Sacred Exchanges: Religious Rhetoric and Twentieth-Century West African Student Migration in the United States

During the Cold War, hundreds of West African students flocked to the United States in search of higher educational opportunities that would equip them to usher in a new Africa free from colonial and imperial rule. Meanwhile, U.S. religious, educational, and political leaders increasingly grew concerned about how students’ perceptions of the U.S. might help or harm the nation’s image abroad. Given that many of these students previously attended missionary schools in their homelands, they were often referred to as “products of missions” in popular U.S. media—that is, forever indebted to the missionary contributions of Americans. In this presentation, I consider how West African students complicated and countered this religious rhetoric. Through a rhetorical analysis of both U.S. newspapers and West African student writings such as autobiographies, I explore how religious metaphors surrounding African student migration contributed to the formation of affective bonds between West African students and US Christians—bonds that were often tested as students encountered US racism firsthand. I thus demonstrate how religious myths and metaphors surrounding African student migration intersected with ideas about Africa’s political future amidst decolonization efforts. Ultimately, my analysis sheds light on the connections between religion, migration, and the politics of U.S. higher education.

While scholar Melani McAlister has helpfully examined how race relations involving African students in the U.S. had an impact on evangelical missions abroad, additional work is needed to center the experiences of African students themselves and assess how the racial climate of the U.S. impacted these so-called “products of missions” (McAlister, 2018). Much like Kathryn Gin Lum’s rhetorical analysis of what she terms the “heathen barometer,” African students sometimes repurposed the popular “products of missions” rhetoric to critique U.S. Christian hypocrisy and racism (Gin Lum, 2022). In the hands of white evangelicals, references to African students as “products of missions” served to portray Africans as perpetually under the auspices of (white) American Christian leadership. Deemed the future leaders of Africa’s emerging nations, West African “products of missions” were seemingly well-suited for national leadership only once they had been properly influenced by U.S. Christians and had migrated to the U.S. for higher education. Moreover, this paternalistic rhetoric also worked to promote affective bonds of indebtedness whereby Africans were frequently reminded that, according to U.S. Protestants, Africa would be nothing without (white) U.S. Christian intervention. 

My paper employs newspaper articles, recorded sermons, and oral history interviews to explore how African students themselves made sense of their racialized environment and how they might have revised this religious “racial script” (Molina, 2014). In short, this paper addresses the following question: What assumptions, debates, and critiques informed and were informed by the deployment of “product of missions” rhetoric in reference to the migration of West African students during the twentieth century? In answering this question, I seek to interrogate how African migrants have theorized race based upon their experiences in the U.S. Understanding such dynamics helps denaturalize assumptions regarding the presumed efficacy of missionary education in West Africa. Doing so also challenges scholars of religion and migration to further interrogate how and why the U.S. has been one of the primary destinations for international students since World War II.

For one case study, I turn to Baptist institutions in the U.S. South such as Virginia Union University to examine the thorny, and underdeveloped, topic of religion, race, and African migration. In 1961, the Institute of International Education (IIE) published the results of a survey they conducted entitled “Survey of the African Student: His Achievements and His Problems.” One survey result in particular was widely publicized and caught the eye of U.S. Protestants. Researchers found that sixteen percent of African students surveyed responded that they had experienced discrimination in churches. The IIE report included a parenthetical note alongside this statistic: “Half had studied in church-related schools in Africa.” The apparent contradiction between embracing Africans as potential converts while denying them full participation in religious spaces only raised more fears that Africans would resist forming alliances with the U.S. during the Cold War. Beyond these geopolitical concerns, African students wrestled with the reality that their membership in a global Christian community seemed to end at the borders of the U.S. Although U.S. Baptists maintained close ties to West African countries like Nigeria through missionary and evangelism organizations, many Nigerian students experienced racial discrimination in U.S. Baptist churches. Through this paper, I hope to analyze how students wrestled with this religious and racial dislocation.

Furthermore, where scholars have previously discussed how African migrants have employed religious metaphors to make meaning of their migratory experiences (Olupona and Gemignani, 2007; Hanciles, 2008; Biney, 2011), this paper analyzes the use of religious metaphors to examine the underbelly of religious framings of migration. As described in popular media, U.S. Protestants bristled when so-called “products of missions” seemed to deviate from their religious tutelage. West African students were deemed to be espousing “anti-American” ideals when they critiqued U.S. racism or advocated for African decolonization by challenging U.S. Christian paternalism in Africa. This paper considers how religious myths and metaphors of migration can be used and re-purposed by Christians in the U.S. and West Africa.