Education as an Instrument of Conversion

Education was another conversion method that was emphasized in missionary Christianity in Northwest Tanzania. It was regarded as an instrument of conversion. Missionaries established schools in Northwest Tanzania because it was believed that through these,

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missionaries could contact many people (Kahakwa 2010:80, Kijanga 1978:59-60).

However, the missionaries‟ education system was mostly meant to create a new African community. Africans were required to abandon their entire cultural heritage and adapt to the new Christian values.

Missionaries maintained that every school established was to teach only European thinking to the natives that aimed at exercising the violent breakup of the primitive instinct that was believed by missionaries to have dominated the spiritual world of the Bantu. “It is due to the fate induced by God that the white has not to adapt to the black, rather the black has to adapt to the white” (Niwagila 1991:58). Conversion through education was also meant to Christianize and civilize the Africans who were considered uncivilized and primitive. This missionary Christianity theoretical approach of conversion through western education created a phenomenon among the Haya whereby education and Christianity became compatible.

A Christian was identified as omushomi which means a person who is educated in a modern way according to western missionaries‟ manner and who knows how to read and write. Until today, to the Haya the word okushoma refers to either of the two meanings: on the first hand it refers to going to church for worship, on the other hand, the same word refers to read or to be educated (Mutembei 1993:79). For that matter the Haya failed to make a distinction between a Christian and a literate person. To be a Christian was tantamount to being a literate person and so you became implicitly different from the non-Christians. It, in some ways, elevated Haya Christians to almost a missionary level. This was the beginning of socio-cultural stratification between Christians and those who were termed as “pagans”.

Christianity as such, was not a distinctive way of life, but one of the characteristics of the European way of life to be acquired for one to qualify to be omushomi (the educated). The advantage of it was that it attracted many people, especially young ones. The result of this approach in the beginning was spectacular, many Haya joined Christianity to fight

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illiteracy. It also prepared the future generation of Haya converts to take various responsibilities in the church and the nation at large.

Kijanga (1978:58) indicated that 90 percent of all the Tanzanian converts during the time of missionary Christianity were the result of school evangelization. The mission churches retained the church educated people to work as teachers in church schools, nurses in church dispensaries and hospitals, and some became evangelists and clergymen. However, missionary education only enabled people to do the work mentioned above, as Kijanga indicates. Employment was between the missionaries and converts and whenever financial predicaments arose, converts were assisted by missionaries, a system that fostered dependence between elite converts and the missionary church of that time.

However, Western education was detrimental to the Haya cultural traditional heritage of informal education. The school system was western oriented and caused separation between the literates and illiterates among the Haya community (Niwagila 1972:119).

Another weakness of the approach that can be pointed out is the indoctrination of Haya learners against the indigenous cultural heritage in favour of a western lifestyle. Apart from a few missionaries in Tanzania, like Bruno Gutmann (1976-1966) who worked among the Chagga in Northern Tanzania who believed in the use of African cultural aspect of community life in evangelization (Keshomshahara 2008:58), most missionaries thought of using education as a tool for uprooting African converts from their pagan tradition. As Keshomshahara (2008:57) critically puts it, “unlike in Europe, where Christianity respected and transformed the indigenous European culture, in Africa [western missionary education system] crushed and eliminated the African culture, thus making Africans lose their identity, as they became „half Europeans and half Africans‟”.

More importantly, from the theological and spiritual dimension, many converts joined Christianity for modernity reasons. The transformation was far more social and physical than spiritual. Larson (1991:31-32), one of the Swedish missionaries in Buhaya, observed that the initial attraction of a new Christian community didn‟t necessarily mean a new faith spiritually apart from things such as writing skills (literate) and new knowledge in

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many other things. In this assertion we see the possibility for a new Christian community having responded to Christianity because of a new modern life with access to literature and new knowledge as a result of these missionary methods of doing mission so as to obtain more converts.

Nonetheless, despite the weakness of this outlined conversion approach, it can still be argued that the introduction of education enhanced social change among the Haya. It emancipated the Haya people from ignorance and helped them to fight poverty and disease. This led to the improvement of their standard of living. Brendan Carmody (2007) in The Nature and Role of Christian Conversion in Zambia notes similar benefits of conversion through education in the Zambian context. He points out that western education through missionaries gave new converts access to schools and opened the door to modernity. Through it African converts accessed “new skills which opened up previously unimagined horizons and possibilities.”