The Invisible Power of Mission in Colonial Africa between Science and Business

When one speaks of mission and colonisation in the 19th century, great figures like David Livingstone come to mind. He was not only a missionary, but also an explorer. On behalf of the London Missionary Society, he penetrated and mapped vast portions of southern Africa previously unknown in Europe, publishing a travel narrative that became a bestseller in the 1850s.2 The success of this operation allowed him to collaborate with the Royal Geographical Society and the British Crown on other colonial expeditions on which the future of British imperialism in Africa would largely depend.The case of Livingstone is well known, but it is no exception. Many European missionaries left for the African continent. Their official mandate was the evangelisation of the indigenous peoples, as well as educating them about the social and sanitary norms of the Western system. The mission was therefore seen and experienced, both by the missionaries themselves and more generally in the West, as a ‘moral entrepreneurship’ – a sociological concept particularly suited to our case. In addition to this, however, the missionaries pursued various collateral activities that also allow us to speak of ‘scientific and economic entrepreneurship’ – this is our argument. In our contribution, we will study some missionaries who, in contrast to Livingstone, are little known. They came particularly from Italy and Switzerland and served French-speaking European missions. They operated in Southern Africa in the 19th century (also) as explorers and as businessmen.