The Mission Archives of the Swedish Riksarkivet

The SMF material on Moyen Congo forms only a small fragment of the riches that are stored away in the Swedish Mission Archives, because the SMF’s total “colonial” collection covers documents from French Equatorial Africa, Belgian Congo, China, India – even Turkestan. The SMF documents run from 1876 until 2013, but the period between the 1920’s and the 1960’s yields the most results and quite naturally, there are generally more documents available from later times than from the earliest periods. The collection is stored at several locations in Stockholm city and county, while part of it is located approximately 65 km away in Uppsala. The material itself is highly diverse. For instance, at the Swedish National Archive’s Döbelnsgatan site in Stockholm city I stumbled upon reports of developments within the mission posts, minutes of conferences, diaries, and an impressive quantity of secondary sources such as dissertations and publications on Congolese history. I also found bibles in the Kikongo language, postcards, photographs, and even audio material.

The Döbelnsgatan site has been closed since August 2017 but the documents have been sorted and moved to other archive locations. Of particular value is that the Riksarkivet holds not only Swedish state and mission documents, but also the private collections of a number of missionaries who lived and worked in the African colonies. Almost needless to say is that material of a more personal and informal character is to be found in those collections. During my own research at Stockholm’s Marieberg archive I saw that such documents sometimes contain bold statements opposing official policy.^{Footnote 10}

Naturally, most of the documents in the SMF archives were written in Swedish, in particular the letters, protocols, reports, and conference minutes that were circulated within the Mission itself. However, a large proportion of the material consists of copies of French Colonial protocols, decrees, official decisions, and reports, as well as correspondence in French among Swedish and French missionaries and administrators. Similar types of documents are to be found in English, although there are fewer of them. Because the Protestant SMF stimulated its missionaries to learn the local languages it is even possible to find in the Moyen Congo collection documents written in Kikongo. In any case, it appears that the Swedish missionaries maintained documents concerning the SMF in good administrative order regardless of the language in which they had been written.

Convenience, Drawbacks, and Public Access

All the archive buildings are equipped with convenient workspaces and visitors are welcome to spend as much time as they require in the reading rooms, computer rooms, at private workstations, and in the cafeteria. It is to be recommended that before actually going to the archives a visitor should at least try to gain some idea of the details of material of interest. By that I mean such things as an idea of the size of the collection, or its precise location – an especially useful thing to know since certain collections are split up over sub-collections which might well be stored at different locations. For that purpose the SMF website may be consulted or contact may be established with the archive’s staff.^{Footnote 11} Obviously, prior knowledge of how bulky the research material is will help any researcher with planning, and my own experience in Sweden is a good illustration of that. I had not expected the Swedish material to be very extensive, so I made the mistake of simply requesting the entire Moyen Congo collection held at the Arninge archive location – without realizing that it amounted to more than forty boxes and folders!

The distribution of the material among several archive locations is of course something of a disadvantage to researchers with limited time to spend in Stockholm. Having some idea in advance of where the research material is stored can therefore be crucial; for example the Arninge archive is housed 25 km from the city centre. Fortunately however, all the archive buildings are accessible by public transport and all offer public vehicle-parking space. Part of the Swedish National Archive’s policy is that one of its fundamental tasks is to be accessible to the public, and therefore in accordance with Swedish law most documents are available to view. The colonial and mission collections are openly accessible in their entirety.

Unfortunately, the SMF collection of the National Archive has not yet been digitized. Researchers in Sweden must therefore be aware that they will have to consult physical documents, and that material has to be requested in writing on an application form giving the collection or document title and code along with the researcher’s personal information and signature. If the collection or file title and code is not known, a staff member will help find it by showing the researcher how to search for it either in a digital catalogue or an actual old-fashioned paper folder. The staff aim to provide visitors with requested files within thirty minutes, and during my visits to the various archive locations they never failed to achieve that. However, it might happen that a file turns out to be stored elsewhere than where the catalogue states it is stored, or even that a certain folder or collection is still listed but seems to have disappeared from the archive’s storage.^{Footnote 12} Such cases are related to the Archive’s reorganization projects. Of course, it is disappointing and perhaps even frustrating when that happens, but in defence of the National Archive and its staff I must say that the lion’s share of the documents are stored efficiently, attested in most cases by the staff’s accomplishment at providing visitors with requested material within the promised half hour. On top of that the staff members are most helpful in doing their best to find suitably relevant alternatives to missing documents.^{Footnote 13}

Limitations of the SMF Material

The role of the Swedish missionaries to the Congo was different from that of the French, although their Northwest European frame of reference was similar. The aim of the Swedes, of course, was to spread the Protestant message, so their documentation was intended to serve the ends of the SMF. What they wrote about has therefore provided us with serendipitous information, such as that of André Matswa and his Société Amicale, and no great conclusions may be derived from it. Valuable as such documents are as a first hand record, nevertheless they do embody methodological barriers which can impede understanding of events. Similarly it must be taken into account that archives are institutions in their own right; they create just as much as they register. The SMF archives are classified according to strict principles formulated by Swedish archivists, who register things according to their own interpretations. Finally it should be noted that the Swedish missionaries did not present an undifferentiated unity, for while most of them adopted a critical stance towards the French colonial state, some operated more in line with the colonizer.