| Once upon a time, they were idealized as brave emissaries, penetrating the heart of darkness to bring God and civilization to the heathens. Today, they are more likely to be demonized as sanctimonious tools of colonial oppression.
But for Daniel Coleman, the African missionary is more like the bahir-zaff.
In Ethiopia, that’s the Amharic word for eucalyptus and literally means "overseas tree." The eucalyptus was brought to the east African country from Australia in the 19th century to solve a serious firewood shortage, as it makes an excellent fast-burning fuel and grows back quickly when it is cut down. Yet its introduction has had a negative side – wherever eucalyptus is planted, it saps the nutrients from the soil, making it impossible for the indigenous vegetation to survive.
In his fascinating new book, The Scent of Eucalyptus, Coleman turns the bahir-zaff’s mixed blessing into a metaphor for the missionaries who also began moving into Ethiopia more than a century ago, bringing schools, medicine and other benefits, but also sowing Christianity and westernization in place of native values and beliefs.
"The problem of importing foreign solutions is that you can wipe out the indigenous ways of life," says Coleman, who was in Calgary recently on a book tour. "But then, on the other hand, the missionaries, like the eucalyptus, did solve a real problem."
Coleman is in a good position to critique the missionary culture – a literary researcher in race and ethnicity at McMaster University in Hamilton, he is also the son of Canadian missionaries and grew up in Ethiopia.
Part memoir, part study, his book views the missionary presence in Ethiopia from a highly personal perspective. Coleman was born in 1961 and his childhood and adolescence paralleled the last days of the reign of Emperor Haile Selassie and the revolution and famine that ensued. The emperor welcomed western missionaries, in part because of the services they provided his country, and Coleman’s early years were idyllic ones, happily growing up alongside Ethiopian children in Obi, a rural community southwest of the capital, Addis Ababa.
"I look back at it now and think, ‘Wow, to have grown up not thinking about racial differences, to be integrated, was wonderful,’" he says.
But later, attending an exclusive boarding school in Addis for missionary kids, he began to experience the division between foreigners and natives, which was exacerbated when Haile Selassie’s government was overthrown by an anti-western military junta. Coleman’s schoolday memories are a mix of the typical youthful pranks and crushes with recollections of riot drills, being stopped and frisked by armed civilian patrols, and glimpsing dead bodies on the streets of Addis from the school bus.
"The politics of the late ’70s drove a wedge between me and an idealized idea of the place," he says. "Those were tough years; it wasn’t easy to be a teenager trying to just figure out your own life, let alone the politics of this really complex environment."
After completing high school, Coleman came to Canada to attend university and, for a long time, avoided talking about his early life in Ethiopia. But his chosen field of academic study, immigrant Canadian writing, got him thinking about his own experiences.
"I was reading (Michael) Ondaatje, Rohinton Mistry, Dionne Brand, and thinking that I could really relate to this idea of the divided life and living between cultures," he says. "That put me on the track of trying to describe what this missionary culture was. That’s why the book has the shape it has. I thought of it more as an ethnography of this ‘ethnic group’ called missionaries. That’s why it’s thematically, rather than chronologically, organized around themes such as clothing, songs, friendships, sports."
Coleman also strives for an even-handed treatment of his subject. "I’d read so many negative stereotypes of missionaries," he says, pointing, as an example, to Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible. "I understand where it comes from – the contrast between the high ideals that missionaries often put forward and the actual lives they live and mistakes they purvey makes them a ready figure for satire and critiques. I wanted to make a rounded, textured representation of that culture."
Although both his parents were missionaries (they are now retired and living in Three Hills, Alberta) and his older brother has carried on their work in Ethiopia, Coleman says his book doesn’t try to justify or defend missionary life, either. "I hope I’ve been able to suggest some of the problems with it as well as show the workings of it."
Yet the book is by no means dispassionate. As a memoirist, Coleman vividly relives emotions as well as sensations and reveals his own spiritual struggles. His most dramatic chapter, however, is reserved for the story of a family friend, a young Ethiopian teacher who underwent torture and imprisonment by the revolutionary government for refusing to recant his Christian beliefs. His patient defiance reads like a heroic tale out of a martyrology and inspires the agnostic Coleman’s deepest reflections on the religion in which he was raised.
Although it is a valuable addition to our understanding of the "missionary position," Coleman hopes The Scent of Eucalyptus also has a wider application.
"There are so many NGOs that do development work out of convictions, whether they’re religious or humanitarian, and encounter the same sort of issues," he says. "There’s this attempt to address the local problems of a place with technology and knowledge from abroad, and I think they run into the same conflicted situation." |
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