This paper addresses the ways in which nineteenth-century missions and contemporary NGOs and charity/aid organizations share a wide range of practices and discursive formations in constructing ideas of “saving” Africa. Missions in the late nineteenth century like contemporary NGOs often employed narratives of development to disseminate their ideas of progress and these show a remarkable similarity between the two periods. For example, current development narratives on the websites of the World Bank echo with a high degree of congruence the narrative structure and tropes of late nineteenth-century mission accounts in the journals used to raise funds for foreign missions.
This paper would extend my published work on nineteenth-century narratives and the practices of “control” they had, as well as the ways in which Africans then and now employed these controlled forms of patronage to lever agency for themselves. It would seek to show that the effects of practices as dissimilar as European and Islamic slavery ”capture” and Christian mission “rescue” had disturbingly similar disruptive and alienating effects on the lives of African communities and individuals. It would also seek to show that practices such as mission rescue and contemporary aid organization/charity rescue operations may be seen to have similar disturbing congruencies. The core concern is how to preserve and facilitate grassroot agency for the people on the receiving end of these various forms of externally generated “rescue” and “salvation”.