Butterflies and Barbarians: Swiss Missionaries and Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa

Patrick Harries.  Butterflies and Barbarians: Swiss Missionaries and Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa.  Athens Ohio University Press, 2007.  304 pp.  $59.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8214-1776-8.
Reviewed by Jeanne M. Penvenne (Tufts University (MA)) Published on H-Luso-Africa (February, 2010) Commissioned by Philip J. Havik

Swiss Missions in Southeast Africa

Missionaries undertook all manner of recording, analyzing, transcribing, decoding, and recoding the African continent’s flora, fauna, languages, cultural practices, and symbols. Communication, the core of evangelical work, drove mission research in language and culture. The letters, publications, paintings, photographs, and material culture produced and preserved by missionary societies provide precious and rare windows into the continent’s past. Over time historians have learned to read mission and colonial archives more critically, to unpack the gaze of photographs, and appreciate that language transcription was a process. Southern Africa received the attentions of a wide range of important mission endeavors.

Within that impressive group, the Mission Romande, known in southeast Africa as the Swiss Missions, fielded some of the continent’s most energetic, curious, scholarly, and ambitious missionaries, and among that impressive group, Henri-Alexandre Junod was the most accomplished. Although Harries insists that this is not a book about Henri-Alexandre Junod, the book is extremely rich thanks to archival preservation of Junod’s astonishing life’s work as a missionary, ethnographer, scientist, linguist, and folklorist. Harries draws on beautiful color plates of bugs, butterflies, and flowers, maps, photographs, and images of mission ephemera. They complement his carefully wrought arguments and generously referenced text.

Patrick Harries, has already published important insights drawn from the Swiss Mission production, but in this he both expands upon and brings them together. His chapter headings chart the territory (Switzerland and southeast Africa) and the topics (natural science, the environment, language and literacy, anthropology, and politics). The Library of Congress assigned this book several subject headings. Despite Harries’s disclaimer,“Henri Alexandre Junod” was the first. That was followed by: “Missionaries,” “Switzerland and Missionaries,” “Africa, Southern.” The last subject assignment was “Africa, Southern—Discovery and Exploration.”

Nineteenth-century explorers’ literature tended to romanticize intrepid foreigners and frame them as fonts and producers of the most important knowledge about Africa. The local people who guided, protected, and informed the explorers about the narratives and landscapes they conveyed to a Western reading public eventually came into the picture. These chapters examine the ways European priorities and biases shaped what they noted and promoted as universal, scientific, and neutral—but without neglecting the interface of knowledge production, modes of interpretation, and their impact on all parties to the engagement.

It is always challenging to craft a balance among the parties.

Archival holdings of personal correspondence from the missionaries allow detailed analysis of their interpretations, but often only second-hand information appears about local people. The rich but uneven holdings make it almost inevitable that Swiss men emerge more fully textured in this book than even the most important African men and women. The power of having put ideas down in writing raises the volume of Swiss perspectives, but Harries teases out shifting and textured appreciations of oralcy and the power of writing. Junod was passionately committed to reading and writing as a projection of modernity and freedom, and associated orality with “immutable institutions and mindless practices that crushed free will” (p. 197). But despite those convictions Junod’s work recording Thonga oral artistry in proverbs, tales, and songs deepened his appreciation of Thonga culture and intellectual life.

This is a book about Swiss missionaries, Thonga, and systems of knowledge in southeast Africa, but it is also very much about power and its limits in contested intellectual and cultural arenas. Harries repeatedly illustrates contrasting Swiss and Thonga approaches to power, whether through knowledge or embedded in practice. Thonga elder Shongi judged writing less powerful than words when it came to important matters: “When we transact business we say things in front of witnesses and the word remains.” Shongi felt that written words could be erased or changed whereas those who bore witness could always be counted upon to uphold the truth. Swiss missionary Arthur Grandjean confirmed the truth of Shongi’s position: “the word is sacred for a black” (p.198).

Despite the thinner and second-hand source base, Harries introduces several cohorts of southeast Africans whose independent and collaborative evangelical efforts anchored the Swiss Mission sites in Valdézia, Magude, Rikatla, and Lourenço Marques. The tensions and accommodations among local and Swiss leadership were uneven. In malarial areas like Magude, which white missionaries deemed “unsuitable” for their settlement, African evangelists developed religious communities “entirely independent of European control.” Yosefa Mhalamhala was “hastily ordained” and put in charge of Magude, receiving essential support from the energetic Ruth Holene (p. 70). Similarly, in Lourenço Marques and Catembe, Jim Ximungana headed the Swiss Mission group despite the fact that he was un-baptized, let alone un-ordained, had three wives, concubines, and slaves, and “lived off the profits of selling liquor” (p. 75). Worse yet, from the Swiss perspective, when Ximungana traveled frequently to take care of his businesses, he left his congregations in the care of “an unbaptized slave girl, a literate agnostic, or perhaps most insidiously ... a Roman Catholic notable” (pp. 194-195). Despite their unorthodox foundation, the communities that Mhalamhala, Holene and Ximungana founded and shepherded endured, survived persecution from the Portuguese in the colonial era and the Frelimo government in the first decade of independence, and flourish today.

The missionaries may seem powerful and manipulative agents of imposed change but Harries consistently returns to indigenous people’s interests in shaping or building on the changing languages and concepts of identity to promote their own ends. He confronts the multiple dilemmas and tensions of Christian conversion, issues of language and ethnicity, and the costs of evangelical commitment to Swiss and Thonga alike. He opens with one of the anthropologists, whose expertise on African life and culture was ascendant over the missionaries’, looking over gravestones as “grim reminders of the high price of early mission anthropology” (p. 1).

The death of Eugénie Berthoud and her children from disease broke missionary Paul Berthoud’s spirit, sending him back to Switzerland. But evangelical commitment also cost Ruth Holene her life. She had pioneered mission work and literacy in Magude with Mhalamhala, and was killed in the Gaza War of 1894, probably for her connection with the mission.

Each chapter in this exploration of the ways Swiss and southeast Africans engaged and shaped one another could actually be read independently and profitably. This is a satisfying and detailed book. Whether on the topic of butterflies, botanizing unexplored terrains, the implications of literacy, or the politics of university appointments Harries efforts are clearly up to Junod’s high standards.

Citation: Jeanne M. Penvenne. Review of Harries, Patrick, _Butterflies and Barbarians: Swiss Missionaries and Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa._. H-Luso-Africa, H-Net Reviews.
February, 2010.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=26170