1 Of the famous Europeans and Americans to work and travel in Central Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Presbyterian missionary William Henry Sheppard has, arguably, one of the most compelling personal histories [2]. As an American of African descent born in 1865 at the end of the Civil War, who was educated in an institution conceived during the Reconstruction Era (1868-1880), and who went on to preach the Christian gospel in Africa to Africans, he was joined in his mission by other Blacks who themselves had been slaves or were “free persons of color”. Black churches of his day saw “a positive role in education and missionary work that Negroes from America might play in Africa’s future [3]”. The Southern Presbyterian Church saw Blacks as the most natural proselytizers of the faith in Africa and Sheppard was their star among missionaries Black or White. He was considered in his time to be one of the greatest missionaries in the world.

2 Despite acclaim during his lifetime, after his death Sheppard’s achievements fell into obscurity. As W.E.B Du Bois prophetically wrote, the problem of the 20^th century would be the problem of the color line [4]. At the time of Sheppard’s death in 1927, Black America was struggling against social, political and economic repression. “Race laws” were in full force, enacted after the failure of Reconstruction, a period of Black enfranchisement and activism after the Civil War during which the federal government sought to economically and politically empower four million freed slaves. Concurrently, four years after the end of Reconstruction and one year after Sheppard entered the seminary in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, the African continent was divided among competing European powers (with the United States in attendance among 14 nations) at the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885. Confined for four hundred years to the African coasts, the major European powers struggled to gain control of the eighty percent of the continent that remained under the control of Africans. In political and cultural self interest, Blacks from America and the Caribbean organized the first Pan-African Congress in London in 1900 [5]. Sheppard had already been in the Congo for a decade.

3 Westerners such as Émile Torday and Leo Frobenius, whom Sheppard preceded in the Kasai Region of the Belgian Congo, from their first publications remained prominent in the annals of Central African ethnography and exploration. Sheppard’s authoritative accounts, based on years of substantial experience in the region, merited not a footnote for four decades after his death [6]. Besides manuscripts published by the Presbyterian Church, it is only since the 1960’s that interest has been revived in his life and work, becoming quite active in the last two decades [7]. This is partly due to the adventure of his story, and partly to the opportunity to reexamine a fascinating chapter in the historic relationship between the struggle for economic and social parity of Blacks in America and the struggle against Africa’s colonization in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

4 This discussion is not a chronology of Sheppard’s achievements in Africa, or of the world’s reaction to him. There are already published accounts that give a thorough recounting of his exploits [8]. It does seek to probe contextually Sheppard’s achievements from his cultural vantage point, and to place who he was in the perspective of his education and talents. It places him among an intelligentsia whose debates and ideas about Africa were experienced at all levels of the Black society of his time. It was an activist intelligentsia that did not speak with one voice, that saw itself as African, and that had sought social justice for freepersons and slaves since the Revolutionary War.

5 Tall, charismatic and physically striking, with endurance, energy and possessing a heroic nature (fig. 1), Sheppard made his mark on the world stage in 1890 as the first Westerner to set foot in the Kuba Kingdom in Central Africa. He is virtually the only witness to the last of the great courts of Central Africa as these existed before the colonial era. Sheppard would be an outsized personality in any time. He was the first Black man to become a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society in England, an honor he received for his exploration of the Kuba and as the discoverer of a lake in the Kasai region unknown to the West at the time [9].

Fig. 1

William Morrison and Sheppard with a buffalo carcass. Sheppard was a superb huntsman who shot many big game animals that he often gave to the population for food.

6 To understand Sheppard’s importance as an ethnographer, explorer, celebrity and internationally-known champion of the rights of Africans, he must first be understood in the context of his education and the ideologies of the Black intelligentsia of his day. Important as well, is the photographic record of mission life at Luebo and Ibanj contrasted with the images of Congolese as they presented themselves (fig. 2) [10]. Information about his public persona is contained in his writings, contemporary biographies and newspaper accounts of his speeches and exploits, and the broadsheets and picture cards of Sheppard with his wife and young children (fig. 3). The broadsheets and postcards, in particular, were used to raise funds and to recruit Blacks for the missionary effort. Their impact can only be adequately assessed in relation to the derogatory racist imagery of the day for their power to evoke a genteel Black bourgeoisie in harmony with White American cultural values. The archives of Hampton University are full of such carefully constructed images of the school from around Sheppard’s formative years onward and such documentation was actively pursued [11]. Finally, both his commentary on and the objects he collected can be read as documents that reveal his talent for intrepid observation, his relationship with the Kuba people and his legacy for Central African ethnography.

Fig. 2

Prince Maxamalenge and wife. Sheppard was close friends with him from his first visit to the Kuba capitol in 1892 and also called his son Maxamalenge as his African name. The boy was known as “Max” throughout his life.

Fig. 3

“William H. Sheppard, F.R.G.S., and Wife”, postcard, 1905. Such cards were used to proselytize the success of the missionary effort in Africa. The image of the Sheppards as a genteel bourgeois couple was in stark contrast to the racially derogatory images of the time.

7 There were various intellectual reactions by Blacks to slavery as an institution. As early as the late eighteenth century a number of American Blacks had emigrated to Liberia and Sierra Leone. The inventor of the slogan “Africa for Africans” was Harvard-educated Martin Delaney, the only Black to receive a field commission during the Civil War. Considered the father of the Back to Africa Movement, a current in Black thought to leading the Black Power Movement of the 1960s, Delaney visited Liberia in 1859 and was impressed by what he saw. The famous Black abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, saw such sentiments as dangerously counterproductive to arguments used against slavery that sought to free and enfranchise Blacks on American soil. After the Civil War, Black newspapers carried the ideas of the leading Black thinkers of the day, and Black churches played a crucial role by disseminating this discussion to all classes of Black society [12]. Among American Blacks, the political, economic and cultural spheres operated concurrently and with equal value across class lines, a fact that Harold Cruse noted was later lost on much of the political left in America [13]. Moreover, after Reconstruction, the church remained the major sphere in which talented Blacks could develop and exercise social and political leadership. For example, Drimmer quotes from Isaac’s The New World of the Negro American :

“Professor Rayford Logan remembers that as a boy he ‘heard the great Negro missionary [William Henry] Sheppard, who told us about the mutilation in the Congo. It made an indelible impression on me. In the humblest Negro church there was a willingness to give in order to send missionaries, an interest in people’s need of the Gospel and a special interest in Africa because we knew we were descendants of Africans [14]’”.

“These missionaries brought more than the Gospel. Negro American missionaries were viewed with great suspicion as teaching subversive ideas, and many of the African students who came home from training in America reinforced this view by becoming agitators and revolutionaries. For example, Daniel Chilembwe of Nyasaland (Malawi), trained at the Negro Virginia Theological Seminary and supported in his work by Negro American Baptists, led a rebellion in 1915. Three American-educated Africans were active in the formation and growth of the African Native National Congress in South Africa [15]”.

8 Sheppard’s attendance from 1881 to 1883 at Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute was the most formative period of his life. The eighty-four normal and high schools and sixteen colleges that were founded by 1879 [18] had a profound effect upon Sheppard’s generation of Black Americans and would, during the next 80 years, produce proponents of Pan-Africanism and train influential African nationalists who would ultimately bring the Colonial Era to an end [19]. A photograph from the Hampton University Archives titled “Hampton’s Girdle Around the World” c. 1890, the year that Sheppard left for Africa, shows the diverse nature of its student body [20]. Students such as these and, later, Peter Mbiyu Koinange, a Gikuyu from Kenya, contributed to the museum collection at Hampton that was established by its founder General Samuel Chapman Armstrong in 1868. Armstrong, a father figure to Sheppard and to Booker T. Washington, its most famous alumni, requested that Sheppard collect for this rich and diverse collection. As a result, Hampton owns the earliest collected Kuba objects in the world and the first African collection made by an African American.

9 It was at Hampton that Sheppard’s evangelical zeal was formed [21]. Founded in 1868 by General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, who had commanded Black troops for the Union Army during the Civil War, Hampton could not have survived without the tenacious motivation of its Black students who, in the early years, endured many privations for the sake of their education [22]. Over four million slaves were freed by the war. While there was some literacy among Blacks free and slave, well over 95 % were illiterate. Forty-five years later, as Sheppard’s sojourn in Central Africa was ending, two-thirds of all Blacks in America were literate despite significant social impediments [23]. For Blacks, education was the great leveler in the struggle for equality and economic progress. Hampton’s most famous alumni and contemporary of Sheppard, the former slave and educator Booker T. Washington observed, “Few people who were not right in the midst of the scenes can form any exact idea of the intense desire which the people of my race showed for education. It was a whole race trying to go to school. Few were too young, and none too old, to make the attempt to learn [24]”.

10 At Hampton, the students not only took the program, but were exhorted to teach in the local communities. Sheppard, who was born free and who came from a relatively comfortable background, went out to Slabtown, a poor Black village one mile from the school, for home mission work. Sheppard did not finish his program at Hampton. In 1883, he went to Tuscaloosa Theological Institute in Alabama (later Stillman Institute) graduating in 1886. It was during his exams that he was asked that if he was called to go to Africa as a missionary would he accept. Sheppard answered that he would gladly go. In 1888, Sheppard was ordained by Atlanta Presbytery to be pastor of Zion Church, a Black congregation in Atlanta, Georgia [25]. In 1890 after numerous petitions, he left for Luebo in the Congo with fellow missionary John Lapsley, who was White [26]. After Lapsley’s untimely death in March of 1892, Sheppard went alone with nine Congolese to search for Mushenge, the Kuba capital. He would subsequently found the Ibanj mission in Kuba territory. Sheppard always credited Hampton Institute as his spiritual home, and its program as the architecture of his life [27]. The unfortunate John Lapsley, whose death Sheppard grieved, described him as “a man of unusual grace and strong points of character [28]”.

11 A rare broadsheet (fig. 4) published in Virginia that is in the Sheppard Collection in the Hampton University Archives was probably published to commemorate his speaking tour of 1894, when he was home on one of his two furloughs from the Congo, shows Sheppard in his official portrait as a newly inducted Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society, a tremendous achievement for any traveler to the continent at the time. It is all the more striking as Sheppard was 28 year-old and the son of a father who had been a former slave. On either side of Sheppard’s portrait are two Christian hymns. Sheppard was a natural linguist. The two hymns are translated into the Kuba language (fundamental for spreading the word of the Gospel). In the upper right hand corner, there is an image of the missionary steamboat, the Samuel Lapsley, that plied the waters of the Congo and the Kasai Rivers and, in the upper left hand corner, a map showing the lower quadrant of the Belgian Congo from Stanley Poole to the Kasai region, the site of the missions where Sheppard preached and made conversions among the local populations (it may be added, with much difficulty). Especially noteworthy is the inscription, “God bless you and cause you to pity the benighted millions of Africa. Your humble and obedient servant. W.H. Sheppard, F.R.G.S. [Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society]”. Obviously meant to raise funds for the mission, the broadsheet is evidence of the public appeal of Sheppard, of his heroic persona and accomplishments that were deemed important to sustaining the missionary effort. Such a document was especially meant to recruit other Blacks. A pamphlet published by the Southern Presbyterian Church as propaganda for its seminary for Blacks at Tuscaloosa, Alabama, from which Sheppard himself graduated, explicitly states this program :

“From Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to Luebo, Congo Independent State, is a far cry, but in a wonderful way God has permitted us to bridge these thousands of miles, and the two places are now closely connected… At Tuscaloosa, Alabama, the Southern Presbyterian Church has a school for the training of Colored preachers. This is done simply and sensibly. No Greek, Latin, or Hebrew is taught. The English Grammar and the Bible are the principal text-books. Most of the graduates preach the gospel to the ignorant and needy people of their race in the South. A few of the graduates, who feel strongly called thereto, are trained to be missionaries to their savage forefathers in Africa [29]”.

Fig. 4

A broadsheet probably used to recruit missionaries, especially black Americans, when Sheppard was on furlough to America in 1893-94 for a speaking tour to raise money for the Presbyterian Congo Mission. The image of Sheppard is his official portrait as a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society in England.

12 The notion of the cultural and moral inferiority of African peoples elicited two responses from Sheppard’s generation. The first was an acceptance of African cultures as inferior, the remedy to which was to train Africans to compete with the West on its own terms technologically, morally and politically laying the foundations for “African nationalism and collective achievement”. The second response was to discredit the notion of Western superiority by investigating the achievements of the African past [30]. The most famous example of the latter is Alain Locke’s landmark essay (and later an anthology) “The New Negro”, published two years before Sheppard’s death, in which the African ancestral cultures of Black Americans are given value as equal to any in the world and declared the foundation of a unique “Negro American” culture [31].

13 The debate over the most effective education for Blacks was highly politicized in America and would occupy a central and controversial ideological position among late 19^th and early 20^th century Black intellectuals. An industrial education (espoused by Hampton-trained Booker T. Washington) versus higher education for the most talented (espoused by Harvard Ph.D. W.E.B. Du Bois) to lift Blacks out of the conditions left by slavery was central to this debate. Skilled and freely undertaken labor was seen as spiritually uplifting for Blacks who had known the co-option of their labor through the coercion of slavery. Photographs of students produced at Hampton Institute and at the Luebo mission at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century often depicted work in highly aesthetic compositions. The stunning image of the lovely Portia, a Hampton student, ironing laundry that was taken by Leigh Richmond Minor for the Camera Club, belongs to the conscious creation of a new and desirable community of African peoples when compared to Sheppard’s recreation of the motif in a photograph of African girls at an ironing table in Luebo (figs. 5 & 6) [32]. Upon the failure of Reconstruction (1868-1880) to economically lift Blacks out of slavery and the subsequent rise of laws aimed at keeping Blacks economically subservient, it was politically expedient to emphasize industrial training over an intellectual education. In fact, in 1906 in a reprint in The Kasai Herald from The Missionary Review of the World, the importance of an industrial education in the missionary context was commented upon by its major proponent in America, Booker T. Washington, leader of Tuskegee Institute and, like Sheppard, a product of Hampton. Washington is quoted at length from the succinct statement of the social and cultural agenda he espoused :

“From conversations with missionaries and from our own Tuskegee students who have gone out to Africa as teachers, I learn the conditions that the missionary encounters among the weaker races are not wholly unlike those that we meet in the Southern States to-day. In both cases we have to deal with races that need moral and intellectual training, but who need, also, the material and social conditions which will support and provide a basis for a higher civilization, into which this sort of teaching seems to invite them to enter. They need to learn habits of industry individual initiative and to acquire the notions of property that preserve to the individual the fruits of his labor. Without these the weaker races must inevitably fall behind, and perhaps perish, in the severe competition with the stronger races. From this competition, on some terns or other, there is no escape. Since the white race has penetrated into Central Africa there is no place where the weaker races have not come under the influence and domination of the stronger races. It is part of the task of the missionary to make those influences a blessing rather than, what they too often have been, a curse. There are parts of Africa to-day in which the Christian missionary organizations seem to be all that stand between the natives and the forces that are ruthlessly crushing out their existence [33]”.

Fig. 5

Portia ironing.

Fig. 6

“The girls doing laundry work”, titled by William Sheppard. Probably taken at the Ibanj mission, 1906-08.

14 There are several observances to be gleaned from this passage and the passage previously cited from the pamphlet, Tuscaloosa to Luebo. The critical difference between the objectives of Blacks like the missionary-ethnographer-explorer Sheppard and explorers and ethnographers such as Torday or Frobenius (whom Sheppard preceded to the Kuba) was the formers’ racial identification with Africans. To Blacks of the time, many of whom accepted the notion that Africans were inferior in the technologies that created property and wealth from labor and in moral culture because they were practicing animists, Black Africans were nonetheless “forefathers”. Black missionaries and proponents of institutes like Hampton, Tuskegee and Stillman saw themselves as adopting a strategy that would help prevent the annihilation of Blacks in the southern United States and Africa at the hands of the civilized, economically and politically superior Western nations [34].

15 In response to Washington, and in the tradition of their mutual educational background, an industrial school was established at Ibanj by 1906. It was at Ibanj that Sheppard, A. L. Edmiston and their wives strove to create an environment illustrative of the Christian and social ideals to which they aspired as Black Americans in response to the abolition of slavery. Pagan Kennedy, in her book on Sheppard, delves into his motivations and those of the other missionaries to create a situation at Ibanj that was free of prejudice, replete with social justice and a physically shining example of a community where Black people worked and lived in control of their environment. Sheppard was a highly successful administrator of the day to day workings of the mission, first at Luebo, after the death of Samuel Lapsley and before the arrival of William Morrison when he was solely in charge as he was later at Ibanj, a mission station collectively created by Black missionaries [35].

16 To the Kuba, and in his own mind, Sheppard was a chief [36]. The Kuba had deemed him a prince upon his first arrival at the capital, the reincarnation of the deceased king Bope Mekabe [37]. He soon demonstrated that he was a successful and fearless big-game hunter. In the southern savannas of Central Africa, the attributes of the buffalo are associated with the attributes of chiefship : boldly powerful yet cunning and stealthy ; implacable in action yet capable of a cool stillness. At the turn on the twentieth century, some chiefs still wore an ancient coiffure like that of a Bushongo chief that Émile Torday published in 1925 as the frontispiece of On the Trail of the Bushongo (fig. 7). It is a highly stylized rendering of the bush buffalo’s horns. The hair is cut to form a ridge around the back of the head wrapping forward to a horn shape over each temple. Pregnant women were also allowed to wear this stylized coiffure thus connecting leadership, power and authority to fertility. In a number of masquerades of the region, of which the Kuba mwaash-mbwooy mushall and the Pende kipoko are two examples, the buffalo coiffure is alluded to in the high stylization of the mask. There is a clear relationship to the Torday images [38]. Sheppard as an intrepidly successful hunter of such dangerous iconic animals that he gifted to the indigenous populations proved himself a powerful, productive and generous leader. In time, Sheppard controlled several villages surrounding the Ibanj mission, a fact that caused resentment among the local chiefs who as a result lost tax revenues. As leaders acknowledging a leader, important chiefs struck agreements with Sheppard necessary for the coexistence of the mission in a volatile region.

Fig. 7

“A Bushongo Chief of the Isambo Sub-Tribe. He wears his hair to imitate buffalo’s horns after the ancient fashion”.

17 It is known that during his long sojourn in Africa, especially at times when he was without his wife’s companionship, Sheppard had lovers among the Kuba women and fathered a son by one of them. An African servant testified against him to church superiors, causing the loss of his post in 1910. The matter was handled with the utmost secrecy. The announcement of the departure of the Sheppards from the field in the Annual Report of 1910 adroitly avoids making public the real reason. Sheppard was not the only missionary who succumbed to such temptations. Other missionaries Black and White took up with African women, and it was a common practice among traders and the like. William Morrison, who sent him into harms way to gather evidence of mistreatment of the Congolese and who faced trial with him in Leopoldville, brought the charges against Sheppard and other Black Presbyterian missionaries. He was almost unanimously effective, thus ending a unique chapter in the colonial history of Central Africa [39]. Arguably, Sheppard’s affairs would have been seen by the Kuba to be an indication of his virility as a leader. The average Kuba man was monogamous, but the great leader had numerous wives. Kennedy writes that Sheppard was even considered a serious contender for the throne, given his reputation, perhaps originally a political contrivance of the Kuba, as a reincarnated former Kuba king [40]. Sheppard’s bold personality, fearlessness, generosity and virility conformed to the nature of the founder chief whose ability to lead is confirmed by his iconoclasm (Sheppard was the bringer of a new world-view), but who nonetheless embodies the law (Sheppard participated in Kuba power relations and sought to establish Christian practices over certain indigenous ones). It is a reasonable assertion that this paradox of power, at once sacred and profane in the indigenous context, characterized Sheppard’s unique relationship with the Kuba.

18 For a man of Sheppard’s gifts, Ibanj was an historic experiment through which a Black man could exercise authority and be autonomous. Sheppard was a master politician and adroit strategist who strove not to offend the sensibilities of his White superiors or the agents of the Belgian government so that he could maintain his unique situation on the border of the Kuba kingdom. In this, he fell back on Hampton Institute as a model for his work at Ibanj. In a short article titled “A Congo Rocking Chair”, in 1908 in The Kasai Herald, A.L. Edmiston extolled a rocking chair made by Kuba boys at Ibanj 1,200 miles inland from the seacoast as remarkable (fig. 8). To his opening remarks Sheppard added ; “Mr. Edmiston has struck the keynote. There are now sixty-seven (67) Bakuba boys and young men who are learning trades, such as carpentering, blacksmithing, mat making, tailoring, basket making, etc. They are also in the regular school ; and hearing the gospel [41]”. Sheppard words describe the program at Hampton Institute he had himself experienced. Moreover, as a gifted ethnographer Sheppard knew that the Kuba were superb workers in iron and copper (Kuba royalty was trained in blacksmithing and metal working, considered sacred transformative acts) ; that they made beautiful mats and textiles for adornment and as grave goods. He knew that they carved impressive sculpture and wove intricate baskets. For Sheppard and his fellow Black missionaries it was not the native manufacture, no matter how grand, but industry as the means for spiritual uplift that was the hallmark of a “superior” civilization [42]. This rocking chair, imbued with iconic importance, was presented to D^r L. Drepondt, the director of the Compagnie du Kasai. The gift of the chair and the publication of Drepondt’s thank-you letter can be seen as politically strategic. The missionaries had a sometimes mutually beneficial relationship with Drepondt. It was reported in The Kasai Herald in 1906 that he had helped four of them travel during the dry season when the waters were too low for the Compagnie du Kasai steamer (July, No. 3) [43]. Perhaps it was also meant to mollify strained relations with a concern that ruthlessly represented the economic interests of Belgium over Africans.

Fig. 8

“A Congo Rocking Chair”, made in the industrial program, 1908, at Ibanj.

19 In 1900, Sheppard himself had investigated atrocities, mutilated corpses and chained Congolese hostages of The Congo Free State with the newly invented Kodak box camera. On orders from William Morrison, appointed his superior in 1897 at Luebo, Sheppard had gone with notebook and camera to document a massacre by the Zappo-Zaps (Songye) at Pianga. Every step of the way he survived being killed with quick thinking and fast talking. Sheppard’s coolness in the face of death and a willingness to follow orders that could have cost him his life manifested his intrepid nature and inordinate luck. Morrison, who did not take the risk, used Sheppard’s report to substantiate the atrocities to the Belgian administration. The Belgians dire economic exploitation of the local population that Sheppard discovered upon his return from furlough to the field in 1906 was strongly objected to by the missionary community.

20 Always before, Sheppard had been careful. He had made his criticisms of Belgian brutality almost anonymously and did not call attention to the situation while on the speaking circuit in late 1903. As Pagan Kennedy writes, “The church had hired Sheppard to raise money, not to raise hell”. Sheppard himself answered his White colleagues who were indignant at his lack of engagement with these issues on the lecture circuit, “Being a Colored man, I would not be understood criticizing a White government before White people [44]”. The year after Sheppard presented the rocking chair to the powerful Drepondt, in 1909, would see him and his superior William Morrison sued for libel and threatened with a huge fine and a jail sentence by the Belgian government. Morrison had been a continual thorn in the side of the Belgian authorities, but it was Sheppard’s unambiguous article in the Kasai Herald decrying the destruction of the Kuba and their culture by the Compagnie du Kasai that precipitated events. From his return in 1906 to 1908, Sheppard had worked at Ibanj amid the extreme suffering of a population that he had known in its great days. Now, everywhere he looked was ruin. Court, king, husbandry, architecture, culture, and ceremony had been impoverished. The reaction of the Belgian authorities would be brought to the attention of the governments of the United States and Europe and make Sheppard an international celebrity. Morrison was dropped from the case on a technicality and the charges against Sheppard were proven absurd in a defense by the leading Belgian socialist lawyer, Émile Vandervelde, who traveled to the Congo at the request of the Presbyterian Congo Missions to represent the two American missionaries at Leopoldville. After Sheppard’s death, however, it was Morrison who became the lone champion of these events [45]. The renewed interest in Sheppard has reinstated him in the record of this sad chapter of the colonial history of Central Africa.

21 Thus, always lurking nascent in Black missionary activity, no matter how “reformist”, were the seeds of resistance. No matter that Sheppard followed the lead of the trade school model at the recommendation of Booker T. Washington who preached accommodation with the White man, and no matter how clever he was at avoiding trouble, moral repugnance pulled Blacks who had lived intimately with the spiritual impoverishment of slavery into the fray. Ultimately, American Blacks were challenged by events in Africa to act. It was inevitable that movements valorizing African cultures would eventually emerge in African American activism and thought. In the most radical expression of these movements, the most impressive cultures of Africa would be seen as superior to the racist West. Paradoxically, missionaries such as Sheppard made this worldview possible through the collection and study of the material culture of African peoples brought back to Black institutions such as Hampton. From the beginning, despite narrow characterizations of such institutions, these collections were used at Hampton as teaching tools to instill racial pride in settings begun during Reconstruction for the education of freed Blacks. This was a brief period that sought to more equitably distribute economic and social power in race relations in America. Early programs, such as the African Studies program established at Hampton in 1873, educated a Black leadership familiar with cultures of the African continent and who matriculated with Africans who would, in time, create movements for independence from colonial rule [46]. This took place even though it is fair to say that such institutions were, and still are, culturally conservative.

22 The lives and careers of such Black intellectuals as Alain Locke, who was at the forefront of revalorizing African culture and other writers and visual artists, for example, of the Harlem Renaissance and the international Négritude movement in which Locke was prominent, would overlap with the lives of the early missionaries. As noted above, Alain Locke’s seminal anthology, The New Negro, was published in 1925 two years before Sheppard’s death. Sheppard had used his collection to demonstrate the nature of the African culture he encountered during his lectures for the Congo Presbyterian Mission on furloughs home to raise money. These talks were given in-depth descriptive accounts in the Black press. A Hampton photo from 1920 shows a domestic economics class examining Kuba textiles from the Sheppard collection [47], a unique educational experience in any institution of the time.

23 During Sheppard’s time, objects that had been brought back from Africa by colonial administrators and missionaries were being reassessed by the West as great world art. Through a well received exhibition containing material from the collection of Belgian diplomat Raoul Blondiau that he had helped to acquire for Theatre Arts Monthly magazine, Alain Locke, in 1927, was responsible in securing works from that collection to augment Hampton’s already significant holdings of Kuba material. Part of that collection also went to the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City. The Harvard educated Locke taught at Howard University from 1912 and in his will in 1954 left a collection of African art to the school. Founded upon a different educational philosophy than the industrial schools, Howard afforded Locke influence upon the most elite educated Blacks. The early international connections of Black schools through missionaries, not only with West and Central Africa, but with Native Americans, the Caribbean and with Asian and Eastern European nations were essential to the formation of an international world-view and the subsequent cultural movements and progressive thinkers that developed among African Americans. In this way, the industrial schools (Hampton) and institutions of higher learning (Howard) impacted the Black intelligentsias of Africa, the Caribbean and the United States.

24 Not only the material cultures the Black missionaries encountered, but the ones they themselves established are matter for fascinating studies. Sheppard and his fellow Black missionaries, like A.L. Edmiston who laid out the plan for the church at Ibanj [48], were responsible for the conception and design of the impressively built environment of the Ibanj mission where all sorts of illustrious men Black and White “came tramping through town and depended on Black Americans’ hospitality… As unofficial mayor, he [Sheppard] would rule over a utopia of African American achievement. For the station of Ibaanc [sic] was built, staffed, designed, and supervised entirely by Black people [49]”. Sheppard was joined in his labor by Black men and women who shared his dreams and motivations. Among the Black missionaries who imported a southern Black ethos to Central Africa was his wife, Lucy Gantt Sheppard, who unstintingly served with him at Luebo and Ibanj. Of two remarkable women who originally came alone as missionaries, Althea Brown and Maria Fearing, Fearing’s story is the most indelible. She was recruited by Sheppard in her fifties. A former slave who paid for her own education at Talladega College, Maria Fearing went to Africa unsupported by the Congo Presbyterian Mission board who did not want to be responsible for her because of her age. Fearing paid her own passage and with her personal resources purchased African children out of slavery, schooling and rearing them at the Luebo mission. She did this until forced to retire from the field in her eighties [50]. Such rectitude informed the daily structure of time and events at these missions. The skills instilled by the industrial training of the Black schools brought a certain harmony and visual clarity to the living environment.

25 No discussion about who Sheppard was and his impact can be complete without mentioning the objects that he collected and sold to Hampton in 1911 and the images of the cultures he encountered. Sheppard in Africa was a man in a world of aesthetic sensibilities. This can be seen in images from Ibanj : the gracefully-posed missionaries in their suits and sharply pressed dresses in front of well-built homes (The Sheppard Collection, Hampton University Archives, Hampton, Virginia), the clarity of the structure of the church interior with its polished and whitewashed dirt floors (fig. 9) and the arches of the Sheppards’ front porch where his little son, Max, poses among African men (The Sheppard Collection ; and The Presbyterian Historical Society in Montreat, North Carolina) ; Sheppard (fig. 10) posing with Max in front of his well-tended field gear on a short trip with native helpers and children (The Sheppard Collection and The Presbyterian Historical Society) [51]. The juxtaposition of images and actors in this drama of cultural encounter draws the viewer into an extraordinary world where the vision of a more just and gracious society born out of the experience of American slavery meets the great court of the Kuba.

Fig. 9

A postcard titled “Interior Lapsley Memorial Chapel, Built by the Natives Congo, Central Africa”.

Fig. 10

“A short journey inland”. Sheppard with his young son, Congolese children and adults. Sheppard made many trips to proselytize the Christian faith and inform the Congolese why the Presbyterian Congo Mission was in the Kasai.

26 Sheppard, in his generosity, gave away many objects that he collected. He sold most of his collection to Hampton in 1911 and annotated the list of objects in 1911 and 1915 [52]. It is invaluable field documentation. There are not only Kuba objects but also objects from the Luba, Songye, Biombo, Soko, Kela, Lulua, Ngala, Teke, Ngata, and Mbuyu (Bockombuya following Sheppard). The majority, however, are Kuba. The list includes objects of ritual, ceremony and rank, among them : a beaded mukyeem helmet mask (related in style to the mwaash-mbwooy mushall but with a stylized elephant trunk at the top) ; a crocodile oracle and various charms ; an intricately patterned Kuba warrior’s insignia horn, extremely fine examples of decorated pipe bowls and cups, some with anthropomorphic motifs, as well as forms of laket, the Kuba hat (head covering) that is elaborated into various insignia of rank. There are shields, and superb examples of metalwork in knives, axes and adze, the finest being given by the king and princes to Sheppard as gifts. The single most important example will be discussed below. There are objects from daily life. In Hampton’s collection are, hat pins, carved boxes, sometimes used to store knives or cakes of red camwood (tukula) powder to cover objects and the body, and neckrests. Various types of the refined Kuba basketry are represented. One of the most important areas of excellence in the Sheppard collection is its textiles. The collection contains some of the oldest examples of Central African raffia cloth in the world. One exceptional piece may date as early as the mid 18^th centuries [53]. The variety, quality, and the date when they were collected make Hampton’s holdings one of the most important from the Kuba, who have produced one of the greatest textile traditions on the African continent. Since cultural information can be learned from the function of these textiles in Kuba society, the most ancient pieces, like those in the Sheppard collection, are of great historical importance [54].

27 Sheppard left a number of indelible images that contextualize his cultural motivations and his response to the African environment he encountered. A charming photograph of Sheppard being shaven by a bare-breasted native woman juxtaposed with a collection of the razors he selected and sold to Hampton published by William Phipps in The Sheppard’s and Lapsley : Pioneer Presbyterians in the Congo [55]. In the image, Sheppard is clearly enjoying himself. His posture is easy, vital yet relaxed, with one hand gracefully slung over his knee. The woman is obviously ministering to someone she respects. She has effaced herself in the act that she performs. Sheppard’s pose is the posture of a supremely confident man at ease in the world around him. A collection of Kuba razors acquired in 1990 by Hampton University Museum shows the aesthetic elaboration of detail in Kuba design that Sheppard so admired.

28 Sheppard published the image of a Kete helmet mask in a story that he wrote for children [56]. Shepard’s caption identifies the mask as one worn by a “witch doctor” and indicates the protagonist of the story, a young boy, has given up participating in local rituals after his conversion to Christianity. Such masks are worn by ritual experts for healing and by initiates and initiators for initiation rites and funerary rituals, information that Sheppard himself clearly noted elsewhere. These functions, however, conflict with the assumption of Christian values and authority, so Sheppard emphasizes in his story that the boy rejects the mask. The image of the mask however has a story to tell. As ethnographic document the mask is interesting in that it is clearly Kete (the ethnic group at Luebo), but its general form, when compared with other Kete masks of its type, hints at the intense borrowing of masks and masking forms that existed among the neighboring groups on the border of the Kuba region. According to oral history, the Kete are made up of several populations and the Kuba took from them their artistic traditions although there is no material evidence to document this. In the capture of this image, Sheppard operates on two levels. He uses the image to proselytize the efficacy of Christianity among pagan peoples. In the process, he documents an important example of a major masking style for future scholarship.

29 Another interesting photograph in the Sheppard Collection and Sheppard’s papers at Hampton University records a group of dancing men that he identifies as Batetela. This elegant image belies the fact that the Batetela were constantly at war with their neighbors and, in 1891, the year after Sheppard arrived in the Kasai, they turned against Arab slavers with the help of the Belgians. Sheppard notes in his writings that the missionaries feared the Batetela :

“After many months of building, preaching and teaching, trouble came to the little band. The Batetela soldiers, far away in the Lulua country, revolted, killing their Belgian officers and threatened to come to Luebo and fight the missionaries. Earnest prayers were offered by the missionaries and Christian natives. God changed the purpose of the fighters and sent them in a different direction [57]”.

30 The single most important object that came into Sheppard’s possession was a large knife with an iron blade and a broken pommel decorated with copper wire [59]. This knife was given to Sheppard by Maxamalenge to thank him for saving his life. The old king had died and a different dynasty ruled the Kuba that sought to force Maxamalenge, the old nyim’s favorite son, to take the poison oracle. Sheppard gave the prince, whom he had befriended since 1892, shelter at Ibanj earning the ire of the Kuba leadership and the eventual destruction of the mission in 1904. The mission was rebuilt but never to its former glory.

31 The accession notes concerning this royal ceremonial sword were dictated by Sheppard. The accession date is March 26, 1915. The notes relate that the sword had been handed down through the reign of many Lukengas and that :

“Once a year, thousands from associated tribes gather to report to Lukenga [60]. Daily for 2 weeks they assemble in [the] public square for speeches, singing and dancing. The Lukenga sits high in his pavilion (sic) surrounded by his family and court. The master of ceremonies lays this long knife before a chief, who picks it up, steps into the circle, salutes the king with the knife and gives his dance as the drums beat and the long ivory horns blow. After this he makes his report.
After the death of the old Lukenga (sic), his successor, of another dynasty, killed as many as possible of the old reigning family and thro’ the influence of the Belgians did away with this annual meeting. Maxamalenge fled the capitol and took refuge with the missionaries at Ibanj. This knife was his thank[s] offering for hospitality received. Dr Sheppard’s son is named for this man [61]”.

“It is the largest of all Kuba weapons having a gradually tapering point and blade decorated with longitudinal grooves. The long, tubular hilt is elaborately carved and inlaid with copper. Together with the lance mbwoom ambady, the mbombaam is an essential part of the royal costume bwaantshy, a massive agglomeration of objects which might best be described as a lexicon of Kuba symbolism associated with the person of the nyim [62]”.

32 How significant, then, was it for such an important ritual object to be placed in Shepppard’s hands ? The Belgians had put an end to the rituals at the capital that reified the sacred and political authority of the nyim (King), rituals in which the mbombaam had been central. In this context, Maxamalenge’s gesture of thanks becomes a poetic act. He transfers a sacred object of kingship to Sheppard, the iconoclast, who by force of his will had established a base of power among the Kuba in delicate balance with the interests of his church against the injustice of the Belgians. It was a moment signaling the twilight descending upon the Kuba Kingdom. The days of glory were over. They would soon be over for Sheppard. His singular adventure was about to come to an end and these two men, a Black American and a Black African had participated in one of the great stories of their time.

33 In the year 2000, at the turn of another century, almost one hundred years after this event, King Kot aMbweeky III, whose namesake was the nyim who received Sheppard as he first entered the capital of the kingdom, visited Hampton University Museum. The object in which he was most interested and that he most treasured was the mbombaam sword that Maxamalenge had given to Sheppard [65]. This arc of history, in which he would be an actor, was unknown to Sheppard as he stood looking for the first time upon the verdant abundance of the Kuba kingdom with its broad streets and woven houses. After his sojourn in the Kasai was over, he returned to America, to a clamoring lecture circuit where he could recount his singular adventure. He also returned to a nation where in daily life he had to hide who he was, a man of uncommon qualities, but he could display and discuss the treasures that he had been gifted and chosen. He could tell about and show the world the greatness of an African people.

34 Sheppard did not falter in regret or sorrow for what was lost. He took care of his family and contributed to the betterment of his last parish community in Louisville, Kentucky with his typical humor and energy. He ended his days at the age of sixty-two from a stroke that invalided him for a year and that was most likely brought on by the numerous bouts of malaria he had experienced in the field. He was able all his life to cope with extreme contradictions – slavery versus freedom, the brutality of Leopold’s Congo versus the rights of the Congolese, being a Black man in a world under White men’s control – and maintain his equilibrium. In a sense, Sheppard “went native” in the Congo identifying with Africans, but he held onto his identity. He was a doer, a Black man who met two presidents, who lectured to an august body of his fellows at Exeter Hall in London. He was a man of deep compassion and great courage, and he sinned in the letter of his creed as a man immersed in a different world that he had come to respect and enjoy.

35 Sheppard was the product of an historical process in which Blacks in the Americas sought to forge an identity apart from the Western ideology of race that supported slavery, and to establish a political and economic base from which that could be made a reality. This generation saw Blacks in the Americas and Africa allied in a battle against spiritual and physical annihilation. The period of Reconstruction after The Civil War was one of great promise for a population whose condition impacted Blacks beyond continental America. In that moment of expectation, an extraordinary generation born slave and free went out to act upon the world stage. Their ideas and movements would reverberate to the mid-twentieth century helping to shape the discourse for civil rights in America and for independence in Africa. The missionary William Henry Sheppard, the “Black Livingstone of Africa”, was one of that generation’s most gifted protagonists.