Seminar 2000
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Mission Coercion
When called to account for courts' extralegal whipping of women, officials noted that until the Chief Justice complained, no one else minded the courts' use of corporal punishments to maintain marital power and encourage economic development. Women lacked an audible voice. And the missions, who in another context might have acted as whistleblowers objecting to gross abuses were, instead, part of this corporally coercive system. In some cases they may even have exceeded the administration in their willingness to accept forced labor, administer corporal punishment, and coordinate the enforcement of marital duties--as the mission defined them--on dissident women. Though both Protestants and Catholics seem to have viewed forced labor and corporal punishments as routine and unremarkable, we gain a glimpse of both the rationale behind such practices, and their possible scope, in the scandals that emerged in Teso, Eastern Uganda, as two Catholic Mill Hill priests, Fathers Kiggen and Thyssen, resorted to extreme violence to enforce their vision of church law on people with very complicated lives.
Forced labor was a routine part of missions' economic support. Protestants, who had the allegiance of most of the region's chiefs and elite families, used forced labor to build churches, porter clergy's goods from place to place on itinerations, and cultivate mission and church school gardens. Catholics' access to these forms of support was more limited, being drawn primarily from individuals and families settled on mission land who provided labor as rent, and from work by students and those converts kidnapped and forced to work for the mission as part of a disciplinary punishment.
In Eastern Uganda during the 1920s, the missions were making up their strategies as they went, in an atmosphere of austerity. Unlike Buganda, where they had operated through alliance with leading Ganda state officials, in the Eastern Province they entered a region with a variety of state and non-state systems, which had been initially evangelized (and conquered) by Semei Kakungulu, his military deputies, and Ganda evangelists.41 Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionaries were a part of this semi-military system as they cooperated with early officials' efforts to occupy land and collect taxes. In Acholi, for example, missionaries temporarily worked directly as tax collectors for the early administration, with one missionary shooting a woman in front of witnesses in 1905. 42 In Teso, conditions were even more unstable as early Ganda evangelists not only entered regions without local requests, but called in Ganda military support when they felt their work or security was threatened.43 CMS official rules and restraints on violence, erratically enforced even in the capital, were challenged by both African and British missionaries. These evangelists largely funded themselves through aggressive promotion of cotton, carving out their own territories to the point that Louise Pirouet has argued "cotton and Christianity became inextricably confused".44 Despite problems controlling its own employees, the CMS found Eastern Uganda an attractive field for new evangelical growth not just because of the money cotton made available, but also because the lack of a local organized Ganda-style elite would allow the mission itself to define an educational, social, and political agenda, rather than relying on kingdom officials to do so.45
The Catholics' position in the region was more tenuous. Three Catholic missions operated in Uganda: the low-budget Verona Fathers in the North (including Acholi), the better-funded White Fathers from Rubaga westward, and the Mill Hill Fathers from Nsambya eastward. The Mill Hill mission, the Colonial Office noted, was the weakest of the major missions in Uganda.46 Few Mill Hill fathers had university degrees or even teaching certificates. Recruited from England, Ireland and the Netherlands, they spoke English, but nevertheless found it difficult to socialize effectively with officials, who tended to be Protestants or secular.47 In this context, without the wealth and prestige of the Protestants, or the skills and education respected by government officials, some Mill Hill priests resorted to a violent discipline to retain control of their converts even though their Bishop, experienced in evangelism in Uganda, declared that "the Fathers are most kind and charitable in all their dealings with the natives.48
The Mill Hill mission's abuses in Eastern Uganda became clear during a bitter feud between the priests and a local administrator, Captain Philips. In July 1926, Philips convicted Father Kiggen for contempt of court. Kiggen had told a chief about to try a case of criminal breach of trust what punishment should be awarded. This intervention in directing judgment, however, had not been Kiggen's first adventure in administration. Previously, he had been summoned by District Officer Philips but had simply ignored the summons. According to his defenders, he could not socialize with Captain Philips, who he saw as a deeply immoral man.49
Father Kiggen was upset about this prosecution and passed on his disgust with Captain Philips to others, both within the mission and in the African Christian community. Kiggen ignored the district administration regarding educational and developmental matters, though as the superior of his mission he was in charge of the schools, churches, and institutions of a substantial area. During his prosecution, Kiggen informed his bishop, Campling, of his complaints against Philips. He asserted that, as well as "leading an immoral life with native women", Philips abused witnesses and engaged in professional misconduct. Philips' superior, the Provincial Commissioner for the Eastern Province, was informed of the charges by anonymous letter, questioned Philips, and dismissed the accusations as malicious and groundless after Philips denied them "on his word of honour".50
But despite superiors' efforts to paper over the animosity between the two men, the feud escalated. Kiggen, even when pushed by Bishop Campling, refused to apologize to Captain Philips. And Philips launched a police investigation into the mission's practices which exposed serious abuses. Instead of simply providing social services and cooperating with the colonial state, Father Kiggen was administering a mission-sponsored state within a state and cutting off appeals to secular authorities. The investigation "produced statements from some twenty-eight natives to the effect that, for the last three years at least, the European representatives and native followers of the Mill Hill Mission in Teso district had beaten and imprisoned natives and intimidated them into compliance with canonical directions".51 Furthermore, even when individuals had sought to appeal beyond the mission to the High Court, the local British police officer, described as a fanatical Roman Catholic, had backed the mission by illegally refusing to forward petitions of appeal.52
Sample complaints against Kiggen show a violent, gendered picture of mission coercion. Of the first nine cases reported, seven involved teachers seizing women, most of whom were beaten and imprisoned. And if the first set of allegations was not sufficient, a second collection of cases was even more graphic, gendered, and clearly illegal. These summaries reported Catholic women who were beaten 24 or 25 strokes and imprisoned with pigs. These beatings and punishments were part of the mission's effort to enforce Christian marriage and block divorce in a population with complex lives.
The police investigation portrayed a society in which women would have done their duty and obeyed non-Catholic husbands, but the mission had intervened to cause hardship for both wives and husbands. A Catholic Teso woman, for example, received 25 strokes for marrying a non-Christian, and was then imprisoned in a pigsty until she escaped. A Ganda woman was given 24 strokes in Kiggen's presence for living with a common law husband outside of Christian marriage. Beaten by teachers even before the punishment Kiggen directed, she lost an eye. And after these beatings, she was confined for two and a half months and forced to carry stones for mission road construction. A Teso woman married by local custom was caught at her husband's house by a teacher who forcibly took her to Toromo, where he kept her for two months until she escaped, running back to her husband. After she had been at home for a month, she was re-captured by the teacher, beaten about the legs which became "very bad" and, despite her pregnancy, put back on the road from Toroma to Ngora, where she escaped, after another beating, and after her clothes had been taken from her. One of the few men reported beaten was a Teso man who received ten strokes in Kiggen's presence for complaining that his "wife, whom he married in accordance with native custom... [was] taken from him and sent into Buganda against her will to learn religion. The complainant asked Father Kiggen for his wife on various occasions but was told she had been sent into Buganda".53
These women's own perspectives are not reported in these summaries and thus it is hard to simply accept the police interpretation of the women's actions and their husbands' or lovers' involvement. Some of these women may have at least initially fled voluntarily to the mission, becoming Catholics to escape husbands or pursue education, following a pattern observed elsewhere in Africa. But this mission was notably unwilling to allow a woman to change her mind later. Instead, it not only defended her against her husband, by sending her elsewhere to school, but against herself and any inclination she might have to abandon the rigorous life of a mission station and return home to the compromises of a non-Christian marriage. And some of the beatings were apparently administered after a husband brought a difficult wife to the teacher and asked that she be whipped.
An unrepentant Father Kiggen, declared persona non grata in the Eastern Province by government officials, was called home after the evidence of mission beatings, judicial interventions, and kidnappings became clear to his superiors. But his recall was not a full rejection of his methods. His bishop pleaded with the order's Father Superior to remove him because, with the police shadowing his every move, Kiggen would be caught even if he just behaved as usual, and in a future case would be unlikely to be able to escape criminal assault convictions.54 His home order, however, kept proposing his return, and the Father General in London visited the Colonial Office directly, complained about the deterioration in relations between officials and the mission, and "endeavoured... to suggest that the flogging incidents must not be taken too seriously having regard to local conditions."55 In a similar case in Cameroon in the early 1930s, mission historians chose to emphasize not the violence or illegality of mission punishments, but the charge that Africans behaved in child-like ways and needed direction.56
An even more dramatic case led to the expulsion of Kiggen's deputy, Father Thyssen, and the critical investigation and revision of ongoing mission practices. Around 1920, a non-Christian man and woman were married according to local custom. By about 1924, the husband had started to visit a Mill Hill mission administered by a Ganda evangelist, becoming a reader and accepting baptism. Once he was a Christian, he made his wife go to the mission with him, though she later asserted that this was entirely against her will. While attending the mission, she fell ill and, unable to object, was baptised by the teacher. Meanwhile, however, the marriage was troubled. On at least two occasions, the husband accused his wife of adultery and brought her to the teacher to be beaten. This was apparently unremarkable, and created no protest. On the second occasion, Father Thyssen was present. Finally, toward the end of August, 1927, fed up with her husband's cruelty and, she alleged, his adultery, she left him, running home to her mother's compound. After dark on 23 October , 1927, Father Thyssen led a group of ten teachers and readers armed with sticks and carrying torches to seize the wife from her mother's home. They dragged her, resisting, from the house. Her mother, who rushed out to protect her daughter, was apparently punched by Father Thyssen personally, in both the face and gut.57
Father Thyssen and his teachers were charged with criminal trespass, voluntarily causing hurt, and riot. Brought before the court, Thyssen paid the teachers' fines and avoided criminal prosecution by paying 25 pounds to the wife's mother, who had been hospitalized by his assault. Neither he nor his teachers were imprisoned or whipped. His superiors simply considered it regrettable that where Kiggen had paid 15 pounds, Thyssen had to pay more. Fortunately, however, from the mission's point of view, Thyssen was able to pay compensation money and thus avoid a criminal conviction.58 His superior noted, "It is not, so far as I know, suggested that he was acting otherwise than from a mistaken sense of duty".59 Bluntly informed both in London and locally by officials that floggings and mission-sponsored kidnappings must end, the order defended its men. But it also issued a circular to priests stating that priests must follow new rules, or the mission would be unable to defend itself from criminal charges: "the Fathers must see that there must be no more beating of natives either by themselves or by Catechists, or by any others over whom they have any control. The Fathers should communicate this regulation to the Catechists and others from a written document, duly dated, which they will preserve". Further, "they must carefully avoid doing or saying anything which might be interpreted as being interference with court cases" and must not collect evidence, must not talk with outsiders, and should be constantly on their guard with officials.60
The new rules, however, were more a response to a threat of prosecution and a difficult legal situation than any rejection of mission violence. The emphasis was on producing a paper trail for mission defense, rather than on compensating the injured, and it provided no apology for past actions, even though in internal documents, the mission worried about Father Thyssen's mental stability.61 The order's new leader in Uganda, indeed, complained that "the Governor has gone too far and beyond his powers in threatening to deport Fathers Kiggen and Thyssen. His actions seem to me to be very arbitrary and spiteful... His Excellency [the Governor] is not a persona grata with anyone".62
In the cases of both Kiggen and Thyssen, the mission clearly understood and to some degree accepted violence as a progressive force in an unruly region. Kiggen, his superiors noted, never could see himself as having done anything wrong or worthy of punishment. And Thyssen, his superiors argued, had simply acted "to see the [canon] Law obeyed and to carry out what is often extremely distasteful duty".63 Overall, Bishop Campling argued that the Fathers were kind and only trying to ensure faith and progress. While "mistakes had been made in Teso", he implied, they were the product of "great zeal to overcome the vices of the natives", certainly the best of motives.64 The order officially abandoned the use of violence only reluctantly and under pressure. Progressive Violence and the New Society
British critics of local practices officially won this particular set of debates over the use of violence in the communities of the Eastern Province. A mild draft letter from the Colonial Office, which rejected any attempt by Griffin to reprimand administrative officers for their disregard for law, nevertheless clearly stated that the native courts should stop beating women.65 And the Mill Hill Mission's instructions to priests barred any more violent enforcement of canon law and Christian marriage.66
On the ground, however, the result of these controversies was far more ambiguous as both European and African officials rejected the assertions of the Chief Justice and Colonial Office and accepted the pressure of local necessities. Eastern Province administrators received complaints from local African courts unsure what to do with all the difficult women under the new rules. And these administrators rejected the Chief Justice's argument that, in violating the law, they had done something fundamentally wrong. Perryman, an Eastern Province expert promoted to acting governor in the wake of the scandal, defended officials' actions, arguing "a District Officer used to be constantly required to commit illegal acts... and it is difficult for him to distinguish between different illegalities".67 Missionaries, too, while restricting their activities out of fear, continued to long for whips as an evangelical tool, even as the Colonial Office officials recoiled in horror at such mechanisms of conversion and church-building.68
Over the next few years, officials' and missionaries' grudging acceptance of the law may have prevented a few beatings. But it also led to an administrative push to reform the law, granting greater autonomy to native courts, providing them with more effective ways to hide their actions from judicial overview and appeal. In 1929, the Governor referred to the controversy over Eastern Province floggings when he proposed a new Native Courts bill that removed individuals' right to appeal to the High Court in favor of a system of review of major court decisions by District Officers and Provincial Commissioners.69 Still upset about the Governor's defense of officials' disregard of law, the Chief Justice condemned the proposed bill, arguing that courts should be overseen by those with a loyalty to justice, rather than merely a desire for smooth administration.70 The Chief Justice, however, lost. The Colonial Office accepted the governor's argument that Native Courts were intended as an institution which provided political education, and that they should therefore be under the tutelage of an administrative service, rather than held to the strict legal standards of the Chief Justice, and his High Court.71
The Governor and his officials, after all, were able to argue that they knew the real conditions of the people, not merely the abstractions of the law. And their mission was to create a solid, comprehensible form of administration, which would root the colonial state in the lives of the people and tie the Africans who mattered--the elite, the literate, and those growing cotton--more closely to the institutions of colonial power. Similarly, the mission's nostalgia for violence was not one of the characteristics which nervous superiors regarded as a possible sign of insanity, but, instead, a devout and serious desire to build the church into the lives of the people and make the people live up to the expectations and demands of Church rules. Neither local officials nor missionaries argued that husbands or fathers should have the right to whip their own wives and daughters. Instead, they argued that the state and church should take on that role, simultaneously taking a distasteful necessity out of the hands of men and transforming the beatings from personal matters to public, formal acts which enforced the new order.
Despite Colonial office disapproval, violence remained an important tool of progressive reformers in the Eastern Province and, indeed, in Uganda as a whole. As the Colonial Office tried to block the state from whipping women, the local administration resisted requests for statistics on whippings and fought vigorously to build new institutions, such as the native courts, which would allow it to hide its actions and continue to flog the marginal and disruptive, such as youth and prisoners.72 Within the leading schools of Uganda, mission teachers encouraged students to maintain a prefect-based system of discipline which fostered violent hazing in the name of educational advancement and the cultivation of leadership. And within the armed forces, whipping remained a tool of military discipline not just of soldiers, but also of their wives, up to the Second World War.73
Far from receding into history as Uganda's elite turned from slave raiding and elephant hunting to cotton farming and government-appointed chieftainships, violence in the name of wealth, progress and orderly administration remained an important tool of a British and Ugandan elite administrative alliance more concerned with results than with methods.
The struggle over state and mission whippings of women was not the simple matter of civilization versus barbarity that the Chief Justice and his colonial office allies suggested. Instead, it was a moment in which administration, mission, and African leaders made explicit the tensions over governance, economic growth and social change. Violence, and patriarchal leadership, was no longer the private prerogative of the husband and father, but a matter of the courts, mission teacher, and public economy. And despite the Chief Justice and Colonial Office's definition of civilization, public, formal violence in native courts, mission schools and churches became an important resource for the men essential to the colony's orderly, "civilizing" administration.
Summary:
This article uses a variety of archival sources to explore controversies over official beatings and corporal punishments administered to women by Native Courts and the Mill Hill Mission in the Eastern Province of Uganda during the 1920s. It argues that colonial actors, with very few exceptions, rejected the Colonial Office rhetoric of colonialism as a civilizing process. Instead, local colonial officials, missionaries and elite Africans saw violence against women as an essential tool in their efforts to promote a functioning alliance between colonialism and African men. Officials, missions, and elite cotton-growing Africans regarded women as too powerful and independent, threatening their progressive agenda. They therefore saw official violence not as traditional or part of a defense of customary law, but as an innovative and progressive way of dealing with women who were central to the farming economy and far too independent for men's comfort. Through violence, state and missions sought to control women, furthering both official and mission aims, and cementing a relationship with African men by providing a useful service.
Footnotes p. 3
41. See, for example, the complex case of Semei Kakungulu, Michael Twaddle, Kakungulu and the Creation of Uganda (Athens, OH: Ohio UP 1993).Back
42. The missionaries involved were Kitching and Pleydell, who routinely took responsibility for threatening rioters and backing the local tax collector. In doing so, they were violating mission regulations. M. Louise Pirouet, Black Evangelists: The Spread of Christianity in Uganda 1891-1914 (London: Rex Collings, 1978) 157.Back
43. Pirouet, Black Evangelists, 179.Back
44. Hints of routine violence by CMS missionaries in Kampala emerge from casual comments by prominent, respected missionaries who beat staff members who refused specific tasks. For example, Dr. Albert Cook described how, when an employee refused to help him dig up skeletons, "I laid him down, and gave him half a dozen of the best for insubordination..." A. Cook, quoted in Nancy Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1999) 2. On conditions in the Eastern province, see for example, "Too much responsibility has often devolved of necessity upon Native workers who are as yet, owing to lack of proper training, unprepared for the burden, in some cases with disastrous results..." Bishop of Uganda, Annual Report of the Uganda Mission 1922, [CMS] G3 A7 O 1922. Eastern evangelists' use of cotton revenues for self support is discussed in Pirouet, Black Evangelists, 182-7.Back
45. Report by Garfield Williams on Education in Uganda [1st draft] CMS G3 A7 O 1924. The implicit contrast here is with Buganda, where the local oligarchs effectively became the lay leadership within the Church of Uganda, causing a variety of headaches for missionaries.Back
46. The other two were the Anglican low church Church Missionary Society and the Catholic White Fathers. [WCS] Note, 10-1-28 PRO CO536/148. The Verona Fathers, who operated in the North, were even weaker, but generally are left out of the trinity of major mission groups.Back
47. The Mill Hill mission was initially invited into the region to address the government's concern that the French White Fathers were aliens. Yet Bishop Campling (British) had clashes with the administration, and his successor Bishop Reesinck (Dutch) pleaded for the division of the diocese to allow a British bishop, rather than himself, take over at Nsambya, Kampala, where socializing and lobbying government officials was an important part of the Bishop's role. Reesinck to Father McLaughlin 2-6-39, MHA UGA Box 27 1939. Back
48 J.W. Campling to Lord, 6-2-26, MHA Box UGA 22.Back
49. Governor to S of S for Colonies 28-2-28, PRO CO536/148. This letter provides a historical summary of the conflict. Note-- the line was clearly murky between social interaction and an administrative summons. This ambiguity arose repeatedly during the case.Back
50. ibid.Back
51. ibid.Back
52. ibid.Back
53. All these cases are summarized in a second set of complaints enclosed in the dispatch from the Governor to S of S for Colonies 28-2-28, PRO CO536/148.Back
54. Bishop Campling to Lordship, undated page [1926] MHA UGA Box 22. Note that even in 1938 and later, Father Kiggen kept trying to return to the area, only to be blocked by the local Mill Hill bishop, who noted in 1938, "In case the question of Father Kiggen's return comes up again I should like you to write to me before because ... the Government will have to be asked... Father Kiggen should not come back as long as any of the officials of that time are still in the Service..." Reesinck to Fr General, 2-10-38, MHA UGA Box 27 (1938).Back
55. Note of meeting between Bishop Biermans and Mr Bottomley, 26-5-28, PRO CO536/148.Back
56. Bernard F. Booth, The Mill Hill Fathers in West Cameroon: Education, Health and Development, 1884-1970 (Bethesda, MA: International Scholars Publication, 1995) 42-4. Booth also emphasized that the priest involved was well-liked, regardless of his methods.Back
57. Note of meeting between Bishop Biermans and Mr Bottomley, 26-5-28, PRO CO536/148. The chief may well have been Protestant. Most chiefs were. And around this time, "certain zealous Protestants" began circulating pictures from the region of "weals and scars on women flogged by the Mill Hill Mission, as well as signed statements from 'victims'". J.E.T. Philipps to Bottomley, 10-1-28, PRO CO536/148. The Protestant campaign against Mill Hill methods thus arose out of the Kiggen incident, and would have made a Protestant chief, or official, more receptive to complaints about the Thyssen incident.Back
58. [unclear] to Father Farmer, undated (Private); [unclear] to Fr Farmer, 7-4-28, MHA UGA Box 30.Back
59. [Campling?] to Father Farmer, undated (Private) [1928] MHA UGA Box 30.Back
60. Biermans (Superior General) to all Fathers, 4-6-28, MHA UGA 30 (1928).Back
61. Bishop Campling to Lord, 14-12-29, MHA UGA Box 30 1929.Back
62. Campling to Lord, 29-3-28, MHA UGA Box 30.Back
63. [Campling?] to Fr Farmer, undated [1928] MHA UGA Box 30 (1928).Back
64. JW Campling to Lord, 6-2-26, MHA Box UGA 22.Back
65. Draft letter for S of S for Colonies to Governor, undated, PRO CO536/139.Back
66. This may not have affected practice, though. scattered evidence from elsewhere in Uganda indicates that corporal enforcement of church rules and church forced labor continued as an unremarkable part of both Catholic and Protestant churches. See, for example, Ronald Kassimir, "The Social Power of Religious Organization: The Catholic Church in Uganda, 1955-91" (Ph.D. Thesis, University of Chicago, 1996) 205.Back
67. Notes of a meeting at Government House 22-9-25 on flogging of women, PRO CO 536/139.Back
68. D. Schut to Biermans, undated [1929] MHA UGA Box 30; Bp Biermans meeting with Mr Bottomley 26-5-28, PRO CO536/148.Back
69. Governor Gowers to S of S of the Colonies 21-6-29, PRO CO536/157.Back
70. Sir Charles Griffin [Chief Justice], Memo 15-5-29, PRO CO536/157.Back
71. Governor Gowers to S of S for the Colonies 21-6-29, PRO CO536/157. Colonial Office analysts (in this file) also cited other imperial precedents, such as Nigeria and Tanganyika.Back
72. TH Davies, 2-6-33, PRO CO536/176. Davies noted that floggings increased in the early 1930s, compared with the 1920s, and while Perryman had, under pressure, agreed that sentences should be limited to a maximum of eight strokes, half the sentences in 1932 were more than that, with many sentences of 24 strokes which "I should think could, in no circumstances, be considered other than barbaric". In Bugishu, Davies noted, a third of those convicted were flogged-- "a fantastically high proportion"-- and about half of those were juveniles. Back
73 The wife of the senior African soldier carried a kiboko, and was responsible for disciplining women. One such wife in the 1920s was referred to as the battalion's "ex-officio beater-in-chief of troublesome wives". And, after asking their officer's permission to discipline their wives, husbands were permitted to beat as they saw necessary. See Timothy H. Parsons, The African Rank and File (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1999)153-4. Back
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