Historical and Anthropological Insights into the Missionary Activities in Ethiopia: Conversions, Resistances and Compromises
Historical and Anthropological Insights into the Missionary Activities in Ethiopia
Workshop
25 – 26 July 2003
Hamburg University
Asia Africa Institute
Flügel Ost – Room 221
Organizers
Andreu Martínez d’Alòs-Moner, Evgenia Sokolinskaia, Verena Böll
Under the auspices of: Professor Siegbert Uhlig
With the financial support from: Fritz Thyssen Stiftung
Introduction. The Horn of Africa and the Missions
Since early times the Horn of Africa was at the crossroads of commercial and ideological networks. Its privileged position facilitated the arrival of the first waves of Monotheism: Christianity around the 4th cent. A.D. and Islam already at the times of Prophet Muhammad. The Horn (which by then started to be known as “Ethiopia”, “Abassia” or the “Land of the Prester John”) was also one of the first areas to be approached by European missionaries. The Catholic world sent its first representatives early in the 16th cent. (Jesuit mission), an experience that had a dramatic outcome. Some centuries later, with modern colonialism would arrive a second wave of missionaries: Capuchin, Lazarist and also Protestant (St. Chrischona-Pilgermission, Swedish Evangelical Mission). The 20th cent. would see the foundation of the first indigenous non-orthodox churches, such as the Ethiopian Evangelical Church Mekane Iyesus and the Catholic Eparchies.
But Ethiopia was also a vector for non-European proselytism. Islam met a revival with the famous djihad of Ahmad Grañ. However, it was only during colonial times that Islamic faith spread far away from its traditional centres in the coast (ŸAdal, Massawa) and Harär. On their part, the Ethiopian Orthodox Täwahédo Church did not remain immobile to the challenges that both “colonial” proselytism and “internal” Islamic expansion represented. The foundation of the modern Ethiopian Empire under Ménilék II and Òaylä Íéllase I was accompanied by a reinforcement of the role of the Orthodox Church and an increase in the number of brethren. It was during the reign of the latest that this Church gained full independence from Alexandria and in 1952 the new Patriarchate of Ethiopia was founded. With the autocephaly the Ethiopian Church went through a reform process that affected its interactions with the different groups of the region, which lead to processes of conversion and religious clash that are by far the least known to the scholars.
Aims
The purpose of the workshop “Historical and Anthropological Insights into the Missionary Activities in Ethiopia” is twofold. On the one hand it is aimed at a better comprehension of a phenomena that by its heterogeneity is still poorly understood. How did the missions work? What was the response of the local societies to their activities? How were these societies affected by the foreign priests, and, at the same time, how did they change the missionaries themselves? Which conflicts – political, cultural, theological – did these processes arouse? The diversity and quality of the participants assures that most of these questions will be answered. On the other hand, the workshop intends to break new ground in scholarly research. The interdisciplinarity (from history to anthropology) and the extensive nature of the problems discussed could be an opportunity to discover new methods of analysis and to reveal new problems for research.
Finally, through this methodological and thematic debate we hope to be able to define, if not to answer, the two main questions lying in the background of the missionary problem in Ethiopia: why Ethiopia? and what does conversion mean? That is to say, what was specific of this African region to produce the encounter, and sometimes the clash, between so many different confessions? And what are the actual, most concrete implications of the dynamics known under the term of “conversion” for the different societies dwelling in this African region?