A lot has been written about the relation between Christian missions and colonialism in Africa. The distinctive feature of this German-language book by Ohiniko M. Toffa is that it offers a fresh perspective on this relationship from an epistemic and ethical angle. The central focus is the writings of Franz Michael Zahn, who directed the Norddeutsche Missionsgesellschaft (NMG) from 1862 to 1900. Active since 1847 among the Ewe in the area that is today southern Togo and south-east Ghana, the NMG had to navigate the German colonial presence after 1884. Toffa, who received a BA in German Studies from the University of Lomé and a PhD in cultural studies from Bremen University – his thesis is the basis of this book – offers a detailed linguistic analysis of Zahn’s mission concept. The aim is to understand what colonialism meant not merely in a political sense, but also in a deeper, less easy-to-grasp epistemological and moral sense, one that enveloped a great deal of Ewe Christian converts and still lingers on as ‘colonial traumata’ in current Ewe society.
The first chapter lays out the central research questions and hypotheses, which seek to grasp Zahn’s mission concept and the NMG’s aim of implementing a new normative-epistemological order that ultimately prompted Ewe converts to submit themselves to the new Christian regime. Chapter 2 introduces Toffa’s theoretical framework. Tracing the emergence of a ‘colonial ethic’ from late antiquity to nineteenth-century European colonialism in Africa, he explains how the missionary project inherent to Christianity entailed not only an evangelical drive but, more importantly, a conception of the world that was global avant la lettre and which situated people in a larger Christian perspective according to which they were ‘heathens’ and thus also potential Christians. Missions employ a particular universalizing ethic that legitimizes the conquering – and making – of the world from a professed European centre. In the footsteps of Foucault, Toffa analyses missionization and colonization as a power–morality–knowledge configuration. How to conduct such an analysis of a concrete case is explained concisely in the third chapter, which calls attention to missionary discourse as the frame that sets the terms for transnational communication between multiple actors. Discourse analysis is the road to unravelling the epistemes and morals of colonial missionary world making.
Spanning over 150 pages, Chapter 4 forms the core of the book. Titled ‘The colonial grammar’ (Die Kolonialgrammatik), it presents a careful exploration of the power structures conveyed though Zahn’s writings. Importantly, Toffa recognizes that Zahn, a staunch pietist, was critical of the German colonial administration. Zahn offered an alternative model – the missionary as the ‘good shepherd’ caring for the lost sheep who were to be reconnected with the one and only Christian God. Against this backdrop, he criticized the German colonial system as a brutal and profit-driven endeavour that denied African people their humanity. And yet, despite these criticisms, Zahn’s mission concept was predicated on a soft power that aimed for a deep transformation – of the heart – of Ewe converts. Grounded in this pietist theology, Zahn targeted the Ewe as ‘heathens’ who were to be humanized in a highly paternalistic manner through the internalization of Christian rules and regulations. The converse of this view was the idea that non-Christians could not truly be human.
Toffa not only offers a perceptive exploration of Zahn’s mode of thinking, but also problematizes the terms through which the missionary project was translated into Ewe, pointing, for instance, to the problematic use of the Ewe term Mawu for the Christian God. He shows the complex process of subjectivation unleashed on Ewe converts, who increasingly started to describe themselves in alien missionary terms. Becoming Christian meant becoming a (potential) part of a world community while rejecting the past as a stage of deplorable ‘wild’ and non-human ‘heathendom’. Living as a Christian also implied living in line with missionary regulations regarding marriage, sexuality and the consumption of alcohol. In other words, they were made to subjectivize themselves in line with a pietist colonial ethic.
The final chapter summarizes the author’s findings and argues that colonialism should be understood as a complex knowledge system with multiple actors. Unpacking this system is the first step towards decolonizing knowledge. The point for Toffa is to refrain from speaking back and criticizing Europe by using lingering yet unacknowledged colonial epistemes, and instead to scrutinize the colonial power–morality–knowledge complex from an inclusive, multicultural angle.
This is a well-crafted book. Due to his impressive linguistic competence in both Ewe and German, Toffa is in a unique position to analyse the project of missionary world making from its inception to its translation to the Ewe through careful linguistic analysis. His book offers a highly successful synthesis of complex theory and the concrete study of textual materials. In so doing, he prompts his readers to question widely held, normalized ideas about humanity through which indigenous, polytheistic people such as the Ewe tend to be marginalized. This raises big questions about alternative possibilities of thinking about the world and about claims to universality from a pluriform angle. Inspired by such postcolonial theorists as Achille Mbembe, Toffa convincingly shows the importance of delving deep into the history of missionary knowledge, rather than seeing missions merely as a by-product of or an exception to colonialism.
Having conducted research on the activities of the NMG among the Ewe and their appropriation of missionary Christianity myself, I see many links between our respective work. Whereas Toffa pays prime attention to the thinking of Zahn, I was more interested in the communication between the missionaries working in Zahn’s spirit and the Ewe ‘on the ground’. This comes with its own ironies – the scholar from Togo mainly looking at German materials, and the scholar from Germany at Ewe materials. While I would have appreciated if Toffa had paid more attention to how Ewe Christians were placed under the regime of the mission and started to subjectivize themselves as Christians, his reading of Zahn opened my eyes to matters I would previously have taken for granted. His book spotlights how the concept of world promoted by the mission connects people under hierarchical conditions yet is, at the same time, a condition for global encounter and exchange. One can only hope that Toffa’s book will soon be translated into English and French, so as to enrich current debates about the mission–colonialism nexus.
