'All for the greater glory of Jesus and the salvation of the immortal souls!' : German missionary nuns in colonial Togo and New Guinea, 1897-1960

Abstract

This thesis, a feminist history of mission in the context of gender, has started on the premise to develop an alternative perspective on the missionary encounter rather than the attempt to enrich existing narratives by adding women. Therefore, it mainly draws on the sources that its principal subjects, western missionary nuns, produced. These are mostly correspondence with Europe, travelogues, chronicles, reports and, to a lesser extent, articles, photographs and memoirs, all of which allow us to gain new insights into the nuns’ religious and practical worlds and their gendered dimensions as they moved within and across imperial and religious systems. In addition, it uses colonial records and ecclesiastical sources in order to scrutinize the power relations that structured the nuns’ missionary engagement and their ambiguous roles as enthusiastic missionaries that took their privileged position as 'white Christians' for granted on the one hand and subordinated to male religious and secular power on the other one. Ultimately, theological perspectives are accorded a prominent place because, to borrow from Andrew Porter, missionaries 'viewed their world first of all with the eye of faith and then through theological lenses'.