Civilising barbarians : missionary narrative and African textual response in nineteenth-century South Africa

Abstract

This is the story of how allegories of human value, cast in narrative dualities based on civilization and barbarism, were prescribed, reified and denied in the 19th-century's struggles over human identity in Africa. As fluid forms of subjectivity and pre-national persuasion slowly emerged into the stratifications, boundaries and principalities later to become South Africa, a battle was waged to give textual form and narrative shape to conceptions of proper human presentation. This process, illustrating how pervasive a broad sense of textuality may have been in the settling of material destinies, coincided with the supremacy of the book and the printed text as ultimate media for resolving questions of all kinds, from the mundane to the transcendental. The book takes a view of colonialism in Africa - missionary colonialism in particular - as a discursive process rather than realpolitik primarily, and in so doing tells an important tale about the stories which were partly responsible for delivering Africa into the paradoxical modernity of segregation and apartheid.

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