An Extraordinary Generation : The Legacy of William Henry Sheppard, the “Black Livingstone” of Africa

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William Henry Sheppard (1865-1927) est resté comme le “Livingstone noir de l’Afrique”. L’un des missionnaires les plus célèbres de son temps, il fut un ethnographe de talent doué d’une sensibilité pour les cultures qu’il rencontra. Bien qu’internationalement reconnu, de son vivant, pour son combat en faveur des Congolais opprimés, il tomba dans l’oubli, de sa disparition aux années 1960, où sa vie et son itinéraire commencèrent à susciter un nouvel intérêt. Le présent article ne livre pas une chronologie de W.H. Sheppard au Congo, mais s’attache à la replacer dans le contexte des combats de l’intelligentsia noire américaine de son époque, de l’éducation dite « réformiste » qu’il reçut, de l’œuvre des missionnaires noirs qui, dans un monde dominé par les pouvoirs blancs, prennent le parti des Africains contre la colonisation. Une extraordinaire génération d’hommes et de femmes qui, dans l’ère de la reconstruction après la guerre civile américaine, évoluent dans un contexte international de rapports de forces complexes et changeants.

William Henry Sheppard (1865-1927), who became known as the “Black Livingstone of Africa”, was one of the most famous missionary-explorers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was also a gifted ethnographer who documented with sensitivity and aesthetic appreciation the cultures he encountered. He became an international celebrity championing the human rights of the Congolese and documenting the atrocities of the Congo Free State and the Compagnie du Kasai. Due to his race, his accomplishments fell into obscurity after his death until the 1960s when renewed interest in his story drew scholarly attention. This discussion does not present a chronology of his experiences in the Congo, but places him in the context of the Black intelligentsia of his time and of the education he received that has been characterized reductively as “reformist”. His story is told from his point of view, as a Black man of uncommon gifts and will who operated adroitly in a world of white authority at a critical time in African history. For all of his singular achievements, however, Sheppard must be seen in the context of a community of Black missionaries, sponsored by established and independent churches, who aligned themselves with Africans against colonialism. The product of institutions established during the Reconstruction Era to train freed slaves after the American Civil War, this was an extraordinary generation of men and women who were active in an international context in a complex world of shifting power relationships. William Henry Sheppard was one of this generation’s most gifted protagonists.