In the fourteenth century, a Chinese fleet sailed westward, winding up in present-day Kenya and islands off the African coast. The largest ship had the potential to circumnavigate the globe. After several months the fleet sailed back to China. European powers did not share Chinese indifference to other humans living on other continents. In this meticulously researched book, Patrick Harries, a professor of history at the University of Basel, follows Swiss Calvinist French-speaking missionaries, who spent long periods of time from the 1870s to the turn of the century in southeastern Africa. The area included areas today in Mozambique and South Africa.

Harries seeks to understand why they went and what their impact was. In a final chapter he addresses the issue of whether these missionaries played a role in spreading racist ideas and providing a rationale for apartheid in the twentieth century. Edward Said (who is not mentioned in the book) along with other post-colonial theorists, wrote that the missionaries and scientists come first, followed by the soldiers. Switzerland, not having an ocean-going navy or an army trained for expansion, was perhaps unique among European nations. Much of post-colonial theory may not, therefore, apply in this case.

Some of Harries's conclusions are surprising. A major reason for some well-educated Swiss missionaries abandoning the Alps may have been their disgust with Europe, where they perceived increasing greed, corruption, secularization, and industrial capitalism. Of course, they might have stayed at home to fight all of these trends, but they chose to leave for the “treeless” desert of Mozambique and the Transvaal. There they would seek to convert tribes that were in a “primitive” state and, thus, not jaded by the decadence spreading across Europe. They were also touched by the German romantic movement of the first half of the century.

Faced with an inhospitable climate that could not be more different from the Alps, they encountered the Bantu and Zulu tribes that had experienced only modest contact with the west, but more than the missionaries realized. They not only brought Bibles, but also came loaded with compasses, sextants, quadrants, pedometers, barometers, and thermometers. While they cetainly came to convert the natives to a Calvinist type of Christianity, they may have spent more of their time classifying and categorizing plants and insects. The amateur scientist, Henry Alexandre Junod, classified more than 500 new plant species, 200 new moths, and 184 previously unknown butterflies. The local system of knowledge was to be replaced by a European one. Junod justified his time spent in bringing some order to nature by claiming he was discovering and charting the totality of God's creation. He also came to the conclusion that his research confirmed Darwin's theory of evolution.

One of the most interesting findings of Harries was that the Swiss sought to separate the African Kulturvolk from the decadent Europeans in Africa. They ignored much of the western influence in the area, and averted their eyes from the thousands of Bantus working on sugar plantations and in diamond and gold mines. In their photos sent back to Switzerland, many of which were pictured in new calendars, they cropped western objects such as modern chairs and suits of clothing from the pictures. They ignored the tin cans, guns, string, and iron tools in their photos although these objects were used by Africans so they could pretend the Africans were pure, that is, untainted. Harries concludes that this practice set the stage for segregation in South Africa and the spread of racist categorization. That is, they played a role in convincing Europeans that the tribes were incapable of assimilating European values, or like Junod's prediction, that it would take 200 years for the tribes to abandon their way of life. The Swiss tended to view the Africans as similar to the Swiss several millennia earlier.

There are two excellent chapters on the spread of literacy and the establishment by the missionaries of a primary language, Thonga. Other languages would be considered dialects such as the Basque language in Spain. Thonga would be the equivalent of Latin in the Middle Ages, and the dialects would be like the vernacular. The problem was that the Portuguese were spreading into the Swiss missionary area and they wanted the natives to learn Portuguese and the local religion to be Roman Catholicism, and, unlike the Swiss, they were heavily armed. The tribes were very positive about literacy, which rapidly brought status to those who had mastered the written version of Thonga. One curiosity was the Swiss emphasis on the natives abandoning their round huts for square ones, which they believed was necessary for the development of native individualism.

While the book certainly achieves the author's goals and is a major contribution to western scholarly literature in southern Africa, there are two areas that would have justified more attention: gender and dress. Although a photo of a woman missionary dominates the book's cover, women are more or less invisible in the book. In the few lines devoted to them, Harries points out that they played a major role in raising the money in Switzerland that enabled the missionaries to go to Africa in the first place. There is also a tantalizing aside in which one learns that up to eighty percent of the converts were women, and they were the ones who administered the village churches, something that disturbed the missionaries. Much attention has been paid recently to the femininization of European Christianity in the nineteenth century. Were the African women more open to western religion than their male counterparts because it offered them a sphere where they would have a good deal of power? Junod and other males were upset by this unforeseen result of their efforts but could do little to stop it.

The Swiss strongly encouraged male converts to wear western dress; however, it was not mandated as essential. They were clearly ill at ease with converts wearing native garb, including feathers, in the churches. But there were no theological grounds to deny a Bantu or Zulu entry to a church based on dress. There is a photo in the book of an African male wearing what appears to be a woolen suit but barefooted.

In the end, Harries concludes that the missionaries did great harm to the Bantus and Zulus by categorizing them as a pure, untouched Kulturvolk. That many of these tribal members lived in towns or cities and, like Europeans, did physical labor in mines was ignored. He is quite critical of the missionaries further for their preaching that the native population should recognize and accept the ruling authority of the European colonial powers. Despite the absence of theory in the book, I strongly recommend it to post-colonial scholars as well as other interested Africanists since the research is truly impressive, and Harries comes to a number of conclusions that post colonialists will recognize as similar to their own. This is particularly true of the chapter where he contrasts the local attitude toward nature with that of the missionaries.