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I Wish I’d Been There: Tanganyika, 1942
by James Hertzler
Seven congregations of Tanganyikan Mennonites and Eastern Mennonite Board of missionaries (EMBM, Lancaster) met in a conference on a Sunday afternoon in Shirati, early August 1942. They gathered at 3:30 p.m. for communion, but that sacrament was postponed for the moment because of stresses within the Tanganyikan church. At the end of that meeting, which did not break up until 9:00 p.m., Africans and missionaries were changed people. I wish I’d been there to witness that.
Revival had been happening throughout East Africa, since the latter 1920s, beginning in Rwanda and spreading to the Belgian Congo, Tanganyika, Kenya and the Sudan. Mennonite missions began on the eastern shore of Lake Victoria in the mid-1930s, initiated by the Lancaster (PA) Conference mission board, the EMBM. Pioneer missionaries were Elam and Elizabeth Stauffer and John and Ruth Mosemann. Consultation with other missionaries on the field led the Mennonites to the village of Shirati, near the border of Kenya.
Evangelistic, educational and medical activities began immediately and additional missionaries came in. They were instructed to present the gospel in ways appropriate to the local African culture, but the missionaries had not been well-prepared in cultural anthropology. Misunderstandings and strains developed between missionaries and the African converts and also between the missionaries and their home board in Lancaster. African customs such as knocking out front teeth, stretching ear lobes, and especially polygamy were opposed by missionaries who wanted to impose new customs such as requiring black shoes, unmustached faces for men and uncut hair for women. Missionaries were sometimes insensitive to their African brothers and sisters. The Africans ridiculed the cultural errors and personal habits of the missionaries and were jealous of the apparent wealth and power of the Westerners. Impatience, gossip, hypocrisy and sin were present, according to Bishop Z. Kisari.
Preaching and prayer preceded the conference in Shirati in 1942. On the last day of the conference there was a feeling that “God would visit us,” wrote Kisari. Prayer, silence and weeping occurred. Kisari described the event, writing, “It was as when you strike a match to petrol.” People began confessing their sins and “our self-righteousness melted before one another.” The 5 ½ -hour meeting closed with prayer. In Bishop Kisari’s words, “That August evening in 1942 the Holy Spirit gave us the insight that both the missionaries and the Africans were all lost from that one true village of God the Father.”
Lives were changed, of Africans and missionaries alike, and they experienced new peace and joy with each other. The mission of the church expanded in the latter 1940s and African leadership emerged with ever-greater authority over their church.
James Hertzler is retired after 32 years on the faculty at Goshen College as a history professor, teaching African History among other things. He is an active member of College Mennonite Church.
Mennonite Historical Bulletin, April 2000