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By Root 1216 0

begun his journey at Berbera in Somaliland: it had taken fifteen months in the wilderness to reach the river. Now he estimated there were perhaps three or four more days of hardship to endure. Only seven white men were believed to have passed this way before and he wondered vaguely about the chances of a group of Africans arriving in canoes. Suddenly, shimmering through the heat haze, from around a bend upstream what should appear but a canoe. More extraordinary was what it contained – a white man in a white suit, holding a pink umbrella above his head. The American fired two rifle-shots into the air and was answered by two shots from the canoe. As the boat approached, the American drew up his porters in a line behind him. The canoe neared the bank, and the man stepped ashore. The American felt that ‘introductions by a third party are unnecessary in these remote regions’. The two men shook hands and the new arrival introduced himself. He was, he explained, the Reverend Robert Ormerod and he was looking for a site to build a new mission station. However unexpected this encounter was to the American, he really should not have been surprised. For missionaries might turn up anywhere. In fact, the remoter the terrain, the better. Making converts was hard work, but missionaries greatly increased their chances if no one had been prospecting for converts in the area before them. The need to find new souls to save took them to places which held no appeal for merchant-venturers, gold-prospectors or imperial strategists.

By the late nineteenth century, flag-planting was inseparable from cross-carrying. ‘It is religion which has given the comparatively small United Kingdom its imperial power and responsibilities,’ said the secretary of the Free Church of Scotland’s mission arm. By the turn of the twentieth century there were an estimated 12,000 British missionaries scattered across the world – the provisional wing of empire and often a damn nuisance to colonial administrators, who objected to their supercilious presumption that they knew better than them what was best for the natives. ‘Confound all these parsons,’ exclaimed the Governor of Uganda, Sir Hesketh Bell. But the missionaries had to be lived with. ‘They spread the use of the English language. They induct the natives into the best kind of civilisation,’ wrote one official. ‘In fact each mission station is an essay in colonisation.’ Or as Lord Salisbury put it, ‘First the missionary. Then the consul. Then the general.’ Or, often enough, first the missionary, then the trader.

Their energy and fortitude were astonishing – some missionaries might walk a thousand miles or more in a year. Alfred Tucker, for example, had been serving as a curate in Durham when, in 1890, he offered his services to the Archbishop of Canterbury as a potential missionary. Had he paused to think he might have deduced that the Archbishop’s decision to raise him immediately to the rank of bishop of Eastern Equatorial Africa (what became Kenya, Uganda and much of Tanganyika) hinted at how unattractive the posting was (the two previous bishops had died in harness). Instead, he left his wife and baby at home and set out for Africa, reaching Uganda in December that year, after a four-month trek from the coast on foot, in the company of a gun-runner. Dressed in tweeds, with a broad-brimmed hat and an enormous moustache, the new bishop set about trying to settle the consequences of the Africans’ eager embrace of Christianity: Anglican and French Catholic missionaries and their communities were on the point of war. Peace accomplished, there was further work ahead, for Uganda was not at the time part of the empire. The Imperial British East Africa Company, which had been given the rights to exploit the territory, was making no money, so Tucker raised sufficient funds from evangelicals in Britain to make it worth their while staying for another year. Two years later the British government declared the territory a protectorate. In his youth, Bishop Tucker had been an enthusiastic walker, cricketer and footballer,