Mission Station Christianity Studies in Christian Mission
General Editor Heleen L. Murre-van den Berg, Leiden University
Editorial Board Peggy Brock, Edith Cowan University James Grayson, University of Sheffield David Maxwell, Keele University Mark R. Spindler, Leiden University
VOLUME 44
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/scm Mission Station Christianity
Norwegian Missionaries in Colonial Natal and Zululand, Southern Africa 1850–1890
By Ingie Hovland
LEIDEN • BOSTON 2013 Cover illustration: Woodcut of Umphumulo mission station, c. 1880. Printed in Norsk Missions- Tidende 1880:49. Reproduced with kind permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hovland, Ingie. Mission station Christianity : Norwegian missionaries in colonial Natal and Zululand, Southern Africa 1850-1890 / by Ingie Hovland. pages cm. -- (Studies in Christian mission, ISSN 0924-9389 ; VOLUME 44) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-25488-6 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Missions, Norwegian--South Africa--KwaZulu- Natal--History--19th century. 2. Missions, Norwegian--South Africa--Zululand--History-- 19th century. I. Title.
BV3625.S67H68 2013 266’.0234810684--dc23
2013026475
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List of Illustrations �����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ix Acknowledgments ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������xi
PART ONE INTRODUCTION
1. Theorizing the Missionary Experience: Christianity, Colonialism, and Spaces ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������3
PART TWO ON THE MISSION STATIONS
2. The First Mission Station: The Problem of Presence �������������������������������� 29 3. The Missionary Body: The Problem of Physicality ������������������������������������ 60 4. The Converts: The Problem of New Members �������������������������������������������� 85 5. Zulu Perceptions of the Mission Stations: The Problem of Intentions and Results �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������131 6. The Missionary Imagination: Spatial Christianization ��������������������������167
PART THREE CONCLUSION
7. The Anglo-Zulu War: Courting Empire �������������������������������������������������������201 8. Living Christianity: How Christianity Shaped Spaces and Spaces Shaped Christianity ����������������������������������������������������������������������������226
Bibliography �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������237 Index ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������251
1. Nils Landmark’s “Mission map of Zululand and Natal,” 1890. (NMS Archives) �����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������176 2. Woodcut of Entumeni mission station, c. 1865. (Printed in Sommerfelt 1865:329.) ������������������������������������������������������������������183 3. Watercolor of Umphumulo mission station, by Hans Christian Leisegang, 1866. (NMS Archives) ������������������������������������������������������������������� 184 4. Woodcut of Inhlazatshe mission station, c. 1884. (Printed in Norsk Missions-Tidende 1884:367.) ����������������������������������������������������������������� 184 5. Woodcut of Eshowe mission station, c. 1886. (Printed in Norsk Missions-Tidende 1886:72.) ������������������������������������������������������������������� 185
This book has taken on a life of its own and become something quite differ- ent from the original dissertation that I wrote under the supervision of J.D.Y. Peel. I would like to thank John, therefore, not only for our many long conversations at SOAS, but also for his friendly support and encourage- ment since then, which have been much appreciated. Thanks also to David Mosse, Richard Fardon, Harry West and Lola Martinez at SOAS for help and comments at various stages during the PhD years, and to my PhD examin- ers, Fenella Cannell and Peter Pels, for envisaging future directions for my work. I am particularly grateful to Fenella for introducing me to the anthro- pology of Christianity, seven years ago – a field that has exploded since then, and which I continue to find fascinating. Several other planned and unplanned encounters have provided oppor- tunities to discuss the nineteenth-century world of the missionaries and to share my enthusiasm for the archives. Torstein Jørgensen first pointed out to me the humanity of the early Norwegian missionary group of the 1850s. Karina Hestad Skeie thoughtfully read and commented (a long time ago) on a research paper on mission metaphors, even though she had never met me; then and since I have benefited from her insights on the genres at play in missionary accounts. An unexpected and pleasant meeting with Jeff Guy helped to clarify the missionaries’ roles during the Anglo-Zulu War. Kristin Fjelde Tjelle invited me to present a draft chapter from this manu- script at a research seminar at the School of Mission and Theology in Stavanger, and we discussed the missionary reorientations of the 1880s. In addition to Kristin, I would like to thank Roald Berg, Odd Magne Bakke, Gerd Marie Ådna and the other participants at the seminar for their con- structive questions. Kristin and Odd Magne also generously took the time to read another chapter each and send written comments, as did Tomas Sundnes Drønen. I would like to extend warm thanks to the staff at the wonderful NMS Archives, which are housed in the Mission Archives at the School of Mission and Theology in Stavanger. Special thanks to Bjørg Bergøy Johansen, Nils Kristian Høimyr, and Gustav Steensland. The images in this book are all used with permission from the Mission Archives, and were kindly provided in electronic form by Bjørg. The Center for Intercultural Communication and the School of Mission and Theology in Stavanger have both been very
INTRODUCTION
THEORIZING THE MISSIONARY EXPERIENCE: CHRISTIANITY, COLONIALISM, AND SPACES
Umphumulo is the most beautiful place I know. Not because of any par- ticular splendor, though the warm, hard-packed red earth, the hundreds of shades of encapsulating green, and the tall blue sky do something to your senses. I lived at Umphumulo in the late 1980s because my parents were missionaries for the Norwegian Mission Society (NMS),1 working at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Umphumulo in KwaZulu, one of the infamous “homelands” of apartheid South Africa. The Seminary was run by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Southern Africa, and the students, most of them black, were monitored by the apartheid government. At one point my father was ordered to leave the country by the government because of his work at Umphumulo. After diplomatic intervention the order was withdrawn, though for us it lingered in the air. Umphumulo was a contested space and had been for a long time – since around 1850, to be exact. In 1850 Umphumulo was set up as the first Norwegian Lutheran mission station in Southern Africa, with the aim of converting the surrounding peo- ple, whom the missionaries took to be Zulus. Its history, like that of the other Norwegian mission stations that were set up over the following decades, is filled with contradictions. The Christian faith tradition of NMS, which in the late 1980s was underlining that the gospel held a message of racial equality that directly contradicted apartheid, had a century earlier made an unresolved shift toward developing a theological justification for colonial overrule and racial inequality.
Two Concepts-Being-Worked-Out
In fact, two emphases – or perhaps more accurately two tensions, or two concepts-being-worked-out – are increasingly observable among the first
1 The official English name of the organization is now the Norwegian Mission Society (NMS), a literal translation of Det Norske Misjonsselskap. In the nineteenth century the mis- sionaries seem to have referred to the Society as the Norwegian Missionary Society when communicating in English, and I shall therefore use this name in the remainder of the book.
Norwegian missionaries in the British Colony of Natal and the neighboring kingdom of Zululand, on the eastern coast of Southern Africa, from around 1850–1890. First, while the missionaries in theory started out in agreement with an abstract idea of equality between all Christians, whether European or African, they ended up in practice developing patterns of interaction that facilitated European rule over African converts, and began talking about a theological justification for European political rule over African populations. Second, and again in theory, the missionaries agreed with the abstract idea that it would be desirable to travel among the Zulus in order to reach as many as possible with the gospel, but in practice they repeatedly affirmed a “station strategy” (Simensen with Børhaug et al. 1986:230), that is, a strategy of building up and residing at permanent, physical settlements on the African landscape, which they called “mission stations” (Missionsstationer). This book considers the connection between these two trends over the first few decades of the Norwegian mission. How did the missionaries and their Christian faith influence the way that they set up the mission station spaces? And, in turn, how did the act of inhabit- ing these particular spaces influence the missionaries’ Christianity? I hope to show some of the complexity of how Christianity can shape spaces in both concrete and conceptual ways, and how, conversely, physical and imagined spaces can have an effect on Christianity as it is practiced. Let me briefly flesh out each of the two concepts-being-worked-out in turn. Firstly, the Norwegian missionaries who arrived in Port Natal in the 1840s had been given instructions regarding their work that were based on abstract ideas about the fundamental equality of all Christians. In theory the mission held that anybody who converted to Christianity would join the Christian community on an equal footing. This early abstract idea con- tained, as Elizabeth Elbourne puts it, a “more potentially socially egalitarian message” (2002:101, orig. emph.). The missionaries’ instructions were to convert Zulus to Christianity, and then, as soon as possible, to ensure that the Zulus could set up and run a Zulu church. In the early days of NMS, in 1847, Andreas Hauge, the founder and editor of NMS’ mission maga- zine Norsk Missions-Tidende2 (literally, Norwegian Mission Tidings) sought to spell out this idea:
2 Copies of Norsk Missions-Tidende can be found in the NMS Archives, housed in the Mission Archives at the School of Mission and Theology (Stavanger, Norway), as well as at Harvard and Yale. An almost complete run of the magazine from 1847–1906 is available online through the Harvard Library website. All articles in Norsk Missions-Tidende were writ- ten in Norwegian, and most translations here are my own; at times I have also benefited
But, is it not so that history has proved it impossible to establish an indepen- dent church among heathen peoples? We should say not! And as proof thereof it should be sufficient to point to our own Christian churches [in Norway], which are indeed independent, and became so without being sup- ported by some foreign mission for any long period […] In addition, the wild peoples of Australia also manifest what Christianity has the power to effect when the hearts of people are taken by it. Even among the West-Indian negroes, one independent church rises after the other. And how many could there not have been if Europeans had not believed European culture to be necessary for a Hottentot or a Greenland-pastor? […] The principal occu- pation of our missionaries is plainly to walk about with the message of salva- tion in Christ, baptize as many as let themselves be persuaded to believe, and then in every place install some of these who are found able as elders and pastors.3 The same line of thought was evident in the set of instructions that the Board of the Norwegian Missionary Society drew up for the first missionar- ies. They were told “as soon as possible to seek to educate some children so that they can be […] your future fellow-laborers.”4 And the strategy of work- ing toward an indigenous and independent church, in which African Christians held authority, was reiterated: As the object of mission is to transplant the church of God, the missionary shall, once a few have been baptized, as soon as possible organize a congrega- tion among them according to the apostolic pattern and care for its preserva- tion and growth. For this purpose he shall also seek to train African converts as pastors and national assistants, and he shall encourage the congregation in general […] to contribute to its subsistence and propagation.5 In practice, however, the Norwegian missionaries found that conversions to Christianity turned out to be painfully few and far between, and, as we shall see, they struggled with the question of how exactly to relate to those Africans who did convert. In fact, the Norwegians avoided ordaining any Christian African as a pastor until 1893, over forty years after the first mission station Umphumulo had been set up in 1850. By this time the male Norwegian missionaries had firmly established their authority over the African converts who lived on their mission stations. As a group, the Norwegians also developed a closer – if problematic – engagement with
from Torstein Jørgensen’s (1990) translations. In 1883 the spelling of the magazine’s name was changed from Norsk Missions-Tidende to Norsk Missionstidende; I shall consistently use Norsk Missions-Tidende for ease of reference. 3 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1847/48:3–4. 4 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1851/52:168. 5 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1851/52:190.
6 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1847/48:4. 7 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1863:284. 8 NMS Archives, “Referat fra konferansen på Eshowe 13.-22. juni 1881” (Minutes from the missionary conference, 1881); cited in Myklebust (1949:92).
they had all, without exception, chosen to concentrate primarily on the work on their mission stations – partially in contravention of requests from their home boards to reach further out (Etherington 1978). This focus on a station strategy included nurturing small resident communities of converts on the stations, which were set somewhat apart from local society. What could account for this trend? Why did the missionaries in practice feel so “stationary” – so tied to their stations? What effect did this have on them and on their Christianity? And what consequences did this have for their relationship with the converts and, more generally, with the people they knew as the Zulus? I will argue that these two developments among the Norwegian mission- aries from around 1850–1890 were related: on the one hand, their deepen- ing dependence on and commitment to Christianized spaces, and on the other, their growing tendency to take on a role of divinely sanctioned authority in relation to growing numbers of Africans. Both these processes were gendered and racialized. By the 1880s, everyday life within the differ- entiated space of the mission station, where white, male authority was partly taken for granted and partly actively established, made it possible for the majority of the Norwegian male missionaries to argue that British mili- tary invasion and overrule of Zululand was theologically justifiable. The fact that this had become a possibility for them does not mean that it necessarily had to happen. The most obvious counter-example is the alternative response of the Anglican missionary Bishop John Colenso in Natal (Guy 1983), who vocally criticized the British agenda in the Anglo-Zulu War, and who shows that other responses were possible. The Norwegian missionary Bishop Hans Schreuder was also at least partly criti- cal of the war, as will be discussed further below. This study of the Norwegian missionaries from around 1850–1890 does not show, therefore, that their overall shift toward a Christianity that supported a military invasion of Zululand and thoroughgoing devastation of Zulu ways of life was inevita- ble. But it shows how this shift in emphasis had been prepared and become thinkable for the majority of them over the preceding three decades on the mission stations. As Peter Pels (1997:171) notes in his overview of the anthro- pology of colonialism, “even a single blow requires cultural preparations.”
Scholarship on Christian Mission in Nineteenth-Century Southern Africa
There is a sophisticated and growing body of scholarship on Christian mis- sion in nineteenth-century Southern Africa that contributes to an under- standing of the dynamics that have shaped South African Christianity and
9 There is a large body of work on nineteenth-century mission in Southern Africa. Some excellent sources are the studies by the Comaroffs (1991, 1997), Elbourne (2002), Etherington (1978), and Landau (1995). See also the edited collections by Bredekamp and Ross (1995b), Elphick and Davenport (1997), and Jeannerat, Kirkaldy and Ross (2009), as well as the litera- ture listed in footnotes 10 and 14 below. 10 Norman Etherington (1996:218) noted this lack in the mid-1990s; Etherington has him- self made efforts to include sources from non-Anglophone missions in his work (Etherington 1978). Since then a number of studies on Swiss, German and Scandinavian missions have been published, e.g. Harries (2007), Keegan (2004), Kirkaldy (2005), Rüther (2001), and the literature cited in footnote 14 below. 11 Myklebust also wrote the section on South Africa for the official NMS centennial his- tory (Myklebust 1949), as well as a number of articles on mission, e.g. Myklebust (1977). 12 Both Simensen and Jørgensen have also published journal articles that sum up some of their key arguments (Jørgensen 1985, Simensen 1986b), and Simensen, who acted as one of Jørgensen’s doctoral examiners, has published his extended examiner’s review of Jørgensen’s dissertation (Simensen 1988). Torstein Jørgensen has also authored the chapter on NMS’ first hundred years for the organization’s official 150-year history (Jørgensen 1992), a book chap- ter on Zulu responses to the Norwegian missionaries (Jørgensen 2002a), and a book chapter on one of the early Zulu converts (Jørgensen 2002b).
that mission, as he says in the preface to the Norwegian volume, was “also something other and far more” than Christian preaching (Simensen 1984b:5). He pays attention to processes of exchange and political implica- tions, choosing to rely mainly on Fredrik Barth’s (1966) transaction theory as a conceptual framework (which, as I shall argue in chapter 5, proves rather limiting when trying to understand mission stations).13 Jørgensen, on the other hand, approaches his study of the missionaries with the explicit aim of looking at the “process of mission by which Christian reli- gion was transmitted from the one party to the other” (Jørgensen 1990:9), and he details the missionaries’ theological understandings, how they tried to convey these to the Zulus, and the various Zulu responses they encoun- tered. Jørgensen’s book is replete with citations and examples from the writings of the missionaries, and he has organized this wealth of informa- tion into categories. His book deals with the period 1850–1873 and thus stops short of analyzing the missionaries’ religious understandings as expressed in the build-up to the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 and its aftermath. Nevertheless, both Jørgensen and Simensen have something to contribute, and I shall draw on and engage with their work throughout the text.14
13 The edited volume (Simensen 1986a) consists of four chapters. The first, on the social and religious background of the Norwegian missionaries (Simensen with Gynnild 1986), and the chapter on the missionaries’ – especially Hans Schreuder’s – political actions and shifts (Hernæs 1986), are both clear and interesting. The chapter by Charles Ballard (1986) on Zulu historical background is insightful. Chapter 4, “Christian missions and socio-cultural change in Zululand 1850–1906: Norwegian strategy and African response” (Simensen with Børhaug et al. 1986), which builds on three separate Masters theses, is unfortunately marred by sev- eral factual errors and the conclusions appear weaker. This has also been pointed out in a couple of the reviews of the book, e.g. Lidwien Kapteijns and Jay Spaulding’s assessment that the chapter demonstrates “the book’s authors’ relative unfamiliarity with Zulu society and religion” (1992:280, quoted in Dannevig 2008:58), and Kristoffer Dannevig’s (2008) related conclusion that the religious life of the Zulus is largely overlooked, as well as his observation that their chapter includes numerous citation and referencing errors. While I have not attempted to compile an exhaustive list of errors and misrepresentations in their chapter, I will mention some of the most significant mistakes in footnotes in the chap- ters below. For other reviews, which are on the whole positive, see e.g. Etherington (1988), Porter (1988), and Ross (1992). 14 Further published academic work on nineteenth-century Norwegian mission in Southern Africa includes Nils E. Bloch-Hoell’s (1982) chapter defending the morality of the Norwegian missionaries; Frederick Hale’s (1997) translation of a selection of nineteenth- century Norwegian missionary letters from Natal and Zululand; Knut Holter’s (2009) article on the role of reading; Thor Halvor Hovland’s (2002a, 2002b) articles on some of the theological differences between Hans Schreuder and Lars Dahle; Hege Roaldset’s (2010) observations on the Norwegian mission’s interaction with Zulu congregants from around 1879–1940; and Kristin Fjelde Tjelle’s (2010b, 2011, and forthcoming) research on missionary masculinity from around 1870–1930, as well as her work on missionary children (2010a). For studies of Norwegian mission in Southern Africa around the turn of the century and into
More widely, there is lively scholarly debate within the field of schol arship that surrounds European and American Christian missions in nineteenth-century Southern Africa, as demonstrated by a number of book reviews, eager “replies” and comments.15 I shall engage with these debates in the chapters that follow; for now, let me simply make note of one point. Until recently, most of this work explored the impact that the encounter between the missionaries and the “missionized” had on the latter. The impact of the encounter on the missionaries themselves was less often a primary focus. Recently a number of interesting studies have accorded more space to theorizing the missionary experience – or, more accurately, missionary experiences – in nineteenth-century Southern Africa.16 One of the contributions of the present study to the debate, therefore, will be to add to this line of inquiry and to offer a theoretically informed analysis of missionary experiences, focusing particularly on how the majority of the Norwegian missionaries were “made” into cheerleaders of Empire. I wish to show how a deeper and more detailed understanding of the missionaries themselves, and the spaces that they constructed, can help us to under- stand their encounter with others and the ambiguous role that they came to play in the history of South Africa.
The Norwegian Missionary Society
The Norwegian Missionary Society largely sprang out of a particular type of Lutheran Evangelical Christianity with a pietistic bent, set in motion by the Evangelical revivals.17 The Evangelical revivals were, in brief, a series of waves of upheaval and renewal that swept across the Protestant populations of Europe and North America over a period of more than two
the twentieth century, see e.g. Bakke (2010, 2012a, 2012b), Hale (1998, 2000, 2011), and Mellemsether (2001a, 2001b, 2003). For studies of the Norwegian mission in Madagascar, active from 1866, see e.g. Fuglestad and Simensen (1986), Predelli (2000, 2003a, 2003b), and Skeie (1999, 2001, 2009, 2013). 15 To gain a flavor of some of this debate, see e.g. the Comaroffs (1997:36–53, 2001), Crais (1994), Elbourne (2003), Erlank (2005), Etherington (1996), Landau (2000), Peel (1995), and Ranger (2001). 16 See e.g. Gaitskell (2003), Harries (2007), Price (2008), Skeie (2013), Tjelle (forthcoming). 17 I will only present a brief summary here of the nineteenth-century mission move- ment in Norway and the background of the Norwegian Missionary Society. For more detailed presentations, see e.g. Berg (2010), Jørgensen (1990:63–93, 1992), Mikaelsson (2003:37–94), Nome (1942, 1943a), Simensen with Gynnild (1986), and Skeie (2013:17–36).
centuries – from the eighteenth century, through the nineteenth, and into the beginning of the twentieth. In North America they are referred to as a series of “Great Awakenings.” It is fitting that these religious waves, which had such a rebellious and independent feel to them, are quite difficult to pin down, though they are commonly traced back to the Pietists in Germany in the late seventeenth century (Ward 1992). The Pietists were concerned with revitalizing the spiritual life of the church, and they gave prominence to the idea of the “new birth,” that is, an “inner conversion,” which they held made one a “new person” in Christ. The Pietist movement also aimed for social renewal, and established orphan houses, dispensaries, schools, and printing presses. As this revitalizing spirit spread, it took on many different forms and new organizational names – it gave rise, for example, to the Methodists, the Congregationalists, and the Baptists, amongst others. While the Evangelical revivals encompassed a wide range of groups and innumerable aims and sentiments, and continued over a long period of time, many of these diverse groups can be seen to hold some core ideals in common. David Bebbington summarizes these core characteristics as: conversionism, the belief that lives need to be changed; activism, the expres- sion of the gospel in effort; biblicism, a particular regard for the Bible; and what may be called crucicentrism, a stress on the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. (Bebbington 1989:2–3, orig. emph.) The importance placed on conversion extended not just to others but also to oneself. Most Evangelicals emphasized the importance of a personal experience of conversion, which was thought of as “being saved.” In many places – including on the southern and western coasts of Norway – the revivals were deeply influenced by the original pietistic sentiments, which placed special importance on sincerity, on rigorous self-examination of the state of one’s “heart,” and on one’s personal relationship with God. Groups inspired by the revivals often held meetings outside the formal structure of a church, including open-air camp-meetings and meetings in private homes. Since most of them emphasized and encouraged evangelism, that is, the act of sharing their religious belief with non-believers, many of them organized charitable collections at their meetings in order to raise funds for mission, both within their own countries and overseas. On the southern and western coasts of Norway there were especially two Evangelical revivalist groups that started engaging with the idea of Christian mission overseas: the Moravians and the Haugeans (Nome 1942). Moravian Christianity had spread from Germany northwards to Norway in the early nineteenth century. Although there were not many Moravians in Norway,
18 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1888:358, “Referat af Forhandlingerne paa Generalforsamlingen i Kristiansand fra 5.-8. juli 1888.”
they were taught geography, world history, church and mission history, the Old and New Testaments, systematic theology, and Norwegian, English and German (Nome 1943a:119–20, 137). They practiced preaching in mission groups. After around five years of study, they were deemed ready to join Hans Schreuder in the mission field. They arrived in Port Natal in October 1849. Lars Larsen traveled with his wife, Martha (née Thommesen), while Tobias Udland and Ommund Oftebro’s fiancées, Guri Messing and Guri Hogstad, were not allowed by the Board to join them in Africa until 1852.19 Over the first half century of its existence, up until 1892, the Norwegian Missionary Society sent 35 male missionaries and male mission assistants to Natal and Zululand, the majority of whom had been educated at the Mission School in Stavanger. Twenty-nine of these men were married when they began or at some time during their missionary service in Natal or Zululand (two were married twice during their time of service), making a total number of 31 “missionary wives” during this period. In addition, NMS sent a total of 10 unmarried female mission assistants before 1892; nine of these were sent in the decade after the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, mainly as teachers or matrons for the Norwegian missionary children, or as nurse-midwives.20 During NMS’ first half century, the NMS missionaries established four- teen mission stations in Southern Africa. Four of these were in colonial Natal: Umphumulo (1850), Esinyamboti (1886), Eotimati (1886), and a sta- tion in Durban (1890). Ten were in Zululand: Empangeni (1851), Entumeni (1852), Mahlabathini (1860), Eshowe (1861), Inhlazatshe (1862), Imfule (1865), Umbonambi (1869), Ekutembeni (1869) – which was subsequently moved to Emzinyati (1870) and then to Ekombe (1880), Kwahlabisa (1871) and Ungoye (1881). Following Hans Schreuder’s break with NMS in 1873, the new Schreuder Mission kept the Entumeni mission station in Zululand,
19 Throughout the text I have sought to avoid the common practice of referring to male missionaries by their surname only (e.g. Oftebro, Larsen), since this serves to continue the historical precedent of giving primary status to the men on the mission stations (which will be discussed further in chapter 4). By referring to the male missionaries by their surnames only, e.g. Larsen, the invisibility of the other Larsen on the station, namely his wife Martha Larsen, is reiterated. I shall therefore follow Amanda Porterfield’s (1997) practice of referring to both male and female personnel by first and last names, or first names only when this is clear. 20 NMS Archives, “List of Norwegian missionaries working for the Norwegian Missionary Society (NMS) in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa” (available at http://www.mhs.no/uploads/ List_NMS-missionaries_SouthAfrica.pdf). See also the appendix in Tjelle (2011:264–72), which provides a list of all NMS missionaries in Zululand and Natal until 1930.
The Anthropology of Christianity
My study of these Norwegian missionaries and their mission stations will largely take an anthropological approach. In order to examine what this means when looking at a Christian group on the colonial frontier, let me start with a point of debate. Joel Robbins (2007) has argued that Jean and John Comaroffs’ (1991, 1997) study of nineteenth-century British missionar- ies to the Tswana in Southern Africa has consistently downplayed the importance of Christianity as a system of meanings and behaviors. Fenella Cannell (2006a:11–12) includes a similar observation about the Comaroffs’ work in her discussion of why Christianity is still largely an “occluded object” in cultural or social anthropology (cf. also Elbourne 2003:452). In short, the Comaroffs’ focus is on how the encounter between missionaries and Tswana meshed with the historical dynamics of colonialism and modernity. I tend to think that the Comaroffs probably did not intend to examine Christianity in particular in these volumes, which are already exceptionally rich and readable, and therefore should not necessarily be held accountable for this lack (a point that Robbins also makes in his critique, 2007:9). But I do agree with Robbins and Cannell that the Comaroffs’ study alerts us to a wider anthropological tendency to ignore or downplay Christianity as a subject of study. I read the critiques as calls for further work that would complement the approach of the Comaroffs, and my study therefore falls within the emerging field of the anthropology of Christianity. Viewing Christianity through an anthropological lens raises the initial question: If cultural or social anthropology primarily engages with the amorphous stuff glossed as “culture,” is Christianity “cultural” (cf. Robbins 2007)? This question may be understood in different ways. One way has been captured succinctly by Andrew Buckser and Stephen Glazier: In many religious traditions, conversion marks the time when the hand of the divine is most plainly visible; conversion narratives overflow with expres- sions of supernatural agency, in which the individual feels guided, or coerced, or enraptured by a divine presence […] To suggest – as anthropologists do – that even this moment owes something of its shape to cultural systems is to intrude culture into the very core of the religious experience. (Buckser and Glazier 2003:xii)
I agree with Buckser and Glazier’s underlying concern here, namely that we need to find a way, as anthropologists (or historians), to take religion seri- ously on its own terms rather than rewriting it. I would hesitate, however, to draw as clear a distinction as them between culture and religious experi- ence, even from the perspective of believers. It seems most helpful to me to think of “Christianity,” like “religion,” as a polythetic concept: it is made up of a cluster of interrelated themes or strands, and each version of Christianity has a selected bundle of these strands (Southwold 1978:369). Christianity, like other religious traditions, is understood, experienced and expressed in different cultural settings, and examining these different cultural expres- sions leads to a deeper understanding of the extraordinary multitude of Christian experiences. When I discuss how the missionaries’ Christianity became intertwined with material forms and spaces, this does not imply that their religion is “reduced” to culture, but rather that their religion, as any other, was mediated through culturally shaped forms. Was it also something more? That is, did their religious faith ultimately connect to a God who exists independently of human cultural forms? In this study I will hold to a stance of methodological agnosticism,21 sug- gesting that the Christian God may or may not also exist beyond human culture, but that the missionaries’ God was fashioned (and re-fashioned) in interaction with the cultural forms around them. This is not meant to reduce, in Carl Jung’s words, “the Christian mystery” (Jung 1999:105): I am always coming up against the misunderstanding that a psychological treatment or explanation reduces God to “nothing but” psychology. It is not a question of God at all, but of man’s [and woman’s] ideas of God, as I have repeatedly emphasized. (Jung 1999:117 n11) In considering the missionaries’ ideas of God, it is also necessary to under- line the ever-present possibility of change, and that one’s perception of God can be broadened, stretched, revised, transformed, rejected, forgotten, remembered, and so on, in life. In other words, the various cultural forms around the missionaries did not pre-determine their image of God, but rather assisted them in forming various (and changing) images of God. In fact, it quickly becomes obvious that in the case of the Norwegian mis- sionaries, one of the problems they encountered was precisely how to hold
21 I would like to thank Fenella Cannell for first discussing the topic of “methodological agnosticism” with me. For further discussion see e.g. Russell McCutcheon’s introduction to the topic (McCutcheon 1999a) and his selection of articles (McCutcheon 1999b).
The Missionaries in a Colonial Context
The terms “colonial” and “colonialism” cover a range of historical and social phenomena that are etched in a spectrum of hard political realities, differ- ent forms of violence, overrule, and economic exploitation, as well as in diffuse processes of cultural encounter, imposed social roles and defini- tions, moral justifications and debates (for a good discussion, see the
22 For a few good starting points and overviews of this field, see e.g. the contributions to the edited collections of Bandak and Jørgensen (2012), Cannell (2006b), and Engelke and Tomlinson (2006), as well as Cannell (2005), Hann (2007), Lampe (2010), McDougall (2009), Robbins (2003, 2004b), and Scott (2005).
Comaroffs’ seven propositions on colonialism; Comaroffs 1997:19–29). Any process of colonialism – such as the one in nineteenth-century Southern Africa – is never fully coherent, but rather enacted through disparate sets of institutions and events, even self-contradictory gestures (Comaroff 1989). I am particularly interested in how colonialism, as Timothy Mitchell (1991:ix) has said, “inscrib[es] in the social world a new conception of space, new forms of personhood, and a new means of manufacturing the real”; at the same time as the new conception of space – or the various new conceptions – remain contested and never fully determined. The nineteenth-century Norwegian missionaries operated on both sides of the border between the Colony of Natal, a British colony from 1843, and the neighboring sovereign Zulu kingdom, which was conquered by the British military in 1879 and formally annexed as a British protectorate in 1887. By paying attention to how the missionaries gradually took on a Christianity that tacitly and openly lent support to some central elements of the uneven process of colonialism unfolding around them, it is possible to examine how heterogenous the make-up of colonial rule and societies was.23 The Norwegian missionaries are an intriguing case in this respect. One might assume that they would act somewhat differently from the British, German, French or American missionaries, since they did not come from a nation with colonial or expansionist aspirations. In fact, Norway was itself in forced political union with Sweden from 1814–1905, and did not have any leeway to formulate its own foreign policy. Yet it seems that despite this, or perhaps because of it, Norwegian missionaries actively sought their place among the dominant colonizing groups on the colonial frontier in Southern Africa. While missionaries in general stood low in the hierarchy within the white colonizing groups and could be characterized as being a “dominated fraction of the dominant class” (Comaroff 1989:663, citing Bourdieu 1984:421), the Norwegian missionaries in particular occupied an even more nebulous position. They did not share a common language with the colonial officials in Natal, as the American and British missionaries did. Although Hans Schreuder seems to have written elegantly in English, this was certainly not true of all the Norwegian missionaries. They also had markedly less money at their disposal than other mission societies, and in
23 Some of the studies I have drawn on in this area include the Comaroffs (1991, 1997), Comaroff (1998), Cooper and Stoler (1997), Dirks (1992), Mitchell (1991), Pels (1997), Stoler (1995, 2002), and Thomas (1994).
Natal and Zululand they were subtly marginalized by other whites who apparently referred to them as “the poor Norwegians” right up until the 1880s (Myklebust 1949:97). The Norwegians mainly established themselves as frontier missionaries who had to “rough it” far from European colonial settlements. This was combined with their relative lack of financial funds. For example, while Hans Schreuder spent £150 on the household at the first Norwegian mission station Umphumulo over the first 12 months, and his colleagues Ommund Oftebro and Lars and Martha Larsen spent a total amount of £102 at Umphumulo over a 15-month period in 1853–54,24 the British Bishop John Colenso of SPG (the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts) spent an average of over £1,500 per year for the first seven years at his station Bishopstowe in Natal in the late 1850s and early 1860s (Guy 1983:79). This relative lack of money meant that the Norwegian missionaries’ standard of housing, furnishings, clothing, eating and general living condi- tions was at times met with thinly veiled ridicule from other whites. In 1875, Hans Schreuder was referred to as “Old Schroeder who is really more than half a Kaffir” by the high-ranking British army officer Sir Garnet Wolseley, then Governor of Natal (Preston 1971:223).25 The Norwegians noticed the pressure surrounding their lack of means in relation to the Zulu royal court as well. In the early 1860s, the Norwegian missionary Jan Kielland at the station Empangeni complained that the Norwegians needed to give more costly gifts to the Zulu royal family than they might be inclined to, because “we have the British [missionaries] very near here, and they are people who do not usually come with trifles when paying their respects to the big men of the country.”26 In some ways the Norwegian missionaries were part of the derided col- lection of “poor whites” that was present in colonial societies. As Ann Laura Stoler has argued, Colonial cultures were never direct translations of European society planted in the colonies, but unique cultural configurations, homespun creations in which European food, dress, housing, and morality were given new political meanings in the particular social order of colonial rule. (Stoler 2002:24)
24 NMS Archives, HA, Box 130, Jacket 4, Lars Larsen to the Board, May 8, 1854. The unpub- lished documents that have been consulted from the NMS Archives are in Norwegian and all translations into English are my own. 25 The term “kaffir” was used by settlers and colonials in nineteenth-century Southern Africa to refer to black people, and came to hold a derogatory insinuation. 26 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1863:207.
Within these shifting configurations, “poor whites” served both to define and threaten the boundaries of (white, male) colonial rule and control (Stoler 2002:34–8). The Norwegian missionaries, who were white but poor, European but not from a colonial power, Christian but “half-Kaffir,” occu- pied an ambiguous role on the colonial frontier, whether in the hinterland of the British Colony of Natal or across the border in Zululand. The above characteristics of the Norwegian missionaries’ ambiguous status might seem to favor a negotiated non-involvement in British colo- nial politics, or a certain distancing from imperialist ambitions. Yet the Norwegians had by the 1880s not only become involved in colonial politics, they had even developed a theological justification for the breakdown and white overrule of Zulu society. They had also become caught up in the colo- nial question of land, and its fraught relationship to race, through their insistence on (white, male) missionary rule over mission stations, includ- ing the African communities resident on these stations. These dynamics tell us much about the lure of involvement, and about how diverse groups of colonizers were “made.” As the Comaroffs have outlined, drawing on Jean-Paul Sartre, one of the defining dimensions of colonialism is its instil- ment of colonial roles, so that certain people come to re-cognize them- selves as “natives” (Comaroffs 1997:19, citing Sartre 1955:215). For my study, I am particularly concerned with the perceived opposite, the parallel pro- cess of how other people – such as the Norwegian missionaries – came to re-cognize themselves as having the right to rule, as being higher up in the colonial hierarchy, as being aligned with the colonizers rather than with the colonized (cf. Comaroffs 1997:19, 25), and as being “defenders of empire” (Stoler 2002:40). I am also concerned with a second theme in relation to the study of colo- nialism, namely the theme of “epistemic murk,” which I shall return to in chapter 7. The term “epistemic murk” has been used by Michael Taussig (1984) and Ann Laura Stoler (1992) to denote the interplay of rumor, hear- say and conjectures, uncertain observations and changing interpretations that constituted the cultural knowledge of colonizing populations in the colonies or on the colonial frontier, as they sought to make sense of actions around them and gauged how to respond. For this study, I shall argue, an understanding of this “epistemic murk” helps to shed some light on the issue of why there are such deep disjunctures between the Norwegian mis- sionaries’ intentions and the consequences of their practices. It points toward how policies and actions within a colonial context are fashioned in a context of incoherent knowledges. Specifically, it provides us with a case
Spaces that Take Hold
The heading “spaces that take hold” takes its cue from Terence Ranger’s (1987) article “Taking hold of the land: Holy places and pilgrimages in twentieth-century Zimbabwe.” Ranger examines how Christian mission aries in what is today Zimbabwe wished to “take hold” of the African landscape by defining Christian sacred sites, mission bases, pilgrimage routes, and so on – often in close interaction with surrounding Shona notions of sacred places and of how people and land stood in relation to each other. The missionaries’ symbolic and ritual endeavors in this regard were picked up by African evangelists and teachers of the mission, who found that they could draw authority from the ways in which Christianity could take hold of the land. Land, religion, power and people became entwined in ways that drew on traditional models, but were also new. In this study, I wish to draw up a complementary argument. I will also look at how the Norwegian missionaries, a bit further south, sought to “take hold” of the land, particularly certain plots of land, among the Zulus. But I will then turn to the question of how the plots of land that they had taken hold of – the mission stations – soon came to “take hold” of them. I will argue that the spaces that they carefully fashioned, in turn came to fashion them – and their Christianity. One of the themes in this study is therefore the construction, perception and use of space, and how the set- ting up of spaces is shaped by and in turn gives shape to human ideas, expe- rience and practice, including religious practice. I am interested in the social and material microcosm of the mission sta- tion space. This was the place where the missionaries lived, farmed, and held reading classes and Sunday services – and where in due course resi- dent communities of employees, converts, and visiting patients and refu- gees also became established. The domestic microcosm has been important more broadly in Southern African history. As the editors of the first volume of The Cambridge History of South Africa note, speaking of gender relations (and attendant social ideology) in the homesteads of the African pastoral- ists and the farms of the colonists, “[i]t is perhaps in the story of its domes- tic arrangements that South African history has been most conservative” (Hamilton, Mbenga and Ross 2010:xvi). Paul Landau too points out the
importance of the homestead structure among southern Bantu-speaking groups, which was based on a central cattle enclosure surrounded by arranged huts (the “Central Cattle Pattern”; Hall 2010), and he argues that “[t]he political history of early South Africa can be understood as a group of variations on what Jan Vansina calls ‘the house’” (Landau 2010a:395, cf. e.g. Vansina 1990, see also Kuper 1993). Similarly, Robert Ross suggests, based on his research on the Boers who trekked away from the Cape, that “there are good reasons to argue that both the continual expansion of the Trek boers toward the northeast and the brutality this entailed related to the microeconomics of the farming households” (Ross 2010:201). Despite this interest in the importance of domestic spaces in Southern African history in general, little sustained attention has been paid to the microcosm of the missionaries’ households, namely the mission stations (though for interest- ing exceptions see the Comaroffs 1997:274–322, MacKenzie 2003, Ranger 1987 and 1993, Sales 1975). A focus on these microcosms can speak to and illuminate broad themes, as I hope to show in the following chapters. My focus on the spaces created by the missionaries echoes the signifi- cance accorded to spaces in cultural and social anthropology.27 Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson note that: The idea that space is made meaningful is, of course, a familiar one to anthro- pologists; indeed, there is hardly an older or better established anthropologi- cal truth. East or west, inside or outside, left or right, mound or floodplain […] The more urgent task would seem to be to politicize this uncontestable observation. With meaning-making understood as a practice, how are spatial meanings established? (Gupta and Ferguson 1997a:40) Gupta and Ferguson develop this line of thought further by arguing that a closer examination of spaces leads – not to an examination of the cul- tural differences that exist in different spaces – but to an exploration of how cultural differences are produced and how they come to be spa- tially mapped (Gupta and Ferguson 1997a:43). The mission stations in nineteenth-century Natal and Zululand lend themselves well to this kind of analysis. Drawing on different theoretical perspectives on space, I will argue that there are many connections between the “different space” that the missionaries managed to create on their stations and their increasing emphasis on a Christianity that was more closely aligned with colonialism,
27 For a good overview, see Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga (2003b).
History in the Ethnographic Grain
In my approach to the historical sources I have drawn on Jean and John Comaroff and Ann Laura Stoler’s discussions of what it means to do “eth- nography in the archives” (Comaroffs 1992:11, Stoler 2009:31, cf. Des Chene 1997). The Comaroffs cite the cultural historian Robert Darnton (1985:3), who says that he does “history in the ethnographic grain.” In similar vein I take anthropological history to be primarily about maintaining a certain analytical stance – one that might be recognized as “ethnographic” – while using tools, materials and perspectives that are usually associated with the historian. An ethnographic stance may sometimes involve, amongst many
other things, trying to see things “from the native’s point of view” (Geertz 1999), paying attention to details of the everyday, thinking about what objects and actions mean to different people as well as how contestations over meaning are acted out, and being aware that meanings and customs can mask power. The historian’s materials, tools and perspectives might include, for example, sifting through and assessing archival sources, read- ing documents carefully and closely, attempting to imagine the past, being willing to be surprised by past thoughts and actions and acknowledging that they do not necessarily fit with our present assumptions, and paying attention to both streams of continuity and significant changes over time. For both the historian and the ethnographer it is usually considered impor- tant to be willing to engage with sources in their complexity. This might mean resisting the impulse to paper over inconsistencies or internal contradictions, and instead explore what the sources might be saying even in all their “messiness,” an inevitable aspect of studying human social life. There are some further and more detailed methodological questions that need to be addressed, including questions related to the acts of reading and interpreting the missionary letters as historical texts, or the complex relationship between persons and processes in historical accounts. But rather than going into detail on these issues here, I have addressed them in brief sections throughout the book. In this way they speak more immedi- ately to the interpretive questions at hand in each chapter. Each of these sections is prefaced with “A note on method”: “Persons and processes” in chapter 2; “Reading the missionary letters” in chapter 3; “Silences in the sources,” “Reading against the grain,” and “Problematizing historical pro- cesses” in chapter 4; “Interpreting binary metaphors” and “Reading mis- sion images” in chapter 6; and “ ‘Front stage’ and ‘back stage’ narratives” in chapter 7. For now, let me merely go into a little more detail on one methodologi- cal question: Should researchers describe what the missionaries said and apparently believed they were doing, or what they seem retrospectively, and through a different conceptual lens, to be doing? A related question con- cerns how researchers should approach the disjuncture between mission- ary ideals, intentions, actions, and consequences. These do not, of course, add up perfectly in any life. Yet during the first decades of the Norwegian mission in Natal and Zululand, the missionaries’ overall apparent inability to bring about their intentions, and the irony of many of the unanticipated outcomes of their actions – as detailed in the following chapters – seem especially strong. This was also true of other mission societies.
I have attempted to respond to this methodological concern by drawing on the ethnographic injunction to oscillate between experience-near and experience-distant descriptions, that is, between emic and etic perspec- tives (Geertz 1999). The text shifts between describing events and view- points “near” to the missionaries’ experience, and descriptions of other contemporary processes or perspectives – related, for example, to the colo- nial state or Zulu perceptions – that the missionaries might regard as more “distant” from their own experience. The text might then tack forward to perspectives offered by current historical interpretations, or relevant theo- retical arguments. This means that the scholarly text that is produced is not something that the missionaries themselves would have written. Instead, the resulting text moves between different viewpoints, including the different viewpoints of the Norwegian missionaries, of the people they interacted with, and of scholars. In short, it is precisely by including these different angles, and by sketching a description that goes beyond what the missionaries themselves would have said, that I can start to approach the ethnographic goal of try- ing to grasp and convey, in academic form, concepts that for some people (but not others) are experience-near, and to attempt to understand these well enough to place them in connection with experience-distant concepts (Geertz 1999:52). It is important to note, however, that although this is considered stan- dard practice in the academy, we should not forget the fact that for the people concerned – the people who are being described – the experience of having one’s intentions, actions, faith and identity re-told within a differ- ent frame of reference than one’s own, with experience-distant concepts, can be a profoundly sad, disturbing, or even bizarre experience (Hastrup 1992). As Elizabeth Elbourne (2003:455) has noted, the enormously compli- cated processes we are interpreting, together with their often painful impli- cations, demand a certain sense of humility from the historian. In conclusion, let me end with two quotes that each reflect on history as a methodological tool in a wider sense. They address the broader question: why look at history at all? Why try to draw out experience-distant concepts from a stack of old missionary letters in the archive, and why try to under- stand and interpret what these missionaries thought they were doing in colonial Natal and Zululand? First, Fernand Braudel, advocate of history in the longue durée, suggests that our surprise at the difference of the past is valuable. He underlines
the importance of the unfamiliar, of surprise in historical explanation: you are in the sixteenth century, and you stumble upon some peculiarity, some- thing which seems peculiar to you […] Why this difference? That is the question which one then has to set about answering. But I would claim that such surprise, such unfamiliarity, such distancing – these great highways to knowledge – are no less necessary to an understanding of all that surrounds us and which we are so close to that we cannot see clearly. (Braudel 2000:250) The historian Howard Zinn, on the other hand, highlights a complemen- tary notion, namely that the immediacy and similarity of the past can also surprise us and pull us out of facile interpretations: Why do we need to reach into the past, into the days of slavery? Isn’t the experience of Malcolm X, in our own time enough? I see two values in going back. One is that dealing with the past, our guard is down, because we start off thinking it is over and we have nothing to fear by taking it all in. We turn out to be wrong, because its immediacy strikes us, affects us before we know it; when we have recognized this, it is too late – we have been moved. (Zinn 2000:191)
PART TWO
ON THE MISSION STATIONS
THE FIRST MISSION STATION: THE PROBLEM OF PRESENCE
When the first Norwegian missionaries arrived in Port Natal, on the eastern coast of Southern Africa, they knew that they wished to tell Africans about Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, and how this meant that everyone – including Africans – could be saved from hell. They wanted to communi- cate how the Africans could adopt a new kind of faith and identity. But how could they show the people they encountered the image of Christ on the cross in such a way that they would be struck by his suffering and love for them, and start to worship him? How could they transport their own Evangelical conversion experiences from the windswept coast of Norway into the warm subtropics of Southeast Africa? The Norwegians could have chosen various routes. They could have established a base in the D’Urban settlement on the coast, by Port Natal, and then spent most of their time traveling among the Africans in Natal and even going on longer journeys within Zululand, in order to preach about Christianity to as many as possible. Or they could have selected a mission area, built a permanent home for themselves, and then held ser- vices and reading classes in different African homesteads in this area. Or they could have sought out powerful African homesteads and requested permission to reside next to them, hoping to gain a foothold and some influence in this way (similar to the strategy adopted by the British mis- sionaries among the Tswana, who lived in more centralized communities; Comaroffs 1991:200–206). Or they could have done what the unusual Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) missionary William Percival Johnson did by Lake Nyasa in East Africa, where he decided to live in African huts, eat African food, and generally try to accommodate himself to an African existence in order to communicate with the Africans around him (Cairns 1965:52–3). The Norwegian missionaries did not, however, choose any of these routes in order to tell the Zulus about Christ. Instead, they decided to start out by building a rectangular house, inviting nearby children to come to reading lessons, and inviting both children and adults to come to Sunday services, in this rectangular house, in which they spoke of a being called uNkulunkulu. This strategy will form the topic for this chapter. Why did the
Natal and Zululand in the Early Nineteenth Century
The Norwegian missionaries said they had settled among the Zulus, and in this book I shall, for convenience, use the term “Zulus” to refer to the people who lived around their mission stations.1 However, it is unclear whether the people around the first Norwegian stations – whether in northern Natal or in southeastern Zululand – commonly used this designation about them- selves, at least in the 1850s. In practice, as John Wright (2010) and Paul Landau (2010b) have shown, the social organization of people in Southeast Africa was quite fluid in the early nineteenth century, with overlapping lin- guistic areas, extended families that stood in different political relations to one another and claimed different ancestors, and some powerful chiefs or kings who claimed loyalty from different groups of peoples, including from subordinate chiefdoms. People were probably most likely to refer to them- selves by the name of their descent group, namely the ancestor(s) whom they claimed as their own (Wright 2010:230). In exchanges recorded by the Norwegian missionaries in Natal and Zululand in the 1850s, they sometimes report that their African interlocu- tors referred to themselves collectively as “we black people,”2 perhaps leav- ing the specific term “Zulu” as a designation for the members of the Zulu ruling house. However, there is also a recorded example of people using the term “Zulu” in a national sense – in reference to the unifying figure of the Zulu king – in the mid-1850s, as reported by the Norwegian missionary Ommund Oftebro from the mission station Empangeni, in southeastern Zululand:
1 Cf. the Comaroffs’ (1991:126) use of the term “the Tswana”: “We use the ethnological term, at this point, purely for convenience; it describes a loose congeries of peoples who occupied a mutually intelligible universe and a contiguous space on a terrain yet to be mapped.” For discussions around “Zulu-ness” more broadly, see Carton, Laband and Sithole (2008). 2 See e.g. Norsk Missions-Tidende 1851/52:82, 1852/53:179, 1860:40.
We now arrive at the topic of conversion, and soon some said: “How could we turn away from our ways? We are Zulus etc.” […] One of those present was a skilled smith […] I now wanted to hear his opinion on the subject of our dis- cussion, and I asked him what he thought. After some hesitation he said: I say; “This is Zululand; we are Zulus; Ukaka came and became king, and people were to walk his way; Udingane came, and people also walked his way; now we have Umpande, and we are to walk his way; and as far as conversion is concerned it would be better if he started; let him start, and then all of us will follow.” “Uginisile, ku pela – you tell the truth, that is all” – was uttered by sev- eral other mouths.3 So who were these people who, at least sometimes, presented them selves to the missionary as “Zulus”? In the late 1810s a kingdom was brought together under Shaka kaSenzangakhona. Shaka has become a central figure in later British, Afrikaner, and Zulu historical lore in South Africa, and has taken on mythical proportions. In reality, as John Wright (2010:228) suc- cinctly notes, “[t]he scale of his conquests has been greatly exaggerated.” The Zulu extended family, which Shaka descended from, and a cluster of related political ally families formed the core of his kingdom. They did not rule over a politically unified nation, but incorporated or subjugated a range of neighboring chiefdoms, which usually kept their own chiefs and customs and entered into a negotiated political relationship (sometimes fraught with resistance) with the Zulu ruling house. One unifying trait that Shaka was able to expand across most of the kingdom during his reign was the practice of ordering all young men to be part of military cohorts based on age, the amabutho system, controlled by a group of headmen, izinduna, appointed by Shaka (Wright 2010:229). Young women were also organized in amabutho, and nobody was allowed to marry before Shaka gave permis- sion for members of a specific amabutho to enter into marriage – a power- ful means of control in a society where much social and political power was based on the establishment of polygynous marriages. (Though even in the 1850s the Norwegian missionary sources note that in the Mbonambi descent group on the eastern coast, on the periphery of the Zulu kingdom, many young men did not join the national Zulu regiments and instead mar- ried when they chose.)4 In the late 1810s and early 1820s there was great social upheaval in the area south of the Thukela river, bordering the southern edges of the Zulu kingdom. Political entities were fragmented, and communities were
3 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1856/57:111. 4 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1856/57:125.
5 For critiques of the mfecane narrative which solely blames Zulu military conquests for the devastation of the area south of the Thukela during this period, see e.g. Cobbing (1988), Hamilton (1995), and Wright (1991).
around 500 white settlers.6 Around the same time, through the 1840s and 50s, a growing wave of Christian missionaries arrived in Natal as the newly established Evangelical mission societies in Europe and North America drew up their strategies. “The tendency to tribalize South Africa’s past runs deep” (Landau 2010b:2), and the colonial officials, settlers and missionaries who arrived in Southern Africa found it desirable, for various political and cognitive reasons, to designate the African inhabitants they encountered as parts of distinct entities or tribes. It became convenient to label one of these groups as “the Zulus,” including many Africans in Natal. The early European delineation and transcription of distinct African languages, such as “the Zulu language,” rather than an acknowledgement of the plethora of dialects in use, contributed to this process (Etherington, Harries and Mbenga 2010:319, 328).7 The first Norwegian missionary Hans Schreuder, for example, produced a “Reading Book in the Zulu Language” (Læsebog i Zulu-sproget; Schreuder 1848) and a “Grammar for the Zulu Language” (Grammatik for Zulu-sproget; Schreuder 1850), based on his encounter with Africans in Natal. During the late 1840s and 50s, the British colonial administration in Natal also tried to work itself out. In 1845 Theophilus Shepstone was appointed as diplomatic agent to the chiefs within the territory (he was given the new title of Secretary for Native Affairs in 1856) (Etherington, Harries and Mbenga 2010:358). In 1850 Benjamin C.C. Pine, a career officer in the British colonial service, was appointed Lieutenant-Governor of the Natal Colony. One of his first actions was to appoint four British officials as “magistrates of Kafir locations.” As he put it: I have filled up these offices at once, before attempting to lay down and carry into execution any complete scheme for the general government of the natives in the district, because I am of [the] opinion, in which Mr. Shepstone concurs, that more specific information in regard to the peculiar circum- stances of the people of each location is required, before such a system could be well managed.8
6 D’Urban was still a relatively small colonial settlement; by comparison, Cape Town had almost 20,000 inhabitants in the 1930s (Ross 1993:14). 7 See Harries (2007:155–81) for an analysis of the linguistic and political decisions made by the Swiss missionaries in relation to “the Gwamba/Thonga language” and “the Ronga language.” 8 Letter from Lieutenant-Governor Benjamin C.C. Pine to the Secretary of State, dated Natal, 7 October 1850, reprinted in Proceedings 1852, IV:93–4.
The magistrates were therefore also charged with collecting “statistical and other information” about the populations under their charge, and Lieutenant-Governor Benjamin Pine hoped on this basis to develop “a scheme for the government of the natives […] as shall appear most likely to conduce to the temporal and eternal welfare of the interesting people whom the Almighty has been pleased to commit to our care.”9 Relations with these “interesting people” were complicated, however, and toward the end of 1851 one of the Norwegian missionaries, Lars Larsen, reported to Stavanger that the situation in the colony seemed somewhat unstable because of disagreement in the British administration over how best to organize the conditions of the natives.10 In 1852 a Native Commission was set down in Pietermaritzburg “to inquire into the past and present state of the Kafir in the district of Natal, and to report upon their future government, and to suggest such arrangements as will tend to secure the peace and welfare of the district” (Proceedings 1852). The commission reported to Lieutenant-Governor Pine, and the long and detailed statements from, amongst others, Theophilus Shepstone, the British missionary James Allison, and the American mis- sionaries Aldin Grout and Lewis Grout, were made public in the report of the proceedings. These proceedings show the early colonial officials grappling with questions of how to understand and govern “the natives,” how to mediate relations with the Boers and other settlers, and what role the missionaries should play; on the whole the missionaries were depicted as rather unsuccessful still in terms of converts, yet to be wel- comed since they brought a Christianizing and civilizing influence to the places where they lived. In fact, the network of mission stations that was in the process of being established across the colony in many ways covered a larger area than the colonial administration could effectively reach. The tentative character of the early colonial administrative gestures is well captured in the fact that only four “magistrates of Kafir locations” were appointed in order to cover the entire area of the Colony of Natal. The early colonial state in Natal, like most other early British colonial states in Africa, was still little more than “a thin white line” (Kirk-Greene 1980, cf. Comaroff 1998).
9 Ibid., 94. 10 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1851/52:119–20.
Land for Mission Stations
This was the setting that the first Norwegian missionaries dived into. When Hans Schreuder arrived in Natal in 1844, he set up temporary lodgings first at Umlazi, an American Congregationalist mission station, and later at a farm called Uitkomst. When Ommund Oftebro, Tobias Udland, Lars and Martha Larsen joined him in 1849 he had still not achieved his most impor- tant objective, which was to establish a mission station within the Zulu kingdom to the north of the Thukela river. The Americans had previously tried to set up a mission station inside Zululand, and had failed. Aldin and Charlotte Grout, sent by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, received King Mpande’s per- mission to establish a station in his territory in 1840. But Mpande soon began to suspect Aldin Grout of malevolent magic after the missionary had prayed for rain during a drought in 1841, at the request of a Zulu delegation, and the rain came – but Mpande’s fields were left dry (Porterfield 1997:68). Such actions posed a threat to Mpande’s ritual power. In addition, people who lived by the Grouts’ mission station and attended their reading classes and Sunday services soon began to express loyalty to the missionaries. In 1842, Mpande, in an effort to reassert his authority, ordered the execution of several of the people who lived near the station, and the Grouts fled to Natal (Porterfield 1997:69–70). Since then no mission station had been set up inside Zululand. To make matters worse for Hans Schreuder, he had not been granted land by the British colonial authorities in Natal either. In the 1840s mission societies in the Colony of Natal were gradually granted discrete plots of land, known as “glebes” and “reserves,” by the colonial administration, and Hans Schreuder was waiting for a mission reserve. This policy of distribut- ing plots of land to missionaries was supported by Theophilus Shepstone, who appreciated the degree to which resident missionaries could aid him in his task of maintaining law and order, and could introduce Western ways of life in parts of the colony that he otherwise had little control over (Keto 1976:604–5, McClendon 2004). (A similar strategy was used by the British colonial government of the Cape in their quest to civilize the Xhosa; Legassick and Ross 2010:267.) The allocation of land to missionaries in Natal was contested by both Dutch and English settlers, who did not wish for white missionaries and Africans to settle together on mission reserves. Settlers also in general opposed the reading and writing classes that were organized by the missionaries, since these threatened the idea of an
11 The Norwegian missionaries used the spelling Umpumulo. Since I refer to this name frequently throughout the text I shall use the spelling that is more common today, namely Umphumulo.
While I agree with Simensen that the potential political advantages probably played a role, I would suggest that the medical aspect should not be dismissed. The Zulu kingdom had expanded and grown in strength under Shaka through a process of subjugating and incorporating surround- ing groups of people. Each incorporated group had their own chiefly and lineage ancestral shades, referred to as oNkulunkulu (in the plural), and their own diviners with powerful medicines (Weir 2005:208–9). These shades and medicines were likewise incorporated into the Zulu state. The key rituals of the subjugated groups, and their most powerful medicines, were appropriated and used by the Zulu king, to underline his political and ritual power. It is therefore perhaps not so surprising that King Mpande allowed precisely Hans Schreuder to build a mission station inside his kingdom. The fact that this young Norwegian man controlled effective medicines and medical skills, and had also demonstrated his spiritual connections by praying to God for the king’s health, may have prompted the king to conclude that it would be wise to incorporate this man, his med- icines and rituals, rather than have him living just across the Thukela river in Natal. The importance of the medical aspect is underlined by the fact that even 27 years later, in 1877 when the Norwegians were planning to evacuate Zululand, King Cetshwayo asked them to leave their medicine box behind.12 The Norwegians had taken their first strategic step, namely to gain access to plots of land. The ownership of one plot, Umphumulo, was gained through the mechanisms of land appropriation in the early colonial state in Natal, by virtue of being Christian European missionaries who might aid the colonial administration merely by being present among “the natives.” The use (though not ownership) of the other plot, Empangeni, was gained by permission from the Zulu monarch, by virtue of demonstrating reli- gious-medical expertise and, probably, by virtue of being white and there- fore embodying potential connections to other whites in the neighboring colony. Most of the other European and American missionaries who arrived in Natal chose, like the Norwegians, to try to gain access to plots of land in order to set up their own mission stations. At Umphumulo, the nearest missionary neighbor was the American mission station of Maphumulo, which was set up by Andrew Abraham in 1849. The German Hermannsburg
12 Government House Papers (Pietermaritzburg), Folio 1397, Robert Robertson to Henry Bulwer, July 4, 1877; cited in Etherington (1978:79 n11).
Missionary Society established their first station, Hermannsburg, in 1854, a little further away from Umphumulo. Further south the first Anglican station, Ekukanyeni or Bishopstowe, was set up in 1855 by Bishop John Colenso. The Berlin Mission Society, the Scottish Presbyterians, and the Swedish Missionary Society also joined the influx, and by 1860 Umphumulo was one of 29 mission stations in the Colony of Natal; 28 belonged to Protestant societies and one to the French Roman Catholics (Etherington 1978). The first mission station to be permanently established within the neighboring Zulu kingdom was the Norwegian station Empangeni which Hans Schreuder set up in 1851, and by 1860 the Zulu king had granted per- mission for another five stations to be set up inside his territory – two more by the Norwegians, two by the Hermannsburg Missionary Society, and one by the Anglicans in the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG).
A New Kind of Space
In 1851 Hans Schreuder brought Tobias Udland with him into Zululand to help establish the new station Empangeni, while he left Ommund Oftebro, Lars and Martha Larsen at Umphumulo with instructions to set up the mission station there.13 They had come to a people and a landscape that was different from the one they had left behind in Europe. In their memory they carried images of the landscape of the Norwegian coastline, with its small, square houses and glass window panes. Around them in Southern Africa they looked out at clusters of beehive huts and endlessly rolling, green hills. Homesteads were dotted across the hillsides instead of being organized in central towns or settlements. Each homestead, umizi, con- sisted of a small group of beehive huts arranged around a cattle enclo- sure, and contained several households; the households were related through blood or, in the polygynous homesteads, through marriage to a familial patriarch.14 The Africans in the area cultivated produce such as corn, groundnuts, pumpkins and sweet potatoes, and tended livestock such as cattle, goats, pigs and chickens – the most important being cattle (Lambert 1995).
13 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1851/52:118. 14 Further analysis of the spaces created by Zulu homesteads is precluded here, but see Fernandez (2003), Hall (2010), and Kuper (1993) for religious, historical and political perspectives.
The people in the area around Umphumulo were thought of by the mis- sionaries as “Zulus.” The largest chiefdom in the area was that under the Qwabe chief Musi, and many of the people in the area were members of Qwabe families (Etherington 1978:3–4, Mahoney 1999:377). The earlier Qwabe chief Phakathwayo had been defeated and incorporated into the Zulu kingdom by Shaka, despite resistance, and different groups of his fol- lowers dispersed (Etherington 1978:1–3); some of them eventually ended up settling just south of the Thukela under chief Musi. Musi had attended school at an American mission station further south as a boy in the 1840s, which he apparently remembered fondly (Etherington 1978:3, Mahoney 1999:377), though he did not embrace Christian mission unreservedly and never wished to convert. In 1851, Lars and Martha Larsen and Ommund Oftebro were charged with making the Christian God’s presence visible in the Maphumulo area. They started out by cutting down trees from the forest, and building a sim- ple, rectangular building that consisted of one room with straight wooden walls (later they made their own earthen bricks for use instead), 20 feet by 11.15 They made a thatched roof that extended out on all sides, to protect the timber and to provide shade. On one side of the house they set up makeshift walls under the extended roof, and Lars and Martha slept in this little makeshift room. They kept practicing Zulu and had opportunity to use it as they tried to invite people in the area to come and “hold Sunday” with them, that is, to attend their Sunday services. They also encouraged chil- dren to come to reading lessons, with varying success. They erected a sim- ple, provisional, rectangular “school house” and a stable for the horses (both of which were less sturdy constructions and after only a few years, in 1854, Lars Larsen noted that they needed to be rebuilt).16 In addition to horses, they kept chickens and sheep, and just over twenty head of cattle.17 They demarcated fields, and employed young boys to help them work the fields with an ox-drawn plough, and to herd the cattle. They cultivated corn and sweet potatoes,18 and probably also other vegetables, such as pumpkins. The farming method that the missionaries used was in key aspects different from local agricultural methods. While the Africans in the area used hoes, the missionaries used ox-drawn ploughs. The mis- sionaries also regarded work on the fields as men’s work, while this was
15 NMS Archives, HA, Box 130, Jacket 4, Lars Larsen to the Board, May 8, 1854. 16 Ibid. 17 Cf. Norsk Missions-Tidende 1873:241. 18 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1852/53:104.
19 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1852/53:46. 20 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1855/56:87. 21 Jørgensen (1990:175), who cites Norsk Missions-Tidende 1854/55:114, 1854/55:194–6, 1855/56:86, 1855/56:100, 1856/57:156. For an overview of similarly gendered tasks on a much larger mission station, Edendale, see Meintjes (1990:134–7). 22 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1852/53:108–13.
gave them an opportunity to create a space for their Evangelical identity. The schedule helped them to underline the importance of daily devotions, of reading, of adhering to differently gendered spheres within and outside the house, of managing a Christian household, and of setting aside appro- priate amounts of time for maintaining productivity and orderliness. They used the seven-day week, with Sunday as the day of rest, both because this was a normal way to mark time for them, and also because it was a further marker of Christianity. As the Comaroffs suggest, the rhythm followed on the nineteenth-century mission stations “introduced a new schedule of activities that encompassed local routines within a global time-table” (Comaroffs 1991:234). The Norwegians at Umphumulo must have felt com- forted by the knowledge that their daily devotions and Sunday services were mirroring the Sunday services held in Norway, and elsewhere. At the same time, already during this initial phase the missionaries were implicated in larger processes that they did not or could not have an over- view over. Keletso Atkins (1988) describes how many misunderstandings and serious disputes occurred as white settlers in mid-nineteenth century Natal attempted to negotiate with Zulus over work times. The Zulus at this time thought of a day as beginning about an hour after sunrise, and ending about an hour before sunset (Atkins 1988:236). They did not wish to be out and about after dark, as this was the time when abathakathi – witches or evil-doers – were out, and could attack them with illness or even death (Berglund 1976:277–8). They did not count seven-day weeks but instead fol- lowed the lunar month, inyanga, a period of around 28 days; the “moonless day” before the new moon was a day to abstain from work (Atkins 1988:231). Atkins also observes that their annual cycle contained two distinct periods: uNyaka, the rainy or field work season, and so the more productive season, and ubuSika, the dry or winter season (Atkins 1988:233). The European settlers, however, brought with them other notions of a “full day’s work,” a seven-day week, and calendar months (of different lengths). During the last half of the nineteenth century, it seems that Zulu laborers were able to dic- tate the terms of their work times more than might have been expected, with settlers frequently having to yield to Zulu demands to work a lunar month rather than a calendar month. All the while, however, the Zulu workforce found iself trying to make sense of and manoeuvre within “a chronological net”: “a complex fabric of merchant time, church time, leisure time controls, and so on” (Atkins 1988:238). Gradually, peasant time shifted to industrial time, and Zulu laborers in Natal increasingly worked on terms set by European ideas of time. Ommund, Lars and Martha, who
23 This is related to Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977) concept of “habitus,” that is, the way in which the practices of everyday life are written into spatial praxis, our bodies and mannerisms, our dispositions, perceptions, styles and tastes. Especially in his observations on the Kabyle house, Bourdieu (1990) teases out how architecture, furnishings, object placements, and movements in and out of the house world are internalized, showing how cultural schemas can be both represented and reproduced in spaces. Karina Hestad Skeie (1999) has drawn on this discussion by Bourdieu in her insightful analysis of nineteenth-century Norwegian mis- sion stations in Madagascar. While keeping Bourdieu at the back of my mind, I shall pay more explicit attention here to Fanon.
shift between worlds – any “world-traveling” (Sullivan 2004:10) – will alter and affect our bodily horizons, and, conversely, changes in our bodily sche- mas will influence our ability to make meaning in the world. For the Norwegian missionaries at Umphumulo in 1851, the rectangular houses they constructed may have reminded them of the shape of the houses they had left in Norway, serving as reassuring bodily attachments that could be reconstructed in this new space to which they had “world-traveled.” In Africa the rectangular houses became important for maintaining their identity; they became part of their bodily “schemas.” The rectangular houses also made the difference between the mission station and the round dwellings of the surrounding area immediately visi- ble. This difference was clearly desired by the missionaries in Southern Africa, who took rectilinearity to be a structuring principle in general – as they emphasized not just straight buildings but also straight pews, class- room seating, hemlines, and lines of print, not to mention bearing and gaze (Landau 2010a:435; cf. the Comaroffs’ discussion of the missionaries’ houses, Comaroffs 1997:274–322). The American missionary Aldin Grout, for exam- ple, was concerned with the lay-out of his Umvoti station in Natal and was proud to report no less than 48 “upright” houses there in 1864 (Etherington 1978:117), and the London Missionary Society’s John Philip was concerned to have “decent,” that is, square, houses on his station (Elbourne 2002:241– 3, see also Hodgson 1997:76). The Norwegian missionaries too invested effort into making the mission station a space that was visually different from the surrounding landscape; a space with a different message. At the same time, it was similar to other mission stations. The Norwegian mission- aries constructed the same kind of buildings as other mission societies – a rectangular residential house (which doubled as church and school house in the beginning), a school house, a church (added in the late 1850s at Umphumulo), a shelter and/or enclosure for farm animals, further rectan- gular houses for missionaries, rectangular houses or round huts for employ- ees and converts – and fields (see e.g. Erlank 1999). It is possible to see the connection between the rectangular houses and the early separations that were gradually and tentatively being taken up in Southern Africa. Clifton Crais (1992:136–8) argues that the square manor houses built by British settlers in the Eastern Cape helped to set up and sustain social distance between the occupiers and “others” – a social dis- tance that gradually turned into a habit. In this way the colonial culture was “carried through the wider landscape” (Crais 1992:137). Already in the British settler houses of the 1830s, Crais suggests, we can see the beginnings
24 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1863:57. 25 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1852/53:119–20.
the “strangers” in the British colonial administration, he too built square houses in the midst of Zulu surroundings in the Maphumulo area in north- ern Natal, which, in some ways, aided the colonial process. The contradic- tions of history were already setting in on this Norwegian mission station. Within a decade of establishing the mission station Umphumulu, the Norwegian missionaries had started to achieve their aim of creating a kind of space that was impactful in its difference (see Fig. 3 in chapter 6, and cover image). At the beginning of 1858, Tobias Udland, who was then posted at Umphumulo, wrote to the Board: The station is expanding and even the natives remark, not infrequently, on how this place has changed in a few years. Where before there were neither homes, trees nor fields, are now both brick houses and other houses, trees and fields (or gardens, if you wish).26 The way Tobias Udland carefully tries out the term “gardens” here, in paren- theses, hints at both the practical uses of a garden as a field, in producing vegetables and fruit, as well as the horticultural and aesthetic connota- tions that “gardens” held for the European missionaries. John MacKenzie (2003:112) suggests that the establishment of European-style mission gar- dens in Africa was part of their broader “education of the landscape,” and for many missionaries the wish to transform and order the African land- scape came to symbolize their wish to bring about the spiritual transforma- tion of Africa (cf. Kirkaldy 2005:121–44, Pritchett 2011). At Umphumulo too the missionaries tried to establish not just fields but also “gardens”; a sign of the new “moral geography” (MacKenzie 2003:121) that they were slowly piecing together in the hopes of bringing converts to Christ.27 A final significant difference of the mission station space should be noted, namely clothing. Right from the start, and following the custom already established on other mission stations in Natal, the Norwegian mis- sionaries required people who worked at Umphumulo to wear European clothing during their stay there.28 They associated the “scant” traditional clothing of the Zulus with their “heathenism,” and the European-style shirts, trousers and skirts that they handed out served as markers of differ- ence. The clothes also introduced complicated dynamics. While settler politicians in Natal attempted to ensure that Zulu servants would only wear light shorts and shirts, in the manner of young boys and as a marker of
26 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1858:95. 27 Cf. the gardens at the Eshowe mission station, depicted in Fig. 5 in chapter 6. 28 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1850/51:196.
A Note on Method: Persons and Processes
In retrospect, as we study the nineteenth-century missionaries, one trend that stands out is the confluence between the types of spaces that they decided to set up and the process of normalizing colonialism that was going on throughout this period. As Patrick Harries puts it: I want to suggest that when they arrived in Africa, the missionaries lacked the visual conventions needed to “see” either the landscape or its inhabitants. To put this another way, when [the Swiss missionary Henri-Alexandre] Junod and his colleagues looked at the land, their gaze was shaped by a very particu- lar, European aesthetic experience. It was only through their cognitive (re)organization of the land that the missionaries gradually took charge of their environment […] At the same time, looking at the ways in which land- scape was constructed helps explain how colonization was normalized. The missionaries’ imprint on the land was part of a wider genre, reflected in the Victorian novel, medical manual, Sunday school text, or handbook of natural history, that portrayed imperialism as a natural process, and colonialism as a civilizing mission. (Harries 2007:97) This is what it looks like to us in hindsight. But, clearly, the missionaries regarded their spaces differently than we do now (as will be discussed fur- ther in chapter 6). This highlights one of the challenges of anthropological history, namely how to understand the complicated interplay between his- torical processes and the persons entangled in them. Jean and John Comaroff have explored this methodological problem in depth (see, for example, Comaroffs 1991:7–39, 1992:3–48 and 2001). They draw the term “biographical illusion” from Pierre Bourdieu (1987) to
describe the way in which we might slip into seeing “biography as history personified, history as biography aggregated,” or, more generally, how we might “find order in events by putting events in order” (Comaroffs 1992:26). In other words, a focus on individual life stories may encourage the ten- dency to paint a picture of autonomous actions and overly neat crystalliza- tions, where intentions lead to results. The Comaroffs observe that the biography, as well as the case study, are “narrative devices [that] may lead away from history by lending a false sense of closure to highly complex, underdetermined diachronic processes” (Comaroffs 2001:109, orig. emph.). In their own work, they attempt to use biographical stories, cases and event descriptions against the background of larger social, political and economic contexts and shifts: “the constant dissolving of ‘nice case studies’ back into history – is precisely our objective: we seek to tack between persons and processes in ways that throw light on their reciprocal determinations” (Comaroffs 2001:109–10). The example of the Norwegian missionaries reminds us that people and their actions are always sustained by and implicated in processes that to some extent are beyond their control, and of which they may only be par- tially aware. In the midst of these processes, they make choices and deci- sions that do not always play out in the way they had hoped. They also frequently find themselves caught up in contradictory positions. The Norwegian missionaries’ early situation as they were trying to set up a mis- sion station at Umphumulo in the 1850s is a prime illustration of this – it throws up “the untidy facts of an unfolding history,” and pits these “against the larger narratives of participants and observers variously positioned in the colonial process” (Comaroffs 2001:113).
Speaking of God
Having depicted some of the material characteristics of the new space that the missionaries sought to fashion at Umphumulo, let me turn now to the type of religious discourse that marked the space. The missionaries attached great importance to words in order to make their God “present” to the Zulus. In the mid-nineteenth century, Zulu life was intertwined with the pres- ence of shades, or ancestral spirits. In Zulu they were given a range of names, the most common being amadlozi (Berglund 1976). The shades could influence the lives of men and women for better or worse. They “‘brood’ over their descendants as a hen broods over chickens; excessive
29 This continued to be the case into the twentieth century; both A.T. Bryant (1917:140– 45) and Axel-Ivar Berglund (1976:188) found that around 90 percent of Zulu diviners were women. 30 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1852/53:179.
began with God’s creation of the world, and the sin of Adam and Eve and their fall from God’s grace. The missionaries believed that the original sin of Adam and Eve had been passed down to all humankind since, so that all humans were living in a sinful state. The sermon would then proceed to the story of Jesus, his life and deeds, how he had revealed to humans what God’s will was, how he was crucified, died, and then rose from the dead. The sermon would make clear that Jesus was God’s son, and that he had taken God’s punishment upon himself in order to save all humankind from the punishment that awaited them for their sins. But he offered this salva- tion only to people who believed in him as their savior. The sermon would end with an account of the final day of judgment, which was to come, when God would offer eternal bliss to believers in heaven, but would send unbe- lievers to eternal condemnation in hell. The context for the missionaries’ preaching varied. When they visited nearby Zulu homesteads, they seem to have preferred to preach by telling the salvation history as a long narrative, in continuous conversation with the Zulus present. Questions and objections were raised and responded to as they went along (Jørgensen 1990:130). When they preached during the Sunday services on the mission stations, on the other hand, they held a more traditional sermon in the form of a monologue, which elaborated on one of the themes from the salvation history, or expanded on a particular Bible passage or story, such as one of Jesus’ parables or one of the ten com- mandments (Jørgensen 1990:131–2). The order of the Sunday service that was first used by the Norwegian missionaries had been set out by Hans Schreuder: it began with a hymn, then the ten commandments and the creed were read out by the missionary and repeated by the congregation, then there was a prayer, followed by the sermon, another prayer, and finally a hymn – all in Zulu.31 Later, a Zulu translation of the Church of Norway’s liturgy for Sunday services was used. Torstein Jørgensen observes that the Norwegian missionaries in the 1850s and 60s seem hardly to have raised overtly political topics in their sermons at all, and that the only times they explicitly addressed contemporary cultural or social topics was when they perceived these to be a hindrance to the gospel. They would, for example, preach against the Zulu belief in shades and the custom of polygamous marriages (Jørgensen 1990:132–6). How might the Zulus have understood the missionaries’ preaching? The most common nineteenth-century Zulu creation narrative told of how
31 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1855/56:88.
32 Henry Callaway, “Unkulunkulu; or the tradition of creation as existing among the Amazulu and other tribes of South Africa,” in Callaway (1870). Cf. also Berglund (1976:34). 33 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1852/53:179. 34 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1856/57:39. 35 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1851/52:82. 36 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1856/57:39.
century. Around a century later, in the 1960s, the Zulu diviners whom Axel- Ivar Berglund interviewed (while he served as a faculty member at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Umphumulo) operated with an estab- lished distinction between the shades in general and a sky divinity, the Lord-of-the-Sky (iNkosi yaphezulu), who might be thought of in certain respects as similar to the Christian God (Berglund 1976:32). But Berglund is cautious in his guesses about when this distinction between the shades and a sky divinity might have taken hold. Based on Zulu accounts and com- ments collected in the mid-nineteenth century by the Anglican priest and ethnographer Henry Callaway – who was, rather unusually, on “cordial terms” with diviners in the vicinity of his station at Springvale in Natal37 – Berglund suggests that the distinction between shades and a sky divinity may not have been established in the nineteenth century. Certainly a read- ing of Henry Callaway’s (1870) The Religious System of the Amazulu shows that the term uNkulunkulu was accorded a range of meanings, and when Henry Callaway’s mid-nineteenth-century Zulu informants did speak of uNkulunkulu as creator, the characteristics of this creator – a distant, some- what obscure, mythical entity – seem quite different from those associated with the creator portrayed in the Old Testament (cf. Hodgson 1997:69 for the similar Xhosa case). This lack of a more clear-cut divinity who was lord over all posed an initial problem for the missionaries, since they wished to speak of an omnipotent, active, and personal Christian God.38 Bishop John Colenso reported in the mid-1850s that European and American missionaries consequently used a variety of terms for God at first, including uThixo (from an imported San term), uYehova and uDio (from Jehova and Deus), umPhezulu (a Zulu term referring to the being in the sky), uNkulunkulu (the Great-Great-One, a Zulu term referring to the first ancestor, or a senior shade, or someone who is very old), and uMvel- ingqangi (the first to appear, of two) (Colenso 1855:56–9, 160; cf. Berglund 1976:34). Hans Schreuder quite early on chose to use uNkulunkulu.39 John Colenso concluded that the Zulus had two names for a Supreme Being, although they did not “know” it: uNkulunkulu and uMvelinqangi (Colenso 1855:59, 129). He decided to use the term uNkulunkulu for God in his transla- tions of portions of the Bible and the Anglican Book of Common Prayer
37 SPG Archives, E7, Henry Callaway, Journal, November 7 and 21, 1860; cited by Etherington (1978:61). 38 Contra Simensen with Børhaug et al. (1986:206) who equate uNkulunkulu with the “remote, supreme God in Zulu belief.” 39 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1852/53:219–20.
(Etherington 2002:425, cf. Guy 1983:48). Other missionaries were aware that uNkulunkulu did not entirely match the characteristics of the Christian God, and there was some controversy over John Colenso’s choice (Weir 2005:205–7) – a controversy that has lasted in scholarship until today (for two recent contributions see Weir 2005, Worger 2001). Over a century later, Berglund noted that the term uNkulunkulu was still used with a number of meanings among Zulus: it could refer to the God worshipped in a Christian church, the Zulu creator or Lord-of-the-Sky, a particular shade, or even an old person, and it could also be used in the plural, oNkulunkulu (Berglund 1976:36, 93). This ambivalence surrounding the words of the missionaries is not an unusual case (cf. Peel 2000:116–22, Worger 2001:431–3). The same multiva- lence is tied, for example, to the term for God that British missionaries used among the Tswana. They chose the term modimo, which held multiple meanings. In addition to the missionaries’ God, it could variously be used to refer to “a missionary, but also power, past kings, the station of one’s ethnonym, or even a living king whose rule united a nation” (Landau 2005:208). Paul Landau notes that this not only introduced a certain ambi- guity around the multiple meanings of the term, but it also sometimes led the missionaries to “split such words in two”: on the one hand, the term designated the intended replacement of “heathen beliefs,” on the other, it still remained the term that was used to refer to those “heathen” aspects (Landau 2005:212). Thus in Natal the missionaries tried hard to define uNkulunkulu to the Zulus. In one of Hans Schreuder’s reported conversations with a Zulu audi- ence he phrased it as follows: Since the days of your forefathers you have deviated from the truth by replac- ing truth with human devices and imagination. You have abandoned, forgot- ten, and neglected the only true God (Unkulunkulu), depraved Him of His glory and replaced Him with imagined ancestral spirits, of which, in the way you imagine them, not even a single one is to be found.40 On the whole it seems that while the Zulus associated uNkulunkulu above all with age, the missionaries tried to replace this – by claiming that the Zulus themselves had replaced the original meaning – with the character- istic of power (Worger 2001:444). The God of the pietistic missionaries was personally involved in the world in a powerful way, and would one
40 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1852/53:219–20.
day triumph over Satan and sit in judgment. He needed to be portrayed as powerful. In addition, William Worger (2001:444) argues that the missionar- ies probably also hoped that the metaphor of power associated with their God would come to be associated with themselves, as messengers on behalf of this God. They may have sensed that if they did not proclaim a powerful religious being, they would have little leverage. The Norwegian missionaries reported, however, that the most animated responses came, not when they spoke of the creator, but when they moved on from the creation account and began to talk about the need for a savior, the resurrection of the body, and the final judgment. As quoted above, this was when the Zulus were usually “gripped by amazement at our great stupidity,” as Lars Larsen put it.41 The missionary preaching on the type of life that they envisioned after death was especially striking to the Zulus (cf. Jørgensen 1990:300). For the Zulus, the living and the shades existed together in a web of relations. The living had living bodies, the shades had other forms; different shades might hold a shadowy existence underneath the earth, or appear in dreams, or enter certain snakes, or keep their abode in the cattle enclosure or in specific parts of the hut (Berglund 1976). When the missionaries insisted that all people would one day appear again in their bodies, at the final judgment, this seemed incredulous to the Zulus. The Norwegian missionary Paul Wettergreen gave this account in the mid-1860s: The word “resurrection” is the one to make the heaviest impression upon them; they often ask: “Is it really true that these izitutana [shades]42 […] shall live? Am I to see my late father and mother again?” Some go away, feeling too uncomfortable to think about it. Others say: “No, we are beaten,” others again become quite at a loss in expressing their thoughts and feelings, they begin to laugh – as if they, by laughing, want to shake off this most strange news for which no place can be found either in the head or in the heart.43 Likewise, the Norwegian missionary Hans Christian Leisegang reported: I then spoke to them trying to tell them the main contents of our faith. When finishing by speaking of the second coming of our savior, the resurrection of
41 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1852/53:179. 42 Isithuthana is the diminutive form of isithutha, which means fool (Jørgensen 1990:236). Isithutha is the name used for shades when one wishes to emphasize their hopelessness and weakness, since they are not even able to acquire food for themselves, but instead have to rely on their descendants to share food such as beer and meat with them (Berglund 1976:91–2). 43 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1864:196–7.
the dead, the judgment, and the new heaven and earth – some of them could no longer conceal their amazement. (Thus I was to point out to them that our izindaba [matters of business, news] […] are not intended to arouse laughter […]).44 Other mission societies gave similar reports; Robert Moffat related that a group of Tswana laughed at one of his speeches on death, and that laughter also “generally followed his attempts to explain ‘the doctrine of the Cross’” (Worger 2001:426, cf. Landau 2010a:405). It seems the missionary preaching on issues surrounding death, Christ’s resurrection, and life after death for Christ’s followers, were experienced as particularly funny, nonsensical, or disturbing. At other times the pietistic imagery of being “washed” in Jesus’ “blood” in order to be “cleansed of sin” caused bemusement (Worger 2001:427, cf. Landau 2010a:405). And sometimes it also seems that the white preacher himself, and the act of preaching, were reason enough for mirth (Worger 2001:426). The missionaries also encountered general indifference to their preach- ing, or simply awkwardness, expressed either through noise or silence. Lars Larsen wrote that in one homestead near Umphumulo, where he went to preach, “some were laughing, others were using snuff, and others again were asleep.”45 Both Ommund Oftebro and Hans Schreuder complained in particular about young girls making a lot of noise during Sunday services.46 And Hans Christian Leisegang commented from the mission station Mahlabathini: As long as the subject of our conversation relates to oxen, fields, houses, etc. the talk is lively enough, but when touching upon the field of religion this comes to an end – they either keep totally silent or say “jebo,” yes, to all our statements.47 In other cases people were curious about the missionaries’ message, and repeated parts of it later. In one homestead Lars Larsen reported that “[t]he audience, counting some 40 individuals, listened carefully all the time.”48 And the missionaries were sometimes surprised to see how much of their story the listeners remembered afterwards – perhaps a testimony to the Zulus’ familiarity with oral tradition. For example, in 1856 Ommund Oftebro reported the following conversation with an elderly woman:
44 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1868:201. 45 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1852/53:114. 46 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1856/57:3, 1871:211. 47 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1868:194. 48 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1852/53:108.
“Yes,” she said, “my children, when they come home, tell me about Unkulunkulu, the Lord up there.” “What then do they say they have heard about him?” I asked. After I had several times closed in upon her with my question, she at last revealed the fund of her knowledge, – which certainly proved to be greater than expected.49 At times, the listeners’ attentiveness also resulted in questions and objec- tions. The Norwegian missionary Jan Kielland recorded the following com- mon objections: “Show us God, show us Jesus, that we can see him!” or “If you are saved and do not die, then we shall also believe, but you white people also die.” And lately: “What has become of the day of judgment, it certainly does not come?”50 A related question concerns how much of the missionaries’ message the listeners understood on the basis of the missionaries’ linguistic fluency, or lack thereof. Reports from later missionaries suggest that among the first group of Norwegian male missionaries, Hans Schreuder and Lars Larsen in time spoke Zulu with technical fluency and picked up and used a certain amount of Zulu imagery and symbolism in their conversations, Ommund Oftebro spoke well enough to be understood by everyone, and Tobias Udland never learnt to speak grammatically correct Zulu but rather devel- oped his own way of using the language (Berge 1906:41, Myklebust 1949:84, 109).51 Their use of Zulu, albeit with varying quality, stands in some contrast to “the almost total ignorance of Zulu and the indifference as to acquiring it exhibited by the emigrants [in Natal]. Settlers deigned only to acquire a hybrid version (Fanagalo) of the language” (Atkins 1988:233). The Norwegian missionaries, on the other hand, sought actively to make the Zulu language a defining characteristic of the space of the mission station. (The ambiva- lence that surrounded this move will be discussed further in chapter 5.) Despite their active use of the Zulu language, however, none of the Norwegian missionaries showed any great interest in describing or under- standing Zulu culture in any depth – as opposed, for example, to the curios- ity exhibited by the Anglican missionary Henry Callaway in Natal. Hans Schreuder even informed the Board in Stavanger, when they asked for more accounts concerning African culture and religion, that this was not part of the missionary’s role.52 The Norwegian missionaries largely continued,
49 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1855/56:8. 50 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1868:142. 51 See also Norsk Missions-Tidende 1878:33 on Tobias Udland. 52 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1856/57:55–69.
Understanding the Nineteenth-Century Christian Mission Encounter
How are we to understand the lengthy and complicated encounter that had begun between the nineteenth-century missionaries and the people they were trying, rather unsuccessfully, to convert? Lamin Sanneh (1989) approaches the process of Christian mission in Africa from the perspective of “translatability.”54 He challenges scholars who “have maintained for far too long that Western motives and suppositions have guided not only the conception of mission but its practical operation in the field as well” (Sanneh 1989:5), and argues instead that as the Christian message is trans- lated from the missionaries’ frame of reference to the frame of reference of the local people, it is this local vernacular context that has the final say in how the message is adopted. In other words, Sanneh argues, the Western assumptions surrounding the missionaries’ religious terminology were made to yield (often without the missionaries’ awareness) to local presup- positions as the terminology was translated. As Sanneh (1989:53) puts it: “When one translates, it is like pulling the trigger of a loaded gun: the trans- lator cannot recall the hurtling bullet.” Sanneh’s perspective emphasizes that at and around the Norwegian mission station Umphumulo in the early 1850s, the Norwegian missionaries had “pulled the trigger,” as it were, but the Zulus determined the final meanings that they appropriated from the missionaries’ message. Sanneh’s analysis differs markedly from the influential analysis of nineteenth-century mission presented by the Comaroffs (1991, 1997). They argue that while the Tswana may on the surface have appropriated – or more frequently rejected – the religious terms and doctrines that the British
53 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1852/53:179. 54 See Bredekamp and Ross (1995a), Gray (1990), and Houle (2011) for similar lines of argument. Houle (2011) discusses the experiences of Zulu Christians, especially from the 1890s onward, and especially in relation to the American missionaries.
missionaries among them espoused, they were still, through this very inter- action with the missionaries, being introduced to underlying Western hege- monic forms of language, time, space, rational argument and subjectivity that the missionaries (wittingly and unwittingly) brought with them. Thus the Comaroffs argue that even when the British missionaries were rela- tively ineffectual in their aims at conversion, they were highly effectual in engaging the Tswana in a “long conversation” with the colonizing culture – an infinitely complicated conversation that yielded sometimes surprising and contradictory results, including independent churches and revolution- ary sentiments, but that also steadily served to incorporate the Tswana into a modern society and political economy that was based on colonial inequal- ity. The Comaroffs’ approach highlights the extent to which the (broadly defined) “conversation” that the Norwegians at Umphumulo were engaged in with the people around them was contributing to long-term processes of colonialism – despite their own dim or partial awareness of this, and despite the fact that it contradicted some of their other aims. A third approach is taken by J.D.Y. Peel (2000) in his study of nineteenth- century missionaries among the Yoruba of Nigeria. He argues that the Comaroffs’ study – although it acknowledges the considerable agency of the Tswana themselves – still on balance ends up primarily defining the Tswana in relation to external forces and the external agency of the mis- sionaries and colonizers. He is critical of the undertone of functionalism that he detects in the Comaroffs’ presentation of a “picture of consistency and fit, both within missionary messages and between their project and the secular projects of their age” (Peel 2000:5); he is wary of conflating the results of the mission project and the results of the colonial project. Peel therefore aims to present research that emphasizes, firstly, the decisive nature of local agency and context for the results of the mission, and sec- ondly, the religious aspect of the missionary project. In this he follows some of the lines drawn up by Sanneh, though he perhaps has a stronger empha- sis on the extent to which local Christianities are more than translations of missionary Christianity. Similarly to the Comaroffs, who suggest that the missionary encounter formed “the Tswana” as a self-conscious collective, Peel’s study of the Yoruba’s nineteenth-century encounter with missionar- ies argues that this encounter resulted in the making of “the Yoruba” as a group. He thinks of this process differently from the Comaroffs, however, since he does not see it as a causal effect of missionary hegemonic prac- tices, but rather as a more complex effect as several larger processes – including European colonialism, Christian conversion, Yoruba historical
Christianity, Words, and Things
Why should we be concerned to look at two Norwegian men and a woman who kneel together to pray one morning in, say, 1852, in a rectangular house, on a ridge of land in the north of Natal, and who then go to practice reading with a few young Zulu boys and a Zulu girl, before they break off into conversation with them about a being that they refer to as uNku- lunkulu? For the time being, I would suggest that this is interesting to us because they were trying to create a space on this ridge that they had not created before. And in doing so, they faced a problem that any Christian group faces, namely the “problem of presence” (Engelke 2007, cf. Keane 1998:16) – that is, how to make their invisible God “present” – and they paid attention to particular words and things in order to address this problem. From an ethnographic perspective, words and things have rich seams of meaning. As Bruno Latour (2005) has argued, things are not simply objects separate from us, but rather gatherings or assemblies of sets of connec- tions. Things hold sets of connections between people, issues, collections of things, and past and present. As we have seen in relation to the mission- aries’ rectangular houses, these buildings brought sets of connections to Umphumulo, including the missionaries’ memories of Norway and associ- ated memories of the type of Evangelical Christian communities from which they hailed, attempts to assert “upright” and “decent” visual edifices
in the midst of the African landscape, and links to early colonial policies of taxation and promotion of European trade. The material objects on the mission stations cannot be separated from people, as Latour puts it. Some of the same line of thinking forms the background for Webb Keane and Matthew Engelke’s explorations of the connections between Christian subjects, objects, and words. Keane (1998, 2006) unpacks how Calvinist missionaries in the colonial Indies and postcolonial Indonesia used materi- ality (or critiques of materiality, such as criticism of large-scale sacrifice and feasting at funerals) and specific forms of spoken language (such as prayer using everyday speech) in ways that delineated the moral domain. Keane (1998:23) suggests that since they were Protestant, they did not think of material objects as being capable of mediating a relationship to the divine. But they thought it important to map out their Protestant sincerity through creating proper relationships to words and things. Engelke (2007) pays attention to the same issues in his analysis of an independent group of Christians in Zimbabwe, the Friday Apostolics, who have chosen not to read the Bible. Again, materiality is closely bound up with morality, but this time with different consequences: the Friday Apostolics reject the thing- ness (and thus the possible decay) of printed Bibles, and instead empha- size spoken, shared, “live and direct” faith. In sum, words and things are used differently within different Christianities in order to delineate moral spheres. The words and things that the Norwegian missionaries chose to use when setting up their first mission station introduced tensions into the new space – whether in the multiple associations embodied in their build- ings and material artifacts, or in the ambiguity inherent in the Zulu terms that they used to speak of their religion. And precisely in trying to fashion and determine the meaning of this space, it was already partly slipping out of their authoritative grasp. This is not particular to them. As shown, for example, by Keane and Engelke, Christian groups across the globe struggle to establish the correct relationship between people, words, and things, in order to shape a believable Christian world with a divine “presence.” In short, some of the shape that the missionaries tried to give to the new space they were creating, and some of the unintended tensions and ambiv- alences that took hold in the space, were not only bound to processes of translation or local agency or colonial hegemonic forms or larger historical changes – though those are important. The tensions were also part and par- cel of the process of trying to work out how to make God “present,” that is, how to be Christian in the world.
THE MISSIONARY BODY: THE PROBLEM OF PHYSICALITY
In the 1850s the first Norwegian missionaries were aware that they had not just relocated to a new geographical location in which they tried their best to establish physical mission stations, but that their “world-traveling” (Sullivan 2004:10) had also, in some sense, shattered their bodily horizons. Their bodily and conceptual space had to be reconstituted as they tried to hold themselves together in this new world, and the fraught conflicts that erupted among the Norwegian missionaries during this early period were at times focused directly on bodily matters. As the missionaries paid atten- tion to body-related tensions, their bodies started to play a role in the moral domain that they were trying to assert on the mission stations. In this chapter I shall present two examples of tensions among the Norwegian missionaries in the mid-1850s: the first centered on a “sofa,” the second on a pregnant woman. Why did a sofa become such a problematic object on the mission station? And why did the body of a pregnant woman cause such commotion in the missionary group? It seems to me that the body work related to these two incidents can tell us something about the larger processes of religious and political change that the missionaries were caught up in and sought to negotiate.
A “Sofa”
In the early 1850s, Hans Schreuder controlled the disbursement of money among the Norwegian missionaries. None of them received a salary; instead, the small group of missionaries operated on a common budget. Money was disbursed as and when Hans thought that it was necessary. At one point, the other missionaries were even told that they had to ask Hans for special permission before purchasing goods on credit in D’Urban, as they had been doing.1 This common budget system gave rise to much strain and embarrassed deference, and as long as it lasted it gave Hans Schreuder an
1 NMS Archives, HA, Box 130, Jacket 4, Lars Larsen to the Board, May 8, 1854.
effective means of control over what his Norwegian missionary colleagues could and could not do on the mission stations. The missionaries were also required to send detailed inventory lists to the Board in Stavanger once a year, noting down everything to be found on their stations. In this way, methods of surveillance and self-surveillance were built into the Norwegian mission enterprise from the start, and the space of the mission station served to amplify the ways that the missionaries could be observed. In 1854, Lars Larsen drew up the budget for Umphumulo. The budget included costs for him and Martha, and Ommund and Guri Oftebro, who were now married. It also included costs for food and clothes for the people who worked and lived at the station. Lars sent the budget to Hans Schreuder so that Hans could send it on to the Board. However, after reviewing the Umphumulo budget, Hans remarked admonishingly in a letter to Lars: “I see that the Umphumulo budget in addition is so substantial already that it will probably draw attention [from the Board].”2 In his next letter to the Board, Lars tried to defend himself: A cursory glance at the bill (when it comes), will assure anyone, that for 14 to 16 people, over a period of 15 months, £40 has been used for food and clothes; what that makes per day You will easily be able to calculate. But should this too seem to be too much, then I do not know what else to do but to refer to Norsk Missions-Tidende, No. 10, April 1851, 6th volume, p. 167, where it can be seen that from Septemb. 1849 to Sept. 1850 around £150 went into the house- hold [at Umphumulo], and then I had nothing to do with the budget or with the household affairs.3 Lars does not need to spell out that from September 1849 to September 1850 the site at Umphumulo and its “household” was being set up and run by Hans Schreuder. In other words, Hans had spent £150 on the household over 12 months, while the Oftebros and the Larsens had spent only £40 on food and clothes over the past 15 months. The total amount of money they spent during this period was £102.4 By way of comparison, as mentioned in chapter 1, Bishop John Colenso spent £11,000 during the first seven years at his station Bishopstowe in the late 1850s and early 60s – an average of around £1,570 per year (Guy 1983:79). The following year, Lars Larsen again sent the Umphumulo budget to Hans Schreuder. This time, Hans remarked that Lars’ budget was
2 Ibid. Lars Larsen was quoting from a letter that Hans Schreuder had written to him; the letter itself has not made its way to Stavanger. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid.
“complicated.” Lars, again, defended himself. It would not be “compli cated,” he lashed out in his next letter to the Board, if they could only stop using the accounting system of a common budget: “as far as the accounts affair is concerned, I am as calm as a young lion,” he wrote.5 It seems he may still have felt anxious that he would be criticized by the Board, however, for he then went on to include a lengthy and rather puz- zling defense in his letter of a certain “sofa”: As it might come about, that reports might be sent home, if not officially then at least privately, which say, that we “have such an easy life here at Umpumulo,” – Peder Blessing, the Secretary in Stavanger, who went through Lars Larsen’s letter with a pencil and marked parts of it for inclusion in Norsk Missions-Tidende, put a question mark next to this; it is clear that he had certainly not heard of any such reports – “that we can sit on a sofa and be well” etc. and the Board, when it looks through the [inventory] list, does not find any “sofa” recorded on this, it would not be surprising if it were to hit on the thought that I probably thought it best to remain silent about the “sofa,” so that I do not think the Board will hold it against me if I spend a couple of words on describing what this “sofa” consists of, so that it thereafter can assess its worth and to what degree it would be necessary to record it on the list.6 Apparently, there was a “sofa” (Sopha) at Umphumulo that Lars had not recorded on the inventory list for the station. Apparently, it must also have occasioned some derisive remarks – or hints or threats of such remarks – from one or more of his Norwegian missionary colleagues. In his letter to the Board, Lars continued in defensive vein by explaining why the “sofa” was necessary: We need to have this in case a person (a white man or woman) might come here, although this rarely happens, since it would look rather sad if one or more of us had to sit on the floor and talk with them, since we just have one chair each. Furthermore, as indicated by Lars’ use of quotes around the term “sofa,” it was not a real sofa: “The sofa at Umpumulo” has been put together by the Society’s wagon driver Umbijane: it consists of 4 sawed-off pieces of a tree trunk 1 foot and 4 inches
5 NMS Archives, HA, Box 130, Jacket 5, Lars Larsen to the Board, June 20, 1855. 6 Ibid.
long. On these pieces of tree trunk are placed 5 planks, 3 lengthwise and 2 across to hold the pieces of wood together. On these planks lies one of the mattresses that the Society gave us to take along when we were sent out and these items make up the “sofa” at Umpumulo.7 And then there was a mirror: but a mirror can be big and it can be small; it can have a gilded frame or a simple wooden frame; the mirror recorded on the list is 10 inches long and 9 inches wide, the glass is cracked, it now has a brown wooden frame.8 And then there was a bed frame: This consists of 4 pieces for the frame and 4 legs of simple timber; strips of untreated ox hide have been drawn through the end and side pieces, on this we put straw mats and on these bed linen.9 Lars even attached a miniature drawing of the bed to his letter, lest the Board should have missed the point: the bed was not luxurious. When I first found this letter from Lars Larsen in the archives, I was puz- zled. Why did he feel it was necessary to go into such a detailed defense of the items on the mission station to the Board? Surely the members of the Board in Norway had far more items, and also far more comfortable items, in their own homes, including sofas, mirrors, and beds. Why did Lars seem to have started to believe that their presence on the mission station might cause him to be reprimanded? I wondered if these items might somehow be held against him and his missionary calling. Material artifacts that would not draw attention in Norway had suddenly become troublesome on the mission station, where they were subject to agitated questions: What did these artifacts mean? And did they mean something else if they could be shown to be less comfortable, more rudimentary, or more cracked? Before reflecting further on these questions, let me present the second body- related conflict.
A Pregnant Woman
In 1854, a small group of mission assistants arrived from Norway: the car- penter Johan Olsen with his wife Elise; the carpenter Siver Samuelsen with his wife Thorine; and Arnt Tønnesen. They were all in their twenties, had
7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid.
10 Though for rare exceptions see e.g. the excerpts from letters from Johan Olsen in Norsk Missions-Tidende 1854/55:189–91 and from Arnt Tønnesen in Norsk Missions-Tidende 1854/55:191–7. 11 NMS Archives, HA, Box 130, Jacket 5, Hans Schreuder to the Board, September 25, 1854.
advice and reflections to satisfy his demanding questions; so when Larsen e.g. wanted to know, how he, in the matter of giving Samuelsen money, should act in the case that Mad. Samuelsen should be, as some thought, expecting, and Samuelsen e.g. demanded either to travel to D’Urban or to send for a midwife or doctor or nursemaid etc. etc., I could in no way satisfy him by e.g. advising him to “act with appropriate discernment and in consideration with Samuelsen and others on the station” […] in other words, he wished only to bear purely mechanical work – and all responsibility rested on me. These same petty con- siderations and difficulties by the way also made themselves felt in almost all my negotiations with Br. [Brother] Larsen even in the most insignificant and simplest of situations.12 We do not have Lars’ version; he never wrote about this discussion, apart from one mention, in which he says that Hans Schreuder had informed him that the Samuelsens wanted to move to Umphumulo, and then sug- gested that Martha Larsen should keep house and cook for all of them, as Hans Schreuder thought that this would be a less costly option than cook- ing separately. Lars was not able to hide his curt contempt at Hans’ treat- ment of his wife, which was tied to the control of money: “it appeared cheap to me, to demand this of her, with the thought that through this something could be saved for the mission, because I think the opposite.”13 And that is all he said about the matter in his letters to Stavanger. All we might guess about the discussion, then, is that both men walked off equally enraged at the other’s wilful misunderstanding, both equally defensive in their refusal to extend some support to the other. Hans Schreuder returned to Entumeni and told Siver Samuelsen that they would not be welcome at Umphumulo; in addition, he added ominously that if they decided to go ahead and move it would be seen as “half a resig- nation” from the Society (Sommerfelt 1865:220). This did not stop Siver Samuelsen. He and Thorine packed their things and moved to Umphumulo in September 1854. In one of the few letters from him to be found in the NMS Archives, he describes their arrival at Umphumulo. In comparison to the style of the letters from Hans Schreuder, Lars Larsen, Ommund Oftebro and Tobias Udland, his tone seems straightforward and almost naive: S. [Schreuder] had depicted our arrival and stay here very darkly. – On the 8th [September 1854] we arrived here and found a completely different reception than we could have expected from S.’s words. Firstly L. [Larsen] let me stay on his verandah until I had set up a room in the old stable. Secondly he gave us
12 Ibid., orig. emph. 13 NMS Archives, HA, Box 130, Jacket 5, Lars Larsen to the Board, June 20, 1855.
food for 3 weeks until I had been to D’Urban and bought victuals. Thirdly since I did not bring any … [unreadable: creatures?] from Zululand, he has promised to give us the necessary butter and milk. In the same way that they also often give us other small articles of the kitchen.14 His letter, in a touchingly stilted way, also informed the Board of his wife’s pregnancy. Here, too, the difference between the letter-writers in Zululand becomes apparent; while the male missionaries who had been through some kind of theological training were able to use the space that the letter format gave them to strike an engaged tone with the Board – a tone of passion (as often in Hans Schreuder’s letters), of wry reflection (as often in Lars Larsen’s letters), or of enthusiasm (as often in Ommund Oftebro’s letters) – the letter-writing remained an unfamiliar and awkward arena for Siver Samuelsen and the other “assistants.” They were certainly not able to use it, as the theologians were, to put forward their disagreements with the Board in a diplomatic or subtle or sarcastic manner. Siver Samuelsen did not quite know how to say it: “This time I send You the sad news that my wife has been blessed with a fruit of the womb, a natural consequence of our common habitation, which I did not know was even prohibited.”15 It was, in fact, not prohibited. Hans Schreuder, however, seems to have indicated strongly to Siver Samuelsen that it was; seemingly out of his gen- uine frustration that because of the missionary wives who were now in his mission field, there was the possibility of children, which might derail the missionaries’ everyday focus and energy away from the great hopes and visions that he had for the Norwegian mission to the Zulus. At this time, Hans Schreuder was not yet married, and was, as his letters show, able to push himself unusually far in terms of both physical and mental efforts. He found it difficult that the other missionaries might not live in the same way. Guri Oftebro had already become pregnant and given birth to a son in May 1854, though Hans Schreuder had refused to pay for the expenses associ- ated with the birth.16 Now Thorine Samuelsen was pregnant, had declined to keep house for everyone at the Entumeni mission station, and had moved to the Larsens at Umphumulo.
14 NMS Archives, HA, Box 130, Jacket 5, Siver Samuelsen to the Board, dated September 1, 1854, though the date must be incorrect, since it is written after the Samuelsens arrived at Umphumulo on September 8, 1854. 15 Ibid. 16 The Oftebros were forced to pay out of their own pocket for their stay in D’Urban around the time of the birth, and this was experienced as so antagonistic by Ommund that he felt hurt over it even eighteen years later, in 1872 (Tjelle 2010a:32, who cites Aktstykker 1876:297–8 and 342–3).
Once the Samuelsens had moved, Hans Schreuder sent off his angry complaints over their and Lars Larsen’s behavior to Stavanger, together with the dramatic declaration that “I had to renounce and hereby renounce any longer to have responsibility for or control over the station Umphu mulo.”17 The Board, upon receiving his letter, convened a very serious meet- ing in February 1855.18 They decided that neither the Larsens nor the Samuelsens were fit to be missionaries, and that they would be recalled from the mission field out of “care for our mission.”19 Hans Schreuder must not have been expecting this, however, and apparently did not wish to lose two missionary couples from the mission field, however difficult those cou- ples were, for in his next letter on the matter to the Board he reported that he had spoken with the Larsens. Then, with characteristic strategic flair, he thanked the Board for their decision that Lars Larsen had to go, but, he explained, “both Larsen and wife are sincerely devoted to the mission,” and they would, in fact, stay.20 The Samuelsens, too, remained in the mission field. Thus the letters of recall had only shown to what a large extent the missionaries were, at one level, able to shape their own situation indepen- dently of the Board. The Board, to their credit, managed to take this dem- onstration of their relative powerlessness graciously: “[W]e say with heartfelt thanks to God,” they replied to Hans Schreuder, “that we with joy have read your account of the good effects that our letters of recall had.”21 However, an open letter to the missionaries from the Board, printed in Norsk Missions-Tidende immediately after the recall letters were sent, emphasized the central point of the matter: Lars Larsen and Siver Samuelsen – they were named and shamed – had not demonstrated suffi- cient self-denial: The behavior of our dear Brothers Larsen and Samuelsen […] hurt us deeply and pained us all the more since we and everyone naturally thinks that one ought to be able to demand an above-average Christian self-denial of those who truly feel called to the act of mission service.22
17 NMS Archives, HA, Box 130, Jacket 5, Hans Schreuder to the Board, September 25, 1854. 18 NMS Archives, Forhandlingsprotokol for det norske Missionsselskabs Hovedstyrelse, November 1853–June 1862, meetings on January 29 and February 8, 1855. 19 NMS Archives, HA, Box 156, The Board to Hans Schreuder, February 12, 1855; see also NMS Archives, HA, Box 156, The Board to Lars Larsen, February 12, 1855. 20 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1855/56:83. In original: “baade Larsen og Kone ere Missionen oprigtigen opoffrede.” Opoffrede literally means “sacrificed,” and thus ties the Larsens to the positive connotations of self-sacrifice within the pietistic tradition of NMS. 21 NMS Archives, HA, Box 156, The Board to Hans Schreuder, January 25, 1856, orig. emph. 22 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1854/55:144.
The Board then went on to address the other missionaries: We certainly hope that You will remember Your calling, Your mission calling, the foundational character of which is obedient self-denial [Selvfornegtelse] […] [The Devil’s] foremost points of attack are the fleshly self-will [Egenvillie], the natural tendency to self-determination […] Therefore you will only be able to counter his attacks through serious self-denial […] so that you may live and suffer one with the other in internal accommodation and communal spirit and self-denying love. Then the Lord will be pleased with the service and will bless Zulu[land] for your sakes.23 What kind of self-denial had the Samuelsens and Larsens not shown? How had their alleged fleshly self-will threatened the moral domain of the mis- sion stations?
A Note on Method: Reading the Missionary Letters
As a segue into discussing the notion of the missionary body and how it might help to make sense of both the problematic “sofa” as well as the com- motion caused by a pregnant woman among the Norwegian missionaries, let me insert a note here on reading. Needless to say, historical documents need to be problematized in order to be read, and the missionary letters are not simply channels of thought direct from the missionary. To attempt to interpret them, as with any historical documents, is in many ways to enter a relentless field of fragments: overhearing snatches of conversations between engaged and positioned subjects whom one has never met (Des Chene 1997:77), and whom one cannot question, afterwards, about any par- ticular obscurity or silence (Peel 1996:72). When interpreting historical documents such as these missionary letters, it is important to understand the context in which they were written, and the motivations for writing them. The Norwegian missionaries in Natal and Zululand were initially supposed to keep personal diaries or journals, and to send extracts of these back to the Board.24 (This was, incidentally, a practice kept by the nineteenth-century Church Missionary Society agents in Western Africa; Peel 2000:10–11.) The NMS missionaries in Southern Africa, however, instead soon adopted a pattern of writing a letter to the Board every three to six months for each station (and it was not uncommon for individual missionaries to write less frequently). These letters were
23 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1854/55:145–6. 24 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1851/52:173, Norsk Missions-Tidende 1852/53:43, 97–120.
considered to be station reports, and so while they were expected to reveal the inner states of the missionary author, they were also potted summaries of activities on the station over the past months or half year. Very soon, these letters took on a performative function. They started to become a stage that the missionaries could effectively use for posing, that is, for describing themselves and their work as they would wish it to be seen by the Board, as well as by the imagined audience of acquaintances, rela- tives and mission supporters spread out across Norway who would read extracts of the letter reprinted in NMS’ magazine Norsk Missions-Tidende. As Karina Hestad Skeie (2001:167) suggests, an important aim for the mis- sionary letter-writers, especially when they were recounting events related to preaching or conversions, was to confirm rather than primarily to inform. They operated with a series of oppositions, centered around the grounding opposition between Christianity and “heathenism,” and their accounts were on the whole meant to confirm the validity of this worldview. In addition, it seems to me that there was also another primary motiva- tion behind the content and style that the missionaries chose for their let- ters. The Norwegian missionaries in the 1850s were clearly not only using the letters as a stage for an audience in Norway, but also as a stage for the benefit of their Norwegian missionary colleagues in Natal and Zululand. The missionaries’ reports were usually required to be sent via the mission- ary superintendent (Hans Schreuder until 1873, and then Ommund Oftebro from 1877–87) – though, at least during the first years, there seems to have been some confusion and resistance to this practice.25 Most of the time, however, this meant that the missionaries knew that the superintendent, Hans Schreuder, would most likely read their musings. They were also aware that parts of their letters – namely the parts carefully chosen and edited by the Secretary of the Society in Stavanger – were reprinted in Norsk Missions-Tidende.26 Copies of the magazine were then sent – not only
25 For example, in 1853 Ommund Oftebro sent the budget for Umphumulo to the Board without sending it via Hans Schreuder, and Hans let him know that this was wrong (NMS Archives, HA, Box 130, Jacket 4, Lars Larsen to the Board, May 8, 1854). In 1855 Lars Larsen sent his report for Umphumulo to the Board via Hans Schreuder, but sealed, so that Hans would not open it. Hans let him know that this too was wrong (Norsk Missions-Tidende 1856/57:153). The practice of sending reports via the superintendent continued under Ommund Oftebro – see e.g. Norsk Missions-Tidende 1879:110, and Ommund Oftebro’s note on Lars Larsen’s letter of January 6, 1881 (NMS Archives, HA, Box 135A, Jacket 13, Lars Larsen to the Board, January 6, 1881). 26 The Board’s initial instructions to the missionaries stated that selected portions of their letters would be made public (“Midlertidig Instrux for det norske Missionsselskabs Missionærer” in Norsk Missions-Tidende 1851/52:173). The missionaries sometimes included
(as will be discussed in chapter 6 on the missionary imagination). The Board always replied as a committee, and thus they at times received per- sonal revelations and confessions, but only replied in the impersonal voice of a fatherly collective, to encourage or to admonish. Moreover, their replies to the missionaries were not printed in Norsk Missions-Tidende, which left them free to speak their collective mind.
The Missionary Body and Self-denial
Let me turn now from method to discussion to try to better understand some of this material from the missionary letters. What was it about the existence on the mission station that led Lars Larsen to feel so defensive about whether his “sofa” was comfortable or not? Why did Hans Schreuder attempt to force an ill, pregnant woman to take care of his household instead of grant her some rest? What was it about the missionary situation that led to such an intense need for control over the missionaries’ bodies – including what these bodies might sit on and what might come out of them – during this initial period? For Hans Schreuder in this early phase, the ability to control his own body seems to have been virtually synonymous with demonstrating com- mitment to the mission project.28 To him, having an exhausted body trans- lated into spiritual reassurance, because the exhaustion signaled that he was giving his utmost to God’s mission, which God himself was watching over and sustaining. His exhaustion let him feel in his body that he was dif- ferent from the “heathendom” around him. However, his fear of a potential loss of control was not only triggered by his Zulu surroundings, but also, more interestingly, by his Norwegian missionary colleagues, especially those who might not agree to be swallowed up by his project. He found it very difficult to relate to the fact that some of the other missionaries might not fully do as he wished, or that they might spend time and energy on wives and children. In the early phase of the mission, it seems that he was afraid his colleagues would introduce weaker elements, leaks or fissures in the mission structure that he tried to maintain by maintaining a grip on himself.
28 See e.g. Hans Schreuder’s description of the circumstances surrounding his trip to Prince Cetshwayo to secure the mission station Inhlazatshe for the Norwegian mission (Norsk Missions-Tidende 1863:109–112), which will be discussed further in chapter 6.
Lars Larsen entered fully into this state of tension. Not only did Hans Schreuder impose control, but Lars, despite his bitter complaints, entered into and actively furthered these techniques of controlling his own body. Lars too made it a point of honor to spend as little money as possible on food and clothes, and preferably less than Hans, as can be seen from the above example in which Lars goes out of his way to demonstrate to the Board that he has spent less money at Umphumulo than Hans. This compe- tition in self-denial was tied to a larger structure of sentiment in which con- trol over one’s body was taken to be a mark of religious commitment. The Board in Stavanger played into these dynamics too. They stressed the Christian virtues of frugality (Sparsommelighed), “self-denial” (Selv fornegtelse) and “world-denial” (Verdensforsagelse). In the pietistic mission circles in Norway these were considered important virtues, intimately tied to one’s sincerity.29 Yet at times the Board seems to have used these virtues as excuses for maintaining low operating costs, and as techniques of con- trol in relation to the missionaries. Certainly, the Board was not in a hurry to raise the wealth or living standard of its missionaries in Southern Africa, despite their relative poverty compared to other white groups. Thus even when the Norwegian Missionary Society started to receive more funds, from the late 1850s onwards (the Society’s income almost quadrupled from the mid-1850s to the mid-1860s),30 the additional money was primarily used to train and send new missionaries, rather than to increase the pay and resources of the missionaries already in the field. They were left to the virtues of frugality and self-denial. The Board’s request for a detailed inventory list for each mission station also sent the implicit message that the missionaries would not be able to keep excessive or luxurious items without the knowledge – and reprimand – of the Board. This is one of the triggers for Lars Larsen’s defensiveness con- cerning the fact that a “sofa,” a mirror, and a bed frame could be found at the Umphumulo station, and his wish to give painstaking explanations for why those items should not be considered overly comfortable. In this way, the Board (and the missionaries, amongst themselves) were able to use the
29 For example, frugality, self-denial, and world-denial were among the fourteen virtues listed in the 1874 “House Order” for the Mission School in Stavanger (see Tjelle 2011:84–5, who cites Birkeli and Tidemann Strand 1959:214–24). Cf. also Kristin Fjelde Tjelle’s discus- sion of the importance of “world-denial” in the Norwegian mission – and the considerable tensions surrounding this concept – in relation to the dismissal of the Norwegian mission- ary Christian Oftebro in 1888 (Tjelle 2011:65–90). 30 The Society’s income in 1854/55 was 4,658 Norwegian spesidaler; in 1863/64 it was 16,975 (Nome 1943a:213–14).
virtues of frugality and self-denial as means of controlling others, and when the missionaries Lars Larsen and Siver Samuelsen were accused by the Board of having insufficient self-denial, this was another way of saying that they had not been sufficiently submissive to the control of the Board and Hans Schreuder. The self-denial and control that the first Norwegian missionaries associ- ated with a lack of bodily comfort were echoed in the control imposed by the architectural set-up of the mission stations. As described in the previ- ous chapter, in 1851 Ommund Oftebro and Lars Larsen initially built a one- room square house at Umphumulo, 20 feet by 11. Against one of the exterior walls they built a smaller lean-to, 6 feet by 5, where Lars and Martha Larsen slept. When the summer rains prevented them from sleeping in the lean- to over the summer of 1853/54, Ommund and Guri Oftebro and Lars and Martha Larsen all slept in the same room. The Larsens did not build a sepa- rate “living house” for themselves until 1857 – six years after moving to Umphumulo. The lean-to was not robust enough to keep out heavy rain, and the other buildings do not seem to have been very sturdy either; already by 1854, Lars reported that the provisional “school house” needed to be rebuilt and that the stable was “about to fall down.”31 Nonetheless, that same year when Siver Samuelsen and his pregnant wife Thorine moved to Umphumulo, they set up room in the apparently dilapidated stable.32 The missionaries did not initially build a separate kitchen at Umphumulo, but built a hearth and chimney in the one-room house where Ommund, Guri, Lars and Martha lived, and food was cooked inside over the open fire.33 Their diet consisted largely of the same foods that the Zulus around them ate – corn, potatoes, chicken, eggs, milk and butter, occasionally mutton or beef, and probably some other vegetables, such as pumpkins.34 All these “apparently insignificant bodily habits” (Comaroffs 1992:70) amounted to a setting where the missionary body was, voluntarily, con- fined to a small living space without much privacy, an explicit lack of “com- fort,” a hot and smoke-filled main room, with an earthen floor and thatched roof, and with relatively fragile architectural structures set up for other uses. Zulu houses also consisted of (round) one-room abodes, without
31 NMS Archives, HA, Box 130, Jacket 4, Lars Larsen to the Board, May 8, 1854. 32 NMS Archives, HA, Box 130, Jacket 5, Siver Samuelsen to the Board, dated September 1, 1854, though the date must be incorrect, since it is written after the Samuelsens arrived at Umphumulo on September 8, 1854. 33 NMS Archives, HA, Box 130, Jacket 5, Lars Larsen to the Board, June 20, 1855. 34 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1852/53:104.
What threat did Thorine Samuelsen’s pregnant body pose? In an atmo- sphere of heightened self-control and of alertness to the difficulty of keep- ing one’s own self intact, a pregnant woman may have signaled a certain lack of closure and control. This was an “unruly” body that threatened to open up and “‘spill over’ into social space, breaching its order” (Comaroffs 1992:73–4). It would need money. It would lead to new preoccupations. It would draw focus away from the mission. It would make it more compli- cated to demand the strictest self-denial of the father. As Ommund Oftebro ruefully noted, around 30 years later, remembering the time when he and Guri had young children in the mission field: It was said [by missionary colleagues]: That’s the end of him and his work, since he’s had children, now he has to take care of them, and when our larger family made it necessary to receive additional pay, it was said: He draws a lot of money, that man, and further: should the rest of us have to pay for not hav- ing children, etc.35 The potential slippage, loosening of control, and unbounded flows that a pregnant body and young children represented were enough to cause a major upheaval among the missionaries in Natal and Zululand in the mid- 1850s – and, in their repercussions, in the Board in Stavanger. This tells us something about the particular Christian culture that was developing on the Norwegian mission stations. It also tells us something about the wider colonial context.
The Missionary Body in a Colonial Context (i): The “Sofa” and the Poor Whites
Jean and John Comaroff note that in any project that sets out to produce “new” men and women, from asylums (Goffman 1961) to prisons (Foucault 1977), from initiation rites to Tshidi Zionist churches, the “redefinition of apparently insignificant bodily habits” is always important (Comaroffs 1992:70). These apparently insignificant bodily habits may relate to dress- ing, sitting, walking, eating, taking medicine, washing, or sleeping; they may be associated, for example, with rules for personal contact or distance, rules for sexual conduct, or rules for movement. Why would such bodily habits be considered significant? The Comaroffs (1992:70) draw on Pierre
35 NMS Archives, Gen. sekr. 40, Box 35, Jacket 13, Minutes from the missionary confer- ence in South Africa 1886; cited in Tjelle (2010a:64–5 n11).
Bourdieu (1977:94) to highlight the close connection between our bodies and our social context; the body expresses organizing social principles (cf. Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga 2003a). This is similar to Frantz Fanon’s (1986) argument, presented in the previous chapter, that our “bodily sche- mas” – the way our bodies are in the world – are made up of intimate con- nections between our physical bodies, our understanding of our selves, and the social space that we are in. Thus any “body work,” that is, any effort to transform what our bodies do and how they do it, will also bring about changes in how we understand ourselves and how we relate to the world. In a colonial context, this is most fundamentally and insidiously the case for people who are “made” into “the colonized.” The Comaroffs (1992: 39–41; and 1991, 1992, 1997 passim) have discussed the topic in relation to the missionaries’ encounter with the African body, as they examine the ways in which the British Nonconformist missionaries among the Tswana attempted to reconceptualise, fashion and change the bodies of the Africans around them. The missionaries exhorted the Tswana to wash, shave or tidy their hair, put on European clothing, maintain “sanitary” liv- ing conditions, cordon off private residential spaces, take European medi- cine, refrain from excessive consumption of alcohol, and so on. Body work was an inherent part of their mission project – in line with the colonial project – with the intention of cultivating and fashioning the Tswana into what they were not.36 Less attention has been paid to the missionary body and the body work associated with this body, which was much more subtle and which took place in a position of political power. However, Natasha Erlank (2001), drawing, amongst others, on Ann Laura Stoler (1995), charts how nineteenth-century British missionaries among the Xhosa guarded their bourgeois identities and bodies over against the bodies of the Xhosa, par- ticularly as these were perceived to be sexually marked. Erlank suggests that part of their guarding of European identity was done through affirm- ing its difference from other types of sexual, domestic and living arrange- ments. To some extent this is true also of the nineteenth-century Norwegian missionaries. As we have seen, the Larsens and Oftebros were concerned that they needed seating furniture on the mission station because of the embarrassment that would be caused if they had a white visitor and could
36 Line Nyhagen Predelli (2003a:102–16) describes how the same processes were evident among nineteenth-century Norwegian missionary staff at a boarding school in Madagascar, where they sought to “remake” the Malagasy girls.
not procure enough “proper” places to sit. The make-shift “sofa” that the wagon driver cobbled together for them, albeit a rather crude version, could still serve this important function. In addition, the very idea of calling it a “sofa” – though Lars Larsen leaves the term in quotation marks – rather than, for example, a bench or a bed, may in itself have been meant to evoke associations of a bourgeois home. The sofa as a material object thus carried several associations: it carefully distinguished the missionaries, as white people, from the Zulus, while drawing a connection between the mission- aries, other whites in the colony, and perhaps the European bourgeoisie. Both race and class were in play here. Hans Schreuder tried, for example, to establish a hierarchy of character, as it were, within the small group of Norwegian missionaries, by implying that his own family background and university education placed him apart from his colleagues. He once remarked of them that their character formation and refinement of man- ners (Dannelsestilpudsning) did not run deep, and still needed “support in order to be maintained” (Handeland 1963:265, cited in Simensen with Gynnild 1984:43). Then again, Hans Schreuder, who at times regarded his colleagues with condescension, was in turn regarded in the same way by at least some of the other Europeans in Natal. As mentioned in chapter 1, the most explicit example is Sir Garnet Wolseley, who was Governor of Natal in 1875, and who noted down after meeting Hans Schreuder that he had met with “Old Schroeder who is really more than half a Kaffir”37 (Preston 1971:223). Hans himself sensed the awkwardness of his bodily status in encounters with higher-ranking British colonial agents, and once reported that he was particularly embarrassed over his worn clothing (Rakkenes 2003:290), presumably since this might be taken as a marker of class. The attention paid by the missionaries to their own bodies, their refine- ment, their clothing, what they sat on, and how they lived, caused some embarrassment and tension among them that can be attributed to the colonial context in which they lived. Within British colonial milieus in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was at times an emphasis – at least formally – on the importance of character, which, as Stoler (2002:27) has observed, existed in a fluid connection with, and at times as a foil for, class status. It was tied to a certain bundle of European
37 As mentioned earlier, the term “kaffir” was used widely in colonial South Africa by white settlers and colonials to refer to black people. In line with racial tensions it came to take on a derogatory and insulting meaning, especially from the early twentieth century. No doubt Sir Garnet’s description of another white man as “kaffir” or black was not meant as a compliment.
The Missionary Body in a Colonial Context (ii): Structures of Sentiment
It seems to me that another relevant factor was the type of surveillance and self-surveillance that was encouraged in colonial settings. The mission sta- tion space that the missionaries set up had some unexpected ramifications and effects, and one of these was the effect that it had on the missionaries themselves. The mission station did not only become a space where Zulus could choose to “give” or “withhold” their hearts, and where they were both observed and judged in the process (as will be detailed more closely in chapter 4 on the converts); it was also a space of surveillance of the mis- sionaries themselves. On the mission station, missionary actions could be observed and scrutinized by their fellow missionaries and by the Board. The Norwegians, in addition, carried with them the pietistic bent toward intense self-scrutiny, and the Board in Stavanger encouraged this self- surveillance by requesting timely and detailed letters from the male mis- sionaries in which they reported not only on the mission activities carried out, but also quite frequently on the state of their hearts. Let me explore this surveillance and self-surveillance further with reference to the work of Ann Laura Stoler. Stoler (2002) has argued that we need to pay more attention to senti- ments and the intimate in the history of empire. She notes that much study of imperialism to date preoccupies itself with tracing the route of reason that led from the Enlightenment to the empire, while structures of sentiment have been seen as mere embellishments along this route of hard political rationality. Through examination of colonial laws and life, however, Stoler suggests that the attempts to foster and master proper
sentiments, and to curtail passions out of place, were a core feature of imperial statecraft. She uses Foucauldian lines of thought to examine how mastery of the care of the self stands in inextricable relation to mastery of the care of the polity (Foucault 1978, 1980), and she examines how much attention was paid to the sentiments – not just of the colonized – but of the colonizers in the colonial Indies. The colonial agents themselves were con- tinuously under surveillance and self-surveillance. Both the absence and the excessive expression of sentiments among them could disturb colonial hierarchies. Appropriate affects were to be nurtured and kept under con- trol. Sentiments of loyalty to and longing for a European homeland were appropriate; excessive homesickness and despair were not. Sentiments of sexual attraction to women of one’s own race were appropriate; to women of the colonized races, increasingly not. This does not mean that inappro- priate sentiments did not occur. On the contrary, they occurred all the time, and were whispered about, frowned upon, reproved, pulled back into check, or secreted away. The point is that sentiments – whether appropriate or inappropriate, whether loyalties, longings, anxieties or attractions – functioned as dense transfer points of power, intertwining the governing of the colonized and the governing of the colonizing self into one indistin- guishable stream of affective modes.38 As with the colonial agents described by Stoler, the Norwegian mission- aries were required to have an appropriate amount of affect that was nei- ther excessive nor out of place, though what exactly this meant in practice was sometimes unclear. Should a husband and wife be allowed to have sexual intercourse, when this might lead to pregnancy and a baby? Hans Schreuder thought this might perhaps be excessive, though he did not
38 This type of surveillance and self-surveillance bears some resemblance to Michel Foucault’s (1977, 1991) notion of “governmentality.” Ann Laura Stoler (1995, 2002:140–61) offers an extended and thoughtful critique of the use of Foucault’s thought in studies of colonial situations, and the Comaroffs (2001) also offer a briefer critical comment. Working along some of the same tack as them, it seems to me that the processes that the missionaries were caught up in unfolded at the intersections of several overlapping and sometimes con- flicting webs of power: that of the early colonial state, that of the interests of early capital- ism, that of the early mission, that of the Zulu nation. These were forces with “distinctive signatures” and “distinct – frequently inimical – sites and sources, means and ends” (Coma roffs 2001:105). Thus while the missionaries did engage in mundane practices that facilitated larger forces and had greater consequences than they knew – a good illustration of the effects of governmentality – the missionaries also came to embody a certain kind of strug- gle, as manifested in body-related conflicts, which reflected the inherent tensions and con- tradictions of the situation, and which is perhaps not fully captured in the way that the term governmentality is commonly used, but is more adequately described by the notion of dense transfer points of power within structures of sentiment, surveillance, and control.
Christian Bodies and the Double-sided Nature of Physicality
A third factor that played into the situation was the missionaries’ particular practical interpretation, during the early period of the mission, of their par- ticular tradition of Christianity. Nineteenth-century Protestant missionar- ies in Africa usually valued the European nuclear family, and they used their families as models of proper domestic arrangements for the Africans around them (Erlank 2001, Robert 2008). During the first phase of the Norwegian mission to the Zulus, however, the missionaries’ attitude dif- fered from this norm. (Only two decades later, they had conformed to the norm, both on the Norwegian mission stations in Southern Africa as well as in Madagascar; Skeie 1999, Tjelle 2011:205–28). The establishment of missionary nuclear families was deliberately post- poned by the Board insofar as they required the male missionaries’ fiancées to wait in Norway until their future husbands had worked in the mission field for two or three years (as happened with Ommund and Guri Oftebro, and Tobias and Guri Udland). In general, the early missionary group did not place spiritual value on having children either. Hans Schreuder actively dis- couraged it. He even wrote a rather strict edict on the matter in 1855, enti- tled “On mission families,” in which he argued that mission families were a “necessary hindrance” and “disadvantage,” and that their effect on the mission should be made as minimal as possible.39 Of the first four male
39 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1855/56:182.
missionaries in the 1850s (Hans Schreuder, Ommund Oftebro, Tobias Udland, and Lars Larsen) – who all in due course got married – only one, Ommund, ever had children. Thus key aspects of the early Norwegian mis- sionaries’ conceptualization and management of their bodies do not neces- sarily seem to fit the Christian bourgeois ideal of a nuclear family so much as a different type of Christian ideal. There are long-standing traditions within the history of Christianity that place an emphasis on values such as sacrifice, asceticism, and suffering – and that map these values directly onto human bodies. The strong emo- tions associated with bodily control among the Norwegian missionaries are reminiscent, for example, of Peter Brown’s (1988) description of bodily con- trol and sexual renunciation in early Christianity. Early Christian ascetic thinkers struggled with the question of how to think of bodily urges, fluids and acts, including menstruation, childbirth, sexual attraction, intercourse, and eating. Bodily motivations came to be associated with images of “the black shadow of self-will” (Brown 1988:433), with illicit delight and innate sinfulness. Renunciation of the body became a means to attain mental and spiritual transformation, and to take on more of the role of not only the suf- fering but also the risen Christ. In the early Middle Ages, the most tangible manifestation of this line of thinking was perhaps the gradual establish- ment of a celibate priesthood in the church. Brown emphasises, however, that the renunciation of the body was never absolute, and never as “icy” (Brown 1988:446) as we might imagine it today. Caroline Walker Bynum (1991:38–48) agrees with this, and in her work picks up some of the same strands of condensed meaning associated with the human body in medieval Christianity. Imitatio Christi (imitation of Christ) became an idea resonant with ideals, for example, of voluntary pov- erty, virginity, sexual celibacy, or fasting. However, she points out that there is a double-sided nature to physicality within Christianity even in the ascetic tradition, and that imitation of Christ also brought new physical experiences. Early medieval texts include tender descriptions of the fleshly intimacy between Mary and Christ, celebrating the physical relationship of mother and child (Brown 1988:446). The Eucharist came to be associated both with asceticism as well as with a fusing between one’s own physical body and Christ’s physical body, a moment of giving oneself over to physi- cality (Bynum 1991:44). While the Norwegian missionaries’ pietistic religiosity did not encour- age the extremes touched on here, the tradition of this Christian ideal alerts us to two important dimensions of the missionaries’ relationship to their
Tacit Understandings
The commotion caused initially by the body of a pregnant woman at Entumeni set other dynamics in motion that were to become significant for the Norwegian missionaries. While the Board saw it as confirmation of their belief in the virtue of self-denial, and took it as an opportunity to emphasize this even more strongly as the framework for the missionaries’ existence, the missionaries as a group seem to have moved slightly in the opposite direction. Firstly, they seem to have reached some kind of tacit understanding, albeit still fraught and vague, concerning the Norwegian women in the mission field. Stoler (2002:25–6) has observed that the pres- ence of white women among colonial agents aroused strong protective instincts on the part of the white men, ostensibly against the perceived
threat of black men to these white women. Among the first Norwegian male missionaries, however, this does not seem to have been a marked ten- dency. Rather, they were more concerned with the potential threat in their own midst, and strong protective displays were immediately acted out when Lars Larsen and Siver Samuelsen sensed that another Norwegian man, namely Hans Schreuder, was making demands of their wives’ bodies. And after the combustive flair-up that followed, it was evident to everyone that Hans Schreuder had only partially got his way. Thorine Samuelsen was still pregnant and she was still in the mission field – and other missionary wives followed suit. By August 1855 the Olsens had also had a baby, and the Oftebros had their second in October 1855. Secondly, as Hans Schreuder and Lars Larsen managed to work out a resolution so that Lars and Martha could avoid the recall from the Board, it seems to have become apparent to the two men that they were both on a mission; they had found that they could not incorporate the other into their own wishes, but that they might be able to let the other do his work. This was a significant, if subtle, shift – especially for Hans Schreuder. And there were other motivations that entered Hans Schreuder’s life around this time which largely remained unwritten, but which came to be very important to him. He had turned from righteous indignation to reluctant acceptance of the fact that other missionaries were married. And then, a couple of years later in 1858, he himself married a woman, Emilie Löwenthal;40 this too led to changes in the way that Hans related to other missionaries. A measure of mutual surveillance, self-surveillance, and self-denial con- tinued to be present among the Norwegian missionaries. For example, when several people in Norway, according to Norwegian custom, sent money to the newly married couple as wedding gifts, Hans Schreuder took care to respond, in Norsk Missions-Tidende: for reasons of conscience I must ask you to excuse the fact that I […] cannot accept monetary gifts that are sent in order to improve our outer conditions and provide greater outer coziness and comfort. However, I […] will be will- ing to accept any specific monetary contributions that might be sent for special use by our congregation here or on any of our other stations.41 However, the most stifling hold of this surveillance against bodily indul- gence seems to have softened somewhat after the first decade. The sense of
40 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1858:220–21. 41 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1861:142, orig. emph.
THE CONVERTS: THE PROBLEM OF NEW MEMBERS
For the first fourteen years after Hans Schreuder arrived in Port Natal in 1844, the Norwegian missionaries did not manage to baptize a single con- vert. The first years were long years in this regard. Then in June 1858 the event that the Norwegian missionaries, the Board, and the Norwegian Missionary Society’s supporters all over Norway had been waiting for finally took place. The missionaries were able to baptize a young African woman, Mathenjwaze Shange.1 She had been working for Lars and Martha Larsen for around four years.2 When she told the missionaries that she would like to convert and be baptized as a Christian, Hans Schreuder came to Umphumulo to prepare her for baptism – probably in the form of reading, recitation and explanation of the Lutheran catechism – before baptizing her. There was jubilation among the Norwegian missionaries. Thanks to this first convert and the handful that followed her over the next years, the Norwegian Missionary Society gained new wind in its sails. Donations to the Society increased, the Mission School in Stavanger was reopened the following year, and a small group of young men embarked on studies under Secretary Peder Blessing in order to prepare to be sent out as missionaries (Nome 1943a:184–96). So momentous was the event of this first baptism that it has made a defi- nite impression on organizational memory in NMS. In fact, the number of years that passed between the year that Hans Schreuder first set foot in Natal, in 1844, and the first baptism, in 1858, is still remembered, a century and a half later. “Can you imagine,” I heard a couple of different people remark during my fieldwork in 2003–04, “can you imagine, they waited for fourteen years.” NMS’ current staff and supporters may not know much about the nineteenth-century history of the organization, but curiously enough, this number has been retained. At the 150th anniversary of this first baptism, in June 2008, the first convert was celebrated at NMS’ head
1 The missionaries transcribed her name as Umatendhjwaze. I have used the spelling that would be considered more common in written Zulu today, namely Mathenjwaze (cf. Tjelle 2011:155). For the other converts whose names are mentioned in this chapter, I have retained the missionaries’ spelling for ease of reference. 2 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1858:202, Norsk Missions-Tidende 1859:203, 220–21.
3 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1859:186–8, Norsk Missions-Tidende 1860:50–51. 4 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1866:276. 5 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1851/52:168. 6 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1851/52:190. 7 For a detailed presentation of this case, see Tjelle (2011:134–45); cf. Myklebust (1949:114).
until 1913, when two converts were ordained; in 1915, five more followed (Tjelle 2011:137). This chapter will explore the role of the African converts on the Norwegian mission stations, focusing especially on the first three decades from around 1850–1880, and examining what might be called “the convert puzzle,” or, perhaps more accurately, “the pastor puzzle.” If the first con- verts in the 1850s were greeted with such joy and were considered so impor- tant as the “first fruits,” that is, the start of an established Christian church among the Zulus, why wait 35 years from the first baptism until the first ordination, and then another 20 years until the second ordination? What were the missionaries hesitant about? In this chapter I will first present the story of two converts at Umphumulo, Mathenjwaze Shange and Mbiyana Ngidi, before outlining some of the reasons for the Norwegian missionaries’ hesitancy in relation to granting authority to these and other converts. This serves as a focal point for dis- cussing the missionaries’ overall relationship to these new members of the Christian community. I will argue that the missionaries do not seem to have hesitated because of anxieties over church standards or doctrines. Instead, I propose that their hesitancy was related to three broad sets of reasons: missionary paternalism, colonial “double vision,” and the Protes tant (especially pietistic) problem of how to assess the sincerity of new members – which proved so difficult on the mission stations. While the missionaries and the mission supporters back in Norway had prayed fervently for converts and truly rejoiced at the first baptisms, they had not anticipated all the implications that would follow once somebody was converted, or the ways in which mission station Christianity would change.
A Note on Method: Silences in the Sources – a Female Convert, a Missionary Wife, and a Native Assistant
One of the first things that might begin to shed light on the convert puzzle can be found already in the story about Mathenjwaze Shange, particularly in the silences that surround her. It is not remembered, either in Norway or in South Africa, and not remarked upon in any of the official histories of NMS (e.g. Nome 1943a:187–8, Myklebust 1949:38–40), that this first conver- sion on a Norwegian mission station can be traced back, in large part, not to any of the male Norwegian missionaries, but to two people on the station who were not vested with the power to write letters to Stavanger:
8 His name was transcribed as Umbijane by the Norwegian missionaries, and as Mbiana or Umbiyana by the American missionaries (Etherington 1978:159). I use the spelling that seems most commonly used today, namely Mbiyana (cf. Denis 2011, Houle 2011, Mahoney 1999). His last name was Ngidi, which does not appear to be given in the Norwegian sources. Many thanks to an anonymous reviewer for making the connection between “Umbijane” and “Mbiyana Ngidi.” 9 Cf. Norsk Missions-Tidende 1852/53:46. 10 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1858:222.
of [Lars] Larsen without also speaking of his friendly wife” (Berge 1906:42), which suggests that while Martha remains largely out of sight in the archives, she must have been an established presence on the mission sta- tion. We do not have any pieces of writing from Martha – and hardly any about her, either. Only male missionaries, at this stage, wrote to the Board in Stavanger. And, on the whole, they were not expected to dwell on their familial circumstances. Therefore Martha Larsen, the first missionary wife in the Society, paradoxically remains more of a mystery in the archives after her marriage to Lars and arrival in Natal than before. In this respect she is not alone. The Norwegian Missionary Society’s history, and the his- tory of other mission societies such as the London Missionary Society (Grimshaw and Sherlock 2005:179–80), is filled with examples of women who, once they were married, were expected to resign from any official employment status they might have held previously, and who disappear from the archives – while carrying on with their work on a voluntary basis without a separate wage. Patricia Grimshaw and Peter Sherlock (2005) suggest that the difficulty of reconstructing the stories of female missionaries and missionary wives is caused both by the fact that their writings are under-represented in mis- sion archives (they wrote mainly to relatives rather than to mission society headquarters), and also because of a lack of conceptual frameworks for their work (cf. Meintjes 1990:126). Their daily work on the station, or work with women and children, was often seen as peripheral to the real mission work, and therefore divorced from the broader narrative of the mission (Grimshaw and Sherlock 2005:175). But Martha’s story shows that even when she was part of the mission’s dominant narrative, namely the narra- tive of conversion, she was still written out of the official reports of the male missionaries. None of them mention her name in relation to the conversion and baptism of Mathenjwaze. None of them mention Mbiyana’s name in relation to Mathenjwaze’s conversion either. As discussed in the previous chapter on “the missionary body,” the letters written by the male Norwegian missionaries quickly became props in their own staged representations of themselves, their male colleagues, their work, and Zulu society. They often downplayed the work of others on the station, whether Norwegian women or Zulu women and men. This means that they are not very clear sources when trying to piece together the work and perceptions of the early African converts on the stations, even when these converts held important roles, such as Mbiyana.
What do we learn about Mbiyana, then, if we enter “through the looking glass of the Norwegian sources” (Drønen 2009:72)? The Norwegian mis- sionary letters tell us that Mbiyana had previously been baptized by an American missionary in Natal.11 We know that he must have been a trusted assistant to the Norwegians at Umphumulo since he was employed there for a decade, starting around 1850. He held a somewhat higher status than the other employees because of his role as a “wagon driver,” which meant a different skill set and a higher wage (Jørgensen 1990:284). Already around 1851 he was given his own assistant, a young boy, Umatikalala, whom he taught and worked with for at least the next four years.12 He must also have been considered a trustworthy Christian by the missionaries, since at some point during the mid-1850s he was given responsibility for leading the evening prayer on the station, as well as prayers and classes on Sunday mornings.13 Mathenjwaze’s encounter with Mbiyana on the station, their wish to get married, and what the two of them talked about must presumably have played a role in her wish to be baptized in 1858, although the missionaries chose not to discuss this in their letters to the Board. And in 1858, the same year that he was married to Mathenjwaze, Mbiyana built “an upright house” for them on the station, Lars Larsen reported14 – in other words, a rectangu- lar house similar to the missionaries’ houses. We know too that Mbiyana’s mother, Unomaganga, and Mathenjwaze’s sister, Unomise, were baptized at Umphumulo two years later, in July 1860 (taking the names Uana and Utabita).15 This may suggest that they too were living on the mission sta- tion. Mbiyana and Mathenjwaze were full members of the new group of African Christians in Natal and Zululand, known as amakholwa, “those who believe.” The missionaries’ failure to mention Mbiyana Ngidi’s role in Mathen jwaze Shange’s conversion is rather typical for these types of sources. While it is clear that the most effective agents of Christianity in Africa were Africans, and that the Western missionaries and the number of mission sta- tions they built cannot account for all the conversions to Christianity in
11 This was the American missionary Samuel Marsh, who worked with his wife Mary at the Itafamasi mission station from 1847–1853 (Etherington 1978:158). Mbiyana must have been baptized, therefore, some time between 1847–1850. 12 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1855/56:93–4. 13 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1856/57:1. 14 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1858:202. 15 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1860:206.
Southern Africa – especially from the late nineteenth century onwards – indigenous evangelists and preachers are largely relegated to the “hidden history of mission and Empire” (Brock 2005:150; cf. Etherington 1996:204, Landau 1995:131–59). Rarely do we hear the stories of indigenous mission agents, and when we do, even more rarely is it expressed in their own words (though see e.g. J.D.Y. Peel’s sources in the CMS archives for an interesting exception, as African CMS agents wrote regularly to London; Peel 2000: 10–11). Indeed their history is often both hidden and somewhat undecid- able; they were both insiders and outsiders (Peel 2000:589), they were not just in-between, but held multiple identities (Neylan 2003:130, cited in Brock 2005:133). The sources therefore need to be read “against the grain” in order to recapture some of the experiences of African converts and Christian agents (cf. Brock 2005, Griffiths 2005) as well as female missionar- ies (cf. Bowie, Kirkwood and Ardener 1993, Okkenhaug 2003).
A Note on Method: Reading against the Grain – Mathenjwaze and Mbiyana’s Departure
How might Mbiyana Ngidi have perceived his role at Umphumulo? The missionary letters do not record any particulars about what he thought during the decade that he spent at the station, but perhaps a few hints may be garnered by reading the missionary sources “against the grain.” The method of reading against the grain here rests on the observation that his- torical documents, such as the missionary letters, are never complete in their self-censorship. They always provide glimpses into several layers of experience, including the experience of self-censorship itself (Griffiths 2005). Reading against the grain therefore involves paying attention to this experience, for example through silences and gaps, outbursts or inconsis- tencies, or even through the provision of a few bare facts that were left to speak for themselves. A few such bare facts were given about Mbiyana Ngidi in 1860, when Tobias Udland reported that Mbiyana had left Umphumulo in order to take up employment with the Americans as a missionary.16 It was not unusual for converts and others to move between missions and mission stations, but in this case the brief announcement seems surprising, given Mbiyana’s long-standing loyalty to Umphumulo. It raises a silent question that is not
16 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1860:207.
17 For the period 1850–1873, Torstein Jørgensen found the following examples of Zulus working as assistant teachers for periods lasting from a few months to a few years: Mbiyana, Umikal and Ugabriel (at Umphumulo), and Ulukase, Uthomase and Umose (at Entumeni) (Jørgensen 1990:219–20). 18 In 1885, the annual report for the Norwegian mission in Natal and Zululand indi- cates that they were employing eight native evangelists/teachers; in 1890 this number had increased sharply to 34, and continued to increase during the early twentieth cen- tury. The number of outstations also grew rapidly in the 1880s and had reached 29 by 1890,
The Further Career of Mbiyana Ngidi
The apparent hesitancy surrounding Mbiyana in the Norwegian sources becomes all the more striking when we consider his further career. He was one of the three Ngidi cousins – Mbiyana, William and Jonathan. William and Jonathan Ngidi were two of Bishop John Colenso’s closest assistants (Etherington 1978:106, 135, 160). In 1860, when Mbiyana Ngidi left Umphu mulo, he was employed as one of the first missionaries of the Native Home Missionary Society, which the Congregationalist American Zulu Mission founded that same year in order to extend their reach (Etherington 1978:151). A little later he was put in charge of his own mission station, Noodsberg, a few miles south of the Umphumulo and Maphumulo mission stations, under the aegis of the American Zulu Mission. His first church members were baptized in 1865, and two years later the congregation had already grown to 25 members. In 1875 his station and congregation were flourishing (Etherington 1978:144, 159). During this period it seems that some of the American missionaries (and, it would probably be fair to assume, the Norwegians too) were both impressed and, perhaps, a little threatened by Mbiyana’s energy and suc- cess in terms of gathering converts. Norman Etherington includes two tell- ing quotes about Mbiyana from American missionaries: Josiah Tyler, who was stationed at Esidumbini near Maphumulo and Umphumulo, remarked already in 1866 that he knew of “no white missionary who has seen so great results in so short a time”19 (cf. Mahoney 1999:383), and Katherine Lloyd wrote in 1869 that “if all were like him our converts would count thou- sands.”20 But, Katherine Lloyd remarked, missionaries were also grumbling about “what Umbiyana wants racing all over the country,”21 and he had to wait seventeen years before the Americans finally ordained him, in 1878 (Etherington 1978:159, Mahoney 1999:383). Part of the tension seems to have been related to his views on “some grave questions” (as reported by
continuing to grow over the next decades. This was associated with the great increase in converts that the Norwegian mission (and other missions in Southern Africa) experienced after 1880. Tjelle (2011:134–5) provides these and further statistics for the period c. 1890–1930. 19 Archives of the American Board of Commissioners (Houghton Library, Harvard), 15.4, VII, Josiah Tyler to Clark, November 20, 1866; cited in Etherington (1978:158). 20 Archives of the American Board of Commissioners (Houghton Library, Harvard), 15.4, VII, Katherine Lloyd to Clark, marked “private,” June 1869; cited in Etherington (1978:158). 21 Ibid., cited in Etherington (1978:159).
Katherine Lloyd), here expressed in his explanation of why kholwa leaders themselves were hesitant to take on ordination: They were told […] “people in America wished them to be appointed mission aries.” They replied it could not be done until some grave questions were first settled. They then went on and told the missionaries that they tried to make American Christians of them instead of Zulu Christians – that they did not mingle with them nor love them – that they had taught the people not to respect black people, so they could not manage the stations and that while in the pulpit the missionaries said “dear friends and brethren” [;] as soon as they came out of the pulpit they would not call them that because they were black, but despised them.22 Interestingly, the tension between Mbiyana Ngidi and the Americans in the 1860s and 70s does not seem to have been related to doctrinal disagree- ments. At his ordination in 1878 he was even commended for his orthodoxy in the face of traditional customs, which probably included his opposi- tion to polygamy, lobola (bridewealth exchange), and utshwala (commu- nal beer-drinking at social gatherings) (Etherington 1978:159, Mahoney 1999:383). The case of Mbiyana Ngidi goes to the heart of “the pastor puzzle”: why did it take the Norwegian missionaries so long before they ordained an African pastor? Here was an apparently committed, charismatic African Christian man, who was in doctrinal agreement with the American (and Norwegian) missionaries, and who was married to the first baptized con- vert from Umphumulo. He had greater success in terms of gaining new converts than either the American or Norwegian missionaries in the area. Yet the Norwegians chose not to employ him as a paid evangelist, preferring instead to think of him as a “wagon driver.”23
22 Ibid., cited in Etherington (1978:150). 23 Mbiyana Ngidi’s later activities are equally interesting: Following the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, he moved to Rorke’s Drift in Zululand to work with his cousin Jonathan Ngidi and Stephanus Mini, a Methodist convert from Edendale. He requested an official posting in Zululand from the American Zulu Mission, but this was denied. In 1885 he announced that he had set up the Uhlanga Church. In 1890 he moved back to the Maphumulo area, the Americans “disfellowshipped” him, and he founded the Zulu Mbiyana Congregational Church there – the first African-initiated church in Natal, just a few miles away from Umphumulo, apparently in direct competition with both the American and Norwegian mis- sionaries. In this church, he did allow lobola and utshwala. In addition to normal ministerial duties he also ordained his own African pastors. For further details, as well as interpretations of the break between Mbiyana Ngidi and the Americans, see Denis (2011:32), Etherington (1978:159–60), and Mahoney (1999:383–5). Michael Mahoney (1999:385) suggests that Mbiyana was married by a Norwegian missionary at Umphumulo in 1883 and that he benefited from their support. It is unclear whether this is an erroneous reference to his
In the following sections I will try to outline some of the reasons that seem to have been at play in the Norwegian missionaries’ hesitancy in rela- tion to granting authority to converts. I will argue that their hesitancy was probably not related in any large part to the issue of church standards or doctrines, but that it was, instead, primarily related to three factors: mis- sionary paternalism, colonial “double vision,” as well as the Protestant problem of how to assess the sincerity of new members.
Church Standards
Torstein Jørgensen (1990:218) has also discussed the question of why it took so long before the Norwegian missionaries started ordaining African pas- tors. He points out that the missionaries carried with them high expecta- tions from the Church of Norway, a church that would usually not ordain anyone who did not have a theology degree from the University in Christiania (later renamed Oslo). Exceptions were made for the missionary candidates from the Mission School in Stavanger, but they were only allowed to serve as pastors in the mission field, not in Norway (Tjelle 2011:58). Jørgensen argues that these high educational standards, together with the low number of converts over the first few decades, are the main reasons why the Norwegian missionaries took so long before they were willing to ordain a Zulu pastor. I am not sure, however, if the issue of high educational standards was an important factor. For one, the Norwegian mission to the Zulus did not prioritize setting up a theological training institution. For the first three decades, they offered no educational opportunities to their con- verts beyond the classes held at the mission stations (with one strik- ing exception: the convert Zibokjane kaGudu, known as Moses, was sent to the Mission School in Stavanger; Jørgensen 2002b). In 1870, Ommund Oftebro reported that some converts at Eshowe were receiving more advanced instruction, which they had been requesting “for a long time.”24 On other stations too some converts were given lessons beyond the reading classes and catechumen classes, branching into geography, arithmetic, and
marriage at Umphumulo in 1858. There is no reason to believe that the Norwegians would have supported him or his independent church after his break with the Americans, since they did not look with favor upon independent African Christian initiatives or “Ethiopianism” (cf. Tjelle 2011:99, 114–45). 24 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1870:100.
Christian doctrine. This was not, however, intended to lead to positions as evangelists or pastors; the missionaries hoped that the converts might become teachers (Jørgensen 1990:174–5). In 1881, the Norwegian mission set up a catechist school at Eshowe, but it was closed down three years later. In 1893 they set up a permanent institution for more advanced train- ing, namely the teachers college at Umphumulo. But it was not until 1912 that they started providing a theological training opportunity, when they began to send converts to the theological seminary run by the Swedish mis- sion at Oscarsberg (Tjelle 2011:135–6).25 This was 54 years after the first bap- tism in the Norwegian mission. It is not at all apparent, therefore, that high educational standards was a pressing concern for the Norwegian mission- aries in Natal and Zululand during the period under study, from around 1850–1890. In support of this view, it is worth noting that when the Norwegian missionaries finally decided to ordain Simon Ndlela in 1893, they discussed whether it was necessary for him to receive formal theologi- cal training first, and concluded that it was not.26 Jørgensen’s second point, namely that the pool of converts was too small to produce suitable candidates, is true insofar as there were few converts. However, among the early converts, even in the 1850s, several of the men seem to have been quite capable as well as interested in evangelizing. In the 1850s Mbiyana Ngidi worked at Umphumulo and, as shown above, was apparently interested in pursuing more evangelizing work. One of the men who was baptized in 1859 was Zibokjane kaGudu, who took the name Moses, and who “was praised by the missionaries as an intelligent and well-gifted young man” (Tjelle 2011:130). He was sent to the Mission School in Stavanger from 1866–69, but upon his return to Zululand he attempted to display loyalty both to Bishop Hans Schreuder as well as to Prince Cetshwayo, and ended up being outlawed by the prince and expelled from the mission by the bishop in 1872.27 Another early convert, also bap- tized in 1859, was Baleni kaNdlela Mthimkhulu, who took the name Simon
25 This was quite different from the NMS mission in Madagascar, which – in contrast to the LMS and SPG missions in Madagascar – was committed to both the advanced training and ordination of Malagasy converts. Already in 1871, only five years after the Norwegian missionaries had started work in the country, Lars Dahle set up a five-year theological semi- nary for converts to train as Lutheran pastors, on the orders of Hans Schreuder (Skeie 2013:137–9, 259). 26 NMS Archives, HA, Gen. sekr. 40, Box 36, Jacket 15, Minutes from the missionary con- ference 1890; cited in Tjelle (2011:139). 27 For a more detailed description of Moses’ activities in the Norwegian mission, see Jørgensen (2002b), Tjelle (2011:130–31).
Ndlela and settled at Umphumulo mission station. In the mid-1870s he taught in the station school, and he established the Norwegian mission’s first outstation in 1875. Kristin Fjelde Tjelle (2011:114, 134–43) has provided a full account of his subsequent career, including the “arbitrary and humiliat- ing treatment” (2011:143) he received from the Norwegian missionaries, the delay of his ordination until 1893, his low wages compared to the missionar- ies, missionary accusations against him, and his suspension from service in 1903. These three men – Mbiyana, Moses and Simon – all lived at Norwegian mission stations already in the 1850s. They were all apparently skilled in different ways, as well as committed and willing to work for the mission. Therefore it seems to me that even though the pool of early converts was small, this in itself is not a sufficient explanation for why the Norwegian missionaries were so hesitant to train and ordain any of the African con- verts as pastors. A related question concerns the issue of doctrines. Was the missionaries’ hesitancy perhaps tied to their desire to keep the mission doctrinally pure? This was an important point for the NMS missionaries in general, since they were invested in making sure that their mission Christianity remained firmly rooted in an Evangelical Lutheran confession (Tjelle 2011:91–113). But it does not seem to have been the main point of contention in their deal- ings with ambitious converts. Mbiyana Ngidi, as mentioned above, was praised by the American missionaries for his orthodoxy in 1878 (Etherington 1978:159, Mahoney 1999:383). Moses, after his expulsion from the Norwegian mission, became an inspector at a sugar mill in Natal, where he reported that he continued to read the books he had obtained from the mission, held evening reading classes at the mill, led Sunday worship in his home, and encouraged several people to become baptized at nearby mission stations (Tjelle 2011:131). Simon Ndlela was apparently in doctrinal agreement with the Norwegian missionaries even when he was suspended from service (Tjelle 2011:141–3).28 It seems to me that there were a number of early con- verts who were, on the whole, in doctrinal agreement with the missionar- ies. Other factors appear to be more important when trying to understand the missionaries’ hesitancy.
28 The only missionary accusation against him that could perhaps have been perceived by the missionaries as tangentially related to doctrines was the more political point that he had conducted a marriage ceremony between a white woman and a black man (Tjelle 2011:141).
Missionary Paternalism
Kristin Fjelde Tjelle (2011:114–45) has likewise explored the question of why the Norwegian missionaries waited so long before deciding to ordain African converts as pastors. She places the question within her broader discussion of what constituted missionary masculinity, and how it was con- structed among the Norwegians in Southeast Africa, mainly from 1870–1930. She argues that “the Zulu man” came to serve as a foil or “other” to mission- ary masculinity, though this was an ambiguous countertype: Zulu men, Christian men and male clergy in particular, were from one point of view regarded as well-gifted men with rich potential. On the other hand, they were regarded as unstable, emotional, and childish men who had not yet reached a level of mature manhood and, therefore, were not yet qualified for the responsibilities of church leadership. (Tjelle 2011:143–4) This argument is especially pertinent from the turn of the century onwards, when the reality of interacting with African pastors occasioned new types of responses from the missionaries, and Tjelle suggests that an ideology of a father–son relationship developed between the Norwegian missionaries and the African pastors (tinted by more overtly racist discourses during the following decades). In the earlier phase of the mid-nineteenth century, I think the kernels of this process – especially its paternalistic aspect – are beginning to take shape. From as early as the 1850s, there seems to me to have been a reluc- tance among the Norwegian missionaries to distribute power (cf. Tjelle 2011:144), and this was closely related to their paternalistic attitudes – both amongst themselves and in relation to converts. This was a replication of the paternalistic, hierarchical structure of the pietistic movement in Norway. It was a form of hierarchy molded around spiritual authority and subservience that the missionaries themselves were all too familiar with. At the Mission School in Stavanger, the future missionaries were treated par- tially as children – supervised, taught, told to live together, given a timeta- ble to follow which included specified times for work and rest, and expected to defer to the Haugean and Moravian father figures who ran, funded and overlooked the Norwegian Missionary Society (Nome 1943a:113–17). Upon being sent to Natal, they entered into a hierarchy among the small group of Norwegian male missionaries. Students from the Mission School, such as Lars Larsen, Ommund Oftebro and Tobias Udland, were told to defer to the authority of Hans Schreuder, who had a university degree. These three men had not been ordained before they left Stavanger, and it
took over a decade in Africa before Hans finally ordained them in 1860 – on explicit orders from the Board not to tarry any longer (Jørgensen 1992:39).29 This meant that Lars, Ommund and Tobias would no longer be titled mission “helpers” (Medhjælp) but would be promoted to “missionar- ies” (Missionær) or “mission pastors” (Missionsprest), allowing them to per- form ministerial duties such as baptisms, weddings, funerals, and Holy Communion. The male mission “assistants” (Assistent), such as Johan Olsen, Siver Samuelsen and Arnt Tønnesen, were accorded even lower sta- tus than the “helpers.” In fact, Siver and Thorine Samuelsen left NMS in 1855, shortly after the controversy with Hans Schreuder (as described in chapter 3), in order to join the Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) under Bishop John Colenso and Robert Robertson. The Anglicans were willing to give Siver more status and respon- sibility,30 including, in time, his own mission station, St Paul’s (Jørgensen 1990:216). In 1857, the Norwegian mission assistant Arnt Tønnesen followed their move and left NMS for SPG as well. Against this background of paternalism within the Norwegian mission it becomes more understandable why missionaries such as Lars Larsen, Ommund Oftebro and Tobias Udland, who were operating within the Norwegian mission hierarchy and whose own ordinations had been with- held for over a decade, were not keen on delegating what religious author- ity they had to Zulu assistants in the 1850s or 60s, but were more concerned to establish their own new-found fatherly role on their mission stations. And this must have been especially important as long as the low number of conversions threatened to reflect badly on their own ability and status. Missionary paternalism in Southern Africa, then, was an extension of pietistic paternalism in Europe – except that the circumstances in Southern Africa changed the force and scope of this paternalism quite dramatically. As Patrick Harries (2007:81) notes of the Swiss missionaries in Southern Africa, they applied the same paternal care in Africa as they would in Switzerland, but in Africa the effects were stronger and different because of two factors: the presence of racial difference, and the isolation of the mis- sion station communities. In Southern Africa, a male missionary was not just a father figure with spiritual and moral authority, as he would have
29 For Hans Schreuder’s perspective, see Myklebust (1949:45). The reason Hans gave for delaying the ordinations was that he wanted the written permission of a bishop to perform the ritual (although this was not common Lutheran practice). For a discussion of Hans Schreuder’s high-church views on ordination, see Hovland (2002b). 30 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1858:226–7.
Colonial “Double Vision”
Having examined missionary paternalism, I would argue that another important reason for the missionaries’ hesitancy regarding the converts was related to what I will call colonial “double vision.” The early converts in the 1850s and 60s gave rise to two tendencies among the Norwegian mis- sionaries that at first glance seem to pull in opposite directions. On the one hand, the missionaries wished to emphasize the connection between the new Zulu Christians, the Christian missionaries, and Christians back in Norway. After the first baptisms at the Empangeni mission station in 1859, for example, the three converts who had been baptized and the missionaries had dinner together afterwards, and the Norwegian mission- aries Hans Schreuder and Ommund Oftebro made a point of serving the African converts (which was apparently unusual).31 Some of the early Zulu converts were also encouraged to send greetings to the mission supporters in Norway. For example, in 1861 Hans Schreuder included with one of his letters to the NMS Board a brief three-sentence note in Zulu, which had been dictated by a female convert, Ulovisa (or Lovise, in Norwegian), and written down by another female convert, Unokutemba. Hans Schreuder provided a Norwegian translation. Both the original Zulu message and the Norwegian translation were printed in Norsk Missions-Tidende: Ulovisa sends her greetings […] We also truly wish that You will pray well for us to the Lord until we meet in our home in heaven. […] [We] also pray to the Lord for You.32
31 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1860:50–51. 32 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1861:144. It is worth noting that this seems to be the first time that the written words of a woman were printed in the mission magazine. (The first Norwegian woman who appeared in print in the mission magazine was Bertha Dahle, who wrote about the children’s school that she managed in Madagascar in 1873; Norsk Missions- Tidende 1873:299–301.)
Ulovisa was married to a Zulu convert, Ubenjamini (or Benjamin), who also dictated a message in Zulu, which was written down by Unokutemba and sent together with one of Hans Schreuder’s letters. Ubenjamini addressed his greetings to the Norwegian Bishop Kaurin, whose picture he had seen, reportedly because he preferred to address the note to a specific person.33 Please greet Your people and the Lord’s congregation from us. […] [Although we] do not know You personally, we will be able to meet in heaven […] By His grace You too, Bishop, are a great teacher in the country of Norway, I send my letter to You. Ubenjamini also writes to the widow in the north of the country, and says: he gives thanks for the favor You showed us when You gave us the Lord’s chalice that You have let us receive; Widow, when we drink of it I will remember You, although I do not know Your name. He greets her and the congregation at her place.34 There is a certain sense of fellowship that shines through in these notes from Zulu converts, as well as a measure of confidence in their status as proper members of a worldwide community – apparently, it seems self-evident to at least some Zulu converts that they might address a Norwegian bishop. And the first Norwegian missionaries for a brief period considered this practice of sending greetings important, because – as Ommund Oftebro put it – it was desirable that the new Christians in Natal and Zululand can be brought into a closer, more aware fellowship of faith and mutual com- munication with the mission congregation at home […] in truth, they need to be properly reminded that they as Christians stand in the shared spirit of all believers.35 However, the custom never took on any significant proportions, and seems to have faded away after just a few years, in the early 1860s.36 At the same time, as discussed above, there was a strong tendency among the male Norwegian missionaries to report on their own work in their letters, rather than that of Zulu assistants, and converts were more often mentioned in reports when they were in danger of “backsliding” than when the mission- aries considered them to be trustworthy Christians.
33 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1861:144. 34 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1861:192–3. For other convert greetings, see Norsk Missions- Tidende 1861:204–6, 1862:190–91, 1863:184–6. 35 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1861:206–7, orig. emph. 36 Though see a couple of later examples in Norsk Missions-Tidende 1882:374–8, 1888:232–3.
From the time of the first converts of the Norwegian mission, therefore, the missionaries enacted apparently conflicting desires: on the one hand, it was emphasized that the converts had entered into the same Christian community as the missionaries, and by implication that they were equal, if new, members of this community; on the other hand, the work, role, and authority of the male Norwegian missionaries were highlighted in their let- ters, while the productive work of others – whether female Norwegians or Zulu converts – was not granted authority and was mostly left in silence. This leads us back to the colonial situation. It seems to me that the Norwegian missionaries, in their reluctance to grant significant authority to Zulu converts, were not just echoing the familiar structure of pietistic paternalism that they knew from Norway; they were also echoing the con- tradiction that Jean and John Comaroff have argued lay at the core of the colonial encounter (Comaroffs 1997:365–404, 2001, Comaroff 1998). On the one hand, the state of colonialism promised to turn “natives” into modern citizens, members of “civilization” with rights and responsibilities, while on the other hand it simultaneously and persistently treated them as ethni- cized subjects who would forever remain different, and therefore subordi- nate, because of who they “were.” I will refer to this as a sort of “double vision.” It was played out by the ensemble of institutions, discourses, poli- cies and actions that together made up, unevenly, the British colonial state in Natal. The two identities that were held out to Africans were at cross- purposes – one promised “becoming” something else, the other denied this – yet both processes needed to be maintained for the colonial state to be built (Comaroffs 2001:120–21). Despite being located on the colonial frontier, in the hinterland of the Colony of Natal and across the border in Zululand, the Norwegian missionaries seem to have enacted some of the same processes of colonial “double vision” on their stations: they viewed converts as potentially equal members of a worldwide Christian commu- nity, but were not apparently willing to see them as Christians who might have something to offer – especially in the form of spiritual authority – as members of a Christian community. The Norwegians were not alone in this. The Comaroffs (e.g. 1997:86–93) have discussed the tensions that surrounded native mission agency among the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society (WMMS) and the London Missionary Society (LMS) missionaries to the Tswana; more often than not, native emissaries chose to base themselves at a certain geographical dis- tance from the British missionaries, while the latter prevaricated over whether to find paid positions for them and what kind of relationship to
establish with them. The London Missionary Society only ordained a total of nineteen African men on all their mission stations in Southern Africa from the start of their mission until 1930, and their converts were left dis- gruntled as Anglican and Wesleyan societies ordained more frequently (Landau 1995:137). Richard Elphick (2008) has similarly shown that among the Western missions in nineteenth-century Southern Africa, the British Anglicans and Methodists were the most willing to ordain indigenous clergy, followed by the American Presbyterians and Congregationalists. The Moravian, Lutheran and Dutch Reformed missions were the most cau- tious. In general, Norman Etherington (2005a:4) has noted that it seems a rather perverse feature of the complex interplay between mission and Empire that nineteenth-century missionaries on the whole – though to somewhat different degrees – tended to resist the attempts of their con- verts to gain equal status in the church. This general trend persisted until the mid-twentieth century wave of “spiritual decolonization,” when mis- sion churches in Africa started to shake off foreign control. In sum, while the Norwegians had longed and prayed for conversions, the actual process of changing relationships that were set in motion once Zulu converts became a notable presence on the stations introduced a hes- itancy and ambivalence that the missionaries do not seem to have antici- pated. While the Norwegian missionaries were not alone in this experience and response, in Natal and Zululand they do seem to have fallen toward the end of the missionary spectrum that was most wary of granting Africans authority. This was tied, I would argue, firstly to the specific paternalistic hierarchies or dynamics of control that existed within their pietistic back- ground and among the male missionaries in the Norwegian mission itself, and, secondly, to the colonial processes that they were enmeshed in and the colonial “double vision” that they enacted. I will now turn to a third set of reasons that seem to me to have been important for the missionaries’ hesitancy in relation to the converts. For the remainder of the chapter, I will explore and untangle what might be termed the Protestant – especially pietistic – problem of judging sincerity and assessing new members. While the question of how to relate to new members is common across all Christian communities, this problem was particularly heightened on the ninenteenth-century mission stations, and became an important aspect of mission station Christianity. How did the missionaries decide whether they thought an African had truly converted and was ready for baptism? And how did they assess the converts’ contin- ued sincerity?
Conversion Caveats
First, two conversion caveats are in order. For one, it is worth noting that a focus on the mission stations gives us a particular vantage point that omits other aspects of the picture. As already mentioned, indigenous evan- gelists were on the whole more effective than Western missionaries in gain- ing converts, especially from the late nineteenth century onwards, when there was an explosive growth in Christian converts across Southern Africa. As Norman Etherington (1996:217) notes, “there were never enough mission stations to account for the vast scale of twentieth century conversions,” and Elizabeth Elbourne (2002:21) similarly urges us to remember that the his- tory of Christianity in South Africa is separate from the history of mission- ary buildings (cf. Landau 1995:131–59). Even during the 1850s, 60s and 70s the Norwegian missionaries frequently talked with people who had first heard about their indaba, their business or matter, from other Zulus. For example, in 1853 Tobias Udland reported that “wherever he went in Zululand he found Schreuder’s sermons spoken of, even in places where Schreuder had never been.”37 An awareness of the importance of indige- nous African communicators, preachers and mission agents nuance any black-and-white image of mission as only being transmitted by white peo- ple (Brock 2005), as North American and European missionaries “would have failed in their endeavours if indigenous people at the periphery had not created their own channels of communication to direct the flow of evangelism beyond the mission stations into the villages and hinterlands of the Empire” (Brock 2005:150). In short, much of the communication and transformation related to Christian conversions in Africa, especially toward the end of the nineteenth century, took place “far away from missionary eyes” (Etherington 1996:217), and when focusing on the mission station, we gain a partial picture and a particular vantage point. Even just focusing on this vantage point, it cannot be denied, as a second caveat, that conversion processes on the nineteenth-century mission stations were, theoretically speaking, very complex affairs (see e.g. Coma roffs 1991:248–51, Drønen 2009, Elbourne 2002:173–88, Horton 1971, Peel 2000:215–47, Ranger 1993). In fact, Jean and John Comaroff (1991:248–51) have argued that the term “conversion” ought to be dropped altogether as a meaningful analytical category when speaking of nineteenth-century
37 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1853/54:149.
missions in Southern Africa. They point out that it was used as a corner- stone ideological category by the missionaries, who wished to write the history of the Tswana “as a chronicle of conversions won or lost” (Coma roffs 1991:250). And the missionaries’ ideas of what it meant to convert – such as gaining a new mental understanding of the world and the forces that operate in it (a change in beliefs), and an exclusively loyal relation- ship to one’s new God – do not seem to provide very accurate or full descriptions of the changes that African converts entered into, so that we need to be careful not to fall into the trap of thinking that “conversion” meant what the missionaries meant by that term. On the other hand, we also need to be careful not to fall into the opposite trap, namely “the mis- leading idea,” as Paul Landau (1995:133) warns us, “that Africans can only make Christianity their own when they have moved towards resistance or revolution.” Some Africans do seem to have embraced missionary teach- ing and to have presented themselves as converts to the missionaries’ Christianity. As will become evident in the rest of this chapter, it seems to me that complex and multi-faceted processes of conversion were indeed going on on the mission stations, and that these processes can be discussed as “conversions” – even though in parts they challenged the missionaries’ ideas of what “conversion” meant. For this reason I also think “conversion” can be a useful comparative category across Christianities in the field of the anthropology of Christianity (cf. Coleman 2003, Hefner 1993, Robbins 2007). But what I take from the Comaroffs’ (1991:248–51) critique of this concept is the point that it is important to be aware of the meanings invested in the idea of “conversion” at the time by the missionaries, and not to slip into the assumption that conversion processes necessarily conformed to these ideas. The missionaries’ understanding of conversion built on their own powerful pietistic conversion experiences, and their Evangelical Christi anity which emphasized the importance of a personal, sincere conversion, the adoption of new beliefs about oneself and God, and, metaphorically speaking, a new state of heart.
Conversion as a Change in Beliefs?
There is a long-standing debate within anthropology concerning the term “belief” (e.g. Needham 1972, Pouillon 1979, Ruel 2002, Southwold 1979), and it is by now a well-rehearsed argument that the modern Protestant emphasis on sincere, interiorized and privatized belief as the core element
of his Zulu catechumens, Uthlapeni, speaking with some acquaintances in a homestead they were visiting, and “[h]e testified openly that he would have nothing to do with amathlozi.”38 This indicates that Uthlapeni still “believed that” the amadlozi, the shades, existed, but that he had chosen to turn away from them and not to “believe in” them any longer. From what can be gauged from missionary reports, it seems that the majority of Zulu converts did not cease to “believe that” the shades existed, but rather started to “believe in” – in the sense of putting (some of) their faith in – the God proclaimed by the missionaries, or the version of this God that they understood and appropriated. As Torstein Jørgensen (1990:364) concludes about conversions on the Norwegian mission stations, “the choice between Christianity and Zulu tra- ditional religion was not so much a question of what was true or what was untrue, but one of deciding or experiencing which of the two was the more powerful.” And, as he also documents, it was not uncommon for Zulu converts to seek medical help from isangoma, diviners, or to draw on traditional explanations of witchcraft – much to the frustration of the mis- sionaries – when the converts thought that these seemed more powerful or appropriate than Christian rituals or explanations, or when they were experiencing particular crises (Jørgensen 1990:363–5). For example, the Norwegian missionary Jan Kielland reported in 1865 that the convert Ulina at Empangeni had sought help from native healers after a long-lasting stomach ache, though both Jan Kielland and Ulina’s husband, another con- vert, had set themselves against this decision.39 Similarly, the Norwegian missionary Paul Wettergreen reported from Entumeni in 1869 that one of the converts had sought advice from “a doctor” (probably an isangoma) for a disease in his leg, and had, at the doctor’s suggestion, slaughtered a cow in order to mix the intestines into some medicine. However, other converts at the station had reacted “very strong[ly]” and voiced their disagreement with this course of action.40 As these two examples show, even the shift to a new allegiance – “believing in” – was an uneven process and was negoti- ated, not just in the convert’s relationship with the missionary, but also in her or his relationship with the community of other converts on the station.
38 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1868:198. 39 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1865:149. 40 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1869:433–4.
Conversion as Continuity and Discontinuity
Motivations for converts’ changes in allegiance or “belief” (whether “believ- ing that” or “believing in”) remain difficult to grasp, since it is often easier to identify why people sought out the mission station in general than why they sought conversion and baptism in particular (Etherington 1996:216). But the sources give us some clues. To start with, the Zulus who converted to Christianity were referred to as ikholwa (amakholwa in the plural). Ikholwa means “to believe,” indicating that the act of believing – with its range of possible meanings – was consid- ered a key characteristic of the new converts. The specific act of baptism seems to have been referred to in Zulu as bapetiza, in direct translation from the English term “baptize.” But it is not clear how widely this term was used by the Zulus themselves. Hans Schreuder once remarked of a conver- sation with Prince Cetshwayo that “he used this foreign word bapetiza three times,”41 indicating that it was somewhat unusual to use this specific word. It seems that Zulus in the nineteenth century more often used the Zulu term wela to refer to the act of becoming a Christian. Wela literally means “to cross,” as in crossing a river or a boundary. In the mid-nineteenth cen- tury, the term was apparently used regularly to refer to the act of crossing southwards over the Thukela river, the boundary between Zululand and the Colony of Natal, by those who wished to escape from the Zulu king or chiefs. It was also used to refer to the process of converting to Christianity on a mission station. An example of this use can be seen, for example, in the following report by the Norwegian missionary Jan Kielland, concerning Umathlaba, a young boy who had signed up as a catechumen at the mission station Empangeni: His relatives have for some time sent for him again and again in order to make him return home. For fear of the king they cannot allow him to wela, i.e. “to cross” right in front of their eyes. They use the same word to describe becom- ing a Christian as for crossing the Tugela in order to flee the country.42 The close connotations that are conjured up here between converting to Christianity and crossing from Zulu to colonial land will be examined fur- ther in the following chapter. For now it is worth noting that, judging by Jan Kielland’s phrasing, the word wela seems to have been commonly used by Zulus but not by the missionaries. Another example of the use of the term
41 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1870:7. 42 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1866:42.
“crossing over” comes from a Zulu man whom we know only as Umvuzane’s father. He told Lars Larsen that he was laughed at by his neighbors when they came together over beer because his two sons had converted to Christianity. He had tried to hinder the baptism of one of them, Umvuzane, for years. In 1860, when speaking with Lars Larsen, however, he stated that he had now started responding to his neighbors by telling them that “it seems as if my sons may become a bridge for me too to cross over to that indaba [business, matter].”43 The idea that the missionaries brought a new indaba, new business or a new matter, was taken further in the widespread understanding that the missionaries brought a new custom. When Ommund Oftebro developed a closer relationship with Prince Cetshwayo in the late 1850s, Uzibokjana, one of the employees at Ommund Oftebro’s station Empangeni, told him that people in the vicinity were generally of the opinion that “Umfundisi [teacher, i.e. the missionary] is doing wrong. He wants to introduce a new tuthlanga – tradition, custom […] He would corrupt the prince.”44 In other words, the missionaries were perceived to be trying not just to rewrite the beginnings of time, but also everything that had evolved from this begin- ning, namely Zulu ways of life. What do these Zulu terms tell us? Norman Etherington (1996:206) notes that: In such colonial situations, imported Christianity and “traditional culture” do not so much constitute separate “worlds” as poles on a continuum between which individual Africans slid rather than jumped – a cause of continual frus- tration for nineteenth century European missionaries who drew sharp men- tal boundaries between believers and pagans. This does indeed seem to be the case for many converts and potential con- verts on the Norwegian mission stations. They gradually became interested in the missionaries’ indaba, their business and what they talked about. Following their baptism, they might still have drawn on the help of tradi- tional Zulu knowledge in times of crisis, as mentioned above, while at other times drawing on the missionaries’ knowledge. And anthropological studies of religious conversion have often tended to emphasize the under- lying continuities that remain in a convert’s life or mental outlook even through such processes of becoming interested in something new (Norris 2003, cf. Landau 2010a:420). As discussed above, it does not seem to have
43 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1861:68. 44 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1860:43.
Is it the “same” religion as the religion of people who have been participat- ing in this religious context for a longer time, perhaps even since birth? Or does the convert enter a religious world known only to her or him (cf. Norris 2003)? We cannot accurately assess the answer to these questions – and there’s the rub, as the missionaries experienced it. They wished to know for certain whether the converts were taking on the “same” religion as themselves; they wished to be able to gauge the converts’ inner state and sincerity. Given the intractable difficulty of assessing another person’s inner religious being, the missionaries turned to outer signs of conversion, which soon took on an important role on the mission stations.
A “Form” of Conversion (i): New Clothes
Norman Etherington (2002) has directed our focus toward the “outward and visible signs” of conversion that both the converts and the missionaries placed such stress on. He argues that outward signs and forms were scruti- nized so closely precisely because it was so difficult to accurately gauge the converts’ inward sincerity, and so visible signs had to be chosen to gauge what was invisible. As Tobias Udland remarked in 1860, it was easier to assess the catechumens’ memorization of the ten commandments than to assess their spiritual growth: It is already known to you that I have had three natives taking preparatory instruction for baptism […] As far as knowledge is concerned, one could, of course, have desired more; but even Uana, who is so old that she cannot see to read from a book, has passably learnt […] the commandments and articles of faith as well as the Lord’s prayer; I for my part, at least, feel it difficult to estimate their maturity for baptism according to our instructions; but to be under preparation for more than a year, I think is too long.45 However, as Lars Larsen pointed out in one of his letters around the same time, memorization was not necessarily a trustworthy sign. There were two young girls at Umphumulo who wished to be baptized and who had taken preparatory classes for over a year. They had memorized “what they ought to of God’s Word,” but, Lars Larsen wrote, they appear to me to have such little knowledge of themselves […] it is taking such a long time for them to internalize [tilegne sig] or apply to themselves what they have heard and learnt.46
45 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1860:206–7. 46 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1861:202.
According to the missionary instructions, Lars points out, they should not be baptized until they demonstrate “testimony concerning the sincerity [Oprigtigheden] of their conversion” and “testimony of serious repentance and faith.” He would therefore not baptize them yet.47 Etherington (2002) mainly discusses the visible sign of printed texts, and the Norwegian missionaries were indeed concerned, as Tobias Udland and Lars Larsen were, with whether potential converts could read or repeat from memory parts of the Bible or the catechism. But as the above quota- tions show, the Norwegian missionaries felt that they also needed other outward signs in order to assess something as intangible as inner conver- sion. They – and the surrounding Africans – also scrutinized, for example, potential converts’ spoken “testimony,” and whether catechumens were able to use a discourse familiar to the missionaries in order to describe their own interior spiritual state. The missionaries assessed whether poten- tial converts were attentive during classes on the mission stations and ser- mons.48 They assessed whether they treated their family and peers in a way that the missionaries thought was fair. And, as a visual shorthand, they were always able to assess whether potential converts made appropriate use of European-style clothes. Let me explore the last of these outward signs of conversion in more detail, namely clothing. European-style clothes were one of the outward forms that African converts most consistently took on, but, in so doing, they at times put into question what the missionaries assumed to be the content of this form. What exactly did it mean to wear European clothes? What precisely was the relationship between “outer” clothes and “inner” belief in Christianity? The Norwegian missionaries, like other missionaries in Southern Africa, made a concerted effort to introduce Western clothes. From the time when they set up their first station at Umphumulo, they required that employees on the station should wear European clothes dur- ing their stay,49 and converts residing on the station (most of whom started out as station employees) continued wearing European-style clothes as a sign of their conversion. The missionaries were apparently content if employees wore a single item of clothing, namely “a shirt of dark, warm and strong fabric to hide their nakedness,” while they preferred the converts to be “completely dressed, especially on Sundays,” with a shirt, trousers, vest,
47 Ibid. 48 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1860:48. 49 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1850/51:196.
coat and hat for the men, and a shirt and skirt for the women.50 As on most other mission stations, clothing became an important external signifier, and creator, of difference. (On the stations in nineteenth-century Bonde in Eastern Africa described by Justin Willis, for example, there were even spe- cial kinds of clothes that were reserved for those who had risen higher in the station hierarchy: native clergy were given robes, and messengers were given special “mission coats”; Willis 1993:145). But, as Etherington (2002:435) rightly notes, this “was not a simple sys- tem of signification imposed from without. From the beginning cloth- ing was at the centre of a dialogue about power in which Africans made choices.” This was most discernible, on the Norwegian mission stations, in the question over whether European-style clothes were necessary for converts – not just in order to signal that the wearer was a Christian – but in order to actually be a Christian. Among many Zulus, especially in more remote areas of Zululand, European clothing seems to have become equated with Christian identity in the mid-nineteenth century. Lars Larsen remarked from remote Inhlazatshe in 1866 that “the wearing of trousers and a hat are, in the thoughts of the Zulus, the basic characteristics of a Christian.”51 A decade later, he again reported that “[b]eing dressed is for the Zulus synonymous with being an ikolwa,” and for this reason anybody who wore European clothing outside the mission station was regarded with suspicion because they were perceived to be Christians.52 Closer to the Colony of Natal and in the colony itself, however, other perceptions were evident in the mid-nineteenth century. While Ommund Oftebro lamented the fact that Zulus often associated becoming a Christian with wearing European clothes, he also remarked that many of his neigh- bors around the mission station at Eshowe requested European clothing because it was becoming more fashionable.53 And in 1863 the Governor of Natal John Scott ordered that “all natives coming to work in Pieter maritzburg or D’Urban shall wear at least a shirt and trousers, – except in the case of work in the harbor.”54 In time, then, the European-style clothes came to take on significance that extended beyond Christianity, including significance tied to fashion, labor, self-expression, native subservience, and
50 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1861:63. The preference for dark fabric may have been intended to avoid the shirt becoming (visibly) dirty too quickly. 51 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1867:40. 52 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1876:245. 53 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1862:5–6. 54 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1863:155.
55 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1872:369.
of Christianity had de facto changed on the stations, as some of the con- verts and others regarded European clothing not only as a key signifier of their converted state, but as part of the content of the conversion.
A “Form” of Conversion (ii): New Names
A similar process can be observed in relation to the use of names on the mission stations. The issue of names is sometimes mentioned in scholarly literature on nineteenth-century missions in Southern Africa, because new converts often took a different name when they were baptized, and this name was often taken from the Bible or from notable missionaries or mis- sion supporters in North America or Europe. Examples of baptismal names taken by converts on the Norwegian mission stations included biblical names such as Uthomase, Udulela Isak, Uzibokjana Moses, Usebeni Gideon, and Ulea, and Norwegian names such as Uanne Marie, Petrea Margreta, and Jens Matias Kaurin. Etherington (2002:429) remarks of this practice that “[e]ven their names were not their own,” and the Comaroffs similarly suggest that those who entered the church were given new names. An act enshrined in the Pauline model for conversion and widely practiced in Africa and elsewhere […] this was an evangelical refraction of the general tendency of imperialisms of all stripes to impose themselves by redesignating people and places. (Comaroffs 1991:219) These remarks place baptismal names within the framework of the mis- sionaries’ linguistic imperialism and the Africans’ passive acceptance. However, it seems to me that this issue was often more complex. In the first half of the twentieth century, Eileen Krige recorded that it was Zulu custom to give a child its true or great name, the igamu, soon after birth, and then new names were taken at significant rites of passage, such as puberty and initiation into a military regiment (Krige 1977:73–4, cited in Jørgensen 1990:345). These served as outward indications of the bearer’s new identity. A few decades later, Axel-Ivar Berglund (1976:287–8, 290–93) discussed the importance of Zulu names, outlining how abathakathi, evil- doers, might harm a person by knowing their name and pronouncing it together with words of death. The efficacy of this pronouncement was made possible because of the intimate connection between name and per- son – as one Zulu diviner told Berglund: “The name is that person. They are the same, the name and the person” (Berglund 1976:292).
So, while not all converts took new names upon being baptized, those who did may have been drawing on their sense that this was a proper way to mark the transition into a new phase of life and a new way of being, a new identity.56 The importance attached by some Africans to this custom can be seen from the case of one of the Norwegian missionaries’ converts, who already had the biblical name of Ujakobe (Jacob) before his baptism, but who chose to take the new biblical name of Ujonatane (Jonathan) when he was baptized.57 Based on the Norwegian missionary sources, it seems to me that it is not fully satisfactory to say that the converts were passively “given new names” (Comaroffs 1991:219), or that their names were “not their own” (Etherington 2002:429). Even in the converts’ mimicry of European and biblical names they may have been paying attention to mat- ters considered important among Zulus. Most converts’ choice of taking on a European or biblical name in order to symbolize their new identity as ikholwa must be seen as a dual process of asserting their own sense of the importance of the event, as well as an expression of the overarching process of their identifying with the colonizing culture on the colonial frontier. A gesture that supports this more complex reading of the situation was that, just over a decade after the first baptism on a Norwegian mission sta- tion, the Norwegian missionaries reported that they were encouraging can- didates for baptism to choose Zulu names rather than Norwegian ones if they wished to take on a new baptismal name – with apparently little suc- cess. For example, in 1871 the Norwegian missionary Ole Stavem listed eight baptized converts, all of whom had been baptized with a European or bibli- cal name (Andrea Tomine, Christian, Abrahamu Salomone, Martin Luther, Umatande Arone, Upaulu, Umarta, and Uberta). He then added: With regard to these names it should be remarked that the natives are encour- aged by the missionaries to choose names that have their origin in their own language, but beyond this we allow them to freely take foreign ones too, if they prefer to do so.58 In 1876, Lars Larsen addressed the same issue, commenting that the mis- sionaries were often not able to sway the Zulus’ choice of new baptismal
56 The desire to take a new name as a mark of religious conversion is not unknown in present-day Western society either. For example, Rebecca Sachs Norris (2003:147) found that converts to Sufism in the Greater Boston area in the United States often take new Muslim names in order to mark their new religious identity. 57 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1866:277. 58 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1871:483–4.
names because the converts “have usually decided for themselves, long before the baptism, which name they want to have.”59 The Norwegian missionaries were not alone in their unease about the European and biblical baptismal names that converts chose to take on. For example, Magema Fuze later recollected that when he was preparing for baptism at Ekukhanyeni in 1859 he wanted to adopt Petros or Johane as his biblical baptismal name, but Bishop John Colenso rejected these “foreign” names and chose the name Magema for him instead (Fuze 1979:iv, quoted in Mokoena 2011:30–31). Here we can detect a similar pattern to the one that emerged in relation to clothing. The relationship that the missionaries assumed to exist between form and content slipped out of their control. The Norwegian mis- sionaries wished to bring the Zulus into close identification with European pietistic Christianity, including its cultural forms. But they did not wish for the Zulu converts to aspire to become European. The “double vision” of the colonial situation was at work again, holding out the promise of a new Christian status to the converts on the one hand, while on the other hand firmly establishing that Africans would always be Africans. Although this was a fine line to tread, it did not seem too complicated in the missionaries’ minds to assume that the Zulus could aspire to take on a religion commu- nicated by Europeans without aspiring to become European. For those con- verts who chose to take on biblical or European names, however, the names seem to point not just to their appropriation of Christianity, but also to their insistence on their right to now identify with European-ness through an important aspect of the self – one’s name. The missionaries did not make much headway with their encouragement to the converts to choose a name with its “origin in their own language” instead. In this case, Robert Strayer’s comment on mission communities in colonial Kenya seems to apply equally to those in Southeast Africa: Strayer (1978:78) remarks that conflicts over values “derived as much or more from African opposition to missionary limits on their access to western culture as from missionary attacks on customary ways of life.” Again, as with clothes, in the interplay of missionary visions and Zulu assertions regarding names, at least some of the Norwegian missionaries gradually came to realize, albeit vaguely, that they had lost full control over the forms that were being used – and thus over the process of conversion and what it meant.
59 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1876:443.
Interstitial Gestures: “Coming Between”
Perhaps it is helpful to think of these material objects and outer forms as interstitial gestures. Homi Bhabha suggests that interstitial gestures are gestures that “come between” (Mitchell 1995). The decisions regarding clothes and names on the mission stations seem to embody some of this interstitial suspense. They “come between” both in the sense of connecting other gestures (the clothing and naming forged connections between, for example, European calls to conversion and African responses to that call), but also in the colloquial sense of “coming between” – interrupting, med- dling and interfering with the original purpose (as both new clothes and new names did). The gestures that come between are gestures that make possible and make trouble, all at once (Mitchell 1995). By focusing on con- versions it becomes clearer how the interstitial gestures that surrounded conversions meant that the missionaries both gained some authority and lost some control, simultaneously. Their authority was affirmed and buttressed through conversions and through the taking on of European forms – architectural, sartorial, linguistic – by the resident congregations. But in the use of these forms in ways other than the missionaries had fore- seen, they had also lost full control over the Christianity that was practiced on the stations. Clothes and names, which had been doctrinally safe objects in Norway, were now contested. The missionaries had to respond to these new challenges, and in doing so, they became enmeshed in the colonial “double vision” discussed above, whereby the converts were regarded as both–but: both Christian like the missionaries, but not quite Christian like the missionaries. The missionaries, of course, were not the only ones responding to new challenges and questions on the stations. Perhaps, for a few Africans, their encounter with the mission station came to resemble the “world-traveling” (Sullivan 2004) experience that the missionaries had on their encounter with Africa. In the new space of the mission station, where Africans sud- denly became, in one sense, out of place, and where the meanings of their bodily schemas and material attachments became contested and de-cen- tered, they may have felt their psychical space thrown into question as well. Shannon Sullivan (2004) draws out the importance of shifting between spaces for Frantz Fanon: as Fanon “world-traveled,” specifically when he left his colonial upbringing in Martinique and came into sharp contact with his own blackness in white France, “[h]is wholly [colonial] white unconscious fractured into black and white parts, transforming a relatively peaceful, united – which is not to say unproblematic – space into one that
was at war with itself” (Sullivan 2004:10). When Fanon moved to France, his own black body became a disruptive and unsettling force in his mind. The Africans who moved to the Norwegian mission stations were also moving to a different kind of space. They may have come to identify with “being white” on the stations in some of the same ways that Fanon did – adopting relevant garb, taking on relevant names. But, like Fanon, they may also have started to wonder about how to think about their own black bodies. For while the silent demonstration of what it meant to be Christian and white was inscribed in the mission station lay-out and everyday practices, so was its perceived opposite, namely the question of what it meant to be Christian and black. Some of the resulting hybridities associated with the mission stations are more obvious than others. An example of the more obvious type may be some of the syncretistic behaviors that arose among African converts, drawing on both Christian symbolism and traditional Zulu rituals, or instances in which traditional and Christian symbolic structures co-existed even as they strained against each other.60 A few early examples include Ommund Oftebro’s report from Eshowe in 1863 that the appearance of inkosazana (probably a female member of the royal family appearing as an ancestral shade; cf. Weir 2005:214–15), along with the appearance of a mysterious human being who had chastised people for not celebrating Sunday, had driven people to the Sunday service on the mission station.61 Similarly, in 1868 Lars Larsen reported from Inhlazatshe that a man had started coming to the Sunday services because he had been told to do so by the shades, amadlozi.62 There is, however, another less straightforward hybridity that particu- larly concerns the space of the mission stations. This is not the hybridity of those Zulus who more or less openly drew on Zulu traditions and Christian rituals to different degrees, picking elements from each and piecing together an eclectic design – and who were then often rebuked either by the missionary or the other converts. Rather, what concerns me here is the hybridity that gradually emerged within the rituals, gestures, behaviors and forms of the Christianity that the missionaries had brought with them and that they sought to practice on the mission stations. In some sense all
60 Cf. Joel Robbins’ (2004a) description and analysis of how this hybridity is played out among the Urapmin in Papua New Guinea. Robbins (2004a:5, 327–33) also includes a discus- sion of how to apply the term “hybridity” to such instances, while relating it to cultural change. 61 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1864:138–9. 62 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1868:205.
Christianities are syncretisms, as the Comaroffs (1997:58) have also pointed out. In addition, when using the term “hybridization” in relation to the mis- sionary encounter, it is helpful to keep in mind that creolization is, “in vary- ing degrees, an ongoing process everywhere” (Comaroffs 1997:59). The use of the term hybridization as part of this analysis should therefore not be seen as a unique moment in the history of Western (or African) Christianity; rather, it is a chance to focus in on one of the moments of hybridization and change that have occurred. And in relation to this moment, I am interested in the difference of the same: how missionary Christianity on the mission stations became subtly hybridized while remaining (apparently the same) missionary Christianity. The missionaries were forced to respond to a range of new and charged forms, including the various ways in which the converts chose to use clothes and names – these interstitial gestures that made possible and made trouble at the same time. The meaning or content of these forms partly slipped out of the missionaries’ grasp, both in obvious and less obvi- ous ways. For example, whether the missionaries liked it or not, some peo- ple continued to view European clothing as indispensable to the very essence of Christianity, and some converts continued to choose Norwegian baptismal names. This subtle hybridization of mission station Christianity came about through the experience of Norwegian missionaries and African converts living together on the mission stations, and trying to come to grips with questions of how to think about and relate to one another.
Conversion as Identification: The Stations as Third Space
Scholarly reflections on religious conversion sometimes focus on conver- sion as a social process of initiation or socialization. The convert is social- ized into a new religious setting and way of being (e.g. Norris 2003), and is initiated and accepted as a new member (Pels 1999:29–32). It seems to me that less attention is paid to the attendant process of conversion as identifi- cation. I would argue that this is also an important aspect of conversion – especially in a setting such as the mission stations, where conversions were frequently proclaimed (whether by the convert or the missionary) within the context of the convert–missionary relationship. Homi Bhabha sees “third space” (which I shall return to below) as a pro- cess of identification (Rutherford 1990:211). He thinks of the process of iden- tifying with another – a person, or an aspect of a person – as a move toward trying to interiorize this other. By making the other part of one’s interior
world (through identification), at the same time as the other is still exterior (the other person is still different), one may set in motion change and development, but also a sense of ambivalence about the boundaries between exterior and interior, the boundaries of one’s self. The process of identification that may go on in colonial situations is even more unstable, because even as colonial subjects are encouraged, and sometimes seek, to identify with colonizers, this new identity is simultaneously offered and denied. As discussed above, the colonial situation is built on a “doubling” gesture. It is the widespread process of that “flawed colonial mimesis, in which to be Anglicized is emphatically not to be English” (Bhabha 1994:125, orig. emph.). In the popular rephrasing, colonial subjects were encouraged to identify as “white but not quite.” Or, as Anne Folke Henningsen (2011:153– 4) sums it up in relation to the Moravian mission in the Cape: “the entire Moravian mission endeavour can be seen as one long double bind commu- nication of saying: become like us, but stay as you are/were” – and (drawing on a term from the card game Bridge) Henningsen suggests that this con- flicted message was “re-doubled” by surrounding colonial politics. The menace of this flawed mimesis is that it discloses the ambivalence of colonial discourse and the great differences that are being put in place; it discloses that this is an outrageous situation for the colonial subject. Thus it can threaten to disrupt authority. It becomes disturbing (Bhabha 1994:126). “The ambivalence of colonial authority repeatedly turns from mimicry – a difference that is almost nothing but not quite – to menace – a difference that is almost total but not quite” (Bhabha 1994:131, orig. emph.). The converts on the Norwegian mission stations – who (in the eyes of the missionaries) had become Christian like the missionaries but not quite Christian like the missionaries – disclose some of the ambivalence of iden- tification. Converts became a flawed mirror image of the missionaries, and, in becoming this, they may also at times have become an unanticipated threatening aspect of mission station Christianity. Kirsten Rüther has observed that while German Lutheran missionaries in the Transvaal started out in the mid-nineteenth century by encouraging Africans to wear European-style clothing, through the 1870s and 80s they felt markedly more uneasy about the European apparel worn on the sta- tions, and in the early 1890s chose to institute some rules in order to limit what they regarded as the converts’ pretentiousness and proclivity to fash- ion. To think of someone else as pretentious is to regard them as acting, in some sense, either above their station or as something which they are not. From then on converts on Berlin Mission Society stations were not, for
63 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1872:369. 64 The term “double bind” here is taken from the work of the anthropologist Gregory Bateson (1972). He used it to refer to a situation or relationship in which a figure of authority simultaneously communicates two conflicting wishes for the behavior of the subject – e.g. a mother says to her child, with tears in her eyes, “I would be happy for you to become inde- pendent; why are you not becoming independent?” – and the subject, who experiences that she will now be wrong no matter what she chooses to do, is neither able to pinpoint the exact reason for this nor to present the dilemma to the authority figure. 65 While the Norwegian missionaries did not emphasize “racial/ethnic authenticity” in the same way that the Moravians did (Henningsen 2011), they did emphasize sincerity, and they were, as this chapter shows, constantly grappling with the problem of how African converts should and could display sincerity.
she would be agreeing to remain in a constant state of perceived inferiority. In these situations, the Norwegian missionaries, just like the Moravians studied by Henningsen, and like missionaries and colonial officials across Southern Africa, put their converts or subjects in an impossible situation – a situation in which they could not win. Some of the effort that European missionaries put into trying (in vain) to retain proper control over Christianity in Africa was already familiar to them from debates within European churches (Elbourne 2003:451). Just as the Haugeans and Moravians in Stavanger partly saw each other as men- aces in their minor feuds over proper Christianity, the new converts on the mission stations in Southern Africa came partly to be seen as challenges, by the missionaries, in the struggle to retain the proper meaning of Christianity. In relation to Zulu converts, however, the differences between them and the missionaries – these differences that might at times be viewed as almost nothing (but not quite) and at other times appear almost total (but not quite) – took on a different quality than the differences between the Haugeans and Moravians. In fact, at least some of the Norwegian mission- aries started to wonder if the differences, rather than being doctrinal or attitudinal, were simply part of what it meant to be Zulu, thus marking Zulu Christians as fated to live their Christianity differently and less appro- priately than Europeans. For example, in 1870 Ommund Oftebro wrote about the community of converts at his station Eshowe: When they are protected from falling into grave sins, stick to the Word of God and pray, live in mutual peace, confess their imperfection and frailty, and will accept advice, then we should be content with them, and we can hope that the One who is the author and finisher of our faith will help them to reach the aim of their faith. This I hope and believe although I must face the fact that there is a lot yet sticking to them that I would very much like to see elimi- nated. I am thinking of their continual talking with laughter and noise, the proposals between the boys and girls, their inability to handle misunder- standings and conflicts in a Christian manner, their lack of readiness to pro- tect their good name and reputation among the heathens, their lack of judiciousness and their pretentiousness in relation to the missionary, their inclination to arrogance, etc. […] Most of this is certainly part of the very character of this people.66 The things that “stuck to” the Zulu converts had, in Ommund Oftebro’s mind, become threats to Christianity. Would the converts always remain
66 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1870:297.
Let me return now to the concept of third space. Bhabha uses the term third space to refer to a process or space that has emerged out of the dis- sonance between two or more currents, and in important ways has gone beyond them. It is a site that in retrospect can be seen to have logically sprung out of the encounter between these currents, but that cannot be dissolved and returned to them; it has repositioned itself and become a dif- ferent space. The hybrid moment comes when elements of, say, two previ- ous traditions are translated and rearticulated so that they become “something else besides,” something that contests the territories of both previous traditions (Bhabha 1994:41). Or, as James Pritchett (2011:32) puts it, the mission stations produced “not simply a synthesis […] but an expanded repertoire of meanings and actions.” This helps us to understand some of the dynamics surrounding mission station Christianity during this period. This particular culture of Christianity was not just a cause of developments on the mission stations – for example, mission station Christianity was not just a cause of the colonial “double vision” that was enacted in relation to the converts. Rather, mission station Christianity was also an effect of these developments. The currents of Norwegian pietistic Lutheranism, African conversions, and a British colo- nial context came together on the mission stations to create “something else besides” – a mission station Christianity marked by the converts’ nego- tiation over identification, and the missionaries’ renewed wish to hold on to authority.
A Note on Method: Problematizing Historical Processes
Following this discussion, let me provide a note on “problematizing” in anthropological history. Below are two quotes from Jean and John Comaroff that on the surface might point in different directions, but that I think are rightfully placed side by side in order to understand the different levels of what was happening on the mission stations. First: For it [the difference between the station and its surroundings] described two distinct maps, two spatial embodiments of social order, social being and social power. Most fundamentally, the landscape itself began to give expres- sion to a dawning confrontation between two cultures – each becoming ever more visible, ever more objectified by contrast to the other, as they struggled for dominance. (Comaroffs 1991:206, orig. emph.) In this quote, the Comaroffs argue that the mission stations demonstrated a gradual delineation of two perceived sides, one of which was thought of
Form and Content
In the Norwegian preface to his edited volume on nineteenth-century Norwegian mission, Jarle Simensen (1984b:5) says that despite the
“widespread impression” that mission was about preaching, it was in fact also “something other and far more,” and that it is this “other and more” that his study addresses. Torstein Jørgensen (1990:9, 11) later responded to this by stating that his own study concerned “the Norwegian missionary endeav- ours to transmit the Christian religion to the Zulus” – in other words, “the process of religious change and continuity” – and that this “differ[s] consid- erably” from Simensen’s study. Jean and John Comaroff and J.D.Y. Peel hint at some of the same wish to distinguish between the missionaries’ material and spiritual endeavors – “the study of Christianity in Africa is more than just an exercise in the analysis of religious change,” say the Comaroffs (1991:11); “Yes; but it is at least, and irreducibly, that,” responds Peel (2000:4, orig. emph.). Several problems arise, however, when one tries to elucidate what the implied difference between the “religious” aspect of the mission and the “other and more” aspects might conceivably be. Was the use of European- style clothes “religious” or “other”? Was the use of new baptismal names “religious” or “more”? Where does the “religious” end and the “other and more” start, and who gets to make this decision? If anything, the attempts to frame studies in respect to a supposed difference between “religious” and “other” processes shows up all too clearly how complicated and tenuous it is to use this as a frame of reference when looking at nineteenth-century mission stations in Southern Africa. Karina Hestad Skeie (1999:72) has outlined a more perceptive approach to this issue. In her analysis of the meanings attached to the houses of the nineteenth-century Norwegian missionaries in Madagascar, she shows that the missionaries did not try to separate the “visible” (material world) from the “invisible” (religious concerns). Rather, the relationship between them in effect became a theological problem that they wrestled with. In Norway, the relationship between spiritual and temporal work, invisible and visible effects, had been taken for granted. In the mission field in Madagascar, however, it posed hitherto unknown difficulties. The mani- fest corporeality of the missionaries’ work – building houses, tending to fields, administering medicine, handing out clothes, and so on – raised theological questions for the missionaries (Skeie 1999:94–5). The nine- teenth-century Norwegian missionaries in Madagascar, in the same way as those in Natal and Zululand, distinguished in their letters to the Board between “the real mission work” (det egentlige Missionsarbeide), such as preaching, teaching, and talking with Zulus about Christianity, and “the outer work” (det ydre Arbeide) or “the secular work” (det seculære Arbeide), such as dispensing medicine, or building houses and churches – but they
67 See e.g. Hans Schreuder’s use of these terms: “Not only has the real mission work suf- fered, but also the secular work of building a church and residential house” (Norsk Missions- Tidende 1858:218).
their own living arrangements, gardens, clothing, and bodily postures), and their inner emotional and somatic responses, thought patterns and inten- tions, Christian sensibilities and beliefs. These learned relationships were challenged in the space of the mission station. Forms, such as clothing, were de-centered and repositioned. New forms, such as baptismal names, were both grasped at and treated with suspicion. Webb Keane has discussed the moral quandaries that the use of words and things, and their proper relation to subjects, can raise for Protestants on the colonial frontier. He especially examines the role of language in the ongoing creation of a “sincere” Protestant self (Keane 2006). Here it is important to note that the human subject, even the Protestant human sub- ject who expends much energy on creating sincere interior states and expressing these in language, “retains a material and social body, […] con- tinues to work on, transact, possess, and know itself through objects, […] is surrounded by social others” (Keane 2002:84). Objects continue to pose dif- ferent problems for different subjects (Keane 1998:13), and part of my inten- tion here is to state more precisely what exactly those problems were perceived to be on the mission stations. Keane refers to Karl Marx’s (1967) commodity fetish: it “is not simply a way of misunderstanding goods but a way humans misunderstand themselves” (Keane 1998:13). In much the same way, the Norwegian missionaries seem to have felt that the way that African converts sometimes failed to take note of, or “mis- understood,” the proper relation between subjects and objects, between inner conversion and its outer forms, might betray a more fundamental misunderstanding of their selves. The fact that the converts rarely explained the relation between objects and subjects, or between form and content, in language that was familiar to the missionaries, also added to the missionar- ies’ mistrust of the things that “stuck to” the converts, and their continued uncertainty about whether the converts were “sincere” – or simply their continued uncertainty about how to think about the converts on the mis- sion stations at all. It seems fair to assume that this uncertainty contributed to the Norwegian missionaries’ drawn-out hesitancy about allowing African converts to become paid assistant evangelists or ordained pastors. While the first bap- tisms in the late 1850s and onwards were greeted with joy and enthusiasm by the missionaries, the first cohorts of converts on the mission stations brought new challenges for them. The problem of how to deal with these new members of the Christian community on the stations extended beyond the types of internal ecclesial problems and doctrinal disagreements that
ZULU PERCEPTIONS OF THE MISSION STATIONS: THE PROBLEM OF INTENTIONS AND RESULTS
The Norwegian missionaries in Natal and Zululand had relatively few Zulu conversions to report during the first decades of their mission. By 1873, 23 years after the first mission station at Umphumulo had been estab- lished, the total number of baptisms that the Norwegian missionaries had performed had not reached more than 285 (Jørgensen 1990:9). By this time the Norwegians were running ten mission stations, all managed by resi- dent Norwegian missionaries. The Norwegians were not the only ones to experience meager “fruits” of their work; on Hermannsburg, the Germans’ first and largest station in Natal, only 25 people in total had been baptized by 1862. The American, British and Swedish missionaries also struggled. The French Roman Catholics, with their one station in Natal, failed to baptize anyone at all (Etherington 1978:37–8, 103). At many stations – and the Norwegian stations were no exception, as we have seen – the employees became a vital source of potential catechumens. Some of the American missionaries, including Aldin Grout, advocated the establish- ment of “family schools” on stations, allowing for groups of youth to remain on the station in the hopes of converting them. Other Americans, includ- ing Lewis Grout, opposed this strategy and had to live with fewer converts (Etherington 1978:103–4). But across the board, Christian converts in Natal and Zululand in the mid-nineteenth century were few and far between. Curiously, this does not mean that nobody came to the mission sta- tions. On the contrary, the stations were actually quite busy places. In 1860, for example, Tobias Udland reported from Umphumulo that 150–200 people attended the church services every Sunday – and then he added, intriguingly: We have often asked ourselves the question, what might move so many peo- ple to come, without yet being able to account for it; because unfortunately there is no apparent awakening or visible longing to hear the Word of God.1 In 1863, months after setting up a new station at Inhlazatshe, Lars Larsen wrote:
1 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1861:129.
There is, therefore, now the kind of liveliness on the station daily, that one can expect from heathens, since many people come by here partly to beg, partly to sell corn, partly to stare and talk […] There is, when the weather permits, a crowd of natives at the service on Sundays […] One therefore has trouble enough to prevent the service from being transformed into a Polish Parliament by the ungovernable crowd.2 While it must be noted that attendance at the Sunday services waxed and waned, it seems that the daily “busy-ness” of the stations persisted. This was true for other missions too. The two American stations in the Maphumulo district (Maphumulo and Esidumbini) as well as their two outstations (Noodsberg and Emushane) reported a far higher number of “adherents” than actual church members or members “in good standing” (Mahoney 1999:380). Why did so many people come to the stations – but not convert? In this simple question lies some of the great difficulty of untangling the varied perceptions and responses of the Africans in colonial Natal and Zululand to the Western missionaries. This chapter will explore Zulu perceptions of the Norwegian mission sta- tions, which were seen variously as spaces for services and exchange, as risky spaces, as esikoleni (school), as resident communities, as rival home- steads, and as isilungu (“land of the whites”). Through these perceptions, I wish to outline some of the most important reasons why the Africans in colonial Natal and Zululand largely displayed such uniform resistance to the idea of Christian conversion during the mid-nineteenth century, despite their sustained knowledge of and contact with Christian missionar- ies. I also hope to highlight some of the disjunctures that – seen from the vantage point of one and a half centuries later – appear to have occurred between the missionaries’ intentions and the results of their actions, espe- cially in relation to the ways in which they organized the station space and daily life.
A Space for Services and Exchange
It seems that a large number of Zulus took to using the mission stations as sites that offered various kinds of opportunities for services and exchange (Simensen 1986b). The stations exhibited various new commodities, such as ox-drawn ploughs, European clothing, cotton and blankets, books, ther- mometers, forks and knives, clocks, lamps and candles, window panes,
2 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1864:30–31.
sugar and coffee. They were sites where news of political developments could be gleaned, and where Zulus might learn more about the relation- ships between the different categories of white people. The stations offered the symbolic capital of knowing white people, the possibility of potentially communicating more easily with other whites in this way (the mission aries could help, for example, with writing letters to colonial officials), and knowledge of Western literacy and ways of life (Etherington 1978:47–55). The missionaries also had British pounds sterling, which the Zulus around Umphumulo needed, amongst other things, in order to pay the hut tax that had been imposed on them by the British colonial administration in Natal. Thus Zulus often stopped by the stations to see if they could sell corn, straw mats, grass for thatching, furs, or other commodities, either for money or for objects such as hoes or blankets. Other Zulus seem to have surmised that there were potentially important spiritual gains to be made by fre- quenting the station. The Norwegian missionaries repeatedly wrote about their frustration that Zulus came to the Sunday services because they believed that this would bring them rain. Other visitors to the stations may have deemed it prudent to gather information about the spiritual forces of which the missionaries claimed knowledge. The Norwegian missionar- ies also offered basic medical aid, including treatment of wounds, bro ken bones and rheumatism, extraction of teeth, and vaccinations against smallpox. The various services, commodities and types of knowledge that the mis- sionaries could offer meant that the mission stations became busy with everyday visitors. In the early 1870s Ommund Oftebro wrote from the mis- sion station Eshowe: There is no lack of Zulu visitors who appear daily on this station. I have, while writing this very letter, been interrupted several times, and each time I have had to deal with small crowds of people. While hardly more than 30 heathens came to attend the Sunday service yesterday, some 50–60 individuals have appeared today on different errands. Thus, not much has yet come of my writing.3 A considerable number of the station visitors seem to have perceived their coming as part of a larger process of exchange (Simensen 1986b). In particular, this was repeatedly expressed by Zulus in reference to their attendance at the Sunday services on the Norwegian mission stations, which some of them clearly viewed as one half of an exchange with the
3 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1872:13.
4 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1865:5. 5 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1872:165–6.
comment futher on below. Many of the Zulus, too, came to see their atten- dance at the Sunday service on the mission station as a way of making their claim on the missionaries visible – whether in order to request immediate benefits, or as part of an investment in a long-term relationship from which various gains might be derived. At other times negotiations were not so tangible. This was especially the case with the exchanges associated with the missionaries’ religious power or expertise, including exchanges that concerned medicines. The Norwegian missionaries commonly spent a significant amount of time on their stations responding to visitors who came to be treated for such medical concerns as wounds, pains, scabs, and stomach aches (Jørgensen 1990:182–5).6 The missionaries used basic medicines, including emetics and salves. They also extracted teeth.7 Hans Schreuder and other missionaries combined medical assistance with religious consultations, preaching or prayer, hoping that their patients would become interested in Christianity.8 For example, in 1858 Lars Larsen reported a conversation he had with a Zulu man who visited the station Umphumulo to ask for advice about his wife’s head, which had been corroded by an idlozi, a shade. Lars asked whether the shade manifested itself in the form of head scabs, which the man confirmed. In that case, Lars told him, his wife should wash herself, and then the idlozi would no longer recognize her and would leave her. And then Lars added that the best means against the idlozi was the Word of God.9 Lars was not only taking on the role of a medical adviser here, draw- ing on his own medical knowledge – namely that head scabs might go away if the scalp were kept clean. He was also using Zulu religious concepts in order to do so, perhaps thinking that the man would be more likely to understand and act on this advice if he were told that a clean scalp would work because it would hinder the idlozi from recognizing his wife. Finally, Lars wished to convince the man that an even greater spiritual power existed, namely the Word of God, which could ultimately protect his wife from the idlozi. Similarly, the Norwegian missionaries were from time to time asked to make it rain. From a Zulu perspective this probably seemed like a reason- able request, given that the missionaries had already been identified as
6 There are numerous examples of this in the sources, see e.g. Norsk Missions-Tidende 1855/56:37, 1858:199, 1865:27, 1865:132–3, 1870:509, and 1872:165–6. 7 For a perceptive analysis of the missionaries’ teeth-pulling, see Landau (1995:118–22). 8 E.g. Norsk Missions-Tidende 1852/53:218–19. 9 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1858:199.
10 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1845/46:148. 11 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1863:130. 12 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1858:198. 13 E.g. James 5:16–18 (King James): “The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man avai- leth much. Elias was a man subject to like passions as we are, and he prayed earnestly that it might not rain: and it rained not on the earth by the space of three years and six months. And he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain, and the earth brought forth her fruit.”
rather than part of their “real mission work” (det egentlige Missionsarbeide).14 In their minds the area of medicine was also a science, of which they had limited knowledge. They combined their medical efforts with prayer, and they believed that science and God could heal people of illness, but not that their prayers would automatically bring this about. Their approach to rain was similar; they believed that natural weather cycles and God could make it rain, and that they could pray for this to happen, but not that they could force God’s hand in this regard. However, they did not always manage to communicate to the Zulus how they perceived these linkages between nat- ural events, scientific knowledge, religious prayer, and an omnipotent God who made independent decisions about how and when to respond to prayer – linkages that were intimately bound up in the historical develop- ment of Protestantism and the Enlightenment in Western Europe over the previous centuries. Instead, the actions of the missionaries seem rather to have communi- cated the opposite to the Zulus, namely that the missionaries’ medical skills, their ability to pray for healing or for rain, and their knowledge of God were all part and parcel of their spiritual powers. In effect, then, the missionaries adopted some of the role that herbalists or diviners, inyanga or isangoma, had among the Zulus. These were experts who practiced both medicine and divination as part of their consultations (cf. Berglund 1976:188). Similarly, the London Missionary Society missionaries among the northern Tswana adopted the role of priest-healers – though with attendant contradictions (Landau 1995:13–14, 114–16). This is part of what Jean and John Comaroff (e.g. 1991:213) have identified as the missionaries’ reactive Africanization of their religious rites. In sum, the mission stations were viewed by some Zulus as sites for vari- ous kinds of services and exchanges. Jarle Simensen (1986b) proposes that the exchanges on the nineteenth-century Norwegian mission stations may be understood as transactions. He views them through the lens of Fredrik Barth’s (1966) transaction theory, that is, as part of a larger attempt by both parties to gain “maximal need-satisfaction” through giving, withholding, or acquiring material and spiritual benefits (Simensen 1986b:83). At one level, I agree with Simensen that some of the exchanges were indeed transac- tions, whether dealing in material or spiritual coin. This was perhaps most evident in the idea among the Zulus – and even at times among the
14 See e.g. Norsk Missions-Tidende 1858:218.
The Mission Stations as Risky Spaces
While some Zulus regarded the mission stations as spaces that offered services and opportunities for exchange, others perceived them as spaces of budding threat. At least some of the Zulus seem to have perceived sustained contact with the missionaries to be potentially dangerous – especially for children, who were regarded as more impressionable than adults. And the fear was frequently heightened in relation to young girls. When Lars and Martha Larsen stayed briefly at Empangeni, several boys and young men sought employment on the station, but no girls. When Lars Larsen asked one of the men in the vicinity if he would let his daughter come to work for Martha on the station, the man told him:
You do not even need to think about getting girls in service here. They will come to attach themselves to you (namatele), enjoying a much better life with you than at home, and therefore we shall come to lose them forever.15 This example shows that some Zulus regarded mission stations as risky spaces because girls might become more attached to the missionary and mission station lifestyle than their homestead, perhaps because the mis- sionaries advocated a gendered division of labor that relegated the heavier work of tending the fields to men rather than women. But at other times missionaries reported that there were other, more dangerous possibilities tied to the perceived risk of the station space. In some cases it is evident that young people who displayed an interest in the missionaries’ teaching were perceived by their families to have ingested some evil. One young man, Ubazambili, was taken away from Umphumulo by his relatives and given emetics. He later told Lars Larsen that “the women in the fields cry after me: ‘There is he who wants to go mad!’”16 Another young boy interested in the missionaries’ religious message, Ungvabaji, was forcibly taken away from the Norwegian station at Inhlazatshe by his older brother, and was then given emetics by his relatives in order to “cure him of the illness they assumed he was suffering from, since he was so wicked as to want to become an ikolwa, i.e. a Christian.”17 There seems to have been some uncertainty regarding the exact nature of his affliction, however, and once the family saw how weak and miserable the emetics made him, they decided to send him back to work and live on the mission station for another year. The same concern is repeated in relation to other potential converts. As one father in the Maphumulo area said when his daughter wished to convert after having worked at Umphumulo: “the purpose of let- ting her take employment with the missionaries had merely been one of earning money – not to let her go bad and become a Christian.”18 In sum, the mission station was perceived as a space where one could potentially “go mad” or “go bad,” and at times emetics were used to try and rid the body of this ingested affliction. Berglund (1976:328–35) reports that in the 1960s he was told by his Zulu conversation partners that vomiting was a common means of purifying oneself of ubuthakathi, evil, that had entered into one’s body. The bad sorcery was thought to have entered
15 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1865:153. 16 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1852/53:180. 17 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1868:66–7. 18 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1860:21.
19 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1862:189. 20 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1873:8. 21 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1861:67. 22 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1867:42. 23 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1858:221.
asserting that the new knowledge of Christianity had been thrust upon the subject, as was the customary way of thinking in relation to the initiation of Zulu diviners.24 At other times the mission station might not be perceived to cause some- thing to “come inside” the person, but rather might cause something to “hold on” to the person. In 1870 the Norwegian missionary Markus Dahle reported from Imfule that a rumor was circulating in the vicinity that he was plotting to keep employees “for a long time on the station before pay- ing them in order to turn them into Christians.”25 The fear was strong enough to make all his employees leave the station. Equally, converts could speak of being held on to. Unokutemba, a young Zulu woman who had decided to convert, told Hans Schreuder that when she had visited her father’s homestead, her father had tried to make her promise that she would leave off being a Christian, but she had answered that “she could not let go of the Word of God as long as God was holding on to her so tightly.”26 The common perceptions of the risks associated with being in regular contact with the missionaries – whether this might lead to going mad, going bad, being entered into, or being held on to – was tied in to a bigger fear of what kind of spiritual forces the missionaries were peddling. Some Zulu diviners were regarded as particularly powerful, and some Zulus apparently wondered if the missionaries fell into the same category – and if so, whether they would work for good or evil. An articulate expression of this perception was given by Prince Cetshwayo after having had a three- hour long conversation with Ommund Oftebro. His words, as reported by Ommund, who added explanatory notes in brackets, were: I say there are two gods – one is ours, we black people, and one is yours, you white people. You missionaries are the servants of God, you know the Word of God, and you can teach others; there are many whites around here who do not know what you know. It is the same with us blacks: we have our mission- aries (isanuzi); and their book is amathlozi (the shadowy spirits of the deceased, ghosts); they know what we do not know, but we learn from them.27 Cetshwayo here made a direct comparison between the missionaries and the isanusi, the most powerful nineteenth-century Zulu diviners who worked for the Zulu king. They were virtually always men, they were
24 Henry Callaway, “The initiation of a Zulu diviner,” in Callaway (1870). 25 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1870:332. 26 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1860:18. 27 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1860:40.
The Mission Station as Esikoleni
When Lars and Martha Larsen and Ommund Oftebro started setting up a proper mission station at Umphumulo in 1851, one of the first things they
28 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1864:124–5.
did was to start to hold daily reading classes for children in the vicinity.29 From the very beginning, reading classes were of great importance in the daily life on the stations.30 In fact, there is some evidence that the missionaries’ emphasis on teach- ing Zulus to read printed texts was perceived, at least by some Zulus, as the most defining characteristic of the space of the mission station. At times it seems that the station itself could even be referred to as “the school,” esiko- leni, as in one remark by Unjekile, a young Zulu woman who had previously been taken away from the mission station Empangeni by force by her brothers, as recorded by the Norwegian missionary Jan Kielland: [She said:] “For a long time I have wanted to return in order to dhlala esikoleni – literally: sit in school, i.e. live on the station –, but they would kill me at home. I stayed with Ommund, but they took me home” […] I asked if she wanted a Zulu hymnal and another little book, but she answered: “They will destroy it at home. I had another book, but they destroyed it.”31 The fact that this was a defining feature of the mission is also evident in the Zulu term that was commonly used to refer to the missionaries, namely umfundisi, teacher. The Comaroffs (1991:233) report the same practice among the Tswana, who referred to the British missionaries as moruti, teacher. Among the Zulus, this label was probably in large part a reference to the missionaries’ preaching and their wish to teach people about Christianity, but it also included their role as actual school teachers on the stations. And, as Prince Cetshwayo noted in the quotation above, their potent information seemed to come from a powerful object, namely what they called the Word of God – the printed text of the Bible (Holter 2009). The Bible was commonly referred to by Zulus on the mission stations sim- ply as “the book,”32 following what seems to have been common usage among Zulus already from the 1830s (Worger 2001:422). “The school,” “the teacher,” and “the book” were thus key defining features of the mission station space in the mid-nineteenth century.
29 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1852/53:46. 30 Contra Simensen with Børhaug et al. (1986:240) who erroneously state that prior to 1880 reading classes were a “peripheral part of station work” and primarily held in “evening schools.” On the contrary, not only did school classes take up a considerable part of the daily schedule on the mission stations from the early 1850s onwards, they were most commonly conducted in mid-morning or afternoon sessions during the first decades rather than in the evenings. Torstein Jørgensen also notes that their statement is incorrect (Jørgensen 1990:178–80). 31 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1864:134–5. 32 E.g. Norsk Missions-Tidende 1855/56:94, 1873:444.
Several Zulus seem to have been anxious about the reading of texts asso- ciated with the mission stations, especially parents whose children visited or worked on stations. Ommund Oftebro wrote from Empangeni in 1858 about a man whose daughter had started frequenting the mission station: “The father’s unease and fear that something might happen to him because of the white-people-like whims of his daughter is not to be wondered at. She is reading and singing.”33 And Umatikalala, the young man who was being trained as a wagon driver by Mbiyana Ngidi at Umphumulo in the 1850s, was told by his mother: “you must not learn the book.”34 For these people, reading was perhaps seen as a dangerous ritual, or an act of communicating with magical material (Harries 2007:194–6). Or perhaps it was simply seen – in accordance with missionary views – as an instrument aimed at conversion: “the door to the church.”35 Even among those who were interested in the Bible, in Christianity, and in becoming baptized themselves, not everyone was enthusiastic about learning to read.36 Indeed, this seems to have been so common that the Norwegian missionaries were forced to adjust to this fact by permitting people to become baptized even if they could not read. Instead, catechu- mens were required to articulate sincere personal confessions of repen- tance and faith, and to be able to repeat off by heart portions of Martin Luther’s Small Catechism and Erik Pontoppidan’s Explanation, translated into Zulu (Jørgensen 1990:172).37 These texts already hint at a certain type of literacy. Literacy and orality can both be thought of as modes of using language and interacting with the world, and they are both socially embedded (Harries 2007:182–205). The learning and use of literate and oral patterns are closely linked to one’s identity and worldview. The Zulus did not commonly use written texts when the Norwegian missionaries first arrived. They had a strong oral tradi- tion, the most well-known feature of which is perhaps izibongo, the praise poems. Izibongo drew on an oral tradition that valued poetic expressions,
33 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1859:6. 34 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1855/56:94. 35 SPG Archives, E5, Henry Callaway, Journal, January 16, 1859; cited in Etherington (1978:54). 36 See e.g. Norsk Missions-Tidende 1860:47–8, 1866:322, 1869:228. 37 Martin Luther’s Small Catechism of 1529 is his short commentary on the ten com- mandments, the creed, the Lord’s prayer, baptism, confession, and holy communion (Luther 1991), and Erik Pontoppidan’s Explanation, which was popular at the time in Scandinavia, is an explanation of Luther’s Small Cathechism in the form of questions and answers (Pontoppidan 1737).
the performance of speech and oratory, and repetition of spoken words (Gunner 1979). The Norwegian missionaries, on the other hand, were par- ticularly attuned to the type of literacy prevalent in pietistic Protestant movements, in which it was important that the Word of God became known to individuals through their own reading and contemplation. Like the German missionaries of the Berlin Mission Society in the Transvaal, the educated Norwegians adhered to a literate Lutheranism, seeing the world from a vantage point of saturated literacy (Hofmeyr 1991). This tendency was supported by a wider Western epistemological framework that empha- sized the importance of written texts in general, and the ability to read and write in order to be an upstanding moral citizen. In Norway at the time there was even a law that prohibited any young person’s confirmation in church unless they could read, and being confirmed was essential in order to be included as a recognized member of society. As Webb Keane (2002, 2006) has shown, there is also an intimate link in Protestantism between the striving for a “sincere” self and the forms of language that one employs, including praying in one’s “own” words and using truthful personal propo- sitions about one’s own interior state. Merely participating in religious rituals does not make one “religious” or “sincere” within pietistic Protes tantism; one also needs to employ one’s own authentic linguistic expres- sions. These were all facets of the Norwegian missionaries’ particular blend of pietistic, Protestant, Western literacy. The Norwegian missionaries set out to teach their literacy to the Zulus by fashioning what they deemed to be a suitable environment – a space that offered an entirely new physical and mental framework to the Zulu students, as described by Lars Larsen from the station Inhlazatshe: When the native who comes to school has completed the first course, in which the topic is: learn to enter through a doorway without breaking the lock or running up against the doorframe, learn to sit on a bench in such a manner that the bench does not topple over, learn to refrain, under all these tribulations, from the richly streaming oaths: Pande, Dingane, etc., overcome the supernatural fear of the witchcraft-like books, amongst other things – then the higher education begins, of which the first aim is to teach them to read from a printed book. It is going slowly.38 As this description by Lars Larsen shows, the students in the reading and catechumen classes sat on benches, resembling the sitting posture that school children adopted in Norway, rather than sitting on the floor in the
38 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1868:205–206.
39 Jørgensen (1990:170), who cites Norsk Missions-Tidende 1861:130, 1864:245, 1869:255, 1874:82. 40 Jørgensen (1990:170–72), who cites Norsk Missions-Tidende 1866:322, 1868:205, 1869:228, 1870:148. 41 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1868:205, 1870:148. 42 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1866:322.
willing to use one another’s translations (Etherington 2002:426). They printed portions of the Bible as they became available, as well as hymns, catechisms, Christian tracts, grammars, and arithmetic booklets. Some also ordered English books for teaching purposes. For the remainder of the nineteenth century, the missions remained the key supplier of printed texts to Africans, as well as the primary producers of texts in African lan- guages in Southern Africa (Etherington 2002:427). This stood in sharp contrast to the concerns of most nineteenth-century Dutch and British settlers in Natal, whose representatives demanded that Africans only be given basic vocational training, and no further education (Etherington 2002:428). The mission schools were the only schools avail- able to Zulus at the time, and many of the settlers who wanted a cheap and compliant African labor force were strongly opposed to teaching Africans to read. The Natal British colonial functionaries, on the other hand, gener- ally supported the mission schools, and in due course they also started to finance them (as will be discussed in chapter 8). As in many other colonial states (Comaroff 1998), the colonial administration in Natal clearly relied on groups of other expatriates to introduce Western ways of life in parts of the colony that the state functionaries had limited overview or authority over. They considered it to be to their advantage to have reading classes on the mission stations. It seems pertinent here to repeat V.Y. Mudimbe’s (1988) description of the major features of “the missionary’s discourse,” (adapted from Fabien Eboussi-Boulaga 1981), even though I disagree with his wider characteriza- tions of the relationship between mission and empire. The missionary discourse, as Mudimbe (1988:51–2) observes, was a language of derision of “heathen” religious beings and rituals, a language of refutation of “heathen” evils as opposed to Christian goodness, and a language of demonstration designed to convey the superiority of Christianity. For example, the mis- sionaries commonly characterized Zulu references to ancestral shades as “deceit”;43 since the shades did not exist, the missionaries argued, the Zulus were deceiving themselves. Zulu religious beliefs were on the whole described as “superstition […] parts of Satan’s bulwarks to be made away with and demolished by the Word of God.”44 The missionaries in general described Zulu life and habits in negative terms, and argued, for example,
43 Jørgensen (1990:133), who cites Norsk Missions-Tidende 1868:143, 1869:71. 44 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1864:196.
45 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1856/57:46. 46 Jørgensen (1990:289) cites eight cases reported in Norsk Missions-Tidende for the period 1850–1873: Norsk Missions-Tidende 1860:155, 1861:22, 1861:124, 1862:6, 1863:77, 1865:2, 1865:26–7, and 1872:256.
Elbourne 2002:163–4). When the Qwabe chief Musi, who lived close to the Umphumulo and Maphumulo mission stations, decided to allow the indigenous evangelist John Hlonono to set up the outstation Emushane (under the American Zulu Mission) in his chiefdom in 1866, he cited two reasons: he had fond memories of the American mission school that he had attended as a boy, and he approved of the prosperity of Christian converts (Mahoney 1999:377). (Incidentally, the economic activity of converts does not always seem to have been viewed positively by the Norwegian mission- aries; Ommund Oftebro commented, for example, that through the trading activity they “expose themselves to many temptations.”)47 On the other hand, the literacy that the missionaries offered was steeped in a value system of its own. Through European pedagogy, the missionaries aimed to recast the epistemic topography of the world they had come to (Comaroff 1998). In the same way that British working-class students may feel alienated by their schooling experience today (Willis 1977), many of the Zulu students in the missionary schools may have faced an unarticulated choice: fail at school, or succeed and accept a negative valuation of your culture. In Not Either an Experimental Doll, Shula Marks (1987) has painted this dilemma of identity that confronted a young Xhosa girl educated by Anglican missionaries on a station in the Eastern Cape. Similarly, Jonathan Draper suggests – referring both to past colonial situations and present-day South Africa – that, “[i]f the non-Western student chooses to succeed under the rules of Western literacy, the result may paradoxically be destructive of her integrity and lead to personal failure,” not to mention failure to be able to participate or be recognized in her community (Draper 2002:306). Missionary schooling was intended as an aspect of the moral reconstruc- tion of persons based on discourses that rejected much of Zulu life (cf. Comaroffs 1991:233). It was not until several decades later that some Zulu writers began to move away from the Western canon and integrated ele- ments of Zulu oral style, content, and poetry into their writings (Cope 1986). One of the independent Christian movements that grew in South Africa in the early twentieth century was that led by Isaiah Shembe, a Zulu prophet and healer, whose movement was known as the amaNazaretha (Cabrita 2010, Gunner 1986, Sundkler 1961). Shembe emphatically under- lined the use of orality in the movement instead of written texts, and he retold the biblical Word in a collection of izibongo, oral Zulu praise
47 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1861:22.
48 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1873:444. 49 See e.g. Cabrita (2010) and Gunner (1986) on the amaNazaretha, and Mokoena (2011) on the amakholwa through the lens of Magema Fuze.
The unease surrounding the nineteenth-century missionaries’ authority to interpret the Bible and to place it within a certain type of Western biblical literacy, along with their ambiguous connections with colonialism and their rejection of large sections of African cultures, is still being worked out in present-day Southern Africa. Tutu has found one way of attempting to resolve this. Jonathan Draper outlines other responses. In his article “‘Less literate are safer’: The politics of orality and literacy in biblical interpretation,” Draper (2002) discusses how he and his colleagues at the present-day University of Natal, in the School of Theology, teach bib- lical studies. He outlines the historical legacy of missionary education, and the continuing unease that many of his students feel about the type of lit- eracy that is required in order to relate to the Bible in the academy. Indeed some of the same unease and dissonance can be detected, he suggests, in the “puzzling gap” between mainly white and mainly black Bible study groups among Anglicans in contemporary South Africa. While white Anglicans on the whole choose to study a selected text line by line, perhaps in parallel with a scholarly commentary, black Christian communities widely use a revival service format instead, which incorporates retelling, repetition, prayer, performance and song related to the word of the text. Draper (2002:304) compares this to how many of his students gain suffi- cient competence in the type of literacy required at university in order to pass their exams, only “so that they can strip it off like a Savile Row suit in the tropics when they get out into the community.” He argues that this can- not simply be traced back to differing historical traditions of orality and literacy between Zulus and white South Africans; rather, he suggests that the emphatic way in which certain discourses are imitated at university, only to be resisted later, is reminiscent of the negotiation and defense of the colonial situation. He also observes that the continued teaching of a certain type of biblical literacy may further this type of alienation. The risk that many of the nineteenth-century Zulus associated with the mission sta- tion reading classes and the missionaries’ particular type of literacy seems to have survived in different forms for a century and a half, into today’s Southern Africa.
Resident Mission Station Communities
While the stations were perceived to be risky spaces for some, for others the stations were (for shorter or longer periods of time) their home. Which people came to reside on the mission stations? The social composition of
50 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1859:41. 51 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1862:121.
recruited from the station employees, rather than from groups of refugees or patients (Jørgensen 1990:279–92). The most stable element of the resi- dent communities on the Norwegian mission stations were thus employees and converts, rather than refugees or patients. Thirdly, most of those who sought work on the Norwegian stations, and virtually all of those who wished to be baptized, were young men and women. Jørgensen has found that during the period he studied, from 1850–1873, not a single polygynous homestead head was converted by the Norwegian mission (Jørgensen 1990:155), and only a small handful of older, married women were baptized. These women all had children who had already converted.52 Most of the rest of the 285 people who had been baptized by the Norwegian missionar- ies by 1873 were, with a few exceptions, below the age of, say, 30–35 at the time of their baptism, judging by the approximate age that Zulus would be married under the rule of King Mpande (Ballard 1986:59, Jørgensen 1990:278). The Zulu kings had, since Shaka, reserved the right to decide when regiments (ordered by age) would marry. Most converts approached the Norwegian mission stations before they reached this age. In terms of size, the resident communities on the Norwegian mission stations were never very large compared with some of the other mis sions’ stations. The Norwegian stations usually had fewer than 50 residents (Jørgensen 1990:343) – even those stations that were most successful at attracting resident communities, such as Umphumulo, Entumeni, and Eshowe. In comparison, in the early 1870s the German Hermannsburg and Berlin mission stations in the Transvaal reported an average community of 95 and 130 members respectively (Rüther 2001:14). The large LMS mission station Bethelsdorp in the Cape reported almost 800 residents in the mid- 1820s, with over 1,400 others attached to the station (Elbourne 2002:169), and the well-known station Edendale in Natal had between 800 and 1,000 residents during the last half of the nineteenth century (Meintjes 1990:128). Zulu converts on the Norwegian stations commonly remained living on the station land, and as mentioned previously it was customary for convert families to build their own beehive hut or square, “upright” house (Jørgensen 1990:344).53 Not until the turn of the twentieth century did it become nor- mal for Zulus who were baptized by the Norwegian missionaries to return
52 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1860:206, 1868:137–8, 1868:226–8, 1869:3; cited in Jørgensen (1990:278, 281). 53 Jørgensen cites Norsk Missions-Tidende 1861:88 (Entumeni), 1865:6 (Empangeni), and 1869:254 (Umphumulo).
54 Simensen with Børhaug et al. (1986:255), who cite Norsk Missions-Tidende 1903:381 and Missionsbladet 1904:130. Missionsbladet (literally The Mission Paper) was the magazine of the Schreuder Mission.
1991:240). The missionaries in Southern Africa also usually frowned upon physical violence against women, and this was clearly part of the appeal of the nineteenth-century mission stations for some of the women who sought to join the resident communities there, including on the Norwegian stations (Porterfield 1997:75).
The Mission Stations as Rival Spaces
Norman Etherington has argued that those Africans who were converted to Christianity during the early decades of Western missionary activity were marginal members of society. As he pithily puts it, if a missionary managed to win any converts among the Zulus at all, “he generally acquired the unstable, the rebellious, or the rejected” (Etherington 1978:67). He suggests that this was also true of the converts on Norwegian stations in Zululand, based on the Norwegian missionary Ole Stavem who wrote in 1915 that the first converts had been “a few from the simplest classes, sick, frail and poor […] the kind of people whom the Zulu chiefs did not care about. They were good for nothing and could reside where they wished” (Stavem 1915:165, my translation, cited in Etherington 1978:83). Undoubtedly there is some truth to this, as those already on the margins of the Zulu world were presumably more willing or prone to be thrown into the new world of the station space. And it is possible to find examples of this in the missionary letters, such as the following from Lars Larsen, written when he first arrived at the Inhlazatshe mission station: I have already engaged two small boys and a crippled adult to work for a few months [at the station]. It is people like this, namely the crippled and young children, and in general those kinds of people whom they themselves do not particularly care about, that the natives think are most suitable for a mission station.55 But these statements also need to be nuanced. Ole Stavem’s account is somewhat inconsistent on this point; a few pages earlier he describes the first converts as young, hard-working, and independent (Stavem 1915: 162–3). And the missionary letters in general contain a much greater complexity on this topic. As Jørgensen (1990:258–65) has documented, the Norwegian missionaries complained repeatedly during the 1850s, 60s and 70s about how catechumens and others interested in becoming Christians
55 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1864:30.
56 Jørgensen cites Norsk Missions-Tidende 1852/53:180, 184, 1855/56:41, 97, 1859:3–5, 6, 83, 1860:110, 155–6, 1861:3–4, 68, 82, 127, 162, 1862:188–9, 1863:124, 1864:203, 1867:133, 1868:66–7, 261–3, 1870:104–5, 1871:206–9, 1872:46. 57 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1870:104–5.
“Marginal” members’ interest in mission stations might also be resisted because it could be perceived as a threat to the patriarchal social order. Paul Landau (2010a:444) observes that a younger sibling who wished to convert to uNkulunkulu – understood perhaps by others in the family to mean a greater patriarch – might be seen as trying to trump the family order. And Deborah Gaitskell (2003) points out that the freely chosen monogamous marriages advocated by the missionaries were a threat to the very power base of Zulu patriarchy. Zulu homestead heads increased their wealth through accumulating wives and cattle, and fathers requested bridewealth (lobola) for their daughters. More accurately, one might perhaps say that the patriarchal system that the missionaries attempted to introduce within the space of the mission stations was a threat to the patriarchal system of the surrounding Zulus. But in both cases, the control of women as a sub- ordinate in marriage was an important element (cf. Elbourne 2003:450). For these reasons, there was a realistic fear among Zulu families that if one of their members were to convert to Christianity, that member – and possibly the entire homestead or family – might be pulled back into line through the mechanisms for social control prevalent in Zululand at the time. The homestead head or other members of the family might lose pres- tige and respect, might be regarded with increased suspicion, or might be “smelled out,” accused of witchcraft, and risk social retaliation (Jørgensen 1990:259–63).58 In sum, to borrow Willis’ words: “Behind the truism that the first con- verts of many missions were ‘the marginal’ lies a more complex reality” (Willis 1993:154). The stations often seem to have been experienced as rival spaces that might build up power at the expense of other spaces, and in this sense they were perceived by some as a threat.
The Mission Stations as Homesteads – with a Homestead Head
Related to the perception of the mission stations as rival spaces that were trying to “accumulate people,” Jørgensen has suggested, based on the mis- sionary letters, that the majority of Zulus thought of the mission station as in many ways analogous with a Zulu homestead, umizi, complete with a homestead head, umnumzane (Jørgensen 1990:245). The mission stations, just like Zulu homesteads, consisted of a small collection of buildings, with
58 Jørgensen gives several citations, including Norsk Missions-Tidende 1852/53:184, 1859:3–4, 1859:6, 1861:68, 1864:203, 1867:132–3, 1867:162.
59 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1870:52. 60 Jørgensen (1990:246), who cites Norsk Missions-Tidende 1873:451–2 as an example. 61 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1861:19.
he would have more than enough to do with that matter alone – having to involve himself in all the affairs of his subordinates – small or big. […] I have been very reluctant to make use of it.62 The missionaries did not explicitly arrange marriages. They also seem to have avoided the umnumzane’s right or duty to mete out physical punish- ment to residents on the stations.63 However, they did take on parts of the role by acting as the sole figure of authority on the stations, and Jørgensen (1990:246) notes that the missionaries’ reluctance to take on more exten- sive umnumzane duties must at times have been interpreted by the Zulus as an attempt at avoiding the obligations that a person who was in charge of other people was supposed to take on in Zulu society. The lack of clari- fied judicial arrangements on the stations, together with the mixed back- ground of the people who came to reside there, did also periodically lead to internal strife and disorder, much to the annoyance and despair of the mis- sionaries themselves (Simensen 1986b:93, Jørgensen 1990:367–8). On the other hand, if they did not always completely fulfill the require- ments of a Zulu umnumzane, the male missionaries still assumed an extent of authority on the mission stations that was much closer to the Zulu umnumzane’s than to that of a pastor in Norway, for example. In many ways the missionaries could exercise immediate control over multiple house- holds and a piece of territory, and they did this from a position of sole authority. At times (but not always) they might consult with their fellow missionaries or the Board in Stavanger, but they did not consult with any kind of local congregational committee (until 1909; Simensen with Børhaug et al. 1986:253). They controlled the distribution of material resources on
62 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1870:52. 63 Contra Simensen with Børhaug et al. (1986:217) who state that “spontaneous thrash- ing” of Zulus by the missionaries occurred on the mission stations. The only reference they give (Simensen with Børhaug et al. 1986:271 n118) is to an isolated incident in which the Norwegian missionary Jan Kielland reported that he had taken a stick and given a single blow to a Zulu male convert, Udaniele, in order to drive him from the station. The reason given by Jan Kielland was Udaniele’s long-standing provocative behavior, which had frus- trated not just the missionary but had also caused some of the station’s Zulu neighbors to complain (Norsk Missions-Tidende 1872:287–8). While it is possible that incidents of physical violence were underreported, it seems fair to assume that they did not markedly character- ize the space of the Norwegian mission stations. I have not come across any other similar comment in the Norwegian sources. This stands in stark contrast, for example, to the degree of physical violence that was employed on some of the mission stations in Central Africa, and which clearly formed the character of these spaces (Cairns 1965:41–6, cf. Willis 1993:147), or the apparently casual way in which German Lutheran missionaries in the Transvaal wrote about beatings, which seems to indicate that this type of violence was nothing particularly out of the ordinary on their stations (Rüther 2002:370, 375).
The Mission Stations as Land of the Whites
The mission stations, with their resident communities, raised the compli- cated issue of political loyalty. Norwegian missionaries in Zululand repeat- edly stated that they did not wish to prevent Zulu subjects from serving their king. This assertion seems similar to that of the British Nonconformist missionaries among the Tswana, who promised not to interfere in “tribal” government (Comaroff 1989:674). As John Comaroff points out, however, this was based on an assumption among the missionaries that they would be able to drive a wedge between the temporal and ritual aspects of local government; they could then support the temporal aspect that had been separated out, while transforming the ritual aspect. The Norwegians in Southeast Africa thus initially held a similar assump- tion: they thought they could support the Zulu king and his political rule, while transforming the religious outlook of the Zulus. As will be discussed in chapter 6 on “the missionary imagination,” the missionaries wished ide- ally to create station spaces that would model an alternative form of pietis- tic Christian society, with Christian worship and rituals, as well as marriages that conformed to their ideas of proper Christian gender relations – i.e. no
polygamous relations or lobola (bridewealth exchange). At times, espe- cially in the 1850s and 60s, it seems that the missionaries thought of these issues as religious questions, and assumed that they could be altered with- out disturbing the overarching political government of the Zulus. (At other times, as we shall see in chapter 6, it seems that the missionaries found that this was impossible, and started taking on the assumption that the entire structure of Zulu society – religious, social, economic and political – would need to be changed if the Zulus were to become a Christian people.) In the first couple of decades of the Norwegian mission, the 1850s and 60s, the missionaries must have appeared rather disingenuous to King Mpande as they openly attacked the Zulu institutions of polygamous mar- riage, bridewealth, and ancestral shades – integral parts of the king’s reli- gious authority and the political economy of his kingdom – yet still avowed that they did not wish to harm the king’s position. Jørgensen (1990:335) points out that although the missionaries said that they wished for the male converts, the male amakholwa, to perform service for the king as part of the national regiments (ukukhonza) like other male Zulu subjects, their requests for certain concessions (that the male converts in military service would be allowed to wear trousers, that they would be given Sunday leave, that they would not take part in regimental executions or in ceremonies based on Zulu religious understandings) in effect made normal military service for the amakholwa impossible from the point of view of the Zulu king. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, the few attempts that were made at including converts in the service of the king around 1870 were on the whole quite unsuccessful (Jørgensen 1990:336–9) – thus bolstering both the Zulu rulers’ suspicion that Christian converts could not continue to serve the Zulu king, as well as the missionaries’ growing suspicion that it would in fact be impossible to transform the Zulus’ religion without also transform- ing their entire social, political and economic structure. Despite instances of generosity and tolerance toward Zulu Christian converts, King Mpande, and after him King Cetshwayo (from 1872), never issued a general permission for Zulus to be baptized as Christians. Jørgensen (1990:322) suggests that for the Zulu court, baptism of Zulu subjects must have looked like an outward sign of “putting oneself under a new lord,” thus implying defection. As Ommund Oftebro put it in the mid-1860s, Prince Cetshwayo was “in a dilemma – with his wish to have missionaries, but not Christianity in his country.”64 The Zulu leaders’ general reluctance to allow
64 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1867:331.
65 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1867:232. 66 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1867:232–3.
the matter with him on behalf of all the Norwegian missionaries in an attempt to defuse this perception of rivalry, that “becoming a Christian was tantamount to defecting from the king and becoming the subject of the white man.”67 There seems to have been a complex dynamic surrounding this exclu- sion of the rival spaces of the mission stations from Zulu territory. The ini- tial permission that the Norwegian missionaries had been given by King Mpande to set up discrete mission stations – on plots of land pointed out by him and borrowed (not bought) from him – seems to have been part of his strategy of keeping the missionaries within transparent and manage- able boundaries. As Jørgensen (1990:318) suggests, “[k]eeping as much as possible of the missionary activity within the confines of certain station areas seems to have been the best way of keeping this innovative factor under control [by the Zulu king] and protecting the people against its unin- tended effects.” In due course it became clearer that the missionaries were using the stations as spaces to enact their stated aim of excluding integral parts of Zulu culture and social structure (such as polygamy and communi- cation with the shades). The Zulu king and his chiefs correctly interpreted this as a political threat. They found it useful in other ways, however, to keep some missionaries within the kingdom. The solution that gradually evolved, therefore, was to allow the mission stations to continue to exist but to make these plots of land extraterritorial. The missionaries tried repeat- edly to protest this extraterritoriality and to underline, rather unconvinc- ingly, that Zulu converts could still be Zulu subjects. They did not wish for their stations to be excluded in the way that they were. Another layer was added to the dynamic when the Zulu political leaders also started to use this imposed extraterritoriality as a charge against the missionaries. As two of King Cetshwayo’s councilors complained to Fred B. Fynney, Theophilus Shepstone’s agent, in 1877: We will not allow the Zulus to become so-called Christians […] If a Zulu does anything wrong, he at once goes to a mission station, and says he wants to become a Christian; if he wants to run away with a girl, he becomes a Christian; if he wishes to be exempt from serving the king, he puts on clothes, and is a Christian; if a man is an umtagati [evil-doer], he becomes a Christian […] The missionaries desire to set up another power in the land.68
67 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1868:165. 68 Great Britain, Parliamentary Papers 1878, v. 55, “Further correspondence respecting the affairs of South Africa,” C. 1961:47.
The king’s councilors’ complaint concerning a policy that the king himself had helped to implement, i.e. making the mission stations extraterritorial, shows up the irony of the situation: both the Zulu ruling house and the mis- sionaries had wished to cordon off the space of the mission stations, but neither wished for the contradictory consequences that this brought about. Each side – the Zulu ruling house and the European missionaries – felt that if they did not continue to cordon off the mission stations as separate spaces, they risked losing their own position and authority. But by cordon- ing off the stations, both sides were also miring themselves down in unin- tended results.
Intentions and Results
Any study of nineteenth-century missionaries in Southern Africa has to come to terms somehow with the seemingly striking disjuncture between the missionaries’ intentions and the results of their actions. Not only is there the short-term disjuncture between their calls to conversion and the lack of converts; there are also the long-term disjunctures between their intentions for the mission stations and for the surrounding African populations, and the consequences that many of their decisions had for these spaces and people. As the Comaroffs remark, doing research on Non conformist missionaries among the Tswana is “a study in ambiguity, con- tradiction, and the sheer perversity of the unintended in history” (1997:368), and the missionaries in many ways present us with an exemplary case study of “the limits and complexities of historical agency” (1997:408). In Natal and Zululand, the interplay between the cordoning off of the space of the mission stations – by parts of the surrounding population, by the Zulu king in Zululand, and by the missionaries – and the cultivation of resident station communities in these separate spaces, had at least two long-term and contradictory effects. Firstly, the communities turned into, as Etherington (1976) has dubbed them, “mission station melting pots.” The social composition and the con- text of separation meant that children and young people on the stations came of age in what was effectively a new kind of society. This was neither the equivalent of Zulu society nor of European Christian society, and the Zulu converts “were deeply conscious of their anomalous position and could articulate the difficulties of their status” (Etherington 1976:603). Those who had grown up on mission stations were conversant with Western ways of life, including ways of thinking about time, cause and
effect, reading and speaking, and gender and other social relations. At the same time, they were acutely aware of the gradations of social hierarchy and difference, and the difficulties that could accompany the process of straddling different cultural frameworks and practices. The residents of these mission station melting pots of the mid- and late-nineteenth century formed an important historical basis for the African political elite that was to emerge in South Africa in the early twentieth century.69 Secondly, a related but different effect can be traced among the Norwe gian missionaries themselves. They too occupied an ambiguous position. The Norwegian missionaries on the whole – and this is true also of other European and American missionaries at the time – did not fall back on ethnic and racial essentializations as their pivotal point of reference as often as colonial administrators did (Pels 1997:172); the missionaries were more focused on religious differences between Christian and “heathen” customs, and the religious position of individuals. As mentioned in the introduction, the Board of the Norwegian Missionary Society had also grounded the Norwegian missionary project on the conviction that the Zulus were their potential equals if they would convert to Christianity and live Christian lives. It is one of the ironies in the history of the Norwegian mission, therefore, that the way that the missionaries organized the spatial set-up of the mission stations facilitated the gradual establishment of both a separation between the stations and the surrounding society that was in part perceived as a racial separation (Zulu land versus “white land”), as well as establishing hierarchical relations on the stations themselves that seem primarily to have fallen along racial and gendered lines rather than reli- gious ones (a white male was the sole figure of authority). In the lay-out of the mission station, the lived bodily experience of both the missionaries and the other residents was one marked by racially differentiated author- ity. As Albert Memmi (1967) has noted, the relation between those who are made to be superior and those who are made to be inferior in a colonial situation is produced in the stylized movements of everyday life. The subtle slippage whereby a mission station became a homestead headed by a white, male missionary, and whereby this homestead became perceived as “land of the whites,” is an ironic development related to the
69 Norman Etherington’s list of mission station residents and children of residents includes Saul Msane (who joined the Transvaal Native Congress), Selby Msimang, Albert Luthuli, James Dube, father of John L. Dube (founder of the forerunner of the ANC), and Ira Nembula, father of John Nembula (founder of the separatist African Christian Union) (Etherington 1976:602).
THE MISSIONARY IMAGINATION: SPATIAL CHRISTIANIZATION
Having explored Zulu perceptions of the stations, I shall now turn to the missionaries: What did they imagine the mission stations to be? In using the term “imagine” and “imagination,” I wish to allude to Edward Soja’s (1996) work on “real-and-imagined places.” Trying to understand the differ- ent ways in which a place is imagined does not suggest that this imagining is distinct from the “reality” of the place. On the contrary, Soja reminds us that there is a complex interplay between spaces, which are constitutive of our experience of the world, and our spatial imagination, which ranges from the creative ways in which we fill spaces with objects and narratives, to our representations, visions and fantasies of these spaces. I shall exam- ine these issues especially in relation to a new mission station that the Norwegian missionaries Lars and Martha Larsen set up in the 1860s, Inhlazatshe.1 I shall do so in a series of six overlapping sections in this chapter, which function much as sides of a prism: as a prism is turned, the light that refracts through it casts different patterns. The sections below speak to one another while casting missionary perceptions into new arrangements. Taken together, they deepen our understanding, but also leave the impression of a more complex and unfinished configuration than might first be assumed (Richardson 1998:358). Some of the things that the mission station Inhlazatshe was imagined to be, from the perspective of the missionaries, was a space that had been won for the mission; a space surrounded by “hard” hearts and “dry” ground, which triggered feelings in the missionaries of being lonely or under threat; a space that served as an island of peace or light in the midst of threat or darkness; a space in which an alternative model of a Christian Zulu society could be constructed in miniature; and a space that demonstrated what true Christian civilization looked like (as opposed to certain depraved versions of settler or colonial civilization).
1 The name “Inhlazatshe” is spelled in a number of different ways in the nineteenth- century letters and reports of NMS; Lars Larsen himself uses Intlasakje, Intasake, Intlasatje, Ithlazakje and Intlazakje for his station. I will use the spelling that is closest to current usage, namely Inhlazatshe (apart from in direct quotations). The place is today called Nhlazatshe.
I shall argue that from an etic or outsider perspective we might see the space as a heterotopia.
The Mission Stations as Trophies
The new mission station at Inhlazatshe started out as a rather charged proj- ect. Hans Schreuder had long wished to have a Norwegian station there. It was a strategic place, situated not far from King Mpande’s royal home- stead at Unodwengu. It was close to the northwestern border of the Zulu kingdom, beyond which lay Transvaal, the Republic that Boer settlers had founded in 1852. There were no other mission stations in the area. In addi- tion, it was a grand and scenic stretch of land, at the foot of the Inhlazatshe mountain, and in the cooler air of the highland. Hans Schreuder wanted it badly.2 So did Bishop John Colenso and one of his Anglican missionary colleagues, Robert Robertson.3 The struggle for Inhlazatshe was launched when Robert Robertson and Hans Schreuder were both, on separate occasions, given permission by King Mpande to build there. This meant, as both of them quickly realized, that whoever managed to start to build first would probably gain the place. When Hans Schreuder came up to survey the area, he heard that Robert Robertson had already been and found a site to build on.4 The matter became urgent. Hans Schreuder visited the king and, having secured consent for the sec- ond time, immediately sent the Norwegian mission assistant Johan Olsen up to start to build something right away, and then sent a mission assistant couple who had recently arrived from Norway, Erik and Anna Ingebrigtsen, to join him. A week later, Robert Robertson tried to secure an audience with the king in order to stop the Norwegians, but was this time denied access to the monarch, apparently because of a spat between the Zulu court and Bishop John Colenso.5 Then Prince Cetshwayo became aware of the matter. The prince was not sure that he would like such a strategic spot – the Boers’ potential war path into Zululand – to be occupied by Europeans. He sent a message to the Norwegian builders at Inhlazatshe, ordering them to move elsewhere. When the message was relayed to Hans Schreuder, he reported that it
2 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1862:83–4. 3 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1862:167. 4 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1862:168. 5 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1862:168.
attacked me, for several reasons, so strongly that it, amongst other things, had the peculiar bodily effect that my guts seemed to throw themselves around and around, my appetite and sleep dissipated, until I was able to tear myself away from the work here at home and set out on the trip.6 In some ways, the mission cause in the early 1860s was still experienced as a desperate business, at least by Hans Schreuder, as his trip to the prince to save Inhlazatshe for the Norwegians, in December 1862, shows. He com- pleted the journey over the Zulu terrain as quickly as he could manage, eating and sleeping as little as possible, while he prepared and perfected his appeal to the prince. When he arrived he was granted an audience the following morning. He presented customary gifts to the prince – woolen blankets and blue cotton fabric – and then, for an hour, laid out his appeal with all the elegance of Zulu oratory that he could muster and had learnt over the past two decades. The prince and his court, whether impressed or amused at how much the possibility of the use of a plot of land meant to this white man, were willing to concede; the prince replied, elegantly, that his original message must have been misunderstood. Hans Schreuder left in considerably uplifted spirits, later triumphantly reporting back to Stavanger: “Heartily thankful for this: in God veni, vidi, vici.”7 All opposing forces – whether Zulu or Anglican – had, in the missionary imagination, been “conquered,” and Inhlazatshe had been “won” for the Norwegian mission. As discussed in chapter 2, the Norwegian missionaries gained access to the land for their mission stations through petitioning the colonial govern- ment in Natal or petitioning the Zulu royal court in Zululand. Richard Price (2008:99–105) observes, in relation to British missionaries among the Xhosa, that the process of petitioning for mission station locations some- times seemed to leave the missionaries in the dark: the procedure at times seemed unclear or unfair to them, when chiefs gave them “a run-around” (2008:103), and they often found it difficult to discern the actual grounds for rejection or permission. Price suggests that this was, in part, a result of the negotiating missionary’s failure to try to understand “the internal and external politics of Xhosa society […] to imagine an autonomous world of the Xhosa outside of his own narrow terms of reference” (2008:103). I hesi- tate to apply this blanket description to Hans Schreuder, who usually had considerable political savvy. But at least in the case of Inhlazatshe, this
6 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1863:108. 7 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1863:112.
Foreignness, Loneliness, Threat
Once Inhlazatshe was firmly in Norwegian rather than British hands, Lars and Martha Larsen moved up there in 1863 and set about establishing the new mission station. Erik Ingebrigtsen helped with building construction – Lars mentions two rectangular houses for the missionaries to live in, and a shed for the ox wagon.8 Lars started holding Sunday services, and people soon started coming by the station to sell corn or exchange news.9 There are many aspects of the Larsens’ life at Inhlazatshe that could be drawn out, but I wish to focus here on one particular tendency of Lars’ let- ters over the next few years. He had moved from the large and established station at Umphumulo, in the Colony of Natal, up to the new station at Inhlazatshe, in a relatively remote area of northwestern Zululand. In some ways the move seems to have been associated with what we today might term culture shock, or perhaps just a general frustrated feeling of differ- ence, foreignness and loneliness. During the 1860s, Lars’ letters contain far more disparaging remarks about the Zulus around him than previously – often reflecting his own difficult state of mind. In 1863, he wrote that six of the mission station cattle had died in the cold September rains, and that people from the surrounding area had come “these past few days, like birds of prey, to […] get the meat of the deceased cattle, which they devour like predators.”10 Shortly afterwards, a young man was brought to him with six gun shot wounds to the head so that Lars could treat his wounds, and Lars commented: “They have frightfully hard skulls, but whether these are harder than the heart, I do not know.”11 The following year, a harrowing
8 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1864:204, 1865:135. 9 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1864:30–31. 10 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1864:30–31. 11 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1864:129.
incident occurred near the mission station when people at a few of the homesteads had apparently refused to do some work for the king’s soldiers. A retaliation army sent by the prince attacked nine homesteads at sunrise and killed almost everyone, leaving only six survivors out of perhaps 50 to 150 people.12 Lars tried to find ways of helping the survivors and neighbors, including giving them medicine. But he also remarked, more coldly, that some of those who had been murdered had previously been murderers themselves, and “their dead bodies are now given to the birds of the air to eat.”13 Remarks like these point to his perception that the area around him was “hard” in more than one sense: there was the hard political reality of instability and occasional violence, and there was the religious reality, as Lars saw it, of the people’s “hard hearts.” During the first three years at Inhlazatshe, he was not able to baptize anyone at all.14 These remarks also stray onto the theme of devouring and being devoured, as he casts the Zulus variously in the roles of predators (devouring meat) or prey (being eaten by the birds). Other remarks circled around the question of what kind of threat the surroundings posed for him and Martha, such as the following:
Yes until now He [the Lord] has made it so, that we live safely among a people who hate peace. He has turned evil away from us, that otherwise could have devoured us.15 The following year, Lars wrote again:
Because as surely as the ungodly has no true peace, and that we, as far as we know, are only surrounded by ungodly, who in their deep ignorance and ensconced in an infinitely pitch dark night still hate peace; just as surely, the Lord has granted us to live in peace, yes even to live safely among this hea- then people.16 It was thanks to the prayers of people in Norway, Lars reflected, “that we until this day stand unharmed (I will only speak for the physical) among a
12 Lars does not estimate how many people were killed, but only states that these nine homesteads were “fairly full of people” (Norsk Missions-Tidende 1865:135). 13 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1865:133. 14 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1867:41. 15 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1865:130–31. Lars Larsen was probably alluding here to the image used in 1 Peter 5:8, where the devil is presented as a lion who walks around seeking someone to devour (opsluke). 16 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1866:154.
17 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1866:155. 18 NMS Archives, HA, Box 131, Jacket 1, Lars Larsen to the Board, April 6, 1864. 19 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1866:155. 20 NMS Archives, HA, Box 131, Jacket 3, Lars Larsen to the Board, July 4, 1866.
identity. The revulsion from direct contact with “heathenism,” and the fear of contamination, “worked in the direction of leaving the missionary in a position of splendid isolation” (Cairns 1965:68). Just as some Zulus were anxious that young people who stayed on the mission stations would become attached to the missionaries and would ingest a certain kind of wickedness or madness and have their interior corrupted (as discussed in the previous chapter), the missionaries, in turn, were sometimes anxious that prolonged contact with Zulu culture would corrupt the missionaries’ own interior beings.21 What could account for these strong expressions of loneliness and threat? For one, these everyday modes were understandably heightened by the relative lack of contact with people from a similar social background and religious standing – and the missionaries’ tendency to avoid seeking out points of common ground with the people around them. The British missionary William Percival Johnson (of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa), by Lake Nyasa, noted in 1916 that there was sometimes a tendency for life in Britain to seem more real to Brits in Africa than life in Africa (Cairns 1965:65). No doubt, as Cairns (1965:65) deduces, this was in lage part due to the “emotional insufficiency” of relationships between the Europeans and the African people they lived among. There are a few exam- ples of friendship and a sense of companionship between certain mission- aries and Africans – Cairns gives the example of Robert Moffat and King Mzilikazi, and among the Norwegian missionaries, Ommund Oftebro developed a complex relationship with Prince Cetshwayo. But this was rare, and the lack of common cultural background, common religious motivations and emotional expectations seem to have set up less intimate relationships. Another reason for many missionaries’ sense of loneliness may perhaps be found in the Evangelical culture itself, which, as Richard Price (2008:74) points out, had some in-built volatilities: “violent mood swings between optimism and pessimism” easily accompanied the process of trying to discern whether or not one’s daily actions were in accordance with God’s plan. The stress of this volatility was especially triggered, Price suggests, in the face of apparent missionary failures, such as the failure to convert large numbers of Africans.
21 For several similar and interesting individual cases drawn from the British mission aries among the Xhosa (from the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, the London Missionary Society, and the Glasgow Missionary Society), see Price (2008, especially chapter 4).
The difficult process of holding on to “oneself” was therefore at times evident among the Norwegian missionaries. Karina Hestad Skeie (1999:97) argues that they felt they needed to maintain the social person that had left Norway in order to fulfill their calling. In order to achieve this, the mission- aries gradually came to maintain a dual focus: on movement outward from the station, in order to convey the gospel to the neighboring Zulus, and on a certain kind of movement that was focused inward, on the station itself, in order to direct energy toward safeguarding themselves spiritually and personally (Skeie 1999:98). Cairns (1965:71–2) touches on the same point when he suggests that the isolation that so many missionaries experienced may have made it seem desirable, indeed virtuous, for them to order much of their existence around the aim of preserving their own religious beliefs and identity, rather than singularly around the aim of transmitting these to the Africans. In this sense it may be appropriate to explore how, as Thomas Beidelman (1982:99) has put it, missionaries were also “in the field to save themselves” (cf. Skeie 1999:96). Putting it slightly differently, at one level the mission station became a space for the missionaries to continue to “work out their salvation,” to use Paul’s phrasing from Philippians 2:12. The problems that they perceived on the stations, including feelings of foreignness, loneliness and threat, were largely experienced as meaningful problems within their framework of faith. Their life on the mission stations was a way of living out the multifac- eted idea of conversion, in the sense that Simon Coleman (2003) has described it. Coleman studied a charismatic Word of Life church in Sweden in which conversion remained a key concept, even though very few people were actually converted by the congregation. If this apparent “failure” to convert leads us to regard the focus on conversion as “mere rhetoric,” however, we will have missed something important, Coleman argues. He explores some of the meanings of conversion, intertwined in “actions that constitute charismatic identity in the very act of extending it out into the world” (Coleman 2003:22). While the Norwegian missionaries were not part of a charismatic congregation, they too had spun their identities around the idea of reaching out to others, and living on a mission station in the midst of “hard” or “dry” or “threatening” surroundings in many ways embodied this very idea. Whether they gained converts or not, their mes- sage achieved an important part of its purpose, as Coleman (2003:24) puts it, “merely by being powerfully and passionately projected out into the world” – in the missionaries’ case, by being powerfully and passionately projected onto the mission stations.
A Note on Method: Interpreting Binary Metaphors – Light and Darkness
The nineteenth-century missionaries frequently used binary metaphors or imagery to communicate the “reality” of the mission station space as they imagined it, for example describing peace versus evil, spiritual life versus spiritual dryness or hardness, or light versus darkness. How are we to under stand these stark images? Let me explore one in particular, namely the binary imagery of light and darkness, which became more and more pro- nounced in the NMS tradition toward the end of the nineteenth century. At one level, the division of the world into “enlightened” and “benighted” areas drew on biblical imagery of light and darkness, such as that used, for example, in the metaphorical language of the Gospel of John, but – unlike the biblical writings – applied these images directly onto the geographical map. The imagery was experienced so tangibly that in 1890 NMS printed a “mission map” of Natal and Zululand (and also one of Madagascar) in which black or a darker shade indicated non-Christian areas and white or a lighter shade indicated areas where Christianity had made inroads (Fig. 1). The mission stations were drawn in as points of light. “One can therefore at a glance see how far one has come, and what still remains,” Norsk Missions- Tidende explained. NMS mass produced the maps, and in 1890 alone 10,000 copies were sold to people across Norway.22 The imagistic understanding of light and darkness that had come to be used by NMS missionaries in the nineteenth century, as well as by many other missions (cf. Pels 1999:56–7), was an effectual metaphorical image. It was almost always expressed in the Norwegian missionaries’ writings as a metaphor rather than a simile. While similes create resemblance by using the phrase “is like,” metaphors simply use the verb “is” (to be): The Zulus are living in darkness. The power of the metaphor stems from the fact that it no longer explicitly acknowledges that the image of light and darkness is make-believe; instead, light and darkness are, linguistically, treated as if
22 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1890:400. There is also another well-known image that draws on the light and darkness metaphor from this period of NMS history. It is a picture that, in a later version, became known within NMS as “Come over and help us” (taken from Acts 16:9). It was first used as the frontispiece for Norsk Missions-Tidende in 1883, and continued, in different versions, to grace the cover of the magazine for the next eight decades. It depicts a couple of Africans on a shore, waiting for the mission ship, which can be seen in the distance next to a rising sun. For a thorough analysis of this image, including all its permutations, see Gullestad (2007:75–98). The frontispiece itself can be viewed in the copies of Norsk Missions- Tidende that are available online through the Harvard Library website.
Figure 1. Nils Landmark’s “Mission map of Zululand and Natal,” 1890. (NMS Archives) they were literal realities (Ricoeur 1977:246). Of course, all the readers of the mission magazine were aware that Zululand was not literally envel- oped in darkness, yet at the same time the metaphor’s created resemblance expressed what the missionaries and mission supporters thought of as the underlying reality of the world. The metaphor did not describe what was “real” but what was “really real.” Metaphors also contain in them an implicit
argument concerning what ought to be done about this underlying reality – for example, if it is not desirable to be “in darkness,” then, logically, someone ought to introduce “light.” Metaphors often become guides for action. As Stephen Bevans (1991) suggests, missionaries’ metaphorical images are not just interesting picture words, they are concentrated theolo- gies of mission. They are also very practical. The emotional importance of the metaphor- ical images rested, partially, on the fact that they gave some “shape” to the messy process of conversion in the mission field that was otherwise quite difficult to grasp and conceptualize. While heavy with significance, the mission’s imagery was thus, as Karina Hestad Skeie (2001:172) points out, also pragmatic and strategic. It served as a memorable marketing tool that helped to make the mission understandable and appealing to its exist- ing and potential financial supporters. The missionaries may frequently have played up the cultural difference between themselves and people around them in this way – highlighting the “light” and “darkness” – because of funding issues (Erlank 2001:27). They and the editors of Norsk Missions- Tidende, and other mission magazines across Europe and North America, may also, perhaps without too much thought, have had a tendency to write and publish descriptions of “the world of the native” in ways that appealed to all-too-common human interests: [The] world of the native, a world recognizably human but tinged with a fris- son of horror, gelled with the seemingly perennial taste for the combination of the shocking and the moral, providing them [readers of mission maga- zines] with both a justification for their interest and a sense of satisfaction in their own superiority to the cultures depicted. (Griffiths 2005:158) The “frisson of horror” can be detected, for example, in Lars Larsen’s description above of murdered bodies lying out in the open, ready for birds to come and eat them. In this respect, Gareth Griffiths (2005:158) remarks, mission writings helped, wittingly and unwittingly, to bolster the wider ideological justification for imperialism. (At the same time, as I shall dis- cuss in the section “Christianity, cilization, colonialism” below, the mission also at times critiqued this ideology and put forward their own ideas of what colonialism ought to be.) In practice, of course, the missionaries’ work was not neatly divided into “light” and “darkness,” or any other binarism, but was rather enmeshed in various uncertainties and shades of gray. However, this in itself may have fueled the need for more black-and-white interpretations; often the mis- sionaries may have resorted to black-and-white images because of a need
The Mission Stations as Miniature Models of an Alternative Society
A fourth aspect of the missionaries’ imagination of the mission station space leaned more toward the utopic. As discussed in the previous chapter, the missionaries encouraged people to live on the mission stations and to
form resident communities. And for Zulus who chose to become baptized and thus distanced themselves from Zulu society, there were usually no other choices than to live on the stations in Zululand or flee to Natal. The specific kind of mission station spaces that evolved were spaces set apart; spaces where the missionaries could encourage the establishment of Christian households, with monogamous marriages, and with what they considered to be appropriate gender relations. In fact, as they encouraged people to live on the stations, to build houses and marry and establish fam- ily life as part of the station community, to farm and do chores and attend devotions and Sunday services, and to send their children to reading classes, the missionaries were also in many ways trying to create a model of an alternative society. At Inhlazatshe in the mid-1860s, for example, Lars Larsen was pleased that there was a noticeable difference, in his view, between the kind of soci- ety that was enacted on the station and the kind of society that existed in the surrounding area: Despite the fact that there are, as one might expect, enough lacks and weak- nesses that stick to our amakolwa, there is nevertheless a great difference also in outer matters between them and the poor Zulus who run around us daily as if they were wild bucks and not human.23 The following year he was equally scathing as he set up a stark difference between social life on and off the station: Not a single grown boy from the surrounding area has yet been able to over- come what hinders him from working here [at the station] for pay. The Board calls this “national pride” in a letter to me, I recall. I might agree with this, if I am merely allowed to add: A “national pride” that for a great part is based on national laziness and national stupidity. […] For what might move a grown boy to work for strangers? He can otherwise lead an easy life by daily strolling with his spears and sticks in hand from homestead to homestead, eating meat and drinking beer and in this way caring for his own flesh. […] In the evening he returns home completely drunk or half drunk, perhaps milks his father’s cows, eats if he can, and then turns in after this useful day’s work!24 The station, in Lars Larsen’s mind, was quite a different space; it was a space where boys – if they chose to come – could be shown the importance of hard work, industriousness, sobriety, avoiding “the easy way out,” and caring for matters higher than one’s own flesh.
23 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1864:87. 24 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1865:151–2.
In extension of this type of besmirching blanket criticism of Zulu social life, the missionaries were interpolating themselves into the local political economy. The Norwegian missionaries’ instructions stated explicitly that: “No heathen, sinful customs are to be tolerated.”25 For the missionaries, the sinful customs of the Zulus included, most importantly, the rituals and beliefs related to the ancestral shades and to polygamous marriages. All the Norwegian missionaries remained steadfast in their condemnation of these two practices throughout the period studied here (1850–1890). In addition, the missionaries held, in principle, that the Zulu marriage custom whereby the groom’s family gave cattle to the bride’s family (lobola) was immoral. The missionaries regarded lobola as an exchange of commod- ities, cattle for woman, and mostly (though not always) missed the mean- ings tied to the custom that served to give the new bride status and security as she moved to the groom’s family homestead. However, the missionaries’ disapproval of lobola actually became highly nuanced in practice, as they found that they were simply not able to call a halt to lobola activity among the converts on the stations, and so made the pragmatic choice of frowning on it in theory but allowing it in practice – at times even coming to the aid of male converts who were too poor to pay a full lobola themselves.26 Ommund Oftebro also reported that when two converts on his station who were cousins wished to get married, he upheld the Zulu custom that forbid cousins to marry, even though such a marriage would have been permitted in Norway.27 Despite these more pragmatic ways of working out how to relate to Zulu customs on the stations, the choices that the missionaries faced seem to have made them only more aware of how far the Zulus stood from what the missionaries thought of as a Christian way of life, and it made them all the more aware of how thoroughly Zulu society needed to be changed before it could conform to their hopes. In 1868 the Norwegian missionary Paul Wettergreen reflected on how few Zulus he had baptized and what bleak prospects the Norwegian mission seemed to face also in the future, and commented: “This heathenism is barricaded in the hearts of the Zulus by prejudices that are thousands of years old, and by the whole national and social system.”28 At Inhlazatshe too Lars Larsen reflected on the vast and
25 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1851/52:192. 26 E.g. Norsk Missions-Tidende 1862:124, 1871:94–5. 27 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1863:258. 28 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1868:261.
thoroughgoing changes that he imagined would be needed in order to extend the miniature Christian society on the stations outward to encom- pass the entire Zulu people: I cannot with the best will in the world see how Umpande and Uzek. [Cetshwayo] would demonstrate any sacrifice for or interest in the spread of God’s kingdom in this country if they granted freedom of religion; since they could easily at the same time modify this permission [to convert to Christianity] by ordering marriages in due course as these young boys grow up. Because in reality nobody dares to decline this offer or this favor by the “big men” […] and once they have been married according to heathen custom they are more trapped in the amatlosi worship than ever before. […] [A] man who gets married makes sure and does what he can in order to get 2 girls at least, at once if possible for him, because as one knows more wives are a sign of wealth among the Zulus, and he who has only one wife is viewed as no more than a poor weakling.29 The entire system of polygamous marriages, which was intertwined with the king’s control of the age regiments and his power to order young men to marry at certain times, thus needed to be dismantled, in Lars Larsen’s view. Missionary criticism of polygamy, lobola, and the ancestral shades (ama- dlozi), was rightfully perceived by the Zulus as a criticism that extended to the very foundations of their social structure. As far as the missionaries were concerned, it would not be possible for the Zulus to convert to Christianity and still maintain this way of life. During the first couple of decades of the Norwegian mission, the missionaries at times seem to have assumed that they could bring wide-reaching socio-religious changes (including what the missionaries saw as religious changes in family and gender relations) to the Zulus without impinging on Zulu political struc- tures and without impinging on the king’s power. But at other times, and increasingly during the 1860s and 70s, the missionaries came to see the problem as lying not just in a difference of religious beliefs, but in a differ- ence interwoven in all facets of society. This meant that the entire edifice of Zulu society would need to be transformed beyond recognition (Etherington 1982:195). And the mission stations could serve as miniature models of what an alternative new Christian Zulu society might look like. This understanding, and the shift that it entailed from a more single- minded and pietistic focus on the Word alone to a focus on an alternative society, grew out of the immediate circumstances that the missionaries faced. Norman Etherington points to the gap that this often created
29 NMS Archives, HA, Box 131, Jacket 6, Lars Larsen to the Board, July 1, 1867.
A Note on Method: Reading Mission Images
If boundaries were hard to pin down in practice, however, they were easier to draw in pictures. A few visual representations of the Norwegian mission stations from the period 1850–1890 can be found in the archives. Most of these are woodcuts that were printed in Norsk Missions-Tidende, depicting
30 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1866:277. While the term “colonies” is used here, Christian Dons does not seem to be referring to colonies in the sense of dependencies or subjugated areas. His opposition to colonizing activity will be touched on below. Perhaps he is using the term “colonies” in the broader sense of “places of settlement.”
Entumeni, c. 1865 (Fig. 2), Umphumulo, c. 1880 (cover image), Inhlazatshe, c. 1884 (Fig. 4), and Eshowe, c. 1886 (Fig. 5).31 There is also a watercolor of Umphumulo by one of the Norwegian missionaries, Hans Christian Leisegang, painted in 1866, a year after he arrived in Southern Africa (Fig. 3). Mission pictures, of course, need to be read as attentively and critically as texts (Gullestad 2007, Kirkaldy 2005:145). First, it is worth considering the scenes that were never captured in images. For example, no images were made during the first few months at a new station, when the mission- aries had to live in a wagon or a Zulu hut before they had built a square resi- dential house (cf. Tjelle 2011:209). The images, instead, show stations that are established, with square houses. Furthermore, the images present the four stations that were arguably the most important Norwegian mission stations during the first decades of the Norwegian mission. Umphumulo, Entumeni, Eshowe and Inhlazatshe were well known among mission supporters, both because they were headed, for long periods of time, by the
Figure 2. Woodcut of Entumeni mission station, c. 1865. (Printed in Sommerfelt 1865:329.)
31 The woodcuts must have been commissioned by the NMS Board, and must have been based on sketches of the mission stations, perhaps drawn by one of the missionaries, though I have not been able to ascertain further details. As far as we know the original sketches and woodcut prints have not been retained (Gustav Steensland, pers. comm., March 25, 2013). The woodcut of Umphumulo that was printed in Norsk Missions-Tidende in 1880 (cover image) is signed “L. C. Larsson” (this was not the same person as the missionary Lars Larsen).
Figure 3. Watercolor of Umphumulo mission station, by Hans Christian Leisegang, 1866. (NMS Archives)
Figure 4. Woodcut of Inhlazatshe mission station, c. 1884. (Printed in Norsk Missions-Tidende 1884:367.)
Figure 5. Woodcut of Eshowe mission station, c. 1886. (Printed in Norsk Missions- Tidende 1886:72.)
first four Norwegian missionary pastors (Tobias Udland, Hans Schreuder, Ommund Oftebro, and Lars Larsen respectively), and also because they had, relatively speaking, some success in attracting converts and building up small resident congregations. However, the visual representations of these four familiar stations con- tain some conspicuous absences. For example, most of the images do not include any beehive huts, even though missionary letters indicate that the mission station areas must have included round Zulu huts, built and used by some of the converts and other temporary or permanent station resi- dents.32 The only round hut that is visible in any of the images is a small hut in the lower left-hand corner of the woodcut of Inhlazatshe (Fig. 4). The hut blends into a small thicket of bushes, at some remove from the central sta- tion area. It is not clear whether this general absence of Zulu huts tells us that round huts were always required to be constructed so far away from the main station that they fell outside the frame of these images, or whether
32 E.g. Norsk Missions-Tidende 1863:57.
has been framed so that this larger-than-life church is central to the pic- ture’s composition, drawing the viewer’s attention to the missionaries’ Sunday services. The representations also alert us to the ideal principle of rectilinearity that the missionaries tried to put into practice, partly as a way of marking the stations’ difference from the surrounding countryside, as discussed in chapter 2. This is especially noticeable in the woodcut of Umphumulo (cover image), which was printed in Norsk Missions-Tidende in 1880, three decades after the Norwegian missionaries started setting up the station. By comparing the woodcut to the earlier watercolor of Umphumulo by Hans Christian Leisegang, painted in 1866 (Fig. 3), we see the gradual develop- ment of the station. Over time, several rectangular areas were mapped out, and neatly planted hedges and straight rows of trees, as well as rectangular houses, were added and used to mark off these square spaces. However, Umphumulo was probably somewhat exceptional in this regard, since it was the largest Norwegian station. The images of Entumeni (Fig. 2) and Inhlazatshe (Fig. 4), for example, seem to show that the buildings at these stations were not arranged in straight lines, but were instead loosely clus- tered together. Umphumulo, being the first and largest Norwegian station, may have carried heavier expectations of conforming to an ideal type or utopic vision, and the woodcut (cover image) seems to acknowledge this in its subtle negotiation between reality and ideals. So far I have focused on the depictions of the mission station areas. But there is more to these images: specifically, there is a lot of empty sky, and a lot of empty foreground. In all the pictures, except for the woodcut of Entumeni, roughly the top third of the picture – or a little more – is taken up by nothing but sky. In the representation of Entumeni (Fig. 2), the top third is sky, but this is broken up by the roof of the building that has been drawn on the right. Also, all the pictures devote roughly the bottom third – or a little less – to foreground. The images can, therefore, be divided into three horizontal parts: the top part is devoted to the sky, the middle part to the mission station area, and the bottom part to the foreground. This may, in part, be put down to artistic convention. Alan Kirkaldy (2005: Illustrations 7, 8, 9) presents three woodcuts of German Lutheran mission stations in Vendaland in the 1880s and 90s, and two of these have a similar composi- tion to the woodcuts of the Norwegian stations, though the German images place somewhat less emphasis on the sky and include more detailed fore- grounds. However, the third image (c. 1886) is composed quite differently, showing the German missionary walking along a road that cuts diagonally
Christianity, Civilization, Colonialism – and Idealism
Another facet of how the missionaries imagined the space of the mission stations concerned their ideas of a certain type of Christian civilizing progress. There was a broad sweep of differing opinions in nineteenth- century and early-twentieth-century mission circles concerning the most
appropriate relationship between evangelizing activity and so-called “civilizing” activity. The collected articles in Torben Christensen and William R. Hutchinson’s (1982b) edited volume provide a cross-section of snapshots from different missionary societies during this period. While vir- tually all of them held evangelization – the proclamation of the gospel, leading to conversion – to be the primary objective, they disagreed on the role that Western civilization played in relation to this goal. Some, such as Gustav Warneck in Germany, Rufus Anderson in the United States, and to a more limited extent Henry Venn in England, did not want the “civilizing” ideal to be too prominent (Christensen and Hutchinson 1982a:6). Henry Venn, who was secretary of the Church Missionary Society from 1841–1872, exhorted the missionaries to establish self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating African churches as quickly as possible. At the other end of the spectrum, other prominent mission figures, perhaps most notably David Livingstone, spoke of the necessarily tripartite advance of “Christi anity, commerce, civilization” – each interwoven in the others. The same approach can also be seen among some of his British Nonconformist mis- sionary colleagues, for example those who had established their “civilizing mission” among the Tswana (Comaroffs 1997, passim). Elizabeth Elbourne (2003:448) suggests that the London Missionary Society’s Robert Moffat, who worked among the Tswana, renewed his focus on “civilization” in order to reclaim some moral high ground in the colonial context. Similarly she argues that John Philip, superintendent of LMS in the Cape, coupled mission and empire in order to demonstrate that mission was no threat to the colonial administration (Elbourne 2003:238–41). Martin Legassick and Robert Ross (2010:271) argue that John Philip went further than this, that he outlined a type of civilization that would suit colonial government, mis- sionaries, and merchants, and that he came to take an aggressive stance in favor of the expansion of colonial rule, through use of the British military if necessary. The majority of nineteenth-century missionaries in practice fell some- where in between these two ends of the spectrum, promoting civilization and wrestling with it at the same time. As Christensen and Hutchinson (1982a:6) sum up of the majority: “Asserting both the primacy of evangeli- zation and the need for education or other ‘civilizing’ functions, they strug- gled mightily to keep the latter in a subordinate position.” There were also differences and passionate disagreements between individual missionaries within the same society, as well as gradual shifts over time, for example from a typical pietistic insistence on being separate from political affairs
Unfortunately we are observing a change for the worse among our heathen neighbors from year to year. As what is called civilization is becoming known among them, and Christianity is not being taken up, the earlier faithfulness, openness and sincerity [Trohjertighed] are replaced by thieving, lies and sus- picion. The scum of civilization, especially intoxicating drink, which is thrust upon them, as well as those [Europeans], who offer this scum, contribute the most to this change for the worse. However, the heathens in the neighbor- hood have behaved in exemplary fashion toward us. Whether this is a fruit and consequence of the preaching of the gospel, nobody knows. […] They are certainly able to differentiate between us and those [European] traders, who give their natives a bottle of liquor on Saturday night which they can make merry with on Sunday.34
33 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1858:37. 34 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1876 (Supplement):35–6.
Similarly, the Norwegian missionary Karl Titlestad complained from the Ekutembeni station in Zululand about: the many examples of whites sauntering about here almost all year […] Many of these also indulge in drink and licentiousness in company with native heathens – teaching them also to drink liquor and Bavarian beer. Usirajo [the district chief] says that he often gets such beer from the government agent Borke, and he now wants me to provide him with this stuff too.35 In northern Zululand, the Norwegian missionary Ole Stavem observed: The relationship of our neighboring heathens to us is for the most part a friendly one. I would very much prefer to have many of these heathens as neighbors rather than white people who bear the Christian name and the mark of the devil [med Christennavnet og Djævelens Mærke] upon their lives and behavior.36 Ole Stavem was probably alluding here to the mark of the beast in Reve lation – a rather harsh allusion, since it draws on some of the strongest and most charged language in the Bible for describing opposition to God. Hans Schreuder too thought that “the depraved speech and behavior” of other Europeans was “a serious obstacle to the progress of mission.”37 And, as seen in the previous chapter, Hans Schreuder rejected the perception that the mission stations were “land of the whites,” because he stated that the Norwegian missionaries did not wish to devour or colonize land in the way that other white groups did.38 In many ways, then, the Norwegian mission- aries regarded themselves – rather than the European colonial officials, set- tlers or traders – as the conveyors of the most desirable form of Western civilization. Further, the Norwegian missionaries both appreciated and distrusted the importance attached to European material artifacts, ranging from clothes to firearms, and were especially wary of any apparent indulgence in materiality (recall Lars Larsen’s awkward defence of the “sofa” at Umphumulo, in chapter 3). Certain European objects were regarded as having strong associations with sinfulness. For example, the Norwegian missionaries refused to supply the Zulu royals with guns, which especially in the early 1870s became a source of conflict between Prince Cetshwayo
35 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1870:514. 36 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1872:124. 37 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1871:458. 38 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1867:232.
You often admire what the white people produce and their skill and knowl- edge, which could lead to this, but you too could become equally skilled. For this too we teachers [missionaries] have come to you so that you black people could become equal to us whites in everything […] From where have the white people received this [wisdom and strength] and why are they now superior to the blacks in so many things? Is it not precisely the Word of God […]?42 As opposed to what the missionaries saw as the more depraved representa- tions of European society, then, they wished to convey an Evangelical ver- sion of Western civilization that frowned on excessive materialism and indulgence, and emphasized piety, frugality, sobriety, and hard work. Some of the aspects of this type of pietistic civilization were mapped directly onto the space of the mission stations. The upright houses of the station, the neatly laid-out fields and gardens, the ploughs, the “decent” clothing, the allotted time for reading classes, catechumen classes, devotions and Sunday services, the clocks, the acceptable medicines, the absence of alco- hol, as well as the absence of any “excessive” amounts of material objects, all characterized the space of the station, and all spoke to the missionaries’ vision of the kind of Christianized civilization that they wished to convey to the Zulus.
39 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1860:157, 1873:257. Torstein Jørgensen (1990:227) found one case during his period of study (1850–1873) of a Norwegian missionary helping a Zulu to obtain a gun, when the missionary Ole Steenberg at Umphumulo wrote to the Natal Secretary for Native Affairs on behalf of one of the converts, Umvuzane, in order to apply for a permit to carry a gun. Jørgensen cites the Government Archives (Pietermaritzburg), SNA Papers 1846–1928, Subsection I.2.2, letter from Ole Steenberg to the SNA. 40 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1872:9. 41 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1873:44. 42 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1868:144–5.
What implications did this have for the Norwegian missionaries’ view of colonialism? As mentioned in the introduction, NMS and its missionaries started out with an abstract understanding of the mission’s strategy: it was, first and foremost, to preach the Christian gospel and to convert as many people as possible to Christianity. Recall that in 1847, the editor of Norsk Missions-Tidende Andreas Hauge suggested that the gospel would have reached further already if Europeans had not insisted on inculcating European cultural norms in foreign people before these people could become pastors.43 Around the same time he also criticized the appropria- tion of land by white settlers in the Cape: These white masters settled, cultivated uncultivated ground, cleared the for- ests, took possession of the pastures for their flocks, and dealt with matters as they pleased as if the entire world existed for them only. Thus, the poor Hottentots were to recede.44 Two decades later, in the mid-1860s, the NMS Board held more or less the same view. The Secretary Christian Dons stated that Christian mission was an age-old activity that spanned the entire history of the Christian church on earth, and should in no way be put in the same category as recent “civi- lizatory ventures.”45 In a speech that was subsequently reported in Norsk Missions-Tidende, he drew a sharp distinction between mission on the one hand, and trade and conquest on the other: He emphasized […] the extraordinary energy by which the people of Europe in this century have spread to all parts of the earth. It would be too sad if the soul-saving testimony of the church did not here counteract the egoistic, often criminal, policy of trade and conquest. The name of Christianity is already sufficiently tainted among the heathens, and it should now be time for the blood of the martyrs of the church to blot out some of the disgrace that has stained the relation of the people of Europe to those of other continents.46 Christian Dons had perhaps been influenced by the opinion of British Evangelicals such as Thomas Fowell Buxton, a leader of the abolitionist movement, who held that mission was an atonement for the wrongs of colonialism (Elbourne 2002:15).47
43 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1847/48:4. 44 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1845/46:153. 45 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1866:54. 46 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1866:242–3. 47 Cf. the interpretation of Christian Dons’ stance put forward in Simensen with Gynnild (1986:38).
While this was the expressed opinion of NMS’ Secretary in Stavanger, the Norwegian missionaries in Natal and Zululand gradually shifted toward a more pragmatic attitude toward the issue of political involvement. This involvement in politics was always a careful line to tread. For example, at Inhlazatshe Lars Larsen decided on a pragmatic strategy of political passiv- ity in relation to the nearby Boer settlers. The station Inhlazatshe was not far from the northwestern border of Zululand, beyond which lay the Boer Republic of Transvaal. During the 1860s and 70s Lars and Martha Larsen seem to have received fairly frequent visits from Boer settlers who passed by the station, especially since they traveled over Inhlazatshe in order to visit King Mpande’s royal homestead at Unodwengu. Martha and Lars received these visitors when they came, even though Lars felt uneasy that neighboring Zulus might perceive the hospitality as a political gesture of support to the Boers.48 On the one hand, he worried that if war broke out between the Boers and the Zulus, the Zulus might turn against the station as well; on the other hand, he noted that it would not be in the station’s best interest to have the Boers as enemies.49 He chose to passively continue to receive the Boer visitors, while hoping that the settlers would be hindered from pushing the Transvaal border any closer to his station.50 At other times, the Norwegians sought actively to petition political lead- ers, especially King Mpande and Prince Cetshwayo, in order to attain more favorable conditions for the mission. Hans Schreuder worked hard, for example, to try to prevent the perception that the stations were “land of the whites” and that Zulu converts resident on the stations had de facto defected from the Zulu king. Already in 1864, only six years after the bap- tism of the first Zulu convert, he reported: I went to see the prince on a matter proving to become one of radical impor- tance to missionary work in this country. The concept has impressed itself upon the Zulus that becoming a Christian inevitably implies thlubuka inkosi, i.e. defection from the king and exception from all duties as his subjects […] What a nuisance this will be, as regards the nation’s turning to Christianity, is easily observable.51 Despite repeated attempts to change this, however, the end result remained more or less the same throughout the 1860s and 70s – namely, as Mpande put it to the Norwegian missionary Paul Wettergreen (as noted in chapter 5),
48 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1865:243, 1874:128. 49 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1874:128. 50 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1865:151. 51 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1865:74.
that “becoming a Christian was tantamount to defecting from the king and becoming the subject of the white man.”52 In the midst of these various strategies of passive and active political involvement, there were disjunctures and murkiness that surrounded the Board and the missionaries’ understanding of their own position. For one, although the Norwegian missionaries, like other missionaries in Southern Africa at the time (cf. Comaroff 1989), considered themselves to be clearly distinct both from colonial agents and from settlers, they often do not seem to have been aware of the implication of the mission in broader colonial processes. And when they did sense the dim outlines of some of these dynamics, they found themselves caught in an ambivalent position that was partly already out of their control, as when they continued – despite their apprehensions about this – to cultivate resident communities of de facto “excommunicated” Zulus on their stations. It is interesting to note that, at least in some cases, the missionaries’ understanding of the mission as substantively different from colonizing projects was tied to specific claims regarding land. However, this too was a point that was surrounded by considerable murkiness. As mentioned above, in the 1840s the editor of Norsk Missions-Tidende criticized white settlers’ appropriation of land in the Cape,53 and in the 1860s Hans Schreuder argued that the mission was different from colonizing groups because the mission did not “devour” the land.54 Also in the 1860s, Lars Larsen discussed what he saw as a crucial difference between the coloniz- ing settlers in the Boer Republic of Transvaal, and the missionaries in Zululand: the settlers claimed to own the land they had settled on, while the missionaries within Zululand did not own the land they lived on, because the missionaries “do not buy the land on which the king has allowed us to build and live.”55 It was agreed within the Zulu court and among the missionaries that, in accordance with Zulu customary land usage, the missionaries were granted the right to use certain plots of land for their mission stations in the same way that Zulus were granted the right to use land for homesteads, but the Zulu king was ultimately the “owner” of the land. Lars Larsen did not discuss the fact that the situation was clearly differ- ent for the Norwegians’ oldest and most established station, namely
52 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1868:165. 53 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1845/46:153. 54 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1867:232. 55 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1864:128.
Umphumulo in Natal. Umphumulo, unlike the stations in Zululand, was located in territory that had been annexed into the British Empire. All the plots of land that had been designated “mission reserves” and “glebes” in Natal, including Umphumulo, were overseen by a committee known as the Mission Reserve Trust, established by the British colonial administra- tion. The committee was made up of both missionaries and colonial offi- cials, including the Secretary of Native Affairs, Theophilus Shepstone. As C. Tsheloane Keto (1976:608) notes, “[i]mplicit in this arrangement was the understanding that the Kholwa and other Africans living within reserve boundaries were supervised by the missionaries, who thus became volun- teer civil servants of the government.” The Norwegian missionaries, as far as we know, never objected to this arrangement. Sometime in the 1860s or 70s, the Norwegian missionary Tobias Udland was even officially named “vice magistrate” at Umphumulo by the colonial administration in Natal (Myklebust 1949:84), thus formally serving as an official of the colonial administration’s Native Affairs Department, while continuing as a mission- ary paid by NMS, and overseer of the Umphumulo mission station and mis- sion glebe – which in turn was overseen by the colonial administration’s Mission Reserve Trust committee. Finally, I think there is another aspect to these slippages between Christianity, civilization, and colonialism. It concerns idealism. Toril Moi (2006), in her study of nineteenth-century Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, examines the notion of idealism in Norway and Europe at this time, and how idealism gradually gave way to early European aesthetic modern- ism. In one of Ibsen’s plays, Brand, published in 1866, an uncompromising pastor sacrifices several of the people around him for the sake of pursuing his ideals and vision – and the play ends with the unresolved question of whether Brand was a monster or a saint. The following year, in the play Peer Gynt, Ibsen seemingly goes to the other extreme and explores what the lack of ideals might mean, as the main character Peer experiences a spiraling downturn and loss of “himself” because he is like an onion – without a core. The way in which such a radical playwright as Ibsen felt drawn to wrestle with idealism indicates its considerable significance in the nineteenth century – indeed, it is hard for us today to imagine its importance, Moi suggests. In one sense, the Norwegian missionaries in Southern Africa were also exploring what idealism meant. Not in order to examine it, but to try to find ways of affirming it; not in order to write and think about idealism in new ways, but in order to live idealism in a new context. Unlike Ibsen, they had
not yet started to critique idealism; they had not become “modern” in that sense. They regarded ideals with trust rather than with suspicion, and the ideals behind actions were significant to them. And so the missionaries seem to have leaned heavily on the underlying notion that at least their ideals (if they could hold on to them), as opposed to the ideals of the set- tlers or the colonial agents, might justify their assertions that they were different from the colonial agents and the settlers, even as, at Umphumulo, they built up a permanent settlement under European rule on a colonized plot of land, and in Zululand, they nurtured extraterritorial communities in the midst of the kingdom.
The Mission Stations as Heterotopias
For the missionaries, there was a complex intersection between reality as experienced and as imagined, between the negotiated everyday reality that they inhabited and their concomitant ideal vision for that reality. A sen- tence from James Laidlaw seems particularly apt here: Where ideals are unrealisable, and where incommensurable values are in conflict – and I take it that this at least is always to some degree the case – then living in the light of an ideal must always be something more subtle and complex than merely conforming to it. (Laidlaw 1995:7) For the missionaries, living in the light of an ideal did indeed prove to be more subtle and complex than they might have anticipated. How did the apparent chafing tension between missionary ideals and negotiated reality shape the space of the mission stations? From an etic or outsider perspective, I think it may aid our understand- ing of this issue and the experiences detailed in this chapter to view the mission stations as heterotopias. The concept “heterotopia” was briefly dis- cussed by Michel Foucault (1986) and later picked up by Edward Soja (1995), and refers to places in which several incompatible spaces may co-exist or intersect. Foucault (1986) gives examples of different kinds of heterotopias, including theaters, cemeteries, and museums. He also men- tions seventeenth-century Puritan colonial societies in North America, and Jesuit colonies in South America. While the Norwegian mission stations do not conform to all aspects of heterotopias as discussed by Foucault and Soja, they did encompass multiple spaces that co-existed and intersected in one place – including, for example, spaces that were thought of as risky by some of the surrounding population, and spaces that were thought of as
CONCLUSION
THE ANGLO-ZULU WAR: COURTING EMPIRE
The Norwegian missionaries’ response to the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 shows some of the subtle ways in which they, and their Christianity, had adjusted over the past decades on the mission stations. Their initial instructions had emphasized that African converts were their potential equals as members of the Christian community and should be given the authority to build an indigenous church, but by the 1870s most of the missionaries seemed unable to imagine how this might come about if the Africans were not under white rule. In retrospect this may seem strange, since the Norwegian missionaries – unlike the British, French, German or American missionaries – were not directly linked to any colonial or expansionist ambitions through their home government. In fact, Norway was in forced union with Sweden from 1814–1905. Although Norway was allowed to keep most of its constitution and its own parliament during this time, it was not permitted to conduct its own foreign policy. We might expect Norwegian missionaries to behave less like missionaries with ties to political governments with imperial ambi- tions, then, and even less like colonial agents. But in fact, as the events of the late 1870s and early 1880s unfolded, we find the opposite.
Instability, Rumors, and Plans
King Mpande died in 1872, and Prince Cetshwayo was declared king of Zululand. The Natal Secretary for Native Affairs Theophilus Shepstone for- mally acknowledged the enthronement, and at the same time – with the aid of Hans Schreuder – sought a closer and more binding treaty between the Colony of Natal and Zululand, which included stipulations that the new Zulu king should not order capital punishment without open trial, and that he should allow missionaries to reside in the land. Cetshwayo does not seem to have regarded these conditions as binding, but was clearly aware of the now tenuous position of the Zulus, wedged between Natal in the south, which was more actively trying to influence the Zulu king’s sphere of
1 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1877:215. 2 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1877:215. 3 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1877:384. 4 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1877:384. 5 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1877:338. 6 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1877:339–40. 7 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1878:56.
“thinking about leaving.”8 Lars and Martha Larsen too decided to return to Inhlazatshe, because, as Lars put it, “while there were plenty of evil rumors in the colony, there was nothing reliable,” and, he reasoned, “I did not think that there was any more danger present than that which we are exposed to daily anyway.” He wrote that the Zulus they met on the way home were relieved to see that they had not left the country, and one Zulu man report- edly remarked to Lars that when the amakholwa and the missionaries left Zululand, “people choked on their corn.”9 This seems to have been an indirect comment on the Zulus’ realization that if the missionaries left, it would make it easier for either the Boers or the British to launch mili- tary campaigns within Zululand without fear of bringing other Europeans into danger.10 In London, Henry Herbert, Earl of Carnarvon, had become Secretary of State for the Colonies in 1874. Lord Carnarvon was interested in the possi- bility of consolidating British rule in Southern Africa by gathering together the British colonies of the Cape and Natal as well as the Boer settler states – the Boer Republic of Transvaal (the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek) and the Orange Free State – in a Southern African confederation. With this in mind, Carnarvon ordered Theophilus Shepstone to annex the Boer Republic of Transvaal, which he did in 1877. However, Zululand – an inde- pendent African kingdom with an organized army and bordering on both Natal and Transvaal – posed a potential threat to further British plans. In 1877, Carnarvon appointed the British colonial agent Sir Bartle Frere as Governor of the British Cape Colony and British High Commissioner of Southern Africa. Part of his brief was to address “the Zulu menace” (Etherington, Harries and Mbenga 2010:382). The Norwegian missionaries called another conference in March 1878. After hearing the advice of Theophilus Shepstone, who told them that he certainly thought they ought to evacuate, it was decided at this meeting that the situation was now so close to boiling point that they would leave their stations.11 Hans Schreuder later criticized the NMS missionaries for this quick evacuation (Hernæs 1986:154), and indeed, in retrospect, it is noteworthy that they were led to evacuate by Theophilus Shepstone’s
8 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1877:339–40. 9 NMS Archives, HA, Box 134, Jacket 11, Lars Larsen to the Board, January 7, 1878, orig. emph. 10 Before the British military invaded Xhosa lands in April 1846, for example, they ordered the missionaries to leave the area (Legassick and Ross 2010:297). 11 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1878:219.
Courting the British Empire
In September 1878, Ommund Oftebro and Ole Stavem traveled to Durban to try to meet the British High Commissioner of Southern Africa, Bartle Frere, who was arriving from the Cape in order to see what could be done about the Zulu question. The two Norwegian missionaries were indeed granted a meeting with him when he arrived. Ommund Oftebro was very pleased. He wished to make sure that whatever plans the British drew up, they would include favorable conditions for the mission. He was also, it seems, thrilled to be talking to Bartle Frere himself; at that moment, it would be no exaggeration to say that this was the most important man in Natal. And Ommund felt that the meeting went well: He [Frere] asked us to give him, in the form of a Memorandum, an overview over our mission, how long it has been working, the number of stations, mis- sionaries, etc. […] He also asked us to enclose, with the presentation of our mission and namely the reason for our leaving the country, a map, which showed the location of the stations.13 Ommund wrote a Memorandum for Bartle Frere. Then he drew him a map. And then he was invited to dine with the highest-in-command of the British troops in Natal, General Frederic Thesiger, 2nd Baron Chelmsford, who
12 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1878:287; though Lars and Martha Larsen returned to Inhlazatshe for a brief period in June and July (NMS Archives, HA, Box 135A, Jacket 1, Lars Larsen to the Board, January 4, 1879). 13 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1878:481.
earlier in 1878 had led the final devastating military victory over the Xhosa in the Eastern Cape in the Ninth Frontier War. Chelmsford asked him many questions “about Zululand, about roads, about where it was unhealthy etc.”14 And Ommund Oftebro, over dinner with the highest-ranking British military officer in the colony, who had just defeated one African group and was planning to defeat another, willingly talked. Bartle Frere later asked him whether the information he was giving them should be treated as con- fidential. Ommund – in retrospect seeming painfully naive – replied that it was up to Bartle Frere to decide.15 In the issues of Norsk Missions-Tidende from 1878 and 1879, the reports from Natal are overwhelmingly dominated by Ommund Oftebro’s letters. And his letters, in these few years, are difficult to grasp when they are read in retrospect. Either he genuinely did not understand what he was doing when handing over information that the British troops would use to stage a military invasion of Zululand. Or he genuinely wished for war so that the Zulus – this hard-hearted, recalcitrant people, as he saw them, whose king was so set against the mission – could be beaten by the British.16 Or his meetings with the high-ranking, important British colonial officials, after a lifetime as a not-so-important Norwegian missionary, proved such an overwhelming experience of sudden significance that it caused him to lose perspective. In the end, all three reasons probably played their parts in this historical puzzle. After Ommund Oftebro’s dinner with Bartle Frere and Frederic Thesiger, he promised to write to Cato, the British consul in Durban, three times weekly with any news that he heard from and about Zululand.17 Bartle Frere was preparing for war. In fact, as Norman Etherington, Patrick Harries and Bernard Mbenga (2010:383) point out, The scale of warfare conducted all over Southeastern Africa during his high commissionership dwarfed all previous conflicts in the region. Only the colo- nial habit of blaming all wars on African aggression and later historians’ ten- dency to treat the history of Southern Africa on a region-by-region basis have
14 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1878:481. 15 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1879:73. 16 This is the explanation favored by Hernæs (1986:150–52) and Simensen with Børhaug et al. (1986:224–5). While their hypothesis offers a plausible (if partial) account of Ommund Oftebro’s motives, I am less certain whether this motivation extends in the same way to the entire Norwegian missionary group (apart from Lars Larsen, Hans Schreuder and Nils Astrup), as they indicate; this will be discussed further below. 17 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1879:76.
prevented these conflicts from getting the label they deserve: the First British War for South African Unification (1877–82). As part of this imperial plan, Bartle Frere was of the opinion that the destruction and subjugation of the Zulu kingdom would eliminate a threat to European domination in Southern Africa, while also increasing the like- lihood that the Boer settlers would be more favorably disposed toward British colonial rule (Hernæs 1986:157). He issued King Cetshwayo with an ultimatum which stipulated the conditions that had to be met by Cetshwayo if he wished to avoid a British invasion.18 Cetshwayo had to completely dis- band the Zulu regiments, make good some cases of restitution, and – this was the part that was crucial for Ommund Oftebro – allow the missionaries to continue their work unhindered.19 Ommund was happy with the ultimatum, and was present when it was handed to Cetshwayo’s envoys in December 1878.20 He hoped that Cetshwayo would not agree to the conditions: because everybody knows, that he will never keep them, even if he promises. One does not wish for war; but nobody who knows the circumstances has any hope that there will be any lasting peace unless the Zulus get to feel the supe- rior power of the English […] God grant that it may be carried out well, with- out too much spilled blood and cruelty.21 It is perhaps the most cold-blooded sentence in the NMS Archives. And of course, when Cetshwayo turned down the ultimatum and the British invaded the Zulu kingdom on January 11, 1879, much spilled blood and cru- elty followed.
Missionary Support for the British Invasion of Zululand
While Ommund Oftebro may have been representative of many of the other Western missionaries in Natal on this point, there were dissenting voices. Bishop John Colenso tried to negotiate with the British on behalf of Cetshwayo – a gesture that the NMS Board, following Ommund Oftebro,
18 It seems that this move was supported by London. The Colonial Office in London, with a new Secretary of State for the Colonies, Sir Michael Hicks Beach, was later embarrassed by the Zulu victory at the Battle of Isandhlwana in January 1879, and at that point released documents falsely suggesting that they had attempted to stop Bartle Frere from issuing the ultimatum (Etherington, Harries and Mbenga 2010:385). 19 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1879:75. 20 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1879:73. 21 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1879:75–6, orig. emph.
was not pleased about: “For the mission in Zululand, a peace agreement with Ukekjwajo [Cetshwayo] now would humanly speaking be the worst of all,” they declared.22 The Swedish missionary Otto Witt, who had a narrow escape together with his wife from their station at Oscarsberg in Zululand during the actual war, returned to Europe immediately afterwards and held a speech at a large meeting in Exeter Hall in which he criticized the British colonial officials in Natal for their “relationship to the natives.”23 Ommund, again, was not pleased; nor was he pleased with Hans Schreuder, who, like John Colenso, acted as a diplomatic link between British colonial officials and Cetshwayo. Hans Schreuder had chosen to break with NMS in 1873 (following a power struggle between him and the Board), and had formed his own mission, the Schreuder Mission. His at times contradictory roles during the war have been well documented and discussed by Per Hernæs (1986). In short, Hans Schreuder wished to further European law and order within Zululand so that all missions could continue their work in peace, but he does not seem to have wished for outright British annexation. Rather, once the war had started he attempted to bring it to a speedy end, and he gave advice to the new High Commissioner for Southeastern Africa, Sir Garnet Wolseley, regarding which Zulu chiefs might, in his view, pro- vide relatively stable rule over smaller areas of land – advice that Garnet Wolseley largely chose to reject (Hernæs 1986:173). Whether Ommund Oftebro was representative of the NMS missionaries as a group in this matter is difficult to assess. Certainly he was supported by the NMS Secretary Christopher Knudsen in Stavanger, who was also the editor of Norsk Missions-Tidende, and who chose to print extracts of Ommund Oftebro’s letters during this time, but did not print any diverging views. It is difficult to imagine that the previous secretary Christian Dons, who had openly expressed such sharp criticism of the history of European conquest,24 would have allowed a similarly one-sided analysis to domi nate the public organ of NMS. But Christopher Knudsen, who succeeded Christian Dons as secretary in 1875, was later noted for his ability to get along with everybody rather than for his strategic vision (Nome 1943b:21–5). Among the missionaries in Southern Africa, there seem to have been dis- crepancies and discussion that was papered over in the official reports at
22 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1879:172. 23 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1879:236. 24 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1866:242–3.
25 Contra Hernæs (1986:160) on this point, and also contra Simensen with Børhaug et al. (1986:224), who suggest that the edited extracts from Ommund Oftebro’s letters represented the view of all the Norwegian missionaries except for Lars Larsen of NMS and Hans Schreuder and Nils Astrup of the Schreuder Mission. 26 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1873:251–8.
Certainly, none of the other Norwegians seem to have acquired the taste for recognition – or the notion that the Anglo-Zulu War could serve as a per- sonal means to this – that Ommund Oftebro did in this period.27 His letters, therefore – and the wholesale adoption of his opinion by the NMS Secre tary and editor of Norsk Missions-Tidende – seem to cover over some inconsistencies. However, despite the fact that Ommund Oftebro’s opinions dominate this discussion, and that the other NMS missionaries may have fallen along a spectrum of opinions regarding the need for war, it must be noted in con- clusion that formally, and as a group, their evacuation of Zululand and their lack of explicit protests amounted to de facto support for the British invasion plans. The NMS missionaries were not alone in their shift toward support – albeit uneven and problematic – for a military invasion and sub- jugation of Zululand, and for subsequent colonial rule over the Zulus.28 When the Norwegians arrived in Natal in the 1840s, neither they nor any of the major mission societies in Southern Africa consciously advocated for European military conquest of independent African territories (Etherington 1982:192). During the mid-nineteenth century a shift occurred so that by the late 1870s, in the immediate lead-up to the Anglo-Zulu War, the majority of missions operating in Natal and Zululand had become convinced that African political independence needed to be destroyed in order for them to be able to evangelize effectively (Etherington 1982:193, Etherington, Harries and Mbenga 2010:383–4). The most remarkable exception to this trend among the missionaries was Bishop John Colenso, who might be said to have shifted the other way: from having close ties with British colonial offi- cials in Natal and being comfortable with Empire, to being a sharp critic of the colonial administration in 1879 and afterwards, and a defender of Zulu independence (Etherington 1996:207, Guy 1983). Norman Etherington (1982:192) also notes that in most cases (though not in the case of the Norwegians) a more pro-imperial stance was taken by missionaries in con- travention of the recommendations of their mission boards in Europe and North America. Though the contours of this shift may be detected in several mission societies, it seems to have played out slightly differently in each one. The
27 For the change in Ommund Oftebro, see e.g. Norsk Missions-Tidende 1879:108–10, 236–7. 28 See Elbourne (2002), Erlank (2001) and Price (2008) for analyses of a similar shift among British missionaries to the Xhosa; cf. Elphick (2008) on the general move among mis- sion organizations in Southern Africa toward segregationist policies.
American Board missionaries were first encouraged by their directors in Boston to aim for conversion of the Zulu people as a whole (Etherington 1982:193). However, this aim proved difficult to achieve. The missionaries first found themselves in a highly unstable situation when Boer settlers invaded Zulu territory and bloody skirmishes ensued in the 1830s, and then Aldin and Charlotte Grout tried to set up a mission station within the terri- tory ruled by King Mpande in 1840 but fled their station in 1843 following executions of many of their potential converts. From then on the Americans set up mission stations in the Colony of Natal and nurtured relationships with potential converts and small communities on their stations. They ignored the requests from their board in Boston to aim for the conversion of the Zulu nation as a whole. And “[t]hey prayed,” as Etherington (1982:194) soberly notes, “for the destruction of Zulu independence” (though later they shifted again, as will be discussed in the following chapter). The German Hermannsburg Mission to the Zulus was initially perhaps the most explicitly anti-imperialist of the missions, and indeed they remained opposed to British invasion and annexation of Zululand for a while (Etherington 1982:194). But their opposition began to weaken as their sta- tions in Zululand – like the Norwegian stations – were effectively placed in quarantine by King Mpande and then King Cetshwayo. As mentioned above, they decided to leave Zululand as early as 1877, and when the British invaded in 1879, the Germans were openly in favor of this move. Even the Anglican missionary, doctor and ethnographer Henry Callaway, who had actively sought out accounts of Zulu folklore and customs in order to record them, in the end reached the conclusion that the economic system of the Zulus would always be a hindrance to their conversion, and because of this he too was in favor of the 1879 invasion and the end that this spelled for Zulu independence (Etherington 1978, Etherington, Harries and Mbenga 2010:384).
A Note on Method: “Front Stage” and “Back Stage” Narratives – the Humiliation Thesis
How did the Norwegian missionaries explain their courting of the British Empire to themselves and one another? In 1879, at the very beginning of the war, Ommund Oftebro wrote: I do not in this way wish to ascribe glory to ourselves for having brought about, through our wisdom, thoughtfulness and by our efforts, those serious precautions that have now been activated in order to overthrow the old Zulu
government, which we have endured so much under; no, but I see God’s fin- ger and His guidance in all of this and therefore I thank Him, who has helped us to do what we have done.29 Around the same time, Ole Stavem commented: So the war has come. It is indeed something horrible, but yet it is the Lord’s chastisement, which is needed every once in a while.30 As these statements indicate, it seems that by the late 1870s and early 1880s a theological justification for the destruction of Zulu society had been taken on by several of the Norwegian missionaries. David Maxwell (2005:288) notes that “[m]any missionaries envisaged an Empire radically different from the designs of secular colonial officials,” and for many of the Norwegians in the lead-up to the Anglo-Zulu War and afterwards, their envisaged Empire was one that would bring about Christian salvation through the sheer forcefulness of invasion and overrule. This uneven pro- imperial theological stance is described as “missionary imperialism” by Per Hernæs (1986:150–52), drawing on the terminology of Anthony Dachs (1972). While Hernæs clearly has good reasons for putting forward this label as part of his argument, in this instance I am more in agreement with Jean and John Comaroff’s remark that the label too easily reduces the issue to the rather dated debate around “whose side were the Christians really on?,” and while it is not directly erroneous, it may distort the picture (Comaroffs 1991:7–8). It seems more useful to me to draw on Jarle Simensen’s (1986b:94) term “the humiliation thesis” to describe the missionaries’ evolving theology: they reasoned that if God used the war to chastise or humiliate the Zulus, then this humiliation might help to lead the Zulus to Christ.31 The mission- aries who took to this theological thesis were probably in part drawing on the ordo salutis, the “order of salvation,” that they had experienced and been taught when they were young. In the Haugean and Moravian pietistic traditions in Norway, a feeling of despair over one’s own helplessness was regarded as an important preparatory step in the conversion process; it would lead to the next step of realizing that only God could bring help and salvation. While in Norway this was regarded as an individual, spiritually induced, interiorized state, the missionaries in Southern Africa seem to
29 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1879:108–9. 30 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1879:111. 31 See Price (2008:136) for a similar line of reasoning used by British missionaries among the Xhosa.
32 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1872:133.
Christianity; since the [Zulus’] self-righteous superiority is gone, and thus the way to many a heart will be opened.33 The statements by Ommund Oftebro and Ole Stavem, presented at the beginning of this section, which the Secretary chose to include in the maga- zine, support this “front stage” story. But what of the missionary letters that were left out of the magazine? Lars Larsen’s letters, for example, were not printed in Norsk Missions-Tidende during this period. However, his letters in the archive show that he was not completely set against this line of thinking. In early July 1879, after the Zulu victory at Isandhlwana and vari- ous subsequent clashes between the Zulu and British sides, and just before the final British victory at Ulundi, he wrote: Oh! dear, what changes and upheavals in all respects the war brings along. Yet, may this chastisement make the Zulu mission field more receptive of the divine Word’s seed and the offer of grace! Those among the Zulu people who hardly listened, or did not listen at all, to the gospel’s loving, inviting voice, now have to listen to the thunder of canons and to the wailing screams of the deadly wounded. Yet, this does not seem, as far as one can tell, to make a sig- nificant impression upon the Zulus. […] One did not believe that the Zulus were capable of such powerful resistance. But they have now surprised the entire civilized world […] All English officers praise the Zulus for their cour- age and persistence. We are certainly not dealing with a despicable enemy, they say, but an enemy who is worthy of our standing.34 Here he voices views aligned with the humiliation thesis in one sentence, only to modify them in the next. Lars also attached a piece of paper to this letter that he had cut out, perhaps from an English Christian magazine, with a rather ambiguous prayer printed on it in English and attributed to John Colenso: An Equivocal Prayer […] The British undertook to punish the Zulus, and the Zulus punished the British. […] Thou knowest, Heavenly Father, what lessons we Christians need to be taught, though it be by suffering even unto death, as well as the ignorant hea- thens with whom we fight. […] [W]atch over, we beseech Thee, […] all our fellow-men, whether white or black, engaged in this deadly struggle. […] [I]n
33 “Det Norske Missionsselskabs 38te Aarsberetning,” Stavanger, 1881:38 (Supplement to Norsk Missions-Tidende 1880). 34 NMS Archives, HA, Box 135A, Jacket 1, Lars Larsen to the Board, July 2, 1879.
Thine own time restore to us, and to those whose land we have invaded, the blessings of peace.35 While not wholly critical of the war, Lars Larsen’s musings and the “equivo- cal prayer” that he attached were critical enough to be left out of the mis- sion magazine. Perhaps the Secretary Ole Gjerløw felt they would add an element of confusion to the tidy “front stage” narrative that he wished to present; thus, they were left “back stage.” After the war, Lars Larsen returned to Inhlazatshe and experienced the political unrest that followed. Sir Garnet Wolseley replaced Sir Bartle Frere as High Commissioner for Southeastern Africa, and reached peace agree- ments with many of the leading Zulu chiefs on the basis of a reduced ulti- matum (Guy 1979; Etherington, Harries and Mbenga 2010:385–6). After Cetshwayo had been captured in August 1879 and sent to Robben Island, Garnet Wolseley divided the previous Zulu kingdom into thirteen chief- tainships, under selected chiefs, and the Zulu national regiments were disbanded. He also appointed Melmoth Osborn as British Resident in Zululand. At Inhlazatshe, Lars Larsen noted the surrounding population’s great resentment against the war and white people – expressed, for exam- ple, in their refusal to attend Sunday services.36 Observing these develop- ments, Lars’ remarks concerning the war became much sharper in his letters to the NMS Board. In 1881 he referred to “the pathetic Zulu war” and slipped in what LMS missionary Robert Moffat was supposed to have said upon hearing about it: “That war will put the Zulu mission back 50 years.”37 He repeatedly emphasized that the supposed result, namely that the Zulus would be more open to the gospel after the war, had not materialized – at least not at Inhlazatshe: “People have been frightened, they are still being disarmed, perceive themselves as conquered by the whites; that is all.”38 Needless to say, none of this was selected for print in Norsk Missions-Tidende. When examining the humiliation thesis, it seems to me that a majority of the NMS missionaries bought into this narrative and discourse, to vary- ing degrees. It was certainly the dominant interpretation of events that was being put forward in NMS at the time. But an awareness of its “front stage”
35 Ibid. 36 NMS Archives, HA, Box 135A, Jacket 6, Lars Larsen to the Board, July 3, 1880; NMS Archives, HA, Box 135A, Jacket 13, Lars Larsen to the Board, January 6, 1881; NMS Archives, HA, Box 135A, Jacket 13, Lars Larsen to the Board, July 5, 1881. 37 NMS Archives, HA, Box 135A, Jacket 13, Lars Larsen to the Board, January 6, 1881. 38 NMS Archives, HA, Box 135A, Jacket 6, Lars Larsen to the Board, July 3, 1880.
character reminds us that even dominant interpretations and “front stage” stories cannot escape occasional “back stage” questioning, confusion, or stabs at counter-interpretations. It also reminds us that “front stage” narra- tives sometimes face competing narratives from other stages – especially, for the NMS missionaries, the competing narrative of the Schreuder Mis sion headed by Hans Schreuder. Hans does not seem to have drawn on the humiliation thesis (Simensen with Børhaug et al. 1986:226). And the Norwegian missionary Nils Astrup, who started working for the Schreuder Mission in 1883, later condemned the humiliation thesis outright. His criti- cal comment in 1889 indicates that many Norwegian missionaries still approved of this line of thinking, a decade after the Anglo-Zulu War: I will never be among the many who pray to God to crush the Zulus in exter- nal matters, so that a few would humble themselves […] I think it is contrary to love to pray that God would do things in a certain way which is perhaps more severe than the way that He in His incredible omnipotence and love can and will use. Such prayer has often offended me among brothers and sisters.39 In general, however, and despite these dissenting voices, it does seem that the humiliation thesis – even though it may have embodied contradictions – took hold in many Norwegian missionaries around the Anglo-Zulu War and then increased in popularity through the following decade. In fact, in retrospect it is perhaps most striking, as Simensen (1986b:94) also observes, that this theological logic survived among the Norwegian missionaries even after the war, when they were able to observe the civil war in Zululand through the early 1880s, with the political disorder and personal tragedy that ensued. Here the religious logic merged most obviously with the missionaries’ need to interpret and legitimate their new political situation. After having struggled against the Zulus’ “recalcitrance” for a long time, including the Zulus’ general reluctance to convert and the Zulu leaders’ excommunication of those who did convert, some of the mis- sionaries clearly gained some satisfaction from the destruction of the Zulu kingdom, along with its economy, and the distress that followed in the 1880s – and it proved useful to be able to provide a religious justification for this. As mentioned in Hans Christian Leisegang’s comment above, some of the Norwegian missionaries even held that Zulus would benefit – as peo- ple and as potential Christians – from working under the severe (and racially marked) discipline of Boer settlers, and one Norwegian missionary,
39 Missionsbladet 1889:102–3.
Ole Steenberg, facilitated the flow of Zulu labor to Boer settler farms in his vicinity.40 Richard Price (2008:120) suggests that the missionaries in this situation were responding to their own “wounded narcissism,” which allowed (some of) them to easily fall in line with colonial reasoning. His analysis of a simi- lar response by the British missionary Henry Calderwood among the Xhosa applies equally to the Norwegian missionaries among the Zulu: Calderwood’s narcissism was surely real enough; here he comes close to com- paring himself with the sacrifice of Christ. But this kind of narcissistic wound was a characteristic theme of colonial culture. It allowed the responsibility for what went so wrong with the colonial project to be projected firmly upon the colonized. (Price 2008:120) Some of the complexity of the Norwegian missionaries’ humiliation thesis also lay in its surprising ability to survive beyond this particular political period, and to be picked up by new generations of missionaries from Norway. In 1949, for example, Olav Guttorm Myklebust, who had worked as a missionary for NMS at the then teacher’s college at Umphumulo from 1931–39, wrote of the Anglo-Zulu War: The breakdown of the Zulu people as an independent people did not just cre- ate better working conditions for the mission in exterior matters. It also cre- ated the interior condition for a renewal of the people on the basis of the gospel. It bent their will. It melted their obstinacy. The self-righteousness and boasting gave way to a milder attitude. (Myklebust 1949:89) This quotation shows that even 70 years after the Anglo-Zulu War, long after the immediate reason for its emergence, the humiliation thesis was still in use as one of the “front stage” narratives of NMS.
Epistemic Murk
The discussion so far leads us on to a question raised by Peter Pels (1990) in his review article of the work of Mary Taylor Huber (1988): Were the mis- sionaries who operated in colonial contexts naive? Did they not under- stand the implications of European imperialism, or the consequences of their own actions within this context? Pels quotes Thomas Beidelman, who states explicitly that “Christian missions represent the most naive and eth- nocentric, and therefore the most thoroughgoing, facet of colonial life”
40 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1890:347.
(Beidelman 1982:5–6, quoted in Pels 1990:104). Huber, on the other hand, argues that the missionaries were aware of the contradictions that they enmeshed themselves in when they set up stations on the colonial frontier, and that this is what led to their “connivance” – that is, bending principles in order to adapt to the realities of the mission – and their use of ironic self- representation (Huber 1988:201–4). She suggests that the missionary expe- rience on the colonial frontier might actually have been ironic, rather than naive. Pels questions Huber’s discussion of irony (Pels 1990:111). And as far as the Norwegian missionaries in Southern Africa go, I would have to agree. There is scant evidence in their writings and actions that theirs was an experience of irony; on the contrary, they seem heavily invested in the pietistic belief in ideals and sincerity, including sincerity in one’s calling and one’s work, even in the face of disappointments and problematic con- tradictions on the colonial frontier. But it seems to me that the different and at times self-contradictory ges- tures evident among the missionaries tell us something important about their apparent – in retrospect – lack of understanding. On one page of a letter Lars Larsen hoped that the war would make the Zulus more welcom- ing of the Word of God, on another page he attached an “equivocal prayer” that placed the burden of guilt for the war on the Western invaders.41 In one of his following letters he observed that nothing good seemed to have come of the war.42 Ole Stavem wavered about the morality of openly sup- porting the British plans. He helped Ommund Oftebro by accompanying him to talk to Theophilus Shepstone, then he turned to discussions with other colleagues about whether “old Larsen” might be right in mistrusting Theophilus Shepstone’s evacuation advice (Stavem 1915:223). Hans Schreuder criticized the NMS missionaries when they first evacuated in 1877. But during the war itself he acted partly on behalf of Cetshwayo as a sort of diplomatic agent who was attempting to minimize the harm of the war, and partly as an ally of the British army, which he supplied with infor- mation regarding Zulu troop movements (Hernæs 1986). These are all instances of wavering and contradictions. Even Ommund Oftebro’s need, after the war, to hold tightly on to the belief that the missionaries did not cause the war,43 signals an awareness that a moral choice had been made, and some apprehension around that awareness. All of these seem to be
41 NMS Archives, HA, Box 135A, Jacket 1, Lars Larsen to the Board, July 2, 1879. 42 NMS Archives, HA, Box 135A, Jacket 6, Lars Larsen to the Board, July 3, 1880. 43 See Ommund Oftebro’s comment written on Lars Larsen’s letter of January 6, 1881 (NMS Archives, HA, Box 135A, Jacket 13, Lars Larsen to the Board, January 6, 1881).
44 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1877:338. 45 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1877:384. 46 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1877:339–40.
was not an option, it seems the missionaries’ experience was neither pri- marily one of irony nor of naivety, but one of gauging, assessing, conjectur- ing and envisioning based on “epistemic murk,” in the same manner as everybody around them. In short, as Ommund Oftebro succinctly summed it up in 1884, in his comment on the rumor that the Zulu King Dinuzulu had apparently sent oxen to the British Resident Melmoth Osborn as a sign that he wished to be subordinate to him: “Everything as usual: mysterious, uncertain, inexplicable.”47 The theological “humiliation thesis” that took shape during the course of this process seems stark and clear-cut when viewed in retrospect. But at the time, I would suggest that it probably functioned more as an expression of a lack of clear-cut plans, and as a welcome and complete vision for many of the missionaries who were dealing with relentlessly fragmented informa- tion. Piecing together the thesis may have given many of them a way of hoping that a great wave of conversions would indeed sweep over the Zulus and that their work as missionaries would amount to something. Following the war, Ommund Oftebro tried to drum up financial aid from the British colonial administration for the rebuilding of the Norwegian mis- sion stations.48 Almost all the stations had been destroyed during the war, and the capital investment that was needed to start work again would be a huge lift for NMS. However, now that the war was over and victory secured, Ommund received a far cooler reception from British colonial officials. Garnet Wolseley saw no reason why the rebuilding of mission stations should be one of the duties of the Empire. Ommund, usually so enthusias- tic and motivated, became uncertain. A despondent tone crept into his writing: This outcome of the war is so surprising, that one can hardly believe anything other than that it is a dream […] Oh how heavy to think, that we, after so much toil, so much work, such a long wait for better times, should bear this disappointment too!49 For Ommund Oftebro, as for many other actors entangled in the epistemic murk of the colonial frontier, some stories were simply “impossible to hear,” and one of these was the narrative that threatened to reposition “vio- lence in the hearts and minds of Europeans themselves” (Stoler 1992:182).
47 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1884:362. 48 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1879:351–2, 427–32. 49 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1879:431.
Ommund did not wish to confront this possibility. He remained surprised at the outcome of the war. The epistemic murk continued although the war had officially ended. There were, for example, competing narratives circulating concerning what or who had caused the war, even among the Norwegian missionaries. Around two years after the war, Lars Larsen underlined from Inhlazatshe that the Zulus around the station believed that the missionaries had been the cause of the war: the people up here in so-called North Zululand [the name given to the area after the British victory] are terribly embittered at the whites, because they have made a captive of their king and taken their land away from them. Since they must regard themselves as conquered, can use no active resistance yet at least, they turn to the passive, namely, in quiet rage to let the missionary – and with the exception of the [British] Resident Osborn there are no other whites apart from the missionary living in the area – be completely ignored, as if he were not here at all. They believe very firmly – and this, of course, is not unfounded in the case of many missionaries – that these, and nobody else, were the first and final cause of the Zulu war.50 As proof, they cited, for example, that the Anglican missionary Robert Robertson had accompanied the British troops as field chaplain; no doubt, the Zulus told Lars, Robert Robertson could have been of great use in many other ways too.51 Ommund Oftebro, in his capacity as superintendent of the missionaries, read through Lars Larsen’s letter before sending it on to the Board in Stavanger. Usually, he never made any marks on the letters. Lars’ last sen- tence above, however, proved too provocative for him; Ommund has underlined the phrase “and this, of course, is not unfounded in the case of many missionaries,” and has added a brief initialed footnote for the benefit of the Board: “This is incorrect. O.C.O.” Ommund still had far too much of himself invested in the war, and in his belief that without the war there would no longer have been any meaningful mission in Zululand, to be able to accept any criticism of it. Lars, on the other hand, was now heading down the opposite path: by criticizing the war, and by distancing himself from the humiliation thesis, he was able to make some sense out of the confusing and harrowing situation that followed. The promised law and order did not come to Zululand after the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, and by the mid-1880s Lars reported that he had
50 NMS Archives, HA, Box 135A, Jacket 13, Lars Larsen to the Board, January 6, 1881. 51 Ibid.
thoroughly given up “the sweet daydreams that those who have caused revolt and human butchery in the land would also do something to bring peace.”52 Following Garnet Wolseley’s institution of thirteen chiefdoms, warring factions controlled different territories. It is not difficult to see that his intention was “to divide the Zulu royal house against itself with these appointments” (Ballard 1986:87). King Cetshwayo was initially banished, but was later allowed to return in 1883, only to be wounded by the powerful Prince Zibhebhu and die the same year. Zibhebhu controlled a relatively large area and was supported by the British. His troops were defeated, how- ever, in 1884, by the uSuthu faction under King Dinuzulu, who was sup- ported by the Boers. The Boers took this opportunity to measure off farms on grazing land in northwestern Zululand – in the vicinity of Inhlazatshe – and to establish the “Nieuwe Republiek” (“New Republic”). The political instability and widespread violence was devastating. For example, Lars Larsen reported in 1883 that almost all the homesteads in the entire Inhlazatshe area had been burned down by the impis, warriors, of the Zibhebhu and uSuthu factions. People tried to hide in the Inhlazatshe forest. Others fled across the northwestern border to Transvaal. In the same year, Zibhebhu’s impis systematically seized all cattle in the Inhlazatshe area in an attempt to force the uSuthu to surrender out of hunger; Lars esti- mated that around 12,000 heads of cattle had been driven past the station.53 And, half a year later, he somberly noted: “The days are evil,”54 echoing Ephesians 5:16. He did not include Ephesians 5:17 in his letter, but perhaps left its critique implicit: “Wherefore be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is.” In 1887, Zululand – except for the Boer’s Nieuwe Republiek – was for- mally declared a British protectorate, governed by a network of British magistrates. The following year the Nieuwe Republiek was incorporated into the Republic of Transvaal.
Questions of Land
Through the 1880s the Norwegian missionaries became ever more entan- gled in questions of land and race in Southern Africa. When the Boers mea- sured off farms for themselves around the Inhlazatshe mission station in
52 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1885:151. 53 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1884:153. 54 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1884:326.
55 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1885:155. 56 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1886:109. Lars Larsen gives the quotation in Norwegian along with the citation “Patteson’s Life, Vol. 2, p. 88”; the book in question seems to be Charlotte Mary Yonge’s Life of John Coleridge Patteson: Missionary Bishop of the Melanesian Islands, 2 Vols (London: Macmillan, 1875).
Because of the civil war in Zululand, the Norwegian missionaries estab- lished two new stations in Natal in the mid-1880s: Esinyamboti and Eotimati. The land for Esinyamboti was bought from Erik Ingebrigtsen, a previous NMS missionary who had left NMS in 1871 in order to become a settler and farmer in Natal. The land for Eotimati was obtained from a local chief, Timoni, after permission was granted by the British colonial admin- istration (Myklebust 1949:91). Gradually the NMS missionaries were able to resume work at their remaining stations in Zululand in the 1880s – Umbonambi, Imfule, Empangeni, and Mahlabathini.57 Ole Stavem, who served as superinten- dent for the NMS missionaries from 1887–1902, spent much time and energy in order to have these plots of land in Zululand officially recognized as NMS “property” by the British, including appealing to the Secretary of State for the Colonies in London (Myklebust 1949:107–8). And the British colonial government did in due course ensure that land was measured off for each station. However, even three decades later Ole Stavem reported that NMS had not yet managed to secure title deeds for all the stations – which, he pointed out, would likely not be of any consequence in terms of the land and buildings (since these would in all probability be recognized as belong- ing to NMS), but might potentially pose a problem for the resident African congregations on the stations if their legal right to reside there was ques- tioned (Stavem 1915:300). In Natal, the mission station Umphumulo formed the center of a large “mission reserve” or “location” with 12,000 acres of land (Myklebust 1949:30). The Norwegian missionaries were allowed to continue to run the reserve while supervising it on behalf of the British colonial government and run- ning a school with financial aid from the government. The missionaries took this role seriously. Ole Stavem wrote in 1890 that families should be threatened with eviction from the Umphumulo “location” if they did not send their children to the mission school: “The Location had been given to the mission by the government and the government expected that people who settled there would receive education.”58 The Norwegian missionaries even changed the language of instruction in their mission schools from Zulu to English, in response to demand both from Zulus, who understood
57 The station at Kwahlabisa was transferred to the Schreuder Mission in return for the Schreuder Mission’s acknowledgement that the Umphumulo glebe (which had originally in 1850 been granted to Hans Schreuder and his followers) should remain the rightful property of NMS, rather than the new Schreuder Mission (Stavem 1915:302–4). 58 Ole Stavem’s Visitation Report for 1890; cited in Simensen (1986b:89).
(Etherington 1982:197, Guy 1979). While the missionaries had hoped for and – on their small plots of land – helped to pave the way for this revolu- tion, they were now only minor historical players in the shadow of the opening of the mines, the settler and commercial needs for cheap labor, and the colonial administration’s policies concerning labor movements, taxation, and land.
LIVING CHRISTIANITY: HOW CHRISTIANITY SHAPED SPACES AND SPACES SHAPED CHRISTIANITY
Christianity, as it is lived by particular communities, has the ability to shape spaces in both tangible and intangible ways. Conversely, spaces can have a powerful effect on how Christianity is understood and lived by particular groups. Let me return now to two of the tensions, or concepts-being-worked- out, that are noticeable among the Norwegian Lutheran missionaries in Natal and Zululand from around 1850 to 1890. Firstly, the missionaries seem to have become quite tied to their stations, “stationary,” so to speak – despite their aim of engaging in more itinerant preaching. Secondly, they came to align themselves, albeit problematically, in the late 1870s and 80s with violent colonizing forces in a racially marked colonial context – despite their abstract idea of Christian equality. I argue that the crystalli zation around 1879 of a position that had not previously been explicitly articulated among the Norwegian missionaries, namely their uneven and unresolved shift toward supporting racial colonial overrule through violent means, was made possible by the decades of daily life on the mission sta- tions that preceded it. I suggest that the gendered and racialized hierar- chies that the Norwegians had already set up and become familiar with through the 1850s, 60s and 70s, within the Christian spaces they had cre- ated on the mission stations, made it thinkable for many of them to take the step into supporting gendered and racialized British colonial overrule over a larger space – and to do so on a theological basis. Within the framework of mission station life, missionary Christianity subtly took on new emphases. This “difference that is almost the same, but not quite” (Bhabha 1994:122) is slippery. What exactly changed? How did the Norwegian missionaries repeatedly choose to construct everyday prac- tices on their stations that underlined the authority of the white male mis- sionaries, while limiting and underreporting the spiritual authority of black Christians? Why did they finally, albeit unevenly, become cheerleaders of Empire, and produce a theological justification for the colonial invasion and white overrule of the Zulu people? These questions cannot be answered straightforwardly. There is no single moment to point to, and no definite
declaration of any specific change; just certain practices that were repli- cated more often and new narratives that started to circulate with more validity, leading up to the 1870s and 80s. Internal contradictions and ambig- uous processes, as well as the seeds of these crystallizations, had been pres- ent – as with any multivalent tradition – from the start of the Norwegian mission, and continued through the period under study. This is not to say that this development was inevitable. Some missionar- ies in nineteenth-century Natal and Zululand – the most notable being the British Bishop John Colenso, and also the Norwegian Bishop Hans Schreuder – were deeply invested in their mission stations, yet chose not to lend theological support to the British invasion of Zululand. However, it is to say that in the case of the majority of the Norwegian missionaries, their practical and moral support of the invasion and its consequences had been prepared and made thinkable through the previous decades by their daily life on the mission stations.
Mission Station Space
Recall that the NMS Board’s instructions to the “pioneer class” of Norwegian missionaries had been, among other things, to make the preaching of the Word their primary focus. Instead of drawing up a strategy that would allow them to incorporate longer itinerant preaching journeys, however, the missionaries during the first decade chose to focus on a “station strat- egy” (Simensen with Børhaug et al. 1986:230) that required the investment of considerable effort and time on the stations. In 1863, around a decade and a half after the first station, Umphumulo, had been established, Hans Schreuder instructed the annual missionary conference to discuss “what our missionaries have been doing, since the last meeting (i.e. conference), in order to preach the gospel outside the immediate surroundings of the station.” During their discussion the missionaries confirmed that “they had not or had only barely managed to get out among the heathens in the surrounding country,” and they suggested that NMS should send more Norwegian missionaries in order to make preaching in the surrounding countryside possible.1 Around the same time, in 1862, they also envisioned that at some point in the future the Norwegian missionaries might take on some itinerant preaching and leave the stations in the care of Zulu
1 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1863:284.
Christians.2 In practice, however, even when six new male Norwegian mis- sionaries arrived a couple of years later, in 1865, this did not lead to a change in strategy in favor of itinerant preaching – it led, instead, to the establish- ment of more mission stations. It was not until the mid-1880s that a shift can be detected among the Norwegian missionaries in relation to the mission stations. At the mission- ary conference in 1881, the young and newly arrived Ole Norgaard spoke eagerly in favor of itinerant preaching, arguing that “if the heathens won’t come to the missionary, the missionary will come to the heathens.”3 “Of course,” Olav Guttorm Myklebust notes in his later comment, “everyone agreed with this” (Myklebust 1949:92). However, in practice the missionar- ies again continued to concentrate the vast part of their time and energy on the stations, and one of the reasons given by Superintendent Ommund Oftebro at the missionary conference a few years later, in 1884, was that: “If preaching is to bear fruit among this people, they need to be under the con- tinuous influence of God’s Word on the stations.”4 Toward the end of the 1880s, however, as Kristin Fjelde Tjelle (2011:65–90) has shown, the tension within the Norwegian mission between preaching and “secular” work, such as industrial training and activities at the stations, came to a head. The pri- ority of preaching was affirmed, and when Ole Stavem succeeded Ommund Oftebro as superintendent in 1888, the ideology of evangelistic outreach started to have concrete effects in the form of more outstations, indigenous teachers, and indigenous evangelists (Tjelle 2011:134–5). It is puzzling that these simple, concrete steps were never taken during the first decades of the Norwegian mission, despite the missionaries’ declared wish to prioritize preaching. Torstein Jørgensen (1990:110–11) observes that there seems to be no doubt that, in theory, the missionaries wished to incorporate itinerant preaching into their work, yet for the period 1850–73, he found that only three, perhaps four longer journeys were reported by the Norwegian missionaries – one each by Hans Schreuder, Hans Christian Leisegang, and Jan Kielland, and perhaps an expedition reported by Karl Titlestad should be included in this category.5 These
2 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1862:217. 3 NMS Archives, “Referat fra konferansen på Eshowe 13.-22. juni 1881” (Minutes of the missionary conference 1881); cited in Myklebust (1949:92). 4 NMS Archives, “Referat fra konferansen på Eshowe 27. juni-7. juli 1884, sak nr. 1” (Minutes of the missionary conference 1884, item no. 1); cited in Myklebust (1949:93). 5 Jørgensen cites Norsk Missions-Tidende 1856/57:10–30, 33–55, 1868:197–203, 1869:68–97, 1870:149, 155–63. Contra Simensen with Børhaug et al. (1986:195) who claim that Hans Schreuder traveled “continually” as part of a strategy of itinerant preaching in the 1850s.
journeys were primarily undertaken, however, in order to prepare for new stations, though the missionaries also preached as they traveled. The majority of the missionaries did not undertake longer preaching journeys at all during the first decades of the Norwegian mission. The avowed pur- pose of itinerant preaching, namely to preach the gospel as widely as possible, which was never formally discarded,6 dimmed into an abstract priority, and in practice the “station strategy” was affirmed among the Norwegians again and again during the first decades, from around 1850 until the mid-1880s. There were probably several overlapping reasons for this. Firstly, it seems that the missionaries during this period thought that stations pro- vided a better response to “the problem of presence” – namely how to make an invisible God visible and present, as discussed in chapter 2. Secondly, as described in chapter 4 on the converts, the missionaries prioritized mission station work because they soon became convinced that this strategy – with the attendant opportunity of forming longer-term relationships with indi- vidual Africans, especially resident station employees – was more likely to lead to conversions than itinerant preaching. Thirdly, as touched on in chapter 5 on Zulu perceptions of the stations, the missionaries were allowed to reside in Zululand on specific plots of land appointed by the Zulu ruling house, and no doubt this was a means of control that the Zulu king and prince wished to maintain through the 1850s, 60s and 70s. As Jørgensen (1990:112) puts it: “From the Zulu authorities’ point of view it can hardly have been desirable to have the missionaries wandering about the country at their own sweet will establishing contact with and exerting influence on whoever might come their way.” Fourth, as outlined in chapter 6 on the missionary imagination, the missionaries actively tried to construct a min- iature model of an alternative Christian Zulu society on the stations – an effort that seems, from their perspective, to have demanded their ongoing presence on the stations.
In fact the two-month journey in 1855–56 that they mention was the only lengthy journey that Hans undertook with the purpose of itinerant preaching to distant Zulus in his entire career with NMS, from 1850–73 (Jørgensen 1990:111). 6 Contra Simensen with Børhaug et al. (1986:197), who state that the missionaries reached the conclusion that there was little point in continuing itinerant preaching at the missionary conference in 1872. This claim is not given any source in the English version (Simensen with Børhaug et al. 1986:197), while in the Norwegian version they reference Norsk Missions-Tidende 1872, December issue (Simensen with Sønstabø et al. 1984:147, 219 n46). The reference is erroneous (as also pointed out by Jørgensen 1990:114 n113).
In fact, once the pattern of building and settling on mission stations had been established, it seems as if the missionaries almost always considered it more important to remain on their stations than to leave them, and the missionaries soon felt very tied to, and protective of, their stations. As Hans Schreuder remarked already in 1854, preaching beyond the local area had to be severely limited because there were continually more urgent matters to take care of on the Entumeni station.7 When Lars and Martha Larsen left their mission station Inhlazatshe for about a month in 1865 in order to buy provisions, Lars Larsen remarked to the Board: “It is far too long a period to be away from the station, as it is not a small risk to leave the station in the hands of some natives to look after.”8 A decade later, in 1876, he wrote: “More would come [to the Sunday services] if I were not so tied to the station, since I am the only white man here, so it is difficult for me to leave in order to remind them [about the services].”9 In other words, the missionaries soon felt that the space of the mission station was at risk if a missionary were not there to oversee events. The need to have a white, Christian man occupying the role of head of the mission station had become an integral part of the space. In the eyes of the missionaries, Zulu converts – although they were resident on the stations – could not, in general, take on this role. This is one of the effects that the “station strategy” had on the missionaries’ self-understanding and their encounters with others. The first Zulu convert to manage a mission station was Simon Ndlela, who was put in charge of the Eotimati station from 1889–91 while the Norwegian missionary Petter Gottfred Nilsen was on fur- lough in Norway. However, even though the missionary reports agreed that he had managed the station well, this did not change their perception of the necessity of having a Norwegian in charge if possible, and Simon Ndlela was never put in charge of another mission station. He was asked to serve at an outstation for the remainder of his career (Tjelle 2011:138–43). With the changing shape of the station space, mission station Christianity was subtly and gradually altered, in contradictory ways. As John and Jean Comaroff (1997:27) note, the nineteenth-century missionaries in Southern Africa “spoke of removing difference but engraved it ever more deeply onto the social and physical landscape.” There is a problematic relationship between the missionaries’ intentions and the results of their actions. The Comaroffs (1997:7, 25) suggest that we need to think with enough nuance
7 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1854/55:160. 8 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1865:241. 9 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1876:444.
to be able to grasp both the dualisms that the actors caught up in the colo- nial confrontation erected, as well as the ironies that consistently under- mined these. This is not to say that this differentiation, the process of coming to recognize oneself as inhabiting a role of gendered and racialized authority, could not have taken place without the mission stations. But it is to say that in the case of the Norwegian missionaries, the stations became the platform on which this gendered and racial differentiation was carried out. As mentioned in the introduction, Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (1997a:43) see a close link between the examination of spaces and the examination – not of differences that are found – but of how differences are produced. It is therefore not difficult to agree with the Comaroffs (1997:408), as noted earlier, that a study of Protestant missionaries in nineteenth-century Southern Africa offers a useful case study for exploring “the limits and com- plexities of historical agency.” The nineteenth-century missions in Southern Africa triggered contradictory processes. They sketched out distinctions on the landscape that contributed to the basis for the colonial, and later apart- heid, state. At the same time they provided converts and others with a powerful discourse of equality and rights that would later be used by African leaders to contest the apartheid policy (Comaroffs 1997:365–405, Etherington 1996:209–10, cf. Tutu 1996).
Mission Station Christianity
The anthropology of Christianity is concerned with exploring what it means to be Christian for different groups and people. Some of the issues that the nineteenth-century Norwegian missionaries became caught up in were due to their “world-traveling” (Sullivan 2004:10); as they entered a new physical space, they were faced with new questions. But many of the ques- tions, if not most, also echo similar questions faced by Christians in general concerning how to fashion the space one inhabits, and how this space in turn fashions one’s self and one’s faith. Matthew Engelke’s (2007) book A Problem of Presence presents a key aspect of inhabiting Christian space. He discusses how Christians, whether in Europe or Africa or elsewhere, need to find ways of dealing with the “problem of presence”: How can they represent God’s presence among them? A God who is invisible and intangible poses a dilemma. Engelke goes on to outline how the Friday Apostolics in Zimbabwe have responded to this issue by discarding the use of the Bible and other material objects;
in Southern Africa, and both certainly played their important parts. But it seems to me that the contradictory historical consequences of the mission- aries’ presence were also a result of their Christianity: their particular responses to the lived theological problems of earthly existence, or, in other words, their way of working out how to live Christianity in the world and to create an inhabitable Christian space.
A Glimpse into the Future: After 1890
In 1893 the Colony of Natal was granted responsible government, which meant that political leadership was transferred from London to Natal’s white settlers – who made up around eight percent of the total population (Keto 1976:617). The following year, the first step was taken to arrange the administrative takeover of the “mission reserves” from the trustees in the Mission Reserve Trust to the Natal government. The only missionaries who seem to have protested against this move were the Americans (Keto 1976:620). The process was completed with the Lands Commission set down by the settler government in 1900, which heard evidence from many white settlers who argued that the mission reserves should be disbanded as such in order to allow for European occupation of the land. The American missionary George Burr Cowes also testified, and he proposed instead that the mission reserves should be converted to African freeholds (Keto 1976:619–20). The Lands Commision was not sympathetic to the mission- ary’s suggestion, however, and instead recommended that the government should have the power to expropriate mission reserve land. With the Mission Reserve Act of 1903 the reserves were not disbanded, but were officially put under the direct rule of the government’s Natal Native Trust, which was supervised by the Natal Native Affairs Department (Keto 1976:621). The Africans living on the mission reserves in Natal were allowed to remain on the reserves if they paid rental fees; no provision was made for African freeholds. The vast majority of the rest of Natal’s land belonged either to white settlers or was controlled by the government (Keto 1976:621). The government during this time also tried its best to counter the “Ethiopian” movement and other African-initiated Christian churches, and when American missionaries complained in 1906 that the rights of African pastors were being curtailed, they were told that missionary work should properly be carried out with “white missionaries resident at, and in control of, each station” (Keto 1976:624) – though this specific requirement was
10 Report of the Native Affairs Commission, 1906–7. Minutes of Evidence, Vol. 1:626 (Pietermaritzburg, 1907); cited in Simensen with Børhaug et al. (1986:252, 274 n240).
development of the Zulu people, both spiritually, economically and cultur- ally” (Myklebust 1949:30, cf. Bakke 2010). These sentences by Myklebust were published in 1949, one year after the 1948 election victory of the National Party in South Africa, marking the beginning of the official apart- heid era. But another change had also taken place. During the four years leading up to NMS’ fiftieth anniversary in 1892, the Norwegian missionaries in Natal and Zululand suddenly reported baptizing an unprecedented number of converts – around 500 people in all (Myklebust 1949:111). This was part of an explosive growth in Christian converts that occurred, not just among the Zulus, but across Southern Africa over the following decades. It has been loosely estimated that in 1880, one in ten Africans in South Africa was a Christian; by 1911, one in four; and by 1921, one in three (Etherington 1982:196). The remarkable growth in converts swelled the so-called mission churches, sparked indigenous revival movements within them, and gave rise to a series of African-initiated churches. In due course, growing African movements within the churches favored and worked for African leader- ship, and independence from direct European or American missionary supervision and control. And by the mid-twentieth century – although many of the Western missionaries were not yet prepared to acknowledge it – the balance of power within African Christianity had already started its decisive shift (Maxwell 2005:296).
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INDEX
Abolitionists 193 Asad, Talal 106 Abraham, Rev. Andrew 37 Astrup, Rev. Nils 208n25, 215, 234 African Christians see Converts; Kholwa Atkins, Keletso 41, 55 African Christian Union 165n69 African evangelists 20, 90–94, 102–3, Ballard, Charles 9n13, 202, 221 see also Pastors Baptism 88, 108 African-initiated churches 94n23, 149–50, of African converts 85–6, 93, 153 233, 235 names chosen for 115–17, 120 African National Congress (ANC) 165n69 requirements for 111–12, 144 Agriculture, on mission stations 39–40, as seen by Zulu royals 161–2 139, 186 Barth, Fredrik 9, 137 Alcohol 94, 94n23, 114, 179, 190–91, 192 Bateson, Gregory 122n64 Allison, Rev. James 34, 40, 160 Bebbington, David W. 11 American Board of Commissioners for Beer see Alcohol Foreign Missions see American Zulu Beidelman, Thomas O. 174, 216–17 Mission Belief 105–7, 110, 114 Amakholwa see Converts; Kholwa Berge, Rev. Lars 88–9 American Zulu Mission (AZM) 35–7, 90n11, Berglund, Axel-Ivar 48, 51–2, 115, 139–40, 91–4, 103, 131–2, 149, 152, 210, 233–4 141–2 Ancestors see Shades Berlin Missionary Society 36, 38, 103, 114, Anderson, Rufus 189 121–2, 145, 146, 153, 159n63, 187 Anglicans see Society for the Propagation of Bethelsdorp mission station 153 the Gospel Bevans, Stephen 177 Anglo-Zulu War, the 205–6, 213–14 Bhabha, Homi 118, 120–21, 124–5 changes in missionary Christianity Bible, the 40, 150–51, 232 and 201 baptismal names from 115–17 civil war following 215, 221 literacy and 42, 143–6 epistemic murk and 202–3, 217–220 materiality of 59, 231 missionary criticism of 7, 207–8 missionary authority and 150 missionary evacuations before 202–4 missionary quotations from 171n15, 175, missionary support for 204–6, 175n, 191, 221 209–10 seen as powerful by missionaries 172, 192 stations destroyed during 219 seen as powerful by Zulus 143–4 Anthropology translation of 146–7 (see also of Christianity 14–16, 58–9, 105–6, Translation) 109–10, 127–9, 231–2 Bishopstowe mission station of colonialism 7 (see also Colonial (Ekukanyeni) 18, 38, 61, 117 society) Blessing, Rev. Peder 62, 85 history and 22–25, 46–7, 125–6 Bodies of space 21 can harbor evil 139 see also Ethnography; History double-sided character of 81–2 Apartheid 3, 22, 150, 231, 235 on mission stations 60, 71–5, 83–4, Architecture 118–19, 139, 145–6 ideas of civilization and 43–4 moral domain and 60, 71–5, 232 on mission stations 29–30, 39, 42–5, 73, punctured subjectivity and 140–41 86, 90, 145, 153, 170, 185–7 race and 118–19 on settler farms 43–4 regulating habits of 71, 73, 75–7, 80–82, of Zulu homesteads 38, 48, 73–4 145–6 Ardener, Shirley 91 space and 42–3, 76, 118–19, 145–6
Boers see Settlers expressed in cultural forms 14–16, Bonde (Tanzania), mission in 113, 134, 156 39–43, 45–6, 127–9, 191–2, 231–2 Børhaug, Thomas 9n13, 51n38, 143n30, expressed in furniture 63, 72, 80, 191 154n54, 159n63, 205n16, 208n25, 215, 227, expressed in gardens 45 228n5, 229n6 expressed in names 115–17, 118, 120 Borke (Government Agent) 191 expressed in timetable 40–41 Bourdieu, Pierre 42n, 46–7, 76 hybridity and 107, 110–11, 119–20, 125 Bourgeois see Class materiality and morality in 58–9, 127–9, Bowie, Fiona 91 231–2 Braudel, Fernand 24–5 pietistic (see Pietism) Bridewealth see Lobola space and 4, 7, 182, 226, 231–3 Brock, Peggy 91, 104 Church see African-initiated churches; Brown, Peter 81 Sunday services Bryant, A.T. 48n29 Church Missionary Society (CMS) 68, 91, 189 Buckser, Andrew 14–15 Civilization, ideas about Bulwer, Sir Henry 202 architecture and 43–4 Buxton, Thomas Fowell 193 colonial rule and 34–6 Bynum, Caroline Walker 81 expressed in clothes 114 missionary attitudes toward 189–93 Cabrita, Joel 149, 150n49 Class, of missionaries 17–19, 76–8, 124 Cairns, H.A.C. 159n63, 172–4 Clothes 191–2 Calderwood, Rev. Henry 216 conversion and 111–15, 163 Callaway, Rev. Henry 50n32, 51, 55, 210 of missionaries 18, 77 Calvinists 59 on mission stations 45–6, 111–15, 118, Cannell, Fenella 14 120, 121–2 Cape Colony 33n6, 203, 234 settler ideas about 45–6 Carnarvon, Earl of (Henry Herbert) 203 Coleman, Simon 105, 106, 174 Catholics 38, 131 Colenso, Bishop John William 93 Cato (British consul) 205 Anglo-Zulu War and 7, 206–7, 209, Cetshwayo, Prince/King 96, 171 213–14, 227 Anglo-Zulu War and 206–7, 214, converts and 117, 160 217, 221 mission station of 18, 38, 61 grants use of land for stations 168–70, Norwegians and 99, 168 229 on Zulu name for God 51–2 instability of 1870s and 201–2 Colonialism makes stations extraterritorial 161–4, anthropology of 7 194–5 architecture and 43–5 missionaries and 37, 109, 141, 143, 158, changes among colonized 76, 138, 165 160–64, 173, 181, 191–2 changes among colonizers and Charismatics 174 missionaries 10, 19, 76, 78–9, 124, Chelmsford, 2nd Baron (Frederic 138, 165 Thesiger) 204–5 concept of 16–17 Christ 81, 232 identification and 121, 149 missionary images of 12, 29–30, 49, interaction between colonized and 54, 82 colonizers 121, 138, 149, 151, 218 see also God missionary criticism of 3–7, 162, 193, 195, Christensen, Torben 189 197, 213–14 Christianity missionary support for 46, 56–7, anthropology of 14–16, 58–9, 105–6, 177, 189–90, 194–7, 209–13, 215–16, 109–10, 127–9, 231–2 226–7, 234 Evangelical (see Evangelicalism) missionary “double vision” and 100–103, expressed in bodies 71–5, 81–2, 83–4 117–18, 121–5 expressed in buildings 43 normalization of 46, 177 expressed in clothes 112–15, 118, 120, 122 see also Colonial rule; Colonial society
Colonial rule send greetings to Norway 100–101 Christianity and 34–6 shape mission Christianity 105–30 epistemic murk and 218 Zulu royals and 161–4 operation of 32–6, 78–9, 102, 115, 147, 196 see also Mission stations tax under 44 Cope, A.T. 149 Colonial society 17–19, 43–4, 76–9, 82–3, Cowes, George Burr 233 124, 218 Crais, Clifton 43–4 Comaroff, Jean and John 41, 120, 149, 154, Culture 160, 164 Christianity expressed in 14–16 (see also on Africanization of mission 137 under Christianity) on anthropology and history 22, 46–7, colonial 17–19, 43–4, 76–9, 82–3, 124, 218 125–6 shock, of missionaries 170 on baptismal names 115–16 space and 20–22 on bodily habits 75–6 on the colonial state 102, 147 Dachs, Anthony 211 on conversion 104–5 Dahle, Bertha 100n32 critique of 14, 128 Dahle, Rev. Lars 96n25 on governmentality 79n Dahle, Rev. Markus 134, 141 on the long conversation 56–7, 127, 128 Dannevig, Kristoffer 9n13 on mission and difference 230–31 Darnton, Robert 22 on “missionary imperialism” 211 Denis, Philippe 94n23 Conversion 104–25 Des Chene, Mary 22, 68 academic study of 14–15, 104–6, Devil, the, missionary ideas about 50, 53, 109–10, 120 68, 147, 171n15, 191 African converts’ ideas about 106–11 Dingane, King 32 African evangelists and 90–91, 104 Dinuzulu, King 219, 221 African resistance to 131–2, 138–44, 155–7 Diviners, Zulu 37, 140–41 as central to missionary identity 174 consulted by converts 107, 110 clothes as sign of 112–15, 120 gender of 48, 141 as crossing (wela) 108–9, 110, 162 missionaries act as 36–7, 135, 136–8 as identification 120–25 missionaries and 51, 141–2 metaphors about 177 Domestic space see Space missionaries’ experiences of 12, 105 Dons, Rev. Christian 182, 193, 207 missionaries’ ideas about 11, 105, 211 “Double vision,” of missionaries 100–103, names as markers of 115–17, 120 117–18, 121–5 narratives of 88, 140 Draper, Jonathan 149, 151 outer signs of 111–17, 128–9 Drønen, Tomas Sundnes 90, 104, 212 as polysemic event 110 Dube, James 165n69 Converts 85–130, 131 Dube, John L. 165n69 adopt European ways 112–17 Dunn, Chief John 222 age of 153 Dutch Reformed Church 103 cease to be Zulu subjects 161–4, 194–5 clothes worn by 112–13, 120, 121–2 Eboussi-Boulaga, Fabien 147 continue using traditional religion 107, Edendale mission station 40, 40n21, 110, 119 153, 160 doctrinal disagreements among 107 Education, on mission stations economic activity of 148–9 African attitudes toward 143–51, 223–4 increase in after 1880s 92n18, 104, 235 African dilemma of identity and 149–51 low number of 131–2, 171 colonial officials’ attitudes toward 147, mainly drawn from employees 86, 131, 223–4 152–3, 229 legacy of 151 names chosen by 115–17, 120 on the Norwegian stations 29, 40–42, opposition experienced by (poten- 95–6, 142–51, 223–4 tial) 139–41, 143–4, 155–7 settler attitudes toward 35–6, 147
Ekombe mission station 13, 222 on missionary focus on alternative Ekukanyeni mission station society 181–2 (Bishopstowe) 18, 38, 61, 117 on printed texts 146–7 Ekutembeni mission station 13, 191 on station communities 152, 154, 155, Elbourne, Elizabeth 4, 14, 24, 36, 43, 123, 164–5 153, 193, 209n28 on stations as basis for African political on conversion 104, 110 elite 165n, 231 on mission and colonial Ethiopian movements see African-initiated administration 189 churches on missionaries acting like chiefs 158 Ethnicity, formation of 57–8, see also on mission as accumulating people 156 Zulu people on patriarchal practices 157 Ethnography 22–24, see also Elphick, Richard 103, 209n28 Anthropology; History Emotions see Sentiments Evangelicalism 10–12, 33, 41, 48–9, 97, 105, Empangeni mission station 13, 18, 38, 109 173, 192, see also Christianity; Evangelical authority of missionary at 158 revivals; Haugeanism; Moravianism; converts and employees at 86, 100, 107, Pietism; Self-denial; Sincerity 138–9, 143, 144 Evangelical Lutheran Church in Southern daily life at 134, 136 Africa (ELCSA) 3 land for 36, 223 Evangelical revivals 10–12 Empire, British see Colonial rule Evangelists, African 20, 90–94, 102–3 Emushane outstation 132, 149 Evil, missionary ideas about 147–8, 171–2, Emzinyati mission station 13, 222 221, see also Devil, the; Witchcraft Engelke, Matthew 58–9, 231 Entumeni mission station 13, 64, 153, 230 Families, missionary 66, 76, 79–82, 83 converts and employees at 92n17, Fanon, Frantz 42–3, 76, 118–19 107, 156 Farming, on mission stations 39–40, 45, land for 222 139, 186 visual representation of 183–8 Ferguson, James 21, 231 Eotimati mission station 13, 223, 230 Food Epistemic murk 19, 218–20 of missionaries 39, 66, 73 Erlank, Natasha 43, 76, 80, 124, 177, 178, of Zulus 38, 73 209n28 Foucault, Michel 79, 79n, 197–8 Eshowe mission station 13, 45n27, 113, 119, Frere, Sir Bartle 203, 204–6, 214 153, 208 Friday Apostolics 59, 231 catechist school at 95 Furniture, on mission stations 62–3, 76–8, converts and employees at 95, 123–4, 80, 145, 191 140, 150 Fuze, Magema M. 117, 150n49 daily life at 133 Fynney, Fred B. 163, 202 land for 222 visual representation of 183–8 Gaitskell, Deborah 154, 157 Esidumbini mission station 93, 132 Gardens, on mission stations 45, 186, see Esinyamboti mission station 13, 223 also Farming Etherington, Norman 8n10, 91, 93–4, 131, Geertz, Clifford 23, 24 142, 166, 224–5, 235 Gender on African resistance to mission 156 division of labor on stations 39–40, on Anglo-Zulu War 202, 203, 205, 64–5, 88, 139, 154 206n18, 209–10, 214 female missionaries 13, 89, 91 on baptismal names 115–16 missionary masculinity 98 on mission shift to missionary paternalism 98–100 pro-imperialism 209–10 missionary wives 66, 71, 74–5, on clothes of converts 113 82–3, 89 on conversion 104, 108, 109, 111–12 patriarchal practices of mission and on missionaries and converts 103 Zulus 154, 157–60
of people drawn to stations 138–9, on Anglo-Zulu War 203–4, 205n16, 206, 142, 152–6 207, 208n25, 217 in South African history: spaces and 20 on “missionary imperialism” 211 use of missionary names and 13n19 Heterotopia 168, 197–8 of Zulu diviners 48, 141 Hicks Beach, Sir Michael 206n18 see also Sexuality History Gifts, from missionaries to royals 18, 169, anthropology and 22–25, 46–7, 191–2 125–6 Gjerløw, Rev. Ole 212–13, 214, 224 describing historical processes 46–7, Glasgow Missionary Society 173n, 209n28 125–6 Glazier, Stephen D. 14–15 reading historical mission God sources 68–71, 87–92, 140, 175–8, academic study of 14–16 182–8, 210–16 belief and 105–6, 110 see also Anthropology; Ethnography; missionary ideas about 49, 52–3, 137, Mission sources 169, 173, 188 Hlonono, John 149 “problem of presence” of 30, 47, 58–9, Hodgson, Janet 43 229, 231 Hofmeyr, Isabel 145, 148 Zulu ideas about missionaries’ 141 Holter, Knut 143 Zulu name for 50–53 Home boards, missionary relationship see also Christ with 67, 70–71, 72–3, 80, 89, 99, 182, 207, Goffman, Erving 212 209–10, 224 Governmentality 79n Homesteads see Zulu homesteads Griffiths, Gareth 88, 91, 92, 177–8 Horton, Robin 104 Grimshaw, Patricia 89 Houle, Robert 56n54 Grout, Rev. Aldin 34, 35, 43, 131, 210 House(s) 21, 42n, see also Architecture Grout, Charlotte 35, 210 Huber, Mary Taylor 216–17 Grout, Rev. Lewis 34, 131 “Humiliation thesis, the” 210–16, 219 Gullestad, Marianne 175n, 183, 212 Hutchinson, William R. 189 Gundersen, Rev. Gundvall 150 Hybridity, and Christianity 107, 110–11, Gunner, Elizabeth 145, 149–50 119–20, 125 Guns 170, 191–2, 214 Gupta, Akhil 21, 231 Ibsen, Henrik 196 Guy, Jeff 7, 18, 52, 61, 209, 214, 224–5 Idealism 196–7 Gynnild, Vidar 9n13, 193n47 Identification in colonial context 121, 149 Hamilton, Carolyn 20 conversion as 120–25 Harries, Patrick 33n7 Imfule mission station 13, 134, 141 on Anglo-Zulu War 202, 203, 205, Indies, colonial 59, 79 206n18, 209–10, 214 Indonesia, mission in 59 on missionary paternalism 99 Ingebrigtsen, Anna 156, 168 on the normalization of colonialism 46 Ingebrigtsen, Erik 156, 168, on reading 144, 146 170, 223 Hastrup, Kirsten 24 Inhlazatshe mission station 13, 113, 119, 167, Hauge, Rev. Andreas 4, 193 171, 190 Haugeanism 11–12, 82, 98, 123, 211 Anglo-Zulu War and 202–3, 204n12, 214, Hauge, Hans Nilsen 12 220–21 Hefner, Robert W. 105 Boer settlers and 194 Henningsen, Anne Folke 121–2 converts and employees at 139–40, Hermannsburg Missionary Society 37–8, 155, 179 103, 114, 131, 146, 152, 153, 159n63, 202, land for 168–70, 222 204, 210 Sunday services at 131–2 Hermannsburg mission station 38, 131 visual representation of 183–8 Hernæs, Per 9n13, 202 Itafamasi mission station 90n11
Jesus see Christ on rectilinearity 43 Johnson, William Percival 29, 173 on resistance to conversion 157 Jørgensen, Torstein 8–9, 49, 92, 114, 127 Landscape 38 on conversion 107 colonial culture carried through 43 on delay of African ordinations 95–6 missionaries took hold of 20, 43–6 on itinerant preaching 228, 229 Language, and colonialism 17, 33, see also on missionaries and Zulu royals 161–3 Translation; Zulu language on missionary ideas about Larsen, Martha 13, 65, 67, 83, 167 civilization 190 absence of information about 88–9 on resistance to mission 131, 155–7 Anglo-Zulu War and 203, 204n12 on station communities 152–4 at Empangeni 138–9 on stations as homesteads 157, 159–60 family life of 81 on Sunday services and exchange 134 at Inhlazatshe 170–72 on why H. Schreuder was granted sets up Umphumulo 39–46, 142–3 land 36 at Umphumulo 73, 85, 88 Jung, Carl Gustav 15 Larsen, Rev. Lars 12–13, 55, 61–7, 69n25, Junod, Rev. Henri-Alexandre 46 167, 185 Anglo-Zulu War and 202, 203, 204n12, Kapteijns, Lidwien 9n13 208, 213–14, 217, 220, 221 Kaurin, Bishop Jens M.P. 101 on being tied to the station 230 Keane, Webb 58–9, 129, 145 Boer settlers and 194–5 Kenya, mission in 117 converts and 111–12, 116–17 Keto, C. Tsheloane 22, 196, 224, 233–4 criticism of Europeans 190 Kholwa 90, 108, see also Converts at Empangeni 136, 138–9 Kielland, Rev. Jan 55, 107, 108, 134, 143, experiences of loneliness, threat 170–72, 158–9, 192, 228 178 Kirkaldy, Alan 45, 183, 187–8 family life of 13, 81, 88–9 Kirkwood, Deborah 91 at Inhlazatshe 113, 119, 131–2, 145–6, 155, Knudsen, Rev. Christopher 207 170, 177 Krige, Eileen J. 115 on land and race 222 Kuruman mission station 158 medical services of 135 Kwahlabisa mission station 13, 14, 223n57 on preaching 48, 50, 54 Kwamagwaza mission station 192 rainmaking of 136 on reading classes 145–6 Labor relationship with colleagues 72–4, 83, division of on stations 39–40, 64–5, 88, 98–9 139, 154 sets up Umphumulo 39–46, 142–3 supply and regulation of in Natal 35–6, at Umphumulo 73, 80, 85, 88 41, 45–6, 147, 224–5 on wish to change Zulu society 179–81 Laidlaw, James 197 Latour, Bruno 58–9 Land Legassick, Martin 189, 203n10 converts live on station 153 Leisegang, Rev. Hans Christian 53–4, missionaries obtain 35–8, 150, 163, 106–7, 183, 184 (Fig. 3), 186, 212, 215, 228 168–70, 195–6, 221–3 Lindquist, Galina 106 missionary rule over 19, 100, 160–64, Literacy 223–4 the Bible and 42, 143–6 race and 22, 43–4, 160–64, 221–5, 233–4 of Norwegian missionaries (Lutheran, Landau, Paul 20–21, 30, 91, 103, 135n7, pietistic) 142–51 140, 162 orality and 144–5, 148–51 on African names chosen for God 52, 157 Livingstone, Dr. David 189 on conversion 105, 109 Lloyd, Katherine 93–4 on missionaries as priest-healers 137 Lobola (bridewealth) 94, 140, 157, 161, on rainmaking 136 180–81
London Missionary Society (LMS) 43, 76, attitudes to African pastors 5, 86–7, 89, 96n25, 102–3, 137, 143, 153, 158, 160, 93–4, 95–7, 102–3 164, 173n, 189 bodies of 60, 71–5, 80–84 Löwenthal, Emilie 83 children of 66, 71, 74–5, 80–81, 82 Lutheranism see Evangelicalism; colonial “double vision” of 100–103, Christianity; Haugeanism; Luther, 117–18, 121–5 catechism of; Moravianism; Pietism criticism of colonialism 3–7, 162, 193, Luther, Martin, catechism of 85, 112, 144 195, 197, 213–14 Luthuli, Albert 165n69 criticism of Europeans 190–95 educational training of 12–13 MacKenzie, John M. 45 education offered by 29, 40–42, 95–6, Madagascar, Norwegian mission in 10n14, 142–51, 223–4 (see also Education) 42n, 76n, 96n25, 100n32, 127–8, 178 experience loneliness, threat 170–74 Mahlabathini mission station 13, 54, 223 female 13, 89, 91 Mahoney, Michael 39, 93–4, 132, 149, 154 “humiliation thesis” of 210–16, 219 Maphumulo mission station 37, 132 ideas about civilization and 189–93 Maqamusela (convert) 140 increasingly wish to change Zulu Marks, Shula 149 society 180–82 Marriage letters from: source criticism of 64–6, mission stations and 152–4, 156–7, 159 68–71, 87–92, 140, 175–8 (see also Zulu regiments and 31, 153 Mission sources) see also Families; Lobola; Missionaries: medical services of 36–7, 133, 135–8, wives of; Polygyny 170–71 Marsh, Mary 90n11 metaphors used by 171–2, 175–8 Marsh, Rev. Samuel 90n11 money and 18, 60–62, 64 Marx, Karl 129 race and 3–7, 77–9, 98, 99–100, 102, Masculinity, of missionaries 98 123–4, 165–6, 192, 209n28, 212, 226, Maxwell, David 211, 235 230–31 Mbenga, Bernard K. 20 relationship with converts 85–130 on Anglo-Zulu War 202, 203, 205, relationship with home boards 67, 206n18, 209–10, 214 70–71, 72–3, 80, 89, 99, 182, 207, Mbonambi people 31 209–10, 224 Medicine relationship with Zulu royals 12, 36–7, missionary use of 36–7, 133, 135–8, 109, 141, 143, 158, 160–64, 173, 181, 191–2 170–71 rivalry among 168–9 Zulu traditional use of 37, 139–40 settlers and 35–6, 147, 193–5, 212, Meintjes, Sheila 40, 40n21, 153, 160 215–16, 223 Memmi, Albert 165 suspected of witchcraft 139–42 Metaphors, used by missionaries 171–2, as teachers (umfundisi) 143 175–8 tied to their stations 6–7, 226–30 Methodological agnosticism 15 understanding of church and Mfecane 32 state 160–64 Mini, Stephanus 94n23 use violence 159, 159n63 Missionaries utopic vision of 178, 198 act as diviners, herbalists 36–7, 135, wives of 66, 71, 74–5, 82–3, 89 136–8 work out their salvation 174 act as homestead heads 157–60 see also names of individual missionaries act as rainmakers 35, 135–8 and mission societies African 20, 90–94, 102–3 “Missionary imperialism” 211 Africanization of roles of 136–8, 158 Mission, differing analyses of 56–9, 126–30, aid colonialism 46, 56–7, 177, 189–90, 137–8 194–7, 209–13, 215–16, 226–7, 234 Mission magazines see Mission sources; arrive in Natal 33, 37–8 Norsk Missions-Tidende
Mission Reserves, Natal 22, 35–8, 196, 223, as rival spaces 155–7, 160–64 224, 233 services and exchange on 132–8, 170 Mission School, Stavanger 12–13, 64, 72n29, “station strategy” 4, 6–7, 227–30 85, 95, 96, 98 as third space 120–26 Mission sources, source criticism of timetable adopted on 40–42 missionary letters and reports 64–6, as trophies 168–70 68–71, 87–92, 140, 175–8 as utopias 198 mission images (art) 175n, 182–8 visual representations of 182–8 mission images (metaphors) 175–8 Zulu perceptions of 131–66 mission magazines 64, 177, 210–16 see also names of individual stations mission maps 175–7 Mitchell, W.J. Thomas 118 Mission stations Moffat, Rev. Robert 12, 54, 158, 160, 173, Africanization of 158 189, 214 architecture on 29–30, 39, 42–5, 73, 86, Moi, Toril 196 90, 145, 153, 170, 185–7 Mokoena, Hlonipha 117, 150n49 as basis for African political elite 165, 231 Money, missionary handling of 18, bodies and 60, 71–5, 83–4, 118–19, 139, 60–62, 64 145–6 Moravianism, Norway 11–12, 82, 98, 123, 211 clothes worn on 45–6, 112–15, 120, 121–2 Moravians, Cape 103, 121–2 converts and employees on 40–42, Moses (Zibokjane kaGudu) 45–6, 86, 88, 90–92, 131, 152–6 (convert) 92n17, 95–7 as counter-sites 198 Mpande, King 32, 153, 171, 201–2 as different from surroundings 39–46, grants use of land for stations 35–8, 168, 118–19, 120–26, 145–6, 148, 154, 164–6, 170, 195, 229 178–82, 190–92 makes stations extraterritorial 161–4, differing analyses of 56–9 194–5 division of labor on 39–40, 64–5, 88, missionaries and 12, 35–7, 160–64, 181 139, 154 Msane, Saul 165n69 education offered on 29, 40–42, 95–6, Msimang, Selby 165n69 142–51, 223–4 Mudimbe, V.Y. 147 entrepreneurial activity on 148–9 Munt, Sally 198 as extraterritorial (land of the Musi, Chief 39, 149 whites) 160–64, 191, 194–5, 197 Myklebust, Olav Guttorm 8, 36, 87, 216, farming on 39–40, 45, 139, 186 228, 234–5 food on 39, 66 Mzilikazi, King 173 furniture on 62–3, 76–8, 80, 145, 191 gardens on 45, 186 Names gender of people drawn to 138–9, 142, baptismal 115–17, 118, 120 152–6 Zulu customary 115 as heterotopias 197–8 Natal, Colony of 203, 234 as homesteads 157–60 British annexation of 32–4 land obtained for 35–8, 163, 168–70, British colonial rule of (see Colonial rule) 195–6, 222–3 granted responsible government 233 missionaries tied to 6–7, 226–30 missionaries arrive in 33, 35–8 missionary perceptions of 167–98 Mission Reserves in 22, 35–8, 196, 223, as models of an alternative society 178– 224, 233 82, 229 policies on land and race 224–5, 233–4 new commodities on 132–3 puts pressure on Zululand 201 normalization of colonialism and 46 Natalia, Republic of 32 race and 119, 123–4, 160–64, 165–6, 226, Native Home Missionary Society 93 230–31 Ndlela, Rev. Simon 86, 92, 96–7, 230 as refuges 152, 154–5, 158, 163 Nembula, Ira 165n69 resident communities on 151–6, 164–5 Nembula, John 165n69 risks and threats of 138–51, 155–7, Neylan, Susan 91 160–64 Ngidi, Jonathan 93, 94n23
Ngidi, Rev. Mbiyana (Umbijane) 88n8, 97 Okkenhaug, Inger Marie 91 baptism of 90, 90n11 Olsen, Elise 63–4 career after Umphumulo 91–4 Olsen, Johan 63–4, 64n10, 99, 168 at Umphumulo 62, 88–90, 144 Orality, and literacy 144–5, 148–51 Ngidi, William 93 Orange Free State 203, 234 Ngwato rulers 162 Ordination see Pastors Nieuwe Republiek 221, 222 Osborn, Melmoth 214, 219, 220 Nigeria, mission in 57 Oscarsberg mission station 96, 207 Nilsen, Rev. Petter Gottfred 230 Nome, John 87, 98, 207 Pastors Noodsberg outstation 93, 132 in African-initiated churches 94n23 Norgaard, Rev. Ole 228 delayed ordination of Africans as 5, Norris, Rebecca Sachs 109, 111, 116n56, 120 86–7, 93–4, 95–100, 103, 129–30 Norsk Missions-Tidende 4n2 delayed ordination of Norwegians copies of sent to missionaries 70 as 98–9 frontispiece of 175n Paternalism, of missionaries 98–100 source criticism of 64–6, 68–71, 87–92, Patriarchal practices 140, 177, 207, 209, 212–14, see also of missionaries 154, 157–60 mission sources of Zulus 154, 157–60 writing of women in 100 Patteson, Bishop John Coleridge 222 Norway Paul, St. 115, 174 mission movement in 10–12 Peel, J.D.Y. 57–8, 68, 91, 104, 127, 128 union with Sweden 17, 201 Pels, Peter 7, 120, 165, 166, 175, 216–17 Norwegian Missionary Society (NMS) Phakathwayo, Chief 39 establishment of 10–13 Philip, Rev. John 43, 189 missionaries in Southern Africa, list Pietism 10–12 of 13n20 conversion and 105, 211 mission stations in Southern Africa, ideas about civilization and 192 list of 13 images of crucifixion in 54, 81–2 name of 3n1 literacy and 145 see also Home boards, missionary paternalism of 98–100, 160 relationship with powerful God of 52–3 Norwegian Mission Tidings see Norsk sacrifice and 67n20, 78 (see also Missions-Tidende Self-denial) separation from politics 189 Oftebro, Dr. Christian 72n29 sincerity and 72, 103, 105, 217 (see also Oftebro, Guri 13, 66 Sincerity) family life of 75, 80 virtues and control in 72 at Umphumulo 73 Word of God and 181 Oftebro, Rev. Ommund C. 12–13, 48, 55, 66, see also Christianity 113, 185 Pine, Sir Benjamin 33–4 Anglo-Zulu War and 202, 204–9, 210–11, Pirie mission station 136 213, 217, 219–20, 222 Polygyny Cetshwayo and 141, 161, 173, 206 African convert criticism of 94 converts and 100–101, 123–4, 149, 180 missionary criticism of 49, 142, 161, 163, at Empangeni 109, 144 180–81 at Eshowe 95, 119, 133 perceived as hindrance to mission 153, family life of 13, 66n16, 75, 80–81 181 as homestead head 158 political economy and 157 on preaching 50, 54, 228 political instability in 1870s and 202 relationship with colleagues 66n16, see also Marriage 98–9 Pontoppidan, Erik 144 sets up Umphumulo 39–46, 142–3 Poor whites see Class as superintendent 69, 208 Porterfield, Amanda 13n19, 48, 142, 154–5 at Umphumulo 73 Prayer, Christian 59, 145, 151, 188, 212
continuity with Zulu customs 110 criticism of Zulu religion 52, 106 medical assistance and 135–8 on families 66, 79–80, 82–3 as part of timetable on stations 40 family life of 81, 83 for rain 136–8 handling of money 60–61, 83 seen as powerful by missionaries 171 legacy of 85–6 Preaching, missionary 48–50, 53–6 obtains land for stations 35–7, 168–70, itinerant 4, 6–7, 182, 226–9 222, 223n57 Predelli, Line Nyhagen 76n, 182 preaching of 54, 104, 227, 228, 230 Price, Richard 169, 173, 173n, 209n28, rainmaking of 136 211n31, 216 on stations as land of the whites Printing 146–7, see also Bible; Literacy (isilungu) 162, 191, 194 Pritchett, James 45, 110, 125 as superintendent 60–61, 64–5, 67, 69, “Problem of presence,” of God 30, 47, 58–9, 71, 73–4, 96n25, 98–9 229, 231 translations into Zulu 33, 49, 50, 51, 146 use of medicine 36–7, 135 Qwabe people 39, 149 Schreuder Mission 13–14, 154n54, 207, 208n25, 215, 223n57, 234 Race Scott, Governor John 113 class and 18–19, 77–78, 124 Self-denial, pietistic virtue of 71–5 land and 22, 43–4, 100, 160–64, 221–5, Sentiments 233–4 in colonial society 78–80 missionaries and 3–7, 77–9, 98, 99–100, among missionaries 170–74 102, 123–4, 165–6, 192, 209n28, 212, 226, pietistic and Evangelical 11 230–31 Settlers mission stations and 119, 123–4, 160–64, African labor in Natal and 35–6, 41, 165–6, 226, 230–31 45–6, 55, 147 Rainmaking, by missionaries 35, 135–8 encroach on Zulu land 202, 221 Ranger, Terence 20, 104 establish Nieuwe Republiek 221–2 Reading see Education; Literacy establish Transvaal 168 Rectilinearity 43, 187 farms of 21, 43–4 Resistance, African, to mission missionaries and 35–6, 147, 193–5, 212, Christianity 131–2, 138–44, 155–7 215–16, 223 Richardson, Laurel 167 in Natal 32–3, 233 Ricoeur, Paul 178 Sexuality 81 Robbins, Joel 14, 16, 105–6, 110, 119n60, 128 in colonial society 76, 79 Robert, Dana 80 missionary attitudes toward 66, 76, Robertson, Rev. Robert 99, 168, 170, 192, 220 79–80, 154 Rorke’s Drift mission station 94 Zulu attitudes toward 142, 154 Ross, Rev. John 136 Shades 37, 47–8, 51, 53, 135, 141–2 Ross, Robert 20–21, 189, 203n10 missionary criticism of 49, 52, 106, 142, Rüther, Kirsten 114, 121–2, 153, 159n63 147, 161, 163, 180, 181 relationship of converts to 107, 110, 119 Samuelsen, Siver 63–7, 73, 83, 99 Shaka, King 31–2, 37, 39 Samuelsen, Thorine 63–7, 73–5, 83, 99 Shange, Mathenjwaze 85n1 Sanneh, Lamin 56 conversion of 85, 87–90 Schreuder, Bishop Hans 8, 12, 13, 17, 18, 55, departure from Umphumulo 91–2 66, 71, 128n, 142, 185 legacy of 85–6 Anglo-Zulu War and 201, 203, 207, at Umphumulo 87–90 208n25, 215, 217, 222, 227 Shembe, Isaiah 149–50 break with NMS 207 Shepstone, John W. 202 class background of 77 Shepstone, Sir Theophilus 33–5, 44, 196, converts and 85, 96, 100–101 201–4, 208, 224 criticism of colonialism 7 Sherlock, Peter 89 criticism of Europeans 191, 195 Shona people, mission among 20
Simensen, Jarle 8–9, 51n38, 126–7, 143n30, in South African history 20–21 154n54, 159n63, 193n47, 205n16, 208n25 Spatial Christianization 182 on “the humiliation thesis” 211, 215 Spaulding, Jay 9n13 on itinerant preaching 228n5, 229n6 Springvale mission station 51 on missionary ideas about State, colonial see Colonial rule civilization 190 State, Zulu see Zulu kingdom on quarantine of stations 162 “Station strategy” 4, 6–7, 227–30, see also on the “station strategy” 4, 227 Mission stations on station strife 159 Stavem, Rev. Ole on transaction theory 133, 137–8 African pastors and 86 on why H. Schreuder was granted Anglo-Zulu War and 202, 204, 208, 211, land 36–7 213, 217 Sincerity converts and 114, 116, 122 as antithesis to corrupting criticism of Europeans 191 civilization 190 on evangelistic outreach 228 importance of in Pietism 11, 105, 145, 217 on first converts 155–6 Keane on Protestantism and 59, 129 on land for stations 222–3 organizational control and 72 on O. Oftebro 208 problem of gauging in others 103, 111, Steenberg, Rev. Ole 192n39, 216 122n65 Stoler, Ann Laura 22, 76, 82–3 as requirement for baptism 111–12 on class and race in colonial soci- Skeie, Karina Hestad 42n, 80, 96n25, 174 ety 18–19, 77–8, 124 on missionary ideas about on differences in colonial society 74 civilization 190 on epistemic murk 218, 219 on missionary metaphors 177–8 St Paul’s mission station 99 on problem of materiality 127–8 Strayer, Robert 117 on source criticism 69 Sullivan, Shannon 42–3, 118–19 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Sunday services 119, 190 Foreign Parts (SPG) 18, 38, 96n25, 99, attendance at 131–2, 214, 230 103, 131, 149, 152, 168–9, 202–3, 204 congregants’ behavior during 50, 54, 132 Sofa see Furniture order of service for 49, 146 Soja, Edward W. 167, 197 as part of an exchange 133–5, 138 Sommerfelt, Halfdan 36 as part of timetable on stations 40–41 Sønstabø, Endre 229n6 Sundkler, Bengt 149 Source criticism see Mission sources Swedish Missionary Society 38, 96, 103, South Africa, Union of 234 131, 207 Southwold, Martin 15 Swiss Mission (Mission Romande) 33n7, Space 20–22 99, 146 anthropology of 21 Bhabha on 120–21, 125 Taussig, Michael 19, 218 bodies and 42–3, 76, 118–19, 145–6 Tax, colonial 44, 133, 224–5 Bourdieu on 42n Theology, of missionaries 233 Christianity and 4, 7, 182, 226, 231–3 evolving around Anglo-Zulu War 211 domestic 20–21, 154 expressed in metaphors 177 Fanon on 42–3, 76, 118–19 justifying missionary authority 160 Foucault on 197–8 materiality and 127–8 Gupta and Ferguson on 21, 231 race and 3–7 heterotopic 197–8 Third space, mission stations as 120–26 imagination and 167 Thomas, Nicholas J. 124 mission stations as different 39–46, Thonga people, Swiss mission among 33n7, 118–19, 120–26, 145–6, 148, 154, 164–6, 99, 146 178–82, 190–92 Time self and 42–3, 76, 118–19 missionary concepts of 40–42 Soja on 167, 197 Zulu concepts of 41
Timoni, Chief 223 land for 36, 196, 223 Titlestad, Rev. Karl 191, 228 name of 36 Tjelle, Kristin Fjelde 72n29, 80, 82, 96, 208 Natal government and 36, 196, 223–4, on missionary masculinity 98 234 on preaching and “secular” work 228 number of people at 152–3 on S. Ndlela 86–7, 92, 96–7, 230 setting up 39–46 Tønnesen, Arnt 63–4, 64n10, 99 Sunday services at 131 Transaction theory 8, 137–8 teachers college at 96, 216 Translation as third space 126 by missionaries into Zulu 33, 49–52, 144, in the twentieth century 3, 36, 51, 86, 146–7 216, 234–5 Sanneh on 56 visual representations of 183–8 Transvaal Native Congress 165n69 Umvoti mission station 43 Transvaal (South African Republic) 168, Umvuzane (convert) 140, 192n39 194, 195, 202, 203, 221, 234 Ungoye mission station 13, 222 mission in 114, 121–2, 145, 153, 159n63 Ungvabaji (employee, Inhlazatshe) 139 Tswana people, mission among 14, 29, 52, Universities’ Mission to Central Africa 54, 56–7, 76, 102, 105, 126, 128, 137, 143, (UMCA) 29, 113, 134, 173 160, 162, 164, 189 Unjekile (employee, Empangeni) 143 Tutu, Archbishop Desmond 150–51 uNkulunkulu (Zulu creator, first ances- Tyler, Rev. Josiah 93 tor) 37, 157 chosen as name for God 50–52 Uana (Unomaganga)(convert) 90, 111 Unodwengu royal homestead 168, 194 Ubazambili (employee, Umphumulo) 139 Unokutemba (convert) 100–101, 141 Ubenjamini (convert) 101 Untunjambili mission station 14 Udaniele (convert) 159n63 Usirajo, Chief 191 Udland, Guri 13, 80 Utabita (Unomise)(convert) 90 Udland, Rev. Tobias 12–13, 38, 55, 185 Uthlapeni (catechumen) 107 converts and 111 Utotongwane (catechumen) 140 family life of 13, 80–81 relationship with colleagues 98–9 Vansina, Jan 21 at Umphumulo 45, 91, 131 Venda people, mission among 187 as vice magistrate 196 Venn, Henry 189 Uitkomst 35 Ulina (convert) 107 Warneck, Gustav 189 Ulovisa (convert) 100–101 Weir, Jennifer 52, 119 Umatendhjwaze see Shange, Mathenjwaze Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society Umatikalala (employee, Umphumulo) 90, (WMMS) 36, 102–3, 152, 173n, 209n28 144 Wettergreen, Rev. Paul 53, 107, Umbijane see Ngidi, Mbiyana 146, 162, 180 Umbonambi mission station 13, 223 White, Hayden 128 Umlazi mission station 35 Williams (Magistrate) 190 Umphumulo mission station 3, 13, 36n, 64, Willis, Justin 113, 134, 156, 157, 159n63 170, 190 Wilson, Monica 47–8 architecture at 39, 42–5, 73 Witchcraft 48, 107, 139–42, 152, 158 budget at 18, 61 missionaries and converts suspected clothes worn at 112–13 of 139–42, 145, 156, 157, 163, 173 converts and employees at 86, 88, 90, Witt, Rev. Otto 207 91–2, 96–7, 111, 139–40, 144, 152, 192n39 Wolseley, Sir Garnet 18, 77, 207, 214, daily life at 135–6 219, 221 daily timetable at 40–42 Women see Gender education at 29, 40, 42, 142–3, 223–4 Worger, William 52–4, 106, 110, 143, 160 furniture at 62–3, 76–8, 80, 191 Wright, John 30–32
Xhosa people regiments in 31, 153, 161, 181, mission among 35, 76, 149, 169, 173, 206, 214 209n28, 211n31, 216 Zululand see Zulu kingdom Ninth Frontier War against 205 Zulu language 33 missionary relationship with 48–52, 55, Younge, Charlotte Mary 222 116–17, 147–8, 223–4 Yoruba people, mission among 57–8 settler relationship with 55 Zulu people, definition of 30–31, Zibhebhu, Prince 221 33, 39 Zimbabwe 20, 59, 231 Zulu royals Zinn, Howard 25 relationship to missionaries (see under Zulu homesteads 20–21, 38, 48, 73–4, 154, Cetshwayo; Mpande) 156–7 ritual powers of 136, 141 Zulu kingdom 17 see also Cetshwayo; Dingane; Dinuzulu; Anglo-Zulu War 201–4, 206, Mpande; Shaka; Zibhebhu; Zulu 213–14 kingdom civil war of 1880s 215, 221 Zulu traditional religion 47–53, founding of 31–2, 37, 39 115, 136 missionaries grow increasingly critical see also Diviners; Medicine; Shades; of 180–82 uNkulunkulu; Witchcraft