“For as the surest source of destruction to men is to obey themselves,” John Calvin wrote in his famous Institutes of the Christian Religion, “so the only haven of safety is to have no other will, no other wisdom, than to follow the Lord wherever he leads. Let this, then, be the first step, to abandon ourselves, and devote the whole energy of our minds to the service of God.” Calvin’s Institutes is little read nowadays, but its influence upon Protestant thought is second to only the (similarly unread, come to think of it) Bible itself. In Mamou, Guinea, on Africa’s west coast, at a boarding school operated by Colorado Springs’ Christian and Missionary Alliance, the children of missionaries too busy saving souls to be parents would learn, with lifelong consequences, just what Calvin’s lofty words really mean — what they really mean here on the ground, that is, where real people actually live.
Opened in the 1920s and closed in 1971, attendance at Mamou Alliance Academy was mandatory for the children of C&MA missionaries stationed in the 4-countries of West Africa.
The C&MA operates several boarding schools, world-wide, for the use of missionary families. C&MA policy West Africa in the 1940′s through the 1970′s was for mandatory boarding school for all missionary children. This was one of the “givens” of the mission vocation then. Missionaries often struggled with the tension between their missionary calling and their responsibilities as parents.
Unfortunately,
It was often difficult to recruit teachers for the school, since it was located in a Muslim area which was actively hostile to missionaries. Over the years, assignment to Mamou became less a prized missionary appointment and more a default responsibility given to those who were unable to tolerate the frontiers of mission work, or those who ‘lost the toss” when missionary assignments were made at annual Field Councils.
And so the stage was set: Stage right, missionaries frantically working to save souls from a million-trillion years, just for starters, as flaming corks bobbing on the Lake of Fire. Stage left, their children, hundreds of miles away in an unfriendly locale, surrendered to the care of bottom tier personnel, missionaries thought not fit for field work.
“At the very heart of Christianity, the symbolism that is there, the metaphor, was that of a father sacrificing his son. And it wasn’t incidental to the whole belief, it was at the center of it.”
Bevery Shellrude Thompson, Mamou student
“The gem in their crown is the fact of their willingness to imitate their God in sending their own sons and daughters off to boarding school. It makes them into heroes.”
Rich Darr, Mamou student
Add to the mix the degrading, force-fed teaching that forms the basis of the need for salvation.
For our nature is not only utterly devoid of goodness, but so prolific in all kinds of evil, that it can never be idle.
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion
The children of Mamou found themselves, at age 6, separated from their parents and living a fevered nightmare where, incommunicado and helpless, the warping pathology of fundamentalist degradation could run riot — and did.
A sampling from the final report of the C&MA investigation into conditions at Mamou Alliance Academy:
- Male Staff Member #1
- Physical Abuse: Beating leaving bruises from knees down to legs, while he was angry and out of control; used belt and hand (caused hand-shaped bruises);punched child in face, leaving black eye. This occurred on at least two separate occasions, possibly more frequently, during victim’s lst and 2nd grade year.
- Psychological Abuse: In an argument with other missionaries, this individual threatened, in presence of the young children in his care, to abandon them at Mamou if he wasn’t replaced as houseparent within two months. Ongoing humiliation, taunting and intimidation of 1st/2nd grader for difficulties with eating and nervousness. Forced two children to eat their own vomit. Humiliated female student for being slow. Placed one student in dangerous proximity to a poisonous snake. Number of Victims: Four.
- Spiritual Abuse: Forced a young child to make a public prayer of repentance, get down on knees; used prayer as a form of punishment and humiliation. Student #1
- Sexual Abuse: Coerced oral sex; forced victim to masturbate him; masturbated victim while victim slept; engaged in frottage [sexual rubbing] with victim using talcum powder. One victim, who was approximately seven years younger than offender. The abuse took place on an ongoing basis, during offender’s eighth grade year.
The children escaped Mamou — sort of — when their parents’ tours ended.
Bruises heal and fears recede, but the abiding injury is the humiliation and impotence of unanswered degradation, and there is no cure for that but justice. But when a courageous handful of Mamou ‘alumni’ stepped forward to demand justice, they were victimized again.
“They kept coming back at us with many things, and one of the recurring things was ‘You’re going to hurt the name of Jesus’”
Beverly Shellrude Thompson
Beverly Thompson made her first complaint of abuse to C&MA in 1987. It was not until 1996, and only after Christian media had begun to take notice of the allegations, that C&MA opened an investigation into Mamou. To this day no comprehensive investigation of any other C&MA-operated school has ever been opened, though individual allegations have been investigated.
Mark Failing, a spokesperson for C&MA, said “I think it is” when I asked him if All God’s Children is an accurate portrayal of events at Mamou. He adds, though, that no investigation of allegations elsewhere has turned-up like abuse, and speculates that what went wrong at Mamou was a failure of leadership. Beverly Thompson’s answer to that is swift and no-nonsense: “It was not unique.”
If, as she believes, the appalling degradations visited upon the children of Mamou is systemic, a consequence of the belief system itself and the missionary culture that springs from it, then she is undoubtedly correct that Mamou is “not unique.” Nobody can deny that, whatever the cause, boarding schools operated to assist the work of glorifying Christianity’s God are often squalid places.
- The Ryan Report found that boarding schools operated by the Catholic Church throughout Ireland physically, sexually, and psychologically abused children for decades.
- The Presbyterian church found abuses similar to Mamou in its missions — and domestically, as well.
- So, too, the United Methodists
- Catholic boarding schools in the United States
The documentary All God’s Children was produced by Scott Solary and Luci Westphal; he is a cousin of two of the children abused at Mamou. Unlike a conventional, television-style documentary with a narrator who briskly steers the viewer, the story of Mamou is told chronologically and wholly in the words of those who were students there, against a backdrop of family movies and photographs. The absence of a guide gives occasionally a sense of aimlessness in the presentation, but that minor cavil is more than offset by the ample time given to presentation, in their own words, of the insights of adults who have had decades to reflect on the way that orthodox Christian teachings, every word familiar to us all, so affected them.
I strongly recommend it, as both a good citizenship guide to what may be afoot somewhere nearby, in your very own neighborhood, and as a spur to reflection on the actual meaning, and implications, of some of those familiar pieties.
The details: All God’s Children was produced by Good Hard Working People, the name of Solary and Westphal’s production company. It may be purchased for personal viewing here, and for group viewing here. The organization founded by the Mamou survivors is MK Safety Net, and its Web site is here.
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