Four young Black women stand before the brick façade of Spelman Seminary in Atlanta. Encased in high-collared dresses, their expressions are composed and their posture bound by the rigid formality of nineteenth-century portraiture. At first glance, the image belongs comfortably within the visual world of the post-Emancipation South, where institutions like Spelman embodied Black education, racial uplift, and the unfinished meanings of freedom.
The names written beneath the photograph – Vunga, Zinga, Nkebani, and Sita – disturb this visual familiarity. Published in the Spelman Messenger in 1895, the portrait shows three young Congolese girls brought to Atlanta, a major centre of Black education and missionary training in the post-Reconstruction South. To the right sits Nora Gordon, an African American missionary and Spelman graduate, identified by the Congolese name she acquired at the Baptist mission station of Lukunga. The frame collapses several overlapping histories: Reconstruction and empire, Black higher education and Christian evangelical mission, the afterlives of American slavery and the consolidation of the Congo Free State.
Histories of the Congo Free State are dominated by its extraordinary violence. Between 1885 and 1908, a rubber regime directed by King Leopold II of Belgium enforced unsustainable rubber harvest quotas through systemic terror. Sentries of the state-backed Force Publique held women and children hostage to compel men into the forests, and enforced a military accounting system which required soldiers to produce a severed hand for every cartridge of ammunition expended.
This violence was challenged by a vast humanitarian effort, spearheaded by E. D. Morel’s Congo Reform Association, which assembled eyewitness testimony to turn colonial violence into evidence. Alice Seeley Harris and other campaign photographers circulated images of mutilated Congolese survivors through lantern-slide lectures, pamphlets, and newspapers. Images like these were powerful instruments of political mobilisation, forcing distant audiences to confront the violence that colonial authorities sought to conceal.
Nora Gordon’s work unfolded within this complex landscape. One of the first generation of African Americans to be born after Emancipation, she was part of a small cohort of Black women missionaries whose religious vocation had been shaped by the evangelical culture of the post-Reconstruction South. Travelling to the Congo in 1889 under the auspices of the American Baptist missionary movement, she began working at Palabala and was transferred in 1891 transferred to Lukunga, where she was joined by fellow Spelman alumna Clara Howard. Mission stations like these were often imagined as ‘islands of civilisation’, imbued with the same spirit of moral and social uplift that had shaped institutions like Spelman. Gordon’s work occupied an uneasy space in which the redemptive ambitions of Reconstruction became entangled with the coercive realities of empire.
The papers of African American missionaries therefore offer a new point of entry for understanding the history of the Congo Free State. The materials held at institutions like Spelman help to fill silences in the colonial record – including those created in August 1908, when King Leopold II ordered the Free State’s records to be burned at the Royal Palace in Brussels and in the administrative offices at Boma. ‘I will give them my Congo,’ the King reportedly remarked, ‘but they have no right to know what I did there.’
Missionary archives also challenge the perspectives of groups like the Congo Reform Association, which limit the historical record by making Congolese bodies legible only through their wounding. In the 1895 Spelman portrait, for example, Vunga, Zinga, and Nkebani are not framed as anonymous victims of atrocity, nor are their bodies presented as evidence of Belgian cruelty. They are composed, fully clothed, named, and arranged within the recognisable genre of a formal school portrait. The pages of the Spelman Messenger consistently deployed such imagery as part of a sophisticated Black visual culture designed to challenge American racism. The seminary used photography to assert the intellectual dignity, Christian respectability, and historical mission of Black students against a Jim Crow order that aggressively denied all three.
In this sense, materials like the Spelman photograph trace an alternative geography of empire. While set against the context of territorial conquest and capitalist extraction, its individual elements were brought together through Black women’s mobility, education, and practices of care. Letters routinely crossed the Atlantic; studio portraits were posted home; fragments of woven cloth were folded and kept in desks. Natural curiosities entered institutional collections in Georgia alongside written entries detailing teaching, illness, friendship, and bereavement. Margaret Nkebani, one of the young women in the photograph, would later send several preserved butterflies to Spelman’s headmistress. In the accompanying letter, she wrote that if she had wings, she would fly home to her beloved school. Materials like these attest to relationships maintained across enormous distance and unsettle familiar ideas about belonging.
It is tempting to read these interactions within a narrative of return. Gordon often described Africa as the land of her ancestors, and her crossing could be imagined as a reversal of the Atlantic journey imposed upon her enslaved forebears. Yet, as Saidiya Hartman has pointed out, reaching Africa was not the same as returning home. Gordon did not know where on the continent her ancestors had lived, and centuries of enslavement had rendered such genealogies almost impossible to recover.
This is where the broadness of Gordon’s language of Africa becomes important. To describe an entire continent as an ancestral homeland submerged differences of language, region, ethnicity, and history beneath a racial category that had itself been forged through slavery and its afterlives. Through this loss of specificity, Gordon could imagine Africa as ancestral without claiming to be Congolese and Nkebani could find community among Black American missionaries without becoming African American.
Friendships between African American missionaries and Congolese converts, however, were not always equal. Excluded from integration into the American body politic, many Black Baptists understood themselves as called to a ‘special mission’ to their ancestral continent. In the Congo Free State they entered a different racial order, standing above the Congolese communities among whom they worked, but never on the same footing as their white counterparts. Local people sometimes named this ambivalence by calling them ‘black white’.
Lukunga was also a complicated site. The mission station stood near the administrative capital of Boma, close to the mouth of the Congo River. Some of the children whom missionaries sought to ‘redeem’ there had themselves been displaced from inland communities due to the continuing trade in enslaved people. While Gordon had crossed the Atlantic towards a place she imagined as ancestral, the communities she encountered had arrived at Lukunga through a very different trajectory of forced movement. Her work brought together people whose experiences of displacement were profoundly unequal and historically distinct.
This ambivalence runs through Gordon’s records. In her correspondence with the official wings of the American Baptist Missionary Union, she acts as an agent answerable to a board. Letters preserved in the Spelman collection, meanwhile, are addressed to a community who knew her as an alumna. Those letters record the growing presence of the colonial state at Lukunga: visits from district commissioners, preparations for inspections, the need to secure approval for school curricula. They narrate that authority, however, largely through the demands the state placed on her time, alongside the loneliness, fatigue, and labour of keeping the mission running.
Lukunga’s Congolese residents stood in a different relation to power. Nkebani, Vunga, and Zinga were children, dependants, and pupils. Some of them had been displaced by slave raids. Newspapers such as the Spelman Messenger presented them as evidence of the mission’s success, within a wider genre of mission-sponsored material advertising the ‘civilising’ of African peoples, and their own voices reach us refracted through the idiom of evangelical Christianity. Spelman was a seminary sponsored and run by the Baptist church, so the institution that preserved these materials was also the one that framed them.
By the turn of the twentieth century, an emerging sense of Blackness had begun to tie African American missionaries and Congolese converts together, providing them a language of belonging across enormous distances. This belonging, however, was inherently uneven. Spelman’s collection holds that unevenness in plain view, as an archive of affection, labour, and discipline created by people who were neither outside empire nor simply its instruments.
There is, after all, something curious about finding a butterfly from Central Africa in the archive of a Black women’s college in Atlanta. Their presence at Spelman points towards a history preserved almost sideways. People move; objects follow them; and their relationships deposit fragments of one history inside the archives of another. Artefacts like Nora Gordon’s letters and Nkebani’s preserved butterflies do not deny the violence of the Congo Free State, but they do counter the idea that its violence is the only history worth saving.