“They seem not to have been trained. …” st. Antony’s students’ reaction to the local brothers’ manage-ment of their former school in zambia, 2021-2023

Abstract

Many Catholic mission schools established and administered by expatriate missionaries from countries in the global north are now in the hands of indigenous Africans. This, in some cases, has had implications on the running of schools, in terms of maintaining infrastructure, academic standards, discipline, and Catholic identity. This article is a critical analysis of a conversation on a WhatsApp group of former students of a Catholic mission school in Zambia, between 2021 and 2023. The article critically analyses the disappointment of the former students, with the Indigenous Zambian Brothers presently in charge of the school that Anthony Simpson, a British anthropologist in his ethnography of the school calls St. Antony’s. The statement, “They seem not to have been trained” by one of the former students seems to have encapsulated the disappointments of his fellow former students. The Missiological theory of Henry Venn (1796-1873) and Rufus Anderson (1796-1880) on the imperative of indigenising missionary churches has been utilised as the analytic framework in this qualitative case study. Two conclusions are made in the article. The first one is that the former students of St. Antony’s seemed to have over-looked the stark reality that the local Brothers did not have the kind of resources in terms of money, equipment, and skills that the European Brothers had. Secondly, rather than discussing how to strengthen the Alumni association, they somewhat depreciated the Black Brothers, thereby, buying into the racial notion that Black Zambian Brothers are incapable of running St. Antony’s as efficiently as the Europeans did.