African Christian Women and the Emergence of Nationalist Subjectivities in Tanzania, 1860--1960s

In the 1860s British missionaries of the Universities' Mission to Central Africa began working with African refugees from the Indian Ocean slave trade. The missionaries established schools on Zanzibar and mainland Tanzania to train African refugees as evangelists, in the hopes that they would introduce Christianity throughout East Africa and work to create a single, supraethnic spiritual community. The theological backgrounds of the mission's founders and the social circumstances of mid-nineteenth century East Africa provided conditions that made a supra-ethnic community possible. For example, the mission focused specifically on what they believed to be the power of African women to engender---both biologically and ideologically---a community of believers. This dissertation focuses on the UMCA's female adherents, women who trained as clerics' wives and teachers, nurses and nuns, wives and mothers. The every-day work of African female evangelists is a lens through which I examine how certain widespread habits of mind and certain modes of thought developed within the UMCA's African communities. Specifically, I look at how this disparate group of African Anglicans first came to think of themselves as members of a supra-ethnic spiritual community and later how the values and goals of this community became entangled with those of other communities in Tanzania. Throughout the mission's 100 years of existence, individuals motivated by modernizing Christianity and by a sense of belonging to a supra-ethnic spiritual community became increasingly involved with territorial, pan-Africanist, anti-colonial nationalist, and political organizations that grew up around the church in Tanzania. I argue that African Anglicans applied their inherited discourses of Christian modernity and supra-ethnic unity to these new circumstances, and that by looking at day-to-day, domestic, and less self-consciously political contributions of individuals to community development we can see instances when individuals continued to find meaning in longer-standing, less self-consciously political ideals of supraethnic community, and where they applied these discourses to new circumstances in ways that were explicitly political, such as the contributions of a multi-generational network of Anglican female evangelists to the development of nationalism and national identity in Tanzania.