Afhi 004 0073

AN EXTRAORDINARY GENERATION : THE LEGACY OF WILLIAM
HENRY SHEPPARD, THE ?BLACK LIVINGSTONE OF AFRICA
Ramona Austin
Verdier | Afrique & histoire
2005/2 - vol. 4
pages 73 à 101
ISSN 1764-1977
ISBN 2-86432-455-5
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a&h_4 BAT 9/08/05 12:03 Page 73
An Extraordinary Generation :
The Legacy of William Henry Sheppard,
the “Black Livingstone” of Africa
Ramona Austin
William Henry Sheppard (1865-1927), who became known as the “Black Livingstone
of Africa”, was one of the most famous missionary-explorers of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. He was also a gifted ethnographer who documented with
sensitivity and aesthetic appreciation the cultures he encountered. He became an
international celebrity championing the human rights of the Congolese and documenting
the atrocities of the Congo Free State and the Compagnie du Kasai. Due to his race,
his accomplishments fell into obscurity after his death until the 1960s when renewed
interest in his story drew scholarly attention. This discussion does not present
a chronology of his experiences in the Congo, but places him in the context of the Black
n ° 4
intelligentsia of his time and of the education he received that has been characterized
reductively as “reformist”. His story is told from his point of view, as a Black man

of uncommon gifts and will who operated adroitly in a world of white authority at a critical
time in African history. For all of his singular achievements, however, Sheppard must be
2 0 0 5 ,
seen in the context of a community of Black missionaries, sponsored by established and
independent churches, who aligned themselves with Africans against colonialism. The
product of institutions established during the Reconstruction Era to train freed slaves after
the American Civil War, this was an extraordinary generation of men and women who
were active in an international context in a complex world of shifting power relationships.
William Henry Sheppard was one of this generation’s most gifted protagonists.
h i s t o i r e ,
In the Congo, the Belgians, as early as , had shown interest in Negro Americans
because of their long experience with the white man’s methods. But by the s
although they were still interested, a critical attitude was developing amongst the Negro
American intelligentsia towards the Leopold régime which was not calculated to ensure
a warm welcome for the coloured American in the future by the Congo authorities…
Beginning with [George Washington] Williams and [William Henry] Sheppard, an
image of the Belgian Congo as the quintessence of European exploitation of Africa was
&
created amongst the Negro American which played no small part in shaping their
attitude to Africa.
G. Shepperson, “Notes on Negro American Influences on the Emergence of
A f r i q u e
African Nationalism ”
Ramona Austin is an Art historian who has done extensive research among the Kongo peoples,
preceded by archival work at the Royal Museum for Central Africa (Tervuren, Belgium). She has
seventeen years of experience in museums as Associate Curator for African art at the Art Institute of
Chicago and the Margaret Mc Dermott Associate Curator for African art at the Dallas Museum of
Art, and most recently as the Director of the Hampton University and Archives. Currently she is
President of the Edo Group, LLC consulting in museums and educational and arts organizations.
. George Shepperson ( : ).
a&h_4 BAT 9/08/05 12:03 Page 74
Ramona Austin 74
O f the famous Europeans and Americans to work and travel in Central Africa
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Presbyterian missionary
William Henry Sheppard has, arguably, one of the most compelling personal
histories . As an American of African descent born in  at the end of the Civil
War, who was educated in an institution conceived during the Reconstruction Era
(-), and who went on to preach the Christian gospel in Africa to Africans,
he was joined in his mission by other Blacks who themselves had been slaves or were
“free persons of color”. Black churches of his day saw “a positive role in education
and missionary work that Negroes from America might play in Africa’s future ”. The
Southern Presbyterian Church saw Blacks as the most natural proselytizers of the
faith in Africa and Sheppard was their star among missionaries Black or White. He
was considered in his time to be one of the greatest missionaries in the world.
Despite acclaim during his lifetime, after his death Sheppard’s achievements
fell into obscurity. As W.E.B Du Bois prophetically wrote, the problem of the th
century would be the problem of the color line . At the time of Sheppard’s death
in , Black America was struggling against social, political and economic
repression. “Race laws” were in full force, enacted after the failure of

Reconstruction, a period of Black enfranchisement and activism after the Civil
War during which the federal government sought to economically and politically
empower four million freed slaves. Concurrently, four years after the end of
Reconstruction and one year after Sheppard entered the seminary in Tuscaloosa,
Alabama, the African continent was divided among competing European powers
(with the United States in attendance among  nations) at the Berlin Conference
of -. Confined for four hundred years to the African coasts, the major
European powers struggled to gain control of the eighty percent of the continent
that remained under the control of Africans. In political and cultural self interest,
Blacks from America and the Caribbean organized the first Pan-African Congress
in London in  . Sheppard had already been in the Congo for a decade.
. I wish to thank Donzella Maupin, Assistant Archivist of the Hampton University Archives, and
D o s s i e r
Mary Lou Hultgren, Curator of Collections and recently appointed Director of the Hampton
University Museum and Archives, for assisting me with archival resources on William Henry
Sheppard. I am also thankful for their thoughtful responses to my inquiries. I want to also thank
William Bynum, the Acting Deputy Director of The Presbyterian Historical Society at Montreat,
North Carolina, for all of his patient help.
. Ibid., p. .
. W. E. B. Du Bois ( [] : , note ).
. L.G. Shepperson (1968 : 503-504) writes, “Although Du Bois was present at this Conference and
became chairman of its ‘Committee on Address to the Nations of the World’, it was started by
H. Sylvester Williams, a West Indian barrister, and a moving spirit was Bishop Alexander Walters
of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, a neglected figure of Negro American history
and a believer in the inevitability of a ‘Negro Cecil Rhodes’. The Conference sent a memorial to
Queen Victoria protesting against the treatment of Africans in South Africa and Rhodesia and
succeeded in eliciting from Joseph Chamberlain a pledge that ‘Her Majesty’s Government will not
overlook the interests and welfare of the native races’”.
a&h_4 BAT 9/08/05 12:03 Page 75
75 The legacy of W. H. Sheppard
Westerners such as Émile Torday and Leo Frobenius, whom Sheppard

preceded in the Kasai Region of the Belgian Congo, from their first
publications remained prominent in the annals of Central African ethnography
and exploration. Sheppard’s authoritative accounts, based on years of
substantial experience in the region, merited not a footnote for four decades
after his death . Besides manuscripts published by the Presbyterian Church, it
is only since the ’s that interest has been revived in his life and work,
becoming quite active in the last two decades . This is partly due to the
adventure of his story, and partly to the opportunity to reexamine a fascinating
chapter in the historic relationship between the struggle for economic and
social parity of Blacks in America and the struggle against Africa’s colonization
in the late th and early th centuries.
This discussion is not a chronology of Sheppard’s achievements in Africa, or
of the world’s reaction to him. There are already published accounts that give a
thorough recounting of his exploits . It does seek to probe contextually
Sheppard’s achievements from his cultural vantage point, and to place who he was
in the perspective of his education and talents. It places him among an
intelligentsia whose debates and ideas about Africa were experienced at all levels

of the Black society of his time. It was an activist intelligentsia that did not speak
with one voice, that saw itself as African, and that had sought social justice for
freepersons and slaves since the Revolutionary War.
Tall, charismatic and physically striking, with endurance, energy and

possessing a heroic nature (fig. ), Sheppard made his mark on the world stage in
. Sheppard was in contact with the Kuba people for twenty years, knew their language fluently and
initially spent four months at the capital at Mushenge in . Torday, by contrast, visited the capital
sixteen years later in  and Frobenius collected in the region between July  and May .
Both men spent weeks among the Kuba compared to Sheppard’s years. In John Mack’s discussion
of Torday’s relation with the nyim (King) Kot aPe and his court he discusses Torday’s antipathy for
the Presbyterian Missionaries, although it is Morrison (who was at Luebo), not Sheppard (who was
closer at Ibanj), who is mentioned. Mack’s discussion is important for the role and capabilities of
Torday that it ascribes to him in relation to his work among the Kuba. One could say that these
attributes are the same that Sheppard possessed and that served him well in an earlier period and for
a longer duration of time. The year mentioned in the letters is , a year of Kuba dynastic
troubles. It  Sheppard played a part in the events surrounding succession to the throne by
protecting the favorite son of the former nyim from other royal aspirants, an act that cost the Ibanj
mission dearly. This is discussed later in this paper. See J. Mack, ( : -).
. P. Kennedy, ( : ). Hampton University Archives in the past year alone has received a
significant number of requests for information on Sheppard including doctorates in progress and
pending publications. Conversation with Donzella Maupin, Acting Archivist, Hampton University
Archives, Summer .
. The following books about Sheppard give an account of his time in Africa : W. Phipps, The
Sheppard’s and Lapsley : Pioneer Presbyterians in the Congo (), and William Sheppard : Congo’s
African American Livingstone, (), P. Kennedy, Black Livingstone : A True Tale of Adventure in
the Nineteenth-Century Congo (). Read also A. Horchschild’s discussion of Sheppard in King
Leopold’s Ghost : A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa ().
a&h_4 BAT 9/08/05 12:03 Page 76
Ramona Austin 76
 as the first Westerner to set foot in the Kuba Kingdom in Central Africa. He
is virtually the only witness to the last of the great courts of Central Africa as these
existed before the colonial era. Sheppard would be an outsized personality in any
time. He was the first Black man to become a Fellow of the Royal Geographic
Society in England, an honor he received for his exploration of the Kuba and as
the discoverer of a lake in the Kasai region unknown to the West at the time .
To understand Sheppard’s importance as an ethnographer, explorer, celebrity
and internationally-known champion of the rights of Africans, he must first be
understood in the context of his education and the ideologies of the Black
intelligentsia of his day. Important as well, is the photographic record of mission
life at Luebo and Ibanj contrasted with the images of Congolese as they presented
themselves (fig. ) . Information about his public persona is contained in his
writings, contemporary biographies and newspaper accounts of his speeches and
exploits, and the broadsheets and picture cards of Sheppard with his wife and
young children (fig. ). The broadsheets and postcards, in particular, were used
to raise funds and to recruit Blacks for the missionary effort. Their impact can
only be adequately assessed in relation to the derogatory racist imagery of the day
for their power to evoke a genteel Black bourgeoisie in harmony with White

American cultural values. The archives of Hampton University are full of such
carefully constructed images of the school from around Sheppard’s formative
years onward and such documentation was actively pursued . Finally, both his
. Sheppard accepted his Fellowship and spoke at Exeter Hall in London in  during which he
showed off Kuba artwork. The lake he discovered was named Lake Sheppard in his honor.
Returning to America he visited President Grover Cleveland presenting him with a Kuba rug
(probably a large mat ?) and sent the rest of the collection to Hampton University beginning its
Kuba collection. See P. Kennedy (2002 : -).
 Images of Sheppard and his family and Ibanj can be found in the Sheppard Collection in the
Hampton University Archives, Hampton Virginia. “Our home at Ibanji” c.  is published as
figure  in M.L. Hultgren et al. () ; a postcard picture of the “Lapsley Memorial Chapel, Built
by the Natives Congo, Central”, a church laid out by A.T. Edmiston, can be found in the Sheppard
Collection, Hampton University Archives and an original photo print of this image can be found
D o s s i e r
at the Presbyterian Historical Archives in Montreat, North Carolina ; William Phipps ()
published an image taken by Sheppard, probably at the Kuba capitol, of Prince Maxamalenge and
his wife, that is also in the Presbyterian Historical Society at Montreat, NC ; and, an unposed image
titled “Batetela Dancing” from or  that was also taken by Sheppard resides in his collection
at Hampton University Archives.
. The derogatory image of Blacks in the United States developed exponentially from the birth of the
minstrel show in the s to countless images used in advertisements, on postcards, as toys, in the
new medium of film and the like. These images became the norm by  when Sheppard was a
decade in the field and the first Pan-African Congress was held in London. Such images of him as
a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society and a  image of Sheppard with his family (figs. a and
b), taken when he was on furlough to raise funds, were highly significant and charged images for
the audiences of the day. Consciously aesthetic photographs of non-Anglo-Saxon Protestant
Hamptonians – Black, Native American, Eastern European, African and Asian – were meant to
counter racist, cultural, and political propaganda against non-Whites. The Hampton Album by
Frances Benjamin Johnston, the images of Portia by Richard Leigh Minor, the works by The
Camera Club are all remarkable documentation of the institution, but also a concerted effort to
a&h_4 BAT 9/08/05 12:03 Page 77
commentary on and the objects he collected can be read as documents that reveal
his talent for intrepid observation, his relationship with the Kuba people and his
legacy for Central African ethnography.
There were various intellectual reactions by Blacks to slavery as an institution.

As early as the late eighteenth century a number of American Blacks had
emigrated to Liberia and Sierra Leone. The inventor of the slogan “Africa for
Africans” was Harvard-educated Martin Delaney, the only Black to receive a field
commission during the Civil War. Considered the father of the Back to Africa
Movement, a current in Black thought to leading the Black Power Movement
of the s, Delaney visited Liberia in  and was impressed by what he saw.
The famous Black abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, saw such sentiments as
dangerously counterproductive to arguments used against slavery that sought to
free and enfranchise Blacks on American soil. After the Civil War, Black
newspapers carried the ideas of the leading Black thinkers of the day, and Black
churches played a crucial role by disseminating this discussion to all classes of
Black society . Among American Blacks, the political, economic and cultural
spheres operated concurrently and with equal value across class lines, a fact that

Harold Cruse noted was later lost on much of the political left in America .
Moreover, after Reconstruction, the church remained the major sphere in which
talented Blacks could develop and exercise social and political leadership. For
example, Drimmer quotes from Isaac’s The New World of the Negro American :
“Professor Rayford Logan remembers that as a boy he ‘heard the great Negro
missionary [William Henry] Sheppard, who told us about the mutilation in the Congo.
It made an indelible impression on me. In the humblest Negro church there was a
willingness to give in order to send missionaries, an interest in people’s need of the
Gospel and a special interest in Africa because we knew we were descendants of
Africans ’”.
Some Black churches that sent missionaries to Africa instigated, joined or

influenced the most radical movements against colonial regimes. Drimmer
commenting on the above states :
“These missionaries brought more than the Gospel. Negro American missionaries
were viewed with great suspicion as teaching subversive ideas, and many of the African
students who came home from training in America reinforced this view by becoming
agitators and revolutionaries. For example, Daniel Chilembwe of Nyasaland (Malawi),
present imagery in direct contradistinction to the prevailing racially derogatory depiction of Blacks.
Hampton even produced a now lost film rebuttal to the racially defamatory Birth of a Nation. J. N.
Pieterse (), is an excellent overview of this American popular visual history.
. M. Drimmer, ( : -).
. H. Cruse ( : ).
. M. Drimmer ( : ).
a&h_4 BAT 9/08/05 12:03 Page 78
Ramona Austin 78
trained at the Negro Virginia Theological Seminary and supported in his work by
Negro American Baptists, led a rebellion in . Three American-educated Africans
were active in the formation and growth of the African Native National Congress in
South Africa ”.
It is too simplistic to think of the trade and normal schools that were
established after the Civil War, such as Hampton and Tuskegee, or the Black
theological seminaries, such as Stillman Institute, as narrowly reformist when
contrasted with schools such as Howard University that was established from the
beginning as an institution of higher learning . Both types of historically Black
institutions have been central to Black progress in America. When there was a
decline of interest in Africa due to the failure of the Garvey Movement, the first
grass-roots Black-nationalist movement in the United States, and the economic
deprivations of the Depression, African’s continued in increasing numbers to be
educated at these schools. Institutes like Hampton became a combination of
programs for “social uplift” and, in time, places where Black cultural leaders and
thinkers of various persuasions found an audience and disseminated their ideas.
Sheppard himself, who attended Hampton Institute from -, may have
heard Edward Blyden, “a leading politician and pioneer theorist of the ‘African

personality’”, speak at the school in . A West Indian born in St. Thomas in
, Blyden warned his audience “against European travelers’ accounts of Africa,
declaring ‘No people can interpret Africa but Africans ’”.
Sheppard’s attendance from  to  at Hampton Normal and Agricultural
Institute was the most formative period of his life. The eighty-four normal and
high schools and sixteen colleges that were founded by   had a profound effect
upon Sheppard’s generation of Black Americans and would, during the next 
years, produce proponents of Pan-Africanism and train influential African
nationalists who would ultimately bring the Colonial Era to an end . A
photograph from the Hampton University Archives titled “Hampton’s Girdle
Around the World” c. , the year that Sheppard left for Africa, shows the
diverse nature of its student body . Students such as these and, later, Peter Mbiyu
D o s s i e r
Koinange, a Gikuyu from Kenya, contributed to the museum collection at

Hampton that was established by its founder General Samuel Chapman
Armstrong in . Armstrong, a father figure to Sheppard and to Booker
T. Washington, its most famous alumni, requested that Sheppard collect for this
rich and diverse collection. As a result, Hampton owns the earliest collected Kuba
objects in the world and the first African collection made by an African American.
. Ibid. p. .

. Howard was established in  by an Act of Congress as a private university.
. G. Shepperson, “Notes…”, p. .
. W.E.B. Du Bois ( : ).
. W.E.B. Du Bois ( : ) ; G. Shepperson (1968 : -).
 “Hampton’s Girdle Around the World”, published in M.L. Hultgren et al. ().
a&h_4 BAT 9/08/05 12:03 Page 79
It was at Hampton that Sheppard’s evangelical zeal was formed . Founded
in  by General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, who had commanded Black
troops for the Union Army during the Civil War, Hampton could not have
survived without the tenacious motivation of its Black students who, in the
early years, endured many privations for the sake of their education . Over
four million slaves were freed by the war. While there was some literacy among
Blacks free and slave, well over  % were illiterate. Forty-five years later, as
Sheppard’s sojourn in Central Africa was ending, two-thirds of all Blacks in
America were literate despite significant social impediments . For Blacks,
education was the great leveler in the struggle for equality and economic
progress. Hampton’s most famous alumni and contemporary of Sheppard, the
former slave and educator Booker T. Washington observed, “Few people who
were not right in the midst of the scenes can form any exact idea of the intense
desire which the people of my race showed for education. It was a whole race
trying to go to school. Few were too young, and none too old, to make the
attempt to learn ”.
At Hampton, the students not only took the program, but were exhorted to
teach in the local communities. Sheppard, who was born free and who came from

a relatively comfortable background, went out to Slabtown, a poor Black village
one mile from the school, for home mission work. Sheppard did not finish his
program at Hampton. In , he went to Tuscaloosa Theological Institute in
Alabama (later Stillman Institute) graduating in . It was during his exams
that he was asked that if he was called to go to Africa as a missionary would he
accept. Sheppard answered that he would gladly go. In , Sheppard was
ordained by Atlanta Presbytery to be pastor of Zion Church, a Black
congregation in Atlanta, Georgia . In  after numerous petitions, he left for
Luebo in the Congo with fellow missionary John Lapsley, who was White . After
Lapsley’s untimely death in March of , Sheppard went alone with nine
Congolese to search for Mushenge, the Kuba capital. He would subsequently
found the Ibanj mission in Kuba territory. Sheppard always credited Hampton
Institute as his spiritual home, and its program as the architecture of his life .
. K. L. Schall ( : ).

. R. F. Engs ( : ).
. W.E.B. Du Bois (1970 : -).
. Ibid. p. .
. W. Phipps ( : -).
. Sheppard was not permitted as a Black man the authority of going alone to the Congo without
the supervision of a White missionary. The notion of racial inferiority went beyond the White
southerners of the Congo Presbyterian Mission board. On the way to the Congo, Sheppard and
Lapsley, with introductions from Alabama Senator John Tyler Morgan and Henry Shelton
Sanford, stopped in Washington to meet President Benjamin Harrison and in Brussels to meet
King Leopold. As a Black man Sheppard was not allowed to attend these meetings. See
A. Hochschild ( : ).
. Ibid. p. .
a&h_4 BAT 9/08/05 12:03 Page 80
Ramona Austin 80
The unfortunate John Lapsley, whose death Sheppard grieved, described him as
“a man of unusual grace and strong points of character ”.
A rare broadsheet (fig. ) published in Virginia that is in the Sheppard

Collection in the Hampton University Archives was probably published to
commemorate his speaking tour of , when he was home on one of his two
furloughs from the Congo, shows Sheppard in his official portrait as a newly
inducted Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society, a tremendous achievement for
any traveler to the continent at the time. It is all the more striking as Sheppard
was  year-old and the son of a father who had been a former slave. On either
side of Sheppard’s portrait are two Christian hymns. Sheppard was a natural
linguist. The two hymns are translated into the Kuba language (fundamental for
spreading the word of the Gospel). In the upper right hand corner, there is an
image of the missionary steamboat, the Samuel Lapsley, that plied the waters of
the Congo and the Kasai Rivers and, in the upper left hand corner, a map
showing the lower quadrant of the Belgian Congo from Stanley Poole to the Kasai
region, the site of the missions where Sheppard preached and made conversions
among the local populations (it may be added, with much difficulty). Especially

noteworthy is the inscription, “God bless you and cause you to pity the benighted
millions of Africa. Your humble and obedient servant. W.H. Sheppard, F.R.G.S.
[Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society]”. Obviously meant to raise funds for
the mission, the broadsheet is evidence of the public appeal of Sheppard, of his
heroic persona and accomplishments that were deemed important to sustaining
the missionary effort. Such a document was especially meant to recruit other
Blacks. A pamphlet published by the Southern Presbyterian Church as
propaganda for its seminary for Blacks at Tuscaloosa, Alabama, from which
Sheppard himself graduated, explicitly states this program :
“From Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to Luebo, Congo Independent State, is a far cry, but
in a wonderful way God has permitted us to bridge these thousands of miles, and the
two places are now closely connected… At Tuscaloosa, Alabama, the Southern
Presbyterian Church has a school for the training of Colored preachers. This is done
D o s s i e r
simply and sensibly. No Greek, Latin, or Hebrew is taught. The English Grammar and
the Bible are the principal text-books. Most of the graduates preach the gospel to the
ignorant and needy people of their race in the South. A few of the graduates, who feel
strongly called thereto, are trained to be missionaries to their savage forefathers in
Africa ”.
The notion of the cultural and moral inferiority of African peoples elicited
two responses from Sheppard’s generation. The first was an acceptance of African
cultures as inferior, the remedy to which was to train Africans to compete with
the West on its own terms technologically, morally and politically laying the
. W. Phipps ( : ).

. J. G. Sendecor, and Dr J. Little (before ).
a&h_4 BAT 9/08/05 12:03 Page 81
foundations for “African nationalism and collective achievement”. The second

response was to discredit the notion of Western superiority by investigating the
achievements of the African past . The most famous example of the latter is Alain
Locke’s landmark essay (and later an anthology) “The New Negro”, published
two years before Sheppard’s death, in which the African ancestral cultures of
Black Americans are given value as equal to any in the world and declared the
foundation of a unique “Negro American” culture .
The debate over the most effective education for Blacks was highly politicized
in America and would occupy a central and controversial ideological position
among late th and early th century Black intellectuals. An industrial education
(espoused by Hampton-trained Booker T. Washington) versus higher education
for the most talented (espoused by Harvard Ph.D. W.E.B. Du Bois) to lift Blacks
out of the conditions left by slavery was central to this debate. Skilled and freely
undertaken labor was seen as spiritually uplifting for Blacks who had known the
co-option of their labor through the coercion of slavery. Photographs of students
produced at Hampton Institute and at the Luebo mission at the end of the
nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century often depicted work in

highly aesthetic compositions. The stunning image of the lovely Portia, a
Hampton student, ironing laundry that was taken by Leigh Richmond Minor for
the Camera Club, belongs to the conscious creation of a new and desirable
community of African peoples when compared to Sheppard’s recreation of the
motif in a photograph of African girls at an ironing table in Luebo (figs.  & ) .
Upon the failure of Reconstruction (-) to economically lift Blacks out of
slavery and the subsequent rise of laws aimed at keeping Blacks economically
subservient, it was politically expedient to emphasize industrial training over an
intellectual education. In fact, in  in a reprint in The Kasai Herald from The
Missionary Review of the World, the importance of an industrial education in the
missionary context was commented upon by its major proponent in America,
Booker T. Washington, leader of Tuskegee Institute and, like Sheppard, a product
of Hampton. Washington is quoted at length from the succinct statement of the
social and cultural agenda he espoused :
“From conversations with missionaries and from our own Tuskegee students who
have gone out to Africa as teachers, I learn the conditions that the missionary
encounters among the weaker races are not wholly unlike those that we meet in the
Southern States to-day. In both cases we have to deal with races that need moral and
intellectual training, but who need, also, the material and social conditions which will
support and provide a basis for a higher civilization, into which this sort of teaching
. G. Shepperson, ( : ).

. A. Locke, ( : -).
. Both images can be found in the Hampton University Archives, The Camera Club Collection and
The Sheppard Collection, respectively.
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Ramona Austin 82
seems to invite them to enter. They need to learn habits of industry individual
initiative and to acquire the notions of property that preserve to the individual the
fruits of his labor. Without these the weaker races must inevitably fall behind, and
perhaps perish, in the severe competition with the stronger races. From this
competition, on some terns or other, there is no escape. Since the white race has
penetrated into Central Africa there is no place where the weaker races have not come
under the influence and domination of the stronger races. It is part of the task of the
missionary to make those influences a blessing rather than, what they too often have
been, a curse. There are parts of Africa to-day in which the Christian missionary
organizations seem to be all that stand between the natives and the forces that are
ruthlessly crushing out their existence ”.
There are several observances to be gleaned from this passage and the passage
previously cited from the pamphlet, Tuscaloosa to Luebo. The critical difference
between the objectives of Blacks like the missionary-ethnographer-explorer
Sheppard and explorers and ethnographers such as Torday or Frobenius (whom
Sheppard preceded to the Kuba) was the formers’ racial identification with Africans.
To Blacks of the time, many of whom accepted the notion that Africans were
inferior in the technologies that created property and wealth from labor and in
moral culture because they were practicing animists, Black Africans were nonetheless
“forefathers”. Black missionaries and proponents of institutes like Hampton,

Tuskegee and Stillman saw themselves as adopting a strategy that would help
prevent the annihilation of Blacks in the southern United States and Africa at the
hands of the civilized, economically and politically superior Western nations .
In response to Washington, and in the tradition of their mutual educational
background, an industrial school was established at Ibanj by . It was at Ibanj
that Sheppard, A. L. Edmiston and their wives strove to create an environment
illustrative of the Christian and social ideals to which they aspired as Black
Americans in response to the abolition of slavery. Pagan Kennedy, in her book on
Sheppard, delves into his motivations and those of the other missionaries to
create a situation at Ibanj that was free of prejudice, replete with social justice and
. B. T. Washington ( : ). In the same issue, the editor of The Kasai Herald, H.P. Hawkins
writes on p.  : “Not loosing sight of the fact that our mission is a spiritual one, we believe a little
D o s s i e r
more attention given to this phase of service, will greatly aid in fallowing the soil out of which the
spiritual harvest is to spring. For industry and thrift in things material, means much to that people
when they will have espoused things spiritual. We do not go so far as some have gone upon this
subject in the advocacy of what is called “Industrial Missionary” as a class apart from those who are
the bearers of the gospel message, but every missionary might contribute in connection with his
regular work, something along these lines in the way of instruction, for in our heathen land they all
are Master of Arts in the field of industry.”
. T. F. Gossett ( : ) writes : “But what is noticeable is that American thought of the period
- generally lacks any perception of the Negro as a human being with potentialities for
improvement. Most of the people who wrote about Negroes were firmly in the grip of the idea that
intelligence and temperament are racially determined and unalterable”. Against this ubiquitous
ideology that was proposed implacably from pulpit to popular culture to discriminatory legislation,
it can be understood why the discourse among Blacks of Sheppard’s era should be so dichotomized.
What is striking is the uniform insistence for full participation in the American democratic ideal
despite this ideological onslaught.
a&h_4 BAT 9/08/05 12:03 Page 83
a physically shining example of a community where Black people worked and

lived in control of their environment. Sheppard was a highly successful
administrator of the day to day workings of the mission, first at Luebo, after the
death of Samuel Lapsley and before the arrival of William Morrison when he was
solely in charge as he was later at Ibanj, a mission station collectively created by
Black missionaries .
To the Kuba, and in his own mind, Sheppard was a chief . The Kuba had
deemed him a prince upon his first arrival at the capital, the reincarnation of the
deceased king Bope Mekabe . He soon demonstrated that he was a successful
and fearless big-game hunter. In the southern savannas of Central Africa, the
attributes of the buffalo are associated with the attributes of chiefship : boldly
powerful yet cunning and stealthy ; implacable in action yet capable of a cool
stillness. At the turn on the twentieth century, some chiefs still wore an ancient
coiffure like that of a Bushongo chief that Émile Torday published in  as the
frontispiece of On the Trail of the Bushongo (fig. ). It is a highly stylized rendering
of the bush buffalo’s horns. The hair is cut to form a ridge around the back of the
head wrapping forward to a horn shape over each temple. Pregnant women were

also allowed to wear this stylized coiffure thus connecting leadership, power and
authority to fertility. In a number of masquerades of the region, of which the
Kuba mwaash-mbwooy mushall and the Pende kipoko are two examples, the
buffalo coiffure is alluded to in the high stylization of the mask. There is a clear
relationship to the Torday images . Sheppard as an intrepidly successful hunter
of such dangerous iconic animals that he gifted to the indigenous populations
proved himself a powerful, productive and generous leader. In time, Sheppard
controlled several villages surrounding the Ibanj mission, a fact that caused
resentment among the local chiefs who as a result lost tax revenues. As leaders
acknowledging a leader, important chiefs struck agreements with Sheppard
necessary for the coexistence of the mission in a volatile region.
It is known that during his long sojourn in Africa, especially at times when he
was without his wife’s companionship, Sheppard had lovers among the Kuba
women and fathered a son by one of them. An African servant testified against
him to church superiors, causing the loss of his post in . The matter was
. P. Kennedy ( : -).

. Ibid., p. . Kennedy speaks of an archival photo from Ibanj of himself with an honor guard of
warriors on which Sheppard has labeled himself as “the chief of Ibaanc”.
. M.L. Hultgren et al (1993 : 9) ; and P. Kennedy ( : -).
. E. Torday (, frontispiece and top illustrations of four titled “Motherhood” opposite page ).
The buffalo coiffure on masks of the Kuba and other Kasai peoples is discussed by R. Austin in
“The Buffalo and the Elephant : Some Thoughts on the Mukyeem Masquerade of the Kuba” in
Nature, Belief and Ritual : Explorations in the Arts of Africa at The Dallas Museum of Art, ,
unpublished manuscript.
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Ramona Austin 84
handled with the utmost secrecy. The announcement of the departure of the
Sheppards from the field in the Annual Report of  adroitly avoids making
public the real reason. Sheppard was not the only missionary who succumbed to
such temptations. Other missionaries Black and White took up with African
women, and it was a common practice among traders and the like. William
Morrison, who sent him into harms way to gather evidence of mistreatment of the
Congolese and who faced trial with him in Leopoldville, brought the charges
against Sheppard and other Black Presbyterian missionaries. He was almost
unanimously effective, thus ending a unique chapter in the colonial history of
Central Africa . Arguably, Sheppard’s affairs would have been seen by the Kuba to
be an indication of his virility as a leader. The average Kuba man was
monogamous, but the great leader had numerous wives. Kennedy writes that
Sheppard was even considered a serious contender for the throne, given his
reputation, perhaps originally a political contrivance of the Kuba, as a reincarnated
former Kuba king . Sheppard’s bold personality, fearlessness, generosity and
virility conformed to the nature of the founder chief whose ability to lead is
confirmed by his iconoclasm (Sheppard was the bringer of a new world-view), but
who nonetheless embodies the law (Sheppard participated in Kuba power relations

and sought to establish Christian practices over certain indigenous ones). It is a
reasonable assertion that this paradox of power, at once sacred and profane in the
indigenous context, characterized Sheppard’s unique relationship with the Kuba.
For a man of Sheppard’s gifts, Ibanj was an historic experiment through

which a Black man could exercise authority and be autonomous. Sheppard was
a master politician and adroit strategist who strove not to offend the
sensibilities of his White superiors or the agents of the Belgian government so
that he could maintain his unique situation on the border of the Kuba
kingdom. In this, he fell back on Hampton Institute as a model for his work at
Ibanj. In a short article titled “A Congo Rocking Chair”, in  in The Kasai
Herald, A.L. Edmiston extolled a rocking chair made by Kuba boys at Ibanj
, miles inland from the seacoast as remarkable (fig. ). To his opening
D o s s i e r
remarks Sheppard added ; “Mr. Edmiston has struck the keynote. There are
now sixty-seven () Bakuba boys and young men who are learning trades, such
as carpentering, blacksmithing, mat making, tailoring, basket making, etc.
They are also in the regular school ; and hearing the gospel ”. Sheppard words
describe the program at Hampton Institute he had himself experienced.
Moreover, as a gifted ethnographer Sheppard knew that the Kuba were superb
workers in iron and copper (Kuba royalty was trained in blacksmithing and
. P. Kennedy (2002 : -).

. Ibid., p.  as reincarnated king, and p. -, on relations and charges of sexual misconduct.
. W.H. Sheppard, “A Congo Rocking Chair”, The Kasai Herald, July , No..
a&h_4 BAT 9/08/05 12:03 Page 85
metal working, considered sacred transformative acts) ; that they made

beautiful mats and textiles for adornment and as grave goods. He knew that
they carved impressive sculpture and wove intricate baskets. For Sheppard and
his fellow Black missionaries it was not the native manufacture, no matter how
grand, but industry as the means for spiritual uplift that was the hallmark of a
“superior” civilization . This rocking chair, imbued with iconic importance,
was presented to Dr L. Drepondt, the director of the Compagnie du Kasai. The
gift of the chair and the publication of Drepondt’s thank-you letter can be seen
as politically strategic. The missionaries had a sometimes mutually beneficial
relationship with Drepondt. It was reported in The Kasai Herald in  that
he had helped four of them travel during the dry season when the waters were
too low for the Compagnie du Kasai steamer (July, No. ) . Perhaps it was also
meant to mollify strained relations with a concern that ruthlessly represented
the economic interests of Belgium over Africans.
In , Sheppard himself had investigated atrocities, mutilated corpses and
chained Congolese hostages of The Congo Free State with the newly invented
Kodak box camera. On orders from William Morrison, appointed his superior in
 at Luebo, Sheppard had gone with notebook and camera to document a

massacre by the Zappo-Zaps (Songye) at Pianga. Every step of the way he
survived being killed with quick thinking and fast talking. Sheppard’s coolness in
the face of death and a willingness to follow orders that could have cost him his
life manifested his intrepid nature and inordinate luck. Morrison, who did not
take the risk, used Sheppard’s report to substantiate the atrocities to the Belgian
administration. The Belgians dire economic exploitation of the local population
that Sheppard discovered upon his return from furlough to the field in  was
strongly objected to by the missionary community.
Always before, Sheppard had been careful. He had made his criticisms of
Belgian brutality almost anonymously and did not call attention to the situation
while on the speaking circuit in late . As Pagan Kennedy writes, “The church
had hired Sheppard to raise money, not to raise hell”. Sheppard himself answered
his White colleagues who were indignant at his lack of engagement with these
issues on the lecture circuit, “Being a Colored man, I would not be understood
criticizing a White government before White people ”. The year after Sheppard
presented the rocking chair to the powerful Drepondt, in , would see him
and his superior William Morrison sued for libel and threatened with a huge fine
and a jail sentence by the Belgian government. Morrison had been a continual
. R.F. Engs ( : ) points out that “industry” did not have the same connotation at the inception
of Hampton. The word came to be weighted with the trappings of capital enterprise by the turn of
the century. Sheppard meant the word in the missionary sense, as moral uplift, of which there are
still remnants in Sheppard’s explanation.
. The Kasai Herald, , Vol. , No. , p. .
. P. Kennedy (2002 : ).
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Ramona Austin 86
thorn in the side of the Belgian authorities, but it was Sheppard’s unambiguous
article in the Kasai Herald decrying the destruction of the Kuba and their culture
by the Compagnie du Kasai that precipitated events. From his return in  to
, Sheppard had worked at Ibanj amid the extreme suffering of a population
that he had known in its great days. Now, everywhere he looked was ruin. Court,
king, husbandry, architecture, culture, and ceremony had been impoverished.
The reaction of the Belgian authorities would be brought to the attention of the
governments of the United States and Europe and make Sheppard an
international celebrity. Morrison was dropped from the case on a technicality and
the charges against Sheppard were proven absurd in a defense by the leading
Belgian socialist lawyer, Émile Vandervelde, who traveled to the Congo at the
request of the Presbyterian Congo Missions to represent the two American
missionaries at Leopoldville. After Sheppard’s death, however, it was Morrison
who became the lone champion of these events . The renewed interest in
Sheppard has reinstated him in the record of this sad chapter of the colonial
history of Central Africa.
Thus, always lurking nascent in Black missionary activity, no matter how
“reformist”, were the seeds of resistance. No matter that Sheppard followed the

lead of the trade school model at the recommendation of Booker T. Washington
who preached accommodation with the White man, and no matter how clever he
was at avoiding trouble, moral repugnance pulled Blacks who had lived intimately
with the spiritual impoverishment of slavery into the fray. Ultimately, American
Blacks were challenged by events in Africa to act. It was inevitable that movements
valorizing African cultures would eventually emerge in African American activism
and thought. In the most radical expression of these movements, the most
impressive cultures of Africa would be seen as superior to the racist West.
Paradoxically, missionaries such as Sheppard made this worldview possible
through the collection and study of the material culture of African peoples brought
back to Black institutions such as Hampton. From the beginning, despite narrow
characterizations of such institutions, these collections were used at Hampton as
D o s s i e r
teaching tools to instill racial pride in settings begun during Reconstruction for the
education of freed Blacks. This was a brief period that sought to more equitably
distribute economic and social power in race relations in America. Early programs,
such as the African Studies program established at Hampton in , educated a
Black leadership familiar with cultures of the African continent and who
matriculated with Africans who would, in time, create movements for
independence from colonial rule . This took place even though it is fair to say that
such institutions were, and still are, culturally conservative.
. Ibid., p. .

. M.L. Hultgren et al. ( : -) ; and G. Shepperson, “Notes…” ( : ) for a discussion
of influences between Africans and African Americans on nationalist ideological formation among
Blacks on both continents.
a&h_4 BAT 9/08/05 12:03 Page 87
The lives and careers of such Black intellectuals as Alain Locke, who was at the
forefront of revalorizing African culture and other writers and visual artists, for
example, of the Harlem Renaissance and the international Négritude movement
in which Locke was prominent, would overlap with the lives of the early
missionaries. As noted above, Alain Locke’s seminal anthology, The New Negro,
was published in  two years before Sheppard’s death. Sheppard had used his
collection to demonstrate the nature of the African culture he encountered during
his lectures for the Congo Presbyterian Mission on furloughs home to raise
money. These talks were given in-depth descriptive accounts in the Black press. A
Hampton photo from  shows a domestic economics class examining Kuba
textiles from the Sheppard collection , a unique educational experience in any
institution of the time.
During Sheppard’s time, objects that had been brought back from Africa by
colonial administrators and missionaries were being reassessed by the West as
great world art. Through a well received exhibition containing material from the
collection of Belgian diplomat Raoul Blondiau that he had helped to acquire for
Theatre Arts Monthly magazine, Alain Locke, in , was responsible in securing
works from that collection to augment Hampton’s already significant holdings

of Kuba material. Part of that collection also went to the Schomberg Center for
Research in Black Culture in New York City. The Harvard educated Locke
taught at Howard University from  and in his will in  left a collection of
African art to the school. Founded upon a different educational philosophy than
the industrial schools, Howard afforded Locke influence upon the most elite
educated Blacks. The early international connections of Black schools through
missionaries, not only with West and Central Africa, but with Native Americans,
the Caribbean and with Asian and Eastern European nations were essential to
the formation of an international world-view and the subsequent cultural
movements and progressive thinkers that developed among African Americans.
In this way, the industrial schools (Hampton) and institutions of higher learning
(Howard) impacted the Black intelligentsias of Africa, the Caribbean and the
United States.
Not only the material cultures the Black missionaries encountered, but the
ones they themselves established are matter for fascinating studies. Sheppard and
his fellow Black missionaries, like A.L. Edmiston who laid out the plan for the
church at Ibanj , were responsible for the conception and design of the
impressively built environment of the Ibanj mission where all sorts of illustrious
men Black and White “came tramping through town and depended on Black
Americans’ hospitality… As unofficial mayor, he [Sheppard] would rule over a
utopia of African American achievement. For the station of Ibaanc [sic] was built,
. Hampton University Archives. Published as figure  in M.L. Hultgren et al. ().
. The Kasai Herald, July , No. , p. .
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Ramona Austin 88
staffed, designed, and supervised entirely by Black people ”. Sheppard was joined
in his labor by Black men and women who shared his dreams and motivations.
Among the Black missionaries who imported a southern Black ethos to Central
Africa was his wife, Lucy Gantt Sheppard, who unstintingly served with him at
Luebo and Ibanj. Of two remarkable women who originally came alone as
missionaries, Althea Brown and Maria Fearing, Fearing’s story is the most
indelible. She was recruited by Sheppard in her fifties. A former slave who paid
for her own education at Talladega College, Maria Fearing went to Africa
unsupported by the Congo Presbyterian Mission board who did not want to be
responsible for her because of her age. Fearing paid her own passage and with her
personal resources purchased African children out of slavery, schooling and
rearing them at the Luebo mission. She did this until forced to retire from the
field in her eighties . Such rectitude informed the daily structure of time and
events at these missions. The skills instilled by the industrial training of the Black
schools brought a certain harmony and visual clarity to the living environment.
No discussion about who Sheppard was and his impact can be complete
without mentioning the objects that he collected and sold to Hampton in 

and the images of the cultures he encountered. Sheppard in Africa was a man in
a world of aesthetic sensibilities. This can be seen in images from Ibanj : the
gracefully-posed missionaries in their suits and sharply pressed dresses in front of
well-built homes (The Sheppard Collection, Hampton University Archives,
Hampton, Virginia), the clarity of the structure of the church interior with its
polished and whitewashed dirt floors (fig. ) and the arches of the Sheppards’
front porch where his little son, Max, poses among African men (The Sheppard
Collection ; and The Presbyterian Historical Society in Montreat, North Carolina) ;
Sheppard (fig. ) posing with Max in front of his well-tended field gear on a
short trip with native helpers and children (The Sheppard Collection and The
Presbyterian Historical Society) . The juxtaposition of images and actors in this
drama of cultural encounter draws the viewer into an extraordinary world where
D o s s i e r
the vision of a more just and gracious society born out of the experience of
American slavery meets the great court of the Kuba.
Sheppard, in his generosity, gave away many objects that he collected. He sold
most of his collection to Hampton in  and annotated the list of objects in 
and  . It is invaluable field documentation. There are not only Kuba objects
. P. Kennedy ( : -).

. Ibid., p.  and .
. “Many trips were made into the interior, visiting scores of towns, explaining to the natives the
purpose of their [the missionaries’] presence in their midst”. W.H. Sheppard, Blazing the African
Trail, p. .
. See the essay by M.L. Hultgren and J. Zeidler ( : -) for a history on the collection made
by Sheppard for Hampton upon General Armstrong’s request.
a&h_4 BAT 9/08/05 12:03 Page 89
but also objects from the Luba, Songye, Biombo, Soko, Kela, Lulua, Ngala, Teke,
Ngata, and Mbuyu (Bockombuya following Sheppard). The majority, however,
are Kuba. The list includes objects of ritual, ceremony and rank, among them : a
beaded mukyeem helmet mask (related in style to the mwaash-mbwooy mushall but
with a stylized elephant trunk at the top) ; a crocodile oracle and various charms ;
an intricately patterned Kuba warrior’s insignia horn, extremely fine examples of
decorated pipe bowls and cups, some with anthropomorphic motifs, as well as
forms of laket, the Kuba hat (head covering) that is elaborated into various
insignia of rank. There are shields, and superb examples of metalwork in knives,
axes and adze, the finest being given by the king and princes to Sheppard as gifts.
The single most important example will be discussed below. There are objects
from daily life. In Hampton’s collection are, hat pins, carved boxes, sometimes
used to store knives or cakes of red camwood (tukula) powder to cover objects
and the body, and neckrests. Various types of the refined Kuba basketry are
represented. One of the most important areas of excellence in the Sheppard
collection is its textiles. The collection contains some of the oldest examples of
Central African raffia cloth in the world. One exceptional piece may date as early
as the mid th centuries . The variety, quality, and the date when they were

collected make Hampton’s holdings one of the most important from the Kuba,
who have produced one of the greatest textile traditions on the African continent.
Since cultural information can be learned from the function of these textiles in
Kuba society, the most ancient pieces, like those in the Sheppard collection, are
of great historical importance .
Sheppard left a number of indelible images that contextualize his cultural
motivations and his response to the African environment he encountered. A
charming photograph of Sheppard being shaven by a bare-breasted native
woman juxtaposed with a collection of the razors he selected and sold to
Hampton published by William Phipps in The Sheppard’s and Lapsley :
Pioneer Presbyterians in the Congo . In the image, Sheppard is clearly enjoying
himself. His posture is easy, vital yet relaxed, with one hand gracefully slung
over his knee. The woman is obviously ministering to someone she respects.
She has effaced herself in the act that she performs. Sheppard’s pose is the
posture of a supremely confident man at ease in the world around him. A
. From notes by W.H. Sheppard on the Sheppard Collection, Hampton University Museum
collection Records, unpublished,  and . M.L. Hultgren et al. (, see illustration 
and detail in addition to the quote from Sheppard on p. ). This piece was estimated at twice
the age of the Lukenga who gave it to Sheppard between  and . When Sheppard met the
Lukenga he was estimated to be about  years old. This would put the date of manufacture
conservatively at circa .
. D. Binkley and P. Darish, “Introductory Catalogue Statements”, in M.L. Hultgren et al. ( :
).
. W. Phipps (). This image is in the archives of both Hampton University and The Presbyterian
Historical Society at Montreat.
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Ramona Austin 90
collection of Kuba razors acquired in  by Hampton University Museum

shows the aesthetic elaboration of detail in Kuba design that Sheppard so
admired.
Sheppard published the image of a Kete helmet mask in a story that he wrote
for children . Shepard’s caption identifies the mask as one worn by a “witch
doctor” and indicates the protagonist of the story, a young boy, has given up
participating in local rituals after his conversion to Christianity. Such masks are
worn by ritual experts for healing and by initiates and initiators for initiation
rites and funerary rituals, information that Sheppard himself clearly noted
elsewhere. These functions, however, conflict with the assumption of Christian
values and authority, so Sheppard emphasizes in his story that the boy rejects the
mask. The image of the mask however has a story to tell. As ethnographic
document the mask is interesting in that it is clearly Kete (the ethnic group at
Luebo), but its general form, when compared with other Kete masks of its type,
hints at the intense borrowing of masks and masking forms that existed among
the neighboring groups on the border of the Kuba region. According to oral
history, the Kete are made up of several populations and the Kuba took from
them their artistic traditions although there is no material evidence to document

this. In the capture of this image, Sheppard operates on two levels. He uses the
image to proselytize the efficacy of Christianity among pagan peoples. In the
process, he documents an important example of a major masking style for future
scholarship.
Another interesting photograph in the Sheppard Collection and Sheppard’s
papers at Hampton University records a group of dancing men that he identifies
as Batetela. This elegant image belies the fact that the Batetela were constantly at
war with their neighbors and, in , the year after Sheppard arrived in the Kasai,
they turned against Arab slavers with the help of the Belgians. Sheppard notes in
his writings that the missionaries feared the Batetela :
“After many months of building, preaching and teaching, trouble came to the little
band. The Batetela soldiers, far away in the Lulua country, revolted, killing their Belgian
D o s s i e r
officers and threatened to come to Luebo and fight the missionaries. Earnest prayers
were offered by the missionaries and Christian natives. God changed the purpose of the
fighters and sent them in a different direction ”.
The Batetela caused a great deal of trouble for the Belgians until defeated in
, the year that Sheppard left the Kasai forever . Taking this captivating
image, probably in  or , may not have been an easy task for Sheppard
. After returning from Africa, Sheppard wrote a series of four stories for children. This image of a Kete
helmet mask was used to illustrate “A Young Hunter” about a boy named Benwenya. Sheppard’s
caption for this photograph reads : “The Witch Doctor in Whom Benwenya Once Believed”. From
True African Stories, “A Young Hunter”, Louisville, Kentucky, n.d. [probably early s].
. W. H. Sheppard, Blazing the African Trail, p. -.
. M. Felix ( : -).
a&h_4 BAT 9/08/05 12:03 Page 91
and probably involved all his negotiating skills. It shows his clear affinity for the
environment around him even in the midst of threatening violence and chaos.
The single most important object that came into Sheppard’s possession was a
large knife with an iron blade and a broken pommel decorated with copper
wire . This knife was given to Sheppard by Maxamalenge to thank him for saving
his life. The old king had died and a different dynasty ruled the Kuba that sought
to force Maxamalenge, the old nyim’s favorite son, to take the poison oracle.
Sheppard gave the prince, whom he had befriended since , shelter at Ibanj
earning the ire of the Kuba leadership and the eventual destruction of the mission
in . The mission was rebuilt but never to its former glory.
The accession notes concerning this royal ceremonial sword were dictated by
Sheppard. The accession date is March , . The notes relate that the sword
had been handed down through the reign of many Lukengas and that :
“Once a year, thousands from associated tribes gather to report to Lukenga . Daily
for  weeks they assemble in [the] public square for speeches, singing and dancing. The
Lukenga sits high in his pavilion (sic) surrounded by his family and court. The master
of ceremonies lays this long knife before a chief, who picks it up, steps into the circle,
salutes the king with the knife and gives his dance as the drums beat and the long ivory
horns blow. After this he makes his report.

After the death of the old Lukenga (sic), his successor, of another dynasty, killed as
many as possible of the old reigning family and thro’ the influence of the Belgians did
away with this annual meeting. Maxamalenge fled the capitol and took refuge with the
missionaries at Ibanj. This knife was his thank[s] offering for hospitality received.
Dr Sheppard’s son is named for this man ”.
The sword that Maxamalinge gave to Sheppard is the mbombaam sword that
only the Bushoong nyim (Kuba king) has the right to wear and only in the most
important ceremonies. Christopher Springs describes the place of this sword in
Kuba weaponry and culture :
“It is the largest of all Kuba weapons having a gradually tapering point and blade
decorated with longitudinal grooves. The long, tubular hilt is elaborately carved and
inlaid with copper. Together with the lance mbwoom ambady, the mbombaam is an
essential part of the royal costume bwaantshy, a massive agglomeration of objects which
might best be described as a lexicon of Kuba symbolism associated with the person of
the nyim ”.
. See illustration  in M.L. Hultgren et al. ( : ).

. Lukenga is a generic honorific title as well as a name. As an honorific appellation it is not the actual
name of the king or Nyim as he is formally titled. During Sheppard’s time in the Kasai there were
nine Nyim, each with a distinct name. This was due to the struggle over the successor to Kot
aMbweeky aMileng when variously five Nyims asserted authority in rapid succession in . It was
these factions that drove Prince Maxamalenge with the threat of assassination to seek refuge at Ibanj
with Sheppard. From  to , two more Nyim held the throne before Kot aPe who held it from
 until . Go to www.worldstatesmen.org/Congo-Kinshasa_native.html for a list of the Kuba
kings from  to the present day.
. Sheppard’s notes on the collection, catalogue number ..
. C. Spring ( : ). Of the significance of the copper inlay that is simply called red metal or red
a&h_4 BAT 9/08/05 12:03 Page 92
Ramona Austin 92
In Kuba rituals of kingship all weapons of iron are shunned save for the
mbombaam. This may be because of the “ambiguous symbolic relationship
between women and metal”. The process of smelting “is perceived in terms of
intercourse and giving birth”. The king in his person is thus seen as allied to the
fertility of the land and therefore of his people. The king as blacksmith in myth
gives birth to the cultural world as women give birth to the natural world . The
mbombaam that Sheppard was given is decorated with the same spiral designs
found on the oldest textiles, corroborating proof of its significant age. As oral
history recorded the sword had been handed down through the reign of many
Lukengas, this ritual weapon given to Sheppard could date from a time when the
power of the Kuba kingdom reached its peak in the mid  th century .
How significant, then, was it for such an important ritual object to be placed
in Shepppard’s hands ? The Belgians had put an end to the rituals at the capital
that reified the sacred and political authority of the nyim (King), rituals in
which the mbombaam had been central. In this context, Maxamalenge’s gesture
of thanks becomes a poetic act. He transfers a sacred object of kingship to
Sheppard, the iconoclast, who by force of his will had established a base of
power among the Kuba in delicate balance with the interests of his church

against the injustice of the Belgians. It was a moment signaling the twilight
descending upon the Kuba Kingdom. The days of glory were over. They would
soon be over for Sheppard. His singular adventure was about to come to an end
and these two men, a Black American and a Black African had participated in
one of the great stories of their time.
In the year , at the turn of another century, almost one hundred years
after this event, King Kot aMbweeky III, whose namesake was the nyim who
received Sheppard as he first entered the capital of the kingdom, visited
Hampton University Museum. The object in which he was most interested
and that he most treasured was the mbombaam sword that Maxamalenge had
given to Sheppard . This arc of history, in which he would be an actor, was
D o s s i e r
iron in many African languages, E.W. Herbert ( : ) writes : “It carries the manifold
connotations of blood : sacrifice, execution, war on the one hand ; fertility and vitality on the other.
It marks the transition from child to adult, from adult to ancestor. Its presence is frequently a
statement of aggressivity, of the power to take life, as in the copper inlay on the Kuba war-knife…”
(my italics).
. C. Spring ( : ).
. The Kuba kingdom became important under Syaam aMbuul aNgoong who ruled from -.
It peaked in power from the middle of the th century until the late th century just when Sheppard
discovered it as the first westerner to visit the kingdom in . Its collapse was brought by Belgian
aggression and domination soon thereafter. See P. Curtin et al. ( : -). On the dating of
the sword by textile designs see the article by David Binkley and Pat Darrish in M.L. Hultgren
et al. ( : ).
. Mary Lou Hultgren, Curator of Collections at Hampton University Museum, pers. comm., June
.
a&h_4 BAT 9/08/05 12:03 Page 93
unknown to Sheppard as he stood looking for the first time upon the verdant
abundance of the Kuba kingdom with its broad streets and woven houses.
After his sojourn in the Kasai was over, he returned to America, to a clamoring
lecture circuit where he could recount his singular adventure. He also
returned to a nation where in daily life he had to hide who he was, a man of
uncommon qualities, but he could display and discuss the treasures that he
had been gifted and chosen. He could tell about and show the world the
greatness of an African people.
Sheppard did not falter in regret or sorrow for what was lost. He took care of
his family and contributed to the betterment of his last parish community in
Louisville, Kentucky with his typical humor and energy. He ended his days at the
age of sixty-two from a stroke that invalided him for a year and that was most
likely brought on by the numerous bouts of malaria he had experienced in the
field. He was able all his life to cope with extreme contradictions – slavery versus
freedom, the brutality of Leopold’s Congo versus the rights of the Congolese,
being a Black man in a world under White men’s control – and maintain his
equilibrium. In a sense, Sheppard “went native” in the Congo identifying with
Africans, but he held onto his identity. He was a doer, a Black man who met two

presidents, who lectured to an august body of his fellows at Exeter Hall in
London. He was a man of deep compassion and great courage, and he sinned in
the letter of his creed as a man immersed in a different world that he had come
to respect and enjoy.
Sheppard was the product of an historical process in which Blacks in the
Americas sought to forge an identity apart from the Western ideology of race
that supported slavery, and to establish a political and economic base from
which that could be made a reality. This generation saw Blacks in the
Americas and Africa allied in a battle against spiritual and physical
annihilation. The period of Reconstruction after The Civil War was one of
great promise for a population whose condition impacted Blacks beyond
continental America. In that moment of expectation, an extraordinary
generation born slave and free went out to act upon the world stage. Their
ideas and movements would reverberate to the mid-twentieth century helping
to shape the discourse for civil rights in America and for independence in
Africa. The missionary William Henry Sheppard, the “Black Livingstone of
Africa”, was one of that generation’s most gifted protagonists.
a&h_4 BAT 9/08/05 12:03 Page 94
Ramona Austin 94
Fig.  : William Morrison and Sheppard with a buffalo carcass. Sheppard was a superb
huntsman who shot many big game animals that he often gave to the population for food.
Courtesy Hampton University Archives.

D o s s i e r
Fig.  : Prince Maxamalenge and wife.

Sheppard was close friends with him from
his first visit to the Kuba capitol in 
and also called his son Maxamalenge Fig.  : “William H. Sheppard, F.R.G.S.,
as his African name. The boy was known and Wife”, postcard, . Such cards were used
as “Max” throughout his life. to proselytize the success of the missionary effort
Courtesy Hampton University Archives. in Africa. The image of the Sheppards as a genteel
bourgeois couple was in stark contrast to the
racially derogatory images of the time.
a&h_4 BAT 9/08/05 12:03 Page 95
Fig.  : A broadsheet probably used

to recruit missionaries, especially black
Americans, when Sheppard was
on furlough to America in - for
a speaking tour to raise money for the
Presbyterian Congo Mission. The image
of Sheppard is his official portrait
as a Fellow of the Royal Geographic
Society in England.
Fig.  : Portia ironing.

Photograph by Richard Leigh Minor,
Hampton Institute c. .
a&h_4 BAT 9/08/05 12:03 Page 96
Ramona Austin 96
Fig.  : “The girls doing laundry work”, titled by William Sheppard.

Probably taken at the Ibanj mission, -.

D o s s i e r
Fig.  : “A Congo Rocking Chair”,

made in the industrial program, ,
at Ibanj. Presbyterian Historical Society,
Presbyterian Church, USA (Montreat, N.C.).
Fig.  : “A Bushongo Chief of the Isambo
Sub-Tribe. He wears his hair to imitate
buffalo’s horns after the ancient fashion”.
After the Frontispiece from On the Trail
of the Bushongo, c .
Photograph by Emil Torday.
a&h_4 BAT 9/08/05 12:03 Page 97
Fig.  : A postcard titled “Interior Lapsley Memorial Chapel,

Built by the Natives Congo, Central Africa”.
Presbyterian Historical Society, Presbyterian Church, USA (Montreat, N.C.).
Fig.  : “A short journey inland”. Sheppard with his young son, Congolese
children and adults. Sheppard made many trips to proselytize the Christian
faith and inform the Congolese why the Presbyterian Congo
Mission was in the Kasai.
Presbyterian Historical Society, Presbyterian Church, USA (Montreat, N.C.).
a&h_4 BAT 9/08/05 12:03 Page 98
Ramona Austin 98
Résumé
William Henry Sheppard (-) est resté comme le “Livingstone noir de
l’Afrique”. L’un des missionnaires les plus célèbres de son temps, il fut un ethnographe de
talent doué d’une sensibilité pour les cultures qu’il rencontra. Bien qu’internationalement
reconnu, de son vivant, pour son combat en faveur des Congolais opprimés, il tomba dans
l’oubli, de sa disparition aux années , où sa vie et son itinéraire commencèrent à
susciter un nouvel intérêt.
Le présent article ne livre pas une chronologie de W.H. Sheppard au Congo, mais
s’attache à la replacer dans le contexte des combats de l’intelligentsia noire américaine de
son époque, de l’éducation dite « réformiste » qu’il reçut, de l’œuvre des missionnaires
noirs qui, dans un monde dominé par les pouvoirs blancs, prennent le parti des Africains
contre la colonisation. Une extraordinaire génération d’hommes et de femmes qui, dans
l’ère de la reconstruction après la guerre civile américaine, évoluent dans un contexte inter-
national de rapports de forces complexes et changeants.
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Sheppard William Henry, “Into the Heart of Africa”, Address in Virginia Hall, Nov ,
, Southern Workman, Vol. XX, No. , December, .
Sheppard William Henry, Blazing the African Trail, ECFM, Presbyterian Church in the
U.S., Nashville, Tennessee Educational Department.
Sheppard William Henry, True African Stories, “A Young Hunter”, Louisville, Kentucky.
Shepperson George, “Notes on Negro American Influences on the Emergence of African
Nationalism” in M. Drimmer (ed.), Black History : A Reappraisal, op. cit., .
Spring Christopher, African Arms and Armor, Washington D. C, Smithsonian
Institution Press, .
The Southern Workman, “Hampton’s African Collection”, September, .
Torday Émile, On the Trail of the Bushongo, Seeley, Service & Co. Limited, .
Washington Booker T., “Industrial Schools as an Aid to Missions”, The Kasai Herald,
Vol. ., Luebo Africa, July , No. , excerpt from The Missionary Review of the
World, Nashville, Tennessee.
Wesley Charles H., “The Prince Hall Story, the Origin of Prince Hall Masonry”, Prince
Hall Directory, st ed., Washington D.C. : , Conference of Grand Masters, Prince Hall

Masons.
Women’s Foreign Missionary Society M. E. Church, South, How Sheppard Made His Way
Into Lukenga’s Kingdom,  pages.
Newspaper Accounts in the Hampton University Archives

By newspaper :
Afro-American Presbyterian Charlotte, North Carolina, June , , “Letter from
Africa”, Ibanj-Kasai District Congo Ind. State, W.C. Africa, March , .
February , , “In the Dark Continent”. Account of the trial of Sheppard and
Morrison for libel against the Kasai Rubber Company.
Amsterdam News New York, New York, March ,  (?), “Shepard (sic) is Here, Congo
D o s s i e r
Hero Arrested as Libeler of King Leopold, Discovered Great Bakubas, Mighty

Missionary and Hunter of the Congo, Who Freed the Most Advanced Tribe in Africa
from the Tyranny of Belgium, and Himself Saved by U. S. Government, Sees Hope
for Africa”.
The Central Presbyterian Monteagle Chautauqua, Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee,
ca. , “A Missionary Heroine” from Rev. D. C. Hankin, in “The Independent”.
Report on a talk given by Mrs. Lucy Gantt Sheppard.
Herald (?) (no location), October , . “American Negro Hero of Congo, One of
Missionaries Acquitted of Libelling (sic) Belgians is Virginian and Son of a Slave, Was
First to Inform World of Congo Abuses.”
Louisville Courier Journal, Louisville, Kentucky, October , , “Many Experiences of
Missionaries to African Related : The Rev. W.H. Sheppard, a Negro, Addresses Big
congregation at Second Presbyterian Church”.
a&h_4 BAT 9/08/05 12:03 Page 101
Nashville American Nashville, Tennessee, March , , “Congo Missionary, Colored
Woman Who Has Served Many Years There to Lecture.” (Lecture by Mrs. Lucy
Gantt Sheppard)
Richmond Planet, Richmond, Virginia, January , , “The Planet in Africa, Little
Heathen Children Inspecting It.”
Tuskegee Student Tuskegee, Alabama. Speech made at the Central Presbyterian Church,
Montgomery Alabama, “In the Heart of Africa, Most Interesting and Informing
Lecture”, April , .
By location :
Boston, Massachusetts, “A Colored F. R. G. S. [sic Fellow of the Royal
Geographic Society], Discoverer of a Race Who Perhaps Civilized Egypt,
‘Behold a Man of Ethiopia !’ – A Product of Tuscaloosa, becomes One of the
Most Eminent Men in the South”, probably 
Staunton, Virginia (?), Speech given at First Presbyterian Church, “Graphic Talk
on Darkest Africa, Rev. W. H. Sheppard is Heard by an Immense
Congregation, Mission Work Among Cannibals, Colored Here of the Congo
Tells of Many Stirring Events Among the Tribes he has Visited — Inland

Africa, a Country Little Known to White People.”
Unpublished Sources :
Austin Ramona, “The Buffalo and the Elephant : Some Thoughts on a Masquerade of
the Kuba” in Nature, Belief and Ritual : Explorations in the Arts of Africa at The Dallas
Museum of Art, , unpublished manuscript.
Houlberg Marilyn, Curator of Collections, Conversation on Haitian Vodun, September
, .
Hultgren Mary Lou, Conversation at Hampton University Museum, June .
Maupin Donzella, Acting Archivist, Conversation on Sheppard Research, Summer .
Schall Larryetta M., Vodicka Julia R., Interview with Mr. Max W. Sheppard, son of
Dr Wm. H. Sheppard, May , .
Sheppard William H., Notes on the Sheppard Collection, Hampton University Museum,
 and .
Web Sources :
On the influence of Prince Hall and black Freemasonry :
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part/p.html
Who is Prince Hall ? See :
http://www.mindspring.com/~Johnsonx/whoisph.html

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AN EXTRAORDINARY GENERATION : THE LEGACY OF WILLIAM

HENRY SHEPPARD, THE ?BLACK LIVINGSTONE OF AFRICA

Verdier | Afrique & histoire

Article disponible en ligne à l'adresse:

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Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour Verdier.

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75 The legacy of W. H. Sheppard

Westerners such as Émile Torday and Leo Frobenius, whom Sheppard

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Tall, charismatic and physically striking, with endurance, energy and

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77 The legacy of W. H. Sheppard

There were various intellectual reactions by Blacks to slavery as an institution.

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Some Black churches that sent missionaries to Africa instigated, joined or

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Koinange, a Gikuyu from Kenya, contributed to the museum collection at

. Ibid. p. .

79 The legacy of W. H. Sheppard

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. K. L. Schall ( : ).

A rare broadsheet (fig. ) published in Virginia that is in the Sheppard

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. W. Phipps ( : ).

81 The legacy of W. H. Sheppard

foundations for “African nationalism and collective achievement”. The second

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. G. Shepperson, ( : ).

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83 The legacy of W. H. Sheppard

a physically shining example of a community where Black people worked and

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. P. Kennedy ( : -).

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For a man of Sheppard’s gifts, Ibanj was an historic experiment through

. P. Kennedy (2002 : -).

85 The legacy of W. H. Sheppard

metal working, considered sacred transformative acts) ; that they made

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. Ibid., p. .

87 The legacy of W. H. Sheppard

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. P. Kennedy ( : -).

89 The legacy of W. H. Sheppard

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collection of Kuba razors acquired in  by Hampton University Museum

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91 The legacy of W. H. Sheppard

horns blow. After this he makes his report.

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. See illustration  in M.L. Hultgren et al. ( : ).

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93 The legacy of W. H. Sheppard

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Fig.  : Prince Maxamalenge and wife.

95 The legacy of W. H. Sheppard

Fig.  : A broadsheet probably used

Courtesy Hampton University Archives.