The “saint” of Livingstonia: Assembling, memorializing, and representation of missionary paraphernalia at the Stone House Museum in Malawi

This article examines the Stone House Museum in Livingstonia, Malawi. The Museum is in a historic Stone House National Monument, a former residence of Reverend Robert Laws, one of the pioneer missionaries of the Livingstonia Mission. The article illustrates how objects, formerly relics of missionary heroism meant to inspire sacrifice and commitment, became “leftover” objects and were later re-made into museum pieces in the 1970s. Through a haphazard process of professionalizing the Museum to attract new publics in the 1990s and early 2000s, these objects became alienating and disconnected when put behind glass. The Museum echoed the Victorian ethos of romanticizing and prioritizing missionaries' “heroic” efforts over the stories of local people and culture. The material objects of the local Malawian community in the Museum were essentially put into a timeless past, tribal representations, and merely cast as a complementary background to the missionaries' activities. This article relies on an ethnographic methodology of museum histories, analysis of exhibitions and engagements with the Museum's publics. It reveals that the collection and displays of the local community were assembled as an adjunct to missionary paraphernalia. The Museum, despite its claims to be aligned with the post-colonial, kept its publics “out of history.”