Mama Mputu: The Missionary Reflections of Buena Rose Stober

by Buena Rose Stober, Scott D Seay (Editor)

312 pages, Paperback

Published April 29, 2026

Reviews

[Phil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Before I launch into personal ruminations, I want to commend Professor Scott Seay for this extraordinary contribution to the history of Christianity in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Anyone who reads his 36-page introduction to Mama Mputu: The Missionary Reflections of Buena Rose Stober (1897-1972) will have absorbed a priceless lesson about the work of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Central Africa during the final half century of the colonial era. After he summarizes the biography of the woman whose letters make up the rest of the book, as well as the broad outlines of the church’s missionary efforts, he points out the nuanced effect of the book. The reader will see a woman “shaped by her time: devoted but limited; compassionate but flawed,” and will realize that “love itself, when filtered through unequal structures, can carry unintended harm.” (p. 36)

While the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in the United States and Canada has declined numerically even more rapidly than other mainline Protestant denominations, the Disciples in the Democratic Republic of the Congo continue to grow and thrive. Nurse Stober’s detailed descriptions of 37 years (“291 months after subtracting travel and furloughs”) in the Congo mission field shows the soil, seeds, roots, trials, and growth of a dynamic Christian presence. We who identify with the Disciples of Christ take undeserved pride in the vitality of the movement associated with our heritage.

How Would I Have Fared?

Nurse Stober’s missionary reflections have led me to wonder how I would have fared if I had said YES when the United Christian Missionary Society offered me the opportunity in 1970 to serve as an assistant in the Congo for a couple of years. From the age of 12 into my college years, I had dreamed of becoming an overseas missionary. My journey had taken detours by that time, but it was still possible to realize this vision. However, the call coincided with my engagement to Paula, who has now been my wife for over 55 years. I turned down the offer. But reading Mama Mputu, I pondered, “What if?”

In the ten years since 1960, when I first felt a call to go to the Congo, which coincided exactly with the Independence of that nation and the official end of Belgian colonial rule, as well as the end of Nurse Stober’s service there, many things had changed, not the least of which was what Isabel Wilkinson would have identified as the caste order between white and black people there. Even during Nurse Stober’s four decades, there were important advances in medical care, such as the near eradication of leprosy (Hansen’s disease). Still, what about things that had hardly changed at all between 1960 and 1970?

A Vast Land with Transportation Challenges

For one thing, the difficulties of getting from place to place in this vast land would still be an issue. Next to Algeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is the largest nation in Africa, larger than all other sub-Saharan countries. Rainforests, swamps, and jungles challenge trekkers. The Congo River, 2900 miles long and in places the deepest river in the world, has many tributaries. It provides a means of transporting people and goods up from the Atlantic Ocean into the heartland, but not without navigational challenges. Mama Mputu (the name the Congolese elders gave Nurse Stober) rode a bicycle to visit half a dozen mission stations and numerous small churches and schools, medical dispensaries, and homes of evangelists and patients. When that wasn’t feasible, eight men in two shifts of four carried her on a teepoi. Sometimes she caught a ride in a long canoe hewn from a huge tree, or else on The Oregon, a river steamboat donated by the Disciples of Christ churches in the Pacific Northwest in 1909. Only in her final years did the missions have trucks or cars, and then using those depended on maneuverable roads.

Communication and Language

Don’t even think about the dot-com revolution of the 1990s and the ubiquitous cell phones found worldwide today. In 1970 it was still a big deal to make a long-distance call in the U.S. In the Congo, they were still sending messages from village to village with drums. Who would have sent or interpreted such codes for me?

Lokundo was the language used among the people in the northwestern part of the Congo where the river crosses the equator, the place where the Disciples missionaries worked. French was the colonial language, spoken by some Africans (and today by more than any other single language). Over 200 ethnic groups spoke 200 different languages, so inter-tribal meetings required interpreters. I took two years of French in college having the Congo in mind, but how steep would my learning curve have been once I landed in Africa?

Animals

A delightful feature of Mama Mputu’s letters is her frequent mention of the pets the missionaries kept. As the years passed, she had collies—Dora, Happy, Tippy, and Cappy. They loved to race along with her bicycle as she traveled around on her visits. A doctor’s family kept Polly, a parrot which mimicked their voices, as well as the voices of the men and boys who worked nearby. Polly could sneeze like a woman or cough like a man and enjoyed calling the family cats to confuse them.

Pets are fun, but less delightful are predators, such as leopards, known to enter a house day or night and tear apart the body of the occupant. Or the hippopotamus, which severely damaged a man’s face. Elephants weren’t cute; they were dangerous.

At the other end of the food chain were the obnoxious little critters that make people sick. Malaria was an ever-present problem. Jiggers, little flea-like bugs that burrow into bare feet, required digging out daily to avoid nasty complications. The river and swamps offered up countless tiny creatures to interfere with one’s health or comfort.

Medical Conditions

Until I took Algebra II, I wanted to be a medical missionary. Then I searched for other ways I might be helpful. If I had shown up in 1970, I would have met the same sort of patients Nurse Stober had been treating until ten years earlier. Children, especially, would have come with yaws, lumps and ulcers that disfigure their faces and legs. Sexually transmitted infections, particularly syphilis and gonorrhea, would be common, even passed down to babies. Fortunately, the AIDS epidemic had not yet plagued Africa, nor was the Ebola virus the problem it is today. Still, dysentery, blackwater fever, and sleeping sickness interfered with the health of many, even the missionaries sometimes. Often when I’ve traveled, I’ve developed gastrointestinal problems. Might I have proven useless to those requesting my assistance if I’d spent all my time in bed or on the toilet?

Even as Nurse Stober and her colleagues trained African nurses, staffing shortages prevented them from meeting the overwhelming needs of the people. Yet, another restraining factor was the pervasive mistrust throughout the folk culture of western medicine.

Congolese Folk Culture

Resistance to medical care was due, according to Nurse Stober, to the influence of witch doctors, who taught people that all illness was caused by evil spirits, and that the medical dispensaries were full of evil spirits. People urgently in need of medical attention often waited until it was too late because of such fear. I wonder whether that part of the native culture has faded away during the past half century.

When I recall the onset of independence in the Congo, I think of the riots and protests in Leopoldville, now called Kinshasa, the capital city, and in other urban centers. During the decade between 1960 and 1970, I suppose change came slowly to the rural villages, barely touched by the so-called “civilizing” influence of colonialism. Therefore, I expect I would have encountered polygamy in a culture where a large harem was a great status symbol for a man. Christian missionaries and Christian Congolese evangelists required a man to renounce his harem and to have only one wife if he wished to be baptized.

The native culture not only encouraged a man to acquire or inherit a harem of several wives but also oppressed women. If a man died, his relatives would “accuse the woman of killing or bewitching the husband.” They would beat her and take her clothes and property (sewing machine, pots and pans, for example). She was bound to wallow in mud, cut her hair, and wail and scream and neither eat nor drink for days. Then her relatives had to pay the family of the deceased man. After several months or even years, the woman could be free to look for another husband if those relatives were satisfied (p. 265). Honestly, I would’ve been dumbfounded to witness such grief.

Even among Christians, disagreements erupted in violent fights. The elders (older men in those days) had what it took to settle people down. I wonder how I might have reacted if a fight broke out near me.

Evangelism

Nurse Stober, as well as any number of her missionary colleagues, labeled the folk culture as “heathenism,” which implicitly was the antithesis of Christian living. Therefore, the Disciples measured their mission in numbers of baptisms and in the offerings of the Congolese churches. Ironically, much as I might have been bothered by this emphasis, the metrics weren’t so different from those in our annual reports to the Yearbook of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in the United States and Canada. On the other hand, the numbers of baptisms in the Congo surpassed those in North America by leaps and bounds. I wonder how that might have changed my perception of our mission in this hemisphere.

Colonialism’s Legacy

With 1960 marking the end of the era of European colonialism in Africa, I became increasingly aware of how that affected the work of the missionaries I had so long revered. I remember talking with Lucille McMillan, a returned missionary who spoke to our church camp when I was in high school and who was my French lab instructor in college. I represented (French) Congo Brazzaville (Republic of Congo) during my first year of Model United Nations. Even so, it has taken many years for me to grow in my understanding of the history of colonialism and its scars of exploitation and injustice. At the same time, I am fascinated to see how African nations are still struggling to assimilate or relate to western civilization.

Mama Mputu has moved me to ask more questions, even as I now volunteer with the North Carolina African Services Coalition and have opportunities to engage with refugees and immigrants from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, and Sudan, among other places.