Norman Etherington

The realm of the Word : language, gender, and Christianity in a Southern African kingdom

Part One The centre of the kingdom: Kharma III and the word of God missionary labours - the struggle to master the church how the meaning of Thuto changed - status, literacy, cattle and nationalism. Part Two The periphery of the realm of the word: the body of Christians medicine, extraction and prayer the way, the truth and the light - how Christians spread the word interference in matters of belief - rape, closed spaces and colonial complicity the masters of the cattle are absent citizenship, identity and power in the village a realm of the word - conclusion and epilogue.

Natal's black rape scare of the 1870s

ABSTRACT For about four years at the end of the 1860s the white population of Natal was gripped by fear of black rape. The fear does not appear to have been engendered by any specific event, nor did it result in a marked increase of prosecutions for rape in the colonial courts. It ended as abruptly and mysteriously as it had begun. Stanley Cohens theory of ‘moral panics’ does not offer a particularly appropriate explanation for this rape scare, but it does suggest fruitful lines of investigation by pointing to the relation between anxiety and the desire of the dominant classes in any society to maintain control. The hypothesis advanced in this case study is that fear of losing control was a constant undercurrent in the thinking of the settler minority. This substratum of anxiety rose to the surface in the form of a moral panic whenever disturbances in the economy or the body politic were severe enough to unsettle the mask of composure worn by the face of public authority. In a patriarchal society where w...

Labour Supply and the Genesis of South African Confederation in the 1870's

Lord Carnarvons scheme for a South African Confederation in the 1870s owed much more than has been generally recognized to influences emanating from Natal. Large employers of African labour recognized in the 1860s that the local population could not provide a cheap stable workforce and that immigrant workers from the African interior would be increasingly important to the prosperity of the colony. Theophilus Shepstone, Natals Secretary for Native Affairs, used all the resources at his disposal to smooth the way for migrant labour. The development of diamond mining in Griqualand West and, to a lesser extent, gold mining in the Lydenburg district of the Transvaal diverted large numbers of African workers away from Natal and set off a frantic search for new sources of labour which underscored the importance of Mocambique and Central Africa as reservoirs of black labour. While planters, traders and officials in Natal worked to keep labour supply routes open between the Transvaal and Portuguese territory, officials in Griqualand West were recommending annexation of territories along the ‘missionary road’ in order to stop Transvaal Afrikaners from blocking labour supply routes from Central Africa. The revival of an active British campaign against the East African slave trade opened another potential source of African labour which Shepstones former border agent Frederic Elton tried to divert to Natal while serving first as an assistant to Sir Bartle Frere and John Kirk in Zanzibar, and later as British Consul in Mocambique. Shepstone arrived in London at a crucial point in the development of Carnarvons thinking on southern African affairs and impressed him with his lucid analysis of the interrelation of African administration, economic development and labour supply. Carnarvons plans for confederation reflected the advice which he was continously receiving from Shepstone and Elton. Their argument for confederation emphasized the essentially unitary nature of the developing southern African economy.

Recent Trends in the Historiography of Christianity in Southern Africa

During the last decade there has been a notable upsurge in publications about religion in African history. The trend is also noticeable in writing specifically concerned with Southern Africa though...

Indigenous Responses to Western Christianity

For over five hundred years, since the great age of exploration, Western Christians have visited, traded with, conquered and colonized large parts of the non-Western world. In virtually every case this contact has been accompanied by an attempt to spread Christianity. This volume explores the manner in which Western missionary Christianity has been shaped and transformed through contact with the peoples of Peru, Mexico, Africa, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, China, and Japan. Indigenous Responses to Western Christianity demonstrates how local populations, who initially encountered Christianity as a mixture of religion, culture, politics, ethics and technology, selected those elements they felt suited their needs. The conversion of the local population, the volume shows, was usually accompanied by a significant indigenization of Christianity. Through the detailed examination and comparison of events in a range of countries and cultures, this book points provides a deeper understanding of mission history and the dynamics of Christianitys expansion. The encounter with Western Christianity is vital to the history of contact between Western and non-Western civilizations. Western Christians have visited, traded with, conquered and colonized large parts of the non-Western world for over five hundred years, and their migration has almost always been accompanied by an attempt to create new Christians in new lands. Just as indigenous people have been converted however, so too has Christianity become variously indigenized. Local populations initially encounter a Christian package of religion, culture, politics, ethics and technology. This volume illustrates the ways in which peoples have selected elements of this package to suit their specific needs, and so explores the myriad transformations missionary Christianity has undergone through contact with the peoples of Peru, Mexico, Africa, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, China and Japan. Contributing are Erik Cohen (University of Jerusalem), Yochanan Bar Yafe Szeminski ?, John F. Howes ?, D. Dennis Hudson ?, Daniel H. Bays (University of Kansas), and Eric Van Young (University of California, San Diego). The chapters are linked by their attempt to overcome conventional regional and disciplinary barriers in order to achieve a deeper understanding of mission history and the dynamics of the expansion of Christianity. A remarkable work, this volume will pave the way for entirely new approaches to a particularly complex and demanding subject.

Missionaries and the Intellectual History of Africa: A Historical Survey

Historical studies of Christian missionaries in Africa have not prospered in recent years. The Journal of African History , which printed six articles on missionaries during the first ten years of its existence, has only printed two articles on the subject in the course of the last ten years. Only one book on missionaries has been published by a major university press in Britain or America since 1972. Very occasionally articles about missionaries appear in the International Journal of African Historical Studies and African Affairs but never in the Canadian Journal of African Studies or the Journal of Modern African Studies .

Preachers, peasants, and politics in southeast Africa, 1835-1880 : African Christian communities in Natal, Pondoland, and Zululand

This study focuses on the response to Christianity in southeast Africa - which witnessed the greatest missionary activity -and seeks to answer a few simple questions. Why did some Africans choose Christianity? Why did most Africans reject it? What kinds of people went to live at mission stations? How did life in African Christian communities differ from life in heathen communities? These and other issues are addressed through a comparative biographical study of the lives oftwo Qwabe cousins, Musi and Nembula, whose names and exploits were first recorded in the 1840s. Musi remained a heathen, established himself as a chief of the Qwabe, and was succeeded by his son who was deposed by white authorities in the aftermath of the Bambatha rebellion. Nembula was baptised; he became manager of a sugar mill and an ordained Congregational minister. Later, while Musis son awaited the mantle of Qwabe chieftainship, Nembulas son was completing studies at Chicago Medical College, eventually to return to Natal.

A False Emptiness: How Historians May Have Been Misled by Early Nineteenth Century Maps of South‐eastern Africa

Long‐standing historical debates on the alleged depopulation of parts of south‐eastern Africa in the period between 1820 and 1835 may well have been affected by the use of pre‐1850 maps, published before scientific surveys of the interior had been conducted. Much of the geographical and demographic information inscribed on the early maps was obtained from accounts of missionaries and casual travellers rather than from surveys. All the maps produced during those years appear to share a significant mistake by which the headwaters of the Limpopo River system are shown as rising about 130 to 150 kilometres east of where they ought to be. The result was the excision of territory containing significant African chiefdoms and tens of thousands of people. Boers proceeding on their Great Trek on to the South African highveld, British officials making policy and later historians appear to have made miscalculations based on these maps. Study of the early nineteenth‐century maps can also shed light on recent historical controversies about South Africas mfecane and the impact of the Indian Ocean slave trade on Africans of the highveld.

Mission Station Melting Pots as a Factor in the Rise of South African Black Nationalism

Since the publication of Roland Olivers The Missionary Factor in East Africa in 1952, secular historians have built up an impressive library of case studies on the impact of Christianity in Africa, a literature which pays tribute not only to the richness of missionary sources but also to their special usefulness. Insofar as the social history of Africa before 1900 can be written at all from documents, it must be based largely on the missionary record. Alone among the agents of Europe who shared the daily life of Africans, missionaries chronicled that life.l Furthermore, they were in a unique position to record certain kinds of dramatic social change. For many historians the most fascinating change associated with missionary activity has been the growth of African political elites committed to African nationalism. How is the high correlation between missionary training and secular leadership to be explained?2 Most of the available explanations emphasize the efficiency with which missionaries detached Africans from traditional societies and gave to these socially disoriented individuals an awareness of new

A tempest in a teapot? Nineteenth-century contests for land in South Africa's Caledon Valley and the invention of the Mfecane

The unresolved debate on the mfecane in southern African history has been marked by general acceptance of the proposition that large-scale loss of life and disruption of settled society was experienced across the whole region. Attempts to quantify either the violence or mortality have been stymied by a lack of evidence. What apparently reliable evidence does exist describes small districts, most notably the Caledon Valley. In contrast to Julian Cobbing, who called the mfecane an alibi for colonial-sponsored violence, this article argues that much documentation of conflict in the Caledon region consisted of various ‘alibis’ for African land seizures and claims in the 1840s and 1850s.