Nicholas Thomas, writing in 1994, identified a crucial problem with contemporary postcolonial scholarship:

This weakness continues to bedevil the discipline, and while common to postcolonial theory in the widest sense, it is especially true of the representation of the missionary. In the study of the colonial role of the missionary, Chinua Achebe's ‘Smith and Brown’ model continues to enjoy a largely unscrutinised hegemony.Footnote ² For many post-colonial writers, the missionary is a two-dimensional metonym for ignorance, repression and hypocrisy. Anna Johnston underlines this problem, expressing her concern that ‘missionaries are subject to numerous “off-hand” asides and critiques throughout postcolonial discourses, be they fictional, historical, or theoretical’.Footnote ³ The assumption of a monolithic ‘missionary project’ means that, in many of these discussions, little effort is made to disentangle the differences between the approaches of Catholic and Protestant missions, on one hand, and the nuances of the various evangelical missions on the other. To a very large degree these weaknesses are the inevitable concomitants of a failure to engage with the texts of missionary discourse, and a general tendency to neglect the ‘texted character … and discursively complex nature’ of the missionary project.Footnote ⁴ Until the post-colonial academy engages with the missionary text, such misrepresentations are likely to continue. Dan Crawford's Thinking black is a prime example of the sort of text that can helpfully inform our approach to the colonial role of the missionary.Footnote ⁵ It is also one of the most remarkable missionary texts to come from the African field, a unique piece of evangelical writing.

Daniel Crawford (1870–1926) was born in the Scottish village of Gourock. His father died when he was four years of age, and Dan was brought up by his mother. In 1877 he experienced evangelical conversion while attending a gospel meeting in Gourock.Footnote ⁶ This assembly of Christians was connected with the movement identified by historians as Brethren, a connection that Crawford was to maintain throughout his life.Footnote ⁷ Crawford quickly developed a keen interest in evangelistic outreach, and especially in missionary work. Following contacts with J. Hudson Taylor, missionary to China, and F. S. Arnot, the Brethren pioneer in Africa, Crawford set out for Africa in March 1889,Footnote ⁸ where he spent the next twenty-two years. He was back in Britain for most of the next four years, before returning to Africa where he remained until his death in 1926. While in Britain he published Thinking black, a book that had been written ‘by the flare of the African campfire’, and which represented the fruits of twenty-two years of missionary experience, with reflection on the principles behind that endeavour.Footnote ⁹ Its publication, in 1912, coincided with the centenary of Livingstone's birth in 1813, and this, combined with a strenuous speaking itinerary, ensured the commercial success of the book. Crawford provided no account of the motives that caused him to write the book; neither did he very clearly define the intended audience. Tilsley provides evidence of a wide readership across the evangelical spectrum, while a review in The Witness, a leading Brethren periodical, enthusiastically endorsed the volume.Footnote ¹⁰Thinking black was a unique achievement. Crawford was later to write a second volume of missionary reminiscences – Back to the long grasses (1922) – but he failed to maintain the freshness of the first book, frequently plagiarising his own epigrams. Thus Thinking black stands as a considered statement of Crawford's approach to the missionary endeavour, and a most important insight on the outworking of Brethren principles in the mission field.

Thinking black also provides us with an invaluable window on a crucial point in the history of Protestant missions. Crawford's departure took place in a period marked by ‘a decided and widespread increase of missionary interest’.Footnote ¹¹ Protestant Churches were enjoying ‘the high-water mark of Christian missionary prosperity and activity’.Footnote ¹² Such was the confidence of late-Victorian Christianity that, at the World Missionary Conference in 1910, the chosen slogan was ‘the evangelisation of the world in this generation’.Footnote ¹³ Also

Africa, in particular, was attracting unprecedented missionary activity.Footnote ¹⁵ The death of Livingstone in Central Africa in 1873, and his burial in Westminster Abbey – a state funeral in form, if not in fact – had the natural effect of focusing the mind of Victorian Britain on his work. The ‘tender Victorian conscience about Africa inherited from the aristocratic Evangelicals of the late 18th century’ was a further motive for African missions.Footnote ¹⁶

At the same time, a new emphasis was emerging in the conduct of missionary outreach – a shift towards a direct dependence on God to supply the necessities of life. This concept developed largely among those connected with the Brethren. Direct dependence on, and responsibility only to, God had two important implications for early Brethren missionaries.Footnote ¹⁷ The first was ‘the belief that full time workers … should not be paid a salary’.Footnote ¹⁸ Anthony Norris Groves, a missionary to Baghdad and India, had urged this practice in his pamphlet Christian devotedness (1825) – one of the seminal documents of Brethren missionary endeavour.Footnote ¹⁹ Groves's teaching on the ability of God to supply his servants became a touchstone of Brethren missionary practise – eventually seen as a ‘defining Brethren characteristic’,Footnote ²⁰ and ‘an essential point of doctrine’.Footnote ²¹ This teaching was famously practised with spectacular success by his brother-in-law George Müller, in his Bristol orphan homes.Footnote ²² Grove's work continued to be influential throughout the nineteenth century, and spread beyond those directly connected with the Brethren, influencing most notably J. Hudson Taylor, and through him C. T. Studd.Footnote ²³ Crawford himself was deeply influenced by this teaching from the start of his full-time service.Footnote ²⁴ Later he remarked ‘good it is we have no society guaranteeing a stated salary. For cut off as we are from our nearest bank by one thousand miles, the said Society would be politely and cleverly baffled how to send our quarterly remittance’.Footnote ²⁵

Brethren teaching was responsible for another change in the missionary's existence. This involved a move away from sectarianism and a fresh emphasis on the missionary's position as a servant of God, directly responsible to his Master.Footnote ²⁶ This was partially inspired by a rejection of any erastian union between Church and State, a relationship that has always been complex and often troubling, especially in the context of empire. Since the Virginian plantations, missionary activity had been seen as the chief and best motivation for conquest. This view of missionary endeavour grew in strength with the ‘evangelical Protestant revival … in the late eighteenth century’ and the resultant ‘heightened sense of religiosity in Britain’.Footnote ²⁷ The growing importance of this relationship has led Anna Johnston to conclude that

This model of missionary activity has informed most post-colonial work on the missionary in African society. It was a model of which Crawford was very conscious – he referred to such missionaries as ‘little Protestant Popes … prophets, priests and kings rolled into one’.Footnote ²⁹ It is, however, a model that fails to take cognisance of the distinctive stance of the Brethren missionaries. For the first generation of Brethren evangelists, the command to ‘come out from among them, and be ye separate’ was of the very first importance.Footnote ³⁰ In religious terms this was seen in their withdrawal from ‘the hardened forms of institutional Christianity’.Footnote ³¹ And this was mirrored by a secular separation. All society – political, religious or social – came under the heading of ‘the world’. This world system was to be shunned by the Christian. Believers were not to involve themselves in the political process.Footnote ³² This separation of the believer from earthly politics had a particular relevance for the missionary. Pioneer missionaries, in particular, were perceived to have a duty to be standard bearers for their countries, to serve the national interests of the homeland as faithfully as those of the kingdom of God. This the early Brethren missionaries refused to do.Footnote ³³ Their approach to missionary endeavour was ably and accurately summarised by Henry Groves and J. L. Maclean, in their preface to Arnot's record of missionary endeavour: ‘Nothing could be simpler than the instructions and equipment of the pioneer gospel labourers. … There was no complicated machinery, but there was power. There were no elaborate plans, but they took their directions from the Lord. They went forward or stood still, guided according to the wisdom of [Christ].’Footnote ³⁴

Each of these developments made their mark on the late-Victorian missions. When we address ourselves to the pages of Thinking black, we must always bear them in mind. The Crawford who speaks so inimitably from the book does not do so as the representative of any missionary society. He does not speak from a sectarian footing. Above all, he does not speak as a coloniser, or as a representative of his nation. While none of these developments can, separately or in conjunction, account for the unique nature of Crawford's work, they do have clear significance because they gave his individuality the freedom to express itself. There was no need for Crawford to write with the board of a society in mind. Criticism of imperial policy could be included without restraint. These facts are crucial to establishing Crawford's place within a paradigm of missionary writing. Furthermore, Crawford's position in the vanguard of Brethren missionary advance, combined with his originality of approach, allowed his voice to play a defining role in the development of a distinctive Brethren missionary idiom, and gives his influence a crucial place in determining their approach to missionary work, and its objects.

We receive our first intimation of the individuality of Crawford's approach even before we begin reading Thinking black. The frontispiece to the volume credits it to ‘D. Crawford, F.R.G.S.’, but also to ‘Konga Vantu’ – Crawford's African name, the ‘gatherer of the people’. We are dealing with an author who has penetrated African society to the extent that it has given him a new name. Crawford is sufficiently conscious of the honour thus conveyed to include the title in such a prominent way. Equally eye-catching are the rubricated epigraphs included by Crawford at the beginning of each chapter. Here, Scripture features largely, as do evangelical heroes like Luther, Whitefield, Booth and Livingstone, and a selection of hymns. The voices of Victorian literature are also present, to a surprising degree, given Brethren suspicion of the world. Milton, Conan Doyle, Dickens, Arnold, Tennyson and Whitman all appear.

Particularly interesting is Crawford's use of classical quotations, from Cicero, Caesar, Jerome and Tacticus,Footnote ³⁵ quotations that deal with ancient Britain, and treat it to the type of ethnographic examination to which Africa was often subjected. Crawford is making a shrewd point. Britain was once the subject of colonial enterprise; her inhabitants had attracted the sort of scorn that contemporary writers were apt to heap on Africa. The reminder that ‘the stupidest and ugliest slaves come from Britain’, is a valuable underlining of the importance of perspective, a vital corrective to any imperial vainglory.Footnote ³⁶ We must be cautious, however, about making these comparisons seem more revolutionary than they really are. In fact, they were central to Victorian comparative anthropology.Footnote ³⁷ ‘The comparative method allowed anthropologists and ethnologists to view contemporary “savages” as equivalent to ancient European peoples.’Footnote ³⁸ Crawford's quotations, among the epigraphs, of Gibbon and Matthew Arnold also bear the impress of this type of thinking. Indeed, by 1890, the comparisons drawn implicitly by Crawford's use of classical quotations, had become ‘something of a cliché’, summarised by an anonymous poem – ‘Let us not the Negro slave despise,/Just so our sires appeared in Caesar's eyes.’Footnote ³⁹ That this verse appeared in an abolitionist tract indicates that this view could be given the egalitarian overtones that Crawford seems to suggest. However, it is also clear that this cultural relativism was based on racist representations of Africa, and could be used to justify European intervention in Africa as a civilising mission.

These epigraphs have more to say about Crawford's view of the value of African civilisation and in this context they become genuinely revolutionary. Amidst this Anglo-centric selection of the best that has been said, we find quotations from African voices, recorded with equal validity. So it is that we find Bantu proverbs juxtaposed with Milton, a Luban chief rubbing shoulders with Cicero and the Emperor Mushidi – whose title is surely significant – cheek-by-jowl with Psalm cvii.Footnote ⁴⁰ Clearly, Crawford is not elevating Mushidi's obiter dicta to the level of Scripture. None the less, it is clear that this African wisdom has as much authority and force as the most influential texts of European civilisation. These quotations assume a close equivalence between the written literature of Europe and the oral tradition of Africa. For Crawford, then, there is nothing static about European domination, whether imperial or intellectual. The processes of empire now operated by Britain once operated upon her, and are practised by the very Africans that she colonises. African voices can share an equal platform with the greatest poets and thinkers of any age. Culture is not to be privileged simply because it is the culture of a colonising power.

Crawford's drive to think and to talk black gives rise to the most remarkable facet of his narrative. Even the casual reader is struck by his abandonment of a strictly chronological narrative in favour of a time scheme that is fluid and, initially, not a little disorientating. The basic time-based progression of the text of Thinking black is broken by a sort of thematic linking. ‘Later’ appears ‘quite often’ at the head of a paragraph and ‘indicates that the section of the narrative it introduces is subsequent in time but similar in character to the conditions of the context’.Footnote ⁴¹ These leaps may encompass as much as twenty years, and cause a constant change of narrative focus. For the reader who expects a clear chronological account of missionary doings, this style can be frustrating. However, it shows an awareness of temporal plasticity never before seen in missionary records. Indeed, it would be tempting to read Thinking black as a modernist text, were it not that Crawford was not interested in being avant-garde for the sake of it and that what he was attempting was, in many ways, far more revolutionary than the modernist project.

Crawford's project was no less than the restoration of Africa's voice to the African missionary narrative. The rhythms of Thinking black, and its disdain for the concrete certainties of chronological writing, echo the complexities of African thought and expression. Tilsley, who displayed a shrewd appreciation of Thinking black, had no difficulty in detecting this purpose:

Crawford's love of language is evident in the range and type of his reading, and his translation of Scripture is testament to his status as ‘a great linguist’.Footnote ⁴³ For over two decades, these abilities had been entirely submerged in African thought and speech. It is small wonder, therefore, that Thinking Black came to bear the impress of this experience. Hence it is very far removed from the chronological exactitude of the traditional ‘precisionist’ missionary narrative. By its very structure, the book restores Africa's voice, and challenges the hegemony of chronological European narrative. In this book, for the first time in the European missionary narrative, Africa's distinctive, idiomatic voice is heard.

The fertile interaction between the wisdom and literature of Europe and Africa sets the tone for Crawford's representation of the missionary's interaction with the missionary subject. However, his representation of the European in Africa seems initially merely to express the standard views of his time. Late-Victorian theories of society were deeply concerned with the idea of degeneration.Footnote ⁴⁴ This discourse was largely energised by the emerging tenets of Darwinism and the parallels that were constantly drawn between the British and Roman empires. Intertwined with contemporary theorising about the decline of civilisations was a deep concern about personal degeneration in colonial settings – the fear that close contact with Africa would have a barbarising effect on the European consciousness.Footnote ⁴⁵ It is Conrad, in Heart of darkness (1899), who gives us the most disturbing depiction of this process in the figure of Kurtz, but, as Rod Edmond points out, Kurtz is ‘at the end of a tradition stretching back at least as far as Robinson Crusoe (1719)’.Footnote ⁴⁶ John Griffith, too, has identified similar concerns in the works of ‘writers as varied as Kipling, Buchan, [and] Haggard’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Initially, Crawford seems, simply, to buy into this view of the fate of the European in Africa:

He goes on to depict a range of examples of those whose ‘manners’ have been corrupted, and who have been seduced by the barbarous tendencies of African behaviour. The depiction seems uncompromising enough, and yet, as we look at Thinking black in its entirety, we realise that Crawford nuances this straightforward representation. We realise that there is nothing inevitable about this cultural contamination, nor, when it does occur, can the blame be laid on Africa's shoulders. Rather, Crawford presents us with two categories of Europeans who render themselves liable to this process of degeneration.

The members of the first category are degenerate on a national basis. Crawford's determination to resist ‘othering’ the African native has no parallel in his treatment of European colonisers. He is marked by a deep horror at the European rape of Africa, especially the slave trade, and is quick to lay the responsibility for this atrocity upon other colonial powers, particularly the Portuguese and the Belgians. To some extent, we must recognise that this depiction is energised by religious and racial stereotypes. Crawford, for example, longed to give the ‘lethargic … Latin’ a ‘subcutaneous injection of the busy spirit of John Bull’.Footnote ⁴⁹ However, national clichés are not the only cause of this criticism. Clearly explicit is a horror of slavery, and of the cruel devices used to perpetuate it. For Crawford, the idea of a colonial regime that could officially decry slavery, and yet connive at its continuation on the ground was truly abhorrent: ‘[Y]ou have the most famous slave track in Africa … all persistently passing under the nose of high constituted authority … if high constituted authority winks at it all … cursed is the said Government that winketh with the eye.’Footnote ⁵⁰ Thus, the contrast is drawn, not between coloniser and colonised, but rather between different types of colonialism. British colonialism is well intentioned, even honourable. Britain, in expanding her empire, was bringing the benefits of evangelical, Protestant Christianity to the African. Other colonisers brought the stupefying influence of alcohol, and the bondage of slavery physically, and their answer spiritually, in the narcotic of Roman Catholicism. In fairness to Crawford, it should be pointed out that this view was not without its historical veracity. Certainly, as Andrew Ross has pointed out, it was

The central point, however, is that the degeneration of these Europeans in Africa is not the fault of African culture. It is their European mother culture that has failed – both on a personal and an official level – to equip these men with the moral fibre necessary to survive the temptations of Africa.

The second class of those who degenerate in Africa comprises those who refuse to engage with African society, bad readers of the continent. Crawford opens the book with an acknowledgement of European ignorance that is far removed from the confident cataloguing and indexing of the usual European approach:

This striking acknowledgement of ignorance, of helplessness and of the danger of trying to impose a Eurocentric identity on Africa is fundamental to Crawford's approach to African culture. Similarly important is his insistence that we must ‘try to understand before we judge’.Footnote ⁵³ The European, arriving in Africa, must therefore abandon all his pretensions to knowledge before he can hope to know her. This process will involve humility on the part of the visitor: ‘British bluff is of no avail, and only by stooping can you wriggle into both Africa the land and Africa the man.’ ‘“Farthest In” is a poor thing if it only applies to the mere elementary geography of Central Africa.’ The European – be he missionary, anthropologist, administrator, or all of these – must be truly in Africa, if he is not to degenerate.

Europeans who fail in this cultural immersion, who lack the required humility, are pitiable, wilfully isolated from an enriching contact with African culture:

Not only are such men pathetic, their state of isolation is also dangerous. It is the lack of meaningful contact with native society that produces distorted personalities like Kurtz. The danger of degeneration comes not from over-exposure to African culture, but from an under-penetration by that culture. These unfortunates, lacking an ‘in-streaming flood of pure negro ideas pump … up [their] poor English counterfeits from the deeps of [their] British breast[s]’.Footnote ⁵⁵ They degenerate in Africa, not because African culture influences them excessively, but because they refuse to allow any contact. Again, the wellspring of barbarity is not the culture of the colonised, but a weakness on the part of the coloniser. Degeneration comes from within. Thus we see Crawford interacting with the imperial stereotypes of his day, but crucially transforming them.

Crawford's representation of the native African is also worthy of consideration. As we would expect from his strictures on the man who never comes into real contact with Africa, his emphasis is on knowing and understanding. Over fifty years before Bishop Taylor's publication of Primal vision, Crawford already appreciated just how vital it was to ‘be present in the life of the individuals and communities with whom he interacted’.Footnote ⁵⁶ In this cultural immersion, he came to appreciate the close links between the African and the European. These links are not those of Taylorite comparative anthropology, extending back over millennia, but a comparison based on the present. So it is that, on acquaintance, ‘one of the withered old “hags” of the modern explorer's book of travels’ becomes seen as a ‘charming dowager armed to the finger tips with finish and polish’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Crucially, it is linguistic interaction, the process of getting ‘on family talking terms’ with her, that effects this transformation. ‘[T]he more this old lady talks the more the scales of prejudice fall from your eyes, and you begin to see her striking resemblance to some English lady you have known.’ Significant also is the source of the stereotype that familiarity negates. It is the ‘book of travels’ that has erected the barriers that have to be overcome. Likewise, the idea of racial difference is deconstructed by the fact that ‘the young darkies’ need only the addition of ‘a white collar and tie’ to resemble ‘their tow-headed English twin brothers Tommy Jones, John Smith, etc’.Footnote ⁵⁸ The difference between these Africans and their British counterparts is a matter of externals only – beneath the surface, there is more to unite than to separate.

This view is, undoubtedly, a result of Crawford's evangelical imperative, and his ability to ‘perceive the universal principles that touch all men’.Footnote ⁵⁹ The belief in common principals is central to Crawford's evangelical mission, which was underpinned by a belief that other is same. This was true, not in the sense that Stephen Neill suggests – ‘to the missionaries the Africans were always the Children of the Heavenly Father’Footnote ⁶⁰ but rather because Africans and Europeans were united in their lost, unregenerate status – ‘by nature the children of wrath even as others’.Footnote ⁶¹ An anonymous hymn-writer had captured this by addressing to the unconverted of Britain the words ‘The vilest wretch of Afric's race/Is just as near as thou’,Footnote ⁶² and Crawford displayed the same belief when he suggested that Thinking black should be subtitled ‘The blacks as bad as the whites’.Footnote ⁶³ The Christian Gospel building on this premise of depravity also offered a unity of opportunity, of hope and of eternal reward – equal need and equal provision. Crawford's impetus towards racial equality was increased by his view of the implications of the incarnation: ‘I am de-nationalized – a brother to all men; Arab, African, Mongol, Aryan, Jew; seeing in the Incarnation a link that binds us up with all men.’Footnote ⁶⁴ Thus, theologically as well as personally, Crawford was well-equipped to personify the ideal colonist addressed by the monument of the African explorer Herbert Wood: ‘To those who understood: to those who loved the natives of Africa.’Footnote ⁶⁵ For Crawford, a love of Africa was, of necessity, based on understanding and communication.

In spite of this radical re-evaluation of racial relations, there are some features of Crawford's representation that jar somewhat with the contemporary reader. Occasionally, he displays that great weakness of British colonial writing – a tendency to an amused paternalism in the contemplation of the African. This can be most clearly seen in the section where Crawford enumerates the ways in which African actions invert European expectations.Footnote ⁶⁶ Crawford's tone is one of amused indulgence, inviting us to join him in his entertainment at the improbable actions of the African. None the less, he does allow a logic behind the actions of the natives. Similarly, Crawford nuances this amusement by turning it back on us – the black man ‘shakes his head and opines we Europeans are wise, but our wisdom is rather showy than exact. The black man, he thinks, is wiser than he seems, and the white man seems wiser than he is’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Further, by pointing out that this ‘topsy-turvyism’ is echoed in nature, by the sight of ‘your old Northern friend the “Great Bear” on the horizon, but … upside down, sprawling on his back in a manner most undignified for a respectable constellation’, Crawford reminds us that different locations and circumstances explain, and may, in fact, require, different approaches to life.Footnote ⁶⁸

The most fascinating aspect of Thinking black, however, is the development of an African Christianity. This issue of ‘Creole Christianity’ is still one of the most debated issues of the missionary legacy in Africa. European Protestant missions in Africa have faced a dilemma well summarised by John and Jean Comaroff:

The difficulty was, on one hand, to distinguish between what was essential to Christianity and what were the purely cultural trappings of European institutional Christianity. Very often, ‘Nonconformists in Britain … were conformists abroad’, exporting wholesale the accretions that the Gospel message had acquired since the activities of the Apostles.Footnote ⁷⁰ On the other hand, missionaries were fearful of anything that hinted of syncretism – the absorption of the practices of traditional African religion into Christian belief.Footnote ⁷¹ Additional to these problems was the question of what role African converts were to play in a developing Church. To a large degree, the primitivism of the Brethren, their insistence on the inspiration and validity of Scripture, resolved these problems for them. It was their understanding of Scripture that had led them, in Europe, to flout the cultural constructions of Christianity, to slough off the layers of external form not validated by direct appeal to the New Testament. Thus, when they arrived in Africa, they were unusually free of any form of ideological investment in extra-biblical ecclesiology and correspondingly unlikely to press any non-scriptural forms upon native converts. At the same time, their focus on Scripture as the basis for all theology, and their distinctive teachings on separation made a syncretistic approach to African Christianity very unlikely. Further, their rejection of an ordained clergy and their insistence on the sufficiency of the instruction of the Holy Spirit for an understanding of divine revelation meant that the European missionary had no monopoly on divine truth.Footnote ⁷²

Thus it is that an endorsement of indigenous Christianity was, and is, characteristic of Brethren missionaries.Footnote ⁷³ Certainly, for Crawford, African Christianity was vibrant and valid; and the missionary stood to gain as much from the native as the natives had from him. Crawford, who had been found a difficult colleague by some British missionaries, seems to have had no difficulty with relating to his new, African brethren and, ever conscious of language, soon began to find his understanding enriched by the African refraction of Scripture:Footnote ⁷⁴

Thus, meanings unseen or, indeed, inaccessible to the missionaries, scintillate from the African encounter with Scripture. It is typical of Crawford's interest in language that he is so excited by the fresh insights that are brought to life by the translation of familiar truths into an African context. Again, Crawford is willing to approach Africa with humility, to learn from the African Christians, and to confess his debt to Africa's view of Christianity. Significantly, Roland Allen, in his critique of contemporary missionary methods, calls for just such recognition:

Just how revolutionary this thinking was becomes clear when we read Thinking black alongside a work like John Buchan's An African colony (1903).Footnote ⁷⁷ Buchan believed that Africans lagged so far behind the civilisation of Europe that ‘to teach them … the dogmas of Christianity at this stage in their development was foolish … Instead, the native should be taught … “honesty, cleanliness and discipline”’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Buchan was not alone in the infantilisation of the colonised subject. Kipling's summary of the colonial other, ‘Your new-caught sullen peoples/Half devil and half child’, is perhaps the most striking example of this trope.Footnote ⁷⁹ To read Crawford by these standards is to appreciate the radical nature of his exercise in thinking black.

Equally significant is the place that Crawford and other Brethren missionaries give to indigenous workers.Footnote ⁸⁰ The devolution of responsibility to the natives was a problematic issue. Again, this was among Allen's chief concerns with contemporary missionary activity:

For Crawford, however, the participation of native Christians in the spread of the Gospel and the operation of churches was not only feasible, but extremely desirable. Indeed, Ruth Slade suggests that Crawford saw the training of African evangelists as central to his mission.Footnote ⁸² Certainly, Thinking black makes clear his high estimation of indigenous evangelism:

Similarly, Crawford enthusiastically endorses the dissemination of the Gospel by native elephant hunters.Footnote ⁸⁴ When these returned with news of converts, the entire lack of European intervention is a cause for rejoicing; not rejection. Just as Crawford declined to be a ‘little Protestant pope’ in secular administration, so he eschewed any special position in the emerging Christian work and community.Footnote ⁸⁵ Equally noteworthy is his response to the evangelical activity of the ‘old negro ladies toddling out … in order to pass on their good news’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Especially significant, in this context, is his quotation from Cowper's ‘Truth’: ‘Just knows, and knows no more, her Bible true,/A truth the brilliant Frenchman never knew.’Footnote ⁸⁷ The ‘brilliant Frenchman’ is, of course, Voltaire, and few of Crawford's evangelical readers would have queried the value system implicit in this quotation. Familiarity with the whole poem lends a more subversive tone to this allusion. Those who knew ‘Truth’ would realise that Crawford, by transposing these ‘negresses’ with Cowper's peasant woman, was in fact privileging their position above social position and external religion, above whole swathes of Victorian society.

Above all this, however, there are two sections of this book that stand out as truly arresting, combining some of the most remarkable elements that have already been discussed. The first of these is Crawford's report of a native ‘dream embassy’ that he encountered in the bush, en route to conveying to another chief the revelation of God received in a dream – a ‘tête-à-tête with the Infinite’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Despite Crawford's insistence on the status of Scripture as the ultimate authority, he is willing to engage with the possibility that God can speak in dreams, and that Africa may require such speech: ‘In our zeal for God's written record we are too apt to treat all this as a weird and doubtful business … Forgetful, … that if England does not get these divine dreams it is because England, a land full of Bibles, does not need them.’Footnote ⁸⁹ Crawford's belief in an equality of opportunity for all, and his conviction that God has a message for the African allows him to contemplate with equanimity the possibility that God may speak to them in special ways; may adopt, as Crawford has, an idiom appropriate to Africa. Crawford may be ‘dazed’ by this story, but his response is crucial – ‘listening and wondering, listening and wondering’. Again, understanding must precede judgement, listening precede response, consideration, condemnation.

The second of these instances occurs close to the start of the book when Crawford describes a convert to Christianity dancing before the Lord:

The tolerance and open-mindedness of these observations is outstanding. We have already seen the Comaroffs’ conclusion that the African expression of Christianity was often seen by missionaries as being tainted with ‘apostasy, and even paganism’.Footnote ⁹¹ Dancing was connected with ‘African levity and “unruliness”’.Footnote ⁹² At best, missionaries ‘responded ambivalently … uncertain whether to celebrate or distrust these “outpourings” of “primitive Christianity”’. In addition, both the Brethren and the Christian establishment in Europe had been very suspicious of ‘Pentecostal phenomena’ emerging from the Irvingite charismatic movement.Footnote ⁹³ Such conduct was regularly ascribed to satanic possession. All Crawford's cultural conditioning, therefore, would have urged him to write off this spectacle as a revolting hangover from ‘heathen’ rites. And yet he is willing to watch, learn and – as ever – to draw the improving lesson – ‘a confession this with a moral, surely, for how much of God's joy is allowed to evaporate by the mouth in mere talk when it should descend to the feet in real walk’.Footnote ⁹⁴ It is difficult to overestimate Crawford's capacity for sympathetic understanding, his drive to fully comprehend and understand. This image of Crawford watching the dance of a native convert is, perhaps, the most profound summary of the uniqueness of this interaction between missionary and convert.

This image captures the remarkable nature of Crawford's approach to the colonial encounter. This is visible enough from a modern standpoint; viewed through the lens of contemporary thought it is astounding. To place Crawford in his context, alongside Conrad and Buchan, is to appreciate how just is Neil Dickson's description of Crawford's endeavours as ‘one of the most remarkable interactions between a Scottish missionary and a non-western culture’.Footnote ⁹⁵ It is also to appreciate the light that Crawford throws on some of the greatest challenges facing postcolonial theory – the need to engage with the colonial encounter in all its complexity. The most challenging aspect of Crawford's text is the fact that it seems always to totter on the verge of accepted wisdom about Africa and her people. To the careless reader, it may, at times, seem to succumb to this lure of the conventional. Yet, in reality, Crawford always gives the text his own twist, and consistently eludes any simplistic reading of the effects of colonialism. Because of this, Thinking black presents fundamental challenges to the conventional view of missionary activity and emphasises the vital importance of critical engagement with the missionary text. Thinking black demands that the reader extend to Crawford the courtesy that he showed to Africa – to ‘understand before we judge’.

Crawford's openness to, and immersion in, Africa is memorably recorded. We must ask, however, whether he is exemplar or exception. How valid is it to extrapolate from his unique record to the wider practice of the Brethren missionaries, and beyond that to the wider circle of faith missions that emerged around this time? There is a good deal of evidence to support just such a connection. We have already seen that Crawford was influenced by Hudson Taylor and F. S. Arnot. Hudson Taylor, although not formally associated with the Brethren, enthusiastically adopted Groves's views on dependence on divine supply of the missionaries’ needs, and Crawford, in his turn, came to share these views. This has remained a distinctive feature of Brethren missionaries.Footnote ⁹⁶ We have already noted the view of missionary endeavour endorsed by the editors of Echoes of Service in the preface to Arnot's Garenganze. Given Arnot's status as the ‘architect of Brethren missionary work in the Beloved Strip’, and his central role in training the corps of ten missionaries, including Crawford, it was scarcely surprising that we can find the roots of Crawford's views in Arnot's.Footnote ⁹⁷ This is especially true of Arnot's determination ‘to distance himself from the ripples of European penetration’.Footnote ⁹⁸ C. A. Swan, with whom Crawford lived and worked in his early days in Africa, ‘alienated’ British officials by his adherence to the same principles.Footnote ⁹⁹ Pauline Summerton's helpful study of Walter Fisher, who sailed for Africa with Crawford, concludes that both Fisher and his extended family sought to preach, in so far as possible, a ‘culture-free Gospel’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Such was the approach of the pioneers. From the start, Brethren missionaries in Africa adopted a de facto apprentice system, which saw established labourers assist novices in their introduction to the work. This system was to perpetuate an approach to missionary endeavour that emphasised dependence upon God, independence from the political machinations of empire and cultural literacy.

This pattern of apprenticeship ensured Crawford's influence on subsequent missionaries. J. H. Brown, in his own idiosyncratic account of his experiences in Africa, acknowledged the importance of Crawford's influence upon him.Footnote ¹⁰¹ While Brown had made a significant move, from mission station to fuller cultural immersion, his approach was an extension of, rather than a reaction to, the principles that motivated Crawford. T. Ernest Wilson, whose call to African service followed a correspondence with Fred Lane, another of Crawford's contemporaries, outlined elements that were, in his view, essential to successful missionary work.Footnote ¹⁰² There was ‘vital importance [in] incorporating indigenous principles in the foundation … Simple living by the missionaries … and then looking and praying to God to raise up gifted nationals to step out in faith’.Footnote ¹⁰³ It is highly significant that Robin McKeown, a full-time evangelist in Northern Ireland, recalls Wilson describing Thinking black as essential reading for anyone contemplating missionary work.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ R. C. Allison, whose call came under the ministry of T. E. Wilson, followed a similar pattern.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ During Allison's introduction to the mission field he ‘was privileged to spend much time with … William Maitland … a colleague of the late Fred Stanley Arnot’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ He was later to recall that:

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Allison was also to form very close relationships with local Christians. Thus the system of older missionaries introducing and training younger missionaries ensured that Crawford's influence was to cast long shadows in African work. The success of Thinking black can only have increased this influence. According to Tilsley ‘Dan Crawford had told his story in his own way. Hundreds of thousands read it and enjoyed it. Many were enlightened and some spiritually influenced by it.’Footnote ¹⁰⁷

However, it is because his practice was built on a primitivist understanding of Scripture that it was echoed by other missionaries in other fields. Examples could be multiplied, but the most compelling evidence of the centrality of a ‘Crawfordian’ approach to the missions is provided in W. E. Vine's The divine plan of missions (1927). Vine bases his discussion entirely on an exegesis of Scripture, and the principles that he adumbrates are precisely those practised by Crawford and others. He is insistent that the New Testament plan ‘is as possible in the wilds of heathendom as in the midst of civilised communities’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Like Crawford, he appreciated the need for cultural immersion: ‘it is undeniably necessary for a worker … to become thoroughly acquainted with the people, their manners and customs, their ideas and susceptibilities, and their interests’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Vine was also very clear about the importance of indigenous Christianity, seeing the planting of local self-sustaining churches as the goal of missionary endeavour.Footnote ¹¹⁰ It is important to stress that Vine was not himself a missionary. Rather, as a leading Bible teacher, he was articulating his understanding of scriptural principles. Thinking black was a unique articulation of these same principles, but the fact that they lie at the heart of the book makes it an account that, for all its individuality, remains a faithful representation of a whole missionary ethos. These principles can be traced through Brethren missionary work, and beyond into those of faith missions that were influenced by Brethren missiology and missionaries.Footnote ¹¹¹ Until post-colonial scholarship comes to terms with the narratives of this encounter, its representation of the missionary will remain unbalanced, partial and unsatisfactory.