An Age of Hubris: Colonialism, Christianity, and the Xhosa in the Nineteenth Century

By Timothy Keegan

An Age of Hubris is the first comprehensive overview of the impact of missionary enterprise on the Xhosa chiefdoms of South Africa in the first half of the nineteenth century, chronicling a world punctuated by war and millenarian eruptions, and the steady encroachment of settler land hunger and colonial hegemony. With it, Timothy Keegan contributes new approaches to Xhosa history and, most important, a new dimension to the much-trodden but still vital topic of the impact—cultural, social, and political—of missionary activity among African peoples.

The most significant historical works on the Xhosa have either become dated, foreground imperial-colonial history, or remain heavily theoretical in nature. In contrast, Keegan draws fruitfully on the rich Africanist comparative and anthropological literature now available, as well as extant primary sources, to foreground the Xhosa themselves in this crucial work. In so doing, he highlights the ways in which Africans utilized new ideas, resources, and practices to make sense of, react to, and resist the forces of colonial dispossession confronting them, emphasizing missionary frustration and African agency.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Jul 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9780813949185

Book preview

Cover Page for An Age of Hubris

An Age of Hubris

Reconsiderations in Southern African History

Richard Elphick and Benedict Carton, Editors

An Age of Hubris

Colonialism, Christianity, and the Xhosa in the Nineteenth Century

Timothy Keegan

University of Virginia Press

Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press

© 2023 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2023

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Keegan, Timothy J., author.

Title: An age of hubris : colonialism, Christianity, and the Xhosa in the nineteenth century / Timothy Keegan.

Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2023. | Series: Reconsiderations in southern African history | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023007045 (print) | LCCN 2023007046 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813949161 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780813949178 (paperback) | ISBN 9780813949185 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Xhosa (African people)—History—19th century. | Xhosa (African people)—Missions. | Christianity—South Africa. | Imperialism—History—19th century.

Classification: LCC DT1768.X57 K44 2023 (print) | LCC DT1768.X57 (ebook) | DDC 968.004963985—dc23/eng/20230214

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023007045

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023007046

Cover art: Genadendal Mission Station, South Africa, plate 9 from The Kafirs Illustrated, engraved by J. Needham, 1849.

Contents

Introduction

1. The Meanings of Conversion

2. The Xhosa and Their History

3. Colonial Contacts, Colonial Influences

4. The Missionaries and the Chiefs

5. Translations and Conversations

6. The Pull of the Mission

7. Moralizing Africa

8. Aftermaths and Conclusions

Notes

Bibliography

Index

An Age of Hubris

Introduction

THIS BOOK is concerned in large part with the world of signs, symbols, and representations that people live by. Religion is not divorced from the hard world of power, politics, and economics. Each is intimately implicated in the other. The world takes on meaning and shape through religious belief and ritual, and it is through religious action that people seek to shape their worlds. When people are faced with forces that cannot otherwise be confronted or resisted, religion becomes politics and politics religion. Secular historians of a radical bent used to steer clear of religion on the grounds that Marx must have had a point when he implied that it was a form of false consciousness. Nothing could be more misleading. Religion (itself an imposed Eurocentric concept for something that cannot be contained as one aspect of human culture) at its most meaningful delves into the deeper recesses of the cultural lives of individuals and communities. My point in this book is to add something to the canon of literature that pays African people the respect they deserve by taking their own rich and complex lives seriously, without in any way diminishing the full impact of the age of global imperialism.

There was a time, fifty years ago, when finding and celebrating African agency was at the heart of African historical studies. Africans were never merely the victims of overwhelming outside forces, it was argued, but shaped their own worlds creatively and effectively. It was even fashionable to argue that European conquest and colonialism were no more than a blip in this sunlit story. However, there was always a counternarrative—derived not only from the older Eurocentric tendency to focus on white men abroad and the empires they created but also from the radical pessimisms espoused by some intellectuals today, not least in the academy, for whom the destructive impact of white colonial power is the only all-consuming topic worth attending to. From colonialism and apartheid to white monopoly capitalism, the leviathan has changed its names but not much of its content or methods. There are those today who warn against historians embracing the notion of African agency as it deflects from the true nature of that history as one primarily of degradation and dispossession.

It’s all a question of perspective. There is the global view, and then there is the close view. The global view tends to favor the top-down, the unidirectional, the Eurocentric: the people with history meeting the people without history, the people with agency doing things for and to the people without agency. There is no shortage of icons who, one way or another, have explained the world from these giddy heights. Western man stands at the pinnacle, for better or worse, pointing the way through conquest and exploitation—or through subtler forms of discursive power—to the future. Europeans constructed the essential, universal subject, the bearer of progress, civilization, and rational thought, against which measure the rest of humanity was constructed as other—colonized, conquered, contained, and exoticized, the beneficiary of white men’s transformative attentions. The European center was constituted by the penumbra of primitivism that surrounded it, waiting to be drawn into the embrace, by force or by seduction, of the exploding commercial, productive, and cultural power of the center. Colonial knowledge of the world was hardly neutral or disinterested. It served the interests of colonial domination and profit.

Christian missionaries must be prime exemplars of this great age of hubris, so the thinking goes. After all, more than anyone else, they envisaged the total transformation of indigenous peoples everywhere, the spread of new subjectivities, the transcendence of all alterities. They could conceive of only one way of being in the world, incorporating all the beliefs and practices that go into making up the lives of individuals and communities. The missionary enterprise went well beyond religious conversion; it embraced all aspects of what missionaries conceived of as the material civilization they represented. Although tolerance of difference might wax and wane over time, the missionizing impulse surely represented, in its essentials and during its florescence, an extreme form of imperial conceit.

This vision of the all-powerful monolith of Western hegemony is very appealing, both to those who commend it as a great progressive force and to those who condemn it as all-devouring and destructive. Indeed, such has been the transformative power of European imperialism since the Great Divergence of the eighteenth century that it might seem impossible to imagine modern global history unfolding in any other way. Industrial capitalism, science, and technology have changed the world in unimaginable ways in 250 years, and empire has been the vector of many of these radical changes across the globe.

However, grand teleological narratives always invite blowback. We should remember that European dominance is recent, relatively short-lived, and waning. Postcolonial scholarship has long been concerned to shift the focus away from the center—indeed, to decenter it altogether—and to establish new geographic, national, ethnic, gender, or class points of view from which to assay the study of history. But for all the labors of postcolonial scholarship, it seems that the voices of those still widely deemed not to have a history are still struggling to be heard.

This book argues that the horrors of what has been visited on the people of South Africa are not negated by moving the focus closer and recognizing that rich and varied lives continue to be lived. At the interface between colonized and colonizer, between indigene and alien, between Black and white, there is never just one-way traffic but mutual interaction and exchange—as well as imposition, violence, and damage. The closer the view, the more complexity emerges. Real people tend to undermine the generalities and assumptions of the panoptic imagination. On closer inspection, what emerges are the limitations and unevenness of colonial power and the extent to which colonial authority, both physical and discursive, was engaged, contested, deflected, and appropriated by indigenous people. For many people in Africa, colonial rule was indeed a fleeting thing. For others it was rich with opportunity. There were winners as well as losers. In certain places, marginalization and escape were as common an experience as incorporation into the global system.

South Africa, with its industrial, self-ruling racial state, lay at one extreme of a spectrum of disruption and subjugation. But even in South Africa, there was a limit to the assault on African hierarchies and cultures. And even among the assaulters, there was a tension between, on the one hand, the ideals of assimilation into a global Christian citizenry, replete with the right to own land, to compete in markets, and to vote for the Cape colonial legislature, and, on the other, the growing resort in the later nineteenth century to extreme racist justifications for economic exclusions and dispossession as capitalism matured and developed. The liberalism that characterized the early Cape Colony was shallow and insubstantial in its effects, benefited a small African elite, and was evoked most ardently by a mercantile colonial class and a band of paternalistic evangelicals with their own unrealistic visions of an empire of God. It could not survive the forward march of the capitalist economy, although its constitutional residue (the nominally nonracial franchise in the Cape) took a long time dying. Yet in the twentieth century, for all the assault on African culture and self-government, ever more elaborate resort was had to the recognition and entrenchment of chiefly authority, African legal regimes, and territorial reserves as modes of control and sources of migrant labor recruitment. African responses, too, took many forms: from widespread military resistance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through pacific and supplicatory assimilationism involving close collaborations across color lines, through participation in puppet state structures, to resort to a new form of armed struggle relatively late in the day. In short, empire and colonialism were never just one thing, nor were they experienced as just one thing—even in so extreme a case as South Africa, where a political economy of white supremacy became as fully elaborated as anywhere on Earth.

The history of empire and colonialism, of capitalist expansion and racial hierarchy, of exploitation and subjugation, remains central to any view of the modern world. But so is the history of peoples and localities that obeyed different rhythms and interactions and experienced different continuities and discontinuities over different time frames. Reading global encounters from the margins yields rich new ways of seeing. Even the center begins to look less centered. The point surely is to integrate the long view and the short view, the global and the local, and not to jettison either.

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THIS BOOK takes up themes that are as old as the academic study of African history. It sets out to examine the impact of missionary enterprise on the Xhosa chiefdoms of South Africa in the first half of the nineteenth century. It aims to contribute new approaches to Xhosa history, adding a new dimension to the much-trodden but still seminal topic of the impact—cultural, social, and political—of missionary activity among African peoples. The primary sources are rich and still not fully exploited. My approach is to use the sources to prize open the ways in which Africans utilized new ideas, resources, signs, and practices to make sense of, react to, and resist the forces of colonial dispossession confronting them. I attempt to combine a cultural approach with an older and still crucial emphasis on the advancing political economy of white supremacy. The book integrates a metropolitan interest in empire with a focus on African history. It analyzes mission enterprise as a manifestation of metropolitan history, while also focusing on the African world the missionaries entered and began to reshape. It is a story that encompasses missionary failure and African initiative, punctuated by war and millenarian eruptions and the steady encroachment of settler land hunger and colonial hegemony. The book leads up to the dramatic developments at mid-century, when the extension of formal colonial rule introduced a new era in the subjugation of the chiefdoms and the initiation of new cultural and political strategies of survival by Xhosa people, including a far wider embrace of local forms of Christianity. All these topics are in need of new approaches and a new synthesis, in a part of Africa where colonial conquest and rule predated similar developments elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa and had more disruptive consequences than in most parts.

Missionaries started arriving among the Xhosa beyond the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony in the early years of the nineteenth century, at a time when conflict over land had already led to intermittent clashes between the chiefdoms and invasive colonial graziers and militias. The Dutch administration was superseded by the British (confirmed in 1806), and the first British settlers, several thousand of them, would soon arrive (in 1820) to consolidate and stabilize the frontiers of settlement. The first missionaries were Congregationalists of the London Missionary Society, followed in earnest in the 1820s by Scots Presbyterians and English Methodists. These missionaries entered Xhosaland under the authority of the chiefs, who had their own reasons for cautiously welcoming them, even incorporating them into the established metaphorical symbolism of kinship relations. Establishing mission stations as centers from which to reach the local people, missionaries from the start sought to challenge and undermine institutions and practices that they condemned without understanding, all the while insisting on their own subordination to the political authority of the chiefs.

Xhosaland, South Africa, settlements and mission stations. (Map by Nat Case)

Xhosaland, South Africa, colonial boundaries. (Map by Nat Case)

At the same time, trade and new technologies were changing the ways Africans lived their lives and related to one another, even as Africans also confronted the constant threat of military depredations and the loss of ancestral land as frontiers were forcibly pushed back in the interests of colonizers. Thus was set up a destructive cycle of bloody conflict that steadily eroded the authority of chiefs and destabilized the chiefdoms in cumulative ways. In this process, missionaries were caught in the middle, indispensable to the chiefs who protected them but often ambivalent in their own loyalties. Most early missionaries distanced themselves from the sources of imperial and colonial power, insisting they sought only an empire of God. However, as colonial pressures and military resources grew, missionaries increasingly understood that their interests lay in supporting the conquest of the Xhosa and the extension of colonial rule over them. In the second half of the nineteenth century, mission stations could easily be seen as extensions of the apparatus of the colonial state, and Christians, by now increasing in number beyond a bare few, began to add up to a substantial force among the Xhosa, often asserting their own independence from mission churches.

The chapters that follow commence with a consideration of the meanings of conversion at a broad conceptual level, then move on to a study of the social, economic, and cultural lives of the Xhosa people and chiefdoms in the early nineteenth century in the context of their interaction with an invasive colonialism. The issue of ethnic identity and the changing and multiple meanings of Xhosa-ness are particularly examined. Chapter 3 examines the earliest interactions and influences emanating from the expanding Cape Colony, with particular reference to the earliest evidence of African engagement with Christian ideas and symbolism, including early manifestations of millenarian prophetic movements among the Xhosa. In chapter 4 I turn to the missionaries and their societies, their initial arrival in Xhosaland, and their interactions with the chiefs and chiefly families. Chapter 5 explores the complexities of language learning, translation, and communication, both in personal interactions and in the huge task of building a body of printed literature, scriptural and secular, in the local vernacular. Translating meaning across a cultural chasm necessarily involved massive misunderstandings and often led to a wholesale misrepresentation of African cultural precepts and history. These efforts entailed the development of colonial knowledge and ethnography as hegemonic systems.

Chapter 6 investigates who were drawn to the mission and what motivated them, as well as the broader audiences that missionaries addressed, in what settings, and the content of the questions and dialogues that arose. The schools that missionaries established had a particular cultural and eventually political impact, and I look into mission pedagogy and African response as well. Chapter 7 examines the specific ways in which missionary culture contested with Xhosa culture, the aspects of Xhosa culture that missionaries took on and tried to change, and the struggles over cultural expression between missionary intolerance and Xhosa ways of being in the world, from sexual mores to gender roles to witchcraft beliefs. A small corps of mission-oriented Christians and Christianizing men and women was emerging among the Xhosa as a result of their confrontation with the forces of colonialism. Social differentiation occurred, and the occasional individual or family detached itself in varying degrees from the leveling imperatives of chiefly rule. After the war of 1834–35, treaties with the chiefs, policed by diplomatic agents, were instituted. They served as a transitional phase leading up to the annexation of parts of Xhosaland under direct colonial rule starting in the late 1840s. During the 1840s, mission attitudes toward the chiefdoms, and chiefly relations with the missionaries, changed. Their mutual interdependence was put under severe strain by imperial overbearance and militant resistance. In the end, Xhosa independence was undermined and chiefly authority emasculated.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the period with which this book is concerned, before colonial rule was formally extended over the chiefdoms, the missionaries, servants of changing masters and working in changing circumstances, continued to see their work of conversion as having largely failed on their own hubristic terms. But as this book seeks to show, despite vast chasms of misunderstanding and confusion on both sides of the cultural and language divide, the symbols and practices by which Xhosa lived, the way they related to the world, were being transformed. For one thing, new channels for advancement in a new world of schooling and commerce were opening for some. Women’s lives were changed by different forms of patriarchy that gave at least some of them room for maneuver. Intergenerational tensions, always a source of conflict in kin-based societies, were greatly aggravated with the loss of access to resources and as new means of accumulation became possible for some. The relative homogeneity of Xhosa society was undermined as alternative sources of patronage and opportunities for self-fashioning opened up. On cultural, symbolic, and material levels, the integrity of the chiefdoms and homesteads was being eroded, and missionary enterprise sought to take advantage by building new communities free from the restraints of tradition and custom. Few formal Christians had emerged from the mission nexus by mid-century, but many African people had been profoundly affected in the ways they lived in and understood the world as a result of their interactions with missionary narratives, pedagogy, and material culture.

There are issues of identity and ethnicity that arise in any study of African peoples. Most parts of Africa have not been subjected to that flattening out of differences that has turned small-scale communities into the imagined larger-scale communities of the nations of Europe. In African history, variety and difference are much more germane than in parts of the world where national narratives predominate in the study of the past. This book centers on people we call (and who referred to themselves as) amaXhosa. There are many people who would today be called Xhosa (isiXhosa-speaking) who were not, strictly speaking, historically amaXhosa—that is, people living under chiefs of the Xhosa royal lineage. These other peoples—Thembu, Mpondo, Mpondomise, Bomvana, others—have been greatly underrepresented in the historical studies relating to the region, today’s Eastern Cape province. That is a function in part of the singular focus of the sources, at least for the period I am concerned with here. But there is much need for more research on the history of the region well beyond the worn path of the colonial frontier and those westernmost chiefdoms that first confronted settler expansion and then missionary infiltration from the late eighteenth century on. This book might, I hope, serve as a spur to further studies into the neglected reaches of this wider history.

Of course, there will be those who suggest that a white historian of colonial heritage has no business writing Xhosa history. I make no special claim to being a historian of the Xhosa people. It is for native isiXhosa speakers to take up that challenge. In the meantime, this is a modest contribution to the study of southern African history drawn from the range of sources that are readily available for the purpose.

1

The Meanings of Conversion

FROM THE point of view of the Christian missionary, the primary objective of his efforts and the chief index of his success was the sacrament known as baptism, the moment at which the individual was born anew, jettisoning not only old beliefs and customs but an entire culture and way of life, including the full panoply of social relationships in which the person was enmeshed. Conventional narratives of conversion presume a deeply subjective reorientation of the self, a rebirth in a new faith with a new way of being in the world. As far as the missionaries were concerned, conversion was a process that began with submission, accompanied by public display of contrition and repentance, followed by a period of trial in catechumens’ class, and, when the time was right, by baptism, the essential rite of transition into a new subjectivity.

But much analysis these days is hesitant to take such claims to personal transformation too seriously. Why should we assume that the earliest African recipients of these arcane ministrations saw them in the same way as the white men who administered them? Why should we assume that they saw any great psychic significance in them at all, other than whatever material benefits the ministrations might bring in their wake? How many converts really intended to take on the awesome cultural baggage that was implied by their new status, including negation of the rituals and social relations that had previously made their lives meaningful? To what extent was this new god not a new god at all but simply a new and different source of magic to contend with the other sources of spiritual power Africans had grown up with? In short, who owned Christianity in Africa: those white men and women who brought it, or those Africans who chose to assimilate it (or parts or variants of it) into the warp and weft of their lives? Rather than taking Christianity as the starting point, we should first reflect on what Africans brought to the encounter.¹

The concept of religion was a product of Enlightenment philosophy, inseparable from the European project to know and therefore control the world that was opening before them. It was an offshoot of Christian encounters with the non-Christian world. Africa did not feature in the taxonomy of Enlightenment thinkers, concerned with distinguishing between monotheism and Asian forms of idolatry. When in the nineteenth century missionaries and others began to describe African beliefs and practices, their findings were used by metropolitan comparativists not as evidence of coherent, integrated systems. These latter scholars were more concerned to elaborate global evolutionary generalizations about stages of human development, based on linear temporal sequences from primitive to civilized, and Africa was merely another source of evidence on the universal primitive. Indeed, missionaries on the ground were the pioneers in the study of African traditional religion as a field of investigation—before such studies had much purchase in metropolitan scholarship.

While initially suspecting that Africans had no religion at all, missionaries early in the nineteenth century began to identify those aspects of African life that fit their rubric of the religious. In the course of that century such speculations developed in sophistication. It was only with the rise of structural-functionalist anthropology from the early twentieth century that African religion became a serious field of study in the metropolitan academy, consisting often of reconstructing (or inventing) religions in a precolonial state of lost purity. Eventually some scholars (secular as well as theological) ascribed such sophistication and coherence to the singular African religion thus reconstructed (or invented) that it seemed to have commonalities with Christianity and Islam (including a hidden and perhaps unconscious monotheism). What Africans and Europeans seemed to share was something supposedly innate in all cultures, a system of belief in the divine. So much so that the world religions, while introducing Africans to new ways of seeing and believing, could (it was assumed) be made to piggyback on what was already a fully fledged African religiosity, continuous through deep history, a religiosity that embraced the old and the new and was organically rooted in a primal worldview.²

One way in which such ideas of religious continuity between the precolonial, the colonial, and the postcolonial eras were manifested was the assumption that what the world religions brought to Africa was not so much radical ontological novelty but rather an increase of scale. Thus the (precolonial) microcosmic gave way to the (colonial-era) macrocosmic, the parochial and specific to the global and transcendent. Africans needed a new god as the scale of their social, economic, and political interactions expanded dramatically with the coming of formal colonialism. The traditional gods do well in simple, harmonious societies where the ills of humanity are parochial and local. But with colonialism, flux and change became endemic and restoration of harmony became impossible; so the god that was needed was not one who merely promised to secure the present, which had become profoundly unstable, but would lead you to some future condition, detached from the present. The result was a move toward a transcendent god rather than one who was immanent in nature, a dynamic god rather than a static one, a committed god rather than an indifferent one. The world religions, Islam and Christianity, stepped into the breach. In a classic formulation, the West Africanist Robin Horton stressed the adaptability of African religions in providing the supreme being—who was already present in their belief system—and thereby reducing the role of world religions to that of mere catalysts to the reinvention of what was already immanent in African ways of seeing.³

Today we would take issue with formulations that fix on microcosms giving way to macrocosms. We no longer see Africans before the age of mass literacy and modern communications as living in a timeless state of tradition and stasis. The old-fashioned ethnographic approach to African studies, with its lack of attention to change over time—long since happily abandoned—reinforced this tendency. For Africans were always part of a world system in one way or another. They did not need conquerors to introduce them to the world at large. African peoples were never so isolated or cut off from those outside the continent, as the imagery of the Dark Continent suggests. The oceans and deserts were highways of cultural interaction for many centuries before Europeans arrived, and there was never a time when outsiders were not traversing Africa for a host of reasons.⁴

Moreover, the construal of African religion as a coherent system of beliefs and practices that had a life of its own separate from other aspects of life is profoundly problematic. The very concept religion is an imposed category for what, for most people through most of history, was immanent in and inseparable from everything else. Religion for Africans was and is not a separate category of thought and experience. Every aspect of the lives of people and the natural environment in which they had their being was pervaded by the world of spirits, friendly and malign, often capricious and unpredictable. There was no distinction between spiritual and secular, between natural and supernatural. Any misfortune, whether it be drought, flood, illness, or death, could be explained by reference to the spirit world. All life’s permutations were deeply imbricated in the communal, and wrongs that caused personal suffering could only be corrected by putting right what was negatively affecting the group as a whole. The ancestors were ubiquitous in the lives of the living, demanding obeisance to the inherited customs and practices of the community. Witchcraft and sorcery were ever-present threats, requiring divination, exorcism, and punishment. Ritual was essential to keeping these threats at bay, to placating and conciliating the ancestors and other spirits inhering in the physical environment. Just about every aspect of life was subject to magical interventions and manipulation. Every household head was a religious practitioner, performing the necessary rituals and sacrifices to maintain order and stability. In Horton’s formulation, African religion was concerned with explanation, prediction, and control of space-time events. There was no dividing line between religion, on the one hand, and politics, economy, and society on the other. There was no fixed doctrine but constant innovation. Beliefs and practices were infinitely flexible and mutable, forever changing shape and absorbing new elements and layers of complexity. They did not necessarily correlate with any sense of group identity. They were a knowledge-producing, creative way of being in the world, requiring constant gambling, experiment, and contestation over the ways in which people should engage the dangerous, uncontrollable world around them. Above all, these beliefs and practices were part of the landscape of the real, not a superstructural reflection of reality or a metaphysical gloss thereon.⁵

African traditional religion as a field of study needs to be treated with caution. African cultures have a history that is rich and dynamic, like every other aspect of human history—although much of it is unknowable to us because of a lack of historical evidence. Historians have long stressed the vitality of precolonial African societies and the capacity of African belief systems to challenge ruling hierarchies and promote radical change. Instability, faction, and defiance were surely as widespread in the realm of tradition as they are in the realm of modernity. There was an internal dynamism to beliefs and ritual practices that could cross political and territorial boundaries, drawing people over wide areas into regional cults and challenging received notions of legitimacy. Movements of prophecy and redemptive renewal were surely not confined to world religions. The point is that history did not begin with the arrival of literate Europeans.⁶

Superficially, mission Christianity seems to have had something wholly different to offer. Protestantism was preeminently a religion of strict belief and commitment rather than mere practice, a religion of the inner as much as of the outer self, of the personal before the social. At a level of abstraction, it was a passive repository of truth disembodied from the believers who embraced it. It demanded adherence to its doctrines to the exclusion of all alternative ways of understanding or interacting with the world. It combined transcendental knowledge with a view of history as a purposive working out of a divine plan. Its dualistic cosmology drew a distinction between this flawed world, rendered debased by man’s sinfulness, and the higher realm to which we are invited to aspire. The Christian God (in theory at least) is otherworldly and transcendent, largely disconnected from the physical world in which mortals live. He (always a he) is less concerned with manipulating this world than with holding out the promise of something better in the hereafter to those who believe (or are chosen). Christianity represented a move from a sense of cosmic oneness with the natural world to a radical distinction between the sacred and the secular, the here and the hereafter. The creator God, omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent, but also punitive and distant, was central to the system of belief. This was a deity who was rational and predictable, purposive, and knowable, the opposite of the capricious and willful spirits that Africans were familiar with. The problem was that the Christian deity was reluctant to address the problems of the here and now. Having created the world, he largely left it for flawed humankind to dwell in and make use of according to divine prescription. God’s providence was a blunt instrument for the individual person struggling to survive. All in all, Christianity, thus abstractly presented, would seem to constitute a dramatic departure from the default modes of being in the world that had served most of humanity down the ages.⁷

This might have seemed very unattractive if taken in toto, especially as missionaries demanded total acceptance of the entire package. Acceptance usually required cutting oneself off from family and community and taking on the material signs of conversion, such as European clothing and new restrictive gender roles. It also ideally involved accepting that there was little one could do about the woes and difficulties of this world, for they were intended to try one’s patience and faith, with no sure supernatural means provided to guard against them or to put them right beyond exhortation through prayer. Christianity provided communion with the divine without the sense of explanation, prediction, and control in the here and now that Africans were used to. Thus starkly presented, the new religion must have seemed a thin gruel indeed. When looked at through the lens of their own culture, most Africans must have regarded it as a piecemeal assemblage of disconnected and barely meaningful stories, threats, and admonitions.

The new religion as preached by the missionaries, however, potentially brought some radical ideas particularly apposite to a rapidly changing world. First was the element of linear instead of cyclical time. Thus, for Christians, all history, from creation to the end-times, is moving toward the ultimate fulfillment of the divine plan. Christian eschatology, the doctrine of eternal life after death, was a novel idea to people for whom death brought no consolation, only dread, and for whom the life of the ancestors was much the same as life among the living. Second was the stress on the individual rather than the collective, the subject rather than the object. Men and women hold their salvation in their own hands. Faith in God is an injunction that only the individual, standing alone before eternity, can embrace. This was a personal rather than a communal God. The corollary often drawn is that Christianity is the religion of material progress, for it releases humankind from thralldom before nature. The self-made individual, taking charge of nature and transforming it to his own ends, is a creature of the Christian God, who expects works as well as faith. God has separated himself from his creation and handed it over to man (the masculine is intentional) as a free agent to oversee and exploit in keeping with God’s mandate, in the knowledge that all is in keeping with a master plan. Thus it is often assumed, rightly or wrongly, that there was a natural link between Protestant Christianity and the rise of capitalism, and indeed between Protestant missions and the rise of a progressive peasantry among Africans.⁸

However, as with most dichotomies, any attempt to draw radical distinctions between African religious practices and Protestant Christianity misrepresents the history of Christian Europe as much as that of non-Christian Africa. A brief detour into European religious history is called for here. Religious observance in Europe five hundred years ago when Luther penned his theses was remarkably similar to the traditional religious systems of Africa. It offered the prospect of supernatural means of control over the earthly environment, protection against evil, assurances of health and healing. The medieval church was bedecked with talismans, amulets, and relics providing protection against fire, fever, and evil spirits. Wells, trees, and stones were imbued with special powers. Festivals were held to ensure the welfare of crops and encourage fertility. The whole paraphernalia of saints, pilgrimages, charms, and incantations was designed to provide the explanation, prediction, and control that, we are told, is the central purpose of African religions.⁹

The Protestant Reformation sought to abolish all those elements of popular religion that involved the manipulation of supernatural power for earthly ends. For the Protestant, man stood naked and alone before his God, without protection or succor. All that the newly purified religion could offer its adherents was the hope that God would take kindly to their prayers and reward the loyal and godly, but without any definite prospect of relief until the afterlife. However, Protestant Christianity, thus shorn of what made religion useful and valuable in people’s daily lives, struggled to dislodge popular adherence to older ways. Thus, at village level all over Europe right up to the modern era, the cunning men and wise women, analogues of the diviners and healers of Africa, continued to identify witches and practice sorcery as before. Things began to change with the Enlightenment, mass education, and the breakup of the old rural economy. But in 1856 it was still possible for an observer in Lincolnshire to note that outsiders can hardly be made to believe or comprehend the hold of charms, witchcraft, wise men and other like relics of heathendom have upon the people.¹⁰ Rationalism for the few, magic for the many was still the rule. Time and again, Protestantism has retreated from the purer tenets of the faith to cater to believers’ need for reassurance and relief in this life, not just the next. Today’s faith ministries, promising health and material success as the rewards for adherence, are the public face of Protestantism in many parts of the world.¹¹

Christianity is certainly not a monolith. What historically defined a world religion like Christianity was a systematized canon of doctrines, scriptures, and rites, policed by a clerical or theological bureaucracy across widely divergent cultural milieus. But even within the confines of one or another of the Protestant denominations that set out to spread the word in Africa, its popular excrescences invariably defied capture by any fixed set of doctrinal beliefs. There is no necessary and direct correlation between Christianization and the internalization of its doctrines, just as there is no necessary and direct correlation between scripture and the beliefs of Christians. Christianity in practice did not require a comprehensive correspondence between high doctrine and popular belief to provide meaning for its adherents. Christianity’s very translatability into local vernaculars and idioms (in contrast to Islam with its insistence on the untranslatability of the Arabic text) facilitated divergence and localization. New meanings were generated in the very process of translation. Beneath the veneer of standardized uniformity, Protestant Christianity in local contexts could begin to resemble the African beliefs and practices it sought to displace. Indeed, the question arises whether the old ways were replaced at all, or whether Africans absorbed the new into long-established patterns of thought and practice. If theories of an unchanging African religious essence need questioning, so does the idea that Christian mission brought radical transformations in Africans’ ways of being in and thinking about the world. If African traditional religion is a bit of a chimera, then so too, it could be argued, is the dogmatic unity or coherence of the Christian God’s word as proclaimed from under trees in rural Africa.¹²

Conversion takes many forms. It entailed neither slavish subjection to new masters nor a spontaneous uprising of the sovereign self from the ignorant slumbers of the ages. It was usually a combination of the personal and the political, the psychological and the social. Conversion as a concept is a blunt instrument to describe what can be a nominal shift in affiliation as much as a repudiation of formerly held beliefs and practices. What is usually at stake is not merely an encounter with the divine in an experience of spiritual rebirth (the common Christian narrative, real as that may be to the individual concerned); what is more materially at stake is a shift in identity, a new and more meaningful sense of belonging in a broken and chaotic world. From this perspective, Christianity might seem a more suitable vehicle for membership in a complex, plural society plugged into global circuits of migration, investment, and exchange than what had gone before. Christianity was associated with literacy, with technologies of communication, of production and trade, that were new to many Africans. It might provide physical protection or access to resources. The medicine of the book and the incantatory effect of prayer and hymn singing promised new kinds of safety and healing. Christianity might provide sources of authority, status, and respectability not otherwise available or no longer available in the long-accustomed ways. New Christians brought with them much that was old and familiar while selectively adapting what was new. Continuity and disjuncture interacted in creative and cumulative ways, so that lots of personal decisions might eventually result in new communities of believers with semiotic ideologies, beliefs, signs, and practices that were radically new and comfortingly familiar at the same time. Converts might accept Christian narratives in a shallow and provisional light, or they might integrate them into their deep structures of thought and belief. Or else they might migrate from one end of the spectrum to the other over time, all the while injecting Christian narratives with indigenous meanings.

The spread of Christianity in Africa must thus be seen as complex and multifaceted. The forced disruptions of colonialism and capitalism upset older ways of being in the world, just as individuals in countless ways sought new identities and new sources of opportunity, self-worth, and moral certainty. The psychological interacted with the social, political, and economic. Conversion might involve individuals, often the most vulnerable and downcast at first; it might make its first inroads at the top of the hierarchy, within chiefly families and lineage heads; it might wean from indigenous ways those of unusual ability and ambition, impatient of old constraints. It might proceed very slowly, repeatedly going into reverse, or (occasionally) it might rage like a veld fire, winning over large populations, often refugee or subordinated peoples. Alternatively, colonialism might, and usually did, engender a revitalization and reformulation of precolonial beliefs and practices, often with novel elements drawn from the colonizers’ practices and symbolic systems. Many who renounced conversion assimilated much of what the new religious thinking had to offer. Many who did convert ended up rejecting the missionaries’ religion and set about constructing hybrids and syntheses of their own. Many stuck loyally to mission churches, making them their own. In short, it was Africans who decided how to adapt to a radical new world, and it would be foolish to imagine there was any unilinearity or evolutionary logic to the choices they made.¹³

Conversion was a concept introduced by Europeans, and we should beware of overstating its significance in African eyes. For most Africans, the idea that any new system of belief required the jettisoning of all that had gone before made little