1860s–1890s: (Mission and Empire — Missionaries as the Moral Frontier of Imperial Expansion, Lobbying for Government Intervention at Lake Nyasa, Deceiving Lo…

1860s–1890s: (Mission and Empire — Missionaries as the Moral Frontier of Imperial Expansion, Lobbying for Government Intervention at Lake Nyasa, Deceiving Lobengula Among the Ndebele, the Bible and the Flag Argument That Britain Must Shoulder Moral Responsibilities Even Without Commercial Motive, and Missionaries as Pioneer Anthropologists Who Contributed to the Invention of Tribal Identities Through Writing Local Languages): From the 1860s and 1870s, the missionary endeavor was increasingly at the forefront of imperial expansion. French Catholic missionaries were in the vanguard of the Third Republic’s creeping imperial project, while Karl Peters sought spiritual sanction through the Evangelical Missionary Society for German East Africa. Livingstone’s martyrdom had fixed the dark continent in the late Victorian imagination, and it was argued that the Bible and the Flag must go together. Missionaries increasingly looked to governments for support — at Lake Nyasa, the Christianity and Commerce lobby argued for intervention against slave-traders, and when Britain declared a protectorate in 1889, missionaries provided a powerful humanitarian argument. Among the Ndebele, a missionary deceived King Lobengula by mistranslating the treaty that signed away his territory to Cecil Rhodes’s concerns. Missionaries were critical in projecting enduring images of Africa, their published accounts keeping religious societies afloat and enabling lobbying of parliaments. They were pioneer anthropologists and historians, accumulating data on custom, culture, and history, often proficient in local languages that they committed to writing for the first time while translating the Bible. Through this work on local languages, they contributed to the invention of tribal identities where none had existed. Yet this was no one-way relationship — Africans manipulated missionaries, using literacy to justify and consolidate particular versions of the past, and in the longer term millions of Africans embraced Christianity and made it their own, using its principles to challenge colonial rule itself.