Being Seen to Care: Photographs, Audiences, and the Swiss Medical Mission in Colonial Mozambique at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

From the earliest days of the Swiss Mission Romande’s establishment in Southeast Africa at the end of the nineteenth century, photography, just becoming an accessible technology for the committed amateur, held a role in the everyday lives of missionaries. Patrick Harries has argued that Swiss missionaries’ photographs of unfamiliar landscapes and cultural practices in this region “conserved and diffused the mixture of apprehension and excitement with which [they] viewed Africa.” This paper takes up this claim to consider how photography and photographic ways of seeing mediated, and reflected shifts in, the specific ambivalence that missionaries felt toward the role of medicine in evangelistic work and the establishment of the mission within this region. The author suggests that by capturing African audiences in photographs, missionaries aimed to communicate the value of the “medical mission” for the real and imagined European audiences of those photographs.