But I wish they did. Hey, has anyone noticed a marked increase in these drones from Utah in South Minneapolis lately? What do they think they are goig to accomplish there?

Anyway:

SALT LAKE CITY – The U.S. Census Bureau has told Utah’s elected leaders it won’t count Mormon missionaries serving overseas in the nation’s next head count.

Census Bureau officials, rejecting Utah’s lobbying efforts for the better part of a decade, say there’s no way to reliably count the overseas missionaries.

Utah leaders say the omission cost the state an extra congressional seat in 2000, when the state fell just 857 people short of receiving the last available slot in the U.S. House. (msbnc)

Missionaries. Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em. Actually, we can live without ’em.

It turns out that a number of calls and emails did come in to the station today but we were unable to get to them. Among the emails, there is this two parter from from Jason Thibeault:

I have a two part question for Greg Laden. In conversations on your blog related to the topic prior to this show, you mentioned that there are secular missions to many of these areas, the purposes for which are to provide the services that the religious missions provide, only omitting the proselytizing. You said at the time that you didn’t know much about them — have you managed to find out more about any existing missions since then?

When I look up “secular mission” on Google, I find stuff about missions where the word “secular” is used for some reason or another, and I find myself. This is not good.

Perhaps the secular “mission” right now is the UN, and in some cases USAID (but if you want that to work, you’ve got to contact your representatives in congress and push for critical evaluation and positive reform) and various NGO’s that are not religious. I think we need to do more research on this, and also, to make things happen.

Also, the thought of setting up such a mission without the backing of a church or religious institution seems particularly daunting. How do you figure one might go about putting together such a mission, if not supported by a religion or university; for instance what would it involve with regard to raising funds and establishing contacts in the countries in question? I’m not suggesting I’m going to do it personally, but hypothetically, if someone like me wanted to, is it possible?

I think the thing to do is to work directly with existing semi-autonomous developing communities. These things exist. I can’t advise specifically regarding the Congo at this time, but in South Africa, I’ve worked with communities that have an internal structure, are fitted to the existing governmental system, and work with secular NGO’s. An outside entity could hook up with some existing partnership such as that and provide grant money for specific, defined projects (this school or that goat farming operation or this water supply program or whatever).

Thanks for the questions, Jason.

Also, as long as water has come up, browse through this blog site for ideas as to how to get involved in that specific issue.

“So, have you found anything interesting?” which is a standard question to which the answer was always “no” … we do not want to give people the idea that they should head out into the bush with a shovel. “So, what to the Pygmies think of your research.” And so on.

I remember that during our second dinner, the fourth or fifth question was this:

“So, since Radiocarbon dating has been proved to not work, how do we really know that the earth is billions of years old?”

Well, that was not one of the standard questions paleoanthropologists like me usually hear, but it is a standard question often asked by creationists. And since Mary and Joseph were pretty hard core and traditional Christians, I could have guessed that they would also be creationists.

So I answered the question and the conversation moved on.

At the next dinner, six weeks or so later, there was more chatter, and more questions, and then one of those creationist questions popped up. I think it was about Piltdown.

“Since Piltdown was a total forgery, how do we know that all the other fossils are not also forgeries?”

I do not know how many times I had dinner with Joseph and Mary. Once or twice each time I stayed at their mission house, in their guest room for rent, and I probably stayed there four times over two years. So there were about five or six dinners. And for all of then but the first, which is when Mary found out that I studied Human Evolution, there were questions like this.

The last time I stayed in their house, things were different. Grinker and I had come into town, I think with a third colleague, and we could not stay at Bwana Ndege’s home (the inn was full, as it were) so we were assigned to the Mission. However, Joseph and Mary were gone. Their stint in the field was over and they were now back in the US, with their kids, probably not ever to return to Zaire again. Or at least not to this mission station. Such is the way of the missionaries; Other than the catholics, who may well stay for an entire life in one spot, the Evangelical missionaries were rotated in and out at various time scales ranging from weeks to a couple of years. Joseph and Mary had stayed a relatively long time as it was.

In fact, no one had been assigned to replace them at this particular station, so we were sent over to Andre’s place first. Andre, who really had little to do with the missions other than the fact that he was a neighbor and, through his retail store, supplied them with goods, was holding the key to the mission house. So we got the key from Andre and went over to the house to fend for ourselves.

Naturally, we had to poke around a bit. We needed to find bedding, pillows, to check out the plumbing to see if the water was on, and so on. The house was mostly deserted, with most of the furniture with which we were familiar removed, and virtually no evidence of Joseph and Mary themselves remained. All personal items were gone.

But there was one room in the back of the house that was of interest. I had noticed Mary frequently going in and out of this room on our visits. I assumed there was some basic household materiel stored there, or something, because she would go in there often enough, even during dinner. So, curious, I went and had a look.

It was a small bedroom converted to a library. There was a modest set of shelves about one third with books. Most were Readers’ Digest anthologies and that sort of thing, there were bibles in various languages, and some language learning textbooks specific to the region.

Then, there was this other book. This was a well worn, dog-eared volume sitting on a shelf more or less by itself, just below my eye level. It has numerous bits of paper sticking out of it, being used as bookmarks.

And the title was: “How to talk to evolutionists.”

Hmm…

So we held hands and bowed our heads, and Mary led a prayer to Jesus for the bounty we were about to receive and stuff, and we all said Amen and were about to dig in, when Mary interrupted with a tone of voice and a hand signal that made everyone stop with their forks in mid air.

“We have a new tradition we’d like you to participate in,” she said. Her husband glanced at her with an obvious lack of understanding. I guessed he had forgotten about the new tradition and was going to keep his mouth shut for the moment.

“We now read a special bible passage at every dinner, to reinforce the children’s learning.” As she said this, she reached behind her and pulled a bible off a side table, and opened it to a previously marked page.

“Rich, I wonder if you would read this aloud for us?”

What can you do? Hey, even to this day, as a practicing atheist with an activist agenda, I’ll read bits and pieces of the bible at whichever Jewish holiday it is that my in laws do that at. Nobody thinks anything of it. Surely, there was a bit of irony here, in that they picked Grinker, who is Jewish, to read from the New Testament, but whatever. What harm could that be, right?

“Oh, OK,” Grinker said after he took the book. “No problem.”

And so Grinker read the text, and a few sentences in it became clear that this was one of those bible passages that had a lot to say about the Jews. The Jews were bad, the Jews could not be trusted, the Jews needed to convert, and so on and so forth. I don’t remember the passage, it was probably from Matthew or maybe one of those especially anti-Semitic bits from John. When it was over, Grinker was, to me, visibly disturbed by having been asked to read this, and possibly even disturbed that such offensive rambling was even part of a ‘religious’ text that he was undoubtedly unfamiliar with. But he kept a smile on his face and this was not brought up again. Joseph himself looked rather embarrassed as well. It was now obvious to us that Mary had created this ruse of a bible reading after saying grace. She lied, and she offended a guest. She was dissing the Jew, or at least, dissing his presumed religion. A victory, I suppose, would have been if Grinker asked to be baptized at the next possible opportunity.

It is true that there was a great deal of variation across the missionaries in their beliefs as well as their practices. Those who were less radical about the religion and more involved in the work they were doing, however, had to keep up the front of being devout. This was, essentially, a cult and they had to maintain a certain level of adherence to doctrine. It is always the case, internationally, that pilots are treated differently. They do not follow the same rules as other people, they are left more on their own, yet when they break certain rules they are punished more severely. For instance, a pilot who is caught bringing any kind of materiel, no matter how innocuous, across a border without proper papers, may lose his licence or at least his job. This was the case with a pilot who would bring VHS tapes of recent movies from town to town in Zaire and back to Belgium, rotating them among a group of people who shared ownership in them. So it was also true with the missionary pilots. They kept more to themselves, and although they would always pray before takeoff (and sometimes during the flight) they were more pragmatic and appeared less religious than the other missionaries.

The Africans who partook in the mission life, living on these compounds, also varied in their level of indoctrination. One man that I ended up working with quite a bit had been a long time resident of one of the mission stations, and had the status of “teacher.” But on the side he was a trader in black market goods, and had served as a mercenary as well as being a soldier in Idi Amin’s army. These were all things that got him in trouble with the mission once they discovered them. He was required to move off station, though his wife and children could remain if they wanted to.

For every white missionary on a mission station, there are probably several dozen Africans, but judging from what I’ve seen in the more remote stations that were not really full communities, or the urban stations that were satellites to the larger extended ‘villages,’ the ratio of African to Foreigner needed to sustain the middle class lifestyle the missionaries enjoyed was perhaps as low as six to one. The duties of the African workers included cooking (though “madam” was the actual cook, there were many cooking related tasks to carry out, including of course cooking for the staff), cleaning, maintaining equipment like the generators, serving as a guard, rebuilding roofs, teaching Madam, Master and the children a local language, and so on.

I do not know many details of the system, but I got the impression that these workers were being observed and to some extent tested on a regular basis, and if as individuals showed themselves to be literate, devout, and well behaved, they would be asked (allowed?) to do “pastoral work.” This meant going among the masses visiting the sick, reading bible passages to people, and so on.

Most important is this: The Africans were taught a version of the religion that was the most strict of all. Different Americans, Brits, Australians and so on would come and go, with different levels of involvement in the religious aspects of the mission. Pilots were pilots who happened to be protestant. Electricians and other technicians were experts on needed services but not necessarily particularly religious. If the missionaries were the Pilgrims, the others were the crew on the Mayflower that made the voyage happen. But the interface between the community of missionaries and the African community was primarily Madam, and to a lesser extent Master (or “Bwana”) and at this interface only the strictest teachings were carried out. As a result, the Africans who carried out the pastoral work were the most conservative of all members of the communities, and when these individuals rose to prominence now and then, their conservatism had an influence.

About 15 years ago, the English Anglican church, which has missionized in this manner since the days of Livingstone, held the first international meeting in many years, and at that meeting the number of African born, African trained bishops who were of this highly conservative ilk was larger than any other faction of bishops. At that meeting, the bishops voted all sorts of policy changes and moved the Anglican church, worldwide, towards a position of modern conservatism that would be envied by the board of directors at Oral Roberts college.

The chickens. They came home. And roosted.

Actual missionaries

Frankly, I think that the world of sceptics and non believers looks a bit asinine for not making much more of an effort to replace these positive effects in a secular way and to give the missionaries a run for their money.

One of the reasons that I’ve written these essays is because I was asked to address this issue by Mike Haubrich. Mike is the producer of Minnesota Atheist Talk Radio. The idea was that I would write a few blog posts on my experiences with missionaries, and then we would do an Atheist Talk Radio spot on the topic. As it turns out, this coming Sunday’s show will be the last Minnesota Atheist Talk Radio instalment. After this, the show will be off the air forever. So don’t miss the show! Mike is producing the upcoming show, and Stephanie Zvan will be conducting the interview.

In other words, you have no clue, most likely. And not only do you have no clue, but most of the bad stuff happening to these people is your fault. And you’re probably never going to get a clue. In fact, you are going to spend your energy denying that this is all your fault instead of just doing something to undo what your civilization has done.

The reason you not likely to figure this out, and that you are most likely to keep doing the wrong this, is because the reality that you are willfully misunderstanding is actually quite complicated, but you’ve been trained by your culture and society to view Africa and Africans as rather monolithic and simple.

These posts on missionaries don’t help much in that regard. In these posts, the Africans themselves are not really featured, and though they are far from one dimensional (do look and compare the different individuals mentioned) since these posts are not directly about them, there is just not much there. But I do hope that in reading these seven essays that you will come to understand one thing: When the missionary is showing the slide show about the great work the missionaries are doing, whether you are seeing this in church or on the web or at the local community center or public school, and the missionary is asking you for your money to help do more, please do write a check.

And send it to the UN. Or to the Ituri Forest People’s fund. Or some place, but not the missions.

Here are links to the missionary posts:

On a Mission from God

Forget the Maginot Line, What About the Beer Line?

Our Research Camp as a Mission Station

The Great White Missionary

Attack of the Hound of Malembi. Or, “Whose are these people, anyway?”

Don’t be a Jew

The good book

One day a rabid dog appeared out of nowhere, bit three or four goats, killed my cat, and bit six people.

The dog disappeared into the forest never to be seen again. The people who were bitten were not concerned because the bites were minor. Rabies, it turns out, was not a disease on the consciousness of the people living here. Grinker and I spent a long time, gathering elders and other influential individuals together, showing them medical books, explaining the nature of the disease, trying to convince the community to convince these six people that they were in danger and that we needed to do something to save them. We were quite prepared to try to save their lives, but we needed their cooperation first. Then, well, we’d figure something out…

The realization that rabies was a real disease, what it meant and how it looked, and that these six individuals may well have been exposed to it came to everyone in the crowd that had gathered at our research site, including the six bitten and their families in a flash. The twenty or thirty people standing and sitting around listening to us went from thinking we were nuts to totally getting it in in a single moment of time. I credit Grinker with making this work.

We had been explaining rabies, talking about symptoms, telling people it was a disease that did not manifest for days after bite, and trying to convince people that once symptoms showed up it was too late … death was inevitable and it would be slow and painful.

No one was getting it. This was due, in part, to the lack of day to day discourse on disease theory, infectious disease, and so on. And partly because it was very very unusual that we, the outsiders, would know something that they, the locals, would not know. We had spent a very long period of time and a great deal of effort convincing the people here that we did not have much to offer them, but that they had a lot to offer us in terms of knowledge, and indeed, the knowledge generally flowed one way, from them to us. It was against our policies to have much knowledge flowing the other way. That would often constitute undue interference. We wanted them to teach us, not the other way around. That may be the main reason that no one was getting it.

Finally, here’s what happened: Grinker handed me one of the medical books that had a description of the rabies symptoms in it, and said “Read this out loud for everyone to hear, one sentence at a time. I’ll act it out.”

So we made a bit of space in the middle of the crowd, and I translated the descriptions of the symptoms of rabies as Grinker acted them out. Grinker sucks as an actor, but he did a pretty good job at foaming at the mouth, convulsions, and hydrophobia. Finally, I threw a glass of water on him and he screamed and screamed at the top of his lungs, rolled around in a convulsive fit for a while, and died.

The crowd fell silent. Suddenly, one of the men from the village next to our base camp started saying something — in an agitated fashion — in the language that these people speak that we only understood a few words of. But I heard the word dog, and the word for illness. Someone else started to speak and I heard the mention of a year, a date a few years back, and someone’s name and the word for “old woman” and the word for “to die.”

Others joined in. People were remembering a story. They were piecing together previously unconnected events that had happened several years ago. One of the men stood up and shouted something out and pointed to Grinker and said in KiSwahili “Just like that. There was a woman here, seven or eight years ago, who was bitten by a dog and two weeks later she died just like that!”

Bingo. Now everyone had it.

Now, the rest of the story is long and involved, but I’ll tell you the simple version of it. We got the six people who were bitten up to the old mission station, 36 kilometers to the north. We had heard rumors that there was a radio there that might be convinced to work.

I suddenly was glad for my days as a kid playing around with amateur radio, because I knew enough to figure out what pieces of gear should be pulled together, how to wire them up, how to set up the antenna, etc.

We had information on when the local missionaries used the radio, and when they listened for signals from remote stations. Every main mission had a radio and every day a volunteer would staff the radio and carry out the relay procedures. But we did not have a working receiver, just a working transmitter. Without a receiver we could not really know if the transmitter was working. So several times during that day and the next morning, we got on the radio and this is what we said:

Attention, attention. This is Andudu Mission. This is Andudu Mission. We are the Ngodingodi researchers. We have no receiver, only a transmitter.

We have six people who were bitten by a rabid dog. Repeat. Six people were bitten by rabid dog. We have a trained nurse but no doctor. We need rabies vaccine in cure dose.

This is Andudu Mission by Nepoko. Drop six cure doses of rabies vaccine on the old airstrip. We are clearing airstrip now. Drop vaccine now, we will call later if we need evacuation.

And we said that whole thing five or six times each on the appropriate frequency at the appropriate times throughout the day, but we had no way of knowing if it was being heard.

At the same time we organized a group of people from the mission to clear the airstrip of vegetation and termite mounds. This airstrip had not been used in years, so this was quite a bit of work. As we did this, we also implemented a system of keeping the airstrip cleared, figuring, with all this work, why not have this as an emergency resource?

We did not have a working vehicle that would make it to town at the time that could carry the six victims. Our plan was to walk with the six victims and enough people to carry them part way (to keep their metabolism low and thus slow down the progress of the rabies) to a place 54 km north where we felt sure we could flag down a truck and bring them 200 km or so to the nearest hospital. But as we were working out that plan, something else happened.

A small plane, a Cessna, buzzed the airstrip once, passed overhead again, and dropped a package on the area where workers were clearing away vegetation. The workers brought us the package, and we opened it.

Six cure doses of rabies vaccine, and six reusable, new needles, packed in such a was as to easily survive a drop from a passing small plane. The nurse, who happened to be living at this mission, started treatment right away. Everyone lived.

~~~

Over a year later I was in the city arranging to fly into the very airstrip we had cleared. I was speaking with the Missionary Air Fellowship pilot about this.

“You are going to have to navigate, because I have no idea where this is.”

“No problem” I confidently replied, having no idea if I could do this or not.

“If you can’t find the airstrip … or if I don’t like the looks of it … we fly on to Beni and you’ll actually be farther from your destination than you are now.”

“I’ll take my chances. No problem,” secretly calculating how I was going to get to the study site from Beni should that happen.

“By the way,” he suddenly said. “I’m the pilot who dropped that rabies vaccine last year!”

“You are! Well, thanks, you saved six lives!”

“Well, that was God’s work, I was just helping,” he laughed. “By the way, how are they doing?”

“Fine, all six are just fine.”

“Are they back in the ‘States?”

“Huh?”

“The States, are the six who were bitten back in the States?”

“Well, ah, no, they were Zairois, from a nearby village. They weren’t Americans.”

Silence.

Then … “Well, OK, I’ll see you in the morning at the airport. Bring your map!”

So the next day I met up with the pilot, and we found the airstrip, and landed with no difficulties. Well, the landing was not really without incident, but that is another story for another time. But in any event, I got to the project area in a day or two.

Then, a month later, someone passing by the research camp stopped in with a bag of stuff.

“This is from Andudu, some mail that was dropped there for the Americans,” he said.

“Thanks.” … and when we opened the mail, there was an item from the Missionary Air Fellowship.

It was a bill for over $600.00, for rabies vaccine and the cost of flying the vaccine from Nairobi, Kenya. Some 16 months after the fact, and we just got the bill. And the date the bill was written was one day after that conversation with the pilot.

I am not going comment on the shifting rationals that must have been … well, shifting and stuff, for this sequence of events to have happened as it did. But I will tell you what I did next.

It occurred to me that the six bitten men were all living in a village down by the river which was initially set up by missionaries back when they were still working in the area. This village hosted the Christmas and Easter celebrations, and they maintained a hut for any Evangelical missionaries that might pass through the area. Which they they never did, but nonetheless the hut was maintained.

In other words, the six bitten men were part of the mission station, a remote and forgotten part, yes, but essentially they were “with” the mission. They were not “my” people or “our” people. They were not just some random people. They were “their” people ….

So, I got a sharpie and I wrote on the bill:

“This came to us, but these were your people from the Mission Village. Bill sent to us by accident. Cheap at twice the price!”

And mailed it to the missionaries. Never heard back on that one.

But then an even rarer thing happened.

As we sat, being rare and chatting about the weather, we heard a the sound of a distant truck approaching. Our visitors (there were always visitors) — Lese (farmers) and Efe (Pygmies) — heard it first. They also figured out first that this was not the car of the Masoeur, the “Sisters” of the catholic mission to the south. (The sisters had driven by a week or two earlier, and thus, might be on their way back from town by this time.) And it was not our truck. Our Land Rover was sitting there in it’s little house quietly growing grass out of it’s front grill. Nobody else drove up and down the “road” so this was a real mystery.

As the vehicle got closer, even I could hear that it was unfamiliar to us. Also, it was not hard to surmise that the driver was unfamiliar with the terrain. Several times the sound of the engine would die away as the driver idled, presumably looking with little relish at the “road” immediately ahead, considering how best to bypass the crevasses and holes without falling into a stream or getting hopelessly stuck.

One of us, Grinker or me, said “Maybe they’ll turn around.”¹ This drew dirty looks from our neighbors. They wanted visitors. We wanted to relish being in the most remote spot on this continent. This was always a minor conflict.

From the time we first heard the vehicle to the time it pulled up to our research camp a half hour passed. This was enough time for a dozen additional friends and neighbors to arrive in anticipation of a visit, perhaps from someone interesting or important. They wanted to be there to see who it was. Our neighbors conjectured that most likely the visitors would be more researchers, coming to join Grinker and me. That could mean more employment for the people in the local villages as a new roof would surely be needed for the hut the new arrivals would stay in. Maybe two huts. If they were a couple that would be one hut. If they were a couple and a third person, that would be two huts. If they were three separate people that would be three huts, and there werent’ three huts! Perhaps a whole new hut would have to be built, and that would be work for more than the usual roofers! And perhaps the new arrivals would need an informant to help with research, or language tutors.

A virtual economic stimulus package could be driving down the road right now!!

I thought it unlikely that new researchers would be arriving because we had not received any word of potential visitors, but given that there was no direct contact with the outside world and no reliable system of mail, that did not mean much. Indeed, when my doctoral adviser had died the previous year during the summer, I did not learn of his death until mid October. So really, this could be anybody.

When the vehicle did make its way down the road close enough to our camp to either pull into our hidden driveway, or accidentally drive past without noticing us (very likely given that we were disguised as a traditional local village and set back from the road), a handful of our neighbors were well positioned on the road to direct what we now saw to be a very new fairly large American built four wheel drive vehicle into the Ngodingodi Research Camp.

Rich and I had already decided, conversing privately in English, to discourage whoever it was from staying unless they needed something serious. It was the policy of the research project to not become a tourist attraction. It was not hospitable, but it was normal, to send people away.

So, up drove the vehicle. The diver was a man in his 40s who was somewhat large, somewhat imposing, dressed in the usual safari suit, and American. He was accompanied, if memory serves, by a wife and teenage boy child who made such little impression on me that I only barely remember them. They were quiet and obsequious to the man. This was very clearly his show. They were also accompanied by one or two Africans, young men, acting as servants.

“Well, hallo everyone, with God’s grace, we made it! Are you the anthropologists?”

Oh crap, he’s here to actually visit us, not just passing through. Someone must have told him about us.

“Ah, yes, we are … this is our research camp,” Rich said, as the Great White Visitor sauntered around his car opening doors and his family and servants got out of the vehicle and started wandering around. “How did you know about us?”

“Oh, a man named Andre mentioned your research camp when I was in town up north. I came to see the Pygmies!”

“OK, hold on a second,” Rich jumped in.

“We don’t use that word … the ‘P’ word … some people find it offensive,” I said. “And you can’t ‘see’ them. They is not a … tourist… attraction.”

As I spoke he came to the back of the vehicle and opened it, without much listening to what I was saying. “Who’d like some lunch! We’ve got ham and cheese sandwiches, some tomato and bacon for BLT’s, cokes, and look, plenty of ice in the cooler!”

Bacon? … Ice?

We are in the most remote part of Africa and we have bacon? … and Ice?

“So, who’s hungry?”

So, Rich turned to me and in some language that was not English quietly said …. “well, he can stay for a while I suppose.”

“Until the ice melts” I said. “And we finish off the bacon.”

“I’m not into bacon much,” replied rich, struggling, as I had, to come up with an understandable word for bacon in a language spoken on in a region with no pigs,² “but did you see that stash of candy bars? And he’s got hot chocolate.”

Our private conversation was interrupted by the Great White Visitor, who was not paying much attention to anyone else anyway. “I’m a missionary. From Oklahoma.”

So, OK, we could let the guy stay for a while. But we had to talk about this “seeing the pygmies” bit. He was obviously unaware that three or four of the local people standing around watching him and his party were Efe (Pygmies). He needed to be educated.

Rich and I were not merely justifying what we were doing for the sake of bacon and ice. We simply made the decision to spend a little time with this guy and his retinue and talk about the Efe, maybe introduce them to some Efe, and help him learn to have a better attitude than to treat the Efe like some kind of tourist destination. Also, he identified himself as a Missionary from Oklahoma, not as a missionary from some particular group. What this meant is the following. He was not an in-country missionary. He would be funded by some church in Oklahoma to come out to “Africa” or someplace and convert some people over to Christianity. He would take pictures of this and give slide shows in the churches in and near his community showing how he had done this converting and how their money was not wasted, then he would go after more funds to come back and do more converting.

This is how all the missions were funded, but over a longer term and with a larger organization handling the flow of money, the flow of personnel, the flow of supplies and equipment. Great White Missionary was a rogue … working on his own, paying for his vacations to various foreign lands by giving a dog and pony show between trips showing how he had converted x number of these people and y number of those people who otherwise were pagans living in direct community with Satan.

So we thought we would spend a little time with him so he’d get a certain impression of what was going on out here, mainly to avoid having him go back, raise the funds to missionize our project area, and return with reinforcements.

And it would take a while to eat all this bacon anyway. Hey, anyone would have done the same thing in our situation…

Oh, and there was a lot of bacon. There was bacon that was cooked already and only needed to be reheated in the toaster oven that magically operated in the back of his Great White Truck. And there were kilos and kilos of frozen bacon that he wanted us to take from him to be distributed among the Efe.

So, Great White Missionary and his retinue sat with us at our research camp and we served tea with his BLT’s, ham and cheese sandwiches, and candy bars. He had many questions and many things to tell us. His way of communicating was like this: Random crap would rattle around his head and every now and then some item would happen to be near that hole in the front we call a mouth and fall out.

“The Pygmies are pagans, they believe that spirits live in rocks.”

“Actually, most of the Efe, we don’t call them Pygmies, are monotheists.”

“These Pygmies have already been converted? I’d like to watch them hunt. Can you arrange for me to hunt with them? Is is true that many of the children are born with tails?”

“Actually, the Efe, we don’t call them Pygmies, are monotheists because that is their religion. They are not Christians…. And that tail thing is not true…”

“Everything is based on a kernel of truth. You better check for the tails. Offer them some of this bacon and I’ll bet they’ll go hunting with me. Can we see where they live? Do you have a rifle?”

… this sort of thing went on for a while, and as it did, Rich and I formulated a plan and slowly put it into effect. In the background, we kept up a conversation with one of our Efe informants who’s camp was actually only a few hundred meters away just off the road …

“So, do the Pygmies have a concept of hell and Satan? Satan’s greatest trick is not being known to those who worship him. I’m afraid they may worship Satan.”

“Ah, well, no, these Efe (We don’t call them Pygmies) are actually Christians!” (changing our story a little).

“Really? Hmm.. In Zimbabwe, I taught a thousand people in one village to accept the word of Jesus our savior. With a single sermon.”

“Yes. The Efe have been Christians for generations, thanks to the mission up north of here. You passed it on your way down. There used to be white missionaries there, and in those days, everyone became a Christian!”

“Really?” … a sense of disappointment creeping into his voice. “In Zambia, I started a food program. To receive the food, you had to be a young boy. By giving the food only to the young boys, the food would get distributed evenly across all the households.”

“Right. Everybody. For miles in every direction. The whole region. Already Christian.”

“Oh. Well, can we go and visit a Pygmy Village. In that village in Zambia, I had a rule. If you behaved, you got a specially made token … a coin I had minted in Oklahoma, like a subway token, at a trophy shop. They had crosses on them. Every time you were good you got one or two tokens. Then, twice a week the young boys would line up and turn their tokens over to me and they would get a bag of food.”

“Ah… right, OK. We could visit an Efe camp. We don’t call them Pygmies. They are the Efe. They don’t live in villages.”

“The Africans are all like children, even when they are adults. But if you set up a structure for them, they’ll follow it. You wouldn’t believe the size of the Boa Constrictor I saw in Malawi. It was twenty feet long. A certain amount of discipline is important, and that is what I taught the boys in Zambia. Great, let’s go to the Pygmy Village”

“They live in a camp. There’s an Efe Camp nearby. This gentleman here is from that camp, he’ll show us.”

… So, we spent the next hour in the bush, cutting our way through vines and undergrowth, traipsing through swamps and streams, climbing over steep and muddy banks, and cutting through more undergrowth. You see, the Efe place their camps, most of the time, on an easily accessible trail connecting the camp to the road or a nearby village. This particular camp was a five minute walk, across the street and through a meadow and then into secondary forest growth for about 50 meters. But we took the long way. The very long, rugged way. We felt it essential that Great White Boy Lover not know the route to anything in our project area….

Now, covered with mud and the ubiquitous rotted plant matter that rains continuously on passers by in the rain forest, soaked with dew and sweat, we arrived in the “Pygmy Village.”

“Have a seat” I said, handing Great White and each of his two companions (the servants were left behind in our research camp) three sticks. As they held the sticks, one of the Efe cut three pieces of vine off of a nearby tree, and in seconds, fashioned each into a sturdy ring about 8 inches in diameter. By that time I had picked my own vine-ring off the roof of a nearby hut, and had placed my own three sticks within the ring, and made a chair on which to sit.

The Forest Folding Chair is a hoot. Three sticks through a ring, at an angle. The first stick holds up the second, the second the third, the third the first. There is nothing soft to sit on (though you can add cloth or a pile of leaves) but they keep you up out of the mud and above the ants. However, getting the seat to not fall down, and sitting in it without causing it to crash, is an art that takes some time to learn.

After considerable fooling around and a great deal of help from the Efe men, who suppressed their laugh while the women and children ROTF at the clumsiness of the Great White Retinue, all were seated. Great White Missionary proceeded to ask me questions to ask the Efe, and mostly I simply relayed the questions and answers back and forth. They were about hunting, about snakes, about food, and about god. The god questions ….. I just made up the answers so that the missionary would be assured that everyone here was already a Christian.

As we spoke, one of the Efe men unwrapped a small bundle of marijuana and broke it to little pieces, putting aside the few seeds that were in the buds, and cut the leaves and flowers into tiny pieces using his arrow, allowing the bits to fall on a flat sheet of metal that had been sitting by the fire. Meanwhile, a different man took a leave of tobacco and placed it right near the fire where it would dry very thoroughly and quickly. Just as the tobacco was starting to emit a bit of smoke, he pulled it away from the fire, powdered it by crushing it in his fist, and added it to the marijuana to make a rather potent mix. The mix was held near the fire a bit longer to dry it further.

A third Efe man took a large plantain plant leaf from the roof of a nearby hut where it had been stored earlier. No one had noticed that this man actually had cut the plantain leaf, about eight feet long, from a plant right next to where we were sitting at the Ngodingodi research camp, and walked off with it at the same time the rest of us headed out for the Efe camp. This man walked directly to the camp rather than taking the long way, and was in the Efe camp, having a nap, at the time of our arrival.

Anyway, he stripped the fleshy leafy part of the leaf away, leaving only the stem that runs down the middle. He then took two strips of palm ‘wood’ that had been fastened together to make a 10 foot long stick, and skilfully ran this through the middle of the plantain leaf’s stem the long way, making it into a giant hollowed-out pipe stem. He then cut a platform into the thick end, and produced a small clay pipe bowl and set it onto the platform, pushing it into the stem, so that the hole of the clay pipe lined up with the hole he had made down the middle.

And thus, he produced an eight foot long pot pipe.

The men then loaded the pipe up with the pot/tobacco mixture. One man sat at one end of the pipe and another and at the other end, eight feet apart. The man at the clay-pie end dropped a small piece of burning wood from the fire onto the mixture while the other man took one huge toke, started gasping and coughing, pounded his open palm on the juncture of his upper arm and chest making a loud popping sound, and shouted “Hojeeee!!!! Mardo!!!!” and passed the pipe to a nearby woman, who did the same thing except the part about yelling “Hojee” (inside joke.)

Thusly, the pipe was refilled and passed around, one filling getting two or three tokes (and one toke per person). Every now and then, someone would cut a bit off the mouth-end of the pipe and discard it. If the pipe needed to be brought to someone sitting farther away than nine or ten feet (the distance that the pipe could be simply passed hand to hand because it was so long) then a child was called over and told to bring the pipe to the next person. In this way, minors were implicated in the practice of smoking pot. Some but not all of the teenagers, who must have looked to Great White’s western eyes (despite his experience with… young boys …) to be a few years younger than they were (as young Efe often do given their size) also smoked.

The young son of Great White had his head bowed and was praying. Mom was wide eyed and … looked like she wanted to join in. Great White himself was turning red and his questions got increasingly incoherent as he obtained a reasonable contact high.

When the pipe eventually came to me, I took a medium size toke but left a lot (but not all) of the smoke in my mouth, and immediately blew it out. I ‘pretended’ to cough, and gave Great White a side long look, saying “I have to do this. Part of the research. But I never inhale…”

For his part, Grinker took a totally fake toke (he never smoked) but pretended to become totally stoned, rolled his eyes back into his head, and fell backwards off his chair onto a midden of dead leaves and cassava shavings.

~~~~

Later on, back at the research camp, Great White and his fellow travelers silently packed up the truck. Only part of the promised bacon wad handed over, and this was given to the Efe who accommodated us. The pot smoking experience had totally blown their minds and they were not going to recover from this. The ‘fact’ that these Efe were Christians was not in accord with what this Oklahoman Evangelical could reconcile with their clearly Satanic behavior. I wondered what stories he would weave to turn this experience into something he could somehow take credit for. He never got to do his hunting (… in fact, I had told him that this was not hunting season. Which is a very, very funny concept …) so maybe he would make something up about hunting.

Great White was an ignoramus. He was a liar. He was a pedophile. He was a swindler. He was not a typical missionary, because most of the missionaries were not rogue like he was, but rather, part of a larger and highly organized effort. But he embodied much of the hypocrisy institutionalized in the larger organizations, personified it, made it real, palpable, and more overtly despicable.

A few months later, I ran into Andre, the merchant in town who suggested this visit to begin with. As usual, we retired to the back of Andre’s store for some Greek coffee. I told him the story of the Great White Visit. Andre was embarrassed.

“I won’t sent you any one like that again,” he promised.

“I know, my friend. I know that.”

¹We usually spoke in a locally understood language even when speaking to each other, as part of our own language training. The idea was to use English only when absolutely necessary. Really, I should be telling you this whole story in Kinguana, but that would chagiza you.

²A derivation of “The pig of the forest that lives in our house among us, it’s flesh” if I recall correctly. It would have been easy to say in KiSwahili but for some reason he was saying it in KiLese.

Our research camp (named “Ngodingodi”¹) did become a bit of a secular mission station because we provided medicines and some other basic services that might have been available if a mission was nearby. But of course, we were secular.

I should also mention, for completeness, that I felt two distinct pressures related to the missionaries. First, although we filled in this gap in services, we were instructed by the project directors, who had made some deal with somebody some time some where, to not go out of our way to appear to be providing medicine to Africans beyond a certain distance outward from our facility. Second, when I was discussing my own research, I was not to mention the word Evolution to the missionaries. It was not hard to follow the first rule because this distance was very far out from where I worked. I ignored the second rule, naturally .

But getting back to the main point: I have often been asked: Don’t the missionaries essentially trade their medicine for the soul of the needy? The answer is … it’s complicated.

As I’ve stated before, there are different kinds of missionaries. As far as I could tell, the Catholics were not exchanging medicine for religious commitment. Any local person could get medical help at the Catholic mission, if they paid. The payment could be as simple and inexpensive as a hand made object of traditional design, such as a piece of bark cloth or a hand made likembe (a thumb piano). The object didn’t have to be well made, it didn’t have to work but it did have to be handed over to the sisters.

The sisters would then put the object, with all the other objects they received as payment, in a building called the Kenge. I’m not sure of the origin of the word Kenge, but it happens to also be the name of the famous Mbuti (Pygmy) informant of anthropologist Colin Turnbull (“The Forest People”), and Colin and Kenge lived about 100 km or so to the south of the mission station to which I refer here.

Anyway, these objects would be put in the Kenge (pronounced “ken-gay”) and sold to tourists who passed through the area. So, how many tourists passed through this area? In the entire time I was there from the mid 1980s through the early 1990s, I counted one, and that was a person disguised as a missionary and really into his trip for the purposes of a kind of religious sex trade, as far as I could tell (I’ll tell you about that later). So maybe the actual number is zero.

So the Kenge would get more and more and more full of totally bogus “traditional crafts” that had been hastily botched together so someone could get antibiotics or perhaps treatment for malaria or a nasty infection. I thought this was nice of the sisters … demanding payment had its positive benefits, but actually requiring payment would deter people getting help. So this pretend payment system worked, and every ten years or so they could have a massive, utterly ridiculous garage sale.

But that was the Catholics. The Evangelicals did it differently. Their medical facilities were available for those people who lived in their built communities, and their communities were essentially giant walled villages full of converts. Although it was not overt, it was clear nonetheless: Medicine for your soul.

I spent a fair amount of time passing among these communities because they were one of the places we would get our pharmaceuticals. Also, some had air strips so they became important points of arrival or departure for the region. One time I was visiting one of these places and decided to see what life was like outside the community, in the nearby village, to see if they were really separate entities and if the medicine and other good stuff inside the community was really off limits. So I took a walk down the road, slipped through the gate, and stopped at the nearest rest stop.

Naturally, the nearest rest stop was a house of prostitution. .. the first little whorehouse after the mission gates. I spent an hour or so having tea, then beer, and a couple of mangoes, with the main prostitute and her husband. Without leading the witnesses, I was able to satisfy myself that indeed you were either in or out, in these parts, of the mission station. If you were in, you had access to the doctor and the medicine, if not, you did not have such access.

Of course, down the road was a private doctor and a pharmacy. The real difference here was not access to goods and services, but how they were paid for. In the community it was more of a collective economy with oppressive social and religious overtones, and in the villages it was more of a cash economy and traditional free market trade.

So our research facility, Ngodingodi, filled a gap in that we provided medicine for those who needed it, to the extent that we could. Eventually, we (and when I say “we” I mean many other people who were there after me) managed to build a small medical facility with trained medical people working in it who could provide what the missions provided but in an entirely secular way. Was there resistance from the missionaries to the development of this non-religious alternative? I’m told that no, there was not from the Catholics, but yes, there was a little from the Evangelicals. We were clearly cutting into their market. But since we existed far beyond the blender line, we were of little consequence.

Then, of course, the war broke out and as usual, the missionaries ran away. As they have always done.

¹Ngodingodi is the local name of a particular bird common in the area.

OK, you won’t really fall off, but you will become scared and lost.

The area of my research in the Ituri was, by many standards, one of those places near the end of the earth, with the lines that have consequences if you cross them. This region of Africa, with complex and important topography, was the last to be figured out by Western explorers and geographers. As recently as 1889, Europeans thought that the Semliki River flowed from the Rwenzori Mountains into Lake Albert, and most people did not know that the lake to become known later as George was a separate lake from Edward.

If you look at the tracts followed by these early explorers, mercenaries, and others, they tend to lead around and partly into but not across the Ituri Forest. In the 1880s there was a dispute over whether this forest even existed: One argument was that there were 250,000 square miles of forest in this region. Another asserted that there were only 2,500 square miles of forest in the region. In truth, the Ituri is about 25,000 square miles (so we split the difference in orders of magnitude) and the overall Congolese forest is considerably larger.

The reason that this research facility was set up where it was, in fact, was because it was one of the most remote areas of Africa. I won’t go into the reasons for that now, but it was a major factor.

So, the lines. When one goes to a place like this, you first go to a city, by plane, then usually into the bush by vehicle, and at some point possibly by foot.

At the time that I worked in Zaire, the Peace Corps had a rule that Peace Corps workers could not reside or work extensively more than a certain distance … measured in hours of travel time … from a certain class of airport. This actually restricted Peace Corps activities considerably, so I personally only ran into Peace Corps people when I was in the big city. There was a line the Peace Corps people could not cross, effectively, and it was pretty close in to the major airports. (Most of the smaller airports had fallen into disuse.)

Beyond this line, things would become increasingly remote until you get to what I call the Blender Line. Here, a blender … the kitchen appliance … stands in for Western Middle Class Luxuries. These sorts of things, including washers and driers, food processors, and so on, required regular electricity and some sort of supply line. Electricity would typically be supplied by generators on site, but those generators needed to be fed fuel, and the fuel needed the supply line. The Blender Line was beyond the Peace Corps line by about the distance a regular vehicle could drive any time of the year (wet or dry season) in about three hours.

Now, let me be clear. Almost no one living between the city and the blender line actually had a blender. But if you wanted a blender it would be possible to set up a building, a generator, get a blender, have a semi-regular supply of fuel, and plug in a blender.

Beyond the Blender Line was the Beer Line. This was the line beyond which there would be no beer, but within which, beer was available as long as you were willing to store it for a week or two. Since the Beer Line is beyond the Blender Line, the beer will not be refrigerated, but it is amazing how quickly one becomes accustom to the beer being cool and not cold. Beer is carried beyond the Blender line by a combination of methods, including young men on bikes, so the Beer Line is close to a day’s regular drive from the cities where the breweries are (meaning, not via 4-wheel drive vehicles). The Beer Line actually penetrated to between 30 and 10 kilometers of our research camp in the Ituri, depending on conditions.

Beyond the beer line was the Anthropologist Line. This line went all the way to the end of the earth as far as one could drive in any motorized vehicle. But not beyond. Most of the researchers with the Ituri Project were quite comfortable relying on very rugged roads that could only be traversed with very rugged vehicles, and not from just any direction and not just any day of the year.

But the didn’t go everywhere. Many of the researchers didn’t go far into the forest, or into the forest very long. In total, about a half dozen of us lived in the forest, beyond the road, a day or two walk (or more) from the road itself, for days or weeks at a time. So even the Anthropologists (and other researchers) had their limits.

But what about the missionaries, the subject of this series of posts?

Well, that depends. The Catholic Missionaries drank beer, and the Evangelicals did not. Or at least, not so far as I observed for most of them. Well, OK, the Australian Baptists drank beer when there were no other Australian Baptists around, but otherwise no. But the Catholics drank beer and wine on a regular basis, and therefore, they either lived within the limits of the beer line or they did what they needed to do to make sure the beer line was extended out to their more remote missions.

The Evangelicals did not drink beer, so they were not limited by the beer line, but they did strongly prefer, for religious reasons, a middle class lifestyle with the blenders and the washing machines and so on. Therefore, the evangelicals lived within the blender line, and in some cases, did what they needed to do to move the line to where they wanted to be.

But, let me be clear: There were missions in the Ituri Forest that were formerly occupied by Evangelicals but with the steady disintegration of the supply lines in the Eastern Congo at that time were abandoned as the blender line moved back farther and farther towards the cities. The nearest non-Catholic mission stations to our study area were hundreds of kilometers away in most directions, but the nearest Catholic mission was about 50 km away. Yet, 22 miles or so north of our study site was a mission formerly occupied by white, foreign missionaries, with blenders. That was abandoned by them (but not by the Africans who lived there) quite some time before I ever saw it.

Why did the Evangelicals require blenders for religious reasons? Well, there are two or three answers to that question.

What they said: The civilized lifestyle of cleanliness was specified in the scriptures as appropriate. These missionaries had to set an example. The fact that the only way they could manage this was to have a LOT of servant’s at every level making this middle class lifestyle work, and that those servants lived in either dormitories or grubby huts, was … well, things were said to be in transition. And besides, the Africans were accustom to this lifestyle. And besides, this was better than life in the traditional villages. And so on.

What was true: These people were mostly up from trailer trash, or in some cases middle class, and they weren’t going to give up this improved lifestyle for nothing. Never. Good thing they had religion to justify the indentured servitude of the African workers.

Out of fairness, though this is still not fair to the servant’s, I’ll mention by way of comparison that the Catholic missionaries were there as adults with no children, and the Evangelicals were reproducing all over the place. So the missionaries with kids wanted more luxuries. And of course, there were plenty of servants to take care of the kids. And blenders. For baby food and stuff.

So, a few missionary stories are in order.

There were several different ‘kinds’ of missionaries working on eastern Zaire back in the 1980s and early 1990s, but broadly two types: Catholics and other Christians. The Catholics were permanent residents, and like my own aunts and uncle who were Franciscan Catholic missionaries for decades in Latin America, the Pacific, and briefly, Canada, they left their mission stations only briefly now and then. The other Christians were evangelicals of various stripes, but almost all were from the US, Australia, or Great Britain. These folks lived for anywhere from a few weeks or months to a few years at their stations, and some were simply passing through.

All of them made me mad, made me laugh, and made me scared, each in their own way. Some were impressive individuals who wanted to, and were able to do, good things. Most of them should have been replaced with secular services and removed from the country a long time ago.

In this and the following stories about missionaries, the names have been changed to protect the innocent, and I will deny saying any of this if questioned by any authorities. Don’t tell anyone where you heard this.

Story 1: “Why I am a missionary”

Among the many missionaries I came to know, there was a family consisting of dad, mom, and a couple of kids, who were stationed in a city I would occasionally visit. It was routine for me and my colleagues to stay in their home, which was nice of them. We had an arrangement. We would stay in their home and stuff, and in return we would provide medicines (which we would buy from the mission station) and medical help to the people of our project area. Why this arrangement worked at all requires a lengthy explanation I’ll provide later. (See “Forget the Maginot Line, What About the Beer Line?” to be published later.)

Since I have a number of stories to tell about these particular, very hospitable folk, I’ll name them for you: They were Joseph and Mary and the children were Joe Junior and Little Mary.

So one day we were at Joseph and Mary’s home, and by “we” I mean my colleague, Rich Grinker and myself. This was early on in the course of getting to know Joe and Mar, so we were talking about those things people talk about when they are first getting to know each other, like what religion are you, and would you not be interested in converting to my religion, and how Jesus first came into my life, and how Jesus saved me, and so on and so forth. Well, mostly, I was sitting quietly watching the servants and wondering if I could get some time alone with them and Rich was wide eyed and astonished at what I think was his first exposure to really really serious Christians.

So I wasn’t paying much attention to the conversation, when I heard Joseph say this: “God told me to be a missionary. Through prayer. I prayed to know what I was to do and he answered me while I prayed.”

Nothing unusual there, for a missionary.

“But when it came to where I should serve as a missionary, I did not know for a long time. The whole time I was at Oral Roberts (the University) I kept asking God where I should go.”

I would have thought this sort of thing was organized by some administrative body, but if God handles that kind of details, well then, fine…

“Then He sent me a sign.”

“A sign?” asked Rich.

I was starting to get interested. Signs from god are always interesting. For one thing, the nature of the sign often depends on the kind of Christian getting the sign. My Catholic missionary relatives got signs consisting of things like the burned image of a hand on a handkerchief neatly folded in the top drawer of the bureau. Protestants received signs as voices in their heads more often, in my experience. So I wondered … what kind of sign?

“Yes,” I added. “What was the sign, Joe?”

“A bumper sticker,” he said without skipping a beat.

“I had been praying and walking around, and I was a bit frustrated. So I just looked at the sky and said out loud ‘Lord Jesus, where am I to serve?’ … and a car came around the corner just at that moment, and the name of the country I was to serve in, this country we are sitting in right now, was printed as plain as day on a bumper sticker on the back of the car.”

Rich and I looked at each other. We both had the same set of thoughts. These were the thoughts:

In our neighborhood in Massachusetts was a discount department store that gave out bumper stickers kind of like those “Where Is Wall Drugs” bumper stickers, but with the name of the store on it. This store was not to be found in Texas or Oklahoma, our missionary friend’s home sate and location of his college. So the car was probably from the east coast, midwest, or southeast somewhere, and had one of the these bumper stickers on it.

So up in Cambridge Mass, at the very moment that we were sitting there in a living room of a modest home in a remote city in the country of Zaire, over in Cambridge at the local Zayre’s Department Store, was God. Waiting. Waiting for Joseph to show up. After all, a sign had been sent.

Rich and I both were thinking … “Right. Zayres. And you’re here. In Zaire. God is probably really pissed off.”

“I’m on a mission from god… to pick up some laundry detergent, toilet paper, and something else, can’t remember…. lord help me remember what I was supposed to get at the store..”

Funny. If you look up Zayre’s department store in Wikipedia, you find this:

Not to be confused with: Zaire, the African country now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Zayres indeed.