Early Khoisan uses of mission Christianity

Abstract

It is striking how much faster mission Christianity was adopted by the battered remnants of Khoikhoi communities of the Eastern and the Western Cape in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries than it was by less politically and economically damaged African societies outside the colony. There is at present an amazing eagerness in the Hottentots to be instructed', observed in some surprise Hendrik Marsveld, Daniel Schwinn and Johan Christian Kiihnel, the first Moravian missionaries to resume in 1792 Georg Schmidt's abandoned mission of 1737-43. The news of their arrival had, they said, 'spread like wildfire in the country'.2 The interdenominational London Missionary Society (LMS) found itself about a decade later in the middle of a war zone in the Eastern Cape where, thrown into acting as political brokers, the founders of Bethelsdorp were inundated with war refugees, many of whom subsequently adopted Christianity. The primary reason for such apparent early success is self-evident: societies in a state of profound crisis dissolution even are far more prone to seek new explanations and meaning systems, than are stable, well-functioning communities.3 However obviously and tragically true, this global explanation is not a substitute for examining the unique local factors which made missionary beliefs or institutions attractive to individuals; nor indeed should it be used to obscure the complexity of religious response, including resistance to the missionary message. Just as, in my opinion, undue stress on the missionaries as 'really' the agents of capitalism, despite the subtlety and exciting insights of many of the writers associated with this position, can make converts appear like the duped and agentless victims of processes beyond their control,4 so too does the 'social crisis' explanation, left to stand on its own, risk occluding agency. I balance here between concern that the Khoisan do not appear on the nineteenth-century stage as transitory and faceless victims, and the need to acknowledge that they were

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