SLAVERY AND THE MORAVIAN MISSION
By Dr Heike Raphael-Hernandez
CCCW-DIVFAC SEMINARS 2023-2024
21 November 2023, 4-5.30pm, Lightfoot Room, Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge
The talk will focus on the complex and, at times, contradictory encounters of Moravian missionaries, a Protestant group from Saxony, with enslaved Africans. The early period of Moravian missionary presence—between the 1730s and 1760s—differed from subsequent periods because later periods lost the original attempts to establish spiritual equality. A close reading of the various documents allows one to detect forms of active protest and creative agency on the part of enslaved people that were fostered, wittingly or unwittingly, by the Moravian missionaries.
