The Equality of Believers: Protestant Missionaries and the Racial Politics of South Africa

By Richard Elphick

From the beginning of the nineteenth century through to 1960, Protestant missionaries were the most important intermediaries between South Africa’s ruling white minority and its black majority. The Equality of Believers reconfigures the narrative of race in South Africa by exploring the pivotal role played by these missionaries and their teachings in shaping that nation’s history.

The missionaries articulated a universalist and egalitarian ideology derived from New Testament teachings that rebuked the racial hierarchies endemic to South African society. Yet white settlers, the churches closely tied to them, and even many missionaries evaded or subverted these ideas. In the early years of settlement, the white minority justified its supremacy by equating Christianity with white racial identity. Later, they adopted segregated churches for blacks and whites, followed by segregationist laws blocking blacks’ access to prosperity and citizenship—and, eventually, by the ambitious plan of social engineering that was apartheid.

Providing historical context reaching back to 1652, Elphick concentrates on the era of industrialization, segregation, and the beginnings of apartheid in the first half of the twentieth century. The most ambitious work yet from this renowned historian, Elphick’s book reveals the deep religious roots of racial ideas and initiatives that have so profoundly shaped the history of South Africa.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Oct 3, 2012
• ISBN: 9780813932798

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The Equality of Believers

RECONSIDERATIONS IN SOUTHERN AFRICAN HISTORY

For Ian and Jocelyn

University of Virginia Press

© 2012 Richard Elphick

All rights reserved

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

First published 2012

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Elphick, Richard.

The equality of believers : Protestant missionaries and the racial politics of South Africa / Richard Elphick.

  p. cm. — (Reconsiderations in southern African history)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8139-3273-6 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8139-3279-8 (e-book)

1. Race relations—Religious aspects—Protestant churches. 2. Protestant churches—Missions—South Africa—History. 3. South Africa—Race relations—History. I. Title. II. Series: Reconsiderations in southern African history. III. Series: Reconsiderations in southern African history.

BR1450.E47 2012

276.8—dc23

2011046420

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Equality of Believers

Part I · The Missionaries, Their Converts, and Their Enemies

1   The Missionaries: From Egalitarianism to Paternalism

2   The Africans: Embracing the Gospel of Equality

3   The Dutch Settlers: Confining the Gospel of Equality

4   The Political Missionaries: Our Religion Must Embody Itself in Action

5   The Missionary Critique of the African: Witchcraft, Marriage, and Sexuality

6   The Revolt of the Black Clergy: We Can’t Be Brothers

Part II · The Benevolent Empire and the Social Gospel

7   The Native Question and the Benevolent Empire

8   A Christian Coalition of Paternal Elites

9   The Social Gospel: The Ideology of the Benevolent Empire

10  High Point of the Christian Alliance: A South African Locarno

11  The Enemies of the Benevolent Empire: Gelykstelling Condemned

Part III · The Parting of the Ways

12  A Special Education for Africans?

13  The Abolition of the Cape Franchise: A Door of Citizenship Closed

14  The Evangelical Invention of Apartheid

15  Neo-Calvinism: A Worldview for a Missionary Volk

16  The Stagnation of the Social Gospel

17  The Abolition of the Mission Schools: A Second Door of Citizenship Closed

18  A Divided Missionary Impulse and Its Political Heirs

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I began my research while a fellow at the Institute for Social and Economic Research, Rhodes University. I am deeply indebted to the Rhodes community for generous hospitality, but particularly to Betty and Rodney Davenport, Jeff Opland, Rene Vroom, Keith Hunt, Cecil Manona, Jeff Peires, and Richard Humphries. The late Ruth Edgecombe kindly arranged for me to do research in Pietermaritzburg. Of the numerous South Africans whose hospitality and good fellowship I have enjoyed over my years of research, I must particularly mention Virginia van der Vliet and David Welsh, Annette and Hermann Giliomee, Jetty and Johann Degenaar, Ellen and Nico Smith, and Tim Couzens.

During a summer at Harvard my kindly hosts were John and Ineke Carman at the Center for the Study of World Religions. At Princeton, while a fellow at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, I was warmly received and ably looked after by Kari Hoover, Grete Otis, and Rob Shell, and obtained valuable responses to my work from Natalie Zemon Davis, Robert Tignor, and Peter Brown. In seminars at the Southern African Research Program at Yale, my early thoughts on the history of South African missions were critiqued and refined: I am particularly indebted to the late Pam Baldwin and to Leonard Thompson, my graduate school mentor and a strong supporter of this project until his death. My understanding of both missions and non-Western Christianity has been immeasurably broadened by the work of Andrew Walls and Lamin Sanneh, and by the conferences they have hosted, alternately at Yale and at the University of Edinburgh.

I gratefully acknowledge grants (devoted wholly or in part to this and related projects) from the American Philosophical Society, the Social Science Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts (administered by Gerald Anderson and Geoffrey Little at the Overseas Ministries Studies Center), the Mellon Foundation (administered by Wesleyan University), and the Colonel Return Jonathan Meigs Fund of Wesleyan University’s History Department. My colleagues at Wesleyan have been extraordinarily supportive, among them Judith Brown, Brian Fay, Donald Moon, Gary Shaw, William Johnston, and Vijay Pinch.

I have been the beneficiary of expert assistance from many archivists and librarians, but most particularly Sally Poole, Michael Berning, and Jackson Vena at Rhodes; Anna Cunningham and Carol Archibald at the University of the Witwatersrand; Moore Crossey and Martha Smalley at Yale; Ds. Charles Hopkins at the former Dutch Reformed Church Archives in Cape Town; Hanna Botha at the University of Stellenbosch; and Sandy Rowoldt Shell, an inspired guide in the early stages of my research at Rhodes and, much later, at the University of Cape Town. I am grateful for materials given to me by Catherine Higgs, Donovan Williams, and Johan Andries Lombard; for assistance from Jane Hofmeyr and Elaine Botha; for perceptive commentary from Lindie Korf; for invaluable advice on issues of African education from Sue Krige and Cynthia Kros; and for long and thoughtful conversations about Dutch Reformed missions with J. du Preez and Nico Smith, both of them former missionaries and Professors of Missions at the University of Stellenbosch. Over the years, I have been assisted by many diligent Wesleyan undergraduates, particularly Brian Shelley, Tom Policelli, Phil Stern, Jocy So, Will Cushing, Josh Stevens, Abby Major, and Adam Tinkle. I’m grateful to Dick Holway and Mark Mones of the University of Virginia Press for their support of this venture; to my copy editor Ruth Steinberg, who greatly enhanced the clarity and consistency of my endnotes and bibliography; to Michael Southern who drew the map; to Enid Zafran, who produced the admirable index; and to the able staff of Wesleyan’s library and Information and Technology Services, especially Jim Kamm, Kevin Wiliarty, Erhard Konerding, and Alan Nathanson.

Numerous colleagues and friends have offered invaluable comments over the years, among them the late Jeffrey Butler, Eugene Klaaren, Brian Stanley, Dunbar Moodie, Cecilia Miller, and John de Gruchy. Rodney Davenport and Christopher Saunders subjected the entire manuscript to a shrewd and sympathetic critique, and Hermann Giliomee commented in detail on the chapters on Afrikaner churches and provided documents and information I could not have found myself. Given the controversial nature of some of my contentions, the traditional caveat applies with double force in regard to these scholars: the errors in this book are mine, not theirs.

With precision and resourcefulness Sue Sturman answered queries, tracked down sources in South Africa, and helped fact-check the entire manuscript. And year after year, she and her husband Brian provided me with warm hospitality in Cape Town. Over sixteen years the legendary editor Jeannette Hopkins helped me discern the crux of my argument, challenged virtually every sentence I wrote, and taught me more about research, writing, and publishing than anyone I’ve ever known. In August of 2011 she died, no doubt irked that this book on which she had lavished such effort had not yet seen the light of day.

But the person who deserves the greatest thanks is my beloved wife, Ester Ponce de Leon Timbancaya Elphick. Marakeng manga babai nga mi binoatan nga dorong ka tinlo, piro labaw ka pa ra enged kanandang tanan.

Parts of chapter 14 are adapted from Richard Elphick, Missions and Afrikaner Nationalism: Soundings in the Pre-history of Apartheid, in Missions, Nationalism, and the End of Empire, ed. Brian Stanley (Grand Rapids and Cambridge, U.K.: Eerdmans, 2003), 54–78, by permission of the publisher.

Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.

The Equality of Believers

Introduction

Soon after 1652, when the Dutch East India Company established a foothold in southern Africa, the pious wife of the first Dutch commander, Jan van Riebeeck, took into her home a young girl from a nearby Khoisan community. Krotoa (or Eva) learned fluent Dutch, became a translator and the company’s ambassador to nearby Khoisan rulers, and was baptized in the Christian faith in the presence of prominent company officials. Krotoa dined frequently with the colony’s elite, and, with the blessing of the government, married a white officer in a Christian wedding. After her husband was killed on an expedition to Madagascar, she sank into drunkenness and prostitution. Abandoning her half-white children, she tried to flee the colony but was arrested and banished to an offshore island. With the dogs [Krotoa] returned to her own vomit, said the colony’s official diary, until finally, in death, she put out the fire of her lust, affording a clear illustration that nature, no matter how tightly muzzled by imprinted moral principles … reverts to its inborn qualities.¹ Thus foundered the colony’s first attempt at proselytizing and assimilating its indigenous neighbors.

For several decades thereafter, Dutch officers and clergymen made only spasmodic attempts to evangelize the Khoisan. Most converts and protégés eventually abandoned Christianity, traded their European clothes for animal skins, or succumbed to self-destructive behavior. Not until 1737 did a solitary German missionary, Georg Schmidt, arrive to labor among the Khoisan, and not until the 1790s did a significant number of missionaries settle in the Cape Colony.

Under Dutch East India Company rule, the colony had slowly evolved into a rigid racial order, with whites on top, slaves and Khoisan below. Many whites, drawing on a specific strand of Calvinist thought, attributed their dominant status to a covenant relationship with God. The term Christian designated their white race and European origin as much as their religion. And when, in the 1790s, missionaries began intensive evangelization among people of color, many Christians feared, though wrongly, that baptism would bestow on slaves the legal right to freedom. Whites were alarmed, too, that some of the Khoisan, the first indigenous people to respond in large numbers to the missionary message, claimed, in the words of one Khoisan woman, to be at least the equal of the Colonists because of [the Khoisan’s] baptism. In the nineteenth century, one largely Khoisan community, the Griqua, adopted Christianity as a virtual state religion; while members of another, the Khoisan settlement at the Kat River, justified an uprising against the colony largely in Christian terms.²

Such were the first inklings of a powerful aspiration for racial equality that would run throughout much of South Africa’s subsequent history, challenging the drift toward rigid white domination. The seed of South African egalitarianism was the theological proclamation of the early missionaries: that Jesus died on the cross for people of every nation and race, not for whites alone; and that, in consequence, all who accepted him were brothers and sisters. The Equality of Believers traces this idea of racial equality, and the missionaries’ ambiguous relationship with it, over the colonial and postcolonial history of South Africa. Intimations of equality posed a constant challenge, and later a lethal threat, to white domination. Racial hierarchy and social oppression, subjects much researched by historians of South Africa, cannot be understood apart from the counter-ideology of equality, to which historians have given much less attention. Missionaries were pivotal to black-white relations, not only on the turbulent frontiers of the nineteenth century, which historians have thoroughly researched, but also in the twentieth-century struggles over industrialization, segregation, and apartheid, where missionaries’ role has been largely ignored.

The Equality of Believers demonstrates that most missionaries in South Africa did not straightforwardly advocate an extension of racial equality from the spiritual to the social realm. Black Christians, to the contrary, tended vigorously to assert that equality in the eyes of God should evolve into social and political equality. The whites missionaries’ relationship to the doctrine they had introduced was immensely complex—an intricate interplay of advocacy, subversion, and even downright hostility. Most significantly, and most consequentially, the broad vision of apartheid, designed explicitly to thwart the drive toward racial equality, originated, in part, among missionary leaders of the Dutch Reformed churches.

After sovereignty over the Cape Colony passed temporarily from the Dutch to the British in 1795, then permanently in 1806, some prominent British missionaries outspokenly advocated legal (though not social or political) equality for Khoisan. And when the British government appeared to side with the missionaries and with nearby African kingdoms on certain contested issues, several thousand Dutch-speaking colonists withdrew from the colony, in the Great Trek of the 1830s. The Voortrekkers were outraged, as one later recalled, that their slaves had been placed on an equal footing with Christians, contrary to the laws of God, and the natural distinctions of race and religion. One of the independent republics that the Voortrekkers founded in the interior declared in its constitution that it would permit no equality between coloured people and the white inhabitants, either in Church or State. Such hostility to gelykstelling, or equalizing of the races, would remain an idée fixe for a century and a half in the political thought of many Dutch-speaking settlers, their Afrikaner descendants, and other white settlers as well.³

In 1853, the British government granted the Cape Colony responsible government, or internal political autonomy, with an assembly elected by male voters, white or black, who could meet certain property qualifications. By now, the missionary movement had won a handful of blacks to the Christian faith, and soon the pace of conversion picked up substantially, thanks largely to the zeal of black evangelists. Many of the converts enrolled in missionary-run schools, mastered basic English, prospered in the settler economy, and thus met the requirement to vote. An emerging black leadership was convinced that Christianity, Western education, and the color-blind franchise would open the way for blacks to attain equality with whites in a common citizenship. Until the middle of the twentieth century, this dream (which did not entail immediate citizenship rights for all blacks but, at first, merely for a qualified elite) was as firmly held by African leaders as opposition to gelykstelling was held by many white colonists. It derived directly from the initial missionary proclamation and depended on missionary schools to train new generations of recruits to the African elite.

In the meantime, in a development of immense importance, the Dutch Reformed Church, the spiritual home of most Dutch settlers, had, through a series of evangelical revivals, itself become intensely mission-minded; in 1826, it commissioned its first missionary. Many black converts clamored for services in Dutch Reformed church buildings formerly used only by whites. To take the sting out of many white settlers’ hostility to missions, a Dutch Reformed synod declared, in 1857, that where whites’ racial prejudice made it necessary, the congregations raised up, or to be raised up, from the Heathen, shall enjoy their Christian rights in a separate building or institution.⁴ Such ecclesiastical segregation enabled the Dutch Reformed Church to minister to all-white Dutch congregations, and, later, to support nationalist movements among the Afrikaner descendents of the Dutch settlers, while, at the same time, remaining firmly committed to the evangelization of blacks. It was to reconcile these contrary aspirations—to be simultaneously a volkskerk (church of the white Afrikaner people) and a missionary church (one converting Africans)—that early intimations of apartheid emerged among Dutch Reformed missionary thinkers in the 1930s.

* * * *

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, a vast Benevolent Empire of educational and medical institutions for blacks guaranteed missionaries a prominent place in South African dialogues about race. In many other countries, secular institutions were displacing clergy from sociopolitical leadership, but the South African government, loathe to tax its white electorate to pay for services to blacks, was happy to subcontract such services to missionaries. Universities, slow to develop in South Africa until the early twentieth century, at first showed little interest in Africans’ cultures, and even less in their social circumstances. Trade unions, mostly under white control, often regarded black workers as their competitors. And, before the coming of apartheid in 1948, South Africa’s racial policies encountered little outrage, except from scattered individuals or organizations with some ties to the international missionary movement.

Early in the twentieth century, as increasingly impoverished Africans migrated from the countryside to unhealthy and crime-ridden cities in search of work, whites in various colonies saw an urgent need to forge a region-wide native policy to control and exploit the African majorities among whom they lived. In 1910, with the power of the British Empire receding, four white-ruled colonies united, with British blessing, to form the Union of South Africa. The Union’s constitution allowed men of color to vote in the Cape Province (the former Cape Colony), but not in the other three provinces. The new South African parliament embarked immediately on a series of racially discriminatory acts that have led historians to call the years from 1910 to 1948 the Age of Segregation. Initially, blacks responded with a moderate African nationalism; in 1912, the direct ancestor of the African National Congress was founded, almost entirely by mission-educated black Christians. For their part, beginning in 1904, missionaries organized themselves on a region-wide basis in the General Missionary Conferences, which would enable them to play a mediating role between whites and blacks in the decades to come.

Most English-speaking missionaries, though expressing doubts about blacks’ administrative and leadership abilities, held much more liberal social and political views than the majority of white settlers. Most favored some sort of political franchise for Western-educated blacks and, perhaps eventually, the right to full South African citizenship. With no power to influence white parliamentary politics directly, the missionaries formed alliances with extra-parliamentary elites—black Christian leaders, white paternalist intellectuals, and international missionary statesmen who raised funds from U.S. charitable foundations and gained a hearing for missionary perspectives in the governing councils of the British Empire.

The principal theological resource for many missionaries in South Africa was the Social Gospel, a loosely articulated but widely held conviction that Christians had a duty to confront social injustice as well as individual sin. Many missionaries found that spiritual remedies alone were insufficient to cope with social disorder and injustice. In the cities, among their laments was: If we tell [Africans] of salvation from sin, they don’t want to be saved from sin. If we tell them of Heaven, Heaven is a long way off and the women and the beer are very near.⁵ The Scots principal of Lovedale, the preeminent secondary school for blacks, documented and publicized the enveloping poverty of rural Africans and the failure of the rapidly proliferating churches to halt economic decline and social disintegration. D. F. Malan, who as prime minister after 1948 would begin the imposition of apartheid on South Africa, began his career as a Dutch Reformed clergyman dedicated to missions and profoundly influenced by a Dutch equivalent of the Social Gospel. While his English-speaking colleagues became increasingly critical of white supremacy, Malan’s social concern shifted from the plight of blacks to that of white Afrikaners, whose morals, industry, and racial pride seemed to be crumbling. In 1915, he resigned his ministry to become an Afrikaner nationalist politician.

In the 1920s, the missionary influence in South African politics reached its peak in an extraordinary Christian coalition—English-speaking missionaries in the center, black nationalist leaders on the left, Afrikaner churchmen on the right. Led by Johannes du Plessis, a pugnacious mission theorist of the Dutch Reformed Church, this motley alliance demanded reforms from the South African government. But after 1928, Du Plessis’s mildly modernist theology undid him, and he was tried for heresy before tribunals of his own church. The most favorable moment had passed for Christian elites to broker interracial reconciliation. Radical Afrikaner nationalists began to gain power in the Dutch Reformed Church, and many black leaders rejected missionary leadership altogether.

English-speaking missionaries were accused by many Continental missionaries, particularly the Germans, of stressing a Social Gospel instead of a gospel of personal salvation. The Anglo-Saxons, so the critics claimed, were turning Africans into black Englishmen in fostering unrealistic hopes of racial equality. English-speaking missions were attacked by formidable critics like Abraham Kuyper, the prominent neo-Calvinist intellectual and prime minister of the Netherlands from 1901 to 1905, and by mission thinkers in Weimar Germany, nourished by the völkisch ideologies that also nourished Nazism.⁶ The fragility of the English-speaking missionaries’ theological and political thought became apparent in the 1940s, when they and white liberal allies failed to pose a persuasive alternative to the vigorously advocated doctrine of apartheid.

Missionaries were divided and indecisive when, in 1926, Prime Minister J. B. M. Hertzog triggered what became a decade-long debate over his proposal to eliminate voting rights of eligible African males in the Cape Province. Many missionaries were tempted to compromise, suggesting that Africans barter the Cape franchise for dubious substitutes such as separate electoral rolls for blacks, or traditional non-democratic African methods of voting. In the end, prodded by the black leadership, particularly by D. D. T. Jabavu, a professor and close collaborator of the missionaries, they rallied behind the Cape franchise and its symbolic affirmation of the potential for white-black equality. In 1936, in a climactic speech, J. H. Hofmeyr, the deeply Christian minister of the interior, broke with his leader the prime minister and denounced Hertzog’s proposal. It was a futile gesture—the bill passed 169 to 11—but the issue had been effectively defined for many whites as one of Christian principle versus white self-interest. New life was breathed into the faltering alliance between missionaries and moderate black leaders.

* * * *

From the Depression years, through the Second World War, and in the run-up years to the apartheid election of 1948, the apartheid doctrine spread among Afrikaner churchmen. To discern the link between Afrikaner religion and apartheid, some historians have focused on the primitive Calvinism of South Africa’s pre-industrial frontiers; others have pointed to the neo-Calvinist philosophy imported to South Africa from the Netherlands around the turn of the twentieth century. Apartheid was indeed a product of twentieth-century thought, but it was not developed, initially, by neo-Calvinist philosophers (or by secular thinkers), but by evangelical missionary leaders of the Dutch Reformed Church who sought to foster development among blacks without threatening white supremacy. In the Orange Free State in 1929, the DRC missionary leader J. G. Strydom advocated the zealous evangelization of blacks, but in the interests of the Afrikaner "volk and fatherland." Blacks converted by the DRC would, Strydom argued, be immunized against the egalitarian notions of Communists and of English-speaking missionaries. In 1935, the entire DRC adopted a proto-apartheid scheme as its official Mission Policy and set out to persuade whites to accept significant sacrifices so that blacks could advance in their separate spheres.⁷

Neo-Calvinist thought was imported from the Netherlands and developed in South Africa chiefly in the small Gereformeerde Church and at Potchefstroom University. It seeped only slowly into the Dutch Reformed Church. Contributing nothing to the foundation of apartheid theory, South African neo-Calvinists nonetheless provided Afrikaner nationalist thinkers with a broad philosophical basis from which to oppose Western notions of racial equality. They denied that the Bible advocated racial equality in society or politics, and contended that Afrikaners’ racial views were natural and God-given products of their history, and in no way irrational or bigoted.

In the 1940s, simultaneously with the consolidation of apartheid thought, a new and competitive language of human rights drifted in from Europe and America, encouraging government bureaucracies and non-profit organizations to imagine a reconstruction of South Africa along more liberal lines. But after the 1948 electoral victory of the National Party, with apartheid in its platform, hope and opportunity faded. The new government quickly took control of the missions’ schools for blacks, encountering only feeble and divided resistance. The closing of the mission hospitals followed. The missionary movement had lost its institutional power base.

The General Missionary Conferences had been superseded, in 1936, by the Christian Council of South Africa, in which mission societies were increasingly overshadowed by churches, many controlled by whites who were less liberal than many missionaries. Blacks in the African National Congress, many of whom had already drifted away from white missionaries’ accommodationist tactics, were now confronting the apartheid government frontally with work stoppages, in the 1949 Programme of Action, and in symbolic breaching of apartheid laws, in the 1952 Defiance Campaign. Impatient radical missionaries, like the English Anglicans Michael Scott and Trevor Huddleston, took part openly in black politics, and, in consequence, were deported or withdrawn from South Africa by their superiors.

Amidst deepening polarization among South African Christians, the secularization of the missionary impulse, long apparent in the Social Gospel’s influence on white liberalism and in the melding of Afrikaner nationalism with Dutch Reformed missions, rapidly accelerated. The Anglican novelist Alan Paton moved an international audience with a vision of racial reconciliation in his best-selling 1948 novel, Cry the Beloved Country. Apartheid was denounced in a strongly Christian idiom by several leaders of the interracial Liberal Party, and by many black politicians, among them Albert John Luthuli, president-general of the African National Congress from 1952 to his death in 1967 and winner of a Nobel Peace Prize. The Dutch Reformed vision of apartheid was secularized, too, as G. B. A. Gerdener, a Dutch Reformed missiologist who had helped draft the Nationalists’ 1948 apartheid manifesto, shifted much of his efforts from the churches to SABRA, a secular Afrikaner think-tank. Similarly, W. W. M. Eiselen, a missionary son who shaped the government’s policy on black education, expounded apartheid ideas in terms congenial to the Christian conscience of many Afrikaners.

In 1960, at the Cottesloe Consultation of church leaders in Johannesburg, the World Council of Churches sought to prevent a rupture between the English-speaking and Afrikaner churches. An astonishing meeting of minds occurred, and, in a final communiqué, some representatives of the Dutch Reformed churches signaled a courageous dissent from several apartheid policies. In consequence, they were publicly denounced by Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd and repudiated by synods of their own churches. The abyss that opened between English-speaking and Afrikaans churches would not be bridged for decades. The era of social and political leadership by missionaries had ended.

Missionaries in South Africa had stayed at the center of public debates far longer than their counterparts in many other regions of the world. Their influence was prolonged by the South African government’s slow provision of public services to blacks, and by the slow growth of universities and other significant secular institutions. Drawing on shared religious commitments, the missionaries had been able to conduct sympathetic dialogue with African nationalists on the one hand, and with conservative whites on the other. They had been strengthened by their success in eliciting funds and support from global Christian networks that saw South Africa as a pivotal test for Christianity on matters of race.

* * * *

The Equality of Believers makes several central claims: that the struggle over racial equalization, or gelykstelling, was pivotal to South African history; that this concept was rooted in the missionaries’ proclamation of God’s love to all people, as manifested in the birth, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus; that the ideal of equality was nurtured in large part by missionary institutions, even though missionaries themselves repeatedly sought to limit, deflect, or retard its achievement, or, in the case of Afrikaner missionaries and apartheid, sought to overturn it altogether. This is, therefore, a history of an idea in relationship with institutions and the people who ran them. Why is such a history necessary? Because neither the idea of equality nor the missionary institutions have received appropriate attention in existing historiography, especially in regard to the twentieth century. The dynamic encounter between the equality of believers and missionary institutions has been scarcely investigated at all.

This negligence by historians may be attributed, in part, to a secular perspective—possibly even stronger in South African than in European or American historiography—that tends to blind historians to the role of religion in history.⁸ But it is also a consequence of the traditional methods of intellectual history, in which scholars focus on major figures, such as scholars, literary figures, public intellectuals, politicians, and others, who expound their thoughts in lengthy texts. In consequence, historical work on white liberalism and the origins of apartheid scarcely mentions South Africa’s highly influential missionaries, whose thoughts must be gathered in snatches from scattered sources, such as sermons, conference resolutions, committee votes, and the like. The loose and informally expressed set of insights, attitudes, and stances that comprised the Social Gospel was the common intellectual currency, not only of missionaries themselves, but of many black, and some white, leaders in the first half of the twentieth century. Yet it has left barely a trace in South African historiography. Studies that treat moderate blacks and white liberals sympathetically (and not all treatments, by any means, are sympathetic) say little of their ties to, and dependence on, missionaries, missionary institutions, and missionary thought.

There are, it is true, innumerable studies of missionaries, many of them book-length manuscripts and theses. Most, however, deal with classical missions of the nineteenth century, when missionaries were highly visible diplomats, power brokers, and transmitters of culture in a time of frontier turbulence; almost all concern a single missionary, missionary society, or region. There has been no attempt at a grand synthesis since Johannes du Plessis’s History of Christian Missions in South Africa, published in 1911. Few studies venture far beyond 1900, and no broad interpretive history of twentieth-century missions has been attempted.

The Equality of Believers aspires to be such a broad interpretive history: fourteen of its eighteen chapters are devoted to the years 1900 to 1960—the era of industrialization, urbanization, segregation, and early apartheid. It is, however, in no sense a general history of the mission movement, much less of South African Christianity as a whole. Rather, it is a history of an idea, the equality of believers, and an investigation of why, despite the failure and shortcomings of its proponents, this idea profoundly shaped the history of South Africa, both in positive and negative ways. For the twentieth century, The Equality of Believers gives most attention to the four missionary enterprises that wielded the strongest influence on black-white politics and dominated the missionary discourse on race—the Anglican, Dutch Reformed, and Scots missions, and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Some missionary organizations that were highly influential in the evangelization of South Africa appear only spasmodically: as, for example, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which was a catalyst in the Ethiopian rebellion of black clergy against white missionary paternalism, and the German societies, which mounted stringent critiques of Anglo-Saxon missions. Comparatively little is said, too, about the Methodists, who, despite the vast extent of their missions, were less consistently vocal on social and political matters than several other English-speaking missions; or about the highly successful missions of the Roman Catholic Church, which, until the 1950s, kept a low profile in South Africa and operated in isolation from the cooperative undertakings of the Protestant missionary movement.

Unlike most books in the historiography of South Africa, The Equality of Believers embraces blacks and whites, Afrikaners and English-speakers, in a single narrative. It does so to make two principal points: that networks linking members of South Africa’s disparate racial and cultural groups are not of recent origin, but go far back in South African history; and that, in seeking to understand the religious origins of apartheid, historians should spend less time hunting for influences imported from the Netherlands and Germany, and should see the Dutch Reformed Church as a predominantly evangelical church, closely akin to British and American Protestant churches, which was determined to shape its policies in constant dialogue and debate with the English-speaking Christian world.

PART I

The Missionaries, Their Converts, and Their Enemies

1

The Missionaries

From Egalitarianism to Paternalism

The Moravians, the Bible, and the Pear Tree

Georg Schmidt, the first full-time missionary in South Africa, was a butcher by trade. He had been converted to Christ on a date he could remember exactly—29 October 1727—through the ministry of Johann Böhme, a linen weaver.¹ Schmidt had lived at Herrnhut in Germany, the highly structured community of the Moravian Brethren, but could not expect to duplicate such a community in South Africa. Settled, in 1737, at Baviaanskloof on the fringe of the Dutch colony, he preached daily to a small and shifting population of indigenous Khoisan² (Hottentots), whom the Dutch settlers had reduced to near serfdom, and taught them how to garden and read. His direct and simple message stressed sin and personal salvation through the power of the blood of Jesus in one’s soul. … Beyond this no salvation is to be had, even if one could live ever so piously.³ Count Ludwig von Zinzendorf, Schmidt’s spiritual leader, wrote to him from Herrnhut: You must tell the Hottentots, especially their children, the story of God’s Son; and if they feel something, pray with them; and if they don’t feel anything, pray for them. If the feeling continues, baptize them.⁴

Though most clergy of the official Dutch Reformed Church considered the despised Hottentots beyond salvation, Schmidt explicitly rejected the Reformed doctrine of the predestination of the elect. The Savior, he said, became a complete sacrifice on the cross for the sins of the whole world.⁵ He proclaimed to the Khoisan the same divine grace he proclaimed to the white colonists, whom he called so-called Christians. There was, he told the colonists, no salvation in doctrinal purity, only in personal experience of Jesus. When five of his Khoisan hearers’ hearts were stirred, Schmidt knelt with them, inquired into their inner state, and baptized each with a new name: Joshua, Christian, Magdalena, Jonas, and Christina. Thereafter, he referred to these converts as his brothers and sisters.⁶

A few whites had tried earlier to convert the Khoisan, but in vain. They concluded, therefore, that God had predestined the Khoisan to damnation. Most Dutch settlers regarded their own Christian profession as an aspect of their white identity, an authorization to monopolize political power and to control the labor of the heathen: Khoisan indigenes and Asian and African slaves. Their domination in this world would, they believed, be followed by eternal blessedness in the next.⁷ In light of that conviction, Schmidt’s baptism of the five Khoisan seemed subversive. If indigenous converts were bound for glory, and many of the so-called Christian white settlers, clergy included, were bound for hell, then the Christian religion’s snug fit with the hierarchy of colonial society was at risk. A dispute on how to handle Schmidt embroiled the governor, the administrative Council of Policy, and the colony’s ultimate rulers, the Netherlands-based directors of the Dutch East India Company. In 1744, before the question could be resolved, Schmidt, lonely and discouraged, left South Africa. He never returned.

For the next forty-eight years, no other missionary was sent out to replace Schmidt, until, on Christmas Eve, 1792, three Moravian missionaries arrived in Baviaanskloof. There they encountered an elderly Khoisan woman whom Schmidt had baptized Helena (or Magdalena). They told her that they were George Schmidt’s brethren, and that, if the Hottentots desired to be saved, they would point out the way unto them, as he had done. Thanks be to God! Magdalena replied, and showed them the Bible Schmidt had given her, carefully enclosed in a leather bag, wrapped around with two sheepskins. Now almost blind, Magdalena could no longer read, but a younger woman, who had learned to read from another of Schmidt’s converts, had been reading the Bible to her regularly. The missionaries were deeply moved that the Christian faith had flickered on, with no outside guidance, for almost half a century.⁸ Magdalena’s Bible, kept in a wooden box made from a pear tree Schmidt himself had planted, is today the prize possession of the mission at Genadendal, the former Baviaanskloof. The Bible, the pear tree, and the mission are the enduring symbols of the founding of Protestant Christianity among the indigenous people of southern Africa.

The Moravians hoped to found a Christian community modeled, in part, on the Moravian villages of Saxony and other parts of Europe. The only inhabitants of these settlements were active members of the church, governed by a warden and committee appointed by the church council and responsible to it. The church ran the village’s economy and controlled people’s right to settle or buy land; spiritual advisors regulated behavior.⁹ In South Africa, the Moravians replicated this pattern, setting up a smithy and a mill, shaping Khoisan converts’ routines of worship and work, and choosing their marriage partners.¹⁰ A stream of aristocratic visitors came to Genadendal, charmed by the good cheer, prosperity, and social deference that flourished there. With the French Revolution raging in Europe and constant political upheaval at the Cape, the Moravian community seemed an oasis of calm. Lady Anne Barnard, wife of the secretary of the British administration that had taken over the Cape from the Dutch in 1795, wrote:

I doubt much whether I should have entered St. Peter’s at Rome, with the triple crown, with a more devout impression of the Deity and His presence than I felt in this little church of a few feet square, where the simple disciples of Christianity, dressed in the skins of animals, knew no purple or fine linen, no pride or hypocrisy. I felt as if I were creeping back 1700 years, and heard from the rude and inspired lips of Evangelists the simple sacred words of wisdom and purity. … [When the minister] used the words, as he often did, Mijne lieve vrienden (my beloved friends) I felt that he thought they were all his children.¹¹

He Felled Me to the Ground: The Radical Nonconformist Mission

In 1799, within a decade of the Moravians’ return, another type of Protestant mission appeared at the Cape, one that would often prove less congenial to the political establishment. These Nonconformist missions, founded by societies not associated with established churches in their homelands, were mostly British and American. The first of their missionaries in South Africa was an extraordinary Dutchman, Johannes Theodorus van der Kemp, who in the Netherlands had been an army officer, a medical doctor, and the author of a Latin treatise on Parmenides. Though influenced by Enlightenment critiques of Christianity, Van der Kemp had long been pressed by family and friends to adhere to Dutch Reformed Church doctrine; he was much afflicted by personal feelings of guilt. He had defied social convention by marrying a woman of the lower classes, to whom, and to whose young daughter by a previous marriage, he was deeply devoted. On a summer afternoon in 1791, Van der Kemp, his wife, and his step-daughter were sailing along the Maas near Dordrecht, when a sudden squall capsized the boat, drowning the child. Van der Kemp’s wife slipped through his hands and drowned as well. Clinging to the keel of the overturned boat, Van der Kemp was eventually rescued. Five days later, at communion at Zwijndrecht, he offered up his dead wife and child to the care of God and was startled to hear a voice say Do not trust them to God, but to me. The invisible and unknown speaker was, he reported, a person, whose qualities far exceed every notion which I had hitherto entertained of my God. Certain that it was the Lord Jesus, Van der Kemp replied, Jesus, my lord, to thee I trust. But, Oh, my Jesus, if I trust only in thee, I must be obliged to adopt the christian doctrine, which I have many times examined, and seemed to find it a jargon of absurdities. The voice answered, Examine it once more, and you will judge otherwise of my doctrine. In response to the divine command, Van der Kemp rethought his theological views and was astounded when a long series of new truths tumbled out of his mind, revealing the pattern by which a sinner from being similar to the guilty and condemned Adam, is brought to the image of a righteous, holy, and glorified Redeemer, and so [is] restored from sin and misery to virtue and happiness, without punishment.¹²

Still very much a scholar, Van der Kemp would later publish a commentary on Paul’s theodicy in the book of Romans. Yet he knew it was not intellectual arguments that had converted him: When the Lord Jesus first revealed himself to [me], he did not reason with me about truth or error, but attacked me like a warrior and felled me to the ground by the force of his arm. Since his own surrender to Jesus had preceded his acceptance of Christian doctrine, Van der Kemp concluded that the faith could be spread among non-Christian peoples without an explicit view of the christian system, only by representing Christ as the proper object of faith. Hence gospel preaching proves in the hand of the [Holy] Spirit, the instrument of exciting faith as easily in the rudest barbarian, as in the most learned Greek.¹³

Before going to South Africa, Van der Kemp engaged in evangelistic campaigns in Europe and studied the strategy of Christian missions. The directors of the London Missionary Society (LMS) therefore assumed he would dominate their team of missionaries at the Cape, and, despite his distaste for hierarchy, he did. After an (apparently) abortive stay among the Xhosa of Ngqika, east of the colonial frontier, Van der Kemp returned to the colony, where he ministered among the Khoisan until his death in 1811. More successful than Schmidt, after eight years he had baptized forty-three women, eighteen men, and sixty-two children.¹⁴

Van der Kemp, like most other early Protestant missionaries, believed that missionaries should have intimate knowledge of an indigenous culture and a vernacular language, and that they should send out indigenous evangelists even before they could train a local clergy. He completed a catechism in the Khoisan language, now apparently lost. By his death, he had entrusted much of the task of evangelization to Khoisan and slave converts like Hendrik Boesak, Alexander Malabar, and Cupido Kakkerlak.¹⁵ Janet Hodgson believes that before Van der Kemp returned to the colony, he had profoundly influenced Ntsikana, the counselor of the Xhosa ruler Ngqika. Ntsikana, who is revered by many Xhosa as the founder of Xhosa Christianity, created a distinctly African theology powerfully expressed in hymns of his own composition. If Hodgson is right, this is a remarkable example, like that of Schmidt, of an uncomplicated gospel leaping over cultural barriers. Van der Kemp himself stayed only briefly among the Xhosa; hampered by incompetent translators, he would have been unable to communicate complex theological ideas clearly.¹⁶

Bethelsdorp, the LMS station that Van der Kemp founded near the modern Port Elizabeth, became a powerful symbol in South African history. To many Khoisan, it was a refuge from the labor demands of white farmers, who saw it as a hotbed of Khoisan escaping their rightful duties. For cultivated spokespersons of the Enlightenment, like Governor Jan Willem Janssens, Hinrich Lichtenstein, and others who visited it, Bethelsdorp reflected its founder’s impractical fanaticism—a den of indolence, poverty, and indiscipline, contrasting unfavorably with the strict and prosperous Moravian settlement at Genadendal.¹⁷ Nor did the ascetic and scholarly Van der Kemp endear himself to South African whites. He campaigned against the labor practices of the Dutch settlers, condemning them for the horrid deeds of oppressions and murder, and in 1806, at fifty-nine, he married a fourteen-year-old Malagasy slave girl, Sara, not then a Christian, who bore him four children. His second marriage, like his first, scandalized contemporaries, and the scandal continued over the next century and a half as white attitudes against miscegenation intensified. (The scandal continued in the superintendency of his successor, James Read, whose marriage to a Khoisan, and sexual liaison with another, triggered a torrent of abuse from colonists and some missionaries.¹⁸) Well into the twentieth century, Van der Kemp’s sexuality featured in white politicians’ condemnation of foreign missionaries, and even in racist South African novels.¹⁹

Among missiologists and church historians, Van der Kemp has found defenders among English-speaking liberals, while Afrikaners have blamed him for tensions between missionaries and colonists and for his peculiar views on social equalization of Hottentots and whites. The great Afrikaner missiologist Johannes du Plessis expressed a more moderate view that Van der Kemp was a great Christian whose judgment had been clouded by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s views on the noble savage.²⁰ Van der Kemp was, in fact, no disciple of Rousseau, but a conventional Calvinist persuaded of the depravity of all people apart from Christ.²¹ He was little concerned to Europeanize or enrich his converts. His rage against the colonists, and against the regime that supported them, was influenced for the most part neither by the Enlightenment nor by the French Revolution, but by antipathy toward whites who, in his view, falsely claimed to be Christian, and by strong sentimental affection for the Khoisan and slave converts, whom many whites abused and exploited.

To early Protestant missionaries like Van der Kemp, the gospel affirmed that Africans were potential brothers and sisters in Christ. They believed that African languages were the most appropriate instruments of evangelization and that African preachers were the most effective heralds of God’s word. These convictions challenged white settlers’ confidence that Christianity was a badge of their own superiority and their charter of group privileges. A measure of respect for non-Western cultures and egalitarianism was implicit in the missionaries’ purpose and in their doctrine. These were not the only implications that could be drawn from evangelicalism, nor always the most influential. Yet they would always remain a challenge, and sometimes a rebuke, to the massive edifice that Protestant missionaries would build up in South Africa.

If a Tinker Is a Devout Man, He Infallibly Sets Off for the East

In 1884, almost a century after the Moravians’ first permanent mission was founded, a survey counted no fewer than 385 mission stations in South Africa.²² Fifteen substantial mission societies were active in the region, three run by white-dominated South African churches (Anglican, Dutch Reformed, and Congregational), and one, the Methodist mission, in transition from British to South African control.²³ The other eleven were based overseas: four in Germany; two in Scotland; and one each in England, Norway, Switzerland, France, and the United States. Most missionaries in this period, apart from the Roman Catholics (marginal except in a few regions in the nineteenth century) and the Anglo-Catholic majority in the Anglican Church, drew from the same theological stream—usually called pietist on the Continent, evangelical in Britain and North America. Relatively uninterested in denominational theology or its disputes, these missionaries were united by a preoccupation with sin, a desire for personal salvation, and an intense attachment to the person of Jesus. They did disagree among themselves on politics and on the proper response to African culture. And among the Scots, Norwegians, and Anglicans bitter quarrels arose over church governance and authority. Yet for the most part the Protestant missionaries were remarkably united in their primary purpose: to mount a single crusade for the conversion of the world.

Five studies of missionary recruitment (three of the British, one of the Norwegians, and one of the Americans) have concluded that a personal experience of salvation was considered essential to a candidate’s call to be a missionary. All pietist and evangelical missionaries in the early nineteenth century were males, many married to wives who had themselves undergone a personal conversion, and they set out to awaken in the heathen the transforming event they had experienced themselves. The typical recruit, usually from a religious family, had been guilt-ridden as a teenager about wayward behavior and a lack of religious feeling, but that guilt had been dissolved in a saving encounter with Christ. Most early candidates for the mission field could date their conversion to a particular day or hour; but for certain groups, such as the Scottish Calvinists, dramatic conversions were less common or crucial than for others, like the Methodists. As the century progressed, more applicants testified to a gradual spiritual awakening.²⁴ Many early Protestant missionaries had been converted after premonitions of eternal damnation, but the preoccupation to save the heathen from hell declined over the century.

Some applicants for the mission field sought to flee the growing religious skepticism among elites and in the new industrial classes, particularly in Britain. Others, appalled by the devastation wrought by industrialization, hoped to build pastoral Christian communities based on an idealized European past.²⁵ One candidate for the London Missionary Society wrote: I feel I should be more at home with the simple uncultivated minds of the natives than with the more cultivated intellects of other countries.²⁶ In 1806, Sydney Smith, a prominent Anglican clergyman and man of letters, snidely observed of Christian missionaries to India: If a tinker is a devout man, he infallibly sets off for the East.²⁷ Early Protestant missionaries did, in fact, come largely from the lower classes. Schmidt was a butcher, and, among his Moravian successors, Marsveld was a tailor, Schwinn a cobbler, and Kühnel a cutler.²⁸ Missionaries to the Xhosa included a town clerk, a carpenter, a shoemaker, two farmers, a soldier, a bookseller-printer, a teacher’s son, a shepherd’s son, an impecunious businessman, and the son of a small factory owner.²⁹ Among the five London missionaries who powerfully shaped the political history of nineteenth-century South Africa, only Van der Kemp had a bourgeois or professional background. John Philip was a weaver; Robert Moffat, a gardener; John Mackenzie, a printer’s apprentice; and David Livingstone, a worker in a cotton mill.³⁰ Continental European missionaries tended to come from more rural backgrounds than British and American missionaries. Of eighty-five students in the Norwegian society’s missionary school between 1845 and 1897, 69.4 percent were sons of farmers, rural laborers, or fishermen; 17.6 percent, marginal town dwellers like artisans, traders, apprentices, or laborers. Among the German Hermannsburg missionaries in 1885, 68.9 percent had fathers who were farmers or agricultural laborers, 11.1 percent fathers who were craftsmen, and 15.6 percent fathers who were laborers.³¹

Lower-class origins have led to speculation about early missionaries’ motivations and character: that they were products of a turbulent century, avidly climbing into the lower middle-class.³² Some historians have written disparagingly of their background and upbringing; Norman Etherington, for example, refers to the inferiority of Methodist personnel, and Donovan Williams attributes the failure of early Xhosa missions to defects in the missionary personality—quarrelsomeness, pettiness, fanaticism, rigidity, introspection, and melancholy, in addition to the missionaries’ humble origins and inferior education.³³

While the missionary calling did allow a young man of baser station to attain power, influence, and a professional status in Africa equivalent to that of the clergy in Europe or America, few of them came from the demoralized poor. Early missionaries had at least rudimentary educations, practical skills, and an abundant confidence that the world was malleable and abounding in opportunities for those who trusted God and worked hard. After the rigors of the pioneering period, the missionaries’ lives in South Africa became comfortable enough that many retired there, their children becoming white South Africans. Still, the image of the upwardly mobile missionary artisan requires some refinement. Certain mission societies—not the largest, but several of the most influential—put great emphasis on educating their missionaries, especially the Paris Evangelicals, the Scots, and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, most of whose missionaries were ministers ordained after prolonged university education.³⁴ Some societies had at least one gadfly of high social or scholarly status. Of these, John William Colenso, the embattled Anglican bishop of Natal from 1853 to 1883—scholarly critic of the Old Testament, cautious defender of African polygamy, and champion of the Zulu royal house—is best known. Bishop Hans Paludan Smith Schreuder, founder of the Norwegian mission in Zululand, was a highly educated member of Norway’s civil service elite, and Johannes Winter was the only theologically educated member of the Berlin mission in South Africa at the end of the century. Both Schreuder and Winter quarreled with their missions, and later broke with them entirely.³⁵

Important studies of recruitment by the London Missionary Society (LMS) and the Wesleyan mission, each highly influential in South Africa, show that, while both societies were initially indifferent to the education and social standing of their recruits, both turned increasingly to the middle and professional classes as the nineteenth century wore on. By 1900, a typical LMS or Wesleyan recruit was a teacher, doctor, office worker, or shopkeeper from a pious, conservative family. This shift upward into the fringe of the middle class coincided with the growing recruitment, from the 1870s on, of women to minister to women and children and to serve in medical missions; later, some societies also employed women as evangelists and organizers of churches. Recruiters preferred to hire women who could pay for their own keep, and some professional women were prepared to do so. By the end of the century, in consequence, some mission societies had become not only better educated and more middle-class, but also more female. The rising social status coincided, in turn, with increasing respect for the mission enterprise in the British political elite, the press, and the universities. Many British government officials of 1900 saw missionaries as patriotic professionals in the service of the British Empire.³⁶

The Mission Station: A Stronghold of Paternalist Power

Both the evangelical message itself—that Jesus died to save black people as well as white—and the example of the missionary—ambitious, practical, mobile, improving, and impatient with tradition and hierarchy—had the potential to undermine the psychological supports of a racially stratified colonial order. Yet in his marriage to a woman of color, and in his aggressive campaign against racial oppression, Van der Kemp was an exception to, not a model of, typical missionary careers. Before long, missions would be profoundly reshaped by the maelstrom of South African politics in ways that would subvert much of the egalitarianism of their original message.

Missionaries’ power derived, in part, from their possessions, such as the mirrors, plows, and gadgets that initially fascinated Africans; and in part, from their ability to teach reading and writing, to heal illness, and to irrigate parched fields. Many local political figures, both white and black, tried to enlist, harness, or resist missionary power in pursuit of their own agendas. Some government officials feared that missionaries would inflame the frontier; others expected them to pacify it. African women, chiefs, healers, and dissidents found much to fear or to embrace in missionary Christianity. White colonists, some of whom warmed to the missionaries’ evangelical message, were threatened by its universalistic implications. Missionaries had to maintain control over their message lest it fall into others’ hands and become distorted or even, in their view, demonic. In the clashing worldviews and polities on the South African frontier, missionaries and their message had explosive potential. Everyone, especially the missionaries themselves, had a stake in controlling the consequences.

As Norman Etherington has stressed, the instrument of control that emerged almost immediately was the mission station. Nineteenth-century engravings of mission stations usually depicted a church, a school, a storehouse, a missionary addressing some natives under a tree, and a herdsman walking a cow—no hint of struggle or alarm.³⁷ The illustrations are misleading: mission stations were sites of intense struggle, even of violence. They were not, in many respects, what missionaries had intended when they left their homelands. Rather, they were shaped in South Africa by contradictory impulses from white and African societies and by the missionaries’ urgent need to control them.

The Moravians, founders of the first South African mission station, were greatly esteemed by mission theorists in other denominations. The Anglo-Catholic Bishop Robert Gray, before launching an Anglican mission in South Africa, declared himself more interested in the Moravian Missions than in any other.³⁸ When, at the London Missionary Society (LMS) station at Bethelsdorp, Van der Kemp had tried to avoid Moravian authoritarianism and regimentation, he was criticized bitterly by colonists, officials, and scholarly visitors. John Philip arrived in 1819 as the new superintendent of the LMS, determined to erase the bad image among colonists of Van der Kemp’s Bethelsdorp. He and the Khoisan inhabitants founded schools, organized benevolent societies and economic enterprises, and suppressed drunkenness and sexual disorder. More democratic than the Moravians in their treatment of Khoisan, the LMS missionaries nevertheless accepted the idea of a tightly ordered community in which missionaries and trusted converts would control economic and social matters, and the religious life of their followers.³⁹

In one respect, the Moravians’ Genadendal and the LMS’s Bethelsdorp—both founded within the Cape Colony and subject to its laws—were not typical of the stations to follow. Most missionaries would yearn to push beyond the colonial borders into areas under African authority, or under no stable authority at all. In the nineteenth century, most southern African regions passed through a long period of political turmoil, much of it the product of intense state-building and warfare among African nations (the so-called Mfecane) and of white colonial expansion into black-held territories. Many South African mission stations were first planted under the aegis of an African ruler, survived the period of confusion and warfare, and continued under colonial rule.

Missionaries of the Nonconformist tradition—like the London Missionary Society, the Scots Presbyterians, the (mostly Congregationalist) American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and the Paris Evangelicals—began their mission with no allegiance to a mission station model. Unlike the Moravians, they had no tradition, or, in the case of the American Congregationalists, no recent tradition, of religious settlements; they sought simply to convert individuals and nations, not to create new church-based social and political structures. Preferring to work under the patronage of African rulers, they distinguished, in the broad Calvinist tradition, the sphere of the church from the sphere of the state. The church, they believed, could challenge the state on moral issues but should not establish a parallel form of governance. They hoped, rather, to convert African rulers, who would, in turn, lead their followers into the church. The LMS had experienced this pattern after 1812 in its mission in Tahiti, which it had founded just before sending missionaries to South Africa.⁴⁰ If African rulers proved impervious to their preaching, Nonconformists would opt, as a second best, to build up congregations within the kingdom, encouraging converts to be loyal to their chiefs in secular, but not in sacred, matters. Apart from the Scots,⁴¹ these missionaries had no devotion to the concept of an established church.

African rulers, however, failed to grant the value of a distinction between secular and sacred, seeing only that missionaries were undercutting their authority by competing for the loyalties of their followers. Henry Calderwood of the LMS reported that the moment a Caffre [i.e., Xhosa] becomes a convert, he comes into direct opposition to the institution of his country. Circumstances occur almost every day in which he cannot obey his chief, or yield to the abominable customs in which very much of the chief’s influence exists. As one ruler had observed to Calderwood, When my people become Christians, they cease to be my people. Missionaries might ingratiate themselves with rulers by serving as counselors and diplomats, and might foster national unity by writing down a national language. Yet the missionaries’ Christian converts could pose serious problems if they refused to rally to the aid of their chiefs in times of conflict. Taboos imposed by missionaries on their converts frequently undercut a ruler’s ritual authority. Fissures were as intense among the Sotho-Tswana of the central highlands, whose rulers often cooperated with missionaries, as they were among the Zulu and Xhosa further east, whose chiefs were more often hostile.⁴²

The Nonconformist model did not require a mission station at all, only the freedom to preach (preferably in the national capital) and the right to build and control the use of churches. Most chiefs were interested in the technological and diplomatic skills of missionaries, but not in their spiritual message, which they feared might corrode traditional cultures. Mothibi of the Tlhaping resisted the missionaries’ desire to implant themselves at the center of his kingdom, preferring them to reside in outlying regions instead. Moshoeshoe of Lesotho located mission stations as part of a strategic