During the Cold War, an oft overlooked battle for minds unfolded on the vast stage of Africa. As colonial powers withdrew and new African nations emerged, both the United States and the Soviet Union scrambled for alliances. 

Author Phil Dow’s new book, “Accidental Diplomats,” catalogs the forgotten and fortuitous influence of American evangelical missionaries in Ethiopia, Kenya and the Democratic Republic of the Congo during the Cold War. 

While these missionaries had arrived with spiritual goals, the deep engagement with local cultures they developed at times led them to unexpected roles of significance within the unfolding political drama. 

Dow, who holds a PhD from Cambridge and is the Head of School at Black Forest Academy in Germany, spoke recently with Isabella Meibauer for Religion Unplugged. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Isabella Meibauer: I caught a small glimmer of your own personal experience that perhaps inspired this book in the Introduction. Please share some more about your background and the impetus for researching such a unique topic. 

Phil Dow: I grew up in Ethiopia, the U.K. and Kenya, primarily. I was surrounded by this missionary world and parents who were actively involved in missionary work. I also grew up as a student attracted to the humanities, in particular history. As I went into university, I decided I wanted to be a history teacher. I went on for an initial master's degree thinking that ultimately I would want to do a PhD in history of some kind, but I didn't have a compelling topic.

[Then] I read a book by Walter Russell Mead, a well-known foreign policy expert, entitled “Special Providence.” In it he made this offhanded comment that one of the most important but hidden elements in American foreign relations history is the story of American missionaries. No one had told the story, but he had a suspicion that a lot of the most significant things that have happened over the last 150 years or so had at least some connection to American missionaries.

As I started looking around in my own upbringing, there were hiding in plain sight all kinds of examples of missionary influence on Kenya-US relations. In fact, I go back to 1988 [when] I was a senior at a boarding school largely for missionary kids in Kenya. We took a day off because the president of Kenya, Daniel arap Moi, was coming to visit the school.

As I reflect[ed] on it later, I said, the president of a country coming to the small, you know, missionary boarding school in rural Kenya? That's not normal. How in the world did this happen? Well, President Moi had been raised by a Christian missionary family, essentially had become a Christian in this missionary family, and for the majority of his political life, had been influenced by two or three of these missionary families that he had grown up amongst.

You can say, well, that's a one-off example and probably an anomaly. But no, in Kenya, it wasn’t an anomaly. There are examples of missionaries all over the place. Then the question I had was, well, is it just unique to Kenya, or is this story seen elsewhere?

Meibauer: I would wager that the Cold War typically evokes images of the USSR and the Berlin Wall, not necessarily the African countries of Ethiopia, Kenya and the Congo. Could you elucidate the significance of these particular countries within the context of the Cold War to set the stage for the book?

Dow: So what you just said is based on the assumption that most people share, and that is [that] the Cold War is primarily a European event. In the last 15 to 20 years, historians of foreign affairs have really started seeing the Cold War as a truly global conflict and that's obviously spilled over into my work.

By the late 1950s the Cold War in Europe had come to a stalemate. At the same time decolonization is happening in Africa and becomes a highly contested space. Between 1959 and 1963 — I want to say — 27 different countries got their independence in Africa.

In Africa, suddenly there's this middle ground where countries were, for the first time since the colonial era, choosing for themselves what their future political orientation would be. So Russia, the Soviet Union, the U.S. and its allies suddenly start paying a lot of attention to Africa in a way that they hadn't up to this point.

We talk about the scramble for Africa in the 19th century, where the colonial powers were seeking authority or control of Africa for whatever reasons. There's a second scramble that happened during the 1950s and 60s and 70s, and that was a scramble for influence in these newly independent countries. That's where the Cold War kind of spilled over into Africa.

Meibauer: So how did these missionaries inadvertently exert influence as accidental diplomats? 

Dow: Missionaries in Africa went out to share their faith with people [in Africa and] they went out to love their neighbor as well. And as a result, they plant churches, they evangelize, they start schools, they start hospitals, and they learn the languages and translate the Bible into those languages. They do all these things that require a tough and committed engagement with the cultures of Africa with no desire or no intention to become politically powerful.

But yet, when the Cold War spills over in Africa, and the Russians and the Americans are suddenly interested, the Americans realize that there is a group of thousands of Americans who have been engaging in Africa for decades who have deep understanding of the cultures and the people and the languages who have built up, in many cases, a significant wellspring of trust among the people of Africa.

Now, the missionaries weren’t seeing themselves that way at all. They were simply doing what they believed God had called them to.

But the reality was, the Americans had something that the Soviet Union didn't have. The assumption by most people going into the 1960s was that the Soviet Union had a natural upper hand in the Cold War in Africa, because they represented anti-colonialism. So, the assumption was that countries breaking free from colonialism would be naturally aligned with the arguments of communism for that reason. But yet, in the end, many of the countries — not all countries— went a pro-West direction.

The question is, how in the world did that happen? And part of the answer is the story that I'm telling.

Meibauer: Do you have a memorable anecdote of an interaction between a missionary and an elite or other political figure from the book that sticks out to you? If so, please share.

Dow: Della Hanson is a missionary from Minnesota who went out with her husband and started a Christian school in Addis Ababa, [Ethiopia]. [Emperor] Haile Selassie hears about this. He goes to visit. There's a deep connection. Della Hanson [prepares] this kind of American style picnic when he comes to visit, and Haile Selassie is  impressed by this.

[And he asks her,] would you consider coming in and [organizing] the palace? Della Hanson comes to the palace. She speaks Amharic, which is the language of the Ethiopian elite, she is incredibly organized, and he ends up asking Della Hanson if she would be interested in becoming, essentially, the chief of staff for the palace. And so for the next 14 years, Della Hanson, this very nondescript person, becomes the chief of staff at the palace in Ethiopia. But what happens is the palace starts to look more and more American in the way it functions. Now, I don't mean like suddenly it looked like you're, you know, some American middle class home. But Della Hanson, in a way, was symbolic of the type of organization that Haile Selassie wanted for his country.

And he wanted a modernization that was rooted in Christianity because of the long Orthodox Christian tradition, but one that was in a sense, a traditional form of modernization and Della Hanson was symbolic of that. So, she ends up having a huge impact on the way that the Imperial Palace runs, and in the way that Haile Salassie wants the government to develop. She's just this very normal middle class American missionary wife from Minnesota, and she ends up having a huge influence in Ethiopia.

Meibauer: Today, many are grappling with the ongoing effects of colonization. How does the influence these missionaries had–and your work cataloging them–fit into the broader discussion? 

Dow: What I tended to hear, even growing up, but certainly now as well, was the stereotypes that I thought were kind of 19th century stereotypes about missionaries essentially being the arm of the government, and that's associated, of course, with countries like, like the British missionary movement. The church of England would have literally been paid by the government.

With the exception of perhaps Liberia, America didn't have any colonial power in Africa. So Americans who were going out to Africa prior to the Cold War and during the Cold War would have been doing so as independent Americans, as there was little to no engagement or interest from the government. When it did happen it was because missionaries were involved in this other work that had very little to do with politics and power. But then American diplomats, like I said, become interested because they see, oh, here’s these people who have this influence. We want a piece of that.

So, as opposed to the government driving the missionary effort, in some other eras, it was missionaries doing their work, and the government, in a sense, trying to harness or take advantage of what opportunities there might be for better relationships with that country as a result of the missionaries. Their intention was to share their faith and to live out the Gospel and as a byproduct, this engagement with politics and power happen.

There were some missionaries [who] did lose their original priority and purpose. There's plenty of examples where missionaries were not constantly praiseworthy, where they either held attitudes or perspectives that we would see as immoral, even, certainly in terms of race.

But having said that, by and large, the missionaries that you see in the book were there because they believed what they said they believed and they acted this out in their lives, however imperfectly. Political power was not their priority.

Meibauer: What lessons or takeaways do you hope readers take away from the book, if any?

Dow: I hope that they, at the end of reading it, say [that] this is a serious piece of research. Two, that it's honest.

I don't think that there's any value at all in telling a story if you're not trying to tell the truth. I hope that they walk away from the book with an understanding that [the] title of ‘Accidental Diplomats’ is an accurate description of the missionaries that were involved in these three countries during the Cold War, that they were there because they're motivated by their faith, and that they did end up as a byproduct, accidentally having a really significant influence on the Cold War in Africa. But it was not because that was their primary aim.

In fact, it's hard for me to find in all my research any missionary who seems to be primarily driven by political influence. There may be some examples, but they're few and far between.

Isabella Meibaurer is a seasoned writer and adaptable communications strategist with a passion for nuanced, contextualized storytelling.