This article seeks to shed light on a much-debated question in the history of mission and anthropology: What is the nature of religious conversion? Through archive studies of the literature produced by the Norwegian missionaries in northern Cameroon from 1943 to 1960 the author shows how the missionaries interpreted religious conversion. The missionary discourse on conversion was biased in a specific theological and cultural environment, yet it was open for negotiations with the encountered population. The missionaries used biblical images to describe conversion to Christianity that were coherent with the cultural practices of both the missionaries and the groups that accepted the message of the missionaries in order to describe conversion to Christianity. Biblical images that corresponded with the cultural practice of groups that did not accept the missionaries are, however, absent from the material. A Western Protestant discourse presented spiritual and social oppression, ignorance, sickness, and lack of moral behaviour as obstacles the Africans had to be liberated from in order to be converted to Christianity. The missionaries, lacking knowledge about the social and religious organisation of traditional society, interpreted the "spiritual oppression" as "heathendom," and interpreted it according to their own theological paradigm. The reactions of the local population to this civilising mission made the missionaries modify their approach in order for their project to fit the agency of the new Christians in northern Cameroon.
