tell a story about problematic aspects of local life in a way which more fully represents the dignity of local people. But of course, attitudes and ideologies are encoded not only in the spoken words but also in the way the film images are shot, so the purposes they can potentially serve are certainly not unlimited. The idealized images of Africa are, as we have seen, part of specific colonial and development ideologies. By depicting Cameroon in an idealized and timeless way, cultural difference is enhanced, and with it the articulation of European authority. It is now up to people in Cameroon to decide whether these images have the potential to be recontextualized in the present era.83 The kind of new usage which is most relevant for local people today would perhaps be in the genre of ‘the documentation of cultural heritage’. All over the world, many people now redefine objects and practices attached to their religious, ethnic and national identities as a means of understanding themselves and of mobilizing in defence of their interests. A part of this identity politics is what we might call a ‘museumification of culture’. Old artefacts and their uses are given new meanings as items to exhibit and thereby as a means to recall the people’s history and provide a basis for feelings of pride, dignity and self-respect. Such artefacts are not static – inert and inconsequential – but can be living forces which are used to shape people’s sense of identity in the direction of feelings of both commonality and separateness. As in many other parts of the world, there are now efforts in Cameroon to systematize and collect what the various ethnic groups see as their cultural heritage.84 In Northern Cameroon, such efforts have been initiated and supported by the concerted efforts of the Norwegian mission and Norad. New ‘culture albums’ have been put together, with pictures of local 82. See MacDougall (1998). 83. Note some recent films in which locals have constructed new interpretations using found colonial footage: the Dutch–Indonesian ‘Mother Dao the Turtle-like’ (using 1930s footage, some of it from missionaries) and the Filipino ‘Bontoc Eulogy’ (using footage from the 1906 world fair in St Louis, reedited by Marlon Fuentes, a Filipino-born Californian who retells the story from the perspective of a fictional grandfather who was exhibited at the fair). 84. See Chapter 9.

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architecture, tools and ritual objects. In these albums, objects such as millstones and the grinding of grain are redefined from being just an old-fashioned part of everyday life to being a cherished – and usually ethnically defined – cultural heritage, worthy of conservation and transmission to the young. While the voiceover in the film judges the grinding of grain on a millstone as ‘primitive and awkward’, the film images might lend themselves to being used as illustrations for a new narrative about ‘traditional culture’. The film would then be more than just a cataloging of cultural features and less than a representation of culture perceived through individual personalities and their lives. The most appropriate characterization would perhaps be a representation of everyday-life objects and practices embedded in a story about ethnic belonging, and perhaps indirectly also of reinforced ethnic division and struggle. Thus, if women and men in Cameroon should want to reclaim the film for their presentday processes of cultural reinforcement and contestation, the potential for redefinition might be there in the images. This potential would be due to Ellingsen’s proficiency as a photographer, his strong interest in human feelings, and the affinity between, on the one hand, Ellingsen and Dalland’s specific ideas about the authentic and, on the other hand, the present-day ethnic revival, identity politics and ‘museumification of culture’. In addition, forces outside the control of the photographer also play a role. In almost any visual representation, whatever the intentions of the photographer or a filmmaker, extra meanings might always be read into the images and/or occur in the viewers’ associations. In the terms of Roland Barthes, films and photographs are both coded and analogical, and thus not wholly the creations of their makers.85 Therefore the disjunction between images and voiceover should come as no surprise. For Gilles Deleuze this is even the normal situation, since, in his view, the antinomy of word and image is an historical a priori, and ‘the most complete examples of the disjunction between seeing and speaking are to be found in the cinema’.86

The Power of the Visual In the film about Sinda, the missionaries have used a narrative about heathen and Muslim men who do not treat their women well as a way to enlist support for the mission in Norway. This is an interesting extension of the focus on the exotic despotism of the sultans discussed in the previous chapter. In both photographs and films, the bodies of Cameroonian women have been important to the discursive constitution of Cameroon in the Norwegian public, promoting essentialized female qualities such as nurturing, piety, and modesty. Not only religious and colonial ideas, but also patriarchal ideas, discourses of modernity and the emerging discourses of development and feminism are present in this film. In my view, the narration of the voiceover is characterized by the particular merging of these different discourses. I also want to argue that the starkness of the stereotyping, the didactic emphasis, and the focus on the pristine and the picturesque is as much an effect of the discourse of development as of the discourse of evangelical pietism. I interpret the film as embodying and representing a defining moment in the history of the mission, of the Norwegian ideologies of

85. Barthes (1977a, 1977b, 2000 [1980]). 86. Deleuze (1988: 64).

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development programmes, as well as of the current popular portrayal of non-white women as victims. In a way, the mission appropriated specific feminist ideas for their own ends. At the same time, I think it is important also to continuously keep in mind that in both the discourse of religion and the discourse of development there is a tension between showing African life as inferior, on the one hand, and the possibility and promise of change, on the other Like many other publications, in this film the many comparisons to life ‘at home’ in Norway stress not only difference but also similarities. In this kind of religious discourse, the evil and fear caused by backwardness can be transformed through baptism and conversion. In contemporary development discourse, backwardness can be changed by new technologies. Within the universe of this film, these discourses are not only compatible but also mutually supportive. Here lies a crucial connection and area of overlap between the historical role of the missions at home and abroad, and present-day development practices. One represented the soft and caring side of colonialism and imperialism. The other represents the soft and caring side of economic neocolonialism. The film Sinda can therefore be regarded as an interesting document in the historical construction of the self-image and authority of Norway as a compassionate and benevolent donor country with a role in lifting up Africa. It was made at an early stage of the formalization and institutionalization of governmental development aid, and illustrates the historical role of the missions in transforming the ideologies of colonialism into the apparently more benevolent and gentler ideologies of development. The propaganda aspects revolve around fixing Africa in the audience’s minds as a premodern region, inevitably having to be yoked to the stories and practices of Christianity, modernization and development. The interrelations between fact and fiction in this film are complex, producing an interesting hybrid with elements from the didactic film, the feature film and the dramatized documentary. Today, this film would perhaps be called a docudrama – it is not a documentary and not fiction but something in between. It can be regarded as a complex network of images with an ambiguous and shifting variety of cultural constructions. The qualities of the photographic images have the potential to serve new interpretations and new uses. Thus, even a propaganda film with an unrelenting didactic structure can be what David MacDougall calls a ‘site of meaning-potential’ rather than just a set of messages sent and received.87

87. MacDougall (1998: 77).

9 FROM RELIGIOUS PROPAGANDA TO CULTURAL HERITAGE Scholars of the former colonies have long recognized the crucial importance of asserting indigenous cultural traditions and retrieving repressed histories to the construction of postcolonial subjects, despite being aware of the dangers of grounding identities in romanticized images of the past. Ian Fairweather1 But how does the post-colonial subject reimagine itself? How does the African (or the Africanist, for that matter) disrupt the discourse within which he or she is constructed? To understand how difficult it is, we must understand the protean nature of the binary logic which constructs the colonial order. Bill Ashcroft2 In recent years, European and North American mission societies have been reorienting themselves to the changing realities both in the former mission fields and at home. Inspired by African theologians, mission theologians are discussing their attitudes to various local forms of knowledge. Many missionaries now acknowledge that the missions not only brought the Gospel but also their own underlying ideas and systems of knowledge. Missiologists now want to communicate the fundamentals of the Gospel, but not necessarily all aspects of European world-views and ways of life, and this means letting go of some of the preconceptions and assumptions that they have hitherto taken for granted. Their goal is both to transmit their messages more effectively and to avoid transmitting ways of life such as EuroAmerican consumerism to Africa. It is, however, difficult to distinguish between what they see 1. Fairweather (2004: 1). 2. Ashcroft (1997: 14).

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as the truth of the Gospel, on the one hand, and the lifestyles and points of view that have accompanied it in unacknowledged and unreflected ways, on the other. This necessitates a degree of reflexivity that is difficult to obtain without a helpful distance in time.3 In this chapter I discuss an emerging communicative modality that I call ‘partnership’. During the last thirty years, missionaries have launched several new initiatives that seriously attempt to be more sensitive to African interests and perspectives. Some, such as Aksel Arhaug and Jorunn Sundby, wanted to present a different and more nuanced picture of Africa than the one which just elicits pity.4 Others have argued for a renewed attention to the cultural contextualization of the Gospel as a precondition for success in proselytizing.5 Still others work for the ‘repatriation’ of missionary photographs that were brought to Europe and the USA. I see these different initiatives as historically and ideologically connected. My main contention in this chapter is that, notwithstanding their well-intended aims and many fine outcomes and future possibilities, the way these new initiatives have so far been carried out, is still also symptomatic of the difficulties of overcoming hierarchical colonial categories and dichotomies.

A History Book in French (1990) As mentioned in Chapter 2, a history book about the two Lutheran missions and the Cameroon national church was published in French in 1990, intended for a Cameroonian audience.6 It is called Appelés á la liberté: histoire de l’église évangélique luthérienne du Cameroun (Called to freedom: The history of the evangelical Lutheran church in Cameroon), the title evoking the fight against slavery as a metaphor for the freedom of baptism. In Northern Cameroon, the publication of this book represents a dividing point in time and manifests in a particular way the shift to the communicative modality of partnership. In addition to the supporters at home (mission friends, congregations and the government), the publications of the mission now also deal with the members of the national church as both potential and actual readers. This book in French, written by the missionary and historian Kåre Lode, came 3. I am again reminded of the distinction made by Martin Kähler in the second half of the nineteenth century between ‘mission’ and ‘propaganda’, and ‘culture’ and ‘Christianity’. The term ‘mission’ refers to the work aimed at winning souls for Christ, while ‘propaganda’ refers to the efforts aimed at winning people for the form of Christian life which at any point in time seems right. Genuine mission work degenerates into propaganda if one does not distinguish between culture and Christianity. See Berentsen (1990: 107–12). 4. Arhaug (1985); Sundby (1991). 5. For the ongoing scholarly discussions, see the International Journal of Mission Frontiers. During the 1990s, quite a few articles proposed new ways to dissociate evangelical efforts from their historical connections to the legacy of colonialism and imperialism. 6. Lode (1990). Kåre Lode was a missionary in Cameroon during several periods between 1972 and 1985. He worked in the book store, at the radio station and within the Protestant educational system. In 1985–86 he was in Mali with his wife Else Lode to prepare the ground for a new mission field. In 1987–88 and 1995–96 he was seconded to Kirkens Nødhjelp (‘Church Relief Aid’) in the north of Mali. From 1990 to 1997 he was a missionary secretary with special responsibilities for Cameroon and Mali. In 1997–2003 he was international consultant for the government of Mali for good governance in the north of Mali.

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out two years before the 1992 two-volume history of the NMS in Norwegian. Lode also wrote a long chapter about Cameroon in the Norwegian history volumes,7 and led the digitalization project that I will discuss later in this chapter. Although the book in French was written from a Norwegian missionaries’ perspective, it represents a serious attempts to lift Cameroonian church leaders and members out of historical anonymity. At the end of the book are sixty-four photographs, constituting the first concerted effort to return some of the many mission photographs to Cameroon. The author has selected a few individual portraits of male missionaries and church leaders and many group pictures and photographs of buildings. Most of them aim at a reframing of the photographs by enhancing the dignity of the national church and its members. In the captions the author provides information about the people in the pictures and the particular occasions. There are a total of 212 individual names in the captions (some people are mentioned several times). Of them, black African women are named seven times; six of these occur in the caption to a group picture from a baptism, and the seventh is in the caption to a photograph of a kindergarten teacher with her class. There are no pictures of the leader of the women’s organization. Black women and children are generally shown in undifferentiated groups, the women as members of the organization Femmes pour Christ. White female missionaries and missionary wives are named twenty-two times. White men are named ninty-nine times. Black African men are named eighty-four times. The black men are mostly, but not always, pastors or theological students. One exception is the lamiido Hamadou of Rey Bouba, who is portrayed with his interpreter Oumarou.8 These figures indicate underlying categories of rank and prestige. High-ranking pastors are most often presented not only by name but also with their title in the captions.9 With the exception of a picture of a missionary conference in 1935, both white and black men are represented without their families. The goal of presenting the African co-workers in the church seems to have led to a reduction in the number of photographs of female missionaries, missionary wives and female church members.

Returning Photographs: The Digitized Collection The selection of photographs in the history book is part of the background for the digitized collection which is my main focus in this chapter. The history of missionary photography is also a history about how the missions have gradually become aware of local people’s reactions to the way they have been represented in Europe, and how they now want to remedy the resentment that this has created. Pictures that were originally taken to elicit interest about

7. See Chapter 6, in particular, about the 1992 history volumes. 8. Picture 58 in Lode (1990). 9. When Kåre Lode selected the images for the book, no systematic work had been carried out to identify people in the photographs. He used the information available to him at the time. Source: Kåre Lode. Given the relative anonymity of women in the official representations that I have documented in this book, the available information had a male bias.

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Cameroon in Norway, were in the year 2000, seventy-five years after the Norwegians started working in Northern Cameroon, returned to become a new cultural resource in the region.10 While the missionary pictures have over many years consistently brought the people in Cameroon (and elsewhere) to life for Europeans, I see the return of some of the images as an attempt to bring the Cameroonians to life for themselves in new ways. It is an act of belated reciprocity in which people in Cameroon are asked to take possession of the missionary images and give them new meanings. In other words, they are invited to treat the photographs as part of their cultural heritage. The repatriation of the missionary images fits in with a worldwide movement for cultural heritage museums to support the dignity and ‘roots’ of groups whose lives and life-worlds are changing. In a project directed by Kåre Lode, and organized by NMS, the NMS archive and the Tromsø/Ngaoundéré Anthropos research programme, 2,000 photographs were selected by Kåre Lode and the late African historian Eldridge Mohammadou in 1996 to be brought back to the region where they were once taken. As already noted, Kåre Lode formerly worked as a missionary in Ngaoundéré, and Eldridge Mohammadou was a university lecturer in the University of Maiduguri in northeast Nigeria who had carried out extensive research in Northern Cameroon. During a few weeks in 1996, the two men looked through all the photographs from Cameroon in the NMS Archive and contacted a selection of Norwegian missionaries and their descendents.11 In order to save time because the funding was limited, they only contacted former missionaries (and their adult children) living in or near Oslo and Stavanger. They were therefore not able to make a full assessment of the existing material. However, everybody who was contacted offered what they had in their possession. The two historians borrowed private albums, photo collections and slide series and made their selection on the basis of both this material and the material already in the NMS Archive, selecting images according to criteria that will be spelled out below. They estimated the total number of missionary photographs that they examined to be at least 25,000. The aim of the collection is to ‘select photos from Adamaoua and its surroundings in order to constitute, on the one hand, a rich collection of photos of historical and cultural interest for scholarly use, and, on the other hand, a collective family album for Adamaoua’.12 Their goal was also to establish ‘a historical or cultural framework for each photograph in order to facilitate scientific work’.13 The photographs were collected and digitized on a series of CD-ROMs. The result is meant to be a contribution to African history in general and to the history of Adamaoua province in particular. Each picture 10. The project was funded by Norad. The idea of returning a selection of the pictures, i.e. making them available to Cameroonians, started at the beginning of the 1980s as the simultaneous vision of several people, among them Eldridge Mohammadou, Lisbet Holtedahl, Nils Kristian Høimyr and Darman Paul, church president of EELC (l’Église évangélique luthérienne du Cameroun) at the time. Lisbet Holtedahl put Kåre Lode in contact with Eldridge Mohammadou. Source: Lisbet Holtedahl. The actual return of the pictures started with Lode’s book (1990) and an exhibition in Cameroon (1992), made by Kåre Lode and Nils Kristian Høimyr, which was funded by Norad. In 1996 Eldridge Mohammadou came to Norway to pick the pictures for the digitized collection together with Kåre Lode. 11. The information about the project derives from two long conversations with Kåre Lode (6 February 2003 and 14 June 2004) as well as email correspondence. Unfortunately, Eldridge Mohammadou passed away during my project. Eldridge was not a member of any church. Source: Kåre Lode. 12. Information provided in the printed albums. 13. Information provided in the printed albums.

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is accompanied by the information it has so far been possible to establish about the photographer, the photographic subjects, the place and the occasion.14 Since this is the first concerted effort by the NMS to bring back digitized photographs for local consumption, the collection can be regarded as a pioneering project in an ongoing process of returning the missionary pictures.15 Later, the NMS created digitized collections for China, Madagascar and South Africa, using some of the same and some different principles of selection.16 The digitized collection represents an effort to move from presenting anonymous and stereotypical images to naming individuals in portraits and group pictures as well as producing specified historical information about the context of the photographs. This entails the possibility of new sorts of uses and meanings for the images, including a new ‘space of representation’.17 The space of representation has been shifted away from a Norwegian audience constituted as active helpers of pitiable Cameroonians and towards the people of Cameroon as the producers of their own histories. The meanings of the pictures can now potentially be reinvented and relocated through new discourses and with new effects. In the following pages I present the ideas behind the project and the criteria that Lode has formulated for the selection of photographs. Then I add my interpretation of the ways in which the selection of pictures simultaneously both transcends former communicative modalities and reproduces former binaries.

The Criteria for Selecting the Photographs According to Kåre Lode, he and Eldridge Mohammadou had some minor differences of interest, but basically they agreed on the criteria for the selection of the pictures and the actual selection that the two of them made on that basis. They selected the photographs for the collection on the basis of three main criteria, as articulated by Lode.18 As a missionary to Cameroon for many years, and as a central person in the historiography of the mission, Lode represents a missionary perspective on the photographs:

14. Lode and Mohammadou were responsible for the selection of pictures as well as for the initial collection of information about them. Later on, several people were engaged in the collection of information. Djaboulé Pierre was responsible for the collection of information in Cameroon, assisted by Vakoté Dieudonné and Hamidou. They went to many villages asking people to identify the subject matter in the pictures. Dr Hamadou Adama at the University of Ngaoundéré was responsible for providing a historical/cultural frame for the information. The intention is to continuously update the information and correct potential misinformation about the pictures when it becomes available. Daouda Ja’e provided valuable help with the digitizing of the pictures. Source: Kåre Lode. 15. The pictures taken to Cameroon were, however, not the very first NMS pictures to be returned. In 1989, about eighty photographs were shown in an exhibition in Antsiarbe, Madagascar. Later, 2,600 images from Madagascar were selected, rephotographed and returned as contact copies and negatives. Source: Nils Kristian Høimyr. 16. The Madagascar archive is digitized, album by album, including a few private collections. Source: Nils Kristian Høimyr. 17. Rose (1997: 277–78). Rose discusses and incorporates into her argument ideas from Pollock (1994). 18. The information from Kåre Lode is based on conversations with him.

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1. Pictures of historical interest: First and foremost we picked pictures of traditional leaders (lamiibe and village chiefs), traditional buildings and traditional ceremonies – altogether a few hundred photographs. We actually included all the pictures of traditional leaders that we found in the collections that we had the time to examine. Concerning ceremonies, the missionary Sverre Fløttum’s pictures of Gbaya traditional secret rituals are particularly interesting. Eldridge was fascinated by the fact that these pictures are taken as close-ups and from angles which indicate that the Gbayas actually allowed Fløttum to photograph them during their ceremonies. Moreover, Eldridge was charmed by the caretaker who built the main church in the city of Ngaoundéré, and therefore we included many pictures of this building process. We also wanted to show the changes brought about by urban development, and we therefore included quite a few landscape pictures. The intention is to give people in Cameroon the opportunity to see what their surroundings looked like earlier. 2. Pictures of cultural interest. For example, Eldridge was interested in the changes in bodily decoration over time: hairstyles, clothes, and people making elaborate hair styles and decorating bodies. 3. Pictures of Africans who we thought it might be possible to identify, and who did not seem to be ashamed (for example because of illness or slavery). This was my particular idea: I wanted to make a family album for people in Adamaoua in which many people could find a grandmother or an uncle. We also tried to choose pictures of people whom we thought do not possess pictures of themselves. This means that we restricted somewhat the number of pictures of people we knew had been often photographed. We did not formulate this criterion explicitly beforehand, but it was there, in the background.

The two historians also had explicit ideas about which pictures they did not want to include in the digitized collection for ethical reasons: 1. Pictures of sick Africans. We did not use the pictures from the leprosy homes in Mbé because illness is regarded as shameful. When people who are photographed look down, it is because they did not want to be photographed. Leprosy, in particular, is regarded as shameful. 2. Pictures of former slaves categorized as slaves. During the last twenty years, talking about slavery and categorizing others as former slaves has become enormously insulting in Cameroon. This has become a taboo, and therefore a great problem. We use the word ‘servant’ (serviteur) because the word ‘slave’ has become controversial. The pictures in our collection that we have categorized as pictures of servants are no doubt connected to slavery. But I feel very confident that the pictures we included do not represent an ethical problem. 3. Pictures of severely damaged roads in the rainy period (gjørmehull). We chose a few, but not many, because these photographs easily create an image of backwardness in those who view them, and thus unrealistic ideas. Since the collection is aimed at people in Cameroon, we could have used these pictures, but we just assumed that they would not be especially interesting to the Cameroonians. 4. Pictures of Norwegian missionaries. We did not choose ‘typically Norwegian’ photographs, in particular photographs from private situations, for example, parties at the missionary station. These pictures are of no interest in Cameroon today.

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They also valued subject matter more than the technical and aesthetic quality of the photographs: The motif of each photograph was more important to us than its aesthetic and photo-technical quality. For this reason we did not choose many pictures by the professional photographer Olaf Ellingsen. His photographs are not as historically and culturally interesting as the other pictures. They were taken to be used as illustrations, without much background information. Out of pure luck Ellingsen was sometimes able to take important photographs, but generally we do not have much information about the people in his pictures. For example, he gave one of his photographs the title ‘Slave owner’. This is an accidental photograph that fitted his ideas about slave owners, and was used to illustrate the mission’s fight against slavery at the time. Since we do not know who the person is, and if he really was a slave owner, I find that the photograph has little historical interest today.19

The Categorization of the Pictures When the two men had selected the pictures they wanted to include in the collection, they needed to categorize them. In the following, I again quote Kåre Lode: We first chose the pictures to be included in the collection, and then we created the categories on the basis of what we had chosen. The categories are therefore made heuristically, not in terms of a particular scientific point of view. Before Eldridge finished his participation in the project, the two of us made a rough categorization of all the pictures. Later on, I found that these categories had to be made somewhat more specific. I went to the Norwegian National Library to find out if they had a model we could apply, but I discovered that no such thing exists. While scholars generally want very clear-cut and specific categories, the general public usually favours wider categories. Everybody who makes a collection has to find his or her own balance between these two concerns. I decided to keep the categorization relatively rough, but to be more specific than in the initial draft. For example, the category ‘human type’ – with the subcategories Pygmies, Fulani, other types – was chosen because we had picked a few pictures from the marginal Pygmy culture, and we did not want them to be presented alone as something very peculiar. Therefore we included the pictures of Pygmies in a larger category of human types, with a few pictures of Fulanis and some pictures of others who also look interesting, but difficult to categorize (‘other types’). I made the final categorization in close cooperation with Djaboule Pierre, who put together the first exhibition of the pictures in Cameroon, and Vakoté Dieudonné and Hamidou, two students who were engaged in systematizing the relevant information about each picture.

19. A brochure about the collection was presented as a supplement to Misjonstidende 2000, 12 corresponding to the contemporary interests of the Norwegian audience. It presented twenty-five pictures, including the typical subject matter of the missionary photographs: a female missionary who is teaching Cameroonian women to knit, a Cameroonian woman bottle-feeding a baby, a Cameroonian woman carrying a large pot, various forms of transport, buildings (including the mosque which resembles the station church in Ngaoundéré, ’traditional’ rituals and practices (including musicians with their instruments and a young woman with a colourful coiffure and jewellery), a class of students at the theological institute, four male missionaries around a table, evangelizing, the children at the orphanage, a lamiido and his men, a parade of Fulani horsemen. Of the twenty-five photographs, one is taken by a woman. Nevertheless, three of a total of five pictures with female subjects are presented on the front page. There are no pictures of men on the front page of the brochure.

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Discussion of the Criteria and the Categories Mohammadou and Lode worked under hard constraints in terms of time and funding. The result is a substantial collection on particular topics, such as, among other things, political and religious leaders, scenery and religious ceremonies. There are many pictures of the lamiibe and their men in the books published for the Norwegian audience, but relatively few pictures of panoramic landscapes and non-Christian and non-Muslim religious ceremonies. To me, it is particularly appropriate that many landscape photographs were included in the digitized collection. They mark symbolically that the mission society now invites local people to take possession of their landscape by visually surveying it. Both missionaries and locals can share an interest in the landscape and how it has changed over time. There also seems to be a new and interesting focus on non-Christian religious practices in the selection. And the goal of making a ‘family album’ responds well to the personal history interest that many subjugated people all over the world now take in colonial archives.20 But I also want to argue here that bringing the photographs to Cameroon does not just involve resetting them in their original context. An important part of the original context is the ways the pictures have been used in Norway. Returning the photographs therefore involves processes of both decontextualization and recontextualization. The pictures are decontextualized from the communicative modalities of the former propaganda purposes (and other purposes, such as private reminiscence), and they are recontextualized by being framed in new ways as a part of a cultural heritage. This is thus a new chapter in the social functions of these images. I see the repatriation as a deliberate attempt by the mission to decolonize the photographs; it is intended as an opening, and not as a point of closure, with the potential of inspiring new interpretations within local memories and historical narratives. In the theoretical terms of my study, the meanings of the photographs change from being embedded in private reminiscence and mission propaganda based on ideas about audience appeal to being attached to emerging worldwide ideologies of cultural heritage and empowerment. The advantage of the way the two historians worked is that they have collected pictures according to a limited set of motifs, and that these motifs accordingly are well represented. But this approach also has it disadvantages. By choosing one photograph from here and another from there, the two historians formed a collection in which each picture is taken out of its original historical context. This decontextualization erases the transcontinental trajectory of the images and the way they have been framed and used in Norway, be it in a private album, a slide series that has been shown many times, a book or a magazine. This removal, in my view, reduces to some extent their value as source material for Cameroonian history. Without the original verbal and visual contexts, many questions cannot be asked. An alternative would have been to digitize all the pictures in each private album, each slide series and each published book. Such a procedure would not have removed the traces of how they were used in Norway and would have facilitated new research from a greater variety of different perspectives. I sympathize with Lode and Mohammadou’s wish to consider the ethics of the photographs when making the selection. But I think that we also need to remember that when removing historical photographs of subjects who appear pitiable from the collection, they also erased the 20. See for example, Driessens and Aird in Pinney and Peterson (2003).

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history of how the pictures had been used in Norway to elicit pity for ‘the poor heathens’. The ethical concerns about the feelings of the descendants of the photographic subjects in Cameroon thus simultaneously also serve to gloss over the history about how Cameroonians have been represented in Norway. Although ethically problematic, the most painful pictures command historical interest. Moreover, the elimination of photos showing ‘backwardness’ (bad roads, former slaves) also makes it hard to make a visual argument for progress, in other words for the achievements of the newly independent nation state. As noted by Lode, because of limited time and funding, the two historians had to prioritize. They prioritized subject matter of historical and cultural interest over the technical and aesthetic quality of the pictures, which is therefore uneven. However, people in Cameroon have not seen many goodquality photographs of their communities and the people they know, since local photo shops formerly tended to overexpose the films they developed.21 With television programmes and video productions from abroad, Cameroonians are now exposed to good quality photography from other regions of the world. The collection would perhaps have been even more interesting for them as a source of dignity and pride if the technical quality had been higher. This is therefore a question that could be discussed when photographs from this and other regions are returned in the future. Which photographs are of historical interest? Which are of cultural interest? And what is the difference? Judging from the explicitly formulated criteria and the collection itself, the two historians focused on political and religious history – with an emphasis on formal leadership (the lamiibe and the village chiefs, the pastors as well as the political-administrative leaders of the Cameroonian government) and religious ceremonies. In practice they defined historical interest as including people and events connected to formal leadership, and cultural interest as including various other phenomena that struck them, especially religious ceremonies. But by excluding social history, the collection tends to reduce the rich history of the mission in Cameroon in ways which make it less in tune with the histories of life as it was lived. This point became clear to me one evening when I was watching the slide series of the retired missionary Ingeborg Mosand.22 She started by showing colour slides of the everyday life in the orphanage where she worked – how the children were fed, washed and bathed; how they were put to bed; the kinds of beds they had, in orderly rows; all in all beautiful pictures, many of them close-ups, showing the missionary childrearing practices at the time as well as the ambiance at the orphanage. To me, these photographs were both moving and informative about how the missionaries inserted themselves into local life, introducing particular ideas about order, hygiene and care.23 In the middle of her slide show was a picture of a black man in front of a house. He was photographed full figure from a distance and occupied a small part of the frame. I did not 21. Source: Ivar Barane. 22. Ingeborg Mosand worked in Yoko from 1950 to 1954, in Ngaoundéré from 1955 to 1959 and in Mbé from 1961 to 1964. See Figure 43 and the cover of this book. 23. Note, though, that at least one of those who grew up in the orphanage at the time describes his childhood as a prison. In a conversation, Yacoubou Luc explained why by telling a story of how, when he was about five years old, he was locked in a room on his own for many hours on Christmas Eve while the others celebrated Christmas. According to him, the reason was that he had refused to accept a pair of trousers that did not fit him as a Christmas present. In other words, he had acted in an ungrateful way.

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immediately see that he was holding a small child. I also did not see a white man in trousers in the doorway behind him. This is one of five photographs that the two historians selected from Ingeborg Mosand’s collection (none of them focusing on women and children). The information about the picture in the digitized collection categorizes it as a photograph of the house of a village chief, and the man is described as a ‘servant, perhaps a slave’. However, the main subject matter listed for the picture is not the man, but a fetish which look like a tree on each side of the door of the chief ’s house, protecting the chief and his community. The child and the white man are not mentioned.24 The digitized collection contains photographs by thirty-seven named photographers, and one who is unnamed. Of those who are named, fifteen are women, but the number of pictures by each female photographer is very small. I see this largely as a result of the choice of subject matter connected to formal leadership.25 In contrast with the ideal of humility involved in the desire to imitate Jesus, I find that the collection tacitly reflects a remarkably rank-conscious organization. On this point the dispositions and sensibilities – the habitus – of the Norwegian missionary and historian, the African historian and the leadership of the Cameroonian church seem to converge. Implicitly, a transcultural male bias seems to have influenced the selection of photographs. Thus, the collection contains relatively few pictures of women’s work and everyday life. While there are specific categories for several male roles and activities (hunting, fishing, cattlerearing etc.), women are categorized mainly as spouses of prominent men. Their everyday work activities are hidden behind labels such as ‘scenes of life’ (scenes de vie) and ‘technology’ (technique). While Cameroonian women are simultaneously both marginal and central in the publications that were made for the Norwegian audience, they are in my view just marginal in the history book and the digitized collection for the Cameroonian audience. The most striking contrast between the published books and the digitized collection is perhaps that the collection contains relatively few close-ups of beautiful women and children. Given the focus on formal leaders of various sorts, such photographs have probably been regarded as of little historical interest. But they might have been relevant for the stated goal of making a ‘family album’ of Adamaoua province. While the many photographs of attractive anonymous women in the books add a visual human touch to these publications, the digitized collection appears somewhat more official, more austere, less technically and aesthetically appealing, and also more distant from everyday life. As explained by Kåre Lode, the reason for not including many pictures taken by the professional photographer Olaf Ellingsen in the collection, in spite of the fact that they are often technically and aesthetically better than those that were included, is that there is no valid

24. PCD : 0418-042. 25. According to Lode, female photographers have mostly taken more recent pictures because one generation ago the camera was used by the husband in the mission family. If this is the case, this contrasts with contemporary Norwegian families. Since the 1920s the wives have often been in charge of cameras and family albums (Tobiassen 1995). Moreover, single female missionaries, such as Ingeborg Mosand, Torunn Lunde and Solveig Bjøru Sandnes, have published many pictures as slide shows for women’s associations, Sunday schools and public schools. The two historians picked one of Solveig Bjøru Sandnes’ photographs for the collection.

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background information for many of these pictures.26 Lode and Mohammadou had good reasons to disagree with the information provided by Ellingsen and Dalland, who only came on a brief visit to the region. But one could ask why the historians did not reject the information and include the photographs. Even if the information given by Ellingsen and Dalland was insufficient and sometimes just wrong, it could have been corrected after the pictures had been shown in Cameroon. Ellingsen photographed all kinds of people, including some who were unknown to the missionaries, and not just church members who were well known to them. And because he often took close-ups, the subjects in his pictures are easily recognizable. This means that it might be possible to establish in Cameroon who the photographic subjects were, even though the information was not available when the collection was put together in Norway. Thus, the exclusion of these pictures seems to contradict Lode’s stated goal of making a family album for people who do not possess many pictures. Some of Ellingsen’s photographs represent well-known subjects, for example, Numjal Rebecca, the first female catechist, affiliated with the Bible school in Meng.27 There is a photograph of her in the digitized collection taken by an unknown photographer which is technically not as good as the portrait by Ellingsen (Figure 25, lower right). In terms of information, about the subject’s identity, they could have chosen the better photograph in this case. The goal of making a ‘family album’ is associated with deeply rooted ideas about inheritance and identity, focusing on relations of kinship and marriage. For me, it actualizes many questions: To whom does the collection belong, as a newly established cultural heritage? Is the principle of inheritance based on descent and thus on ‘blood relations’? Or is it based on inhabiting a common territory? Does it belong to all the ethnic groups in the region, or only to some? Does it unite them or divide them? Does it belong only to African blacks, or can it be shared with whites? The great advantage of the collection is that it makes it possible for many people in Cameroon to find pictures of their fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers. As in other parts of the globe, there is much interest in Cameroon in pictures of close relatives. At the same time, according to the criteria formulated by Lode, photographs of the white missionaries’ everyday lives were not included because they were regarded as ‘private’ and, presumably, ‘of no interest in Cameroon today’. Also, the missionaries already possessed photographs of themselves, so these images did not meet the criteria. However, an unintended side-effect of this view is differential treatment: the privacy of white subjects is protected, but not the privacy of black subjects. More importantly, I see the exclusion from African visual history of white missionaries who, for good and for bad, spent most of their adult life in Africa, as an unintended reproduction in inverse form of the binary racial logic of colonialism. The assumption that pictures of whites are of no interest in Cameroon (which may of course

26. There are actually forty-nine pictures by Ellingsen in the collection, which is not a small number, but few are portraits. 27. In most sources she is described as a catechist. In the digitized collection she is described as an evangelist, and her name is spelled Noumdjal. See also Chapter 4.

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be true) supports the idea that whites do not ‘belong’ in Africa28 and implies a risk of essentializing and freezing fluid and overlapping identities. This is so whether this idea is maintained and rearticulated by white Norwegians or black Cameroonians. It seems to me that underlying the aim of making a ‘family album’ for Adamaoua province is the idea that the blacks in the region constitute a family of descent in contrast to the white missionaries whose pictures are partially excluded from the collection. What I am trying to say is that although differently positioned, both Europeans and Africans still tend to look at themselves and each other through the filter of the binary logic of colonial culture. As I have spelled out in earlier chapters, this logic implies a mental separation between metropole and colony, between Europe and Africa. Another associated colonial binary which is rearticulated as an underlying categorization in the digitized collection is the distinction between the traditional and the modern, applied across various subject matters such as Cameroonian authorities, ceremonies, architecture, dances and so on. The lamiibe are ‘traditional’, while the French colonial authorities and the Cameroonian government after independence are ‘modern’. Round houses are ‘traditional’, while rectangular buildings connote modernity within this visual universe. Operating with just two modes, I see this distinction as being more ideological than historical. The long history and development of the various Cameroonian institutions – the way old forms are rearticulated and reaffirmed while performing new functions and obtaining new meanings – is eclipsed.29 So is the way in which new forms of knowledge brought by the missionaries were absorbed and appropriated by blacks in Cameroon, and the ways the missionaries had to adapt their teachings to local conditions. Many ‘traditional’ practices can be seen not as a more or less fixed premodern residue, but rather as constantly changing in the face of new circumstances due to broader cultural, political and economic forces. I interpret the many pictures of ceremonies and rituals in the collection as an attempt to correct the earlier demonization of heathenism in the publications for the general Norwegian audience. Nevertheless, while Muslim and Christian ceremonies are categorized together in the collection as ‘religious events’, Gbaya ceremonies are labelled ‘traditional ceremonies’, indicating a hierarchy of religions. The main point of my analysis of the criteria and the categories is that the photographs in the collection are part not only of the history of Cameroon, but also of the mediation of complex interactions between people in Norway and Cameroon. When examining the pictures and systematizing them for research and publication, I think that one has to take into account that they are representations of the encounter between people involved in different systems of knowledge and value. This wider horizon is also necessary for the use of the photographs as resource materials for Cameroon’s national history and the history of the province of Adamaoua. The collection is now the responsibility of people in Cameroon. It can 28. This binary potentially buys into tremendous political problems all over the continent. Fifty years after white colonial rule in Africa began to collapse, relatively few whites remain in sub-Saharan Africa. In Kenya, a former white stronghold, Europeans, Asians and Arabs combined now make up less than 1 per cent of the population. Zimbabwe has lost nearly three-quarters of a million whites in recent years. Today just 35,000 remain. Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe declared that his nation ‘is for black people, not white people’, and South Africa’s leaders failed to rebuke him. Chicago Tribune 17 July 2005: 9. 29. See, for example, Geschiere (1997) and Rowlands and Warnier (1988) about the historicity and modernity of ‘witchcraft’ (French: sorcellerie).

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potentially be used both to fortify social relationships and to produce and reproduce divisions – between blacks and whites and between different ethnic groups in Cameroon.

Overlapping Pictures When compiling the collection, the two historians examined private albums, slide series and the pictures in the NMS archive, but not the published books. In my study, I have looked at some of the same sources as well as the books. We have thus not examined exactly the same material, and we have not had the same goals and perspectives. Of the photographs that I have discussed in this book, the following three pictures are also included in the digitized collection: 1. A studio photograph of ‘the pioneers’ who first went to Cameroon to choose this mission field (Figure 12). They are posing in a serious manner in black suits. I included this picture in my discussion because, in the missionary books, only male missionaries are represented by serious studio portraits. When Cameroonians were allowed to assume ‘Victorian’ poses, the resulting photographs resembled this type of representation. I assume that the two historians included this picture in the digitized collection because by being the very first who came to Cameroon, the photographic subjects are of a high rank within the missionary hierarchy as well as within the national church. The picture thus conforms well to the way the two historians applied the criterion of historical interest. 2. A picture of a female missionary (Ingeborg Mosand) surrounded by small children (Figure 35). I chose this photograph for analysis in Chapter 5 in spite of the fact that it has not been published in a book. It is available thanks to Lode and Mohammadou’s collection. My justification is that the subject matter is very similar to many photographs published in the books; at the same time as it is a more beautiful picture. I thus selected it because of its emblematic nature. This is probably also the reason why the two historians chose it for the digitized collection. It also fits the criterion of making a ‘family album’ for the province. It is an image of the missionary with her converts which humanizes the photographic subjects and provides an interesting counterpoint to representations of male missionaries focusing on formal positions, power and rank, such as the one of ‘the pioneers’. 3. The picture of Rundok (Figure 20). I chose this picture for my discussion of Halfdan Endresen’s published pictures of former slaves in Chapter 4 because it exemplifies how the mission has inspired pity for Cameroonians in Norway. I found it in one of his books, and later also in the digitized collection. I have republished it in this book in spite of the fact that to me it is ethically the most problematic of all the representations of slaves that I have found in the books. Working under pressure of time, the two historians selected this picture and not a more dignified one, such as that of Yiglau (Figure 19), for their collection. This happened even though they did not want to include pictures of former slaves; they did not want to include ethically problematic photographs; and they knew neither the name of the photographic subject nor who the photographer was. Perhaps they chose it for the same reasons that I did: it is a powerful visualization of suffering.

Accidentally, the three overlapping pictures (white male pioneers, caring white mother, old black woman who once was a slave) can be regarded as key images which summarize my

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analysis in this book and its elements of male heroism, female nurture and victims who were saved.

A Potential not Fully Realized: The Use of the Pictures in Cameroon Today The digitized collection was brought to Cameroon in 1998. I was present when some elite men in Ngaoundéré saw the albums printed out from the collection for the first time, and I noticed their excitement. As a new form of cultural heritage it represents a potential which is not yet fully realized. A resource and documentation center at the University of Ngaoundéré, CRED (Centre de resources et documentation), was planned by the Ngaoundéré-Anthropos programme, but has not yet been established because the money allocated for its funding disappeared in 2003 through embezzlement by Cameroonians in positions of trust. Because of the embezzlement, the Ngaoundéré–Anthropos programme has been dormant in 2003, 2004 and 2005.30 For this reason, not much has happened to the collection. The collection exists both in digitized form and as printed-out albums. There are at present three copies of the CDs and albums in Ngaoundéré: one set is at the mission, another is deposited with the Ngaoundéré–Anthropos programme, and the third is located at the mission’s radio station, looked after by Daouda Ja’e, who works at the studio.31 At the general synod meeting of the national church in Tibati in 2004, the photographs were shown continuously on a large screen. In principle, the pictures are available for everybody to buy. People are invited to come to the studio and leaf through the albums, then order the photographs they want for a fee. Daouda Ja’e is currently (2006) selling the pictures for 3,000 FCA for one A4-size copy and 2,000 FCA for a copy half that size. In the beginning quite a few people came to have a look at the collection, and then the number of visitors fell. However, Daouda Ja’e has not complained about the number of visitors: if the demand increases, he will not have enough paper to make the copies. More recently, most of the people who have come to look at the albums are students at the university. Daouda Ja’e finds the project extremely valuable, most of all because digitization protects the pictures and prolongs their life. Photographs printed on paper are easily damaged in the Cameroonian climate. He distinguishes between the missionaries’ use of the pictures and their value for local people: The pictures are not important to us in the missionary sense, but because they show us our history, how the church has developed, how the society has developed as well as the specific history of the people – including the lamiibe, the fire in the city and all the houses that burnt down, everything that had to be rebuilt. … People have come here to find the picture of their father.32

30. The mission wants to use the collection to earn money for the church, and is trying to stop others from using the collection commercially. Source: Daouda Ja’e. The NMS claims to be the only copyright holder, while Lisbet Holtedahl, the leader of the Ngaoundéré–Anthropos programme, thinks that it ought to be shared between the two organizations. Source: Lisbet Holtedahl. 31. Source: Daouda Ja’e. 32. Conversation with Daouda Ja’e in 2004, translated from French.

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Based on many conversations, I think that the division between ‘the missionary sense’ and ‘our sense’ is typical for many church members in Cameroon, and I see the criteria for making the collection as formulated by Lode as partly a response to current Cameroonian ideas. We are thus observing the power of the African ‘receivers’ and the transformation of the communicative modality from ‘development’ to ‘partnership’. Many Africans in elite positions now use the historical dividing lines between blacks and whites as a resource for understanding their current position and as a tool in mobilizing support. White missionaries are following up these ideas with the intention of being attentive to African perceptions and interests. Daouda Ja’e, Kåre Lode and Eldridge Mohammadou thus seem to represent a similar tendency to view the ‘missionary sense’ as more or less opposite to the ‘Cameroonian sense’. Both parties share common underlying categories and assumptions about a division between Africans and missionaries, ‘us’ and ‘them’. As I have shown throughout this book, the mission simply cannot risk either further stoking African feelings of resentment or fully communicating this resentment to the donors in Norway. They therefore are seriously attempting to pay attention to Cameroonian views at the same time as they play down the degree of resentment to Norwegian donors. This is not necessarily a conscious strategy, but a rearticulation of unacknowledged and habitual responses within a new and more complex communicative modality that now also includes people in Cameroon as recipients of information. The communicative modality that I have heuristically called ‘partnership’ implies the continuous need to communicate their work in Africa to the donors in Norway as a story of progress – the mission friends want touching conversion stories and Norad wants improved working and living conditions – in a way which is now also acceptable to the Christians in Cameroon. In this respect, it is quite typical that when the main NMS journal interviewed Eldridge Mohammadou during his stay in Norway at the time he and Lode were selecting the photographs for the digitized collection, the journalist emphasized his positive views on the mission: ‘His words of praise of Kåre Lode and the NMS come from the heart.’33

The Literature Project and the Culture Albums Like other missions, the NMS has over the years done much work translating the Bible into local languages. Their goal is to bring the Word to local people in ‘the language of the heart’ of each potential convert.34 At the same time, there have until recently been few similar efforts to contextualize the Christian message visually in terms of local images. Even today, some Norwegian Lutheran missionaries teach the message of the Gospel using glossy Italian Sunday

33. Misjonstidende 1996 14 : 22. The article is called ‘Returning Cameroonian pictures’ (Kamerunske bilder i retur). Eldridge Mohammadou was happy that these pictures were returned to Cameroon, but he ideally wanted the whole archive to be returned. Source: Lisbet Holtedahl. In other words, his political interest was translated into the missionary discourse of heartfelt emotion and interpreted as satisfaction with the mission. 34. The current literature project is led by Lucie Neba. It is partly funded by Norad and promotes literacy, including the translation of local stories and fairy tales.

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school pictures of a white Jesus, and they transmit health information using visual materials which show North Americans and Europeans in situations that are very different from those in Africa. Thus, their visual communication is not fully in step with the verbal communication. Because of many cultural and practical barriers, applying new ideas about visual contextualization is, so far, more a hope for the future than a reality. Around the turn of the millennium, two missionaries attempted to visually contextualize biblical and health information messages in Cameroon. Ivar Barane is a professional photographer, and Janne Eide is competent in the making and transmission of art. Both were missionary spouses who obtained missionary status when the NMS changed its policy. While Janne Eide was in Cameroon, she founded VIN’ART, an independent group of artists who cooperate with the church and receive some funding from Norad. Ivar Barane was in Cameroon more or less during the same time period as Eide. He wanted to take photographs for the Cameroonian audience that would contextualize campaigns against AIDS as well as evangelizing efforts through using local images: The appearance of the people in the pictures, their clothes, the physical surroundings – all of this can be important in order to inspire people to take the information seriously. Health information pictures with square houses and white men in shorts often do not work in Cameroon, especially not in relation to the Fulanis. ‘This applies to “them”, not to “us”’, the viewers automatically think.

Barane started to work with local artists who had been hired by Janne Eide to make new drawings to illustrate biblical stories. He travelled to various ethnic groups in order to take photographs of their houses, clothing and tools. The aim was to record these things in a detailed way and thus to provide a photographic database that the artists could use as a resource when they made illustrations for each group in the various books published in the local languages. The goal was to visually contextualize biblical and other stories in terms of specific local conditions and cultural artefacts. The young missionary-photographer visited several regions in Northern Cameroon. When he explained to the elders that he wanted to take photographs of their ‘traditional culture’, the old men asked him to also take photographs of their most sacred objects, such as fetishes and musical instruments. Because they have difficulties in transmitting their traditions to their young people, the male elders saw his project as an opportunity to properly record the items they venerate the most. According to Barane, the old men appreciated the aims of his project and used him for their own purposes and on their own terms. They showed their trust in him by letting him take photographs of objects that whites are seldom allowed to see. The work resulted in a series of ‘culture albums’ with texts explaining the function of the objects. These albums are now located as the literature office of the church.35 Ivar Barane now lives in Norway and teaches photography at a Christian school (folkehøyskole). However, one of his concerns is still to find ways for the national church in Cameroon to transmit its needs and ideas directly to the public in Norway. They already have professional journalists, he says, and he wants to contribute to the education of professional photographers. Therefore he is currently trying to teach a man in Cameroon to become a 35. Sometimes women are not allowed to see some of the objects. These are covered in the album and carry a written warning.

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photographer via the internet. He wants the NMS to start commissioning photographs from Cameroonians in the church and pay them as freelancers. According to Barane, many people in the organization appreciate the idea of using an African photographer, but it is nevertheless difficult to put it into practice. In addition to economic reasons, the leadership at the Norwegian headquarters seems to be afraid of losing control over the information flow to the various sections of the Norwegian public. This would not be surprising, given that so many people and their activities depend on the careful management of NMS’s public relations to the various supporters, and the stability and planning that this involves. What would the implications be of letting the Cameroonians take over? Would they lack the Norwegians’ tacit knowledge about the Norwegian public and thus not produce materials that could elicit enough material and spiritual support from them? Would they only ask for what they know the donors are ready to give? Would they transmit the Cameroonians’ resentment about the mission to the supporters in Norway (including Norad)? And would the various supporters then see them as ungrateful rather than as justifiably angry, or perhaps something in between? In other words, would replacing the missionaries with Cameroonian information specialists break the vicious circle which reproduces ‘donors’ and ‘receivers’? I have no answers to these important questions, but I think they need to be discussed.

From Mission Propaganda to Ethnic Folklore In the late twentieth century, the European cultural heritage museums gradually came to be conceived as fora for debating the past, rather than as places in which objective models of the past are displayed for the education of the public. The challenge for those who establish the various forms of postcolonial cultural heritage projects that I have discussed in this chapter is to devise new strategies of representation which do not reproduce colonial ways of organizing experience – to change dominant narratives and negotiate the tensions they involve. The digitized collection can be regarded as an example of a selective rendering of symbols and signs and a systematic attempt to convey notions of authenticity through stylized displays of history and culture; a capturing of ‘cultural heritage’ through a series of images which simplify and objectify more complex webs of practice and meaning. Similarly, the creation of the ‘culture albums’ can be regarded as a folklorization of culture – the selective appropriation of cultural forms for representative purposes. Practices such as grinding grain on a millstone or playing a sacred instrument become free-floating signs that can be attached to new sets of values and worldviews. During the destruction of a former way of life to build a more technologically advanced society, certain elements of the old ways are appropriated and turned into folklore. This is now happening all over the world. The ideas of a ‘traditional culture’ and a ‘cultural heritage’ exemplifies the fact that received practices often become dearer to people when they lose their place in everyday life, and that received notions start being cultivated when they lose their self-evident nature. There is a risk, however, that this kind of objectification of culture connected to ethnic groups subsequently reinforces ethnocentrism and ethnic divisions. In Cameroon and in Norway today, such folklorization as objectification often set the stage for the reproduction of the very boundaries that they intend to overcome. Cultural reification often follows in the footsteps of cultural revitalization.

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Thus, technologies of objectification, such as photography and film, create new possibilities for understanding and defending oneself, at the same time as they pose new risks of essentialization, rigidity, alienation, divisions and exclusions. The current situation in Cameroon is not that cultural authenticity is measured by hegemonic Western ideas and practices rather than by the practices and ideas of the people who produce and live with the cultural artefacts in question. Instead, colonial binaries are now rearticulated and reaffirmed by Africans themselves within the new communicative modality with its focus on partnership. So far, the role of the Europeans seems to have been to follow up and respect the local reaffirmation of colonial binaries. By paying attention to the wishes of African colleagues, they retain the division between Africans and Europeans and continue controlling the information flow to Norway. They make the representations of these relationships more harmonious for audiences in Norway by playing down the history of missionary propaganda in Cameroon, the degree of resentment in Africa, as well as their own disappointment and vulnerability.

10 GOODNESS AND ITS SIDE-EFFECTS The ‘native’ would be brought into the European world, but as the recipient of a gift he could never return – except by acknowledging, gratefully, his own subordination. And in this colonizing project the Christian missionary would play a special role as agent, scribe and moral alibi. Jean and John Comaroff 1 Those of us who today work together with Africans have to be prepared to endure the injustice when accumulated aggression is released in unmotivated ways in the encounter with a white person. The European who does not know the history of the white man in Latin American and Africa should not become a missionary or developmental worker in the Third World today. Bjørn Bue2

The overarching principle is equality and cooperation. One should not forget, however, who controls the purse. By tightening the strings on that occasion and opening them up on that occasion, the old missionary society can control the new church as effectively as before – its work policy, educational institutions, pastors 1. Comaroff and Comaroff (1997b: 691). 2. Bue (1992: 70).

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and missionaries. One cannot pretend to be equals when one party constantly has to ask, and the other constantly can decide when he wants to give. Economic independence is therefore a condition for this theology, a condition which is seldom present. Gunvor Lande3 Although the story of the Norwegian missionaries in Cameroon is a success story, considering the vital national church and large number of related institutions, there are also some aspects of their work which exemplify more general divisions, tensions and dilemmas. These tensions and dilemmas are also present in other organizations, such as development aid and human relief work. The missionary publications are part of a system within which they constantly have to take the preconceptions and the needs of the public into account. They arrived in Africa with material resources from their supporters in Norway, and the propaganda activities that I have examined in this book were directed at these supporters in order to enlist more support. The examination of the communicative modalities influencing the missionaries’ published images and texts helped me to identify specific underlying codes and a specific logic that I will attempt to analyse more precisely in this chapter by bringing in a broader set of considerations. My contention is that the mission’s acting with the best of intentions has had some unforeseen side-effects both in Norway and Cameroon. What is generally considered ‘typically African’ and ‘typically European’ is influenced by the long-term encounter between people from these two world regions. The interaction between the mission and local ways of life has changed both parties, and not always in the ways envisaged by the mission. These sideeffects have tended to construct and affirm a paternalist divide between missionaries and Cameroonians, in spite of intensive and idealistic interaction and collaboration. The relationship is thus simultaneously characterized by close involvement and marked distance. I have chosen to call this combination ‘relational uneasiness’, due to the difficulties of one party continuously being at the receiving end of a goodness regime. The people who give assume a superior position in relation to those who receive,4 by commanding a surplus which is simultaneously both material and moral. One party thus has something valuable to contribute, while the other consists of people who do not fully control their lives. In other words, the generosity of the missionaries implies the potential humiliation of the Africans, leading not only to the continuous production and reproduction of the interrelated categories of ‘donors’ and ‘receivers’, but also to an anger which is difficult to express and to various strategies on the part of the receivers to evade the social category within which they are enclosed. In the previous Chapter, I presented Daouda Ja’e, the young, educated Fulani who is currently managing the digitized collection of photographs at the church’s radio station in Ngaoundéré. He told me that among young educated people in Cameroon it is now quite common to take and share photographs. Making an album is a way of visualizing one’s life course and remembering specific events. When visiting someone’s house, the first thing a 3. Lande (1979: 26). 4. See Mauss (1954) about the power of the gift.

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friend will show you is his photo album, and only after that will you be offered a glass of water. Good friends often request photographs of each other. But Daouda Ja’e is suspicious about the mission’s use of photographs: I certainly do not want to be photographed by a missionary I do not know. They leave, and you don’t know for what purposes the photographs are used. I would find such a situation very difficult, because I suspect that the pictures might be used in a way that I do not support. I have serious misgivings. There are missionaries whose fundraising is noble, but other missionaries collect money just for themselves. For example, once we, the students, did the major annual cleaning of the Protestant high school. Many of us discovered papers with our names on them saying that such and such a student was to receive such and such sum of money for the Christmas celebrations. But we did not receive any money.5

I interpret this quote as an expression of Daouda Ja’e’s awareness of the fact that the faces and bodies of local people have been used for missionary propaganda purposes. It shows that suspicion exists even among church members who interact and collaborate closely with the missionaries. Such suspicion is based on the fact that their photographs have served as resources in a project for their own good, but a project, nevertheless, that they did not themselves control. Remember, also, some people’s fear of derision, discussed in Chapter 4. Other Cameroonians have voiced the opinion that there is a relationship between the expression of faith and access to resources such as fellowships and jobs. According to one woman, the students at her school who told the teacher that they ‘had received Jesus’ had a better chance of getting free schooling in the form of scholarships. I want to contrast these points of view with one from the other side of the categorical divide. Henri Nissen, the Danish missionary and journalist who worked with the Norwegians at the radio station in Ngaoundéré, has written the so far most recent missionary book about Northern Cameroon. Nissen wanted to give his Danish readers a different picture of the developing countries than ‘the sugar-sweet, positive and glossy image we often transmit of the work of the mission and development aid’. In his view, people in missionary and development circles prefer to represent the African ‘in a pure and innocent light’.6 Moreover: The greatest problem is the attitude of the Africans themselves. Their mentality. There are many positive things to be said about the African lifestyle. Personally I am very fond of their relaxed way of dealing with everything. … The reverse side of this ‘relaxed lifestyle’ is, nevertheless, that there is no development. … Again, in order not to be called a racist, I have to state that there are of course exceptions. What I talk about is the general mentality, whatever its cause. … The African cares about himself. He is an egotist, like the rest of us. Nevertheless, I have nowhere else in this world experienced a similar greediness and egotism. … If it was the case that only the large, well-resourced development projects had exhibited stagnation and corruption, but unfortunately we see the same tendencies in the projects of the church. The

5. Source: Daouda Ja’e in a conversation on 10 December 2004. Perhaps the money was not given to the students individually but was used (in more patronizing ways) for collective purposes. 6. Nissen (1999: 80).

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more money involved, the worse is usually the result. The best functioning churches are the ones with the poorest partners. They have only received the Gospel, without a lot of money as well.7

Perhaps inspired by the heated debates in the Danish media about ‘the foreigners’ (de fremmede) – in other words the Muslim immigrants to Denmark and their descendants – Nissen seems to believe that he is presenting an entirely new picture of the African to the supporters of the Danish mission. To me, Nissen’s way of formulating his point of view is not typical, but the underlying ideas are quite common among missionaries. We therefore have to distinguish between style and content. His style is more blatantly paternalistic, but his focus on mentality and individual morality when explaining social problems is in fact consistent with much mission propaganda. As we have seen, the missionary films and books are often characterized by a mixture of moral orthodoxy and pragmatism in which African problems are perceived in terms of individual and family morals. The statements by Daouda Ja’e and Henri Nissen indicate a social and cultural boundary, as well as different ways of explaining its existence. Both of them, however, focus on the greediness of the other. In the following pages, I examine the tensions in the relationships between the mission and local people in order to sketch out how such different perceptions may have developed over time. I want to show that the reproduction of the binaries between blacks and whites, between Cameroon and Norway, is not just a matter of Cameroonians taking over colonial categories but is the result of more complicated processes in which both the humiliating aspects of charity and missionary conceptions of goodness, piety, rationality and conversion play a role. The total picture is of course complex, involving many other elements that I am not able to go into detail about here. For example, a full analysis would necessitate more information about the life worlds of Cameroonians, and how they understand the various relations to the missionaries, to the church, to other ethnic groups than their own, and so on. It would also necessitate a more profound understanding of the brutal aspects of social life in Cameroon before the Europeans arrived. Nevertheless, I think that my analysis is able to tease out an element in the total dynamic. The discussion takes us back to the ‘evangelizing’ and ‘development’ communicative modalities of the mission.

Bringing a Potent Mixture of Science and Religion While the missionaries served as vehicles of a hegemonic worldview and influenced local people in many ways that they did not fully realize, they nevertheless wanted to create modern, literate, self-sufficient, self-controlled, self-willed and monogamous Christian subjects.8 They expected conversion to have radical consequences on everyday life – on

7. Nissen (1999: 82–84, italics in the Danish original). Such statements in his book caused quite a stir, including in Norwegian missionary circles, because problems in the national church became publicly known. 8. See Comaroff and Comaroff (1991, 1997a).

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matters such as dress, literacy and family life.9 In other words, they attempted to recast African personhood, habits and home life, including local values and ideas about virtue. In particular, the missionaries worked actively against illiteracy and polygamy. Even though the missionaries had to make many compromises, to be saved ideally implied a total reorganization of space and time in the lives of the converted. They had to live according to a new sense of right and wrong, and strive for specific forms of cleanliness and order in the sociospatial connections among kin, property, production and place. Rephrasing a slogan in the Cameroon mission – ‘the work among the sick has been the plough head of the Gospel’ – one could argue that the missions have been among the plough heads of capitalist modernity in Africa. I base this interpretation on the fact that the missionaries brought modern Western technologies to Africa in the form of medicine, education, agriculture – and photography. When photography was invented in the nineteenth century, it became a tool in the modern marginalization of belief in magic and mysticism. Premodern beliefs in the supernatural were replaced by a modern reliance on optical precision, on documenting and proving the visible. In principle, everything visible could be represented in a photograph. Natural scientists, philosophers and artists no longer looked for the essential unifying properties of the universe, but wanted to see things ‘the way they are’ in each case. In line with realist ideas in science and art, the invention of photography tended to reduce the world to objectively describable phenomena, to facts without essential meanings and helped to dismiss the existence of the supernatural. Seen in this light, the missionaries’ use of photography is indeed intriguing. I view their particular mixture of religion and science-based technologies as a key to their historic role, including the relational dynamics they set in motion. While theories of modernity often hold that science has replaced religion as a common ground and ideological centre, the history of the missions tells a different story about how science and technology were successfully used to promote religion. In previous chapters, I have shown how the NMS treated sick people regardless of their religious affiliation and that their medical, educational and social work provided many contexts for taking interesting photographs in negotiated photographic occasions. Within relationships of trust and gratitude, established through the missionaries’ charity and the modern medical technologies they commanded, patients consented to being photographed. Implicitly and self-evidently, the work among the sick was not only based on biblical ideas of care, but also on science-based medicine. With their focus on evangelizing and compassion, the missionaries largely took for granted the scientific and technological grounding of much of their practical work. In other words, they harnessed specific secular traditions of knowledge to Christian ends. The memoirs contain numerous examples of the ways the missionaries contrasted science-based medicine to African medical practices of various sorts and used the contrast as evidence for the backwardness of heathenism and ‘the fear of spirits’ (åndefrykten) compared to Christianity.

9. In this respect the Norwegian mission was slightly different from the US-based Sudan Mission with which they cooperate (the two missions formed the national church). The Sudan Mission was more flexible than the NMS about requiring a convert to be able to read and write. The NMS missionaries do not accept polygyny. In the 1987 NMS film Kvinnefrigjøring i Kamerun (‘Women’s liberation in Cameroon’), the audience is introduced to a man and his three wives. Only the first wife is accepted at communion (natverd), although two of them are members of Femmes pour Christ.

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For both Africans and missionaries, technological power often became a symbol of the superior power of the Christian faith, and it contributed to the historical success of the missions, including their success in evangelizing. In the words of James R. Ryan, ‘the mutual extension of Christian religion and scientific knowledge represented a transference of “light” into the “dark” recesses of the globe’.10 In this quote, ‘light’ apparently refers to both Christianity and the rationality of science. When bringing the Gospel, Western science was to the missionaries what the miracles were to many interpretations of the life of Jesus. Thus, modern science-based rationality was a central part of the missionary teachings from day one in the field. They were not just God’s messengers; they also incorporated particular kinds of rationality and science-based modernity. One universal reinforced the other, as it were. The combined universals of science and Christianity led them to a mixture of paternalism and parochialism that to some extent closed them off from seeing the valuable aspects of local traditions of knowledge, hampering a serious dialogue about these issues for a long time. Both Norwegians and Cameroonians combine different traditions of knowledge in particular forms of contested syncretism, some of them involving beings that within a modern European worldview are seen as supernatural. In Western thought, these knowledge traditions are clearly divided into theology, on the one hand, and medicine, agriculture, photography etc., on the other, and the missionaries did not see the similarities between their own practical combination of religion and science and the Cameroonian combinations of traditions of knowledge and belief. Like most other Europeans, they nurtured modern conceptual divisions at the same time as their practices were syncretic.11 They classified most Cameroonian practices related to illness and suffering as heathen and largely demonized them en bloc. With a few exceptions, in the form of after-thoughts,12 the missionary books indicate a systematic rejection of local practices and worldviews and an accompanying intolerance for the hybrid coexistence of different systems of knowledge. Applying their own theologically based conceptual dichotomies, in their books for the general audience they tended to classify practices as either Christian (allied with modern science) or heathen, sometimes subsuming Islam under heathenism. This was explicitly done in the name of Christianity, and implicitly on the basis of the practices of modern science. In this way, ritual objects connected to ‘sorcery’ (French: sorcellerie), as well as therapies, pharmacopeias and herbal medicines, were reduced to ‘magic remedies’ (tryllemidler), the missionary catch-all term for objects belonging to different traditions of knowledge.13 The explicit goal of the mission was to eliminate these traditions. 10. Ryan (1997: 26). 11. In the words of Bruno Latour (1993), ‘we have never been modern’. 12. See Chapter 2 about the missionary books. In Bjørn Bue’s book, he mentions a disagreement between himself and Solbjørg Pilskog on the value of local medical practices (Bue 1992: 126). According to him, they disagreed on the question of whether there is a difference between (a potentially valuable) local ‘herbal medicine’ (naturmedisin) and (despicable) ‘sorcery’ (trylledoktormedisin). The matter could not be solved, it seems, because neither of them knew very much about local medical practices, which rely on the use of plants and other kinds of natural materials, as well as amulets (Fulani: lekki; French: gris gris), and various other sorts of occult power. 13. See Bue (1992: 26) about the necessity, as seen by the missionaries, of burning the ‘magic remedies’ (tryllemidler) because they are ‘the ties to Satan’ (Satans band). In the official 1992 NMS history (Jørgensen 1992, II), the term tryllemidler is still used (for example, in a caption on p. 12). See Pool (1994) for an ethnographic discussion of interpretations of illness in the Northwest Province of Cameroon.

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But from day one in the field the mission had to make compromises, due to the tenacity of local practices. In particular, the issues of bride wealth, polygamy, and whether to baptize people who were not able to read and write have been recurrent. To some extent the mission thus had to engage with indigenous practices in order to evangelize. But, judging from the missionary publications for their audiences in Norway, they were not inclined to make many adjustments to their biblical teachings in order to make them more relevant to the various groups they worked with in Cameroon. They engaged with local practices reluctantly, and the reluctance was partly based on their theology and partly on the rationality of modern science. In this they were in line with the French colonial administration, which made it illegal to practise ‘traditional medicine’. It seems to me that the missionaries’ modern ideas were reinforced by a specific theological interpretation of God’s power to create something radically new. This theology tended to lead to a view of conversion as an all-or-nothing affair, and not as a change necessarily and unavoidably embedded in a specific sociocultural environment. Since some missionaries spoke local languages and often stayed for a long time, they became familiar with specific local ideas and practices. Nevertheless, their call to preach the Gospel, the science-based ideas they took for granted, as well as their radical definition of conversion necessarily implied a form of cultural violence. While a few missionaries have been interested in recording and photographing local customs and rituals, for a long time most missionaries did not really know and appreciate the various beliefs, practices and systems of knowledge that they were attempting to replace. They often did not quite understand that local people were not able to shed everything from their past like old clothes but had to continue living their lives and interpreting their circumstances by means of complex and conflict-ridden hybrid mixtures of old and new ideas and practices.14 The various groups lived by specific patterns of thought and emotion and within circumstances that made them continue to seek relations and activities in addition to the ones the mission had to offer. Seen from African points of view, the missionaries’ lack of understanding and interest could be interpreted as a rejection of local ways of life and systems of knowledge and belief. In spite of attempting to remove African symbols and their communicative universe, the mission saw itself only as a given, nevertheless. At evangelizing meetings and church services, actual and potential church members were until quite recently encouraged to come forward and burn their ‘magic remedies’. Some of the old missionaries still frown upon finding such objects hidden under somebody’s bed or hearing that a Christian has gone to healers au village or dans le quartier to solve a problem, be it childlessness, hepatitis or something else. Even missionaries with close ties to local people, and with considerable knowledge about the rearticulated and reaffirmed existence of local healing practices within the Christian congregations, tend to think that this is something local people at some point will be ‘freed from’ (løst fra), and that they should instead lay their problems in the hands of God (and, it is implicitly understood, in the hands of modern science-based medicine). Many of those who accepted the spiritual reorientation of the Christian faith had to abandon practices such as sacrifices to particular spirits and ancestor worship, the belief in the power of ‘witchcraft’ and ‘sorcery’, as well as other traditions of knowledge and belief, in order not to offend the missionaries. A common solution (which again potentially created new 14. As already noted, some missionaries have been aware of this fact, as an afterthought.

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problems) was to attempt to hide from public view their continued adherence to the traditions of knowledge that the missionaries considered to be heathen. In fact, silence was often the preferred form of resistance to the language and practice of evangelizing and development. This form of resistance engages not only rank-and-file church members, but also church leaders on various levels. Why tell the hands that feed you and/or your church about things they do not want to hear? The mission to some extent contributed to the exclusion from public life of what they conceived of as heathen practices and the cultivation of ‘false gods’.15 In the individual missionary memoirs, there are therefore quite a few references to the existence of things that Africans normally do not tell whites.16 And conversely, when I have talked to Cameroonian members of the church, they also voice the view that the white missionaries form closed ranks that are not open to blacks. But both missionaries and locals can usually mention some particular person in the other group who ‘has been open’ and has thus helped them understand more as how the other group thinks. After the mission schools had operated for many years, and quite a few Cameroonians had become educated, Cameroonian colleagues started to play a similar role as the servants in teaching the missionaries about local practices. In personal conversations, some missionaries mention their luck in finding – or being found by – a local friend who helped them avoid the worst mistakes, and who explained to them when they had done something wrong, in order to avoid future calamities. For example, for Erik Larsen, who was a missionary in Cameroon from 1965 to 1972, his colleague at the radio studio, Philippe Manikasset, became a good friend.17 Nevertheless, these crucial friendships across the divide do not really seem to challenge its continued existence. In the words of anthropologist Rachel Djesa, forms of knowledge connected to ‘magic’ and ‘witchcraft’ represent an undercurrent in Cameroonian society, and many Christians have developed various techniques to apply these forms of knowledge without being negatively sanctioned. When she went back to her native group, the Dii, in order to study ‘witchcraft’, she discovered that nobody wanted to talk to her, because the questions she asked were already impregnated with the power of modern Western scholarship.18 Similarly, when Cameroonian students go from Norway to Cameroon to make a film, they are not treated as Africans, but as Europeans.19 In these respects, the difference between blacks and whites is no longer a matter of skin colour but of social relations and access to different forms of knowledge and material resources. These categories and the boundaries they imply continue to be practised and affirmed, and are at the same time constantly crossed. No wonder, then, that some local people, such as the Muslim Fulani, seem to have made an effort to harness the power of the whites yet evade their control and the colonization of consciousness implied in their establishment of new hegemonies. To some extent, local traditions of knowledge and belief also became the focus of a more articulate resistance among Cameroonian Christians and the basis for the ongoing Africanization of Christianity. 15. A comparison could be made here to the forced assimilation of the Norwegian Sami before the 1970s, and the stigma associated with Sami systems of knowledge and belief. 16. See for example Budal (1962, 1979). 17. Source: Erik Larsen. In the anniversary volume (Larsen 1973; see Chapter 6), there is a small portrait of Philippe Manikasset identified by name on p. 108. 18. Djesa (2002: 39). 19. Source: Alphonse Ahola Ndem.

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The Humiliating Aspects of the Gift The missionaries brought valuable gifts to Africa, and the relational dynamics between them and the people they work with is related to the ways these gifts were conceptualized, thought about, presented and managed. To ‘do something for others’ epitomizes goodness, both for the missionaries and for their core public at home, but not unambiguously so for the Africans at the receiving end of these donations. When helping out is based on mutuality and reciprocity – in the sense that today I need your help and tomorrow I might be able to help you – this is different from when it is conceived as going only in one direction. The verb ‘to give’ (Norwegian: å gi) contains ambiguous tensions in this respect. It can be interpreted with an emphasis on sharing, equality and mutuality, or as ‘giving away’ (gi bort), a one-sided enterprise. For many people in Cameroon, as elsewhere, generosity is a central value which confers prestige on the giver. According to Marcel Mauss’s theory, a gift carries an obligation to reciprocate.20 Not being able to reciprocate is often regarded as humiliating. With a few exceptions, people in Cameroon have primarily been in contact with the missionaries, not with the organizations and people in Norway, and they receive the donations from the supporters through them. Part of the relational uneasiness is a result of the fact that they cannot reciprocate in the same terms. First, there is a difference in the standard of living between the missionaries and the locals. This is often more painful for missionaries and other idealists who have devoted themselves to improving the lives of people in need than for business executives, for example. Their idealism also makes them more vulnerable to accusations of paternalism and racism. Second, the mission and the church manage resources such as jobs and fellowships that are important to local people. The value of these resources has increased with the decline of the Cameroonian economy, described in Chapter 2. The churches are thus sources of secular, economic power. Over the years, many discussions among the missionaries have concerned the question of whether or not to inform local church employees about exactly how much the missionaries earn. Some have been against it, because the difference between their income and that of most local employees is, after all, considerable, while others have wanted to be frank because, as they say, Cameroonians are usually very surprised when they learn how little the missionaries earn in comparison to the former French colonial administrators, European and American business managers, and international development experts.21 These tensions reveal that the values of goodness and self-sacrifice are always relative, and that the missionaries do not, in fact live just like the people they are there to help.22 The following excerpts from the book about the retired missionary nurse Solbjørg Pilskog illustrate well the relational uneasiness due to the difference in living conditions, and the dilemmas posed by the difference in control over vital material resources: 20. Mauss (1954). 21. Source: Ellen Eliassen and Erik Larsen. According to Larsen, the American missionaries earned more than the Norwegians. Before 1970 the income of the Norwegians was called maintenance (underhold), not income. Because it was considered to be far too small, their income increased 40 per cent in 1970/71. 22. In fact, the lone ethnographer is more likely to do this while in the field, since there is no sheltering organization to make sure that a higher standard of living is provided.

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Even though the missionaries are not at all rich, their houses are of such a high standard and their surroundings are so well kept that there is a marked difference between them and most others. – It is obvious, said Solbjørg, – in their eyes we are millionaires. … Solbjørg has a servant who washes her clothes, makes dinner and cleans her house. Because of him, she can concentrate better on her work among the sick. Moreover, in this way a national is employed and is able to feed his family. When Solbjørg does not use the Toyota, she rides around in the neighbourhood on a bicycle that she bought from ‘Teia-Lars’ in Hareid in 1950. Every year she receives new tyres and inner tubes from Norway.23 Solbjørg maintains that running the medical activities is totally impossible without help from the outside: – We have many good national health workers now, but the people who are sick cannot afford to pay for the treatment and the medicines. For several years, the employees at the hospital in Ngaoundéré have only received half their wage. How long will they be able to manage? In the schools the conditions are still worse. The teachers only receive two or three of their monthly wages a year. The work they contribute is worthy of much respect. … Would people in Norway have put up with this? Everybody knows that pastors, evangelists and catechists only get their monthly wage two or three times a year. This is part of the calling and the sacrifice of working in the church. And they live primarily by cultivating their fields. In the countryside this is OK, but the situation is different and much worse in the cities. Bakari Etienne in Ngaoundéré does not complain. But then we give him some money on the sly every now and then. (Men så stikk vi då i han litt pengar av og til.)24

The description of the well-kept missionary house and visual contrasts are tacitly regarded as universal by the journalist, but the kinds of orderliness appreciated by many Norwegians are not necessarily equally important to Cameroonians. They, of course, notice differences in living standards, but probably not using exactly the same criteria as the visiting Norwegian journalist. In these particular quotes, Solbjørg Pilskog expresses her deep respect for and benevolence towards Pastor Bakhari Etienne. He does not complain. In my reading of the way she chooses to express herself, she does not take into account the potential humiliating aspects of her generosity. The quote can therefore be used to illustrate a more general lack of awareness in Norway of what it means to give and the many ways of giving. Even though she is older than Bakhari Etienne, and can therefore occupy a motherly position in relation to him, it may not be easy to be the one who is given ‘some money on the sly every now and then’. What he gives Pilskog in return, it seems, is gratitude and prestige. Many such interactions can thus be regarded as exchanges of material resources for gratitude and prestige.25 23. Grimstad (1997: 62). Like several others, Solveig Pilskog uses the term ‘the nationals’ about Cameroonians. I see this as a well-intended attempt, perhaps inspired by the language use of the French, at finding neutral terms in a sensitive semantic field. 24. Grimstad (1997: 121). Bakari Etienne is the same pastor who was pictured in Konstanse Raen’s book discussed in Chapter 2. There his name is spelled Bakhari Etienne. 25. Since servants are regarded in present-day Norway as a luxury and their work as debasing, missionaries generally feel that they have to justify having a servant to the supporters at home. But see also the discussion of Karl Flatland’s pictures in Chapter 4. Some missionaries recently chose not to employ servants. In their own eyes they were idealistic and followed Christ’s example of living simply. In the eyes of many Cameroonians, they were stingy because they did not share their resources with a local family.

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Although the missionaries live modestly and endure many hardships, there are also quite a few pleasant aspects to their life in Cameroon: the climate, the pace of life, the friendliness and gratitude shown to them, their prestige, and having servants to do the most arduous household tasks. In the book about Solbjørg Pilskog, both in the subtitle and repeatedly in the text, the region she works in is called a ‘kingdom’ (rike), and the author describes how she moves around her kingdom and is greeted by all. The implication is that in this region she is like a queen.

The Social Meaning of Gratitude When reading the literature and talking to present and former missionaries, I have noticed over and over again that expressions of ‘deep gratitude’ play a crucial role in the relations between missionaries and Africans. Missionaries are generally delighted when people in Cameroon in various ways are able to show that they are thankful for what they receive and tend to be disappointed when expected expressions of gratitude are not forthcoming. For the missionaries, the gratitude substantiates their feelings of being needed and doing a good job, and helps them to endure the hardships of life in a foreign environment and to confidently and eagerly communicate about the work of the mission to the various people in Norway who donate the money. Positive stories nourish the supporters at home, and encourage them to share their resources with people in foreign lands.26 Moreover, the gratitude nourishes and inspires the work of the missionaries by constituting a central element in their self-motivation. The missionaries work as ambassadors for Cameroon in Norway, and when they are discouraged, the supporters also lose inspiration and withdraw their funding. Moreover, the gratitude of Cameroonians provides the missionaries with positive images of themselves as good people, a gift which is often taken for granted and not registered at the ideological level. In a way, the missionaries are thus receivers who do not see that they, too, receive various forms of gifts in the form of a positive self-image. Thus, both the missionaries and the supporters at home need to receive gratitude. To some extent, a show of gratitude reconciles the relational uneasiness about the one-way flow of material resources, at the same time as it affirms and reinforces the conceptual dichotomy between ‘donors’ and ‘receivers’ and the accompanying potential for feelings of enhanced selfrespect (the donors) and humiliation (the receivers). Expressions of gratitude also substantiate the missionaries’ vision of having been called, not only by God, but also by local people. A show of gratitude can be regarded as a call for help, as depicted in the many visualizations of the passage in the Acts called ‘The call from Macedonia’. For the Cameroonians, expressing their gratitude by, for example, performing a service, can be a way of giving something back and thus creating a symbolic balance in the (materially speaking) unequal relationship between themselves and the mission. Nevertheless, there is often, and almost inevitably, a little uncertainty among the missionaries about the motives of their Cameroonian colleagues and friends. Many have from time to time asked themselves: Do Cameroonians accept my religious interpretations, express 26. For Henri Nissen, who was quoted above, the gratitude of the locals, and therefore the meaningfulness of the work of the missionary, is definitively a thing of the past, due to the (in his view) bad way the Protestant hospital is being run since the national church took it over.

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gratitude, praise my work and befriend me because of who I am and what I do – or because they need me as a link to vital resources? In the words of Ragnhild Mestad: ‘As a white person in Africa, one is used to being treated as an inexhaustible source of money.’27 Gunhild Raen, daughter of two missionaries, who at the time of her interview by Jorunn Sundby had lived fourteen of her sixteen years in Cameroon, expressed her awareness of the relational uneasiness in the following way: ‘I also feel a bit different, because I am so very, very much richer than they are. Often this is a sad and difficult experience.’28 She also experienced a cultural boundary: in her close, mutual and very satisfying relationship with Marie, the Cameroonian girl who was her best friend, she nevertheless did not confide as often in Marie as Marie confided in her, ‘perhaps because it is so difficult to explain our culture’.29 Henri Nissen, for his part, made the point that while he lived in Cameroon as a missionary, he every now and then had to get away from all the people who in his view wanted to ‘know’ him and be his ‘friend’ only because they expected to gain some advantage from the relationship.30 From his Scandinavian perspective, it seems morally wrong for a person to want to know him in order to use the connection for some purpose. Some missionaries therefore complain that ‘Cameroonians always ask me for money’. These missionaries interpret such exchanges as involving ‘materialism’ and ‘egotism’, and in some contexts they do not see the social value of reciprocity implied through the incurring of debts. Independence and self-sufficiency are central values for the Scandinavians; they tend to become suspicious when someone asks them for help, and often resist asking others for help. Thus, missionaries (and development experts) tend to continuously thwart the role of ‘the giver’ in others by not daring to accept and appreciate help and by not recognizing the both abstract and concrete gifts that they actually receive.

‘Crafty Takers’ and ‘Foolish Givers’ Expressions of religious faith and gratitude and performing services in exchange for material resources do not always work as a solution to relational uneasiness. Like many other poor countries in the world today, Cameroon suffers from what Séverin Cécile Abega, literature professor at the University of Yaounde, calls a ‘generalized corruption’ (une corruption généralisée).31 According to a Cameroonian saying, the goat eats where it is attached (la chèvre brout oú elle est attachée).32 This saying serves to explain the almost endemic dishonesty concerning money. Since the serious economic and political changes in the late 1980s and the beginning of 1990s, people at all levels of society have lost their shame (French: hônte) and are no longer anxious about the consequences of corruption and embezzlement.33 The national evangelical church in Cameroon has not been spared: as noted in Chapter 2, it has several times suffered from serious misappropriation of funds by Christian Cameroonians in positions of trust within the church. Perhaps this can be seen as a result of 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

Mestad (2000: 10). Sundby (1991: 26). Ibid.: 26. Nissen (1999: 63, 64). Patrimoine, November 2003: 5. Source: Alphonse Ahola Ndem. Source: Hamadjoda Adjoudji, president du Conseil d’administation de l’Université de Ngaoundéré.

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the dividing lines between locals and missionaries, meaning that many Cameroonians feel that the church is not theirs, but still belongs to the foreigners. Stealing from the missionaries – who from a Cameroonian perspective may appear to have inexhaustible funds – would then not be regarded as stealing, but just taking what is rightfully theirs. During the long-term encounter between missionaries and Cameroonians, new, creative forms of dishonesty have evolved, and I cannot but see an inverse and perverse logic as part of the reason. Driven by feelings of rejection and humiliation, some Cameroonians seem to redefine the uneasy relationship between a generous giver and a thankful receiver as one between a ‘foolish giver’ and a ‘crafty taker’. This definition is no less uneasy, indeed, but for the dishonest person it carries other possibilities of power and agency – to avoid humiliation and to be a doer and a benefactor in relation to his or her own connections, rather than somebody to whom things are done. It can be interpreted as a way to bypass the implicit request for gratitude and a show of respect. In addition, I assume that it is also related to the brutal practices in the local culture, former imperial dominance, the practice of silence and secrecy in relation to local traditions of knowledge discussed above, the rapidly increasing social mobility for people who had been oppressed by the Fulani as well as to strong family obligations. The development of dishonesty has provided the mission with new dilemmas that it shares with development programmes and humanitarian aid. In NMS’s publications to the general public, these problems tend to be played down. Elite Africans have capitalized on Europeans’ images of African poverty in order to become ‘crafty takers’ of the donated money, and this implies a humiliating definition of both the mission and the donors as ‘foolish givers’. This new transformation of the old representational dilemma seems to hinder effective institutionalization of what these organizations have learned from their involvement in Africa. Thus, the missionaries’ relentless work for cross-cultural solidarity is accompanied by an almost inevitable simultaneous reinforcement of dichotomies and hierarchies – such as between ‘donors’ and ‘receivers’ and between ‘foolish givers’ and ‘crafty takers’– and the inevitable potential feelings of humiliation that these entail. The missionaries want equality and cooperation with Africans and independence for the national institutions (the most recent key term among both missionaries and experts in international development is ‘partnership’) at the same time as they are also the ones who have access to the most abundant economic resources. The missionaries live modestly compared to the former colonial administrators and present-day experts, but enjoy a considerably better standard of living than the average Cameroonian church members. They serve local people, but create paternalistic relationships because of differentiated economic power. They focus on moral problems in African family life and social life more generally while tending to ignore or misrepresent global structures of economic injustice and inequality.34 They elicit pity for Africa in Europe by presenting narratives of 34. What is given to Africa by the rich countries is small in relation to what is taken from the continent through unjust neocolonial trade relations. Like the other rich countries, Norway takes more out of ‘the Third World’ than its total budget for development programmes. See also Repstad (1973), a social analysis of how poorly the wider context of the missions was reflected in the journals of different Norwegian missionary organizations. However, this work was not read by the leadership of the NMS, who regarded the application of an outside scholarly perspective as an abuse of their confidence. Source: Erik Larsen. The reception of this and other critical analyses thus supports the main thesis in this book that that the need to continuously justify their activities to the various donors in Norway has hindered the feedback processes through which effective learning and innovative thinking depends.

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need, but do not see the contributions of Africans to their self-image as benevolent ‘donors’. One part of the problem is, as already noted many times, that formerly colonized people look at themselves through the filter of the colonial culture. Another part of the problem is the lack of recognition in Europe of what missionaries and supporters receive from Africa.35 The missionaries’ publications largely deflect attention from the privations that colonialism and neocolonialism have inflicted on African populations. Implicitly they tend to teach people in Europe to turn a blind eye to the negative effects of capitalism and an unequal world order. The missionaries have many good intentions, but the effects of their work are at times not what they expect. Quite a few Africans have over the years visited Norway for shorter or longer periods of time. In particular, gospel singers from Cameroon have been in Norway to give concerts several times. As an element in the communicative modality of partnership, the NMS now plans to support Cameroonian evangelists who want to work in Norway.36 Their publications nevertheless tend to construct a vision of the world for a Norwegian audience in which Africa has to learn from Norway, while people in Norway have little to learn from them. A similar relational uneasiness and its typical resolutions are present in even more pronounced forms in humanitarian aid and international development. The discourse of development programmes depicts ‘us’ as civilized, orderly and willing to give a helping hand. The dilemmas are more acute within development programmes, because modern development experts do not live as modestly, stay so long, use the local languages, and know the local conditions as well as the old missionaries usually did. The flow of money is also greater. For this reason, many observers have pointed to a connection between, on the one hand, how the funds for developmental and humanitarian aid are administered and, on the other hand, the runaway corruption in many countries. If one focuses too narrowly on the contrast between religious and secular ways of legitimizing and practising reaching out to the poor, such similarities are lost. When starting this study, I knew that, like anthropologists doing fieldwork, the missionaries are in many situations the ones who need help. They are far from home, some of them become emotionally attached to some Africans; they do not have as much local knowledge as the people they work for; and some local practices might seem frightening. Therefore I wanted to find out if a certain helplessness might be evident in their publications; in other words, if the photographic images and accompanying texts might tell a story of the missionary not only as a competent helper but also a helpless stranger, and of the African as competent in local knowledge. This idea could be seen as a counterpoint to current more or less self-evident notions about the Third World person as pitiable, poor, helpless and steeped in backward religious practices. My expectations were not fulfilled. Throughout the century, even though the locals were increasingly catching up with the missionaries in terms of education and presence in pictorial representations, the missionaries most often appear 35. In Sundby (1991) (see also Chapter 7), Saïdou, one of the young Muslim men interviewed, makes the point that Cameroon is a miniature version of Africa – with steppes, savannahs and rain forests, and with many different religions, languages and ethnic groups. In spite of all the differences, they manage to live together. On this basis, he voices the opinion that perhaps people in Cameroon have something to teach others (Sundby 1991: 29). However, Sundby does not seem to appreciate the profound implications of this point. From her vantage point, for example, the many different languages in Cameroon constitute a problem – a true source of confusion (Sundby 1991: 19). 36. Source: Ragnhild Mestad.

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visually to be the ones in control. One effect back in Norway is the construction, maintenance and consolidation of a giver–receiver relationship between Norway and Africa, between white Norwegians and nonwhite peoples. In other words, the way the intention to elicit compassion and solidarity was realized in missionary propaganda had the unintended effect of producing pity. Both missionaries in Africa and donors in Norway would probably have some trouble answering the simple question: What can people in Africa do to help you? What do you need that they can provide? The categories of ‘givers’ and ‘receivers’ are so powerful that it seems almost impossible to move beyond them. This is so within all the three main communicative modalities that I have documented in this book: evangelizing, development and partnership. In their propaganda back home, the recipients of the evangelizing communicative modality were the mission friends; the communicative modality of development also includes the Norwegian government; and the even more complex communicative modality of partnership also includes the church members in Cameroon. The missions, need to legitimize their good works in Norway through pictures and texts focusing on ‘us’ and what ‘our missionaries’ do has continued to maintain and consolidate an unquestioned perception of the overall goodness of their activities, the position of the giver as a giver, and a discourse about Africa in Norway as a paternalistic discourse from above. From this perspective, even the well-intended wish that local people should be able ‘manage on their own’ has a paternalist flavour. People in Norway imagine Africa and Africans in specific ways, and these preconceptions are constantly replenished from many different sources, not only from the missions. The nature of these networks of relationships as a goodness regime is above all evident in the tacit barriers to commenting critically on specific issues without being regarded as an adversary. A defensive organizational culture has developed which to some extent has limited the active and positive use of critical analyses. In their books for the general public, missionaries sometimes argue rhetorically against critical views of the mission: those who criticize the mission think that life in Africa is an idyll, and that Africans do not need any help. This caricature is then refuted without argument. ‘Heathenism is no idyll, the way people in Norway want to think’.37 Thus, the matter is reduced to a choice between extreme romanticism and the particular missionary brand of realism. Similarly, critical comments about the mission (and development aid) are typically interpreted as ingratitude (when made by people in Cameroon) or egotism (when made by people in Norway). Even today there are echoes of colonial dichotomies in many kinds of popular representations of Cameroon, including the missionary publications. The white missionaries are there to transmit ideas, to help and instruct local people based on what they see as the only true religion (and as superior medical and agricultural technologies). All through the twentieth century, the relations between white Europeans and black Africans have simultaneously been characterized by equality and hierarchy. The missionaries regarded Africans as different and inferior; at the same time their essential humanity and equality were emphasized and, thus, their potential for religious conversion and modernization. The most important changes in the popular consciousness in Norway regarding Africa in the second half of the twentieth century seem to be, first, a change from the optimism surrounding political independence and faith in the dissemination of technology and capital, as advocated in the development and modernization ideologies of the 1950s and the 1960s, to the disappointment and sometimes 37. See Pilskog in Grimstad (1997: 74).

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even resignation discernible from the 1980s onwards; and, second, a reinforced focus on nonwhite men as oppressors and nonwhite women as victims, implying that nonwhite women need to be rescued by whites. Thus, true equality is still elusive. In a sociology of religion dissertation, Petter Vårdal examined two missionary journals from 1943 and 1965 to the present, one of them the main NMS journal.38 He found that local people are described as heathens living in the dark, and that light and darkness are central metaphors. While the missionaries’ attitudes today are still patronizing, he also discerned a development from seeing nothing of value in other religions towards more openness and generosity in relation to cultural variation.39 Changes in attitude are constantly taking place, but the journals show little reflection upon what was wrong before, and Christ is still seen as the only way to salvation.40 Vårdal’s conclusion is that there is little basis for religious dialogue in the missionary journals. The time is not yet ripe, because true dialogue can only occur between participants who consider each other to be equals.41

The Need for Europe to See Itself Through the Eyes of Africans The missionaries see the people back home who are not ‘born again’ and the heathens in foreign lands in the light of the same dichotomy between the saved and the unsaved. But other dichotomies have also been applied to people in Africa. These are related to the rejection of African systems of knowledge and belief, the conspicuous differences in living conditions, the fact that material resources mainly flow in one direction – in other words, the power of the gift – as well as the unequal power over representation.42 The missionaries’ gaze is seldom allowed to be returned. Missionaries – and development workers – have a different platform than business administrators and investors looking for economic profit. Precisely because they want to treat local people as equals and not take advantage of them, they tend more readily to become the targets of a love–hate relationship. Many Cameroonians desire Western objects and Western power without being able to satisfy this desire. Sometimes they express their love–hate relationship in the form of ‘reverse racism’, leading to unhappiness and suffering among the missionaries. This may also partly be a matter of generational change. Part of the resentment of some of the adult children and grandchildren of the first Christians in Cameroon seems to stem from their disappointment because they have not advanced as much as they hoped in Cameroonian society, and from the difficulties of transmitting a revivalist ‘inner’ religious faith to children who have been born into the congregation and thus have not experienced conversion themselves. Sometimes the missionaries react by lamenting when among themselves: ‘We have sacrificed so much for them, how can they do this to us?’ Sometimes they react with resignation, as in the quote at the beginning of this chapter by the late Cameroon missionary Bjørn Bue. His call for more historical insight was no doubt grounded 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

Vårdal (2002). The two journals examined were Misjonstidende (under changing names) and Utsyn. Vårdal (2002: 80, 88, 89). Ibid.: 82. Ibid.: 83. Referring to Marcel Mauss’s important essay about gift-giving, Knut Nustad (2003) used ‘The Power of the Gift’ (Gavens makt) as the title of his book about the changing ideologies and practices of Norwegian development aid.

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in heartfelt experience. As a way of fending off competitors, African leaders at various levels from time to time capitalize on people’s feeling of having been patronized and humiliated by whites in order to build up their own political power in ways which affirm and reinforce social categories and boundaries. At the same time, many local people are afraid of voicing feelings of resentment publicly because they fear that the outside aid might dry up. In their reports to Norway, missionaries and development experts have no doubt tended to underestimate the anger and resentment that local people hold back. They often focus on their own explicit intentions, and do not see the full range of the social effects of the ideas that they have taken for granted and put into practice in Africa. This is part of the reason why local people’s experiences with missionaries and other ‘helpers’ have not really been collected, systematized and theorized.43 As discussed in the previous chapter, the situation is now changing. There is an effort to counteract the long and deep-seated tradition of demonizing cultural difference. Cameroonian Christian theologians, such as Joseph Ngah, are Africanizing Protestant theology by seriously studying, acknowledging and incorporating parts of African ideas and practices into Christianity.44 For these theologians, the matter is conceived as a question of fully accepting the Gospel, but not necessarily all the elements of the worldview which historically came along with the missions. At the same time Cameroonian anthropologists, such as Rachel Djesa, are Africanizing anthropology by critically reexamining concepts such as ‘witchcraft’ and ‘sorcery’. 45

Photography Today The tensions in the relations between missionaries and Cameroonians provide a context which helps me to better understand some of the characteristics of the photographic encounters they engaged in. These encounters were shaped by the trust built up by individual missionaries over time, by the prestige and power accompanying missionaries’ help and generosity, as well as by the wish of local people to show their gratitude or resistance to this. In the light of the points of view expressed by Daouda Ja’e and Henri Nissen about missionary versus African greediness quoted earlier in the chapter, it is reasonable to ask to what extent they actually share ‘the same’ experience. Missionaries and local church leaders relate to different and colour-coded national hierarchies of prestige, power and remuneration, and can have very different worldviews, intentions and agendas. Their collaboration, often crystallized in a photograph, is likely to gloss over many layers of different conceptualizations and interpretations. The visual rhetoric of the missionary photographs has over time established its own mental frames and pictorial conventions which have since been followed by many others actors. These conventions exert lasting influence – on international development agencies, humanitarian aid organizations and the news media who, like the missionaries, also want to win the hearts and the minds of the public. I see both historic connections and parallels 43. See Huber and Lutkehaus (1999) and Kipp (1990), who have tried to do this to some extent. 44. Ngah (2001). Joseph Ngah is currently the Dean at the theological seminary in Meiganga. See also Bongmba (2001) for a philosophical and theological critique of the witchcraft practices of the Wimbum people in the Northwest province of Cameroon. 45. Djesa (2002).

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between the transformations in missionary practices and the establishment and transformation of development policy during the last century. Some of these connections can be regarded as part of what has recently been termed ‘the re-sacralization of politics’46 and ‘the Norwegian goodness regime’47 in foreign politics. These connections need to be explored further in the future. The power of representation is most crudely exemplified by the relative lack of photographs taken by Africans of colonial officials, missionaries and development experts. The gaze of the colonized upon the colonizers represents a body of photographs that were never taken.48 What we have is the gaze of the colonizers, evangelizers and developers upon the formerly colonized and the traces in the photographs of how the Africans acted in relation to them. However, there are new visions and practices in the making. One, as already noted, is that a Norwegian missionary started to take photographs in Cameroon for a Cameroonian audience. Another idea, not yet realized, is for Cameroonians to take their own photographs and present their own stories to audiences in both geographical regions. A third is for Cameroonians to take photographs in Europe and share their views about the relations between Europe and Africa with audiences in Europe. In the winter of 2004, I took part in a two-day fête de boeuf (‘celebration of the herds’), organized by a successful agricultural business entrepreneur in Cameroon, Al Hajji Abbo. During the celebrations, I noticed that several people were filming and taking photographs, some of them using advanced digital equipment. A few photographers came from outside Cameroon to report on the event or take photographs of Al Hajji Abbo;49 some were from Cameroonian public television, others had been appointed by Abbo to record what was going on, and a few took photographs for themselves, to remember the occasion. Not only outsiders, but also Cameroonians are now in a position to represent Cameroonian realities. At the same time, most Cameroonians still do not own a camera. This is the basis for an observation made by Ranveig Kaldhol, the current local representative of the Norwegian mission, who has lived in Cameroon most of her life. At meetings and gatherings of Norwegian missionaries and African Christians, it is now often the Cameroonian participants who ask the missionaries to take a photograph of the group, which they call a ‘family photo’ (photo de famille).50 I think the notion of a family photograph symbolically connects people across class, gender, age and colour. Where formerly the missionaries mostly wanted pictures for their own private reminiscence and to show their work to the public in Norway, the Cameroonian church leaders now increasingly also ask for pictures for their own, different purposes. Their request for a ‘family photograph’ at church gatherings can be regarded as a symbol of the continuing attempt to create a common experience across the categorical divides.51 Every Sunday, the many churches in Cameroon are packed with people. During the services, ethnically based choirs take turns singing and dancing, accompanied by drums.52 Participating in any one of the three Sunday services at the Protestant churches in Ngaoundéré can therefore be an overwhelming experience. It made me realize in a more profound way than before that Christianity is truly a global religion. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

Brekke (2002). Tvedt (2003). But see Pinney and Peterson (2003) about photography’s other histories. Lisbet Holtedahl is currently making a documentary film about Al Hajji Abbo. Source: Ranveig Kaldhol. See also Pink (1999). See Houma (2004) about the choirs in Ngaoundéré.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources Individual Missionary Books Aarhaug, Aksel. 1985. Mitt Afrika. Oslo: Luther Forlag. (Illustrated.) Aasen, Per Arne. 1952. Savannen i sol og regn. Stavanger: Misjonsselskapets Forlag. (Illustrated.) ———. 1954. Alfred Saker: Bantu-Afrikas apostel. Stavanger: Misjonsselskapets forlag. (An illustrated biography about the first missionary in Southern Cameroon, the Englishman Alfred Saker who arrived in Douala in 1844.) Bjøru, Solveig. 1968. Haremspikens flukt. Stavanger: Nomi Forlag. (A novel from Cameroon, based on the true history of Numjal, called Sejo in the novel.) Budal, Jostein. 1962. Der Lamidoen rår. Stavanger: Nomi Forlag. ———. 1979: Menneske i Kamerun. Oslo: Luther Forlag. Bue, Bjørn. 1992. Såkornet og spirekrafta: År i Afrika. Oslo: Nye Luther Forlag. Dalland, Jan. 1960. Med kamera i Afrika: Inntrykk fra en filmekspedisjon i Kamerun. Stavanger: Nomi Forlag. (Written by the NMS’s film expert, sent to Cameroon together with professional photographer Olaf A. Ellingsen. Illustrated with Ellingsen’s photographs.) Endresen, Halfdan. 1954. Slavekår i dagens Afrika. Stavanger: Misjonsselskapets forlag. (Illustrated.) ———. 1965. Solgt som slave: om slaveri og slavehandel i Afrika og Arabia i vårt århundre. Stavanger: Nomi Forlag. (Expanded and updated edition of the 1954 book , with new illustrations.) ———. 1969. I slavenes spor. Stavanger: Nomi Forlag. (Illustrated.) Flatland, Karl. 1922. Fra Sudan. Kristiania: Det Norske Missionsselskaps Hjælpekomité for Sudanmissionen. (Illustrated.) Grimstad, Leiv Arne. 1997. Peresletta. En reise til Solbjørg Pilskogs rike i Kamerun. Oslo: Luther Forlag. (A portrait of a Cameroon missionary written by a journalist.) (Illustrated.) Haagensen, Olaf. 1940. Med kjentmann gjennom Sudan. Stavanger: Det Norske Misjonsselskaps Forlag. (One photograph.) Klæbo, Arthur. 1963. Ullstrømper til Afrika. Oslo: Lutherstiftelsen. (Written by a Norwegian journalist with close ties to the mission.) (Illustrated.) ———. 1981. Nye ullstrømper til Afrika. Stavanger: Det norske misjonsselskap. (New edition of the 1963 book , but without pictures.) Nelson, Henny Waala. 1996. Minner fra 1.periode i Afrika 1948–52. Mandal: Eget Forlag. ———. Not dated. ‘Minner fra 2.periode i Kamerun 1955–1959’. Unpublished manuscript. NMS Archive, Stavanger. Nikolaisen, Jens. 1937. På nybrottsarbeide i Central-Afrika: Fra vår misjonsforpost i Sudan. Stavanger: Det norske Misjonsselskaps Forlag. (Illustrated.) Nissen, Henri. 1999. Unskyld, kan de sige mig vejen til Afrika? 3 år til Cameroun med hele familien bagi. København: Forlaget Scandinavia. (Written by a Danish missionary who worked at the radio station in Ngaoundéré.) (Illustrated.)

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Øglænd, Beate (Arne Prøis in conversation with Beate Øglænd). 1988. Du skal til Afrika. Oslo: Lunde Forlag. Raen, Konstanse. 1990. Gjennom språkmuren: Med Guds ord til et skriftlaust folk. Oslo: Verbum (Andaktsbokselskapet). Published in cooperation with the Norwegian Missionary Society. (Illustrated.) Røst, Gudrun. Not dated (probably 1942). Under tropesolens glød: Blant hedninger og muhamedanere i Afrika. Oslo: Norsk Bokforlag. (The author probably worked as a missionary for the Lutheran Brethren.) (Illustrated.) Toftner, Rolf Ove. 2001. Min tur: besøk på misjonsmarken I Gadjiwan. Kamerun gjennom en lang og tørr februar måned a d 2001. Dagboksopptegnelser: Maura. (Illustrated.) Walle, Lilly. 2006. Eva: En kvinne på Guds spennende stier. Rasta: Forlaget Norske Bøker

History Books about the Norwegian Missionary Society (NMS) and Its Work in Cameroon Jørgensen, Torsten. 1992. ‘De første hundre år. Nytt arbeidsfelt i Afrika-Kamerun’ in Torsten, Jørgensen, (ed.), I tro og tjeneste. Det Norske Misjonsselskap 1842–1992. Stavanger: Misjonshøgskolen, Vol. I, pp. 110–16. (Illustrated.) Larsen, Erik. 1973. Kamerun – norsk misjon gjennom 50 år. Oslo: Nomi Forlag. (Illustrated.) Lode, Kåre. 1990. Appelés á la liberté: histoire de l’église évangélique luthérienne du Cameroun. Amstelven: IMPROCEP éditions. (Illustrated.) ———. 1992. ‘Kamerun’, in Torsten Jørgensen (ed.), I tro og tjeneste. Det Norske Misjonsselskap 1842-1992. Stavanger: Misjonshøgskolen, Vol. II, pp. 7–106. (Illustrated.) Nikolaisen, Jens and Halfdan Endresen. 1949. ‘Det norske misjonsselskaps historie: Sudan’, in Det norske misjonsselskaps historie i hundre år, Vol. III. Stavanger: Det Norske Misjonsselskap. (Illustrated.)

Books and Booklets for Schools and Study Groups Bue, Bjørn. 1969. ‘Nytt liv for alle i landsbyen’, in Eileen Laeger (ed.), Nytt liv for alle. Stavanger: Nomi, pp. 173–2001. Det Norske Misjonsselskap. 1978: Kamerun: Klassesett for barneskolen. Stavanger: Det Norske Misjonsselskap. (Written by Gerd Tunheim and Konstanse Raen.) (Illustrated.) ———. 1995. Bli kjent med Kamerun. Et misjonsopplegg til bruk i foreninger, grupper og lag. Stavanger: Det Norske Misjonsselskap. (Illustrated.) Eggen, H. Angell and Olav Toft. 1959. Misjonskall – misjonærkall. Kjenner du Kamerun? Stavanger: Misjonsselskapets Forlag. Eide, Egil S. 1986. Hjertets kontinent: Kirkeliv og misjon – Kamerun, Kenya og Madagaskar. Stavanger: Det Norske Misjonsselskap. (Illustrated.) Nikolaisen, Jens. 1937. Hvorledes Sudanmisjonen er vokset frem – Hjemmearbeidets egenartede arbeidsvilkår. Oslo: Centralforlaget. Oseland, Sverre. 1946. Kamerun: vårt nyeste kampfelt. Bibel og misjonskurs pr. korrespondanse. Kurs 11, del II. Stavanger: Det Norske Misjonsselskap. (Illustrated.) Otterøy, Nils. 1966. ‘Mbum–Fulani Biblane i Kamerun’, in Sverre Smaadahl and Nils Otterøy (eds.), Guds ord til alle folk. Mbum–Fulani Biblane i Kamerun. Ergoserien. Stavanger: Nomi. (Illustrated.) Skagestad, Aud. 1971a. Kors eller halvmåne. Norsk misjon blant muhammedanere i Kamrun. [Slightly revised edition 1977.] Oslo: Det Norske Misjonsselskap, Studie- og skolekontoret. (Illustrated.) ———. 1971b. Halfdan Endresen: Postmannen som ble slavenes frigjører. [Slightly revised edition 1977.] Oslo: Det Norske Misjonsselskap, Studie- og skolekontoret. (Illustrated.) Sundby, Jorunn. 1991. Ung i Afrika: Portretter fra Kamerun. Oslo: IKO-Forlaget. (Illustrated.) Trønderaksjonen for spedalskehospitalet i Kamerun. 1960. Tibati: Et nytt Lambarene. Trondheim. (Illustrated.)

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Waala, Henny. 1960. Med kurs for Kamerun: Liv og Erik besøker Kamerun. Stavanger: Misjonsselskapets Forlag. (Book for children, illustrated with drawings and a few photographs.) (Henny Waala later became Henny Waala Nelson.)

Lists of the NMS Missionaries Erling, Danbolt. 1949. ‘Det norske misjonsselskaps misjonærer 1842–1948’. Vol. V of Det Norske Misjonsselskaps historie i hundre år. Stavanger: Det Norske Misjonsselskap. (Illustrated with portarits of each missionary.) Det Norske Misjonsselskap. 1977. Guds høstfolk: Det Norske Misjonsselskaps misjonærer 1842–1977. Stavanger: Det Norske Misjonsselskap.

The Changing Cover of the Main Journal Norsk Missionstidende 1 January 1883, vol. 38, no.1. Norsk Missionstidende January 1892, vol. 47, nos. 1–2. Norsk Missionstidende January 1911, vol. 66, no. 1. Norsk Missionstidende 3 January 1925, vol. 80, no. 1. Norsk Missionstidende 2 January 1926, vol. 81, no. 1. Norsk Misjonstidende 2 January 1937, vol. 92, no. 1. Norsk Misjonstidende 9 April 1949, vol. 104, no. 12. Norsk Misjonstidende 8 September 1956, vol. 111, no. 28. Norsk Misjonstidende 19 February 1966, vol. 121, no. 7.

Internal Documents Larsen, Erik. 1971. ‘Vårt arbeid i morgen’. Unpublished talk at the missionary conference in Cameroon in 1971. ———. 1975. ‘Kort oversikt over Kameruns historie frem til 1972’. Unpublished lecture at a UNICEF seminar in Helsinki in 1975. Skagestad, Aud. 1974. Orienteringsbok for kamerunmisjonærer. Yoko, Kamerun: Det Norske Misjonsselskap.

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INDEX

NOTE: Page numbers in italic figures refer to illustrations. The abbreviation n against a page number refers to a footnote. A Aarhaug, Aksel 59, 68, 70, 152, 152, 206, 248 Aasen, Ove 148, 149 Aasen, Per Arne, descriptions and photographs of Muslims 205–9, 207, 208 Abbo, Al Hajji 282 abolitionist propaganda, engraving 80–1, 80 Adamaoua province arrival of pioneer missionaries 38 ‘family album’ of returning photographs 250, 256, 257, 258 Adamu 113, 114, 115 aesthetic quality, photographs selected for return 253, 255 Africa highly problematic concept 31–2 missionary called by God and by Africa 95 problematic aspects to justify mission 25 problems highlighted in film 227–31, 236–7, 240 Africa and Africans, represented in particular ways 24–5 African mentality and morality, a negative view 266–7 African personhood, missionary attempts to recast 268–9 African photographers, proposal to commission 263 African subjects of photographs representation to European audiences 6, 8, 249, 255 their engagement with photography 6 Africanizing anthropology 281 Africanizing Protestant theology 281 Africans, trust and gratitude shown to missionaries 59 Africans, pictures of, criteria for selection 252 Africa’s perspective on Europe, seldom presented 13

Afrikafilm66 159 age filmmakers’ focus on Maman’s old age 238 perceptions encoding racial difference 17 agricultural work of missions launch of agricultural project 241–2 supported by development aid 45 Ahidjo, Ahmado (President), a Fulani Muslim from the north 44 air, of a photograph 27, 171–2, 180–1, 197–8, 201, 213 Aissatou 131, 196–9, 197, 198, 213 Alloula, Malek 210 amateur photography 53, 55 Amdahl, Einar 173 analyst, both outsider and insider 29–33 analytical language, to examine discursive universe of missionaries 31 anger and resentment, response to the missionaries’ arrival 97 animal life in Africa, stories and pictures 67 animism, the cultivation of spirits 42 ‘Anniversary book’ 173–87 anonymity anonymous baby 185, 185 anonymous indviduality 171 anonymous woman and child 190–2, 191 anonymous young boy 188–90, 189 Cameroonian women in missionary photographs 199–201 ‘The Unknown Heathen’, Mbororo woman 178–85, 179, 184 see also names of subject in photographs anthropology, decline in use of photography 30–1 anthropology and missionary activity, parallels and links 30 Arendt, Hannah 22, 25 Aronson, Elliot 20, 24

Aryan peoples, German–Nordic popular revitalization 81 ascetic beauty, of the male body 81–2, 81 Ashcroft, Bill 31 assimilation, forced, of Sami and Romani 44 audiences evoking indignation and compassion of 242 power over communication process 59–60 receiving information in different ways 60 the aura 171 autobiographical reflexivity, the exception in missionary memoirs 68–9 B baptism arranged picture 157–62, 158, 193 interpretation of picture 159–62 performed by Halfdan Endresen 112, 112, 161–2 representing the harvest of evangelism 157–62, 157 Barane, Ivar 53, 70, 213, 262 bare feet, symbolism in ‘Sinda’ 223, 224 Barringer, Terry 2 Barthes, Roland 7, 27, 60, 117, 133, 245 the air of a photographic portrait 27, 171–2, 180–1, 197–8, 201, 213 Baxter, Pastor 204 beauty, interpretation and appreciation 56–7 Benetter, artist 82, 83, 84–5 Benjamin, Walter, the aura 171 Berger, John 7 Bible Acts 16: 9–10, Paul’s call from Macedonia 75 John 4: 35–38, harvesting 163 Luke 8: 4–8, parable of the sower 86, 87, 88 Luke 18: 15–17, Jesus blesses the children 154 Mark 4: 3–20, parable of the sower 135

Index

Matthew 28: 16, Jesus commissioning disciples 75, 89–90, 89 Bible reading, literacy epitomizing change from heathenism 23 binarism and dualist segregation, colonial binaries 9, 14, 16, 19 Biya, Paul (President), a Beti Christian 44 Bjøru, Solveig 231, 233–4, 238 ‘black’, racial stereotypes 16 Bloch, artist 87 Botten, Joakim 67 Brantlinger, Patric 80 Brewer, Sandy 154 Budal, Jostein 55, 117, 132 Bue, Bjørn 68, 71, 265, 280–1 buildings, evidence of work and harvest 146 C ‘call from Macedonia’ as motif 75–80, 82–6, 88–97 illustrations 77, 83, 85, 88, 89, 90, 93 ‘Called to freedom’, history of evangelical church 61, 248–9, 248(n6) camera, ‘little black house with a glass eye’ 104–5 Cameroon changing colonial administrations 43–4 dichotomies in popular representation 279–80 education 16 history of NMS mission 37, 38–46 implications of Norwegian missionary activities 5 master narrative portraying land and people 24 political independence 219 recent history 43–4 Cameroon national church (EELC) 40–1, 96 digitized collection of photographs 266–7 embezzlement of funds 40–1, 276–7 local church leader/missionary relations 281 Cameroonian audiences, missionary publications relating to 65–6 Cameroonian Christians evangelists and catechists 39 Numjal, first local female catechist 125, 127, 257 objections to label ‘slave’ 51, 118 Cameroonians attitudes to photographs 54 relational uneasiness with missionaries 266–8 resentment at representation in photographs 249 capitalism, expansion of 11 captions, of photographs in missionary memoirs 63–6

295

captions and texts, accompanying photographs 7–8, 29 catechists novel about first female catechist in Cameroon 63 Numjal, first local female catechist 125, 127, 257 categorization, of returning photographs 253–9 Catholic missions, NMS competing with 38, 138 children both marginal and central 169–201 in missionary pictures 151–7 ‘Two courageous children’, an illustrated narrative 109, 110 Christ, central character in missionary narratives 24 Christian images of family life, entering into colonial discourses 13 Christian missionaries, as ethnographers 2 Christian missions and colonialism 9, 11–14 historical background 36–46 Christianity contrasted with heathenism 125, 127 incorporating African ideas and practices 281 symbolism in film 227 Christians, second-class citizens in Cameroon 44 church at Ngaoubela 146, 147 church in Ngaoundéré 114, 146 Church of Norway 36 class, perceptions encoding racial difference 17 class pictures 144–6, 156 clinic in Gadjiwan 198 clinic in Galim 147, 148, 181, 193 clothing in photographs missionaries’ dress 56 Muslim and Christian influence in Cameroon 55 significance of 55 collectivization, Cameroonian women in photographs 199–201 colonial binaries 258 reaffirmed by Africans 264 colonial ideologies, characterized by binarism and dualist segregation 9, 10, 14, 16 colonial relations, surviving as changing socio-economic structures 13 colonialism and Christian missions 9, 11–14 a differentiated encounter 9–14 colonialism and imperialism ‘civilizing mission’ 4 tensions between exploitation and civilization 3 Comaroff, Jean and John 81

Come over and help us, painting 76, 77, 78–81 communication see missionary communication communicative modalities change from ‘evangelizing’ to ‘development’ 97 evangelizing, development and partnership 14 communicative modality, partnership 14, 248, 261 compassion, as distinct from pity 22 conferences see missionary conferences contextualizating cultural contextualization of the Gospel 248 information using local images 262 of missionary photographs 4, 6–9 Copping, Harold 154, 155 corruption, endemic dishonesty 276 criteria for selecting returning photographs 251–3, 254–9 transcultural male bias 256 cross-cultural photography 26 cultural difference, tradition of demonizing difference 281 cultural heritage documentation of 244–5 returning missionary photographs 249–61 strategies of representation 263 cultural interest, criteria for selecting photographs 252, 255, 257 cultural project, colonialism itself 10 cultural violence, attempts to replace beliefs and practices 271–2 ‘culture albums’ 262 folklorization of culture 263 D Dahle, Pastor Lars 85 Dalland, Jan and criteria for returning photographs 257 expedition to Cameroon 119–31, 120, 217–46 head of NMS film office 52, 96–7, 214–15 making of film, ‘Sinda’ 217–18, 224(n22), 228(n31) 231, 232–6, 245 Daniel, Salpou 243 Danish Sudan Mission 37, 38, 102, 104 decolonizing, returning photographs 254 decontextualization, and recontextualization of photographs 254 Deleuze, Gilles 245 development communicative modality 14, 37, 39 discourse of development programmes 278

296

emerging communicative modality 241 ideologies following political independence 4 see also Norad development aid institutionalized 217, 240 related ideologically to mission work 165–6 development policy, and transformations in missionary practices 281–2 ‘developmentalism’ 11–12 Dieudonné, Vakoté 253 differential treatment, in selection of returning photographs 257–9 digitalization project 249–61 digitized collection, use of in Cameroon today 260–1 Dirks, Nicholas 1, 9, 10 ‘discourse of goodness’, involving a knowledge regime 24–5 discursive representation see representation dishonesty ‘crafty takers’ and ‘foolish givers’ 276–80 shared dilemmas 277–80 disillusion, from unmet aspirations 280 Djesa, Rachel 272, 281 documentation of Africa in Europe, largely one–sided 13 ‘donors’ and ‘receivers’, social categories and boundaries 25–6 Dostoevsky, Fydor 22 doubts of missionaries, missing from publications 71–3 dualist segregation, use of colonial binaries 9, 10, 14, 16 E economic crimes, embezzlement of funds 40–1 economic crisis in Cameroon (1993–95) 44 economic crisis in Norway (1930s) 44 economic neocolonialism, transformed cultural dynamics 11, 13–14 editing photographs 125 education branch of missionary activity 37 in Cameroon 16 mission provision for women 49 missions supported by development aid 45 role of mission featured in film 221, 222, 226 Edwards, Elisabeth 31 EELC see Cameroon national church Eide, Janne 262 Ellingsen, Olaf 53, 191, 192, 192 and criteria for returning photographs 256–7 expedition to Cameroon 119–31, 120, 214–46

Picturing Pity

making of the film, ‘Sinda’ 217–18, 231, 233–4, 236–7, 245 objective as a photographer 129 photograph of an Mbororo herdsman 125, 128, 129, 192, 214 photograph of Paul Ngonom 124, 124, 200 embezzlement of funds 40–1, 276–7 emotions, common humanity of blacks and whites 70 Endersen, Birgit, present in pictures but not named 113 Endresen, Halfdan 205 ambivalence about mentioning his wife 113, 157 baptism photographs 112, 112, 157–62, 158, 193 construction work at Ngaoundéré hospital 148, 149 performing a baptism 112 work against slavery and oppression 50, 55, 111–19, 241 equality and inequality, tensions in missionary representations 17 ethical criteria, for omitting photographs from selection 252, 254–5 ethnographic films transcultural quality 8 see also images; missionary photographs; photographic images; pictures; visual images ethnographic photographs 107, 109, 110 ethnographic writing, similarities of missionary books to 111 Etienne, Pastor Bakhari 65, 274 Europe, long-lasting contact with Third World 6 European Union, Norway’s ambivalent relationship 44 evangelical church in Cameroon, history 61, 248–9, 248(n6) evangelists and catechists few women appointed in Cameroon 49–50 Numjal, first local female catechist 125, 127, 257 evangelizing communicative modalities 14, 37, 39 going out into the wilderness of heathenism 137 role of missionary publications 18, 21 exploitation, victims of 11

family photos, in families and church gatherings 282 Farestad, Else Marie 145 Fatuma 114, 115 fear of having photograph taken 104 fear of fixing the image 100 loss of control of own image 133 feelings, strong feelings in the name of Jesus 69–71 female emancipation, role of women missionaries 46 female virtues, symbolized in photograph 171–2 female see also women Femmes pour Christ 40, 49, 190, 249 leader, Satou Marthe 243 with her family 193–4, 193 Fidus see Höppener, Hugo film, ‘Sinda’ see ‘Sinda’ film as medium, controversy in NMS over its use 218 Flatland, Karl 112 attitudes to Islam 204–5 composition of two group photographs 102–3, 102, 103, 205 ‘Karl Flatland and his servants’ 102 one of the four ‘pioneer missionaries’ 68, 101–7 studio photographs of ‘The Pioneers’ 101, 177, 259 Focus, newsletter 52, 99 formal gatherings, missionary pictures 144–6 formal leadership, criteria for selecting photographs 255 French colonial administration 43–4 ambivalence towards lamiibe 203 reluctant to enforce the law on Lamiibe 50, 203 taken over by Africans 219 ‘friends of the mission’, supporters in home country 5, 58, 63 frontispieces and covers, of NMS journal 82–95, 97, 136, 170–3 Fulani fascination of missionaries with 107 light skin and beautiful features 110 not easy to reach with Christian message 209 physical appearance 56, 181 politically dominant Muslim group 42 subjugation of local peoples 50 Fulani language, Lars Gaustad conversant in 182 Full Gospel International 38

F ‘family album’, of Adamaoua province 250, 256, 257, 258 family ideology taught by missionaries, contradicted by photographs 157

G Gadjiwan health clinic 198 Galim clinic 147, 148, 181, 193 Gaustad, Lars, photographer–subject relationship 179, 181–5, 184, 198

Index

Geddal, a former slave 112, 116, 117–18, 119 gender, age and ‘race’, complexities of 15–17 gender, perceptions encoding racial difference 17 gender roles, girls in Northern Cameroon 49 gender subordination, two sides of one coin 240, 241, 242 general strike in Cameroon (1989–90) 44 gift humiliating aspects of the 273–5 power of the gift 280 Gilman, Sander L. 16–17 giving and receiving, redefining 276–80 Gjerløv, D. 82 God central character in missionary narratives 24 missionaries called by God and by Africa 95 ‘God’s Reapers’ 162–6 goodness based on good intentions 70, 72 a goodness regime 23–6 of the missionary task 71–3 missionary wives 47–8 ‘resacrilization’ of politics 282 and its side-effects 265–82 social arenas and representations 35–73 unintended side-effects of 26, 266 goodness regimes, missions and development aid 45, 165, 279 gratitude response to the missionaries’ arrival 97 social meaning of 275–6 greediness, Missionary versus African 267–8, 281 Gregory XV, Pope 20 H Hamidou 253 Hanche, Else 165 harem in missionary literature 210 motif in Orientalist art 210 harvest biblical metaphor 136 symbolized in picture, ‘God’s reapers’ 163–6, 164 harvesting, biblical passages 135, 138, 162, 163 Hauge, Hans Nielsen 36 headscarf, significance in the way worn 175, 176 health, branch of missionary activity 37 heart, central metaphor among Cameroonians 70 heathenism Islam subsumed under heathenism in film 229

297

missionaries’ relationship with heathens 139–40 missionary accounts of the savage 16 photo of ‘The unknown heathen’ 178–85, 179, 184, 213 symbolism in film 227 the wilderness of heathenism 137 herdsman 125, 128, 129 historical documents, missionary photographs 6–9 historical interest, criteria for selecting photographs 252, 255 Hodnefjeld, Anna 166 Høimyr, Nils Kristian 188 Holy Congregation for Propagation of the Faith 20 Holy Scripture see Bible The Hope of the World 154, 155 Höppener, Hugo (Fidus), A Prayer to the light 81–2, 81, 84, 86 houses, North Cameroon 175, 176 housing for missionaries 148–9, 273–5 human rights, struggle in Cameroon 50–1 human sameness, pictures attempting to communicate 28 humanitarian aid, appeals by NGOs 150 ‘humanitarian superpower’, Norway in international arena 45 humanity of local people, conveyed in film to Norwegian audience 242 I images of Africa, conceptual categories and boundaries 14 see also ethnographic films; missionary photographs; photographic images; pictures; visual images imperialism see also colonialism income differences, between missionaries and locals 273–5 independence, of former colonies 96 indifference, response to the missionaries’ arrival 97 infantilizing of the colonized, encoding racial difference 17 insensitivity, in some photographic situations 105, 134 institutional and relational dynamics, created by actions of individuals 13 interpretation of photographs 4, 6–9 Ellingsen’s reflections 130–1, 132 influenced by cultural codes and value systems 27 invisibility, missionary wives in publications 63–5, 107, 109, 112 involvement, European interest in distant people 7

Islam missionary perceptions and attitudes 203–16 new attitudes to 213 subsumed under heathenism in film voiceover 229 as a threat to freedom of women 183 see also Muslims; non-Christians Islam, Syed 66 J Ja’e, Daouda 260, 261–7, 281 Jahoda, Gustav 16 Jesus commissioning the disciples 75–6, 89–90, 89 missionaries representing and imitating 24 Johnsen, Johs. 166 Jowett, Garth S. 20 K Kaldhol, Ranveig 41, 282 Keïta, Seydou 100 khaki shorts and shirts 56 Kjær, photographer 105 knowledge and belief, rejection of African systems of 280 knowledge regime, representing Africa and Africans 24–5 Knudsen, Chr. 82 L lamiibe ambiguous images and contrasting accounts 204, 205–6, 209, 210–12 criteria for selecting photographs 255 missionaries’ perceptions of 204 rivals and potential converts 204 and their courts 210, 212–13 lamiibe (plural form of sultans) 203 a lamiido (sultan) 126, 131 lamiido’s procession Aasen’s description 205–6 in texts and photographs 205–6, 211 Lamunière, Michelle 100 landscape, criteria for selecting photographs 254 Larsen, Erik 173, 175, 176, 182, 193, 272 Lejeune, Philippe 68 leprosy patients, photographs omitted from selection 252 light, cultic relationship to 81–2, 81 light and dark Christianity and heathenism 16, 78–9, 81, 86, 91, 159, 188 white for baptismal dress 159 light and dark skin, degrees of darkness 86, 110 literacy, in order to read the Bible 23, 40

298

living standards, difference between missionaries and locals 273–5 LMS see London Missionary Society Lode, Kåre 188 history of evangelical church in Cameroon (1990) 61, 248–9, 248(n6) returning photographs project 250, 256, 257, 261 Lofthus, Njell 175 Loga, Jill 24 London Missionary Society (LMS) 154, 155 love–hate relationships, inequalities and aspirations 280 Lutheran missions 69 M MacDougall, David 8, 246 Macedonia Paul’s call from, as motif 75–80, 82–6, 88–97 illustrations 77, 83, 85, 88, 89, 90, 92, 93 Madagascar 165 main field of NMS operations 36, 37 Mangarano, home for leper children 58 Maïdawa, Pastor 70 male missionaries not shown as family men 156–7 presenting specific form of masculinity 157 Manikasset, Pastor Philippe 70, 272 Marie, Cameroonian girl 276 Markowitz, Sally 17 marriage NMS policy on ‘mixed marriages’ 48–9 see also polygamous marriage Marthe, Satou 193–4, 193, 243 Mathur, Saloni 210 Mauss, Marcel 273 Mbororo, physical appearance 56, 181 Mbororo herdsman 125, 128, 129, 192, 214 resonance with ‘The call from Macedonia’ 129 women, freedom and strong position 182–3 Mbororo woman, photographed by Gaustad 178–85, 179, 184, 198, 213 Mbum non-Muslim ‘animist’ group 42 physical appearance 56 subject to Fulanis’ ‘alliances’ 50 medical missions 37 arena to meet non-Christians 182, 198, 225 featuring in film, ‘Sinda’ 228, 229 pictures 149–50 medical practices 270–1 medical work of missions 45 Meling, Gunnar Andreas 218 Mestad, Ragnhild 276

Picturing Pity

Mikaelsson, Lisbeth 68 mission, relations with Muslims 44, 203 ‘mission fields’, use of term 136–7 mission propaganda ‘discourse of goodness’ 24–5 focus more on seduction 23 memoirs analysed as 69 missionary documentation 18–23 moral orthodoxy and pragmatism 268 as part of communicative modalities 21 presentation of photographs 125, 128, 129 propaganda aspects of film, ‘Sinda’ 240–3 publications to persuade and engage 18–23, 91–2 suspicions expressed 267 ‘The call from Macedonia’ 91–2 ‘to ignite a fire in the hearts’ 69 two central themes 173 victimhood of slaves and mission intervention 51 Mission station in Tibati 146, 207 mission tourists, guided tours of mission fields 60 missionaries ambivalence towards Cameroon government 43 attempting to recast African personhood 268–9 changing roles and responsibilities 40 interaction with local people 107 and local church leaders 281 meetings with core supporters in Norway 59 perception of the lamiibe 204 photographed with small children 156 relational uneasiness with Cameroonians 266–8 relations with the lamiibe 204 relationship with the heathens 139–40 representating their work abroad to Norwegians 57–61 resonance with ‘The call from Macedonia’ motif 95 response to their arrival 96–7 tension between ‘foreign land’ and homeland 167–8 two sets of information strategies 3–4 missionaries’ campaigning, distinct character of 19 missionaries’ communications, with people in Europe 6 missionary activity and anthropology, parallels and links 30 in churches, schools and medical work 37 missionary building pictures 146–9 missionary communication, heathen and home audiences 24–6

missionary conferences 140–3, 140, 192–3 missionary documentation, specific point of view 3 ‘missionary epoch’ in Cameroon, reasons for its ending 41 missionary graves, in ‘foreign soil’ 166–8, 167 missionary information materials, valuable research source 2–3 missionary memoirs accounts of their experiences 61–6 Erik Sandvik’s anecdote 186 read as autobiographies 68–9 reflections on photography 99–134 missionary photographers 53 missionary photographs 101 by professionals 119–31 changes over a hundred years 52 configuring ideas, meanings and beliefs 7 cross-linguistic and transcultural phenomena 26 distribution and viewing in Norway 57–61 documenting need for mission and results 136 interpretation and contextualization 4, 6–9 introduction to analysis of 3 many taken for private purposes 54 repertoire of subject matters 28 representation to European audiences 6, 249 representing relationship with locals 139 response from European audiences 58 suspicions expressed 267 taken for ethnographic purposes 54 visual rhetoric with own conventions 281–2 see also ethnographic films; images; photographic images; pictures; returning photographs; visual images missionary publications 61–6 ‘back stage’ account 73 distinctness of 3 Endresen’s documentation of oppressive practices 50 exhibiting transformations over time 4 ‘front stage’ account 71–3 tensions and contradictions 4, 8, 15 textual silences and photographic lacunae 71–3 to inform and involve supporters at home 4–5 transmission of knowledge to widening audiences 59 women a large part of audience 46 missionary task, universality reinforced in painting 77, 79–80, 81 missionary wives lower status 47–8

Index

visual presentation of self 63–5, 107, 109 missionary writing, intense involvement/paternalistic distance 67 missions letting local leaders take over 41 related ideologically to development aid 45, 165–6 ‘mixed marriages’, NMS policy 48–9 Mohammadou, Eldridge, returning photographs project 250, 257, 261 Mohammedanism see Islam moral character, Cameroonian women in missionary photographs 199–201 moral orthodoxy and pragmatism, missionary propaganda 268 morality and African mentality, a negative view 266–7 Mosand, Ingeborg 153, 153, 154, 255, 259 Mouna 195–6, 195 Müller, Fredrik 37 museumification of culture 244–5 musical instruments 206, 211 Muslim men, missions’s fight against slavery 203–16 Muslim sultans 125, 126, 131 Muslim women, oppression by fathers and brothers 199 Muslims Fulanis’ subjugation of local people 50 increased influence 42–3 influence in Cameroon government 44 missionary activities to counter expansion 37 new attitudes to 213 Norwegian attitudes to Muslim women 196–9, 197 praying 126, 212 rivals in struggle to save souls 12 see also Islam; non-Christians N names of subjects in photographs 145, 249 of Cameroonians 63, 65, 102–3, 111, 115 of children 109 of former slaves 115 (n34) 119 spelling of African names 117, 124, 125 (n50) of white adults in conference picture 140, 142, 192–3 see also anonymity narratives and parables, missionary communication 23–4 national church see Cameroon national church (EELC) naturalization, Cameroonian women in missionary photographs 199–201 Nelson, Henny Waala 95, 151, 152, 154, 156

299

Ngah, Joseph 281 Ngaoubela church 146, 147 Ngaoundéré arrival of four pioneer missionaries 38, 88, 101 site of main mission station 42 Ngaoundéré boarding school, attended by missionaries’ children 156 Ngaoundéré church 114, 146 mosque built as a copy 204 Ngaoundéré high school 186 Ngaoundéré University see University of Ngaoundéré Ngaoundéré-Anthropos CRED 260 Ngonom, Paul, first man in the field to be baptized 124, 124, 200, 213 Nissen, Henri 19, 209, 267–8, 276, 281 NMS see Norwegian Missionary Society non-Christians, medical missions as arena to meet 182, 198, 225 Norad 37, 41, 44–5, 96, 165, 261 book for young Norwegians 194–9 involvement in agricultural project 241–2 Northern Cameroon conditions for photography 53–4 history of NMS mission 38–46 multiethnic region coexisting with Islam 42 NMS’ most important mission field 2 Norway donor country with a role in lifting Africa up 241 government agency for development cooperation see Norad implications of missionary activities in Cameroon 5 recent history 44–6 Norwegian audiences, missionary publications relating to 65–6 Norwegian culture, impact of missionary encounters in North Cameroon 12 Norwegian Lutheran Missionary Association 36 Norwegian missionaries, photographs omitted from selection 252 Norwegian Missionary Society (NMS) Archive project, returning photographs 250 Bible translations 40, 261 book for young people in Norway 194–9 books about the history of 61, 62 ‘Cameroon: Norwegian mission for 50 years’ 173–87 film office 52–3, 231 ‘God’s reapers’ 162–6, 164

history of the Society (1992) 36, 188–94 inspired by Paul’s call from Macedonia 75–80, 82–6, 88–97 illustrations 77, 83, 85, 88, 89, 90, 92, 93 institutions 39–40 journal frontispieces and covers 82–95, 97, 136, 170–3 Missionary School in Stavanger 36 need for western technology in Cameroon 241 photographs from the field taken for granted 53, 99 published texts and photographs 2 relation to African women 49–50 representation of Africa in text and pictures 5 separation of medical and educational work 37 showing of photographs in Norway 57–61 strong feelings playing important role 69 support for Cameroon national church 40, 41 tensions and dilemmas 266 transmission of information to Norwegian public 38–9 women playing crucial roles 46–7 Norwegian popular culture, missionary books as a genre 73 Norwegian Santal Mission 36 Norwegians ambivalence towards Cameroon government 43 ambivalence towards French colonial administration 43 ideals of beauty 56–7 photographs a meeting point with Cameroonians 7 novel, about first female catechist in Cameroon 63 nursing students, in cover photo 172–3 O O’Donnell, Victoria 20 Øglænd, Beate 58, 59, 61, 68 consecration as a missionary 138 owning a car 144 on sacrifice of missionaries 167–8 oppression of Africans 14 focus of film and continuing theme 241 missionaries’ fight against practices of sultans 203 missionaries as intermediaries for subjugated groups 43 victims of 11 of women by Muslims 210 oral culture, missionaries’ repertoires 186 orchestra of the lamiido 211 ‘Orientalism’ and culture of imperialism 12

300

influence on attitudes of missionaries 210 in missionary publications 210 orphanage in Yoko 152, 153, 154, 259 colour slides of 255–6 Oumarou 213, 214 P palanquin, carrying chair borne by bearers 143–4 parochialism 270 partnership communicative modality 14, 248, 261, 278 missionaries and development experts 277 rhetorical focus on 4 party held by missionaries 142–3 paternalism 270 relations between Norway and Africa 4 patriarchal attitudes, towards women in the NMS 46–50, 107 Paul, ‘call from Macedonia’ see ‘call from Macedonia’ as motif Pentecostalism 38, 69 Pere people 64 performing and viewing, multidimensional 9 persuasion of self, in missionary propaganda 25 photogenic women 181–2 photographers, professional 119–31 photographic identification 27–8 and distancing 26–9 photographic images cross-referencing with other representations 6 see also ethnographic films; images; missionary photographs; pictures; visual images photographs in missionary memoirs 62–6 in relation to text 7–8 transformation of meaning from individual to type 54–5 photographs by Africans, gaze of colonized on colonizers 282 photography decline in use in anthropology 30–1 a form of violence 106, 133 missionaries’ use of 269 in missionary memoirs 99–134 new visions and practices in Cameroon 282 a secular activity serving missionary ends 52 teaching via internet 262–3 today 281–2 in West Africa 100 physical appearance, differences in Northern Cameroon 56 ‘pictorial turn’, changes in contemporary culture 1

Picturing Pity

pictures in relation to text 7–8, 29 tools in reproduction of asymmetrical relations 9 see also ethnographic films; images; missionary photographs; photographic images; visual images Pierre, Djaboule 253 Pieterse, Nederveen 16 Pilskog, Solbjørg 61, 68, 144, 273–5 pioneer missionaries 38, 39, 88, 101 ‘The Pioneers’, studio portrait 101, 177, 259 pitification, identification and distance 28 pity as distinct from compassion 22 eliciting pity for Africans in Europe 277–8 paternalism associated with invitation to pity 133 women in Northern Cameroon objects of 12 political history, criteria for selecting photographs 255 political independence of former colonies 96 transformed cultural dynamics 11 polygamy persistance of 199 polygamous marriage in storyline of ‘Sinda’ 224 ‘The poor little ones in the land of the heathens’ xiii, 58 posing for photographs African reluctance 100, 104–5, 121–2, 124, 130 Cameroonian conventions 100, 123–4 Dalland’s experiences filmmaking 234–5 European style 55 full figure represented 54, 100, 113, 117, 173 negotiated photographs 123–4, 130, 133, 134 not showing teeth 100, 113, 124–5, 129, 194 for professional photographer in Africa 55 reluctance to have photograph taken 104, 132–3 respect shown to Cameroonians 113 serious 100, 180, 181 smile associated with Christian conversion 172, 185, 188, 190, 197 smiling broadly (showing teeth) 54, 76, 183 see also unnegotiated photographs postcolonial analytical perspective 9–14 power churches sources of secular power 273

inherent in photographic medium 8–9 Pratkanis, Anthony R. 20, 24 Pratt, Mary Louise 27 A Prayer to the light 81–2, 81, 84, 86 praying Muslims 126, 212 problematic terms and notions 31–2 problems of Africa, highlighted in film 227–31, 236–7, 240 professional roles, of remaining missionaries 40 propaganda use of the term 20–1 see also mission propaganda Protestant missions, NMS cooperating with 38, 138 Protestant theology, Africanizing 281 punctum 27, 117 ‘The unknown heathen’ 180–1 R race relations, polarised and mediated in film 238–9 racial images and stereotypes 16–17 racialization, not an exception but the rule 15 racism no trace in missionary photographs 15 in present-day Norway 15 Raen, John Gunnar 64 Raen, Konstanse 63–4, 69–70, 112 rationality, science based, central to mission teaching 270 readers of missionary publications, immanent readers 63–4 relational uneasiness between missionaries and locals 266–8, 273–6 redefining giving and receiving 276–90 relationship between God, the missionaries and the people 96 between missionaries and heathens 139–40 religious groupings in Cameroon 43 reluctance to have photograph taken 104 repatriation of missionary photographs see returning photographs representation of Africans in Europe 6, 8, 249, 255 dilemmas in writing this book 31–3 discursive, of missionary photographs 6 discursive, politics of 12 in images and text 6–9, 29 power of the gift over 280 power of 11 ‘space of representation’ 251 resentment at representation in photographs 134, 249

Index

response to the missionaries’ arrival 97 towards missionaries and aid experts 261, 263, 264, 280–1 returning photographs decontextualization and recontextualization 254 the digitized collection 249–61 enhancing dignity of national church 249 first concerted effort in Lode’s history 249 use of pictures in Cameroon today 260–1 roads in damaged state, photographs omitted from selection 252, 255 Rogaland farm, at Meng 241–2 Roman Catholic Church 20 NMS competing with Catholic missions 38, 138 Røst, Gudrun 66, 107–11, 108, 112 Roverud, artist 85 Rundok, a former slave 114, 115, 117, 119, 133, 200 digitzed photograph 118, 118, 259 Ruud, Borghild 145 Ryan, James R. 270 S Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide 20 sacrifice, missionary graves as monuments of 167 Said, Edward 12, 210 Saïdou 213, 215 Saker, Alfred, first missionary to Southern Cameroon 61 salvation, unconscious plea for 84 Sandvik, Erik 185, 186 school classes audiences for missionary slide shows 58 missionary pictures 144–6 science and technology, used to promote religion 269–70 secularization of symbolism, in NMS motif 94, 97 seed, planting of, biblical metaphor 136 seed sower, vignette 86, 87, 136 self-presentation, in terms of selfsacrifice 66–9 self-sacrifice, recurrent theme of goodness 25, 72 sensory immediacy, effect on viewer 7 sensualization, Cameroonian women in missionary photographs 199–201 sex, perceptions encoding racial difference 17 sexuality, implicitly central on thematic level of film 237 Shellem, ‘The king of Shellem and some of his wives’ 102, 102, 205, 210, 212 Sidibé, Malick 100

301

Simon, Ahmadou 193 ‘Sinda: a description of real life in Cameroon’ (film) actors with real life problems 231–3 audience response 219 credits 231–5 first showing of film 219 interpretation of film 227–31 photographic images 235–7 possible new usages for present era 244–5 reactions in Cameroon 243 storyline 220–5, 233–4 storyline conduit for mission information 225 skin colour degrees of darkness 86, 110 European perceptions of beauty 236 Skulberg, Kristian 147 slave-like conditions 50 slavery art in abolitionist propaganda 80–1, 80 character of former slave in film 225–6 difference of perspective between locals and missions 51 different kinds in Northern Cameroon 50–1 missionaries’ fight against practices of sultans 203 names of former slaves in photograph captions 115, (n34) 119, 212 objections to use of label ‘slave’ 51, 118 pictures of former slaves representing maltreatment 212 racial ideas and justification of 16 reasons for hesitation to use term 51 slave photographs omitted from selection 252, 255 ‘slave village’ used in filming of ‘Sinda’ 235–6 victimhood of slaves in mission propaganda 51 slide shows, presented by individual missionaries 57–8 smile, associated with Christian conversion 129, 172 snake, symbolism in film’ ‘Sinda’ 224 social categories, visual separation in conference photograph 140, 141–2, 192–3 social history, excluded from returning photographs 255–6 social life of missionaries, Norwegian evening 142–3 social mobility, through education in Cameroon 43 social work, branch of missionary activity 37 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts 20

Sola, Guri 238 Sontag, Susan 7, 106, 133 Sørensen, artist 85 South Cameroon, older mission field 38 sower, parable of the 86, 87, 135 sowers of the word of God, in the ‘mission fields’ 136–40 sowing and harvesting, biblical passages 135, 138, 162 ‘space of representation’, context of photographs 251 Stavanger Aftenblad 182, 184 stereotypes characters in film 237–8 Orientalism in missionary publications 205–6, 210 racial images 16–17 ‘stolen’ photographs see unnegotiated photographs stories and testimonials, missionary communication 23–4 studium 27 subject matter, photographs selected for return 253 subjects see photographic subjects Sudan, NMS mission 37–8 suffering, documentary photography 8 suffering and helplessness, missing from missionary publications 71–3 sultans see lamiibe (plural form of sultans) sun helmet 56 Sundby, Jorunn 19, 131, 194, 196, 200, 213, 276 supporters of NMS film intended to evoke indignation and compassion of 242 negatively affected by economic crime in Cameroon 40–1 in Norway 4–5, 8, 41, 66 photographs of medical work to inform supporters 150 resonance with ‘The call from Macedonia’ motif 95 strengthening calling of missionaries 59 T Taylor, John 172 technical quality, photographs selected for return 253, 255 technological power, symbol of superiority of Christian faith 270 tensions and contradictions, in missionary publications 4, 8, 15 text, in relation to photographs 7–8, 29 theological foundation of missions, Jesus’ commissioning the disciples 75–6, 89–90, 89 ‘The Three Graces’, analysis of photograph 170–3, 170 threshhold experience, represented in painting 78–9, 81

302

Thunem, Adolf, Come over and help us 76, 77, 78–81 Tibati mission station 146, 207 Tipani, André 185–7, 185 Tombontsoa, Madagascar 165 ‘traditional culture’ photographs 262 traditional medicine, mission goal to eliminate 270–1 traditional and modern, colonial binary 258 transcontinental communication, captions to missionary photographs 63–6 transcontinental networks, involvement with unknown people 7 transcultural quality, of visual images 8 transportation pictures 143–4 travel writing in missionary accounts 66–7 similarities of the missionary books to 111 Tromsø/Ngaoundéré Anthropos research programme 250 Tuareg physical appearance 56 women, freedom and strong position 182–3 U United Nations Cameroon a trust territory 44 Endresen’s documentation of oppressive practices 50 University of Ngaoundéré, resource and documentation center 260 ‘The Unknown Heathen’, photograph of Mbororo woman 178–85, 179, 184, 198, 213 unnegotiated photographs 105–7, 121–2, 123–4, 130 photography a form of violence 106, 133 the stolen nonoccasion 134 V Vårdal, Petter 280 victimization, Cameroonian women in missionary photographs 199–201 viewing and performing, multidimensional 9 viewing of photographs, influenced by cultural codes and value systems 27 viewpoint behind the subject, composition of painting 79–80 VIN’ART 262 vision, metaphor for privileged knowledge 26 vision over narrative, in orientalizing discourses 13 visual, power of the visual 245–6 visual images transcultural quality 8

Picturing Pity

see also ethnographic films; images; missionary photographs; photographic images; pictures visual narratives, missionary photographs 6–9 visual relationship, social categories in conference photograph 140, 141–2, 192–3 visual and verbal tensions, in missionary publications 4, 15 visualizations from key Bible passages 75 see also Bible Volaou 119, 200 Vollen, Eli 197, 198 voting rights, women in Norway 47 W ‘white’, racial stereotypes 16 wildlife 109 witchcraft and magic, Africans hiding continued adherence 271–2 wives, of the king of Shellem 102, 102, 205, 210, 212 wives of Bible school students 145, 145, 193 wives of a Lamiido 122, 122, 193, 211–12 wives of missionaries, lower status 47–8 woman on the beach, changing motif 78, 80, 82, 84, 93, 94, 96 women African women in need, rescue portrayed in film 229 ‘Anonymous women’ 130–1, 132 both marginal and central 169–201 central to support groups in Norway 4 focus on female missionaries in film 238–9 freedom of Mbororo and Tuareg women 182–3 images of women’s work in film 239–40 juxtaposition of contrasting pictures 125, 127 limited use by NMS of female perspective 188 NMS relation to African women 49–50 perceived status central to missionary ideology 17 work and activity, omitted from returning photographs 256 women and children, photographs accentuating humanity 191, 192 women and girls, in the NMS 1973 anniversary book 187 women missionaries among Muslims of Northern Cameroon 47

early ignorance of Muslims’ dress sensitivity 56 unequal role 48 women writers, missionary books 61–2 women see also females women’s roles, changes in Norway and Cameroon 47 Word of the Holy Scripture see Bible World Council of Churches Information Service 172 World War II, German Nazi occupation of Norway 44 Wuhrmann, Anna 213 Y Yaya, Bouba 179, 181 Yiglau 116, 117, 133, 200 Yoko orphanage 153, 153, 154, 259 young Cameroonians, interviews compiled for young Norwegians 194–9 Z Zululand, first NMS missionary field 36