North American missionaries developed a North American-style school to prepare their children for life back in North America

In her article “Sacred children and colonial subsidies” Anicka Fast suggests that the missionaries of the American Mennonite Brethren Mission developed a school for their children in order to separate the missionary children from the Congolese children. That is an unfortunate misinterpretation of the historical situation. The missionary children were always intimately associated with Congolese children on the mission stations. The missionary children’s school was developed to train the missionary children so they could return to North America, where they were legally expected to return and live. They were not immigrants in the Congo. They needed a “North American-style education” so they would have a reasonable chance of success when they returned to North America. The school itself eventually was moved to Kinshasa where it developed into the American School of Kinshasa, which serves a wide spectrum of black and white children from around the world. The matter of colonial subsidies was only tangentially related to the development of the school.

Sacred children and colonial subsidies: The missionary performance of racial separation in Belgian Congo, 1946–1959

While most Protestant missions in Belgian Congo gladly accepted the colonial state’s offer of educational subsidies in 1946, a strong emphasis on church–state separation led the American Mennonite Brethren Mission (AMBM) to initially reject these funds. In a surprising twist, however, the AMBM reversed its position in 1952. Through archival research, I demonstrate that a major factor that led the AMBM to accept subsidies was the creation and institutionalization of a racially separate ecclesial identity from that of Congolese Christians. Moreover, the development of this separate identity was closely intertwined with missionaries’ vision for a “white children’s school,” geographically separated from their work with Congolese. The enactment of white identity helped pave the way for the acceptance of subsidies, both by bringing the missionaries more strongly into the orbit of the colonial logic of domination, and by clarifying the heavy cost of failing to comply with the state’s expectations. Through this case study, I engage with the complexity of missionaries’ political role in a colonial African context by focusing on the everyday political choices by which missionaries set aside their children as sacred, by exploring how ideas about separateness were embedded into institutions, and by demonstrating how attention to the subtleties of identity performance can shed new light on major missionary decisions.