Chapter 7 Binding Words: Student Biographical Narratives and Religious Conversion
In: The Individual in African HistorySearch for other papers by Morgan Robinson in
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Abstract
For many years, the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA), an Anglican missionary society established on Zanzibar in 1864, focused its evangelical efforts on former slave children who had been caught up in the Indian Ocean slave trade. Like many Protestant missionary societies, the UMCA periodically collected and published the conversion narratives of its students, in an effort to offer motivation for new converts as well as to be used as fundraising pieces at home. In this chapter, I argue that, beyond the stereotyped progression from capture to redemption, these narratives offer crucial insight into the process of conversion in coastal East Africa. Specifically, the stories of these students make clear that religious conversion was closely linked to the process of ‘social rebirth’. The chapter examines how individuals attempted to rebuild their social networks within the mission community, a process that often looked like, and was written about in terms of, religious conversion.