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From Hampton “[I]nto the Heart of Africa”: How Faith in God and Folklore Turned Congo Missionary William Sheppard into a Pioneering Ethnologist

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2014

Benedict Carton*
Affiliation:
George Mason University
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The African-American missionary, William Henry Sheppard Jr. (1865-1927), lived in the Kuba kingdom of central Africa at the turn of the twentieth 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, the Force Publique, and its local auxiliaries spawned suffering throughout the equatorial region. They pillaged villages in Kasai, the southern Congo area surrounding Sheppard's Presbyterian outposts, killing families and driving survivors into brigades that collected wild rubber for European concessionary companies. This rubber boom, in turn, generated profits that not only enriched Leopold II and his business allies, but also propelled a revolution in transportation that culminated in the mass production of tires for the bicycle and automobile. Sheppard is known for bearing witness to Congo atrocities, but his ground-breaking ethnological research remains unfamiliar to many Africanists. It is fortunate for these scholars that the college that nurtured Sheppard's fascination with folklore, Hampton Institute (now Hampton University), houses his papers, photographs, and artwork. This paper introduces and analyzes these sources.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2009

References

1 This paper benefited from a Virginia Foundation for the Humanities grant in 2004. VFH funds supported the writing of a bibliographic guide to the William Henry Sheppard Papers (WHSP) in the Hampton University Archives (HUA), which my colleague at George Mason University, Ms. P. Slade Martin, and I co-authored in 2005. Without her innovative ideas and guidance as Associate Director of GMU's African American Studies Program, this paper would not have been possible. I also owe a debt of gratitude to undergraduates in my historical methodology course, “HIST 300: Colonialism in Africa.” Over the past five years, we investigated Sheppard's ethnological fieldwork in the Congo. Below, I acknowledge students whose final papers on Sheppard's missionary career used evidence from Hampton and other archival repositories. Finally, I thank the following scholars for their contributions and comments: D. McDow, R. Harms, R. Edgar, R. Short, S. Krech, R. Vinson, and L. Vis.

2 These Presbyterian mission stations were named Luebo and Ibanj.

3 Illustration courtesy of HUA

4 Harms, R., “The End of Red Rubber: a Reassessment,” JAH 16(1975), 7388.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 In the late nineteenth century ethnology was being enfolded into anthropology, an emerging social science recognized by leading universities and, significantly, by the United States government. By the early 1880s, Congress had started to fund a Bureau of Ethnology to tap the minds of “scientific men engaged in the study of anthropology.” George Stocking elucidates: “Conceived in evolutionary terms, ‘anthropology’ was no less embracive than ‘ethnology’ … since an evolutionary explanation had in principle to account not only for the physical development of the human species, but also for the development of its distinctive mental capacities—including not only language, but all the mental or social phenomena … of ‘culture’ or ‘civilization’:” Stocking, , Delimiting Anthropology: Occasional Inquiries and Reflections (Madison, 2001), 310–11.Google Scholar

6 For other Zappo Zaps' atrocities reported by Sheppard see Shaloff, S., Reform in Leopold's Congo (Richmond, 1970), 165–74.Google Scholar

7 “Horrors,” Washington Post (15 March 1903); “Natives,” Boston Globe (25 March 1904). See also: Benedetto, R., Presbyterian Reformers in Central Africa: a Documentary Account of the American Presbyterian Congo Mission and Human Rights Struggle in the Congo, 1890-1918 (Leiden, 1996)Google Scholar; Morel, E., King Leopold's Rule in Africa (London, 1904)Google Scholar; Lewis, W. and Stengers, J., E. D. Morel's History of the Congo Reform Movement (Oxford, 1968).Google Scholar Mark Twain cited Sheppard's Pianga Massacre report in King Leopold's Soliloquy: a Defense of His Congo Rule (Boston, 1905), 23Google Scholar; Rare Books and Special Collections, Jefferson Building, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Links between Sheppard and Congo reformers: Grant, K., A Civilised Savagery: Britain and the New Slaveries in Africa, 1884-1926 (London, 2004), 35-36, 3942, 6267Google Scholar; and Cookey, S., Britain and the Congo Question, 1885-1913 (New York, 1968), 59-67, 107.Google Scholar

8 Illustration courtesy of HUA

9 Boston Herald (17 October 1909).

10 Phipps, W., William Sheppard: Congo's African American Livingstone (Louisville, 2002)Google Scholar; Kennedy, P., Black Livingstone: a True Tale of Adventure in the Nineteenth-Century Congo (New York, 2002).Google Scholar

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13 Kennedy, , Black Livingstone, xviii.Google Scholar For Sheppard's complex Victorian manhood see Turner, J., “A ‘Black-White’ Missionary on the Imperial Stage: William H. Sheppard and Middle-Class Black ManhoodJournal of Southern Religion 9 (2006): at jsr.fsu.edu/Volume9/Turner.htm accessed 2 11 2008.Google Scholar

14 Hochschild, A., King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terrorism, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston, 1998), 152–73Google Scholar; Campbell, J., Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787-2005 (New York, 2006), 137–87.Google Scholar

15 W. (Randy) Short's deeply researched doctoral thesis delves into these themes: William Sheppard: Pioneer African-American Presbyterian Missionary, Human Rights Defender, and Collector of African Art, 1865-1927” (Ph.D., Howard University, 2006).Google Scholar

16 Phipps, , William Sheppard, 7.Google Scholar For racial politics in Sheppard's hometowns see Pancake, F., A Historical Sketch of the First Presbyterian Church, Staunton, Virginia (Richmond, 1954)Google Scholar; Hoge, A, Report of Treasurer of the First Presbyterian Church, Staunton, Virginia, from April 1, 1885, to June 30, 1898, with a Brief History of the Church (Staunton, 1898)Google Scholar; Historic Staunton Foundation, A Town in Transition: Staunton, Virginia (Staunton, 1979)Google Scholar; Hawke, G., A History of Waynesboro, Virginia, to 1900 (Waynesboro, 1997)Google Scholar; Hawke, G., Meese, E., and Waynesboro Heritage Foundation, A History of Waynesboro, Virginia, 1900-1976 (Waynesboro, 2007).Google Scholar I thank GMU undergraduates D. Rorer and G. D'Angelo for pointing me to these sources. For scholarship on the Civil War in western Virginia see Ayers, E. and Rubin, A., Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War (New York, 2000).Google Scholar

17 Inspired by his own boyhood (Christian) adventure literature, Reverend Sheppard decided to write his own series of children's books with Congo themes; see, for example, An African Daniel: Katembua, the Bugler: WHSP, HUA.

18 W. Sheppard, “Into the Heart of Africa” (typescript), 14 November 1893, WHSP, HUA. In the early 1900s, when Sheppard returned to the United States on furlough to raise funds for his Congo mission, he visited leading Southern secessionists. In 1906, for example, Sheppard and his wife Lucy approached the widow of Confederate General Stonewall Jackson, who later wrote to the couple expressing her gratitude to William Sheppard for expressing “esteem and admiration of my dear husband.” Mary Jackson asked the Sheppards for their “acceptance of the small check I enclose to aid in carrying on your work in Africa:” Letter Mary A. Jackson to Rev. W. H. Sheppard, 9 January 1906, William Sheppard Papers, Presbyterian Historical Society, Montreat, North Carolina. I thank P. Slade Martin for this reference.

19 Kennedy, , Black Livingstone, 64.Google Scholar For an interesting study of conversion, missionaries, and tooth pain in colonial Africa, see Landau, P., “Explaining Surgical Evangelism in Southern Africa: Teeth, Pain and Faith,” JAH 37(1996), 261–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 For Native American education at Hampton see Robinson, W., “Indian Education at Hampton Institute” in Schall, K., ed. Stony the Road: Chapters in the History of Hampton Institute (Charlottesville, 1977), 129.Google Scholar

21 For Washington's “up from slavery” ethos as domesticated “civilizing mission” see Harlan, L., Separate and Equal (Chapel Hill, 1983)Google Scholar; Norrell, R., Up From History: the Life of Booker T. Washington (Cambridge, MA, 2009).Google Scholar See also Vinson, R. and Edgar, R., “Zulus, African Americans and the African Diaspora” in Carton, B., Laband, J., and Sithole, J., eds. Zulu Identities: Being Zulu, Past and Present (London, 2008), 242–43.Google Scholar

22 New York Times (30 October 1882). Sections of Blyden's 1882 American tour speech, excerpted in the New York Times, refers to failed European evangelization in Africa, particularly at the “mouth of the Congo.” For a scholarly analysis of Blyden's speeches see Williams, W. A., Black Americans and the Evangelization of Africa, 1877-1900 (Madison, 1982), 1213.Google Scholar For Blyden as a Pan-Africanist see H. Lynch, Edward Wilmot Blyden: Pan-Negro Patriot, 1832-1912 (London, 1967)Google Scholar; Shepperson, G., “Notes on Negro American Influences on the Emergence of African Nationalism,” JAH 1(1960), 299.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For Pan-Africanism in Jim Crow America see Lemelle, S. and Kelley, R., “Imagining Home: Pan-Africanism Revisited” in Lemelle, S. and Kelley, R., eds. Imagining Home: Class, Culture and Nationalism in the African Diaspora (London, 1994), 12.Google Scholar

23 0utlook (8 10 1904), 375–77.Google Scholar Moved to action by Sheppard's Pianga massacre report and endorsed by Mark Twain and British missionaries Alice and John Harris, Washington organized a White House visit for African-American preachers. This religious delegation informed President Theodore Roosevelt of Leopold II's atrocities in the Congo: Letter, Barbour, Thomas S., Boston, , to Washington, Booker T., Tuskegee, , 3 01 1906, in Harlan, L., Smock, R., and McTigue, G., eds. The Booker T. Washington Papers, 1904-1906 (Urbana, 1979), 8:482–84.Google Scholar Interestingly, while Washington was building up his Tuskegee institution, he was an outspoken critic of African-American “emigration to the … Congo.” Instead, he advised “young people … to lead a positive, helpful, and independent life, right here in Alabama as a black man:” Washington, A Helpful Life,” Southern Workman (03 1880), 25.Google Scholar The Southern Workman had an illustrious reputation at the turn of the twentieth century, particularly in African-American intellectual circles, which praised the newsletter's commitment to publish Booker Washington, Du Bois, W. E. B., Johnson, E. Pauline, and others: Christian Recorder (14 11 1901), 14.Google Scholar

24 Sheppard, , Presbyterian Pioneers, 17Google Scholar

25 Letter, Dr. E. B. Frissell to Mr. Sheppard, 4 January 1911, William Sheppard Papers, Presbyterian Historical Society, Montreal, North Carolina. I thank P. Martin for this reference. My GMU student M. Jones also alerted me to a similar set of correspondence in the special collections at Union Theological Seminary, Richmond, Virginia.

26 At Hampton diploma ceremonies, graduates were urged to advance the civilizing mission as a “line of soldiers who are to fight the battle against ignorance and prejudice and against all the evils that tie down the human race:” Chicago Defender (6 May 1911). For racial diffusionism see Short, “William Henry Sheppard,” 168; Barkan, E., The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the Wars (Cambridge, 1992), 4042.Google Scholar African-American proponents of civilizationalism projected a vision of “‘pagan’ Africa awaiting ‘regeneration’ by its elite progeny” in “lieu of political influence and social opportunities at home”: Gaines, K., Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, 1996), 3339.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Sources on Samuel Armstrong life and ideas can be found in the Wilhams College Archives and Special Collections, Williamstown, Massachusetts.

27 Scholars trace Armstrong's pioneering work in folklore and ethnology to his Hawaiian upbringing. See, for example, Baker, L., “Research, Reform, and Racial Uplift: the Mission of the Hampton Folk-Lore Society, 1893-1899” in Handler, R., ed. Excluded Ancestors, Inevitable Traditions: Essays Toward a More Inclusive History of Anthropology (Madison, 2000), 44.Google Scholar

28 For Samuel Armstrong in Hawaii see Beyer, C. Kalani, “The Connection of Samuel Chapman Armstrong as Both Borrower and Architect of Education in Hawai'i,” History of Education Quarterly 47(2007), 2348.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29 Sheppard's admiration for his “holy inspiration” may have stemmed from the Hampton president's penchant for regaling students about his Maui mission serving a royal family. Sheppard would find himself in similar circumstances as a missionary in the Kuba kingdom. See, for example, Sheppard's campus orations “Into the Heart of Africa” and “Give Me Thine Hand” (typescripts) WHSP, HUA. On ABM influences in Hawaii see Melier, N., “Missionaries to Hawaii: Shapers of Island Government,” Western Political Quarterly 11(1958): 788–99Google Scholar; see also Central Committee of the Hawaiian Mission Centennial, The Centennial Book: One Hundred Years of Christian Civilization in Hawaii (Honolulu, 1920), 1112.Google Scholar

30 Carton, B., “Awaken Nkulunkulu, Zulu God of the Old Testament: Pioneering Missionaries in the Age of Racial Spectacle,” in Zulu Identities, 133-40, 146–50.Google Scholar

31 Illustration courtesy of HUA

32 Armstrong, S.Editorials about Papers on Conjuring,” Southern Workman 7(1878), 2635.Google Scholar

33 Baker, , “Research,” 5255.Google Scholar Alice Bacon would play a decisive role in creating Hampton's Folklore Society in the 1890s; the Society had ties to Harvard's Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology; ibid., 61. For the close links between folklore, ethnology, and the establishment of anthropology see Darnell, R., “American Anthropology and the Development of Folklore Scholarship,” Journal of the Folklore Institute 10(1973), 2339.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34 Image courtesy of HUA.

35 Personal communication with Cele's daughter, Joyce Cele Williams, Lynchburg, Virginia, 26 April 2009. My thanks to Bob Edgar for facilitating this, and for his research on Madikane Cele's academic career in the United States.

36 Vinson, /Edgar, , “Zulus,” 245–46Google Scholar; see also Magubane, Z., Bringing the Empire Home: Race, Class, and Gender in Britain and Colonial South Africa (Chicago, 2004), 173.Google Scholar Cele's Hampton-inspired influence in South Africa: Chicago Defender (4 October 1913)

37 An account of Sheppard's donation of Kuba art to Hampton is Hultgren, M. and Zeidler, J., A Taste for the Beautiful: Zairian Art from the Hampton University Museum (Hampton, 1993), 2426.Google Scholar See as well Southern Workman 20 (1891), 168.Google Scholar

38 Image source: www.shorpy.com/node/5788 accessed 27 March 2009.

39 Baker, , “Research,” 68.Google Scholar

40 Baker, A., “Proposal for Folk-Lore Research at Hampton,” Journal of American Folklore 6(1893), 305–09Google Scholar; idem., “Conjuring and Conjure-Doctors in the Southern United States,” Journal of American Folk-Lore 9(1896), 224-26. The practices of conjure-doc-tors in African-American communities annoyed Hampton graduate Booker T. Washington, who called them enemies of respectable progress: Baker, , “Research,” 52.Google Scholar See as well Gaines, , Uplifting the Race, 3242.Google Scholar For a demographic portrait of Slabtown see Jackson, L., “The Origin of Hampton InstituteJournal of Negro History 10(1925), 131–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Angs, R., Freedom's First Generation: Black Hampton, 1861-1890 (Philadelphia, 1979).Google Scholar

41 Vernacular African-American traditions in the Hampton area such as “hag-craft”—i.e., occult techniques involving women healers and their balms—were reported by Bacon, to the American Journal of Folk-Lore 7(1894), 66, 79Google Scholar; see as well Bacon, A. and Parsons, E. C., “Folk-Lore from Elizabeth City County, Virginia,” Journal of American Folklore 35 (1922), 250327.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

42 Sheppard, “Into the Heart of Africa,” WHSP, HUA.

43 Sheppard, , Presbyterian Pioneers, 17Google Scholar; see also: Sheppard, “Into the Heart of Africa,” WHSP, HUA. For further links between Alice Bacon and William Sheppard with regard to the Congo and ethnology, see: American Journal of Folk-Lore 7(1894), 84.Google Scholar

44 This religious fraternity was the Missionary Association for the Congregational Church.

45 Kellersberger, J., Lucy Gantt Sheppard: Shepherdess of His Sheep on Two Continents (Atlanta, n.d.), 510Google Scholar; WHSP, HUA.

46 In 1894 the couple married in the United States. That same year they left for the Congo Free State, where over the next few years Lucy proselytized between and during multiple pregnancies. She and her husband had only one surviving daughter, Wilhemina, and one surviving son, Maxamalinge. Virulent contagions took their toll on the family. To avoid the threat of deadly disease, Lucy Sheppard insisted that her toddlers go back to Staunton, Virginia, where her husband's sister, Eva, was for a time the surrogate mother of Wilhemina and Maxamalinge Sheppard.

47 Sheppard, W., William H. Sheppard: Pioneer Missionary to the Congo (Nashville, n.d.), 910Google Scholar; WHSP, HUA; Sheppard, W., Presbyterian Pioneers in Congo, 18.Google Scholar

48 Image courtesy of HUA.

49 Redkey, E., Black Exodus: Black Nationalist and Back-to-Africa Movements, 1890-1910 (New Haven, 1969), 9.Google Scholar

50 Ibid. Lynching peaked in the 1890s, just as new laws increasingly stripped African Americans of the vote, rights to own property, and skilled employment. See Brundage, W., Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930 (Urbana, 1993)Google Scholar; White, W., Rope and Faggot: a Biography of Judge Lynch (New York, 1929).Google Scholar

51 Gaines, , Uplifting the Race, 5253.Google Scholar

52 New York Times (19 July 1903)

53 Bedinger, R., Triumph of the Gospel in the Belgian Congo (Richmond, 1920), 20Google Scholar; WHSP, HUA.

54 Samuel Lapsley fondly remembered his childhood playing with sons of freed slaves: Lapsley, J., ed. Life and Letters of Samuel Norvell Lapsley (Richmond, 1893), 222.Google Scholar See as well The Missionary (01 1891), 34Google Scholar; Washington Post (13 December 1903).

55 Verner, S., Pioneering in Central Africa (Richmond, 1903), 4Google Scholar; WHSP, HUA.

56 For evidence of Sheppard's obliging response to Jim Crow protocols, see his willingness, while on furlough from the Congo, to address separate racial congregations in Bristol, Virginia: Bristol Herald (16 December 1905). My interpretation of Sheppard's “accommodationism” draws on the ideas of my colleague P. Slade Martin: Martin, P., “‘Through the Back Door’: William Henry Sheppard: Accommodation as Resistance in Jim Crow America” (Unpublished paper, George Mason University, 2003).Google Scholar

57 Williams, , Black Americans, 85Google Scholar; see as well Jacobs, S., ed. Black Americans and the Missionary Movement in Africa (Westport, CT, 1982), esp. 184–90.Google Scholar

58 Instructions of Executive Committee to the Reverend Messrs. Lapsley, and Sheppard, , 13 01 1890, Presbyterian Reformers in Central Africa ed. Benedetto, Robert (Leiden, 1996), 7172.Google Scholar

59 Lapsley's untimely death greatly grieved Sheppard: Phipps, , William Sheppard, 6667.Google Scholar

60 The biographers of the “Black Livingstone” single out such intrepid displays to show the prowess of their protagonist emerging in the Congo. But in doing so, they overlook the young Sheppard's prior encounters with danger in Virginia's wilderness.

61 New York Times (10 March 1899).

62 At Hampton, Sheppard was frequently introduced as an honored Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. On Sheppard and the Royal Geographic Society see The Negro as Missionary,” Missionary Review of the World 26(1903), 946.Google Scholar

63 One could compare Sheppard's charismatic discourses to previous promotional speeches on Africa given by Martin Delany, who in 1879 published Principia of Ethnology: the Origin of Races and Color with an Anthropological Compendium of Ethiopian and Egyptian Civilization from Years of Careful Examination and Enquiry (Philadelphia, 1879).Google Scholar This treatise explored how ethics of loyalty and nobility originated in ancient Africa and spread elsewhere in the world: Moses, W., Afrotopia: the Roots of African American Popular History (Cambridge, 1998), 7880.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

64 The issue of Kodak images of Belgian atrocities is an important theme in Mark Twain's pamphlet, King Leopold's Soliloquy. Twain's fictional monarch grouses about “photographs of mutilated negroes,” adding that he once “was looked up to as the benefactor of down-trodden and friendless people. Then all of sudden came the crash! That is to say the incorruptible Kodak.” Twain, , King Leopold's Soliloquy, 39.Google Scholar

65 I thank my GMU student M. Jones for providing me with this information.

66 Twain, , King Leopold's Soliloquy, 25.Google Scholar

67 Ibid, 24.

68 For Morel's engagement with officials in Washington see New York Times (17 October 1904), and for CRA appeals in the United States, Washington Post (20 November 1908). Morel's choice of images for CRA brochures may have been for more than an aesthetic preference. Harris took her photographs as a self-styled activist of human rights, while Sheppard did not openly claim that mantle.

69 For period accounts of the trial see Missionary Matters in the Kongo,” Missionary Review of the World (09 1909), 717–18Google Scholar; The Kongo Missionaries Acquitted,” Missionary Review of the World (11 1909), 805.Google Scholar Given the international interest in this libel case, researchers should consider whether Sheppard's Kodak images were entered into the court record and subsequently lost. Could the photographs be in someone's private papers? For scholarly inquiries into these questions see Thompson, J., “Light on the Dark Continent: the Photography of Alice Seeley Harris and the Congo Atrocities of the Early Twentieth CenturyInternational Bulletin of Missionary Research 26(2002), 146–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Grant, K., “Christian Critics of Empire: Missionaries, Lantern Lectures, and the Congo Reform Campaign in BritainJournal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 29(2001), 2758.CrossRefGoogle Scholar I am grateful to my GMU student K. Smith for uncovering the provenance of CRA atrocity photographs.

70 Morel, E., The Treatment of Women and Children in the Congo State, 1895-1904 (Boston, 1904).Google Scholar I thank my GMU student, Y. El-Amin, for providing me with photographs from this pamphlet.

71 Morel, The Treatment of Women and Children.

72 Sheppard, “Into the Heart of Africa,” WHSP, HUA. Sheppard also spoke of his Luba name, Xepate, and his wife Lucy's Luebo mission title, Mama Xepate. On the etymology of these names, see Starr, F., A Bibliography of Congo Languages (Chicago, 1908), 82.Google Scholar Lucy Sheppard also demonstrated her philological interests, translating Tshiluba hymns in a book titled Musambu ws Nzambi, or Songs of God. This book's original title seems to have been Mukamba wa Misambu Luebo (American Presbyterian Press, 1902)Google Scholar: Starr, F., Bibliography, 82.Google Scholar

73 Sheppard, “Into the Heart of Africa,” WHSP, HUA. See appendix below.

74 Sheppard, W., “Graphic Talk on Darkest Africa,” Daily Trader (9 01 1905)Google Scholar WHSP, HUA. Sheppard's Hampton lectures sponsored by Frissell: Letter Dr. H. Frissell to Rev. W. Sheppard, 1 April 1911, WHSP, HUA. Sheppard showed a keen interest in examining the multifarious rivalries in the Kuba royal family. See, for example, Sheppard, W., “An African's Work for Africa,” Missionary Review of the World (10 1906), 770.Google Scholar Scholarly analyses of Kuba succession disputes include Vansina, J., Kingdoms of the Savanna (Madison, 1966), 108-22, 192242Google Scholar; idem., The Children of Woof, a History of the Kuba Peoples (Madison, 1978), 43-50, 153-72. Finally, while Sheppard extolled “Kuba civilization,” he lamented one missing dimension in the kingdom, Christianity: Sheppard, “Into the Heart of Africa,” WHSP, HUA.

75 Sheppard, “Into the Heart of Africa,” WHSP, HUA. Much later, academics trained in anthropology and history such as Jan Vansina revisited the wider region surrounding Sheppard's area of fieldwork and mapped the ethnic groups of the Kuba kingdom from the Bulang, Pyang Ibaam, and Bieng to Ngongo, Mbengi Kete, and Cwa: Vansina, Children of Woot.

76 Sheppard, “Into the Heart of Africa,” WHSP, HUA.

77 Examples of Sheppard's collection are installed in the Hampton University Museum. For Sheppard's analysis of Kuba art see Cureau, H., “William H. Sheppard: Missionary to the Congo and Collector of African Art,” Journal of Negro History 67(1982), 340–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hultgren/Zeidler, Taste for the Beautiful.

78 Sheppard, W., “African Handicrafts and Superstitions,” Southern Workman (09, 1921), 401–08Google Scholar; see also Vansina, Jan, Art History in Africa: an Introduction to Method (London, 1984), 319.Google Scholar

79 During the question-and-answer session that often followed his addresses, Sheppard unfurled ornate mats and cowrie strings, and lifted wooden carvings and metal knives: Washington Post (25 December 1893). See also: Sheppard, W., “African Handicrafts and Superstitions,” Southern Workman (12 1921), 401.Google Scholar

80 Sheppard, “Into the Heart of Africa,” WHSP, HUA.

81 Image courtesy of the African and African American Studies Program, GMU. For academic analyses of raffia cloth see Adams, M., “Kuba Embroidered ClothAfrican Arts 12/1(1978), 2439CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Darish, P., “Kuba Textiles: The Dynamics of Creation, Style, and Meaning within the Kuba Kingdom” (Ph.D., Indiana University, 1991).Google Scholar

83 Sheppard, W., “Into the Heart of Africa,” Southern Workman (12 1893), 187.Google Scholar

84 Sheppard, W. and Roosevelt, President T.: Washington Post (15 01 1905).Google Scholar

85 Hultgren, /Zeidler, , Taste for the Beautiful, 25.Google Scholar This pictorial book, with scholarly commentary, features William Sheppard's Kuba art and provides an excellent historical overview of the collection in Hampton's possession. See also Deacon, D., “African Art at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture,” African Arts 14/2(1982), 6488CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Sims, L., “Collecting the Art of African-Americans at the Studio Museum: Positioning the ‘New’ from the Perspective of the Past” in Altshuler, B., ed. Collecting the New: Museums and Contemporary Art (Princeton, 2007), 149.Google Scholar

86 Image source: www.umich.edu/~hartspc/umsdp/UMA/UMA034.html accessed 16 Jan. 2009.

87 Starr, F., Truth about the Congo, 58.Google Scholar A contributor to the Journal of American Folk-Lore, Starr claimed to identify the source of cannibalistic behavior in central Africa: New York Times (28 January 1907). Scholarship analyzing the range of ethnological research during much of the period spanning Sheppard's career includes MacGaffey, W., “Ethnology and the Closing of the Frontier in Lower Congo, 1885-1921,” Africa 5(1986), 378–89.Google Scholar