Huron University was once part of a large Christian missionary movement found across much of the world. During the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, missionaries with ties to Huron partnered with a brutal colonial regime, building the Huron Training College in German East Africa. In the years leading up to the creation of the Huron Training College, German officials in East Africa brutalized and murdered hundreds of thousands of Indigenous Tanzanians during, and in retaliation for, the Maji Maji Uprising after local Tanzanians revolted against forced labour practices. [1] The objects from the Huron Missionary Museum (1911-1944) and the collections remaining at Huron University come, in part, from donors who lived in German East Africa as part of their missionary efforts. To better understand how the Huron Missionary Museum collection developed, this essay aims to demonstrate how the Huron Missionary Museum connects Huron University College to European colonial regimes in Africa. The collection of artifacts by missionaries who partnered with these colonial regimes brings into question the ethical status of the Huron Missionary Museum itself. Huron University originally opened as a theological college for the Anglican Diocese of Huron. Benjamin Cronyn became the first bishop in 1852 and just over a decade later he founded Huron College as a theological institute to train priests and missionaries in the Anglican faith and for service in the new diocese. With the creation of the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society of the Church of England in 1883, members of the Huron Diocese took a more expansive view of their faith work. In this first year alone, the Huron Diocese contributed $2,438.33 to support overseas missions. In 1902, the Missionary Society of the Church of England in Canada (M. S. C. C.) replaced the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society as the organization directing missionary efforts for the Anglican Church in Canada. The Huron Diocese contributed $11,000.[2] This new institution started by enrolling every member of the Anglican Church in Canada into its membership.[3] Huron Diocese members hoped for the expansion of missionary work in the Anglican Church of Canada to equal their counterparts in the Anglican Church of England. In A Jubilee Memorial-Diocese of Huron 1857-1907, Archdeacon Richardson, the Archdeacon of London, Ontario, hoped the Anglican Church in Canada would work “in all regions of the heathen,” and become “herself a missionary church, like the missionary Church of England, from which she sprang, taking her full part in the evangelizing of this world.” [4] By the early twentieth century, the Huron Diocese put significant focus on expanding overseas missionary efforts. By 1911, Huron College established the Huron Missionary Museum to display artifacts brought back by alumni on overseas expeditions. Much of the museum’s objects came from the collection of Reverend Thomas Buchanan Reginald Westgate, who graduated from Huron College and later joined the Church Missionary Society in German East Africa around 1902.[5] The Canadian branch of the CMS partially amalgamated with the M. S. C. C. in 1903. Westgate remained a missionary under the German East African C. M. S. while also receiving support from its Canadian counterparts. [6] Westgate’s work with the CMS went hand-in-hand with German imperial interests. In a book about Westgate’s life, his son, Wilfrid, wrote that German administrators saw his father’s missionary work as “an asset to this part of the German colonial empire.”[7] A true test of this relationship came with the Maji Maji Uprising in 1905. The German East African administration enacted legislation for local peoples to perform forced labour to produce cotton. Despite significant language and cultural differences between them, the local population revolted against their colonial rulers. [8] Westgate and his wife feared that the German East African army would lose to the Indigenous population. Westgate showed this fear as he maintained contact with German authorities who protected his missionary station.[9] In 1913, C. M. S. members in German East Africa decided to build a college to train local people to become pastors in the Anglican faith. Westgate had much success gaining fundraising support from fellow alumni of Huron College. Using these funds, the C. M. S. began constructing the building, which they would name Huron Training College and welcomed thirteen students in January 1914. The First World War paused the partnerships with German East Africa, forcing Westgate and administrators to close the school. While Westgate was no longer the principal, Huron Training College reopened in the early 1920s with 47 students enrolled by September 1923.[10] The college continues today under the moniker: St. Philips Theological Seminary. Reverend Thomas Buchanan Reginald Westgate and the Huron Training College of Tanzania demonstrate the connection of Huron University and the Huron Missionary Museum to colonial institutions in Africa. Around the turn of the twentieth century, the Anglican Church of Canada placed more focus on missionary work. This priority, along with the work of other missionary societies, provided the foundation upon which to raise funds to support the work of missionaries like Rev. T. B. R. Westgate. Westgate was Huron Training College’s first principal and alumni of Huron College. As part of his work, Westgate partnered with a colonial regime in Africa in the same region he collected artifacts that are now in the Huron Missionary Museum Collection. The Training College bore the same name of “Huron” before changing to St. Philips Theological Seminary. Many Huron alumni donated toward constructing the school.

Notes

[1] James Giblin and Jamie Monson, eds., Maji Maji: Lifting the Fog of War (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 1. [2] Ven. Archdeacon Richardson, “Historical Sketch of the Diocese,” in A Jubilee Memorial-Diocese of Huron 1857-1907 (London, ON: The London Printing and Lithographing Company, n.d.), pp. 7-91, 88ee-89. [3] Eugene Stock, The History of the Church Missionary Society, vol. 4 (Salisbury Square: London Church Missionary Society, 1916), 88. [4] Richardson, “Historical Sketch of the Diocese,” 90-91. [5] Yves Engler, Canada in Africa: 300 Years of Aid and Exploitation (Black Point, Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishing, 2015), 56-57. [6] Stock, The History of the Church Missionary Society, 538. [7] Engler, Canada in Africa, 56-57. [8] Giblin and Monson, eds., Maji Maji, 1. [9] Engler, Canada in Africa, 56-57. [10] Hugh Prentice, History of Kongwa: A Centenary History of St Philip’s Theological College, Kongwa, Tanzania, 2014, Chapter 1. https://a.co/bpTBGCo