African History Commons^™

Tickets, Concerts And School Fees: Money And New Christian Communities In Colonial Zimbabwe, Carol Summers

History Faculty Publications

It is worth exploring how this new identity emerged. In standard mission history narratives, European missionaries emphasized their own role and that of God, appealing for more funds from Europe and America within a heroic evangelical narrative which characterized missionaries as pioneers harvesting African people, like ripe grain, for Jesus. This theme has been echoed by African church historians who have tended to focus on church leadership and the ways officials overcame challenges and built institutions.² More recently, anthropologists and historians have emphasized how communities under pressure from colonial contact, conquest, and institutionalization found in Christianity a way of …