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The result showed how closely missionaries were linked with the colonial environment and the extent to which cultural differences and worldview were grounded practices. The study manifests certain features and a critical view of traditional mission historiography by making an important intervention of German missionaries’ involvement in the pre-colonial to draw attention to a more nuanced treatment of mission sources enabling a deeper understanding of colonial encounters. This book is particularly useful because it makes clear distinctions between other studies by showing how intellectual history, gender, and “race” mattered in determining power relations in the colonized world, a problem to which as it turns out, remains unsolved and the contemporary world is still dealing with it.
Religion consists of dual complementary strands, namely the word and the disseminator of the word. Often, when the word reaches its destination, it has been diluted to suit the messenger’s taste. Trying to discover such misadventures is like venturing into new territories. Thus, let us proceed with open eyes and minds to learn something new. Indeed something new, which will throw old beliefs overboard in the face of new evidence that reveal the nature of discourses, activities, melancholia, and trauma fundamental to colonial relationships between missionaries and local inhabitants. These new pieces of evidence not only help us to recover the past, they also illuminate how such behaviors are common in contemporary human relationships.