Airstrips and Underdevelopment

When the missionaries created a settlement, they often built an airstrip. Some of these airstrips where we landed have not seen traffic in more than 20 years, before we came there a few weeks ago. Some of them have been well maintained; others have been recently renovated. Still others, like the one at Luebo, are in pretty terrible shape--short, rough, and overgrown. Here is my view on landing (and we came into this airstrip twice).

Sheppard established the American Presbyterian Congo Mission (APCM) in Luebo in 1891. The locations of the early stations were chosen by the missionaries, but required the approval of Leopold’s colonial State. Since the State was Catholic, Protestant denominations were kept away from cities and conceded territory that was farther a field. Some Protestants liked this--the more isolated the people were, the greater their need for “civilization.” These out-of-the-way stations often created artificial settlements and unsustainable development of which these airstrips serve as reminders. Furthermore, the land concessions, a process I am learning more about, highlight the extent of the church’s unholy collaboration with illegitimate colonial authorities. Sadly this alliance might hardly be noteworthy in mission history did it not represent a shift from the early years when the APCM was the State’s most vocal and important critic.

Missions shifted development patterns as they became one of the major employers in the area, hiring Congolese as sentries, cooks, housekeepers, and eventually in religious, educational, and medical projects. This altered historical patterns of development from convenient proximity to a clean water source (and other natural resources that provide necessities which is how communities historically develop) to a higher plateau where they could build an airstrip so that they could easily import canned sardines from apartheid South Africa. The missionaries did not, for the most part, live simply or with much awareness of their surroundings. And the infrastructure they created of housing, schools, hospitals, and roads was designed to meet the needs of the foreign missionaries rather than of the local population. I have been discussing this with some of my fellow travelers. Initially some of them resisted the suggestions that there were both practical and political reasons why the mission stations of their childhoods were not preserved in the ways that they think they should have been. Now, with some distance between them and the emotion of the trip, we are having some good exchanges.

This is the plane. As the first plane to land on the airstrip in a long time, we attracted quite a bit of attention from the surrounding areas.