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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | From Hampton '[i]nto the heart of Africa': how faith in God and folklore turned Congo missionary William Sheppard into a pioneering ethnologist |
Author: | Carton, Benedict |
Year: | 2009 |
Periodical: | History in Africa (ISSN 1558-2744) |
Volume: | 36 |
Pages: | 53-86 |
Language: | English |
Geographic terms: | Congo (Democratic Republic of) Congo Free State |
Subjects: | anthropology missions Kuba African Americans biographies (form) |
About person: | William Henry Sheppard (1865-1927) |
External link: | http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/history_in_africa/v036/36.1.carton.pdf |
Abstract: | The African-American missionary, William Henry Sheppard Jr. (1865-1927), lived in the Kuba kingdom of central Africa (now Democratic Republic of Congo) at the turn of the 20th century. A student of Virginia's Hampton (Normal) Institute in the early 1880s, Sheppard left the United States a decade later to preach in the Congo Free State, a colonial territory claimed by Belgian monarch Leopold II. This king's army and its local auxiliaries spawned suffering thoughout the equatorial region. Sheppard is known for bearing witness to Congo atrocities, but his ground-breaking ethnological research remains unfamiliar to many Africanists. However, the college that nurtured Sheppard's fascination with folklore, Hampton Institute (now Hampton University), houses his papers, photographs and artwork. The present paper introduces and analyses these sources. App., notes, ref. [ASC Leiden abstract] |