God’s feet or the mission’s pack donkey

Abstract

For decades mission history in Namibia has been written from a missionary perspective main ly emphasizing the Europeans’ missionary activities and their role alone. However, we have noticed that most of the ground works have been done by the local indigenous people. For European missionaries to reach their local targets, such as local leaders to consents to ope rate, they always had to go through the medium of local people as interpreters or even as local missionaries and carriers of the missionaries’ message to the local people in a langua ge or languages understood to them. European missionaries stayed mostly at mission cen ters while local missionaries travelled cress crossing the villages and local terrains spreading the Good News. Unfortunately, cognizance has been taken that there has been a prevailing gap that the actual role of local missionaries was left unaddressed. It is therefore vital that such a gap need to be filled. Hans-Martin Milk is one of those who are trying to fill this historic gap. In 2004 he traced the fascinating way, how Christianity came to Kavango – mostly through the activity of local missionaries – and published it in the book For the Power and Glory: Maka ranga. In 2016 he wrote a book about a debatable if not controversial contemporary topic on The Role of the Rhenish Mission Society during the Erection of Concentration Camps in Nami bia 1905 to 1908 (including the actual role of local missionaries). His writings on these two topics are most enlightening. In this book Milk ventured on the very important and much needed topic of Evangelists of the Rhenish Mission Society. This is a collection of individuals’ life stories of Namibian evan gelists, analyzing their day-to-day strategies and describing how they influenced the various historical phases of Namibia church and society between 1820 and 1990. The aim of this book is, amongst others, to help to differentiate the view of the history of Namibia. I believe this book adds value to the historical annals of the church in Namibia. It is a book worth reading because it entails also other general historical information of the country. This book is strongly recommended to the lovers of history, especially Namibian church historians and theological students and institutions – and last not least the Namibian Christians. This book also invites scholars to discover a wide range of venues for further research.