CBM Mission House at Ikau (Mr and Mrs Padield), Congo, ca. 1900-1915

Black and white lantern slide showing a mission house raised from the ground with one storey and a thatched roof. A European couple (possibly Mr and Mrs Charles Padfield) can be seen in the doorway. The house is on grassland. Ikau was one of the first mission stations of the Congo Balolo Mission, for which land was purchased in 1889. Charles Padfield was a Congo Balolo Mission missionary who gave evidence to the Congo Commission of Enquiry into the atrocities committed towards Congolese workers by white rubber plantation bosses and their sentries. The Commission was a body that King Leopold II, King of the Belgians and owner of the Congo Free State Territories, had been forced to establish in 1905 to investigate the cruelty against native Congolese rubber workers. Padfield was accepted for the Congo Balolo Mission in 1903 and died of rheumatic fever in 1921. This slide comes from a collection generated by missionaries working for the Congo Balolo Mission, a mission begun in 1889 under the supervision of the East London Training Institute for Home and Foreign Missions that developed into the interdenominational evangelical mission Regions Beyond Missionary Union after 1900.