La Mission de Paris au Lesotho : Évangélisation et indépendance politique

Résumé En

When the Paris Mission sent its first missionaries to Africa in 1833, it was in Southern Africa that they settled down, or more exactly in Lesotho, then an independent kingdom. But the strict evangelical mission had quickly to grope with harsh colonial facts. The Sotho kingdom was successively threatened by the Boers’ and other African peoples’ inroads. Caught between the territorial claims of the new Boer republics and the imperialists aims of the British, the kingdom went through a long period of wars, during which the French missionaries played the part of "foreign secretary", pleading with London’s authorities in particular to safeguard the Sotho’s independence. And yet, if success in the field of evangelization remained limited, the social and cultural contribution was considerable. Not only did the French missionaries create, as others did elsewhere, schools and nursing homes, but, by identifying their own destiny with that of the Sotho people, soon to become a nation, they helped to preserve its independence and culture. A whole generation of French parsons (from fathers to sons) thus devoted their efforts, outside pastoral tasks, to the study of this people from an archeological, ethnological and historical. In the second part of this paper the original contribution of the French missionaries will be analyzed.