Concluding Remarks

Abstract

Michael S. Kimmel argues that the masculine ideal of the self-made man was born in Western industrialised societies in the early nineteenth century.¹ Men were now free to create their own destinies, to find their own ways and to rise as high as they could. Erik Sidenvall, in a study of Swedish low-class missionaries to China in the late nineteenth century, asks if religious activism in terms of missionary service could in fact be understood as a road to male self-making: these humble missionaries ‘made’ it in the religious world.² The current study of Norwegian Lutheran missionaries to the Zulus supports Sidenvall’s assertion. The nineteenth-century missionary masculinity ideals were actually related to modern, middle-class notions of masculinity, particularly the concept of male self-making. The Norwegian missionaries were mostly rural men who lacked resources in terms of class; however, through their missionary education and career, they ended up as respected and championed seniors. Their background was humble, but they possessed other valued masculine qualities. Missions, like all overseas expansions, depended on manpower and on the supply of men of a certain type. To survive in the ‘pagan wilderness’ and to be able to construct Christian communities on the ‘frontiers of civilisation’, the missionary men had to be physically strong, tough and robust; they had to be handymen who could manage a variety of crafts; and they had to be self-reliant men who were rich in initiative and energy.