The Equality of Believers

Protestant Missionaries and the Racial Politics of South Africa

Richard Elphick

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780813932736
• eBook ISBN: 9780813932798
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

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

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

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

PART I

The Missionaries, Their Converts, and Their Enemies

1

The Missionaries

From Egalitarianism to Paternalism

The Moravians, the Bible, and the Pear Tree

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He Felled Me to the Ground”: The “Radical” Nonconformist Mission

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Five studies of missionary recruitment (three of the British, one of the Norwegians, and one of the Americans) have concluded that a personal experience of salvation was considered essential to a candidate’s “call” to be a missionary. All pietist and evangelical missionaries in the ear...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Equality of Believers
• Part I · The Missionaries, Their Converts, and Their Enemies
• Part II · The Benevolent Empire and the Social Gospel
• Part III · The Parting of the Ways
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index