Although missionary Christianity was brought to the Haya from a western religio-cultural viewpoint that was influenced by the renaissance and enlightenment, scientific discovery, Darwin‟s theory of evolution and quasi-scientific worldview, they are remembered as having brought significant social change that later became instrumental for the Haya‟s socio-economic development.
Whilst acknowledging the shortcomings of western missionary Christianity in terms of not taking seriously the African culture, religion, conceptual worldview and spirituality of the Haya people during missionization of African, Lugazia‟s (2010:63-64) comments on the contribution of missionaries in Africa are worth quoting:
Any African historian can accept without doubt that the western missionaries who came to Africa made Christ known among Africans through evangelization and social services. Because of missionaries, Africans learned to read and write. Such formal education led to much development in Africa, be it secular or religious.
In a similar vein, Kibira (1964:72) points out that “whatever mistakes the missionaries have made, they brought the Bible to Africa and have shown us Christ.” Kibira sees that although the Haya knew God (Luhanga) whom they worshipped and venerated in their own pre-missionary Christian religion, they did not know Jesus until the missionaries came. For Kibira, it remains the task of the African church and theologians to indigenize Christianity by interpreting the Bible in an African philosophical setting. By so doing
“each place (congregations) can live happily as Christians in their place, without being
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required to adopt the civilization of the missionaries which in some cases is destructive and unnecessary”.
For what it is worth, missionary Christianity conversion methods, though presented with shortcomings, for some missionaries – probably many – were applied in good faith. It is certainly obvious that the work of missionaries among the Haya and indeed in Africa cannot be underestimated. Although, the missionaries‟ preconceptions of the Haya traditional religious life and culture which during their course of missionization made them unnecessarily launch an attack on the essence of Haya social life, structure, customs and religion, yet the significant social development was feasibly realized. Many Haya joined Christianity even if not all of them were motivated by religious and spiritual motives and their life standards were changed in terms of education, health care and poverty alleviation. Some of the Haya converts who went through western missionary education played significant roles in leadership, both in churches and political arenas.
It is also important to recognize a few missionaries who in a unique way contributed to the development of African indigenization of African Christianity, such as Placide Temples, John Taylor and others like Bruno Gutmann (1876-1966) in Northern Tanzania, who studied the African culture and wrote down systematically the African philosophy which they thought could be a bridge towards making Christianity in Africa relevant (Kibira 1964:72).
Fiedler (1996:4), one of the German missionaries in Tanzania, in his book Christianity and African culture: conservative German Protestant Missionaries in Tanzania , 1900-1940, while admitting that most missionaries in Tanzania didn‟t share a positive attitude towards African culture and religion and that missionaries and colonialists shared the same systems of values as they were both “children of their time”, yet he recognizes the contribution of a few who did have positive view about African religion and culture. Apart from missionaries like Bruno Guttmann among the Chagga of North Tanzania there were others like Traugott Bachmann in Mbozi, Unyiha (1898-1916) and Ernest Johansen who worked in Usambara, Rwanda and later in Bukoba (1891-1929). These, unlike many of
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their fellow missionaries, had a positive attitude to African culture of which may had appeared potential for their missionary vision in Africa60.
It is important to acknowledge that social interaction of western missionaries and indigenous Haya brought about an effect of cross-fertilization that became instrumental in opening the door for social change among the Haya and Africans at large. In line with this, Montgomery (1999:16) views missionaries as agents of changes. According to him, missionaries should be considered as changes agents, as mentioned in chapter three. He points out that in the modern era, because of the contrast in technological development between the west and the rest of the world, missions have contributed to change the potential converts in a variety of social areas.
However, from diffusion theoretical point of view, Montgomery (1999:61), emphasises that, “in spite of missionaries being seen as change agents, the readiness and the perception of the recipient is even more important for successful diffusion”. His argument is based on the fact that we should not only see missionaries as the only change agents, but we also need to consider other aspects that facilitate diffusion of religion, for missionaries had not dictated these changes. He points out that “the changes missionaries have brought about have not always been expected or even desired by the missionaries or their sending bodies, or by the nations from which they came (1999:47).” Certainly, among the Haya as pointed out earlier, the modern fields of education and medicine are two obvious areas where changes in terms of modernization that has been brought about through missionary Christianity are undeniably significant.
60Those interested in reading more on the role of some missionaries who contributed significantly in indigenization of western Christianity into African soil read Steven Kaplan, The Africanization of missionary Christianity: History and typology (1986). Kaplan, despite the fact that he admits the failure of the majority of western missionaries to indigenize western Christianity into African cultural context and while arguing that the extreme ethnocentricity and cultural arrogance of many western missionaries cannot be denied, calls us not to ignore the contribution of the western missionaries in Africanization of Christianity. Kaplan has provided a list of several missionaries both in East and Central African who came to terms with African setting where they worked as missionaries. Although his work is beyond the parameters of our research area, his contribution is remarkable, especially the typology he develops to describe their model of adaptation which is: toleration, translation, assimilation, Christianisation, acculturation, and incorporation. His works helps to avoid the fallacy of generalization when discussing the western missionaries‟ approach to African religion and culture.
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Montgomery‟s contention, therefore, underpins what Sanneh points out when he argues that despite the shortcomings of the missionaries‟ presentation of the Gospel in Africa, African Christians assimilated Christianity successfully. So the point he makes is that mission in Africa in general and in our case among the Haya in particular, as we shall see in the next chapters, was successful not because of the minority western missionaries and their conversion methods, but rather by God himself using both western and indigenous missionaries as agents of Missio Dei among their people.
The concept of Missio Dei in missiology demands that one sees that mission is done by God through human agency. Although human agency is important, its weakness cannot be the reason for the failure of the mission of God. Some scholars such as Sanneh (1993:424), Bediako (1995:206) and Maluleke (1996:3) maintain that the success of conversion in Africa did not solely depend on western missionaries, but that the translatability and assimilation of the Gospel into African cultural idioms was the key factor for this success. In structuration theory terms we can put it that the African (Haya) converts with their contact with western missionaries drew on rules and resources from their religio-cultural social structure to make sense of conversion in their own frame of reference.
Suffice to conclude this section by pointing out that missionary Christianity‟s conversion methods among the Haya, despite their weaknesses in terms of the way they were presented, produced social change that was instrumental for modernity and social economic development among the Haya that cannot be underestimated. The following section, however, will investigate the weakness of these missionary Christianity conversion methods based on their nature and on how they were applied among the Haya in the mainline churches of Northwest Tanzania.