Having recent experience of the activities of several missions in part of ex-British Africa, I read with great interest Elizabeth Power’s article ‘Black Nuns in Africa’ (New Blackfriars, December, 1966, and the subsequent exchange between her and Sr Anne Gregson, February, 1967) and, more recently, the correspondence about mission strategy in East Africa (August, 1967).

My work demanded that I should liv e with rural Africans in their huts and learn to speak their language. I spent most time in the diocese of one particular society of Roman Catholic missionaries, but I also saw a little of the work of three other Roman Catholic missionary societies and four Protestant ones. There were marked differences between these different missions, in their resources of finance and personnel, in their organization and the amount of responsibility they gave to Africans, in what they thought it proper for missionaries or Europeans to do, and in what they thought Christianity is concerned with.

I had for a long time thought it would be interesting to know about the way of life and attitudes of African nuns, but the first African nuns I saw on the central mission station could only observe from a distance. Even those who were teachers had been trained to keep their distance from visitors so I could not speak to them. The missionaries took pains to point out to me that the African nuns had clothes in greater quantity and quality, better housing and bedding, and a more adequate and better balanced diet than nearly all rural African women.